Part 15

_The Supreme Comedy_ Marriage, at Best, is full of a sour and inescapable comedy, but it never reaches the highest peaks of the ludicrous save when efforts are made to escape its terms--that is, when efforts are made to loosen its bonds, and so ameliorate and denaturize it. All projects to reform it by converting it into a free union of free individuals are inherently absurd. The thing is, at bottom, the most rigid of existing conventionalities, and the only way to conceal the fact and so make it bearable is to submit to it docilely. The effect of every revolt is merely to make the bonds galling, and, what is worse, poignantly obvious. Who are happy in marriage? Those with so little imagination that they cannot picture a better state, and those so shrewd that they prefer quiet slavery to hopeless rebellion.

8

_A Hidden Cause_

Many a woman, in order to bring the man of her choice to the altar of God, has to fight him with such relentless vigilance and ferocity that she comes to hate him. This, perhaps, explains the unhappiness of many marriages. In particular, it explains the unhappiness of many marriages based upon what is called "love."

9

_Bad Workmanship_

The essential slackness and incompetence of women, their congenital incapacity for small expertness, already descanted upon at length in my psychological work, "In Defense of Women," is never more plainly revealed than in their manhandling of the primary business of their sex. If the average woman were as competent at her trade of getting a husband as the average car conductor is at his trade of robbing the fare-box, then a bachelor beyond the age of twenty-five would be so rare in the world that yokels would pay ten cents to gape at him. But women, in this fundamental industry, pursue a faulty technique and permit themselves to be led astray by unsound principles. The axioms into which they have precipitated their wisdom are nearly all untrue. For example, the axiom that the way to capture a man is through his stomach--which is to say, by feeding him lavishly. Nothing could be more absurd. The average man, at least in England and America, has such rudimentary tastes in victualry that he doesn't know good food from bad. He will eat anything set before him by a cook that he likes. The true way to fetch him is with drinks. A single bottle of drinkable wine will fill more men with the passion of love than ten sides of beef or a ton of potatoes. Even a _Seidel_ of beer, deftly applied, is enough to mellow the hardest bachelor. If women really knew their business, they would have abandoned cooking centuries ago, and devoted themselves to brewing, distilling and bartending. It is a rare man who will walk five blocks for a first-rate meal. But it is equally a rare man who, even in the old days of freedom, would _not_ walk five blocks for a first-rate cocktail. To-day he would walk five miles.

Another unsound feminine axiom is the one to the effect that the way to capture a man is to be distant--to throw all the burden of the courtship upon him. This is precisely the way to lose him. A man face to face with a girl who seems reserved and unapproachable is not inspired thereby to drag her off in the manner of a caveman; on the contrary, he is inspired to thank God that here, at last, is a girl with whom it is possible to have friendly doings without getting into trouble--that here is one not likely to grow mushy and make a mess. The average man does not marry because some marble fair one challenges his enterprise. He marries because chance throws into his way a fair one who repels him less actively than most, and because his delight in what he thus calls her charm is reënforced by a growing suspicion that she has fallen in love with him. In brief, it is chivalry that undoes him. The girl who infallibly gets a husband--in fact, _any_ husband that she wants--is the one who tracks him boldly, fastens him with sad eyes, and then, when his conscience has begun to torture him, throws her arms around his neck, bursts into maidenly tears on his shoulder, and tells him that she fears her forwardness will destroy his respect for her. It is only a colossus who can resist such strategy. But it takes only a man of the intellectual grade of a Y. M. C. A. secretary to elude the girl who is afraid to take the offensive.

A third bogus axiom I have already discussed, to wit, the axiom that a man is repelled by palpable cosmetics--that the wise girl is the one who effectively conceals her sophistication of her complexion. What could be more untrue? The fact is that very few men are competent to distinguish between a layer of talc and the authentic epidermis, and that the few who have the gift are quite free from any notion that the latter is superior to the former. What a man seeks when he enters the society of women is something pleasing to the eye. That is all he asks. He does not waste any time upon a chemical or spectroscopic examination of the object observed; he simply determines whether it is beautiful or not beautiful. Has it so long escaped women that their husbands, when led astray, are usually led astray by women so vastly besmeared with cosmetics that they resemble barber-poles more than human beings? Are they yet blind to the superior pull of a French maid, a chorus girl, a stenographer begauded like a painter's palette? ... And still they go on rubbing off their varnish, brushing the lampblack from their eyelashes, seeking eternally the lip-stick that is so depressingly purple that it will deceive! Alas, what folly!

INDEX

Abbott, Lawrence Abbott, Lyman Akins, Zoë Alcott, A. B. Allen, James Lane _Also sprach Zarathustra_ _American Painting and Its Tradition_ _American Scholar, The_ Amherst College Anderson, Sherwood Archer, William _Aspects of Death and Correlated Aspects of Life_ _Atlantic Monthly_ _Authors' League Bulletin_

Babbitt, Irving _Backward Glance Along My Own Road, A_ _Backwash of War, The_ Baker, George P. Bancroft, George Barton, Wm. E. Baudelaire, Charles Beach, Rex Beethoven, Ludwig Bennett, Arnold Benson, E. F. Bierce, Ambrose Billroth, Theodor Blasco, Ibáñez, V. _Blue Hotel, The_ Böhme, Jakob Bonaparte, Charles J. _Bookman_ Boynton, P. H. Brady, Cyrus Townsend Brahms, Johannes Brainard, J. G. C. Bright, John Bronson-Howard, George Brooks, Van Wyck Brown, Alice Browne, Porter Emerson Brownell, W. C. Bruce, Philip Alexander Bryant, Wm. Cullen Burroughs, John Burton, Richard Butler, Fanny Kemble Bynner, Witter

Cabell, James Branch Cahan, Abraham Caine, Hall Candler, Asa G. Carlyle, Thomas Carnegie, Andrew Carrel, Alexis Cather, Willa Sibert Chambers, Robert W. Channing, Wm. Ellery Chesterton, G. K. Churchill, Winston Clemens, S. L. Cobb, Irvin Cobden, Richard Comfort, Will Levington Comstockery _Confessions of an Actress, The_ Conrad, Joseph Coogler, J. Gordon Cooper, J. Fenimore Corelli, Marie _Cosmopolitan_ Crane, Frank Crane, Stephen Crile, George W. Crothers, Samuel MCC

D'Annunzio, Gabriel Dawson, Coningsby Davis, Richard Harding Debussy, Claude Deland, Margaret _Democratic Vistas_ Dickens, Charlesx _Die Meistersinger_ _Dissertations on the English Language_ Doyle, A. Conan Dreiser Protest Dreiser, Theodore

Eliot, T. S. Ellis, Havelock Emerson, Ralph Waldo _Ethan Frome_ Evans, Caradoc

Fernald, Chester Bailey Flexner, Simon Frank, Waldo Freneau, Philip Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa von Fuller, Henry B.

Gale, Zona Garland, Hamlin Geddes, Auckland _"Genius;" The_ Georgia Gilman, Daniel Coit Glasgow, Ellen Glass, Montague Glyn, Elinor _Good Girl, A_ Gorky, Maxim Gosse, Edmund Grant, Robert Graves, John Temple Greenwich Village Griswold, Rufus W. Grote, George

Hadley, Herbert K. Hamilton, Clayton Harris, Corra Harris, Frank Harrison, Henry Sydnor Harte, Bret Haweis, H. R. Hawthorne, Hildegarde Hawthorne, Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hay, Ian Haydn, Josef _Heart of Darkness_ _Hearst's_ Hecht, Ben _Hedda Gabler_190 Henry, O. Hergesheimer, Joseph Hillis, Newell Dwight Holmes, Oliver Wendell Hooker, Brian Hopper, James Hough, Emerson Howe, E. W. Howells, Wm. Dean Hubbard, Elbert Huneker, James

_Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt_ _In Defense of Women_ _Industrial History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century_ Irving, Henry Irving, Washington Iveagh, Lord

James, Henry

_Jenseits von Gut und Böse_ Johns Hopkins University Johnson, Owen Johnson, Robert U. Johnston, Mary

Kellner, Leon Kilmer, Joyce Kipling, Rudyard Knapp, Samuel Lorenzo

La Motte, Ellen Lardner, Ring W. _Last of the Mohicans, The_ _Lay Anthony, The_ _Leaves of Grass_ _Lectures on American Literature_ Lee, Gerald Stanley Le Quex, William _Letters and Leadership_ Lincoln, Abraham Lindsay, Vachel _Little Review_ Loeb, Jacques London, Jack Longfellow, H. W. Lowell, Amy Lowell, James Russell Loveman, Robert

Mabie, Hamilton Wright McClure, John _McClure's_ MacGrath, Harold Maeterlinck, Maurice Mallarmé, Stephen _Man: An Adaptive Mechanism_ Mansfield, Richard Marden, Orison Swett Markham, Edwin Martin, E. S. Mason, Walt Matthews, Brander _Mechanistic View of War and Peace, A_ Merrill, Stuart _Metropolitan_ Mitchell, Donald G. Moore, George More, Paul Elmer Morris, Gouverneur _My Antonia_ _My Book and I_ _My Neighbors_ _Mysterious Stranger, The_

_Nation_ Nietzsche, F. W. _Night Life in Chicago_ Nordfeldt, Bror Norris, Charles G. Norris, Frank Norris, Kathleen Northcliffe, Lord Noyes, Alfred

O'Brien, Edward J. O'Neill, Eugene Oppenheim, E. Phillips Oppenheim, James O'Sullivan, Vincent

Parmelee, Maurice _Parsifal_ Perry, Bliss _Personality and Conduct_ Phelps, Wm. Lyon Phillips, David Graham Poe, Edgar Allan _Poetic Principle, The_ _Poetry: a Magazine of Verse_ Porter, Eleanor H. Pound, Ezra Prescott, W. H. Puritanism

Ransome, Arthur Rathenau, Walther von Reading, Lordx Reese, Lizette Woodworth Repplier, Agnes Ricardo, David _Ride of the Valkyrie, The_ Rideout, Henry Milner Riley, James Whitcomb Rinehart, Mary Roberts Rockefeller, John D. Rolland, Romain Roosevelt, Theodore Rossetti, Christina

Saintsbury, George Sandburg, Carl Sargent, John _Saturday Evening Post_ Scheffauer, Herman George Schubert, Franz Schumann, Robert Shakespeare, Wm. Shaw, George Bernard _Shelburne Essays_ Sherman, S. P. Sisson documents Spingarn, J. E. Stanton, Frank L. Stearns, Harold _Sterbelied, Das_ Sterling, George Stratton-Porter, Gene Strauss, Johann Strauss, Richard Strawinsky, Igor Sudermann, Hermann Sumner, William Graham Sunday, Billy

Tarkington, Booth Teasdale, Sara _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_ Thayer, William Roscoe _Theodore Roosevelt_ Thomas, Augustus Thoreau, Henry David _Times Book Review,_ New York Townsend, E. W.

Vance, Louis Joseph _Vandover and the Brute_ Van Dyke, Henry van Dyke, John C. Van Vechten, Carl Veblen, Thorstein Virginiax

Wagner, Richard Walpole, Hugh Weber, F. Parkes Webster, Noah Wellman, Rita Wells, H. G. Wendell, Barrett Wharton, Edith _What Every Young Husband Should Know_ _What is Man?_ Whitman, Stephen French Whitman, Walt Whittier, J. G. Wilcox, Ella Wheeler Willis, N. P. Wilson, Harry Leon Wilson, Woodrow Wister, Owen Woodberry, George, E. Wright, Harold Bell

Zangwill, Israel