HUSBANDS AND WIVES
It has always been common to discuss the psychology of women. The
psychology of men has usually been passed over, whether because it is too
simple or too complicated. But the marriage question to-day is much less
the wife-problem than the husband-problem. Women in their personal and
social activities have been slowly expanding along lines which are now
generally accepted. But there has been no marked change of responsive
character in the activities of men. Hence a defective adjustment of men
and women, felt in all sorts of subtle as well as grosser ways, most felt
when they are husband and wife, and sometimes becoming acute.
It is necessary to make clear that, as is here assumed at the outset,
"man" and "husband" are not quite the same thing, even when they refer to
the same person. No doubt that is also true of "woman" and "wife." A woman
in her quality as woman may be a different kind of person from what she is
in her function as wife. But in the case of a man the distinction is more
marked. One may know a man well in the world as a man and not know him at
all in his home as a husband; not necessarily that he is unfavourably
revealed in the latter capacity. It is simply that he is different.
The explanation is not really far to seek. A man in the world is in vital
response to the influences around him. But a husband in the home is
playing a part which was created for him long centuries before he was
born. He is falling into a convention, which, indeed, was moulded to fit
many masculine human needs but has become rigidly traditionalised. Thus
the part no longer corresponds accurately to the player's nature nor to
the circumstances under which it has to be played.
In the marriage system which has prevailed in our world for several
thousand years, a certain hierarchy, or sacred order in authority, has
throughout been recognised. The family has been regarded as a small State
of which the husband and father is head. Classic paganism and Christianity
differed on many points, but they were completely at one on this. The
Roman system was on a patriarchal basis and continued to be so
theoretically even when in practise it came to allow great independence to
the wife. Christianity, although it allowed complete spiritual freedom to
the individual, introduced no fundamentally new theory of the family, and,
indeed, re-inforced the old theory by regarding the family as a little
church of which the husband was the head. Just as Christ is the head of
the Church, St. Paul repeatedly asserted, so the husband is the head of
the wife; therefore, as it was constantly argued during the Middle Ages, a
man is bound to rule his wife. St. Augustine, the most influential of
Christian Fathers, even said that a wife should be proud to consider
herself as the servant of her husband, his _ancilla_, a word that had in
it the suggestion of slave. That was the underlying assumption throughout
the Middle Ages, for the Northern Germanic peoples, having always been
accustomed to wife-purchase before their conversion, had found it quite
easy to assimilate the Christian view. Protestantism, even Puritanism with
its associations of spiritual revolt, so far from modifying the accepted
attitude, strengthened it, for they found authority for all social
organisation in the Bible, and the Bible revealed an emphatic predominance
of the Jewish husband, who possessed essential rights to which the wife
had no claim. Milton, who had the poet's sensitiveness to the loveliness
of woman, and the lonely man's feeling for the solace of her society, was
yet firmly assured of the husband's superiority over his wife. He has
indeed furnished the classical picture of it in Adam and Eve,
"He for God only, she for God in him,"
and to that God she owed "subjection," even though she might qualify it
by "sweet reluctant amorous delay." This was completely in harmony with
the legal position of the wife. As a subject she was naturally in
subjection; she owed her husband the same loyalty as a subject owes the
sovereign; her disloyalty to him was termed a minor form of treason; if
she murdered him the crime was legally worse than murder and she rendered
herself liable to be burnt.
We see that all the influences on our civilisation, religious and secular,
southern and northern, have combined to mould the underlying bony
structure of our family system in such a way that, however it may appear
softened and disguised on the surface, the husband is the head and the
wife subject to him. We must not be supposed hereby to deny that the wife
has had much authority, many privileges, considerable freedom, and in
individual cases much opportunity to domineer, whatever superiority custom
or brute strength may have given the husband. There are henpecked
husbands, it has been remarked, even in aboriginal Australia. It is
necessary to avoid the error of those enthusiasts for the emancipation of
women who, out of their eager faith in the future of women, used to
describe her past as one of scarcely mitigated servitude and hardship. If
women had not constantly succeeded in overcoming or eluding the
difficulties that beset them in the past, it would be foolish to cherish
any faith in their future. It must, moreover, be remembered that the very
constitution of that ecclesiastico-feudal hierarchy which made the husband
supreme over the wife, also made the wife jointly with her husband supreme
over their children and over their servants. The Middle Ages, alike in
England and in France, as doubtless in Christendom generally, accepted the
rule laid down in Gratian's _Decretum_, the great mediæval text-book of
Canon Law, that "the husband may chastise his wife temperately, for she is
of his household," but the wife might chastise her daughters and her
servants, and she sometimes exercised that right in ways that we should
nowadays think scarcely temperate.
If we seek to observe how the system worked some five hundred years ago
when it had not yet become, as it is to-day, both weakened and disguised,
we cannot do better than turn to the _Paston Letters_, the most
instructive documents we possess concerning the domestic life of excellent
yet fairly average people of the upper middle class in England in the
fifteenth century. Marriage was still frankly and fundamentally (as it was
in the following century and less frankly later) a commercial transaction.
The wooer, when he had a wife in view, stated as a matter of course that
he proposed to "deal" in the matter; it was quite recognised on both sides
that love and courtship must depend on whether the "deal" came off
satisfactorily. John Paston approached Sir Thomas Brews, through a third
person, with a view to negotiate a marriage with his daughter Margery. She
was willing, even eager, and while the matter was still uncertain she
wrote him a letter on Valentine's Day, addressing him as "Right reverent
and worshipful and my right well-beloved Valentine," to tell him that it
was impossible for her father to offer a larger dowry than he had already
promised. "If that you could be content with that good, and my poor
person, I would be the merriest maiden on ground." In his first
letter--boldly written, he says, without her knowledge or license--he
addresses her simply as "Mistress," and assures her that "I am and will be
yours and at your commandment in every wise during my life." A few weeks
later, addressing him as "Right worshipful master," she calls him "mine
own sweetheart," and ends up, as she frequently does, "your servant and
bedeswoman." Some months later, a few weeks after marriage, she addresses
her husband in the correct manner of the time as "Right reverent and
worshipful husband," asking him to buy her a gown as she is weary of
wearing her present one, it is so cumbrous. Five years later she refers to
"all" the babies, and writes in haste: "Right reverent and worshipful Sir,
in my most humble wise I recommend me unto you as lowly as I can," etc.,
though she adds in a postscript: "Please you to send for me for I think
long since I lay in your arms." If we turn to another wife of the Paston
family, a little earlier in the century, Margaret Paston, whose husband's
name also was John, we find the same attitude even more distinctly
expressed. She always addressed him in her most familiar letters, showing
affectionate concern for his welfare, as "Right reverent and worshipful
husband" or "Right worshipful master." It is seldom that he writes to her
at all, but when he writes the superscription is simply "To my mistress
Paston," or "my cousin," with little greeting at either beginning or end.
Once only, with unexampled effusion, he writes to her as "My own dear
sovereign lady" and signs himself "Your true and trusting husband."[12]
[12] We see just the same formulas in the fifteenth century letters of
the Stonor family (_Stonor Letters and Papers_, Camden Society), though
in these letters we seem often to find a lighter and more playful touch
than was common among the Pastons. I may refer here to Dr. Powell's
learned and well written book (with which I was not acquainted when I
wrote this chapter), _English Domestic Relations 1487-1653_ (Columbia
University Press).
If we turn to France the relation of the wife to her husband was the same,
or even more definitely dependent, for he occupied the place of father to
her as well as of husband and sovereign, in this respect carrying on a
tradition of Roman Law. She was her husband's "wife and subject"; she
signed herself "Vostre humble obéissante fille et amye." If also we turn
to the _Book of the Chevalier de la Tour-Landry_ in Anjou, written at the
end of the fourteenth century, we find a picture of the relations of women
to men in marriage comparable to that presented in the _Paston Letters_,
though of a different order. This book was, as we know, written for the
instruction of his daughters by a Knight who seems to have been a fairly
average man of his time in his beliefs, and in character, as he has been
described, probably above it, "a man of the world, a Christian, a parent,
and a gentleman." His book is full of interesting light on the customs and
manners of his day, though it is mainly a picture of what the writer
thought ought to be rather than what always was. Herein the Knight is
sagacious and moderate, much of his advice is admirably sound for every
age. He is less concerned with affirming the authority of husbands than
with assuring the happiness and well-being of his dearly loved daughters.
But he clearly finds this bound up with the recognition of the authority
of the husband, and the demands he makes are fairly concordant with the
relationships we see established among the Pastons. The Knight abounds in
illustrations, from Lot's daughters down to his own time, for the example
or the warning of his daughters. The ideal he holds up to them is strictly
domestic and in a sense conventional. He puts the matter on practical
rather than religious or legal grounds, and his fundamental assumption is
"that no woman ought ever to thwart or refuse to obey the ordinance of her
lord; that is, if she is either desirous to be mistress of his affections
or to have peace and understanding in the house. For very evident reasons
submission should begin on her part." One would like to know what duties
the Knight inculcated on husbands, but the corresponding book he wrote for
the guidance of his sons appears no longer to be extant.
On the whole, the fundamental traditions of our western world concerning
the duties of husbands and wives are well summed up in what Pollock and
Maitland term "that curious cabinet of antiquities, the marriage ritual of
the English Church." Here we find that the husband promises to love and
cherish the wife, but she promises not only to love and cherish but also
to obey him, though, it may be noted, this point was not introduced into
English marriage rites until the fourteenth century, when the wife
promised to be "buxom" (which then meant submissive) and "bonair"
(courteous and kind), while in some French and Spanish rites it has never
been introduced at all. But we may take it to be generally implied. In the
final address to the married couple the priest admonishes the bride that
the husband is the head of the wife, and that her part is submission. In
some more ancient and local rituals this point was further driven home,
and on the delivery of the ring the bride knelt and kissed the
bridegroom's right foot. In course of time this was modified, at all
events in France, and she simply dropped the ring, so that her motion of
stooping was regarded as for the purpose of picking it up. I note that
change for it is significant of the ways in which we modify the traditions
of the past, not quite abandoning them but pretending that they have other
than the fundamental original motives. We see just the same thing in the
use of the ring, which was in the first place a part of the bride-price,
frequently accompanied by money, proof that the wife had been duly
purchased. It was thus made easy to regard the ring as really a golden
fetter. That idea soon became offensive, and the new idea was originated
that the ring was a pledge of affection; thus, quite early in some
countries, the husband, also wore a wedding ring.
The marriage order illustrated by the _Paston Letters_ and the _Book of
the Chevalier de la Tour-Landry_ before the Reformation, and the Anglican
Book of Common Prayer afterwards, has never been definitely broken; it is
a part of our living tradition to-day. But during recent centuries it has
been overlaid by the growth of new fashions and sentiments which have
softened its hard outlines to the view. It has been disguised, notably
during the eighteenth century, by the development of a new feeling of
social equality, chiefly initiated in France, which, in an atmosphere of
public intercourse largely regulated by women, made the ostentatious
assertion of the husband's headship over his wife displeasing and even
ridiculous. Then, especially in the nineteenth century, there began
another movement, chiefly initiated in England and carried further in
America, which affected the foundations of the husband's position from
beneath. This movement consisted in a great number of legislative measures
and judicial pronouncements and administrative orders--each small in
itself and never co-ordinated--which taken altogether have had a
cumulative effect in immensely increasing the rights of the wife
independently of her husband or even in opposition to him. Thus at the
present time the husband's authority has been overlaid by new social
conventions from above and undermined by new legal regulations from below.
Yet, it is important to realise, although the husband's domestic throne
has been in appearance elegantly re-covered and in substance has become
worm-eaten, it still stands and still retains its ancient shape and
structure. There has never been a French Revolution in the home, and that
Revolution itself, which modified society so extensively, scarcely
modified the legal supremacy of the husband at all, even in France under
the Code Napoléon and still less anywhere else. Interwoven with all the
new developments, and however less obtrusive it may have become, the old
tradition still continues among us. Since, also, the husband is,
conventionally and in large measure really, the economic support of the
home,--the work of the wife and even actual financial contributions
brought by her not being supposed to affect that convention,--this state
of things is held to be justified.
Thus when a man enters the home as a husband, to seat himself on the
antique domestic throne and to play the part assigned to him of old, he is
involuntarily, even unconsciously, following an ancient tradition and
taking his place in a procession of husbands which began long ages before
he was born. It thus comes about that a man, even after he is married, and
a husband are two different persons, so that his wife who mainly knows him
as a husband may be unable to form any just idea of what he is like as a
man. As a husband he has stepped out of the path that belongs to him in
the world, and taken on another part which has called out altogether
different reactions, so he is sometimes a much more admirable person in
one of these spheres--whichever it may be--than in the other.
We must not be surprised if the husband's position has sometimes developed
those qualities which from the modern point of view are the less
admirable. In this respect the sovereign husband resembles the Sovereign
State. The Sovereign State, as it has survived from Renaissance days in
our modern world, may be made up of admirable people, yet as a State they
are forced into an attitude of helpless egoism which nowadays fails to
commend itself to the outside world, and the tendency of scientific
jurists to-day is to deal very critically with the old conception of the
Sovereign State. It is so with the husband in the home. He was thrust by
ancient tradition into a position of sovereignty which impelled him to
play a part of helpless egoism. He was a celestial body in the home around
which all the other inmates were revolving satellites. The hours of rising
and retiring, the times of meals and their nature and substance, all the
activities of the household--in which he himself takes little or no
part--are still arranged primarily to suit his work, his play, and his
tastes. This is an accepted matter of course, and not the result of any
violent self-assertion on his part. It is equally an accepted matter of
course that the wife should be constantly occupied in keeping this little
solar system in easy harmonious movement, evolving from it, if she has the
skill, the music of the spheres. She has no recognised independent
personality of her own, nor even any right to go away by herself for a
little change and recreation. Any work of her own, play of her own,
tastes of her own, must be strictly subordinated, if not suppressed
altogether.
In the old days, from which our domestic traditions proceed, little
hardship was thus inflicted on the wife. Her rights and privileges were,
indeed, far less than those of the modern woman, but for that very reason
the home offered her a larger field; beneath the shelter of her husband
the irresponsible wife might exert a maximum of influential activity with
a minimum of rights and privileges of her own. To many men, even to-day,
that state of things seems the realisation of an ideal.
Yet to women it seems increasingly less so, and of necessity since the
cleavage between the position of woman in society and law, and the
position of the wife in the sacramental bonds of wedlock, is daily
becoming greater. To-day a woman, who possibly for ten years has been
leading her own life of independent work, earning her own living, choosing
her own conditions in accordance with her own needs, and selecting her own
periods of recreation in accordance with her own tastes, whether or not
this may have included the society of a man-friend--such a woman suddenly
finds on marriage, and without any assertion of authority on her husband's
part, that all the outward circumstances of her life are reversed and all
her inner spontaneous movements arrested. There may be no signs of this
on the surface of her conduct. She loves her husband too much to wish to
hurt his feelings by explaining the situation, and she values domestic
peace too much to risk friction by making unexpected claims. But beneath
the surface there is often a profound discontent, and even in women who
thought they had gained an insight into life, a sense of disillusion.
Everyone knows this who is privileged to catch a glimpse into the hearts
of women--often women of most distinguished intelligence as well as women
of quite ordinary nature--who leave a life of spontaneous activity in the
world to enter the home.[13]
[13] While this condition of things is sometimes to be found in the more
distinguished minority and in well-to-do families, it is, of course,
among the great labouring majority that it is most conspicuous. Mrs.
Will Crooks, of Poplar, speaking to a newspaper reporter (_Daily
Chronicle_, 17 Feb., 1919), truly remarked: "At present the average
married woman's working day is a flagrant contradiction of all
trade-union ideals. The poor thing is slaving all the time! What she
needs--what she longs for--is just a little break or change now and
again, an opportunity to get her mind off her work and its worries. If
her husband's hours are reduced to eight, well that gives her a chance,
doesn't it? The home and the children are, after all, as much his as
hers. With his enlarged leisure he will now be able to take a fair share
in home duties. I suggest that they take it turn and turn about--one
night he goes out and she looks after the house and the children; the
next night she goes out and he takes charge of things at home. She can
sometimes go to the cinema, sometimes call on friends. Then, say once a
week, they can both go out together, taking the children with them. That
will be a little change and treat for everybody."
It is not to be supposed that in this presentation of the situation in the
home, as it is to-day visible to those who are privileged to see beneath
the surface, any accusation is brought against the husband. He is no more
guilty of an unreasonable conservatism than the wife is guilty of an
unreasonable radicalism. Each of them is the outcome of a tradition. The
point is that the events of the past hundred years have produced a
discrepancy in the two lines of tradition, with a resultant lack of
harmony, independent of the goodwill of either husband or wife.
Olive Schreiner, in her _Woman and Labour_, has eloquently set forth the
tendency to parasitism which civilisation produces in women; they no
longer exercise the arts and industries which were theirs in former ages,
and so they become economically dependent on men, losing their energies
and aptitudes, and becoming like those dull parasitic animals which live
as blood-suckers of their host. That picture, which was of course never
true of all women, is now ceasing to be true of any but a negligible
minority; it presents, moreover, a parasitism limited to the economic side
of life. For if the wife has often been a lazy gold-sucking parasite on
her husband in the world, the husband has yet oftener been a helpless
service-absorbing parasite on his wife in the home. There is, that is to
say, not only an economic parasitism, with no adequate return for
financial support, but a still more prevalent domestic parasitism, with an
absorption of services for which no return would be adequate. There are
many helpful husbands in the home, but there are a larger number who are
helpless and have never been trained to be anything else but helpless,
even by their wives, who would often detest a rival in household work and
management. The average husband enjoys the total effect of his home but is
usually unable to contribute any of the details of work and organisation
that make it enjoyable. He cannot keep it in order and cleanliness and
regulated movement, he seldom knows how to buy the things that are needed
for its upkeep, nor how to prepare and cook and present a decent meal; he
cannot even attend to his own domestic needs. It is the wife's consolation
that most husbands are not always at home.
"In ministering to the wants of the family, the woman has reduced man to a
state of considerable dependency on her in all domestic affairs, just as
she is dependent on him for bodily protection. In the course of ages this
has gone so far as to foster a peculiar helplessness on the part of the
man, which manifests itself in a somewhat childlike reliance of the
husband on the wife. In fact it may be said that the husband is, to all
intents and purposes, incapable of maintaining himself without the aid of
a woman." This passage will probably seem to many readers to apply quite
fairly well to men as they exist to-day in most of those lands which we
consider at the summit of our civilisation. Yet it was not written of
civilisation, or of white men, but of the Bantu tribes of East
Africa,[14] complete Negroes who, while far from being among the lowest
savages, belong to a culture which is only just emerging from cannibalism,
witchcraft, and customary bloodshed. So close a resemblance between the
European husband and the Negro husband significantly suggests how
remarkable has been the arrest of development in the husband's customary
status during a vast period of the world's history.
[14] Hon. C. Dundas, _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, Vol.
45, 1915, p. 302.
It is in the considerable group of couples where the husband's work
separates him but little from the home that the pressure on the wife is
most severe, and without the relief and variety secured by his frequent
absence. She has perhaps led a life of her own before marriage, she knows
how to be economically independent; now they occupy a small dwelling, they
have, maybe, one or two small children, they can only afford one helper in
the work or none at all, and in this busy little hive the husband and wife
are constantly tumbling over each other. It is small wonder if the wife
feels a deep discontent beneath her willing ministrations and misses the
devotion of the lover in the perpetual claims of the husband.
But the difficulty is not settled if she persuades him to take a room
outside. He is devoted to his wife and his home, with good reason, for the
wife makes the home and he is incapable of making a home. His new
domestic arrangements sink into careless and sordid disorder, and he is
conscious of profound discomfort. His wife soon realises that it is a
choice between his return to the home and complete separation. Most wives
never get even as far as this attempt at solution of the difficulty and
hide their secret discontent.
This is the situation which to-day is becoming intensified and extended on
a vast scale. The habit and the taste for freedom, adventure, and economic
independence is becoming generated among millions of women who once meekly
trod the ancient beaten paths, and we must not be so foolish as to suppose
that they can suddenly renounce those habits and tastes at the threshold
of marriage. Moreover, it is becoming clear to men and to women alike, and
for the first time, that the world can be remoulded, and that the claims
for better conditions of work, for a higher standard of life, and for the
attainment of leisure, which previously had only feebly been put forward,
may now be asserted drastically. We see therefore to-day a great
revolutionary movement, mainly on the part of men in the world of Labour,
and we see a corresponding movement, however less ostentatious, mainly on
the part of women, in the world of the Home.
It may seem to some that this new movement of upheaval in the sphere of
the Home is merely destructive. Timid souls have felt the like in every
period of transition, and with as little reason. Just as we realise that
the movement now in progress in the world of Labour for a higher standard
of life and for, as it has been termed, a larger "leisure-ration,"
represents a wholesome revolt against the crushing conditions of prolonged
monotonous work--the most deadening of all work--and a real advance
towards those ideals of democracy which are still so remote, so it is with
the movement in the Home. That also is the claim for a new and fairer
allotment of responsibility, of larger opportunities for freedom and
leisure. If in the home the husband is still to be regarded as the
capitalist and the wife as the labourer, then at all events it has to be
recognised that he owes her not only the satisfaction of her physical
needs of food and shelter and clothing, but the opportunity to satisfy the
personal spontaneous claims of her own individual nature. Just as the
readjustment of Labour is really only an approach to the long recognised
ideals of Democracy, so the readjustment of the Home, far from being
subversive or revolutionary, is merely an approximation to the long
recognised ideals of marriage.
How in practice, one may finally ask, is this readjustment of the home
likely to be carried out?
In the first place we are justified in believing that in the future home
men will no longer be so helpless, so domestically parasitic, as in the
past. This change is indeed already coming about. It is an inestimable
benefit throughout life for a man to have been forcibly lifted out of the
routine comforts and feminine services of the old-fashioned home and to be
thrown into an alien and solitary environment, face to face with Nature
and the essential domestic human needs (in my own case I owe an
inestimable debt to the chance that thus flung me into the Australian bush
in early life), and one may note that the Great War has had, directly and
indirectly, a remarkable influence in this direction, for it not only
compelled women to exercise many enlarging and fortifying functions
commonly counted as pertaining to men, it also compelled men, deprived of
accustomed feminine services, to develop a new independent ability for
organising domesticity, and that ability, even though it is not
permanently exercised in rendering domestic services, must yet always make
clear the nature of domestic problems and tend to prevent the demand for
unnecessary domestic services.
But there is another quite different and more general line along which we
may expect this problem to be largely solved. That is by the
simplification and organisation of domestic life. If that process were
carried to the full extent that is now becoming possible a large part of
the problem before us would be at once solved. A great promise for the
future of domestic life is held out by the growing adoption of
birth-control, by which the wife and mother is relieved from that burden
of unduly frequent and unwanted maternity which in the past so often
crushed her vitality and destroyed her freshness. But many minor agencies
are helpful. To supply heat, light, and motive power even to small
households, to replace the wasteful, extravagant, and often inefficient
home-cookery by meals cooked outside, as well as to facilitate the growing
social habit of taking meals in spacious public restaurants, under more
attractive, economical, and wholesome conditions than can usually be
secured within the narrow confines of the home, to contract with specially
trained workers from outside for all those routines of domestic drudgery
which are often so inefficiently and laboriously carried on by the
household-worker, whether mistress or servant, and to seek perpetually by
new devices to simplify, which often means to beautify, all the everyday
processes of life--to effect this in any comprehensive degree is to
transform the home from the intolerable burden it is sometimes felt to be
into a possible haven of peace and joy.[15] The trouble in the past, and
even to-day, has been, not in any difficulty in providing the facilities
but in prevailing people to adopt them. Thus in England, even under the
stress of the Great War, there was among the working population a
considerable disinclination--founded on stupid conservatism and a
meaningless pride--to take advantage of National Kitchens and National
Restaurants, notwithstanding the superiority of the meals in quality,
cheapness, and convenience, to the workers' home meals, so that many of
these establishments, even while still fostered by the Government, had
speedily to close their doors. Ancient traditions, that have now become
not only empty but mischievous, in these matters still fetter the wife
even more than the husband. We cannot regulate even the material side of
life without cultivating that intelligence in the development of which
civilisation so largely consists.
[15] This aspect of the future of domesticity was often set forth by
Mrs. Havelock Ellis, _The New Horizon in Love and Life_, 1921.
Intelligence, and even something more than intelligence, is needed along
the third line of progress towards the modernised home. Simplification and
organisation can effect nothing in the desired transformation if they
merely end in themselves. They are only helpful in so far as they
economise energy, offer a more ample leisure, and extend the opportunities
for that play of the intellect, that liberation of the emotions with
accompanying discipline of the primitive instincts, which are needed not
only for the development of civilisation in general, but in particular of
the home. Domineering egotism, the assertion of greedy possessive rights,
are out of place in the modern home. They are just as mischievous when
exhibited by the wife as by the husband. We have seen, as we look back,
the futility in the end of the ancient structure of the home, however
reasonable it was at the beginning, under our different modern social
conditions, and for women to attempt nowadays to reintroduce the same
structure, merely reversed would be not only mischievous but silly. That
spirit of narrow exclusiveness and self centred egoism--even if it were
sometimes an _égoisme à deux_--evoked, half a century ago, the scathing
sarcasm of James Hinton, who never wearied of denouncing the "virtuous and
happy homes" which he saw as "floating blotches of verdure on a sea of
filth." Such outbursts seem extravagant, but they were the extravagance of
an idealist at the vision which, as a physician in touch with realities,
he had, seen beneath the surface of the home.
It is well to insist on the organisation of the mechanical and material
side of life. Some leaders of women movements feel this so strongly that
they insist on nothing else. In old days it was conventionally supposed
that women's sphere was that of the feelings; the result has been that
women now often take ostentatious pleasure in washing their hands of
feelings and accusing men of "sentiment." But that wrongly debased word
stands for the whole superstructure of life on the basis of material
organisation, for all the finer and higher parts of our nature, for the
greater part of civilisation.[16] The elaboration of the mechanical side
of life by itself may merely serve to speed up the pace of life instead of
expanding leisure, to pile up the weary burden of luxury, and still
further to dissipate the energy of life in petty or frivolous
channels.[17] To bring order into the region of soulless machinery running
at random, to raise the super-structure of a genuinely human civilisation,
is not a task which either men or women can afford to fling contemptuously
to the opposite sex. It concerns them both equally and can only be carried
out by both equally, working side by side in the most intimate spirit of
mutual comprehension, confiding trust, and the goodwill to conquer the
demon of jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of
keeping it alive.
[16] "The growth of the sentiments," remarks an influential psychologist
of our own time (W. McDougall, _Social Psychology_, p. 160), "is of the
utmost importance for the character and conduct of individuals and of
societies; it is the organisation of the affective and conative life. In
the absence of sentiments our emotional life would be a mere chaos,
without order, consistency, or continuity of any kind; and all our
social relations and conduct, being based on the emotions and their
impulses would be correspondingly chaotic, unpredictable, and
unstable.... Again, our judgments of value and of merit are rooted in
our sentiments; and our moral principles have the same source, for they
are formed by our judgments of moral value."
[17] The destructive effects of the mechanisation of modern life have
lately been admirably set forth, and with much precise illustration, by
Dr. Austin Freeman, _Social Decay and Regeneration_.
This task, it may finally be added, is always an adventure. However well
organised the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of
risks. We may smile, therefore, when it is remarked that the future
developments of the home are risky. Birds in the air and fishes in the
sea, quite as much as our own ancestors on the earth, have always found
life full of risks. It was the greatest risk of all when they insisted on
continuing on the old outworn ways and so became extinct. If the home is
an experiment and a risky experiment, one can only say that life is always
like that. We have to see to it that in this central experiment, on which
our happiness so largely depends, all our finest qualities are mobilised.
Even the smallest homes under the new conditions cannot be built to last
with small minds and small hearts. Indeed the discipline of the home
demands not only the best intellectual qualities that are available, but
often involves--and in men as well as in women--a spiritual training fit
to make sweeter and more generous saints than any cloister. The greater
the freedom, the more complete the equality of husband and wife, the
greater the possibilities of discipline and development. In view of the
rigidities and injustices of the law, many couples nowadays dispense with
legal marriage, and form their own private contract; that method has
sometimes proved more favourable to the fidelity and permanence of love
than external compulsion; it assists the husband to remain the lover, and
it is often the lover more than the husband that the modern woman needs;
but it has always to be remembered that in the present condition of law
and social opinion a slur is cast on the children of such unions. No
doubt, however, marriage and the home will undergo modifications, which
will tend to make these ancient institutions a little more flexible and to
permit a greater degree of variation to meet special circumstances. We can
occupy ourselves with no more essential task, whether as regards ourselves
or the race, than to make more beautiful the House of Life for the
dwelling of Love.