The Forerunner Part 52

So interwoven with our inner consciousness are these purely arbitrary codes of propriety in costume, that we have such extremes as Kipling shows us in his remote Himalayan forests,--a white man thousands of miles from his kind, who "dressed for dinner every night to preserve his self-respect." No doubt a perfectly sincere conviction, and one sunk deep in the highbred British breast, but even so of a most shallow and ephemeral nature, based on nothing whatever but a temporary caprice of our parlor-mindedness.

Being reared in that state of mind, and half of us confined to it professionally, we are inevitably affected thereby, and react upon life--the real moving world-life, under its pitiful limitations.

If one's sense of beauty must be first, last and always personal, and confined to one's parlor,--for of course we cannot dictate as to other women's parlors,--then how is it to be expected that we should in any way notice, feel or see the ugliness of our town or city, schoolhouse or street-car?

See the woman who has had "an education," who has even "studied art,"

perhaps, and whose husband can pay for what she wants. Her parlor may become a drawing-room, or two, or more, but she does not grow to care that a public school-room is decorated in white plaster trimmed with a broad strip of blackboard.

The bald, cruel, wearing ugliness of the most of our schools, is worthy of penal inst.i.tutions, yet we with cheerful unconcern submit growing children to such influences without ever giving it a thought.

"My parlor" must be beautiful, but "our school" is no business of mine.

Is there any real reason, by the way, why blackboards must be black? A deep dull red or somber green would be restful and pleasant to the eye, and show chalk just as well. As is being now slowly discovered. There are no blackboards in our parlors. Our children leave home to go to school, and their mother's thoughts do not. In the small measure of parlor decoration grows no sense of public art.

Great art must be largely conceived, largely executed. For the temple and palace and forum rose the columns and statues of the past; for the church and castle the "frozen music" of mediaeval architecture; for church and palace again, the blazing outburst of pictorial art in the great re-birth. Now the struggling artist must cater to the tastes of parlor-bred patrons; must paint what suits the uses of that carpeted sanctuary, portraits of young ladies most successful! Or he must do for public buildings, if by chance he gets the opportunity, what meets the tastes of our universal parlor-mindedness.

With this parlor-mindedness, we repudiate and condemn in painting, literature, music, drama and the dance, whatever does not conform to the decorum of this shrine, whatsoever is not suitable to ladylike conversation. Be the book bad, it is unsuited to the parlor table. Be the book good--too good, or be it great, then it is equally unsuited.

Controversy has no place in parlors, hence no controversial literature.

Pleasant if possible, or sweetly sad, and not provocative of argument--this is the demeanor of the parlor table, and to this the editor conforms. To the editorial dictum the "reader" must submit; to the "readers" decisions the writer must submit; to the _menu_ furnished by the magazines, the public must submit, and so grows up among us a canon of literary judgment, best described as "parlor-minded." This is by no means so damaging as kitchen-mindedness, for those who escape the influence of the parlor are many, and those who escape the influence of the kitchen are few; but it is quite damaging enough.

One of the main elements of beauty in our lives is the human body. Some keep swans, some peac.o.c.ks, and some deer, that they may delight their eyes with the beauty thereof. We ourselves are more beautiful than any beast or bird, we are the inspiration of poet, painter, and sculptor; yet we have deliberately foregone all this constant world of beauty and subst.i.tuted for it a fluctuating nightmare.

In what sordid or discordant colors do we move about! What desolate blurring of outline and action, by our dragging ma.s.ses of cloth, stiffened and padded like Chinese armor! What strange figures, conventionalized as a lotus pattern, instead of the moving glory of the human form!

Why do we do it? Having done it why do we bear it longer? Why not fill our streets with beauty, gladden our eyes and uplift our souls with the loveliness that is ours by nature, plus the added loveliness of the textile art? We have pictures of our beauty, we have statues of our beauty--why go without the real thing? Suppose our swans could show us in paint and marble the slow white grace of their plumed sailing, but in person paddled about in a costume of stovepipes. Suppose deer and hound,--but wait!--this we have seen, this extreme of human folly forced upon the helpless beast,--dogs dressed to suit the taste of their parlor-minded owners! Not men's dogs,--women's dogs.

To cover--at any cost, with anything, that is a major ideal of the parlor. There is an exception made, when, at any cost of health, beauty and decency, we uncover--but this too, is to meet one of the parlor purposes. In it and its larger spread of drawing and a.s.sembly rooms, we provide not only for "social intercourse"--but for that necessary meeting of men and women that shall lead to marriage.

A right and wholesome purpose, but not a right and wholesome place. Men and women should meet and meet freely in the places where they live, but they should not live in parlors. They should meet and know one another in their working clothes, in the actual character and habit of their daily lives.

Marriages may be "made in heaven," but they are mainly--shall we say "retailed"? in parlors. What can the parlor-loved young woman know of the parlor-bound young man? Parlor manners only are produced, parlor topics, parlor ideas. He had better court her in the kitchen, if she is one of the "fifteen sixteenths" of our families who keep no servants, to know what he is going to live with. She never knows what she is going to live with; for the nature of man is not truly exhibited either in kitchen or parlor. A co-educational college does much, a studio or business office or work-shop does more, to show men and women to each other as they are. Neither does enough, for the blurring shadow of our parlor-mindedness still lies between. It has so habituated us to the soft wavelets and gla.s.sy shallows of polite conversation, that we refuse to face and discuss the realities of life. With gifts of roses and bonbons, suppers and theatres that cost more than the cows of the Kaffir lover, and ought to make the girl feel like a Kaffir bride, the man woos the woman. With elaborate toilettes and all the delicate trickery of her unnatural craft, the woman woos the man. And the trail of the parlor is over it all.

Gaily to the gate of marriage they go, and through it--and never have they asked or answered the questions on which the whole truth of their union depends. Our standards of decorum forbid,--parlor standards all.

We have woven and embroidered a veil over the facts of life; an incense-clouded atmosphere blinds us; low music and murmured litanies dull the mind, but not the senses. We drift and dream. In the girl's mind floats a cloud of literary ideals. He is like a "Greek G.o.d," a "Galahad," a "Knight of old." He is in some mystic way a Hero, a Master, a Protector. She pictures herself as fulfilling exquisite ideals of wifely devotion, "all in all" to him, and he to her.

She does not once prefigure to herself the plain common facts of the experience that lies before her. She does not known them. In parlors such things are not discussed,--no naked truths can be admitted there.

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 att.i.tude 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 n.o.body, 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 n.o.ble 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.

NAUGHTY

The young brain was awake and hungry. It was a vigorous young brain, well-organized; eager, receiving impressions with keen joy and storing them rapidly away in due relation.

Such a wonder world!

Sweetness and light were the first impressions--light which made his eyes laugh; and Sweetness Incarnate--that great soft Presence which was Food and Warmth and Rest and Comfort and something better still; for all of which he had no name as yet except "Ma-ma!"

He was growing, growing fast. He was satisfied with food. He was satisfied with sleep. But his brain was not satisfied. So the brain's first servant went forth to minister to it; small, soft, uncertain, searching for all knowledge--the little hand.

Something to hold! Ancestral reflexes awoke as the fingers closed upon it. Something to pull! The soft arm flexors tightened with a sense of pleasure. Sensations came flowing to the hungry brain--welcomed eagerly.

Then suddenly, a new sensation--Pain! He drew back his hand as a touched anemone draws in its tentacles, scarce softer than those pink fingers; but he did not know quite where the pain was--much less where it came from, or what it meant.

"More!" said the hungry brain. "More!" and the little hand went out again.

It was sharply spatted. "No, No!" said a strange voice--he had never heard that kind of tone before. "No! No! Naughty! Don't touch!" He lifted his face unbelievingly. Yes--it was Food and Warmth and Comfort who was doing this to him.

The small moist mouth quivered grievingly--a cry rose in him.

"Here!" said the Presence, and gave him a rattle.

He had had that before. He knew all that it could do. He dropped it.

Over and over again, day after day, the little servant of the brain ran forth to minister, and met sharp pain; while the dim new concept "'Naughty'--something you want to do and mustn't"--was registered within.

The child grew and his brain grew faster. He learned new words, an behind the words, in the fresh untouched s.p.a.ces, the swift brain placed ideas--according to its lights. He had learned that the Presence varied. It was not always Sweetness and Rest and Joy--sometimes it was Discomfort--Hindrance--even Pain. He had learned to look at it with doubt--when about to do something--to see which way it would react upon him.

"Isn't that baby cute?" said the Presence. "He knows just as well!"

But his brain grew stronger, and his hand grew stronger, and about him was a world of objects, rousing all manner of sensations which he fain would learn.

"I have to watch that child every minute to keep him out of mischief!"

said the Presence.

She caught him sharply by the arm and drew him back.

"Don't touch that again! If you do I'll whip you!"