The Substance of a Dream | Page 3

man, she does not understand: her end is
only his beginning: his object is possession, still to come: hers is
already gained in the form of the tribute to her charm: she was only
playing (every woman is a child), he was in deadly earnest, and took
her purely instinctive self-congratulation for a promise deliberately
made. Suddenly illuminated, she lets him down abruptly with a bump,
all the harder that she never meant to do it (the coquette does: but she is
a horrible professional, methodising feminine instinct, for prey: a
psychological ghoul, feeding on souls instead of bodies, and deserving
extermination without benefit of clergy). The real crime of woman is
not so much a crime as a defect: she is weak, as all the sages know, and
all languages prove, though "democracy" ignores it; it is her strength,
and half her charm, that she cannot stand alone, like a creeper. But that
is why you cannot depend on her, good or bad. Irresolution is her
essence: she will "determine" one way, and act in another, according to
the pressure. Instinct, inclination or aversion, vanity, emotion, pity or
fear, or even mere chance: these are her motives, the forces that move
her: reason counts with her for absolutely nothing, a thing like
arithmetic, useful, even indispensable, but only for adding up a grocer's
bill, or catching a train. It has literally nothing to do with her heart.
There is no folly like the folly of supposing that it has: yet on this folly
rest most of the accusations against her. Reduce her to a rational being,
and you degrade her to the level of an inferior man. But she is not his
inferior: she is his dream, his magnet, his force, his inspiration, and his
fate. Take her away, and you annihilate him: Othello's occupation's
gone. Nine-tenths of the great things done in the world have been done
for a woman. Why? Exactly because she would burn down a street to
boil her baby's milk. No rational being would do that: but we all owe
our lives to it.
And hence, misogyny is only a pique. To fall foul of the sea, like
Xerxes, when it wrecks your ambitions, is to behave as he did, like a
spoiled child, without the child's excuse. "If you burn your fingers, is
the flame to blame?" You should have known better. When Aristotle
was reproved, by some early political economist, for giving alms to a
beggar, he replied: I gave not to the man, but humanity. Admirable

retort! which is exactly in point here. When she requited your homage
with such encouraging smiles, it was not you but the man in you, that
appealed to her. And because you are a man, are you necessarily the
man? Not at all. And argument is mere waste of time: reason is not the
court of appeal. If of herself she will not love, nothing can make her.
Yet why draw the poet's ungallant conclusion? Why should the devil
take her? Because she was weak (were you not weak?) is she therefore
to be damned beyond redemption? Because flattery was sweet, must
she give herself away to every male animal that confesses the spell?
Surely that is not only harsh, but preposterous, even outrageous. Are
you sure that your merit is worthy of such generosity?
And yet, here is the human catastrophe. Why did the Creator scatter his
sexual attraction so anomalously that it is so rarely reciprocated, each
lover pursuing so often another who flies him for a third, as in
Midsummer Night's Dream, an imbroglio oddly enough found in a little
poem identical in the Greek Moschus and the Hindoo Bhartrihari? Was
it blunder or design? Why could he not have made action and reaction
equal and opposite, as they are in mechanics? For if affection could not
operate at all, unless it was mutual, there would be no unhappy,
because ill-assorted, marriages. What a difference it would have made!
Had mutual gravitation been the law of the sexes, as it is of the spheres,
this Earth would never have stood in need of a Heaven, since it would
have existed already: for the only earthly heaven is a happy marriage.
As it is, even when it is not a Hell, a marriage is only too often but an
everlasting sigh.
* * * * *
And not marriage only, but life. For here lies the solution of a mystery
that has baffled the sages, who have failed to discover it chiefly
because they have blinded themselves by their own theological and
philosophical delusions, idealism and monotheism. Why is it, that
gazing at Nature's inexhaustible beauty, thrown at us with such lavish
profusion in her dawns and her sunsets, her shadows and her moods,