Florida Pier : writings and about / jmcvey.net
Marriage and Steel Teeth, etc.
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (May 21, 1910) : 27
hathitrust : link
A spirited woman has said that, much as she believes reforms to be necessary, she considers all those now under way to be hopelessly beside the mark. She is interested in two only, and until these are taken up she will have nothing to do with any others. What she feels to be really vital is that every one shall be born married and with a full set of steel teeth. With these two matters arranged for us before we enter the world, very little trouble could occur afterward. All human ills, she avers, arise from teeth and marriage, and between the getting of teeth and spouses and the disposing of them one really has very little time for anything else. They are both too important to be left so entirely in our hands, and should be looked after as breathing is and the circulation of the blood and sleeping. A pretty mess we would all be in if we were obliged to superintend these matters ourselves! How to start such a reform is a matter much more complicated than the simple recognition of its need. But that is only the case with all reform. The difficulty of improving a thing that is in desperate need of being changed has kept the world busy rectifying its own mistakes ever since Adam first demanded Eve and then requested to have her taken back. Perhaps the best way will be to make every one see the merits of such a scheme, and it will then happen of its own accord merely because it is so deeply desired. The perfections of such an arrangement are so obvious that one is a little put to it to dilate upon them. The thought bobs up at once that if one was born married one's spouse would be in no way a thing one was to blame for, and, no matter what his or her drawbacks, that person would be treated with a polite blindness on the part of every one, much with the delicate oblivion shown a birthmark.
For all responsibility to be taken from our shoulders would be the right and proper state of things. If any human has to choose, the one most concerned must, of course, make the choice; but that it should ever have been given over into our hands in the first place is what seems so preposterous. If in the beginning we had stopped to think, we never would have consented to such an arrangement. It is a bad habit long established that gives trouble by passing for the natural and intended when it is only the absurd taken root. A number or mark on the heel of every baby, to be published in the paper at the moment of its birth, the parents correspondingly marked baby please to communicate, and the children brought up on the same lines and finally married without a moment’s hesitation on the part of every one, seems perhaps the most direct plan. No self-questionings, no experiments — just a glance at one’s heel to make sure and no more thought on the matter.
For how are we to know whom we want to marry? We cannot pick out a hat or a house with any real certainty that it is the one we want. We are still wondering if we did not prefer the other when the hat is worn out and the house has been our home for years. What talent have humans ever shown for knowing what was good for them that they should recklessly be entrusted with such a task? We do not know anything about ourselves, and we have hopelessly garbled ideas of other people. Not to realize this and to act makes spectators stop breathing.We do not know anything about ourselves, and we have hopelessly garbled ideas of other people. Not to realize this and to act makes spectators stop breathing. Το realize it and to be spectator of one’s own premeditated action stops action. A person of balanced mind looks into the situation and says, “This is a matter for which I am entirely unfitted, and I will just keep out of it.” To give it due attention one would end one’s life inspecting the first million of the world’s population; for who is justified in making a choice until he has seen every one? And to do the thing carelessly, skimmingly — ah, it is far better to leave it alone!
As for the virtue of steel teeth — but every one knows how the matter of teeth is bungled from beginning to end. The need of a reform in that direction goes without saying.
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Once in a while there is a conscientious novelist — the breed is very scarce, but specimens are occasionally found and his life is so vexatious a one that it partly explains why conscience has never become prevalent. He tries to verify all his plans and every detail of his embryo plot, and if he comes through the ordeal with sufficient spirit left with which to write a novel he is so confirmed in his tale-telling that nothing could have discouraged him, not even a conscience. A dozen encounters with a dozen technical minds, each believing that, unless his specialty is done full justice to, the book is of no importance, reduce a plot to such a pitiable state that rest and quiet are imperative for it. A novelist asks an oculist — it is so young and attractive and honest of him to take the trouble that one’s heart goes out to his good intentions — whether a blow on the head with a chair could cause almost instant blindness. The oculist becomes deeply interested and says: “That would depend upon what the chair was made of . How many pounds have you planned to have the chair weigh?” Pounds! Weigh! The novelist’s brain reels. He had not gone into what the chair might weigh. It was just a chair, an ordinary chair. He had hardly intended to honor it with a descriptive adjective. The oculist at once has doubts of the novel’s value, but, hoping to convert this vague writing person, he goes on at great length to tell that a certain weight of chair, if crashed down on an exact spot of the skull (he gives technical terms for the spot and all surrounding ones, writing them down and begging that they be used, as such things are apt to be glossed over in novels), might produce a certain type of blindness. He ends by producing pamphlets on recorded cases of this kind, and limply the novelist gets out of his office, uncertain that he is fitted to write of so deep a subject, wondering if it would not be as dramatic to have his hero dodge the chair and retain his sight.
The frequently expressed liking of artists for criticisms from janitors and laundresses becomes clear. A hearty lack of technical knowledge is very soothing to the artistic mind. To have a ship at sea greeted with, “My! that is a gale!” is much pleasanter than to have a sailor explain how, by painting in a little different set of the sails, the ship could be made to tack right out of the way of that splendid blue cloud, and so on, out of the picture. With a heroine lost in a South-American jungle and a remarkable description of mists rising from the ground at night, it is most disconcerting to have a pricking of the conscience send one off to an explorer, who, on being asked if mists would rise from the ground, answers, cautiously, “ Well, that depends at what altitude you have laid your story.” Altitude! A beautiful heroine is inextricably entangled in an impenetrable forest, and this man is bloodlessly talking of altitudes! It is so leaden, so heartless an attitude to take, that the novelist is repelled to the point of never again attempting to verify another point of his intended tale. He will, if it adorns his story, have the sun and moon shining brightly a yard apart with a garland of stars joining them, realizing that because no one living can remember such a thing having happened, it does not follow that it never has happened or never will happen. After a period of conscientiousness, the novelist decides that, under given circumstances, everything can happen. What is not usual is a strange coincidence and what is not believed cannot always be disproved. Even disproved things still have a place in fiction, and after fiction there remains romance, the home of all the engaging things that should be possible and are, because no technicians are allowed within its sacred precincts.
28 August 2022