Breaches of the Marriage Contract and Divorce
(1) ANALYSIS OF THE MARRIED LIFE OF POSITIVE PEOPLE
In the chapter on Marriage we saw that the married state is a difficult
one for both parties, but that monogamy is more tolerable to the woman
than to the man, provided always that children are born regularly. It
was there seen that woman must not be falsely likened to man in the
claims she makes on monogamy for a perfect sexual life. The coitus is
relatively so unimportant to her, that the man himself, her husband,
holds only a secondary or tertiary place in her life. That which
chiefly matters to the healthy positive woman is that, at stated
intervals, her body should be allowed to experience the whole female
cycle of sex, from the coitus to the weaning of the child.
Indeed, woman’s unconscious demand for the experience of this whole
cycle is so persistent and clamorous that they may be excused who, like
Schopenhauer, perceive in it the importunate voice of the Will of the
Species (_Wille der Gattung_) resolutely demanding Life, and ever more
and more guarantees of its survival.[70]
It is owing to the secondary, tertiary, or, at any rate, minor position
of importance that her husband occupies in the life of a woman who
is bearing him children at regular intervals, that his individual
characteristics do not really require to be very striking in order to
prove satisfactory to her. It is for this reason that he must be a
brute indeed, or a drunken sot, or a maniac, if he is to provoke her
active hatred while child-bearing continues. Finding, as she does, her
principal pleasure in the experiences of motherhood—provided that he
behaves with average decency and earns a comfortable living—she asks
but little more.[71]
Short of impossible conduct on his part, therefore, it may be taken for
granted that it never occurs to the positive healthy married woman, who
bears children at regular intervals, to make any effort to seek another
love affair, and even if the opportunity for such a love affair should
come her way, and be set before her with all the persuasiveness that
deep desire in the other party can lend it, she will, as a rule, resist
it and let it pass by without very much of a struggle. She is finding
the consummation of her being in the life she is leading, and let her
husband be ever so besotted, ignorant, boring and uncompanionable, it
will never occur to her to go in search of another love.
This conclusion is, I think, borne out by the statistics of divorce
in England and Wales, where separations between people who do not
attempt to limit the family, is extremely rare. It is usually said
with reference to such cases that it is the children who “strengthen
the union.” This is the popular and even the learned opinion.[72]
The prevalence of this opinion, and the high authority behind it,
however, should not lead us to misunderstand the true nature of the
actual forces at work. It is to some extent true that the presence
of children does induce parents, who might be tempted to separate,
to think twice about it. The father pauses before he decides to
deprive his offspring of their mother, and _vice versâ_. But these
wholly impersonal considerations binding a couple together are as
nothing compared with the vital forces that are actually at work. The
impersonal considerations may weigh, but only if supported by the far
more potent promptings of healthy and normal conditions. Nor should
it be concluded too hastily from the low figures of divorce among
people who have large families, that the presence of children operates
in causing the parents to feel a deeper “love” for each other. It is
possible for a fruitful couple to be almost entirely indifferent to
each other, as many thousands are, and yet to remain together, partly
because of the impersonal considerations already referred to, partly
from pure conservatism, and also from fear of publicity, or scandal, or
a feeling of shyness, or a certain cynicism which leads them to prefer
the devil they know before the devil they know not.
We must not allow ourselves to be blinded by sentimental tears,
therefore, to the extent of supposing that offspring invariably
increase conjugal affection. A long observation of our fellow-creatures
convinces us, on the contrary, that the presence of children operates
in precisely the opposite direction, and that if we are going in search
of “romantic” love, lasting long after the first years of marriage,
we are much more likely to find it among infertile than among fertile
couples. Children, far from cementing the affection existing between
their parents, are rather inclined to supply its most potent and
infallible corrosive.
The alacrity with which a young mother becomes absorbed in her young
ones, the lightning speed with which all her activities, mental
and physical, concentrate upon her brood, their wants and their
development, is hardly calculated to effect that “cementing” which is
believed to take place in marital relations from the moment children
begin to appear.
Very soon after the birth of the first children there occurs in all
decent positive women a certain definition of the maternal side of
their nature, which tends to convert them ever more and more into the
nun, miser, or prophet type—that is to say, self-centred, impatient
of distracting forces, and fanatical. They listen to matters foreign
to the nursery and their children, as if they had been wakened out of
a dream or roused from some thrilling meditation. A certain vagueness
comes over them in regard to all matters not strictly domestic, which,
while it may please the wise and understanding husband, as furnishing
a conclusive proof of their perfect femininity, nevertheless can
hardly fail to inform him that his rank in the household has suffered
noticeable degradation.[73]
When he speaks concerning topics which interest him, he is no longer
listened to with the same attention—not to mention eagerness. Indeed,
he soon finds that strangers outside his home are very much more
inclined to vouchsafe him an attentive hearing than the spouse of
his heart, and more ready to give serious consideration to his more
thoughtful expressions of opinion. Now, it requires all the philosophy
and understanding in the world—particularly to the man who may cherish
certain ideals about marriage as companionship—to accept this secondary
position in the home of his own creating, without a feeling of
resentment or mortification. How, then, can the full realization of the
position be said to “cement” or “strengthen” the affection between the
couple?
It is true that the normal father acquires a deep fondness for his
children, and that this attaches him to the home in which he has
suffered his degradation of rank.[74] It is also true that, as the
children grow older and realize him as their father, he may enjoy a
fresh access of the very importance of which their arrival deprived
him. But, while all these facts are readily admitted, they can hardly
be used to prove that the presence of children “strengthens” the union
between the parents as lovers. _That_ has been shaken once and for all
beyond any hope of recovery. Economic reasons, the attitude of each
parent to the children, reasons of policy, etc., may now attach each
parent individually to the home; but that does not mean that the other
parent is the lasting attracting force.
Later on, when the children grow old enough to discriminate or to draw
comparisons, and the original dependence, which makes filial affection
so fanatical, is beginning to wane, certain members of the growing
brood may, and frequently do, exhibit preferences for one parent or the
other—preferences which nine times out of ten are reciprocated. The
more passionate the attachment between the parents and the children has
been in infancy and childhood, the more likely is this to occur. But
distinctions of this sort drawn by children in favour of one parent
only tend to increase the cleavage already existing; and wherever in
such circumstances an occasion for any divergence of opinion happens
to arise between the parents and sides are taken, as they must be
taken where preferences have already been mutually proclaimed, the
declaration of allegiance by becoming overt amounts to little less than
a frankly acknowledged feud with the other side.
Quite apart, however, from the possibility of particular children
appealing more to one parent than the other, and the cleavage which
such factions confirm or start in the home, children and their
multifarious wants are, in themselves, an inexhaustible source
of contention. Their particular foibles, their wilfulness, their
education, are matters which, while they are constantly to the fore
among the problems of the home, as constantly give rise to friction,
or, to say the least, to differences of opinion between their parents.
When once, therefore, one of the parents—the father—has naturally
and inevitably suffered so marked a degradation in rank that his
word, his opinion, his judgment, is no longer attended to with the
respect and eagerness which he encountered in his wife in their early
childless days, it is not surprising that discussions or arguments,
from being merely amicable exchanges of opinion, should degenerate into
acrimonious and heated quarrels—the husband resenting every minute
more and more the cavalier manner in which his views are rejected as
worthless by the “spouse of his heart,” the wife resenting every moment
more and more the presumption with which the mere _means to an end_,
this _sparking-plug_ and _breadwinner_, is daring to assume supreme
authority over _her_ brood, _her_ babes, the fruit of _her_ womb.
Now, in view of all this, can it any longer be maintained that this
element in the home—the children—actually contributes to the affection
between the parents? In the happiest cases the ardent love of the
father for one child, and the ardent love of the mother for another,
may attach each parent individually to the common hearth; but to argue
as the two judges, above quoted, argued before the Divorce Commission
of 1912,[75] that this proves that children “strengthen the union,” or
“keep it together,” without explaining more narrowly how they effect
this end, is to deliver the whole question over into the hands of the
romanticists and sentimentalists, who will not scruple to arrive at
the foolish conclusion that children perforce increase the affection
existing between parents.
I have stated the extreme case in order to make the nature of the
cleavage, in so far as it arises from the presence of the children, as
plain as possible. In all families it does not become acute, because
there is too much at stake; and much is therefore suffered in silence,
swallowed down or repressed, for the sake of the home. The only point
it is necessary to make clear is, that when it is also argued here
that the presence of children in the home does contribute to a very
great extent to the stability of that home, something very different is
meant from what sentimentalists and other muddlers are likely to infer.
I most emphatically do not mean that the presence of the children
increases the mutual love of the parents—nay, I would go farther and
say that it leads to exactly the opposite result.
What, then, is the precise influence of children?
My reply is, that in all homes where the wife is a positive, healthy
and desirable woman, the repeated birth of a child at regular intervals
thoroughly adapts the woman by giving her a full physiological and
spiritual life, and thus reconciles the principal member of the
household (as far as stability is concerned) to the monogamic state and
to the home.
She can afford to control her temper when she is enjoying the
perfect serenity of mind and body that complete adaptation brings.
She can afford to pretend devotion, for economic and other reasons,
to a creature who has long ceased from holding even that space in
her heart, which is occupied by her first baby’s smallest toe. She
can afford to put up with years, not to mention hours, of a boring
companion, seeing that he secures her this perfect serenity, and, by
his daily labours, guarantees her own and her precious children’s
survival. If she is clever, she realizes how much is at stake, and she
makes allowances for his peculiarities. If she is shrewd enough to
appreciate the true nature of her happiness, she does her utmost, in
order that her bliss may be uninterrupted, to delude him into thinking
that he is _not_ merely the fifth wheel of the family coach. And
while all the world points the moral that it is the children who have
“cemented” the affection between herself and her husband, she knows
perfectly well that this affection has long ago been transmuted into a
curious compound of which the principal ingredients are: a desire to
play a safe game, a deep attachment to her children impelling her to
secure by fair means or foul someone who will supply them with all they
need, and a patient toleration of a creature whom she does her best to
regard as something more precious than a necessary evil.
The fact that this curious compound appears to the outside world in the
false light of connubial affection does not disturb her, because, as a
rule, she is constitutionally and congenitally predisposed herself to a
romantic interpretation of phenomena, and eagerly seizes the tinselly
cloak the world gives her, in order to conceal the sordid truth.
In such circumstances the union might last for ever. The only event
that can bring it to an end is the demise of one of the parties to it.
The husband, actuated by habit, timidity, a sense of duty and
propriety, attached to his home by his deep affection for one or more
of his many children, and deluded both by the voice of the world and
by the repeated asseverations of his wife into believing that there is
a deep affection uniting them, endeavours to act up to the part, and
as a rule succeeds extraordinarily well. But is that all? There must,
of course, be something else. Just as the woman is induced to accept
the situation, because it provides her with the only prize that is
really worth securing in life—complete physical adaptation[76]—so the
man must also be deriving some deeper satisfaction from the position
than the mere pleasure of conforming to a social ideal. It is otherwise
inconceivable that he should persist in “playing up” to his spouse with
the histrionic zeal of a paid actor.
Truth to tell, the father of a large family is attracted to the
position he holds by very deep and very powerful appeals to his most
primitive instincts. But again, it requires emphasizing that these deep
and powerful appeals are as a rule quite independent of his attitude
towards his wife, and provided that she do not actively conspire to
displease or to harass him, they will continue to bind him to his home
long after all genuine affection for her has entirely subsided.
These appeals are: The sense of power he derives from the visible
extension of his own identity in his offspring, and: The silent tribute
that the presence of offspring makes daily and hourly to the deepest
source of his self-esteem—virile potency.[77]
Both of these appeals act secretly, and chiefly through the least
conscious functions of his mind, so that he may never be perfectly
aware of them. Nevertheless, they give rise to a constant feeling of
self-assurance and self-confidence which is pleasant and fortifying,
and which, being interpreted roughly by the conscious mind, appears to
his intelligent perception in the form of a very profound attachment
to his home and family. This pleasant feeling, like the complete
physical adaptation of his wife, also fills him with a certain calmness
and serenity which enable him to suffer kindly any exasperating
peculiarity in his spouse, to endure with patience her ill-concealed
indifference to him as being little more important than a sparking-plug
or breadwinner, and to meet in a conciliating spirit any opposition
with which she may encounter his plans for their children, or for any
other feature of their joint lives. It should not be forgotten either
that this feeling helps him to resign himself also to the conscious
depreciation in his own affection towards her.
The world speaks of him as “unselfish,” “devoted,” “self-sacrificing,”
“good-natured,” etc., and his children are reared, sometimes by their
mother, but always by strangers, in the belief that he is entitled to
all these epithets, because there are so many men who have not acted
as he has. He himself, however, accepts these epithets with a mild
pretence of modest deprecation, for in his heart of hearts he realizes
that somehow they ring strangely by the side of his intimate knowledge
of the deep satisfaction he has derived from the whole business.
Now statistics and legal authorities tell us that this kind of marriage
is the best, the most lasting, and the happiest kind of marriage. The
judges say that it is because “children strengthen the union” or “keep
the home together.” We have seen in what way a growing family effects
this end. We have seen that it has very little to do with the attitude
of the parents towards each other. Now we have to discover how it is
that, according to statistics, divorces are more frequent where there
are only one, two, or three children, and where child-birth may be said
to have stopped.
(2) UNHAPPINESS IN THE HOME OF THE POSITIVE COUPLE
In another chapter the positive woman has been called “the custodian of
Life”; we have already seen that Schopenhauer has graphically described
her unconscious insistence on experiencing the whole physical cycle
from the coitus to the weaning of the child as the Will of the Species
(_Wille der Gattung_) demanding more Life and thus achieving human
survival. We have also spoken of the voice of nature in her, clamouring
not only for Life, but also for Life’s multiplication.
These are only different more or less successful attempts at describing
that instinct which in the positive woman is paramount—the instinct
to employ her elaborate reproductive equipment effectively. The fact
that when this equipment remains idle the existence of the species
is imperilled, evidently led Schopenhauer to discern the unconscious
will of the species in the positive woman’s restlessness in awaiting
fertilization. But we should always be careful in using these
descriptions of woman, to remember that in her the end, which is the
multiplication of life, is quite unrealized by her conscious mind.
She acts in a way that brings about the multiplication of life; her
instincts impel her to achieve that end; but she is not intelligently
concerned with anything so remote as the will of the species or its
preservation.[78] She is much more concerned with her own personal
wishes, her own personal notion of pleasure, and her own sensations.
When once these are gratified, the fact that the demands of the species
are also satisfied is, as far as woman is concerned, merely a happy
coincidence, in which she can have but an academic interest.
Nevertheless, in judging of her conduct, and in drawing moral
conclusions from it, we must be careful to allow her the full benefit
of the view that, in acting as she does, she is securing the survival
of the species in ultimate fact. More than nine-tenths of the abuse
to which women have been subjected throughout the ages has been due
precisely to man’s omission to allow her the full benefit of this view.
The gratification of woman’s passions serves her own end, inasmuch as
it affords her pleasure—Yes!—but it also serves the purpose of the
race. That is the fundamental fact to remember.
In another chapter I have described how Life itself is woman’s hardest
taskmaster, and that her first impulse in all circumstances is to be
faithful to this taskmaster, even at the cost of infidelity to human
pledges.
(_a_) _Adultery of the positive spouse through absence of the mate._
Long absences of husbands, therefore, during wars, transoceanic
voyages, explorations, etc., should always be viewed in the light of a
rebuff to woman’s hardest taskmaster. The prolonged absence of the male
imposes idleness on the female’s reproductive organs, and, since the
best women are primarily faithful to Life itself, and only secondarily
so to their mates, it must follow that in all cases in which husbands
are absent for long periods, that the call of Life in positive women
becomes too imperious to be ignored—hence the thousands of wives who
were unfaithful to their husbands during the last war, both in England
and on the Continent.[79]
Ignorant, pious people, and even experienced Divorce-Court judges
expressed their horror at the thought that while their men were nobly
risking their lives in defence of “King and Country,” these women in
their thousands calmly sought fertilization elsewhere. But a woman’s
character as a woman would be almost forfeited if she did not act in
this way![80] Where else would you have her transfer her allegiance?
Would you invite her to break the whole valuable tradition of her sex
which has been consistently devoted to the multiplication of life, in
order to show allegiance—say to an oath, or to an ideal, or to a moral
precept? But even Schopenhauer himself, with all his detestation of
women, would defend them here, and say, “Surely the species is more
important than your trumpery moral codes, your ephemeral oaths, and
your pretentious ideals!”
The English world is almost comic in the light of its most cherished
illusions. It does not base its outlook upon the unalterable laws of
life, consequently it is constantly receiving the rudest shocks and the
most unpleasant surprises. The fact that so many thousands of women in
England and Wales were unfaithful to their husbands during the war came
as a shock to the dear Puritanical and ignorant old ladies, chiefly
unmarried, that rule public opinion in England.
Had they ever dreamt, or had they ever been told, that the best women,
the most desirable women, must be unfaithful to their husbands when,
through what cause soever, the latter are forcing them to be unfaithful
to Life itself, they might have shown less righteous indignation and
more understanding when the women of the country in their legions
turned adulteresses in war-time.
As it was, the phenomenon was quite unexpected, and proved a most
terrible blow to the national conscience. For it was realized only
too shrewdly that if thousands of these women were ultimately found
out, many more thousands must have escaped the discovery; and thus
the character of the nation seemed to have suffered very severe
deterioration.
Truth to tell, the parties to blame were not the women at all, but the
hopelessly vain men who were the co-respondents in the actions, and who
understood so little of female psychology that they interpreted these
adulteresses’ fidelity to Life and its multiplication, as a preference,
if you please, for themselves before their legal spouses. Not knowing
of the positive woman’s inveterate fidelity to Life, they arrogantly
imagined that their personal and irresistible attractions were the
cause of these adulteresses’ infidelity to their husbands.
They—these men—were the people against whom the world ought to have
inveighed; for the man who is capable of so misunderstanding the human
female as to flatter himself that it is his personal attractions that
are seducing her, when all the time it is the Will of the Species,
neglected by her absent husband, that is impelling her to go in search
of fertilization elsewhere, is not worth the rope with which he ought
to be hanged.
The mistake, as a mistake, is all the more monstrous, seeing that it is
the outcome of maniacal vanity. For no man who was not too much elated
by a woman’s attention to retain calm reflection, could ever be such a
fool as to imagine that his triumph over her husband was due to his own
personal charm.
There is no need, however, to labour the question any longer, if once
the true nature of woman be properly grasped; for then it is seen
immediately that, in the best and most vital women, fidelity to Life
must take precedence of fidelity to the mate, to a pledge, to an oath,
to a vow, to a custom, or to anything else.[81]
Would the reader perhaps have it otherwise? Would he have a race of
women reared (we are unfortunately not so very far from the attainment
of this ideal to-day) to whom the claims of Life are secondary—women,
that is to say, who are so constituted that they could hesitate between
Life’s call and some trumpery human convention? Would he have women so
constituted that their self-preservative instinct is more powerful than
their reproductive? Because that is what it amounts to. A woman who,
when confronted by Life’s call, can calmly discriminate between that
and her own safety, her own future, her own smug ease, and can proceed
to select the latter in preference to the former, is not a desirable
woman in the best sense, for she cannot be trusted to do the right
thing for the species in all circumstances. The spark of vitality in
her does not glow with sufficient ardour to compel her to serve Life’s
interests before her own. She is the kind of woman that is rapidly
coming into power in all classes above the working class, but hers is a
_bad_ character, not a _good_ character, for a woman to possess.
No, we want to keep the best women as they are. We do not want to tame
the life out of them. But since we cannot have it both ways, if we
insist on women remaining desirable—that is to say, faithful primarily
to Life itself, we must breed a race of men who understand them, and
who in the absence of their fellows on wars or expeditions can see
what is happening when young wives “make eyes at them.” Any man who in
such circumstances imagines he is irresistible and falls in with the
woman’s designs through sheer vanity, deserves a punishment very much
more severe than being mulcted in damages; he has qualified himself for
some disciplinary correction which ought at least to include a term
of hard labour. For it is not his understanding of woman alone that
is at fault—although this in a full-grown man would be unpardonable
enough—but his estimate of himself, which leads him to the gross
presumption of imagining himself capable of conquering another man’s
wife single-handed without the assistance of Life itself, pushing her
violently into his arms the whole time.[82] Why, he might just as well
flatter himself that a flea has bitten him, not because it was too
hungry to wait, but because there was something exceptionally delicate
or precious in the composition of his vile blood!
_Thus adultery, when the wife is the defaulter, is always a case of a
man betraying another man, and never that of a woman betraying her man.
Woman, if she is the right sort, remains throughout faithful to Life.
Only if she betrays Life does she cease to be desirable._
Continuing our consideration of the positive couple, we must now
examine the forces which operate in causing a woman to be unfaithful to
her husband while yet living and cohabiting with him in apparent peace
and happiness.
(_b_) _Adultery of the positive spouse through impotence of the male or
through childlessness._
If the positive female cannot tolerate long absences on the part of
the male without endeavouring to seek fertilization elsewhere (because
her equipment for Life’s multiplication is otherwise reduced to
inaction) it is obvious that, since male impotence is tantamount to a
complete absence of the male (from the standpoint of reproduction), she
can hardly be expected to tolerate it any more gladly.
Truth to tell, I have known cases of male impotence where the natural
modesty and fear of publicity in the wife prevented an action for
nullity and also all adulterous liaisons; both parties to the match
having advanced quite peaceably and resignedly to middle, and
ultimately to old age, without anyone, except the couple themselves and
their immediate relatives, knowing the truth;[83] and it is probable
that in many cases of childless marriages, in modern England, impotence
on the part of the male may be suspected as the cause, although the
wife may have been too timid or too shamefast to drag the misery of
their married life before the courts. But in almost all marriages
where this occurs without adultery on the part of the wife, it is safe
to infer that the female of the match is herself partly or wholly
negative, or that she has become so in process of time, otherwise it
is inconceivable that her timidity or shame should thus override the
deepest force within her, which, as we have seen, is the Will of the
Species for Life and its multiplication.
In the case of most positive and desirable women it is safe to argue
that, where the husband is impotent, either adultery or a suit for
nullity will be the inevitable result.[84]
Among the positive couples where, although the male may be potent,
childlessness is secured by some contraceptive method, for reasons
of economy, or because it is thought that three, four, or even five
years of connubial bliss without children will allow both parties to
have what is known as a “good time,” it is obvious that the toleration
of the positive female may last longer than in cases where the male
is impotent; but since the orgasm does not supply the female with her
complete sexual experience, it is equally clear that the state of
childlessness cannot last an unlimited time without causing trouble.
As, however, in these peculiar circumstances, the psychological
processes in the female, which lead her to adultery, are more subtle
than in the event of male impotence, I shall be obliged to enter into
them with more detail.
When the male is impotent the positive woman knows that this is so, and
she _consciously_ realizes the need of seeking fertilization elsewhere,
lest she remain childless for the rest of her life. This alternative is
presented plainly to her consciousness and there is no doubt about it.
In the case of the couple using contraceptives while cohabiting
affectionately together, however, the female is not conscious of a
desire to seek fertilization elsewhere. Not realizing clearly that, in
fact, her life is equivalent (but for the repeated orgasms) to that
of the married woman whose male is impotent, she has no _conscious_
motive or warrant for seeking fertilization outside her home. Very
few women indeed know that the orgasm forms such an insignificant
part of their sexual experience as to leave their bodies completely
unsatisfied and disappointed.[85] It follows, therefore, that if her
love for her husband be very deep and guileless, she may continue
living with him for years without taking any notice of other men. If
her positiveness persist, however, despite the deleterious influence
of the contraceptive habit, and she and her husband still continue to
pursue their policy of childlessness, she will eventually find that
other men do begin to interest her a good deal, although this interest
at first will appear to herself as entirely involuntary and innocent.
It will begin to show itself by a certain childish eagerness to see
her husband’s friends, to meet them at bridge, at golf, or at tennis.
She may suggest dancing lessons, or regular attendances at public and
private entertainments, where she can meet and talk with other men.[86]
All this time her affection for her husband will continue as strong
as ever, and she will not be conscious of his having declined in her
esteem by one iota. If the men she meets at this period in her married
life happen to be men of the world, they will note the eager interest
with which she looks at them, laughs at their clumsiest sallies, and
applauds their most trifling manifestations of intellect, and they will
be on their guard and remain punctiliously formal. If, on the other
hand, they belong to the modern herd of arrogant, overdressed townsmen,
whose only mainspring is vanity, and who find in the favour of a poor
starved female body the highest flattery that their stupid, fatuous
lives can offer them, they will fancy that this young wife’s eager
attention when they speak, and her delirious laughter when they attempt
to be witty, constitute a tribute to their intellect and wit. They will
flatter themselves that the little woman has been captivated by them.
And from that time onward the little woman in question will be in great
danger.
Now let us try to ascertain precisely what has occurred in the body of
the young wife in question, in order that we may follow and understand
her conduct.
We will suppose she has been married three or four years, and all this
time has been living in perfect concord with her husband. Occasional
differences there have been, of course; but they have been unimportant.
They have all turned, as is customary in English houses, upon the
ridiculous words “selfish” and “unselfish.” When the young wife has
wanted her way against her man she has endeavoured to make him yield
by giving him a guilty conscience over the matter, and calling his
opposition “selfish”; and when at last he has yielded, she has declared
both to his face and to the world, that he was the most “unselfish”
of husbands.[87] Likewise the man, when he has wanted to exert some
leverage upon his wife’s mind, has warned her that resistance on her
part would be “selfish,” and upon her yielding has admitted that she
was “unselfish.” But apart from these foolish verbal quibbles around
the utterly fantastic antithesis “selfish” and “unselfish,” they have
had no quarrels.
Meanwhile, however, although the husband’s sexual experience has
been complete, his wife’s has been of the most fragmentary order.
Her reproductive organs and functions, though repeatedly stimulated
as if their important business were about to begin, have been robbed
each time of the natural sequel to that stimulation. Despite hundreds
of alarms and starts, the complete cycle has never been experienced.
As a result, this large reproductive equipment has not only remained
idle, but in this very idleness has also been cheated again and again
of its legitimate expectations, when those expectations seemed most
certain of being fulfilled. These repeated rebuffs, together with
the continued inactivity of this important mechanism, has not been
suffered with impunity. Gradually, as the idleness came to be felt
more and more acutely, and the sense of physiological disappointment
became insistent, vague messages were sent up through the young wife’s
subconsciousness to her brain. These messages we can decipher without
any serious inaccuracy as follows:—“We are still idle; we are still
inactive. _When_ are we going to function? We ache to function.”
It must not be supposed, however, that these messages are deciphered
as accurately as this by the woman’s conscious mind. She is vaguely
conscious of the importunate calls from her dissatisfied reproductive
equipment; but she is aware of them only as _dissatisfaction_. Whence
they hail, what they mean, she has not the slightest idea. If you told
her that they amounted to protests from her inactive reproductive
equipment, she would probably feel so utterly outraged that she
would never speak to you or see you again. She would need to be a
psychologist herself to interpret them accurately.
Now it is when this vague feeling of dissatisfaction first becomes
insistent in her conscious mind that she proceeds to act upon it in the
manner already described (see p. 196).
Quite unsuspecting, her husband falls in eagerly with her plans. Truth
to tell, any such marked change in a young married woman is a very
serious sign; but the husband knowing nothing of these matters, and
concluding after a review of the last three years that he has perhaps
invited his wife to lead too dull a life, acquiesces with alacrity in
her schemes.
Now if we suppose that the new régime, with its constant round of
gaiety and variety, has lasted a further six months or a year,
and still nothing has happened—that is to say, the young wife’s
reproductive equipment is still inactive—a second and more dangerous
phase very rapidly sets in.
The young woman suddenly finds one morning or evening that she is
unaccountably exasperated by the way her husband fingers his tie
while he talks to her or to a friend, or by his habit of knocking his
pipe out against the iron of the grate, or by his manner of clearing
his throat, or by any other peculiarity which, twenty-four hours
previously, she was not even aware of having noticed particularly.
At first she is a little alarmed and suppresses her feeling of
irritation. She feels that it is unfriendly, and that he does not
deserve a rebuke for something so ridiculously trifling. Very soon,
however, after she has continued to note the exasperating peculiarity
for four or five days, her irritation begins to choke her, and she
feels she must express it. The next time she observes him doing the
fatal thing, therefore, she snaps sharply at him with a “Don’t, Harry,
you fidget me with that constant noise!” or “Don’t, Harry, you always
finger your tie in that ridiculous manner when you are talking—why do
you do it?” etc.
She has not the faintest suspicion that this irritation and
exasperation over a trifling aspect of her husband’s behaviour is only
a surface ripple of a very much deeper and more bitter exasperation,
down somewhere in her body; and the young husband, who is even less
conscious of the matter than she is, turns to her in a manner utterly
dumbfounded, and wonders what on earth can have happened.
He sees that she is serious. He has noted the strain of bitterness in
her rebuke and its threatening note of anger, and, if he is a man of
spirit, he points out to her that if she is out of sorts she had better
go to bed, but that it is absurd for her to start now, after four years
of marriage, rebuking him for something he has done regularly every day
of their married life.
This discussion may end in a serious quarrel—the first serious quarrel
in which words very much more stinging than “selfish” and “unselfish”
are used freely for the first time; and both may retire to bed utterly
bewildered by what has happened.
It is about this time that the young wife shows the eagerness described
above in her attitude towards other men. These men may be, and usually
are, a hundred times plainer, prosier and less potent than her husband;
but this does not disturb her. She looks into their faces as if in
their countenances alone she expected to find a spark of intelligence
or manliness. Her husband’s superior witticisms fall flat, while at
the grossest pun from his friends she contorts herself with laughter.
She organizes games, picnics, excursions, and even summer holidays, in
which some of her husband’s friends always contribute their share to
the entertainment. Quiet lanes in Devonshire alone with her husband
are no longer her ideal. She wants to organize a “jolly” party for the
holidays, and learn to dive and swim with the other girls and young men
of the party.
It is usually at this juncture that some prize fool of a man comes
forward, who, in his superlative vanity and his crass ignorance of the
true state of affairs, sets all the young woman’s restless eagerness,
and particularly her attentiveness to himself, down to the credit of
his own irresistible charm.
This sums up the psychology of all co-respondents. They are fatuously
vain, they are criminally ignorant of female psychology, and they
eagerly place to the credit account of their wit, their good looks,
their intelligence, and their virility, a so-called conquest in which
the part they have played is no more than that of an old horse’s leg
that is taken into a stagnant pond to catch hungry leeches with.
At all events, if such a dangerous fool happens to be in the
neighbourhood at such a juncture, and the young wife is thrown much
into his company, the chances are that, encouraged by his eager
acceptation of a situation in which his personal characteristics count
for nothing, she is likely to imagine herself both “loved” and “in
love”; and then nothing can save her from matrimonial ruin.
Her blind manœuvres will have achieved what her reproductive equipment
most ardently desired; they will have removed her from a male who
abused without satisfying this equipment, and will have thrown her
into the arms of a man who, though possibly inferior to her husband in
every respect (as she herself would have realized had her reproductive
organs been content), or at any rate not so very much superior to him
to justify all this fuss, was at least holding out to her reproductive
equipment a fresh promise of fertilization.[88]
And since fertilization is what the will of the species insists upon,
and woman is that will, she must be forgiven if, in the circumstances,
she goes over to the vain ass who imagines he has captivated her
affections. At any rate, she herself is in no way to blame. She
has been true to the power to which she owes all her fidelity. The
blame, if any, lies, in the first place, with her husband for having
deprived a positive and desirable woman of her full sexual experience
for a number of years, and for not having realized that this was
her trouble when she first became restless; and secondly, with the
co-respondent for having mistaken an exasperated woman’s longing for
fertilization—not for “companionship,” for “understanding” or for a
“kindred soul” as she has declared—for a triumph attributable to his
irresistible attractions. The illicit lover in this case, besides being
a vain fool, betrays his own sex in the man whose wife he robs.
In such cases a little knowledge of sex psychology will, as a rule,
save the situation. But so long as the world continues to be thronged
with jackasses who are ready to go hot all over with pride at every
woman’s smile, the ridiculous spectacle of a co-respondent in every
way the inferior, or at least no more than the equal, of the wronged
husband, will continue to be common in our midst.
The strange part of the whole affair is that the young wife’s notion
of promised bliss with the co-respondent is based entirely upon her
unconscious or bodily hope that fertilization is now sure to follow.
Unless it do follow, therefore, she finds herself a twofold dupe;
for she has exchanged a man to whom she is at least legally attached
for a man who in nine cases out of ten is either no more than her
husband’s equal, or his inferior; and she is no better off; because,
the moment the novelty of the situation will have died down, the same
dissatisfaction that takes its root in her rebuffed reproductive organs
will make itself felt again.
Now the above analysis of the workings of a positive married
woman’s mind in all cases of adultery resulting from physiological
disappointment, is typical, and may stand as the unalterable frame or
pattern which all similar cases may be made to fit. For it matters not
whether the marriage is a childless one, or whether it be one in which,
from motives of economy, child-birth has been stopped after the birth
of one, two, or three children; the phases which mark the approach to
adultery are always the same. And it may be said with perfect accuracy
that, where positiveness persists in the woman, and child-birth is
stopped while she is still too young for her reproductive equipment to
tolerate idleness gladly, some kind of unhappiness is bound to enter
the home, and as a rule this unhappiness will lead to adultery.
When we note in the statistics of divorce the comparatively high
figures shown for marriages in which there have been one or two
children only, therefore, we may take it that unhappiness began to
enter the home in the third, fourth, or fifth year after the birth of
the last child—that is to say, at a period when the idleness of her
reproductive organs was beginning to prove a source of intolerable
exasperation to the young female. And in these cases, as in the
classical instance detailed above, the same phases occur. There is the
same sudden interest in matters outside the home—either golf, tennis,
acting, bridge, dancing, a new religion, a new philosophy, or a Cause.
This brings the young wife into touch with a number of strange men,
and as her interest in these increases, she begins to be aware of a
vague feeling of irritation concerning certain aspects of her husband’s
person or behaviour, of which theretofore she had not been conscious.
Finally, she becomes infatuated with one of the strange men, and her
feelings for her husband suffer a corresponding change for the worse.
Then only cowardice, caution, or extreme devotion to her small family,
can possibly prevent her from compromising herself.
This is now the time and the place to consider whether there are not
perhaps other physiological and psychical conditions resulting from
deliberate childlessness, or from the deliberate limitation of the
family, besides those discussed above, which hasten the rupture between
the positive couple.
There are certainly many such physiological and psychical conditions,
and the foremost of these is the deleterious effect which the constant
use of contraceptives has upon the happy sexual relations of the
young couple. That there should be no known contraceptive which does
not in some way mar the complete happiness of marital intercourse,
will perhaps be regarded by some as a very wise dispensation of
Providence;—for certainly the best brains of all nations for many
thousands of years have concerned themselves with the problem, and it
seems astonishing that, so far, nothing really perfect should have been
discovered;—but at all events this fact goes a considerable way towards
making the marriage-bed of people who deliberately limit the family at
least a breeding-place of very serious trouble.
Secondly, the very fact that childlessness as an end is incessantly
present to the minds of the young couple—whether they have had no
children at all, or only one, two, or three—during the cohabitation,
constitutes in itself an influence which in time is certain to destroy
the savour of their relations at a pace commensurate with their
positiveness.
The reduction of any human function to the plane of sensationalism
alone has this strange result that, in the end, the very sensations it
provides tend to decline in intensity. It is as if sensation alone were
an insufficient psychical foundation to support the whole arch of any
permanent human interest or effort, and that where it is not correlated
with the feelings of power or purposefulness, it tends to crumble and
to perish.
The woman in such cases suffers even more quickly than the man,
because in her the physiological disappointment sings in chorus with
the psychical disillusionment. But in the man too ultimate anæsthesia
is inevitable; for, sooner or later, the fact that the natural
consequences of his act (offspring) are not forthcoming, will begin to
tell on his self-esteem and his sense of power, with which elements
more than half the savour of sexual relations must certainly have been
associated by his ancestors.[89]
A further psychological factor must be reckoned with, which has its
share in bringing about matrimonial difficulties in the state of
deliberate childlessness, or of the limitation of the family, and
that is the feeling of aimlessness that ultimately supervenes, when
any two people associate together without any further object in life
than that of eating, drinking, or making merry. This is not due to
the fact that eating, drinking, and making merry are in themselves
bad, as the Puritans would have us believe; but that they are at least
monotonous if unrelieved by any other interests. Life, as we have
seen, is repetition with a modicum of variation, and so is happiness.
Nothing that can introduce variety into the home of the young couple,
therefore, ought to be eschewed, for fear lest that lack of variety
should be realized which causes life to lose its interest and its
savour. Now children are obviously a constant source of variety in
the home. Each child, in its turn, gives the home a different aspect,
a different outlook, a different responsibility. Children, moreover,
give the family unit a superior aim and purpose, which increases in
importance with the number of the offspring. In this sense alone,
therefore, a state of childlessness or of family limitation (when the
number of children is small), in an ordinary home, where there are no
compensating features such as ardent artistic, scientific or religious
preoccupations, constitutes a dangerous state from the standpoint of
connubial stability.
Before concluding this discussion of the positive couple in relation to
divorce, which we propose to do with an examination of the statistics,
it will now be necessary to consider the circumstances under which the
positive man himself becomes unfaithful.[90]
From the statistics it would appear that more women than men go wrong
in a childless marriage. This is only what, from our argument, we
should have expected; because since the coitus represents a complete
physiological experience to the man, he is less likely to become
vaguely dissatisfied with childlessness than the woman. Nevertheless,
should the childless state be continued too long—that is to say, for
five, six, or more years—there are sure to arise certain indistinct
feelings of dissatisfaction in the man, which will cause him to
become restless and interested in other women. These feelings will
be the result of the total lack of those “appeals” to his primitive
instincts, which the regular procreation of children provides for
almost all men without exception. He will miss the sense of power
which he would derive from the material and visible extension of his
own identity in his offspring, and he will also feel the need of that
silent tribute which children would make to the deepest source of his
self-esteem—virile potency.
It should also be borne in mind that, where there are no children, the
man is more likely, owing to the absence of heavy responsibilities, to
indulge that inclination to varied sexual experiences, to which every
positive man is subject after some years of marriage. We have seen how
entirely man’s sexual experience depends for its savour upon desire—the
desire he feels for the object of his sexual passion. When, therefore,
through years of regular intimacy with his wife, this desire tends to
decline, there naturally follows a corresponding decline in the savour
of his sexual experience. To correct this he is tempted to go in search
of change, of novelty. Now, when this inclination arises in monogamic
marriages, it is frequently checked out of consideration for the
children, and more especially by the secret satisfaction derived from
their presence. Where there are no children, it is much more likely to
be given free rein.
Another factor which ought to be given due weight in the sexual
psychology of man, is his love of protecting and patronizing. The wife
who gives him a number of children not only makes a strong appeal to
this love in her own person but also in the persons of her offspring.
He becomes, figuratively, a huge buttress supporting the dependent
members of his family, and this gratifies the self-esteem of the
average simple-minded man, and in innumerable cases induces him not
only to accept the burden, but also to love it deeply and passionately
for giving him such a delightful and constant sense of real importance.
Finally, in the conduct of the man of high ethical development, there
will enter the factor of moral ideals. When once he feels his family
about him, he will be conscious of certain duties, certain obligations,
which will preclude all idea, all velleity, of not abiding by his
original pledges. This man will be able to live till the end of his
days with a woman, however much his feelings may have changed towards
her, and still give the world the impression of being a most dutiful
and most devoted husband. Temptation, sexual passion, the desire
for variety, will simply not enter within his purview. The moment
an irregular thought occurs to his mind, it will be, as it were,
“switched off.” It should, however, be remembered that when such men
are positive by nature, they will usually be found to practise in their
leisure hours some kind of sport (_hard walking_, _cycling_, _golf_,
_riding_) or industry (_carpentry_—true of thousands of Englishmen
to-day; _wood-cutting_, e.g. Gladstone and the ex-Emperor of Germany;
_stamp-collecting_ and _numismatics_—true of thousands of modern
Englishmen) or religious activity (_Christian_, _Spiritualistic_ or
other propaganda) in which much of their sex becomes absorbed.
In Chart I, I have given figures covering a period of twenty-one
years—from 1899 to 1919 inclusive, for England and Wales; and the
most important conclusions to be drawn from them at a glance are the
following:—
(_a_) The preponderance of divorces which occur as the result of
husbands’ petitions over those which occur as the result of wives’
petitions.
Bearing in mind the more insistent impulse to variety in sexual
experience which harasses the male throughout life, this preponderance
of husbands’ petitions only tends to show the extreme difficulty with
which women can tolerate either the premature cessation of child-birth
or no child-birth at all. For although it may be argued that in order
to obtain a divorce the woman must charge her husband with something
more than the mere indulgence of his craving for variety, and therefore
that proportions are misleading from this point of view, it should also
be remembered that, where there has been a transference of affection
with adultery on the male’s part, desertion would necessarily follow,
and therefore supply the minimum grounds for the woman’s petition.
CHART I. NUMBER OF CHILDREN AT TIME OF FILING PETITION OF DIVORCE.
————————————————————+—————————+———————+———————+———————+———————
| 1899. | 1900. | 1901. | 1902. | 1903.
_Number of +—————————+———————+———————+———————+———————
Children_ |H. W.[91]| H. W.| H. W.| H. W.| H. W.
————————————————————+—————————+———————+———————+———————+———————
No children |175 147 |167 156|188 166|230 185|183 170
1 child | 97 83 | 80 84|129 91|140 115|105 133
2 children | 58 57 | 59 53| 93 57| 98 62| 76 75
3 to 6 children | 66 69 | 68 63| 86 67|131 65|128 70
Above 6 children | 4 14 | 6 9| 10 11| 9 15| 11 11
Number unknown | | 1 1| | |
————————————————————+—————————+———————+———————+———————+———————
| 1904. | 1905. | 1906. | 1907. | 1908. | 1909.
_Number of +———————+———————+———————+———————+———————+———————
Children_ | H. W.| H. W.| H. W.| H. W.| H. W.| H. W.
————————————————————+———————+———————+———————+———————+———————+———————
No children |178 147|180 167|201 161|169 182|198 235|213 197
1 child |110 116|114 137|120 127| 91 128|119 136|104 137
2 children | 78 82| 73 86| 73 80| 84 82| 86 67| 75 89
3 to 6 children | 97 66| 83 69| 62 78| 84 70| 82 71| 80 79
Above 6 children | 6 7| 3 5| 9 12| 6 7| 3 11| 3 6
Number unknown | | | 2 1| | 2|
————————————————————+———————+———————+———————+———————+———————+———————
| 1910. | 1911. | 1912. | 1913. | 1914. | 1915.
_Number of +———————+———————+———————+———————+———————+———————
Children_ | H. W.| H. W.| H. W.| H. W.| H. W.| H. W.
————————————————————+———————+———————+———————+———————+———————+———————
Total successful | | | | | |
petitions |412 343|466 393|506 414|548 450|607 468|682 461
No children |412[92]| 408 | 444 | 493 | 496 | 491
1 child | 222 | 281 | 347 | 372 | 366 | 379
2 children | 146 | 201 | 193 | 194 | 241 | 248
3 to 6 children | 119 | 170 | 160 | 192 | 228 | 231
Above 6 children | 9 | 12 | 10 | 12 | 17 | 17
————————————————————+———————+———————+———————+———————+———————+———————
| 1916. | 1917. | 1918. | 1919.
_Number of +———————+—————————+—————————+———————————
Children_ | H. W.| H. W.| H. W.| H. W.
————————————————————+———————+—————————+—————————+———————————
Total successful | | | |
petitions |781 382|1,044 379|1,807 516|4,076 1,009
No children | 563 | 660 | 1,043 | 2,338
1 child | 382 | 433 | 707 | 1,627
2 children | 231 | 307 | 488 | 930
3 to 6 children | 200 | 285 | 423 | 831
Above 6 children | 16 | 19 | 27 | 36
————————————————————+———————+—————————+—————————+———————————
CHART II. DURATION OF MARRIAGE UP TO TIME OF FILING PETITION OF DIVORCE.
—————————————————+—————+—————+—————+—————+—————+—————+—————
|1910.|1911.|1912.|1913.|1914.|1915.|1916.
—————————————————+—————+—————+—————+—————+—————+—————+—————
Less than 1 year | | 14 | 17 | 29 | 22 | 18 | 35
1 and over to 2 | 29 | 26 | 25 | 44 | 17 | 40 | 58
2 and over to 5 | 110 | 143 | 145 | 136 | 150 | 130 | 192
5 and over to 10 | 284 | 353 | 378 | 427 | 394 | 371 | 383
10 and over to 20| 369 | 418 | 440 | 481 | 583 | 618 | 577
Above 20 | 116 | 119 | 155 | 146 | 182 | 194 | 165
—————————————————+—————+—————+—————+—————+—————+—————+—————
—————————————————+—————+—————+—————
|1917.|1918.|1919.
—————————————————+—————+—————+—————
Less than 1 year | 27 | 36 | 75
1 and over to 2 | 78 | 86 | 156
2 and over to 5 | 274 | 516 |1,171
5 and over to 10 | 482 | 858 |1,947
10 and over to 20| 667 | 930 |2,008
Above 20 | 177 | 262 | 405
—————————————————+—————+—————+—————
The high figures for faithless wives revealed in these statistics,
therefore, point to the extreme refractoriness of women under the
conditions imposed by modern economic pressure, which makes the
limitation of families an ineluctable rule in most homes. This is
furthermore confirmed by a comparison of the high figures given for
childless marriages, or marriages of only one, two, or three children,
with those given for marriages which have more than three children.
On the other hand, the proportion of husbands’ petitions to wives’ in
those marriages in which there are more than six children, leaves no
doubt that in most of these cases not the wife but the husband was at
fault, which is exactly what we should expect.
(_b_) It is interesting to note the steady rise in husbands’ petitions
during the years 1915-1919—all years of war: the figure 4,076 as
against 1,009 in 1919 constituting the most convincing evidence we have
of the difficulty with which women tolerate the lack of children or the
cessation of child-birth, even when it is due to the absence of their
husbands on what was believed to be a “Crusade.” It seems probable that
the bulk of these women must have been young, for the total number of
divorces for that year, in cases where there was only one child or
none, amounts to 3,965.
Of course, from my point of view, the value of these figures is
lessened by the fact that it is impossible to differentiate between
marriages of positive and negative couples; but perhaps the steadiness
with which certain characteristic proportions are revealed in them
compensates to some extent for this defect.
When we add to this Lord Salvesen’s evidence before the Royal
Commission on Divorce (1912), in which he declared that in Scotland the
proportion of divorces among childless couples was “immensely larger”
than that among fertile couples, it can leave little doubt in our
minds that, in order to be so constant and universal, this rule must
be based on unalterable laws taking their root in deep physiological
and psychological conditions, and that the sentimental and emotional
factors can be but surface phenomena accompanying rather than affecting
the operation of these laws. For, if we have been right in arguing
that the presence of children does not operate as a strengthener of
the union by cementing the _love_ of married couples, but by meeting
certain instinctive needs in their physical and mental constitution,
it is clear that the sentimental elements in the union are the most
insignificant—hence their inability to tide large numbers of positive
couples over the periods of physiological and psychical stress which
childlessness or the limitation of the family imposes.
(_c_) When we turn to Chart II and examine the figures given for the
duration of the marriage up to the time when the petition was filed
(for the years 1910-1919), we also note a fact that does not surprise
us, and that is the immeasurably higher figures given for the four
years lying between the fifth and the tenth years of marriage, than for
all other periods.
It is precisely during these four years that those two disturbing
forces which do most to mar modern marriages are most likely to begin
to operate, viz:—
(_a_) The irascibility of the wife as the result of the cessation
of child-birth; this irascibility showing itself in a decreasing
satisfaction with her home and her husband, and an increasing interest
in outside amusements and occupations, and in other men.
(_b_) The loss of desire for his wife, in the husband, which causes
him to seek other sexual experiences.
With regard to (_a_) it is obvious that during the sixth, seventh,
eighth and ninth years of marriage, most couples who are attempting to
limit their families will have ceased from procreating. They will have
had from one to three children, and will have decided to have no more.
The wife will therefore tend to become increasingly impatient with her
lot, and ultimately make a confidant of some idiot of a man, who will
interpret her marked attentions as a proof of his irresistible charm,
and the two will end in what the world is pleased to call “falling in
love.”
With regard to (_b_), six, seven, eight or nine years is a long
period over which to extend the average man’s desire for fresh sexual
experience, and in the event of a cessation of child-birth (which
means the use of contraceptives—always unfavourable to happy marital
relations) it is during these last years of his first decade of married
life that he is most likely to feel the ardent desire for a change.
The two factors (_a_) and (_b_) conspiring together soon force the
couple asunder, if they are positive, brave, and intolerant of
conventions and rules—hence, I believe, the high figures for the period
in question.
CHART III. DIVORCES ACCORDING TO PROFESSIONS.
————————+————————————+———————+—————————————+——————————+——————————
|Agriculture.|Mining.|Manufactures.|Navigation| Inland
| | | | and |Transport.
| | | | Fishing. |
————————+————————————+———————+—————————————+——————————+——————————
1908 | 26 | 17 | 168 | 14 | 42
1909 | 19 | 21 | 172 | 25 | 29
1910 | 22 | 11 | 118 | 18 | 38
1911 | 21 | 9 | 194 | 24 | 30
1912 | 24 | 17 | 211 | 38 | 21
1915[93]| 37 | 26 | 362 | 31 | 84
1916 | 28 | 24 | 310 | 43 | 60
1917 | 44 | 48 | 419 | 33 | 79
1918 | 61 | 95 | 744 | 63 | 204
1919 | 133 | 192 | 1,581 | 78 | 468
————————+————————————+———————+—————————————+——————————+——————————
————————+——————+————————+——————————————+————————————
|Trade.|Domestic|Professionally|Unspecified
| |Service.| Employed. |Occupations.
| | | |
————————+——————+————————+——————————————+————————————
1908 | 345 | 13 | 298 | 87
1909 | 253 | 10 | 244 | 110
1910 | 344 | 12 | 267 | 78
1911 | 366 | 12 | 320 | 97
1912 | 347 | 24 | 389 | 87
1915[93]| 381 | 11 | 361 | 79
1916 | 397 | 27 | 444 | 1
1917 | 446 | 18 | 545 | 73
1918 | 591 | 34 | 826 | 79
1919 |1,174 | 64 | 1,903 | 169
————————+——————+————————+——————————————+————————————
In Chart III we have the statistics for divorce, tabulated according to
the occupations of the husbands. Now, according to the 1911 census, the
figures given for the total number of males engaged in three out of the
nine categories is as follows:—
Professional callings 367,578[94]
Agriculture 1,140,515
Mining 1,039,083
If we compare these total figures[95] with the corresponding figures
given for the divorces in each category, we see the enormously high
percentage of divorces that occur in the professional classes, as
compared with both the mining and agricultural industry, and although
in accounting for this conspicuous difference we have to bear in
mind the facilities, chiefly financial, for procuring divorce in the
professional classes, we are nevertheless confronted by a disparity
which requires some explanation.
When, however, we consider the greater prevalence of birth-control
among the professionals, with the inevitable unconscious disaffection
that it introduces among the wives of that class; when, also, we
reflect upon the more artificial circumstances in which this class
lives, and the higher and less natural demands that its spouses make
upon each other; when, moreover, we remember the greater irascibility
and nervousness, together with the usually lower passion, of all people
engaged in the more intellectual pursuits of life, which make them more
prone to chafe under the many vexations to which married life gives
rise, and less likely to attain that physiological serenity which is
the pre-requisite of all solid contentment, these statistics seem to
confirm the conclusions at which we have arrived, and, on the whole,
to support the analysis we have made both of the marriage tie itself,
and of the factors that conspire to loosen it.
* * * * *
Having dealt with divorce in so far as it concerns positive couples,
I have now to deal with it in its relation to the negative man and
woman. My present task is, therefore, by far the more difficult of the
two, seeing that the moment we leave the uniformity of natural law
and the regularity of indomitable forces, we find ourselves in a maze
of possibilities, which, while they defy enumeration owing to their
extreme multiplicity, also elude all effort at classification because
of the infinite combinations and permutations that low health and
eccentricity are capable of producing.
It must be clear that the moment the driving force of healthy, normal
passion ceases to be the motive actuating male and female, the vagaries
of human conduct are no longer calculable. One knows what in certain
circumstances a healthy passionate animal will do. It is impossible to
foretell what an unhealthy or unpassionate one will do.[96]
To describe all the possible complications that will ultimately lead
a negative couple into the Divorce Court, or cause them to seek a
judicial separation, or induce them to conclude that they would be
happier living apart, is therefore beyond the powers of any human
being. The negative man and woman, like the invalid or the eccentric,
must remain an enigma, because natural laws and forces no longer
operate normally or calculably in them.
Nevertheless, it is possible, in a rough way, to outline certain
features which are more or less common even to sub-normal people, and
from which, therefore, certain general rules of conduct may be inferred.
For instance, we may say of negative men and women that:—
(_a_) The physiological promptings of an instinctive and organic kind
are never likely (as with their healthier brethren) to weigh very
heavily with them. (The ethereal lovers who believe that marriage is a
union of souls.)
(_b_) The sentimental and intellectual aspects of a sexual situation
are more likely to determine their conduct than its vital or
reproductive aspects. (The lovers in most modern novels, in which
“Luvv” is supposed never to have bodily union as its aim, but only
companionship, or sweet words, or pure affection, or a life of
“unselfish” mutual service, or some other high-falutin’ nonsense.)
(_c_) The force of passion being no longer the ruling determinant in
them, such factors as vanity, caution, cowardice, and even indolence,
may dominate the sex impulses and direct conduct to their own ends.
(The bulk of hasty marriages made during the war were of this nature,
vanity both in the man and the woman giving rise in each individual to
such elated feelings that these were mistaken for depth of passion.)
(_d_) The intellectual attitude towards love, and the passions which
it tends to assume, may cause negative people to _imitate_ without
_feeling_ the behaviour of their more passionate fellows and their
love affairs, thus producing a false but fairly accurate image of true
passion. (The actors in modern society, all of which are by no means
professional histrions.)
Dealing with (_a_) first, it must be fairly obvious that where
physiological promptings are feeble, deep bodily disappointments, and
particularly rebuffs to the reproductive system of the women, can be
tolerated very much more placidly than where physiological promptings
are imperious.
Thus all negative women are likely to endure for a very much longer
period a childless marriage, or a marriage in which child-birth has
ceased in the first four to six years, than are their positive sisters.
In all “happy” marriages of this kind, therefore, which have only
terminated with the demise of one of the parties, negativeness may
certainly be suspected in the woman, and, since like tends to attract
like, also in the man.
When, therefore, unhappiness supervenes in such a home, other causes
must be sought than the secret and unconscious revolt of the woman’s
reproductive equipment, or the man’s fiery need for sexual variety.
Negativeness being the outcome of an atonic condition of the body,
or, at least, of the genital organs, and negative women being less
likely to function properly than their more positive sisters, there
will naturally arise a tendency, in all such matches (owing to the
small amount of pleasure and gratification that is derived from the
whole of the physical side of marriage and motherhood), to discount the
physiological side, and to exalt only states of the soul and the mind.
These people will have the old maids of all Puritanical communities
with them when they cast scorn upon the pleasures of the body; and as
their number is increasing daily, the chorus of body-despisers grows
steadily louder and louder in all the countries enjoying Western
Civilization.
The women in these matches are likely to confound motherhood with
self-sacrifice and martyrdom, and their husbands to confound the
birth of a child with the threat of financial ruin. Science, costly
and inefficient science, helps them at every step, and when finally
child-birth stops, which is never too soon (for the women in any case),
and nurses and perambulators take their leave, science remains to
the last to try to repair or neutralize the debility that unwelcome
fertility has left behind.
In their most private moments the women of such matches speak of the
“horrible sensuality” of men, and of the havoc this sensuality has made
of their lives; and in thought and in action they incline to everything
that emphasizes the soulful or spiritual side of life. They cultivate a
taste for extremely soulful literature or poetry (Maeterlinck’s _Serres
Chaudes_, for instance) and tend to gravitate towards those forms of
Christianity that are most quintessential.
Divorce, if it is ever resorted to by such couples, is usually the
fault of the husbands. They may at length manifest a desire to have
a breath of air untainted by sickness or debility, and in that case
usually become entangled with a woman quite as negative as their wife.
The women hardly ever go further than to cultivate an apparently
ardent but platonic attachment to some poet, musician, or other
artist, to whom they write long soulful letters, full of hints about
a non-physical kind of bliss in love, which they have longed all
their lives to experience. But in a large majority of cases, negative
couples of precisely this kind tend to finish their days more or less
tiresomely together, each bewailing the fact that such a white elephant
as the body ever became associated with the more “exalted” spiritual
side of man.
In regard to (_b_) it can only be said that the type is so very
prevalent that it is becoming almost the _norm_ of modern civilization.
Its principal characteristic is that both the male and the female
tend to choose each other for reasons which are as remote as possible
from the body. The men of this type choose “clever,” “artistic,”
sylph-like, narrow-hipped “sweet” women, with thin slender hands,
spiritual interests, and probably a history of some intestinal
irregularity in their past. The women, while aspiring to a high ideal
of health and manliness in their mates, have not the instinct to pick
out the passionate man, but usually select one, who though he may be
big of body and limb, intellectual and “breezy,” is quite fireless,
unpassionate and dull.
The couples belonging to this type can also endure childlessness or
a cessation of child-birth with almost perfect equanimity; the man
being very much more concerned about the figure he is cutting as a
chivalrous, sporting mate, who observes the rules of “cricket” with his
spouse, than about any other aspect of their married life. He studies
with asinine perplexity the so-called inscrutable complexities of
his wife’s mind, and is always making “allowances” and preaching the
doctrine of give and take. His great charm, according to modern values,
is the fact that he regards women as utterly incomprehensible. Women
are so powerful nowadays in determining opinion, and have so often
and so emphatically called the men who show some insight into women’s
nature “prigs,” that at the present day both women and men unanimously
call any man who voices penetrating views about _woman_, an out-and-out
prig. In fact, in order to be a prig it is necessary to have shown some
ability in analysing the true nature of woman.[97]
The women in such unions very frequently outstrip their male companions
in mental nimbleness, and this disturbance of the proper balance
frequently leads them, in their vague discontent, to become prominent
exponents and defenders of all those claims of sex-equality and
sex-levelling, which have agitated the home life of northern European
countries (where most negative people are to be found) for the last
hundred years. The spectacle of their lady-like and unobtrusive
male, there can be no doubt, is usually the first incentive towards
these kinds of activities, and, seeing that they have the constant
substantiation of their claims in the tame animal with whom they
cohabit, it is not surprising that they frequently enter into “Woman’s
Cause” with a conviction and a fervour very much more intense than the
more academic enthusiasm of the old maid who is usually their associate
in the movement.
Indeed, it not infrequently happens that the “male” of these militant
women is himself an active collaborator in his wife’s public work, and
so complete is their intellectual and sentimental agreement on the
question, that he will echo her words with the docility of a parrot.
The type (_c_) is also common enough and is growing more plentiful in
all classes of society. It is the negative type which approximates most
to the passionate, tragic type of real life and fiction; because, while
it possesses no deep passions, its extreme vanity makes it capable of
the wildest excesses.
In all the possible situations of married life, this type never
consults any other arbiter than vanity, and it is only when its
caution, cowardice or indolence can overpower its vanity that the
latter does not decide the issue.
Having no real deep passion to direct them, the men and women of
this type are actually drawn into marriage in the first place solely
from motives of vanity, because the state of being betrothed is a
state of (1) supreme importance, (2) conspicuousness, (3) intense and
unscrupulous mutual worship, and (4) romantic glamour.
Their marriage is likely to be the least stable of all marriages among
negative people, however, for the moment their vanity ceases to be fed,
or humoured, they are likely to weary of an association that affords
them ever less and less of the joys of their engaged days. Lacking
the sound physiological promptings which make a fully-adapted life
sufficient for their happiness and serenity, they become restless the
moment (1) adulation declines from the quarter of the spouse, (2) the
attention of their world ceases from being concentrated upon them,
and (3) that feeling of exaltation which filled their breast during
courtship—and particularly on their wedding day—shows signs of waning.
The woman in this kind of match finds out soon after marriage that
while she has become the mistress of her own home, she is living in an
atmosphere which, compared with that she had grown accustomed to in
the days when her matchmaking mother directed her life, and during the
months or years of her courtship, is depressingly deficient in appeals
to her vanity.
Her husband is securely bound to her by law. His first raptures are
over, and the two seem to be settling down to a hum-drum existence, in
which those deep thrills of yore seem entirely to have gone from her
life. But precisely those thrills were the breath of her nostrils. All
the joys of marital intimacy with the man she “loves” do not make up
for the loss of that. Her body is not tonic or vital enough to provide
any comfort for the exaltation her vanity once afforded her.
She therefore contrives so to modify her hum-drum existence as to
restore to it some of the atmosphere of her late adolescence and the
days of her courtship. She goes in search of company; she insists on
men coming to the house. She sings, or acts, or goes in for sports—all
with a view to restoring that atmosphere in which she became engaged.
In the end, she easily finds some idiot of a man who will be ignorant
and vain enough to court her, and when this happens she will at last
breathe deeply again.
These courtships which the vain negative woman contrives to bring
about, in order to feed her vanity, may or may not lead to adultery.
Frequently they do, because, although she is certainly not actuated by
passion in contriving them, she may by chance light upon a paramour who
is passionate, and then, in order to prolong the farce, she finds she
must yield to his importunacies. Indeed, unless she do yield, the whole
of the realistic nature of the love affair, which she has done her
best to impart to the experience, will be destroyed. Thus, despite her
lack of real passion, this kind of vain adulteress frequently finds
herself in the Divorce Court, with the most damning evidence against
her, when all the time she has never desired the illicit consummation.
What was necessary—nay, essential—to her, was the breath of adulation,
not the final embrace of the procreator. She wanted a life that was a
long courtship, because courtship is the time when vanity receives its
strongest appeals. As, however, she could hardly simulate _une grande
passion_ without actually appearing desirous of the consummation, her
first marriage is ruined.
Very frequently indeed these women do not allow the consummating step
to be taken. Not being at all disposed to it physically, their caution,
their cowardice, and their indolence easily get the upper hand, and
they ultimately disappoint their expectant lover; but as a rule
this happens only when they have squeezed him dry of every possible
flattering epithet and attention.
But, the reader will object, as far as behaviour and results are
concerned, where is the difference here between the negative woman
acting on the impulse of vanity, and the positive woman acting on the
impulse of passion?
To judge from the evidence heard in the Divorce Court, the difference
is admittedly slight. There is the same dissatisfaction with the home
and the mate, leading to the same longing for amusements and activities
of all kinds which promise a chance of variety. In actual practice,
however, the differences are marked. The positive woman goes about
the business with more solemn, even sullen determination. She does
not smile, laugh, and frivol about it as the negative woman does. The
latter betrays her immediate aim, which is the satisfaction of vanity,
by her extreme enjoyment of every step along her irregular path. She
enjoys the mere means to an end, which supply the gratification that
her vanity needs. The former, having only the end in view, accepts the
means as a necessary preliminary, but these means obviously leave her
much more unmoved than they do her negative sister.
Thus negative women are notoriously what the French call _grimacières_.
They proclaim their true nature by the perpetual grin that distorts
their features throughout the whole period in which they receive
attentions from their worshipper. Deep passion does not grin in this
way. It is either too deeply stirred, or it is too shy, to make an open
exhibition of its feelings. Besides, it is greatly agitated and anxious
about the issue.
The vain, negative woman, moreover, is always conscious of an observing
public when she is in the company of her admirer, and her triumphant
glances at onlookers in such circumstances are a sort of challenge to
them to contemplate her in the full intensity of her joy. Part of the
gratification of her vanity consists in drawing the envious looks of
other women upon her. Hence, too, her perpetual grin, a good deal of
which is meant for public notice. The positive woman, on the other
hand, is too deeply interested, too seriously concerned, to be able to
give a thought to the onlookers. She may even shun the crowd. In her,
everything is subordinated to the principal end she has in view.
The vain, negative woman, moreover, because she does not really desire
the man who happens to be worshipping her, will brook no breach of
manners, of chivalry, of steady worship from him. She is constantly on
the alert and vigilant. She keeps him up to the mark, and will quickly
rap his knuckles if the incense he is burning at the altar of her
self-esteem is the least bit stale, or burns with only a moderate fury,
or is swung with any sign of diminished zeal. The passionate woman, on
the other hand, will bear anything from the man she really desires,
except—absence.
The vain woman’s hatred is roused, not by a refusal to cohabit with
her, but by a noticeable lameness in her worshipper’s flattering
fluency. _She hates those who wound her vanity, not those who cheat her
will to Life and its multiplication._ She will become homicidal only if
she is made to look small or ridiculous, not if she is left sterile.
She loathes situations in which she cannot make a display of her bliss.
The positive woman, on the other hand, longs for privacy and secrecy,
and forgives nothing less easily than a lack of virile ardour in her
male pursuer. He may be silent to the point of dumbness, inarticulate
to the point of being unable to apologise when he spills his soup over
her dress at table;—all these things she overlooks if he has the first
pre-requisite of Life, which is virile ardour rising to impatient and
restless importunacy. On the other hand, the worshipper who spills his
soup over his negative mistress’s dress in a restaurant or any public
assembly, would thenceforward be loathed on that account alone. Because
it is mortifying to one’s vanity to be made ridiculous in public.
The negative man of this class is of the cold Don Juan type, who
gratifies his vanity more than his sexual appetite by repeated
conquests. He too soon tires of his wife and of his home. He does this
all the more readily, seeing that his marriage itself has usually
been quite an unintended consummation on his part of one of the many
flirtations his vanity led him into in early manhood, and that he has
been chafing ever since it was finally settled at the thought of the
many conquests he might have made before taking the final step.
His nostrils, too, yearn for the hot breath of adulation. He is a
tormentor of positive women, because he can so readily hold himself
aloof at the last station before the terminus.
If this man becomes unfaithful, it will be because his enormous vanity
has overcome his caution. In order to extract the last and most
enthralling confession from a young woman’s heart—which will cause him
to reach his highest pinnacle of exaltation—one day he will go too far,
either in his protestations or in his caresses,[98] and then, if he is
dealing with the kind of girl or woman who knows of no facile retreat
from such avowals, and who is really in earnest, he will find himself
impelled in a direction and to an end which he can truthfully swear he
never had in contemplation at the outset.
The fact that the law of England deals too lightly with this kind of
dandified scoundrel (for such men almost always dress well) is due not
merely to the fact that, generally speaking, it is grotesquely lenient
to correspondents as a class, but also to its inability to distinguish
between the adultery of the negative man and woman, whose misdemeanour
is the outcome of vanity alone, and whose ruin of another’s home is,
therefore, wanton and unnecessary, and the adultery which is the
outcome of genuine passion, and which, therefore, partakes far more of
that quality of human action which is elemental and inevitable.
This man only becomes tragic under a snub. He finds no infinite
resource in a deep knowledge of his own value, and is, therefore,
incapable of self-consolation when shown the cold-shoulder. Hence the
woman who does not fall in with his scheme of mutual worship, incurs
his homicidal loathing. She destroys his _joie de vivre_, his very
_primum mobile_, the source of his will to live. His career is a series
of escapes from female fires he has deliberately kindled; but he is
always more ready to forgive a burn than the fuel that refuses to flare
up under the power of his bellows.
Before concluding section (_c_) perhaps it would be advisable and
also helpful to give a brief analysis of the psychological forces
which impel the negative, vain man and woman along their career of
vanity-gratification at all costs. For, while to understand them will
be in a measure to exonerate them, it will also serve as a means of
recognizing their type when we see it.
Now the fundamental truth to be grasped about vanity is that it is
always found in conjunction with modesty. It is the intense modesty of
the vain person that forces him to gratify his vanity at every turn.
What, then, is modesty? In ultimate practice it amounts to an inability
to set a value on oneself, an inability to place oneself according to
one’s worth in the graduated hierarchy of human beings. The modest man
waits to be given his place, to be told where he stands, to be priced
and valued by his fellow-men. Compliments mean a good deal to him,
because, since he has no settled opinion of himself, they promote his
self-esteem. In short, his self-esteem fluctuates according to his
receipts in compliments and abuse. And since his good spirits depend
largely upon his self-esteem, his spirits may also be said to fluctuate
according to these receipts. Unlike his proud brother, he does not hold
a good or poor opinion of himself because of an inner conviction of
his worth, which is settled; he holds it because he has been _modest_
enough to wait for the world to give it to him.
But this makes him entirely dependent upon his fellow-men for his
knowledge of his worth, and consequently for the condition of his
spirits. By throwing him always upon the judgment of his fellows for
his opinion of himself and his good spirits, his modesty therefore
tends to lead the modest man into the constant practice of trying to
_seduce_ his fellow-men to such an opinion of himself as will not
cause his spirits to suffer. He covets good opinions, because on them
alone can his self-esteem, and therefore his good spirits, thrive.
In order to enjoy that comfortable feeling of satisfaction which
promoted self-esteem affords, he is constantly tempted to persuade his
fellow-men into giving it to him. This makes him amenable, and what the
modern world calls “lovable,” because he glows under compliments, and
becomes pliable and susceptible to influence, and by the side of him
his proud inflexible brother appears to the modern world as cold and
inaccessible.[99] The vain man asks: “What did So-and-so say of me?”
or “What did So-and-so think of me?” And according to the answer he
receives he is either happy or depressed.
The proud man does not care what So-and-so thinks of him. He is not
concerned with public opinion. He knows his own good and bad points,
and no views about himself, entertained by his fellows, can modify that
knowledge one way or the other. Consequently he is not always busy
trying to seduce his circle of relatives, friends, and acquaintances
into a good opinion of him. This makes him stiff, independent,
unamenable, and dignified—in fact, everything that the modern world is
least able to tolerate with patience.
The modest man lives in his neighbour’s views of himself. He depends
on them for his self-esteem, and therefore for his _joie de vivre_. On
these views he measures his worth. It is only human, therefore, that he
should be anxious to make them as favourable as possible.
Now it is this constant effort to make these views as favourable as
possible, and the pleasure he feels over the success of his efforts,
that constitute the characteristic known as “vanity,” for which the
modest man is notorious. It is obvious that when no other deeper
motives interfere—as in the case of all those people whom I call
negative, and whose physiological or bodily promptings are hardly
audible—vanity very soon becomes the only mainspring of action. It
constitutes the only tribunal before which life’s alternatives are
drawn for examination; and, according to whether vanity promises to
be gratified or not by a certain course, that course is adopted or
rejected.
When I say, therefore, that these vain, modest and negative people
approximate nearest to the passionate, tragic type, it will readily
be seen why this must be so. For to snub or to withhold your good
opinion from the vain man or woman, is not only an offence in itself,
it also deprives that man or woman of self-esteem for the time being.
They depend on your good opinion of them for their good opinion
of themselves. Not to give them your good opinion is, therefore,
tantamount to destroying their _joie de vivre_ for the time being;
it amounts to depriving them of their mainspring, which is gratified
vanity. But this is as good as killing them. Until they can find
someone, or think of someone, who can cancel out your poor opinion of
them, by a more exalted opinion, they are, therefore, desperate. They
hate with a homicidal hatred (vain people never forgive anyone who has
mortified their vanity), and this makes them tragic. Tragedy among vain
negative people is always to be traced to wounded vanity, and never to
passion. The constant mistake made by the modern world is to confound
the passionate crime with the crime that arises from vanity.[100] But
the passionate crime is of a different order of rank altogether. It is
always a crime arising out of an affront against Life itself, whereas
the crime that springs from vanity is always the result of the much
more insignificant fact that somebody’s good opinion of himself has
been assailed.[101]
In class (_d_) we also have a very large and growing section of the
population, particularly among the middle classes. It consists of
people, not unlike the former, but who know exactly what real passion
does, and how it does it, and who proceed to ape it in every momentous
incident of their lives. They are negative and therefore have no
genuine promptings from passion; but they read and observe a good deal,
and they emulate their passionate fellows with a pertinacity worthy
of a better purpose. They will fall in love, marry, commit adultery,
divorce, and even commit murder, provided that they can convince
themselves that each successive step has been taken in the grand style.
And, as they proceed through their various metamorphoses, they watch
themselves with the double interest of participators and spectators of
a great drama.
* * * * *
Of the whole negative class it may be said that they are radically
unstable in marriage, because they are not actuated by any natural
passion or impulse, and therefore do not become _wedded_ to any
environment where their instincts find perfect adaptation. On the
other hand, however, they are frequently able, owing to this very
lack of natural passion, to endure for a lifetime matrimonial unions
which would be intolerable to the positive type for a month, and this
accounts for the fact that, in England particularly, there are so many
peaceful lifelong unions of couples who are childless and doomed to
childlessness.
The most constant characteristic of all negative people, however, is
this, that they are always prepared, and able, to silence the natural
passions (because in them these forces are so feeble) and to direct
their conduct according to any conceivable rule other than that of
these natural passions. Thus opportunism, vanity, an eye to the main
chance, love of display, histrionic tastes, indolence, caution,
cowardice—each one of these factors may at different moments direct
their lives; but true passion certainly never will, and the very
fact that it cannot, they will dress in every form of high-falutin’
euphemism. They will call their lack of passion, self-control, or
strength of will; they will describe it as ordinary common decency;
they will even have the impudence to call it simply “good breeding,”
and sometimes they will have the duplicity and arrogance to call it
purity.
FOOTNOTES:
[70] See Chapter 44 of the _Ergänzung zum vierten Buch_ of the _Welt
als Wille und Vorstellung_. In _La Femme Criminelle et la Prostituée_,
by C. Lombroso and G. Ferrero (Paris, Felix Alcan, 1896) the authors,
wishing to emphasize the same fact, say very plainly: “C’est le besoin
de l’espèce, le besoin maternel, qui pousse la femme vers l’homme,
l’amour féminin étant une fonction subordonnée à la maternité” (p. 107).
[71] See _ante_, p. 148. See also Lombroso and Ferrero, Op. cit.
(p. 112): “Psychiquement, l’amour de la mère se greffe toujours et
l’emporte sur le besoin du sexe.”
[72] See Sir Bargrave Deane’s evidence before the Royal Commission
on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, 1912, para. 1163: “My impression
is that it is a very serious question—this absence of children—to
the married life, and I believe you will find (I am certain it is so
from my experience this term) that if there are children it keeps the
home together, and they both work together.” Lord Salvesen (Judge of
Court of Sessions, Scotland), speaking before the same Commission, and
discussing the statistics as to childless and fruitful marriages, said:
“I draw this inference, that I think they show where there are children
the union is strengthened, and parties are more unwilling to have it
dissolved” (para. 6214 of the Report).
[73] In addition to the engrossing character of the rôle of mother, and
the tendency it has to invade every controlling centre in a positive
woman’s nature, we should also remember that, inasmuch as man is only
important to woman as a means to an end, his importance must diminish
_pro rata_ as the end tends to be achieved and visibly materialized in
the form of the growing family.
[74] The modern man’s chief safeguard against becoming a complete
nonentity in the home is, of course, his hold on the purse-strings.
This procures him a sort of perfunctory regard.
[75] See footnote, pp. 179, 180.
[76] Buffon in his _Discours sur la nature des Animaux_ makes the
following profound remark which English people as a whole would do well
to take to heart: “_Amour, pourquoi fais-tu l’état heureux de tous les
êtres, et le malheur de l’homme? C’est qu’il n’y a que le physique de
cette passion qui soit bon; c’est que, malgré ce que peuvent dire les
gens épris, le moral n’en vaut rien_” (see _Oeuvres Complètes, Tome
3me_, Paris, 1837, pp. 21-22).
[77] As a proof of this, behold the aggressive exultation of the
ordinary man over every fresh addition to his family.
[78] So far from being conscious of the will to the multiplication of
life, it frequently happens that women do all that is required in order
to achieve fertilization, and yet protest that they do not wish to have
children, or that they do not care for children.
[79] The ancient Hindus, from whose great wisdom nothing was hidden,
not only openly recognized this fact, but made special provision for
it. In the _Book of Manu_ there were special periods of absence allowed
for husbands, beyond which their wives were no longer forbidden from
seeking fertilization elsewhere (see Book IX, verse 76). It should be
borne in mind, however, that a very large proportion of the women who
committed adultery during the war did so out of vanity rather than out
of passion. The preponderance of negative women in England makes the
passionate crime a much rarer occurrence than is generally supposed.
See explanation of the rôle of vanity in adultery in the second half of
this chapter.
[80] Even in regard to the legendary Penelope we have to remember that
tradition relates certain facts about her that cast some reflection
upon her normality. Why, for instance, was she thrown into the sea by
her parents? Both of her parents came from Sparta, and the Spartans
did not scruple to destroy abnormal children. In fact, they regarded
it as a religious duty to do so. At the very beginning of her life,
therefore, some suspicion is cast which entitles us to question whether
she can have been as desirable as the numbers of her suitors leads us
to believe. Further, we may quite pertinently inquire what it was that
ever induced Odysseus to spend twenty years of his life away from his
wife, unless there were some secret and profound reason. It is true
that his adventures are presented to us in the narrative as being
forced upon him. But who has ever known an adventurer whose adventures
were not inevitable?
[81] The realism and methodical certainty with which adultery was
expected in the wife by the absent husband both in antiquity and
the Middle Ages is shown (1) by the general attitude of wonder
and admiration maintained towards Penelope, and (2) by the famous
_ceintures de chasteté_ in which the aid of the locksmith was enlisted
in order to safeguard an absent husband’s honour.
[82] The fact that during the war numbers of married women were thus
served by men very much older than themselves, only shows how, as his
years increase, a foolish man’s vanity sets ever greater store by a
female’s favours. It is too easily forgotten that when a man is a born
fool, old age does but increase his foolishness; it does not, as most
people suppose, turn bad wine into good.
[83] In one case this occurred, despite the fact that all the woman’s
relatives and friends constantly urged her to rid herself of her
useless mate by fair means or foul.
[84] The _Laws of Manu_ make special provision for a woman who is
childless owing to her husband’s fault.
[85] A good deal of the pseudo-scientific literature of their day
even tells them that the orgasm is just as important to them as to
the male, and lays such stress upon it that they may be forgiven for
misunderstanding its real value to their lives.
[86] Women of a slightly more intellectual mould of mind generally
become interested in some public movement or Cause, or begin to take up
a new religion or philosophy, or express the desire to go in for acting
at this stage. But the same forces are at work in them as in the woman
described above—that is to say, their old environment having failed
to procure them the whole physiological cycle which they need, their
instincts urge them blindly to seek a fresh environment.
[87] Women are particularly prone to endeavour to rule in the home by
means of this trick of giving their spouse a guilty conscience, and
they do not mind much what words they use or abuse to achieve that
end. The word “selfish,” however, is a very convenient word for this
purpose, particularly if they happen to be dealing with a man who
believes, as they do, that it has a meaning and that this meaning is
offensive.
[88] All this time she may have been protesting _consciously_ that
_she does not want children_ and that she is quite happy without them.
It is her blind instinct and the impelling force of her dissatisfied
reproductive organs that have been driving her (despite her conscious
disinclination or indifference to motherhood) into situations in which
she can be fertilized.
[89] To this anthropologists may object: What about the Australian
Bushmen who did not associate the coitus with reproduction? True; but
they knew that children came with marriage, although they did not know
that the coitus had anything to do with their appearance. And the fact
of being a married man would thus become inextricably mingled with the
condition of paternity.
[90] Among the reasons given for the wife’s unfaithfulness there are
of course a few that apply also to the husband. These the reader will
readily pick out, and they do not require to be re-stated here. To give
one example of these common reasons, however, I would remind the reader
of the effect of the continued use of contraceptives on happy sexual
relations.
[91] “H” signifies husband’s petition: “W” signifies wife’s.
[92] Unfortunately these figures were unobtainable, as for the previous
years, distinct for husband and wife.
[93] Figures for the years 1913 and 1914 unobtainable.
[94] Priests of the Holy Catholic Church not included.
[95] As they include unmarried men, they are somewhat in excess of the
correct figures for families, but the proportions between them would
not be so very much affected by the omission of the unmarried.
[96] It is this omission to draw a sharp distinction between the
proclivities of flourishing health and those of lack of health or of
sub-normal health, that vitiates the arguments and conclusions in
such books as Otto Weininger’s _Sex and Character_, and essays like
Schopenhauer’s on _Woman_ and _The Metaphysics of Love_. This omission
is more particularly fatal to-day when negative people are becoming
very much more numerous than positive people.
[97] The reason why women live in such dread of the man who can see
through them, and endeavour to heap every kind of ignominy upon him, is
that in their alleged “mystery” lies their power over the average man,
and that their sentiments and insistence on a sentimental view of their
sex, all help to furnish their arsenal with the weapons they can wield
most effectively against man in general. The wonder is that they have
been able to impose _their_ view of the penetrating man upon the mass
of British mankind.
[98] The same lack of caution probably led to his marriage; for, in
view of the negative character of his constitution he is not likely to
marry in order to meet the deep bodily need St. Paul speaks of.
[99] Truth to tell, the proud man is disliked nowadays. There is no
place for him. The whole of the modern world is run and organized
on such lines, that only the vain man and woman are regarded as
desirable. The bulk of modern men are of the modest-vain type, who purr
contentedly when their fellows smile upon them; hence the enormous
increase in futile and meaningless orders and badges of honour in
recent years, and the stampede there is to obtain them.
[100] In his _House of the Dead_, Dostoiewsky lays some stress on the
frequent occurrence of vanity in criminals. See particularly Chapter I.
[101] It is this fact that makes the judgments of vain people so
unreliable and worthless; because a vain person always judges all
people, not according to their true worth, but according to the
satisfaction his vanity has derived from them. Thus a genius who
mortifies a vain man’s vanity (or a vain woman’s vanity) is called a
“fool,” a “detestable fraud,” a “stuck-up, pretentious prig,” etc.,
etc. On the other hand, the fool who knows how to flatter is regarded
as intelligent, understanding, perspicacious, knowledgeable, etc.,
etc., by the vain person. The whole of modern opinion, based as it
largely is upon vain impulses, thus becomes quite worthless.