Most revolutions are explosions: and most explosions blow up a great deal more than was intended. It is obvious, from later history, that the French didn’t really want to blow up the whole monarchic and aristocratic system, in the 1790’s. Yet they did it, and try as they might, they could never really put anything together again. The same with the Russians: they want to blow a gateway in a wall, and they blow the whole house down.
All fights for freedom, that succeed, go too far, and become in turn the infliction of a tyranny. Like Napoleon or a soviet. And like the freedom of women. Perhaps the greatest revolution of modern times is the emancipation of women; and perhaps the deepest fight for two thousand years and more has been the fight for woman’s independence, or freedom, call it what you will. The fight was deeply bitter, and, it seems to me, it is won. It is even going beyond, and becoming a tyranny of woman, of the individual woman in the house, and of the feminine ideas and ideals in the world. Say what we will, the world is swayed by feminine emotion today, and the triumph of the productive and domestic activities of man over all his previous military or adventurous or flaunting activities is a triumph of the woman in the home.
The male is subservient to the female need, and outwardly, man is submissive to the demands of woman.
But inwardly, what has happened? It cannot be denied that there has been a fight. Woman has not won her freedom without fighting for it; and she still fights, fights hard, even when there is no longer any need. For man has fallen. It would be difficult to point to a man in the world today who is not subservient to the great woman-spirit that sways modern mankind. But still not peacefully. Still the sway of a struggle, the sway of conflict.
Woman in the mass has fought her fight politically. But woman the individual has fought her fight with individual man, with father, brother, and particularly with husband. All through the past, except for brief periods of revolt, woman has played a part of submission to man. Perhaps the inevitable nature of man and woman demands such submission. But it must be an instinctive, unconscious submission, made in unconscious faith. At certain periods this blind faith of woman in man seems to weaken, then break. It always happens at the end of some great phase, before another phase sets in. It always seems to start, in man, an overwhelming worship of woman, and a glorification of queens. It always seems to bring a brief spell of glory, and a long spell of misery after. Man yields in glorifying the woman, the glory dies, the fight goes on.
It is not necessarily a sex struggle. The sexes are not by nature pitted against one another in hostility. It only happens so, in certain periods: when man loses his unconscious faith in himself, and woman loses her faith in him, unconsciously and then consciously. It is not biological sex struggle. Not at all. Sex is the great uniter, the great unifier. Only in periods of the collapse of instinctive life- assurance in men does sex become a great weapon and divider.
Man loses his faith in himself, and woman begins to fight him. Cleopatra really fought Antony — that’s why he killed himself. But he had first lost faith in himself, and leaned on love, which is a sure sign of weakness and failure. And when woman once begins to fight her man, she fights and fights, as if for freedom. But it is not even freedom she wants. Freedom is a man’s word: its meaning, to a woman, is really rather trivial. She fights to escape from a man who doesn’t really believe in himself; she fights and fights, and there is no freedom from the fight. Woman is truly less free today than ever she has been since time began, in the womanly sense of freedom. Which means, she has less peace, less of that lovely womanly peace that flows like a river, less of the lovely, flower-like repose of a happy woman, less of the nameless joy in life, purely unconscious, which is the very breath of a woman’s being, than ever she has had since she and man first set eyes on one another.
Today, woman is always tense and strung-up, alert, and bare- armed, not for love but for battle. In her shred of a dress and her little helmet of a hat, her cropped hair and her stark bearing she is a sort of soldier, and look at her as one may, one can see nothing else. It is not her fault. It is her doom. It happens when man loses his primary faith in himself and in his very life.
Now through the ages thousands of ties have been formed between men and women. In the ages of discredit, these ties are felt as bonds, and must be fought loose. It is a great tearing and snapping of sympathies, and of unconscious sympathetic connexions. It is a great rupture of unconscious tenderness and unconscious flow of strength between man and woman. Man and woman are not two separate and complete entities. In spite of all protestation, we must continue to assert it. Man and woman are not even two separate persons: not even two separate consciousnesses, or minds. In spite of vehement cries to the contrary, it is so. Man is connected with woman for ever, in connexions visible and invisible, in a complicated life-flow that can never be analysed. It is not only man and wife: the woman facing me in the train, the girl I buy cigarettes from, all send forth to me a stream, a spray, a vapour of female life that enters my bloood and my soul, and makes me me. And back again, I send the stream of male life which soothes and satisfies and builds up the woman. So it still is, very often, in public contacts. The more general stream of life-flow between men and women is not so much broken and reversed as the private flow. Hence we all tend more and more to live in public. In public men and women are still kind to another, very often.
But in private, the fight goes on. It had started in our great- grandmothers; it was going strong in our grandmothers; and in our mothers it was the dominant factor in life. The women thought it was a fight for righteousness. They thought they were fighting the man to make him “better,” and to make life “better” for the children.
We know now this ethical excuse was only an excuse. We know now that our fathers were fought and beaten by our mothers, not because our mothers really knew what was “better,” but because our fathers had lost their instinctive hold on the life-flow and the life- reality, that therefore the female had to fight them at any cost, blind, and doomed. We saw it going on as tiny children, the battle. We believed the moral excuse. But we lived to be men, and to be fought in turn. And now we know there is no excuse, moral or immoral. It is just phenomenal. And our mothers, who asserted such a belief in “goodness,” were tired of that self-same goodness even before their death.
No, the fight was, and is, for itself, and it is pitiless — except in spasms and pauses. A woman does not fight a man for his love- though she may say so a thousand times over. She fights him because she knows, instinctively, he cannot love. He has lost his peculiar belief in himself, his instinctive faith in his own life-flow, and so he cannot love. He cannot. The more he protests, the more he asserts, the more he kneels, the more he worships, the less he loves. A woman who is worshipped, or even adored, knows perfectly well, in her instinctive depths, that she is not loved, that she is being swindled. She encourages the swindle, oh enormously, it flatters her vanity. But in the end comes Nemesis and the Furies, pursuing the unfortunate pair. Love between man and woman is neither worship nor adoration, but something much deeper, much less showy and gaudy, part of the very breath, and as ordinary, if we may say so, as breathing. Almost as necessary. In fact, love between man and woman is really just a kind of breathing.
No woman ever got a man’s love by fighting for it: at least, by fighting him. No man ever loved a woman until she left off fighting him. And when will she leave off fighting him? When he has, apparently, submitted to her (for the submission is always, at least partly, false and a fraud)? No, then least of all. When a man has submitted to a woman, she usually fights him worse than ever, more ruthlessly. Why doesn’t she leave him? Often she does. But what then? She merely takes up with another man in order to resume the fight. The need to fight with man is upon her, inexorable.
Why can’t she live alone? She can’t. Sometimes she can join with other women, and keep up the fight in a group. Sometimes she must live alone, for no man will come forward to fight with her. Yet, sooner or later, the need for contact with a man comes over a woman again. It is imperative. If she is rich, she hires a dancing partner, a gigolo, and humiliates him to the last dregs. The fight is not ended. When the great Hector is dead, it is not enough. He must be trailed naked and defiled; tied by the heels to the tail of a contemptuous chariot.
When is the fight over? Ah when Modern life seems to give no answer. Perhaps when a man finds his strength and his rooted belief in himself again. Perhaps when the man has died, and been painfully born again with a different breath, a different courage, and a different kind of care, or carelessness. But most men can’t and daren’t die in their old, fearful selves. They cling to their women in desperation, and come to hate them with cold and merciless hate, the hate of a child that is persistently ill-treated. Then when the hate dies, the man escapes into the final state of egoism, when he has no true feelings any more, and cannot be made to suffer.
That is where the young are now. The fight is more or less fizzling out, because both parties have become hollow. There is a perfect cynicism. The young men know that most of the “benevolence” and “motherly love” of their adoring mothers was simply egoism again, and an extension of self, and a love of having absolute power over another creature. Oh, these women who secretly lust to have absolute power over their own children — for their own good! Do they think the children are deceived? Not for a moment! You can read in the eyes of the small modern child: “My mother is trying to bully me with every breath she draws, but though I am only six, I can really resist her.” It is the fight, the fight. It has degenerated into the mere fight to impose the will over some other creature, mostly now, mother over her children. She fails again, abjectly. But she goes on.
For the great fight with the man has come almost to an end. Why? Is it because man has found a new strength, has died the death in his old body and been born with a new strength and a new sureness? Alas, apparently not so at all. Man has dodged, sidetracked. Tortured and cynical and unbelieving, he has let all his feelings go out of him, and remains a shell of a man, very nice, very pleasant, in fact the best of modern men. Because nothing really moves him except one thing, a threat against his own safety. He is terrified of not feeling “safe.” So he keeps his woman there between him and the world of dangerous feelings and demands.
But he feels nothing. It is the great counterfeit liberation, this counterfeit of Nirvana and the peace that passeth all understanding. It is a sort of Nirvana, and a sort of peace: in sheer nullity. At first, the woman cannot realize it. She rages, she goes mad. Woman after woman you can see smashing herself against the figure of a man who has achieved the state of false peace, false strength, false power: the egoist. The egoist, he who has no more spontaneous feelings, and can be made to suffer humanly no more. He who derives all his life henceforth at second-hand, and is animated by self-will and some sort of secret ambition to impose himself, either on the world or another individual. See a man or a woman trying to impose herself, himself, and you have an egoist in natural action. But the true pose of the modern egoist is that of perfect suaveness and kindness and humility: oh, always delicately humble!
When a man achieves this triumph of egoism: and many men have achieved it today, practically all the successful ones, certainly all the charming ones, and all the “artistic” ones: then the woman concerned is apt to go really a little mad. She gets no more responses. The fight has suddenly given out. She throws herself against a man, and he is not there, only the sort of glassy image of him receives her shocks and feels nothing. She becomes wild, outrageous. The explanation of the impossible behaviour of some women in their thirties lies here. Suddenly nothing comes back at them in the fight, and they go crazy, demented, as if they were on the brink of a fearful abyss. Which they are.
And then they either go to pieces, or else, with one of those sudden turns typical of women, they suddenly realize. And then, almost instantly, their whole behaviour changes. It is over. The fight is finished. The man has side-tracked. He becomes, in a sense, negligible, though the basic animosity is only rarefied, made more subtle. And so you have the smart young woman in her twenties. She no longer fights her man — or men. She leaves him to his devices, and as far as possible invents her own. She may have a child to bully. But as a rule she pushes the child away as far as she can. No, she is now quite alone. If the man has no real feelings, she has none either. No matter how she feels about her husband, unless she is in a state of nervous rage she calls him angel of light, and winged messenger, and loveliest man, and my beautiful pet boy. She flips it all over him, like eau de cologne. And he takes it quite for granted, and suggests the next amusement. And their life is “one round of pleasure,” to use the old banality: until the nerves collapse. Everything is counterfeit: counterfeit complexion, counterfeit jewels, counterfeit elegance, counterfeit charm, counterfeit endearment, counterfeit passion, counterfeit culture, counterfeit love of Blake, or of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, or Picasso, or the latest film-star. Counterfeit sorrows and counterfeit delights, counterfeit woes and moans, counterfeit ecstasies, and, under all, a hard, hard realization that we live by money, and money alone: and a terrible lurking fear of nervous collapse, collapse.
These are, of course, the extreme cases of the modern young. They are those who have got way beyond tragedy or real seriousness, that old-fashioned stuff. They are — they don’t know where they are. And they don’t care. But they are at the far end of the great fight between men and women.
Judging them as a result, the fight hardly seems to have been worth it. But we are looking on them still as fighters. Perhaps there is something else, positive, as a result.
In their own way, many of these young ones who have gone through everything and reached a stage of emptiness and disillusion unparalleled since the decadent Romans of Ravenna, in the fifth century, they are now, in very fear and forlornness, beginning to put out feelers towards some other way of trust. They begin to realize that if they are not careful, they will have missed life altogether. Missed the bus! They, the smart young who are so swift at hopping onto a thing, to have missed life itself, not to have hopped onto it! Missed the bus! to use London slang. Let the great chance slip by, while they were fooling round! The young are just beginning uneasily to realize that this may be the case. They are just beginning uneasily to realize that all that “life” which they lead, rushing around and being so smart, perhaps isn’t life after all, and they are missing the real thing.
What then? What is the real thing? Ah, there’s the rub. There are millions of ways of living, and it’s all life. But what is the real thing in life? What is it that makes you feel right, makes life really feel good?
It is the great question. And the answers are old answers. But every generation must frame the answer in its own way. What makes life good to me is the sense that, even if I am sick and ill, I am alive, alive to the depths of my soul, and in touch somewhere in touch with the vivid life of the cosmos. Somehow my life draws strength from the depths of the universe, from the depths among the stars, from the great “world.” Out of the great world comes my strength and my reassurance. One could say “God,” but the word “God” is somehow tainted. But there is a flame or a Life Everlasting wreathing through the cosmos for ever and giving us our renewal, once we can get in touch with it.
It is when men lose their contact with this eternal life-flame, and become merely personal, things in themselves, instead of things kindled in the flame, that the fight between man and woman begins. It cannot be avoided; any more than nightfall or rain. The more conventional and correct a woman may be, the more outwardly devastating she is. Once she feels the loss of the greater control and the greater sustenance, she becomes emotionally destructive, she can no more help it than she can help being a woman, when the great connexion is lost.
And then there is nothing for men to do but to turn back to life itself. Turn back to the life that flows invisibly in the cosmos, and will flow for ever, sustaining and renewing all living things. It is not a question of sins or morality, of being good or being bad. It is a question of renewal, of being renewed, vivified, made new and vividly alive and aware, instead of being exhausted and stale, as men are today. How to be renewed, reborn, revivified? That is the question men must ask themselves, and women too.
And the answer will be difficult. Some trick with glands or secretions, or raw food, or drugs won’t do it. Neither will some wonderful revelation or message. It is not a question of knowing something, but of doing something. It is a question of getting into contact again with the living centre of the cosmos. And how are we to do it?