To point to economic pressure here, and to say that the English girl is more hard pressed than the French girl, would be entirely false. It is much more difficult, as a matter of fact, for a French girl than for an English girl to find a husband.
The truth of the matter is that the French girl is very much more positive to Life and therefore to man, than the English girl. The latter can frequently not only be happy without man; but she will boast of the fact—applaud, that is to say, her negativeness, her nothingness!
I do not say this in any spirit of hostility to the English girl, because I have travelled England and Scotland, and am aware that very large numbers of British girls are positive and extremely positive to Life and to man; it is, however, unfortunately true that negativeness is on the increase—hence the almost amazing liberty that is granted, and every year more readily granted, to the English girl in her intercourse with young men. Were things otherwise, such liberty would only lead to the most disastrous results; because there is absolutely no reason whatever to suppose that the Englishman’s social instinct—which is the only adequate check to an overpowering reproductive instinct—is superior to that of the Frenchman.
There is, however, another side to the question, and a far more serious and alarming side. I refer to the almost universal and increasing negativeness of the English youth and young man. The negativeness among females in England is as nothing compared with the negativeness to be found among males—and it is here really and truly that the safety of the young positive girl lies. Often to her intense annoyance and sorrow she finds she is dealing with wood and not with vital tissue at all. It is simply humbug to speak of self-control in such cases. For the negative young man is nothing more or less than a wet squib—and who believes in the self-control of a wet squib when it refuses to respond to the lighted match.[38]
The ravages that Puritanism perpetrated in the human kind—and I have dwelt sufficiently upon these ravages in another work[39]—affected the men of England far more deeply than the women; and were in a sense bound to do so. Men are not Life itself, they are an amputation from Life. As I have shown, the reproductive instinct is less powerful, less wilful, more fitful and less persistent in them than in women; how, then, could they fail to be more disastrously affected by the cruel repressing and detoning methods of Puritanism than women are? They had fewer forces to meet and resist the attack; sex held their bodies with too much laxity to make them survive it completely, and the consequence is that in England and all countries like England, sexual exuberance in males—save in the working classes (which are always the last to be affected by anything)—is not only lower than elsewhere, rarer than elsewhere, and more heartily suspected than elsewhere; but it is also decreasing more and more every year. So much so, indeed, that for many generations now, long chaste engagements have not only been possible, but more or less common; so much so that positive girls who marry are able to declare quite honestly that marriage is a disappointment and an empty delusion; so much so, that in nine cases out of ten we could without a qualm and without a scruple allow our unmarried daughter to travel round the world with her so-called lover and feel quite certain that they would both remain perfectly chaste.
This may seem most convenient and even desirable from the standpoint of the squeamish matron; but would it not be ever so much better from the point of view of Life if it were impossible, and if we were forced to exercise a vigilance at least equal if not greater than that of the French chaperon over the young couple?
To mention self-control in connexion with such safety in the association of young people is to use a euphemism for a very much less acceptable word. It would be unfair and wrong to postulate the possession of a higher degree of social instinct by the Englishman than by the Frenchman; therefore it must be some other factor that is active in this unnatural continence where there are no safeguards; and that factor, as every one must know, as every doctor knows, and as most women know, is a low degree of sexual exuberance, a strong and in many cases a pronounced form of negativism.[40]
Many readers will probably cry out: “But surely this is excellent! What could be better! Our girls are safer; we do not require to be suspicious; we can trust the young men—and everybody is happy!”
But everybody is not happy! The men are not happy; because this negativism in sex, this lack of exuberance in sex, gives them no mastery over it, and leaves them all their lives with a guilty conscience about it. (For, as pointed out earlier in the book, certain fusions are only made possible through fire. Fire purifies all things.) And the women are certainly not happy, particularly if they are positive; because they meet with no response, they meet with no leadership, they yield to no overwhelming impetuosity where sex is concerned—an impetuosity that carries everything before it, and which leaves them with no ungratified desire or longing, with not one of those aching, secret longings that thousands of women are too tasteful and too proud to reveal and often even too modest to entertain.
Of course the negative ideal in sex was excellent from the Puritan point of view; because, as I have shown elsewhere,[41] the Puritans were concerned with rearing a race of office hermits, clerks, commercial and industrial slaves of all kinds; and to these, sexual exuberance would naturally be a most irksome, dangerous and undesirable possession. But Life is not an office or a factory, or, for that matter, a large draper’s store; and what may be eminently desirable for these horrible institutions, is simply ugly, repulsive, and nauseating out in the open, amid fields, sucking lambs and beneath a shining sun.