About this time it so happened that another woman began to engage my
thoughts, but in an altogether different manner. Circumstances resulted
in my being taken into the secret of unhappy and disturbing domestic
relations in a well-to-do house to which I was frequently invited, and
where to all outward seeming all the necessary conditions of domestic
happiness were present.
The master of the house had in his younger days been a very handsome
man, lazy, not clever, and of an exceedingly passionate temper. He was
the son of a man rich, worthy and able, but of a very weak character,
and of a kept woman who had been the mistress of a royal personage.
Through no fault of his own, he had inherited his mother's professional
vices, persistent untruthfulness, a comedian's manner, prodigality, a
love of finery and display. He was quite without intellectual
interests, but had a distinguished bearing, a winning manner, and no
gross vices.
His wife, who, for family reasons, had been married to him much too
young, had never loved him, and never been suited to him. As an
innocent, ignorant girl, she had been placed in the arms of a man who
was much the worse for a reckless life, and suffering from an illness
that necessitated nursing, and made him repulsive to her. Every day
that passed she suffered more from being bound to a man whose slightest
movement was objectionable to her and whose every remark a torture. In
the second decade of her marriage the keenest marital repulsion had
developed in her; this was so strong that she sometimes had to pull
herself together in order, despite her maternal feelings, not to
transfer her dislike to the children, who were likewise his, and in
whom she dreaded to encounter his characteristics.
Towards her, the man was despotic and cunning, but not unkind, and in
so far excusable that, let him have done what he might, she could not
have got rid of the hatred that plagued him and consumed her. So
dissimilar were their two natures.
Her whole aim and aspiration was to get the bond that united them
dissolved. But this he would not hear of, for many reasons, and more
especially from dislike of scandal. He regarded himself, and according
to the usual conception of the words, justly so, as a good husband and
father. He asked for no impossible sacrifice from his wife, and he was
affectionate to his children. He could not help her detesting him, and
indeed, did not fully realise that she did. And yet, it was difficult
for him to misunderstand. For his wife scarcely restrained her aversion
even when there were guests in the house. If he told an untruth, she
kept silence with her lips, but scarcely with her expression. And she
would sometimes talk of the faults and vices that she most abhorred,
and then name his.
The incessant agitation in which she lived had made her nervous and
restless to excess. As the feminine craving to be able, in marriage, to
look up to the man, had never been satisfied, she only enacted the more
vehemently veracity, firmness and intellect in men. But undeveloped as
she was, and in despair over the dissatisfaction, the drowsiness, and
the darkness in which her days glided away, whatever invaded the
stagnation and lighted up the darkness: sparkle, liveliness, brilliance
and wit, were estimated by her more highly than they deserved to be.
At first when, in the desolation of her life, she made advances to me,
this repelled me somewhat. The equestrian performer in Heiberg's Madame
Voltisubito cannot sing unless she hears the crack of a whip. Thus it
seemed to me that her nature could not sing, save to the accompaniment
of all the cart, carriage and riding whips of the mind. But I saw how
unhappy she was, and that the intense strain of her manner was only an
expression of it.
She could not know the beauty of inward peace, and in spite of her
Protestant upbringing she had retained all the unaffectedness and
sincerity of the natural human being, all the obstinate love of
freedom, unmoved in the least by what men call discipline, ethics,
Christianity, convention. She did not believe in it all, she had seen
what it resulted in, and what it covered up, and she passed her life in
unmitigated despair, which was ordinarily calm to all appearance, but
in reality rebellious: what she was enduring was the attempted murder
of her soul.
To all that she suffered purely mentally from her life with her husband
in the home that was no home at all, there had of late been added
circumstances which likewise from a practical point of view made
interference and alteration necessary. Her lord and master had always
been a bad manager, in fact worse than that; in important matters,
thoroughly incapable and fatuous. That had not mattered much hitherto,
since others had looked after his affairs; but now the control of them
had fallen entirely into his own hands, and he managed them in such a
way that expenses increased at a terrific rate, while his income
diminished with equal rapidity, and the question of total ruin only
seemed a matter of time.
His wife had no outside support. She was an orphan and friendless. Her
husband's relations did not like her and did not understand her. And
yet just at this time she required as a friend a man who understood her
and could help her to save her own and the children's fortunes from the
shipwreck, before it was too late. She felt great confidence in me,
whom she had met, at intervals, from my boyhood, and she now opened her
heart to me in conversation more and more. She confided in me fully,
gave me a complete insight into the torture of her life, and implored
me to help her to acquire her freedom.
Thus it was that while still quite a young man a powerful,
never-to-be-effaced impression of the miseries of modern coercive
marriage was produced upon me. The impression was not merely powerful,
but it waked, like a cry of distress, both my thinking powers and my
energy. As through a chink in the smooth surface of society, I looked
down into the depths of horror. Behind the unhappiness of one, I
suspected that of a hundred thousand, knew that of a hundred thousand.
And I felt myself vehemently called upon, not only to name the horror
by its name, but to step in, as far as I was able, and prevent the
thing spreading unheeded.
Scales had fallen from my eyes. Under the semblance of affection and
peace, couples were lacerating one another by the thousand, swallowed
up by hatred and mutual aversion. The glitter of happiness among those
higher placed dazzled the thoughtless and the credulous. He who had
eyes to see, observed how the wretchedness due to the arrangement of
society, wound itself right up to its pinnacles.
The vices and paltrinesses of the individual could not be directly
remedied; inherited maladies and those brought upon one's self,
stupidity and folly, brutality and malice, undeniably existed. But the
institutions of society ought to be so planned as to render these
destructive forces inoperative, or at least diminish their harmfulness,
not so as to give them free scope and augment their terrors by securing
them victims.
In marriage, the position of the one bound against his or her will was
undignified, often desperate, but worst in the case of a woman. As a
mother she could be wounded in her most vulnerable spot, and what was
most outrageous of all, she could be made a mother against her will.
One single unhappy marriage had shown me, like a sudden revelation,
what marriage in countless cases is, and how far from free the position
of woman still was.
But that woman should be oppressed in modern society, that the one-half
of the human race could be legally deprived of their rights, revealed
that justice in society, as it at present stood, was in a sorry state.
In the relations between the strong and the weak, the rich and the
poor, the same legalised disproportion would necessarily prevail as
between man and woman.
My thought pierced down into the state of society that obtained and was
praised so highly, and with ever less surprise and ever greater
disquiet, found hollowness everywhere. And this called my will to
battle, armed it for the fight.