Who is your doctor? Yes, his skill’s immense—
But it’s a dreadful danger and expense!”
It’s all a powder-puff matter: marriage means new clothes, gifts, and a house to play with. It gives her another chance to get something for nothing—which is immoral. But the beauty of the situation is that the immorality (thanks to our habits of not thinking straight) is so perfectly concealed: it even appears that she is the one who does the giving. As for any bother about sex, she’ll soon put an end to that. And so she goes on her pirate ways, luring for the sake of the lure, adding her voice to the already swelled chorus which proclaims that truth and beauty lodge in things as they are, not in things as they might or should be.
But, to return to the novelist’s argument about clothes, the present fashion for low necks and slit skirts has nothing to do with sex necessarily. Its origin is in vanity—which may or may not have a bearing upon sex. And of course it usually hasn’t; for vanity is an attribute of small natures, and sex is an attribute of great ones.
There has never been a time when women had such an opportunity to be beautiful physically. And they are taking advantage of it. Watch any modern matinée or concert or shopping crowd carefully. There’s something about the new style that points to a finer naturalness, just as it is more natural for men to wear clothes that follow the lines of their bodies than to pad their shoulders and use twice too much cloth in their trouser legs. The move of muscles through a close-fitting suit gives an effect of strength and efficiency and animal grace that is superbly healthy. And it is so with women, too. With the exception of the foolish and unnecessary restrictions in walking women have such a splendid chance to look straight, unhampered, direct, lithe. I don’t know just why, but I want to use the word “true” about the new clothes. They’re so much less dishonest than the old padded ways—the strange, perverted, muffled methods. The old plan was built on the theory that the suppression of nature is civilization; the new plan seems to be that a recognition of nature is common sense. We may become Greek yet. By all of which I’ll probably be credited with supporting the silly indecencies we see every day on the street—ridiculous, unintelligent manifestations of the new freedom—instead of merely seeing in its wise expression a bigger hope of truth. I think the preachers who are filling the newspapers with hysterical protests about women’s dress had better look a little more closely at the real issue and stop confusing a fine impulse with its inevitable abuses.
But after all there’s only one important thing to be said about sex in its relation to a full life. Some day we’re going to have a tremendous revaluation of the thing known as feeling. We’re going to realize that the only person who doesn’t err in relation to values is the artist; and since the bigger part of the artist’s equipment is simply the capacity to feel, we’re going to begin training a race of men toward a new ideal. It shall be this: that nothing shall qualify as fundamentally “immoral” except denial—the failure of imagination, of understanding, of appreciation, of quickening to beauty in every form, of perceiving beauty where custom or convention has dwarfed its original stature; the failure to put one’s self in the other person’s place; the great, ghastly failure of life which allows one to look but not to see, to listen but not to hear—to touch but not to feel.
The other night I heard Schumann’s Des Abends—that summer-night elegy of a thousand, thousand cadences—played near a place where trees were stirring softly and grass smelling warm and cool; some one said afterward that it was pretty.... The other day I heard a violin played so throbbingly that it was like “what the sea has striven to say”; and through it all a group of people talked, as though no miracle were happening. Not very long after these two —— (I can’t find a noun), I talked with some one who tried to convince me that the biggest and most valiant person I know was—“well, not the sort one can afford to be friends with.” Somehow all three episodes immediately linked themselves together in my mind. Each was a failure of the same type—a failure of imagination, of feeling; the last one, at least, was tragedy; and it will become impossible for people to fail that way only when they stop failing in the first two ways.
Not long ago I went into a music store and bought Tschaikowsky’s Les Larmes. It cost twenty-eight cents. I walked out so under the spell of the immense adventure of living that I realized later how imbecile I must have looked and why the clerk gazed at me so suspiciously. But I had a song which had cost a man who knows what sorrow to write—a thing of such richness that it meant experience to any one who could own it. One of the world’s big things for twenty-eight cents! And such things happen every day!
Sex is simply the quintessence of this type of feeling, plus a deeper thing for which no words have been made. But we reach the wonder of the utmost realization in just one way: by having felt greatly at every step.
“American artists know everything,” said a young foreign sculptor lately; “they know that much” (throwing out his arms wide), “but they only feel that much!” (measuring an inch with his fingers). How can we produce the great audiences that Whitman knew we needed in order to have great poets, if we don’t train the new generations to feel? How can we prevent these crimes against love and sex—how put a stop to human waste in all its hideous forms—if we don’t recognize the new idealism which means not to deny?