Part 9

“But what if they don’t?” A complete answer to that question, from the Utopian point of view, would take us far afield from the subject of friendship; yet some further answer may seem to be required, if only by way of confessing to Mrs. Grundy that the problem is not so simple as it may seem. Well, then, out of many possibilities which the future holds, I offer this one for what it may be worth. Such friendships, let us agree, tend to merge insensibly into romantic sexual love. But if marriage may be conceived as yielding some of its traditional rights, extra-marital romance may well be called upon for similar concessions. The first thing that extra-marital romance might be asked to surrender would be its intolerable and fatuous airs of _holiness_. Yes, “holiness” is the word--a holiness all the more asserted by such extra-marital lovers because their relations are likely to be taken disrespectfully by a stupid world. Oh, unquestionably, if you ask them, never was any legal and conventional love so high and holy as this romantic passion of theirs! Its transcendental holiness calls for sacrifices. So they sacrifice themselves--and, incidentally, others--to it. Anything less, they feel, would be cowardly. They must not palter with these sacred emotions--not even by the exercise of their dormant sense of humor!--So it is to-day: but perhaps in a future where extra-marital romance is made room for with a tender and humorous courtesy, it may give up these preposterous and solemn airs, and actually learn to smile at its illusions--illusions which will still give the zest of ultimate danger to relationships of merely happy and light-hearted play. Thus life will continue to be interesting.

As for the talk of friendship, my Utopian speculations uncover for me no respect in which the thing itself can be improved upon. The circumstances can be made happier, the attitude of society can foster it; but the talk of friendship has already reached a splendid perfection beyond which my imagination is unable to soar. At its best it has, despite its personal aspect, an impersonal beauty; it is a poignant fulfillment of those profound impulses which we call curiosity and candor; it serves human needs as deep as those which poetry and music serve, and is in some sense an art like them. The art exists, and it remains only for the future to give it an adequate hospitality.

Love and Marriage

By Ludwig Lewisohn

Ludwig Lewisohn

_author of “Up Stream,” “Don Juan” and other books and contributing editor of_ The Nation, _is now studying conditions in Eastern Europe and Palestine. Was born May 30th, 1882, in Berlin--came to America in 1890--B.A. and M.A. College of Charleston, S. C., 1901--M. A. Columbia, 1903--Editorial staff, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1910-1911. Instructor in German, University of Wisconsin, and Literature at Ohio State University. Dramatic Editor_, Nation, _1919. Author of “The Broken Snare,” 1908;--“A Night in Alexandria,” 1909; “German Style--an Introduction to the Study of German Prose,”--1910; “The Modern Drama,” 1915; “The Spirit of Modern German Literature,” 1916; “The Poets of Modern France,” 1918; Editor with W. P. Trent of “Letters of an American Farmer,” 1909; “A Book of Modern Criticism,” 1909. Translator--Feuchlersleben’s “Health & Suggestion,” 1910; Sudermann’s “Judean City,” 1911; Halbe’s “Youth,” Hirschfeld’s “The Mothers,” 1916; Latzko’s “The Judgment of Peace,” 1919; Wassermann’s “World’s Illusion.” Editor and chief translator of Gerhardt Hauptmann’s Dramatic Works, 1916, 1917; Contributing Editor, Warner’s Library of World’s Best Literature. His latest book is “The Creative Life,” 1924._

LOVE AND MARRIAGE

BY LUDWIG LEWISOHN

Utopia is the loveliest of all countries; it is also the farthest away. One may make magnificent generalizations concerning the future of the relations of the sexes; one may set down truths that are theoretically unanswerable. Only one will change nothing, help not a single soul. Let me cling to a few humble facts....

So far as any one can see the habit of one man living with one woman will persist. The young will hear of nothing else, since they are under the sway of romantic passion which is, subjectively, exclusive and final; those who are older will hear of nothing else because experience has shown this method of life capable of securing the healthiest freedom from preoccupation with sex and the maximum amount of ordered activity. To be a rake or even a fastidious “varietist” is the costliest of occupations. Rational monogamy is in no danger. The trouble lies elsewhere; it lies in the fact that current notions of monogamy are, I use the word advisedly, insane.

Local bill-board advertisements of moving pictures have recently shown a ball-room in which an irate gentleman in evening-dress grasped the shoulder of another gentleman who looked crushed and crest-fallen. With an inimitable gesture of moral indignation the first gentleman pointed to a quivering female on the other side of the room. The caption of this stirring lithograph was “His Forgotten Wife.” The exquisite absurdity of this picture is clear. It is significant of the way in which we are all brow-beaten by the sodden nonsense of the tribe that it took me some minutes of reflection to come upon the unreason of the thing. If the crushed looking gentleman had forgotten the lady, she was not, of course, his wife and could never have truly been. If we are dealing with a euphemism and are to understand that he wanted to forget her, she may once have been his wife, but had, quite obviously, ceased to be.

In this moving picture there is illustrated what I call the insane view of monogamic marriage, namely, that it is put on like a shirt or a coat and must be kept on however ill-fitting, comfortless, unclean, or dangerous, and that in this mere keeping on there is virtue. There is the further implication that marriage has nothing to do with good behavior, which is rewarded even in penitentiaries, or with ill; that it is, indeed, an abstract kind of fate, a magical or infernal machine, a metaphysical trap. Once you are caught in it, you must stay caught. To wriggle is sin.

Do I seem to be discussing the matter on too low a plane? I wish I were. The truth is that cultivated and liberal people have not yet freed their minds from the concepts with which that amusing picture deals. It is in action, not in fireside talk that these things are tested. And it is true that even such people will pay an uninhibited respect to a depraved character, cruel, treacherous, stupid, who practices that moving-picture theory of marriage which, in ways no less real for being subtle and but half-conscious, they will be tempted to withhold from a person of the utmost spiritual grace and charm who practices that kind of marriage of which, theoretically and outspokenly, they so eloquently approve.

This very tentative argument, then, is not directed against marriage. I am not even ready to plead--that would be Utopian--that the relations of the sexes be withdrawn from social control. Our first step, at least in America, must be an attempt to sanitate marriage. This can be done--if it can be done at all--by relating marriage and its practice to certain notions of good and decency and honor that already have a tenure, however feeble, upon the public consciousness. Marriage, in brief, should be held to be created by love and sustained by love. I shall, of course, be accused of meaning passion. I mean that precise blending of passion and spiritual harmony and solid friendship without which, as even those who will not admit it know, the close association of a man and a woman is as disgusting as it is degrading. And marriage should be dependent, though this matter is included in the first, on good behavior. I will not keep a man or a woman as my friend whom I discover to be a liar, slanderer, thief. Much less ought one to keep such a person as husband or wife. Who is to judge, it will be asked? No objective judgment is needed. A subjective conviction of this sort suffices to reduce the union in question to dust and ashes.

Here is the one practical point; here the one possibility of hope. To frame a rational theory of the relations of men and women is easy and agreeable. The very fashioners of such theories, being human, will be brought, under the discomforts of social pressure, to _seem_ to assent to all that their minds most passionately deny. A man or a woman of the highest philosophic insight will struggle through the ignominy of the divorce courts not so much in order to dissolve a meaningless legal bond as to save some one whom he or she loves and reveres from the criticism of the vulgar. For we live in a vulgar world. There is no safe and ultimate escape; its vulgarity in precisely these matters will often affront us where we least expected it. To mitigate that vulgarity must be our first task.

I do not know whether it can be done at all. But if so, then it must be done by making an unhappy union disgraceful. People who are always bickering with each other, who are obviously unhappy in each other’s presence, who always hold opinions acridly opposed, who are always trying either subtly or obviously to escape from each other--such couples must fall under social disapproval. And this disapproval must apply even though one of the two prefers possessiveness to either happiness or decency or self-respect. Similarly those who are deliberately unfaithful should be disgraced--not for the act of unfaith but for the hypocrisy of remaining in a union which that very act, which the temptation to that very act, shows to have lost its purpose and its meaning.

This sort of social control is not my ideal. Love is like religion, a matter for the individual soul. To change partners in love is very much like changing one’s opinion on some deep and vital matter. The spirit must bear its own inherent witness. But I promised myself not to be Utopian. And may it not conceivably be brought home to a few people to begin with that the men who laugh so spontaneously when the song-and-dance man sings “My wife’s gone to the country, hurray, hurray!” are leading immoral lives and reducing their partners to the rôle of disagreeable prostitutes and unsatisfactory servants?

I am not prepared to stress the point unendurably. True marriage, the true and lovely union of a man and a woman, body and spirit, is rare. But to-day it is not even an ideal, not even something admired and striven for. Love in itself is rare and married love is perhaps as rare as beauty or genius. Happiness, too, is rare, happiness in any relation. But even as a man or a woman has made an obvious and shattering mistake if his or her chosen work does not produce a reasonable minimum of lasting inner satisfaction, so may marriage also be tested by a reasonable minimum of lasting--let us say, preference and blessedness. To fall below that minimum is to cheat both the self and society, both the present and posterity, to sacrifice honor to a fetish and vitality to decay.

Communist Puritans

By Louis Fischer

Louis Fischer

_is Moscow correspondent of the New York_ Nation.

COMMUNIST PURITANS

BY LOUIS FISCHER

The Soviet state is omnipotent and omnipresent. Bukharin, the arch-theorist, contends that this is a transitional phase in the development of Communism toward perfection. The Bolsheviks’ professed aim is the _reductio ad administratum_ of the functions of the state; they would make government the traffic cop of the nation but not the all-pervading busybody and touch-everybody-everywhere which it is now in Russia. The transitional period, however, may last long. In default of a world revolution it may project itself beyond the present generation and even beyond the next. And in the meantime it is good Communist doctrine to maintain an Argus-eyed, Herculanean-clubbed state. The Soviet Government is alike an administrator, politician, statesman, merchant, manufacturer, banker, shipbuilder, newspaper publisher, school-teacher, and preacher.

Such a state is the highest expression of the anti-individualism of socialist philosophy. The single _simian erectus_ is nothing; it is the class, the nation which counts.

The citizen lives for the state. Mind and muscle must ever be at its service. A Communist who is a loose liver is an anomaly. There is virtue even in a grain of asceticism and in “morality,” not, it is important to note, because luxury and license are sinful and lead to damnation and hell but because the excessive gratification of physical desires, be they for sex or for alcohol, and any over-indulgence of one’s selfish mental weaknesses reduce the energy and attention which the individual can offer to the state and to society.

The Bolsheviks do not believe in evolution in the realm of politics; they are revolutionists. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century liberalism tended toward the survival of the fittest. But the essence of the Russian revolution is the protection of the under dog, of the proletarian and peasant who, unaided, would not survive in the unequal struggle with the capitalist and landowner. The function of the Soviet state is to support the oppressed majority against the vested and acquired interests of the economically powerful minority.

The doctrine of the survival of the fittest, translated into every-day life, permits freedom of action, as little restraint as possible, the freest play for nature and human nature. Communist doctrine involves the negation of individual freedom; human nature is discounted in the socialist scale of weights and measures; laissez-faire is replaced by discipline, if need be, by force. Only once did the Communists reveal a liberal vein. It was in their treatment of conscientious objectors during the civil wars. Russia has many sects such as the Dukhobors who are opposed to violence on grounds of conscience. Though the Government was engaged in a death struggle, it respected these sentiments. But in all else, whenever its own interests have been at stake, the state has disregarded the wishes and inclinations of the human unit. Liberty of the individual is not as sacred an ikon as it is in the West. To give economic freedom to the mass is a nobler aim. Thus the Communists would explain and justify (but in my opinion this does not justify) the absence of a free press in Russia and the activities of the G. P. U.

The aim of the Bolsheviks was not merely to overthrow one government and to establish their own. This was a means toward creating a new society. To that extent the Bolsheviks are as presumptuous as most reformers. In 1917 they must have argued to themselves much to this effect: “We are a minority. The majority has not invited us to rule it. But we know better than the majority what is good for it.” In the interest of the new society a powerful state was set up. The powerful state was privileged to ride roughshod over the individual. The Bolsheviks presume to tell the individual how to act and how to live. This is the “superiority complex” which is one of the most essential characteristics of puritanism. “I am perfect. Watch me. Go thou and do likewise.” The Russian Communists are puritans without religion.

In matters of morals the Communists advocate and agitate but do not use force. Only in the case of members of the Communist Party do they interfere if the individual’s actions are likely “directly or indirectly to discredit the party.” (Such a phrase permits of the widest interpretation and misinterpretation.) Thus in an article in the _Pravda_ on The Party and Personal Life, O. Zortzeva, an official of the Central Control Committee, writes that “not long ago one of the representatives of the Control Committee in the South asked for instructions to combat the evil of divorce.” She cites an instance (and there must be many more such instances) where a Communist was required to explain why he left his wife. He replied he could not live with her because she was unfit to mingle in the society of his new friends and acquaintances. The reply was regarded as unsatisfactory. The Soviet state enforces a most liberal divorce law. But the Communists discourage divorce. Within the party it is looked upon with disfavor.

The war, the revolution, the civil wars have worked havoc with the Russian family. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that family life is crumbling. Trotzky, who has given more active attention to these questions of personal behavior than any other Communist leader, seeks to reënforce the collapsing buttresses of the family. (It will be recalled that Engels, the author with Marx of the “Communist Manifesto,” wrote the “Origin of the Family” to prove that the family was a new, unnecessary, and reactionary institution.) Trotzky urges the “communalization of the family household” so as to “disencumber the family of kitchen and laundry.” Take the burden of washing, cooking, sewing, child-raising from the family and “the relation between husband and wife will be cleansed of all that is external, foreign, forced, accidental. Each would cease to spoil the life of the other....”

The family life of most Communist leaders would probably find favor in the eyes of the Bishop of New York, and we can imagine that Cotton Mather, if he returned to the flesh and visited Moscow, would hurry to Trotzky, slap him untheologically on the back, and say, “Thou art a man.” There was something ascetic and impersonal in the way Lenin used to live. There is something reminiscent of Christian self-abnegation in Chicherin’s, Bukharin’s, Radek’s disdain for good clothes. A Communist is required to contribute to the party treasury all the salary he earns above $95 a month. And even if his writings bring him a supplementary income he must not spend it for luxuries. The Communists are the shock troops of the Soviet régime. They must be like athletes in training. They must not consume mental and spiritual ice creams and pastries.

Alexandra Kollontai, now Soviet ambassador in Christiania, stands for the utmost freedom in sexual relations. But a review in the official press of her book, “Love Among Laboring Bees,” stigmatizes her views on the subject as “prostitution” and “intellectual tomfoolery.” “It is imperative,” reads the last sentence of the criticism, “to guard against the harmful influence of Comrade Kollontai.” This is the attitude which in other countries leads to the appointment of vice censors. Russia, fortunately, is too advanced to subject itself to such a humiliation. Only the lives of Communists are censored. In respect to the great mass of the people the Bolsheviks content themselves with preaching.

Trotzky’s sermons will certainly do the people no harm. Russians have barely a trace of puritanism. Take the instance of their famous, many-ply “mother” oaths. Beside them the worst product of the British navvy looks pale. Says Trotzky: “One would have to consult philologists, linguists, and folk-lore experts to find out whether any other people has such unrestrained, filthy, and disgusting oaths as we have. As far as I know, there is no other.” The Communists have initiated an anti-swearing campaign. In some factories the workers themselves decided to fine any one who used an “expression.” Wherever one goes, in industrial plants, in beer saloons, in clubs, one sees the colored “Don’t Swear” poster. Even in the army, where curses once found their most fertile field, they are becoming increasingly rare.

A Communist should not play cards. A member of the party will not, if he is a good Communist, enter a gambling casino. (The Moscow gambling casinos, incidentally, have been closed by order of the Government.) Newly initiated Communists ask their instructors whether they are to permit their wives to powder their faces. A Communist would hardly come to her office with her lips rouged and even non-Communist workers in many Soviet commissariats feel that it is bad form to use the lipstick. Certainly very few if any women Communists dress to fashion. Most of them dress badly. There are more serious things to do than to mind the clothes on one’s back. It is unworthy of a Communist, and Communists think it is unworthy of all Russians, to give too much thought to the flesh. I know a non-Communist Soviet official who likes to carry a cane, but he leaves it home when he goes to work.

There can be no let-up, says Trotzky, in the war against alcohol. The Government has abolished vodka, but the bootleg “samogonka” has replaced it. The police arrest men and women (in Russia most of the apprehended bootleggers are women) but force removes as little of the evil here as it does in the United States. So strong is the drink tradition in Russia that even many Communists indulge in the permissible wines and light beers. But the party reminds its members that they must inhibit such desires. It will not do for the best soldiers of the state and the master-builders of a new society to become inebriated, or lose their heads and time in the pursuit of women, or play cards, or stop to adjust their neckties while the foundations of the structure are being laid.

Stereotypes

By Florence Guy Seabury

Florence Guy Seabury

_is a frequent contributor to the_ New Republic _and to various popular magazines._

STEREOTYPES

BY FLORENCE GUY SEABURY

If Clarissa Harlow could have stepped out of her pre-Victorian world to witness some of the women stevedores and “longshoremen” now at work along the New York water front, she would certainly have fainted so abruptly that no masculine aid could have restored consciousness. If we can believe the 1920 census, a goodly number of Clarissa’s timid and delicate sex are toiling gloriously in the most dangerous and violent occupations. Nor are they only engaged in handling steel beams and freight, running trucks and donkey engines, but as miners and steeplejacks, aviators and divers, sheriffs and explorers--everything, in fact that man ever did or thought of doing. They have proved, moreover, as successful in such a new occupation as capturing jungle tigers as in the old one of hunting husbands, as deft in managing big business as in running a little household.

But the census bureau, compiling all the facts of feminine industry, forgot to note that woman might perform these amazingly varied operations, outside the home, without changing in any measurable degree the rooted conception of her nature and activities. She may step out of skirts into knickers, cut her hair in a dozen short shapes and even beat a man in a prize fight, but old ideas as to her place and qualities endure. She changes nothing as set as the stereotyped image of her sex which has persisted since Eve.

The Inquiring Reporter of the New York _Sun_ recently asked five persons whether they would prefer to be tried by a jury of men or women. “Of men,” cried they all--two women and three men. “Women would be too likely to overlook the technical points of the law.” “Women are too sentimental.” “They are too easily swayed by an eloquent address.” “Women are by nature sentimental.” Almost anybody could complete the list. Ancient opinions of women’s characteristics have been so widely advertised that the youngest child in the kindergarten can chirp the whole story. Billy, aged ten, hopes fervently that this country may never have a woman president. “Women haven’t the brains--it’s a man’s job.” A. S. M. Hutchinson, considerably older than Billy, has equally juvenile fears: that the new freedom for women may endanger her functions in the home. Whatever and wherever the debate, the status and attributes of women are settled by neat and handy generalizations, passed down from father to son, and mother to daughter. For so far, most women accept the patterns made for them and are as likely as not to consider themselves the weaker vessel, the more emotional sex, a lay figure of biological functioning.