第59章

The politician, the clergyman, or the lawyer does not improve his social or public standing by violent addictions in these directions; to drink his companions under the table, to be known to have the largest number of illicit sex relations, to be recognised as an habitual visitant of the gambling saloon, does not, even in the case of a crowned head, much enhance his reputation, and with the ordinary man may ultimately prove a bar to all success.If the New Woman's conception of love between the sexes is one more largely psychic and intellectual than crudely and purely physical, and wholly of an affection between companions; the New Man's conception as expressed in the most typical literature and art, produced by typically modern males, gives voice with a force no woman has surpassed to the same new ideal.If to the typical modern woman the lifelong companionship of a Tom Jones or Squire Western would be more intolerable than death or the most complete celibacy, not less would the most typical of modern men shrink from the prospect of a lifelong fetterment to the companionship of an always fainting, weeping, and terrified Emilia or a Sophia of a bygone epoch.

If anywhere on earth exists the perfect ideal of that which the modern woman desires to be--of a labouring and virile womanhood, free, strong, fearless and tender--it will probably be found imaged in the heart of the New Man; engendered there by his own heighest needs and aspirations; and nowhere would the most highly developed modern male find an image of that which forms his ideal of the most fully developed manhood, than in the ideal of man which haunts the heart of the New Woman.

Those have strangely overlooked some of the most important phenomena of our modern world, who see in the Woman's Movement of our day any emotional movement of the female against the male, of the woman away from the man.

We have called the Woman's Movement of our age an endeavour on the part of women among modern civilised races to find new fields of labour as the old slip from them, as an attempt to escape from parasitism and an inactive dependence upon sex function alone; but, viewed from another side, the Woman's Movement might not less justly be called a part of a great movement of the sexes towards each other, a movement towards common occupations, common interests, common ideals, and towards an emotional sympathy between the sexes more deeply founded and more indestructible than any the world has yet seen.

But it may be suggested, and the perception of a certain profound truth underlies this suggestion; How is it, if there be this close reciprocity between the lines along which the advanced and typical modern males and females are developing, that there does exist in our modern societies, and often among the very classes forming our typically advanced sections, so much of pain, unrest, and sexual disco-ordination at the present day?

The reply to this pertinent suggestion is, that the disco-ordination, struggle, and consequent suffering which undoubtedly do exist when we regard the world of sexual relationships and ideals in our modern societies, do not arise in any way from a disco-ordination between the sexes as such, but are a part of the general upheaval, of the conflict between old ideals and new; a struggle which is going on in every branch the human life in our modern societies, and in which the determining element is not sex, but the point of evolution which the race or the individual has reached.

It cannot be too often repeated, even at the risk of the most wearisome reiteration, that our societies are societies in a state of rapid evolution and change.The continually changing material conditions of life, with their reaction on the intellectual, emotional, and moral aspects of human affairs, render our societies the most complex and probably the most mobile and unsettled which the world has ever seen.As the result of this rapidity of change and complexity, there must continually exist a large amount of disco-ordination, and consequently, of suffering.

In a stationary society where generation has succeeded generation for hundreds, or it may be for thousands, of years, with little or no change in the material conditions of life, the desires, institutions, and moral principles of men, their religious, political, domestic, and sexual institutions, have gradually shaped themselves in accordance with these conditions; and a certain harmony, and homogeneity, and tranquillity, pervades the society.

In societies in that rapid state of change in which our modern societies find themselves, where not merely each decade, but each year, and almost day brings new forces and conditions to bear on life, not only is the amount of suffering and social rupture, which all rapid, excessive, and sudden change entails on an organism, inevitable; but, the new conditions, acting at different angles of intensity on the different individual members composing the society, according to their positions and varying intelligence, are producing a society of such marvellous complexity and dissimilarity in the different individual parts, that the intensest rupture and disco-ordination between individuals is inevitable; and sexual ideals and relationships must share in the universal condition.