Most of us are old who sit in the seats whereon are the names of the dead. I am, I believe, next to the youngest member, and I am not young. I put my vote the other day for several younger than I, so that new life may come in and early enough to enjoy the company of the learned. For there is no doubt that the Academy is the company of the learned. I keep a respectful silence most of the time, for the learning of these learned men is not profoundly my own. They are the musicians, the painters, the writers, the architects of the United States. I am still studying the subjects which they have made theirs long since and in which they are eminent, while I can never be but an amateur. I comfort myself with the thought that there are also many things I know which they do not.
For example, although they discuss so beautifully the symbolism of Mallarmé, do they know the symbolism of the famous essayists, or the hidden novelists, of China? These are never discussed. And for another example, among The Hundred Books, those classics which Western scholars have chosen to represent the sources of human civilization, there was not one Asian book, although in Asia great civilizations flourished long before our day and still exist in revitalized strength. “Why,” I asked an American scholar, “are there no books from Asia in The Great One Hundred?”
“Because,” he said quite honestly but without the least sign of guilt, “nobody knows anything about them!”
Nobody? Only millions of people! Ah, well—
Meanwhile I like very much to be in this company of the learned, deservedly or not. They are truly learned men and therefore without conceit and bombast. They are simple in manner, kind and mildly humorous, and they are careful not to wound one another. This is because they are civilized as learning alone can civilize the human being. I like to hear them speak even of unfamiliar subjects, for their voices are pleasant and their language often quite beautiful. Whatever their appearance, they have the gentle look of scholars, not dead but living in a pure and vital atmosphere. They jest now and then about the graves outside the window, for they are aware of their destination, but none is afraid. They are part of a stream, a river, that, broadening, carries mankind toward a vast eternal sea. Each knows his worth and yet his humble place. In this atmosphere I feel at home, for it is the atmosphere of scholars in every country and, I daresay, in every age.
Today it is winter, the tree will be bare against the grey sky and the tombstones will stand stark. But the next time we meet it will be spring.
When I look back over the twenty years that I have now lived in my own country, I realize that I still do not see my people plain. The years are rich with living, but life does not flow here in a river as it did in China. I see it as a series of incidents and events and experiences, each separate, sometimes complete, but always separate. The parts do not yet make a whole. And I am quite aware of the historical fact that our national life broke in two pieces in 1914, when the First World War began, so that what we were before we never can be again. There is no normalcy for us, no point of return. We can only go on, whatever the risks of the future.
Take the subject of women, for example. American women always absorb my interest, I watch them everywhere I go, I ponder upon them, I observe the way they talk and think and behave. Years ago I wrote a little book called Of Men and Women. So changeful is the American scene that while the book remains true in principle — that is, as it pertains to the relationship between men and women in the United States — yet women have changed very much since I wrote it. The present generation of young women, the daughters of the mothers about whom I wrote, are not “gunpowder women” as I called their mothers then. They are almost Victorian in their desire to marry, to be supported by their husbands, to have children, to do nothing outside the home. In spite of the fact that these young women are compelled to do a great deal outside the home, they seldom enjoy it, and they want now above all else, it seems, to be given an excuse, a moral reason, why they should give up outside interests. They want big families to provide the reason, they proclaim boldly that they take jobs only because they must. In this generation a girl is not ashamed to say that she wants to marry, and she appraises every man she meets, married or not, as a possible husband for herself.
Perhaps men do not accept marriage as necessary to a man’s estate as once they did. Military life, it is said, does a damage to normal life for a man. It not only increases the number of homosexuals, but it persuades men to consider life without marriage as good enough. In military life men find their companionship with men, and sex becomes a physical rather than an emotional experience. Once in so often a man needs a woman physically, and when that time comes he can go out and find her easily enough and often without paying money for it. Why, then, the emotionally dwarfed man inquires, should he burden himself with the responsibilities of wife and children? The number of men who find civilian life unsatisfactory and return to the shelter of the armed forces has never been made public but it is worth study, and women ought to be the students. If they crave home and family as they now seem to do, they had better find out how to fulfill their longings.
The pursuit of men by women is not healthy. It is a portent of totalitarianism. In prewar Germany homosexuality was rife as it usually is in militaristic societies, and women, knowing or not knowing, felt that they were not desirable in the old ways and they became abject and fawning before men. I do not like to see American girls in this generation give up their own individualities in order to attract men, for if men can be attracted by such behavior, then it is alarming. And it is alarming that girls stake so much on marriage so that if they do not marry they consider themselves failures, even though marriage should be the proper goal of men and women alike, an inevitable and desirable state, if society is in balance.
There will come a time, I daresay, when a sensible means will be developed for men and women to marry and as a matter of course, so that any one who wishes to marry will have a dignified and sane opportunity to meet persons suitable for marriage, and when, if individuals need help for the final arrangements of betrothal and wedding, it can be provided. In China this was done by the parents of both boy and girl. Who, the Chinese used to say to me, can know son or daughter better than his own parents, and who therefore is more suited to find a proper mate? Americans, unless family life becomes much broader and more stabilized than it is at present, will scarcely accept the parental control of marital fate, but it may be that our increasing trust in scientists will lead us to put our faith in those who may specialize in matching mates. Adoption agencies make great ado about matching adoptable children to the color, creed, environment, temperaments, the race, and the likes and dislikes of adoptive parents, thereby incidentally forcing many good people to remain childless because their individual peculiarities are not reproduced in children available for adoption, any more than they would probably be if they gave birth to a child. I have known parents with red hair and freckled complexions who gave birth to a black-haired, black-eyed child, and no one took the child away from them. Indeed I once knew a Canadian storekeeper in China who was brunette, and so was his wife, and in honorable matrimony they had six children, two black-haired and black-eyed, two red-haired and green-eyed and two yellow-haired and blue-eyed, with complexions to match the three varieties. Yet they were allowed to keep all these children, the ones that matched them and the ones that did not. But social workers are trained to be careful of their colors and their creeds, and I daresay that as time goes on we shall develop social work still further and then we shall find ourselves in the hands of matchmakers in marriage as well as in adoption. Men and women being born in about the same assortment, however, some shuffling will doubtless result in everybody finding the right person, scientifically at least, to marry.