galley-slave. I have read _The Seats of the Mighty_, and shuddered at
the idea of being imprisoned for five years alone and without a light.
I have seen a flock of sheep driven by shouting, panting, racing
little boys, and have been glad I did not have to drive sheep for my
daily bread. I have rejoiced that my lot was not that of a Paris
cab-horse, but I never in all my life thought of any fate so appalling
as that contained in those words--the perpetual society of fools.
Why not reform our penitentiary methods? What is a prison cell to a
clever embezzler, if he can have books and a pipe? Nothing but a long
rest for his worn-out nerves--possibly a grateful change.
But what would be the feelings of a man of brilliant intellect--for
the accomplished villain is always clever--who was detected in his
crime, and who stood breathless before his accusers, waiting for and
expecting a life sentence at hard labor, to hear the judge's voice
pronounce sentence, "Condemned for life to the perpetual society of
fools!"
I believe the man would be taken from the court-room a raving maniac.
I cannot but think that a real fool is conscious of his own
foolishness. He must realize his aloofness from the rest of mankind,
and in moments of such bitter self-knowledge I can picture many whom
the world regards as too far gone to comprehend their calamity praying
the prayer of the court-jester, "God be merciful to me a fool." I am a
little tender towards such. I do not condemn them. They have reached
the stage when they are the victims of human pity--a lamentable
condition. But those dense persons inhabiting the thickly populated
region bordering on foolishness--those self-satisfied, uncomprehending
egotists occupying the half-way house between wisdom and folly, known
as stupidity--against such my wrath burns fiercely. They are
deceptive--so un-get-at-able. They wear the semblance of wisdom, yet
it is but a cloak to snare and delude mankind into testing their
intelligence. They are not labelled by Heaven, like the fools we may
avoid if we will, or to whom we may go in a spirit of philanthropy.
They do not wear straw in their hair like maniacs, nor drool like
simpletons. Now they infest society clad in the most immaculate of
evening clothes. Often they are college graduates, and get along very
well with other men. They are frequently found among the rich,
sometimes even among the poor. Sometimes they are stolid and cannot
understand. Sometimes they are indifferent and won't understand.
Sometimes they are English.
We women are those upon whose souls their stupidity bears most
heavily. But stay--they do not oppress all women alike! There are
women whose spiritual needs never soar above the alphabet. When these
men are men of family, and one expects to find their wives sitting
with clinched hands and set teeth, simply enduring life and praying
for death, one is often surprised to see that they are generally stout
women, who wear many diamonds and a bovine expression in their eyes.
Evidently there is no nervous tension in their house, and the dense
man is quite capable of comprehending the a b c of human nature and of
keeping his family in flannels.
In strictly fashionable society the stupid man is not conspicuous,
because one never has time to comprehend that one is not understood.
If he nods his head sagely and says nothing, one is probably grateful
and passes on to the next, thinking that he is most entertaining. But
in that society where one sometimes sits down and breathes, where
conversation is considered as a fine art, and where talk is a mutual
game of battledoor and shuttlecock, then it is that your stupid man
looms up on the horizon like a blanket of clouds.
In America, particularly, conversation is something which not even the
French, who approach it most nearly, can thoroughly understand, for
with all its blinding nimbleness and kaleidoscopic changes there is a
substratum of Puritan morality which holds some things sacred--too
sacred even to argue in public--and one who transgresses turns off the
colored lights, and lo! your conversation is all in grays and browns.
To converse properly in America one must possess not only a nimble wit
and a broad understanding, but he must take into consideration one's
pedigree, and the effect of the climate.
This practically bars the stupid man from ever hearing the sound of
his own voice outside the secluded walls of his own home--or should.
It ought also to bar the simply witty man; for what is more jarring
than a misplaced wit or an ill-timed jocularity?
No, the chief requisite for a seat among the glorious company of the
elect is a deep-seeing, far-reaching, sensitive comprehension; a
capacity to see not only through a thing but over it and under it and
beyond it; to see not only its derivation and ancestry, but its
purport and import and influence and posterity; to detect the inner
meaning and the double meaning, and to smile alone at its surface
meaning. There are those of us, particularly women, who must have this
all-enveloping comprehension if we are to be thought fit to live. Our
conversation is such that, if we were taken literally, we deserve to
be strangled.
In this day of mad competition in every walk in life, it is not those
who can shout the loudest, even in those busy marts where voice reigns
supreme, who are going to be heard. No one man can continue to shout
the loudest. A momentary audience and a raw throat are the most he can
expect. But it is he who can exaggerate the most intelligently and
overpaint the most subtly. That sort of impertinence will attract the
eye and ear of the most loudly howling mob. Even the wayfarer gets an
inkling from a poster, but it is a man of the widest comprehension who
gets the whole truth from the subtlest exaggeration, and he who
possesses a sense of humor who realizes its acuteness.
To persons of this ilk the stupid man is a calamity compared to which
the loss of fortune and back-door begging would be a luxury.
But of course there are grades of stupidity even among stupid men, and
of these the educated stupid man is perhaps the most exhausting,
because a woman is constantly led into trying to converse with him,
having heard rumors that he is a college man, or that he has written a
book on mathematics. If a man is a genuine fool, of course one would
merely show him pictures, or play games with him, and so save brain
tissue. But with the deceptive halfway man, one is defenceless.
A single instance of a _bona-fide_ conversation will serve as a
fearful warning to the unwary.
A graduate of a German university, a man who has written three books
and has a reputation for always winning his lawsuits, sought me out
after a dinner, with the fatal accuracy of a man who has dined to
repletion and wishes to be amused.
Possibly because I also had dined and was therefore affable, I
endeavored to see if there was any forgotten corner of his mind, any
blind alley I hitherto had left unexplored, where I might find mine
own and feel at home.
His face was dull, heavy, unemotional, but I said in sprightly tones
to coax his lethargy:
"I have made such a delicious discovery to-day. I have found that
Carlyle has given the most acute definition of humor I ever read.
Isn't that rather surprising, when Carlyle's humor is rather
lumbering?"
He thought a moment.
"It is," he said, carefully, with that want of recklessness which
should endear him to a stone image.
"Do you know it, or shall I tell you?" I said, with fatal geniality.
Another pause.
"Tell me," he said, heavily, wadding his mind with cotton, for fear
some lightness should percolate through it.
"Why, he said that humor was an appreciation of the under side of
things. Isn't that delicious?"
I spoke with unctuous satisfaction, for I really expected him to
comprehend. He looked at my beaming countenance with grave suspicion,
and slowly reddened. He said nothing. I still smiled, but my smile was
fast freezing.
"Well?" I said, impatiently.
"You are jesting," he said. "That isn't the real answer."
"Why, yes, it is. Do you mean to say that you don't understand?"
"You jest so much. I never can tell--" he broke off, helplessly.
"But surely you see that," I urged. "How would _you_ define humor?"
"Why, humor is something funny. There's nothing funny about--er--that
that Carlyle said."
"Yes, but it's only a very delicate and occult way of exhibiting his
acuteness," I said. "Don't you see? An appreciation of the under side
of things--the side that does not lie on the surface."
"Are you serious?" he asked, as I leaned back to rest from my toil.
"Perfectly. But I can hardly believe that you are."
"Do you mean to say that you really see anything in that definition?"
"I do," I said, with ominous distinctness.
My manner indicated his stupidity, and he resented it. He grew
excited.
"Now, tell me, on your honor, do you really see anything funnier in
the under side of that sofa than in the top side?"
I could have screamed with anguish. But, being in company, I only
smote my hands together in my impotence and prayed for death.
The tension was relieved by the young son of our hostess in the
library just beyond having overheard our conversation. He laid his
hand over his mouth and went into such convulsions of silent laughter,
all the time writhing and twisting his lean body into such contortions
that in watching his extraordinary gymnastics over the head of my
unconscious _vis-à-vis_, and wondering if the boy ever could untie
himself, I forgot my suffering. I even relaxed my mental strain and
forgot the stupid man.
Would I could keep on forgetting him.
THE NEW WOMAN
"You have taught me
To be in love with noble thoughts."
That clever _bon-mot_, "To say 'everybody is talking about him' is a
eulogy. To say 'every one is talking about her' is an elegy," is no
longer true, more's the pity. More's the pity, I mean, because such a
delicious bit deserves a longer life. I could weep over the early
death of an epigram with a hearty spirit, which is second only to the
grief I feel at a good story spoiled for relation's sake. Cleverness,
like beauty, is its own excuse for being, and the first attribute of
the new woman is her cleverness. It is the new woman who is
responsible for the death of that epigram. But as she did not take an
active part in the murder, but was only an accessory after the fact,
let us hope that she will escape with as light a sentence as possible
from that stern old judge, public opinion, who is not her friend.
The newspapers have ridiculed the new woman to such an extent, and
their ridicule is so popular, that it requires an act of physical
courage to stand up in her defence and to tell the public that the
bloomer girl is not new; that they have had the newspaper
creation--like the poor--with them always; that they have passed over
the real new woman without a second glance. In other words, to assure
them as delicately as possible that they have been barking up the
wrong tree.
The first thing which endears the new woman to me personally, more
even than her cleverness, is that she has a sense of humor. You may
deny that, if you want to. I firmly believe it, but I am not
infallible. Thank Heaven that I am not. I abominate those people who
are always right. You can't amuse yourself by picking flaws in them.
They are so irritatingly conclusive. Now I am never conclusive, and
you ought to be glad of it. It makes it so much pleasanter for you to
be able to disagree with me logically.
Why have men always possessed an exclusive right to the sense of
humor? I believe it is because they live out-of-doors more. Humor is
an out-of-door virtue. It requires ozone and the light of the sun. And
when the new woman came out-of-doors to live, and mingled with men and
newer women, she saw funny things, and her sense of humor began to
grow and thrive. The fun of the situation is entirely lost if you stay
at home too much.
Now don't let the supersensitive men--who always want women to pursue
the perfectly lady-like employment of knitting gray socks--don't let
them have a fit right here for fear women have come out-of-doors to
stay and are never going in-doors again. Even women, my dear sirs,
know enough to go in when it rains. They love a hearth-rug quite as
well as a cat does. A cat and a woman always come home to the
hearth-rug. But there is very little mental exhilaration in a
hearth-rug. Lots of comfort, but little humor. The real excitement of
life, at least to a cat, is when in a morning stroll abroad she goes
out of her sphere--the hearth-rug--and meets some feline friend to
whom she extends a claw, playful or otherwise; or possibly meets some
merry puppy which induces her to move rapidly up the nearest tree with
an agility which you never would believe the mother of a family could
boast if you had not been an eye-witness to the interesting scene.
Such an encounter will not induce her to want to stay up a tree. It
only makes the safety of the hearth-rug more inviting. Now, if she
always remained on the hearth-rug, how could we tell, should the
hearth-rug be invaded in the absence of her natural protectors, that
she could defend herself? For my part, I am glad to know, when I leave
her, that she is not so helpless or so sleepy as she looks. It is a
great thing to know that a cat's tree-climbing abilities are not
hopelessly dormant. It does not make her purr the less when she is
stroked. Her fur is as soft, her ways are as gentle as they ever were,
and as she lies there so quietly upon the hearth-rug she looks as
though she never had left it. Only once in a while she regards you out
of one eye in a companionable way, as who should say, "That's all
right. You know I _can_ climb a tree when occasion requires."
The dear new woman! I like her. Perhaps she is crude in her newness.
Give her time. Perhaps she makes a little too much of her freedom. How
do you know what she suffered before she became new? Perhaps she has
her faults. Are you perfect?
Of course there is the woman who shrieks on political platforms and
neglects her husband, and lets her children grow up like little
ruffians; the woman who wears bloomers and bends over her handle-bar
like a monkey on a stick; the woman who wants to hold office with men
and smoke and talk like men--alas, that there _is_ that variety of
woman--but she is not new. Pray did you never see her before she wore
bloomers? Bloomers are no worse than the sort of clothes she used to
wear. Her swagger is no more pronounced now than it used to be in
skirts. She has always had bloomer instincts. You don't pretend to
declare, do you, that there never were unconventional women,
ill-dressed and rowdy women, before the new woman was heard of? That
is the great mistake you make. These women are _not_ new women. We've
always had them. We never, unfortunately, have been without them.
The real new woman is a creature quite different. She is one whom you
would wish to know. She is one whom you would invite to your most
select dinners. You would be better men if you had more friends like
her, and broader-minded women if you dropped a few of those who hand
you doughnut recipes over the back fence, and who entertain you with
the history of the baby's measles, and how they are managing to meet
the payments on their little house. I am not unsympathetic, either,
with the measles or the payments, but I prefer the subjects of
conversation which a new woman selects. There is more ozone in them.
The new woman whom I mean is silk-lined. She is nearly always pretty.
She is always clever. She is always a lady, and she is always good.
Perhaps, to the cynical, that combination sounds as if she might not
be interesting; but she is. Of course not always. One may have all
those gifts, and yet not know how to make use of them for other
people's benefit. The gift of being interesting is a distinct one by
itself. But the new woman, having fresh and outside interests, is
generally able to talk of them delightfully.
The new woman is new only in the sense that she has opened her eyes
and has begun to see the value of the simple, common, everyday truths
which lie nearest to her. The whole world becomes new to those who
suddenly awake to the beauties which they never had thought of before.
Once women taught their daughters housekeeping and sewing from stern
principle, and made it neither beautiful nor attractive.
Then house-keeping went out of fashion.
Feather-headed boys married trivial girls, and began to make a home
without the first gleam of knowledge as to how the thing should be
done. The foolish little wife knew not how to cook or sew. The foolish
little husband said he was glad of it. He didn't want his wife to wear
herself out in the kitchen. Servants could do such things. So they
hired servants more ignorant than themselves, "and the last state of
that man was worse than the first." Children came to them. That was
the most pitiful part of all. A house may be badly managed and
ignorantly cared for, and people do not die of it, or become warped or
crippled, but the soul of a child, to say nothing of the helpless
little body, can be ruined utterly through the irresponsibility of the
criminally ignorant people to whom the poor little thing is sent.
Their ignorance is so dense and deep-searching that they never know
that they are ignorant. But back of it all there is a reason. A
bigoted, senseless, false, and misnamed delicacy. Mothers reared their
daughters and sent them to fulfil their mission in life, of being
wives and mothers, versed in everything except the two things they
were destined to be. It was as if a physician were taught
architecture, music, and painting, and then sent out to practise his
unskill in medicine upon a helpless humanity.
Then the new woman opened her eyes. She read those sturdy words which
are much quoted, but which never can be repeated too often: "The
situation which has not its duty, its ideals, was never yet occupied
by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable
Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal;
work it out therefrom, and working, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is
in thyself; thy condition is but the stuff thou art to shape this same
Ideal out of; what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that,
so the form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? Oh, thou that pinest in
the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a
kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth--the thing
thou seekest is already with thee, 'here, or nowhere,' couldst thou
only see."
It read like book-learning when applied to other women. It read like a
revelation when applied to herself. She thought what her mission was.
To make a home; to be a good wife; to understand and teach little
children. And where do you find the new woman now? In the kindergarten
colleges; in university settlements; attending mothers' meetings;
teaching ignorant mothers how to understand the tender souls and
delicate bodies of the dear little creatures committed to their loving
but unwise care. You find them well prepared by a course of study to
accept the responsibilities of life when their time comes. Is _that_
trivial? Is _that_ a subject to sneer at or to jest about? Rather it
is the hope of the nation.
Legislation cannot satisfactorily restrict immigration. Laws do not
forbid the criminal from marrying and the insane from being born. All
the masculine wisdom in the world cannot prevent the State from
annually paying millions of dollars for the support of those who are
foredoomed through generations of ignorance and crime--crime which too
often comes only from ignorance--to fill your jails and asylums. Who
is doing anything to remedy? The men. Who is doing anything to
_prevent_? The women. The new woman, the sneered at, the ridiculed and
abused, caricatured by the cartoonist, derided by the press, is going
quietly to work with jail-schools, with free kindergartens in tenement
districts, with college settlements, to begin with the care of mothers
and children. That is just one of the things the new woman is doing.
Is she a poor creature? Is she wearing bloomers? Is she masculine or
unwomanly? Rather she possesses attributes almost divine in that she
strikes at the very root of the matter, and begins a course of action
which, if carried out, will do what all the men in creation can never
cure. She will prevent.
The new woman is young. The new woman is oftener a pretty girl than
otherwise. They are not poor girls either, who are doing these things.
They are not obliged to earn their daily bread. They are the daughters
of the rich. They are the travelled, cultured, delicately reared
girls. They are such girls as, two generations ago, would have
disdained anything but accomplishments, who were only charitable with
their money, and who never dreamed of giving their own time to such
work. They were girls who considered their education finished when
they left school.
I glory in the new woman in that so often she _is_ rich and beautiful.
It is easy enough to be good if you are plain. In fact, there is
nothing else left for a plain woman "_to do_." But take these lovely
girls who are tempted by society to idle away their days and waste
their lives listening to a flattery which may be but a thing of the
moment, and let them have sense to see through its hollowness, and
want to be something and do something, and it becomes heroic.
Perhaps it is only a fad. Then Heaven send more fads. If it is the
fashion to have a vocation and to educate one's self along these lines
which never were heard of a few years ago, then for once fashion has
accidentally become noble.
It strikes me rather that the reign of common-sense has begun--that
the age of utility has come. When nine out of every ten of the girls
you meet in smart society have a distinct vocation of their own; when
a girl who only sings or plays or crochets is considered by her
sister-women to be a butterfly; when society girls are being trained
nurses; when, if you are paying calls upon a fashionable friend, you
are quite apt to be told that she is living at Hull House this month;
when a girl whose face generally appears in the society column
suddenly comes out as the composer of a new song; when a girl who
dances best at balls calmly announces that she is taking a course at
the university; when everything nowadays is gone into so seriously,
the time has come to look the question of the new woman squarely in
the face--to put a stop to cheap witticisms at her expense and to give
her your honest respect.
The new woman has attacked the problem of how to live. Not how to live
for show, not how to veneer successfully, but how to get the most good
out of life. She is not simply endeavoring to kill time as she once
was. She is trying to live each day for itself. She is not living so
much in the to-morrows which never come. Having begun to earn her own
money, she is learning the value of her father's--a thing the American
father has been trying to teach her for fifty or a hundred years, but
she could not learn because she saw it come so easily and she let it
go so freely.
A man said to me not long ago, "What has got into the girls? Has it
become the fashion to economize? All the nicest girls I know are
talking of the value of money and of how much is wasted unthinkingly.
Are we poor bachelors to take courage and believe that we can afford
one of these beautiful luxuries in wives?"
Alas, it is anything but a hint to take courage; for this heavenly
phase of the new woman means that when she has learned that she can
support herself, so that in case her riches take wings she need not be
forced to drudge at uncongenial employment, or to marry for a home,
she will be more particular than ever in the kind of a man she
marries. For in fitting herself for marriage she is learning quite as
well the kind of husband she ought to have. And she will not be as apt
to marry a man on account of his clothes or because he dances divinely
as once she might have done.