The Physiology of Vanity

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The Physiology of Vanity

[Sidenote:  Conceit and Vanity]

“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” It is the common human emotion, the root of the personal equation, the battling residuum in the last analysis of social chemistry.  There is a wide difference between conceit and vanity.  Conceit is lovable and unconcealed; vanity is supreme selfishness, usually hidden.  Conceit is based upon an unselfish desire to please; vanity takes no thought of others which is not based upon egotism.

Vanity and jealousy are closely allied, while conceit is a natural development of altruistic virtue.  Conceit is the mildest of vices; vanity is the worst.  Men are usually conceited but infrequently vain, while women are seldom afflicted with the lesser vice.

Man’s conceit is the simplest form of self-appreciation.  He thinks he is extremely good-looking, as men go; that he has seen the world; that he is a good judge of dinners and of human nature; that he is one of the few men who may easily charm a woman.

The limits of man’s conceit are usually in full view, but eye nor opera-glass has not yet approached the end of woman’s vanity.  The disease is contagious, and the men who suffer from it are usually those whose chosen companions are women.

Woman’s vanity is a development of her insatiate thirst for love.  Her smiles and tears are all-powerful with her lover, and nothing goes so quickly to a woman’s head as a sense of power.  She forever defies the Salic law—­each woman feels that her rightful place is upon a throne.

[Sidenote:  The One Object]

The one object of woman’s life is the acquirement of power through love.  It is because this power is freely recognised by the men who seek her in marriage that her vanity seldom has full scope until after she is married.

[Sidenote:  The Destroyer]

After marriage, a great many women begin the slow process of alienating a man from his family, blind to the fact that by lessening his love for others, they add nothing to their own store.  The filial and fraternal love is not to be given to anyone but mother and sisters—­they have no place in a man’s heart that another woman could fill.  The destroyer simply obliterates that part of his life and offers nothing in its place.

The achievement sometimes takes years, but it is none the less sure.  Later, it may be extended to father and brothers, but they are always the last to be considered.

It is most difficult of all to break the tie which binds a man to his mother.  The one who bore him is not faultless, for motherhood brings new gifts of feeling, sometimes sacrificing judgment and clear vision to selfish unselfishness.  It is only in fiction and poetry that such love is valued now, for the divine blindness which does not question, which asks only the right to give, has lost beauty in our age of reason and restraint.