Modesty and Romance
A person can therefore no more promise to love or not to love
than he can promise to live long. What he can promise is to take
good care of his life and of his love.--ELLEN KEY.
Artists clearly, and poets in veiled language, have in all
ages, expressed the glory of the naked human body. Before the
Venus of Milo in her Paris home, even the empty-headed and
ridiculously-dressed creatures of fashion stand for a moment with
a catch in the throat and a sense that here is something full of
divine secrets. One day, when I was doing my reverence before
this ancient goddess, drinking in strength and happiness from the
harmonies of her curves, a preposterously corsetted doll came up
to the statue, paused, and said with tears in her voice to the man
beside her: "Hasn't she got the _loveliest_ figure!"
If cold marble so stirs us, how much more the warmth and vitality of
living beauty! Any well-formed young man or woman is immeasurably
more graceful when free from the clinging follies of modern dress,
while a beautiful woman's body has a supernal loveliness at which
no words short of a poetic rapture can even hint. Our race has so
long neglected the culture of human beauty that a sad proportion of
mature men and women are unattractive; but most young people have
the elements of beauty, and to them chiefly this book is addressed.
A young man or woman perfectly naked _cannot_ be tawdry. The
fripperies, the jagged curves and inharmonious lines and colours
of the so-called "adornments" are surmounted, and the naked figure
stepping from their scattered pile is seen in its utter simplicity.
How charming even the raggedest little street urchins become when
they leave their rags on the bank and plunge into the water!
It is therefore not surprising that one of the innumerable sweet
impulses of love should be to reveal, each to each, this treasure of
living beauty. To give each other the right to enter and enjoy the
sight which most of all sights in the world draws and satisfies the
artist's eyes.
This impulse, however, is, on the part of the woman, swayed by two
at least of the natural results of her rhythmic tides. For some time
during each month, age-long tradition that she is "unclean," coupled
with her obvious requirements, have made her withdraw herself from
even her husband's gaze. But, on the other hand, there regularly
come times when her body is raised to a higher point of loveliness
than usual by the rounding and extra fullness of the breasts.
(This is one of the regular physiological results of the rhythmic
processes going on within her.) Partly or wholly unconscious of the
brilliance and full perfection of her beauty, she yet delights in
its gentle promptings to reveal itself to her lover's eyes when he
adores. This innocent, this goddess-like self-confidence retreats
when the natural ebb of her vitality returns.
How fortunate for man when these sweet changes in his lover are not
coerced into uniformity! For man has still so much of the ancient
hunter in his blood that beauty which is always at hand and ever
upon its pedestal must inevitably attract him far less than the
elusive and changing charms of rhythmic life. In the highly-evolved
and cultivated woman, who has wisdom enough not to restrict, but to
give full play to the great rhythms of her being, man's polygamous
instinct can be satisfied and charmed by the ever-changing aspects
of herself which naturally come uppermost. And one of her natural
phases is at times to retreat, to experience a profound sex
indifference, and passionately to resent any encroachment on her
solitude.
This is something woman too often forgets. She has been so
thoroughly "domesticated" by man that she feels too readily that
after marriage she is all his. And by her very docility to his
perpetual demands she destroys for him the elation, the palpitating
thrills and surprises, of the chase.
In the rather trivial terms of our sordid modern life, it works out
in many marriages somewhat as follows: The married pair share a
bedroom, and so it comes about that the two are together not only at
the times of delight and interest in each other, but during most of
the unlovely and even ridiculous proceedings of the toilet. Now it
may enchant a man once--perhaps even twice--or at long intervals--to
watch his goddess screw her hair up into a tight and unbecoming knot
and soap her ears. But it is inherently too unlovely a proceeding to
retain indefinite enchantment. To see a beautiful woman floating in
the deep, clear water of her bath--that may enchant for ever, for
it is so lovely, but the unbeautiful trivialities essential to the
daily toilet tend only to blur the picture and to dull the interest
and attention that should be bestowed on the body of the loved one.
Hence, ultimately, everyday association in the commonplace daily
necessities tends to reduce the keen pleasure each takes in the
other. And hence, inevitably and tragically, though stealthily and
unperceived, to reduce the keenness of stimulation the pair exert
on each other, and thus to lower their intensity of the consummation
of the sex act, and hence to lower its physiological value.[10]
[10] A quotation from Thomas (p. 112 of William Thomas' book "Sex
and Society," 1907, Pp. 314) is here very apt, though he had been
speaking not of man, but of the love play and coyness shown by
female birds and animals.
"We must also recognise the fact that reproductive life must be
connected with violent stimulation, or it would be neglected and
the species would become extinct; and on the other hand, if the
conquest of the female were too easy, sexual life would be in danger
of becoming a play interest and a dissipation, destructive of energy
and fatal to the species. Working, we may assume, by a process of
selection and survival, nature has both secured and safeguarded
reproduction. The female will not submit to seizure except in a
high state of nervous excitation (as is seen especially well in the
wooing of birds), while the male must conduct himself in such a
way as to manipulate the female; and, as the more active agent, he
develops a marvellous display of technique for this purpose. This
is offset by the coyness and coquetry of the female, by which she
equally attracts and fascinates the male, and practises upon him to
induce a corresponding state of nervous excitation."
In short, the overcoming of her personal modesty, which is generally
looked on as an essential result in marriage where the woman becomes
wholly the man's, has generated among our women a tradition that
before their husbands they can perform any and all of the details of
personal and domestic duties. Correspondingly, they allow the man to
be neglectful of preserving some reticence before them. This mutual
possession of the lower and more elementary experiences of life has
been, in innumerable marriages, a factor in destroying the mutual
possession of life's higher and more poetic charms.
And woman's beauty wanes too often more through neglect than
through age. The man, with the radiant picture of his bride blurred
by the daily less lovely aspects, may cease to remind her by acts
of courtship that her body is precious. But many men by whom each
aspect of their wives is noted, are often hurt by woman's stupidity
or neglect of herself. Women lose their grace of motion by relying
on artificial bones and stiffenings, and clog their movements with
heavy and absurdly fashioned garments. They forget how immeasurably
they can control not only their clothed appearance but the very
structure of their bodies by the things they eat and do, by the very
thoughts they think.
A wise man once said that a woman deserved no credit for her beauty
at sixteen, but beauty at sixty was her own soul's doing. I would
that all the world so thirsted for beauty that we moulded the whole
race into as lovely forms as the Greeks created.
In this respect I am inclined to think that man suffers more
than woman. For man is still essentially the hunter, the one who
experiences the desires and thrills of the chase, and dreams ever of
coming unawares upon Diana in the woodlands. On the other hand, the
married woman, having once yielded all, tends to remain passively in
the man's companionship.
Though it may appear trivial beside the profound physiological
factors considered in recent chapters, I think that, in the
interests of husbands, an important piece of advice to wives is: Be
always escaping. Escape the lower, the trivial, the sordid. So far
as possible (and this is far more possible than appears at first,
and requires only a little care and rearrangement in the habits of
the household) ensure that you allow your husband to come upon you
only when there is delight in the meeting. Whenever the finances
allow, the husband and wife should have separate bedrooms. No soul
can grow to its full stature without spells of solitude. A married
woman's body and soul should be essentially her own, and that can
only be so if she has an inviolable retreat. But at the same time
the custom of having separate rooms should not mean, as it often
does, that the husband only comes to his wife's room when he has
some demand to make upon her. Nothing is more calculated to inhibit
all desire for union in a sensitive wife than the knowledge of what
her husband wants when he comes, however lovingly, to her side.
Every night, unless something prevents, there should be the tender
companionship and whispered intimacies which are, to many people,
only possible in the dark. The "good-night" should be a time of
delightful forgetting of the outward scars of the years, and a
warm, tender, perhaps playful exchange of confidences. This is not
incompatible with what has been said in the previous chapters, and
when this custom is maintained it overcomes the objection some
people make to separate rooms as a source of estrangements.