We live a marvellous life at home. Visibly we have the care and labor of housekeeping, the strain and anxiety of childbearing as it is practised, the elaborate convention of "receiving" and "entertaining." Under these goes on life. Our bodies are tired, overtaxed, ill-fed, grossly ill-treated. Our minds are hungry, unsatisfied, or drugged and calm. We live, we suffer and we die,—and never once do we face the facts. Birth and death are salient enough, one would think, but birth and death we particularly cover and hide, concealing from our friends with conventional phrases, lying about to our children. Over the strong ever-lasting life-processes, we spin veil on veil; drape and smother them till they become sufficiently remote and symbolic for the parlor to recognize.
In older nations than ours, we can see this web of convention thickened and hardened till life runs low within. Think what can be the state of mind in India which allows child-marriage—the mother concurrent! Think of the slow torture of little girls in foot-bound China, the mother concurrent! Then turning quickly, think of our own state of mind, which allows young girls to marry old reprobates,—the mother concurrent!
That mental attitude which maintains ancient conventions, which prefers symbol to fact, which prescribes limits to our conversation, and draws them narrowly down to what can be understood by anybody, and can instruct, interest and inspire nobody, is parlor-mindedness. It does harm enough both in its low ideals of beauty and art, manners and morals, to its placid inmates and its complaisant visitors; it does more harm in its fallacious shallows as a promoter of marriage; it does most in its failure to promote the one thing it is for—social intercourse.
To meet freely; to talk, discuss, exchange and compare ideas, is a general human need. Those who do not know they need it, need it most.
Each of us alone, taps the reservoir of world-force, in some degree, and pours it forth in some expression. Often the intake seems to fail, the output is unsatisfying. Then we need one another, now this one and now that one, now several, now a crowd. In combination we receive new power. The human soul calls for contact and exchange with its kind. This contact should be fluent and free, spontaneous, natural; that we may go as we are drawn to those who feed us best.
Men need men and women women; men and women need one another; it is a general human condition. From such natural meeting arises personal relief, rest, pleasure, stimulus, and social gain beyond counting, in the growth of thought. The social battery is continually replenished by contact and exchange. Some friends draw out the best that is in us, some, though perhaps near and dear to us, do not.
No matter how "happily married," or how unhappily unmarried, we need social interchange. To quench this thirst, to meet this need, wide as the world and deep as life, we provide—the parlor.
Is it any wonder that our talk is mainly personality? That we love gossip, even when it bites and sours to scandal? Is it any wonder that women talk so much of their kitchen and nurseries, of their diseases, and their clothes, yet learn so little about better feeding, better dressing, better health and better child-culture? Is it any wonder that to our parlor-mindedness the daily press descends, gives us the pap we are used to, and then artfully peppers our pap, insinuating some sparkle of alcohol, some solace of insidious drug, that we may "get the habit" more firmly? Is it any wonder that we, parlor-bred and newspaper-fed, continue to cry out fiercely against personal, primitive, parlor sins, and remain calm and unshocked by world-sins that should rouse us to horror, shame and action?
In these small shrines, adorned with what, in our doll-house taste, we fondly imagine to be beautiful, we seek to keep ourselves, "unspotted from the world," but by no saving grace of a thousand parlors, do we succeed in keeping the world unspotted from ourselves! We make the world. We are the world. It might be a place of noble freedom, of ever-growing beauty, of a fluent, truthful radiant art, of broadening education, wide peace and culture, universal wealth and progress. And we miss even seeing this, living sedately, curtained, carpeted, well content, in our ancestral parlor-mindedness.