Great art must be largely conceived, largely executed. For the temple and palace and forum rose the columns and statues of the past; for the church and castle the "frozen music" of mediaeval architecture; for church and palace again, the blazing outburst of pictorial art in the great re-birth. Now the struggling artist must cater to the tastes of parlor-bred patrons; must paint what suits the uses of that carpeted sanctuary, portraits of young ladies most successful! Or he must do for public buildings, if by chance he gets the opportunity, what meets the tastes of our universal parlor-mindedness.
With this parlor-mindedness, we repudiate and condemn in painting, literature, music, drama and the dance, whatever does not conform to the decorum of this shrine, whatsoever is not suitable to ladylike conversation. Be the book bad, it is unsuited to the parlor table. Be the book good—too good, or be it great, then it is equally unsuited. Controversy has no place in parlors, hence no controversial literature. Pleasant if possible, or sweetly sad, and not provocative of argument—this is the demeanor of the parlor table, and to this the editor conforms. To the editorial dictum the "reader" must submit; to the "readers" decisions the writer must submit; to the menu furnished by the magazines, the public must submit, and so grows up among us a canon of literary judgment, best described as "parlor-minded." This is by no means so damaging as kitchen-mindedness, for those who escape the influence of the parlor are many, and those who escape the influence of the kitchen are few; but it is quite damaging enough.
One of the main elements of beauty in our lives is the human body. Some keep swans, some peacocks, and some deer, that they may delight their eyes with the beauty thereof. We ourselves are more beautiful than any beast or bird, we are the inspiration of poet, painter, and sculptor; yet we have deliberately foregone all this constant world of beauty and substituted for it a fluctuating nightmare.
In what sordid or discordant colors do we move about! What desolate blurring of outline and action, by our dragging masses of cloth, stiffened and padded like Chinese armor! What strange figures, conventionalized as a lotus pattern, instead of the moving glory of the human form!
Why do we do it? Having done it why do we bear it longer? Why not fill our streets with beauty, gladden our eyes and uplift our souls with the loveliness that is ours by nature, plus the added loveliness of the textile art? We have pictures of our beauty, we have statues of our beauty—why go without the real thing? Suppose our swans could show us in paint and marble the slow white grace of their plumed sailing, but in person paddled about in a costume of stovepipes. Suppose deer and hound,—but wait!—this we have seen, this extreme of human folly forced upon the helpless beast,—dogs dressed to suit the taste of their parlor-minded owners! Not men's dogs,—women's dogs.
To cover—at any cost, with anything, that is a major ideal of the parlor. There is an exception made, when, at any cost of health, beauty and decency, we uncover—but this too, is to meet one of the parlor purposes. In it and its larger spread of drawing and assembly rooms, we provide not only for "social intercourse"—but for that necessary meeting of men and women that shall lead to marriage.
A right and wholesome purpose, but not a right and wholesome place. Men and women should meet and meet freely in the places where they live, but they should not live in parlors. They should meet and know one another in their working clothes, in the actual character and habit of their daily lives.
Marriages may be "made in heaven," but they are mainly—shall we say "retailed"? in parlors. What can the parlor-loved young woman know of the parlor-bound young man? Parlor manners only are produced, parlor topics, parlor ideas. He had better court her in the kitchen, if she is one of the "fifteen sixteenths" of our families who keep no servants, to know what he is going to live with. She never knows what she is going to live with; for the nature of man is not truly exhibited either in kitchen or parlor. A co-educational college does much, a studio or business office or work-shop does more, to show men and women to each other as they are. Neither does enough, for the blurring shadow of our parlor-mindedness still lies between. It has so habituated us to the soft wavelets and glassy shallows of polite conversation, that we refuse to face and discuss the realities of life. With gifts of roses and bonbons, suppers and theatres that cost more than the cows of the Kaffir lover, and ought to make the girl feel like a Kaffir bride, the man woos the woman. With elaborate toilettes and all the delicate trickery of her unnatural craft, the woman woos the man. And the trail of the parlor is over it all.
Gaily to the gate of marriage they go, and through it—and never have they asked or answered the questions on which the whole truth of their union depends. Our standards of decorum forbid,—parlor standards all. We have woven and embroidered a veil over the facts of life; an incense-clouded atmosphere blinds us; low music and murmured litanies dull the mind, but not the senses. We drift and dream. In the girl's mind floats a cloud of literary ideals. He is like a "Greek god," a "Galahad," a "Knight of old." He is in some mystic way a Hero, a Master, a Protector. She pictures herself as fulfilling exquisite ideals of wifely devotion, "all in all" to him, and he to her.
She does not once prefigure to herself the plain common facts of the experience that lies before her. She does not known them. In parlors such things are not discussed,—no naked truths can be admitted there.