Nothing less binding than a lifelong contract is coercive enough or is sufficiently chastening to bridle woman"s native changefulness and curb her instinctive emotionalism. The realisation that there is no way out of a situation is her finest incentive to n.o.bility. She bruises her impulses against the iron of circ.u.mstance, and the essences of her intrinsic Woman-soul distil in patience and in sweetness. Under the harrow of sacrifice, she feels herself martyred. And yet without the sense of martyrdom, as may be also without the conditions thereof, no true woman is ever wholly content that she is fulfilling her destiny.
Ellen Key writes of "_all the impurity that the s.e.xual life shuts up within the whited sepulchre of legal marriage_." She falls here into the common error of a.s.suming such evil to be restricted solely to the state of marriage. Whereas the higher interests, the duties and affections of the family life--purifying and inspiring influences lacking in unsanctioned unions--make inevitably for the uplifting of the relation.
That some husbands and wives fall short of the pure intensity of pa.s.sion possible to some others between whom love is the sole bond, is true, of course. But as are most other human developments, this is a matter of the character of individuals rather than of the terms of the bond uniting them. Certainly, high and tender pa.s.sion is scarcely to be expected in a union for no better reason than that this is illicit.
VIII
Were life designed for happiness and pleasure merely, the case would be different. Were one life our sole portion, it might be different too.
Having one life only, we might be justified in claiming for it the joy of the best love available. An unhappy or a less than happy marriage is only one, however, of the many expedients for the evolution of faculty.
If the evolution of the individual progresses by way of countless earth-existences strung upon a thread of spiritual continuity, one life is but a brief and single page of everybody"s great Life-serial.
That is, doubtless, why all feel their lot to be an episode merely--unexplained, and incomplete, rather than a finished story. And in our innumerable pages and innumerable episodes, we must resign ourselves to sundry matrimonial vicissitudes.
Says the author of _The World-Soul_, "The more function is specialised in either s.e.x the less able either is to stand alone." This is argument for further and fuller specialisation of their respective functions, in both s.e.xes, because so great is the happiness of fulfilling for that other his or her great need of us, and of being blessed by that other in our own need. But too, it raises the voluntary surrender of such happiness for honour"s sake, for holiness" sake, for G.o.d"s sake, or for children"s sake, to the height of a renunciation which transfigures human life and character, and proportionally enn.o.bles both.
That both man and woman should be ent.i.tled to divorce for infidelity, for incorrigible drunkenness, criminality or insanity on the part of the mate, would be just and reasonable clauses in the marriage-code.
Because, apart from the unmerited cruelty and shame of such bondages, is the risk of entailing degenerate offspring. Otherwise, it appears that relaxation of the Divorce-Law would result in evils far worse than any it would remedy. And these evils would re-act inevitably far more cruelly--both temperamentally and materially--upon women and children than upon men.
The conjugal and the paternal instincts being traits the s.e.x has acquired by long ages of developmental progress, for men to lose these would be as easy as the loss would be degenerative to themselves and to those others. Folly to suppose that having reached a certain stage of human character-building, we can, with impunity, kick away the foundations whereon our house of evolution has been raised; and on which it must rest for all time.
The irrevocability of the marriage-contract is woman"s greatest security. Realisation of that s.e.x-lawlessness which is an innate Male-trait--relic of the promiscuous and cursory nature of the primal male-instinct--should set us on guard against weakening, in the least degree, this covenant, which is the best among those privileges whereby man, in the teeth of his inherent instincts, has chivalrously protected woman and the family. In the teeth of these, he has applied his natural intelligent bent for Conformity in concrete affairs to the repression and regulation of his impulses by the inst.i.tution of Marriage. And this--the apotheosis of masculine conformity to the exactions of Progress--is now menaced by the native Non-conformity of woman, exploited by Feminism.
It is notable that men are but seldom truly fond of, nor are they faithful to the wife who works outside the home. In France, where the clever, industrious wife of the middle and lower cla.s.ses is more a business-partner than she is a wife, conjugal fidelity is not expected.
Not only is a house without a woman in it to devote her best interests and powers to the arts of home-making, not a home, but the bond of that fraction of interest and affection left over to her from her work outside it is a thing too slight to bind her husband to her. He finds no difficulty in subst.i.tuting--should he seek this--a haven with more atmosphere of home and sentiment in it, companionship with more of temperament in it, more resiliency and freshness, than that of the industrious and wage-earning, but fatigued and jaded working-wife.
The children of such a union--if such there be--supply no bond either to draw together and unite their parents. Children reared by servants, without understanding or affection, are but seldom affectionate or charming. Moreover, the children of hard-working mothers are but seldom true children. They bring to the home nothing of the freshness, the vitality or charm of natural childhood.
If father and mother possess aesthetic sensibilities, these are offended probably by the plainness and the lack of graces in their offspring--bye-products merely of their economic a.s.siduities. Perhaps the big spectacles through which the young eyes gaze forth like doleful prisoners from behind bars, make them feel strangely uncomfortable; as in the presence of weird and reproachful intelligences.
Neither derives interest or joy enough from the family circle to repay them for their parental obligations and responsibilities.
IX
Love between the s.e.xes, being a need alike of souls and biogenesis, is regarded by some as reason enough in itself for relaxing the Marriage-law--even for the abolition of Marriage; making affection the sole bond between the lovers.
We cannot, logically, abolish the legal contract uniting two persons in marriage, however, without at the same time abolishing every other form of legal contract, and the legal liabilities thereof. Logically, we cannot make conjugal duty and family responsibility mere matters of personal conscience, unless we are a.s.sured that the human species has reached such a phase of moral integrity as to need no other incentive than its own integrity to secure fulfilment of its obligations, moral and material. If we abolish the legal factor in marriage, to be consistent we must abolish the legal factor in business partnerships and in all other sociological compacts. We must make the payment of rent, of rates and taxes, of tradesmen"s bills and so forth, debts of conscience and of honour merely; for the discharge whereof conscience and honour must alone suffice.
It may be objected that these are purely material obligations, while the bond between the s.e.xes is an emotional one. And yet--Have we reached such a stage of development that emotional considerations are more binding on us than material ones are?
Moreover, if we are to make love the sole bond--clearly the waning of love must release from the bondage. Further, when we sift out the purely emotional element in the vast majority of unions, we shall find it but a very slender factor among other more binding reciprocities. Certainly a far more slender thread to trust to in the safeguarding of a contract than is, for example, the factor of commercial honesty. Commercial honesty is not, perhaps, a conspicuous virtue of the times.
Nevertheless, the sense of honesty in business is a good deal stronger in most men than is their sense of honour with regard to love. And their sense of honour in love has developed mainly as a direct consequence of those legal compulsions and responsibilities of love which have been exacted and fostered by the legality of marriage.
How many men are there, for example, who, having come to care for some other, hold themselves bound in the least by an illicit tie; howsoever much they may have cared at one time for the woman in the case? Lightly come--lightly go! And if the terms, marriage and love, are by no means necessarily synonymous, it has been, nevertheless, greatly by way of the obstacles and compulsions and the social penalties attaching to violation of the marriage vows that the love-pa.s.sion has been purified and uplifted out of the barbarism of mere instinct and promiscuity, into the graces of emotion and the virtues of monogamy.
Had any man and woman, reciprocally attracted at their first meeting, been free always to have carried this attraction straightway to its biological conclusion, the s.e.x-relation would be still the merely physiological incident it was in primal forests. The circ.u.mstance that such attraction has been debarred from ready consummation by the obligations and the obstacles engendered by a recognised and legalised bond between the s.e.xes, has been debarred, moreover, in innumerable cases, by one of the attracted couple being subject to this bond--all of this has preserved the nascent emotion from straightway relapsing to the basic level whence it sprang, and has fostered the evolution of love in the higher reaches of emotion; of imagination, of controlled and chastened pa.s.sion.
It may be said that modern men and women, loving one another with the more highly-evolved pa.s.sion of our enlightened epoch, would love as devotedly and would remain as constant in an illicit as in a legalised union. If so, such constancy would be an echo mainly of the long-dignified state of wedded constancy; and the greatest of all tributes to the values of this. Nevertheless--For how long after the clarion-note of aspiration sounded by Marriage should have ceased to vibrate, would the echo of it last?
Should woman, in her short-sighted efforts to "emanc.i.p.ate" herself still further, release herself wholly (as she now inclines to do) from the marriage-bond, she will have thrown back in man"s face the very tenderest guerdon of his worth and of his high regard for her. And she will have destroyed, at a blow, his most vital incentive to further advance, her own and her children"s most powerful safeguard, and the main b.u.t.tress not alone of national but, as well, of Natural human progress.
CHAPTER VI
FEMINIST DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE DISASTROUS TO INFANT-LIFE AND HUMAN FACULTY
"_A hundred men may make an encampment, but it takes a woman to make a home._"--Chinese Proverb.
I
The paths alike of progress and of happiness lie, obviously, in the ever further dignifying and enhancement of the functions of home and of wifehood, by way of every further interest and charm that higher, fairer Womanhood confers.
The chief cause of latter-day conjugal unrest and disaffection is to be found--not in the natural state of marriage, but in a decline of those personal traits which make for happiness therein. Girls brought up as now, without home-interests or training, but, on the contrary, with mainly self-realising and self-absorbing aims and pursuits, are deficient not only in domestic apt.i.tudes but lamentably also in emotional qualities. And the home-life without the emotions to give values to it, is like a fine air played on the keyboard of a piano from which have been removed the strings that transform the movements of the fingers into melody.
So keenly self-centred the majority of women have become, so bent upon their hobbies and careers, as to have lost nearly all of that sympathetic adaptiveness natural to woman, which enables her to forget--and to forget with pleasure--her own in the personality and interests of others.
How eagerly latter-day girls seek refuge from their boredom in the tennis-court, the Bridge-table, the dance, or in some other mode of direct action which entails but little temperamental tax or output!
To such degree the s.e.xes are now drilled to the same standards, interests, and points-of-view, that neither brings to the other any new thing, of freshness, of colour, or of inspiration. The interchange is only too often a compet.i.tive struggle, indeed, as to which shall know (or shall appear to know) more than the other knows (or appears to know) of topics equally trite to both. There is little or nothing of the zest and glamour of a delightful picnic of two; whereat each keeps producing some new and unexpected thing to supplement the new and unexpected of the other. Modern woman has no novelty in language even for her mate, but deals him back his own slang--a vernacular which among women of the working-cla.s.ses not seldom takes the forms of blasphemy and obscenity, wholly disqualifying for the rearing of children. As, indeed, do the coa.r.s.e and vulgar phrases in vogue now among the cultured of the s.e.x. In view of woman"s native faculty of music and her subtle apt.i.tude for naming (as for nick-naming), one cannot doubt that she it was who mothered Language. Yet now-a-days, adopting virile lingo, her "rotten,"
"stick-it," and the like are murdering the infant of her quondam genius.
And what genius it was, that gave birth to our surpa.s.sing mother-tongue!
In case of engagement between a young man and his bored one--whom, by the way, although he may suspect that the relation is not all that it might be, he never suspects of being bored--manlike, he trusts to marriage "to put everything right." Yet although the newly-wedded more and more relieve themselves of the strain of a honeymoon, with its unmitigated (or inimitable) company of two, a month or six weeks of wedlock find most young modern couples wofully at cross-purposes.
Possession has freed the man of the obligation to woo. And when the wooing--which had engendered for the woman a flattering and intoxicating sense of being a coveted prize--comes to a more or less abrupt ending, she feels herself defrauded.
He too! Because while Courtship is man"s affair, Marriage is woman"s.
And where love is not, to recruit and quicken pa.s.sion and to take the place of novelty, the wane of honeymoons is sad indeed.
(There are faults and failings on the bridegroom"s part, "tis true. That belongs to another story, however. Sufficient for these pages is the unpleasing task of holding a mirror to the faults of a single s.e.x.)
It should be remembered that men, for the most part, are not eager to marry. Considering the nature of the bond, with its lifelong obligations, responsibilities and sacrifices, this is little to be wondered at. A week after marriage a wife may be crippled by an accident, may become insane; or may otherwise be thrown, more or less a burden, on her husband"s hands. Or she may develop disagreeable and wholly uncongenial traits. In spite of which, even though they wreck his happiness, he will have bound himself to her--and will have bound himself to maintain her--till death them parts.
He too, of course, may turn out wholly unsatisfactory. That belongs likewise to the other story. But from the material standpoint, the onus of support which falls on him, and which, in the case of an invalided or of an obnoxious wife, may prove nothing but a carking care, makes the liabilities unequal.
It is, doubtless, because of these his greater material obligations and responsibilities, that pa.s.sion has been planned to beset man more urgently than woman. And had Church and State not taken advantage of his inherent, chivalrous instinct, and so turned it to account, both for his own moral uplifting and for the founding and maintenance of the family, woman and society--and man, accordingly--would have remained at very low grades of development.
II
Among other "wrongs" resented by women is that his obligation and his economic means to support a wife have endowed the male, in the majority of cases, with the lordly prerogative of selecting his mate. On her side, while having much to gain materially by marriage, unless she is unusually attractive she has but little range of choice.
And yet this masculine prerogative of selection has served as the strongest incentive to the culture both of higher attribute and charm in woman. Failing that economic struggle which has been man"s spur to development, this incentive has operated vastly to her benefit; inducing her parents to educate and to enhance her gifts, and influencing her to do the like for herself. A proportion of women have always been self-supporting, of course. But their work has been mainly in fields of unskilled labour, and has lacked, accordingly, the stimulus of compet.i.tion. The goal of marriage has not only supplied thus the element of emulation, but it has turned Woman-culture in the direction of developing personal traits and morale, rather than industrial or professional specialisations. And this has been the right direction, seeing that the role of the s.e.x is one demanding personal qualities and virtues rather than economic technicalities.