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Akin to Nature
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (July 27, 1912) : 25
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It is interesting to hear that in human beings alone it is customary for the female offspring to remain with the parents after maturity, making no effort to start off on her own account. We are the only species that has circumvented Nature in this matter. In all the rest, as soon as the female offspring is fit to do so, she sets forth to forage for herself and to pass on the life she has received. The animals do these things so simply. They have no problem of the generations, nor is half their population attempting to redefine their appellation. The cry of “back to Nature” is a restful obliteration of all our worries, but it is seldom meant, or, if meant, it is meant vaguely. It is very wearing to be civilized, and the more civilized we become the more worn we are. That is one reason why so many deny the existence of the problem of the women. It is so upsetting to admit it. If the women constitute a problem, then so many contingent problems surround the central one. If they are a simple proposition, and what the world requires of them is clear and best for the world, then life is again that delicious, lulling drone we all like.
The thing that makes the animal world enviable is that it has no ideals. The thing that makes the animal world enviable is that it has no ideals. We have a way of packing things in ideal values which impedes us greatly. When the thing packed is in a condition where change is imperative we are in a painful predicament, as change threatens a displacement of the ideals. Half the people see only the ideals, and this half deny that the thing around which the ideals are grouped is anything but as ideal as the ideals themselves. They also cry out in consternation and hot dismay at the sacrilege of a change that involves so much that is beautiful. They have so much right on their side that the complexities of the situation increase as one gazes on them. If they had a little less right on their side they would be much easier, more open people to talk to. The possession of it has gone to their heads and finished them.
The other half are so incensed by the blindness of the first half that their irritation gives them the angry oblivion necessary to smash the ideals. They present a rather unlovely picture as they shatter real good to fragments, and they have the hardness of all reformers, which makes them as unpopular as reformers always are. In calmer moments they would have been unable to attain such hardness. Nothing but the smugness of their opponents could have egged them on to that precise point where they were able to deny good to the ideals, or the thing the ideals held in a vise. Nothing but the smugness of their opponents could have egged them on to that precise point where they were able to deny good to the ideals, or the thing the ideals held in a vise. But Providence, knowing how difficult it is to get people to be muscular iconoclasts, sent into print and conversation the people who talk about “the hand that rocks the cradle” and “woman’s influence,” and these people possessed that magic amount of boresome, hypocritical blindness which rouses the most gentle, lenient, and philosophical of minds, and gives it strength to deny that cradles ever should be rocked (as a matter of fact it is a most unscientific thing to do, completely discarded by the young, cruel generation) or that woman’s influence can ever be anything but immoral. If it is the influence of a dull woman it is stultifying, if of a clever woman it is indecently insidious, and no unprotected man should ever be exposed to it.
The precise degree of ire is reached where one smashes right and left, a little frightened and half hoping that one is hitting nothing more important than one’s antagonists. One’s flaming belief in their wrongheadedness keeps one at the smashing almost longer than one had intended, so that when a halt is finally called it is necessary to take account of the damage done, and one’s precise position in the wreckage. The result is an overwhelming surprise. The ideals which are lying around in fragments have by some happy trick become better, different, more difficult and dazzling ideals than they ever were before, and they still group themselves, though less heavily and more comfortably, about the identical thing which before the upheaval they came near to crushing. One’s relief makes one smile so hugely as even to include one’s antagonists. One’s delight is a little humbled by the newest ideal being so closely allied to the ways of those sane if simple beings, the other species. Yet if one’s goes off on a tangent the simple, straight road always looks a little foolishly obvious when one returns to it. Civilization has had her tangent: she must not mind feeling foolish when she sees how obvious Nature always is.
We are all accustomed to preparing a judgment during the first act of a play or the first half of a novel, so that the end may find us with a pat remark ready to stick on the final word, like the bang of a carriage-door as it drives off. It may be away, but it was we who caused the final noise. So rooted is this tendency to sum a thing up and finish it that Bernard Shaw was driven to building his entire play of “Fanny’s First Play” in order to escape those glib summations. We adore reducing a big accomplishment to dimensions that will fit into our opinions. And yet when we find it out of the question to do this the sensation is so novel that we veer about and like it hugely. To see something like the Irish Players in play by J. M. Synge (1905)
wikipedia“The Well of the Saints” is to have the most refreshing sense of being slightly intoxicated. You are only genteelly intoxicated and it is in the best society, but it is sufficient to prevent your knowing precisely where you are. You do not know what you think of the play or the players, you have not a single reaction, and the blankness of your mind is heady, very heady. You think you will know presently, but that is what a slightly intoxicated old gentleman thinks. He smiles and feels that he will remember presently where he lives. In the end you find that what you feel is enthusiastic admiration, but for quite a long time you are as free of opinions as a savage of clothes, and you like the nudity of your condition immensely.
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