Gala-Days [38]
o' nights, ruddy, rotund, robust, with black hair and white bands, well-dressed, well-fed, well-to-do, jolly, gentlemanly, clique-y, sensible, shrewd, au fait. The nuns--now I am vexed to look at them. Are nuns expected to be any more dead to the world than priests? Then I should like to know why they must make such frights of themselves, while priests go about like Christians? Why shall a nun walk black, and gaunt, and lank, with a white towel wrapped around her face, all possible beauty and almost all attractiveness despoiled by her hideously unbecoming dress, while priests wear their hair and their hats and their coats and their collars like any other gentleman? Why are the women to be set up as targets, while the men may pass unnoticed and unknown? If the woman's head must be shorn and shaven, why not the man's? It is not fair. I can think of no reason, pretext, or excuse, unless it is to be found in the fact that women are more beautiful than men, and need greater disfigurement to make them ugly. That is a fact which I have long suspected, and observations made on this journey confirm my suspicions,--intensify them into certainty. An ugly woman is handsomer than a handsome man,--if you examine them closely. She is finer-grained, more soft, more delicate. Men are animals more than women. I do not now mean the generic sense in which we are all animals, but specifically and superficially. Men look more like horses and cows. See our brave soldiers returning from the wars--Heaven's blessing rest upon them!--grand, but are they not gruff? A woman's face may be browned, roughened, and reddened by exposure, yet her skin is always skin; but often when a man's face has been sheltered from storm and shine, his skin is hide. His mane is not generally so long and flowing as a horse's, but there it is. Once, in a car, a man in front of me put his arm on the back of his seat and fell asleep. Presently his hand dropped over, and I looked at it,--a mass of broad, brawny vitality, great pipes of veins, great crescents of nails, great furrows at the joints, and you might cut a fine sirloin of beef off the ball of the thumb; and this is a hand! _I_ call it an ox. A woman's hand, by hard labor, spreads and cracks, and sprouts bunches at the joints, and becomes tuberous at the ends of the fingers, but you can see that it is a deformity and not nature. It tells a sad story of neglect, of labor, perhaps of heartlessness, cruelty, suffering. But this man's hand was born so. You would not think of pitying him any more than you would pity an elephant for being an elephant instead of an antelope. A woman's hair is silky and soft, and, if not always smooth, susceptible of smoothness. A man's hair is shag. If he tries to make it anything else, he does not mend the matter. Ceasing to be shag, it does not become beauty, but foppishness, effeminacy, Miss Nancy-ism. A man is a brute by the law of his nature. Let him ape a woman, and he does not cease to he brutal, though be does become ridiculous. The only thing for him to do is to be the best kind of a brute.
In all of which remarks there is nothing derogatory to a man,-- nothing at which any one need take offence. I do not say that manhood is not a very excellent kind of creation. Everything is good in its line. I would just as soon have been a beetle as a woman, if I had never been a woman, and did not know what it was. I don't suppose a horse is at all crestfallen because he is a horse. On the contrary, if he is a thorough-bred, blood horse, he is a proud and happy fellow, prancing, spirited, magnificent. So a man may be so magnificently manly that one shall say, Surely this is the monarch of the universe; and hide and shag and mane shall be vitalized with a matchless glory. Let a man make himself grand in his own sphere, and not sit down and moan because he is only a connecting link between a horse and a woman.
I suppose Mother Church is fully cognizant of the true state of affairs, and thinks men already sufficiently Satyric, but woman must be ground
In all of which remarks there is nothing derogatory to a man,-- nothing at which any one need take offence. I do not say that manhood is not a very excellent kind of creation. Everything is good in its line. I would just as soon have been a beetle as a woman, if I had never been a woman, and did not know what it was. I don't suppose a horse is at all crestfallen because he is a horse. On the contrary, if he is a thorough-bred, blood horse, he is a proud and happy fellow, prancing, spirited, magnificent. So a man may be so magnificently manly that one shall say, Surely this is the monarch of the universe; and hide and shag and mane shall be vitalized with a matchless glory. Let a man make himself grand in his own sphere, and not sit down and moan because he is only a connecting link between a horse and a woman.
I suppose Mother Church is fully cognizant of the true state of affairs, and thinks men already sufficiently Satyric, but woman must be ground