Part 4

Women can look upon love as a physical act which enables them to become mothers. They can look upon it as a sanctification or a means of enjoyment. They can look upon it as a subject of scientific curiosity, in which mood they logically compare facts and come to sage conclusions. They can consider their own temperaments and peculiarities, and take into account their personal bias and characters, philosophically. Or they can use their imaginations to alter all the conditions which life has imposed upon them, to transcend all the limitations of incarnation, and, having passed beyond philosophy, science, emotion, and experience, bathe in the love between the fixed stars and comets rushing from the spaces beyond. They can take dim legends and embroider them with rich details. In a word, the imaginative woman from her childhood has known dreams of such rare beauty that nothing life shows her is good enough. She passes from disappointment to disappointment. She never finds in one place or one person the wonder that description had made her see in her mind’s eye.

Thousands of less imaginative women long for the impossible. They are fed on romantic stories and live in the more or less commonplace imagination of the novelists or playwrights they patronize. Thousands of tired men have this same love of vicarious sensation--anything that lifts them out of the drab of their surroundings into a merry or sentimental atmosphere is a relief.

Life seems hopeless to the middle-aged. Most of them once thought they could put it right in a week if they had a free hand. They try, they fail, they marry and spend the evening of their lives trying to destroy the illusions of their children as quickly as possible, so that they also may “settle down” to hard facts. To excuse himself a thinker will say, “I know the dangers of cultivating the imagination; I know that unless it is nipped in the bud this wild flower of the mind will twine its tendrils round me, cover me with its shadows, intoxicate me with its fragrance, and destroy reason and physical health.” In answer, I admit there are dangers, but on the other hand if the possibly evil weed is cultivated by wise gardeners, it may show itself at last as the most splendid flower of the soul. The cultivator of flowers that sterilizes the bud and diverts the life-force into creations of elaborate beauty has found the physical side of the religious mystery called the Coronation of the Virgin. The imaginative power that has reached this point transmutes human nature, whether philosophic, scientific, sensual, or physical, and it is then that the soul may be said to have attained the regenerate state which makes for the unnatural beauty we call perfection of culture.

The imaginative woman may reach the degree of joyous saintly beauty, or she may stop short at the next stage in which she is enough of a philosopher to recognize the great variety of temperaments to be met with among her fellow-creatures, and to greet them all alike with sympathy and interest. She may not reach the philosophic or really sympathetic stage, she may remain in a third stage, where her mind can coldly classify her fellow-creatures with critical discretion, and laugh at them all cynically. Or she may not be able to perceive clearly, but may be carried away perpetually by her own feelings and sensations, in the fourth degree of unawakened ignorance. Lastly, she may abandon the four regions of beautiful image making, sympathy, perception, and sensation, and deliberately devote herself with common-sense prudence to the patient task of getting her daily bread and reproducing her species until she dies of it. On the other hand, she may go mad, she may become silly, she may drown her disgust with life in alcohol or drugs, or she may irritate her feeble dream-power with novelettes. These states of degenerate imaginations are the worst curses of the woman’s sphere as it is at present understood. Good hard work, rewarded by a decent income, varied by motherhood and love, is the best cure for these vapourings.

The men who have a good deal of womanhood in their natures suffer and enjoy through their imaginations in the same way, and it is interesting to observe that a really virile man has no trace of imaginative power in his composition. He cares for nothing but tangible reality. When men of imagination talk to him he has not the smallest conception of what they mean. I think it was Goethe who said that he felt the universe in his arms when he embraced a woman. What I am obliged to call a virile man feels nothing of the kind, he is merely amusing himself like Don Juan, or any cat or dog. However, Don Juan is a rarity.

It is very difficult to classify temperaments without alluding to Weiningen’s _Sex and Character_. That book has been followed by other classics on the subject by Forel and Bloch, but I only want to remind my readers that in Weiningen’s book they will find, set out at length, the ingenious theory that virile men and feminine women are the rarest creatures on earth, and that the great majority of us are made up of various proportions of the two sexes. He further suggests that happy unions are those in which the proportions of sex in the two lovers together make up one virile man and one feminine woman. For instance, a man who was one-eighth feminine should marry a woman who was one-eighth masculine.

I am told that Mr. Austen Chamberlain repeatedly made the very careless statement that “men are men, and women are women,” in a speech delivered in 1909. He evidently has not acquainted himself with the elementary science of sex. Is it not time that the books alluded to above should be made generally accessible? Then our younger statesmen, at least, might come to the platform with some less absurd refrain than that obsolete inaccuracy. Let me assure Mr. Chamberlain that German science and research have proved that the contrary statement would be rather more exact.

IX

EXPERIMENTS

We are all speculating about the changes to be brought about in this century from which we women hope so much, and a great many people are making practical experiments. Myself, I am of that tranquil nature which willingly follows the advice of Punch when he says: “Never practise what you preach, to do so is to hold up your opinions to obvious ridicule.”

I must confess to an altogether selfish concern for my own comfort. I dislike the home because it means that one has to live with people who are privileged to behave without politeness in each other’s company. Most of us share the feeling, I think, that we like to be the worst-behaved person present. This can only be achieved satisfactorily to all when one lives by oneself. My own experiments have mostly been in the attempt to modify the solitary life with an exactly pleasant proportion of social life. I was brought up in a large family until I was twenty-three, and I lived the orthodox married life for four years, so that I have given home and the family as much trial as seemed necessary.

As a hermit with mitigating friends and enemies, and the various societies I have helped to run, my life has been unusually full of varied interests. I have no regrets, because my failures have been some of my most valuable experiences, and my moments of bitterness have been the cause of my greatest contentment.

At the same time, one is horribly afraid that one might induce courage in some other person whose heart is too tender to get through trouble. One is rather apt to dread the grey life of a patient woman without any kind of artistic talent, who makes a muddle of her affairs because she religiously practises instead of preaching.

Some people say that example is better than precept; but in the case of social reform and the need of a real change in public opinion, my experience shows me that precept is no good at all, if one is suspected of inventing it to serve one’s own purposes of self-indulgence. I own I have indulged myself by leading a solitary life as described above, therefore I do not propose to try to destroy the home and family life. Those who are suffering from the home want to do away with it. With philosophic calm I can suggest improvements and ways of escape that would make it bearable, but would not destroy it. As a matter of fact the home is in a very poor way just at present. Public-houses, clubs, restaurants, the servant difficulty are all devastating it. Still, it does not do to say we are glad, so I register the fact with as long a face as I can pull, and trust my readers will recognize the sad truth in the same serious spirit.

But, to return to experiments, let us go back a little in time, and we find that all gay societies, such as that under Louis XIV and XV of France, The Empire and the Second Empire, practised every kind of experiment. Yet one looks upon Rousseau, Mary Wolstonecraft, Shelley, and Godwin as the real pioneers of experiment, because they made a kind of religion of their protests against convention. Of late years it has become the fashion to solemnly register a protest every time one omits to register one’s marriage.

It is partly my stupid objection to public indecency that makes me object to the advertisement of marriage, legal or illegal. One has to clean one’s teeth, some people have to marry, but for the life of me I cannot see the use of talking about either of these necessities. Surely the whole object of modern civilization is to conceal the fact that we are animals. It is true that we have begun to make a public art of eating, but although we permit ourselves to munch in public, we disguise the nature of our food, and we have sternly suppressed the more ancient freedoms of the dinner-table. We no longer think it polite to go about when we suffer from catarrh, and it is seldom that we encounter unpleasant expectorations, except in the immediate haunts of admittedly hooligan circles.

They say that nowadays it is possible to talk of any subject as long as one does so with sufficient delicacy and avoids the words of the gutter and the club smoking-room. Still, I admit that it is difficult to explain that just as we feel that every other necessary function of nature should be performed without attracting attention to it, so I feel that I would rather not be informed every time the bold experimenters in marriage see fit to take a partner.

When outspokenness is for the public good, when a “hushed-up disease” becomes disastrous simply because it is “hushed up,” then there is some meaning in making a gospel and parade of the truth. But I really think it is time we accepted the convention that men and women seek each other’s society in order to exchange ideas.

Strangely enough it is often the case. A woman has only to talk and listen well, and she will find that the less she desires love the more friendliness she will receive from men. Saint Teresa of Spain was an excellent example of this. I suppose she had more warmly affectionate friendships with men, without a shadow of scandal, than any other woman. A perfectly frank woman will generally keep men as her friends, they will not dare to be her lovers unless she deliberately ceases to be frank.

Unfortunately experimenters have to be original in order to be successful. The people for whom I am sorry are those who are led into making experiments which are unnatural to them by the hypnotic power of seductive example.

Save us from our imitators is the cry of all great poets; and the only valuable advice one can give is, if you must experiment be careful that you lead the way and are not seduced by the example of anyone else. If by nature you must follow, it is a sign that you are a gregarious animal, and had better remain with the main body of the herd. The real experimenters are quite ready for solitude, and when they have found fair country and good pasture the rest of the herd will come over in a body with one accord. It is no use perishing with cold on the way to the Pole, unless you have the capacity to find it. Much better stop at home by the fireside.

X

THE SAVAGE, THE BARBARIAN, THE CIVILIZED

The stately Spaniard, graceful as a tree swaying in its dance with the wind, savage and noble.

The Nihilist Russian, watching in her lair, instinctive and ready to kill. Her hatred of government marking her as the free barbarian.

The Parisian, knowing the correct convention of a funeral or an adultery, civilized and logical to her glove-tips.

Of the three women the two first are simple, but civilization is complex, and it may mean to be cultivated with regard to intellect like the Jesuits, art like the Greeks, morals like the Irish, or religion like the Arab.

In which way will the women of the future develop? Will she strive like the frequenters of the _salon_ of Madame de Rambouillet to excel in intellect, or like Saint Teresa of Spain as a religious mystic? We have seen both these types, and I have no doubt that we shall see many shining examples of morality, but at the moment I cannot think of any conspicuous woman of whom no one has whispered scandal. For in these days if people do not trip in one direction, it is said it is because they prefer to trip in another; and soon it will be taken as a sign of evil life that one should live in a desert on bread and water. I mention in passing that our late Queen is usually admitted to have been conspicuously moral. In the arts we have seen, and hope to see again, great women novelists and actresses. In history we have an array of splendid uncivilized women immortalized from all time--Medea, Electra, the Roman empresses, Queen Maive of Connaught, the Russian heroines. Whether they excelled most as noble savages or as gloriously barbaric haters of ordered life, I cannot stay to consider.

For I want the women who read this book not to dwell upon the past, but to look forward to the great century that is waiting for their alchemy, to transmute its life by giving it a more intent purpose. Are we going to be like the very badly dressed lady of title, whom we heard the other day imploring us to behave ourselves like other people, just as we dressed like other people, in order not to be conspicuous! Or are we really going to make something out of this brilliant opportunity given us by the “refusal of the vote,” and the quickly spreading passion of enthusiasm which is moving the women of all nations to make a fight against the patriarchal faith of the goat-worshippers.

Mr. Gorst says that the object of life is making (moral) love. I think the object of our life is to make experiments, as gardeners make experiments in floriculture. I quarrel with absorption in the family because family jealousy is a bar to that kind of social intercourse which is the only education worth having, and the only experience which can lead to any result worth having. They say in France, “Love is a play in which the acts last five minutes, and the _entr’actes_ for any time you like.” If it filled the whole of life it would only mean that life would be as short as that of the ephemeral winged creatures of the insect world. Family love cannot absorb us if we wish to survive. We are complicated, and our possibilities of social and political intercourse are a subject of endless interest and inquiry. Let us then start again on our voyages of discovery, this time with a little more purpose in our method and delight in our hearts.

Women want the vote, it is true, but what they want more, and what they are getting, is strength to hammer through the prisons which have kept them for many centuries packed away conveniently for use on occasion. They are all coming out into the daylight for the first time within our memory, and now the real movement of life begins.

We want to change public opinion about divorce, contagious diseases, and forethought with regard to breeding. We want married women to recognize the various proportions of sexuality in each sex, to make allowance for the passionate, and to admit that we are greatly indebted for our culture to individuals who do not desire to be parents.

In conclusion, all I can say is, “Talk! talk! talk!” We are more moved by one conversation than by many eloquent discourses. After all, what is so permanently delightful as communion of ideas? So once again I say, “Go on talking until the savage, the barbarian, and the civilized women have found out all they can learn from each other. Plenty of men will be glad to help them in their discoveries.”

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