The Intelligence of Woman Part 11

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Too much together is bad, and too much apart may be worse. As I suggested before, there is no pleasing this inst.i.tution.

It is easier to live too separate than too close, for one comes together freshly, and marriage feels less irremediable when it hardly exists.

There really are couples who care for each other very well, who meet in a country house and say: "What! you here! How jolly!" That is an extreme case. In practice, separateness means conjugal acquaintanceship.

Different pleasures, different friends, perhaps different worlds; indeed, one is mutually fresh, but traveling different roads, one may find that there is nothing in common. Of two evils, it is better perhaps to be too intimate than too distant, because there are many irritating things that with reminiscence become delightful. The dreadful day when he sat on the eggs in the train is not entirely dreadful, for he looked so silly when he stood up, removing the eggs, and though one was angry, one vaguely loved him for having made a fool of himself. (There are nine and sixty ways of gaining affection, and one of them is to be a good-tempered b.u.t.t.)

Separateness, naturally, cannot coincide with the sense of mutual property. This is perhaps the cause of the greatest unhappiness in marriage, for so many forget that to be married is not to be one. They do not understand that however much they may love, whatever delights they may share, whatever common ambitions they may harbor, whatever they hope, or endeavor, or pray, two people are still two people. Or if they know it, they say, "He is mine." "She is mine." If one could give oneself entirely, it would be well enough, but however much one may want to do so one cannot, just because one is the axis of the earth. Because one cannot, one will not, and he that would absorb will never forgive.

He will be jealous, he will be suspicious, tyrannical, he will watch and lay traps, he will court injury, he will air grievances, because the next best thing to complete possession is railing at his impotency to conquer. That jealousy is turned against everything, against work, against art, against relatives, friends, dead loves, little children, toy dogs: "Thou shalt have none other G.o.ds but me" is a human commandment.

Men do not, as a rule, suffer very much from this desire to possess, because they are so sure that they do possess, because they find it so difficult to conceive that their wife can find any other man attractive.

They are too well accustomed to being courted, even if they are old and repulsive, because they have power and money; only they think it is because they are men. Beyond a jealous care for their wives' fidelity, which I suspect arises mainly from the feeling that an unfaithful wife is a criticism, they do not ask very much. But women suffer more deeply because they know that man has lavished on them for centuries a condescending admiration, that the king who lays his crown at their feet knows that his is the crown to give. While men possess by right of possession, women possess only by right of precarious conquest. They feel it very bitterly, this fugitive empire, and their greatest tragedy is to find themselves growing a little older, uncertain of their power, for they know they have only one power; they are afraid, as age comes, of losing their man, while I have never heard of a husband afraid of losing his wife, or able to repress his surprise if she forsook him.

It would not matter so much if the feeling of property were that of a good landlord, who likes to see his property develop and grow beautiful, but mutual property is the feeling of the slave owner. Sometimes both parties suffer so, and by asking too much lose all. Man seldom asks much: if only a wife will not compromise his reputation for attractiveness while maintaining her own by flirtation, if she will accept his political views, acquire a taste for his favorite holiday resorts, and generally say, "Yes, darling", or "No, darling", opportunely, she need do nothing, she has only "beautifully to be." He is not so fortunate, however, when she wants to possess him, for she demands that he should be active, that the pretty words, caresses, the anxious inquiries after health, the presents of flowers and of stalls should continue. It is not enough that he should love her; he must still be her lover. When she is not sure that he still is her lover, a madness of unrest comes over her; she will lacerate him, she will invent wishes so that he may thwart them, she will demand his society when she knows it is mortgaged to another occupation, so that she may suffer his refusal, exaggerate his indifference. Here are cases:

M 21. She: "He used to take me to dances. The other day he wouldn't come, he said he was tired. He wasn't tired when we were engaged."

The Investigator: "But why should he go if he didn't want to?"

She: "Because I wanted to."

The Investigator: "But he didn't want to."

She: "He _ought_ to take pleasure in pleasing me."

(The conversation here degenerates into a discussion on duty and becomes uninteresting.)

M 4. The husband is a doctor with a very extended city practice. He is busy eleven hours a day and has night calls. His marriage has been spoilt because in the first years the wife, who is young and gay, could not understand that the man, who was always surrounded by people, in houses, streets, conveyances, should not desire society. She resented his wish to be alone for some hours, to shut himself up. There were tears, and like most people she looked ugly when she cried. She was lonely, and when one is lonely, it is difficult to realize that other people may be too much surrounded.

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A great deal of all this, however, might pa.s.s away if one could feel that it would not last. Nothing matters that does not last. Only one must be conscious of it, and in marriage many people are dully aware that they have settled down, that they have drawn the one and only ticket they can ever hope to draw, unless merciful death steps in. There will be no more adventures, no more excitements, no more marsh fires, which one knows deceptive yet loves to follow. It will be difficult to move to other towns or countries, to change one's occupation; it will even be difficult to adopt new poses, for the other will not be taken in. One will be for evermore what one is. True there is elopement, divorce; in matters of art, there is the artist courage that enables a man to see another suffer for the sake of his desire. But all this is very difficult, and few of us have courage enough to make others suffer; if one had the courage to do no harm at all, it might not be so bad, but not many can follow Mr. Bernard Shaw: "If you injure your neighbor, let it not be by halves." They almost invariably do injure by halves: he that will not kill, scratches. There is no refuge from a world of rates, and taxes, and bills, and houses overcrowded by children, and old clothes, dull leaders in the papers, stupid plays, the morning train, the unvarying Sunday dinner. It is so bad sometimes that it causes willful revolt. I sincerely believe that a great many men would be model husbands if only they were not married. Only when everything is respectable and nice there is a terrible temptation to introduce a change; the wild animal in man, that is in a few a lion, in most a weasel, reacts against the definite, the irremediable, the a.s.sured. He must do something. He must break through. He must prove to himself that he has not really sentenced himself to penal servitude for life. That is why so few of the respectable are respectable, and why reformed rakes do make good husbands. (Generally, that is, for a few rakes feel that they must keep up their reputation; on the other hand, a really respectable man knows no shame.)

Curiously enough, children seem to act both against and in favor of these disruptive factors. It is difficult to deprive children of influence; they must part, or they must unite. They are somebody in the house; they make a noise, and it depends upon temperament whether the noise exasperates or delights. Parents are divided into those who love them, and those who bear their children; generally, men dislike little babies, unless they are rather strong men whom weakness attracts, or unless they feel pride of race, while women, excepting those who live only for light pleasures, give them a quite unreasoning affection.

Children are a frequent source of trouble, for the tired man's nerves are horribly frayed by screams and exuberances. He shouts: "Stop that child howling!" and if his wife a.s.sumes a saintly air and says that "she would rather hear a child cry than a man swear," the door opens towards the club or public house. Likewise, a man who has given so many jewels that the mother of the Gracchi might be jealous, will never understand the appalling weariness that can come over the mother in the evening, when she has administered, say, twelve meals, four or eight baths, and answered several hundreds of questions varying between the existence of G.o.d and the esoterics of the steam engine. Loving the children too much to blame them, she must blame some one, and blames him.

People do not confess these things, but the socio-psychologist must remember that when a man quietly picks up a flower pot and hurls it through the window, the original cause may be found in the behavior of the departmental manager six hours before. The irritation of children can envenom two lives, for it seems almost inevitable that each party should think the other spoils or tyrannizes. It is not always so, and sometimes children unite by the bond of a common love; very much more often they unite by the burden of a common responsibility. Indeed, it is this financial responsibility that draws two people close, because tied together they must swim together or sink together, until they are so concerned individually with their salvation that they think they are concerned with the salvation of the other. That bond of union is dangerous, because marriage is expensive, and because one tends to remember the time when bread was not so dear and flesh and blood so cheap. There is affluence in bachelordom; there is atrocious discomfort too, but when one thinks of the good old times, one generally forgets all except the affluence. Of the present, one sees only that one cannot take the whole family to Yellowstone; of the past, one does not see the sitting room, or the hangings on which the landlady merely blew. The wife thinks of her frocks, garlands of the sacrificial heifer, the husband of the days when he could afford to be one of the boys. And, as soon as the past grows glamorous, the present day grows dull; always because one must blame something, one blames the other. It is so much more agreeable to spend a thousand dollars than to spend a hundred, even if one gets nothing for it. It is power. It is excitement. One thinks of money until one may come to think of nothing but money, until, as suggested before, a husband turns into a vaguely disagreeable person who can be coaxed into paying bills. In the working cla.s.s especially there is bitterness among the women, who before their marriage knew the taste of independence and of earned money in their purses. It is a great love that can compensate a woman for the loss of freedom after she has enjoyed it.

Nothing indeed can compensate a woman for this, except a lover, that is to say, a return to an older state. That is to what she turns, for strange as it may seem, marriage does not vaccinate against the temptations of love. She does not easily love again, for she has been married, and while it is easy to love again when one has been atrociously betrayed, just because one invests the new with everything that the old held back, it is difficult to love again when the promised love turned merely to dullness. There is nothing to strike against.

There is no contrast, and so women slip into relationships that are silly, because there is nothing real behind them. Boredom is the root of all evil, and I doubt whether busy and happy women seek adventure, for few of them want it for adventure's sake: they seek only satisfaction.

That is what most men cruelly misunderstand; they blame woman instead of searching out their own remissness. Sins of omission matter more than sins of commission, more even than infidelities, for love, which is all a woman's life, is only a momentous incident in that of a man. Love may be the discovery of a happiness, but man remains conscious of many other delights. Woman is seldom like that. You will imagine a man and a woman who have blundered upon mutual understanding standing upon the hill from which Moses saw Canaan. The woman would fill her eyes with Canaan, and could see nought else, while the man gazing at the promised land would still be conscious of other countries. In the heart of a man who is worth anything at all, love must have rivals,--art, science, ambition,--and it is a delight to woman that there should be rivals to overcome, even though it be a poor slave she tie to her chariot wheels.

Marriage does not always suffer when people drift away from their allegiance; in countries such as France notably, where many husbands and wives do not think it necessary to trust, or tactful to watch each other, the problem does not set itself so sharply. It is mainly in Anglo-Saxon countries where the little blue flower has its altars that the trouble begins. A rather fascinating foreigner said to me once: "Englishwomen are very troublesome; they are either so light that they do not understand you when you tell them you love them, or so deep that you must elope every time. This is a difficult country." I do not want to seem cynical, but the polygamous nature of man is so ill-recognized and the boredom of woman such a national inst.i.tution that when it is too late to pretend that that which has happened has not happened, most of the mischief has already been done. Why a husband or wife who has found attraction in another should immediately treat his partner abominably is not easily understood, for falling in love with the present victim need not make him rude or remiss to the rest of the world. But the British are a strange and savage people. Also, when in doubt they get drunk, so I fear I must leave a clearer recognition of polygamous instincts to the slow-growing enlightenment of the mind of man.

He is growing enlightened; at least he is infinitely more educated than he was, for he has begun to recognize that woman is to a certain extent a human being, a savage, a barbarian, but ent.i.tled to the consideration generally given to the Hottentot. I do not think woman will always be savage, though I hope she will not turn into the clear-eyed, weather-beaten mate that Mr. H. G. Wells likes to think of--for the future. She has come to look upon man as an equation that can be solved.

He, too, in a sense, and both are to-day much less inclined than they were fifty years ago to overlook a chance of pleasing. It is certain that men and women to-day dress more deliberately for each other than they ever did before, that they lead each other, sometimes with dutiful unwillingness, to the theatre or the country; it is very painful sometimes, this organization of pleasure, but it is necessary because dull lives are bad lives, and better fall into the river than never go to the river at all. It is dangerous and vain to take up the att.i.tude, "I alone am enough." Yet many do: as one walks along a suburban street, where every window is shut, where every dining room has its aspidistra in a pot, one realizes that scores of people are busily heaping ash upon the once warm fire of their love. The stranger is the alternative; he obscures small quarrels; if the stranger is beautiful, he urges to compet.i.tion; if he is inferior, he soothes pride. But above all, the stranger is change, therefore hope. The stranger is an insurance against loss of personal pride; he compels adornment, for what is "good enough for my husband" is not good enough for the lady over the way. The stranger serves the pleasure l.u.s.t, this violent pa.s.sion of man, and cannot harm him because the l.u.s.t for pleasure, within the limits of hysteria, involves a desire for good looks, for elegance, for gaiety; above all, love of pleasure was reviled of our fathers, and whatever our fathers thought bad is become a good thing. Our fathers did not understand certain forms of pride: there is more than pride of body in good looks, good clothes, and showing off before acquaintances: there is achievement, which means pride of conquest. I imagine that the happiest couple in the world is the one where each lives in perpetual fear that somebody will run away with the other.

Looking at it broadly, I see marriage as a Chinese puzzle, almost, but not quite, insoluble. Spoilt by coldness, spoilt by ardour, spoilt by excess, spoilt by indifference, spoilt by obedience, by stupidity, by self-a.s.sertion, spoilt by familiarity, spoilt by ignorance. Spoilt in every possible way that man can invent. Spoilt by every ounce of influence a jealous or ironical world can muster, spoilt by habit, by contrast, by obtuseness quite as much as by overclose understanding. And yet it stands. It stands because there is nothing much to put into its place, because marriage is the only road that leads a man away from his dinner when he is forty-five, or teaches a woman to preserve her complexion. It stands like most human things, because it is the better of two bad alternatives. Only because it stands we must not think that it will never change. All things change, otherwise one could not bear them. I suspect that marriage, that was once upon a time the taking of a woman by a man, which has now grown legalized, and may become courteous, will turn into a very skilled occupation. It will be recognized still more than now that all freedom need not be lost after putting on the wedding ring. As legal right and privilege grow, as women develop private earnings, a consciousness of worth must arise. Already women realize their value and demand its recognition. If they demand it long enough, they will get it. I suspect that the economic problem is at the root of the marriage problem, for people are not indiscriminate in their relationships, and even Don Juan, after a while, longs to be faithful, if only somebody could teach him how to be it. Marriage can be made close only by making divorce easy, by extending female labor. For labor makes woman less attractive and to be attractive is rather a trap: how much higher can a woman rise? But the economic freedom of woman will mean that she need not bind herself; she will be able to break away, and in those days she will be most completely bound, for who would run away from a jail if the door were always left open?

I detest Utopia, and these things seem so far away that I am more content to take marriage as it is in the hope that unhealthy novels, unnecessary discussions, unwholesome views, and unnatural feelings may little by little reform mankind. Meanwhile, I hold fast to the private maxim that hardly anything is unendurable if one sets up that all mankind could not give one a quite worthy mate. But there is another alleviation: understanding not only that one is married to somebody else, but also that somebody else is married to yourself, and that it is quite as hard for the other party. There are many excellent things to be done; here are a few:

(1) Do not open each other's letters. (For one reason you might not like the contents.) And try not to look liberal if you don't even glance at the address or the postmark.

(2) Vary your pursuits, your conversation, and your clothes. If required, vary your hair.

(3) If you absolutely must be sincere, let it be in private.

(4) (Especially for wives.) Find out on the honeymoon whether crying or swearing is the more effective.

(5) Once a day say to a wife: "I love you"; to a husband: "How strong you are!" If the latter remark is ridiculous, say: "How clever you are!" for everybody believes that.

(6) Forgive your partner seventy times seven. Then burn the ledger.

[Ill.u.s.tration]