And yet how different—and more beautiful—are the present relations between men and women in general, especially among the Germanic peoples. A friendly comradeship prevails among the young men and women studying at the university, in art academies, music schools, business colleges, etc. In the North, this comradeship often continues from the primary schools, through the grades to the university, with results advantageous to both sexes. Especially in the years under twenty, this comradeship has a significance which cannot be overestimated. Girls, who were, earlier, confined to a narrow, uninteresting, joyless family circle, now often find in the circle of masculine and feminine comrades their share of the joy of youth without which life has no springtime. Youths who formerly had known no other young women than those with whom they should never have come in contact, now learn to know soulful, pure-minded girls, and this gives them a new conception of woman. Both sexes now experience together the joys of youth in such fresh and significant forms as folk-dancing, sport, etc. They have opportunity for stimulating interchange of ideas in a great circle, and quiet discussion with a few congenial friends. During the last twenty or thirty years, young men and young women have again begun to discover one another spiritually, discoveries which since the days of romanticism have been made only through the stained glass of literature. In the romantic period, men and women exercised reciprocally upon one another a humanising influence. A like influence again obtains at the present time, but upon a much broader basis. The men and women of romanticism formed a group bound together only by spiritual relationship, in which the women aspired to the culture of the men and shared their intellectual interests, while the men promoted the women’s “desire for men’s culture, art, knowledge, and distinction” (Geluste nach der Männer Bildung, Kunst, Weisheit und Ehre.—Schleiermacher). Now, young people studying in different fields exert a mutual humanising influence and thereby learn to know one another from the side of intelligence as well as from that of character and disposition. Thus are dispelled certain illusions and conceptions almost forced upon them through which both sexes in the years of adolescence once regarded each other. Men as well as women obtain a finer criterion for the conception of “womanliness” and of “manliness”; both discover the innumerable shadings which these conceptions conceal; both recognise that the sexes can meet not only upon the erotic plane, but upon a plane that is universally human; finally, both learn that the more perfect and complete human beings they become, the more they have to thank one another for it.
Comprehension in erotic relations is most difficult because, there, women are far in advance of men. Woman’s ideal of love, however, is becoming more and more the ideal of young men. Young girls, on their side, are beginning to understand better the sexual nature of men. The whole world in which man received his culture, won his victories, suffered his defeats, is no longer terra incognita to women; they have lost the blind reverence or the blind hostility with which they formerly regarded the doings and dealings of men. Men, on the other hand, are learning that the domestic labours for the comfort of the family, which they have thus far regarded as the sole duty of woman, cannot engross her whole soul, that domesticity leaves many wishes unfulfilled. So both sexes have begun, each on its own side, to build a bridge across the chasm which law and custom had dug between them. The young still ponder over the enigmatical antitheses in their natures, yet they find they have very much that is human in common with one another. In comradeship, however, that “chivalry” vanishes, which among other things consisted in the ideal that the young men had always to bear all the burdens and duties. Now as a rule, the girl carries her own knapsack on excursions and pays her share of the expenses. But if she really needs help, the youth is quite as ready as before to grant it to her, just as she also on her part is ready to assist according to her strength: honest friendship has replaced rapturous chivalry. This friendly comradeship often satisfies the young man’s need of feminine kindness and enjoyment in those dangerous years when, as a young man said, “Three fourths of the life of a youth, conscious and unconscious, is sex life.” And nothing can more effectually prevent him from degrading himself than access to a circle where in quiet and freedom he meets young girls, without an indelicate, intruding family surveillance, interfering and asking him about his “intentions.” If between two such comrades an erotic feeling finally develops, even if the wooing takes place in a laboratory instead of a romantic arbour, the possibilities always exist, in the golden haze of love, of making mistakes. But both have, however, had opportunities of seeing each other in many character-illuminating situations; they have observed each other, not only with their own eyes, but also through the more critical glasses of the comrade circle. On the other hand, it often happens that discussions and interchange of letters conjure up a congeniality which exists only in opinions and temperament, not in nature. It is fortunate when this is discovered in time. Otherwise bitter conflicts may be the result, should a strong individual nature wish to mould the other after himself or after his ideal of man or woman. For that anyone loves the individuality of another without illusions is still very rarely the case. It now happens somewhat more frequently, since young people in comradeship learn to know mutually their ideals and dreams, as well in erotic as in universally human aspects. But if these ideals and dreams do give a hint of character, comradeship brings a true knowledge of character only when it also offers an opportunity of seeing others act; not only of hearing them speak of themselves. Such analyses of one’s own soul or the soul of others in the atmosphere of tea and cigarettes, music and poetry, give the “interesting” masculine or feminine parasites opportunity to ensnare a victim, who is then intellectually or erotically, often even economically, sucked dry.
But even if such an interchange of ideas really enriched all, it can be carried to excess and become deleterious to energy for work, directness, and idealism. However beneficial may be the honesty of to-day in sexual questions, the discussion of the instincts of life which has now become a commonplace is also dangerous. These discussions are fraught with the same danger to the roots of human life as is a continual digging up of the roots of a plant to see how it is growing.
The earlier a marriage can be consummated, the less is the danger of freshness being lost in this way; the greater the prospect that man and wife will grow close together, just as do the man and wife of the people, through the difficulty of the common struggle for existence. But if this struggle becomes easier before youth has entirely passed, then there enters often into the life of the man a crisis which the practised French call “La maladie de quarante ans”: the need of the man for a new erotic experience. While those on a lower erotic plane, to-day as at all times, seek this in transient secret alliances, it leads those on a higher level in our time to the most tragic of all separations, where the man—after decades of the most intimate life together, of the most faithful work together, of mutual understanding—drives the wife out of the home in order to bring in a young wife who has never been to him, perhaps never can be to him, a fellow fighter and helper, as the repudiated wife was, but who has for him the charm of the mystery which the maiden had for the man before the days of coëducation, sexual discussions, comradeship, and dress-reform!
Women students now escape the earlier danger of the daughter of the family, falling in love out of lack of occupation. They have not the time, often also not the means to permit themselves erotic dreams. There are among them many poor girls who dare lose no single semester, for they must hasten to earn their livelihood. Moreover, such a girl knows that if she should yield to the need for tenderness, for support, that is so strong in her, the same fate could happen to her as to this or that fellow student who after a short happiness was left alone when the lover found a good match. And she was left behind not only in her sorrow but also in her work. And the more a yearning girl buries herself in her studies, the more science or art unlock their riches to her, the happier, more full of life she feels herself in spite of loneliness, scanty means, and shabby dress.
Among women students there are also many of the cerebral type, mentioned above, women who need tenderness neither in the form of friendship nor of love; yes, who fear in both a bond for their “free individuality.” These take part in sports, discuss, jest, with their fellow men students, openhearted and unconcerned, without thinking whether they please or not. All these young girls now go about with perfect freedom; even in the Romance countries, a young woman can now go alone with her bag of books or her racquet. For in circles where study has not yet exercised its freeing influence, sport has brought this about.
In America, student life, because of the early entrance of the men into the professions, becomes more a one-sided, feminine comrade life. There, the women have to develop their arts of the toilet for each other, whom they find more interesting, more worthy of pleasing than the masculine sex. Even in Europe, feminine comradeship in the student years is at times most intimate. For a friendship between a young girl and a young man often ends with love—on one side. Or in an intimate circle A has fallen in love with B, but B with C, etc. Such eventualities the wise girl will avoid for they can bring both suffering and obstruction to her work. With women comrades, she has, without this risk, an interchange of ideas which promotes study, deepens culture, opens up new views, and gives to all new impulses. There exists, at least at the present time, a difference between the masculine and feminine method of inquiry, of solving problems, of apprehending ideas, which results in the fact that comradeship between women cannot take the place of comradeship between men and women. It is, however, for deep and beautiful natures often impossible at the beginning of life to be capable, in a spiritual sense, of more than a single friendship with their own sex; for each new spiritual contact becomes a new and difficult problem. For such men or women a friendship with a comrade of their own sex is often the richest advantage of their student time. Often a student in good circumstances finds her joy in taking care of some lonely comrades. They find at her apartments, in a friendly welcome, a few flowers and pictures, a teakettle, a fireplace, that feeling of homely warmth for which the shivering students have longed,—a longing which has often driven a lonely, impressionable youth from the dreary students’ room to “rough pleasures.” Now when he leaves the little comrade circle, his sweetest memories of home, his finest dreams, vibrate in him. And the timid girl goes in the certainty that there is another girl who is concerned about her wretched fate.
In such a quiet as also in a more lively comrade life both sexes learn to know not only each other but also different classes and, in certain European universities, the several nations. It is not unusual for nine or ten races to be found represented in one small group of comrades. Life thus becomes everywhere enriched by strong manifestations or fine shades of congeniality; spiritual attractions and repulsions cross one another; inspiring or restraining impressions radiate in all directions. It would be quite as impossible to estimate the fructifying influence of such a friendly intercourse as to measure the life which comes into existence on a spring day filled with the sigh of the wind, the fluttering of butterflies, and humming of bees.
In such a circle of comrades, devotion and capacity for sacrifice are past belief, especially in the nation where “the girls wear short hair and the young men long hair,” as a wag characterised the young Russians studying abroad. That a couple of Russian girls, for a whole winter, possessed together but a single pair of shoes and so could never go out at the same time, is one of the innumerable small and great expressions of the feeling of solidarity among the poorest students of the university.
When the comrade life assumed the form exclusively of coffee-house visits, then the women had to revolt against it. But they often, alas, allowed themselves to be carried with the stream. Because the coffee-house life at first really gave a certain polish to the intelligence, it could for a short time have its justification. But when a blade is worn out, the artist of life should cease grinding; if on the contrary he allows the grindstone to go on continually, then at last he has only the haft in his hand. Formerly, it was only the young men but now even the girls wear out thus their weapons or tools before they ever use them seriously.