The Woman Who Saw It First BY ALEXANDER BLACK A BOUT ten years ago an American editor said of Mrs. Gilman, "She is the George Bernard Shaw of America, unless we prefer to call Mr. Shaw the Charlotte Perkins Gilman of England." Superficially, the reference was not much more than a picturesqueness complimentary to Mr. Shaw. The actual intention may have been to characterize certain lively traits in the work of two persons who could not well be more strikingly different. It would have been absurd, for example, to imply that Mrs. Gilman likes to be startling. She has been startling, but scarcely in Mr. Shaw's way. She has been quotable, and has, perhaps with less than Mr. Shaw's luck, paid penalties for pungence. To be quotable is to be misquoted. It once seemed that shuttling crippled quotations of Mrs. Gilman was an established indoor sport. So much for being a radical. The American's theory of keeping a jump ahead, his frequent display of a go-getter complacency, as if he had invented initiative, give a grotesque twist to the fact, never more apparent than it is to-day, that he does not like radicals. He can offer a spirited welcome to a new thing, but he continues to give the impression of being less sympathetic than the European toward new thinking. Having called himself a pathfinder, he is likely to be annoyed by any reminder that he has overlooked something. Perhaps the How most stubborn stodginess begins with this sort of dismissing gesture. can the open-minded be wrong? Having started business as a nation with quite satisfying slogans by which all the world might see that we were up and coming, that we were a lusty, high-spirited company, defiant of traditions, quick on the trigger, nervously responsive to new devices, we proceeded politically to become the most conservative nation conservative nation on earth. In political ancestor worship we are supreme. The most ancient of delusions, that difference of opinion can be stamped out by statute, is seen at its ripest in this country. We are sometimes tolerant of a nice, decently conforming liberalism, but the sheer inconvenience of people who refuse to leave life as it is nowhere meets with more violent resentment. Naturally, the degree of discomfort in a radicalism is fixed by the degree of its nearness. A radical in a foreign country is permitted to be a prophet. In an adjacent town he can be ridiculed as a visionary. Next door he is a menace. is a menace. And in a community that is convinced of its special enlightenment and liberality there is a fate for menaces. However, all of our radicals have not landed in jail. Early and late we have found divers ways of expressing disapproval. And we have agreed to differentiate between one sort of radical and another. We do not adjudge every blow at the established as an assault in the first degree. To be a little too sympathetic toward male laborers, for example, is a very serious matter. Merely to be deeply concerned about female laborers, especially unsalaried female laborers in households, is naturally less serious. A Thoreau or a Walt Whitman will make less trouble than an Altgeld. Even a Thomas Paine could not hurt like a Debs. All radicals share the chance that civilization will catch up with them. The radical of Nazareth may illustrate the fact that there can be no certainty of such a consummation, but the phenomenon happens often enough to remind any who care to think about it that civilization does at times, perhaps breathlessly, come abreast, or almost seem to have come abreast, of one who has been striding ahead. Civilization can do this without condoning the original offense of being too soon, which gives a peculiar interest to speculation upon the situation of the caught-up-with. 82 It might be a bit reckless to classify Charlotte Perkins Gilman among thinkers who have been overtaken. She is still, in many of her doctrines and convictions, lonesomely in advance of the accepted. The arc of her early challenge ran beyond the visible horizon. But so much of her preaching that once was regarded as revolutionary is now a matter of polite consideration, if not of practice, that her total effect is no longer so sharply radical as it was to the generation to which we look back. She herself is still looking forward. She was never a mere storm. An imitative noisiness is often mistaken for real rebellion. Mrs. Gilman has always been more like an incorrigible current. Her tide seems to have no ebb. She is the poorest compromiser I know. She is never pugnacious. No one could have less interest in conflict for its own sake. Her persistent idealism has often appalled the merely aggressive. I can testify that as partner in a wrangle she is as gentle as a river. When you try an obstruction, she overflows the banks of the argument. She can do this graciously-as graciously as gravitation. She exemplifies a fact, which we frequently have occasion to notice, that preachers of a better socialization for the world have seldom been aggressively "sociable." It is as if to see socialization one must be aloof. We do not look for social idealism in a mixer. The prophet is likely to be an incompetent pusher, perhaps because the all-of-us vision is hard to acquire in contact with the crowd. Yet Mrs. Gilman might seem to have followed Emerson's suggestion with regard to solitude and society by keeping her head in one and her hands in the other. She is no recluse. I am thinking of her congenital inadaptability to the free-for-all. She is more a telescope person than a microscope person, despite her disposition to open every scientific door. She thinks best in terms of constellations, with due respect to the electron as a theoretical detail. To her the individualist represents the great delusion. She sees the human brain as a social product and all separatist efforts as grotesque. She speaks somewhere of an "ex-man" on a desert island. The absurdity of the socially created trying to be selfish, of trying to feed a social hunger an There is plenty of room for quarrel in any such contention, as any struggler in philosophy before or during Bergson well knows. I have, on occasion, joined the mêlée. I belong among the innocents who are ready to admit that the collective comes first. But first considerations are not always most important considerations. It is of first importance to be born. It is of greater importance to be worth borning. Mass is a beginning fact. It may be that it was invented to make possible an individual destination-that it is the mass and not the individual that is a means. Mrs. Gilman holds, adding her own inflections, with the school to which the individual is purely theoretical. Her individual is atomic. He never really happens. When he is being most personal he is simply expressing a unit sign of a collective fact. ego meal, stirs her sense of the in- tual forces animating the womancongruous. suffrage movement. With voice and with the printed word she stirred the pulse of progressive opinion, but recoiled from the political implications. It was not that she resented, here or elsewhere, the drudgery of application. She has, indeed, too seldom considered the limits of her strength in throwing herself into any labor of brain or hand, in the forum or in the household, that seemed to make demand of her. We cannot think of her as standing on a chair in the sooty rain of a Liverpool street, holding that British crowd with a voice as slender as her body, but singularly impassioned and penetrating, conquering the ear by the silent attention it could win, without realizing her resources in sacrifice. The trouble was that politics meant adjustment, concession, trimming. She wanted to move as she thought— straight through. The devious strategies of politics always affected her as not only irksome, but immoral. It was useless to argue that all application implied concession; that a searchlight might fall straight, but that the journey to the illuminated spot might mean not only fences and wet feet, but certain contentions as to right of way. She held the search-light with a fervent steadiness. Talking to her about expedience was like asking a compass to compromise. No one could offer a profounder illustration of the individual paradox than Mrs. Gilman herself. Before an audience she can seem to prophesy the most perfect participation. Yet her flame is not to be merged. When she preached socialistic ideals in California, the Socialists assumed that they had found a leader. But it turned out that a capital S could not be attached to her. Political Socialism, that is to say, applied Socialism, was unable to enlist her. She could speak before the Fabians in England, beside Bernard Shaw and his compatriots, but they could not make a Fabian of her. To the religion of socialistic effort she was warmly responsive; to the theology of Socialism she was cold. It was the same with the suffrage question. She was one of the strongest of the intellec It was in her blood to be a preacher: the Beecher strain was there, the Perkins strain was there. Preacher traditions came to her with the impress of a liberal New-Englandism. Her conscience may have been of New England; her convictions had no geography. Perhaps the West influenced the flowering of her impulses. Inevitably, her trend was affected by conditions of her youth, which had been piercingly unhappy. With her athletic frame came bitter mental struggles. The gestation of a spirit is not completed with the birth of a body. A long and torturing travail brought her face to face with a world in which women seemed to be playing a submerged part. The imaginative excursions of her girlhood were as of dreams in a prison. These excursions were extraordinarily diverse and fantastic. She was only eleven when she worked out a theory of a color concert based upon a rainbow octave, of a symphonic rain of color accomplished with the aid of a piano-and an imagination. There was a sustained fairy-story about a benevolence that carried unhappy children to wonder places. At the elbow of all possible benevolences lurked the fearful figure of Duty. The thing that was right dominated all other things. Beauty and happiness had always to be justified or was it excused? No picture could be more disturbing, more profoundly pitiful, than that of a child building a conscious system of ethics. Yet this is the picture I see in the adolescent years of Charlotte Perkins. The brain carried by that energetic body began, before it should have been through with dolls and dryads, to grapple with abstractions, to diagram this duty matter, to piece together an original formula for explaining the world. It seethed with It seethed with theories. It strove, with a burning earnestness, in school, in what should have been the time of play, in the dark of bed hours, to read the hidden, to answer that strange, too early, questioning cry. As a young girl there was a bit of weirdness in her blending of conscience and adventure, of enor mous restraint and a plunging mind. She had ravened among books. She had ransacked the philosophies, halted and fascinated by all sorts of intellectual fantasies, but emerging always into the heights. She had reached a kind of incandescence. And she wanted to be a voice. Dominating all of her eager perceptions was the notion that women were people. The implications of this idea were vastly complicated, the more so because philosophy had ceased to be contemptuous, and civilization, after merely mouthing the words, had been content to ask, What of it? An honest recognition of the idea involved a rearrangement of the world. Charlotte Perkins set about the job. mon She began to be the voice. The note defied her own resources of strength, the clutch of personal situation. Poverty and a stricken mother did not stifle her wish or silence her voice. The way opened among commen and women, strugglers, thinkers the nuisances of a stay-put civilization. She had rapt attention wherever she spoke in those early California days. There was the tipsy man who shouted, "Here comes our little queen!" The little queen had turned for an hour or two from a bedside and a kitchen where, one evening, a delegation of working-men found her. "We have heard," stammered the spokesman, "that you are indigent. He hated to say "poor," and the elaborate word seemed to soften the suggestion. The business of the moment was to give her money, and it soon appeared that this could n't be done. He would have been an inspired ambassador to know how to give Charlotte Perkins money. That smile of hers may have been bitter, but it was there. The teeth of facts never frightened her. "It is my purpose to talk to you," began one of her early speeches, "not about what has been said concerning things, but about the things themselves." That has always been her note-things themselves. There was a harsh reality in the long ordeal ended by her mother's death. The sharp change left her free, on nothing a year, to go forward with the work of changing the world. It was characteristic of the world she sought to change that it should find so many ways of lashing her for the calamities of a marriage. She was twenty-three when she married Walter Stetson, unquestionably one of the ablest American painters of his time. She had been painting and earning precariously as a teacher of drawing. Stetson thought she could paint still life as skilfully as any one living. But her call was not in that quarter, and all aspirations were engulfed in a physical breakdown such as recurred again and again to threaten all sustained effort. To be a good wife and a good mother-we can readily fancy the ardor of such an aspiration in an idealist of this type. Motherhood was realized. Wifehood crashed. It is not for the outsider to ask why such a relationship came to seem impossible to the two directly concerned. "A good and great man," she has called him. His reverence for her was of no lesser sort. A good man and a good woman; yet the mating which should not have been could not endure, though it was maintained for seven years. Separation was followed by divorce. The fact that, ten years later, she married her cousin, George Houghton Gilman, and that this marriage has been markedly happy, will suggest what it may to confident exponents of newer psychologies. It cannot fail to suggest that in this matter of marriage Mrs. Gilman's life has no fundamental quarrel with her philosophy. Any but an intensive and impudent criticism would have seen the consistency of her attitude toward her child. The welfare of the daughter was more to her than any sentimental tradition. If the daughter's development could be favored, as it was, by a later interval of life with her father, if an inherited artistic talent could be nourished by travel and the associations of European art centers, if her ultimate happiness could be advanced by a time of withdrawal from the independent struggles of her mother, the mother could await the fulfilments of a quite secure affection. The event justified the sacrifices. The motherand-daughter closeness was unbroken. It was like Charlotte Perkins that even in the midst of the divorce disaster she should stubbornly hold aloft the ensign of a personal loyalty to the partner in failure. This was against the code. The code was that heart unions might be dissolved by law under legal imperatives, but that social expectations involved a few blackguardly gestures. If there was to be divorce, some one had to be pictured as a monster. The Pickwickian trick would be understood. Such stultifications were impossible to Charlotte Perkins. Her crowning offense came when Walter Stetson, in the following year, married the brilliant granddaughter of William Ellery Channing, and it became known that the first wife recognized the assured beauty of this marriage. Not to hate |