Maternal love is an instinctive and natural impulse, and animals possess it in a degree as high as that of human beings. This alone is enough to show that it is not true love, that it is not of moral origin; for all morality proceeds from the intelligible character which animals, having no free will, do not possess. The ethical imperative can be heard only by a rational creature; there is no such thing as natural morality, for all morality must be self-conscious.
Her position outside the mere preservation of the race, the fact that she is not merely the channel and the indifferent protector of the chain of beings that passes through her, place the prostitute in a sense above the mother, so far at least as it is possible to speak of higher or lower from the ethical point of view when women are being discussed.
The matron whose whole time is taken up in looking after her husband and children, who is working in, or superintending the work of, the house, garden, or other forms of labour, ranks intellectually very low. The most highly-developed women mentally, those who have been lauded in poetry, belong to the prostitute category; to these, the Aspasia-type, must be added the women of the romantic school, foremost among whom must be placed Karoline Michaelis-Böhmer-Forster-Schlegel-Schelling.
It coincides with what has been said that only those men are sexually attracted by the mother-type who have no desire for mental productivity. The man whose fatherhood is confined to the children of his loins is he whom we should expect to choose the motherly productive woman. Great men have always preferred women of the prostitute type.[16] Their choice falls on the sterile woman, and, if there is issue, it is unfit and soon dies out. Ordinary fatherhood has as little to do with morality as motherhood. It is non-moral, as I shall show in chap. xiv.; and it is illogical, because it deals with illusions. No man ever knows to what extent he is the father of his own child. And its duration is short and fleeting; every generation and every race of human beings soon disappears.
[16] Wherever I am using this term I refer, of course, not merely to mercenary women of the streets.
The wide-spread and exclusive honouring of the motherly woman, the type most upheld as the one and only possible one for women, is accordingly quite unjustified. Although most men are certain that every woman can have her consummation only in motherhood, I must confess that the prostitute—not as a person, but as a phenomenon—is much more estimable in my opinion.
There are various causes of this universal reverence for the mother.
One of the chief reasons appears to be that the mother seems to the man nearer his ideal of chastity; but the woman who desires children is no more chaste than the man-coveting prostitute.
The man rewards the appearance of higher morality in the maternal type by raising her morally (although with no reason) and socially over the prostitute type. The latter does not submit to any valuations of the man nor to the ideal of chastity which he seeks for in the woman; secretly, as the woman of the world, lightly as the demi-mondaine, or flagrantly as the woman of the streets, she sets herself in opposition to them. This is the explanation of the social ostracisms, the practical outlawry which is the present almost universal fate of the prostitute. The mother readily submits to the moral impositions of man, simply because she is interested only in the child and the preservation of the race.
It is quite different with the prostitute. She lives her own life exactly as she pleases, even although it may bring with it the punishment of exclusion from society. She is not so brave as the mother, it is true, being thoroughly cowardly; but she has the correlative of cowardice, impudence, and she is not ashamed of her shamelessness. She is naturally inclined to polygamy, and always ready to attract more men than the one who would suffice as the founder of a family. She gives free play to the fulfilment of her desire, and feels a queen, and her most ardent wish is for more power. It is easy to grieve or shock the motherly woman; no one can injure or offend the prostitute; for the mother has her honour to defend as the guardian of the species, whilst the prostitute has forsworn all social respect, and prides herself in her freedom. The only thought that disturbs her is the possibility of losing her power. She expects, and cannot think otherwise than that every man wishes to possess her, that they think of nothing but her, and live for her. And certainly she possesses the greatest power over men, the only influence that has a strong effect on the life of humanity that is not ordered by the regulations of men.
In this lies the analogy between the prostitute and men who have been famous in politics. As it is only once in many centuries that a great conqueror arises, like Napoleon or Alexander, so it is with the great courtesan; but when she does appear she marches triumphantly across the world.
There is a relationship between such men and courtesans (every politician is to a certain extent a tribune of the people, and that in itself implies a kind of prostitution). They have the same feeling for power, the same demand to be in relations with all men, even the humblest. Just as the great conqueror believes that he confers a favour on any one to whom he talks, so also with the prostitute. Observe her as she talks to a policeman, or buys something in a shop, you see the sense of conferring a favour explicit in her. And men most readily accept this view that they are receiving favours from the politician or prostitute (one may recall how a great genius like Goethe regarded his meeting with Napoleon at Erfurt; and on the other side we have the myth of Pandora, and the story of the birth of Venus).
I may now return to the subject of great men of action which I opened in chap. v. Even so far-seeing a man as Carlyle has exalted the man of action, as, for instance, in his chapter on “The Hero as King.” I have already shown that I cannot accept such a view. I may add here that all great men of action, even the greatest of them, such as Cæsar, Cromwell, Napoleon, have not hesitated to employ falsehood; that Alexander the Great did not hesitate to defend one of his murders by sophistry. But untruthfulness is incompatible with genius. The “Memoirs of Napoleon,” written at St. Helena, are full of misstatements and watery sophistry, and his last words, that “he had loved only France,” were an altruistic pose. Napoleon, the greatest of the conquerors, is a sufficient proof that great men of action are criminals, and, therefore, not geniuses. One can understand him by thinking of the tremendous intensity with which he tried to escape from himself.
There is this element in all the conquerors, great or small. Just because he had great gifts, greater than those of any emperor before him, he had greater difficulty in stifling the disapproving voice within him. The motive of his ambition was the craving to stifle his better self. A truly great man may honestly share in the desire for admiration or fame but personal ambition will not be his aim. He will not try to knit the whole world to himself by superficial, transitory bonds, to heap up all the things of the world in a pyramid over his name. The man of action shares with the epileptic the desire to be in criminal relation to everything around him, to make them appanages of his petty self. The great man feels himself defined and separate from the world, a monad amongst monads, and, as a true microcosm, he feels the world already within him; he realises in the fullest sense of personal experience that he has a definite, assured, intelligible relation to the world whole. The great tribune and the great courtesan do not feel that they are marked off from the world; they merge with it, and demand it all as decoration or adornment of their empirical persons, and they are incapable of love, affection, or friendship.
The king of the fairy tale who wished to conquer the stars is the perfect image of the conqueror. The great genius honours himself, and has not to live in a condition of give and take with the populace, as is necessary for the politician. The great politician makes his voice resound in the world, but he has also to sing in the streets; he may make the world his chessboard, but he has also to strut in a booth; he is no more a despot than he is a beggar for alms. He has to court the populace, and here he joins with the prostitute. The politician is a man of the streets. He must be completed by the public. It is the masses that he requires, not real individualities. If he is not clever he tries to be rid of the great men,
