ely unlike the reckless, unreasoning, maternal reproduction of
the woman of the past, the most typical male tends to feel in at least
the same degree the moral and social obligation entailed by awakening
lifehood: if the ideal which the New Woman shapes for herself of a male
companion excludes the crudely animal hard-drinking, hard-swearing,
licentious, even if materially wealthy gallant of the past; the most
typically modern male's ideal for himself excludes at least equally
this type. The brothel, the race-course, the gaming-table, and habits
of physical excess among men are still with us; but the most superficial
study of our societies will show that these have fallen into a new place
in the scale of social institutions and manners. The politician, the
clergyman, or the lawyer does not improve his social or public standing
by violent addictions in these directions; to drink his companions
under the table, to be known to have the largest number of illicit sex
relations, to be recognised as an habitual visitant of the gambling
saloon, does not, even in the case of a crowned head, much enhance his
reputation, and with the ordinary man may ultimately prove a bar to all
success. If the New Woman's conception of love between the sexes is one
more largely psychic and intellectual than crudely and purely physical,
and wholly of an affection between companions; the New Man's conception
as expressed in the most typical literature and art, produced by
typically modern males, gives voice with a force no woman has surpassed
to the same new ideal. If to the typical modern woman the lifelong
companionship of a Tom Jones or Squire Western would be more intolerable
than death or the most complete celibacy, not less would the most
typical of modern men shrink from the prospect of a lifelong fetterment
to the companionship of an always fainting, weeping, and terrified
Emilia or a Sophia of a bygone epoch.

If anywhere on earth exists the perfect ideal of that which the modern
woman desires to be--of a labouring and virile womanhood, free, strong,
fearless and tender--it will probably be found imaged in the heart of
the New Man; engendered there by his own highest needs and aspirations;
and nowhere would the most highly developed modern male find an image of
that which forms his ideal of the most fully developed manhood, than in
the ideal of man which haunts the heart of the New Woman.

Those have strangely overlooked some of the most i