VI

BEAUTY AND MOTHERHOOD

“Americanism” is the word sometimes used by scientific men to imply the terror of motherhood that is coming upon women. The old days when Nelson said the two most beautiful things in the world were a ship in full sail and a woman with child, are passed. Pain and the loss of beauty mean something hauntingly horrible—something of a nightmare to the modern highly strung, nervous woman. In America the question is becoming one of national importance: as a matter of fact some women are beginning to refuse motherhood, both there and in other parts of the world. I do not see anything alarming in this. To me it means that women will specialize in the future. When the unnatural economic reasons for marriage have been removed, the natural desires of women will be able to assert themselves. For centuries they have lied and schemed and flattered men in order to wheedle a living out of them, and it will take some time for the weaker sex to learn that it may really tell the truth; tolearn, indeed, that it is necessary for the good of the race that it should tell the truth. When this is done it will be perceived that women are divided into two distinct classes—those that love men better than children, and those that love children better than men. This is natural enough. In ordinary life we can see some people prefer to associate with their inferiors, and some with their superiors. At present the comparatively free life led by men make them far better company, and therefore superior as a sex to women. They do not talk as well as clever women, but their views are wide, and as a rule they know something of the general facts of life. They are merrier, too, and I have often thought, “It is not so much that men must work and women must weep, but that men may laugh and women must look shocked.”

But, as I was saying, some people prefer to look up, and others prefer to look down on their companions. Some people, to put it more pleasantly, like to care for and watch over others, while others want to be cared for. So it comes about that some women do not really love children. They may feel such a passion for a man that they long to be the mother of his child, but that is a state of unusual exultation, which in cold blood is repented later. On the other hand, the born mothers—the women who really long forchildren, to whom it is a terrible deprivation to live without children—are undoubtedly the people who may best be entrusted with the future of the race.

I do not think that we shall ever get mankind to carry out the eugenic ideal of careful breeding, but I do think we might come to a time when the natural instinct of a woman for the fit father of her child will be a very important factor in the arrangements made for the existence and benefit of future generations.

We have such a lumber of useless old ethical codes to get rid of, and such innumerable practical suggestions for race betterment, that we hardly know where to begin. In theEugenic Reviewfor October, 1909, there is an excellent paper by Mr. Havelock Ellis, which explains a newly discovered and harmless operation which can be performed without making the slightest difference to an individual’s happiness. This operation would prevent him or her from ever becoming a parent. It is hoped that it may some day be used in cases where the heredity is hopelessly bad. It would save a great deal of public expense in cases where the dangerous person would otherwise have to be kept under constant supervision. The great benefit of the discovery is that it has none of the unfortunate effects which often follow from thepractice of more Eastern methods of sterilizing the unfit. Contact with radium has also been found to lead to temporary sterility. But although stamping out the worst class of disease and imbecility in one generation would be a tremendous benefit, it is not the only remedy proposed. The encouragement and training of fit men and women—I mean the education in the laws of sexual health—would do a great deal to save the next generations from many ills that are brought upon it by the sheer ignorance of its parents. Here, again, we have to fight the silly conspiracy of silence which leaves schoolboys and schoolgirls to struggle through the early temptations of life without a word of warning from responsible people who have studied the subject of sex.

There is no doubt that the world at present is full of motherly women who have no chance of becoming mothers, and of unmotherly women who have children that they do not want, or more children than they want. It would be a great advance if these arrangements could be readjusted by some slight change of public opinion, guided by the obvious facts of heredity. For instance, it is a fact that some women are very fit to be mothers, and are unattractive as wives. For others, attractive to men as they often are, it is a sin to become mothers. A tuberculous woman is apt to have a much larger family than anormally healthy woman, and that tendency ought to be modified by surgical aid. Even these few suggestions acted upon would help to make the world less full of pain and sorrow.

But we are full of prejudices against these improvements. The old marriage laws, the old ideas of right and wrong remain; religious prejudice lasts far longer than religion; and the world moves on, and everyone hears of improvements that might be made quite easily. But nothing is done because of a public opinion which everyone supposes to exist, but is really a bugbear invented by the Press on the strength of a few letters from the sort of people who write letters of protest to the public libraries. A hundred letters impress an editor, because he forgets the millions of people who do not write letters, but pay all the same.

One of the most serious facts which is alleged with regard to the “Americanism” I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, is that the nervous sensitiveness from which the women of the United States suffer is caused by their education being too purely intellectual. Now this is probably true. I remember one of the cleverest men I have ever met, the late Professor York Powell, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, who was an encyclopædia of information, and could assimilate the contents of a book in a phenomenally short time, told me thathe meant to paint up the words “Damn Intellect” over his mantelpiece at Christ Church. Intellect has been said to be the result of man’s struggle with material facts, very useful as far as material facts go, but absurdly misleading when applied to the all-important side of our natures which comes under the consideration of the psychologist. The stuffing of one’s head with a lot of undigested knowledge for purposes of examination is not only useless in after life, but really damaging to the vital apparatus. I was myself educated in the colleges of Miss Dorothea Beale and Miss Buss, and I know it took me quite six years to get out of the shell my education had hardened around me. I don’t suppose I should ever have spread my own wings if the beak of my destiny had not been stronger than my overwhelming education, so that it succeeded in hammering through that shell at last.

In the next chapter I hope to show in more detail how women might be educated to deliberately cultivate their instincts, and use them in conjunction with the practical intellect to increase the power of intuitively understanding the consciousness of groups and crowds of people. Above all, how they may learn by definitely guiding the vegetative consciousness to increase the health and beauty of their children.

VII

THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY

Intellect, then, is only a part of the life-consciousness. Henri Bergson and William James have both agreed that the other parts deserve our respect, and demand the attention of all practical people. They are Instinctive Consciousness and Torpid Consciousness. Bergson, so well known on the Continent, gives inL’Evolution Créatricea brilliant outline of the relations of the intellectual, instinctive, and torpid states. Briefly, he pictures vital consciousness as the centre from which the three diverge in different radiations. The intellect which covers an enormous field and can grapple successfully with the superficial appearances we call facts, finds its present culmination in mankind. The instinct which dawns in the consciousness as vision, and deals only with one or two things, but knows them perfectly through and through to their deepest causes, finds its culmination in insects, especially in the elaborate societies of ants and bees. The torpid state which, without external motion, like deep sleep, is mostcreatively powerful, most enduring, and most in touch with the first beginnings of organic life, finds its culmination in the vegetable kingdom. The psychologists’ idea, then, for the practical future of our race is that it should turn its attention to the cultivation of these two modes of consciousness which have hitherto been lamentably neglected in all schemes of education.

Bergson says that there are many questions the intellect can ask but can never answer, which the instinct could answer, but, unprompted by the intellect, would never ask.

The practical turn psychology has taken lately has a very deep significance for women. For the adolescent girl and the woman with child are the very types of the power of mysterious torpid consciousness which is so little understood by the most learned men. The ancients have believed that a mother’s impressions stamp themselves on the child and determine its type. I mean, for instance, that a woman surrounded by Burne-Jones’s pictures would be likely to have children resembling that type. The whole matter is one of the deepest interest, and one guiding principle stands out from all our uncertainties on the subject, which is, that a woman with child should not use up her vitality in other directions, that she should for the time being live the life of a fruit tree, and nourish herself,and sun herself without care and without intellectual distractions.

It is said that in deep sleep the creations of our imagination are conceived; and that the state of impending motherhood should be one of rest, and the quiet enjoyment of beauty and peace if it is to have a good result.

I am not saying all women should be mothers, nor am I saying that mothers should not have intellectual pleasures, but I do agree that they should not have intellectual tasks, and above all that they should be protected from worry, anxiety, and irritation. If the care of mothers became a national question, I believe the saving in the care of lunatics and unemployables and criminals would be incalculable.

The torpid consciousness is one which women who are to be mothers should respect. I believe it is a state cultivated to a high degree by the Eastern mystics, who have given us glimpses of the psychic powers to which it can give birth. It is intimately connected with a control over the emotional storms which affect most people and govern their conduct. The Eastern sage does not starve his emotional nature, but learns to direct it, while he is in a state of apparent torpor. So I believe the wise mother might, if she gave herself the opportunity, direct the future character of her child in the best sense of the word.

At present the torpid consciousness ishardly understood at all, but the instinctive consciousness has been studied, although it is talked of with a contempt it is far from deserving. I admit that to some extent instinct is the enemy of civilization, but at the same time civilization is the enemy of instinct.

The old matriarchal village community seems to be the ideal state of an instinctive race of people. I do not say it is possible now, but it certainly seems a good way of conducting affairs on a dignified basis without the family unit.

Temperance with an occasional orgy is a prescription ordered for a patient by a modern doctor, and that exactly describes the life of the old matriarchal village. In the first place, it was situated near the equator, and everyone could do without clothes. The village children grew up together under the care of the elder men and women, with no curiosity about the unseen. They worked in the fields and perhaps hunted a little, but they all lived like brothers and sisters. They had a central grove of sacred trees in their village, with a dancing ground; the huts were round the grove, and then the belt of cultivated land was called the “guardian serpent.” Beyond that was the jungle, with paths leading to other villages. In the spring the Saturnalia was celebrated, and the young men left their homes and visited the other villages, scattered in the neighbourhood beyond the jungle-paths, tocelebrate the festival with song, wine, and dance. The orgy lasted a few weeks, during the blossom time, when there was no work required at home. It ended in a good deal of love-making, after which the young men returned to their homes sobered, and ready to work in their own villages for another year. Nine months later, when the weather made it well to remain indoors, the children were born, and were called the children of the sacred grove or the tree, and no one talked of fathers. The men of the tribe cheerfully undertook the education of the children, and maintained them on communal principles. It sounds almost as socially elaborate as a hive, and the whole business appears to have been carried out on purely instinctual lines. Perhaps I ought to add that all can read for themselves about these matriarchal customs in a book calledThe Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, by J. F. Hewitt, and in Tiele’sOutline of the History of Ancient Religions, also in Risley’sTribes and Castes of Bengal. The life was perhaps too austerely virtuous for the majority of mankind, but it had its advantages.

Instinct is an animal faculty cultivated by an outdoor life, which we to a great extent have swamped in our all-pervading intellects. It is a power of the consciousness which appears to act without effort, and to increase its power as we decrease our mental struggles. Veryoften when after fussing over a lost object or forgotten name we cease to trouble ourselves, and employ our clamorous minds in some other direction, the consciousness of the name or place appears like the sky from which the clouds have cleared away. It is in the interplay between intellect and instinct that the practical value of the new school of psychology will be found. Our instincts need to be stimulated by the curiosity of our intellects. We have an extraordinary and inexhaustible power of inventing surprises for our intellect, both in our dreams and in inventive states of meditation. Some people call these things manifestations of the subconsciousness. I prefer to think of them as manifestations of the long-neglected powers of the instinct. We know that many insects who have never met their parents in their lives, yet carry out their destinies as if they had received the most careful personal instruction. The truth about instinct appears to be that it is a race-consciousness—a kind of wireless telegraphy which can be set in motion between sympathetic centres without passing through the mental machinery at all. It almost seems as if our brains, our nervous plexuses, and our glands[1]each had a manifestconsciousness of their own, and it is not until we can set in motion an interplay of the three that we shall gain all we can, either from the intellect, the instinct, or the torpid creative consciousness.

When women come in for their share of control in affairs, there is no doubt we shall make further use of these more feminine aspects of vital consciousness.

[1]As to the study of the functions of the glands, many interesting discoveries have been mentioned in the medical journals during the last few years.

VIII

THE IMAGINATIVE WOMAN

Now women can look at love from a great many points of view. If it were not so, Byron would hardly have been justified when he said:

“Love is from men’s lives a thing apart,’Tis woman’s whole existence.”

“Love is from men’s lives a thing apart,

’Tis woman’s whole existence.”

Women can look upon love as a physical act which enables them to become mothers. They can look upon it as a sanctification or a means of enjoyment. They can look upon it as a subject of scientific curiosity, in which mood they logically compare facts and come to sage conclusions. They can consider their own temperaments and peculiarities, and take into account their personal bias and characters, philosophically. Or they can use their imaginations to alter all the conditions which life has imposed upon them, to transcend all the limitations of incarnation, and, having passed beyond philosophy, science, emotion, and experience, bathe in the love between the fixed stars and comets rushing from the spaces beyond. They cantake dim legends and embroider them with rich details. In a word, the imaginative woman from her childhood has known dreams of such rare beauty that nothing life shows her is good enough. She passes from disappointment to disappointment. She never finds in one place or one person the wonder that description had made her see in her mind’s eye.

Thousands of less imaginative women long for the impossible. They are fed on romantic stories and live in the more or less commonplace imagination of the novelists or playwrights they patronize. Thousands of tired men have this same love of vicarious sensation—anything that lifts them out of the drab of their surroundings into a merry or sentimental atmosphere is a relief.

Life seems hopeless to the middle-aged. Most of them once thought they could put it right in a week if they had a free hand. They try, they fail, they marry and spend the evening of their lives trying to destroy the illusions of their children as quickly as possible, so that they also may “settle down” to hard facts. To excuse himself a thinker will say, “I know the dangers of cultivating the imagination; I know that unless it is nipped in the bud this wild flower of the mind will twine its tendrils round me, cover me with its shadows, intoxicate me with its fragrance, and destroy reason and physical health.” In answer, Iadmit there are dangers, but on the other hand if the possibly evil weed is cultivated by wise gardeners, it may show itself at last as the most splendid flower of the soul. The cultivator of flowers that sterilizes the bud and diverts the life-force into creations of elaborate beauty has found the physical side of the religious mystery called the Coronation of the Virgin. The imaginative power that has reached this point transmutes human nature, whether philosophic, scientific, sensual, or physical, and it is then that the soul may be said to have attained the regenerate state which makes for the unnatural beauty we call perfection of culture.

The imaginative woman may reach the degree of joyous saintly beauty, or she may stop short at the next stage in which she is enough of a philosopher to recognize the great variety of temperaments to be met with among her fellow-creatures, and to greet them all alike with sympathy and interest. She may not reach the philosophic or really sympathetic stage, she may remain in a third stage, where her mind can coldly classify her fellow-creatures with critical discretion, and laugh at them all cynically. Or she may not be able to perceive clearly, but may be carried away perpetually by her own feelings and sensations, in the fourth degree of unawakened ignorance. Lastly, she may abandon the four regions of beautiful image making, sympathy,perception, and sensation, and deliberately devote herself with common-sense prudence to the patient task of getting her daily bread and reproducing her species until she dies of it. On the other hand, she may go mad, she may become silly, she may drown her disgust with life in alcohol or drugs, or she may irritate her feeble dream-power with novelettes. These states of degenerate imaginations are the worst curses of the woman’s sphere as it is at present understood. Good hard work, rewarded by a decent income, varied by motherhood and love, is the best cure for these vapourings.

The men who have a good deal of womanhood in their natures suffer and enjoy through their imaginations in the same way, and it is interesting to observe that a really virile man has no trace of imaginative power in his composition. He cares for nothing but tangible reality. When men of imagination talk to him he has not the smallest conception of what they mean. I think it was Goethe who said that he felt the universe in his arms when he embraced a woman. What I am obliged to call a virile man feels nothing of the kind, he is merely amusing himself like Don Juan, or any cat or dog. However, Don Juan is a rarity.

It is very difficult to classify temperaments without alluding to Weiningen’sSex andCharacter. That book has been followed by other classics on the subject by Forel and Bloch, but I only want to remind my readers that in Weiningen’s book they will find, set out at length, the ingenious theory that virile men and feminine women are the rarest creatures on earth, and that the great majority of us are made up of various proportions of the two sexes. He further suggests that happy unions are those in which the proportions of sex in the two lovers together make up one virile man and one feminine woman. For instance, a man who was one-eighth feminine should marry a woman who was one-eighth masculine.

I am told that Mr. Austen Chamberlain repeatedly made the very careless statement that “men are men, and women are women,” in a speech delivered in 1909. He evidently has not acquainted himself with the elementary science of sex. Is it not time that the books alluded to above should be made generally accessible? Then our younger statesmen, at least, might come to the platform with some less absurd refrain than that obsolete inaccuracy. Let me assure Mr. Chamberlain that German science and research have proved that the contrary statement would be rather more exact.

EXPERIMENTS

We are all speculating about the changes to be brought about in this century from which we women hope so much, and a great many people are making practical experiments. Myself, I am of that tranquil nature which willingly follows the advice of Punch when he says: “Never practise what you preach, to do so is to hold up your opinions to obvious ridicule.”

I must confess to an altogether selfish concern for my own comfort. I dislike the home because it means that one has to live with people who are privileged to behave without politeness in each other’s company. Most of us share the feeling, I think, that we like to be the worst-behaved person present. This can only be achieved satisfactorily to all when one lives by oneself. My own experiments have mostly been in the attempt to modify the solitary life with an exactly pleasant proportion of social life. I was brought up in a large family until I was twenty-three, and I lived the orthodox married life for four years, sothat I have given home and the family as much trial as seemed necessary.

As a hermit with mitigating friends and enemies, and the various societies I have helped to run, my life has been unusually full of varied interests. I have no regrets, because my failures have been some of my most valuable experiences, and my moments of bitterness have been the cause of my greatest contentment.

At the same time, one is horribly afraid that one might induce courage in some other person whose heart is too tender to get through trouble. One is rather apt to dread the grey life of a patient woman without any kind of artistic talent, who makes a muddle of her affairs because she religiously practises instead of preaching.

Some people say that example is better than precept; but in the case of social reform and the need of a real change in public opinion, my experience shows me that precept is no good at all, if one is suspected of inventing it to serve one’s own purposes of self-indulgence. I own I have indulged myself by leading a solitary life as described above, therefore I do not propose to try to destroy the home and family life. Those who are suffering from the home want to do away with it. With philosophic calm I can suggest improvements and ways of escape that would make it bearable,but would not destroy it. As a matter of fact the home is in a very poor way just at present. Public-houses, clubs, restaurants, the servant difficulty are all devastating it. Still, it does not do to say we are glad, so I register the fact with as long a face as I can pull, and trust my readers will recognize the sad truth in the same serious spirit.

But, to return to experiments, let us go back a little in time, and we find that all gay societies, such as that under Louis XIV and XV of France, The Empire and the Second Empire, practised every kind of experiment. Yet one looks upon Rousseau, Mary Wolstonecraft, Shelley, and Godwin as the real pioneers of experiment, because they made a kind of religion of their protests against convention. Of late years it has become the fashion to solemnly register a protest every time one omits to register one’s marriage.

It is partly my stupid objection to public indecency that makes me object to the advertisement of marriage, legal or illegal. One has to clean one’s teeth, some people have to marry, but for the life of me I cannot see the use of talking about either of these necessities. Surely the whole object of modern civilization is to conceal the fact that we are animals. It is true that we have begun to make a public art of eating, but although we permit ourselves to munch in public, we disguise the nature ofour food, and we have sternly suppressed the more ancient freedoms of the dinner-table. We no longer think it polite to go about when we suffer from catarrh, and it is seldom that we encounter unpleasant expectorations, except in the immediate haunts of admittedly hooligan circles.

They say that nowadays it is possible to talk of any subject as long as one does so with sufficient delicacy and avoids the words of the gutter and the club smoking-room. Still, I admit that it is difficult to explain that just as we feel that every other necessary function of nature should be performed without attracting attention to it, so I feel that I would rather not be informed every time the bold experimenters in marriage see fit to take a partner.

When outspokenness is for the public good, when a “hushed-up disease” becomes disastrous simply because it is “hushed up,” then there is some meaning in making a gospel and parade of the truth. But I really think it is time we accepted the convention that men and women seek each other’s society in order to exchange ideas.

Strangely enough it is often the case. A woman has only to talk and listen well, and she will find that the less she desires love the more friendliness she will receive from men. Saint Teresa of Spain was an excellent example of this. I suppose she had more warmlyaffectionate friendships with men, without a shadow of scandal, than any other woman. A perfectly frank woman will generally keep men as her friends, they will not dare to be her lovers unless she deliberately ceases to be frank.

Unfortunately experimenters have to be original in order to be successful. The people for whom I am sorry are those who are led into making experiments which are unnatural to them by the hypnotic power of seductive example.

Save us from our imitators is the cry of all great poets; and the only valuable advice one can give is, if you must experiment be careful that you lead the way and are not seduced by the example of anyone else. If by nature you must follow, it is a sign that you are a gregarious animal, and had better remain with the main body of the herd. The real experimenters are quite ready for solitude, and when they have found fair country and good pasture the rest of the herd will come over in a body with one accord. It is no use perishing with cold on the way to the Pole, unless you have the capacity to find it. Much better stop at home by the fireside.

THE SAVAGE, THE BARBARIAN, THE CIVILIZED

The stately Spaniard, graceful as a tree swaying in its dance with the wind, savage and noble.

The Nihilist Russian, watching in her lair, instinctive and ready to kill. Her hatred of government marking her as the free barbarian.

The Parisian, knowing the correct convention of a funeral or an adultery, civilized and logical to her glove-tips.

Of the three women the two first are simple, but civilization is complex, and it may mean to be cultivated with regard to intellect like the Jesuits, art like the Greeks, morals like the Irish, or religion like the Arab.

In which way will the women of the future develop? Will she strive like the frequenters of thesalonof Madame de Rambouillet to excel in intellect, or like Saint Teresa of Spain as a religious mystic? We have seen both these types, and I have no doubt that we shall see many shining examples of morality, but at the moment I cannot think of any conspicuous woman of whom no one has whispered scandal. For in these days ifpeople do not trip in one direction, it is said it is because they prefer to trip in another; and soon it will be taken as a sign of evil life that one should live in a desert on bread and water. I mention in passing that our late Queen is usually admitted to have been conspicuously moral. In the arts we have seen, and hope to see again, great women novelists and actresses. In history we have an array of splendid uncivilized women immortalized from all time—Medea, Electra, the Roman empresses, Queen Maive of Connaught, the Russian heroines. Whether they excelled most as noble savages or as gloriously barbaric haters of ordered life, I cannot stay to consider.

For I want the women who read this book not to dwell upon the past, but to look forward to the great century that is waiting for their alchemy, to transmute its life by giving it a more intent purpose. Are we going to be like the very badly dressed lady of title, whom we heard the other day imploring us to behave ourselves like other people, just as we dressed like other people, in order not to be conspicuous! Or are we really going to make something out of this brilliant opportunity given us by the “refusal of the vote,” and the quickly spreading passion of enthusiasm which is moving the women of all nations to make a fight against the patriarchal faith of the goat-worshippers.

Mr. Gorst says that the object of life is making (moral) love. I think the object of our life is to make experiments, as gardeners make experiments in floriculture. I quarrel with absorption in the family because family jealousy is a bar to that kind of social intercourse which is the only education worth having, and the only experience which can lead to any result worth having. They say in France, “Love is a play in which the acts last five minutes, and theentr’actesfor any time you like.” If it filled the whole of life it would only mean that life would be as short as that of the ephemeral winged creatures of the insect world. Family love cannot absorb us if we wish to survive. We are complicated, and our possibilities of social and political intercourse are a subject of endless interest and inquiry. Let us then start again on our voyages of discovery, this time with a little more purpose in our method and delight in our hearts.

Women want the vote, it is true, but what they want more, and what they are getting, is strength to hammer through the prisons which have kept them for many centuries packed away conveniently for use on occasion. They are all coming out into the daylight for the first time within our memory, and now the real movement of life begins.

We want to change public opinion aboutdivorce, contagious diseases, and forethought with regard to breeding. We want married women to recognize the various proportions of sexuality in each sex, to make allowance for the passionate, and to admit that we are greatly indebted for our culture to individuals who do not desire to be parents.

In conclusion, all I can say is, “Talk! talk! talk!” We are more moved by one conversation than by many eloquent discourses. After all, what is so permanently delightful as communion of ideas? So once again I say, “Go on talking until the savage, the barbarian, and the civilized women have found out all they can learn from each other. Plenty of men will be glad to help them in their discoveries.”

BOOKS by FLORENCE FARR

BOOKS PUBLISHED by FRANK PALMER

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