The World Set Free

Section 7

For a time Karenin said very little, and Kahn, the popular poet, talked of passionate love.  He said that passionate, personal love had been the abiding desire of humanity since ever humanity had begun, and now only was it becoming a possible experience.  It had been a dream that generation after generation had pursued, that always men had lost on the verge of attainment.  To most of those who had sought it obstinately it had brought tragedy.  Now, lifted above sordid distresses, men and women might hope for realised and triumphant love.  This age was the Dawn of Love….

Karenin remained downcast and thoughtful while Kahn said these things.  Against that continued silence Kahn’s voice presently seemed to beat and fail.  He had begun by addressing Karenin, but presently he was including Edith Haydon and Rachel Borken in his appeal.  Rachel listened silently; Edith watched Karenin and very deliberately avoided Kahn’s eyes.

‘I know,’ said Karenin at last, ’that many people are saying this sort of thing.  I know that there is a vast release of love-making in the world.  This great wave of decoration and elaboration that has gone about the world, this Efflorescence, has of course laid hold of that.  I know that when you say that the world is set free, you interpret that to mean that the world is set free for love-making.  Down there,—­under the clouds, the lovers foregather.  I know your songs, Kahn, your half-mystical songs, in which you represent this old hard world dissolving into a luminous haze of love—­sexual love….  I don’t think you are right or true in that.  You are a young, imaginative man, and you see life—­ardently—­with the eyes of youth.  But the power that has brought man into these high places under this blue-veiled blackness of the sky and which beckons us on towards the immense and awful future of our race, is riper and deeper and greater than any such emotions….

’All through my life—­it has been a necessary part of my work—­I have had to think of this release of sexual love and the riddles that perfect freedom and almost limitless power will put to the soul of our race.  I can see now, all over the world, a beautiful ecstasy of waste; “Let us sing and rejoice and be lovely and wonderful.” . . .  The orgy is only beginning, Kahn….  It was inevitable—­but it is not the end of mankind….

’Think what we are.  It is but a yesterday in the endlessness of time that life was a dreaming thing, dreaming so deeply that it forgot itself as it dreamt, its lives, its individual instincts, its moments, were born and wondered and played and desired and hungered and grew weary and died.  Incalculable successions of vision, visions of sunlit jungle, river wilderness, wild forest, eager desire, beating hearts, soaring wings and creeping terror flamed hotly and then were as though they had never been.  Life was an uneasiness across which lights played and vanished.  And then we came, man came, and opened eyes that were a question and hands that were a demand and began a mind and memory that dies not when men die, but lives and increases for ever, an over-mind, a dominating will, a question and an aspiration that reaches to the stars….  Hunger and fear and this that you make so much of, this sex, are but the elementals of life out of which we have arisen.  All these elementals, I grant you, have to be provided for, dealt with, satisfied, but all these things have to be left behind.’

‘But Love,’ said Kahn.

’I speak of sexual love and the love of intimate persons.  And that is what you mean, Kahn.’

Karenin shook his head.  ’You cannot stay at the roots and climb the tree,’ he said….

‘No,’ he said after a pause, ’this sexual excitement, this love story, is just a part of growing up and we grow out of it.  So far literature and art and sentiment and all our emotional forms have been almost altogether adolescent, plays and stories, delights and hopes, they have all turned on that marvellous discovery of the love interest, but life lengthens out now and the mind of adult humanity detaches itself.  Poets who used to die at thirty live now to eighty-five.  You, too, Kahn!  There are endless years yet for you—­and all full of learning….  We carry an excessive burden of sex and sexual tradition still, and we have to free ourselves from it.  We do free ourselves from it.  We have learnt in a thousand different ways to hold back death, and this sex, which in the old barbaric days was just sufficient to balance our dying, is now like a hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges through human life.  You poets, you young people want to turn it to delight.  Turn it to delight.  That may be one way out.  In a little while, if you have any brains worth thinking about, you will be satisfied, and then you will come up here to the greater things.  The old religions and their new offsets want still, I see, to suppress all these things.  Let them suppress.  If they can suppress.  In their own people.  Either road will bring you here at last to the eternal search for knowledge and the great adventure of power.’

‘But incidentally,’ said Rachel Borken; ’incidentally you have half of humanity, you have womankind, very much specialised for—­for this love and reproduction that is so much less needed than it was.’

‘Both sexes are specialised for love and reproduction,’ said Karenin.

‘But the women carry the heavier burden.’

‘Not in their imaginations,’ said Edwards.

‘And surely,’ said Kahn, ’when you speak of love as a phase—­isn’t it a necessary phase?  Quite apart from reproduction the love of the sexes is necessary.  Isn’t it love, sexual love, which has released the imagination?  Without that stir, without that impulse to go out from ourselves, to be reckless of ourselves and wonderful, would our lives be anything more than the contentment of the stalled ox?’

‘The key that opens the door,’ said Karenin, ’is not the goal of the journey.’

‘But women!’ cried Rachel.  ’Here we are!  What is our future—­as women?  Is it only that we have unlocked the doors of the imagination for you men?  Let us speak of this question now.  It is a thing constantly in my thoughts, Karenin.  What do you think of us?  You who must have thought so much of these perplexities.’

Karenin seemed to weigh his words.  He spoke very deliberately.  ’I do not care a rap about your future—­as women.  I do not care a rap about the future of men—­as males.  I want to destroy these peculiar futures.  I care for your future as intelligences, as parts of and contribution to the universal mind of the race.  Humanity is not only naturally over-specialised in these matters, but all its institutions, its customs, everything, exaggerate, intensify this difference.  I want to unspecialise women.  No new idea.  Plato wanted exactly that.  I do not want to go on as we go now, emphasising this natural difference; I do not deny it, but I want to reduce it and overcome it.’

‘And—­we remain women,’ said Rachel Borken.  ’Need you remain thinking of yourselves as women?’

‘It is forced upon us,’ said Edith Haydon.

’I do not think a woman becomes less of a woman because she dresses and works like a man,’ said Edwards.  ’You women here, I mean you scientific women, wear white clothing like the men, twist up your hair in the simplest fashion, go about your work as though there was only one sex in the world.  You are just as much women, even if you are not so feminine, as the fine ladies down below there in the plains who dress for excitement and display, whose only thoughts are of lovers, who exaggerate every difference….  Indeed we love you more.’

‘But we go about our work,’ said Edith Haydon.

‘So does it matter?’ asked Rachel.

’If you go about your work and if the men go about their work then for Heaven’s sake be as much woman as you wish,’ said Karenin.  ’When I ask you to unspecialise, I am thinking not of the abolition of sex, but the abolition of the irksome, restricting, obstructive obsession with sex.  It may be true that sex made society, that the first society was the sex-cemented family, the first state a confederacy of blood relations, the first laws sexual taboos.  Until a few years ago morality meant proper sexual behaviour.  Up to within a few years of us the chief interest and motive of an ordinary man was to keep and rule a woman and her children and the chief concern of a woman was to get a man to do that.  That was the drama, that was life.  And the jealousy of these demands was the master motive in the world.  You said, Kahn, a little while ago that sexual love was the key that let one out from the solitude of self, but I tell you that so far it has only done so in order to lock us all up again in a solitude of two….  All that may have been necessary but it is necessary no longer.  All that has changed and changes still very swiftly.  Your future, Rachel, as women, is a diminishing future.’

‘Karenin?’ asked Rachel, ‘do you mean that women are to become men?’

‘Men and women have to become human beings.’

’You would abolish women?  But, Karenin, listen!  There is more than sex in this.  Apart from sex we are different from you.  We take up life differently.  Forget we are—­females, Karenin, and still we are a different sort of human being with a different use.  In some things we are amazingly secondary.  Here am I in this place because of my trick of management, and Edith is here because of her patient, subtle hands.  That does not alter the fact that nearly the whole body of science is man made; that does not alter the fact that men do so predominatingly make history, that you could nearly write a complete history of the world without mentioning a woman’s name.  And on the other hand we have a gift of devotion, of inspiration, a distinctive power for truly loving beautiful things, a care for life and a peculiar keen close eye for behaviour.  You know men are blind beside us in these last matters.  You know they are restless—­and fitful.  We have a steadfastness.  We may never draw the broad outlines nor discover the new paths, but in the future isn’t there a confirming and sustaining and supplying role for us?  As important, perhaps, as yours?  Equally important.  We hold the world up, Karenin, though you may have raised it.’

’You know very well, Rachel, that I believe as you believe.  I am not thinking of the abolition of woman.  But I do want to abolish—­the heroine, the sexual heroine.  I want to abolish the woman whose support is jealousy and whose gift possession.  I want to abolish the woman who can be won as a prize or locked up as a delicious treasure.  And away down there the heroine flares like a divinity.’

‘In America,’ said Edwards, ’men are fighting duels over the praises of women and holding tournaments before Queens of Beauty.’

‘I saw a beautiful girl in Lahore,’ said Kahn, ’she sat under a golden canopy like a goddess, and three fine men, armed and dressed like the ancient paintings, sat on steps below her to show their devotion.  And they wanted only her permission to fight for her.’

‘That is the men’s doing,’ said Edith Haydon.

‘I said,’ cried Edwards, ’that man’s imagination was more specialised for sex than the whole being of woman.  What woman would do a thing like that?  Women do but submit to it or take advantage of it.’

‘There is no evil between men and women that is not a common evil,’ said Karenin.  ’It is you poets, Kahn, with your love songs which turn the sweet fellowship of comrades into this woman-centred excitement.  But there is something in women, in many women, which responds to these provocations; they succumb to a peculiarly self-cultivating egotism.  They become the subjects of their own artistry.  They develop and elaborate themselves as scarcely any man would ever do.  They look for golden canopies.  And even when they seem to react against that, they may do it still.  I have been reading in the old papers of the movements to emancipate women that were going on before the discovery of atomic force.  These things which began with a desire to escape from the limitations and servitude of sex, ended in an inflamed assertion of sex, and women more heroines than ever.  Helen of Holloway was at last as big a nuisance in her way as Helen of Troy, and so long as you think of yourselves as women’—­he held out a finger at Rachel and smiled gently—­’instead of thinking of yourselves as intelligent beings, you will be in danger of—­Helenism.  To think of yourselves as women is to think of yourselves in relation to men.  You can’t escape that consequence.  You have to learn to think of yourselves—­for our sakes and your own sakes—­in relation to the sun and stars.  You have to cease to be our adventure, Rachel, and come with us upon our adventures. ...’  He waved his hand towards the dark sky above the mountain crests.