Lesbia Newman (1889)/Chapter 18
CHAPTER XVIII.
The Correspondence Concluded.
No. 4.—Letitia to Lesbia.
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Assuredly, my dear girl, I do not take you, or your uncle either, for a bibliolater in the vulgar sense; but it is clear that Mr Bristley is a believer, after a sort, in the inspiration of the Bible. I hardly expected this, and I must say it is a belief I do not share. A man with a hobby and lots of talent can hew anything he pleases into the shape of his theory; but to my mind the authors of the Jewish sacred books were simply augurs, who pandered to the ignorant superstitions of a people sitting in darkness, solely with a view to keep them under their thumb. Still your uncle is not the only clever man of the present day who thinks otherwise. For instance, we have here in Brooklyn a noted preacher, Dr Josiah Mispath,[1] who delights in just such lucubrations as those you have treated me to. I read to him that part of your letter; he was much interested, and said he would like to meet you. In particular, he asked me to draw your attention to Isaiah xiv. 29. “Rejoice not thou, whole Palestina, because the rod of him that smote thee is broken: for out of the serpent’s root shall come forth a cockatrice, and his fruit shall be a flying dragon.” Dr Mispath says this is a passage containing more occult wonders than those you have found in Genesis. He sees in it an esoteric doctrine to the effect that the male sex of mankind is to be superseded by the female, not only in all the higher functions common to both, but virtually also in those physiological ones which hitherto have been his separate province. He finds also other parts of Hebrew Scripture, such as the song of Deborah and Barak, where this monster out of the deep is obscurely alluded to. Well, that will not happen in our time, Lesbie, or only very exceptionally; so I will confine my attention to more practical relations.
‘And this leads me to say that, mythology apart, I have strong misgivings upon the whole subject, I mean upon the manner in which your philosophy handles the other sex. As I gather your drift, the love of woman for son or husband is a delusion and a snare, or at least it is love for an object essentially temporal—one which has not and cannot have the afflatus of eternal life. I understand you to say that as man rises in the spiritual world, he must put off from his soul all its masculine accoutrements, and incorporate the graces and virtues which are distinctively feminine. In doing so, he perforce discards his old identity altogether, he becomes—not the same person developed and improved, but a different person—a woman. No doubt the new and beautiful butterfly will retain some traces of its former self; still it will be no longer the dear ugly old grub upon whom so much tenderness used to be lavished. To argue home, I guess I have a good daughter’s affection for my own father, although I do not meet in him that intellectual affinity you are fortunate enough to find in your Uncle Bristley. Again, as I told you before, I look to marrying some day, when I get an offer from a man whose mental calibre I need not despise. In that event, I shall probably grow deeply attached to my mate as the years roll by, and feel that my existence is indissolubly bound up with his, for better for worse, both on this side of the grave and beyond. Even without any progeny to cement the bond, such a feeling of union and such joint hopes of immortality between husband and wife are, happily, not uncommon. Well, but now, according to your theories, Lesbie, it seems there is to be no Beyond for my father or my husband! Or rather, the Beyond will change their sex, and in so doing, will change their identity! To show how thoroughly it will do so, suppose my future husband to be a gigantic bearded man with a deep bass voice. When, in the future life, he is transfigured into a woman, will he keep the same bass voice or one like it, his person being changed into that of a gigantic female beauty? I grant you, the effect of such a metamorphosis would be grand, but would it not give a sad wrench to my tender thoughts of ‘auld lang syne?’ Do we not—those of us who are true-hearted—bestow more sterling love on our old decrepit pets than on the most attractive newcomers? If your own fine bull pup Goss were to live to be an old infirm dog, would you part with him to the first sausage-man who might come round, in order to make way for a new fancy? No, Lesbie, I am very sure you would not. And yet you calmly tell womankind that we must prepare to do with our husbands and fathers what you would not consent to do with your dog,—discard them hereafter in favour of more attractive personalities! This can hardly be accurate.
‘Believe me, I detest the loathsome idolatry upheld by the dollymopses, weaker vessels, or whatever you call them, who look upon wedlock as the end and aim of woman’s existence. I hold with you that to worship any men or man whatever, setting them up in our place, is the very essence of spiritual corruption. But that does not compel me to deny any place at all to the male sex; it does not prove to me that the leaning of a mother toward her son as a son, of a wife towards her husband as a husband, are illusions belonging to the terrestrial conditions, and doomed to pass away along with those conditions. Rather it seems to me that just as the common religious instinct of the world is a guarantee for a future life, so the equally general attraction of women toward their male kith and kin is a guarantee for the permanence of the bi-sexual relation in that future life. If you may despise the guarantee in the one case, why not also in the other? Anyhow, Lesbie, I must hear a good deal further, before I can digest the notion that the male half of society is an optical illusion! For in sober truth, your doctrine almost comes to that.’
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No. 4.—Lesbia to Letitia.
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‘Decidedly, dear Lettie, I should like to know your friend Dr Mispath; it would be one of the many inducements to my crossing the ocean to see you, if ever that can be compassed. Meanwhile, I see the drift of what he says, and if it be true, if the writers of the Hebrew mystical books were controlled by spirits, not lying ones, superior to their own intelligence, the passage you refer to about the fiery dragon out of the serpent’s root conveys at once a promise of Eden to those who are with our cause, and a warning of another place or state to those who are against it.
‘But to come down from ethereal speculations of that kind to the more homely part of our subject, I quite admit the force of what you say in praise of faithful affection for old companions, be they human beings or lower animals, and I admit, moreover, that if as frail mortals we have been true-hearted in that way, assuredly we shall not be less, but rather more so, when we become immortals. So far you and I are agreed; but you must see, nevertheless, that your contention as regards fidelity to the individual cuts both ways. If it establishes on the one hand that true love is for old companions, not new charmers, it surely implies on the other hand that such love should endure through any conceivable change in the personal appearance of the loved one. It should endure even through a change for the worse; how much more, then, through a change for the better! And, as a matter of fact, it does endure through change. Does not every mother’s son change his personality, to all intents and purposes, with his growth? What resemblance can a mother pretend there is between the boy of four who sat on her knee and the man of forty who brings her grandchildren to see her? The identity of the son is little more than nominal, yet the maternal affection, as a rule, endures. And so with husband and wife; does not your ‘auld lang syne’ represent a great change in both? ‘We twa hae run aboot the braes,’ etc. etc., in what respect does their old age resemble that time? Their affection is for a personality which endures through change, not for an unchanged personality. I maintain, therefore, that the constancy of good women’s love is a guarantee of its continuance, and of its increase too, for the quondam male partner who in the hereafter shall have cast his slough and returned into the Image of God, retaining only that which was pure in his former state.
‘But it stands to reason, from the analogies of natural evolution, that such upward change can only be for those who have striven upwards sincerely. They, for instance of the contrary, who, by wilfully opposing the elevation of womanhood upon earth, have done what in them lies to mar the rehabilitation of the spiritual hermaphrodite sundered by the Fall—such, it is clear, have forfeited for the time their birthright of redemption; their portion is the second death, the degradation below humanity, in order that they may have a chance to do better when eventually they reach it again through the varieties and degrees of animal transformation which may be necessary in each case. I need not go further into that: you have heard my uncle talk about it more than once;[2] and, after all, it is an open question after a certain point, that point being that we have to account for the existence of the lower world somehow. Swedenborg, who went deeply into the great questions of the other world, does not seem to have taken up the transmigration theory; that is rather surprising, because one would have expected that a philosopher who brought such a powerful understanding to bear upon human destiny, would not be content to leave unsolved the problem of animal origin. No doubt it may be said in reply that minds which range high, need not necessarily be able to range wide; but that is unsatisfactory to modern thought, which prefers rather to deal with patent facts than to invent ingenious theories. But what is more to your and my purpose, Lettie, I believe that neither class of mind, nor any class, will be able to see far behind the veil which separates us from the other world, until the intelligence of the one half of mankind shall be as free as the other, until the complete emancipation of our sex from the bondage which is partly traditional, partly self-imposed, shall give the world an impetus such as it has never yet had toward the better recognition of its temporal and eternal interests alike.’
******** (This closes such of the correspondence between our two girls, extending over several months, as it is worth while to give samples of. Great events, already dimly foreshadowed to each of them, arose to put an end for the time to their speculations.)