The Secret Life

I think that this noise among the women was the last wave of the democratic ideal expending itself. It was their restlessness under a sense of their inferiority to man. Until the nineteenth century, woman had been content to accept the male of her kind, with his mental and physical endowments, as the true standard of human excellence, and to humbly admit that she permanently failed to reach that standard.

The universality of the democratic ideal aroused in her at last an unwillingness to admit her innate inferiority, and drove her to a desperate search for some fountain of Salmacis that should transmute her to an exact likeness of her long-time lord and superior. The search, of course, was delayed and confused by that furious and debasing fin de siecle demand for happiness at all cost. She heard no talk anywhere of courage, submission, or duty. The later decades of the democratic century had refused to contemplate the world-old riddle of the blind Fates who create one vessel to honour and another to dishonour. So woman, no more than her fellows, would consider the caprices of destiny which from the union of one man and one woman will produce an heir to beauty, talent, and success, and from the same union – without volition or intention upon anyone's part – brings forth a cripple, an idiot, or the helpless Inadequate, who is foredoomed to failure with a grim gravitation no human laws or institutions can arrest. The nineteenth century was a sentimental one; unwilling to consider unpleasant truths. "All men are born equal," it stubbornly persisted in asserting, and then was rather shocked when some of its offspring sought this equality of happiness at the sword's point or the bomb's fuse – as if content was a coin to be stolen and concealed about the person of the thief.

Of course, the women finally became infected with the bacillus of unsound ideas, and struggling against the immutable burden of sex ran to and fro, crying "Lo, here!" and "Lo, there!" and wailing, "Where is my happiness? Who has my happiness? You men have stolen and are keeping it from me!"

A certain part of the charge was true, too. Men had filched from her.

The theft was not a new one. If the statute of limitations could ever run in crimes against nature it might have almost ceased to be a wrong in this case, after the lapse of nearly two thousand years.

Morgan in his "Ancient Society," dealing with the question of Mütter-Recht, declares that throughout the earliest period of human existence regarding which any knowledge is attainable, descent and all rights of succession were traced through the women of the gens or clans, into which primitive man was organized. Women, as being the bearers and protectors of the young, were regarded as the natural land owners, and therefore did not leave their homes to follow the fathers of their children, lest they should lose their own possessions and rights of inheritance. Instead, the men married into the sept of their wives. The power and independence of women was lost at last through the practice of making female captives in war. These had no land and were the property of, and dependent upon the will of, their male captor. In course of time men naturally grew to prefer these subservient wives. The Arab advises his son: "It is better to have a wife with no claims of kin and no brethren near to take her part."

Women therefore began to dread capture as the greatest of evils. After the movements of vast hordes began – the marches of the race columns across the continents – with their wars of spoliation and conquest, there was no security save in physical strength, and the females yielded all claims to the men in return for protection. It was better, they thought, to be a slave at home than a slave among strangers. Still the man, while asserting physical superiority, claimed none morally. Under the pagan rule of Rome, the jurisconsults, by their theory of "Natural Law," evidently assumed the equality of the sexes as a principle of their code of equity. Sir Henry Maine says there came a time "when the situation of the female, married or unmarried, became one of great personal and proprietary independence; for the tendency of the later law … was to reduce the power of the guardian to a nullity, while the form of marriage conferred on the husband no compensating superiority."

Among the Germanic races of the Roman period, a woman was occasionally ruler of the tribe, and the blue-eyed wife of the roving Barbarian, as well as the proud Roman matron, were held alike in high esteem for their functions as wife and mother. The priestess crowned with oak leaves, officiating at the sylvan altars of the forest, or the Vestal Virgin serving the fires of the white temples of Rome, were alike held worthy of speaking face to face with the gods and of conveying their blessings to man. It was the humble religion of Judea – which women embraced with ardour, and to which they were early and willing martyrs – that cursed them with a deadly curse. It denied woman not only mental and physical, but moral equality with man, and besmirched the very fountain and purpose of her being with a shameful stain. It made her presence in the most holy places a desecration, and for the first time regarded her feminine functions as a disgrace rather than a glory. And this although the founder of the Christian faith had set an example of reverence and tenderness for the sex in his own life, and had left his mother to be raised to a heavenly throne by his worshippers. Never from his lips had fallen a word that could give warrant for the insult offered woman by his church. He was the first of all men living to denounce the injustice of visiting upon the woman the whole penalty of a double sin, and his life was beautified with the tenderest friendships with women. But already, before a church had been fairly organized, Paul was dictating silence to women, covered heads and supreme submission to the male, and was declaring against marriage as a weakness. If a man must marry because of his weakness, he might do so, but not to marry was better.

Scorn of woman and her functions grew. Antagonism to marriage intensified. Woman by the very law of her existence was a curse and a temptation to sin. Hear Tertullian – one of the fathers of the Church – on this subject:

"Do you not know that each one of you is an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age; the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil's gateway; you are the unsealer of the forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him who the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert – that is death – the Son of God had to die!"

This is but one of a thousand similar insults by the early writers of the Church – all Patristic books bristle with them.

Lecky, comparing the Roman jurisprudence with the canon or ecclesiastical law, remarks that "the Pagan laws during the earlier centuries of the Empire were constantly repealing the disabilities of women, whereas it was the aim of the canon law to substitute enactments which should impose upon the female sex the most offensive personal restrictions and stringent subordination."

Even marriage and the production of offspring – which in the pagan world had been an honour to both sexes – was stigmatized. No priest of God might approach a woman, scarcely even look at her, and no woman was allowed to serve at God's altar. Celibacy was a virtue so great in man that none set apart for the highest duties might marry, and woman was encouraged to suppress in herself all the sweet and wholesome instincts for motherhood – an instinct upon which the race hung dependent, one for which she willingly suffered the sharp pangs of childbirth – and instead to immure herself in convents and endeavour to find solace in the spiritual ecstasies of morbid meditation.

Now was woman at last robbed and poor indeed! Her social and civil equality having been yielded in exchange for protection, her protectors had bereft her of all moral rights, and denounced as unclean the function for the perfect performance of which she had paid out all her goods. It was the triumph of the Oriental idea over the ideals of the Occident, and so deeply did the Eastern thought stamp itself upon the Western mind that only to-day the latter begins to free itself from the yoke of the Asian Paul's fierce egotism of sex. So deeply indeed did this thought penetrate, that historians do not hesitate to attribute to this scorn of woman and her mission of childbearing a long delay in the development of European civilization. The higher spiritual natures, being more under the influence of the Church, accepted its suggestions of asceticism and left the baser sort to perpetuate the race and thus delayed the processes of evolution.

It was the denial by the Church of the beauty and nobility of natural love that drove the Middle Ages to the invention of chivalry and the romantic love of the unwedded, that they might evade the ban and find some outlet for the emotions.

With the Reformation, that first uprising of the Western mind against Asian domination, men threw off the yoke in so far as it bound their own necks, and declared the rightness and reasonableness of all their mental and physical functions. It was no longer a shame for the priest of God to mate with a woman, nor a weakness for a man to round his life with the fulness of joy to be found in connubial love, when he at the same time assumed its duties and responsibilities. The ingrained contempt of women was not so easily eradicated. Honour the man defined for himself as integrity, wholeness, a development of every power to its highest possibility. Honour for woman was simply chastity. That is to say, if she repressed all the animal side of life she might entirely neglect the spiritual. She might be but indifferently honest, a liar, a slanderer and a tattler, guilty of every minor baseness, and yet be held in good and honourable repute. The wonder is that woman's morals survived at all so false a training!

Centuries of such teaching wrought their wretched work despite all the forces of nature. Virginity instead of purity became the ideal of the highest type of woman, who shrank from the fulfilment of her functions as a stepping down, instead of glorying in it as the fulfilment of her sacred purpose. What had been urged upon her upon every side she endeavoured to conform to in the spirit as well as the letter. Her mind strained towards the virginal as well as her body. The higher type of woman cried out to man for spiritual rather than physical love, and she found his natural sane tenderness for her person brutal rather than beautiful. The young girl, sedulously guarded from knowledge of the fundamental reasons of her being, cast suddenly and unprepared into marriage, shrank with disgust from a relation which her husband – educated in wholeness of thought – regarded as the culmination of the flower of life into its fruit. It is not too much to say that four fifths of all modest, pure girls – as a result of their foolish training – contemplated the sexual relation with the bitterest reluctance. They had been led to believe that virginity was in itself a virtue, instead of regarding it only as the sanctification of the body until such time as it legitimately becomes the temple of life. With many this feeling survived marriage, and embittered it to both the wife, who resented what she looked upon as a baser nature in the man, and to the man who resented, and was rebuffed by the coldness of his companion.

At least half of the disappointments and failures of marriage arose from the mistaken training of good women.

Ten years ago this Patristic ideal still had a strong hold upon the race, but the long centuries of study of the Latin and Greek literatures in the schools finally, almost suddenly, bore fruit. We had through our school boys and girls imbibed the spirit of the two European races whom the Semitic influences had never dominated. One wonders that some foolish so-called progressives should now be wishing to drop those literatures from the curriculum of students, though perhaps their work is done. At all events we hear very little now of this talk of the inferiority of women.

When the miracles of male achievement are pointed to to-day, women know enough to say proudly, "Did man make this? Well, I made man"; and is content.

May 4. Seville.

The Beauty of Cruelty

What a people are these, – these Spaniards! This afternoon – Sunday – I saw my first bull-fight. One need never wonder again at the Roman Arena and its horrors. It is as incredible that human beings can sit through such spectacles as that women could have reversed their thumbs when a staggering, bloody barbarian turned up a glazed eye to seek mercy… And this, after two thousand years of Catholicism, of Christianity!

These Spaniards say – staring stupidly at your horror – "Mas, no es Cristianos. They are only animals." Animals! – and yet Christians dare talk of divine mercy; of their faith having softened hearts, and sweetened human nature. Civilization has done so, in truth, but where this faith reigns most arbitrarily such an atrocious spectacle is permissible; goes undenounced of its priests.

It is not the baser sort alone who love this cowardly butchery. In the same box with ourselves sat a woman and her two daughters, evidently members of the upper classes. The arena below was crowded with the people – women in sulphur-coloured shawls, embroidered with sharp blues and scarlets – men of all classes – dandies and workmen cheek by jowl – but the rows of boxes above held the women and children of the well-to-do, even the aristocracy. The Royal family itself patronizes the arena.

The women, whose faces I watched instead of the shambles after the fight began, grew devilish, a hard smile drew their lips back over their teeth; their eyes glittered; a look of lust strained the lines about the nose. They forced the children – some of whom cried, and shrank from the horrid sight – to turn and see the blood and the struggle.

I believe the secret charm of this gory game to many is the prick that the sight of blood gives to the senses. The history of war is full of evidence of this fact – that the sight of horrors spurs the passions. It was curious to think that many of the people there owed their existence to just such a stimulus as this. Cruelty thus lies, hereditarily, at the very roots of their being; intensified in each generation.

For the same reason, I suppose, that so much of my life seems to me a glamour of tangled shadows, elusive and shifting, with no definite line between the real and the unreal, between to-day and all the yesterdays – for that reason the arena's gaunt, windowless walls and passages seemed startlingly familiar. Equally familiar the yellow, sand-strewn circle; the glaring blue sky above the bright-coloured maelström of faces; the whirl of fans all around the ring – as of a circle of innumerable dancing butterflies; the cries of the venders; the clang of the trumpets; the glitter of the tinsel and gew-gaws; the bold rush of the black bull; the quick spatter of the applauding hands…

No animal was ever more beautiful than this splendid beast, the perfect focus of power and rage. He knew that he was facing murder. There was desperation in his glance from the first moment, but he simply didn't know the meaning of cowardice. He knew there was no use in anything he might do; that his courage, and beauty, and long battle for life, would not stir to pity one of those hard, handsome faces with their dark shaven jaws and tight lips, but he struck at his foes with all his force in mere sullen fury. He tore open the bellies of the shivering, sweating, blindfolded horses, who staggered a few steps trailing their entrails in the sand and then crumpled helplessly; he caught a man in the breast and tossed him over the barrier with blood spurting from the hole his horn had made. He himself leaped the fence once, as agile as a deer, and brushed the crowd back like flies, but he did it all without a sign of hope, and never made a sound.

Pricked, goaded, red streams running over his satin skin and searing his eyes, stumbling wildly here and there, his sides sunk in, his muzzle dragging in the dust, dumb, dull fury in his heart at his useless torture, spurred to new effort by explosive darts that tore his flesh into gory, pendulous ribbons, hissed by the women, he fell at last upon his knees in blind helplessness…

How it ended I don't know. A rage of horror squeezed my heart till the tears spurted from my lids. It seemed necessary to seize some weapon and slaughter indiscriminately the men who were murdering this poor brute for mere amusement, the women who were hissing his death throes. In such horrid sequence does cruelty engender cruelty.

The people about me regarded my emotion and retreat with surprise and contempt. Some such sensation, I suppose, as would have been felt by a Roman who should have seen me shed tears when the big cats of the arena crushed the bones of some brave young barbarian or Christian. These creatures were so far beneath him in the scale of existence that he could not conceive of any poignancy of suffering or emotion in such a mere animal. Was not one hair of a Roman worth many sparrows – or Christians?

The Jewish democrat tried to teach the world to recognize the value of the individual, the sanctity of each human life – when will a Christ of the beasts arise?

May 5.

This old world, with its horrors and its beauties, how tame it makes our smug, comfortable America appear!.. Yesterday I wished to make a hecatomb of the Spaniards. To-day I forgive them everything because of the Sevillian dancers. My lusts are all of the eye. I can quite conceive Herod tossing the Baptist's head to the supple Salome in an ecstasy of approval. Dancing, when it is good, is more beautiful to me than music. And this dancing is very good.

The muscular gymnastics, which modern Italy has imposed upon the world as dancing, are as dissimilar from the real thing as the fiorituri singing is from the old bel canto. The Spaniards make dancing – as all arts should be made – the poetical expression of life and love. Such ardour and seduction, such abandon to the joy of living, such rage and daring, such delicate coquetry and wild wooing!.. there is nothing like it out of Spain, the country where they torture helpless animals for sport.

Is there, perhaps, some secret tie between cruelty and beauty; between crime and art? It is certain that religious reformers have always thought so, and have acted with logical fury. In our peaceful, decent country, beauty, except such as Nature herself affords, is rare. A race that loves its neighbour as itself seems incapable of creating an art. The good Swiss have done nothing for the mind's delight: the virtuous Spartans could not even appreciate loveliness when they saw it. Nearly all the great periods of flowering in art come after the roots of a nation have been watered in blood, after some frightful crise of suffering. It would seem as if bringing forth must be always accompanied by birth-pangs.

May 7. Granada.

The Duke of Wellington's Trees

H – said that the greatness of a people depended upon its trees. This sounded rather cryptic, and I entreated him to be more diffuse. We were walking home from that enchanted garden, owned by the Pallavicini, which rewarded the Moor for betraying his city. The May moon was shining on the white mountain tops, and the jargoning of the snow-brooks sounded about our feet. The air smelled of orange flowers and roses, and the nightingales were shouting in the gloom of those one hundred thousand trees planted by the Duke of Wellington.

"This Spanish peninsula," H – said, "under the rule of the Moors, supported thirty millions of people in comfort. The Christian kings allowed the upland forests to be ruthlessly sacrificed, and now look at Spain."

"One swallow" – I quoted. "Will one instance support a theory?"

"No; but I could give you a dozen. Carlyle and the rest of the historians have talked the fearfulest rot about France under the monarchy which preserved her forests. Of course, every one has weakly credited the stories of oppression and starvation in aristocratic France. And yet the sons of these peasants, who were pitifully pictured snatching at leaves of those forests for food, overran Europe. I don't believe that children bred in starvation could ever have had the vitality to be conquerors. At all events, when the land was divided and the forests delivered to spoliation, the population of France began to decline. Possibly the modern effort at reforesting the country may arrest that decline."

"Just listen to the noise of those nightingales," I said. "Do you suppose we shall be able to sleep?"

May 15. Naples.

The Boy with the Goose

The Pompeian bronze, which the guide books and catalogues name The Boy with the Goose, is quite wrongly named. The lad carries a wine-skin. The rude, swollen outlines of the pig are clear, and the attitude of the boy one may see any water-seller in Tangier assume when called upon for a drink – the arm raised, the body tilted back upon the hip to elevate the lip of the skin, so that no more water may flow than is needed. The whole, a delicious bit of genre, smiling and vivid after two thousand years.

There is a curious vitality of a trifling custom discoverable here in the Pompeian museum. The great bronze horses of Balbo have forelocks wrapped and twisted in exactly the same fashion that still prevails all along this Neapolitan shore. The breed has changed utterly; bone and structure have altered and shrunk, but the vetturino, who drives through the streets of Naples to-day, twists up that bit of hair in exactly the same manner as did the coachman of Glaucus or Balbo.

May 30. Rome.

A God Indeed