this history of birth and death. The conflict of man and man is ever on account of the blood, of woman. Woman, as Time, is that for which there is history at all.
The woman with race in her feels this even when she does not know it. She is Destiny, she plays Destiny. The play begins with the fight of men for the possession of her — Helen, and the tragedy of Carmen, and Catherine II, and the story of Napoleon and Désirée Clary, who in the end took Bernadotte over to the side of his enemies — and it is not a human play only, for this fight begins down in the animal world and fills the history of whole species. And it culminates in her swaying, as mother or wife or mistress, the Destiny of empires — Hallgerd in the Njal saga, the Frankish queen Brunhilde, Marozia who gave the Holy See to men of her choice. The man climbs up in his history until he has the future of a country in his hands — and then woman comes and forces him to his knees. Peoples and states may go down in ruin over it, but she in her history has conquered. This, in the last analysis, is always the aim of political ambition in a woman of race.[1]
Thus history has two meanings, neither to be blasphemed. It is cosmic or politic, it is being or it preserves being. There are two sorts of Destiny, two sorts of war, two sorts of tragedy — public and private. Nothing can eliminate this duality from the world. It is radical, founded in the essence of the animal that is both microcosm and participant in the cosmic. It appears at all significant conjunctures in the form of a conflict of duties, which exists only for the man, not for the woman, and in the course of a higher Culture it is never overcome, but only deepened. There are public life and private life, public law and private law, communal cults and domestic cults. As Estate,[2] Being is "in form" for the one history; as race, breed, it is in flow as itself the other history. This is the old German distinction between the "sword side" and the "spindle side" of blood-relationships. The double significance of directional Time finds its highest expression in the ideas of the State and the Family.
The ordering of the family is in living material what the form of the house is in dead.[3] A change in the structure and import of family life, and the plan
- ↑ And not until women cease to have race enough to have or to want children, not until they cease to be history, does it become possible for them to make or to copy the history of men. Conversely, it is deeply significant that we are in the habit of calling thinkers, doctrinaires, and humanity-enthusiasts of anti-political tendency "old women." They wish to imitate the other history, the history of woman, although they — cannot.
- ↑ No exact equivalent exists in common English for the German word "Stand." "Aristocracy" is too narrow, as under most aspects the clergy and under some even the Tiers have to be reckoned in. "Class" fails because, for logical completeness, it has to be stretched so as to bring in the qualitatively unclassed as a distinct category. (A whole social history is contained in the use of these and similar words at different periods.) The word "Estate" itself is used nowadays for the "masses" ("Fourth Estate" = "Proletariat"), but this very use, by Socialists, is an assertion that the masses, as workers, possess a qualitative peculiarity and condition of their own, and the word thus continues to connote ideas of differentiation, specific constitution, and oriented outlook. It may, therefore, be employed here without fear of misunderstanding or reproach of pedantry. — Tr.
- ↑ Cf. pp. 120, et seq.
