Dark forces, menacing words, thanks to which rivers of tears have flowed, and rivers of blood-words that set us shuddering like the memory of the Inquisition, of torture, of the plague . . .
and yet they are the words under the shadow of which, as under the sword of Damocles, the family has lived and is living.
There is no turning them out of doors by abuse or by denial.
They remain round the corner, slumbering, ready on the slightest occasion to destroy everything near and far, to destroy us ourselves . . . .
Clearly we must abandon our honourable intention of utterly extinguishing these smouldering flames and modestly confine ourselves to humanely guiding and subduing the consuming fire.
You can no more bridle passions with logic than you can justify them in the lawcourts. Passions are facts and not dogmas.
Jealousy, moreover, has always enjoyed special privileges. In itself a violent and perfectly natural passion, which hitherto, instead of being muzzled and kept under, has only been stimulated. The Christian doctrine which, through hatred of the body, sets everything fleshly on an extraordinary height, and the aristocratic worship of blood and purity of race, have developed to the point of absurdity the conception of a mortal affront, a blot that cannot be washed off. Jealousy has received the ius gladii, the right of judgment and revenge. It has become a duty of honour, almost a virtue. All this will not stand a moment's criticism-but yet there still remains at the bottom of the heart a very real, insurmountable feeling of pain, of unhappiness, called jealousy, a feeling as elementary as the feeling of love itself, resisting every effort to deny it, an 'irreducible' feeling .
. . . Here again are the everlasting limits, the Caudine Forks t ' . . . the Prince' ( Vladimir) ' . . . ordered that Perun should be bound to a horsp's tail and dragged along Boriche,· to th!' rin•r. . . . After they had thus dragged thP idol along they cast it in to tht> DniPpt>r.' Samuel H. Cross: The Russian Primar)· Chronicle ( Cambridg!', Mass., 1 930) , p.
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under which history drives us. On both sides there is truth, on both there is falsehood. A brusque entweder-oder will lead you nowhere. At the moment of the complete negation of one of the terms it comes back, just as after the last quarter of the moon the first appears on the other side.
Hegel removed these boundary-posts of human reason, by rising to the absolute spirit; in it they did not vanish but were transmuted, fulfilled, as German theological science expressed it: this is mysticism, philosophical theodicy, allegory and reality purposely mixed up. All religious reconciliations of the irreconcilable are won by means of redemptions, that is, by sacred transmutation, sacred deception, a solution which solves nothing but is taken on trust. What can be more antithetical than freewill and necessity? Yet by faith even they are easily reconciled.
Man will accept without a murmur the justice of punishment for an action which was pre-ordained.
Proudhon himself, in a different range of questions, was far more humane than German philosophy. From economic contradictions he escapes by the recognition of both sides under the restraint of a higher principle. Property as a right and property as theft are set side by side in everlasting balance, everlastingly complementary, under the ever-growing Weltherrschaft of iuslice. It is clear that the argument and the contradictions are transferred to another sphere, and that it is the conception of justice we have to call to account rather than the right of property.
The simpler, the less mystical and the less one-sided, the more real and practically applicable the higher principle is, the more completely it brings the contradictory terms to their lowest denomination.
The absolute, 'all-embracing' spirit of Hegel is replaced in Proudhon by the menacing idea of justice.
But the problem of the passions is not likely to be solved by that either. Passion is intrinsically unjust; justice is abstracted from the personal, it is 'interpersonal'-passion is only individual.
The solution here lies not in the la\'\'Court but in the humane development of individual character, in its removal from emotional self-centredness into the light of day, in the development of common interests.
The radical elimination of jealousy implies eliminating love for the individual, replacing it by love for woman or for man, by love of the sex in general. But it is just the personal, the individual, that pleases; it is just that \vhich gives colouring, tone,
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sensuality to the whole of our life. Our emotion is personal, our happiness and unhappiness are personal happiness and unhappiness.
Doctrinairianism with all its logic is of as little comfort in personal sorrow as the consolations of the Romans with their rhetoric. Neither the tears of loss nor the tears of jealousy can be wiped away, nor should they be, but it is right and possible that they should flow humanely . . . and that they should be equally free from monastic poison, the ferocity of the beast, and the wail of the wounded owner of property.3
I I
To REDUCE the relationships of man and woman to a casual sexual encounter is just as impossible as to exalt and bolt them together in marriage which is indissoluble before the planks of the coffin. Both the one and the other may be met with at the extremes of sexual and marital relationships, as a special case, as an exception, but not as a general rule. The sexual relationship will be broken off or will continually tend towards a closer and firmer union, just as the indissoluble marriage will tend towards liberation from external bonds.
People have continually protested against both extremes. Indissoluble marriage has been accepted by them hypocritically, or a As I was correcting the proofs of this I came upon a French newspaper with an extremely characteristic incident in it. !'\ear Paris a student had a liaison with a girl, which was discovered. The girl's father went to the student and on his knees besought him. with tears, to rehabilitate his daughter's honour and marry her; the student refused with contumely.
The kneeling father gave him a slap in the face. the student challenged him, they shot at each other; during the duel the old man had a stroke which crippled him. The student was disconcerted, and 'decided to marry,'
and the girl was grieved, and also decided to marry. The newspaper adds that this happy denouement will no doubt do much to promote the old father's recovery. Can this have happened outside a madhouse? Can China or India, at whose grotesqueries and follies we mock so much, furnish anything uglier or stupider than this story? I will not say more immoral. This Parisian romance is a hundredfold more wicked than all the roastings of widows or buryings of vestal viq:�ins. In those cases there was religious faith, which removed all personal responsibility, hut in this case there is nothing but com·entional, visionary ideas of external honour, of external reputation . . . . Is it not clear from this story what the student was like? \Vhy should the destiny of the girl be shackled to him a perprtuite.) \Vhy was she ruined to save her reputation? Oh, Bedlam!