ALL SORTS OF MEN

At safe distance I have spent much time observing men and the world they are making through the field glasses of my mind. I still prefer it to any world women can make. This is not an indication of turpitude, but due, no doubt, to my gender and the association of ideas. We know that men are strong by the deeds they have performed, the cities they have built and the cities they have taken; by the courage they have shown in war and in the face of wildernesses to be conquered, and by every hardship which women endure but cannot overcome. So I instinctively look up to men.

I am not defending myself, although women have made great strides recently in discovering how weak and unworthy men have always been of the confidence we reposed in them. I am not reposing much confidence in them, but I am simply admitting that the tilt of my gaze toward them is instinctive and prayerful, not rational, any more than personal faith in God would be regarded as reasonable by a materialist. But observe the advantage I have of the rationalist, who is reduced to the dirt dauber’s creed of worshiping his own intellect, while I enjoy the more becoming distinction of spreading wider wings upward.

My ideas about men spring from the same shrewd source of financing my future by faith--that evidence of things hoped for but not seen. I am determined to remain the weaker vessel and to hold them to the higher altitude of superior beings. It is more profitable and the surest way of forcing them to make good. They are only too willing to part with their responsibilities to these valiant modern women who are so anxious to prove their own ability to assume these burdens and bear them.

I have no doubt there is a smile up the sleeve of every man in this country as he watches the return of his women to servitude, not the old domestic bondage, but every other kind. Millions of them bread winners, filling positions at half the price these positions paid when men filled them. No wonder men can afford an eight-hour working day. Enough women are working longer hours to more than make up the difference in the common-to-all income. No wonder there are so many strikes. They can afford the luxury and disturbance on the sweat of the women.

In the same way they are serving men in politics, because they can reach a class of constituents the male candidate cannot reach, and because they can practice arts he never had to get him elected. I am wondering what will happen when these women discover that they cannot make this a good little world to live in by amendments, and that all their labor and devotions have been spent for the promotion and gratification of men, as usual. My prediction is that there will be such a shrieking strike as the whole National Guard cannot put down, because every striker will rush home, and fling herself upon the bed to do her shrieking.

I hope I shall live to see that holy day. It will mark the defeat of men and their return to duty in a strangely diminished frame of mind. But I shall never see it. The thing will come to pass so gradually, one woman at a time coming to her senses, and then taking refuge in nervous prostration or some other condition obviously and naturally beyond the power of men to reach or control her.

The only man I had ever known was, as it happened, different from other men. He desired above all things to be meekly and truly blameless before the Lord. God was his public opinion. I was amazed, you may say, to the point of fainting spiritually to discover that men in general have no such instinct for piety. In his heart I do believe the veriest saint among them would shrink from a too notorious reputation for being merely good and entirely virtuous, although the least and meanest one of them wishes to appear great, if it is only to one woman, no matter how short he is in personal virtues.

I believe they are all more spiritually inclined than we are; but heavens, what unscrupulous spirituality! It is a sort of noble side line they carry. They crave as we never do the sensations of power, exaltation. This, I believe, is the psychological explanation of why many men take to intoxicants before they feel the need of artificial stimulants which the hard pressure of this swiftly moving age now brings. They want to feel like gods, they wish to enjoy the sensations of being hard-boiled, when by nature they are polite, timid little fellows. They wish to feel for a moment the power in their heel to kick the world around, though as a rule they remain sufficiently sober not to lift a foot in the actual experiment.

The fool wants to be witty. The Smart Aleck wishes to light all his candles at once and watch himself shine. The man with a bad conscience longs for the false courage to swank about like a supervillain and rejoice in his iniquities. And there are those who drink to drown their sorrows, although my observation is that they will do it before they have any griefs or legitimate depressions from weariness or hardship to overcome. They are really suffering from that masculine embarrassment in sobriety of knowing how limited they are in power and other godlikenesses which all men perpetually crave. If even all the women in the world would concede these qualities, humor them with sufficient admiration and reverence, we should have no need for the Eighteenth Amendment, seeing that these several classes of men would be already sublimely intoxicated.

They have not made good as gods in spite of these divine retchings, but they have built a magnificent world. I will warrant there is nothing comparable to their achievements on any of the other planets of our solar system. But you will not find the mark of one feminine finger upon the architecture of this one and very few traces of the feminine imagination in these great accomplishments. We have our good points, but they are not architecturally or literally constructive. We are, I should say, at best the patient conservators of what men make, win, and produce. This is the reason why dissipation is far less excusable in women than men. They have their vanities and virtues, but no such boundless egotism to keep up and satisfy. When we are forever physically incapable of being the builders and achievers that men are, I do think it is regrettable that we should imitate that vice in them which is merely the mortal weakness of a sublime quality.

We have our feminine deceits, ten thousand, but obvious and appealing. Men have another kind, which also spring from their passion for augmenting themselves, not endearing themselves. The vainest woman who ever lived does not crave the admiration of men as men crave that of women. They want it whether they want her or her love or even her property, whether she is young, old or blind. This is the reason why they cannot be truthful or quite honest in their relation to us. It is not the desire to deceive, but to shine, to rule and overcome us with their minds and their wills.

I do not think any exercise of our recent rights as citizens will ever overcome this handicap. The fact is it is fatal to do so. The moment a man perceives himself diminished to his true proportions in a woman’s eyes, she becomes offensive and repugnant to him, and he is right about that. She was originally designed by her Maker to be the complimentary mirror in which Adam might gaze to spoof himself to greater endeavors.

When I found out all these things about men it had a queer effect upon me. I distinctly recall facing about, thinking Lundy up out of his dust and reviewing him in the light of this new information. Had I ever really understood my husband? I never shall know. That perfect illusion which love is still clothed him, and I could make nothing of all my remembered evidence beyond the kindness and patience and prayers of our life together. I remember still with pleasure how grand and superior he used to look when he flared into flames of fine eloquence that put my light out. But just let any man try that now! I can see the difference every time between the mere man of him and his eloquence. I am not moved. I simply regard him with a listening eye while I divide the light of his words from his own darkness, whether real or potential. If I should be won by his eloquence or his arguments, he has the advantage. Presently I shall be taking his advice or adopting his opinions against my own woman’s judgment, which is bad business, if you know what I mean.

As near as I can tell the truth from memory, it was this instinct of inferiority which led me to earn my life and my living in strict retirement after my husband’s death. I perceived that the training I had had with him in the scriptural simplicities of living was no adequate preparation for competing with men in any way. I might hold a candle to them, but I’d never hold my own with them. And trying to get a working knowledge of them at the age I was then would have been like trying to learn a foreign language after you are forty when you were born with a lisping, stammering tongue.

There was another consideration that influenced me. As a wife I had practiced the habits of obedience. My husband laid the scenes of our life and controlled our destiny. I simply helped him do that. I had been confirmed in the womanly attribute of being guided by his stronger will. What I discovered at the end of these three years’ thoughtfulness is that every man’s will is stronger than any woman’s. She may outwit him, but she cannot outwill him. It was not my idea to dizzy around as a widow, being guided by this man or that one in my affairs. The best thing I could do was to break the entail of that beautiful attribute of obedience I had as a wife, tear it up like a scrap of paper, and retreat to a safe distance. I meant to lay a few scenes of my own devising and to become the captain of my own fate, let the Lord do as he saw fit about my soul.

I was near to being tired of my soul by this time from worrying with it and straining spiritually for so many years to the exclusion of all earthly profits. Later, I did resume intimate relations with it, because once you have adopted the ideals of a spiritual life you are meanly impoverished without them. You are degraded in your own consciousness as bitter, worm-eaten dust without this sublime reservation held by faith, that there is eternal life no matter what griefs you have had or what happiness you have missed or what an ordinary person you have been all your life.

I feel these limitations keenly, and have always been extremely anxious to find out for sure that I really am extraordinary and immortal and worthy of my own admiration at the very last. I wish to die proud.

This is something that can only happen to us in the next world, where I hope to forget my mortal limitations and some of the ridiculous as well as tragic mistakes I have made here that caricature me now to myself. For the same reason I am not inclined to interpret too literally and painfully those Scriptures which intimate that our memories will be resuscitated with us. I do hope this is not obligatory. For I should need no memory to recognize Lundy or Faith. I should know them as one comes again in full possession of his mind and heart after a long sleep. My idea of a happy resurrection would be to rise from my dust cleansed from every embarrassing and diminishing recollection, because this is the only way to be as prideful as one expects to be in Heaven.

Grief, however poignant, is like a wound, if you are not by nature infirm, but a normal person with a strong mental constitution, you recover from it as you would from any other wound or sickness. So I recovered from the death of my husband. The health of my spirit returned, and with it the idea of happiness began to freshen in my mind.

Faith was married by this time. I was alone and free to live that life of mine which I had wished for as saints long for immortality. My feeling has always been that happiness lies somewhere in Genesis, in those first scenes of man. For this reason I set out for the hills behind the world in Georgia, where the days come and go much as they did in the beginning, where human speech is such a rare sound that the dogs bark when they hear it in this valley, and where the song of birds is the real language one hears. It is a place where there is no wealth, no learning, and much natural wisdom of the woods, the hills and streams. There are a few people, but I know them only as one knows a little prose, a little poetry and a few Scriptures, not personally nor intimately.

I have written at some length in ‘My Book and Heart’ of this old cabin and the surroundings, but I am setting down now the real reason for coming here. It was to escape the mind and will of the world, to practice my own will and mind in living and so find happiness--that animation of the mortal spirit which is far more refreshing than peace.

It was my way of laying claim to my own life. I am now in a position to say that I very much doubt whether there is such a thing as a human life which belongs exclusively to one person. It is something we borrow from other men, from books, from a thousand sources, and something we spend or lend likewise; but life does not belong to us as it does to other living creatures, nor even to the grass. We are the most dependent of all God’s creatures, not only upon one another, but upon the beasts of the fields and upon everything that lives. And nothing we win, even if it is everything, can possibly satisfy us. I suppose this is one of those terrific provisions of Providence to keep us doing and moving toward some far-off divine event.

What follows is the record of my adventures in this business. Launcelot looking for the Holy Grail never traveled farther or endured greater hardships than I have in this narrow valley looking for happiness. I have worn all my virtues to a frazzle and I am about to grow old in sorrowful defeats without attaining even the bright rim of the cup of happiness. And now, when maybe it is too late, I have discovered the mistake I made. This is scarcely reason enough to go on with these annals, because when at the end I prove it and set it down in plain words, not one who reads this tale can avoid making it. We are the perpetual victims of an illusion. We may as well take what comes, whether it is happiness or not, and avoid the struggle.