ABSTRACT
The masculine ideal of strength and complete control is joined to its opposite by the closest of all possible relations between opposites that of paradox. Again and again in works by the School of Virility the very drive for control is itself the cause of control's dissolution. The men who pursue this control have their own kind of vital energy; ultimately, though, they lose the deeper elan vital, that flexible principle which includes all possibilities and not just that of manhood. As the moments of 'natural' virility elude a man over and over again, he begins to shore up his sense of manhood with theory, with language, with artifice. Similarities and differences must be held in the head simul-taneously, resisting the temptation to exaggerate in either direction. This applies to men as a group; to men and women; to the individual and the whole of humanity. William Blake, for one, would approve: 'Without Contraries there is no Progression'.
