[Illustration: Edwd Carpenter]
LOVE’S COMING-OF-AGE
_A SERIES OF PAPERS_
ON
THE RELATIONS OF THE SEXES
BY
EDWARD CARPENTER
_Author of “Towards Democracy,” “England’s Ideal,” Etc._
CHICAGO
STOCKHAM PUBLISHING CO.
1902
[_The little god of Love is generally represented as a child; and
rightly, perhaps, considering the erratic character of his ways among
the human race. There are signs, however, of a new order in the
relations of the Sexes; and the following papers are, among other
things, an attempt to indicate the inner laws which, rather than the
outer, may guide Love when—some day—he shall have come to his full
estate._]
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE SEX-PASSION 7
MAN, THE UNGROWN 29
WOMAN: THE SERF 38
WOMAN IN FREEDOM 55
MARRIAGE. A RETROSPECT 73
MARRIAGE: A FORECAST 91
THE FREE SOCIETY 112
SOME REMARKS ON THE EARLY STAR AND SEX WORSHIPS 129
NOTES—
On the Primitive Group-Marriage 136
Jealousy 140
The Family 143
Preventive Checks to Population 146
APPENDIX 151
THE SEX-PASSION
The subject of Sex is difficult to deal with. There is no doubt a
natural reticence connected with it. There is also a great deal of
prudery. The passion occupies, without being spoken of, a large part of
human thought; and words on the subject being so few and inadequate,
everything that is said is liable to be misunderstood. Violent
inferences are made and equivocations surmised, from the simplest
remarks; qualified admissions of liberty are interpreted into
recommendations of unbridled license; and generally the perspective of
literary expression is turned upside down.
There is in fact a vast deal of fetishism in the current treatment of
the question. Nor can one altogether be surprised at this when one sees
how important Sex is in the scheme of things, and how deeply it has been
associated since the earliest times not only with man’s personal
impulses but even with his religious sentiments and ceremonials.
Next to hunger it is doubtless the most primitive and imperative of our
needs. But in modern civilized life Sex enters probably even more into
consciousness than hunger. For the hunger-needs of the human race are in
the later societies fairly well satisfied, but the sex-desires are
strongly restrained, both by law and custom, from satisfaction—and so
assert themselves all the more in thought.
To find the place of these desires, their utterance, their control,
their personal import, their social import, is a tremendous problem to
every youth and girl, man and woman.
There are a few of both sexes, doubtless, who hardly feel the
passion—who have never been “in love,” and who experience no strong
sexual appetite—but these are rare. Practically the passion is a matter
of universal experience; and speaking broadly and generally we may say
it is a matter on which it is quite desirable that every adult at some
time or other should have actual experience. There may be exceptions;
but, as said, the instinct lies so deep and is so universal, that for
the understanding of life—of one’s own life, of that of others, and of
human nature in general—as well as for the proper development of one’s
own capacities, such experience is as a rule needed.
And here in passing I would say that in the social life of the future
this need will surely be recognized, and that (while there will be no
stigma attaching to voluntary celibacy) the state of enforced celibacy
in which vast numbers of women live to-day will be looked upon as a
national wrong, almost as grievous as that of prostitution—of which
latter evil indeed it is in some degree the counterpart or necessary
accompaniment.
Of course Nature (personifying under this term the more unconscious,
even though human, instincts and forces) takes pretty good care in her
own way that sex shall not be neglected. She has her own purposes to
work out, which in a sense have nothing to do with the individual—her
racial purposes. But she acts in the rough, with tremendous sweep and
power, and with little adjustment to or consideration for the later
developed and more conscious and intelligent ideals of humanity. The
youth, deeply infected with the sex-passion, suddenly finds himself in
the presence of Titanic forces—the Titanic but sub-conscious forces of
his own nature. “In love” he feels a superhuman impulse—and naturally
so, for he identifies himself with cosmic energies and entities, powers
that are preparing the future of the race, and whose operations extend
over vast regions of space and millennial lapses of time. He sees into
the abysmal deeps of his own being, and trembles with a kind of awe at
the disclosure. And what he feels concerning himself he feels similarly
concerning the one who has inspired his passion. The glances of the two
lovers penetrate far beyond the surface, ages down into each other,
waking a myriad antenatal dreams.
For the moment he lets himself go, rejoicing in the sense of limitless
power beneath him—borne onwards like a man down rapids, too intoxicated
with the glory of motion to think of whither he is going; then the next
moment he discovers that he is being hurried into impossible
situations—situations which his own moral conscience, as well as the
moral conscience of Society, embodied in law and custom, will not admit.
He finds perhaps that the satisfaction of his imperious impulse is, to
all appearances, inconsistent with the welfare of her he loves. His own
passion arises before him as a kind of rude giant which he or the race
to which he belongs may, Frankenstein-like, have created ages back, but
which he now has to dominate or be dominated by; and there declares
itself in him the fiercest conflict—that between his far-back Titanic
instinctive and sub-conscious nature, and his later developed, more
especially human and moral self.
While the glory of Sex pervades and suffuses all Nature; while the
flowers are rayed and starred out towards the sun in the very ecstasy of
generation; while the nostrils of the animals dilate, and their forms
become instinct, under the passion, with a proud and fiery beauty; while
even the human lover is transformed, and in the great splendors of the
mountains and the sky perceives something to which he had not the key
before—yet it is curious that just here, in Man, we find the magic wand
of Nature suddenly broken, and doubt and conflict and division entering
in, where a kind of unconscious harmony had erst prevailed.
And the reason of this is not far to seek. For in comparing, as we did a
page or two back, the sex-needs and the hunger-needs of the human race
we left out of account one great difference, namely, that while food
(the object of hunger) has no moral rights of its own,[1] and can be
appropriated without misgiving on that score, the object of sex is a
person, and cannot be used for private advantage without the most dire
infringement of the law of equality. The moment Man rises into any sort
of consciousness of the equal rights of others with himself his
love-needs open up this terrible problem. His needs are no less—perhaps
they are greater—than they were before, but they are stricken with a
deadly swound at the thought that there is something even greater than
them.
Heine I think says somewhere that the man who loves unsuccessfully knows
himself to be a god. It is not perhaps till the great current of sexual
love is checked and brought into conflict with the other parts of his
being that the whole nature of the man, sexual and moral, under the
tremendous stress rises into consciousness and reveals in fire its
god-like quality. This is the work of the artificer who makes immortal
souls—who out of the natural love evolves even a more perfect love. “In
tutti gli amanti,” says Giordano Bruno, “e questo fabro vulcano” (“in
all lovers is this Olympian blacksmith present”).
It is the subject of this conflict, or at least differentiation, between
the sexual and the more purely moral and social instincts in man which
interests us here. It is clear, I think, that if sex is to be treated
rationally, that is, neither superstitiously on the one hand nor
licentiously on the other, we must be willing to admit that both the
satisfaction of the passion and the non-satisfaction of it are desirable
and beautiful. They both have their results, and man has to reap the
fruits which belong to both experiences. May we not say that there is
probably some sort of Transmutation of essences continually effected and
effectible in the human frame? Lust and Love—the Aphrodite Pandemos and
the Aphrodite Ouranios—are subtly interchangeable. Perhaps the corporeal
amatory instinct and the ethereal human yearning for personal union are
really and in essence one thing with diverse forms of manifestation.
However that may be, it is pretty evident that there is some deep
relationship between them. It is a matter of common experience that the
unrestrained outlet of merely physical desire leaves the nature drained
of its higher love-forces; while on the other hand, if the physical
satisfaction be denied, the body becomes surcharged with waves of
emotion—sometimes to an unhealthy and dangerous degree. Yet at times
this emotional love may, by reason of its expression being checked or
restricted, transform itself into the all-penetrating subtle influence
of spiritual love.
Marcus Aurelius quotes a saying of Heraclitus to the effect that the
death of earth is to become water (liquefaction), and the death of water
is to become air (evaporation), and the death of air is to become fire
(combustion). So in the human body are there sensual, emotional,
spiritual, and other elements of which it may be said that their death
on one plane means their transformation and new birth on other planes.
It will readily be seen that I am not arguing that the lower or more
physical manifestations of love should be killed out in order to force
the growth of the more spiritual and enduring forms—because Nature in
her slow evolutions does not generally countenance such high and mighty
methods; but am merely trying to indicate that there are grounds for
believing in the transmutability of the various forms of the passion,
and grounds for thinking that the sacrifice of a lower phase may
sometimes be the only condition on which a higher and more durable phase
can be attained; and that therefore Restraint (which is absolutely
necessary at times) has its compensation.
Any one who has once realized how glorious a thing Love is in its
essence, and how indestructible, will hardly need to call anything that
leads to it a sacrifice; and he is indeed a master of life who,
accepting the grosser desires as they come to his body, and not refusing
them, knows how to transform them at will into the most rare and
fragrant flowers of human emotion.
Until these subjects are openly put before children and young people
with some degree of intelligent and sympathetic handling, it can
scarcely be expected that anything but the utmost confusion, in mind and
in morals, should reign in matters of Sex. That we should leave our
children to pick up their information about the most sacred, the most
profound and vital, of all human functions, from the mere gutter, and
learn to know it first from the lips of ignorance and vice, seems almost
incredible, and certainly indicates the deeply-rooted unbelief and
uncleanness of our own thoughts. Yet a child at the age of puberty, with
the unfolding of its far-down emotional and sexual nature, is eminently
capable of the most sensitive, affectional, and serene appreciation of
what Sex means (generally more so, as things are to-day, than its
worldling parent or guardian); and can absorb the teaching, if
sympathetically given, without any shock or disturbance to its sense of
shame—that sense which is so natural and valuable a safeguard of early
youth. To teach the child first, quite openly, its physical relation to
its own mother, its long indwelling in her body, and the deep and sacred
bond of tenderness between mother and child in consequence; then, after
a time, to explain the relation of fatherhood, and how the love of the
parents for each other was the cause of its own (the child’s) existence:
these things are easy and natural—at least they are so to the young
mind—and excite in it no surprise, or sense of unfitness, but only
gratitude and a kind of tender wonderment.[2] Then, later on, as the
special sexual needs and desires develop, to instruct the girl or boy in
the further details of the matter, and the care and right conduct of her
or his own sexual nature; on the meaning and the dangers of solitary
indulgence—if this habit has been contracted; on the need of
self-control and the presence of affection in all relations with others,
and (without undue asceticism) on the possibility of deflecting physical
desire to some degree into affectional and emotional channels, and the
great gain so resulting; all these are things which an ordinary youth of
either sex will easily understand and appreciate, and which may be of
priceless value, saving such an one from years of struggle in foul
morasses, and waste of precious life-strength. Finally, with the
maturity of the moral nature, the supremacy of the pure human relation
should be taught—not the extinguishment of desire, but the attainment of
the real kernel of it, its dedication to the well-being of another—the
evolution of the human element in love, balancing the natural—till at
last the snatching of an unglad pleasure, regardless of the other from
whom it is snatched, or the surrender of one’s body to another for any
reason except that of love, become things impossible.
Between lovers then a kind of hardy temperance is much to be
recommended—for all reasons, but especially because it lifts their
satisfaction and delight in each other out of the region of
ephemeralities (which too soon turn to dull indifference and satiety)
into the region of more lasting things—one step nearer at any rate to
the Eternal Kingdom. How intoxicating indeed, how penetrating—like a
most precious wine—is that love which is the sexual transformed by the
magic of the will into the emotional and spiritual! And what a loss on
the merest grounds of prudence and the economy of pleasure is its
unbridled waste along physical channels! So nothing is so much dreaded
between lovers as just this—the vulgarization of love—and this is the
rock upon which marriage so often splits.
There is a kind of illusion about physical desire similar to that which
a child suffers from when, seeing a beautiful flower, it instantly
snatches the same, and destroys in a few moments the form and fragrance
which attracted it. He only gets the full glory who holds himself back a
little, and truly possesses who is willing if need be not to possess.
On the other hand it must not be pretended that the physical passions
are by their nature unclean, or otherwise than admirable and desirable
in their place. Any attempt to absolutely disown or despite them,
carried out over long periods either by individuals or bodies of people,
only ends in the thinning out of the human nature—by the very consequent
stinting of the supply of its growth-material, and is liable to stultify
itself in time by leading to reactionary excesses. It must never be
forgotten that the physical basis throughout life is of the first
importance, and supplies the nutrition and food-stuff without which the
higher powers cannot exist or at least manifest themselves. Intimacies
founded on intellectual and moral affinities alone are seldom very deep
and lasting; if the physical basis in any form is quite absent, the
acquaintanceship is liable to die away again like an ill-rooted plant.
In many cases (especially of women) the nature is never really
understood or disclosed till the sex feeling is touched—however lightly.
Besides, it must be remembered that in order for a perfect intimacy
between two people their bodies must by the nature of the case be free
to each other. The bodily intimacy or endearment may not be the object
for which they come together; but if it is denied, its denial will bar
any real sense of repose and affiance, and make relation restless,
vague, tentative and unsatisfied.
In these lights it will be seen that what we call asceticism and what we
call libertinism are two sides practically of the same shield. So long
as the tendency towards mere pleasure-indulgence is strong and
uncontrolled, so long will the instinct towards asceticism assert
itself—and rightly, else we might speedily find ourselves in headlong
Phaethonian career. Asceticism is in its place (as the word would
indicate) as an exercise; but let it not be looked upon as an end in
itself, for that is a mistake of the same kind as going to the opposite
extreme. Certainly if the welfare and happiness of the beloved one were
always really the main purpose in our minds we should have plenty of
occasion for self-control, and an artificial asceticism would not be
needed. We look for a time doubtless when the hostility between these
two parts of man’s unperfected nature will be merged in the perfect
love; but at present and until this happens their conflict is certainly
one of the most pregnant things in all our experience; and must not by
any means be blinked or evaded, but boldly faced. It is in itself almost
a sexual act. The mortal nature through it is, so to speak, torn
asunder; and through the rent so made in his mortality does it sometimes
happen that a new and immortal man is born.
Sex-pleasures afford a kind of type of all pleasure. The dissatisfaction
which at times follows on them is the same as follows on all pleasure
which is sought, and which does not come unsought. The dissatisfaction
is not in the nature of pleasure itself but in the nature of seeking. In
going off in pursuit of things external, the “I” (since it really has
everything and needs nothing) deceives itself, goes out from its true
home, tears itself asunder, and admits a gap or rent in its own being.
This, it must be supposed, is what is meant by sin—the separation or
sundering of one’s being—and all the pain that goes therewith. It all
consists in seeking those external things and pleasures; not (a thousand
times be it said) in the external things or pleasures themselves. They
are all fair and gracious enough; their place is to stand round the
throne and offer their homage—rank behind rank in their multitudes—if so
be we will accept it. But for us to go out of ourselves to run after
them, to allow ourselves to be divided and rent in twain by their
attraction, that is an inversion of the order of heaven.
To this desertion of one’s true self sex tempts most strongly, and
stands as the type of Maya and the world-illusion; yet the beauty of the
loved one and the delight of corporeal union all turn to dust and ashes
if bought at the price of disunion and disloyalty in the higher
spheres—disloyalty even to the person whose mortal love is sought. The
higher and more durable part of man, whirled along in the rapids and
whirlpools of desire, experiences tortures the moment it comes to
recognize that It is something other than physical. Then comes the
struggle to regain its lost Paradise, and the frightful effort of
co-ordination between the two natures, by which the center of
consciousness is gradually transferred from the fugitive to the more
permanent part, and the mortal and changeable is assigned its due place
in the outer chambers and forecourts of the temple.
Pleasure should come as the natural (and indeed inevitable)
accompaniment of life, believed in with a kind of free faith, but never
sought as the object of life. It is in the inversion of this order that
the uncleanness of the senses arises. Sex to-day throughout the domains
of civilization is thoroughly unclean. Everywhere it is slimed over with
the thought of pleasure. Not for joy, not for mere delight in and excess
of life, not for pride in the generation of children, not for a symbol
and expression of deepest soul-union, does it exist—but for our own
gratification. Hence we disown it in our thoughts, and cover it up with
false shame and unbelief—knowing well that to seek a social act for a
private end is a falsehood. The body itself is kept religiously covered,
smothered away from the rush of the great purifying life of Nature,
infected with dirt and disease, and a subject for prurient thought and
exaggerated lust such as in its naked state it would never provoke. The
skin becomes sickly and corrupt, and of a dead leaden white hue, which
strangely enough is supposed to be more beautiful than the rich
rose-brown, delicately shaded into lighter tints in the less exposed
parts, which it would wear if tanned by daily welcome of sun and wind.
Sexual embraces themselves seldom receive the benison of Dame Nature, in
whose presence alone, under the burning sun or the high canopy of the
stars and surrounded by the fragrant atmosphere, their meaning can be
fully understood: but take place in stuffy dens of dirty upholstery and
are associated with all unbeautiful things.
Even literature, which might have been expected to preserve some decent
expression on this topic, reflects all too clearly by its silence or by
its pruriency the prevailing spirit of unbelief; and in order to find
any sane faithful strong and calm words on the subject, one has to wade
right back through the marshes and bogs of civilized scribbledom, and
toil eastward across its arid wastes to the very dawn-hymns of the Aryan
races.
In one of the Upanishads of the Vedic sacred books (the Brihadaranyaka
Upanishad) there is a fine passage in which instruction is given to the
man who desires a noble son as to the prayers which he shall offer to
the gods on the occasion of congress with his wife. In primitive, simple
and serene language it directs him how, at such times, he should pray to
the various forms of deity who preside over the operations of Nature: to
Vishnu to prepare the womb of the future mother, to Prajapati to watch
over the influx of the semen, and to the other gods to nourish the
foetus, etc. Nothing could be (I am judging from the only translation I
have met with, a Latin one) more composed, serene, simple, and religious
in feeling, and well might it be if such instructions were preserved and
followed, even to-day; yet such is the pass we have come to that
actually Max Muller in his translations of the Sacred Books of the East
appears to have been unable to persuade himself to render these and a
few other quite similar passages into English, but gives them in the
original Sanskrit! One might have thought that as Professor in the
University of Oxford, presumably sans peur et sans reproche, and
professedly engaged in making a translation of these books for students,
it was his duty and it might have been his delight to make intelligible
just such passages as these, which give the pure and pious sentiment of
the early world in so perfect a form; unless indeed he thought the
sentiment impure and impious—in which case we have indeed a measure of
the degradation of the public opinion which must have swayed his mind.
As to the only German translation of the Upanishad which I can find, it
balks at the same passages in the same feeble way—repeating nicht
wiederzugeben, nicht wiederzugeben, over and over again, till at last
one can but conclude that the translator is right, and that the
simplicity and sacredness of the feeling is in this our time indeed “not
to be reproduced.”
Our public opinion, our literature, our customs, our laws, are saturated
with the notion of the uncleanness of Sex, and are so making the
conditions of its cleanness more and more difficult. Our children, as
said, have to pick up their intelligence on the subject in the gutter.
Little boys bathing on the outskirts of our towns are hunted down by
idiotic policemen, apparently infuriated by the sight of the naked body,
even of childhood. Lately in one of our northern towns, the boys and men
bathing in a public pool set apart by the corporation for the purpose,
were—though forced to wear some kind of covering—kept till nine o’clock
at night before they were allowed to go into the water—lest in the full
daylight Mrs. Grundy should behold any portion of their bodies! and as
for women and girls, their disabilities in the matter are most serious.
Till this dirty and dismal sentiment with regard to the human body is
removed there can be little hope of anything like a free and gracious
public life. With the regeneration of our social ideas the whole
conception of Sex as a thing covert and to be ashamed of, marketable and
unclean, will have to be regenerated. That inestimable freedom and pride
which is the basis of all true manhood and womanhood will have to enter
into this most intimate relation to preserve it frank and pure—pure from
the damnable commercialism which buys and sells all human things, and
from the religious hypocrisy which covers and conceals; and a healthy
delight in and cultivation of the body and all its natural functions,
and a determination to keep them pure and beautiful, open and sane and
free, will have to become a recognized part of national life.
Possibly, and indeed probably, as the sentiment of common life and
common interest grows, and the capacity for true companionship increases
with the decrease of self-regarding anxiety, the importance of the mere
sex-act will dwindle till it comes to be regarded as only one very
specialized factor in the full total of human love. There is no doubt
that with the full realization of affectional union the need of actual
bodily congress loses some of its urgency; and it is not difficult to
see in our present-day social life that the want of the former is
(according to the law of transmutation) one marked cause of the violence
and extravagance of the lower passions. But however things may change
with the further evolution of man, there is no doubt that first of all
the sex-relation must be divested of the sentiment of uncleanness which
surrounds it, and rehabilitated again with a sense almost of religious
consecration; and this means, as I have said, a free people, proud in
the mastery and the divinity of their own lives, and in the beauty and
openness of their own bodies.[3]
Sex is the allegory of Love in the physical world. It is from this
fact that it derives its immense power. The aim of Love is
non-differentiation—absolute union of being; but absolute union can
only be found at the center of existence. Therefore whoever has truly
found another has found not only that other, and with that other
himself, but has found also a third—who dwells at the center and holds
the plastic material of the universe in the palm of his hand, and is a
creator of sensible forms.
Similarly the aim of sex is union and non-differentiation—but on the
physical plane,—and in the moment when this union is accomplished
creation takes place, and the generation (in the plastic material of the
sex-elements) of sensible forms.
In the animal and lower human world—and wherever the creature is
incapable of realizing the perfect love (which is indeed able to
transform it into a god)—Nature in the purely physical instincts does
the next best thing, that is, she effects a corporeal union and so
generates another creature who by the very process of his generation
shall be one step nearer to the universal soul and the realization of
the desired end. Nevertheless the moment the other love and all that
goes with it is realized the natural sexual love has to fall into a
secondary place—the lover must stand on his feet and not on his head—or
else the most dire confusions ensue, and torments aeonian.
Taking all together I think it may fairly be said that the prime object
of Sex is union, the physical union as the allegory and expression of
the real union, and that generation is a secondary object or result of
this union. If we go to the lowest material expressions of Sex—as among
the protozoic cells—we find that they, the cells, unite together, two
into one; and that, as a result of the nutrition that ensues, this joint
cell after a time (but not always) breaks up by fission into a number of
progeny cells; or if on the other hand we go to the very highest
expression of Sex, in the sentiment of Love, we find the latter takes
the form chiefly and before all else of a desire for union, and only in
lesser degree of a desire for race-propagation.[4]
I mention this because it probably makes a good deal of difference in
our estimate of Sex whether the one function or the other is considered
primary. There is perhaps a slight tendency among medical and other
authorities to overlook the question of the important physical actions
and reactions, and even corporeal modifications, which may ensue upon
sexual intercourse between two people, and to fix their attention too
exclusively upon their child-bearing function; but in truth it is
probable, I think, from various considerations,[5] that the spermatozoa
pass through the tissues and affect the general body of the female, as
well as that the male absorbs minutest cells from the female; and that
generally, even without the actual Sex-act, there is an interchange of
vital and ethereal elements—so that it might be said there is a kind of
generation taking place within each of the persons concerned, through
their mutual influence on each other, as well as that more specialized
generation which consists in the propagation of the race.
At the last and taking it as a whole one has the same difficulty in
dealing with the subject of Love which meets one at every turn in modern
life—the monstrous separation of one part of our nature from another—the
way in which, no doubt in the necessary course of evolution, we have cut
ourselves in twain as it were, and assigned “right” and “wrong,” heaven
and hell, spiritual and material, and other violent distinctions, to the
separate portions. We have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of good and
evil with a vengeance! The Lord has indeed driven us out of Paradise
into the domain of that “fabro vulcano” who with tremendous
hammer-strokes must hammer the knowledge of good and evil out of us
again. I feel that I owe an apology to the beautiful god for daring even
for a moment to think of dissecting him soul from body, and for speaking
as if these artificial distinctions were in any wise eternal. Will the
man or woman, or race of men and women, never come, to whom love in its
various manifestations shall be from the beginning a perfect whole, pure
and natural, free and standing sanely on its feet?
MAN
THE UNGROWN
Man, the ordinary human male, is a curious animal. While mastering the
world with his pluck, skill, enterprise, he is in matters of Love for
the most part a child. The passion plays havoc with him; nor does he
ride the Lion, as Ariadne is fabled to have done.
In this he differs from the other sex; and the difference can be seen in
earliest years. When the boy is on his rocking horse, the girl is
caressing her doll. When the adolescent youth, burning to master a real
quadruped, is still somewhat contemptuous of Love’s power, “sweet
seventeen” has already lost and regained her heart several times, and is
accomplished in all the finesse of feeling.
To the grown man love remains little more than a plaything. Affairs,
politics, fighting, moneymaking, creative art, constructive industry,
are his serious business; the affections are his relaxation; passion is
the little fire with which he toys, and which every now and then flares
out and burns him up. His affections, his passions, are probably as a
rule stronger than woman’s; but he never attains to understand them or
be master of their craft. With woman all this is reversed.
A man pelts along on his hobby—his business, his career, his latest
invention, or what not—forgetful that there is such a thing in the world
as the human heart; then all of a sudden he “falls in love,” tumbles
headlong in the most ludicrous way, fills the air with his cries,
struggles frantically like a fly in treacle: and all the time hasn’t the
faintest idea whether he has been inveigled into the situation, or
whether he got there of his own accord, or what he wants now he is
there. Suicides, broken hearts, lamentations, and certainly a whole
panorama, marvellous in beauty, of lyrical poetry and art, mark the
experience of love’s distress in Man. Woman in the same plight neither
howls nor cries, she does not commit suicide or do anything extravagant,
she creates not a single poem or work of art of any account; but she
simply goes her way and suffers in silence, shaping her life to the new
conditions. Never for a moment does she forget that her one serious
object is Love; but never for a moment does she “give herself away” or
lose her head, in the pursuit of that object.
It is perhaps in a kind of revenge for this that man for so many
centuries has made woman his serf. Feeling that she really somehow
mastered him on the affectional plane, he in revenge on the physical
plane has made the most of his superior strength, and of his power over
her; or, more probably, not thinking about it at all, he has simply
allowed all along the sex-passion (so strong in him) to prompt him to
this mastery.
For the sex-passion in man is undoubtedly a force—huge and fateful—which
has to be reckoned with. Perhaps (speaking broadly) all the passions and
powers, the intellect and affections and emotions and all, are really
profounder and vaster in Man than in Woman—are more varied, root deeper,
and have wider scope; but then the woman has this advantage, that her
powers are more co-ordinated, are in harmony with each other, where his
are disjointed or in conflict. A girl comes of age sooner than a boy.
And the coming-of-age of Love (which harmonizes all the faculties in the
human being) may take place early in the woman, while in the man it is
delayed long and long, perhaps never completely effected. The problem is
so much bigger, so much more complex, with him; it takes longer for its
solution. Women are sometimes impatient with men on this score; but then
they do not see, judging from their own little flock, what a big herd of
cattle the man has to bring home.
Anyhow, the point is that Man with his great unco-ordinated nature has
during these later centuries dominated the other sex, and made himself
the ruler of society. In consequence of which we naturally have a
society made after his pattern—a society advanced in mechanical and
intellectual invention, with huge passional and emotional elements, but
all involved in whirling confusion and strife—a society ungrown, which
on its material side may approve itself a great success, but on its more
human and affectional side seems at times an utter failure.
This ungrown, half-baked sort of character is conspicuous in the class
of men who organize the modern world—the men of the English-speaking
well-to-do class. The boy of this class begins life at a public school.
He does not learn much from the masters; but he knocks about among his
fellows in cricket and football and athletics, and turns out with an
excellent organizing capacity and a tolerably firm and reliable grip on
the practical and material side of life—qualities which are of
first-rate importance, and which give the English ruling classes a
similar mission in the world to the Romans of the early Empire. A
certain standard too (for what it is worth) of school-boy honor and
fairness is thumped into him. It is very narrow and conventional, but at
its best rises as high as a conception of self-sacrifice and duty;
though never to the conception of love. At the same time a strong and
lavish diet and an easy life stimulate his functional energies and his
animal passions to a high degree.
Here certainly is some splendid material, and if well pounded into
shape, kneaded and baked, might result in a useful upper crust for
society. But alas! it remains, or actually degenerates into, a most
fatuous dough. The boy never learns anything after he leaves school. He
gets no more thumps. He glides easily into the higher walks of the
world—backed by his parents’ money—into Law or Army or Church or Civil
Service or Commerce. He has really no serious fights to fight, or
efforts to make, sees next to nothing of actual life; has an easy time,
can marry pretty well whom he chooses, or console himself with unmarried
joys; and ultimately settles down into the routine and convention of his
particular profession—a picture of beefy self-satisfaction. Affection
and tenderness of feeling, though latent in him, have never, owing to
the unfortunate conditions of his life, been developed; but their place
begins to be taken by a rather dreary cynicism. Sex, always strong,
still even now in its waning days, retains the first place; and the
mature man, having no adequate counterpoise to it in the growth of his
sympathetic nature, is fain to find his highest restraints or sanctions
in the unripe code of his school-days or the otiose conventions and
prejudices of the professional clique to which he belongs.
So it comes about that the men who have the sway of the world to-day are
in the most important matters quite ungrown; they really have never come
of age in any adequate sense. Like Ephraim they are “a cake not turned.”
Wherever they turn up: in Lords or Commons, Civil or Military, Law or
Church or Medicine, the Judge on the bench, the Bishop, the ruler of
India, the exploiter of South Africa, the man who booms a company in the
city, or who builds up a great commercial trust and gets a title for
supporting a Government: it is much the same. Remove the distinctive
insignia of their clique and office, and you find underneath—no more
than a public school-boy. Perhaps, indeed, rather less; for while the
school-boy mind is there, and the school-boy code of life and honor, the
enthusiasm and the promise of youth are gone.
It is certainly very maddening at times to think that the Destinies of
the world, the organization of society, the wonderful scope of possible
statesmanship, the mighty issues of trade and industry, the loves of
Women, the lives of criminals, the fate of savage nations, should be in
the hands of such a set of general nincompoops; men so fatuous that it
actually does not hurt them to see the streets crammed with prostitutes
by night, or the parks by day with the semi-lifeless bodies of tramps;
men, to whom it seems quite natural that our marriage and social
institutions should lumber along over the bodies of women, as our
commercial institutions grind over the bodies of the poor, and our
“imperial” enterprise over the bodies of barbarian races, destroyed by
drink and deviltry. But then no doubt the world is made like that.
Assuredly it is no wonder that the more go-ahead Women (who have come
round to the light by their own way, and through much darkness and
suffering) should rise in revolt; or that the Workmen (finding their
lives in the hands of those who do not know what life is) should do the
same.
Leaving now the Middle-class man of to-day, the great representative of
modern civilization, and the triumphant outcome of so many centuries of
human progress, to enjoy his distinctions—we may turn for a moment to
the only other great body of men who are of any importance: the more
capable and energetic manual workers.
In the man of this class we have a type superior in many ways to the
other. In the first place he knows something of what Life is; from an
early age probably he has had to do something towards his own living.
Anyhow he has been called upon in a thousand ways to help his parents,
or his brothers and sisters, and has developed a fair capacity of
sympathy and affection—a thing which can hardly be said of the public
school boy; while his work, narrow though it may be, has given him a
certain definite ability and grasp of actual fact. If, as is now
happening in hundreds of thousands of cases, there is superadded to all
this some of the general culture which arises from active reading and
study, it is clear that the result is going to be considerable. It may
not count much to-day, but it will to-morrow.
On the other hand this class is lamentably wanting in the very point
where the other man excels—the organizing faculty. Take a workman from
the bench, where he has never so to speak had to look beyond his nose,
and place him in a position of responsibility and command, and he is
completely at sea. He turns out hopelessly slattern and ineffectual, or
a martinet or a bully; he has no sense of perspective and stickles
absurdly over little points while he lets the great ones go; and it is
almost impossible for him to look before and after as he should do, or
bring to a proper focus a whole field of considerations. In all this he
is a mere child: and evidently by himself unfit to rule the world.
In many respects the newer Women and the Workmen resemble each other.
Both have been bullied and sat upon from time immemorial, and are
beginning to revolt; both are good at detailed and set or customary
work, both are bad at organization; both are stronger on the emotional
than on the intellectual side; and both have an ideal of better things,
but do not quite see their way to carry it out. Their best hope perhaps
lies in their both getting hold of the Middle-class Man and thumping him
on each side till they get him to organize the world for them. The
latter has no ideal, no object, no enthusiasm, of his own. He cannot set
himself to work; and consequently he is just made use of by the
commercial spirit of the day. It is really lamentable to think how this
great organizing capacity—which might create a holy Human empire of the
world—is simply at present the tool of the Jew and the Speculator. In
Parliamentary, Military, Indian, Home or Colonial politics, the quondam
public school-boy is just led by the nose by the money-grubbing
interest, to serve its purposes; and half the time has not the sense to
see that he is being so led.
It might seem that it would be the greatest blessing and benefit to the
man of this class to find him an ideal to work to. Certainly it is his
only real and conceivable function to form an alliance with the two
other great classes of the modern nations—the women and the workmen—and
organize for them. Whether he will see it so, we know not; but if this
might come about great things would happen in the world.
WOMAN
THE SERF
A half-grown man is of course a tyrant. And so it has come about that
the rule of Man in the world has for many ages meant the serfdom of
Woman.
Far back in History, at a time when in the early societies the thought
of inequality had hardly arisen, it would appear that the female in her
own way—as sole authenticator of birth and parentage, as guardian of the
household, as inventress of agriculture and the peaceful arts, as
priestess or prophetess or sharer in the councils of the tribe—was as
powerful as man in his, and sometimes even more so. But from thence,
down to to-day, what centuries of repression, of slave-hood, of dumbness
and obscurity have been her lot!
There is much to show that the greed of Private Property was the old
Serpent which brought about the fall of our first parents; for as this
sentiment—the chief incentive to modern Civilization—rose and spread
with a kind of contagion over the advancing races of mankind, the human
Male, bitten by it, not only claimed possession of everything he could
lay hands upon, but ended by enslaving and appropriating his own mate,
his second self—reducing her also to a mere chattel, a slave and a
plaything.
Certainly it is curious that, with whatever occasional exceptions, the
periods of man’s ascendancy have been the periods of so much sadness and
degradation of women. He, all through, more and more calmly assuming
that it must be her province to live and work for him; shutting her more
and more into the seclusion of the boudoir and the harem, or down to the
drudgery of the hearth; confining her body, her mind; playing always
upon her sex-nature, accentuating always that—as though she were indeed
nought else but sex; yet furious if her feelings were not always
obedient to his desire; arrogating to himself a masculine license, yet
revenging the least unfaithfulness on her part by casting her out into
the scorned life of the prostitute; and granting her more and more but
one choice in life—to be a free woman, and to die, unsexed, in the
gutter; or for creature-comforts and a good name to sell herself, soul
and body, into life-long bondage. While she, more and more, has accepted
as inevitable the situation; and moved, sad-eyed, to her patient and
uncomplaining work, to the narrow sphere and petty details of household
labor and life, of patience and self-effacement, of tenderness and love,
little noticed and less understood; or twisted herself into a ridiculous
mime of fashion and frivolity, if so she might find a use for her empty
head, and some favor with her lord; her own real impulses and character,
her own talents and genius, all the while smothered away and blighted,
her brain dwarfed, and her outlook on the world marred by falsity and
ignorance.
Such, or something like it, has been the fate of woman through the
centuries. And if, like man, she had been light-armed for her own
defense, it might have been possible to say it was her own fault that
she allowed all this to take place; but when we remember that she all
the while has had to bear the great and speechless burden of Sex—to be
herself the ark and cradle of the Race down the ages—then we may perhaps
understand what a tragedy it has all been. For the fulfilment of sex is
a relief and a condensation to the Man. He goes his way, and, so to
speak, thinks no more about it. But to the Woman it is the culmination
of her life, her profound and secret mission to humanity, of
incomparable import and delicacy.
It is difficult, of course, for men to understand the depth and
sacredness of the mother-feeling in woman—its joys and hope, its leaden
weight of cares and anxieties. The burden of pregnancy and gestation,
the deep inner solicitude and despondency, the fears that all may not be
well, the indrawing and absorption of her life into the life of the
child, the increasing effort to attend to anything else, to care for
anything else; her willingness even to die if only the child may be born
safe: these are things which man—except it be occasionally in his role
as artist or inventor—does but faintly imagine. Then, later on, the
dedication to the young life or lives, the years of daylong and
nightlong labor and forethought, in which the very thought of self is
effaced, of tender service for which there is no recognition, nor ever
will or can be—except in the far future; the sacrifice of personal
interests and expansions in the ever-narrowing round of domestic duty;
and in the end the sad wonderment and grievous unfulfilled yearning as
one by one the growing boy and girl push their way into the world and
disavow their home-ties and dependence; the sundering of heart-strings
even as the navel-cord had to be sundered before: for these things, too,
Woman can hope but little sympathy and understanding from the other sex.
But this fact, of man’s non-perception of it, does not make the tragedy
less. Far back out of the brows of Greek goddess, and Sibyll, and Norse
and German seeress and prophetess, over all this petty civilization look
the grand untamed eyes of a primal woman the equal and the mate of man;
and in sad plight should we be if we might not already, lighting up the
horizon from East and West and South and North, discern the answering
looks of those new comers who, as the period of women’s enslavement is
passing away, send glances of recognition across the ages to their elder
sisters.
After all, and underneath all the falsities of this period, may we not
say that there is a deep and permanent relation between the sexes, which
must inevitably assert itself again?