possible, and it is glorious; and, in its degree, the need for it comes to
everyone. Do not imagine that it is not needed in marriage as well as
out of marriage. Every married lover will tell you that if his love is to
remain what it was in the beginning--if it is rather to grow in power and
beauty--he also must be able gradually to transmute his love in such a way
that the spirit dominates the flesh more and more, and that the physical
side of marriage becomes simply an expression of the love of the spirit,
the perfect final expression, the sacrament of love. Do not imagine that
this is not needed, this effort, and this power, by every human being who
desires to be human in his love, and not something less than human. And to
those to whom the need comes in its sternest form, I will not pretend for
a moment that it is not hard. Nay, I will prophesy to you that if you do so
choose to serve the world, it will to all of you sometimes seem too hard.
With Christ, with St. Francis, your human nature will sometimes assert
itself. "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the
Son of Man"--the Servant of Humanity--has no such joy. But of whatever life
you choose, that is sometimes true. To the finest spirit in marriage there
comes sometimes the thought that, but for this great claim, he might have
undertaken some adventure, might have answered some call, which now he
cannot answer. Does that mean that he regrets his choice? No, not for
a moment! It only means that human nature is so rich and so varied that
whatever life you forego will sometimes seem to you the better choice. You
will think, for a moment, that you might have chosen differently. If that
happened to St. Francis, believe me, it will happen to you. But yet, is it
not a heroic path that I point out to you? Is it not possible that to this
generation heroism may be possible in such a way, on such a scale, that you
will leave this world nobler in moral stature because of the hardness
which you endured, the choice that you made? Women, to whom this comes home
specially at this time, may it not be that you, by taking this way, will
become the mothers in spirit of women in a happier generation, on whom will
never again be imposed our cramped, stifling, sub-human conception of what
women ought to be? You will show to the world not only that the individual
woman of genius may have a value to Humanity beyond her sex, but that every
woman has that value. In solving your own problem, and taking hold of life
where most it hurts you, you will end by making a moral standard nobler, a
humanity richer and more human, a womanhood freer, greater, more Christlike
than it was. And future generations shall rise up and call you blessed.
III
CONSIDERATION OF OTHER SOLUTIONS OF THE PROBLEM OF THE DISPROPORTION OF THE
SEXES
"My spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given."
Shelley: "Adonais."
Let us now move away from that aspect of the moral problem which
has concerned us hitherto--that of the difficulties created by the
disproportion of the sexes at this time and in this country--and consider
the problem as it presents itself under more normal conditions. For even
in ages and in countries where there are an equal number of men and women
there are difficulties in their relations with one another, and a "moral
problem."
People ask, for example, whether sex-relationships should be governed by
law at all; whether they should continue in any given case when passion has
died, or when love (which is more than passion) has gone. Should love ever
be other than perfectly free, and is not the attempt to bind it essentially
"immoral"? Should it ever be exclusive or proprietary? Is not the "moral
problem" really created, not by human nature, but by the attempt to bind
what cannot be bound and to coerce what should be free?
The answer given to such questions is often to-day on the side of what is
called, mistakenly, I think, "free love." And in considering this answer,
I want to remind you that it is often given by people who are most sincere,
most idealistic, in their own lives and in their own love. Indeed it has
often been pointed out that it is at times of great spiritual exaltation
and fervour that the cult of "free love" is most likely to find adherents.
The great principle that "love is the fulfilling of the law" is held with
a fervour which makes any question as to what love is, and how much it
involves, seem half-hearted and cold. Those who preach this doctrine remind
us--and very justly--of the weakness and insincerity of the "orthodox"
moral standard, whether it is enforced by law or by custom. They revolt
against the proprietary and possessive view of marriage as giving a
woman "a hold over her husband" when he has "grown tired of her," or as
justifying a man in enforcing upon his wife the rights which only love
makes right, when she has grown tired of him. I appeal, therefore, to those
to whom the dispassionate discussion of "free love" seems quite outrageous,
to remember that there are those to whom this teaching is _not_ a mere
excuse for licence, but an attempt to reach something lovelier and nobler
than the present moral code, whose failures and insincerities no thinking
person can ignore.
In considering this view, I want first to point out that although to have
no legal or enforceable tie in sex-relationships seems on the surface much
the simplest and easiest way to arrange life, although permanent monogamous
marriage is exceedingly difficult and inconvenient, yet the movement of
humanity does seem to have been on the whole in that direction. It is, of
course, untrue to say that among primitive peoples there is anything that
can fairly be called promiscuity. Historians and anthropologists have
taught us that among all peoples, however barbarous, there are conventions,
sanctions, tabus, by which the relations of men and women are regulated.
The customs of such people may seem to us mere licence; but they are not
so. And some of the customs of more "civilized" countries are at least as
horrifying to the "savage" as his can be to us. Nevertheless, it is true
to say that as civilization advances, and especially where the position of
women improves, the movement has been towards a more stable and exclusive
form of marriage. We grope uncertainly towards it: we fail atrociously. Yet
we do not abandon an ideal which asks so much of human nature that human
nature is continually invoked to prove its impossibility.
Why have we persisted? It is idle to speak of monogamy as though it were
a senseless rule imposed on unfortunate humanity by some all-powerful
Superman. We have imposed it on ourselves. It is our doing. Why have we
done it? Surely because, in spite of its alleged "impossibility," its
obvious inconveniences, there is some need in human nature which demands a
permanent and a stable sex relationship to meet it.
I believe that there is something in our human nature which desires
stability in its relations with other human beings. It is perhaps a
recognition of the fact that, though we live in time and suffer its
conditions, we are immortal also and chafe under too strict a bondage to
time. Our relations with other human beings ought not to be evanescent!
There is something cheap and shoddy in the giving and taking of human
personality on such easy soon-forgotten terms. It is not only in sexual
relations that this is true. It is true of all human intercourse. The
longer care and devotion of human parents for their offspring is not a
physical only, but a spiritual necessity: and it is bound up with the
greater faithfulness of human lovers. In parenthood, in loverhood, in
friendship, those who take their obligations lightly are not the finer
sort of men and women, but the slighter, cheaper make. It is not a love of
freedom but a certain inferiority and shoddiness that makes it possible
for us to give ourselves, and take others, lightly. For in all human
relationships it is "ourselves" that we give and take. It is not what your
friend does for you or gives to you that makes him your friend; but what
he _is_ to you. It is his personality that you have shared. And so there
is something rather repulsive in quickly forgetting or throwing it away.
People who make friends and lose them as the trees put out their leaves
in spring to shed them in the autumn, are not quite human. The capacity to
make friends--to make many friends--is a great power: the capacity to lose
them not so admirable. Yet there are people who always have a bosom-friend,
every time you meet them; only it is never the same friend. And this is a
poor sort of friendship, for it _is_ poor to give and take so little that
you easily cease or forget to give at all.
If this is true of friends, it is not less true of lovers: it is more
true. For sex-love includes more of one's personality, it more completely
involves body, soul and spirit, is the most perfect form of union that
human beings know. How strange, then, to argue that one may treat a lover
as one would not treat a friend! Make one and lose one so lightly, and
disavow all the responsibility of a love in which so much is given, so much
involved! It is true that all human love has a physical element, even if
it is only the desire for the physical presence of the beloved one. We
all want sometimes to see and to touch our friends. But in sex-love that
physical element becomes a desire for perfect union, expressing a spiritual
harmony. Can one take such a gift lightly, and pass from one relationship
to another with a readiness which would seem contemptible in a friend?
It is this holding of human personality cheap that is really immoral,
really dishonest: for it is not cheap. It is this which makes prostitution
a horror, and prostitutes the Ishmaels of their race. They "sell cheap what
is most dear," and, knowing this, rage against their buyers. The hideously
demoralizing effect of a life of prostitution on the soul is a commonplace.
"These women," it has been said, "sink so low that they cease to know what
love is, they cease to be able to give. They can only cheat and steal and
sell." It is true. Whatever virtues of kindliness and pity the prostitute
may (and often does) have for other unfortunates and outcasts, her attitude
in general does become that of the parasite, the swindler, the vampire.
Why? Because on her the deepest outrage against human personality is
committed. Without a shadow of claim, without a pretence of offering its
equivalent, that, in her, is bought and sold which is beyond price. Why
should she not cheat and thieve? Take all she can, she cannot get the true
value of what has been bought from her. Does she reason all that out? More
often than we think. But whether she reasons consciously or not, she knows
she has been defrauded: and she defrauds.
But it is the buying and selling, I shall be told, that makes her so vile:
between such a sale and the free gift of lovers lies the whole difference
between morality and immorality. I do not think so. It is the contemptuous
use of another which is immoral, and though actually to buy and sell the
person is the lowest depth of immorality, because it is the lowest and
most brutal expression of such contempt, any lightness or irreverence
is "immoral" in its degree; so therefore is conduct which makes love an
evanescent thing, or the giving of personality which love involves, a
passing emotion.
If we feel this to be so in friendship, surely it is more and not less
true of a union so complete on every plane as that of sex. Can you take
that--and give it--and pass on, as though it were a light thing?
The desire for permanence, for stability, for trustworthiness lies very
deep in human nature. We may--we do--rebel against it, and speak with
rapture of an unfettered existence without material ties: but even in
material things the nomad is the least creative, the least civilized of his
kind. His existence is neither so picturesque nor so human as we imagine.
One has only to read history to see how little he has contributed to
humanity--and how little he has helped to raise the human level above the
animal. It is not for nothing that we find the home imposed upon human kind
by the necessities of human infancy. It is the helplessness of the child
that has humanized our species by creating the home which its helplessness
demanded, and though a great deal that is sentimental is said about homes,
this remains a fact. The nomadic, the homeless race gives little to the
world; it is by nature and circumstances an exploiter of resources for
which it feels no responsibility, from which it is content to take without
giving. Reading in a pamphlet of Professor Toynbee's the other day, I found
this description of the Eastern world in the 15th and 16th centuries of our
era:--"Even when the East began to recover and comparatively stable Moslem
states arose again in Turkey and Persia and Hindustan, _the nomadic taint
was in them and condemned them to sterility_.... One gets the impression
not of a government administering a country, but of _a horde of nomads
exploiting it_."[B]
[Footnote B: The italics are mine.--A.M.R.]
Even so is it with human love. These nomads of the affections give and take
so little as they pass from hand to hand that they become cheap and have
little left to give at last: nor do they really get what they would take.
Men and women claim the right to "experience," but experience of what? We
do not live by bread alone, and the physical experience is not really
all we seek. It is something, however? Yes--certainly something: but by
a paradox familiar enough in human affairs, to snatch the lesser is to
sacrifice the greater. The experimental lover, the giver whose small and
careful gift is for a time, claims in the name of "experience," of the
"fulfilment of his nature," what really belongs only to a greater giving.
Such lovers are like a rich man who sets out tramping with nothing in his
pocket. He may suffer temporary inconvenience, but is within safe distance
of his banking account. He plays with a risk he can never really know,
since knowledge and experience are not for those "whose sails were never
to the tempest given." The prudent lover whose love is lightly given for
as long as it lasts is as wise--and as futile.
I think, too, that those who offer this little price for so great a thing
have nothing left at last. To taste love, to _use_ the great passion of sex
is on a par with the exploitation of genius on a series of "pot-boilers."
Genius may outlast a few such meannesses, but they will murder it at last,
and the man who by pot-boiling has gained the opportunity to create a real
work of art finds there is no more art left in him. He has now the leisure,
the opportunity, the public: but not the power. So is it with those who
lightly use so great a thing as sex. Yielded to every impulse, given
to each "new-hatched, unfledged companion," it loses its capacity for
greatness, and the experience desired passes for ever from the grasp.
It is this which, to my mind, rules out the "experimental marriage."
Much may be said for it--and has been, and is being said by people whose
judgment must command respect. But love is impatient of lending. If it
is not given outright in the belief that the gift is final, can the
"experiment" be valid? Is not this very sense of finality--this desire
to give and burn one's ships--of the very essence of love? One cannot
experiment in finality.
It is true that many marriages would not have taken place, and had much
better not have taken place, if there had been greater knowledge: but we
have yet to learn what greater knowledge can do even without experiment.
Hitherto we have gone to the opposite extreme and buried all that belongs
to sex not in a fog of ignorance only, but under a mountain of hypocrisy
and lies. Let in the light, and see if we cannot do better! And though it
is true that some things cannot be known by any amount of teaching,
and wait upon experience, yet I submit that the essential experience
is realized only when it is believed to be the expression of an undying
love--a gift and not a loan.
Let me say one last word on the solution to our moral difficulties proposed
by those who affirm for every woman "the right to motherhood." This
claim is based on the belief that the creative impulse is more, or more
consciously, present in the sexual nature of a woman than of a man, and
that, in consequence, the satisfaction of that impulse is to a great extent
the satisfaction of a need which makes the disproportionate number of women
in any country a real tragedy. It is impossible to generalize with any
degree of confidence about the sexual nature of either man or woman in our
present state of crude and barbarous ignorance; but I am inclined--very
tentatively--to agree that this generalization is correct, and that the
creative impulse is an even stronger factor in the sexual life of women
than of men. I realize the cruelty of a civilization in which war and
its accessories create an artificial excess of women over men, and in
consequence deprive hundreds of thousands of women of motherhood. I do not
think I underestimate that cruelty or its tragic consequences. I admit the
"right" of women to the exercise of their vocation and the fulfilment of
their nature.
But I affirm that those who base upon this claim the right to bring
children into the world, where society has made marriage impossible, are
not moved to do so by the instinct of motherhood. No, no, for motherhood is
more than a physical act; it is a spiritual power. Its first thought is
not for the right of the mother but of the child. And what are a child's
rights? A home--two parents--all that makes complete the spiritual as well
as the material meaning of "home." I do not believe that there is any
woman who is the mother of young children, and a widow, who does not
daily realize how irreparable is the loss sustained by the fatherless. War
perhaps has inflicted that loss upon them; it is one of the iniquities of
war. And though the mother tries all she can--yes, and works miracles of
love to make herself all she _can_ be to her child, that loss cannot wholly
be made up. I speak with intensity of conviction on this point, for I have
myself a little adopted child--orphaned of both parents--in my home. I
never see other children with their parents without realizing what she has
lost not only in her mother but her father. There is needed the different
point of view, the different relationship, bringing with it a fuller and a
richer experience of life. What woman that hast lost her husband does not
realize the truth of what I say?
It is beside the mark to say that a bad father is worse than no father, or
that accident may take the father even from happily circumstanced homes.
This is true. But a woman does not deliberately _choose_ a bad father for
her children, or _choose_ that he shall be taken away from them by death.
It is the deliberate infliction beforehand of this great loss upon a child
that seems to me the very negation of that motherhood in whose name this
"right" is enforced. And for what purpose is a child to be brought into the
world under conditions so imperfect? To "fulfil the nature" of its mother;
to complete her experience; to meet her need. Is there any mockery of
motherhood more complete than this sacrifice of the child to the mother?
Why, our physical nature itself is less selfish! When a woman conceives,
her child receives _first_ all the nourishment it needs; whatever it does
not demand, the mother has. A woman herself undernourished can, if the
process has not gone too far, bear a well-nourished and a healthy child,
because she has given all to that child. It is the epitome of motherhood!
And now it is affirmed that a woman, to satisfy her own need, has a right
to bring into the world a child on whom she--its mother--has deliberately
inflicted a grave disadvantage. I do not speak of such lesser disadvantages
as may be involved in illegitimacy. I trust the time is at hand when
we shall cease to brand any child as "illegitimate" or despise one for
another's defect. But though children are never illegitimate, parents may
be so; and none more than the woman who sacrifices her child to herself.
For this disadvantage is not a mere cruelty of society which may be
"civilized" away; it is inherent in the case. A child should have a father
and a mother and a home.
It is no defence to say that the unmarried mother proposes to give her
child a better home than many a child of married parents has. If her
concern is for the child, there are, alas! only too many waifs already in
the world to whom such a home, though imperfect, would be a paradise to
what it has. Real motherhood could and often does rescue such children with
joy. That so few children are adopted in a world of women clamouring for
motherhood proves the essential selfishness of the claim. It is not the
child--it is herself--that the woman who demands motherhood as a "right" is
concerned with. What an irony! For to satisfy herself first is the negation
of motherhood.
We have heard much of late years--and rightly--of the exploitation of
women by men. Let us not celebrate our growing enfranchisement by becoming
ourselves the exploiters; and that, not of men, but of babes.
IV
THE TRUE BASIS OF MORALITY
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out ev'n to the edge of doom:--
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved."
W. Shakespeare.
"He that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.
What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy
Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not
your own?" (I. Cor. vi., 18-19.)
I said in an earlier chapter that I wanted to find a moral standard which
should be based on the realities of human nature, and in order to do that
we must first have a clear idea of what human nature really is, and by what
law it lives. We have been passing during the last generation from an idea
of law which belonged to our forefathers to a new idea of law which has
been given to us by modern science; and in transition we still talk in
ambiguous terms about "law"--moral "law," for instance--confusing ourselves
between a law that is imposed on us from outside, a law that is passed by
Parliament, for instance, or a law that has been the common custom of
the country through its judges, and that kind of "law" which science has
revealed to us. Scientific "law" is not imposed from without; it is the law
of our being. When you talk of the "law" of gravitation, you do not mean
that somebody outside has laid it down that mass shall act in a certain
way with regard to other masses; you mean that mass-material--being what it
is--behaves in a certain way. That is to say, a scientific law is _the law
of being_ of that which obeys the law. It obeys it because it is its
nature to do so. If we could get a firm, hold of that idea of law, our own
legislation would not be so senseless as it often is; for we should try to
discover what is the nature of human beings--their real nature, about which
we are often deceived--and we should try to make our laws, including our
moral laws, those to which human nature, at its best, would most naturally
and fully respond. That is the conception that is at the back of the great
phrase which sounds like a paradox in one of the Collects of the English
Prayer Book: "Whose service is perfect freedom." "Whose service is perfect
freedom"; that is to say, when you obey God, you find perfect freedom
because you are doing what it is your true nature to do. And that is why I
want to base our moral law, our moral standard, on the realities of human
nature. But, you will reply, when people are free to act as they choose
they sometimes choose to violate their own nature. I cannot say how that
happens; it involves the entire problem of evil; and I do not propose even
to attempt to deal with it in this book. I will only say that our confusion
has arisen, as I think, out of the very fact that instead of obeying the
law of our being we have violated it; and now are so confused that we
hardly know what "human nature" really is, or of what it is capable. That
is why we get such extraordinarily different ideas about morals, and why,
as I think, we get such arbitrary judgments on human beings.
Before, then, we can rightly establish our moral standard we have to decide
what human nature really is, and when we have done that we shall know what
is really moral. I suppose that sounds like a paradox to many, because they
think that morality is always "going against" human nature. If people do
anything that is generally called "immoral," they will excuse themselves on
the grounds of human nature; they will say: "After all, _human nature being
what it is_, you must expect this, that and the other kind of licence and
immorality"; and to say that morality, real morality, can only be based
on the realities of human nature will therefore sound to many of you the
wildest kind of paradox. But I want to pursue it just as though it were
true, because I believe it is true.
What, then, are the realities of our nature? Here is one: a human being is
not and never can be cut off from other human beings. He is not alone. He
cannot consider himself only. If he does so he violates his own nature,
because it is not his nature to be alone, and he cannot act without his
actions affecting other people. He cannot think, he cannot feel, he cannot
act or speak without affecting other people, and it is futile for anyone
to say: "It does not matter to others what I do; nobody knows; it concerns
only myself." Your innermost thought affects the whole world in which you
live, and whatever moral standard you are going to adopt, you must take
it for granted that your standard will affect other people, and that it is
absolutely impossible for you to act or think alone.