The Book of Life Part 28

I know that there are people who don't mind running such chances; that is one reason why there are venereal diseases. All I can say is that the s.e.x-code set forth in this book is based upon the idea that to deliver mankind from the venereal plague, we wish to confine the s.e.x relations.h.i.+p within the narrowest limits consistent with health, happiness and spiritual development; and that to this end we take the young and teach them chast.i.ty, and we marry them early while they are clean, and then we call upon them to make the utmost effort to make a success of that union, and to make it a matter of honor to keep the marital faith. We do this with some hope of effectiveness, because we have made our program consistent with the requirements of nature, the genuine needs of love both physical and spiritual.

The second argument for monogamy is the economic one. We have dreamed a social order where every child will be guaranteed maintenance by the state, and where women will be free from dependence on men. What will be the love arrangements of men and women under this new order is another problem which we leave for them to decide, in the certainty that they will know more about it than we do. Meantime, we are for the present under the private property regime, and have to love and marry and raise our children accordingly. The children must have homes, and if they are to be normal children, they must have both the male and female influence in their lives; which means that their parents must be friends and partners, not quarreling in secret. This argument, I know, is one of expediency. I have adopted it, after watching a great number of people try other than monogamous s.e.x arrangements, and seeing their chances of happiness and success wrecked by the pressure of economic forces. To rebel against social compulsion may be heroism, and again it may be merely bad judgment. For my part, the world's greatest evil is poverty, the cause of crime, prost.i.tution and war. I concentrate my energies upon the abolis.h.i.+ng of that evil, and I let other problems wait.

The third reason is that monogamy is economical of human time and thought. The business of finding and wooing a mate takes a lot of energy, and adjustment after marriage takes more. To throw away the results of this labor and do it all over again is certainly not common sense. Of course, if you bake a cake and burn it, you have to get more material and make another try; but that is a different matter from baking a cake with the deliberate intention of throwing it away after a bite or two.

The advocates of varietism in love will here declare that we are begging the question. We are a.s.suming that love and the love chase are not worthy in themselves, but merely means to some other end. Can it be that love delights are the keenest and most intense that humans can experience, and that all other purposes of life are contributory to them? Certainly a great deal of art lends support to this idea, and many poets have backed up their words by their deeds. As Coleridge phrased it:

"All thoughts, all pa.s.sions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love And feed his sacred flame."

This is a question not to be played with. Experimenting in love is costly, and millions have wrecked their lives by it. The s.e.x urge in us is imperious and cruel; it wants nothing less than the whole of us, body, mind and spirit, and ofttimes it behaves like the genii in the bottle--it gets out, and not all the powers in the universe can get it back. I have talked with many men about s.e.x and heard them say that it presents itself to them as an unmitigated torment, something they would give everything they own to be free of. And these, mind you, not men living in monasteries, trying to repress their natural impulses, but men of the world, who have lived freely, seeking pleasure and taking it as it came. The primrose path of dalliance did not lead them to peace, and the pursuit of variety in love brought them only monotony.

I stop and think of one after another of these s.e.x-ridden people, and I cannot think of one whom I would envy. I know one who in a frenzy of unhappiness seized a razor and castrated himself. I think of another, a certain cla.s.smate in college whom I once stopped in a conversation, remarking: "Did you ever realize what a state you have got your mind into? Everything means s.e.x to you. Every phrase you hear, every idea that is suggested--you try to make some sort of pun, to connect it somehow or other with s.e.x." The man thought and said, "I guess that's true." The idea had never occurred to him before; he had just gone on letting his instincts have their way with him, without ever putting his reason upon the matter.

That was a crude kind of s.e.x; but I think of another man, an idealist and champion of human liberty. One of the forms of liberty he maintained was the right to love as many women as he pleased, and although he was a married man, one hardly ever saw him that he was not courting some young girl. As a result, his mental powers declined, and he did little but talk about ideas. I do not know anyone today who respects him--except a few people who live the same sort of life. The thought of him brings to my mind a sentence of Nietzsche--a man who surely stood for freedom of personality: "I pity the lovers who have nothing higher than their love."

A question like this can be decided only by the experience of the race.

Some will make love the end and aim of life, and others will make it the means to other ends, and we shall see which kind of people achieve the best results, which kind are the most useful, the most dignified, the most original and vital. I have seen a great many young people try the experiment of "free love," and I have seen some get enough of it and quit; I could name among these half a dozen of our younger novelists. I know others who are still in it--and I watch their lives and find them to be restless, jealous, egotistical and idle. My defense of monogamy is based upon the fact that I have never known any happy or successful "free lovers." Of course, I know some n.o.ble and sincere people who do not believe in the marriage contract, and refuse to be bound by law; but these people are as monogamous as I am, even more tightly bound by honor than if they were duly married.

It seems to be in the very nature of true and sincere love to imagine permanence, to desire it and to pledge it. If you aren't that much in love, you aren't really in love at all, and you had better content yourself with strolling together and chatting together and dining together and playing music together. So many pleasant ways there are in which men and women can enjoy each other's company without entering upon the sacred intimacy of s.e.x! You can learn to take s.e.x lightly, of course, but if you do so, you reduce by so much the chances that true and deep love will ever come to you; for true and deep love requires some patience, some reverence, some tending at a shrine. The animals mate quickly and get it over with; but the great discoveries about love, and the possibilities of the human soul in love, have come because men and women have been willing to make sacrifices for it, to take it seriously--and more especially to take seriously the beloved person, the rights and needs and virtues of that person. From the lives of such we learn that love is nature's device for taking us out of ourselves, and making us truly social creatures.

Early in my life as a writer I undertook to answer Gertrude Atherton, in her glorification of the s.e.x-corruptions of capitalist society. She indicted American literature for its "bourgeois" qualities--among these the fact that American authors had a prejudice in favor of living with their own wives. Mrs. Atherton set forth the joys of s.e.x promiscuity as they are understood by European artists, and I ventured in replying to remark that "one woman can be more to a man than a dozen can possibly be." That sounds like a paradox, but it is really a profound truth, and the person who does not understand it has missed the best there is in the s.e.x relation. There is a limit to the things of the body, but to those of the mind and spirit there is no limit, and so there is no reason why true love should ever fall prey to boredom and satiety.

CHAPTER XLV

THE PROBLEM OF JEALOUSY

(Discusses the question, to what extent one person may hold another to the pledge of love.)

Once upon a time I knew an Anarchist shoemaker, the same who had me sent to jail for playing tennis on Sunday, as I have narrated in "The Bra.s.s Check." I remember arguing with him concerning his ideas of s.e.x, which were of the freest. I can hear the very tones of his voice as he put the great unanswerable question: "What are you going to do about the problem of jealousy?" And I had no response at hand; for jealousy is truly a most cruel and devastating and unlovely emotion; and yet, how can you escape it, if you are going to preserve monogamy?

The Anarchist shoemaker's solution was to break down all the prejudices against s.e.xual promiscuity. Free and unlimited license was every person's right, and for any other person to interfere was enslavement, for any other person to criticize was superst.i.tion. But the power of superst.i.tion is strong in the world, and the shoemaker found men resentful of his teachings, and disposed to confiscate the rights of their wives and daughters. Hence the shoemaker's disapproval of jealousy.

Other men, less purely physiological in their att.i.tude to s.e.x, have wrestled with this same problem of jealousy. H. G. Wells has a novel, "In the Days of the Comet," in which he portrays two men, both n.o.bly and truly in love with the same woman. One in a pa.s.sion of jealousy is about to murder the other, when a great social transformation is magically brought about, and the would-be murderer wakes up to universal love, and the two men n.o.bly and lovingly share the same woman. Sh.e.l.ley also dreamed this dream, inviting two women to share him. I have known others who tried it, but never permanently. I do not say that it never has succeeded, or that it never can succeed. In this book I am renouncing the future--I am trying to give practical advice to people, for the conduct of their lives here and now, and my advice on this point is that polygamous and polyandrous experiments in modern capitalist society cost more than they are worth.

I once knew a certain high school teacher, who believed religiously in every kind of freedom. When she married, she and her husband, an artist, made a vow against jealousy; but as it worked out, this vow meant that the wife had a steady job and took care of the husband, while he loafed and loved other women. When finally she grew tired of it, he accused her of being jealous; also, she had brought it down to the matter of money!

I know another woman, an Anarchist, widely known as a lecturer on s.e.x freedom. She laid down the general principle of unlimited personal freedom for all, and she tried to live up to her faith. She entered into a "free union" with a certain man, and when she discovered that he was making love to another woman, in the presence of a friend of mine she threw a vase of flowers at his head. You see, her general principles had clashed with another general principle, to the effect that a person who feels deep and strong love inevitably desires that love to endure, and cannot but suffer to see it preyed upon and destroyed.

Let us first consider the question, just what are the true and proper implications of monogamous love? The Roman Catholic church advocates "monogamy," and understands thereby that a man and woman pledge themselves "till death do us part," and if either of them cancels this arrangement it is adultery and mortal sin. I hope that none of my readers understands by "monogamy" any such system of spiritual strangulation. My own idea is rather what some churchman has sarcastically described by the term "progressive polygamy." I believe that a man and woman should pledge their faith in love, and should keep that faith, and endeavor with all their best energies to make a success of it; they should strive each to understand the other's needs, and unselfishly to fulfill them, within the limits of fair play. But if, after such an effort has been truly made, it becomes clear that the union does not mean health and happiness for one of the parties, that party has a right to withdraw from it, and for any government or church or other power to deny that right is both folly and cruelty.

Now, on the basis of this definition of monogamy--or, if you prefer, of progressive polygamy--we are in position to say what we think about jealousy. If two people pledge their faith, and one breaks it, and the other complains, we do not call that jealousy, but just common decency.

Neither do we call it jealousy if one expects the other to avoid the appearance of guilt; for love is a serious thing, not to be played with, and I think that a person who truly loves will do everything possible to make clear to the beloved that he is keeping and means to keep the plighted faith.

You may say that I am using words arbitrarily, in endeavoring thus to distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable jealousy, and calling the former by some other name. It does not make much difference about words, provided I make clear my meaning. I could point out a whole string of words which have good meanings and bad meanings, and cannot be discussed without preliminary explanations and distinctions; religion, for example, and morality, and aristocracy, and justice, to name only a few. Most people's thinking about marriage and love has been made like soup in a cheap restaurant, by dumping in all kinds of sc.r.a.ps and notions from such opposite poles of human thought as Christian monkery and Renaissance license, absurdly called "romance." So before you can do any thinking about a problem like jealousy, you have to agree to use the word to mean something definite, whether good or bad.

We shall take jealousy as a "bad" word, and use it to mean the setting up, by a man or woman, of some claim to the love of another person, which claim cannot be justified in the court of reason and fair play.

This includes, in the first place, all claims based upon a courts.h.i.+p, not ratified by marriage. It is to the interest of society and the race that men and women should be free to investigate persons of the other s.e.x, and to experiment with the affections before pledges of marriage are made. If sensible customs of love and just laws of marriage were made, there would be no excuse for a woman's giving herself to a man before marriage; she should be taught not to do it, and then if she does it, the risk is her own, and the disgusting perversion of venality and greed known as the "breach of promise suit" should be unknown in our law. The young should be taught that it is the other person's right to change his mind and withdraw at any time before marriage; whatever pains and pangs this may cause must be borne in silence.

The second kind of jealousy is that which seeks to keep in the marriage bond a person who is not happy in it and has asked to be released. The law sanctions this kind of cowardly selfishness, which manifests itself every day on the front pages of our newspapers--a spectacle of monstrous and loathsome pa.s.sions unleashed and even glorified. Husbands set the bloodhounds of the law after wives who have fled with some other man, and send the man to a cell, and drag the woman back to a loveless home.

Wives engage private detectives, and trail their husbands to some "love nest," and then ensue long public wrangles, with was.h.i.+ng of filthy linen, and the matter is settled by a "separation." The virtuous wife, who may have driven the man away by neglect or vanity or stupidity, is granted a share of his earnings for the balance of her life; and two more people are added to the millions who are denied s.e.xual happiness under the law, and are thereby impelled to live as law violators.

For this there is only one remedy conceivable. We have banned cannibalism and slavery and piracy and duelling, and we must ban one more ancient and cruel form of human oppression, the effort to hold people in the bonds of s.e.x by any other power save that of love. I am aware that the reactionaries who read this book will take this sentence out of its context and quote it to prove that I am a "free lover." I shall be sorry to have that done, but even so, I was not willing to live in slavery myself, and I am not willing to advocate it for others. I am aware that there are degenerate and defective individuals, and that we have to make special provision for them, as I shall presently set forth; but the average, normal human being must be free to decide what is love for him, and what is happiness for him. Every person in the world will have to deny himself the right to demand love where love is not freely given, and all lovers in the world will have to hold themselves ready to let the loved one go if and when the loved one demands it. I am aware that this is a hard saying, and a hard duty, but it is one that life lays upon us, and one that there is no escaping.

CHAPTER XLVI

THE PROBLEM OF DIVORCE

(Defends divorce as a protection to monogamous love, and one of the means of preventing infidelity and prost.i.tution.)

You will hear sermons and read newspaper editorials about the "divorce evil," and you will find that to the preacher or editor this "evil"

consists of the fact that more and more people are refusing to stay unhappily married. It does not interest these moralizers if the statistics show that it is women who are getting most of the divorces, and that the meaning of the phenomenon is that women are refusing to continue living with drunken and dissolute men. To the clergy, the breaking of a marriage is an evil _per se_, and regardless of circ.u.mstances. They know this because G.o.d has told them so, and in the name of G.o.d they seek to keep people tied in s.e.x unions which have come to mean loathing instead of love.

Now, I will a.s.sert it as a mathematical certainty that a considerable percentage of marriages must fail. It is essential to progress that human beings should grow, both mentally and spiritually, and manifestly they cannot all grow in the same way. If they grow differently, must they not sometimes lose the power to make each other happy in the marital bonds? Who does not know the man who masters life and becomes a vital force, while his wife remains dull and empty? If such a man changes wives, the world in general denounces him as a selfish beast; but the world does not know nor does it care about those thousands of men who, not caring to be branded as selfish beasts, fulfill the needs of their lives by keeping mistresses in secret.

I knew a certain country school teacher, one of the most narrowly conventional young women imaginable, who was engaged to a middle-aged business man. He went to New York on a business trip, and stayed a couple of months, and wrote her that he had met some Anarchists, and had discovered that all he had read about them in the newspapers was false, and that they were the true and pure idealists to whom the rest of his life must be devoted. The young lady was horrified; nor was she any happier when she came to New York and met her fiance's new friends. She ought in common sense to have broken the engagement; but she was in love, and she married, as many another fool woman does, with the idea of "reforming" the man. She failed, and was utterly and unspeakably wretched.

I know another man, a conservative capitalist of narrow and aggressive temper, whose wife turned into an ardent Bolshevik. The man thinks that all Bolsheviks should be shut up in jail for life, while the wife is equally certain that all jails should be razed to the ground and all Bolsheviks placed in control of the government. These two people have got to a point where they cannot sit down to the breakfast table without flying into a quarrel. I know another case of a modern scientist, an agnostic, whose wife, a half-educated, sentimental woman, took to dabbling in mysticism, and drove him wild by setting up an image of Buddha in her bedroom, and consorting with "swamis" in long yellow robes. I know another whose wife turned into an ultra-pious Catholic, and turned over the care of his domestic life to a priest. Is it not obvious that the only possible solution of such problems lies in divorce? Unless, indeed, we are all of us going to turn over the care of our domestic lives to the priests!

Our grandfathers and grandmothers believed one thing, and believed the same thing when they were seventy as when they were twenty; so it was possible for them to dwell in domestic security and permanence till death did them part. But we are learning to change our minds; and whether what we believe is better or worse than what our ancestors believed, at least it is different. Also we are coming to take what we believe with more seriousness; the intellectual life means more and more to us, and it becomes harder and harder for us to find s.e.xual and domestic happiness with a partner who does not share our convictions, but, on the contrary, may be contributing to the campaign funds of the opposition party.

I do not mean by this that people should get a divorce as soon as they find they differ about some intellectual idea; on the contrary, I have advocated that they should do everything possible to understand and to tolerate each other. But it is a fact that intellectual convictions are the raw material out of which characters and lives are made, and it is inevitable that some characters and lives that fit quite well at twenty should fit very badly at thirty or forty. When we refuse divorce under such circ.u.mstances we are not fostering marriage, as we fondly imagine; we are really fostering adultery. It is a fact that not one person in ten who is held by legal or social force in an unhappy s.e.x union will refrain from seeking satisfaction outside; and because these outside satisfactions are disgraceful, and in some cases criminal, they seldom have any permanence. Therefore it follows that "strict" divorce laws, such as the clerical propaganda urges upon us, are in reality laws for the promotion of fornication and prost.i.tution.

There is a short story by Edith Wharton, in which the "divorce evil" is exhibited to us in its naked horror; the story called "The Other Two,"

in the volume "The Descent of Man." A society woman has been divorced twice and married three times, and by an ingenious set of circ.u.mstances the woman and all three of the men are brought into the same drawing-room at the same time. Just imagine, if you can, such an excruciating situation: a woman, her husband, and two men who used to be her husbands, all compelled to meet together and think of something to say! I cite this story because it is a perfect ill.u.s.tration of the extent to which the "divorce problem" is a problem of our lack of sense.

Mrs. Wharton will, I fear, consider me a very vulgar person if I a.s.sert that there is absolutely no reason whatever why any of those four people in her story should have had a moment's discomfort of mind, except that they thought there was. There is absolutely nothing to prevent a man and woman who used to be married from meeting socially and being decent to each other, or to prevent two men from being decent to each other under such circ.u.mstances. I would not say that they should choose to be intimate friends--though even that may be possible occasionally.

I know, because I have seen it happen. In Holland I met a certain eminent novelist and poet, a great and lovable man. I visited his home, and met his wife and two little children, and saw a man and woman living in domestic happiness. The man had also two grown sons, and after a few days he remarked that he would like me to meet the mother of these young men. We went for a walk of a mile or so, and met a lady who lived in a small house by herself, and who received us with a friendly welcome and talked with us for a couple of hours about music and books and art. This lady had been the writer's wife for ten years or so, and there had been a terrible uproar when they voluntarily parted. But they had refused to pay attention to this uproar; they understood why they did not wish to remain husband and wife any longer, but they did not consider it necessary to quarrel about it, nor even to break off the friends.h.i.+p which their common interests made possible. The two women in the case were not intimate, I gathered, but they frequently met at the homes of others, and found no difficulty in being friendly. I suggest to Mrs.

Wharton that this story is at least as interesting as the one she has told; but I fear she will not care to write it, because apparently she considers it necessary that people who are well bred and refined should be the helpless victims of destructive manias.

CHAPTER XLVII

THE RESTRICTION OF DIVORCE

(Discusses the circ.u.mstances under which society has the right to forbid divorce, or to impose limitations upon it.)

We have quoted the old maxim, "Marry in haste and repent at leisure,"

and we suggested that parents and guardians should have the right to ask the young to wait before marriage, and make certain of the state of their hearts. We have now the same advice to give concerning divorce; the same claim to enter on behalf of society--that it has and should a.s.sert the right to ask people to delay and think carefully before breaking up a marriage.