INTRODUCTION
As a professional critic of life and letters, my principal business
in the world is that of manufacturing platitudes for tomorrow, which is
to say, ideas so novel that they will be instantly rejected as insane
and outrageous by all right thinking men, and so apposite and sound that
they will eventually conquer that instinctive opposition, and force
themselves into the traditional wisdom of the race. I hope I need not
confess that a large part of my stock in trade consists of platitudes
rescued from the cobwebbed shelves of yesterday, with new labels stuck
rakishly upon them. This borrowing and refurbishing of shop-worn goods,
as a matter of fact, is the invariable habit of traders in ideas, at all
times and everywhere. It is not, however, that all the conceivable
human notions have been thought out; it is simply, to be quite honest,
that the sort of men who volunteer to think out new ones seldom, if
ever, have wind enough for a full day's work. The most they
can ever accomplish in the way of genuine originality is
an occasional brilliant spurt, and half a dozen such spurts,
particularly if they come close together and show a certain
co-ordination, are enough to make a practitioner celebrated, and even
immortal. Nature, indeed, conspires against all such genuine
originality, and I have no doubt that God is against it on His heavenly
throne, as His vicars and partisans unquestionably are on this earth.
The dead hand pushes all of us into intellectual cages; there is in all
of us a strange tendency to yield and have done. Thus the impertinent
colleague of Aristotle is doubly beset, first by a public opinion that
regards his enterprise as subversive and in bad taste, and secondly by
an inner weakness that limits his capacity for it, and especially his
capacity to throw off the prejudices and superstitions of his race,
culture anytime. The cell, said Haeckel, does not act, it reacts--and
what is the instrument of reflection and speculation save a congeries of
cells? At the moment of the contemporary metaphysician's loftiest
flight, when he is most gratefully warmed by the feeling that he is far
above all the ordinary airlanes and has absolutely novel concept by the
tail, he is suddenly pulled up by the discovery that what is
entertaining him is simply the ghost of some ancient idea that his
school-master forced into him in 1887, or the mouldering corpse of a
doctrine that was made official in his country during the late war, or a
sort of fermentation-product, to mix the figure, of a banal heresy
launched upon him recently by his wife. This is the penalty that the
man of intellectual curiosity and vanity pays for his violation of the
divine edict that what has been revealed from Sinai shall suffice for
him, and for his resistance to the natural process which seeks to reduce
him to the respectable level of a patriot and taxpayer.
I was, of course, privy to this difficulty when I planned the present
work, and entered upon it with no expectation that I should be able
to embellish it with, almost, more than a very small number of
hitherto unutilized notions. Moreover, I faced the additional
handicap of having an audience of extraordinary antipathy to ideas
before me, for I wrote it in war-time, with all foreign markets cut
off, and so my only possible customers were Americans. Of their
unprecedented dislike for novelty in the domain of the
intellect I have often discoursed in the past, and so there is no need to go into
the matter again. All I need do here is to recall the fact that, in the
United States, alone among the great nations of history, there is a
right way to think and a wrong way to think in everything--not only
in theology, or politics, or economics, but in the most trivial matters
of everyday life. Thus, in the average American city the citizen
who, in the face of an organized public clamour(usually managed by
interested parties) for the erection of an equestrian statue of Susan
B. Anthony, the apostle of woman suffrage, in front of the chief
railway station, or the purchase of a dozen leopards for the
municipal zoo, or the dispatch of an invitation to the Structural Iron
Workers' Union to hold its next annual convention in the town
Symphony Hall--the citizen who, for any logical reason, opposes
such a proposal--on the ground, say, that Miss Anthony never
mounted a horse in her life, or that a dozen leopards would be less
useful than a gallows to hang the City Council, or that the Structural
Iron Workers would spit all over the floor of Symphony Hall and
knock down the busts of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms-- this citizen is
commonly denounced as an anarchist and a public enemy. It
is not only erroneous to think thus; it has come to be immoral. And
many other planes, high and low. For an American to question any
of the articles of fundamental faith cherished by the majority is for
him to run grave risks of social disaster. The old English offence of
"imagining the King's death"has been formally revived by the
American courts, and hundreds of men and women are in jail for
committing it, and it has been so enormously extended that, in some
parts of the country at least, it now embraces such remote acts as
believing that the negroes should have equality before the law, and
speaking the language of countries recently at war with the
Republic, and conveying to a private friend a formula for making
synthetic gin. All such toyings with illicit ideas are construed as
attentats against democracy, which, in a sense, perhaps they are.
For democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies
that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even
half-wits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must thus be to
penalize the free play of ideas. In the United States
this is not only its first concern, but also its last concern. No other enterprise,
not even the trade in public offices and contracts, occupies the
rulers of the land so steadily, or makes heavier demands upon their
ingenuity and their patriotic passion.
Familiar with the risks flowing out of it--and having just had to
change the plates of my "Book of Prefaces," a book of purely
literary criticism, wholly without political purpose or significance, in
order to get it through the mails, I determined to make this brochure
upon the woman question extremely pianissimo in tone, and to
avoid burdening it with any ideas of an unfamiliar, and hence illegal
nature. So deciding, I presently added a bravura touch: the
unquenchable vanity of the intellectual snob asserting itself over all
prudence. That is to say, I laid down the rule that no idea should go
into the book that was not already so obvious that it had been
embodied in the proverbial philosophy, or folk-wisdom, of some
civilized nation, including the Chinese. To this rule I remained
faithful throughout. In its original form, as published in 1918, the
book was actuary just such a pastiche of proverbs, many of
them English, and hence familiar even to Congressmen, newspaper
editors and other such illiterates. It was not always easy to hold to
this program; over and over again I was tempted to insert notions
that seemed to have escaped the peasants of Europe and Asia. But
in the end, at some cost to the form of the work, I managed to get
through it without compromise, and so it was put into type. There
is no need to add that my ideational abstinence went unrecognized
and unrewarded. In fact, not a single American reviewer noticed it,
and most of them slated the book violently as a mass of heresies and
contumacies, a deliberate attack upon all the known and revered
truths about the woman question, a headlong assault upon the
national decencies. In the South, where the suspicion of ideas goes
to extraordinary lengths, even for the United States, some of the
newspapers actually denounced the book as German propaganda,
designed to break down American morale, and called upon the
Department of Justice to proceed against me for the crime known to
American law as "criminal anarchy," i.e., "imagining the King's
death." Why the Comstocks did not forbid it the mails as lewd and
lascivious I have never been able to determine. Certainly, they
received many complaints about it. I myself, in fact, caused a
number of these complaints to be lodged, in the hope that the
resultant buffooneries would give me entertainment in those dull
days of war, with all intellectual activities adjourned, and maybe
promote the sale of the book. But the Comstocks were pursuing
larger fish, and so left me to the righteous indignation of
right-thinking reviewers, especially the suffragists. Their concern,
after all, is not with books that are denounced; what they
concentrate their moral passion on is the book that is praised.
The present edition is addressed to a wider audience, in more
civilized countries, and so I have felt free to introduce a number of
propositions, not to be found in popular proverbs, that had to be
omitted from the original edition. But even so, the book by no
means pretends to preach revolutionary doctrines, or even doctrines
of any novelty. All I design by it is to set down in more or less plain
form certain ideas that practically every civilized man and woman
holds in petto, but that have been concealed hitherto by the vast
mass of sentimentalities
swathing the whole woman question. It is a question of capital importance to all human beings, and it
deserves to be discussed honestly and frankly, but there is so much
of social reticence, of religious superstition and of mere emotion
intermingled with it that most of the enormous literature it has
thrown off is hollow and useless. I point for example, to the
literature of the subsidiary question of woman suffrage. It fills
whole libraries, but nine tenths of it is merely rubbish, for it starts
off from assumptions that are obviously untrue and it reaches
conclusions that are at war with both logic and the facts. So with
the question of sex specifically. I have read, literally, hundreds of
volumes upon it, and uncountable numbers of pamphlets, handbills
and inflammatory wall-cards, and yet it leaves the primary problem
unsolved, which is to say, the problem as to what is to be done
about the conflict between the celibacy enforced upon millions by
civilization and the appetites implanted in all by God. In the main, it
counsels yielding to celibacy, which is exactly as sensible as advising
a dog to forget its fleas. Here, as in other fields, I do not presume to
offer a remedy of my own.
In truth, I am very suspicious of all remedies for the major ills of life, and believe that most of them are
incurable. But I at least venture to discuss the matter realistically,
and if what I have to say is not sagacious, it is at all events not
evasive. This, I hope, is something. Maybe some later investigator
will bring a better illumination to the subject.
It is the custom of The Free-Lance Series to print a paragraph or
two about the author in each volume. I was born in Baltimore,
September 12, 1880, and come of a learned family, though my
immediate forebears were business men. The tradition of this
ancient learning has been upon me since my earliest days, and I
narrowly escaped becoming a doctor of philosophy. My father's
death, in 1899, somehow dropped me into journalism, where I had
a successful career, as such careers go. At the age of 25 1 was the
chief editor of a daily newspaper in Baltimore. During the same
year I published my first book of criticism. Thereafter, for ten or
twelve years, I moved steadily from practical journalism, with its
dabbles in politics, economics and soon, toward purely aesthetic
concerns, chiefly literature and music, but of late I have felt a
strong pull in the other direction, and what interests me chiefly
today is what may be called public psychology, ie., the nature of the
ideas that the larger masses of men hold, and the processes whereby
they reach them. If I do any serious writing hereafter, it will be in
that field. In the United States I am commonly held suspect as a
foreigner, and during the war I was variously denounced. Abroad,
especially in England, I am sometimes put to the torture for my
intolerable Americanism. The two views are less far apart than they
seem to be. The fact is that I am superficially so American, in ways
of speech and thought, that the foreigner is deceived, whereas the
native, more familiar with the true signs, sees that under the surface
there is incurable antagonism to most of the ideas that Americans
hold to be sound. Thus If all between two stools--but it is more
comfortable there on the floor than sitting up tightly. I am wholly
devoid of public spirit or moral purpose. This is incomprehensible
to many men, and they seek to remedy the defect by crediting me
with purposes of their own. The only thing I respect is intellectual
honesty, of
which, of course, intellectual courage is a
necessary part. A Socialist who goes to jail for his opinions seems
to me a much finer man than the judge who sends him there, though
I disagree with all the ideas of the Socialist and agree with some of
those of the judge. But though he is fine, the Socialist is
nevertheless foolish, for he suffers for what is untrue. If I knew
what was true, I'd probably be willing to sweat and strive for it, and
maybe even to die for it to the tune of bugle-blasts. But so far I
have not found it.
H. L. Mencken