THE FINANCIAL QUESTION IN MARRIAGE.
Before breeding time birds build their nests to receive their future
young and to protect them from the weather. Many men, more improvident
than the birds, marry without knowing where and how they can house the
children of their love. Air, earth, and forest afford food to birds
gratuitously; to man only the butcher, the baker, and eating-house
keeper give food, and they have the weakness to ask payment for their
services. Economic improvidence in marriage is the bane of all social
decadence, and it is precisely amongst workmen and the unemployed,
or amongst those who are always struggling and succumbing, that one
finds it most, for they have become thoughtless fatalists, to whom
the day is sufficient. Fatalism has many forms, but it is always a
cowardly emasculation of self, or an even more cruel mutilation, for
it undermines the strength of the will and leads us to renounce all
that is best in us. In individuals it is emasculation or mutilation,
in nations it is suicide; the Ottoman Empire will soon show us whither
_Turkish fatalism_ leads.
I am compassionate, and believe that I pay my debts of charity toward
those who have wrecked their life; but when a starving fellow begs
alms of me, or pleads his _large family_ or _many children_ as an
excuse for his moral and physical demoralisation, anger gets the
better of me and I exclaim: _Why, then, did you have so many?_
And this exclamation is not an insult to misery nor a curse; it is
the voice of reason, which if it could be heard in the homes of the
poor would suffice to solve the social problem. I am a Malthusian
impenitent, and as long as I live I shall always say to those
struggling with poverty:
_Love, but do not beget children._
In vain priests and rugged moralists of _Providence_ combat
Malthusianism, which has now become a social institution, and without
the need of written codes governs the economy of the family in
France, Italy, Germany, and even in chaste and fecund Albion.
In vain my _Elementi d’Igiene_ were put _ad indice_, for from year
to year the Malthusian apostolate has made new disciples, and will
continue to do so.
Neither do I side with those who believe, with too great a faith or
fanaticism, that a restriction in the number of births is sufficient
to resolve the social problem. No, certainly not; it is not enough;
but it clears the ground of the most thorny brambles among which human
felicity gets entangled; and a comparison between the proletariat in
the populous cities of Europe and that of the desert regions of South
America is sufficient to convince us that prolific improvidence is
also the prolific mother of hunger, disease, and death.
If, then, you are not a Malthusian, nor desire to be converted to the
new doctrine, if you have no straw to build your nest, do not take a
wife, but increase the glorious number of the animals of rapine and
cuckoos.
⁂
I know very well that the most hateful and disagreeable problem
of matrimony is the economic, but we cannot avoid nor solve it by
shutting our eyes and disregarding it.
To love and be loved, to feel that our life is doubled and the
horizons of the future enlarged, to drink from the eyes of a woman
who is a perfect fountain of delight, to feel the doors of paradise
opened to us by her lips; and then all at once to be obliged to
speak of _income_ and _dowry_ amidst such intoxicating pleasures;
then to remember between one kiss and another that to harbour all
this paradise we do not possess, I cannot say a house, but not even
the most modest of rooms! It is hard, cruel, abominable, but it is
necessary!
The _quart d’heure de Rabelais_ in the affairs of love, and the
exclamation of the Trappists who at table say to their brethren:
_Remember we must all die_, are the waiters who, entering the guest
chamber, present the _bill_ to the gay and thoughtless merry-makers.
But in matrimony the accounts must be made out before, and drawn up
seriously, calmly, and inexorably.
There is only one man in whose case I could overlook a want of this
prudence, and it is he who feels that he has the strength to fight
for and the energy to gain a position, and to the man who strikes his
forehead and exclaims, _Numen adest_. What does it matter if such a
man has no fortune, nor even a dowry with her whom he loves? He has
faith in himself founded not upon pride, but upon the consciousness of
knowledge and power; and this is more than a patrimony, for neither
phylloxera, bank failures, nor shipwreck can assail it. It will last
as long as life itself, and its results still longer.
But how many such men are there? With the experience of more than half
a century I recommend all others to use such foresight as is near
akin to fear. The whole history of Italian finance, and the whole
chronology of our innumerable ministers of finance, teach us that the
balance of expenditure is always greater than that of the income. Just
fancy when these are added up by that maddest of treasury ministers
whose name is Love!
The following words must have been repeated more than a thousand times
between a kiss and a sigh, _A cottage and your heart_!
But common sense has succeeded in throwing so much cold water on the
phrase as to render it ridiculous, and to relegate it to the museum of
comic virtues. However, notwithstanding the many years I have lived,
I still have the ingenuous good nature to believe this phrase when
it comes warmly and spontaneously from two loving hearts, and when
those two hearts live in two organisms superior in intelligence and
sentiment it may yet be true; the cottage may soon become a house,
perhaps even a palace.
But how many such are there?
The rest no longer say, _A cottage and your heart_; but, _A palace
even without your heart. A hundred thousand francs income, with or
without the heart._
In the first pages of this book we have seen how and why the economic
consideration dominates marriage in civilised society with all the
rigour of a tyrant, how it commands everything, and is the “to be or
not to be” of a family.
⁂
As regards the balance of fortune, the ideal in marriage would be that
both husband and wife should be equally rich, or both have moderate
means. It is not necessary that there should be absolute equality, but
it ought to approach it. In these fortunate cases the equality of the
income increases the dignity of the family to a fellowship, and is
necessarily accompanied by many other harmonies of habits, tastes, and
needs.
An _hyper-ideal_ of perfection would be this, that although the amount
of these incomes may be the same, the separate units should be of a
different nature. Thus if the husband be a rich land owner the wife
should hold house property; and if she has a large share of money
in the funds the other should own lands or houses. In this way even
the most unexpected political or meteoric disturbances would never
strand the family. In many cases a good profession in the hands of
the husband is equivalent to a rich dowry in the wife; but even here
one must remember that life is uncertain, death certain. And, in
truth, where the income proceeds entirely from the work of the father
of the family this very fact is often a cause of ruin to the family
well-being. They have no land, houses, nor money in the funds; a
lucrative employment gives them riches, and parents and children live
upon them without putting a penny aside. Then a railway accident or
some illness unexpectedly kills the father, and from a gay, rich life
they are reduced to the most squalid misery.
_Empleomania_ is a Spanish word, and it sprung up in Spain as if in
its native soil, but if we have not registered it in our classical
dictionaries we have the equivalent in the speech of the common
people. And above all we unfortunately have the thing it represents;
and it is one of the most exact measures of our inertia of intellect
and will. In the middle class, and especially in its lower ranks, the
daily dream of the good mother of a family is to give her daughter
to a _government official_, and it is the dream of a thousand small
men, young, short-sighted fellows of slight phrenic development, to
have some _official situation_, no matter what, so that in the morning
they are not obliged to think how they can pass the day or to make
any itinerary, but just go to the office at fixed hours, and at fixed
hours return home. To do what others desire them to do, without the
trouble of thinking themselves, and to muse on the sweets of the
Sunday rest for six days in advance; for eleven months to feel the
delights of the twelfth, that of the vacation, and to be able to
think that every month of the year has a certain day which bears the
number 27: a blessed day on which, whether it rains or pours, whether
Liberals or Conservatives are in power, whether Crispi or Rudini is
ruling, the paymaster is ready and they receive their salary—ah! these
are serene and tranquil pleasures which make mothers weep for joy,
wives leap for pleasure, and the hearts dance in nine-tenths of those
Italian bipeds who love the peace and security of the morrow ... and
the 27th of the month.
⁂
If there be an inequality in the riches of two married people it is a
hundred times better that it should be in favour of the husband.
A woman is never humiliated when she is poor and marries a rich man,
or when, with moderate means, she marries a millionaire. However much
she may be oppressed by social laws, however often she be placed below
man in position, she brings him so many treasures with her beauty,
youth, grace, and all the prizes of her womanhood that they weigh in
equal value to gold, millions, and coats of arms rich with a hundred
emblazonings.
There is perhaps another less noble, but more human, reason, which
explains the inequality of our judgment on the subject of matrimony
between persons with different amounts of income.
It is precisely because the woman is set a peg below us by law and
custom that she can accept riches from us without any feeling of
shame; besides, it is very difficult, if not often impossible, for
her to gain sufficient by hand or brain work to maintain the family.
Everything, then, conspires to enable her to give her hand to a rich
man without selling or prostituting herself.
When instead of this it is the man who accepts the riches from the
woman, without balancing them by great genius or by a very high social
position, he always renounces that manly dignity which ought to be
his nobility; he stands degraded before his wife, lowered, and at the
least collision with vanity or passion he may be struck full in the
face by an insult which ought to sink into his very heart.
I know several cases in which a very rich woman fell desperately
in love with a handsome, cultivated, but poor young man, and he to
save his own dignity fled from her love. And the lady followed and
conquered him, trusting courageously to the proverb, _Ce que femme
veut, Dieu le veut!_
They were married, and he loved her, working constantly with his pen,
brush, or chisel, having sworn to himself and to her that he would
only live by his work. Noble and touching struggles for personal
dignity, of love and pride, which one but seldom sees, but which
console our sight, daily saddened by so many simonies of luxuries, so
many pretences of heroism, so many individual, social, and political
lies, which darken the air so heavily that it is difficult for the
sun to penetrate the cloud.
Whoever makes a business of marriage will laugh cordially at me, and
at my sentimental fantasies.
Let him laugh! I do not pretend to teach him how to make marriage a
paradise on earth. He will continue to seek a golden dowry, and if he
has a great coat of arms and an empty purse he will put the first up
at auction in order to fill the second; and if the game should succeed
he will carry his wife’s money to the gaming table, the turf, or to
the cabinet of the cocotte, and feel himself happy to have gained in
one day that which others cannot obtain with all the hard work of a
laborious and pure life.
Lying on a Turkish divan, smoking a perfumed Havana, he will raise to
himself a monument of admiration and acknowledgment amidst the blue
fumes of his cigar.
And is he happy? Happy, perhaps, but never enviable; for I know no
true and durable happiness which degrades dignity, which hides itself
in the depths of the soul, which can silence itself with the gag of
sophism and the accommodation of conscience, but that, like a steel
spring, it will burst and spring from its bonds the more unexpectedly
the greater the repression. A man who in the inexorable soliloquies
of his own conscience has something on which he dare not think, or
has a room in his house which he can never visit without a shudder or
remorse, is never happy.
And even if the long training in cynicism succeeds in silencing the
cry of repressed dignity, there will come a day of domestic discord,
of duels fought between husband and wife, with the weapon of bitter
smiles, cruel compliments, and insinuations full of perfidy and venom,
a day when the wife, striking her fan on the arm-chair with little
convulsive blows, will cry: _But in short, my good fellow, I keep
you_.... If that man, in such a moment does not redden to the roots
of his hair, if at that moment his saliva is not changed to gall, nor
forms a lump in his throat, if he does not feel his very heart and
source of life poisoned, that man is not a man, but an unclean animal
who has sold his manhood for a handful of gold; he is a most abject
being, a hundred times more despicable than the poor prostitute who
sells her body to gain her daily bread.