Brann the Iconoclast Volume 1 Part 10

Perhaps a religious periodical like the ICONOCLAST should avoid a question of such delicacy, should leave it to the medical magazines, which may speak as plainly as they please, even in the presence of the proverbial "young person"--now deep in the study of physiology and even essaying the practice of therapeutics. My quarrel, however, is with these same medical magazines, which delight in discovering mares' nests for no other apparent purpose than to make mankind uncomfortable. They will persist in disregarding the time-honored axiom that "everybody knows more than anybody," a truism which Dr.

Spahr elaborated in his declaration that "the common observation of common people is more trustworthy than the statistical investigations of the most unprejudiced expert"-- even though he be a distinguished M.D. I have before me an essay by George Troup Maxwell, M.D., of Florida, read before the a.s.sociation of doctors and printed, with evident approval, by the Virginia Medical Semi-Monthly. Like most gentlemen of his profession, Dr. Maxwell discusses matters of the utmost delicacy with refres.h.i.+ng freedom, an example which I must follow to some extent if I would expose his fallacies; hence the "young person"--unless indeed she be studying to become a doctor or a writer of "realistic" fiction--is solemnly adjured to dive no deeper here. Dr. Maxwell makes several startling a.s.sertions from which I--albeit a doctor of divinity instead of medicine--must emphatically dissent. I make no apology for so doing, for it is the time-honored prerogative of preachers to speak ex cathedra on all questions, whether religious, scientific or political. The pulpit is to all other professions what philosophy is to the various schools of science--exercises supervisory power, and by a tap here and a prod there, makes them consentient with its own infallible scheme of things, so to speak. It is a very trying occupation, yet some complain that we parsons must have our summer vacation on full pay and nurse our precious health at swell hotels, while common people feed on potatoes--and plant and grow six-cent cotton for the benefit of the contribution plate. But from of old there have been morbose people ever ready to criticize the holy and put c.o.c.kleburs in the back hair of the pure in heart. The salient features of Dr.

Maxwell's essay may be summarized; as follows:

s.e.xually considered, civilized man is more b.e.a.s.t.i.a.l than the brutes. He does not respect the person of his gestant wife, and this disregard of natural law is the most potent failure in the curtailment of natural increase. Certain physiological facts indicate that woman is dest.i.tute of desire. Carpenter, the great English scientist, is quoted in support of this proposition, and a "female lecturer of distinction" (name not given) to establish the theory that the chief cause of marital unhappiness and the ill health of wives is the s.e.xual inhumanity of husbands--such inhumanity being quite as common among the better as among the uncultured.

The foregoing is as delicately as I can state propositions of such far-reaching importance, and which neither Dr.

Maxwell nor the "female lecturer of distinction" treat in a manner at all "mealy-mouthed." Even after exhausting my stock of euphemisms the recital appears risque enough to alarm more than one lady reader, and I am tempted to turn back; but courage, good soul! there's n.o.body looking, and if we must live it is important that we learn. "The proper study of mankind is man;" and we can obtain no true idea of the animal if we view him only in holiday attire.

As despite all "progress of science," incubators and other labor-saving machinery, people still persist in entering the world in the primogenial way, the relation of the s.e.xes is of quite immeasurable importance, and knowledge thereof should not be monopolized by the narrow circle who read medical magazines. It is well that we come occasionally out of the cloud-realm of sentiment and discuss the relations of man and woman from the standpoint of practical common sense. I am aware that the views expressed by Dr. Maxwell are entertained by some very able medical men; but they violate the public understanding, and, as usual, the people are right and the specialists are wrong. We do not find desire, as here understood, in plants and the lowest development of animal life, it being particularly an attribute of the higher biogeny.

As the more perfect the animal organism the more acute the sensations of pleasure and pain, it follows that in man, most complex of earthly creatures, is found the most powerful procreative pa.s.sion. But while this is the necessary correlative of his superior nervo-muscular organization, his better attributes are likewise developed--or differentiated--by the same law of evolution. Desire, though accentuated, is refined and rendered subordinate to his reason, while the brute is the blind slave of instinct. With the desire of the man and the reason of the mollusk, the genus h.o.m.o would be all that he is painted by Dr.

Maxwell. Should man become for one day "more b.e.a.s.t.i.a.l than the brute" his boasted civilization would revert to subter-savagery. Under such conditions human progress, society itself, were impossible. It is by no means true, as Dr. Maxwell a.s.serts, that children are born solely because men are animals possessing animalistic instincts. True, they could not well be born were men not animals; but the "sweet reasonableness" of things enters ever more and more into the advent of children upon this earth. Were man made altogether of mud, intent only on the indulgence of brute desire, there had been no sacred inst.i.tution of marriage, and family names proudly handed down from sire to son through many centuries. The name of father had not been venerable, nor that of mother a synonym of sanct.i.ty. To the civilized man marriage does not mean, as Dr. Maxwell seems to imagine, simply license for obscene riot, but a solemn covenant that he and the object of his adoration have forsaken all else to cleave each unto the other through weal and through woe, through life unto death. Desire may be the basic principle of the union, but only as the earth is the basic principle of the rose's beauty and the jasmine's perfume. Since earliest biblical days women have sought to bear children that their husbands might love them better; indicating that indulgence is not man's sole concern, even though he be a barbarian; that one reason he seeks the opposite s.e.x is his desire for fair daughters and brave sons--a love in which there is no taint of l.u.s.t. Hugo, to whom the human heart was as a printed page, has given us an admirable portrait of "the way of a man with a maid" in the courts.h.i.+p of Marius and Cosette.

Youth and ardor and opportunity, yet no thought of evil--all the dross in human nature transformed into the spirituelle by the pure white light of love. True, all men are not Mariuses or Romeos. There be Lovelaces and Cagliostros and Calibans; but prithee, good sir, let us judge our kind by the n.o.bler instead of the baser standards. Josephs and St.

Anthonys are not plentiful I grant you; but neither are such brutish husbands as those you denounce. Love and poetry and chivalry still have an abiding-place in the heart of man, and the mother and matriarch of this triune is woman. Prof.

Carpenter, Dr. Maxwell and the "female lecturer of distinction" to the contrary notwithstanding, it is doubtful if the s.e.xes differ much in the intensity of desire. True, I have written somewhere that "G.o.d made the male to seek, the female to be sought"; but it does not follow therefore that every woman is a Daphne who would be transformed into a laurel tree to escape an importunate lover. There may have been women so bloodless that their love left frost on the window-panes of their boudoirs; but never did their sons become world compellers. Despite the pretty theory of Dr. Maxwell, the same fiery cross is laid upon the daughters as upon the sons of men, and thousands falter and fall beneath it and are swept downwards to their doom.

Were it otherwise, were women the pa.s.sionless creatures some doctors delight to paint them, all our encomiums of female virtue were idle mockery. It is because we realize that in the veins of the vestal virgin runs the same fierce tide which Egypt's Queen nor Russia's Empress could control, and which flamed in battle-splendor in the ten years' war of Troy, that with uncovered heads we render her the tribute of our respect. Women admit all this in demanding the "single standard of morals." It is doubtless true that many women are less amorous than their lords-- are to some extent the victims of the latter; but before a.s.suming that this defect is congenital it were well to inquire if there be not an efficient post-natal cause. It is no compliment to woman to urge that she contributes unwillingly to the world, would fain ignore the G.o.d-given law to "be fruitful and multiply." Regardless of the affected horror of anaemic prudes and ancient wall-flowers, the woman of to-day insists upon being recognized as a vital force--is even beginning to comprehend that, refine it as you will, differentiate it as you may, it is the same vital force which fills the cradle that sways the scepter. As she aspires to share with man the regency of this world, she will scarce thank Carpenter and Maxwell for a premise from which the conclusion must be inevitably drawn that, as a world-power, she must ever rank with eunuchs--that she is here solely by man's volition and despite her implied protest. We must understand woman before presuming to measure her pa.s.sions or estimate her powers; and it is well to remember that after some sixty centuries of interested scrutiny she remains very much a mystery--to eminent physicians as well as others. Her mind seems to bewilder the psychologists no less than her body puzzles the physiologists--both find the factual impossible and the self-evident absurd. Dr. Maxwell has discovered, however, that comparatively few women marry men whom they would select were they free to inspect the entire human penfold and make a choice of a mate. Now if he will conjoin that fact to this other, equally self-evident, that with the average woman desire is the fruitage of which love is the flower, perchance he will find a valid explanation of what Carpenter calls her s.e.xual pa.s.sivity. Man is a born polygamist, but woman is not naturally polyandrous. This statement--which I have made hitherto to the consternation of the G.o.dly and at imminent danger of being prosecuted for heresy--is substantiated by the fact that with man desire usually precedes love, while the latter is not its necessary sequence; but with the normal woman love must act as pilot for pa.s.sion--so much is she our moral superior. Every woman is a day-dreamer and a wors.h.i.+per. During girlhood she pictures to herself some perfect man--some impossible demiG.o.d--who is to drift within the little circle of her life and make her the proudest of women, the happiest of wives. In grace or beauty, in genius or bravery--or all these attributes--he is to be the paragon, to tower like Saul above his brethren. Her husband is to be a man of whom she will be intensely proud, herself the envy of her s.e.x. If this be not correct let some old mother in Israel answer. Happy for the daydreamer if her fairy prince, or somewhat her fond imaginings can accept as such, lays heart and fortune at her feet; sorrowful indeed if he come not, worse if he materialize and have eyes only for others. If she be so fortunate as to wed the one man in all the world whom she would have chosen had such choice been vouchsafed her by kind Heaven, o'ermastering love will sweep her through all the heavens a sensuous fancy ever feigned; but the chances are that her idol lives only in the ghostly realm of dreams, else goes elsewhere to wive, and she marries not whom she would but whom she must-- wedlock, thanks to her mistaken training, being the end and aim of her existence. Instead of an idol to adore, she secures some foolish eidolon whom she can scarce respect, and through days of disgust and nights of agony strives to "do her duty," to conceal from the world her disappointment. Thus is blood that might have been a sirocco to stir the soul of an anchorite, transformed into an icy mist--the Paphian Venus lies crushed, degraded, cold, amid the reeds of Pan. But this mesalliance, this mating with Davus the detested instead of with Oedipus the adored, is not the only cause of indifference. The health of American wives, their muliebrity or womanly power, is sapped in various ways. Millions of them are overworked, all the virility ground out of them in the brutal treadmill of existence; and it not infrequently happens that they are the wives of men in easy circ.u.mstances, who are too fat- headed to realize that those womanly attributes which so charm the sterner s.e.x cannot long withstand continual drudgery. One is tempted to believe that such men married to save the expense of hiring a housekeeper, that they hoped by sleeping with their laundress to avoid wash bills.

Take the great middle cla.s.s of America (which is the social and moral cream of the country) and you will find that, as a rule, the men have abundant leisure in which to recuperate from the exhaustion of labor, and are robust as Jove's Phoenician bull, while their wives slave from early morn till dewy eve and present the faded, "washed-out" appearance that bespeaks the work which is never done and the worry which ends only with death. If you will look closely you will detect traces of tight corsets and other sartorial enginery with which Dame Fas.h.i.+on attempts to eliminate the little life which continual cooking, was.h.i.+ng and pot- walloping has left--for woman, though her heart be broken, her spirit crushed and her viscera a chaos, still clings to her vanity, will "follow the fas.h.i.+ons" though they lead to a funeral. Such is your Idalian Aphrodite ten years after marriage, when to her matured charms the beauty of her girlhood should be as moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine. And this wan, suffering creature, with a drug- shop on her pantry shelves and more "female complaints"

than were known to the father of medicine, is expected to comfort the couch of Caesar! Nor is this all. As the struggle for existence grows harder (as it has been doing in America for some decades) and the necessity for "keeping up appearances" more imperative, ever greater precautions are taken to prevent family increase. So widespread is this evil that you can scarce pick up a paper without finding some abortion nostrum advertised. Scan the next paper that comes into your home and see if the virtues of some tansy, penny-royal or other foeticidal compound be not therein set forth. Were these crime promoters not extensively sold the murderous scoundrels who manufacture them could not annually expend vast sums of money without "public educators" for their exploitation.

These advertis.e.m.e.nts frequently suggest the crime; that is their intent; hence publishers who insert them are the co- partners of abortionists and share both the iniquity and the cash. But even this costly advertising does not indicate the extent of the evil, for by far the greater part of those married women who desire to avoid maternity are their own pract.i.tioners--paying the penalty with premature age, impotency and pain. As a rule the mother of a large family is a healthy woman with vigor unimpaired, while others of her age having few children or none are the semi-invalids who denounce their husbands to the doctor. The practice of avoiding marital responsibility is frequently condemned by the medical press, even by the pulpit; but while M.D.'s and D.D.'s make a specialty of both gynecology and gyneolatry, neither seem to understand the spirit in which these sins against hygienics are committed. Doubtless a few fas.h.i.+onable b.u.t.terflies avoid motherhood for selfish reasons; but these are unimportant exceptions to the rule.

If a woman does not love her husband she may not care to bear him children; but maternal instinct usually dominates this desire. If she does love him, and his financial resources be limited, she hesitates to increase his responsibilities. The social standing of a family in this artificial age is measured chiefly by the faithfulness with which it follows fas.h.i.+on's decrees; and as every child, by enhancing expense makes service of this modern Moloch more difficult, the unborn innocents are slain. She considers the educational and other advantages that will accrue to the children already born, and unselfishly--if sinfully--sacrifices herself. It is an evil that will scarce be eliminated by the dehortations of homilists who see no deeper than the surface. Dr. Maxwell and his lady lecturer are certainly mistaken in the a.s.sumption that American husbands do not consider the welfare of their wives when in a delicate condition, and it is a mistake that must be cla.s.sed either as criminal negligence or calumny. I opine that the lady lecturer aforesaid is a sour old maid--that if she ever becomes a wife and mother she will learn somewhat of the caprices of her s.e.x subsequent to conception that will materially modify her complaint.

Reasoning by a.n.a.logy from the inferior order of animals to man hagled more than one enthusiastic physiologist into serious error. The medical profession is continually alarming the country. It has been but a little while since men were a.s.sured that they were poisoning their babies by kissing them, and now they are flatly told that their wives regard the nuptial couch with aversion. Havana cigars give a fellow the "tobacco heart," plug exhausts the saliva necessary to digestion, and bourbon whiskey burns his stomach full of blowholes. Beer makes him bilious, tea and coffee knock out his nerves, while plum-pudding gives him dyspepsia, grape pie appendicitis and hot biscuits undermine his general health. Emotional preaching afflicts him with "jerks," golf has a tendency to paresis, the round dance infects him with philogyny and bicycling deforms his face. We might just as well be dead and with Lucifer as believe these doctors, for life wouldn't be half worth the living if we heeded their laws. My brethren of the loaded capsule and sociable stethoscope are evidently off their equipoise. Babies flourish much better on the kiss micrococcus than on the slipper bacillus, few women will live with impotent husbands, and nearly every centenarian is a collocation of bad habits that, by all the laws of Hippocrates, should have buried him at the halfway house.

It may seem unchivalrous to say so, but it is a stubborn fact nevertheless, and merits the consideration of Dr. Maxwell, that more men are misled by l.u.s.tful women than maids betrayed by designing men. In fact, no man--at least no civilized man--makes improper advances to a woman unless he receives some encouragement, being deterred both by chivalrous sentiment and respect for the persuasive shotgun. Despite the picture drawn by the lady lecturer and others of the horrors of married life, I opine that the woman who captures a sure-enough man who isn't negotiating simply for a cook and chambermaid, and who can be depended upon to play Romeo to her Juliet for sixty years or so, should be in no unseemly haste to break into that heaven where Hymen is given the marble heart, and the matron who breaks into the game with seven obedient husbands to her credit has no advantage over the old maid who never swallowed a pillow while watching a man clad only in a single garment and a cerulean halo of profanity, making frantic swipes under the bureau for a missing collar- b.u.t.ton.

HYPNOTIC POWER OF HER.

I have received a letter from Tyler, Texas, propounding the following fateful conundrum: "Can Woman Hypnotize Man?" My correspondent adds that "by answering, the ICONOCLAST will confer a favor on the people of Tyler, decide a bet and settle a vexatious question."

The affirmative scoops the stakes--wins dead easy, and world without end. The man who puts his doubloons on the negative either never saw a woman until after she was dead, or didn't know what ailed him when under her hypnotic influence. Perhaps he imagined that he had a chronic case of yellow jaundice, was threatened with paresis or had been inadvertently struck by lightning.

Perhaps he's under the mystic spell of some "wily Vivien"

even now, and laying foolish wagers in his mesmeric sleep.

"Can woman hypnotize man? "Well, I should sn.i.g.g.e.r.

She can hypnotize anything that wears pants, from the prince at his gilded poker game, to the peasant scattering worm poison in the lowly cotton patch and revolving in his think tank the tenets of Populism; and I'm not sure but the clothing store dummies and their brother dudes are simply the physical wrecks and mental ruins of her hypnotic medicine. She hypnotizes because she can't help it.

She's built that way. The Tyler savants are 'way behind the times. They are plunging into the sh.o.r.eless realm of psychology in search of information that was trite in antediluvian times. They are trying to determine whether man is a free moral agent in matters matrimonial, when the sire of Solomon had made answer, and Lillian Russell's mult.i.tudinous husbands settled the "vexatious question"

forever and for aye. But perhaps Tyler has been too busy raising politicians to keep pace with the psychological procession. Eve hypnotized Adam and made him cast away the empire of the earth for a scrubby apple, and ever since her fair daughters have been making men imitate their remote forefather's folly.

Woman does not "operate" as do the professional he- hypnotists. Instead of giving you a bright b.u.t.ton or brand- new dime to look at, she puts her dimples in evidence-- maelstroms of love in a sea of beauty. She dazzles you for a moment with the dreamy splendor of her eyes, then studies the toe of a boot that would raise a Kansas corn- crop for Trilby or supply Cinderella with bunions. She looks down to blush and she looks up to sigh--catches you "a- comin' an' goin' "--and you're gone! You realize that the linchpin is slipping out of your logic, but you let 'er slip.

You suspect that your judgment has taken unto itself wings, and that you couldn't tell whether you're a red-licker Democrat or a hard-cider Prohibitionist; but you don't care.

You simply bid farewell to every fear and give the "operator" your undivided attention. She plays with a skilled hand on all your senses, until the last one of them "pa.s.ses in music out of sight" and leaves you a mental bankrupt. She makes you drunken with the music of her voice and maddens you with the low, sweet melody of her skirts. She permits you, quite accidentally, of course, to catch a glimpse of an ankle turned for an angel, and, as she bends forward to chastise you with her fan, your vagrant gaze rests for a fleeting moment on alabaster hemispheres rising in a billowy sea of lace, like Aphrodite cradled in old ocean's foam. You are now far advanced in the hypnotic trance, and very fond of it as far as you've got.

Her every posture is a living picture, her slightest movement a sensuous symphony, her breath upon your cheek a perfumed air to waft you to the dreamy but dangerous land of the lotus-eaters. You drift nearer, and ever nearer, like a moth revolving in narrowing circles around an incandescent light, until you find yourself alone with her in some cozy nook, the world forgetting if not by your creditors forgot. Being naturally industrious, you seek employment, and she gives you her hand to hold. Of course, she could hold it herself, but the occupation pleases you, and she doesn't mind. Besides, you make more rapid progress into the realm of irresponsibility by taking care of it for her occasionally. You conceive that what is worth doing at all is worth doing well, and freeze to that little fragment of pulsing snow like a farmer to his Waterbury in a camp-meeting crowd. She rewards your devotion to duty by a gentle pressure, and a magnetic thrill starts at your finger tips and goes through your system like an applejack toddy, until it makes your toes tingle, then starts on its return trip, gathering volume as it travels, until it becomes a tidal wave that envelops all your world. You are now uncertain whether you have hit the lottery for the capital prize or been nominated for justice of the peace.

You have lost your ident.i.ty, and should you chance to meet yourself in the middle of the road would need an introduction. The larger the supply of brains you sat into the game with, the less you have left. You begin to talk incoherently, and lay the premise for a breach of promise case. You sip the hand-made nectar from the rosy slot in her face, harrow the Parisian peach bloom on her cheek with your scrubbing-brush mustache, reduce the circ.u.mference of her health-corset with your manly arm, and your hypnotism is complete. Right there the last faint adumbration of responsibility ends and complete mental aberration begins. You sigh like a furnace and write sonnets to your mistress' eyebrow--you cut fantastic capers before high Heaven for the divertis.e.m.e.nt of those who don't yet know how it is themselves. The "operator" may break the spell by marrying you, in which case you will return by easy stages to the normal and again become a sane man and useful member of society; but if she lets you down with the "sister" racket, your nervous system is pretty apt to sour. When a woman loses her hypnotic power she either straddles a bike, becomes a religious crank or seeks surcease for her sorrow among the female suffragists.

VICTOR HUGO'S IMMORTALITY.

Philadelphia's school board has barred Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" from the list of books to be used in the high school in the teaching of French, as a book not fit for girls. What would not one give for a diagram of the heads of these educators? It must be a nasty mind which can find anything immoral in that book as a whole. One may take a chapter out here and there, and show it to be broad and coa.r.s.e, divorced from the context, but the whole effect of the book is moral. The mind of the man who can say that "Les Miserables" will not tend as a whole to make a girl more womanly, a boy more manly, must be poisoned by the miasma from a filthy heart. What and who in it are immoral? Not Valjean! Not Fantine even, nor Cosette!

Not Marius! Not Javert, the detective! Is the chapter on Cambronne's surrender the offending fragment of the great literary masterpiece? That chapter is the sublimity of disgust! There never was anyone hurt spiritually or morally by the great French masterpiece of fiction. The man who can say the book is defiling, would draw defilement from the fount of Castaly. The Philadelphia school board has declared itself an aggregation of a.s.ses. "Les Miserables"

is the greatest poem of divine humanity that this world has known since Shakespeare wrote "Lear." But I suppose "Lear," too, is immoral. I suppose everything is immoral, from "Oedipus, the Tyrant," to Hall Caine's "Christian,"

that teaches that men are born of woman, and that love will have its way, even unto all bitterness. It is eminently fitting that "Les Miserables" should be condemned as immoral in the most immoral city in the United States. A Philadelphian may be depended upon to see immorality in one of Raphael's Madonnas.--St. Louis Mirror.

My esteemed contemporary should bottle up its indignation, there is absolutely nothing to be gained by lambasting idiots, by criticizing cretins. Editor Reedy is but casting his pearls before swine--is talking to people who, having eyes see not, having ears hear not, and whose cerebra are filled with sawdust. They are like unto a lot of sheep that follow the master ram, not because they comprehend or care whither he is going, but because they smell him, and point their proboscidi in his direction as naturally as the needle lines the pole. It was Jean Paul--was it not?--who discovered that if a cane be held horizontally before the lead ram of a flock, compelling him to saltate, then removed, the thousandth ewe lamb will jump at that point just as did the pioneer. So it is with a pietistical and puristical people--they will follow some stupid old bellwether because utterly incapable of independent thought, of individual ratiocination. When "Les Miserables"

first appeared some literary Columbus made the remarkable discovery that it was a French book, that it was shot full of "slang," the expressive patois of the race, that it was liberally spiced with argot, the vernacular of vagabonds. Hugo's immortal masterpiece has not yet recovered from this discovery--the thousandth ewe lamb is still blithely saltating over the blackthorn. It is as useless to contend against the purist fad as against the holiness fake.

Like a plague of army worms or epidemic of epizootic, it must run its course. Preternicety of expression, an affectation of euphemism, has in every age and clime evidenced moral degeneration and mental decay. When people emasculate their minds, they redouble their corporeal devotion at the shrine of Priapus, for nature preserves the equipoise. Every writer of virility is now voted obscene, every man who strikes sledge-hammer blows at brutal wrong intrenched in prescriptive right is denounced as immoral. "Les Miserables" not fit for young ladies' reading!--and this the epocha of the New Woman, of the single standard of mind and morals. While woman is insisting that she is every way man's equal, ent.i.tled to share with him the wards.h.i.+p of this world, Detroit is putting bloomers on the statues of Dian, Boston refusing the Bacchante, Waco draping the marble figure of a child exhibited at her cotton palace, Anthony Comstock having cataleptic convulsions, "Les Miserables" excluded from Philadelphia high schools and the ICONOCLAST denounced by certain bewhiskered old he-virgins as obscene! And so it goes. This world is becoming so awfully nice that it's infernally nawsty. It sees evil in everything because its point of view is that of the pimp. Its mind is a foul sewer whose exhalations coat even the Rose of Sharon with slime. A writer may no longer call a spade a spade; he must cautiously refer to it as an agricultural implement lest he shock the supersensitiveness of hedonists and call down upon his head the Anathema Maranatha of men infinitely worse than Oscar Wilde. What the Mirror means by "Cambronne's surrender" I cannot imagine, unless Editor Reedy was indulging in grim irony. I present extracts from the account of Cambronne, which he suspects may have given the pietistical Quakers a pain. It is the finale of Hugo's matchless word-painting of the Battle of Waterloo:

"A few squares of the guard, standing motionless in the swash of the rout, like rocks in running water, held out till night. They awaited the double shadow of night and death, and let them surround them. Each regiment, isolated from the others, and no longer connected with the army, which was broken on all sides, died where it stood. The gloomy squares, deserted, conquered and terrible, struggled formidably with death, for Ulm, Wagram, Jena and Friedland were dying in it. When twilight set in at nine in the evening, one square still remained at the foot of the plateau of Mont St. Jean. In this mournful valley, at the foot of the slope scaled by the cuira.s.siers, now inundated by the English ma.s.ses, beneath the converging fire of the hostile and victorious artillery, under a fearful hailstorm of projectiles, this square still resisted. It was commanded by an obscure officer by the name of Cambronne. At each volley the square still diminished, but continued to reply to the canister with musketry fire, and each moment contracted its four walls. Fugitives in the distance, stopping at moments to draw breath, listened in the darkness to this gloomy diminis.h.i.+ng thunder. When this legion had become only a handful, when their colors were but a rag, when their ammunition was exhausted, and muskets were clubbed, and when the pile of corpses was greater than the living group, the victors felt a species of sacred awe, and the English artillery ceased firing. It was a sort of respite; these combatants had around them an army of specters, outlines of mounted men, the black profile of guns, and the white sky visible through the wheels; the colossal death's head which heroes ever glimpse in the smoke of battle, advanced and looked at them. They could hear in the twilight gloom that the guns were being loaded; the lighted matches, resembling the eyes of a tiger in the night, formed a circle round their heads. The linstocks of the English batteries approached the guns, and at this moment an English general, Colville according to some, Maitland according to others, holding the supreme moment suspended over the heads of these men, shouted to them, 'Brave Frenchmen, surrender!' Cambronne answered, 'Merde.' To Cambronne's exclamation, an English voice replied, 'Fire!' The batteries flashed, the hillside trembled, from all these throats of bra.s.s came a last eruption of grape, a vast cloud of smoke vaguely whitened by the rising moon rolled up, and when the smoke had been dissipated, there was nothing. The dreaded remnant was annihilated, the guard was dead. The four walls of the living redoubt lay low, with here and there a scarcely perceptible quiver among the corpses. Thus the French legions, grander than those of Rome, expired on Mont St.

Jean, on the earth sodden with rain and blood."

Hugo quite needlessly apologized for quoting the Frenchman's laconic reply to the summons to surrender.

He was writing history, and no milk-and-water euphemism could have expressed Cambronne's defiance and contempt.

Of course John Bull pitilessly shot to death that heroic fragment of the Old Guard, which forgot in its supreme hour that while foolhardiness may be magnificent, it is not war. I would have put a cordon of soldiers about that pathetic remnant of Napoleon's greatness and held it there to this good day rather than have plowed it down as a farmer plows jimson weeds into a pile of compost; but John Bull is not built that way--is impregnated with the chivalry of Baylor. Cambronne's reply is the only objectionable word in the entire work, and certain it might be pardoned in a sc.r.a.p of history by people whose press and pulpit have apotheosized "Trilby," Du Maurier's supposit.i.tious prost.i.tute. I presume that the Philadelphia school board is about on an intellectual and moral parity with the trustees of Baylor--haven't the remotest idea whether merde means maggots or moons.h.i.+ne. Victor Hugo was a lord in the aristocracy of intellect; his masterpiece is nature's faithful mirror. Ame de boue should be branded with a hot iron on the hickory-nut head of every creature whom its perusal does not benefit. His description of the Battle of Waterloo is to "Ben-Hur's" chariot race what Mount Aetna in eruption is to a glow worm. It transcends the loftiest flights of Shakespeare. Before it even "The Wondrous Tales of Troy" pales its ineffectual fires. It casts the shadow of its genius upon Bulwer's "Pompeii" as the wing of the condor shades the crow. Byron's "sound of revelry by night" is the throbbing of a snare drum drowned in Hugo's thunders of Mont St. Jean. Danton's rage sinks to an inaudible whisper, and even Aeschylus shrivels before that cataclysm of Promethean fire; that celestial monsoon. It stirs the heart like the rustle of a silken gonfalon dipped in gore, like the whistle of rifle-b.a.l.l.s, like the rhythmic dissonance of a battery slinging shrapnel from the heights of Gettysburg into the ragged legions of General Lee. I have counseled my contemporary to be calm; but by Heaven! it does stir my soul into mutiny to see a lot of intellectual pismires, who have secured positions of trust because of their political pull in the Tenderloin, hurling their petty scorn at Victor Hugo. It were like Carlyle's "critic fly"

complacently rubbing its hinder legs and giving its opinion of the Parthenon, like aesop's vindictive snail besliming the masterpiece of Phidias, like a Baylor professor lecturing on the poetry of Lord Byron. Every writer of eminence since the days of Moses has had to run the gauntlet of these slight people's impotent wrath. While slandering the prophets of progress and religion they have vented their foul rheum on all the G.o.ds of literature. Kansas, I am told, put a man in the penitentiary for sending through the mails biblical texts printed on postal cards. Speaking of Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," Carlyle says:

" 'Meister,' it appears is a vulgar work; no gentleman, we hear in certain circles, could have written it; few real gentlemen, it is insinuated, can like to read it; no real lady, unless possessed of considerable courage should profess having read it at all!"

And yet "Wilhelm Meister" changed the whole current of European literature--the work was practically committed to memory by the n.o.blest men and women of the world. We hear the venerated Queen of Prussia repeating from it in her cruel exile,

"Wer nie sein Brod mit Thranen a.s.s, Wer nicht die k.u.mmervollen Nachte Auf Seinem Bette weinend sa.s.s, Der Kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Machte."

Let the Philadelphia school board and the Baylorian managers construe it if they can.

"Udi vura udorini udiri cicova cilti mora Udorini talti hollna u ede caimoni mora"

What? I guess "nit." The idea of keeping "Les Miserables" away from the ladies!--just as though there could be found in the whole country a sixteen-year-old maid with any pretensions to intelligence who hasn't wept over little Cosette, been in love with Enjolras and "doted on"

Gavroche and Jean Valjean! So ultra nice has the world become that we must skip the Canticles. Shakespeare's plays must now be clapper-clawed to make them palatable.

Alexander Pope's philosophic rhyme must be deleted with dashes. Walt Whitman's poetry is too strong for the average stomach. But we continue to fire into the bosoms of our families the daily press with its specialization of Hogan's Alley and the Yellow Kid, reeking with its burden of ads. of abortion recipes and syphilitic nostrums--even take our wives and daughters to the Tabernacle to be told by Sam Jones that if they don't think he has backbone he'll "pull up his s.h.i.+rt-tail and show 'em!" Byron was vigorously denounced by the vindictive Miss Nancys of his day, but scornfully replied:

"I have not loved the world, nor the world me; I have not flatter'd its rank breath nor bow'd To its idolatries a patient knee."

There seems to be nothing left that we may safely read except Watts' Hymns, Talmage's sermons and the pathetic story of Mary's Little Lamb--a promising diet truly, upon which to rear intellectual t.i.tans. The remarkable thing about this purist fad is that all the Podsnaps wear pants--the ladies are not on tenter-hooks all the time lest something be said or written that will "bring a blush to the cheek of a young person." It is the he-virgins, the bearded women who are ever on the watch lest young femininity become impregnated with an idea. This country's got a bad case of malus pudor--and needs an heroic dose of double-action liver pills.

THE SCIENCE OF KISSING.

I note that a Britisher named Prof. Bridger has been infringing my copyright by proclaiming, as an original discovery, that kissing is an excellent tonic and will cure dyspepsia. When the o'erbusy bacteriologists first announced that osculation was a dangerous pastime, that divers and sundry varieties of bacteria hopped blithely back and forth engendering disease and death, I undertook a series of experiments solely in the interest of science.

Being a Baptist Preacher and making camp-meetings my specialty, I had unusual opportunity for investigation, for those of our faith are strict constructionists of the biblical law to "greet one another with a kiss." I succeeded in demonstrating before the end of the tenting season that osculation, when practiced with reasonable discretion and unfaltering industry, is an infallible antidote for at least half the ills that human flesh is heir to. The reason the doctors arrived at different conclusions is that they kissed indiscriminately and reasoned inductively. They found on casting up the account that bad breath and face powder, the sour milk-bottle of youth and the chilling frost of age, comprised six-sevenths of the sum total. Under such conditions there was nothing to do but establish a quarantine. I pointed out, as Prof. Bridger has since done, that a health microbe as well as a disease bacillus nidificates on the osculatory apparatus, and added that failure to absorb a sufficient quant.i.ty of these hygiologic germs into the system causes old maids to look jaundiced and bachelors to die sooner than benedicts. Kisses, when selected with due care and taken on the installment plan, will not only restore a misplaced appet.i.te, but are especially beneficial in cases of hay fever, as they banish that tired feeling, tone up the liver, invigorate the heart, and make the blood to sing through the system like a giant jewsharp. I found by patient experiment that the health microbe becomes active at fifteen, reaches maturity at twenty, begins to lose its vigor at forty, and is quite useless as a tonic when, as someone has tersely expressed it, a woman's kisses begin to "taste of her teeth." Thin bluish lips produce very few health germs, and those scarce worth the harvesting; but a full red mouth with Cupid curves at the corners, will yield enormously if the crop be properly cultivated. I did not discover whether the blonde or brunette variety is ent.i.tled to precedence in medical science, but incline to the opinion that a judicious admixture is most advisable from a therapeutical standpoint. Great care should be taken when collecting the germs not to crush them by violent collision or blow them away with a loud explosion that sounds like hitting an empty sugar hogshead with a green hide. The practice still prevailing in many parts of this country of chasing a young woman ever the furniture and around the barn like an amateur cowboy trying to rope a maverick, rounding her up in the presence of a dozen people, uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g her neck and planting almost any place a kiss that sounds like a muley cow pulling her hind foot out of a black-waxy mud hole, and which jars the putty off the window panes, possesses no more curative powers than hitting a flitch of bacon with the back of your hand. I prithee, avoid it; when a girl runs from a kiss you may take it for granted either that the germ crop is not ripe or you are poaching on somebody else's preserves. The best results can be obtained about the midnight hour, when the dew is on the rose, the jasmine bud drunken with its own perfume and the mock- bird trilling a last good night to his drowsy mate. You entice your best girl into the garden to watch Venus' flaming orb hanging like the Kohinoor pendant from the crescent moon. You pause beneath the great gnarled live oak, its myriad leaves rustling softly as the wings of seraphs. Don't be in a hurry, and for G.o.d's sake, don't gab--in such a night silence is the acme of eloquence. "In such a night Troilus mounted the Trojan walls and sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents where Cressid lay." She watches the fireflies respiring in phosph.o.r.escent flame amid the clover blooms, while you watch her and twine a spray of honeysuckle in her hair. Your clumsy fingers unloose the guards and her fragrant tresses, caught up by the cool night wind, float about your face. Somehow her hand gets tangled up with yours, and after a spasmodic flutter there remains a willing prisoner. The fireflies have failed to interest her and she is studying the stars. You move your shoulder forward to give her head a rest and get hold of her other hand. Be patient; when she wants you to kiss her she'll find means to make it manifest, and a maid worth kissing despises a forward man. She looks very beautiful with her face upturned in the moonlight; but don't say a word about it, for there's a little of the poseur about all the daughters of Eve. She withdraws her eyes from the stars, slowly turns them dreamily upon yours, and you note that they are filled with astral fire. They roam idly over the shadowy garden, then close as beneath a weight of weariness. Her head rests more heavily against your shoulder and her bosom trembles with a half-audible sigh. There is now really no occasion for further delay. Do not swoop down upon the health germs like a hungry hen-hawk on a green gosling, but incline your head gently until your carefully deodorized breath is upon her lips--there pause, for the essence of enjoyment is in antic.i.p.ation. The man who gulps down a gla.s.s of old wine without first inhaling its oenanthic and feasting his eyes upon its ruddy splendors, is simply a sot.

Wait until you have noted the dark lashes lying upon the cheek of sun-flushed snow, "the charm of married brows,"

the throat of alabaster, the dimple in her chin, the wine-tint of her half-parted lips with their glint of pearl--wait until her eyes half-open, look inquiringly into yours, and close again, then cincture her gently but firmly with one arm, support her chin with the other hand, and give the health germs ample time to change their home. A kiss to have any scientific value, should last one minute and seven seconds by Shrewsbury clock, and be repeated seven times, not in swift succession, but with the usual interval between wine at a symposiac. Byron did these things differently, but the author of "Don Juan" is not a safe example for young folks to follow. He pictures Mars lying with his head in the lap of Venus,

"Feeding on thy sweet cheek, while thy lips are With lava-kisses melting while they burn, Shower'd on his eyelids, brow and mouth as from an urn."

That may be eminently satisfactory to Mars, but scarce proper for Venus. It is exciting, but not scientific. It suggests charity children gorging themselves with plum- pudding, rather than poetic natures drunken with beauty; and fragrance, swooning 'neath the sweetness of a duet sung by their own chaste souls. The dyspeptic who cannot recover by following my prescription deserves to die. The pessimist whom it doesn't make look at life through rose- tinted gla.s.ses, should be excluded from human society.

The hypochondriac whom it doesn't help ought to be hanged. There is not a human ill--unless it be hypocrisy-- for which nature does not provide a remedy, and I recommend the health germ which builds its nest on lovely woman's lips as worth more than the whole materia medica. I don't know whether it will raise the dead, but I've always doubted the story that Egypt kissed the cold lips of her Roman Antony--have suspected it would have brought me back to life and love had I been dead a month. The unscientific catch-as-catch-can kiss has no more beneficial effect than slapping yourself in the face with a raw beef- steak. It is but a slight improvement on the civilization of Ashantee, where a man proposes marriage by knocking his Dulcina down with a club and dragging her through the backwoods' pasture by the hair of her head; but kisses properly taken--beneath the stars and among the roses--are the perennial fount of youth for which Ponce de Leon sailed far seas in a vain search for the blessed Bimini.

THE NEW SOUTH.