"Only by the conquest of four natural limitations is the aristocratic life to be achieved.They come in a certain order, and in that order the spirit of man is armed against them less and less efficiently.Of fear and my struggle against fear I have told already.I am fearful.I am a physical coward until I can bring shame and anger to my assistance, but in overcoming fear I have been helped by the whole body of human tradition.Every one, the basest creatures, every Hottentot, every stunted creature that ever breathed poison in a slum, knows that the instinctive constitution of man is at fault here and that fear is shameful and must be subdued.The race is on one's side.And so there is a vast traditional support for a man against the Second Limitation, the limitation of physical indulgence.It is not so universal as the first, there is a grinning bawling humour on the side of grossness, but common pride is against it.And in this matter my temperament has been my help: I am fastidious, I eat little, drink little, and feel a shivering recoil from excess.It is no great virtue; it happens so; it is something in the nerves of my skin.I cannot endure myself unshaven or in any way unclean; I am tormented by dirty hands or dirty blood or dirty memories, and after I had once loved Amanda I could not--unless some irrational impulse to get equal with her had caught me--have broken my faith to her, whatever breach there was in her faith to me....
"I see that in these matters I am cleaner than most men and more easily clean; and it may be that it is in the vein of just that distinctive virtue that I fell so readily into a passion of resentment and anger.
"I despised a jealous man.There is a traditional discredit of jealousy, not so strong as that against cowardice, but still very strong.But the general contempt of jealousy is curiously wrapped up with the supposition that there is no cause for jealousy, that it is unreasonable suspicion.Given a cause then tradition speaks with an uncertain voice....
"I see now that I despised jealousy because I assumed that it was impossible for Amanda to love any one but me; it was intolerable to imagine anything else, I insisted upon believing that she was as fastidious as myself and as faithful as myself, made indeed after my image, and I went on disregarding the most obvious intimations that she was not, until that still moment in the Indian Ocean, when silently, gently as a drowned body might rise out of the depths of a pool, that knowledge of love dead and honour gone for ever floated up into my consciousness.
"And then I felt that Amanda had cheated me! Outrageously.
Abominably.
"Now, so far as my intelligence goes, there is not a cloud upon this question.My demand upon Amanda was outrageous and I had no right whatever to her love or loyalty.I must have that very clear....
"This aristocratic life, as I conceive it, must be, except accidentally here and there, incompatible with the domestic life.
It means going hither and thither in the universe of thought as much as in the universe of matter, it means adventure, it means movement and adventure that must needs be hopelessly encumbered by an inseparable associate, it means self-imposed responsibilities that will not fit into the welfare of a family.In all ages, directly society had risen above the level of a barbaric tribal village, this need of a release from the family for certain necessary types of people has been recognized.It was met sometimes informally, sometimes formally, by the growth and establishment of special classes and orders, of priests, monks, nuns, of pledged knights, of a great variety of non-family people, whose concern was the larger collective life that opens out beyond the simple necessities and duties and loyalties of the steading and of the craftsman's house.
Sometimes, but not always, that release took the form of celibacy;but besides that there have been a hundred institutional variations of the common life to meet the need of the special man, the man who must go deep and the man who must go far.A vowed celibacy ceased to be a tolerable rule for an aristocracy directly the eugenic idea entered the mind of man, because a celibate aristocracy means the abandonment of the racial future to a proletariat of base unleaderly men.That was plain to Plato.It was plain to Campanelea.It was plain to the Protestant reformers.But the world has never yet gone on to the next step beyond that recognition, to the recognition of feminine aristocrats, rulers and the mates of rulers, as untrammelled by domestic servitudes and family relationships as the men of their kind.That I see has always been my idea since in my undergraduate days I came under the spell of Plato.It was a matter of course that my first gift to Amanda should be his REPUBLIC.Iloved Amanda transfigured in that dream....
"There are no such women....
"It is no excuse for me that I thought she was like-minded with myself.I had no sound reason for supposing that.I did suppose that.I did not perceive that not only was she younger than myself, but that while I had been going through a mill of steely education, kept close, severely exercised, polished by discussion, she had but the weak training of a not very good school, some scrappy reading, the vague discussions of village artists, and the draped and decorated novelties of the ‘advanced.' It all went to nothing on the impact of the world....She showed herself the woman the world has always known, no miracle, and the alternative was for me to give myself to her in the ancient way, to serve her happiness, to control her and delight and companion her, or to let her go.
"The normal woman centres upon herself; her mission is her own charm and her own beauty and her own setting; her place is her home.She demands the concentration of a man.Not to be able to command that is her failure.Not to give her that is to shame her.As I had shamed Amanda...."22
