VENTURES IN WORLDS MARIAN COX VENTURES IN WORLDS BY MARIAN COX SPIRITUAL CURIOSITIES VENTURES IN WORLDS CROWDS AND THE VEILED WOMAN MARIAN COX [PHOTOGRAPH BY ARNOLD GENTHE] VENTURES IN WORLDS BY MARIAN COX NEW YORK MITCHELL KENNERLEY 1915 COPYRIGHT, IQIS, BY MITCHELL KENNERLEY PRINTED IN AMERICA CONTENTS IN NEW WORLDS PAGE OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 3 OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 45 OUR NERVOUS HUMANITY 94> IN OLD WORLDS THE MAN-MADE WOMAN OF JAPAN 123 A CUP OF TEA IN JAPAN 167 MR. GRUNDY AND EVE'S DRESS 196 3418G3 IN NEW WORLDS VENTURES IN WORLDS OUR MUSICAL CULTURE AS we devour the printed page for knowl- edge of the Crazy War that is devastating the Old World, at this moment, we read con- stantly of music, as it figures in records of the singing soldiers, the national anthems, the bugles and the drums, the regimental bands that play during battle, the gramophones in the trenches, and of all that terrible sonority which is resounding through the world inspired by the fatal song of Germany: "Germany over all." And war, the supreme art of the savage, and music, the supreme art of the cultured, have met as allies in this century's Dance of Death that will conquer by baton as by bayonet. This is the War of Culture. So Germany, its sponsor, has declared; and modern culture is characterized by music more strongly than by any other influence of art. Human nature 4 VENTURES IN WORLDS is sincere in this art; for music is the so-called language of the emotions and the emotional be- ing is not a falsifier such as the thinking being. Music is thus the most natural art of man al- though it did not attain its consummate expres- sion until the nineteenth century. It is curious to see how musical expression has developed with the complexities and struggles of modern civilization as though it were the only natural outlet left to cultured man and so he must pour his soul into his song. The genius of the age is the genius of matter, of the triumph of things. There is Romanism in it and skyscrapers and the survival-of-the- fittest. Music is perfectly adapted as an art- medium to the genius of this age, and it exposes as nothing else the modern soul of man in its passionate egoism, its mystic cruelty, its ruth- less hunger for vitality and change, its cry for life, in short. Music has always found its highest expres- sion at periods of aggressive materialism such as the present time and in the conquering days of imperial Rome. Modern music, in fact, is said to be "the last great legacy which Rome OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 5 has left to the world." The Greeks, though the most aesthetic people the world has known, developed every art except that of music. It is true they created the theory of music as a sort of intellectual feat but, outside of that, they showed no comprehension of the nature and effects of music, as we know them to-day. The Greeks lived out their lives so simply, freely and objectively that they never discov- ered the subjective sources of music as the Romans did. Rome boasted of her opposition to all the arts and yet the renaissance of music began beneath her iron heel. Her concrete and austere mind was incapable of the broad culture that humanized the Greeks and yet musical culture found its first congenial soil in those law-making, force-worshipping days when Christianity was contributing nothing as yet but more conflicts, new kinds of conflicts and oppressions to the existence of man. The monks of the Roman Church first evolved the subjective element in modern mu- sic, for the erotico-religious diathesis is essen- tial to creativeness in music as in every art and this received its greatest impetus from 6 VENTURES IN WORLDS those renunciatory, monastic souls who sought in music what was denied to them in life. But at last like all predatory materialists Rome grew senile and suicidal, and suc- cumbed through sheer fear of life before the young German barbarians that rushed in to conquer the Roman Empire, then the World's Empire. Perhaps the hordes of young blond beasts sang then as they are singing now their terrible song of "Germany over All." And the sovereignty of music passed on from Rome to Germany. Mammon, Megalomania and Melomania. They breathed like three Fatalities in the spirit of Rome; and Germany, her conqueror, has been the first inheritor of that Roman spirit, second to which comes our own imperial young America. Musical, military Germany so modern and yet ancient as Rome ! There is a difference of degree and not of kind be- tween the war-lusts of Cgesar's conquests and the music-lusts of Wagner's day. But the Roman spirit is the distinctly mod- ern spirit in Germany. Dormant for centu- ries, its culture has burst into its century-plant- OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 7 like bloom during a brief period, beginning with the Bismarckian influence. Once there was a Golden Age in German culture, a hun- dred years ago, when the German mind was idealistic instead of materialistic and produced all its great poets and philosophers, its Goethe, Kant and Schiller. That was before the Ger- man knew how great he was. Not yet tutored in the snobbery of his culture German Cul- ture over All! his mind retained its capacity for true culture. Culture is a result of our ad- mirations and not of our antagonisms ; but the Herr Instructors of Germany reversed this order. The cultured mind, or mind capable of culture, is an open mind, receptive, growing, healthy plastic and mobile like all living things. But the modern cultured mind of Germany is a closed mind, closed by antagon- ism, chauvinism, the sickliness of arrogance and pose. The soldier could not exist in hu- man society except for the snob ; and the most incendiary doctrine in the world is to teach the little man how great he is for he has no means of proving it except by fighting. There are many ways to make man crazy. 8 VENTURES IN WORLDS One is to teach him his own supremacy in an irreverent universe; and another is to intoxi- cate him with his own ego through music. Both influences have heen exerted upon the unfortunate German proletariat by modern culture, the culture of baton and bayonet. Two insane kings of Germany, Emperor William the Second, the great Megalomaniac who started the Self -over- All movement, and his cousin Ludwig of Bavaria, the great Melo- maniac who started the Wagner movement, were the gardeners of this modern culture whose monstrous seed has produced the Furor Teutonicus which craves a world's plaudits for its bloody arena of Glory. Surely the sane remnant of humankind should feel compelled at last to attack this royal Prestige of Culture that ministers to the roots of war. The very word, Culture! has possessed such a charm for us. Above all its other forms Musical Culture! has been so sounding and subtle in its spell, so bewitching, alluring, ego-tickling and glorified that it re- quires a new point of view now that all culture OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 9 is under suspicion because of the twentieth- century Fall of Man. Perhaps a recent personal experience has prejudiced me in my association of musical culture with the spirit of the great war. Last summer I was one of the marooned Americans in Europe; and the war-panic landed me in Bayreuth during those staggering first weeks of the mobilization that followed after August the first. Now he to whom the name of Bay- reuth is meaningless must confess himself one of the unanointed in Culture's forms and creeds ; for little Bayreuth of Bavaria wields an influence upon modern culture as great as that once possessed by little Weimer during the days of the Goethe- Schwaermerei. Until the fatal date last summer when big Berlin under- took the job of spreading culture, little Bay- reuth was actually making a world-conquest for German culture which now can never be accomplished, but ruined, by Berlin's cannons of culture. Bayreuth brought the world to Germany, Berlin has driven the world from Germany. Bayreuth was the Pied Piper of 10 VENTURES IN WORLDS civilization; and we flocked willingly to its strains as culture's elect; Wagnerites, Nietz- scheans, Pro-Teutons, super-educated Amer- icans, nomadic royalties, and gilt-edged cos- mopolitans. Everybody who was anybody went to Bayreuth, or hoped to go to Bayreuth, once in a lifetime, at least, like an ambitious Moslem to Mecca. In Bayreuth is it superogatory to state? Wagner, "The Cagliostro of Modernism," was born and lived and died, in the flesh but not in the spirit. While he lived he had the Bayreuther Blatter said to be "the only instance known of a newspaper founded ex- clusively for the deification of a living man"- and dead he has all Bayreuth living upon his name and tomb which attracts all the music- idolators of Europe and America. The heart of Wagnerism, of course, is Bayreuth; but culture has brought other rich contributions to its atmosphere in the way of, to him who hath shall be given and there is a Bayreuth- ianism of culture in which the most influential great names figure as residents at one time or other. Jean Paul Richter lived here, and Max OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 11 Sterner who wrote the "Ego and his Own" and Nietzsche and Houston Chamberlain; and an endless list of illustrious names could be added to those that have bestowed such a daz- zling prestige upon the little capital of Upper Franconia. Every two years the Wagnerian Festival takes place in Bayreuth and the town is then filled with the visiting foreigners and notabil- ities upon whose revenue the population almost entirely subsists. It was during the Festival period that I made my involuntary visit to Bayreuth. We were at Carlsbad when the tocsin of war sounded and were part of the helter- skelter exodus that fled, with American trust and scepticism, in any direction that seemed to point "home." The day after the news of Germany's declaration of war penetrated to the Spa, we fled in a French automobile with a French chauffeur straight into Germany; and there the now well-known tourist's troubles in the war-zone began for us. The spy-mania was at its height. Every town and hamlet had its mob espying a spy in every foreigner, 12 VENTURES IN WORLDS with a savage fanaticism that carried one back to the witch-hunting days of the Middle Ages. Those peasant-mobs of the Bavarian hills, through which we passed, had been told that the Foreigners had brought a War upon Ger- many! and their fear of the foreigner ex- pressed itself in a malignant suspicion and per- secution of every hapless foreigner caught in the trap of Europe's catastrophe. "It is all ignorance," we declared to ourselves, for the sake of human faith, "this insensate fear and hate that makes war on an automobile because it is marked 'French,' or upon a whole world because it is marked by frontiers it is nothing but ignorance." Well, it would make a long story, that of our perilous flight and escapes from German village doltishness ; and my sub- ject limits me to the musical side of my fright- ful adventure, which began after our arrival in Bayreuth. Bayreuth, with its fame for culture and its evidence of civilization, seemed at first like a haven to our peace-loving American souls, so averse to the "dangerous living" which Nietzsche extols as a "tonic for the system." OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 13 "Here, surely, a poor foreign devil is safe," we said. "Without trains or automobile, or trunks or passports or credit or money or a Thomas Cook's or a Consul, here surely we are safe because Bayreuth is a city of culture and a resort of foreigners." We were hungering for some sign of the old European courtship of foreigners, so fa- miliar to Americans, and believed some flick- ering grace of it would be found in this sophis- ticated haunt of cosmopolitanism. But alas! we spent three weeks in Bayreuth trying to prove that we were desirable aliens with no de- sire to spy upon anything except a way out of our own troubles; and it looked as if we would have to remain there until the war was over unwanted and yet withheld until a certain lucky accident, which is another story. Those three weeks in Bayreuth possessed the vibrant monotony of a bit of eternity in a Hell of Suspense. The mobilization was going on and all Bayreuth was in suspense as it watched the soldiers springing forth from its civilian life, like a crop of Cadmus-teeth. Nobody seemed to know what had happened, why it 14 VENTURES IN WORLDS had happened, or what was about to happen. There was "no news" except the official news that bewildered instead of convinced. At the Wagner-Festspielhaus during the last act of "Parsifal," Saturday night, the singers and the audience had been informed for the first time, of Germany's declaration of war. This meant the immediate closing of the opera house, the cancelling of all contracts, the tearing down of the festival decorations from the houses and streets, and the precipitate flight of the visiting music-lovers and music-makers upon the last passenger trains before they were monopolized for the troops. Bayreuth is a garrison town; and thereafter, every hour of the day and the night, the whistling little trains arrived at the Bahnhof to take away their load of youth for the minotaur, War, across the frontiers. A new kind of singing then reverberated through those Wagnerian streets attuned to the hush of a seeing, hearing, sympathetic cul- ture to the soul-cry of man. The singing of the soldiers as they passed through the hushed streets in small tramping troops, so brand-new and strong, swinging their limbs together as OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 15 rhythmically as a machine. Sometimes the wives and children trudged along beside the troops, mutely, until they reached the station and the trains started off with the singing soldiers, and then they cheered. But the whistle of the train always drowned the final cheering and singing, like the shriek of some triumphant thing that carries off its prey to the bourne whence no traveller returns. The little station was just opposite the hotel where we stopped and they passed by our win- dows every hour : infantry and cavalry, march- ing to the measure of their song, or rumbling over the cobblestones with their commissariat and cannon. One lady at our hotel frequently broke down and wept, declaring that she could "stand anything except the singing of the soldiers." The first few days at Bayreuth, we seemed to be the only derelicts from the foreign hegira, but soon a small community of the stranded were discovered to each other ; and we collected together, now and then, for the exchange of rumors and the gregarious illusion of safety. In the company of misery our war-stunned 16 VENTURES IN WORLDS minds found many small comforts for our plight. It was a comfort to find that Madam Schumann-Heink was with us, she was as vociferously American in Germany as she is vociferously German in America! and to en- counter Dr. Muck, of the Boston Symphony, who always brought "news" in the German language which kept us zealously curious, as we could not understand a word of it; and it filled us with a comforting sense of the in- discriminating justice of German authority to discover as we did that the man who is often referred to nowadays as one of the chief collab- orators of Germany's gospel of war, Houston Chamberlain, was under strict Police surveil- lance in Bayreuth as a foreigner, a pseudo- Englishman and potential spy. But we dared not venture forth upon the streets of Bayreuth for fear of the mob that reigned as despotically in this musically cul- tured atmosphere as in the benighted districts that had never heard the tones that are said to soothe the savage breast of man. Not a day passed without hearing of some vandalism committed by the mob. A shop-window OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 17 broken because it bore the French sign "Cafe," an automobile smashed because it was of for- eign make, some poor alien wanderer attacked as a spy; and once a Russian Princess, sister of the Czar, a Festival visitor in Bayreuth, fell into the hands of the mob and was seri- ously injured before rescued by some cosmo- politan-spirited Bavarians. Those beery, mu- sical Philistines who composed the mob, but were called "the people," of Bayreuth, must have found that kind of intoxication in popu- lar outbursts of fury which Wagner tells about in his "Life," when confessing to his share in the students' vandalism at Leipzig. But the climax came in the rumor, which con- stantly recurred, that the Festspielhaus was about to be burned down by the "people" be- cause it had been the cause of the foreigner's invasion of Bayreuth, and it was the foreign- ers now who were seeking to destroy the Fa- therland and its Culture. While in Bayreuth I suffered a series of disillusions regarding all that I had fancied, previously, about the psychologic results of musical culture, and the completion of the 18 VENTURES IN WORLDS process came through a personal contact with Siegfried, son of Richard Wagner. Siegfried Wagner is known to all the cognoscenti of modern music, for he rules like a sovereign in their world of culture and careers. His favor, or royal invitation to sing at Bayreuth is the ultima thule of every musical student and singer in Germany. His nod can make or un- make fortunes. His smile confers the nth de- gree of distinction upon the golden-throated. A great father and a great mother, Cosima, daughter of Franz Liszt, inherited gifts, a vast fortune (he is reputed to be worth 60,000,- 000 marks which everybody in Bayreuth will tell you as the first item in his biography) and a world-ennobled place these have been the factors for the creation of this personality which one can justly expect to embody the culled flower of our civilization. Siegfried Wagner is a picturesque figure on the streets of Bayreuth, where we saw him pass every day at a certain hour, on his way to the Biirgerreuth or to the station to meet the trains of soldiers to whom he distributed auto- graphed post-card pictures of himself, with the OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 19 naive liberality of a master of life's gifts. He was invariably accompanied by a huge St. Bernard dog, and several Fraus or Frauleins who followed in his wake and had the prim womanly air of instruction in applause if not in music. He is below the average height for a German, and always wore knickerbockers and was hatless upon the streets. A shock of grey hair crowning a long-featured large face gives him a sort of pale leonine distinction. He walks in quick nervous steps, but slightly bent forward, with a self-absorbed unseeing air, as if he were in a tremendous hurry about nothing at all, except himself. He has a Semitic profile, in blondness, and round china- blue eyes, hard as steel, though their contour is drooping. Evidently he is very vain of his appearance, for one sees it portrayed every- where, on every wall and in every shop-win- dow, in every pose and form and surroundings, in Bayreuth. The Owl Restaurant has a room entirely devoted to Siegfried's portraiture, at every age, and it was here that I met him one evening. Every evening, at the same hour, Siegfried 20 VENTURES IN WORLDS can be seen at the Owl Restaurant, which is situated obscurely in a back-alley, but englam- oured as a one-time rendezvous of Richard Wagner. Here the master used to drink beer and eat white radish every night at a cer- tain hour; and every night at a certain hour, the son can now be seen drinking beer and eat- ing white radish just like his father. I was introduced to him by one of the stranded sing- ers who trembled at his own temerity in intro- ducing "a foreigner, at this time, to Herr Wagner." But our exchange of words was brief. "Do you speak German?" were his first words to me, uttered out of one side of his mouth, full of white radish. At my negative reply he turned away and made fluent comments in his own language to his party of ladies. My companion translated for me that the Herr Wagner expressed as- tonishment at the daring of Americans in thus venturing into lands where they did not speak the language. Then the great man turned to me again, but only to stare, silently, for awhile, as though he were trying to make up his mind OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 21 about that ubiquitous creature before him, the American woman, who, so evidently, does not know her place at home. His eyes were very round and hard, his face in a cud-like absorp- tion, before he began to question me with the mannerless abruptness of a child or a king. I had been told before I met him that he had "the manners of royalty." "What does America think of the war?" he asked. "How can we know?" I replied, despair- ingly. "We have been in Germany since the war began. But" I added, with the tact learned by much globe-trotting "America is the friend of Germany. It is said that one quarter of the American people are Germans, you know, by birth or descent." At this a vague smile of approval lightened his heavy face. He translated my remark to his ladies and seemed to discuss the war with them, for awhile, pleasingly, without opposi- tion to his views. The German lady is so well-raised to please the musical and martial male! And then he turned again to me and stared and chewed and thought and chewed, 22 VENTURES IN WORLDS before he gave me the fruit of his ruminations in a startling oracular remark. "This war is America's opportunity," an- nounced Siegfried Wagner. "America ought to grab Canada and grab Mexico and grab everything else she can get." The rest of our conversation is irrelevant; besides I can never get beyond the memory of this Grab-policy of life, as the enunciated faith of a High Priest of Culture, in my reminiscences of Bayreuth. Since then I have placed the musicians, the militarists and the millionaires all together as the makers of our modern predatory civilization. A recent newspaper interview quotes the Princess von Biilow (the American-born wife of the German prince) as saying: "I would I might have a thousand tongues to tell everybody in the land of my birth how gloriously noble and great our Germany is. Here is the true justice, here true greatness. When I see the troops pass by, when I feel the breeze of the spirit that now goes through all Germany, then I seem to be in Bayreuth again at the inauguration day of the Fest- OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 23 spielhaus when Richard Wagner raised the baton and the Ninth Symphony resounded in splendid harmony, or three years later, when for the first time, and directly by the master himself, the Ring der Nibelungen brought his inspiring accords to my ear." I, too, will always see Bayreuth and the Festspielhaus again when I remember the pass- ing troops of German soldiers, singing as if to the Wagnerian libretto of "Grab, grab, grab." After I returned to America, it struck me for the first time that our Empire city has adopted the culture of Bayreuth as she has adopted the clothes of Paris : one as the decora- tion of the mind, the other as the decoration of the body. It is but a step from the Huns of German culture to the Snobs of American culture. In America, our musical culture has been a costly indulgence which may yet cost us our dearly bought Democracy. To consider the money side alone, it is amazing to realize that the United States spends annually 600,000,000 dollars for its people's music, a sum three times 24 VENTURES IN WORLDS greater than that which it spends for the army and navy. The price of our musical in- dulgence makes insignificant, in comparison, even the large sum represented by the liquor bill, another form of our national weaknesses. But the human toll we pay for music is more interesting to estimate than the financial cost. It is estimated that ten thousand young girls come to the Metropolis every year for the pur- pose of studying music. How many of this number are ever heard of afterwards in the musical professions? Their little veneer of musical culture merely unfits them for their homes; and the lure of music for American womankind has broken up more homes and has broken more hearts than all the other lures that we have heard so much about, the past year. Our constant flow of young blood to Europe and especially to Germany is chiefly in quest of this ignis fatuus of the am- bitious; and musical ambition has been more derogatory to American prestige and ideals than the financial ambition, for which we are so much accused. The Old World comes to OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 25 America for money; but we desert the New World for music. Everybody recognizes the fact that some- thing has destroyed the true values and hap- piness in the home-life of the American people, but no one, as yet, has traced it to its source: the influence wielded over the home by the modern musical culture that is symbolized by the piano in my lady's parlor. The royal pre- rogatives of the piano is the only original dis- covery made by the American woman. The piano has never affected the middle class of England, the bourgeois of France, or the folk of Germany in which countries it is also the symbol of gentility ! as it has affected the American "people" in their homes. In the East it is at the core of our servant-problem, in the West of our servant-famine. It has cast the social odium upon the hands that work, and has sicklified with vanity the hands that play on the piano. It has made "a lady" out of what would have been a wholesome female, and this perversion of nature constitutes a common tragedy of domestic life, particularly in rural districts. The saloon thrives in sec- 26 VENTURES IN WORLDS tions where there is a thriving commerce in pianos. One musical member of a family can demoralize all the rest with false ideals, nerves, and the sacrifice of one's individual taste to what the world calls "culture." Doubtless every one, at some time in life, has encountered the pathos of a shabby-genteel family, which has sent a daughter "abroad to study music." The fatuous pride of it! The blighting self- denials! The cankering emptiness of the ex- istence hungry for the clapping of hands around a lady's performance at the piano! "Home" to the American woman has come to mean simply a parlor with a piano. Without this setting there is no place for her, it seems, except the streets; and yet her presence in the parlor is actually more injurious to the human race than on the streets. On the streets there is, at least, the open air, the widening skies, humanity in its heart-tugging democratic ap- peal, and the loss of one's own overswollen identity. But in the parlor with its presiding piano, there is unwholesome narrowness, hot- house snobbery, the "holier than thou" of man's perverted sense of culture a little cage for OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 27 the dwarfed breeding of the three Fatalities: Melomania, Megalomania, and Mammon. It is the lady-soloist and not the woman- suffragist upon whom the male-critics should direct their militant attacks, for she is indeed the real destroyer of human nobility and the high ideals of the home. And upon our Upper Ten, the Four Hun- dred, the Smart Set, the Purse-Proud and Culture- Cultists, our musical culture does not set more admirably than upon the aspiring masses. They place a high value upon it be- cause it supplies a mode for self-distinction from their neighbors. One must work for dis- tinction in all other fields of human ambition, but the distinguished appearance of musical culture can be purchased. Thus we see it in New York favored by all our plutocratic Pomp, the opera house serving as a public Treasury, and society therein in the smug com- placency of a Masonic Order that possesses signs and symbols for separating the sheep from the goats, the perfumed from the great unwashed and the cultured from the great uncultured. In time to come, the Horse- 28 VENTURES IN WORLDS shoe of our own Metropolitan Opera House may be depicted as the first circle of the Sin of Snobbery in the Inferno of the twen- tieth century that will be written by some future Dante. Snobbery is in the individ- ual what nationalism is in a race. It be- gins in ignorance, egoism, arrogance, and ends in the lust for conquest and "Self over all." So far our snobbery has not spread be- yond the individual into a rapacious spread- eagleism of the nation, like the winged pow- ers of darkness that have sprung from the snobbish souls of the Europe'an nations now at war. For the triple-extract of American snobbery is concentrated, as yet, within the lorgnetted spaces of the opera-box of our best society. Without the opera box, New York society would possess no real standards of suc- cess, no positive test for proving the worth of the individual, or the location of that elusive quantity called social position. The opera box supplies the ground for society's exhibitionism, culture's pageantry, and is the voting booth of social candidature. Tiaras and music, dia- monds and culture, low-necks, swell-heads and OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 29 high-brows, are all mixed up together in our ideas of what constitutes the quality of the "best people" of America; and since we can- not find their embodiments for ourselves we are too democratic to discriminate! we go to the Opera and gaze up at the dazzling Wag- nerians in their Luck's Horseshoe of boxes, as at the archtypes in an earthly Paradise. The first tier of opera boxes represents the musically cultured who compose New York society ; the second tier represents the musically cultured who have arrived in society; the third tier represents the musically cultured who are about to arrive in society. Thus we see that the best society of our Empire State is made up of three public tiers (and oceans of private ones shed by the musically inclined American lady) much as our "real thing" in aristocratic breeding is said to be made by three genera- tions of aspiration. But there are a few over-looked nonde- scripts, like myself, in America, who possess no musical culture, instinctive or acquired, and we have begun to tremble with fear before the growing formidability of .culture. A Great 30 VENTURES IN WORLDS War of Culture already upon us ! And we are informed by Germany, with all her academic and bellicose might, that culture is a matter of force and not of growth as we had believed it to be once, when we admired, respected and trusted it. Now I have heard of only one case in which musical culture was brought about by the proc- esses of brute force, the case of Ludwig von Beethoven. A biographer informs us that in his early youth Beethoven showed a strong aversion to music and that his father used to beat him to make him study and practice on the piano with the illustrious success known to all. Beethoven was a German; and from this instance one might infer that culture can be beaten into the Teutonic race. Therefore we must not blame the Germans too severely for their 1914 crusade to beat culture into the rest of the world. Nevertheless, to me and the countless un- cultured of my kind that happen to dwell in this Land of Liberty the prospect before us of more musical culture to be driven in with the whole German army behind it, is one to OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 31 appall the imagination. I can conceive of no fate more distressing than a compulsory at- tendance at operas, concerts and piano-recitals, such as we would have under Prussian rule. And to live in an atmosphere where the social pressure made it the sign and manual of good- form, to pledge one's soul to Wagnerism, would be as intolerable as to live in a land where Es ist Verboten to publicly express one's private opinion of the Kaiser. But such a future we now have to face. Music, canonized, worshipped, sanctified society formed of its gaudy priests and bleat- ing laity its heretics damned to secret tor- tures tortures adapted to the modern mind of man with the refined deviltry of the In- quisitorial tortures once adapted to the ancient body of man: The horrification of the pros- pect! The goose-flesh of the very idea! I shudder and perspire as though in the future throes of Wagnerism as my imagination con- ceives it. Even as conditions now exist in still free America, there is a plague of music that is difficult for peace-lovers to escape. Much ill- 32 VENTURES IN WORLDS health, and therefore crime, can be traced to its inescap ability. In this morning's paper I read the headlines "Murder and Suicide Caused by a Hymn" which tells of a man, Joseph Sellars by name, who shot his wife, son and himself because enraged by the hymn- singing of his daughter. Without a doubt, the practising of vocal scales, and the music of phonographs and Hurdy-Gurdies are re- sponsible for much of the crime that occurs in urban population; for they most subtly reach and stir both the homicidal and suicidal im- pulses of man. In a realistic drama of New York life, "The Easiest Way," a Hurdy- Gurdy plays a part that is significant. While the heroine lies sobbing upon her frugal bed in a paroxysm of choice between the good and the bad a Hurdy-Gurdy, outside, starts up its Festival airs, and the lady chooses the easi- est way. We New Yorkers all suffer from indigestion of the nerves caused by the mel- odic din of restaurant life as much as by their overseasoned repasts. Noise, laughter, chat- ter, and music! They are all so fashionable because they express vitality, juvenality, red- OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 33 blood, Nietzschism, and the faith of the heir of Wagner. These are the molding admira- tions of our modern minds and they have brought us the culture of noise. In our cul- tured society, the noisiest entertainment is con- sidered the most successful, the noisiest hostess is the most courted, the noisiest orator is the most convincing, and the noisiest celebrity in the arts is the most popular. When a lady wishes to entice a crowd or some of the tired business men to her afternoon tea or social function, she writes "music" in a corner of the invitation card. The promise of "music" is equivalent to a promise that there will be no conversation, no exchange of ideas, no neces- sity for the play or expression of personality. Music reduces the social world to a state of quacking clappers, cottening to the wee gods of the hour. In recent years the American people have become so affected by the music-craze, our nerves have become so morbid, our brains so emptied, our will-to-live so played upon, that nature has inspired us to seek a cure in the dance-craze. The dance-craze is nature's way 34 VENTURES IN WORLDS of ridding the human system of the poison of the music-craze. Movement is the effort of health to throw off the affections of the rnind. Henry James cautions us against the mental effects of music with this advice, "Never to suffer one's self to have an emotion at a con- cert without expressing it afterwards in some actual way." In the Middle Ages, Italy held the supreme place in musical culture among nations. "The Italians no longer think now that they sing so well," wrote Voltaire of them. And in the heyday of Italy's musical glory, a strange mal- ady broke out among the Italian people to which was given the name of the Tarantulle. It affected its victims with convulsions of the limbs which made them dance with frenzy un- til they fell exhausted or dead. An homeo- pathic cure was then discovered. Music itself was found to cure these victims of music, and thereafter troupes of itinerant musicians went through the Italian villages offering their cure for the stricken ones. Those old Italian tunes played then quick in rhythm and Bacchic as the Phrygian airs that Aristotle wished ex- OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 35 eluded from the Ideal Republic still retain the name of the malady they were designed to cure, the Tarantulle. In modern times we have found another therapeutic use for music. Alienists employ it in Insane Asylums as a cure for certain forms of psychic malady such as hysteria, epilepsy and convulsions. The insane are greatly affected by music. It calms the vio- lent, stirs the imbecile, and exalts the melan- cholic. In fact, only upon the deranged does it seem to exert an altogether wholesome and beneficial influence. Perhaps the time will come, in a more sane and kindly world, when music will be restricted to this medical use. John Stuart Mill ex- pressed his belief that the time would come when musical creativeness would be extin- guished in humanity. A higher humanity, this would be, we may be sure, a humanity be- yond all lures of melomania, megalomania, mammon and militarism. Napoleon discovered the militant value in music and doubtless the Kaiser has learned this also from the superman he has sought to 36 VENTURES IN WORLDS emulate. Napoleon once wrote from Milan to the Inspecteurs du Conservatoire, who had charged him to copy the music of Italy: "Of all the fine arts, music is that which has the most influence upon the passions, and is that which the Law ought to encourage the most." Napoleon, it seems, believed musical culture could be achieved through Legislatures just as the Kaiser believed it could be achieved through Armaments. There is another element in the psychology of music which cannot be ignored, the sex- element. This has always been found out by the professional sleuths of sex such as the Puri- tans, the Clergy, the Comstocks and the Men- tal Alienists; but the normal human being is too apt to ignore it wholly and to recognize, in music only a heavenly appeal to the divine in man. He is apt to be too vain of his pro- ficiency in musical appreciation. He declares it is so "spiritual" or "intellectual" and feels chastened and exalted after he goes through the music-loving process which has made him dream of angels. But the Moralists have always objected with OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 37 violence to any kind of Paradise on earth which man might construct for himself in spirit or senses. Therefore music fell under the vi- ciously virtuous ban when the moral-mongers discovered there was pleasure in it and that it was potent with the anathema, Sex. When the Puritans ascended to power in England in the seventeenth century, one of their first acts was an attempt to silence the music that had made the Tudor period so vital and gay. They even denounced Church-music and once destroyed the organ of Westminster Abbey as a source of corruption to the soul of man. It is certain that if the case of Morality versus Music could have been presented in words instead of emotions during those days of man's militant morality and religion, it would have been silenced, completely, long ago. One can imagine the mute indignation excited in the breast of sacerdotal man when he experienced, all involuntarily the mystic lures, and voluptuous titillations and savage thrills awakened by the uncensored, secular music of the day. The Church did the best it could for music and morality by making its 38 VENTURES IN WORLDS singers eunuchs but music seems to exist in the inextinguishable nature of things, for it has gone on developing its art surpassingly, in spite of all the ancient Celibates and modern Censors. Biologically, music is the art of the male. Noise and combat are the two sex-qualifica- tions of the male, as sympathy and service are the two sex-qualifications of the female. Thus to make music and to make war are closely related in the primal instinct of the male-or- ganism in a world that still depends upon courtship and conquest for the preservation of the species. Twentieth century humanity is seen in Europe, to-day, in a supreme tri- umph of music, war and maleness. Musicians, singers and orators are invariably over-sexed beings. Ideal lovers, romantic strayers, supersensualists. That is why their private conduct so often affords a subject for public scandal or reprobation. It has been ob- served before that the woman who is endowed with musical-genius, reveals certain stigmata of the male in her organism, mental or phys- OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 39 ical, and therefore she can be considered an abnormal woman. But the normal woman without exception possesses a susceptibility to sound, just as the normal man possesses a gift for sound, which it is useful to remember when we consider some of the many psycholog- ical mysteries of the sexes. Modern music is woman's favorite refuge from the cages and censorships of woman's existence. The prude, the mismated and the imaginative fly to it for in its wild waves they find a little exercise for their poor little emotional wings. In the Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoi expresses his opinion that music is "the most refined lust of the senses." Cultured woman, therefore, is its devotee. During the ages, woman has been made to believe that she could achieve "refinement" only by the sacri- fice of her senses, but through music woman recovers her elementary soundness again. As nature intended, music has a sexual effect on woman in inspiring her with a sense of rap- turous surrender, with a Saint Theresa-like connubiality with the Divine; and upon man, 40 VENTURES IN WORLDS also, it has a sexual effect, the dynamic effect electrifying him with sound and fury, with creativeness and destruction. It is the most natural thing in the world for a woman to fall in love with a musician, a singer, an orator, or merely a good-talker. This, woman constantly does, though it never ceases to puzzle mere man. And woman re- veals her biological weakness for sound in every sincere, realistic novel she has ever writ- ten. Invariably the authoress describes, with eloquence, the voice of the hero of her romance ; for every woman knows that nothing affects her whole being so overpoweringly as the voice of the man she loves. The defects of the voice of the American man accounts largely for his lack of attraction for the American woman; that is, in comparison to the attraction that the more sexually voiced foreigner possesses for her. I believe it was Grant Allen who remarked somewhere the exact words I do not recall that a woman could resist a man's genius, a man's looks, a man's money, could resist everything, in short, except a man's voice. Our Mother Eve was not really se- OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 41 duced by the lure of the apple, but by the al- lurement offered in the man's voice of the ser- pent. As soon as we understand this human sci- ence within music, it becomes clear that the musical sense should not receive any more es- teem or homage than is accorded to any other process of nature. Music possesses no appeal to the intellect the morals the ideals- or the spirituality of mankind. Its affinities are solely for the Will-to-Live of the species. The sincere enjoyment of music represents but a transitional stage in human evolution, and depends upon the existence of a certain degree of savagery or refined sadism in the spirit of the music-lover. Thus the music- lover can be said to be atavistic or degenerate. Music expresses the sounds of human sensibil- ity the sighs and struggles and sorrows and lusts and dreams of the human species and to be able really to enjoy their intensely mov- ing appeal one must possess the constitution of a savage or a Marquis de Sade. Music is too human, too terribly human to enjoy. It is the voice of humanity itself cry- 42 VENTURES IN WORLDS ing in the wilderness of the Infinite. A deeply sympathetic and spiritualized nature, a nature that has transcended sex and become aware of the inarticulate touch of the Omniscient can- not experience so-called enjoyment of music. We know nothing of Heaven except its Si- lence, and we must believe in God as a Deaf- mute. To step from the sublime to the ludicrous, it is significant to note here that the only ani- mal which has developed a soul and possesses sympathy for mankind the dog cannot bear music. The dog is said to possess a sixth- sense, so sensitized is he to many intangible influences that are unknown to the senses of man. The dog dislikes music. In the home he frequently reveals his wounded sensibilities by howling at the pianist or vocalist. The dog is the best friend of man. The noise that delights the child annoys the adult; the music that gives pleasure to the un- cultured adult annoys the cultured adult. It requires a finer sensibility to dislike music than to like it. Even Wagnerism appears to be a step further on towards the beatitude of si- OUR MUSICAL CULTURE 43 lence, for many music-lovers have said that after they learned to understand and to enjoy Wagner all other music became unbearable to them. Many men of genius have found music dis- agreeable, or even dangerous to themselves. Darwin, Doctor Samuel Johnson, Victor Hugo, Carlyle, Theophile Gautier, Flaubert, Dumas fils the De Goncourts, Zola, and many other great writers and artists have confessed to a constitutional antipathy to music. "Mu- sic," said Bill Nye, "is merely expensive noise." Schopenhauer often mentions his hatred of noise; De Musset, Carlyle and Flaubert lived in the country in order to escape the noise of the city; and Johnson wrote of music that it was merely the least disagreeable of noises. Bobby Burns could not distinguish one tune from another; and to Walter Scott music was but "a babble of confused sounds." Pierre de Coulevain confessed in one of her charming self -revelations that music never pleased her except when it stopped. Berlioz has described the effect of music upon himself: "first a sense of voluptuous 44 VENTURES IN WORLDS ecstasy, immediately followed by general agi- tation with palpitation, oppression, sobbing, trembling, sometimes terminating with a kind of fainting fit." Maliban fell in a convulsive fit on first hearing Beethoven's symphony in C minor. Beethoven is responsible also for a similar effect upon Richard Wagner. "I hardly know," wrote Wagner, "for what I was originally intended. I only know that I heard one evening a symphony of Beethoven's, that I thereupon fell ill of a fever, and that when I recovered I was a musician!" To conclude this study of our musical cul- ture, it seems best to summarize it in a simple definition as an erotico-religious-dementia- praecox, a disease of the soldiers and the snobs of our man-made structure of modern society. OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE IF materialism is the sin of the age, it can be traced to man's materialization of mar- riage. Nature endowed sex with mysticism in order that marriage might mean a sacred consumma- tion of two lives in love. But our civilized sys- tem of marriage has destroyed the mysticism of sex to such a degree that it has destroyed with it the deeper impulses of love, the primal passion, the biological imperative of the mo- nogamous instinct itself. The statutes of the law, the canons of the church, the conventions of society, have united their forces in such coercion of the most incor- rigible of human instincts, that the instinct has been vitiated into strange transmutations of its nature. One feels impelled to revert to the beginning of the chain of culture and to seek to discover in more elementary forms of human existence, 45 46 VENTURES IN WORLDS the long lost secret of the monogamous instinct of man. There is an abundance of testimony recorded in the natural history of marriage to prove that man was once possessed of a monogamous in- stinct so imperative that it was capable of forming life-long unions of the most idealistic type, actuated solely by the inward impulse and law of nature. But our system of mar- riage has completely ignored the inwardness of marriage the spirit of marriage for its out- wardness, the form, appearance, and law on marriage until it should not be surprising to find at last that marriage is being treated as an automatic relation and a depersonalized state that belongs more to the rights of the com- munity than to the individual. Nature intended that marriage should be the most individualistic of human acts. Its natural lure was the quest of life-enhancement for two mystics of love who sought a nest to- gether as remote as possible from public pry- ing and concern, the primal home built on a covenant of Two, on a collusion for the ex- change of the secrets of Two, a conspiracy of OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 47 nature against the peace of the community, for the primal passion is as anarchistic as it is mys- tic. But our system of marriage has socialized marriage as well as materialized it. Therefore no lure to marriage exists to-day for the mys- tics of love that will bear the test of their indi- vidualism: and when one marries it is rarely with the natural ideal of the nest and of primal passion, but is always with an ideal of the home as sacred simply and solely because the com- munity has pronounced it so. Community life both with animals and man develops the social qualities and dead- ens the personal ones. Thus the gregarious animals have become the polygamous ones, and the cultivated sociability of man has devel- oped in his nature its characteristic sex-aberra- tions. The trend of society has been away from individualism towards communism, and therefore away from the influences for mo- nogamy to the influences for promiscuity. It was the sensitive individualism of the primitive man that made him by nature a monogamist; and it is the sensitive communism of cultured 48 VENTURES IN WORLDS man that has made him by nature a polygamist, by pretence a monogamist, and consequently that which Christ condemned as the most unre- generate of humankind, the hypocrite. Monogamy was the common state in primi- tive society of "the lowest people." Many ethnographical writers have agreed upon this now, and disproved the popular idea of primi- tive promiscuity and communal marriage as a theory of the mythological stage of human in- telligence. In primitive society promiscuity and polygamy were the exceptional and un- natural conditions of human relations, brought about by the eventualities of war, established female subjection, the influence of alien civ- ilization and the degeneracy of the peoples. But the vast majority of savages, primitives and barbarians have been monogamous when living in a state of nature, and when, in later stages, there have been other forms of mar- riage they have been modified in a monoga- mous direction. Alfred Russell Wallace says that "The savage is more chaste, more moral and more normal in his sexual relations than the civilized being." Neither celibacy nor OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 49 prostitution, shame, hypocrisy nor obscenity, were factors in the sex-life of the primitive be- ing. By instinct he was a monogamist like all the higher primates because he possessed the natural mysticism of sex which made all sex relations and processes appear religious to him. Even in the monogamous animals, one can not fail to recognize that the mystic or psychic side of sex is as essential and imperative as its physical impulse. Otherwise one could not account for that phenomenon in the vast ma- jority of the lower orders of life, in which gen- eration is restricted to the briefest of seasons and yet the male and female remain together for many seasons or a lifetime. Westermarck thus explains animal monogamy: "The tie which joins male and female is an instinct de- veloped through the powerful influence of natural selection" But there were other influences, more pro- found and complex, that once preserved the subtle forces of the monogamous instinct in man. In certain studies of primitive society among the best known those of Wester- 50 VENTURES IN WORLDS marck, Frazer and Crawley there is given a fund of facts about primitive customs and ideas regarding sex which suggests to the mind a new train of surmise in explanation of the failure of monogamy in the higher forms of life. Obviously the monogamy of the primitive is explained by his mystic attitude to the married relation, but the means by which he sought to preserve the spirit of marriage have been over- looked in their significance and direction for monogamy in civilization. The atmosphere deemed essential by the natural man as inti- mated by all his ways and ideas and customs for the spirit of marriage, was one of secrecy, strangeness and sanctity. The primitive re- garded his person as sacred, hence the most personal of the relations of life became sacred to him in a way that makes its "sacredness," as exploited by modern society, a word of mock- ery. In his desire to keep the married rela- tion sacred and apart from all other relations, social, domestic, and material, there was prac- tised in relatively all the monogamous races a more or less elaborate system of suspension of OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 51 marital rights, of taboos in the common home life, and of periodic separations of husband and wife sometimes extending over the space of three or four years which was observed with a religious and mystical scrupulosity. They preserved the "purity of home" by a sys- tem of prohibitions against the marital rela- tion taking place within its precincts. Gener- ally "the rendezvous between husband and wife are arranged in the depths of the forest un- known to any but the two," says Ernest Craw- ley, and giving accumulate instances of this custom he adds: "This principle can be traced right down to the lower animals." The well known eugenic experiments of Sparta adopted this principle for marriage, and every married couple of that State was enjoined to social secrecy of their union, and husband and wife were forbidden by public sentiment to dwell under the same roof. Thus the cultivated Greek of Sparta, in the eugenic awakening of his time, became one with the Fijian, described by Wilkes as "the most barbarous and savage race now existing upon the globe," and yet "he possesses such an 52 VENTURES IN WORLDS idea of delicacy in his sex relations that he does not share the same roof with his wife at night." The veil of modesty and mysticism is be- stowed by the child of nature upon that which the child of culture calls "sacred" only when it is familiar and vulgarized. In primitive so- ciety the life in common of husband and wife was disapproved of to such a degree that "not merely is the intercourse of husband and wife not practised in the house, but even the per- formance of ordinary functions, such as eating, is prohibited there as in New Zealand and the Sandwich Islands." Among many existed such superstitions and ideas that lovers and married people would come to dislike each other by eating from the same plate, or drink- ing from one glass or biting the same piece of bread, and all such functioning together in the daily material life that most of them feel un- der the taboo, which formed the primal etiquette of man. The taboo created an ideal of good manners in the home life of the primi- tive, but our civilized marriage, without a taboo ! is notorious for its bad manners in home life. OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 53 But the mystic ideal of the primitive, to hold and preserve the mating-passion apart and sacred from the sordid sacrilege of the home, was most fully expressed in his gradually evolved theory of Incest and, later, in the cus- tom of Exogomy which became universal in the whole uncivilized world. Originally, man, like the animals, had no in- stinctive aversion, moral prejudice or mental conception of that which we term "incest." The original meaning of "incest" to the prim- itive was "unchaste." It was by a process of associated ideas and experience that there grad- ually evolved in the human race the fixed aver- sion to consanguineous marriage. At certain periods it has been practised by nearly every race, both ancient and modern. The Egyp- tians and Persians sanctioned marriage be- tween brother and sister, and when the idea existed mentioned by ^Eschylus that the mother was not related to her child, incest was habitually practised by the Arabs, the Jews, the Peruvians and the Greeks. In the earliest stages of the family the sex relations were con- sanguineous. 54 VENTURES IN WORLDS But slowly man awakened to the recognition of a certain psychologic effect produced in him by marriage with one in the closeness and kin- ship of family life. A complex feeling, a sub- conscious aversion to love and marriage was realized as existing between the male and fe- male who had been raised together or were in continuous contact in the same home. Hence arose the convention in all primitive society that "it is indecent for housemates to inter- marry." Upon this aversion of nature was founded the primitive theory of incest, the primitive practice of Exogamy (marriage with a woman foreign to the clan, tribe or locality) and the primitive taboo of the sexual relation in the home. The primitive observed the work- ings of nature to guide his conduct and laws of love and marriage, and as a mystical mo- nogamist found the essential lure for the union of the sexes and the glamour of the life of spirit and senses, in secretiveness, strangeness and sanctity. But civilized man in his mania to cultivate monogamy for the sake of woman ! has gone contrary to all the workings of nature, so pre- OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 55 cious and binding upon the monogamous nat- ural man. In the first place, our civilized, or pseudo- Christian system of marriage, has been founded upon an unnatural, impossible as- sumption, an idealized sham-miracle, a nega- tion of the person in love and marriage itself, upon the Oneness of the Spirit and the Flesh of the Married! Whether or not any man or woman has ever been stupid enough to accept this doctrine with the faith once enjoined for a similar doctrine of the Eucharist, it has actually served to create an attitude to marriage which permeates the whole institution and our laws and customs even to this contemporary day of realism in thought and literature. One part of the ideal the Oneness of the Spirit of the Married has been surrendered as unessential since too easily disproved in the divorce court but the other part the Oneness of the Flesh of the Married has been preserved and observed in all the ritualisms of society and the home. As soon as a man and woman marry per- haps propelled by the primal dream of home as the nest of seclusion and privacy they are 56 VENTURES IN WORLDS at once thrust into a realisation of the appalling publicity of their Home Performance. Public opinion and sentiment of the sacred are imme- diately involved in the existence of that home, keenly concerned about keeping that home to- gether, regardless of the will or fancies of its inmates. The System and Society demand of the fated ones that they shall perform together in this home all the imperative functions which create the appearance and results of marriage : s eating and drinking and sleeping and breed- ing and going out together, always together, the Two as One, an eternal Togetherness with- out a solitary Taboo! Our Home performance seems deliberately designed to bring about, to increase, to multi- ply and to sanctify, that which was most shunned and exorcised from the marriage re- lation by the primitive being, the Aversion. The aversion of nature which condemned the state in which it existed as an unholy, unnat- ural, or incestuous union of primal man and woman. And how has the human being become en- trenched in such a state of life against all the OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 57 wholesome instincts of human nature? One may well ask. The sources and evolution are so remote and devious that it supplies but a crude answer to reply as one must that the most striking char- acteristics of modern marriage have been brought about by the mediaeval ideals and Dog- matism of Marriage. At one time man believed in martyrdom as his means and grace of personal morality and salvation. In the Christian era of human evo- lution, man was so intent upon making him- self and his woman miserable in this mundane sphere, that he accepted the ecclesiastical mind's version of sex and turned against all the values of life which nature had provided for the human being in love and marriage. The Church pronounced marriage a state of sin. For twelve long centuries the Church thundered against the sinfulness of marriage, just as it now thunders against the sinfulness of divorce. Man, a religious animal, believed that marriage was a state of sin, and respected, accordingly, only celibacy. Yet, alas ! for hu- man nature; marriage waxed so popular with 58 VENTURES IN WORLDS its glamour as a state of sin, and persisted so defiantly as a civil contact, dissoluble, and de- nounced by the ultra-Respectable of that day that the Church finally recognized the ex- pediency of taking under its control a state it could not prevent, and thereupon performed a volte-face and issued the Dogma of marriage as a Sacrament. Thus the Church obtained its absolutism over the most vital of human relations. By the six- teenth century the Church had discovered that here in marriage was one ideal mode in this world for man's expiation for sex and for woman's Eternal Punishment. As the result of this recognition and thus tardily the Church bestowed the religious ceremony upon marriage, the Council of Trent pronounced it a Divine institution, and simultaneously it was secured as a Divine Martyrdom by the pro- nouncement upon it of the Dogma and Law of Indissolubility. Humanity then became so thoroughly miser- able in marriage that a Martin Luther finally arose for its deliverance and precipitated the Reformation in his undertaking to destroy the OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 59 false idealism and sadistic sacramentalism that destroyed human happiness in marriage. Suc- ceeding so well, indeed, that no one believes to-day in the ecclesiastical interpretation of marriage, either as a state of sin or a state of holiness. Marriage at last stands on a human basis, unassailed by the Powers of the past, though pervaded still with the past ideals of morality: morality as martyrdom. Here is the crux of the modern problem. The issue between the old and the new ideals of life and of what constitutes morality in mar- riage. The old ideal of life made the virtues of marriage consist in the qualities of endur- ance, abnegation, self-suppression and self- sacrifice, a sort of vicarious atonement of self to the species. But the new ideal of life has made the virtues of marriage consist in the qualities of love, harmony, self-fulfilment and self-creation as the only values in marriage for the individual or the race. The new morality is the natural morality, defined once by Cicero when he said that vir- tue was but nature carried out to its utmost. To-day it has come into our life and thought 60 VENTURES IN WORLDS because of the sensitive individualism of the highly organized modern which makes him more akin to the savage in temperament than to the civilized being. Extremes can meet; and the vantage of hope in civilization to-day is the perception that worlds of culture have passed over us and left most of us potentially primitive still. The best of humanity are now more prim- itive in nature than Christianized. Therefore mysticism has reappeared in our needs for the human relations, sexual and social, and man and woman both demand in marriage that which the most individualistic of modern peo- ples, the Americans, endeavored to guarantee to humanity in all its institutions Life, Lib- erty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Each individual marriage must survive the test of this standard, to survive at all, but the test has not yet been applied to the System of Marriage, which stands englamoured by tra- dition, and supported by all the forces of con- temporary Phariseeism even in the New World. But the day is coming when the Americans will apply to this entrenched system OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 61 the same revolutionary principles of the Rights of Man with which they once upset so many other Systems just as rooted, respectable arid Roman. Already the practising is preceding the preaching, for there is forming in our midst the silent forerunners of what has been prophe- sied as the "aristocracy of the future," Celib- acy. Celibacy has again become an ideal as a protest against the sham idealism of the mar- riage system. A few months ago the press was vociferous over one sign of this social phenomenon as re- vealed by a report of the Census that in the United States there are seventeen million celibates, of the matrimonially desirable age, and in the number an excess of a million more female celibates than male. In a country where there is still a preponderance of males this seemed unaccountable. "Why don't they marry?" became a popular query, and removed the musty marriage problem from the closets of the Academics and the cellars of the An- archists into the open discussion of democratic society. 62 VENTURES IN WORLDS Social observation reveals the character of this growing aristocracy as being formed of the best of humanity, the gifted, educated, at- tractive and spiritually minded of the Ameri- cans. If not celibates in actual life, they are decidedly so in principle. Celibacy appeals to them because it is seen in the glamour of an atmosphere of freedom, and, to a modern, free- dom is the only power that can cast a glamour over anything to-day. Once marriage was given the glamour of secrecy by the primitive, once it was given the glamour of sin by the Christian, and to-day a glamour is gathering about Celibacy as a Golden Guild composed of the workers, charmers and mystics in modern life. Marriage, divested of all natural morality, appears to these aristocrats as the supreme im- morality. Marriage has become immoral through its denial of the spirit and worship of the letter of marriage; immoral through its property rights over person; immoral through its sacrifice of the sanctity of the individual and the race to the pseudo-sanctity belonging to a mythical thaumaturgy a lie, which if true OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 63 would mean but a miracle of consanguinity, converting the Two of Marriage into the flesh and bone of the One of Incest. That is why, when a man marries, it is, as a rule, from the outer instead of the inner mo- tives and promptings. The monogamous in- stinct is dead or degenerate in the average man, so that marriage has become a communal act on the part of the male. The common motives that prevail with a man are the material ones, of marriage for money or social position, for a hostess of a palace or a housekeeper for a hovel, for a stepmother for previous offspring or a mother for desired heirs, for a personal at- tendant in invalidism or a caretaker for old age or if idealistic and a supporter of the Sys- tem, a man will marry merely for the respecta- bility of the performance, for Home as man's visible pledge of reform and landmark of the Family Tie. At the present time, it is only the social idealism of the home that enables it to serve as a lure to marriage. Formerly, it was frankly materialized and the old-fashioned man used to marry chiefly for the creature com- 64 VENTURES IN WORLDS forts of home life. But the improvements of club-life, hotel-life and bachelor apartments, have changed all this, and no man marries to- day for the superior material gratifications once provided by the separate home. Man now desires freedom and personal rights in his private existence and these can only be secured by the celibate mode of existence. The press and the divorce court in modern life have sig- nally exposed the home of marriage as the most public of all institutions, a mere housetop, as it were, from which everything that takes place therein may be shouted on some terrible, ever possible day. Man has become too mystical and individual- istic to incur with deliberation the rough ex- perience of home life. Privacy and personal rights are a mockery in the typical home atmos- phere ; an atmosphere deadening to life with its enforced intimacies, destructive to dreams with its cares and clamors and collisions of raw temperament. To-day no bachelor is pitied, in society, for his homelessness and no married man is pitied for his childlessness. To ask man to support this home by the sweat of his brow OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 65 is demanding from his nature that which the home has destroyed, the primal instincts. The nest has ended as the cage. Caged animals, as every naturalist knovs, lose the wholesome instincts that guided them in freedom and were preservative of their own life and that of their race. Thus race-suicide and the perversion of instincts become nature's revenge in the cage. Apply the same knowl- edge to our cage homes of marriage, and it makes comprehensible the modern "aversion to the child" a familiar comment and the strange manners and morals that distinguish domesticated life. Another contributory cause to man's loss of the monogamous instinct through marriage is found in the System's ideal of the Wife of home. Let us recall that monogamy was nat- ural to man only when he expressed both sides of his sex nature, the psychic and physical, in a love marriage with another human being a human being ever provocative in her separ- ateness and freedom to escape! and it makes comprehensible, also, why the ideal Wife and Mother made by man into the most fixed, se- 66 VENTURES IN WORLDS cured and familiar of all living embodiments^ is ever desired as a part of the idealism of the home, but rarely, if ever, represents the per- sonal idealism of the man himself. Therefore the modern male takes his licensed-for-life marriage, incidentally, as a social duty at its best, and desires represented therein chiefly the social ideals. Man respects the ideal of the wife too sin- cerely and solemnly ever to entertain for her such a socially damaging thing as passion, primal or otherwise. If it exists as it does sometimes in certain simple naive souls suffi- ciently to have furnished a natural motive for the stern fatality of marriage, it is soon extin- guished by the atmosphere of the home. The monogamous savage loved his nest for its secretiveness, loved his rendezvous for its strangeness, loved his mate for her foreign looks and ways, for her little taboos and mys- tery of sacred selfhood. But none of these primal elements are garnered into the atmos- phere of the home for the safeguarding of the modern male. Marriage is the licensed viola- tion of the selfhood of man and woman. OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 67 Everything capricious, charming and chary, the coquetry of the soul itself luring man on to infinities of search has been lost in marriage by its system of compulsion for making Two live in the gross corporeality of One. Man does not really love his own flesh and bones. His whole existence from the beginning of time is recorded by his efforts to get away from the materialism of himself into the free- dom and infinities of art and creation. Surely the initial mistake in our system of marriage was the rapt cynicism of making the creative relation of man a Sacred Consanguinity; for nature makes incest sterile. In marriage man finds not his mate but his housemate. She whom the savage said "it is indecent to marry," she who lives in a relation signifying all the in-laws and blood-ties and spiritual consanguinities to her housemate. Consequently the modern man as husband de- velops affection for his wife (she symbolizes so much to him!), family affection, but passion becomes to him as something quite outside the family circle. Family life has degraded the primal passion 68 VENTURES IN WORLDS in man. In the purity of the sacred home at- mosphere, he develops a positive aversion. The very word "passion" comes to shock pater- familias and all the impurity that mediaeval- ism attached to sex, flourishes in the thoughts of the family circle, so that the marital relation therein appears as something incredible and indecent, a relation for a gumshoeing obscen- ity. It is necessary to note that the recent ex- posures to the family circle of the existence of the Social Evil outside their door, also in- formed them of the amazing fact that the clientele of the social evil is chiefly composed of the married man, and the man of position and family. It is fortunate for the System that the mar- ried man soon loses all desire for his mate in captivity. In this way the home atmosphere is rendered virtually sexless and "pure," and as the type of woman chosen by sophisticated man for the ideal wife is usually the woman of sexual anaesthesia (another pathological result of civilization) this enables the Family Life to be honest, at least, in what it pretends to be, OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 69 a Symbol of Social Purity, a public monument to the Monogamy of Man. As such it has become more compatible to the acquired tastes of modern man than to those of woman. Woman, more primitive, is less satisfied with the objective material side of marriage and regards it with the feminine view- point, subjectively. With man, more civilized, hence more mechanical in his relations than woman the natural impulses for the married relation are no longer essential. In fact mar- riage most amply gratifies some of his culti- vated instincts, the communal and proprietorial instincts, for instance. And therein consists its hold on the nature of man to-day. Unde- niably it has a hold, unreasoning, blind and mysterious as instinct. Statistics prove it. In Bailey's book, "Modern Social Condi- tions," he gives these figures of the matri- moniality of men and women, according to Canderlier's method of computation, and taken from a representative State of the United States where the sexes are about equally distributed: "There are nearly a thousand more females than males marrying 70 VENTURES IN WORLDS for the first time" but "73 widowers and di- vorced males remarry to 15 widows and di- vorcees" and "more than twice as many men as women are contracting a third marriage and more than five times as many a fourth." Conclusively, these statistics show how the system and appearances of marriage survive with man as a habit. Woman is less easily explained in her new aristocracy of celibacy. We have been told for so long that marriage was made for woman, that it was her boon and bonanza, her Glory, her only excuse for living and her arch-per- formance for the sake of the permanency of the human race, that it is curious and inexplicable to find her now deserting her smug sphere with her very first breath of freedom. But the world has always had its suspicions about woman in relation to its System of mar- riage. So much so, indeed, so profoundly dis- trustful have been all the Powers of civiliza- tion, State, Church and Society, that they have conspired with superb success to hold woman in her natural place without a glimmering chance for the wantonness of escape. OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 71 Surely it is stale and superfluous in these plethoric days of feminism to review the many methods once employed by the system for the coercion of the female to marriage and for her captivity therein. The old ways and means are familiarly known now; the closing of careers, professions, the higher education, the social taboos on the old maid and the free woman, and the myriad forms of convention and ban and suspicion of the original sin of womanhood which made woman so pre-em- inently the husband-hunter, the match-maker, the woman of marriage in the past. And having secured her successfully as the woman of marriage, society proceeded to make her pay a price for the privileges of matrimony that would have been fatal to the system to have exacted from the male. She paid with the surrender of her name, domicile, fortune and human right to wage, she paid with her free-will of person in marriage and maternity, she paid with the entire personality of woman, in short, for the marriage of the past, in which the female of the species was forced to exist as an insensible machine of procreation for the 72 VENTURES IN WORLDS supporters of the system. In the sacred name of Marriage, woman has been made to exist as a human being without the human rights of will, freedom and experience, to live as a wife without the passion or senses of a wife, to be- come a mother without the desire or dream of the child, to remain forever the senseless mar- tinet of the cage that symbolizes to modern Phariseeism the sanctity of its ideals. It is not surprising that the free woman of to-day bears a grudge against marriage. Our system of marriage has robbed woman of her primal right of "natural selection," the Creator's gift to the female of the species which elects her as nature's vestal of the flame of life. When a woman loves, her soul and body be- come the meeting place for all the forces of creation. A woman in love becomes the child, the savage and the genius of nature. A woman in love how sublime, absurd, tragic, foolish, divine and pitiful she is. Human- ity's link with the Unborn; woman would be lost in the infinities of her nature, if nature had not cared so richly for her own and provided woman's instinct to guide her in the chaos of OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 73 the primal passion. Thus woman remains im- pregnably sound, intuitive, exacting and selec- tive in the bestowal of her love, for she knows, instinctively, that when she gives herself she gives everything: the nature of humanity it- self to be molded through her being. And unto what hands of man woman hath delivered herself through man's system of marriage! The awakening of woman has been with the dawning realization of her great loss, human- ity's great loss, through the surrender of her- self in marriage. Instinctively, blindly, and with mystic savagery, woman is now groping about the cosmos of human affair in search of woman's birthright again. Herself! That is all, and everything. But for this there may have to come another Luther as a leader of men, an Apostle of Nature, powerful enough to upset the world in another Reformation of Marriage. It is no wonder that marriage in its present form of undisguised materialism does not ap- peal to the superior woman. Its old-fashioned lure as a means of self-preservation from the suspicion and stones of society, or as a means 74 VENTURES IN WORLDS of livelihood, on its lowest possible terms, sub- sistence subject to the will of the master, has no longer any charm for her. The self-sup- porting woman of modern conditions has too clearly revealed the true status of the "sup- ported" wife. "Life-long support" on the terms of life-long marriage cannot entice any woman capable of self-support, and therefore of self-respect. Woman's "support" in mar- riage is not given on the self-respecting basis that the sensitive modern requires in the eco- nomic sphere of his or her existence. Even the mercenary woman is no longer attracted by the system's honeyed utterance "with all my worldly goods I thee endow" at the altar, since she too has come to realize that woman is made to ask, beg, wheedle, extort or blackmail her keeper for a part of these worldly goods upon the hearth. Without any economic value placed upon woman's services in the home, they have become to her slave services, ignominious services without a gain for power or esteem as in all services outside the home; and yet these are the primal services of woman, economically, and her most essential contribution to the OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 75 world's work. When woman was being ideal- ized as the Wife of Man, her pauperization in the home seemed necessary to the system to keep her married ; and when the fierce fight was waged over the Married Woman's Property Act it was opposed on the grounds that it would at once destroy the home (divorce laws have always been opposed on the same grounds) for it seemed inconceivable to the mind of those days that woman would remain voluntarily in the home if she possessed any means of escape. To-day woman has discovered that she can escape from marriage and from the home, but she still continues to marry, and of her own free will. She reveals, in fact, a strong bias in favor of marriage as statistics show when it is a first marriage. Marriage does not hold woman as a habit as it holds man, but it still entices her as an experiment. She refuses to consider it as a means of livelihood, the one modus Vivendi of the old-fashioned woman, but it appeals to her now as a means of self-realiza- tion. Woman, proverbially curious, wants to know the mysteries of life; and marriage has 76 VENTURES IN WORLDS been contrived by the system as The Great Mystery to woman. The asterisks of litera- ture on the subject, the secrecies of society, the purity of the home, the Comstockery of Amer- ican life all for the sake of the young girl! contrive to excite her mind with such a sense of mystery that she becomes eager, with Eve- like eagerness, before the forbidden knowledge and fairly precipitates herself into her first marriage. But with knowledge and maturity woman becomes averse, statistically recorded, to the second, third, fourth and fifth marriage, as compared to man. This does not imply, necessarily, disenchant- ment for a woman in marriage, it is merely indicative of a discovery she makes, through the experience of marriage, that woman's higher forms of self-realization can only be attained outside of marriage. For it is only the unmarried woman, in the conditions of modern life, who is permitted the right to self- realization and the indulgence of a personality. As the young girl in America, the self-support- ing woman or the society celibate, woman is granted a perfect social leeway to create her- OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 77 self as she desires to be. She can come and go as she pleases, she can give and take in charm and contact with all humanity, and most dazzling license of all! unmarried, woman remains free from the Suspicion that has been ever attendant upon her Sex, the Sus- picion that has haunted the world since the fall from Eden, the Suspicion that birthmarks every female with the blush of shame the sus- picion as to the existence or non-existence of her one and only "virtue," the great negative virtue as the Ideal virtue of the monogamously cultivated female. And it is the freedom from this suspicion in celibacy that has made it such a glamourous state of life to the modern woman. It is only in an atmosphere of freedom that one can develop a natural, wholesome, or mag- netic personality. The psychological results of woman's new- found-freedom are revealed in the splendid human qualities and dynamic per- sonalities which have made the womanhood of America renowned in the four quarters of the globe. For instance, the young girl in Amer- ica, free from the chaperonage and suspicion 78 VENTURES IN WORLDS that dogs her hours and days in the Old World, has made of herself a personality with an in- ternational prestige for vividness and charm; the widow and divorcee of this country, who in independence becomes so shy of marriage, is so far-famed for sheer liveliness of person- ality, that she serves to make marriage, her marriage, appear as a great success after all, to naive maidens ; and the self-supporting celi- bate, in her freedom, is undoubtedly the aristo- crat among American women, for she is envied, aped and respected by them all for her dis- tinguished capability, refinement and selective power in love. Of late the custom is growing for a woman who has become a personality in public life or interest, to retain her maiden name and to keep her marriage and private life as secret as possible: the supreme compliment to women's new glorification of celibacy. On the other hand, everybody, the public, the pastors of the flocks, Mrs. Grundy, and all the Argus eyes of Peacock Alley, suspect and watch the married woman. As wife, the American woman is chaperoned by society, as though all society were in some secret service OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 79 of the marriage System and fearful lest the female escape. As soon as a woman becomes the Wife of Man she falls under suspicion if she goes forth unaccompanied by her one man, she falls under suspicion in every relation of friendship and companionship with any man other than the licensed One, she falls under sus- picion if she appears lively and pleasure-loving, charming and a natural free-self, and most of all she falls under suspicion if she is of the ad- vanced sisterhood type and wants to vote on the Marriage and Divorce laws of the nation. The charm of society consists in its freedom of contact with diversified personalities that stir the mysticism of spirit and sense with the lure of their strangeness and the glamour of their secret life. But the marriage system will not brook the charms of social freedom in the stern lot of the married. Thus the convention is es- tablished that man and wife must be seen to- gether in society in order that everybody may behold their togetherness, their indissoluble Fate, their eternal couplement of the Two as One. It simplifies matters for the charming celibates of society thus to segregate the mar- 80 VENTURES IN WORLDS ried apart from the rest of humankind. So convention demands that the married couple must always be seen in public together, must be invited to the same functions, visit the same houses, make the same friends, share the same affinities and tastes and experiences and con- tacts of life until there is no escape for the married from each other, even in the hour of worldliness, and everything seems calculated with the sinister intent of preventing the mar- ried couple from ever again developing any of the strangeness, secrets, and sacredness of self, which formed the fatal lure that originated their marriage. A brilliant much-sought bach- elor girl was asked recently why she had never married, and replied, "Because of the Siamese- twin ideal of marriage in Society." Wells re- marks upon marriage as being a sort of social cleavage that divides people off into couples watching each other. The suspicion and es- pionage that accompany our proprietorial form of marriage, deliberately cultivates a spawn of repellent characteristics in human nature : con- ceit, jealousy, exaction, distortion of motives, and the many mean traits of petty self-aggres- OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 81 sion that are licensed as the good manners and good morals of the married. Special exceptions are arranged for man in the social system that permit him to escape from his marriage, in resuscitating periods of work and play, and this is another reason why man endures and survives marriage with an impunity not yet gained by woman. But woman cannot escape from her marriage ex- cept through divorce ; therefore divorce is often resorted to, when she simply needs a holiday from the marital atmosphere. The atmos- phere so sickening to a healthy soul with its airs of exclusion and enclosure, of stagnation and stalemate. Convention demands that the wife of man shall wear a badge on her finger and a tag to her name so that none can mistake her in public or private, for other than the wife of man. Her wedding ring is her symbol of security in every man's respect. It is a lit- tle omnipresent family circle in whose atmos- phere the married woman must sit forever cut off from all the enlarging contacts and experi- ences of life sit in sacredness and loneliness, a composite being of Fakir, Hen and Saint. 82 VENTURES IN WORLDS In thus eliminating the rights of personality from marriage, the system has succeeded in eliminating all the grace and play in the rela- tion of the sexes; for neither mysticism nor courtship can exist in an atmosphere sur- charged with captivity. The omission of the primal needs of man, woman, and child, from the marriage relation, makes it seem as though the creators and supporters of the system, the dogmatists, moralists, rigorists, sacramental- ists and Pharisees, must be people unendowed by nature with any of the qualifications that could attract and hold another by the might of personality alone. On the face of it, the mar- riage system seems to have been arranged ex- clusively for the benefit of the people who never should have been allowed to marry: the defective, ugly, decrepit, unhealthy or sadistic. The System has made marriage and its progeny uncesthetic; whereas Nature planned the subtle functioning of soul with sense for love and marriage as a master means to form and con- summate human beings in an atmosphere of sestheticism. Although woman in her modern phase is re- OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 83 vealing herself as so shockingly natural, so primitive and savage and wholly feminine, that she is bent upon a Renaissance of Nature in the World's affairs, yet, strange to say, her enemies and detractors and Anti's are holding her up for condemnation as an example of the unnatural woman ; woman demoralized by free- dom because freedom has enabled her to become so selective in her sexual life that she prefers celibacy to an unnatural marriage and sterility to an unnatural maternity. Here is the amaz- ing revelation in woman to-day: she has sur- vived all the systems of civilization to make her unnatural, automatic, false and Ideal, and appears at last before the world in an ultimate triumph of Herself! Freedom is feared for woman, more than anything else, because supposed to be espe- cially perilous to the monogamous instinct of woman, set in her solitaire "Virtue." But marriage, without freedom, has deadened or de- stroyed the monogamous instinct in both man and woman to such a degree, that there is left only one really convincing proof of its atavistic existence in woman's nature. Strange to say, 84 VENTURES IN WORLDS it is the prostitute that proves the reality of a monogamous instinct in woman, for she to whom society accords freedom with shame possesses a quality of loyalty to some one male, her "owner," "slaver," or "lover" despite her physical traffic of self, a loyalty so tenacious and unreasoning it can only be explained as the psychic instinct of monogamy, ineradicable, deep-rooted and ever-recurrent in woman. In the psychology of the prostitute is discovered, also, the realities of certain marital virtues long supposed to be specialties of the ideal Wife of Man: self-sacrifice, fawning devotion and di- vine forgiveness for the male despite his every abuse, injury and infidelity. But the aristocratic celibate who refuses to prostitute herself either in freedom or mar- riage the selective sensitive individualist so prevalent in modern life is she to be per- mitted to escape marriage seeing that mar- riage of some sort or other is indispensable for the recruitment of the race ? The new woman, without a doubt, possesses the highest of eu- genic values, therefore the sacrifice of conven- tion, prejudice and tradition seems a small OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 85 price to pay in order to reform marriage along some lines in conformance with the freedom- loving modern nature. Since so evident that we need systems at this stage of human prog- ress, then, I would suggest that we inaugurate a new and life-enhancing system for the sake of marriage and the married. An established system, in the social life, which will guarantee to the wedlocked couple a certain amount of statutory holidays from the common home and common life, compulsory separations in public, prohibitions upon all open performances of to- getherness, conventional self-exhibitions minus ring and other insignia of the conjugal state, and in the domestic interior itself an established etiquette of taboos, and suspension of conju- gal rights legally, religiously or voluntarily imposed which inevitably will form a fresh at- mosphere for married life in which personality can be made to appear so sacred and free that marriage will be undertaken and borne as lightly and gracefully as a secret sin. This would be the first great step towards the dematerialization of marriage. The sec- ond great step would be to make divorce sub- 86 VENTURES IN WORLDS ject to the will of the individuals involved in a marriage instead of, as it now is, subject to the will of the officials of the System who re- gard nothing but the externals of marriage and ignore its essential life. Divorce should be, ex- clusively, a matter of collusion between the Two of a marriage, just as marriage is a mat- ter of collusion between the Two. But the System has made the collusion of the married for divorce a statutory offence for which the penalty is indissolubility of the union. All stages of society and civilization have recognized divorce as the only moral regulator of marriage and have placed it on the basis of mutual consent ("collusion") until the Christian dogmatists evolved the theory of the indissolubility of marriage. But even in its absolutism the Church was forced to concede in fact what it denied in spirit, for it allowed "annulments" for "consanguinity and affinity up to the seventh degree, and consanguinity of a spiritual character such as god-parents and god-children and even on the grounds that a forbidden affinity had been established between persons who had committed adultery." It is OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 87 recorded that in those divorceless days there was an astonishing amount of consanguineous relationships, spiritual and physical, discovered after the marriage union which entitled the "unequally yoked together" to the decency of "separate bed and board." To-day marriage is as consanguineous as it ever was but the modern does not possess a means of escape as decent as that of the medisevalist with his all- veiling plea of "consanguinity." In the United States divorces are being granted at the rate of two hundred a day, but this, by no means, indicates the amount of di- vorces that are desired, the amount that ought to be granted, nor the enormous amount of people who are living practically divorced though sharing the same roof "for the sake of appearances." The reason of this is that di- vorce has been made unavailable to the best part of our humanity, the well-born and well- bred, in America, because of the nature of the offences that must be used as the "grounds" for a divorce, and because of the publicity at- tached to divorce as the "deterrent ordeal"; The Ordeal of Divorce, which, as a matter of 88 VENTURES IN WORLDS fact, deters more people from marriage than from divorce. The statutory grounds for di- vorce, though varying in every State, partake of the same nature in them all : grossly phys- ical, brutal or criminal, representing acts which any sane, self-respecting individual would be incapable of committing no matter how trag- ically mis-mated he or she might happen to be. The divorce laws recognize nothing but the material nature of marriage, deny the psychic side of sex, and stand as a testimony for the System that man lives by bread and flesh and force alone. However there is one exception in the na- ture of the legal grounds for divorce, found in a few States that form the errata of the Union. "Incompatability of temperament" is a mod- ern innovation in the grounds for divorce, but, as yet, it appears in but a few States, discred- ited alike for respectability and culture. But it is at least significant as the first recognition by the State of some spiritual elements exist- ing in marriage; and reveals, also, woman's subjective view of marriage which is gradually OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 89 insinuating itself into some of the legislatures of our country. It is said that three quarters of the divorces granted are procured by the woman and yet the divorce laws are established upon grounds that, oddly enough, are rarely the ones which are most destructive to modern home life or destructive to the happiness and well-being of the modern woman. Few women nowadays have the problem of the wife- beater to face, but a sensitive woman can be wrecked in soul and body by starvation for love in her marriage. The divorce laws reveal the System's denial of the personal and private nature of marriage, for the legal grounds for divorce appear in the character of a public offence. For instance, the usual grounds throughout the United States are felony (which constitutes a crime against the public), insanity (a public men- ace), physical injuries (publicly exhibited), non-support or desertion (leaving the family a public charge), adultery (only when corrobo- rated by witnesses, detectives, and other public proof) and therefore divorce is made prac- 90 VENTURES IN WORLDS tically unavailable and impossible for any in- dividual who is decent enough to desire privacy for the most intimate of human relations. The modern divorce court is a pillory of ex- posure for the personal matters which even a savage had the instinctive good-breeding to veil from the eyes and concern of his world. Divorce is abhorred by the supporters of the System simply because it betrays the unnat- uralness and unholy secrets of modern mar- riage. But both Society and the State man- age to save their face, in the divorce court, by an idealization of the child of marriage. Out- side of marriage, the child, as "a natural child" is refused protection and human sympathy, by all the Powers of the System, but the child of marriage, as aptly termed " the unnatural child" becomes the object of a colossal concern, a monstrous sentimentality, from the Powers, as soon as its parents desire to escape the fecund intimacies of their hated union. Whether or not a married couple have a child, whether or not it is the kind of child a couple ought to have, whether or not the parents are the kind of parents a child ought to associate OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 91 with, the Child of Marriage invariably figures as the sanctified excuse for holding together as One the Two whom Nature has pronounced divorced. All the current cant against di- vorce, and all the artillery of modern Moral- ity, have been reared upon this figurative child of marriage although every natural instinct in man and woman assures them that what is good for them love, happiness, harmony is the natural right and primal need of their child, potential or actual. But the Law of Change is being recognized as the Law of Life in every form of man's in- stitutionalism. Even in the institution of Marriage and Divorce, it is seen that they have survived only by means of a constant change and adaptation to the ever springing new ideals, needs, and demands of humanity. And the same type of supporters of systems, right or wrong, who once forbade divorce to the wretched victims of marriage, for any cause whatsoever, now seem to be united in a consen- sus populi of modern Christianity, in declar- ing divorce a vital necessity,, but only for one kind of wrong, adultery. Thus concessions of 92 VENTURES IN WORLDS the right-to-life are handed forth to man in the meagrest of measures, from time to time, by the still enthroned martyrizers of man. A final word, about this strictly limited, one and only, justifiable cause for divorce, adultery now so popularly endorsed by the rigorists, dogmatists, sacramentalists and Pharisees of marriage. This, as the statutory cause, com- pletes our evidence as to the fleshly, material and masculinized interpretation of the nature of marriage, for, as Gladstone said, "We have many causes more fatal to the great obligation of marriage than adultery." Woman's atti- tude to marriage corroborates this view ; for, as we all know, adultery is never condoned in the wife by the husband, but is, as a rule, condoned by the wife in the husband when she loves him. For woman in marriage finds the affinities of the spirit of far more importance than the vi- cissitudes of the flesh. Besides the unfaithful male frequently possesses personal qualities of lovability that endear him, indissolubly, to his wife, despite his conquests beyond the home (so easily concealed by the male unless he wishes them to serve as the public offence for OUR INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE 93 divorce) ; whereas the faithful husband is as frequently a moral-bigot, a kill- joy, money- tyrant, or soured puritan and stand-patter for systems, right or wrong, in whom his wife would welcome anything so human as adultery and so liberating to her from marriage to him. Let us remember that Christ condemned hypocrisy more severely than adultery, and treated the sins of the spirit as of far more im- portance than the sins of the flesh. And His attitude alone should be sufficient to prove that marriage in accordance with the present Sys- tem of Marriage and Divorce is not in accord- ance with the laws of Nature or Morality or of a real Christianity, even; Christianity in whose bemasking name are committed so many sins in Man's sacred Homes and Temples of Mo- nogamy. OUR NERVOUS HUMANITY WE stand aghast before the great new ordeal of pain that has opened at our feet humanity's dancing feet of 1914. We thought we had progressed beyond the old plane of humanity's physical pain and had stepped upon the great new plane of human- ity's moral pain. Physical pain unites us close to mother earth, but moral pain unites us to some nerve of the divine. And here we are dragged down again to the old plane of the physical, beholding another crusade against the new-grown spirit of man in the hell being dealt his body in the Great War by the ag- gressive union of the Normal, the triumphant majority in humanity. And how has this occurred in our new hu- manity the humanity so proud of itself until a certain date last summer so sure of its change from the past nature of man, so hu- mane and well-read in the lessons of history, so sensible and nervous? 94 OUR NERVOUS HUMANITY 95 All our questioning seems to lead us for an- swer to the bed-rock of human nature, the hu- man nature that we have divided so fluently into types of the so-called normal and abnor- mal natures of man. Is there something wrong in this our con- ception of human nature? Is society in the sense of embodying the science of human con- duct and ideals the expression of the best, the soundest, the most evolutive instincts of humanity? We see everywhere that society is the creation and fortress of the normal being and that by the normal being is meant the more fit and hardy, the more resistant to pain, the more personal in his relations and nerveless of humankind. Whereas the abnormal being thus conceived is the type that is too af- fected by pain, too impersonal in his relations to life, too nervous hence disqualified for the struggle of existence in this material world which, so far, the normal has dominated. Humanity has been developing its nerves for two thousand years. The nerves were the new factor in the promising life of twentieth cen- tury humanity. The psychic nerves were in- 96 VENTURES IN WORLDS deed a novelty in the old somatic nature of man. At last humanity had become too nerv- ous we believed for the old festivals of pain once endured, ay, enjoyed by normal man- kind and war seemed obsolete, crime con- trolled, disease under a microscope, poverty on the wane, and humanitarianism, in all its phases, the hobby of the pillars of society simply because of our nerves. Because of our nerves the future seemed full of change, of new ascents and trials and evolu- tion for the species called man. The pain of the world had somehow gotten into the nerves of some of us of the abnormal of moderns and we were developing sympathies, sensibili- ties, a sort of cosmic consciousness so painfully new that it was wholly repudiated by the nor- mal being. This strange equipment called "nerves" made one think and feel and be in touch with the pain of the world, therefore the normal being armed himself against its spread with a web of conventions, fears, lies and se- crecies, to cover up the very existence of pain in this "best of all possible worlds" until like all denied and darkened truths it has burst into OUR NERVOUS HUMANITY 97 a still greater fruition of pain, into the vast new Gehenna of the modern world. The battle of normal and abnormal in human society is worth while to study now that all our roads seem to have led to the Armageddon. To-day we have no way of distinguishing apart the abnormal and normal of mankind except by the test of their nerves. Scientifically "nerves," the state of neurosis, is but the state of affectibility, the coenassthesis or systemic sensations of the individual being; and we, in our dislike of the hypernormal, have regarded the higher state of nerves as a pathological state, a morbid psycho-neurosis, in fact, and the lower state of nerves as the glorified nor- mality of man's fitness and health. According to our social and physiological conceptions of health, the nervous state of the so-called abnormal being is an unhealthy state. It is too affectible, too conscious, too living, for health. Health is an unconscious state com- pared to the intense consciousness of ill-health ; and sleep how normal and healthy! compared to insomnia, a disease. Yet the quickening of life as it ascends into higher and higher forms 98 VENTURES IN WORLDS brings greater and greater intensity of con- sciousness until, it seems as if the ultimate of all living organisms were some infinite neurosis of insomnia and pain. To live, to feel, to be conscious with every experience and knowledge and sympathy, is the goal to which the evolution of our nerves would lead us were it not for the arrest of the normal. The normal represents the fixed, neuro-cerebral construction for the continua- tion of the kingdom of matter. It is the ar- rested development of man, so that he cannot transcend a different and higher sphere. The normal portion of humanity is arranged to re- sist change, to form cakes of custom and chains of tradition and everything we see expressed in man's congregate power to hold down to the planetary mean of human existence. The spirit of the normal is the spirit of the law of gravitation. And alone accounts for what Bagehot calls "the whole family of arrested civilizations," which the history of the world reveals. India, Egypt, China, Greece, Rome every kind of civilization and humanity has reached a height through the travail of its ab- OUR NERVOUS HUMANITY 99 normal beings from which, sooner or later, it has been pulled down by the aggression of its normal beings. Modern society has brought about complex and accumulate distinctions between the ab- normal and normal in the nature of man, but their conflict with each other is revealed by the profound test of pain. Thus, roughly gen- eralized, the abnormal is the type equipped for the realization of pain, and to reveal it to the rest of humanity in creations of art or move- ments of reform. In modern jargon this type is called the neurotic, with a derogatory signifi- cance in the term. The normal, on the other hand, is the type equipped against the realiza- tion of pain, in himself or others, and this na- ture expresses itself in the ''public" which so detests the painful revelations of truth in lit- erature and drama, and in the "society" which ostracizes every evidence of human failing, suffering and pessimism. The normal being of to-day so shuns, fears and hates the realiza- tion of pain that in spite of himself he has thought about their causes more deeply than olden-time man and so has developed in him- 100 VENTURES IN WORLDS self a certain nervous self-consciousness which has made him abnormal in his very normality. The normal being has become the hysteric of society. Hysteria originates from suppres- sions, conventions, falsehoods and shams; and as society is constructed upon these it has made its upholders hysterics. The neurotic and the hysteric are the modern types of humankind, and they are actually opposed in nature though our current conceptions have confused them as one. The nature of their difference springs from a fundamental peculiarity. For instance, the neurotic is marked by a deep inhibition in the currents of egoism. In his nature the volun- tary movement is not equal to that of the sensi- tive, and because of this, he is uniquely en- dowed to suffer through sympathy, and the consciousness of the impersonal in life. But the hysteric is marked by the lack of this deep inhibition, and in all the disorders of hys- teria he suffers only from the craving for sympathy and attention upon himself and lives only in the orbit of the personal. This ac- counts for the seeming contradiction of insensi- OUR NERVOUS HUMANITY 101 bility and suggestibility which are so distinc- tive of the hysteric. It is the inhibitory force in the neurotic which enables him to resist the imitative instinct that sways the hysteric, and also it is this force allied with the inevitable humanitarianism of sympathy, that forms man's psychological resistance to the impulses and instincts of crime, implicit, natural and normal in man. In the Century Cyclopedia we find a defi- nition of this distinction as seen in the nature of woman: "The neurotic woman is sensitive, zealous, managing, self- forgetful, wearing her- self out for others; the hysteric, whether lan- guid or impulsive, is purposeless, introspective, and selfish." But in the aggregate woman is far more the neurotic than the hysteric in type ; and man is far more the hysteric than the neurotic. Even in the psychology of races we see this distinction revealing itself most clearly to-day in the nations at war. The French peo- ple are revealed as the neurotics and the Ger- mans as the hysterics of modern culture; and the French has been said to be the most fem- inine and the German the most masculine of 102 VENTURES IN WORLDS nations. Wars have always issued from the inspiration of the hysteric, and pacific move- ments from the inspiration of the neurotic nature. But the nerve-state of both neurotic and hysteric is merely the signal of changing hu- man nature conflicting with environment and with each other. In the hysteric there is menace for the future, in the neurotic there is promise. For social development progresses only through the gradual discovery and sub- stitution of impersonal relations for the per- sonal and these can only be attained by means of the temperament that can experience im- personal pain. Sympathy, then, with impersonal pain is the hallmark of man's superiority, but modern society has branded sympathy as "unsound," "morbid," "unhealthy." One cannot fail to see that pain is the ultimate of culture, the pen- alty of greatness, and gives the one lesson we are all compelled to learn within this terrene sphere. The will for pain, to know, to feel, to help the pain of life imbues the human spirit with its only nobility; and all meanness, low- OUR NERVOUS HUMANITY 103 ness, ugliness, and the social diseases of virtue and vice, result from the repudiation of pain for ourselves and denial of the pain of others. A world-transfiguring morality could be established upon the simple laws that good is that which increases one's sympathy with pain, and evil that which makes one wish to give pain. The first step in civilization begins with the dawning realization in the savage brain of the meaning of pain. "In every nerve-cell there is memory," says Maudsley; and sympathy is inherently the racial memory or clairvoyance of pain. Genius is but a complex of all the nerve- elements of life; and the nerve-elements still form the mystery of science. No physico- chemical theory has yet explained the electrical currents in nerves that were discovered by the researches of Matteucci and Du Bois Rey- mond. The nerve life is quite as unfathom- able and inexplicable as the spermatozoic soul, eluding every grasp and hypothesis of science. We can only know that it is the excess of nerve-element in genius, and in the organisms of the higher evolution, which makes them dif- 104 VENTURES IN WORLDS ferent from the great bulk of mankind. The vividness of the human consciousness depends upon the activity of the nerve-process; all thought, all feeling, all personality, find their maximum or minimum development through its force and finesse. It is this neurosis which enables genius to know the things unknown and unf elt by the normal being who, in his con- ceit of omnipotent majority, attributes all the finer and higher sensations, emotions and thoughts to pathogenetic abnormality, and considers his own dullness of nerves soundness, and the lack of sensibility health of mind and body. If this abnormality must be called patholog- ical, normality can be proven, as convincingly, criminological. The genius and the criminal are at the opposite extremes of the human species in nerve-structure and temperament not meaning the criminal in the juridical sense of crime whose definitions vary with every age. Marro attributes the origin of crime to a defect of nutrition of the central nervous system, just as the origin of genius can be said to be in the fulness of its nervous system. Here again is OUR NERVOUS HUMANITY 105 seen the difference between the nervous and the nerveless but in the general definitions of science, the genius is said to be distinguished by what is termed hyper algesia, meaning ex- cessive sensibility to pain, and the criminal is distinguished by analgesia, insensibility to pain, which is both physical and moral in him. The state of analgesia has been noted also by alienists and nerve-specialists as a common symptom in hysteria and insanity. This analgesia spontaneous or artificial in some of its many degrees, exists in the organism and temperament of the criminal, the savage, the lunatic, the hysteric, and in that mass of ap- parently civilized mankind who find their much belauded "soundness," "fitness," and "normal- ity" in their resistant indifference and insensi- bility to pain. With this fundamental similarity in charac- ter of the criminal and the normal man, they possess many other characteristics in common. Everywhere in the study of criminology one finds them abundantly recorded, but they are given as the characteristics of abnormal man, whereas, in reality, they have become the com- 106 VENTURES IN WORLDS mon characteristics of the normal man of mod- ern days. A review of some of the most strik- ing makes this clear. Criminal-anthropologists agree upon the analgesia of the criminal as his fundamental state of mind and find many of its manifesta- tions identical with the psychic qualities noted of the hysteric. For instance, the criminal and the hysteric are alike in their preoccupa- tion with the personal, in their self-satisfaction and impressionability, in their love of sensa- tional notoriety for themselves and of sensa- tional slander and detraction of others: quali- ties that have become strikingly familiar in modern worldliness. Dostoyevsky, in his profound study of crim- inals, expatiates upon what he calls their "ter- rible indifference"; Davitt speaks of their mental state as a chronic mood of "sinister con- tentment"; Dr. Wey of Elmira writes "Scenes of heart-rending despair are hardly ever witnessed among prisoners. Their sleep is disturbed by no uneasy dreams, but is easy and sound; their appetites also are excellent." Despine remarks likewise that nothing re- OUR NERVOUS HUMANITY 107 sembles the sleep of the just more closely than the slumber of an assassin. Lombroso and Ferri have dwelt upon the attributes of cheer- fulness, stoical fortitude, and that optimism which accompanies cynicism, as characterizing the criminal almost without exception. And Lombroso mentions that executioners have told him that all the highwaymen and murder- ers went to their death joking. The murderer is invariably optimistic and cynical. He holds a cynical belief in the crim- inality of all mankind allied with a touching faith in the pardon of God for his own special wrong-doing. It is rare, if not impossible, to find a criminal of any degree of crime whatso- ever, who does not believe in a good God, in universal salvation, and who does not feel self- justification in all his impulses of crime. For, as Havelock Ellis has shown, the criminal psychosis has a curious contradiction to its cruelty and insensibility in its capacity when endowed with any refinement of thought or feeling to attain and reveal most strongly the qualities called sentimentality and piety. Now a summary of these well-known and 108 VENTURES IN WORLDS established characteristics of the criminal: cheer, content, hope, stoicism, self-satisfaction, jocularity, optimism sentimentality and piety, seem precisely like a summary of the most praised and desired qualities that form the fa- miliar "sane and wholesome" temperament of the normal man and woman to-day. Society is organized on an animal basis; therefore the criminal elements as they exist in the rudimentary being are looked upon as the eminently fit and normal equipment for man- kind. The man or woman who becomes a social success or popular leader must neces- sarily possess the criminal temperament com- bined with a cultured adaptability instead of affectibility to civilization which enables one to be lawless in egoism and lawful in acts. Of such are the kingdom of Earth. And as society is thus organized the finer and higher types of humanity naturally ap- pear anti-social, just as they appear abnormal. Tarde observes that "in a savage society one of the chief criminal types would be that of the delicate and artistic natures, sensuous and sen- sitive, ill adapted for pillaging neighboring OUR NERVOUS HUMANITY 109 tribes," and MacDonald says that "Savage races, whose minds are less active, react with the greatest force against any innovation re- garding the innovators as criminals." In Sanskrit the word for action is the word for crime. Curious and general confusions of ideas have grown up to-day regarding the genius and the criminal because of the attempt made by so- ciety to unite them in the sinister category of the anti-social. Christ and Socrates ap- peared so anti-social in their day that they were condemned as criminals. The criminal is a more social creature than the genius judged by the standards: compat- ability with his social environment, and the consciousness of kind that animates him. Quentelet even said that "Society prepares crime, the criminal becomes its executive." Consequently the criminal does not seek to change society as genius does, for society is really propitious to his self -development and is arranged by Charity for his guardianship. But genius possesses the anti-social qualities for which society has no understanding, no bars 110 VENTURES IN WORLDS and no rewards ; therefore the only discourage- ment and disarmament it has found for genius is to relegate all the higher developments of genus homo to the Clinic for study, classifica- tion and stigmatizing as the abnormal, the mor- bid, the psychopathic, the teratological and neurological. Forensic science, in the hands of normal men, has done its utmost to interpret the symptoms of human evolution as those of devolution. Neurology has become a science marked with the skull and crossbones of danger and disease, to the public mind; for in it alone can be found some explanation of the difference between the genius and the criminal, between the neurotic and the hysteric, broadly, between the nervous and the nerveless a dis- tinction we have not been instructed to make. As a matter of fact, and in the common run of life, nervous people, who live in the higher nerve-centres, such as brain-workers, artists and other creative personalities, are recorded statistically, as living longer and in better physical and mental health, on the whole, than the nerveless people, who live in the lower nerve centres, such as muscle-workers, uncrea- OUR NERVOUS HUMANITY 111 live mediocrities and ordinary "normal" human beings. Longevity has increased with the nervous diathesis of the modern being. Youth and beauty, too, are being prolonged through the development of the neurotic woman, the type to which belong all gifted, cerebral, creative women. But doubtless the tests of science can reveal all modern humanity living in various stages of disease just as the tests of religion in bygone ages revealed all humanity living in various stages of sin. Disease is the modern obsession as sin was the mediaeval. So the normal and the abnormal both appear to be in minor and major stages of malady or race-distortion. The normal being is unhealthy in his direc- tion towards hysteria, atavism and analgesia, the abnormal being is unhealthy in his direc- tion towards neurosis, evolution and hyper- algesia. But humanity must choose the direc- tion of one or the other as the future itinerary of its soul. To choose the abnormal direction means to choose the hard tutelage of pain. To suffer has but one crown, creativeness. Great crea- 112 VENTURES IN WORLDS tive minds have found their lightning in their darkness ; and have mastered that one and only secret of genius (and perhaps, too, of God), that one creates in proportion to his capacity for suffering, for melancholy, and despair. Suffering is full of knowledge, melancholy is full of dreams, despair is full of self -resource. The biographies of great men and women pro- vide the evidence of this, and reveal beyond dispute, the temperamental or philosophical unhappiness of genius. Happiness, if it can be found in this world, is reserved for that sup- posedly normal being who is hysteric from his repudiation of personal pain, criminal from his insensibility to impersonal pain, atavistic from his negation of the pain of change and evolution. At this moment I can recall only two great men of genius to whom public opinion has ac- corded the possession of "health" of mind, and "normality" of organism Goethe and Turge- nev. Perhaps this idea was formed because of the unquestionable physical perfection and ma- terial good fortune of every kind that blessed them both. But now they afford two illustri- OUR NERVOUS HUMANITY 113 ous examples of the neurosis of pain of this study, for both Goethe and Turgenev pos- sessed the so-called pathology of the abnormal, in its highest degree, in their exaggerated sen- sibilities and sympathies. Goethe confessed in his autobiography his life-long unhappiness and said "every increase of knowledge is an in- crease of sorrow;" and a biographer of Turge- nev wrote that he had "never known any man who suffered like Turgenev from mere De- spair." The unhappiness of men and women of genius is not because of their infirmities, as we are directed to believe, but is because of the nervous organization of genius. "There is from the metaphysical observer's point of view neither disease nor health of the soul, there are only psychological states," writes Bourget; but the science of psychiatry, a product of this century, is in an elementary state and that of physiology so completed that we have nothing but physiological conceptions of mental and spiritual conditions. Thus the genius of Browning has been attributed to the good digestion of the poet and the genius of Carlyle attributed to his indigestion. Nordau, 114 VENTURES IN WORLDS after a lifetime's study, discovered no solution for the riddle of genius except "degeneration" and phrenopathic nerves. Dr. Gould revealed in his series "Biographic Clinics" defective eye- sight as an explanation of the temperamental peculiarities of genius; and countless medical and scientific writers attribute the finer sensi- bilities, emotions and "nerves" to visceral de- rangements, uric acid, and other metabolisms of our corporeal substance. The life of the senses as normal and the life of the sensibilities as something monstrous has descended to us as a literary, medical, and social tradition. Recalling the theory of evolution which said that the cerebral development of the human began in the indigestion of an overeating ape. The false and the pathologic holds all hu- manity in a spell which can only be broken by some magic cure of nature hidden in the mys- teries of Love, Art, and Joy. In their at- mosphere humanity finds its breath of great- ness; but it has lost its way to them because they are so surrounded by the shunned path- ways of pain. Love frightens away because of its pain, but OUR NERVOUS HUMANITY 115 it is only through its endemic sufferings that love attains its fulfilment and greatness. The pain of love has been the forcing-ground of the sympathies, and thus of the virtues of human- ity, but they have been evolved chiefly in the soul of woman, as the martyr of nature and man in love. Man, on the contrary, has never attained spiritual fulfilment or greatness in love be- cause nature and the social conventions have freed him from its pain. He has developed his love for woman only through its pleasures. Man is incapable of even considering love with- out a consciousness of its pleasures, and there- fore it appears to him merely physical, ignoble, or obscene, until man has become, thereby, the natural censor and hypocrite and squeamish of speech regarding "love." But woman can- not think of love without a consciousness of its pain, therefore it appears great, mystic and deific to her, and it is only through woman's nature and revelations that humanity can hope to discover for its ills the cure of love. Human society has been fashioned by man with the aim of securing for man all the pleas- 116 VENTURES IN WORLDS ures of love, and of securing for woman all its pains. Since time immemorial society has created all its penalties, responsibilities, claims and compulsions of love for woman alone, and for man has so safeguarded its pleasures and license that it has completely warped the sex- sense of man until he can not consider woman or love with a wholesome breadth of view, or with justice, honor and sympathy: the quali- ties of human nobility sacrificed to man's pleasure in love. Nature itself has made woman noble in love by making her erotic surrender a surrender to death, to the danger and pains of death; and has made man mean in love by making his erotic surrender never more than a surrender to life, in its acme of egoism, life perpetuating itself at any cost of pain to others. Since civilization has been arranged for the expression of man's nature and not of woman's in love we find to-day that man is a more normal creature in love than woman. Man is hysteric, atavistic and analgesic in his love, thus the personal, unsympathetic thoroughly material normal being ; and woman is neurotic, OUR NERVOUS HUMANITY 117 evolutive and hyperalgesic in her love, thus the impersonal, sympathetic, spiritualized abnor- mal being. Art, like love, to attain greatness must con- tain the pain-elements of life. The Greek spirit has come to signify the spirit of art to us, and the Greeks gained their dynamic quality in art and in personality through what Nietzsche describes as their spirit of tragedy: "The longing for the ugly, the good, resolute desire of the Old Hellene for pessimism, for tragic myth, for the picture of all that is ter- rible, evil, enigmatical, destructive, fatal at the basis of existence whence then must tragedy have sprung? Perhaps from joy, from strength, from exuberant health, from overfulness." At another great creative period, the Renais- sance, the artists possessed then also that "over- fulness" of temperament which seems vitalized by all the elements of life. The Gothic artists sang at their work as they built the magnificent gloom of their cathedrals. The song of au- dacious strength and defiant youth that does not deny tragedy, ugliness, suffering, but sees 118 VENTURES IN WORLDS it too clearly to be overcome by it and gets rid of it in the triumph of creativeness. The gar- goyles and tortured saints and shadows and cavernousness of Gothic cathedrals, with the songs, the rose-windows, the gold and lilies and painted colors, must exist in the soul of every creative artist. The weak and the fearful, the empty, the sick and the morbid deny the very existence of the dark things and the pains of life. Gifted youth is full of tragic moods, of thoughts of suicide and healthy pessimism which decline as the vitality, ability and passions lessen. Old age is optimistic, cynical and piously assured of personal salvation, in spite of all its mis- deeds, like criminals. Old age is more normal than youth; that is why it is a more prolonged state and finally a chronic condition in the life of every human being. And Joy the greatness and the health of joy where do we find it in our hysterical hedonism to-day? Our pleasures depend upon a running away, an ostrich-hiding from the pain of the world knocking at the hospital of the human heart. The apparent joyousness OUR NERVOUS HUMANITY 119 of society, which we see so fashionable every- where, is but feigned, imitative or toxic, based on nothing but hysteria in all its fears of truth. Balzac wrote that "None but those who suffer can paint joy" or realize it, let us add, for joy is but the consciousness of power which evolves eventually from the neurosis of pain. Again Nietzsche, the tragic apostle of Joy, tells us that "All those who undertook at some time or other to build a new heaven found the power for such an undertaking only in their own hell." Humanity has built so many little heavens founded on the air, that now at a time that reveals the collapse of them all, perhaps the humanity of to-morrow will undertake to build a new heaven on new foundations taken from the sound realities of man's earthly hell. * * * IN OLD WORLDS THE MAN-MADE WOMAN OF JAPAN IT has become the fashion to look upon Japan as the great land of promise in the East. She is expected to furnish the link of civiliza- tion and understanding between the East and the West. She is a self-elected world's cruci- ble. Her most radical admirers assert that in this land of the Rising Sun is to be created the new religion for which the world waits, a sort of re-orientalized Christianity uniting the best from the oriental and occidental mind and heart, japanned by modern science; and her detractors can only say that she has stolen her arts from China, her learning from Korea, her constitution from Germany, her naval system from Britain, her Code Napoleon from France, her industrialism from America and so is a kind of mental pickpocket amid the family of nations. The Chinese have given the Japanese a con- 123 124 VENTURES IN WORLDS temptuous name Lie Europeans; the Eng- lish call them the Yankees of Asia, since en- countering the new enterprise and competition of the Japanese in the far eastern trade; and altogether we find these little men of Dai Nip- pon presenting to the world the astounding phenomenon of being the first oriental people who have ever opened their minds to alien civ- ilizations with an appetite for assimilation. To what will it lead? Illimitable vistas of world's change open at the surmise. Three quarters or more of the earth's population con- sists of the yellow races. And if our modern democratic principles have the might of right in them and the rule of the majority must pre- vail in the future, the realization is inevitable that the nature and ideas of these people are of more consequence than our own. The source of every race is in its mothers. Man, like wa- ter, never rises higher than his source. For the enlightened Westerner the great interest in Japan to-day is its women. The easiest way to arrive at a conception of the Japanese woman is to think of every qual- ity directly contrary to the qualities of the THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 125 typical American woman and to see her as the embodiment of these. She is as docile as the American woman is aggressive, as demure as the American is flamboyant, as modest as the American is impudent, as humble as the Amer- ican is snobbish, as conservative as the Ameri- can is faddish, as reticent as the American is effusive. In fact, in the Japanese we find the commonly expressed masculine ideal of woman more wholly realized than anywhere else in the world. To the truth of this every male author and globe-trotter has testified with intemperate eulogies. The Japanese woman is a superlative realiza- tion of what man, even the occidental, pro- fesses to admire; and in this day when the threat of woman- suffrage has made men threaten women with the loss of their admira- tion, of chivalry and the much-vaunted priv- ileges of the sex, it becomes worth while to study what the antithesis of the suffragette, the embodiment of man-made femininity, has been accorded in admiration, chivalry and privileges from the megaphone sex. The woman of Japan is as much the product 126 VENTURES IN WORLDS of the man as is its art. In her, as in Japan- ese art, we see the beauty of a simplicity that does not issue from truth, but from irregu- larity. She is a paradox of naivete and arti- ficiality. In her is consummated that complex craft whose final effect is artlessness. A Jap- anese artist will spend a lifetime learning to paint a paper kakemona with a half-dozen strokes of his brush. Keinen, perhaps the greatest living artist in Japan to-day, will take seven years to fulfil the order for a picture that takes but a day to paint. Thus these peo- ple have won for their art the description- great in little things and little in great things. They are in love with the grandiose, but depict it as the microscopic. The Japanese is a na- ture worshipper like the ancient Greek, but like him also he ends in anti-nature. The trees of his country mean so much to the Japanese that he has their changes and progress daily recorded in his newspapers under the heading, News of the Trees; thefts of trees sometimes occur; and the people will travel immense dis- tances to see the cherry trees and the iris fields in bloom; yet the Japanese as a gardener cares THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 127 only to develop dwarfs, fantasies and freaks of horticulture. Another instance of his perver- sity of taste is that the favorite subject of the Japanese artist is tigers. Everywhere one finds them depicted from the shoji of the Nijo Palace to the little curio-shops on the Benton-Dori. I inquired of a picture dealer in Yokohama the why and wherefore of this artist's favorite and was told it was "because there are no tigers in Japan." In other char- acteristics besides his love for the impossible, the Japanese resembles the Greek. He has at once the soft wickedness of a highly cultivated sestheticism and the Spartan's austerity, great power of endurance and self-discipline. Like the Greeks, too, the Japanese teach their wives only virtues without accomplishments, and leave them to their own and their children's society, while the chosen companionship of the men is among the women to whom they teach the accomplishments without the virtues. From this we can gather some hint of the masculine psychology which has created the Japanese woman as she is. She is an epitome of her nation's virtues. 128 VENTURES IN WORLDS From the highest to the lowest, from the Em- press to the yujo of the Yoshiwara, we find some unparalleled virtue in the Japanese woman. In the Dowager-Empress we find the extreme of the conjugal virtues; did she not mother all the illegitimate children of her royal spouse, Mutsuhito, and smile complaisance upon his concubines ? And in the unfortunate of the Yoshiwara we find the extreme of that filial piety, the great virtue of Japan, which makes her willing to become a lotos in the mud as the famous writer and beautiful oiran Murasaki named her for the benefit of her parents. Almost everything we see in Japan can be more or less traced to some carefully inculcated traits of its women. The impressionability and obsequiousness of its men doubtless issue from the supineness of its women; their subtle streak of treachery, which makes them so un- reliable as merchants and servants in other lands, may issue from the sex-servility of their mothers, for the enslaved mind ever subtilizes and revenges itself in two-f acedness ; their blood-thirstiness which so horrified the world THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 129 in their treatment of the Chinese at Port Ar- thur, might have its root in that deep frenzy of the elemental which clots itself within the baffled woman-nature, but which seems to have no manifestation in the winsome meek woman of Japan until perchance she becomes a mother- in-law. But we must remember that the To- kugawa period was famed for its women war- riors; the museums are filled with the swords, longer and heavier than those of the men- soldiers, which were borne by them; and the women of the Samurai carried out its ferocious code of heroics as sternly as the men. The millennium is expected to come when the meek inherit the earth. The Japanese peo- ple have adopted the appearance of meekness as one of their distinctions. According to their social canons, a man must disclaim all merit in himself or his, must eschew all ostentation, must be eager to die for his emperor and even has no personal pronouns or swear words in his language; and yet we find that this too obvious humility really covers such an intoler- ant arrogance and vanity that even the school children are taught that "to be laughed at" is 130 VENTURES IN WORLDS the most fearful thing that can happen to them. In the days of the Samurai when a nobleman wished to guarantee the payment of a bor- rowed sum, he affixed to his note the permis- sion to be laughed at in public in case he failed to pay. Behind the man's meekness we thus find an exaggerated egotism and sensitiveness to criticism. And behind the woman's meek- ness, what do we find? The mystery of woman's meekness is the mystery of mysteries in Japan. It is true her lot far transcends what it is in all other oriental nations, and her chief injury at man's hands seems to be simply that he has succeeded in making her so good that she is powerless to influence him to any good not even into in- venting a Japanese word to describe gallantry or chivalry to woman. She has been made to accept the doctrine of her perpetual obedience : obedience to father as a daughter, obedience to husband as a wife, obedience to eldest son as a widow. For two hundred years her conduct has been founded upon the teachings of the sage, Kaibara, who laid down the law for her in the Onna Daigaku. In this venerated doc- THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 131 ument the virtues befitting woman are defined as obedience, first and foremost, chastity, mercy, quietness and self-sacrifice; and her worst vice jealousy: a natural choice of the qualities for woman in a country where a man limits the number of his wives only by the lim- its of his purse. It makes duty her sole honor, and self-extinction her supreme glory. Her raison d'etre and mission in life are explained as enlivening her husband's life, bearing children for him, and in waiting upon her hus- band's mother and relations. And lest she might bear the palling demeanor of the martyr, the most annoying of all demeanors to men, she has been disciplined to conceal every emo- tion that might be displeasing to others and is taught from her babyhood the heroism of smiles and the noble ingratiation of pretty bows. The Bushido code tells her also, "Do not sadden others by intruding your personal grief upon them." It has happened, there- fore, that the Japanese woman has fully de- veloped the trait most charming to men in women: reticence; reticence to the very oblit- eration of her personal woes and desires. To 132 VENTURES IN WORLDS insure this accommodating principle in woman still further, he made talkativeness one of the causes for divorce from her. After such a tri- umphant creation of goodness for his woman- kind, it does seem ungallant of him to have made all the goddesses in Japan of an evil countenance and disposition. We can read the character and domestic his- tory of the Japanese in their divorce laws. Be- fore the New Civil Code (adopted in 1893) divorce was only granted to the husband. The seven causes for which a man could divorce his wife were: disobedience, barrenness, disease, jealousy, lewdness, stealing and talking too much; in other words, simply if he wanted to be rid of her. As under the Mosaic law di- vorce was invented for the benefit of the man, neither law nor public opinion in Japan al- lowed to the wife even the right to desire a divorce. Besides she was taught from infancy the popular precepts of her country that "all women shall think their husbands to be heaven" and "woman has no home in the three worlds- past, present and future" so she was grateful to her honorable master when he gave her THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 133 the shelter of his little paper house, and when he bade her leave it to make room for a new occupant, she blamed only herself for failure to please him. The Japanese are accustomed to saying that gratitude is one of the strong- est traits of their race. In order to divorce his wife all the husband need do was to write her a letter notifying her of the fact the Mikoudarihan, literally three lines and a half and the thing was ipso facto done. The children were always his exclusive property; and he did not have to make any provision for the poor little divorcee. .One wonders what became of her in a country where only the lower class woman can be self-supporting and the families are so eager to be rid of the expense of their daughters and loath to take back one whom divorce has marked undesirable. But some one has written that she always remar- ried, "presumably because some friend of her husband's has noticed that she was not so black as her mother-in-law painted her." The Japanese claim with pride that the new Civil Code has placed their women upon an equality with men as in western nations by 134 VENTURES IN WORLDS at last granting the right of divorce to the wife. Their idea of equality is illuminating. The wife can now get a divorce for various causes and by mutual consent (which would be denied in America as "collusion"), but she cannot get a divorce for the adultery of her husband, which is the chief and often the only cause in western civilization. But in Jap- anese law a married man commits adultery only when his paramour is married also, thus con- sidering only the injury to the other man, but the wife is guilty of adultery whether or not her paramour is married: the same law that exists in other civilizations. The framers of the New Code also laid down that "a person who is judicially divorced or punished because of adultery cannot contract a marriage with the other party to the adultery." Since the husband cannot be divorced for adultery, this applies solely to the wife and constitutes both a modern punishment for her and a protection for the other man. In former days the law of Japan punished the adultery of the wife by crucifixion or by decapitation and exposure of the head; or else, for the sake of independence THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 135 and variety, her husband might take her to a place similar to one shown to tourists at Kyoto, a precipice near the Kiomidzu temple where it was the manly old custom of husbands to give their wives the benefit of the doubt by hurling them to the rocky depths below as a test of their possible innocence: if the wife survived the fall, she was vindicated; if not, her guilt was avenged. But the Samurai class substituted for the barbarous physical punishment the more refined and up-to-date torture of a moral one. When a woman of noble birth erred she was sent to the Yoshiwara for a term of three to five years; which was considered an ex- emplary vindication of the family honor. There are many stories also of Samurai women who have voluntarily sold away their liberty to the same penal colony in order to give their husbands or fathers the means to purchase weapons or armor in time of warfare. The Japanese women have not shown much disposition to avail themselves of their modern right of divorce, and for several good reasons ; chiefly because the children still belong to the father, unless given her by the State with his 136 VENTURES IN WORLDS consent. And children have ever been the weighty anchorage of woman. In Japan a woman possesses no legal right to her child, but the husband has the right to repudiate even his legal child. A son is not legally recognized unless he is registered by his father, while also his illegitimate child is recognized as a true son if he is so registered. "There is always a tacit recognition of a father's right to decline the gift which Heaven has bestowed on him, and a new-born babe is still formally presented to his father for acceptance. In old days unless the new-born child was laid at his father's feet, the father could refuse to take it, and the child was then exposed to die in a bamboo grove, as the proverb says." There is one divorce to every three marriages in Japan and only one per cent, of the divorces have been sought by the wives. Another rea- son for this is that public opinion still penal- izes the woman who will not submit to every- thing from her husband. When a Japanese woman is the plaintiff in a divorce suit, she loses social position or respectability; but if she is the defendant she loses nothing but a bad THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 137 husband and retains a good chance of getting another one. So love for her children and the social ban of sex are serving to keep the Jap- anese woman as effectually bound to-day as she was formerly bound by the Confucian social and official order. In America at present we are hearing much against the facility of divorce in our country, and the opponents of "woman's rights" attrib- ute our domestic disasters to the emancipated ideas of the American women. But here in Japan, we see a land of subject women ff fille, on nous supprime; femme, on nous opprime" and yet divorces are far more common and easier to be had here than in America. This should be a sufficient answer to those tiraders who make woman responsible for every wrong on earth at the same time that they deny her every right to be or act as herself. There are a half million less women than men in Japan, but the minority has not en- hanced the value of woman nor opened to her any of the advantages it is supposed to have procured for the sex in some of the western States of America. Marriage is still the sole 138 VENTURES IN WORLDS business of a woman's life in Japan. If she is not married before she is twenty, she is dis- graced socially. She is given no chance to de- velop ambition, and is rarely allowed to finish her school course before she is married by her parents, who are eager to get her married as early as possible. That she might develop some of the ambition of her brother, if given the chance, seems possible, when we learn from Miss Bacon, an authority on Japanese girls and women, that "in some cases the breaking down of a girl's health may be traced to threats on the part of her parents that if she does not take a certain rank in her studies, she will be taken from school and married off." The hus- band is selected for her by her parents and she is given no dowry, but is given as complete a trousseau as her family can afford. The trous- seau of the bride is supposed to last her all her life, or at least to comprise all those clothes and household articles which she will need during the next two or three years, in order that she will not have to ask her husband for money. When the wife's stealing is one of the causes for divorce, doubtless this little spouse never THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 139 dares go through the pockets of her lordly hus- band's hikama while he lies oblivious upon his futon on the ground; and one wonders where she finds the yen and sen to spend for the mys- terious contents of the little dressing case which every Japanese woman carries hidden in her big pagoda sleeve. Marriage is a civil contract and merely re- quires registration; but certain time-honored rites are observed in a properly conducted wed- ding. The bride must be dressed in white, the color of death-garments, to signify that she is dead to her family; and purification fires are lit at her parents' home upon her departure. She is lifted over a fire at the threshold of her home and the momentary nearness of the little bride to the flames of destruction makes one glad that the etiquette of her country allows her to escape them, unlike her neighbor the In- dian woman for whom man invented the fin- ishing etiquette of suttee. After this the bride is taken to her husband's home where she changes her dress for one of a livelier hue and drinks with him three times three little cups of sake, which concludes the marriage cere- 140 VENTURES IN WORLDS monies. Until the Empress Haruko refused to submit to the fashion, a woman blackened her teeth when she became a wife and shaved her eyebrows at the birth of her first child. Whoever has seen a little Japanese thus dis- figured (and there are many provincial and middle-aged women who still adhere to the old fashion) can no longer blame the husbands for their habit of divorce. Yet it all originated in the desire to please him; thus sacrificing the wife's attractiveness upon the connubial altar in order to exorcise f orevermore the green-eyed monster from his soul. Delivered over to her honorable master, what an extraordinary little wife the slit-eyed, doll-like, little mousme becomes! No wonder Sir Edward Arnold, Lafcadio Hearn, Pierre Loti, and so many lesser lights have sought their feminine ideal in a Madame Chrysan- theme among them. The life of a Japanese wife is all incense, flowers, prayers and smiles offered up to the god man. But it is the Japanese lady who makes the ideal wife. The woman of the lower classes is often quite ex- ceptional in her deviations from domestic rule. THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 141 She often seeks a divorce like a man be- cause she can earn her own living, and so is ceded the tacit right to a choice in the man she may support with her earnings, and also be- cause she does not have to fear that bete noire, social position, which the lady must lose if she is the petitioner for divorce. It is well known that the working woman in Japan receives far more consideration than the woman of the up- per classes. And really it is not the woman who coals the vessels in the harbor of Naga- saki who deserves the foreigner's sympathy (so generously and ignorantly lavished upon her) for she is the freest woman in Japan; but it is the undowered lady and wife, and the little beflowered maiko and geisha who ceases to paint and rice powder her face and calls her- self old at twenty, and the poor little slave of the Yoshiwara who sits in her cage, disgraced, with her obi tied in front, sold by parents and master: the toy women, the subject women, the women earning their living through sex, whether as prostitute or as wife and mother, these are the women whose lot is to be pitied in Japan. 142 VENTURES IN WORLDS Nevertheless the Japanese woman is a merry little creature who seems to hold forever invio- late in her memory the treasure of her happy, sexless childhood. Something of the dainty creatures with which she played as a child- butterflies, fireflies, dragon flies seem to have left their spirit within her own, for it is full of their harmonious consent to the lights and darks in her wee garden of life, and her winged ignorance is never troubled to query as to the shape of the earth nor saddened by knowing that men once gave up their lives to prove that it was round. Discontented woman seems to be chiefly the product of America where she is treated more like an individual and human be- ing than anywhere else in the world. In Japan, she has uttered no complaints ; she has never dreamed of politics or of interfering in man's star-chamber methods of laying down the law for her, and the blue-stocking women here have even organized societies "to resist the invasion of Christian institutions that would re- lieve them from oppression," very much as some of our advanced club-women have organ- ized anti-suffrage parties in America. THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 143 She is so charming, this little Nipponese wife, who has dolls strapped to her back when she is a baby in order that she grow used to her future burdens in the j oiliest way and wears her jet hair in the oddest top-knot, as a proof to all men when she is married and when dressed in her best is tied in at the knees so that she may not seem to walk in unwomanly freedom and walks in pattering clogs with her toes turned in as far as possible, the fash- ionable walk in Japan, since men said it showed "modesty" in women and so started the fash- ion and wears her sleeves so long "long to dry her tears with," as a poet once said and lays her head in the air at night and her neck on a guillotine-like pillow, and knows the alle- gorical meaning of flowers and the solemn tea- ceremony and how to smoke from a tiny pipe that holds but three whiffs, and a repertoire of kowtowing and salutations, and can play on the samisen and count sums on the abacus, and has glances and hisses like a little cat, and can do all the cute, sweet, quaintly silly, child- ish and affected things which appeal to men except one, the most popular feminine accom- 144 VENTURES IN WORLDS plishment in the West to kiss. This the Japanese man has never taught her, nor had any impulse to do himself; so they never miss it in their home; and she makes for him such a perfect little home according to all his stand- ards, that it becomes incomprehensible why the Japanese husband is said to be a born club- man; and like the French, not even to have the word for home in his vocabulary. Surely he has everything exactly as he wishes at home; why then does he constantly desert home for club and tea-house, and his good little wife for that "dainty iniquity," the geisha, as Kipling calls her, or for worse the secreted "hell- woman"? It is unknown to the Japanese wife to fail in her duties. She would have too many stones cast at her if she did and a paper house forms no more protection than a glass one. Her life is all arranged for her with a wonderful ingenu- ity in destroying the leisure that a house built like a Japanese paper lantern, without furni- ture, and with one "dust-hole" in the centre where all the misplaced matter can be dumped in an instant and hidden by a clean mat, and THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 145 the fact of her lifelong trousseau would seem to warrant. But custom has made it the par- ticular honor of the wife (even with servants) to perform the menial services for the family, and they have been multiplied for her, sa- gaciously. She must be the first to get up in the mornings and open the house and greet every one with a cheery "O-Hayo"; then she goes out in the diminutive garden and gathers a branch of blossoms or maple or azalea twig and arranges them in a vase in the honorable tokonoma; she makes and takes up the honor- able tea to her honorable lord and his honorable mother; she brushes her husband's clothes, fetches and carries for him, and hunts for what- ever odd jobs she can perform for him and all his elderly relations, until she, with all the serv- ants, sees him off in the mornings at the door- step. With smiles and bows and respectful rubbings of her knees, and perhaps a hiss or two but never a kiss, she bids him "sayonara," the pretty Japanese word for good-bye which means literally "if it must be so." She must be at that same doorstep when he returns in the late afternoon, to show her hon- 146 VENTURES IN WORLDS orable impatience to fuss around him with at- tentions, to conduct him to the bath she pre- pares for him, to help him shed the European garments he wears outside his home, and assist him into the luxurious kimono, and to serve him with his tea or supper. At meals she is not al- lowed to eat with her husband or sons and must not even sit down in her husband's presence. (The lower-class wife can eat with her hus- band providing she sits at a respectful dis- tance from him.) She must not speak unless she is spoken to, and even then is supposed to utter the exclusive monosyllable, yes. She must slide back the shutters for him when he leaves the room and must pick up anything he happens to drop. When they appear in public together, she must walk a few paces behind him, a relic of the days, some one has explained, when a man must be protected from a stab in the back. But they rarely do appear in pub- lic together, the husband taking good care that his wife is kept busy in her proper sphere, home. Upon her wedding day her master has re-read to her the sage's commandments for women to obey, and her relations-in-law never permit her THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 147 to forget them. One is: "Women shall al- ways keep to their duty, rise early and work till late at night. They must not sleep during the day, must study economy, and must not neglect their weaving, sewing, and spinning, and must not drink too much tea or wine. They shall not hear or see any such lascivious thing as a theatre or drama; before reaching the age of forty, women shall not go to those places, or to where many people collect, such as a temple or a shrine." So her day is amply filled with duties as house-maid, nurse, cook, seamstress, valet, and general factotum of the household, so that she doubtless does not have time even to dream of the good time she is going to have after she is too old to want it. The flower-festivals and picnics, the wrestling matches, the temples and theatres all these wonderful things which no respectable woman can attend while she is young and pretty, are given her when a hoary mater familias. The only dissipation allowed a young wife is an oc- casional debauch in tea with two or three mousmees or matrons, in the solemn tea-cere- mony, the Cha-no-yu, which takes hours to per- 148 VENTURES IN WORLDS form and is the most ingenious device ever cre- ated by man for an elaborate preoccupation over airy trifles and harmless nothings. Naturally the Japanese woman does not con- ceal her age. In fact she is more apt to say she is older than she is; for the Japanese have a queer way of reckoning age, by which a child at birth is called a year old. This may have started with the girl babies for whom the indul- gent parents desired to hasten the golden age. Age is a favorite topic of conversation among ladies, and when introduced to a Japanese lady one is supposed to put her in a good humor by asking her how old she is. The Japanese translations of Moliere's works were sup- pressed by public consent because they rid- iculed old age. The Japanese generously de- sire to leave the illusions of old age for the comfort of their women. In this they are certainly more fortunate than the Western woman. The latter in all her emancipation has not yet emancipated herself from her most feared and pitiless master Age. The Ameri- can woman is a coquette only until she is a grandmother; but a Japanese woman is al- THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 149 lowed to become a coquette when she is a grand- mother ; and how much more a woman knows of coquetry then than at twenty. The tragedy of most women's lives is that they do not discover how to live until the mirror tells them it is time for them to die; but the little Japanese can snap her fingers at this reflection, and see in every wrinkle a springing hope of wild oats to be sown. The world must concede that in making his women yearn for old age, the Jap- anese has achieved the triumph of man over matter. Many men in Japan are opposing the educa- tion of their women on the ground that it will create a servant problem which hitherto their country has been free from. The abasement of the wife (into the general servant of the household) has served to elevate domestic serv- ice and the social status of servants. The servant is ranked above the tradesman, the farmer and the artisan. Although servants are bound by rigid laws of etiquette and have "no rights" at all, to our western eyes they seem to be treated like the members of the family. In old-fashioned homes the servants 150 VENTURES IN WORLDS commingle with the family after working hours and can help to entertain guests and take part in the conversation and laughter. Servants are frequently university students. Prince Ito, the great statesman and premier who framed the constitution for the New Japan, took the position of a waiter during the several years he studied the English language and Western institutions. It was Prince Ito also who inaugurated European dress for his people. "So long as we dress differently from the rest of the world, they will regard us as freaks," he told them, cleverly appealing to their sensitiveness to ridicule. Then the Empress ordained foreign dress for the court ladies, and for a while it seemed as if the death knell had been sounded for the picturesque national costume. When Japan was lifted to the dizzy height of the world's recognition as a first class power, un- like all other peoples, success did not give her the intolerance of diversity, but gave her the apishness of admiration for all foreign things. The men accepted the foreign as their official dress and many made their wives do the same THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 151 as a sort of signalia of modern progress and revolutionary change in Japan. But the im- ported costume has restricted itself to the im- perial and bureaucratic circles, and is doubtless worn only in public by them as a sort of play- up to the civilizations of the West with which Japan is so eager to be identified. The Jap- anese are the best bluffers in the world. And they would not be so quick at adaptation of the extraneous were they not arrantly superficial. At least we know that in the privacy of home, the foreign costume is immediately shed for the more comfortable hikama and kimono. But of late years there has been a reaction in favor of holding to the native costume ; perhaps because they are discovering that foreign dress makes them appear more odd and ridiculous than in their own becoming garments. Strange to say, while the Japanese men have shown such zeal for the revolution in dress, the women have shown themselves most loath to adopt it; in this again marking themselves the conservative sex. Excepting when her hus- band's ambitions have demanded it of her (and even then it is discarded at home when no for- 152 VENTURES IN WORLDS eigners are present) she dons it only to have her photograph taken. The Japanese adore hav- ing their photographs taken, a la European, and the stiffer and more unnatural the pose, the more satisfied they are with it. This aversion of the Japanese women to European dress be- comes extraordinary and baffling when we un- derstand what this dress signifies and procures for her in her country. Upon the day of the declaration of the new constitution the Em- press Haruko wore European dress and hat and for the first time in public rode side by side in the same carriage with the Emperor, and that night at the state dinner was offered his arm and seated beside him which ushered in the new era of public courtesy to women, on state occasions at least. Since then every woman in European attire is treated with the appearance of a respect and consideration never accorded her when in kimono, obi and getas. The wife dressed as a European can walk beside her husband instead of behind him ; and have him slide back the screens for her and assist her into the jinrikisha, and can eat her meals with him and receive visitors and appear THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 153 at the host's entertainments and mingle in com- panies of both sexes before she is senile. In fact this dress is a sort of uniform of progress and compulsory change in Japan which grants to woman privileges, immemorially denied. It represents for her emancipation frorii^)ast con- tempt and public humiliation ; and yet only the ultra-fashionable ladies have adopted it (from motives of policy) and even they are profess- ing more distaste for it every day. Woman, hugging her chains, is indeed a mystery. While I was in Japan, in all the big cities from Nikko to Nagasaki, I did not see one Japanese woman in European dress, but saw the majority of men wearing it, or portions of it combined with their own costume which gave them an incongruous appearance. Neverthe- less there is one touch of foreign influence evi- dent upon the women which seems to be gaining considerable popularity, and this is a new mode of hair-dressing. One sees many women dressed in kimono and obi and shuffling pat- tens, but with their hair dressed in the new mode of a simple imitation of the Western style. Without camillia oil or loops or that 154 VENTURES IN WORLDS funny little pin which holds it out in the back as if to show it is impossible to lay that unctu- ous head upon a pillow, the hair in this new mode is simply pompadoured over an imported "rat" that encircles the head and is pinned upon the crown in a flat knot with side combs. In this trifle, of hair-dressing, there is con- cealed immensity. Until this modern era in Japan, convention decreed that woman should wear her hair in specified ways which announce certain personal facts about her, interesting to men: her age, and whether she is maid, wife or widow; if the latter, whether or not she is willing to be mar- ried again; even her respectability or its lack must be publicly declared by these particular modes of top-knots, loops and pins. Hence, for the present generation to adopt the non- committal hairdressing of the West, may be the augury of an eventful revolution in her con- dition and status. The first glance will no longer satisfy man's curiosity about a woman. He will be put to guessing her age, her amorous experience, her willingness or unwillingness for the marital yoke. What a new element in the THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 155 life of the Japanese this will introduce! Woman an enigma. Woman ending so un- expectedly as an enigma, after man's centuries and centuries of effort to make her as defined and confined and as uninteresting as possible. And what a successful sphinx she will become, this little Japanese, with her half-opened kitten eyes and her watchword "silence," and her un- canny refinements and Buddha-like little poses if only she is given a chance at the blunted imaginations of her men. Missionaries attribute the degradation of Japanese women to the teaching of Buddhism and Confucianism, in whose dogmas the sex- antagonized ecclesiastical mind has surpassed itself in calling her names: "a temptation, a snare, an unclean thing, a scapegoat, an ob- stacle to peace and holiness." But since the Christian fathers also excelled in similar com- pliments to the accursed sex, we must not at- tribute her position to the animadversions of holy scripture but to the pathology of over- sexed man. A nation, of course, is founded upon its homes ; and in Japan the home is founded upon 156 VENTURES IN WORLDS a separation of the sexes mentally, morally and socially. In the Daigaku one reads that "it was the custom of the ancients on the birth of a female child to let it lie on the floor for the space of three days. Even in this way may be seen the likening of the man to Heaven and of the woman to Earth." Nevertheless, the heavenly qualities are expected only of the woman. It would be laughable, if the results had not been so tragic, to see how valiantly man has striven to safeguard the human race by the exclusive goodness of women, and then has taken all the credit to himself wherever and whenever humanity has proved itself immune to the consequences of his own license to sin. In Japan the human duality begins early. After six or seven years of age, the sexes are separated in play and study. The girl is taught that she was created to serve the will of man, that for this only her body is of value and her brain nothing; and the boy is taught his importance in the future of his country, in the arts, sciences, politics, and has the inferiority of the feminine drilled into him as a necessary part of his education. Thus from childhood THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 157 all social intercourse, sympathy and under- standing between the sexes is rendered impos- sible. Man's intellectual life is shut out from home and wife ; and the best substitute the Jap- anese man can find for woman's companion- ship is at the tea-houses among the geishas, who are said to be "the best educated women in Japan" with their poor little hetairai accom- plishments. But woman is on the road to discover a way to stir the imagination of the Japanese man; and that is one element the Japanese has never yet brought to bear upon the sex-relation imagination. Sex has been rigidly kept in the realm of appetite. Not yet has the Japanese evolved the imagination to clothe it with the fancy, the poetry, the humanity, and the divin- ity the western imagination has bestowed upon it. There is no romance between the sexes in Japan. The relation is either crude and busi- ness-like as in marriage, or unmentionable and bestial, out of marriage. No wonder there is no word in the Japanese language which can be translated as "love" in our language. The only love that can be spoken or written of in 158 VENTURES IN WORLDS Japan is the filial ; and the word usually trans- lated as love, "horeru," when applied to man and woman, means something base and shame- ful. In the text-book for woman's training, even in woman's complete library called Onna Yushoku Mibae Bunko, the word love does not occur. The little mousme of Japan is given, therefore, no sweet dreams and roseate illusions of love that thrilling Glory of the western maiden as she is raised and rounded for the minotaur marriage. There are no words of endearment for lovers, nor for husband and wife. Marriage is without courtship, court- ship without kisses, caresses or pet names. No Japanese knight has ever performed a deed of valor for love of a woman. No Japanese poet has ever written a poem of "love" that could be read to a pure woman. These people have put all their refinement into their etiquette of life and so have had none left for the ele- mental facts of life; they have put all their imagination in a hair-splitting epicureanism and so have had none left with which they might dignify humanity's greatest passion. THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 159 When the Japanese nation evolves the kiss of man and woman she may cease to be a mim- icker and become a moulder of civilization. A kiss is the acme of imagination. It represents the triumph of sex in ideality. In reading of the loveless, kissless, woman- denouncing Japanese, one might believe him austerely chaste, puritanical, the true ascetic, and to those unversed in the duality of human nature it comes with a shock of surprise to learn that, on the contrary, his ruthless immor- ality and licentiousness are notorious and the scandal of Japan. There is one feature of this so unique and so illustrative of the vicious outgrowths of man's lop-sided civilizations, that it has a claim upon the interest of every student of Japan or of human nature: the institution of the Yoshi- wara. Classified with our "white slave traffic" and the sordid evils that nightly stalk Broadway, Piccadilly and the Parisian Boulevards, it yet differs from them all in certain elements which make it the most sickening and tragic exhibition 160 VENTURES IN WORLDS the world affords of the inhuman injustice and shame accorded woman in civilizations made strictly of the men, for the men, by the men. At a temple in Nikko, there is a famous pic- ture of three monkeys, one with his hands cov- ering his eyes, which means see no evil, another with hands covering ears, which means hear no evil, the other with hands covering mouth, which means speak no evil. This is evidently the Buddhistic formula for peace on earth, good will to men; but thanks to the men who have not observed it, humanity has evolved from some of its barbarities, and most of the barbarities that exist to-day endure because women have been too long and thoroughly trained by men to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. So upon the silence of society and the deaf, dumb and blind ignorance of women and the double-ledgering of men (double-standards, double-lives, one set of figures for women to read, another hidden one for man) such institu- tions as the Yoshiwara have reared themselves. No one can understand the Japanese people until he has seen the menagerie-like spectacle THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 161 of that portion of its womankind whom they place outside of human rights in a hideous trav- esty of human dignity. In the dusk of every evening, just as the temple bells of Iriya are pealing forth their summons to the strange gods of Nippon, this spectacle begins : women, girls the majority mere children in appear- ance file into cages which open onto the streets, exactly like the cages in a zoo, and sit for hours behind those wooden bars like mer- chandise for sale, with an aureole of tortoise shell combs around their heads and bedecked in garish splendor of attire. The spectacle arouses disgust and scorn until one learns the hidden springs behind this system of woman- sale and then there comes only pity. The government has placed its sanction upon this institution; "thus sayeth the law" is more powerful in Japan than in any other civilized country; so the idea has been perpetuated among the people that parents have a moral (because legal) right to dispose of their daugh- ters to their own advantage, and the inmates of the Yoshiwara are sold by their parents or adopted parents when too young and ignorant 162 VENTURES IN WORLDS to understand the nature of the transaction or the ghastly future it will bring. But even if she knew, the Japanese daughter is as power- less to resist the parental will as her brother the soldier would be to resist the will of his Em- peror. As we know, she is taught filial devo- tion as her religion. It is not true, as has been so frequently stated, that unchastity does not dishonor a woman in Japan. Even these slaves of the Yoshiwara, involuntary victims, are treated as below humankind. Until a few years ago, they had no chance of escape from what even the Japanese call "the bitter sea of misery." When there were runaways, the law authorized their capture, punishment and re- turn to their keepers. That there were many runaways we can believe when we learn that the average number of suicides among these girls throughout the land was forty and fifty a month. In 1900 the right of "free cessation" was won for them through the courageous efforts of a foreign clergyman, and during the following two months the suicides ceased and the exodus of girls made it seem as if "the Nightless City" THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 163 were at last to become a deserted city. And then a strange thing happened: the law still exacted that a girl's debt to her keeper must be paid (the original price paid her parents for her and which she is supposed to pay off to re- gain her freedom, something the keeper does not permit to occur unless he wishes to be rid of her) and when she thus seized the opportunity to escape through the first right ever given her, the law authorized the attachment and forfeit of her parent's property. As soon as the girls discovered this, their desertion of the Yoshi- wara ceased. The girl is now held there by the moral obligation to pay her debt as powerfully as she was previously held by her official help- lessness. Nowadays those engaged in rescue work are first asked by the girls who desire to escape from their life: "But what shall I do about my debt ?" One writes : "This idea has been instilled in the minds of the women until they feel that they are committing an immoral act in leaving while they leave debts due the keeper." Need one add more to show how even the immorality of a woman's life in Japan has been brought about by man's trafficking in 164 VENTURES IN WORLDS her moral nature and superior sense of respon- sibility ? These elements are what lift the piti- ful victims of the Yoshiwara the legalized sac- rifice of womanhood to the male from the realm of the sordid and negligible into the im- pressiveness and demand of monstrous tragedy. During the past four years there has been a lively agitation in Japan for a complete change in its social and moral system. The leaders of public opinion proclaim that something is rad- ically wrong, but do not seem to know what it is that must be changed, nor just what new laws to enact; for more laws is the masculine solu- tion of every difficulty. Concubinage has in- creased to such an extent that the Government recently endeavored to strike it a blow by en- acting a law that hereafter no child of a concu- bine could inherit a titled name. It is said that nearly a third of the titled names in Japan are at present borne by the offspring of concu- binage. All the children of the late Emperor are thus illegitimate. And the geisha and kin- dred classes are increasing to such a degree that it forms a constant topic for discussion in the press and for wonder and alarm in good so- THE MAN-MADE WOMAN 165 ciety. Many predict the dissolution of family life; others harangue the women for lack of wifely devotion and so forth. Fukuzawa, said to be the greatest man in Japan to-day, and sometimes called "The Great Commoner," says that "the first step in the reform of the family and the establishment of monogamy is to de- velop public sentiment against prostitution and plural or illegal marriage; and the way to do this is first to make evil practices secret. This is more important than to give women a higher education." From which we gather that woman's educa- tion has been proposed in Japan by some fool- hardy reformers as a possible factor for the improvement of family life and the morals of her country. But the great Fukuzawa and kindred potentates who have studied the West, declare simply and solely for an imitation of its institution Monogamy; and in creating the new standards and new family life the Japan- ese men will do exactly as the Western men have done : sit alone in the councils of State and Church and Academy and arrange it all in a stupendous new system of Marriage, Divorce 166 VENTURES IN WORLDS and Morality, with the nature and the value and the soul of its chief factor entirely left out : Woman. Until Japan learns this, her ambition will lead only to the futilities and never to the tri- umphs of the West. With her degraded womanhood, Japan will always remain an eth- nologic, geologic, ethical and artistic freak, which has "birds without song and flowers with- out odor," fruit trees without fruit, music with- out melody, theatres without actresses, soldiers without pensions, women without kisses, mar- riages without love, and at last, perhaps, hu- manity's culture without humanity's civiliza- tion, which will be to her much as if she had gained the whole world and had lost her own soul. * * * A CUP OF TEA IN JAPAN NOW that "Tea" in the Western World has come to be the Sacrament of the dance, the gossip, the flirtation, and the chief outlet of woman's orgy-instinct of eat-drink- and-be-merry-for-to-morrow-we-die it is per- tinent to contrast its nature in the Eastern World whence it came to us. In the seventeenth century the little leaf of the Camellia travelled to Europe from Japan. But it did not reach its present devotees with- out overcoming the usual difficulties that beset new things. At first an attempt was made to restrict its use to Royalty and Plutocracy by making its price deterrent to others ; then, as its popularity grew in spite of its aristocratism, an attempt followed on the part of the clergy to ban its use to one-half their world, at least, and they denounced tea as pernicious to the health and morals of woman; that lorn object of man's protection through taboos. Therefore it be- comes gratifying to relate that one of the vic- 167 168 VENTURES IN WORLDS tories of Feminism has already been won in this battle of the teacup, for tea has become a common and democratic beverage, fairly mo- nopolized by the sober sex. In Japan, the home of tea, it is the symbol for every ideal the imagination can construe about life. But in America we have never put any idealism into tea-drinking except once: when we drank no tea. For awhile, during Revolutionary days, all loyal Americans re- nounced tea-drinking for the sake of their patriotic ideal ; and at a time when they were as great tea drinkers as the English. After the famous tea-cargo was thrown into the Boston Harbor, all sorts of substitutes for tea were resorted to. The leaves of the raspberry, strawberry, current, sage, and thoroughwort were used to make that concoction called "Lib- erty Tea," which was partaken of, if not rel- ished, by our plain-living and high-thinking forefathers. From a cup of Liberty tea, we may be sure, there was sipped more of the real spirit of Japan than exists to-day in the real Japanese tea that fills our rapid-transit tea- cups. A CUP OF TEA IN JAPAN 169 Japan has evolved a strange and beautiful thing it calls Teaism. Teaism means a re- ligion, a philosophy, the arts, all the social ideals and the essence of Japanese nationality itself poured into the minute confines of a tea- cup as an elixir for sense and soul. We im- ported from Japan the dried leaves of the Camellia, but we left behind that Teaism which contains so many little secrets of the lost art of life. But the Japanese say the Occidentals are more interested in the art of death than in the art of life. Therefore we have adopted their school of the Jiu-jitsu and ignored their school of Tea. And our thirst for knowledge about their Manchurian battlefields, their Murata guns and Dreadnaughts and Code of Samurai, has made them also say contemptuously of us that Occidentals have blood-thirst but no thirst for tea. When a Japanese says of one that there is "no tea" in him, it means that he is devoid of soul. When one has "too much tea" in him it means that he is accursed by an ex- cess of what in the West is called "the artis- tic temperament": tangential, cloud-gazing, 170 VENTURES IN WORLDS dream-drunk. To have a thirst for tea is to have longings and aspirations for those graces of conduct and ideals of thought which alone can create an art of life. Among Occidentals, Americans particularly have the wit to perceive and the naivete to ad- mit that somehow they have missed finding the art of life. We are the vandals instead of the masters of this first of arts. And in the midst of the busy, noisy, mannerless life that we have made, we are fast realizing the initial mistake that has put all experience for us strangely out of gear. We are suffering from too much force and too little time, from too much greed and too little taste, from too much show, sham and strife in our talk, our thought, our feeling. All of which ills of excess, a Jap- anese might say, could be cured by a salutary treatment of Teaism. Teaism teaches the sense of proportion, the strength of economy, and the attainment of harmony, three lessons most sadly needed by force-wasting Ameri- cans. In Japan I learned the significance of Tea- ism though it lives in my memory now only as a A CUP OF TEA IN JAPAN 171 series of mystic englamoured pictures. The idealized tea-drinking and tea-thinking of Japan is represented by a formal tea ceremony called the Cha-no-yu. For this impressive affair an especial kind of tea is drunk, the Matsu-cha, considered too sanctified and too potent for ordinary use. My introduction to the ceremonial tea happened to take place in circumstances truly favored by the strange Tea gods of Nippon. It was in the old Zen monastery, the Ginkaku-ji, at Kyoto, that I drank my first cup of the Matsu-cha. Even to me, a sacri- legious, vandalizing tourist, my cup of tea that day was sublimated by the surroundings. Fantasy-shadowed surroundings that would thrill any mind sensitive to the mysteries of alien faiths, peoples, and antiquity. At the threshold of the Temple, we discarded our shoes and with noiseless steps wandered through the hallowed precincts of the old Ginkaku-ji, the Silver Pavilion. In the apartments once lived the great beau ideal Yoshimasa, eighth of the Ashikaga shoguns. It was built as a palatial retreat from the world 172 VENTURES IN WORLDS for the regal old aesthete bent upon discovering therein a creative sestheticism of life. We were shown the tiny suite in which he pursued his consecrated existence of beautific sensual- ism. Here is one little room in which he ex- perimented with the ethereal art of incense- sniffing, and the adjoining little room is the immemorial tea-room wherein the first Cha-no- yu was held. Yoshimasa with the collaboration of the priest Shuko and the painter Soami here for- mulated the first ideals and ritual for that Tea Ceremony which was destined to evolve and consummate about itself all the fine arts of Japan. Yoshimasa can be said to have in- augurated the custom of tea-drinking in Japan with his ecstasy of the senses, Shuko to have exalted it with his sacramentalism of the spirit, and Soami to have endowed it with his decora- tive aastheticism. The place of the origination of the Cha-no- yu is of everlasting interest. The old Zen building is made of cypress wood that has a silvery sheen, like the glamour of grey age, and stands in the midst of what the Japanese call A CUP OF TEA IN JAPAN 173 "natural gardens." The Japanese idea of the natural is exquisitely whimsical. They attain what is esteemed so greatly as a "natural ef- fect" by the artificial gnarling of a dwarfed tree, or by meticulous flower-arrangements in which every leaf is posed, every stalk bent, and most of the blossoms eliminated as superfluous. Nature to us seems crazy with its waste, super- fluity, excess, and unruliness; but to the Jap- anese Nature means restraint, simplicity, econ- omy, and a regulated irregularity. The natural gardens of the Ginkaku-ji are carefully wrought into rugged picturesqueness against the background of a hill clad in sombre green. Near the entrance are two odd-looking mounds which the guide will tell you are the Silver Sand Platform where Yoshimasa used "to sit and hold aesthetic revels," and the moon- gazing mound where the old priests and sho- guns used to sit and moon-gaze through the night. Doubtless, dreaming fancies for their written poetry or fanciful elaborations for the ever-glorifying Cha-no-yu. We walked about the gardens conducted by a little shaven-headed "embryo priest." Upon 174 VENTURES IN WORLDS everything the crooked little paths and gloomy distorted trees and the still pond with its humpy bridges, tiny-islets and "soul- informed rocks," there was the grey of distance, the ghostliness of time, and the pressure of strange quiet. The spirit of Yoshimasa, the dead voluptuary of dreams, seems to haunt his ancient garden; and to hush hurry and quell tumult in the minds of its visitors as the ex- treme of bad taste, at least. As we stood beside the pond in unaccus- tomed silence, staring at the mirror of nature that had reflected so many vain and fleeting faces of man, the stillness was suddenly bro- ken by the embryo priest who clapped his hands to summon the golden carp to the surface ; and the waters were pricked with air-bubbles from the rising throats of the sacred fish as we cast out bits of rice cake upon them. When we returned to the Temple we were served by the old priests with the ceremonial tea of the Cha-no-yu. We sat upon the floor on straw mats and watched the curious process of tea-making. Nowadays at the Ginkaku-ji everything is eliminated from the regular pro- A CUP OF TEA IN JAPAN 175 ceedings of the Cha-no-yu except the actual making and drinking of the tea. The foreign invasion of Japan has brought about such ab- breviations in all the public proceedings for foreign benefit. The Matsu-cha or sacred tea consists of a green powder made from grounded tea leaves. Its proper infusion was finally made by the old priest, whipped into froth, and poured into lit- tle black bowls that were handed to us to drain as etiquette required. No sugar or cream is used for tea in Japan but little bean cakes were given us now which Miseroki, our faithful con- ductor through the mysteries of Japan, consid- erately explained "is to sweeten the mouth for the tea." Without this tempering of its gall- like bitterness, I daresay I could not have per- formed my feat of drinking the pseudo-heav- enly beverage which requires so much imagina- tion to appreciate. As I sipped my tea, with politeness and curi- osity, I looked up and noticed a scroll-picture that hung upon the wall facing us. It por- trayed a subject which soon becomes a familiar one in Japan, for it is encountered constantly 176 VENTURES IN WORLDS upon the walls of monasteries and curio-shops. The face of Daruma, unparalleled saint and first Tea-god, was that which looked down upon us from the Kakemono, and it seemed a point in the Japanese scheming fitness of things that this Divinity should preside over the initiation of "foreign devils" into the beati- tude of tea. As I met the dreadful stare of Daruma's lidless red-rimmed eyes, the eyes of tea-tremens and insomnia, I remembered the legend about him and with supplementations from Miseroki, it was retold now to all. We responded to the droll old legend by clinking our cups together, western-fashion, and finished our tea-drinking as a toast to the eternal peace of "good old Daruma": a vulgar- ity, perhaps, which disgusted the old priest sit- ting beside us in vigilant patience for tipping- time. Tea was introduced into Japan from China by Buddhist priests (first in the eighth century, then again in the twelfth) and with it they brought their legend of the Saint Daruma. Daruma was a priest who attained the dizziest heights of sainthood by performing one of the A CUP OF TEA IN JAPAN 177 feats of virtue that abound in all sacred lore, East and West. As the legend runs, Daruma sat in prayer immovably for nine years until his legs "rotted and fell off him," and the divine man was known to have erred only once in a human way. Once, while at his religious exer- cises, he succumbed to the temptation of sleep and upon awakening, he was so horrified at his dereliction that straightway he cut off his eye- lids as a sure precaution against its recurrence. From the severed eyelids of Daruma the tea plant is said to have sprung. Until the time of Yoshimasa, tea-drinking was confined to the priests and religious orders. And they valued it solely as a remedy against the sinister sleepiness so liable to overcome a holy man at his long prayers, vigils and med- itations. Then when the religions were all at war with one another in Japan, Zennism, Shintoism, Taoism and the various other isms of strange faith, tea drinking was discovered to serve another purpose for the godly elect. With tea drinking as the excuse, it was found that gatherings could be formed to bring about pacific discussions and social amenities that 178 VENTURES IN WORLDS smoothed the troubled waters of religious dis- sension. The teacup was thus made the loving cup of society during the times of social up- heaval. Later, during a long period of peace (the great fifteenth century), it fell into the aesthetic hands of Yoshimasa, who made of it the inspiration for the great Art development and Art worship of his country. It was first brought to Yoshimasa by the priest Shuko of the Temple of Stomjoji. Shuko had discovered in himself the priestly failing of sleepiness when at his devotions, and a medicine man in the order had recommended tea drinking as the new remedy. "It will fortify the heart so that you will not need sleep," Shuko was assured. He at once com- municated his discovery to the royal experi- menter of novelties Yoshimasa, who, in return for his service, constituted Shuko the first Cha- jin, Tea-expert and Master of polite cere- monies of the Cha-no-ju. After him there came a long series of Cha- jin during what is now called the Golden Age of the Cha-no-yu. The old Tea-masters each tried to excel his predecessors by adding new A CUP OF TEA IN JAPAN 179 values, ideals and beauties to the Tea- Cere- mony or to Teaism, its Credo. The arts of flower-arrangement, of painting and pottery and bronze and ceramics, all attained their per- fection in the inspiring atmosphere of the Tea- room. The Cha-no-yu has been the supreme influence in evolving the wonderful Art and the no less wonderful etiquette of Japan. Etiquette is the play of old people and the hypocrisy of the young. We Americans are too young to be sincere in any of the formalities etiquette demands; and the Japanese are old enough to find the grace of movement in its stiff canons. The school of Japanese etiquette is quite as impresisve and extraordinary as the school of Tea; in fact the two belong to each other as a social expression of the cultivated Japanese soul. The Ogasawara thus defines the aim of the Japanese school of etiquette : "The end of all etiquette is to so cultivate your mind that even when you are quietly seated not the roughest ruffian can dare make onset on your person." Etiquette to the Japanese is a sort of moral hygiene that takes the place of what we West- 180 VENTURES IN WORLDS erners call "morals" in exercising the power of an undeviating rule of conduct. Individual- ity has no scope in Japanese etiquette, just as individuality has no scope in Western morals. One measure is for all sizes and shapes of be- ing. The laws of Japanese etiquette are based on politeness, self-control and that cultivated aesthetic instinct which gives the good-taste that inevitably creates good form. But at one time the Tea-Ceremony devel- oped the Western disease of exaggeration and extravagance. This violated the conservative spirit of Japan and seemed an anarchy against the sovereign sweetness and refinement of the Japanese soul. Poets tiraded against the evils that had crept into the Cha-no-yu. It had grown expensive, over-elaborate and full of ostentation and affectations. The evils were recognized at a time when the country was im- poverished by a long period of wars. Insur- gent aesthetes arose everywhere to declare that the Cha-no-yu had become a decadent institu- tion which ignored the realities of life. The pristine quality of "nature" and truth no longer existed in it. It had developed un- A CUP OF TEA IN JAPAN 181 wholesomely out of touch with surrounding hu- manity in its lowly condition, and so had lost the fine ethical element indispensable for true social grace and the highest inspirations of art. A reformation of the Cha-no-yu then took place. The old Cha-jin Rikyu, whom many say was the greatest of the great Tea-masters, became the Martin Luther in the Reformation of the Tea room. Into its overdone atmosphere he brought an air of simplicity and poverty like a clean breath of Nature. Rikyu declared the first essentials for a tea party to be purity, peacefulness, reverence and abstraction, and gave these quaint rules and precepts for its conduct : 1st. As soon as the guests are assembled on the bench they announce themselves by knock- ing on the Don (wooden gong) . 2nd. It is important (on entering) to have not only a clean face and hands but chiefly a clean heart. 3rd. The host must meet his guests and conduct them in. If on account of the host's poverty, he cannot give them the tea and neces- 182 VENTURES IN WORLDS saries for the table, or if the eatables be taste- less, or even if the trees and rocks do not please him, he (the guest) can leave at once. (Since politeness is the first requirement of good- breeding this doubtless never occurred.) 4th. As soon as the water makes a sound like the wind in the fir-trees, and the bell rings, the guests should return, for bad would it be to forget the right moment for the water and the fire. 5th. It is forbidden, since long ago, to speak in or out of the house of anything worldly (in this category comes political conversation, and especially scandal) . The only thing is the Tea and the Tea Societies. 6th. No guest or host may, in any true, pure meeting, flatter either by word or deed. 7th. A meeting may not last longer than two hours (2 Japanese hours equal 4 Euro- pean hours). Notice Let the time pass by in talking about these rules and maxims. The Tea So- cieties recognize no difference of social stand- ing, but permit free intercourse between high and low. A CUP OF TEA IN JAPAN 183 Written in the 12th year of Tensho (1584) and the ninth day of the ninth month. The adoption of the rules and standards of Rikyu became the fashion in old Japan. Re- fined poverty in the appearance and appoint- ments of the tea room constituted the best style and taste. The surroundings of nature or un- adorned simplicity within walls were the acme of elegance, and the plainest materials, rough pottery and hand-moulded utensils, were used for the Cha-no-yu. Consequently, human na- ture asserted itself in the usual way, even in Japan where humility is chic, and soon the cheapest-looking utensils became in fact the costliest, the crude pottery in reality the most luxurious, and an artistic air of poverty the most difficult and expensive to obtain. But this is a long and complex story that has left its record upon all the arts of Japan. Rikyu is now regarded and venerated as the restorer of the temporarily lost art of po- liteness in Japan. The true spirit of polite- ness surely consists in the humble adaptation of one's self to the condition of others, rather than in the ostentatious patronage of others, 184 VENTURES IN WORLDS such as we have in the West. The old Tea- reformer taught the arrogant rich of his day the eestheticism of economy. Really, economy is but another word for the reserve without which there is no efficiency in force. In de- portment the economy of force means grace; in art the economy of force means mastery. There are now many schools of Teaism in modern Japan, each of which claims precedence over the other. And the youth of both sexes are thoroughly instructed in the conventions and deportment of the Tea- Ceremony as their chief social accomplishment. Years of train- ing are necessary in order to master the culture and practice of the Cha-no-yu, which, to West- ern eyes, seems such a Pomp and Pageant of Much- Ado- About-Nothing. The schools differ in little points of tea- etiquette, and, in some places, society is di- vided into snobbish sets, claiming superiority over each other, by the adoption of one or the other method of tea-conduct. The points of difference often seem absurd ; for instance, one modern school says that the guest must make a loud sucking noise in swallowing the tea, thus A CUP OF TEA IN JAPAN 185 complimenting host or hostess by an audible enjoyment; but the more popular schools say the process must be noiseless. The Japanese aversion to noise is so marked that they employ the adjective "noisy" as a term for dislike or tastelessness. "Noisy" flowers are those which do not harmonize with their surroundings. Nowadays when the Japanese men have lost their former leisureliness and respect for punc- tilio through the industrialism imported from the West the old-time glory of the Cha-no-yu is chiefly maintained by the women, the ladies of high degree. After my tea-initiation in Kyoto it was my good fortune to participate in a private Cha-no-yu given by an ultra-fashion- able lady at her home in Nagasaki. Inci- dentally, the same day, previous to the tea- party, an "American luncheon" was given us by a progressive Japanese in which the plat de surprise was an "ice cream" made of the Matsu- cha, the sacred green powder tea. The Jap- anese consider the Americans a frozen nation, gastronomically and aesthetically. The tea-party took place at a delightful doll- like house, on the roadway of the Mogi all 186 VENTURES IN WORLDS made of painted screens, bamboo and crypto- meria, and set in the heart of a garden that would have entranced Kubla Khan. Its se- rene seclusion was hidden by a high bamboo fence over which the passersby on the roadway could glimpse nothing except a Magnolia tree in bloom and a lofty cluster of growing bam- boo, pale, frail, straight and forever young, the ideal lady of horticulture. It was March. In the ides of this season Japan clothes itself in grey. Next month will usher in the radiance of the cherry blossom season and to relish to the full its festival of color, Japan prepares itself by a fast of grey. The everlasting green hills wear veils of fog. The skies are a deliquescent oyster-shell in which gleams a hidden pearl, the sun. The streets and the houses, and everything is grey except the bright kimonas of the children and the maikos, and an occasional burst of preco- cious bloom. In the gardens spring announced itself in the shimmer of the white plum trees and in the heavy red lips of the Magnolia blossoms. The grassless ground was strewn with pine needles, A CUP OF TEA IN JAPAN 187 a charming Japanese device to gain a "natural effect," and with mossgrown rocks. Through the grey vista I could see the rain-washed bronze of a small Daibutsu, and further on the misty outlines of a Torii and the glint of a gold-roofed Pagoda. At the portico of the house I was greeted by a bowing little figure dressed in grey, and on entering the reception room I encountered two more bowing little figures in grey, my hostess and her honorable guests. At every word of my attempted conversation the gentle ladies responded with profound bows and im- placable smiles, and my hostess lisped "yes" to every word, for she had had a "modern edu- cation," so her husband had proudly declaimed to us! and "spoke English." The quaint beings seemed absurdly alike to me; all top-heavy with their rolls of shiny black hair, all yellow faces, wide and blank, with in- scrutable, crooked little eyes, and their bodies, grotesquely sexless, seemed mummy-like in the grey kimonas, tight about the extremities, identically alike in make and color, with their family crests embroidered upon the huge 188 VENTURES IN WORLDS sleeves. Suddenly the three little figures struck me as representing the universal ideal of female perfection: dogmatic, colorless little figures, childest in mind and aged in conven- tion, at once charming and ridiculous. I had prepared myself for the tea party by assiduous inquiry in order to avoid the usual American Malapropisms among foreigners. It was a relief to find that the rules of the Cha- no-yu so regulate the conversation and move- ments that there is little leeway for a faux pas. Silence is compulsory at certain long periods during the proceedings, then comments of an appointed order are allowed, then specified sub- jects must be discussed in the classic manner, et cetera. And the tea party that now took place was a faithful exemplar of all the formal tea parties taking place among the Japanese ladies of this forceful twentieth century. When the elaborate salutations were over, the hostess slid open a panel in the wall and knelt beside the low doorway as her guests passed through it into the tea room. The tea room is invariably of an orthodox size, six feet square, partitioned off from the reception or A CUP OF TEA IN JAPAN 189 drawing room. Its name, the Sukiya, means the Abode of Fancy. The tea room was the conventional one, without furnishings or adornments except the four straw mats on the floor, the open brazier in the centre, and the vase of flowers and scroll- painting in the Tokomona, the recess within the wall. The grey-garbed figures knelt before the Tokomona and made obeisances before it, and exchanged softly spoken words which, as I knew, were the precise words expressing the precise thoughts and emotions which their mothers and great, great-grandmothers used when they too once worshipped in the tea room the beauty of the flowers, of the vase and of the picture, the beauty of the spirit of Art it- self enshrined for its Japanese devotees within the tiny Tokomona. In households that observe the finest modes of artistic living, the picture and the flower in the Tokomona are changed punctiliously sev- eral times a day in order that their coloring should harmonize with the varying light of the hours. 190 VENTURES IN WORLDS While her guests were preoccupied in their studious ecstasy before the adornments of the Tokomona, the hostess noiselessly withdrew from the tea room to go and fetch the materials for the fire making and tea making. All the menial tasks must be performed by the hostess herself; for since the wholesome castigation of the severe old Tea-master Rikyii, the Cha-no-yu means the idealization of the mundane and the lowly. The hostess returned carrying a little basket full of the fire materials : bits of charcoal of the prescribed shape and size, the feather-duster, the fire-tongs or Hibashi, and other mysterious minutiae She walked very slowly, for every step must be carefully measured according to rigorous rule. Just so many steps must be taken to reach the brazier from the threshold, and just so many movements must be made in order to attain every little end in the stately infinitesimal proceedings thereon. Otherwise she commits a lapse from honored propriety that may well mar her social prestige forever. Back and forth, with her rote-timed air, the silken, shadow-toned figure passed until all the A CUP OF TEA IN JAPAN 191 essential things were in the tea room and ar- ranged about the fireplace. The hostess then knelt beside the fireplace, her guests around her in a sphinx-eyed circle. She lifted the kettle off the trivet, which was the signal for them to break the respectful si- lence, to ask permission to see the making of the fire, and to slip nearer her upon the mats for the homely rite which the Japanese sanctify with art. It is a dainty process the making of a fire- in the empiric little hands of a Nipponese lady ! First she dusted the brazier with an eagle's feather, and arranged the burning embers as though they were flowers from which her sub- tle fingers wished to procure a "natural effect." On top of the red glow she placed bits of charred rhododendron and then a white lime- coated twig of azalea. The finishing touch was a pinch of powder which she took from the Ko-bako, the incense box, and sprinkled upon the fire. Suddenly the air was filled with a bewildering fragrance; at which it was in- cumbent upon the guests to break again the homage of silence and to conjecture decorously 192 VENTURES IN WORLDS among themselves as to the name and kind of incense used. The incense box was handed to them to examine. This is always a beautiful piece of art and workmanship, usually in bronze or Cloisonne. The hostess then drew a purple silk cloth from the bosom of her kimona and with con- fusing intricacy of motion proceeded to wipe all the utensils for the tea-making with as much care as though they were not already impec- cably clean. The purple cloth must always be drawn forth, used, refolded and put back in her bosom in unimpeachable, stereotyped ways. A piece of white crepe paper was then given to each guest to be used for wrapping up and taking away what portions of the food they could not eat. Next the tea bowl was scalded out, the bam- boo-whisk rinsed with infinite care, and three or four teaspoonsful of the green powder tea were taken from a jar, put in the bowl and hot water (boiling water is never used for tea in Japan) poured upon it. The infusion was beaten up with the bamboo-whisk; a delicate process that requires long and patient prac- A CUP OF TEA IN JAPAN 193 tice for the whisk must be held with a certain turn of the wrist difficult to acquire and just so many turns must be made with it in order to achieve the superlative decree of the "froth of the liquid jade." The bamboo-whisk resembles the occidental shaving brush; and it has aroused indignation among the Japanese aesthetes that it has been imported into America to be used here in the drinking bars for frothing cocktails and other vulgar, soul-dissipating drinks. The hostess finally handed the tea bowl to her first most honorable guest, and I took a sip of the pungent contents and passed it on to the next most honorable guest. Her en- suing niceties of behavior at once informed me of my clumsy Western ignorance of the art that can be made even from a sip of tea. She seemed to go through the cabalistic signs of an unknown Cult as she took the bowl from my hands, lifted it slowly to her forehead, low- ered it, took three sips from it, wiped the edge of the bowl and passed it on to her neighbor, like a loving-cup solemn with Olympian nec- tar. The sips must be exactly measured so 194 VENTURES IN WORLDS that the last one who drinks will drain the bowl with her three sips. At last the tea-sipping and cake-nibbling with their lengthy corollaries were over, and the hostess began her apologies for the poor quality of the tea, for the food and for all the materials used in the tea ceremony. And one by one all the implements were handed around to receive the admiring criticisms of the guests. On the top wave of apology and eulogy, the hostess withdrew from the tea room, apparently to take away the tea things, but also to provide the opportunity for a private discussion among the guests of her conduct of the Cha-no-yu. The "talking behind her back" is of course overheard through the paper walls and maybe is the most enjoyable moment of the whole occasion to the Japanese ladies, whose faultless politeness makes them appear so meekly self- obliterative. The return of the hostess signified the termi- nation of our tea party. Again she knelt de- voutly beside the doorway as her honorable guests with more compliments and low bow- ing, made their departure. A CUP OF TEA IN JAPAN 195 Necessarily I have omitted many marvels of detail in the Cha-no-yu, and the one I at- tended was shortened out of deference to my hurried nationality. Among themselves the Japanese ladies extend the proceedings through unlimited hours, and certainly it seems to be an ideal vent through channels of gentil- ity for woman's irrepressible orgy-instinct. There may indeed be a lesson for us West- erners in the revelation the Cha-no-yu conveys, of how the Japanese have made values of peace, harmony, courtesy, and beauty out of life's simplest things, and find in the smallest tea room the sweet, worshipful mood for a sub- lime Art of Life. MR. GRUNDY AND EVE'S DRESS (In 1914) IN childhood we value our parents because we believe in them; in maturity we value them because we can blame them. The first parents in this world are unforgettable because most human failings can be blamed upon Old Adam and Mother Eve. To-day there is a hubbub about dress. Sumptuary legislation has been proposed and some actually enacted, in a valiant attempt to make the new-fashioned woman's attire accord with the old-fashioned man's views. Does mankind change? Way back in the Garden of Eden the first man inaugurated this crusade against woman's dress. Milton tells us that after God's gift to Adam of Eve "with perfect beauty adorned," in all the majestic lowliness of nature in his first confidential chat with the Creator about her, Adam complained that Nature 196 EVE'S DRESS 197 " from my side subtracting, took perhaps More than enough at least on her bestowed Too much of ornament, in outward show Elaborate, of inward less exact." Since his divinely made-to-order spouse did not possess "a dress to her name" or an orna- ment or even a wedding ring or a fig-leaf at that time, this conjugal criticism of her excess in ornament and outward show does indeed seem to warrant the sigh of every future Eve in humankind: "Is there any pleasing him?" In this question of dress is hidden the little key to many big enigmas. At least here is the instrumentality which has enabled man to achieve a complete transposition in the sex- prerogatives. Nature intended woman to be the arbitrary agent of selection in the mating of the sexes, but the conditions of her destiny were so arranged that this aim was defeated, and man usurped the sovereignty of choice. Throughout the animal kingdom the godly in- tent is plainly manifest by the male's exclusive endowment of the magnetizing externals. The dazzling colors and thrilling songs and gorgeously spread tails and hirsute adornments 198 VENTURES IN WORLDS all belong to him as his stock-in-trade in the game of sex, by means of which he may or may not win the plainly garbed, songless little fe- male. The male rivalry for her favor and the exactions of her aesthetic taste are clearly the influences which developed the male's beauty and superior might. Nature seemed wise in making of the female the sanctuary of the beauty and strength of the race; she seemed safe in trusting to the vestal fires of her aesthetic sense ; with its f astidiosities, refinements, admi- rations and rejections based upon that instinc- tive feeling which is exercised only in physical and spiritual freedom. A wise and safe plan it seemed, but man has never approved of scheming Nature. The economic, religious, social and domestic systems of every land and civilization have been especially contrived to despoil woman of her one great primal right, her right of choice. She has been made the chosen instead of the chooser. And through so many ages is it any wonder we find, now, that she has lost also her aesthetic sense, that world-beautifying and EVE'S DRESS 199 health-giving little appendage attached to woman's mating-right? Man has never conquered woman by his strength but by his subtlety. The master- stroke of genius in subjugating her was in his making her love dress and decoration in her- self instead of as nature intended in man. Hence the complete transposition in the orig- inal sex-roles, from the male's desire and effort to please the female's senses to the female's de- sire and effort to please the male's senses; so evident to-day. Woman is now the decorative sex, mastered, and living under the thrall of dress and fash- ion, more blighting to her true nature in these modern days than any erstwhile tyranny of man. Sometimes we have quaint signs of the artificiality of these conditions and of woman's obsolete fundamental being. For instance, when a woman greatly loves, we discover her. Few women and fewer men are capable of a great true passion of love; but when it occurs in a woman, she becomes Woman magnified, and one can then really behold and interpret 200 VENTURES IN WORLDS the eternal feminine. When a woman loves, it is her instinct to become demure in dress. The little mystic Cupid in every woman's soul whispers to her that she must be loved for herself alone, she must be simple and natural and unadorned; and in the halcyon days of mutuality of love, every girl or woman feels a subconscious hankering for inconspicuous- ness in dress, for the pure or dark tones, plain- ness, every approach to Nature's sartorial ordi- nation for the female, in fact. And strange to say because so little remarked upon or inter- preted the true lover expresses odd preju- dices against conspicuous attire in his sweet- heart. He invariably shows himself most pleased when she is most demurely gowned; but neither can realize nor read Nature's ar- rows directing them to love's lost Arcadias. She sees him surrounded by bevies of fashion- able "dressers" ; he, perhaps, fatally, expresses admiration for some stylish worldling; she is informed from every side that man is wooed and won and only kept as a monogamist by woman's dress. So the amorous maiden turns deaf ears to the haunting ghost of her feminine EVE'S DRESS 201 heart and follows the example of the world's femininity who flaunt their clothes before man, like designing little picadors egging on with gay-bannering a sight-maddened Toros. Again in the felicitous wife, we see still more strongly, the silk-muffled instinct. It has been so generally detected in her that "woman's lit- erature" is full of observations and advice to young wives upon this point. The bride is always admonished against becoming indiffer- ent to dress. Now that she has caught her husband by dress, she must hold him by dress, is the matrimonial recipe given her by the wise- acres. Curl papers in the morning, and neg- ligees in the evening are depicted as the rocks for man's shipwreck of illusion, so woman as wife buys and hides false hair and laces and hobbles like a prospective divorcee. Her honeymoon days would emancipate woman from the Despot Dress were it not for woman's literature and the advice of the Elders. When woman loves, she is both elementary and ex- alted. She is at once too animal and too divine to care for dress. Her dress is for man; her over-dressing and bad-dressing is because she 202 VENTURES IN WORLDS does not understand man; and her captious, senseless changing of dress is because she does not believe in man as a monogamist. Woman is lost and astray in her so-called woman's province of dress. With modern education, she has become conscious and dis- gusted with her blindness and errors in sesthet- icism; therefore she is expressing her general dissatisfaction with the scheme of things by revolting against all orders and rulings except those of the power that has undone and ex- posed her, Dress; the unrecognized enemy, which has made the fair sex into a lonely monopolist of self-decorations and sense-ap- peal, chasing, charming, capturing whatsoever members of the strong sex are too weak-willed to escape, regardless of their sex-attraction for woman or their eugenic eligibility. Why was the olden-time woman, of faded ancestral halls, more contented and so much less exigent and greedy than her tumultuous great granddaughters? Her wrongs and ob- livion of sphere seem unbearable to women to- day, but certainly she had some pristine source of content denied to us. I think it was her EVE'S DRESS 203 admiration for man. She was enthralled by admiration for man, aesthetically, ethically, and intellectually. A fanatic of adoration, she en- dured with poise the tyranny of this wonderful, all-wise, highly decorative deity, Man. The clinging, selfless, Mid- Victorian woman was the cumulative personality from long eras of woman's exclusive admiration of man. When man appeals to woman through the senses, he does not need to hold her down by statute. What woman has not thrilled in some atavistic arcanum of her being, at the representation of some beautiful masculine type in man's heyday of self -decoration and display as in a paint- ing by Van Dyck with its regalia of laces, silks, brocades, jewels and curls, redeemed by the ancient aroma of the aesthetic male ? Even to-day a woman gets a suggestion of the primordial thrill when she gazes upon a parade of men, gold-buttoned and epauletted, brass- banded, the true male lure in life's game of sex. But man surrendered his right of self-deco- ration and his natural physical vanity for the sake of his modern credo, Democracy. The first rumor of "Woman's rights" is dated si- 204 VENTURES IN WORLDS multaneously. Plain man created discon- tented woman. Sometimes it is advanced nowadays that woman does not dress to please man, but to please herself. This seems more consistent with her present attitude of independence and freedom. Paola Lombroso wrote a book about the female convicts in prisons, and her study of them seems, to many psychologists, to verify this supposition. She tells us that "the prison rules strictly forbid the use of powder, per- fumes, cosmetics and all vanities of that order to the female convicts" but that in spite of every rule, and even in solitary confinement, they manage to obtain something with which to adorn their faces, by "patiently licking the walls of the cells," and from that making a sort of paste for whitening their complexions. She mentions one who was found one morning "her face all painted with red, like a ballerine d'opera. They could not understand how she had obtained that paint. Her cell was searched in vain. Finally they discovered the secret. In the stuff of which they made the camisoles of the prisoners, was found a red EVE'S DRESS 205 thread. This woman had had the patience to remove this thread, bit by bit. She had soaked it a long time in the water which it finally col- ored red." This seems to prove an incorrigible instinct of self-decoration in woman, but it proves on the contrary how incorrigibly automatic she has become in her long cultivation of artificial traits. That some women may embellish for themselves does not prove the nature or reality of woman's aesthetic sense any more than the abnormality and perversion of the maternal sense in a hen which makes her sit on glass eggs or potatoes as willingly as on her own future fledglings proves the nature of the ex- istence of the maternal in all female creatures. No ; woman dresses to please man. And as she is not yet developed sufficiently in her aesthetic sense to know how to achieve this end, her dress and fashions are designed, accepted or banned by man. She has had but one great inspiration in dressing herself, viz., man is a polygamist. Hence the personal aim of wom- an's dress is always newness, variety, novelty. The clever woman of the world seeks to give 206 VENTURES IN WORLDS man a new woman in herself every season, so new and startling strange from footgear to headgear, that he marked by Darwin as being "ready to pair with any female" cannot rec- ognize the sameness of the old feminine core concealed by the mutations of fashion. And because a wife provides her husband with a harem of clothes in the occidental world, woman has succeeded in making man an osten- sible monogamist here. In the Orient, where the feminine styles never change, and woman dresses under man's complete dominion, with- out a single inspiration of her own, man re- mains an unhampered, full-winged polygamist. When I was in India, some time ago, one of the weirdly picturesque and pitiful sights to me there was to see the Mohammedan ladies moving like spectres through the colorful throngs of the oriental streets. Completely concealed by their bundlesome, white draperies, with two holes for their eyes, they looked as if in some grotesque Hallowe'en disguise. With these shrouded Mohammedan ladies, man has achieved the consummate realization of his avowed tastes and sartorial dictations. EVE'S DRESS 207 They are living embodiments of the modesty of the sex. In a Zenana at Delhi I met an educated and very intelligent Indian lady, the wife of a Nawab of Oudh, who expressed some advanced and Western views regarding the conditions of her sex. I inquired why she and other Indian women of her class and views did not inaugur- ate a "dress-reform" as the first and most im- portant emancipation for oriental women. "Yes," she replied, "most of us are well aware that our unhealthy clothing and veiling are the cause of the general ill-health of Indian ladies. But what lady would dare discard her veil? Why, the men would be horrified! No man would marry her, and if married she would be divorced. She would be looked upon as an immodest, shameless creature!" It made me wonder if the male sex is the in- ventor and sole custodian of "woman's mod- esty." It is indisputable that the women of all na- tions show an astonishing alacrity in discard- ing whatever superfluities of clothing the squeamishness of Mr. Grundy will allow. 208 VENTURES IN WORLDS Last August the American newspapers related the attack of a mob of men upon a woman, wife of a wealthy hotel proprietor, who appeared on the beach at Atlantic City in a daring "slit- skirt" costume. She was so seriously injured by the chivalrous sex that she had to be taken to a hospital. Woman dresses for man and by man, but to please man with her dress is evi- dently a different matter, and an historically and exegetically impossible feat. Woman has done her gallant utmost to ad- mire, humor and honor man through all his follies of fashion, from tattooing and war- feathers to priestly petticoats and Judge's big wigs ; and how has he returned the compliment ? Adam and St. Paul led the way. And all the saintly fathers followed with echoes and individual discoveries of the natural tendencies of woman to improper clothing. Tertullian wrote a treatise describing the proper dress for virgins. St. Clement of Alexandria was the inspiration for a Papal "bull," issued as late as 1800, against woman's "indecency" in dress, holding up for holy horror "the sensations it may excite even in the withered bosom of a EVE'S DRESS 209 monk." Ancient Rome and Sparta gave a new order of dress restrictions for women ; and the time-hallowed masculine meddlesomeness has never ceased for a day. It was imported into the promising New World with our uncompromising Puritan fore- fathers. Whitfield tiraded against the * 'fool- ish virgins of New England covered all over with the Pride of Life"; and "sad-colors" was the name given to the hues selected as the proper ones for well-conducted colonial ladies to wear. Massachusetts enacted sumptuary laws to abolish "wicked apparel," and forbade the purchase or manufacture of any slashed clothes "except those with one slash in each sleeve and another slash in the back." Slashes, we see, are always objects of hostile Puritan suspicion. But in spite of the most drastic decrees, history relates that "In Newbury, in 1653, two women were brought up for wearing silk hoods and scarfs, but they were discharged on proof that their husbands were worth 200 each. Thirty-eight women of the Connecticut Valley were presented at one time for various degrees of finery, and of too small estate to 210 VENTURES IN WORLDS wear silk. A young girl named Hannah Ly- man was presented for wearing silk in a flaunt- ing manner, in an offensive way and garb, not only before but when she stood presented." Maurice Low writes of these dour days that "so eager were the women to be in fashion that the pseudo-humble follower of Saint Crispin, the Simple Cobbler of Agawan, who seems to have concerned himself more with women's souls than men's soles, vented his scorn on the 'nugiperous gentledames' of the colony who were so frivolous as to ask 'what dress the Queen is in this week' and who instead of lis- tening to pious exhortations, must needs fill their minds with the Very newest fashion of the Court,' and he poured forth all the vials of his wrath on the 'woman who lives but to ape the newest court fashion' by pronouncing her 'the very gizzard of a trifle, the product of a quarter of a cypher the epitome of nothing, fitter to be kicked, if she were of a kickable substance, than either honored or humored.' Only a few years after the establishment of the colony it was found necessary to enact ordi- nances prohibiting the wearing of short sleeves EVE'S DRESS 211 by women so as to reveal their arms ; nor must women appear with 'naked breasts or arms, or as it were pinioned with superstitious ribbons on hair and apparel.' ' Even when woman's self-adornment and beauty were made actually perilous to her life, as in the days of witch- burning, it did not seem to deter her from the witchery of dress, for woman is not by nature a social-coward such as the Old Adam has so amply proven himself to be. The improper dress has been as autocratic- ally designed and enforced by man, as the proper dress for woman. In Spain women of a certain class were once legally sanctioned "to bare their shoulders; and all dressmakers who furnished the interdicted gowns to others than courtesans were condemned to four years' penal servitude." To-day in Spain a woman appear- ing in public without a mantilla or hat can be insulted with impunity as being of questionable virtue. The Greek courtesans were required to wear costumes of "flowered stuff" ; the Ro- mans made them wear upon their arm a knot of yellow; the Italians once made them wear "natural or dyed blond hair" to distinguish 212 VENTURES IN WORLDS them from their lawfully virtuous sisters; and in Japan the filles de joie must wear their obi tied in front, besides other dress specifications. An old illustrator in the twelfth century is said to have represented Satan as the lady of the period in the latest fashions of the day; and in the twentieth century the fashionable lady still seems to appear to the clergy in this sem- blance for they never cease to greet her new appearances each season with scorn and ex- orcism; undaunted by the fact that she fills nearly all the pews of their congregations. The argus-eyed pulpit discovered woman's open-work stockings and "peek-a-boo" waists as a crime against man, years, centuries it seems, before it discovered any of the crimes against woman white-slavery, industrial- slavery, political- slavery, etc. now fashion- ably assailed by the clergy, in obedience to the irrepressible spirit of interrogation that marks the new Woman- Age. The 1913 fashions in dress: the slit-skirt, shadow-gown, X-ray-gown, street-decollete and various transparencies, divisions and ultra- close fittings of the hour have aroused such a EVE'S DRESS 213 storm of abuse and evil-soothsaying from Pul- pit, Press and Man of the World, that one is not surprised to find the Medical Men step forth with authority upon the question. The Director of the Health Department, Dr. E. R. Walters, of Pittsburg, recently made a pub- lic statement: "In looking over my statistics I find that there has been a slight increase of nervous diseases among men this summer, and I strongly suspect that the slashed skirt has had something to do with it." One is forced to inquire, what is the cause of these unprecedented conniptions over wom- an's dress? What is she really doing, that she has never done before? A story much repeated in London last sum- mer was about an English woman shopping in Paris, who had a dress offered her by a v en- deuse with this inducement to buy it: "Ma- dame sera satisfaite de cette robe, car en met- tant un ruban rose dessous, Madame aura I 3 air complement nue" Is this the desideratum of the present tenden- cies in dress? That over-burdened Caryatid of the latest 214 VENTURES IN WORLDS feminine mistakes and misbehavior, the Suffra- gette, is incriminated also in this Trial of Woman's Dress. For they do say that her antics and advice have made woman hanker to don the enviable trouser, and that this is the Ultima Thule of the present tendencies. Will women wear trousers in 1914? If the misdeed occurs, let us pray that the Legislatures will not disturb national and civic affairs by penalizing it, for already it has been tried and found wanting by ever curious woman. In France, when trousers first came into general vogue for men during the Reign of Terror they were adopted also by the women and worn for a brief spell. That one sublime approach to Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood, changed the face of the world, but it did not succeed in changing the style or structure of woman. Following the Revolu- tion, woman made haste to don the opposite extreme in fashion. The Merveilleuse became the "craze"; a gown surprisingly similar to those under dispute to-day : filmy, flowing, friv- olous, tied in at the knees and with a tunic, sometimes split from the hips. In Alice Morse EVE'S DRESS 215 Earle's study of Costume in America she speaks of these split gowns appearing in this country also in the 1807 fashions. She says, "I have seen these robes brought out of old trunks in staid New England homes gowns of fine organdie or mull, scant, with a narrow tail-like train; so low-necked that they were indeed incroyable; slit up at one side nearly to the waist. One was the wedding gown of a parson's wife." So the new woman of to-day is not quite so new as she appears to man to be. We grow confused in approaching the cru- cial point and eternal quibble, decency or inde- cency in dress, when Mrs. Earle informs us further that, in our discreet grandfatherly days: "Old men of courtly tastes clung closely to knee-breeches, and deemed trousers careless, inelegant and vulgar. Old ladies had a similar horror of drawers and never wore them." Perfumes have been accused of inde- cency. The Reverend Stubbes called them "allurements to sin, provocations to vice." Egyptian women consider it indecent to expose the backs of their heads. The Mohammedan 216 VENTURES IN WORLDS thinks any visible inkling of a woman's flesh is indecent. Savages say that clothes upon their women are indecent, because it has a de- moralizing effect upon the men. Medical lit- erature reveals that there are men who experi- ence the hysterics of Eros at the sight of an empty feminine garment or slipper. Is this because of the indecency or immorality of the empty garment or slipper? In the endeavor to define decency and inde- cency in dress, I think we can be safe in say- ing that the positive and undeviating indecency in woman's dress is constituted by its ugliness, absurdities of exaggeration, and unhealthiness. Thus the inquisitorial corsets, tiny waists, vo- luminous petticoats, hoops and bustles of our grandmothers, were wholly indecent because ugly, exaggerated and unhealthy. The race has suffered indeed because of these decrees of fashion for our grandmothers. But in the fashions of to-day there are some salient points of worth which ought to be perpetuated by the statute and the admiration of Mr. Grundy. The big waist, now in vogue, is a veritable god- send; and the drapery and upper roominess of EVE'S DRESS 217 the present modish skirts, are a chef d'oeuvre of grace and common sense. Even the mis- chievous slit is but a safe little exit from the in- decent and absurd hobble and harem skirts of last year. The tailor-made suit has done more to eman- cipate the American woman than any other influence. It inspired her to work, play, and health. As athletic Miss Columbia, she is now the admired of nations, though statistics are occasionally brought forth to show that she is growing disproportionately big in comparison to her rather stationary little brother. But the American woman is the worst offender of her sex in her misuse of woman's right of dress. In her we see fully exemplified the truth that woman's aesthetic sense is at last as withered, useless and dangerous, as the vermiform appen- dix. At a convention at the Chicago Dressmak- ers' Club, a few months ago, the following schedule was given in estimating woman's yearly expenditures for clothes: "A few, $75,000. "One hundred social leaders, $50,000. 218 VENTURES IN WORLDS "Ten thousand others, $5,000. "Well dressed women, $1,500. "The Suffragette, $500. "The Church worker, $500. "The Social worker, $300. "The stenographer, $275. "The shop girl, $250. "The factory girl, $200." The expenditures of the first three classes of women would drop down to that of the fourth, the "well dressed women," if these rich women possessed any real aesthetic sense or vivid individuality. The fashionable woman may be a personage, but she is rarely a person- ality. Her superfluity of clothes is the mask of her inner nakedness. When woman's real personality begins, the tyranny of clothes ends. Fashionable American women are noted for their imitativeness in dress. With monkey- like prehension, they seize upon all the newest and latest appearances in fashion regardless of their beauty or suitability. French taste, their dress-makers' opinion, or what the Fifth Ave- nue girl is wearing, are substituted as a guide in place of their own atrophied aesthetic sense. EVE'S DRESS 219 Therefore we have that paradox in America: women, apes in dress and anarchs in disposi- tion. A rich woman's wardrobe is the record of her irresponsible taste. It is a veritable bone- yard for brand-new but cast-off clothes. She must have a new dress every day because she is incapable of recognizing the consummate be- coming when she possesses it. Nothing she buys can equal to her the gowns she sees be- decking her friends or the mannikins. Every- thing on display is so much more alluring than when in her possession. She admires every- thing off, but nothing on herself. How hide- ous the styles of last season, as soon as the new ones dawn! And with this glimpse into the mind of the typical Mondaine, we can under- stand the American disease of extravagance, contracted from the "buying-craze" of the American woman which Magnan declared to be a stigma of degeneration, and named Onio- mania. When men pay the exorbitant dress bills of their wives they are paying one of the many penalties man now pays for the mistake of our 220 VENTURES IN WORLDS progenitors in depriving woman of the exer- cise of her aesthetic, mating instinct. Whenever I observe street-crowds of the hu- man species, I am struck by the overwhelming generality of the physically degenerate speci- mens of the male sex : under or over sized, un- symmetrical, grotesquely proportioned, weak or brutalized faces, with mongrel features ; and I think here is the visible commentary upon the loss of the aesthetic sense of woman. Man now buys from woman what nature intended her to give. Would society be full, as it is, of ugly rich Calibans married to the loveliest Aphrodites, if woman possessed her right to choose her mate with an aesthetic conscience? The reason is plain why, as a rule, all unattractive, senile, ugly men are instinctively opposed to the fur- ther emancipation of woman. But the present controversy over dress does not touch upon the philosophy of aesthetics in the matter; only morality seems involved. How far away is our Hellenic Renaissance! Renan can illuminate us upon this point, since he has written something that has been quoted EVE'S DRESS 221 with approval by the great moralist Tolstoi. "The fault of Christianity is well disclosed; it is too exclusively moral, it has altogether sac- rificed beauty. Whereas, in the eyes of a com- plete philosophy, beauty, far from being a mere superficial advantage, of danger, an inconveni- ence, is a gift of God, like virtue. It is as worthy as virtue," and, "Woman in embellish- ing herself accomplishes a duty; she practises an art, an exquisite art, in a sense the most fascinating of arts. Do not let us be led astray by the smile which certain words pro- voke in the frivolous. Mankind awards the palm of genius to the artistic Greek, who knew how to solve the most delicate of problems, the adornment of the human body, which is to adorn perfection itself; and yet some people wish to see only an affair of rags in the attempt to further God's finest work, woman's beauty. Woman's toilette, with all its delicacies, is, in its way, high art. Epochs and nations which know how to succeed in this are the great epochs and the great nations. The history of Christianity shows that by excluding this spe- cies of art it postponed the full development of 222 VENTURES IN WORLDS the social ideal which it conceived, to a much later period, when the revolt of men of the world had broken the narrow yoke primitively imposed upon the sect by an exalted fanati- cism." In this enlightened epoch of proclaimed broad-mindednes and laisser-faire, why is it that women's new experiments in dress have so increased the vocal scandalization of man? We must remember the play where Tar- tuff e bade Dorine cover her neck with a hand- kerchief lest his soul be wounded. "You are very tender to temptation," she retorts, "and the flesh makes a great impression upon your senses. I am not so easily moved." It is the hyperaesthesia of the over-sexed modern man which makes him so easily and excessively scandalized to-day. Modern woman, more chastely willed and trained than man, is, so noticeably, less "modest." But for the sake of peace on earth, good-will to men, I would like to present a mammoth petition to the modern Eve of to-day's fash- ions, entreating her not to dress and undress EVE'S DRESS 223 in public, as she is doing, during this fleshy sex o'clock time, not because of the immodesty of her conduct, but because of the immodest modesty of man. * * * THE END AN INITIAL PINE OP 25 CENTS LD 21-loOm-8,'34 91* a /YV< 341 8CS UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY