INTRODUCTION
“The most disgusting cant permeates everything. Except for the representation of savage and violent sentiments, everything is stifled by it.”—Stendhal, De l’Amour.
The object of this volume is twofold: in the first place to raise certain weighty objections to that industrialization and commercialization of woman, which has stamped the “progress” of Western Europe during the last fifty years; and, secondly, to reveal woman, not only as a creature whose least engaging characteristics are but the outcome of the most vital qualities within her, but also as a social being in whom these least engaging characteristics themselves only become disturbing and undesirable when she is partially or totally out of hand.
While trying to escape the influence of all that “tinsel of false sentiment” which in the atmosphere of Democracy and sentimentality has gathered about the subject of Woman in modern England, it has been my endeavour to defend her against certain traditional and well-founded charges, by showing that the very traits in her character which have given rise to these charges form so essential a part of her vital equipment that it would be dangerous to the race to modify or to alter them. Thus, despite the fact that there is much in this book that may possibly strike the reader as unfriendly, if not actually harsh, I am aware of no other work in which so complete and so elaborate a plea (from the standpoint of Life and Life’s needs) has been made in defence of Woman’s whole character, including all that side of it which the wisest of mankind, and the oldest traditions of mankind, have consistently and unanimously deprecated.
Couched in the briefest possible terms, my thesis is practically this, that, whether we contemplate Woman in the rôle of the adulteress, of the heartless stepmother, of the harlot, or of the creature whose duplicity has been the riddle of all ages; or whether we contemplate her as the staunchest of lovers, as the most reliable of allies, as the mother whose noble devotion to her offspring will drive her to any extreme of danger in defence of them, and as the representative of that sex which has given us a Joan of Arc, an Emily Brontë, and an Emily Davison of Derby fame; we are always confronted by a creature whose worst can, on final analysis, be shown to be only the outcome of her best and most vital qualities, turned to evil by mal-adaptation; and whose best is but the normal and effortless expression of her natural endowments.
Seeing, however, that among the mal-adaptations which cause Woman’s best to manifest itself as her worst, I include lack of guidance and control from the quarter of her menfolk, I range myself naturally among the Anti-Feminists, though at the same time I most emphatically disclaim all anti-feminine prejudices. Indeed, so far from this being the case, I am a deep and passionate admirer and lover of Woman. In order to love her, however, I do not find it necessary to exalt her to a plane on which all her sturdier, more vital, and more “dangerous” characteristics are whittled down to mere sweetness. Those to whom the love of woman depends upon so gross an idealization of her nature as to cause them to overlook or deny that “wickedness” in her, which is at once her greatest vital strength and her most powerful equipment as the custodian and the promoter of life, will find very little to sustain them in this love throughout the present volume. And, if in this age of “Safety first,” they fancy that it is expedient to rear and to love only those women from whom all “danger” has been removed, they will find that I have endeavoured to demonstrate to them the extreme peril even of this plausible ideal.
As far as I know this work represents the first radical attempt that has been made to differentiate two very definite and dissimilar types of women—the positive and the negative—and to account for their respective virtues and vices on the grounds of their peculiarities of health, tonality, vigour, and constitutional bias in favour of life. It is my belief that this is a necessary and useful differentiation, that without it there can be no clarity about Woman, and that the fact that it has not been attempted by previous writers, accounts for much in their work which is both unfair and untrue. It must be quite plain to everyone, that in a world where so-called virtue is all too frequently the outcome of a minus rather than of a plus in vitality, it would be grossly inaccurate to class all women together; for while in the case of one woman chastity may be a great feat of discernment and self-overcoming, in the case of another whose body is less tonic and less vital, it may be the easiest of human accomplishments. All reactions are known to differ according to the vitality of the organism stimulated. To overlook tonality and vitality in any description of human beings would therefore be a most unpardonable omission. Thus, Weininger’s and Schopenhauer’s failure to differentiate between positive and negative women effectually invalidates, in my opinion, most of what they have said about her; while a good deal of the rest of the literature dealing with the subject of sex seems to me to fail owing to the fact that it makes no attempt to describe a standard or a norm before it proceeds to expatiate upon sex characteristics and their consequences.
The fact that a classification on these broad lines does not prevent me from occasionally bringing charges which will seem severe against the very type that I most warmly recommend, is in no way inconsistent with my claim that my work is a vindication; for while I show that all the charges that I myself advance are only an indictment of Woman in so far as she is unguided and uncontrolled, I also defend her against many other harsh judgments which are commonly passed against her, and with which I will have nothing to do.
Thus in the course of this work, the reader will find that I defend even the so-called “male” woman against the gibes which recently it has been the fashion to level against her. And on what grounds do I undertake her vindication?—I point out that, in a nation that can boast, as England undoubtedly can, of great and worldwide masculine achievements in the past, such achievements can only have been possible because the women of the nation did not too seriously dilute the masculine qualities of the race, with the element “effeminine.” But for this to have been the rule, these women must have had a large share of masculine virtues. I show that other nations, such as the Romans and the Red Indians, also reared generations of masculine women, and always to the advantage of the community. These male women, against whom so much has been said, are therefore merely the vestiges of our great masculine past. Now they are ill-adapted, because they can no longer find the men to whose greater masculinity they might adapt themselves. It is the degeneration of man that is the cause of their mal-adaptation. Women, or at least the best women, nowadays, are no longer inspired or uplifted by their association with him.
To reply to this, as most people all too hastily do, that the last War was a proof that Englishmen at least have not degenerated, does not constitute a serious objection to my statement. For, after all, successful fighting is only one—and the most primitive—among the many desirable qualities that the masculine civilized being has cultivated.
Degeneration may be defined as a departure from the high qualities of a race or a kind. But it is possible to depart from a very great number of cultivated qualities, and still to retain the moral and physical equipment of the good fighter. When, therefore, I seek to explain a good deal of Woman’s discontent with Man, and most of her very justifiable contempt of him, by pointing to his degeneration, I mean that, despite the evidence of the great War, in which the modern European admittedly revealed the primitive fighting qualities in all their pristine strength, the man of to-day in many other respects—in the matter of catholicity of tastes, for instance, versatility of gifts, will-power, vigour, character, and health—shows a marked departure from the higher endowments of his ancestors. The fact that this degeneration is due to the devitalizing, cramping and specialized labours which several generations of Commercialism and Industrialism and excessive “Urbanism” have imposed upon the male sex, can hardly be questioned; and if we are in search of an explanation of Feminism, if we are anxious to discover how and why it is that women are now coming forward in large numbers to measure their strength against men in all those callings and offices which hitherto have been regarded as Man’s special spheres, we may be sure that the true cause of all this does not lie so much in a desirable change in Woman’s nature itself, as it does in an undesirable depreciation in our own general abilities, which women have been only too slow to observe.
To point to the great War in such circumstances, is only cant; but like all cant, it is the outcome of a desire to spare our vanity at a moment when everything points indubitably to our humiliation.
There is, however, no subject in the whole world, or at least in the whole of our English world, around which more cant has collected, than the subject of sex and the relation of the sexes. But perhaps it would be as well to make quite clear what is precisely meant by “cant” in this respect. With Stendhal, I am of the opinion that cant is created more by vanity than by Puritanism, or the sense of propriety. And it is because vanity is involved, that the fight against cant is so stubborn. If Psycho-Analysis had really assailed our vanity, instead of merely offending our sense of propriety, we should have heard much less about it. Also we have only to think of the huge popular success of writers like Zola in order to assure ourselves that for a man’s work to be hushed up and ignored, he must be guilty of a greater crime than the mere violation of the proprieties or conventions.
As a rule, mankind will listen patiently when it is told of the material and not infrequently sordid animal background to some of its dearest emotions; for, after all, it is only disturbed in its prudery by such revelations. But proceed to tear away the tinsel of cant from those activities, for instance, which are alleged to be humanitarian, “unselfish,” or to belong to the class known as “self-sacrifice,” and point out how all these activities themselves invariably arise from purely egotistical emotions and desires, and mankind will immediately become both incredulous and indignant. Why is this? Obviously because a very large section of the population of the western world find the very basis of their self-esteem in the activities enumerated. To show the egotistical root of these activities, as Hobbes, Helvetius, Stendhal and Nietzsche consistently did, is therefore to wound these people in the very sanctuary of their vanity; and those against whom this kind of violence is attempted nowadays usually retaliate with both rancour and rage. Hence the determination with which writers like Hobbes, Helvetius, Nietzsche and Stendhal are forgotten and ignored.
Over the writings of all these men there hangs a very pronounced and unmistakable fragrance, which may be almost painful at the first inhalation, and a certain atmosphere which has a noticeably low temperature. Frequently this atmosphere is quite glacial, and produces the distinctly unpleasant reaction of goose-skin in the reader’s mind. Both in the ideas they present, and in their manner of presenting them, these authors scorn to please. They all possess the same penetrating insight into the psychology of man; they reveal what the French call “une psychologie fouillée,” and their honesty is hampered by no desire to fortify themselves or their fellows in their self-esteem. Unlike Swift, however, it is certain that these men did not write “to vex the world more than to divert it,” but because they realized that certain falsifications of sentiment are dangerous and lead to degeneration.
Now there is an instinctive inclination in every reader to identify himself with the picture of humanity presented to him in the book that he happens to be perusing, whether it be a novel or a scientific treatise. Naturally enough, therefore, he is exposed to the severest shocks if at every turn he is prevented from idealizing his own nature, or from thinking too well of it, owing to the fact that the picture he is contemplating is too humiliating to be pleasant, and yet too convincing to be lightly rejected.
The bulk of modern readers, however, are women. This fact, too well known to editors and publishers, is quite inadequately understood from the standpoint of its influence on taste and quality in literary production. For not only do women reveal the trait common to all readers, which consists in a tendency to identify themselves with one of the characters of a novel, or with the portrait of humanity presented in a scientific treatise, but they are also addicted to the practice of confounding that which is pleasant to themselves with that which is true. Thus in the woman reader there is a twofold tendency to tolerate or to applaud cant; for, on the one hand, she views truth hedonistically, and, on the other, she feels deep discomfiture, either when she finds herself unable, through her false idealization of herself and her motives, to identify herself with the anti-cant portrayal of a certain heroine (Stendhal’s Félicie Féline, for instance), or, when she finds her reading of human nature, which is based upon her idealized reading of herself, affronted by a picture of humanity which shatters her rosy view.
To the influence of women in this connexion, however, ought in all fairness to be added that of a vast number of men, who, in these days, whether from the same hedonistic view of truth, or prompted by a certain poltroonery and vanity in the face of reality, tend to shrink ever more and more from any understanding of human relations and the passions that govern them, which would distort their comfortable and comforting assumptions concerning both. If, however, they actually form, together with the women, a force sufficiently powerful to govern the taste of the day, especially in the world of literature and in that department of it which treats of human psychology, we may well feel some anxiety concerning the real worth of that literature. If Byron and Stendhal could honestly complain of cant even in their time, what can be our position to-day?
Frankly acknowledging my indebtedness to the school of writers that can be said to have adopted the rigorous psychological uprightness of our great philosopher Hobbes, I have endeavoured also to strip the “tinsel of sentiment” from one of the most important of human relations, in order, if possible, to build afresh, and to build wholesomely, where too much confusion and too much falsehood have been allowed to flourish in the past. In order, however, to protect myself from a charge to which the asperity and frequent severity of my language is almost sure to expose me, it may be as well for me to state at once that, unlike many that have written on the subject of Woman, I have been animated by no bitterness and by none of those unhappy experiences which often warp judgment and impair the vision. On the contrary, to all my principal relations to women I owe the most pleasant and possibly some of the most valuable experiences of my life.
Unlike Schopenhauer, Byron, or Balzac, my relationship to my mother was an exceptionally devoted and happy one. Both friends and relatives are unanimous here, and have frequently declared that they rarely saw anything to equal it, both on her side and on my own. Up to the time of her death she was my best and dearest friend, and in my passionate love for her, my love for my subject may well be said to have begun. What has my relation to other women been? In this regard I can only say that, though I have spent an enormous amount of my time with women, I have never suffered the smallest wrong at the hands of any one of them; neither have I had any experience which could possibly give me a distorted view of the sex, or a resentful attitude towards it as a whole. I have learned a tremendous deal from women, and, having not a little of the woman in me besides (and to comprise is to comprehend), I have through the usual channels of introspection been able to supplement my objective studies with a good deal of subjective information. From my earliest youth, too, the subject of sex has interested me deeply. True, it interests every one deeply; but I have fortunately never felt any of the customary shame that so often arrests thought and speculation on the subject. Neither can I say that my environment was ever of a kind to hinder me in my free and careful study of it. Brought up in an atmosphere of art and literature, I never became acquainted with that false modesty and embarrassment that seizes upon most young people when, for the first time, they are confronted with the most mysterious and fascinating subject of existence. I was allowed to dwell on the question, had no reason to suppose it was wrong to do so, and even when, at the age of ten I took my first steps in the science of physiology—a subject I used to beg all my elders to instruct me upon—I and they little knew that I was anticipating, by at least six years, a passionate interest in the principal and most fundamental question of human relations. To this day I remember the little green manual of Physiology, by Professor Huxley, that my governess put into my hands, and I cannot say I remember any book better, save perhaps another little green volume containing Schopenhauer’s essays on Woman and the Metaphysics of Love, which I read when I was eighteen. At the age of nineteen I wrote my first book, which bore the title Girls and Love; but, needless to say, it was never published. And ever since the subject of sex has scarcely ever ceased from occupying my mind in various ways. For the rest, I have listened with respectful attention to the voice of the Ancients—of the Orient, of Egypt and of Greece—and, as usual, have listened most intently there where I knew relative permanence to have been achieved and humanity to have flourished best. Such preoccupations in regard to a matter that ought to be so natural, so well ordered, as to be taken for granted, just as breathing is, can denote but one thing, namely: that to the thoughtful, nowadays, sex has undoubtedly become a real and puzzling problem; that is to say, something that is not in order, that is not properly understood, and that every one has, as it were, to face and to overcome for himself afresh, before he can “carry on,” and before he can allow time and age to overtake him.
In the present work I have attempted to be as clear and as straightforward as is compatible with the task of handling a delicate subject delicately. I am convinced that a good deal of the dangerous silence that hangs over the vital and fundamental questions I shall sometimes have to touch upon, owes its existence for the most part to the unfortunate fact that the subject of sex, outside medical circles, has hitherto usually been confronted by only two classes of mind—the puritanically prudish, who have done their best to shelve it, and their opposite extreme, the licentious and libidinous, who have refrained from no excess or extravagance that could possibly offend and startle their opponents in the opposite camp. With neither of these classes have I any connexion. I object to the licentious as wholeheartedly as to the Puritanical. I protest against being suspected unjustly of a licentious turn of mind, because I venture to speak freely concerning a subject that is systematically hushed up to the peril of all; I also protest most emphatically against being suspected of Puritanism because I make no attempt to conceal my loathing of certain modern aspects of the sexual relationship.
Part I
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
CHAPTER I
Positiveness—The Saying of
“Yea” to Life
(1) SEX VERSUS DEATH
A scheme of life that includes death as the periodic end of each generation of beings must, if it is to persist, include some form of periodic reproduction of life. Reproduction, or the reproducing of a fresh generation of beings, is thus the necessary balance of death. This sounds the merest platitude. But it is a platitude that cannot be dwelt upon too often or too carefully, if one remembers how constantly and obstinately its consequences are denied or vilified.
To speak of the higher organic life on this globe as sexual, therefore, is merely to state in other words, that all higher organic life is doomed to die, and must be replaced by new life. Abolish death and you abolish the meaning and the need of sex and reproduction. Abolish sex and reproduction, and, if you cannot establish eternal higher organic life, the higher organic life of the globe must for ever perish.
At least for human beings and myriads of animals, Death and Sex are consequently counterparts. Sex with its purpose, reproduction, might be regarded as the contrivance for circumventing Death, for nullifying it, for cheating it of its complete victory over life. And that is why all dreams or concepts of eternal life are, and cannot help being, tainted by a certain hostility to sex: because where eternal life is the scheme, sex drops out. Conversely, all hostility to eternal life is and cannot help being tainted by a certain positiveness, friendliness and favour towards mortal life and its ally sex: because where eternal life is an impossibility, sex is indispensable.
It is for this reason that, in its depths, Christianity is more logical and more acceptable to a rational man than Mohammedanism. Christianity, accepting the concept Eternal Life, says: “In heaven there will be no marriage or giving in marriage.”[1] It realized that you cannot eat your cake and have it. Mohammedanism, while accepting the concept Eternal Life, imagines an eternity of sex-life into the bargain, which is an absurdity. Mohammed did not realize that you cannot eat your cake and have it. Read the Koran and you will understand how it happened that he could be guilty of this confusion of thought.
Sex, then, while as a scheme it is opposed to eternal life, is nevertheless the enemy of death—the most unconquerable, crafty, resourceful and untiring enemy of death—so much so, indeed, that whereas mortal life is not nearly such a good opposite of death as is eternal life (for the dead mortal is eternally dead to this world), sex might, and in this book will be regarded as the opposite of death, the reverse of death.
This point is important in any case; but it is particularly important to me in this book; because all my conclusions will be based upon it. To repeat, then, the equation reads: Sex = Mortal Life; No-Sex = Eternal Life, or, in the absence of Eternal Life, Death.
From this chapter onwards, however, save in regard to the one particular question of virtue, I shall cease from considering Eternal Life; because, as we see from the equation, Eternal Life and Death come strangely as correlatives together—that is to say, for all ordinary purposes, and as far as this world is concerned, they mean the same thing—they both oppose mortal life and sex.
A very significant conclusion arises from this: that in this conflict of sex and death, all those who are opposed to sex, or who call it a sin, or who associate it with guilt, or who cast odium upon it, range themselves on the side of death; while all those who stand by sex, favour it, wish to vindicate it, and claim for it a character absolutely free from all sin, guilt or odium, range themselves against death. Here Christianity is quite logical. At its root it is hostile to mortal life, and in favour of Eternal Life. But it never refers to Eternal Life as a possibility on this globe, but always as an existence that is a correlative of death on this globe.
Christianity, therefore, being an advocate of Eternal Life, very logically preaches that sex is to be deplored, to be avoided, and, if possible, negatived. And the Puritan, who may be regarded as the extreme Christian, is notorious for his implacable loathing of sex. Unconsciously he sees quite clearly that any scheme of organic life that involves sex, must be a substitute for eternal organic life[2]—which in an idealized form is the life for which he has been taught to crave. Death to him, therefore, is merely a merciful gateway leading from Sex into Eternal Life. Being the foe of Sex, he knows quite well that Death must be his ally, his accomplice, his ringleader, in his conspiracy to realize Eternal Life.
Is this quite clear? For the present I have wished to say nothing concerning the respective merits either of Sex, Death, Eternal Life, or Mortal Life; I have only wished to point out that, as schemes, as ideas, they are mutually exclusive and irreconcilable, and that you cannot desire the one without thereby coveting the doom of the other.
As far as this world and its problems are concerned, however—and who, if you please, stands outside this world and its problems?—we have to deal with one kind of life only—Mortal Life. As I have shown, the necessary correlative of Mortal Life, if it is to continue, is Sex. We are concerned, therefore, immediately and directly, with Mortal Life, and its indispensable correlative Sex. We need not accept the scheme as it is thus unceremoniously thrust upon us. We can deny Mortal Life and its concomitant need, Sex, by putting an end to everything at least for ourselves, through straightway committing suicide the very moment we realize that Mortal Life and Sex are undesirable. If, however, we accept the proposition, “Mortal Life is desirable,” we necessarily commit ourselves to the rider, “Sex is desirable.” These features are all we know concerning Life; they constitute the two sides of the only kind of Life of which we are aware, and however real and realistic our visions of an Eternal Life may be, however vivid our mental pictures of a Heaven may seem, such visions and such mental pictures, as we very well know, are of a kind the true existence of which is quite incapable of proof or demonstration; whereas Mortal Life is here before us, with us and in us, and the way to live it is our chief concern; the way to live it well so that it may redound to the benefit and credit of all, is our highest concern.
Throughout this book, I shall argue on the assumption that the reader, like myself, believes that mortal life is desirable. I shall take it for granted that he, like me, is content to allow transcendental questions to weigh with him only in so far as they do not render him hostile to Mortal Life. I shall therefore assume all along that he believes, as I do, that Sex is desirable, however far the consequences of such an admission may lead him.
Be this as it may, let him entertain no qualms as to the direction in which I wish these consequences to lead him. There are more than two alternatives in the choice of one’s attitude to Sex. To most people there appear to be but two opposite extremes: the attitude of the lecherous reprobate who makes decent women ashamed of being women; and the attitude of the Puritan who, in his heart of hearts, feels that if only he could have been at the Almighty’s elbow at the time of the Creation, he would have respectfully suggested a somewhat more “drawing-room” method of propagating the species.
To neither of these attitudes has this book, or the spirit of it, even the remotest relation. The acknowledgment that Mortal Life is desirable, and that consequently its indispensable correlative Sex is desirable, can be made by a man in full possession of a healthy control over his passions,[3] in a state of complete mastery over his appetites, and endowed with the most fastidious taste as to where normal desire and its gratification end, and where excess begins. Extremes belong only to the uncultured, to the hogs of life. It is they who make everything appear disgusting, simply because they are unable to approach a single aspect of life with that amount of understanding and reverence which is due to all things connected with the sacred task of making mankind and his existence an honour and not a curse to the universe.
To accept the proposition that Mortal Life is desirable and to commit one’s self by so doing to its inevitable rider that Sex is desirable, may lead one very far, as this book will show; but, if it lead one to a tastelessly pornographic or licentious attitude towards the most fundamental instinct of life, then one is of a nature that has no right to Mortal Life, much less, therefore, to its indispensable correlative Sex.
Without wishing to labour this point, but with a keen sense of the host of misunderstandings and prejudices that will cling like barnacles to a book of this kind, unless I make my position unmistakably clear from the start, let me put the case a little differently by the use of another instinct of Mortal Life. Let me say, to accept the proposition, Mortal Life is desirable, is to commit one’s self to its inevitable rider that eating and drinking are desirable. There is no objection to this statement as it stands. All who endorse Mortal Life also endorse eating and drinking. And those who attack eating and drinking, simultaneously strike at Mortal Life.
This conclusion, however, provides absolutely no sanction for those who are sufficiently material and gross to make food and drink things of shame and of horror. No man, therefore, need fear lest by acknowledging that eating and drinking are desirable he should find himself supporting gluttony, drunkenness and bestiality of all kinds. It is, however, a strange and significant coincidence that, where we find hostility to Sex, we also find a certain suspicion of all things connected with the body. The Puritans did not accept Sex as desirable; at the best they held it to be a necessary evil; but we also find the Puritans hostile to eating and drinking, and not only to excessive eating and drinking. I have already shown with sufficient elaboration elsewhere what regrettable reforms in food and drink they introduced into England in the seventeenth century.[4] This only supports my contention that you cannot be hostile to Sex without being hostile to Mortal Life in general.
If, therefore, you believe that the acceptance of Sex is immoral, as Otto Weininger did;[5] if you believe, as he did, that “woman is the sin of man”;[6] if, moreover, you claim, as he did, that “it is the Jew and the woman who are the apostles of pairing to bring guilt on mankind”;[7] if, again, you assert that “sexual union is immoral”;[8] that “women must really and truly and spontaneously relinquish it”;[9] that “woman will exist as long as man’s guilt is inexpiated, until he has really vanquished his own sexuality”;[10] that “man must free himself of sex, for in that way, and that way alone, can he free woman”;[11] and, finally—this gem of negativeness: “all sexuality implies degradation”;[12]—if this be your position, I say, then, you must logically be hostile to Mortal Life, and you cannot rationally accept it. Your only course is to commit suicide. This, as we know, Otto Weininger was logical and consistent enough to do. He died by his own hand on October 4, 1903.
(2) MORTAL LIFE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES ACCEPTED
As we have seen, it is impossible to have it both ways and to remain consistent. You are at liberty, of course, to take up the Puritan’s, or Otto Weininger’s, or St. Paul’s attitude towards Sex; but, by so doing, you straightway disclaim Mortal Life itself and reject it utterly. Let this be quite clear to you before you go any further, because a good deal depends upon this simple but profoundly significant issue. The fact that St. Paul and the Puritans did not put an end to themselves right away, as Otto Weininger was clear-headed and honest enough to do, need not disturb you. Fanatics are rarely clear-headed, and they are scarcely ever honest. It is sufficient for my purpose to point to St. Paul’s and the Puritan’s hostility to life in general in order to show that, although they did not reach the logical end of their journey, they were certainly well advanced along the road thither. Besides, if you study St. Paul and the Puritans, you will find, as I have done, that there is perhaps another explanation to their apparent inconsistency.
A man may remain longer than he likes in a certain vicinity or apartment, if he feels it his duty, before taking his leave, to get others to accompany him thence, to persuade and exhort others to forsake the place as well. St. Paul certainly felt it his duty to act in this way, and so for that matter did Schopenhauer.
For us who accept Mortal Life and say “Yea” to it wholeheartedly, there are certain very grave duties too. The thing to which we say “Yea,” we wish to keep both clean, sweet and alluring. This world is our home, and we take a pride in it. We must make it such that we are able to take a pride in it. We recognize that Mortal Life includes pain as a prominent factor; but, provided that pain is practically inseparable from the best purposes of life (as, for instance, the pain of self-discipline, self-mastership, the pain of habituation to new knowledge, new arts, the pain resulting from the natural relationships to our myriads of fellows, and the pains of child-birth), we say “Yea” to it too, and with the same wholeheartedness.
We do not shrink from pain, as Schopenhauer did, we do not magnify it or concentrate upon it, as he did, and condemn the whole of existence because of it. We do not call our glorious history, as the King of the Animals, the Martyrdom of Man, as Winwood Reade did. We call our history the Triumph of Man; and it is because we wish to maintain it as the triumph of man that we face it with spirit and positiveness.
Our duties are grave, I say; they involve everything, in fact, that can be conceived as belonging to the task of keeping that to which we say “Yea” in the highest degree worthy of our “Yea”—worthy, that is to say, of our unreserved acceptance.
The conduct of Mortal Life, therefore, is our principal concern. And for this conduct to be correct and fruitful in good things, we must be quite clear as to the “shall” and the “shall not” of what we should hate and what we should love, of what we should call bad, and what we should call good.
Throughout this book the word “good” will always mean “that which is favourable to the best kind of Mortal Life and its multiplication.” If this book reveals any hate at all, it will be for that which is hostile to the best kind of life, and if it reveals any love at all it will be for everything that is friendly to the best kind of life.
This takes us far, no doubt; but not farther, I believe, than anyone should wish to go who has said “Yea” honestly and sanguinely to Mortal Life.
For instance, in opposition to men like St. Paul, Knox, Calvin, Prynne, Schopenhauer, Otto Weininger and their like, we say that Sex is good, Woman is good, the flesh is good. And we heartily dislike men like St. Paul, Knox, Calvin, Prynne, Schopenhauer and Otto Weininger because their attitude shows not only hostility to Woman and to Sex, but also, by implication, to Mortal Life, to which we have said “Yea.”
We call good all that which actuates us and maintains us in a proper exercise of our functions, and makes Mortal Life desirable: appetite, desire, lust, motherhood, fertility, reproductive love, reverence for the body, prepossession in favour of health and prejudice against sickness, respect of love, of beauty and of its multiplication. We also call good the loathing of ugliness and the desire to suppress it; we therefore approve of deep suspicion towards ugliness and illness, and towards everything and everybody that attempts to give ugliness and illness fine-sounding and euphemistic names, and we cultivate a love of moderation and a loathing of excess.
We call bad all that thwarts us in a proper exercise of our functions and all that makes Mortal Life undesirable or seem undesirable: loss of appetite or desire, the abuse of appetite or desire, as of all things; the finding of excuses or extenuating circumstances for ugliness, botchedness and sickness. We also call the following bad: excess, sterility, non-reproductive love, prostitution, homosexuality, irreverence towards the body, the setting of transcendental questions before vital questions.
On our side, in our advocacy of the first-named things, we have our instincts which, if they are sound, confirm us on every point.
It frequently happens, however, that Mortal Life is so difficult, and those who preach against it are so many, so eloquent and so powerful, that we need almost an intellectual assent over and above our instinctive acceptance of it. For it is precisely in the moments of our greatest weakness, when we feel uncertain, when we have made mistakes and know that we have erred, that the preachers against life and the body, and against the fundamental instincts and desires of Mortal Life, will seem to be right, will seem almost to convince us that they are right. Like vultures they wait afar off till they see the body of our trust and hope in life, the corpse of our clean conscience, prostrate on the ground, and then down they swoop and devour the carrion that is their natural food.
It is before such disasters happen that an intellectual assent to the deepest promptings of our instincts is the greatest need of all. In practical life it may be taken as a general rule that it is more helpful to have an intellectual justification for our mistakes and the instincts that have led to them, than the most convincing theories in favour of our virtues. For it is innocence in the exercise of our natural functions that the preachers against Mortal Life and the body are most anxious to undermine, and most successful in undermining. And how often, particularly when an instinct has, so to speak, “drawn in its horns,” or ceased to assert itself owing to a momentary mistake, check or rebuff, would not an intellectual justification of its vigorous re-assertion help us to tide over the evil hour without our falling a prey to the opposing party—to the enemies of Mortal Life and the body!
If, however, we bear in mind the maxim that everything is “good” that is favourable to the best kind of Mortal Life, and everything is “bad” that is unfavourable to the best kind of life; if, moreover, we stand bravely and firmly by the principle that Mortal Life is acceptable and desirable, and therefore that all it exacts for its continuance must also be acceptable and desirable, and consequently that the things of the body—beauty, charm, ardour—together with the flesh, the world, sex, woman, procreation, multiplication and good food, are for the glory, joy and exaltation of Mortal Life and man; if, over and above all this, we heroically embrace pain as a necessary incidental factor in the process of living, then, I say, we have an intellectual weapon far more formidable and far more effective for the warding off of those vultures of gloom and doubt—the preachers against life and the body—than any known engine of destruction could possibly be. It is this intellectual attitude to Mortal Life, with all its consequences in our code of morals, our likes and dislikes, that throughout this book I shall call the “positive” or “yea-saying” attitude: while the opposite attitude of mind will be designated by the word “negative.”[13] Nor shall I refer any longer in these pages to “Mortal Life,” but will speak merely of Life itself: for not only is it the only kind of life that will concern me here, but also, as we know nothing about Eternal Life, and our only notions of life are derived entirely from what we know of Mortal Life, Mortal Life and Life are to all intents and purposes one and the same thing for us, and the expression “Mortal Life” can well fall out at this stage of the discussion.
(3) THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POSITIVE MIND
Unless they are very delicate or very sick, all children are positive. They are fresh from the anvil of Life. Life itself speaks through them without reserve, without constraint. They have made no mistakes yet, or are not aware of having made any; they have had none of those rude shocks that shake our faith in Life and render us an easy prey to those vultures of which I have already spoken, that live on the carrion of shattered hopes and broken consciences. They say “Yea” to Life innocently and unconsciously, like kittens playing with balls of wool. And it is because they say “Yea” to Life innocently and unconsciously that they are so deeply interesting to the positive philosopher. Because in them he sees the attitude which he must maintain and sustain intellectually, despite all the shocks and misfortunes life has brought. But I point out again that I speak of this intellectual positiveness only as a helpful confirmation of sound instincts. If the sound instincts are not there, the positive intellectual attitude is nothing but a pose.
There is something strangely pathetic about this positiveness of the child. The philosopher knows the wilderness it is in. He knows that on the mountain peaks all around, the vultures are waiting hungrily to see it make its first mistake, to see it writhe under its first misfortune—or its first “guilt” as they like to call it. He knows with what extraordinary vigilance they are tracking its footsteps, so that they may be there in time, so that they may be at its side in the first moment of its doubt in Life, to tell it that Life is sinful, that lust is sinful, that sex is sinful, that the World, the Flesh and the Devil are interchangeable terms. And the positive philosopher cannot help wondering with some alarm how the child will survive this first encounter with doubt, with suspicion, and with distrust concerning that to which a moment ago it said “Yea” so wholeheartedly.
The positive philosopher trembles over the outcome of the conflict. With fear and trepidation he forges the weapons of intellectual positiveness and flings them with anxious prodigality before the child, hoping that they will sustain it in the struggle and confirm its best instincts; trusting with all his heart that they will revive its “Yea” to Life before it is completely overcome. And when the positive philosopher succeeds in this and sees the birds of ill-omen turn disconsolately away, foiled in their endeavour, he celebrates his feast of feasts; because there is more rejoicing in his heart over one child that is saved from negativeness than over thousands that repent!
To the positive philosopher, then, the healthy child is the best pattern for the yea-saying and positive man. The only danger the child is in, as I have shown, consists in the fact that it is intellectually unprepared to justify its “Yea” in the face of the preachers of “Nay.” Apart from this one flaw, however—which in a universally positive world would not be felt as a disadvantage at all (because it is only in negative environments and negative ages that a conscious or intellectual confirmation of one’s soundest instincts is necessary)—the child, or the animal for that matter, presents the perfect example of the positive attitude towards Life. The positive philosopher, therefore, learns from the child, and watches it with interest.
The principal characteristic of the healthy child is, that it does not play with its primary appetites; it does not laugh about them; it cannot abide a joke about them. Watch a healthy child eat! It is absolutely serious, absorbed, concentrated, intent! A very healthy boy will even frown over his meal, just as he will frown when he eats a piece of chocolate. It is obvious from his expression that eating is no joke with him. It is one of the gravest, most pressing, most engrossing interests in life. And the same holds good of all healthy, positive adults. Watch a healthy and positive adult at his meals; he is serious to a fault! It is only when the demands of his body have been satisfied that he begins to indulge in levity. The man who habitually jokes at the beginning of a meal is past salvation. He is negative by nature and cannot be rescued.
Seriousness towards the primary instinct of self-preservation is one of the principal characteristics of the healthy child. But the healthy child is not yet fully, consciously concerned about any other instinct; if it were—if, for instance, it were fully conscious of the reproductive instinct—we may be quite sure that it would take it quite seriously too; for it is serious—most serious perhaps—even when it is playing.
In spite of all the apparent light-heartedness of the healthy child, which is all that superficial people can see in it; in spite of the ease with which it turns from sleep to wakefulness, from tears to laughter, and vice versâ, there is a profundity, a sobriety, a solidity about its seriousness that nothing can affect. It takes its own body, itself, the world, and life tremendously seriously. It takes its wants and its desires seriously. It takes its loves and its hates seriously. Little children can be homicidal in their loathing of other children; they can be heroic in their devotion. Those who always depict children with a smile on their chubby faces, and hopping about on one leg, know nothing about them. They know nothing of the imperturbable gravity of the child, and of positiveness generally.
To watch the face of an elderly, negative spinster when a really healthy boy loses his temper, is to witness in one human countenance the whole history of the long conflict between those vultures of which I have spoken and the artless yea-sayer to Life.
Later on, if he is carefully handled, this boy will take his love seriously; he will cling to the girl he chooses in a manner that will make that same spinster marvel at his determination, and he will be as fierce and as serious in his desire for the woman of his choice as he once was over his games, over his hates, and over his meals.
Laughter is not nearly such a common characteristic of healthy positive life as the superficial imagine—more particularly noisy laughter. In every mixed party where much loud laughter or shrill laughter is heard, there is sure to be a good deal, not of gaiety, not of wanton spirits, but of nervous irascibility, sexual excitation, and particularly sexual abstinence, exasperation and—negativeness! He who travels the world over ascertains this curious fact: that loud, shrill laughter is essentially the social noise of Puritanical countries.
Positive people take too serious an attitude to life, to themselves, to each other, and particularly to members of the opposite sex, constantly to vent what they feel in an idle cackle or giggle. They laugh, but their hilarity is short, violent, and apparently effective; because it seems to relieve them for longer periods than does the laughter of negative people.
One of the chief characteristics of the positive mind, then, is the gravity, the solemn interest, with which it confronts life itself, the body that holds it, and everything vital, including sex.
Behold the healthy child, and you have an automaton guided absolutely by a positive mind! To retain this positive mind throughout one’s youth and adulthood is the greatest triumph—particularly nowadays—that anyone can achieve. He who achieves it may well laugh; he has a right to laugh; for he has mastered the most redoubtable foe a man can encounter—the powerful false values that are now seeking to prevail everywhere, and over the victims of which the vultures are muttering their thanksgiving.
The only positive form of laughter is the expression of a consciousness of acquired power. This is Hobbes’ view, it was Stendhal’s view; it is the biologist’s view, who says that laughter is the expression of superior adaptation.
Another characteristic of the positive mind is its forgetfulness in regard to the things that incapacitate it for taking a lively interest in life. This quality of the mind is simply a spiritual counterpart of the healthy body’s power of evacuating those portions of the food absorbed which cannot be assimilated without hurt: forgetting and digesting being the same function of evacuation in two different departments. The positive mind, like the healthy body it is in, knows how to get rid of a useless thing quickly—in fact knows how to forget. Things do not weigh on it, or bear it down, any more than a hearty meal lies heavily on its body’s stomach. Its body digests quickly, and has very soon done with the process. The positive mind digests quickly—particularly its supposed misdeeds. That is why it is so difficult to give a positive person a guilty conscience; because a guilty conscience is simply a costive conscience. The positive mind remembers only so much as interests it keenly, or as much as does not stand in the way of a continued positive attitude to life; just as its body only retains the nourishment out of all it absorbs.
The positive mind has no fear of pain, particularly if this pain is incurred in a vital effort. Little boys will actually enjoy enormous discomfort and pain, provided it is encountered in doing things that reek of active life, that bring their bodies into violent action, and give them the thrill and bracing sensation of overcoming an obstacle, of resisting an attempt at capture, or of effecting a capture. “Yea” is their constant attitude to everything, even to the things which, to the adult, are disagreeable.
I remember on one occasion, when I was walking home from a friend’s house in the pouring rain, I met that same friend’s two little sons returning at a perfectly leisurely pace from school. I had an umbrella, they had not. Naturally I felt it incumbent upon me to see them home, and, gathering them carefully under my silk shelter, I marched them smartly in the direction of their father’s house. I soon found, however, that all my pains were wasted on them, for whenever I was not looking, out one of them would stray into the drenching shower; and when I insisted on their keeping quite close to me, each of them gravely extended his free arm out into the rain to catch as much of it as possible, while every puddle was conscientiously and solemnly explored by their feet.
This may seem a trifling circumstance to dwell upon; but unimportant as it was, it struck me as being but another example of the indomitable yea-saying of healthy childhood to anything and everything.
The gravity of the little boy when he does these things shows clearly the relation between positiveness and things that matter—things that have weight, solidity, importance, tangibility, definition.
Another incident occurs to me as I write. I remember once feeling a little intrigued by the sight of a knot of little village boys standing like conspirators very seriously together in one of the streets of my favourite Sussex village. Their ages ranged from about eight to eleven years. I knew them all perfectly well, and the fact that I drew close up to them did not disturb them in the least. When I was near enough to discover what they were talking about, this is what I saw and heard:—In the centre of the grave and almost hushed group there stood a lad of about nine years of age. He was exhibiting his dirty hands proudly and almost arrogantly to his friends, and the latter were listening with rapt attention to his harangue. I noticed that they all appeared to be a little crestfallen and dejected, save the boy who was demonstrating with his hands, and one other boy who seemed to be arguing with him. Now the explanation of all this profound interest, rapt attention and conflicting emotions, was as follows:—The central figure, the boy of nine, had hands that were covered thickly with large warts, and he possessed one particularly big and ugly-looking specimen just beneath the knuckle of a finger of his right hand. He was exhibiting these horrible excrescences to his schoolfellows triumphantly and defying them to show anything like them, or even approaching them in size and number; and there was but one of them who had a sufficiently respectable record, where warts were concerned, to be able to answer him and meet him, as it were, on equal ground, and this was the boy who had been contesting his point all the time.
Again, this is a trifling incident, but it is full of significance for the analyst of the positive mind. This yea-saying to anything and everything, which surges up with the conviction of an explosion at every moment, everywhere, is far more important, far more profound, far more solid, as a characteristic of childhood, than that mythical innocence and sweet merriness which is the only characteristic of healthy childhood that superficial child-lovers will either grant or recognize.
(4) DISCIPLINE IN ITS RELATION TO THE POSITIVE MIND
The discipline of healthy children, because of their very positiveness, is one of the most intricate and delicate tasks that devolves upon the adult man or woman. It is the task and problem of practical morality, and to solve it without chilling any of that valuable positiveness of childhood, to impose a limit, in fact, upon juvenile positiveness without destroying or blighting it, is the most difficult achievement in education.
To say “yea” to everything—to mud, to filth, to danger, to illness (for positive children are positive even to their bodily disorders), to the rain, to animals, to vermin, to the knife, to explosives, to ladders, to dangerous altitudes, to the precipice, and so on—is of course, supremely delightful, supremely healthy; but it cannot be allowed in its full catholicity. This I am perfectly ready to knowledge. The luxuriance of the child’s positiveness must be pruned. The human being must be reared for society. He must be taught the limitations of his freedom; above all, he must be taught taste and discrimination: what to select and what to reject. And there is perhaps no more solemn moment in life than when a full-grown man or woman, in perfect possession of all the necessary intellectual equipment for the task, approaches his universally yea-saying junior to discipline it—that is to say, to determine its “yea,” to limit it, and to confine it only to a certain set of things.
The problem is obviously, how can the child be kept positive to this world while being rendered negative to the undesirable elements in this life. Or to put it in a sentence: how can I make my little boy say “No” to warts without saying “No” to the world? To all those who approach the child with a negative creed, to all those who are vultures themselves, or who derive from the vulture breed, the order is clearly “Hands off!” Only people who have retained their positive attitude to life should be allowed to interfere where children are concerned; because ordered social life itself is discipline, and but very little careful and discriminating guidance need be added. When Herbert Spencer said that children of large families were always better than those of small families, because in the case of the former the parents have less time to interfere with natural processes, he propounded a very true principle as far as the modern negative world is concerned; because most of the juvenile discipline nowadays is not only imposed by negative people, but the very social environment in which these people move and breathe is also negative and hostile to life.
The object and province of juvenile discipline are simply these: to rear a positive human being for social life; to discipline it to selection and rejection without forcing it to scout or to suspect vital functions or vital virtues. It sounds simple enough when stated in a single line; but how many misunderstandings, how many ruined careers, how many bitter, disappointed and ill-adapted adults are not the result of the opposite principle, the principle which reads that the positive child should above all be taught to distrust its deepest instincts, its body, and to be suspicious of the world, the flesh and the Devil—the latter meaning very often no more than wanton spirits.
Sometimes when one sees the kind of people—men and women—into whose gentle bloodless hands, into whose drab, lifeless but well-meaning existences, healthy helpless children are made to fall, it is difficult not to shudder. How good they are! How sweet is their ideal of what a child ought to be! How vigilant they are for any signs of “wickedness”! Who can submit to their Procrustean method and survive a whole, positive being? They know! They know what pleases God and the angels! No one is better informed than they on this subject. Honest?—no one could be more so than they. Reliable?—they could be trusted to stamp the exuberance out of a boa-constrictor! Good?—not merely good, but holy! Their mild cerulean eyes gaze beyond the child in their tender care, and towards a wonderful ideal, far away, of perfect childhood—a bright, merry, glowing angel who, preferably, would have wings on his shoulders, à la Joshua Reynolds, and nothing—no nothing at all—beneath the thorax. His body might end there with advantage. That is their belief, their hope, their ambition. All human beings might end there with advantage; but above all the child, because children are so pure, so guileless, so sweet; it is such a pity that——
Luckily, robust positiveness has a tenacity and a vigour that frequently survive even the contagion of these toads with evil consciences. But how few are the survivals compared with the number that go under annually!
That is why little girls survive the process more often than little boys; because, as a rule, unless attacked from the side of the body, a female’s positiveness to life is wholly and utterly unbreakable. But it is deeper, more silent, less conspicuous, less articulate than that of the little boy; therefore it more easily eludes the cerulean but very superficial glance of the negative adult. It is more unconscious and consequently less liable to betray itself in the presence of constraining influences. It manifests itself, too, in a less arresting, less annoying fashion; it appears to be “harmless.” Behold the girls that are turned out annually from convent schools or strictly Puritanical High Schools. If their tremendous positiveness had not been secret, concealed, subcutaneous, unconscious, how could it possibly have survived? Again and again I have heard the negative adult deny a passionate positive temperament in a little girl, when I saw it clearly. It is this mistake, this inability to detect a trait that is deep enough to be very far below the surface, that is alone responsible for the salvation of thousands of girls to-day.
Modern man is not only less positive generally than woman, but the modicum of positiveness he possesses is also more apparent, less resisting, more self-assertive, more conscious and therefore less secret. It also manifests itself in a more obtrusive and more irritating way.[14]
Boys suffer most from a negative discipline. Men are suffering most physically and mentally from our negative age. Women only suffer from the indirect results of the age—that is to say, from the deterioration it causes in their men.