“Incense and Splendor”
Margaret C. Anderson
A young American novelist stated the other day that the American woman is oversexed; that present-day modes of dress are all designed to emphasize sex; and that it is high time for a reaction against sex discussions, sex stories, and sex plays.
But I think she’s entirely mistaken. The American woman, speaking broadly, is pathetically undersexed, just as she is undersensitive and underintelligent. The last adjective will be disputed or resented; but it’s interesting once in a while to hear the thoughtful foreigner’s opinion of our intelligence. Tagore, for instance, said that he was agreeably surprised in regard to the American man and astonished at the stupidity of the American woman. As for our fiction and drama—we’ve had much about sex in the last few years, some of it intensely valuable, much of it intensely foolish; but it’s quite too early to predict the reaction. The really constructive work on the subject is yet to be done.
And the pity of the whole thing is that the critics who keep lecturing us on our oversexedness don’t realize that what they’re really trying to get at is our poverty of spirit, our emotional incapacities, our vanities, our pettinesses—any number of qualities which spring from anything but too much sex. Nothing is safer than to say that the man or woman of strong sex equipment is rarely vain or petty or mean or unintelligent. But as a result of all this vague bickering, “sex” continues to shoulder the blame for all kinds of shortcomings, and the real root of the trouble goes untreated—even undiagnosed. One thing is certain: until we become conscious that there’s something very wrong with our attitude toward sex, we’ll never get rid of the hard, tight, anæmic, metallic woman who flourishes in America as nowhere else in the world.
This doesn’t mean the old Puritan type, to whom sex was a rotten, unmentionable thing; nor does it mean the Victorian, who recognizes the sex impulse only as a means to an end. They belong to the past too definitely to be harmful. It means two newer types than these: the woman who looks upon sex as something to be endured and forgiven, and the woman who doesn’t feel at all.
The first type has a great (and by no means a secret) pride in her spiritual superiority to the coarse creature she married, and a never-dying hope that she can lead him up to her level. She talks a lot about spirituality; she has her standards, and she knows how to classify what she calls “sensuality”; she’s convinced that she has married the best man in the world, but—well, all men have this failing in common, and the only thing one can do is to rise above it magnificently, with that air of spiritual isolation which is her most effective weapon. Shaw has hit her off on occasion, but he ought to devote a whole three acts to her undoing; or perhaps an Ibsen would do it better, because tragedy follows her path like some sinister shadow, as inevitably as those other “ghosts” of his. The second type has no more capacity for love or sex than she has for music or poetry—which is none at all. Like a polished glass vase, empty and beautiful, she lures the man who loves her to a kind of supreme nothingness. She will always tell you that marriage is “wonderful”; and she urges all her friends to marry as quickly as possible, for that’s the only way to be perfectly happy. Marriage is “wonderful” to her just as birth is “wonderful” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s satire:
Birth comes. Birth—
The breathing re-creation of the earth!
All earth, all sky, all God, life’s sweet deep whole,
Newborn again to each new soul!
“Oh, are you? What a shame! Too bad, my dear!
How will you stand it, too. It’s very queer
The dreadful trials women have to carry;
But you can’t always help it when you marry.
Oh, what a sweet layette! What lovely socks!
What an exquisite puff and powder box!
Who is your doctor? Yes, his skill’s immense—
But it’s a dreadful danger and expense!”
It’s all a powder-puff matter: marriage means new clothes, gifts, and a house to play with. It gives her another chance to get something for nothing—which is immoral. But the beauty of the situation is that the immorality (thanks to our habits of not thinking straight) is so perfectly concealed: it even appears that she is the one who does the giving. As for any bother about sex, she’ll soon put an end to that. And so she goes on her pirate ways, luring for the sake of the lure, adding her voice to the already swelled chorus which proclaims that truth and beauty lodge in things as they are, not in things as they might or should be.
But, to return to the novelist’s argument about clothes, the present fashion for low necks and slit skirts has nothing to do with sex necessarily. Its origin is in vanity—which may or may not have a bearing upon sex. And of course it usually hasn’t; for vanity is an attribute of small natures, and sex is an attribute of great ones.
There has never been a time when women had such an opportunity to be beautiful physically. And they are taking advantage of it. Watch any modern matinée or concert or shopping crowd carefully. There’s something about the new style that points to a finer naturalness, just as it is more natural for men to wear clothes that follow the lines of their bodies than to pad their shoulders and use twice too much cloth in their trouser legs. The move of muscles through a close-fitting suit gives an effect of strength and efficiency and animal grace that is superbly healthy. And it is so with women, too. With the exception of the foolish and unnecessary restrictions in walking women have such a splendid chance to look straight, unhampered, direct, lithe. I don’t know just why, but I want to use the word “true” about the new clothes. They’re so much less dishonest than the old padded ways—the strange, perverted, muffled methods. The old plan was built on the theory that the suppression of nature is civilization; the new plan seems to be that a recognition of nature is common sense. We may become Greek yet. By all of which I’ll probably be credited with supporting the silly indecencies we see every day on the street—ridiculous, unintelligent manifestations of the new freedom—instead of merely seeing in its wise expression a bigger hope of truth. I think the preachers who are filling the newspapers with hysterical protests about women’s dress had better look a little more closely at the real issue and stop confusing a fine impulse with its inevitable abuses.
But after all there’s only one important thing to be said about sex in its relation to a full life. Some day we’re going to have a tremendous revaluation of the thing known as feeling. We’re going to realize that the only person who doesn’t err in relation to values is the artist; and since the bigger part of the artist’s equipment is simply the capacity to feel, we’re going to begin training a race of men toward a new ideal. It shall be this: that nothing shall qualify as fundamentally “immoral” except denial—the failure of imagination, of understanding, of appreciation, of quickening to beauty in every form, of perceiving beauty where custom or convention has dwarfed its original stature; the failure to put one’s self in the other person’s place; the great, ghastly failure of life which allows one to look but not to see, to listen but not to hear—to touch but not to feel.
The other night I heard Schumann’s Des Abends—that summer-night elegy of a thousand, thousand cadences—played near a place where trees were stirring softly and grass smelling warm and cool; some one said afterward that it was pretty.... The other day I heard a violin played so throbbingly that it was like “what the sea has striven to say”; and through it all a group of people talked, as though no miracle were happening. Not very long after these two —— (I can’t find a noun), I talked with some one who tried to convince me that the biggest and most valiant person I know was—“well, not the sort one can afford to be friends with.” Somehow all three episodes immediately linked themselves together in my mind. Each was a failure of the same type—a failure of imagination, of feeling; the last one, at least, was tragedy; and it will become impossible for people to fail that way only when they stop failing in the first two ways.
Not long ago I went into a music store and bought Tschaikowsky’s Les Larmes. It cost twenty-eight cents. I walked out so under the spell of the immense adventure of living that I realized later how imbecile I must have looked and why the clerk gazed at me so suspiciously. But I had a song which had cost a man who knows what sorrow to write—a thing of such richness that it meant experience to any one who could own it. One of the world’s big things for twenty-eight cents! And such things happen every day!
Sex is simply the quintessence of this type of feeling, plus a deeper thing for which no words have been made. But we reach the wonder of the utmost realization in just one way: by having felt greatly at every step.
“American artists know everything,” said a young foreign sculptor lately; “they know that much” (throwing out his arms wide), “but they only feel that much!” (measuring an inch with his fingers). How can we produce the great audiences that Whitman knew we needed in order to have great poets, if we don’t train the new generations to feel? How can we prevent these crimes against love and sex—how put a stop to human waste in all its hideous forms—if we don’t recognize the new idealism which means not to deny?
A Kaleidoscope
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay