13.


Women and the Emotions


The fact that women have a greater capacity than men for
controlling and concealing their emotions is not an indication
that they are more civilized, but a proof that they are less civilized.
This capacity, so rare today, and withal so valuable and worthy of
respect, is a characteristic of savages, not of civilized men, and its
loss is one of the penalties that the race has paid for the tawdry boon
of civilization. Your true savage, reserved, dignified, and courteous,
knows how to mask his feelings, even in the face of the most
desperate assault upon them; your civilized man is forever yielding
to them. Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and
hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a
mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep
the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by
an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are
no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging
dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the
effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a
mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine
fury. Here the effect of civilization has been to reduce the
noblest of the arts, once the repository of an exalted etiquette and
the chosen avocation of the very best men of the race, to the level of
a riot of peasants. All the wars of Christendom are now disgusting
and degrading; the conduct of them has passed out of the hands of