I saw in a neighboring city not long ago a drunken woman. She was in
a fashionable hotel and stood beside a post in the little gallery
that ran around the court. She was not three feet above our heads,
was dressed in the height of fashion, wore a hat that looked like a
huge poppy and altogether she was not unlike a beautiful tiger lily
that seemed about to fall over into our arms. Instantly that wave of
romance and reverence as natural to man, when he sees beauty clothed
in purity, as the tides that do follow the midnight moon, swept over
me. Her form was faultless, her gown perfect, her face beautiful.
At least I thought so until I looked up and happened to catch her eye.
She smiled the sensual smile of a wood-nymph and leered as disgustingly
as ever Bacchus through a glass of old Falerian. In a moment it all
changed. Her face was no longer beautiful, but hard and cruel. Her form
was made--her gown the gaudy thing of a demi-monde.
I blushed when she singled me out and leered, and ducked my head, for
fear someone had seen me. But I soon saw that she leered at all alike
and knew no difference between a man and men.
For a half hour she stood there, scarce able to cling to the post she
stood by, the observed of every man in the court, the disgusting moral
that pointed the old story of the fallen angel.
It is bad enough to see a drunken man. Nothing so quickly robs goodness
of its sweetness, genius of its charm, greatness of its colossal form,
than to behold it drunk. There are some great men I know who, if I ever
saw them drunk, never again would I believe they were great. They say
Poe was a drunkard. I cannot imagine it. And S. S. Prentiss--I cannot
believe it. I cannot think of DeQuincy and Coleridge as opium eaters,
Byron and Burns as whisky-heads. If I did I could never again read
anything they wrote. For of all things that levels man to the beasts
and makes knowledge a strumpet and genius a bawdy, it is the maudlin
rottenness of a plain old drunk.
Whisky and not death is the greatest leveler with the dirt.
But to see a drunken woman--Good God! Nature is partial to a man. She
has made some laws for him she has not made for woman. She has filled
him with passion and strength and capacity for work and great things.
She overlooks it, perhaps, when he steps aside, under the burning law
she has forced on him for reproduction, and she sighs and smiles when
he drowns his strenuousness now and then in the forgetfulness of the
cup. He may do all that, and if his wife be pure still may he sire sons
who will be brave and honest, and daughters who will be pure and noble.
But let the woman be weak and fall, and see how quickly nature revenges
herself for the desecration of her unwritten law by throwing back on
humanity sons who are thieves and daughters who are impure. This is an
unwritten law, but it proves that the mother is the great moral force
of the world. Let her violate it and the punishment comes quickly on
the race.
As I looked at this woman I could not help thinking: “I hope, as one
who, interested in stock, is more interested in the human race, that
you carry in your life that penalty of impureness--barrenness. For it
were better for mankind that such as you should never be mothers, to
fill prison pens with thieves and forgers and bawdy houses with painted
Magdalenes. Indeed, it is up to you to pass off the stage of life and
cease to encumber an earth on which not one single womanly law is left
you to fill. The honest matron of the noble horse brings forth yearly
and within the sacred laws of nature an animal that is the pride of
man and the glory of his kind. The gentle mother of the dairy is an
inspiration and a blessing to the earth. The very brood sow of the pen
suckles her hungry brood begot in honorable wedlock. But you, O, being
of a higher world, O breeder of immortal beings, made in the image of
God and endowed with the reason of the angels, you from whom nature
expects so much, you fall below all of these and brand yourself the
harlot of humanity!”
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_Depravity is not so much a creature of inheritance as of environment._