Edward Carpenter

“ The undoubted evils which exist in relation to it, for instance in our public schools as well as in our public life, owe their existence largely to the fact that the whole subject is left in the gutter so to speak—in darkness and concealment. No one offers a clue of better things, nor to point a way out of the wilderness; and by this very non-recognition the passion is perverted into its least satisfactory channels. All love, one would say, must have its responsibilities, else it is liable to degenerate, and to dissipate itself in mere sentiment or sensuality. ”

“ Yet Whitman could not have spoken, as he did, with a kind of authority on this subject, if he had not been fully aware that through the masses of the people this attachment was already alive and working—though doubtless in a somewhat suppressed and un-self-conscious form—and if he had not had ample knowledge of its effects and influence in himself and others around him. Like all great artists he could but give form and light to that which already existed dim and inchoate in the heart of the people. ”

“ For if the slaughter of tyrants is not the chief social duty nowadays, we have with us hydra-headed monsters at least as numerous as the tyrants of old, and more difficult to deal with, and requiring no little courage to encounter. And beyond the extirpation of evils we have solid work waiting to be done in the patient and life-long building up of new forms of society, new orders of thought, and new institutions of human solidarity—all of which in their genesis must meet with opposition, ridicule, hatred, and even violence. ”

“ I believe affection, attachment—whether to the one sex or the other—springs up normally in the youthful mind in a quite diffused, ideal, emotional form—a kind of longing and amazement as at something divine—with no definite thought or distinct consciousness of sex in it. The sentiment expands and fills, as it were like a rising tide, every cranny of the emotional and moral nature ”

“ For that the Urnings in their own lives put Love before everything else—postponing to it the other motives like money-making, business success, fame, which occupy so much space in most people’s careers—is a fact which is patent to everyone who knows them. This may be saying little or nothing in favor of those of this class whose conception of love is only of a poor and frivolous sort; but in the case of those others who see the god in his true light, the fact that they serve him in singleness of heart and so unremittingly raises them at once into the position of the natural leaders of mankind. ”

“ Then does my love become almost platonic, and lifts itself up—only to sink again in the mire, when it is deprived of its proper activity.
“For the rest, I am—and I can say it without boasting—not one of the worst of men. Mentally more sensitive than most average folk, I take interest in everything that moves mankind. I am kindly-disposed, tender, and easily moved to pity, can do no injury to any animal, certainly not to a human being, but on the contrary am active in a human-friendly way, where and however I can. ”

“ The Intermediate Sex.
“Urning men and women, on whose book of life Nature has written her new word which sounds so strange to us, bear such storm and stress within them, such ferment and fluctuation, so much complex material having its outlet only towards the future; their individualities are so rich and many-sided, and withal so little understood, that it is impossible to characterise them adequately in a few sentences.”—Otto de Joux. ”

“ In one form, as the mere semi-conscious Sex-love, which runs through creation and is common to the lowest animals and plants, it appears as a kind of organic basis for the unity of all creatures; in another, as the love of the mother for her offspring—which may also be termed a passion—it seems to pledge itself to the care and guardianship of the future race; in another, as the marriage of man and woman, it becomes the very foundation of human society. ”

“ Is it too much to hope that schools will in time recognise comradeship as a regular institution—considerably more important, say, than “fagging”—an institution having its definite place in the school life, in the games and in the studies, with its own duties, responsibilities, privileges, etc., and serving to ramify through the little community, hold it together, and inspire its members with the two qualities of heroism and tenderness, which together form the basis of all great character? ”

“ It is incontestable that a great number of men (and women) are drawn into the teaching profession by this sentiment—and the work they do is, in many cases, beyond estimation. Fortunate the boy who meets with such a helper in early life! I know a man—a rising and vigorous thinker and writer—who tells me that he owes almost everything mentally to such a friend of his boyhood, who took the greatest interest in him, saw him almost every day for many years, and indeed cleared up for him not only things mental but things moral, giving him the affection and guidance his young heart needed. ”

“ Such a woman, it is easily seen, from her special combination of qualities, is often fitted for remarkable work, in professional life, or as manageress of institutions, or even as ruler of a country. Her love goes out to younger and more feminine natures than her own; it is a powerful passion, almost of heroic type, and capable of inspiring to great deeds; and when held duly in leash may sometimes become an invaluable force in the teaching and training of girlhood, or in the creation of a school of thought or action among women. ”

“ It is the nature of youth to be long-enduring where Love is put to the test and a kind of occasional flicker—a kind of mocking semblance of hope, as like to hope as the rushing meteor is to the enduring sun—helps to support the load of misery, and so to prolong it. ”

“ For as people are beginning to see that the sexes form in a certain sense a continuous group, so they are beginning to see that Love and Friendship—which have been so often set apart from each other as things distinct—are in reality closely related and shade imperceptibly into each other. Women are beginning to demand that Marriage shall mean Friendship as well as Passion; that a comrade-like Equality shall be included in the word Love; and it is recognised that from the one extreme of a ‘Platonic’ friendship (generally between persons of the same sex) ”

“ There is no distinction in their minds between the simplest or most naive expression of feeling and the gravest abuse of human rights and decency; there is no distinction between a genuine heart-attachment and a mere carnal curiosity. ”

“ I felt myself frightfully desolate, miserable and unfortunate, and longed for a friend of the same nature as myself—yet without dreaming that there could be other such men. At the age of twenty-two149 I came to know a young man who at last cleared up my mind about sexual inversion and those affected with it, since he—an Urning, like myself—had fallen in love with me. The scales fell from my eyes, and I bless the day which brought light to me.... Towards woman in her sexual relation I feel a real horror, which the exercise of all my strongest powers of imagination would not avail to overcome ”

“ Plato fully understood its importance, and aimed at giving what to his countrymen was more or less sensual, a noble and exalted direction.... As one who has had much to do in instructing boys and starting them in life, I am convinced that the great secret of being a good teacher consists in the possibility of that rapport; not only of a merely intellectual nature, but involving a certain physical element, a personal affection, almost indescribable, that grows up between pupil and teacher, and through which thoughts are shared and an influence created that could exist in no other way. ”

“ How much of the enormous amount of philanthropic work done in the present day—by women among needy or destitute girls of all sorts, or by men among like classes of boys—is inspired by the same feeling, it would be hard to say; but it must be a very considerable proportion. I think myself that the best philanthropic work—just because it is the most personal, the most loving, and the least merely formal and self-righteous—has a strong fibre of the Uranian heart running through it ”

“ In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness,49 except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. ”

“ For a boy of fifteen or sixteen and upwards the boarding-school system may have its advantages. By that time a boy is old enough to understand some questions; he is old enough to have some rational ideal of conduct, and to hold his own in the pursuit of it; and he may learn in the life away from home a lot in the way of discipline, organization, self-reliance, etc. But to send a young thing, ignorant of life, and quite unformed of character, to take his chance by day and night in the public school as it at present exists, is—to say the least—a rash thing to do. ”

“ What is new in my view is that according to it homosexuality cannot be regarded as an atavism or as due to arrested embryonic development, or to incomplete differentiation of sex; it cannot be regarded as an anomaly of rare occurrence interpolating itself in customary complete separation of the sexes. Homosexuality is merely the sexual condition of those intermediate sexual forms that stretch from one ideal sexual condition to the other ideal sexual condition. ”

“ Certainly, if the confronting of danger and the endurance of pain and distress for the sake of the loved one, if sacrifice, unswerving devotion and life-long union, constitute proofs of the reality and intensity (and let us say healthiness) of an affection, then these proofs have been given in numberless cases of such attachment, not only as existing between men, but as between women, since the world began. ”

“ De Joux, who speaks on the whole favourably of Uranian men and women, says of the former: “They are enthusiastic for poetry and music, are often eminently skilful in the fine arts, and are overcome with emotion and sympathy at the least sad occurrence. Their sensitiveness, their endless tenderness for children, their love of flowers, their great pity for beggars and crippled folk are truly womanly.” ”

“ They concluded that a woman is simply a woman, and a man simply a man. In reality this is not so; there are women who are very much women, and women who are very little so. Such differences, concealed in former times by costume and mode of life, and masked by prejudice, stand out clearly in our society. ”

“ The very thought, so soon as it arises, of losing one’s social existence and of being rejected by everybody is more torment than can be imagined. In such a case, everything, everything would be forgotten that one had ever done in the way of good; in the consciousness of his lofty morality every normally disposed man would puff himself up, however frivolously he might really have acted in the matter of his love. I know many such normal folk whose unworthy conception of their love is indeed hard for me to understand.”—Ibid, p. ”

“ He speaks of this kind of love as causing a “generation in the beautiful”45 within the souls of the lovers. The image of the beloved one passing into the mind of the lover and upward through its deepest recesses reaches and unites itself to the essential forms of divine beauty there long hidden—the originals as it were of all creation—and stirring them to life excites a kind of generative descent of noble thoughts and impulses, which henceforward modify the whole cast of thought and life of the one so affected. ”

“ That men of this kind despise women, though a not uncommon belief, is one which hardly appears to be justified. Indeed, though naturally not inclined to “fall in love” in this direction, such men are by their nature drawn rather near to women, and it would seem that they often feel a singular appreciation and understanding of the emotional needs and destinies of the other sex, leading in many cases to a genuine though what is called ‘Platonic’ friendship. ”

“ In very truth I have injured no one, and I hold my love in its nobler activity for just as holy as that of normally disposed men, but under the unhappy fate that allows us neither sufferance nor recognition I suffer often more than my life can bear.”—Extract from a letter given by Krafft-Ebing. ”

“ Anyone who realises what Love is, the dedication of the heart, so profound, so absorbing, so mysterious, so imperative, and always just in the noblest natures so strong, cannot fail to see how difficult, how tragic even, must often be the fate of those whose deepest feelings are destined from the earliest days to be a riddle and a stumbling-block, unexplained to themselves, passed over in silence by others.6 To call people25 of such temperament ‘morbid,’ and so forth, is of no use. ”

“ These things indeed suggest to one that it is possible that the Uranian spirit may lead to something like a general enthusiasm of Humanity, and that the Uranian people may be destined to form the advance guard of that great movement which will one day transform the common life by substituting the bond of personal affection and compassion for the monetary, legal and other external ties which now control and confine society. ”

“ Such an individual is able to bewitch men by his soul-aroma, as they—though passively—bewitch him. But as he always lives in men’s society, and men, so to speak, sit at his feet, it comes about that such a supervirile often climbs the very highest steps of spiritual evolution, of social position, and of manly capacity. Hence it arises that the most famous names of the world and the history of culture stand rightly or wrongly on the list of homosexuals. Names like Alexander the Great, Socrates, Plato, Julius Cæsar, Michel Angelo, Charles XII. of Sweden, William of Orange, and so forth. ”

“ We cannot love women, but we lament with them, and help them on the hearth and by the cradle, in need and loneliness, as their most unselfish friends.... We do not despise women because they are weak, for we are much clearer-sighted, much less prejudiced than the so-called lords of creation, much nobler, more helpful, and just-minded than they.... ”

“ Affection in Education The place of Affection, and the need of it, as an educative force in school-life, is a subject which is beginning to attract a good deal of attention. Hitherto Education has been concentred on intellectual (and physical) development; but the affections have been left to take care of themselves. Now it is beginning to be seen that the affections have an immense deal to say in the building up of the brain and the body. Their evolution and organisation in some degree is probably going to become an important part of school management. ”

“ Of course wherever this subject touches on the domain of love we may expect difficult queries to arise. Yet it is here probably that the noblest work of the intermediate sex or sexes will be accomplished, as well as the greatest errors committed. It seems almost a law of Nature that new and important movements should be misunderstood and vilified—even though afterwards they may be widely approved or admitted to honour. Such movements are always envisaged first from whatever aspect they may possibly present, of ludicrous or contemptible. ”