MARRIAGE

It is an interesting subject--and one which has touched, or will

probably touch, most of our lives, therefore it may not be

unprofitable to study it a little, and what it means and what it

should mean; because, in the present upheaval of all our old beliefs,

marriage, as a sensible institution, is being attacked upon many

sides.

It is extremely easy to pull down a house, but it requires skill and

special training to rebuild it again; and before dragging the roof off

and demolishing the walls, it would be wiser to have made a distinct

plan and provided the materials ready for the reconstruction of a new

habitation, that the rain and the wind may not overcome us when we

have no shelter for our heads. But this is what the attackers of

marriage have failed to do as yet. Here are three facts which we can

begin by looking at.

_Firstly._ Some kind of union between man and woman, consolidated by

the law, is necessary for the continuation of a race in vigour and

moral upliftment.

_Secondly._ It is admitted by great philosophers and deep thinkers

that the welfare of the community is of more importance than the

fluctuating desires of the individual.

_Thirdly._ A fine ideal, however impossible of attainment, is a force

for good to be held up before the eyes of the mass of the people, who,

however much actual education has advanced, are still too unendowed

with personal brain to have any judgment themselves--their capacities

only allowing them to see the effects of things upon their immediate

surroundings without perceiving the causes, and therefore leaving them

incapable of judging what could be good for the country, the race, or

humanity in general.

After all these centuries, legal marriage still holds, because no one

has been able to suggest any other union which could take its place

without bringing chaos. And it seems more than likely that no one will

ever be sufficiently inspired so to do! Thus let us now consider the

present legal marriage as still being a stable fact, and see how we

can make the best of it. In it there are two things which both man and

woman forget--or refuse to face--and which are perhaps the chief

causes of most unhappiness. Man forgets that his kind _words_ of love

and sympathy matter far more to the actual happiness of the woman than

any of his _deeds_: because words fill and satisfy her imagination,

which is active whenever she is alone; and kind deeds, with few or

indifferent words, make very little impression upon it. Woman

forgets--or will not face--the fact that man is by nature a polygamous

animal. There is no use in arguing about this and saying he ought not

to be, and that it is a horrible idea. It is a physiological fact, and

to dispute it is to criticise the Almighty's scheme for ensuring a

continued population. That man should have polygamous instincts is

essential for this scheme to work against any odds.

Whatever we choose to say in contradiction to this resolves itself

into empty words, the fact of nature remaining. It would be just as

sensible to try to argue that, because we do not like to drink sea

water, it has no business to be salt! and to decide that it is _not_

salt! and that we will not recognise that _it is_ salt! The ocean

would just laugh at us, and remain briny! And no doubt Nature laughs

at silly woman too, when she tries to judge man without understanding

the elementary principle of creation.

This being grasped clearly, it must be seen that monogamous marriage

is _an ideal state_, not a _natural state_, and it must be admitted to

be such, and lived up to as an ideal, not undertaken with the notion

that fidelity in man is _natural_, and infidelity an _unnatural_

thing. It is the other way about because of the fundamental instincts

of man, which continuously and subconsciously suggest to him the

necessity for self-preservation, and in its larger sense

self-preservation means species-preservation.

Woman, on the other hand, although unconsciously inspired by this same

fundamental instinct of species-preservation, is not naturally

polygamous, or rather polyandrous, because such a state would militate

against this end by eventually destroying pure offspring. She only

becomes so under certain conditions. Fidelity, then, is, so to speak,

a natural state for woman, and she has not to fight against any

fundamental instinct of her sex in order to preserve it--she has only

to resist perverted desire, which is an exotic growth, the outcome of

civilisation. Thus fidelity is much harder for man, who, to succeed in

being faithful, is obliged to dominate a natural instinct, which is a

far more difficult thing to do than to fight against an exotic desire;

because all natural things are governed by inexorable and eternal

laws, and are not at the mercy of circumstance. Thus the natural

instinct of man is at work all the time in continuous activity--and

the exotic desire of woman is intermittent, and the result of

circumstance.

Of course, all this has been said before by every serious thinker, and

I am only reiterating these facts because the general readers may have

forgotten them, and I must bring them to their recollection to make

the rest of our discussion upon marriage clear.

These nature instincts being admitted, we can get on to a survey of

legal marriage. At first, it must have been an affair of expediency.

The woman was probably expected to be faithful, and brute force took

care that she was so, or that she immediately paid the price of

possible contamination of offspring by being killed. She was expected

to be faithful for a natural reason, not for a spiritual or

sentimental one; the reason being, as already inferred, to ensure the

purity of the offspring. Man had no need to be faithful to one woman

to secure this end, and never, in consequence, dreamed of being so.

All through Pagan times infidelity in man was rampant and recognised,

and not looked upon as sin. And when woman became civilised enough to

have exotic desires, she lost her natural instinct, that of

preservation of pure offspring, and became liable to vagrant fancies

and often a vicious creature.

Then the Church arrived and turned marriage into a sacrament;

presumably with the noble intention of trying to elevate man and

overcome his carnal nature. Man outwardly conformed, and, with his

whole soul's desire to be true and to uplift himself, each individual

who really believed no doubt did war with his instincts, and numbers

probably succeeded in conquering them. While woman, always a creature

of more delicate nervous susceptibilities, flung herself with furore

under the influences of spiritual things, and in the truly devout

cases overcame her grafted desires and returned to natural instincts.

But in beings of both sexes who were unconvinced by religion,

infidelity continued to flourish, as it does even to this day. A man

who truly believes that he is sinning in being unfaithful, and who

understands that outside opinion is nothing in the soiling of his own

soul, but that the matter is between himself and God, will always be

faithful _in body_ to a woman he has wedded, whether he cares for her

or not. But a man who has not this conviction, and who does not live

in this intimate relation to God, has no reason to hold him from

indulging his natural instinct, except the fear of being found out,

and when his sagacity has suggested safeguards against this, his

instinct will certainly give itself expression. It is all a question

of personal belief. There are numbers of good and honest characters

who do not feel convinced that entire fidelity in man to one woman was

intended by the Creator, and who therefore feel no degradation in the

latitude they allow themselves. It is not for us to argue which are

right and which are wrong, but to stick to the subject of marriage and

how it can perhaps be made happier in these present days, when all

other conditions of life are changing, by a better comprehension of

fundamental instincts and laws of nature.

Woman has developed so far that generally she thinks she is (and

sometimes she really is!) a reasonable and balanced creature, with

strong individuality--and personal tastes and likes and dislikes. She

is now ill-fitted to keep them all in subservience to man, unless he

is her intellectual master. She may have wedded only because the

emotion of sex (not understood as such, and called by a number of

other names such as "love," "devotion," "attraction") forced her at

one of its powerful moments to take a physical mate--totally unsuited

to her moral calibre. But she has knelt at the altar and sworn vows

before God--and perhaps has fulfilled woman's original mission in the

world, and become the mother of children--so what is to be done to

rectify her mistake and its unhappy consequences?

She must look the whole circumstances of it in the face and ask

herself whether she herself threw dust in her own eyes as regards the

character of her husband, whether he deceived her in this, or whether

they just drifted together, each to blame as much as the other,

through the attraction of sex and the cruelty of ignorance. She may

regret it a thousandfold--but she has done the thing of her own free

will, no one forced her to wed the man; she may have done so

unwillingly in some cases--and for ulterior motives, but at all events

she was consenting and not dragged to church resisting, and so if she

is sensible she will use the whole of her intelligence to make the

best of it. She will look to the end of her every action and her every

thought. Will brooding over her "rights," and the wrongs he has

inflicted, mend them? Will it do anything but give her vanity--the

satisfaction of self-pity? Certainly not.

If she has really evolved enough to wish to impose her opinions and

individuality upon her household or the community, she will have

realised that the welfare of the home for which she is responsible,

and the community to which she belongs, are, or ought to be, of far

more consequence to her than her own personal emotions. Therefore she

must ask herself whether she has any right to upset the happiness of

the one, and the conception of good of the other, by indulging in

personal quarrels and bickerings, or open scandal with her mate. A

really noble and unselfish woman would never consider her personal

emotion before her duty to God and to her neighbour. It is because the

outlook of woman is as a rule so pitifully narrow and self-centred

that she often makes a useless and unhappy wife, and shipwrecks her

own and others' futures.

Man has gone on with his brute force, and his physical and mental

attraction, and his tastes and beliefs and aspirations very much the

same for thousands of years. Numbers of them were brutes then, and

numbers are brutes still and will remain so. It is only woman who has

so incredibly changed, and after staying immeasurably behind in

importance and in intellectuality for countless centuries, now seeks

to equal if not outstep man in all things. It would be well for man to

wake up to the fact that he is now wedding a woman with every sense

and nerve and conception of life far in advance of what his mother

believed herself to be capable of--and so his methods towards her in

return must not be as his father's were. If man wishes to have the

good, domestic, obedient wife his father--perhaps one should go

farther back and say grandfather!--expected--and got--he must either

choose a timid weakling who becomes just his echo, or he must learn to

treat the modern woman as a comrade, a being who mentally can

understand and follow his aspirations and even assist him in his

desires, a creature to respect and consult, and whom he cannot rule

just because he is a man and she is a woman--but can only do so, and

bring her to obedience, when he has shown her his intellectual

superiority and his wisdom.

Woman is as willing to be ruled as ever she was--she always adores a

master; but she has grown too intelligent to bow her head just because

a man is a _man_--he must be _the man_. Man is naturally fighting for

his old omnipotence, which he possessed regardless of his personal

endowment, simply because he was a male creature--and the foolish

section of woman is fighting man, with bombs and tricks and frantic

words, instead of _convincing_ him by her wisdom and attainments, by

her demonstrations of knowledge of life and its duties and

responsibilities, that she has grown at last indeed fitted to be

treated as an equal and a comrade, not as a plaything and a slave.

Who does not respect a woman who fulfils all her obligations with

grace and charm, whose house is well ordered, whose friends are well

entertained by her fine mind, and whose children are well brought up

and full of understanding? She is indeed more precious than rubies and

far more full of influence for the good of her community than she who

shouts of rights and wrongs and votes and such-like. The first woman

could control a hundred votes, and help a government, but the second

can only clog the wheels of the sex's advancement.

Now we get back to marriage!

And the first and foremost thing to be understood is that it is a

frightful responsibility to undertake, and that all those who enter

into this bond lightly and for frivolous motives, or from just

drifting, will be made by fate to pay the price.

Think of it! Two people stand up and swear before God to continue to

love one another until death do them part. They solemnly stand there

and make vows about an emotion over which they have no more control

than they have over the keeping of the wind in the south. They have

only control, if they have strong wills, over its demonstration. And

then in nine cases out of ten neither thinks for a moment afterwards,

of his or her responsibility _of trying to make possible_ the

observance of these vows, by keeping alight the flame of love in the

other's heart. A man utterly disillusions a woman and then blames her,

not himself, for her ceasing to care for him, and being eventually

attracted by some one else! A woman disgusts or bores a man, and then

bewails her sad lot, and calls the man a brute for being indifferent,

and a shameful creature for looking elsewhere for consolation! In all

marriages there is no one to blame or praise for unhappiness or

happiness but the two individuals themselves. It is his fault--or

misfortune--if she no longer cares, and likewise hers in the parallel

case--and it is owing to the weakness of either if outside

circumstances have been able to interfere. Thus to ensure happiness

there must be a tremendous sense of personal responsibility, and there

should be understanding of life and understanding of nature instincts

and understanding of sex instincts; and a ruthless tearing away of the

false values which a Victorian age grafted upon religion, narrowing

the mind of woman as to man's needs--and narrowing man's conception of

woman's mental capacity.

No woman must ever forget in her relation to man that "he who pays the

piper calls the tune," and in this I am not only speaking literally of

shekels of gold and silver, but of the power incorporated in certain

personalities; and man, if he chose to exert it, has always _force

majeure_ at his command in the last extremity, although in these days

of Herculean young women he may lose even this in time!

Before undertaking to play that most difficult part of wife, every

girl ought to ask herself, Does she really care for the man enough to

make her use her intelligence to understand him, and to try to keep

him loving her? Or if she does not personally care enough for him to

trouble about this--will the situation of her husband in the world

satisfy her, and make the bondage, unleavened by love, of the care of

house, servants, and possible children, worth while?

Before undertaking the situation she ought to look at every aspect of

the case, and question herself searchingly upon her own aims and ends,

and if the actual facts will or will not fit in with them. Having made

up her mind that for one reason or another it is for her happiness to

take a certain man for her mate, she ought then sedulously to

cultivate all the aspects of the condition which can conduce to peace

and to the attainment and enjoyment of that end. She must not forget

that the man has paid her the highest honour a man can pay a woman. He

has selected her to be his life's companion. He proposes in nine cases

out of ten, to provide her with a home and a position in life, and to

take upon himself the responsibility of her maintenance (when the

woman has money of her own this question is different naturally). But

in all cases the man in asking her to marry him has shown that

something in her--or in her possessions--makes her appear worth the

giving up of his liberty. So she owes him just as much as the thing he

took her for. If for her money, and she knows it is for that, and she

has been sufficiently humble to accept him on those terms--she owes

him money. If for love--she owes him at least the outside observances

of love. If he has pretended love and it is for some other motive, his

Nemesis will fall upon himself in the disillusion and contempt he will

inspire. But in all cases the woman, through want of intelligence or

pure misfortune, has crossed the Rubicon with him; she has allowed him

to teach her the meaning of dual life--she has put it into his power

with her to create future lives. She cannot, for any price or any

prayers, recross that fatal stream. So for all reasons of common

sense--and above all, sense of responsibility to the community--she

had better make the best of her bargain.

Likewise, man should pause and think, Is it merely because I cannot

obtain this woman upon any other terms that I am offering her

marriage? Have I respect for her? Do I think she will bring happiness

into my house as well as pleasure to my body? Is she suited to my

brain capacity when I am not exalted by physical emotion? Am I going

to curb my selfishness and behave decently towards her?

If he cannot answer these questions satisfactorily he may know that he

is undertaking a hundred-to-one chance of peace and happiness. But if

the physical desire is stronger than all these considerations, then he

must _know and realise_ that whatever happens _he must never blame the

woman_. He has succumbed to the most material and alas! the most

hideously strong force in nature--not because the woman tempted him,

as it has been the fashion for man to say since the days of Adam--but

because there is something in himself which is so weak that it cannot

listen to the promptings of the spirit when the body calls.

In each and every case it is a man's duty to be kind and courteous to

a woman who is his wife. He has made her so by his free vows before

God (because no one can be forced to the altar against his absolute

will in these days), or he has made her so by vows and business

agreement, according to the laws of his country, before the Registrar.

In either case he has made her his legal wife and the possible mother

of his children--units unborn who can affect the welfare of his

country. He has, then, his great duties towards her. If she was a

girl, he has taken from her that which nothing on earth can restore;

he has made her into another being. He has been instrumental in making

her--this other human soul--accept responsibilities, and he is bound

as an honourable man to school himself so as to be able to help the

mutual happiness and peace of their dual existence. And if he wishes

to be obeyed, loved, and respected, he has to look to himself that he

inspires obedience, love, and respect in his mate. She will not

experience these feelings to order; and fear alone, or some other and

lower motive, would make her simulate them. Man must not forget that

nothing simulated can last. Truth alone remains at the end of the

year.

No marriage can be certain of continuing happy which has been entered

into in the spirit of taking a lottery ticket. But most marriages

could be fairly happy if both man and woman looked the thing squarely

in the face and made up their minds that they would run together in

harness as two well-trained carriage horses, both knowing of the pole,

both pulling at the collar and not over-straining the traces, both

taking pride in their high stepping and their unity of movement. How

much more dignified than to make a pitiful exhibition of

incompatibility like two wild creatures kicking and plunging, and

finally upsetting the vehicle they had agreed to draw?

I would like to discuss now the problem of whether or not marriage

could be made happy no matter how it starts, by using common sense,

but the deep interest of the whole subject has made my pen already

cover too much space and I must refrain in this chapter.

Only, men and women who read this, do not pass it by, but stop and

_think_ before you plunge, through the giving and the taking of a

wedding ring, into happiness or misery.