That dream, which waking haunts the hearts of certain nineteenth-century men and women (as indeed it has haunted hearts in all centuries which have reached a certain stage of intellectual growth, from old Montaigne pacing in his long study in France, to Plato in the gardens of Athens)—the dream of a sex union, in which the physical shall be but emblematic of an indissoluble union of head and heart, which shall be as fruitful in the mental life of both man and woman as the physical union is fruitful in perpetuating the race, and across which shall lie as its darkest shadow only the fear of death's separation!—this dream the real old Boer has of necessity never yet dreamed.
If we suppose a child to take a handful of smooth, square blocks, and seek to amuse itself by placing them securely one on another, he would probably find small difficulty; each block he seized would fit with equal smoothness on the surface of any other, and his game would require no skill.
If, however, one should take a knife and trace a few shallow geometrical lines and figures on the surface of the blocks, and the object was to make them interfit perfectly on one another, the game would now be more complex. Each block would not now accord with the surface of any other with equal smoothness; and though all might be super-imposed, some would fit well and some ill, as their surfaces coincided or not; and the mating of them, though still simple, would require some skill.
If yet again one should carve out the surface of certain blocks into arabesque designs and delicate organic figures, the child's problem would be made almost insoluble. Each surface would require to be matched with a surface corresponding to its own in complex indentations, and it would be hard to find any two which might be brought into contact without breaking off some of their finer points and marring their beauty; and that child might sit long with each ornate block in its hand, and only when by rare good fortune a surface harmonizing with its corrugations was found, could the matching go on satisfactorily. The game so simple when it began with the smooth blocks, would have become an intricate puzzle with the carved.
Very crudely, but with some sharpness, would this child's play exemplify the great problem of sexual selection in the different stages of social and individual growth.
The primitive savage, running naked in his primeval wood, or the savage who survives in the heart of a civilized society in the form of the pure sensualist and libertine, resembles our flat block. In him, sexual instinct is still so simple and undifferentiated that every female whom, as the naked savage he captures in war, or, as the clothed savage, purchases with his gold, is equally suited to satisfy his needs; for him the search for sex fellowship is neither much more difficult, or more important, than that of the jelly-fish or the hippopotamus, or any creature still in the quadrupedal stage. For persons in this stage of emotional and intellectual development there is no more any complex problem of sexual selection than for the child with its smooth blocks there is a problem of block selection.
On the other hand, if we turn to the individuals of our own or past ages who have reached the highest individualized development, emotional as well as intellectual, we shall find them in the matter of sex selection not inaptly to be compared with our most ornate and carved blocks. As the child may hold its flowered block long in its hand unable to mate it without injuring it, so individuals with highly differentiated intellectual and emotional sex needs, not only find the attainment of satisfactory sexual relationships one of the most difficult and important matters of life, but they frequently fail entirely, and are compelled to accept the mutilated life of celibacy, or the more mutilated life of inharmonious union.[58]
Though as the carved block once interwedged with a corresponding surface yields a combination more stable than could ever be effected between smooth surfaces; so, sex emotion having blossomed into its intellectual and æsthetic stage, the unions of men and women, though more difficult of attainment, may be when attained of more permanent strength; till, in the case of a Pericles and an Aspasia, we may find it possible for the most highly developed human natures to find in sexual companionship carried out on the highest planes the same absolute completeness of satisfaction, which an Indian hunter, on his lower plane enjoys, when he captures a new squaw.
Midway between these two extremes in the matter of sexual evolution may be placed the condition of our primitive South African Boer. If, in the matter of sexual relationships, he has not attained to the very highest æsthetic and intellectual standpoint yet reached by human nature,—if even the transports of the monogamous bird, who pursues his courtship with a breast swelled out with song, are little known to him, he is yet very far removed from the level of the barbarian, or the civilized libertine of our cities. He resembles our block when in its second stage of complexity, where it passes from its matchable condition and has not yet reached that stage of organic complexity, which makes successful mating almost insuperably difficult. Our Boer, when he seeks a wife, seeks, it is true, not so much the individual as the woman—but it must be a woman of his own race, class, and stage of growth; and if his psychic sexual wants are still so simple and uniform that many a woman of his own class may satisfy them, they still exist. The woman whom he places in the elbow-chair of his house, must share his simple religion, his ancestral view of life and its right ordering, must be able to instruct his children in those simple matters in which he was himself instructed, and to order his household with dignity; and, simple as these needs are, they are imperative. It is not as a merely physical companion, and still less a sexual slave, whom he seeks to rule for his own pleasure, that he desires her: undoubtedly his sex relations are on the whole dominated by less crudely primitive instinct than those of the larger numbers of the sex unions, both legal and illegal, which are formed in our nineteenth-century societies, however much they may in certain matters fall below the highest ideal.
His system of sex relations has generally two vast advantages: it is healthy, and it is just.