it was true that i did ignore or minimize sexual questions as much as i could. i was forced now to think why i did this. that carried me back to those old days of passion, memories i had never stirred for many years. and i wrote to mary that there was indeed no reason but a reasonable fear, that in fact i had dismissed them because they had been beyond my patience and self-control, because i could not think very much about them without an egotistical reversion to the bitterness of my own case. and in avoiding them i was only doing what the great bulk of men in business and men in affairs find themselves obliged to do. they train themselves not to think of the rights and wrongs of sexual life, not to tolerate liberties even in their private imaginations. they know it is like carrying a torch into a powder magazine. they feel they cannot trust their own minds beyond the experience, tested usages, and conventions of the ages, because they know how many of those who have ventured further have been blinded by mists and clouds of rhetoric, lost in inexplicable puzzles and wrecked disastrously. there in those half explored and altogether unsettled hinterlands, lurk desires that sting like adders and hatreds cruel as hell....
and then i went on—i do not clearly remember now the exact line of argument i adopted—to urge upon her that our insoluble puzzles were not necessarily insoluble puzzles for the world at large, that no one soldier fights anything but a partial battle, and that it wasn't an absolute condemnation of me to declare that i went on living and working for social construction with the cardinal riddles of social order, so far as they affected her, unsolved. wasn't i at any rate preparing apparatus for that huge effort at solution that mankind must ultimately make? wasn't this dredging out and deepening of the channels of thought about the best that we could hope to do at the present time, seeing that to launch a keel of speculation prematurely was only to strand oneself among hopeless reefs and confusions? better prepare for a voyage to-morrow than sail to destruction to-day.
whatever i put in that forgotten part of my letter was put less strikingly than my first admissions, and anyhow it was upon these that mary pounced to the disregard of any other point. "there you are," she wrote, with something like elation, "there is a tiger in the garden and you won't talk or think about it for fear of growing excited. that is my grievance against so much historical and political and social discussion; its hopeless futility because of its hopeless omissions. you plan the world's future, taking the women and children for granted, with egotistical sex, as you call it, a prowling monster upsetting everything you do...."
but i will not give you that particular letter in its order, nor its successors. altogether she wrote me twenty-two letters, and i one or two more than that number to her, and—a thing almost inevitable in a discussion by correspondence—there is a lot of overlapping and recapitulation. those letters spread over a space of nearly two and a half years. again and again she insists upon the monstrous exaggeration of the importance of sex in human life and of the need of some reduction of its importance, and she makes the boldest experimental suggestions for the achievement of that end. but she comes slowly to recognize that there is a justification for an indirect attack, that sex and the position of women do not constitute the primary problem in that bristling system of riddles that lies like a hostile army across the path of mankind. and she realized too that through art, through science and literature and the whole enquiring and creative side of man's nature, lies the path by which those positions are to be outflanked, and those eternal-looking impossibles and inconceivables overcome. here is a fragment—saturated with the essence of her thought. three-quarters of her earlier letters are variations on this theme....
"what you call 'social order,' stephen, all the arrangements seem to me to be built on subjection to sex even more than they are built (as you say) on labor subjection. and this is an age of release, you say it is an age of release for the workers and they know it. and so do the women. just as much. 'wild hopes' indeed! the workers' hopes are nothing to the women's! it is not only the workers who are saying let us go free, manage things differently so that we may have our lives relieved from this intolerable burthen of constant toil, but the women also are saying let us go free. they are demanding release just as much from their intolerable endless specialization as females. the tramp on the roads who won't work, the swindler and the exploiter who contrive not to work, the strikers who throw down their tools, no longer for twopences and sixpences as you say but because their way of living is no longer tolerable to them, and we women, who don't bear children or work or help; we are all in one movement together. we are part of the general strike. i have been a striker all my life. we are doing nothing—by the hundred thousand. your old social machine is working without us and in spite of us, it carries us along with it and we are sand in the bearings. i'm not a wheel, stephen, i'm grit. what you say about the reactionaries and suppressionists who would stifle the complaints of labor and crush out its struggles to be free, is exactly true about the reactionaries and suppressionists who would stifle the discussion of the woman's position and crush out her hopes of emancipation...."
and here is a page of the peculiar doubt that was as characteristic of her as the quick changes of her eyes. it gives just that pessimistic touch that tempered her valiant adventurousness, that gave a color at last to the tragedy of her death....
"have you ever thought, stephen, that perhaps these (repressionist) people are righter than you are—that if the worker gets free he won't work and that if the woman gets free she won't furl her sex and stop disturbing things? suppose she is wicked as a sex, suppose she will trade on her power of exciting imaginative men. a lot of these new women run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, beguile some poor innocent of a man to ruin them and then call in fathers, brother, husbands, friends, chivalry, all the rest of it, and make the best of both sides of a sex. suppose we go on behaving like that. after we've got all our emancipations. suppose that the liberation of common people simply means loafing, no discipline, nothing being done, an end to labor and the beginning of nothing to replace it, and that the liberation of women simply means the elaboration of mischief. suppose that it is so. suppose you are just tumbling the contents of the grate into the middle of the room. then all this emancipation is a decay, even as conservative-minded people say,—it's none the less a decay because we want it,—and the only thing to stop it is to stop it, and to have more discipline and more suppression and say to women and the common people: 'back to the sterner virtues; back to servitude!' i wish i hadn't these reactionary streaks in my thoughts, but i have and there you are...."
and then towards the second year her letters began to break away from her preoccupation with her position as a woman and to take up new aspects of life, more general aspects of life altogether. it had an effect not of her having exhausted the subject but as if, despairing of a direct solution, she turned deliberately to the relief of other considerations. she ceased to question her own life, and taking that for granted, wrote more largely of less tangible things. she remembered that she had said that life, if it was no more than its present appearances, was "utter nonsense." she went back to that. "one says things like that," she wrote "and not for a moment does one believe it. i grumble at my life, i seem to be always weakly and fruitlessly fighting my life, and i love it. i would not be willingly dead—for anything. i'd rather be an old match-woman selling matches on a freezing night in the streets than be dead. nothing nonsensical ever held me so tightly or kept me so interested. i suppose really i am full of that very same formless faith on which you rely. but with me it's not only shapeless but intangible.... i nibble at religion. i am immensely attracted. i stand in the doorway. only when they come out to persuade me to come in i am like a shy child and i go away. the temples beguile me and the music, but not the men. i feel i want to join it and they say 'join us.' they are—like vergers. such small things! such dreadful little arguing men! they don't let you come in, they want you to say they are right. all the really religious people seem to be outside nowadays and all the pretending, cheating, atheistical, vain and limited people within....
"but the beautiful things religion gives! the beauty! do you know saint paul's, stephen? latterly i have been there time after time. it is the most beautiful interior in all the world, so great, so sombrely dignified, so perfectly balanced—and filled with such wonderful music, brimming with music just as crystal water brims in a bowl of crystal. the other day i went there, up into a little gallery high up under the dome, to hear bach's passion music, the st. matthew passion. one hangs high and far above the little multitudes below, the white-robed singers, the white-robed musicians, ranks and ranks, the great organ, the rows and rows and rows of congregation, receding this way, that way, into the haze of the aisle and the transepts, and out of it all streams the sound and the singing, it pours up past you like a river, a river that rushes upward to some great sea, some unknown sea. the whole place is music and singing.... i hang on to the railings, stephen, and weep—i have to weep—and i wonder and wonder....
"one prays then as naturally as one drinks when one is thirsty and cold water comes to hand. i don't know whom i pray to, but i pray;—of course i pray. latterly, stephen, i have been reading devotional works and trying to catch that music again. i never do—definitely. never. but at times i put down the book and it seems to me that surely a moment ago i heard it, that if i sit very still in a moment i shall hear it again. and i can feel it is there, i know it is there, like a bat's cry, pitched too high for my ears. i know it is there, just as i should still know there was poetry somewhere if some poor toothless idiot with no roof to his mouth and no knowledge of any but the commonest words tried to read shelley to me....
"i wish i could pray with you, stephen; i wish i could kneel down somewhere with you of all people and pray."
