No woman ever got a man’s love by fighting for it: at least, by fighting him. No man ever loved a woman until she left off fighting him. And when will she leave off fighting him? When he has, apparently, submitted to her (for the submission is always, at least partly, false and a fraud)? No, then least of all. When a man has submitted to a woman, she usually fights him worse than ever, more ruthlessly. Why doesn’t she leave him? Often she does. But what then? She merely takes up with another man in order to resume the fight. The need to fight with man is upon her, inexorable.
Why can’t she live alone? She can’t. Sometimes she can join with other women, and keep up the fight in a group. Sometimes she must live alone, for no man will come forward to fight with her. Yet, sooner or later, the need for contact with a man comes over a woman again. It is imperative. If she is rich, she hires a dancing partner, a gigolo, and humiliates him to the last dregs. The fight is not ended. When the great Hector is dead, it is not enough. He must be trailed naked and defiled; tied by the heels to the tail of a contemptuous chariot.
When is the fight over? Ah when Modern life seems to give no answer. Perhaps when a man finds his strength and his rooted belief in himself again. Perhaps when the man has died, and been painfully born again with a different breath, a different courage, and a different kind of care, or carelessness. But most men can’t and daren’t die in their old, fearful selves. They cling to their women in desperation, and come to hate them with cold and merciless hate, the hate of a child that is persistently ill-treated. Then when the hate dies, the man escapes into the final state of egoism, when he has no true feelings any more, and cannot be made to suffer.
That is where the young are now. The fight is more or less fizzling out, because both parties have become hollow. There is a perfect cynicism. The young men know that most of the “benevolence” and “motherly love” of their adoring mothers was simply egoism again, and an extension of self, and a love of having absolute power over another creature. Oh, these women who secretly lust to have absolute power over their own children — for their own good! Do they think the children are deceived? Not for a moment! You can read in the eyes of the small modern child: “My mother is trying to bully me with every breath she draws, but though I am only six, I can really resist her.” It is the fight, the fight. It has degenerated into the mere fight to impose the will over some other creature, mostly now, mother over her children. She fails again, abjectly. But she goes on.
For the great fight with the man has come almost to an end. Why? Is it because man has found a new strength, has died the death in his old body and been born with a new strength and a new sureness? Alas, apparently not so at all. Man has dodged, sidetracked. Tortured and cynical and unbelieving, he has let all his feelings go out of him, and remains a shell of a man, very nice, very pleasant, in fact the best of modern men. Because nothing really moves him except one thing, a threat against his own safety. He is terrified of not feeling “safe.” So he keeps his woman there between him and the world of dangerous feelings and demands.
But he feels nothing. It is the great counterfeit liberation, this counterfeit of Nirvana and the peace that passeth all understanding. It is a sort of Nirvana, and a sort of peace: in sheer nullity. At first, the woman cannot realize it. She rages, she goes mad. Woman after woman you can see smashing herself against the figure of a man who has achieved the state of false peace, false strength, false power: the egoist. The egoist, he who has no more spontaneous feelings, and can be made to suffer humanly no more. He who derives all his life henceforth at second-hand, and is animated by self-will and some sort of secret ambition to impose himself, either on the world or another individual. See a man or a woman trying to impose herself, himself, and you have an egoist in natural action. But the true pose of the modern egoist is that of perfect suaveness and kindness and humility: oh, always delicately humble!
When a man achieves this triumph of egoism: and many men have achieved it today, practically all the successful ones, certainly all the charming ones, and all the “artistic” ones: then the woman concerned is apt to go really a little mad. She gets no more responses. The fight has suddenly given out. She throws herself against a man, and he is not there, only the sort of glassy image of him receives her shocks and feels nothing. She becomes wild, outrageous. The explanation of the impossible behaviour of some women in their thirties lies here. Suddenly nothing comes back at them in the fight, and they go crazy, demented, as if they were on the brink of a fearful abyss. Which they are.
And then they either go to pieces, or else, with one of those sudden turns typical of women, they suddenly realize. And then, almost instantly, their whole behaviour changes. It is over. The fight is finished. The man has side-tracked. He becomes, in a sense, negligible, though the basic animosity is only rarefied, made more subtle. And so you have the smart young woman in her twenties. She no longer fights her man — or men. She leaves him to his devices, and as far as possible invents her own. She may have a child to bully. But as a rule she pushes the child away as far as she can. No, she is now quite alone. If the man has no real feelings, she has none either. No matter how she feels about her husband, unless she is in a state of nervous rage she calls him angel of light, and winged messenger, and loveliest man, and my beautiful pet boy. She flips it all over him, like eau de cologne. And he takes it quite for granted, and suggests the next amusement. And their life is “one round of pleasure,” to use the old banality: until the nerves collapse. Everything is counterfeit: counterfeit complexion, counterfeit jewels, counterfeit elegance, counterfeit charm, counterfeit endearment, counterfeit passion, counterfeit culture, counterfeit love of Blake, or of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, or Picasso, or the latest film-star. Counterfeit sorrows and counterfeit delights, counterfeit woes and moans, counterfeit ecstasies, and, under all, a hard, hard realization that we live by money, and money alone: and a terrible lurking fear of nervous collapse, collapse.
These are, of course, the extreme cases of the modern young. They are those who have got way beyond tragedy or real seriousness, that old-fashioned stuff. They are — they don’t know where they are. And they don’t care. But they are at the far end of the great fight between men and women.
Judging them as a result, the fight hardly seems to have been worth it. But we are looking on them still as fighters. Perhaps there is something else, positive, as a result.
In their own way, many of these young ones who have gone through everything and reached a stage of emptiness and disillusion unparalleled since the decadent Romans of Ravenna, in the fifth century, they are now, in very fear and forlornness, beginning to put out feelers towards some other way of trust. They begin to realize that if they are not careful, they will have missed life altogether. Missed the bus! They, the smart young who are so swift at hopping onto a thing, to have missed life itself, not to have hopped onto it! Missed the bus! to use London slang. Let the great chance slip by, while they were fooling round! The young are just beginning uneasily to realize that this may be the case. They are just beginning uneasily to realize that all that “life” which they lead, rushing around and being so smart, perhaps isn’t life after all, and they are missing the real thing.
What then? What is the real thing? Ah, there’s the rub. There are millions of ways of living, and it’s all life. But what is the real thing in life? What is it that makes you feel right, makes life really feel good?
It is the great question. And the answers are old answers. But every generation must frame the answer in its own way. What makes life good to me is the sense that, even if I am sick and ill, I am alive, alive to the depths of my soul, and in touch somewhere in touch with the vivid life of the cosmos. Somehow my life draws strength from the depths of the universe, from the depths among the stars, from the great “world.” Out of the great world comes my strength and my reassurance. One could say “God,” but the word “God” is somehow tainted. But there is a flame or a Life Everlasting wreathing through the cosmos for ever a
nd giving us our renewal, once we can get in touch with it.
It is when men lose their contact with this eternal life-flame, and become merely personal, things in themselves, instead of things kindled in the flame, that the fight between man and woman begins. It cannot be avoided; any more than nightfall or rain. The more conventional and correct a woman may be, the more outwardly devastating she is. Once she feels the loss of the greater control and the greater sustenance, she becomes emotionally destructive, she can no more help it than she can help being a woman, when the great connexion is lost.
And then there is nothing for men to do but to turn back to life itself. Turn back to the life that flows invisibly in the cosmos, and will flow for ever, sustaining and renewing all living things. It is not a question of sins or morality, of being good or being bad. It is a question of renewal, of being renewed, vivified, made new and vividly alive and aware, instead of being exhausted and stale, as men are today. How to be renewed, reborn, revivified? That is the question men must ask themselves, and women too.
And the answer will be difficult. Some trick with glands or secretions, or raw food, or drugs won’t do it. Neither will some wonderful revelation or message. It is not a question of knowing something, but of doing something. It is a question of getting into contact again with the living centre of the cosmos. And how are we to do it?
NOBODY LOVES ME
Last year, we had a little house up in the Swiss mountains, for the summer. A friend came to tea: a woman of fifty or so, with her daughter: old friends. “And how are you all?” I asked, as she sat, flushed and rather exasperated after the climb up to the chalet on a hot afternoon, wiping her face with a too-small handkerchief. “Well!” she replied, glancing almost viciously out of the window at the immutable slopes and peaks opposite, “I don’t know how you feel about it — but — these mountains! — well! — I’ve lost all my cosmic consciousness, and all my love for humanity.”
She is, of course, New England of the old school — and usually transcendentalist calm. So that her exasperated frenzy of the moment — it was really a frenzy — coupled with the New England language and slight accent, seemed to me really funny. I laughed in her face, poor dear, and said: “Never mind! Perhaps you can do with a rest from your cosmic consciousness and your love of humanity.”
I have often thought of it since: of what she really meant. And every time, I have had a little pang, realizing that I was a bit spiteful to her. I admit, her New England transcendental habit of loving the cosmos en bloc and humanity en masse did rather get on my nerves, always. But then she had been brought up that way. And the fact of loving the cosmos didn’t prevent her from being fond of her own garden — though it did, a bit; and her love of humanity didn’t prevent her from having a real affection for her friends, except that she felt that she ought to love them in a selfless and general way, which was rather annoying. Nevertheless, that, to me, rather silly language about cosmic consciousness and love of humanity did stand for something that was not merely cerebral. It stood, and I realized it afterwards, for her peace, her inward peace with the universe and with man. And this she could not do without. One may be at war with society, and still keep one’s deep peace with mankind. It is not pleasant to be at war with society, but sometimes it is the only way of preserving one’s peace of soul, which is peace with the living, struggling, real mankind. And this latter one cannot afford to lose. So I had no right to tell my friend she could do with a rest from her love of humanity. She couldn’t, and none of us can: if we interpret love of humanity as that feeling of being at one with the struggling soul, or spirit, or whatever it is, of our fellow-men.
Now the wonder to me is that the young do seem to manage to get on without any “cosmic consciousness” or “love of humanity.” They have, on the whole, shed the cerebral husk of generalizations from their emotional state: the cosmic and humanity touch. But it seems to me they have also shed the flower that was inside the husk. Of course, you can hear a girl exclaim: “Really, you know, the colliers are darlings, and it’s a shame the way they’re treated.” She will even rush off and register a vote for her darlings. But she doesn’t really care — and one can sympathize with her. This caring about the wrongs of unseen people has been rather overdone. Nevertheless, though the colliers or cotton-workers or whatever they be are a long way off and we can’t do anything about it, still, away in some depth of us, we know that we are connected vitally, if remotely, with these colliers or cotton-workers, we dimly realize that mankind is one, almost one flesh. It is an abstraction, but it is also a physical fact. In some way or other, the cotton-workers of Carolina, or the rice growers of China, are connected with me and, to a faint yet real degree, part of me. The vibration of life which they give off reaches me, touches me, and affects me all unknown to me. For we are more or less connected, all more or less in touch: all humanity. That is, until we have killed the sensitive responses in ourselves, which hap pens today only too often.
Dimly, this is what my transcendentalist meant by her “love of humanity,” though she tended to kill the real thing by labelling it so philanthropically and bossily. Dimly, she meant her sense of participating in the life of all humanity, which is a sense we all have, delicately and deeply, when we are at peace in ourselves. But let us lose our inward peace, and at once we are likely to substitute for this delicate inward sense of participating in the life of all mankind another thing, a nasty pronounced benevolence, which wants to do good to all mankind, and is only a form of self-assertion and of bullying. From this sort of love of humanity, good Lord deliver us! and deliver poor humanity. My friend was a tiny bit tainted with this form of self-importance, as all transcendentalists were. So if the mountains, in their brutality, took away the tainted love, good for them. But my dear Ruth — I shall call her Ruth — had more than this. She had, woman of fifty as she was, an almost girlish naive sense of living at peace, real peace, with her fellow-men. And this she could not afford to lose. And save for that taint of generalization and will, she would never have lost it, even for that half-hour in the Swiss mountains. But she meant the “cosmos” and “humanity” to fit her will and her feelings, and the mountains made her realize that the cosmos wouldn’t. When you come up against the cosmos, your consciousness is likely to suffer a jolt. And humanity, when you come down to it, is likely to give your “love” a nasty jar. But there you are.
When we come to the younger generation, however, we realize that “cosmos consciousness” and “love of humanity” have really been left out of their composition. They are like a lot of brightly coloured bits of glass, and they only feel just what they bump against, when they’re shaken. They make an accidental pattern with other people, and for the rest they know nothing and care nothing.
So that cosmic consciousness and love of humanity, to use the absurd New England terms, are really dead. They were tainted. Both the cosmos and humanity were too much manufactured in New England. They weren’t the real thing. They were, very often, just noble phrases to cover up self-assertion, self-importance, and malevolent bullying. They were just activities of the ugly, self- willed ego, determined that humanity and the cosmos should exist as New England allowed them to exist, or not at all. They were tainted with bullying egoism, and the young, having fine noses for this sort of smell, would have none of them.
The way to kill any feeling is to insist on it, harp on it, exaggerate it. Insist on loving humanity, and sure as fate you’ll come to hate everybody. Because, of course, if you insist on loving humanity, then you insist that it shall be lovable: which half the time it isn’t. In the same way, insist on loving your husband, and you won’t be able to help hating him secretly. Because of course nobody is always lovable. If you insist they shall be, this imposes a tyranny over them, and they become less lovable. And if you force yourself to love them — or pretend to — when they are not lovable, you falsify everything, and fall into hate. The result of forcing any feeling is the death of that feeling, and the substitution
of some sort of opposite. Whitman insisted on sympathizing with everything and everybody: so much so, that he came to believe in death only, not just his own death, but the death of all people. In the same way the slogan “Keep Smiling!” produces at last a sort of savage rage in the breast of the smilers, and the famous “cheery morning greeting” makes the gall accumulate in all the cheery ones.
It is no good. Every time you force your feelings, you damage yourself and produce the opposite effect to the one you want. Try to force yourself to love somebody, and you are bound to end by detesting that same somebody. The only thing to do is to have the feelings you’ve really got, and not make up any of them. And that is the only way to leave the other person free. If you feel like murdering your husband, then don’t say, “Oh, but I love him dearly. I’m devoted to him.” That is not only bullying yourself, but bullying him. He doesn’t want to be forced, even by love. Just say to yourself: “I could murder him, and that’s a fact. But I suppose I’d better not.” And then your feelings will get their own balance.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1016