Society
Love is fed not by what it takes, but by what it gives, and that
excellent dual love of man and wife must be fed also by the love
they give to others.--EDWARD CARPENTER.
Man, even the commonplace modern man, is romantic. He craves
consciously or unconsciously for the freedom, the beauty, and the
adventure which his forefathers found in their virgin forests. This
craving, transmuted, changed out of recognition by civilised life
and modern circumstances, is yet a factor not to be ignored in the
relationship of the sexes.
The "bonds of matrimony," so often referred to with ribald laughter,
touch, and perhaps secretly gall, even the most romantic and devoted
husband. If to the sincere and friendly question: "What is most
difficult in married life for the man?" one gets the sincere and
rueful answer--that answer may be summed up in the words "perpetual
propinquity."
Of this, the wife, particularly if she be really in love, is seldom
fully aware. If her husband is her true lover, his tenderness
and real devotion will give him the wit to conceal it. But
though by concealment he may preserve the unruffled surface of
their happiness, yet the longing to be roving is not completely
extinguished. In the true lover this unspoken, unconscious longing
is perhaps less a desire to set out upon a fresh journey than a
longing to experience again the exquisite joy of the return; to
re-live the magic charm of the approach to the spot in which the
loved one is living her life, into the sacred separateness of which
the lover breaks, and, like the Prince by his kiss, to stir her to
fresh activity.
As will be realised by those who have understood the preceding
chapters, each coming together of man and wife, even if they have
been mated for many years, should be a fresh adventure; each winning
should necessitate a fresh wooing.
Yet what a man often finds so hard is to come to that wooing with
full ardour and with that complete sense of romance which alone can
render it utterly delightful, if the woman he is to woo has been in
a too uninterrupted and prosaic relation with him in the meantime.
Most men, of course, have their businesses apart from their homes,
but in the home lives of the great mass of middle-class people the
Victorian tradition still too largely preponderates, and the mated
pair bore or deaden each other during the daily routine.
To a very thoughtful couple whom I have known, so precious was
the sense of romantic joy in one another that they endeavoured to
perpetuate it by living in different houses.
Such a measure, however, is not likely to suit many people,
particularly where there are children. Yet even without bodily
separation (which must always entail expense) or any measure of
freedom not at everyone's command, much can be done to retain that
sense of spiritual freedom in which alone the full joy of loving
union can be experienced.
But even intellectual and spiritual freedom is often rendered
impossible in present-day marriage.
The beautiful desire for ideal unity which is so strong in most
hearts is perhaps the original cause of one of the most deadening
features in many marriages. In the endeavour to attain the ideal
unity, one or other partner consciously or unconsciously imposes
his or her will and opinions first upon the wife or husband, and
then upon the children as they grow up.
The typical self-opinionated male which this course develops,
while a subject for laughter in plays and novels, a laughter which
hastens his extermination, is yet by no means extinct. In his less
exaggerated form such a man may often be an idealist, but he is
essentially an idealist of narrow vision. The peace, the unity, for
which he craves is superficially attained; but it takes acuter eyes
than his to see that it is attained not by harmonious intermingling,
but by super-position and destruction.
I have known a romantic man of this type, apparently unaware that he
was encroaching upon his wife's personality, who yet endeavoured not
only to choose her books and her friends for her, but "prohibited"
her from buying the daily newspaper to which she had been accustomed
for years before her marriage, saying that one newspaper was enough
for them both, and blandly ignoring the fact that he took it with
him out of the house before she had an opportunity of reading it.
This man posed to himself more successfully than to others, not only
as a romantic man, but as a model husband; and he reproached his
wife for jeopardising their perfect unity whenever she accepted an
invitation in which he was not included.
On the other hand, in homes where the avowed desire is for the
modern freedom of intellectual life for both partners, there is
very frequently a bickering, a sense of disharmony and unrest that
dispels the peace and the air of restful security which is an
essential feature of a true home.
It is one of the most difficult things in the world for two people
of different opinions to retain their own opinions without each
endeavouring to convert or coerce the other, and at the same time to
feel the same tender trust in the judgment of the other that each
would have felt had they agreed.
It takes a generous and beautiful heart to see beauty and dignity in
the attitude of a mate who is looking at the other side of a vital
question.
But the very fact that it _does_ take a beautiful and generous heart
to do this thing proves it well worth the doing.
If the easier way is chosen and the two mutually conceal their views
when they differ, or the stronger partner coerces the weaker into
hiding those traits which give personality to an individual, the
result is an impoverishing of both, and through that very fact, an
impoverishment, a lowering of the love which both sought to serve.
In marriage each one dreams that he will find the Understander--the
one from whom he may set out into the world in search of treasures
of knowledge and experience, and before whom the spoils may be
exhibited without thought of rivalry, and with the certainty of
glad apprisal. Treasures, dear to our own hearts but of no value
to others, should here find appreciation, and here the tender
super-sensitive germ of an idea may be watered and tended till its
ripe beauty is ready to burst upon the world.
As marriage is at present such tenderness and such stimulating
appreciation is much more likely to come from the woman to the man
and his work than from the man to the woman. For too long have men
been accustomed to look upon woman's views, and in particular on her
intellectual opinions, as being something demanding at the most a
bland humouring beneath the kindest smiles.
Even from the noblest man, the woman of sensitive personality
to-day feels an undercurrent as of surprised congratulation when
she has anything to say worth his _serious_ attention outside that
department of life supposed to belong to her "sphere." Thus man robs
his wedded self of a greatness which the dual unity might reach.
But in marriage the mutual freedom and respect for opinion,
vitally important though it be, is not sufficient for the full
development of character. Life demands ever-widening interests.
Owing partly to the differentiation of many types of individuals due
to the specialisation of civilisation, which interests thoughtful
individuals, and partly to the transmutation of his old vagrant
instinct, man increasingly desires to touch and to realise the lives
of his fellows. In the lives of others our hearts and understanding
may find perpetual adventures into the new and strange.
Individual human beings, even the noblest and most complex yet
evolved, have but a share of the innumerable faculties of the race.
Hence even in a supremely happy marriage, which touches, as does the
mystic in his raptures, a realisation of the whole universe, there
cannot lie the _whole_ of life's experience. Outside the actual
lives of the pair there must always be many types of thought and
many potentialities which can only be realised in the lives of other
people.
In the complete human relation friends of all grades are needed,
as well as a mate. Marriage, however, in its present form is too
often made to curtail the enjoyment of intimate friendships. The
reason for this is partly the social etiquette, which, though
discarded in the highest levels of society, still lingers in many
circles, of inviting the husband and the wife together upon all
social occasions. It is true that they are separated at the dinner
table, but they are always within the possibility of earshot of
each other, which very often deadens their potentialities for being
entertaining. The mere fact of being overheard repeating something
one may have already said elsewhere is sufficient to prevent some
people from telling their best stories, or from expressing their
real views upon important matters.
And, still more serious barrier to joy, so primitive, so little
evolved are we even yet, there is in most human beings a strong
streak of sex-jealousy. For either mate to be allowed to go out
uncriticised into the world, is to demand, if not more than the
other is willing to give, at least a measure of trust which by its
rarity appears nowadays as something conspicuously fine.
Jealousy, which is one of the most frequent shadows cast by the
blight of love, is very apt to sow a distrust in one which makes a
normal life for the other partner impossible.
It is hard to say in which sex the feeling is more strongly
developed. It takes special forms under different circumstances,
and if a nature is predisposed towards it, it is one of the most
difficult characteristics to eradicate.
Custom, and generations of traditions, seem to have imprinted on our
race the false idea that marital fidelity is to be strengthened by
coercive bonds. We are slowly growing out of this, and nowadays in
most books giving advice to young wives there is a section telling
them that a man should be allowed his men friends after marriage.
But this is not enough. There should be complete and unquestioning
trust on both sides. The man and the woman should each be free to
go unchallenged by a thought on solitary excursions, or on visits,
weekends or walking tours, without the possibility of a breath of
jealousy or suspicion springing up in the heart of one or the other.
It is true that many natures are not yet ready for such trust, and
might abuse such freedom. But the baser natures will always find a
method of gratifying their desires, and are not likely to err more
in trusted freedom than they would inevitably have done through
secret intrigues if held in jealous bondage.
While, on the other hand, it is only in the fresh unsullied air of
such freedom that the fullest and most perfect love can develop. In
the marriage relation it is supremely true that only by loosening
the bonds can one bind two hearts indissolubly together.
When they are sometimes physically apart married lovers attain the
closest spiritual union. For with sensitive spirits--and they are
the only ones who know the highest pinnacles of love--periods of
separation and solitude can be revivifying and recreative.
So great is the human soul that some of its beauty is hidden by
nearness: it needs distance between it and the beholder to be
perceived in its true perspective.
To the realisation of the beauty and the enjoyment of solitude,
woman in general tends to be less awake than man. This, perhaps, is
due to the innumerable generations during which the claims of her
children and of domestic life have robbed her of Nature's healing
gift.
Although it is merely incidental to the drama, yet to me the most
poignant thing in Synge's beautiful play _Deirdré_ is that she could
feel inevitable tragedy when the first thought of something apart
from herself crosses her lover's mind. Deirdré and her lover had
been together for seven years in an unbroken and idyllic intimacy,
and she feels that all is finished, and that her doom, the knell of
their joy, had struck, when for the first time she perceived in him
a half-formed thought of an occupation apart from her.
This ancient weakness of her sex must be conquered, and is being
conquered by the modern woman.
While modern marriage is tending to give ever more and more freedom
to each of the partners, there is at the same time a unity of work
and interest growing up which brings them together on a higher
plane than the purely domestic one which was so confining to the
women and so dull to the men. Every year one sees a widening of the
independence and the range of the pursuits of women: but still,
far too often, marriage puts an end to woman's intellectual life.
Marriage can never reach its full stature until women possess as
much intellectual freedom and freedom of opportunity within it as do
their partners.
That at present the majority of women neither desire freedom for
creative work, nor would know how to use it, is only a sign that
we are still living in the shadow of the coercive and dwarfing
influences of the past.
In an interesting article on woman's intellectual work, W. Thomas
(1907, "Sex and Society") says:
The American woman, with the enjoyment of greater liberty,
has made an approach toward the standards of professional
scholarship, and some individuals stand at the very top in their
university studies and examinations. The trouble with these
cases is that they are either swept away and engulfed by the
modern system of marriage, or find themselves excluded in some
intangible way from association with men in the fullest sense,
and no career open to their talents.
He sees clearly that this is but a passing phase in the development
of our society, and he advocates a wider scope for the play of
married women's powers.
The practice of an occupational activity of her own choosing,
and a generous attitude towards this on the part of the man,
would contribute to relieve the strain and make marriage more
frequently successful.
When woman naturally develops the powers latent within her, man will
find at his side not only a mate, free and strong, but a desirable
friend and an intellectual comrade.
The desire for freedom, both for physical and mental exploration and
for experiences outside the sacred enclosure of the home, may at
first sight appear to be conflicting and entirely incompatible with
the ideal of closer and more perfect unity between the married pair.
But this conflict is only apparent, though it is true that most
writers have failed to realise this. Consequently in some sections
of the writing and teaching of the "advanced" schools there are
claims only for increased freedom--a freedom to wander at will--a
freedom in which the wanderer does not return to his fixed centre.
On the other hand there are those who realise principally the beauty
of married unity, and, concentrating on the demand for the unity and
extremest stability on the part of the married pair, are very apt
to ignore the enriching flow of a wide life's experiences. They try
to dam up the fertilising tide of life, and thus, though they are
unconscious of what they are doing, they tend to reduce the richness
and beauty of marriage.
It is for the young people of the new generation to realise that the
two currents of longing which spring up within them--the longing
for a full life-experience and the longing for a close union with a
lifelong mate--are not incompatible, but are actually both essential
parts of the more perfect and fuller beauty of the future that
already seeks to find its expression in their lives.
Ellen Key ("Love and Marriage") seems to fear the widening of the
married woman's life, and she writes as though the aspiration to do
professional and intellectual work of a high order must dwarf and
sterilise the mother in the married woman.
She writes of a more northerly people, the Scandinavians, and it
may be true of her countrywomen, I do not know. But it is _not_
essentially and universally true. I am writing of the English,
the English of to-day, and though we also have among us that
dwarfed and sterilised type of woman, she forms in our community a
dwindling minority. The majority of our best women enter marriage
and motherhood, or else long for a marriage more beautiful than the
warped mockery of it that is offered them.
As Mrs. Stetson says ("Women and Economics"):
In the primal physical functions of maternity the human female
cannot show that her supposed specialisation to these uses has
improved her fulfilment of them, rather the opposite. The more
freely the human mother mingles in the natural industries of a
human creature, as in the case of the savage woman, the peasant
woman, the working woman everywhere who is not overworked, the
more rightly she fulfils these functions.
The more absolutely the woman is segregated to sex-functions
only, cut off from all economic use and made wholly dependent on
the sex-relation as means of a livelihood, the more pathological
does her motherhood become. The over-development of sex caused
by her economic dependence on the male reacts unfavourably
on her essential duties. She is too female for the perfect
motherhood!
The majority of our young women, I am convinced, have in them
the potentiality of a full and perfected love. So, too, have the
majority of our young men. For the best type of young man to-day is
tired of polygamy; he has seen enough in his father's and friends'
lives of the weariness of the sinister, secret polygamy, that hides
itself and rots the race under the protecting cloak of the supposed
monogamy of our social system.
But as things are at present in England, the young man who marries,
however much he may be in love, is generally too ignorant (as has
been indicated in the preceding chapters) to give his wife all
her nature requires. Then, sooner or later, comes the sequence of
disappointments which culminate in the longing for a fresh adventure.
As one young husband said to me, "A decent man can't go on having
unions with his wife when she obviously does not enjoy them," and so
he is forced to "go elsewhere." "And they call us polygamists! We
are not polygamists any longer. But marriage is a rotten failure,"
was his verdict.
No. They are not polygamists, the finest young men of the present
and of the future. Most men to-day are not in their heart of hearts
polygamists, in spite of all the outward signs to the contrary; in
spite of the fact that so few of them have remained faithful to one
woman. But they are ignorant of the sex-laws and traditions, that
sex-knowledge which was the heritage of much less civilised tribes,
and so they have trampled and crushed out the very thing for the
growth of which their hearts are aching.
Hence secretly (for in a marriage that is at least superficially
happy the man seldom does this openly) the man begins to crave for
another type of society and he "goes elsewhere." Not, it is true,
to find, or even in the hope of finding, what he would get from a
perfect marriage; but often to satisfy in some measure that yearning
for fresh experience, for romance, and for that sense of fusion
with another in the romantic experience which, even if it is only a
delusion of the senses, is yet one of the most precious things life
has to offer.
It is hard, indeed in many cases it seems impossible, for a good
woman to understand what it is that draws her husband from her.
Restricted by habit and convention in the exercise of her faculties,
she is unaware of the ever-narrowing range of her interest and her
powers of conversation. The home life tends to become that of a
fenced pond, instead of a great ocean with innumerable currents.
From the restricted and fenced man's instinct is ever to escape.
Man's opportunities for exploration in the cities are few, and the
prostitute is one of the most obvious doors of escape into new
experiences.
Women feel a so righteous and instinctive horror of prostitution,
and regarding it they experience an indignation so intense, that
they do not seek to understand the man's attitude.
The prostitute, however, sometimes supplies an element which is not
purely physical, and which is often lacking in the wife's relation
with her husband, an element of charm and mutual gaiety in pleasure.
If good women realised this, while they would judge and endeavour
to eliminate prostitution no less strenuously, they might be in a
better position to begin their efforts to free men from the hold
that social disease has upon them.
It is perhaps impossible to find the beginning of a vicious circle,
but the first step out of it must be the realisation that one
is within it, and the realisation of some, at any rate, of its
component parts.
Man, through prudery, through the custom of ignoring the woman's
side of marriage and considering his own whim as marriage law,
has largely lost the art of stirring a chaste partner to physical
love. He therefore deprives her of a glamour, the loss of which he
deplores, for he feels a lack not only of romance and beauty, but
of something higher which is mystically given as the result of the
complete union. He blames his wife's "coldness" instead of his own
want of art. Then he seeks elsewhere for the things she could have
given him had he known how to win them. And she, knowing that the
shrine has been desecrated, is filled with righteous indignation,
though generally as blind as he is to the true cause of what has
occurred.
Manifold and far-reaching, influencing the whole structure of
society not only in this country, but in every country and at
every time, have been the influences which have grown up from the
root-fallacy in the marriage relation.
Then there is another cause for the dulling of a wife's bright
charm--her inferior position in the eyes of the law. It is indeed a
serious matter, as Jean Finot says, "that, under present conditions,
the mistress keeps certain liberties which are denied to married
women."
The past and its history have been studied by many, and we may leave
it. What concerns the present generation of young married people is
to-day and the future. The future is full of hope. Already one sees
beginning to grow up a new relationship between the units composing
society.
In the noblest society love will hold sway. The love of mates will
always be the supremest life experience, but it will no longer be an
experience exclusive and warped.
The love of friends and children, of comrades and fellow-workers,
will but serve to develop every power of the two who are mates. By
mingling the greatness of their individual stature they can achieve
together something that, had both or either been dwarfed and puny
individuals, would have remained for ever unattainable.
The whole trend of the evolution of human society has been toward an
increased coherence of all its parts, until at the present time it
is already almost possible to say that the community has an actual
life on a plane above that of all the individuals composing it:
that the community, in fact, is a super-entity. It is through the
community of human beings, and not in our individual lives, that we
reach an ultimate permanence upon this globe.
When our relation to the community is fully realised, it will be
seen that the health, the happiness, and the consequent powers of
every individual, concern not only his own life, but also affect
the whole community of which he is a member.
The happiness of a perfect marriage, which enhances the vitality
of the private life, renders one not only capable of adding to
the stream of the life-blood of the community in children, but by
marriage one is also rendered a fitter and more perfect instrument
for one's own particular work, the results of which should be shared
by society as a whole, and in the tempering and finishing of which
society plays a part.
Thus it is the concern of the whole community that marriage should
be as perfect, and hence as joyous, as possible; so that the powers
which should be set free and created for the purpose of the whole
community should not be frittered away in the useless longing and
disappointment engendered by ignorance, narrow restrictions, and low
ideals.
In the world the happily mated pair should be like a great and
beautiful light; a light not hid under a bushel, but one whose beams
shine through the lives of all around them.