6.—“The ecstasy of earnest souls ...”
“Without recognising the possibilities of individual and of racial evolution, we are shut up to the conventional view that the poet and his heroine alike are exceptional creations, hopelessly beyond the everyday average of the race. Whereas, admitting the theory of evolution, we are not only entitled to the hope, but logically compelled to the assurance that these rare fruits of an apparently more than earthly paradise of love, which only the forerunners of the race have been privileged to gather, or, it may be, to see from distant heights, are yet the realities of a daily life towards which we and ours may journey.”—Geddes and Thomson (“Evolution of Sex,” p. 267).
Id.... “What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers, and capacities with reciprocal superiority in them—so that each can enjoy the pleasure of looking up to the other, and can have alternately the pleasure of leading and of being led in the path of development—I will not attempt to describe. To those who can conceive it there is no need; to those who cannot, it would appear the dream of an enthusiast. But I maintain, with the profoundest conviction, that this, and this only, is the ideal of marriage; and that all opinions, customs, and institutions which favour any other notion of it, or turn the conceptions and aspirations connected with it into any other direction, by whatever pretences they may be coloured, are relics of primitive barbarism. The moral regeneration of mankind will only really commence when the most fundamental of the social relations is placed under the rule of equal justice, and when human beings learn to cultivate their strongest sympathy with an equal in rights and cultivation.”—J. S. Mill (“The Subjection of Women,” p. 177).
XX.
2.—“And lingers still the hovering shade of night.”
George Eliot had yet to say, “Heaven was very cruel when it made women”; and Georges Sand, “Fille on nous supprime, femme on nous opprime.”
XXI.
1.—“... carnal servitude...”
It may be objected by some that details in the verse or in these notes are of too intimate a character for general narration. The notes have, however, all been taken either from widely read public prints of indisputable singleness of purpose, or works of writers of undoubted integrity. One is not much troubled as to those who would criticise further. To them may be offered the incident and words of the late Dr. Magee, who, as Bishop of Peterborough, and a member of a legislative committee on the question of child-life insurance, said:—“In this matter we have to count with two things: first, almost all our facts are secrets of the bedchamber; and, secondly, we are opposed by great vested interests. This thing is not to be done without a good deal of pain.”—(Review of Reviews, Vol. IV., p. 37).
And thus are verified, in a transcendental sense also, the words of Schiller:—