13. Women and the Emotions
The fact that women have a greater capacity than men for
controlling and concealing their
emotions is not an indication
that they are more civilized, but a proof that they are less civilized.
This capacity, so rare today, and withal so valuable and worthy of
respect, is a characteristic of savages, not of civilized men, and its
loss is one of the penalties that the race has paid for the tawdry boon
of civilization. Your true savage, reserved, dignified, and courteous,
knows how to mask his feelings, even in the face of the most
desperate assault upon them; your civilized man is forever yielding
to them. Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and
hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a
mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep
the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by
an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are
no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging
dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the
effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a
mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine
fury. Here the effect of civilization has been to
reduce the
noblest of the arts, once the repository of an exalted etiquette and
the chosen avocation of the very best men of the race, to the level of
a riot of peasants. All the wars of Christendom are now disgusting
and degrading; the conduct of them has passed out of the hands of
nobles and knights and into the, hands of mob-orators,
money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers. To recreate one's self with
war in the grand manner, as Prince Eugene, Marlborough and the
Old Dessauer knew it, one must now go among barbarian peoples.
Women are nearly always against war in modern times, for the
reasons brought forward to justify it are usually either transparently
dishonest or childishly sentimental, and hence provoke their scorn.
But once the business is begun, they commonly favour its conduct
outrance, and are thus in accord with the theory of the great
captains of more spacious days. In Germany, during the late war,
the protests against the Schrecklichkeit practised by the imperial
army and navy did not come from women, but from sentimental
men; in England and the United States there is no record that any
woman ever raised her voice against the blockade
which destroyed hundreds of thousands of German children. I was on
both sides of the bloody chasm during the war, and I cannot recall
meeting a single woman who subscribed to the puerile doctrine that,
in so vast a combat between nations, there could still be categories
of non-combatants, with aright of asylum on armed ships and in
garrisoned towns. This imbecility was maintained only by men,
large numbers of whom simultaneously took part in wholesale
massacres of such non-combatants. The women were superior to
such hypocrisy. They recognized the nature of modern war
instantly and accurately, and advocated no disingenuous efforts to
conceal it.
