Modern Society

by Julia Ward Howe

The great desiderata of humanity still remain these: to preserve the integrity of nature, the purity of sentiment, and the coherence of thought. The great extension of educational opportunities which we see to-day should make the attainment of these objects easier than in ages of less instruction. But while the pursuit of them is ever normal to the human race, the inherent difficulties of their attainment remain undiminished. Without self-discipline and self-sacrifice, no man to-day attains true education, or the dignity of true manhood. For here comes in the terrible fact of man's freedom as a moral agent.

Could our age possess and administer the powers of the universe to its heart's content, in that heart would yet rest the issues of its life and of its death.

The period of which I have to speak has certainly witnessed great improvements in the theory of hygiene. The old heroic treatment of diseases has nearly disappeared. The nauseous draughts, the blood-letting and blisters, have given place to moderate medication, the choice of climate and the regulation of diet. Women have been admitted as copartners with men in the guardianship of the public health. Athletic sports help the student to fresh blood and efficient muscle, without which the brain sickens and perishes.

But even in this department how much is left to desire and to do! Our greatest and richest city is still festering with the corruption that breeds disease. No board of health seems to have power to sweep its side streets and dark alleys. Fashion keeps her avenues clean, and neglects the rest of the vast domain, for which she has her reward in many a ghastly epidemic. The late Edward Clarke, of Boston,—heaven rest his soul!—could alarm the whole continent with his threats of the physical evils which the more perfect education of one sex would entail on both. But he has left no public protest against the monstrosities of toilet which deform and mutilate the bodies of women to-day, nor against the selfish frivolity of life in both sexes, which is equally inimical to true motherhood and to true fatherhood.

I have seen in fashions of dress and furniture the curious cycle which my elders foretold, and which it takes, I should think, half a century to fulfil. My earliest childish remembrance is of the slim dresses which display as much as is possible of the outlines of the figure. I remember the élégantes of Gotham walking the one fashionable street of fifty-five years ago, attired in pelisses of pink or blue satin. A white satin cloak trimmed with dark fur seemed, even to my childish observation, a chill costume for a pedestrian in the heart of winter. My mother's last Paris bonnet, bought probably in 1825, appeared to her children, twenty years later, such a caricature, that pious hands destroyed it, in order that we might have no ludicrous association with the sweet young creature whose death had left us babes in the nursery.

After many fluctuations and oscillations, I have seen modern head-gear near of kin to the subject of this holocaust. I have seen the old forms and colors return to popular favor. I have even heard that the very white satin cloak, which seemed outré to the critic of six years, has been worn and greatly admired in the recent gay world of Paris. The return in these cases, it must be said, is not to the identical point of departure. Progress, according to some thinkers, follows a spiral, and is neither shut in a circle nor extended in a straight line. The hoops of our great-grandmothers are not the hoops which we remember to have seen or worn. Their eelskin dresses are not the model of ours. Still, the recurrence of the same vein of fancy marks a periodical approximation to the region or belt of influence in which certain forgotten possibilities suggest themselves to the seeker of novelty, and in which the capricious, antithetical fancy delights to crown with honor all that it found most devoid of beauty a few lustres ago.

Does this encyclical tendency in the familiar æsthetics of life imply a corresponding tendency in the moral and intellectual movement of mankind? I fear that it does. I fear that seriousness and frivolity, greed and disinterest, extravagance and economy, in so far as these are social and sympathetic phenomena, do succeed each other in the movement of the ages. But here the device of the spiral can save us. We must make the round, but we may make it with an upward inclination. "Let there be light!" is sometimes said in accents so emphatic, that the universe remembers and cannot forget it. We carry our problem slowly forward. With all the ups and downs of every age, humanity constantly rises. Individuals may preserve all its early delusions, commit all its primitive crimes; but to the body of civilized mankind, the return to barbarism is impossible.

The æsthetic elaboration of ethical ideas, always a feature of civilization, becomes in our day a task of such prominence as to engage the zeal and labor of those even who have little natural facility for any of its processes.

The ignoring of this department of culture by our Puritan ancestors, had much to do with the bareness of surrounding and poverty of amusement which almost affright us in the record of their society. With all their insufficiency, these periods of severe simplicity are of great importance in the history of a people. The temporary withdrawal from the sensible and pleasurable to the severe verities of ethical study accumulates a reserve force which is sure to be very precious in the emergencies to which all nations are exposed. The reaction against the extreme of this is as likely to be excessive as was the action itself.

If we tend to any extreme, nowadays, it is to that of making art take the place of thought, as may somewhat appear in the general rage for illustration and decoration.