THE APOTHEOSIS OF THE HARLOT IN THE PASSING SHOW.
I am well aware that the true lover of books is too wise to take a one idea’d bigot of a reformer to his cosy fireside. I therefore preface my observations under this somewhat alarming caption with an assurance that I am inspired by no visionary enthusiasm to turn aside the course of human nature.
These few notes deal with certain superficial aspects of the general consciousness, as molded and modified by the social, civil and moral influences of our time. They show certain forces incident to the development of some measure of mental life in the mass. They are not made in any spirit of arrogant ascetism, or in the hope of radically mending the everyday morals of mankind by precept or persuasion. The morals of mankind are already under the care of a certain apostolic succession, that with great wisdom has substituted faith for morality as better suited to the constitution of human nature. These enlightened trustees of infallible revelation are ably reinforced by a great many reformers, and they need no support from profane literature. Indeed the professional moralists find extremely good picking in the widespread hallucination that presents morality in the fascinating form of a rabid curiosity about the doings of others. They rather resent scientific criticism, and I shall never intrench upon the workers in this field, alluring as are all impossible reforms to me, so long as there is any sort of following for common sense. But I think certain psychological forces at work in the swelter of this century-end are worthy of some sort of record; and at this moment I am thinking exclusively of American conditions and phases, which are the least likely to find an historian, and not of Max Nordau’s pictures of contemporary Europe.
There is so much pinching of the spirit done in the name of morality that it is not surprising that some who care most for the spiritual side of life view all moral propagandas with some disfavor. In these few pages I simply wish to make a plea for a little sweetness and sanity from the Epicurean standpoint. Among the grossest satyrs the ideal concerns of the intellect and imagination often find their most inspiring welcome, while among moralists and reformers of human nature they are regarded with indifference or open animosity. For this reason it is important that a well defined distinction should be made in the reader’s mind between the claims of simple sanity and the absurd dreams of perfectibility which form the insensate ambition of moralists. The aims of literature can never be those of reform.
Every generous mind is impelled at some time or other to try to wholly mend or end the perversities of human nature, but, in spite of the faith and example of the saints and martyrs, a few years’ experience shows the folly of it. The folly of a Utopian moralist and reformer is greater than the folly of the mob itself. Even the old Hebrew prophets, with all their fine fury and mystical reliance on the arm of Jehovah, and their undoubted leadership and influence, failed to lessen the potent and eternal allurement of carnal pleasure and indulgence one jot or tittle. The world has grown too old for any but mad persons to dream of combatting those evils which are inevitable in the constitution of things. But since nearly all the consolations of life are not inherent in human nature but are the painful conquests of the mind, are, in a word, artificial creations of man’s own subjective life, and not at all incident to the ordinary course of life in a wild and natural state, we must strive to maintain a distinction between the interests of the imagination and intellect, and the concerns of everyday human nature.
It is not, therefore, in any intolerant spirit that would deny the inevitableness of the carnal life that I touch upon “The Apotheosis of the Harlot.” I simply wish to show, in the broadest and most liberal temper, that even the most inevitable and legitimate passion of humanity must be kept restrained within bounds, or the whole of human life forfeits its hope and dignity and purpose. Nature can parody herself in the excess of madness. The sanity of human life, social institutions, and all intellectual activity is imperilled when the passions of the blood, and especially passions perverted, obtain an exaggerated dominance over the emotions and passions of the mind. That there is a decided drift toward this ascendancy of the Pander and the Harlot in the social and intellectual life of modern democracy, is beyond all sort of doubt, and cannot be blinked by any clear minded and untainted observer. That is, any observer who is not in fee of one of these gigantic enterprises which flourish upon the epidemic of mediocrity. There is an odd and strange obliquity of moral vision that accompanies optimism professed as a probable investment in the follies of the credulous.
Of course the triumph of the Harlot in great affairs and destinies is nothing new. She has swayed courts and kings and empires from antiquity, and there is no moral force in human society that can ever disturb this firmly established and most stable of all human institutions. Dynasties totter, empires fall into ruins, religions decline, philosophies shrivel to empty names, nations perish and their history is lost, civilization advances or decays, but the Harlot plays her fateful part in the destinies of the race. She is almost as important a factor in molding the purpose and character of humanity as the mother. Her potent and unassailable dominion of the minds of men is due to the eternal fantasy of human passion, and whatever may be the prevailing code of morals, she will hold her sway of wreck and ruin to the end of time. To rail against an institution so inherent in the constitution of human affairs is sheer folly. Indeed, it may be almost said to be flying in the face of Providence, since the only providence which we know to be effective in this world is the unfailing crookedness of human nature.
This view of Providence in human affairs makes turning on Providence a less heinous offence than the phrase suggests to some with minds in pawn; and there are always some idealists ready to oppose human nature itself, in rash dreams of the conquest of life for love and beauty and the spirit. It is not the eternal witchery and potency of the Harlot I wish to emphasize in this place, for that needs no argument, but the fact that with the progress of modern democracy this ancient institution, hitherto confined within the limits of civic life, the court and political affairs, has suddenly loomed up as the one great overshadowing fact and potency of human existence. And so in spite of my parade of common sense and sanity I may be held to be an impossible idealist in many quarters, for I am opposing my own individual tastes and those of a small minority, to the overwhelming tide of human nature. I find the reign of the Harlot irksome—especially in the distractions of literature and the theatre.
Some sort of parity has hitherto been maintained, for a period of historical development, between human nature in its unbridled enjoyment of sensation, and those concerns of the intellectual life, which have been the occupation and solace of the few, to whom the pleasures of artifice have grown more necessary than those of sense, and, in moments of clearness and calm, dearer than life itself. With the progress of modern democracy, ordinary human nature has sought factitious and unusual excitements, and plunged into a course of sophistication. It has insidiously encroached upon this realm of artificial delights of the intellect, which the aliens of the race have painfully wrested from life and nature. The Harlot astride Pegasus is the end of popular education.
The authority of religion and the force of superstition, which for centuries kept the arts and literature somewhat remote from the common ideals and passions of the mass of men, have declined, and with their eclipse the ideals of the great mass of vulgar appetites have grown with social freedom and popular education, until, at this hour, we see the greatest tyranny of history established, of which the Triumphant Harlot is the head and front and fitting symbol. It is the pitiless despotism of the millions of uplifted, cruel, greedy maws that hold the fateful pence that decide every question of life and thought in this age of enlightenment. Every clod’s dirty penny or vote counts for as much as a head full of brains. It is a sublime spectacle. It is not the fact of the prosperity of the Harlot in democracy which is at all remarkable, for of course she has not depended upon societies or governments, but upon human nature for her queenship; it is the glorification of her arts and her power, in the open prostitution of the printing press in her honor and worship, the deification of her calling and character in the popular imagination, the dedication of the theatres solely to her exploitation, and the trafficking in her person and perversities, which is the stock in trade of the picture periodicals devoted to the edification of the millions—these things are not only maddening and nauseating, but they belong distinctly and peculiarly to this end of the century. It is a form of insane sex worship which is destitute of every vestige of glamor, of poetry, of real excuse in nature. It is a grotesque parody of all the beauty and dignity of human life. It is the grim and ironical ending of the emancipation of the appetites of the millions, in the thousand and one delusions of popular education. Ancient religions included the glorification of sex. But this is the exaltation of the lowest type of humanity—the sexless Pander to that grim disease of imagination which is peculiar to our hypocrisy of ascetic morality.
In the hourly prints of the day we pick up, at every turn in the city, on hoardings, on every theatre bill board, in the shop windows—everywhere the triumphant, glorious and illustrious Harlot of the day or season, in one of her many roles, as dancer, actress, singer, society woman, erotic novelist and the rest, confronts us in her overwhelming and audacious supremacy of finery, wealth, comfort and the adulation of the community. We get her triumphs, her person, her biographies, her lovers, her scandals, her clothes and her character (these are all about the same, too) with the painstaking detail of sober history. Some of the queans, who have discovered the secret of perpetual rejuvenation, we cannot escape by any chance. These we seem doomed to get forced upon us forever. There may be great poets, great thinkers, great philosophers and teachers in our contemporary world, but there is no room for them in the tide of current history-making or in the popular interest and imagination. The glorified Harlot alone is worthy to fill the mirror of the time; she alone can warm the cockles of the heart of democracy. It is for this that the great democracy has mastered the three R’s.
Aspasia in the full noontide of the greatness of Pericles, Lais just turned into the wonder of the world in the marble of Appeles, and Phyrne made immortal by Praxiteles as Venus rising, rosy, nude and dishevelled from the sea, are wantons who will ever hold the imaginations of men enthralled. But it is certain that in the very meridian of their glory, with poets, philosophers and the greatest artists of history at their feet, their fame never filled the narrow confines of the ancient world as that of the season’s kicking strumpet of the Music-hall fills the modern world with its enlarged boundaries. The fame and name of every fresh bawd from the canaille is now cabled to the four corners of the earth. The notorious harlot of each season’s revels is the female Colossus of the modern world. She is the goddess of the world of traffic. There, aloft, above the reach of all hungry, envious paupers, she rules and overshadows two hemispheres with her legs astride.
Walter Blackburn Harte.