The truth is that the picture of male carnality that such women conjure
up belongs almost wholly to fable, as I have already observed in
dealing with the sophistries of Dr. Eliza Burt Gamble, a paralogist on
a somewhat higher plane. As they depict him in their fevered treatises
on illegitimacy, white-slave trading and ophthalmia neonatorum, the
average male adult of the Christian and cultured countries leads a life
of gaudy lubricity, rolling magnificently from one liaison to another,
and with an almost endless queue of ruined milliners, dancers,
charwomen, parlour-maids and waitresses behind him, all dying of poison
and despair. The life of man, as these furiously envious ones see it,
is the life of a leading actor in a boulevard revue. He is a
polygamous, multigamous, myriadigamous; an insatiable and
unconscionable debauche, a monster of promiscuity; prodigiously
unfaithful to his wife, and even to his friends’ wives; fathomlessly
libidinous and superbly happy.
Needless to say, this picture bears no more relation to the facts than
a dissertation on major strategy by a military “expert” promoted from
dramatic critic. If the chief suffragette scare mongers (I speak
without any embarrassing naming of names) were attractive enough to men
to get near enough to enough men to know enough about them for their
purpose they would paralyze the Dorcas societies with no such cajoling
libels. As a matter of sober fact, the average man of our time and race
is quite incapable of all these incandescent and intriguing
divertisements. He is far more virtuous than they make him out, far
less schooled in sin, far less enterprising and ruthless. I do not say,
of course, that he is pure in heart, for the chances are that he isn’t;
what I do say is that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, he is
pure in act, even in the face of temptation. And why? For several main
reasons, not to go into minor ones. One is that he lacks the courage.
Another is that he lacks the money. Another is that he is fundamentally
moral, and has a conscience. It takes more sinful initiative than he
has in him to plunge into any affair save the most casual and sordid;
it takes more ingenuity and intrepidity than he has in him to carry it
off; it takes more money than he can conceal from his consort to
finance it. A man may force his actual wife to share the direst
poverty, but even the least vampirish woman of the third part demands
to be courted in what, considering his station in life, is the grand
manner, and the expenses of that grand manner scare off all save a
small minority of specialists in deception. So long, indeed, as a wife
knows her husband’s income accurately, she has a sure means of holding
him to his oaths.
Even more effective than the fiscal barrier is the barrier of
poltroonery. The one character that distinguishes man from the other
higher vertebrate, indeed, is his excessive timorousness, his easy
yielding to alarms, his incapacity for adventure without a crowd behind
him. In his normal incarnation he is no more capable of initiating an
extra-legal affair—at all events, above the mawkish harmlessness of a
flirting match with a cigar girl in a cafe-than he is of scaling the
battlements of hell. He likes to think of himself doing it, just as he
likes to think of himself leading a cavalry charge or climbing the
Matterhorn. Often, indeed, his vanity leads him to imagine the thing
done, and he admits by winks and blushes that he is a bad one. But at
the bottom of all that tawdry pretence there is usually nothing more
material than an oafish smirk at some disgusted shop-girl, or a
scraping of shins under the table. Let any woman who is disquieted by
reports of her husband’s derelictions figure to herself how long it
would have taken him to propose to her if left to his own enterprise,
and then let her ask herself if so pusillanimous a creature could be
imaged in the role of Don Giovanni.
Finally, there is his conscience—the accumulated sediment of ancestral
faintheartedness in countless generations, with vague religious fears
and superstitions to leaven and mellow it. What! a conscience? Yes,
dear friends, a conscience. That conscience may be imperfect, inept,
unintelligent, brummagem. It may be indistinguishable, at times, from
the mere fear that someone may be looking. It may be shot through with
hypocrisy, stupidity, play-acting. But nevertheless, as consciences go
in Christendom, it is genuinely entitled to the name—and it is always
in action. A man, remember, is not a being in vacuo; he is the fruit
and slave of the environment that bathes him. One cannot enter the
House of Commons, the United States Senate, or a prison for felons
without becoming, in some measure, a rascal. One cannot fall overboard
without shipping water. One cannot pass through a modern university
without carrying away scars. And by the same token one cannot live and
have one’s being in a modern democratic state, year in and year out,
without falling, to some extent at least, under that moral obsession
which is the hall-mark of the mob-man set free. A citizen of such a
state, his nose buried in Nietzsche, “Man and Superman,” and other such
advanced literature, may caress himself with the notion that he is an
immoralist, that his soul is full of soothing sin, that he has cut
himself loose from the revelation of God. But all the while there is a
part of him that remains a sound Christian, a moralist, a right
thinking and forward-looking man. And that part, in times of stress,
asserts itself. It may not worry him on ordinary occasions. It may not
stop him when he swears, or takes a nip of whiskey behind the door, or
goes motoring on Sunday; it may even let him alone when he goes to a
leg-show. But the moment a concrete Temptress rises before him, her
nose snow-white, her lips rouged, her eyelashes drooping
provokingly—the moment such an abandoned wench has at him, and his lack
of ready funds begins to conspire with his lack of courage to assault
and wobble him—at that precise moment his conscience flares into
function, and so finishes his business. First he sees difficulty, then
he sees the danger, then he sees wrong. The result is that he slinks
off in trepidation, and another vampire is baffled of her prey.
It is, indeed, the secret scandal of Christendom, at least in the
Protestant regions, that most men are faithful to their wives. You will
a travel a long way before you find a married man who will admit that
he is, but the facts are the facts, and I am surely not one to flout
them.