The Broken Joy
What shall be done to quiet the heart-cry of the world? How
answer the dumb appeal for help we so often divine below eyes
that laugh?--Æ. in "The Hero in Man."
Dreaming of happiness, feeling that at last they have each found the
one who will give eternal understanding and tenderness, the young
man and maiden marry.[1]
[1] In this, and in most of the generalisations found in this
book, I am speaking of things as they are in Great Britain. While,
to a considerable extent, the same is true of America and the
Scandinavian countries, it must be remembered all through that I am
speaking of the British, and primarily of our educated classes.
At first, in the time generally called the honeymoon, the
unaccustomed freedom and the sweetness of the relation often does
bring real happiness. How long does it last? Too often a far shorter
time than is generally acknowledged.
In the first joy of their union it is hidden from the two young
people that they know little or nothing about the fundamental
laws of each other's being. Much of the sex-attraction (not only
among human beings, but even throughout the whole world of living
creatures) depends upon the differences between the two that pair;
and probably taking them all unawares, those very differences which
drew them together now begin to work their undoing.
But so long as the first illusion that each understands the other is
supported by the thrilling delight of ever-fresh discoveries, the
sensations lived through are so rapid and so joyous that the lovers
do not realise that there is no firm foundation of real mutual
knowledge beneath their feet. While even the happiest pair may
know of divergencies about religion, politics, social custom, and
opinions on things in general, these, with goodwill, patience, and
intelligence on either side, can be ultimately adjusted, because in
all such things there is a common meeting ground for the two. Human
beings, while differing widely about every conceivable subject in
such human relations, have at least _thought_ about them, threshed
them out, and discussed them openly for generations.
But about the much more fundamental and vital problems of sex, there
is a lack of knowledge so abysmal and so universal that its mists
and shadowy darkness have affected even the few who lead us, and who
are prosecuting research in these subjects. And the two young people
begin to suffer from fundamental divergencies, before perhaps they
realise that such exist, and with little prospect of ever gaining a
rational explanation of them.
Nearly all those whose own happiness seems to be dimmed or broken
count themselves exceptions, and comfort themselves with the thought
of some of their friends, who, they feel sure, have attained the
happiness which they themselves have missed.
It is generally supposed that happy people, like happy nations,
have no history--they are silent about their own affairs. Those
who talk about their marriage are generally those who have missed
the happiness they expected. True as this may be in general, it is
not permanently and profoundly true, and there are people who are
reckoned, and still reckon themselves, happy, but who yet unawares
reveal the secret disappointment which clouds their inward peace.
Leaving out of account "_femmes incomprises_" and all the
innumerable neurotic, super-sensitive, and slightly abnormal people,
it still remains an astonishing and tragic fact that so large a
proportion of marriages lose their early bloom and are to some
extent unhappy.
For years many men and women have confided to me the secrets of
their lives; and of all the innumerable marriages of which the
inner circumstances are known to me, there are tragically few which
approach even humanly attainable joy.
Many of those considered by the world, by the relatives, _even by
the loved and loving partner_, to be perfectly happy marriages, are
secretly shadowed to the more sensitive of the pair.
Where the bride is, as are so many of our educated girls, composed
of virgin sweetness shut in ignorance, the man is often the first to
create "the rift within the lute"; but his suffering begins almost
simultaneously with hers. The surface freedom of our women has not
materially altered, cannot materially alter, the pristine purity
of a girl of our northern race. She generally has not even the
capacity to imagine the basic facts of physical marriage, and her
bridegroom may shock her without knowing that he was doing so. Then,
unconscious of the nature, and even perhaps of the existence of his
fault, he is bewildered and pained by her inarticulate pain.
Yet I think, nevertheless, it is true that in the early days of
marriage the young man is often even more sensitive, more romantic,
more easily pained about all ordinary things, and he enters
marriage hoping for an even higher degree of spiritual and bodily
unity than does the girl or the woman. But the man is more quickly
blunted, more swiftly rendered cynical, and is readier to look upon
happiness as a Utopian dream than is his mate.
On the other hand, the woman is slower to realise disappointment,
and more often by the sex-life of marriage is of the two the more
_profoundly_ wounded, with a slow corrosive wound that eats into her
very being.
Perfect happiness is a unity composed of a myriad essences; and this
one supreme thing is exposed to the attacks of countless destructive
factors.
Were I to touch upon all the possible sources of marital
disappointment and unhappiness, this book would expand into a dozen
bulky volumes. As I am addressing those who I assume have read, or
can read, other books written upon various ramifications of the
subject, I will not discuss the themes which have been handled by
many writers, nor deal with abnormalities, which fill so large a
part of most books on sex.
In the last few years there has been such an awakening to the
realisation of the corrosive horror of all aspects of prostitution
that there is no need to labour the point that no marriage can be
happy where the husband has, in buying another body, sold his own
health with his honour, and is tainted with disease.
Nor is it necessary, in speaking to well-meaning, optimistic young
couples, to enlarge upon the obvious dangers of drunkenness,
self-indulgence, and the cruder forms of selfishness. It is with the
subtler infringements of the fundamental laws we have to deal. And
the prime tragedy is that, as a rule, the two young people are both
unaware of the existence of such decrees. Yet here, as elsewhere
in Nature, the law breaker is punished whether he is aware of the
existence of the law he breaks or not.
In the state of ignorance which so largely predominates to-day,
the first sign that things are amiss between the two who thought
they were entering paradise together, is generally a sense of
loneliness, a feeling that the one who was expected to have all in
common is outside some experience, some subtle delight, and fails to
understand the needs of the loved one. Trivialities are often the
first indicators of something which takes its roots unseen in the
profoundest depths. The girl may sob for hours over something so
trifling that she cannot even put into words its nature, while the
young man, thinking that he had set out with his soul's beloved upon
an adventure into celestial distances, may find himself apparently
up against a barrier in her which appears as incomprehensible as it
is frivolous.
Then, so strange is the mystical inter-relation between our bodies,
our minds, and our souls, that for crimes committed in ignorance of
the dual functions of the married pair, and the laws which harmonise
them, the punishments are reaped on planes quite diverse, till new
and ever new misunderstandings appear to spring spontaneously from
the soil of their mutual contact. Gradually or swiftly each heart
begins to hide a sense of boundless isolation. It may be urged that
this statement is too sweeping. It is, however, based on innumerable
actual lives. I have heard from women whose marriages are looked
upon by all as the happiest possible expressions of human felicity,
the details of secret pain of which they have allowed their husbands
no inkling. Many men will know how they have hidden from their
beloved wives a sense of dull disappointment, perhaps at her
coldness in the marital embrace, or from the sense that there is in
her something elusive which always evades their grasp.
This profound sense of misunderstanding finds readier expression
in the cruder and more ordinary natures. The disappointment of the
married is expressed not only in innumerable books and plays, but
even in comic papers and all our daily gossip.
Now that so many "movements" are abroad, folk on all sides are
emboldened to express the opinion that it is marriage itself which
is at fault. Many think that merely by loosening the bonds, and
making it possible to start afresh with someone else, their lives
would be made harmonious and happy. But often such reformers forget
that he or she who knows nothing of the way to make marriage great
and beautiful with one partner, is not likely to succeed with
another. Only by a reverent study of the Art of Love can the beauty
of its expression be realised in linked lives.
And even when once learnt, the Art of Love takes _time_ to practise.
As Ellen Key says, "Love requires peace, love will dream; it cannot
live upon the remnants of our time and our personality."
There is no doubt that Love loses, in the haste and bustle of the
modern turmoil, not only its charm and graces, but some of its
vital essence. The evil results of the haste which so infests and
poisons us are often felt much more by the woman than by the man.
The over-stimulation of city life tends to "speed up" the man's
reactions, but to retard hers. To make matters worse, even for
those who have leisure to spend on love-making, the opportunities
for peaceful, romantic dalliance are less to-day in a city with its
tubes and cinema shows than in woods and gardens where the pulling
of rosemary or lavender may be the sweet excuse for the slow and
profound mutual rousing of passion. Now physical passion, so swiftly
stimulated in man, tends to override all else, and the untutored man
seeks but one thing--the accomplishment of desire. The woman, for
it is in her nature so to do, forgives the crudeness, but sooner
or later her love revolts, probably in secret, and then for ever
after, though she may command an outward tenderness, she has nothing
within but scorn and loathing for the act which should have been a
perpetually recurring entrancement.
So many people are now born and bred in artificial and false
surroundings, that even the elementary fact that the acts of
love should be _joyous_ is unknown to them. A distinguished
American doctor made this amazing statement: "I do not believe
mutual pleasure in the sexual act has any particular bearing
on the happiness of life." (Amer. Med. Assoc. Rep. 1900.) This
is, perhaps, an extreme case, yet so many distinguished medical
men, gynecologists and physiologists, are either in ignorance or
error regarding some of the profoundest facts of human sex-life,
that it is not surprising that ordinary young couples, however
hopeful, should break and destroy the joy that might have been
their life-long crown.