How dwarfed against his manliness she sees the poor pretension, the wants, the aims, the follies, born of fashion and convention!
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All education should be directed toward the refinement of the individual's sensibilities in relation not only to one's fellow humans everywhere, but to all things whatsoever. In the societies of the Western world compassionate intelligence is encouraged in girls - in boys it is tabu. The tabu on tenderness in which boys are conditioned, the emphasis on 'manliness,' 'machoism,' plays havoc with the male's capacity for compassionate intelligence. Tenderness is considered to be feminine, and that is sufficient to remove it from the repertoire of masculine behavior. Indeed, things have reached such a pass in the Western world that many men seem to have lost all understanding of its meaning. The masculine world would substitute for it the idea of 'justice.' The difficulty with that is that there is not much compassion in their justice, and justice without compassion is not justice at all.
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Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together, I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.
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History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.
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Private and public life are subject to the same rules; and truth and manliness are two qualities that will carry you through this world much better than policy, or tact, or expediency, or any other word that was ever devised to conceal or mystify a deviation from the straight line.
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Do not fall prey to the false belief that mastery and domination are synonymous with manliness.
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In all the silent manliness of grief.
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