This view of Providence in human affairs makes turning on Providence a less heinous offence than the phrase suggests to some with minds in pawn; and there are always some idealists ready to oppose human nature itself, in rash dreams of the conquest of life for love and beauty and the spirit. It is not the eternal witchery and potency of the Harlot I wish to emphasize in this place, for that needs no argument, but the fact that with the progress of modern democracy this ancient institution, hitherto confined within the limits of civic life, the court and political affairs, has suddenly loomed up as the one great overshadowing fact and potency of human existence. And so in spite of my parade of common sense and sanity I may be held to be an impossible idealist in many quarters, for I am opposing my own individual tastes and those of a small minority, to the overwhelming tide of human nature. I find the reign of the Harlot irksome—especially in the distractions of literature and the theatre.
Some sort of parity has hitherto been maintained, for a period of historical development, between human nature in its unbridled enjoyment of sensation, and those concerns of the intellectual life, which have been the occupation and solace of the few, to whom the pleasures of artifice have grown more necessary than those of sense, and, in moments of clearness and calm, dearer than life itself. With the progress of modern democracy, ordinary human nature has sought factitious and unusual excitements, and plunged into a course of sophistication. It has insidiously encroached upon this realm of artificial delights of the intellect, which the aliens of the race have painfully wrested from life and nature. The Harlot astride Pegasus is the end of popular education.
The authority of religion and the force of superstition, which for centuries kept the arts and literature somewhat remote from the common ideals and passions of the mass of men, have declined, and with their eclipse the ideals of the great mass of vulgar appetites have grown with social freedom and popular education, until, at this hour, we see the greatest tyranny of history established, of which the Triumphant Harlot is the head and front and fitting symbol. It is the pitiless despotism of the millions of uplifted, cruel, greedy maws that hold the fateful pence that decide every question of life and thought in this age of enlightenment. Every clod’s dirty penny or vote counts for as much as a head full of brains. It is a sublime spectacle. It is not the fact of the prosperity of the Harlot in democracy which is at all remarkable, for of course she has not depended upon societies or governments, but upon human nature for her queenship; it is the glorification of her arts and her power, in the open prostitution of the printing press in her honor and worship, the deification of her calling and character in the popular imagination, the dedication of the theatres solely to her exploitation, and the trafficking in her person and perversities, which is the stock in trade of the picture periodicals devoted to the edification of the millions—these things are not only maddening and nauseating, but they belong distinctly and peculiarly to this end of the century. It is a form of insane sex worship which is destitute of every vestige of glamor, of poetry, of real excuse in nature. It is a grotesque parody of all the beauty and dignity of human life. It is the grim and ironical ending of the emancipation of the appetites of the millions, in the thousand and one delusions of popular education. Ancient religions included the glorification of sex. But this is the exaltation of the lowest type of humanity—the sexless Pander to that grim disease of imagination which is peculiar to our hypocrisy of ascetic morality.
In the hourly prints of the day we pick up, at every turn in the city, on hoardings, on every theatre bill board, in the shop windows—everywhere the triumphant, glorious and illustrious Harlot of the day or season, in one of her many roles, as dancer, actress, singer, society woman, erotic novelist and the rest, confronts us in her overwhelming and audacious supremacy of finery, wealth, comfort and the adulation of the community. We get her triumphs, her person, her biographies, her lovers, her scandals, her clothes and her character (these are all about the same, too) with the painstaking detail of sober history. Some of the queans, who have discovered the secret of perpetual rejuvenation, we cannot escape by any chance. These we seem doomed to get forced upon us forever. There may be great poets, great thinkers, great philosophers and teachers in our contemporary world, but there is no room for them in the tide of current history-making or in the popular interest and imagination. The glorified Harlot alone is worthy to fill the mirror of the time; she alone can warm the cockles of the heart of democracy. It is for this that the great democracy has mastered the three R’s.
Aspasia in the full noontide of the greatness of Pericles, Lais just turned into the wonder of the world in the marble of Appeles, and Phyrne made immortal by Praxiteles as Venus rising, rosy, nude and dishevelled from the sea, are wantons who will ever hold the imaginations of men enthralled. But it is certain that in the very meridian of their glory, with poets, philosophers and the greatest artists of history at their feet, their fame never filled the narrow confines of the ancient world as that of the season’s kicking strumpet of the Music-hall fills the modern world with its enlarged boundaries. The fame and name of every fresh bawd from the canaille is now cabled to the four corners of the earth. The notorious harlot of each season’s revels is the female Colossus of the modern world. She is the goddess of the world of traffic. There, aloft, above the reach of all hungry, envious paupers, she rules and overshadows two hemispheres with her legs astride.
Walter Blackburn Harte.
WHEN SHAKESPEARE WROTE.
When Shakespeare wrote his mighty plays,