Modern marriage and how to bear it Part 10

I

TO BEGET OR NOT TO BEGET--THE QUESTION OF THE DAY

'Marriage is therefore rooted in family rather than family in marriage.' --WESTERMARCK.

If we could leave children out of the question, the readjustment of the conjugal conditions would be simple enough. But Amoret has truly called this problem 'the _cul-de-sac_ of all reforms.' Any system, whatever its form, whether leasehold marriage, free love, polygamy, polyandry, or duogamy--any scheme that tends to confuse the fatherhood of the child, or deprive the child of the solid advantages of a permanent home--is hopeless from the start. This, however, obviously applies only to the couples who have children. Formerly those who married expected to have a family, and were disappointed if this hope were not fulfilled. That it was possible to limit the number of their offspring, or even to avoid parenthood entirely, was of course unknown to them. Nowadays all this is changed, and the doctrines of Malthus obtain everywhere.

Bernard Shaw says: 'The artificial sterilisation of matrimony is the most revolutionary discovery of the nineteenth century.' It certainly makes possible the revolutionary suggestions about marriage, or rather _would_ make them more feasible if the 'discovery' were universally put into practice.

Let us take it then, that where children are desired no relaxation of our present marriage system is advisable, and that people who wish to experiment in new matrimonial schemes must resolutely avoid the '_cul-de-sac_ of all reforms,' and remain childless.

To beget or not to beget--that is the question nowadays, and a very vexed question it is. There is hardly a subject on which opinions are more diversified. Some people regard parenthood as the most horrible disaster; others think that to die without creating is to have lived uselessly. I heard a woman say once: 'I hate children; it's much better to keep a few dear dogs,' and she was not an ignorant or devitalised girl, but a healthy, sensible, fully developed young woman of six-and-twenty. Not long ago another woman, in announcing her engagement to me, added in the same breath that she didn't mean to have children on any account. Mr George Moore, in that sinister and repulsive book, _The Confessions of a Young Man_ says: 'That I may die childless, that when my hour comes I may turn my face to the wall, saying, I have not increased the great evil of human life--then, though I were murderer, fornicator, thief, and liar, my sins shall melt even as a cloud. But he who dies with children about him, though his life were in all else an excellent deed, shall be held accursed by the truly wise, and the stain upon him shall endure for ever.' (One wonders on reading this why Mr Moore continues to perpetuate the great evil of human life in his own person, when he could so easily end his existence without paining anyone!)

But I have heard many people, both men and women, married and single, say that without children marriage is meaningless, in which opinion I heartily concur. More than one young woman dowered with generous blood, vitality, and courage has confided in me that whether she should marry or not she wished to be a mother at all costs. It is one of the disastrous results of men's shrinking from matrimony that fine women like these must deliberately stifle this glorious pa.s.sion of motherhood, or pay a terrible price for expressing it--a price exacted not only from themselves but from the child to whom they have given life. Such women, however, are not often met with.

And now we come to the reason why people do not want children. 'We can't afford it' is the plea most frequently heard, and a despicably selfish one it is. I have said previously that every man can afford to marry--when he meets the right woman. To this I add that every man who can afford a wife can also afford a child. People who are too selfish to afford a couple of children (or at least one, sad though it be for the youngster to have neither brother nor sister) ought not to marry at all.

Some people say they are happy enough without little ones. A good many women deliberately forgo their prospect of motherhood because it would interrupt their pleasures, spoil the hunting season, interfere with their desire to travel or their craze for games. Perhaps some day they may think too high a price was paid for indulgence in these hobbies.

Others honestly dislike children, and would be entirely at a loss in possessing them. It is as well that such people should have none: the poor little unwanted ones can always be recognised.

'Delicacy' is another plea put forward by neurotic women who are not one whit too delicate to bear a child. Where the ill-health is genuine, or some const.i.tutional weakness or disorder is present, of course this plea is sensible enough. An apparently sane woman once told me quite seriously that she would have liked a child, only she often had a bad cough in the winter, and would not risk the possibility of 'handing it on.' Her lungs were perfectly sound, it was merely a temporary cough that troubled her. On the same occasion another woman present remarked that she too would have liked a child, only 'there wouldn't be room in our flat, and it is so convenient, we shouldn't like to leave it.' My state of mind on hearing these remarks could only have been adequately expressed by knocking these two ladies down and trampling on them, and as this course would not have found favour with our hostess, I had to content myself with merely being rather rude to them.

I believe the root of the whole matter is that the maternal instinct is not so general as formerly. The causes for this I am not wise enough to determine. It may be due to the greater enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of women, the widening of women's lives and ambitions, the new occupations, the new interests which have so transformed feminine existence. Maternity and the grievous and irksome processes of its accomplishment are apt to interfere with all this. The instinct of motherhood is still doubtless innate in the majority; when the babies come, often unwelcome, the instinct rea.s.serts itself as a rule, but it is certainly not general for the average woman of to-day to feel it stirring before marriage or actual motherhood, and I honestly believe that the number of women who, like the female bee, are utterly without this instinct is yearly increasing. It has often occurred to me that men are really fonder of children than are women. In my own experience, I hardly know a man who does not love them, whereas I know many women who positively detest children, and many others who only endure their own because they must.

I have also observed that quite devoted mothers dislike all other children, whereas men, if fond of the little ones at all, seem fond of every child. Note the attention men will pay a not particularly attractive child in a railway carriage, whilst the women present are entirely indifferent to it. A lady who has kept a girls' school for many years told me recently that in her opinion the very nature of girls seems changing, and love of dolls and babies is apparently decaying.

Can this be generally true? Is it possible that the higher education of women has such grave drawbacks?

Fortunately for the honour and ideals of our country, the philoprogenitive element is still in an overwhelming majority and many people who for various reasons do not actually want children are ready enough to welcome the Stork if he does elect to pay them a visit. In after years they will tell one that they can't imagine what life would have been like without the noise of little feet throughout the house, the clamour of little voices, the tender faces of little children.

II

THE PROS AND CONS OF THE LIMITED FAMILY

'The child--Heaven's gift.' --TENNYSON.

On the other hand, though I think it the greatest possible mistake for legally married people to intentionally remain childless, for any reason other than mental or physical degeneration, I am strongly against the Lutheran doctrine of unlimited families. Times have changed since Luther's day, and the necessity for small families is fairly obvious in the twentieth century for all but very wealthy people. Where money is no object, and the parents are thoroughly robust, the great luxury of a large family may be indulged in. And it _is_ a luxury, let cynics sneer as they choose. We modern parents with our two and three children, or our one ewe lamb who can scarcely be trusted out of our sight because he is our unique creative effort--we miss much of the real domestic joy that our mothers and fathers must have known, with their baker's dozen or so of l.u.s.ty boys and girls. Our children can't even get up a set of tennis among themselves without borrowing one or more from another household. Much of the anxiety and worry we suffer over our rare offspring was unknown in the days when blessings were numerous, and families ran into two figures as a matter of course.

Nowadays these joys are the luxuries of the wealthy, who, however, rarely avail themselves of this special privilege of riches. With the necessities of life getting dearer every year, a continual panic in the money market, and the pressure of compet.i.tion a.s.suming nightmare proportions--a small family of two or three children is all the man of moderate income can allow himself. Four is an outside number, but it is worth making some sacrifices to attain it. Professor E. A. Ross has recently stated in _The American Journal of Sociology_ that although restriction 'results in diffusion of economic well-being; lessens infant mortality; ceases population pressure, which is the princ.i.p.al cause of war, ma.s.s poverty, wolfish compet.i.tion and cla.s.s conflict,' yet there are 'disquieting effects, and in one-child or two-child families both parents and children miss many of the best lessons of life; the type to be standardised is not the family of one to three but the family of four to six.' The German scientist, Mobius, has also stated his opinion that the general adoption of the two-children system would lead to deterioration of the race.

But whether the family numbers one or six, it is all one to Father Bernard Vaughan, who in his violent attack on modern parents draws no distinction between the rich man who has but one child and the hard-working professional man who has several. To limit one's family at all is in his eyes a heinous and revolting sin, 'a vile practice,' and people who do it are 'traitors to an all-important clause in the sacred contract which they called upon G.o.d to witness they meant to keep.' This last is hardly logical--none of us are responsible for the wording of the marriage service, and we cannot very well interrupt the recital of its barbaric formulae to explain that there are limitations to our desire for multiplication.

Father Vaughan also says that this disinclination to multiply means 'the extinction of Christian morality,' and const.i.tutes 'defiance of G.o.d.' It is not clear to me why a respectable middle-cla.s.s couple who decide that three children is a more suitable number than twelve or fourteen for an income of, say, 300 a year, should be accused of defying G.o.d by this exercise of common-sense and self-control. Is the idea that the children will only be sent if the Almighty wishes us to have them, and it is therefore impious to regulate the number? It would be just as fair to accuse a young woman who refuses several offers of marriage of defying G.o.d, since He clearly wishes her to marry. Bodily ills and accidents presumably come from the same divine agency, yet no one thinks it sinful to seek to remedy these with the means science has provided for the purpose. Why are the means of regulating families made known to us if we are not to use them when population-pressure becomes acute? The doctrine of Free-will becomes a positive farce if Father Vaughan is right. If he confined his remarks to people who deliberately refuse to have _any_ children, he would have found many adherents, but he alienates our sympathy by the very excess of his denunciation. He even brands as immoral the practice of regulating the time between the births of children, which is so essential to the mother's health. Apparently he would think it right for a woman to have a baby every eleven months or so, irrespective of her husband's limited income, until she became an ailing wreck or died of over-production, leaving her family in the plight of being motherless. His remarks are of course directed princ.i.p.ally at 'smart' society people, but as Father Vaughan considers lack of means no excuse for 'deliberate regulation of the marriage state,' his strictures must be taken as applying to all alike. One feels inclined to echo with a character in _The Merry-Go-Round_: 'In this world it is the good people who do all the harm.'

I learn that as long ago as 1872, before there was any perceptible fall in the birth-rate to consider, an article by Mr Montagu Crackenthorpe, Q.C., appeared in _The Fortnightly Review_, contending that small families were a sign of progress rather than of retrogression. This article was recently republished in a book ent.i.tled _Population and Progress_. There are many other books on the subject, and to them I must refer those of my readers who desire further knowledge of this very important problem. I have no s.p.a.ce for an exhaustive consideration of it here. It is a subject essentially considered by the majority from a narrow, personal point of view, for it is impossible to expect people struggling for existence to 'think imperially,' and put the needs of the Empire before the limitations of their income. The question from the economic standpoint has been exhaustively dealt with by that master of political economy, Mr Sidney Webb in a pamphlet ent.i.tled _The Decline of the Birth Rate_, published by the Fabian Society at 1d.

I wish I could convince people, however, of the mistake of having only one child. The loss to the parents is heavy and to the child incalculable. All parents who have tried it know what disadvantages they experience in their early attempts at training, when there is 'no one to play with,' and no one to give up to--perhaps the most important of life's lessons. Two or more children growing up together are twice as easy to manage and to teach as is one alone, and infinitely happier in every way. Later on, schoolfellows to a certain extent supply the deficiency, but the only child is still no less an object for commiseration, as are his parents. All their hopes are centred in the one, and, as the circ.u.mstances almost inevitably combine to spoil the one, their hopes are more or less handicapped. Parents find out too late that they have made a mistake.

I was at a children's party not long ago where 'sole hopes' were greatly in the majority. A lovely little family trio consisting of a boy and two tiny girls was much admired and the mother openly envied. Several of the mothers present said they often wished that Joan or Tommy had a brother or sister. As few of the children mentioned were over five, the difficulty did not seem insuperable, but opinions were unanimous among the ladies that it was 'too late to start the nursery again'; 'it was no good unless the two could grow up together, five years was too great a gap,' and so on. No doubt they will one day bitterly regret their timidity, as many women to my personal knowledge have already done. Joan or Tommy may be taken from them, or what is worse may turn out unloving and undutiful, and in that sad day they will have no other children to turn to.

If the facile writers of those endless newspaper articles on the degeneracy of modern women really wish to make good their case, they had better abandon their foolish complaints as to women's inability to manage the spinning-wheel or preserve pickles, and other tasks which the progress of machinery have rendered unnecessary. Let them instead turn their attention for proof of degeneracy to the strange helplessness of middle-cla.s.s mothers in training their children, and their dread of nursery complications. I know many a woman whose financial ability and capacity for organising almost amounts to genius, who would doubtless not be at a loss in dealing with a burglar, yet who would on no account face the terrors of a longish railway journey in sole charge of her two-year-old child, whilst to 'take the baby at night' once in a way during the nurse's absence from home is a nerve-shattering experience which necessitates at least one day's complete rest in bed afterwards.

'To start the nursery again,' with all its complicated machinery, when the sole hope has got over its teething torments, can walk, feed itself, and generally be companionable, is a prospect before which modern mothers seem to quail. The remedy is to multiply the number of hopes before the nursery has time to be outgrown by Hope No. 1, in fact to keep the nursery going a good many years longer than is nowadays fashionable--though by no means for the unlimited period advised by Father Vaughan and other celibate priests entirely ignorant of nurseries and their exigences!

III

PARENTHOOD: THE HIGHEST DESTINY

'O happy husband! happy wife!

The rarest blessing Heaven drops down The sweetest treasure in spring's crown, Starts in the furrow of your life.'

--GERALD Ma.s.sEY.

Perhaps I may be accused of dealing with marriage in a too flippant manner. Most of the treatises that I have read have erred in the opposite direction and have treated the subject from a tediously transcendental point of view. I have purposely tried to deal with realities, with facts, with matrimony as it really is--I mean as it really appears to me--in this very workaday world, and not as it might be in a glorious ideal world of n.o.ble spirits.

In truth, marriage, as it is carried out by the large majority does not seem to me to possess much of a sacred element. What is there holy in the fact of two human beings agreeing to live together to suit their own convenience, for purely social and domestic reasons, and very often with a strong commercial motive? There is, of course, a certain sanct.i.ty about all love, but, of the various kinds of human love, the s.e.xual variety seems the least holy in itself. Family love, where the tie of blood exists, the love between friends--purest of all affections--is often more essentially sacred than the so-called holy love between husband and wife. Marriage, the mere social and physical union of men and women, _apart from parenthood_, is simply a partnership--resulting, if you like, in an enormous increase of happiness and good to the contracting parties--essentially an excellent contract, but a mere mundane contract for all that. But when the children come, when the divine and wonderful miracle is accomplished, then, indeed, is marriage placed on a wholly different basis, and in dealing with it, I willingly take my shoes from off my feet, for it is holy ground.

On the birth of a child the union that produced it acquires an immortal significance. Formerly of importance only to the two people concerned, the union is now of importance to the State and to posterity, and consequently a truly awful responsibility devolves on the parents. On the physique, the character, the intelligence of each child the fate of future generations may depend. If we do not feed our child properly he may be rickety, and a future generation may be deformed for our carelessness. If we do not teach him thoroughly the duty of self-control he may become a drunkard or a libertine, and a thousand subsequent evils may curse our grandchildren. 'The responsibilities of perpetuating the existence of a race, with all its immeasurable possibilities of sin and suffering, is one from which the boldest might recoil. But the only effective way of improving the lot of man is to rear up a new generation of better stock. For the reflecting to shirk parentage is to make over the future to the sp.a.w.n of unreflecting indulgence. In the world's great field of battle no duty is higher than to keep the ranks of the forces of Light well filled with recruits. It is to no holiday that our offspring are called--rather it is to a combat long and stern, ending in inevitable death.'[5]

[Footnote 5: W. T. Stead, _Review of Reviews_, January 1908.]

It has been truly said that children are the wealth of nations: if we were to take our parenthood very seriously indeed--far, far more seriously than we now do, surely this would prove the strongest defence against the moral and physical decay of which we hear so much. I would like to see parenthood elevated to the dignity of a great spiritual ideal. Not that I advocate the ultra-glorification of mere procreation in itself, though to bring fine and healthy children into the world is an excellent service, and one that men and women ought to take the highest pride in, but 'to summon an immortal soul into being--what act is comparable to this?' To train the new-born spirit to grow towards the sun, striving to develop in it the n.o.bler possibilities of the complex human organism and make of it an 'upright, heaven-facing speaker'--what better lifework can a man or woman hope to achieve, what greater monument to leave behind?

If parenthood were to become a great ideal, in time public opinion--that mighty weapon--would grow so strong that unworthy parenthood would be regarded with disfavour by all decent people. The unfit would not dare to commit the crime of perpetuating their kind, and the stigma attached to this sin against the community might eventually even equal the stigma attached nowadays to the awful crime of cheating at cards!

Inspired by the ideal of n.o.ble parenthood, maidens would look for the father's heart in their lovers; men would seek the beautiful maternal qualities in the girls they were wooing, and the material considerations that now so largely influence both would obtain less and less. The bond of marriage would be strengthened a hundredfold. Infidelity would be rarer, for the husband and wife who had been blessed with children would feel that their union had been dignified, made truly indissoluble. The father and mother who had embraced for the first time over the form of their first-born could never forget that ineffable moment. The man and woman who had shared a baby between them, taught it to talk and to play and guided its first faltering steps, could never lightly set aside the vows that bound them. The soft hands of little children were made to link men and women's hearts together, and wonderfully they fulfil the task!

'Only when we become fathers and mothers do we realise all that our fathers and mothers have done for us'--and what a revelation it is! What a new heaven and a new earth are opened to us by the magic of a little child's presence in our home--the little body that has been mysteriously fashioned in our image, the little soul given into our keeping.

But for the children, marriage would indeed be a universal failure. In their interest it was inst.i.tuted and it is they who make it possible.

Children make a happy union perfect and an indifferent one happy. Very often they patch up an utter failure into at least an endurable partnership. When a childless marriage proves happy--really happy--it is generally because the man and woman are particularly attached to each other, or are people of unusual character.

One knows of rare instances where husband and wife have grown dearer and more closely knit by reason of having no other object to divide their affection. The wife, with lesser cares, not needing to merge the sweetheart in the mother, remains more youthful in her husband's eyes than would otherwise be possible, whilst on the man is lavished her maternal as well as her wifely devotion, and he is at once husband and child to her. In such a union one can see the sacred element, although it has produced no children; a couple of this kind does not seem to miss the little ones that never come. The same is sometimes the case with artists, whose whole interest and creative energies are absorbed in their work.

With all my heart I despise those married people in full possession of health and strength who deliberately elect to remain childless. With all my heart I pity the celibate and those to whom children are denied. Yet they have compensations--though they lose the rapture, they miss also the infinite anxieties, the innumerable worries, the constant self-denial, the often bitter disappointments. Children bring many other pains than those of birth. Tennyson says, 'the saddest soul in all the world is she that has a child and sees him err.' Yet by some subtle alchemy of nature, the strings of mother hearts are sometimes attuned even more tenderly to the children who err. I think one of the most beautiful lines ever written occurs in Stephen Philips' _Marpessa_. When the maid Marpessa rejects the G.o.d in favour of the humble mortal lover, of the latter she says:

'And he shall give me pa.s.sionate children, not Some radiant G.o.d that will despise me quite, But clamouring limbs, and little hearts that err.'

But the clamouring limbs soon wax great, alas! out of all recognition; the little hearts become wise and worldly and err in a less pleasing manner--our pa.s.sionate children outgrow us quickly nowadays. That is the real tragedy of motherhood--_to be outgrown_.