Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/154

138 Sand, whose ideas on the emancipation of woman and whose psychological expositions of the most beautiful sides of ennobled humanity shame and ‘astonish us men.

There is nothing more pitiable than the fact that the greater part of the sex that preeminently represents beauty and joy pines away in the bondage of disagreeable and joyless powers. — As spring beside winter, so does this dark, odious, dehumanized priesthood stand beside the joyous, poetic, humane Grecian world, whose goddess was beauty and whose religion was joy. A second Greece will one day arise, an ennobled Greece, which will expiate the sins of the old by a complete recognition of the feminine sex. A second, revised edition of Greece designates the stage towards the attainment of which the entire aspirations of our present development must be directed.

It requires a great deal to take from man in general the religious need (I am not at all speaking of the æsthetic need) to embody his thoughts, desires, hopes, and ideals in pictures, or to worship them in symbols. It is, therefore, possible that the age of complete mental liberty will be bridged over by a period of philosophic-artistic romanticism; by a sort of new mythology which will represent the results of our historical development and of the moral ideals in works of art, and make them the objects of a new cult. If the objects of this cult only are the right ones, then it