The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎630v] (151/239)

120
THE POSITION OF WOMEN.
There has been loss all along the line, and the greatest loss of all
that the race has suffered through the old ideals is in the realm of
the affections.
Paradox again, it will be said, yet how can intelligent people
persuade themselves that the great affections can flourish under the
relationship of authority on the one hand and subservience on the
other?
The man who believes he can get all he wants under such a
regime is easily satisfied indeed! As well expect the rose to
bloom in polar ice-fields as a lasting love or a great friendship to
exist between master and bondswoman.
But what has all this meant for mankind ? The hindering of
progress, cruel waste of power and effort; centuries of needless
suffering and the cutting off of all chance of real happiness; for
it is in the affections that happiness lies; in love, in friendship in
all their infinite phases, their inspiring and their consoling
possibilities.
Man, in proportion to his development, needs the satisfaction of
both intellect and heart, of the innate craving for true and close
companionship of spirit, not the mere invaded privacy of ordinary
family life. Such are, for the fully-endowed human being, the
nally satisfying things, and such he will increasingly need and
crave for. Happiness has been finely described as consisting in
the number of things that you love and bless and that love and
bless you.
What, after all, is the mainspring of all imaginative literature,
of all poetry? Love : whether it be of Beauty, of Nature, of Art,
of Woman, of Friend ; it is all the same great passion, and one of
the most haunting of its myriad aspects, around which a glory of
romance and dream has grown up, is the love of man for woman and
of woman for man. There is an ineradicable sense persisting, in
spite of all disappointments, that there lies the Earthly Paradise.
But how have fared these beautiful imaginings, these truly
prophetic dreams of the human heart? How have they fared at
the hands of the prosaic everyday “ practical ” world which has
instituted marriage on the foundation of bondage, coercion,
duty, ’ rights of property in flesh and soul?
All literature rings with the cry of unrealised hopes, lost
illusions, romance and poetry trampled under foot.
The crude ordinances to which we are all constrained to bow
have been like coarse and ugly vessels of clay into which the nectar
of the gods was to be irreverently poured. And luckless, foolish
humans, secure in their ordinances, dared to found upon them a
thousand rights and intrusive tyrannies in the fatuous belief that
they could confine and appropriate as personal property that which