This brings us to a fact frequently noted by students of the subject:
that first-rate men, when they marry at all, tend to marry noticeably
inferior wives. The causes of the phenomenon, so often discussed and so
seldom illuminated, should be plain by now. The first-rate man, by
postponing marriage as long as possible, often approaches it in the end
with his faculties crippled by senility, and is thus open to the
advances of women whose attractions are wholly meretricious, e.g.,
empty flappers, scheming widows, and trained nurses with a highly
developed professional technic of sympathy. If he marries at all,
indeed, he must commonly marry badly, for women of genuine merit are no
longer interested in him; what was once a lodestar is now no more than
a smoking smudge. It is this circumstance that account for the low
calibre of a good many first-rate men’s sons, and gives a certain
support to the common notion that they are always third-raters. Those
sons inherit from their mothers as well as from their fathers, and the
bad strain is often sufficient to obscure and nullify the good strain.
Mediocrity, as every Mendelian knows, is a dominant character, and
extraordinary ability is recessive character. In a marriage between an
able man and a commonplace woman, the chances that any given child will
resemble the mother are, roughly speaking, three to one.
The fact suggests the thought that nature is secretly against the
superman, and seeks to prevent his birth. We have, indeed, no ground
for assuming that the continued progress visualized by man is in actual
accord with the great flow of the elemental forces. Devolution is quite
as natural as evolution, and may be just as pleasing, or even a good
deal more pleasing, to God. If the average man is made in God’s image,
then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God,
and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority
perish with his bodily frame. All animal breeders know how difficult it
is to maintain a fine strain. The universe seems to be in a conspiracy
to encourage the endless reproduction of peasants and Socialists, but a
subtle and mysterious opposition stands eternally against the
reproduction of philosophers.
Per corollary, it is notorious that women of merit frequently marry
second-rate men, and bear them children, thus aiding in the war upon
progress. One is often astonished to discover that the wife of some
sordid and prosaic manufacturer or banker or professional man is a
woman of quick intelligence and genuine charm, with intellectual
interests so far above his comprehension that he is scarcely so much as
aware of them. Again, there are the leading feminists, women artists
and other such captains of the sex; their husbands are almost always
inferior men, and sometimes downright fools. But not paupers! Not
incompetents in a man’s world! Not bad husbands! What we here
encounter, of course, is no more than a fresh proof of the sagacity of
women. The first-rate woman is a realist. She sees clearly that, in a
world dominated by second-rate men, the special capacities of the
second-rate man are esteemed above all other capacities and given the
highest rewards, and she endeavours to get her share of those rewards
by marrying a second-rate man at the top of his class. The first-rate
man is an admirable creature; his qualities are appreciated by every
intelligent woman; as I have just said, it may be reasonably argued
that he is actually superior to God. But his attractions, after a
certain point, do not run in proportion to his deserts; beyond that he
ceases to be a good husband. Hence the pursuit of him is chiefly
maintained, not by women who are his peers, but by women who are his
inferiors.
Here we unearth another factor: the fascination of what is strange, the
charm of the unlike, _heliogabalisme_. As Shakespeare has put it, there
must be some mystery in love—and there can be no mystery between
intellectual equals. I dare say that many a woman marries an inferior
man, not primarily because he is a good provider (though it is
impossible to imagine her overlooking this), but because his very
inferiority interests her, and makes her want to remedy it and mother
him. Egoism is in the impulse: it is pleasant to have a feeling of
superiority, and to be assured that it can be maintained. If now, that
feeling be mingled with sexual curiosity and economic self-interest, it
obviously supplies sufficient motivation to account for so natural and
banal a thing as a marriage. Perhaps the greatest of all these factors
is the mere disparity, the naked strangeness. A woman could not love a
man, as the phrase is, who wore skirts and pencilled his eye-brows, and
by the same token she would probably find it difficult to love a man
who matched perfectly her own sharpness of mind. What she most esteems
in marriage, on the psychic plane, is the chance it offers for the
exercise of that caressing irony which I have already described. She
likes to observe that her man is a fool—dear, perhaps, but none the
less damned. Her so-called love for him, even at its highest, is always
somewhat pitying and patronizing.