I have said that women are not sentimental, i.e., not prone to permit
mere emotion and illusion to corrupt their estimation of a situation.
The doctrine, perhaps, will raise a protest. The theory that they are
is itself a favourite sentimentality; one sentimentality will be
brought up to substantiate another; dog will eat dog. But an appeal to
a few obvious facts will be enough to sustain my contention, despite
the vast accumulation of romantic rubbish to the contrary.
Turn, for example, to the field in which the two sexes come most
constantly into conflict, and in which, as a result, their habits of
mind are most clearly contrasted—to the field, to wit, of monogamous
marriage. Surely no long argument is needed to demonstrate the superior
competence and effectiveness of women here, and therewith their greater
self-possession, their saner weighing of considerations, their higher
power of resisting emotional suggestion. The very fact that marriages
occur at all is a proof, indeed, that they are more cool-headed than
men, and more adept in employing their intellectual resources, for it
is plainly to a man’s interest to avoid marriage as long as possible,
and as plainly to a woman’s interest to make a favourable marriage as
soon as she can. The efforts of the two sexes are thus directed, in one
of the capital concerns of life, to diametrically antagonistic ends.
Which side commonly prevails? I leave the verdict to the jury. All
normal men fight the thing off; some men are successful for relatively
long periods; a few extraordinarily intelligent and courageous men (or
perhaps lucky ones) escape altogether. But, taking one generation with
another, as every one knows, the average man is duly married and the
average woman gets a husband. Thus the great majority of women, in this
clear-cut and endless conflict, make manifest their substantial
superiority to the great majority of men.
Not many men, worthy of the name, gain anything of net value by
marriage, at least as the institution is now met with in Christendom.
Even assessing its benefits at their most inflated worth, they are
plainly overborne by crushing disadvantages. When a man marries it is
no more than a sign that the feminine talent for persuasion and
intimidation—i.e., the feminine talent for survival in a world of
clashing concepts and desires, the feminine competence and
intelligence—has forced him into a more or less abhorrent compromise
with his own honest inclinations and best interests. Whether that
compromise be a sign of his relative stupidity or of his relative
cowardice it is all one: the two things, in their symptoms and effects,
are almost identical. In the first case he marries because he has been
clearly bowled over in a combat of wits; in the second he resigns
himself to marriage as the safest form of liaison. In both cases his
inherent sentimentality is the chief weapon in the hand of his
opponent. It makes him cherish the fiction of his enterprise, and even
of his daring, in the midst of the most crude and obvious operations
against him. It makes him accept as real the bold play-acting that
women always excel at, and at no time more than when stalking a man. It
makes him, above all, see a glamour of romance in a transaction which,
even at its best, contains almost as much gross trafficking, at bottom,
as the sale of a mule.
A man in full possession of the modest faculties that nature commonly
apportions to him is at least far enough above idiocy to realize that
marriage is a bargain in which he gets the worse of it, even when, in
some detail or other, he makes a visible gain. He never, I believe,
wants all that the thing offers and implies. He wants, at most, no more
than certain parts. He may desire, let us say, a housekeeper to protect
his goods and entertain his friends—but he may shrink from the thought
of sharing his bathtub with anyone, and home cooking may be downright
poisonous to him. He may yearn for a son to pray at his tomb—and yet
suffer acutely at the mere approach of relatives-in-law. He may dream
of a beautiful and complaisant mistress, less exigent and mercurial
than any a bachelor may hope to discover—and stand aghast at admitting
her to his bank-book, his family-tree and his secret ambitions. He may
want company and not intimacy, or intimacy and not company. He may want
a cook and not a partner in his business, or a partner in his business
and not a cook. But in order to get the precise thing or things that he
wants, he has to take a lot of other things that he doesn’t want—that
no sane man, in truth, could imaginably want—and it is to the
enterprise of forcing him into this almost Armenian bargain that the
woman of his “choice” addresses herself. Once the game is fairly set,
she searches out his weaknesses with the utmost delicacy and accuracy,
and plays upon them with all her superior resources. He carries a
handicap from the start. His sentimental and unintelligent belief in
theories that she knows quite well are not true—e.g., the theory that
she shrinks from him, and is modestly appalled by the banal carnalities
of marriage itself—gives her a weapon against him which she drives home
with instinctive and compelling art. The moment she discerns this
sentimentality bubbling within him—that is, the moment his oafish
smirks and eye rollings signify that he has achieved the intellectual
disaster that is called falling in love—he is hers to do with as she
will. Save for acts of God, he is forthwith as good as married.