To take refuge from life is to refuse it. Life generally offers due
scope for the leading instinct in a man or a woman; and sometimes it
offers the scope at a very low price, at no price at all.
For example, a young man may have a very marked instinct for
engineering, and his father may be a celebrated and wealthy engineer
who is only too anxious that the son should follow the same profession.
Life has offered the scope and charged nothing for it.
But, on the other hand, a man may have a very marked instinct for
authorship, and his father may be a celebrated and wealthy engineer
who, being convinced that literature is an absurd and despicable
profession, has determined that his son shall not be an author but an
engineer. ‘Become an engineer,’ says the father, ‘and I will give you
unique help, and you are a made man. Become an author, and you get
nothing whatever from me except opposition.’
Life, however, which has provided the instinct for literature, has also
provided the scope for its fulfilment. The scope for young authors
is vaster to-day on two continents than ever it was. But the price
which in this case life quotes is very high. The young man hesitates.
The price quoted includes comfort, parental approval, domestic peace,
money, luxury, and perhaps also a comfortable and not unsatisfactory
marriage. It includes practically all the ingredients of the mixture
commonly known as happiness. Of course, by following literature the
young man may recover all and more than all the price paid. But also he
may not. The chances are about a hundred to one that he will not. He is
risking nearly everything in order to buy a ticket in a lottery.
Let us say that, being a prudent and obedient young fellow, he declines
to beggar himself for a ticket in a lottery. His instinct towards
literature has not developed very far; he sacrifices it and becomes
the engineer. By industry and goodwill and native brains he becomes
a very fair engineer, the prop of the firm, the aid, and in due
course the successor, of his father. He treats his work-people well.
He marries a delightful girl, and he even treats her well. He has
delightful children. He is a terrific worldly success, and a model to
his fellow-creatures. That man’s attention to duty, his altruism, his
real kindness, are the theme of conversation among all his friends. He
treats his conscience with the most extraordinary respect.
And yet, if his instinct towards literature was genuine, he is not
fundamentally happy, and when he chances to meet an author, or to read
about authors (even about their suicides of despair), or to be deeply
impressed by a book, he is acutely aware that he has committed the sin
of taking refuge from life; he knows that the extraordinary respect
which he pays to his conscience is at bottom a doping of that organ;
he perceives that the smooth path is in fact the rough path, and that
the rough path, which he dared not face, might have been, with all
its asperities, the smooth one. His existence is a vast secret and
poisonous regret; and there is nothing whatever to be done; there is no
antidote for the poison; the dope is a drug--and insufficient at that.
V
Women, even in these latter days when reason is supposed to have
got human nature by the neck, have far greater opportunities and
temptations than men to run away from life. Indeed, many of them are
taught and encouraged to do so. The practice of the three ancient
cardinal female virtues--shutting your eyes, stopping your ears, and
burying your head in the sand--is very carefully inculcated; and then,
of course, people turn round on young women and upbraid them because
they are afraid of existence! And, though things are changing, they
have not yet definitely changed. I would not blame a whole sex--no
matter which--for anything whatever. But to state a fact is not to
blame. The fact is that women, when they get a chance, do show a
tendency to shirk life. Large numbers of them come to grips with life
simply because they are compelled to do so. A woman whose material
existence is well assured will not as a rule go out into the world.
Further, she will not marry as willingly as the woman who needs a home
and cannot see the prospect of it except through marriage. By which
I mean to imply that with women the achievement of marriage is due
less to the instinct to mate than to an economic instinct. Men are
wicked animals and know not righteousness, but it may be said of them
generally that with them the achievement of marriage _is_ due to
the instinct to mate.
Examining the cases of certain women who put off marrying, I have been
forced to the conclusion that their only reason for hesitating to
marry is that men are not perfect, and that to marry an imperfect man
involves risk. It does, but the reason is not valid. Risk is the very
essence of life, and the total absence of danger is equal to death.
I do not say that to follow an unsatisfactory vocation and to fail in
it is better than to follow no vocation. But I am inclined to say that
any marriage is better than no marriage--for both sexes. And I think
that the most tragic spectacle on earth is an old woman metaphorically
wrapped in cotton-wool who at some period of her career has refused
life because of the peril of inconvenience and unhappiness.
Both men and women can run away from life in ways far more subtle and
less drastic than those which I have named. For the sake of clearness
I have confined myself to rather crude and obvious examples of flight.
There are probably few of us who are not conscious of having declined
at least some minor challenge of existence. And there are still fewer
of us who can charge ourselves with having been consistently too bold
in our desire to get the full savour of existence.