It should be plain enough now why English marriages so often are
unhappy. The immense failure of marriage to-day arises from the
confusion of our minds and our chaotic desires so that we have no firm
ideal, no fixed standard of conduct either for the wife or for the
husband. Every couple starts anew and alone, and the way is too
difficult for solitary experiments.
The existence of many standards, of what ought to be done and what
ought not to be done, the liberty permitted to the husband, the liberty
permitted to the wife, if the wife shall continue her work or profession
or remain at home dependent on the husband's earnings, whether the
marriage shall be fruitful or sterile--these are but a few of the
questions left undecided. And thus to leave unguided each wife and each
husband, with their own idea of what is good to do and what is evil,
makes for narrowness and waste of effort; while further, our inability
to set up a standard of right and wrong conduct--of ideals to strive
after--leaves vacant room for false ideals of every kind. These empty
places of the mind have been occupied by the ravings of advanced people.
The harm has been incredibly active in the consciousness of the young.
We have put before their imagination nothing worthy of contemplation,
therefore they easily sink downward attracted by what is base.
Then we suggest economic changes. But the evil is not economic. No evils
are fundamentally economic. The structure of society is the unforeseen
result of the conflicting desires and capacities of the individuals who
comprise the society. A false view of marriage, a false view of the
relative values of life and money, of service and liberty, of happiness
and duty, is not dependent on economic conditions. Yet, let us not
forget that this is the age of the gadding mind and the grabbing hand.
We tend to value everything by what it brings in to us, in feelings if
not in more tangible results.
You will see what this must mean. I am brought back to our wrong ideals;
I have no new remedy to give; I can only again insist upon this truth: A
preoccupation with a desire for love does not, and never can, result in
happiness. But the personal (or perhaps my meaning will be clearer by
saying the egoistic) view of love has assumed such gigantic proportion
in our minds to-day that we accept these selfish desires as a safe basis
for permanent happiness. _Marriage has ceased to be a discipline; it has
become an experiment._
The romantic view of love as the basis of marriage is, of course, the
essence of the English habit of life; as we have seen, it focuses desire
on personal adventures and personal needs. Romance necessarily leads to
license, and not license of the body alone finding expression in more or
less gross immoralities, for there is a spiritual license far more
dangerous because so much more seductive. Appetite for adventure, for an
excitement that is mainly mental is a condition that is quite as
dangerous to marriage and much more common than the unfaithfulness that
leads to the divorce courts.
I would appeal to the young, to each young girl, who to-day is
questioning the future. Many of you have passed through a supremely
heroic period of your lives; now you are waiting. You want to do right,
and it is so difficult, for everyone seems to be at a loose end of
desire. Perhaps some among you will ask me: "What can I do?" My answer
is this: Fix your ideal. Do not make the child's mistake and think that
the desirable thing is to do just what you like. You can never find
freedom or happiness in that way. Hold firm in your hearts that no gain
of personal liberty counts as happiness to women. Treasure your womanly
qualities--your sweetness, your gentleness, your shyness, your unlimited
capacity for devotion, guard these as your greatest possession. Do not
acknowledge your poverty by failing to honor yourself. Be the
establishers of a revived feminist idealism, the founders of a new
tradition of womanly service. It is for you to fix the type that will
one day give woman her real freedom; one day--but not yet.
In these times of uncertainty there is great danger. Every woman should
be asked at the moment to believe in simple things; in her home, her
children, her husband, and her country. The only hope is in unity, and
for unity you must have discipline, and for discipline, for the present,
at least, you must accept authority. Much, incalculably much, depends
upon the young. The generation to which I belong is passing, we have to
hand on to you who are younger the torch of life.
With more courage to face truth, you should have a surer ideal than we
have found. When this comes, there will be less sentimentality but much
deeper feeling about marriage. I have tried to show you a different
ideal, and picture for you the Jewish home, where the exalted esteem in
which women are held is the outcome of their attitude to marriage and
the Jewish way of life: it is an ideal that depends directly upon duty
and a religious view of marriage.
To-day we need a new consciousness of our social and racial
responsibilities, the idea of handing down at least as much as we have
received. Let the young women of England learn as a great new faith
that the sons and daughters they bear are not their children and the
children of their husbands only, but the sons and daughters of
England--the inheritors of all the fine traditions of our race. Let us
spread the new romance of Love's responsibility to Life; let us honor
ideals of self-dedication to our husbands, understanding their
dependence upon us, to our homes, to our sons and our daughters, to our
race, its great ones and their deeds; our moral obligations to all
children even before they are born.
It is women, and they alone, who can save marriage; they hold all life
in their hands. Never before in the world has the opportunity been so
vast; it is a fearful thing to find oneself among realities. To you, who
to-day are young, negligence no longer is possible. Listen to what I
tell you: those heroes who have died for this England of ours cry to you
for children to hold their memories and make their lives everlasting.
Let us take seriously what the politicians have said without meaning it:
let us make an England fit for heroes to be born in, able to mold a
character of heroism in each of its children: not, as at present, an
England so tainted with mean self-assertion that the dedication of a
wife to her husband, of a mother to her children, counts as a sacrifice
of her personality.[80:1]