Loe raamatut: «The Secret Life», lehekülg 5
May 4. Seville.
The Beauty of Cruelty
What a people are these, – these Spaniards! This afternoon – Sunday – I saw my first bull-fight. One need never wonder again at the Roman Arena and its horrors. It is as incredible that human beings can sit through such spectacles as that women could have reversed their thumbs when a staggering, bloody barbarian turned up a glazed eye to seek mercy… And this, after two thousand years of Catholicism, of Christianity!
These Spaniards say – staring stupidly at your horror – "Mas, no es Cristianos. They are only animals." Animals! – and yet Christians dare talk of divine mercy; of their faith having softened hearts, and sweetened human nature. Civilization has done so, in truth, but where this faith reigns most arbitrarily such an atrocious spectacle is permissible; goes undenounced of its priests.
It is not the baser sort alone who love this cowardly butchery. In the same box with ourselves sat a woman and her two daughters, evidently members of the upper classes. The arena below was crowded with the people – women in sulphur-coloured shawls, embroidered with sharp blues and scarlets – men of all classes – dandies and workmen cheek by jowl – but the rows of boxes above held the women and children of the well-to-do, even the aristocracy. The Royal family itself patronizes the arena.
The women, whose faces I watched instead of the shambles after the fight began, grew devilish, a hard smile drew their lips back over their teeth; their eyes glittered; a look of lust strained the lines about the nose. They forced the children – some of whom cried, and shrank from the horrid sight – to turn and see the blood and the struggle.
I believe the secret charm of this gory game to many is the prick that the sight of blood gives to the senses. The history of war is full of evidence of this fact – that the sight of horrors spurs the passions. It was curious to think that many of the people there owed their existence to just such a stimulus as this. Cruelty thus lies, hereditarily, at the very roots of their being; intensified in each generation.
For the same reason, I suppose, that so much of my life seems to me a glamour of tangled shadows, elusive and shifting, with no definite line between the real and the unreal, between to-day and all the yesterdays – for that reason the arena's gaunt, windowless walls and passages seemed startlingly familiar. Equally familiar the yellow, sand-strewn circle; the glaring blue sky above the bright-coloured maelström of faces; the whirl of fans all around the ring – as of a circle of innumerable dancing butterflies; the cries of the venders; the clang of the trumpets; the glitter of the tinsel and gew-gaws; the bold rush of the black bull; the quick spatter of the applauding hands…
No animal was ever more beautiful than this splendid beast, the perfect focus of power and rage. He knew that he was facing murder. There was desperation in his glance from the first moment, but he simply didn't know the meaning of cowardice. He knew there was no use in anything he might do; that his courage, and beauty, and long battle for life, would not stir to pity one of those hard, handsome faces with their dark shaven jaws and tight lips, but he struck at his foes with all his force in mere sullen fury. He tore open the bellies of the shivering, sweating, blindfolded horses, who staggered a few steps trailing their entrails in the sand and then crumpled helplessly; he caught a man in the breast and tossed him over the barrier with blood spurting from the hole his horn had made. He himself leaped the fence once, as agile as a deer, and brushed the crowd back like flies, but he did it all without a sign of hope, and never made a sound.
Pricked, goaded, red streams running over his satin skin and searing his eyes, stumbling wildly here and there, his sides sunk in, his muzzle dragging in the dust, dumb, dull fury in his heart at his useless torture, spurred to new effort by explosive darts that tore his flesh into gory, pendulous ribbons, hissed by the women, he fell at last upon his knees in blind helplessness…
How it ended I don't know. A rage of horror squeezed my heart till the tears spurted from my lids. It seemed necessary to seize some weapon and slaughter indiscriminately the men who were murdering this poor brute for mere amusement, the women who were hissing his death throes. In such horrid sequence does cruelty engender cruelty.
The people about me regarded my emotion and retreat with surprise and contempt. Some such sensation, I suppose, as would have been felt by a Roman who should have seen me shed tears when the big cats of the arena crushed the bones of some brave young barbarian or Christian. These creatures were so far beneath him in the scale of existence that he could not conceive of any poignancy of suffering or emotion in such a mere animal. Was not one hair of a Roman worth many sparrows – or Christians?
The Jewish democrat tried to teach the world to recognize the value of the individual, the sanctity of each human life – when will a Christ of the beasts arise?
May 5.
This old world, with its horrors and its beauties, how tame it makes our smug, comfortable America appear!.. Yesterday I wished to make a hecatomb of the Spaniards. To-day I forgive them everything because of the Sevillian dancers. My lusts are all of the eye. I can quite conceive Herod tossing the Baptist's head to the supple Salome in an ecstasy of approval. Dancing, when it is good, is more beautiful to me than music. And this dancing is very good.
The muscular gymnastics, which modern Italy has imposed upon the world as dancing, are as dissimilar from the real thing as the fiorituri singing is from the old bel canto. The Spaniards make dancing – as all arts should be made – the poetical expression of life and love. Such ardour and seduction, such abandon to the joy of living, such rage and daring, such delicate coquetry and wild wooing!.. there is nothing like it out of Spain, the country where they torture helpless animals for sport.
Is there, perhaps, some secret tie between cruelty and beauty; between crime and art? It is certain that religious reformers have always thought so, and have acted with logical fury. In our peaceful, decent country, beauty, except such as Nature herself affords, is rare. A race that loves its neighbour as itself seems incapable of creating an art. The good Swiss have done nothing for the mind's delight: the virtuous Spartans could not even appreciate loveliness when they saw it. Nearly all the great periods of flowering in art come after the roots of a nation have been watered in blood, after some frightful crise of suffering. It would seem as if bringing forth must be always accompanied by birth-pangs.
May 7. Granada.
The Duke of Wellington's Trees
H – said that the greatness of a people depended upon its trees. This sounded rather cryptic, and I entreated him to be more diffuse. We were walking home from that enchanted garden, owned by the Pallavicini, which rewarded the Moor for betraying his city. The May moon was shining on the white mountain tops, and the jargoning of the snow-brooks sounded about our feet. The air smelled of orange flowers and roses, and the nightingales were shouting in the gloom of those one hundred thousand trees planted by the Duke of Wellington.
"This Spanish peninsula," H – said, "under the rule of the Moors, supported thirty millions of people in comfort. The Christian kings allowed the upland forests to be ruthlessly sacrificed, and now look at Spain."
"One swallow" – I quoted. "Will one instance support a theory?"
"No; but I could give you a dozen. Carlyle and the rest of the historians have talked the fearfulest rot about France under the monarchy which preserved her forests. Of course, every one has weakly credited the stories of oppression and starvation in aristocratic France. And yet the sons of these peasants, who were pitifully pictured snatching at leaves of those forests for food, overran Europe. I don't believe that children bred in starvation could ever have had the vitality to be conquerors. At all events, when the land was divided and the forests delivered to spoliation, the population of France began to decline. Possibly the modern effort at reforesting the country may arrest that decline."
"Just listen to the noise of those nightingales," I said. "Do you suppose we shall be able to sleep?"
May 15. Naples.
The Boy with the Goose
The Pompeian bronze, which the guide books and catalogues name The Boy with the Goose, is quite wrongly named. The lad carries a wine-skin. The rude, swollen outlines of the pig are clear, and the attitude of the boy one may see any water-seller in Tangier assume when called upon for a drink – the arm raised, the body tilted back upon the hip to elevate the lip of the skin, so that no more water may flow than is needed. The whole, a delicious bit of genre, smiling and vivid after two thousand years.
There is a curious vitality of a trifling custom discoverable here in the Pompeian museum. The great bronze horses of Balbo have forelocks wrapped and twisted in exactly the same fashion that still prevails all along this Neapolitan shore. The breed has changed utterly; bone and structure have altered and shrunk, but the vetturino, who drives through the streets of Naples to-day, twists up that bit of hair in exactly the same manner as did the coachman of Glaucus or Balbo.
May 30. Rome.
A God Indeed
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of – Apollo!.. I have to-day, for the first time, seen a god.
He stands in the Vatican, and follows, with upthrown head and far-seeing eye, the flight of the golden arrow that slays the serpent of the miasmatic marsh. One feels a sad tenderness for the poor bleeding deity, who hangs dead and helpless from a thousand crucifixes here in Rome, but to-day, for the first time in my life, I felt the impulse to fall on my knees and worship. Here is at last, and indeed a god, whose fine feet disdain the earth, whose proud youth never knew suffering or defeat. Here is the embodiment of the ideal of the European – beauty, health, power. How he must smile to stand here, merely a statue, in the place where the Christian reigns, amid luxury and pomp, in the name of the sorrowful Hebrew democrat who had not a place to lay his head. Apollo's ideal, his worship, still remains dominant, though they call his religion by another name. The European remains, and always will remain, a pagan; none more pagan than the popes with their lust for temporal power.
Only here in Rome is it possible to realize the long struggle for supremacy between the European and Semitic ideas; for here is gathered the bulk of the relics of Greece – mother and nurse of our race – who early broke the bonds of Asiatic thought and sought her own development, material rather than spiritual (if one accepts the theory that spirit and matter are divisible), sensuous rather than mystical, concerned more with the well-being of the body and the freedom and vigour of the mind than with the condition of the soul. She who threw herself with passion into the arms of Nature, and worshipped only the sublimated human characteristics and visible natural forces deified into exquisite personifications. She who exalted the beauty and health of the body into a cult, strove after the demonstrable truths of science, and loved man as he was – humorously loved him with all his faults and limitations, rather than an impossible ideal of him.
Here in Rome one finds all the records of the next great development of the European Erd-geist – the growth of its genius in military, social, and political organization. Still, as in Greece, clinging to the aristocratic ideal; to the rule of the strong and gifted. The fruit did not exist for the benefit of the vine; the vine existed to produce, to nourish, to minister to the perfect culmination of its species in the fruit, which drank its sap as of right. Here again the European followed Nature, that Arch-Aristocrat who destroys multitudes to produce a few perfect specimens – whose right is always might.
The Asian conquests brought again inroads of Asian thought; more particularly the thought of that small tribe, the quintessential of Semitism, which was ever engaged in revolt against nature, and maintaining democratic convictions in the teeth of all experience. Impatient of rulers, but submissive to those who scourged the impulses of their appetites. Scornful of kings, and turning from beauty and genius to exalt the insane and insect-ridden fakir with knotted unshorn locks who muttered vague prophecies. Struggling always to escape from the grip of the inevitable cruelties of natural forces by opposing to them bloody sacrifices and cruel self-restraints – flowering at last into that supreme incarnation of the Semitic mind called Jesus Christ, who wrested from asceticism a dream of a panacea for the brutalities of the laws of life. The misshapen and undeveloped fruit of the tree of existence, the windfalls – always a vast majority – received with ecstasy this new gospel, absurd but fascinating, which denied actualities and promised impossibilities. The feeble majority clutched at a power denied them by nature, and only by outwardly accepting the new tenets were the strong few able to maintain their old dominance.
Nietsche's "blond savage" pouring in from the north found Rome disintegrated by this Asian influence, and unable to discern that the new faith was not an integral part of the civilization whose splendour dazzled him, accepted this theory of life as part of the lesson he set himself humbly to learn at the feet of Italy.
Hence followed that blind welter of mediævalism; the material genius of the European race struggling in the bonds of a creed entirely foreign and unsympathetic. The strong still ruled, as always, but ruled by new formulæ, and moistened with blood and kneaded by swords the hard paste of the European Aryan was leavened by Semitism. Not willingly; never entirely. A thousand years after Rome's acceptance of the new cult the re-discovery of the old art and philosophy of Greece intoxicated Europe with joy. Here was something of her own – natural to her – sympathetic. The Renaissance became an ecstasy of negation of the heavy yoke under which her neck had so long been bowed. Learning again was glorious. The philosopher dared assert his superiority to dirty, ignorant scions of the gutter, who had claimed equality with sovereigns by reason of not eating three meals a day, and because of the virtue which lay in the frequent recitation of gibberish. Art abandoned its endless repetitions of a single theme, and essayed in faltering delight to rival the glorious fragments of those who had made nature their model and had joyed to picture life in all its rich grace and charm. The Western world stood once more upon its feet and burst into a rapture of creation. It laughed to scorn the narrow commands of Semitic asceticism against the graven image. Once more it allowed the beauty of visible nature to pour through its veins in a rich, fecundating flood.
But after all, the leaven had reached every part, and had tinctured it past any possible casting out. Never could the European be free of Asian influence. The pendulum has swung back and forth ever since – ever moving a little higher toward the side of the natural, material development of the race, but ever checked and brought back to the old Jewish revolt against nature. To-day the influence of Asia shows itself in the absurdities of democracy, the phantasies of socialism.
… One of the most curious phases of the whole question is that the Jew – dispersed throughout the Western world – has entirely succumbed to the very ideas which he overthrew. He is the artist, the materialist of our times!
June 1.
A Question of Skulls
The portrait busts of the Romans were their highest achievements in art. One sees literally thousands of them in Italy, and their painstaking accuracy is obvious. What is to me most interesting is that the sculptured Roman head and face might easily be taken for a portrait of the English people of to-day. In any congregation of the English governing classes will be found constantly reproduced the long, narrow skull, the bold aquiline nose, the stern lips and chin, and that clean fleshless outline of the Roman – resembling the keen modelling of the head of the high-bred horse – repeated so frequently in marble and porphyry in all these museums.
Can it be that Empire reproduces the type? Yet ethnologists trust more to the shape of the skull in the study of race affinities than to any other proof. The modern Italian skull is the extreme opposite in type; is short and broad; so indeed is the skull of all the continental races of Europe. I know that the skull measurements are not supposed to give this result, but to the eye the English alone seem to possess this long, narrow skull.
Amusing also is it to remark that the Roman women were not handsome. In both races the resemblance between the sexes is too strong. The fine, bony, equine type, so admirable in the male Roman and Englishman, becomes hardness in the women, who lack seduction and charm. Also curious to note, there is the same proud grace of costume and coiffure in the men; the same ugliness and lack of taste in the arrangement of the hair and dress of the women of the two races.
London. June 30.
The Modern Woman and Marriage
H – and I dined last night with Mary L – at the Carleton, and H – asked her, in his large generic fashion, what everybody had been doing at home during our absence.
"Oh, having their appendices cut out and getting divorced!" she said flippantly, and H – laughed outrageously, so that people turned and stared. It was probably the lobster we ate that made me think her remark more pathetic than funny while I turned it over in my mind all the long hours I lay awake.
Howells has said, with only humorous apology, that his sex, after nineteen hundred years, is but imperfectly monogamous, and yet our modern women are beginning to treat marriage so disrespectfully, and change partners for life as light-heartedly as if the engagement was as unimportant as an engagement for a dance!
That even this imperfect measure of self-denial and fidelity has been arrived at by men seems to me to be almost solely due to the women of the past. I know the Church claims – in her usual arrogant way – that she should have the credit of it, but Lecky says in his "European Morals":
"The first consequence of the prominence of asceticism was a profound discredit thrown upon the domestic virtues. The extent to which this discredit was carried, the intense hardness of heart and ingratitude manifested by the saints towards those who were bound to them by the closest of earthly ties, is known to few who have not studied the original literature on the subject. These things are commonly thrown into the shade by sentimentalists who delight in idealizing the devotees of the past. To break by his ingratitude the heart of the mother who had borne him, to persuade the wife who adored him that it was her duty to separate from him for ever, to abandon his children, uncared for and beggars, to the mercies of the world, was regarded by the true hermit as the most acceptable offering he could make to his God."
The root of family life is not mutual affection between man and woman, because that, alas! – whether it be founded on physical attraction or mental affinity – is subject to change. Age withers, and custom stales it: circumstance blights it, a diversity of spiritual growth rends it apart, and no man or woman can say with certainty that it will endure for a lifetime. But the fluctuations to which wedded love is subject are unknown to the self-abnegating instinct of parenthood. Mutual affection for the offspring will hold together the most opposite natures; it will rivet for all existence two lives that must otherwise inevitably spring asunder by instinctive repulsion.
Love of offspring is in man a cultivated emotion; in woman an instinct. There are women lacking the instinct as there are calves born with two heads, but for purposes of generalization these exceptions may be ignored. In many of the lower orders of life the female is obliged to protect the young from the enmity of the male parent. The alligator finds no meal so refreshing as a light lunch off his newly hatched children, and the male swine shares this epicurean taste for tender offspring. The stallion is a dangerous companion for the mare with colt at foot, though the colt be of his own get, and many species of male appear to experience a similar jealousy of the young while absorbing the attentions of the female. Speaking generally of the animal world, the young are obliged to look to the mother entirely for food and care during the period of helplessness. With savage man of the lower grade the paternal instinct is still faint and rudimentary, and even where the woman has, through long ages of endeavour, succeeded in cultivating in the heart of the other parent a fair imitation of her own affection, this affection, being a cultivated emotion and not an instinct, frequently breaks down under stress of misbehaviour or frowardness on the part of the child.
To this end, then, – that end "toward which the whole creation moves," – to effect this result of an equal care and affection for the offspring, all the energies of women have been bent for ages.
She has fought polygamy with incessant hatred; not only for its injury to herself, but its constant menace to her children. The secret strings of the woman's heart are wrapped about the fruit of her own flesh, but the desire of the man is to the woman, and this desire she has used as a lever to work her will – not consciously, perhaps, not with reasoned forethought, but with the iron tenacity of blind instinct. Reasoned will may be baffled or deflected, but water can by no means be induced to run up hill; and so while woman has been apparently as fluidly yielding as water – to be led here and driven there according to the will of her master – she has stuck to her own ends with a silent persistency that has always tired out opposition at last. She has, like Charity, suffered all things, endured all things; she has been all things to all men. She has yielded all outward show of authority; she has submitted to be scoffed at as an inferior creation, to be sneered at for feebleness and shallow-mindedness, to be laughed at for chattering inconsequence, and to be regarded as a toy and trifle to amuse man's leisure hours, or as a dull drudge for his convenience, for ends are not achieved by talking about them. All the ages of masculine discussion of the Eternal Feminine show no reply from her, but to-day the world is a woman's world. Civilization has, under the unrelaxing pressure of endless generations of her persistent will, been bent to her ends. Polygamy is routed, and the errant fancy of the male tamed to yield itself to a single yoke. She has, "with bare and bloody feet, climbed the steep road of wide empire," but to-day she stands at the top – mistress of the world. Man, with his talents, his strength, and his selfishness, has been tamed to her hand. The sensual, dominant brute with whom she began what Max Nordau calls "the toilsome, slow ascent of the long curve leading up to civilization," stands beside her to-day, hat in hand, her lover – husband; tender, faithful, courteous, and indulgent.
This is the conquest that has been made, the crown and throne achieved by the silent, uneducated woman of the past.
Monogamous marriage is the foundation stone on which has been built her power; a power which, while it has endured to her own benefit, has not been exercised for selfish ends. She has raised the relation between man and herself from a mere contract of sensuality or convenience to a spiritual sacrament within whose limits the purest and most exalted of human emotions find play. For the coarse indulgence and bitter enmities of polygamy has been substituted the happiest of bonds, in which the higher natures find room for the subtlest and completest felicities, and within which the man, the woman, and the child form a holy trinity of mutual love and well-being.
To this jewel, so hardly won, so long toiled for, it would be natural to suppose that woman would cling with all the force of her nature; all the more as education broadened her capacity for reflection and deepened her consciousness of self. On the contrary, the little learning she has so far acquired seems, as usual, a dangerous thing, and with the development of self-consciousness the keen, unerring flair of her instinct for the one thing needful has been blunted and enfeebled. It is not necessary to give undue weight to the blatant and empty-headed crew who announce marriage to be a failure, and that women are tired of, and will no longer submit to, child-bearing. There are crowing hens in all barnyards, and their loud antics never materially affect the price of eggs.
But that the women of our own time should treat marriage – that hard-won, dear-bought triumph – with such profligate recklessness amazes me. We are making ducks and drakes of the treasure heaped up for us by our mothers. How long will this imperfectly monogamous animal respect an institution which is all for our benefit, if we ourselves regard it so lightly?
The modern woman is so spoiled, so indulged, that she does not realize how much a man gives and how little he gets in marriage. He gives a half, sometimes – indeed often – more than half, of his earnings, his name and its honour, his protection and defence of her person, and a lifelong responsibility for her and her children, and he gets – what? Her person, and it is to be hoped her affection. The woman of the present day lays too much stress upon this gift of her person. She appears to think that this gift alone renders man her eternal debtor. To speak a little brutally, he knows that he can easily buy a like gift elsewhere and for a less price.
I remember that last year Alice complained of some of Ned's small foibles.
"Oh, you must be patient with him," I said. "Think how much he gives you; home, name, support, protection – everything. He works hard for you every day. You are under tremendous obligations to him."
"Well, if you put it that way – " she answered resentfully, "but don't I give him love and affection in return?"
"Yes," I countered triumphantly, "but he gives you equal love and all these other things beside. It seems to me there's no question who gives most."
She opened her eyes rather wide and looked thoughtful.
