III. BREAKERS
Duck! Dive! Here comes another one! Wait till the crest-ruffles show! Beyond is smooth water in beauty and wonder-- Shut your mouth! Hold your breath! Dip your head under! Dive through the weight and the wash, and the thunder-- Look out for the undertow!
If Diantha imagined that her arithmetical victory over a too-sordid presentation of the parental claim was a final one, she soon found herself mistaken.
It is easy to say--putting an epic in an epigram--"She seen her duty and she done it!" but the space and time covered are generally as far beyond our plans as the estimates of an amateur mountain climber exceed his achievements.
Her determination was not concealed by her outraged family. Possibly they thought that if the matter was well aired, and generally discussed, the daring offender might reconsider. Well-aired it certainly was, and widely discussed by the parents of the little town before young people who sat in dumbness, or made faint defense. It was also discussed by the young people, but not before their parents.
She had told Ross, first of all, meaning to have a quiet talk with him to clear the ground before arousing her own family; but he was suddenly away just as she opened the subject, by a man on a wheel--some wretched business about the store of course--and sent word that night that he could not come up again. Couldn't come up the next night either. Two long days--two long evenings without seeing him. Well--if she went away she'd have to get used to that.
But she had so many things to explain, so much to say to make it right with him; she knew well what a blow it was. Now it was all over town--and she had had no chance to defend her position.
The neighbors called. Tall bony Mrs. Delafield who lived nearest to them and had known Diantha for some years, felt it her duty to make a special appeal--or attack rather; and brought with her stout Mrs. Schlosster, whose ancestors and traditions were evidently of German extraction.
Diantha retired to her room when she saw these two bearing down upon the house; but her mother called her to make a pitcher of lemonade for them--and having entered there was no escape. They harried her with questions, were increasingly offended by her reticence, and expressed disapproval with a fullness that overmastered the girl's self-control.
"I have as much right to go into business as any other citizen, Mrs. Delafield," she said with repressed intensity. "I am of age and live in a free country. What you say of children no longer applies to me."
"And what is this mysterious business you're goin' into--if one may inquire? Nothin you're ashamed to mention, I hope?" asked Mrs. Delafield.
"If a woman refuses to mention her age is it because she's ashamed of it?" the girl retorted, and Mrs. Delafield flushed darkly.
"Never have I heard such talk from a maiden to her elders," said Mrs. Schlosster. "In my country the young have more respect, as is right."
Mrs. Bell objected inwardly to any reprimand of her child by others; but she agreed to the principle advanced and made no comment.
Diantha listened to quite a volume of detailed criticism, inquiry and condemnation, and finally rose to her feet with the stiff courtesy of the young.
"You must excuse me now," she said with set lips. "I have some necessary work to do."
She marched upstairs, shut her bedroom door and locked it, raging inwardly. "Its none of their business! Not a shadow! Why should Mother sit there and let them talk to me like that! One would think childhood had no limit--unless it's matrimony!"
This reminded her of her younger sister's airs of superior wisdom, and did not conduce to a pleasanter frame of mind. "With all their miserable little conventions and idiocies! And what 'they'll say,' and 'they'll think'! As if I cared! Minnie'll be just such another!"
She heard the ladies going out, still talking continuously, a faint response from her mother now and then, a growing quiet as their steps receded toward the gate; and then another deeper voice took up the theme and heavily approached.
It was the minister! Diantha dropped into her rocker and held the arms tight. "Now I'll have to take it again I suppose. But he ought to know me well enough to understand."
"Diantha!" called her mother, "Here's Dr. Major;" and the girl washed her face and came down again.
Dr. Major was a heavy elderly man with a strong mouth and a warm hand clasp. "What's all this I hear about you, young lady?" he demanded, holding her hand and looking her straight in the eye. "Is this a new kind of Prodigal Daughter we're encountering?"
He did not look nor sound condemnatory, and as she faced him she caught a twinkle in the wise old eyes.
"You can call it that if you want to," she said, "Only I thought the Prodigal Son just spent his money--I'm going to earn some."
"I want you to talk to Diantha, Doctor Major," Mrs. Bell struck in. "I'm going to ask you to excuse me, and go and lie down for a little. I do believe she'll listen to you more than to anybody."
The mother retired, feeling sure that the good man who had known her daughter for over fifteen years would have a restraining influence now; and Diantha braced herself for the attack.
It came, heavy and solid, based on reason, religion, tradition, the custom of ages, the pastoral habit of control and protection, the father's instinct, the man's objection to a girl's adventure. But it was courteous, kind, and rationally put, and she met it point by point with the whole-souled arguments of a new position, the passionate enthusiasm of her years.
They called a truce.
"I can see that you think its your duty, young, woman--that's the main thing. I think you're wrong. But what you believe to be right you have to do. That's the way we learn my dear, that's the way we learn! Well--you've been a good child ever since I've known you. A remarkably good child. If you have to sow this kind of wild oats--" they both smiled at this, "I guess we can't stop you. I'll keep your secret--"
"Its not a secret really," the girl explained, "I'll tell them as soon as I'm settled. Then they can tell--if they want to." And they both smiled again.
"Well--I won't tell till I hear of it then. And--yes, I guess I can furnish that document with a clean conscience."
She gave him paper and pen and he wrote, with a grin, handing her the result.
She read it, a girlish giggle lightening the atmosphere. "Thank you!" she said earnestly. "Thank you ever so much. I knew you would help me."
"If you get stuck anywhere just let me know," he said rising. "This Proddy Gal may want a return ticket yet!"
"I'll walk first!" said Diantha.
"O Dr. Major," cried her mother from the window, "Don't go! We want you to stay to supper of course!"
But he had other calls to make, he said, and went away, his big hands clasped behind him; his head bent, smiling one minute and shaking his head the next.
Diantha leaned against a pearly eucalyptus trunk and watched him. She would miss Dr. Major. But who was this approaching? Her heart sank miserably. Mrs. Warden--and all the girls.
She went to meet them--perforce. Mrs. Warden had always been kind and courteous to her; the girls she had not seen very much of, but they had the sweet Southern manner, were always polite. Ross's mother she must love. Ross's sisters too--if she could. Why did the bottom drop out of her courage at sight of them?
"You dear child!" said Mrs. Warden, kissing her. "I know just how you feel! You want to help my boy! That's your secret! But this won't do it, my dear!"
"You've no idea how badly Ross feels!" said Madeline. "Mrs. Delafield dropped in just now and told us. You ought to have seen him!"
"He didn't believe it of course," Adeline put in. "And he wouldn't say a thing--not a thing to blame you."
"We said we'd come over right off--and tried to bring him--but he said he'd got to go back to the store," Coraline explained.
"He was mad though!" said Dora--"I know."
Diantha looked from one to the other helplessly.
"Come in! Come in!" said Mrs. Bell hospitably. "Have this rocker, Mrs. Warden--wouldn't you like some cool drink? Diantha?"
"No indeed!" Mrs. Warden protested. "Don't get a thing. We're going right back, it's near supper time. No, we can't think of staying, of course not, no indeed!--But we had to come over and hear about this dear child's idea!--Now tell us all about it, Diantha!"
There they sat--five pairs of curious eyes--and her mother's sad ones--all kind--all utterly incapable of understanding.
She moistened her lips and plunged desperately. "It is nothing dreadful, Mrs. Warden. Plenty of girls go away to earn their livings nowadays. That is all I'm doing."
"But why go away?"
"I thought you were earning your living before!"
"Isn't teaching earning your living?"
"What are you going to do?" the girls protested variously, and Mrs. Warden, with a motherly smile, suggested--
"That doesn't explain your wanting to leave Ross, my dear--and your mother!"
"I don't want to leave them," protested Diantha, trying to keep her voice steady. "It is simply that I have made up my mind I can do better elsewhere."
"Do what better?" asked Mrs. Warden with sweet patience, which reduced Diantha to the bald statement, "Earn more money in less time."
"And is that better than staying with your mother and your lover?" pursued the gentle inquisitor; while the girls tried, "What do you want to earn more money for?" and "I thought you earned a lot before."
Now Diantha did not wish to state in so many words that she wanted more money in order to marry sooner--she had hardly put it to herself that way. She could not make them see in a few moments that her plan was to do far more for her mother than she would otherwise ever be able to. And as to making them understand the larger principles at stake--the range and depth of her full purpose--that would be physically impossible.
"I am sorry!" she said with trembling lips. "I am extremely sorry. But--I cannot explain!"
Mrs. Warden drew herself up a little. "Cannot explain to me?--Your mother, of course, knows?"
"Diantha is naturally more frank with me than with--anyone," said Mrs. Bell proudly, "But she does not wish her--business--plans--made public at present!"
Her daughter looked at her with vivid gratitude, but the words "made public" were a little unfortunate perhaps.
"Of course," Mrs. Warden agreed, with her charming smile, "that we can quite understand. I'm sure I should always wish my girls to feel so. Madeline--just show Mrs. Bell that necktie you're making--she was asking about the stitch, you remember."
The necktie was produced and admired, while the other girls asked Diantha if she had her fall dressmaking done yet--and whether she found wash ribbon satisfactory. And presently the whole graceful family withdrew, only Dora holding her head with visible stiffness.
Diantha sat on the floor by her mother, put her head in her lap and cried. "How splendid of you, Mother!" she sobbed. "How simply splendid! I will tell you now--if--if--you won't tell even Father--yet."
"Dear child" said her Mother, "I'd rather not know in that case. It is--easier."
"That's what I kept still for!" said the girl. "It's hard enough, goodness knows--as it is! Its nothing wicked, or even risky, Mother dear--and as far as I can see it is right!"
Her mother smiled through her tears. "If you say that, my dear child, I know there's no stopping you. And I hate to argue with you--even for your own sake, because it is so much to my advantage to have you here. I--shall miss you--Diantha!"
"Don't, Mother!" sobbed the girl.
"Its natural for the young to go. We expect it--in time. But you are so young yet--and--well, I had hoped the teaching would satisfy you till Ross was ready."
Diantha sat up straight.
"Mother! can't you see Ross'll never be ready! Look at that family! And the way they live! And those mortgages! I could wait and teach and save a little even with Father always losing money; but I can't see Ross wearing himself out for years and years--I just can't bear it!"
Her mother stroked her fair hair softly, not surprised that her own plea was so lost in thought of the brave young lover.
"And besides," the girl went on "If I waited--and saved--and married Ross--what becomes of you, I'd like to know? What I can't stand is to have you grow older and sicker--and never have any good time in all your life!"
Mrs. Bell smiled tenderly. "You dear child!" she said; as if an affectionate five-year old had offered to get her a rainbow, "I know you mean it all for the best. But, O my dearest! I'd rather have you--here--at home with me---than any other 'good time' you can imagine!"
She could not see the suffering in her daughter's face; but she felt she had made an impression, and followed it up with heart-breaking sincerity. She caught the girl to her breast and held her like a little child. "O my baby! my baby! Don't leave your mother. I can't bear it!"
A familiar step outside, heavy, yet uncertain, and they both looked at each other with frightened eyes.
They had forgotten the biscuit.
"Supper ready?" asked Mr. Bell, with grim humor.
"It will be in a moment, Father," cried Diantha springing to her feet. "At least--in a few moments."
"Don't fret the child, Father," said Mrs. Henderson softly. "She's feeling bad enough."
"Sh'd think she would," replied her husband. "Moreover--to my mind--she ought to."
He got out the small damp local paper and his pipe, and composed himself in obvious patience: yet somehow this patience seemed to fill the kitchen, and to act like a ball and chain to Diantha's feet.
She got supper ready, at last, making griddle-cakes instead of biscuit, and no comment was made of the change: but the tension in the atmosphere was sharply felt by the two women; and possibly by the tall old man, who ate less than usual, and said absolutely nothing.
"I'm going over to see Edwards about that new incubator," he said when the meal was over, and departed; and Mrs. Bell, after trying in vain to do her mending, wiped her clouded glasses and went to bed.
Diantha made all neat and tidy; washed her own wet eyes again, and went out under the moon. In that broad tender mellow light she drew a deep breath and stretched her strong young arms toward the sky in dumb appeal.
"I knew it would be hard," she murmured to herself, "That is I knew the facts--but I didn't know the feeling!"
She stood at the gate between the cypresses, sat waiting under the acacia boughs, walked restlessly up and down the path outside, the dry pepper berries crush softly under foot; bracing herself for one more struggle--and the hardest of all.
"He will understand!" he told herself, over and over, but at the bottom of her heart she knew he wouldn't.
He came at last; a slower, wearier step than usual; came and took both her hands in his and stood holding them, looking at her questioningly. Then he held her face between his palms and made her look at him. Her eyes were brave and steady, but the mouth trembled in spite of her.
He stilled it with a kiss, and drew her to a seat on the bench beside him. "My poor Little Girl! You haven't had a chance yet to really tell me about this thing, and I want you to right now. Then I'm going to kill about forty people in this town! Somebody has been mighty foolish."
She squeezed his hand, but found it very difficult to speak. His love, his sympathy, his tenderness, were so delicious after this day's trials--and before those further ones she could so well anticipate. She didn't wish to cry any more, that would by no means strengthen her position, and she found she couldn't seem to speak without crying.
"One would think to hear the good people of this town that you were about to leave home and mother for--well, for a trip to the moon!" he added. "There isn't any agreement as to what you're going to do, but they're unanimous as to its being entirely wrong. Now suppose you tell me about it."
"I will," said Diantha. "I began to the other night, you know, you first of course--it was too bad! your having to go off at that exact moment. Then I had to tell mother--because--well you'll see presently. Now dear--just let me say it all--before you--do anything."
"Say away, my darling. I trust you perfectly."
She flashed a grateful look at him. "It is this way, my dear. I have two, three, yes four, things to consider:--My own personal problem--my family's--yours--and a social one."
"My family's?" he asked, with a faint shade of offence in his tone.
"No no dear--your own," she explained.
"Better cut mine out, Little Girl," he said. "I'll consider that myself."
"Well--I won't talk about it if you don't want me to. There are the other three."
"I won't question your second, nor your imposing third, but isn't the first one--your own personal problem--a good deal answered?" he suggested, holding her close for a moment.
"Don't!" she said. "I can't talk straight when you put it that way."
She rose hurriedly and took a step or two up and down. "I don't suppose--in spite of your loving me, that I can make you see it as I do. But I'll be just as clear as I can. There are some years before us before we can be together. In that time I intend to go away and undertake a business I am interested in. My purpose is to--develop the work, to earn money, to help my family, and to--well, not to hinder you."
"I don't understand, I confess," he said. "Don't you propose to tell me what this 'work' is?"
"Yes--I will--certainly. But not yet dear! Let me try to show you how I feel about it."
"Wait," said he. "One thing I want to be sure of. Are you doing this with any quixotic notion of helping me--in my business? Helping me to take care of my family? Helping me to--" he stood up now, looking very tall and rather forbidding, "No, I won't say that to you."
"Would there be anything wrong in my meaning exactly that?" she asked, holding her own head a little higher; "both what you said and what you didn't?"
"It would be absolutely wrong, all of it," he answered. "I cannot believe that the woman I love would--could take such a position."
"Look here, Ross!" said the girl earnestly. "Suppose you knew where there was a gold mine--knew it--and by going away for a few years you could get a real fortune--wouldn't you do it?"
"Naturally I should," he agreed.
"Well, suppose it wasn't a gold mine, but a business, a new system like those cigar stores--or--some patent amusement specialty--or anything--that you knew was better than what you're doing--wouldn't you have a right to try it?"
"Of course I should--but what has that to do with this case?"
"Why it's the same thing! Don't you see? I have plans that will be of real benefit to all of us, something worth while to do--and not only for us but for everybody--a real piece of progress--and I'm going to leave my people--and even you!--for a little while--to make us all happier later on."
He smiled lovingly at her but shook his head slowly. "You dear, brave, foolish child!" he said. "I don't for one moment doubt your noble purposes. But you don't get the man's point of view--naturally. What's more you don't seem to get the woman's."
"Can you see no other point of view than those?" she asked.
"There are no others," he answered. "Come! come! my darling, don't add this new difficulty to what we've got to carry! I know you have a hard time of it at home. Some day, please God, you shall have an easier one! And I'm having a hard time too--I don't deny it. But you are the greatest joy and comfort I have, dear--you know that. If you go away--it will be harder and slower and longer--that's all. I shall have you to worry about too. Let somebody else do the gold-mine, dear--you stay here and comfort your Mother as long as you can--and me. How can I get along without you?"
He tried to put his arm around her again, but she drew back. "Dear," she said. "If I deliberately do what I think is right--against your wishes--what will you do?"
"Do?" The laughed bitterly. "What can I do? I'm tied by the leg here--l can't go after you. I've nothing to pull you out of a scrape with if you get in one. I couldn't do anything but--stand it."
"And if I go ahead, and do what you don't like--and make you--suffer--would you--would you rather be free?" Her voice was very low and shaken, but he heard her well enough.
"Free of you? Free of you?" He caught her and held her and kissed her over and over.
"You are mine!" he said. "You have given yourself to me! You cannot leave me. Neither of us is free--ever again." But she struggled away from him.
"Both of us are free--to do what we think right, always Ross! I wouldn't try to stop you if you thought it was your duty to go to the North Pole!" She held him a little way off. "Let me tell you, dear. Sit down--let me tell you all about it." But he wouldn't sit down.
"I don't think I want to know the details," he said. "It doesn't much matter what you're going to do--if you really go away. I can't stop you--I see that. If you think this thing is your 'duty' you'll do it if it kills us all--and you too! If you have to go--I shall do nothing--can do nothing--but wait till you come back to me! Whatever happens, darling--no matter how you fail--don't ever be afraid to come back to me."
He folded his arms now--did not attempt to hold her--gave her the freedom she asked and promised her the love she had almost feared to lose--and her whole carefully constructed plan seemed like a child's sand castle for a moment; her heroic decision the wildest folly.
He was not even looking at her; she saw his strong, clean-cut profile dark against the moonlit house, a settled patience in its lines. Duty! Here was duty, surely, with tenderest happiness. She was leaning toward him--her hand was seeking his, when she heard through the fragrant silence a sound from her mother's room--the faint creak of her light rocking chair. She could not sleep--she was sitting up with her trouble, bearing it quietly as she had so many others.
The quiet everyday tragedy of that distasteful life--the slow withering away of youth and hope and ambition into a gray waste of ineffectual submissive labor--not only of her life, but of thousands upon thousands like her--it all rose up like a flood in the girl's hot young heart.
Ross had turned to her--was holding out his arms to her. "You won't go, my darling!" he said.
"I am going Wednesday on the 7.10," said Diantha.
THE "ANTI" AND THE FLY
The fly upon the Cartwheel Thought he made all the Sound; He thought he made the Cart go on-- And made the wheels go round.
The Fly upon the Cartwheel Has won undying fame For Conceit that was colossal, And Ignorance the same.
But to-day he has a Rival As we roll down History's Track-- For the "Anti" on the Cartwheel Thinks she makes the Wheels go back!
THE BARREL
I was walking, peacefully enough, along a plain ordinary road, when I lifted my head and observed an impressive gateway. The pillars were of stone, high, carven, massive; mighty gates of wrought iron hung between them, the gray wall stretched away on either side.
As the gates were open and there was no prohibitory sign, I entered, and for easy miles walked on; under the springing arches of tall elms, flat roofs of beech, and level fans of fir and pine; through woodland, park and meadow, with glimpses of starred lily-ponds, blue lakelets, and bright brooks; seeing the dappled deer, the swans and pheasants--a glorious place indeed.
Then a smooth turn, and across velvet lawns and statued gardens I saw a towering palace, so nobly beautiful, so majestic, I took off my hat involuntarily. Approaching it I was met by courteous servingmen; told that it was open to visitors; and shown from hall to hall, from floor to floor; where every object was a work of art; where line, color and proportion, perfect architecture and fitting decoration made an overwhelming beauty.
"Whose it is?" I inquired. "Some Duke?--King?--Emperor? Who owns this palace?--this glorious estate?"
They bowed and offered to lead me to him.
Downward and toward the back; through servants' apartments; through workroom, scullery and stable; out to the last and least and meanest little yard; narrow and dark, stone-paved, stone-walled, shadowed by caves of barns; there, huddled in a barrel, they pointed out a man.
They bowed to him, they called him master. They told me he was the owner of this vast estate.
I could not believe it--but they stood bowing--and he ordered them away.
"What!" I cried. "You!--you are the owner--the master of all this wealth of beauty--this beauty of wealth! You own these miles of breezy upland and rich valley--still forests and bright lakes! You own these noble trees--those overflowing flowers--those glades of browsing deer! You own this palace--a joy to the eye and uplift to the soul! This majesty and splendor--this comfort, beauty, form, you own all this--and are living--here."
He regarded me superciliously, with a weary expression.
"Young man," he said, "you are a dreamer--a visionary--a Utopian!--an idealist! You should consider Facts, my young sir; fix your mind on Facts! The Fact is that I live in this Barrel."
It was a fact;--he did visibly live in the Barrel.
It was also a fact that he owned that vast estate.
And there was no lid on the Barrel.
OUR ANDROCENTRIC CULTURE; or, THE MAN-MADE WORLD
III.
HEALTH AND BEAUTY.
NOTE--The word "Androcentric" we owe to Prof. Lester F. Ward. In his book, "Pure Sociology," Chap. 14, he describes the Androcentric Theory of life, hitherto universally accepted; and introduces his own "Gyneacocentric Theory." All who are interested in the deeper scientific aspects of this question are urged to read that chapter. Prof. Ward's theory is to my mind the most important that has been offered the world since the Theory of Evolution; and without exception the most important that has ever been put forward concerning women.
Among the many paradoxes which we find in human life is our low average standard of health and beauty, compared with our power and knowledge. All creatures suffer from conflict with the elements; from enemies without and within--the prowling devourers of the forest, and "the terror that walketh in darkness" and attacks the body from inside, in hidden millions.
Among wild animals generally, there is a certain standard of excellence; if you shoot a bear or a bird, it is a fair sample of the species; you do not say, "O what an ugly one!" or "This must have been an invalid!"
Where we have domesticated any animal, and interfered with its natural habits, illness has followed; the dog is said to have the most diseases second to man; the horse comes next; but the wild ones put us to shame by their superior health and the beauty that belongs to right development.
In our long ages of blind infancy we assume that sickness was a visitation frown the gods; some still believe this, holding it to be a special prerogative of divinity to afflict us in this way. We speak of "the ills that flesh is heir to" as if the inheritance was entailed and inalienable. Only of late years, after much study and long struggle with this old belief which made us submit to sickness as a blow from the hand of God, we are beginning to learn something of the many causes of our many diseases, and how to remove some of them.
It is still true, however, that almost every one of us is to some degree abnormal; the features asymmetrical, the vision defective, the digestion unreliable, the nervous system erratic--we are but a job lot even in what we call "good health"; and are subject to a burden of pain and premature death that would make life hideous if it were not so ridiculously unnecessary.
As to beauty--we do not think of expecting it save in the rarely exceptional case. Look at the faces--the figures--in any crowd you meet; compare the average man or the average woman with the normal type of human beauty as given us in picture and statue; and consider if there is not some general cause for so general a condition of ugliness.
Moreover, leaving our defective bodies concealed by garments; what are those garments, as conducive to health and beauty? Is the practical ugliness of our men's attire, and the impractical absurdity of our women's, any contribution to human beauty? Look at our houses--are they beautiful? Even the houses of the rich?
We do not even know that we ought to live in a world of overflowing loveliness; and that our contribution to it should be the loveliest of all. We are so sodden in the dull ugliness of our interiors, so used to calling a tame weary low-toned color scheme "good taste," that only children dare frankly yearn for Beauty--and they are speedily educated out of it.
The reasons specially given for our low standards of health and beauty are ignorance, poverty, and the evil effects of special trades. The Man with the Hoe becomes brother to the ox because of over-much hoeing; the housepainter is lead-poisoned because of his painting; books have been written to show the injurious influence of nearly all our industries upon workers.
These causes are sound as far as they go; but do not cover the whole ground.
The farmer may be muscle-bound and stooping from his labor; but that does not account for his dyspepsia or his rheumatism.
Then we allege poverty as covering all. Poverty does cover a good deal. But when we find even a half-fed savage better developed than a well paid cashier; and a poor peasant woman a more vigorous mother than the idle wife of a rich man, poverty is not enough.
Then we say ignorance explains it. But there are most learned professors who are ugly and asthmathic; there are even doctors who can boast no beauty and but moderate health; there are some of the petted children of the wealthy, upon whom every care is lavished from birth, and who still are ill to look at and worse to marry.
All these special causes are admitted, given their due share in lowering our standards, but there is another far more universal in its application and its effects. Let us look back on our little ancestors the beasts, and see what keeps them so true to type.
The type itself set by that balance of conditions and forces we call "natural selection." As the environment changes they must be adapted to it, if they cannot so adapt themselves they die. Those who live are, by living, proven capable of maintaining themselves. Every creature which has remained on earth, while so many less effective kinds died out, remains as a conqueror. The speed of the deer--the constant use of speed--is what keeps it alive and makes it healthy and beautiful. The varied activities of the life of a leopard are what have developed the sinuous gracile strength we so admire. It is what the creature does for its living, its daily life-long exercise which makes it what it is.
But there is another great natural force which works steadily to keep all animals up to the race standard; that is sexual selection. Throughout nature the male is the variant, as we have already noted. His energy finds vent not only in that profuse output of decorative appendages Ward defines as "masculine efflorescence" but in variations not decorative, not useful or desirable at all.
The female, on the other hand, varies much less, remaining nearer the race type; and her function is to select among these varying males the specimens most valuable to the race. In the intense masculine competition the victor must necessarily be stronger than his fellows; he is first proven equal to his environment by having lived to grow up, then more than equal to his fellows by overcoming them. This higher grade of selection also develops not only the characteristics necessary to make a living; but secondary ones, often of a purely aesthetic nature, which make much of what we call beauty. Between the two, all who live must be up to a certain grade, and those who become parents must be above it; a masterly arrangement surely!
Here is where, during the period of our human history, we in our newborn consciousness and imperfect knowledge, have grieviously interfered with the laws of nature. The ancient proprietary family, treating the woman as a slave, keeping her a prisoner and subject to the will of her master, cut her off at once from the exercise of those activities which alone develop and maintain the race type.
Take the one simple quality of speed. We are a creature built for speed, a free swift graceful animal; and among savages this is still seen--the capacity for running, mile after mile, hour after hour. Running is as natural a gait for genus homo as for genus cervus. Now suppose among deer, the doe was prohibited from running; the stag continuing free on the mountain; the doe living in caves and pens, unequal to any exercise. The effect on the species would be, inevitably, to reduce its speed.
In this way, by keeping women to one small range of duties, and in most cases housebound, we have interfered with natural selection and its resultant health and beauty. It can easily be seen what the effect on the race would have been if all men had been veiled and swathed, hidden in harems, kept to the tent or house, and confined to the activities of a house-servant. Our stalwart laborers, our proud soldiers, our athletes, would never have appeared under such circumstances. The confinement to the house alone, cutting women off from sunshine and air, is by itself an injury; and the range of occupation allowed them is not such as to develop a high standard of either health or beauty. Thus we have cut off half the race from the strengthening influence of natural selection, and so lowered our race-standards in large degree.
This alone, however, would not have hid such mischievous effects but for our further blunder in completely reversing nature's order of sexual selection. It is quite possible that even under confinement and restriction women could have kept up the race level, passably, through this great function of selection; but here is the great fundamental error of the Androcentric Culture. Assuming to be the possessor of women, their owner and master, able at will to give, buy and sell, or do with as he pleases, man became the selector.
It seems a simple change; and in those early days, wholly ignorant of natural laws, there was no suspicion that any mischief would result. In the light of modern knowledge, however, the case is clear. The woman was deprived of the beneficent action of natural selection, and the man was then, by his own act, freed from the stern but elevating effect of sexual selection. Nothing was required of the woman by natural selection save such capacity as should please her master; nothing was required of the man by sexual selection save power to take by force, or buy, a woman.
It does not take a very high standard of feminine intelligence, strength, skill, health, or beauty to be a houseservant, or even a housekeeper; witness the average.
It does not take a very high standard of masculine, intelligence, strength, skill, health or beauty to maintain a woman in that capacity--witness average.
Here at the very root of our physiological process, at the beginning of life, we have perverted the order of nature, and are suffering the consequences.
It has been held by some that man as the selector has developed beauty, more beauty than we had before; and we point to the charms of our women as compared with those of the squaw. The answer to this is that the squaw belongs to a decadent race; that she too is subject to the man, that the comparison to have weight should be made between our women and the women of the matriarchate--an obvious impossibility. We have not on earth women in a state of normal freedom and full development; but we have enough difference in their placing to learn that human strength and beauty grows with woman's freedom and activity.
The second answer is that much of what man calls beauty in woman is not human beauty at all, but gross overdevelopment of certain points which appeal to him as a male. The excessive fatness, previously referred to, is a case in point; that being considered beauty in a woman which is in reality an element of weakness, inefficiency and ill-health. The relatively small size of women, deliberately preferred, steadfastly chosen, and so built into the race, is a blow at real human progress in every particular. In our upward journey we should and do grow larger, leaving far behind us our dwarfish progenitors. Yet the male, in his unnatural position as selector, preferring for reasons both practical and sentimental, to have "his woman" smaller than himself, has deliberately striven to lower the standard of size in the race. We used to read in the novels of the last generation, "He was a magnificent specimen of manhood"--"Her golden head reached scarcely to his shoulder"--"She was a fairy creature--the tiniest of her sex." Thus we have mated, and yet expected that by some hocus pocus the boys would all "take after their father," and the girls, their mother. In his efforts to improve the breed of other animals, man has never tried to deliberately cross the large and small and expect to keep up the standard of size.
As a male he is appealed to by the ultra-feminine, and has given small thought to effects on the race. He was not designed to do the selecting. Under his fostering care we have bred a race of women who are physically weak enough to be handed about like invalids; or mentally weak enough to pretend they are--and to like it. We have made women who respond so perfectly to the force which made them, that they attach all their idea of beauty to those characteristics which attract men; sometimes humanly ugly without even knowing it.
For instance, our long restriction to house-limits, the heavy limitations of our clothing, and the heavier ones of traditional decorum, have made women disproportionately short-legged. This is a particularly undignified and injurious characteristic, bred in women and inherited by men, most seen among those races which keep their women most closely. Yet when one woman escapes the tendency and appears with a normal length of femur and tibia, a normal height of hip and shoulder, she is criticized and called awkward by her squatty sisters!
The most convenient proof of the inferiority of women in human beauty is shown by those composite statues prepared by Mr. Sargent for the World's Fair of '93. These were made from gymnasium measurements of thousands of young collegians of both sexes all over America. The statue of the girl has a pretty face, small hands and feet, rather nice arms, though weak; but the legs are too thick and short; the chest and shoulders poor; and the trunk is quite pitiful in its weakness. The figure of the man is much better proportioned.
Thus the effect on human beauty of masculine selection.
Beyond this positive deteriorative effect on women through man's arbitrary choice comes the negative effect of woman's lack of choice. Bought or stolen or given by her father, she was deprived of the innately feminine right and duty of choosing. "Who giveth this woman?" we still inquire in our archaic marriage service, and one man steps forward and gives her to another man.
Free, the female chose the victor, and the vanquished went unmated--and without progeny. Dependent, having to be fed and cared for by some man, the victors take their pick perhaps, but the vanquished take what is left; and the poor women, "marrying for a home," take anything. As a consequence the inferior male is as free to transmit his inferiority as the superior to give better qualities, and does so--beyond computation. In modern days, women are freer, in some countries freer than in others; here in modern America freest of all; and the result is seen in our improving standards of health and beauty.
Still there remains the field of inter-masculine competition, does there not? Do not the males still struggle together? Is not that as of old, a source of race advantage?
To some degree it is. When life was simple and our activities consisted mainly in fighting and hard work; the male who could vanquish the others was bigger and stronger. But inter-masculine competition ceases to be of such advantage when we enter the field of social service. What is required in organized society is the specialization of the individual, the development of special talents, not always of immediate benefit to the man himself, but of ultimate benefit to society. The best social servant, progressive, meeting future needs, is almost always at a disadvantage besides the well-established lower types. We need, for social service, qualities quite different from the simple masculine characteristics--desire, combat, self-expression.
By keeping what we call "the outside world" so wholly male, we keep up masculine standards at the expense of human ones. This may be broadly seen in the slow and painful development of industry and science as compared to the easy dominance of warfare throughout all history until our own times.
The effect of all this ultra masculine competition upon health and beauty is but too plainly to be seen. Among men the male idea of what is good looking is accentuated beyond reason. Read about any "hero" you please; or study the products of the illustrator and note the broad shoulders, the rugged features, the strong, square, determined jaw. That jaw is in evidence if everything else fails. He may be cross-eyed, wide-eared, thick-necked, bandy-legged--what you please; but he must have a more or less prognathous jaw.
Meanwhile any anthropologist will show you that the line of human development is away from that feature of the bulldog and the alligator, and toward the measured dignity of the Greek type. The possessor of that kind of jaw may enable male to conquer male, but does not make him of any more service to society; of any better health or higher beauty.
Further, in the external decoration of our bodies, what is the influence here of masculine dominance.
We have before spoken of the peculiar position of our race in that the woman is the only female creature who carries the burden of sex ornament. This amazing reversal of the order of nature results at its mildest in a perversion of the natural feminine instincts of love and service, and an appearance of the masculine instincts of self-expression and display. Alone among all female things do women decorate and preen themselves and exhibit their borrowed plumage (literally!) to attract the favor of the male. This ignominy is forced upon them by their position of economic dependence; and their general helplessness. As all broader life is made to depend, for them, on whom they marry, indeed as even the necessities of life so often depend on their marrying someone, they have been driven into this form of competition, so alien to the true female attitude.
The result is enough to make angels weep--and laugh. Perhaps no step in the evolution of beauty went farther than our human power of making a continuous fabric; soft and mobile, showing any color and texture desired. The beauty of the human body is supreme, and when we add to it the flow of color, the ripple of fluent motion, that comes of a soft, light garment over free limbs--it is a new field of loveliness and delight. Naturally this should have filled the whole world with a new pleasure. Our garments, first under right natural selection developing perfect use, under right sex selection developing beauty; and further, as our human aesthetic sense progresses, showing a noble symbolism, would have been an added strength and glory, a ceaseless joy.
What is the case?
Men, under a too strictly inter-masculine environment, have evolved the mainly useful but beautiless costume common to-day; and women--?
Women wear beautiful garments when they happen to be the fashion; and ugly garments when they are the fashion, and show no signs of knowing the difference. They show no added pride in the beautiful, no hint of mortification in the hideous, and are not even sensitive under criticism, or open to any persuasion or argument. Why should they be?
Their condition, physical and mental, is largely abnormal, their whole passionate absorption in dress and decoration is abnormal, and they have never looked, from a frankly human standpoint, at their position and its peculiarities, until the present age.
In the effect of our wrong relation on the world's health, we have spoken of the check to vigor and growth due to the housebound state of women and their burdensome clothes. There follow other influences, similar in origin, even more evil in result. To roughly and briefly classify we may distinguish the diseases due to bad air, to bad food, and that field of cruel mischief we are only now beginning to discuss--the diseases directly due to the erroneous relation between men and women.
We are the only race where the female depends on the male for a livelihood. We are the only race that practices prostitution. From the first harmless-looking but abnormal general relation follows the well recognized evil of the second, so long called "a social necessity," and from it, in deadly sequence, comes the "wages of sin;" death not only of the guilty, but of the innocent. It is no light part of our criticism of the Androcentric Culture that a society based on masculine desires alone, has willingly sacrificed such an army of women; and has repaid the sacrifice by the heaviest punishments.
That the unfortunate woman should sicken and die was held to be her just punishment; that man too should bear part penalty was found unavoidable, though much legislation and medical effort has been spent to shield him; but to the further consequences society is but now waking up.
COMMENT AND REVIEW
Mr. H. G. Wells is an author whose work I have followed with delight, interest and respect for years--since first I read that sinister vision of dead worlds, "The Time Machine." He is a successful craftsman, an artist of power; and has that requisite so often missing in our literary craftsmen and artists--something to say. In his mighty work of electrifying the world's slow mind to the splendid possibilities of life as it might be, may be, will be, as soon as we wake up, he has my admiring sympathy.
But alas! and alas! Like many another great man, Mr. Wells loses his perspective and clear vision when he considers women. He sees women as females--and does not see that they are human; the universal mistake of the world behind us; but one unworthy of a mind that sees the world before us so vividly.
He has knowledge, the scientific habit of mind, an enormous imagination and the courage to use it; he is not, usually, afraid of facts, even when an admission carries reproach. But in this field he shows simply the old race-mind, that attitude which considers women as mothers, potential, active, and in retrospect; and as nothing else. He likes them as mothers. He honors them as mothers. He wants to have them salaried, as mothers. But he thinks it quite beyond reason that they should appear as regular members of the working world; their motherhood, to his mind, would prevent it.
In this attitude he has produced a vivid novel called Ann Veronica; a book of keen analysis and delicate observation, full of amusing darts and flashes; seeing and showing much that is absurd in our modern uneasiness and wavering discussion; and thus explained by himself in The Spectator (which had denounced the work as "poisonous").
"My book was written primarily to express the resentment and distress which many women feel nowadays at their unavoidable practical dependence upon some individual man not of their deliberate choice"; and he further says he sympathizes with the woman who lives with a man she does not love; and respects her natural desire to prefer some one man as her husband and father of her children--a harmless position surely.
To carry out these feelings he has described a girl, vigorous and handsome, a nice, normal girl, who is crushed and stultified in her home life and wants to get out of it; as is the case with so many girls today. She wants freedom--room to grow--more knowledge and power--again as is so common nowadays. We read with sympathy, admiring his keen sure touch, hoping much for this brave woman in her dash for freedom.
Then he makes this girl, so strong and intelligent, deliberately refuse various kinds of work she might have done because they did not please her; and borrow money from a man in preference to earning her living. She exposes herself to insult and even danger with an idiocy that even a novel-reared child of sixteen would have scorned. She falls in love, healthfully enough, with a fine strong man; and sees no reason for avoiding him when she learns he is married. She cheerfully elopes with him--quite forgetting the money she had borrowed, and when she remembers about that abhorrent debt, expects her companion to pay it, without a qualm apparently.
The ex-wife must have conveniently died after a while; and the man develops a sudden new talent as a playwright; for they wind up very respectably in a nice flat, having Ann Veronica's father and aunt to dinner, and regarding them as a pair of walking mummies. Nothing more is said of any desire on the part of the heroine for freedom, knowledge, independence; having attained her man she has attained all; indeed Mr. Wells goes to the pains to fully express his idea of the case, by describing her early struggle and outburst as like "the nuptial flight of an ant."
It is hard to see why Mr. Wells, in seeking "to express the resentment and distress which many women feel nowadays" at their dependence; and in showing sympathy with their natural right of choice, should have burdened himself with all this unnecessary complication of special foolishness on the part of his heroine which alienates our sympathy; and special illegality on the man's position. Perhaps this is to add heroism to her effort to secure the right mate, to indicate how small are any other considerations in comparison to this primary demand of life.
Waiving all objections to this framework of the story, there remains the painful exhibition of Mr. Wells's misapprehension of the larger causes of the present unrest among women. What later historians will point out as the most distinguishing feature of our time, its importance shared only by the movement towards economic democracy, is the sudden and irresistible outburst of human powers, human feeling, human activities, and in that half the world hitherto denied such experiences.
Ann Veronica, as at first portrayed, shared in this world impulse. She wanted to be human, and tried to be. Her masculine interpreter, seeing no possible interests in the woman's life except those of sex, dismisses all that passionate outgoing as comparable to the mating impulse of insects. He overestimates the weight of this department of life, a mistake common to most men and some women.
When opposed, the protagonists of this position cry that their opponent wishes to unsex women; to repudiate motherhood; and see in all the natural development of the modern woman only a threat of decreased population.
Cannot Mr. Wells, as one acquainted with zoology, see that both male and female of a species are alike in the special qualities of that species, although differing in sex? Can he not see that the area of human life, the social development of humanity, is one quite common to both men and women; and that a woman, however amply occupied in wife and mother-hood, suffers from lack of human relation, if denied it, even as a man would, whose activities were absolutely limited to husband- and father-hood?
*
If you are a believer in women's voting why don't you take the best equal suffrage paper in the country? Not the Forerunner--which is only a suffrage paper because of its interest in women, and only a woman's paper because of its interest in humanity, but this one:
Vol. XL. The Woman's Journal
FOUNDED BY LUCY STONE AND HENRY B. BLACKWELL
A weekly newspaper published every Saturday in Boston, devoted to the interests of women--to their educational, industrial, legal and political equality, and especially to their right of suffrage
Entered at the Post Office, Boston, Mass., as second-class mail matter
EDITOR: ALICE STONE BLACKWELL
ASSOCIATE EDITORS: FLORENCE M. ADKINSON, CATHARINE WILDE
OFFICE: NO. 6 BEACON STREET, BOSTON, MASS. ROOM 1018
The love and faith, the hope and courage, the steady unflinching devotion of forty years of solid work, and the quality of brain power, which have fed this lamp of liberty, make a Iight that is worth following.
Two noble lives have been given to it, and the daughter of one of those two is carrying it on superbly. It is a paper that will broaden, live and grow, and carry on its larger work long after this one political question is rightly settled.
It carries news--the kind of news progressive women want. It is broad and bright, and interesting; full of short and memorable bits that prick the mind to understanding.
I have read this paper, myself, many years, and know its merits well.
Try it.
*
The Sea of Matrimony. By Jessie H. Childs. Broadway Pub. Co., New York and Baltimore.
Here is quite another kind of a novel. Earnest, thoughtful, sincere, lacking in humor and in technical finish, yet holding one's attention by the complete preoccupation of the author in her theme, and by the common interests of the discussion.
It reminds one vaguely of "Together," giving pair after pair of ill-mated persons, but one happy marriage in the lot, and that a childless one, and offering no solution to the problem raised save in that searching philosophy we seek to cover by the term New Thought.
There is much keen observation in this book; and so intimate an analysis of character that one wonders who this person and that may be; and the courage shown in giving spades their names is worthy of respect
The author shows a power of keen appreciation of the daily problems of life. The description of the woman who tried to change even her husband's cigars to the brand her father used to smoke is particularly good.
Many men and women may see their troubles reflected in this study of the intricate difficulties of married life; and some will find strength and hope in its conclusions.
PERSONAL PROBLEMS
Here is a question of financial ethics sent by one of our readers: "A woman is sent out on a trip of inspection for her State School, or for her Club. She is told to keep accurate accounts of her expenditures, and is expected to send in an itemized account. Shall she send in the regular two or three dollars a day account? Or shall she itemize each street carfare and meal? Shall she not be justified in using a dollar to-day which she did not spend on yesterday's dinner, in livening up her mind by a visit to the theatre? Or shall she eat, whether hungry or not, and pay all her own minor expenses?"
This is a good long question, and seems open to some discussion. The simplest answer seems to be, "If the woman is required to send in an itemized account, she should do so, accurately. If her expenses are within the usual amount allowed it should make no difference to the employer whether the money is spent on a dinner or a theatre.
She visibly could not suppress the theatre expense and yet have an accurate account; nor could she call it a dinner--and be truthful.
If it is simply a matter of having such and such an allowance for expenses, then it is no one's business how she spends it; but if she has agreed to itemize she ought to do so.
PLAY-TIME
THE MELANCHOLY RABBIT
(A Pantoum.)
A melancholy rabbit in distress, Was heard complaining on the moonlit mead, And neither we, nor anyone, could guess If he were ill at ease, or ill indeed
We heard complaining on the moonlit mead, We sought the lonely wanderer to relieve; If he were ill at ease or ill indeed We did not ask--sufficient he should grieve.
We sought the lonely wanderer to relieve With sundry bundles of electric hay; We did not ask--sufficient he should grieve-- If he were used to dieting that way.
With sundry bundles of electric hay The suffering hare was speedily supplied; If he were used to dieting that way It could not be the reason that he died.
The suffering hare was speedily supplied-- A melancholy rabbit in distress; It could not be the reason that he died-- And neither we, nor anyone, could guess.
[Advertisement]
THE FORERUNNER CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN'S MAGAZINE CHARLTON CO., 67 WALL ST., NEW YORK
AS TO PURPOSE:
What is The Forerunner? It is a monthly magazine, publishing stories short and serial, article and essay; drama, verse, satire and sermon; dialogue, fable and fantasy, comment and review. It is written entirely by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
What is it For? It is to stimulate thought: to arouse hope, courage and impatience; to offer practical suggestions and solutions, to voice the strong assurance of better living, here, now, in our own hands to make.
What is it about? It is about people, principles, and the questions of every-day life; the personal and public problems of to-day. It gives a clear, consistent view of human life and how to live it.
Is it a Woman's magazine? It will treat all three phases of our existence--male, female and human. It will discuss Man, in his true place in life; Woman, the Unknown Power; the Child, the most important citizen.
Is it a Socialist Magazine? It is a magazine for humanity, and humanity is social. It holds that Socialism, the economic theory, is part of our gradual Socialization, and that the duty of conscious humanity is to promote Socialization.
Why is it published? It is published to express ideas which need a special medium; and in the belief that there are enough persons interested in those ideas to justify the undertaking.
AS TO ADVERTISING:
We have long heard that "A pleased customer is the best advertiser." The Forerunner offers to its advertisers and readers the benefit of this authority. In its advertising department, under the above heading, will be described articles personally known and used. So far as individual experience and approval carry weight, and clear truthful description command attention, the advertising pages of The Forerunner will be useful to both dealer and buyer. If advertisers prefer to use their own statements The Forerunner will publish them if it believes them to be true.
AS TO CONTENTS:
The main feature of the first year is a new book on a new subject with a new name:--
"Our Androcentric Culture." this is a study of the historic effect on normal human development of a too exclusively masculine civilization. It shows what man, the male, has done to the world: and what woman, the more human, may do to change it.
"What Diantha Did." This is a serial novel. It shows the course of true love running very crookedly--as it so often does--among the obstructions and difficulties of the housekeeping problem--and solves that problem. (NOT by co-operation.)
Among the short articles will appear:
"Private Morality and Public Immorality." "The Beauty Women Have Lost" "Our Overworked Instincts." "The Nun in the Kitchen." "Genius: Domestic and Maternal." "A Small God and a Large Goddess." "Animals in Cities." "How We Waste Three-Fourths Of Our Money." "Prize Children" "Kitchen-Mindedness" "Parlor-Mindedness" "Nursery-Mindedness"
There will be short stories and other entertaining matter in each issue. The department of "Personal Problems" does not discuss etiquette, fashions or the removal of freckles. Foolish questions will not be answered, unless at peril of the asker.
AS TO VALUE:
If you take this magazine one year you will have:
One complete novel . . . By C. P. Gilman One new book . . . By C. P. Gilman Twelve short stories . . . By C. P. Gilman Twelve-and-more short articles . . . By C. P. Gilman Twelve-and-more new poems . . . By C. P. Gilman Twelve Short Sermons . . . By C. P. Gilman Besides "Comment and Review" . . . By C. P. Gilman "Personal Problems" . . . By C. P. Gilman And many other things . . . By C. P. Gilman
DON'T YOU THINK IT'S WORTH A DOLLAR?
THE FORERUNNER CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN'S MAGAZINE CHARLTON CO., 67 WALL ST., NEW YORK
_____ 19__
Please find enclosed $_____ as subscription to "The Forerunner" from _____ 19___ to _____ 19___
__________
__________
__________
[Advertisement]
Confidential Remarks About Our Advertising
This magazine was planned to carry twenty-four pages of reading matter and eight of advertising matter.
A careful list was made of about twenty first class articles, personally known and used by the editor; and the offer was made to write absolutely true descriptions and recommendations of them.
The value of this form of advertisement was not in the extent of the circulation, but in
a. The unique and attractive method.
b. The select class of goods.
c. The select class of readers.
d. The weight of a personal authority specially known to these select readers.
Our readers as far as heard from have almost without exception spoken highly of our advertisements and declared they would purchase the goods.
If, however, the amount of sales secured does not equal the price of the advertisement, there is no reason whatever why any dealer should use our pages.
*
There is a tooth-paste, specially recommended by physicians, well used and found of marked value, noticeably checking decay of the teeth and improving mouth and throat conditions.
Now, suppose the makers take one page in one issue of The Forerunner at $25.00. Then suppose that only one thousand of our readers spend 25 cents each to try that tooth-paste. That makes $250.00; and the makers ought to get at least half of it.
if only two hundred did it, the makers would still get their money back--to say nothing of the additional advertising given by each new purchaser who likes it.
*
Here is an experiment The Forerunner would like to try.
If all the readers who did purchase goods on the strength of these recommendations would waste a cent in sending me a post card saying they had done so, it would definitely show whether this small experiment in honesty has any practical value.
Meanwhile The Forerunner will continue to run one or two as samples; put in real ones when it gets them; and may find it necessary to take out the eight pages which would have been so useful if properly filled.
Best of all; if enough subscriptions come in, we can get along without any advertising whatever--and furnish more reading matter.
For this ideal state we look forward hopefully.
[Advertisement]
Things we wish to Advertise
This is the list of articles the editor wishes to secure, having known and used them for from two to forty years; some were used by her mother before her. They are things you can buy anywhere or order by mail.
A TOILET PREPARATION: Used by mother and self. A COURTPLASTER: Used from infancy, perfect. SOMETHING SIMILAR TO ABOVE, Most excellent. A SILVER CLEANER: Very satisfactory. SEVEN KINDS OF SOAP--and such like--all good. A BREAKFAST FOOD: Used unvaryingly for nine years. SIX OTHER BREAKFAST FOODS: All first-rate. ONE VARIETY OF SOUPS: Absolutely good. FOUR OTHER FOOD-MAKERS: Safe to recommend. FOUR KINDS OF COCOA: All very good. A HAIRBRUSH: A real delight--if you have hair. MY TYPEWRITER: I would have this kind. A PEN: All my books were written with this pen. A VOICE TABLOID: A blessing to a speaker. A TOOTHPASTE: The best out of many. PERFECTION IN HAIRPINS. TWO KINDS OF UNDERWEAR: Good ones. TWO KINDS OF HOSIERY: They wear well. A HOUSEHOLD COMFORT AND TIME-SAVER. A MATTRESS: Continuously satisfactory. BOOKCASES: The kind you want. A MUSIC MACHINE: Or how to keep the boys at home. FIVE FOOD ARTICLES: Long valued. A DRESS SHIELD: That can be trusted. SOMETHING BETTER THAN WHALEBONE. TWO KINDS OF SKIRT-BINDING: Always reliable. THE BEST OF CRACKERS. FOUNTAIN PEN THAT NEVER LEAKS.
These are "preferred stock." More may be tried and found worthy; but these have been used long and continuously--just because they were good.
If this list could be filled out at reasonable rates, it would form a very useful little collection, to seller and buyer. And to
THE FORERUNNER CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN'S MAGAZINE CHARLTON CO., 67 WALL ST., NEW YORK
[Advertisement]
C A L E N D U L A
CHILDREN CEASE TO CRY FOR IT.
This is a gratuitous advertisement, benefitting
a) The Child; whose pain stops;
b) The Mother; who doesn't have to hear him cry;
c) The Nearest Druggist--a little.
CALENDULA is a good standard old drug--made of marigolds--in the materia medica. You buy a little bottle of tincture of calendula, and keep it on the shelf. Nobody will drink it by mistake--it doesn't taste good.
Presently Johnny falls down hard--he was running--he fell on a gritty place--his poor little knee is scraped raw. And he howls, how he howls! square-mouthed and inconsolable.
Then you hastily get a half a tea-cupful of water, a little warm if you have it, and put in a few drops of calendula. Wet a soft clean rag in it, bind it softly on the wound, keep it wet--and the pain stops.
Many many times has this quieted my infant anguish; also have I used it as a grown up. The effect is the same.
C A L E N D U L A TAKES THE PAIN FROM A R A W W O U N D
THE FORERUNNER
A MONTHLY MAGAZINE
BY
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AUTHOR, OWNER & PUBLISHER
1.00 A YEAR .10 A COPY
Volume 1. No. 4 FEBRUARY, 1910 Copyright for 1910 C. P. Gilman
There is one large obstacle to woman suffrage which has nothing to do with sex. Men, the governing class, hesitate in extending equal political responsibility and power to their domestic servants. Do you wonder?
TWO PRAYERS
Only for these I pray, Pray with assurance strong: Light to discover the way, Power to follow it long.
Let me have light to see, Light to be sure and know, When the road is clear to me Willingly I go.
Let me have Power to do, Power of the brain and nerve, Though the task is heavy and new Willingly I will serve.
My prayers are lesser than three, Nothing I pray but two; Let me have light to see, Let me have power to do.
AN OFFENDER
"Where's Harry?" was Mr. Gortlandt's first question.
"He's gone to the country, to mother. It was so hot this last day or two, I've sent him out, with Miss Colton. I'm going Saturday. Sit down."
"I miss him," said her visitor, "more than I thought I could. I've learned more in these seven years than I thought there was to know. Or in the last two perhaps, since I've found you again."
She looked at him with a little still smile, but there was a puzzled expression behind it, as of one whose mind was not made up.
They sat in the wide window of a top floor apartment, awning-shaded. A fresh breeze blew in upon them, and the city dust blew in upon them also, lying sandy on the broad sill.
She made little wavy lines in it with one finger--
"These windows ought to be shut tight, I suppose, and the blinds, and the curtains. Then we should be cleaner."
"As to furniture," he agreed, "but not as to our lungs."
"I don't know about that," she said; "we get plenty of air--but see what's in it."
"A city is a dirty place at the best; but Mary--I didn't come to consider the ethics of the dust--how much longer must I wait?" he asked, after a little pause. "Isn't two years courting, re-courting--enough? Haven't I learned my lesson yet?"
"Some of it, I think," she admitted, "but not all."
"What more do you ask?" he pursued earnestly. "Can't we come to a definite understanding? You'll be chasing off again in a few days; it's blessed luck that brought you to town just now, and that I happened to be here too."
"I don't how about the luck," said she. "It was business that brought me. I never was in town before when it was so hot."
"Why don't you go to a hotel? This apartment is right under the roof, gets the sun all day."
"It gets the breeze too, and sunlight is good. No, I'm better off in the apartment, with Harry. It was very convenient of the Grants to be away, and let me have it."
"How does Hal stand the weather?"
"Pretty well. But he was getting rather fretful, so I sent him off two hours ago. I do hope he won't run away from Miss Colton again. She's as nervous as I am about him."
"Don't you think he is fond of me?" asked the man. "I've got to catch up, you see. He can't help being mine--half mine," he hastily added, seeing a hint of denial in her look.
"Why yes, he seems fond of you, he is fond of you," she conceded. "I hope he always will be, and I believe you are beginning to love him."
"A pretty strong beginning, Mary," said the man. "Of course I don't pretend to have cared much at first, but now!--why he's so handsome, and quick, and such a good little duffer; and so affectionate! When he gives a jump and gets his arms around my neck and his legs around my waist and 'hugs me all over' as he calls it, I almost feel as if I was a mother! I can't say more than that, can I?"
"No, you certainly can't say more than that. I believe you, I'm not questioning," for he looked up sharply at her tone.
"I've never had much to do with children, you see," he went on slowly, "no little brothers or sisters, and then only-- What astonishes me is how good they feel in your arms! The little fellow's body is so firm and sinewy--he wriggles like a fish--a big fish that you're trying to hold with both hands."
The mother smiled tenderly. She knew the feel of the little body so well! From the soft pink helplessness, the little head falling so naturally into the hollow of the arm or neck, the fumbling little hands; then the gradual gain in size and strength, till now she held that eager bounding little body, almost strong enough to get away from her--but not wanting to. He still loved to nestle up to "Muzz," and was but newly and partially won by this unaccustomed father.
"It's seven years Mary! That makes a man all over, they say. I'm sure it has made me over. I'm an older man--and I think, wiser. I've repented, I've outgrown my folly and seen the justice of my punishment. I don't blame you an atom for divorcing me--I think you did right, and I respect you for it. The biggest lesson I've learned is to love you! I can see--now--that I didn't before.
Her face hardened as she looked at him. "No, you didn't, Harry, you certainly didn't, nor the child-- When I think of what I was when you married me! Of my proud health!--"
"You are not hurt!" he cried. "I don't mean that you haven't been hurt, I could kill myself when I think of how I made you suffer! But you are a finer woman now than you were then; sweeter, stronger, wiser, and more beautiful. When I found you again in Liverpool two years ago it was a revelation. Now see--I don't even ask you to forgive me! I ask you to try me again and let me prove I can make it up to you and the boy!"
"It's not easy for me to forgive," she answered slowly-- "I'm not of the forgiving nature. But there is a good deal of reason in your position. You were my husband, you are Hal's father, there's no escaping that."
"Perhaps, if you will let the rest of my life make up for that time of my Godforsaken meanness, you won't want to escape it, Mary! See--I have followed you about for two years. I accepted your terms, you did not promise me anything, but for the child's sake I might try once more, try only as one of many, to see if I could win you--again. And I love you now a hundred times better than I did when I married you!"
She fanned herself slowly with a large soft fan, and looked out across the flickering roofs. Below them lay the highly respectable street on which the house technically fronted, and the broad, crowded, roaring avenue which it really overlooked.
The rattle of many drays and more delivery wagons rose up to them. An unusual jangle drowned his words just then and she smilingly interpreted "that's railroad iron--or girders, I can tell lots of them now. About four A. M. there is a string of huge milk wagons. But the worst is the cars. Hear that now--that's a flat wheel. How do you like it?"
"Mary--why do you bring up these cars again when I'm trying my best to show you my whole heart? Don't put things like that between us!"
"But they are between us, Henry, all the time. I hear you tell me you love me, and I don't doubt you do in a way; yes, as well as you can, very much indeed!--I know. But when it comes to this car question; when I talk to you of these juggernauts of yours; you are no more willing to do the right thing than you were when I first knew you."
Mr. Cortlandt's face hardened. He drew himself up from the eager position in which he had leaned forward, and evidently hesitated for a moment as to his words.
In spite of his love for this woman, who, as he justly said, was far more beautiful and winsome than the strong, angular, over-conscientious girl he had married, neglected and shamed, his feelings as a business man were strong within him.
"My dear--I am not personally responsible for the condition of these cars."
"You are President of the Company. You hold controlling shares of the stock. It was your vote that turned down the last improvement proposition."
He looked at her sharply.
"I'm afraid someone has been prejudicing you against me Mary. You have more technical information than seems likely to have reached you by accident."
"It's not prejudice, but it is information; and Mr. Graham did tell me, if that's what you mean. But he cares. You know how hard the Settlement has worked to get the Company to make the streets safer for children--and you wouldn't do a thing."
Mr. Cortlandt hesitated. It would never do to pile business details on his suit for a love once lost and not yet regained.
"You make it hard for me Mary," he said. "Hard because it is difficult to explain large business questions to a--to anyone not accustomed to them. I cannot swing the affairs of a great corporation for personal ends, even to please you."
"That is not the point," she said quickly.
He flushed, and hastily substituted "Even to suit the noblest humanitarian feelings."
"Why not?" said she.
"Because that is not what street cars are run for," he pursued patiently. "But why must we talk of this? It seems to put you so far away. And you have given me no answer."
"I am sorry, but I am not ready yet."
"Is it Hugh Graham?" he demanded. The hot color leaped to her face, but she met his eyes steadily. "I am much interested in Mr. Graham," she said, "and in the noble work he is doing. I think I should really be happier with him than with you. We care for the same things, he calls out the best in me. But I have made no decision in his favor yet, nor in yours. Both of you have a certain appeal to my heart, both to my duty. With you the personal need, with him the hope of greater service. But--you are the father of the child, and that gives you a great claim. I have not decided."
The man looked relieved, and again drew his chair a little closer. The sharp clangor of the cars rose between the,.
"You think I dragged in this car question," she said. "Really, I did it because it is that sort of thing which does most to keep us apart, and--I would like to remove it."
He leaned forward, playing with her big fan. "Let's remove it by all means!" he said.
She looked at his bent head, the dark hair growing somewhat thin on top, almost tenderly.
"If I could feel that you were truly on the right side, that you considered your work as social service, that you tried to run your cars to carry people--not to kill them!--If you could change your ground here I think--almost--" she stopped, smiling up at him, her fan in her lap, her firm delicate white hands eagerly clasped; then went on,
"Don't you care at all for the lives lost every day in this great city--under your cars?"
"It cannot be helped, my dear. Our men are as careful as men can be. But these swarming children will play in the streets--"
"Where else can they play!" she interjected.
"And they get right in front of the cars. We are very sorry; we pay out thousands of dollars in damages: but it cannot be helped!"
She leaned back in her chair and her face grew cold.
"You speak as if you never heard of such things as fenders," she said.
"We have fenders!--almost every car--"
"Fenders! Do you call that piece of rat-trap a fender! Henry Cortlandt! We were in Liverpool when this subject first came up between us! They have fenders there that fend and no murder list!"
"Conditions are different there," said he with an enforced quiet. "Our pavement is different."
"Our children are not so different, are they?" she demanded. "Our mothers are made of the same stuff I suppose?"
"You speak at if I wanted to kill them! As if I liked to!"
"I thought at first it would hurt you as it did me," she said warmly. "I turned to you with real hope when we met in Liverpool. I was glad to think I knew you, and I had not been glad of that for long! I thought you would care, would do things."
Do what he would, his mouth set hard in its accustomed lines. "Those English fender are not practicable in this country, Mary. They have been tried."
"When? Where? By whom?" she threw at him. "I have read about it, and heard about it. I know there was an effort to get them adopted, and that they were refused. They cost more than this kind!" and she pointed disdainfully at the rattling bit of stub-toed slat-work in front of a passing car.
"Do you expect me to make a revolution in the street car system of America--to please you? Do you make it a condition? Perhaps I can accomplish it. Is it a bargain? Come--"
"No," she said slowly. "I'm not making bargains. I'm only wishing, as I have wished so often in years past--that you were a different kind of man--"
"What kind do you want me to be?"
"I want you to be--I wish you were--a man who cared to give perfect service to his country, in his business."
"Perhaps I can be yet. I can try. If I had you to help me, with your pure ideals, and the boy to keep my heart open for the children. I don't know much about these things, but I can learn. I can read, you can tell me what to read. We could study together. And in my position perhaps, I could really be of some service after all."
"Perhaps?" She watched him, the strong rather heavy face, the attractive smile, the eyes that interested and compelled. He was an able, masterful man. He surely loved her now. She could feel a power over him that her short miserable marriage had never given her; and her girlhood's attraction toward him reasserted itself.
A new noise rose about them, a dissonant mingled merry outcry, made into a level roaring sound by their height above the street.
"That's when the school up here lets out," she said. "We hear it every day. Just see the crowds of them!"
They leaned on the broad sill and watched the many-colored torrent of juveniles pouring past.
"One day it was different," she said. "A strange jarring shrillness in it, a peculiar sound. I looked out, and there was a fight going on; two boys tumbling about from one side of the street to the other, with a moving ring around them, a big crowd, all roaring in one key."
"You get a birdseye view of life in these streets, don't you. Can you make out that little chap with the red hair down there?"
"No--we are both near-sighted, you know. I can't distinguish faces at this distance. Can you?"
"Not very clearly," he said. "But what a swarm they are!"
"Come away," said she, "I can't bear to look at them. So many children in that stony street, and those cars going up and down like roaring lions!"
They drew back into the big sunny room, and she seated herself at the piano and turned over loose sheets of music.
He watched her with a look of intensest admiration, she was so tall, so nobly formed, her soft rich gown flowed and followed as she walked, her white throat rose round and royal from broad smooth shoulders.
He was beside her; he took away the music, laid it out of reach, possessed himself of her hands.
"Give them back to me, Mary," he pleaded. "Come to me and help me to be a better man! Help me to be a good father. I need you!"
She looked at him almost pleadingly. His eyes, his voice, his hands,--they had their old-time charm for her. Yet he had only said "Perhaps"--and he might study, might learn.
He asked her to help him, but he did not say "I will do this"--only "I may."
In the steady bright June sunshine, in the sifting dust of a city corner, in the dissonant, confused noise of the traffic below, they stood and looked at one another.
His eyes brightened and deepened as he watched her changing color. Softly he drew her towards him. "Even if you do not love me now, you shall in time, you shall, my darling!"
But she drew back from him with a frightened start, a look of terror.
"What has happened!" she cried. "It's so still!"
They both rushed to the window. The avenue immediately below them was as empty as midnight, and as silent. A great stillness widened and spread for the moment around one vacant motionless open car. Without passenger, driver, or conductor, it stood alone in the glaring space; and then, with a gasp of horror, they both saw.
Right under their eyes, headed towards them, under the middle of the long car--a little child.
He was quite still, lying face downward, dirty and tumbled, with helpless arms thrown wide, the great car holding him down like a mouse in a trap.
Then people came rushing.
She turned away, choking, her hands to her eyes.
"Oh!" she cried, "Oh! It's a child, a little child!"
"Steady, Mary, steady!" said he, "the child's dead. It's all over. He's quite dead. He never knew what hit him." But his own voice trembled.
She made a mighty effort to control herself, and he tried to take her in his arms, to comfort her, but she sprang away from him with fierce energy.
"Very well!" she said. "You are right! The child is dead. We can not save him. No one can save him. Now come back--come here to the window--and see what follows. I want to see with my own eyes--and have you see--what is done when your cars commit murder! Child murder!"
She held up her watch. "It's 12:10 now," she said.
She dragged him back to the window, and so evident was the struggle with which she controlled herself, so intense her agonized excitement, that he dared not leave her.
"Look!" she cried. "Look! See the them crowd now!"
The first horrified rush away from the instrument of death was followed by the usual surging multitude.
From every direction people gathered thickly in astonishing numbers, hustling and pushing about the quiet form upon the ground; held so flat between iron rails and iron wheels, so great a weight on so small a body! The car, still empty, rose like an island from the pushing sea of heads. Men and women cried excited directions. They tried with swarming impotent hands to lift the huge mass of wood and iron off the small broken thing beneath it, so small that it did not raise the crushing weight from the ground.
A whole line of excited men seized the side rail and strove to lift the car by it, lifting only the rail.
The crowd grew momently, women weeping, children struggling to see, men pushing each other, policemen's helmets rising among them. And still the great car stood there, on the body of the child.
"Is there no means of lifting these monsters?" she demanded. "After they have done it, can't they even get off."
He moistened his lips to answer.
"There is a jacking crew," he said. "They will be here presently."
"Presently!" she cried. "Presently! Couldn't these monsters use their own power to lift themselves somehow? not even that?"
He said nothing.
More policemen came, and made a scant space around the little body, covering it with a dark cloth. The motorman was rescued from many would be avengers, and carried off under guard.
"Ten minutes," said she looking at her watch. "Ten minutes and it isn't even off him yet!" and she caught her breath in a great sob.
Then she turned on the man at her side: "Suppose his mother is in that crowd! She may be! Their children go to this school, they live all about below here, she can't even get in to see! And if she could, if she knew it was her child, she can't get him out!"
Her voice rose to a cry.
"Don't, Mary," said he, hoarsely. "It's--it's horrible! Don't make it worse!"
She kept her eyes on her watch-face, counting the minutes She looked down at the crowd shudderingly, and said over and over, under breath, "A little child! A little soft child!"
It was twelve minutes and a-half before the jacking crew drove up, with their tools. It was a long time yet before they did their work, and that crushed and soiled little body was borne to a near-by area grating and laid there, wrapped in its dingy shroud, and guarded by a policeman.
It was a full half hour before the ambulance arrived to take it away.
She drew back then and crouched sobbing by the sofa. "O the poor mother! God help his mother!"
He sat tense and white for a while; and when she grew quieter he spoke.
"You were right, Mary. I--naturally, I never--visualized it! It is horrible! I am going to have those fenders on every car of the four systems!"
She said nothing. He spoke again.
"I hate to leave you feeling so, Dear. Must I go?"
She raised a face that was years older, but did not look at him.
"You must go. And you must never come back. I cannot bear to see your face again!"
And she turned from him, shuddering.
BEFORE WARM FEBRUARY WINDS
Before warm February winds Arouse an April dream-- Or sudden rifts of azure sky Suggest the bluebird's gleam;
Before the reddening woods awake, Before the brooks are free-- Here where all things are sold and hired, The driven months we see.
Wither along our snow-soiled streets, Or under glass endure, Fruits of the days that have not come, Exotic--premature.
I hear in raw, unwelcome dawns The sordid sparrows sing, And in the florist's windows watch The forced and purchased spring.
KITCHEN-MINDEDNESS
It is physically possible to see through a knot-hole. If the eye be near enough, and the board be movable, one can, with patient rotation, see the universe in spots, through a knot-hole. Such a purview is limited of necessity, and while suitable to the microscope, is not congenial to the study of life in general.
When those who would save the forests of America began their work, the burden of effort lay in so stimulating and stretching the mental vision of our people, that they could see wider than their own immediate acreage, deeper than their own immediate profit, further than their own immediate time. Some such struggle was no doubt gone through, when that far-seeing iconoclast of early times strove to prove to the greedy hunter that more food was to be attained by breeding cattle than by killing them all at once; that meat kept better when alive. What mental labor, what arduous conflict between that prehistoric ant and grasshopper!
Steadily up the ages the mind of man has had to stretch, and sturdily has he resisted the process. That protoplasmic substance of the brain, used so much and understood so little, astonishes us no less by its infinite capacity for new extension, for endless fluent combination, than by its leaden immobility. Here are some, open-minded, sensitive and hospitable to new impressions; and here are others, an innumerable majority, preferring always to know only what they have known, to think only what they have thought before. The distinction does not seem innate. A normal child provided with proper stimulus, responds with ever fresh interest as field after field of new fact and new idea opens before him.
Twenty years later that same child has lost this capacity, has become dull, inert, conventional, conservative, contented. Upon his growing mind have been imposed in long succeeding years, the iron limitations of his "elders and betters"; only in the rarest of cases has he the mental strength to resist these influences and "think new," think for himself.
Here we all are, living together in relations as complex as the pattern of some mighty tapestry; each of us, seeing only his own part in it, considering the pattern from the point of view of a stitch. This attitude is exquisitely expressed by the reply of a dull student to the earnest teacher who strove to arouse in him some spontaneous opinion on human conduct. With enthusiasm and dramatic force, this instructor exhibited the career of Nero,--showed his list of crimes natural and unnatural, personal and political; his indecency, and cruelty, demanding what should be said of the monster. The student, spurred by questions, some-what fretfully responded, "He never did anything to me!"
Consciousness is of varying range. We know its gradual development, its narrow field in childhood, its permanent restriction in idiocy. We know how it may be developed, even in animals, how we have added to the dog's field of consciousness a deep and passionate interest in his master's life; how a well-befriended cat becomes desperately uneasy, when the family begins to pack for a journey. We know personally the difference between our range of thought at one age, and at another; how one's consciousness may include wider and wider fields of knowledge, longer ranges of time, deeper causal relations; and how the same object, viewed by different minds, may arouse in one as it were, a square inch, and in the other a square mile of consciousness. Those of us, who have the larger area under cultivation,--who are accustomed to think of human life as age-long, world-wide, and in motion, learn to see human conduct, not as something in neat detachable strata, like a pile of plates, but as having long roots and longer branches, and requiring careful handling to alter.
To these, studying the world's affairs, clear lines of causal sequence present themselves. Is it a thousand cases of typhoid? They trace the fever to its lair as one would hunt a tiger; they point out every step of its course; they call on the citizens to rise and fight the enemy, to save their lives. Do the citizens do it? Not they. Individually they suffer and die. Individually they grieve and mourn, bury,their dead (when they should cremate them), and pay the doctor and the undertaker. Hundreds of dollars they pay as individuals to nurses, doctors, graveyard men, and monument makers. If, collectively they would put up a tenth of the sum to ensure a pure water and milk supply, they would save not only hundreds for themselves, but thousands and millions for those after them.--to say nothing of grief!
But they look at life through a knot-hole. They see their own personal affairs as things of sky-shadowing importance, and those same affairs, taken collectively, become as remote and uninteresting as the Milky Way.
Now in the mere labor of intellectual comprehension our average citizen of common-school education is able to see that where so much tuberculous milk is fed into so many babies, that such a proportion will surely die. He sees, but it does interest him. Show him tubercular bacilli from the autopsy of his dead baby, show him the same in the bottle of milk reposing in his refrigerator, and show him the man who put them there--and you may get results.
He could see the larger facts, but only feel the smaller ones. It is a limitation of consciousness.
All workers for human advance know this. Whatever the cause upheld, those who work for it find everywhere the same difficulty; they have to stretch the minds, to stimulate the consciousness, to arouse the interest of their hearers, so that they will take action for the common good.
In one field it is easy, that of public danger from war. The reason is clear. Wars are carried on by men, and men have reacted to conflict stimuli collectively, for so many ages, that it is a race habit with them. Only in the last extreme of terror is this habit broken, and the battle turns to rout, with every man for himself. Then comes the officer and strives to rekindle that common consciousness without which is no human victory.
In the economic world our habits of organization are not so old. We have fought in company since we fought at all, as humans; but we have worked, for the most part alone. The comradeship of shop and factory is of yesterday, compared to the solitary spindle, loom and forge of earlier centuries. Yet in that comradeship wherever found, comes the new consciousness, that recognizes common danger or common gain, and substitutes the army for the mob, the victory for the rout.
This effect is so strong, so clear, so quick in appearance, that even with one poor century or two of economic combination, we ought to find much better results than we do. Where the common interest is as clear as day, where the common strength is so irresistible, where the loss and the danger lie so wholly in isolation, one wonders over and over at the lack of comprehension which keeps us so helplessly apart.
We can see the immense activities of the nation, the multiplication of national wealth, power, and progress,--the saving of life, the elimination of disease, the development of art and science, of beauty and of health and glorious living that we might have, but we cannot feel these things. Therefore we do not act.
Can there be still among us some general cause, acting on everyone, which mysteriously checks out progress, which makes us "penny-wise and pound-foolish," makes us "save at the spigot and spend at the bung-hole," which continually intensifies our consciousness of personal interest and continually prevents the recognition of social interests?
It may seem almost grotesque to make so heavy a complaint as this, and then to put forward as chief offender our old companion the kitchen.
Briefly the charge is this: that in the private kitchen, we maintain in our civilization an economic institution as old as house-building, almost as old as the use of fire. The results of this surviving rudiment of a remote past are many. The one presented here is the effect of the kitchen on the mind.
The condition is practically universal. For each house a kitchen. Be it the merest hut, the smallest tenement, one room; wherever the family is found, there is the kitchen. For each man there is a cook. In the great majority of cases the man's wife is his cook, and as she must spend most of her time in the kitchen, there must be her little ones also. In fifteen-sixteenths of American families, the children are thus reared,--by cooks in kitchens.
We, in our fatuous acceptance of race habits, have ceaselessly perpetuated this kitchen-bred population, and even defended it as an educational influence of no mean importance. "Children brought up by their mothers in the kitchen," we say, "early acquire knowledge and skill in various occupations; they see things done, and learn how to do them themselves."
This seems to the superficial listener like good sense. He never looks below the allegation for the evidence. He sees that daily observation, and practice should develop knowledge and skill, and fails to inquire further to see if it does.
Surely if all children were brought up in blacksmith shops, it would make them good blacksmiths; if they were brought up in dental parlors they would become good dentists!
Waiving the desirability of a form of training calculated to turn out an unvarying population of cooks, let us see if this daily association with the maternal house-servant in her workshop does educate as stated. On this point one clear comment has been made: "If kitchen life is such good training to mind and hand, why is it that so few of us are willing to follow the kitchen trades when we are grown? and why is it that competence in the kitchen is so rare?" This is a most practical observation. If fifteen-sixteenths of our women followed incessantly the occupation of shoemaking, and brought up their children in the shoe shop, we should hardly claim great educational advantages for that arrangement. If we did, would it not be disappointing to find that the trade of shoemaking was universally disliked and despised, and that good shoemakers were hard to find at any price?
Yet this is precisely the case in hand. Our kitchen-bred children, boy and girl alike, prefer almost any other trade, and when we wish to secure competent workers in the kitchen we find them extremely scarce.
Moreover, in its own special activities, the private kitchen makes no advance. Advance comes to it from outside; from the wider and more progressive professionalism of its various industries; specialized and socialized one by one. But, left to itself, domestic cook hands down to domestic cook the recipes of female ancestors, occasionally added to by obliging friends. It is endless repetition, but not progress.
The purpose of this discussion, however, is not to show the inefficacy of this ancient workshop, as a means of carrying on that great art, science, handicraft, and business--the preparation of food; but to point out the effect of the kitchen on the human mind.
The one dominant note of kitchen work is personality. Its products are all prepared for home consumption only. Its provisions are all secured and its processes directed with a view to pleasing a small group. It does not and cannot consider the general questions of hygiene, of nutrition, of the chemistry of improved processes of preparation, and the immense and pressing problems of pure food.
The kitchen mind, focussed continually upon close personal concerns, limited in time, in means, in capacity, and in mechanical convenience, can consider only; a, what the family likes; b, what the family can afford; and, c, what the cook can accomplish.
The most perfect type of organization we have is the military. Military success depends most absolutely on the commissary and sanitary departments. "An army travels on its belly," is the famous dictum.
Is there any difference in this respect between soldiers and other people? Are we not all gasteropods whether singly or in regiments? Is not the health and strength of the productive workers of the world, at least as valuable as that of the cumbrous forces of destruction?
In our last little war, and in the big one before that, disease killed more than sword and steel. We lament this--in armies. We prefer to keep our soldiers healthy that they may fight more strongly, and die more efficaciously, and this sick list is pure waste.
Is it any less waste in private life? Can we easily afford the loss in money--annual billions; the loss in strength, the loss in intellect, the loss in love, that falls on us so heavily from year to year? Study the record of man's fight with disease. See how the specialists devoting not only lifetimes, but the accumulating succession of lifetimes to the study of causes, cures and preventions, announce to us at last, "thus and thus are you made sick. Thus may you be cured, and thus may you so live as to be well."
See then the sanitary work of an aroused public; a truth is discovered; a truth is announced; a law is made; the law is enforced--a disease is conquered.
This is vividly shown in the work of our Government against pleuro-pneumonia--in cattle. The Federal Government, furnishing information and funds, and cooperating with the various States, attacked that disease, and stamped it out completely.
There is an effort now to rouse our government to fight the White Plague, in people as well as in cattle. And, as always, the difficulty is to stir and stretch and rouse our kitchen minds, to make us see things in common instead of individually. The men whose cattle had pleuro-pneumonia, kept them in herds, and lost them in herds, losing much money thereby. Many men were so afflicted. Therefore these many men got together, and, using the machinery of the State, they together destroyed their enemy. Cattle-raising is a business, a social industry.
But child-raising, husband-feeding, the care of the lives and health of all our families, is a domestic industry, in the management of the kitchen mind.
it has been shown recently that 72 per cent. of the cattle in New York State are tuberculous. This does not kill them quickly like pleuro-pneumonia. They live and may be sold. They live and may give milk. It has been shown recently (as stated in our unimpeachable daily press), that in some of the milk sold in New York City, there were more germs to the cubic millimeter, than in the same amount of sewage!
This milk, and most of the milk in all our cities, goes into the kitchen; the blind, brainless, family-feeding kitchen, and from there is given us to drink.
What protest rises from the kitchens of New York, or Chicago, or any city? What mass-meeting of angry women, presenting to their legislators the horrible facts of strong men poisoned and babies slain by this or any other abomination in the food supply?
A young man writes a novel exhibiting the badness of our meat supply. Men become excited. Men take action. Men legislate. The great meat industries stagger under the shock, recover, and go on smiling. Before this meanwhile, and afterwards, the meat went into out kitchens and we ate it.
Being kitchen-minded we cannot see that health is a public concern; that the feeding of our people is one of the most vital factors in their health, and that the private kitchen with its private cook is not able to keep the public well.
Ask the physician, the sanitary expert. He will tell you that the great advance in sanitary science is in its battle with the filth diseases; and that we die worse than ever from food diseases.
In fighting the filth diseases we have the public forces to work with; compulsory systems of sewage and drainage, quarantine, isolation hospitals, and all the other maneuvers by which an enlightened public protects itself.
But who shall say what a child shall eat, or a man or woman? Is it not wholly their own affair?
We cry out upon our women for the falling birth rate;--why not say something about the death rate of their babies? The average family must have four, merely to maintain a stationary population, said Grant Allen; "two to replace themselves and two to die." The doctor will tell you that they die mostly of what are called "preventable diseases" and that those diseases are mainly of the alimentary canal.
Kitchen-fed are we all, and those of us who survive it, who become immune to it, cry loudly of its excellence! If we could once see outside of these ancient limits, once figure to ourselves the vision of a healthy world, and the noble duty of making it,--then we should no longer be kitchen-minded.
Our narrowness of vision, our petty self-interest, does not end its injuries with our bodily health. Its leaden limitation is felt in all the economic field.
Not a business have we in the world but needs to be considered as a matter of public service; needs to be studied, helped, restricted, generally managed for the public good. Not a business in the world but is crippled and distorted by the childish self-interest of its promoters. Kitchen-bred men born of kitchen-bred mothers are we, and inevitably must we consider the main duty of life to be the service of our own body. What else does the child see his mother do, but work, work, work to cover the family table with food three times a day, and clear up afterward? What else can he grow up to do but work, work, work, to provide the wherewithal for another woman to do the same?
A million women are making bread as their mothers made it. How many women are trying to lift the standard of bread-making for their country? How many even know the difference in nutriment and digestibility between one bread and another?
They do not think "bread," but only "my bread." Their view of the staff of life is kitchen-minded. When our kitchen trades become world trades, when we are fed, not by the most ignorant, but by the wisest; when personal whims and painfully acquired habits give place to the light of science, and the fruit of wide experience; when, instead of dragging duty or sordid compulsion, we have wisdom and art to feed us; the change will be far greater than that of improved health. It will be a great and valuable advance even there. We shall become healthy, clean-fleshed people, intelligent eaters, each generation improving in strength and beauty, but we shall be helped in wider ways than that. We shall have the enlarged mental capacity that comes of a wider area of work and responsibility. We shall have in each man and woman the habitual power of organization, the daily recognition of mutual service and world-duty.
When the world comes out of the kitchen for good and all, and for that primitive little shop is substituted the cool glittering laboratory, wherein the needs of bodily replenishment are fully and beautifully met, it will give to the growing child a different background for his thought processes. At last we shall mark the great division between production, which is the social function, and consumption which is personal.
As we now emerge from the warm and greasy confines of our ancient cookshop, we begin to see with new eyes its true place as an economic factor. We are learning the unbridled waste of it; how it costs struggling humanity about forty-three per cent. of its productive labor, and two-thirds of its living expenses; how it does not conserve the very end for which we uphold it,--the health of the family; how it leaves us helpless before the adulterators of food, the purveyors of impure milk, diseased meat, and all unpleasantness. We are beginning to see how, most dangerous of all, it works against our economic progress, by perpetuating a primitive selfishness.
Public interest grows in public service. Self-interest is maintained by self-service. We can neither rightly estimate social gain, nor rightly condemn social evil, because we are so soddenly habituated to consider only personal gain, personal good and personal evil; because we are kitchen-minded.
TWO STORKS
Two storks were nesting.
He was a young stork--and narrow-minded. Before he married he had consorted mainly with striplings of his own kind, and had given no thought to the ladies, either maid or matron.
After he married his attention was concentrated upon his All-Satisfying Wife; upon that Triumph of Art, Labor, and Love--their Nest, and upon those Special Creations--their Children. Deeply was he moved by the marvellous instincts and processes of motherhood. Love, reverence, intense admiration, rose in his heart for Her of the Well-built Nest; Her of the Gleaming Treasure of Smooth Eggs; Her of the Patient Brooding Breast, the Warming Wings, the downy wide-mouthed Group of Little Ones.
Assiduously he labored to help her build the nest, to help her feed the young; proud of his impassioned activity in her and their behalf; devoutly he performed his share of the brooding, while she hunted in her turn. When he was o-wing he thought continually of Her as one with the Brood--His Brood. When he was on the nest he thought all the more of Her, who sat there so long, so lovingly, to such noble ends.
The happy days flew by, fair Spring--sweet Summer--gentle Autumn. The young ones grew larger and larger; it was more and more work to keep their lengthening, widening beaks shut in contentment. Both parents flew far afield to feed them.
Then the days grew shorter, the sky greyer, the wind colder; there was less hunting and small success. In his dreams he began to see sunshine, broad, burning sunshine day after day; skies of limitless blue; dark, deep, yet full of fire; and stretches of bright water, shallow, warm, fringed with tall reeds and rushes, teeming with fat frogs.
They were in her dreams too, but he did not know that.
He stretched his wings and flew farther every day; but his wings were not satisfied. In his dreams came a sense of vast heights and boundless spaces of the earth streaming away beneath him; black water and white land, grey water and brown land, blue water and green land, all flowing backward from day to day, while the cold lessened and the warmth grew.
He felt the empty sparkling nights, stars far above, quivering, burning; stars far below, quivering more in the dark water; and felt his great wings wide, strong, all sufficient, carrying him on and on!
This was in her dreams too, but he did not know that.
"It is time to Go!" he cried one day. "They are coming! It is upon us! Yes--I must Go! Goodbye my wife! Goodbye my children!" For the Passion of Wings was upon him.
She too was stirred to the heart. "Yes! It is time to Go! To Go!" she cried. "I am ready! Come!"
He was shocked; grieved; astonished. "Why, my Dear!" he said. "How preposterous! You cannot go on the Great Flight! Your wings are for brooding tender little ones! Your body is for the Wonder of the Gleaming Treasure!--not for days and nights of ceaseless soaring! You cannot go!"
She did not heed him. She spread her wide wings and swept and circled far and high above--as, in truth, she had been doing for many days, though he had not noticed it.
She dropped to the ridge-pole beside him where he was still muttering objections. "Is it not glorious!" she cried. "Come! They are nearly ready!"
"You unnatural Mother!" he burst forth. "You have forgotten the Order of Nature! You have forgotten your Children! Your lovely precious tender helpless Little Ones!" And he wept--for his highest ideals were shattered.
But the Precious Little Ones stood in a row on the ridge-pole and flapped their strong young wings in high derision. They were as big as he was, nearly; for as a matter of fact he was but a Young Stork himself.
Then the air was beaten white with a thousand wings, it was like snow and silver and seafoam, there was a flashing whirlwind, a hurricane of wild joy and then the Army of the Sky spread wide in due array and streamed Southward.
Full of remembered joy and more joyous hope, finding the high sunlight better than her dreams, she swept away to the far summerland; and her children, mad with the happiness of the First Flight, swept beside her.
"But you are a Mother!" he panted, as he caught up with them.
"Yes!" she cried, joyously, "but I was a Stork before I was A Mother! and afterward!--and All the Time!"
And the Storks were Flying.
WHAT DIANTHA DID
IV. A CRYING NEED
"Lovest thou me?" said the Fair Ladye; And the Lover he said, "Yea!" "Then climb this tree--for my sake," said she, "And climb it every day!" So from dawn till dark he abrazed the bark And wore his clothes away; Till, "What has this tree to do with thee?" The Lover at last did say.
It was a poor dinner. Cold in the first place, because Isabel would wait to thoroughly wash her long artistic hands; and put on another dress. She hated the smell of cooking in her garments; hated it worse on her white fingers; and now to look at the graceful erect figure, the round throat with the silver necklace about it, the soft smooth hair, silver-filletted, the negative beauty of the dove-colored gown, specially designed for home evenings, one would never dream she had set the table so well--and cooked the steak so abominably.
Isabel was never a cook. In the many servantless gaps of domestic life in Orchardina, there was always a strained atmosphere in the Porne household.
"Dear," said Mr. Porne, "might I petition to have the steak less cooked? I know you don't like to do it, so why not shorten the process?"
"I'm sorry," she answered, "I always forget about the steak from one time to the next."
"Yet we've had it three times this week, my dear."
"I thought you liked it better than anything," she with marked gentleness. "I'll get you other things--oftener."
"It's a shame you should have this to do, Isabel. I never meant you should cook for me. Indeed I didn't dream you cared so little about it."
"And I never dreamed you cared so much about it," she replied, still with repression. "I'm not complaining, am I? I'm only sorry you should be disappointed in me."
"It's not you, dear girl! You're all right! It's just this everlasting bother. Can't you get anybody that will stay?"
I can't seem to get anybody on any terms, so far. I'm going again, to-morrow. Cheer up, dear--the baby keeps well--that's the main thing."
He sat on the rose-bowered porch and smoked while she cleared the table. At first he had tried to help her on these occasions, but their methods were dissimilar and she frankly told him she preferred to do it alone.
So she slipped off the silk and put on the gingham again, washed the dishes with the labored accuracy of a trained mind doing unfamiliar work, made the bread, redressed at last, and joined him about nine o'clock.
"It's too late to go anywhere, I suppose?" he ventured.
"Yes--and I'm too tired. Besides--we can't leave Eddie alone."
"O yes--I forget. Of course we can't."
His hand stole out to take hers. "I am sorry, dear. It's awfully rough on you women out here. How do they all stand it?"
"Most of them stand it much better than I do, Ned. You see they don't want to be doing anything else."
"Yes. That's the mischief of it!" he agreed; and she looked at him in the clear moonlight, wondering exactly what he thought the mischief was.
"Shall we go in and read a bit?" he offered; but she thought not.
"I'm too tired, I'm afraid. And Eddie'll wake up as soon as we begin."
So they sat awhile enjoying the soft silence, and the rich flower scents about them, till Eddie did wake presently, and Isabel went upstairs.
She slept little that night, lying quite still, listening to her husband's regular breathing so near her, and the lighter sound from the crib. "I am a very happy woman," she told herself resolutely; but there was no outpouring sense of love and joy. She knew she was happy, but by no means felt it. So she stared at the moon shadows and thought it over.
She had planned the little house herself, with such love, such hope, such tender happy care! Not her first work, which won high praise in the school in Paris, not the prize-winning plan for the library, now gracing Orchardina's prettiest square, was as dear to her as this most womanly task--the making of a home.
It was the library success which brought her here, fresh from her foreign studies, and Orchardina accepted with western cordiality the youth and beauty of the young architect, though a bit surprised at first that "I. H. Wright" was an Isabel. In her further work of overseeing the construction of that library, she had met Edgar Porne, one of the numerous eager young real estate men of that region, who showed a liberal enthusiasm for the general capacity of women in the professions, and a much warmer feeling for the personal attractions of this one.
Together they chose the lot on pepper-shaded Inez Avenue; together they watched the rising of the concrete walls and planned the garden walks and seats, and the tiny precious pool in the far corner. He was so sympathetic! so admiring! He took as much pride in the big "drawing room" on the third floor as she did herself. "Architecture is such fine work to do at home!" they had both agreed. "Here you have your north light--your big table--plenty of room for work! You will grow famouser and famouser," he had lovingly insisted. And she had answered, "I fear I shall be too contented, dear, to want to be famous."
That was only some year and a-half ago,--but Isabel, lying there by her sleeping husband and sleeping child, was stark awake and only by assertion happy. She was thinking, persistently, of dust. She loved a delicate cleanliness. Her art was a precise one, her studio a workshop of white paper and fine pointed hard pencils, her painting the mechanical perfection of an even wash of color. And she saw, through the floors and walls and the darkness, the dust in the little shaded parlor--two days' dust at least, and Orchardina is very dusty!--dust in the dining-room gathered since yesterday--the dust in the kitchen--she would not count time there, and the dust--here she counted it inexorably--the dust of eight days in her great, light workroom upstairs. Eight days since she had found time to go up there.
Lying there, wide-eyed and motionless, she stood outside in thought and looked at the house--as she used to look at it with him, before they were married. Then, it had roused every blessed hope and dream of wedded joy--it seemed a casket of uncounted treasures. Now, in this dreary mood, it seemed not only a mere workshop, but one of alien tasks, continuous, impossible, like those set for the Imprisoned Princess by bad fairies in the old tales. In thought she entered the well-proportioned door--the Gate of Happiness--and a musty smell greeted her--she had forgotten to throw out those flowers! She turned to the parlor--no, the piano keys were gritty, one had to clean them twice a day to keep that room as she liked it.
From room to room she flitted, in her mind, trying to recall the exquisite things they meant to her when she had planned them; and each one now opened glaring and blank, as a place to work in--and the work undone.
"If I were an abler woman!" she breathed. And then her common sense and common honesty made her reply to herself: "I am able enough--in my own work! Nobody can do everything. I don't believe Edgar'd do it any better than I do.--He don't have to!--and then such a wave of bitterness rushed over her that she was afraid, and reached out one hand to touch the crib--the other to her husband.
He awakened instantly. "What is it, Dear?" he asked. "Too tired to sleep, you poor darling? But you do love me a little, don't you?"
"O yes!" she answered. "I do. Of course I do! I'm just tired, I guess. Goodnight, Sweetheart."
She was late in getting to sleep and late in waking.
When he finally sat down to the hurriedly spread breakfast-table, Mr. Porne, long coffeeless, found it a bit difficult to keep his temper. Isabel was a little stiff, bringing in dishes and cups, and paying no attention to the sounds of wailing from above.
"Well if you won't I will!" burst forth the father at last, and ran upstairs, returning presently with a fine boy of some eleven months, who ceased to bawl in these familiar arms, and contented himself, for the moment, with a teaspoon.
"Aren't you going to feed him?" asked Mr. Porne, with forced patience.
"It isn't time yet," she announced wearily. "He has to have his bath first."
"Well," with a patience evidently forced farther, "isn't it time to feed me?"
"I'm very sorry," she said. "The oatmeal is burned again. You'll have to eat cornflakes. And--the cream is sour--the ice didn't come--or at least, perhaps I was out when it came--and then I forgot it. . . . . I had to go to the employment agency in the morning! . . . . I'm sorry I'm so--so incompetent."
"So am I," he commented drily. "Are there any crackers for instance? And how about coffee?"
She brought the coffee, such as it was, and a can of condensed milk. Also crackers, and fruit. She took the baby and sat silent.
"Shall I come home to lunch?" he asked.
"Perhaps you'd better not," she replied coldly.
"Is there to be any dinner?"
"Dinner will be ready at six-thirty, if I have to get it myself."
"If you have to get it yourself I'll allow for seven-thirty," said he, trying to be cheerful, though she seemed little pleased by it. "Now don't take it so hard, Ellie. You are a first-class architect, anyhow--one can't be everything. We'll get another girl in time. This is just the common lot out here. All the women have the same trouble."
"Most women seem better able to meet it!" she burst forth. "It's not my trade! I'm willing to work, I like to work, but I can't bear housework! I can't seem to learn it at all! And the servants will not do it properly!"
"Perhaps they know your limitations, and take advantage of them! But cheer up, dear. It's no killing matter. Order by phone, don't forget the ice, and I'll try to get home early and help. Don't cry, dear girl, I love you, even if you aren't a good cook! And you love me, don't you?"
He kissed her till she had to smile back at him and give him a loving hug; but after he had gone, the gloom settled upon her spirits once more. She bathed the baby, fed him, put him to sleep; and came back to the table. The screen door had been left ajar and the house was buzzing with flies, hot, with a week's accumulating disorder. The bread she made last night in fear and trembling, was hanging fatly over the pans; perhaps sour already. She clapped it into the oven and turned on the heat.
Then she stood, undetermined, looking about that messy kitchen while the big flies bumped and buzzed on the windows, settled on every dish, and swung in giddy circles in the middle of the room. Turning swiftly she shut the door on them. The dining-room was nearly as bad. She began to put the cups and plates together for removal; but set her tray down suddenly and went into the comparative coolness of the parlor, closing the dining-room door behind her.
She was quite tired enough to cry after several nights of broken rest and days of constant discomfort and irritation; but a sense of rising anger kept the tears back.
"Of course I love him!" she said to herself aloud but softly, remembering the baby, "And no doubt he loves me! I'm glad to be his wife! I'm glad to be a mother to his child! I'm glad I married him! But--this is not what he offered! And it's not what I undertook! He hasn't had to change his business!"
She marched up and down the scant space, and then stopped short and laughed drily, continuing her smothered soliloquy.
"'Do you love me?' they ask, and, 'I will make you happy!' they say; and you get married--and after that it's Housework!"
"They don't say, 'Will you be my Cook?' 'Will you be my Chamber maid?' 'Will you give up a good clean well-paid business that you love--that has big hope and power and beauty in it--and come and keep house for me?'"
"Love him? I'd be in Paris this minute if I didn't! What has 'love' to do with dust and grease and flies!"
Then she did drop on the small sofa and cry tempestuously for a little while; but soon arose, fiercely ashamed of her weakness, and faced the day; thinking of the old lady who had so much to do she couldn't think what to first--so she sat down and made a pincushion.
Then--where to begin!
"Eddie will sleep till half-past ten--if I'm lucky. It's now nearly half-past nine," she meditated aloud. "If I do the upstairs work I might wake him. I mustn't forget the bread, the dishes, the parlor--O those flies! Well--I'll clear the table first!"
Stepping softly, and handling the dishes with slow care, she cleaned the breakfast table and darkened the dining-room, flapping out some of the flies with a towel. Then she essayed the parlor, dusting and arranging with undecided steps. "It ought to be swept," she admitted to herself; "I can't do it--there isn't time. I'll make it dark--"
"I'd rather plan a dozen houses!" she fiercely muttered, as she fussed about. "Yes--I'd rather build 'em--than to keep one clean!"
Then were her hopes dashed by a rising wail from above. She sat quite still awhile, hoping against hope that he would sleep again; but he wouldn't. So she brought him down in full cry.
In her low chair by the window she held him and produced bright and jingling objects from the tall workbasket that stood near by, sighing again as she glanced at its accumulated mending.
Master Eddy grew calm and happy in her arms, but showed a growing interest in the pleasing materials produced for his amusement, and a desire for closer acquaintance. Then a penetrating odor filled the air, and with a sudden "O dear!" she rose, put the baby on the sofa, and started toward the kitchen.
At this moment the doorbell rang.
Mrs. Porne stopped in her tracks and looked at the door. It remained opaque and immovable. She looked at the baby--who jiggled his spools and crowed. Then she flew to the oven and dragged forth the bread, not much burned after all. Then she opened the door.
A nice looking young woman stood before her, in a plain travelling suit, holding a cheap dress-suit case in one hand and a denim "roll-bag" in the other, who met her with a cheerful inquiring smile.
"Are you Mrs. Edgar Porne?" she asked.
"I am," answered that lady, somewhat shortly, her hand on the doorknob, her ear on the baby, her nose still remorsefully in the kitchen, her eyes fixed sternly on her visitor the while; as she wondered whether it was literature, cosmetics, or medicine.
She was about to add that she didn't want anything, when the young lady produced a card from the Rev. Benjamin A. Miner, Mrs. Porne's particularly revered minister, and stated that she had heard there was a vacancy in her kitchen and she would like the place.
"Introducing Mrs. D. Bell, well known to friends of mine."
"I don't know--" said Mrs. Porne, reading the card without in the least grasping what it said. "I--"
Just then there was a dull falling sound followed by a sharp rising one, and she rushed into the parlor without more words.
When she could hear and be heard again, she found Mrs. Bell seated in the shadowy little hall, serene and cool. "I called on Mr. Miner yesterday when I arrived," said she, "with letters of introduction from my former minister, told him what I wanted to do, and asked him if he could suggest anyone in immediate need of help in this line. He said he had called here recently, and believed you were looking for someone. Here is the letter I showed him," and she handed Mrs. Porne a most friendly and appreciative recommendation of Miss D. Bell by a minister in Jopalez, Inca Co., stating that the bearer was fully qualified to do all kinds of housework, experienced, honest, kind, had worked seven years in one place, and only left it hoping to do better in Southern California.
Backed by her own pastor's approval this seemed to Mrs. Porne fully sufficient. The look of the girl pleased her, though suspiciously above her station in manner; service of any sort was scarce and high in Orchardina, and she had been an agelong week without any. "When can you come?" she asked.
"I can stop now if you like," said the stranger. "This is my baggage. But we must arrange terms first. If you like to try me I will come this week from noon to-day to noon next Friday, for seven dollars, and then if you are satisfied with my work we can make further arrangements. I do not do laundry work, of course, and don't undertake to have any care of the baby."
"I take care of my baby myself!" said Mrs. Porne, thinking the new girl was presuming, though her manner was most gently respectful. But a week was not long, she was well recommended, and the immediate pressure in that kitchen where the harvest was so ripe and the laborers so few--"Well--you may try the week," she said. "I'll show you your room. And what is your name?"
"Miss Bell."
LITTLE LEAFY BROTHERS
Little, leafy brothers! You can feel Warmth o' the sun, Cool sap-streams run, The slow, soft, nuzzling creep Of roots sent deep, And a close-anchored flowing In winds smooth-blowing. And in the Spring! the Spring! When the stars sing-- The world's love in you grows Into the rose!
Little hairy brothers! You can feel The kind sun too; Winds play with you, Water is live delight; In your swift flight Of wings or leaping feet Life rushes sweet-- And in the Spring! the Spring! When the stars sing-- The world's love stirs you first To wild, sweet thirst, Mad combat glorious, and so To what you know Of love in living. Yes, to you first came The joy past name Of interchange--the small mouth pressed To the warm, willing breast.
But O! the human brothers! We can feel All, all below These small ones know; Earth fair and good, The bubbling flood Of life a-growing--in us multiplied As man spreads wide; Not into leaves alone, Nor flesh and bone, But roof and wall and wheel Of stone and steel; Soft foliage and gorgeous bloom Of humming loom; And fruit of joy o'er-burdened heart Poured forth in Art! We can not only leap in the sun, Wrestle and run, But know the music-measured beat Of dancing feet, The interplay of hands--we hold Delight of doing, myriad-fold. Joy of the rose, we know-- To bloom--to grow!-- Joy of the beast we prove-- To strive--to move! And in the Spring! the Spring! When the stars sing, Wide gladness of all living men Comes back again, A conscious universe at rest In one's own breast! The world's love! Wholly ours; Through breathing flowers, Through all the living tumult of the wood, In us made good; Through centuries that rise and fall-- We hold it all! The world's love! Given music, fit To carry it. The world's love! Given words at last, to speak, Though yet so weak. The world's love! Given hands that hold so much, Lips that may touch! The worlds's love! Sweet!--it lies In your dear eyes!
OUR ANDROCENTRIC CULTURE; or, THE MAN-MADE WORLD
IV.
MEN AND ART.
Among the many counts in which women have been proven inferior to men in human development is the oft-heard charge that there are no great women artists. Where one or two are proudly exhibited in evidence, they are either pooh-poohed as not very great, or held to be the trifling exceptions which do but prove the rule.
Defenders of women generally make the mistake of over-estimating their performances, instead of accepting, and explaining, the visible facts. What are the facts as to the relation of men and women to art? And what, in especial, has been the effect upon art of a solely masculine expression?
When we look for the beginnings of art, we find ourselves in a period of crude decoration of the person and of personal belongings. Tattooing, for instance, is an early form of decorative art, still in practice among certain classes, even in advanced people. Most boys, if they are in contact with this early art, admire it, and wish to adorn themselves therewith; some do so--to later mortification. Early personal decoration consisted largely in direct mutilation of the body, and the hanging upon it, or fastening to it, of decorative objects. This we see among savages still, in its gross and primitive forms monopolized by men, then shared by women, and, in our time, left almost wholly to them. In personal decoration today, women are still near the savage. The "artists" developed in this field of art are the tonsorial, the sartorial, and all those specialized adorners of the body commonly known as "beauty doctors."
Here, as in other cases, the greatest artists are men. The greatest milliners, the greatest dressmakers and tailors, the greatest hairdressers, and the masters and designers in all our decorative toilettes and accessories, are men. Women, in this as in so many other lines, consume rather than produce. They carry the major part of personal decoration today; but the decorator is the man. In the decoration of objects, woman, as the originator of primitive industry, originated also the primitive arts; and in the pottery, basketry, leatherwork, needlework, weaving, with all beadwork, dyeing and embroideries of ancient peoples we see the work of the woman decorator. Much of this is strong and beautiful, but its time is long past. The art which is part of industry, natural, simple, spontaneous, making beauty in every object of use, adding pleasure to labor and to life, is not Art with a large A, the Art which requires Artists, among whom are so few women of note.
Art as a profession, and the Artist as a professional, came later; and by that time women had left the freedom and power of the matriarchate and become slaves in varying degree. The women who were idle pets in harems, or the women who worked hard as servants, were alike cut off from the joy of making things. Where constructive work remained to them, art remained, in its early decorative form. Men, in the proprietary family, restricting the natural industry of women to personal service, cut off their art with their industry, and by so much impoverished the world.
There is no more conspicuously pathetic proof of the aborted development of women than this commonplace--their lack of a civilized art sense. Not only in the childish and savage display upon their bodies, but in the pitiful products they hang upon the walls of the home, is seen the arrest in normal growth.
After ages of culture, in which men have developed Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Music and the Drama, we find women in their primitive environment making flowers of wax, and hair, and worsted; doing mottoes of perforated cardboard, making crazy quilts and mats and "tidies"--as if they lived in a long past age, or belonged to a lower race.
This, as part of the general injury to women dating from the beginning of our androcentric culture, reacts heavily upon the world at large. Men, specializing, giving their lives to the continuous pursuit of one line of service, have lifted our standard in aesthetic culture, as they have in other matters; but by refusing the same growth to women, they have not only weakened and reduced the output, but ruined the market as it were, hopelessly and permanently kept down the level of taste.
Among the many sides of this great question, some so terrible, some so pathetic, some so utterly absurd, this particular phase of life is especially easy to study and understand, and has its own elements of amusement. Men, holding women at the level of domestic service, going on themselves to lonely heights of achievement, have found their efforts hampered and their attainments rendered barren and unsatisfactory by the amazing indifference of the world at large. As the world at large consists half of women, and wholly of their children, it would seem patent to the meanest understanding that the women must be allowed to rise in order to lift the world. But such has not been the method--heretofore.
We have spoken so far in this chapter of the effect of men on art through their interference with the art of women. There are other sides to the question. Let us consider once more the essential characteristics of maleness, and see how they have affected art, keeping always in mind the triune distinction between masculine, feminine and human. Perhaps we shall best see this difference by considering what the development of art might have been on purely human terms.
The human creature, as such, naturally delights in construction, and adds decoration to construction as naturally. The cook, making little regular patterns around the edge of the pie, does so from a purely human instinct, the innate eye-pleasure in regularity, symmetry, repetition, and alternation. Had this natural social instinct grown unchecked in us, it would have manifested itself in a certain proportion of specialists--artists of all sorts--and an accompanying development of appreciation on the part of the rest of us. Such is the case in primitive art; the maker of beauty is upheld and rewarded by a popular appreciation of her work--or his.
Had this condition remained, we should find a general level of artistic expression and appreciation far higher than we see now. Take the one field of textile art, for instance: that wide and fluent medium of expression, the making of varied fabrics, the fashioning of garments and the decoration of them--all this is human work and human pleasure. It should have led us to a condition where every human being was a pleasure to the eye, appropriately and beautifully clothed.
Our real condition in this field is too patent to need emphasis; the stiff, black ugliness of our men's attire; the irritating variegated folly of our women's; the way in which we spoil the beauty and shame the dignity of childhood by modes of dress.
In normal human growth, our houses would be a pleasure to the eye; our furniture and utensils, all our social products, would blossom into beauty as naturally as they still do in those low stages of social evolution where our major errors have not yet borne full fruit.
Applied art in all its forms is a human function, common to every one to some degree, either in production or appreciation, or both. "Pure art," as an ideal, is also human; and the single-hearted devotion of the true artist to this ideal is one of the highest forms of the social sacrifice. Of all the thousand ways by which humanity is specialized for inter-service, none is more exquisite than this; the evolution of the social Eye, or Ear, or Voice, the development of those whose work is wholly for others, and to whom the appreciation of others is as the bread of life. This we should have in a properly developed community; the pleasure of applied art in the making and using of everything we have; and then the high joy of the Great Artist, and the noble work thereof, spread far and wide.
What do we find?
Applied art at a very low level; small joy either for the maker or the user. Pure art, a fine-spun specialty, a process carried on by an elect few who openly despise the unappreciative many. Art has become an occult profession requiring a long special education even to enjoy, and evolving a jargon of criticism which becomes more esoteric yearly.
Let us now see what part in this undesirable outcome is due to our Androcentric Culture.
As soon as the male of our species assumed the exclusive right to perform all social functions, he necessarily brought to that performance the advantages--and disadvantages--of maleness, of those dominant characteristics, desire, combat, self-expression.
Desire has overweighted art in many visible forms; it is prominent in painting and music, almost monopolizes fiction, and has pitifully degraded dancing.
Combat is not so easily expressed in art, where even competition is on a high plane; but the last element is the main evil, self-expression. This impulse is inherently and ineradicably masculine. It rests on that most basic of distinctions between the sexes, the centripetal and centrifugal forces of the universe. In the very nature of the sperm-cell and the germ-cell we find this difference: the one attracts, gathers, draws in; the other repels, scatters, pushes out. That projective impulse is seen in the male nature everywhere; the constant urge toward expression, to all boasting and display. This spirit, like all things masculine, is perfectly right and admirable in its place.
It is the duty of the male, as a male, to vary; bursting forth in a thousand changing modifications--the female, selecting, may so incorporate beneficial changes in the race. It is his duty to thus express himself--an essentially masculine duty; but masculinity is one thing, and art is another. Neither the masculine nor the feminine has any place in art--Art is Human.
It is not in any faintest degree allied to the personal processes of reproduction; but is a social process, a most distinctive social process, quite above the plane of sex. The true artist transcends his sex, or her sex. If this is not the case, the art suffers.
Dancing is an early, and a beautiful art; direct expression of emotion through the body; beginning in subhuman type, among male birds, as the bower-bird of New Guinea, and the dancing crane, who swing and caper before their mates. Among early peoples we find it a common form of social expression in tribal dances of all sorts, religious, military, and other. Later it becomes a more explicit form of celebration, as among the Greeks; in whose exquisite personal culture dancing and music held high place.
But under the progressive effects of purely masculine dominance we find the broader human elements of dancing left out, and the sex-element more and more emphasized. As practiced by men alone dancing has become a mere display of physical agility, a form of exhibition common to all males. As practiced by men and women together we have our social dances, so lacking in all the varied beauty of posture and expression, so steadily becoming a pleasant form of dalliance.
As practiced by women alone we have one of the clearest proofs of the degrading effect of masculine dominance:--the dancing girl. In the frank sensualism of the Orient, this personage is admired and enjoyed on her merits. We, more sophisticated in this matter, joke shamefacedly about "the bald-headed row," and occasionally burst forth in shrill scandal over some dinner party where ladies clad in a veil and a bracelet dance on the table. Nowhere else in the whole range of life on earth, is this degradation found--the female capering and prancing before the male. It is absolutely and essentially his function, not hers. That we, as a race, present this pitiful spectacle, a natural art wrested to unnatural ends, a noble art degraded to ignoble ends, has one clear cause.
Architecture, in its own nature, is least affected by that same cause. The human needs secured by it, are so human, so unescapably human, that we find less trace of excessive masculinity than in other arts. It meets our social demands, it expresses in lasting form our social feeling, up to the highest; and it has been injured not so much by an excess of masculinity as by a lack of femininity.
The most universal architectural expression is in the home; the home is essentially a place for the woman and the child; yet the needs of woman and child are not expressed in our domestic architecture. The home is built on lines of ancient precedent, mainly as an industrial form; the kitchen is its working centre rather than the nursery.
Each man wishes his home to preserve and seclude his woman, his little harem of one; and in it she is to labor for his comfort or to manifest his ability to maintain her in idleness. The house is the physical expression of the limitations of women; and as such it fills the world with a small drab ugliness. A dwelling house is rarely a beautiful object. In order to be such, it should truly express simple and natural relations; or grow in larger beauty as our lives develop.
The deadlock for architectural progress, the low level of our general taste, the everlasting predominance of the commonplace in buildings, is the natural result of the proprietary family and its expression in this form.
In sculpture we have a noble art forcing itself into some service through many limitations. Its check, as far as it comes under this line of study, has been indicated in our last chapter; the degradation of the human body, the vicious standards of sex-consciousness enforced under the name of modesty, the covered ugliness, which we do not recognize, all this is a deadly injury to free high work in sculpture.
With a nobly equal womanhood, stalwart and athletic; with the high standards of beauty and of decorum which we can never have without free womanhood; we should show a different product in this great art.
An interesting note in passing is this: when we seek to express socially our noblest, ideas, Truth; Justice; Liberty; we use the woman's body as the highest human type. But in doing this, the artist, true to humanity and not biassed by sex, gives us a strong, grand figure, beautiful indeed, but never decorated. Fancy Liberty in ruffles and frills, with rings in her ears--or nose.
Music is injured by a one-sided handling, partly in the excess of the one dominant masculine passion, partly by the general presence of egoism; that tendency to self-expression instead of social expression, which so disfigures our art; and this is true also of poetry.
Miles and miles of poetry consist of the ceaseless outcry of the male for the female, which is by no means so overwhelming as a feature of human life as he imagines it; and other miles express his other feelings, with that ingenuous lack of reticence which is at its base essentially masculine. Having a pain, the poet must needs pour it forth, that his woe be shared and sympathized with.
As more and more women writers flock into the field there is room for fine historic study of the difference in sex feeling, and the gradual emergence of the human note.
Literature, and in especial the art of fiction, is so large a field for this study that it will have a chapter to itself; this one but touching on these various forms; and indicating lines of observation.
That best known form of art which to my mind needs no qualifying description--painting--is also a wide field; and cannot be done full justice to within these limits. The effect upon it of too much masculinity is not so much in choice of subject as in method and spirit. The artist sees beauty of form and color where the ordinary observer does not; and paints the old and ugly with as much enthusiasm as the young and beautiful--sometimes. If there is in some an over-emphasis of feminine attractions it is counterbalanced in others by a far broader line of work.
But the main evils of a too masculine art lie in the emphasis laid on self-expression. The artist, passionately conscious of how he feels, strives to make other people aware of these sensations. This is now so generally accepted by critics, so seriously advanced by painters, that what is called "the art world" accepts it as established.
If a man paints the sea, it is not to make you see and feel as a sight of that same ocean would, but to make you see and feel how he, personally, was affected by it; a matter surely of the narrowest importance. The ultra-masculine artist, extremely sensitive, necessarily, and full of the natural urge to expression of the sex, uses the medium of art as ingenuously as the partridge-cock uses his wings in drumming on the log; or the bull moose stamps and bellows; not narrowly as a mate call, but as a form of expression of his personal sensations.
The higher the artist the more human he is, the broader his vision, the more he sees for humanity, and expresses for humanity, and the less personal, the less ultra-masculine, is his expression.
COMMENT AND REVIEW
The literary output of the ancient Hebrews must have been great, since we are told by their critical philosopher, "Of the making of many books there is no end."
There must have been some limit, however, because their books were hand made, and not everyone could do it. Since the printing press relieved this mechanical restriction, and educational facilities made reading and writing come, if not by nature, at least with general compulsion, the making of books has increased to the present output--which would have made the ancient philosopher blush for his premature complaint.
In this, as in all social functions, we have the normal and the abnormal growth before us; but so far we have not learned to divide them. There is no harm at all in having anybody and everybody write books if they choose, any more than in having anybody and everybody talk if they choose. Literature is only preserved speech.
Freedom of speech is dear to our hearts; it is an easy privilege, and costs little--to the speaker. People are free to talk, privately and publicly, and free to write, privately and publicly.
The harm comes, in this as in other processes, by the door of economic interest. It is not the desire to write which crowds our market so disadvantageously; it is the desire to sell.
Though a fair capacity in the art of literature were even more general than to-day, if our social conditions were normal only a certain proportion of us would naturally prefer that form of expression. Our literary output is abnormally increased by two influences; the hereditary and inculcated idea of superiority in this profession, and the emoluments thereof. These last are greatly over-estimated, as, in truth, is the first also.
There is nothing essentially more worthy in the art of saying things than in the art of doing things. The basic merit in literature, as in speech, lies in the thing said. This the makers of many books have utterly forgotten. "She's a beautiful talker!" we might say of someone. "It's perfectly lovely! Such language! Such expression! It's a joy to hear her!"
Then an unenthusiastic person might rudely inquire, "Yes--but what does she say?"
Talking is not fancy-work. It is not an exhibition of skill in the use of the vocal chords, in knowledge of grammar and rhetoric. Speech is developed in our race as a medium of transmission of thought and feelings. The greater or less ease and proficiency with which we elaborate the function should always be held subordinate to the real use. Literature is to be similarly judged by its initial purpose, the preservation and transmission of ideas and feelings. Even the picture-work of fiction must carry a certain content of ideas, else it cannot be read; it does not, as the children say, "make sense."
Now take up your current magazine--the largest medium of literary expression to-day--and consider it from this point of view.
The modern magazine is a distinctly new product. When the slow, thick stream of book-making first began to spread and filter out through the new channels of periodic publication, a magazine was a serious literary production. The word "magazine" implies an armory, a storehouse, a collection of valuable pieces of literature. Now we need a new word for the thing. It has become a more and more fluent and varied mouthpiece of popular expression. It is a halfway-house between the newspaper and the book. The older, higher-priced, more impressive of them, keep up, or try to keep up, the standards of the past; but the world of to-day is by no means so much interested in "beautiful letters" as in the fresh current of knowledge and feeling belonging to our times.
Articles about flying machines may or may not be "literature" but they are small doses of information highly desirable to persons who have not time enough, nor money enough, to read books.
If you have time, you can go to the libraries. If you have money, you can order from your dealer.
If you have only ten cents--no, fifteen, it takes in these days of prosperity--you can with that purchase a deal of valuable and interesting matter, coming on fresh every month--or week.
Sweeping aside all the "instructive" articles as hopelessly without the lofty pale of literature, we have left an overwhelming mass of fiction. This, too, is ruthlessly condemned by the austere upholder of high standards. This, too, is not literature.
What is literature?
Literature, in the esoteric sense of lofty criticism, is a form of writing which, like the higher mathematics, must be free from any taint of utility. Pure literature must perforce be a form of expression, but must not condescend to express anything.
To write with the narrow and vulgar purpose of saying something, is to be cut off hopelessly from the elect few who produce literature. This attitude of sublime superiority as an art is responsible for our general scorn of what we call,
"The Novel With a Purpose."
Have any of us fairly faced the alternative? Are we content to accept delightedly the "Novel Without a Purpose"?
Do you remember the Peterkin Papers? How Solomon John, the second son, thought he would like to write a book? How Agammemnon, the oldest son, and Elizabeth Eliza, the sister, and the Little Boys, in their beloved rubber boots, as also the parents, were all mightily impressed with the ambition of Solomon John? How a table was secured, and placed in the proper light? How a chair was brought, paper was procured, and pens and ink? How finally all was ready, and the entire family stood about in rapt admiration to see Solomon John begin?
He drew the paper before him; he selected a pen; he dipped it in the ink and poised it before him.
Then he looked from one to another, and an expression of pained surprise spread over his features.
"Why," said Solomon John, "I have nothing to say!"
(I quote from memory, not having the classics at hand.)
There was great disappointment in the Peterkin family, and the project was given up. But why so? Solomon John need not have been so easily discouraged. He was in the exact position to produce literature--pure, high, legitimate literature--the Novel Without a Purpose.
In the effort to preserve the purity of the Pierian Springs, those guardians of this noble art, who arbitrate in the "standard magazines," condemn and exclude what they define as "controversial literature."
Suppose someone comes along with a story advocating euthanasia, showing with all the force of the art of fiction the slow, hideous suffering of some helpless cancer patient or the like, the blessed release that might be humanly given; showing it so as to make an indelible impression--this story is refused as "controversial," as being written with a purpose.
Yet the same magazine will print a story no better written, showing the magnificent heroism of the man who slowly dies in year-long torment, helpless himself and steady drain on everyone about him, virtuously refusing to shorten his torments--and theirs.
What is a controversy? A discussion, surely. It has two sides.
Why isn't a story upholding one side of a controversy as controversial as a story upholding the other side?
Is it only a coincidence that magazines of large circulation and established reputation so consistently maintain that side of the controversy already popularly held as right?
Time passes. Minds develop. New knowledge comes. People's ideas and feelings change--some people's. These new ideas and feelings seek expression ion the natural forms--speech and literature, as is legitimate and right.
But the canons of taste and judgement say No.
The ideas and feelings of the peoples of past times found expression in this way, and are preserved in literature. But our ideas and feelings, so seeking expression, do not make literature.
It is not the first time that the canons were wrong. Straight down the road of historic progress, from the dim old days we can hardly see, into the increasing glare of the calcium-lighted present, there have always stood the Priesthood of the Past, making human progress into an obstacle race.
PERSONAL PROBLEMS
QUERY: "I am a woman of about forty; my children are pretty well grown up; my home does not take all my time. I could do some work in the world, but I do not know what to do. Can you advise me?"
QUERY: "I appreciate the need of women's working, and am free to do so, but cannot make up my mind what work to undertake. It is very easy for you people with 'a mission' and talents, but what is an ordinary woman to do?"
ANSWER: These two questions belong together, and may be answered together. Neither of the questioners seem to be driven by necessity, which simplifies matters a good deal.
Work has to be done for two real reasons. One is the service of humanity, of society, which cannot exist without our functional activity. Work is social service.
The other is personal development. One cannot be fully human without this functional social activity.
In choosing work, there are two governing factors always, and generally the third one of pressing necessity. Of the two, one is personal fitness--the instinctive choice of those who are highly specialized in some one line. This makes decision easy, but does not always make it easy to get the work. You may be divinely ordained to fiddle--but if no one wants to hear you, you are badly off. The other is far more general; it is the social demand--the call of the work that needs doing.
If you are able to work, free to work, and not hampered by a rigid personal bent, just look about and see what other people need. Study your country, town, village, your environment, near or distant; and take hold of some social need, whether it is a better school board or the preservation of our forests. So long as the earth or the people on it need service, there is work for all of us.
PLAY-TIME
A WALK WALK WALK
I.
I once went out for a walk, walk, walk, For a walk beside the sea; And all I carried for to eat, eat, eat, Was a jar of ginger snaps so sweet, And a jug of ginger tea.
For I am fond of cinnamon pie, And peppermint pudding, too; And I dearly love to bake, bake, bake, A mighty mass of mustard cake, And nutmeg beer to brew.
II.
And all I carried for drink, drink, drink, That long and weary way, Was a dozen little glasses Of boiled molasses On a Cochin China tray.
For I am fond of the sugar of the grape, And the sugar of the maple tree; But I always eat The sugar of the beet When I'm in company.
III.
And all I carried for to read, read, read, For a half an hour or so, Was Milman's Rome, and Grote on Greece, And the works of Dumas, pere et fils, And the poems of Longfellow.
For I am fond of the Hunting of the Snark, And the Romaunt of the Rose; And I never go to bed Without Webster at my head And Worcester at my toes.
ODE TO A FOOL
"Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather than a fool in his folly."--Prov. 17th, 12th.
Singular insect! Here I watch thee spin Upon my pin; And know that thou hast not the least idea I have thee here. Strange is thy nature! For thou mayst be slain Once and again; Dismembered, tortured, torn with tortures hot-- Yet know it not! As well pour hate and scorn upon the dead As on thy head. While I discuss thee here I plainly see Thee sneer at me.
Marvellous creature! What mysterious power In idle hour Arranged the mighty elements whence came Thy iron frame! In every item of thy outward plan So like a man! But men are mortal, dying every day, And thou dost stay. The nations rise and die with passing rule, But thou, O Fool! Livedst when drunken Noah asleeping lay, Livest to-day.
Invulnerable Fool! Thy mind Is deaf and blind; Impervious to sense of taste and smell And touch as well. Thought from without may vainly seek to press Thy consciousness; Man's hard-won knowledge which the ages pile But makes thee smile; Thy vast sagacity and blatant din Come from within; Thy voice doth fill the world from year to year, Helpless we hear.
Wisdom and wit 'gainst thee have no avail; O Fool--All Hail!
THE FORERUNNER
A MONTHLY MAGAZINE
BY
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AUTHOR, OWNER & PUBLISHER
1.00 A YEAR .10 A COPY
Volume 1. No. 5 MARCH, 1910 Copyright for 1910 C. P. Gilman
How many a useless stone we find Swallowed in that capacious, blind, Faith-swollen gullet, our ancestral mind!
THE SANDS
It runs--it runs--the hourglass turning; Dark sands glooming, bright sands burning; I turn--and turn--with heavy or hopeful hands; So must I turn as long as the Voice commands; But I lose all count of the hours for watching the sliding sands.
Or fast--or slow--it ceases turning; Ceases the flow, or bright or burning-- "What have you done with the hours?" the Voice demands. What can I say of eager or careless hands?-- I had forgotten the hours in watching the sliding sands.
A MIDDLE-SIZED ARTIST
When Rosamond's brown eyes seemed almost too big for her brilliant little face, and her brown curls danced on her shoulders, she had a passionate enthusiasm for picture books. She loved "the reading," but when the picture made what her young mind was trying to grasp suddenly real before her, the stimulus reaching the brain from two directions at once, she used to laugh with delight and hug the book.
The vague new words describing things she never saw suggested "castle," a thing of gloom and beauty; and then upon the page came The Castle itself, looming dim and huge before her, with drooping heavy banners against the sunset calm.
How she had regretted it, scarce knowing why, when the pictures were less real than the description; when the princess, whose beauty made her the Rose of the World (her name was Rosamond, too!), appeared in visible form no prettier, no, not as pretty, as The Fair One with The Golden Locks in the other book! And what an outcry she made to her indifferent family when first confronted by the unbelievable blasphemy of an illustration that differed from the text!
"But, Mother--see!" she cried. "It says, 'Her beauty was crowned by rich braids of golden hair, wound thrice around her shapely head,' and this girl has black hair--in curls! Did the man forget what he just said?"
Her mother didn't seem to care at all. "They often get them wrong," she said. "Perhaps it was an old plate. Run away, dear, Mama is very busy."
But Rosamond cared.
She asked her father more particularly about this mysterious "old plate," and he, being a publisher, was able to give her much information thereanent. She learned that these wonderful reinforcements of her adored stories did not emanate direct from the brain of the beneficent author, but were a supplementary product by some draughtsman, who cared far less for what was in the author's mind than for what was in his own; who was sometimes lazy, sometimes arrogant, sometimes incompetent; sometimes all three. That to find a real artist, who could make pictures and was willing to make them like the picture the author saw, was very unusual.
"You see, little girl," said Papa, "the big artists are too big to do it--they'd rather make their own pictures; and the little artists are too little--they can't make real ones of their own ideas, nor yet of another's."
"Aren't there any middle-sized artists?" asked the child.
"Sometimes," said her father; and then he showed her some of the perfect illustrations which leave nothing to be desired, as the familiar ones by Teniel and Henry Holiday, which make Alice's Adventures and the Hunting of the Snark so doubly dear, Dore and Retsch and Tony Johannot and others.
"When I grow up," said Rosamond decidedly, "I'm going to be a middle-sized artist!"
Fortunately for her aspirations the line of study required was in no way different at first from that of general education. Her parents explained that a good illustrator ought to know pretty much everything. So she obediently went through school and college, and when the time came for real work at her drawing there was no objection to that.
"It is pretty work," said her mother, "a beautiful accomplishment. It will always be a resource for her."
"A girl is better off to have an interest," said her father, "and not marry the first fool that asks her. When she does fall in love this won't stand in the way; it never does; with a woman. Besides--she may need it sometime."
So her father helped and her mother did not hinder, and when the brown eyes were less disproportionate and the brown curls wreathed high upon her small fine head, she found herself at twenty-one more determined to be a middle-sized artist than she was at ten.
Then love came; in the person of one of her father's readers; a strenuous new-fledged college graduate; big, handsome, domineering, opinionative; who was accepting a salary of four dollars a week for the privilege of working in a publishing house, because he loved books and meant to write them some day.
They saw a good deal of each other, and were pleasantly congenial. She sympathized with his criticisms of modem fiction; he sympathized with her criticisms of modern illustration; and her young imagination began to stir with sweet memories of poetry and romance; and sweet hopes of beautiful reality.
There are cases where the longest way round is the shortest way home; but Mr. Allen G. Goddard chose differently. He had read much about women and about love, beginning with a full foundation from the ancients; but lacked an understanding of the modern woman, such as he had to deal with.
Therefore, finding her evidently favorable, his theories and inclinations suiting, he made hot love to her, breathing, "My Wife!" into her ear before she had scarce dared to think "my darling!" and suddenly wrapping her in his arms with hot kisses, while she was still musing on "The Hugenot Lovers" and the kisses she dared dream of came in slow gradation as in the Sonnets From the Portuguese.
He was in desperate earnest. "O you are so beautiful!" he cried. "So unbelievably beautiful! Come to me, my Sweet!" for she had sprung away and stood panting and looking at him, half reproachful, half angry.
"You love me, Dearest! You cannot deny it!" he cried. "And I love you--Ah! You shall know!"
He was single-hearted, sincere; stirred by a very genuine overwhelming emotion. She on the contrary was moved by many emotions at once;--a pleasure she was half ashamed of; a disappointment she could not clearly define; as if some one had told her the whole plot of a promising new novel; a sense of fear of the new hopes she had been holding, and of startled loyalty to her long-held purposes.
"Stop!" she said--for he evidently mistook her agitation, and thought her silence was consent. "I suppose I do--love you--a little; but you've no right to kiss me like that!"
His eyes shone. "You Darling! My Darling!" he said. "You will give me the right, won't you? Now, Dearest--see! I am waiting!" And he held out his arms to her.
But Rosamond was more and more displeased. "You will have to wait. I'm sorry; but I'm not ready to be engaged, yet! You know my plans. Why I'm going to Paris this year! I'm going to work! It will be ever so long before I'm ready to--to settle down."
"As to that," he said more calmly, "I cannot of course offer immediate marriage, but we can wait for that--together! You surely will not leave me--if you love me!"
"I think I love you," she said conscientiously, "at least I did think so. You've upset it all, somehow--you hurry me so!--no--I can't bind myself yet."
"Do you tell me to wait for you?" he asked; his deep voice still strong to touch her heart. "How long, Dearest?"
"I'm not asking you to wait for me--I don't want to promise anything--nor to have you. But when I have made a place--am really doing something--perhaps then--"
He laughed harshly. "Do not deceive yourself, child, nor me! If you loved me there would be none of this poor wish for freedom--for a career. You don't love me--that's all!"
He waited for her to deny this. She said nothing. He did not know how hard it was for her to keep from crying--and from running to his arms.
"Very well," said he. "Goodby!"--And he was gone.
All that happened three years ago.
Allen Goddard took it very hard; and added to his earlier ideas about women another, that "the new woman" was a selfish heartless creature, indifferent to her own true nature.
He had to stay where he was and work, owing to the pressure of circumstances, which made it harder; so he became something of a mysogynyst; which is not a bad thing when a young man has to live on very little and build a place for himself.
In spite of this cynicism he could not remove from his mind those softly brilliant dark eyes; the earnest thoughtful lines of the pure young face; and the changing lights and shadows in that silky hair. Also, in the course of his work, he was continually reminded of her; for her characteristic drawings appeared more and frequently in the magazines, and grew better, stronger, more convincing from year to year.
Stories of adventure she illustrated admirably; children's stories to perfection; fairy stories--she was the delight of thousands of children, who never once thought that the tiny quaint rose in a circle that was to be found in all those charming pictures meant a name. But he noticed that she never illustrated love stories; and smiled bitterly, to himself.
And Rosamond?
There were moments when she was inclined to forfeit her passage money and throw herself unreservedly into those strong arms which had held her so tightly for a little while. But a bud picked open does not bloom naturally; and her tumultuous feelings were thoroughly dissipated by a long strong attack of mal de mer. She derived two advantages from her experience: one a period of safe indifference to all advances from eager fellow students and more cautious older admirers; the other a facility she had not before aspired to in the making of pictures of love and lovers.
She made pictures of him from memory--so good, so moving, that she put them religiously away in a portfolio by themselves; and only took them out--sometimes. She illustrated, solely for her own enjoyment some of her girlhood's best loved poems and stories. "The Rhyme of the Duchess May," "The Letter L," "In a Balcony," "In a Gondola." And hid them from herself even--they rather frightened her.
After three years of work abroad she came home with an established reputation, plenty of orders, and an interest that would not be stifled in the present state of mind of Mr. Allen Goddard.
She found him still at work, promoted to fifteen dollars a week by this time, and adding to his income by writing political and statistical articles for the magazines. He talked, when they met, of this work, with little enthusiasm, and asked her politely about hers.
"Anybody can see mine!" she told him lightly. "And judge it easily."
"Mine too," he answered. "It to-day is--and to-morrow is cast into the waste-basket. He who runs may read--if he runs fast enough."
He told himself he was glad he was not bound to this hard, bright creature, so unnaturally self-sufficient, and successful.
She told herself that he had never cared for her, really, that was evident.
Then an English publisher who liked her work sent her a new novel by a new writer, "A. Gage." "I know this is out of your usual line," he said, "but I want a woman to do it, and I want you to be the woman, if possible. Read it and see what you think. Any terms you like."
The novel was called "Two and One;" and she began it with languid interest, because she liked that publisher and wished to give full reasons for refusing. It opened with two young people who were much in love with one another; the girl a talented young sculptor with a vivid desire for fame; and another girl, a cousin of the man, ordinary enough, but pretty and sweet, and with no desires save those of romance and domesticity. The first couple broke off a happy engagement because she insisted on studying in Paris, and her lover, who could neither go with her, nor immediately marry her, naturally objected.
Rosamond sat up in bed; pulled a shawl round her, swung the electric light nearer, and went on.
The man was broken-hearted; he suffered tortures of loneliness, disappointment, doubt, self-depreciation. He waited, held at his work by a dependent widowed mother; hoping against hope that his lost one would come back. The girl meanwhile made good in her art work; she was not a great sculptor but a popular portraitist and maker of little genre groups. She had other offers, but refused them, being hardened in her ambitions, and, possibly, still withheld by her early love.
The man after two or three years of empty misery and hard grinding work, falls desperately ill; the pretty cousin helps the mother nurse him, and shows her own affection. He offers the broken remnants of his heart, which she eagerly undertakes to patch up; and they become tolerably happy, at least she is.
But the young sculptor in Paris! Rosamond hurried through the pages to the last chapter. There was the haughty and triumphant heroine in her studio. She had been given a medal--she had plenty of orders--she had just refused a Count. Everyone had gone, and she sat alone in her fine studio, self-satisfied and triumphant.
Then she picks up an old American paper which was lying about; reads it idly as she smokes her cigarette--and then both paper and cigarette drop to the floor, and she sits staring.
Then she starts up--her arms out--vainly. "Wait! O Wait!" she cries--"I was coining back,"--and drops into her chair again. The fire is out. She is alone.
Rosamond shut the book and leaned back upon her pillow. Her eyes were shut tight; but a little gleaming line showed on either cheek under the near light. She put the light out and lay quite still.
*
Allen G. Goddard, in his capacity as "reader" was looking over some popular English novels which his firm wished to arrange about publishing in America. He left "Two and One" to the last. It was the second edition, the illustrated one which he had not seen yet; the first he had read before. He regarded it from time to time with a peculiar expression.
"Well," he said to himself, "I suppose I can stand it if the others do." And he opened the book.
The drawing was strong work certainly, in a style he did not know. They were striking pictures, vivid, real, carrying out in last detail the descriptions given, and the very spirit of the book, showing it more perfectly than the words. There was the tender happiness of the lovers, the courage, the firmness, the fixed purpose in the young sculptor insisting on her freedom, and the gay pride of the successful artist in her work.
There was beauty and charm in this character, yet the face was always turned away, and there was a haunting suggestion of familiarity in the figure. The other girl was beautiful, and docile in expression; well-dressed and graceful; yet somehow unattractive, even at her best, as nurse; and the man was extremely well drawn, both in his happy ardor as a lover, and his grinding misery when rejected. He was very good-looking; and here too was this strong sense of resemblance.
"Why he looks like me!" suddenly cried the reader--springing to his feet. "Confound his impudence!" he cried. "How in thunder!" Then he looked at the picture again, more carefully, a growing suspicion in his face; and turned hurriedly to the title page,--seeing a name unknown to him.
This subtle, powerful convincing work; this man who undeniably suggested him; this girl whose eyes he could not see; he turned from one to another and hurried to the back of the book.
"The fire was out--she was alone." And there, in the remorseless light of a big lamp before her fireless hearth, the crumpled newspaper beside her, and all hope gone from a limp, crouching little figure, sat--why, he would know her among a thousand--even if her face was buried in her hands, and sunk on the arm of the chair--it was Rosamond!
*
She was in her little downtown room and hard at work when he entered; but she had time to conceal a new book quickly.
He came straight to her; he had a book in his hand, open--he held it out.
"Did you do this?" he demanded. "Tell me--tell me!" His voice was very unreliable.
She lifted her eyes slowly to his; large, soft, full of dancing lights, and the rich color swept to the gold-lighted borders of her hair.
"Did you?" she asked.
He was taken aback. "I!" said he. "Why it's by--" he showed her the title-page. "By A. Gage," he read.
"Yes," said she, "Go on," and he went on, 'Illustrated by A. N. Other.'"
"It's a splendid novel," she said seriously. "Real work--great work. I always knew you'd do it, Allen. I'm so proud of you!" And she held out her hand in the sincere intelligent appreciation of a fellow craftsman.
He took it, still bewildered.
"Thank you," he said. "I value your opinion--honestly I do! And--with a sudden sweep of recognition. "And yours is great work! Superb! Why you've put more into that story than I knew was there! You make the thing live and breathe! You've put a shadow of remorse in that lonely ruffian there that I was too proud to admit! And you've shown the--unconvincingness of that Other Girl; marvellously. But see here--no more fooling!"
He took her face between his hands, hands that quivered strongly, and forced her to look at him. "Tell me about that last picture! Is it--true?"
Her eyes met his, with the look he longed for. "It is true," she said.
*
After some time, really it was a long time, but they had not noticed it, he suddenly burst forth. "But how did you know?"
She lifted a flushed and smiling face: and pointed to the title page again.
"'A. Gage.'--You threw it down."
"And you--" He threw back his head and laughed delightedly. "You threw down A-N-Other! O you witch! You immeasurably clever darling! How well our work fits. By Jove! What good times we'll have!"
And they did.
THE MINOR BIRDS
Shall no bird sing except the nightingale? Must all the lesser voices cease? Lark, thrush and blackbird hold their peace? The woods wait dumb Until he come?
Must we forego the voices of the field? The hedgebird's twitter and the soft dove's cooing, All the small songs of nesting, pairing, wooing, Where each reveals What joy he feels?
Should we know how to praise the nightingale, Master of music, ecstacy and pain, If he alone sang in the springtime rain? If no one heard A minor bird?
PARLOR-MINDEDNESS
"Won't you step in?"
You step in.
"She will be down in a moment. Won't you sit down?"
You sit down. You wait. You are in the parlor.
What is this room? What is it for?
It is not to sleep in, the first need of the home. Not to eat in, the second. Not to shelter young in, the third. Not to cook and wash in, to sew and mend in, to nurse and tend in; not for any of the trades which we still practice in the home.
It is a place for social intercourse. If the family is sufficiently intelligent they use it for this purpose, gathering there in peace and decorum, for rest and pleasure. Whether the family is of that order or not, they use the parlor, if they have one, for the entertainment of visitors. Our ancient Webster gives first: "The apartment in monastery or nunnery where the inmates are permitted to meet and converse with each other, or with visitors and friends from without," and second, "A room in a house which the family usually occupy for society and conversation; the reception room for visitors." It is, as the derivation declares, "a talking room."
While you wait in the parlor you study it.
It is the best room. It has the best carpet, the best furniture, the pictures and decorations considered most worthy. It is adorned as a shrine for the service of what we feel rather than think to be a noble purpose--to promote social intercourse.
In the interchange of thought and feeling that form so large and essential a part of human life, these parlors are the vehicles provided. Are they all the vehicles provided? Is it in parlors that the sea of human thought ebbs and flows most freely? That mind meets mind, ideas are interchanged, and the soul grows by contact with its kind? Is it in parlors that art is talked? politics? business? affairs of state? new lights in science? the moving thoughts of the world?
If you could hide in a thousand parlors and listen to the talk therein what would you hear? When "she" has come down, greeted her friend with effusion or her caller with ample cordiality, and the talk begins, the interchange of thought, what does the parlor bring forth?
Alas and alas! It brings forth the kitchen, the nursery, and the dressmaker's shop. It furnishes shop-talk mostly, gossip of the daily concerns of the speakers.
Are there no men then in the parlors? Yes, frequently. The man of the house is there with his family in the evening; other men call with their wives; young men call on young women to court them; but in all these cases the men, talking to the women, must needs confine the conversation to their lines of work and thought. When men talk with men it is not in parlors. The women may be ignorant, knowing only household affairs; or they may be "cultivated," more highly educated than the men, talking glibly of books they have read, lectures they have heard, plays they have seen; while the men can talk well only of the work they have done.
When men wish to talk with men of world-business of any sort, they do not seek the parlor. The street, the barroom, the postoffice, some public place they want where they may meet freely on broader ground. For the parlor is the women's meeting ground--has been for long their only meeting ground except the church steps.
Its limits are sharp and clear. Only suitable persons may enter the parlor; only one's acquaintances and friends. Thus the social intercourse of women, for long years has been rigidly confined to parlor limits; they have conversed only with their own class and kind, forever rediscussing the same topics, the threadbare theme of their common trade; and the men who come to their parlor, talk politely to them there within prescribed lines.
It is interesting and pathetic to see the woman, when means allow, enlarge the size of her parlor, the number of her guests, seeking continually for that social intercourse for which the soul hungers, and which the parlor so meagerly provides. As we see the fakir;
"Eating with famished patience grain by grain, A thousand grains of millet-seed a day,"--
So the woman talks incessantly with as many as she can--neither giving nor getting what is needed.
When we find an institution so common as the parlor, exerting a constant influence upon us from childhood up, carrying with it a code of manners, a system of conduct, a scheme of decoration, a steady prohibitive pressure upon progressive thought, we shall be wise to study that institution and in especial its effect upon the mind.
First, we may observe as in the kitchen the dominant note of personality.
In the parlor more than elsewhere are to be found the "traces of a woman's hand." It is her room, the Lady of the House and other Ladies of other Houses, having each their own to exhibit, all politely praise one another's display.
When a knowledge of art, a sense of beauty, grows in the world, and slowly affects the decorators and furnishers, then does it through the blandishments of the merchants filter slowly into a thousand parlors. But as easily when there is neither art nor beauty in such furnishings, are they foisted upon the purchasing housewife. Such as it is, provided through the limitations of the housewife's mind and the husband's purse, this "best room" becomes a canon of taste to the growing child.
"The parlor set" he must needs see held up as beautiful; the "reception chairs," the carefully shadowed carpet,--these and the "best dress" to go with them and the "company manners" added, are unescapable aesthetic influences.
Few children like the parlor, few children are wanted or allowed in the parlor, yet it has a steady influence as a sort of social shrine.
Most rigidly it teaches the child exclusiveness, the narrow limits of one's "social acquaintances." As rigidly and most evilly it teaches him falsehood. Scarcely a child but hears the mother's fretful protest against the visitor, followed by the lightning change to cordial greeting. The white lie, the smiling fib, the steady concealment of the undesirable topic, the mutual steering off from all but a set allowance of themes, the artificial dragging in of these and their insufferable repetition--all this the silent, large-eyed child who has been allowed to stay if quiet, hears and remembers. See the little girl's "playing house." See the visitor arrive, the polite welcome, the inquiries after health, the babbling discussion of babies and dress and cookery and servants,--these they have well learned are proper subjects for parlor talk.
The foolish and false ideas of beauty held up to them as "best," they seek to perpetuate. The arbitrary "best dress" system, develops into a vast convention, a wearing of apparel not for beauty, and not for use, not for warmth, protection nor modesty (often quite the opposite of all these), but as a conventional symbol of respectability.
So interwoven with our inner consciousness are these purely arbitrary codes of propriety in costume, that we have such extremes as Kipling shows us in his remote Himalayan forests,--a white man thousands of miles from his kind, who "dressed for dinner every night to preserve his self-respect." No doubt a perfectly sincere conviction, and one sunk deep in the highbred British breast, but even so of a most shallow and ephemeral nature, based on nothing whatever but a temporary caprice of our parlor-mindedness.
Being reared in that state of mind, and half of us confined to it professionally, we are inevitably affected thereby, and react upon life--the real moving world-life, under its pitiful limitations.
If one's sense of beauty must be first, last and always personal, and confined to one's parlor,--for of course we cannot dictate as to other women's parlors,--then how is it to be expected that we should in any way notice, feel or see the ugliness of our town or city, schoolhouse or street-car?
See the woman who has had "an education," who has even "studied art," perhaps, and whose husband can pay for what she wants. Her parlor may become a drawing-room, or two, or more, but she does not grow to care that a public school-room is decorated in white plaster trimmed with a broad strip of blackboard.
The bald, cruel, wearing ugliness of the most of our schools, is worthy of penal institutions, yet we with cheerful unconcern submit growing children to such influences without ever giving it a thought.
"My parlor" must be beautiful, but "our school" is no business of mine. Is there any real reason, by the way, why blackboards must be black? A deep dull red or somber green would be restful and pleasant to the eye, and show chalk just as well. As is being now slowly discovered. There are no blackboards in our parlors. Our children leave home to go to school, and their mother's thoughts do not. In the small measure of parlor decoration grows no sense of public art.
Great art must be largely conceived, largely executed. For the temple and palace and forum rose the columns and statues of the past; for the church and castle the "frozen music" of mediaeval architecture; for church and palace again, the blazing outburst of pictorial art in the great re-birth. Now the struggling artist must cater to the tastes of parlor-bred patrons; must paint what suits the uses of that carpeted sanctuary, portraits of young ladies most successful! Or he must do for public buildings, if by chance he gets the opportunity, what meets the tastes of our universal parlor-mindedness.
With this parlor-mindedness, we repudiate and condemn in painting, literature, music, drama and the dance, whatever does not conform to the decorum of this shrine, whatsoever is not suitable to ladylike conversation. Be the book bad, it is unsuited to the parlor table. Be the book good--too good, or be it great, then it is equally unsuited. Controversy has no place in parlors, hence no controversial literature. Pleasant if possible, or sweetly sad, and not provocative of argument--this is the demeanor of the parlor table, and to this the editor conforms. To the editorial dictum the "reader" must submit; to the "readers" decisions the writer must submit; to the menu furnished by the magazines, the public must submit, and so grows up among us a canon of literary judgment, best described as "parlor-minded." This is by no means so damaging as kitchen-mindedness, for those who escape the influence of the parlor are many, and those who escape the influence of the kitchen are few; but it is quite damaging enough.
One of the main elements of beauty in our lives is the human body. Some keep swans, some peacocks, and some deer, that they may delight their eyes with the beauty thereof. We ourselves are more beautiful than any beast or bird, we are the inspiration of poet, painter, and sculptor; yet we have deliberately foregone all this constant world of beauty and substituted for it a fluctuating nightmare.
In what sordid or discordant colors do we move about! What desolate blurring of outline and action, by our dragging masses of cloth, stiffened and padded like Chinese armor! What strange figures, conventionalized as a lotus pattern, instead of the moving glory of the human form!
Why do we do it? Having done it why do we bear it longer? Why not fill our streets with beauty, gladden our eyes and uplift our souls with the loveliness that is ours by nature, plus the added loveliness of the textile art? We have pictures of our beauty, we have statues of our beauty--why go without the real thing? Suppose our swans could show us in paint and marble the slow white grace of their plumed sailing, but in person paddled about in a costume of stovepipes. Suppose deer and hound,--but wait!--this we have seen, this extreme of human folly forced upon the helpless beast,--dogs dressed to suit the taste of their parlor-minded owners! Not men's dogs,--women's dogs.
To cover--at any cost, with anything, that is a major ideal of the parlor. There is an exception made, when, at any cost of health, beauty and decency, we uncover--but this too, is to meet one of the parlor purposes. In it and its larger spread of drawing and assembly rooms, we provide not only for "social intercourse"--but for that necessary meeting of men and women that shall lead to marriage.
A right and wholesome purpose, but not a right and wholesome place. Men and women should meet and meet freely in the places where they live, but they should not live in parlors. They should meet and know one another in their working clothes, in the actual character and habit of their daily lives.
Marriages may be "made in heaven," but they are mainly--shall we say "retailed"? in parlors. What can the parlor-loved young woman know of the parlor-bound young man? Parlor manners only are produced, parlor topics, parlor ideas. He had better court her in the kitchen, if she is one of the "fifteen sixteenths" of our families who keep no servants, to know what he is going to live with. She never knows what she is going to live with; for the nature of man is not truly exhibited either in kitchen or parlor. A co-educational college does much, a studio or business office or work-shop does more, to show men and women to each other as they are. Neither does enough, for the blurring shadow of our parlor-mindedness still lies between. It has so habituated us to the soft wavelets and glassy shallows of polite conversation, that we refuse to face and discuss the realities of life. With gifts of roses and bonbons, suppers and theatres that cost more than the cows of the Kaffir lover, and ought to make the girl feel like a Kaffir bride, the man woos the woman. With elaborate toilettes and all the delicate trickery of her unnatural craft, the woman woos the man. And the trail of the parlor is over it all.
Gaily to the gate of marriage they go, and through it--and never have they asked or answered the questions on which the whole truth of their union depends. Our standards of decorum forbid,--parlor standards all. We have woven and embroidered a veil over the facts of life; an incense-clouded atmosphere blinds us; low music and murmured litanies dull the mind, but not the senses. We drift and dream. In the girl's mind floats a cloud of literary ideals. He is like a "Greek god," a "Galahad," a "Knight of old." He is in some mystic way a Hero, a Master, a Protector. She pictures herself as fulfilling exquisite ideals of wifely devotion, "all in all" to him, and he to her.
She does not once prefigure to herself the plain common facts of the experience that lies before her. She does not known them. In parlors such things are not discussed,--no naked truths can be admitted there.
We live a marvellous life at home. Visibly we have the care and labor of housekeeping, the strain and anxiety of childbearing as it is practised, the elaborate convention of "receiving" and "entertaining." Under these goes on life. Our bodies are tired, overtaxed, ill-fed, grossly ill-treated. Our minds are hungry, unsatisfied, or drugged and calm. We live, we suffer and we die,--and never once do we face the facts. Birth and death are salient enough, one would think, but birth and death we particularly cover and hide, concealing from our friends with conventional phrases, lying about to our children. Over the strong ever-lasting life-processes, we spin veil on veil; drape and smother them till they become sufficiently remote and symbolic for the parlor to recognize.
In older nations than ours, we can see this web of convention thickened and hardened till life runs low within. Think what can be the state of mind in India which allows child-marriage--the mother concurrent! Think of the slow torture of little girls in foot-bound China, the mother concurrent! Then turning quickly, think of our own state of mind, which allows young girls to marry old reprobates,--the mother concurrent!
That mental attitude which maintains ancient conventions, which prefers symbol to fact, which prescribes limits to our conversation, and draws them narrowly down to what can be understood by anybody, and can instruct, interest and inspire nobody, is parlor-mindedness. It does harm enough both in its low ideals of beauty and art, manners and morals, to its placid inmates and its complaisant visitors; it does more harm in its fallacious shallows as a promoter of marriage; it does most in its failure to promote the one thing it is for--social intercourse.
To meet freely; to talk, discuss, exchange and compare ideas, is a general human need. Those who do not know they need it, need it most.
Each of us alone, taps the reservoir of world-force, in some degree, and pours it forth in some expression. Often the intake seems to fail, the output is unsatisfying. Then we need one another, now this one and now that one, now several, now a crowd. In combination we receive new power. The human soul calls for contact and exchange with its kind. This contact should be fluent and free, spontaneous, natural; that we may go as we are drawn to those who feed us best.
Men need men and women women; men and women need one another; it is a general human condition. From such natural meeting arises personal relief, rest, pleasure, stimulus, and social gain beyond counting, in the growth of thought. The social battery is continually replenished by contact and exchange. Some friends draw out the best that is in us, some, though perhaps near and dear to us, do not.
No matter how "happily married," or how unhappily unmarried, we need social interchange. To quench this thirst, to meet this need, wide as the world and deep as life, we provide--the parlor.
Is it any wonder that our talk is mainly personality? That we love gossip, even when it bites and sours to scandal? Is it any wonder that women talk so much of their kitchen and nurseries, of their diseases, and their clothes, yet learn so little about better feeding, better dressing, better health and better child-culture? Is it any wonder that to our parlor-mindedness the daily press descends, gives us the pap we are used to, and then artfully peppers our pap, insinuating some sparkle of alcohol, some solace of insidious drug, that we may "get the habit" more firmly? Is it any wonder that we, parlor-bred and newspaper-fed, continue to cry out fiercely against personal, primitive, parlor sins, and remain calm and unshocked by world-sins that should rouse us to horror, shame and action?
In these small shrines, adorned with what, in our doll-house taste, we fondly imagine to be beautiful, we seek to keep ourselves, "unspotted from the world," but by no saving grace of a thousand parlors, do we succeed in keeping the world unspotted from ourselves! We make the world. We are the world. It might be a place of noble freedom, of ever-growing beauty, of a fluent, truthful radiant art, of broadening education, wide peace and culture, universal wealth and progress. And we miss even seeing this, living sedately, curtained, carpeted, well content, in our ancestral parlor-mindedness.
NAUGHTY
The young brain was awake and hungry. It was a vigorous young brain, well-organized; eager, receiving impressions with keen joy and storing them rapidly away in due relation.
Such a wonder world!
Sweetness and light were the first impressions--light which made his eyes laugh; and Sweetness Incarnate--that great soft Presence which was Food and Warmth and Rest and Comfort and something better still; for all of which he had no name as yet except "Ma-ma!"
He was growing, growing fast. He was satisfied with food. He was satisfied with sleep. But his brain was not satisfied. So the brain's first servant went forth to minister to it; small, soft, uncertain, searching for all knowledge--the little hand.
Something to hold! Ancestral reflexes awoke as the fingers closed upon it. Something to pull! The soft arm flexors tightened with a sense of pleasure. Sensations came flowing to the hungry brain--welcomed eagerly.
Then suddenly, a new sensation--Pain! He drew back his hand as a touched anemone draws in its tentacles, scarce softer than those pink fingers; but he did not know quite where the pain was--much less where it came from, or what it meant.
"More!" said the hungry brain. "More!" and the little hand went out again.
It was sharply spatted. "No, No!" said a strange voice--he had never heard that kind of tone before. "No! No! Naughty! Don't touch!" He lifted his face unbelievingly. Yes--it was Food and Warmth and Comfort who was doing this to him.
The small moist mouth quivered grievingly--a cry rose in him.
"Here!" said the Presence, and gave him a rattle.
He had had that before. He knew all that it could do. He dropped it.
Over and over again, day after day, the little servant of the brain ran forth to minister, and met sharp pain; while the dim new concept "'Naughty'--something you want to do and mustn't"--was registered within.
The child grew and his brain grew faster. He learned new words, an behind the words, in the fresh untouched spaces, the swift brain placed ideas--according to its lights. He had learned that the Presence varied. It was not always Sweetness and Rest and Joy--sometimes it was Discomfort--Hindrance--even Pain. He had learned to look at it with doubt--when about to do something--to see which way it would react upon him.
"Isn't that baby cute?" said the Presence. "He knows just as well!"
But his brain grew stronger, and his hand grew stronger, and about him was a world of objects, rousing all manner of sensations which he fain would learn.
"I have to watch that child every minute to keep him out of mischief!" said the Presence.
She caught him sharply by the arm and drew him back.
"Don't touch that again! If you do I'll whip you!"
He stared at her, large-eyed, revolving the language. Language was so interesting. "Don't" he knew well, and "touch" and "that" and "again." "If you do" was harder. He was not at all sure about "if." And "whip"--that was quite new. He puckered his soft mouth and made a little whispering sound, trying to say it.
"Yes, Whip!" said the Presence. "Now you be good!" He knew "be good," too. It meant not doing anything. He couldn't be good very long--any more than the Proverbial Indian.
In the course of his growing he soon learned "Whip." It was very unpleasant. The busy brain, receiving, sorting, arranging, re-arranging, stored up this fierce experience without delay. "Whipping--Pain and Insult. It happens when you break anything. It is a Consequence."
The brain was kept very busy re-arranging this Consequence. "It happens when you spill the milk--when you soil your dress--when you tear it (dresses must be sacred!)--when you 'meddle'--when you run away--when you get wet--when you take sugar--when"--(this was a great discovery), "when Mama is Angry." He was older now, and found that the Presence varied a good deal. So the brain built up its group of ethical impressions.
And then--one memorable day--this neat arrangement of ethics, true, received a great shock.
There was the sugar--in easy reach--and sugar is All Good to the young body. Remembered pleasure, strong immediate desire, the eye's guidance, the hand's impulse--all urged to perform the natural act of eating. Against it,--what? The blurred remembrance of promiscuous pain, only by main force to be associated with that coveted, visible pleasure; and the dawning power of inhibition. To check strong natural desire by no better force than the memory of oral threat, or even of felt pain, is not easy always for adults.
He ate the sugar, fearing yet joyous. No one else was present. No one saw the act, nor learned it later.
He was not whipped.
Then rose the strong young brain to new occasion. It observed, deduced, even experimented, flushed with the pleasure of normal exercise. It established, before he was five years old, these conclusions:
"'Naughty' is a thing you're punished for doing--if you're not punished it isn't naughty.
"Punishment is a thing that happens if you're found out--if you're not found out you're not punished.
"Ergo--if you're not found out you're not naughty!"
And the child grew up to be a man.
WHAT DIANTHA DID