(From an Unpublished Letter, well known to Theosophists.)
ONE need not belong to the Theosophical Society
to be forcibly struck with the correctness of the above remarks. The accepted
creeds of the civilized nations have lost their restraining influence
on almost every class of society; nor have they per had any other restraint
save that of physical fear: the dread of theocratic thumb-screws, and
hell-tortures. The noble love of virtue, for virtue's own sake, of which
some ancient Pagan nations were such prominent exemplars has never blossomed
in the Christian heart at large, nor have any of the numerous post-christian
philosophies answered the needs of humanity, except in isolated instances.
Hence, the moral condition of the civilized portions of mankind has never
been worse than it is now--not even, we believe, during the period
of Roman decadence. Indeed, if our greatest masters in human nature and
the best writers of Europe, such acute psychologists--true vivisectors
of moral man--as Count Tolstoi in Russia, Zola in France, and as Thackery
and Dickens in England before them, have not exaggerated facts--and against
such optimistic view we have the records of the criminal and divorce courts
in addition to Mrs. Grundy's private sessions "with closed doors"--then
the inner rottenness of our Western morality surpasses anything the old
Pagans have ever been accused of. Search carefully, search far and wide
throughout the ancient classics, and even in the writings of the Church
Fathers breathing such hatred to Pagans--and every vice and crime fathered
upon the latter will find its modern imitator in the archives of the European
tribunals. Yea, "gentle reader," we Europeans have servilely
imitated every iniquity of the Pagan world, while stubbornly refusing
to accept and follow any one of its grand virtues.
Withal, we moderns have undeniably surpassed the ancients in one thing--namely,
in the art of whitewashing our moral sepulchres; of strewing with fresh
and blooming roses the outside walls of our dwellings, to hide the better
the contents thereof, the dead men's bones and all uncleanness, and making
them, "indeed, appear beautiful without." What matters it that
the "cup and platter" of our heart remain unclean if they "outwardly
appear righteous unto men"? To achieve this object, we have become
past-masters in the art of blowing trumpets before us, that we "may
have glory of men." The fact, in truth, that we deceive thereby,
neither neighbor nor kinsman, is a matter of small concern to our present
generations of hypocrites, who live and breathe on mere appearances, caring
only for outward propriety and prestige. These will moralize to their
neighbors, but have not themselves even the moral courage of that cynical
but frank preacher who kept saying to his congregation: "Do as I
bid you, but do not do as I do."
_______________
Cant, cant, and always cant; in politics and religion, in Society, commerce,
and even literature. A tree is known by its fruits; an Age has to be judged
by its most prominent authors. The intrinsic moral value of every particular
period of history has generally to be inferred from what its best and
most observant writers had to say of the habits, customs, and ethics of
their contemporaries and the classes of Society they have observed or
been living in. And what now do these writers say of our Age, and how
are they themselves treated?
Zola's works are finally exiled in their English translations; and though
we have not much to say against the ostracism to which his Nana and La Terre have been subjected, his last--La Bête Humaine--might
have been read in English with some profit. With "Jack the Ripper"
in the near past, and the hypnotic rage in the present, this fine psychological
study of the modern male neurotic and "hysteric," might have
done good work by way of suggestion. It appears, however, that prudish
England is determined to ignore the truth and will never allow a diagnosis
of the true state of its diseased morals to be made--not by a foreign
writer at all events. First, then, have departed Zola's works, forcibly
exiled. At this many applauded, as such fictions, though vividly pointing
out some of the most hidden ulcers in social life, were told really too
cynically and too indecently to do much good. But now comes the turn of
Count Lev Tolstoi. His last work, if not yet exiled from the bookstalls,
is being rabidly denounced by the English and American press. In the words
of "Kate Field's Washington" why? Does "The Kreutzer Sonata"
defy Christianity? No. Does it advocate lax morals? No. Does it make the
reader in love with that "intelligent beast" Pozdnisheff? On
the contrary. . . . Why then is the Kreutzer Sonata so abused?
The answer comes: "because Tolstoi has told the truth," not
as averred "very brutally," but very frankly, and" about
a very brutal condition of things" certainly; and we, of the19th
century, have always preferred to keep our social skeletons securely locked
in our closets and hidden far away from sight. We dare not deny the terribly
realistic truths vomited upon the immorality of the day and modern society
of Pozdnisheff; but--we may call the creator of Pozdnisheff names. Did
he not indeed dare to present a mirror to modern Society in which it sees
its own ugly face? Withal, he offers no possible cure for our social sores.
Hence, with eyes lifted heavenward and foaming mouths, his critics maintain
that, all its characteristic realism notwithstanding, the "Kreutzer
Sonata is a prurient book, like to effect more harm than good, portraying
vividly the great immorality of life, and offering no possible remedy
for it" (Vanity Fair). Worse still. "It is simply repulsive. It is daring beyond measure and without excuse; . .
. the work of a mind . . . not only morbid, but . . . far gone in disease
through unwholesome reflection" (New York Herald).
_______________
Thus the author of "Anna Karenina" and of the "Death of
Ivan Ilyitch," the greatest psychologist of this century, stands
accused of ignoring "human nature" by one critic, of
being "the most conspicuous case out of Bedlam," and by another (Scot's Observer) called "the ex-great artist."
"He tilts," we are told, "against the strongest human instincts"
because forsooth, the author--an orthodox Russian born--tells us that
far better no marriage at all than such a desecration of what his church
regards as one of the holy Sacraments. But in the opinion of the Protestant Vanity Fair, Tolstoi is "an extremist," because "with
all its evils, the present marriage system, taken even as the vile
thing for which he gives it us (italics are ours) is a surely less
evil than the monasticism--with its effects--which he preaches."
This shows the ideas of the reviewer on morality!
Tolstoi, however, "preaches" nothing of the sort; nor does
his Pozdnisheff say so, though the critics misunderstand him from A to
Z, as they do also the wise statement that "not that which goeth
into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth"
or a vile man's heart and imagination. It is not "monasticism"
but the law of continence as taught by Jesus (and Occultism) in
its esoteric meaning--which most Christians are unable to perceive--that
he preaches. Nothing can be more moral or more conducive to human happiness
and perfectibility than the application of this law. It is one ordained
by Nature herself. Animals follow it instinctively, as do also the savage
tribes. Once pregnant, to the last day of the nursing of her babe, i.e.,
for eighteen or twenty months, the savage squaw is sacred to
her husband; the civilised and semi-civilised man alone breaking this
beneficent law Therefore speaking of the immorality of marriage
relations as at present practised, and of unions performed on commercial
bases, or, what is worse, on mere sensual love,
Pozdnisheff elaborates the idea by uttering the greatest and the holiest
truths, namely, that:"
For morality to exist between men and women in their daily life, they
must make perfect chastity their law.1 In progressing towards this end, man subdues himself. When he has
arrived at the last degree of subjection we shall have moral marriages.
But if a man as in our Society advances only towards physical love,
even though he surrounds it with deception and with the shallow formality
of marriage, he obtains nothing but licensed vice.
A good proof that it is not "monasticism" and utter celibacy which are preached, but only continence, is found on
page 84 where the fellow-traveller of Pozdnisheff is made to remark that
the result of the theory of the latter would be "that a man would
have to keep away from his wife except once every year or two." Then
again there is this sentence:--
"I did not at that time understand that the words of the Gospel
as to looking upon a woman with the eyes of desire did not refer only
to the wives of others, but especially and above all to one's own wife."
"Monastics" have no wives, nor do they get married if they
would remain chaste on the physical plane. Tolstoi, however, seems to
have answered in anticipation of British criticism and objections on these
lines, by making the hero of his "grimy and revolting book" (Scot's Observer) say:--
"Think what a perversity of ideas there must be, when the happiest,
the freest condition of the human being, that of (mental) chastity,
is looked upon as something miserable and ridiculous. The highest ideal,
the most perfect condition to be attained by woman, that of a pure being,
a vestal, a virgin, provokes, in our society, fear and laughter."
Tolstoi might have added--and when moral continence and chastity, mistaken
for "monasticism," are pronounced far more evil than "the
marriage system taken even as the vile thing for which he (Tolstoi)
gives it us." Has the virtuous critic of Vanity Fair or the Scot's Observer never met with a woman who, although the mother
of a numerous family, had withal remained all her life mentally and morally
a pure virgin, or with a vestal (in vulgar talk, a spinster) who although physically undefiled, yet surpassed in mental, unnatural
depravity the lowest of the fallen women? If he has not--we have.
We maintain that to call "Kreutzer Sonata" pointless, and
"a vain book," is to miss most egregiously the noblest as well
as the most important points in it. It is nothing less than wilful blindness,
or what is still worse--that moral cowardice which will sanction every
growing immorality rather than allow its mention, let alone its discussion,
in public. It is on such fruitful soil that our moral leprosy thrives
and prospers instead of being checked by timely palliatives. It is blindness
to one of her greatest social evils of this kind that led France to issue
her unrighteous law, prohibiting the so-called "search of paternity."
And is it not again the ferocious selfishness of the male, in which species
legislators are of course included, which is responsible for the many
iniquitous laws with which the country of old disgraced itself? e.g., the right of every brute of a husband to sell his wife in a market-place
with a rope around her neck; the right of every beggar-husband over his
rich wife's fortune, rights now happily abrogated. But does not law protect
man to this day, granting him means for legal impunity in almost all his
dealings with woman?
Has it never occurred to any grave judge or critic either--any more than
to Pozdnisheff--"that immorality does not consist in physical
acts alone but on the contrary, in liberating one's self from all moral
obligations, which such acts impose"? (Kreutzer Sonata, p. 32.)
And as a direct result of such legal "liberation from any
moral obligations," we have the present marriage system in every
civilized nation, viz., men "steeped in corruption" seeking
"at the same time for a virgin whose purity might be worthy"
of them (p. 39); men, out of a thousand of whom "hardly one could
be found who has not been married before at least a dozen times"
(p. 41)!
_______________
Aye, gentlemen of the press, and humble slaves to public opinion, too
many terrible, vital truths, to be sure, are uttered by Pozdnisheff to
make the "Kreutzer Sonata" ever palatable to you. The male portion
of mankind--book reviewers as others--does not like to have a too faithful
mirror presented to it. It does not like to see itself as it is, but
only as it would like to make itself appear. Had the book been
directed against your slave and creature--woman, Tolstoi's popularity
would have, no doubt, increased proportionately. But for almost the first
time in literature, a work shows male kind collectively in all
the artificial ugliness of the final fruits of civilization, which make
every vicious man believe himself, like Pozdnisheff, "a thoroughly
moral man." And it points out as plainly that female dissimulation,
worldliness and vice, are but the handiwork of generations of men, whose
brutal sensuality and selfishness have led woman to seek reprisals. Hear
the fine and truthful description of most Society men:--
"Women know well enough that the most noble, the most poetic love
is inspired, not by moral qualities, but by physical intimacy. . . .
Ask an experienced coquette . . . which she would prefer, to be convicted
in the presence of the man she wishes to subjugate, of falsehood, perversity,
and cruelty, or to appear before him in a dress ill-made. . . . She
would choose the first alternative. She knows very well that we only
lie when we speak of our lofty sentiments; that what we are seeking
is the woman herself, and that for that we are ready to forgive all
her ignominies, while we would not forgive her a costume badly cut.
. . . Hence those abominable jerseys, those artificial protrusions behind,
those naked arms, shoulders and bosoms."
Create no demand and there will be no supply. But such demand being established
by men, it….
"Explains this extraordinary phenomenon: that on the one hand
woman is reduced to the lowest degree of humiliation, while on the other
she reigns above everything. . . . 'Ah, you wish us to be merely objects
of pleasure? Very well, by that very means we will bend you beneath
our yoke,' say the women" who "like absolute queens, keep
as prisoners of war and at hard labor nine-tenths of the human race;
and all because they have been humiliated, because they have been deprived
of the rights enjoyed by man. They avenge themselves on our voluptuousness,
they catch us in their nets" . . . Why? Because" the great
majority look upon the journey to the church as a necessary condition
for the possession of a certain woman. So you may say what you will,
we live in such an abyss of falsehood, that unless some event comes
down upon our head . . . we cannot wake up to the truth" . . .
The most terrible accusation, however, is an implied parallel between
two classes of women. Pozdnisheff denies that the ladies in good society
live with any other aims than those of fallen women, and reasons in this
wise:
"If human beings differ from one another by their internal life,
that ought to show itself externally; and externally, also, they will
be different. Now compare women of the most unhappy, the most despised
class, with women of the highest society; you see the same dresses,
the same manners, the same perfumes, the same passion for jewelry, for
brilliant and costly objects; the same amusements, the same dances,
music, and songs. The former attract by all possible means; the latter
do the same. There is no difference, none whatever."
And would you know why? It is an old truism, a fact pointed out by Ouida,
as by twenty other novelists. Because the husbands of the "ladies
in good Society"--we speak only of the fashionable majority, of course--would
most likely gradually desert their legitimate wives were these to offer
them too strong a contrast with the demi-mondaines whom they all
adore. For certain men who for long years have constantly enjoyed the
intoxicating atmosphere of certain places of amusement, the late suppers
in cabinets particuliers in the company of enamelled females
artificial from top to foot, the correct demeanor of a lady, presiding
over their dinner table with her cheeks paintless, her hair, complexion
and eyes as nature made them--becomes very soon a bore. A legitimate
wife who imitates in dress, and mimicks the desinvolture of her
husband's mistress has perhaps been driven at the beginning to effect
such a change out of sheer despair, as the only means of preserving some
of her husband's affection, once she is unable to have it undivided. Here,
again, the abnormal fact of enamelled, straw-haired, painted and almost
undressed wives and girls in good Society, are the handiwork of men--of
fathers, husbands, brothers. Had the animal demands of the latter
never created that class which Baudelaire calls so poetically les fleurs
du mal, and who end by destroying every household and family whose
male members have once fallen a victim to their hypnotism--no wife and
mother, still less a daughter or a sister, would have ever thought of
emulating the modern hetaira. But now they have. The act of despair
of the first wife abandoned for a demi-mondaine has borne its fruit.
Other wives have followed suit, then the transformation has gradually
become a fashion, a necessity. How true then these remarks:
"The absence of women's rights does not consist in being deprived
of the right of voting, or of administering law; but in the fact that
with regard to matters of affection she is not the equal of man, that she has not the right to choose instead
of being chosen. That would be quite abnormal, you think. Then let
men also be without their rights. . . . At bottom her slavery lies in
the fact of her being regarded as a source of enjoyment. You excite
her, you give her all kinds of rights equal to those of man:2 but she is still looked upon as an instrument of pleasure, and she is
brought up in that character from her childhood. . . . She is always
the slave, humiliated and corrupted, and man remains still her pleasure-seeking
master. Yes, to abolish slavery, it is first of all necessary that public
opinion should admit that it is shameful to profit by the labor of one's
neighbor; and to emancipate woman it is necessary that public opinion
should admit that it is shameful to regard her as an instrument of pleasure."
Such is man, who is shewn in all the hideous nakedness of his
selfish nature, almost beneath the "animals" which "would
seem to know that their descendants continue the species, and they accordingly
follow a certain law." But "man alone does not, and will
not know. . . . The lord of creation--man; who, in the name of his love,
kills one half of the human race! Of woman, who ought to behis helpmate
in the movement of Humanity towards freedom, he makes, for the sake of
his pleasures, not a helpmate but an enemy." . . . .
And now it is made abundantly clear, why the author of the Kreutzer
Sonata has suddenly become in the eyes of all men--"the
most conspicuous case out of Bedlam." Count Tolstoi who alone has
dared to speak the truth in proclaiming the whole relation of the sexes
to each other as at present, "a gross and vile abomination,"
and who thus interferes with "man's pleasures"--must, of course,
expect to be proclaimed a madman. He preaches "Christian virtue,"
and what men want now is vice, such as the old Romans themselves
have never dreamed of. "Stone him to death"--gentlemen of the
press. What you would like, no doubt, to see practically elaborated and
preached from every house-top, is such articles as Mr. Grant Allen's "The
Girl of the Future." Fortunately, for that author's admirers, the
editor of the Universal Review has laid for once aside "that
exquisite tact and that rare refinement of feeling which distinguishes
him from all his fellows" (if we have to believe the editor of the Scot's Observer). Otherwise he would have never published such
an uncalled-for insult to every woman, whether wife or mother. Having
done with Tolstoi's diagnosis we may now turn to Grant Allen's palliative.
_______________
But even Mr. Quilter hastens while publishing this scientific effusion,
to avoid identifying himself with the opinions expressed in it. So much
more the pity, that it has seen the light of publicity at all. Such as
it is, however, it is an essay on the "problem of Paternity and Maternity"
rather than that of sex; a highly philanthropic paper which substitutes
"the vastly more important and essential point of view of the soundness
and efficiency of the children to be begotten" to that "of the
personal convenience of two adults involved" in the question of marriage.
To call this problem of the age the "Sex Problem" is one error;
the "Marriage Problem," another, though "most people call
it so with illogical glibness." Therefore to avoid the latter Mr.
Grant Allen . . . . "would call it rather the Child Problem, or if
we want to be very Greek, out of respect to Girton, the Problem of Pædopoetics."
After this fling at Girton, he has one at Lord Campbell's Act, prohibiting
certain too décolleté questions from being discussed
in public: after which the author has a third one, at women in general.
In fact his opinion of the weaker sex is far worse than that of Pozdnisheff
in the Kreutzer Sonata, as he denies them even the average intellect
of man. For what he wants is "the opinions of men who have thought
much upon these subjects and the opinions of women (if any) who have
thought a little." The author's chief concern being "the
moulding of the future British nationality," and his chief quarrel
with the higher education of women, ' the broken-down product of the Oxford
local examination system, he has a fourth and fifth fling, as vicious
as the rest, at "Mr. Pod snap and Mrs. Grundy" for their pruderie, and at the "university" ladies. What, then, he queries:.
. .
. . ."Rather than run the risk of suffusing for one moment the
sensitive cheek of the young person, we must allow the process of peopling
the world hap-hazard with hereditary idiots, hereditary drunkards, hereditary
consumptives, hereditary madmen, hereditary weaklings, hereditary paupers
to go on unchecked, in its existing casual and uncriticized fashion,
for ever and ever. Let cancer beget cancer, and crime beget crime: but
never for one moment suggest to the pure mind of our blushing English
maiden that she has any duty at all to perform in life in her capacity
as a woman, save that of gratifying a romantic and sentimental attachment
to the first black moustache or the first Vandyke beard she may happen
to fall in with.". . .
Such weakness for one "black moustache" will never do.
The author has a "nobler," a "higher" calling for
the "blushing English maiden," to wit, to keep herself in readiness
to become a happy and proud mother for the good of the State, by several "black" and fair moustaches, in sequence, as
we shall see, if only handsome and healthy. Thence his quarrel with the
"higher education" which debilitates woman. For--
. . . "the question is, will our existing system provide us with
mothers capable of producing sound and healthy children, in mind and
body, or will it not? If it doesn't, then inevitably and infallibly
it will go to the wall. Not all the Mona Cairds and Olive Schreiners
that ever lisped Greek can fight against the force of natural selection.
Survival of the fittest is stronger than Miss Buss, and Miss Pipe, and
Miss Helen Gladstone, and the staff of the Girls' Public Day School
Company, Limited, all put together. The race that lets its women fail
in their maternal functions will sink to the nethermost abyss of limbo,
though all its girls rejoice in logarithms, smoke Russian cigarettes,
and act Æschylean tragedies in most æsthetic and archaic
chitons. The race that keeps up the efficiency of its nursing mothers
will win in the long run, though none of its girls can read a line of
Lucian or boast anything better than equally-developed and well-balanced
minds and bodies.
_______________
"Having done with his entrée en matière, he
shows us forthwith whither he is driving, though he pretends to be able
to say very little in that article; only "to approach by a lateral
avenue one of the minor outworks of the fortress to be stormed."
What this "fortress" is, we will now see and by the "lateral"
small "avenue" judge of the magnitude of the whole. Mr. G. Allen,
having diagnosed that which for him is the greatest evil of the day, now
answers his own question. This is what he proposes for producing sound
children out of sound--because unmarried--mothers, whom he urges
to select for every new babe a fresh and well-chosen father. It is, you
see--
. . . "what Mr. Galton aptly terms 'eugenics'--that is to say
a systematic endeavor towards the betterment of the race by the deliberate
selection of the best possible sires, and their union for reproductive
purposes with the best possible mothers." The other "leaves
the breeding of the human race entirely to chance, and it results too
often in the perpetuation of disease, insanity, hysteria, folly, and
every other conceivable form of weakness or vice in mind and body. Indeed,
to see how foolish is our practice in the reproduction of the human
race, we have only to contrast it with the method we pursue in the reproduction
of those other animals, whose purity of blood, strength, and excellence
has become of importance to us."
"We have a fine sire of its kind, be it stallion, bull, or bloodhound,
and we wish to perpetuate his best and most useful qualities in appropriate
offspring. What do we do with him? Do we tie him up for life with a
single dam, and rest content with such foals, or calves, or puppies
as chance may send us? Not a bit of it. We are not so silly. We try
him freely all round a whole large field of choice, and endeavor by
crossing his own good qualities with the good qualities of various accredited
mares or heifers to produce strains of diverse and well-mixed value,
some of which will prove in the end more important than others. In this
way we get the advantage of different mixtures of blood, and don't throw
away all the fine characteristics of our sire upon a single set of characteristics
in a single dam. which ma or ma not prove in the end the best and fullest
complement of his particular nature."
Is the learned theorist talking here of men and women, or discussing
the brute creation, or are the human and animal kinds so inseparably linked
in his scientific imagination as to disable him from drawing a line of
demarcation between the two? It would seem so, from the cool and easy
way in which he mixes up the animal sires and dams with men and women,
places them on the same level, and suggests "different mixtures of
blood." We abandon him willingly his "sires," as, in anticipation
of this scientific offer, men have already made animals of themselves
ever since the dawn of civilization. They have even succeeded, while tying
up their "dam" to a single "sire" under the threat
of law and social ostracism, to secure for themselves full privileges
from that law and Mrs. Grundy and have as great a choice of "dams"
for each single "sire," as their means would permit them. But
we protest against the same offer to women to become nolens volens "accredited mares and heifers." Nor are we prepared to say
that even our modern loose morals would publicly approve of or grant Mr.
Allen the "freedom" he longs for, "for such variety of
experimentation," without which, he says it is quite "impossible
to turn out the best results in the end for humanity." Animal humanity would be more correct, though he explains that it is "not
merely a question of prize sheep and fat oxen, but a question of begetting
the highest, finest, purest, strongest, sanest, healthiest, handsomest
and morally noblest citizens." We wonder the author
does not add to these laudatory epithets, two more, viz., "the most
respectful sons," and men "proudest of their virtuous mothers."
The latter are not qualified by Mr. Grant Allen, because, perchance, he
was anticipated on this point by the "Lord God" of Hosea (i.
2) who specializes the class from which the prophet is commanded to take
a wife unto himself.
_______________
In a magazine whose editor has just been upholding the sacredness of
marriage before the face of the author of the Kreutzer Sonata, by
preceding the "Confession" of Count Tolstoi with an eulogy on
Miss Tennant, "the Bride of the Season"--the insertion of "The
Girl of the Future" is a direct slap in the face of that marriage.
Moreover, Mr. G. Allen's idea is not new. It is as old as Plato, and as
modern as Auguste Comte and the "Oneida Community" in the United
States of America. And, as neither the Greek philosopher nor the French
Positivist have approached the author in his unblushing and cynical naturalism--neither
in the Vth Book of the Republic, nor "the Woman of the Future"
in the Catechism of the Religion of Positivism--we come to the
following conclusion. As the name of Comte's "Woman of the Future"
is the prototype of Mr. G. Allen's "Girl of the Future," so
the daily rites of the "mystic coupling" performed in the Oneida, must have been copied by our author and published, with only an additional
peppering of still crasser materialism and naturalism. Plato suggests
no more than a method for improving the human race by the careful elimination
of unhealthy and deformed children, and by coupling the better
specimens of both sexes; he contents himself with the "fine characteristics"
of a "single sire" and "a single dam," and would have
turned away in horror at the idea of "the advantage of different
mixtures of blood." On the other hand the high-priest of Positivism,
suggesting that the woman of the future "should cease to be the female of the man," and "submitting to artificial fecundation,"
thus be come "the Virgin Mother without a husband," preaches
only a kind of insane mysticism. Not so with Mr. Grant Allen. His noble
ideal for woman is to make of her a regular brood-mare. He prompts
her to follow out
. . . "the divine impulse of the moment, which is the voice
of Nature within us, prompting us there and then (but not for a lifetime)
to union with a predestined and appropriate complement of our being," and adds: "If there is anything sacred and divine in man surely it is the internal impetus which tells him at once, among a thousand
of his kind, that this particular woman, and no other, is now and here
the one best fitted to become with him the parent of a suitable off
spring. If sexual selection among us (men only, if you please),
is more discriminative, more specialized, more capricious, and more
dainty than in any other species, is not that the very mark of our higher
development, and does it not suggest to us that Nature herself, on these
special occasions, is choosing for us anatomically the help most meet
for us in our reproductive functions?'
But why "divine"? And if so, why only in man when the
stallion, the hog and the dog all share this "divine impulse"
with him? In the author's view "such an occasional variation modifying
and heightening the general moral standard" is ennobling;
in our theosophical opinion, such casual union on momentary impulse is essentially bestial. It is no longer love but lust, leaving
out of account every higher feeling and quality. By the way, how would
Mr. Grant Allen like such a "divine impulse" in his mother,
wife, sister or daughter? Finally, his arguments about "sexual selection"
being "more capricious and dainty in man than in any other species
of animal," are pitiable. Instead of proving this "selection"
"sacred and divine" he simply shows that civilized man has
descended lower than any brute after all these long generations of
unbridled immorality. The next thing we may be told is, that epicureanism
and gluttony are "divine impulses," and we shall be invited
to see in Messalina the highest exemplar of a virtuous Roman matron.
This new "Catechism of Sexual Ethics"--shall we call it.?--ends
with the following eloquent appeal to the "Girl of the Future"
to become the brood mares of cultured society stallions:--
"This ideal of motherhood, I believe, under such conditions would
soon crystallize into a religious duty. The free and educated woman,
herself most often sound, sane, and handsome, would feel it incumbent
upon her, if she brought forth children for the State at all, to bring
them forth in her own image, and by union with a sympathetic and appropriate
father. Instead of yielding up her freedom irrevocably to any one
man, she would jealously guard it as in trust for the community, and
would use her maternity as a precious gift to be sparingly employed
for public purposes, though always in accordance with instinctive
promptings, to the best advantage of the future offspring. . . . If
conscious of possessing valuable and desirable maternal qualities, she
would employ them to the best advantage for the State and for her own
offspring, by freely commingling them in various directions with
the noblest paternal qualities of the men who most attracted her higher
nature. And surely a woman who had reached such an elevated ideal
of the duties of sex as that would feel she was acting far more
right in becoming the mother of a child by this splendid athlete, by
that profound thinker, by that nobly-moulded Adonis, by that high-souled
poet, than in tying herself down for life to this rich old dotard, to
that feeble young lord, to this gouty invalid, to that wretched drunkard,
to become the mother of a long family of scrofulous idiots."
_______________
And now gentlemen of the Press, severe critics of Tolstoi's "immoral" Sonata, stern moralists who shudder at Zola's "filthy
realism," what say you to this production of one of your own national
prophets, who has evidently found honor in his own country? Such naturalistic
articles as "The Girls of the Future," published in the hugest
and reddest Review on the globe, are, methinks, more dangerous
for the public morals than all the Tolstoi-Zola fictions put together.
In it we see the outcome of materialistic science, which looking on man
only as a more highly developed animal, treats therefore its female portion
on its own animalistic principles. Steeped over the ears in dense matter
and in the full conviction that mankind, along with its first cousins
the monkeys, is directly descended of an ape father, and a baboon mother
of a now extinct species, Mr. Grant Allen must, of course, fail to see
the fallacy of his own reasoning. E.g., if it is an "honor
for any woman to have been loved by Shelley. . . . and to have brought
into the world a son by a Newton," and another "by a Goethe,"
why should not the young ladies who resort to Regent Street at the small
hours of night and who are soaked through and through with such "honors,"
why should not they, we ask, receive public recognition and a vote of
thanks from the Nation? City squares ought to be adorned with their statues,
and Phryne set up hereafter as an illustrious example to Hypatia.
No more cutting insult could be offered to the decent women and respectable
girls of England. We wonder how the ladies interested in the Social problems
of the day will like Mr. Grant Allen's pallative. H.P.B.
Lucifer, July,
1890
1 All the italics throughout the article are
ours.
back to text
2 This, only in "semi" civilised
Russia, if you please. In England she has not even the privilege of voting
yet.
back to text |
