<SPAN name="startofbook"></SPAN>
<div class='tnotes covernote'>
<p class='c000'><b>Transcriber’s Note:</b></p>
<p class='c000'>The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.</p>
</div>
<div class='figcenter id001'>
<ANTIMG src='images/i_frontis.jpg' alt='Edwd Carpenter' class='ig001' /></div>
<div class='titlepage'>
<div>
<h1 class='c001'>LOVE’S COMING-OF-AGE<br/> <span class='large'><i>A SERIES OF PAPERS</i></span><br/> <span class='small'>ON</span><br/> <span class='xlarge'>THE RELATIONS OF THE SEXES</span></h1></div>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center c002'>
<div><span class='small'>BY</span></div>
<div class='c003'><span class='xlarge'>EDWARD CARPENTER</span></div>
<div class='c003'><i>Author of “Towards Democracy,” “England’s Ideal,” Etc.</i></div>
<div class='c002'>CHICAGO</div>
<div><span class='large'>STOCKHAM PUBLISHING CO.</span></div>
<div>1902</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c004'>[<i>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.</i>]</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<h2 class='c005'>CONTENTS</h2></div>
<table class='table0' summary='CONTENTS'>
<tr>
<th class='c006'></th>
<th class='c006'> </th>
<th class='c007'><span class='small'>PAGE</span></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c006' colspan='2'><span class='sc'>The Sex-Passion</span></td>
<td class='c007'><SPAN href='#Page_7'>7</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class='c006' colspan='2'><span class='sc'>Man, the Ungrown</span></td>
<td class='c007'><SPAN href='#Page_29'>29</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class='c006' colspan='2'><span class='sc'>Woman: the Serf</span></td>
<td class='c007'><SPAN href='#Page_38'>38</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class='c006' colspan='2'><span class='sc'>Woman in Freedom</span></td>
<td class='c007'><SPAN href='#Page_55'>55</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class='c006' colspan='2'><span class='sc'>Marriage. A Retrospect</span></td>
<td class='c007'><SPAN href='#Page_73'>73</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class='c006' colspan='2'><span class='sc'>Marriage: A Forecast</span></td>
<td class='c007'><SPAN href='#Page_91'>91</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class='c006' colspan='2'><span class='sc'>The Free Society</span></td>
<td class='c007'><SPAN href='#Page_112'>112</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class='c006' colspan='2'><span class='sc'>Some Remarks on the Early Star and Sex Worships</span></td>
<td class='c007'><SPAN href='#Page_129'>129</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class='c006' colspan='2'><span class='sc'>Notes</span><hr /></td>
<td class='c007'> </td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class='c006'> </td>
<td class='c006'>On the Primitive Group-Marriage</td>
<td class='c007'><SPAN href='#Page_136'>136</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class='c006'> </td>
<td class='c006'>Jealousy</td>
<td class='c007'><SPAN href='#Page_140'>140</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class='c006'> </td>
<td class='c006'>The Family</td>
<td class='c007'><SPAN href='#Page_143'>143</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class='c006'> </td>
<td class='c006'>Preventive Checks to Population</td>
<td class='c007'><SPAN href='#Page_146'>146</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr><td> </td></tr>
<tr>
<td class='c006' colspan='2'><span class='sc'>Appendix</span></td>
<td class='c007'><SPAN href='#Page_151'>151</SPAN></td>
</tr>
</table>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_7'>7</span>
<h2 class='c005'>THE SEX-PASSION</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c008'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_8'>8</span> 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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_9'>9</span>as that of prostitution—of which latter evil indeed it is
in some degree the counterpart or necessary accompaniment.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>For the moment he lets himself go, rejoicing in
<span class='pageno' id='Page_10'>10</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_11'>11</span>in, where a kind of unconscious harmony had erst
prevailed.</p>
<p class='c009'>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,<SPAN name='r1' /><SPAN href='#f1' class='c010'><sup>[1]</sup></SPAN> 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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_12'>12</span>perfect love. “<span lang="it" xml:lang="it">In tutti gli amanti</span>,” says Giordano
Bruno, “<span lang="it" xml:lang="it">e questo fabro vulcano</span>” (“in all lovers is this
Olympian blacksmith present”).</p>
<p class='c009'>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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_13'>13</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>Any one who has once realized how glorious a
thing Love is in its essence, and how indestructible,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_14'>14</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_15'>15</span>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.<SPAN name='r2' /><SPAN href='#f2' class='c010'><sup>[2]</sup></SPAN> 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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_16'>16</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_17'>17</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_18'>18</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_19'>19</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_20'>20</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_21'>21</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_22'>22</span>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 <span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">sans peur et sans reproche</span>,
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
<span lang="de" xml:lang="de">nicht wiederzugeben, nicht wiederzugeben</span>, over and
over again, till at last one can but conclude that the
translator is right, and that the simplicity and sacredness
<span class='pageno' id='Page_23'>23</span>of the feeling is in this our time indeed “not to
be reproduced.”</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_24'>24</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.<SPAN name='r3' /><SPAN href='#f3' class='c010'><sup>[3]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_25'>25</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_26'>26</span>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.<SPAN name='r4' /><SPAN href='#f4' class='c010'><sup>[4]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c009'>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;
<span class='pageno' id='Page_27'>27</span>but in truth it is probable, I think, from various
considerations,<SPAN name='r5' /><SPAN href='#f5' class='c010'><sup>[5]</sup></SPAN> 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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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 “<span lang="it" xml:lang="it">fabro vulcano</span>” who
with tremendous hammer-strokes must hammer the
<span class='pageno' id='Page_28'>28</span>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?</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_29'>29</span>
<h2 class='c005'>MAN<br/> <span class='large'>THE UNGROWN</span></h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c008'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_30'>30</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_31'>31</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_32'>32</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_33'>33</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_34'>34</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_35'>35</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_36'>36</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_37'>37</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_38'>38</span>
<h2 class='c005'>WOMAN<br/> <span class='large'>THE SERF</span></h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c008'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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!</p>
<p class='c009'>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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_39'>39</span>ended by enslaving and appropriating his own mate,
his second self—reducing her also to a mere chattel, a
slave and a plaything.</p>
<p class='c009'>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,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_40'>40</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_41'>41</span>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.</p>
<p class='c009'>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
<span class='pageno' id='Page_42'>42</span>comers who, as the period of women’s enslavement
is passing away, send glances of recognition across
the ages to their elder sisters.</p>
<p class='c009'>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?</p>
<p class='c009'>To this relation the physiological differences perhaps
afford the key. In woman—modern science has
shown—the more fundamental and primitive nervous
centers, and the great sympathetic and vaso-motor
system of nerves generally, are developed to a greater
extent than in man; in woman the whole structure
and life rallies more closely and obviously round the
sexual function than in man; and, as a general rule, in
the evolution of the human race, as well as of the
lower races, the female is less subject to variation and
is more constant to and conservative of the type of the
race than the male.<SPAN name='r6' /><SPAN href='#f6' class='c010'><sup>[6]</sup></SPAN> With these physiological differences
are naturally allied the facts that, of the two,
Woman is the more primitive, the more intuitive, the
more emotional. If not so large and cosmic in her
scope, the great unconscious processes of Nature lie
somehow nearer to her; to her, sex is a deep and
sacred instinct, carrying with it a sense of natural
purity; nor does she often experience that divorce
between the sentiment of Love and the physical
<span class='pageno' id='Page_43'>43</span>passion which is so common with men, and which
causes them to be aware of a grossness and a conflict
in their own natures; she is, or should be, the interpreter
of Love to man, and in some degree his guide
in sexual matters. More, since she keeps to the great
lines of evolution and is less biased and influenced
by the momentary currents of the day; since her life
is bound up with the life of the child; since in a way
she is nearer the child herself, and nearer to the savage;
it is to her that Man, after his excursions and
wanderings, mental and physical, continually tends to
return as to his primitive home and resting-place, to
restore his balance, to find his center of life, and to
draw stores of energy and inspiration for fresh conquests
of the outer world. “In women men find beings
who have not wandered so far as they have from the
typical life of earth’s creatures; women are for men
the human embodiments of the restful responsiveness
of Nature. To every man, as Michelet has put it, the
woman whom he loves is as the Earth was to her
legendary son; he has but to fall down and kiss her
breast and he is strong again.”<SPAN name='r7' /><SPAN href='#f7' class='c010'><sup>[7]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c009'>If it be true that by natural and physiological
right Woman stands in some such primitive relationship
to Man, then we may expect this relationship to
emerge again into clear and reasonable light in course
<span class='pageno' id='Page_44'>44</span>of time; though it does not of course follow that a relationship
founded on physiological distinctions is absolutely
permanent—since these latter may themselves
vary to some degree. That a more natural and sensible
relation of some kind between the sexes is actually
coming to birth, few who care to read the signs of the
times can well doubt. For the moment, however, and
by way of parenthesis before looking to the future, we
have to consider a little more in detail the present
position of women under civilization. Not that the
consideration will be altogether gracious and satisfactory,
but that it may—we are fain to hope—afford
us some hints for the future.</p>
<p class='c009'>It was perhaps not altogether unnatural that Man’s
craze for property and individual ownership should
have culminated in the enslavement of woman—his
most precious and beloved object. But the consequence
of this absurdity was a whole series of other
absurdities. What between insincere flattery and rosewater
adorations on the one hand, and serfdom and
neglect on the other, woman was, as Havelock Ellis
says, treated as “a cross between an angel and an
idiot.” And after a time, adapting herself to the treatment,
she really became something between an angel
and an idiot—a bundle of weak and flabby sentiments,
combined with a wholly undeveloped brain. Moreover
by being continually specialized and specialized in
the sexual and domestic direction, she lost touch with
<span class='pageno' id='Page_45'>45</span>the actual world, and grew, one may say, into a separate
species from man—so that in the later civilizations
the males and females, except when the sex-attraction
has compelled them as it were to come
together, have been wont to congregate in separate
herds, and talk languages each unintelligible to the
other. Says the author of the Woman’s Question:
“I admit there is no room for pharisaical self-laudation
here. The bawling mass of mankind on a racecourse
or the stock-exchange is degrading enough in
all conscience. Yet this even is hardly so painful as
the sight which meets our eyes between three and
four in the afternoon in any fashionable London
street. Hundreds of women—mere dolls—gazing intently
into shop-windows at various bits of colored
ribbon. * * * Perhaps nothing is more disheartening
than this, except the mob of women in these
very same streets between twelve and one at night.”</p>
<p class='c009'>The “lady,” the household drudge, and the prostitute,
are the three main types of women resulting in
our modern civilization from the process of the past—and
it is hard to know which is the most wretched,
which is the most wronged, and which is the most
unlike that which in her own heart every true woman
would desire to be.</p>
<p class='c009'>In some sense the “lady” of the period which is
just beginning to pass away is the most characteristic
product of Commercialism. The sense of Private
<span class='pageno' id='Page_46'>46</span>Property, arising and joining with the “angel and
idiot” theory, turned Woman more and more—especially
of course among the possessing classes—into an
emblem of possession—a mere doll, an empty idol, a
brag of the man’s exclusive right in the sex—till at
last, as her vain splendors increased and her real usefulness
diminished, she ultimated into the “perfect
lady.” But let every woman who piques and preens
herself to the fulfilment of this ideal in her own person,
remember what is the cost and what is the meaning of
her quest: the covert enslavement to, and the covert
contempt of Man.</p>
<p class='c009'>The instinct of helpful personal service is so strong
in women, and such a deep-rooted part of their natures,
that to be treated as a mere target for other
people’s worship and services—especially when this
is tainted with insincerity—must be most obnoxious
to them. To think that women still exist by hundreds
and hundreds of thousands, women with hearts and
hands formed for love and helpfulness, who are
brought up as “ladies” and have to spend their lives
listening to the idiotic platitudes of the Middle-class
Man, and “waited upon” by wage-bought domestics,
is enough to make one shudder. The modern “gentleman”
is bad enough, but the “lady” of bourgeois-dom,
literally “crucified twixt a smile and whimper,” prostituted
to a life which in her heart she hates—with its
<span class='pageno' id='Page_47'>47</span>petty ideals, its narrow horizon, and its empty honors—is
indeed a pitiful spectacle.</p>
<p class='c009'>In Baronial times the household centered round
the Hall, where the baron sat supreme; to-day it centers
round the room where the lady reigns. The
“with” is withdrawn from the withdrawing-room, and
that apartment has become the most important of all.
Yet there is an effect of mockery in the homage paid—a
doubt whether she is really qualified yet for the
position. The contrast between the two societies, the
Feudal and the Commercial, is not inaptly represented
by this domestic change. The former society was
rude and rough, but generous and straightforward;
the latter is polished and nice, but full of littleness and
finesse. The Drawing-room, with its feeble manners
and effects of curtains and embroidery, gives its tone
to the new sovereign; and, as far as her rule is actual,
to our lives now-a-days. But we look forward to a
time when this room also will cease to be the center
of the house, and another—perhaps the Common-room—will
take its place.</p>
<p class='c009'>Below a certain level in society—the distinctively
commercial—there are no drawing-rooms. Among
the working masses, where the woman is of indispensable
importance in daily life, and is not sequestered
as an idol, there is no room specially set apart for her
worship—a curious change takes place in her nominal
position, and whereas in the supernal sphere she sits
<span class='pageno' id='Page_48'>48</span>in state and has her tea and bread and butter brought
to her by obsequious males, in the cottage the men
take their ease and are served by the women. The
customs of the cottage, however, are rooted in a
natural division of labor by which the man undertakes
the outdoor, and the woman the indoor work;
and there is, I think, quite as much real respect shown
to her here as in the drawing-room.</p>
<p class='c009'>In the cottage, nevertheless, the unfortunate one
falls into the second pit that is prepared for her—that
of the household drudge; and here she leads a
life which, if it has more honesty and reality in it
than that of the “lady,” is one of abject slavery. Few
men again realize, or trouble themselves to realize,
what a life this of the working housewife is. They
are accustomed to look upon their own employment,
whatever it may be, as “work” (perhaps because it
brings with it “wages”); the woman’s they regard as
a kind of pastime. They forget what monotonous
drudgery it really means, and yet what incessant forethought
and care; they forget that the woman has no
eight hours day, that her work is always staring her
in the face, and waiting for her, even on into the night;
that the body is wearied, and the mind narrowed down,
“scratched to death by rats and mice” in a perpetual
round of petty cares. For not only does civilization
and multifarious invention (including smoke) make
the burden of domestic life immensely complex, but
<span class='pageno' id='Page_49'>49</span>the point is that each housewife has to sustain this
burden to herself in lonely effort. What a sight, in
any of our great towns, to enter into the cottages or
tenements which form the endless rows of suburban
streets, and to find in each one a working wife struggling
alone in semi-darkness and seclusion with the
toils of an entire separate household—with meals to be
planned and provided, with bread to be baked, clothes
to be washed and mended, children to be kept in order,
a husband to be humored, and a house to be swept and
dusted; herself wearied and worried, debilitated with
confinement and want of fresh air, and low-spirited
for want of change and society! How futile! and how
dreary!</p>
<p class='c009'>There remains the third alternative for women;
nor can it be wondered at that some deliberately
choose a life of prostitution as their only escape from
the existence of the lady or the drudge. Yet what a
choice it is! On the one hand is the caged Woman,
and on the other hand is the free: and which to
choose? “How can there be a doubt,” says one,
“surely freedom is always best.” Then there falls a
hush. “Ah!” says society, pointing with its finger,
“but a free Woman!”</p>
<p class='c009'>And yet is it possible for Woman ever to be
worthy her name, unless she is free?</p>
<p class='c009'>To-day, or up to to-day, just as the wage-worker
has had no means of livelihood except by the sale of
<span class='pageno' id='Page_50'>50</span>his bodily labor, so woman has had no means of
livelihood except by the surrender of her bodily sex.
She could dispose of it to one man for life, and have
in return the respect of society and the caged existence
of the lady or the drudge, or she could sell it
night by night and be a “free woman,” scorned of the
world and portioned to die in the gutter. In either
case (if she really thinks about the matter at all) she
must lose her self-respect. What a choice, what a
frightful choice!—and this has been the fate of Woman
for how long?</p>
<p class='c009'>If, as a consequence of all this, woman has gone
down hill, there is no doubt that man has gravitated
too. (Or was it really that Jack fell down first, and
“Jill came tumbling after?”) Anyhow I think that
nothing can be more clear—and this I believe should
be taken as the basis of any discussion on the relation
of the sexes—than that whatever injures the one sex
injures the other; and that whatever defects or partialities
may be found in the one must from the nature
of the case be tallied by corresponding defects and partialities
in the other. The two halves of the human
race are complementary, and it is useless for one to
attempt to glorify itself at the expense of the other.
As in Olive Schreiner’s allegory of Woman (“Three
Dreams in a Desert”), man and woman are bound
together by a vital band, and the one cannot move
a step in advance of the other.</p>
<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_51'>51</span>If we were called upon to characterize these mutual
defects (inbred partly by the false property relation)
we should be inclined to say they were brutality and
conceit on the one hand, and finesse and subtlety on
the other. Man, as owner, has tended to become arrogant
and callous and egotistic; woman, as the owned,
slavish and crafty and unreal.</p>
<p class='c009'>As a matter of fact, and allowing that sweeping
generalizations of this kind are open to a good many
exceptions, we do find (at any rate in the British
Isles) a most wonderful and celestial indifference to
anything but their own affairs amongst the “lords of
creation,” an indifference so ingrained and constitutional
that it is rarely conscious of itself, and which
assumes quite easily and naturally that the weaker
sex exists for the purpose of playing the foil, so to
speak, to the chief actor in life’s drama. Nor does the
fact that this indifference is tempered, from time to
time, by a little gallantry afford much consolation—as
may be imagined—to the woman who perceives
that the gallantry is inspired by nothing more than a
passing sex-desire.</p>
<p class='c009'>On the other hand Jill has come tumbling after
pretty quickly, and has tumbled to the conclusion
that though she cannot sway her lord by force, she
may easily make use of him by craft. Finesse, developed
through scores of generations, combined with the
skillful use of the glamor belonging to her sex, have
<span class='pageno' id='Page_52'>52</span>given her an extraordinary faculty of carrying out her
own purposes, often through the most difficult passes,
without ever exposing her hand. Possibly the knowledge
of this forms one reason why women distrust each
other so much more than men distrust each other.
Certainly one of the rarest of God’s creatures is a
truly undesigning female, but—when dowered with
intellect such as might seem to justify it in being
designing—one of the most admirable and beautiful!</p>
<p class='c009'>Looking a little deeper, and below the superficial
contract which an unsatisfactory relation between
the sexes has doubtless created, one seems to discern
some of those more vital and deep-rooted differentiations
spoken of on an earlier page. It is a commonly
conceived opinion that woman tends more to
intuition and man to logic;<SPAN name='r8' /><SPAN href='#f8' class='c010'><sup>[8]</sup></SPAN> and certainly the male
mind seems better able to deal with abstractions and
generalizations, and the female mind with the personal
and the detailed and the concrete. And while this
difference may be in part attributable to the artificial
confinement of women to the domestic sphere, there
is probably something more organic in it than that.
At any rate it gives to Woman some of her best qualities—a
quick and immediate perception, appreciation
of character, tact, and a kind of artistic sense in the
<span class='pageno' id='Page_53'>53</span>ordering of her own life, so that you do not see the
tags and unraveled ends which appear in man’s conduct.
While the man is blundering about, fighting
with himself, hesitating, doubting, weighing, trying
vainly to co-ordinate all the elements of his nature,
the woman (often no doubt in a smaller sphere) moves
serene and prompt to her ends. Her actions are characterized
by grace and finality; she is more at unity
with herself; and she has the inestimable advantage of
living in the world of persons—which may well seem
so much more important and full of interest than that
of things.</p>
<p class='c009'>On the other hand, this want of the power of
generalization has made it difficult for woman (at any
rate up to to-day) to emerge from a small circle of
interests, and to look at things from the point of
view of public advantage and good. While her sympathies
for individuals are keen and quick, abstract
and general ideas such as those of Justice, Truth, and
the like have been difficult of appreciation to her; and
her deficiency in logic has made it almost impossible
to act upon her through the brain. A man, if he is
on the wrong track, can be argued with; but with a
woman of this type, if her motives are nefarious, there
is no means of changing them by appeal to her reason,
or to the general sense of Justice and Right—and
unless controlled by the stronger sway of a determined
<span class='pageno' id='Page_54'>54</span>personal will (of a man) her career is liable to be pretty
bad.</p>
<p class='c009'>Generally it will be admitted, as we are dealing
with points of mental and moral difference between
the sexes, Man has developed the more active, and
Woman the more passive qualities; and it is pretty
obvious, here too, that this difference is not only due
to centuries of social inequality and of property-marriage,
but roots back in some degree to the very
nature of their respective sexual functions. That there
are permanent complementary distinctions between the
male and female, dating first perhaps from sex, and
thence spreading over the whole natures, physical,
mental and moral, of each, no one can reasonably
doubt. These distinctions have, however, we contend,
been strangely accentuated and exaggerated during
the historic period—till at last a point of maximum
divergence and absolute misunderstanding has been
reached. But that point is behind us now.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_55'>55</span>
<h2 class='c005'>WOMAN<br/> <span class='large'>IN FREEDOM</span></h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c008'>It is clear enough, from what has been said, that
what Woman most needs to-day, and is mostly
seeking for, is a basis of independence for her life.
Nor is her position likely to be improved until she
is able to face man on an equality; to find, self-balanced,
her natural relation to him; and to dispose of
herself and of her sex perfectly freely, and not as a
thrall must do.</p>
<p class='c009'>Doubtless if man were an ideal creature his mate
might be secure of equal and considerate treatment
from him without having to insist upon an absolute
economic independence; but as that is only too obviously
not the case there is nothing left for her to-day
but to unfold the war-flag of her “rights,” and
(dull and tiresome as it may be) to go through a
whole weary round of battles till peace is concluded
again upon a better understanding.</p>
<p class='c009'>Yet it must never be forgotten that nothing short
of large social changes, stretching beyond the sphere
of women only, can bring about the complete emancipation
<span class='pageno' id='Page_56'>56</span>of the latter. Not till our whole commercial
system, with its barter and sale of human labor and
human love for gain, is done away, and not till a
whole new code of ideals and customs of life has come
in, will women really be free. They must remember
that their cause is also the cause of the oppressed
laborer over the whole earth, and the laborer has to
remember that his cause is theirs.<SPAN name='r9' /><SPAN href='#f9' class='c010'><sup>[9]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c009'>And since Motherhood is, after all, woman’s great
and incomparable work, people will come to see that
a sane maternity is one of the very first things to
be considered—and that really, though not the only
consideration, it is a work which if properly fulfilled
does involve the broadest and largest culture. Perhaps
this might seem to some only too obvious; yet
when for a moment we glance around at the current
ideals, when we see what Whitman calls “the incredible
holds and webs of silliness, millinery and every
kind of dyspeptic depletion” in which women themselves
live, when we see the absolute want of training
for motherhood and the increasing physical incapacity
for it, and even the feminine censure of those who
pass through the ordeal too easily, we begin to realize
<span class='pageno' id='Page_57'>57</span>how little the present notion of what woman should
be is associated with the healthy fulfilment of her most
perfect work. A woman capable at all points to bear
children, to guard them, to teach them, to turn them
out strong and healthy citizens of the great world,
stands at the farthest remove from the finnikin doll or
the meek drudge whom man by a kind of false sexual
selection has through many centuries evolved as his
ideal.</p>
<p class='c009'>The nervous and sexual systems of women to-day,
ruined among the rich by a life and occupations
which stimulate the emotional sensibilities without
ever giving the strength and hardiness which flow
from healthy and regular industry, and often ruined
among the poor by excessive labor carried on under
most unhealthy conditions, make real wifehood and
motherhood things almost unknown. “Injudicious
training,” says Bebel, “miserable social conditions
(food, dwelling, occupation) produce weak, bloodless,
nervous beings, incapable of fulfilling the duties of
matrimony. The consequences are menstrual troubles<SPAN name='r10' /><SPAN href='#f10' class='c010'><sup>[10]</sup></SPAN>
and disturbances in the various organs connected with
sexual functions, rendering maternity dangerous or
impossible. Instead of a healthy, cheerful companion,
a capable mother, a helpmate equal to the calls made
upon her activity, the husband has a nervous excitable
<span class='pageno' id='Page_58'>58</span>wife, permanently under the doctor’s hands, and too
fragile to bear the slightest draught or noise.”</p>
<p class='c009'>The Modern Woman sees plainly enough that no
decent advance for her sex is possible until this whole
question is fairly faced—involving, as of course it will
do, a life very different from her present one, far more
in the open air, with real bodily exercise and development,
some amount of regular manual work, a knowledge
of the laws of health and physiology, an altogether
wider mental outlook, and greater self-reliance
and nature-hardihood. But when once these things
are granted, she sees that she will no longer be the
serf, but the equal, the mate, and the comrade of
Man.</p>
<p class='c009'>Before any such new conception it is obvious
enough that the poor little pinched ideal of the “lady,”
which has ruled society so long, will fade away into
distance and obscurity. People may rail at the new
developments, but what, it may be asked, can any
decently sensible woman think of her present position—of
the mock salutations and heroic politeness of the
conventional male—with their suggestion of an empty
homage to weakness and incapacity; of the unwritten
law which condemns her, if occupying any place in
society, to bridle in her chin and use an affected speech
in order that it may be patent to everybody that she
is not free; which forbids natural and spontaneous
gesture as unbecoming and suspicious—and indeed in
<span class='pageno' id='Page_59'>59</span>any public place as liable to the attention of the policeman;
what can she think of the perpetual lies under
which she has to live—too numerous to be recorded;
except that all these things are intolerable? Rather
than remain in such a coil the modern woman is sensible
enough to see that she must face the stigma of
doing things “unlady-like;” and that only by facing
it can she win her true place in the world, and a real
comradeship with the only class of man who is capable
of such a thing—namely, the man who is willing not
to be “a gentleman.”</p>
<p class='c009'>That a new code of manners between the sexes,
founded not on covert lust but on open and mutual
helpfulness, has got to come in, is obvious enough.
The cry of equality need not like a red rag infuriate
the Philistine bull. That woman is in general muscularly
weaker than man, and that there are certain
kinds of effort, even mental, for which she is less
fitted—as there are other kinds of effort for which she
is more fitted—may easily be granted; but this only
means, in the language of all good manners, that there
are special ways in which men can assist women, as
there are special ways in which women can assist men.
Anything which goes beyond this, and the friendly
exchange of equal services, and which assumes, in the
conventionalities of the private household or the public
place, that the female claims a general indulgence
(because of her general incapacity) is an offence—against
<span class='pageno' id='Page_60'>60</span>the encouragement of which women themselves
will no doubt be on their guard.</p>
<p class='c009'>I say the signs of revolt on the part of the lady
class—revolt long delayed but now spreading all along
the line—are evident enough. When, however, we
come to the second type of woman mentioned in the
preceding pages, the working wife, we—naturally
enough—do not find much conscious movement. The
life of the household drudge is too like that of a slave,
too much consumed in mere toil, too little illuminated
by any knowledge, for her to rise of herself to any
other conception of existence. Nevertheless it is not
difficult to see that general and social changes are
working to bring about her liberation also. Improved
house-construction, public bakeries and laundries, and
so forth, and, what is much more important, a more
rational and simple and healthful notion of food and
furniture, are tending very largely to reduce the labors
of Housework and Cookery; and conservative though
women are in their habits, when these changes are
brought to their doors they cannot but see the advantage
of them. Public institutions too are more
and more taking over the responsibilities and the cost
of educating and rearing children; and even here and
there we may discern a drift towards the amalgamation
of households, which by introducing a common
life and division of labor among the women-folk will
probably do much to cheer and lighten their lot. None
<span class='pageno' id='Page_61'>61</span>of these changes, however, will be of great use unless
or until they wake the overworked woman herself to
see and insist on her rights to a better life, and until
they force from the man a frank acknowledgment of
her claim. And surely here and there the man himself
will do something to educate his mate to this point.
We see no reason indeed why he should not assist in
some part of the domestic work, and thus contribute
his share of labor and intelligence to the conduct of
the house; nor why the woman—being thus relieved—should
not occasionally, and when desirable, find salaried
work outside, and so contribute to the maintenance
of the family, and to her own security and sense
of independence. The over-differentiation of the labors
of the sexes to-day is at once a perpetuation of the
servitude of women and a cause of misunderstanding
between her and man, and of lack of interest in each
other’s doings.</p>
<p class='c009'>The third type of woman, the prostitute, provides
us with that question which—according to Bebel—is
the sphinx-riddle that modern society cannot solve,
and yet which unsolved threatens society’s destruction.
The commercial prostitution of love is the last
outcome of our whole social system, and its most clear
condemnation. It flaunts in our streets, it hides itself
in the garment of respectability under the name of
matrimony, it eats in actual physical disease and death
right through our midst; it is fed by the oppression
<span class='pageno' id='Page_62'>62</span>and the ignorance of women, by their poverty and denied
means of livelihood, and by the hypocritical
puritanism which forbids them by millions not only
to gratify but even to speak of their natural desires;
and it is encouraged by the callousness of an age
which has accustomed men to buy and sell for money
every most precious thing—even the life-long labor of
their brothers, therefore why not also the very bodies
of their sisters?</p>
<p class='c009'>Here there is no solution except the freedom of
woman—which means of course also the freedom of
the masses of the people, men and women, and the
ceasing altogether of economic slavery. There is
no solution which will not include the redemption of
the terms “free woman” and “free love” to their true
and rightful significance. Let every woman whose
heart bleeds for the sufferings of her sex, hasten to
declare herself and to constitute herself, as far as she
possibly can, a free woman. Let her accept the term
with all the odium that belongs to it; let her insist on
her right to speak, dress, think, act, and above all to
use her sex, as she deems best; let her face the scorn
and the ridicule; let her “lose her own life” if she likes;
assured that only so can come deliverance, and that
only when the free woman is honored will the prostitute
cease to exist. And let every man who really
would respect his counterpart, entreat her also to act
so; let him never by word or deed tempt her to grant
<span class='pageno' id='Page_63'>63</span>as a bargain what can only be precious as a gift; let
him see her with pleasure stand a little aloof; let him
help her to gain her feet; so at last, by what slight
sacrifices on his part such a course may involve, will
it dawn upon him that he has gained a real companion
and helpmate on life’s journey.</p>
<p class='c009'>The whole evil of commercial prostitution arises
out of the domination of Man in matters of sex. Better
indeed were a Saturnalia of free men and women
than the spectacle which as it is our great cities present
at night. Here in Sex, the women’s instincts are,
as a rule, so clean, so direct, so well-rooted in the
needs of the race, that except for man’s domination
they would scarcely have suffered this perversion. Sex
in man is an unorganized passion, an individual need
or impetus; but in woman it may more properly be
termed a constructive instinct, with the larger signification
that that involves. Even more than man should
woman be “free” to work out the problem of her sex-relations
as may commend itself best to her—hampered
as little as possible by legal, conventional, or economic
considerations, and relying chiefly on her own native
sense and tact in the matter. Once thus free—free
from the mere cash-nexus to a husband, from the
money-slavery of the streets, from the nameless terrors
of social opinion, and from the threats of the choice
of perpetual virginity or perpetual bondage—would
she not indeed choose her career (whether that of wife
<span class='pageno' id='Page_64'>64</span>and mother, or that of free companion, or one of single
blessedness) far better for herself than it is chosen for
her to-day—regarding really in some degree the needs
of society, and the welfare of children, and the sincerity
and durability of her relations to her lovers,
and less the petty motives of profit and fear?</p>
<p class='c009'>The point is that the whole conception of a nobler
Womanhood for the future has to proceed candidly
from this basis of her complete freedom as to the disposal
of her sex, and from the healthy conviction that,
with whatever individual aberrations, she will on the
whole use that freedom rationally and well. And surely
this—in view too of some decent education of the
young on sexual matters—is not too great a demand
to make on our faith in women. If it is, then indeed
we are undone—for short of this we can only retain
them in servitude, and society in its form of the hell
on earth which it largely is to-day.</p>
<p class='c009'>Refreshing therefore in its way is the spirit of
revolt which is spreading on all sides. Let us hope
such revolt will continue. If it lead here and there to
strained or false situations, or to temporary misunderstandings—still,
declared enmity is better than unreal
acquiescence. Too long have women acted the part of
mere appendages to the male, suppressing their own
individuality and fostering his self-conceit. In order
to have souls of their own they must free themselves,
and greatly by their own efforts. They must learn to
<span class='pageno' id='Page_65'>65</span>fight. Whitman in his poem “A Woman Waits for
Me,” draws a picture of a woman who stands in the
sharpest possible contrast with the feeble bourgeois
ideal—a woman who can “swim, row, ride, wrestle,
shoot, run, strike, retreat, defend herself,” etc.; and
Bebel, in his book on Woman, while pointing out that
in Sparta, “where the greatest attention was paid to
the physical development of both sexes, boys and girls
went about naked till they had reached the age of
puberty, and were trained together in bodily exercises,
games and wrestling,” complains that now-a-days “the
notion that women require strength, courage and resolution
is regarded as very heterodox.” But the truth
is that qualities of courage and independence are not
agreeable in a slave, and that is why man during all
these centuries has consistently discountenanced them—till
at last the female herself has come to consider
them “unwomanly.” Yet this last epithet is absurd;
for if tenderness is the crown and glory of woman,
nothing can be more certain than that true tenderness
is only found in strong and courageous natures; the
tenderness of a servile person is no tenderness at all.</p>
<p class='c009'>It has not escaped the attention of thinkers on
these subjects that the rise of Women into freedom
and larger social life here alluded to—and already
indeed indicated by the march of events—is likely to
have a profound influence on the future of our race,
It is pointed out that among most of the higher animals,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_66'>66</span>and indeed among many of the early races of
mankind, the males have been selected by the females
on account of their prowess or superior strength or
beauty, and this has led to the evolution in the males
and in the race at large of a type which (in a dim and
unconscious manner) was the ideal of the female.<SPAN name='r11' /><SPAN href='#f11' class='c010'><sup>[11]</sup></SPAN>
But as soon as in the history of mankind the property-love
set in, and woman became the chattel of man,
this action ceased. She, being no longer free, could
not possibly choose man, but rather the opposite took
place, and man began to select woman for the characteristics
pleasing to him. The latter now adorned
herself to gratify his taste, and the female type and
consequently the type of the whole race have been
correspondingly affected. With the return of woman
to freedom the ideal of the female may again resume
its sway. It is possible indeed that the more dignified
and serious attitude of women towards sex may give
to sexual selection when exercised by them a nobler
influence than when exercised by the males. Anyhow
it is not difficult to see that women really free would
never countenance for their mates the many mean and
unclean types of men who to-day seem to have things
all their own way, nor consent to have children by
such men; nor is it difficult to imagine that the feminine
influence might thus sway to the evolution of a
<span class='pageno' id='Page_67'>67</span>more manly and dignified race than has been disclosed
in these last days of commercial civilization!</p>
<p class='c009'>The Modern Woman with her clubs, her debates,
her politics, her freedom of action and costume, is
forming a public opinion of her own at an amazing
rate; and seems to be preparing to “spank” and even
thump the Middle-class Man in real earnest! What
exactly evolution may be preparing for us, we do not
know, but apparently some lively sparring matches
between the sexes. Of course all will not be smooth
sailing. The women of the new movement are naturally
largely drawn from those in whom the maternal
instinct is not especially strong; also from those in
whom the sexual instinct is not preponderant. Such
women do not altogether represent their sex; some are
rather mannish in temperament; some are “homogenic,”
that is, inclined to attachments to their own,
rather than to the opposite, sex; some are ultra-rationalizing
and brain-cultured; to many, children are
more or less a bore; to others, man’s sex-passion is a
mere impertinence, which they do not understand, and
whose place they consequently misjudge. It would
not do to say that the majority of the new movement
are thus out of line, but there is no doubt
that a large number are; and the course of their progress
will be correspondingly curvilinear.</p>
<p class='c009'>Perhaps the deficiency in maternal instinct would
seem the most serious imputation. But then, who
<span class='pageno' id='Page_68'>68</span>knows (as we have said) what evolution is preparing?
Sometimes it seems possible that a new sex is on
the make—like the feminine neuters of Ants and
Bees—not adapted for child-bearing, but with a marvelous
and perfect instinct of social service, indispensable
for the maintenance of the common life. Certainly
most of those who are freeing themselves—often with
serious struggles—from the “lady” chrysalis are fired
with an ardent social enthusiasm; and if they may
personally differ in some respects from the average of
their sex, it is certain that their efforts will result in a
tremendous improvement in the general position of
their more commonplace sisters.</p>
<p class='c009'>If it should turn out that a certain fraction of the
feminine sex should for one reason or another not
devote itself to the work of maternity, still the influence
of this section would react on the others to render
their notion of motherhood far more dignified than before.
There is not much doubt that in the future this
most important of human labors will be carried on
with a degree of conscious intelligence hitherto unknown,
and which will raise it from the fulfilment of a
mere instinct to the completion of a splendid social
purpose. To save the souls of children as well as
their bodies, to raise heroic as well as prosperous citizens,
will surely be the desire and the work of the
mothers of our race.<SPAN name='r12' /><SPAN href='#f12' class='c010'><sup>[12]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_69'>69</span>It will perhaps be said that after going about to
show (as in the previous chapter) the deficiency of
women hitherto in the matter of the generalizing
faculty, it is somewhat inconsistent to express any
great hope that they will ever take much active interest
in the general social life to which they belong; but
indeed the answer to this is that they are already beginning
to do so. The social enthusiasm and activity
shown by women in Britain, Russia, and the United
States is so great and well-rooted that it is impossible
to believe it a mere ephemeral event; and though in
the older of these countries it is at present confined
to the more wealthy classes, we can augur from that—according
to a well-known principle—that it will in
time spread downwards to the women of the nation.</p>
<p class='c009'>Important as is the tendency of women in the
countries mentioned to higher education and brain
development, I think it is evident that the widening
and socialization of their interests is not taking place
so much through mere study of books and the passing
of examinations in political economy and other sciences,
as through the extended actual experience which
the life of the day is bringing to them. Certainly the
book-studies are important and must not be neglected;
<span class='pageno' id='Page_70'>70</span>but above all is it imperative (and men, if they are to
have any direct sway in the future destinies of the
other sex, must look to it) that women, so long confined
to the narrowest mere routine and limited circle
of domestic life, should see and get experience, all
they can, of the actual world. The theory, happily now
exploding, of keeping them “innocent” through sheer
ignorance partakes too much of the “angel and idiot”
view. To see the life of slum and palace and workshop,
to enter into the trades and professions, to become
doctors, nurses, and so forth, to have to look
after themselves and to hold their own as against
men, to travel, to meet with sexual experience, to
work together in trade-unions, to join in social and
political uprisings and rebellions, etc., is what women
want just now. And it is evident enough that at any
rate among the more prosperous sections in this
country such a movement is going on apace. If the
existence of the enormous hordes of unattached females
that we find living on interest and dividends
to-day is a blemish from a Socialistic point of view; if
we find them on the prowl all over the country, filling
the theaters and concert-rooms and public entertainments
in the proportion of three to one male, besetting
the trains, swarming onto the tops of the ’buses, dodging
on bicycles under the horses’ heads, making
speeches at street corners, blocking the very pavements
in the front of fashionable shops, we must not
<span class='pageno' id='Page_71'>71</span>forget that for the objects we have just sketched, even
this class is going the most direct way to work, and
laying in stores of experience, which will make it impossible
for it ever to return to the petty life of times
gone by.</p>
<p class='c009'>At the last, and after centuries of misunderstanding
and association of triviality and superficiality with the
female sex, it will perhaps dawn upon the world that
the truth really lies in an opposite direction—that, in
a sense, there is something more deep-lying fundamental
and primitive in the woman nature than in that
of the man; that instead of being the over-sensitive
hysterical creature that civilization has too often made
her, she is essentially of calm large and acceptive even
though emotional temperament. “Her shape arises,”
says Walt Whitman,</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c011'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“She less guarded than ever, yet more guarded than ever,</div>
<div class='line'>The gross and soil’d she moves among do not make her gross and soil’d,</div>
<div class='line'>She knows the thoughts as she passes, nothing is concealed from her,</div>
<div class='line'>She is none the less considerate or friendly therefor,</div>
<div class='line'>She is the best belov’d, it is without exception; she has no reason to fear, and she does not fear.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c009'>The Greek goddesses look down and across the
ages to the very outposts beyond civilization; and
already from far America, Australasia, Africa, Norway,
Russia, as even in our midst from those who
<span class='pageno' id='Page_72'>72</span>have crossed the border-line of all class and caste,
glance forth the features of a grander type—fearless
and untamed—the primal merging into the future
Woman; who, combining broad sense with sensibility,
the passion for Nature with the love of Man, and
commanding indeed the details of life, yet risen out
of localism and convention, will help us to undo the
bands of death which encircle the present society, and
open the doors to a new and a wider life.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_73'>73</span>
<h2 class='c005'>MARRIAGE<br/> <span class='large'>A RETROSPECT</span></h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c008'>Of the great mystery of human Love, and that
most intimate personal relation of two souls to
each other—perhaps the firmest, most basic and indissoluble
fact (after our own existence) that we know;
of that strange sense—often, perhaps generally, instantaneous—of
long precedent familiarity and kinship,
that deep reliance on and acceptation of another in his
or her entirety; of the tremendous strength of the
chain which thus at times will bind two hearts in life-long
dedication and devotion, persuading and indeed
not seldom compelling the persons concerned to the
sacrifice of some of the other elements of their lives
and characters; and, withal, of a certain inscrutable
veiledness from each other which so frequently accompanies
the relation of the opposite sexes, and which
forms at once the abiding charm, and the pain, sometimes
the tragedy, of their union; of this palpitating
winged living thing, which one may perhaps call the
real Marriage—I would say but little; for indeed it is
only fitting or possible to speak of it by indirect language
and suggestion, nor may one venture to rudely
<span class='pageno' id='Page_74'>74</span>drag it from its sanctuary into the light of the common
gaze.</p>
<p class='c009'>Compared with this, the actual marriage, in its
squalid perversity as we too often have occasion of
knowing it, is as the wretched idol of the savage to
the reality which it is supposed to represent; and one
seems to hear the Aristophanic laughter of the gods
as they contemplate man’s little clay image of the
Heavenly Love—which, cracked in the fire of daily
life, he is fain to bind together with rusty hoops of
law, and parchment bonds, lest it should crumble and
fall to pieces altogether.</p>
<p class='c009'>The whole subject, wide as life itself—as Heaven
and Hell—eludes anything like adequate treatment,
and we need make no apology for narrowing down
our considerations here to just a few practical points;
and if we cannot navigate upward into the very heart
of the matter—namely, into the causes which make
some people love each other with a true and perfect
love, and others unite in obedience to but a counterfeit
passion—yet we may fairly, I imagine, study some of
the conditions which give to actual marriage its present
form, or which in the future are likely to provide
real affection with a more satisfactory expression than
it has as a rule to-day.</p>
<p class='c009'>As long as man is only half-grown, and woman is
a serf or a parasite, it can hardly be expected that
Marriage should be particularly successful. Two people
<span class='pageno' id='Page_75'>75</span>come together, who know but little of each other,
who have been brought up along different lines, who
certainly do not understand each other’s nature; whose
mental interests and occupations are different, whose
worldly interests and advantage are also different; to
one of whom the subject of sex is probably a sealed
book, to the other perhaps a book whose most dismal
page has been opened first. The man needs an outlet
for his passion; the girl is looking for a “home” and
a proprietor. A glamor of illusion descends upon the
two, and drives them into each other’s arms. It envelopes
in a gracious and misty halo all their differences
and misapprehensions. They marry without
misgiving; and their hearts overflow with gratitude to
the white-surpliced old gentleman who reads the service
over them.</p>
<p class='c009'>But at a later hour, and with calmer thought, they
begin to realize that it is a life-sentence which he has
so suavely passed upon them—not reducible (as in the
case of ordinary convicts) even to a term of 20 years.
The brief burst of their first satisfaction has been followed
by satiety on the physical plane, then by mere
vacuity of affection, then by boredom, and even
nausea. The girl, full perhaps of a tender emotion,
and missing the sympathy and consolation she expected
in the man’s love, only to find its more materialistic
side—“This, this then is what I am wanted
for;” the man, who looked for a companion, finding
<span class='pageno' id='Page_76'>76</span>he can rouse no mortal interest in his wife’s mind save
in the most exasperating trivialities;—whatever the
cause may be, a veil has fallen from before their faces,
and there they sit, held together now by the least
honorable interests, the interests which they themselves
can least respect, but to which Law and Religion
lend all their weight. The monetary dependence
of the woman, the mere sex-needs of the man, the
fear of public opinion, all form motives, and motives
of the meanest kind, for maintaining the seeming tie;
and the relation of the two hardens down into a dull
neutrality, in which lives and characters are narrowed
and blunted, and deceit becomes the common weapon
which guards divided interests.</p>
<p class='c009'>A sad picture! and of course in this case a portrayal
deliberately of the seamy side of the matter.
But who shall say what agonies are often gone through
in those first few years of married life? Anyhow, this
is the sort of problem which we have to face to-day,
and which shows its actuality by the amazing rate at
which it is breaking out in literature on all sides.</p>
<p class='c009'>It may be said—and often of course is said—that
such cases as these only prove that marriage was
entered into under the influence of a passing glamor
and delusion, and that there was not much real devotion
to begin with. And no doubt there is truth
enough in such remarks. But—we may say in reply—because
two people make a mistake in youth, to condemn
<span class='pageno' id='Page_77'>77</span>them, for that reason, to life-long suffering and
mutual degradation, or to see them so condemned,
without proposing any hope or way of deliverance, but
with the one word “serves you right” on the lips, is a
course which can commend itself only to the grimmest
and dullest Calvinist. Whatever safeguards against a
too frivolous view of the relationship may be proposed
by the good sense of society in the future, it is certain
that the time has gone past when Marriage can
continue to be regarded as a supernatural institution
to whose maintenance human bodies and souls must
be indiscriminately sacrificed; a humaner, wiser, and
less panic-stricken treatment of the subject must set
in; and if there are difficulties in the way they must
be met by patient and calm consideration of human
welfare—superior to any law, however ancient and respectable.</p>
<p class='c009'>I take it then that, without disguising the fact that
the question is a complex one, and that our conclusions
may be only very tentative, we have to consider
as rationally as we conveniently can, first, some of the
drawbacks or defects of the present marriage customs,
and secondly such improvements in these as may seem
feasible.</p>
<p class='c009'>And with regard to the former, one of the most
important points—which we have already touched
on—is the extraordinary absence of any allusion to
these subjects in the teaching of young folk. In a
<span class='pageno' id='Page_78'>78</span>day when every possible study seems to be crammed
into the school curriculum, it is curious that the one
matter which is of supreme importance to the individual
and the community is most carefully ignored. That
one ought to be able to distinguish a passing sex-spell
from a true comradeship and devotion is no
doubt a very sapient remark; but since it is a thing
which mature folk often fail to do, how young things
with no experience of their own or hint from others
should be expected to do it is not easy to understand.
The search for a fitting mate, especially among the
more sensitive and highly-organized types of mankind,
is a very complex affair; and it is really monstrous
that the girl or youth should have to set out—as they
mostly have to do to-day—on this difficult quest without
a word of help as to the choice of the way or the
very real doubts and perplexities that beset it.</p>
<p class='c009'>If the pair whom we have supposed as about to
be married had been brought up in almost any tribe
of savages, they would a few years previously have
gone through regular offices of initiation into manhood
and womanhood, during which time ceremonies
(possibly indecent in our eyes) would at any rate have
made many misapprehensions impossible. As it is,
the civilized girl is led to the “altar” often in uttermost
ignorance and misunderstanding as to the nature of
the sacrificial rites about to be consummated. The
youth too is ignorant in his way. Perhaps he is unaware
<span class='pageno' id='Page_79'>79</span>that love in the female is, in a sense, more diffused
than in the male, less specially sexual: that it
dwells longer in caresses and embraces, and determines
itself more slowly towards the reproductive system.
Impatient, he injures and horrifies his partner, and
unconsciously perhaps aggravates the very hysterical
tendency which marriage might and should have allayed.<SPAN name='r13' /><SPAN href='#f13' class='c010'><sup>[13]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c009'>Among the middle and well-to-do classes especially,
the conditions of high civilization, by inducing an
overfed masculinity in the males and a nervous and
hysterical tendency in the females,<SPAN name='r14' /><SPAN href='#f14' class='c010'><sup>[14]</sup></SPAN> increase the difficulties
mentioned; and it is among the “classes” too
that the special evils exist of sex-starvation and sex-ignorance
on the one hand, and of mere licentiousness
on the other.</p>
<p class='c009'>Among the comparatively uncivilized mass of the
people, where a good deal of familiarity between the
sexes takes place before marriage, and where probably
there is less ignorance on the one side and less licentiousness
on the other, these ills are not so prominent.
But here too the need for some sensible teaching is
<span class='pageno' id='Page_80'>80</span>clear; and sheer neglect of the law of Transmutation,
or sheer want of self-control, are liable to make the
proletarian union brutish enough.</p>
<p class='c009'>So far with regard to difficulties arising from personal
ignorance and inexperience. But stretching beyond
and around all these are those others that arise
from the special property relation between the two
sexes, and from deep-lying historic and economic
causes generally. The long historic serfdom of
woman, creeping down into the moral and intellectual
natures of the two sexes, has exaggerated the naturally
complementary relation of the male and the female
into an absurd caricature of strength on the one hand
and dependence on the other. This is well seen in the
ordinary marriage-relation of the common-prayer book
type. The frail and delicate female is supposed to cling
round the sturdy husband’s form, or to depend from
his arm in graceful incapacity; and the spectator is
called upon to admire the charming effect of the union—as
of the ivy with the oak—forgetful of the terrible
moral, namely, that (in the case of the trees at any
rate) it is really a death-struggle which is going on,
in which either the oak must perish suffocated in the
embraces of its partner, or in order to free the former
into anything like healthy development the ivy must
be sacrificed.</p>
<p class='c009'>Too often of course of such marriages the egoism,
lordship and physical satisfaction of the man are the
<span class='pageno' id='Page_81'>81</span>chief motive causes. The woman is practically sacrificed
to the part of the maintenance of these male virtues.
It is for her to spend her days in little forgotten
details of labor and anxiety for the sake of the man’s
superior comfort and importance, to give up her needs
to his whims, to “humor” him in all ways she can; it
is for her to wipe her mind clear of all opinions in
order that she may hold it up as a kind of mirror in
which he may behold reflected his lordly self; and it
is for her to sacrifice even her physical health and natural
instincts in deference to what is called her “duty”
to her husband.</p>
<p class='c009'>How bitterly alone many such a woman feels! She
has dreamed of being folded in the arms of a strong
man, and surrendering herself, her life, her mind, her
all, to his service. Of course it is an unhealthy dream,
an illusion, a mere luxury of love; and it is destined
to be dashed. She has to learn that self-surrender
may be just as great a crime as self-assertion. She
finds that her very willingness to be sacrificed only
fosters in the man, perhaps for his own self-defense,
the egotism and coldness that so cruelly wound her.</p>
<p class='c009'>For how often does he with keen prevision see that
if he gives way from his coldness the clinging dependent
creature will infallibly overgrow and smother him!—that
she will cut her woman-friends, will throw aside
all her own interests and pursuits in order to “devote”
herself to him, and, affording no sturdy character of
<span class='pageno' id='Page_82'>82</span>her own in which he can take any interest, will hang
the festoons of her affection on every ramification of
his wretched life—nor leave him a corner free—till he
perishes from all manhood and social or heroic uses
into a mere matrimonial clothes-peg, a warning and a
wonderment to passers by!</p>
<p class='c009'>However, as an alternative, it sometimes happens
that the Woman, too wise to sacrifice her own life
indiscriminately to the egoism of her husband, and
not caring for the “festoon” method, adopts the middle
course of appearing to minister to him while really
pursuing her own purposes. She cultivates the gentle
science of indirectness. While holding up a mirror
for the Man to admire himself in, behind that mirror
she goes her own way and carries out her own designs,
separate from him; and while sacrificing her
body to his wants, she does so quite deliberately and for
a definite reason, namely, because she has found out
that she can so get a shelter for herself and her children,
and can solve the problem of that maintenance
which society has hitherto denied to her in her own
right. For indeed by a cruel fate women have been
placed in exactly that position where the sacrifice of
their self-respect for base motives has easily passed
beyond a temptation into being a necessity. They
have had to live, and have too often only been able
to do so by selling themselves into bondage to the
man. Willing or unwilling, overworked or dying,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_83'>83</span>they have had to bear children to the caprice of their
lords; and in this serf-life their very natures have
been blunted; they have lost—what indeed should be
the very glory and crown of woman’s being—the perfect
freedom and the purity of their love.<SPAN name='r15' /><SPAN href='#f15' class='c010'><sup>[15]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c009'>At this whole spectacle of woman’s degradation
the human male has looked on with stupid and open-mouthed
indifference—as an ox might look on at a
drowning ox-herd—not even dimly divining that his
own fate was somehow involved. He has calmly and
obliviously watched the woman drift farther and farther
away from him, till at last, with the loss of an
intelligent and mutual understanding between the
sexes, Love with unequal wings has fallen lamed to
the ground. Yet it would be idle to deny that even
in such a state of affairs as that depicted, men and
women have in the past and do often even now find
some degree of satisfaction—simply indeed because
their types of character are such as belong to, and
have been evolved in accordance with, this relation.</p>
<p class='c009'>To-day, however, there are thousands of women—and
everyday more thousands—to whom such a
lopsided alliance is detestable; who are determined
that they will no longer endure the arrogant lordship
and egoism of men, nor countenance in themselves
or other women the craft and servility which are the
necessary complements of the relation; who see too
<span class='pageno' id='Page_84'>84</span>clearly in the oak-and-ivy marriage its parasitism on
the one hand and strangulation on the other to be
sensible of any picturesqueness; who feel too that
they have capacities and powers of their own which
need space and liberty, and some degree of sympathy
and help, for their unfolding; and who believe that
they have work to do in the world, as important in
its own way as any that men do in theirs. Such
women have broken into open warfare—not against
marriage, but against a marriage which makes true
and equal love an impossibility. They feel that as
long as women are economically dependent they cannot
stand up for themselves and insist on those rights
which men from stupidity and selfishness will not voluntarily
grant them.</p>
<p class='c009'>On the other hand there are thousands—and one
would hope every day more thousands—of men who
(whatever their forerunners may have thought) do not
desire or think it delightful to have a glass continually
held up for them to admire themselves in; who look
for a partner in whose life and pursuits they can find
some interest, rather than for one who has no interest
but in them; who think perhaps that they would
rather minister than be (like a monkey fed with nuts
in a cage) the melancholy object of another person’s
ministrations; and who at any rate feel that love, in
order to be love at all, must be absolutely open and
sincere, and free from any sentiment of dependence
<span class='pageno' id='Page_85'>85</span>or inequality. They see that the present cramped
condition of women is not only the cause of the false
relation between the sexes, but that it is the fruitful
source—through, its debarment of any common interests—of
that fatal boredom of which we have spoken,
and which is the bugbear of marriage; and they would
gladly surrender all of that masterhood and authority
which is supposed to be their due, if they could only
get in return something like a frank and level comradeship.</p>
<p class='c009'>Thus while we see in the present inequality of
the sexes an undoubted source of marriage troubles
and unsatisfactory alliances, we see also forces at work
which are tending to reaction, and to bringing the
two nearer again to each other—so that while differentiated
they will not perhaps in the future be quite
so much differentiated as now, but only to a degree
which will enhance and adorn, instead of destroy, their
sense of mutual sympathy.</p>
<p class='c009'>There is another point which ought to be considered
as contributing to the ill-success of many marriages,
and which no doubt is closely connected with
that just discussed—but which deserves separate
treatment. I mean the harshness of the line, the kind
of “ring-fence,” which social opinion (at any rate in
this country) draws round the married pair with respect
to their relations to outsiders. On the one hand,
and within the fence, society allows practically the
<span class='pageno' id='Page_86'>86</span>utmost passional excess or indulgence, and condones
it; on the other hand (I am speaking of the middling
bulk of the people, not of the extreme aristocratic and
slum classes) beyond that limit, the slightest familiarity,
or any expression of affection which might by any
possibility be interpreted as deriving from sexual feeling,
is sternly anathematized. Marriage, by a kind of
absurd fiction, is represented as an oasis situated in
the midst of an arid desert—in which latter, is pretended,
neither of the two parties is so fortunate as to
find any objects of real affectional interest. If they do
they have carefully to conceal the same from the other
party.</p>
<p class='c009'>The result of this convention is obvious enough.
The married pair, thus driven as well as drawn into
closest continual contact with each other, are put
through an ordeal which might well cause the stoutest
affection to quail. To have to spend all your life with
another person is severe; but to have all outside personal
interests, except of the most abstract kind, debarred,
and if there happens to be any natural jealousy
in the case, to have it tenfold increased by public interference,
is terrible; and yet unless the contracting
parties are fortunate enough to be, both of them, of
such a temperament that they are capable of strong
attachments to persons of their own sex—and this
does not always exclude jealousy—such must be their
fate.</p>
<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_87'>87</span>It is hardly necessary to say, not only how dull a
place this makes the home, but also how narrowing
it acts on the lives of the married pair. However appropriate
the union may be in itself it cannot be good
that it should degenerate—as it tends to degenerate
so often, and where man and wife are most faithful to
each other—into a mere <span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">egoisme a deux</span>. And right
enough no doubt as a great number of such unions
actually are, it must be confessed that the bourgeois
marriage as a rule, and just in its most successful and
pious and respectable form, carries with it an odious
sense of Stuffiness and narrowness, moral and intellectual;
and that the type of Family which it provides
is too often like that which is disclosed when on turning
over a large stone we disturb an insect Home that
seldom sees the light.</p>
<p class='c009'>But in cases where the marriage does not happen
to be particularly successful or unsuccessful, when
perhaps a true but not overpoweringly intense affection
is satiated at a needlessly early stage by the continual
and unrelieved impingement of the two personalities
on each other, then the boredom resulting is
something frightful to contemplate—and all the more
so because of the genuine affection behind it, which
contemplates with horror its own suicide. The weary
couples that may be seen at seaside places and pleasure
resorts—the respectable working-man with his
wife trailing along by his side, or the highly respectable
<span class='pageno' id='Page_88'>88</span>stock-jobber arm-in-arm with his better and
larger half—their blank faces, utter want of any common
topic of conversation which has not been exhausted
a thousand times already, and their obvious
relief when the hour comes which will take them back
to their several and divided occupations—these illustrate
sufficiently what I mean. The curious thing is
that jealousy (accentuated as it is by social opinion)
sometimes increases in exact proportion to mutual
boredom; and there are thousands of cases of married
couples leading a cat-and-dog life, and knowing
that they weary each other to distraction, who for
that very reason dread all the more to lose sight of
each other, and thus never get a chance of that holiday
from their own society, and renewal of outside
interests, which would make a real good time for them
possible.</p>
<p class='c009'>Thus the sharpness of the line which society draws
around the pair, and the kind of fatal snap-of-the-lock
with which marriage suddenly cuts them off from the
world, not only precluding the two, as might fairly
be thought advisable, from sexual, but also barring
any openly affectional relations with outsiders, and
corroborating the selfish sense of monopoly which
each has in the other,—these things lead inevitably to
the narrowing down of lives and the blunting of general
human interests, to intense mutual ennui, and
when (as an escape from these evils) outside relations
<span class='pageno' id='Page_89'>89</span>are covertly indulged in, to prolonged and systematic
deceit.</p>
<p class='c009'>From all which the only conclusion seems to be
that marriage must be either alive or dead. As a
dead thing it can of course be petrified into a hard
and fast formula, but if it is to be a living bond,
that living bond must be trusted to, to hold the lovers
together; nor be too forcibly stiffened and contracted
by private jealousy and public censorship, lest the
thing that it would preserve for us perish so, and cease
altogether to be beautiful. It is the same with this as
with everything else. If we would have a living thing
we must give that thing some degree of liberty—even
though liberty bring with it risk. If we would debar
all liberty and all risk, then we can have only the
mummy and dead husk of the thing.</p>
<p class='c009'>Thus far I have had the somewhat invidious task,
but perhaps necessary as a preliminary one, of dwelling
on the defects and drawbacks of the present marriage
system. I am sensible that, with due discretion,
some things might have been said, which have not
been said in its praise; its successful, instead of its unsuccessful,
instances might have been cited; and taking
for granted the dependence of women, and other
points which have already been sufficiently discussed,
it might have been possible to show that the bourgeois
arrangement was on the whole as satisfactory as could
be expected. But such a course would neither have
<span class='pageno' id='Page_90'>90</span>been sincere nor have served any practical purpose.
In view of the actually changing relations between the
sexes, it is obvious that changes in the form of the
marriage institution are impending, and the questions
which are really pressing on folks’ mind are: What
are those changes going to be? and, Of what kind do
we wish them to be?</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_91'>91</span>
<h2 class='c005'>MARRIAGE<br/> <span class='large'>A FORECAST</span></h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c008'>In answer to the last question it is not improbable
that the casual reader might suppose the writer of
these pages to be in favor of a general and indiscriminate
loosening of all ties—for indeed it is always easy
to draw a large inference even from the simplest expression.</p>
<p class='c009'>But such a conclusion would be rash. There is
little doubt, I think, that the compulsion of the marriage-tie
(whether moral, social, or merely legal) acts
beneficially in a considerable number of cases—though
it is obvious that the more the compelling force takes
a moral or social form and the less purely legal it is,
the better; and that any changes which led to a cheap
and continual transfer of affections from one object
to another would be disastrous both to the character
and happiness of a population. While we cannot help
seeing that the marriage-relation—in order to become
the indwelling-place of Love—must be made far more
free than it is at present, we may also recognize that a
certain amount of external pressure is not (as things
are at least) without its uses: that, for instance, it tends
<span class='pageno' id='Page_92'>92</span>on the whole to concentrate affectional experience and
romance on one object, and that though this may
mean a loss at times in breadth it means a gain in
depth and intensity; that, in many cases, if it were
not for some kind of bond, the two parties, after their
first passion for each other was past, and when the
unavoidable period of friction had set in, might in a
moment of irritation easily fly apart, whereas being
forced for a while to tolerate each other’s defects they
learn thereby one of the best lessons of life—a tender
forbearance and gentleness, which as time goes on
does not unfrequently deepen again into a more pure
and perfect love even than at first—a love founded indeed
on the first physical intimacy, but concentrated
and intensified by years of linked experience, of
twined associations, of shared labors, and of mutual
forgiveness; and in the third place that the existence
of a distinct tie or pledge discredits the easily-current
idea that mere pleasure-seeking is to be the object of
the association of the sexes—a phantasmal and delusive
notion, which if it once got its head, and the bit between
its teeth, might soon dash the car of human advance
in ruin to the ground.</p>
<p class='c009'>But having said thus much, it is obvious that external
public opinion and pressure are looked upon
only as having an educational value; and the question
arises whether there is beneath this any reality of marriage
which will ultimately emerge and make itself
<span class='pageno' id='Page_93'>93</span>felt, enabling men and women to order their relations
to each other, and to walk freely, unhampered by props
or pressures from without.</p>
<p class='c009'>And it would hardly be worth while writing on
this subject, if one did not believe in some such reality.
Practically I do not doubt that the more people
think about these matters, and the more experience
they have, the more they must ever come to feel that
there is such a thing as a permanent and life-long
union—perhaps a many-life-long union—founded on
some deep elements of attachment and congruity in
character; and the more they must come to prize the
constancy and loyalty which rivets such unions, in
comparison with the fickle passion which tends to
dissipate them.</p>
<p class='c009'>In all men who have reached a certain grade of
evolution, and certainly in almost all women, the deep
rousing of the sexual nature carries with it a romance
and tender emotional yearning towards the object of
affection, which lasts on and is not forgotten, even
when the sexual attraction has ceased to be strongly
felt. This, in favorable cases, forms the basis of what
may almost be called an amalgamated personality.
That there should exist one other person in the world
towards whom all openness of interchange should establish
itself, from whom there should be no concealment;
whose body should be as dear to one, in every
part, as one’s own; with whom there should be no
<span class='pageno' id='Page_94'>94</span>sense of Mine or Thine, in property or possession;
into whose mind one’s thoughts should naturally flow,
as it were to know themselves and to receive a new
illumination; and between whom and oneself there
should be a spontaneous rebound of sympathy in all
the joys and sorrows and experiences of life; such is
perhaps one of the dearest wishes of the soul. It is
obvious however that this state of affairs cannot be
reached at a single leap, but must be the gradual result
of years of intertwined memory and affection.
For such a union Love must lay the foundation, but
patience and gentle consideration and self-control must
work unremittingly to perfect the structure. At length
each lover comes to know the complexion of the
other’s mind, the wants, bodily and mental, the needs,
the regrets, the satisfactions of the other, almost as
his or her own—and without prejudice in favor of self
rather than in favor of the other; above all, both parties
come to know in course of time, and after perhaps
some doubts and trials, that the great want, the great
need, which holds them together, is not going to
fade away into thin air; but is going to become
stronger and more indefeasible as the years go on.
There falls a sweet, an irresistible, trust over their
relation to each other, which consecrates as it were
the double life, making both feel that nothing can
now divide; and robbing each of all desire to remain,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_95'>95</span>when death has indeed (or at least in outer semblance)
removed the other.<SPAN name='r16' /><SPAN href='#f16' class='c010'><sup>[16]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c009'>So perfect and gracious a union—even if not always
realized—is still, I say, the bona fide desire of most
of those who have ever thought about such matters.
It obviously yields far more and more enduring joy
and satisfaction in life than any number of frivolous
relationships. It commends itself to the common
sense, so to speak, of the modern mind—and does not
require, for its proof, the artificial authority of Church
and State. At the same time it is equally evident—and
a child could understand this—that it requires
some rational forbearance and self-control for its realization,
and it is quite intelligible too, as already said,
that there may be cases in which a little outside pressure,
of social opinion, or even actual law, may be helpful
for the supplementing or reinforcement of the weak
personal self-control of those concerned.</p>
<p class='c009'>The modern Monogamic Marriage, however, certified
and sanctioned by Church and State, though apparently
directed to this ideal, has for the most part
fallen short of it. For in constituting—as in a vast
number of cases—a union resting on nothing but the
outside pressure of Church and State, it constituted a
thing obviously and by its nature bad and degrading;
while in its more successful instances by a too great
<span class='pageno' id='Page_96'>96</span>exclusiveness it has condemned itself to a fatal narrowness
and stuffiness.</p>
<p class='c009'>Looking back to the historical and physiological
aspects of the question it might of course be contended—and
probably with some truth—that the human male
is, by his nature and needs, polygamous. Nor is it
necessary to suppose that polygamy in certain countries
and races is by any means so degrading or unsuccessful
an institution as some folk would have it to
be.<SPAN name='r17' /><SPAN href='#f17' class='c010'><sup>[17]</sup></SPAN> But, as Letourneau in his “Evolution of Marriage”
points out, the progress of society in the past
has on the whole been from confusion to distinction;
and we may fairly suppose that with the progress of
our own race (for each race no doubt has its special
genius in such matters), and as the spiritual and emotional
sides of man develop in relation to the physical,
there is probably a tendency for our deeper alliances
to become more unitary. Though it might be said
that the growing complexity of man’s nature would
be likely to lead him into more rather than fewer
relationships, yet on the other hand it is obvious
that as the depth and subtlety of any attachment
that will really hold him increases, so does such attachment
become more permanent and durable, and
less likely to be realized in a number of persons.
<span class='pageno' id='Page_97'>97</span>Woman, on the other hand, cannot be said to be by
her physical nature polyandrous as man is polygynous.
Though of course there are plenty of examples of
women living in a state of polyandry both among savage
and civilized peoples, yet her more limited sexual
needs, and her long periods of gestation, render one
mate physically sufficient for her; while her more
clinging affectional nature perhaps accentuates her capacity
of absorption in the one.</p>
<p class='c009'>In both man and woman then we may say that
we find a distinct tendency towards the formation of
this double unit of wedded life (I hardly like to use the
word Monogamy on account of its sad associations)—and
while we do not want to stamp such natural
unions with any false irrevocability or dogmatic exclusiveness,
what we do want is a recognition to-day
of the tendency to their formation as a natural fact,
independent of any artificial laws, just as one might
believe in the natural bias of two atoms of certain
different chemical substances to form a permanent
compound atom or molecule.</p>
<p class='c009'>It might not be so very difficult to get quite young
people to understand this—to understand that even
though they may have to contend with some superfluity
of passion in early years, yet that the most
deeply-rooted desire within them will probably in the
end point to a permanent union with one mate; and
that towards this end they must be prepared to use
<span class='pageno' id='Page_98'>98</span>self-control against the aimless straying of their passions,
and patience and tenderness towards the realization
of the union when its time comes. Probably
most youths and girls, at the age of romance, would
easily appreciate this position; and it would bring to
them a much more effective and natural idea of the
sacredness of Marriage than they ever get from the
artificial thunder of the Church and the State on the
subject.</p>
<p class='c009'>No doubt the suggestion of the mere possibility of
any added freedom of choice and experience in the relations
of the sexes will be very alarming to some
people—but it is so, I think, not because they are at
all ignorant that men already take to themselves considerable
latitude, and that a distinct part of the undoubted
evils that accompany that latitude springs
from the fact that it is not recognized; not because
they are ignorant that a vast number of respectable
women and girls suffer frightful calamities and anguish
by reason of the utter inexperience of sex in
which they are brought up and have to live; but because
such good people assume that any the least
loosening of the formal barriers between the sexes
must mean (and must be meant to mean) an utter dissolution
of all ties, and the reign of mere licentiousness.
They are convinced that nothing but the most
unyielding and indeed exasperating straight-jacket can
save society from madness and ruin.</p>
<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_99'>99</span>To those, however, who can look facts in the face,
and who see that as a matter of fact the reality of
Marriage is coming more and more to be considered
in the public mind in comparison with its formalities,
the first thought will probably be one of congratulation
that after such ages of treatment as a mere formality
there should be any sense of the reality of the
tie left; and the second will be the question how to
give this reality its natural form and expression. Having
satisfied ourselves that the formation of a more or
less permanent double unit is—for our race and time—on
the whole the natural and ascendant law of sex-union,
slowly and with whatever exceptions establishing
and enforcing itself independently of any artificial
enactments that exist, then we shall not feel
called upon to tear our hair or rend our garments at
the prospect of added freedom for the operation of
this force, but shall rather be anxious to consider how
it may best be freed and given room for its reasonable
development and growth.</p>
<p class='c009'>I shall therefore devote the rest of the chapter to
this question. And it will probably seem (looking
back to what has already been said) that the points
which most need consideration, as means to this end,
are (1) the furtherance of the freedom and self-dependence
of women; (2) the provision of some rational
teaching, of heart and of head, for both sexes during
the period of youth; (3) the recognition in marriage
<span class='pageno' id='Page_100'>100</span>itself of a freer, more companionable, and less pettily
exclusive relationship; and (4) the abrogation or modification
of the present odious law which binds people
together for life, without scruple, and in the most
artificial and ill-assorted unions.</p>
<p class='c009'>It must be admitted that the first point (1) is of
basic importance. As true Freedom cannot be without
Love so true Love cannot be without Freedom.
You cannot truly give yourself to another, unless you
are master or mistress of yourself to begin with. Not
only has the general custom of the self-dependence
and self-ownership of women, in moral, social, and
economic respects, to be gradually introduced, but the
Law has to be altered in a variety of cases where it
lags behind the public conscience in these matters—as
in actual marriage, where it still leaves woman uncertain
as to her rights over her own body, or in politics,
where it still denies to her a voice in the framing
of the statutes which are to bind her.</p>
<p class='c009'>With regard to (2) hardly any one at this time of
day would seriously doubt the desirability of giving
adequate teaching to boys and girls. That is a point
on which we have sufficiently touched, and which
need not be farther discussed here. But beyond this
it is important, and especially perhaps, as things stand
now, for girls—that each youth or girl should personally
see enough of the other sex at an early period to
be able to form some kind of judgment of his or her
<span class='pageno' id='Page_101'>101</span>relation to that sex and to sex-matters generally. It
is monstrous that the first case of sex-glamor—the
true nature of which would be exposed by a little experience—should,
perhaps for two people, decide the
destinies of a life-time. Yet the more the sexes are
kept apart, the more overwhelming does this glamor
become, and the more ignorance is there, on either
side, as to its nature. No doubt it is one of the great
advantages of co-education of the sexes, that it tends
to diminish these evils. Co-education, games and
sports to some extent in common, and the doing away
with the absurd superstition that because Corydon and
Phyllis happen to kiss each other sitting on a gate,
therefore they must live together all their lives, would
soon mend matters considerably. Nor would a reasonable
familiarity of this kind between the sexes in
youth necessarily mean an increase of casual or clandestine
sex-relations. But even if casualties did occur
they would not be the fatal and unpardonable sins that
they now—at least for girls—are considered to be.
Though the recognition of anything like common pre-matrimonial
sex-intercourse would probably be foreign
to the temper of a northern nation; yet it is
open to question whether Society here, in its mortal
and fetichistic dread of the thing, has not, by keeping
the young of both sexes in ignorance and darkness
and seclusion from each other, created worse ills and
suffering than it has prevented, and whether, by giving
<span class='pageno' id='Page_102'>102</span>sexual acts so feverish an importance, it has not
intensified the particular evil that it dreaded, rather
than abated it.</p>
<p class='c009'>In the next place (3) we come to the establishment
in marriage itself of a freer and broader and more
healthy relationship than generally exists at the present
time. Attractive in some ways as the ideal of the
exclusive attachment is, it runs the fatal risk, as we
have already pointed out, of lapsing into a mere stagnant
double selfishness. But, after all, Love is fed
not by what it takes, but by what it gives; and the
love of man and wife too must be fed by the love they
give to others. If they cannot come out of their
secluded haven to reach a hand to others, or even to
give some boon of affection to those who need it more
than themselves, or if they mistrust each other in
doing so, then assuredly they are not very well fitted
to live together.</p>
<p class='c009'>A marriage, so free, so spontaneous, that it would
allow of wide excursions of the pair from each other,
in common or even in separate objects of work and
interest, and yet would hold them all the time in the
bond of absolute sympathy, would by its very freedom
be all the more poignantly attractive, and by its
very scope and breadth all the richer and more vital—would
be in a sense indestructible; like the relation
of two suns which, revolving in fluent and rebounding
curves, only recede from each other in order to return
<span class='pageno' id='Page_103'>103</span>again with renewed swiftness into close proximity—and
which together blend their rays into the glory of
one double star.</p>
<p class='c009'>It has been the inability to see or understand this
very simple truth that has largely contributed to the
failure of the Monogamic union. The narrow physical
passion of jealousy, the petty sense of private property
in another person, social opinion, and legal enactments,
have all converged to choke and suffocate
wedded love in egoism, lust, and meanness. But surely
it is not very difficult (for those who believe in the
real thing) to imagine so sincere and natural a trust
between man and wife that neither would be greatly
alarmed at the other’s friendship with a third person,
nor conclude at once that it meant mere infidelity—or
difficult even to imagine that such a friendship
might be hailed as a gain by both parties. And if it
is quite impossible (to some people) to see in such intimacies
anything but a confusion of all sex-relations
and a chaos of mere animal desire, we can only reply
that this view exposes with fatal precision the kind
of thoughts which our present marriage system engenders.
In order to suppose a rational marriage at
all one must credit the parties concerned with some
modicum of real affection, candor, common sense and
self-control.</p>
<p class='c009'>Withal seeing the remarkable and immense variety
of love in human nature, when the feeling is
<span class='pageno' id='Page_104'>104</span>really touched—how the love-offering of one person’s
soul and body is entirely different from that of another
person’s, so much so as almost to require another
name—how one passion is predominantly physical,
and another predominantly emotional, and another
contemplative, or spiritual, or practical, or sentimental;
how in one case it is jealous and exclusive,
and in another hospitable and free, and so forth—it
seems rash to lay down any very hard and fast general
laws for the marriage-relation, or to insist that a
real and honorable affection can only exist under this
or that special form. It is probably through this fact
of the variety of love that it does remain possible, in
some cases, for married people to have intimacies with
outsiders, and yet to continue perfectly true to each
other and in rare instances, for triune and other such
relations to be permanently maintained.</p>
<p class='c009'>We now come to the last consideration, namely
(4) the modification of the present law of marriage. It
is pretty clear that people will not much longer consent
to pledge themselves irrevocably for life as at
present. And indeed there are always plentiful indications
of a growing change of practice. The more
people come to recognize the sacredness and naturalness
of the real union, the less will they be willing to
bar themselves from this by a life-long and artificial
contract made in their salad days. Hitherto the great
bulwark of the existing institution has been the dependence
<span class='pageno' id='Page_105'>105</span>of Women, which has given each woman a
direct and most material interest in keeping up the
supposed sanctity of the bond—and which has prevented
a man of any generosity from proposing an alteration
which would have the appearance of freeing
himself at the cost of the woman; but as this fact of the
dependence of women gradually dissolves out, and as
the great fact of the spiritual nature of the true Marriage
crystallizes into more clearness—so will the formal
bonds which bar the formation of the latter gradually
break away and become of small import.</p>
<p class='c009'>Love when felt at all deeply has an element of
transcendentalism in it, which makes it the most natural
thing in the world for the two lovers—even
though drawn together by a passing sex-attraction—to
swear eternal troth to each other; but there is something
quite diabolic and mephistophelean in the practice
of the Law, which creeping up behind, as it were,
at this critical moment, and overhearing the two
pledging themselves, claps its book together with a
triumphant bang, and exclaims: “There now you are
married and done for, for the rest of your natural
lives.”</p>
<p class='c009'>What actual changes in Law and Custom the collective
sense of society will bring about is a matter
which in its detail we cannot of course foresee or determine.
But that the drift will be, and must be, towards
greater freedom, is pretty clear. Ideally speaking
<span class='pageno' id='Page_106'>106</span>it is plain that anything like a perfect union must
have perfect freedom for its condition; and while it is
quite supposable that a lover might out of the fullness
of his heart make promises and give pledges, it is
really almost inconceivable that anyone having that
delicate and proud sense which marks deep feeling,
could possibly demand a promise from his loved one.
As there is undoubtedly a certain natural reticence in
sex, so perhaps the most decent thing in true Marriage
would be to say nothing, make no promises—either
for a year or a life-time. Promises are bad at
any time, and when the heart is full silence befits it
best. Practically, however, since a love of this kind is
slow to be realized, since social custom is slow to
change, and since the partial dependence and slavery
of Woman must yet for a while continue, it is likely for
such period that formal contracts of some kind will
still be made; only these (it may be hoped) will lose
their irrevocable and rigid character, and become in
some degree adapted to the needs of the contracting
parties.</p>
<p class='c009'>Such contracts might, of course, if adopted, be
very various in respect to conjugal rights, conditions
of termination, division of property, responsibility for
and rights over children, etc. In some cases<SPAN name='r18' /><SPAN href='#f18' class='c010'><sup>[18]</sup></SPAN> possibly
they might be looked upon as preliminary to a later
and more permanent alliance; in others they would
<span class='pageno' id='Page_107'>107</span>provide, for disastrous marriages, a remedy free from
the inordinate scandals of the present Divorce Courts.
It may however be said that rather than adopt any
new system of contracts, public opinion in this country
would tend to a simple facilitation of Divorce, and
that if the latter were made (with due provision for the
children) to depend on mutual consent, it would become
little more than an affair of registration, and the
scandals of the proceeding would be avoided. In any
case we think that marriage-contracts, if existing at
all, must tend more and more to become matters of
private arrangement as far as the relations of husband
and wife are concerned, and that this is likely to happen
in proportion as woman becomes more free, and
therefore more competent to act in her own right. It
would be felt intolerable, in any decently constituted
society, that the old blunderbuss of the Law should interfere
in the delicate relations of wedded life. As it
is to-day the situation is most absurd. On the one
hand, having been constituted from times back in favor
of the male, the Law still gives to the husband
barbarous rights over the person of his spouse; on
the other hand, to compensate for this, it rushes in
with the farcicalities of Breach of Promise; and in any
case, having once pronounced its benediction over a
pair—how hateful the alliance may turn out to be to
both parties, and however obvious its failure to the
whole world—the stupid old thing blinks owlishly on
<span class='pageno' id='Page_108'>108</span>at its own work, and professes itself totally unable to
undo the knot which once it tied!</p>
<p class='c009'>The only point where there is a permanent ground
for State-interference—and where indeed there is no
doubt that the public authority should in some way
make itself felt—is in the matter of the children resulting
from any alliance. Here the relation of the
pair ceases to be private and becomes social; and the
interests of the child itself, and of the nation whose
future citizen the child is, have to be safe-guarded.
Any contracts, or any proposals of divorce, before
they could be sanctioned by the public authority,
would have to contain satisfactory provisions for the
care and maintenance of the children in such casualties
as might ensue; nor ought there to be maintained
any legal distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘legitimate’
children, since it is clear that whatever individuals or
society at large may, in the former case, think of the
conduct of the parents, no disability should on that
account accrue to the child, nor should the parents (if
identifiable) be able to escape their full responsibility
for bringing it into the world. If those good people
who make such a terrible outcry against folk entering
into married life without going through all the abracadabra
of the Law, on account of the children, would
try and get the law altered so as to give illegitimate
children the same status and claim on their parents
as legitimate children, it would show more genuinely
<span class='pageno' id='Page_109'>109</span>for their anxiety about the children, and would really
be doing something in the interests of positive morality.</p>
<p class='c009'>If it be objected that private contracts, or such facilitations
of Divorce as here spoken of, would simply
lead to frivolous experimental relationships entered
into and broken-off ad infinitum, it must be remembered
that the responsibility for due rearing and maintenance
of children must give serious pause to such a
career; and that to suppose that any great mass of
the people would find their good in a kind of matrimonial
game of General Post is to suppose that the
mass of the people have really never acquired or been
taught the rudiments of common sense in such matters—is
to suppose a case for which there would hardly
be a parallel in the customs of any nation or tribe
that we know of.</p>
<p class='c009'>In conclusion, it is evident that no very great
change for the better in marriage-relations can take
place except as the accompaniment of deep-lying
changes in Society at large; and that alterations in
the Law alone will effect but a limited improvement.
Indeed it is not very likely, as long as the present commercial
order of society lasts, that the existing Marriage-laws—founded
as they are on the idea of property—will
be very radically altered, though they may
be to some extent. More likely is it that, underneath
the law, the common practice will slide forward into
<span class='pageno' id='Page_110'>110</span>newer customs. With the rise of the new society,
which is already outlining itself within the structure of
the old, many of the difficulties and bugbears, that at
present seem to stand in the way of a more healthy relation
between the sexes, will of themselves disappear.</p>
<p class='c009'>It must be acknowledged, however, that though a
gradual broadening out and humanizing of Law and
Custom are quite necessary, it cannot fairly be charged
against these ancient tyrants that they are responsible
for all the troubles connected with sex. There are
millions of people to-day who never could marry happily—however
favorable the conditions might be—simply
because their natures do not contain in sufficient
strength the elements of loving surrender to another;
and, as long as the human heart is what it is,
there will be natural tragedies arising from the
willingness or unwillingness of one person to
release another when the former finds that his
or her love is not returned.<SPAN name='r19' /><SPAN href='#f19' class='c010'><sup>[19]</sup></SPAN> While it is
quite necessary that these natural tragedies should
not be complicated and multiplied by needless legal
interference—complicated into the numberless artificial
<span class='pageno' id='Page_111'>111</span>tragedies which are so exasperating when represented
on the stage or in romance, and so saddening
when witnessed in real life—still we may acknowledge
that, short of the millennium, they will always be with
us, and that no institution of marriage alone, or absence
of institution, will rid us of them. That entire
and unswerving refusal to ‘cage’ another person, or to
accept an affection not perfectly free and spontaneous,
which will, we are fain to think, be always more and
more the mark of human love, must inevitably bring
its own price of mortal suffering with it; yet the Love
so gained, whether in the individual or in society, will
be found in the end to be worth the pang—and as far
beyond the other love, as is the wild bird of Paradise
that comes to feed out of our hands unbidden more
lovely than the prisoner we shut with draggled wings
behind the bars. Love is doubtless the last and most
difficult lesson that humanity has to learn; in a sense
it underlies all the others. Perhaps the time has come
for the modern nations when, ceasing to be children,
they may even try to learn it.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_112'>112</span>
<h2 class='c005'>THE FREE SOCIETY</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c008'>Taking, finally, a somewhat wider outlook over
the whole subject of the most intimate human
relations than was feasible in the foregoing chapters,
we may make a few general remarks.</p>
<p class='c009'>One of the great difficulties in the way of arriving
at any general understanding on questions of sex—and
one which we have already had occasion to note—is
the extraordinary diversity of feeling and temperament
which exists in these matters. Needless to
say, this is increased by the reserve, natural or artificial,
which so seldom allows people to express their
sentiments quite freely. In the great ocean there are
so many currents, cold and warm, fresh, and salt, and
brackish; and each one thinks that the current in
which he lives is the whole ocean. The man of the
world hardly understands, certainly does not sympathize
with, the recluse or ascetic—and the want of appreciation
is generally returned; the maternal, the
sexual, and the philanthropic woman, are all somewhat
unintelligible to each other; the average male
and the average female approach the great passion
from totally different sides, and are continually at
<span class='pageno' id='Page_113'>113</span>odds over it; and again both of these great sections of
humanity fail entirely to understand that other and
well-marked class of persons whose love-attraction is
(inborn) towards their own sex, and indeed hardly
recognize the existence of such a class, although as a
matter of fact it is a large and important one in every
community. In fact, all these differences have hitherto
been so little the subject of impartial study that
we are still amazingly in the dark about them.</p>
<p class='c009'>When we look back to History, and the various
customs of the world in different races and tribes and
at different periods of time, we seem to see these natural
divergencies of human temperament reflected in
the extraordinary diversity of practices that have obtained
and been recognized. We see that, in some
cases, the worship of sex took its place beside the
worship of the gods; and—what appears equally
strange—that the orgiastic rites and saturnalia of the
early world were intimately connected with religious
feeling; we find that, in other cases, asceticism and
chastity and every denial of the flesh were glorified
and looked upon as providing the only way to the
heavenly kingdom; we discover that marriage has
been instituted and defined and sanctioned in endless
forms, each looked upon as the only moral and possible
form in its own time and country; and that the
position of women under these different conditions has
varied in the most remarkable way—that in some of
<span class='pageno' id='Page_114'>114</span>the primitive societies where group-marriages<SPAN name='r20' /><SPAN href='#f20' class='c010'><sup>[20]</sup></SPAN> of one
kind or another prevailed their dignity and influence
were of the highest, that under some forms of Monogamy,
as among the Nagas of Bengal,<SPAN name='r21' /><SPAN href='#f21' class='c010'><sup>[21]</sup></SPAN> women have
been abjectly degraded, while under other forms, as in
Ancient Egypt and the later Roman Empire, they
have been treated with respect; and so forth. We
cannot fail, I say, to recognize the enormous diversity
of practice which has existed over the world in this
matter of the relations of the sexes; nor, I may add,
can we venture—if we possess any sense of humanity—to
put our finger down finally on any one custom
or institution, and say, Here alone is the right way.</p>
<p class='c009'>On the contrary, it seems to me probable that,
broadly speaking, a really free Society will accept and
make use of all that has gone before. If, as we have
suggested, historical forms and customs are the indication
of tendencies and instincts which still exist
among us, then the question is, not the extinction of
these tendencies, but the finding of the right place and
really rational expression for them. That the various
customs of past social life do subsist on beneath the
surface of modern society, we know well enough; and
it seems likely that society in the future will have to
recognize and to a certain extent transform these. In
<span class='pageno' id='Page_115'>115</span>fact, in recognizing it will inevitably transform, for it
will bring them out from darkness into light, and from
the old conditions and surroundings of the past societies
into the new conditions of the modern. Polygamy,
for instance, or some related form of union, supposing
it really did spontaneously and naturally arise
in a society which gave perfect freedom and independence
to women in their relation to men, would be
completely different in character from the old-world
polygamy, and would cease to act as a degrading influence
on women, since it would be the spontaneous
expression of their attachment to each other and to
a common husband; Monogamy, under similar circumstances,
would lose its narrowness and stuffiness;
and the life of the Hetaira, that is of the woman who
chooses to be the companion of more than one man,
might not be without dignity, honor, and sincere attachment.</p>
<p class='c009'>Again it is easy to see, if the sense of cleanness in
sex ever does come in, if the physical body ever becomes
clean (which it certainly is not now-a-days),
clean and beautiful and accepted, within and without—and
this of course it can only be through a totally
changed method of life, through pure and clean food,
nakedness to a large extent, and a kind of saturation
with the free air and light of heaven; and if the mental
and moral relation ever becomes clean, which can only
be with the freedom of woman and the sincerity of
<span class='pageno' id='Page_116'>116</span>man, and so forth; it is easy to see how entirely all
this would alter our criticism of the various sex-relations,
and our estimate of their place and fitness.</p>
<p class='c009'>In the wild and even bacchanalian festivals of all
the earlier nations, there was an element of Nature-sex-mysticism
which has become lost in modern times,
or quite unclean and depraved; yet we cannot but see
that this element is a vital and deep-lying one in humanity,
and in some form or other will probably reassert
itself. On the other hand, in the Monkish and
other ascetic movements of Christian or pre-Christian
times, with their efforts towards a proud ascendancy
over the body, there was (commonly sneered at though
it may be in the modern West) an equally vital and
important truth,<SPAN name='r22' /><SPAN href='#f22' class='c010'><sup>[22]</sup></SPAN> which will have to be rehabilitated.
The practices of former races and times, however anomalous
they may sometimes appear to us, were after
all in the main the expression of needs and desires
which had their place in human nature, and which still
for the most part have their place there, even though
overlaid and suppressed beneath existing convention;
and who knows, in all the stifled longings of thousands
and thousands of hearts, how the great broad soul of
Humanity—which reaches to and accepts all times
and races—is still ever asserting herself and swelling
against the petty bonds of this or that age? The
nearer Society comes to its freedom and majority the
<span class='pageno' id='Page_117'>117</span>more lovingly will it embrace this great soul within
it, and recognizing in all the customs of the past the
partial efforts of that soul to its own fulfillment will
refuse to deny them, but rather seek, by acceptance
and reunion, to transform and illumine them all.</p>
<p class='c009'>Possibly, to some, these remarks will only suggest
a return to general confusion and promiscuity; and of
course to such people they will seem inconsistent with
what has been said before on the subject of the real
Marriage and the tendency of human beings, as society
evolves, to seek more and more sincerely a life-long
union with their chosen mate; but no one who
thinks twice about the matter could well make this
mistake. For the latter tendency, that namely “from
confusion to distinction,” is in reality the tendency
of all evolution, and cannot be set aside. It is in the
very nature of Love that as it realizes its own aim it
should rivet always more and more towards a durable
and distinct relationship, nor rest till the permanent
mate and equal is found. As human beings progress
their relations to each other must become much more
definite and distinct instead of less so—and there is no
likelihood of society in its onward march lapsing backward,
so to speak, to formlessness again.</p>
<p class='c009'>But it is just the advantage of this onward movement
towards definiteness that it allows—as in the
evolution of all organic life—of more and more differentiation
as the life rises higher in the scale of existence.
<span class='pageno' id='Page_118'>118</span>If society should at any future time recognize—as
we think likely it will do—the variety of needs of
the human heart and of human beings, it will not
therefore confuse them, but will see that these different
needs indicate different functions, all of which
may have their place and purpose. If it has the good
sense to tolerate a Nature-festival now and then, and
a certain amount of animalism let loose, it will not be
so foolish as to be unable to distinguish this from the
deep delight and happiness of a permanent spiritual
mating; or if it recognizes in some case, a woman’s
temporary alliance with a man for the sake of obtaining
a much-needed child, it will not therefore be so
silly as to mark her down for life as a common harlot.
It will allow in fact that there are different forms and
functions of the love-sentiment, and while really believing
that a life-long comradeship (possibly with little
of the sexual in it) is the most satisfying form, will
see that a cast-iron Marriage-custom which, as to-day,
expects two people either to live eternally in the same
house and sit on opposite sides of the same table, or
else to be strangers to each other—and which only
recognizes two sorts of intimacy, orthodox and criminal,
wedded and adulterous—is itself the source of
perpetual confusion and misapprehension.</p>
<p class='c009'>No doubt the Freedom of Society in this sense, and
the possibility of a human life which shall be the fluid
and ever-responsive embodiment of true Love in all
<span class='pageno' id='Page_119'>119</span>its variety of manifestation, goes with the Freedom of
Society in the economic sense. When mankind has
solved the industrial problem so far that the products
of our huge mechanical forces have become a common
heritage, and no man or woman is the property-slave
of another, then some of the causes which compel
prostitution, property-marriage, and other perversions
of affection, will have disappeared; and in such economically
free society human unions may at last take
place according to their own inner and true laws.</p>
<p class='c009'>Hitherto we have hardly thought whether there
were any inner laws or not; our thoughts have been
fixed on the outer; and the Science of Love, if it may
so be called, has been strangely neglected. Yet if,
putting aside for a moment all convention and custom,
one will look quietly within himself, he will perceive
that there are most distinct and inviolable inner forces,
binding him by different ties to different people, and
with different and inevitable results according to the
quality and the nature of the affection bestowed—that
there is in fact in that world of the heart a kind
of cosmical harmony and variety, and an order almost
astronomical.</p>
<p class='c009'>This is noticeably true of what may be called the
planetary law of distances in the relation of people to
one another. For of some of the circle of one’s acquaintance
it may be said that one loves them cordially
at a hundred miles’ distance; of others that they
<span class='pageno' id='Page_120'>120</span>are dear friends at a mile; while others again are indispensable
far nearer than that. If by any chance
the friend whose planetary distance is a mile is forced
into closer quarters, the only result is a violent development
of repulsion and centrifugal force, by which
probably he is carried even beyond his normal distance,
till such time as he settles down into his right
place; while on the other hand if we are separated for
a season from one who by right is very near and who
we know belongs to us, we can bide our time, knowing
that the forces of return will increase with the separation.
How marked and definite these personal distances
are may be gathered from considering how
largely the art of life consists in finding and keeping
them, and how much trouble arises from their confusion,
and from the way in which we often only find
them out after much blundering and suffering and mutual
recrimination.</p>
<p class='c009'>So marked indeed are these and other such laws
that they sometimes suggest that there really is a
cosmic world of souls, to which we all belong—a
world of souls whose relations are eternal and clearly-defined;
and that our terrestrial relations are merely
the working-out and expression of far antecedent and
unmodifiable facts—an idea which for many people is
corroborated by the curious way in which, often at the
very first sight, they become aware of their exact relation
to a new-comer. In some cases this brings with
<span class='pageno' id='Page_121'>121</span>it a strange sense of previous intimacy, hard to, explain;
and in other cases, not so intimate, it still will
seem to fix almost instantaneously the exact propinquity
of the relation—so that though in succeeding
years, or even decades of years, the mutual acquaintanceship
may work itself out with all sorts of interesting
and even unexpected developments and episodes,
yet this mean distance does not vary during the
whole time, so to speak, by a single hair’s breadth.</p>
<p class='c009'>Is it possible, we may ask (in the light of such experiences),
that there really is a Free Society in another
and deeper sense than that hitherto suggested—a
society to which we all in our inmost selves consciously
or unconsciously belong—the Rose of souls
that Dante beheld in Paradise, whose every petal is an
individual, and an individual only through its union
with all the rest—the early Church’s dream, of an eternal
Fellowship in heaven and on earth—the Prototype
of all the brotherhoods and communities that exist on
this or any planet; and that the innumerable selves
of men, united in the one Self, members of it and of
one another (like the members of the body) stand in
eternal and glorious relationship bound indissolubly
together? We know of course that the reality of
things cannot be adequately expressed by such phrases
as these, or by any phrases, yet possibly some such
conception comes as near the truth as any one conception
can; and, making use of it, we may think that
<span class='pageno' id='Page_122'>122</span>our earthly relations are a continual attempt—through
much blindness and ineffectualness and failure—to feel
after and to find these true and permanent relations
to others.</p>
<p class='c009'>Surely in some subtle way if one person sincerely
love another, heart and soul, that other becomes a
part of the lover, indissolubly wrought into his being.<SPAN name='r23' /><SPAN href='#f23' class='c010'><sup>[23]</sup></SPAN>
Mentally the two grow and become compact together.
No thought that the lover thinks, no scene that he
looks on, but the impress of his loved one in some way
is on it—so that as long as he exists (here or anywhere)
with his most intimate self that other is threaded
and twined inseparable. So clinging is the relation.
Perhaps in the outer world we do not always see such
relations quite clear, and we think when death or
other cause removes the visible form from us that the
hour of parting has come. But in the inner world it
is clear enough, and we divine that we and our mate
are only two little petals that grow near each other
on the great Flower of Eternity; and that it is because
we are near each other in that unchanging
world, that in the world of change our mortal selves
are drawn together, and will be drawn always, wherever
and whenever they may meet.</p>
<p class='c009'>But since the petals of the immortal Flower are
<span class='pageno' id='Page_123'>123</span>by myriads and myriads, so have we endless lessons of
soul-relationship to learn—some most intimate, others
doubtless less so, but all fair and perfect—so soon as
we have discovered what these relationships really
are, and are in no confusion of mind about them. For
even those that are most distant are desirable, and
have the germ of love in them, so soon as they are
touched by the spirit of Truth (which means the fearless
statement of the life which is in us, in poise
against the similar statement of life in others); since,
indeed, the spirit of Truth is the life of the whole, and
only the other side of that Love which binds the whole
together.</p>
<p class='c009'>Looking at things in this light it would seem to us
that the ideal of terrestrial society for which we naturally
strive is that which would embody best these enduring
and deep-seated relations of human souls; and
that every society, as far as it is human and capable
of holding together, is in its degree a reflection of the
celestial City. Never is the essential, real, Society
quite embodied in any mundane Utopia, but ever
through human history is it working unconsciously in
the midst of mortal affairs and impelling towards an
expression of itself.</p>
<p class='c009'>At any rate, and however all this may be, the conclusion
is that the inner laws in these matters—the
inner laws of the sex-passion, of love, and of all human
relationship—must gradually appear and take the
<span class='pageno' id='Page_124'>124</span>lead, since they alone are the powers which can create
and uphold a rational society; and that the outer laws—since
they are dead and lifeless things—must inevitably
disappear. Real love is only possible in the freedom
of society; and freedom is only possible when
love is a reality. The subjection of sex-relations to
legal conventions is an intolerable bondage, but of
course it is a bondage inescapable as long as people
are slaves to a merely physical desire. The two slaveries
in fact form a sort of natural counterpoise, the
one to the other. When love becomes sufficient of a
reality to hold the sex-passion as its powerful yet willing
servant, the absurdity of Law will be at an end.</p>
<p class='c009'>Surely it is not too much to suppose that a reasonable
society will be capable of seeing these and
other such things; that it will neither on the one hand
submit to a cast-iron system depriving it of all grace
and freedom of movement, nor on the other hand be
in danger of falling into swamps of promiscuity; but
that it will have the sense to recognize and establish
the innumerable and delicate distinctions of relation
which build up the fabric of a complex social organism.
It will understand perhaps that sincere Love is,
as we have said, a real fact and its own justification,
and that however various or anomalous or unusual
may be the circumstances and combinations under
which it appears, it demands and has to be treated by
society with the utmost respect and reverence—as a
<span class='pageno' id='Page_125'>125</span>law unto itself, probably the deepest and most intimate
law of human life, which only in the most exceptional
cases, if at all, may public institutions venture
to interfere with.</p>
<p class='c009'>In all these matters it is surprising to-day what
children we are—how we take the innumerable flowers
and try to snip and shape all their petals and leaves
to one sorry pattern, or how with a kind of grossness
we snatch at and destroy in a few moments the bloom
and beauty which are rightfully undying. Perhaps it
will only be for a society more fully grown than ours
to understand the wealth and variety of affectional
possibilities which it has within itself, and the full enchantment
of the many relations in which the romance
of love by a tender discrimination and aesthetic continence
is preserved for years and decades of years in, as
it were, a state of evergrowing perfection.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_129'>129</span>
<h2 class='c005'><span class='sc'>SOME REMARKS<br/> on the<br/> EARLY STAR and SEX WORSHIPS</span></h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c008'>There seems to be a certain propriety in the
fact that two of the oldest and most universal
cults have been the worship of the stars on the one
hand, and of the emblems of sex on the other. The
stars, the most abstract, distant and universal of phenomena,
symbols of changeless law and infinitude,
before which human will and passion sink into death
and nothingness, and sex, the very focus of passion
and desire, the burning point of the will to live; between
these two poles the human mind has swayed
since the eldest time.</p>
<p class='c009'>With these earlier worships, too, the later religions
have mingled in inextricable but not meaningless entanglement.
The Passover, the greatest feast of the
Jews, borrowed from the Egyptians, handed down to
become the supreme festival of Christianity, and finally
blending in the North of Europe with the worship of
the Norse goddess Eastre, is as is well known closely
connected with the celebration of the Spring equinox
<span class='pageno' id='Page_130'>130</span>and of the passing over of the sun from south to north
of the equator—i. e., from his winter depression to
his summer dominion. The Sun, at the moment of
passing the equinoctial point, stood 3,000 years ago
in the Zodiacal constellation of the Ram or he-lamb.
The Lamb, therefore, became the symbol of the young
triumphant god. The Israelites (Exodus xii. 14) were
to smear their doorways (symbol of the passage from
darkness to light) with the blood of the Lamb, in remembrance
of the conflict of their god with the powers
of darkness (the Egyptians). At an earlier date—owing
to the precession of the equinoxes—the sun at
the spring passage stood in the constellation of the
Bull; so, in the older worships of Egypt and of Persia
and of India, it was the Bull that was sacred and the
symbol of the god. Moses is said to have abolished
the worship of the Calf and to have consecrated the
Lamb at the passover—and this appears to be a rude
record of the fact that the astronomical changes were
accompanied or followed by priestly changes of ceremonial.
Certainly it is curious that in later Egyptian
times the bull-headed god was deposed in favor of the
ram-headed god Ammon; and that Christianity adopted
the Lamb for the symbol of its Savior. Similarly,
the Virgin Mary with the holy Child in her arms can
be traced by linear descent from the early Christian
Church at Alexandria up through the later Egyptian
times to Isis with the infant Horus, and thence to the
<span class='pageno' id='Page_131'>131</span>constellation Virgo shining in the sky. In the representation
of the Zodiac in the Temple of Denderah
(in Egypt) the figure of Virgo is annotated by a
smaller figure of Isis with Horus in her arms; and the
Roman church fixed the celebration of Mary’s assumption
into glory at the very date (15th August) of the
said constellation’s disappearance from sight in the
blaze of the solar rays, and her birth on the date (8th
Sept.) of the same constellation’s reappearance.<SPAN name='r24' /><SPAN href='#f24' class='c010'><sup>[24]</sup></SPAN></p>
<p class='c009'>The history of Israel reveals a long series of
avowedly sexual and solar worships carried on alongside
with that of Jehovah—worships of Baal, Ashtaroth,
Nehushtan, the Host of Heaven, etc.—and if we
are to credit the sacred record, Moses himself introduced
the notoriously sexual Tree and Serpent worship
(Numbers xxi. 9, and 2 Kings xviii. 4); while
Solomon, not without dramatic propriety, borrowed
from the Phoenicians the two phallic pillars surmounted
by pomegranate wreaths, called Jachin and
Boaz, and placed them in front of his temple (1 Kings
vii. 21). The Cross itself (identical as a symbol with
the phallus of the Greeks and the lingam of the East),
the Fleur de Lys, which has the same signification,
and the Crux Ansata, borrowed by the early Christians
from Egypt and indicating the union of male and female,
are woven and worked into the priestly vestments
<span class='pageno' id='Page_132'>132</span>and altar-cloths of Christianity, just as the
astronomical symbols are woven and worked into its
Calendar, and both sets of symbols, astronomical and
sexual, into the very construction of our Churches and
Cathedrals. Jesus himself—so entangled is the worship
of this greatest man with the earlier cults—is
purported<SPAN name='r25' /><SPAN href='#f25' class='c010'><sup>[25]</sup></SPAN> to have been born like the other sun-gods,
Bacchus, Apollo, Osiris, on the 25th day of December,
the day of the sun’s re-birth (i. e., the first day
which obviously lengthens after the 21st of December—the
day of the doubting apostle Thomas!) and to
have died upon an instrument which, as already
hinted, was ages before and all over the world held
in reverence as a sexual symbol.</p>
<p class='c009'>I have only touched the fringe of this great subject.
The more it is examined into the more remarkable
is the mass of corroborative matter belonging to
it. The conclusion towards which one seems to be
impelled is that these two great primitive ideas, sexual
and astronomical, are likely to remain the poles of
human emotion in the future, even as they have been
in the past.</p>
<p class='c009'>Some cynic has said that the two great ruling
forces of mankind are Obscenity and Superstition.
Put in a less paradoxical form, as that the two ruling
forces are Sex and the belief in the Unseen, the saying
<span class='pageno' id='Page_133'>133</span>may perhaps be accepted. To call the two Love
and Faith (as Dr. Bucke does in his excellent book
on “Man’s Moral Nature”) is perhaps to run the risk
of becoming too abstract and spiritual.</p>
<p class='c009'>Roughly speaking we may say that the worship of
Sex and Life characterized the Pagan races of Europe
and Asia Minor anterior to Christianity, while the
worship of Death and the Unseen has characterized
Christianity. It remains for the modern nations to
accept both Life and Death, both the Greek and the
Hebrew elements, and all that these general terms
denote, in a spirit of the fullest friendliness and sanity
and fearlessness.</p>
<p class='c009'>A curious part of all the old religions, Pagan or
Christian—and this connects itself with the above—is
Asceticism: that occasional instinct of voluntary
and determined despite to the body and its senses.
Even in the wildest races, rejoicing before all things
in the consciousness of Life, we find festivals of fierce
endurance and torments willingly undergone with a
kind of savage glee;<SPAN name='r26' /><SPAN href='#f26' class='c010'><sup>[26]</sup></SPAN> and during the Christian centuries—monks,
mystics, and world-spiting puritans—this
instinct was sometimes exalted into the very first
place of honor. I suppose it will have to be recognized—whatever
absurd aberrations the tendency may
have been liable to—that it is a basic thing in human
<span class='pageno' id='Page_134'>134</span>nature, and as ineradicable in its way as the other
equally necessary instinct towards Pleasure. To put it
in another way, perhaps the ordinary Hedonism makes
a mistake in failing to recognize the joy of Ascendancy,
and (if it is not a “bull” to say so) the pleasure
which lies in the denial of pleasure. In order to enjoy
life one must be a master of life—for to be a slave to
its inconsistencies can only mean torment: and in
order to enjoy the senses one must be master of
them. To dominate the actual world you must, like
Archimedes, base your fulcrum somewhere beyond.</p>
<p class='c009'>In such moods a man delights to feel his supremacy,
not only over the beasts of the field, but over
his own bodily and mental powers: no ordinary pleasure
so great, but its rejection serves to throw out
into relief this greater; no task so stern, but endurance
is sterner; no pain so fierce but it wakes the soul to
secret laughter. If there is something narrow in the
creed of the ascetic on its negative side—that of denial—one
cannot but feel that on its positive side, the establishment
of authority and kingship, it has a real
and vital meaning.</p>
<p class='c009'>In another mood, however (equally undeniable and
important), man acknowledges his delight in life, and
gives the rein to his desires to chariot him to the
extremest bounds of his kingdom. The kiss of the
senses is beautiful beyond all and every abstraction;
the touch of the sunlight, the glory of form and color,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_135'>135</span>the magic of sweet sound, the joy of human embraces,
the passion of sex—all so much the more perfect because
they are as it were something divine made actual
and realizable. In such a mood asceticism in any
form seems the grossest impiety and folly, and the
pursuit of the Unseen a mere abandonment of the
world for its shadow.</p>
<p class='c009'>Are not these two moods both necessary—the great
rhythmical heart-beat, the systole and diastole, of the
human soul? The one, a going forth and gathering of
materials from all sources, the other an organizing of
them under the most perfect light, or rather (it may
be said) a consumption of them to feed the most perfect
flame; the one centrifugal, the other centripetal;
the one individual, the other universal; and so forth—each
required for the purposes of the other, and making
the other possible?</p>
<p class='c009'>Do we not want a truly experiential view of what
may be called Religion—derived from the largest actual
acquaintance with, and acceptance of, all the facts
both of mundane and extra-mundane consciousness—neither
(like some secularists) denying the one, nor
(like some religionists) minimizing or contemning the
other? And is it not possible that in the early Star
and Sex worships we have evidence of the attempt of
the human mind to establish some such sane polarity?</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_136'>136</span>
<h2 class='c005'>NOTE<br/> ON THE PRIMITIVE GROUP-MARRIAGE</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c008'>One of the early forms of union among human beings
appears to have been that of the Group-marriage,
which was an alliance between a group of
men and a group of women. It had various forms,
but rested in general on the fact that the women in
primitive societies did not, on marriage, leave their
parental habitation but remained there and were visited
by the men—by one man first, who would come
with presents of game, etc., from the chase, and would
afterwards bring his “brothers” or friends. Thus in
general a group of “brothers” would come into relation
with a group of “sisters.” In such a state of society,
however, it is obvious that parentage would be
very uncertain, and the terms brother and sister would
not always have the stricter meanings which we give
them. Such a group-marriage was the “Punalua” or
“friend” marriage of Morgan’s North American Indians;
which is also supposed by Marx and Engels to
have prevailed at an early time throughout Polynesia.
See Lewis Morgan’s “Ancient Society” and Friedrich
Engels’ “<span lang="de" xml:lang="de">Ursprung der Familie</span>.”</p>
<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_137'>137</span>In later times the group-marriage became restricted
in various directions, according to the genius of
various races—marriage of cousins, for instance, being
severely prohibited among some barbaric tribes, while
among others all relatives (in the maternal line) were
barred. Thus ultimately, in some quarters, sprang up
a Pair-marriage; which however was only loosely defined;
which had much of the old group-marriage
lingering round it; and in which the children still belonged
to the woman, and descent was traced in the
maternal line only.</p>
<p class='c009'>Under these conditions of society the woman was
comparatively well off. Remaining as she did in her
own gens or clan and among her own relations, and
the husband being as it were a visitor from the outside,
she was by no means subject to him; in fact, in
order to gain access, he had to make himself agreeable
not only to her but to her own family! She had the
disposal of the children; there was no danger of their
being sequestrated to her husband; and whatever little
property she had she could leave to them; to her was
all the honor of ancestry. The husband on the other
hand, even if he knew which his own children were,
could see little of them, and could not leave his possessions
to them without alienating those possessions
from his clan—which the clan-customs would not permit.
Thus in marriage he practically had to take the
second place.</p>
<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_138'>138</span>With the growth however of property and the sense
of property, there came a time when the men could
stand this state of affairs no longer, and insisted, violently
at first, in carrying off the women and locating
them in their own tents and among their own clans—a
change rudely recorded probably in legends like the
Rape of the Sabines, and in all the later customs of
Marriage by Capture. And with this change marriage
took on new forms. Women became the property of
their husbands; they ceased to hold property of their
own, in their children or in anything else; and descent
was traced through the males only. In the Patriarchal
system marriage was closely akin to slavery. Polygamy
and Monogamy were the two resulting institutions.</p>
<p class='c009'>Polyandry may perhaps be looked upon as a survival
of the group-marriage in a special form adapted
to warrior races; but—as Engels remarks—both Polygamy
and Polyandry in any strict sense can only be regarded
as exceptional institutions, since if they were
general in any one country, that would imply a great
preponderance of one sex over the other—unless indeed
the two institutions existed side by side in the
same country, which notoriously never happens. As
a matter of fact in oriental countries Polygamy is confined
to the rich, and is so to speak a luxury, within
reach of the few only.</p>
<p class='c009'>Thus it would appear that from the first, in oriental
<span class='pageno' id='Page_139'>139</span>countries, the practices of polygamy and monogamy
were intermixed. In Greece and Rome polygamy
ceased to be recognized as an institution; though concubinage
in one form or another remained. The
Monogamic marriage became the legal institution;
and the woman was handed over to the man as his
chattel: was bought symbolically with his money, in
the marriage ceremony; and had at first no more
rights of her own than a chattel. In the later times,
however, of the Roman Empire, with the institution
of the dowry and the power granted to women of
holding property, together with the great facilities of
divorce allowed, the position of the Roman matron
became much improved. And in modern European
countries the monogamic institution seems to have
passed or be passing through somewhat the same
stages as in ancient Greece or Rome.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_140'>140</span>
<h2 class='c005'>ON JEALOUSY.</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c008'>A great disturber of the celestial order of Love
is Jealousy—that brand of physical passion
which carried over into the emotional regions of the
mind will sometimes rage there like a burning fire.
One may distinguish two kinds of jealousy, a natural
and an artificial. The first arises perhaps from the
real uniqueness of the relationship between two persons—at
any rate as it appears to one of them—and
the endeavor to stamp this uniqueness on the whole
relationship, sexual and moral—especially on the sexual
relationship. This kind of jealousy seems in a
sense natural and normal, at any rate for a period; but
when the personal relation between the two parties has
been fully and confessedly established, and is no more
endangered, the feeling does often I think (equally
naturally) die away; and may do so quite well without
damaging the intimacy and uniqueness of the
alliance. This jealousy is felt with terrible keenness
and intensity by lovers before the consummation of
their passion, and perhaps for a year or two afterwards—though
it may be protracted rather indefinitely
in the case where the alliance, on one side at any
rate, is not quite satisfactory.</p>
<p class='c009'><span class='pageno' id='Page_141'>141</span>The other kind of jealousy rests on the sense of
property, and is the kind that is often felt by the
average husband and wife long after honeymooning
days—by the husband not because of his especial devotion
to his partner, but because he is furious at the
idea of her disposing as she likes with what he considers
his property; and by the wife because she is terrified
at the thought that her matrimonial clothes-peg,
from which depend all her worldly prospects, may
vanish away or become the peg for another woman’s
clothes. This kind of jealousy is more especially the
product of immediate social conditions, and is in that
sense artificial. Though probably not quite so heart-rending
as the other, it is often passionate enough, and
lasts on indefinitely, like a chronic disease.</p>
<p class='c009'>In early times, with the more communistic feeling
of primitive societies, and with customs (like group-marriage)
which allowed some latitude in sex-relation,
jealousy though strong was not probably a very
great force. But with the growth of individualism
in life and in love, with the rise of the sense of property
under civilization and the accentuation of every
personal feeling in what may be called the cellular
state of society, the passion became one of fearful and
convulsive power and fury; as is borne witness to by
numberless dramas and poems and romances of the
historical period. In the communism and humanism
of the future, as the sense of property declines, and as
<span class='pageno' id='Page_142'>142</span>Love rises more and more out of mere blind confusion
with the sex-act, we may fairly hope that the artificial
jealousy will disappear altogether, and that the other
form of the passion will subside again into a comparatively
reasonable human emotion.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_143'>143</span>
<h2 class='c005'>ON THE FAMILY</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c008'>A change somewhat similar to that in the position
of Jealousy has taken place in the role of
the Family during the progress of society into and
through the period of civilization. In the primitive
human association the Family was large in extent, and
in outline vague; the boundaries of kinship, in cases
where the woman might have several husbands, or
the husband several wives, were hard to trace; paternal
feeling was little or not at all developed; and the whole
institution rested on the maternal instinct of care for
the young. In the middle societies of civilization, and
with monogamic arrangements, the Family grew exceedingly
definite in form and circumscribed in extent.
The growth of property and competition, and the
cellular system of society, developed a kind of warfare
between the units of which society was composed.
These units were families. The essential communism
and fraternity of society at large was dwarfed now and
contracted into the limits of the family; and this institution
acquired an extraordinary importance from
the fact that it alone kept alive and showed in miniature
(intensified by the darkness and chaos and warfare
<span class='pageno' id='Page_144'>144</span>outside) the sacred fire of human fraternity. So
great was this importance in fact that the Holy Family
became one of the central religious conceptions of the
civilized period, and it was commonly thought that
society owed its existence to the Family—instead of,
as was the case, the truth being reverse, namely that
the Family was the condensation of the principle
which had previously existed, though diffused and unconscious,
throughout society.</p>
<p class='c009'>The third and future stage is of course easy to see—that
is, the expansion again of the conception of the
family consciously into the fraternity and communism
of all society. It is obvious that as this takes place the
family will once more lose its definition of outline and
merge more and more again with the larger social
groups in which it is embedded—but not into the old
barbaric society in which the conception of human
fellowship lay diffused and only dimly auroral, but
into the newer society in which it shall be clear and
all-illuminating as the sun.</p>
<p class='c009'>Thus the Family institution in its present form,
and as far as that form may be said to be artificial, will
doubtless pass away. Nevertheless there remains of
course, and must remain, its natural or physiological
basis—namely the actual physical relation of the parents
to each other and to the child. One perhaps of
the most valuable results of the Monogamic family institution
under civilization has been the development
<span class='pageno' id='Page_145'>145</span>of the paternal feeling for the child, which in primitive
society was so weak. To-day the love of man and
wife for each other is riveted, as it never was in
ancient days, by the tender beauty of the child-face, in
which each parent sees with strange emotion his own
features blended with the features of his loved one—the
actual realization of that union which the lovers so
desired, and which yet so often seemed to them after
all not consummated. The little prolongation of oneself,
carrying in its eyes the star-look of another’s
love, and descending a stranger into the world to face
a destiny all its own, touches the most personal and
mortal-close feelings (as well as perhaps the most impersonal)
of the heart. And while to-day this sight
often reconciles husband and wife to the legal chains
which perforce hold them together, in a Free Society,
we may hope, it will more often be the sign and seal
of a love which neither requires nor allows any kind of
mechanical bond.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_146'>146</span>
<h2 class='c005'>ON PREVENTIVE CHECKS TO POPULATION.</h2></div>
<p class='drop-capa0_0_6 c008'>This is no doubt a complex and difficult subject.
Nature from far back time has provided in the
most determined and obstinate way for the perpetuation
of organic life, and has endowed animals, and
even plants, with a strong sexual instinct. By natural
selection this instinct tends, it would seem, to be
accentuated; and in the higher animals and man it
sometimes attains a pitch almost of ferocity. In civilized
man this effect is further increased by the intensity
of consciousness, which reflects desire on itself, as
well as by collateral conditions of life and luxury.</p>
<p class='c009'>In the animal and plant world generally, and up
to the realm of Man, Nature appears to be perfectly
lavish in the matter, and careless of the waste of
seed and of life that may ensue, provided her object
of race-propagation is attained; and naturally when
the time arrives that Man, objecting to this waste,
faces up to the problem, he finds it no easy one to
solve.</p>
<p class='c009'>And not only Man (the male) objects to lower
Nature’s method of producing superfluous individuals
only to kill them off again in the struggle for existence;
<span class='pageno' id='Page_147'>147</span>but Woman objects to being a mere machine for
perpetual reproduction.</p>
<p class='c009'>There are only two ways commonly proposed of
meeting the difficulty: either (1) the adoption of some
kind of artificial preventatives to conception, or (2)
the exercise of very considerable continence and self-control
in the face of the powerful instinct of procreation.
Of course, also, the two methods may be used
in conjunction with each other.</p>
<p class='c009'>(1) It must be acknowledged that artificial checks
to population are for the most part very unsatisfactory:
their uncertainty, their desperate matter-of-factness,
so fatal to real feeling, the probability that
they are in one way or another dangerous or harmful,
and then their one-sideness, since here—as so often in
matters of sex—the man’s satisfaction is largely at the
cost of the woman: all these things are against them.
One method however—that which consists in selecting,
for sexual congress, a certain part of the woman’s
monthly cycle, can hardly be called artificial, and is
altogether the least open to the objections cited. Its
success truly is not absolutely certain, but is perhaps
sufficiently nearly so for the general purpose of regulating
the family; and if the method involves some self-control,
it does not at any rate make an impracticable
demand in that direction.</p>
<p class='c009'>(2) To adopt the method of self-control alone
without regard to (1) would practically mean, in those
<span class='pageno' id='Page_148'>148</span>instances where children were thought undesirable, an
entire abstinence from actual intercourse, and would
in most cases be making too great a demand on human
nature, as well as, in some, running a possible risk of
prejudice to health. No doubt the danger of prejudice
to health has been greatly exaggerated; for as a rule a
strong effort towards voluntary continence is one of
the best safeguards of health; but it does not follow
from this that complete abstinence is generally either
practicable or desirable. It may, however, be said
that it is in the direction of self-control rather than in
the direction of unlimited “checks” that we should
look for the future; and that if some effort were made
towards a wise choice of the periods of congress, the
general object in view would be attained without putting
an inordinate strain upon the average human nature,
and without necessitating recourse to doubtful
and artificial devices. The effort itself, too, would lead
to that Transmutation of sex-force into the higher
emotional elements, of which we have spoken already,
and which is such an important factor in Evolution.</p>
<p class='c009'>I do not much doubt that, as society evolves, the
sex-difficulty generally—which has been such a serious
one during the civilization-period—will to a great
extent subside again. As to excessive breeding (which
of course does not necessarily mean excessive sex-congress)
it is probably a phenomenon which marks
different races during a certain period of their growth
<span class='pageno' id='Page_149'>149</span>and maturity, and which passes away again. And as
to excessive sex-desire, since the animals certainly do
not show the inordinateness of man in this respect,
there is hope for man too when he comes to his senses!
A cleaner life, a cleaner diet, the habit of the open air,
the growth of the mind to wider interests, the growth
of Love itself—all will help. The two last-mentioned
elements indeed necessarily evoke a certain effort of
control over the more animal instinct—and a kind of
conflict, until the two portions of the nature are
brought into harmony.</p>
<div class='chapter'>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_151'>151</span>
<h2 class='c005'>APPENDIX</h2></div>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_7'>7</SPAN>.—“<i>Natural Reticence.</i>”</h3>
<p class='c013'>Sex belongs to the Unconscious or universal-conscious regions
of our nature (which is the meaning perhaps of Modesty),
and will resume its place there some day. Meanwhile,
having crept into the Conscious, it must for the time
being be sincerely faced there.</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_14'>14</SPAN>.—“<i>To Teach the Child First, Quite Openly, its Physical Relation to its Own Mother.</i>”</h3>
<p class='c013'>“It was not without much anxiety that I took the first
step on a road I intended to explore alone. Chance favored
me. I was in Java, and amongst my servants was a dressmaker,
married to the groom. This woman had a dear little
baby with a velvety brown skin and bright black eyes, the
admiration of my little daughter, whom I took with me to
see mother and child, when the baby was a few days old.
While she admired and petted it wonderingly, I said to her:
‘This pretty little baby came out of Djahid like the beautiful
butterfly came out of the chrysalis, it lay close to
Djahid’s heart, she made it, and kept it there till it grew.
She loved it so much that she made it grow.’ Lilly looked
at me with her large, intelligent eyes in astonishment.
‘Djahid is very happy to have this pretty baby. Djahid’s
blood made it strong while it lay close to her heart; now
Djahid will give it milk, and make it strong, till it will
grow as big as my Lilly. It made Djahid ill and made her
suffer when it was born, but she soon got well, and she is
so glad.’ Lily listened, very much interested, and when
she got home, she told her father the story, forgetting
<span class='pageno' id='Page_152'>152</span>nothing. But beyond that, she did not refer again to the
matter, and soon forgot all about it. The birth of Djahid’s
second baby gave me the opportunity of repeating the little
lesson. This time she asked some questions. I explained
many things to the eager little listener, very simply,
and told her that the mother kept the child within
her, and took great care of it until it was old enough to
endure the changes of temperature, etc., and showed her
how a mother’s joy and love made her forget her pain. The
little creature, suddenly remembering that she must have
given her mother pain, kissed me tenderly. That was a
flower of love and gratitude, which it was my happiness
to see develop on the fruitful soil of truth. * * * I
analyzed a flower, I pointed out to her the beauty of coloring,
the gracefulness of shape, the tender shades, the difference
between the parts composing the flowers. Gradually,
I told her what these parts were called. I showed
her the pollen, which clung like a beautiful golden powder
to her little rosy fingers. I showed her through the microscope
that this beautiful powder was composed of an infinite
number of small grains. I made her examine the
pistil more closely, and I showed her, at the end of the
tube, the ovary, which I called a ‘little house full of very
tiny children.’ I showed her the pollen glued to the pistil,
and I told her that when the pollen of one flower, carried
away by the wind, or by the insects, fell on the pistil of
another flower, the small grains died, and a tiny drop of
moisture passed through the tube and entered into the little
house where the very tiny children dwelt; that these tiny
children were like small eggs, that in each small egg there
was an almost invisible opening, through which a little of
the small drop passed; that when this drop of pollen mixed
with some other wonderful power in the ovary, that both
joined together to give life, and the eggs developed and
became grains or fruit. I have shown her flowers which
had only a pistil and others which had only stamens. I
<span class='pageno' id='Page_153'>153</span>said to her, smiling, that the pistils were like little mothers,
and the stamens like little fathers of the fruit. * * *
Thus I sowed in this innocent heart and searching mind
the seeds of that delicate science, which degenerates into
obscenity, if the mother, through false shame, leaves the
instruction of her child to its schoolfellows. Let my little
girl ask me, if she likes, the much dreaded question; I will
only have to remind her of the botany lessons, simply
adding, ‘the same thing happens to human beings, with
this difference, that what is done unconsciously by the
plants, is done consciously by us; that in a properly arranged
society one only unites one’s self to the person one
loves.’”—(Translated from “<span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">La Revendication des Droits
Feminins</span>,” Shafts, April, 1894, p. 237.)</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_16'>16</SPAN>.—“<i>The Vulgarization of Love.</i>”</h3>
<p class='c013'>“I have found in my experience that those who seek to
draw into the selfish confines of their own breasts the electric
current of Love are withered by its force and passion.
The energy degrades to sensualism if it has only the Individual
channel for expression. The sexual expression of
Love is good and beautiful if normal, but it is not so
infallible as the subtler intercourse of the soul and the
affections, or so satisfying as a comradeship in work for
Humanity, and a mental and spiritual affinity.”—Miriam W.
Nicol.</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_24'>24</SPAN>.—“<i>In the Beauty and Openness of Their Own Bodies.</i>”</h3>
<p class='c013'>“All the loves—if they be heroic and not purely animal,
or what is called natural, and slaves to generation as instruments
in some way of nature—have for object the
divinity, and tend towards divine beauty, which first is
communicated to, and shines in, souls; and from them or
rather through them is communicated to bodies; whence it
is that well-ordered affection loves the body or corporeal
beauty, insomuch as it is an indication of beauty of spirit.”—Giordano
<span class='pageno' id='Page_154'>154</span>Bruno, “<span lang="it" xml:lang="it">Gli Eroici Furori</span>” (dial. iii. 13), trans.
by L. Williams.</p>
<p class='c009'>“In Sparta the spectacle of the naked human body and
the natural treatment of natural things were the best safeguard
against the sensual excitement artificially produced
by the modern plan of separating the sexes from the earliest
childhood. The forms of one sex and the functions of
its specific organs were no secret to the other. There was
no possibility of trifling with ambiguities.”—Bebel’s
“Woman,” Bellamy Library, p. 70.</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_26'>26</SPAN>.—<i>Generation and Nutrition.</i></h3>
<p class='c013'>“It is in the almost homogeneous fabrics of the cellular
plants that we find the closest connection between the function
of nutrition and that of reproduction; for every one of
the vesicles which compose their fabric is endowed with
the power of generating others similar to itself; and these
may extend the parent structure or separate into new and
distinct organisms. Hence it is scarcely possible to draw
a line in these cases, between the nutrition of the individual
and the reproduction of the species.”—W. B. Carpenter,
“Principles of Human Physiology,” sec. 281.</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_42'>42</SPAN>—<i>Secondary Differences Between the Sexes.</i></h3>
<p class='c013'>The following are some of the points of difference given
by H. Ellis in “Man and Woman” (Contemporary Science
Series):—</p>
<p class='c009'>The average cranial capacity of men is greater than that
of women (as would be expected from the general proportions
of the sexes); but the difference in this respect between
men and women is greater in the higher civilized
races than in the lower and more primitive.</p>
<p class='c009'>Evidence points on the whole to the cerebellum being,
relatively, distinctly larger in women than in men.</p>
<p class='c009'>Intellectually, women tend to the personal and concrete,
men to the general and abstract.</p>
<p class='c009'>Women endure pain, operations, etc., better than men,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_155'>155</span>and show greater tenacity of life; men are superior in
motor perfection, skill, and muscle. In delicacy of sense-perceptions
the two sexes are about equal.</p>
<p class='c009'>Women show in some respects a greater affectability than
men, which is encouraged by their slight tendency to anaemia,
by the greater development of their vaso-motor system,
and by the periodicity of their functions. They are
more hypnotic, the lower—that is, the more primitive and
fundamental—nerve-centers preponderate and are more excitable;
hysteria, ecstasy, and suggestibility, more marked.</p>
<p class='c009'>Men show a greater tendency to race-variation than
women; abnormalities of various kinds, idiots and geniuses,
are commoner amongst males. Man represents the radical,
or experimental element in the life of the race.</p>
<p class='c009'>Woman represents the conservative element. She remains
nearer to the child, but for that very reason is in
some respects more advanced than man, who, as he grows
older, is “farther off from heaven than when he was a
boy.”</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_51'>51</SPAN>.—<i>Finesse in Woman.</i></h3>
<p class='c013'>“The method of attaining results by ruses (common
among all the weaker lower animals) is so habitual among
women that, as Lombroso and Ferrero remark, in women
deception is ‘almost physiological.’ * * * But to regard
the caution and indirectness of women as due to innate
wickedness, would, it need scarcely be said, be utterly
irrational. It is inevitable, and results from the constitution
of women, acting in the conditions under which they
are generally placed. There is at present no country in the
world, certainly no civilized country, in which a woman
may safely state openly her wishes and desires, and proceed
openly to seek their satisfaction.”—H. Ellis, “Man
and Woman,” p. 174.</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_56'>56</SPAN>.—(note).—“<i>The Freedom of Woman Must Ultimately Rest on the Communism of Society.</i>”</h3>
<p class='c013'>“The reproduction of the race is a social function,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_156'>156</span>and we are compelled to conclude that it is the duty of the
community, as a community, to provide for the child-bearer
when in the exercise of her social function she is unable to
provide for herself. The woman engaged in producing a
new member, who may be a source of incalculable profit
or danger to the whole community, cannot fail to be a
source of the liveliest solicitude to everyone in the community,
and it was a sane and beautiful instinct that found
expression of old in the permission accorded to the pregnant
woman to enter gardens and orchards, and freely help
herself.”—Havelock Ellis, Pamphlet on “Evolution in Sex,”
p. 15.</p>
<p class='c009'>“She held it just that women should be so provided for,
because the mothers of the community fulfil in the State
as important and necessary a function as the men themselves
do.”—Grant Allen, “The Woman Who Did,” p. 73.</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_57'>57</SPAN>.—“<i>Menstrual Troubles and Disturbances.</i>”</h3>
<p class='c013'>There is little doubt that menstruation, as it occurs to-day
in the vast majority of cases, is somehow pathological
and out of the order of nature. In animals the periodic
loss is so small as to be scarcely noticeable, and among
primitive races of mankind it is as a rule markedly less
than among the higher and later races. We may therefore
suppose that its present excess is attributable to certain
conditions of life which have prevailed for a number of
centuries, and which have continuously acted to bring about
a feverish disposition of the sexual apparatus, and an
hereditary tendency to recurrent manifestations of a diseased
character. Among conditions of life which in all
probability would act in this way may be counted (1) the
indoor life and occupations of women, leading to degeneration
of the neuro-muscular system, weakness, and inflammability;
(2) the heightening of the sex-passion in both
men and women with the increase of luxury and artificialism
in life; (3) the subjection of the woman to the unrestrained
use and even abuse of the man, which inevitably
<span class='pageno' id='Page_157'>157</span>took place as soon as she—with the changes in the old
tribal life—became his chattel and slave; and which has
continued practically ever since. These three causes acting
together over so long a period may well seem sufficient to
have induced a morbid and excessive habit in the female
organism; and if so we may hope that with their removal
the excess itself and a vast amount of concomitant human
misery and waste of life-power will disappear.</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_62'>62</SPAN>.—“<i>Natural Desires.</i>”</h3>
<p class='c013'>“Although I agree with Malthus as to the value of virtuous
abstinence, the sad conviction is forced upon me as a
physician that the chaste morality of women—which though
it is certainly a high virtue in our modern States is none
the less a crime against nature—not unfrequently revenges
itself in the cruellest forms of disease.”—Dr. Hegerisch,
translator of Malthus.</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_64'>64</SPAN>.—“<i>They Must Learn to Fight.</i>”</h3>
<p class='c013'>“Women have as little hope from men as workmen
from the middle classes.”—Bebel, “Woman,” p. 72.</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_66'>66</SPAN>.—<i>Sexual Selection Exercised by the Female.</i></h3>
<p class='c013'>“Hunger—that is to say, what we call economic causes—has,
because it is the more widespread and constant, though
not necessarily the more imperious instinct, produced nearly
all the great zoological revolutions. * * * Yet love has,
in the form of sexual selection, even before we reach the
vertebrates, moulded races to the ideal of the female; and
reproduction is always the chief end of nutrition which
hunger waits on, the supreme aim of life everywhere.”—“Evolution
in Sex,” p. 12.</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_72'>72</SPAN>.—“<i>The Features of a Grander Type.</i>”</h3>
<p class='c013'>“Towards the Future I look and see a greater race to
come—of beautiful women, athletic, free, able in mind and
logic, great in love and in maternal instincts, unashamed
of their bodies and of the sexual parts of them, calm in
nerve, and with a chronic recognition of Spiritual qualities—a
<span class='pageno' id='Page_158'>158</span>race of men, gentle, strong, courageous, continent, affectionate,
unselfish, large in body and mind, full of pluck and
brawn, able to suffer, clean and honest in their animal
necessities, self-confident, with no king or overseer.”—Miriam
Wheeler Nicol.</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_78'>78</SPAN>.—“<i>The Search for a Fitting Mate.</i>”</h3>
<p class='c013'>“With the disappearance of the artificial barriers in the
way of friendship between the sexes, and of the economic
motive to sexual relationships—which are perhaps the two
chief forces now tending to produce promiscuous sexual intercourse,
whether dignified or not with the name of marriage—men
and women will be free to engage, unhampered,
in the search, so complicated in a highly civilized condition
of society, for a fitting mate.”—“Evolution in Sex,” p. 13.</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_79'>79</SPAN> (note).—<i>Desire of Congress Less Strong in Woman.</i></h3>
<p class='c013'>“I will mention here that from various late sources of
information I conclude that sexual insensibility in women
is much commoner than usually assumed. Of course I
mean by this, insensibility as from the sexual standpoint:
of the sense of pleasure and satisfaction in congress, as
well as the desire for congress. This desire is much less
frequent in woman than generally supposed. But the soulside
of love on the other hand is often more prominent in
females than in males.”—A. Moll, “<span lang="la" xml:lang="la">Contrare Sexual-empfindung</span>,”
2nd edn., p. 325.</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_83'>83</SPAN>.—“<i>In This Serf-Life Their very Natures Have Been Blunted.</i>”</h3>
<p class='c013'>“Not so the wife; however brutal a tyrant she may be
chained to * * * he can claim from her and enforce the
lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made
the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations. * * * No amount of ill-usage, without adultery
superadded, will in England free a wife from her tormentor.”—Mill’s
“Subjection of Women,” 1869.</p>
<p class='c009'>Clitheroe Case, 1891.—After the refusal of the wife to
<span class='pageno' id='Page_159'>159</span>cohabit, the husband said: “I therefore took my wife, and
have since detained her in my house, using no more force
or restraint than necessary to take her and keep her.”</p>
<p class='c009'>The Lord Chancellor said: “I am of opinion that no,
such right or power exists in law”—and ordered the lady
to be restored to her liberty.—“Woman Free,” by Ellis
Ethelmer, p. 144.</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_95'>95</SPAN>.—<i>The Monogamic Marriage.</i></h3>
<p class='c013'>“In attempting to estimate the moral worth of a people,
a race, or a civilization, we are much more enlightened by
the position given to woman than by the legal type of the
conjugal union. This type, besides, is usually more apparent
than real. In many civilizations, both dead and living,
legal monogamy has for its chief object the regulation of
succession and the division of property.”—Letourneau, “Evolution
of Marriage,” p. 186.</p>
<p class='c009'>Conjugal Unions Among the Animals.—“Among many of
the animal species the sexual union induces a durable association,
having for its object the rearing of young. In nobility,
delicacy, and devotion these unions do not yield
precedence to many human unions.”—Ibid., p. 19.</p>
<p class='c009'>“It is especially interesting to study the various modes
of conjugal and familiar association among birds. This
may be easily inferred from the ardor, the variety and
delicacy they bring to their amours. * * * There are
some birds absolutely fickle and even debauched—as, for
example, the little American starling (Icterus pecoris),
which changes its female from day to day. * * * Other
species, while they have renounced promiscuity, are still
determined polygamists. The <span lang="la" xml:lang="la">gallinaceae</span> are particularly
addicted to this form of conjugal union, which is so common
in fact with mankind, even when highly civilized and
boasting of their practice of monogamy. Our barndoor
cock, vain and sensual, courageous and jealous, is a perfect
type of the polygamous bird.” * * *—Ibid., p. 26.</p>
<p class='c009'>“Nearly all the rapacious animals, even the stupid vultures,
<span class='pageno' id='Page_160'>160</span>are monogamous. The conjugal union of the bald-headed
eagle appears even to last till the death of one of
the partners.” * * *</p>
<p class='c009'>“With the female Illinois parrot (Psittacus pertinax)
widowhood and death are synonymous, a circumstance rare
enough in the human species, yet of which the birds give
us more than one example. When, after some years of
conjugal life, a Wheat-ear happens to die, his companion
hardly survives him a month.”—Ibid., p. 27.</p>
<p class='c009'>“Bad fathers are rare among birds. Often on the contrary
the male rivals the female in love for the young; he
guards and feeds her during incubation, and sometimes
even sits on the eggs with her. The carrier pigeon feeds
his female while she is sitting; the Canadian goose and the
crow do the same; more than that the latter takes his companion’s
place at times, to give her some relaxation. The
blue marten behaves in the same manner. Among many
species male and female combine their efforts without distinction
of sex; they sit in turn, and the one who is free
takes the duty of feeding the one who is occupied. This
is the custom of the black-coated gull, the booby of Bassan,
the great blue heron, and of the black vulture.”—Ibid., p. 30.</p>
<p class='c009'>“In regard to mammals, there is no strict relation between
the degree of intellectual development and the form
of sexual union. The carnivorous animals often live in
couples; but this is not an absolute rule, for the South
African lion is frequently accompanied by four or five females.
Bears, weasels, whales, etc., generally go in couples.
Sometimes species that are very nearly allied have
different conjugal customs; thus the white-cheeked peccary
lives in troops, whilst the white-ringed peccary lives
in couples. There is the same diversity in the habits of
monkeys. Some are polygamous and others monogamous.
The Wanderoo (Macacus Silenus) of India has only one female
and is faithful to her until death. The Cebus Capucinus,
on the contrary, is polygamous.”—Ibid., p. 33.</p>
<div>
<span class='pageno' id='Page_161'>161</span>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_101'>101</SPAN>.—“<i>The Destinies of a Life-Time.</i>”</h3></div>
<p class='c013'>“Unlike the Catholic Church in its dealings with novices,
Society demands (in marriage) the ring, the parchment, and
the vow as a preliminary to the knowledge and experience;
hence adulteries, the divorce court, home-prisons, and the
increase of cant and pruriency in the community. Unless
a woman knows what a man’s body is like, with its virile
needs, and realizes to the full her own adult necessities,
how is it possible that she can have the faintest conception
as to whether the romantic passionate impulse a man
awakens in her is the trinity of love, trust and reverence,
which alone lays the foundations of real marriage?”—Edith
M. Ellis, “A Noviciate for Marriage,” p. 13.</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_106'>106</SPAN>.—“<i>Contracts of Some Kind Will Still Be Made.</i>”</h3>
<p class='c013'>“It is therefore probable that a future more or less distant
will inaugurate the regime of monogamic unions,
freely contracted, and, at need, freely dissolved by simple
mutual consent, as is already the case with divorces in
various European countries—at Geneva, in Belgium, in
Roumania, etc.—and with separation in Italy. In these
divorces of the future, the community will only intervene
in order to safeguard that which is of vital interest to it—the
fate and the education of the children. But this evolution
in the manner of understanding and practicing marriage
will operate slowly, for it supposes an entire corresponding
revolution in public opinion; moreover, it requires
as a corollary profound modifications in the social organism.”—Letourneau,
“Evolution of Marriage,” p. 358.</p>
<p class='c009'>“The antique morals which hold woman as a servile
property belonging to her husband still live in many minds.
They will be extinguished by degrees. The matrimonial contract
will end by being the same kind of contract as any
other, freely accepted, freely maintained, freely dissolved;
but where constraint has disappeared deception becomes an
unworthy offence. Such will be the opinion of a future
humanity, more elevated morally than ours. Doubtless it
<span class='pageno' id='Page_162'>162</span>will no longer have any tender indulgence for conveniently
dissimulated adultery, but, on the other hand, it will no
longer excuse the avenging husband.”—Ibid., p. 127.</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_106'>106</SPAN>.—<i>Contracts Preliminary to a Permanent Alliance.</i></h3>
<p class='c013'>“The custom of hand-fasting, rare now anywhere else,
still prevails to some extent in Iceland. A man and woman
contract to live together for a year. If at the end of the
year the parties agree thereto, they are married; if not,
they separate without stigma on either side. The contract
may be made conditionally binding from the first. It may
bind the parties to marry in the event of issue, or in the
event of no issue, as the case may be.”—Prof. Mavor, “Iceland:
Some Sociological and Other Notes,” Proceedings
Philosophical Society, Glasgow, 1890–91.</p>
<h3 class='c012'>PAGE <SPAN href='#Page_118'>118</SPAN>.—<i>A Certain Amount of Animalism.</i></h3>
<p class='c013'>“The Saviors of this, as of every corrupt and stupid
generation, must feel the pulse of the adulterer as well
as that of his victim, and stand clear-eyed and honest as
pioneers of the new sexual renaissance, which will probably
combine a healthy temperate animalism with Browning’s
vision of that rare mating when soul lies by soul.”—Edith
M. Ellis, “A Noviciate for Marriage,” p. 4.</p>
<p class='c009'>“She gave him comprehension of the meaning of love: a
word in many mouths, not often explained. With her,
wound in his idea of her, he perceived it to signify a new
start in our existence, a finer shoot of the tree stoutly
planted in good gross earth; the senses running their live
sap, and the minds companioned, and the spirits made one
by the whole-natured conjunction. In sooth, a happy prospect
for the sons and daughters of Earth, divinely indicating
more than happiness: the speeding of us, compact of
what we are, between the ascetic rocks and the sensual
whirlpools, to the creation of certain nobler races, now very
dimly imagined.”—George Meredith’s “Diana of the Cross-ways,”
ch. 37.</p>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center c002'>
<div>THE END.</div>
</div></div>
<hr class='c014' />
<div class='footnote' id='f1'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r1'>1</SPAN>. Though this is of course not true of animal food.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f2'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r2'>2</SPAN>. See “Appendix.”</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f3'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r3'>3</SPAN>. See “Appendix.”</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f4'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r4'>4</SPAN>. Taking union as the main point we may look upon the idealized
Sex-love as a sense of contact pervading the whole mind and body—while
the sex-organs are a specialization of this faculty of union
in the outermost sphere: union in the bodily sphere giving rise to
bodily generation, the same as union in the mental and emotional
spheres occasions generation of another kind.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f5'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r5'>5</SPAN>. These are (1) the curious, not yet explained, facts of “Telegony”—i. e.,
the tendency (often noticed in animals) of the children of
a dam by a second sire to resemble the first sire; (2) the probable
survival, in a modified form, of the primitive close relation (as seen
in the protozoa) between copulation and nutrition; (3) the great
activity of the spermatozoa themselves.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f6'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r6'>6</SPAN>. For other points of difference see Appendix.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f7'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r7'>7</SPAN>. Man and Woman, by Havelock Ellis. Contemporary Science
Series, p. 371.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f8'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r8'>8</SPAN>. Physiologically speaking a certain excess of affectability and
excitability in women over men seems to be distinctly traceable.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f9'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r9'>9</SPAN>. The freedom of Woman must ultimately rest on the Communism
of society—which alone can give her support during the period of
Motherhood, without forcing her into dependence on the arbitrary
will of one man. While the present effort of women towards earning
their own economic independence is a healthy sign and a necessary
feature of the times, it is evident that it alone will not entirely
solve the problem, since it is just during the difficult years of
Motherhood, when support is most needed, that the woman is least
capable of earning it for herself. (See Appendix.)</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f10'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r10'>10</SPAN>. See “Appendix.”</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f11'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r11'>11</SPAN>. See “Appendix.”</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f12'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r12'>12</SPAN>. As to the maternal teaching of children, it must be confessed
that it has, in late times, been most dismal. Whether among the
masses or the classes the idea has been first and foremost to
impress upon them the necessity of sliding through life as comfortably
as possible, and the parting word to the boy leaving home
to launch into the great world has seldom risen to a more heroic
strain than “Don’t forget your flannels!”</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f13'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r13'>13</SPAN>. It must be remembered too that to many women (though of
course by no means a majority) the thought of Sex brings but little
sense of pleasure, and the fulfillment of its duties constitutes a
real, even though a willing, sacrifice. See Appendix.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f14'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r14'>14</SPAN>. Thus Bebel in his book on Woman speaks of “the idle and
luxurious life of so many women in the upper classes, the nervous
stimulant afforded by exquisite perfumes, the over-dosing with
poetry, music, the stage—which is regarded as the chief means of
education, and is the chief occupation, of a sex already suffering
from hypertrophy of nerves and sensibility.”</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f15'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r15'>15</SPAN>. See “Appendix.”</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f16'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r16'>16</SPAN>. It is curious that the early Church Service had “Till death us
depart,” but in 1661 this was altered to “Till death us do part.”</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f17'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r17'>17</SPAN>. See R. F. Burton’s Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah,
chap. xxiv. He says, however, “As far as my limited observations
go polyandry is the only state of society in which jealousy and
quarrels about the sex are the exception and not the rule of life!”</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f18'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r18'>18</SPAN>. See “Appendix.”</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f19'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r19'>19</SPAN>. Perhaps one of the most sombre and inscrutable of these natural
tragedies lies, for Woman, in the fact that the man to whom she
first surrenders her body often acquires for her (whatever his
character may be) so profound and inalienable a claim upon her
heart. While, either for man or woman, it is almost impossible to
thoroughly understand their own nature, or that of others, till they
have had sex-experience, it happens so that in the case of woman
the experience which should thus give the power of choice is frequently
the very one which seals her destiny. It reveals to her,
as at a glance, the tragedy of a life-time which lies before her, and
yet which she cannot do other than accept.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f20'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r20'>20</SPAN>. See note on the Primitive Group-marriage, infra.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f21'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r21'>21</SPAN>. Letourneau (“Evolution of Marriage,” p. 173) mentions also
among the inferior races who have adopted Monogamy the Veddahs
of Ceylon, the Bochimans of S. Africa, and the Kurnails of Australia.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f22'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r22'>22</SPAN>. See Remarks on the Early Star and Sex Worships, infra.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f23'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r23'>23</SPAN>. Perhaps this accounts for the feeling, which so many have
experienced, that a great love, even though not apparently returned,
justifies itself, and has its fruition in its own time and its own
way.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f24'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r24'>24</SPAN>. These dates have shifted now by two or three weeks owing to
the equinoctial precession.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f25'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r25'>25</SPAN>. The date of his birth was not fixed till A. D. 531—when it was
computed by a monkish astrologer.</p>
</div>
<div class='footnote' id='f26'>
<p class='c009'><SPAN href='#r26'>26</SPAN>. Note especially the ordeals through which the youth of so many
savage races have had to pass before being admitted to manhood.</p>
</div>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c003' /></div>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center'>
<div>WORKS OF</div>
<div class='c003'><i>Edw<sup>d</sup> Carpenter</i></div>
</div></div>
<div class='figcenter id001'>
<ANTIMG src='images/i_163.jpg' alt='' class='ig001' /></div>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center c015'>
<div><span class='under'><i>Except love build the house they labor in vain who build it.</i></span></div>
</div></div>
<div class='section ph2'>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center c016'>
<div>Towards Democracy</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c017'>A masterpiece, the work of a seer. Gifted as poet and philosopher,
the author has given us one of the great, if not the greatest,
work of the nineteenth century. It is full of vivid pictures of the
soul’s enlightenment. Its perusal gives the reader a realization of
the divine in man—“the divine life which incloses and redeems all
souls.” Through this life every soul finds itself akin to every other
soul; brotherhood is more than a myth and democracy ceases to
be a dead letter.</p>
<p class='c009'><b>A. B. Stockham, M. D.</b>: I have read and reread Towards
Democracy with transports of delight, and with a great hope for
humanity. As a <i>chela</i> to a <i>guru</i> my soul bows to thine. People
of the nineteenth century may be deaf to the poetic strains pealing
throughout in clarion notes; they may be blind to the universal
truths flashed in scintillating lights, but illumined souls of the coming
centuries will honor the author as one of the chosen, and will
understand the message of deliverance he has given to imprisoned
souls.</p>
<p class='c009'><b>Chas. A. Hamilton</b>: Towards Democracy is a revelation!
Walt Whitman, Emerson, Tennyson, Ruskin and Carlisle rolled into
one! I reveled in it like a bather in the cool waves of the ocean. I
splashed through its pages as a strong swimmer through the white
surges; I drank it in as a parched traveler drinks cool spring water
gushing out from under a rock; I was united with it even as hydrogen
and oxygen become one in the millionth part of a second.
Later—I am still reading Towards Democracy. It thrills and
thrills me and I shed hot tears of which I am not ashamed.</p>
<p class='c009'><b>W. L. Sinton</b>: Towards Democracy stands side by side with
the Bible, and to him who has the eye to see and the ear to hear, it
contains a key to all the problems of life.</p>
<p class='c009'><b>Cecelia Evans</b>: I have Towards Democracy beside my bed,
and read something in it every night and some mornings. I can
never, never tell by word or pen the good that book has done me. I
never pick it up that my courage is not renewed. His “Joy, Joy”
would kill any case of blues. I always felt that these little daily
tasks were so hard, and thought if one could only get out in the world
and do something one might be saved; but his “Sweet are the Uses
of Life,” with his promise that the Lover will come when we are
about our little homely tasks, has been a revelation. I never did
care much for housework, but even washing the dishes has its
blessing now. I let the present hour bring its gift and am not fretting
about the future.</p>
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<div>Over 300 pages, bound in cloth. Prepaid, $1.50</div>
</div></div>
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<div class='nf-center c018'>
<div><span class='under'>“<i>Who is the poet whom love has made strong, strong</i>, <span class='fss'>STRONG</span>, <i>with all strength</i>.”</span></div>
</div></div>
<p class='c009'>A Visit to a Gnani</p>
<p class='c009'>With an Introduction by Alice B. Stockham, M. D.</p>
<p class='c009'>A vivid pen picture of oriental thought and teaching, containing
in a few pages what one often fails to find by searching many volumes.
A Gnani is one who knows, a Knower; in other words, one
who has a consciousness of the greater or universal life which Carpenter
calls the Kosmic Consciousness, which is the higher self of
Theosophists, the Infinite I of Fichte, the Noumena of Kant, the
Divine Mind of Christian Religion.</p>
<p class='c009'>In a concise and comprehensive manner, the author presents the
practical esotericism of the East, giving points of likeness to western
philosophy. Man loses his life to gain it, loses his consciousness of
and dependence upon physical and material life to gain a consciousness
of the universal life—a Kosmic consciousness.</p>
<p class='c009'><b>Health Culture</b>: The book contains many interesting facts and
anecdotes concerning Gurus, Adepts, Yogis, etc., besides it is a study
of the duality of mind. To gain the power of blotting out the personal
consciousness, so that the Kosmic consciousness shall dominate—one
becomes a Gnani or one who knows.</p>
<p class='c009'><b>Sidney Flower</b>: In the domain of occultism this is clearly the
book of the year. It is interesting to note that the East and the
West touch hands in the matter of self-development. We simply
make our will the master of the mind, and by thus subjugating the
noise of the machinery, we make it possible to hear and attend to
the Voice in the Silence.</p>
<p class='c009'><b>Psychic Review</b>: As one reads this vivid pen picture, his interest
is held throughout, and he realizes that there is a life more wonderful
and perhaps more real than the material life.</p>
<p class='c009'><b>Chicago Chronicle</b>: A Gnani is one who has consciousness of
the Universal Life—it is the absolute Ego of Fichte, the self-affirming
Activity of Schilling, the Geist of Hegel, the Unknowable of
Spencer, the Kingdom of Heaven of Christ. The use of the higher
faculties is acquired only after a long training and according to
laws peculiarly their own. This must not result in oblivion, but in
a divine consciousness without the limitations of thought.</p>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
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<div>Illustrated, bound in Vellum de Luxe. Prepaid, $1.00</div>
</div></div>
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<div><span class='under'><i>I will have none that will not open his door to all—treating others as I have treated him.</i></span></div>
</div></div>
<p class='c009'>Love’s Coming of Age</p>
<p class='c009'>A comprehensive and philosophical treatise on Sexual Science
and Marriage. In this book Edward Carpenter has done his work
well and all will peruse it with interest and profit. It evinces a
breadth of thought and research seldom found in treating these delicate
subjects.</p>
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<div class='line'>Prepaid, $1.25</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<hr class='c019' />
<p class='c009'>Other works by Edward Carpenter are England’s Ideals: Civilization,
its Cause and Cure; Eros and Psyche; Angel Wings; Unknown
People, etc., all of which can be ordered through our house.</p>
<p class='c009'>Carpenter may be considered a leader in the philosophy of life—at
least every student of economics or social ethics must give his
works more than a passing perusal.</p>
<div class='nf-center-c0'>
<div class='nf-center c002'>
<div><span class='xlarge'>Stockham Publishing Co.</span></div>
<div class='c003'>56 <span class='sc'>Fifth Avenue</span></div>
<div class='c003'>Authorized Agents CHICAGO</div>
</div></div>
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<div class='tnotes'>
<div class='section ph2'>
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<div>TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<ol class='ol_1 c002'>
<li>Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
</li>
<li>Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
</li>
<li>Footnotes were re-indexed using numbers and collected together at the end of the last
chapter.
</li>
</ol></div>
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