The Marriage of the Positive Girl and the Positive Man
The multiplication of life in human society involves certain burdens
and responsibilities. A normal, positive young man could easily
fertilize a hundred women a year, without departing even for one
instant from his usual habits of industry and useful productivity.
Could he, however, undertake to provide for, protect, and rear
a hundred children in the ensuing year? He might if he were a
millionaire; but all men are not millionaires.
Although, therefore, the mere carnal union of two young positive people
is the normal and natural consummation of their desire, it is bound to
be interfered with by the State, or by the community, in order that
the burdens and responsibilities resulting from Life’s multiplication
may be delimited, defined, fairly apportioned and allotted as far as
possible to those who ought properly to bear them. And since a man
cannot procreate a hundred children a year without in the vast majority
of cases imposing grave burdens and responsibilities upon his fellows,
the State or the community officially refuses to recognize, or to offer
legal status, to any offspring that are the outcome of multiplication
that takes place outside the monogamic union. Thus although marriage
and its forms and limitations—particularly the monogamic limitation—may
frequently have a religious ceremonial, it is society, or the
community, that ultimately favours it, because society as a whole
cannot undertake to pay for the promiscuous indulgence of every man’s
lust.
Hence, despite the fact that the carnal union of our positive couple
is all that the multiplication of Life requires, and all that the
conscious or unconscious desire of the two young people demands, the
State interposes its jurisdiction and declares that the multiplication
of life that will follow the union, in fact the union itself, will
only be legally recognized provided that it take place along certain
specified lines.
Thus marriage is not a natural state, nor is it even the logical
outcome of the “love” of a positive couple; it is an artificially
imposed condition devised for the purpose of safeguarding the
community. And, being unnatural and gratuitously imposed upon the
simple relationship that Nature requires, it complicates that
relationship, and necessarily possesses all the disadvantages that any
unnatural[50] solution of a natural problem must involve.
It might be thought that if it is so very unnatural the positive
couple would instinctively rebel against it?—Not so! How many of them
are aware even that it is not a natural law? Custom deceives the
young positive couple in the same way as it deceives us all. We are
accustomed to innumerable constraints which to a man unfamiliar with
them would be intolerably irksome. When, therefore, the young positive
couple stand at the altar and hear the priest say to the man: “Wilt
thou love her, comfort her, and keep her in sickness and in health,
and forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both
shall live?” and the young positive man answers innocently “I will,”
neither of them suspects the cloven hoof of social fear or social
constraint behind the words. They imagine not only that the question
is a perfectly normal one, implying a normal condition, but they also
imagine that this implied condition itself—that of lifelong love—is a
possible and generally acceptable proposition. They are not even led
to suppose that it is an _ideal_ difficult to realize, otherwise the
man would not be invited to take such an enormously difficult vow with
so little preparation and warning. To answer the priest’s question
honestly—that is to say, with a full knowledge of the terms of the
vow and with a perfect conviction that he is ready to fulfil them—a
young positive man would require to be in possession of knowledge
regarding himself and the future which he can hardly be expected to
possess. For a man to say on March 20, 1922, that, if he live so long,
he will entertain the same æsthetic or moral or political sentiments
on March 20, 1952, as those he holds on the day he makes the vow,
would be daring—or to say the least, presumptuous—as implying a claim
to a gift of prophecy. But for a man to say of a sentiment in which
passion enters as an important factor, that he will hold it thirty
years hence, he must either be quite ignorant of what he is being asked
to declare, or a prophet capable of accurately reading the future; or
else he must be the most unprincipled blackguard that ever lived, and
prepared to take any vow in order to obtain his immediate needs. Now,
since it would be unfair to assume that the majority of the young men
who answer “I will” to that question are blackguards; since, moreover,
it would be unscientific to suppose that any of them are gifted with
the superhuman power of prophecy, we can only conclude that they are
completely ignorant of what it means. They are completely ignorant of
the whole significance of the marriage rite, and it is their ignorance,
coupled with the fact of the force of custom, that enables them to
accept the unnatural imposition of the State-ordered marriage as if it
were a natural condition. Besides, the young positive couple are, as a
rule, not very analytical. The only thing they insist upon with all the
impatience of what is called “love,” is union; and since their elders
and society seem to offer them the chance of union without black
looks and moral indignation, only in legalized “marriage,” they seize
society’s offer without thinking much about the question of natural or
unnatural solutions of natural problems. Thousands, it is true, do not
wait for the unnatural solution.[51] They simply unite and consummate
their desire without taking any public vow. Then, however, they
find the social machinery for discouraging such simple behaviour so
formidable and unrelenting that they are frequently unable to face it,
and resort to crime in order to attempt to wipe out the consequences
of their action. Unmarried motherhood, with all the moral indignation
it provokes; prosecutions for affiliation, and the weekly payments in
which they result—are some of the unpleasant menaces that face those
who refuse to wait for the State’s conditions before consummating
their desire; and, in the end, the great majority, preferring the more
peaceable and more generally accepted course, resolve on marriage the
moment they feel they must consummate their desire.
The desire that makes the two young positive people wish to unite is
called “love.” It is mutual attraction culminating in a condition
of mutual irresistibility. It is the power which, in the course of
evolution, each has acquired to draw the other into that condition
which best serves the purpose of Life and its multiplication.
Now, as we have already pointed out, this power of attraction serves
its purpose—multiplication—whether they unite legitimately or
illegitimately. Since, however, the purposes of society are best served
by their uniting according to certain rules, and since these rules
are chiefly designed to secure each party to the union against the
evil consequences (to society) of promiscuous mating, it is expedient
that the two should be bound together for life; and the marriage tie
is made a permanent tie: “_Till death us do part_,”—that is the ideal
aimed at. But in this way a lie is tacitly smuggled by society into the
marriage of two young people. Since society’s purposes are best served
by a permanent match between the young positive couple, they are led to
believe that the desire which the moment before union has drawn them
together, and which is called “love,” is also permanent; in fact that
it is really the _best_ reason for making the match permanent!
Having once been perpetrated by the social organism, this lie is
repeated in all the moral prejudices and saws, all the fairy-tales,
the popular novels, the poetry and the songs, of a whole nation—of a
whole continent—and soon acquires the sanctity of truth; and he who
dares to nail it to the counter as a piece of counterfeit psychology or
physiology, is dubbed a cynic, an anarchist, and a misogynist.
We call the emotion “love” which convinces two young people that they
had better, on grounds of expediency, accept the State regulations
concerning their prospective union, but we have no business to imply
by actual words or by suggestion that the desirable permanence of that
union, from society’s point of view, will find one of its principal
causes in the persistence of the emotion that led to its being
consummated. Unfortunately, the advantage to society and to the family
of a permanent legal contract, has led to so complete a distortion of
the truth, that the majority of young people are led to believe, quite
blindly, that it is the enduring power of the emotion itself which
justifies the nature of the contract. And everything is done to confirm
them in this belief. It is only when they are married that they find
how utterly untrue it is.
It is readily admitted that in every generation of human beings there
is a percentage, an ever-dwindling percentage in degenerate days, of
men and women who are capable of deep and lasting emotions. These rare
creatures of profound and enduring passion, to whom change of any
sort is distasteful, and who cling faithfully and stubbornly to their
hobbies, their pursuits, their ancestral faiths, and their particular
taste in literature, music, the graphic arts and food, may and do
sometimes evince a steadiness and a stability in their love which makes
their monogamic unions exceptionally harmonious and affectionate to the
last. But for the average modern couple to claim that they belong to
this very small percentage of human beings, is the most contemptible
impudence. Even positive couples cannot all be said to belong to this
class, and as for the negative couples, whose unions are chiefly an
idle pursuit of sensation or else a gratification of vanity, they
are as different from these slow-moving, deeply passionate people as
if they belonged to a race utterly strange to them. It is therefore
essential that, for the vast majority of people, a more sensible, less
dramatic, and more realistic colour should be lent to their unions,
so that they may enter them with a clearer understanding of the
enormous difficulties with which permanent marriage is beset, and with
other considerations to support and fortify them, than a trust in a
possibility so utterly fantastic as the endurance of their emotions.
When once they are married, it is perfectly true that expediency,
economic considerations, and the presence of children frequently
convince them that it is better that their union should be permanent;
but to call by the name of “love” the reasons which cause them to
arrive at this conclusion, is a colossal hoax, the prodigiousness of
which would be amusing did it not lead to such untold misery.
But, it may be objected, even if we admit that the legal union,
marriage, is as a rule incompatible with lasting “love,” where is the
harm, provided that the two objects of the contract, the obtaining of
a union between two positive people and the propagation of children on
regular and well-ordered lines, be secured? Is it not after all the
best solution of the sex problem?
The question whether it is the best solution of the sex problem we must
leave undecided for a moment. But to the first part of the question
we may now answer definitely that there is harm in any contract based
upon a lie, when that lie is one which, connected as it is with the
psychological and physiological conditions of a certain common human
relationship, is bound to be discovered as a lie by the parties to that
relationship.
To allow, however tacitly or implicitly, that society’s unnatural
solution of the sex problem is even favourable to the endurance of the
emotion which first led the couple to desire union, is harmful in the
first place:—
(1) Because it makes the idea and pursuit of marriage too hedonistic.
Young people know that the state of mutual desire in which they find
themselves before the union, is one of exquisite pleasure. As we have
pointed out in Chapter V, it is probably the richest experience, as
spirito-physiological sensations go, that anyone can have. They also
know that the happy and masterly consummation of this desire is a
source of enormous spiritual and physical well-being and delight.
The parties to be united, therefore, can easily be persuaded, both
immediately before consummation and for a brief period afterwards, that
this exquisite pleasure and delight will be secured them permanently
by a permanent contract, and marriage is pursued as a source of
happiness. People are even in the habit of asking of a married couple,
not “Are they successful?” not, “Are they breasting their difficulties
satisfactorily?”; but always, “Are they happy?”—as if for all the
world one were necessarily happy in fulfilling a difficult and vastly
complicated contract.
It is necessary for the positive young girl to find her physical
adaptation. Only the negative girl can be content without it. It is
also necessary for the positive young man to find his. But surely it is
not necessary to lead either of them to suppose that in doing this by
means of legal marriage they will find anything more in the long run
than the most moderate well-being, disturbed by the most tremendous
responsibilities and difficulties.
The way in which girls and young men are led to look forward to the
married state as if it were a kind of fairy transformation, summed up
in the formula “and they were happy ever afterwards,” vitiates the
whole value of the contract; for while it lays all emphasis on the
contentment that naturally comes with proper physical adaptation, it
passes over the enormous difficulties which any such permanent contract
between sensitive and intelligent beings must entail.
(2) It is harmful, secondly, because by leading both young people
to expect too much from marriage, it expedites the period of
disillusionment, which is bound ultimately to supervene in the great
majority of such unions. If the State solution of the sex problem,
known as monogamic marriage, be really a good institution, then surely
everything should be done to make it tolerable for as long as possible
to those who are parties to it. Since disillusionment must come, it
is obviously the duty of teachers and elders to endeavour to postpone
it as long as possible. And the way to do this is certainly not by
emphasizing the “happiness” of marriage to the exclusion of all thought
about its enormous and almost insuperable difficulties. A salutary
reform in this respect would consist in leading young people to accept
the State’s solution of the sex problem in a more sober mood, with a
more grave concern about the future, with a greater insight into the
utility of marriage, and with less precipitancy than is shown at
present. They would realize that while union was what they desired,
legal marriage was the least unsatisfactory way for all concerned of
meeting that desire for union; but that it was only a clumsy way of
securing their sexual adaptation, and held no necessary promise of
any greater happiness than they could expect from any other system of
constraints.
It might be objected that, in this case, young people would not marry.
The reply to this objection is that they would if their desire for
normal adult adaptation were strong enough, but that they would be
likely to fulfil the contract all the more satisfactorily by realizing
from the start its utility, its limitations, its very doubtful promise,
and its artificial nature.
(3) It is harmful, thirdly, because, by _confusing marriage with
the pursuit of happiness_, grave considerations are likely to be
overlooked. Let me give a concrete instance:—
It may be in the best interests of a farmer’s son, who intends to
adopt his parent’s calling, to marry a rural maiden, accustomed to the
problems of a farm, and familiar with all the valuable traditions of
the countryside. In fact, from the standpoint of the State also, it may
be best for him to select his bride from among the female population of
his village or locality; for by so doing, in addition to acquiring a
useful mate, his children will inherit rural virtues from both sides,
and are more likely to become good and efficient farmers in their turn.
But if, by a false association of happiness with marriage, he fancies
that he will have what is known as a “better time” with an urban
typist of smart appearance, with small bird’s-claw hands and expensive
tastes, he is likely to overlook the gravity of the purpose of marriage
in order to gratify his hedonistic lust. This accounts also for the
destruction of many of our aristocratic houses by _mésalliances_
with chorus-girls and American and Jewish heiresses. If the utterly
hedonistic bias were only removed from marriage, such stupid and wanton
outrages against good blood might be prevented. For since the alleged
“happiness” of a permanent association like legal marriage is in nine
cases out of ten pure illusion, it should not be allowed to override
a man’s duty to himself and to his children. One of the principal
rewards of the legal marriage is the means it gives a man of preserving
his family virtues and tradition, and since this is best achieved by
choosing a girl from his own kind and set, the supposed pursuit of
happiness can only act as a disturbing element, which could be condoned
only if it were not so entirely illusory.
Of course the _mésalliance_ as a social evil has a Puritanical root
as well, which ought perhaps to be mentioned here. The Puritans were
not so utterly and incurably stupid as to deny the existence of bodily
pleasure. They knew perfectly well that the joys of sex were very real
joys. By insisting, however, upon these joys being sought only in fast
wedlock, they threw a burden upon marriage which it was hardly designed
to bear. They converted it by one stroke into a source of joy—that is
to say, into the unique source for a certain kind of joy, into a symbol
of pleasure and happiness of a certain kind. By so doing, however, a
false association grew up in the minds of men regarding marriage, which
has resulted in the scions of some of our best houses seeking happiness
and pleasure in matrimony by marrying women whose blood necessarily
diluted or destroyed their stock qualities. Had the stupid Puritan
prejudice not existed, they might have found pleasure with these
inferior females without marrying them, and thereby saved their family
line with some one who, though perhaps less garish and less vulgarly
amusing, was at least capable of giving them children true to their
traditional stock quality.
The advantages of the legal monogamic match are chiefly social. _They
have very little to do with happiness, and most of them redound to the
benefit of law and order._ They are:—
(_a_) The creation of a compact unit known and recognized as the
family, in which responsibility for the fruits of the union fall on
the two parents, and in which the financial responsibility in the
great majority of families falls upon the more free (physically) of
the two parents—the male. The State is by this means secured against
the obligation of having to rear the innumerable host of children that
would result from promiscuous parenthood where the father could not be
traced.
(_b_) The creation of a unit with which it is easy for the law to deal,
because in it human duties are simplified down to the three relations,
spouse, parent, child, each of which has its status in the law, all
converging towards the head of the unit, who can be made answerable to
the law for his unit.
(_c_) The creation of a definite and stable environment for the early
and tenderest years of the nation’s youngest inhabitants, where, in
the majority of cases at least, they may be assured the care and the
supervision and the schooling of those who are by nature best equipped
for discharging the duties of protectors and tutors with love and
tenderness, with natural pride in their work, and above all without
demanding payment for their services.
(_d_) The creation of a natural centre of interest for the female and
the male, but particularly for the former, after the first bloom of
youth and attractiveness has fled, so that each may claim, as by right,
a place in a _home_, in which their presence is earnestly desired, at
least by the majority—the children.
(_e_) The creation of a microcosm—a part and counterpart of the nation
as a whole, reduced to its smallest compass, in which the traditional
character of a people becomes imparted to its children, in which the
virtues and aspirations of a nation are inculcated by precept and
example upon its youngest members, and in which these form the first
strong attachments which, increasing with age, ultimately identify
them, and act as the first moral check upon their conduct.
(_f_) The creation of a centre in which the child has a chance to
develop family or stock qualities quietly, slowly, and unhindered;
because it is sheltered, or partly so, from the influence of
antagonistic or competing mob or universal characteristics.
(_g_) The creation of relationships—that of spouse to spouse, parent
to child, child to child, and child to parent, in which the growth of
many virtues useful to society are fostered and cultivated: a sense of
responsibility, self-respect, fidelity, early associations of devotion
and gratitude, the sense of traditional continuity which gives rise
to the feeling of dignity, honour, obligation, and individual rights,
claims and duties.
(_h_) The creation of a community on the smallest scale, in which the
children may, by constant association with their parents, acquire their
stock of general and specialized knowledge, learn the business by which
they may ultimately earn their living, and cultivate efficiency in
it quietly and gradually from infancy upwards. (This is an advantage
which, except in rare cases, has hardly survived in family life in
England.)
Now, attractive as these advantages may appear to the legislator, or
legislators of a people, and cogent as they may make the argument for
monogamic marriage, it will be seen, that they contain little that
will necessarily secure the conjugal “happiness” of the two young
people whose actions and movements they are designed to limit and to
constrain. They consist chiefly of duties which, while not necessarily
unpleasant, give rise to no small amount of anxiety and misgiving, and
certainly lend a graver accent to matrimony than is usually imparted to
it by that promise of light-hearted enjoyment upon which most stress
is laid by the traditional literature, poetry and public sentiment of
all Anglo-Saxon people. On the other hand, it would be idle to deny
that if the aspects of monogamous marriage that they represent were
more frequently emphasized and brought to the attention of both young
and old, the number of “happy” marriages might certainly be very much
increased. For as I have shown, it is the hedonistic view of marriage,
or that picture of it that dwells immoderately upon its supposed
unfailing gift of happiness, that has done most in modern civilised
societies to undermine its value as a working and workable institution.
Its plain utility is smothered under too much sentiment and false
doctrine. This result has been brought about largely by Christianity,
which has persistently endeavoured to teach the high-falutin’ nonsense
of matrimony as principally “a union of souls”[52]; but added to
Christian influence in Anglo-Saxon countries, at least, there has also
been the detrimental overlay of romantic obsessions,[53] which has made
a realistic view of primitive and natural needs almost impossible.
The general tendency in Puritanical and Anglo-Saxon countries, at
least, is to keep as far as possible in the background the subject of
offspring and the fruits of marriage when discussing it or arranging
for it in the presence of any two young people who have stated their
desire to be joined together. It is not considered decent to refer
to this, its most important side. As we have seen, the advantages of
the legal monogamic marriage chiefly concern the children that may
result from the match. Scarcely any other advantage exists. It is
folly, therefore, not to make the subject of offspring one of the most
important in all deliberations relating to matrimony. It is true that
in the _Book of Common Prayer_ the first reason given for the joining
of a man and woman together in holy matrimony, is “for the procreation
of children”; but there are many people who dislike this passage in the
marriage service, and all those who have attended marriage ceremonies
often will be able to testify to the frequency with which it is rapidly
slurred over in order to give the least possible offence.
Now this is the most pernicious nonsense that could ever have been
devised for destroying the value of the legal monogamic marriage. For
if proper stress were laid upon the consequences of the union, _the
children_, it would not only check the hedonistic attitude towards
marriage as an institution, but would also make young people more
serious in the matter of choosing their mates and more critical of
themselves in regard to their readiness for marriage.
“Am I one who can grant myself the privilege of contributing fresh
people to the world? Am I sufficiently desirable? Is it at all
desirable that I should reproduce myself in a second, third or fourth
edition?”
But how can these questions be asked in an atmosphere where the
offspring of a marriage is the last consideration to be thought of?
How can they be expected to be asked in an atmosphere where “Luvv” is
supposed to justify any match, however horrible?
In regard to the mate, too—who nowadays selects her with that serious
criticism which gazes through the optics of the next generation and
envisages their best interests? How can the average man assume this
attitude, when all the stress in matrimony is laid upon the love match,
upon the union of two souls? As far as possible, everyone tries to
forget the other matter in contemplating a girl and her betrothed.
People shrug their shoulders and say, “If children come, they come—and
there’s an end of it.” They prefer to regard the couple from that
standpoint. Christianity has so far succeeded in establishing a false
atmosphere of a union of souls around this most fundamental of all
relationships (that of the betrothed couple) that it is possible now
to meet people who entertain the most solemn determination to marry,
and yet who have hardly one single feature in their minds or bodies
that would render their repetition or recurrence on earth in any way
desirable.
The whole attitude of Christianity towards the joining of male and
female together, however, is so unrealistic on the one hand, and so
base on the other, that it is not astonishing that after 2,000 years
of Christian teaching we have wellnigh reached matrimonial chaos in
Europe, and all countries like Europe.
Marriage should be regarded as the sacred garden of the next
generation. All the exalted emotions that possess an artist at his
work, all the solemn misgivings that beset a responsible man when
he feels he is determining the future of Man, ought to surge in the
breast of him who contemplates matrimony. To feel that emotion which
the modern world calls “love” may excuse a man for forming an illicit
union, but, alone, it does not justify him in concluding so grave a
contract as marriage.
The disadvantages of the monogamic marriage are chiefly confined to its
effects upon the individual, and are of a nature that the State can,
as a rule, afford to ignore and to waive. I shall only point to one
disadvantage that deeply concerns the State (see objection H), and that
is so serious that it should be examined and removed instantly.
The disadvantages are the following:—
(A) Monogamic marriage presupposes a possibility which is the very
reverse of natural and human, one in fact which, through the optics of
life, does not even amount to a probability—and that is that two people
of different sexes can be united for life without needing or craving
for that same variety and respite which in all other departments of
their lives they regard as the most essential factor of well-being.
This is the great _lie_ underlying the State’s tacit assurance that its
solution of the sex problem is for the benefit of the individual.
Every child suspects, every adult knows, how difficult friendship is,
how hard it becomes to keep up that enthusiasm and eager interest
in the relationship of friends, which alone makes companionship a
refreshment and a pleasure. And everyone feels that there is a natural
prudence in sound friendship which, founded on good taste, points
distinctly to a moderate frequentation of a friend at all times
when that enthusiasm and eager interest show signs of declining too
seriously. So that it might truthfully be said in a paradox, that
friendship can be maintained only by judicious separations, and that
the duration of these separations is determined by the barometric
level, so to speak, of the friendship felt at certain periods.
No one who has attained to adult years can fail to have realized
the value of change to the body. Variations in diet, occupation and
environment act as a stimulus not only to the senses but also to the
tissues; they brace and invigorate the system. Life, like beauty,
has even been defined as “repetition with a certain modicum of
variation.”[54]
Moreover, every human being, child, adult, savage or sage knows the
fatal consequences of complete and exhaustive exploration: how it
cloys, how it surfeits, how it nauseates! The very constitution of man
as a sentient being necessitates such consequences. The repetition of
a stimulus reduces the force of its appeal owing to the very tendency
to habituation to which all of us as adaptable creatures are prone. We
react eagerly and quickly at first; the thousandth time we hardly lift
an eyelid.
Now, in the face of all these facts of common and everyday experience,
it would seem both absurd and indefensible to claim that any two
people, whether of the same or of different sexes, could hope to spend
many years together—not to mention a lifetime—without ultimately
falling the prey to indifference, if not dislike; and where the
circumstances of their first coming together have been attended by any
excessive warmth of feeling, the ultimate revulsion of that feeling,
by constituting at once a disillusionment and, among unwise people, a
surprise, must lead to an indifference proportionately more acute.
Unlike the mere association of friends, in which two people may work
together, share the same interests, enjoy the same games, or suffer
the same hardships, pleasures and difficulties, the married couple are
united chiefly by a physical bond which has its basis in an act of
_passion_, an act of _desire_, an act of _power_.
But _passion_ is largely a matter of surplus strength, violent
stimulation and the lust of possession, all of which are steadily
worn down by (_a_) a steady drain on surplus strength, (_b_) the
supervention of gradual callousness through the repetition of similar
stimuli, and (_c_) the consciousness of holding definitely, or rather
indefinitely, the object originally coveted.
_Desire_ also, by being gratified, is stilled. The best cure, in fact,
for desire is precisely gratification. But a _cure_ is hardly what is
anticipated by the usual love-match.[55]
With regard to the _act of power_, which, despite civilization, still
accounts for more than half the savour of the sexual relationship,
that is surely seriously impaired by the law itself which enjoins
cohabitation as a duty upon the parties to a marriage contract.
Thus the indefinite continuance of the emotion which first led a couple
to unite, and the protraction _sine die_ of the delights of the early
consummation of their desire, are bound, as it were, with mathematical
certainty to become impossible. But this makes the relationship
exceedingly difficult, and one which, far from constituting a promise
of happiness, is very much more likely to develop into an absolute
guarantee of incessant and most tiresome differences.
To reply to these objections that there is a “love” that transcends all
these difficulties, may sound pleasant and charming and good-natured,
but it is hardly candid. For as I have pointed out above, the
possibility of the existence of this rare kind of love does not justify
us in making marriage a lie for the bulk of mankind.
(B) Furthermore, monogamic marriage makes no allowance for the fact
that human courtship and the subsequent union of the sexes to which it
leads, partakes essentially of the nature of an adventure. In fact, to
a large number of people in these dull and ordered days it is the only
adventure of their lives. In many of its aspects it is reminiscent of
the qualities of the chase, and it would be unscientific not to allow
for this smack of venery in the preliminaries which precede _venery_.
That mutual attraction which ultimately leads to mutual capitulation is
full of the excitement, the doubt, the anxiety and the final triumph
of the huntsman. When the quarry is a positive virgin and her pursuer
a positive man, even the fascination of fear is added—fear of the
intensity of the passion awakened—to complete the similitude of the
experience to the circumstances of the chase.
Beside this, however, the steady hum-drum routine of married life can
at best only be a flat parody—particularly married life in modern
civilization, witnessed, as it is, by innumerable stuffy relatives,
marred by imperfect health, supported by tired and irascible nerves,
and depressed by the consciousness that it must last a lifetime.
Nor can it be said that the divine gifts of imagination and artistic
creativeness tend to mitigate the solemn boredom and exasperation that
overtake the parties to such a legal union; on the contrary, they but
enhance its horrors: behold the unhappy married lives of most men of
genius, Dickens, Carlyle, Byron, and the philosophic Socrates!
(C) The monogamic marriage based on the modern idea of “love” (which
should, by the by, be spelt “Luvv” to differentiate it from the nobler
idea called by the same name), in addition to leading to bitter
disillusionment, has in its very first condition—this sentiment
“Luvv”—the seeds of its most potent corrosive. For it is impossible
nowadays to conceive of love without contempt. Indeed, an innuendo of
contempt is essential before love can be possible. This is easily seen
if we reflect upon what love is. It is, in its present acceptation,
a very wild, a very torrential sentiment. From the man who says he
loves her, the girl exacts little less than single-minded adoration.
She expects him to say she is the best girl in the world for him, and
she insists on his believing it. She might, at a pinch, forgive his
not regarding her as _the best girl_ in the whole world, in the sense
of supreme above all other girls _in fact_. But to him, relative to
his taste alone, she expects to be that. And he expects the same. But
what does this mean? What can it not help meaning? Both parties in a
courtship are fully aware of what sorry figures they cut before the
critical and fully informed eye of their own inner consciousness. Each
knows his shortcomings, his pitiful and helpless foibles, his ugly
traits, his despicable features, his nauseating, revolting side!
And what? Some one has been found who calls this the best? who raves
about it? who is visibly frantic about it?
Deep down in her heart, therefore, where the girl secretes her
contempt for herself, she now begins secreting the first drops of
contempt for the one who can appear so wildly enthusiastic over
something she knows to be so defective. Her man feels exactly the
same, and though he may be exalted, for a while, by the girl’s having
mistaken him for a hero, he would not be human if he did not feel a
little contempt for one who could appear so enthralled by such humble
attainments as he knows his to be.
When once, however, the first blush of passion has died away, this
seed of contempt has to be reckoned with, and then, watered by
disillusionment and nourished by indifference, it soon germinates and
grows into the fungus which helps to blight the last green leaves
that may still be left on the spare frail tree of conjugal affection.
Because, the moment it shows its true colour and nature, it is
recognized by either party in the other, and interpreted as a flat and
wilful recantation of their former protestations, and consequently as
an insulting and heartless _volte-face_ which cannot be forgiven.
(D) In addition to the element of contempt in all love of the
ordinary sort, there is another factor which, when once the moment of
disenchantment comes in monogamic marriage, adds seriously to its force
and hastens the end; and that is the unpardonable arrogance which is
implicit in all these “love” matches.
When a young man A so far misunderstands his condition as to say
he loves a young girl B with _undying_ affection, although the
psychologist may smile, he does not necessarily expostulate; for, after
all, the attitude, though ridiculous, is not necessarily provokingly
impudent. It is true that it is assuming that he is capable of an
enduring passion, and therefore, that he is arrogating to himself a
depth and a permanence which nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of
a thousand do not possess; nevertheless, it is allowed to pass, because
a certain modicum of exaggeration is allowed to lovers.
When, however, the young girl B believes A’s declaration of undying
love, and accepts it as a fact, the psychologist is naturally annoyed;
for here a degree of self-deception comes into play which cannot
possibly arise out of anything else than the most stupendous arrogance.
In order that B may believe A, she must first have convinced herself of
the following:—
(α) That she is capable of inspiring an undying passion.
(β) That she is capable of keeping it alive when once it has been
kindled.
(γ) That there is nothing at all unlikely or preposterous in her being
the object of such a passion.
But to convince herself of any one of these propositions she must
possess the most prodigious conceit, the most unbounded impudence.
And the same applies to A, to whom B has declared her undying love.
In addition to contempt, therefore, there is in every love-match in
which the parties propose to adopt a permanent monogamic union as their
destiny, a degree of arrogance and self-esteem on either side which is
wholly and unspeakably distasteful both to the sane psychologist and to
the man of balanced mind.
But let that pass! What does it matter that the psychologist should be
offended when he hears that A has declared his undying love to B and
that B has believed him?
Yes, but unfortunately the arrogance that B shows in listening with
patience and even credulity to such a declaration as A’s, does not end
merely in giving offence to the psychologist. It ultimately recoils
upon herself in the cruellest possible manner; just as A’s arrogant
acceptance of B’s declaration recoils upon him. When the moment
of disillusionment and indifference supervenes, as it must in all
ordinary “love” matches, A finds it somewhat difficult to forgive B
for having ever dreamt, even in her wildest nightmare, that she could
keep their love alive all through their married life, and B finds
it equally difficult to forgive A for having fancied, even in the
wildest flights of his imagination, that he could ever provoke a life
passion. And thus, in addition to the contempt that has already been
analysed in the preceding section, there now arises a rankling feeling
of indignation of each towards the other for ever having been guilty of
such stupendous arrogance.
And we must confess that in the majority of cases this indignation is
well deserved.
The only excuse that may be pleaded in mitigation of A’s and B’s lack
of modesty is that probably no one had ever told them, nor had they
ever read, that to accept a declaration of undying love necessitates a
degree of self-esteem that is positively indecent.
(E) There are many modern people who will protest that I have not
considered the monogamic marriage on its “higher” or more “spiritual”
aspect as _companionship_, and that unless its possibilities in this
respect be viewed fairly and impartially, its general desirability
cannot possibly be estimated. But before we assume too hastily that
this is one of the brighter aspects of the monogamic marriage, let us
make quite certain that we are not confronted by yet another of its
grave disadvantages.
Companionship is a matter of the spirit. The pleasure of it might be
likened to the refreshment that a parched body obtains from a fresh
drink. It is the bliss peculiar to friendship. The friend refreshes one
by his companionship. Provided we have not spent too many of our years
with him, he opens before us a new aspect of things. Provided that we
have not frequented him too much, his mind, however simple it may be,
always offers us some sentiment or point of view which we have not
yet thoroughly explored. And this communion with the friend is a joy,
because it is a recreation. It makes the old world seem new again. Even
familiar landscapes, viewed again with a friend whom one has seen at
discreet intervals, acquire a freshness they did not possess before.
The very essence of companionship, therefore, if it is to be a joy,
consists in the freshness, the novelty, the change that it introduces
into our life.
But where is the freshness, where, therefore, the joy of companionship
with some one whose mind one has thoroughly explored, whose every
word, comment, or exclamation one anticipates five or six seconds
ahead? Where is the exquisite quality of the companion in one whom
one knows as well as oneself, whom one has had endless days, weeks,
months and years to study, to listen to and to understand? The most
gifted brain can be circumnavigated if it be lived with daily. The
richest storehouse of spirituality can hardly hold out against daily
depredation.
Companionship, however, offers something else that is priceless in the
mortal monotony of our lives. It draws us away from excessive communion
with ourselves, from the surfeit of self. Thus the friend comes as a
welcome disturber of the interminable meditation that proceeds at all
hours of the day between a man and himself.
But the mate who is always with you is so much a part of yourself,
so intimately known to you, that nothing she can say is sufficiently
arresting to disturb any meditation; and unless she actually overturns
the lamp, or accidentally chops one of her fingers off, or falls
downstairs, she is hardly noticed.
And what is true of the husband here is equally true of the wife. She
gets to know her husband’s every word, every mood, every gesture by
heart. To call his presence companionship, or the boon that comes with
friendship, would be to cast a slur on all companionship and friendship
for ever.
Companionship between husband and wife is therefore impossible.
It is impossible because the very source of the chief quality
of companionship—refreshment—is cut off at the root by too much
association, too much and too incessant exploration of each other’s
minds, by the two spouses.
(F) The monogamic marriage is as a rule more satisfying to the female
than to the male; but only, as we shall see in the chapter on Divorce,
if children are born regularly, and the circumstances of their birth
and their infancy run a normal course. The reason of this is that
since the positive healthy woman finds her complete sexual experience
only by means of the coitus, _plus_ the period of gestation, _plus_
parturition, and _plus_ the months of lactation, she finds, as a rule,
in the course of a married life in which she brings forth children
regularly and in normal circumstances, all that her body can possibly
expect from an adapted sexual life.[56] The act of fertilization,
which, as we have already seen in a former chapter, is only the
sparking-plug that starts the huge cycle that culminates in the
weaning, is such a trifling incident in her sexual experience that very
soon her husband begins to assume in her eyes the importance which,
as a matter of fact, he enjoys relative to the huge cycle itself. And
if she happens no longer to feel that enthusiasm for him which she
felt as a fiancée, she can endure the disillusionment with equanimity
and sweetness because she is now aware that, after all said and done,
he does not really matter to her nearly as much as she once rather
foolishly imagined. Promoting and expediting the drop in a woman’s
affection for her husband must also be reckoned not only the natural
surfeit and indifference that comes with excessive familiarity, but
also the presence of the children themselves. For while they act as
a consolation to the woman for the declining affection of the pair,
they also operate as a powerful reducer of that affection in herself.
The unconscious longing for fertilization that has long been drawing
her to her husband and forcing her to transfigure his very common and
ordinary personality into something exceptional, naturally abates as
fast as children are born, because, as an unconscious longing, it gets
gratified and therefore stifled. And thus children, far from being
the alleged bonds uniting couples, may become the most potent wedges
driving them asunder. The extraordinary number of loving childless
couples in which the woman’s devotion remains unabated may be accounted
for in this way.[57] Policy, as a rule, bids her treat him with
consideration and the outward signs of devotion as the breadwinner, as
the father of her children, and as a person who, since he is destined
to be her constant companion, it is merely ordinary good sense to
humour and to please; but provided that she have children from him at
regular intervals, she is not much troubled by the pronounced drop in
her affection and regard for him.
To the man, on the other hand, to whom, as we have seen, the
sparking-plug incident constitutes a complete sexual experience, and
whose sexual life therefore begins and ends with this spasmodic desire
for woman and the brief relation with her to which it leads, this
falling off in affection and desire is a matter of very grave concern,
_because he has no bodily consolation_. He may love his children, he
may delight in their company, and he may be wholly interested in his
home; but the bearing and nursing of his children constitutes no bodily
experience to him; and in life it is the demands of the body that are
most important and most importunate when they are not obeyed.
For his body to enjoy its necessary, satisfactory experience, slight
and brief as it is, it is essential that some desire, some passion, in
fact some of the feeling he felt for his wife as a fiancée, should
remain. It is necessary that he should still look upon the act as one
of passion, desire and power. But as we have seen, the act has been
deprived of most of its passion, desire and power by the inevitable
consequences of the State monogamic marriage. Its beauties have
literally been worn away. It has lost its savour and its strength by
having been systematized, time-tabled, protected, ordered, and above
all, repeated too often, without that “certain modicum of variety”
which is the essential element in all life.
Generally speaking, then, it may be argued with justice that, where
conditions are normal and children are born regularly, monogamic
marriage can be tolerated quite well by women, but not by men. For when
once the elements constituting the joy of cohabitation have been robbed
from the man’s share—as in nine hundred and ninety-nine marriages out
of a thousand they must—the relationship, though still endurable to the
positive healthy female, to whom the act of fertilization, and _raison
de plus_ her husband, is of such minor importance, becomes intolerable
to the healthy positive male; and unless he is prepared to face a life
in which every week is a long-drawn-out torture to his body, he cannot
remain faithful to his spouse.
In its general attitude towards and understanding of monogamic
marriage, therefore, this Age, in addition to smuggling the lie of
happiness into the contract, also completely distorts the true relation
to the union of the woman on the one hand, and the man on the other.
By a false and entirely gratuitous analogy, it supposes that the man’s
position can be and is as tolerable as that of the child-bearing female.
It is useless to object that thousands of married men to-day remain
faithful to their wives, and yet cannot be said to be among those rare
geniuses in love for whom alone the monogamic marriage is suitable. In
the first place it may be asked, how many of those thousands are really
healthy positive men, sexually exuberant and virile? It is simple
enough to be a Puritan if one is below par. But how many faithful
husbands are truly normal, in the sense of their body’s insisting upon
leading a satisfactory sexual life?
(G) It would be unfair to omit to mention among these objections to
the modern monogamic marriage, those that arise more particularly from
the woman’s standpoint in a match with a man who is both positive and
healthy.
At the risk of repeating statements already made, the reader must be
reminded here that when either party to a matrimonial match is negative
or unhealthy, the union ceases from being one to which mere objections
can be raised; it then becomes actually impossible. And by positiveness
and health in the woman, I mean that condition in which the bearing
of children is accompanied throughout by an easy pleasure-giving
functioning of the body.
Because I am not attempting to discuss all the sordid complications
of the sort of match in which either one or both of the parties are
unhealthy or negative, it does not follow that I fail to recognize the
enormous percentage of unhappy marriages, to which such unions lead.
But this is not a book on the pathological aspects of sex. I take only
the best possible conditions—the mating of a healthy and positive
woman with a man of the same stamp, and show the objections that may
be raised to their monogamic match. Naturally, if the unfavourable
circumstances with which the start is made be increased, the objections
to the match necessarily increase proportionately.
Now, despite the best initial circumstances, there are objections
to monogamy from the woman’s standpoint which will be seen to be
both serious and insuperable. But these objections, let it be well
understood, only arise in thoroughly modern conditions. I have hinted
at one of them in a former chapter (see Chapter VI, section 3).
(G1) A woman may marry a man who is wholly positive, healthy, and
therefore quite savoury (such men get ever more rare, but they are
still to be found). Very early in her married life, however, she
discovers that, through some cause which she of course cannot fathom,
her husband is a person utterly unfit to make her his wife in the only
way in which her instincts and senses easily accept the rôle—that is
to say, as the yielding partner to an impetuous, masterful, and at the
same time skilful initiator. Although he is not negative by nature, he
has been brought up negatively. He fears and shuns what he should be
most eager to experience. His timidity and awkwardness are infectious.
He proves himself not only unmasterly; he convinces her that he is a
bungler—often a bungler more terrified than she is herself.
A relationship which should have been but a means of raising their
courting happiness to ecstasy becomes instead either frigid and
frightened post-marital virginity for weeks after marriage,[58] which
proves disastrous to their love and ruinous to their nerves; or else, a
consummation which is so hopelessly clumsy, hurried and nervous, and so
distasteful to either party, that it is repeated as seldom as possible,
and is always followed by the most bewildering disenchantment.
I have previously explained that to the decent girl the act of
consummation seems acceptable and right only if purified by fire. She
does not need to be in the least influenced by Puritanical prejudices
in order to hold this attitude. It is the natural outcome of her
instincts, as they have been formed throughout the ages. The bulk of
the ancestors in her line, for millions of years, on the female side,
having encountered the proper impetuosity and fire in the male, which
carries all before it—that prehensile and initiatory masterfulness that
belongs by nature to the male’s share in the act of consummation—this
is what her racial memory leads her to expect, this alone is what gives
her that clean joy in sex, that light-hearted innocence in sex, without
which her married life is but a torment.
Yet now she finds herself with a creature who far from showing any
mastery or abandon, actually increases, if you please, her own natural
timidity about the whole affair, and even carries it one stage further
until it is brought perilously near to disgust and moral indignation.
Beginnings tell most poignantly, particularly when they consist of
first experiences in fundamental matters. And this kind of beginning,
if it is not quickly corrected, is almost always fatal. It destroys
that trust, that confidence, that humble and willing subservience,
which are at once a young woman’s instinct and her joy. It poisons the
first hours of her maturity, of her self-realization, of her taste of
life’s deeper waters; but, above all, it revives in her precisely those
emotions and prejudices which ought to have been stifled for ever—her
high-school doubts and qualms regarding the general desirability of her
Maker’s scheme for mammalian fertilization.
She may forgive this first tragic disenchantment. It is doubtful
whether she ever forgets it. And if her husband, as is often the case,
continues inept, clumsy and uneasy about the whole relationship, it
matters not even if they have children, that disillusionment which, in
any case, is bound to come, is unduly expedited, and the union gets
prematurely blighted. If there are no children—then there is either
open revolt or infidelity, or both.
In this way very many eminently desirable women suffer untold
hardships through monogamy[59]; and though they are frequently too
proud and too dignified to reveal to anyone the smallest hint of their
suffering, this may be read in a hundred signs about their homes and
their persons. The bitter contempt that many women display towards
their husbands, their tendency to contradict, offend and insult them
before strangers, and their aptitude to appeal to outsiders rather than
to their husbands for advice and help, are all probably the outcome of
experiences that have occurred quite early in their married life, all
of which were disenchanting, unpleasant, and destructive of confidence.
For the healthy, positive young man, in this case, all that can be
pleaded is that it is not entirely his fault. In England, as a rule, he
is bred in an atmosphere so perfectly sex-tight, that no intelligent
or enlightening word ever reaches him on the subject. On the contrary,
all is clammy, frightened, guilty silence. On reaching maturity, if he
be sensitive, the ordinary means of acquiring practical experience in
the matter will probably strike him as too sordid, too commercial, too
completely lifted out of the atmosphere of romance and adventure in
which his mind has always pictured ideal sexual experiences; and the
consequence is that frequently he not only practises abstinence for too
long, but also develops inhibitions and fantasies which hardly conduce,
when the time comes, to a happy consummation of his first love-match.
And yet the world has grown so stupid in regard to all these matters,
and foolish romantic women’s voices have become so clamorous, that
there is an ever-increasing body of idiots who insist on the
desirability of men being virgins when they marry!
(G2) Another deep objection, from the standpoint of woman, to the
monogamic marriage, arises out of what is known as “maleness” in women.
According to Weininger this varies in degree with each individual,
and modern authorities on psychology have more or less confirmed
Weininger’s view.
For the reader unacquainted with the present knowledge on this point,
perhaps it would be as well to state plainly what results have been
obtained.
In the first place it has been demonstrated to the satisfaction of most
people that no one male or female is wholly masculine or feminine.
The stage of hermaphroditism through which all human beings are
supposed to pass in their early fœtal development, is never apparently
quite overcome, and the fully developed fœtus, as also the perfectly
developed child, retains in its constitution vestiges of a sex to which
its outward and primary sexual characteristics do not belong. These
vestiges of the other sex which survive are both physical and mental,
and according to their proportion in the individual body, determine the
character of their host. Thus a child who is to all outward appearance
a boy may yet possess elements according to which he is actually 25
or 30 or only 10 per cent female. A female child may likewise possess
vestiges of the other sex which constitute her 10, 20, 30 or even 40
per cent male.
Although, therefore, all men have a preponderancy of male elements, and
all women a preponderancy of female elements, each may possess a more
or less heavy percentage of the elements of the other.
In extreme cases these elements of the opposite sex cause trouble by
leading those who possess them to form desires and to lead lives so
conspicuously out of keeping with their primary sexual characteristics
as to make them obnoxious to society; but it should be remembered
that this degree of morbidity is rare, and that as a general rule
the modicum of _maleness in the female and femaleness in the male has
no such disturbing results if the other elements proper to the sex of
the primary reproductive organs in each individual find their normal
adaptation_.
Thus the maleness in the female has a tendency to manifest itself, more
especially when her sexuality is not fully developed or not actively
engaged. Little girls, for instance, are notoriously sadistic—sadism
being a derivative of the male reproductive instinct—as are also many
spinsters and some old women.
Femaleness in the male, on the other hand, tends to manifest itself
particularly in cases where the male reproductive instinct has been
stifled, or unhinged, or when his spirit has been ruthlessly broken.
Now it may be as well for the reader to know that the attitude of
the modern world is to fall down in a state of acquiescence before
this important fact of sex, without attempting to inquire whether the
importance with which it looms on the horizon of our lives is not
precisely due to the attitude of prostrate acceptance with which it is
met.
Particularly in England is the phenomenon of mixed elements
noticeable—so much so that foreigners call attention to it as something
exceptional.[60] But it is only noticeable in this marked degree in
England because, like all other manifestations of sex in this country,
it is ill-adapted. A well-adapted sexual proclivity does not cry aloud
and call attention to itself in this way.
Humbly as they may acquiesce in it, however, it is customary for people
in this country to speak disparagingly of the “male woman,” of her who
flaunts manly attire, affects a walking-stick, hunts like a man, and is
always the last to be drawn away from a drain or other refuge in which
some unfortunate fox or other hunted animal has run for safety. I know
of a case where such a woman constantly waits until long after dark in
order to catch or kill the fox that has thus hoped to save its life.
(Unconscious Sadism.)
Now it is all very well to inveigh against the existence of such
viragos, and to describe as morbid their manifestation of male sexual
characteristics, but, as a matter of fact, there is as a rule nothing
really morbid in their constitutions. And in any case, an attitude of
humble acquiescence before them, as if they were an imposition from
Providence, which must be suffered willy-nilly, is hardly the best way
of modifying either the disagreeable character of their proclivities or
tastes, or the evil to which these proclivities and tastes undoubtedly
lead.
I realize that in making this statement I am at variance with
practically every authority on the subject; but it is because in no
authority on the subject have I found a suggestion of what I am about
to say, that I venture to trust my own judgment, and provisionally to
adhere to it until such time as the authority who opposes it makes
allowances for all I am going to advance in defence of these so-called
“male” women.
In the first place, then, it may be pointed out that it would be absurd
to complain that a race is breeding women with manly traits in their
character, if the desideratum of that race is avowedly to breed people
of highly virile propensities. The mating of highly virile males with
women devoid of all trace of virility would surely only lead to a
depreciation of the stock. For the males, by having their seed diluted
by elements utterly unlike them, could not hope to be the fathers of
boys in any way worthy of them.
The rearing of women with strong male characteristics is, in fact,
always an advantage to a race that wishes to produce a fine virile
manhood;[61] for the dangerous diluent “effeminine”—to coin a new word
for a new notion—is thus reduced to a minimum.
Among the ancients Celts, Teutons and Slavs, than which few races have
been more virile, women, when necessary, used to fight side by side
with their men. It is said of the virile Similkameen Indians, that
“the women were nearly as good hunters as the men.”[62] The whole race
survived only by means of hunting. It was therefore an advantage for
the females to approximate to the men in their skill. By this means
a double strain of hunting virtues descended to the offspring, thus
leading to ever greater and greater refinement and specialization of
instinct and judgment.
From the reading of the biographies of great men also we are in a
position to determine to what extent the quality which to-day is
opprobriously referred to as female “masculinity” was present in
their mothers. Think of Schopenhauer, Byron, and, above all, of King
Alfred the Great, to whose mother history declares the monarch owed
everything! She could hardly have reared so manly a king, had she not
herself possessed some innate knowledge of manliness and masculine
virtue.
This manliness of women, therefore, far from being a disaster, is
rather a desirable trait, if a particularly virile race of men is
required. And since the existence of women with pronounced male
characteristics cannot possibly be a novelty in this world, it is
far more likely that the outcry against them, which is modern, is
due to modern conditions, than that they are truly and intrinsically
undesirable.
“But,” argue the man and woman of taste, “the masculine woman in our
society is surely disagreeable!”
I agree. But while I shall now endeavour to explain why she is, or has
become, disagreeable, I should like to repeat that she is by no means
the only example of a disagreeable sex-phenomenon in our midst; that
there are other phenomena just as obnoxious, and that all take their
root not necessarily in abnormality of an incurable kind, but in the
condition of ill-adaptation into which sex has fallen in this country—a
condition that sex-psychologists do not sufficiently reckon with when
they regard as pathological the unfortunate modern female who is either
sadistic, hostile to man, unnatural in her love and pursuit of women,
or blatantly and ostentatiously masculine in her tastes, her kit and
her interests.
The maleness of women, considered from the standpoint of marriage—which
is the only standpoint relevant to this chapter[63]—can be deprecated
only when it renders impossible, or more than usually difficult, the
cohesion of that valuable unit in society known as the family.
As this is not a work on the pathology of sex, I cannot deal with
cases of genuine physical and mental aberration in which a woman is
so intensely masculine that motherhood is quite out of the question.
I can only deal with those cases where male elements are present in
sufficient quantities in the female to avert serious dilution of virile
qualities in a stock.
Now in such cases marriage is not only possible, but can be quite
successful—or at least as successful as any marriage can be from the
standpoint of the individual—provided that the female elements in the
woman find complete and happy adaptation, and the male elements in her
are prevented from guiding her conduct and her judgment at the cost of
the female elements.
If the male elements in her are not prevented from guiding her conduct
and her judgment, the evil result will be twofold: (1) she will develop
her masculine proclivities at the cost of her female or maternal side;
and (2) she will come into early and bitter conflict with her husband.
Either one of these evil results is sufficient to upset the balance of
the unit known as the family.
What kind of man, then, is likely to be the best mate of the woman with
pronounced masculine elements in her constitution?
_The problem is to make her masculine elements recessive in favour of
her female elements._ It amounts to this, then—in what circumstances
is a woman likely to abandon her masculine elements as a weapon in the
struggle of life? In what circumstances is she likely to realize their
uselessness to her?
—Only, it may be said, when she has found them utterly useless; only
when she has learned to despise them. But when does this occur?—It
always occurs where the masculine elements belonging to the woman have
in a sharp conflict, or by gradual experience covering innumerable
small incidents, discovered superior, overwhelmingly superior,
masculine elements in the mate. It may never come to a conflict. The
superiority of the male elements in the husband may become impressed
upon her by repeated lessons, by small daily occurrences, that teach
her in spite of herself to trust his masculinity more than hers.
When this point is achieved, her masculine elements rapidly become
recessive, and thenceforward give no further trouble—nay, they may
cease to manifest themselves altogether.
For this end to be attained, however, the male—the husband—must be
a creature of overwhelming masculinity, against whom no masculine
elements belonging to any female could possibly measure themselves
without the certainty of absolute rout.[64]
In the same way it might be pointed out that the womanly man finds his
happiest and best adaptation with the female—the wife—of overwhelming
femininity; for then his female elements finding it impossible to
measure themselves against those of his spouse, quickly become
recessive and cease to give any further trouble.
But what actually happens to-day?
Our great past as a virile race has certainly left us an inheritance of
thousands of virile women, some of whom excel anything that any other
European country can produce; but alas! owing to the degeneracy of man,
caused by his bad health, his Puritanism, his bemeaning occupations,
and his absurd obsessions about chivalry, there are not the males to
hand with whom to mate these women.
When one of these women marries nowadays she must perforce unite
with a man who is utterly incapable of making her male elements
recessive; who, on the contrary, is himself so exiguously endowed with
masculinity that his wife not only has every temptation, but also every
opportunity, to express, assert, and impose her masculine elements upon
the family and himself.
But the continuous expression and assertion of male elements in a
woman, and of female elements in a man, at the cost of those elements
proper to their primary sexual organs, far from leading to happiness,
result in nothing but misery both mental and physical, while the
ultimate effect on the nerves is always disastrous.
If, however, there is nothing in her immediate environment to make her
despise her male elements, or to convince her that they can safely lie
quiescent, a woman’s very self-preservative instinct will not allow her
to abandon them to the process of recession, and the consequence is
that in thousands of marriages at the present day the wives are utterly
and deeply miserable on this account alone. Masculine men are lacking.
The great past of the race has produced generation after generation of
fine, stout-hearted women with a large percentage of virile elements.
But the mates for these remaining memorials of our whilom greatness
are no more, and thus these unfortunate women either wander the world
unmated, or if mated, suffer an ill-adaptation that is sometimes even
more cruel than spinsterhood itself.
To point to these wretched, unadapted virile women—whether married
or unmarried—as the legitimate butts for our scorn or our contempt,
however, is the acme of ignorance and stupidity. It is the degeneration
of man, the low ebb of his former greatness, that has left them
standing high and dry in conspicuous isolation; and if England’s
“trousered women” now strike the foreigner as one of the regrettable
features of our civilization, it is regrettable only in the sense that
it proves positively that this country once enjoyed a racial greatness
of which she can no longer boast, and of which these women are the
belated reminder.
(H) But the chief and most serious objection to the monogamic marriage,
apart from all the pain that it brings to individuals, male and female,
consists in the injury which, particularly at the present day, it does
to the offspring of each generation. From the standpoint of posterity,
indeed, the gravity of this charge can hardly be exaggerated.
It may seem a far cry to speak of the increase of indigestion and of
bad or defective teeth in connexion with the monogamic marriage, but in
practice this connexion is not so remote as it would appear.
The ideal condition for a child that is to be well-constituted and
flourishing in body and mind, is, in the first place, that its mother
should be left in peace during gestation, and certainly that she should
be left scrupulously alone during the period of suckling. From the
standpoint of the race it is of such supreme importance that a child
should be reared on mother’s milk, that everything should be done, no
stone should be left unturned, to secure if possible the certainty of
this condition.
With regard to cohabitation during gestation it is only fair to
say that opinions are sadly divided, some doctors maintaining one
thing, and others the reverse. If we require a standard, however,
we have only to study the lower animals, among which the female is
not even accessible during pregnancy. Whereas some doctors will
declare, however, that any cohabitation whatsoever during gestation
is most pernicious, all are unanimous in pronouncing against _normal_
indulgence at such times. But apart from everything that changeable and
uncertain science may periodically proclaim regarding this question,
it would seem obvious that cohabitation at a time when fertilization
is impossible cannot in any case have been Nature’s design; and if,
therefore, there remain the smallest doubt about the matter—as the
division of opinion among medical men reveals—surely the benefit of the
doubt ought, in all humanity, to be given to the expected offspring!
With regard to cohabitation after the confinement and during the seven
to nine months of suckling that should follow, there can, however, be
no doubt whatsoever. This _must_ be bad; for, seeing that it is of
primary importance that the child during these months should be able
to obtain mother’s milk, no risks should be run which can in any way
jeopardize the happy fulfilment of this condition.
At such times the mother should be left severely alone. She is happy,
exquisitely happy.[65] Her nervous system is concentrated on the one
important and essential object—that of providing for her infant child.
Any action or diversion that tends to disturb the attention of the
nervous system, or to shake this precious concentration upon the mammæ,
cannot therefore be too strongly deprecated.
What is the alternative? The mammæ find the nervous energy of the body
divided. The woman’s system is no longer that of a mother alone; it
has been recalled to its rôle as a wife. There may be conception or
there may not—at any rate, the frequent occurrence of children only a
year or thirteen months older than a brother or sister, shows how often
conception does take place in such circumstances—and the consequence is
that the suckling has to be removed from the breast, in order to become
the experimental victim of every kind of abomination in the form of
substitutes for mother’s milk.
To the ignorance of the young mother concerning artificial foods are
now added the ignorance of neighbours, the audacious and criminal lies
of commercial baby-food manufacturers, and frequently the ineptitude of
the local doctor. Against such a conspiracy of error—irrespective of
the fact that no substitute, however good, can possibly compensate for
the loss of mother’s milk—it is not surprising that the infant’s body
should rebel; and the result is a child who cannot by any conceivable
chance be saved from digestive trouble, whom nothing can cure of
digestive trouble, and who, by having alimentary disorders started so
early in life, reaches maturity not only with a strong bias in favour
of gastric and intestinal vices, but also—if indeed his teeth survive
so long—with every imaginable kind of dental disease, from caries to
pyorrhœa.
From mothers congenitally and constitutionally unfit either to have
babies or to nurse them, there will surely always come a sufficiently
vast contribution of unhealthy and undesirable babies to each
generation; but these, at least, no ordinary precaution can save,
and if their early upbringing only tends to promote a condition of
degeneracy already inherent in them, so that they find it difficult to
survive, we can only applaud this confirmation of a thoroughly moribund
tendency.
But in the case of healthy, positive women, admirably fitted to fulfil
all the functions of motherhood efficiently and pleasurably, anything
that interferes with this healthy functioning amounts to a national
and racial calamity, and it is to these I refer when I emphasize the
immense danger of cohabitation during the nursing period.
Now the monogamic marriage makes this sort of plague almost a natural
necessity, a sort of ineluctable scourge. It is impossible to ask a
normal, positive, healthy man to exercise sexual abstinence for sixteen
or eighteen months—that is to say, the nine months of his wife’s
pregnancy and the seven or nine months of lactation. Only Manicheans,
Puritans, or people thoroughly below par and quite devoid of virility,
could possibly think of recommending such a course. Psycho-analysis
has at last shown what all decent and clean-minded people knew about
prolonged sexual abstinence—that it is both wrongful and harmful. It
can only be thought of and practised by people who have either used
religious and alcoholic methods of sublimating their passions, or else
by people who are utterly and conspicuously undesirable; but in the
case of the latter it should be remembered that it is not abstinence
or so-called “self-control,” but semi-impotence. Where it is attempted
by exuberant, positive young men, who are neither geniuses in art,
philosophy or religion, it can only mean disease—possibly physical, but
certainly nervous.
The husband, therefore, in a monogamic marriage consisting of the
union of two positive, healthy people, finds himself on the horns of
a dilemma. If he be sound and normal he cannot dream of abstaining for
the number of months that would be necessary for his child’s welfare
(for even if he indulges in cohabitation during gestation, he still has
to face the seven or nine months of suckling, during which he _must_ at
all costs leave his wife in peace); and yet society (modern society)
and convention generally bid him rather ruin his child than practise
even the most innocuous form of virtual polygamy.
Of course the intelligent, thoughtful and good-natured man in such
circumstances turns to some sort of modern substitute for polygamy. But
the curse of modern civilization, its great blot and disfigurement,
lies in the fact that at this stage in his wise resolve, he must
perforce resort to secrecy, to deception, to concealment, to a
hole-and-corner liaison, which may and frequently does expose him to
every conceivable danger and expense—danger from disease if he be a
fool and unwary, danger from blackmail if he fall into the hands of
knaves, danger from ruin if he happen to have lighted upon unscrupulous
associates, and danger from a criminal prosecution into the bargain.
But in any case, however fortunate he may be in forming his liaison,
he is certain, if found out, to incur the moral indignation of all
the snivelling, worthless, ignorant and “respectable” people of his
circle, among whom the loudest in their outcry will be the spinsters
and the Puritans, of whom not one—_no not one_—can have or ever has had
the faintest beginnings of an understanding of any aspect of the sex
question.
This is how our society is organized. Its whole basis, its whole
prepossession, is directed stubbornly towards degeneration. Nothing
that points, however meekly, the other way, is any longer listened to,
much less observed!
Can it be wondered at, in the circumstances, that the average
unresourceful and timid man, prefers to remain strictly faithful to
his monogamic vows? Can it be wondered at that he prefers to ruin his
child’s constitution and temper?
This is the gravest charge that can be brought from the standpoint of
the race against the monogamic marriage, and it embodies the outline of
an explanation of perhaps half the physical and mental degeneracy of
modern times.
It seems necessary to remind the reader here, that all these strictures
against monogamy only apply to the healthy, normal, positive man and
woman. They do not, therefore, apply to half the existing population.
For in order that a woman may be thoroughly happy bearing and nursing
children, she must be healthy, well-constituted and positive, and
in order that a man may find it impossible to practise what the
modern Age arrogantly calls “self-control,” he must be positive,
healthy and exuberantly virile. To half the modern world this alleged
“self-control” is merely a euphemistic cover for the ease with which
they can forget the weak, barely audible call of their bodies; and to
an ever-increasing number of modern women there is precious little
enjoyment associated with any stage in the sexual cycle, whether it be
actual fertilization, gestation, parturition or lactation.
In discussing the value of monogamic marriage, therefore, and the
possible reforms that might be instituted to render it suitable for the
positive man and woman, it is hoped that none of the remarks I shall
make will be thought to apply to the vast crowds to-day who are able
to find in monogamic marriage a satisfactory, though perhaps tiresome,
adaptation.
But, in the first place, it may be objected that, since I find so
many serious difficulties in modern monogamic marriage, why do I not
straightway recommend its total abolition, and advocate polygamy, or
promiscuity, or polyandry, or total sexual anarchy?
I might certainly be tempted to advocate frank and open polygamy were
I not too deeply conscious of the very many serious and far-reaching
advantages that the ideal of the family, as at present held in modern
Europe, enjoys over every other kind of social unit designed to solve
the problem of the sexes.
As I have already stated these advantages, from the standpoint of
society, earlier in the chapter, there is no need to repeat them here.
Nevertheless, before proceeding, it might be as well for the reader
to glance at them again, so that he may the more easily follow the
modifications I am about to recommend.
The problem before us, therefore, is _how to maintain the monogamic
marriage and give it fresh life, while modifying it in such a way as to
meet the gravest of the objections that can be advanced against it_.
But before I proceed it may be as well to utter some words of warning
to those romanticists and sentimentalists who have doubtless been
offended by the strictures I have already pronounced against monogamic
marriage.
Let me tell them, therefore, that however much they may be persuaded
of the contrary, it is not I, with my clear and merciless criticism
of modern marriage, who am the bitterest enemy of that institution,
but they themselves, with their wilful concealment of all that I have
brought to light.
Modern marriage is now on the rocks. If it has drifted into this
perilous position it is, however, not because the question of its
advantages and disadvantages has been properly ventilated and
discussed, and the disadvantages corrected; but because it has been
persistently and almost maliciously overlaid with false sentiment
and bogus psychology, by these very romanticists and sentimentalists
themselves.
If, therefore, it is to be saved, as it should be saved, this end
can be achieved only by a blank refusal to shut one’s eyes to its
drawbacks, so that the latter may be rectified wherever possible; and
by a full and earnest advocacy of its advantages, however unromantic
and unsentimental these may appear to feverish modern sensationalists.
Before proceeding to the review of the specific objections outlined
above, the general criticism of modern monogamic marriage with which
the chapter opened must first be dealt with.
_Method of Meeting General Criticisms._
1. Stress should be removed from the alleged permanence of love and the
happiness of the marriage state, as far as possible, and laid on the
utilitarian aspect of matrimony.
2. The young people should be taught realistically that since some sort
of physical adaptation in sex is indispensable to the healthy adult,
monogamic marriage was designed as a means of meeting that need.
3. Its difficulties should be emphasized, and a happy issue shown to
be as difficult an accomplishment as the complexities of the contract
would lead them to expect. They should be told that in their search
for a mate they should show more concern about minimizing these
difficulties than about desiring to have “a good time.”
4. The responsibilities of a family should be understood, and the
wife regarded in her utilitarian aspect as a keeper of the home, as a
mother, and as a guardian of the home comforts; marriage itself, as
the sacred garden of the future of mankind, in which each party to the
contract has the privilege of contributing to that future.
5. Differences of temperament and tradition between mates should be
avoided. Since ill-health forbids our marrying into our own families
(the ideal match), the young must not forget that in going beyond
their families for a mate in order to contradict certain hereditary
taints—such as gout, or consumption, or cancer, or any other
constitutional vice—they need not therefore contradict the virtues
and abilities that their particular family line has cultivated; for
this leads to decline, and to the procreation of children who have no
character and no ability. They should seek, as far as possible, their
like in a strange family.[66] The policy of avoiding family taints in
too near relations should not be extended into a policy of seeking
opposites.
6. If by chance the expected disenchantment does not supervene in a
form intolerably acute, when marriage has been taught on these lines,
and the two young people discover that they do not necessarily become
surfeited of each other with years, then at least the surprise would
be pleasant, and not as it always is to-day, the sudden unpleasant
realization of complete disillusionment.
_Method of Meeting Specific Objections._[67]
(A1) People should be taught quite early how changeable they are. They
should be persuaded of the frangibility of their resolutions, vows, and
promises, and they should learn how deeply they are wedded to variety
before ever they celebrate their final and most fateful wedding.
(2) They should be taught that it is only the exceptions among mankind
that have that genius for love which can endure for a lifetime, and
they should be shown the hollowness of the popular assumption that
every one is capable of _une grande passion_; therefore, that to
arrange their lives as if they were one of these geniuses in love is
not only the grossest form of megalomania, but dangerous into the
bargain.
(B) The problem here is one belonging to the art of life. Those who can
practise this art, and contrive to make themselves always the desired
object of the spouse, have overcome one of the principal difficulties
of monogamic marriage. The French are perhaps the most successful
European people at practising this art—hence the high percentage of
happy marriages in France.
(C) If the approval of each party to the match is understood merely to
mean the recognition by each of the necessity of an adequate physical
adaptation, and the unconscious desire for this physical adaptation in
each is discounted from the enthusiasm felt for the other as mate, then
it will be seen that the residue, which will be a pretty tepid feeling,
is by no means the outcome of an overvaluation of the individual, and
the contempt need not arise.
In other words, teach the girl to subtract the need and the desire for
physical adaptation from her love of the man, and teach the man to do
the same in regard to the girl, and what remains will quickly be seen
to consist only of a strong personal regard, which can hardly lead to
the contempt that would otherwise result if the enthusiasm on both
sides were supposed to arise from the unaided charms of either party to
the match.
(D) The remedy here is the same as for (C). If a man realizes that when
a girl protests her undying love for him the bulk of the ardour she
feels is provoked merely by him as her physical adaptation—by him _qua_
male—and that his individual traits play only a minor part, he will
be less likely to believe that he is capable of provoking a life-long
passion because a girl approved of him as her mate. It is a simple idea
to grasp. Both the girl and the man should always reflect how much
nature is helping them towards their success. When the declaration of
life-long love came, it could then be estimated at its proper worth,
without either party fancying that any exceptional fascination in
themselves had been the principal power at work.
(E) It should be inculcated upon all, young and old alike, that
companionship is not to be sought with people whom, in view of peculiar
circumstances, one is bound to see every day and every hour of the day.
The sooner we free our minds from these foolish notions the better. A
man and a woman should seek companions of the same sex as themselves,
and outside their families. Then an hour with the mate—with the lawful
spouse—may come as a rest, as a respite, as a welcome spell of peace
when we need not say or do anything. But this moment of repose, of
speechless serenity, with the sound of someone breathing not three feet
away, should not be confused with companionship.
(F) As society is organized at present it is difficult to meet
this objection. Wherever possible the man should, of course,
have a concubine of some sort. Provided that the wife continues
child-bearing, at regular intervals, as she should, she cannot weary
of the relationship as hopelessly as he will. Women should be taught
to realize that the division of labour is so unfair, that they get so
much more entertainment out of sex than men do, that some compensating
feature ought to be introduced into the lives of the latter. The
importance of the act of fertilization alone to the man’s reproductive
instinct cannot be exaggerated. To woman, its importance is only equal
to the proportion it bears to the rest of the sexual cycle. To preserve
his peace of mind and health of body and nerves, therefore, the man
must be in a position to perform his one function with healthy desire.
The children he had from his concubine, if any there were, would not
necessarily rank in law with the children of his first wife.
(G1) In order to meet this objection it is imperative that we should
institute some sort of tasteful method of initiation into sex for
young men. Let the girls be initiated by their proper and natural
initiators—their husbands; anything else is simply modern nonsense; but
men should be properly and carefully initiated before marriage, away
from the dangers of commercial prostitution. This school of initiation,
however formed, would also serve, as it did with the Greeks, as a means
of preventing the evils of total sexual abstinence among the young men
who have to wait a long time for marriage.
The general ideal in modern England is that the eligible young man
should be what is called “clean-minded.” It cannot be disputed that
“clean-mindedness” is a very desirable and very rare quality. But the
way to set about securing it is the very reverse of that which the
bulk of modern English people would recommend. They would say, let the
young man practise rigorous sexual abstinence before marriage, let him
go in for sport and exercise “self-control.” Only thus can he remain
clean-minded.
But the very last means by which a healthy positive young man may
hope to attain to a clean mind is precisely the means advocated under
the general head of sexual abstinence. _The non-indulgence of the
sex-impulses in the vigorous young male is the means par excellence of
destroying clean-mindedness._
Sexual abstinence, even when accompanied by energetic exercise and
indulgence in sports, by chaining in the desires and wishes arising
from the young man’s reproductive instincts, causes them to become
ramping demons. It causes the imagination to become filled with wish
fantasies, often of a morbid kind. It fills the mind with obsessions,
always obscene and frequently revolting, and if not quickly relieved
must undermine the whole of a young man’s healthy mental and physical
attitude towards a normal sexual life. No mind residing in a healthy
young male body, practising sexual abstinence, can remain clean every
minute of the day, and even in the night it is disturbed by occasional
bodily protests in the form of dreams.
The dangers of not being clean-minded, however, are so great and so
far-reaching, and the risks run by the healthy total sexual abstainer
are so enormous, that it is high time that the truth about this matter
were more widely understood.
To clean the mind, the deep wishes of the body, which refuse to be
flouted, must be satisfied. To forget sex, in fact, the sex instinct
must be indulged. Freedom here, as in the case of any other appetite,
can only be attained by gratification.
It is true that permanent sublimation is also a possible alternative.
But unless a young man is destined for the Holy Catholic Church, who
would wish to sublimate his sex?
It necessarily follows from this, that clean-mindedness in abstinent
young men, as it is generally understood, is a pure myth, a complete
misunderstanding; and that if it is desirable that eligible young men
should be clean-minded (and I am of opinion that it is most desirable),
then the road thereto does not lie through the dark spook-haunted
swamps of sexual abstinence, but through the open sunny highways of
healthy sex gratification, secured from the dangers of commercial
prostitution.
(G2) This objection can only be met by the Herculean undertaking of
rearing a type of manhood richer in masculine traits of mind and
character, and possessed of more exuberant virility—a type, that is
to say, by the side of which virile women would immediately feel the
inadequacy of their male elements and would not be tempted to use them
as weapons. By this means alone can the male elements in the finest
women be made recessive.
At present the idea of the “manly” man is foolishly limited to one who
loves sports of all kinds, who believes in open-air life, and who,
while having a sense of humour, also wears about him an air of breezy
modesty. By this modesty is meant a disinclination to make any special
claims for himself.
But all women quickly discover the ease with which they become mistress
of the fate of such a man, and it is curious that, in spite of the
thousands of cases of such subjection on the part of this type of man
in English marriages, he still continues to pass as the “manly” man.
The man of will, the man of character, the man who wishes to administer
his own life and the lives of those dependent upon him, because he is
conscious of being fit for the responsibility, and repeatedly proves
this fitness,[68] is being born in ever smaller numbers every year.
It is the system of education in England that is at fault. It produces
a womanly will-less creature, with heavier muscles than the average
woman, but with less grit and less bite in him, with less pride and
less jealous love of responsible action and mastery than the average
girl has who is his partner at golf.
If this seems like calumny or exaggeration, let the reader watch the
career of any one of these alleged “manly” men of England, from his
school years to his tenth or eleventh year of marriage, and if in
_every case_ they do not behold a creature who has long abandoned all
self-direction, not to speak of direction of dependents, I invite him
to close this book at this point as the most unspeakable nonsense.
With such a man, woman’s male elements cannot possibly be made
recessive. But it should not be imagined that she is any happier on
that account. On the contrary, both wisdom and compassion would seem to
unite in advocating the return in ever larger numbers of exuberantly
virile men, if only for the sake of securing happier and fuller lives
to the bulk of modern women.
(H) Regarding, as I do, this objection as so serious as to constitute
the chief and most fundamental objection to monogamic marriage, I can
see no possibility of making the institution sound unless something
be done to meet it. We cannot hope that things will right themselves
with an evil like this at the root of our national life. Suppressing
the sale of commercial products fraudulently declared to be equal
to mother’s milk is not enough. Self-control is the counsel for
wax-figures. To be offended by a frankly polygamic solution and yet
to feel that no stigma attaches to women unable to suckle their
babies,[69] and to be conscious of no indignation at the horrors of
the present state of monogamy with prostitution, is wanton and brutal
hypocrisy. Those who are guilty of this hypocrisy have wished to run
the world too long.
* * * * *
I have now examined the monogamic marriage of the positive man and the
positive woman in all its more important aspects. Wisdom would seem,
at all costs, to advocate the salvage of monogamic marriage from the
wreckage of modern society. But before marriage can be saved and handed
on as a valuable institution to the New Age, it must be reformed and
established on a sounder basis. To continue along our present lines,
without correcting our attitude towards marriage and some of the most
rigorous customs that govern it, is simply to steer our course headlong
back into sexual promiscuity, anarchy and chaos. No reform of modern
marriage, or of the ideas that cluster about it, can possibly achieve
any good, however, which does not satisfactorily meet every one of
the objections I have advanced against it. To proceed, as we are now
proceeding, by making the dissolution of marriage easier, is only one
step farther in the direction of barbaric promiscuity. No readjustment
can avail that does not go to the root of the problems involved; and
although it may certainly be legitimate to inquire whether, at this
late hour in our torrential degeneration, it is worth while making any
reforms in anything, it does not alter the fact that if marriage is
to be saved, all the objections to it that have been raised in this
chapter will require to be fairly and seriously faced.
Since, however, the sex question is so fundamental as to be almost of
primary importance; since the building of the social unit, the ideal
family, constitutes the first elementary task in all sound social
organization, it is not impossible, fantastic though it may seem, that
wise and thorough reform in this department of life may alone prove the
best means of rescuing Western Civilization itself.
FOOTNOTES:
[50] When I use the word “unnatural” here, I should like it to
be understood as meaning “unnatural to human beings,” for, as we
know, “nearly all rapacious animals, even the stupid vultures, are
monogamous,” certain monkeys are so too; but no anthropologist would
argue that _monogamic marriage_ was natural to man.
[51] The proportion of those who do not wait, to those who do, may be
judged to some extent from the following figures:—
Legitimate and illegitimate births in England and Wales during the nine
years 1911-19.
Legitimate. Illegitimate.
1911. 843,505 37,633
1912. 835,209 37,528
1913. 843,981 37,909
1914. 841,767 37,329
1915. 778,369 36,245
1916. 747,381 37,689
1917. 631,189 37,157
1918. 621,209 41,452
1919. 650,562 41,876
[52] See Ch. Letourneau, _The Evolution of Marriage_ (London, 1891):
“Christianity, which taught that the earthly country was of no account,
and taxed with impurity all that related to sexual union, made marriage
a sacrament, and consequently an institution quite apart from humble
considerations of social utility.... We shall see how hurtful the
influence of Christianity has been on marriage, and we shall come to
the conclusion that in order to manage earthly affairs well, it is not
good to keep our looks constantly raised to the skies” (pp. 205-6). See
also p. 245: “Abandoning the modest reality, it [Christianity] lost
anchor from the first and was drowned in a sea of dreams. Marriage,
instead of being simply the union of a man and woman in order to
produce children, became mystic.”
[53] As we shall point out later, these romantic obsessions in regard
to matrimony are chiefly Woman’s work.
[54] See the interesting treatise entitled _The Grammar of Life_ by my
friend Dr. G. T. Wrench (Heinemann, 1908), p. 218.
[55] That is why the world’s greatest love stories—those of Dante and
Beatrice, Romeo and Juliet, and Heathcliff and the elder Catherine
(in _Wuthering Heights_)—are all stories of a love that _was never
consummated_. In poetry and fiction, as in life, it is felt that for
a great love romance to remain at its lofty level of passion and
desire, the couple enacting it must never have an opportunity of living
together as man and wife.
[56] Naturally these remarks do not apply to the large and
ever-increasing number of women nowadays to whom every stage in the
process of child-bearing, from the preliminaries to the weaning, is
a torment and a source of disgust. But such women are too abnormal,
whatsoever their numbers may be, and too sick and below par to be
called positive healthy women, or to be reckoned with in any discussion
regarding what is characteristic of happy and successful functioning.
They are the kind of women who can truly regard matrimony and maternity
as states of self-sacrifice.
[57] Of course this can only happen where the woman is inclined to
pronounced negativeness, otherwise the longing for children drives her
away from a husband who cannot or does not give them to her.
[58] The writer has known one case in which it lasted for years.
Sometimes, in extreme cases, where the girl is too decent to be
sacrificed for a lifetime, there is a nullity suit, and the man
produces doctors who declare that he is perfectly normal. Of course
he is perfectly normal! What is wrong about him is the whole of his
upbringing and the effects of absurdly Puritanical notions about sex,
acting upon a peculiarly sensitive nature. For such men are usually
extremely desirable and acutely sensitive. They cannot, however,
overcome the ridiculous prejudices that prevailed regarding sex in the
atmosphere in which they have been reared.
[59] It should be noted that this does not apply to working-class
women. The men of the working classes may be coarser and more brutal
than the men of the wealthier classes, but they are also very much more
normal, easy, natural, and gifted in the matter of sex, and from this
point of view generally make excellent husbands. They may sometimes
strike their wives, but they also know how to love them. The nullity
suits and the bad lovers are to be found in the so-called “upper”
classes.
[60] August Strindberg, in a letter written in the autumn of 1888,
refers to England as “a nation of bigots that has delivered itself
up into the hands of its women,” and later on speaks of “England’s
trousered women.”
[61] I mean here, by “male characteristics,” only such traits as can
be safely emulated and acquired by the female without the sacrifice
or impairment of her reproductive functions, or of the instincts and
virtues that derive from them (see chapter X).
[62] See _Journal Anthropological Institute_, Feb., 1892, p. 307. See
also Bancroft, quoting Heame (_Native Races_), Vol. I, p. 117, where
a North American Indian Chief of some nomadic tribe, speaking of the
women said: “There is no such thing as travelling any considerable
distance in this country without their assistance.” Evidently here too
it was an advantage to the race for the women to be as nearly masculine
in their characters as possible. Australian women, like Cuban women,
used to fight beside their men and were very formidable. The former,
when on the march, are said to have hardly troubled to halt for so
slight a performance as child-birth. The newly-born infant was wrapped
in skins, and the mother marched on with the rest.
[63] I shall deal with other standpoints in the chapter on the Old Maid.
[64] This solution of the problem of the manly woman, who is not
undesirable, will thus be seen to be the very reverse, the flat
contradiction, of that advanced by the decadent Weininger. He argues
that the male woman does and ought to marry the female man, and the
modern, decadent world, more or less agrees with him. But this means
an accentuation of her maleness, a triumph of her maleness, at the
cost of her femaleness—obviously an undesirable result, both from
the standpoint of the race and the family, the only two standpoints
from which the monogamic marriage has any meaning or can find any
justification.
[65] I remind the reader that I refer here to the healthy, positive
woman, all of whose bodily functions are a joy to her.
[66] See my more detailed discussion of this question in chapter VII of
my _Defence of Aristocracy_.
[67] The letters correspond to those heading each objection in the body
of the chapter.
[68] Such a man can be, and usually is, just as fond of open-air
exercise and sports as the merely “manly” man.
[69] The fact that at present no stigma attaches to loss of function or
failure to function in the human body, is one of the most conclusive
proofs of the degeneration in taste and instinct that Christianity
has brought about. It is interesting, however, to be told by a woman
emphatically that “the incapacity of a mother to nourish the babe she
has borne should be known for a mark of degeneracy—sign, too, that she
was unfitted to have borne a child” (see Arabella Kenealy, Op. cit., p.
214).