Averse from multiplying a species of animal for which neither of us felt very much respect

Fortunately my wife and I always agreed on the question of progeny. Neither of us wanted children, and we took steps to avoid them. Not that we necessarily held Proudhon’s view that ‘à l’amour proprement dit la progéniture est odieuse,’183 although I believe there is much to be said for this view; but at bottom, apart from wishing to escape the economic burden of a family, our feelings were averse from multiplying a species of animal for which neither of us felt very much respect, and in this matter would rather have sympathized, even if we did not altogether agree, with Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859).

In his Memoirs there is this remarkable passage: ‘I regard marriage as a sin and the procreation of children as a crime. Moreover, I am convinced that he who burdens himself with the yoke of matrimony is an evil-doer because he brings children into the world without being able to guarantee their happiness. I despise mankind in all classes. I foresee that posterity will be much more miserable than we are.184 Should I not be a sinner if, despite this outlook for my offspring, I thought of having any?’

Years later, George Moore was even more emphatic: ‘That I may die childless,’ he said, ‘that when my hour comes, I may turn my face to the wall, saying, I have not increased the great evil of human life—then, though I were a mundane, a fornicator, thief and liar, my sins shall melt even as a cloud. But he who dies with children about him, though his life were in all else an excellent deed, shall be accused by the truly wise, and the stain upon him shall endure for ever.’185The satanic Aleister Crowley was even more bitterly misanthropic, for he exclaimed: ‘Kill off mankind and give the earth a chance; Nature may find in her inheritance some seedlings of a race less infinitely base.’186

These may seem hardly tenable exaggerations, and as Humboldt’s and Moore’s were uttered a century ago they may sound unjustified. But to those youngsters who may think that for the septuagenarians and octogenarians of today to adopt an attitude of negativism and hostility to the modern world and humanity is unwarranted, if not contemptible, let it be solemnly and emphatically stated that no young person of the present day can ever know what we old Victorians feel about the many staggering changes that have come over the world since we were adolescents like them. They who have been born in a world already loudly humming with the whirl of mechanical transport, punctuated with the deafening detonations of motorcycles; whose skies were already being crossed and criss-crossed by machines travelling faster than sound, and whose peace and enjoyment of life and its former amenities have become more and more and habitually limited and threatened by innovations of all kinds, even in the most rural recesses of the land; whose very freedom of movement and of other activities has become exasperatingly hampered by the teeming hordes of a redundant population, so that every want, from a postage-stamp to a seat in a bus, train, restaurant, theatre or park, can be satisfied, if at all, only after a harassing wait or a bitter contest with competing crowds, especially in towns where every inch of pavement has to be conquered before it can be occupied—they, I say, who have been born in such a world, with all its present political uncertainties, dangers and confusions, cannot imagine how enchanting was our world of 1890, and how desperately we deplore its evanescence. To remember the peace, the freedom of movement, the serenity, stability and, above all, the predictability of English life in the nineties of the nineteenth century; to have known the absence of the perpetual scrimmage which now rages along every street, in every railway station and at every holiday resort in the land; even to see what has happened to the South Downs since we first trod their resilient turf seventy years ago, is to appreciate what the young of today have lost and are doomed to lose ever more and more irretrievably.

Anthony Ludovici
Confessions of an Anti-Feminist

[183] Amour et mariage, 1860, deuxième étude, Chapter 2, ix. ‘To love itself, progeny is hateful.’
[184] How prophetic! And Heine made the very same prophecy in 1842. See his Französische Zustände, Part II, Chapter 42.
[185] Confessions of a Young Man, 1886, Chapter 13, iii.
[186] Quoted in Louis Marlow, Seven Friends, 1953, Chapter 3.