and lowers the threshold of disgust. The husband begins to observe
what the lover was blind to, and often his discoveries affect him as
unpleasantly as the treason of a trusted friend. And not only is the
fever cooled: the opportunities for exact observation are enormously
increased. It is a commonplace of juridical science that the great
majority of divorces have their origin in the connubial chamber. Here
intimacy is so extreme that it is fatal to illusion. Both parties,
thrown into the closest human contact that either has suffered since
their unconscious days _in utero,_ find their old capacity for disgust
reviving, and then suddenly flaming. The girl who was perfect in her
wedding gown becomes a ghastly caricature in her _robe de nuit;_
the man who was a Chevalier Bayard as a wooer becomes a snuffling,
shambling, driveling nuisance as a husband--a fellow offensive to
eyes, ears, nose, touch and immortal soul. A learned judge of my
acquaintance, constantly hearing divorce actions and as constantly
striving to reconcile the parties, always tries to induce plaintiff
and defendant to live apart for a while, or, failing that, to occupy
separate rooms, or, failing that, to at least dress in separate
rooms. According to this jurist, a husband who shaves in his wife's
presence is either an idiot or a scoundrel. The spectacle, he argues,
is intrinsically disgusting, and to force it upon a refined woman is
either to subject her to the most exquisite torture or to degrade her
gradually to the insensate level of an _Abortfrau._ The day is saved,
as every one knows, by the powerful effects of habit. The acquisition
of habit is the process whereby disgust is overcome in daily life--the
process whereby one may cease to be disgusted by a persistent noise or
odor. One suffers horribly at first, but after a bit one suffers less,
and in the course of time one scarcely suffers at all. Thus a man, when
his marriage enters upon the stage of regularity and safety, gets used
to his wife as he might get used to a tannery next door, and _vice
versa._ I think that women, in this direction, have the harder row to
hoe, for they are more observant than men, and vastly more sensitive in
small ways. But even women succumb to habit with humane rapidity, else
every marriage would end in divorce. Disgusts pale into mere dislikes,
disrelishes, distastes. They cease to gag and torture. But though they
thus shrink into the shadow, they are by no means disposed of. Deep
down in the subconscious they continue to lurk, and some accident may
cause them to flare up at any time, and so work havoc. This flaring
up accounts for a familiar and yet usually very mystifying phenomenon
--the sudden collapse of a marriage, a friendship or a business
association after years of apparent prosperity.
2
_The Incomparable Buzzsaw_
The chief (and perhaps the only genuine) charm of women is seldom
mentioned by the orthodox professors of the sex. I refer to the charm
that lies in the dangers they present. The allurement that they hold
out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds
out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously
fascinating. To the average man, doomed to some banal and sordid
drudgery all his life long, they offer the only grand hazard that he
ever encounters. Take them away and his existence would be as flat and
secure as that of a milch-cow. Even to the unusual man, the adventurous
man, the imaginative and romantic man, they offer the adventure of
adventures. Civilization tends to dilute and cheapen all other hazards.
War itself, once an enterprise stupendously thrilling, has been reduced
to mere caution and calculation; already, indeed, it employs as many
press-agents, letter-openers, and chautauqua orators as soldiers. On
some not distant to-morrow its salient personality may be Potash, and
if not Potash, then Perlmutter. But the duel of sex continues to be
fought in the Berserker manner. Whoso approaches women still faces the
immemorial dangers. Civilization has not made them a bit more safe than
they were in Solomon's time; they are still inordinately barbarous and
menacing, and hence inordinately provocative, and hence inordinately
charming and romantic....
The most disgusting cad in the world is the man who, on grounds of
decorum and morality, avoids the game of love. He is one who puts
his own ease and security above the most laudable of philanthropies.
Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by
man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion
of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that,
even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always
possible to enslave and torture a man. This feeling is fostered when
one makes love to them. One need not be a great beau, a seductive
catch, to do it effectively. Any man is better than none. No woman
is ever offended by admiration. The wife of a millionaire notes the
reverent glance of a head-waiter. To withhold that devotion, to shrink
poltroonishly from giving so much happiness at such small expense, to
evade the business on the ground that it has hazards--this is the act
of a puling and tacky fellow.
3
_Women as Spectacles_
Women, when it comes to snaring men, through the eye, bait a great many
hooks that fail to fluster the fish. Nine-tenths of their primping and
decorating of their persons not only doesn't please men; it actually
repels men. I often pass two days running without encountering a single
woman who is charmingly dressed. Nearly all of them run to painful
color schemes, absurd designs and excessive over-ornamentation. One
seldom observes a man who looks an absolute guy, whereas such women
are very numerous; in the average theater audience they constitute a
majority of at least nine-tenths. The reason is not far to seek. The
clothes of men are plain in design and neutral in hue. The only touch
of genuine color is in the florid blob of the face, the center of
interest--exactly where it ought to be. If there is any other color at
all, it is a faint suggestion in the cravat--adjacent to the face, and
so leading the eye toward it. It is color that kills the clothes of the
average woman. She runs to bright spots that take the eye away from her
face and hair. She ceases to be woman clothed and becomes a mere piece
of clothing womaned.
Even at the basic feminine art of pigmenting their faces very few women
excel. The average woman seems to think that she is most lovely when
her sophistication of her complexion is most adroitly concealed--when
the _poudre de riz_ is rubbed in so hard that it is almost invisible,
and the penciling of eyes and lips is perfectly realistic. This is
a false notion. Most men of appreciative eye have no objection to
artificiality _per se,_ so long as it is intrinsically sightly. The
marks made by a lip-stick may be very beautiful; there are many lovely
shades of scarlet, crimson and vermilion. A man with eyes in his head
admires them for themselves; he doesn't have to be first convinced that
they are non-existent, that what he sees is not the mark of a lip-stick
at all, but an authentic lip. So with the eyes. Nothing could be more
charming than an eye properly reënforced; the naked organ is not to be
compared to it; nature is an idiot when it comes to shadows. But it
must be admired as a work of art, not as a miraculous and incredible
eye. ... Women, in this important and venerable art, stick too closely
to crude representation. They forget that men do not admire the
technique, but the result. What they should do is to forget realism for
a while, and concentrate their attention upon composition, chiaroscuro
and color.
4
_Woman and the Artist_
Much gabble is to be found in the literature of the world upon
the function of woman as inspiration, stimulant and _agente
provocateuse_ to the creative artist. The subject is a favorite one
with sentimentalists, most of whom are quite beyond anything properly
describable as inspiration, either with or without feminine aid. I
incline to think, as I hint, that there is little if any basis of fact
beneath the theory. Women not only do not inspire creative artists to
high endeavor; they actually stand firmly against every high endeavor
that a creative artist initiates spontaneously. What a man's women
folks almost invariable ask of him is that he be respectable--that he
do something generally approved--that he avoid yielding to his aberrant
fancies--in brief, that he sedulously eschew showing any sign of
genuine genius. Their interest is not primarily in the self-expression
of the individual, but in the well-being of the family organization,
which means the safety of themselves. No sane woman would want to be
the wife of such a man, say, as Nietzsche or Chopin. His mistress
perhaps, yes--for a mistress can always move on when the weather gets
too warm. But not a wife. I here speak by the book. Both Nietzsche and
Chopin had plenty of mistresses, but neither was ever able to get a
wife.
Shakespeare and Ann Hathaway, Wagner and Minna Planer, Molière and
Armande Béjart--one might multiply instances almost endlessly. Minna,
at least in theory, knew something of music; she was thus what romance
regards as an ideal wife for Wagner. But instead of helping him to
manufacture his incomparable masterpieces, she was for twenty-five
years the chief impediment to their manufacture. "Lohengrin" gave her
the horrors; she begged Richard to give up his lunacies and return
to the composition of respectable cornet music. In the end he had to
get rid of her in sheer self-defense. Once free, with nothing worse
on his hands than the illicit affection of Cosima Liszt von Bülow,
he produced music drama after music drama in rapid succession. Then,
married to Cosima, he descended to the anticlimax of "Parsifal," a
truly tragic mixture of the stupendous and the banal, of work of genius
and _sinfonia domestica_--a great man dying by inches, smothered by the
smoke of French fried potatoes, deafened by the wailing of children,
murdered in his own house by the holiest of passions.
Sentimentalists always bring up the case of Schumann and his Clara
in rebuttal. But does it actually rebut? I doubt it. Clara, too,
perpetrated her _attentat_ against art. Her fair white arms, lifting
from the keyboard to encircle Robert's neck, squeezed more out of
him than mere fatuous smirks. He had the best head on him that music
had seen since Beethoven's day; he was, on the cerebral side, a
colossus; he might have written music of the very first order. Well,
what he _did_ write was piano music--some of it imperfectly arranged
for orchestra. The sad eyes of Clara were always upon him. He kept
within the limits of her intelligence, her prejudices, her wifely
love. No grand experiments with the orchestra. No superb leapings and
cavortings. No rubbing of sand-paper over critical ears. Robert lived
and died a respectable musical _Hausvater._ He was a man of genuine
genius--but he didn't leave ten lines that might not have been passed
by old Prof. Jadassohn.
The truth is that, no matter how great the domestic concord and how
lavish the sacrifices a man makes for his women-folk, they almost
always regard him secretly as a silly and selfish fellow, and cherish
the theory that it would be easily possible to improve him. This
is because the essential interests of men and women are eternally
antithetical. A man may yield over and over again, but in the long run
he must occasionally look out for himself--and it is these occasions
that his women-folk remember. The typical domestic situation shows
a woman trying to induce a man to do something that he doesn't want
to do, or to refrain from something that he does want to do. This
is true in his bachelor days, when his mother or his sister is his
antagonist. It is preëminently true just before his marriage, when
the girl who has marked him down is hard at the colossal job of
overcoming his reluctance. And after marriage it is so true that there
is hardly need to state it. One of the things every man discovers to
his disquiet is that his wife, after the first play-acting is over,
regards him essentially as his mother used to regard him--that is, as
a self-worshiper who needs to be policed and an idiot who needs to
be protected. The notion that women _admire_ their men-folks is pure
moonshine. The most they ever achieve in that direction is to pity
them. When a woman genuinely loves a man it is a sign that she regards
him much as a healthy man regards a one-armed and epileptic soldier.
5
_Martyrs_
Nearly the whole case of the birth-controllers who now roar in
Christendom is grounded upon the doctrine that it is an intolerable
outrage for a woman to have to submit to motherhood when her private
fancies may rather incline to automobiling, shopping or going to the
movies. For this curse the husband is blamed; the whole crime is laid
to his swinish lasciviousness. With the highest respect, nonsense! My
private suspicion, supported by long observation, copious prayer and
the most laborious cogitation, is that no woman delights in motherhood
so vastly as this woman who theoretically abhors it. She experiences,
in fact, a double delight. On the one hand, there is the caressing
of her vanity--a thing enjoyed by every woman when she achieves the
banality of viable offspring. And on the other hand, there is the fine
chance it gives her to play the martyr--a chance that every woman
seeks as diligently as a man seeks ease. All these so-called unwilling
mothers wallow in their martyrdom. They revel in the opportunity to be
pitied, made much over and envied by other women.
6
_The Burnt Child_
The fundamental trouble with marriage is that it shakes a man's
confidence in himself, and so greatly diminishes his general competence
and effectiveness. His habit of mind becomes that of a commander who
has lost a decisive and calamitous battle. He never quite trusts
himself thereafter.
7
_The Supreme Comedy_ Marriage, at Best, is full of a sour and
inescapable comedy, but it never reaches the highest peaks of the
ludicrous save when efforts are made to escape its terms--that is, when
efforts are made to loosen its bonds, and so ameliorate and denaturize
it. All projects to reform it by converting it into a free union of
free individuals are inherently absurd. The thing is, at bottom, the
most rigid of existing conventionalities, and the only way to conceal
the fact and so make it bearable is to submit to it docilely. The
effect of every revolt is merely to make the bonds galling, and, what
is worse, poignantly obvious. Who are happy in marriage? Those with so
little imagination that they cannot picture a better state, and those
so shrewd that they prefer quiet slavery to hopeless rebellion.
8
_A Hidden Cause_
Many a woman, in order to bring the man of her choice to the altar of
God, has to fight him with such relentless vigilance and ferocity that
she comes to hate him. This, perhaps, explains the unhappiness of many
marriages. In particular, it explains the unhappiness of many marriages
based upon what is called "love."
9
_Bad Workmanship_
The essential slackness and incompetence of women, their congenital
incapacity for small expertness, already descanted upon at length in
my psychological work, "In Defense of Women," is never more plainly
revealed than in their manhandling of the primary business of their
sex. If the average woman were as competent at her trade of getting a
husband as the average car conductor is at his trade of robbing the
fare-box, then a bachelor beyond the age of twenty-five would be so
rare in the world that yokels would pay ten cents to gape at him. But
women, in this fundamental industry, pursue a faulty technique and
permit themselves to be led astray by unsound principles. The axioms
into which they have precipitated their wisdom are nearly all untrue.
For example, the axiom that the way to capture a man is through his
stomach--which is to say, by feeding him lavishly. Nothing could be
more absurd. The average man, at least in England and America, has such
rudimentary tastes in victualry that he doesn't know good food from
bad. He will eat anything set before him by a cook that he likes. The
true way to fetch him is with drinks. A single bottle of drinkable wine
will fill more men with the passion of love than ten sides of beef or
a ton of potatoes. Even a _Seidel_ of beer, deftly applied, is enough
to mellow the hardest bachelor. If women really knew their business,
they would have abandoned cooking centuries ago, and devoted themselves
to brewing, distilling and bartending. It is a rare man who will walk
five blocks for a first-rate meal. But it is equally a rare man who,
even in the old days of freedom, would _not_ walk five blocks for a
first-rate cocktail. To-day he would walk five miles.
Another unsound feminine axiom is the one to the effect that the way
to capture a man is to be distant--to throw all the burden of the
courtship upon him. This is precisely the way to lose him. A man face
to face with a girl who seems reserved and unapproachable is not
inspired thereby to drag her off in the manner of a caveman; on the
contrary, he is inspired to thank God that here, at last, is a girl
with whom it is possible to have friendly doings without getting into
trouble--that here is one not likely to grow mushy and make a mess. The
average man does not marry because some marble fair one challenges his
enterprise. He marries because chance throws into his way a fair one
who repels him less actively than most, and because his delight in what
he thus calls her charm is reënforced by a growing suspicion that she
has fallen in love with him. In brief, it is chivalry that undoes him.
The girl who infallibly gets a husband--in fact, _any_ husband that she
wants--is the one who tracks him boldly, fastens him with sad eyes, and
then, when his conscience has begun to torture him, throws her arms
around his neck, bursts into maidenly tears on his shoulder, and tells
him that she fears her forwardness will destroy his respect for her.
It is only a colossus who can resist such strategy. But it takes only a
man of the intellectual grade of a Y. M. C. A. secretary to elude the
girl who is afraid to take the offensive.
A third bogus axiom I have already discussed, to wit, the axiom that a
man is repelled by palpable cosmetics--that the wise girl is the one
who effectively conceals her sophistication of her complexion. What
could be more untrue? The fact is that very few men are competent to
distinguish between a layer of talc and the authentic epidermis, and
that the few who have the gift are quite free from any notion that the
latter is superior to the former. What a man seeks when he enters the
society of women is something pleasing to the eye. That is all he asks.
He does not waste any time upon a chemical or spectroscopic examination
of the object observed; he simply determines whether it is beautiful or
not beautiful. Has it so long escaped women that their husbands, when
led astray, are usually led astray by women so vastly besmeared with
cosmetics that they resemble barber-poles more than human beings? Are
they yet blind to the superior pull of a French maid, a chorus girl,
a stenographer begauded like a painter's palette? ... And still they
go on rubbing off their varnish, brushing the lampblack from their
eyelashes, seeking eternally the lip-stick that is so depressingly
purple that it will deceive! Alas, what folly!
INDEX
Abbott, Lawrence
Abbott, Lyman
Akins, Zoë
Alcott, A. B.
Allen, James Lane
_Also sprach Zarathustra_
_American Painting and Its Tradition_
_American Scholar, The_
Amherst College
Anderson, Sherwood
Archer, William
_Aspects of Death and Correlated Aspects of Life_
_Atlantic Monthly_
_Authors' League Bulletin_
Babbitt, Irving
_Backward Glance Along My Own Road, A_
_Backwash of War, The_
Baker, George P.
Bancroft, George
Barton, Wm. E.
Baudelaire, Charles
Beach, Rex
Beethoven, Ludwig
Bennett, Arnold
Benson, E. F.
Bierce, Ambrose
Billroth, Theodor
Blasco, Ibáñez, V.
_Blue Hotel, The_
Böhme, Jakob
Bonaparte, Charles J.
_Bookman_
Boynton, P. H.
Brady, Cyrus Townsend
Brahms, Johannes
Brainard, J. G. C.
Bright, John
Bronson-Howard, George
Brooks, Van Wyck
Brown, Alice
Browne, Porter Emerson
Brownell, W. C.
Bruce, Philip Alexander
Bryant, Wm. Cullen
Burroughs, John
Burton, Richard
Butler, Fanny Kemble
Bynner, Witter
Cabell, James Branch
Cahan, Abraham
Caine, Hall
Candler, Asa G.
Carlyle, Thomas
Carnegie, Andrew
Carrel, Alexis
Cather, Willa Sibert
Chambers, Robert W.
Channing, Wm. Ellery
Chesterton, G. K.
Churchill, Winston
Clemens, S. L.
Cobb, Irvin
Cobden, Richard
Comfort, Will Levington
Comstockery
_Confessions of an Actress, The_
Conrad, Joseph
Coogler, J. Gordon
Cooper, J. Fenimore
Corelli, Marie
_Cosmopolitan_
Crane, Frank
Crane, Stephen
Crile, George W.
Crothers, Samuel MCC
D'Annunzio, Gabriel
Dawson, Coningsby
Davis, Richard Harding
Debussy, Claude
Deland, Margaret
_Democratic Vistas_
Dickens, Charlesx
_Die Meistersinger_
_Dissertations on the English Language_
Doyle, A. Conan
Dreiser Protest
Dreiser, Theodore
Eliot, T. S.
Ellis, Havelock
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
_Ethan Frome_
Evans, Caradoc
Fernald, Chester Bailey
Flexner, Simon
Frank, Waldo
Freneau, Philip
Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa von
Fuller, Henry B.
Gale, Zona
Garland, Hamlin
Geddes, Auckland
_"Genius;" The_
Georgia
Gilman, Daniel Coit
Glasgow, Ellen
Glass, Montague
Glyn, Elinor
_Good Girl, A_
Gorky, Maxim
Gosse, Edmund
Grant, Robert
Graves, John Temple
Greenwich Village
Griswold, Rufus W.
Grote, George
Hadley, Herbert K.
Hamilton, Clayton
Harris, Corra
Harris, Frank
Harrison, Henry Sydnor
Harte, Bret
Haweis, H. R.
Hawthorne, Hildegarde
Hawthorne, Julian
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Hay, Ian
Haydn, Josef
_Heart of Darkness_
_Hearst's_
Hecht, Ben
_Hedda Gabler_190
Henry, O.
Hergesheimer, Joseph
Hillis, Newell Dwight
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Hooker, Brian
Hopper, James
Hough, Emerson
Howe, E. W.
Howells, Wm. Dean
Hubbard, Elbert
Huneker, James
_Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt_
_In Defense of Women_
_Industrial History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century_
Irving, Henry
Irving, Washington
Iveagh, Lord
James, Henry
_Jenseits von Gut und Böse_
Johns Hopkins University
Johnson, Owen
Johnson, Robert U.
Johnston, Mary
Kellner, Leon
Kilmer, Joyce
Kipling, Rudyard
Knapp, Samuel Lorenzo
La Motte, Ellen
Lardner, Ring W.
_Last of the Mohicans, The_
_Lay Anthony, The_
_Leaves of Grass_
_Lectures on American Literature_
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Le Quex, William
_Letters and Leadership_
Lincoln, Abraham
Lindsay, Vachel
_Little Review_
Loeb, Jacques
London, Jack
Longfellow, H. W.
Lowell, Amy
Lowell, James Russell
Loveman, Robert
Mabie, Hamilton Wright
McClure, John
_McClure's_
MacGrath, Harold
Maeterlinck, Maurice
Mallarmé, Stephen
_Man: An Adaptive Mechanism_
Mansfield, Richard
Marden, Orison Swett
Markham, Edwin
Martin, E. S.
Mason, Walt
Matthews, Brander
_Mechanistic View of War and Peace, A_
Merrill, Stuart
_Metropolitan_
Mitchell, Donald G.
Moore, George
More, Paul Elmer
Morris, Gouverneur
_My Antonia_
_My Book and I_
_My Neighbors_
_Mysterious Stranger, The_
_Nation_
Nietzsche, F. W.
_Night Life in Chicago_
Nordfeldt, Bror
Norris, Charles G.
Norris, Frank
Norris, Kathleen
Northcliffe, Lord
Noyes, Alfred
O'Brien, Edward J.
O'Neill, Eugene
Oppenheim, E. Phillips
Oppenheim, James
O'Sullivan, Vincent
Parmelee, Maurice
_Parsifal_
Perry, Bliss
_Personality and Conduct_
Phelps, Wm. Lyon
Phillips, David Graham
Poe, Edgar Allan
_Poetic Principle, The_
_Poetry: a Magazine of Verse_
Porter, Eleanor H.
Pound, Ezra
Prescott, W. H.
Puritanism
Ransome, Arthur
Rathenau, Walther von
Reading, Lordx
Reese, Lizette Woodworth
Repplier, Agnes
Ricardo, David
_Ride of the Valkyrie, The_
Rideout, Henry Milner
Riley, James Whitcomb
Rinehart, Mary Roberts
Rockefeller, John D.
Rolland, Romain
Roosevelt, Theodore
Rossetti, Christina
Saintsbury, George
Sandburg, Carl
Sargent, John
_Saturday Evening Post_
Scheffauer, Herman George
Schubert, Franz
Schumann, Robert
Shakespeare, Wm.
Shaw, George Bernard
_Shelburne Essays_
Sherman, S. P.
Sisson documents
Spingarn, J. E.
Stanton, Frank L.
Stearns, Harold
_Sterbelied, Das_
Sterling, George
Stratton-Porter, Gene
Strauss, Johann
Strauss, Richard
Strawinsky, Igor
Sudermann, Hermann
Sumner, William Graham
Sunday, Billy
Tarkington, Booth
Teasdale, Sara
_Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_
Thayer, William Roscoe
_Theodore Roosevelt_
Thomas, Augustus
Thoreau, Henry David
_Times Book Review,_ New York
Townsend, E. W.
Vance, Louis Joseph
_Vandover and the Brute_
Van Dyke, Henry
van Dyke, John C.
Van Vechten, Carl
Veblen, Thorstein
Virginiax
Wagner, Richard
Walpole, Hugh
Weber, F. Parkes
Webster, Noah
Wellman, Rita
Wells, H. G.
Wendell, Barrett
Wharton, Edith
_What Every Young Husband Should Know_
_What is Man?_
Whitman, Stephen French
Whitman, Walt
Whittier, J. G.
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
Willis, N. P.
Wilson, Harry Leon
Wilson, Woodrow
Wister, Owen
Woodberry, George, E.
Wright, Harold Bell
Zangwill, Israel