Paul and the Christian churches have dirtied desire, degraded women, debased procreation, vulgarized and vilified the best instinct in us. Priests in black gowns are going their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys and desires.
And the worst of it all is that the highest function of man has been degraded by foul words so that it is almost impossible to write the body's hymn of joy as it should be written. The poets have been almost as guilty in this respect as the priests: Aristophanes and Rabelais are ribald, duty, Boccaccio cynical, while Ovid leers cold-bloodedly and Zola, like Chaucer, finds it difficult to suit language to his desires. Walt Whitman is better, though often merely commonplace. The Bible is the best of all, but not frank enough even in the noble song of Solomon which now and then by sheer imagination manages to convey the ineffable!
We are beginning to reject Puritanism and its unspeakable, brainless pruderies; but Catholicism is just as bad. Go to the Vatican Gallery and the great Church of St. Peter in Rome and you will find the fairest figures of ancient art clothed in painted tin, as if the most essential organs of the body were disgusting and had to be concealed.
I say the body is beautiful and must be lifted and dignified by our reverence: I love the body more than any Pagan of them all and I love the soul and her aspirations as well; for me the body and the soul are alike beautiful, all dedicate to Love and her worship.
I have no divided allegiance and what I preach today amid the scorn and hatred of men will be universally accepted tomorrow; for in my vision, too, a thousand years are as one day.
We must unite the soul of Paganism, the love of beauty and art and literature with the soul of Christianity and its human loving-kindness in a new synthesis which shall include all the sweet and gentle and noble impulses in us. What we all need is more of the spirit of Jesus: we must learn at length with Shakespeare: «Pardon's the word for all!»
I want to set this Pagan-Christian ideal before men as the highest and most human, too.
Now one word to my own people and their peculiar shortcomings. Anglo-Saxon domineering combativeness is the greatest danger to humanity in the world today. Americans are proud of having blotted out the Red Indian and stolen his possessions and of burning and torturing Negroes in the sacred name of equality. At all cost we must get rid of our hypocrisies and falsehoods and see ourselves as we are-a domineering race, vengeful and brutal, as exemplified in Haiti; we must study the inevitable effects of our soulless, brainless selfishness as shown in the World War.
The Germanic ideal, which is also the English and American ideal, of the conquering male that despises all weaker and less intelligent races and is eager to enslave or annihilate them must be set aside. A hundred years ago, there were only fifteen millions of English and American folk; today there are nearly two hundred millions, and it is plain that in another century or so they will be the most numerous, as they are already by far the most powerful race on earth.
The most numerous folk hitherto, the Chinese, has set a good example by remaining within its own boundaries, but these conquering, colonizing Anglo-Saxons threaten to overrun the earth and destroy all other varieties of the species man. Even now we annihilate the Red Indian because he is not subservient, while we are content to degrade the Negro who doesn't threaten our domination.
Is it wise to desire only one flower in this garden of a world? Is it wise to blot out the better varieties while preserving the inferior?
And the Anglo-Saxon ideal for the individual is even baser and more inept. Intent on satisfying his own conquering lust, he has compelled the female of the species to an unnatural chastity of thought and deed and word. He has made of his wife a meek upper-servant or slave (die Haus-frau), who has hardly any intellectual interests and whose spiritual being only finds a narrow outlet in her mother-instincts. The daughter he has labored to degrade into the strangest sort of two-legged tame fowl ever imagined: she must seek a mate while concealing or denying all her strongest sex-feelings; in fine, she should be as cold-blooded as a frog and as wily and ruthless as an Apache on the war-path.
The ideal he has set before himself is confused and confusing: really he desires to be healthy and strong while gratifying all his sexual appetites. The highest type, however, the English gentleman, has pretty constantly in mind the individualistic ideal of what he calls an «all-round man,» a man whose body is harmoniously developed and brought to a comparatively high state of efficiency.
He has no inkling of the supreme truth that every man and woman possesses some small facet of the soul which reflects life in a peculiar way or, to use the language of religion, sees God as no other soul born into the world can ever see Him.
It is the first duty of every individual to develop all his faculties of body, mind and spirit as completely and harmoniously as possible; but it is a still higher duty for each of us to develop our special faculty to the uttermost consistent with health; for only by so doing shall we attain to the highest self-consciousness or be able to repay our debt to humanity. No Anglo-Saxon, so far as I know, has ever advocated this ideal or dreamed of regarding it as a duty. In fact, no teacher so far has even thought of helping men and women to find out the particular power which constitutes their essence and in-being and justifies their existence. And so nine men and women out of ten go through life without realizing their own special nature: they cannot lose their souls, for they have never found them.
For every son of Adam, for every daughter of Eve, this is the supreme defeat, the final disaster. Yet no one, so far as I know, has ever warned of the danger or spoken of this ideal.
That's why I love this book in spite of all its shortcomings and all its faults: it is the first book ever written to glorify the body and its passionate desires and the soul as well and its sacred, climbing sympathies.
Give and forgive, I always say, is the supreme lesson of life.
I only wish I had begun the book five years ago, before I had been half-drowned in the brackish flood of old age and become conscious of failing memory; but notwithstanding this handicap, I have tried to write the book I have always wanted to read, the first chapter in the Bible of Humanity.
Hearken to good counseclass="underline" Live out your whole free life, while yet on earth, Seize the quick Present, prize your one sure boon: Though brief, each day a golden sun has birth; Though dim, the night is gemmed with stars and moon.
Chapter I. My Life and Loves
Memory is the Mother of the Muses, the prototype of the artist. As a rule she selects and relieves out the important, omitting what is accidental or trivial. Now and then, however, she makes mistakes, like all other artists. Nevertheless, I take memory in the main as my guide. I was born on the 14th of February, 1855, and named James Thomas, after my father's two brothers; my father was in the navy, a lieutenant in command of a revenue cutter or gunboat, and we children saw him only at long intervals. My earliest recollection is being danced on the foot of my father's brother James, the captain of an Indiaman, who paid us a visit in the south of Kerry when I was about two. I distinctly remember repeating a hymn by heart for him, my mother on the other side of the fireplace, prompting: then I got him to dance me a little more, which was all I wanted. I remember my mother telling him I could read, and his surprise. The next memory must have been about the same time; I was seated on the floor screaming when my father came in and asked: «What's the matter?» «It's only Master Jim,» replied the nurse crossly; «he's just screaming out of sheer temper, Sir.