XVI.

My dear sir:

A LETTER FROM H. Y. R. TO MR. ANDREWS.

I inclose a newspaper slip of a letter published in a late issue of the St. Paul "Press," in which you will readily recognize the ear-marks of your old antagonist of twenty odd years ago, Henry James, of Newport.

I feel assured that Mr. James is laboring under a misconception of the motive which animates the "free-lover" in assailing our present cruel marriage laws, and is thus led to misstate the issue. He is equally earnest in his desire for the emancipation of woman, and his vehement rhetoric has demonstrated on numberless occasions that the legal tyranny of marriage serves only to embitter and defile its otherwise sweet and wholesome waters. But he assumes that the hostility of the technical free-lover is based on a totally different motive from his own; that it is a supremely selfish one, wholly in the interest of his organic appetites and passions. As well might he assume that the effort to relieve the hard conditions of prison-life was made in the interest of thievery, and insist that anyone advocating such amelioration afforded instant evidence that he was a thief, or at least was calculating the risks involved in some scheme of private plunder. To make good his position, it is incumbent on Mr. James to show that the men and women known as "technical free-lovers" are, practically, libertines, debauchees, and harlots; are lecherous, libidinous persons, who shamelessly "obey the voice of passion in preference to the voice of conscience." This is a task from which Mr. James would shrink with unfeigned abhorrence, but I see no other means by which he can vindicate his claim to candor and sober truth.

I have read the writings of Mrs. Woodhull, and heard her deliver her lectures; have read the current literature of the free -love movement these twenty years or more; and-while meeting with much that was repulsive and reprehensible- I am satisfied that the settlement of the question of social freedom involves issues of immeasurable value to the race, and invites the effort of every courageous and sincere man and woman; and I am also satisfied that, while a large proportion of the individuals who have espoused this unpopular cause exhibit a certain unhandsome egotism, and possess perhaps more vigor than cultivation, they are in all moral regards neither better nor worse than their neighbors.

But I fear Mr. James has confounded some of the exuvia of this new truth with the fair promise itself. The new truth in transition is always accompanied with irregular and sporadic manifestation. To be sure, well-bred people do not want to be always talking about their sexual relatio ns; nor will they, after these matters have been readjusted. Once woman is emancipated from the social and household subjection in which she is now (in a great measure unconsciously) held, a cooling, healing influence of modest restraint will descend from woman herself, and these turbulent waves of public discussion concerning a domain of life so private and sacred will subside into equable relations with other departments of human activity.

Henry James sits a crowned king in the realm of metaphysics. His penetration is something marvelous. His admirers become enthusiasts and declare that he alone of all men living is entitled to the name of philosopher. Time and space confess themselves mere shams, and the material universe fades out of mind under the matchless power of his analysis; the innermost mysteries of being unfold themselves, fall into order and method, and ultimate in worlds and passionate human hearts as a matter of course; history is illuminated, and the splendid destiny of the race is forecast with overwhelming certainty. But in the midst of all this, or perhaps because of this, one detects in him a certain inability to cope with actual affairs as they arise in the ever-shifting drama of life. His thought turns back upon itself when it comes in contact with the raw edge of things. And I hold that in this letter he has spoken unwisely; he has made his point, but it is at the expense of his own candor and magnanimity. He perceives the stupendous frauds we suffer in our social relations, none more clearly; and he with us is moved to attack; but, while the common instinct of outraged justice urges the rough onset with whatever bludgeon lies at hand, he is dismayed at the turmoil and confusion, and puts up his keen and highly-tempered blade in disgust, confessing that he has no stomach for the fight. Hinc illæ lacrymæ.

H. Y. R.

XVII.

COMMENTS BY MR. ANDREWS.

Henry James has, in a high degree, the rare qualities assigned to him by H. Y. R. But what shall we say of his persistent misrepresentation of the doctrine of free love? It is astounding that a man of his intelligence can write such balderdash. The fact argues either a crass and chronic stupidity on the subject, on his part, or else that he is wilfully bearing false witness against his neighbor. He asserts, not as his opinion, but ex cathedra, and as the undoubted fact, that the free love doctrinaires demand that the flesh shall be supreme; that free lovers are fleshly-minded or lecherous people, ignoring or subordinating the spiritual element of man's nature; that they are chimpanzees, brute beasts, etc., etc. The free lovers have never said so. They have merely asserted the law of individual freedom, instead of, or in predominance over, social constraint, as the safer and better medium through which to conduct to the higher development of mankind. They are a set of social philosophers who have arrived at this degree of spiritual insight into causes, and of faith in the self-regulative powers of freedom, in the place of regulations imposed from without. They may be right or wrong in this assurance, but, if wrong, it is on the side of spiritual elevation. It is because the God within them denies the necessity any longer of outward constraint and discipline to lift them to the highest social and spiritual conditions. It is surprising that Mr. James should not sufficiently well understand the working of spiritual laws to know that in charging on others the predominance of low and animal desires and manifestations simply because they demand a free field to live their own true lives, he convicts them of nothing, while he implicitly confesses that he is such, and that he would habitually so manifest himself, if outward constraint were not so laid upon him; in other words, that he, individually, is still a chimpanzee and nothing else, except in so far as outward social and legal constraint, coupled with domestic discipline, compel him to the exhibition of an outward decency; with some promise, withal, that, by the continuance of these ministrations, he may at some future day be developed into the higher sort of humanity, upon the spiritual plane.

But, if there is this hope of a better result in the future, even in his case, it may be that other individuals, with a better nature from superior inherited conditions and other causes, may long since have attained to that higher state in which they

are justified in claiming to be a law unto themselves, and to be exempt from disciplines which they or their ancestors may have had enough of, and which are now only hindrances for them, however necessary they may still be for less progressive individualities. Mr. James and a large class which he represents may still need a course of domestic infelicities, and, if I could accommodate them at the same time, I would even be willing that the dose should be increased in size and frequency; but that is no good reason why those who never had or have recovered from the chimpanzee disease should be required to go through, again and again, the same purgation.

I wonder whether it ever really did occur to Mr. Henry James and those of that ilk that possibly there may be men and women in the world who are built on a higher plane, or may have attained to a higher plane, spiritually, than any that he and they have yet attained to; instead of uniformly assuming that, if anybody differs from them and their personal standards, he must necessarily be on a lower plane of development. But Swedenborg, Mr. James's supreme channel of spiritual wisdom, rightly no doubt says that an angel, lifted into a higher heaven than that where he resides, sees nothing. STEPHEN PEARL ANDREWS.

XVIII.

LETTER FROM MR. JAMES TO MR. ANDREWS.

S. P. Andrews, Esq.:

DEAR SIR,-My letter of December, 1872, was not designed for publication, as is obvious upon the face of it, and I regret that my friend Mr. R. should have been so inconsiderate as to print it without consulting me. Had it been intended for publication, I should have modified its phraseology in more than one respect. It was written in the confidence of friendship, and betrays a latitude of expression permissible only to such confidence. My sole conscious purpose in writing it was to characterize two rival doctrines, and I should have abhorred to reflect injuriously upon the supporters of either doctrine, least of all the unfashionable one. For while multitudes of equally sincere people may be found doubtless arrayed on either side of this controversy, there can be just as little doubt that sincerity in your direction costs a good deal of thoughtless opprobrium, while in mine it wins a good deal of equally thoughtless popular applause; and sincerity that forfeits one's personal consideration will always argue a higher manhood than sincerity that attracts it. It is more than a duty, it is a pleasure, to admit all this; but I repeat that my difference with you is primarily intellectual and only derivatively personal. Your doctrine — if I understand it—is twofold, namely: First, that men are de jure exempt from outward liability, which is liability to other men, for the indulgence of their appetites and passions; Second, that they are de facto exempt from all inward liability for such indulgence, or liability to their own distinctive nature as men. In other words, you hold that I am not only under no conventional obligation to control my passions, no obligation imposed by outward law, but also under no natural obligation to that effect, no obligation imposed by my essential human quality. To say all in a word: You hold man to be his own law in respect to his passions, as well as in respect to his actions: provided of course that he doesn't wound his own ideal, or violate good taste.

(1) Thus your doctrine has both a negative or implicit force, as addressed to the making marriage free by progressively enlarging the grounds of divorce; and (2) a positive or explicit force, as addressed to the making love free by denying its essential subordination to marriage.

Now, I wholly agree with your doctrine on its negative merits, or in so far as it