unsympathetic as was the attitude of Dahomeyans. He did not condemn
it (possibly he did not condemn the Dahomeyans, seeing that the civic
and social ideals of France and Dahomey are in no wise comparable);
but he explained with careful emphasis that the French woman, unlike
her American sister, is not, and does not desire to be, “_un objet
sacro-saint_.” The reverence for women in the United States he
assumed to be a national trait, a sort of national institution among
a proud and patriotic people. “_L’idolâtrie de la femme est une chose
américaine par excellence._”
The superlative complacency of American women is due largely to the
oratorical adulation of American men,--an adulation that has no more
substance than has the foam on beer. I have heard a candidate for
office tell his female audience that men are weak and women are strong,
that men are foolish and women are wise, that men are shallow and women
are deep, that men are submissive tools whom women, the leaders of
the race, must instruct to vote for _him_. He did not believe a word
that he said, and his hearers did not believe that he believed it;
yet the grossness of his flattery kept pace with the hypocrisy of his
self-depreciation. The few men present wore an attitude of dejection,
not unlike that of the little boy in “Punch” who has been told that he
is made of
“Snips and snails,
And puppy dogs’ tails,”
and can “hardly believe it.”
What Mr. Roosevelt called the “lunatic fringe” of every movement is
painfully obtrusive in the great and noble movement which seeks fair
play for women. The “full habit of speech” is never more regrettable
than when the cause is so good that it needs but temperate championing.
“Without the aid of women, England could not carry on this war,” said
Mr. Asquith in the second year of the great struggle,--an obvious
statement, no doubt, but simple, truthful, and worthy to be spoken.
Why should the “New Republic,” in an article bearing the singularly
ill-mannered title, “Thank You For Nothing!” have heaped scorn upon
these words? Why should its writer have made the angry assertion that
the British Empire had been “deprived of two generations of women’s
leadership,” because only a world’s war could drill a new idea into
a statesman’s head? The war has drilled a great many new ideas into
all our heads. Absence of brain matter could alone have prevented
this infusion. But “leadership” is a large word. It is not what men
are asking, and it is not what women are offering, even at this stage
of the game. Partnership is as far as obligation on the one side and
ambition on the other are prepared to go; and a clear understanding of
this truth has accomplished great results.
Therefore, when we are told that the women of to-day are “giving their
vitality to an anæmic world,” we wonder if the speaker has read a
newspaper for the past half-dozen years. The passionate cruelty and
the passionate heroism of men have soaked the earth with blood. Never,
since it came from its Maker’s hands, has it seen such shame and glory.
There may be some who still believe that this blood would not have
been spilled had women shared in the citizenship of nations; but the
arguments they advance in support of an undemonstrable theory show a
soothing ignorance of events.
“War will pass,” says Olive Schreiner, “when intellectual culture and
activity have made possible to the female an equal share in the control
and government of modern national life.” And why? Because “Arbitration
and compensation will naturally occur to her as cheaper and simpler
methods of bridging the gaps in national relationship.”
Strange that this idea never “naturally” occurred to man! Strange that
no delegate to The Hague should have perceived so straight a path to
peace! Strange that when Germany struck her long-planned, well-prepared
blow, this cheap and simple measure failed to stay her hand! War will
pass when injustice passes. Never before, unless hope leaves the world.
That any civilized people should bar women from the practice of law
is to the last degree absurd and unreasonable. There never can be an
adequate cause for such an injurious exclusion. There is, in fact,
no cause at all, only an arbitrary decision on the part of those who
have the authority to decide. Yet nothing is less worth while than to
speculate dizzily on the part women are going to play in any field
from which they are at present debarred. They may be ready to burnish
up “the rusty old social organism,” and make it shine like new; but
this is not the work which lies immediately at hand. A suffragist who
believes that the world needs house-cleaning has made the terrifying
statement that when English women enter the law courts they will sweep
away all “legal frippery,” all the “accumulated dust and rubbish of
centuries.” Latin terms, flowing gowns and wigs, silly staves and
worn-out symbols, all must go, and with them must go the antiquated
processes which confuse and retard justice. The women barristers of the
future will scorn to have “legal natures like Portia’s,” basing their
claims on quibbles and subterfuges. They will cut all Gordian knots.
They will deal with naked simplicities.
References to Portia are a bit disquieting. Her law was stage law,
good enough for the drama which has always enjoyed a jurisprudence
of its own. We had best leave her out of any serious discussion. But
why should the admission of women to the bar result in a volcanic
upheaval? Women have practised medicine for years, and have not
revolutionized it. Painstaking service, rather than any brilliant
display of originality, has been their contribution to this field.
It is reasonable to suppose that their advance will be resolute and
beneficial. If they ever condescended to their profession, they do so
no longer. If they ever talked about belonging to “the class of real
people,” they have relinquished such flowers of rhetoric. If they have
earnestly desired the franchise, it was because they saw in it justice
to themselves, not the torch which would enlighten the world.
It is conceded theoretically that woman’s sphere is an elastic term,
embracing any work she finds herself able to do,--not necessarily do
well, because most of the world’s work is done badly, but well enough
to save herself from failure. Her advance is unduly heralded and unduly
criticized. She is the target for too much comment from friend and foe.
On the one hand, a keen (but of course perverted) misogynist like
Sir Andrew Macphail, welcomes her entrance into public life because
it will tend to disillusionment. If woman can be persuaded to reveal
her elemental inconsistencies, man, freed in some measure from her
charm--which is the charm of _retenue_--will no longer be subject to
her rule. On the other hand, that most feminine of feminists, Miss Jane
Addams, predicts that “the dulness which inheres in both domestic and
social affairs when they are carried on by men alone, will no longer
be a necessary attribute of public life when gracious and grey-haired
women become part of it.”
If Sir Andrew is as acid as Schopenhauer, Miss Addams is early
Victorian. Her point of view presupposes a condition of which we had
not been even dimly aware. Granted that domesticity palls on the
solitary male. Housekeeping seldom attracts him. The tea-table and the
friendly cat fail to arrest his roving tendencies. Granted that some
men are polite enough to say that they do not enjoy social events in
which women take no part. They showed no disposition to relinquish such
pastimes until the arid days of prohibition, and even now they cling
forlornly to the ghost of a cheerful past. When they assert, however,
that they would have a much better time if women were present, no one
is wanton enough to contradict them. But public life! The arena in
which whirling ambition sweeps human souls as an autumn wind sweeps
leaves; which resounds with the shouts of the conquerors and the
groans of the conquered; which is degraded by cupidity and ennobled
by achievement; that this field of adventure, this heated race-track
needs to be relieved from dulness by the presence and participation of
elderly ladies is the crowning vision of sensibility.
“_Qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête_,” said Pascal; and the Michigan
angel is a danger signal. The sentimental and chivalrous attitude of
American men reacts alarmingly when they are brought face to face with
the actual terms and visible consequences of woman’s enfranchisement.
There exists a world-wide and age-long belief that what women want
they get. They must want it hard enough and long enough to make their
desire operative. It is the listless and preoccupied unconcern of their
own sex which bars their progress. But men will fall into a flutter of
admiration because a woman runs a successful dairy-farm, or becomes the
mayor of a little town; and they will look aghast upon such commonplace
headlines as these in their morning paper: “Women Confess Selling
Votes”; “Chicago Women Arrested for Election Frauds”;--as if there had
not always been, and would not always be, a percentage of unscrupulous
voters in every electorate. No sane woman believes that women, as
a body, will vote more honestly than men; but no sane man believes
that they will vote less honestly. They are neither the “gateway to
hell,” as Tertullian pointed out, nor the builders of Sir Rabindranath
Tagore’s “spiritual civilization.” They are neither the repositories of
wisdom, nor the final word of folly.
It was unwise and unfair to turn a searchlight upon the first woman
in Congress, and exhibit to a gaping world her perfectly natural
limitations. Such limitations are common in our legislative bodies,
and excite no particular comment. They are as inherent in the average
man as in the average woman. They in no way affect the question of
enfranchisement. Give as much and ask no more. Give no more and ask as
much. This is the watchword of equality.
“God help women when they have only their rights!” exclaimed a
brilliant American lawyer; but it is in the “only” that all savour
lies. Rights and privileges are incompatible. Emancipation implies
the sacrifice of immunity, the acceptance of obligation. It heralds
the reign of sober and disillusioning experience. Women, as M. Faguet
reminds us, are only the equals of men; a truth which was simply
phrased in the old Cornish adage, “Lads are as good as wenches when
they are washed.”
The Strayed Prohibitionist
The image of the prohibition-bred American youth (not this generation,
but the next) straying through the wine-drenched and ale-drenched pages
of English literature captivates the fancy. The classics, to be sure,
are equally bibulous; but with the classics the American youth has no
concern. The advance guard of educators are busy clearing away the
débris of Greek and Latin which has hitherto clogged his path. There is
no danger of his learning from Homer that “Generous wine gives strength
to toiling men,” or from Socrates that “The potter’s art begins with
the wine jar,” or from the ever-scandalous Horace that “Wine is mighty
to inspire hope, and to drown the bitterness of care.” The professor
has conspired with the prohibitionist to save the undergraduate from
such disedifying sentiments.
As for the Bible, where corn and oil and wine, the three fruits of a
bountiful harvest, are represented as of equal virtue, it will probably
be needful to supply such texts with explanatory and apologetic
footnotes. The sweet and sober counsel of Ecclesiastes: “Forsake not
an old friend, for the new will not be like to him. A new friend is as
new wine; it shall grow old, and thou shalt drink it with pleasure,”
has made its way into the heart of humanity, and has been embedded
in the poetry of every land. But now, like the most lovely story of
the marriage feast at Cana, it has been robbed of the simplicity of
its appeal. I heard a sermon preached upon the marriage feast which
ignored the miracle altogether. The preacher dwelt upon the dignity
and responsibility of the married state, reprobated divorce, and urged
parents to send their children to Sunday school. It was a perfectly
good sermon, filled with perfectly sound exhortations; but the speaker
“strayed.” Sunday schools were not uppermost in the holy Mother’s mind
when she perceived and pitied the humiliation of her friends.
The banishing of the classics, the careful editing of the Scriptures,
and the comprehensive ignorance of foreign languages and letters which
distinguishes the young American, leaves only the field of British
and domestic literature to enlighten or bewilder him. Now New England
began to print books about the time that men grew restive as to the
definition of temperance. Longfellow wrote a “Drinking Song” to water,
which achieved humour without aspiring to it, and Dr. Holmes wrote a
teetotaller’s adaptation of a drinking song, which aspired to humour
without achieving it. As a matter of fact, no drinking songs, not
even the real ones and the good ones which sparkle in Scotch and
English verse, have any illustrative value. They come under the head
of special pleading, and are apt to be a bit defiant. In them, as in
the temperance lecture, “that good sister of common life, the vine,”
becomes an exotic, desirable or reprehensible according to the point
of view, but never simple and inevitable, like the olive-tree and the
sheaves of corn.
American letters, coming late in the day, are virgin of wine. There
have been books, like Jack London’s “John Barleycorn,” written in the
cause of temperance; there have been pleasant trifles, like Dr. Weir
Mitchell’s “Madeira Party,” written to commemorate certain dignified
convivialities which even then were passing silently away; and there
have been chance allusions, like Mr. Dooley’s vindication of whisky
from the charge of being food: “I wudden’t insult it be placin’ it on
the same low plain as a lobster salad”; and his loving recollection
of his friend Schwartzmeister’s cocktail, which was of such generous
proportions that it “needed only a few noodles to look like a biled
dinner.” But it is safe to say that there is more drinking in “Pickwick
Papers” than in a library of American novels. It is drinking without
bravado, without reproach, without justification. For natural treatment
of a debatable theme, Dickens stands unrivalled among novelists.
We are told that the importunate virtue of our neighbours, having
broken one set of sympathies and understandings, will in time deprive
us of meaner indulgences, such as tobacco, tea, and coffee. But
tobacco, tea, and coffee, though friendly and compassionate to men, are
late-comers and district-dwellers. They do not belong to the stately
procession of the ages, like the wine which Noah and Alexander and
Cæsar and Praxiteles and Plato and Lord Kitchener drank. When the
Elgin marbles were set high over the Parthenon, when the Cathedral of
Chartres grew into beauty, when “Hamlet” was first played at the Globe
Theatre, men lived merrily and wisely without tobacco, tea, and coffee,
but not without wine. Tobacco was given by the savage to the civilized
world. It has an accidental quality which adds to its charm, but which
promises consolation when those who are better than we want to be
have taken it away from us. “I can understand,” muses Dr. Mitchell,
“the discovery of America, and the invention of printing; but what
human want, what instinct, led up to tobacco? Imagine intuitive genius
capturing this noble idea from the odours of a prairie fire!”
Charles Lamb pleaded that tobacco was at worst only a “white devil.”
But it was a persecuted little devil which for years suffered shameful
indignities. We have Mr. Henry Adams’s word for it that, as late as
1862, Englishmen were not expected to smoke in the house. They went out
of doors or to the stables. Only a licensed libertine like Monckton
Milnes permitted his guests to smoke in their rooms. Half a century
later, Mr. Rupert Brooke, watching a designer in the advertising
department of a New York store making “Matisse-like illustrations
to some notes on summer suitings,” was told by the superintendent
that the firm gave a “free hand” to its artists, “except for nudes,
improprieties, and figures of people smoking.” To these last, some
customers--even customers of the sex presumably interested in summer
suitings--“strongly objected.”
The new school of English fiction which centres about the tea-table,
and in which, as in the land of the lotus-eaters, it is always
afternoon, affords an arena for conversation and an easily procurable
atmosphere. England is the second home of tea. She waited centuries,
kettle on hob and cat purring expectantly by the fire, for the coming
of that sweet boon, and she welcomed it with the generous warmth of
wisdom. No duties daunted her. No price was too high for her to pay.
No risk was too great to keep her from smuggling the “China drink.”
No hearth was too humble to covet it, and the homeless brewed it by
the roadside. Isopel Berners, that peerless and heroic tramp, paid ten
shillings a pound for her tea; and when she lit her fire in the Dingle,
comfort enveloped Lavengro, and he tasted the delights of domesticity.
But though England will doubtless fight like a lion for her tea, as for
her cakes and ale, when bidden to purify herself of these indulgences,
yet it is the ale, and not the tea, which has coloured her masterful
literature. There are phrases so inevitable that they defy monotony.
Such are the “wine-dark sea” of Greece, and the “nut-brown ale” of
England. Even Lavengro, though he shared Isopel’s tea, gave ale, “the
true and proper drink of Englishmen,” to the wandering tinker and his
family. How else, he asks, could he have befriended these wretched
folk? “There is a time for cold water” [this is a generous admission on
the writer’s part], “there is a time for strong meat, there is a time
for advice, and there is a time for ale; and I have generally found
that the time for advice is after a cup of ale.”
“Lavengro” has been called the epic of ale; but Borrow was no English
rustic, content with the buxom charms of malt, and never glancing
over her fat shoulder to wilder, gayer loves. He was an accomplished
wanderer, at home with all men and with all liquor. He could order
claret like a lord, to impress the supercilious waiter in a London
inn. He could drink Madeira with the old gentleman who counselled
the study of Arabic, and the sweet wine of Cypress with the Armenian
who poured it from a silver flask into a silver cup, though there was
nothing better to eat with it than dry bread. When, harried by the
spirit of militant Protestantism, he peddled his Bibles through Spain,
he dined with the courteous Spanish and Portuguese Gipsies, and found
that while bread and cheese and olives comprised their food, there was
always a leathern bottle of good white wine to give zest and spirit
to the meal. He offered his brandy-flask to a Genoese sailor, who
emptied it, choking horribly, at a draught, so as to leave no drop for
a shivering Jew who stood by, hoping for a turn. Rather than see the
Christian cavalier’s spirits poured down a Jewish throat, explained the
old boatman piously, he would have suffocated.
Englishmen drank malt liquor long before they tasted sack or canary.
The ale-houses of the eighth century bear a respectable tradition of
antiquity, until we remember that Egyptians were brewing barley beer
four thousand years ago, and that Herodotus ascribes its invention to
the ingenuity and benevolence of Isis. Thirteen hundred years before
Christ, in the time of Seti I, an Egyptian gentleman complimented Isis
by drinking so deeply of her brew that he forgot the seriousness of
life, and we have to-day the record of his unseemly gaiety. Xenophon,
with notable lack of enthusiasm, describes the barley beer of Armenia
as a powerful beverage, “agreeable to those who were used to it”; and
adds that it was drunk out of a common vessel through hollow reeds,--a
commendable sanitary precaution.
In Thomas Hardy’s story, “The Shepherd’s Christening,” there is a rare
tribute paid to mead, that glorious intoxicant which our strong-headed,
stout-hearted progenitors drank unscathed. The traditional “heather
ale” of the Picts, the secret of which died with the race, was a
glorified mead.
“Fra’ the bonny bells o’ heather
They brewed a drink lang-syne,
’Twas sweeter far than honey,
’Twas stronger far than wine.”
The story goes that, after the bloody victory of the Scots under
Kenneth MacAlpine, in 860, only two Picts who knew the secret of the
brew survived the general slaughter. Some say they were father and son,
some say they were master and man. When they were offered their lives
in exchange for the recipe, the older captive said he dared not reveal
it while the younger lived, lest he be slain in revenge. So the Scots
tossed the lad into the sea, and waited expectantly. Then the last
of the Picts cried, “I only know!” and leaped into the ocean and was
drowned. It is a brave tale. One wonders if a man would die to save
the secret of making milk-toast.
From the pages of history the prohibition-bred youth may glean much
off-hand information about the wine which the wide world made and
drank at every stage of civilization and decay. If, after the fashion
of his kind, he eschews history, there are left to him encyclopædias,
with their wealth of detail, and their paucity of intrinsic realities.
Antiquarians also may be trusted to supply a certain number of papers
on “leather drinking-vessels,” and “toasts of the old Scottish gentry.”
But if the youth be one who browses untethered in the lush fields of
English literature, taking prose and verse, fiction and fact, as he
strays merrily along, what will he make of the hilarious company in
which he finds himself? What of Falstaff, and the rascal, Autolycus,
and of Sir Toby Belch, who propounded the fatal query which has been
answered in 1919? What of Herrick’s “joy-sops,” and “capring wine,”
and that simple and sincere “Thanksgiving” hymn which takes cognizance
of all mercies?
“Lord, I confess too, when I dine,
The pulse is thine,
The worts, the purslane, and the mess
Of water-cress.
’Tis Thou that crown’st my glittering hearth
With guiltless mirth.
And giv’st me wassail bowls to drink,
Spiced to the brink.”
The lines sound like an echo of Saint Chrysostom’s wise warning, spoken
twelve hundred years before: “Wine is for mirth, and not for madness.”
Biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, all are set with traps
for the unwary, and all are alike unconscious of offence. Here is Dr.
Johnson, whose name alone is a tonic for the morally debilitated,
saying things about claret, port, and brandy which bring a blush to
the cheek of temperance. Here is Scott, that “great good man” and
true lover of his kind, telling a story about a keg of whisky and a
Liddesdale farmer which one hardly dares to allude to, and certainly
dares not repeat. Here is Charles Lamb, that “frail good man,”
drinking more than is good for him; and here is Henry Crabb Robinson,
a blameless, disillusioned, prudent sort of person, expressing actual
regret when Lamb ceases to drink. “His change of habit, though it on
the whole improves his health, yet, when he is low-spirited, leaves him
without a remedy or relief.”
John Evelyn and Mr. Pepys witnessed the blessed Restoration, when
England went mad with joy, and the fountains of London ran wine.
“A very merry, dancing, drinking,
Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking”
time it was, until the gilt began to wear off the gingerbread. But
Evelyn, though he feasted as became a loyal gentleman, and admitted
that canary carried to the West Indies and back for the good of
its health was “incomparably fine,” yet followed Saint Chrysostom’s
counsel. He drank, and compelled his household to drink, with sobriety.
There is real annoyance expressed in the diary when he visits a
hospitable neighbour, and his coachman is so well entertained in the
servants’ hall that he falls drunk from the box, and cannot pick
himself up again.