arisen in so many other ways.  Real responsible woman has never been silly; and any one wishing to knock her would be wise (like the streetboys) to knock and run away.  It is ultimately idiotic to compare this prehistoric participation with any royalties or rebellions.  Genuine royalties wish to crush rebellions.  Genuine rebels wish to destroy kings.  The sexes cannot wish to abolish each other; and if we allow them any sort of permanent opposition it will sink into something as base as a party system.

As marriage, therefore, is rooted in an aboriginal unity of instincts, you cannot compare it, even in its quarrels, with any of the mere collisions of separate institutions.  You could compare it with the emancipation of negroes from planters—­if it were true that a white man in early youth always dreamed of the abstract beauty of a black man.  You could compare it with the revolt of tenants against a landlord—­if it were true that young landlords wrote sonnets to invisible tenants.  You could compare it to the fighting policy of the Fenians—­if it were true that every normal Irishman wanted an Englishman to come and live with him.  But as we know there are no instincts in any of these directions, these analogies are not only false but false on the cardinal fact.  I do not speak of the comparative comfort or merit of these different things:  I say they are different.  It may be that love turned to hate is terribly common in sexual matters:  it may be that hate turned to love is not uncommon in the rivalries of race or class.  But any philosophy about the sexes that begins with anything but the mutual attraction of the sexes, begins with a fallacy; and all its historical comparisons are as irrelevant and impertinent as puns.

But to expose such cold negation of the instincts is easy:  to express or even half express the instincts is very hard.  The instincts are very much concerned with what literary people call “style” in letters or more vulgar people call “style” in dress.  They are much concerned with how a thing is done, as well as whether one may do it:  and the deepest elements in their attraction or aversion can often only be conveyed by stray examples or sudden images.  When Danton was defending himself before the Jacobin tribunal he spoke so loud that his voice was heard across the Seine, in quite remote streets on the other side of the river.  He must have bellowed like a bull of Bashan.  Yet none of us would think of that prodigy except as something poetical and appropriate.  None of us would instinctively feel that Danton was less of a man or even less of a gentleman, for speaking so in such an hour.  But suppose we heard that Marie Antoinette, when tried before the same tribunal, had howled so that she could be heard in the Faubourg St. Germain—­well, I leave it to the instincts, if there are any left.  It is not wrong to howl.  Neither is it right.  It is simply a question of the instant impression on the artistic and even animal parts of humanity, if the noise were heard suddenly like a gun.