Part 11 (1/2)

Sall.u.s.t writes thus of a notorious Roman matron:

”Semp.r.o.nia had committed many crimes of a boldness _worthy of a man_.

Blest alike in family and beauty, in husband and children, she was well-read in Greek and Roman literature; could sing, play and dance more gracefully than any honest woman need; had many of the other accomplishments of a riotous life. She cared for nothing less than for decency and modesty.”

Fifty years later, Seneca takes up the story of a rapid decadence: ”The ladies do not reckon the years by the number of the Consuls, but by the number of their husbands.”

Much the same licence, extravagance and viciousness of the s.e.x characterised the greater number of those other old-world wreckages.

The higher Woman-attributes ceased to evolve; ceased to be exercised; ceased to inspire. Women cultivated solely, or pre-eminently, the male-side of their natures; muscle, intellect, ambition, concrete activities, indulgence of s.e.x-instincts. By power of which masculine and alien proclivities, they increasingly dominated the men, in whom the virile traits had proportionally declined. Thus, more and more, the purifying, uplifting and inspiring potence of true Womanhood, together with the softening refinements of The Home, became ever further withdrawn from the national life. Thus corruption undermined; and chaos finally engulfed.

III

Things were different in Ancient Greece.

It has been said that Greece fell because she did not give her women liberty. For a time comes, in the development of every nation, when its women must be freed. Or decadence sets in inevitably. And some of those old civilisations declined, undoubtedly, from lack of progress in this respect.

It would seem that the first sips of liberty require to be administered to the s.e.x with caution, however; the effects observed carefully, the doses increased warily. Otherwise, impulsive and impressionable as they are, women lose their heads; become intoxicated, and get out of hand.

And once women get out of hand, it is next to impossible to bring them again under control (as was seen in the outbreaks of Feminist militancy). Civilisation forbids that men shall deal with them as with masculine rebels. And fenced thus behind the privileges of their own s.e.x, when armed with the prerogatives of the other, they may prove dangerously difficult customers.

In ancient Greece, the wives and mothers and the other reputable women had but little or no freedom. They lived, for the most part, in seclusion; dull and unintelligent and uneventful lives. There was no pure, wholesome, and inspiring social life. The only women who were free were the _hetairai_, those famous ladies who shed a lurid brilliance over the corruption and decline of this great State--a decline wherewith they had, most certainly, much to do. A faction apart from the wives and mothers--although many among them were courtesans, they stood apart too from the courtesan cla.s.s. Women who had found in the unfreed state of the wife and mother of their epoch, inadequate scope for their impulses and talents, they broke away from domestic conditions, to form a coterie of free lances--a cultured, brilliant and alluring band of renegades, sought and esteemed for their beauty and intelligence by all men; aristocrat, philosopher, and pleasure-seeker.

More likely than that Greece fell because she did not emanc.i.p.ate her women, it is that she fell because the women who emanc.i.p.ated themselves abandoned the roles of wife, of mother, and other reputable functions.

For these Grecian _hetairai_ comprised, in the main, the flower of their generation. One sees them, indeed, as brilliant Racial poison-blossoms, greedily appropriating and exploiting to their own purposes the nation's beauty and the nation's talent, its aspirations, potence, pa.s.sion--without transmitting any of these racial attainments to a later generation. In place of endowing their kind with such n.o.bler light and faculty, inspiration and sweetness, as supply a people's evolutionary impulse, they abandoned the home and the sacred and spiritualising functions of true wifehood, and of the motherhood of such higher living types as are indispensable to lead a nation's progress.

A kindred movement--modified, for the present, by the more enlightened traditions of our Century--is foreshadowing itself across the higher civilisations of our day. More and more, our better types of women (the misinterpretations of the Feminist Movement having imparted a distorted bias and direction to their powers) are similarly abandoning the Home, or are withdrawing their best interests and talents from it; are evading wholly, or are gravely restricting their maternal obligations to the Race; regarding children as bye-products, merely, of life--vastly less important than some hobby or career. In place of realising the new generation as the Vanguard of Life and Evolution; that which beyond every other human achievement counts in the Universe.

Worse than this even, more and more, everywhere, women are failing in the maternal power of transmitting to offspring the health, the beauty, the abilities and aspirations which are the model and ideals of our age.

IV

A menace to the Race more alarming than that of the hard and mannish woman (who, because of her lack of womanly attractiveness, is debarred, in considerable degree, from marriage) is another and less ungraciously obvious deviation from The Normal--an order of the s.e.x, modern and artificial, and rapidly increasing in number, over-civilised and highly-feminised both of physique and of temperament, which may be described as an Ultra-Feminine, or, in contradistinction to the Feminist, as a Feminist order.

Their womanhood but lightly rooted in neurotic systems, the women of this sect are unstable and erratic, seeking distraction for their restless, ill-balanced forces, in cards, crazes, drugs; fads and freaks.

Unfitted for wifehood and motherhood--some by faulty heredity, but a far greater number by educational strain and consequent warp--some of these ultra-feminised and frequently interesting creatures absorb themselves feverishly in public movements; religious, social or political. Some are persons of irreproachable morale and ideals; devoted, gifted, wholly admirable. And being wives not seldom of men as talented, it is deplorable that warp of culture, unfitting them for motherhood, should have left such to waste their powers and aspirations in beating the thin air merely of Utopian propaganda. When, otherwise, they might have led the true and only way of Progress by endowing the Race with living presentments and evolving treasuries of the parental ideals and endowments.

The greater her charm, the n.o.bler her character and talent, the more the pity is when woman is defective in the power to transmit her high qualities, or has power to transmit these in inferior degree only; thus sealing up for ever, or gravely impoveris.h.i.+ng a vital spring of living faculty and individualism--a unique line of Human Ascent which no other stock can supply, and one which may have been leading up to the production of genius such as the world has not yet known.

Another--and quite different--sub-order of this neurotic (and partially-sterilised) type, in losing its higher potential of motherhood has lost the racial instinct wherein personal virtue is rooted. The lives of these are free and irregular. Not measures, but men, are their vogue; to serve as admirers of their charm and talents, as spectators of their temperamental extravagances. Incapable of the emotions of love, they seek, are discontented, and seek further when they do not find in its excitements, the joys and contentment that reside alone in deep and abiding emotions. The poise and repose, the charm, the refreshment and the inspiration of true Womanhood are lacking in them. They demand increasing novelty and change of venue for their ill-ballasted powers and capricious sensibilities. And this precisely in proportion as they are deficient in those womanly emotions and illusions which endue the least and simplest things with glamour and with beauty.

This type, which can scarcely be said to _live_, but merely to frolic through life, is pre-eminently dangerous to progress. Because, while possessing the psychology, the appeal and influence of women, some of these have cast off, utterly, the traditions, the n.o.bler aspirations and the functions of the best womanhood.

V

It is universally admitted that a bad woman is far more wicked than a bad man is. She is more callous, ruthless, wanton and debased. The irresponsibility regarding concrete affairs (innate in a s.e.x whereof The Concrete is only secondarily the province) makes her a dangerous and a demoralising factor when her acquired male brain and activities (for the clever, bad woman is always of masculine bent) over-ride her own natural apt.i.tudes. Because the powers she has artificially acquired--in subst.i.tution for her native ones--do not alter her inherent const.i.tution of a creature builded upon instincts; instincts which her native higher qualities are alone adequate to guide and inspire. One may acquire some of the characteristics of an opposite s.e.x, _but never the morale_; which is inborn and inherent to the natural s.e.x-characteristics.