A Pasteurized “Man and Superman”
The Raft, by Coningsby Dawson. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]
The Raft is based on the same idea as Shaw’s—minus moral shocks, mental exhilaration, and the Superman. The theory is served as strong drink in the one, as good boy’s tea in the other. The same idea receives such different treatment that the person who would pronounce Man and Superman a “corrupt play” might speak of The Raft, as a beautiful story, provided a few courageous truths which it was necessary for the author to state in order to refute, could be forgiven. It is a harmless compromise between the belief that no literature has a right to exist that is not suitable for a girl in her teens, and the conviction that men and women must face life as it is.
In The Raft, we read this figurative suggestion of the theory:
We’re girls adrift on a raft and we can’t swim. Over there’s the land of marriage with the children, the homes and the husbands; we’ve no means of getting to it. Unless some of the men see us and put out in boats to our rescue, we’ll be swept into the hunger of mid-ocean. But they’re too busy to notice us.... Always wanting, wanting, wanting the things that only men can give.... Did men ever want to be married or was it always necessary to catch them?
In Man and Superman we find a more liberal statement:
To a woman, a man is only a means to the end of getting children and rearing them. Vitality in woman is a blind fury of creation. What other work has she in life but to get a husband? It is a woman’s business to get married as soon as possible, and a man’s to keep unmarried as long as he can.... You think that you are the pursuer, and she pursued. Fool, it is you who are the pursued, the destined prey.
During the last few years stories and plays exploiting this doctrine have been hurled thick and fast in the attempt to batter down so-called romantic love, romantic though fortified not only by the fancies of the poets and novelists but also by the analyses of the scientists and the experiences of life. According to these stories, love is nothing more or less than a passion for reproduction, a desire for children. This idea is being emphasized by two very different types for two very different reasons: one tries to make a Don Quixote of romantic love and hopes by ridicule to eliminate it as the great motive and to give some of the other passions a chance in literature; the other considers everything even suggestive of sex unmoral, and so searches for an excuse to justify the gratification of a natural craving. Neither satire nor platitudes can alter nature.
Love, they say, considered as intense personal affection is an idea purely fanciful, romantic. If so to consider it is romantic, scientists are romantic; for such men as Lankester and Pycraft say “the view that the sequel of mate hunger is the dominant instinct has no foundation in fact. Desire for the sake of the pleasure of its gratification, not its consequences, is the only hold on life which any race possesses. Love is the attribute upon which this preservation of the race depends.”
In other words it is a case of cause and effect. That the joy of motherhood is greater than any other joy in a woman’s life has absolutely nothing to do with the question as to whether or not the hope of that joy was the reason for the selection of a mate. The question is not one of superiority but priority; not which is the greater, but which came first; which is the cause and which the effect. If the desire for children is the cause of what we call love, the only logical outcome is that in selection any woman could not refuse any man fit to be the father of her children on the ground that he did not appeal to her personally. Life does not support such a conclusion.