brought up at one of the best Convent Schools in England, the other day to her father when he happened to be praising that institution." 1 The logic is unavoidable. If love is impure so is the rite which pretends to sanctify it, and so is the state which that rite professes to create. Unholy Love can never produce Holy Matrimony; as Job needed to look God in the face, so do men and women need to look Love in the face, who assuredly is God's messenger to them, to teach them that no man liveth unto himself, and no man dieth unto himself. Why should they resent the compulsion or be afraid of the joy? But before Job could see God, he had to clear away the intervening superstitions of Religion; and before men and women can see Love, they must be quit of the superstition of the marriage rite. Marriage must be retained as a temporary expedient for the infirmity of mankind, who cannot at present dispense with outward and visible signs; but when it is erected into an idol more vast 1 Religio Poetae, by Coventry Patmore, p. 104. Sec. (f). than Baal and more rapacious than Moloch, the heavens recede and Love betakes himself to regions not salubrious. I never yet knew a woman who was not a Manichean at heart. All women, I think, have a secret conviction that, though God made the soul, the Devil made the body. They agree with the feminine mind of Sir Thomas Browne, and would like to obliterate sex, without obliterating children; though how they suppose that children would inherit joy without being conceived in joy does not appear. It seems inconceivable by them that when God imprinted sex on protoplasm (if we like to put it in that pseudo-scientific manner) he possibly knew what he was about. But women were held in cruel sexual subjection for thousands of years, and treated by Religion as unclean, and it is therefore no wonder that they continually pose as pure. They have yet to learn the sublime meaning of Blake's words: "The nakedness of woman is the work of God"; though it must be confessed that they seem thoroughly to enter into the spirit of the contiguous sentence: "The pride of the peacock is the glory of God"!1 This false attitude of the feminine mind has been nowhere exemplified so well as in the outcry that women have raised from time to time against "the nude in Art." Their objection depends on a confusion between nudity and nakedness, which are by no means the same. Blake uses the latter word in a symbolic sense; but its actual meaning is common in the Bible. In this sense there is no nakedness in the artistic nude, except in that which is deliberately obscene. Especially in the female nude (to which the chief objection attaches) there is no nakedness. It exists only in the observer's eye, or rather in his or her mind's eye. It is a most vivid instance of the power of imagination (in this instance perverted) and of the topsy-turvy way in which the world 1 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. See Selections, pp. 156-157. 2 See, for example, Genesis 1x, 22; Leviticus, passim ; Isaiah XLVII, 3; Ezekiel xxxIII, 18; Revelation 1, 18, &c. regards life. That which is entirely absent is seen as if it were present. It is the most perfect instance of illusion, depending on depraved imagination, that can be found in the whole range of human experience. "1 The use of clothes, in fact, did not arise and does not exist for the purpose of concealing nudity, but rather of suggesting it. Carlyle puts the truth in a very attenuated form: "The first purpose of Clothes is not warmth or decency, but ornament. From this inadequate statement he naturally draws an inadequate conclusion: "Clothes which began in foolishest love of Ornament, what have they not become! . . . Shame, divine Shame (Schaam, Modesty), as yet a stranger to the Anthropophagous bosom, arose there mysteriously under Clothes, a mystic groveencircled shrine for the Holy in man.”2 was nothing of the kind, except in the sense that sex itself is holy; for the real origin of garments was to increase attraction." Wherefore certain savage tribes regard them 2 Ibid, p. 36. 3 Westermarck, op. cit., p. 192. 1 Sartor Resartus, p. 34. It " 1 as indecent. "They excite through the unknown; in other words by suggestion." Eastern women cover their face for the same reason, though the custom is attributed to modesty, and the scarlet robe has the same signification among them as it had in the days of the Kings of Israel. "The sweeping pall and buskin, and nodding plume," says Hazlitt, "were never more serviceable to Tragedy, than the enormous hoops and stiff stays worn by the belles of former days were to the intrigues of Comedy. They assisted wonderfully in heightening the mysteries of the passion, and adding to the intricacy of the plot. Wycherley and Vanbrugh could not have spared the dresses of Vandyke. These strange fancy-dresses, perverse disguises, and counterfeit shapes, gave an agreeable scope to the imagination. That seven-fold fence,' was a sort of foil to the lusciousness of the dialogue, and a barrier against the sly encroachments of double entendre. The greedy eye and bold hand of indiscretion were re1 Westermarck, pp. 194 and 201. |