stupidity shot with pain, marriage responds to a human need to live
together and to foster the species, and that though we will make it
easier and approach free union, we shall always have something of the
sort. And so, because I believe it eternal, I think it necessary.
But why does it fare so ill? Why is it that when we see in a restaurant
a middle-aged couple, mutually interested and gay, we say: "I wonder if
they are married?" Why do so many marriages persist when the love knot
slips, and bandages fall away from the eyes? Strange cases come to my
mind: M 6 and M 22, always apart, except to quarrel, meanly jealous,
jealously mean, yet full of affability--to strangers; M 4 and many
others, all poor, where at once the wife has decayed; when you see youth
struggling in vain on the features under the cheap hat, you need not
look at the left hand: she is married. It is true that however much they
may decay in pride of body and pride of life, when all allowances are
made for outer gaiety and grace, the married of forty are a sounder,
deeper folk than their celibate contemporaries. Often bled white by
self-sacrifice, they have always learnt a little of the world's lesson,
which is to know how to live without happiness. They may have been
vampires, but they have not gone to sleep in the cotton wool of their
celibacy. Even hateful, the other sex has meant something to them. It
has meant that the woman must hush the children because father has come
home, but it has also meant that she must change her frock, because even
father is a man. It has taught the man that there are flowers in the
world, which so few bachelors know; it has taught the woman to interest
herself in something more than a fried egg, if only to win the favor of
her lord. Marriage may not teach the wish to please, but it teaches the
avoidance of offence, which, in a civilization governed by negative
commandments, is the root of private citizenship.
2
For the closer examination of the marriage problem, I am considering
altogether one hundred and fifty cases; my acquaintance with them varies
between intimate and slight. I have thrown out one hundred and sixteen
cases where the evidence is inadequate: the following are therefore not
loose generalizations, but one thing I assert: those one hundred and
sixteen cases do not contain a successful marriage. Out of the remaining
thirty-four, the following results arise:
Apparently successful 9
Husband unfaithful 5
Wife unfaithful 10
Husband dislikes wife 3
Wife dislikes husband 7
Success is a vague word, and I attempt no definition, but we know a
happy marriage when we see it, as we do a work of art.
It should be observed that when one or both parties are unfaithful, the
marriage is not always unsuccessful, but it generally is; moreover,
there are difficulties in establishing proportion, for women are
infinitely more confidential on this subject than are men; they also
frequently exaggerate dislike, which men cloak in indifference. Still,
making all these allowances, I am unable to find more than nine cases of
success, say six per cent. This percentage gives rise to platitudinous
thoughts on the horrid gamble of life.
Two main conclusions appear to follow: that more wives than husbands
break their marriage vows, and (this may be a cause as well as an
effect) that more wives than husbands are disappointed in their hopes.
This is natural enough, as nearly all women come ignorant to a state
requiring cool knowledge and armored only with illusion against truth,
while men enter it with experience, if not with tolerance born of
disappointment. I realize that these two conclusions are opposed to the
popular belief that a good home and a child or two are enough to make a
woman content. (A bad home and a child or nine is not considered by the
popular mind.)
There is no male clamor against marriage, from which one might conclude
that man is fairly well served. No doubt he attaches less weight to the
link; even love matters to him less than to women. I do not want to
exaggerate, for Romeo is a peer to Juliet, but it is possible to
conceive Romeo on the Stock Exchange, very busy in pursuit of money and
rank, while Juliet would remain merely Juliet. Juliet is not on the
Stock Exchange. If business is good, she has nothing to do, and if Satan
does not turn her hands to evil works, he may turn them to good ones,
which will not improve matters very much. Juliet, idle, can do nothing
but seek a deep and satisfying love: mostly it is a lifelong
occupation. All this makes Juliet very difficult, and no astronomer will
give her the moon.
Romeo is in better plight, for he makes less demands. Let Juliet be a
good housekeeper, fairly good looking and good tempered; not too stupid,
so as to understand him; not too clever, so that he may understand her;
such that he may think her as good as other men's wives, and he is
satisfied. The sentimental business is done; it is "Farewell! Farewell!
ye lovely young girls, we're off to Rio Bay." So to work--to money--to
ambition--to sport--to anything--but Juliet. While he forgets her, the
modern woman grows every day more attractive, more intellectually vivid.
She demands of her partner that he should give her stimulants, and he
gives her soporifics. She asks him for far too much; she is cruel, she
is unjust, and she is magnificent. She has not the many children on whom
in simpler days her mother used to vent an exacting affection, so she
vents it on her husband.
Yet it is not at first sight evident why so easily in England a lover
turns into a husband, that is to say, into a vaguely disagreeable person
who can be coaxed into paying bills. I suspect there are many
influences corrupting marriage, and most of them are mutual in their
action; they are of the essence of the contract; they are the mental
reservations of the marriage oath. So far as I can see, they fall into
sixteen classes:--
1. The waning of physical attraction.
2. Diverging tastes.
3. Being too much together.
4. Being too much apart. (There is no pleasing this institution.)
5. The sense of mutual property.
6. The sense of the irremediable.
7. Children.
8. The cost of living.
9. Rivalry.
10. Polygamy in men and "second blooming" in women.
11. Coarseness and talkativeness.
12. Sulkiness.
13. Dull lives.
14. Petty intolerance.
15. Stupidity.
16. Humour and aggressiveness.
There are other influences, but they are not easily ascertained;
sometimes they are subtle.
M 28 said to me: "My husband's grievance against me is that I have a
cook who can't cook; my grievance against him is that he married me."
Indeed, sentiment and the scullery painfully represent the divergence of
the two sexes. One should not exaggerate the scullery; the philosopher
who said "Feed the brute" was not entirely wrong, but it is quite easy
for a woman to ignore the emotional pabulum that many a man requires. It
is quite true that "the lover in the husband may be lost", but very few
women realize that the wife can blot out the mistress. Case M 19
confessed that she always wore out her old clothes at home, and she was
surprised when I suggested that though her husband was no critic of
clothes, he might often wonder why she did not look as well as other
women. Many modern wives know this; in them the desire to please never
quite dies; between lovers, it is violent and continuous; between
husband and wife, it is sometimes maintained only by shame and
self-respect: there are old slippers that one can't wear, even before
one's husband.
The problem arises very early with the waning of physical attraction. I
am not thinking only of the bad and hasty marriages so frequent in young
America, but of the English marriages, where both parties come together
in a state of sentimental excitement born of ignorance and rather
puritanical restraint. Europeans wed less wisely than the Hindoo and
the Turk, for these realize their wives as Woman. Generally they have
never seen a woman of their own class, and so she is a revelation, she
is indeed the bulbul, while he, being the first, is the King of men. But
the Europeans have mixed too freely, they have skimmed, they have
flirted, they have been so ashamed of true emotion that they have made
the Song of Solomon into a vaudeville ditty. They have watered the wine
of life.
So when at last the wine of life is poured out, the draught is not new,
for they have quaffed before many an adulterated potion and have long
pretended that the wine of life is milk. For a moment there is a
difference, and they recognize that the incredible can happen; each
thinks the time has come:
_"Wenn ich dem Augenblick werd sagen:
Verweile doch, du bist so schoen . . ."_
Then the false exaltation subsides: not even a saint could stand a daily
revelation; the revelation becomes a sacramental service, the
sacramental service a routine, and then, little by little, there is
nothing. But nature, as usual abhorring a vacuum, does not allow the
newly opened eyes to dwell upon a void; it leaves them clear, it allows
them to compare. One day two demi-gods gaze into the eyes of two
mortals and resent their fugitive quality. Another day two mortals gaze
into the eyes of two others, whom suddenly they discover to be
demi-gods. Some resist the trickery of nature, some succumb, some are
fortunate, some are strong. But the two who once were united are
divorced by the three judges of the Human Supreme Court: Contrast,
Habit, and Change.
Time cures no ills; sometimes it provides poultices, often salt, for
wounds. Time gives man his work, which he always had, but did not
realize in the days of his enchantment; but to woman time seldom offers
anything except her old drug, love. Oh! there are other things,
children, visiting cards, frocks, skating rinks, Christian Science teas,
and Saturday anagrams, but all these are but froth. Brilliant, worldly,
hard-eyed, urgent, pleasure-drugged, she still believes there is an
exquisite reply to the question:
"Will the love you are so rich in
Light a fire in the kitchen,
And will the little God of Love turn the spit, spit, spit?"
Only the little God of Love does not call, and the butcher does.
It is her own fault. It is always one's own fault when one has
illusions, though it is, in a way, one's privilege. She is attracted to
a strange man because he is tall and beautiful, or short and ugly and
has a clever head, or looks like a barber; he comes of different stock,
from another country, out of another class--and these two strangers
suddenly attempt to blend a total of, say, fifty-five years of different
lives into a single one! Gold will melt, but it needs a very fierce
fire, and as soon as the fire is withdrawn, it hardens again. Seldom is
there anything to make it fluid once more, for the attraction, once
primary, grows with habit commonplace, with contrast unsatisfactory,
with growth unsuitable. The lovers are twenty, then in love, then old.
It is true that habit affects man not in the same way as it does woman;
after conquest man seems to grow indifferent, while, curiously enough,
habit often binds woman closer to man, breeds in her one single fierce
desire: to make him love her more. Man buys cash down, woman on the
instalment plan, horribly suspecting now and then that she is really
buying on the hire system. A rather literary case, Case M 11, said to
me: "I am much more in love with him than I was in the beginning; he
seemed so strange and hard then. Now I love him, but ... he seems tired
of me; he knows me too well. I wonder whether we only fall in love with
men just about the time that they get sick of us."
Her surmise may be correct: there is no record of the after-life of
Perseus and Andromeda, and it is more romantic not to delve into it.
Neither they nor any other lovers could hope to maintain the early
exaltations. I am reminded of a well-known picture by Mr. Charles Dana
Gibson, showing two lovers in the snow by the sea. They are gazing into
each other's eyes; below is written: "They began saying good-by last
summer." Does any one doubt that a visit to the minister, say, in the
autumn, might have altered the complexion of things? And no wonder, for
they were the unknown, and through marriage would become the known. It
is only the unknown that tempts, until one realizes that the unknown and
the known are the same thing, as Socrates realized that life and death
are the same thing, mere converses of a single proposition. It is the
unknown makes strange associates, attracts men to ugly women, slatterns
to dandies. It is not only contrast, it is the suspicion that the
unexpected outside must conceal something. The breaking down of that
concealment is conquest, and after marriage there is no conquest; there
is only security: who could live dangerously in Brooklyn? Once licensed,
love is official; its gifts are doled out as sugar by a grocer, and
sometimes short weighed. Men suffer from this and many go dully
wondering what it is they miss that once they had; they go rather heavy,
rather dense, cumbrously gallant, asking to be understood, and
whimpering about it in a way that would be ridiculous if it were not a
little pathetic. Meanwhile, their wives wonder why all is not as it was.
It is no use telling them that nothing can ever be as it was, that as
mankind by living decays, the emotions and outlook must change; to have
had a delight is a deadly thing, for one wants it again, just as it was,
as a child demands always the same story. It must be the same delight,
and none who feel emotion will ever understand that "the race of
delights is short and pleasures have mutable faces."
It is true that early joys may unite, especially if one can believe that
there is only one fountain of joy. I think of many cases,--M 5, M
33,--where there is only one cry: "It is cruel to have had delights, for
the glamour of the past makes the day darker." They will live to see the
past differently when they are older and the present matters less. But
until then, the dead joy poisons the animate present; the man must drift
away to his occupation, for there is nothing else, and the woman must
harden by wanting what she cannot have. She will part herself from him
more thoroughly by hardening, for one cannot count upon a woman's
softness; it can swiftly be transmuted into malicious hatred.
3
This picture of pain is the rule where two strangers wed, but there are
some who, taking a partner discover a friend, many who develop agreeable
acquaintanceship. Passion may be diverted into a common interest, say in
conchology; if people are not too stupid, not too egotistic, they very
soon discover in each other a little of the human good will that will
not die. They must, or they fail. For whereas in the beginning foolish
lips may be kissed, a little later they must learn to speak some wisdom.
In this men are most exacting; they are most inclined to demand that
women should hold up to their faces the mirror of flattery, while women
seem more tolerant, often because they do not understand, very often
because they do not care, and echo the last words of Mr. Bernard Shaw's
Ann: "Never mind her, dear, go on talking;" perhaps because they have
had to tolerate so much in the centuries that they have grown expert.
One may, however, tolerate whilst strongly disapproving, and one must
disapprove when one's egotism is continually insulted by the other
party's egotism. There is very little room for twice "I" in what ought
to have been "We", and we nearly all feel that the axis of the earth
passes through our bodies. So the common interests of two egotisms can
alone make of these one egotism. The veriest trifle will serve, and pray
do not smile at Case M 4, who forgive each other all wrongs when they
find for dinner a _risotto a la Milanaise_. A slightly spasmodic
interest, and one not to be compared with a common taste for golf, or
motoring, or entertaining, but still it is not to be despised. It is so
difficult to pick a double interest from the welter of things that
people do alone; it is so difficult for wives truly to sympathize with
games, business, politics, newspapers, inventions; most women hate all
that. And it is still more difficult, just because man is man and
master, for him really to care for the fashions, for gossip, for his
wife's school friends, and especially her relations, for tea parties,
tennis tournaments at the Rectory, lectures at the Mutual Improvement
Association, servants' misdeeds, and growths in the garden. Most men
hate all that. People hold amazing conversations:
She: "Do you know, dear, I saw Mrs. Johnson again to-day with that man."
He: (Trying hard) "Oh! yes, the actor fellow, you mean."
She: (Reproachfully) "No, of course not, I never said he was an actor.
He's the new engineer at the mine, the one who came from Mexico."
He: "Oh! yes, that reminds me, did you go to the library and get me
Roosevelt's book on the Amazon?"
She: "No dear, I'm sorry I forgot. You see I had such a busy day, and I
couldn't make up my mind between those two hats. The very big one and
the very small one. _You_ know. Now tell me what you _really_ think--"
and so on.
It is exactly like a Tchekoff play. They make desperate efforts to be
interested in each other's affairs, and sometimes they succeed, for they
manage to stand each other's dullness. They assert their egotism in
turns. He tells the same stories several times. He takes her for a
country walk and forgets to give her tea, and she never remembers that
he hates her dearest friend Mabel. Where the rift grows more profound is
when trifles such as these are overlooked, and particularly where a man
has work that he loves, or to which he is used, which is much the same
thing. In early days the woman's attitude to a man's work varies a good
deal, but she generally suspects it a little. She may tolerate it
because she loves him, and all that is his is noble. Later, if this work
is very profitable, or if it is work which leads to honour, she may take
a pride in it, but even then she will generally grudge it the time and
the energy it costs. She loves him, not his work. She will seldom
confess this, even to herself, but she will generally lay down two
commandments:
1. Thou shalt love me.
2. Thou shalt succeed so that I may love thee.
All this is not manifest, but it is there. It is there even in the days
of courtship, when a man's work, a man's clothes, a man's views on
bimetallism are sacred; in those days, the woman must kowtow to the
man's work, just as he must keep on good terms with her pet dog. But the
time almost invariably comes when the man kicks the pet dog, because
pet dogs are madly irritating sometimes--and so is a man's work. There
is something self-protective in this, for work is so domineering. I
should not be at all surprised to hear that Galatea saw to it that
Pygmalion never made another statue. (On second thoughts it strikes me
that there might be other reasons for that.)
It is true that Pygmalion was an artist, and these are proverbially
difficult husbands: after an hour's work an artist will "sneer, backbite
and speak daggers." Art is a vampire, and it will gladly gobble up a
wife as well as a husband, but the wife must not do any gobbling. She
does not always try to, and there are many in London who follow their
artist husbands rather like sandwichmen between two boards, but they are
of a trampled breed, indigenous, I suspect, to England. I think they
arise but little in America, where, as an American said to me, "women
labor to advance themselves along a road paved with discarded husbands."
(This is an American's statement, not mine, so I ask the Reverend John
Bootfeller, President of the Kansas and Nevada Society for the
Propagation of the Intellect, to spare me his denunciations.)
But leaving aside such important things as personal pettinesses, which
too few think important, it must be acknowledged that women seldom
conceive the passion for art that can inflame a man. They very seldom
conceive a passion for anything except passion,--an admirable tendency
for which they blush as one does for all one's natural manifestations.
They hardly ever care for philosophy; they generally hate politics, but
they nearly always love votes. They are quite as irritating in that way
as men, who almost invariably adore politics and detest realities,
sometimes love science and generally prefer record railway runs. But
where such an interest as a science or an art has reigned supreme in a
man, and reasserts itself after marriage, she recognizes her enemy, the
serpent, for is he not the symbol of wisdom? Invariably he rears his
head when the love fever has subsided. Woman's impulse is more artistic
than man's, but it seldom touches art; her artistic impulse is not yet
one of high grade; she is the flower arranger rather than the flower
painter, the flower painter rather than just the painter. But this
instinct that is in all women and in so few men avails just enough to
make them discontented, while the great instinct that is in a few men is
always enough to make them wretched.
It would not be so bad if they had not to live together, but social
custom has decided that couples must forsake their separate ways and
evermore follow the same. Most follow the common path easily enough,
because most follow the first path that offers, but many grumble and
cast longing eyes at side tracks or would return to the place whence
they came. They cannot do so because it is not done, because other feet
have not broken paths so wide that they shall seem legitimate. When
husband and wife care no longer for their common life, the only remedy
is to part: then the contradictory strain that is in all of us will
reassert itself and make them rebound towards each other. If the law
were to edict that man and wife should never be together for more than
six months in the year, it would be broken every day, and men and women
would stand hunger and stripes to come together for twelve months in
twelve. If love of home were made a crime, a family life would arise
more touching than anything Queen Victoria ever dreamed. But from the
point of view of a barbarous present, this would never do, for the very
worst that can happen to two people is to reach the fullness of their
desire. The young man who raves at the young woman's feet: "Oh! that I
were by your side day and night! Oh! that ever I could watch you move!
I grudge the night the eight hours in which you sleep!"-- Well, that
young man is generally successful in his wooing and gets what he wants;
a little later he gets a little more. For proximity is a dangerous
thing; it enables one to know another rather well: full knowledge of
mankind is seldom edifying. One sees too much, one sees too close; a
professional Don Juan who honors me with his friendship told me that he
has an infallible remedy against falling in love more often than three
times a day: "Stand as close to your charmer as you can, look at her
well, very well, at every feature; watch her attitudes, listen to every
tone of her voice; then you will discover something unpleasant, and you
will be saved." That is a little what happens in marriage; for ever and
ever people are together, hearing each other, watching each other.
Listen to M 14:
"I really was very much in love with him and only just at the end of the
engagement did I notice how hard he blew his nose. After we were
married, I thought: 'Oh! don't be so silly and notice such little
things, he's such a splendid fellow.' A little later--'Oh! I do wish he
wouldn't blow his nose like that, it drives me mad.' Now I find myself
listening and telling myself with an awful feeling of doom: 'He's going
to blow his nose!'"
(She never tells him that he trumpets like an elephant. She fears to
offend him. She prefers to stand there, exasperated and chafed. One day
he will trumpet down the walls of her Jericho.)
There are awful little things between two people. Here are some of them:
M 43. When tired, the wife has a peculiar yawn, roughly: "Hoo-hoo!
Hoo-hoo!" The husband hears it coming, and something curls within him.
M 98. Every morning in his bath the husband sings: "There is a fountain
fill'd with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins," always the same.
M 124. The wife buys shoes a quarter size too small and always slips
them off under the table at dinner. Then she loses them and develops
great agitation. This fills her husband with an unaccountable rage.