MARY JOHNSTON ON PROGRESS1

Reported verbatim in the Woman’s Journal March 11, 1911, page 2.2

At the suffrage dinner recently given in Baltimore, Miss Mary Johnston said:

All United

It is so comfortable to know that we are all of one mind! No opponents, no antagonists!—just us. It is lovely to be addressing a co-operative conclusion—our conclusion. Wherever look, I see my own opinion in a certain great matter. I uphold that opinion; I believe it to be a right opinion, an adequate idea, and I am glad and glad again to meet it here in such strength tonight.

A Swiss Experience

The last time that I was in Lucerne, after I had sat for a while before the Lion, and had gone into the glacier garden, and watched the glacier mill at work, and into the museum, and into the shop where they sell fossils, and purchased Stenoplebia aequalis Kimmeridgien,3 I was tempted into the Crystal Maze, and then into some kind of an ascending apparatus in which you stood as in a lift and saw yourself reflected a thousand times or two. Mary Johnstons to the right of me, Mary Johnstons to the left of me, Mary Johnstons before me—a vast crowd of Mary Johnstons! I cannot say that it was altogether a pleasant experience, saw a number of things I should like to change in Mary Johnston. So it is, I imagine, with very many of us when we look upon this—our world. This our world is very largely—just us. By our presence here tonight we declare—do we not?—that there are certain things in this old world of ours—which is just us—that need changing, and that we are enlisted in the fight to change them.

Change and Progress

That is what emerges, clearer and clearer, from this movement of ours. Change–and change in the right direction! It is what I wish; it is what I welcome. The thing in the cocoon is to become the thing with wings. I am today. I will be tomorrow. But I wish to be, tomorrow, stronger and greater than I am today. Beyond the cocoon, the flitting life; beyond the flitting life, Psyche4 with her wings.

Looking Before and After*

Mine is the type of mind that looks before and after. Thousands of years ago, a thousand years to come, are to me very nearly as real as is this eighteenth of February, 1911. In thought I revisit, I forecast. I think in both directions. Tonight I see before me confederated mind. We are all facets of the same crystal, leaves of the same tree, waves of the same ocean. I am in my own tribe, and I speak to my own people. Indulge me a little, then, while I talk as I think.

The Turn of the Road

The evolutionary lane is long, but it is a long lane indeed that has no turning. This one has had many, and always, where it bends, there is a signpost, and before the willy-nilly travellers upon that road spreads a vast new landscape. Far back, far back, coming out of the land called Azoic5, the road turned. The sign-post was but a microscopic speck of protoplasm, but the imagination of it strikes so deep and towers so high that we see neither base nor summit. The name of that sign-post was Life, and the landscape seen from that turn of the road was marvellous beyond marvel, terrible beyond terror, beautiful beyond beauty. On went the road, and it turned again at Sensation, and it turned again at Intelligence, and it turned again at Sex. And then it went on through great lands and ages, past the fish in the seas, and the amphibians in the steamy, reedy littoral6, and the great reptiles in the fens, and the marsupials on the grassy plains, and the simian folk in the tropical forest. And there came a great sign-post called Intellect, and the road turned there. And presently it encountered another very great sign-post called Humanity. Since then the road has gone straight on. But there is a light in the sky, and a wind blowing fresh. At times we almost see another sign-post.

On the Humanity stretch of the road there have been sign-marks, too—lesser ones than the gigantic marks where the road turns at right angles, but still great figures set for signs, and where they are set the view, too, changes. They are great enough; they are only less than the first. They are set for mighty realms in the stretch called Human.

The Mother Age

The first has for its sign the form of a woman. Ages and ages she dominates—that woman figure, strong and free. The Mother—Mother Heart, Mother Country, Mother Age, Mother Love, Mother Nature—Mother and Priestess, she stands there!—a babe at her breast. . . . There is an undulation in the road, a deflection. Mists rise and hide the ancient sign. Up looms a newer mark, child of the other. Who is this in the red and purple light, with the incense streaming up, with the hunting horn and the war drum, with the captives and the victims, with inventive genius his slave of the ring, and coordinating mind his slave of the lamp, with pomp and glory and empire and sway? This is Man, and for ages and ages his hand is raised, and his shadow falls. He is Caesar, crowned and wearing purple, and in his triumph walks a veiled and shadowy figure—walks the ancient queen and priestess—walks the mother. . . . It has lasted long, long, long! that stretch of the road.

The Upward Slope

It is plain behind us. We have hardly yet left it. We are just where the land rises, more and more swiftly rises, to the frontier of an empire, greater than all before. The signs here are twain; they are two forms; they are a man and a woman. They stand equal, hand in hand, and over the country is a rainbow, and beyond are vast and flowery slopes mounting to something wonderful, and before the two, up and up, ever higher and higher, walks a child. The child goes toward the light in the sky, toward the wind blowing so fresh, toward the greater sign-post than all before.

Man, man! Woman, woman! Is not this that we are entering a happier land? Is it not better to go upon this so wonderful a journey of ours hand in hand? Do we want any longer masters and slaves, kings and subjects, governors and governed, owners and chattels? Do we not want allies, friends, comrades? Oh, this country that we are entering is a fairer and a greater country than the one that fades behind us! Here are lovers that are lovers indeed. Here are homes that are homes indeed. Here is romance that is romance indeed. It blooms all along the way. Trust is here, and understanding, and a mutual courtesy, and a great sweetness and a beauty not found before; and in this land Love has his capital city. Here is virtue that is virtue indeed, and here is honest dealing that is honest dealing indeed, and here is religion that is religion indeed. In this land grow purpose, and intention, and courage, and high endeavor, and noble accomplishment. And one of the names of the country is Justice, and another is Altruism.

When disease is no more.
When poverty has become plenty.
When the Father’s heart has waked.
When the mother’s brain is cared for.
When the two Powers link hands and are equal.
When, generation by generation, the child mounts the stairs.

Then will come the wonderful days!
Then will the dawn come up with singing,
With sweet chants and carols the golden age.
The golden age ne’er dwelt in the dusk behind us.
The golden age dwells in the time before us.
Through it, like double stars, move the two Powers;—
Wisdom and strength and power and love,
Beauty exceeding in man and in woman,
Artists and builders, vast wielders of thought,
Rejoicers in good, great discoverers of better,
Hero and heroine, demigod and goddess!
New worlds shall they find, greater than that which the Genoese admiral found!
They shall plumb the depths, they shall mount the heights.
Life of the body shall be theirs, undreamed length of years.
The poison wells all dried, the wild beasts slain!—
Life of the body closes; but the psychic goes forth,
Taking its birth from life; immaterial thought,
Stamped by the thought of the past, as was life by the life of the past.
Idea, knowledge, will, purpose, cohering; organized thought!

Demigod and goddess, their temples are the Whole!
As we to the Bronze Age, so shall be their minds to ours.
Secure, swift, they will send their thought where they will, and when they will.
They will speak, each to the other, though the earth were between.
They will range the past with their thought, and see it as in clear day.
They will look on the Permian7 hills and mark the great ferns where they grew.
Leviathan and behemoth will they note in their wanderings.
They will move through the colored forest, old haunt of the simian,
While the rain patters on the leaves, and the red and green parrots sit disconsolate.
They will watch the cave man chipping arrow heads, and the cave woman with her brood.
They will visit the Kings of the East, Babylon and Bagdad.
Egypt will they reconstruct, and rebuild again the town of Troy.
They will see the Vikings, and Alfred, and the Court of Charlemagne.
They will see the first tool, and the first weapon, and the first ship, and the first book.
Theirs is the past to note, observe and ponder; ah, may be,
Theirs is the past to change, relive and alter,
Wipe out old stains, old woes, away old tears!
We do not know the strength of those great brains of theirs,
And Time once again, forever gone, may be a fiction!

For theirs will be constructive thought, imagination,
Intuition, power, freedom, sway!
Think half a year, we cannot think what they
Will doff aside as but the fancy’s play.
Strain vision to the utmost, we only see a light!
Beyond it lies their world in splendour and in grace,
Where they stand in clean, fair cities, where, hand in hand, they move
Through their gardens filled with fountains, where they smile in love
On the child who runs before them, up the splendid, splendid road.
Oh, their earth so blooms and blossoms! And the child is singing,
Carols for light-heartedness in the happy golden age!
Ah, the beauty that they see! Ah, the worth, the majesty!
Man and woman, equal, holding high the happy child!—
Demigod and goddess, they also look beyond.
They see a light we see not; they guess a vaster star.
They hear a music of the spheres. The wind comes fresh to them.

Footnotes

  1. Johnston was the keynote speaker at a major East Coast suffrage event coordinated by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Her speech was then published in the Woman’s Journal, the official publication of NAWSA. In this speech, one hears strains of optimistic faith in evolutionary progress that would be further developed in The Wanderers six years later. ↩

  2. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusettes https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:53675989$80i. ↩

  3. Tourist activities in Lucerne ↩

  4. The Greek personification of the human soul is imaged as a female butterfly. ↩

  5. Relating to the Precambrian eon, in which there was no life on the earth. ↩

  6. Related to shoreline or coastal ↩

  7. Prehistoric geological formations ↩