The Book of Life Part 25

I appreciate that there is opportunity for controversy here. As a matter of psychology, it is not easy to separate instinct from experience, to state whether a certain impulse is innate or acquired. Some may argue that savages know nothing about idealism in s.e.x, neither do those modern savages whom we breed in city slums; some may make the same a.s.sertion concerning a great ma.s.s of loutish and sensual youths. We have got so far from health and soundness that it is hard to be sure what is "normal" and what is "ideal." But without going into metaphysics, I think we can reasonably make the following statement concerning the s.e.x impulse at its first appearance in the average healthy youth in civilized societies; that this impulse, going to the roots of the being, affecting every atom of energy and every faculty, is accompanied, not merely by happiness, but by sympathetic delight in the happiness of the woman, by interest in the woman, by desire to be with her, to stay with her and share her life and protect her from harm. In what I have to say about the subject from now on, I shall describe this condition of being and feeling by the word "love."

But now suppose that men should, for some reason or other, evolve a set of religious ideas which denied love, and repudiated love, and called it a sin and a humiliation; or suppose there should be an economic condition which made love a peril, so that the young couple which yielded to love would be in danger of starvation, or of seeing their children starve. Suppose there should be evolved cla.s.ses of men and women, held by society in a condition of permanent semi-starvation; then, under such conditions, the impulse to love would become a trap and a source of terror. Then the energies of a great many men would be devoted to suppressing love and strangling it in themselves; then the intellectual and spiritual sanctions of love would be withdrawn, the beauty and charm and joy would go out of it, and it would become a starving beggar at the gates, or a thief skulking in the night-time, or an a.s.sa.s.sin with a dagger and club. In other words, s.e.x would become all the horror that it is today, in the form of purchased vice, and more highly purchased marriage, and secret shame, and obscure innuendo. So we should have what is, in a civilized man, a perversion, the possibility of love which is physical alone; a purely animal thing in a being who is not purely animal, but is body, mind and spirit all together. So it would be possible for pitiful, unhappy man, driven by the blind urge of nature, to conceive of desiring a woman only in the body, and with no care about what she felt, or what she thought, or what became of her afterwards.

That purely physical s.e.x desire I will indicate in our future discussions by the only convenient word that I can find, which is l.u.s.t.

The word has religious implications, so I explain that I use it in my own meaning, as above. There is a great deal of what the churches call l.u.s.t, which I call true and honest love; on the other hand, in Christian churches today, there are celebrated innumerable marriages between innocent young girls and mature men of property, which I describe as legalized and consecrated l.u.s.t.

We are now in position to make a fundamental distinction. I a.s.sert the proposition that there does not exist, in any man, at any time of his life, or in any condition of his health, a necessity for yielding to the impulses of l.u.s.t; and I say that no man can yield to them without degrading his nature and injuring himself, not merely morally, but mentally, and in the long run physically. I a.s.sert that it is the duty of every man, at all times and under all circ.u.mstances, to resist the impulses of l.u.s.t, to suppress and destroy them in his nature, by whatever expenditure of will power and moral effort may be required.

I know physicians who maintain the unpopular thesis that serious damage may be done to the physical organism of both man and woman by the long continued suppression of the s.e.x-life. Let me make plain that I am not disagreeing with such men. I do not deny that repression of the s.e.x-life may do harm. What I do deny is that it does any harm to repress a physical desire which is unaccompanied by the higher elements of s.e.x; that is to say, by affection, admiration, and unselfish concern for the s.e.x-partner and her welfare. When I advise a man to resist and suppress and destroy the impulse toward l.u.s.t in his nature, I am not telling him to live a s.e.xless life. I am telling him that if he represses l.u.s.t, then love will come; whereas, if he yields to l.u.s.t, then love may never come, he may make himself incapable of love, incapable of feeling it or of trusting it, or of inspiring it in a woman. And I say that if, on the other hand, he resists l.u.s.t, he will pour all the energies of his being into the channels of affection and idealism. Instead of having his thoughts diverted by every pa.s.sing female form, his energies will become concentrated upon the search for one woman who appeals to him in permanent and useful ways. We may be sure that nature has not made men and women incompatible, but on the contrary, has provided for fulfillment of the desires of both. The man will find some woman who is looking for the thing which he has to offer--that is, love.

And now, what about the suppression of love? Here I am willing to go as far as any physician could desire, and possibly farther. Speaking generally, and concerning normal adult human beings, I say that the suppression of love is a crime against nature and life. I say that long continued and systematic suppression of love exercises a devastating effect, not merely upon the body, but upon the mind and all the energies of the being. I say that the doctrine of the suppression of love, no matter by whom it is preached, is an affront to nature and to life, and an insult to the creator of life. I say that it is the duty of all men and women, not merely to a.s.sert their own right to love, but to devote their energies to a war upon whatever ideas and conventions and laws in society deny the love-right.

The belief that long continued suppression of love does grave harm has been strongly reinforced in the last few years by the discovery of psycho-a.n.a.lysis, a science which enables us to explore our unconscious minds, and lay bare the secrets of nature's psychic workshop. These revelations have made plain that s.e.x plays an even more important part in our mental lives than we realized. s.e.x feeling manifests itself, not merely in grown people, but in the tiniest infants; in these latter it has of course no object in the opposite s.e.x, but the physical sensations are there, and some of their outward manifestations; and as the infant grows, and realizes the outside world, the feelings come to center upon others, the parents first of all. These manifestations must be guided, and sometimes repressed; but if this is done violently, by means of terror, the consequences may be very harmful--the wrong impulses or the terrors may survive as a "complex" in the unconscious mind, and cause a long chain of nervous disorders and physical weaknesses in the adult.

These things are no matter of guesswork, they have been proven as thoroughly as any scientific discovery, and are used in a new technic of healing. Of course, as with every new theory, there are unbalanced people who carry it to extremes. There are fanatics of Freudianism who talk as if everything in the human unconsciousness were s.e.x; but that need not blind us to the importance of these new discoveries, and the confirmation they bring to the thesis that sane and normal love, wisely guided by common sense and reasoned knowledge, is at a certain period of life a vital necessity to every sound human being.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

CELIBACY VERSUS CHASt.i.tY

(The ideal of the repression of the s.e.x impulse, as against the ideal of its guidance and cultivation.)

There are two words which we need in this discussion, and as they are generally used loosely, they must now be defined precisely. The two words are celibacy and chast.i.ty. We define celibacy as the permanent and systematic suppression of love. We define chast.i.ty, on the other hand, as the permanent and systematic suppression of l.u.s.t. Chast.i.ty, as the word is here used, is not a denial of love, but a preparing for it; it is the practice and the ideal, necessary especially in the young, of consecrating their beings to the search for love, and to becoming worthy for love. In that sense we regard chast.i.ty as one of the most essential of virtues in the young. It is widely taught today, but ineffectively, because unintelligently and without discrimination; because, in other words, it is confused with celibacy, which is a perversion of life, and one of humanity's intellectual and moral diseases.

The origin of the ideal of celibacy is easy to understand. At a certain stage in human development the eyes of the mind are opened, and to some man comes a revelation of the life of altruism and sympathetic imagination. To use the common phrase, the man discovers his spiritual nature. But under the conditions then prevailing, all the world outside him is in a conspiracy to strangle that nature, to drag it down and trample it into the mire. One of the most powerful of these destructive agencies, as it seems to the man, is s.e.x. By means of s.e.x he is laid hold upon by strange and terrible creatures who do not understand his higher vision, but seek only to prey upon him, and use him for their convenience. At the worst they rob him of everything, money, health, time and reputation; at best, they saddle him and bridle him, they put him in harness and set him to dragging a heavy load. In the words of a wise old man of the world, Francis Bacon, "He who marries and has children gives hostages to fortune." In a world wherein war, pestilence, and famine held sway, the man of family had but slight chance of surviving as a philosopher or prophet or saint. Discovering in himself a deep-rooted and overwhelming impulse to fall into this snare, he imagined a devil working in his heart; so he fled away to the desert, and hid in a cave, and starved himself, and lashed himself with whips, and allowed worms and lice to devour his body, in the effort to destroy in himself the impulse of s.e.x.

So the world had monasteries, and a religious culture, not of much use, but better than nothing; and so we still have in the world celibate priesthoods, and what is more dangerous to our social health, we have the old, degraded notions of the essential vileness of the s.e.x relationship--notions permeating all our thought, our literature, our social conventions and laws, making it impossible for us to attain true wisdom and health and happiness in love.

I say the ideal of celibacy is an intellectual and moral disease; it is a violation of nature, and nature devotes all her energies to breaking it down, and she always succeeds. There never has been a celibate religious order, no matter how n.o.ble its origin and how strict its discipline, which has not sooner or later become a breeding place of loathsome unnatural vices. And sooner or later the ideal begins to weaken, and common sense to take its place, and so we read in history about popes who had sons, and we see about us priests who have "nieces"

and attractive servant girls. Make the acquaintance of any police sergeant in any big city of America, and get him to chatting on friendly terms, and you will discover that it is a common experience for the police in their raids upon brothels to catch the representatives of celibate religious orders. As one old-timer in the "Tenderloin" of New York said to me, "Of course, we don't make any trouble for the good fathers." Nor was this merely because the old sergeant was an Irishman and a Catholic; it was because deep down in his heart he knew, as every man knows, that the craving of a man for the society and companionship of a woman is an overwhelming craving, which will break down every barrier that society may set against it.

There is another form of celibacy which is not based upon religious ideas, but is economic in its origin, and purely selfish in its nature.

It is unorganized and unreasoned, and is known as "bachelorhood"; it has as its complements the inst.i.tutions of old maidenhood and of prost.i.tution. Both forms of celibacy, the religious and the economic, are entirely incompatible with chast.i.ty, which is only possible where love is recognized and honored. Chast.i.ty is a preparation for love; and if you forbid love, whether by law, or by social convention, or by economic strangling, you at once make chast.i.ty a Utopian dream. You may preach it from your pulpits until you are black in the face; you may call out your Billy Sundays to rave, and dance, and go into convulsions; you may threaten h.e.l.l-fire and brimstone until you throw whole audiences into spasms--but you will never make them chaste. On the contrary, strange and horrible as it may seem, those very excitements will turn into s.e.xual excitements before your eyes! So subtle is our ancient mother nature, and so determined to have her own way!

The abominable old ideal of celibacy, with its hatred of womanhood, its distrust of happiness, its terror of devils, is not yet dead in the world. It is in our very bones, and is forever appearing in new and supposed to be modern forms. Take a man like Tolstoi, who gained enormous influence, not merely in Russia, but throughout the world among people who think themselves liberal--humanitarians, pacifists, philosophic anarchists. Tolstoi's notions about s.e.x, his teachings and writings and likewise his behavior toward it, were one continuous manifestation of disease. All through his youth and middle years, as an army officer, popular novelist, and darling of the aristocracy, his life was one of license, and the att.i.tude toward women he thus acquired, he never got out of his thoughts to his last day. Gorky, meeting him in his old age, reports his conversation as unpleasantly obscene, and his whole att.i.tude toward women one of furtive and unwholesome slyness.

But Tolstoi was in other ways a great soul, one of the great moral consciences of humanity. He looked about him at a world gone mad with greed and hate, and he made convulsive efforts to reform his own spirit and escape the power of evil. As regards s.e.x, his thought took the form of ancient Christian celibacy. Man must repudiate the physical side of s.e.x, he must learn to feel toward women a "pure" affection, the relationship of brother and sister. In his novel, "Resurrection,"

Tolstoi portrays a young aristocrat who meets a beautiful peasant girl and conceives for her such a n.o.ble and generous emotion; but gradually the poison of physical s.e.x-desire steals into his mind, he seduces her, and she becomes a prost.i.tute. Later in life, when he discovers the crime he has committed, he humbles himself and follows her into exile, and wins her to G.o.d and goodness by the unselfish and uns.e.xual love which he should have maintained from the beginning.

It was Tolstoi's teaching that all men should aspire toward this kind of love, and when it was pointed out to him that if this doctrine were to be applied universally, the human race would become extinct, his answer was that there was no reason to fear that, because only a few people would be good enough and strong enough to follow the right ideal! Here you see the reincarnation of the old Christian notion that we are "conceived in sin and born in iniquity." We may be pure and good, and cease to exist; or we may sin, and let life continue. Some choose to sin, and these sinners hand down their sinful qualities to the future; and so virtue and goodness remain what they have always been, a futile crying out in the wilderness by a few religious prophets, whom G.o.d has sent to call down destruction upon a world which He had made--through some mistake never satisfactorily explained!

It is easy nowadays to persuade intelligent people to laugh at such a perverted view of life; but the truth is that this att.i.tude toward s.e.x is written, not merely into our religious creeds and formulas, but into most of our laws and social conventions. It is this, which for convenience I will call the "monkish" view of love, which prevents our dealing frankly and honestly with its problems, distinguishing between what is wrong and what is right, and doing anything effective to remedy the evils of marriage-plus-prost.i.tution. That is why I have tried so carefully to draw the distinction between what I call love and what I call l.u.s.t; between the ideal of celibacy, which is a perversion, and the idea of chast.i.ty, which must form an essential part of any regimen of true and enduring love.

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII

THE DEFENSE OF LOVE

(Discusses pa.s.sionate love, its sanction, its place in life, and its preservation in marriage.)

I have before me as I write a newspaper article by Robert Blatchford, a great writer and great man. He is dealing with the subject of "Love and Marriage," and his doctrine is summed up in the following sentences: "There is a difference between loving a woman and falling in love with her. The love one falls into is a sweet illusion. But that fragrant dream does not last. In marriage there are no fairies."

This expresses one of the commonest ideas in the world. Pa.s.sionate love is one thing, and marriage is another and different thing, and it is no more possible to reconcile them than to mix oil and water. Our notions of "romantic" love took their rise in the Middle Ages, from the songs and narratives of the troubadours, and this whole tradition was based upon the glorification of illegitimate and extra-marital love. That tradition has ruled the world of art ever since, and rules it today. I do not exaggerate when I say that it is the conventional view of grand opera and the drama, of moving pictures and novels, that impa.s.sioned and thrilling love is found before marriage, and is found in adultery and in temptations to adultery, but is never found in marriage. I have a pretty varied acquaintance with the literature of the world, and I have sat and thought for quite a while, without being able to recall a single portrait of life which contradicts this thesis; and certainly anyone familiar with literature could name ten thousand novels and dramas and grand operas which support the thesis.

English and American Puritanism have beaten the tradition down to this extent: the novelist portrays the glories and thrills of young love, and carries it as far as the altar and the orange blossoms and white ribbons and showers of rice--and stops. He leaves you to a.s.sume that this delightful rapture continues forever after; but he does not attempt to show it to you--he would not dare attempt to show it, because the general experience of men and women in marriage would make him ridiculous. So he runs away from the issue; if he tells you a story of married life, it is a story of a "triangle"--the thrills of love imperiling marriage, and either crushed out, or else wrecking the lives of the victims. Such is the unanimous testimony of all our arts today, and I submit it as evidence of the fact that there must be something vitally wrong with our marriage system.

Personally, I am prepared to go as far as the extreme s.e.x-radical in the defense of love and the right to love. I believe that love is the most precious of all the gifts of life. I accept its sanctions and its authority. I believe that it is to be cherished and obeyed, and not to be run away from or strangled in the heart. I believe that it is the voice of nature speaking in the depths of us, and speaking from a wisdom deeper than we have yet attained, or may attain for many centuries to come. And when I say love, I do not mean merely affection. I do not mean merely the habit of living in the same home, which is the basis of marriage as Blatchford describes it. What I mean is the love of the poets and the dreamers, the "young love" which is thrill and ecstasy, a glorification and a transfiguration of the whole of life. I say that, far from giving up this love for marriage, it is the true purpose of marriage to preserve this love and perpetuate it.

To save repet.i.tion and waste of words, let us agree that from now on when I use the word love, I mean the pa.s.sionate love of those who are "in love." I believe that it is the right of men and women to be "in love," and that there is no true marriage unless they are "in love," and stay "in love." I believe that it is possible to apply reason to love, to learn to understand love and the ways of love, to protect it and keep it alive in marriage. Blatchford writes the sentence, "Matrimony cannot be all honeymoon." I answer that a.s.suredly it can be, and if you ask me how I know, I tell you that I know in the only way we really know anything--because I have proven it in my own life. I say that if men and women would recognize the perpetuation of the honeymoon as the purpose of marriage, and would devote to that end one-hundredth part of the intelligence and energy they now devote to the killing of their fellow human beings in war, we might have an end to the wretched "romantic tradition" which makes the most sacred emotion of the human heart into a sneak-thief skulking in the darkness, entering our lives by back alleys and secret stairways--while greed and worldly pomp, dullness and boredom, parade in by the front entrance.

In the first place, what is love--young love, pa.s.sionate love, the love of those who "fall in"? I know a certain lady, well versed in worldly affairs, who says that it is at once the greatest nonsense and the deadliest snare in the world. This lady was trained as a "coquette"; she, and all the young ladies she knew, made it their business to cause men to fall in love with them, and their prestige was based upon their skill in that art. So to them "love" was a joke, and men "in love" were victims, whether ridiculous or pitiable. To this I answer that I know nothing in life that cannot be "faked"; but an imitation has value only as it resembles something that is real, and that has real value.

I am aware that it is possible for a society to be so corrupted, so given up to the admiration of imitations, of the paint and powder and silk-stocking-clad-ankle kind of love, that true and genuine love interest, with its impulse to self-sacrifice and self-consecration, is no longer felt or understood. I am aware that in such a society it is possible for even the very young to be so sophisticated that what they take to be love is merely vanity, the worship of money, and the grace and charm which the possession of money confers. I have known girls who were "head over heels" in love, and thought it was with a man, when quite clearly they were in love with a dress suit or a social position.

In such a society it is hard to talk about natural emotions, and deep and abiding and disinterested affections.

Nevertheless, amid all the false conventions, the sham glories and cowardices of our civilization, there abides in the heart the craving for true love, and the idea of it leaps continually into flame in the young. In spite of the ridicule of the elders, in spite of blunders and tragic failures, in spite of dishonesties and deceptions--nevertheless, it continues to happen that out of a thousand maidens the youth finds one whose presence thrills him with a new and terrible emotion, whose lightest touch makes him shiver, almost makes his knees give way.

If you will recall what I have written about instinct and reason, you will know that I am not a blind worshipper of our ancient mother nature. I am not humble in my att.i.tude toward her, but perfectly willing to say when I know more than she does. On the other hand, when I know nothing or next to nothing, I am shy of contradicting my ancient mother, and disposed to give respectful heed to her promptings. One of the things about which we know almost nothing at present is the subject of eugenics. We are only at the beginning of trying to find out what matings produce the best offspring. Meantime, we ought to consider those indications which nature gives us, just as we consider her advice about what food to eat and what rest to take.

It is not my idea that science will ever take men and women and marry them in cold blood, as today we breed our cattle. What I think will happen is that young men and women will meet one another, as they do at present, and will find the love impulse awakening; they will then submit their love to investigation, as to whether they should follow that impulse, or should wait. In other words, I do not believe that science will ever do away with the raptures of love, but will make itself the servant of these raptures, finding out what they mean, and how their precious essence may be preserved.

I perfectly understand that the begetting of children is not the only purpose of love. The children have to be reared and trained, which means that a home has to be founded, and the parents have to learn to co-operate. They have to have common aims in life, and temperaments sufficiently harmonious so that they can live in the house together without tearing each other's eyes out. This means that in any civilized society all impulses of love have to be subjected to severe criticism. I intend, before long, to show just how I think parents and guardians should co-operate with young people in love; to help them to understand in advance what they are doing, and how it may be possible for them to make their love permanent and successful. For the moment I merely state, to avoid any possible misunderstanding, that I am the last person in the world to favor what is called "blind" love, the unthinking abandonment to an impulse of s.e.x pa.s.sion. What I am trying to show is that the pa.s.sionate impulse, the pa.s.sionate excitement of the young couple, is the material out of which love and marriage are made. Pa.s.sion is a part of us, and a fundamental part. If we do not find a place for it in marriage, it will seek satisfaction outside of marriage, and that means lying, or the wrecking of the marriage, or both.

Pa.s.sion is what gives to love and marriage its vitality, its energy, its drive; in fact, it gives these qualities to the whole character. It is a vivifying force, transfiguring the personality, and if it is crushed and repressed, the whole life of that person is distorted. Yet it is a fact which every physician knows, that millions of women marry and live their whole lives without ever knowing what pa.s.sionate gratification is. As a consequence of this, millions of men take it for granted that there are "good" women and "bad" women, and that only the latter are interesting.

This, of course, is simply one of the abnormalities caused by the supplanting of love by money as a motive in marriage. Love becomes a superfluity and a danger, and all the forces of society, including inst.i.tutionalized religion, combine to outlaw it and drive it underground. Or we might say that they lock it in a dungeon--and that the supreme delight of all the painters, poets, musicians, dramatists and novelists of all climes and all periods of history, is to portray the escape of the "young G.o.d" from these imprisonments. The story is told in six words of an old English ballad: "Love will find out the way!"

Is it not obvious that there must be something vitally wrong with our inst.i.tutions and conventions in matters of s.e.x, when here exists this eternal war between our moralists and our artists? Why not make up our minds what we really believe; whether it is true that poets are, as Sh.e.l.ley said, "the unacknowledged legislators of mankind," or whether they are, as Plato declared, false teachers and seducers of the young.

If they are the latter, let us have done with them, let us drive them from the state, together with lovers and all other impa.s.sioned persons.

But if, on the other hand, it is truth the poets tell about life, then let us take the young G.o.d out of his dungeon, and bring him into our homes by the front door, and cast out the false G.o.ds of vanity and greed and worldly prestige which now sit in his place.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX

BIRTH CONTROL

(Deals with the prevention of conception as one of the greatest of man's discoveries, releasing him from nature's enslavement, and placing the keys of life in his hands.)

I a.s.sume that you have followed my argument, and are prepared to consider seriously whether it may be possible to establish love in marriage as the s.e.x inst.i.tution of civilized society. If you really wish to bring such an inst.i.tution into existence, the first thing you have to do is to accomplish the social revolution; that is, you must wipe out cla.s.s control of society, and prestige based upon money exploitation.

But that is a vast change, and will take time, and meanwhile we have to live, and wish to live with as little misery as possible. So the practical question becomes this: Suppose that you, as an individual, wish to find as much happiness in love as may now be possible, what counsel have I to offer? If you are young, you wish this advice for yourself; while if you are mature, you wish it for your children. I will put my advice under four heads: First, marriage for love; second, birth control; third, early marriage; fourth, education for marriage.