6. The sense of the irremediable.
7. Children.
8. The cost of living.
9. Rivalry.
10. Polygamy in men and "second blooming" in women.
11. Coa.r.s.eness and talkativeness.
12. Sulkiness.
13. Dull lives.
14. Petty intolerance.
15. Stupidity.
16. Humour and aggressiveness.
There are other influences, but they are not easily ascertained; sometimes they are subtle.
M 28 said to me: "My husband"s grievance against me is that I have a cook who can"t cook; my grievance against him is that he married me."
Indeed, sentiment and the scullery painfully represent the divergence of the two s.e.xes. One should not exaggerate the scullery; the philosopher who said "Feed the brute" was not entirely wrong, but it is quite easy for a woman to ignore the emotional pabulum that many a man requires. It is quite true that "the lover in the husband may be lost", but very few women realize that the wife can blot out the mistress. Case M 19 confessed that she always wore out her old clothes at home, and she was surprised when I suggested that though her husband was no critic of clothes, he might often wonder why she did not look as well as other women. Many modern wives know this; in them the desire to please never quite dies; between lovers, it is violent and continuous; between husband and wife, it is sometimes maintained only by shame and self-respect: there are old slippers that one can"t wear, even before one"s husband.
The problem arises very early with the waning of physical attraction. I am not thinking only of the bad and hasty marriages so frequent in young America, but of the English marriages, where both parties come together in a state of sentimental excitement born of ignorance and rather puritanical restraint. Europeans wed less wisely than the Hindoo and the Turk, for these realize their wives as Woman. Generally they have never seen a woman of their own cla.s.s, and so she is a revelation, she is indeed the bulbul, while he, being the first, is the King of men. But the Europeans have mixed too freely, they have skimmed, they have flirted, they have been so ashamed of true emotion that they have made the Song of Solomon into a vaudeville ditty. They have watered the wine of life.
So when at last the wine of life is poured out, the draught is not new, for they have quaffed before many an adulterated potion and have long pretended that the wine of life is milk. For a moment there is a difference, and they recognize that the incredible can happen; each thinks the time has come:
_"Wenn ich dem Augenblick werd sagen: Verweile doch, du bist so schon . . ."_
Then the false exaltation subsides: not even a saint could stand a daily revelation; the revelation becomes a sacramental service, the sacramental service a routine, and then, little by little, there is nothing. But nature, as usual abhorring a vacuum, does not allow the newly opened eyes to dwell upon a void; it leaves them clear, it allows them to compare. One day two demi-G.o.ds gaze into the eyes of two mortals and resent their fugitive quality. Another day two mortals gaze into the eyes of two others, whom suddenly they discover to be demi-G.o.ds. Some resist the trickery of nature, some succ.u.mb, some are fortunate, some are strong. But the two who once were united are divorced by the three judges of the Human Supreme Court: Contrast, Habit, and Change.
Time cures no ills; sometimes it provides poultices, often salt, for wounds. Time gives man his work, which he always had, but did not realize in the days of his enchantment; but to woman time seldom offers anything except her old drug, love. Oh! there are other things, children, visiting cards, frocks, skating rinks, Christian Science teas, and Sat.u.r.day anagrams, but all these are but froth. Brilliant, worldly, hard-eyed, urgent, pleasure-drugged, she still believes there is an exquisite reply to the question:
"Will the love you are so rich in Light a fire in the kitchen, And will the little G.o.d of Love turn the spit, spit, spit?"
Only the little G.o.d of Love does not call, and the butcher does.
It is her own fault. It is always one"s own fault when one has illusions, though it is, in a way, one"s privilege. She is attracted to a strange man because he is tall and beautiful, or short and ugly and has a clever head, or looks like a barber; he comes of different stock, from another country, out of another cla.s.s--and these two strangers suddenly attempt to blend a total of, say, fifty-five years of different lives into a single one! Gold will melt, but it needs a very fierce fire, and as soon as the fire is withdrawn, it hardens again. Seldom is there anything to make it fluid once more, for the attraction, once primary, grows with habit commonplace, with contrast unsatisfactory, with growth unsuitable. The lovers are twenty, then in love, then old.
It is true that habit affects man not in the same way as it does woman; after conquest man seems to grow indifferent, while, curiously enough, habit often binds woman closer to man, breeds in her one single fierce desire: to make him love her more. Man buys cash down, woman on the instalment plan, horribly suspecting now and then that she is really buying on the hire system. A rather literary case, Case M 11, said to me: "I am much more in love with him than I was in the beginning; he seemed so strange and hard then. Now I love him, but ... he seems tired of me; he knows me too well. I wonder whether we only fall in love with men just about the time that they get sick of us."
Her surmise may be correct: there is no record of the after-life of Perseus and Andromeda, and it is more romantic not to delve into it.
Neither they nor any other lovers could hope to maintain the early exaltations. I am reminded of a well-known picture by Mr. Charles Dana Gibson, showing two lovers in the snow by the sea. They are gazing into each other"s eyes; below is written: "They began saying good-by last summer." Does any one doubt that a visit to the minister, say, in the autumn, might have altered the complexion of things? And no wonder, for they were the unknown, and through marriage would become the known. It is only the unknown that tempts, until one realizes that the unknown and the known are the same thing, as Socrates realized that life and death are the same thing, mere converses of a single proposition. It is the unknown makes strange a.s.sociates, attracts men to ugly women, slatterns to dandies. It is not only contrast, it is the suspicion that the unexpected outside must conceal something. The breaking down of that concealment is conquest, and after marriage there is no conquest; there is only security: who could live dangerously in Brooklyn? Once licensed, love is official; its gifts are doled out as sugar by a grocer, and sometimes short weighed. Men suffer from this and many go dully wondering what it is they miss that once they had; they go rather heavy, rather dense, c.u.mbrously gallant, asking to be understood, and whimpering about it in a way that would be ridiculous if it were not a little pathetic. Meanwhile, their wives wonder why all is not as it was.
It is no use telling them that nothing can ever be as it was, that as mankind by living decays, the emotions and outlook must change; to have had a delight is a deadly thing, for one wants it again, just as it was, as a child demands always the same story. It must be the same delight, and none who feel emotion will ever understand that "the race of delights is short and pleasures have mutable faces."
It is true that early joys may unite, especially if one can believe that there is only one fountain of joy. I think of many cases,--M 5, M 33,--where there is only one cry: "It is cruel to have had delights, for the glamour of the past makes the day darker." They will live to see the past differently when they are older and the present matters less. But until then, the dead joy poisons the animate present; the man must drift away to his occupation, for there is nothing else, and the woman must harden by wanting what she cannot have. She will part herself from him more thoroughly by hardening, for one cannot count upon a woman"s softness; it can swiftly be trans.m.u.ted into malicious hatred.
3
This picture of pain is the rule where two strangers wed, but there are some who, taking a partner discover a friend, many who develop agreeable acquaintanceship. Pa.s.sion may be diverted into a common interest, say in conchology; if people are not too stupid, not too egotistic, they very soon discover in each other a little of the human good will that will not die. They must, or they fail. For whereas in the beginning foolish lips may be kissed, a little later they must learn to speak some wisdom.
In this men are most exacting; they are most inclined to demand that women should hold up to their faces the mirror of flattery, while women seem more tolerant, often because they do not understand, very often because they do not care, and echo the last words of Mr. Bernard Shaw"s Ann: "Never mind her, dear, go on talking;" perhaps because they have had to tolerate so much in the centuries that they have grown expert.
One may, however, tolerate whilst strongly disapproving, and one must disapprove when one"s egotism is continually insulted by the other party"s egotism. There is very little room for twice "I" in what ought to have been "We", and we nearly all feel that the axis of the earth pa.s.ses through our bodies. So the common interests of two egotisms can alone make of these one egotism. The veriest trifle will serve, and pray do not smile at Case M 4, who forgive each other all wrongs when they find for dinner a _risotto a la Milanaise_. A slightly spasmodic interest, and one not to be compared with a common taste for golf, or motoring, or entertaining, but still it is not to be despised. It is so difficult to pick a double interest from the welter of things that people do alone; it is so difficult for wives truly to sympathize with games, business, politics, newspapers, inventions; most women hate all that. And it is still more difficult, just because man is man and master, for him really to care for the fashions, for gossip, for his wife"s school friends, and especially her relations, for tea parties, tennis tournaments at the Rectory, lectures at the Mutual Improvement a.s.sociation, servants" misdeeds, and growths in the garden. Most men hate all that. People hold amazing conversations:
She: "Do you know, dear, I saw Mrs. Johnson again to-day with that man."
He: (Trying hard) "Oh! yes, the actor fellow, you mean."
She: (Reproachfully) "No, of course not, I never said he was an actor.
He"s the new engineer at the mine, the one who came from Mexico."
He: "Oh! yes, that reminds me, did you go to the library and get me Roosevelt"s book on the Amazon?"
She: "No dear, I"m sorry I forgot. You see I had such a busy day, and I couldn"t make up my mind between those two hats. The very big one and the very small one. _You_ know. Now tell me what you _really_ think--"
and so on.
It is exactly like a Tchekoff play. They make desperate efforts to be interested in each other"s affairs, and sometimes they succeed, for they manage to stand each other"s dullness. They a.s.sert their egotism in turns. He tells the same stories several times. He takes her for a country walk and forgets to give her tea, and she never remembers that he hates her dearest friend Mabel. Where the rift grows more profound is when trifles such as these are overlooked, and particularly where a man has work that he loves, or to which he is used, which is much the same thing. In early days the woman"s att.i.tude to a man"s work varies a good deal, but she generally suspects it a little. She may tolerate it because she loves him, and all that is his is n.o.ble. Later, if this work is very profitable, or if it is work which leads to honour, she may take a pride in it, but even then she will generally grudge it the time and the energy it costs. She loves him, not his work. She will seldom confess this, even to herself, but she will generally lay down two commandments:
1. Thou shalt love me.
2. Thou shalt succeed so that I may love thee.
All this is not manifest, but it is there. It is there even in the days of courtship, when a man"s work, a man"s clothes, a man"s views on bimetallism are sacred; in those days, the woman must kowtow to the man"s work, just as he must keep on good terms with her pet dog. But the time almost invariably comes when the man kicks the pet dog, because pet dogs are madly irritating sometimes--and so is a man"s work. There is something self-protective in this, for work is so domineering. I should not be at all surprised to hear that Galatea saw to it that Pygmalion never made another statue. (On second thoughts it strikes me that there might be other reasons for that.)
It is true that Pygmalion was an artist, and these are proverbially difficult husbands: after an hour"s work an artist will "sneer, backbite and speak daggers." Art is a vampire, and it will gladly gobble up a wife as well as a husband, but the wife must not do any gobbling. She does not always try to, and there are many in London who follow their artist husbands rather like sandwichmen between two boards, but they are of a trampled breed, indigenous, I suspect, to England. I think they arise but little in America, where, as an American said to me, "women labor to advance themselves along a road paved with discarded husbands."
(This is an American"s statement, not mine, so I ask the Reverend John Bootfeller, President of the Kansas and Nevada Society for the Propagation of the Intellect, to spare me his denunciations.)
But leaving aside such important things as personal pettinesses, which too few think important, it must be acknowledged that women seldom conceive the pa.s.sion for art that can inflame a man. They very seldom conceive a pa.s.sion for anything except pa.s.sion,--an admirable tendency for which they blush as one does for all one"s natural manifestations.
They hardly ever care for philosophy; they generally hate politics, but they nearly always love votes. They are quite as irritating in that way as men, who almost invariably adore politics and detest realities, sometimes love science and generally prefer record railway runs. But where such an interest as a science or an art has reigned supreme in a man, and rea.s.serts itself after marriage, she recognizes her enemy, the serpent, for is he not the symbol of wisdom? Invariably he rears his head when the love fever has subsided. Woman"s impulse is more artistic than man"s, but it seldom touches art; her artistic impulse is not yet one of high grade; she is the flower arranger rather than the flower painter, the flower painter rather than just the painter. But this instinct that is in all women and in so few men avails just enough to make them discontented, while the great instinct that is in a few men is always enough to make them wretched.
It would not be so bad if they had not to live together, but social custom has decided that couples must forsake their separate ways and evermore follow the same. Most follow the common path easily enough, because most follow the first path that offers, but many grumble and cast longing eyes at side tracks or would return to the place whence they came. They cannot do so because it is not done, because other feet have not broken paths so wide that they shall seem legitimate. When husband and wife care no longer for their common life, the only remedy is to part: then the contradictory strain that is in all of us will rea.s.sert itself and make them rebound towards each other. If the law were to edict that man and wife should never be together for more than six months in the year, it would be broken every day, and men and women would stand hunger and stripes to come together for twelve months in twelve. If love of home were made a crime, a family life would arise more touching than anything Queen Victoria ever dreamed. But from the point of view of a barbarous present, this would never do, for the very worst that can happen to two people is to reach the fullness of their desire. The young man who raves at the young woman"s feet: "Oh! that I were by your side day and night! Oh! that ever I could watch you move!
I grudge the night the eight hours in which you sleep!"-- Well, that young man is generally successful in his wooing and gets what he wants; a little later he gets a little more. For proximity is a dangerous thing; it enables one to know another rather well: full knowledge of mankind is seldom edifying. One sees too much, one sees too close; a professional Don Juan who honors me with his friendship told me that he has an infallible remedy against falling in love more often than three times a day: "Stand as close to your charmer as you can, look at her well, very well, at every feature; watch her att.i.tudes, listen to every tone of her voice; then you will discover something unpleasant, and you will be saved." That is a little what happens in marriage; for ever and ever people are together, hearing each other, watching each other.
Listen to M 14:
"I really was very much in love with him and only just at the end of the engagement did I notice how hard he blew his nose. After we were married, I thought: "Oh! don"t be so silly and notice such little things, he"s such a splendid fellow." A little later--"Oh! I do wish he wouldn"t blow his nose like that, it drives me mad." Now I find myself listening and telling myself with an awful feeling of doom: "He"s going to blow his nose!""
(She never tells him that he trumpets like an elephant. She fears to offend him. She prefers to stand there, exasperated and chafed. One day he will trumpet down the walls of her Jericho.)
There are awful little things between two people. Here are some of them:
M 43. When tired, the wife has a peculiar yawn, roughly: "Hoo-hoo!
Hoo-hoo!" The husband hears it coming, and something curls within him.
M 98. Every morning in his bath the husband sings: "There is a fountain fill"d with blood drawn from Emmanuel"s veins," always the same.
M 124. The wife buys shoes a quarter size too small and always slips them off under the table at dinner. Then she loses them and develops great agitation. This fills her husband with an unaccountable rage.
M 68. The wife is afflicted with the _cliche_ habit and can generally sum up a situation by phrases such as: "All is not gold that glitters."
Or, "Such is life." Or, "Well, well, it"s a weary world." The husband can hear them coming.
There are scores of these little cruel things which wear away love as surely as trickling water will wear away a stone. (Observe how contagious _cliches_ are!) The dilemma is horrible; if the offended party speaks out, he or she may speak out much too forcibly and raise this sort of train of thought: "He didn"t seem to mind when we were engaged. He loved me then, and little things didn"t matter. He doesn"t love me now. I wonder whether he is in love with some one else. Oh! I"m so unhappy." If, on the other hand, one does not speak out forcibly, or does not speak at all, the offender goes on doing it for the rest of his or her life, and there is nothing to do except to wait until one has got used to it and has ceased to care. But by that time one has generally ceased to care for the offender.
There are ideal marriages where both parties aim at perfection and are willing to accept mutual criticism. But there is something a little callous in this form of self-improvement society. People who are too much together are always making notes, adding up in their hearts bitter little adverse balances with which they will one day confront the fallen lover. Some slight offense will bring up the bill of arrears. A quarrel about a forgotten ticket will give life to the cruel thing he said seven years before about her mother"s bonnets, or her sudden dismissal of the cook, or the dreadful day when he sat on the eggs in the train. (Clumsy brute!) All these things pile up and pile up until they form a terrible, towering cairn made up of tiny stones, but of great total weight, just as an avalanche rests securely upon a crest until a whisper releases it.
Nearly all marriages are in a state of permanent mobilization. There is only one thing to do, to remember all the time that one could not hope to meet one quite great enough to be one"s mate, and that this is the best the world can do. The thought that n.o.body can quite understand one or quite appreciate one arouses a delicious sorrow and an enormous pride.