the twentieth century. Officially, I know, politically, that
intelligence didn't tell-but it was there. And I question your
hypothesis. I doubt if that discovery could have been delayed.
There is a kind of inevitable logic now in the progress of
research. For a hundred years and more thought and science have
been going their own way regardless of the common events of life.
You see-they have got loose. If there had been no Holsten there
would have been some similar man. If atomic energy had not come
in one year it would have come in another. In decadent Rome the
march of science had scarcely begun… Nineveh, Babylon, Athens,
Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough experiments in
association that made a security, a breathing-space, in which
inquiry was born. Man had to experiment before he found out the
way to begin. But already two hundred years ago he had fairly
begun… The politics and dignities and wars of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries were only the last phoenix blaze of the
former civilisation flaring up about the beginnings of the new.
Which we serve… 'Man lives in the dawn for ever,' said
Karenin. 'Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning. It
begins everlastingly. Each step seems vaster than the last, and
does but gather us together for the nest. This Modern State of
ours, which would have been a Utopian marvel a hundred years ago,
is already the commonplace of life. But as I sit here and dream
of the possibilities in the mind of man that now gather to a head
beneath the shelter of its peace, these great mountains here seem
but little things…'
Section 6
About eleven Karenin had his midday meal, and afterwards he slept
among his artificial furs and pillows for two hours. Then he
awoke and some tea was brought to him, and he attended to a small
difficulty in connection with the Moravian schools in the
Labrador country and in Greenland that Gardener knew would
interest him. He remained alone for a little while after that,
and then the two women came to him again. Afterwards Edwards and
Kahn joined the group, and the talk fell upon love and the place
of women in the renascent world. The cloudbanks of India lay
under a quivering haze, and the blaze of the sun fell full upon
the eastward precipices. Ever and again as they talked, some vast
splinter of rock would crack and come away from these, or a wild
rush of snow and ice and stone, pour down in thunder, hang like a
wet thread into the gulfs below, and cease…
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 emotionalforms 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, Iamthinking 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
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. Iam
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.
Section 8
'These questions are the next questions to which research will
bring us answers,' said Karenin. 'While we sit here and talk
idly and inexactly of what is needed and what may be, there are
hundreds of keen-witted men and women who are working these
things out, dispassionately and certainly, for the love of
knowledge. The next sciences to yield great harvests now will be
psychology and neural physiology. These perplexities of the
situation between man and woman and the trouble with the
obstinacy of egotism, these are temporary troubles, the issue of
our own times. Suddenly all these differences that seem so fixed
will dissolve, all these incompatibles will run together, and we