MALE AND FEMALE SEX-INSTINCTS AND MORALE DIAMETRICALLY DIFFERENT
"_In conjunction with any other beings but men, women would have
been angels; but with men they are just women, which when all is
said and done, is much the same thing._"--De Livry.
I
Among many other misconceptions with regard to Sex-characteristics, is
the modern teaching that the sex-instinct is identical in men and women.
Ignoring the truth that a higher moral code is the mark of psychical
superiority, and moreover that the exaction of it from women, under
social penalty, has done more than any other thing to purify and to
exalt the woman-character, impassioned fallacy now sees this higher
standard demanded of the sex as a stigma of inferiority, and as an
injustice. Accordingly it preaches equal liberty in this as in other
respects. The trend toward equalisation is unfortunately (but
inevitably) in the direction of lowering the woman-code rather than of
raising man's.
No falser or more disastrous doctrine could be promulgated. As in all
its other attributes and functions, so in this, the woman-nature differs
wholly from that of the male. The primal male sex-instinct was one of
tyranny and subjugation. There was no element of affection in it, and
its bent was toward promiscuity. In the primal female, the instinct as
an initiative impulse was non-existent. The surrender was to fear, and
to habit engendered by fear. Fondness for her mate came to woman by way
of her love for his child, a source essentially monogamous in trend.
Physical passion in woman is derived from the Male-traits in her. It is,
accordingly, a borrowed, not an inherent instinct. And in all natural
women, passion is secondary to love; love belonging to her own intrinsic
nature. Because of its heritage, there is, in a true woman's love,
always a maternal altruistic element: unselfish, ministering, devoted.
Love has come to be intensified in her by fire of passion and by force
of personal attraction. It is no longer a mere meek surrender, with fear
for spur and maternity for solace. In proportion as she is of high
organisation, it has become a complex of mind and emotion and sense;
intense and vital. But always, in proportion as she is womanly, her own
way of loving--the way of devotion and tenderness--is ascendant over
passion.
In man, howsoever it be leavened by the higher love, passion dominates.
When in woman passion dominates love, she is loving with the Male-traits
in her--not as woman. And in the measure wherein she falls short of the
womanly monogamous ideal, she is less woman than she is male.
Mr. Justice Hannen, for long President of the Divorce Court--and a
subtle expert in women--observed that it was not the passionate,
warm-eyed women who figured most before him, but, in far greater number,
the cold-blooded, greedy and emotionless. Because for one woman who
succumbs to love or passion, twenty transgress from motives of vanity or
gain; or from mere frivolous craving for excitement.
It is the sexless women who are most immoral, for the same reason that
some dyspeptics are always hungry. Persons of healthy digestion eat, and
are satisfied. The healthfully-sexed love, and are content. The
emotionless woman is for ever seeking in novelty, emotions she lacks the
emotion to feel. Such women exploit passion for vanity, for
distraction, or for the primal male-instinct of subjugation. Their
desire for a lover is less a sentiment than it is of the nature of that
craving for drink, or for drugs, or for dress, which many of this order
also indulge. All are megalomanias--natural instincts distorted to vices
by warp of abnormal self-centredness.
With its foundations laid in instinct, its organic emotionalism, its
streak of mental irresponsibility, and its hunger for approbation, the
Woman-nature, when lacking in the higher Woman-traits of affection and
selflessness, or when these are not duly absorbed in the natural
interests and functions of the sex, may degenerate to a very ugly thing.
Some of our latter-day "smart" young married women, childless or with
one or two children consigned to hirelings, their passions excited by
marriage and not duly assuaged by maternity, their impulses unchastened
and their powers unexpended in affection and care for the family, seek
outlet and distraction in promiscuous philanderings, in intrigue or in
vice.
Human faculty and impulse diverted from their normal channels readily
find crooked and dangerous courses.
In the fourth year of War, the Prussian Protestant State-Church declared
that "immorality among German women has attained such a degree that the
very foundations of Society are threatened." This and kindred
developments in other War-ridden countries are not due to women having
changed their natures, but are the outcome of conditions so altered as
to have released them from the wholesome disciplinary exercise of their
accustomed duties, relaxing thus the salutary curbs of habit and
convention. Child of Nature that she is, woman is a born rebel; for ever
in revolt against the law and order and restraints which man has imposed
as indispensable to Progress. Whereas men abhor, women exult in crises
and upheavals. Because these serve for outlet to their restive
emotionalism and supply scope for exotic sensation, while at the same
time giving them temporary mastery over the male--who is always at a
disadvantage in exhibitions of feeling.
And this temperamental erraticism is valuably disciplined by the
masculine bent for rule and method, and normally finds admirable
safety-valves in wifely, housewifely, and motherly functions.
II
To advocate a moral standard higher for women than for men is regarded
now as reactionary and regressive.
Nevertheless, it is certain that beyond all the other virtues, personal
purity is essentially the highest, and is racially the most valuable of
all the Woman-qualities. Lapses in the other sex are in no way
comparable, as regards moral, biological, or sociological significance,
with kindred lapses in woman. Because of her native non-conformability,
once she has deviated from the monogamous code, she is dangerously
likely never after to conform to it. (It is a truism that _The woman who
has one, has many lovers_.) Her non-conformity requires, accordingly, to
be protected by a social ordinance more rigid than is that of man. Man
being less complex of psychology, moreover, that which in him is merely
biological is vice in woman. The fact alone that the male is able to
employ the sex-function as a weapon of brutality (as in violation)
proves him totally dissimilar to woman in this relation.
Man disperses; Woman absorbs. And the consistency of Nature is such that
these two diametrically-opposite biological modes in reproduction are
reflected on the planes of mind and impulse. The diametrical difference
of the modes disposes outright of the Feminist demand for identical
moral codes for the sexes; the sex-functions of the two being so
intrinsically contrary in method and inherence, with correspondingly
signal differences in moral impulse and significance.
Biologically, the masculine function concludes with its fulfilment.
Whereas the feminine function _begins_ mainly therewith, and continues
thence onward to operate in an ever-deepening, broadening, and
intensifying tide of issues; biological and psychological. And so potent
and subtle is Nature's consistency with regard to this primary and vital
function of woman in Life, that whether or not biological issue results,
psychological issues do inevitably. Woman's mode and mood of
_receptiveness_ in this mysterious union so operate that, in her
surrender, she admits to the inmost sanctuary of her being an alien
presence--which remains with her till death. Fade as it may from her
consciousness, it remains, nevertheless, impressed for ever after on the
vibrant records of her sensitive Subconsciousness, as vitally as in the
hour of her surrender. And underlying mind and character and conduct
ever after, it for ever after contributes its quota to these.
Because of the vivifying potence of her creative womanhood--the function
whereof is to engender Life--the stranger admitted to her citadel
becomes endued with Life, and takes up his abode with her to the end of
her natural term. For this reason, the adulterous woman is adulterous in
a sense impossible to man--adulterous in both a vital and an intrinsic
psychical sense that is revolting.
With the increasing intensification in the male, with advancing
evolution, of his inherited Woman-traits, he has become ever further
endowed with Woman's Sub- and Supra-conscious faculties. So that the
function which was, in its primal moral, but brief and cursory, ending
summarily with its biological fulfilment, has become increasingly endued
in him with the vital emotionalism, and accordingly with the moral
significance inherent to the Woman-nature. If his experiences fade more
quickly from his consciousness than hers do, they remain nevertheless
(in the degree of his psychical development) potent still in his
Subconsciousness--as possibly adulterating and debasing factors. But
since his Subconscious emotionalism is an acquired and not an inherent
part of his male mentality, it is a medium vastly less sensitised and
operative in him than it is in her; of whom it is the very basis of her
being.
This is no apology, of course, for masculine aberration, but a counsel
of feminine virtue--a counsel making indirectly, therefore, but none the
less surely for masculine virtue also. The reasons for chastity in the
one sex differ diametrically from those which should be the motive
thereof in the other, however.
Chivalry and Prostitution are incompatible.
It must be confessed, however, that deterioration of the
woman-organisation and temperament conduces greatly to masculine
promiscuity. Not only because this entails loss of power to charm and
bind the mate, but because with the sex-immaturity, on the one hand of
the over-Feminised type, on the other, of the Mannish woman, women lose,
in greater or less degree, the natural power of one sex to assuage
passion in the other.
Man is deteriorated, moreover, by moral and psychical deterioration in
that sex whence moral impulse springs, because, in such case, the appeal
of woman ceases to be, as is normal, to the emotional and chivalrous in
him, but evokes, on the contrary, biological instinct mainly, or merely.
It is well-established truth that her first lover (or her husband,
supposing she had loved him) retains a unique hold upon a woman's mind
throughout her after-life--his personality or memory dominating her
imagination as no later-comer is able to do. This is because that first
enters into possession of both Consciousness and Subconsciousness while
the tablets of these are still virgin and unblotted. This first
impresses himself, therefore, clearly and strongly defined upon her
exquisitely-sensitised tablets of remembrance.
Latter-day young girls, permitted the injurious licence of free and
unchaperoned association with the other sex, even when they come to
marriage, inviolate, have, many of them, passed through experiences
which so have blurred and sullied their young highly-impressionable
temperament and senses as to have despoiled these of that fair purity
and freshness indispensable alike to potent impressions and to deep
attachments. In natural woman who has arrived at womanhood without
premature arousing of the senses, soul and sense are at fine poise, and
respond in vital unison to love. In girls whose innocence and conduct
have not been duly safeguarded, the prematurely-excited senses have
become detached from the soul--from the higher emotions, that is. With
the result that this fine poise of mind and body, which is the Hall-mark
of Woman-development, and whence romantic passion issues, has been
irretrievably lost.
The same is true, in degree, of young men. They too deteriorate when
biological instinct is dissociated in them from the higher impulses of
passion. But in men, the poise, being less delicate, is not only less
readily lost, but it is more readily recovered. In this, as in other
things, the normal male makes for means; while woman's bent is toward
extremes. Further, physical passion being normally far stronger in him,
and _initiative_ in impulse--whereas in her it is mainly
_responsive_--the senses assert sway over him spontaneously. While in
natural girls these lie more or less dormant, unless artificially
roused, or until aroused in natural response to love.
Early philanderings (more serious than boy-and-girl comradeship and
innocent flirtation) prevent women not only from ever attaining their
highest levels of organisation and temperament, but they destroy
effectually their power to love profoundly and whole-heartedly. They rob
them, accordingly, of the greatest transfiguring potence and happiness
of life.
III
Odious and startling evidence that because of woman's vital emotionalism
and sensitive psychology, her nature retains ineffaceable vestiges of
all that has happened to her, is the fact that a woman's children by a
second husband may resemble her first husband far more than they
resemble their father. A significant and repulsive adulteration of type,
and one so intrinsic that a woman who had been previously wife to a
negro or a Chinaman will present her second husband, typically European,
with offspring of negroid or of Mongolian type. That husbands and wives
come to resemble one another in physiognomy and characteristics, is
further indication of the subtle and potent temperamental fusion and
implications of the mysterious sex-union.
The adulteration of type which may thus repulsively mar the offspring of
women twice-mated is seen, at first hand, in that adulteration of
personality which results from sex-promiscuity. Not only is the
individuality both of mind and character obliterated, but the
individuality both of form and feature is obliterated too. The features
of persons of irregular life become blurred and more or less mongrel;
character and expression so degenerating as to produce eventually that
which has been styled a "composite face"--the face resulting when a
number of portraits of different persons are printed one over another on
the same photographic plate.
The degree to which in the sex-union--howsoever lightly entered
on--they twain become intrinsically and remain irrevocably one, in the
vital records of individualism and character, is wholly unsuspected. But
in this--which is a complex phenomenon of Hypnosis--indelible undying
images, such as are impressed upon the Subconscious mind in every other
form of Hypnosis, remain impressed thereon; to inspire and fructify, or
to weaken and vitiate nature and faculty.
That vigilant supervision of her young daughters for which the early
Victorian mother is now decried, secured a purity of racial type, in
fine physique and constitution, in notable talent and enterprise, in
rare womanly beauty and virile handsomeness, which proves the unique
potentialities inherent in our Anglo-Saxon stock. No merely material
service a woman can render to the State approaches in value the
all-potent one of safeguarding the virtue of its young daughters.
Each sex has its own morale to sustain. And personal virtue is woman's.
The desire for equal liberty in this respect is added proof of the
ascendancy, in modern women, of Male over their own natural
Woman-traits. It springs not from an intensification of passion, but, on
the contrary, from a waning of that power to love which holds a woman
true to one mate.
Last and most cogent of reasons: In view of those long centuries of
suffering and aspiration, by way of which the evolution of the
Woman-traits of love and purity has been achieved in blood and
tears--albeit the monogamous ideal is far yet from attainment--beyond
all else, the sex should strive toward this, both personally and
socially.
It is the soul of Love and Life, the impulse of Human advance. With
decline of this ideal, the emotions cease to centre in the Home and
Family, and civilisation relapses to barbarism.
IV
Ellen Key, in _Love and Marriage_, observes: "Few propositions are so
lacking in proof as that monogamy is the form of sexual life which is
indispensable to the vitality and culture of nations." And further: "all
the progress that is ascribed to Christian civilisation has taken place
while monogamy was indeed the law, but polygamy the custom."
She overlooks the portentous truth that a law is the expression of a
general aspiration toward an ideal for which a people is striving. That
a law is broken proves that the higher in man moves him to set a
standard beyond his power--or beside his inclination--to sustain
undeviatingly. Yet although he may not act up to it undeviatingly, it
stands, nevertheless, for the ideal he realises that he should reach.
Abolition of a good and elevating law proves, therefore, not only the
serious lapse of a community from an established standard of conduct,
but it inevitably lowers the level of conduct by removing
barriers--self-respect and self-restraint, public opinion and so
forth--standing in the way of laxity. Despite the death-penalty, murders
are committed. But were the death-penalty to be abolished, murder would
increase by leaps and bounds. The human mind is strangely susceptible.
And the power of habits acquired under fear of penalties is an
invaluable force for good. The higher minds of a community evolve and
establish codes for lesser minds to shape by. And undoubtedly the
subconscious as well as the conscious shaping toward such standards
furthers development in the directions thereof. To make honesty a matter
of personal choice, with no penalties attaching to theft, would be in
itself an incentive to theft.
Comparison with polygamous countries, of countries in which monogamy is
the law, refutes straightway Miss Key's discredit of monogamy; showing
the polygamous uncivilised, unenlightened, unprogressive, subject to
monogamous races, and in every sense, both materially and morally
decadent. And if, with a notion of establishing equality in all things
between the sexes by emancipating woman from the higher moral code,
leasehold marriage or other forms of wedded laxity should be
substituted--not only would national purity, but personal character and
happiness too would suffer grievously.
If men have not kept the monogamous law, the instinct of jealousy,
reinforced by repugnance to supporting alien offspring, has seen to it
that wives should trespass as seldom, at all events, as was possible to
be guarded against. Custom and public opinion, furthered by personal
fear and fear of divorce, have all contributed toward advancing ideals
of womanly honour and conduct. And from monogamous mothers--whether
voluntarily or involuntarily so--progress has derived immense impulse.
Apart from biological considerations, the benefit to the family of the
mother's influence centred in her home and kept from straying thence,
either by her own aspirations, by public opinion, or by fear of the
husband, has been incalculable.
During and since the War, crime among children has increased by 50 per
cent., largely owing to absence of mothers from their homes, working or
drinking, or otherwise dissipating, while their children have been left
to run wild in the streets.
Our reformatories are full to overflowing with these neglected
unfortunates; deprived thus of the haven of homes and maternal control.
As a man is responsible to the State for the support of his family, so a
woman should be held responsible to the State for the proper care and
supervision of its future citizens, who, without due care and
disciplinary influence, become a burden and scourge to the community.
In all these vitally-momentous issues, let us free our minds alike of
sex-bias and false sentiment, in order that we may see clearly, and may
act honestly and wisely in the interests not only of women themselves,
but in those of the Race.
V
The sex-instinct in woman having had its origin in surrender, retains
much still of this primal element. And both middle-class men of lower
evolutionary grade, and men of the working classes, exercise still, to
considerable degree, the brute-trait of terrorism over women--moral
rather than physical terrorism.
In rescuing young girls from molestation in the streets, one may see in
them the panic of such intimidation. They are pale and trembling, with
pupils widely dilated. In full daylight, it may be in a crowded
thoroughfare, with police at hand, primal instinctive emotionalism
paralyses reason, resource and will-power. Weak-minded women, who lack
their due share of masculine combativeness to stiffen resistance in
them, frequently marry, or otherwise yield to such men, far more because
they are afraid than because they are fond of them. And the terrorism
husbands have exercised over wives has nerved wives against the
terrorism exercised over them by other men; and has thus served to
protect them from their own weaknesses.
The Woman-traits, always at a disadvantage in concrete affairs against
superior strength, have been buttressed thus and coerced--often cruelly
and tyrannously, 'tis true. But they have nevertheless been greatly
furthered in development by a mate who, if he did not recognise the
higher calibre of woman's nature, nor himself aspired to the code he
exacted from her, recognised, at all events, that this higher code he
exacted of her was that best adapted to progress. Thus has poor
mortality been beaten and shapen on the anvils of compulsion and
exigency. And always the woman has most suffered--to be beautiful of
nature.
Were it not that an advance-guard of higher and chivalrous men stand, by
force of the laws they have made, between women and the lower and
coarser masculine orders, no woman's life would be worth the living
because of perpetual affront. With existing laws, indeed, which protect
even the most degraded of the sex, the women of the poorer classes are
everywhere subject to insult and unseemly jest, open or covert. Because
to many men of crude order, the eternal mystery of Sex shows mainly as
subject for levity. The crass and unimaginative frequently deride thus
things too high for their dense understanding.
Women have come to take their chivalrous protection by law as mere
matter-of-course, precisely as they take it as matter-of-course that men
should labour, and should endow them with the benefits of their
industry. These things are by no means matter-of-course, however, but
are matter of chivalry--chivalry so innate as to have become convention.
It would be occasion for laughter, were it not cause for profoundest
regret, that the hypertrophy of male-traits in woman has engendered
to-day a sex-antagonism which has set her in open revolt against man,
from whom, if she has suffered and suffers, and will continue to suffer
at the hands of his defects, she nevertheless derives, and has always
derived from his chivalries her most gracious human privileges.
That the obligations and the recompenses of the sexes are reciprocal,
is true. It is equally true, however, that the choice has lain
with men to have ignored the nobler issues of the compact. As the
seraglio-imprisoned women of the less manly and progressive peoples
prove.
All our civilisation, with its complex sociological, intellectual, and
moral developments, rests on a basis of Force. Men must still prove
their right to each and all of their laboriously-won achievements by
arms and the valours of war. In peace, the laws--which alone make life
tolerable--rest equally upon the powers of masculine will and strength
to inflict due punishment for violation thereof.
And laws having been made by men, it was clearly optional with them to
have left women unprotected, or far less protected than the other sex;
in place of having extended special protection to their more delicate
attributes.
In safeguarding women in general, men safeguard their own individual
women, of course. Human motive is involved; is the product of a number
of factors. That this is so is reason for eliminating no single one of
these factors, lest the resultant undergo a wholly unexpected and
disastrous transformation.
The Plan sets most women at the mercy of most men, by reason of the
greater physical strength of males, and by temptation of their more
urgent sex-instinct. In view of her inherent disabilities, it would have
seemed, _a priori_, that no woman could in ruder days have attained to
womanhood, inviolate.
And yet that her very disabilities have served for her increasing
protection is shown by the fact of her increasing protection as, with
the evolution of her higher organisation, her disabilities have
intensified.
Civilised woman, with her more delicate organisation, is far more
defenceless than was savage woman. But in response to the claims of her
increasing defencelessness, the instinctive chivalry of the stronger
male, her natural protector, has become progressively the intelligent
and moral chivalry of higher man. No strength or capability of woman's
own to defend herself could so have served her; nor could so have served
the other sex for fine incentive.
To free woman of her highly specialised and inspiring disabilities by
substituting in her, powers, muscular and mental, that would fit her to
meet the male on equal terms, would be to frustrate the method of the
male evolutionary ascent, by eliminating the humanising and uplifting
appeal to his manhood of these her inspiring unfitnesses.
The deplorable decadence in masculine regard for and bearing toward
women, which has resulted in direct proportion as the sex has
substituted male efficiencies for womanly ineptitudes, serves for one of
many other valuable object-lessons of the War.
VI
Among other Feminist fallacies, the _demi-mondaine_ has come to be
regarded as victim merely, on the one hand, of an unjust,
man-administered economic system, on the other, of masculine
libertinism. The truth is that the vast majority of immoral women are
under no compulsion, but voluntarily adopt this mode of life either to
escape work, or because of a natural vicious proclivity. A number are
mental defectives; some actually feeble-minded, others only morally
deficient.
It must always be remembered, moreover, that, biologically speaking, the
separation of the _genus_ woman into the folds, respectively, of sheep
and goats is of signal racial and social service. That some goats are in
the sheep-fold, some lambs among the goats, is not to be denied.
Fatalities, injustices, and incongruities are inevitable to all broad
human classifications. In the main, however, the women who resist
temptation and remain virtuous are obviously better fitted to be the
wives and mothers of the Race than are they who fall.
And although this is not, of course, the calculated purpose of this
lamentable under-world, the rough division of the sex thereby into two
main classes has been of service, by supplying a sociological backwater
wherein the worst of our racial derelicts--mental and moral
defectives--are segregated; and are precluded, for the most part, from
perpetuating their mental and moral defectiveness.
Women, like men, must uphold and battle for their standards in the
teeth of circumstance. The most notable types of parasite-women,
selfish, slothful, worthless, venal, vicious, whose standards are jewels
and clothes, their goals luxury and pleasure and the evasion of all that
is difficult and distasteful in life, are found among the aristocratic
and the plutocratic orders; safely secured against economic necessity or
lack of scope and outlet for their powers.
The Feminist fallacy that prostitution is almost entirely a product of
male economics has been strikingly refuted, too, by War-conditions,
which opened numerous well-remunerated employments for the sex. Yet,
coincident with a sad deficit of women to fill these, prostitution has
waxed rampant.
Wise and discreet were those early Victorians, with their uncompromising
ostracism of loose women. Apart altogether from such salutary expression
of their condemnation of impure living, they were vastly too clever and
far-seeing to admit persons of notoriously evil habit, peeress or
actress, to association with their clean young girls, as modern mothers
do; to meet and to mix freely with them socially or at Charity Bazaars,
on Flag-Days, and so forth. With the result that girls all the world
over have become increasingly lax and decadent in tone and manner, in
dress and morale, from confusion of their young standards by social
tolerance and recognition of such persons, as also from corruption by
demoralising contact with and observation of such.
Intolerance? Pharisaism? By no means!
The strong and straight, uncompromising moral standards of its women
serve as landmarks of, and impulse to a nation's progress. Clear and
definite lines of demarcation between good and evil, between possible
and impossible modes of conduct, point the moral of advance, and turn
the scale in the upward direction for the weak, the hesitating, and the
imitative.
Dread of consequences went far, in less sophisticated days, to
safeguard and foster womanly virtue. Modern expedients have,
unfortunately, removed all cause for fear in this relation; permitting
an impunity of action demoralising to the weak in will or principle, who
require every possible aid and check to guide them aright. In simpler
days, girls who had lapsed were steadied and strengthened in character
and self-restraint by the compulsion to support, as too by their natural
fondness for the unwanted child. Now the first step--having cost them
nothing--predisposes to further backslidings. And both character and
self-control degenerate increasingly.
VII
To weaken the marriage-bond by setting it for a term of years only, or
by making it terminable by consent, would virtually destroy marriage and
family-life. The fact that the bond would not be binding would make
persons more careless even than they are at present in selection of the
mate, and would thus multiply the number of mis-matings. Which would be
still further to deteriorate species, since the finer types of children
are born only of well-mated parents.
The finality of the bond, if it does not always prevent one or both from
meeting some other they prefer, prevents the scrupulous, at all events,
from seeking such. Or having found, it keeps many from fostering and
from yielding to temptation. Were marriage terminable, or, as is
sometimes proposed, were it abolished wholly, and love the only bond
between the sexes, there would be no confidence, no sense of security
between the partners, no stability of family life; no centring of
interests in this, and but small endeavour to retain affections which
for the many could be easily replaced--and replaced, moreover, with the
zest of novelty. On the contrary, a curse of unrest would afflict the
vast majority of married folk with the unsettling--mayhap with the
alluring--prospect of meeting their further "Fate"; perhaps their
second, possibly their third, it might be, their seventh "Fate."
Only the few are strong enough of heart or stable enough of character to
remain steadfast for a lifetime in any undertaking, unless bound
stringently thereto by authorised obligations, incentives, and
penalties. Only the few are deep enough of nature to love for a
lifetime; or are deep enough of nature to love so intensely as to
justify altering the marriage-code in order to spare these few
suffering. The wane of nine out of ten honeymoons impresses the value of
an inflexible decree that declines to reckon with disillusion, but
sternly bids the disillusioned take up their burden and make the best of
it. And having no choice, many do this and make a success of it--on new,
and, it may be, on far higher lines than those they had set out upon.
That but few love so deeply as to love for life by no means implies that
marriage for less than a lifetime should be substituted. It shows, on
the contrary, that the majority of persons would prove as incapable of
loving No. Two for long as they had been incapable of loving No. One; or
as they would be incapable of loving No. Three, or No. Ten. A bond that
rivets them for life to No. One therefore, and entails loss or suffering
when they fail to abide by it, is safeguard for them against such a
succession of loves as would be as demoralising to the individual as it
must be destructive of society.
Examples of this tendency to amorous licence have been furnished by the
complications of War-"widows," who, on report of the death of
soldier-husbands, remarried in unseemly haste--only to find the husband
return. So too, by the widespread infidelity of wives to absent
soldier-husbands. If the grave and moving circumstance of a husband
facing death or mutilation in the trenches, for his country's defence,
was not grave nor moving enough to keep his wife faithful to him, then
we should congratulate ourselves upon a marriage-law which, by exacting
penalties whereby such a wife suffers material damage, supplies the only
argument likely to stiffen the morale of so light-minded and callous a
creature.
Nothing less binding than a lifelong contract is coercive enough or is
sufficiently chastening to bridle woman's native changefulness and curb
her instinctive emotionalism. The realisation that there is no way out
of a situation is her finest incentive to nobility. She bruises her
impulses against the iron of circumstance, and the essences of her
intrinsic Woman-soul distil in patience and in sweetness. Under the
harrow of sacrifice, she feels herself martyred. And yet without the
sense of martyrdom, as may be also without the conditions thereof, no
true woman is ever wholly content that she is fulfilling her destiny.
Ellen Key writes of "_all the impurity that the sexual life shuts up
within the whited sepulchre of legal marriage_." She falls here into the
common error of assuming such evil to be restricted solely to the state
of marriage. Whereas the higher interests, the duties and affections of
the family life--purifying and inspiring influences lacking in
unsanctioned unions--make inevitably for the uplifting of the relation.
That some husbands and wives fall short of the pure intensity of passion
possible to some others between whom love is the sole bond, is true, of
course. But as are most other human developments, this is a matter of
the character of individuals rather than of the terms of the bond
uniting them. Certainly, high and tender passion is scarcely to be
expected in a union for no better reason than that this is illicit.
VIII
Were life designed for happiness and pleasure merely, the case would be
different. Were one life our sole portion, it might be different too.
Having one life only, we might be justified in claiming for it the joy
of the best love available. An unhappy or a less than happy marriage is
only one, however, of the many expedients for the evolution of faculty.
If the evolution of the individual progresses by way of countless
earth-existences strung upon a thread of spiritual continuity, one life
is but a brief and single page of everybody's great Life-serial.
That is, doubtless, why all feel their lot to be an episode
merely--unexplained, and incomplete, rather than a finished story. And
in our innumerable pages and innumerable episodes, we must resign
ourselves to sundry matrimonial vicissitudes.
Says the author of _The World-Soul_, "The more function is specialised
in either sex the less able either is to stand alone." This is argument
for further and fuller specialisation of their respective functions, in
both sexes, because so great is the happiness of fulfilling for that
other his or her great need of us, and of being blessed by that other in
our own need. But too, it raises the voluntary surrender of such
happiness for honour's sake, for holiness' sake, for God's sake, or for
children's sake, to the height of a renunciation which transfigures
human life and character, and proportionally ennobles both.
That both man and woman should be entitled to divorce for infidelity,
for incorrigible drunkenness, criminality or insanity on the part of the
mate, would be just and reasonable clauses in the marriage-code.
Because, apart from the unmerited cruelty and shame of such bondages, is
the risk of entailing degenerate offspring. Otherwise, it appears that
relaxation of the Divorce-Law would result in evils far worse than any
it would remedy. And these evils would re-act inevitably far more
cruelly--both temperamentally and materially--upon women and children
than upon men.
The conjugal and the paternal instincts being traits the sex has
acquired by long ages of developmental progress, for men to lose these
would be as easy as the loss would be degenerative to themselves and to
those others. Folly to suppose that having reached a certain stage of
human character-building, we can, with impunity, kick away the
foundations whereon our house of evolution has been raised; and on which
it must rest for all time.
The irrevocability of the marriage-contract is woman's greatest
security. Realisation of that sex-lawlessness which is an innate
Male-trait--relic of the promiscuous and cursory nature of the primal
male-instinct--should set us on guard against weakening, in the least
degree, this covenant, which is the best among those privileges whereby
man, in the teeth of his inherent instincts, has chivalrously protected
woman and the family. In the teeth of these, he has applied his natural
intelligent bent for Conformity in concrete affairs to the repression
and regulation of his impulses by the institution of Marriage. And
this--the apotheosis of masculine conformity to the exactions of
Progress--is now menaced by the native Non-conformity of woman,
exploited by Feminism.
It is notable that men are but seldom truly fond of, nor are they
faithful to the wife who works outside the home. In France, where the
clever, industrious wife of the middle and lower classes is more a
business-partner than she is a wife, conjugal fidelity is not expected.
Not only is a house without a woman in it to devote her best interests
and powers to the arts of home-making, not a home, but the bond of that
fraction of interest and affection left over to her from her work
outside it is a thing too slight to bind her husband to her. He finds no
difficulty in substituting--should he seek this--a haven with more
atmosphere of home and sentiment in it, companionship with more of
temperament in it, more resiliency and freshness, than that of the
industrious and wage-earning, but fatigued and jaded working-wife.
The children of such a union--if such there be--supply no bond either to
draw together and unite their parents. Children reared by servants,
without understanding or affection, are but seldom affectionate or
charming. Moreover, the children of hard-working mothers are but seldom
true children. They bring to the home nothing of the freshness, the
vitality or charm of natural childhood.
If father and mother possess aesthetic sensibilities, these are offended
probably by the plainness and the lack of graces in their
offspring--bye-products merely of their economic assiduities. Perhaps
the big spectacles through which the young eyes gaze forth like doleful
prisoners from behind bars, make them feel strangely uncomfortable; as
in the presence of weird and reproachful intelligences.
Neither derives interest or joy enough from the family circle to repay
them for their parental obligations and responsibilities.
IX
Love between the sexes, being a need alike of souls and biogenesis, is
regarded by some as reason enough in itself for relaxing the
Marriage-law--even for the abolition of Marriage; making affection the
sole bond between the lovers.
We cannot, logically, abolish the legal contract uniting two persons in
marriage, however, without at the same time abolishing every other form
of legal contract, and the legal liabilities thereof. Logically, we
cannot make conjugal duty and family responsibility mere matters of
personal conscience, unless we are assured that the human species has
reached such a phase of moral integrity as to need no other incentive
than its own integrity to secure fulfilment of its obligations, moral
and material. If we abolish the legal factor in marriage, to be
consistent we must abolish the legal factor in business partnerships and
in all other sociological compacts. We must make the payment of rent, of
rates and taxes, of tradesmen's bills and so forth, debts of conscience
and of honour merely; for the discharge whereof conscience and honour
must alone suffice.
It may be objected that these are purely material obligations, while the
bond between the sexes is an emotional one. And yet--Have we reached
such a stage of development that emotional considerations are more
binding on us than material ones are?
Moreover, if we are to make love the sole bond--clearly the waning of
love must release from the bondage. Further, when we sift out the purely
emotional element in the vast majority of unions, we shall find it but a
very slender factor among other more binding reciprocities. Certainly a
far more slender thread to trust to in the safeguarding of a contract
than is, for example, the factor of commercial honesty. Commercial
honesty is not, perhaps, a conspicuous virtue of the times.
Nevertheless, the sense of honesty in business is a good deal stronger
in most men than is their sense of honour with regard to love. And their
sense of honour in love has developed mainly as a direct consequence of
those legal compulsions and responsibilities of love which have been
exacted and fostered by the legality of marriage.
How many men are there, for example, who, having come to care for some
other, hold themselves bound in the least by an illicit tie; howsoever
much they may have cared at one time for the woman in the case? Lightly
come--lightly go! And if the terms, marriage and love, are by no means
necessarily synonymous, it has been, nevertheless, greatly by way of the
obstacles and compulsions and the social penalties attaching to
violation of the marriage vows that the love-passion has been purified
and uplifted out of the barbarism of mere instinct and promiscuity,
into the graces of emotion and the virtues of monogamy.
Had any man and woman, reciprocally attracted at their first meeting,
been free always to have carried this attraction straightway to its
biological conclusion, the sex-relation would be still the merely
physiological incident it was in primal forests. The circumstance that
such attraction has been debarred from ready consummation by the
obligations and the obstacles engendered by a recognised and legalised
bond between the sexes, has been debarred, moreover, in innumerable
cases, by one of the attracted couple being subject to this bond--all of
this has preserved the nascent emotion from straightway relapsing to the
basic level whence it sprang, and has fostered the evolution of love in
the higher reaches of emotion; of imagination, of controlled and
chastened passion.
It may be said that modern men and women, loving one another with the
more highly-evolved passion of our enlightened epoch, would love as
devotedly and would remain as constant in an illicit as in a legalised
union. If so, such constancy would be an echo mainly of the
long-dignified state of wedded constancy; and the greatest of all
tributes to the values of this. Nevertheless--For how long after the
clarion-note of aspiration sounded by Marriage should have ceased to
vibrate, would the echo of it last?
Should woman, in her short-sighted efforts to "emancipate" herself still
further, release herself wholly (as she now inclines to do) from the
marriage-bond, she will have thrown back in man's face the very
tenderest guerdon of his worth and of his high regard for her. And she
will have destroyed, at a blow, his most vital incentive to further
advance, her own and her children's most powerful safeguard, and the
main buttress not alone of national but, as well, of Natural human
progress.