THE OBJECTS OF MARRIAGE
What are the legitimate objects of marriage? We know that many people seek
to marry for ends that can scarcely be called legitimate, that men may
marry to obtain a cheap domestic drudge or nurse, and that women may marry
to be kept when they are tired of keeping themselves. These objects in
marriage may or may not be moral, but in any case they are scarcely its
legitimate ends. We are here concerned to ascertain those ends of marriage
which are legitimate when we take the highest ground as moral and
civilised men and women living in an advanced state of society and
seeking, if we can, to advance that state of society still further.
The primary end of marriage is to beget and bear offspring, and to rear
them until they are able to take care of themselves. On that basis Man is
at one with all the mammals and most of the birds. If, indeed, we
disregard the originally less essential part of this end--that is to say,
the care and tending of the young--this end of marriage is not only the
primary but usually the sole end of sexual intercourse in the whole
mammal world. As a natural instinct, its achievement involves
gratification and well-being, but this bait of gratification is merely a
device of Nature's and not in itself an end having any useful function at
the periods when conception is not possible. This is clearly indicated by
the fact that among animals the female only experiences sexual desire at
the season of impregnation, and that desire ceases as soon as impregnation
takes place, though this is only in a few species true of the male,
obviously because, if his sexual desire and aptitude were confined to so
brief a period, the chances of the female meeting the right male at the
right moment would be too seriously diminished; so that the attentive and
inquisitive attitude towards the female by the male animal--which we may
often think we see still traceable in the human species--is not the
outcome of lustfulness for personal gratification ("wantonly to satisfy
carnal lusts and appetites like brute beasts," as the Anglican Prayer Book
incorrectly puts it) but implanted by Nature for the benefit of the female
and the attainment of the primary object of procreation. This primary
object we may term the animal end of marriage.
This object remains not only the primary but even the sole end of marriage
among the lower races of mankind generally. The erotic idea, in its deeper
sense, that is to say the element of love, arose very slowly in mankind.
It is found, it is true, among some lower races, and it appears that some
tribes possess a word for the joy of love in a purely psychic sense. But
even among European races the evolution was late. The Greek poets, except
the latest, showed little recognition of love as an element of marriage.
Theognis compared marriage with cattle-breeding. The Romans of the
Republic took much the same view. Greeks and Romans alike regarded
breeding as the one recognisable object of marriage; any other object was
mere wantonness and had better, they thought, be carried on outside
marriage. Religion, which preserves so many ancient and primitive
conceptions of life, has consecrated this conception also, and
Christianity--though, as I will point out later, it has tended to enlarge
the conception--at the outset only offered the choice between celibacy on
the one hand and on the other marriage for the production of offspring.
Yet, from, an early period in human history, a secondary function of
sexual intercourse had been slowly growing up to become one of the great
objects of marriage. Among animals, it may be said, and even sometimes in
man, the sexual impulse, when once aroused, makes but a short and swift
circuit through the brain to reach its consummation. But as the brain and
its faculties develop, powerfully aided indeed by the very difficulties
of the sexual life, the impulse for sexual union has to traverse ever
longer, slower, more painful paths, before it reaches--and sometimes it
never reaches--its ultimate object. This means that sex gradually becomes
intertwined with all the highest and subtlest human emotions and
activities, with the refinements of social intercourse, with high
adventure in every sphere, with art, with religion. The primitive animal
instinct, having the sole end of procreation, becomes on its way to that
end the inspiring stimulus to all those psychic energies which in
civilisation we count most precious. This function is thus, we see, a
by-product. But, as we know, even in our human factories, the by-product
is sometimes more valuable than the product. That is so as regards the
functional products of human evolution. The hand was produced out of the
animal forelimb with the primary end of grasping the things we materially
need, but as a by-product the hand has developed the function of making
and playing the piano and the violin, and that secondary functional
by-product of the hand we account, even as measured by the rough test of
money, more precious, however less materially necessary, than its primary
function. It is, however, only in rare and gifted natures that transformed
sexual energy becomes of supreme value for its own sake without ever
attaining the normal physical outlet. For the most part the by-product
accompanies the product, throughout, thus adding a secondary, yet
peculiarly sacred and specially human, object of marriage to its primary
animal object. This may be termed the spiritual object of marriage.
By the term "spiritual" we are not to understand any mysterious and
supernatural qualities. It is simply a convenient name, in distinction
from animal, to cover all those higher mental and emotional processes
which in human evolution are ever gaining greater power. It is needless to
enumerate the constituents of this spiritual end of sexual intercourse,
for everyone is entitled to enumerate them differently and in different
order. They include not only all that makes love a gracious and beautiful
erotic art, but the whole element of pleasure in so far as pleasure is
more than a mere animal gratification. Our ancient ascetic traditions
often make us blind to the meaning of pleasure. We see only its
possibilities of evil and not its mightiness for good. We forget that, as
Romain Rolland says, "Joy is as holy as Pain." No one has insisted so much
on the supreme importance of the element of pleasure in the spiritual ends
of sex as James Hinton. Rightly used, he declares, Pleasure is "the Child
of God," to be recognised as a "mighty storehouse of force," and he
pointed out the significant fact that in the course of human progress its
importance increases rather than diminishes.[8] While it is perfectly true
that sexual energy may be in large degree arrested, and transformed into
intellectual and moral forms, yet it is also true that pleasure itself,
and above all, sexual pleasure, wisely used and not abused, may prove the
stimulus and liberator of our finest and most exalted activities. It is
largely this remarkable function of sexual pleasure which is decisive in
settling the argument of those who claim that continence is the only
alternative to the animal end of marriage. That argument ignores the
liberating and harmonising influences, giving wholesome balance and sanity
to the whole organism, imparted by a sexual union which is the outcome of
the psychic as well as physical needs. There is, further, in the
attainment of the spiritual end of marriage, much more than the benefit of
each individual separately. There is, that is to say, the effect on the
union itself. For through harmonious sex relationships a deeper spiritual
unity is reached than can possibly be derived from continence in or out of
marriage, and the marriage association becomes an apter instrument in the
service of the world. Apart from any sexual craving, the complete
spiritual contact of two persons who love each other can only be attained
through some act of rare intimacy. No act can be quite so intimate as the
sexual embrace. In its accomplishment, for all who have reached a
reasonably human degree of development, the communion of bodies becomes
the communion of souls. The outward and visible sign has been the
consummation of an inward and spiritual grace. "I would base all my sex
teaching to children and young people on the beauty and sacredness of
sex," wrote a distinguished woman; "sex intercourse is the great sacrament
of life, he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh his
own damnation; but it may be the most beautiful sacrament between two
souls who have no thought of children."[9] To many the idea of a sacrament
seems merely ecclesiastical, but that is a misunderstanding. The word
"sacrament" is the ancient Roman name of a soldier's oath of military
allegiance, and the idea, in the deeper sense, existed long before
Christianity, and has ever been regarded as the physical sign of the
closest possible union with some great spiritual reality. From our modern
standpoint we may say, with James Hinton, that the sexual embrace,
worthily understood, can only be compared with music and with prayer.
"Every true lover," it has been well said by a woman, "knows this, and the
worth of any and every relationship can be judged by its success in
reaching, or failing to reach, this standpoint."[10]
[8] Mrs. Havelock Ellis, _James Hinton: A Sketch_, Ch. IV.
[9] Olive Schreiner in a personal letter.
[10] Mrs. Havelock Ellis, _James Hinton_, p. 180.
I have mentioned how the Church--in part influenced by that clinging to
primitive conceptions which always marks religions and in part by its
ancient traditions of asceticism--tended to insist mainly, if not
exclusively, on the animal object of marriage. It sought to reduce sex to
a minimum because the pagans magnified sex; it banned pleasure because the
Christian's path on earth was the way of the Cross; and even if
theologians accepted the idea of a "Sacrament of Nature" they could only
allow it to operate when the active interference of the priest was
impossible, though it must in justice be said that, before the Council of
Trent, the Western Church recognised that the sacrament of marriage was
effected entirely by the act of the two celebrants themselves and not by
the priest. Gradually, however, a more reasonable and humane opinion crept
into the Church. Intercourse outside the animal end of marriage was indeed
a sin, but it became merely a venial sin. The great influence of St.
Augustine was on the side of allowing much freedom to intercourse outside
the aim of procreation. At the Reformation, John à Lasco, a Catholic
Bishop who became a Protestant and settled in England, laid it down,
following various earlier theologians, that the object of marriage,
besides offspring, was to serve as a "sacrament of consolation" to the
united couple, and that view was more or less accepted by the founders of
the Protestant churches. It is the generally accepted Protestant view
to-day.[11] The importance of the spiritual end of intercourse in
marriage, alike for the higher development of each member of the couple
and for the intimacy and stability of their union, is still more
emphatically set forth by the more advanced thinkers of to-day.
[11] It is well set forth by the Rev. H. Northcote in his excellent
book, _Christianity and Sex Problems_.
There is something pathetic in the spectacle of those among us who are
still only able to recognise the animal end of marriage, and who point to
the example of the lower animals--among whom the biological conditions are
entirely different--as worthy of our imitation. It has taken God--or
Nature, if we will--unknown millions of years of painful struggle to
evolve Man, and to raise the human species above that helpless bondage to
reproduction which marks the lower animals. But on these people it has all
been wasted. They are at the animal stage still. They have yet to learn
the A.B.C. of love. A representative of these people in the person of an
Anglican bishop, the Bishop of Southwark, appeared as a witness before the
National Birth-Rate Commission which, a few years ago, met in London to
investigate the decline of the birth-rate. He declared that procreation is
the sole legitimate object of marriage and that intercourse for any other
end was a degrading act of mere "self-gratification." This declaration
had the interesting result of evoking the comments of many members of the
Commission, formed of representative men and women with various
stand-points--Protestant, Catholic, and other--and it is notable that
while not one identified himself with the Bishop's opinion, several
decisively opposed that opinion, as contrary to the best beliefs of both
ancient and modern times, as representing a low and not a high moral
standpoint, and as involving the notion that the whole sexual activity of
an individual should be reduced to perhaps two or three effective acts of
intercourse in a lifetime. Such a notion obviously cannot be carried into
general practice, putting aside the question as to whether it would be
desirable, and it may be added that it would have the further result of
shutting out from the life of love altogether all those persons who, for
whatever reason, feel that it is their duty to refrain from having
children at all. It is the attitude of a handful of Pharisees seeking to
thrust the bulk of mankind into Hell. All this confusion and evil comes of
the blindness which cannot know that, beyond the primary animal end of
propagation in marriage, there is a secondary but more exalted spiritual
end.
It is needless to insist how intimately that secondary end of marriage is
bound up with the practice of birth-control. Without birth-control,
indeed, it could frequently have no existence at all, and even at the
best seldom be free from disconcerting possibilities fatal to its very
essence. Against these disconcerting possibilities is often placed, on the
other side, the un-æsthetic nature of the contraceptives associated with
birth-control. Yet, it must be remembered, they are of a part with the
whole of our civilised human life. We at no point enter the spiritual save
through the material. Forel has in this connection compared the use of
contraceptives to the use of eye-glasses. Eye-glasses are equally
un-æsthetic, yet they are devices, based on Nature, wherewith to
supplement the deficiencies of Nature. However in themselves un-æsthetic,
for those who need them they make the æsthetic possible. Eye-glasses and
contraceptives alike are a portal to the spiritual world for many who,
without them, would find that world largely a closed book.
Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our
social life. By furnishing the means to limit the size of families, which
would otherwise be excessive, it confers the greatest benefit on the
family and especially on the mother. By rendering easily possible a
selection in parentage and the choice of the right time and circumstances
for conception it is, again, the chief key to the eugenic improvement of
the race. There are many other benefits, as is now generally becoming
clear, which will be derived from the rightly applied practice of
birth-control. To many of us it is not the least of these that
birth-control effects finally the complete liberation of the spiritual
object of marriage.