The craft of the tortoise

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Preface

The tortoise of the fable finally won the race for two reasons. The major one was preeminently masculine; the minor one was preeminently feminine.

Although the hare himself in a moment of contemptuous boasting had suggested it^ the idea of their being pitted against each other was so ridiculous to a person of his nimble legs that he looped all over the adjacent territory and then took a nap. He felt confident that whenever he elected to return to the course he could easily whisk in ahead. Thus it was not at all that he disdainfully tossed her a specious advantage by this gallivanting (as is the habit of his human prototype) ; or that he desired to throw in for the benefit of the sole spectator a few pyrotechnics (also a mannish characteristic) ; or even that he tried to stimulate his own languid interest, in a race so one-sided, by developing an artificial excitement (which would have been behavior eminently human) . It was merely that the thought of her as a real competitor never entered his silly head.

Those possessing the confidence of an enormous advantage, as ^sop would say, have ever underestimated not so much their competitors as the difficulties in the way of recovering lost time and making a brilliant lastmoment finish. The idea has ever intrigued the vigorous. Indeed, it lends the crowing exuberance to vigor, this feeling that there is plenty of time for the final easy demonstration of one's superiority. Nor can it be denied that to make the grand tour yet win the race at the same time is the summum bonum of human existence.

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That is possibly the reason why the deathbed repentance occupied for so many centuries the principal place in the imagination of the Christian church and actuated so many of its forms. Not only had Holy Writ furnished instances of the most colorful and romantic nature^ but many of its soberer teachings were calculated to enhearten the philanderer who would throw himself panting and victorious over the line at the last moment. If the wages of the eleventh hour servant equalled the wages of those who had borne the heat of the day, why report for duty any earlier than necessary? If there is less joy in Heaven for the ninety and nine that need no repentance than for the one sinner that returneth just as grace is finally over and the meal is being spread, why not contribute noticeably to the delight of the angels ? Especially as, the passage hinting substantially at boredom, it would seem prudent to enter so permanent a community not only as the welcomest of citizens but with a reputation already established as a dispenser of smiles and an enlivener of tedium.

To men as to angels the plodder has ever been unattractive. Terrestrially speaking, only in human society is the drone encouraged. In school and college, the children of the species delight to dub him "greasy," an epithet so loose as to seem picked for its opprobrium. In maturer social circles, the thoughtful spender laying foundation for future solidity is stigmatized as a tightwad; and a spendthrift who scatters coin in one's own direction is approved by the most hardened of moralists. Nor is there lack of scriptural authority. Jesus admired the lilies of the field because they toiled not nor spun; and he is represented, in the most curious of passages, as administering a somewhat ungracious rebuke to one of his hostesses, the plodding Martha who looked out for his creature comforts, in favor of her sister, although manifestly the house could not have kept itself. Our fiction exploits the prodigal; there is no romance

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in the ledger^ its balancing or its balancer. The knight errant is the pictorial personage, not the knight who stayed at home and managed his farm, though there must have been several of these unknown to song and story. Say what you please, he that kissed and rode away has inspired more delightful memories than the lover who settled down to the humdrum business of paying the rent and feeding the children. Wherever one looks, in the teaching of the church or in the sorry habit of the world, the dull sensible plodder is discouraged.

The church, of course, catered to the weakness of humanity in this matter; and the prevalence among men of this tradition so sedulously cultivated, points to some basic reason. May it not be man's elaborate justification of his prevailing vices ? For the edifying ending of all our novels and plays is simply hoakem; nobody would read stories which began as they finish. What we really want is the tale of an irresponsible gallivanter who undergoes a last page conversion to the proprieties we like to consider an appropriate influence for the young; who breaks every moral maxim except the only attractive one setting forth that it is never too late to mend. Even a priest finds a sizable sin surprisingly grateful in the tedious round of small confessions; and the mildest of ministers sniggers when a reprobate hails him as a gay dog. The fleeing Joseph is subject for laughing everywhere but in a book. Here he ceases at once to be entertaining, and his thwarting of promising adventure becomes an unmixed exasperation. What is the use of books, we say, unless they are more interesting than most of us allow ourselves to be.^ And as nowhere in life are brilliant finishes provided outside of the realm of religion, let us minister to our craving and at the same time uphold the teachings of the church by providing them in literature. For, as some one has remarked, the last page conversion is as comforting to all concerned as the deathbed repentance. It is impossible to demonviii Preface

strate its inefEcacy; one has had all the delights of the feast while the appetite still remained keen; and the eternal verities are reestablished just as indigestion sets in.

Yes^ the tortoise had only the virtue of the plodder; and it is of all virtues — where all lack zest to the spectator — the least colorful. The occasional conflict with vice enlivens even the possessor of virtue with a brief exhilaration, but the tortoise struggles with nothing so lively as vice — merely vtdth its juiceless shadow, temptation. The only comfort of the plodder, putting aside one after another the endless enticements to pleasant loitering and pleasanter aberration, is to keep the physical eye upon the ground covered inch by inch and the spiritual vision upon the distant goal. The heroism of the plodder has never been rightly applauded since it is entirely unspectacular. It consists not only in rigorously shutting out the scenery but in as rigorously closing the mind to a recognition that would paralyze all endeavor. At any moment the hare may dash joyously back from adventure and come rollicking in ahead, cutting the tortoise out of the rewards of the race and of the manifold privations upon the journey. Yet who shall say that this stem limitation of the horizon is a heroism after all? It may be only that mute dependence upon fundamental human psychology which still exists among us despite the teachings of the church to the contrary. The habit of gambolling is not to be put off at will. The hare is a gamboler still, even when the tortoise is nosing the line. Glancing back from the heights of the beckoning adventure, he beholds the tortoise dragging her slow length past the stake — yet before her hinderparts are well across, he may still crop that biggest daisy just beyond and frisk triumphantly in, his victory more golden that it is snatched from apparent defeat just as umpire fox is about to award the prize. So it is ever with the hare, and who shall say that the thought has not buoyed

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the plodding tortoise from the moment she set out? If plodding is the least colorful of the virtues^ it is the only one which does not wait until heaven to find its reward. Perhaps this is after all the final reason why the tortoise is humanly unattractive. Not only have men and theologians got together to belittle her, but the jealous other virtues have also entered the social conspiracy to cheapen her invariable success. The entire human fabric saves its face at the expense of the plodder.

Yet though decidedly handicapped by a virtue which we have been taught to detest, the tortoise is not devoid of human attractiveness. What is the essence of our eternal delight in the tramp, the vagabond.^ Not that he roams, surely; but that wherever he roams he is always at home, and in a house for which he pays no rent. To carry one's house on one's back, to be able to retire within it upon the slightest threat of danger, to drop asleep in one's tracks with perfect security from marauders, to extrude oneself delightfully in the morning and set off without any formality and with the knowledge that one will not have to oust an unwelcome tenant at nightfall — all this is a convenient union of domesticity and adventure. These are abilities which the frisking hare, nay even the stalking lion, might covet. Let others burrow or build or search for partial security in cavern or crevice, the tortoise is provided by birthright with both shelter and armor. And so another item of fundamental psychology may have buoyed the tortoise in her toilful journey. She came slowly but she carried her house on her back. Not for nothing is the tortoise in the ancientest mythology the earth-bearer, the symbol of the origin of things and their permanence. The tortoise, wherever she strays, is an essential housekeeper.

The moral support of a well-fitting back has been alluded to by a brilliant lady who understood one of the more ob\ious functions of woman's clothes — to humiliate

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her less fortunate sisters. This play develops the theme that woman compensated for her bodily inferiority to man, which handicapping her in the beginning proved her strength in the end, by the utilization of her apparel. This armor differs from the shell of the zoological tortoise in that it is not for defense but for offense. Yet if not her actual birthright, it was improvised — if one may believe the whimsical story of Adam and Eve — at most the day after she was created. Let Eve fabricate what story she pleased to fob off on the architect of the garden, she perceived instinctively that the apparent is never as tempting as the suggested. She achieved on the evening of her birth the greatest height to which man has ever climbed by the painful exertion of his much-boasted, late-acquired imagination. No sooner had she discovered Adam's invaluable appetite than her intuition told her that it would grow listless unless artificially stimulated. And she utilized his stupid fear to explain her innovation plausibly. That she clad him also, was only a further ruse to hide her motive. One may guess that she did so reluctantly, with contempt for his hulking wits and with much regret for the wise caution of concealing her cleverness until she had looked around a bit. It was a policy she soon found not worth while to pursue. Manifold other clevernesses she has discovered since and utilized his stupidity to go on exercising them in concealment; but with this, the first-born of her invention, she shortly discarded subterfuge and allowed her motive to be partially discerned by her mate — perhaps because she foresaw he would never have wit enough to profit by it or because she perceived at once that he preferred artificial stimulation anyway, even if he saw through it.

The woman in her slow race for supremacy utilized not only the clothes which she made herself but those which society made for her. This play deals with some successive spurts which the tortoise accomplished while the

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hare was gambolling or napping. It presents several women who utilized the draperies of society for their personal advantage. For the craft of the human tortoise is not only to plod. Every forward inch has been accomplished by trickery also. The long history of the selfishness and brutality of men to the weaker sex made this the only means of advancement.

Let it not be thought that this play misrepresents that history. An historical fact does not cease to be serious because it has now become funny. Nor should the farcical interpretation of some of the incidents in this play discredit the authenticity of the facts at the basis of most of them. Tribes still exist where the warrior disdains the menial service of bringing home his kill or even feeding himself. Intermittently for a period of some centuries in the Middle Ages^ the idea persisted that women should conceal their hair. This period has been somewhat extended to include the invention of the corset^ often ascribed to Catherine de Medici; and this innovation has arbitrarily been made to coincide with the subsequent invention of the farthingale^ at its height (or breadth) under Queen Elizabeth. The priests of the Middle Ages are full of censure for the unmanly excesses of male attire; and sought to curb them rather than the extravagances of women^ which^ long before fluctuating styles of dress had been even dimly suggested, they seem to have given up as a hopeless job. The early Christians' mandate against all jewelry and ornamentation save in the service of the church encouraged such richness of priestly apparel that it was not until late in the Middle Ages that the church succeeded in compelling the clergy to adopt a uniform. By this time also, with the political prudence which always marked it, the church had extinguished the brilliant career of the Lady Abbess. The summary marriage of landed women by edicts of the overlord had reached the proportion of a scandal and had to be checked, not by the church but by xii Preface

the State, before a less candid civilization adopted the more disguised form of succeeding periods. The detailed rules and regulations of the Love Game and the seriousness with which these were followed for the moment by polite society, the universal practice of the uncommercialized mistress succeeded by the vogue of the acknowledged and supported one (followed in a less candid civilization by the supported but unacknowledged one), the absence of social stigma for the illegitimate — all these are matters of history. Also they are matters of history that can be matched by as farcical beliefs and practices which seriously exist today, in their turn to become serious matters of farce tomorrow.

This play shows, too, the power of the church developing by trickery as well as the power of woman. The career of the one has been bound up in the career of the other. The church with its male priests naturally took in the beginning the male attitude. Yet priests and women early recognized each other as allies ; and in the beginning, women were doubtless as scornful of their allies as their allies remained until recently scornful of them. Their position, function, and vocation in the household of the master were similar ; and their opportunity to play into each other's hands against him must soon have been made apparent. The priests, of course, had the inestimable superiority in their ability to capitalize his stupid fear, which they soon learned to increase by mechanical invention. It gave them an unapproachable strategic position; but for the rest they were dependents like women, existing by his favor and feeding. As women's personal function was to serve his appetite, so the priest's personal function was to serve his vanity. But this was by a most ingenious remove. Just as women were consorts as well as slaves to men, so priests were consorts as well as slaves to the gods ; and it was to the vanity of these they were ostensibly administering while in reality administering

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to man*s. It is not improbable that women learned from priests as quickly as from war that they also could administer to the vanity of man. Being stupidly boastful himself and reasoning that the powers of earth and air could be flattered or bribed into better treatment, he made these men that he could do so with more surety. They were men like himself, except, being manifestly stronger, he equipped them with more arms and legs and other members. Having thus flattered them, in time he had the inspiration to flatter himself by proclaiming that they had created him, with the necessary exceptions, in their own image — a rather poor flattery, as man has always been better than his gods. Their go-betweens he treated as a sort of privileged women, fearing and yet disdainful of them. Even today the peasants of some countries publicly flog their saints when they do not bring good harvests or otherwise disappoint as go-betweens; and even in New York City little Saint Josephs are ignobly stood upon their heads until they restore lost property.

If priests did not long remain in their category, it was because they early realized that no development was possible as long as they remained in the home. Leaving it, they gradually came to rule men openly although never entirely. Yet women, though remaining in the home and hence in their category, gradually came to rule men secretly although never entirely. Fear was the pull in one case, sex in the other. But as the objects of fear remained the same and the objects of sex kept changing, the priests always had the better of it. With the scientific explanation of the physical forces to appease which by flattery he invented gods, man has found them increasingly inconvenient and largely cast them aside.

That woman, whose function formulated Christianity so belittled, has remained more faithful to it would at first sight seem an anomaly. Yet the explanation is xiv Preface

not far to seek. Having learned by long experience to go around what she could not surmount and make the best of what she could not help, she began to derive from the very religion that threatened sex many sex reactions. This was easily accomplished in that religion even in its last evolution had, with its many sensuous accompaniments and mystic symbols, never forgotten that its first ritual was a sex manifestation; and the deification of the crucified man of Nazareth with its acutely visualized glorification of physical suffering actually made the church whose dogma penalized sex more sexual than some earlier religions. Social law had allowed men sex experience at all times, but as social law shaped itself under ecclesiastical influence it allowed women sex experience only within strict limitations ; and the excluded woman found a psychic sex life in the church, the more as for her had been invented a special apparatus in the spiritual bridegroom and his bride. All women, too, were glad to revive themselves with the doctrine of the church that in heaven (even though it admitted no such union, and she must leave the house on her back an outworn shell behind her) woman would be recompensed for all that a master's god ordained that she should forfeit upon earth.

Of all the non-essential industries of man, godmaking and war-making have been the most inevitable and piteous. They have the same derivation, fear and fear-bom swagger; and they have gone hand in hand. That gods have always been carried forth to battle, proves nothing of course; but it is significant that the people at present most politically opposed to war are as a class both by profession and accusation godless. Nor was the continuous failure of formulated religion to set itself against war ever more clearly demonstrated than in the inception of the last two religions, Christianity and Mohammedanism. The latter held out more definite inducements to war than any religion previously

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contrived. In the campaign document which monastic hands made of the teachings of Jesus, he figures as the prince of peace who has come to bring a sword upon earth. The human intellect is peculiarly at the mercy of such naive contradictions as these_, and religious utterance had seized from the beginning upon its weakness for paradox. Folklore early accustoms the childish mind to fairies as dainty repositories of unlimited power, and, once accustomed to such beloved formulas, few people grow so mature as to subject them to impersonal inspection.

The ability of custom to envelop with an endearing haze the monstrous, the hideous, the absurd is endless. Yet invent a new grotesquerie precisely similar, and who so shocked as those who cling most tenderly to the nursery.^ A curate will fondly make a pilgrimage for the hot cross buns our cunning bakers display on Good Friday — surely an inherently shocking thing — when he would recoil in horror from a new advertisement of, let us say, Easter Self-Raising Buckwheats, Tell such a person, if you dare, that the Bolsheviki have made the best demonstration of the so-called teachings of Jesus since his day, in that they have in a whole-hearted and wholesale manner put down the mighty from their seat and exalted them of low degree, and you will speedily discover that a sentiment hazed by abstraction or heavenly remoteness is one thing, and its concrete and localized eruption is another. It is, of course, impossible that the man who said Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's should ever have rejoiced in the contemplation of such indiscriminate topsyturvydom. This perversion of his teaching was merely another of the catchall processes by which his utterance was distorted into a campaign document which should allure not only pacifist and militarist but free and bond.

The Christian religion when formulated into a poxvi Preface

litical engine was astutely calculated^ as has been said, to keep the enslaved and woman in subjection and to make them accept their lot by substituting credit for cash, reward in the next world for endurance in this. It was more easily achieved in that the scattered sayings of the simple socialistic teacher^ who went about doing good and healing people out of the abundance of that life which he so confidently asserted and on which he made such limitless drafts, were often in the approved religious manner, vague and paradoxical. Nor did they trouble themselves about consistency (if indeed we may believe that any of them have come down as uttered) any more than have those of other great energies before or since. It is impossible to formulate enough general remarks to cover the whole of human activity without being inconsistent; and fortunately the great dynamic personalities who have tried to do so have never dribbled away their energy in mere carpenter work. Thomas a Kempis alone, of all the great souls who have spiritually energized humanity, is notable for consistency, and he accomplished it only by having a harp with a single string, the subduing of self. Jesus taught self-expression as well as self-mastery; and since he did so, his language could without much difficulty be sophisticated into a battle-cry.

Despite the plentiful religious training to which both as slaves and women they have been subjected in order to increase their submission to man's yoke, women as a sex have always been opposed to war. It must be admitted, however^ that her penchant for uniforms has occasionally led her into identifying the trappings with the fimction. Her weakness for masculine uniforms is, by the way, very simply explained. They gratify her taste for finery without in the least particular allowing the individual man any scope for individuality in dress, which she jealously guards as her own prerogative; and they are at the same time a pleasing evidence of the subjection of man to his own institutions which she

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herself has always been encouraging as a step to her ultimate subjugation of him. War itself she has always opposed; and if during all the years of his domination, it is not likely that she will care to exert this particular mannishness in the day of her freedom. However her activities in politics and business may bring her to resemble man in superficial mental and even in deeper temperamental qualities, she will never duplicate the folly of this, the more obviously devastating of his leading industries. She carries her house on her back. She will not willingly see it imperilled or the work of her body destroyed. It is impossible to expect peace at the hands of men; the fierce race-protecting passion of women is the only hope of the future as far as war is concerned.

It may be too much to expect that women will long defer the attempt to invent a female god. Having now political and a partial industrial freedom, they will naturally desire to replace a man-made god with one of their own. Already there are signs of it. "O God which art our father and our mother," was an invocation beginning to be heard as early as the middle of the last century. The two fashionable recently-made religions. Christian Science and New Thought, are women movements. The first, while it introduced a new life principle (or rather an old one which Christianity as an engine discarded before it was tried), still adhered somewhat closely to the old nomenclature and machinery; but the second separated itself still further from the last widely successful invention of man in the way of gods. That women will succeed in banishing what remains of this male despot is devoutly to be hoped in the interests of genuine spirituality; but that they will substitute for him a female god is just as devoutly to be feared in the interests of genuine spirituality. Nevertheless the evolution is but simple progression, from father to father-mother to mother-father xviii Preface

to mother unadulterated. Should women commit this mannish stupidity, the spiritual development of the race will again receive a check.

One feels, however, that even this regrettable occurrence cannot plunge us back into the previous condition of arrested development. Out of the Orient have come all the gods that have endured, and consequently they are all orientals. The Christian religion, fastening like the two new-made religions just mentioned on a form then in vogue, inherited an oriental despot who disdained a slave as his companion. This was bad enough, but unfortunately it straightway fell into the hands of emasculate ascetics who feared woman as a companion. The Hebraic god was a notably majestic conception for its time: his misuse of the all-power with which he was endowed by the Hebrews was much less gross than that of other tribal gods; and though he was endowed neither with all-love nor all-wisdom, he was not conspicuously hateful nor short-sighted except as his war-making proclivities made him so. Jesus, unversed in man's mental habits, was apparently for throwing away this conception almost in entirety, but his more worldly executives had other ideas. Jesus, the great spiritual energy of no locality, did not fear to be a companion of women; the orientalized St. Paul did, although he had the masculine eagerness to utilize their services in the new religion he began to administrate out of an energy into an engine, out of a principle into a creed, out of an emotion into a thought, out of an ideal into an idea. The endeavor to amalgamate the Hebraic god with what monkish temperaments interpreted to be the god of Jesus had aspects both frightful and ludicrous. The joining of the two in the dogma of the church was so crude in places that the seamings still leave fantastic gaps. It was an impossible undertaking, of course, but so inexacting was a mankind carefully swaddled in superstitious ignorance by its exploiters

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that the combination lasted as long as any other human invention when exposed to the mechanical wear and tear of progress. To sandpaper down the least jagged of the joinings has been the major business of petty ecclesiastical diplomats for centuries^ the roughest of them they wisely brazened out by resort to paradox. On the whole, it has been a fruitless endeavor to metamorphose a god of fear into a god of love. Fortunately at the very outset the inherent paganism of Europe proved strong enough to enforce many modifications in monkish intention; and Christianity as a growing political engine embodied (with inimitable political acumen, it must be owned) what it was unable to obliterate as naively as it juggled the Roman saturnalia into the birthday of its founder and the plowing feast into Easter — and so inexacting is mankind cradled in custom that it occurs to few to wonder why Jesus was born upon a fixed date and died upon a movable one. Other modifications followed as the antique inheritance grew increasingly repellent to modern consciousness, but modified by pagan influences and later by humanitarian ones as he is, he still remains a male oriental; and if women misuse their new power by inventing a female occidental to take his place, it will not however regrettable be surprising.

For the god the monkish fathers finally achieved of the rough joining of the Hebraic and the Paulist inventions was, in spite of several theological and ritualistic concessions to sex, the arch enemy of sex love. Jesus himself they represented as born of no sex union and afterwards, when pagan influences had finally forced her into reluctant prominence, his mother also. This god cheapened and coarsened, despised and penalized the most vital force of life out of which all the others stem. The church had even the incredible temerity to announce that marriage, which it was obliged to solemnize if it would usurp all the orderly processes of gov-