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Woman and Labour-Part22_Oliver Schreiner(1855-1920)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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increasing intercourse between distant races and lands, brought about by



rapid means of intercommunication, widening and changing in every direction

the human horizon--all these produce a society, so complex and so rapidly



altering, that social co-ordination between all its parts is impossible;

and social unrest, and the strife of ideals of faiths, of institutions, and



consequent human suffering is inevitable.

If the ancient guns and agricultural implements which our fathers taught us



to use are valueless in the hands of their descendants, if the samplers our

mothers worked and the stockings they knitted are become superfluous



through the action of the modern loom, yet more are their social

institutions, faiths, and manners of life become daily and increasingly



unfitted to our use; and friction and sufferinginevitable, especially for

the most advanced and modified individuals in our societies. This



suffering, if we analyse it closely, rises from three causes.

Firstly, it is caused by the fact that mere excessiverapidity of change



tends always easily to become painful, by rupturing violently already

hardened habits and modes of thought, as a very rapidly growing tree



ruptures its bark and exudes its internal juices.

Secondly, it arises from the fact that individuals of the same human



society, not adapting themselves at the same rate to the new conditions, or

being exposed to them in different degrees, a wide and almost unparalleled



dissimilarity has today arisen between the different individuals composing

our societies; where, side by side with men and women who have rapidly



adapted or are so successfully seeking to adapt themselves to the new

conditions of knowledge and new conditions of life, that, were they to



reappear in future ages in more co-ordinated societies, they might perhaps

hardly appear wholly antiquated, are to be found men and women whose



social, religious, and moral ideals would not constitute them out of

harmony if returned to the primitive camps of the remote forbears of the



human race; while, between these extreme classes lies that large mass of

persons in an intermediate state of development. This diversity is bound



to cause friction and suffering in the interactions of the members of our

societies; more especially, as the individuals composing each type are not



sorted out into classes and families, but are found scattered through all

classes and grades in our societies. (One of the women holding the most



advanced and modern view of the relation of woman to life whom we have met

was the wife of a Northamptonshire shoemaker; herself engaged in making her



living by the sewing of the uppers of men's boots.) Persons bound by the

closest ties of blood or social contiguity and compelled to a continual



intercourse, are often those most widely dissevered in their amount of

adaptation to the new conditions of life; and the amount of social friction



and consequent human suffering arising from this fact is so subtle and

almost incalculable, that perhaps it is impossible adequately to portray it



in dry didactic language: it is only truly describable in the medium of

art, where actualconcrete individuals are shown acting and reacting on



each other--as in the novel or the drama. We are like a company of chess-

men, not sorted out in kinds, pawns together, kings and queens together,



and knights and rooks together, but simply thrown at haphazard into a box,

and jumbled side by side. In the stationary societies, where all



individuals were permeated by the same political, religious, moral, and

social ideas; and where each class had its own hereditary and fixed



traditions of action and manners, this cause of friction and suffering had

of necessity no existence; individual differences and discord might be



occasioned by personal greeds, ambitions, and selfishnesses, but not by

conflicting conceptions of right and wrong, of the desirable and



undesirable, in all branches of human life. (Only those who have been

thrown into contact with a stationary and homogeneous society such as that



of primitive African tribes before coming in contact with Europeans; or




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