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HAVELOCK ELLIS, p \, , , has & - AUTHOR. O. " * ...f.” :) “THREE MoDERN SEERs,” “My coPNISH NEIGHBOURs.” “KIT's woman,” “LovE-ACRE,” “THE IMPERISHABLE wing,” “ATTAINMENT." “THE LovER's CALENDAR,” ETC. TWITH A PREFA GE BY HA VELOCK ELLIS A PEIOTOGRAVUEE FRONTISPIECE AND SEVEN IILUSTRATIONS IN HALF-TONE LONDON STANLEY PAUL & CO 31 ESSEX STREET, STRAND, W.C.2 First published in 1918 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN §s { - Mrs. Havelock Ellis, the author of this book, died on the 14th of September, 1916, shortly after placing the completed MS. in the publishers’ hands. TO MY FRIEND EMILIE GRIGSBY THE CRYSTAL Wom AN PR E FA C E THE name of James Hinton is unfamiliar to the generation of to-day. Yet he was a man of passionately vivid and eager temperament, whose hands could not fail to leave the distinct impress of that temperament on any subject he touched. At the beginning of his career he wrote a book, Man and his Dwelling Place, which has little interest for us to-day, but made a considerable appeal to the thinkers of Hinton’s own generation; later he wrote a popular yet highly original book of biological character, Life in Nature, which still seems to me the most satisfactory of his books; he further accomplished good work in the special field of surgical practice to which he devoted himself, and as an aurist achieved com- plete professional success; finally, during the last years of his life, he became absorbed in social and moral problems, more especially those connected with sex, and accumulated vast piles of manuscript which he never worked up for publication. It so happened that, as a youth, a few years after Hinton’s death, I chanced to read Life in Nature, and the view of the natural world there presented, as at once scientifically explicable 1X X IPREFACE mechanism and a satisfyingly beautiful vision, greatly aided me in obtaining a harmonious con- ception of life and the Universe. I cannot say, however, that Hinton’s moral speculations, which I then knew nothing about, had any influence on my work in the field of sex; that work was, indeed, very largely a reaction against premature speculation, an attempt to reach the solid facts by which all mere speculation must be tested and measured. But I became generally inter- ested in Hinton. I obtained access to his un- published papers, and I assisted Mrs. Hinton in selecting and editing some of them under the title of The Law-breaker. Finally, it was Mrs. Hinton’s wish that I should ultimately put a complete presentation of his moral speculations before the world. With that end in view I read and extracted a large quantity of Hinton’s manuscript and collected the reminiscences of many of his friends. As years passed, however, I realised that the task I had undertaken pre- sented many difficulties, while at the same time I became more occupied with the very different, and even to some extent incongruous, work of my own. Finally, I abandoned my project. Some ten years ago, my wife became interested in Hinton, and spontaneously proposed to take up the task I had abandoned. In this she re- ceived the approval and encouragement of Hinton’s son, the late C. Howard Hinton. I handed over to her the material I had collected and the notes I had made, and she proceeded to PREFACE xi investigate Hinton’s manuscripts afresh and also obtained valuable aid from the more intimate of his few surviving friends. She has at inter- vals proceeded with this task ever since, ham- pered not only by some of the same difficulties I encountered, but also by a serious struggle with ill-health. The work has, however, re- mained entirely her own, and I have had nothing to do with either the planning or the writing of it. The final result, still imperfect as she would herself recognise, is here presented to the reader. This book is not, however, presented, I feel sure, with any view to a propaganda for those special solutions of social evils which haunted James Hinton. That, indeed, is one of the diffi- culties in dealing sympathetically with Hinton as a moralist; it is difficult, that is to say, to make clear that one may sympathise deeply with the spirit of his aims and yet be neither for nor against the precise ends of those aims. A thinker’s value for us is not always in propor- tion to the value of his detailed solution of prob- lems, but in proportion to the stimulating originality and courage with which he faces the problems. Here it is that Hinton's work shows a really inspiring quality, such as seems to have been felt by those who came in intimate contact with the man himself. And this inspiring quality is not merely due to his emotional temperament, the exalted temperament of a Shelley, but also, we realise when we read the material dealt with in the present volume, to a certain originality xii PREFACE of intellectual attitude. The fruitfulness of Pasteur’s work in biology was largely due to the fact that he turned to it with a new vision trained in a widely different field of chemistry. Hinton had not the genius of a Pasteur, but the stimulating freshness of his moral speculations is largely due to the fact that he turned to morals with a vision trained in a widely different field of biology. He brought his worship of Nature, that is to say, his belief in the progressively and flexibly vital and dynamic, into a field where, as men had usually been taught, it is the chief business of life to fight against Nature. When he once published a paper on “Force ’’ Tyndall remarked to him : “You have the physical mind,” and on turning to morals it was natural to Hinton to treat it as a problem in the re- distribution of force. Just as his earlier bio- logical book was called Life in Nature, so the later ethical book he proposed might well have been called Morals in Nature. For the text on which he is never weary of preaching is always : “Truth is truth to Nature; goodness is the goodness of Nature.” Needless to say, this fundamental principle never meant for Hinton licence, or selfishness, but rather the reverse. Yet the principle was so large, and in the moral field so unfamiliar, that he himself seems often to have been be- wildered and confused over its meaning. He never realised that in Society Nature comes to us, as it were, from afar, transformed into the historical traditions of our race, which we can PREFACE xiii but slowly remould, and that a direct appeal to Nature herself, apart from these traditions in which she reveals herself to us, although it may bring us face to face with the fundamental realities of the world, is apt to be dangerous, the reason being that our mental limitations scarcely permit us to formulate the details of our social life in terms of ultimate principles. Thus it is that, in reading Hinton, we are constantly repelled by elements which scarcely appeal to us as evidence of truth to Nature: old-fashioned interpretations of the Bible, re- iterated formulae, one-sided opinions on the “Woman-question.” This last has been felt by many as a serious stumbling-block in the way of appreciating Hinton’s attitude. Hinton had from the first a wide outlook on women’s ques- tions, and held that every woman should be brought up to a profession. But he was not in sympathy with the narrowly political “Women’s rights * movement of his time, and though that movement, as we now recognise, was circum- scribed and inevitably clashed in its manifesta- tions with Hinton’s conceptions of life, it yet possessed a significance and importance which he seems to have overlooked. At the present time, however, that difficulty has ceased to be serious. The questions of woman’s economic position and woman’s political rights, if not actually settled, are now placed on so firm a basis that Hinton’s lack of sympathy with the champions of “Woman’s rights * in his own time has ceased to be of the slightest b xiv. PREFACE consequence. The woman question is now enter- ing a new and larger phase which brings it near to precisely those fundamental problems with which Hinton was mainly concerned. Here it is that Hinton’s significance for us is seen. Half a century ago he was struggling with these very problems, among people for whom they had no meaning at all. To-day they have become intelligible. We realise the actuality of these problems, and can for the first time recognise the daring and the freshness, even the modernity, of the spirit in which he faced them and struggled with them. As we watch Hinton in this struggle, we seem sometimes to be conscious of a prophet who is caught up from the earth in a whirlwind he cannot control, and borne away in a chariot we cannot follow. But the challenging stimulus and inspiration of the spectacle may still remain with us. HAVELOCK ELLIS. August 1916. C O N T E N T S PAGE: JAMES HINTON º © & 4. & XIX INTRODUCTION © tº gº O . xxiii - CHAPTER I ANCESTRY AND LIFE . © o º I CHAPTER II THE PIONEER © º • • . 16 CHAPTER III THE LAw-BREAKER AND LAw-MAKER , 50 CHAPTER IV THE MYSTERY of PLEASURE AND PAIN . 77 CHAPTER V THE PURITAN AND THE PRODIGAL . & 98 XV xvi CONTENTS CHAPTER VI MONOGAMY AND PolyGAMY CHAPTER VII NATURE CHAPTER VIII GENIUS : ITS WHY AND WHEREFORE CHAPTER IX Wom.AN AND THE HOME CHAPTER X ART AND MORALs INDEx . PAGº I21 I85 I98 224 254 281 ... . . LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS JAMES HINTON . Photogravure Frontispiece FAOING PAGE REv. JAMES HINTON . • © c . 32 JAMES HINTON . o º e e . 64 MRS. JAMES HINTON . º o o . 96 18, SAVILE ROW, W. . e e º . I 28 HINTON's SON, WILLIE © • • . 176 MISS CAROLINE HADDON . e e . 224 A FRAGMENT OF HINTON's MS. * . 272 xvii 1822 I836 I838 I840 I842 l846 I847 1850 I852 J A M E S H IN TO N Born at Reading, the third child of John Howard Hinton, M.A., minister of the Hosier Street Baptist Chapel at Reading, and Eliza Birt, his wife. At school at Harpenden. Became cashier at a wholesale draper’s, 123, High Street, Whitechapel. Clerk in an Insurance Office in the City. Entered as a student St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Voyage to China as Surgeon of the passenger ship City of Derry. Qualified with distinction, having previously gained several medals. - In practice as an assistant at Newport, Essex. Medical Officer in charge of negro emigrants from Sierra Leone to Jamaica, where he remained at Roslyn for a year to satisfy himself as to their treatment and welfare, also taking medical charge of the Marine Hospital, the Gaol, and the Poorhouse. Returned to London, after visiting New Orleans, and entered into partnership with Mr. Fisher in Bartholomew Close, London. Became engaged to Miss Margaret Haddon, with whom he had been in love for ten years. Marriage. xix XX JAMES HINTON I852 1853 I856 1858 1859 I860 I862 I863 I866 In practice by himself as a London Surgeon in Charter House Square and specialising in aural Surgery. Birth of his son Howard. Began to write for publication, contributing papers on physiological and ethical subjects to the Christian Spectator. Published a paper in the Medico-Chirurgical Review “On Physical Morphology, or the Law of Organic Forms,” suggesting that organic growth takes place in the direction of least resistance, a generalisation afterwards em- bodied by Herbert Spencer in his First Prin- ciples. Published (at first anonymously) Man and his Dwelling Place : An Essay towards the In- terpretation of Nature. Encouraged by the success of this book, aban- doned practice for literature and settled in Tottenham. Published Life in Nature, previously issued serially, under the title of Physiological Riddles, in the Cornhill by Thackeray, who remarked: “Whatever else this man can do, he can write.” Returned to practice in George Street, Hanover Square, and was appointed Aural Surgeon at Guy’s Hospital, the post being specially created for him. Removed to 18, Savile Row, succeeding to the practice of the eminent aurist, Toynbee, and henceforth took the first rank in this branch of his profession. Published The Mystery of Pain : A Book for the Sorrowful, written three or four years earlier; Several editions have since appeared. JAMES HINTON xxi 1868 1869 1870 1871 I873 I874 Visited Germany and Austria to study condition of Aural Surgery. Commenced writing again, and henceforth largely devoted his evenings to setting down his thoughts. Published a pamphlet on Nursing as a Profession. Joined the Metaphysical Society at the request of Tennyson, and became a regular attendant at its meetings. At the beginning of this year his later moral doctrines first began to appear in his MSS. In this year he began (and completed in 1874) the private printing in four large volumes of un- revised MSS. written some ten years earlier, the last portion of the fourth volume, on Art, being more recent. They were placed in the British Museum Library and elsewhere. At the outbreak of the Franco-German War made a tour with his family through France and Spain and on to St. Michael’s in the Azores, where he had purchased a property, Grena. New and revised edition of Man and his Dwelling Place. Thoughts on Health and Some of its Conditions, previously printed in the Cornhill. Delivered the opening lecture of the Session at Guy’s Hospital Medical School on The Place of the Physician, published with other essays in the following year. Retired from practice and left Savile Row. Published the Questions of Aural Surgery and An Atlas of the Diseases of the Membrana Tympani, the drawings for which were executed by Mrs. Hinton ; these books embodied the outcome of his professional work. xxii JAMES HINTON I875 I878 I879 I881 I884 I886 Also in this year edited Physiology for Practical Use by various writers in two volumes. In South Wales investigating the causes of a great strike among the miners at Merthyr Tydvil. Sailed in the autumn with his family to settle on his estate and grow Oranges at St. Michael’s. Died in Hospital at St. Michael’s on December 16 and buried in the churchyard of the English Church at Ponta Delgada. Life and Letters of James Hinton, edited by Ellice Hopkins, with an Introduction by Sir William Gull. Chapters on the Art of Thinking and Other Essays, edited by C. H. Hinton, with an Introduction by Shadworth Hodgson. Philosophy and Religion, being passages from the early printed Selections from Manuscripts, edited by Caroline Haddon. The Law-breaker and the Coming of the Law, edited by Mrs. Hinton from the later Manu- scripts, with an Introduction by Havelock Ellis. The Larger Life: Studies in Hinton’s Ethics, by Caroline Haddon, with some of Hinton’s un- published letters. IN T R O DUCTION THE reformer as seer, or pioneer, introduces into the community a new aspect of law, the breaking of the form of the law leading to its true keeping in the 'spirit. So at least it always seemed to Hinton. The wrong, cries this seer, is in the soul. A virtue that harms others is as bad as a vice that harms others. The moral aim must be for a spiritually flexible law. That things are not to be seen as they are in themselves, but in their relation, is his constant assertion. This new life corresponds, according to Hinton, to the higher life of the moth. When this is on its way a great process of decay sets in—a casting off of that which was its very substance and which no knife but that of its own life could have dissected out without leaving it a shapeless ruin. What R. H. Hutton, in an article on James Hinton, called the “wistful and sanguine, almost hectic idealism of James Hinton ’’ found in such solutions of the problems of love itself a new interpretation. In an intuitive moment he saw how and why man fails. A spiritual power must be used in spiritual relations for spiritual ends, and the love of the soul in the body is surely this. Hinton, in his philosophy, was always seeking xxiii xxiv. INTRODUCTION to put new wine into old bottles. He wanted to use the symbolism of the Bible as the theo- logical mind uses it, while courageously building on these beautiful symbols an entirely new meaning for evolved human beings. He tried to bind his ideas about the flexibility of love in old superstitious swaddling bands. That was one of his blunders. Through it he became tied in his own knot by still seeming to cater for men’s passions with a remedy Abraham’s dis- ciples would have accepted. It is thus true that he has not in places pro- ceeded on wholly advanced lines. He wanted to reform some effete ideas instead of sweeping them away altogether. Yet Hinton knew, as few know, that it is not another world we need, but this world, made good, sweet, and clean by a new thought of right. Hinton considered that morals are automatic when the heart is right, but that we must com- bine old suppressed facts with the new vision. “We need to see the suppressed thing come back perfected. In this may it be that England (and perhaps America) is specially advanced ? Have they passed soonest through this process of suppression ? So is not Love (so called) itself to alter its character ? Will it not rise to such a different thing that men shall look back on what we now even rightly and justly call love as a brutal passion—the passion that de- mands, that tolerates, that its object should make comfort its end and centre 2 Will not men come to look on that feeling (that which INTRODUCTION XXV has the name of love among the best of us) as we now look on mere sensuality ?” Our still existing ideal has not been a success in practice. It is the things that are not good enough, said Hinton, which fail to succeed. Hinton once said that his heart had at last withdrawn into his brain, that the personal was absorbed in the universal, and that he would be glad to be bad, as the world called it, in order that others could be good. “In respect to my work about Ethics, I tremble, I shudder, as I think of it. I seem like a person who has walked over a precipice impassible to the waking step and who wakes up and shudders to see where he has been and feels that he would not for his life attempt it again.” He talks about his dynamic vision. What Tyndall said to him when commenting on a paper of his on “Force” was : “You have the physical mind.” He perceived the universal relations of force, and expressed them in the sphere of morals and of love by the light of the man-woman soul within him. In this way he often argues that “It is not self-goodness against self-passion which is the true struggle, but goodness and passion, united, against self. Let the forces arrange themselves but truly, and the fight is done.” A friend says of him : “The sexual passion gave him the very closest feeling of contact with the spiritual— not only in its emotional aspects, though they are wonderful and reduce to merely nothing the sensational, but in ways quite mysterious and unsayable. He made one think that if it had xxvi INTRODUCTION not been for that experience, so absolutely and intensely identifying the physical and spiritual, we could never have known that the two were One.” . In his books and his manuscripts, Hinton again and again seeks to show the difference in action of the mere theoretic conception of good and the idealistic carrying out of well-devised means to that good. He says thus that “A false sacredness is a fatal injury to man. It adds such power to the passion itself, gives it such a morbid, a diseased intensity. It is the secret of a great part of practical impurity, by the morbid desire and the irrational with- holdings which it sets up. It is like what is noted of drunkenness. It adds to the desire and diminishes the pleasure. It makes a morbid desire at once infinitely harder to resist and a pleasure infinitely less.” We have been seeking good in restraint of passion, which is an attempt, he declares, to Tevivify asceticism, and so we feel evil and court failure. What we must do is to alter our view, and let what we seek be a passion not needing restraint, and then it is transformed. “Man is not a sense-creature,” he cries, “but a soul-creature, and he cannot live with his life affirming the contrary. Only by his life being as the soul demands and the body accepting whatever that may bring—yes, even though it be mere pleasure—can he fulfil his real nature.” He believed that what conduces to most joy conduces to most good. INTRODUCTION xxvii James Hinton was a seer in the sense that he saw the difference between actual truth and verbal truth. He felt that we have been clinging to a false right and following a false command- ment. The true right is not in an action at all, but in motive—whether the action is, Or is not, for self only. The soul cannot be sacrificed to the senses, but the senses should be joyful ser- vants of the soul. To live this out is often only a matter of giving up appearances and holding on to facts. “Here there is a true thought of joy,” he tells us. “Strong sensuous passions, of any and every kind, mighty impulses of sense and flesh (nay, strong temptations of the devil too), are not evil things, nor do they bar the good; they are its accompaniments, its servitors, its instruments whereby it rules, and exercises its mightiest dominion. Ever the hero has them, the man who most easily and utterly throws self away. The body is not evil, or to be dreaded ; it gives, and it alone, the true temper to the soul. In the mighty passions, in the impulses which, abused to self, most degrade, lies not the world’s danger, but its hope. What things most hurt us, ever, but the things destined most to serve *IS 2 ** - What Hinton demanded was that the “self ‘’ should be cast out of goodness. He demanded that we should cease to banish goodness from all that is pleasurable. He had great faith in humanity, and knew, as the seer alone knows, that there is no such thing as “badness,” only ignorance and weakness and struggle. Man’s xxviii INTRODUCTION seeing is his refusal to see, and the seer is the man who cannot go on refusing. He asks us : “Is it not true, as true in spiritual things as in physical, that the eye sees that which it brings with it the power to see ? Does not the soul find in its fellow creatures that which it looks for 2 ” The man who declared that “the use of the sexual passion is to create such a passion for good that even itself shall be at its feet,” had the insight of a seer. He saw that the sexual passion is not a simple thing, but many things in one, not the least being a new inspiration for the spiritual life. In the basis of the sexual passion, as he saw it, body was included with spirit. Hinton was possessed with the idea that what we need in our future civilisation is an entirely new thought of morals, so that in throwing aside the old traditions we can realise a more wonderful spiritual life far beyond anything into which mere legalities can force us. A passion for service rather than a lust for self-virtue, a desire to fly rather than a willingness to crawl, is what Hinton suggested. He voiced the great truth that it is hopeless to seek a remedy in external change, but only in a change of Outlook, and hence of action. It is this change of Outlook, and suggestions as to where change of action may come about, that make the study of Hinton worth while. - E. M. O. ELLIS. JAMES HINTON CHAPTER I ANCESTRY AND LIFE THE Hintons have often been noted personalities. It is interesting to trace how the same charac- teristics of combined rebellion and humility run through several generations.” The Rev. James Hinton, grandfather of the James Hinton whose life and thought we have here to study, had many of the family traits. His Biographical Portraiture was published in 1824 by his son, the Rev. John Howard Hinton. This life was written, not so much as a record of events, as “ to delineate his character.” The grandfather of the subject of the Bio- * One of these remarkable personalities, Surgeon-Major H. B. Hinton, a cousin of James Hinton, died this year (1916) after living simply and abstemiously to the advanced age of 103, in excellent health to the last and able to read without glasses. He distinguished himself in the Indian Mutiny, China, and else- where, and spent his declining years in Adelaide, South Australia. He was a man of vigorous and original personality, to the verge of eccentricity, and, as he possessed all the Hintonian spirit of rebellion against authority, he was frequently at loggerheads with his official superiors. See Lancet, July 8, 1916, and British Medical Journal, March 15, 1913, where his portrait will be found. l 2 JAMES HINTON graphical Portraiture of the Rev. James Hin- ton, M.A., one Charles Hinton, settled in 1712 at Charlton-upon-Otmoor in Oxfordshire. Al- though he was of unblameable morals and punc- tual in the forms of religion, he was, like many others in those days, violently prejudiced against Evangelical piety, which was then ridiculed under the name of Presbyterianism. He had six sons, and had to place them in work. One was sent to the family of a Mr. Bolton at Chipping Norton, but under a solemn pledge never to enter a meeting-house. He found his master a good and happy man, so he began to make inquiries as to why this vow was asked of him, and, though he had promised not to enter the meeting-house, he saw no objection to listening at the door. He was converted, and slowly he converted the whole of his family, even his mother and the children. Thomas, his fifth son, was the father of the Rev. James Hinton. He had a remarkable dream, when young, about the Judgment Day, and it changed his life. “My father,” his son tells us, “ placed no dependence on the dream itself, and often said that it is not the way in which divine truth reaches the mind that ought to be regarded, but the effect which it produces.” Thomas Hinton, a “man of great piety and worth,” settled in Buckingham and married a Miss Mary Strange of Aylesbury, a woman of exemplary piety and remarkable strength of character. James, the second son, was born in 1761. Like his father he met with much opposition, ANCESTRY AND LIFE 3 but, like his more famous namesake and grand- son, even in early life he showed “a spirit of daring enterprise and undaunted resolution, together with a generous self-devotion which always made the cares of the oppressed his own.” On one occasion, for the purpose of preventing him from attending chapel, some distance away, the knockers were forced from nearly all the doors in Buckingham, and thrown through a light over the door into the passage of his house, on a Saturday night, so that the Sabbath was disturbed by a multitude of persons coming to discover and reclaim their property. At eleven years old he was discovered writing his own ideas in his copy-books instead of the words exhibited for his imitation. At fifteen a crowd of evil and wicked thoughts, so he tells us, broke in upon him. These were, in fact, certain objec- tions to Christianity which he had heard from the workmen in his father’s shop. After baptism at the age of twenty (for he joined the Baptist Church) he kept a diary. Here are some ex- tracts : + “April 19th, 1794.—On the whole I have been rather slow and uncomfortable in mind, though not without a mixture of cheerful hope. “August 23rd.—A calm, comfortable, and spiritual week, blessed be God. “October 25th.--A good week. I hope corrup- tion has been kept low, though I have many struggles in my heart. “June 13th.-I have been in the presence of God, reviewing my past life for seven or eight 4. JAMES HINTON weeks. I find that I have, through a great pressure of family care, and constant engage- ments in the school, in visiting and in public labours, and, above all, through a culpable negligence, which has its source in aversion to God and devotion, but too much reason to use the language of Solomon : “They made me keeper of the vineyards, but mine own vineyard have I not kept.’” - Two more extracts from his diary will suffice to convey his cast of mind. “August 24th, 1798.-Comfortable in morning devotion and diligent in business through the day. Found my mind hurt, that is unfitted for devotion, by reading Shakespeare’s, All’s Well that Ends Well. Could not recover a good frame for prayer-meeting, was obliged to fly to the well-known blessed fountain that is open for guilt. Blessed be God, it is still open. “September 27th, 1799.-I still find myself prone to earthly enjoyments, too little alone in the right frame of mind, too apt to speak hasty words, and above all harassed with a latent infidelity, an evil heart of unbelief.” In 1788, he had become minister of the Congre- gational Church at Oxford, an important and arduous position in which he spent his life. He married Miss Ann Taylor in 1790; she belonged to the energetic and intellectual stock of the Taylors of Ongar, being the daughter of Josiah Taylor the engraver, and aunt to the well-known writers, Isaac, Ann, and Jane Taylor. The first child, born in 1791, was named John Howard, ANCESTRY AND LIFE 5 in accordance with a half-playful request of the famous philanthropist to his mother before her marriage. John Howard Hinton, Baptist minister of Devonshire Chapel, was at one time the most intellectual dissenting preacher in London. His son James Hinton, in culture, tenderness, and poetic impulse was finer than the father, but both were beyond their time. Mr. George Peard, who wrote an article on the father and son in the Contemporary Review (1878) after The Life and Letters of James Hinton appeared, remarks that, as a thinker, the father moved in fetters. He was considered a dangerous man because he preached against a material hell-fire. Intenselp musical, as his son was, he was also a “bitter disputant.” He married Eliza Birt, described as a noble woman whose conversation was de- lightful. James, the third of a family of eleven children, was born at Reading in 1822. He married Margaret Haddon in 1852, and died at St. Michael’s in the Azores on December 16, 1875. In studying James Hinton, whose life has been written by Miss Ellice Hopkins," it is not necessary to give the external details of his history so much as to analyse the trend of his work and aims in the spiritual adventures and amid the economic conditions which belong to the new civilisation he foreshadowed. In Ellice Hopkins’s life of the man, and in Three Modern * Life and Letters of James Hinton, by Ellice Hopkins, 1878 (Kegan Paul). 6 JAMES HINTON Seers,” the details are to be found, in the same way that one would describe a canary’s cage and habits, rather than his way of singing. The inheritance of James Hinton is clearly proved in his life and his writings, but in this sketch the new Over-man must be more minutely analysed. At the outset I cannot perhaps do better than to quote the words (referring to a press criticism of Three Modern Seers) of Hinton’s friend, the late Mrs. Everest Boole, widow of the great mathematician:-"It would not be my place to make any comment, if James Hinton had not asked me to interpose in this matter, if ever the need should occur. Reading Mrs. Ellis’s book was like being back in the company of the dear “Wizard ” himself in the Savile Row house. Hinton was emphatically a thought- artist, a teacher of the “Art of Thinking’ in the fullest sense of “Art for Art’s sake.” He was related to it as a dancer is to the art of locomo- tion, the test being, not where one gets to, but the rhythm of the motion. He was, by in- clination, an abstemious and virtuous man, but I think there was hardly any crime that he would not have committed, if the only other alternative had been going down to posterity in the character of a propagandist of any ethical conclusion. He aimed to give to the world the artist’s joy in the act of thought-sequence. He saw, with passionate grief, that moralists were trying to hitch his influence on to some definite * Three Modern Seers, by Mrs. Havelock Ellis, 1910 (Stanley Paul.) ANCESTRY AND LIFE 7 moral dictum or pronouncement. Trying to hitch him on to this or that opinion, was like trying to hitch Turner on to some theory that painting ought to be done in greys or in reds. “For every true artist, conduct (namely sequence and combination) is everything. In- dividual acts matter nothing; but the region to which this law applies depends on the art which he professes. For the musician the se- quence and combination of notes are all in all. No note is prohibited or is compulsory. For the painter no colour is compulsory or forbidden. For the thought-artist no opinion is right or is wrong. The all-important thing is the conduct of the thinking-machinery. T-----~ “James Hinton once said to me something to the effect that the value of Christianity depends on the fact that it forces on the convert, once for all, the meanest and vilest of mental acts, the accepting of an innocent victim ; after which (he considered) there could be no further question of any act being right or wrong in itself. Nothing put him into such white rages of wrath as any one ‘accepting Christ' and after that bothering other people with notions of particular acts being right or wrong. “Hinton’s material was, at one time, the evolu- tion of ferns and flowers; at another, the evolu- tion of quadratic equations; later on, the evolution of laws about sex-questions. But the motif was always the same—the Rhythm of Thought. “James Hinton had no views as to whether monogamy or polygamy was the best. He 8 JAMES HINTON objected to sham monogamy as bad art; it accustoms people to false canons of the Art of Thinking. He had no more views or principles than a weathercock. He ‘found and gave new passion and new joy, that nought but Earth’s destruction can destroy,” as George Eliot says Of Jubal.” - Perhaps it needs a complex man with much of the woman in him, or a complex woman with much of the man in her, for the “Art of Thinking ” in the modern social or even sexual problem; but even these, more numerous than we imagine, are still hide-bound by the masculine or feminine belief that the one must be more or less of a dogmatist and the other a door-mat. Hinton had much of the woman in his nature, so he realised, what all advanced women know, that there must be no longer possession in persons, and that individual persons belong, in the cosmic consciousness, to a great whole, and in the limitations of mortal life to themselves, in order that they may give freely to others. Hinton realised that Truth, like Love, only mates with its own, and, like Love, no blasphemer can destroy it, and no miser hoard it. What is truth in Hinton’s teaching will germinate, and what is false will be useful to serve a “ forward end,” as is all pain, accepted in the right spirit. Complex as Hinton was, and also sincere, he was not always subtle enough to convey to his hearers the inner strength and purpose of his own teaching. The home influences of his early life, including the death of his eldest brother, ANCESTRY AND LIFE 9 his school life, and above all his work in White- chapel, where he met the problems in full force which he felt called upon to try and readjust later, were not conducive to health. He once heard a clergyman’s wife call some one “A regular Whitechapel wretch.” “I was a regular Whitechapel wretch as she spoke,” he says, “ and all vile things in me I love if they make me one with them.” He suffered, as many pioneers suffer, from a tension of brain and heart which made practical idealistic work almost impossible at times. His early attachment to his future wife, Margaret Haddon, and the train- ing for a medical profession made him seek other than merely orthodox courses. He went out to China as a ship’s surgeon, and returned to England with new ideas when he took his medical diploma. These led him to take charge of Negro emigrants to Jamaica, where he remained as assistant surgeon for some time. From his letters at that time we realise the magnitude of his religious difficulties, dealt with, side by side with the problems of love, in many letters to his future wife. His first experiments in medi- cine were in relation to aural Surgery, and in addition he studied homoeopathy, moral drug- ging, the use and abuse of drink. He analysed the physical power of the emotions, and even the physiology of blushing and the use of a tear, as well as the nature of the brain and the mating of matter and spirit. All these ques- tions, and many more, became the bed-rock of a philosophy which, interesting as it is in the IO JAMES HINTON hastily written notes of his unpublished manu- scripts, have not as yet been given to the world as he felt them, and now and then presented them to his patients and friends. His thoughts about good and evil, asceticism, self-tormenting, love of woman, prostitution, Nature, brought on often a mental depression the healer experiences from those he would heal. Man and His Dwelling Place, Thoughts on Health, The Mystery of Pain, and Life in Nature reveal much that he had thus won. As life went on his excitability increased, in spite of his happy home life and the devotion of many friends. He retired from practice at last, and dwelt on the dynamic relations of evil and good. The nervous depression and exhaustion increased, and he set sail for his estate in the Azores with the hope of cure and a new adaptability for work. Worry, through loss of property, to- gether with the martyrdom the seeker for truth always endures, set up inflammation of the brain, and on December 16, 1875, James Hinton passed into those regions where truth is no indecency and love a trumpet-call. His body rests in the churchyard of the little English church at Ponta Delgada. “The perfect circle of Eternity Is but a crooked line in time.” Hinton was one of the thinkers who seem to have realised that Beauty, Love, Joy, Morality, Genius, Art, and Nature are rounds in a great spiral, and not contradictions of one another. ANCESTRY AND LIFE II. If the foundation of the spiral is sound, and in it the true controlling force, all must be well, as the whole body must be well if the heart and circulation are healthy. Hinton had an almost unique point of view towards Art, Morals, and Genius. What he slowly came to realise as a moralist he found in studying Music and Paint- ing, and what he intuitively grasped while listening to Mozart or studying Turner’s pictures, he constructed into a parallel for morals. Paint- ing taught him life and Music taught him Love." “‘Doing evil that good may come,’” he wrote, “is the very opposite of this positive denial of the right; the negative opposite; and surely every positive has this same negative opposite. Sin is an “ignorance,” and like it— like every negative—has its use. The whole idea is of morals becoming dynamic—a matter of Life and not of forms—and fulfilling the con- ditions for being dynamic, which is, becoming true to Nature. And it is but again the law that, perfectly to have, we must give up.” Miss Caroline Haddon, his sister-in-law and devoted disciple,” declared that Hinton’s spiritual biography has yet to be written. He saw that sense is to be interpreted, and not succumbed to or fled from. All great births are preceded by spasms and convulsions. A real conversion is a convulsion of the soul, such as Hinton certainly experienced. As man and pioneer, he refused 1 See Havelock Ellis, “Hinton’s Later Thought,” Mind, No. XXXV. 1884. * See especially her essays, The Larger Life. I2 JAMES HINTON to accept wrong as right, and the merely per- sonal as the equivalent of the divine. He always had a horror of any attitude correspond- ing to the one of a child with a plate of food who insists on spreading its arms round it, and so keeping hungry children away. Forty years ago the fight for new ideals in these matters was almost a single-handed one, and Hinton some- times seems to have lost hope. The real result of his work is still to be seen. For Hinton, the secret lies in becoming dynamic, because reforma- tion is a matter of Life, and not of forms, and being true to Nature is quite as essential as being courageous, or even polite and distinguished. That he died too soon is apparently sad, but when a ditch is filled with the bodies of dead men it is easier to those who come after to climb the wall. Hinton saw that what is amiss in the world is that the disorder, wrong, and difficulty of our practical life is due to our thoughts being wrong about goodness and badness. Woods Hutchinson says, in his excellent book on Common Diseases, that “virtues sometimes seem as dangerous as vices if not indulged in with strict moderation.” Contemptible superstition is the real name of many a virtue, and a longing for joy the name of many a vice. Hinton tells us plainly that “it is not at all in what things are, but in whether they are done for self or not, that the moral question lies, not in whether indulgence is virtue, but in whether self-in- dulgence is self-virtue. But we, leaving out this question of whether the doing is for self ANCESTRY AND LIFE I3 or not, have had, of course, to make up other moral questions of things : to make out some things moral, and some immoral.” “I seem almost reconciled to anything I understand,” he wrote in 1859. “My claim is to know. I don’t wish things to be one way rather than another, but let me know the nature of the case. It is my nature to demand first knowledge before acting. I must first see the thing good.” He knew his own characteristics as well as those of others. “I know the woman in myself so clearly. I have precisely, and as strongly as can be, those unreasoned, unjustifiable con- victions beforehand—prejudices most justly so called. But this is the difference—the woman holds to them and from me they are blown away at the least breath of evidence to the contrary.” In a passage from one of his letters to Miss Caroline Haddon (not inserted in the Life and Letters) Hinton says: “Orthodoxy is like some great blind prophet uttering, under an inspira- tion he does not know, great words he does not understand.” Hinton did know, and he de- clared that a nation of hypocrites is not a nation of the righteous; he declared that if his ideas were accepted in One or two generations he would be satisfied. It is from women he expects the new effort to gain a real civilisation. “It is said, and truly enough, that the civilisa- tion of Europe, firm as it looks, is but as a crust over a volcano; the fiercest forces are restrained beneath, and might at any moment not only 14 JAMES HINTON break out, but spread indefinitely. And not only is this true, but it is true also that nothing but a change of the whole substance of the life can do away with that condition. Now does it not seem as if to women only was truly given the power to do this ; as if in their hands alone there existed a real opportunity for giving in any true sense deep enough for the need ? They can ; but who else 2 How can any others do anything of real potency of the same kind 3 The rich, e.g.—how can they, in any radical sense, give 2 What would come of it but pampering on the One hand and waste of means of life on the other ? what good in all being poor together ? But women can give; they have possession of the talisman.” About men he declared that : “In making that new right which alone can reorganise the world, how shall the man who does it know Ż How shall he be sure that he is not misled, that he does not give up what he ought not or how he ought not, or affirm bonds that are undue 2 How shall he be sure that his con- victions do not mislead him, and especially since the true right must have a wrong in it, must involve violations not only of customary right, but of that the rightness and unspeakable value and beauty of which no one feels more strongly than himself? How is he to go steadily and with clear vision here, and to know that he does so, to know that the wrongs he accepts are the right wrongs 2 Can it be by a primary and exclusive relation to the moral, or must it not ANCESTRY AND LIFE 15 be given by a previous experience in a region not moral, but intellectual—a training, ob- serve, like that given to man by childhood— later, a time and sphere in which errors are of no moment and experience can be safely gained —an experience teaching him to know truth when he possesses it, to be sure of the conditions to which it is given. So on every man who is to recreate morality is there laid, necessarily, a previous task of intellectual vision.” Ascetic restraint often bases itself on absorp- tion of thought in the sensuous and the selfish. What, after all, Hinton asks, if what is really at the basis of the great social evils of the day were an ascetic restraint 2 CHAPTER II THE PIONEER, JAMES HINTON was at once scientific and hysterical, pure and yet sensuous, longing for rest and yet driven to incessant change and excitement. He was Quixotic and practical, sane in outlook, and yet having moods which had all the appearance of instability and weak- ness. Born into Anglo-Saxon surroundings and conventions, he seemed a cosmopolitan spirit with the humour and daring of a Celt. His magnetic power, versatility, love of novelty, and a longing for sympathy combined with a de- licious childlikeness, made him at once a delight and a conundrum to his friends and followers. His magnetic influence over others, especially women, was the outcome of these characteristics. Some one has said of his ideas that it is like learning a new language really to understand him, for in his life and in his work he was at once far beyond his time, and yet unable to cope with the difficulty of keeping abreast of it while trying to carry his ideals into practice. He was at moments like the man to whom he refers in his manuscripts, walking beneath arches too low to allow him to stand upright and content to creep under them on all fours. At other 16 THE PIONEER I'7 times he was like the same man, who, at length seeing the arches were too low for the upright human being, attempts to throw them down and build others in their place. Yet Hinton’s own vision (new in many ways in the history of the world) of the great problems of desire, happiness, pleasure, and pain never led him to active revolt. An old friend says of him : “I cannot recall a single instance in which his influence led either woman or man to rebel, although he breathed into many a courage ripe for martyrdom.” It is not as an infallible interpreter of truth that Hinton comes before us, but rather as a personality resembling the irresolute Peter who was the rock upon which the Founder of Chris- tianity built His Church, or even the Magdalen who learnt through much loving. Hinton was a living proof of his own declaration that weakness is an intrinsic part of the genius through which Nature often gives her great messages. Miss Caroline Haddon finds a similarity in Hinton’s declaration that “a goodness that is possible to me is not impossible to the worst,” to St. Paul proclaiming that he was himself “the chief of sinners.” He pointed out clearly to those who knew him intimately that every “mischief right,” or goodness, in the world has a “non- sense reason,” and it is the work of the pioneer or the seer to sift the wheat from the chaff and the sense from the nonsense. Mistakes do not hurt, Hinton declares, so much as self-virtues, deliberate cruelty, base jealousy, or reckless self-indulgence. 2 I8 JAMES HINTON “Let that feeling once be that goodness and purity can be something else than what most aids man, something to which man’s visible good can be sacrificed, and then it is a matter of accident what it leads to ; all cruelty, all de- struction are involved in it ; what form of destruction and blasting of human life, of human bodies and human souls alike, shall come of it, is left to the caprice of Satan. By that feeling he can lead us blindfold, helpless, to anything. For he has our very virtue, our aims and effort after purity and good, to lead us by. In their name he can say to us ‘So destroy your fellow,” and man cannot refuse him. If we will let being good and serving God mean injuring our fellow, then we have delivered our- selves bound hand and foot to be instruments of cruelty, and cannot even struggle against it, for it is to us struggling against good. All the cruelties enacted in the name of God and for virtue’s sake we shudder at them—as children burnt at idol shrines. But how can we think that more cruel than we ?” And again he declares : “Even so is it not with our “virtues ? So long as they oppose, and so far as they put aside, selfishness, love of self-indulgence, disregard of service, they are truly right and good; but when they begin to oppose service, to forbid giving, to silence pity, then they are proved falsely right and good, and their end too has come.” Sanctimonious hypocrites and prim prudes, through either their inexperience or their lack THE PIONEER I9 of courageous adventure, are those Hinton found it so difficult to persuade that coldness does not necessarily imply morality, nor the conventional following of tradition, spirituality. He declares that a fear of trusting to the best in man is like the fear of a person who has not learnt to Swim. Fear is the bugbear hindering the new civilisation. “Not in restraints accepted,” he Says, “ but in restraints made needless, lies man’s true triumph of achievement.” Hinton was one of the pioneers who realised how men violate, in mere bewilderment, their own consciences and deepest feelings, and so Often those who mean the best fall into the deepest pitfalls. “The infamy of ‘greed is what the good so often desire,” he writes, and with a blending of pity and contempt he assures us that much of our cherished virtue is enough to arouse the laughter of every devil in hell. Towards the close of his life, in 1870, he declared that the new education will consist in letting people educate themselves, even by their own mistakes. Children must be taught, he said, not only never to grudge their own pleasure or pain, but to realise that through them they can help others. “There is nothing too good to be given up, to be used,” he cried. “Whatever fails, unseen ends are served; better ends than those which failed,” he declares again and again. Impurity makes false laws. “I must be a person not making things evil,” he cried. But, like all experimenters in a new order, Hinton found himself unbalanced and distraught through 20 JAMES HINTON personal perplexities and the blindness of others. He faced, as a child would face, certain diffi- cult problems. He became as John in the wilderness, with the added burden of going in and out amongst men to earn money for his family. In a letter by Sir Samuel Wilks in the Lancet dated January 8, 1876, we find this passage : “When I say Hinton was one of the most re- markable men in our profession, I feel astonished that he was ever in it, but being in it he was not of it. I believe accident alone must have made him a medical student, just as a kind of chance gave him his specialty. Of all the mistakes (as he often told me) which people made about him, the greatest of all was that of regarding him as an eminent doctor. . . . Once, when twitting him upon his numerous patients and large fees, he said that the harder he worked the sooner he would gain his freedom. . . . He always spoke of his indebtedness to Coleridge for affording him the true interpretation of this great mystery [of life]. Coleridge had regarded life as an all- pervading essence, but more concentrated or * individualised in man. Man therefore be- came the possessor of consciousness, and ob- tained of necessity an erroneous idea of the living world around him. That the whole world, organic and inorganic, was living was the centre round which Hinton’s mind evolved, . . . Scien- tific, in the ordinary sense of the word, he was not . . . he was eminently a seer. . . . Some thought his writings merely oddities; others THE PIONEER 21 thought he was propagating a new gospel which would soon number countless devotees.” Hinton was rent by the apparent contra- dictions of his theories when attempted in practice, and also by the vagaries of his most ardent and unintelligent followers, often leading to disaster. He was enthused by purity yet exalted into indiscretions, giving himself and others away to simpletons in the heat of propa- ganda, and almost done to death through the absurd and tragic results which sometimes fol- lowed. He said himself it would take two hundred years for his ideas to work out, and yet he pointed them out to his followers as if they must be patented and tried in every household the next day. His revolutionary suggestions on sexual matters for the renovation of morals, and his drastic conclusions for the reformation of prigs and hypocrites, were so often lacking in humour that it is no wonder his listeners ran away open-mouthed crying, “This man hath a devil.” He had no time to co-ordinate his ideas, and the crowd had no time to disintegrate the weak from the strong or the false from the true. His death from cerebral tumour was apparently a triumph for the virtuous, who well know what they do when they irritate, challenge, and at last spiritually crucify a sincere ex- perimentalist in the arts of love and life. He desired to be a knight of the Holy Ghost, “born of the water and of the wind,” as he liked to express the fluid and active forces of nature. It was no light thing for such a nature to try 22 JAMES HINTON sincerely to follow his own teaching, and give up his best because he believed a better would emerge. His tortured physical nerves were com- bined with a depression which brought in its train a doubt at last, not only of himself but of His vision, through the dubiousness about it in the minds of those he loved. It was even more difficult to survive the strain forty years ago, when he stood almost alone in the fine con- ception of a new love and a new life. The curse of the pioneer fell on him in its most subtle form, the paining of those dearest and nearest by a wish to experiment with the new truths as well as to proclaim them. In seeking to combine purity and passion into one, he was willing to surrender personal peace in order to gain a new understanding for the community of the worth of human love. All mistakes may be forgiven one who loved as Hinton loved his race. He never thought of his own peace or pleasure alone, but of the ultimate good of all. Two personal letters about him, one from a man and another from a woman, may throw light on his personality from this point of view. One is from the Rev. Stopford Brooke, when, after the publication of Three Modern Seers, I wrote to ask if he had any letters throwing new light on Hinton’s ideals : “I have no letters or papers. All my rela- tions with Hinton were represented by conversa- tions, not by writing. He came in here at night often, and used to talk till two in the morning. He was a seer as you say, but he never took any THE PIONEER 23 real pains to make the ordinary man see what he saw. He said he did ; but he couldn’t manage it. His scientific work forced him into definition, and was the anchor of his life. It kept him from useless divagations. I implored him not to give it up. ‘Work at it all day,” I said, “ and write your metaphysics in the evening. You have lots of time, and your daily practice will steady your ideas and their presentation in metaphysics.” He would not listen, and what I feared took place. He never did any good metaphysical work afterwards, and he indulged himself in views against which the whole of society was antagonised, and this was too much for him. To be antagonised by society is often a proof, or rather a result, of greatness and good- ness, when the views society opposes are just and noble. But, while Hinton himself was almost always noble, his views in later years on some social matters were those of a faddist, and not of a seer; and the practice of them, while things are as they are, would have done great harm to human affairs. He felt the pull against him more than I could have believed, and it gnawed at his soul and his brain.” The other letter is from one I will call simply “Evelyn,” as she desires, for she is still living. As a girl great sympathy existed between her and James Hinton, but “Evelyn’s ” father was antagonistic to the friendship, and a letter Hinton wrote to their mutual friend Mrs. B., shows his human and unselfish attitude. This letter was written for “Evelyn '' and given 24 JAMES HINTON to her by Mrs. B. thirty-four years after he wrote it. “ 18, SAVILE Row, LONDON, W. ** 23.6.1871. “As I was writing just now the feeling came over me that some day (when I am dead I mean) Evelyn will long to know and be quite sure what I felt and thought about her now. So will you keep it for her, in my own handwriting, that I was quite sure all along that she was all the while the same to me as always, and that she did but carry out what she said in her letter to you ; that for nothing would she give her father pain; which also is what I should have wished. If she did not falter or doubt at all, standing alone as she did with all she was bound most to regard and reverence opposed to her, that was more than human power could be expected to be capable of. But I never doubted once what her own heart and conscience said, and never had any pain about it except for her pain, which I accepted as a gift from her, and knew she was willing to give it. “Will you keep, too, as a record for her, this which I have said to you before; that my life was of infinitely more value to me for what she did for me, which I think no one else could have done, or done so well; that she gave to me enough, enough for one life; that needed no adding to complete it. If any late work of mine lives as any power in men’s hearts, it is she lives in it; not alone indeed, but indis- pensably. You will be very kind in doing this.” THE PIONEER 25 “Evelyn,” when answering a letter from me about James Hinton, writes as follows: “Your letter deeply touched and interested me. I have only one of Mr. Hinton’s letters now. Many, I regret to say, were destroyed years ago. This one is not addressed direct to me, as he had promised my father that he would not write to me again, so he wrote as you see indirectly. What can I say ? “Only this : that James Hinton was the inspirer and is the inspirer of my higher life. I owe everything that really counts to him and his teaching. “He was thinking towards the Light, but things confused his utterance a little. He was emphatically a seer. “And what did he see ? “That Love should be the only ‘Lord of Life,” and, if that is so, sacrifice, pain, sorrow (born in a mystic way for the redemption of the world), is joy, unutterable joy. “There is no separation of the ‘good from the bad (both misleading terms). It is this last thought which is so embedded in my con- sciousness that nothing can uproot it in me, and is the keynote of all my teaching and my actions. This little letter was kept by Mrs. B. for thirty- four years, and then handed to me when I re- turned to England on a visit. I carried it unopened to the National Gallery; sat down in front of Lippo Lippi’s ‘Annunciation,” and read it, for he was the medium of my annunciation—a 26 JAMES HINTON glad message of loving all. I know you dread a long letter. So good-bye.” This letter illustrates his influence on many women. Some he shocked, some he inspired, others he stimulated. “A fool,” declares Hin- ton, “is known by the littleness of his folly.” It is easy to realise that a man like Hinton had many adventures and entanglements which savoured neither of hypocrisy, impurity, nor crudity, and yet brought upon his life the foul names with which the fearful and unimaginative stigmatise the poet or the pioneer. To ignore his mistakes would be to take away from the value of his life. To minimise his apparently pitiful end would be to reckon crucifixion as a loss instead of the gain he himself taught it to be. It would be to judge a Saviour by his human cry of “Father, let this cup pass.” Hinton’s wife declared that all who came near enough to him to love him and be loved by him suffered, and there was no help for it. This was the stigma belonging to him. “ He had,” said Caroline Haddon, who understood him well, “ more than most men the open vision. He knew when he saw and when he was in darkness, and could not supplement the vision by any inventions of his own.” He has been spoken of as a sentimentalist, and as a seducer of women as well as their saviour and inspirer. Both these views may have frightened Ellice Hopkins when analysing him in the Life and Letters, and also the fear of casting a slur on her own “un- THE PIONEER 27 spotted name.” Mrs. Hinton declared that Ellice Hopkins made Hinton more what she wishes he had been than what he really was, and Miss Caroline Haddon, who knew him as many years as Miss Hopkins did months, though appreciating the kindly analysis of the mis- sionary and the sufferer, knew that the world through that book could not grasp the real nature of the semi-mystic and wholly human being Hinton was to the end. What some people called serpentine and insincere in him was a fluid quality of being able to run in fresh channels, to sweep away the dust and cobwebs, and to float in a region undreamed of by the merely sane and stolid. The tenderness in Hinton towards human nature probably created other misconceptions about his work and ideals. This aroused in him a force which was, one who knew him intimately remarks, “truly terrific.” “I never knew such wrath,” she says. “When he spoke of the false law that tortured the bodies and souls of men and women he would look at his hands as if he saw claws and fangs. His anguish was unfathomable; it killed him at last.” He was certainly an instance of his own teaching, in The Mystery of Pain, that some arrive through the madness or extinction of others. He often needed the advice he gave in a letter to one of his most valued friends: “Get distracted over crocuses and Snowdrops and myrtles. . . . You want to be smothered in moss for a little while with a lot of pleasant men and women to coax and chaff and talk nonsense all 28 JAMES HINTON round.” He once told this same friend, busy, intellectual woman that she was, to make mud- pies and gather shells. Mrs. Hinton wrote to her after James Hinton’s death : “You and I know that my husband’s life was not one of a lower moral tone than other people’s, but rather so much higher that purity precludes prudery and truth hypocrisy.” Miss Agnes Jones, whose whole life was tuned in both concord and discord to Hinton’s message, said of him that he seemed to have a skin too little. And Mr. George Peard, who wrote an article on “ The Hintons, Father and Son,” in the Contemporary Review of May 1878, after the appearance of the Life and Letters, says of James Hinton : “He took to ideas with the passion of the poet, for the fires of conscience and self-sacrifice were always at white heat within him. Troubles and wrongs, which were in common speech no concern of his, con- sumed him with pity or indignation, or both. In addition to this, his heart was not in the work he had to do as a professional man, but in the work he never had time to do. The sins and sorrows of the world around him he felt the most acutely in the direction of his tenderest sus- ceptibilities. He said of himself that his desire for human welfare exceeded in its intensity the sum of all his other desires, and it was very largely through his love and reverence of women that the wrongs and sufferings which give us all the heartache now and then hit him hardest. . . . We never attended a meeting on any Woman’s question, educational or other, without meeting THE PIONEER 29 James Hinton. No stranger who saw him steaming along the street on the way to such a gathering would have supposed that he was on such an errand. Very likely the nap of his hat was brushed the wrong way; he wore no gloves, and he had probably a book under his arm. On the whole, he looked, to a superficial observer, like a perfectly commonplace clerk to a book- seller or something of that sort. There was an improvised look about him and an indescribable mixture of absence of mind and presence of mind. In spite of his intentness of eye and attitude, he always looked as if he had just dropped in to a place out of curiosity, and was just ready to hurry out again. His eye saw, but only what it wanted there and then to see. It was by no means easy to catch it—so intent was he on what was going forward.” “Art,” says Anthony Ludovici, “is always the expression of the most sensitive men of the age.” This may well include the prophets and poets as well as the artists, and if “England is the most absurdly sentimental, over-Christian- ised and over-Puritanised country on earth,” a sensitive nature like that of Hinton, proclaiming truths to the populace, had either to succumb physically or to corrode mentally. To the crude or coarse, a man who declared that “caresses made him think like music ’’ was either mad or a fool. “We do not know the joy of manhood and womanhood in each other yet,” he cries. “Till we are pure how should we ? It wants yet to be 30 JAMES HINTON revealed. We are in respect to it as children who make love in make-believe and fancy them- selves enraptured.” It was Hinton’s willingness to lay down his life in order to help the world that endears to us the man we trace in the pioneer. “Is not another thing clear in history,” he asks, “ namely this—that the means of intro- ducing and establishing the not-self life always exist, and will certainly not be wanting 2 For what it will need, of course, is a willingness for utter sacrifice on the part of some : a willingness to give up, asking no questions whether they will not lose everything. This it demands; it is the one thing it demands; a few persons to take in their hands everything they count dear, and simply lay it down, unquestioning ; and this may ever be demanded, with no fear of failure.” “There are some,” F. D. Maurice says, “who would give us only the husks of truths in systems, and there are others who would give us only the price of truths in feelings and sympathies.” Hinton belonged to the latter, and paid his full price to help others. The sensuous and the spiritual were fused in him, and more often than not confused in the women who followed him. But, as a pioneer of the new order and as an experimenter and artist of living, in the sense that his life was not an outrage on love or a living lie, Hinton is well worth considering. Love is surely the finest of all arts, and the artist most fit to describe the beauties of love is one who has experimented in life’s colours with some THE PIONEER 31 understanding of the law of his craft. It is just because Hinton was neither wholly iconoclast nor wholly seer that he is of value to some of us who are in the thicket and not in the open. He is valuable as a pioneer because of his scientific training, and because of the rough discipline life doled out to him. His passionate adoration of women, mingled with the streak of the mystic in him, which made him able to unravel their pruderies and their complaisances, brought him often face to face with semi-solutions of difficult problems which it is worth our while to consider. It is not as a sexless saint, or even as a perfect lover, that one studies James Hinton. Realities are always of more value than hypocrisies, and the courageous analysis of a natural human being is invaluable in teaching us what to accept and what to avoid. The gospel he longed to shout from the housetops, as a message from the sky, was liable to be echoed in the pigsty, with terrifying results to the casual reformer inside, trying to clean one spot in a very dirty place. Hinton, at times, raved like a maniac against the whited sepulchres and cloistered cells wherein men and women hid, not only their vices, but their virtues. He often said and did things which brought on him a condemnation he de- Served. He was neither a blind fanatic nor an angel of light. He was more like a medium or vehicle through which the weaknesses and aspira- tions of the man who was not overman, or underman, but growingman, could be expressed. The discomfort of growing pains is heard all 32 JAMES HINTON through Hinton’s message. He was, to the end, a lovable child possessed by a gospel he only managed to make into an epistle. He saw the glory and the waste of womanhood, and the strength and selfishness of manhood. He was egotistic enough to imagine that in his small life-time, and through his teaching, a glimmer of new light could be cast on a problem which even Christ seemed not to touch directly, except by saying “he that is without sin among you let him cast the first stone.” Hinton felt the time has come when, contrary to the declaration of Mr. Pecksniff, there is something personal in morality. Some of his conclusions are so sug- gestive that, even if we cannot agree with him, we may formulate for ourselves, through his sug- gestiveness, some newer solution. The teacher worth while in these matters is surely one who realises the romance of the soul through all its persistent efforts to shine through every channel of the body, and to Hinton this seemed a possibility of the future. “So was it not certain,” says Hinton, “that with that perception of the sacredness of the whole of the physical that comes with recog- nising it as the phenomenon of the spiritual, this perception respecting the true relation of the sexual passion must have come 2 It is surely the very same as, in the beginning of Science, sense is raised to its true dignity, worth, value, power, in fulfilling its true office.” He saw what confusion we have been in about impulse and sacrifice, confounding good and bad in our \， ，§. · |× ， . // ſae， ， ·ſae ， ! º， ſº， ·，· · ， ， , |… .. ſae， ſae， ---- - - - - - ---- - → ~ı ∞ do |- | - ~~ ~ - - z. O |- ---- ---- |- |- tae №. |- rº. − |- REV. 32] THE PIONEER 33 analysis. “Acting for self and freely obeying impulse will not go together; they make an evil compound. And men, looking at this, have said, “Obeying impulse is evil,” as if, milk and Strychnine being mixed, men should have said milk is poison and kept the strychnine for food.” His thoughts were so hurriedly written down that it is a most difficult matter to co-ordinate the scattered fragments he left during the last five years of his life. In these hastily written fragments, and through his impulsive actions, bearing years of pain in their train, we gather here and there the meaning of the big issues at stake in a new civilisation. “His thoughts were so completely undressed,” says Miss Caroline Haddon. One could easily use an expression about Hinton he used about the joy of writing : “It is like having one’s home on the whirlwind.” When studying him one feels an atmosphere at one with the giant forces of nature, the up- heavals, the hidden currents in the ocean, the Scudding clouds and bewildering earthquakes. The man or woman who is destined to have the privilege of giving life and love a newer and truer value has to be tossed and torn, branded and disfigured as Nature disfigures when she yields her most gorgeous effects. Hinton was possibly destined to help the world to redis- cover love. An animal desire, a gluttonous im- pulse, a primitive instinct of race production, have been the makeshifts in the past. Hinton saw sexual love in the future as one of Nature's Subtlest devices for gaining ends as yet out of 3 34 JAMES HINTON the sight or reach of this generation and its civilisation. The deliverers are those who save man from his self-made superstitions and his false idolatries. Hinton was such a deliverer. Yet he declares that “there is not one thing in the whole world that I know rightly as it should be known.” All he sees is “a vision of the world transformed by pity, and I go about as if dazed by the thought. I cannot see anything else, nor care. That is all that is the matter.” He asks : “Till some one got mad enough to say why should not that be bad which does harm and that good which does good how could we but continue each one the best way we could to reconcile doing harm with being good 7 There is not a single thing a bad man does for his badness a good man shall not do for his goodness, when goodness means thinking first of others. The tendency to be “virtuous’ against others’ good is one of the lusts; one of the things which “drown men in destruction and perdition.” Not a lust of the flesh perhaps; but is it not ‘ the pride of life’?” His old friend Dr. Berry once asked Hin- ton, “When did God make matter ?” Hinton clapped his hands in his gleeful way and said : “I’ll ask you a question. When did God make the sun go round the earth 2 Matter is only a phenomenon.” James Hinton performed a use- ful service in thus giving shocks to people full of preconceived ideas, and his questions are often startling and perplexing, combining as they do a quixotic humour and a grim savagery. There THE PIONEER 35 is, however, oftener than not, a rare insight in both question and answer. He asks Mrs. Boole, in a letter written about two in the morning : “Do you think the sun ever gets dazzled with its own light 2 ” In contrast to this fantastic question, he asks in another mood : “Is it love to keep a man or a woman childless, or to have children with disease ?” The main aim of his later thinking was to emancipate the impulses, and that is a task for the gods rather than a mere human being. “The desires,” he says, “are the horses linked to a wagon.” Hinton knew how the horses should be harnessed and the wagon adjusted for good transport, but he was the man to point the way rather than to take the reins in hand and with curb, bit, and snaffle to encounter all the dangers of a hitherto unknown highway. Hinton’s fight not to be- come what his enemies called him, his insistence on the beauty of desire and the joy of life, as not necessarily apart from real morality and sincere spirituality, is interesting in the extreme. Impurity makes false laws. “I must be a person not making things evil,” cries Hinton, but, like all experimenters in a new order, he found himself becoming unbalanced and dis- traught through personal perplexities, and the blindness of others. He faced, as a child would face, certain difficult problems. He became obsessed at last, and lost the priceless twin of vision—a sense of humour. He was a man living always in internal light, but more often than not, through living in the 36 JAMES HINTON world and yet not being entirely at one with it, he became involved in external darkness. He was a man of vision, but the practical shadows of the vision obscured the light. Blake and Shelley apparently failed less, for they could let their reason rule them more completely than an aurist surrounded by the details of do- mesticity. The two poets saw the world, but fled from its power to blast the orderliness of their dreams. Hinton saw, and remained to be crucified. “If the man of genius is not faithful to the light he sees, though all the world beside cannot see it, there is nothing else he can be faithful to—he must stand by his vision, though men and angels laugh.” Laurence P. Jacks declares, in his All Men are Ghosts, that “there is a sort of friendship in the Universe which does not scruple on occasion to break every bone in a man’s body.” Maybe there is a Celestial Love which apparently breaks every fibre of a man’s soul for its ulterior purpose. If the new civilisation ever puts the weak on a par with the strong, so far as concerns equality of oppor- tunity, then men of the stature of James Hinton will not be done to death, like heretics in the time of the Inquisition. It is little wonder that Hinton’s ways were very trying under ordinary domesticity. It has been said of him that he was a man not to be liked only, but to be loved. The curious thing about him was that his faults came out most markedly towards, those he loved best, and in the majority of cases endeared him more because THE PIONEER 37 of them. It has been said that intimacy with him deepened the belief in his greatness. This is the testimony of those who knew him well and in his most trying moods. A woman who knew him under both ordinary and extraordinary circumstances (Mrs. Hinton’s sister) adds that there was no disillusionary process to be gone through with him, for everything in him was real and true. She declares that if one told the things he did and said it might probably not help other people to believe in him, because of the rarity of the power in human beings to under- stand a pioneer who was at Once strong and weak, emotional and intellectual, and yet com- bining in one personality the visions of a god and the waywardness of a child. Hinton, until his death, never realised the difference between being a child and becoming as a child, and, to the end, let maggots and serpents in their apparently first incarnations as human beings, rob him, at intervals, of both his courage and his vision. “Is it not evident,” he writes, “that our life is a joke, a kindly joke, a very expression of sportive fun, though so serious too, and loving, and with a work achieving so great an end, purifying all the pain, but still most visibly a joke? For instance, this union of man and woman made to be so much to us. Is it not absolutely embodied fun ?” In his most balanced moods he both realised and enjoyed the fun, but he was made, not only of such stuff as dreams are made of, but of nerves liable to attract poison by overwork, introspection, worry, 38 JAMES HINTON and a wrong distribution of emotion. Puri- tanical hypocrisy has no toleration for the pioneer, and his mistakes are counted as the worst of crimes. Hinton, and all those he loved and who loved him, suffered through the weight and stress of his striving to weld the old into the new before he, as a human being, could master and co-ordinate the difficult details of the wide outlook which, as a pioneer, he sensed in a very original way. In a letter written to his wife, towards the end of his life, he says: “We shall see, I hope, the fruits of our burdens and toils. Think what a work had to be done ! ” In a letter written to Miss Caroline Haddon in the year he died he says: “The price of my vision and of the madness it brings will have to be paid. It must be. It was not possible to have the whole world turned round and be quite different, and to see the assurance of its being good and not evil any more, without being driven back on oneself, and the penalty will come, and not alone.” This was inevitable in the case of a pioneer and seer who, like Hinton, believed that often the solution of difficulties lies through a man or woman giving up appearances and refusing to live by outworn traditions. “We hold up a new , thought, a new aim, a new model.” We must put a true for a false, according to him. We must bring passion to help us, not to hinder us. We must banish blindness and see truly. Man, Hinton has declared, has tried to arrive at a perfect subjection to the restraints. The THE PIONEER 39 spiritual call to him is never to be such that the restraints need be. “The good do much more difficult things than those which we assume could not be done. The only thing is, they do not think whether it may not be the right to do the pleasant—that does not occur to them ; it is prejudged.” Hinton seems to imply that we have been seeking good in the restraint of passion, which in its way is an attempt to re- vivify asceticism, and so we feel good as evil, and court failure because of our wrong point of view. “In this cannot we see a little how man is one, and must be seen as one, namely, in the changes of the ascetic life 2 It looks like, here a number of heroes, there of dull, sensual, evil men, then heroes again, then again hypocrites and evil. But, seeing truly, we see it was quite different. It was a poor little child trying again and again to poise himself on an impossible standing-ground and slipping down; failing and renewing the effort again and again. That is what it was : a poor child grasping with all his force to raise himself and holding on till he could hold no more, and slipped and fell, and then getting up again, and laying hold and slipping.” “So we see what our “morals are, and our moral efforts, and seekings for virtue. They are this : that while Nature is calling us to a good- ness that means no regard to Self, we have been trying to feel instead of it one that will let us have a chief regard to Self and make serving 40 JAMES HINTON that do for the whole foundation undisturbed. This is what our moral efforts, our religious strivings mean. And so we see how the theo- logians who speak of man’s heart as so deceitful, and of all our goodness even being mixed with greed, speak more truly than they think. . . . “It comes to this : that where our taking means others’ loss, there we take, recklessly, unconsidering, boundlessly, just as self-desire prompts; but where our taking might mean others’ gain and good, satisfied hearts and fruit- ful lives, health of body and happiness of soul, where our taking might mean these things for Others—there we will not take ; there we are restrained ; restrained, it must be observed, not truly by virtue or good, but by impurity. It is the impurity forbids, for, put that aside, and the forbidding need not be ; the virtue and goodness might still be, but not the forbidding. . . . “Heroism has never been called for and refused to come, nor ever will—especially from those whom men call bad. Publicans and worst of sinners went of old, and still will go, quickest into heaven’s kingdom (let them but see it). Shall men live so, or shall they not ? It rests with women to decide what life, in presence of such appeal as makes itself to them, they will lead. That same will man follow. . . . “Give the soul truly the dominion, and it will take all the body says in its fulness and accept it wholly, feeling it as a mere means to the exercise of its true dominion, and never wishing to crush it or ignore it. She will want it as her THE PIONEER 41 material, as her guide. Here in Science—in the relation of sense to the reason—we see that true purity has all things pure to it : the things that in its bondage most corrupted the reason, in its rule most serve it. So when the soul truly rules the body, the things it has been most obliged to put away will serve it most.” And again he declares : “On God’s left hand are the two forms of the becoming of Life : the self-pleasure and the self-virtue. That is, the two forms of the regard to pleasure, pursuing it and putting it away. On God’s left hand these—the fire and the darkness; and on His right, Life perfected and pleasures for evermore. Pleasure made perfectly free because not pur- sued, and therefore not to be put away. The entering into the truth of the world and finding it made for joy; for joy and pleasure and free impulse, because for service. If any one says, “But this world would not do ; its pleasures must always be poor and marred, and while we have the body low and unsatisfying, even at its best,’ let him try what its pleasures are, taken with an absolute regard for good and not for self. He has not tried self put wholly away. . . . Love itself gets spoilt by its very lack of distribution,” or, as he puts it elsewhere, “we can contaminate love itself with exclusiveness, and sanctify jealousy.” # He is never tired of reiterating that we do not see how utterly mistaken we have been. It is in the body is the source, not of our despair, but of our hope. “There is our power, our aid; 42 JAMES HINTON the friendly hand of Nature to deliver us from our foe. It is in the soul the self is, not in the body, and the body shall cast self out. So in the Reason is the self—the ignorance—and the sense casts it out.” Hinton always insists that things are never to be viewed as they are in themselves, but in their relation to other things. It is not another world we want, says Hinton, but this one to be made good and sweet and clean by an entirely new thought of right and service. “How strange,” he says, “it is to think that to become spiritual must mean to cease to appear as phenomenal The appearance of the pheno- menal (or physical) is the only evidence of the spiritual.” By the simple fact of the law of change, as in the moth’s life, no rigid thing can long be allowed to be. As this is a world of change and a world of wants, rigidity leads to stagnation and even death. Hinton saw that the eternal is in the present. He denied that this world was the “suburb of the life elysian,” but thought of it as one of the manifestations of the spiritual, as thousands of worlds might also be. “The rule of reason over sense,” he says, “ purposes no hard burden, no strife, no struggle, no constant battle with subduing power of sense. It expresses the most perfect, fullest, satisfying, pleasurable use of sense, and is the true rule of the soul over the self, and is no burden, no strife, no constant battle. It is simply harmony—the fullest and truest use and THE PIONEER 43 satisfaction of all the tendencies, emphatically of those that are deposed from ruling. It is no burden. It is liberty. The struggle, the demand and effort to restrain come before the victory is won, not after. While sense rules it has to be restrained, not after, and so pleasure too. It has not to be restrained when it has found its place. The way to possess the physical is to make it spiritual.” Hinton knew well that the sin of pleasure is in confining and limiting and starving others. “Self-indulgence has two forms, the pleasure- restraining and the goodness-restraining.” And again he declares : “If goodness has truly nothing to do with not-pleasure, then the pleasure-led have no affinity with badness, but a good falsely turned against pleasure makes them bad. It is an infamous wrong against them. So these people who can be virtuous so are cruel. They inflict infinite wrong; they cast out of the path of the good those who are not bad, and so cast them practically out from goodness too. So that beautiful goodness has to be refused, for it cannot be for all ; it thrusts into hell those who need not go.” If we do this we are bound by the letter of morality instead of by the spirit of love. “Spirit,” says Hinton, “if it be bound, must be bound by spiritual bonds. How can a “body’ physical, material, be a bond upon spirit 2 Is it not clearly a confusion of ideas 2 ° Some one said of Hinton that, after hearing him in one of his “rollicking ” talks, one felt 44 JAMES HINTON that God and Nature were his playfellows in a metaphysical playground. He seemed at one with the eternal spirit of joy in his finest moods, and had a deep sense of both the pity and the humour of it, that man so often refuses good for the sake of goodness, and objects to put clearly traceable needs above virtue. He realised, for instance, that physical passion was so little in itself and yet in it there is enough to uproot all life. In his last manuscripts he speaks of it as “no more than a language of hands, and yet it casts out Satan ; no more than touching the eyes, and yet it gives light instead of darkness, and enables us to see where we have been blind. Nothing, and yet so much.” All round him Hinton caught glimpses of the real in the apparent, of the mystical in the physical. “If,” he said, “God can make a dog of matter, He can make an angel.” He declared that the imagination’s true use is simply in seeing the phenomenal as it is, and not only as it appears. To see any physical relation from the physical side only is to mis-see it altogether, to condemn it to abuse and evil. What is used as spiritual is spiritual. In passing from one order to another, which this new vision demands, incalculable prices are put upon man’s soul. Hinton as seer felt that, once we have transferred our mode of thought from the material to the spiritual, anything can be. In this transference we are pledged, he says, to “destroy all that bends love to cruelty, purity to foulness, justice to wrong, and pity to with- THE PIONEER 45 holding. What is pure in itself let it be pure to us,” he cries, “for the new law is one binding the heart and letting free the deeds.” This point of view gives an opportunity for un- paralleled sacrifice in the pioneers of the new civilisation, of which, in many subtle ways, James Hinton was a forerunner. He was always insisting on the error of putting a rigid thing in place of a process. “Whatever is given up for love a better comes of it,” he says, and again he declares that “the means of being true to the unseen and invisible is to be true to the visible. The one is the other.” “Let that force go to its true use. It is trained in these external things, but it exists for that deep internal change. So the casting out the rule of self means always a new liberty; it is a law fulfilled in the heart, so making things that were evil no more evil; making things pure which were impure only because man had made them so. It is his leaving off making things evil.” Has not evil, he asks, been a mistake, not choice of bad but a false thought of good, a strife we have been waging against Nature ? Spiritual clearness is a great thing if combined with courage. People can be technically pure from impure motives, can live in a world of impurity in thought and yet keep their outward actions chaste from economical and calculating motives. So how much of what are counted the “evil’’ tendencies of man are truly the best, for no one (except artificially) wishes to 46 JAMES HINTON be bad. “What men wish is that right and pleasure should not oppose. Well, this is God’s command : ‘Make right and pleasure not op- posed.’ That is man’s duty—this to which he so tends, and which it seems so evil that he should tend to. And here is the condition. You want your right not to oppose pleasure; attach it absolutely to service—absolutely and wholly—and it shall not. . . . “There are two forms of temptation to the one wrong—that is, to serve self; two forms answering to the two ways in which we can hurt others; viz. by seeking, and by refusing, pleasurable things. It is the pure in heart who see and dare, even through their own apparent failures.” Hinton always distinguishes between a nutri- tion and a function. He insists upon the con- version of nutrition into function, as, for instance, in the matter of eating. If we eat in such a spirit that we realise that we are renewing the body for service, and so render gluttony im- possible, it is “a desire made new.” In the matter of sex he proclaims that nutrition merges into function when joy and a new creation for the race is the result. Theory, according to him, is also nutrition when the interpretation of the theory becomes function through some good result for the individual, the home, or the State. The world appears as matter to us, and its meaning is not transparent to us because our powers are defective. We pretend till our pretence seems real. Once we see that so often THE PIONEER 47 good is repressed by repressing what we call evil, we shall rid ourselves of shams and fears, and be content to be real human beings, even if the world calls us evil. Hinton knew that neither the new vision nor the new life will be ushered in by merely wishing, conforming easily, or even trying to patch things up here and there. A new point of view means upheaval in every direction. It is a moral change of outlook and an ultimate change of action, as a conse- quence, which will finally deliver us. To pursue any form of virtue against others’ needs will be one of the sins of the future. According to Hinton, “the laws of the spirit are the laws of universal love and service.” Why, he asks, shall we any longer assume that souls are not pure, or bind the pure by the laws with which impurity fetters itself 2 He saw it was time to leave off doing so many unnecessary and hard things, and time also to put our regard on the facts of the inner life rather than on the fancies and futilities of the Outer life. “Surely,” he asks, “when we reflect we cannot but feel that this using others, enforced on us for duty, is worse, more demoralising, more poisonous to the soul, than anything else can be. It poisons the very thought of life itself; it eats away all that Life can live upon. How could any life that, deliberately and know- ingly, used others for itself be so hurtful ? The Roman lady, for example, who without disguise, for her own pleasure, trifled away the lives of 48 JAMES HINTON her hordes of barbarian slaves, and went to the circus to see them kill each other ? How could it be so criminal in her as our doing the same thing behind a mask, for duty’s sake 2 There was the open, unrestrained selfishness in her, but she did not call it virtue. Still she was free to let that be which her soul prompted and her ancient legends taught. She did not talk piety to her slaves.” In Hinton’s later manuscripts we find this summary of his vision as seer and pioneer : “Our thought and aim are changed; our object is a new one ; our goodness a different thing. It is changed from deeds to a state. We aim not at the fulfilment of a false right, but at fulfilling the conditions of a true one; that our life may become such—the life of all—that no more a false right but a true one may be the right for man. We hold up a new thought, a new aim, a new model; we put a true for a false; we bring passion to help us, not to hinder; we banish blindness and see truly. We aim at more. Was man ever able to succeed when he aimed at too little 2 We aim at his becoming so good that his right may be a true right ; not one made merely by his being under the do- minion of self; we try at a new thing ; at the possible instead of the impossible.” A false sense of sin, and a false sense of virtue, made Hinton realise that the thoughts and aims of the modern should be to emphasise the change of a state of mind rather than to em- phasise mere deeds. Much of the later thought THE PIONEER 49 of Hinton reminds us of a saying of Romain Rolland : “You are always thinking of what you can keep or lose. Only think of what you can give. Live l Be like the water that flows. The world would not exist without that happi- ness of beings, of flowers in the sun, that joy of giving one’s life to the point of exhaustion— which is also a joy of dying continually.” CHAPTER III THE LAW-MAIKER AND THE TAW-IBREAKER NERVoUs people declare that if Law-breakers like Hinton are tolerated society would soon be overthrown. One of Hinton’s own favourite images was, however, that in overthrowing society the reformer was merely putting an inverted pyramid right side up. That, he said, is just where the usefulness of Law-breakers comes in. Christianity overthrew society, and so did the Reformation ; so he felt he had excellent precedents for modern reformers to follow. It is only, he insisted, an overthrowing of an old form in order that a new spirit may emerge; not a change in the nature of man, but a method of offering him new chances for his moral emotions, his sweet impulses, strong powers, and subtle perceptions. It is not, as some imagine, a diabolical overthrowing of beauty. It is a chance for the magical and mystical transformation of beauty into new and glowing colours, so that elements that are hidden may emerge, and new powers be created for the workings of a new spirit. Hinton meant by Law-breaking, he said, what Christ meant when He defended His disciples for unlawfully plucking the ears of corn on the Sabbath Day. 50 LAW-BREAKER AND LAW-MAKER 51 Christ broke the rigid law out of a flexible regard for human needs. The law, says Hinton, is truly broken when keeping it externally would be breaking it in the soul, and so, in order to keep it in reality, it must be broken. As a Law–breaker Hinton attacked con- ventional morality through what he called its own “nonsense reasons.” He declared that these reasons make love the minister of selfish- ness, of jealousy, and of both unnatural re- pression and lust. He would break down the “nonsense reasons ° and bring in, as Law- maker, real reasons why flexible morality should take the place of traditionalised morality. One nonsense reason of current morality is, according to Hinton, that the flesh is corrupt. Another is that it is impossible to love more than one person in a certain way. If, he asks, it is possible to love another after one is dead, why not when one is alive 2 Another “ nonsense reason '' is that we are all to be fettered for the sake of uniformity. Another, that men’s cruelty to some women brings honour to others. In such ways as these Hinton held that the good people are confounding vice with virtue and hindering progress by a parochial prudery. Nature, he says, makes us write the law with unwilling fingers, and in terms of death, until we read it in the terms of life. To analyse carefully some of Hinton’s “nonsense reasons,” trying to solve the problems they suggest from the inner law of love, rather than by the outer legislative or conventional code, is to approach a new order 52 JAMES HINTON of living altogether. False or outworn laws work the very ruin they are supposed to cure, whereas a courageous Outlook, eventually leading to sane individual and collective experiments, may prove to the conventionalist that freedom is not necessarily licence, or the widening of love an increasing of impurity. Hinton declares there are five ways of shutting our eyes to the evils around us : 1. Making false reconcilings. (Mill.) 2. Ignoring one term. (H. Spencer.) 3. Calling a thing a mystery in religion. (Roman Catholic.) 4. Accepting it as philosophy. (Hegel.) 5. Affirming that we know the limits of our power of knowing. (Positivism.) Fluidity, as opposed to rigidity, was Hinton’s invariable suggestion to moralists and reformers. The Law-breaker always represents a force contending with a force, or, in other words, genius, fluid and receptive, contending with convention, rigid and stagnant. What looks like breaking is opening, says Hinton. This is the way the Law-breaker gives way to the Law-maker. The choice between wrong and right, according to nature and spirituality, is that between what injures and what does good. All religious teachers of men, he says, have come into a world where they have found people declaring : “I love and reverence this Person so much that I shall hurt my fellow creatures LAW-BREAKER AND LAW-MAKER 58 for His sake l’” And this has determined their action, has made their vision. Hinton believed that every great Law-breaker, as genius or as mystic, overthrows a system of rights, and as Law-maker puts a unity in its place. The lesser law-keepers, however, as disciples of the law-breakers, limit the great conceptions and so bring in disaster. The true pathos of Christ’s life, Hinton declares, is in the things that are done in His name. This is Christ’s revelation: “Whatever seems to be God’s law, but makes us an instrument, even passively, of ill to our fellows, is mis-read. It does not mean that.” Then he adds : “This false law of things that bids you to be an instrument of ill to your neighbours—because some one has told you God commands it, or another that human virtue depends upon it, or because you have never known it done otherwise—that you may be good, need never bind you more. I have delivered you from it once and for ever.” Hinton’s main idea both as Law-breaker and Law-maker was that we must always act for traceable good, whether it be pleasant or un- pleasant. He wanted to break the law for fixed actions and bring in a law of the spirit for all conduct. A thousand actions apparently the same, done by a thousand different persons, will have a thousand different results because of the different motives behind the actions. “Take,” he says, “the idea of a dagger trans- fixing a human heart. With this physical re- lation there are no fixed moral relations what- 54 JAMES HINTON ever. Done as murder it is bad ; occurring by accident or done by a madman, it is wholly indifferent ; done by law as just punishment it is right; done as an act of self-sacrifice it is heroic ; done to save a daughter’s honour it is sublime.” The physical relations being the same, the moral relations may vary to the utmost extremes. There can be no moral quality in any physical thing or event taken in itself. We have so long arbitrarily drawn the line between things instead of between modes of action. We may declare, Hinton points out, that going to races is degrading, but if a physio- logist were there studying locomotion, what then 2 It is the motive Hinton would get right and let actions take care of themselves. He wanted every action to be a result of right thinking, not of learning by heart certain com- mandments graven on stone, suitable only for the limitations of one age and wrong for another. “Love, and do as you like,” proclaimed by St. Augustine was emphasised by Hinton as the cry, not only of a Law-breaker but a Law- maker. To fix a law of the spirit on practical matters Hinton knew to be terribly difficult, but if the law is love the working out includes as well as excludes, in the harmonic way Nature teaches us. He wanted to undermine the false, traditionalised law, in order that the spiritual law may assert its rights. What chiefly hinders goodness, he believed, is that loud screaming for virtue which is so often mistaken for virtue itself. The true Law-breaker thus fulfils a twofold LAW-BREAKER AND LAW-MAKER 55 task, building up as he pulls down. Nature turns bud into flower and destroys the flower for the fruit; so this moral process is in the same great order of development. Hinton had some very definite ideas as to what to overthrow in modern morality, and somewhat vague Ones as to what would ultimately take their place. Our main interest in the man and his work is in analysing these ideas, and sifting the good from the bad, and the strong from the weak. As a critic of morals he is invariably stimulating, and, if his conclusions are not entirely satisfactory, at any rate, as a thinker, he induces us to formulate our own ideas of morality. He stands for ever outside sheltered cloisters of virtue, and is unafraid of being classed with the sinners. He openly declared he belonged to the “bad” folk, not because he was wicked, but because he felt suffocated near the so-called good, who so often are meagre in sympathy, or maggoty in intellect. There is no law, he declared, for doing fixed things at all, no profit in doing that which is against the traceable good of others. When this idea is raised from theory to practice a revolution has begun. It is the realisation of the fact that there is nothing too good to lose in order to gain a better thing. Hinton saw this, not only in mathematics and morals, but in all the arts, particularly music and painting. The wrong thing regularly pre- cedes the right thing. From a simplification, which is savagery, then an ornately detailed civilisation in which both life and love are 56 JAMES HINTON evolving, we approach a higher evolution, still in an apparently spontaneous order, which is a finer simplification than either the savage or the ornate. The three developments are in a natural and divine order. It is a false morality, so often the result of fear and ignorance, which hinders this threefold process of human evolu- tion. Whatever comes, Hinton urges, do not let our goodness stand in the way of our doing good. It is the eternal law of the spirit, which, as Law-maker, Hinton brings to bear on all questions involving the transition of mankind from an old order to a new. He insists ever that it is the motive in the heart which counts, and not the external action, and that there can be no moral quality in any physical condition or event, taken in itself. It is, according to Hinton, whether an action serves some universal as well as personal end, which is a test of virtue. The Law-breaker has to hammer down the prisons in which love is caged, and give it the true freedom. “Our life,” says Hinton, “ looks one thing outside and is quite another within. It looks half dead, powerless, with no future before it, more like a corpse than a living thing, but within it is full of powers waiting for the time to exercise themselves. What we need is to give outward expression and activity to that into which the true life has gone. It was once in restraint of passion, but not now. We must change the passion, and then there is no need for restraint. Not to need restraint is to have changed the thought within. To see LAW - BREAKER AND LAW-MAKER 57 human life thus, is it not to see a clear and perfect order take the place of a series of wanton manias, mere incoherent paroxysms of folly, without reason, significance, or end ? What mere sweeps of unreason history appears, es- pecially the moral history of man from its starting-point of destiny, the bondage, and the setting free ” Hinton, the Law-breaker, came very close to a great spiritual secret, but it is often difficult, from the chaotic manuscripts he has left, to place it in a definite form. He realised fully that the thought should rule the senses, instead of the senses the thought, and that it is im- possible to place a physical restraint upon a spiritual function. Tradition has bound us up in the idea that physical joy is moral sorrow, that sexuality has only to do with babies, and that to be good is of necessity to be dull, stereo- typed, and more or less passionless and un- satisfied. Real goodness, surely, is glowing, vibrating and stimulating, and it is under its banner, and not under mere convention, that evolved human beings will gather. Hinton knew that our life now is more or less mingled licence and superstition. “In former days,” he says, “man at least could crawl, caterpillar fashion, if nothing else; now he can only wriggle. But this means that he is to fly.” It is not whether it is useful or the contrary, legitimate or not so. “The taking for self is the licence, and that is why nature punishes or redeems.” Hinton forgot, however, to emphasise that an 58 JAMES HINTON altruism which leaves self out is as bad as an egotism which leaves others out. His plea for self, in and for others, was not always explained as a mingling of sane egotism and balanced altruism. Hinton felt that law and morality practically say, “Keep your licence out of such and such forms, and I will protect you in all the rest. This really means that the law by which we are governed has slipped off the soul on to the body, and it is then time that the Law-breaker did his worst.” Any new mani- festation of the spirit of freedom and love is better than virtue screwed up in air-tight com- partments. Even if so-called virtue apparently breaks a little in the process, there is a chance that human and loving kindness may fill the crevices. Hinton tells a story of a savage who was asked why he divided his dinner with another : “It is not the custom in this country,” was the answer, “to eat while others are hungry.” The same spirit made Hinton want to break monopolising laws which give security and joy to one set of the community at the expense of others. The future task of morality, Hinton believed, would be to force the weight of goodness on to the heart, and to emphasise and trust the spiritual intuitions more, and not implicitly depend on legislation or mere rigid codes or rules. “Love your neighbour, and desire his good,” says Hinton, “and live for that. The actions will take care of themselves. They will, of necessity, vary, but not in spiritual signi- ficance.” LAW-BREAKER AND LAW-MAKER 59 Hinton as Law-breaker wanted to overthrow the legalities, the traditions, and the supersti- tions which nail love to the cross. Daring as his theories are with regard to passion, they are neither balanced enough, nor definite enough, to fit into that unwritten law of uncommon sense which an evolved human being accepts when he has learned the full value of restraint. He was often tied up in his own knot, both in his arguments and his experiments, but this fact increases rather than diminishes his significance as a Law-maker. As a Law-breaker he stood, hammer in hand, before our moral code and asked : “Is our purity real purity, or does it need a new conception ? Only when the ex- ternal and material is seen, by the regard being on others, to be the very highest and best means of attending to the spiritual demands of the internal life, can we escape from realising that we must subjugate the material to the im- material, and the external action to the internal ideal. For it is a true indispensable feeling that our own life within is a thing of infinite value and necessity. Only the needs of others can be seen in their true meaning and value when they are seen to be the means of creating this internal life.” Men follow self-desires, Hinton thought, only for the want of realising the loveliness of that which resembles self-sacrifice and yet is joy. He saw how necessary it is for us all to under- stand the art of ceasing to make innocent things wrong. He felt it was necessary to dare all in 60 JAMES HINTON great moral adventures. As goodness, purity, and loveliness are always seeking new forms, according to a divine order, it is essential for the real Law-breaker to make room, even by danger- ous experiments and expedients, for the new Law-maker. In a letter written to his sister-in- law, Miss Carrie Haddon, from South Wales in March 1875, he lays stress upon the need to employ Nature’s forces by laying hold of the dynamic relations, and using the force of a thing falling to do our raising. He sees the necessity to use the power of the fall of a thing that has been raised. As Law-breaker and Law-maker he lays great stress upon the dynamic relations of evil. “Evil,” he declares, “is the raising of a heavy weight, which in its fall raises some- thing else. You see what I mean, don’t you ? This or the like thought is the thought Art gave me, first coming concretely, of course, but this is what it means. I want to reorganise human life on the basis of a dynamic law and to use the force given by falling things, so that we shall not stand aside, saying, There is this raised, we must keep it so; but, In this raised thing there is a force given us. What can be done in its fall ? Now to do this what I need is, of course, unwearied patience. It is the aim of my life to work that out in a practical form. That is not to be in a hurry. It is a long aim, needing inexhaustible study, patience, looking, thinking, disappointment, unquenchable resolution, and, above all, knowledge. That is what I want. I have got the patience. I have got the tenacity. LAW-BREAKER AND LAW-MAKER 61 These are no virtues; they are born in me. I so long for the result that the aim cannot cease from my heart and brain. It would not depart from me if I were brayed in a mortar. But I want the knowledge, and that is my business to get.” He was determined to help the average human being to a new principle of action. The majority of people long to do the right thing, but they rarely see wherein it lies, because of their blind subjection to legality and traditions. The real reformer knows that the worst people to-day live below the law as the best people live beyond it. So many good people become criminals with the best intentions, as so many bad people do good unconsciously. Hinton sensed in a new and original way that powers adapted for ultimate good, whether their first manifestations appear as good or evil, always work mischief if they are not turned into a channel where they are able to do the best for all mankind. Are we not justified, he asks, in saying that every power that works us mischief is a power waiting to achieve a good, waiting till we see and under- stand 2 - Hinton realised that the main part of most people’s energy is directed, not to aiding human life to be its fullest and finest, but to attracting to themselves the largest possible share of all that is to be got. As a Law-maker and as a Law-breaker he saw that new ideas must lead to new actions. When the form limits or seems to destroy the work of the spirit, the Saviour comes in the shape of a Law-breaker. Hinton 62 JAMES HINTON declared that there are two different forms of ignorance : holding on without changing, and changing without holding on. The sane Law- breaker only destroys that he may build. This is why the man of genius is the true Law-breaker, for, being at one with Nature, he keeps a form only while it is both beautiful and useful and then ruthlessly destroys the limited form for a larger or a different one. Hinton, as Law-breaker, insisted on the desire for good instead of mere restraint, on purity of intention rather than the mechanical obeying of a code. In other words, he wanted to teach people to cultivate an ideal within, working Outwards to harmonious issues. Moral cripples are so often manufactured through the blind following of an outworn commandment. “The worst, meanest, cruelest thing in him is his goodness,” he said once to some one. An otherwise kind and loving nature so often forces itself to be cruel and hard for the sake of a false morality, or makes up for strenuous morality on One side of life by huge lapses on the other. For instance, a moral person of my acquaintance, terrific in invectives against any lapse of the passions, considers it quite justifiable in the cause of morality to open letters meant for another or listen at the door to intimate talk in order to preserve the sanctity of inquisitorial virtue. If the morality were sound, meanness or cruelty would appear as defiling as lust or any other unevolved feeling, and, according to the law of the spirit, scandal-mongering may be LAW-BREAKER AND LAW-MAKER 63 as great a sin as murder, since it is murder on another plane. As Law-breaker, Hinton wanted to overthrow self-virtues with their deliberate cruelties and inquisitions of all kinds done in the name of some obsolete tradition. He wanted to minimise reckless self-indulgence, through giving a new light, colour, and meaning to love and desire. He realised at the same time how the best and purest are suffering most at this crossing of the ways, when the old faiths seem to have gone and the new paths are not clear. The conflict of superstition with the newer needs, the tug of war between the primitive desires (which can never be wrong as part of the human being) and the evolved claim which realises the moral absurdity of the less absorbing what belongs to the greater, the waste of force among moralists and ethical people in condemning the flesh and belittling the spirit, irritated one who, as doctor, prophet, man, and lover, realised that the uses of the flesh are not for destruction and folly, but for rare joy and splendid spirituality. It is hell on earth if we attempt to separate soul- functions from body-functions, as if they were foes instead of allies. Hinton longed for the day when we shall be able to look at the world and say quietly, and without effort, that it is human as well as divine nature for man to base his life on a denial of self combined with joy, and on purity combined with impulse. It is, he says, the basing life on self that imposes those false duties that are but 64 JAMES HINTON self-assertion in another form. Hinton wanted to break a false law about these matters in order to bring in a true one. It has been said that he desired to live as he believed, and was consumed by a passion needing no restraint, obedient to its lightest touch, whether it led him into joy or suffering, acceptance of good or ill. He lived the life of paradox all poets and saviours must live, the life of sorrow latent in joy, and failure conditioning success. He says: “I have joys, intense joys, nay, an absolute, unending joy. I see the goodness of the world, God’s work in it, the end, the coming end. Oh I I see the very end of man’s wretchedness, man’s very life beginning.” He saw, what so few people under- stand, that truth is truth of relation, and that the sincere Law-breaker is the only valuable Law-maker. He declared that what the law of service or love forbids, there is no spiritual dispensation for doing, and what it enjoins, there is no moral dispensation for not doing. That which is absoluteness and perfection in the spiritual law, says Hinton, is often rigidity and deadness in the conventional rule. “It is quite curious,” he says, in a letter to Miss Haddon in 1878, “how a conviction grows and deepens in the heart without being able to give an account of itself, or to justify itself for a moment. One might compare the seeing of a new fact to the dawning of a day, a mere in- describable change in the night at first. It is not as it was before. It must disappear, and then there are dim streaks in the horizon, so 64] JAMES HINTON. . : LAW-BREAKER AND LAW-MAKER 65 that you know in what direction to look, and after that follow glowing colours, the blaze of splendour witnessing to a victory won. That may stand for the proud burst of intoxicating joy with which a man’s heart burns when he can first say out, and demonstrate to himself, that the truth must be, and is, that way, and that a new day has dawned upon the world. But those colours (and they were no true emblems else) are painted only upon clouds, and do but gild the vapours which absorb and hide the light. So vain and empty are the passion and the pride, and so they pass. Thank God, they pass. And when the day has come, behold it is the common, simple light of day.” What is so refreshing in Hinton is the fact that he seemed to have his finger on the pulse. of Nature, and in that curious mingling in him of man, woman, and child, as well as doctor and naturalist, he sensed what was wrong in our modern denial of eternal verities and in our crazy mingling of conventions with truth. The effect of a false thought of goodness, he says, is, that it turns our very virtues to waste or worse, and brings corruption instead of redemption. In one of his latest manuscripts we find this passage : “He who touches the social problems had need to know the feel of ignorance. Nothing else can save him. It will not suffice for him (though this is good) to be taught to know it by tests. Do I not see the true solution of human life 2 Will it not be too rich in joy and freedom for the desire of badness 2 And the 5 66 JAMES HINTON moral right will be fulfilled in its violation. Not that there will be the habitual violation. The moral right will be most perfectly fulfilled. But to solve each insoluble, will not the right and fitting violation come, come quietly, calmly, with perfect vision that it is the right 2 The violation will be, not because man cannot or will not fulfil the law, but because the other is the right, the true fulfilling, the truth to Nature. The perfect human life is in being true to human nature, which uses laws but not obeys them.” His advice seems to be, both in his published and unpublished writings (and more particularly in the latter), that it is incumbent upon us to obtain from both life and love all the results that in Nature, grass, flowers, trees and the earth itself obtain from the sun. He sees that virtue consists in man becoming so far human as to be unable to take pleasures only for him- self, or to reject joy for fear it has to be shared. He says: “There is no tendency in human nature towards this condition which we see, this union of true goodness with boundless self- serving and self-preferring. That is imposed from without. There can no more be that than a tendency in a line to be at once straight and crooked. Can the same fountain send forth at Once sweet water and bitter 7 No ; but bitter waters may be poured into the stream, as they are into the stream of modern life. There are various tendencies in human nature. There is a tendency to vice, to licence, to self-pleasing, strong enough. There is a tendency, not less LAW-BREAKER AND LAW-MAKER 67 strong, to restraining passion, to denying self, to putting away all pleasure, for the sake of good- ness, to torturing the body, to racking the soul, treating all delight as sin, all pleasure as tempta- tion. There is also another tendency, strongest of all, though last, and destined to be universal —the tendency, namely, to cast out the self, and make pleasure free. The tendency, in a word, of human life to be—the tendency of Man to live l’” It is because we are calculating, timid, spiritually anaemic and cold that we fear passion. “God’s instrument,” cries Hinton, “for casting out self is passion.” Let us have more and not less passion, is his demand, for any passion forged into power, to use the title of Mrs. Boole's fine book, is a Jove's thunderbolt for dispelling imbecilities and pruderies. The mystical mean- ing of passion has not yet, except in isolated cases, emerged from the debauchery and the savagery of a partially evolved humanity. Hin- ton craved that all the tense power in evil should be taken up and made into a servant to obey love. It is a great discovery, he says, that if you shut off a force from the channels in which it is ordinarily filtered away, you will have a great deal more left for the particular mill-wheel on which you direct it. It is time that so many thoughts true of heaven be applied to earth, and in substituting the desire for good for the re- straint of passion, does not the human race pass from its chrysalis state to nearer the winged state? Hinton declared that we ought to have an * Passion forged into Power, by Mary Everest Boole. 68 JAMES HINTON objective test for superstition. As he con- sidered that the need of sacrifice for any human good is the greatest of all superstitions, in fact a perversion of goodness, he calls on us to put it to the test in modern life. Our social order may be said to be a regard for others without impulse, or with a fear lest we lose our souls. It is almost as if men and women, through lethargy or worse, had tried to make society do their loving for them on the same plan as the Tibetans use praying machines. The evolved idea surely is that a spontaneous necessity, through an enlarged family feeling, insists on every human being acting as member of a harmonious family in any crisis, or even in daily and hourly living. Hinton saw that if goodness and purity can be something which injures rather than aids mankind, or something to which visible good can be sacrificed, that then it is only a matter of accident what such virtue leads to in the way of cruelty or meanness, to say nothing of joylessness. He begs us not to let the eyes of the body blind us to the eyes of the soul. “And indeed,” says Hinton, “is there not a palpable error in this very thought of training in self-control and restraint, as if they were the end ? Heaven is not to be restraint— why practise that for heaven 2 If we want that (as indeed we do) is it not evidently as a means ? And how clearly it is adapted as a means and stepping-stone to something else : to that in which we truly want the practice, in that true taking which is one with giving.” LAW-BREAKER AND LAW-MAKER, 69 Hinton as Law-breaker wanted to make prosti- tution impossible, and as Law-maker to widen marriage and develop it into an evolved and beautiful relationship divorced from economic and sensual considerations. In his writings he often seems to be struggling to make the law of Christ bear upon sex matters. This he found a colossal difficulty. Christianity, as preached for hundreds of years, has directly put a slur on the flesh, and so put corruption on it. This is because what Christ left unsaid on these matters St. Paul and others have said. Sex is either in hell or in prison, with rare exceptions, chiefly because of this attitude. It is the work of men like Hinton and of women who dare face all the cruelty and misunderstanding of preaching the truth and living it, to declare that to cleanse and at the same time widen the senses, is the way to elevate love. The Law-breaker in these matters has to cast out impurity of heart and as Law-maker to insist on passion in love and not outside it. As a separate thing, a mere lust or gluttony, we have to regard it as below bestiality in evolved human beings, and so not sane or safe in modern life. Hinton’s great desire was to find a remedy for prostitution, and in thinking out this terrible question he became obsessed, as many are obsessed to-day about the white slave traffic. This made him a Law- breaker in order that he might help to crush false morality, and a Law-maker so that he could construct the newer ethics. The idea Hinton wanted to change in the 70 JAMES HINTON minds of men and women was that physical love is a mere matter of bodily gratification. If, for a generation, it could be considered as a matter of soul gratification struggling to express itself through the inadequate medium of the body, the reform in morals and the joy in love would be built up. Because the continuance of the race is dependent upon bodily contact, moralists have confused the place of physical desire in evolved human beings. What is a simple and uncomplicated function in the ape, the tiger, or the primitive man, may be a supreme expression of the soul in the evolved human being, tending to produce as a result babies, pictures, songs, or word-painting, or only, maybe, a new joy in living, which communicates itself to others by a scattering of forces strengthened by a perfect love union. The body is an instrument capable of an infinitude of vibrations. The true mu- sician alone can bring out the best melodies. If by chance a piano was cast on an island inhabited by savages, the beating of its notes by a cannibal would not evoke the same sounds as if Busoni, in an air-ship, were suddenly to descend and use it as it was meant to be used by civilised man. The stereotyped moralist is like a teacher who remains intent on laying down rules for five-finger exercises. The advanced moralist sits down boldly at the piano, tunes it to its finest pitch, and plays on it the sublimest and most passionate music that he knows. No wonder that, as a spiritual musician, Hinton refused to believe that hymns played with one LAW-BREAKER AND LAW-MAKER 71 finger, or rag-time sensualities banged out with both hands, were music. Because his vision of the beauty of a true sexual relationship was so exalted, he realised how inadequate and in- temperate statements about the passionate things of love can mar or destroy what is supremely pure and wonderful. He often grew hopeless, and even rebellious, and felt it was better to compromise as all around him seemed to be compromising. It was probably in those moods, induced by the stupidity and venom of his enemies, or his unintelligent misinterpreters, that many of his impulsive mistakes were made. Is there any surer way, he asks, to make any one bad than to treat him as being so 2 What was flame to Hinton was often mud to his hearers, and his inner perceptions, translated into words of traditionalised meaning in the minds of his listeners, only confused them and hurt him. Two are needed to tell a truth, the speaker and the hearer, especially if one is a Law-breaker. Hinton tried to impress on good people that their feeling about the sexual passion is a per- version. It has been made into a lust instead of a means to the greatest service. The problem for men and for women, he says, is to use and possess the sexual passion so as to make it the minister to the highest things, and with no restraint in it but that. His idea was that passionate desire should make the body an instrument wherein the soul can express itself, and be incapable of anything else. The sex relation has been per- verted into a self thing, a pleasure like racing 72 JAMES HINTON or billiards, a pastime and indulgence instead of a rapturous means to universal service. Hence the discord and the tension. The restraint is imposed because of the laxity, and the laxity is a result of a wrong point of view. “Love,” says H. B. Binns, “at its fullest, is something different from virtue. It contains elements which virtue can never possess and which most ethical codes consign to the category of vice. Such love alone is the expression of the soul, and every student of love discovers sooner or later that the soul has its own intimate standard for judging what is wrong and what is right, and when that which seemed wrong becomes right.” " It was the dogmatism about sexual matters Hinton wanted to destroy in the spirit of the true Law-breaker and Law-maker, though to- wards the end of his life he grew almost too emphatic in defining the new order. “If this dreadful disorder of sexual morality,” he writes, “is to be overcome, it must be by boldly facing it unafraid. Goodness or purity, which alone has power over it, is rendered impotent by its very shrinking. It takes affright at the associations which exist now with the sexual passion, especially in its perverted forms, and so is unable to look through these and see it as it truly is : see its nobleness, and use its essential power and purity to purify. So it cannot see it as it is. Its immediate shock and revulsion are too strong. The abuses and accidents are to it as the thing, and it can do nothing; nay, * Life of Whitman, by H. B. Binns. LAW-BREAKER AND LAW-MAKER, 73 worse than nothing, it makes the evil inevitably worse, for it seeks to crush it and put it away, instead of turning it to use, which never can succeed; can never fail, indeed, to make the evil more. Only in the acceptance and use of that which is mis-seen in the perverted forms can the evil be overcome ; only by turning it to good.” According to Hinton, true passion in evolved beings needs no limitations from without. Such limitations, he declares, would interfere with the rule of good. A freedom with no concession to licence would, he thinks, soon prove that freedom is the foe of licentiousness, and in fact love’s best security. “Passion cannot be made permanently impure,” he declares. “No im- purity even that has passion in it can be made permanently impure. It tends, by irrepressible necessity, to purify itself. Mix it with what impurity we may, it will, by its own necessity, burn itself pure. It is a fire. Only that which forbids and restrains passion can be impurity, utter and hopeless.” - It is easy to see that statements like these often confused the novice in the theory and art of love. “Is it not beautiful,” Hinton cries, “to see the promise of a purity of life, by the side of which the highest and whitest purity of the most exalted devotee is not true purity ? To use, shows us master ; to crush, shows us slave. In the one case we rule; in the other it rules.” “Was there not here a great mis- take,” he asks, “that we confuse man’s passion 74 JAMES HINTON for woman, which truly is emotional—a passion for union of feeling, of sympathy, rather than of body—with sensuality ? We have a wrong thought here : the passion, not the sensation, is what man prizes. In this it is one with all the passions, all the bodily ones as well as the rest. The thing desired truly is the passion, not the sensation, and it is proved both ways. At once passion is more delight, more joy, if it can be while the sensation is not, as in rapturous self-denial. The sensation, if separated from the passion, is not pleasure, but disgust : it is not a matter of desire save by mistake and false belief of what must be pleasure; like the greedi- ness of a child after appetite is satisfied. “It is the emotion man desires. The thought of sensuality as primarily in it is the worst sensuality of all. The beauty of Nature is in this : that into this passion, which is one of emotion, she has so introduced that sense- pleasure, so joined the two, that they cannot be disjoined, and so by what forbids the sense- pleasure, the emotional passion is forbidden too. And so by all the power that passion and the desire of it have over man, he is driven, forced, to turn out of him that rule of self, which by forbidding the sense-pleasure forbids that. He is driven to make himself such, so pure, so un- ruled by sense, so wholly swayed by emotions that go quite beyond pleasure, that there need be no restraint on him, save that which is within his soul. Then his passion can be free. “Is not this what Nature means by putting LAW-BREAKER AND LAW-MAKER 75 so insidiously, so inseparably, this sense element into the emotion of man towards woman 2 If not this, what does it mean 2 why a thing so palpably too much for any visible end ? Is it not plainly this : by the force of that passion of man for woman—the strongest in his soul— to compel even his sense-pleasure to become pure ; that is, to compel him to become wholly pure ? He must, or that delight of passion is forbidden. The source of all purity is forbidden —the union of soul with woman—unless the self be so cast out that the bodily pleasure, too, needs no restraint because it carries with it its own. So is there not a rightness also in that false purism, which is most repulsive, forbidding any signs of affection or tenderness, unless it means marriage 2 Has it not its necessity, ex- pressing what the self imposes and part of the force for its Overthrow 2 °’ - . Hinton clearly realised, as destroyer and con- structor, the two processes contributing to one end, the crushing of the soul, in this great problem of passionate desire. He dealt sternly with the unnatural forms of badness on the one hand, both artificial and perverted, and what conventional moralists call the practice of right on the other, a practice which often is, of all things, the farthest from it. He saw the only justifiable use of passion as one of the points in the great circle of love. To him passion was what the sun is to flowers and fruit, and it is by their fruits that we shall know the real lovers of the world. We are so traditionalised by the 76 JAMES HINTON need of giving or of grabbing, that when the real face of love or passion in one is offered to us, we often spurn it or hasten from it. It is, according to Hinton, a superstition and a delusion to have fear of this wondrous power. He would rid passion in love of jealousy, of selfish monopolies, of fear of itself, and shame at its own flaming desire. It was no easy task that he attempted, for both repression and indulgence have blinded us to the greater issues that arise from a Love splendidly free. “To be fluid and chaste,” as Whitman puts it, is to be bound by spiritual and not by mere material laws. To dare to love to the height and depth and strength of one’s nature, as a spiritual giant, and not to be forced by conventionality to dwindle into an ethical dwarf, is to defy con- vention, almost to court crucifixion, and to consent, in one form or another, to be slain by the very law of Love itself, which creates and recreates by suffering, by death, and by many resurrections. CHAPTER IV THE MYSTERY OF PILEASURE AND PAIN IN Three Modern Seers I have dealt with the two great mysteries of Life which Hinton con- sidered of vital importance in the reconstruction of the new civilisation. In a study of James Hinton and his ideals, however, one cannot ignore his attitude towards the forces of Pain and Pleasure which, in his opinion, will tend to purify and sanctify evolving human nature. “Passions,” Hinton declared, “are rich by absorption of other passions,” and he added that “ rising above sense is an illusion.” Earth, he believed, when impulse is perfected, is the only heaven needed, where pleasure is regarded as “trouble taken willingly,” and “flesh has risen to be the spirit’s minister.” “Praised be pain and praised be joy Both are holy. They form the world and they broaden great Souls. Joy and pain are powers, are life, are God.” So exclaims Romain Rolland. It is a Hintonian sentiment. James Hinton’s little book, The Mystery of Pain, has been the comfort of the orthodox and the heterodox. There is in it a physiological, and certainly an intellectual * Three Modern Seers, Chaps. III-IV. (Stanley Paul.) 77 78 JAMES HINTON and emotional standpoint, which gives an in- terpretation from the side of celestial Love, and also an analysis of Mother Nature’s meaning. The subtlety of the book is shown in the analysis of the “forward ends '' of suffering and loss. The mating of pain with pleasure is pointed out as one of the reasons for their mutual existence. “The thought of the mystery of pain,” says Hinton, “is the seeing our life again as a Fluxion. The feeling of pain is an element brought into the self-form by isolation. It is losing coming first in the self-form. . . . By the magic of giving, ills and losses turn round to gains and joys.” It was Hinton’s theory that the sufferings of man- kind go to a general pool to be divided up for the redemption of the world. Pain, as pain, seems to most of us pure evil. If we analyse the different kinds of pain, it is only when looking upon it as willing sacrifice that it seems pure good. As pain becomes interpreted as a joyous giving it ceases to be pain in the tradi- tional meaning of the word. If we analyse martyr pain, accidental pain, all pain inflicted upon men by their fellows, when there has not been crime in them but misconception or disease, such as tortures for witchcraft, or the agony of cancer, we shall realise that probably James Hinton fell upon a subtle truth—a truth he expresses in the simplest words: “The highest good of everything is its making possible a better thing, a thing not possible except for it.” In his manuscripts he makes some one say, when considering the good of sorrow : “I was given MYSTERY OF PLEASURE AND PAIN 79 a seed and when most I loved it I was bidden to bury it in the ground, and I buried it, not knowing I was sowing.” Elsewhere he says: “If Nature teaches us any lesson, if experience be a guide, should they not have taught us at least to ask if this power does not work us mischief exactly because it is meant to work us good, and we do not apply it 2 Powers adapted for good always work mischief if they are not turned to that good. Are we not justified in saying, indeed, every power that works us mischief is a power waiting to achieve a good, waiting till we see and understand 2 ” Hinton implies that the more evolved a person is the more he realises what flowers the root of suffering can produce. He looks on pain as the widow’s mite, of infinite value in the giving. He beseeches us never to grudge it, as it has direct and indirect results which are valuable for the world. If a man had lost a sovereign, and he hears that a man dying of starvation has found it, he ought to be glad he lost it. So with pain. If it helps us to comfort others by the knowledge we gain through it, or even if it makes us paint or write or dance differently, it is so much to the good somewhere and somehow, and intensifies the undying joy in service. . “Here is the work: to gather up the force which is in these evil things, which now we merely feel as pain, uselessly, save as it makes a tension in our hearts that must gain its relief and expend itself in Life at last. To gather 80 JAMES HINTON up the force which is in these evil things, and put it to its use.” James Hinton laid a great stress on the magical results which would be produced if pain could be considered as a divine gift for us to bestow as a blessing upon the world, when once we have transmuted it into a kindly power rather than a malignant one. He saw pleasure, too, as a wonder-world of helpful enterprise and delicious nature-surprises. It is our fear of both pain and pleasure that produces bitterness and dulness. “Man shies at pleasure,” he says. “Now, how is a horse cured of shying 2 It is by taking him straight up to it, and letting him see it, and touch it, and find out that there is nothing to fear.” Once we take pain as we would take pleasure were we not afraid of it, and once we take pleasure as a Child of God and a producer of the joys of both earth and the heavens, we shall see the inner meaning of both pain and desire. Our ideas are inverted about both these mysteries; Our actions, as a result, are a little nervous, and even sometimes a little putrid. Hinton would have the soul rule both pain and pleasure. - “If a bodily relation is to be put above the soul, we shall see the body ruling and trampling upon it everywhere. That is not the body’s fault,” he says. “If fire is thrown into gun- powder who blames it for the explosion ? The bodily relations were never meant to have power to make the Life their slave. Could we have intenser proof of it than now 2 * These are the MYSTERY OF PLEASURE AND PAIN 81 questions he asks us : “Is not this what we want, the impulse to pleasure so strong that no regard to self shall be able to restrain it? Then will it not feel, and naturally obey, the true restraints; nay, will it not find them coinciding with itself 2 Why should it not ? And may we even think thus : that once heaven, viz. the perfect Life, is pleasure, must there not be, as the sign of an increasing Life, more and more impulse to pleasure ? Can it be otherwise, or ought it 2 So do we see this as man’s history, not a diminishing but an increasing impulse of pleasure ? Do we not want the impulse to pleasure so strong that regard to self shall be unable to restrain it; then it will come into contact with the true power to restrain it, viz. good or service 2 The false restraint, self-virtue, keeps the true away. It is as if there were a bit which would control a horse, but another bit is in the way which cannot control it, and so it seems as if it defied the other; but what is amiss is, that the other is not brought into play. So there is no reason to believe that man would refuse the law of service in pleasure.” The less a thing is in the spirit the more it is in the form, and conventions always insist upon the form while sneering at the spirit. In one of his letters to Miss Caroline Haddon, Hinton says that “Genius is the discoverer that joy is bitterer than pain and pain dearer than delight. Is not this beautiful and true to Nature, nay, exquisitely like her (who is a woman to her inmost soul) that the secret of the liberty of 6 82 JAMES HINTON genius for pleasure is that it is willing to bear pain 7 ° In Hinton’s conception of the new Order of thinking with regard to pleasure, purity is to be the starting-point and not the end, so that the senses can give more joy and yet rule less. “Any tendency,” he says, “made strong enough to be a passion gives a pleasure. The pleasure is simply the gratifying of the tendency, any tendency. So that “pleasure * is simply the result or fruit of any tendency that rises to a passion. When we see truly shall it yet be said that pain is deeper, enters more profoundly into our life, elicits deeper responses from our souls, than pleasure ? We have not known that her power is more terrible, more searching, more consuming than even that of her sister Pain. No power goes so deep into the soul as Pleasure’s power. None so kills, so makes alive. Surely Pain, glorious as she is and full of joy, is but a feeble satellite around that sun.” Hinton clearly saw that the mode of our thinking is wrong. The thought of what a thing is to others must be reckoned with, as well as what it is to ourselves, and to the race, and must not be selfishly or only personally con- sidered. The morally dark age came, according to Hinton, by pleasure claiming its rights as opposed to real life, the life of mutual aid. He believed that even work should have pleasure in it, and should have joy as an ensign. “Nothing could ever have made men prefer self-virtue to self-vice but a deliberate closing of the eyes, and then looking only at one little part and MYSTERY OF PLEASURE AND PAIN 83 refusing to see the connection of things.” Be- cause of this attitude we are possibly realising at last that, though vice seduces, virtue often punishes. One of Hinton’s friends declared that it was his need to reconcile pleasure with right, impulse with love, and the ideal with the practical, which made his enthusiasm worth while. He pleaded that all relationships should be for human purposes and not merely, as is common, self-interested ones. “If any one says that purity and sensuous desire want restraining, I say, either that through not thinking of the subject reasonably he does himself gross injustice, or else he is a blackguard in his soul. If a woman says so to me, I say that she is so muddled and bewildered by the false ideas and feelings she lives amongst that her instincts are utterly perverted and she does not know what she says.” Hinton so often thought of women as flowers, and wrote and spoke of them in flower symbols, that it is interesting to find amongst his manuscripts a reference which throws light on his feelings about flowers and kissing. “If, besides the pleasure to us of smelling and kissing a flower, it were also a distinct delight and joy to them, and were besides a good, reviving them when faded or brightening them and making them stronger and lovelier, could laws prevent it being done 7 But would not a law that flowers should be kissed only when it was for their good and never against it, be worth while 2 Would it not make its own keeping 2 84 JAMES HINTON “And if it were attempted to prevent people from kissing the flowers (apart from the question of good to the flower) by making it an artificial evil, insisting that every flower that was so unlawfully kissed should be cast out into the dust to wither, evidently it will follow that the flowers so cast out would be kissed. There would be no reason not. A true instinct is tortured and turned away, but its very dis- tortion forms its dominion.” Hinton declared in his earlier years that his Mystery of Pain was an ascetic book, and so did not include the Mystery of Pleasure. In his later years Pleasure’s voice became to him as sacred as Pain’s voice, and its meaning as glorious and wonderful. They are ministers and servants, he declared, the one of the other. “How curious it is, and yet how natural and inevitable, that the substitution of the idea of self-right for that of pleasure, as the guide of life, should go together with a mean, mad pur- suit of indulgence in low pleasure l’’ He says, “How natural, too (to one who has seen what sort of a thing Nature truly is), that the true cure for this madness should be a reinstitution of pleasure as the law. Yes, surely ; every degraded thing wants restoring to its rights. Have we not treated pleasure as a sort of harlot ? And see what she has become ! For pleasure truly is giving.” In both his early and late manuscripts we find statements in which he links pleasure with both service and pain. He implies that from pain MYSTERY OF PLEASURE AND PAIN 85 there is always a creative joy born of its own travails. “Looking at the restraints against use in our life,” he says, “we see that they are supersti- tions, but that they can be only rightly seen and treated so by seeing our licence; that taking all sorts of pleasure for self, which we think so legitimate, is licence, and not liberty, is a defiance of humanity, and not human. This is the fulfilling the condition of that. Thus the equal opposites are present and ensure us, under the changed form, the same fact. And is it not true that the licence must be first seen to be licence, before the superstition can be seen to be superstition ?” Hinton realises that our false sense of sin is often misguided virtue, and our joylessness merely missing what Nature means us to enjoy. “Love means doing, for others' sakes, pleasant things that were wrong and degrading apart from love.” He tells us that to think anything is sin simply because it implies pleasure would surely make an inhabitant of heaven declare us to be either diseased or mad. It is the refusing joy, not the seeking or aiming after it, that is wrong. The missing of it is the wrong, according to this practical idealist. “Surely we have wholly misapprehended sin; have thought of it quite falsely as a going after pleasure, as consisting in that, or even having that at all for its character. Sin, the rule of self, surely has this essentially, primarily, for its character—that it restricts from pleasure. Do 86 JAMES HINTON not all heavenly beings see it so, as disease and madness 2 - “Was not this what it first did in Adam and Eve ; made them restrict themselves from the pleasure of each other’s beauty ? Is not that throughout and ever the sign of evil, its first, most essential, and characteristic sign and fruit 2 So that we have to read it all in a new way, to see it all afresh, recognising here too (how simple it is—it is one thing everywhere !) that our im- pression is utterly unlike the fact.” Hinton declared that all real pleasures bear with them a divine necessity of man’s becoming good. “If goodness has truly nothing to do with not-pleasure, then the pleasure-led have no affinity with badness, but a good falsely turned against pleasure makes them bad. It is an . infamous wrong against them. So those people who can be virtuous so are cruel; they inflict infinite wrong; they cast out of the pale of the good those who are not bad. So that that beautiful goodness has to be refused, for it cannot be for all ; it thrusts into hell those who need not go.” And again he says: “There is not a single thing a bad man can do for his badness that a good man shall not do for his goodriess, when he is thinking first of others.” To be always trying to clean the outside of the cup of passion and pleasure, instead of having it clean within, has been the delusion. “Is it not a new power in the world, rendering possible what must have been impossible with- MYSTERY OF PLEASURE AND PAIN 87 out it, to see this true meaning of pleasure; that it is the means, the force, to banish self and set man free from it : that it calls for this, and will not be denied it 2 This is the reason it exists, and why it was made. Is it not a new power to see this 2 A new position of man in relation to his life 2 Does it not put man in a new attitude towards pleasure altogether, enab- ling him to treat it in a new way; giving it new, unsuspected potencies for good, and render- ing impossible most of its power for evil. Is it not fulfilling that condition which we have found is the condition for escaping the evil of any hurtful thing—the finding out its use and making it serve us by the very qualities by which it has hurt us 2 ° Through this statement we realise that what Hinton means by true goodness is both the desire made true by the restraint, and the free indulgence made right because of the true desire. “Only the strength of passion can bring it into purity, so that pleasure cannot be refused and in this way made good, pure, and holy to its very soul, so that it shall need no keeping down, and shall find no possible being ‘better or even restraint. Only its strength can do this—only the passion mighty, overwhelming, of an infinite, unmeasured power to thrill and carry into rapture and fascinate into glory and delight.” Hinton claims that “goodness” so often is not in good being done but in pleasure being limited. This limitation, he says, is sin and not virtue, as is falsely supposed. It is one of the most 88 JAMES HINTON stupid forms of sowing to the flesh and must of necessity reap corruption. This point of view, Hinton declared, was one of the sources of the open “brutalities * of our life which is but the other side of this false choice of pleasure, instead of good in pleasure, which is so often the de- termining element of our actions. “Is not this what we want, the impulse to pleasure so strong that no regard to self shall be able to restrain it 2 Then will it not feel, and naturally obey, the true restraints; nay, will it not find them coinciding with itself? Why should it not ? And may we even think thus: that once ‘heaven, viz. the perfect Life, is pleasure, must there not be, as the sign of an increasing Life, more and more impulse to pleasure ? Can it be otherwise, or ought it 2 So do we see this as man’s history, not a diminish- ing but an increasing impulse to pleasure. Do we not want the impulse to pleasure so strong that regard to self shall be unable to restrain it 2 then it will come into contact with the true power to restrain it, viz. good or service. The false restraint, self-virtue, keeps the true away.” Hinton warns us that, in emancipating our- selves from superstitions it is no real emancipa- tion if we merely seek goodness for self instead of pleasure for self. He declares that no one ever knows the true pleasure till he does it, not for pleasure but for the sake of service, and so does it that, if the service were not, he could not do it, nor desire it. “The pleasure is to be an MYSTERY OF PLEASURE AND PAIN 89 incident ; and, wherever this is the case, of course it cannot have any determining influence and it can have no power. This is what is demanded : Everywhere, yes in everything, pleasure is to be an incident. This is what the law of service means. Pleasure and pain alike are but incidents, and therefore not powers, not determiners; with no power to move, and therefore no reason to deter. Nothing less than this is what Nature plainly means.” The great need, he sees, is for a flexible right, as opposed to a rigid right, with the strength of pleasure as its inspiration. Licence can never be put away by that which is the rule of pleasure in another form, for then it is pleasure tyrannising without its true conditions fulfilled, or is another form of gluttony, putting pleasure conditions above human ones. “So how much of what are counted the “evil’ tendencies of man are truly the best : for no one (except artificially) wishes to be bad. What men wish is that right and pleasure should not oppose. Well, this is God’s command : ‘Make right and pleasure not op- posed.’ That is man’s duty—this to which he so tends, and which it seems so evil that he should tend to. And here is the condition. You want your right not to oppose pleasure. Attach it absolutely to service, absolutely and wholly, and it shall not.” The persistency with which we cling to some external device of virtue while the soul slips away is, according to Hinton, but unlovely and cowardly. “The difference between the idolatry of savages and ours is,” -a-º-w' t’ 90 JAMES HINTON he declares, “ that they, for virtue, afflict them- selves ; we, others.” He declares that “ The body is not evil, or to be dreaded. It gives, and it alone, the true temper to the soul. In the mighty passions, in the impulses which, abused to self, must degrade, lies, not the world’s danger, but its hope. What things most hurt us, ever, but the things destined most to serve us 2 “Most curious it is, as showing the false right that comes from wrong, that prostitutes have, as a rule, an objection to show their bodies; many will not do it for any sum. And they will not even be models (to a great extent) partly for the same reason. They have made, of course, a pure thing impure. This should help us to see what impurity means, and to feel rightly respecting it. A wrong always tends to have a false right as its expression and its betrayal. In this way we may learn to recognise it and estimate it. One sees so often the cruelty of our false right and how it makes the very wicked- ness it punishes. As a false law of the Sabbath ruins and corrupts by making it sinful to break it, so these other false laws against pleasure, all of them, make crime and make recklessness. The “sufferer,” so crushed into sin, is often nearer to Nature, and dearer to her than they who keep up the false law, and bend it to their ruin. Did not He who knew Nature best of all men plainly say of those whom false laws crushed into sin that they were nearer Nature’s kingdom than those who never “ sinned ’ 2 We must look afresh at those frightful scenes of MYSTERY OF PLEASURE AND PAIN 91 * wickedness,” and learn to feel what wickedness it is that is revealed in them. There stands revealed the vileness of laws consenting not to trust our impulses. Oh how well broken And by those, surely, broken who most readily would find it in them to accept God’s law.” “This is interesting. It is as if the problem of food had been given expressly as a guide for us. Every child has surely to pass through a state of gluttony, of inability to follow properly its impulses. It is almost impossible it should not, for what else should occupy it, at first 7 But is not gluttony “naturally out-grown by other interests coming in, if no special power is given it by unwise stress laid on food 2 And then when the passion for woman comes, man is already no more a child ; he has solved the problem before and comes prepared to meet it, so that there need be no glutton stage. The food-problem has been given him to solve it once for all. Before he comes to Love, he will know that he must not cut himself loose from passion as his guide.” The ascetic, Hinton claims, thinks from a pleasure point of view, the spiritual person from Nature’s wider vision, wherein there is no greed nor obsession. “If anything forbids good because it is also pleasure, that is the demon of Lust. Here we grasp him, as it were. He has come out from his hiding-place of passion, where we cannot see him truly, but confound him with that which is not him, and where we cannot kill him be- 92 JAMES HENTON cause our blows fall on Nature, and not on him.” Hinton declares that “Anything treated as sensual passion is treated now would degrade it.” He instances the sexual joy of a woman who suckles her own child. Suppose, he asks, she suddenly declared, “I cannot do it; it is pleasure.” What then 2 The absurdity is clearly seen when we face a “nonsense-reason '' of one kind, and compare it with another. “In respect to our reason for fearing the sexual passion and its apparently terrible power,” he asks, “is it not the phenomenon of quite a different thing, namely, the certainty of a false right to be broken 2 The right here is false, and therefore it cannot command obedience : so it seems as if that passion were so terrible. But it is not in the passion; it is in the falsity of the right, the evil lies. We need not be afraid : true rights Nature keeps ; false ones she breaks. The very breaking of the false one is promise, guarantee, of the keeping of the true. It is as the hindrance of the current to one rowing against it. It is a pledge of its aid when his back is turned.” As late in his life as 1870 Hinton wrote in a short autobiography : “Sexual pleasure It is to me emphatically emotional. It is a spiritual and scarcely a sensuous thing at all. Pleasure taken for self necessarily implies, demands, re- strictions from without. Taken for good, there is no place for them—no place for any questions except as to the good, never as to the thing. MYSTERY OF PLEASURE AND PAIN 93 That taking for pleasure (which is for self) is inverted—the less put over the greater. Neces- sarily it involves restrictions, conditions; evi- dently pleasure cannot be taken (for pleasure’s sake) ad libitum. So the restrictions come from that. “So the very fact of these restrictions existing in respect to the relation to women—as they do not in respect of eating, for example—proves impurity there. That is, it shows the external mark of impurity yet unremoved, and working its evil, though the internal cause may have greatly ceased. “Pleasure taken for good does not want— inevitably throws off—all external restrictions. It has its restrictions in itself; it carries with it its own limitations. . “That is, the true “passion restrained ’ is a fluxion. Is it not that the “pleasure and the ‘good” are ordinates ? “It needs no limitations from without ; it cannot have any, indeed ; for they would in- terfere with the rule of good.” Everything Hinton wrote implied that the sexual passion is too mystical a force to degrade it into self-seeking, or to deny it pleasure in the glowing and flame-like sense of the word. “Truly seen, sexual passion is no more an animal thing, a condition (glad to be parted with, even) of our physical state. It is the great spiritual power of human life; the regenerator of man ; the means by which his life is raised to its true height. How should we be ashamed of 94 JAMES HINTON it, or blush to speak of it, or seek to banish it, or do anything with it but use it perfectly 2 If ashamed of anything, only ashamed of treating it as that animal thing it is not ; letting the animal relation rule, using it, i.e., not as it is, but as we mis-see it.” According to Hinton, the play of passion is made truly free when the restraint is within it. “To hold to the physical relation,” he says, “save as the instrument of this spiritual power is the very same mistake as to sacrifice the human truth of a story for some mere detail, wholly fictitious, the whole truth of which is in its seeing that human truth.” He emphasises the fact that “ The greatest revolutions often lie in the simplest changes of states or ideals. If a thing has been done one way and with one motive, there is no reason it should not be done another way through a new motive. It is the new motive which inspires, as the old one causes corruption and decay. “The sexual pleasure is simply a pleasure like any other, to be subordinated to use, and re- garded simply like anything else. And yet, instead of that being the case, all society is soaked and saturated with impurity from it, because of its wrong point of view. Could any Being, looking at us from without, pure himself, help saying: “What that society of man ex- presses is absorption in, mere bondage to, the bodily relation of the sexes. All the life re- volves round that ; all use and good are sacrificed to it. Sensuality is written on its forehead.’” MYSTERY OF PLEASURE AND PAIN 95 Hinton always maintains that all pleasures, even physical pleasures, are worthy and per- manent in precise proportion to the amount of previous sacrifice or toilsome self-denial which they absorb. It is as with a true gardener. His enjoyment of his garden depends on his labour in it, and so pleasure and pain should become merged into a beautiful result for the world. If we could only transform or transmute a sexual power into beauty instead of urging it to evil as we do, the world might be a possible flowering-ground for the theories of poets and scientists instead of a battle-field in either a mental or a physical sense. Hinton points out, with regard to the passion of hunger, that we might of course starve and tantalise man into a mere ravenousness of hunger, that would make the true nature of passion for food absolutely invisible to us, and even make it a mere bugbear and terror, and so fill us with fatal panic re- specting it. Do we not entirely, he asks us, misuse this other passion, the sex passion, and dread it with an entirely unfounded terror 7 Let impurity be recognised, Hinton says, where it is most vile, that is in the false purity, and in the restrictions which mean impurity. Let the conscience be trained to revolt at them, let the aim be purity of heart, not restrictions, which imply and teach the contrary. Let the eye become accustomed to penetrate through the outside and feel what these powers are within, and so beauty, wherever it is, becomes a true pure blessing to the human race. To Hinton it 96 JAMES HINTON appeared that there are few things so pernicious as a good thing made evil, and then forbidden. “Make the demand for the true purity, be- cause, for it, the false outside purity is too little. Man’s deliverance here must come from passion, and not from coolness; from fire, not from stone. Fire is the purifier here as everywhere, here above all. From the intense passion, the un- quenchable desire, the deliverance must come. . . . The passion fullest and most passionate and most drunk with its delight will insist, and refuse to be denied, its being made holy and fit to be counted as a holy thing. It only will fulfil the conditions of not having to restrain.” Hinton saw that to take pleasure without greed and let it go without grumbling, to fix our thoughts on the highest right and not on the expedient, is to refuse to be limited by law or by those commandments which place love in a groove and desire in ill favour. “Man aims a blow at indulgence thinking to crush the self; but he crushes the passion only, and leaves the self. Then, when the time has come, he aims at the restraint, thinking to crush it ; but in truth he crushes the licence and leaves the restraint—leaves it in its perfect form.” - This is a large part of Hinton’s gospel, a revelation of the need to intensify a new view of sex by changing our conception of it from an animalism, a soul-corrupting mania, to a purifier through the mysticism which makes the body a creator in the finest sense. James Hinton was 96] MRS. JAMES HINTON. - - - - - - - - - - - - - i MYSTERY OF PLEASURE AND PAIN 97 one of the first reformers who realised that sex- love is shaking itself free from lust, and that its fulfilment, though it may or may not include physical gratification, is a condition to be at- tained by intelligent human beings as one of the arts of life. The mystic and mental elements in the sex-life are transmuting the gross and primal elements, which in the monkey or the tiger are rational and clean, but in the evolved man and woman merely primitive. This change of outlook is to-day forced upon our moral life, leading us to consider seriously and sincerely why the history of love is still so largely a history of deception, perversion, or persecution. We have created in the past the monster we now dread by distorting passion, and by making pleasure an end and not an incident. Passion is power, cries Hinton, and should not be with- drawn, and life or death is knowing how to live with pleasure, how to make it friend or enemy. A baby who burns himself might think that in a good world there would be no fire. But it is with fire as with every natural power man has to live by. He dreads them, misuses them, finds them working mischief. His only freedom from their mischief is their right use. CHAPTER V THE PURITAN AND THE PRODIGAL THERE is a tendency in civilisation both to dwarf and to exaggerate the place of the senses. These two attitudes may be described as those of the puritan and the prodigal. The puritan limits to excess, and the prodigal indulges to excess. One is the miser , and the other the spendthrift. The prude and the prostitute are alike affronts to Mother Nature and slurs on human nature. A spiritual healer would diag- nose their state as anaemic or apoplectic, but not normal or healthy. The evolved human being finds no virtue in repression and no joy in excess. The puritan’s sense of sin and the prodigal’s impulse to excess limit alike the evolution of Desire and of Beauty, Love’s chosen handmaidens. James Hinton saw the starvation and the waste of sexual energy in the manifestations of civilised life as represented by puritanism and prodigality. He wanted to destroy, to reconstruct, and to spiritualise the most primitive of all human emotions. As a man of Science, he saw the futility of any attempt to abolish prostitution and leave everything else the same. He believed that to open the way to more beautiful ex- 98 THE PURITAN AND THE PRODIGAL 99 pressions of passion in love would inevitably lead to the minimising of prudery and the elimination of prostitution. As a recent anony- mous American writer has declared : “Passion without purity is impurity, but purity without passion is impotence.” There are people who declare that prostitution will always exist because it has once existed. Hinton was one of the few reformers who de- clared that prostitution must be driven out of modern life, as cannibalism has been driven out. If it is proved that prostitution is a necessary evil the modern thinker would have it made, at least, into an honourable profession. This pro- fession, however, must be a free choice, as mar- riage should be, and not in any way injured by the ostracism of those who refuse to find room in their hearts or homes for those who, they declare, safeguard their virtue. To despise a protector of one’s honour or be too cowardly to take one’s share in casting out the slur pro- stitution is on love, is to own oneself a craven and a traitor about the most important things in life. Hinton faced this bewildering problem with the outlook of a man and with something of the insight of a woman, but sometimes also with the arrogance of a child and the ardour of a moral fanatic. He declared that prostitution should be swept from modern life through women realising the wider outlook. He emphasised again and again that it is not the virtue, but the prudery, of women that prostitution protects. The average woman looks on prostitution as I00 JAMES HINTON she looks on kitchen-maids—creatures to be organised, and “kept in their places '' for the comfort and safety of “respectable '’ women, and at the same time to be despised and rejected by those to whom they minister. If prostitutes were really felt to be human beings Hinton imagined that all women must, through their intrinsic womanliness, rise in revolt against the mockery of pleasure, passion, and love which street-traffic is. When a woman once said to James Hinton, “Man cannot do much for prostitution, but why should woman be pre- vented ?” he realised that the great sacrifice which must be made to cast prostitution out will eventually come from women, and that probably a woman with a clean, mystical, and humorous vision will one day proclaim that the way to cure any gluttony is not by restraint alone, or an enlarged licence, but by a purer passion manifesting itself in a greater freedom. The new action of a greater and not a lesser force in passionate desire might thus, in time, bring a fuller and sweeter life to both men and WOIſleI). - The elimination of prostitution, according to Hinton, means the enlarging of human love- life. Prostitution must have existed to usher in the reign of sacrifice, he declared in one of his manuscripts. “Talk about what God accepts as sacrifice See what He has accepted from the harlots | See the enormous power ready, the only power sufficient. Let women only see prostitution, and know it, and it makes them THE PURITAN AND THE PRODIGAL 101 willing, glad, for anything. It must be from this that the change must come. It must consist in the raising the goodness of the good, making our best thing better, that it may be good enough for the bad. What the knowledge of it must do, is to make women mad; make them say : * Come what may, good or evil, right or wrong, I refuse this state of things.’” He felt it was not a calculation of consequences, but a passion of love, that must move women to this new adventure and sacrifice in one, a passion of love for one another and mankind as a whole. Mrs. Hinton stated that her husband used to declare : “Prostitution is dead. I have slain it.” She shuddered at his audacity, as again when he cried: “Christ was the Saviour of men, but I am the Saviour of women, and I don’t envy Him a bit.” If women gain a new power of insight through Hinton’s partial vision on the One side, and his incapacity to realise on the other the new limitations his dogmas and designs for women would force upon her, he has not lived in vain. Since the necessity for complete economic independence is rarely, if ever, emphasised by this would-be emancipator of women, nor her right to bring her maternal forces into the region of political and spiritual life, there is still much left to formulate and explore in regions within and without his theories. To-day the truly advanced woman, in one direction, sees further than Hinton saw, and realises that, in approaching the problem of the puritan and the prodigal, economics, civics, I02 JAMES HINTON politics, and laws count for much. She has perhaps not yet fully realised, however, the necessity of a sane resolve to bring into the world by the power of intellect, common sense, and vision, a purity that combines the mystical and the physical in all the manifestations of the sexual and the maternal life. Hinton calls on women to face the grim fact that domestic virtue which rests in any sense on prostitution is condoning “hell in our houses, death in our streets.” The average woman to-day and yester- day has taken no more notice of the cruelty of the prostitution round her than the inquisitors took of the groans of men on the rack. It simply had to be, she imagined. “The cure of prostitution,” Hinton declares, “is to be in a great woman-sacrifice, nothing else or less. For what is prostitution itself but a stupendous woman-sacrifice 2 Here—nay, wherever sacri- fice is—like alone shall cure like." Shall there be less sacrifice in the world when prostitution is no more ? Not till heaven and hell change places !” He knew that the sacrifice of jealousy, monopo- lies, luxury, and selfish traditions will be as overwhelming a stress for bodies and souls as prostitution is for those who bear the brunt of our sins of commission and omission. Towards the end of his life he stated, in these startling notes of his : “How little came formerly from woman knowing the facts of prostitution How * See Mrs. Havelock Ellis, Three Modern Seers, p. 17. (Stanley Paul.) THE PURITAN AND THE PRODIGAL 103 little would come, does come now, of all the softening and elevating influences of literature But put the two together. Here, in prostitution, is force enough to break the heaviest yoke that humanity ever wore : the yoke of the self-life, fortified by science, sent to sleep by theology, intoxicated by art and poetry, puffed up with knowledge, self-deceived by love of Nature, enervated by luxury—the hardest yoke humanity ever bore, the subtlest chain that Satan ever wove, the heaviest stone that ever lay upon a sepulchre. Who shall roll us away the stone 2 What angel clad in white and with heavenly lustre on his wings—what angel coming from above 2 * The answer seems almost to come to us in the same manuscript. “Women will step down, absolutely down, and feel it an infinite giving up ; and they will do it for the prostitute’s sake. They have tried to keep aloof and raise them ; and they propose to try still more. But not there will the remedy lie.” It is to a woman he looks as a saviour of women— a woman brave enough and clean enough to defy the world, the flesh, and the demon of “respectability '' when it closes the eyes and ears of those who attempt partial remedies and who, through legislation or philanthropy, shirk the real day of reckoning. “If chaste women can only be saved by prostitutes, what a price for virtue, and how disreputable the virtuous !” cried Hinton. To woman, Hinton felt, the great central revelation of life must come and with it the I04 JAMES HINTON whole change of attitude towards the sexual relation. For her to recognise sex as the great spiritual power of human life and to regard it as the regenerator and inspirer of both men and women alike, when used for inspiration and not for savagery or gluttony, was to him the real dawn of the redemption of the world. When women seriously ask themselves if their boasted purity rests on foulness, or in setting a bodily relationship above honour or mercy, and answer the question as Hinton would answer it for them, then he felt a new earth is preparing the way for any possible heaven. “Come what may,” she will cry in the near future, “we will not tolerate an unwilling prostitution—a prostitution founded on so-called virtue, a vicarious sacrifice for vice l’’ Hinton saw that “ The cure must come from the root of society, and the fact must be recog- nised that what surrounds the prodigal with hopelessness and drives her to become what she would perhaps never otherwise be is that her ‘virtuous ' sister is not only keeping her from a return to true morality, but from real life itself.” If women can save women in so whole-hearted a way they will prove the truth of one of James Hinton’s sayings that “Love not only fulfils, but reveals the true law, and brings with it the law that it fulfils.” But that lies in the future. “Women have not yet looked at prostitution. For the sake of putting an end to that, Pleasure and Pain must first become indifferent. They would do very much and give up very much, but yet not all; they must still hold something THE PURITAN AND THE PRODIGAL 105 for themselves.” The subtle enmity which is suffered to dwell in one woman’s feeling to another woman, whether she be puritan or prodigal, is, in Hinton’s mind, to yield soon to that need for utter surrender for the good of another which woman, as yet, has manifested chiefly to men and children. Hinton points out that when Luther married a nun he hit celibacy a deadly blow, and he believes that when women cease to injure one another and give their best to each other, that they will then inflict on prostitution its deepest blow. He saw, though in perhaps a one-sided and masculine way, that the real social evil will never be cured till the cruel selfishness and jealousy in individuals is torn up by the roots. When woman really faces what prostitution is, she will sacrifice even her jealousy, and in fact anything rather than that women with the same impulses as herself should suffer. The attitude of the married woman, as Hinton so often points out, to the outcast, is often more horrible, in the deeper sense of sin, than adultery itself. He was more terrified of good people than of bad ones. Good people, it seemed to him, are not too sure of their good- ness, and so often use envy, malice, and all deceitfulness as weapons for guarding it. A child of nature, as Hinton was, resents a prude and a hypocrite as one resents fleas and mos- quitoes. He saw so clearly that the puritan enters what he calls ‘ bondage good,” and the prodigal enters “bondage bad,” and that re- straint and licence are both results of incapacity I06 JAMES HINTON to tune body and soul to one fine harmony. The war of body against soul was to Hinton, as it is becoming to all thinking people, an absurdity. Into “homes of greed and streets of horror” Hinton would have us penetrate and learn into what pitiful caricatures men and women have degraded pure passion. He emphasises so often that we treat our sexuality as if it were the devil instead of the angel of our lives. We approach it as if in the divinest of all instruments, the violin, we should insist that music was mean and low because the strings of the instruments are made of the entrails of cats and the tails of horses. If cats’ bowels, Hinton declared, can become so exalted so can man’s primitive lusts be turned into passion’s sweetest forces. The things we feel as lowest are often the subtlest instruments of spiritual power. Through a man like Hinton it is possible to emphasise the beauty more than the sordidness of desire. Otherwise, to return to the simile of the catgut and the violin, it is almost as if we considered it indelicate to go to concerts. Hinton believed that, if it were only possible to place the spiritual first, the fleshly things could take care of themselves. “When we feel what sex truly is,” he writes, “it is no more wonder that it has been used for religious worship than that music has.” He looks ahead to the time when love cannot share a crime with a woman and then betray and deride her, to a day when it will be man’s joy to give joy to a woman and not debase or befoul her for his THE PURITAN AND THE PRODIGAL 107 own mistaken idea of pleasure. “We make sensuality the ravening monster we see it, and then let this brute of our own creation bind us with fresh chains, and by its very presence confirm its own sources.” He wrote as late as 1870 : “How utterly all feeling of impurity or reason for special feeling at all is gone from the sexual passion in my mind It stands before me absolutely as the taking of food. I cannot even recall why the feelings of special impurity cling about it. It has taken its place in my mind absolutely afresh, and as one with all that is most simple and natural and pure and good.” In his curious and human mixture of egoism and humility he declares, when recalling a year later what made him woman’s knight and worshipper : “I know it was those shrieks I heard at night, when I lived at Whitechapel, that banished the self from me, especially that horror which came over me (and which remains undiminished after all other experiences of horror) when two women stood in a doorway as I passed, and said to me, a boy of fifteen, “Which of us will you have 2 ° It was this above all that determined my life. Since that time it is the truth ; I know it. I have done nothing for pleasure only. Enjoying pleasure as much as any one, nay, for that very reason, more—I have done nothing for pleasure. My reason for all things has been that the world might be better. This it is has given me my liberty. I thank God for the horror and the pain. It was those words truly abolished pros- titution. Then it was overthrown. They did L08 JAMES HINTON it.” He assures us again and again that the chief evil in modern life is in our incapacity to realise that “the sexual passion, frightful as it is as a ruler, is sacred as a servant. And so we see it wanted making sacred, for by it all else is made sacred, and all that it serves. But in order to do this, is it not evident how it must for a time be put above our life, and made, although so wrongfully, the ruler ?” Hinton, from very pertinent observation, found out that “the mystery of the world is not that man’s badness is so bad and disastrous, but that his goodness so often comes to evil, and seems to have some blight on it, some curse that compels us to think of a malignity outside us.” “Thinking again,” he writes, “ of the dreadful sights of prostitution, is it not plain that what they indicate is some universal vice in the social order, or rather, surely, in the heart. It is a revelation, not an excrescence. Quite false is the seeming that womanhood is divided into a pure and a corrupt portion ; that some part is so good, some so bad ; it is an universal, all-pervading taint that expresses itself so. Men all make badness for themselves, the good tendencies of nature being impurely received.” The school-boy characteristics of lust and glut- tony are left behind by those who have grown up in any sense; but the puritan insists on keep- ing them in evidence, and the prodigal seeks new fields for their caperings. - Hinton foresaw some of the wonders of the inevitable wedding of purity and passion, but THE PURITAN AND THE PRODIGAL 109 he often wasted time and breath in trying to convince and convert the members of the Purity Leagues he had as patients, and in glorifying passion as a god in itself. He could not make others realise, and perhaps he himself only dimly realised, that passion at white-heat is purity, but that purity divorced from passion, and ashamed and afraid of passion, is weakness. Purity stands so often outside the human dwelling-house crying plaintively to the in- habitants to come out and worship a messenger from heaven. No wonder the door is often hastily banged in the face of what could so easily be mistaken for sleet and snow. This is one of the ways the prodigal is made, for youth and life want colour and warmth. The puritan, on the other hand, is often manufactured through mistaking Nature’s warmth and colour for hell fire, or mere volcanic eruption. Women in Hinton’s life-time were more nervous than they are now of facing the complex ques- tions of love and desire. Though mystical in her intuitions, woman is nearer Nature, through the maternal in her, than man. Nature has made her in all ways more passive to receive so that she can maternally give. If this fact is faced, we may be nearer a solution of many vexed questions than is apparent at the moment. Physical passion, as desire, is not such an over- whelming hunger in the majority of women as in men, but desire, as a passionate maternal surrender, even towards men, is the heart-hunger in all normal women. Once a woman faces this II.O JAMES HINTON fact she loses some of the nonsense-reasons for shunning desire, an attitude in many women, even as loving wives, which helps to bring the prodigal woman much more into evidence. To ravish is not necessarily to enervate, and to charm is rarely to destroy. Woman is tradi- tionalised about her desires, even in her eating and drinking, and man is traditionalised in an opposite direction about his. To both her lover and her child, according to Hinton, a woman cries : “Here I am. Take of me.” The re- sponse generally from the man is : “There you are 1 Come ! let me gobble you up !” Even Hinton, anxious as he was to deliver woman, attached little or no importance to her economic freedom, but only to her sexual freedom, apart from equal economic conditions with man. The modern woman is beginning to protest at being a “kept woman '' even in marriage, and against being gobbled up beyond her own passionate desires either as a legal wife, mother, or concubine. She is at last realising the fact that her hunger for giving has induced gluttony in the receiver of her gifts, and, moreover, her example as giver and man’s example as receiver have made the onlooker either more puritanical or more prodigal. The harlot makes the prude, and the prude makes the harlot. Advanced men and women are facing the situation, and by the aid of religion, science, eugenics, and legislation are trying to minimise the evil effects of puritanism and prodigality. Hinton, though THE PURITAN AND THE PRODIGAL 111 he died more than forty years ago, declared that his doctrines could not be worked from theory to practice under two hundred years. He has, however, given us, as seer, doctor, and evolved lover hints of that new order, when buying and selling in any region of love will be as criminal as buying or selling in human flesh. Every modern thinker must realise that prosti- tution, whatever advantages he may see in it, has no warrant from Love, and no hall-mark from Nature. Woman, as she evolves, realises that to safeguard one woman at the expense of another is neither just nor honourable, and to flaunt petty pruderies or mock moralities in the face of great Mother Nature is to court Nature’s punishment, and to pay heavier prices than one life-time can discharge. The problem James Hinton set himself to solve was how to combine personal love needs, and universal service needs, into a harmonious whole. The task broke him in body and soul, but in studying his half-formed conclusions others may profit and possibly co-ordinate his somewhat vague theories into a balanced whole. “I could not bear the pain of the world if I could not see it as good,” he cried. It was his opposition to the current ideas about these matters which brought on him doubt and anguish, as well as persecution from those who tried to follow some of his theories in an erratic and fanatic way. Hinton saw that the need of woman to sacrifice herself is man’s opportunity, in the near future, to direct the channel into which this innate II 2 JAMES HINTON feeling shall run. The future woman will surely cry to her mate : “I need thee for myself in order that I may comfort and help others ”; and the man will answer: “I need nothing but thy happiness, so that thou canst enrich others and be thyself through me. For this, and all the ravishment that the senses, and thy joy and my joy, can give to us, are right.” Hinton saw what this would mean if once men and women could grasp the two sides of his conception, though he had no time to co-ordinate the methods he thought would minimise the evil done by both the puritan and the prodigal. He compared our false monogamy, which is often a sly polygamy (a legal wife combined with intrigues), to the high-bred Hindoo’s horror of killing a flea. The Hindoo has a great dislike for fleas as unclean things, but he suffers in his self-respect if he kills a flea, so he simply transfers it to a beggar, and thus, he thinks, protects his virtue. According to Hinton, the average man keeps his home holy, and transfers his vices to Piccadilly or Broadway. The Hindoo hires a beggar to protect his morality in the shape of preserving life, and we tolerate prostitution to protect our morality in the shape of a pure home. We respect the “life " of a form of marriage which we call monogamy to salve our conscience, knowing well that it is often the ugliest form of polygamy when it is mixed with deceit, tyranny, luxury, cruelty, and self-pleasure. Its source or ideal being lost, it makes injury to others a right, as in the case of the Brahmin and THE PURITAN AND THE PRODIGAL 113 the flea. Man’s carelessness in this matter and woman’s callousness are hindering the true emancipation, when men and women will mutu- ally agree to put the prude and the prostitute out of civilised modern life. The temptation which comes, says Hinton, from “a passion of goodness * in performing outward acts or in preserving a legal boundary for morality, makes the sham moralist invent a “nonsense-reason '' against sane experiments. The Brahmin refuses to kill the flea, or to have it on him, so that the form of virtue may survive. What should we say to the Brahmin were we quite unprejudiced about the matter 2 Should we, asks Hinton, say to him, “Rise to purity, restrain your passion, bear the flea '.' * No ! We should say, “Do not be a fool. Kill the flea and save the beggar both torture and degradation. Why waste your energy and his by bearing flea-bites because an outward morality tells you to do it 2 If a real purpose is to be served by bearing the bites, bear them : if not, kill the flea as soon as possible.” Prostitution was analogous, in Hin- ton’s mind, to the flea. Men, he considered, are carefully preserving a form of marriage in name, but with no idea of inconveniencing them- selves, and with no idea of restraint, except, as with the Brahmin and the flea, when no beggar is handy and the flea will bite. Restraint for a mere code of morality, and not for true morality, is a waste of energy and power. It is an ex- ample of a false right instead of what is service- able, a restraint for the sake of restraint and not 8 114 JAMES HINTON for true service and real freedom. It is the emphasis on the law and not on the spirit, on tradition instead of spirituality. A new fashion in morals will soon alter society’s grossness or blindness. “And as for the cause of the social disorder,” says Hinton, “this I hold certain, that if women made the same treatment of their little fingers men would be just as madly bent on getting hold of them.” Hinton asks the question : “Can it be a mere accident that in the two forces of restraint, Eastern and Western, flea and beggar, prostitute and moralist, the restraint has slipped out and the form remains ?” He realised ugliness in both the puritan and the prodigal because he saw them as results of one another. However mistaken some of his theories may be, they are not ignoble, if in them there is a possibility of giving joy and expansion to the puritan, and freeing civilisation of mock desire in legal or illegal unions. It was from the death of prosti- tution, the shadow of love, that he saw the new life for love emerging. “And then, if this thought of womanhood be true,” he says, “that darkest of all mysteries—Prostitution—reveals its meaning, stands as a must-be before us. It is the negative, the anticipation, the shadow, of the perfect self-abnegation of womanhood. It is woman’s life drawn inversely (as selfish tyranny is man’s true life inversely drawn). It is woman’s utter sacrifice —nothing held too sacred to be thrown away. This is certain : no thought of life, or of womanhood, will be true which does THE PURITAN AND THE PRODIGAL II.5 not give the key to prostitution; nay, which does not find in prostitution the key to all.” Hinton knew, as doctor and philosopher, that it will be woman’s business in the future to keep the sexual from being sensual; by the same means the true healer keeps disease from arising, instead of spending enormous energy in curing it. This will be done in the moral world, not by increasing the vast army of repressed or abnormal women, but by teaching a new view of the senses, wherein woman will be the high-priestess of sense and not the victim of sensuality. He makes the future woman cry to the man : “Do not pervert your life, or you make this wonderful thing sensual; this, your relation to me, you make sensual and your goodness will forbid your doing good. Do not do it. I am bound if you make yourself a slave. Without your joy I cannot have joy; without your life, I die.” Hinton acknowledged that the prodigal in man spells selfishness and the puritan in woman the same, self-pleasure and self-virtue being the false moving forces. “We see a piston,” he says, “ and it cannot move because of an enor- mous machinery connected with it, but compel its motion, and, for the very same reason, all is moved. Woman’s giving cannot be because of man’s selfishness.” Hinton knew that sup- pressed things rise as ghosts and scare the ignorant. Sensual things are often bogies of a past animalism. By evolved human beings the fire and fervour of the senses are used as in- struments and not as tyrants. In seeking to II 6 JAMES HINTON bring about a saner use of the senses Hinton, at times, became dogmatic, as in the question of experiments in a new order of living. His plea, however, even for a refined polygamy was not a plea for sensuality, but for an emergence for man and woman alike. He knew that the prude and the rake are both counterfeits. He wanted Nature, Love, and Spirituality to work as one in three and three in one. James Hinton drew attention to the pitiable waste of human love shut up in walls more terrible than those of convents, and he saw the same waste in brothels. He realised how much of the prudery and hot-house absorption in family life is responsible for the laxity and lasciviousness in the houses of prodigals. He tried to make women see that the real criminal is one who is content to receive and maintain her virtue at the hands of prostitutes. If no- thing else, a sense of humour should save “virtuous ” women from scorning and crushing the very people who, according to their own definition, are their “saviours.” There are only two ways of facing this question of Prostitution. Either to accept the prostitute as sister and Saviour and make her task as bearable as possible, or to widen the gates of love and cleanse its channels, so that each man and each woman may bear their own sexual burden or joy. In other words, kill the flea and save the beggar, or bear the flea as a penance for the flesh, if an effete morality about such matters still attracts; in the same spirit kill THE PURITAN AND THE PRODIGAL II.7 prostitution by saving the prostitute, or honour the prostitute by bringing her into modern life as a solver of difficulties the wife refuses to meet. “Every devotion to a wider good,” says Hinton, “runs the risk of being counted traitor to it, and especially by the materialist.” Hinton saw that what degrades is surely the hurting others that we may enjoy, and the degradation of the senses by one set of women, in order that another set may live selfishly, and not even naturally. Lust destroys but love builds up, and the evolved woman realises that to protect her “virtue '' in four narrow walls, while the price is paid by women outside whom she despises, is to court a punishment the gods alone know how to inflict. No wonder Hinton declared the very virtue of the good destroys. He challenged the good, especially the good women, to face this matter. He draws a picture of the admirable women whose lives are so splendid, and to whom man’s love seems so needless. They, like the prostitute, help to destroy womanhood by keeping up in man’s soul the careless indifference whether he has real love for a woman or not. Prudery fills the streets with prostitutes quite as certainly as prodigality. The angry repulsion of the puritan, and the leering thought of pleasure of the prodigal, make evident the wrong within us. “Why,” cries Hinton, “should there not be a law of equivalence of force in these matters ? Here are our human scales in the persons of the puritan and the prostitute, and what an ex- II.8 JAMES HINTON periment in human relationships it would be to adjust the balance of true morality and true pleasure How will people persuade girls not to be prostitutes and make them value so highly a bodily purity, while the very women who urge them to it let their souls sink into a defilement of greedy isolation, a whoredom of the soul in which to keep the body pure ? It is cause for laughter, seeing one woman swallow- ing a camel and begging the other not to swallow a gnat.” To sum up this intricate problem of the puritan and the prodigal is to realise that both the puritan and the prodigal alike draw lines Nature does not draw, and, as Nature is simple and Sane, she wipes them out again and again. The line between wrong and right, according to nature and spirituality, is between that which injures and that which does good. “Prostitution for man, restraint for woman, they are two sides of the same thing, and both are denials of love, like luxury and asceticism. The mountains of restraint must be used to fill up the abysses of luxury,” declares Hinton. In Lafcadio Hearn’s letters to Hall Chamber- Iain he makes this statement : “I think that, to modern philosophy, vice has taken a new and terrible magnitude and virtue an awful beauty.” The “awful beauty " Hearn alludes to may possibly be the dawning recognition, in puritan and prodigal alike, that love and passion are not pastimes or manias, but divine driving forces for ends out of sight as yet, but clearly THE PURITAN AND THE PRODIGAL II.9 legible in the great books of Nature and Destiny. When the puritan and the prodigal meet in understanding, knowing that the waste in re- straint and in excess must one day be garnered up as the fruits of pleasure and loveliness, we shall be nearer common sense and uncommon sensibility than now, when, in our terror of vice and boredom of virtue, we are not ourselves but scarecrows or marionettes. All Hinton’s published and unpublished writings are full of a denial of this absurdity of refusing to see nature’s alliance with the spiritual. He asks: “Do we not see, too, how this also aids the “degradation 2 Here we are still maintaining a self-goodness and a restriction, not for use but for ‘virtue.’ So we have the feeling that we are good, while still selfishness rules utterly. Thus we unite the evils of all states. We abandon serving, the true putting self beneath us, we accept the conditions of its ruling as our right, but we still keep something that, putting our virtue above use, makes us feel we are virtuous and good. So our very virtues poison us. Was ever contrivance so elaborate and complete for evil 7 Did not Satan know his time was short when he invented this, and wrought with that diligence and wrath of his 2 ” Hinton believed that the whole new conception of love, a sexual revolution and renaissance in one, was in the hands of women. All the non- sense reasons against real love and pure desire must be faced by women. What women, through nature and love, learn, they silently I 20 JAMES HINTON teach to men and to one another. Though the solutions Hinton propounded may not be ulti- mately accepted, or may not even be advisable, he was right in the main conception that women have the future of Love in their hands. Loyalty to one another in the deepest and subtlest sense, and devotion to causes as much as to persons, combined with a resolution to divorce love from money, may sooner than we dare imagine drive the puritan and the prodigal to become sane manifestations of a Super-woman able and willing to construct the newer civilisation, where- in love can neither be bought nor sold. When human relationships widen and become at the same time purified, when domesticity develops into unlimited usefulness, instead of remaining a limitation, and when sexual desire is acknowledged to be a ravishment like music and not a mere intoxication like champagne, we may be nearing the day when the puritan and the prodigal become one as the priestess of love. The way may even now be seen which leads to Nature’s open spaces and Art’s beautiful palaces. To love utterly is to be a seer, to be truly prodigal is the first prerogative of love, and to be pure in heart is to have cast out all fear of passion or desire in order that the essence we call love may shed its full power in us and from us. CHAPTER VI MONOGAMY AND POLY GAMY PROFESSOR MICHELs, in his book on Seawal Ethics,” has coined the word “sincerification,” which could easily stand for much of what James Hinton suggested in attempting to read- just domestic and sexual relationships. In his analysis of the puritan and the prodigal, the prude and the prostitute, as well as the honoured wife and dishonoured outcast, he has thrown, especially in his later manuscripts, much light on a complicated problem. His keen analysis of the contrast between the night consciousness and the day consciousness in sexual matters may bring out the difference between real degradation and conventional degradation. In the day consciousness he includes legal wives and guarded spinsters and reserves the night consciousness for mistresses and harlots. He is more stimulating through the suggestions he inspires than through the methods he formu- lates. He was to the end confused by his own issues, and never really made clear, either * Robert Michels, Seawal Ethics, 1914, p. 5. (Contemporary Science Series, Walter Scott.) 121 I22 JAMES HINTON rationally or sentimentally, how a woman can be at once a free personality, a wage-earner, a wife and a mother, and at the same time remain for the world at large a healthy, romantic, joyful, capable, and charming human being. An interrogative fever is often his substitute for rational thinking. At times a schoolmaster’s or a clergyman’s dogmatism seems to clash with the insight of a seer. He is at once crude and illuminating while examining what was good yesterday and useless to-day, and what may also, in a fuller and freer form, become once more beautiful to-morrow. Sincerification in Hinton’s analysis of Mono- gamy and Polygamy leads to a fearless analysis of a subject which the European War has brought close to our homes and consciences—the Euro- pean preponderance of women over men. Hinton forced on our notice new aspects of vice and virtue. If we dare to face a few of his cour- ageous statements we can never think in the old rigid grooves again. Perhaps, indeed, the result for which he scarcely ventured to hope is already in sight. There is to-day a clearer insight with regard to morals, civics, ethics, and education than forty years ago, when James Hinton stood almost alone in his advanced theories of a new morality. All great reformations have come about through one man or woman, chosen by Destiny, proclaiming in a clear and intense way the old truths in new forms, to a multitude slow to grasp the eternal fact that the vision within MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY I23 makes the action without, and that character revolutionises more than wars or than laws. Of marriage, in its outward and legal form of monogamy, Hinton says what St. Augustine said of God : “Rather would I, not finding, find Thee, than finding, not find Thee.” He knew well that it is only in the rarest cases of affinity, of passion not run to waste but pursued to the uttermost and divinest, that the ordinary legal marriage is not either a domestic absorp- tion and selfishness, wherein is no chance for beautiful and rare adventures, or a mask to cover both mortal and venial sins of the flesh, within the home or outside it. He asks us not to be afraid, but to face, by the laws of Nature, Art, and Beauty, this vital question of living and loving. “Every good thing,” he says, “comes first in a self-form, and, being itself not truly good, it renders the true good possible in its seeming to pass away. In its sacrifice it becomes living. So, how beautiful is our mar- riage though but a self-good, see how it renders possible a freedom, a true marriage-state which shall contain all it has given us : inability to use women as mere instruments of desire, perfect respect for her true woman qualities, the feeling of her perfectly equal place, the reverence for her power of sacrifice, the intense passion for purity and union with her. These are the things for which self-marriage has been, the things which it has given us. These render possible to us a state not possible but through its having been. These are its true gifts, its 124 JAMES HINTON true benefits. They are its substance, the very fact and being of it and all its being. Having these, the negative in it is no longer necessary.” Hinton declares that, just as Sabbath observ- ance was expressly adapted to take in self- virtuous people, so our feeling respecting fleshly purity sets a person thinking about a feeling of rigid morality rather than what is love and service combined. Whatever sets itself against service places a noose round its neck, and then nature instantly proceeds to tighten it. Hinton made the daring statement that, in our Western Society, fewer men are in a real sense monogam- ists than in any polygamous country whatever. When he said that domestic purity was a Moloch he meant probably what Blake did when he described marriage as a funeral hearse. The two men, poet and moralist, realised how, within four narrow walls, human virtues are slain every day. The selfishness of monogamy, and even of the home, and the crudity and cruelty of rigid virtue made Hinton realise that a forced monogamy is responsible for many of the evils of prostitution. His firm conviction was that, good as monogamy is in its ideal form, we have arrived at it as a legal or universal form too soon to carry it Out in its integrity, and so actually called into being more licentiousness that would be possible under an open polygamy or polygyny. In the first stages of the earth’s populating crisis, and later in its further social evolution, polygyny was possibly nature’s evolu- tionary order, and would, if left to develop MONOGAMY AND POLY GAMY I 25 naturally, sooner or later, as bud turns to flower, evolve into a real, human, and beautiful mono- gamy. We are far from monogamy still, as every sincere man and woman realises day by day in the contemplation of the tragedy of its mockeries and even in the evolution of its sincerities. When open dealing between man and wife has taken the place of deception, mercy and justice between women the places of cruelty and jealousy, and when in men and women alike a new capacity has evolved which enables both sexes to weigh in a humane way each of their needs, passions, and idiosyncrasies, then we shall realise the truth about the matter of future relationships. So traditionalised are we still about these things that when a man friend of my own exclaimed gaily, in relating the success of one of his “first-class tempta- tions,” that the reason he loved his wife so much, was because he could deceive her so magnificently, it never struck him, fine thinker, dreamer, husband and father as he is, that the woman to whom he gave himself away felt it almost a degradation to be called a wife in these days of so-called monogamous marriages. When a woman can countenance the cruelty and in- justice of a man casting off a mistress in order to marry her, and rejoice in such an action as a sign of his morality, we need not go to Dante’s Inferno to find the tiger spirit in the frames of men and women. Hinton tried to make people analyse the self-marriage, as differentiated from the service- 126 JAMES HINTON marriage. “Is it not plain as it is sickening,” he asks, “that with us the relation of marriage is centred round the body ?” He sees abnor- mality in our present so-called normal relation- ship. “More and more painfully,” he declares, “ the unblushing badness which our marriage relations involve reveals itself. The parent scheming for his or her own daughter’s marriage, regardless that that means some one else’s daughter is not married, choosing not to regard it, which choosing and striving for one’s own, in every form in which it comes, is hellish, and not human, but in this form hellish most of all, because it defiles the noblest things. And then it is unconcealed that girls are kept un- taught useful occupations, with no good true work in their possession whereby they may earn their own living, because that diminishes their chance of marriage. In truth it does diminish it, and while things are on their present basis will continue to do so. That is the price we pay for Our monogamy—the bodies and souls of women—that is what man’s not being pure enough to face pleasure like a man and take it or not take it as use bids, comes to : the quivering flesh and blood of tortured woman- hood, her body, soul, and spirit slain, slain on the altăr of his impurity.” The centralisation of the thoughts round the body, in or out of marriage, and the making a barter of the body between a man and a woman, have hidden to a great extent the Sacramental, and even the sentimental, feeling of those who love in the MONOGAMY AND POLY GAMY I27 rarer fashion of true lovers, legal or illegal. The only way to arrive at a true summing up of what is real or unreal in the marriage problem is to face it as if it were the first time we had analysed it. “Women,” Hinton says, “natur- ally feel that monogamy secures them a per- manent position which men, acting in selfishness, would not give them. They feel that its aban- donment would be leaving them, as age came on, more liable to be put aside and neglected; more, in a word, at their husband’s mercy. Now we need not ask whether this would be really the case, whether, even if no other pre- ventives existed, the same public feeling which is the woman’s only real security against such loss now, would not be equally effective then. But the feeling is not to be wondered at, and we see how it exists. And is there really some true relation here with that condition of this age which makes it so especially to seek to put aside the trusting to human emotion any- Where 2 °” Hinton realised that our crazy blunders with regard to sex relationships resemble the case of an inundation in a house from a tap left open. We resemble people not looking at the tap, and with a vain energy of terror trying to wipe up the water. Opening our eyes to see what is really amiss is simply like seeing the open tap. As soon as it is seen the whole thing is done. It is no more necessary to try to stem the stream, save only to clear away the relics of the past afterwards, and at leisure. It is I 28 JAMES HINTON essential in these great problems to go to the root of the matter so that the social tree later can bear good fruit. “See how differently,” says Hinton, “we think in respect of moral and physical things. In the latter, how completely we have mastered the thought that the intensest seeming, nay, the most absolute practical truth, may be false, and that which is the fact be wholly unlike that which all experience would suggest. Yet, when we come to man’s nature, there we entirely alter our plan of judging, and set it down that the fact is just as it seems. It is simply that we have not learned to see how truly our marriage relation now answers to the idea of an idol, no longer fulfilling the ideal. How far short of it, indeed, it falls ’’ Hinton often refers us back to the old question of monkhood and celibacy. “Were there not,” queries Hinton, “in the worst of monkish times more true celibates than there are now true monogamists 2 Celibacy never became such a pretence as monogamy is now, an unblushing pretence. Even in its worst days was hypocrisy ever so rampant 2 Was monkhood ever so rotten as monogamy is now 2 Did it act as a whole and as a reality on the conscience of men, or ever so distinctly profess one thing and practise another, consent to take one outside standard and substitute another in their deeds 2 Was ever monkhood mocked as our monogamy is, that is, so hated by nature’s soul ?” For that is what this lover of nature calls upon us to face. “Man will never be fine enough for a 1S, SAVILE ROW, W. 128] MONOGAMY AND POLY GAMY I 29 condition nature refuses, for that would be finally and fatally impure. What was said to the false monks was : “You wretched hypo- crites, marry and be honest; which is, do purely a thing which even yourselves have been doing impurely.’ So now may it not be said to our false monogamists: “You foul hypocrites, marry this woman’?” - What Hinton seems to argue is that no rigid physical order can, in itself, make things truly right or utterly wrong. The very thought of identifying right with any such thing is a mistake. Right and wrong is in the soul, and the same act can be base or heroic according to the condition of the soul. Anything, Hinton points out, that will give man and woman this perception is worth while. The dual selfishness which the average marriage implies is as much, in modern times, against Nature’s great design as asceticism was. “When we speak of self- marriage,” says Hinton, “it is necessary to remember that one does not mean any reproach. All things come first in the self-form. It denotes simply a stage of the becoming, and does not in any way mean badness. It is indeed only another expression for the reductio ad absurdum —to denote that man starts from a negation, and that all things come first in a way that denotes that negation is the basis.” What Hinton, as a lover of nature, calls upon us to face is, that we are obstinately blinding our- selves with superstitions and worldly plati- tudes. A new feeling, declares Hinton, must 9 I 30 JAMES HINTON come into our souls respecting marriage. “It must no more be first our family and then the world, but the world and our family as one.” He declares that marriage, as it is now, makes feelings of isolation, and of being against others, as nothing else does or could. It makes “to be against the world'' seem right and good. “We two against the world’’ sounds to us a song at once holy and delightful. If one against the world is bad, why are two against it better ? In some sense, and in very many practical re- spects, Hinton thinks they are worse. Edouard Berth says, quotes Hinton, “that the true idealist is not one who despises nature, but he who, playing his legitimate, necessary, and natural part, liberates himself for the spiri- tual life.” This statement is truly Hintonian in sentiment, and is what Hinton meant when in marriage, as in other matters, he desired to substitute a state of the soul in place of an idolatry of external laws and material things or an enslavement of the body. “Does not,” he asks, “the presence of these restrictions mean that marriage is impure still ? Must it not be so, or how could they be 2 But this must be stated with a limitation, with two limitations, indeed. One is, that it refers to men and not to women, viz. not to the woman’s nature, though it may to particular women. Marriage is impure as man takes it, viz. for pleasure and not for giving. But this also wants a second limitation, viz. that already with the “good it has ceased, has even long ceased, to be truly MONOGAMY AND POLY GAMY I3]. thus. It is that this way of acting, as if it were impure, as if it were taken for self and not for good, remains, while its basis in the dominion of self has been overthrown. This is the con- dition which last precedes the making right the starting-point—the condition most full of evil. Still, practically it is true, in its treatment and in the effects of it, that marriage is an impure thing. And surely is it not so, even to woman in one aspect, though it is to her in some respects a giving, a sacrifice and not a taking, yet is there not a very strong element of self in it on her part also, viz. in respect to her claim on . the man’s devotion, her demand to be first in his regard 2 Does this not also give it an im- purity of another kind, even to her, perhaps of a kind deeper, and even longer in being escaped from, than the physical one 7 And does not this also account for somewhat of the feelings which surround married life in her mind and for part of the exclusiveness 2 ” To be human in marriage, and not beast-like or worse before pleasure, or monkish before a false restraint, is to become emancipated for joy and spiritualised in desire, according to Hinton. The exalted wife, the degraded pro- stitute, and the selfish or vicious man, either in his day or night consciousness, exclude the possibilities of a fine union between man and woman. “Here one sees too,” says Hinton, “how asceticism in every form must fail. It avoids, not solves, the problem. It does not make marriage pure by its abstaining. Rather 132 JAMES HINTON it confesses, affirms, it must be impure. It is a palliative, merely, which tends to confirm the evil. Marriage must be made pure, and then there can be no need to abstain, no thought of “restraining passions.” Make it human, and let it be as human use demands, and then, to talk of abstaining as more devoted would be to insult humanity.” Hinton wants us to open our eyes to the dark side of our monogamy. He wants us to consider how the good take everything, and preach monkhood to the bad. “Did people ever wish to slay their children 7 ° he asks. “Did they not do it for an idol, be- cause it was their duty to their highest God, and to maintain the thing to them most sacred ? Did they not say, “We are very sorry, but must not the worship of God be maintained ?’ So are we ‘ very sorry, but must not domestic purity be maintained ?’” Hinton knew that the highest good is in giving, and yet he also knew that the whole of the conventional idea of marriage is in keeping. “With the new thoughts of marriage,” he says, “I feel that a healing has passed upon me. I am conscious of a new emancipation, a new power and liberty to enjoy, to enter freely into Nature, and feel her loveliness, a new effortless preference of better over worse.” He saw how, in the past, the monstrous social restraint was on celibacy which is now on marriage. He believed that in the future freedom from re- straint and a new education in the spiritual and the material will allow the law of love to MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY I 33 rule in the heart, and so free women and passion at one stroke. “Celibacy,” he says, “was a good thing while it truly was, and so monogamy might be if it truly were ; but what is it with us but a hypocrisy, and a frightful one 2 ° Hinton believed that monogamy, with its sham and hypocrisy, is polygamy refusing its own human conditions, laughing to scorn justice, and even purity, while putting nature at defiance. “There must be,” he says, “ some one great wrongness in respect to marriage, indicated by evils such as these, for example: “So many unable, or for bad motives refusing, to marry, and so vast an amount of vice there- with. “So many marrying merely for money and position. “So much mutual unfaithfulness, and the habit of keeping mistresses so prevalent. “So many wives ruined in their health, or made hysterical, apparently by excessive or unharmonised duties, and the restlessness and dissatisfaction which thus express themselves. “That, even where the union seems most perfect, it assumes a form of luxury, and deli- berate preference of the joint selves in a narrow circle. “The feeling that any other woman must, if it so happens, be simply sacrificed to preserve the wife’s position. “The wide-spread notion that prostitution is the price of other women’s virtue. “And last, and most horrible of all, the I34 JAMES HINTON universal thought that, in marriage, a mutual self-seeking must be the idea, so prohibiting the uttermost devotion to impersonal ends.” He then makes the following statements with regard to the renunciation or re-adjust- ment of monogamy. “The giving up of monogamy would be directly beneficial in respect to prostitution in three ways: “(1) More women would be married. “(2) Mistresses need not sink into prosti- tutes. “(3) A career would be open to women which might be permanent without their necessarily giving up marriage. “This last seems to me the most important of the three (indeed, the most important aid that could be given in the doing away with vice, next to enabling all men to marry). But all these are nothing as initiating a life of giving up. This life would then advance rapidly, for it is the true natural life. The self-life is a forced one, contrary to our nature. “This great woman-sacrifice is what prostitu- tion has existed for—the negative image of it, how clearly.” Is it, he asks, that a rigid monogamy has tried to exact from woman an impossible task—that of being wife, mother, and house-keeper all at once 2 He wonders, in a manly generosity of realisation, if the restrictions of women in the polygamy of the past and in monogamy as it is now, are not both modes of subordination to MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY I35 men. May we not, he queries, look upon the crude forms of an old polygamy and the present would-be rigid monogamy as worn-out Sup- pressions, leading later to an advanced form of relationship, in which Man as Taker and Woman as Sacrificer may alter their entire point of view and procedure with regard to modern sexual ethics 2 A pertinent question he puts to reformers is this : “Is it not evident indeed, that one reason of the so frequent utter ruin that is in marriage, is the insisting on having it to be in all cases what it can only truly be in some 2 Granted the ideal good, the best, why incur ruin where the conditions for it do not exist, instead of the good that might be 2 ° Most men, and a few women, are born poly- gamists. Most women, and some men, are born monogamists. The law of love, a spiritual and not a carnal law, and the law of nature, an emphatic call to all healthy creatures to increase and be joyful, have somehow to be welded into one before the newer ideals can be put into action. “ That old sexual relation of non- restraint before marriage is purity compared with our very thought of chastity which puts that physical relation of men and women in such a position that all things must bend to it. If we were thinking so much about eating and drinking, it would mean a most intense gluttony in heart, and it would issue too in an unutterably intolerable vice of gluttony through society. Society being now so moulded around sexual pleasure, it gets a fatal hold on the imagination.” I36 JAMES HINTON Hinton saw that no fixed modes of action, only a fixed principle, can be insisted upon rigidly. Passion and love are fluid things, working out differently in different individuals. “So it is,” he says, “thinking how, of old, marriage was for use, in the form of children, and now is compelled to be for pleasure, we see how, by the very goodness which forbids it to be sense-pleasure, it infuses a poison into the purest region of our life, and how the end, surely, is to be the restoration of marriage for use, not only in the form of children, but also of work and of aid in the work of man. Does not work seek what pleasure seeks 2 Must it not ? Are not pleasure and work identified (within limits and with exceptions, especially under certain conditions) 2 Is this a law 2 And so, in doing for work (viz. not for self) will not that tend to be done which is done for pleasure ? Is not this a necessary consequence of nature’s making one of pleasure and work 2 And does not this apply directly to marriage 2 ° Hinton felt that, just as when men and women are starving it should be impossible for onlookers to eat luxurious dinners, and while the mass is deprived of art it is selfish to keep lovely pictures only between four narrow walls, so marriage should be a thing for service and the general good as well as the rest. “Service,” he says, “will sweep like a tornado over the whole of life and lead all to it.” He demanded that the relations of a man and a woman must be accord- ing to use as well as pleasure, and according MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY I 37 to reason and love with no self in them at all at the basis. This latter is imperative, he declares, as there is great risk when we base things on a reason that will not endure. With- out an ideal basis of this kind any rash experi- ments might lead to more pathetic failures and tragedies, even worse than our present system could bring about. Without true economic freedom for women, combined with a new point of view of the sex relations in men, it is possible that a haphazard experiment on Hintonian lines might soon lead us into a new sensuality instead of a new freedom. The greater the possibility of flying high, the greater the possibility and magnitude of the fall. Hinton raises a very suggestive point about the matter of growth and decay in reference to nature. “So, in our life,” he says, “we should always watch. Here is a downward process, a decay. True! Now, it produces, or tends to produce, an upward process. Let us watch for it, be ready for it, accept it, and be sure that it be not prevented. So here, breaking marriage should make an upward answering movement in our life, should make us not have self-interest first. How can we make it so 2 It would not be necessary if men were not as they are. Then how may it cease to make men not be as they are 2 In every form of life is the added impulse that causes the ‘decay” to produce new life, always the equivalent of woman making man’s mere taking a giving to her. Is this unusual for I38 JAMES HINTON life 2 Is it not only how it comes now, but how it first became 2 Was it not by some added impulse to some “downward process " ? It is through the “resistance ’—a resistance excited or gained by the added impulse itself—that the life is caused to be. Without the “resistance ’ it is mere decay, but the resistance being occa- sioned (and the added impulse causes it to arise) then the downward process becomes the upward one. And so it starts a new life which then nature takes up and cherishes, and brings up into the perfect being.” Marriage, as it is now, Hinton says, is breaking fast. “ Knowing what we do, is it not quite clear how strongly monogamy tends to make marriage intolerable, when else it might even develop into well-nigh its most perfect form 2 We know how closeness of contact, enforced, tends to make hatred and quarrels; we know how they arise at sea amongst persons who would otherwise be entirely friends. Now, would not married quarrels continually tend to subside were less of that pressure enforced ?” Mono- gamy, Hinton declared, may be good, even the only good if of free choice, but a law for it is another thing. If marriage and prostitution seem part of one another, we may come to the conclusion that celibacy, asceticism, buying and selling in love, are all things of the past, and that the adoption of the new ideals of love must be part of new social conditions. - “Women are heroes,” cried Hinton, “and should be treated as such.” Marriage, however, 6 (, MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY I39 cannot be heroic in any beautiful sense while it is a means of livelihood, or while it is a mutual self-seeking and so prohibits the uttermost devotion to impersonal ends. Even the ideal form of it hitherto, the mutuality of passion and comradeship, combined with the careful training of children, is, in the new order, only one phase of its possible beauty and usefulness. The marriage of the future will combine, not only pleasure and the production of children, but will have for its main object work for the world, just as the future motherhood will not only be represented in one nursery but through the fine enterprises of those who have educated themselves as race-mothers. Like celibacy, monogamy is a beautiful thing, but when, as Hinton points out, it puts a bar between men and women, it requires to be taken from its rigid form and allowed to flow into a more fluid one. The body, through asceticism, was gradually lost from its own first fine intention in celibacy. A soul asceticism gradually made the body the letter for the inner meaning of restraint, and slew the spirit of temperate control. The domination of lust gradually crept into this hypocritical celibacy, as the rule of lust has grown into monogamy when we declare that, to keep it safe, prostitution and exclusive- ness must be its ministering fiends. Nothing is more imperative than to see pro- stitution as it really is, a safety valve for “virtue” and a recognised substitute for sex interdepend- ence and love’s working field and playground. I40 JAMES HINTON 2 “You may have all monogamy,” says Hinton, “ and yet society be corrupt to its very core, and true faithfulness to woman almost un- known.” The “dangerous * doctrine Hinton proclaimed was that “the relations of man and woman must be according to use, to reason, and to love, with no self-seeking at its base.” This idea brought to bear on the woman problem would, according to Hinton, revolutionise the immoral so-called “moral ” code of to-day. Have this feeling of love in the heart, even to- wards one’s enemies, and personal happiness, success, money, power, and even stereotyped virtue are small by the side of it. But the desire for good instead of restraint, the thought ruling the senses instead of the senses ruling the thought, was still his main idea. He realised that the self-passions which enslave the soul are not true passions, but a waste of wonderful powers. “We now feel private revenge wrong, and the law seems to us an instrument of revenge, a means of per- mitting or fulfilling it. So we look on general sexual intercourse as wrong, and legal marriage as a permission of it. But is it not the fact that, as certainly revenge was not of old regarded as wrong but as a duty, and one of the highest, so also in that old (and by no means necessarily bad) society, general intercourse was not re- garded as any wrong at all ? Only, society, by marriage, chooses to limit it, as it chooses to limit revenge. Surely if this be true a real light is to be seen here : the parallel between MON OGAMY AND POLYGAMY I41 undefined and unlimited revenge and unlimited intercourse is suggestive.” To-day we have concubinage, according to Hinton, in its most devil-ridden form. When a young curate in the Church of England said to Hinton : “I have not been much with women; only a little. I have only had about thirty,” it is easy, through this ingenuous answer, to realise what is the disease at the root of so-called monogamy. Hinton wanted to sap monogamous “virtue '' of this description and substitute a living thing. Human beings to-day crave both beauty and freedom in a truer, newer, and more open sexual relationship. “So long,” Hinton says, “as any woman whatsoever has less good than would be possible through the absence of a man’s unimpeded love, who can say there is too much sexual passion ?” He dared to proclaim the truth which lies at the root of sexual jealousy and absorption. The impure will continually decry him for his courage and his insight. “The disease is,” he says, “that marriage is sensual. That is what is amiss with society. All the symptoms flow from that, and that is all. Cure that, and all is cured. How clearly this is felt when one thinks of the response which comes to the proposal that a man might have two wives, that he should restrain his passions. That betrays the whole mystery; the secret of the disease is revealed ; its cause and centre shown. Marriage is sensual. That reply means that it is regarded as a matter of sensual pleasure.” I42 JAMES HINTON James Hinton felt that only a woman can shatter the falsity about marriage we hold as truth, and substitute a vital and beautiful unity in its place. She alone can realise that those who most love a thing are those who can truly give it up, because in final surrender the new and beautiful thing is conceived and ulti- mately comes to birth for the world’s good. “Surely,” he says, “what we call marriage is the cruellest idol ever known. In all history is there anything so sad 2 Does not prostitution exist to make us see it 2 A kind of reflection for us, as in a glass, that we may see what our marriage is. Is it not lust embodied ? Affection even, turned to serve the self, the very emotions made to become its slaves; to maintain this what sacrifices are made l’’ To Hinton the great evil of monogamy was the intense jealousy in women and an insistance on the mere physical relationship which turns spontaneity and purity into corruption, even compelling the pure and good to be, in respect to this power of the body over them, as the evil are. “That enforced holding against each others’ needs is the thing that is so evil in our marriage,” he says. “The very viciousness in the marriage relation comes of our “goodness and ‘virtue which sets goodness against giving and purity against sharing.” The question of jealousy is perhaps one of the most vital to reckon with in the new relation- ship between men and women. The idea is so fundamentally in our minds that jealousy is an MONOGAMY AND POLY GAMY 143 unbecoming but forgivable part of love that it will take, even with the finest experimentalists in love, a long time for the majority of us to realise that jealousy is love’s shadow and never part of its real substance. It is always fear or selfishness, either in a disguised or an open form. It is insecurity in its most dangerous, hideous, and tormenting manifestation. No one is faith- ful by habit alone, though that is a valuable asset. He who goes was ready to go. Nothing but spiritual gymnastics can help us in this matter. Hinton quotes a fine passage from Realmah in connection with this subject. “There would probably be no such thing as jealousy if souls were visible, for we should find then that the love of any person for any other is so com- plete and peculiar a relation between those two only that there would be nothing for any third person to be jealous of. We are speaking now, of course, of the higher kinds of love.”" Hinton tried to diagnose the jealousy of women towards each other in its crudest form, that of mere selfish rivalry. He asks us to consider the sad form of it when one woman prefers that another woman should go mad through repression rather than she herself should suffer any loss. How perverted our ideas are about these matters is proved by a simple test. Ask a number of women this question and make a careful note of the answers. “If it were proved that it were necessary for men to have more than one woman sexually, would you rather * Realmah, by Sir Arthur Helps. (Macmillan & Co. 1868.) l44 JAMES HINTON your husband loved another woman, or merely used her for his pleasure and her further de- gradation ?” There is usually only one answer to this question. “I should not mind my husband going to a prostitute half so much as loving another in any real sense.” Is it possible to imagine any more radically Satanic attitude 2 That a woman should not mind if her mate is degraded in body and soul, and another woman is lowered into bestiality, provided her own emotional greediness remains undisturbed | Sex union, without love, in evolved beings, is a blasting of the life forces instead of a mingling of them. Hinton realised that the woman who retains this attitude, whether to save herself or win others, is more savage than an animal, and more dangerous than the unevolved sensual Iſla,I). The law of affinity is as definite as the law of gravitation, and none of us can break it with impunity. The trinity of Nature, Love, and Spirituality in us makes us pay the just price for our sins of either commission or omission in this matter. The woman who declares that, if a man must love more than one woman, then let it be for love and not for lust (because she realises that all real love educates and purifies and so must enrich and ennoble a man and all those he loves) is either not believed, or is looked upon as a sort of prostitute herself. And yet, as Hinton dimly saw, in the new era of love, men and women must face the fact that it is only real love that dares to share because MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY l45 it dare not destroy. Difficulties he realised there must be in the new experiments, heart- breaks too there cannot fail to be, as well as failures scarcely recognised as evidence of future victories. “Failures,” says Hinton, “ and in- experience may be to teach us those conditions when we think they teach us to despair. Is not what we want a life of passion with all the result of restraint embodied ?” In an anony- mous booklet by a well-known American writer we have the future woman asking her real mate the questions the future man may also possibly one day ask the evolved woman : - “Did you think, dear Love, I could leave you because you were too loving 2 Because you loved too much or too many ? “No, Man of my Breast, I am not so small as that. I am larger than you think me. I am larger than you ever thought a woman could be. “If you love another, love her ; love her with all the beauty of your soul, love her until you call out and answer all the beauty of her soul, and I will love her with you. “If she is worthy of you, and not a person who would in any case be repellent to me, then the fact that you love her will draw me to her and not make her seem my enemy. “Mutual love of a thing found lovely should be a road, not a fence, should it not 7 ° Many will declare, of course, that this attitude * Psalms of the Race Roots. Privately printed. I0 I46 JAMES HINTON is as far beyond human nature as the other is below it. Nevertheless, both life and love may some day prove that in that attitude is the security of love and the cleansing of desire. It is so in friendship as well as love, What we bind we lose, what we set free remains with us or returns to us. Doubtless the love will have monstrous birth-pains, killing many and driving some mad. The evolution from the savage to the civilised human being is not easy. But the death of jealousy would be the birth of a new love. It is almost impossible that two people should be able completely to satisfy every need of each other. It does happen, but it is very rare. Therefore, the wider and more beautiful the loves are, in individual life, the less mania there is in passion and the less loss in those rare relationships which spell affinity. This statement may at first seem to imply both laxity and immorality, but it is really the foe to these survivals of the savage and the prude. “Here is the noblest, sweetest, most entrancing thing,” cries Hinton, “ and it betrays the soul, and gives it no chance even to suspect the snare.” “Man’s chief thought is as to whether he will be virtuous instead of woman’s good. By her needs woman has rendered her chief service to man. A different relation of man to woman need not necessarily degrade him or her.” Hinton saw that what degrades is hurting others that we may enjoy and that the degradation of the senses by one set of women in order that another MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY 147 set may live selfishly is not even natural. “We always call jealousy bad,” says Hinton, “when there is nothing ‘bodily’ concerned; when there comes that element then we find it right.” Here is a pertinent question Hinton asks : “Is not this certain from facts 2 The woman’s natural jealousy is not at a man’s loving another but at his forsaking her ? So, with the thought of love as necessarily meaning love for one only, two things become identified and the passion of jealousy becomes degraded even from its own poor nature to one infinitely worse. It is the association of love with ex- clusiveness that has done this.” One must be able to live a long and varied love-life before one realises that the crowned lover, either man or woman, is one who is capable of loving many well rather than one who loves within a set form, circumspectly and of necessity. Jealousy precludes the perfect relationship, and must eventually go as much out of fashion as crinolines, which also were devices to cover immorality. “Is it not strange to think,” asks Hinton, “how jealousy links itself with sensuality, to clothe itself as an angel of light ! Jealousy is the worst of all evil things because it is self turning love to its own purposes. But we see well, in it, how difficulty comes of the true right. In jealousy, of course, are feelings which are right; of course there are. There is nothing which is not right and good. All things are good, nor is there any evil but the perverting of good things by self. Everything, I 48 JAMES HINTON even badness itself, is good, except as the self rules and uses it.” Hinton vaguely felt what perhaps women alone, when once emancipated from terror of opinion and a false jealousy, will one day realise, that there are both romantic and spiritual adventures in marriage, as well as fine conces- sions and generosities between those now called rivals, that compensate for what seems re- nunciation. There are losses which may ulti- mately be summed up as gains, too, in these newer relationships. The love of woman for woman has in it possibilities with which neither puritans nor reformers have as yet reckoned. The growing loyalty of women to women will one day make them answer, about more mystical matters than eating, that it is a shame and a dishonour in any evolved person to monopolise a beautiful thing while others have no chances for either joy or development. “What things some women bear now,” says Hinton, “what burdens, loss of health, over-weariness for the sake of keeping others out, on the supposition that love, to be true, must have exclusiveness in it, must be a self-centred thing !” The feeling that prefers monogamy, declares Hinton, is the same that prefers virginity. He imagines he hears the Great Voice when the Judgment comes: “You were not good in heart; you had your desires on yourselves,” and the answer must be : “True, O Lord ' We made others suffer. We put their needs aside. But we were good 1 '' Hinton saw the divine meaning in the apparent MONOGAMY AND POLY GAMY 149 paradox that the “good,” in order to save the “bad,” must not only be good, but learn how to give up their outer goodness for an inner order. Hinton had an idea that the true elevation of woman will be in a return to some past, uniting that with something that has put it aside. He saw that the present order of sexual relations is a cross between an Orgy and a repression, the result of an old savage animalism turned into conventional detail. He believed that we are on the verge of a civilisation com- bining nature’s demands with evolving human ideals. From art, Hinton learnt how primitive simplicity led to ornate detail, and ornate detail to a complex simplicity, which combined in its freedom the old spontaneity and elabora- tion. There is always a conflict when the old order undergoes transmutation into the new. The men and women who refuse to aid in the conflict are, as Hinton describes it, like a man who, seeing another drowning, exclaims, when asked to help : “I have had my bath to-day, and I prefer one bath.” This is the attitude of the sheltered virtuous men and women to-day towards what Hinton describes as “the two destructions amongst women,” the destruction of the soul of the pampered wife and the destruc- tion of the body of the crushed outcast. “Still man uses the body of the Outcast, and even the pampered legal wife, as barbarously as his fore- father when he stole her or exchanged her for sheep and cattle. He buys her still, knowing I 50 JAMES HINTON marriage is often her one chance of livelihood, and often under his legal bargain with her and her parents he crushes her soul as the savage her body, and still uses her body for his self- pleasure. For many years James Hinton delved into the problem as to how the social evil is to be faced. He saw that under the rule of phil- anthropy and “virtue,” the “failures,” and even the “redemptions,” are both confusing and unsatisfying. In “moral ” relationships, it seemed to him that excluding is made the very essence of possessing. This led him, little by little, to reason and inquire if it would not be possible to weld passion and pleasure with use, or “service,” into a perfection of goodness in the real sense, by making them one. “Marriage was once a sacred thing,” he says, “ and shall be so again assuredly, with a sacredness never dreamt of, and shaming all sacredness that ever has been before—when it does not put a bodily relation above mercy.” He saw how conventional morality crushes spirituality, and how puritanism slays purity. Towards the end of his life, he became obsessed with a frantic desire to induce women to accept what seemed to him a new and finer form of marriage as a step towards the sincerification of relationships. “With all my heart and soul,” he cries, “I wish nature would exonerate me from being obliged to see that polygamy is right.” Such intensification of the form this new order might take was, perhaps, the weakest part of MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY I5] his teaching; towards the end of his life it threatened to destroy the very ideals he believed so fully. His emphasis on polygamy gave many people a wrong idea of his life, as so many rushed to the conclusion that he was in fact what he only suggested in theory. He was so emphatic in stating that no physical order is or can be in itself good or bad. He declares, indeed, that if we do not recognise this we can see nothing in the moral relations of the world at all. “If we recognise this,” he points out, “is it not evident, at once, what a beauty and glory there might be in the physical relations of men and women being such as to make polygamy true to their nature ? For we must keep clearly before us that in any such physical relations there can be no good nor harm ; that whatever Nature has made in this respect is and must be equally pure and good if she has made it. That, supposing God had made one man adapted to be husband to a thousand women, or vice versa, it must be exactly as right and pure as if He had made no relation of husband and wife at all. This we must remember, that what Nature makes is pure, by the fact of her making it, and that to think otherwise is to blaspheme God, for all physical relations alike have no moral quality in themselves.” Hinton saw distinctly, however, that “the evils of a selfish polygamy would be too great to be tolerated. Men cannot go back to that.” He saw, in his clearest moments, that polygamy could not co-exist among us with our ideas of I52 JAMES HINTON purity and our self-based lives. No one saw more clearly how polygamy, if carelessly entered into by the average man, would produce an in- crease of sensual gluttony, though in the ex- ceptional lover it might have results both purifying to the individual and to the race. We cannot revert to an order which, as in the ordinary polygamy of the past, was allowed only for considerations of passion or of economics. Any form or appearance of it, in the future, must minister only to the finest form of both conjugal and parental love, and a comradeship which the world has never yet seen. To reconstruct any form of barbaric life into its apparent counter- part is a very difficult matter. It can only be attempted by those who can rightly give and rightly take. “Polygamy not being in itself necessarily a sin, here is a case given, in which rights can be given up without instituting any sin. And observe, the sacrifice attempted by a woman in giving up monogamy would be slight compared with that imposed upon her by man, in rendering marriage impossible. It might be said, doubtless will be, that the grounds of monogamy are not the rights of women, but the well-being of society; and that it must be maintained, however willing wives might be to give it up. But this, I think, is a mistake, and that, socially, monogamy was necessary only as suppression. “Here, surely, is the chief social as well as intellectual hindrance : the not knowing that things which are right to be or to be affirmed MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY I53 are also right to be undone and denied ; so leading to the prolonged not giving up. And even if it were the best, it inflicts evils too great. It is what yet the human race is not fit for, and is established too soon. “The idea that monogamy is really higher than polygamy is truly the same notion, the same error, as that celibacy is higher than marriage. He who feels this last, simply does not know what marriage is ; so he who feels monogamy higher than polygamy does not know what polygamy in its true sense is. Both these ideas are the contrary of unsensual ; both are an exaggeration, making too much of the physical. The true idea of polygamy is to enable life to be, to the highest possible degree, un-self- centred and devoted ; to make the thought on all sides to be: ‘What can we do?’ embracing so the united male and female work.” Hinton’s idea was clean and fine, but he failed to realise that his Quixotic cry to wives to become heroines, to distribute joy and to call on men to put aside impurity through a fine polygamy, was to a great extent a masculine claim in its mode of proclamation. Hinton’s “ polygamy '' was always a polygyny and never a polyandry. It did not include the complete freedom of woman to choose her own way of deliverance from the further tyranny of man and the cruelty of woman. Her complete economic independence was not insisted upon as the pivot on which her new life must turn. Here and there only, in his most intimate 154 JAMES HINTON papers, he senses the truth as a whole. “Surely,” he says, “the true social life will not be any fixed and definite relation, as of polygamy or anything else, but a perfect subordination of every physical relation whatever to reason and good, so that the question shall never be asked what those relations have been, but only whether the life has been free from self-dominion.” Here, and not in his suggestions for the establish- ment of a new polygamy, we have his final and complete thought. As he is always declaring that things must be fluid and not rigid, it follows indeed, as a necessary sequence, that neither monogamy nor polygamy, nor any fixed form of union, can be insisted upon in the future, but that variation must be allowed when once the consciences of men and women are alive to the vital fact that hypocrisy, jealousy, cruelty, desertion of children, or neglect of the duties incumbent upon any form of love are as gross failures in the sight of Heaven as the adulteries and lusts of nature’s primitive instincts. - “It is no wonder,” says Hinton, “ looking at men as they are, that the conviction comes that any true, deep goodness from them is impossible. That to admit the rule of self and seek merely to secure obedience to external laws and restraints is all that can be or with any safety sought. It is no wonder. What we think in our hearts indeed, is, “Why has God made such creatures as men at all ?” But, in truth, has He made them as we see them 2 Is this what they really are, or what they have been MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY I55 crushed down into ? Is man really, or ever was he, a creature to whom it was unsafe to say, ‘Let service rule you; act for that truth- fully and honestly, and you will fulfil all duty’ 2 What does that mean, but so degraded is man now, that if you do but give him a ready-made excuse, if you do but formulate a pretence for him, he will at once adopt it, and throw aside all morals 2 If any person fears degradation beyond this, what does he mean by degradation ? But it is not true, now or ever. It is the result of a long degrading process, and makes us think it must remain for ever so.” Hinton asserts that purity is not in marrying or not marrying, but in a desire made new. It may take us quite as long to discover that purity is not a mere thing of the flesh but of the spirit, as it has taken us to cease believing in hell-fire and brimstone. “Monogamy suits men well enough ; if they are licentious and rich, what could possibly suit them so well ? And then, if they are virtuous and desire the satisfaction of goodness, it suits them also. Well enough it suits men, both ways. But if they did not hoodwink women it could not last five years.” There is no way yet known of making any bodily relation always pure. Any may be impure, any may be pure. “The truth is,” says Hinton, “that if once we allow ourselves to ask if one married relation be in itself more pure than another, we are already impure. There is nothing for us but to repent and put away the corruption.” Restric- tions, he tells us, are often attempts to do I 56 JAMES HINTON without goodness, instead of making goodness palatable to the body as well as to the soul. Those who realise the new order must correct the premiss in order that they may reach the right conclusion. Hinton declared that to refuse good for our virtue is to violate the sacredness of marriage. Self-needs have suffocated both our joy and our goodness, and in them we have forgotten the needs of humanity, which are quite as imperative to an evolved person as the sel- fish and individual needs. “It is an excellent argument, surely,” Hinton observes, “in respect to marriage, that the true thought of it is—and this is what gives it dignity and value—that it is not merely, or even mainly, a personal but a social thing; one in which the main interests regarded and to be preserved are not those of the individual only, but of man as a whole. Surely this is true, and is complete and final against all “relaxations of it, all less sacredness of it for the mere pleasure of the individual; that is, all ‘licence or taking for self. But the case is wholly the contrary in respect to refusing service. To refuse service for our virtue is to violate this sacredness of marriage : to make it matter for self and refuse to let the demands of humanity be supreme in it. All that argu- ment is for the absolute rule of service. “Is it not beautiful to be thinking of the relations of men and women not as a matter of pleasure—this almost wholly fallen out of sight, and scarcely remaining at all—but as a condition on which the spiritual power depends 2 ” We MONOGAMY AND POLY GAMY I57 have blasphemed the uses of the flesh and so made what is natural sinful. “The Church,” says Hinton, “ has taught adultery by her ceremonies.” It is evident that wives are to-day ceasing to submit to be the mere instruments through which the impurity of men operates. This rebellion is not only for their own good, but for the good of the men they love and also for the sake of the fathers of their children. Under the old polygamy and the present monogamy, woman has been largely sacrificed, and her individuality swept away for man. Hinton says: “For so we may surely trace how marriage has become what it is with us : it has sought to substitute pleasure of emotion and sentiment for that of sense; or at least to superadd as much as possible, and quite hide the other. This, which is emphatically true of woman, is true of men also, and of the whole scope of human life. Man is a self-sacrificer—a giver in his true nature, but this giving has also not-giving in it, and he has made the same mistake in treating himself as in treating women. He has treated himself as if he were essentially the Taker, and has crushed and negatively denied that which is the Being and substance of him.” We have based sex union hitherto on reasons that will not stand, and have been, Hinton asserts, almost like cannibals who cannot see the degrada- tion of eating their fellows, even counting it a virtue. Monogamy, with prostitution at its back, is, indeed, a sort of cannibalism, as is I58 JAMES HINTON the jealous exclusiveness of women in mar- riage. “Infinitely fascinating and beautiful as mono- gamy is (while one looks only at what it gives), exquisite as is the thought, and lovely the emotions and the relation, yet when we look fully and see how human nature is really made, we see that both as respects the mental and the bodily constitution of men and women it must be, as an enforced and rigid order, exquisitely and terribly cruel. It commits too much to accident ; there must be some cases in which it means distress and crushing too dreadful to be borne. It is so good, and yet in its self- form weighted with such evils. What, then, do we want, what is the exact need 2 This : to bring needs, wants, demands of nature’s, that is of God’s, for having it virtually, not in the self-form but in its spirit; so having all its good, and all its ills avoided ; that is, having it as it is adapted for man ; namely, absolutely for the spirit, not rigidly for the body. God has given it to us exactly as we need it, and are adapted for it in the spirit. And its evils belong to its self-form : they exist to make us quit our grasp of it in that form.” In evolved desire there is a mental element in the sex life of men and women. Physical expression gratifies the primitive needs. In those needs to-day, with and as part of the more complex manifestations, are the mental expres- sions of sex in which also are pure satisfaction. Sex love is not necessarily lust, and may even MONOGAMY AND POLY GAMY I59 exist apart from physical gratification. The love feeling of men to women, under the joint rule of monogamy and prostitution, has been expressed in the past by the egotistic statement ‘‘I for me and I in thee,” instead of the one Hinton foretold : “I for thee and you through me.” “Man is capable,” says Hinton, “ of a marriage ordered by service as soon as ever he prefers a woman’s honour to his basest desire, but there have been feelings which have neces- sarily kept this back.” Only those who are at once masters of desire, and yet desirous of complete love, dare contemplate a change in domestic relationships which shall exclude impurity and admit freedom without licence. “The very moral power,” says Hinton, “which expresses itself in our restrictions on marriage is the only thing that can enable them to cease.” We have always, Hinton is continually repeating, the perverting idea that a new thing, and a better thing, means of necessity a harder thing. As a matter of experience, it often means not Only an easier thing, but a much more delightful thing. When a child has once learnt to walk it is easier than crawling. “For those,” Hinton says, “who believe in the greater purity of a domestic life over celibacy, how clear the argu- ment must be against the attempt to arrive at purity by restraint | For see how, in an age of unendurable licence, the abolishing of restraints was the spring of purity. Think of Luther marrying a nun It was not by first gaining the self-restraint that purity came, but by 160 JAMES HINTON saying and acting “ these restraints are false, and they must go.” There is absolute direct experience to teach us. And is it not neces- sarily certain this must be so 2 In every case in which a restraint exists which nature does not truly impose, the only hope is that one true human being throws it aside. If monogamy were the condition of a spiritual union with woman, one based on the soul and not on the sense, it were an infinite gain every way. To a man at least as much, nay more than to a woman, it is one to be prized beyond all things, and maintained at all hazards. But equally, if it be a hindrance, then all the terms are to be reversed.” Under an ideal polygamy, the woman would thus be used for nature, and those who are now mistresses and dishonoured, would be made into wives with useful profes- sions, backed by a new emancipation. “How perfect a gain,” says Hinton, “is the idea of polygamy voluntarily accepted—or rather in- sisted on—by woman (at least the legal right to it). Because, have we not seen it as a law, that the perfect form is that very thing volun- tarily accepted, which, in the imperfect state, is imposed ? Surely women were enslaved at first into polygamy (although in some places it may have come to work well); which means surely that later they are to accept it, to choose it.” - Hinton became often obsessed with the idea of a fine polygamy taking the place of a merely false and rigid monogamy, and he looked MONOGAMY AND POLY GAMY 161 to women to lead the way. “Think,” he says, “of that self - centred life the comfortable married woman leads in the presence of such things as surround her; think of that by the side of any yielding of passion, and which is mote and which is beam 2 And is it not ever so when any people begin to think that their business is with others’ morals 2 Does not Nature always avenge the folly with a mockery like this, a bitter mockery, cruel with the cruelty of love 2 Is it not exactly so with the thought of the rich men towards the morals of the poor ? Does not Nature plainly laugh and say : When you have cast out the beam, you shall remove that mote.” Hinton came to look upon monogamy as a step to polygamy, and with absolute faith in woman’s power to carry it out as a priestess of sense. “Is it not easy and natural,” he asks, “if one looks at men and women, to get the feeling of polygamy as being based on a superiority in woman 2 ” Hinton looked forward to a time when women should accept a shared life, and men should reverence and sustain the women they now de- stroy. In that time women would neither be the prey of men, nor be vampires using sex for material ends. He looked forward to a day “when bodies will be embraced within the aspiration,” and not bought or sold, Snared or destroyed. “A true polygamy,” says Hinton, “would be at once a demand on the “good men, the men who do restrain their passions, to take more pleasure, a demand for ‘indulgence ’ II. I62 JAMES HINTON in that sense, and a demand on the rest for more restraint, for an accepting of obligations in place of licence. How is this twofold relation always visible 2 Does every coming of a true not-self-indulgence bring with it such a putting aside of licence 2 If the restraint be made un- necessary, that means that there is not evil from the passions. It means that they have become passions ruled by use.” Hinton believed that man’s claim on woman, and woman’s claim on man, are equally un- satisfied under the present rule of a mingled licence and restraint. “Is a woman,” he asks, “who pretends to like a man and sells her body to him for half an hour, what a man wants 2 ” He answers his own question by declaring that such a love is like eating the peel of an orange. Man may be driven by famine or other necessity to do this. Nature, through hunger, drives him to unnatural devices, but it is not what he cares about. His need, and woman’s need also, com- prises a complete balance of desire, restraint, and abandonment in one, joy and surrender, pleasure and pain, passionate love and universal service. “Is it possible,” he asks, “really that polygamy was an ‘anticipation,” and is suppressed for perfecting 2 Some facts look like it. And may there be a recondite relation of cause here ? May the absence of occupation for women have arisen from too much having been put upon them 2 Has monogamy tried to exact from woman an impossible task, and so has it come to pass that she has not had the MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY I63 chance of doing what was possible 7 Thus there has come her lack of occupation, because, by demanding things from one that could only truly be rendered by many, she has been able to do, truly, nothing, and everything has slipped away—everything which ought to be hers which could go. What has been put upon her has been the inappropriate work it suited others to throw on her.” The usual arguments against polygamy Hinton puts cynically aside as due to man’s egotism, selfishness, or fear. “May not this very thing,” he says, “ be one of the reasons why Nature has made men and women differently in this respect, viz. that for true goodness she must insist on an ability to take pleasure, to take it fully, and even against a seeming ‘right.” She cannot accept anything as the right goodness that has not in it the ability to take all the pleasure she demands, naturally and simply and selflessly. And so she makes this relation exactly in order that man’s goodness may have to be raised to that, to his taking humanly what is thus accord- ing to her order. So she gives man this problem, this measure of his task. When you have accepted all pain and loss, still you are not absolutely good till you can, with all your most developed sense of justice and purity, simply, unself wise, in a word, humanly, take polygamy. You are made so, and have to learn to enjoy fully and absolutely, or you are not right. So may we not see how modesty and the feelings of justice are given us, positively to deny to l64 JAMES HINTON have them in their effect as the means to true goodness 2 So the rightness and yet the wrong- ness in both are so evident. And then—in the same thing with this demand on man—is there the complementary demand on woman— of her once accepting sacrifice f * If, he de- clares, we have any taint of the feeling that it is because marriage is so high and holy that it must not be shared, and must not be used for giving, then this means that a corruption is already imposed upon our souls by what we have made of marriage. It means that the vileness we have imported into it has already begun to work its death, and has already poisoned our thought of good. “How close is the relation of polygamy and monogamy the sensual basis still retained, but the results pruned and regulated. And the mockery it is, is so curious. As if the demand was for any particular forms and relations; as if the important thing was the form of men’s actions, instead of the act. As if nature did not say from the first : “It is no particular thing I want ; any relations of men and women based on reason and good, are the same to me: only I want the self cast out.” And we mock her ; we leave the self in, and carefully regulate the forms of its operation. We give her stones for bread; the stones of a life formed externally to the demands of a justice based on self. We give her things to which she is absolutely in- different—the forms of our actions. Does she not say, as plainly as hell can speak : ‘I will MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY I65 have none of these your sacrifices '2 Why should she 7 Look at her ; how should she care for such things 2 Does she not say, with every voice, that she cares nothing for forms, only for the absence of the self 2 °’ He points out that at first the attempt was to make the relation of man and woman less one of the body alone. But it has become exactly the contrary, and is more or less an insistence that it must centre around the body, and not only that, but be absolutely ruled by it. “Marriage,” he asserts, “was never meant to be a thing in which the body should rule.” It cannot be so without ruin, because the use of love is not confined to the mere senses, though it can work through them, making marriage a great “belonging,” which includes the lesser in the greater, and the greater in the All. “The argument,” Hinton says, “that mankind are not yet good enough for marriage restrictions to be loosened thus, is it not truly quite inverted, really applying the other way ? Is not the fact rather this 2 That the world is not good enough yet for women to be submitted to an enforced celibacy 2” Those who know well the inner lives of many people are often impressed with the number of celibate lives in many of the happiest marriages, as well as of beautiful unions amongst those who appear detached, also of those who have the new insight and beauty in the humanised relations of one sex for another. A false idea of monogamy to-day, as a false idea of chastity yesterday, I66 JAMES HINTON must soon make way for those new relationships which spell out the divine, under whatever name or label society puts upon them. “In thinking of these two forms of the marriage-relation, we must avoid one very natural error : namely, thinking that because monogamy involves certain better things than polygamy, therefore it means that those who adopt it are better. One sees the very same emotions produce different actions in different conditions of mankind. Are we better than. Abraham 2 If monogamy superseded polygamy under the influence of good emotions, is it not most likely that it was only because certain evils connected with polygamy came to be felt by men as they were not before ; came into view and made a demand for change not hitherto made ; and did not imply at all that the men were better; only that circumstances had changed, and that fresh things had become visible.” “Thinking on that line,” says Hinton, “that * a woman who deliberates is lost,” I felt how arbitrary, artificial, contrary to nature, is the life that is now imposed upon woman in this matter of chastity. We make danger; making all womanhood hang upon a point like this, surrounded with unnatural, preternatural dan- gers. For, however we may refuse to think it, prostitution does secure our daughters. There is a wanton unreason embodied in the life of woman now. The present ‘virtue' is a morbid, unhealthy plant. Nature and God never poised MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY 167 the life of a woman upon such a needle's point, and it is connected with our insisting on an un- nature, the intense degradation of prostitution. The whole modern idea of chastity has latent in it (in that wonderful way in which things are their opposites) sensual exaggeration, Surely in part remaining to us from other times; with that which was good in connection with it, it may be, in great part gone.” In the question of polygamy Hinton argued that, just because of the possible increase it makes possible, in the Ordinary man, of sensual gluttony, it demands a good man to affirm it, and a pure woman to experiment wholesomely and openly with it, and to dare any failure or scorn. Woman must be willing to sacrifice for woman, and man must understand the whole meaning of love as service and passion com- bined, and as nutrition and function in one. They are to be neither thieves, trespassers, infidels in love, or cowards. “Here,” Hinton says, “I should state what I mean by the true bodily relation of man and woman. I mean the surely quite obvious fact that, taking the average, the man’s body is as much con- structed for more sexual activity than the woman’s, as it is to demand more food. This fact monogamy simply refuses to recognise, and in doing this inevitably,–at least when, as now, the proportion of women is in excess, it expressly implies that restraint of passion is good apart from its serving good; i.e. it poisons the very thought and conception of I68 JAMES HINTON goodness, and makes it corrupt, and affirms a thing which means that life ought to be based on self and pleasure. For otherwise restraint of passion is not good.” He affirms again and again that “by acting for self we compel goodness to mean a denial of pleasure, and then this reacts with evil effect through all our life, but especially in the marriage relation. It is there its evil effects become concentrated, as they must do. It hardly needs pointing out, in fact. If any one will reflect, it is evident what a miserable perversion of the relations must ensue. It is not only the perversion of the thought that is so mischievous, though that could scarcely be exaggerated, making us mix up with goodness that which has no real connection with it. Is it not clear marriage cannot work, the relations of man and woman cannot be arranged, on a basis that makes goodness be in refusing pleasure ? Then shall we not change it 2 Why should we cling to a thing, a thought—for it is a thought only, rather than anything more, even now—that has this effect 2 The evils introduced by it into the relations of man and woman are explained by the fact of our needing something of extreme force to compel us to open our eyes to see the error of the thing we were doing.” Hinton’s idea thus was that the old polygamy might possibly be tried again under new con- ditions. “In Utah, for instance, polygamy has cast out prostitution. The Mormon women surely have at any rate done this immense MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY I69 service to humanity. They have shown that women not only can live in love, or at least outward harmony and aid together, and give up that which they have counted so precious, but that for an object some women at least will do it, and those not picked and highly and ex- pressly trained and educated for it. In respect of this, is it not to be noted that they are women of the working classes 2 Is it not part of what is to be : the renewal of man’s life on a human basis through women of the working classes 2 With us, might it not, if carried out ideally, cast out jealousy, boredom, and even, in the end, the economic dependence of woman on man which is the crux of the whole social evil 2 Might it not also solve part of the domestic service problem as well as the great problem of passion and purity ?” - “Monogamy,” he says again, “was possible on condition of the wife being a slave, having no rights. Has this not the character of a suppression ? And, see again, monogamy seems perfect for some, like various imperfect systems of thought. In certain instances it seems as if nothing else could be desired. Take some of the best among all nations, and the present marriage union seems perfect. But look widely. In England, among the mass, how brutal it is In some countries how loose and unreal in others it is the relation of a domestic drudge alone. In America, is it not relaxed, not for the woman’s life, but for her whims ? Is it not plain that polygamy is not positively but I'70 JAMES HINTON negatively denied in it 2 And the things which will only work for some, for a ‘better class, are not good enough.” And again he asks, “If Nature willed restraint, did she not also make the ‘use' to demand it, to give reason and guidance 2 Show the use demanding it, and then of course passion should follow it. That is its being human ; but, without this, why restrain part for any reason that would not restrain all 2 Such restraint cannot be intro- duced save by poisoning love, sanctifying jealousy, making men and women alike force love into unnatural unions with exclusiveness. If we will have part of men’s passion restrained apart from use, that is the price we must pay. We must consent to have love justly called ‘the most selfish of the passions.’” Hinton often and forcibly drew attention to the unnatural restraint upon men, women, and nature. If his propositions are only valuable as aids to divest us of our mental blinkers his life, work, and suffering have all been worth while. “There are three restraints,” says Hinton, “ of which that on the man is altogether the least and in comparison quite trivial, though enormous in its effects. (1) There is the re- straint on the married women which compels them to hold that position of possessing to the exclusion of others; against their will and wish, but seeming their duty. That is the first and chief restraint, and the most intense. It is that restraint primarily that is broken : the wife is set free to give. (2) The restraint upon MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY I'71 all women, as they grow up, in marriage being a chance, and upon those who do not marry, in the obvious ways. This is immense and terri- ble also, though less hurtful than the first. (3) The restraint upon the man which limits him to one wife. This is trivial in comparison, and in all cases but a few is absolutely insignificant. Taken at the most, so far as the body is con- cerned, apart from disease, it can be but a thing of the imagination. It only grows at all important when considered in relation to work. But, trivial as it is, see what power is in it. Here we see the way nature works. That little restraint, not worth mentioning, to let it be cast off demands not less than a total recon- struction of man’s life. He must become wholly different, being called on to throw it off. Is not that a wonder and a beauty 2 How great weights indeed nature hangs on wires so small ! “I perceive,” says Hinton, “that first I thought most of the evils of the prostitutes; then most of the evils of the unmarried women ; now most of the evils of the married. This is the course my thoughts have gone; an inverse order to the seeming evils. It comes to this, that those appear now to me to suffer most loss who seem to suffer least ; most losers the wives, and least the prostitutes; most losers those to whom sacrifice is least. Is not this the truth 2 And the contrary appearance to us, is it not a revelation of what our way of seeing is ? The wives seemed to be rich, and possessing every- thing, and now they seem most to have need. I 72 JAMES HINTON Their need is of the right to give.” In a protest against the absorption of family exclusiveness he writes: “What clearer curse could God write upon the infamy we call marriage than that genius cannot touch it without showing it to be the hell it is l’’ At present women are forced by the Church, the State, and the so-called moral code, to be dogs in the manger, and actually to restrain their sweet and generous impulses because of public opinion. A woman once confessed to me that if only gossip had not fallen on her husband’s “unfaithfulness * to her, and made a degradation of it, she would have looked on the matter as a gain, and would have cared for the woman who had entered their lives. “But people would think me mad,” she said. Hinton called on women to make a great sacrifice. “A right sacrificed willingly is most perfectly possessed,” he said. A sacrifice accepted in- stead of imposed makes a great difference in the working out of a big problem. Every true woman objects to be used or even sacrificed. She wants her act to be her own. Hinton declares that woman’s history is a refusal to be driven to the stake but a longing to lay down her life for others. How, he queries, can woman make a more beautiful gift to her sister than by sharing the finest things in life with her ? “How should consenting to be one of two or more wives degrade her so much as consenting to let another woman be turned off for her ? Men’s own sisters and daughters are MONOGAMY AND POLY GAMY I'73 not to be degraded, only some women they do not care about ! But surely if we are to ask any woman to accept sacrifice it must be those in whom our own life is bound up !” It is an intellectual exercise to co-ordinate Hinton’s thoughts upon the question of mono- gamy and polygamy. It can do no harm to sift this matter if one’s faith in sound morality is fixed, and it must do some good to those whose ideals are vague and whose actions are the mere following of convention apart from conviction. A change of public opinion, from a devotion to the keeping up of shams to a propaganda and practice of realities, may well bring about a new beauty of living, and “a desire made new,” as Hinton expresses it. Women alone can change the old order into the new without degradation in the process. “Once they are respected,” says Hinton, “their position cannot degrade them. Even a man’s having more than one wife will be far from being a mere subordination of the woman to him ; it will be precisely in order that she may not be so subordinated ; in order that she may be, besides his wife, herself; in order that she may not, in a word, be negatively but only positively, denied in becoming a wife. A woman ought to be able to devote her life to a work, and yet to have a husband. This would be placing her on a par with men. It must be a depressing influence for women to know that, if they marry, they must be absorbed in house work; that is, their being used up for the man.” I74 JAMES HINTON To attain to sincerification is the first step in the onward and upward movement towards a sexual renaissance, and, as a result of that, sincere experiments backed by good intentions and common sense. If, side by side with this, we gained a new loyalty and love of women towards women, and also an enlarged sense of honour in women towards men, which will forbid vampirism or exploitation, we should surely be on the verge of a new civilisation. “Only let it be possible,” says Hinton, “for one woman truly to help another in her wifehood, instead of robbing her, by sharing it; only let this be possible, and how much of good might come !” “We must have travelled far from nature,” he says, “that it should seem, as it does, wildly impossible for women to do purely for love what women have done impurely for gain.” “If custom,” he continues, “ and assumed moral ideas were put aside, and if there were no objection on the part of the first wife, no woman eminent in art, or other gift, Surely would shrink in the least from being the second wife of a man with whom she had an intense spiritual sympathy. I feel equally sure that in many cases the first wife would gain immensely in every way, freedom from a crushing weight being the least. She would gain in union and sympathy with her husband. The second wife might even be a link and interpreter between them. There is nothing here really repulsive to the natural order of cultivated moral sensi- bilities. And it is palpable that our monogamy MONOGAMY AND POLY GAMY 175 crushes, forbids, and suppresses things most legitimately, inevitably aspired to.” Democracy has many issues, and not the least is the question of sex relationships. When women, as Hinton hopes, are used for nature and not for self, we are emerging into a new era. To-day she is used for man, for money, and for material ease and luxury. In a developed marriage order, according to Hinton, nature and the woman’s own will and desire will be manifested. If every woman, who to-day is in the bondage of harlotry or economic dependence, were made an honoured wife able to share with others in art, the training of children, or in house-work, according to her desire and capa- bility, and paid fairly for all she does, her life would be at once joyous and useful. If men became truly democratic there could be no question of subservience, of lust, or of selfishness. “The idea,” Hinton says, “ has a certain aspect of removing restraint from a man, as being more pleasure, for him. But, in truth, to him it is mainly a taking of obligations, and aban- doning an artificial and unnatural licence, and, even in respect to its freedom for pleasure, it is this infinitely more to a woman. Looked at chiefly in that aspect towards men, it is wholly mis-seen. About men it is truly said, ‘The good men will not want it ’; and it may be added, too, ‘The bad would rather have licence.’ It is not in man’s body the power lies to bring it, but in woman’s soul.” If the self is subdued to service, and wives are brought I'76 JAMES HINTON from degradation into honour, what, cried Hinton, is there to fear 7 “Is it not wretched,” he asks, “that this should even suggest the fancy that it means not loving, or honouring, or wholly delighting in the first wife 7 As well might one say, when a man with an increasing business wanted another partner, “Then you will be sure to be false to your engagements with the first,” etc. It means nothing but that most hateful forcing of exclusiveness into love and profanation of it by things one forbears to name.” The true guard against polygamy, or anything else degrading women, is to gain a true respect for the proper nature and natural activity of women. Names so often destroy, and it is a pity that Hinton attacked monogamy and advocated polygamy without defining more clearly, or even not attempting to define at all, exactly what he contemplated in the new experiments in sexual relationships. He forgot to emphasise the important point in modern life, that what applies to man applies to woman. Like Milton, when writing on divorce, he over- emphasised the man’s point of view even when striving his hardest to get justice for women. “What I seek to do,” he says, “is to weave all the elements of human life into one chorus, like Handel, trying with one theme, as it were, to bring in all the rest and making that a har- mony.” The pathetic part of it is that, even yet, discussions on these great questions, and still more experiments, however conscientiously attempted in purity of heart and sincere con- HINToN’s son, will IE. 176] MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY 177 viction, bring the same odium the fearful inflict on the fearless. Men like Hinton, however, are instruments to take off the bandages from Love's closed eyes, and their deaths, quite as much as their lives, help many of us to find new and wider paths. In order to overthrow a system of moral rights or laws, it is necessary to put the unity of love in their place. For “Thou shalt not,” after which could be enumerated thousands of actions based on self-love, Hinton would say, “Thou shalt love, and then do any- thing, because love cannot injure.” Hinton felt that anything which limits love must be cast aside, and anything which sets it free for its own wonderful work must be admitted, at the risk of suffering or ostracism. His mistake was in dogmatising too arbitrarily as to what form the newer manifestations of love will take in civic and domestic life, although in the end he recognised that no definite order can be laid down. He felt that men must change their at- titude to women so as to be ready to place their needs first, and he added to this, and because of this, that no woman should be sexually starved. He looked forward to a time when men, being freed from lust and selfishness, may respond to the needs of women so as not to dishonour either Nature or Love. His attitude was meant to deal a blow at prostitution, and, however offensive his ideas may appear at the first hearing, they are at any rate a plea for some element outside mere brutality and gluttony in the region of love. But the theory, as pro- l2 I78 JAMES HINTON pounded by Hinton, if followed out literally by men and women still holding swinish or limited ideas, would almost certainly, as yet, lead us deeper into laxity and lasciviousness, even if law legalised what is now illegal. Education in the art of love, self-control trained out of bondage into happy habit, must pave the way to those liberties which spring from the beauty of the spirit, making flesh a means to a lovely end and not an end in itself. Make-shifts, like some of those advocated by Hinton, must give way to the courageous working out, through education and economics, of a cleaner, saner, fuller and more rapturous expression of love and desire. The haphazard polygamy Hinton suggested would probably only be an emphasis to man’s greed and a newer manifestation of woman’s sacrifice, for it might mean greater torture to both men and women. In the rôle she would have to adopt woman would probably, unless the new ideal was very strong, be twice cursed through jealousy of her fellow woman, and through the atavism of the masculine ignoramus or experimenter in new sensualities. Being a man, Hinton tried to emphasise the worn-out forms of desire between man and woman by more or less reversing the old Order, man’s need and woman’s sacrifice, to man’s sacrifice and woman’s need. He did not realise that, however refined a polygamy took the place of sham monogamy and living lies, there is no guarantee that it would free woman or man from lust or stupidity. Love MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY I'79 has been long in Swaddling bands and in chains, and, before it can come of age in its beauty, a new revelation must come to men about women, and to women about men, and also to women with regard to each other. Hinton demanded that any and every sacrifice must be made on the woman’s part if it only meant dealing a blow at a domesticity which limits beauty or love, and, through its sexual exclusiveness, ex- cludes happiness for others. In his almost boyish impertinence, he thought a refined con- cubinage would solve the worst part of the problem for women, not realising that the evolved woman’s needs are more subtly maternal for human and wider ends than ever before, and just because of this, her personal desires for complete union with her mate more complex and differ- entiated. I have heard it said of a modern woman that it would take a Heine, a Barbarossa, a Chopin, and a Napoleon in one to meet the subtlety of her nature, and, though that is a somewhat large order, the hint underneath the statement implies that man, while remaining woman’s dearest child, is losing his hold on her as a complete mate owing to his persistency in remaining, in sexual matters, as gluttonous as a school-boy, or as prosaic as George Eliot’s Casaubon. The need of woman is man’s oppor- tunity to be a lover and a mate, not merely a generous financier or a sexual sybarite. “The need of man,” Heine says, “ is woman, and woman’s need is man’s need of her.” May we not add to this that the need of man and woman I80 JAMES HINTON alike is tender understanding and complete freedom in their mutual relationships, in order to work out their individual lives for their own mutual joy and for the good of the race 2 For this end, physical passion should be so finely realised that it is an inspiration, and not an enervation. Hinton resented all the waste of energy directed to rob the senses of both purity and passion. He did not realise that, to glorify passion, we must be sure we have it at white heat rather than red, and so free from smoke and dirt. - “Embracing a woman is the most spiritual of all things,” cries Hinton. In fact, he again and again declares in his manuscripts that it can only be compared to prayer and music. Every true lover knows this, and the worth of any and every relationship can be judged by its success in reaching, or failing to reach, this standpoint. It was into this sphere of prayer that Hinton wanted to lift love, but his sugges- tion of polygamy, if carried into law, might leave us just where we are, or even more en- tangled in the sensual and selfish. Love, trust, and reverence, with the flame of passion over all, is what the future of marriage will probably be, instead of remaining unevolved human desire anxious for a home, or friendship struggling to take to itself that which is not its own. Those who would be pioneers in this great question of Love and Desire must realise that sexual passion is a force in nature like the wind and sea, untamable and uncagable. For that very MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY I 81 reason it should be like the sun, transfiguring rather than destroying what it permeates. It is the spirit which gives life, and so the spirit must put aside the letter or the form, and be itself. There is a pleasure which hurts another, and a pleasure which serves another, and the one which serves is the one by which to guide the life, declares Hinton. Man hitherto has believed that woman’s need to give has proved man’s need to grab. The idea Hinton tried to convey was that man’s receiving should be his giving too. If he is acting only for self, all things are wrong; if for others, all things are right. The line between wrong and right in these matters is between that which injures and that which does good. We have been calling “right º’ that which puts ourselves first and service second. He thought he had diag- nosed the social disease eating away the physical and spiritual lives of women. He was possessed by a fever to save women, but, being a man, virile and impetuous, he sought the solutions on lines which have rightly been described as “dangerous.” He had hit on a partial truth, and so offered only a partial remedy. He realised that women’s legalised monopoly of love and cherishing often includes the “dog in the manger ‘’ feeling of holding, for economic considerations, that for which she has no other use. He studied the monopolies, the limitations, the four-walled absorptions of the average con- nubial life, and he saw that something in its intrinsic make-up hindered the fullest beauty and I82 JAMES HINTON vitality which should be given out of the glow of intimate relationships to the world at large. He saw women in guarded homes making the very conditions for women in brothels. He saw the beauty of a full sex life robbed and narrowed by respectable make-believes of passion in conventional morality, and he saw passion mutilated and destroyed under prostitution. Parasitism on one hand and prostitution on the other were social sores he desired to cure. He felt something must be done, however drastic. His plea to women was to enlarge their borders and pull down their narrow walls. He advocated a refined polygamy to meet this situation. With his insistence on the need for man to act from a cleaner and ever more sacrificing attitude towards women, his idea was not the foul thing people imagined. Is not every man who has any relationship apart from his legal wife a polygamist, and is not every woman who coun- tenances or shares in intrigues, deceit, and un- loveliness in love, responsible 2 Hinton saw the horrors done under cover of the name of morality and passion, and became a fanatic at last on this question. He did not see that the evils we are suffering from now could be as rampant in a modern harem as in an old-fashioned doll’s house. The inner law of love forbids, in modern relationships, dogmatic rules and legislative interference. It is well, however, for the sake of Hinton’s suggestiveness, to realise fully his ideas. He may often lead us to the vision of a better MONOGAMY AND POLYGAMY I83 and cleaner state of things than the present, when even friendship between a man and woman is rarely possible because of the “nonsense reasons * against it. We have surely to be brave and realise that woman, not being a snarer except by wrong habit, and man not being a seducer except by tradition, the more they are together and know one another the better, whatever names we may apply to the relationship. One may have a hundred friend- ships with men or women without Cupid’s arrows or Love’s torch being in evidence, and the more of these friendships women and men cherish the less bestiality and the less obsession we shall have in sexual relationships. We are so trite, and insist on primitive desires so much, that we dare not experiment in the newer harmonies of love. Lust, possession in persons, and economic dependence will perhaps at last give place to love, freedom, and interdependence, and what we need are men and women cour- ageous enough to live out the beauty they realise and to cease fearing about what they do in the sacred and clean name of love. To have the right idea within is to be able to do anything without, for the pure in heart see, not only the Eternal, but Love, who is the chosen servant of the Infinite. Hinton vaguely realised this, but he emphasised the bodily passion by his very ardours against its self- form. Physical passion cannot be expelled in the real human being, nor is it desirable it should be, as Nature, the great mother, is against I84 JAMES HINTON so offensive and silly an attempt. Yet physical passion must not be over-emphasised, for the nature force in every human being has in it not only volcanic energy, but Sunbeams and dewdrops and tendrils and rainbows. Women are just as stupid as men in adopting and con- doning the traditional attitude towards physical passion. Any woman who gives her body, in or out of marriage, to a man without real love and affinity, delays the day for the emergence of the finest form of love. Starvation and excess are alike affronts to Nature, and she has an artful way of avenging Outrages on her decency, her orderliness, and her beauty. Nature, Love, and Spirituality in one, may help us to combine and formulate a new gospel of sex love. The born polygamist and the born monogamist, and those who are neither one nor the other, but “freaks,” will surely one day all gather under the same banner whereon is written “Service.” To serve is to save, to bind is to lose, to dogmatise is to destroy, and to love is to know. - CHAPTER VII NATURE JAMES HINTON, as genius, was one of the “ministering fiends' of Nature. His cry to her was that she should use his “badness,” his “goodness,” as seemed best to her. “Nature,” he tells us, “ is man’s nurse.” If we refuse to obey her or slap her homely, lovely face, she, in good-humour, and for definite, spiritual ends, Smacks us in places she considers harmless, but makes us writhe. Her cradle is ready if we are willing to obey. Her breasts are for our peace and nourishment if we cease screaming for what is not for good. In reading Hinton’s Life in Nature, as well as his other published or unpublished work, we feel that what he says of woman, and in fact what he worships in woman, is what he finds in Nature. Her change of moods, her relentless cruelty in order to gain her own ends from man, her exhortations to his muddled intellect to forget itself and be as spontaneous as her flowers and her animals, and yet as controlled as her oceans, and as serene as her trees, in addition to her appeals to his emotions to be as fierce as the wind and apparently as invisible, her ceaseless efforts to break through obstacles in order 185 I86 JAMES HINTON to put aside a fine thing so that she may produce a finer, her passionate moods of self-denial and self-assertion between a dawn and a sunset—all these were warrants to declare to the world some of her secrets. “By those opposites of hers, Nature, as it were, plays us perpetual tricks, keeps us in the presence of an everlasting magic which has no key but that. By opposites to- gether anything can be done ; more made by less and less by more. This is how we find her such a puzzle. Here is palpably less, and we look, and it is more, and here comes visibly more, and lo it is less.” She had whispered to him that she, as Mother, wants no new force in the world with the existing force made into a new spring-tide at her command. He heard and understood, and immediately capered and called out her messages, as children do in a nursery if a Santa Claus comes in suddenly from the fresh air with a stocking full of surprises. “I have been compelled,” he says, “to see Nature truly, and so now I say I will not be forbidden to see woman’s beauty truly.” He saw that Nature, if we are single and pure, teaches us new things in morals as well as in art or physics, things all against Our formulas and preconceptions, and even against our most cherished beliefs, which, if carried to a logical issue, may break our brains and hearts in order to heal the brains and hearts of her other children through that very fact. She seems to have no pity, she who is at heart pitiful. Down go our idols, if only for her to make a new vision in a Sunset apparent to our NATURE I87 enemy. She never wastes, she never spares. She laughs through the wind at a heartbreak. She shelters neither man nor wren if it serves her larger ends, and a rigid thing must give way before her fluid re-creation. “Nature,” says Hinton, “is made to act through a man’s deed.” He grew more and more convinced that the only deadness in Nature is man’s selfish- ness. She wants to take off his bandages, and he feels safer with them on. “What I see in Nature,” Hinton says, “is the Divine Power acting within an imposed limit.” He knew that when our conscious life is part of Nature we have there and then a new “spiritual body.” “Nature,” he says, “makes us write the law even with unwilling fingers, and in terms of death, until we read it in the terms of life.” The great Mother is as fierce in her demands as she is pitiless in her reformations. “Nature’s cannon-balls are human hearts,” Hinton tells UIS. In one of his letters to an intimate friend he says: “When man’s hands are empty she fills them with herself, she bathes the trembling limbs with all her dews, and soothes the shud- dering spirit with heavenly dreams.” And in another letter in 1873 Hinton writes: “Truly the people with whom I always live, to whom I always talk, for whom and under whom I always act, whose will and work I care about, whose aims and means I study, whose thoughts and designs and passions I seem to know, before whom my soul bows and my desires are still, I 88 JAMES HINTON who are welcome to me, who could do me no wrong but not using me as they would, the people with whom I live are the Beings who are engaged in bringing Man to his Life, that is, Nature and God. I know Nature and I grip Her hand, and am content—that is, I am content in the sense that means being infinitely discontent, being rich in the sense that means possessing nothing.” Hinton believed that in the making of humanity Nature wanted, as her tools, both sinning and suffering, and that she had given the sinning mainly to man and the suffering to woman. Which, he wonders, does she love best ? Nature, in her eclipse mood, hides her face, so that neither man nor woman shall see her smile as they question her ways and design. But Hinton caught some of Nature’s humour when he declared that the goodness of the merely good—that is, the people through whom Nature does not speak—must cease to rule the world. Hinton desired to make ethics a science, and fuse Art and Thought and Morals into one. He says that, if a man gives himself to Nature absolutely, how can he stipulate as to where she will take him, or what pains she will give him, or make him give others ? Nature thrusts man from the old towards the new ; man resists her. “Suppose,” says Hinton, “reptiles had been developed as fishes. Of course, they would have lived together in the water until they were so stified they were obliged to get out. They would have tried to live as fishes and found it NATURE 189 hard enough. So men try now to stifle them- selves through a false law of morals.” It was apparently Nature, not Sin, who nudged this child of genius and made him pro- claim himself as among “ the lost and the bad,” for, as Michael Wood declares, “there could not be superior persons amongst lost souls.” " Hinton’s continual proclamation that he was one of the “bad” may account for some of the absurdities of vice credited to him by the impure of heart and the blunt of brain. In one of his Quixotic and declamatory moods he cried: “I shall be one of the sinners. The vile and the outcast will be one with me. Nay, they are one with me, and always were. I do but seek my own.” Nature, according to Hinton, says to genius: “‘Hold to nothing, follow me with an absolute faith.” Are we not in Nature’s bosom, and must we not accept her decrees 7 Is it not the restlessness of men that they will not move with her ? Is not motion only the art of giving up 7 Is not the universal motion the universal giving, and having in losing 7 ° “And do you know,” he writes in one of his letters, “I speak quite seriously. My highest moral ambition (as well as personal, which somehow seems to have died) is to be just such a nature who does its work perfectly as part of Nature, and of whose character or desserts no one thinks of asking.” Hinton was a genius in the same way as he describes the men who have their hearts and 1 Michael Wood, The Willow Weaver, p. 12. I90 JAMES HINTON intellects in one and the same groove. He was Nature’s slave and worshipper much as he was a worshipper of woman. He was dumb and palsied when he was out of the range of women, and Nature was always a woman to him either as Mother or as Mistress. Hinton fully realised she was not a woman for nothing. In his con- ception of her demands upon him for love and also for adoration and her comprehension of his utter willingness to serve her most erratic claim, as well as delight in his complete subjection before all her moods and her beauty, Hinton often almost lost his hold on what people call “ the world of realities.” His tightest grip on conformity, Orthodoxy, or saintliness relaxed at her touch, and under her magnetic eyes he realised that no loss was terrible and no sin unforgivable if they lead to her greater designs. As her vagaries were often her sweetest inspira- tions, and her apparent madnesses her serenest sanity, he was at once lost and found in minister- ing to her. “If this is what Nature affirms, it will be what I believe,” Hinton says. This domination of Hinton by both Nature and woman may account for many of his ap- parent inconsistencies. His ingrained and in- herited orthodoxy, his conformity to tradition in the practices of his daily life, were at times, in his theories, flung to the winds when Nature as his mistress rather than his mother showed him her nakedness or unfolded her sweetest secrets for his special hearing. She gave him no peace and yet she filled him with both her NATURE I91 rapture and her calm. If one understands Hinton from this nature point of view one ceases to be “shocked ” at many things he said, but rarely did, which otherwise seem inexplicable. “All things that have passion in them,” he cried, “ have a touch at least of Nature’s purity.” The sober and vigilant side of him is shown in an answer he made once to his son Howard, who came to consult him with reference to a friend who was considering the desirability of entering upon an illegitimate relationship. James Hinton, in all sincerity, replied that the remedy was worse than the disease. And yet this man quotes for our consideration what Saint-Simon said to Madame de Stäel, long before Eugenics were thought about. “Let us have a child,” urged Saint-Simon; “we should, for the sake of what the child would be and do.” Madame de Ståel put it away, treating the suggestion almost as a joke. “Which of the two was thinking of self paramountly, which not ??’ asks Hinton, with Mother Nature’s point of view evidently in his mind. Yet, with Shelley, he had the intense realisa- tion that Nature is a Spirit, and not only a mother and a mistress. His mystic statements about sex emphasise this in all his writings. It was Nature’s excellence, her loveliness, and her holiness and tenderness combined with her charm, which gave him the insight into matters the materialist can only confuse and smear. He studied the general relations of man and woman by the light of Nature and Love. He 192 JAMES HINTON saw how, in despising sex, people tried to explain away all the palpable spirituality of Nature. “The doing for self what may only be done for Nature * was to him a mortal sin in an evolved human being. In one of his manu- scripts, which were always written late at night, and so are often unco-ordinated though full of fire, he writes: “This was my prayer to-night as I came through the park, ‘Thou lovely Nature, come in and rule me utterly.’” In her gracious womanliness, she answered his prayer by be- stowing upon him a newer insight and a bewilder- ing suffering. Hear him : “Strange as it seems, does it not appear rather that what man needs for his perfecting is not to escape from the physical, but to become completely that which we term the physical—to be at one with Nature ? And how can this be otherwise when we know the physical is but our perceiving of the spiritual 2 ” Hinton was permitted, through his prayer, to gaze into “Nature’s clear and passionate soul,” and this is one of the things he saw : “Holiness is emancipation from the law of restraining passion *; and this is what he heard : “Just because Nature will not look like what she is, those strong, sharp observers who miss nothing are sure to be taken in.” And the “good,” according to Hinton, are taken in more than the “bad”; and why Because, he declares, Nature cannot tell us the facts except in ap- parent contradictions, and, as we will not re- ceive them, being self-sure, she has to give her great simple truths to us in halves, and waits NATURE I93 to see in what state is our spiritual digestion. “How plainly,” he says, “there stands against what man calls morals not only Nature without but all that is Nature within man l’’ Nature is two things, says this child of hers. She is that which God makes her, and that which we make her. The problem is, which Nature does God make, and which man 2 “If,” says Hinton in his later manuscripts, “there is to be this false purity, which man has manufactured, that lays such stress on the body, it is better it should at least be consistent and seek such grandeur, nobleness, and generosity as is possible to it.” In another manuscript he seeks to give us Nature’s point of view on this matter. “This is what Nature is telling us: Live not under a carnal commandment, but in the power of a life. Your call is not to obey these rights, but to cease to be under them. To have no more true the thing that they imply. This she makes us understand at last, that she means ‘You are not under law, but under grace.” . . . This is Nature’s gospel. There is no right but service, and the way she brings it is by putting a service against the one right man values.” In another passage he says: “As man advances in his life he is always ready to bear and to abstain ; but Nature says to him, ‘ I do not want you to abstain or bear, but to be better, so that it shall not be necessary.’” Huxley said to his son : “Sit down before a fact as a little child; be prepared to give up every preconceived notion; follow humbly wher- 13 I94 JAMES HINTON ever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.”" This is Hintonian in attitude. Nature, to him, was no mere com- bination of matter and force, but a mighty spiritual presence, a living Being, tenderly and passionately loved, and so understood. The laws of Nature, to him, were the habits of a dear and intimate friend. This outlook upon Nature, the outlook of the poet and the scientist in one, is so rare that it cannot be passed lightly over. To him, as he tells us, the law by which man lives is the law of stars and crystals, of flowers, of music, of painting, and of mathematics. “Nature is God’s act. The universe is a scene of absolute life and beauty and good. Nothing is there that is not so except the sad fact that some spirits refuse to share in it. There is the great mystery of sin—a refusal to share in Life.” Hinton learnt all his altruism from Nature. There nothing exists in and for itself alone. Each force, to live as power, he declares, must merge itself in some other force. Nothing stops short at itself. All Nature’s ends are larger means. Man can only be made one with Nature by living in others and subordinating himself to a whole. “It is curious how there are three things presented to us, as it were, in the world : in the inorganic, no self; in the animal world, self, but without law ; in man, self under law. It is interesting to ask what it means. Is it not the introducing of a negation, and the resolving it again into Being 7 ° * Life and Letters of Hwæley, by his son, vol. i. p. 235. NATURE I95 Nature’s way of having rights is, according to Hinton, to have them in the giving. He saw that Nature and science alone can raise Christianity from the death its followers have nearly inflicted on it. To Hinton there was no such thing as “dead matter.” Through Nature he realised that, when real love holds the keys of the house of life, Nature will open the doors of the house, and spiritual desire will light it up. “Nature,” says Hinton, “is not abrogated because we refuse her. Her demands are not laid aside because we have not fulfilled the conditions of obeying them. So it is she holds the avenging power in her hands.” When man turns from a self premise to a nature premise the conclusion will neither be selfishness nor selflessness. “To Nature, neither barbarous nor civilised, brutal- ised nor polished, arranging women around men or subordinating men to women, matters any- thing, but a new creature. That is what she wants of you, O man, that, and nothing more nor nothing less. To be a being who need not think of his own goodness, be a new creature; this is what Nature claims of man.” Nature destroys almost with joy when her time has come to produce a greater thing. “I feel how Nature is, by myself. I have been tortured all my life, but I have not known it, not having anything to compare it with. I have only felt an infinite longing for deliver- ance. This was, I felt, the torture. So Nature groans to be delivered. Her smiles are the smiles of a tortured man. For it is so Nature’s I96 JAMES HINTON perfect work (and yet it is all imperfect too) is done. It is just as in genius, only by continual giving up. She tries to do everything else but what she does, and does but come at last to lay herself passively with a bruised and smit- ten heart before God. That is what is in Na- ture, the constant baffling, the attainment only through utter baffling, and she does not know that she is tortured. Nay, when the grief has risen to its utmost, when the giving up has become perfect, then it is triumph. How can she know that she is tortured when she feels it as rapture ? Here we see how men are sacri- ficed, and how those to whom most is given receive their dower by thus being sacrificed.” Hinton explains this more fully in another paragraph where he describes the sort of man, generally the genius man, Nature needs for her supreme ends. “What Nature cannot have for her work is a man who must ever say “Now I must be good,” who can go with her to a certain point, but then must stop and say, ‘Here good- ness forbids.” She must have a man to whom that is never necessary. Nor is this difficult. It does not need a wonderful man at all, least of all a good One ; only a man with a passion ruling and using all within him, and that is not ‘for himself. What she has to teach him is her right and wrong, her good and evil, and so teach him a new right. The necessity is, there- fore, that he should not put up his own.” Nature shows mere indifference to the tortures she demands in her animal and even her vegetable NATURE I97 kingdom. She has designs before which pain is a delight to a man or woman, once they have a hint of her meanings. And as for man and woman, from them she expects more in pro- portion to the subtle pain she inflicts. “How little Nature seems to care (but indeed she cares) for the crushing and bruising of that soft body of his against those hard rocks She forces him against them surely as she forces a fungus against a paving-stone, knowing that that little life can raise it, resolving that it shall. But is it not a frightful force alone can make him do it 2 Only all nature surging through him—as it surges through the fungus. Might not this necessity alone suffice to account for all weak and wayward impulses 2 ° Everything seemed surburban and parochial to Hinton in comparison with Nature. In the year 1875 we find the following paragraph in his notes : “Man seems to me an impertinence, a miser- able failure, by Nature’s side. It irks me, this arbitrary, self-turned grandeur and greatness of men. It is from them, not to them, I look for the Divine.” If that was a subconscious prayer it was granted to him, for in that year he passed from martyrdom to light. CHAPTER VIII GENIUS : ITS WHY AND WHEREFORE ONE of James Hinton’s friends, in some notes written about him after his death, tells us that Hinton declared talent to be the intellectual power of mastering a subject as one studies a foreign language and in time speaks it, but that it is never natural. Genius, on the other hand, is a gift, in the operations of which Nature makes a medium of a certain individual and enables him to produce, or rather forces out of him, work which is not by any means whatever to be accounted for by anything he has learned. In other words, a man of talent is one who studies subjects, masters them, and expands them for the benefit of others, whereas a man of genius is one through whom Nature herself shines, entirely without his knowledge, only utilising his intellect so far as to assist in the exhibition or production of that which she chooses to manifest. “Poor Nature cannot tell us the fact except in contradictions, and, as we will not receive them, being self-sure, she has to give it to us in halves, and wait. And then, at last, when she has got man to accu- mulate a great quantity in this way, and people 198 GENIUS : ITS WHY AND WHEREFORE 199 are getting sick of it, and beginning to feel it won’t do, and that they are fighting and squab- bling to no end or purpose—when they are getting tired and burdened, and a little bit out of spirits and hope, then she just makes a person, not of a particularly great or brilliant sort at all, but only one who will not feel that he knows until he does know, or see until he does see, and to whom therefore she can tell both things. His power is not of discovery but only of putting together. ‘I know * is at the bottom of man’s ignorance. “I don’t know ’ is the whole secret of genius.” - To Hinton, the man of genius was not a great prophet but a little child, a medium for doing what is wanted. Only under great compulsion, he tells us, does genius become defiant, and the defiance is only shame of itself turned into willingness to suffer and proclaim. Genius, he declares, is the child restored again, making the person who sees bold and not ashamed ; bold in affirming that which is beyond logical laws, and bold also in doing that which is beyond moral laws. “Genius,” he says, “ seems to have such special instincts, but it is not so at all. It has simply the power of obeying its impulses. Supposing all men but one were gluttonous; either greedily indulging, or equally greedily restraining and regulating, and that one man had his thoughts off his pleasure and ate natur- ally. He would seem to have a wonderful and unmatched ‘instinct ' for eating, knowing by 200 JAMES HINTON a kind of special divine endowment exactly what was best. Yet he would not. He would simply have the common universal power of man, that which animals have indeed. And this bears on the whole moral life also. Man in his true life will possess simply what all animals have. And this bears again on genius being so akin to the animals, and to the same appear- ance in women.” “It is,” according to Hinton, “ the ideal compelled to take in sense in serving, and also doing its miracles by not wasting and driving force into unnatural channels. People seem as if they cannot help desiring for them- selves. They feel that there is no sin in that ; they do not see how, or indeed why, they are to be otherwise, even in heaven. In their theories they carry the self-basis of life even there, and imagine some magic whereby it shall be made a different thing there from here.” But it is, according to Hinton, a poor notion that having no body will make so much difference, for will not jealousy, the worst self-thing of all, remain 2 “So, of course, they are bound to the form-right, and think they must always be so. This is what Nature does in producing a genius of the right kind. She makes one who does not and cannot desire for self, and that is so simple. It is because it desires something else, so much more. Its passion for its work is so intense she does that impossible thing. And this she does simply by showing herself to it : that is all the art. Men follow self-desires only for want of seeing the true comeliness; true GENIUS : ITS WHY AND WHEREFORE 201 genius merely sees, and that is all. Seeing Nature, its power of desiring for itself is para- lysed ; and so the whole problem is done : the false right imposed by desiring for self has fallen off. The holding to the form-right is the hindrance, the feeling that this must not be let go, inevitably so strong, embodying as it does all the feeling of right and duty, and self- restraining. We do not see how it is against this that Nature brings her force; how against it she puts up evils till they become intolerable. She compels man so to relax his hold on the form-right. Then she brings genius with its instinct to break the law. When that is done, all is done; the compelling the form-right to be abandoned compels the not-self act in its place : the one is the other, and cannot be without it. The force will not cease to be ; it will operate in one or the other way.” “How should genius,” he asks, “be afraid, above all of evil or evil beings 2 How afraid of hell or devils, while being one of them and the breaker of the law As the girl with rattle- Snake blood in her was not afraid of rattlesnakes, nor could be hurt by them, their blood being in her, so truly the blood of the ‘bad is in genius, and it cannot be hurt by them. In truth is not that story good for genuis 2 Is it as a birth from man “bitten by Nature ? Would that make a better tale 7 Genius made as coming from human parents, with an in- trusion of the natural powers, and she, in the end, reclaiming the youth, working in his blood 202 JAMES HINTON all along and disordering all his relations, and at length bringing into human life Nature herself, the force we call inanimate, and bringing human life one stage back to her. Is not that what genius has ever been 2 It has brought into human life ever more and more fragments of nature, bridging the gulf over, till at last the reunion is complete. Genius is the reuniter of man and nature, and so itself partaker of both natures.” In Nelson’s face Hinton asks us to notice how plain the character is. “The quiet- ness, the mere receptiveness and yielding, the utter passiveness before nature, with latent all the while, ready and ever on the stretch, the spring, as of a cat or tiger; the instant action, too quick to trace, that latent spring, what intentness of eagerness it is l’’ When Hinton declared he was one of the bad, many people took his statement seriously from a conventional point of view of morality. He said it from the point of view of one who prays to heaven that he may never fail in purity or courage if given a task either as heaven’s jester or heaven’s charwoman, in order to render earth sweeter and human beings happier. “Here,” he declares, “is, above all, the true test of genius. If, for the thing it feels called to do, it should be necessary to be bad, it is content to be bad. And so, loving old Nature, by her law of use, the absolute touchstone of the true right, guides it to the right badness, the badness that is only badness if done for self.” Hinton asks if it is not ever the characteristic GENIUS : ITS WHY AND WHEREFORE 203 of the face of genius, that while the face does not smile the eyes do 2 Does it not carry per- petual laughter in its eye 2 And the reason is evident. It sees nature as a perpetual living trick. How can it help being like a child 2 It feels itself dealt with as a child for ever. It is seeing always: “This thing looks this way, but it is that way.” That is how it stands related to Nature, and its eyes must laugh for ever. They cannot help it; Nature is feeding it with riddles evermore. In this way Hinton considers that genius is like woman, in its being acted through, being an instrument, its action being the action of others in it. This is its constitution, and woman’s is, in large measure, the same. “It is too curious,” he says, “to see that strong mouth of genius, and the laugh in its eyes. And how the one must bring the other. The mouth made to hold the physical brings, for it cannot help bringing, the sight of Nature’s trick. It compels the man to see that the true right or good, or beauty, or reality, or ideal (whatever he be seeking) is not in turning away ; not in doing, but in the conditions of not having to do. And then the laugh comes into its eyes for ever. That make of the mouth brings the laugh into its eyes. Genius is the art of ceasing to make innocent things wrong.” On the other hand, “Is not,” he asks, “talent- work always a doing by our own efforts what Nature will do for us, and do infinitely better, when we can let her ? Now in the moral life 204 JAMES HINTON is not the putting aside service that same doing with our own efforts, and the simply following service her doing for us 2 Is not that the com- mand : Let Nature do for you ?” Hinton saw that genius is the best law-maker because it is the point of least resistance in man to Nature. Nature takes possession of genius and makes it say what she wishes, more than what a selfish man or woman desires. Genius realises that things of this world or any other world are so often changing and fluent, not fixed or dead. , Hinton always looked at Nature with the eyes of one who ignored rigid rules that cannot float in her deepest channels and adjust themselves to her sweetest needs. The basis of living and acting for self in any form reduces life to rigid rules, which, even if called morality, often only enslave the best human beings. “Genius,” he declares, “ has liberty to obey its impulse: that is the price it has paid. Others can do what it does afterwards, the result and meaning being made clear. It has to do, not knowing what will come, not foreseeing, only compelled, driven even to recklessness. So is there not here a reason that its work remains for ever the greatest and unmatched, because never again, in the same thing, is there or can there be the same demand for passion. Others afterwards can do in cool blood what genius does in pain and crucifixion.” He tells us again that “genius is inability to keep out Nature, and is the woman in man.” Its tendency to GENIUS : ITS WHY AND WHEREFORE 205 accept, and even in Some cases to seek the pain- ful, proves that it knows what to miss. “Is not genius,” he asks, “the pivot in the turning of the world so that it must be crushed ? That is part of the work, its function. Uncrushed, its work were not done.” Hinton always connected genius with weakness and not with strength. People so often think of it as the most grand spiritual, intellectual, and super-sensuous in- spiration, declares Hinton, when it is only a channel. It is true genius has intuition, and so enables us to penetrate to the higher meaning of things; but he asks us to look at the mouths of Beethoven, Wagner, Ruskin, Swinburne, and George Eliot. What do we find 2 The blending of weakness and strength and the direction of least resistance for Nature’s life to enter. Genius spends itself recklessly in Nature’s service, asks no questions, analyses rarely, but follows the call of Nature, which often seems to the average man a call to licence or madness. “Nature repudiates man’s goodness in so far as he is not one with her, and she gets a man to express this for her. Through him she says: ‘You are very good to be so good, but I want you not to take this trouble, but be one with me. There is too much denial, too much re- straint, too little pleasure in that which you are doing.’ Genius never said anything but that from the beginning of the world. Nature says one thing always through genius, and it is this : ‘That force you are wasting I want to use through you.’ So the feeling is all intoxication, 206 JAMES HINTON indeed a delight of wonder and freedom till it is Seen what it means. Genius must always break false rights and rigid rules because Nature is not rigid, and never will be.” The fact that genius is the organ of Nature’s aspirations is often the very reason she breaks or destroys her instrument, in compelling a man or woman to feel a myriad impulses and passions new to the general world. This is one of the reasons genius is so often self-centred, and yet in spite of this appearance the impulses and actions are often more indirectly for the good of the race. “Genius,” says Hinton, “ever preaches de- liverance for the captives and the breaking of their chains to them that are bound.” The real genius breaks law because he is embodied law. It is the great spirit of truth breaking the mere letter of truth. “The child,” Hinton reminds us, “ looks and observes, and yet sees the new by light of the old, which habit is indeed the source of many of the prettiest errors of childhood. Truly genius is but being a perpetual child. The child is its image: Surely its anticipation. . . . Thus the true form of the doctrine of genius is not so much that it is male and female in one, as that it contains the child. It is the child perfected. It enters the Kingdom of Heaven because it * is converted and re-becomes a little child.’” In all Hinton’s suggestions about Life and Love or Morals we find that he teaches that everything must develop from extreme simplicity, like the child’s, to the baffling complexity and GENIUS : ITS WHY AND WHEREFORE 207 detail of youth, and in the learning of the arts. From unconscious simplicity and from detailed complexity the final true emergence is into a finer and conscious simplicity which has the spontaneity of the child and the controlled habit of the experimental artist, expressed at last in a rare simplicity and spontaneity belong- ing to the great impulses of Nature. “Of course,” Hinton says, “the world shall have its genius-period. That will be the ‘in- tegrated Greek.” The Greek, how plainly, was the child; the opposing elements lay unopposing side by side in his mind. So he had that free and sportive life, and enormous because un- cramped energy. “But it was but the life of the child ; and we see the differentiation begin. Plato and Aris- totle mark the epoch, and Greek life, under the most favourable circumstances, could have been the true Greek life no more. - “Then came the Dark Ages, and Christianity swept over the world, with its thought of sin and deliverance, and feeling of tremendous moral problems blackening into despair. Surely just as the youth, whose life is not perverted or heart incapable, grows into a dark and earnest strife with moral questions. “I say the world must have its genius period; must have, for differentiation exists but for the sake of integration, and that beautiful uncon- scious life could not have been suppressed except for perfecting. And then, besides, man is genius-life. He accomplishes ends unforeseen, 208 JAMES HINTON and does by instinct what he could not do by trying. “Genius puts a thing as it does not appear at all, but as it is. Because to appear and to be are really incompatible. A thing cannot appear as it truly is to any faculty. It is only to be seen by being as something it does not appear.” - Hinton becomes the seer when he avows: “Surely the talent men are the colours, and genius the white light. “I am the Light of the World,” said Christ the Genius. Genius need not be more ; it may be very little indeed, but it includes all and shows things as they are. “Flood the world with red or yellow light, have fifty suns, and we cannot see it. The more of that light the more it is strewn with ineradicable negatives. The tiniest ray of the all-including light shows it as it is. How plainly two men, at any rate, are in genius: the man who ‘touches the spiritual and the man who ‘touches the phenomenal’—or, better, the man who is in contact with each. Is not this exactly how genius is in contact with each at once 2 That is, it is two-handed. So it possesses, lifts, uses, comprehends—as holding with both hands what the others, touching with one hand, the opposite hand respectively, do but as it were push and grope over, not feeling the other side, the other limit, and grasping it. They, as it were, necessarily keep behind it. They feel, perceive that it is before them, but genius comprehends it.” GENIUS : ITS WHY AND WHEREFORE 209 Hinton’s subtle grasp of the problem of gaining and losing is declared in this matter. “Genius is the key to losing. All is in that; it loses its life to have it, and shows therein what all losing is. He loses it self-wise: he has it altruistically. Just as much should we wish to keep, as genius should wish to remain a mere anticipator. So this is what human life is, this constant losing. Seen fairly, from without, and not from within alone, it is genius. Humanity is one great genius work; for does not genius lose too, and weep over its losses 2 Does it not sit down in agony and think it has lost its all ? And was sinner ever more amazed at heaven than genius at his own vision ? His own per- formance amazes him. He has done nothing but give up, he knows he has not, and behold, he possesses all things.” Hinton declares that “genius opens its mouth wide and Nature fills it. The others close it on the bare imagination of a feast.” Hinton again and again emphasises the weak- ness of genius being the chance for Nature to strengthen and fill to the utmost. “Every truth,” he says, “ has its anticipation for man. Every true thing, said perfectly, has been said imperfectly before. . . . But genius gives up its anticipation, not arbitrarily, but because its losing demands a gaining from above. “Surely, to judge what genius does by rules, is as if one should criticise the grammar of the first words a man says in heaven. For is he not intoxicated with glory, as Paul says, and drunk 14 210 JAMES HINTON with the Spirit 2 Is it not clear that this will be the way—at least one way—the true, positive denials of the moral will come, as things genius does in its intoxication ? “Genius gives up its anticipation first, and then its accuracy of detail, but the first it gives up in tears and sadness, the last in joy. The first is letting things pass from sight. The last is emphatically seeing, the only true seeing.” Since the man of genius is often the seer or prophet of a renaissance of both life and love, it is worth understanding, lest we crucify it unawares or imprison it because of our own limitations. Hinton says truly that “the char- acteristic of genius is, that the peculiar sensi- bility in the man who possesses it is so pre- dominant that all other influences are nothing by the side of it. And this comes, as seen, not from the strength of that sensibility, but from the relative weakness of all opposing ones. So ‘pig-headed people are a parody of genius. They insist on whims, as a man of genius on his perception. Now here is a case of the form without the fact ; the empty form of genius is a whim. Genius sees the invisible. Here it is clear how talent must be wrong, because it takes account only of what is visible. What is in- visible it leaves out, or, guessing, puts wrong.” Hinton’s belief in women made him declare that “genius has the woman’s way of seeing (intuition) on a wider subject. This is precisely what I have said, that men of genius are the women of the race.” He also weds Nature with GENIUS : ITS WHY AND WHEREFORE 211 genius. “Genius presents nature as it is, though not as it is seen, and the eye is satisfied, as it is in nature.” When men and women criticise, and almost wish to ostracise, genius, they indeed know not what they do. It is as if they would destroy gulls or nightingales. Genius knows without learning, as by a wonderful instinct. It knows beforehand. What it has to learn is only how its knowledge fits. In summing up the whole matter, Hinton de- clares that “genius subordinates to the true relation all that suppresses it.” He tells us Serenely that when men are astonished at the ease of genius they should remember that it is doing what is truly much “easier,” that is, that wants much less effort and so demands enormously less exertion, less achievement by “force.” It is truly easier. It is in great part a real yielding to the natural tendency, a simple giving. “For surely no folly of the human race is greater than this tendency, which it ever has, to be afraid to apply the right method of doing to great and important things : to know that a way is good in trifles, and act on it and succeed, but to be afraid to do this in respect to great things. To think that there it must act in ways which it knows would fail, and are false. It is afraid to apply the ways it has proved to be true and faithful. “How, in truth, is genius ever anything else at all but the applying of these methods, used 212 JAMES HINTON and familiar and known to be the true ones in little things, to greater ones 2 Is it not always simply the getting rid of this fear 2 It seems so to me. See in respect to gravitation how plain it is. There was this “ duty of affirming the appearance—of being “exact ’; but Newton was not afraid to take the plan of explaining a little thing—the falling and rising of a pendulum, e.g. and apply it to a great one. He gave up that “great ' duty, the duty of thinking according to appearances, and said, ‘I shall not think of this body as moved as it seems but I shall think of it as falling. This method, which answers here, I shall apply there.’” Hinton, himself, has the genius element, in So far as by suggesting simple pictures he can make us realise where we succeed and where we fail in our duty to mankind, and support us in our defence, and not defiance, of natural, or even abnormal, people, and their actions for good or evil. “Suppose the habit,” he says, “deemed a moral right, of holding the hands up without anything to be done by the action. The instinct genius fulfils is simply that of letting them fall. Now in doing so what offence he would give And what reply would he have 2 People would say to him : “Why do you put your hands down 2' What could he say but that he felt dis- posed to ? But they might reply : “Do not we all feel disposed to as much as you ? Are we not all “tempted ” to do so? but we do not do it.” What could he reply but simply : “Why should GENIUS : ITS WHY AND WHEREFORE 213 I not ? what is the good of not doing it 2 ' And then, would not all the arguments apply about not breaking a law because all were not able to break it rightly, and the rest, all the arguments from ‘example,” etc. : “But, indeed, there is something more here. This instinct of genius is really not only an instinct that not-restraint must be the right. It is an instinct not to waste power. It rests on its intentness on action, on its passion for doing, the fulness of its hands for work which will not let it waste any power on that which accomplishes no end. It is, in fact, simply an instance in it of Nature’s law of least action. It insists on no power being Squandered for no good.” Hinton insists that there is a constant ten- dency to think falsely in respect to genius, and to under-estimate or over-estimate it; that is, to think too little or too much of the law it breaks. “We have, in order to know genius, to recog- nise above all what its breaking of law is, how it is the breaking of that which is felt to be most sacred, has been enforced and bound by every sanction; that cannot, save by willing- ness to put aside anything, ever be put aside. It is the most absolute and sacred law that can command things, that genius breaks. It is its life genius gives to break it. And here we see the meaning of the loss, the punishment it brings; we may judge of what its breaking of law is, by the wreck it may leave the man.” Hinton 214 JAMES HINTON gives many cases in point to show what man, woman, and even child, can do in order to get a perfect good through a seeming bad. “How well,” he says, “Lady Godiva shows the genius- act, and the feeling, too, with which it is done; the clinging still to do the very “right it puts aside. Rather than that shall be, I will do what done otherwise were wrong. I won’t ask, Am I doing right 2 But there is still the feeling that the other is the right : no one is to look.” Hinton tells us that in genius the human part is reduced to a minimum, and at the same time universalised ; not the man, but the con- stitution of humanity expresses itself. It is not the man’s act ; it is the turning out of that. “Genius,” he says, “is precisely the “positive denial of the self, the only way in which it can be truly denied. Just as asceticism is the nega- tive denial of self, and love its positive denial. “Thus genius represents heaven, and is it not evidently in having an altruistic life 2 And genius shows, too, how true being is even now in us, an altruistic life being ours. No man is in his work so much the very man he is as the man of genius. It is his nature expressing itself (and when our nature expresses itself, our self is passive), his nature which is Nature. Genius is the means by which the man’s true nature (one with the universal nature) expresses itself. The self-action oppresses and puts aside the very nature of the man who does it ; his nature recognises itself in genius.” “Genius-work has in it that which cannot be GENIUS : ITS WHY AND WHEREFORE 215 done by trying. It is embodied ease. Nay, it is emphatically rest, ceasing from labour. This is its very definition; it is the right leaving off. That is what heaven is called, a ceasing from labour; but do we think that is doing nothing 2 ” Hinton asks if in the words, “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life,” there is not described, at once, genius and humanity. That is what is said to genius. Its whole life is but the expression of it. It is faithful unto death, following Nature, accepting what she tells it, even to the laying down of its goodness, and so, at One time or another, it receives life as its reward. According to Hinton, here are the characters of an act of genius : (1) It must be gratifying and pleasurable to some natural tendencies in the person who does it. - - (2) It must be a thing in some respects the same as what “bad” persons do for their mere pleasure. (3) It must be a thing he hates to do. - (4) That is, a thing that for himself he could not be tempted to do ; because he hates it too much done so. (5) That is, it must be a thing that he feels is needed to be done, and for some object that he cares about. (6) (This next is true at present, but per- haps is not essential.) It must be 216 JAMES HINTON done half unawares, and what it was, only clearly seen afterwards, on the spur of the moment and not deliber- ately. (7) It must be a thing in its form new, and not a conscious repetition of a thing done before, and accepted as right to do. “What genius has,” says Hinton, “is not power, but freedom, the freedom of the little child. “The truth shall make you free and “Become as a little child are the same. It was from His own experience that Christ spoke. If any time there is to come a truer right, a right above man’s idea or thought of right, it must come so. But here, too, One sees again a mean- ing for those words: “When Thou hadst over- come the sharpness of death Thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers.’ When genius has laid down its goodness, when the sharpness of death has passed, and when all can be one with Nature, the way is opened, easy, plain to all, with one condition, that they believe and that they see, and consent, that a true life is one of serving wholly, with self no more put first.” “And this,” urges the pioneer of a new civilisation, “is what genius does. It casts all its care upon Nature, even the care of its own goodness, and finds she cares for it. It says to her : ‘You want this done; then you take care of my goodness : I will do it. I leave my justifying to you.’ GENIUS : ITS WHY AND WHEREFORE 217 “In genius, Nature takes one of the persons who are ruled by passion, but she says, “Let me make his passion.” It is one of the ‘bad persons she takes, and shows what she truly means by the badness : and it draws them with an irresistible attraction. Genius is the apothe- osis, the manifestation, of the bad. The minus is cast out of them, and their true nature stands out, for them, and all, to see. And that it is so is evident ; else why do the ‘good always call it bad 2 Nature says in genius, ‘ I want man to be led by his passions, but I to put the passion.” What is wrong in vice is, not that it is led by passion, but that it is a not-nature passion.” “How exquisitely,” says Hinton, “genius is contrived thus, a piece of mechanism, as it were, prepared and destined to come into play at the touch of a spring ; made One way, and put into conditions that are another. It is made one of those who prefer their pleasure to their goodness, put among those who prefer their goodness to their pleasure, kept there by a false seeming of service. A whole future is written in that : a nature, a tendency is kept down, by a force that must eventually cease. The seeming of service being false can hold it only until seen as false. And the two are thus made one. Out of the twain is made One new man. Thus it is genius is made. It at Once restrains and indulges, and it becomes so by being an indulger and being made a restrainer. Then, when it becomes an indulger, it is with the conditions fulfilled. At once it restrains and not restrains. 218 JAMES HINTON It has brought nature into man : passion is made free with its conditions fulfilled. From this point can one not see what it means that genius in its early stage is ascetic 2 It consents to restraint, but will give even its restraint a passion.” Hinton asserts that, to see genius truly, the importance, the absolute bindingness upon all men, at the time, of the law it breaks must be seen. If that be lightly thought of because shown to be no true law—it is mis-seen wholly. Especially is genius robbed of its true thanks. For that is its one claim, its one and only claim to thanks. It does not withhold its goodness from the sacrifice: it gives its life. If, in that losing, it finds it, that is because it gave it utterly, and no thought of finding it again was in its heart. That is its one claim to thanks : that it lays itself utterly and wholly down before Nature and says: “Ride over me wholly. Be a Juggernaut if thou wilt; here is my neck, beneath thy car; ride on. All thy billows shall go over me; cast me as a wreck, a corpse upon the shore : it matters not. Must I die to look upon thy face 2 Behold, I am as a dead man before thee.” Not to see how terrible that breaking law is, which genius does for men, is to rob it of its one claim to thanks, says Hinton. “Take that away, and nothing remains, for it is not great, it is not good. It has not done much, has not had power to do much. What it seems to do, it does by others’ power, not its own. It reaps where other men have sown. It owes GENIUS : ITS WHY AND WHEREFORE 219 thanks, not deserves them. But one thing it does for man, and tears and silence so commemorate the gift: tears and silence, not praise, for it could not help it. It gives its life. That is all it does. It says, “Let me be numbered among the trans- gressors.” It is not much ; only enough to make men silent when they think of it.” The significance of Hinton’s unconventional dogmatism comes out in the following statement. “This is what is amiss,” he says, “that at last these ‘good people (in whom surely nature is not) have got the upper hand. This is the calamity of these last days, worst and most hopeless, save that it brings its own destruction with it, of this rule of the ‘good which says that though a thing would be for service, it is not right, and shall not be. Genius hates that outside goodness, and knows, with scornful hatred and bitter laughter in its heart, that one sweep of its little finger will throw it to the ground. Is it not visible in Christ 2 Did not plain paroxysms of rage and scorn Sweep through His soul ? Did He not say with glee, rejoicing with a gleam of triumphant passion in His eyes, “There shall not stand one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down ? He knew He had done it. It was not that He wept over. And the cause in Him, the power which made Him what He is, is it not plain He had lived as a boy, a youth, a man, engaged in his work among the degraded poor men of Nazareth ; and then He came and saw the scribes and the rest. Yes this is genius: goodness for the bad, 220 JAMES HINTON achievement for the weak; holiness that is not, does not demand, restraint of passion.” Hinton realised that genius is numbered among the transgressors, numbered among them without being one of them. That stamps it. It is all described there, and whensoever this is there the true right has come ; the false law is ban- ished ; the heart is made alive. Some man (he did not add woman, but it is true of her too) is “ numbered,” but not being one, with the trans- gressors. This is the condition. It is then Nature’s life has come into man. The man starts from a fresh point of view. “I find unspeakable value in it. To me it is a whole store and fountain of power and guidance. It works in me. Truly that was for service. This is what is unconsciously in genius, the feeling that its impulses are for service, whether it sees what or not : the feeling that Nature wants that done, and that is enough ; she knows what for ; he does not wish to know. Is not the feeling essentially the same as the feeling we should have that pleasure always is itself service, if it be not visibly hurtful ? So is an impulse not for self certainly service, if it be not hurtful ? Has genius a latent feeling of this moving it 2 And is it not evidently necessary 2 If an impulse is not for self it is Nature. It is her act, and is service, as all her action is.” Hinton tells us that “Genius says to Nature, ‘Give me to sit on your throne’; she replies to it, “Drink of my cup,” and it drinks it, the cup of passion, to the dregs. And when it has done GENIUS: ITS WHY AND WHEREFORE 221 thus, her law is in its heart, her law of least action. It has also her dominion when it no longer wants it, nor can desire it, when all that could make it desire it is gone. Nor is it to genius alone she says it, but to man, and man does it also. Not while it is desired can it be given, for so the self-demanded right would hold back the hand. Either the hand were held back, or the right were refused.” Hinton assumes that genius is doing what is wanted. Instead of doing fixed things, it follows the demands simply as they arise, for the living thing changes with everything around. So there is meaning in the definition of ‘Life as co-ordina- tion of the internal to the external. That is the very law of service, according to Hinton, as opposed to the law of things. “Assuredly it is not hard,” he says, “cannot be hard, to do the work that genius does. It wants no power, no skill, above all no goodness, no, not even any enthusiasm, only passion. It needs only to be perfectly open to Nature, not to refuse her, but to accept from her any- thing. It is not to refuse anything, even though it is the thing you hate most, have shrunk from with most horror, counted evil and degradation most. This must be, for it is the self cast out, with its rights. Is it not Satan falling from heaven In a word, it is being on the rack, and not wishing not to be. And so we see this in genius. Its right is to do, indeed, the thing it has hated and counted evil, but to do it not for itself, but wholly for Nature’s sake, however 222 JAMES HINTON much with joy, with whatever thrills of over- rapturing delight. To do these things not for Nature’s sake, but for its own, for the thought of advantage or pleasure, this were a sort of prostitution. And indeed do we see it, and is it the “fall of genius' as it is the fall of woman 2 Here, again, we see how genius is akin to woman : to both a ‘fall is possible. Doing for self the things that should have been done only for Nature’s love.” “Is this,” he asks, “why genius in its ordinary Sense of great achievement is so rare : viz. that this quality, being by a minus, so rarely goes with great general capacity and power of enduring work 2 That its natural affinities are rather with that which excludes the general capacity and force 2 Is the quality not so un- common, both generally co-existing with weak- ness 2 When combined with strength and in- tense vigour, then it is called genius. It is male and female in one, and it is this combining which is so difficult, as it were, to Nature : this putting together of things which have an oppositeness. It is easy to have an altruistic mode of seeing, as in women, with weakness; easy to have strength and vigour of mind, com- bined, as in men, with absence of the altruistic vision, but how to get them both is the problem.” In genius, then, we find not only the woman and the man, but the characteristics of the child. We see how difficult it is ; because how con- stantly, where there is the male strength and vigour in a woman there is the absence of her GENIUS : ITS WHY AND WHEREFORE 223 peculiar gift. So there are many men, perhaps, with that kind of seeing, but they have not the male strength. That which belongs to weakness, which is by an absence, combined with strength, this is genius. Genius sees the keys to things, and moreover believes that it has the power of the keys, in order to obtain from the cupboards of Life, Love, and Death the things worth while. CHAPTER IX WOMAN AND THE HOME As Nietzsche declared that “in the soul’s poverty of two they call marriage * there is nearly always disaster, so James Hinton pro- claimed that “the happy Christian homes are the dark places of the world.” It seems that in both marriage and the home woman has often been forced to make her finer nature and her domesticity subordinate to self-serving, instead of to the larger life of the world. The Great War has opened our eyes by making simplification in domesticity imperative, and class feeling is found to be a barrier to mutual aid. The pro- test made by women in the years since James Hinton’s death against false views of love, marriage, and home has been valiant, though also often absurd. In her breathless haste, the modern economically free woman has rarely faced this complex matter in an orderly fashion, on the basis of her physiological, practical, economic, and, above all, fundamental psy- chical and sensuous needs. The War, however, has made some reflect as to what, in the future, the real woman will demand and receive, and also what the new civilisation has in store for 224 NE HADDON. MISS CAROLI 224] WOMAN AND THE HOME 225 both man and woman, in a home or out of it. As in a cinematograph, we are beginning to realise how horrible the idea of the average English home might be to the dwellers of another planet. Here we have the aristocrat (the woman) in the house, and woman menials doing all the work, and another aristocrat (the man) using women either as beasts of burden or objects of desire with the excuse, “Oh, she is not my wife ” Hinton realised how we are still forcing celibacy on the unlucky, and considering this as part of our virtue. In his indignation at what he saw all around him he declared in one of his wrathful moods that most of the “virtuous and happy homes * were “floating blotches of verdure on a sea of filth.” He asks us bluntly : “Is not the badness of those who keep the home for themselves worse than all others ? A greed more truly brutal and with less excuse, an excuse worse than the wrong, namely, that they feel it right, and they do not even feel it bad, so little are their souls awake.” It is possible that a real monogamy and a real home will one day emerge, but in the meanwhile Hinton asks us to examine our lives, our hearts, and our homes, and answer if they have really existed yet in the sense of a fine civilisation, or even according to true religion or social ethics. Any social order, cries Hinton, reeks with foulness if other women are sacrificed, either in the home or in the streets. Let us hope that both men and women will soon realise this. It is possible that the growing loyalty of women to women 15 226 JAMES HINTON will one day make them answer, about more mystical things than eating, that it is a shame and a dishonour in any evolved person to mono- polise a beautiful thing while others have no chances for joy or development. According to Hinton, it is in the home that the coming moral battle will be fought. It is there that women will have to answer the question as to whether the law of service is the true law. The marital and domestic relations will in the future be the touchstones of morality. One fact is certain, and that is, that the new life for men and women will be gained only by sacrifice. Marriage and domesticity may be wrecked, and then possibly redeemed. Although Hinton knew that it is chiefly in the home that the battle for women will be settled he never emphasised the great practical truth that economic freedom is at the root of the problem for women. The question he chiefly raises is whether the law of service is the true law or not. That is, is or is not acting for self to be accepted or refused ? “How curious it is, that now among ‘good people marriage tends to be abstained from in order that they may not be hindered from work What an instance is here of the self-basis for- bidding good : for how plainly that assumes in marriage a self-basis of life. Those people do not know what the true union with a woman is—the union for work; and how, when this true union exists, all things that might seem to hinder are helps : how married life, too, may WOMAN AND THE HOME 227 be not-self. If they did, they would see that to abstain from it for work’s sake was exactly like abstaining for work’s sake from food enough to maintain health.” He tells us that “the deliverance from barbarism would be women domesticated, but not isolated. The non-domestication (or non- division of labour) on the one hand, and the isolation on the other, are the two forms of barbarism.” We all know, if we are honest, that home is often a centre and citadel for serving self, and we sanctify this as holy, and make luxury im- possible to be banished. Home, from childhood on, often diffuses through all our life as a sacred thing the thought of keeping for ourselves what others want. Hinton declares that Satan tempts man with a more potent bait than all the kingdoms of the world: the bait of domestic happiness. So often it is as dangerous as a rat-trap, as poisonous to the soul as a prison, because it is the centre and citadel for self-serving and a greedy isola- tion. To feel blessed, he declares, in any loss of any other is surely a curse. And yet Hinton believed that home, the lovely home of the future, is woman’s place, because his belief was that it is in woman’s power alone to raise the physical to the spiritual, the thing to a power. It is debased and degraded till then. A celebrated surgeon of Hinton’s day said : “Our English public life is bad : only its domes- tic life is good.” Our public life will not be 228 JAMES HINTON good, declared Hinton, until our domestic life is better, until we have opened it out to beauty and joy, and the emancipated cleanliness of shared labour and love. He may be right, he may be wrong, but to consider his statement is at any rate a goad to a finer domesticity than the ideal so well expressed in the doggerel Verse : “Me and my John, Thee and thy John : TJs four and no more.” Hinton once made the following declaration when analysing the home : “Nowhere,” said he, “ have I seen a person deliberately tortured to death except in connection with the home, nor a life deliberately gambled with except in connection with the Church. I have seen many places, and lived in some, but nowhere seen these things except in the English home and the English Church.” “The home is the enemy of woman,” says W. L. George, in his challenging book, Woman and To-morrow. He looks on the average home of the past as the oppressor of woman, and concludes that “the sterility of home labour is the result of social rather than conjugal con- ditions.” The daily combat with small details and worries, petty as cobwebs, and the battling with moods and inefficiency render the life of most housewives more wearing than battle- fields or the stock-exchange for men. It is quite time that domesticity reappeared in a civilised form. This form, so Mr. George thinks, WOMAN AND THE HOME 229 will be one of “voluntary organisation, an orderly anarchic society, when the two sexes no more exact service from each other than do the individuals.” He rightly protests against the using of women, even in domestic duties, merely for the procuring of man’s comfort. Co-opera- tion need not imply servility or drudgery for either side of the contracting parties. Freedom in work, high pay, and expert labour must take the place of drudgery, poor wages, and in- capacity. In other words domestic work must become a profession and cease to be a haphazard experiment. “Is it not one clue to the distresses of our age,” Hinton similarly asked, “that we are living in the throes of the passing away of a self-law of marriage, even as our fathers lived in those of the passing away of monasticism 2 And may we not see in our own instance that always when a ‘law of things is thus to pass, there comes a special power of need against it 2 Has it not been so in all the past, that there was a special demand of good arising against it whenever any self-law was to fall ?” Hinton’s criticism on love, marriage, and the home, shows women, as well as men, that in the new civilisation courage and experiment will be needed in order that fulness of life should not be hindered. We have degraded love, he tells us, and waste our lives in ugliness and vice rather than in spiritual getting and giving. “We act as if, in the divinest of all music, we should insist, above all, that the violin was 230 JAMES HINTON the entrails of cats and the tails of horses— which it is. There is nothing mean or low, and God has given to the lowest and meanest things of all the most abundant honour to make us know there is nothing that is not perfect in spiritual glory. He exalts the cat’s bowels to the height—though but the second height— of spiritual power and delight for the same reason that He exalts the woman’s body : that we may know there is not, cannot be, anything mean or low, but that the things we feel lowest are His instruments of almost spiritual power; in fact, that they are spiritual powers and nothing else. Suppose we would keep thinking of cats’ bowels and horses’ tails, and keep them always before our minds instead of the spiritual value and power of music. If we would keep that second, and feel the fleshly things first, it would be counted vulgar and dirty and in- delicate to go to concerts. And that is how we will keep thinking of the love of woman. We do that about it. We feel the fleshly things first, and the spiritual power and value after- wards. When we feel what it brings, it is no more wonder that it has been used for religious worship than that music is. And is not music, too, abused, and the worship of God turned into mere sensuous delight 7” James Hinton worshipped women. He was one of the few men of his generation who saw in them the greater future of the world, and he longed to give his life for them. In a certain way he did this. In struggling not only to WOMAN AND THE HOME 231 express but to work out his theories with regard to womanhood at war with, and blinded by, masculine traditions and despotisms, he often became entangled in his own knot, and ulti- mately broke down in the attempt to unravel the things of the spirit when combined with those of the flesh. “Every woman,” says Dr. Andrew Macphail, “is born with a veil.” Her instinct is to create an atmosphere of mysticism round her supreme function. In this atmosphere Hinton lived until the end of his life, and through this he realised that woman must no longer be an instrument of man’s sensuality, or of his selfishness. “Now I know what my influence over women is,” he says. “Women find themselves in me, a feeling like their own and yet united with what they want in men, without that from which they shrink from in them, viz. that I can give them a passion which is not sensuous, a passion truly passionate and yet free from that element, from “danger.” Probably the reverence I learnt from my mother is manifest throughout and affects them quite independently. I owe to her that extreme, even in some sense exaggerated, respect for women.” In every woman who appealed to him Hinton loved womanhood. He said once he wanted all women to love and to pity him. He was too much of a woman, wholly to master his problem, and too much of a man to save without some destruction in the saving. Yet through both his intense emotionality and his intellectuality he realised 232 JAMES HINTON the limitations and the degradations of women. “Why is it that every shame of womanhood makes my soul wither as if it was my shame 2 O God, have I not borne the sins of the world 2 ” he cried. His passionate and protecting nature drew him again and again into difficulties for which con- ventional morality has only scorn. He wanted to save, but he was rent in twain at times in the saving. The lack of psychological and sexual knowledge in the women he wanted to convert to his ideas, so as to help in the work he had set himself to do, the limitations of expressing in words the finer harmonies of modern love and desire, the insistence of the average attitude towards purity, making it a local and bodily thing, placed him often in morasses of personal difficulty. In the masses of his manuscripts and correspondence, nothing strikes one so much as the extraordinary difficulty Hinton had in making the truths he had to teach plain to women. Their response to his rapid, eloquent, passionate pleas for a new purity and a wider outlook for love must have added to his per- plexities. Many women fell hopelessly in love with him. As children of nature, they immedi- ately recognised the magnetic humanity of the man before them, and afterwards denied in terror what they had asserted previously, leaving the missionary of new ideals of love impotent to protect them or himself. Many fled in scorn, reviled what they had not even had the intelligence or courage to face, and busied WOMAN AND THE HOME 233 themselves with circulating libels about the man and his work; these libels pass as truths to some even yet. Others, again, brought him their own personal difficulties as an answer to his statements, and he, knightly by nature and courageous by habit, seeing no further than the moment, because of his singleness of aim, gaily took all kinds of burdens on his shoulders. If a morass was reached by some mischance, and he fell headlong into it, he was immediately blamed for the loss or damage to the pack on his back. The women who have worshipped or reviled Hinton throw the strongest light on his personality that can be given to us, as I have found in intimate talks with two women, one the reviler of him, and the other one whose whole life has been a dedication to him. Woman, to Hinton, was a great mystery, and held the keys of the future development of the race. “O woman,” he says, “may I be your messenger ? Will you speak to me 2 I am even worthy, for with all my heart and always I have reverenced, honoured, and believed in you, trusted you through all mysteries, seen you through all hidings of your face.” It was just this almost feminine realisation of the inner tragedies of women’s lives that gives Hinton’s work its value with regard to women’s problems. He grew ferocious at the revelations which opened up before him as he realised the inhumanity of human life, and the immorality of conven- tional morality. He knew, as doctor, some of the indignities men dare to heap on women 234 JAMES HINTON under the name of legal wedlock, and as reformer he probed into the dens of infamy which are supposed to keep one set of women “safe ‘’ while destroying the other. He knew, as doctor and friend of many women, how a woman so often succumbs in silence to what her soul loathes, to what she cannot even speak of, how she feels her very life and reason ebbing away while she stands by and sees those she might rescue cast down into hell. The Savage may kill his wife's body with impunity, but the so- called civilised man starves her soul while embracing her body, and Hinton asks : What is the difference 2 He saw how marriage to-day often kills both those who obey and those who transgress. The life of women’s souls, he argued, cannot be sacrificed for an affair of men’s bodies, or spiritual purity be sacrificed to fleshly prudery. This he felt as a real inversion which must be put right. Man’s needs ought never to mean woman’s sacrifice, but the needs of woman should alone constitute man’s pleasure. In that idea is a revolution. He believed that purity is built into woman’s very body by its need of motherhood, and he asks why it should not be so in man also by his need of fatherhood. In a spiritually dark age Hinton sees man, as it were, asleep, as Adam in the old story slept in the garden of Eden. In a newer and more wonderful sense, man must waken and find once more that woman has been taken out of him, or rather away from him, in order to become WOMAN AND THE HOME 235 herself, a self free, and so able to give; a self neither vassal, slave, doll, drudge, mere witch, or irresponsible breeder, a self, mystic by nature and giver by habit. Woman, as Hinton beheld her, is not to be looked upon as a snare or an appeaser of gluttony and lust, but as a coolness and as a shadow : one delivered from all limita- tions and so able to compass the apparently impossible and limitless; one able to surrender utterly to love because she is her own, and no longer possessed, except by love itself. He declared that “in our domestic life we have a grain of wheat, a true grain, but far from enough to feed the world. What shall we do with it 2 Hoard it, be a miser with it, a man who refuses to sow 2 Do we believe it has life in it or not ? Is it a living grain 2 If we think it is living can we refuse to serve it or sow it 2 The refusal would mean that we ourselves do not believe it is living or we could trust it, yea, utterly lost and gone. How prevent this seed from abiding alone 2 Not from abiding alone merely ; the seed unsown, treasured for itself, dies not less surely. Only it brings forth no fruit. It must be given up to Nature, trusted to her forces even though they kill it. Can we trust our domestic life to Nature and so to God 7 Can we say to them : There is Life here? Come in though you seem to make it die; to its own fuller life it will bend and use all that seems even most to put it aside.” Even as a youth Hinton tried to unravel some of the deeper problems which Ibsen, Olive 236 JAMES HINTON Schreiner, and the group surrounding them brought before the world. “Ought not this woman, whom Satan hath bound through a hundred years to be loosed ?” he cried. In a fever of protest against many old and new suggestions for the emancipation of love, Hinton tried to throw himself into the heart of a woman, to see as she sees, and suffer and enjoy as she does. From the point of view of a lover, a doctor, and a redeemer, he probed into the evils which as yet neither religion nor legislation dare wholly face. Many of his fantastic or mistaken suggestions are the result of a failure to comprehend the fundamental need of woman for complete economic independence, and her growing realisation that possession in persons is no longer a possibility in modern civilisation. Though not ignoring his attempts at solution of difficult problems, it is well to bear in mind where his danger lies as well as his inspiration to fuller life and love. Common to Christ and to woman is “My body broken for you,” he quotes when emphasising the mighty power of sacredness in the body to which we are as yet more or less blind; but in his very ardency we realise that, with him more or less, it is still as temptress or deliverer, as destroyer or angel, that she is to be judged. Hinton’s conception of society was based on the belief that it is like a pyramid on its apex instead of on its base. He does not always realise that this is true of the woman problem also. As a masculine person, he does not wholly WOMAN AND THE HOME 237 grasp that woman should be realised as a human being first, and not only as a sex being, and this in man’s attitude towards woman is the differ- ence between base and point in the pyramid of the woman problem. Hinton continually re- verted to woman’s sex function as her warrant from life to exist. It is the crucial question we are still trying to solve in practice as well as in theory. Though Hinton believed that woman, through her intuitions and her mysticism, knew the will of the gods more than men, the mascu- line element in him subconsciously felt that man must ever be the guide to her instincts. That he loyally strove, nevertheless, to make the sexual impulse one with love rather than lust, is evident in all he writes: “If any action hurts a woman it is wrong,” was his declaration. He believed that when Nature has obtained her will and fixed man’s regard on woman rather than on man as her chief aid, she will have re- created woman, and man with her. Man hither- to has been like the poor Egyptian Hinton tells us of : “I say to my wife, ‘It makes my head ache and my heart sore to have to beat you, but I am obliged.’” What, asks Hinton, do not men feel “obliged ” to inflict on women 2 When shall we learn not to do mischief for the sake of “goodness”? Another point of view would have saved the Egyptian’s headaches and the average man and woman heartaches. He says: “Let the thought once come of what is good for women, instead of what is pure for man.” He asks a crucial question: “Was 238 JAMES HINTON woman ever so dishonoured as our honour dis- honours her ?” When Hinton asked women to ponder as to whether they are not keeping men impure through keeping their relations to him distorted for ulterior ends, he has as clear a point of view as when he declares that “woman’s body is the destined purifier of the world. It must be the purifier, having been the corrupter. It is as the face of God which kills and makes alive. Is it not visibly written in organic life how the corrupter is the purifier ? The oxygen which makes putrescence, that is what destroys and takes away all corruption.” Woman may be, more than man, the re- generator of the future civilisation. “It is true, doubtless, a “woman’s age” is coming for the world, a time in which the woman’s power shall be felt throughout it, and her nature fulfil itself in all its doings. But it will not be by following in the steps of man, and trying to do what he has done. Has the experiment suc- ceeded so well with him, that all we want is more of it 2 When woman’s part truly is in the world, shall it not be something more than that ? It may be made wholly new through her ; can we be content with less 2 ” Hinton was one of the first to see that woman’s need is man’s opportunity, instead of man’s need demanding her sacrifice. He saw that woman is tired of trying to be only what men expect of her, and have partially made her. She is beginning to demand that he shall serve her life, and not her selfishness. “If man is to WOMAN AND THE HOME 239 be born, however much it is to be a second birth, if he is to be a babe again, it must be from woman it must come.” Often in his manu- scripts we have glimpses of the intense, tremu- lous, passion-loaded thing he took woman’s soul to be. The vibrations, discords, and har- monies which exist in the two groups of women recognised by law and order, the respectable married or unmarried women, and the recognised prostitutes, may indeed be well past finding out, even by the Hintons of the world. “Women see altruistically,” says Hinton. “ They see one thing in another thing. This is a genius mode of sight.” In a letter to Mrs. Boole (September 2nd, 1869) he says: “All my thoughts about art from which came that about women, rose from a remark in one of my manu- scripts thirteen years ago about music, to the effect that certain music obeyed a thought, and not a sound order; was determined by the intellect of the composer, and not by the ear. That started me, and I have seen heavenly things from it—at least, you will admit, angelic ones. Don’t you see, I saw it enthusiastically. I perceived it because I knew it in something else. . . . Things don’t look what they are — never did and never will.” Is not, he asks, this surely true of women 2 Hinton saw how woman’s life is a lottery, and he wanted to make it an art. When will woman say, asks Hinton, “I will give my faithfulness for my own sake and as a free gift to you for yours, but I won’t sell it for a bargain I do not get.” Hinton saw that 240 JAMES HINTON woman must no longer be looked on or used as a mere instrument of desire, and therefore the fundamental remedy for her is one applicable to man too. They must both realise that purity is not a matter of the flesh, but of the spirit. He has thrown out the hint to woman that she is to change her attitude in order to enable man to change his—to be no longer a creature to sacrifice or to snare, but one not only to give joy but to receive joy, not only to be a passive receiver, but a glad giver in a world hitherto abandoned to greediness in man and somewhat vulgar surrender in woman. Her right from man is that he shall give her joy as a preliminary to anything she may create for him or the world— from a baby to a picture. “Rectifying a false relation of womanhood to man must uproot evils : that evil is the very one above all it must have generated ; how should it not cease with the coming in of truth 2 How cease before ? In recognising a falsity in a thing so sacred, we have all the assurance we need that God has given that Destroyer into our hands; that even out of it shall come forth food that shall be to us as the very bread of life. “A deep sleep has fallen on man’s soul—a sleep, a blindness, which makes him think his good is not in serving, but in some virtue he must possess; a sleep which means that he makes his right to be in a thing and not in the act. What can it mean but that woman is to be born ? Woman born, born again, and to be brought to man that he may see her, which WOMAN AND THE HOME 241 indeed he never has done yet. And he shall call her name, Life; for she will be the mother of his own.” The new commandment for man is that he must love a woman before he dares to possess even her body, and that her desire for the man should be his only ground for physical delight. According to Hinton, every relationship is wrong when acting for self, and the really degraded woman is one who accepts the old tradition, and so acts as to prove that she is in any sense of the word a commodity. It is, according to Hinton, man’s work to save woman, more than woman’s mission to save man. Man will still insist and believe that he is in the glutton stage of existence with regard to woman when it is even becoming in the evolved man irksome to him to possess her in that way at all. If law, tradition, fashion, or cowardice keep men and women in the glutton stage, it is the work of those with Hinton’s vision to proclaim that Nature has more than one way of carrying out her designs, and a new revelation of her mysteries is as inevitable as for a snake to cast its old skin. To-day men and women, “good * as they mean to be, are under the “duty ‘’ of not having a passion except under circumscribed conditions. That is the glutton stage. Hinton desired to be a herald of a new conception of sex relationships. He wanted them to be viewed in the same single and simple spirit that men and women deal with flowers, prayer, music, or even normal thirst or hunger, 16 242 JAMES HINTON so that there would be no ground for avoidance, any more than there would be to try and escape from fresh air. - “Woman’s true, perfect union with man— the thing her soul longs for—can come only when she has made him like herself, so that man shall be unable to look on good and say, “But it must not be; it would be my pleasure.’ Till then, one whole region of life that is pure to her is corrupt to him, and cannot be cleansed. She has one law, and he another; the gulf between them is nothing less than that. And she feels it; always she feels it, and merely submits in wonder, thinking God has made them differently, but He has not. Let woman think of her being forbidden to suckle, and see how different her life would be with her thought in suckling com- pelled to be of herself, of pleasure, of her body. Could her life be anywhere really and fully the same 2 But this is the condition in which she consents to hold man. And must not she be chief sufferer? For it is in respect to her that she thus consents to hold his thoughts to his body. It is her good that she forbids him to put first. But that is little. See what she gets by holding his soul beneath that yoke; saying, when good and pleasure come together, give the rule to pleasure. She has bound him hand and foot beneath sensuality—and there ! The body is summoned to put aside good and to rule. The question is made of its pleasure and it comes, like the Saxon came at the summons of the Briton, to hold all the domain for itself. It is not WOMAN AND THE HOME 243 woman that imposed the bondage. Man im- posed it on himself and holds it ; but only woman can set it free.” Excess and restraint, man is finding out, are both signs of ignorance. That some women should be ill from too much bodily relation to a man, and others ill from too little, is a mockery of the word “purity.” Hinton perceived that virtue, after holding up its hands in horror of vice so long, will one day suddenly realise that it is itself that it should be terrified of, and will lead the way to real virtue. “With the rising glory of woman, the sexual passion of man will grow, grow in strength as well as in purity. And is not that a joy to think: that its purification will be in and by its strength? For how poor a hope that seems which some entertain, that with the lapse of centuries the passion may grow weaker | If in its strength, its growing strength, the hope lies, is it not a true hope 2 And is it not clear, how with the growing glory of woman, its power and its purity must rise together. So that its restraint would not need to be restraint; its very joy would be in it. So is not this what we see : how at once opposite things may be 2 This sexual passion, so much more sacred and intense, and yet to be put wholly aside, becomes a thing wholly for use. As a servant, how excellent ; but now that it reigns, of course the earth is troubled.” To Hinton, it seemed that man is but a pedestal for womanhood to be revealed. He 244 JAMES HINTON felt that nature’s messages have been faked because of man’s impurity and woman’s sacrifice. “In respect to woman’s position in relation to man, there is nothing ultimately to rely on but man’s humanness and preference of good over evil. Apart from that, artificial props and regulations are of no real avail; they do at best but prop up some at the expense of others. Apart from those feelings in man it is evident they never can do anything. But with them, no such props and artificial methods are needed. Without the feelings they are vain; with them needless.” If Hinton’s cure for our sexual blunders, under legal and illegal unions, was a demand to admit women into wider relationships with men, not necessarily sexual relationships at all, but nevertheless including passion of other degrees and kinds, and if the lack of this is one woman’s destruction and the inclusion of it another’s spiritual wreckage, it may or may not be beauti- ful and reasonable, according to early Victorian ideals, but it must evolve into both beauty and use, if it tends to exclude jealousy, and admit into love the three graces of Freedom, Purity, and Joy. “Men do not know woman—how often it is said ' and it is true. They do not know her; for they take it for granted that her life is bent on and moulded to trifles and self-pleasing They could not more utterly blind their eyes.” Again he says in his manuscript : “How plain it is that no perfectness of moral constitu- WOMAN AND THE HOME 245 tion in a woman, no power of will, no wish and resolution to be good, no force of virtue or religion, or control of custom, can secure what is called the ‘virtue of a woman | The emotion of absolute devotion with which some man may inspire her will sweep them all away. So how plain it is, also, that society, in choosing to erect itself on that basis, chooses inevitable disorder, and, so long as it continues to choose it, will continue to have that result. Is it not wonder- ful it should choose to be so blind, should so persist in it 2 The only thing not wonderful, indeed, is that the disorder comes; that is the one point of reason in it. When will society wake up to see that absolutely the only differ- ence between the women who have maintained their honour and some of those who have lost it, is one of circumstance; and not even of external condition and surroundings merely, but of conditions simply adapted to excite feeling 2 This is a fact on which it must mould its course, if ever it is to escape its fatal ship- wreck.” It is so often seen how man’s very protection of woman is on a line with the protection of his other property, whereby his lease entitles him to secure his own ends. The love of man for woman is so often love of himself, a demand for submergence on her part and emergence on his In trying to reverse matters a little, Hinton often grew confused. When proposing a remedy, he tried to bring his solutions in line with the over- stimulated physical needs of man by inviting 246 JAMES HINTON woman to abandon her restraint and live for the fulfilment of her primitive nature. This could be done, he thought, by making man a conscious means to her ends instead of woman being a means to his joy, through any sacrifice of her soul, her spirit, or her body. Man has had a false conception of woman, woman a false conception of her relation to man. Some woman in the future, perhaps, contain- ing in her the intellect of a man, the subtleties of a woman, and the sincerity of a child, may formulate a code of action for sexual living. That is, if she be maternal, scientific, logical, and spontaneous enough to be free from jealousy, prudery, and self-seeking, her code could easily be inspired by Hinton’s theories, but laxity and lasciviousness would not be part of it. To the evolved man and woman, lust is as dull as any other gluttony, jealousy a moral cannibalism, and a selfish monopoly of love a spiritual murder. The time has come to erase our wrong premises in order to come to a right conclusion about love. Wrong premises have to change in mathematics; how much more so in lovel The definitions in mathematics, Hinton says, must be false at first, and changed as the knowledge grows different; so we must be content to experi- ment and revise. The horrors around us in prostitution, domestic and maternal limitations, hidebound conventions, lust under legality or illegality, must all give place to a new order; but this can only come about through pain, failure, and apparent evil, as a wrong premise WOMAN AND THE HOME 247 being worked out into a true conclusion. “What a thing it is to know,” Hinton exclaims, “that the right we want for life is not to do the hard thing, but rightly to do the easy one, the love thing, desiring the good of others first !” Hinton realised that one of the difficulties in the great woman problem is, that women have not yet learnt to draw out the hidden sides in One another, and so do not really know one another because of jealousy, vanity, cunning, and self-seeking. His plea to woman is to put heroism in the place of jealousy. Her famished love of heroism, shown in a distorted form in militant suffragism, must evolve in more drastic and beautiful manifestations towards man and WOIſla, Il. Why, asks Hinton, should not men give up their vices instead of wives their rights 2 And why should not women give up, if needed, their most jealously guarded monopolies 2 Hinton never, however, really laid stress on the vital truth that woman will always remain a posses- sion of man until she is economically free of him. No sex problem can be solved till economic conditions are perfectly equal and the State acts justly to her most significant citizen, the begetter and rearer of her children. Economic dependence and woman’s habit of self-surrender, combined with her lack of real knowledge of her own nature- needs and man’s nature-needs, hinder the com- plete moral emancipation of woman and the spiritual evolution of man, quite as much as the muddle-headedness and unworthy greed they 248 JAMES HINTON both manifest so often in their physical relation- ships. Law alone, Hinton saw, indeed, could never save either man or woman. If we need deliver- ance from law, it is imbecile to try more law. He pointed out that the perfection of everything is in becoming as the childhood of that thing, the simplicity of the child passing through the detail of the youth to the greater simplicity of the evolved man. “The self is latent in the child. It is brought into consciousness later, then cast out.” The condition for man to see woman is in a purity of heart childlike through the details of morality being absorbed into a later simplicity and mysticism of function. Woman is demanding that man shall not choke her life or crush it. And he is demanding that she shall not exploit his. She is demanding of man that, in the face of his joy in her, he shall think more of her than of it. She asks of him that he shall be the true servant of both Nature and Woman, not the slave or the tyrant, but the servant in the sense of mutuality of service. “Recognising the relation of these two things —the freedom to woman with the casting out the self—is simply like joining a power to a weight. Here are now, in human life, a weight and a power; and they are apart. We want that to cease, this to be. That cannot cease but with the being of this; then why not let the One do the other ? So is not this the way Nature acts with man 2 Here is a desirable thing in itself; but it is a change, not of outward WOMAN AND THE HOME 249 things, but of the very centre of his being, of his life and soul.” Hinton points out that everything in these latter days seems to have conspired to hurt woman, even love itself in almost its best forms. Novelists set up love as the one perfect good, yet making it a “self-good,” and perverting it. Hinton sees it from a different point of view. “Think,” he says, “ of the embracing a woman as good for a man’s brain, giving force and vivid- ness and delicacy to his intellectual work, and this very same thing being life, free expression of the soul, sanity, health, to a woman also. Is it not a wonder of joy, an amazement of delight and purity, no single thought needing to be self, no shadow of self-indulgence in that utmost indulgence of delight and passion in its fulness 2 And this is what we have called impure, think of as low, and say could only be for self l’’ No wonder woman could not do her full work, could make no headway except through a lure, or primitive passion, or exploitation, or all three. “To place life on a basis of self incapacitates woman wholly. She cannot act so ; it makes her at once a monstrosity. Nothing in her heart answers to it, and putting it into her head simply paralyses her. Nothing any more (I speak of the true characteristic woman) is or can be according to any real reason in her : all reason is shattered, to her, in that unreason. How can she have any more principles left 7 In that cataclysm and turning of the whole moral universe upside down, they are all over- 250 JAMES HINTON thrown together. What remains to guide her, but any chance thing that may come 2 She takes what comes, shuts herself up in anything nearest, believes anything—for how can she judge 2 And so she sinks inert, or with a fatal logic adopts a reckless selfishness at which man himself stands amazed.” Hinton calls on us to witness what woman can bring herself to do when “goodness” and “virtue’’ strain her to breaking point. “These frightful things that women do prove how in- tense the wretchedness is to which they are otherwise condemned, they prevent our con- tinuing to hide from ourselves the cruelty—the extreme and frightful cruelty—to which we feel bound. So cruel our “goodness' is It is nothing less than what these things imply. In these very crimes see what hope there is. What cannot women be brought to do if they can be brought to kill their children 2 What may not be expected from them ż Why not that from which they most intensely shrink, which seems most abhorrent to their nature ? Is it only for evil, and not for good 7 . “No 1 ° cries Hinton, “the value is wholly for women. For all to be able simply and straightforwardly to marry if they choose, to have a life of work open to them and not neces- sarily interrupted, to have marriage itself made a spiritual thing, and used for spiritual ends instead of served as by a slave—that is the value. It is the woman’s, not the man’s, save as he, too, shares in the spiritual life given to WOMAN AND THE HOME 251 marriage in its becoming a thing for mutual work, a thing whereby his life is changed, and he can feel that, instead of using a woman for himself, he serves her life, and can receive from her more fully the aid of mind and heart she has to give. Save as this, the “more pleasure to the man is a farce. Man is nothing in it : one might say that his use had been to make prostitution, merely.” - One can almost see the strange head and mouth and eyes of Hinton bowed in his hands puzzling out this question of the impenetrable riddle of woman, and following distractedly both wrong and right clues. Who can fathom her when she cannot fathom herself 2 Who can judge her by Nature when she herself is ofttimes tricksy and wily and turbulent 2 “This, too, is the reason,” cries Hinton, “why it is so hard for men to understand women (and very likely also for them to understand them- selves), this presence of opposites in women which makes an apparent absence. Man looks at her and sees there is not that and that ; and has no notion that it is positively and not negatively denied ; that is, made to seem absent by the presence of other things. She is thus more true to Nature, which is thus opposites together; is also of course akin to genius, which is by the same presence of opposites together. A thing that has opposites in it we may know by this : it looks as if it were nothing; touch it, and see what comes.” It has been said that Hinton’s love for other 252 JAMES HINTON women was like summer lightning and for his wife a devouring flame. She, above all others, could torture him by being other than his impossible demands required, and the thought of the pain he gave her doubtless increased that torture. It is useless to ignore the obsession which absorbed him towards the end of his life, which made him propose, even although only as a future possibility, to take a second wife in the home on principle—he, who believed in fluidity and not rigidity in relationships ' It was as if Nature had played an impish trick with him, though she did not let him live to carry it out. It was not that he advocated any special woman for the sacrifice, but his theory needed proving, and so heartache and confusion took its unwarrantable place. He died loving his wife to the end, and to the end she loved him, and that was a reality, leaving many theories in nature’s store-house to await the perfect form or place. The problems that tortured him still await solutions, but his rare spiritual vision is our heritage and a priceless possession. Such vision is a glowing, vibrant essence, which, Once in the soul of a man, makes every common thing lovely, every passion a power, every lapse an education, and every success a warning. To love with rapture and yet with continence, to let all go because all is held, to give and take all things from the hands of love, to be unashamed and unafraid of all the great possibilities of desire in beauty, is to become an artist in love and life. To cast out WOMAN AND THE HOME 253 Fear and admit Joy, to love to the uttermost all human things, and to give from passionate, personal love unlimited human help and under- standing, this is what the true lover knows, and, knowing, is full of a Great Enterprise. To be a Knight of Love is to be able to enter hell as well as heaven, and to enter it with joy and understanding. Hinton was such a knight; but he died before his spiritual adventures were finished. CHAPTER X ART AND MORALS JAMES HINTON used to say that it was painting which broke down his morals. “Long ago,” he says, “I saw that the positive denial of the details comes by the attempt to include all. A picture cannot in detail represent the fulness of nature. Such positive denial is the very condition of the existence of art.” Hinton’s love of pictures developed late in life. He admired Turner and Constable most, and said he felt inclined to kneel before some of their work. He was also much attracted to David Cox and Jules Dupré. A friend of his who knew him six years before his death says of him : “It is a strange fact, and it seems to be the gift of great intellects, that they shall of their own great strength discern things in the mystic operations of art which are veiled even from those who labour as skilled workmen in the very work-shops where articles of that art are manufactured. Though I am not aware that he ever handled any brush destined to higher service than the one he used when shaving, he could have told Turner many things con- cerning his pictures of which he, as the painter, 254 ART AND MORALS 255 was entirely innocent.” The same friend says, in speaking of his love of music, that “very few musicians, few even of the best composers, have hearts and minds capable of feeling and suffering music as he did.” Music was sheer delight to him. At the mere mention of it his face, jaded and worn by long application to the business of his life, would brighten up instantly. He seemed to do flash-light thinking under its power. As has already been pointed out, all his thoughts about art arose from the observa- tion that certain music was determined by the intellect of the composer, and not by the ear. “That started me,” he said; “and I have seen heavenly things since.” Hinton often alluded to what he held to be the three stages of painting and their deep moral significance. “Painting may well be considered as making affirmations, and in its course it, as it were, makes three. “I. Nature is a unity. Surely it was this prompted the first painter. (The sim- plification first period.) - “2. Then the opposite: Nature is a great variety of things. (The detail period.) “3. Then the third : Nature is a unity in varied forms. (The simplification re- stored, combining impulse and de- tail.)” He puts this in another place in a more significant way : 1. Rude and inaccurate drawing whose 256 JAMES HINTON “freedom * is the freedom of a scrawl, as of a child or a savage. 2. Where the whole is sacrificed to a pains- taking accuracy of details, the picture itself going all to pieces through this very fact. This he compared to the rigid, fixed laws of self-righteousness and fashionable “virtue.” 3. Where details are seen with reference to a larger and a deeper fact, so that not they but only the effect and spirit of them is seen in the work. This he compared to the larger liberty or the fulfilling of a higher law of service as opposed to mere licence or a rigid stroke or letter of morality. He pointed out that the conditions for art are the conditions for life : im- pulse, then detail, and through these a complex simplicity including the old impulse renewed, and details used only for the whole and not merely for the part. “Art,” he says, “makes the perfect beauty out of a unity not beautiful. That is, the true beauty has not beauty in it. Now in the same way the true good has badness in it. It must , include, not banish, this badness of the world. That is the problem. We err as the painter does who will construct his work by collecting beautiful materials alone.” He goes on to say : “Surely the deepest charm of art lies in its ART AND MORALS 257 significance, as the type and image of life, in showing us, solved, the problems which baffle us, and pain us so, and seem so insoluble. It is not merely beauty as we think of it, not the mere sensuous thing, however it may raise us above sense, and give us thoughts and feelings about the highest. Beauty is beauty because of its relation to our life. It is this that thrills us , so and compels us to pursue it, and count it of all things most precious.” The spiritual law on the artist is not on the things he does, but on the way he does them. The artist, as it were, dies to live, and alters gladly a premise for a new conclusion. Our deeds, he tells us, may be of any form, but their colour must be right. This is the question art raises : Shall man’s “right ° be in doing certain things, or in being able to do all things? “Nature is able on one side to do anything, man on the other side having to do certain things only. The artist is a traitor in the camp, and goes over from man to Nature. Nature and the artist have one right, and succeed. Man stands with another right, and fails.” He puts this more fully in another passage: “Long ago I saw in painting that the positive denial of the details comes by the attempt to include all. A picture cannot in detail repre- sent the fulness of Nature. That seems a limitation, a disadvantage, judged by the idea of absolute perfection. But is it 2 So far from this, such positive denial is the very condition of the existence of art. Art, as we know (from I7 258 JAMES HINTON photography, for instance), could not be, except under that condition. “But then, there is another thought in the opposite direction. If painting has to express in space, and by means utterly inadequate, an infinite fulness, life also is this very thing. As paint and canvas are to Nature, so is human life to that fact of which it is the picture. The fact is to our conscious human life as is a land- scape to a picture. It is the infinite fulness and richness of that fact that makes a difficulty of our life, that demands its solution in self- sacrifice. “Is not art given us as an easy means of solving the problem of life, done first to show us the way in a form which is pleasure alone and no pain 2 So that is done there which is to be done in life. But, then, will not the influence be mutual 2 If art first solves the problem of living, and teaches it to life, life, thus taught and aided, will add a new power to art, and teach it in turn. The including of the not beautiful in our idea of beauty means that the business of art is truly with the ugly. So here is another ethical application of art : the very thought of beauty is a liking with a not- liking in it. “This higher beauty came not by any demand on the part of any man for a higher and nobler thing; it came not from him but to him. It was forced upon him by the demand of the self-details to be positively denied. All this higher feeling of beauty, all that makes it ART AND MORALS 259 grander and profounder and more soul-stirring, all this is the gift to us of that exact presenta- tion of details which seems to set beauty at defiance. All comes from the effect of these, when they positively deny themselves, upon the forms of beauty which fled before them. It was really not for themselves, but to make beauty more beautiful, that they insisted upon being recognised and having their claims ful- filled. And so it is in life; all right and duty exist to make joy perfect. It becomes ex- quisite, profound, first worthy the name of joy, only through that stern duty which banishes it, and seems as if it must banish it for ever. It is from this that joy derives its perfectness. “But this perfecting of joy, by self-rights positively denied, is the same thing as the perfecting of forms by the self-details, when they give up their life to live. It is just so our life shapes itself. When our hearts grow weary of insisting on what we ought to have, and doing what we ought to do, and we cry out for the old life of simple pleasure, yet saying : Let it be a pleasure which is not pleasing myself, that is God coming into the soul, as Nature comes into the artist’s work. . “Then, if this thought is true, the higher and deeper feeling of beauty which men now possess, and which is so large an element in that culti- vation of the emotional nature which is this age’s work, has been the gift of the painters. Yet not from them, but through them. It is not the result of the painter’s thought or feeling 260 JAMES HINTON of beauty : it comes from Nature bringing in the not-beautiful. Here is presented to us, plain to see, Nature coming into men, and working through them. And we see that she comes in, not to the individual, but through many working conjointly. So that men reach to be Man by being a part with others, having others’ work working in them. By having others in him, man becomes one with Nature.” Hinton declares that art brings the “Gospel of Peace,” the peace between the “good * and the “bad.” “There is another thing that art emphatically testifies, its second great lesson perhaps, that there is a sublimity, grandeur, beauty, loveliness, and true joy and delight for the soul, in decay, dilapidation, ruin, failure, and wretchedness. It bears witness to that as the great Revealer. It is the same in morals as in art. Truth is truth to Nature, goodness is the goodness of Nature. It is man’s love of freedom and joy in it—that is, his joy in art. He sees his own destiny, his own longing wrought out there and achieved—the truer perception, that makes the law that was before, fall off. It makes it no more one of things, and is the very Gospel that he reads upon that canvas. “Take into account,” says Hinton, “the truth to nature of that spiral, the hand. The child draws according to it, and draws wrongly. There is the ‘passion of the hand,” but it wants something. Yet it is right; we see it is, for if we put it away what have we ? Even if we draw with a miracle of skill, it is wonderful, ART AND MORALS 261 it may be useful, but it is not art. That is the passion of the hand again, with something added. Putting it away will not do. That is why the passion of the hand comes first. It must come back, also, and bring with it its falsity too, made more true than what it has sought as truth. And in music, too, how one hears it ! One musician walks the forest and loiters and gives you, so truly, so exquisitely, what he hears. And you listen and feel : Yes, it is wonderful, beautiful; what exquisite skill, how true ! but, would that Nature would speak to one, the very wood itself l And then comes another and gives you a mass of queer sounds, and the very forest enters into your soul. The thing that gives it is the structure, the passion of the ear (or of the hand) which indeed is the very wood itself; which could not have been but by and through it, for which the wood was : in which it all is intensified, multiplied, summed up into an inch. The forests of a continent live in the fibres of the ear. Not indulgence put away, but indulgence with something added to it—that is art and that is life.” It is true of art, according to Hinton, that only the pure in heart can see her. All that has been said of that is true here also. “So we may see a new rightness and meaning in the feelings which have refused art and put it aside as an evil thing. They have not been baseless; they are strictly on a par with our refusal of the sight of woman’s beauty. And we suffer from our art, just as an impure man 262 JAMES HINTON might suffer from such liberty, true liberty though it is. We reap from art death, corrup- tion, licence. And thus we are helped to see the true guide for us in every such case; whether it is our wisdom to put away the liberty which corrupts when the heart is impure, or to insist that the heart shall be made pure, or at least that that shall be our aim, even if we perish in it. Which should we do with art 2 The same as we do with woman’s beauty, for the problem is the same. Art, too, demands that the heart be pure, in order to look upon her; and, if it is not, it is death. “The impure, those whose life is based on self, cannot look on her and live. Of course they cannot. For her name, too, is Joy; she also is God’s face. “Thus there is a visible relation between that thought in the Old Testament, “No man can see God’s face and live,’ and the forbidding of art by Jews. These two things speak one language. And so the whole relation of the Old Testament and the New comes into yet clearer light. The thought of the Old Testa- ment is seen with clear, honest eyes, eyes from which the self has been cast out. “In man’s heart is impurity,” says Hinton. “That must be which is according to this. It is all summed up in that one sentence, “No man can see God and live.’ All is in that. To impurity, everything in which is God’s face brings corruption; every joy and liberty brings death ; for it turns it into licence, and takes ART AND MORALS 263 for self. In all joy, in all liberty, God’s face is seen ; man cannot take it. The whole spirit of Judaism was the carrying out of that Sentence. “And asceticism, too, is the same, only more emphatic. It, too, said that man cannot look upon the face of God and live. But there was a difference : it meant, live with a higher life; there was a lower allowed to all but some. And still that is in asceticism. Thus, a Jesuit once said to me that he adopted the life because he felt that if he did not bind himself so he would run into evil and peril his soul. That is, he felt he could not “ look on God’s face and live.” He could not dwell in liberty and give passion freedom and “live.” So how clear it is, the ascetic life is directly against Christ. And indeed we see it was only adopted into Chris- tianity, not arising with it.” Is there not in art a parallel to asceticism 2 asks Hinton. “The painter finds that, if he draws strictly as he sees, he does not produce the same impression. He alters, in part, not for the sake of any adaptation, but to be true. He tries to produce the same impression and succeeds, but, in doing this, he has altered form as he alters colour. And the reason is plain enough. If he exactly reproduces what he sees he no more truthfully represents Nature than the man of science who does the same thing. He puts his own perception as cause of itself. Of course, what we perceive is all right as our perception, but put as cause of our perception 264 JAMES HINTON it is quite different. For the representation undertakes to show us, and cannot help doing so, the cause of our perceiving. And the painter, in order that he may reveal, has com- mitted himself to altering what he undertakes to represent. The perceived will not do for a representation of itself, as it makes a false affirmation. For the painter’s affirmation is not, “There is this in me as a perception,” but, ‘There is that out there causing my per- ception.” And that must be different from the perception itself. “Looking at the work of various painters, is not the law apparent that all true work has a negative in it plainly marked by the side of its positive 2 Some great sacrifice is made, something given up that some opposite may be more complete. And at last the inspiration of the reunion comes, and all is embraced in a new perception.” Hinton often makes his best suggestions by asking questions. “But is not this thought beautiful ? By art, which has been the overthrower of morals (and cannot help dissolving them, for it is the very dissolution of the self-right which constitutes morals and cannot come into contact with life so based without poisoning it), by this very thing that has been the destroyer of man’s moral life, which has bought death, life is to come. Out of destruction comes forth life. Could the words have a lovelier fulfilment 2 And thus, too, it is a revealer of the universal law ART AND MORALS 265 that every destroyer destroys but to create. For, although the impure in heart cannot look on God’s face, on joy, on art, on beauty, on liberty, but it slays them, still it is God’s face, and its very slaying has healing in it. It kills, but it also makes alive. That is the song and paean of the pure in heart : “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” Slay him he will, and sink him into a death beneath which he shall groan in anguish, and the universe shall pause in wonder and pity to behold, and heaven itself shall say, ‘Can these dry bones live 2 " But they shall live. God’s face does not only destroy. We see it here in art, which destroys and makes alive. To be destroyed by God’s presence is not what we think destruction ; from that destruc- tion the true life comes. Not only to the pure in heart is God’s face the one true blessing. To the impure also blessing can come only so, even though he die. “Is not man now man enough, pure enough within, to look on art and live 2 It is like pre- senting a living germ, a germ with ‘vital re- sistance ’ in it, to the forces of Nature, to the ‘ decay.” Are not the living seed and the dead seed as the pure and impure in heart 2 The dead seed cannot face the forces of Nature, but it ‘dies,” sinks into corruption; the very things that are life to the living seed are its destruction. The living seed, pure in heart, can look on the face of Nature and not die. And so, does not Nature here teach us again what purity of heart is ? All things but the living germ Nature 266 JAMES HINTON corrupts, dissolves : not adamant itself can withstand it. . “The impure in heart cannot see God and live. Their very impurity is death. It is but a false seeming life they have ; and God’s presence only makes manifest their deadness. God does not destroy life. And so it is that losing life is finding it. It is but the false life that is lost; it is the purging away of the dross. For so, God again is as a refiner’s fire. And so also is pleasure. And genius looking on its face, and breaking the false law and taking it— that is its purging with fire. The fire that con- sumes the impure consumes pleasure’s impurity also. We have indeed left pleasure utterly un- seen ; we have not known at all its use and meaning. And so we mis-saw it ; the not- seeing implies the mis-seeing. We have wholly to see and know it anew, art being its revealer. We have to know it as the fire and the killer ; yes, and as the maker alive. Its mightiness for evil only shows its omnipotence for good. Here is pleasure, that mighty storehouse of force, and we have not known it. We have thought almost only of the power of pleasure to slay, to slay the impure in heart if they look on her; all that that implies we have forgotten, and yet were saying every day that very same thing of God. Is it not the very mightiest in heaven and earth, this power we have thought so little of 2 Mighty power for evil that it has been, does not that mean merely that its true use has not yet been found 2 That is the law with all ART AND MORALS 267 our powers for good. Their true use undis- covered, they destroy. “Man cannot look on the face of God in art and not die. His self-goodness cannot stand against it. It has killed his poor life, and it dissolves before it like the ‘life of the dead ice, which has indeed a life of its own, mocking true life with its outward form. Art stands thus in respect of life. Here is an easy thing, a giving up trouble and evil, a doing what is pleasant; can it be truly the right 2 What sign is there ? And art comes as the sign. It is right. Now this is a type of the universal relation of altruistic seeing. Take it in thought. Here is this way of thinking; it would be so easy, so pleasant, would relieve me from so much toil, but may I take it 2 Can it be right 2 And the vera causa comes as the proof that it is right. Art is Nature’s sign to man : ‘Here is this thing; I do acknowledge it; it is in me. You are not wandering away from me in following it and taking it as your law, though you go away from the appearance of me, from that which I seem to bid you, and which you have rightly tried to do in obedience to your thought. You do not really go away from me, you are truly coming to me, coming to my heart | Art is the telling us this. “So this would be a motto for a gallery : “No man can look upon Thy face and live : He that will lose his life shall find it.’” “Is it not,” he asks again, “in art as in science 2 its whole true value is to show us what 268 JAMES HINTON nature is ; the special things that it deals with, their interest, beauty, utility, are nothing; these are simply boys’ inducements. So is it not in art 2 It is its interpreting of nature, its prefigur- ing of human life, in its having by giving up, that is the one true thing of value in it. This it is to carry to the utmost, and surely we have no conception yet of what it is to show us in respect to what Nature truly is. So, that it may help men hereafter in their most serious difficulties, may be studied by statesmen, by men of science, by all who have to regulate other people’s lives, or even their own, for guidance when their own problems are utterly dark.” Hinton points out how plainly we see in pic- tures that if a painter is aiming simply at truth to Nature, simply and wholly doing merely what serves that and all that serves that, then the fewer strokes and the more perfectly free and and pleasurable, the higher the art. Its ease, pleasure, absence of trouble and restraint are its praise, for the conditions are fulfilled. But if he is merely using contrivances to produce certain results, doing a thing he has learnt to do, then fewness of strokes, roughness, unfinish, are faults, and produce anger and deserve it. They are slovenliness, carelessness, laziness, at the least, and very likely worse. We apply in the two cases absolutely opposite standards of judgment. The very same thing which is good in the one case is bad in the other. Hinton tersely declares that “morals cannot stand before a paint-brush. Art is the sphinx, ART AND MORALS 269 whereof man must read the riddle or die. . . . He must understand her meaning and let it make his life, or she will destroy it.” He tells us that he has discovered in some music, and good music, that it is linked on, not by sound, but by meaning. Its true order is therefore determined, not by the ear but by the intellect. This he regards as talent music. “The true music, which is art,” he says, “obeys, not an intellectual, but a sonorous order. The demands of the ear determine it. - “Now evidently there is a parallel in painting. While talent-painters are determined by thought, the true art is determined by the eye. It follows, not an intellectual but a visual order. Genius, in each of these, is the expression and rule of the sense. “What the sense thus introduces is necessity. It excludes arbitrariness, in this being exactly one with science. This seems almost pre-emin- ently manifest in colour. In the art-picture, there must be harmony of colour, a certain unity running in some way, in reality not at all uncertain, through the whole. In demanding that harmony the eye demands necessity; that the whole should make each part necessary. Art is, in truth, a “sense-science.” Yes, and science is a ‘ thought-art.” “One sees that art is, as science is, essentially subjective. Here is the truth of that saying that art is nature as seen by man, that it has man’s soul in it, and so on. If it is true, it has man’s sense in it. The work of genius is done in 270 JAMES HINTON obedience to a subjective, not to an objective demand; this demand being the very same that is in interpretative science, a demand to have nature presented as it is, and not as it seems. It puts aside, as it were, man’s limita- tions, the partialness of his perceptions. Truly in Nature, if it be seen largely enough, is this necessity, this harmony. The limitation of man’s view introduces the absence of it, and it is this the genius-sense turns out. “There is something in the way in which nature is presented to the eye against which the eye itself revolts, when it is definitely and in detail and artificially presented to it, just as the intellect does against the way in which it apprehends nature when so presented. Here is the basis, the law, of the painter’s “altering' of nature, and the process is the same. It is a reductio ad absurdum. By clear presentation of results the premise is corrected. Not only the why, but the how, may surely be seen. To thine own self be true, thou canst not then be false to nature. “The genius-painter banishes arbitrariness, ‘specal contrivances,’ from nature. The talent- painter has for his function to make distinctly manifest in all their hidden detail (for he too must, in a sense, see the hitherto invisible) the multitude of the appearance of this. Precisely the same as in science. Nature excludes the arbitrary. True necessity is an attribute of the divine action. Is not the domain of art that in which sense, strictly so called, rules 7 Where ART AND MORALS 271 the eye and the ear have not the rule, however much the method may be that of genius, it is not art. The sense of use, of fitness, of correct- ness, of reason in thought would not constitute a basis for art. - “Nothing can be more beautiful than the connection of art with free-will, involving as it does so clearly the recognition of necessity as an essential element of rightness. All seems summed up in this : that free-will is talent-action and holiness is genius-action. Talent-work, good though it is when at its best—nay, the best possible to man at first, or by trying—yet being never the truly right or good, nay, being by and in its very goodness inevitably wrong, this talent- work perfectly illustrates human goodness, the goodness that is by effort. Virtue is talent- goodness : that is all.” We realise, through Hinton’s thought, that all art progresses from unconscious simplicity and from detailed complexity to its final emergence into a finer and more conscious simplicity, which has the spontaneity of the child and the con- trolled habit of the experimental artist, expressed at last in a rarer and deeper way with a joyous spontaneity belonging not only to the great impulses of nature, but to the newer and diviner art of love. “The false imitation of the true art is so clear, and how it comes. The true painter sees : “There are all these other things to be done here; I must represent that particular one so; this little stroke must do for it.” 272 JAMES HINTON “How beautifully, by the by, our relation to the universe is shown here, and how it is not by our much doing that much is done. Even as Christ said of praying, it is with doing too, not for our much doing does Nature cause to be done. What a feeling of joy comes with this sight ! Here, surely, one feels a little what is the meaning of heaven as rest. Art shows it to us. Here, in the less doing, the more is done. We have to understand all things around us by the light of this. We think wrongly if we do not see that this must be. - “So by that less doing the true artist does more. And then there comes a man, thinking of merely the one thing, the mere “object,” who looks and says: “Oh, this may be done with so little trouble as that; I shall do it so.” How plain the error is ; he is thinking of the thing only; he does not see the more. So what the true painter does for more fulness, the imitator makes empty.” “Indeed, will not human life be beautiful when every form and mode of it is seen to be the very same process, exhibiting the same laws (all absolutely spiritual, in their significance), and everything that is dark or insoluble in any one branch may be sought for and surely found in some other ? Will it not be beautiful when man’s practical life is based upon a truly spiritual, human order, and surrounded by a phalanx of handmaids in all the arts and all the sciences, indeed in every device of his brain or occupation of his hands, all contributing their , , , 40 a 9 2 3 J Q * 3 2 1 2 3 ‘ŞIN S,NOJNIH BIOTsawovuſvy · · · · · · · · · · · · · - • • • • . . . ' A ART AND MORALS 273 quota to its service, not only in use, adornment, and delight, but in illustration of its principles and guidance in its perplexities 2 (To help to bring this, who would not suffer all ?)?” It is not one art, but all arts, he measures by his rule. “The same things must be in music, as indeed one feels plainly enough.” He says: “Is it not evident in Mendelssohn's characteristic music how he listened exactly to the sounds of nature and reproduced them as he heard them 2 It is told how, one day, he made his friend be quiet, suddenly, as they lay on the grass, while he listened to the cadence of a fly’s hum, which he reproduced exactly in his Midsummer Night’s Dream. In this what a light all art receives | In order to hear that sound so exactly Mendels- sohn had to close his ears to all but that, of course. When he reproduced it, then, in his music, how could it give the feeling of nature ? We do not listen to nature so : we hear, not singled-out things with ears shut to all else, but masses and multitudes of things in which each is only in its effect. Is not the case absolutely parallel to that of the painter, who to see in the self-right way must close his eyes 2 One sees, too, how well the universe and human life are called music. They are the art. . . . The true painter says to each thing: ‘You shall not be what you are in yourself: you shall be part of nature, one with these other things, which is truly what you are . . . ; and the eye accepts it, and feels it has been making a bungle in its I8 274 JAMES HINTON way of taking things. For the eye isolates things in a way in which they are not truly isolated, and art makes it confess its error. Now the touch does the same, and science bears just the same relation to it. It makes touch confess that it has been making a bungle in its way of taking things.” “In respect to the affirming necessity, how curiously art and science are one ! What science shows is, as it were, necessity to the touch, or the fingers. It shows necessity mechanically. Art shows it, as it were, to the eye.” Hinton came to realise that the deepest charm of art lies in its significance in being the type and image of life, in its showing us, solved, the problems which baffle and pain us. He em- phasises the fact that “the painter sees, not in thought but in vision, and that Nature is a process, and not things. This is the new basis. Adopting this, he is freed from the command of exactitude; he gives the spirit of detail, that is, its life. For the detail-painting is absolutely untrue in putting the ‘things as “being ' these things. Nature is only truly shown when shown as a becoming and a giving.” It is a help towards understanding Hinton, the man, to know him as a would-be artist. “This is so striking in painting, it is the thing it taught me (and so gave me a wholly new vision of nature), that the true, the right, is absolutely independent of form ; that anything may be right.” Painting gave him a clue to life itself. ART AND MORALS 275 “Now this is the same thing that needs to be seen in life also : that it is not external ‘things ’ that are right or wrong, but “actions’ produced by the love impulse only. The process, the art, alone make the right, as it alone makes art. Is not calling some things art and others not art the very same error as calling some external forms of doing ‘right' and others ‘wrong’ 7 As all action that is for good is right, and only that, so surely all doing that truly unites man and nature is art, and that only.” “Surely, genius has no art but that of not refusing to see ? Is not that all ?” He tells us that art must come to us as an emotion, direct and primary, in which, on studying, we can find that paint-brushes or catgut, etc., have been the instruments. It must not first be paints and vibrating strings, colours or sounds. - “A critic says that Titian, with the grossest refusal of possible truth, would draw a figure in Sunlight, and make the ground in shade, would even make the foot illuminated while the ground was dark. The critic thought it was wrong. But was it 2 Did it not mark the true spirit of the artist, and does it not give the reason that he was such a king among painters ? For, doing that, he must be one of two things, either no painter at all, a mere victim of caprice, or a painter of the highest rank. A man who at Once could paint, and could do that, must have been amongst the first of painters. “Here is what it means, that the true painter’s Work comes by his seeing, not by conceiving, not 276 JAMES HINTON by ‘making up.’ The vision is the spiritual fact.” Hinton tells us that “Nature is more than it is to our perception. Art is to show us the hidden things—hidden, but not, therefore, in- operative. So it is that mere representations are not, and cannot be, true to nature. They have not the hidden things in them. One may see it well by the idea of latent heat, or any other tension. To present a body merely of a given temperature without regard to its latent heat would be giving a thing not true to that body or a bent bow without the tension. How should a painter draw truly to nature a bent bow 2 How but straightened, with the arrow flying 2 is not this the sort of relation of art to nature ?” Hinton implies that the artist is a man who has perfect command of the fact that his right must include what would be wrong done another way, and is perfectly ready to accept more and more, in fact anything nature may bid him. “Art is distinctly this readjustment of the very thought or feeling of good or right. And so we see what it means : it means going deeper, passing on from the mere outward doing to the soul.” In fact, according to Hinton, “Art demands a goodness that is of the soul. It says to re- strictions which mean something else than a total passion for absorption in truth, that is to all restrictions, ‘Begone, you mean badness,” which they do, of course, and must. . . . This ART AND MORALS 277 will be our thought of badness in life too, the same with love becoming our good. Art teaches life its method ; life, art its reason.” In such passages as these Hinton puts forward suggestions about the greatest art of all, the art of life with its inner arts of love and death, for, as he so truly says, death is an art too, and it is only through living harmoniously that one can die harmoniously. Hinton seems to imply that human nature, as a whole, has emerged from the first stage of progress, the spontaneous child-life, to the detailed life of the youth, with its fixed codes, its morality details, and its cumbersome and arbitrary rules of being and having. In this second condition of stern moralities and definite dogmas we are fixed down by a sort of mental routine about morality. It is as if we are being forced to be bad because we are good, and so become slaves to mere morality rules. Youth scorns the child it was once, and dogmatises. Complexity, having taken the place of spon- taneous simplicity, life’s picture is crammed with arbitrary lines blocking out the truth to Nature and to Beauty. We are concerned with detail more than life, with rigidity rather than fluidity, with morality more than spiritu- ality. Many of us are at the point in modern life at which a true artist might have arrived if, knowing and accepting Hinton’s view about painting, he had been asked to put a certain drawing true to nature and not to convention. He would see immediately that the first thing 278 JAMES HINTON would be to clear the canvas from unnecessary lines and regain a simplicity, unlike that of a child’s drawing, and yet having in it all that the child’s attempt implied and the youth’s attempt implied—spontaneity and control. The true moralist to-day is trying to weld the past into the newer view of what true morality and real spirituality imply. To see with the singleness of the child and combine this with the control merged into habit by the youth, so as to retain in the great picture of human life what is essential and beautiful, is to be the artist in life. The larger world of true spiritu- ality knows neither licence nor restraint, but only beauty and joy. The day for arbitrary rules about vice and virtue, for evolved souls, is past. “A virtue,” says Rahel Varnhagen, the Jewess, “may be a much poorer thing than a passion, and fulfilment of duty is often nothing else than a form of punctiliousness and officious- ness.” As the child period in both life, art, and morals has to be gone through, it is also impera- tive to linger a while in the period where detail, dogmatism, and arbitrary rules take the place of spontaneity. The true artist in life should, however, desire to emerge into a finer sphere, , which is beyond morality, and reach, in this way, the higher liberty which needs no fixed com- mandments, as it is a law in itself. It is just this great spiritual fact that we seem afraid to face. The simple vision of our child- hood seems almost forgotten, the land wherein ART AND MORALS 279 fairies and pixies were realities, and we cling to the traditions and almost inquisitions in which our youth has been guarded. In deadly fear lest we may be letting go all things by accepting all things, we dare not rub out our superstitions or act as artists in the true sense. Fear of life as a whole holds us as the fear of hell Once held us. It is the fear of the child when its swaddling clothes are untied, or the fear of the bride as she looks in her lover’s eyes at the new life ahead. The time has arrived for us to come out from the chrysalis stage and use our wings, or, as Hinton would put it, to erase old lines in our picture so that the horizon may be seen and the imagination have free play. Not an un- necessary stroke must be conceded to the con- ventions, not a curve omitted if it makes for a larger view and for the Greater Beauty. Love is in prison and fettered by commercialism, lust, and prudery. “Good,” in this as in all things, must be seen in relation and not in isolation or in detail, and “bad” must be realised as a mere rubbing out of unnecessary lines and curves. Just as Tagore’s definition of death is the image of a child taken from its mother’s left breast in order to drink from the right breast, so the true moralist’s conception is life able to drink at Nature’s breast without a sense of shame or sin, in a sure certainty that what is natural is divine, and what is divine is beautiful. THE END INT) E X Altruism, Hinton's, 58, 194 Art and morals, 254 et seq. Asceticism, 13, 39, 91, 128, 131, 139, 263 Augustine, St., 54, 123 Beauty, 258, 261 Beethoven, 205 Berry, Dr., 34 Berth, Edouard, 130 Binns, H. B., 72 Birt, Eliza, 5, 231 Blake, 36, 124 Boole, Mrs. Everest, 6, 34, 67,239 Brooke, Rev. Stopford, 22 Chastity, 135, 166 Child in relation to genius, 199, 206, 222, 248,277 Christ, 53, 208, 219 Christianity, 7, 50, 69, 156, 195, 228 Church, the, 228 Civilisation, Hinton on European, 13 Coleridge's influence on Hinton, 20 - Constable, Hinton's admiration of, 254 Cox, David, 254 Domestic service problem, 169, 229 Dupré, Jules, 254 Dynamic conception of morals, 11, 60, 67, 117, 137 Economic independenceof women, 101, 110, 122, 134, 137, 173, 175, 226, 236, 247 Eliot, George, 205 Ellis, Havelock, i\. Evelyn, 23 Family life, Hinton on, 116, 130, 224 et seq. Free-will, 271 Genius, Hinton's conception of, 17, 81, 196, 198 et seq., 269 George, W. L., 228 Gluttony, moral analogy of, 46, 91, 95, 135, 199, 241 Godiva, 214 Haddon, Caroline, 11, 13, 17, 26, 27, 37, 38, 64, 81 Hearn, Lafcadio, 118 Hegel, 52 Helps, Sir Arthur, 143 Hindoo's attitude towards fleas, analogy of, 112 Hinton, Charles, 2 Hinton, C. Howard, 191 Hinton, Surgeon-Major H. B., I Hinton, James, his character, 5, 13, 16, 21, 26, 28; his mother, 5,231; death, 10,21; a thought- artist, 6, 16; on Christianity, 7, 50, 69, 156, 195, 228 ; his appearance, 29; on prostitu- tion, 98 et seq. ; on monogamy and polygamy, 7, 121 et seq., 252; much of the woman in, 8, 13, 233; influence of White- chapel on, 91, 107; as a moral- ist, 11, 15, 55, 60, 254 et seq.; his love of music and painting, 11, 254; his conception of purity, 18, 45, 59, 104, 106,229, 265; influence of Coleridge On, 20; his friendships with women. 281 282 INDEX ception of love, 33, 41, 73, 85, 119, 126, 177, 180, 241 ; his conception of service, 46, 111, 136, 150, 193; his conception of the law-breaker, 50 et seq. ; his altruism, 58, 194; his Mystery of Pain, 77; as a sinner, 189; dominated by Nature, 190; opinion of illegitimate relationships, 191 ; his feeling for Nature, 194; his view of genius, 198 et seq.; his worship of women, 230; on art, 254 et Séq. Hinton, Mrs. James, 9, 26, 27, 28, 101 Hinton, Rev. James, 1, 2, 3, 4 Hinton, Rev. John Howard, 1, 5 Hinton, Thomas, 2 Holiness, 271 - Home, Hinton on the, 116, 224 et Seq. Hopkins, Ellice, 26 Howard, John, 4 Hutchinson, Woods, 12 Huxley, 193 Ibsen, 235 Impulse, Hinton on obeying, 33, 35 Jacks, L. P., 36 Jealousy, 102, 142 et seq., 247 Jones, Miss Agnes, 28 Love, Hinton’s conception of, 33, 41, 73, 85, 119, 126, 177, 180, 24] Luther, 105, 159 Macphail, A., 231 Marriage, 69, 121 et seq., 156, 159, 164, 169, 170, 172,226 Mathematics, 7, 55 Maurice, F. D., 30 Mendelssohn, 273 Michels, Robert, 121 Mill, J. S., 52 Milton, 176 Monogamy, 7, 112, 121 et &eq. 16, 23, 26, 31, 232; his con- Morals, Hinton on, 11, 39, 51, 55, 60, 67, 117, 137; in relation to art, 254 et seq., 278 Mozart, ll Music, Hinton’s love of, 11, 254, application of his ideas to, 55, 239, 255, 261, 269, 273; com- pared to sexual pleasure, 106, 229 Nature, Hinton's conception of, 60, 81, 185 et seq., 201, 217, 255, 268 Nelson, 202 Newton, 212 Nietzsche, 224 Ongar, Taylors of, 4 Pain, the mystery of, 77 et seq. Painting, Hinton’s love of, 11, 255, application of his ideas to, 55, 255 et seq., 274 Passion, Hinton on the function of, 39, 67, 73. Peard, George, 5, 28 Pleasure, the morality of, 43, 77 et seq., 266 Polygamy, Hinton’s conception of, 7, 121 et seq. ; criticism of, 178 et seq., 252 Polygyny, 153 Positivism, 52 Prostitution, 69, 90, 98 et seq., 139, 168, 171 Purity, Hinton’s conception of, 18, 45, 59, 73, 104, 109, 124, 155, 265 Restraints involved by marriage system, 170 Rolland, Romain, 49, 77 Ruskin, 205 Sabbath-keeping, analogy of, 90 Saint-Simon, 191 Schreiner, Olive, 235 Science, 274 Self, Hinton on the rule of, 12, 41, 63, 88, 241, 249 INDEX 283 Service, Hinton's conception of, 46, 111, 136, 150, 193 Sexual union, Hinton on, 37, 44, 70, 92, 106, 167, 180, 229, 241, 249 Shakespeare, 4 Shelley, 36, 191 Sin, 11, 85, 188 Sincerification, 121, 174 Spencer, Herbert, 52 Ståel, Madame de, 191 Strange, Mary, 2 Swinburne, 205 Tagore, 279 Talent and genius, 198, 203, 208. 27] Taylor, Ann, 4 Taylor, Josiah, 4 Titian, 275 Turner, 11, 254 Utah, 168 Variation in marriage order, 154, 164 Virtue, 12, 18, 19, 34, 56, 66, 104, 119, 141, 243, 245, 271 Wagner, 205 Whitman, 76 Wilks, on Hinton, Sir Samuel, 20 Women, and a new civilisation, 13, 14, 142, 173, 175, 224, 238; as saviours, 103; as music, 106, 229; nearer to nature than man, 109, 251 ; economic inde- pendence of, 101, 110, 122, 134, 137, 153, 173, 175,226,236,249; their business in the future, 115, 119 ; sacrificed in marriage, 157, 250; and chastity, 166; moral equality with men, 176; maternal needs of, 179; and genius, 210, 239, 251 ; and the home, 224 et seq. ; Hinton’s worship of, 230; functions of, 237; virtue of,245; beauty of, 261 Wood, Michael, 189 JAN 13 1020 Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury. 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