Hartmann on the Ideal of Chastity

Franz Hartmann · Living the Life Series · 7 pages

From Five Years of Theosophy: Mystical, Philosophical, Theosophical, Historical, and Scientific Essays selected from “The Theosophist,” London: Reeves & Turner, 1885, pages 139–43. The frontispiece is John William Godward's Bouquet of 1899.

Hartmann's argument opens not with a rule but with an admission, and the admission is what gives the piece its character. Ideal woman is called the most beautiful work of the evolution of forms, and a beautiful woman the most attractive and lovely being a man can imagine; he adds that he never saw a male being with any claim to manly vigour, strength or courage who was not an admirer of woman, and that only a profligate, a coward or a sneak would hate women. The account that follows describes what he takes to happen next: that when a woman smiles on a complete man his human nature is aroused, his animal desires clamour like children for bread and refuse to be starved, his whole soul flies towards her, and if his higher principles are not strong enough to restrain him, his soul follows the temptations of the body. The outcome is stated as a reversal of roles — the animal nature has subdued the divine, the woman rejoices in her victory, the man is ashamed of his weakness, and instead of representing strength he becomes an object of pity. From this Hartmann draws the conclusion the title announces: that to be truly powerful a man must retain his power, and the ideal that modern society ridicules is a condition of that retention rather than a denial of what he has just conceded.

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