Part 2

The average middle-class Englishman, I believe, looks upon his married life as a kind of business partnership, in which he pays money in order that he may not be worried about the care of his clothes or his food or his affectional needs. These things once settled and put under the care of a sensible woman, he can devote his thoughts to business, to betting, to cards, to golf, or any other amusement he may select to ensure that he may not become a “dull man.” The average working man, of course, not only marries a housekeeper, a cook, a maid-of-all-work, but the mother and nurse of his continuous flow of offspring, and the butt of his temper when the world has used him ill.

If any hope of eventual economic freedom is to come for the whole sex, I stand aghast to think of all the antagonistic interests that will have to be reconciled. It will be worse than the Budget. The wives will have to stand out for fixed allowances. The mothers will have to make their bargain either with their husbands or the State, whichever wants their children most. The housekeepers will have to take their wages like the other servants.

The women of the adventuress class are a hopeless problem. They are worth a hundred a week at one moment, and nothing at all a few weeks later perhaps. Their trade is so dangerous. But we can cheer ourselves up with the statistics which tell us they are in England and Wales numbered by thousands only, whereas we are dealing at present with the problem of seventeen millions of women.

We have, then, four classes of women--the heiresses, the portionless wives, the courtesans, and the prostitutes--who stand in the way of the economic independence of women because they appear to be better off under the present state of disorganization. The labour market for women is of course permeated by their influence. The rich women who work for nothing, the wives who “get round” their husbands, the courtesans who command the “flesh market,” the prostitutes, who are ignored by the rest of their sex, but revenge themselves on the ignorant by spreading disease and sorrow among the happy and healthy.

The record of the overwhelming advantages of the economic independence of women can hardly be compressed into the compass of this chapter. It would make love marriages possible. It is almost certain that a love marriage on the woman’s side is one of the most important elements for good in the production of a fine race. If a girl were free to choose according to her inclination, there is practically no doubt that she would choose the right father for her child, however badly she might choose a lifelong companion for herself.

This is, of course, true about both the sexes to a certain extent, although average men are much less dainty about these matters than the average woman. If we could remove the economic considerations from parenthood it would help towards the invigoration of the race.

The sad part of this question is that according to all the great racial ideals women ought to be economically independent, but, according to all little social ideals, it seems inevitable that her independence will be resisted to the last.

III

THE VARIATIONS OF LOVE

We cannot trust ourselves to make a real love-knot unless money or custom forces us to “bear and forbear.” There is always the lurking fear that we shall not be able to keep faith unless we swear upon the Book. This is, of course, not true of young lovers. Every first love is born free of tradition; indeed, not only is first love innocent and valiant, but it sweeps aside all the wise laws it has been taught, and burns away experience in its own light. The revelation is so extraordinary, so unlike anything told by the poets, so absorbing, that it is impossible to believe that the feeling can die out. Sometimes one feels a great pity for the lovers in England, because young English girls are very apt to mistake a feeling of gratified vanity and the emotion of a new sensation for love of some special man who happens to make love to them at the propitious moment. Many faithful women go through life enduring the love of a man whom they care for very moderately, who, on his side, congratulates himself on having found a virtuous wife. It is lucky for these people that probably the wife, in her limited circle of acquaintances, will never meet the man who ought to have been her mate.

I have often talked to the apparently contented mother of a family, when some little word reveals to me that it is possible to be the mother of a man’s children merely by putting up with his caresses while one thinks about some other subject. Is it any wonder that the race becomes more and more anæmic and bored with existence as generation follows generation?

Other wives have loved their husbands with passion, and perhaps for two years their devotion has steadily increased, but the husband meanwhile has known many ecstasies and wearinesses. His love is like the waves, which follow each other as periods of dullness follow moments of rapture. Hers has been like the tide, increasing in devotion and tenderness; but the tide turns at last, and the dancing of the waves can do very little to stay its ebbing. I think men are justified who say that women either love too much for their taste or not at all.

Some women say they could love their husbands better if they did not see so much of the unromantic side of their lives. The holes in a man’s socks are not the most endearing remembrances in the world.

The only permanent relations are founded on mutual contempt. Brothers and sisters have no illusions about each other, and if they feel any affection at all it is a steadfast one. Alas! the close knowledge of weaknesses very seldom permits the affection to show through the contempt. Married lovers have to pass from the state of love, which is so apt to be a state of delusion, to the state of clear-sighted affection. The ordeal is one which very few survive.

Another tragedy of love is jealousy. A man or woman is very often jealous of the partner’s brothers and sisters, or other relations. Those who love wish to be all in all to each other, those who quarrel dislike to have others taking sides in their quarrels. This fundamental jealousy of relations is ever apt to break into a flame, besides jealousy of the more usual kind.

Mr. Harold Gorst has written a book on _The Philosophy of Love_, in which he points out that it is unwise of a bridegroom to take instant possession of his bride. He maintains that the usual programme, in which a wife shows all her modesty and a husband all his love on the wedding-night, is an absurd waste of the honeymoon, which ought to be spent in a gradual approach to the supreme surrender. Again, wives are too apt to give up the charming resistances which are necessary to the satisfaction of a man’s emotional nature. Mr. Gorst cannot imagine that a husband would tire of his wife if she kept her right over her own body with a firm hand, and required wooing every time she yielded to the wedding of her husband. So much for the man of the world’s point of view.

The marriage tie is a way of keeping people together while they undergo the various disillusions and jealousies that are inevitable, unless one of them is prepared to give way in everything. Is there any better way? In most cases, no.

The marriage tie will always exist, because it is the natural impulse of the majority of young people to wish to love each other alone, and to remain with each other for ever. The honeymoon having elapsed, they very likely find they are about to become parents, and they spend the intervening months in making happy preparations. Then the baby is born, and has to be brought up until it is old enough to go to school. If there are three children, they have to be looked after for about fourteen years. The wife is now thirty-four, and the husband thirty-eight. The children are placed in various schools away from home. Is there any alternative to the rather boring life that has to be lived out until death parts the parents? None. They are not rich enough to travel and amuse themselves, so the wife goes on housekeeping and calling on neighbours, and changing her servants, and the husband goes to the City, plays golf, and reads trashy novels. The marriage tie must always persist while these people exist.

But what are the six million bachelors and the seven million spinsters to do? Some of them are very young; thousands of them do not wish to marry, their sexual nature is hardly developed more than a child’s; others are invalids, openly or secretly; and a good number are leading illegally arranged lives because the present marriage laws do not suit their constitutions. Among the grown-up population about half the number are married, and the other half unmarried. Many of these marriages are unhappy, and it is to be presumed that at least six million of each sex do not wish to marry enough to overcome the terrors of saying what they want for ever, and getting it.

Now, having regard to the natural variations of love, I must suggest that the stigma might be removed from those who are not capable of lifelong fidelity. There seems good proof that a few millions of men and women are bringing misery upon the rest because they are treated as unworthy of social consideration. Medical men are saying that the disease which is undermining the health of the nation is dangerous only because it is shameful. It could be easily cured in its early stages if it could be treated openly and without ruining the reputation of those whom it attacks. Even when health is retained, reputations are lost and careers are ruined in order to prop up the tottering institution of marriage by making it the only refuge for the respectable.

But until it is acknowledged that it is not respectable to live together when the temperaments are incompatible, there will be no real virtue in the married state. Never to want the same thing at the same time is a more far-reaching cause of emotional degradation than one violent outbreak of temper under extreme provocation. It is more degrading to the finer feelings than a temporary alienation of marital love. One would imagine that the men who refuse to alter the divorce laws really do believe in the sacrament of the marriage ceremony, instead of in the sacrament of the true love, which abides when there is a real compatibility of temperament.

IV

THE SORDID DIVORCE

I mentioned in passing that marriage was an institution that should not be ended, but should be mended. In the first place, let us inquire whether the marriage ceremony is a sacrament, whether parenthood is a sacrament, and why marriage should be binding. The Catholic Church refuses divorce altogether on the ground that the blessing of the Church makes the contract binding till death. Parents with children are generally prepared to endure each other for the sake of their family. While women are economically dependent it would be pure folly for them to advocate marriage for a short term. Very few women succeed in retaining their attraction for men for any considerable length of time. Ten years of attractiveness is not to be thought of in the majority of cases. While a man holds the purse-strings he can always find someone to marry. A woman can offer nothing but her power of enchantment, and most of them have to rely on the universal enchantment of innocence which can only be offered once.

But conditions are very variable even now. Women hold the purse-strings when they are heiresses. They are as free as men when they are childless. Ninon de l’Enclos was irresistible until she was eighty, apparently because she was amusing as well as fascinating. Under such circumstances as these it is sometimes wise to seek divorce. In England this cannot be done without outraging every feeling of dignity and delicacy.

Unless one of the married pair is faithless, impotent, cruel, or rich enough to leave the neighbourhood, the other cannot get a divorce. This involves discussing the secrets of the alcove with solicitors, and a final exposure of your domestic concerns in the law courts, for the press and the public to take or leave as they are more or less painful to you and amusing to them.

A very frequent method of obtaining a divorce now is for a wife, who would not touch her husband with a besom if she could help it, to sue publicly for restitution of conjugal rights. To a woman of any delicacy such a demand would be degrading, even if it were made in private. To be obliged to make it publicly as a matter of form is, to say the least, unpleasant to such a woman. The next proceeding is taken when a certain time has elapsed and the husband has not noticed the wife who has to pretend to be pining for his forced caresses.

I confess it is hard to realize the state of a woman who actually can desire the society of a man who is weary of her. I have not imagination for that, I am afraid. The law was made by men, and men are said to know women better than they know each other; also, we have all heard of the charms of a captured or unwilling bride, so perhaps it is an instance in which men have done for women what they would wish to have done for themselves.

Whatever the reason is, the law is there, and when the husband has been faithless and refused his wife’s embraces, he has done sufficient to justify the court in calling him guilty of desertion and adultery, and a decree _nisi_ is pronounced. Then, if no evidence of collusion is forthcoming, and the court can make believe that one of the parties at least does _not_ want to be divorced, the decree is made absolute in six months. Can anyone realize that the present divorce law is in such a hopelessly stupid state? There seems no possibility of using common sense in a law court. To get a divorce you must _not_ agree together that it is a desirable step. To get a divorce the innocent person must speak in public of subjects no innocent person would care to mention in private. To get a divorce from a woman you respect at all, you must refuse to live with her, and must openly commit adultery, at the same time making no arrangement with her as to how she is to get rid of you. The old complaint of the inequality of the divorce laws for the sexes is perhaps of importance, but to me it seems a small thing in comparison to the general sordidness of the whole proceeding.

Surely the one cause of causes for a divorce is that both the parties want it. Some simple form of procedure, such as separation on the first application, to be followed by divorce in six months if the parties had not made up their differences in the meantime, should be devised.

The difficulties would arise in cases in which the parties were not agreed, and I am afraid in those instances the question of money would nearly always be discovered to be the root of the trouble. Ladies would be found to be unaccountably attached to their husband’s cheque-books; and gentlemen unable to separate themselves from a share in their wives’ dividends. But when the question of fortune or wealth enters into the marriage bargain, why not let it be fought out on that ground?

Divorce is always brought about because of the weariness and boredom one human being causes another. Cruelty, adultery, temporary desertion, every kind of outrage can be borne if excitement and interest counterbalance suffering. But the devotion of the whipped dog would soon be exhausted if the dog could find something in the world which interested him more than his master. Curiosity once fully satisfied, tenderness balances on the edge of the precipice of boredom, and may topple over at any moment.

Of course the insult of being considered a bore would be harder to bear in most instances than the accusation of wickedness, so on the whole it would seem advisable to keep to the good old formula of “incompatibility of temper,” and fight out the money questions on their own merits.

Now the merits of the money question in marriage have never been properly arranged. In France the wife has her own _dot_, as a matter of course; but the French have so carefully adjusted their population to their pockets that we can only bow in silent admiration of their unparalleled foresight.

In England a girl very often marries without any fortune of her own, on the understanding either that she is beautiful and that the husband is prepared to endow her with all his worldly goods, or that she is so useful that she will really save him a good deal of money. If she is very beautiful, her relations can generally get a settlement made on her; if she is only useful, she is lucky if she can induce her husband to insure his life in her favour. The merely useful wife has very little hold on ready money. One week she may get a good sum of money, another week nothing, for her household expenses. If she is clever and managing, she will probably gain her husband’s confidence, and if he is honest and has a regular income they may be very comfortable together; but under other conditions the affairs of the household go from bad to worse, and the wife is only a very inefficient servant, who may get her keep, but who will certainly not get her wages.

I can only suggest that the position of wife and mother ought to legally entitle a woman to a fixed proportion of her husband’s income, and the position of housekeeper to a further proportion. If, as is often the case in upper and middle-class modern marriage, the husband and wife do not live in the connubial state, the legal allowance as wife and mother would not be made, but the allowance as hostess and housekeeper could be enforced as long as they remained under the same roof. In the case of the poorer classes, where the wife does the whole work of keeping up the home and increasing the family, the proportion should be very much greater, so great, indeed, as to make both partners think twice before recklessly bringing children into the world. Among this class I think that the birth of a child might legalise the union of the parents. This appears to be an old custom in many parts of the world.

The working man is the greatest enemy of women’s equal value, I am afraid. Among the mining population, where his wages are high enough to make him independent, the woman he has married holds a very low position--very much what middle-class women held early in the nineteenth century. The working man of prudence and forethought is of course limiting his family with as much care as the rest of the world. But the others, who drive away drab intelligence by a Saturday orgy, forget prudence, and the result is that their wives are always in the pangs of childbirth or miscarriage. The usual self-sacrifice of women comes dangerously near suicide in this matter. To save her husband from a few moments of self-control she goes through months of drugging, loses her beauty, undermines her health in the endeavour to exercise prudence and to avoid bringing children into the world for whom she has no hope of making provision.

A romance of the mining world, in September, 1909, is instructive reading. One Friday night, at 10 o’clock, the husband came home with two former lodgers, two old friends, and one stranger. They brought plenty of beer with them. The wife was upstairs in bed, but she called over the banisters to them to make themselves at home, and returned to her sleep. Later on, when the men were nearly all dead drunk, one of the former lodgers heard screams upstairs. He found the stranger undressed and making an assault on the wife of his host. The lodger flung him downstairs, and to his horror found that he had killed him. He was terrified, and he and the woman left the house, calling to the others to fetch a doctor at once. Whatever the woman and he said to each other it was tragic, for she hurried to a pond and drowned herself, while he went to his sister’s house and waited arrest. The husband was severely reprimanded for his “negligence.” A woman counts for very little in the mining districts, she takes the German position of a kind of upper servant, in whose emotions, if she has any, none take any interest. In the manufacturing districts the working man’s wife is generally a breadwinner herself, and she only needs a little enterprise to make her position much more favourable than it is at present.

Nearly all the police court cases turn on the question of the wife’s housekeeping allowance. It is an endless source of dispute, and if it could be regulated, irrespective of caprice, most of the miseries of married poverty would cease. The poor are simple, and in this truth about them we see the truth about ourselves. We all want a regular income, and very few of us gain from being dependent on the affection of our family. Divorce, then, is sordid with regard to sentiment and with regard to money, and in these ways is greatly in need of change.

V

THE GREEN HOUSES OF JAPAN

This chapter deals with the subject of prostitution from the point of view of public health, so that the nervous reader had better skip it.

Edmond de Goncourt has written some charming chapters in his book about Outamaro, the Japanese artist, on the courtesans who live within the walls of Yoshiwara. He describes the quarter as containing fifty green houses within the walls and a hundred without the walls. They were established by the Emperor of Japan in the eighth century for the use of foreign princes, ambassadors, and wealthy merchants. The present walls were built in the seventeenth century. The girls, from all parts, are brought up like princesses, and taught writing, the arts, music, and the archaic language spoken by the court in the seventh and eighth centuries, which is now the language of the poets. The formalities of the suitors are three visits of ceremony, each with its ritual of good manners. A green house contains twenty first-class beauties and sixty second-class beauties. They sing, play, and write verses. These are a few translations which give some idea of their feelings:--

“It is only when both of us are looking at it that the moon is beautiful; when I am alone it makes me feel too sad.”

“This evening who will share the sweetness of life, this floating body in the passing world?”

“Oh, that the moonlight might shine brightly in the waters of this life [the courtesan’s], but the autumn moon on the other side of the clouds makes me long for it” [wifehood].

“Although I am nothing here, the moon lights up my heart with a ray of consolation.”

“How often do I part from one whose shadow I shall never see again under the moon of dawn!”

These little moon-women are not the only members of the sisterhood in Tokio. There are the geishas who dance and sing, and there are the old and abandoned; but the horrible sordidness of the red blinds and the draggled torn lace curtains one sees in the streets Charles Booth has coloured red in his maps of London, is absent.