“We’ve been hearing about your coming for several days now. Speed wrote us nearly a week ago that you might come.”
It flattered me to be so much thought of.
“I’ve been hearing nice things of you, too,” I said, studying her pretty nose and chin and the curls about her forehead. In any apologia pro vita sua which I may ever compose, I will confess frankly and heartily to a weakness for beauty in the opposite sex.
She seemed inclined to talk, but was a little bashful. From her general appearance I gathered that she was not only of a gay, lightsome disposition, but a free soul, spiritually as yet not depressed by the local morality of the day—the confining chains of outward appearances and inward, bonehead fears. I had the feeling that she was beginning to be slightly sex conscious without having solved any of its intricacies as yet—just a humming bird, newly on the wing. She hung about, answering and asking questions of no import. Presently Speed had to leave and she went along, with a brisk, swinging step. As she neared the corner of the lawn she turned just for a second and smiled.
Apropos of this situation and these two girls who curiously and almost in spite of myself were uppermost in my mind—the second one most particularly, I should like to say—that of all things in life which seem to me to be dull and false, it is the tendency of weak souls in letters and in life to gloze over this natural chemical action and reaction between the sexes, to which we are all subject, and to make a pretence that our thoughts are something which they are not—sweet, lovely, noble, pure. It has become a duty among males and females, quite too much so, I think, to conceal from each other and from themselves, even, the fact that physical beauty in the opposite sex stirs them physically and mentally, naturally leading to thoughts of union.
What has come over life that it has become so super-fine in its moods? Why should we make such a puritanic row over the natural instincts of man? I will admit that in part nature herself is the cause of this, the instinct to restrain being possibly as great as the instinct to liberate, and that she demands that you make a pretence and live a lie, only it seems to me it would be a little better for the mental health of the race if it were more definitely aware of this. Certainly it ought not be connected with religious illusion. It may not be possible, because of the varying temperaments of people, for anyone to express what he feels or thinks at any precise moment—its reception is too uncertain—but surely it is permissible in print, which is not unakin in its character to the Catholic confessional, to say what one knows to be so.
All normal men crave women—and particularly beautiful women. All married men and priests are supposed, by the mere sacrament of matrimony or holy orders, thereafter to feel no interest in any but one (or in the case of the priest none) of the other sex—or if they do, to rigidly suppress such desires. But men are men! And the women—many married and unmarried ones—don’t want them to be otherwise. Life is a dizzy, glittering game of trapping and fishing and evading, and slaying and pursuing, despite all the religious and socalled moral details by which we surround it. Nature itself has an intense love of the chase. It loves snares, pitfalls, gins, traps, masks and mummeries, and even murder and death—yes, very much murder and death. It loves nothing so much as to build up a papier-mâché wall of convention, and then slip round or crash through it. It has erected a phantasmagoria of laws which no one can understand, and no one can strictly adhere to without disaster, and to which few do strictly adhere. Justice, truth, mercy, right are all abstractions and not to be come at by any series of weights or measures. We pocket our unfair losses or unearned gains and smile at our luck. Curiously, in finance and commercial affairs men understand this and accept it as a not altogether bad game. It has the element in it which they recognize as sport. When it comes to sex, the feeling becomes somewhat more serious. A man who will smile at the loss of a hundred, a thousand, or even a million dollars, will pull a grim countenance over the loss of a wife or a daughter. Death is the price in the judgment of some temperaments. In others it is despair. Why? And yet nature plans these traps and pitfalls. It is the all mother who schemes the Circe and Hellenic temperaments—the fox, the wolf, the lion. A raging, destroying bull, which insists on gormandizing all the females of a herd, is the product of nature, not of man. Man did not make the bull or the stallion, nor did they make themselves. Is nature to be controlled, made over, by man, according to some theory which man, a product of nature, has discovered?
Gentlemen, here is food for a dozen schools of philosophy! Personally, I do not see that any theory or any code or any religion that has yet been devised solves anything. All that one can intelligently say is that they satisfy certain temperaments. Like those theorems and formulæ in algebra and chemistry, which aid the student without solving anything in themselves, they make the living of life a little easier—for some. They are not a solution. They do not make over temperaments which are not adapted to their purposes. They do not assist the preternaturally weak, or restrain the super-strong. They merely, like a certain weave of mesh in fishing, hold some and let others get away—the very big and the very little.
What sort of moralic scheme is that, anyhow, which governs thus? And why is poor, dull man such a universal victim of it?