impulses toward other men gave me a keen though sometimes painful
relish. Up to the present stage in the story these impulses of hers
had received no tangible expression. I saw them in her eyes, in her
thought about other things, in that frequently unbreakable reserve
toward me, that coolness, that aloofness that so often froze my soul
and filled me with a violent desire to disturb her or to rush off into
the slighter excitements of sex and of boon companionship. And when I
did so--the actualities of which were few indeed as compared with my
vagrant impulses--she knew it, for at that time I concealed nothing
from her. It was a pleasure for me to try to disturb her in this way,
too; but something I could hardly bear at times to see was how little
she seemingly cared for my infidelities. Was it because she cared
little for me in that relation, or because she knew how deeply I was
bound to her? Or was it because she was still dreaming of the Lover,
unrealized, unknown, that these my acts had little meaning for her?
Perhaps all these were elements of her feeling, and perhaps I was wrong
in attributing to her that indifference, for at a later time I suddenly
realized that these acts of mine had meant more to her than I had
thought. The simple truth is that I never knew and never shall know
what her real feeling was or may be.
At times, indeed, even then, I obscurely felt that her remoteness, her
frequent unwillingness was the condition of a greater love for me than
I felt for her; it enabled her to see me more impersonally and perhaps
to love me more unselfishly, to see me as apart from any necessary
instinctive relation to me. From the start, a part of her attitude was
that of a mother. The very intensity of my need for her gave me at
times to her the appealing charm of a child. And as her children came
to her, I became more of a child to her, and, a seeming contradiction,
more of a sensual need, for that element is not absent from a mother’s
love, and one strong feeling does not take from but adds to another.
I know in my cooler moments of sober thought that I could never have
loved a woman who was my mistress merely. A strong permanent desire
in me is and always has been to hold all things together, to combine
steadily in the course of life all the elements of it. Whenever I
saw in her an awakening love of a child, a greater going out to
Nature, a richer social unfolding, or a developing feeling for things
outside of our relation, at such moments there came a great inrushing
of love for her, even a greater sensual desire, and a more exalted
spiritual regard. And this broader love for her immediately re-acted
upon all my other interests,--my work, my feeling about society and
religion--giving to these greater warmth and passion. Thus the ocean
swells to and fro, the tides roll in and out, and there is a strange,
vibrating relation between all things, each enhancing the meaning of
all else. So that it is impossible for a lover to have a mistress, in
the sense of having a woman with whom he has a sensual relation only,
for a lover loves all things. Otherwise he is no true lover. And
whenever I saw anew the human being in her,--the mother, the artist,
the life-critic--I loved the female in her more intensely than ever!
Yes, I loved the female in her more intensely than ever, but it
is only the truth to add that I hated it more intensely too! As I
re-read what I have written, I am impressed with my desire to tell
the essentials, to lay bare the psychological facts of our relation,
without sentimentality, nakedly. But I am also again impressed with
the impossibility of it. As I read, it seems like fiction, even to me,
who can supply much more than I can write down. I know I have not told
enough about how I hated the female in her.
I indeed hated her bitterly at times. I was never indifferent, as she
was, but my hatred swelled as my love did; it took possession of me,
and though only once did I even take hold of her physically in anger,
and then slightly, yet a thousand times have I broken loose in utter
desire to hurt her to the foundations, to destroy her morally and
spiritually.
I hated as I loved her perfect and never-failing egotism, the
unconscious completeness with which she remained herself. I saw and
loved the integrity of her nature, its unyielding simplicity, but
I hated it too. She never spared me. She was as inexorable as even
Nietzsche could desire. Whenever she was uncomfortable, the females’
claws were immediately in evidence. I could feel them there, even when
she spoke no word. And when she did speak it was a relief, although
the words might be rasping and impatient. Because it was unnatural
for her to express herself in sound, when she did so, the sounds, if
those of exasperated discomfort, were peculiarly irritating. And yet
I preferred them to her intolerable silence, when that silence subtly
breathed an entire abandonment to her outraged need of female comfort.
When at peace her silence was balmy and adorable, but when her feline
equilibrium was threatened, her silence was worse to me than all the
torments of hell. Silence without positive peace is a plague more
unbearable than any of the compartments of Dante’s Inferno.
No, never in any real sense did she ever spare me. She never yielded
to my constant desire for what seemed to her, and perhaps were, the
minor moralities of life. They were forced upon her by circumstances,
and slowly and painfully she partly adapted herself to them, but never
willingly. By nature she hated housekeeping, and the prattle and needs
and noise of small children filled her with a wild yearning to go to
the woods and to attain the peace of the savage state. If she could
have lived in the sea, she would long ago have become a mermaiden,
reveling in the salty, undemanding, sea-weedy, salad-like charm of
that undifferentiated monster. Just as she withdrew herself at times
from my social and amorous demands, to sink into the bowels of her
earth, so she had wildly vicious moments when the children, cooks and
neighbors--whose social calls she never returned, and for whom she
generally had a blighting, cold contempt--appeared to her as scorpions
made to torment her. She disliked them as she disliked bed-bugs and
mosquitoes which to her were the most annoying of all the lower
animals. And for her to dislike anything meant something far deeper
than hatred. She seldom attributed to anything sufficient dignity
to hate it. But dislike was a sensation she knew to the full. What
irritated her comfort or her taste filled her with an inexpressible
dislike.
I was by training and perhaps by nature susceptible to the minor
claims of what is called civilization. I had a sense of responsibility
about expenditures, about waste, and an anxious, foreboding soul that
sometimes saved the children from disease and death, but irritated her
beyond expression. I nagged and nagged her, and tried to fit her into
the world of our meticulous society, and she, like a stubborn mare,
kept the bit between her teeth and went her own intolerable way.
I spared her, indeed, as little as she spared me. I dinned nervously
into her my demands. I insisted on economy and regularity, an
affability towards neighbors and friends. I kept my many engagements
with scrupulous care and I expected her, who had no sense of time or
punctuality whatever, to keep hers. And when she did not, I fumed and
fretted and stormed and acted like a petulant child.
For years and years I struggled to overcome her in these minor matters
of moralities, rather than of morality; and there was constant nervous
friction between us. It is possible that the friction helped to keep
the spark of love alive; perhaps it was there for some obscure,
beneficent purpose. It seems to me at times that it was I who did the
yielding, gradually, unwillingly. At other times, when I see the deep
harmony now in her relation with children and with her outside world, I
feel the distance she has gone. In a way, the years have brought about
a change in both of us and in our mutual relations and attitudes. In
some measure the nagging soul is dead in me, and in her there is a far
greater adjustment to children, neighbors and engagements, a greater
feeling for what I have called the minor moralities of society. And as
I see the outside world and the universe in grayer and grayer hues, her
vision is brighter and more cheerful. Her love of life increasingly
grows while mine is on the wane. So now we agree unusually in what
Matthew Arnold calls the criticism of life. For my love of existence
had a long way to ebb, hers a long way to flow!
_Chapter VII_
Spare one another we never did; each struggled to realize his own
individuality, his egotistic need. Neither of us was considerate to
the other. Those pale renunciations which hold many couples together
in fragile relations neither of us would accept. In spite of the
manifold connections of a life of work, children and responsibility
shared, the deeper relation between us was founded not on compromise,
but on attraction and repulsion, on a kind of interesting warfare. In
the midst of the complexities of our common life, each of us has stood
fiercely for the individual soul and its personal needs. Sometimes
she has conquered and killed me, but I have never really yielded, and
children, work and impinging society have at times overcome her and
forced her warmly from her well of damp, withdrawing comfort; but never
with her soul’s consent; never merely to be considerate or thoughtful
of others. Our relation has been divinely lacking in sentimentality
and in that kind of morality which takes the salt out of life. We both
passionately demanded that our union should add to, not take from,
abundance. So that whenever we have found an adjustment it has been a
real one, based on unconscious necessity and not on the minor efforts
of the deliberate will.
I have been more of a mother, more of a housekeeper than the great
majority of men. This was due in large measure to my indifference to
the usual ambitions of the male, to business, to conventional art
and literature and to the standards of society; and to my practical
lack and inabilities, as well as to her limitations in domestic
and wifely qualities. And she has been more of a father than the
great majority of women--she has gone out to the larger world in her
thought, her imagination and her work, and has helped to make up for
my deficiencies. So that though we never tried to compromise, each
has departed in some degree from the conventional sphere and has
contributed in the other’s fields. Or, more truly, neither of us has
felt any limitation of sex, except the fundamental one, and we have
worked out our common life as if there were no conventional career
for either man or woman. It has been difficult and painful, but it
has seemed to us the larger thing to do, the more exciting, the more
amusing, procedure.
Amusing! That is the word she has taught me to use in her instinctively
Gallic sense. Mentally, emotionally and temperamentally interesting is
what she means by amusing, and to insist as we did upon our egotistic
personalities as elements in every situation was invariably amusing,
no matter how painful it might be. Sometimes the pain seemed almost
to break the relation and separate us inevitably, but that which
brought us back with a fuller emotion was the impersonal pleasure of
contemplation, which to some extent enabled us to see ourselves as if
we were others and to be pleased and amused by the spectacle. Art is a
significant amusement, and as I have written, there was in each of us,
an unconscious attempt to see life as art, impersonally though warmly.
That is why we both disliked the sentimental and why we passionately
rejected the considerate and the decent attitude toward each other,
which was not good enough for our high instinctive resolve.
The deeper disturbance of our mutual life, there from the beginning
as undertones, became more definite as time went on, grew into clear
motifs in the symphony of our relation. The essential discord was
strengthened, making the harmony more difficult but when maintained
rendering it deeper; as it does in the operas of Strauss and Debussy.
About six years after the honeymoon we went, with our two children,
to the Middle West where we passed an important year. To make clear
the threatening new elements which came into our lives I need to refer
to my deepening interest in what is called the labor movement of our
day. This interest had grown out of my work as a journalist in New
York, and had helped to bring out my natural love for what is called
the under-dog. It was a love that had no need of a remoter charm.
It had no relation to kindness or philanthropy. It had no pity or
morality in it. It was a simple love for the unfamiliar, and for those
instincts and basic ideas newly germinating which to my imagination
seemed to hold out the promise of a more exciting and interesting
and therefore a juster and better society. I was deeply tired of
historical, platitudinous conventions and moralities in living and in
art, and whenever I found the consciously or unconsciously rebellious
I was strangely and pleasurably moved. It was for me an enjoyment
second only in intensity to my love for the Woman, and, at bottom,
these passions were connected. An intense temperamental element in
the love for a woman is the exhilaration of a close relation with the
primitive, the instinctive, and the ideal at once. He who has never
desired a re-valuation of all values, who in his deeper emotions is
not a revolutionist, has never fully loved a woman, for in the closest
personal relation there lies a challenge and a threat to all that is
meaningless or lifeless in organized society.
I have never been able to learn much from books; or from any other
record of human experience. Only when I come in contact with men and
women do I seem to myself to think. I then feel the strange inner
excitement which is analogous to the thrill of the love adventure.
What seems a new conception arouses me as does the kiss of the beloved!
My life among the rebellious victims of the industrial system gave me
some vital ideas which for a time played an unwarrantably important
part in my life and have left a definitely sound and permanent effect.
And these ideas deeply disturbed my relation with Her, and, as I
now think, enriched and stimulated our lives both together and as
individuals.
I saw how deep and all-embracing, and really how destructive of our
conventions and minor moralities, the philosophy of the proletarian
really is; how it strips society to the essential! It destroys the
values we put on personal property as it points out with intensity
the enslaving function of possessions. A conception of a social order
whose morality, law, art and conventions are formed about the economic
advantage of a dominant few startles the mind and the imagination and
turns the strenuous soul to an analysis of the fundamentals. It puts
him in a mood where respectability and all its institutions seem a
higher form of injustice and robbery and makes him see the criminal,
the outcast and the disinherited with a new and wondering sympathy;
not a sympathy which expresses itself in benevolence and effort toward
reform, but a mental and imaginative sympathy which sees in revolution
the hope of a more vital art and literature, a deeper justice and
a richer human existence; a sympathy which is in its character
æsthetic--the sympathy of the social artist, not of the mere reformer
or of the narrow labor agitator.
For a year I was deeply absorbed in these ideas and feelings, new and
disturbing and enriching to me. And I, of course, brought them home to
her, as I brought everything home to her. I took to her my feelings and
my impressions, unbalanced and hot from their source; and she met the
men and women who were the incarnations of these disturbing conceptions.
Ideas of marriage and the love relation in general were affected like
everything else by this far-reaching proletarian philosophy. To free
love from convention and from the economic incubus seemed a profoundly
moral need. The fear that the love of one’s mistress was the indirect
result of commercial necessity aroused a new variety of jealousy! In
some strenuous lovers a strange passion was aroused--to break down
all sex conventions in order to purify and strengthen the essential
spiritual bond!
I met men and women who, with the energy of poets and idealists,
attempted to free themselves from that jealousy which is founded on
physical possession. They longed to have so strong a spiritual bond
that it would be independent of any material event or any mere physical
happening. They tried to rid themselves of all pain due to the
physical infidelities of their lovers or mistresses!--believing that
love is of the soul, and is pure and intense only when freed from the
gross superstitions of the past. And one of the gross superstitions
seemed to them the almost instinctive belief that a sexual episode or
experience with any other except the beloved is of necessity a moral or
spiritual infidelity. They traced this feeling to old theology and to
the sense of ownership extended until it includes the body of the loved
one!
They highly demanded that the love relation should be free and
independent, that it should be one in which proud and individual equals
commune and communicate, and give to each other rich gifts, but make
no demands and accept no sacrifices, and claim no tangible possession
in the personality of the other. Only so could each bring to the other
his best, something racy and strange because his own, something so
personal that it stimulated the other, though it might waylay, disturb
and exasperate. Their voice was that of strenuous and idealistic youth
bearing the burden of a general historical disillusionment.
A burden indeed it is! To accept well marked out conceptions of
morality and norms of beauty is the easier way. To try to reconstruct
the basis on which our feelings express themselves is a task indeed for
the gods. And since men and women are not unlimited, these idealists
among them fell frequently and bit the dust of humiliation and despair.
Old tradition and old instinct proved stronger than they and, filled
with commonplace jealousy, a new pain was added to the old--they were
not only crudely and madly jealous but they also hated themselves for
being so! Theirs was a new, deep pain indeed! They were no longer
comforted by the conviction of being wronged, of their honor outraged,
of being soldiers, though unhappy, in the cause of morality. They
suffered and condemned themselves for suffering. They did not have even
the consolation of thinking themselves justified!
These subtly-interrelated ideas connected with the whole field of
the philosophy of total reconstruction with which I came in personal
contact through association with expressive personalities among the
industrial victims of conventionalized society, had a great and for a
time an unbalancing influence on me, and, with my customary need for
giving all I had, bad and good, I delivered to her my new passionate
perceptions, my disturbing ideals and my fragmentary and idealistic
hopes of a superior race of men and women--men and women capable of
maintaining beautiful and intense relations and at the same time being
superior to the time-worn and, as I thought, outworn tests of virtue
and fidelity.
To try the impossible is the function of the idealist and of the
fool. And I have certainly at times been a fool if not an idealist in
my demands on myself and on her. She took these my new and excited
feelings as she tended to take everything in her moral environment, to
make it a part of her as far as she could harmonize it with what she
already possessed, with what had gone before. And so she began to make
experiments which had been in part instigated by me, but which, after
all, was only the following out of her deeper nature, a nature more
unconventional than mine, and less theoretical. She tended more than I
to put into thorough practice what she had once mentally accepted. The
ease and calmness with which she could take a mental proposition filled
me with uneasiness. I felt that if she loved me she would have more in
her instincts to overcome.
I encouraged her to have intimate friendships with other men; to be
alone with my friends and with hers; but when I saw in her an eager
readiness to take advantage of my initiative, the old racial feeling of
jealousy would stir within me. When I saw that other men excited her,
and that she often preferred their society to mine, deep pain would
take possession of me! One day she coolly told me not to come home to
luncheon as she wanted that time alone with one of my friends!
That was the occasion of a violent quarrel between us. When I expressed
my dislike at being excluded she accused me of hopeless inconsistency.
Inconsistent I was, but not in the way she meant. My inconsistency
lay in demanding from her what her nature could not give, even when I
knew she could not give it! Perhaps a part of my love for her was this
inability of hers to give herself to me, but I always have struggled
desperately to secure from her that absolute devotion in passion of
which she is incapable--at least to me.
It was not that she lunched alone with another man who was beginning
with excitement to see her. It was not that that disturbed me. It
was not so crude as that, though she ironically and contemptuously
characterized it so. I loved to have her like other men, as I loved to
have her like all of life. To taste and to enjoy and to be stimulated
to greater thought and understanding and to more comprehensive
emotion, I loved to feel that this was for her. It gave me a vicarious
excitement, a warm secondary pleasure, and it fed my illusion, an
illusion recognized by me as an illusion, of what she might one day be
capable of with me.
And to have her know other men intimately, just as I continually wished
to know other women intimately, was with me a genuine desire. I saw
in this one of the conditions of greater social relations between her
and me, of a richer material for conversation and for common life
together. Whenever she showed an interest in other men I saw in it what
I call the live line; it was to me an exciting sign of imaginative
vitality--I saw the life spirit in her!
Yes, but what filled me at the same time with unutterable passionate
misery was her tendency at such moments to reject me! That she wanted
to see other men alone and intimately squared with my conscious ideals
and even with my emotional impulses and with my need of pleasurable
excitement. But that this new experience should make the distance
between her and me still greater, this was to me the unendurable. For
her to tell me she did not want me to be with her and him, when I
wanted to be there, this was an intolerable exclusion, and reopened the
old periodic wounds.
I dwell upon this seemingly trivial occasion of the luncheon because
of its symbolic character. It was typical of much that had happened
between us continually. The thing in her which all my instincts as
well as all my philosophy and thought rejects is her inability to feel
for me at the moment she feels for another! This is the eternal jar,
the perception which takes from the harmony of life, from the unity of
the universe. As I have written, all through life I have instinctively
and consciously struggled to hold all the essential elements of my
life together,--not to drop anything out of what has once been seen as
beautiful. In this painful effort to maintain our deeper memory, what
we call the soul is born.
This demand for an extended harmony is what made the youthful Weininger
so bitter towards womankind, in whom he saw an essential limitation of
memory, and therefore a limitation of soul. His personal, unhappy fate
made him err in making of this truth a merely sexual matter. It is not
only the woman but the man, too, whose intensity and concentration
is not sufficient to hold enough together on the basis of which the
triumphant soul emerges.
I imagine that at the root of every real love is this almost
metaphysical passion--this deep emotional insistency on unity. So that
when I saw, as I often did in her, transparent forgetfulness, a dry
ability to put herself entirely into the interest of the moment, losing
the harmonizing fringe of consciousness in which the values of the
past are held, it almost seemed to me as if her soul was damned or had
never been born, and my whole being wept at the temporary destruction
of my Ideal, at the confutation of my philosophy, at the negation of my
deepest instinct.