I am quite sure that if these poetic dreamers
had ever come across a shepherdess in real life--dirty, unkempt,
ignorant, coarse, immoral--they would themselves have made haste to
disavow their heroines and seek less malodorous "maidens" for
embodiments of their exalted fancies of love[128]. Richard Wagner was
promptly disillusioned when he came across some of those modern
shepherdesses, the Swiss dairy-maids. "There are magnificent women
here in the Oberland," he wrote to a friend, "but only so to the eye;
they are all tainted with rabid vulgarity."
III. WAR
Herbert Spencer has devoted some eloquent pages[129] to showing that
along with chronic militancy there goes a brutal treatment of women,
whereas industrial tribes are likely to treat their wives and
daughters well. To militancy is due the disregard of women's claims
shown in stealing or buying them, the inequality of status between the
sexes entailed by polygamy; the use of women as laboring slaves, the
life-and-death power over wife and child. To which we may add that war
proves an obstacle to love, by fostering cruelty and smothering
sympathy, and all the other tender feelings; by giving the coarsest
masculine qualities of aggressiveness and brute prowess the aspect of
cardinal virtues and causing the feminine virtues of gentleness,
mercy, kindness, to be despised, and women themselves to be esteemed
only in so far as they appropriate masculine qualities; and by
fostering rape and licentiousness in general.
Pages:
478
479
480
481
482
483
484
485
486
487
488
489
490
491
492
493
494
495
496
497
498
499
500
501
502