THE BESETTING OF SEX
1
Art is selection and so is most autobiography.But I am concerned with a more tangled business than selection, I want to show a contemporary man in relation to the state and social usage, and the social organism in relation to that man.To tell my story at all Ihave to simplify.I have given now the broad lines of my political development, and how I passed from my initial liberal-socialism to the conception of a constructive aristocracy.I have tried to set that out in the form of a man discovering himself.Incidentally that self-development led to a profound breach with my wife.One has read stories before of husband and wife speaking severally two different languages and coming to an understanding.But Margaret and I began in her dialect, and, as I came more and more to use my own, diverged.
I had thought when I married that the matter of womankind had ended for me.I have tried to tell all that sex and women had been to me up to my married life with Margaret and our fatal entanglement, tried to show the queer, crippled, embarrassed and limited way in which these interests break upon the life of a young man under contemporary conditions.I do not think my lot was a very exceptional one.I missed the chance of sisters and girl playmates, but that is not an uncommon misadventure in an age of small families; I never came to know any woman at all intimately until Iwas married to Margaret.My earlier love affairs were encounters of sex, under conditions of furtiveness and adventure that made them things in themselves, restricted and unilluminating.From a boyish disposition to be mystical and worshipping towards women I had passed into a disregardful attitude, as though women were things inferior or irrelevant, disturbers in great affairs.For a time Margaret had blotted out all other women; she was so different and so near; she was like a person who stands suddenly in front of a little window through which one has been surveying a crowd.She didn't become womankind for me so much as eliminate womankind from my world....And then came this secret separation....
Until this estrangement and the rapid and uncontrollable development of my relations with Isabel which chanced to follow it, I seemed to have solved the problem of women by marriage and disregard.Ithought these things were over.I went about my career with Margaret beside me, her brow slightly knit, her manner faintly strenuous, helping, helping; and if we had not altogether abolished sex we had at least so circumscribed and isolated it that it would not have affected the general tenor of our lives in the slightest degree if we had.
And then, clothing itself more and more in the form of Isabel and her problems, this old, this fundamental obsession of my life returned.The thing stole upon my mind so that I was unaware of its invasion and how it was changing our long intimacy.I have already compared the lot of the modern publicist to Machiavelli writing in his study; in his day women and sex were as disregarded in these high affairs as, let us say, the chemistry of air or the will of the beasts in the fields; in ours the case has altogether changed, and woman has come now to stand beside the tall candles, half in the light, half in the mystery of the shadows, besetting, interrupting, demanding unrelentingly an altogether unprecedented attention.Ifeel that in these matters my life has been almost typical of my time.Woman insists upon her presence.She is no longer a mere physical need, an aesthetic bye-play, a sentimental background; she is a moral and intellectual necessity in a man's life.She comes to the politician and demands, Is she a child or a citizen? Is she a thing or a soul? She comes to the individual man, as she came to me and asks, Is she a cherished weakling or an equal mate, an unavoidable helper? Is she to be tried and trusted or guarded and controlled, bond or free? For if she is a mate, one must at once trust more and exact more, exacting toil, courage, and the hardest, most necessary thing of all, the clearest, most shameless, explicitness of understanding....
2
In all my earlier imaginings of statecraft I had tacitly assumed either that the relations of the sexes were all right or that anyhow they didn't concern the state.It was a matter they, whoever "they"were, had to settle among themselves.That sort of disregard was possible then.But even before 1906 there were endless intimations that the dams holding back great reservoirs of discussion were crumbling.We political schemers were ploughing wider than any one had ploughed before in the field of social reconstruction.We had also, we realised, to plough deeper.We had to plough down at last to the passionate elements of sexual relationship and examine and decide upon them.
The signs multiplied.In a year or so half the police of the metropolis were scarce sufficient to protect the House from one clamorous aspect of the new problem.The members went about Westminster with an odd, new sense of being beset.A good proportion of us kept up the pretence that the Vote for Women was an isolated fad, and the agitation an epidemic madness that would presently pass.But it was manifest to any one who sought more than comfort in the matter that the streams of women and sympathisers and money forthcoming marked far deeper and wider things than an idle fancy for the franchise.The existing laws and conventions of relationship between Man and Woman were just as unsatisfactory a disorder as anything else in our tumbled confusion of a world, and that also was coming to bear upon statecraft.
