There are different kinds of families. Only in the struggle between the dead and the living do they become the same even when the contestants differ. I will describe only one type. Perhaps it is the American family; perhaps it is not.
It is the family which considers culture a matter of polished fingernails and emotional suppression and dinner table aphorisms, puns and the classics in half morocco. It has bound volumes of The Philistine or some other mawkish philosophical twaddle on view in the bookcase. It—the spirit of this family—knows the titles of books memorized from literary reviews in current magazines and will discourse bitingly on the malicious trend of these radical volumes from the sweeping knowledge she has of their titles. In the matter of music the spirit of this family “plays safe.” It will characterize as “tinkly” or “syrupy” anything melodious which secretly pleases it. The rather humorous falseness of its culture is inexhaustible.
Introspection is an indecent as well as impossible thing to the spirit of this family. To look into her soul and see the diseased and dead things that fill it is naturally impossible and naturally indecent. Dostoevsky calls man an animal who can get used to anything. And a man’s adjustment to hideous things is not so final as a woman’s.
For the spirit of this family to reveal an honest reaction when it is contrary to the approved artificial demands of a situation is as heinous an exhibition of bad taste as to uncover a thigh. But luckily, this concealing of honest feeling is not often required. The spirit of this family is incapable in the main of honest feeling. That is a part of the beauty killed long ago in her, a part of the beauty she killed in the daughter, a part of the beauty the daughter will strangle in her own children. And one of the compensations for dead souls is that they naturally feel dishonest feeling and do not have to suffer with a realization of hypocrisy.
This family thinks of virtue in terms of legs. This family regards art and truth with a modulated leer. It is crudely cynical of everything outside its range. It sneers and pooh-hoos, it ostracizes and condemns. It is vulgarly contemptuous of the factors in life superior to it. The spirit of this family would have shrieked in outrage at the presence of Verlaine in its home—unless he could have reflected social distinction on it. It would have closed the doors to Ibsen,—except for the social distinction,—to every triumphant soul that had escaped the dead fingers and realized itself. And by some inexplicable trick of self-adjustment the spirit of this family looks upon thought as an undesirable affectation.
Social success means to this family a speaking acquaintance with any wealthier unit which originally considered itself “above” this family. Moral success means to this family an exemption from the prosecution of the forces it has reared for its own protection—keeping out of jail, out of scandal-mongering newspapers, out of the malicious after-dinner gossip of its friends.
Of an evening you will find this family in the living room. The husband and father reads a newspaper. He has worked in his office all day and is tired. Life long ago ceased to mean anything to him. He is an animal husk in fine linen. He has his little prejudices and his little conventions. Indeed, he is a part of the system of the unit but not much interested in it. He never was possessed of the capacity for beauty which his women folk once had and which they found it necessary to kill in each other. Man is a more natural part of the world’s ugliness. He is coarser stuff in general. For him it is not necessary to wage any struggle. He accepted matrimony because of a concentrated physical curiosity in one woman, and because it was the thing to do at his age. Love suffered epileptic dissolution in the nuptial couch. Honor toward his woman expired when the mysteries of her flesh paled. Obedience is his natural state—that is, long ago he established a line of least resistance and inoculated his women folk with the fable that adherence to this line was the obedience and respect he owed them. If a latent instinct awakens suddenly in him he indulges himself. He finds it rather difficult to be immoral, but as he hesitates a latent strength overcomes his fear and thus he is able to be immoral and unfaithful to his own convenient restrictions in a natural manner and with no great loss of sleep.
One man in ten thousand inherits the beauty of the woman who bore him and he becomes an artist. It is not necessary for him to revolt. His fathers have taken care of that. There is an assured place in the world for him—not in the living room here in front of the fireplace but elsewhere, in places of which poets sing.
The family man keeps posted. He knows what is going on in the world but does not understand it. He is not capable of understanding. But sometimes understanding and reason coincide with his prejudices and he is then as liable to hold minority views as not. He is dry, sometimes clever. But always he jogs, jogs, jogs along. He can even sleep night after night in the same bed with his wife without feeling annoyance. His bluntedness is complete. Dostoevsky is right.
His wife and the mother of his children is a part of the furniture of existence for him. In his own way he is quite dead, but it was not necessary to kill him. If his son revolts the instinct of his mother is communicated to him and he fights. He borrows the mother’s weapons and he blasphemes in a half-hearted way about the duty to parents. But the beauty which the mother found easy to kill in the daughter usually discovers a hardier citadel in the son and usually he carries it safely into the world.