s 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
h