Chapter 7

Religious people do sometimes think such mean things of human nature, and human nature is, for the most part, so much nobler, so much more loyal, so much more loving than we imagine. "Lift up your eyes unto the hills from whence cometh your help." "He that walketh in the light, stumbleth not, for he seeth the light of the world."

Let us face the future courageously, with great reverence for other people's opinions and views. Let us not join that mob of shouters who are prepared to howl at everyone who desires to say something that is not quite orthodox, but which is their serious and considered contribution to a great and difficult problem. Let us greet them with respect, however much we may differ from them. Let us look forward without fear. Believe me, below all the froth and scum of which we make so much, human nature is very noble.

Let us give that example to the world which is worth a thousand arguments--the example of a noble married life, the example of a noble single life. Those of you who are alone can do infinitely more for virtue by being full of gentleness, wisdom, sanity, and love than by any harsh repression of yourselves. It is by what you can make of celibacy that the world will judge celibacy. And so of married lovers. Believe me, it is not the children of married lovers who are rebels against a lofty standard. Those who have seen with their eyes a lovely, faithful and unwavering love are not easily satisfied with anything that is less. "Lift up your eyes unto the hills. From whence cometh your strength." And in the light of a great ideal, in the light of knowledge, sincerity and truth, in the light of what I know of human nature, I, for one, am not afraid for the future moral standard of this country.

VII

FRIENDSHIP

"Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions. Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your apparel. How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! Oh Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places. I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!" (II. Sam. i. 23-27.)

"And Orpah kissed her mother-in-law; but Ruth clave unto her. And she said, Behold thy sister-in-law has gone back unto her people, and unto her gods: return thou after thy sister-in-law. And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part me and thee." (Ruth i. 14-17.)

People have sometimes discussed with me whether it is right to have as intense and absorbing a love for a friend of one's own sex as exists between lovers. The word "absorbing" is perhaps the difficulty in their minds. All love is essentially the same, and it has been pointed out that the great classic instances of great love have been almost as often between friends as between lovers. But the test of love's nobility remains the same. If it is in the strict sense "absorbing"--if, that is, it is exclusive, if it narrows one's interests instead of enlarging them, if it involves a failure in love or sympathy with other people, it is wrong--it is not in the true sense "love"; but if it enriches the understanding, widens interest, deepens sympathy--if, in a word, to love one teaches us to love others better, then it is good, it is love indeed. A friendship which is of such character that no one outside it is of any interest, a maternal love which not only concentrates on its own but wholly excludes all other children, even a marriage which ultimately narrows rather than widens and is exclusive in its interests, is a poor caricature of love. A young mother may, in the first rapture of her motherhood, seem wholly absorbed; but, as a matter of fact, she generally ends by caring more for _all_ children because she loves one so deeply. Even lovers, after the first absorption of newly-discovered joy, must learn to share their happiness and the happiness of their home with others if it is not to grow hard and dull. And friends may easily estimate the worth of their friendship by the measure with which it has humanized their relations to all other human beings.

There is another test also for love: Does it express itself naturally and rightly? This test is much more difficult to apply. One may believe that all love is essentially the same, but it is certain that all human relationships are not the same, and, therefore, love cannot always be expressed in the same way; but it is not possible to lay down any exact rule between the sort of "expression" legitimate to each. Everyone must have suffered sometimes from a sense of having forced undesired demonstrations on other people, or having them forced on oneself. One's suffering in the first instance is intensified by the knowledge of the extremity of revolt created by the second. There is nothing, I suppose, more acutely painful than the sense of being compelled to accept demonstrations of affection to which one cannot in the same way respond. I believe that this shrinking from expressions which seem unnatural, is rightly intensified a hundredfold when the sense of wrongness or "unnaturalness" is due not to the individual but to the relationship itself.

The love which unites the soul to God, children to their parents, mothers and fathers to sons and daughters, lovers to one another, friend to friend, the disciple to his master, is all one. You cannot divide Love. But to each belongs its right and natural expression, and to parody the love of lovers between friends revolts the growing sense of humankind. The very horrors of prostitution create a less shuddering disgust than the debauching of a young boy by an older man, though with a tragically common injustice society is more apt to be disgusted by the unfortunate victim, bearing all the marks of his moral and physical perversion, than by the more responsible older man who profits by or even creates it.

Yet it is, as I have said, only by the _growing_ sense of humanity that such things are condemned. They were not always so in every case. On the contrary it has sometimes been maintained that friendship between men was so much nobler than the love of men and women that even when it demanded physical expression it was still the finest of all human relationship. This idea was, of course, widely held by the Greeks during the noblest epochs of their history, and Plato, though he does not, as is commonly believed, justify such expression as good in itself, evidently regards it as practically inevitable and, therefore, to be condoned. And though from this indulgent attitude there has been a very general revolt in modern times, the reaction has not always been very discriminating in its condemnation or very just in its reprisals. Now--in consequence, no doubt, of this injustice--there has arisen another attempt to assert the superior nobility of friendship over love,[E] and even to claim a superior humanity for people who are more attracted by members of their own sex.

[Footnote E: I am using the terms "friendship" and "love" in their ordinarily accepted and narrow sense, as meaning respectively the love of friends and the love of lovers. This is arbitrary, but I cannot find other words except by using long phrases.]

There is not in this any question of the bestial depravity which deliberately debauches the young and innocent: it is a question of the kind of friendship glorified by Plato. And those who uphold the Platonic view are not always debauchees but sometimes men and women who, however incomprehensibly, still sincerely believe that they and not we who oppose them are the true idealists. This is why it is worth while to state our reasons for our profound disagreement, and to do so as intelligently and fairly as possible. It is also worth while because no one has suffered more cruelly or more hopelessly than those whose temperament or abnormality has been treated by most of us as though it were _in itself_, and without actual wrong-doing, a crime worthy of denunciation and scorn.

First, then, let it be remembered that the highest types humanity has evolved have been men and women who are really "human," that is to say who have not only those qualities which are generally regarded as characteristic of their sex, but have had some share of the other sex's qualities also. A man who is (if such a thing could be) wholly and exclusively male in all his qualities would be repulsive; so would a woman wholly and exclusively female. One has only to look at history to realize it. Compared with the exquisite tenderness and joy of a St. Francis of Assisi, the courage and determination of a St. Joan of Arc, the intellectual power of a St. Catherine of Siena or St. Theresa of Spain, the "brute male" who is wholly male, the "eternal feminine" with her suffocating sexuality seem on the one hand inhuman, on the other subhuman. It is not the absence of the masculine qualities in a man, or of the feminine qualities in a woman which raises them above the mass; it is the presence in power of both; and no man is truly human who has not something of the woman in him--no woman who has not something of the man. Here is a certain truth. And its supreme example is Christ Himself--Christ in Whom power and tenderness, strength and insight, courage and compassion were equally present--Christ Who is in truth the ideal of all humanity without distinction of race, class or sex.

This is true. But its truth has been misunderstood by teachers like Edward Carpenter. Beauty and strength in human nature as elsewhere depend on harmony, and in such characters as I have cited that harmony is found. For, in fact, there is no instance in nature of a male wholly male or a female entirely female. Even physically the elements are shared. And if we say with confidence that where these elements are most fully shared there is found the fullest humanity, we are not committed to adding that where the body has one predominating character and the spirit another there is something finer still!

For harmony of life and temperament the body should be the perfect instrument and expression of the spirit. When you have the temperament of one sex in the body of another, this cannot be. There is at once a disharmony, a dislocation, a disorder--in fact, a less perfect not a more perfect type. Humanity does, I believe, progress towards a fuller element of the woman in the man, the man in the woman, and the best we have produced so far confirm the truth of this. But it is not an advance to produce a type in which the temperament and the body are at odds. This is not progress but perversion.

It is the same consciousness of dislocation which makes us condemn homosexual practices. Here it is a dislocation between the means and the end. The instinct of sex, to whatever use it may have been put, is fundamentally the creative instinct. It is not by an accident, it is not as a side-issue, that it is through sexual attraction that children are born. And however sublimated, however enriched, restrained and conditioned, the creative power of physical passion remains at once its justification and its consecration. To use it in a relationship which must for ever be barren is "unnatural" and in the deepest sense immoral. It is not easy to define "immorality," because morality is one of the fundamentals which defy definition; but though it is not easy to define, it is not hard to recognize. All the world knows that it is immoral to prostitute the creative power of genius to mere commercialism, for money or for fame. No one can draw a hard and fast line. No one will quarrel with a great artist because he lives by his art, or because he will sometimes turn aside to amuse himself, his public, or his friends. Michaelangelo is not blamed because, one winter's afternoon, he made a snow-statue for Lorenzo de Medici! Yet all will admit that _merely_ to amuse, _merely_ to make money, _merely_ to gain popularity is a prostitution of genius. Why? Because it is to put to another than its real purpose the creative power of a great artist.

In the same way, to use the power of another great creative impulse--that of sex--in a way which divorces it wholly from its end--creation on the physical as well as the spiritual plane--is immoral because it is "unnatural." Again and again it will be found to lead to a violent reaction of feeling--a repulsion which is as intense and violent as the devotion which was its prelude.

What then should those do who have this temperament? No one, perhaps, can wisely counsel them but themselves. They alone can find out the way by which the disharmony of their being can be transcended. That it can be so I am persuaded. That modern psychology has already made strides in the knowledge of this problem we all know. What is due to arrested development or to repression can be set right or liberated: what is temperamental transmuted. But I appeal to those who know this, but who have suffered and do still suffer under this difficulty, to make it their business to let in the light, to help others, to know themselves, to learn how to win harmony out of disharmony and to transcend their own limitations. Let them take hold of life there where it has hurt them most cruelly, and wrest from their own suffering the means by which others shall be saved from suffering and humanity brought a little further into the light. Who knows yet of what it is capable? Who knows what is our ultimate goal? It may be that out of a nature so complex and so difficult may come the noblest yet, when the spirit has subdued the warring temperament wholly to itself.

And to the others I would say this. If the homosexual is still the most misunderstood, maltreated, and suffering of our race, it is due to our ignorance and brutal contempt. How many have even tried to understand? How many have refrained from scorn? Other troubles have been mitigated, other griefs respected if not understood. But this we refuse even to discuss. We are content to condemn in ignorance, boasting that we are too good to understand. In consequence, though a few here and there have preached homosexuality as a kind of gospel, far more have suffered an agony of shame, a self-loathing which makes life a hell.

To be led to believe that one is naturally depraved!--to be condemned as the worst of sinners before one has committed even a single sin! Is that not the height and depth of cruelty? Do you wonder if here and there one of the stronger spirits among these condemned ones reacts in a fierce, unconscious egotism and proclaims himself the true type of humanity, the truly "civilized" man? How shall they see clearly whom we have clothed in darkness, or judge truly who are so terribly alone?

To have a temperament is not in itself a sin! To find in your nature a disharmony which you must transcend, a dislocation you have to restore to order, is not a sin! Whose nature is all harmony? Whose temperament guarantees him from temptation? Is there one here who is not conscious of some dislocation in his life that he must combat? Not one!

It is a disharmony to have an active spirit in a sickly body. It is a disharmony to have, like one of the very greatest of Christ's disciples, "a thorn in the flesh to buffet him." Who shall deliver us from this body of death? When you hear of a Beethoven deaf or of a Robert Louis Stevenson spitting blood, are you not conscious of disharmony? Where there is perfect harmony--_perfect_, I say--such a dislocation could not be. Epilepsy has been called "la maladie des grands," because some great ones have suffered from it. Perhaps St. Paul did. It is not possible to imagine Christ doing so. In Him there existed so perfect a harmony of being that one can no more associate Him with ill-health than with any other disorder or defect. Yet we do not speak (or think) with horrified contempt of the disharmony present in St. Paul or in Beethoven. Rather we reverence the glorious conquest of the spirit over the weakness and limitations of the flesh. Some of us have even rushed to the opposite extreme and preached ill-health as a kind of sanctity, in our just admiration for those who have battled against it and shown us the spirit dominant over the flesh.

But, it will be urged, ill-health is quite another kind of disharmony than vice. We are not responsible for it, and cannot be blamed.

I am not prepared to admit that this is altogether true, but I will not discuss it now. The point I want to make clear, if I make nothing else clear, is that to be born with a certain temperament is not in itself a sin nor does it compel you to be a sinner. "Your temperament decides your trials; it does not decide your destiny." It is no more "wicked" to have the temperament of a homosexual than to have the weakness of an invalid. It is difficult for the spirit to dominate and to bring into a healthy harmony a body predisposed to illness and disorder. The greater the glory to those who succeed! Let us confess with shame that in this other and far harder case we have not only ignored the difficulty and despised the struggler, but--God forgive us--have, so far as in us lay, made impossible the victory.

VIII

MISUNDERSTANDINGS

"If there is one result or conclusion that we may pick out from the science of sex which has developed so rapidly of recent years, as thoroughly established and permanently accepted, it is that the old notion of the sinfulness of the sex process, _in se_, is superstitious, not religious; and must be discarded before ethical religion can assert its full sway over humanity's sex life. And, most assuredly, the conception narratives [of the New Testament], by retaining the sex process to the important extent of normal pregnancy and parturition, foreshadowed and hallowed this development of ethical thought. They make it clear that the Spirit of God and the spirit of woman, in conscious union, refuse to justify superstitious and paralyzing fears, refuse to allow that the sex process is irredeemable; they render possible and imperative the working out of the ethical problems directly concerned with sex."

_Northcute: Christianity and Sex Problems_, _pp._ 415, 416.

During the course of these addresses I have more than once, and with more than common urgency, pleaded for the light of knowledge, that we may in future not make so many disastrous mistakes from sheer ignorance and misunderstanding. I have been asked to say more definitely what "misunderstandings" I had in mind, and to discuss them with at least as much courage as I have so pressingly demanded from others.

The demand is just; and I feel the less able to disregard it because I have discussed these very difficulties with people whose lives have been wrecked by the ignorance in which they were brought up, or saved by knowledge wisely imparted before the difficulties arose. Knowledge cannot save us from hardship or difficulty; it cannot make us invulnerable to attack, or lift us above the ordinary temptations of ordinary mortals; but it can show us where we are going; it can guide us when we wish to be guided; it can save us, when we wish to be saved, from mistakes cruel to ourselves and often far more cruel to other people.

For instance: it is very generally believed that the struggle for continence is greatly eased by continual and even exhausting physical activity. To work hard--to work even to exhaustion--is believed by some to be a panacea. At our great public schools the craze for athleticism is justified on the ground that, even at the expense of the things of the mind, it does at least keep the boys from moral evil.

I believe this to be a mistake, and a mistake which is due to our looking at sex from a too purely physical point of view. It is, of course, imbecile to forget the physical, and deal with sex simply as a "sin"; but it is no less stupid to forget that our bodies and souls are intimately bound together, and that there is much more in passion than a merely physical instinct. As a matter of fact, a tired person is not immune from sex-hunger, and even an exhausted person is likely to find that, far from sexual feeling being exhausted too, it turns out to be the only sensation that will respond to stimulus at all. The exploitation of sexuality by our theatres and Press is not successful only in the case of the idle and the overfed; it finds its patrons also among those who are too tired to put their minds into anything really interesting from an intellectual or artistic point of view, but whose attention can be distracted and whose interest held by a more or less open appeal to the primitive instincts of sex. Tired people want to be amused and interested if possible; but they are not easily amused by anything that appeals to the mind, because they are tired. They want a sensation other than the customary one of fatigue, and the easiest sensation to excite is a sexual one. They get it thinly disguised, in a theatre or music-hall, more thickly disguised in the form of cheap fiction, or quite undisguised elsewhere. But the idea that sexuality is destroyed by fatigue is a very mischievous illusion which has misled and helped to destroy some of the most honest strivers after self-control. Such people will, with a touching belief in saws, seek to find in exhaustion relief from temptation. But it is not amusing always to feel tired. One desires at last something else--some other kind of feeling--and one is too tired to make an effort. But sexual sensation is easily excited, and in the end the unfortunate finds that he has yielded again. His hard fight has only ended in defeat, and he either abandons the advice as mistaken, or himself as hopelessly and uniquely depraved.

The truth is, of course, that what is needed is not physical exhaustion any more than physical idleness and overfeeding. What is wanted is hard and _interesting_ work--work that absorbs one's mental as well as physical strength. A boy at a public school who really cares for games can pour his energies into them and appear a fine example of the system; a boy who, though games are compulsory, cannot interest himself in them at all, is not helped by being physically exhausted. If, then, he yields to a temptation the other has escaped, this need not be because he is more wicked or more weak. It may quite well be because the insistence on athleticism, which has been elevated into a cult, in our public schools, has supplied a real and absorbing interest for the one, but has merely used the physical capacity of the other without touching his mind or his spirit at all. When shall we learn that every human being is a unity, and that to ignore any part of it--body, mind or spirit--is idiotic? The muscular Christian who believes that continence is achieved by physical fatigue is as short-sighted as he who would treat the whole matter as a purely ethical problem. But the man or woman who works hard at some congenial and absorbing task--especially if it be creative work--finds the virtue of continence well within his grasp without exhaustion and without asceticism. It is because sex is essentially a creative--the creative--power in humanity that we have to direct its force into some more spiritual channel than mere physical labour, if we are to make ourselves its master.