nothing so sad as the same girl, if Time brings her disillusion instead
of the true marriage which is "a mutual concord and agreement of souls,
a harmony in which discord is not even imagined; the uniting of two
mornings that hope to reach the night together."
The world is full of pain and danger for those who face it alone, and
home, that sanctuary where one may find strength and new courage, must
be built upon a foundation of mutual helpfulness and trust. No one can
make a home alone. It needs a man's strong hands, a woman's tender
hands, and two true hearts.
[Sidenote: The Light upon the Altar]
The light which shines upon the bridal altar is either the white flame
of eternal devotion or the sacrificial fire which preys hungrily upon
someone's disappointment and someone's broken heart. But to the utter
rout of the cynic, the dream which led the two souls thither sometimes
becomes divinely true.
Marriage is said to be sufficient "career" for any woman, and it is
equally true of men. Like Emerson's vision of friendship, it is fit "not
only for serene days and pleasant rambles, but for all the passages of
life and death."
It is to make one the stronger because one does not have to go alone. It
is to make one's joy the sweeter because it is shared. It is to take the
sting away from grief because it is divided, and the dear comfort of the
other's love lies forever around the sore and doubting heart.
[Sidenote: Fire and Snow]
It is to be the light in the darkness, the belief in the distrust, the
never-failing source of consolation. It is to be the gentlest of
forgiveness for all of one's mistakes--strength and tenderness, passion
and purity, the fire and the snow.
It is to make one generous to all the world with one's sympathy and
compassion, because in the sanctuary there is no lack of love. It is
"the joining together of two souls for life, to strengthen each other in
all peril, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each
other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable
memories at the moment of the last parting."
The Physiology of Vanity
[Illustration]
The Physiology of Vanity
[Sidenote: Conceit and Vanity]
"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!" It is the common human emotion, the
root of the personal equation, the battling residuum in the last
analysis of social chemistry. There is a wide difference between conceit
and vanity. Conceit is lovable and unconcealed; vanity is supreme
selfishness, usually hidden. Conceit is based upon an unselfish desire
to please; vanity takes no thought of others which is not based upon
egotism.
Vanity and jealousy are closely allied, while conceit is a natural
development of altruistic virtue. Conceit is the mildest of vices;
vanity is the worst. Men are usually conceited but infrequently vain,
while women are seldom afflicted with the lesser vice.
Man's conceit is the simplest form of self-appreciation. He thinks he is
extremely good-looking, as men go; that he has seen the world; that he
is a good judge of dinners and of human nature; that he is one of the
few men who may easily charm a woman.
The limits of man's conceit are usually in full view, but eye nor
opera-glass has not yet approached the end of woman's vanity. The
disease is contagious, and the men who suffer from it are usually those
whose chosen companions are women.
Woman's vanity is a development of her insatiate thirst for love. Her
smiles and tears are all-powerful with her lover, and nothing goes so
quickly to a woman's head as a sense of power. She forever defies the
Salic law--each woman feels that her rightful place is upon a throne.
[Sidenote: The One Object]
The one object of woman's life is the acquirement of power through love.
It is because this power is freely recognised by the men who seek her in
marriage that her vanity seldom has full scope until after she is
married.
[Sidenote: The Destroyer]
After marriage, a great many women begin the slow process of alienating
a man from his family, blind to the fact that by lessening his love for
others, they add nothing to their own store. The filial and fraternal
love is not to be given to anyone but mother and sisters--they have no
place in a man's heart that another woman could fill. The destroyer
simply obliterates that part of his life and offers nothing in its
place.
The achievement sometimes takes years, but it is none the less sure.
Later, it may be extended to father and brothers, but they are always
the last to be considered.
It is most difficult of all to break the tie which binds a man to his
mother. The one who bore him is not faultless, for motherhood brings new
gifts of feeling, sometimes sacrificing judgment and clear vision to
selfish unselfishness. It is only in fiction and poetry that such love
is valued now, for the divine blindness which does not question, which
asks only the right to give, has lost beauty in our age of reason and
restraint.
He had thought that face the most beautiful in all the world--until he
fell in love. Now he sees his mother as she is; a wrinkled old woman,
perverse, unreasonable, and inclined to meddle with his domestic
affairs. The hands that soothed his childish fretting are no longer
lovely. Inattention to small details of dress, which he never noticed
before, are painfully evident. The eyes that have watched him all his
life with loving anxiety, shining with pride at his success and
softening with tenderest pity at his mistakes, are subtly different now.
He wonders at his blindness. It is strange, indeed, that he has not
realised all this before.
[Sidenote: The Awakening]
To most men the awakening comes too late if it comes at all. Only when
the faded eyes are closed and the worn hands folded forever; when
"mother" is beyond the reach of praise or blame, her married boy
realises what has been done. With that first shock comes bitterest
repentance--and he never forgives his wife. Many a woman who complains
of "coldness" and "lost love" might trace it back to the day her
husband's mother died, and to the sudden flash of insight, the
adjustment of relation, which comes with death.
The comic papers have made the mother-in-law a thing to be dreaded. She
is the poster attached to the matrimonial magazine which inspires
would-be purchasers with awe. Many an engaged girl confides to her best
friend that her fiancé's mother is "an old cat." She usually goes still
further, and gives jealousy as the cause of it.
No right-minded mother was ever jealous of the woman her son chose for
his wife. But she has seen how marriage changes men and naturally fears
the result. The altar is the grave of many a boy's love for his mother.
Neither of the women most intimately concerned is blind to the impending
possibilities; it is only man who cannot see.
[Sidenote: One in a Thousand]
There are some girls who realise what it means, but they are few and far
between. One in a thousand, perhaps, will openly acknowledge her debt to
the woman who for twenty-five or thirty years has given her best thought
to the man she is about to marry.
Is he strong and active, healthy and finely moulded? It is his mother's
care for the first sixteen years of his life. It is the result of her
anxious days and of many a sleepless night, while the potential man was
racked with fever and childish ills. His chivalrous devotion to the girl
he loves is wholly due to his mother's influence. His clean and
open-hearted manliness is a free gift to her, from the woman now
characterised as "an old cat."
It is seldom that the mother receives credit for his virtues, but she is
invariably blamed for his faults. Too many women expect a man to be cut
out by their pattern. The supreme mental achievement is the ability to
judge other people by their own standards, and a crank is not
necessarily a person whose rules of life and conduct do not coincide
with our own.
[Sidenote: The Thirst for Power]
To this thirst for power may be traced all of woman's vanity. It is
commonly supposed that she dresses to please others, but she often
values fine raiment principally because it shows how much her husband
thinks of her. If a man's coat is shiny at the seams and he postpones
the new one that his wife may have an extra hat, she is delicately
flattered by this unselfish tribute to her charm.
From a single root vanity spreads and flowers until its poisonous blooms
affect all social life. A woman becomes vain of her house, her rugs, her
tapestries, her jewels, horses, and even of the livery of her footman.
The things which should be valued for their intrinsic beauty and the
pleasure-giving quality, which is not by any means selfish, soon become
food for a vice.
She gradually grows to consider herself a very superior person. She is
so charming and so much to be desired, that some man works night and day
in his office, sacrificing both pleasure and rest, that she may have the
baubles for which she yearns.
It is not far from absolute self-satisfaction, in either man or woman,
to generous bestowal of enlightenment upon the unfortunate savages who
linger on the outskirts of one's social sphere.
In the infinite vastness of creation, where innumerable worlds move
according to the fiat of majestic Law, there lies one called Earth.
There are planets within reach of the scientific vision of its
inhabitants that are many times larger. There are some which have more
moons, more mountains and rivers, longer days, and longer years.
Countless suns, the centres of other vast planetary systems, lie in the
inconceivable distances beyond.
[Sidenote: A Mote in the Sun]
In the midst of this unspeakable greatness, Earth swings like one of the
motes which a passing sunbeam illumines. Upon this mote, one fifth of
the inhabitants have assumed supreme knowledge and understanding, given
them, doubtless, because of their innate superiority. This preferment,
also, is theirs by the grace of an infinitely just and merciful God.
The other four fifths are supposedly in total darkness, though the same
heavens are over their heads, the same earth under their feet, and
though the light of sun and moon and the gentle radiance of the stars
are freely given to all.
There are the same opportunities for development and civilisation, but
they have not received The Enlightenment. To them must go the foreign
missionaries, to teach the things which have been graciously given them
on account of their innate superiority.
[Sidenote: Narrowing Circles]
Man's life is a succession of narrowing circles. He admits the force of
the heliocentric idea, for it is the sun which gives light and heat.
Then the circle narrows, almost imperceptibly, for, of all the planets
which circle around the sun, is not Earth the chief?
This point being gained, he is inside the geocentric circle. Earth is
the centre of creation. Sun, moon, and stars are auxiliary forces,
bountifully arranged by the Giver of all Good for Earth's beauty and
comfort. Of all the creatures who share in this, is not man the most
important? Thus he retreats to the anthropocentric circle.
[Sidenote: By Strength of Mind and Arm]
Man is the centre of organic life, and it is easily seen that his race
is far superior to the others. Their skins are not the same colour,
their ships are not so mighty, their cunning with weapons is infinitely
less. His race is dominant by strength of mind and arm.
The dark-skinned races must be taught civilisation, with fire and sword,
with cannon and bayonet, with crime and death. They must be civilised
before they can be happy. The naked savage who sits beneath a palm tree,
with his hut in the distance, while his wife and children hover around
him, is happy only because he is too ignorant to know what happiness is.
In order to be rightly happy, he must have a fine house, carriages, and
servants, and live in a crowded city where tall buildings and smoke
limit one's horizon to a narrow patch of blue. He must struggle daily
with his fellows, not for the necessaries of life, but for small pieces
of silver and bits of green paper, which are not nearly as pretty as
glass beads.
The savage, unaccustomed to refinement, stabs or beheads his enemy.
Civilisation will teach him the uses of poison, and that putting typhoid
germs into the drinking water of an Emperor is much more delicate and
fully as effectual.
[Sidenote: The Sublime Egotism]
From this small circle, it is only a step to the centre and to that
sublime egotism which has been named Vanity.
Man repeats in his own life the development of a nation. He progresses
from unquestioning happiness to childish inquiry and wonder, from fairy
tales of princes and dragons to actual knowledge; through inquiry to
doubt, through faith to disbelief, through civilisation to decay.
He is not content to let other nations and others races pursue their
normal development. He insists that the work of centuries be crowded
into a generation. And in the same manner, the growth and strivings of
his fellows call forth his unselfish aid. Having infinite treasures of
mental equipment, gained by superior opportunity and wider experience,
he will generously share his noble possessions.
[Sidenote: Personal Vanity]
It is personal vanity of the most flagrant type which intrudes itself,
unasked, into other people's affairs. There are few of us who do not
feel capable of ordering the daily lives of others, down to the most
minute detail.
We know how their houses should be arranged, how they should spend and
invest their money, how they should dress, how they should comport
themselves, and more definitely yet do we know the things they should
not do. We know what is right and what is wrong, while they, poor
things! do not. We know whom and when they should marry, how their
children should be educated and trained, and what servants they should
employ.
We know for what pursuit each one is best fitted and how each should
occupy his spare time. We know to what church all should go; what creed
all should believe. We know what particular traits are faults and how
these can be corrected. We know so much about other people that we often
have not time to give due attention to ourselves. We neglect our own
affairs that we may unselfishly direct others, and sometimes suffer in
consequence, for nobody but a lawyer makes a good living by attending to
other people's business.
[Sidenote: Theoretically]
Theoretically, this should be pleasing to each one. Every person of
sense should be delighted at being told just what to do. It would
relieve him from all care, all responsibility; the necessity for
thought, planning, and individual judgment would be wholly removed.
The musical student would not have to select his own instrument, his own
teacher, nor even his own practice time. Every author would know just
how and when to write, and in order to become famous, he need only act
upon the suggestions for stories and improvement of style which are
gratuitously given him from day to day, by people who cannot write a
clear and correct sentence. This thing actually happened; consequently
it is just the theme for fiction. This plot, suitably developed, would
make the nations sit up, and send the race by hundred thousands to the
corner bookstore.
The cares incident to selecting a wardrobe would be wholly removed.
Every woman knows how every other should dress. Her sure taste selects
at a glance the thing which will best become the other, and over which
the Unenlightened may ponder for hours.
[Sidenote: A Common Vanity]
There is no more common vanity than claiming to "know" some particular
person. We are "all things to all men." The two who love each other
better than all the world beside, have much knowledge, but it is not by
any means complete. "Souls reach out to each other across the impassable
gulfs of individual being." And yet, daily, people who have no sympathy
with us, and scarcely a common interest, will assume to "know" us, when
we do not fully know ourselves, and when we earnestly hide our real
selves from all save the single soul we love.
To assume intimate knowledge of the hundred considerations which make up
a single situation, the various complexities of temperament and
disposition which the personal equation continually produces in human
affairs, of the imperceptible fibres of the web which lies between two
souls, preventing always the fullest understanding, unless Love, the
magician, gives new sight--amounts to the proclamation of practical
Omnipotence.
[Sidenote: "I Told You So"]
There is no position in life which is secure. No complication ever comes
to our friends, which our advice, acted upon, would not immediately
solve. If our most minute directions are not thankfully received and put
into effect, there is always the comforting indication of
superiority--"I told you so."
And when the jaded soul revolts in supreme defiance, declaring its right
to its own life, its own duties, its own friendships, and its own loves,
there is much expressed disgust, much misfortune predicted, and, saddest
of all, much wounded vanity.
The dominant egotism forbids that anything shall be better than itself.
No success is comparable to one's own, no life so wisely ordered, and
there is nothing so sad as the fame attained by those who do not follow
our advice.
Adversity is commonly accepted as the test of friendship, but there is
another more certain still--success. Anyone may bestow pity. It is
fatally easy to offer to those less fortunate than ourselves; whose
capabilities have not proved adequate, as ours have; but it requires
fine gifts of generous feeling to be genuinely glad at another's good
fortune, in which we cannot by any possibility hope to share.
[Sidenote: Advice]
Advice is usually to be had for the asking. In the case of a corporation
attorney or a specialist, there is a high value placed upon it, but it
is to be freely had from those who love us, and, strangely enough, from
those who do not.
It is one of the blessings of love, that all the experience of another,
all the battles of the other soul, are laid open for our better
understanding of our own path. But there is a subtle distinction between
the counsel of love and that of vanity. The one is unselfishly glad of
our achievements, taking new delight in every step upward, while the
other passes over triumphs in silence and carps upon the misfortune
until it is not to be borne.
From the intimate union of two loving souls, Vanity is forever shut out.
Jealousy dare not show her malignant face. These two are facing the
world together, side by side and shoulder to shoulder, each the other's
strength and shield.
Success may come only after many failures; the tide may not turn till
after long discouragement and great despair. But in the union with that
other soul, so gently baring its inmost dream that the other may
understand, defeat loses its sting.
[Sidenote: The Sanctuary of that Other Soul]
Ambition forever beckons, like a will o' the wisp. When realisation
seems within easy reach, the dream fades, or another, seemingly
unattainable, mockingly takes its place. But in the sanctuary of that
other soul, there is always new courage to be found. Long aisles and
quiet spaces lessen the fever and the unrest. Darkness and cool shadows
soothe the burning eyes, and in the clasp of those loving arms there is
certain sleep.
Vanity cares for nothing which is not in some way its own, and it is
perhaps an amorphous vanity, as carbon is akin to a diamond, that makes
a hard-won victory doubly dear.
There are always sycophants to fawn and flatter, there are hands that
will gladly help that they may claim their share of the result, but that
realised dream is wholly sweet in which only the dreamer and the other
soul have fully believed. Failure, even, is more easily borne if it is
entirely one's own; if there is no one else to be blamed.
[Sidenote: The Bitter Proof]
"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." So spake the prophet in Jerusalem
and the centuries have brought the bitter proof. Vanity has reared
palaces which have vanished like the architecture of a mirage. Vanity
has led the hosts against itself.
Where are Babylon and Nineveh; the hanging gardens and the splendour of
forgotten kings? Where are Cæsar and Cleopatra; Trianon and Marie
Antoinette? Where is the lordly Empire of France? Is it buried with
military honours, in the grave of the exiled Napoleon?
Vanity's pomp endureth for a day, but Vanity itself is perennial. Vanity
sets whole races of men in motion, pitting them against each other
across intervening seas.
One woman has a stone, no larger than a pea, brought from a mine in
South Africa. Vanity sets it proudly upon her breast and leads other
women to envy her its possession, for purely selfish reasons. One
woman's gown is made from a plant which grows in Georgia and she is
unhappy because it is not the product of a French or Japanese worm.
One woman's coat is woven from the covering of a sheep, and she is not
content because it has not cost a greater number of silver pieces and
more bits of green paper, besides the life of an Arctic seal, that never
harmed her nor hers.
Vanity allows a tender-hearted woman, who cannot see a child or a dumb
brute in pain, to order the tails of her horses cut to the fashionable
length and to wear upon her hat the pitiful little body of a song-bird
that has been skinned alive.
Vanity permits a woman to trim the outer garments of the little stranger
for whose coming she has long waited and prayed, with pretty, fluffy fur
torn from the unborn baby of another mother--who is only a sheep. Vanity
permits a woman to insist that her combs and pins shall be real
tortoise-shell, which is obtained from the quivering animal by roasting
it alive before a slow fire.
[Sidenote: All is Vanity]
"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!" The mad race still goes on. It is
insatiate vanity which wrecks lives, ruins homes, torments one's
fellows, and blinds the clear vision of its victims. It harms others,
but most of all one's self.
[Sidenote: The Conqueror]
There is only one place from which it is shut out--from the union with
that other soul. Great as it is, there is still a greater force; there
is the inevitable conqueror, for Vanity cannot exist side by side with
Love.
Widowers and Widows
[Illustration]
Widowers and Widows
Next to burglars, mice, and green worms, every normal girl fears a
widow. Courtships have been upset and expected proposals have vanished
into thin air, simply because a widow has come into the game. There is
only one thing to do in such a case; retreat gracefully, and leave the
field to her.
[Sidenote: The Charm]
A widow's degree of blandishment is conservatively estimated at
twenty-five spinster power. At almost every session of spinsters, the
question comes up for discussion. It is difficult to see just where the
charm lies.
A widow has, of course, a superior knowledge of ways and means. She has
fully learned the value of silence, of food, and of judicious flattery.
But these accomplishments may be acquired by the observing spinster who
gives due attention to the subject.
The mystery lies deeper than is first suspected. It is possible that the
knowledge of her own limitations has something to do with it. A girl
who has been flattered, adored, placed upon a pedestal and worshipped,
naturally comes to the conclusion that she belongs there. She issues her
commands from that height and conveys to man various delicate reminders
of his servility.
[Sidenote: The Pedestal Idea]
When the same girl is married and by due operation of natural law
becomes a widow, she doubtless has come to a better understanding of the
pedestal idea. Hence she does not attempt the impossible, and satisfies
herself with working those miracles which are comparatively simple.
A widow has all of the freedom of a girl, combined with the liberty of a
married woman. She has the secure social position of a matron without
the drawback of a husband. She is nearer absolute independence than
other women are ever known to be.