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“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (March 8, 1913) : 29
hathitrust : link
 

      If the reforms and creeds, ideals and activities, are making toward any agreed goal, it is toward a happier, serener, simpler, and at the same time more interesting life for each individual. With this as the surface destination, it becomes a droll contradiction that we look with disfavor on the few people who have already arrived there. We each of us know some family that answers all the requirements of the model family of the future. It lives outside the city, yet near enough to come in for the Ring. Its home is a place of such proportions that it lends them dignity, yet does not force opulence upon them, and has an air of elevated democracy, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say of simple aristocracy. The husband and wife work at the same thing, their activities are many, but principally carried on inside the family circle. Their children are marvels of healthy prattling intellectuality. The house contains objects of genuine beauty understood by their possessors. The keenness, originality, and talents of each member are above the average. They are precisely the product which idealists and reformers, each in their own way, hope to evolve by the thousand.
      It would seem obvious that they should be studied with fervor. They are prophecies of the future, and if we believe them to be authentic we should give them our closest attention and imitation. What we actually do is amazingly different.They are prophecies of the future, and if we believe them to be authentic we should give them our closest attention and imitation. What we actually do is amazingly different. The majority regard them as queer, spontaneity and naturalness coupled with intelligence being for some reason embarrassing to the many. There are others who adore such a family, if they be so fortunate as to know one. They gloat over each detail of their lives. They are besieged with questions from friends who delight in the family at second hand. Their delicious simplicities are balm to worn nerves. The individuals themselves are loved, their ways are affectionately chuckled over, the oasis they make in modern life is a tonic and refreshment. Yet there is a reservation in the approval bestowed upon them. Instead of being visited as a group that is living as it should, and alone out of all the world needs no change brought about in its midst, they are seen as a delightful but wholly unreal fairyland having no serious connection with the rest of civilization.
      We go to them as we would to “Peter Pan,” sure in advance of the beneficial results of so innocent and healthy a pastime. When we come away we feel it to be a return to hard ground, a descent, in fact, from Peter Pan’s tree-tops. It is just possible that the weight of our own morality brought us to earth, for, though we like to see Peter Pan living in the tree-tops, we do not for a moment believe that the tree-tops are a feasible environment for the majority. We go further, and with a perverse, tiresomely rigorous instinct feel that a residence in the tree-tops cuts one off from the great masses of people who are living on the ground, that to be cut off even by being markedly above is to be somehow in the wrong. We feel that the residents of tree-tops tend a little to become scornful of those below them, when not entirely oblivious of their existence. The pleasant but necessarily isolated existence of our delightful family is, we feel, led much nearer the clouds than it is to solid earth. We, of the earth, shake our solemn heads at this. The heights have their advantages, we grudgingly admit. They give a broad view of distances, but, we add hastily, the distances are very distant, and the resultant attitude is that the members of the family and a few harmonious friends alone seem of normal size, while every one else is reduced to the scuttling specks seen in a bird’s-eye view. When we have gone as far as this in the ungracious business of dissecting, we find that our perfect family has a little the effect of being a selfish family, and this because we cannot help feeling that its content is premature.
      Why we should insist upon riding this moral high-horse it is impossible to tell. It might be traced to Puritan disapproval of happiness, and, if it were, it would be dismissed with the abruptness owing such crabbed emotion. It may be a Greek doubt of the wisdom of flaunting contentment so openly in the eye of the jealous Fates. It may be a grave belief that the few have no right to grasp happiness even though it rests on their palm when the many suffer so sorely. Or it may be just a funny human panic at seeing some one calmly eating the ices when you have many a hard task to do before you can expect the joy of sitting down to soup.
      They ought to be struggling and theorizing and panting and disillusioned as we are.Whatever the reason, we cannot sweep away our feeling that though these groups remain lovable and diverting above everything, they are somehow cheating. They ought to be struggling and theorizing and panting and disillusioned as we are. If we have to go through these unpleasant phases, it was not friendly of them to have failed to go through them with us. Hurrying ahead and calmly sitting down and taking their ease under the tree of Active-Serenity-And-Keen-Contentment, while we flounder along within view, appears, in the light of our own self-pity, a heartless thing to have done.
 

6 August 2026