Baltimore Evening Sun (1 September 1911): 6.

THE FREE LANCE

If, in point of actual fact, the great masses of the plain people are intelligent enough and honest enough to rule themselves, then the direct primary is an invention as noble as the sonnet, the corkscrew or the Bismarck herring. But–

From one corrupted by the prejudices of an outworn dehumanized morality:

You are all wrong about swearing. It may not be actually sinful, but it is certainly a dirty and unnecessary custom. Would you swear in the presence of a lady—your wife, for example? And, if so, would you like to hear her swear back?

Why not, good friend? It so happens that I am fortunate enouhh to lack a wife, and that, in consequence, I lack nine-tenths of the average married man’s excuse for swearing, but if I had one it is extremely probable that I should swear in her hearing now and then, and not only in her hearing, but also occasionally at her. At no other place, indeed, is swearing so necessary an art and so benign in its effects as at the domestic hearth. Life there is constantly made uncomfortable by petty irritations, by small differences of opinion, by minor conflicts over nothing—and it is for just such microscopic wounds that swearing is a sovereign balsam. As I said the other day, quoting Lord Crewe, the loudest “damn” ever uttered will not appreciably ameliorate actual tragedy. But even a whispered, pianissimo damn, inaudible six feet away, will help a man to bear a splinter in his heel. And by the same token it will also enable him to bear cold soup, a greasy chop, the squawk of an infant, the Czerny exercises or the news of a maternolegal visit.

I speak, of course, of the swearing of civilized men—of swearing as it has been mellowed and refined by 2,000 years of human thought and effort—not of the coarse, vulgar swearing of stevedores, stage managers and ward heelers, but of the refined and exquisite swearing of the sensitive—of men who feel the most delicate nuances of propriety and wash behind the ears. Such swearing relieves the performer without offering the slightest offense to the audience. It is neither blasphemous nor indecent. The high, astounding terms in which it is couched are in themselves no more high or astounding than the incantations of an Emmanuel Mover. It is their emotional content that makes them hiss and sting—and the man of education sees to it that their emotional content is never excessive. The civilized Anglo-Saxon, indeed, is not emotional—his passions are always in hand.

It is a common superstition, of course, that all swearing, however marked its artistic restraint and reticence, is offensive t ladies, and ladies themselves, being the most superstitious class among us, usually think that it is, and conduct themselves accordingly. But the opinion of ladies, even about their own feelings, is not worth considering, nor even worth hearing. As I have pointed out in the past, they constitute an artifical and denaturized class or sect of human beings—a class from which all the actual weaknesses of humanity have been theoretically removed. and into which a large number of imaginary and disgusting weaknesses have been introduced. Thus, it is maintained, by those who take conventions seriously, that one whiff of cigar smoke will make a lady sick; that a lady who has been napping at a matinee all afternoon is less able to stand up in a street car than a man who has been working hard all day; that an indelicate jocosity, in a book or on the stage, gives every lady acute anguish. And in the same way it is maintained that swearing wrings her heart.

Poppycock! Don’t believe it, my dear sir, or madam. As a matter of fact, the lady is a mere human being, like the rest of us, and if she has intelligence, she must get an agreeable thrill out of artistic swearing, as one gets a thrill out of any noble work of art. She herself is not above practicing the craft profane. She has, in, brief, her own little vocabulary of cuss-words—her “Mercy me!” her “Goodness gracious!” her “Oh, bother!” and so on—and many of these fragile things are more sulphurous at bottom then the favorites in the pharmacopœia of man, as any honest etymologist will tell you. And as civilization overtakes her, as she emerges from her cocoon of conscious and unconscious fraud, as she takes her proper place among normal human beings, she will drop these dubious sweets and take to the honest, straightforward, unashamed swearing of her present lords protector. That is one of the boons the suffrage will bring us.

Meanwhile, I freely confess that most husbands (and I suppose I should be among them if I had a wife) object to workmanlike swearing by their wives. But moralists and other such ignoranti mistake the reason. It is not because intelligent men think that swearing is degrading, but because they wish to retain a monopoly upon that subtle art, and so retain the ancient superiority of their sex. For the very same reason they object to smoking, to poker playing and to wine-bibbing among women, though they themselves practice all of those sciences incessantly. It Is man, indeed, that has foisted upon the lady all of her theoretical weaknesses, and made her believe in them herself, for it is only by making her ignorant and weak that he can keep her a slave.

This, I am convinced, is why the average husband is outraged when his wife, by any chance, shown enterprise enough to study and master swearing. It is not that he objects to the thing itself, but that he objects to the possession of so lordly a mystery by one over whom he yearns to exercise a despotic sway. A wife who can swear is a wife to be handled with care. No longer defenseless, she can give as well as take—and so she becomes a dangerous anarchist, a standing menace to the kingship of her lawful boss. Her feminine chicanery he understands, and so he can meet and circumvent it. But when she borrows masculine lightnings and has at him with a roar, then he must needs fight for his life, and perchance go down to ignominious flabbergasting before a superior technique, a greater natural gift.

The Voice of the People, as it beats upon the pane:

I don’t know nobody I wouldn’t have sooner saw nominated than Tom McNulty. The next Legislature ought to be a juicy session.

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Contributions to the new thesaurus of unprecedented similes: