And then, the whole polarity shifts over. Man still remains the doer and thinker. But he is so only in the service of emotional and procreative woman. His highest moment is now the emotional moment when he gives himself up to the woman, when he forms the perfect answer for her great emotional and procreative asking. All his thinking, all his activity in the world only contributes to this great moment, when he is fulfilled in the emotional pa.s.sion of the woman, the birth of rebirth, as Whitman calls it. In his consummation in the emotional pa.s.sion of a woman, man is reborn, which is quite true.
And there is the point at which we all now stick. Life, thought, and activity, all are devoted truly to the great end of Woman, wife and mother.
Man has now entered on to his negative mode. Now, his consummation is in feeling, not in action. Now, his activity is all of the domestic order and all his thought goes to proving that nothing matters except that birth shall continue and woman shall rock in the nest of this globe like a bird who covers her eggs in some tall tree. Man is the fetcher, the carrier, the sacrifice, the crucified, and the reborn of woman.
This being so, the whole tendency of his nature changes. Instead of being a.s.sertive and rather insentient, he becomes wavering and sensitive. He begins to have as many feelings--nay, more than a woman.
His heroism is all in altruistic endurance. He worships pity and tenderness and weakness, even in himself. In short, he takes on very largely the original role of woman. Woman meanwhile becomes the fearless, inwardly relentless, determined positive party. She grips the responsibility. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.
Nay, she makes man discover that cradles should not be rocked, in order that her hands may be left free. She is now a queen of the earth, and inwardly a fearsome tyrant. She keeps pity and tenderness emblazoned on her banners. But G.o.d help the man whom she pities.
Ultimately she tears him to bits.
Therefore we see the reversal of the old poles. Man becomes the emotional party, woman the positive and active. Man begins to show strong signs of the peculiarly strong pa.s.sive s.e.x desire, the desire to be taken, which is considered characteristic of woman. Man begins to have all the feelings of woman--or all the feelings which he attributed to woman. He becomes more feminine than woman ever was, and worships his own femininity, calling it the highest. In short, he begins to exhibit all signs of s.e.xual complexity. He begins to imagine he really is half female. And certainly woman seems very male. So the hermaphrodite fallacy revives again.
But it is all a fallacy. Man, in the midst of all his effeminacy, is still male and nothing but male. And woman, though she harangue in Parliament or patrol the streets with a helmet on her head, is still completely female. They are only playing each other"s roles, because the poles have swung into reversion. The compa.s.s is reversed. But that doesn"t mean that the north pole has become the south pole, or that each is a bit of both.
Of course a woman should stick to her own natural emotional positivity. But then man must stick to his own positivity of _being_, of action, _disinterested, non-domestic, male_ action, which is not devoted to the increase of the female. Once man vacates his camp of sincere, pa.s.sionate positivity in disinterested being, his supreme responsibility to fulfill his own profoundest impulses, with reference to none but G.o.d or his own soul, not taking woman into count at all, in this primary responsibility to his own deepest soul; once man vacates this strong citadel of his own genuine, not spurious, divinity; then in comes woman, picks up the scepter and begins to conduct a rag-time band.
Man remains man, however he may put on wistfulness and tenderness like petticoats, and sensibilities like pearl ornaments. Your sensitive little big-eyed boy, so much more gentle and loving than his harder sister, is male for all that, believe me. Perhaps evilly male, so mothers may learn to their cost: and wives still more.
Of course there should be a great balance between the s.e.xes. Man, in the daytime, must follow his own soul"s greatest impulse, and give himself to life-work and risk himself to death. It is not woman who claims the highest in man. It is a man"s own religious soul that drives him on beyond woman, to his supreme activity. For his highest, man is responsible to G.o.d alone. He may not pause to remember that he has a life to lose, or a wife and children to leave. He must carry forward the banner of life, though seven worlds perish, with all the wives and mothers and children in them. Hence Jesus, "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" Every man that lives has to say it again to his wife or mother, once he has any work or mission in hand, that comes from his soul.
But again, no man is a blooming marvel for twenty-four hours a day.
Jesus or Napoleon or any other of them ought to have been man enough to be able to come home at tea-time and put his slippers on and sit under the spell of his wife. For there you are, the woman has her world, her positivity: the world of love, of emotion, of sympathy. And it behooves every man in his hour to take off his shoes and relax and give himself up to his woman and her world. Not to give up his purpose. But to give up himself for a time to her who is his mate.--And so it is one detests the clock-work Kant, and the pet.i.t-bourgeois Napoleon divorcing his Josephine for a Hapsburg--or even Jesus, with his "Woman, what have I to do with thee?"--He might have added "just now."--They were all failures.
CHAPTER IX
THE BIRTH OF s.e.x
The last chapter was a chapter of semi-digression. We now return to the straight course. Is the straightness none too evident? Ah well, it"s a matter of relativity. A child is born with one s.e.x only, and remains always single in his s.e.x. There is no intermingling, only a great change of roles is possible. But man in the female role is still male.
s.e.x--that is to say, maleness and femaleness--is present from the moment of birth, and in every act or deed of every child. But s.e.x in the real sense of dynamic s.e.xual relationship, this does not exist in a child, and cannot exist until p.u.b.erty and after. True, children have a sort of s.e.x consciousness. Little boys and little girls may even commit indecencies together. And still it is nothing vital. It is a sort of shadow activity, a sort of dream-activity. It has no very profound effect.
But still, boys and girls should be kept apart as much as possible, that they may have some sort of respect and fear for the gulf that lies between them in nature, and for the great strangeness which each has to offer the other, finally. We are all wrong when we say there is no vital difference between the s.e.xes. There is every difference.
Every bit, every cell in a boy is male, every cell is female in a woman, and must remain so. Women can never feel or know as men do. And in the reverse men can never feel and know, dynamically, as women do.
Man, acting in the pa.s.sive or feminine polarity, is still man, and he doesn"t have one single unmanly feeling. And women, when they speak and write, utter not one single word that men have not taught them.
Men learn their feelings from women, women learn their mental consciousness from men. And so it will ever be. Meanwhile, women live forever by feeling, and men live forever from an inherent sense of _purpose_. Feeling is an end in itself. This is unspeakable truth to a woman, and never true for one minute to a man. When man, in the Epicurean spirit, embraces feeling, he makes himself a martyr to it--like Maupa.s.sant or Oscar Wilde. Woman will _never_ understand the depth of the spirit of purpose in man, his deeper spirit. And man will never understand the sacredness of feeling to woman. Each will play at the other"s game, but they will remain apart.
The whole mode, the whole everything is really different in man and woman. Therefore we should keep boys and girls apart, that they are pure and virgin in themselves. On mixing with one another, in becoming familiar, in being "pals," they lose their own male and female integrity. And they lose the treasure of the future, the vital s.e.x polarity, the dynamic magic of life. For the magic and the dynamism rests on _otherness_.
For actual s.e.x is a vital polarity. And a polarity which rouses into action, as we know, at p.u.b.erty.
And how? As we know, a child lives from the great field of dynamic consciousness established between the four poles of the dynamic psyche, two great poles of sympathy, two great poles of will. The solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion, great nerve-centers below the diaphragm, act as the dynamic origin of all consciousness in man, and are immediately polarized by the other two nerve-centers, the cardiac plexus and the thoracic ganglion above the diaphragm. At these four poles the whole flow, both within the individual and from without him, of dynamic consciousness and dynamic creative relationship is centered. These four first poles const.i.tute the first field of dynamic consciousness for the first twelve or fourteen years of the life of every child.
And then a change takes place. It takes place slowly, gradually and inevitably, utterly beyond our provision or control. The living soul is unfolding itself in another great metamorphosis.
What happens, in the biological psyche, is that deeper centers of consciousness and function come awake. Deep in the lower body the great sympathetic center, the hypogastric plexus has been acting all the time in a kind of dream-automatism, balanced by its corresponding voluntary center, the sacral ganglion. At the age of twelve these two centers begin slowly to rumble awake, with a deep reverberant force that changes the whole const.i.tution of the life of the individual.
And as these two centers, the sympathetic center of the deeper abdomen, and the voluntary center of the loins, gradually sparkle into wakeful, _conscious_ activity, their corresponding poles are roused in the upper body. In the region of the throat and neck, the so-called cervical plexuses and the cervical ganglia dawn into activity.
We have now another field of dawning dynamic consciousness, that will extend far beyond the first. And now various things happen to us.
First of all actual s.e.x establishes its strange and troublesome presence within us. This is the ma.s.sive wakening of the lower body.
And then, in the upper body, the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of a woman begin to develop, her throat changes its form. And in the man, the voice breaks, the beard begins to grow round the lips and on to the throat. There are the obvious physiological changes resulting from the gradual bursting into free activity of the hypogastric plexus and the sacral ganglion, in the lower body, and of the cervical plexuses and ganglia of the neck, in the upper body.
Why the growth of hair should start at the lower and upper sympathetic regions we cannot say. Perhaps for protection. Perhaps to preserve these powerful yet supersensitive nodes from the inclemency of changes in temperature, which might cause a derangement. Perhaps for the sake of protective warning, as hair warns when it is touched. Perhaps for a screen against various dynamic vibrations, and as a receiver of other suited dynamic vibrations. It may be that even the hair of the head acts as a sensitive vibration-medium for conveying currents of physical and vitalistic activity to and from the brain. And perhaps from the centers of intense vital surcharge hair springs as a sort of annunciation or declaration, like a crest of life-a.s.sertion. Perhaps all these things, and perhaps others.
But with the bursting awake of the four new poles of dynamic consciousness and being, change takes place in everything, the features now begin to take individual form, the limbs develop out of the soft round matrix of child-form, the body resolves itself into distinctions. A strange creative change in being has taken place. The child before p.u.b.erty is quite another thing from the child after p.u.b.erty. Strange indeed is this new birth, this rising from the sea of childhood into a new being. It is a resurrection which we fear.
And now, a new world, a new heaven and a new earth. Now new relationships are formed, the old ones retire from their prominence.
Now mother and father inevitably give way before masters and mistresses, brothers and sisters yield to friends. This is the period of _Schwarmerei_, of young adoration and of real initial friendships.
A child before p.u.b.erty has playmates. After p.u.b.erty he has friends and enemies.
A whole new field of pa.s.sional relationship. And the old bonds relaxing, the old love retreating. The father and mother bonds now relax, though they never break. The family love wanes, though it never dies.
It is the hour of the stranger. Let the stranger now enter the soul.
And it is the first hour of true individuality, the first hour of genuine, responsible solitariness. A child knows the abyss of forlornness. But an adolescent alone knows the strange pain of growing into his own isolation of individuality.
All this change is an agony and a bliss. It is a cataclysm and a new world. It is our most serious hour, perhaps. And yet we cannot be responsible for it.
Now s.e.x comes into active being. Until p.u.b.erty, s.e.x is submerged, nascent, incipient only. After p.u.b.erty, it is a tremendous factor.
What is s.e.x, really? We can never say, satisfactorily. But we know so much: we know that it is a dynamic polarity between human beings, and a circuit of force _always_ flowing. The psychoa.n.a.lyst is right so far. There can be no vivid relation between two adult individuals which does not consist in a dynamic polarized flow of vitalistic force or magnetism or electricity, call it what you will, between these two people. Yet is this dynamic flow inevitably s.e.xual in nature?
This is the moot point for psychoa.n.a.lysis. But let us look at s.e.x, in its obvious manifestation. The _s.e.xual_ relation between man and woman consummates in the act of coition. Now what is the act of coition? We know its functional purpose of procreation. But, after all our experience and all our poetry and novels we know that the procreative purpose of s.e.x is, to the individual man and woman, just a side-show.
To the individual, the act of coition is a great psychic experience, a vital experience of tremendous importance. On this vital individual experience the life and very being of the individual largely depends.
But what is the experience? Untellable. Only, we know something. We know that in the act of coition the _blood_ of the individual man, acutely surcharged with intense vital electricity--we know no word, so say "electricity," by a.n.a.logy--rises to a culmination, in a tremendous magnetic urge towards the magnetic blood of the female. The whole of the living blood in the two individuals forms a field of intense, polarized magnetic attraction. So, the two poles must be brought into contact. In the act of coition, the two seas of blood in the two individuals, rocking and surging towards contact, as near as possible, clash into a oneness. A great flash of interchange occurs, like an electric spark when two currents meet or like lightning out of the densely surcharged clouds. There is a lightning flash which pa.s.ses through the blood of both individuals, there is a thunder of sensation which rolls in diminishing crashes down the nerves of each--and then the tension pa.s.ses.
The two individuals are separate again. But are they as they were before? Is the air the same after a thunder-storm as before? No. The air is as it were new, fresh, tingling with newness. So is the blood of man and woman after successful coition. After a false coition, like prost.i.tution, there is not newness but a certain disintegration.
But after coition, the actual chemical const.i.tution of the blood is so changed, that usually sleep intervenes, to allow the time for chemical, biological readjustment through the whole system.
So, the blood is changed and renewed, refreshed, almost recreated, like the atmosphere after thunder. Out of the newness of the living blood pa.s.s the new strange waves which beat upon the great dynamic centers of the nerves: primarily upon the hypogastric plexus and the sacral ganglion. From these centers rise new impulses, new vision, new being, rising like Aphrodite from the foam of the new tide of blood.
And so individual life goes on.
Perhaps, then, we will allow ourselves to say what, in psychic individual reality, is the act of coition. It is the bringing together of the surcharged electric blood of the male with the polarized electric blood of the female, with the result of a tremendous flashing interchange, which alters the const.i.tution of the blood, and the very quality of _being_, in both.
And this, surely, is s.e.x. But is this the whole of s.e.x? That is the question.
After coition, we say the blood is renewed. We say that from the new, finely sparkling blood new thrills pa.s.s into the great affective centers of the lower body, new thrills of feeling, of impulse, of energy.--And what about these new thrills?
Now, a new story. The new thrills are pa.s.sed on to the great upper centers of the dynamic body. The individual polarity now changes, within the individual system. The upper centers, cardiac plexus and cervical plexuses, thoracic ganglion and cervical ganglia now a.s.sume positivity. These, the upper polarized centers, have now the positive role to play, the solar and the hypogastric plexuses, the lumbar and the sacral ganglia, these have the submissive, negative role for the time being.
And what then? What now, that the upper centers are finely active in positivity? Now it is a different story. Now there is new vision in the eyes, new hearing in the ears, new voice in the throat and speech on the lips. Now the new song rises, the brain tingles to new thought, the heart craves for new activity.