of men, on the assumption that there is something in sex too shameful to
be spoken about or looked at in the light. We set out, I repeat, on our
campaign without a map of the country and with our compasses pointing the
wrong way. And this, above all, is true when repression has caused some
actual perversion in the mind, some arrested development, some abnormal
condition. This is not always the consequence of deliberate repression on
the part of the individual, but it is, I believe, often the consequence
of an artificial state of civilization; an attitude towards a great and
wonderful impulse which has perverted our whole view of what is divine and
lovely in human nature. Whatever the cause, the result is abnormality of
some kind, and to people who have suffered so, I want, above all, to say
this: light and understanding are needed more by you, perhaps, than by
anyone else, and to you, above all, they have been denied. Loneliness,
isolation, the loss of self-respect, the darkness of ignorance have
surrounded those to whom the sacrifice has been hardest, and, therefore,
the repression, whether racial or individual, most disastrous. You can,
if you choose, leave the world a nobler place because you let light in on
these dark places. Do not say to yourselves that your suffering is useless
and purposeless because it is no good to anyone: no one knows of it: no
one understands it: and, therefore, it has all the additional bitterness of
being to no purpose. That need not be true. Ignorance need not continue.
If you will try to make your suffering of service to the world, it is not
difficult to measure how great may be our advance in fundamental morality
in this present generation.
We do not know yet of what human nature is capable, and those who are
studying the human mind are perhaps the greatest of all pioneers at the
present moment. Some of you have trusted me, and by your trust have enabled
me to help other people. Others of you, perhaps, have yourselves become or
will become students of psychology. You will advance a little further in a
science which is as yet only making its first uncertain steps. Even if you
do none of these things, yet if you will try to understand yourselves, by
the mere fact that you understand, you will find that you are able to help
other people--other people whose condition is most tragic, most lonely--to
face with courage the problem they share with you.[D] Try to solve it, as
you can. You will gain in understanding and strength, so that those in yet
greater need will instinctively come to you for help. Base your own moral
standard on all that is noble, and wise and human, and you will find that
in you the spiritual begins so to dominate the physical that others will
see its power and come to you for help.
[Footnote D: This subject is more fully dealt with in the next chapter.]
"With aching hands and bleeding feet,
We toil and toil; lay stone on stone.
Not till the light of day return
All we have built shall we discern."
Now let us turn to the other side of the problem--the more normal relations
of men and women who are lovers, who are husbands and wives. May I again
recapitulate what appears to be the history of many married people, even in
1921.
Let me remind you first that this contract of marriage is the most
important, probably, in the whole life of the man and woman who undertake
it; that it concerns human personality as perhaps no other relation in the
world does, so deeply, so closely, so intimately, that those who enter into
it are very near either to heaven or hell. The nearer you come to any
other human personality, the nearer you get to the supreme happiness or the
supreme failure. And when people enter on this relationship, how are they
prepared? Many of them are ignorant--and in the case of women often wholly
so--of what marriage actually involves. I find it difficult to speak in
measured terms of those parents who deliberately allow their daughters to
take a step which involves the whole of their future life and happiness,
and that of another human being also, in ignorance of what they are doing.
This relationship, which requires all the love and all the wisdom of men
and women--so much so that even those who do not call themselves Christians
often desire to go to a church and ask for the grace of God to enable
them to carry out so great an undertaking--is entered upon by people who
literally do not know what, from the very nature of marriage, is required
of them. I suppose many people will say that I speak of a state of things
which passed a generation ago. No, I do not. I speak of a state of things
that is only too common at this present time. I have known marriage after
marriage wrecked by the almost unbelievable ignorance that has been present
on both sides. I say both sides. First of all, there is the girl. To her,
marriage comes sometimes as so great a shock that her whole temperament is
warped and embittered by it. Then there is the man, equally ignorant--very
often, probably less ignorant of himself, but equally ignorant of her--not
realizing how she should be treated. They are often quite ignorant of each
other's views on marriage; of what sort of claims they are going to make
on each other; what each thinks about the duty of having children. These
elementary facts of human life, which must confront those who marry, are
faced by them without any kind of preparation, without the most rudimentary
knowledge of each other's point of view. And that there are so many happy
marriages in spite of all this makes one realize how extraordinarily loyal,
fine and courageous, on the whole, human nature is.
Only the other day I was speaking in a town in the north of England on this
very subject, and I got a letter afterwards to say that the writer had very
greatly enjoyed my address at the time. She had found it, she assured me,
inspiring and elevating. But she felt bound to write and tell me afterwards
(what she was sure would both shock and distress me) that she had found
that some of the people in my audience were actually acting on what I
said! I suppose every public speaker comes up against that sort of thing
sometimes--the calm assurance that you are merely talking in the air and
have not the slightest desire that anyone should act on what you say.
So this lady wrote to say that, though she and her husband had both been
greatly impressed by what I said, they were horrified to find that, as
a result, people were actually discussing with one another, before they
married, certain points which she mentioned to me and which she said they
ought never to discuss until they _were_ married. Is it not amazing
that anyone should seriously contend that it is better to arrive at an
understanding with the person he or she is about to marry _after_ marriage
than before? That people who would not dream of betraying anyone into any
kind of contract about which they were not satisfied that its terms were
understood should be willing to betray others--I deliberately call it
a betrayal--into a contract of such infinite importance, and positively
desire that they shall be ignorant of its nature?
It really seems sometimes as if pains were positively taken to mislead
those who are going to be married. One of the most amazing statements on
this subject, for instance, is contained in the marriage service of the
Church of England, where the bride and bridegroom are told that marriage
was ordained that "such persons as have not the gift of continency might
marry and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body." That there
should be anyone in the twentieth century who does not know that a man or
a woman who has not the gift of continency is totally unfit for marriage is
really rather startling. What such a person requires is both a divine and a
physician; but that he should be told that he is fit for marriage and
that marriage was expressly designed for him is not only misleading, it is
absolutely horrifying. It explains the tragic wreck which so many marriages
become after a comparatively short time.
I would urge, then, for the future, that we should not concentrate all
our moral, ethical, religious, and social force on perpetuating the tragic
failure of an empty marriage, but, rather, should concentrate our efforts
on trying to make people understand what marriage is; what their own
natures are; what marriage is going to demand from them; what they need in
order to make it noble. I urge, moreover, that the same principle should
apply to those who do not marry--that they also should learn in the
light what their difficulties are going to be; how to face their
own temperaments; how to deal with their own minds and bodies. Your
temperament, men and women, does not decide your destiny; it does decide
your trials. To know how to deal with it and how to make it your servant,
how so to enthrone spiritual power in your nature that it shall dominate
all that is physical, not as something base, but as a sacred and a
consecrated thing--it is on this that the teachers of to-day should
concentrate with all their power. It is true that when we have learnt
all that is possible from teaching, there is still something to learn. In
marriage is it possible to know finally until the final step is taken?
No, I do not think so. But when you consider how we have struggled against
ignorance, how many pitfalls have been put in the path of those who
desired knowledge, how we have, as it seems, done our best to make this
relationship a failure, surely it is worth while, at least, to try what
knowledge, and understanding, and education, and training _can_ do. We
cannot know all. That is no reason why we should not know all that we can.
Surely marriage must be a divine institution, since we have done so much
to make it a failure, and yet one sees again and again such splendid love,
such magnificent loyalty and faith! "You advocate," someone wrote to me the
other day, "you advocate that people should leave each other when they are
tired of each other." No, I do not advocate that anyone should accept
a failure. I advocate that every human being should do all that is
possible--more perhaps than is possible without the grace of God--to
make marriage the noble and lovely thing it should be. I think those are
faint-hearted who easily accept the fact that it is difficult, and from
that drift swiftly to the conclusion that for them it is impossible. I
advocate that the greatest faith and loyalty should be practised. I believe
in my heart that there is perhaps no relationship which cannot be redeemed
by the love and devotion and the grace of God in the hearts of those who
seek to make it redeemable. What I do say is that in Church and State we
should concentrate all our efforts on helping men and women to a wise,
enlightened, noble conception of marriage before they enter upon it, and
not on a futile and immoral attempt to hold them together by a mere legal
contract when all that made it valid has fled.
I believe that the more one knows of human nature the more one reverences
it. I believe that the vast majority of human beings strain every nerve
rather than fail in so great a responsibility. Do you remember reading in
Mr. Bertrand Russell's book, "Principles of Social Reconstruction," of
a little church of which it was discovered, not, I think, very long
ago, that, owing to some defect in its title, marriages which had been
celebrated there were not legal? Mr. Bertrand Russell says that there were
at that time I forget how many couples still living who had been married
in that church, who found that, by this legal defect, they were not legally
bound. Do you know how many of those married people seized the opportunity
to desert each other and go and marry somebody else? Not a single one!
Every one of those couples went quietly away to church and got married
again!
Religious people do sometimes think such mean things of human nature, and
human nature is, for the most part, so much nobler, so much more loyal, so
much more loving than we imagine. "Lift up your eyes unto the hills from
whence cometh your help." "He that walketh in the light, stumbleth not, for
he seeth the light of the world."
Let us face the future courageously, with great reverence for other
people's opinions and views. Let us not join that mob of shouters who are
prepared to howl at everyone who desires to say something that is not quite
orthodox, but which is their serious and considered contribution to a great
and difficult problem. Let us greet them with respect, however much we may
differ from them. Let us look forward without fear. Believe me, below all
the froth and scum of which we make so much, human nature is very noble.
Let us give that example to the world which is worth a thousand
arguments--the example of a noble married life, the example of a noble
single life. Those of you who are alone can do infinitely more for virtue
by being full of gentleness, wisdom, sanity, and love than by any harsh
repression of yourselves. It is by what you can make of celibacy that the
world will judge celibacy. And so of married lovers. Believe me, it is not
the children of married lovers who are rebels against a lofty standard.
Those who have seen with their eyes a lovely, faithful and unwavering love
are not easily satisfied with anything that is less. "Lift up your eyes
unto the hills. From whence cometh your strength." And in the light of a
great ideal, in the light of knowledge, sincerity and truth, in the light
of what I know of human nature, I, for one, am not afraid for the future
moral standard of this country.
VII
FRIENDSHIP
"Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and
in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than
eagles, they were stronger than lions. Ye daughters of Israel,
weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, with other
delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your apparel. How
are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! Oh Jonathan,
thou wast slain in thine high places. I am distressed for thee,
my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy
love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. How are
the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!" (II. Sam.
i. 23-27.)
"And Orpah kissed her mother-in-law; but Ruth clave unto her.
And she said, Behold thy sister-in-law has gone back unto her
people, and unto her gods: return thou after thy sister-in-law.
And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from
following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and
where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my
people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and
there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if
ought but death part me and thee." (Ruth i. 14-17.)
People have sometimes discussed with me whether it is right to have as
intense and absorbing a love for a friend of one's own sex as exists
between lovers. The word "absorbing" is perhaps the difficulty in their
minds. All love is essentially the same, and it has been pointed out that
the great classic instances of great love have been almost as often between
friends as between lovers. But the test of love's nobility remains
the same. If it is in the strict sense "absorbing"--if, that is, it is
exclusive, if it narrows one's interests instead of enlarging them, if it
involves a failure in love or sympathy with other people, it is wrong--it
is not in the true sense "love"; but if it enriches the understanding,
widens interest, deepens sympathy--if, in a word, to love one teaches us to
love others better, then it is good, it is love indeed. A friendship which
is of such character that no one outside it is of any interest, a maternal
love which not only concentrates on its own but wholly excludes all other
children, even a marriage which ultimately narrows rather than widens and
is exclusive in its interests, is a poor caricature of love. A young mother
may, in the first rapture of her motherhood, seem wholly absorbed; but,
as a matter of fact, she generally ends by caring more for _all_ children
because she loves one so deeply. Even lovers, after the first absorption of
newly-discovered joy, must learn to share their happiness and the happiness
of their home with others if it is not to grow hard and dull. And friends
may easily estimate the worth of their friendship by the measure with which
it has humanized their relations to all other human beings.
There is another test also for love: Does it express itself naturally and
rightly? This test is much more difficult to apply. One may believe
that all love is essentially the same, but it is certain that all human
relationships are not the same, and, therefore, love cannot always be
expressed in the same way; but it is not possible to lay down any exact
rule between the sort of "expression" legitimate to each. Everyone
must have suffered sometimes from a sense of having forced undesired
demonstrations on other people, or having them forced on oneself. One's
suffering in the first instance is intensified by the knowledge of the
extremity of revolt created by the second. There is nothing, I suppose,
more acutely painful than the sense of being compelled to accept
demonstrations of affection to which one cannot in the same way respond.
I believe that this shrinking from expressions which seem unnatural,
is rightly intensified a hundredfold when the sense of wrongness or
"unnaturalness" is due not to the individual but to the relationship
itself.
The love which unites the soul to God, children to their parents, mothers
and fathers to sons and daughters, lovers to one another, friend to friend,
the disciple to his master, is all one. You cannot divide Love. But to each
belongs its right and natural expression, and to parody the love of lovers
between friends revolts the growing sense of humankind. The very horrors
of prostitution create a less shuddering disgust than the debauching of
a young boy by an older man, though with a tragically common injustice
society is more apt to be disgusted by the unfortunate victim, bearing
all the marks of his moral and physical perversion, than by the more
responsible older man who profits by or even creates it.
Yet it is, as I have said, only by the _growing_ sense of humanity that
such things are condemned. They were not always so in every case. On the
contrary it has sometimes been maintained that friendship between men was
so much nobler than the love of men and women that even when it demanded
physical expression it was still the finest of all human relationship. This
idea was, of course, widely held by the Greeks during the noblest epochs
of their history, and Plato, though he does not, as is commonly believed,
justify such expression as good in itself, evidently regards it as
practically inevitable and, therefore, to be condoned. And though from this
indulgent attitude there has been a very general revolt in modern times,
the reaction has not always been very discriminating in its condemnation
or very just in its reprisals. Now--in consequence, no doubt, of this
injustice--there has arisen another attempt to assert the superior nobility
of friendship over love,[E] and even to claim a superior humanity for
people who are more attracted by members of their own sex.
[Footnote E: I am using the terms "friendship" and "love" in their
ordinarily accepted and narrow sense, as meaning respectively the love of
friends and the love of lovers. This is arbitrary, but I cannot find other
words except by using long phrases.]
There is not in this any question of the bestial depravity which
deliberately debauches the young and innocent: it is a question of the
kind of friendship glorified by Plato. And those who uphold the Platonic
view are not always debauchees but sometimes men and women who, however
incomprehensibly, still sincerely believe that they and not we who oppose
them are the true idealists. This is why it is worth while to state our
reasons for our profound disagreement, and to do so as intelligently and
fairly as possible. It is also worth while because no one has suffered more
cruelly or more hopelessly than those whose temperament or abnormality has
been treated by most of us as though it were _in itself_, and without
actual wrong-doing, a crime worthy of denunciation and scorn.
First, then, let it be remembered that the highest types humanity has
evolved have been men and women who are really "human," that is to say
who have not only those qualities which are generally regarded as
characteristic of their sex, but have had some share of the other sex's
qualities also. A man who is (if such a thing could be) wholly and
exclusively male in all his qualities would be repulsive; so would a woman
wholly and exclusively female. One has only to look at history to realize
it. Compared with the exquisite tenderness and joy of a St. Francis
of Assisi, the courage and determination of a St. Joan of Arc, the
intellectual power of a St. Catherine of Siena or St. Theresa of Spain,
the "brute male" who is wholly male, the "eternal feminine" with her
suffocating sexuality seem on the one hand inhuman, on the other subhuman.
It is not the absence of the masculine qualities in a man, or of the
feminine qualities in a woman which raises them above the mass; it is the
presence in power of both; and no man is truly human who has not something
of the woman in him--no woman who has not something of the man. Here is a
certain truth. And its supreme example is Christ Himself--Christ in Whom
power and tenderness, strength and insight, courage and compassion were
equally present--Christ Who is in truth the ideal of all humanity without
distinction of race, class or sex.
This is true. But its truth has been misunderstood by teachers like Edward
Carpenter. Beauty and strength in human nature as elsewhere depend on
harmony, and in such characters as I have cited that harmony is found. For,
in fact, there is no instance in nature of a male wholly male or a female
entirely female. Even physically the elements are shared. And if we say
with confidence that where these elements are most fully shared there is
found the fullest humanity, we are not committed to adding that where
the body has one predominating character and the spirit another there is
something finer still!
For harmony of life and temperament the body should be the perfect
instrument and expression of the spirit. When you have the temperament
of one sex in the body of another, this cannot be. There is at once a
disharmony, a dislocation, a disorder--in fact, a less perfect not a more
perfect type. Humanity does, I believe, progress towards a fuller element
of the woman in the man, the man in the woman, and the best we have
produced so far confirm the truth of this. But it is not an advance to
produce a type in which the temperament and the body are at odds. This is
not progress but perversion.
It is the same consciousness of dislocation which makes us condemn
homosexual practices. Here it is a dislocation between the means and
the end. The instinct of sex, to whatever use it may have been put, is
fundamentally the creative instinct. It is not by an accident, it is not as
a side-issue, that it is through sexual attraction that children are born.
And however sublimated, however enriched, restrained and conditioned, the
creative power of physical passion remains at once its justification and
its consecration. To use it in a relationship which must for ever be barren
is "unnatural" and in the deepest sense immoral. It is not easy to define
"immorality," because morality is one of the fundamentals which defy
definition; but though it is not easy to define, it is not hard to
recognize. All the world knows that it is immoral to prostitute the
creative power of genius to mere commercialism, for money or for fame. No
one can draw a hard and fast line. No one will quarrel with a great artist
because he lives by his art, or because he will sometimes turn aside to
amuse himself, his public, or his friends. Michaelangelo is not blamed
because, one winter's afternoon, he made a snow-statue for Lorenzo de
Medici! Yet all will admit that _merely_ to amuse, _merely_ to make money,
_merely_ to gain popularity is a prostitution of genius. Why? Because it
is to put to another than its real purpose the creative power of a great
artist.