e, is to repress
that something. And here I want to say a word in answer to a number of
letters that I have had on the point which I raised early in this book,
when I claimed that women have to pay as great a tax and suffer as great
a hardship from repression as men do. People--both men and women--have
written to say that this is not true, and to such I wish to make my point
quite clear. I did not say that men and women suffered _in the same way_. I
said that they suffered _equally_; and since the question has been raised,
I should like just to answer it here. To me it seems, judging as far as I
can, from the people that I know, that--speaking very generally--passion
comes to a man with greater violence, and is more liable to leave him in
peace at other times. Passion is to a man who is of strong temperament like
a storm at sea. It seems the very embodiment of violence and force. The
mere sight of the sea angry almost terrifies one, even if one is perfectly
safe from the violence of the storm; but the depths are not stirred. And in
the case of a woman I would take a different figure of speech altogether,
and say that very often the strain on her is much less dramatic, much less
violent, and more persistent. I think of the strain as something like that
silent, uninterrupted thrust of an arch against the wall, of a dome on the
walls that support it. There is no sign of stress. But it is so difficult
to build a dome rightly that Italy, the land of domes, is covered with the
ruins of those churches whose domes gradually, slowly, thrust outwards till
the walls on which they rested gave way and the church was in ruins. That
kind of strain is easily denied by the very people who are enduring it. It
is so customary, so much a part of their life, that they are unconscious of
it.

No one who studies psychology to-day can fail to realize how unconscious
people often are of the seat and the nature of their own troubles. It is
true that the tendency to _exaggerate_ the importance of sex seems likely
to vitiate to some extent the conclusions of psychologists like Freud and
his disciples. But that they have revealed to us a mass of hitherto unknown
and un-understood suffering in the minds of both women and men, arising
from the continual repression of a passion whose strength may be measured
by the disastrous consequences caused by repressing it, no one who knows
anything at all of modern psychology can deny. Those who do not understand