Sex and Common-Sense Part 4

"With aching hands and bleeding feet, We toil and toil; lay stone on stone.

Not till the light of day return All we have built shall we discern."

Now let us turn to the other side of the problem--the more normal relations of men and women who are lovers, who are husbands and wives. May I again recapitulate what appears to be the history of many married people, even in 1921.

Let me remind you first that this contract of marriage is the most important, probably, in the whole life of the man and woman who undertake it; that it concerns human personality as perhaps no other relation in the world does, so deeply, so closely, so intimately, that those who enter into it are very near either to heaven or h.e.l.l. The nearer you come to any other human personality, the nearer you get to the supreme happiness or the supreme failure. And when people enter on this relations.h.i.+p, how are they prepared? Many of them are ignorant--and in the case of women often wholly so--of what marriage actually involves. I find it difficult to speak in measured terms of those parents who deliberately allow their daughters to take a step which involves the whole of their future life and happiness, and that of another human being also, in ignorance of what they are doing.

This relations.h.i.+p, which requires all the love and all the wisdom of men and women--so much so that even those who do not call themselves Christians often desire to go to a church and ask for the grace of G.o.d to enable them to carry out so great an undertaking--is entered upon by people who literally do not know what, from the very nature of marriage, is required of them. I suppose many people will say that I speak of a state of things which pa.s.sed a generation ago. No, I do not. I speak of a state of things that is only too common at this present time. I have known marriage after marriage wrecked by the almost unbelievable ignorance that has been present on both sides. I say both sides. First of all, there is the girl. To her, marriage comes sometimes as so great a shock that her whole temperament is warped and embittered by it. Then there is the man, equally ignorant--very often, probably less ignorant of himself, but equally ignorant of her--not realizing how she should be treated. They are often quite ignorant of each other's views on marriage; of what sort of claims they are going to make on each other; what each thinks about the duty of having children. These elementary facts of human life, which must confront those who marry, are faced by them without any kind of preparation, without the most rudimentary knowledge of each other's point of view. And that there are so many happy marriages in spite of all this makes one realize how extraordinarily loyal, fine and courageous, on the whole, human nature is.

Only the other day I was speaking in a town in the north of England on this very subject, and I got a letter afterwards to say that the writer had very greatly enjoyed my address at the time. She had found it, she a.s.sured me, inspiring and elevating. But she felt bound to write and tell me afterwards (what she was sure would both shock and distress me) that she had found that some of the people in my audience were actually acting on what I said! I suppose every public speaker comes up against that sort of thing sometimes--the calm a.s.surance that you are merely talking in the air and have not the slightest desire that anyone should act on what you say.

So this lady wrote to say that, though she and her husband had both been greatly impressed by what I said, they were horrified to find that, as a result, people were actually discussing with one another, before they married, certain points which she mentioned to me and which she said they ought never to discuss until they _were_ married. Is it not amazing that anyone should seriously contend that it is better to arrive at an understanding with the person he or she is about to marry _after_ marriage than before? That people who would not dream of betraying anyone into any kind of contract about which they were not satisfied that its terms were understood should be willing to betray others--I deliberately call it a betrayal--into a contract of such infinite importance, and positively desire that they shall be ignorant of its nature?

It really seems sometimes as if pains were positively taken to mislead those who are going to be married. One of the most amazing statements on this subject, for instance, is contained in the marriage service of the Church of England, where the bride and bridegroom are told that marriage was ordained that "such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body." That there should be anyone in the twentieth century who does not know that a man or a woman who has not the gift of continency is totally unfit for marriage is really rather startling. What such a person requires is both a divine and a physician; but that he should be told that he is fit for marriage and that marriage was expressly designed for him is not only misleading, it is absolutely horrifying. It explains the tragic wreck which so many marriages become after a comparatively short time.

I would urge, then, for the future, that we should not concentrate all our moral, ethical, religious, and social force on perpetuating the tragic failure of an empty marriage, but, rather, should concentrate our efforts on trying to make people understand what marriage is; what their own natures are; what marriage is going to demand from them; what they need in order to make it n.o.ble. I urge, moreover, that the same principle should apply to those who do not marry--that they also should learn in the light what their difficulties are going to be; how to face their own temperaments; how to deal with their own minds and bodies. Your temperament, men and women, does not decide your destiny; it does decide your trials. To know how to deal with it and how to make it your servant, how so to enthrone spiritual power in your nature that it shall dominate all that is physical, not as something base, but as a sacred and a consecrated thing--it is on this that the teachers of to-day should concentrate with all their power. It is true that when we have learnt all that is possible from teaching, there is still something to learn. In marriage is it possible to know finally until the final step is taken?

No, I do not think so. But when you consider how we have struggled against ignorance, how many pitfalls have been put in the path of those who desired knowledge, how we have, as it seems, done our best to make this relations.h.i.+p a failure, surely it is worth while, at least, to try what knowledge, and understanding, and education, and training _can_ do. We cannot know all. That is no reason why we should not know all that we can.

Surely marriage must be a divine inst.i.tution, since we have done so much to make it a failure, and yet one sees again and again such splendid love, such magnificent loyalty and faith! "You advocate," someone wrote to me the other day, "you advocate that people should leave each other when they are tired of each other." No, I do not advocate that anyone should accept a failure. I advocate that every human being should do all that is possible--more perhaps than is possible without the grace of G.o.d--to make marriage the n.o.ble and lovely thing it should be. I think those are faint-hearted who easily accept the fact that it is difficult, and from that drift swiftly to the conclusion that for them it is impossible. I advocate that the greatest faith and loyalty should be practised. I believe in my heart that there is perhaps no relations.h.i.+p which cannot be redeemed by the love and devotion and the grace of G.o.d in the hearts of those who seek to make it redeemable. What I do say is that in Church and State we should concentrate all our efforts on helping men and women to a wise, enlightened, n.o.ble conception of marriage before they enter upon it, and not on a futile and immoral attempt to hold them together by a mere legal contract when all that made it valid has fled.

I believe that the more one knows of human nature the more one reverences it. I believe that the vast majority of human beings strain every nerve rather than fail in so great a responsibility. Do you remember reading in Mr. Bertrand Russell's book, "Principles of Social Reconstruction," of a little church of which it was discovered, not, I think, very long ago, that, owing to some defect in its t.i.tle, marriages which had been celebrated there were not legal? Mr. Bertrand Russell says that there were at that time I forget how many couples still living who had been married in that church, who found that, by this legal defect, they were not legally bound. Do you know how many of those married people seized the opportunity to desert each other and go and marry somebody else? Not a single one!

Every one of those couples went quietly away to church and got married again!

Religious people do sometimes think such mean things of human nature, and human nature is, for the most part, so much n.o.bler, so much more loyal, so much more loving than we imagine. "Lift up your eyes unto the hills from whence cometh your help." "He that walketh in the light, stumbleth not, for he seeth the light of the world."

Let us face the future courageously, with great reverence for other people's opinions and views. Let us not join that mob of shouters who are prepared to howl at everyone who desires to say something that is not quite orthodox, but which is their serious and considered contribution to a great and difficult problem. Let us greet them with respect, however much we may differ from them. Let us look forward without fear. Believe me, below all the froth and sc.u.m of which we make so much, human nature is very n.o.ble.

Let us give that example to the world which is worth a thousand arguments--the example of a n.o.ble married life, the example of a n.o.ble single life. Those of you who are alone can do infinitely more for virtue by being full of gentleness, wisdom, sanity, and love than by any harsh repression of yourselves. It is by what you can make of celibacy that the world will judge celibacy. And so of married lovers. Believe me, it is not the children of married lovers who are rebels against a lofty standard.

Those who have seen with their eyes a lovely, faithful and unwavering love are not easily satisfied with anything that is less. "Lift up your eyes unto the hills. From whence cometh your strength." And in the light of a great ideal, in the light of knowledge, sincerity and truth, in the light of what I know of human nature, I, for one, am not afraid for the future moral standard of this country.

VII

FRIENDs.h.i.+P

"Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions. Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your apparel. How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! Oh Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places. I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, pa.s.sing the love of women. How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!" (II. Sam.

i. 23-27.)

"And Orpah kissed her mother-in-law; but Ruth clave unto her.

And she said, Behold thy sister-in-law has gone back unto her people, and unto her G.o.ds: return thou after thy sister-in-law.

And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy G.o.d my G.o.d: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part me and thee." (Ruth i. 14-17.)

People have sometimes discussed with me whether it is right to have as intense and absorbing a love for a friend of one's own s.e.x as exists between lovers. The word "absorbing" is perhaps the difficulty in their minds. All love is essentially the same, and it has been pointed out that the great cla.s.sic instances of great love have been almost as often between friends as between lovers. But the test of love's n.o.bility remains the same. If it is in the strict sense "absorbing"--if, that is, it is exclusive, if it narrows one's interests instead of enlarging them, if it involves a failure in love or sympathy with other people, it is wrong--it is not in the true sense "love"; but if it enriches the understanding, widens interest, deepens sympathy--if, in a word, to love one teaches us to love others better, then it is good, it is love indeed. A friends.h.i.+p which is of such character that no one outside it is of any interest, a maternal love which not only concentrates on its own but wholly excludes all other children, even a marriage which ultimately narrows rather than widens and is exclusive in its interests, is a poor caricature of love. A young mother may, in the first rapture of her motherhood, seem wholly absorbed; but, as a matter of fact, she generally ends by caring more for _all_ children because she loves one so deeply. Even lovers, after the first absorption of newly-discovered joy, must learn to share their happiness and the happiness of their home with others if it is not to grow hard and dull. And friends may easily estimate the worth of their friends.h.i.+p by the measure with which it has humanized their relations to all other human beings.

There is another test also for love: Does it express itself naturally and rightly? This test is much more difficult to apply. One may believe that all love is essentially the same, but it is certain that all human relations.h.i.+ps are not the same, and, therefore, love cannot always be expressed in the same way; but it is not possible to lay down any exact rule between the sort of "expression" legitimate to each. Everyone must have suffered sometimes from a sense of having forced undesired demonstrations on other people, or having them forced on oneself. One's suffering in the first instance is intensified by the knowledge of the extremity of revolt created by the second. There is nothing, I suppose, more acutely painful than the sense of being compelled to accept demonstrations of affection to which one cannot in the same way respond.

I believe that this shrinking from expressions which seem unnatural, is rightly intensified a hundredfold when the sense of wrongness or "unnaturalness" is due not to the individual but to the relations.h.i.+p itself.

The love which unites the soul to G.o.d, children to their parents, mothers and fathers to sons and daughters, lovers to one another, friend to friend, the disciple to his master, is all one. You cannot divide Love. But to each belongs its right and natural expression, and to parody the love of lovers between friends revolts the growing sense of humankind. The very horrors of prost.i.tution create a less shuddering disgust than the debauching of a young boy by an older man, though with a tragically common injustice society is more apt to be disgusted by the unfortunate victim, bearing all the marks of his moral and physical perversion, than by the more responsible older man who profits by or even creates it.

Yet it is, as I have said, only by the _growing_ sense of humanity that such things are condemned. They were not always so in every case. On the contrary it has sometimes been maintained that friends.h.i.+p between men was so much n.o.bler than the love of men and women that even when it demanded physical expression it was still the finest of all human relations.h.i.+p. This idea was, of course, widely held by the Greeks during the n.o.blest epochs of their history, and Plato, though he does not, as is commonly believed, justify such expression as good in itself, evidently regards it as practically inevitable and, therefore, to be condoned. And though from this indulgent att.i.tude there has been a very general revolt in modern times, the reaction has not always been very discriminating in its condemnation or very just in its reprisals. Now--in consequence, no doubt, of this injustice--there has arisen another attempt to a.s.sert the superior n.o.bility of friends.h.i.+p over love,[E] and even to claim a superior humanity for people who are more attracted by members of their own s.e.x.

[Footnote E: I am using the terms "friends.h.i.+p" and "love" in their ordinarily accepted and narrow sense, as meaning respectively the love of friends and the love of lovers. This is arbitrary, but I cannot find other words except by using long phrases.]

There is not in this any question of the b.e.s.t.i.a.l depravity which deliberately debauches the young and innocent: it is a question of the kind of friends.h.i.+p glorified by Plato. And those who uphold the Platonic view are not always debauchees but sometimes men and women who, however incomprehensibly, still sincerely believe that they and not we who oppose them are the true idealists. This is why it is worth while to state our reasons for our profound disagreement, and to do so as intelligently and fairly as possible. It is also worth while because no one has suffered more cruelly or more hopelessly than those whose temperament or abnormality has been treated by most of us as though it were _in itself_, and without actual wrong-doing, a crime worthy of denunciation and scorn.

First, then, let it be remembered that the highest types humanity has evolved have been men and women who are really "human," that is to say who have not only those qualities which are generally regarded as characteristic of their s.e.x, but have had some share of the other s.e.x's qualities also. A man who is (if such a thing could be) wholly and exclusively male in all his qualities would be repulsive; so would a woman wholly and exclusively female. One has only to look at history to realize it. Compared with the exquisite tenderness and joy of a St. Francis of a.s.sisi, the courage and determination of a St. Joan of Arc, the intellectual power of a St. Catherine of Siena or St. Theresa of Spain, the "brute male" who is wholly male, the "eternal feminine" with her suffocating s.e.xuality seem on the one hand inhuman, on the other subhuman.

It is not the absence of the masculine qualities in a man, or of the feminine qualities in a woman which raises them above the ma.s.s; it is the presence in power of both; and no man is truly human who has not something of the woman in him--no woman who has not something of the man. Here is a certain truth. And its supreme example is Christ Himself--Christ in Whom power and tenderness, strength and insight, courage and compa.s.sion were equally present--Christ Who is in truth the ideal of all humanity without distinction of race, cla.s.s or s.e.x.

This is true. But its truth has been misunderstood by teachers like Edward Carpenter. Beauty and strength in human nature as elsewhere depend on harmony, and in such characters as I have cited that harmony is found. For, in fact, there is no instance in nature of a male wholly male or a female entirely female. Even physically the elements are shared. And if we say with confidence that where these elements are most fully shared there is found the fullest humanity, we are not committed to adding that where the body has one predominating character and the spirit another there is something finer still!

For harmony of life and temperament the body should be the perfect instrument and expression of the spirit. When you have the temperament of one s.e.x in the body of another, this cannot be. There is at once a disharmony, a dislocation, a disorder--in fact, a less perfect not a more perfect type. Humanity does, I believe, progress towards a fuller element of the woman in the man, the man in the woman, and the best we have produced so far confirm the truth of this. But it is not an advance to produce a type in which the temperament and the body are at odds. This is not progress but perversion.

It is the same consciousness of dislocation which makes us condemn h.o.m.os.e.xual practices. Here it is a dislocation between the means and the end. The instinct of s.e.x, to whatever use it may have been put, is fundamentally the creative instinct. It is not by an accident, it is not as a side-issue, that it is through s.e.xual attraction that children are born.

And however sublimated, however enriched, restrained and conditioned, the creative power of physical pa.s.sion remains at once its justification and its consecration. To use it in a relations.h.i.+p which must for ever be barren is "unnatural" and in the deepest sense immoral. It is not easy to define "immorality," because morality is one of the fundamentals which defy definition; but though it is not easy to define, it is not hard to recognize. All the world knows that it is immoral to prost.i.tute the creative power of genius to mere commercialism, for money or for fame. No one can draw a hard and fast line. No one will quarrel with a great artist because he lives by his art, or because he will sometimes turn aside to amuse himself, his public, or his friends. Michaelangelo is not blamed because, one winter's afternoon, he made a snow-statue for Lorenzo de Medici! Yet all will admit that _merely_ to amuse, _merely_ to make money, _merely_ to gain popularity is a prost.i.tution of genius. Why? Because it is to put to another than its real purpose the creative power of a great artist.

In the same way, to use the power of another great creative impulse--that of s.e.x--in a way which divorces it wholly from its end--creation on the physical as well as the spiritual plane--is immoral because it is "unnatural." Again and again it will be found to lead to a violent reaction of feeling--a repulsion which is as intense and violent as the devotion which was its prelude.

What then should those do who have this temperament? No one, perhaps, can wisely counsel them but themselves. They alone can find out the way by which the disharmony of their being can be transcended. That it can be so I am persuaded. That modern psychology has already made strides in the knowledge of this problem we all know. What is due to arrested development or to repression can be set right or liberated: what is temperamental trans.m.u.ted. But I appeal to those who know this, but who have suffered and do still suffer under this difficulty, to make it their business to let in the light, to help others, to know themselves, to learn how to win harmony out of disharmony and to transcend their own limitations. Let them take hold of life there where it has hurt them most cruelly, and wrest from their own suffering the means by which others shall be saved from suffering and humanity brought a little further into the light. Who knows yet of what it is capable? Who knows what is our ultimate goal? It may be that out of a nature so complex and so difficult may come the n.o.blest yet, when the spirit has subdued the warring temperament wholly to itself.

And to the others I would say this. If the h.o.m.os.e.xual is still the most misunderstood, maltreated, and suffering of our race, it is due to our ignorance and brutal contempt. How many have even tried to understand? How many have refrained from scorn? Other troubles have been mitigated, other griefs respected if not understood. But this we refuse even to discuss.

We are content to condemn in ignorance, boasting that we are too good to understand. In consequence, though a few here and there have preached h.o.m.os.e.xuality as a kind of gospel, far more have suffered an agony of shame, a self-loathing which makes life a h.e.l.l.

To be led to believe that one is naturally depraved!--to be condemned as the worst of sinners before one has committed even a single sin! Is that not the height and depth of cruelty? Do you wonder if here and there one of the stronger spirits among these condemned ones reacts in a fierce, unconscious egotism and proclaims himself the true type of humanity, the truly "civilized" man? How shall they see clearly whom we have clothed in darkness, or judge truly who are so terribly alone?

To have a temperament is not in itself a sin! To find in your nature a disharmony which you must transcend, a dislocation you have to restore to order, is not a sin! Whose nature is all harmony? Whose temperament guarantees him from temptation? Is there one here who is not conscious of some dislocation in his life that he must combat? Not one!

It is a disharmony to have an active spirit in a sickly body. It is a disharmony to have, like one of the very greatest of Christ's disciples, "a thorn in the flesh to buffet him." Who shall deliver us from this body of death? When you hear of a Beethoven deaf or of a Robert Louis Stevenson spitting blood, are you not conscious of disharmony? Where there is perfect harmony--_perfect_, I say--such a dislocation could not be. Epilepsy has been called "la maladie des grands," because some great ones have suffered from it. Perhaps St. Paul did. It is not possible to imagine Christ doing so. In Him there existed so perfect a harmony of being that one can no more a.s.sociate Him with ill-health than with any other disorder or defect.

Yet we do not speak (or think) with horrified contempt of the disharmony present in St. Paul or in Beethoven. Rather we reverence the glorious conquest of the spirit over the weakness and limitations of the flesh. Some of us have even rushed to the opposite extreme and preached ill-health as a kind of sanct.i.ty, in our just admiration for those who have battled against it and shown us the spirit dominant over the flesh.

But, it will be urged, ill-health is quite another kind of disharmony than vice. We are not responsible for it, and cannot be blamed.

I am not prepared to admit that this is altogether true, but I will not discuss it now. The point I want to make clear, if I make nothing else clear, is that to be born with a certain temperament is not in itself a sin nor does it compel you to be a sinner. "Your temperament decides your trials; it does not decide your destiny." It is no more "wicked" to have the temperament of a h.o.m.os.e.xual than to have the weakness of an invalid. It is difficult for the spirit to dominate and to bring into a healthy harmony a body predisposed to illness and disorder. The greater the glory to those who succeed! Let us confess with shame that in this other and far harder case we have not only ignored the difficulty and despised the struggler, but--G.o.d forgive us--have, so far as in us lay, made impossible the victory.

VIII

MISUNDERSTANDINGS

"If there is one result or conclusion that we may pick out from the science of s.e.x which has developed so rapidly of recent years, as thoroughly established and permanently accepted, it is that the old notion of the sinfulness of the s.e.x process, _in se_, is superst.i.tious, not religious; and must be discarded before ethical religion can a.s.sert its full sway over humanity's s.e.x life. And, most a.s.suredly, the conception narratives [of the New Testament], by retaining the s.e.x process to the important extent of normal pregnancy and parturition, foreshadowed and hallowed this development of ethical thought.

They make it clear that the Spirit of G.o.d and the spirit of woman, in conscious union, refuse to justify superst.i.tious and paralyzing fears, refuse to allow that the s.e.x process is irredeemable; they render possible and imperative the working out of the ethical problems directly concerned with s.e.x."

_Northcute: Christianity and s.e.x Problems_, _pp._ 415, 416.