Part 4

So a part of my love for her--my ever deepening and increasing love for her--were these successive pregnancies, these material signs of sensibility to the spirit of life itself; this, her capacity to receive and to be affected by the germinating seeds of existence, to have her being threatened and developed at the same time, to be struck and to expand, and to give birth to little children, through whom existence passes and who respond constructively to it.

Why do we all struggle for that impossible ideal we call consistency? I do not know unless it is because we are unable to attain it, and our strenuous souls desire the unattainable. I loved in her this insistent sensitiveness, loved to see her receive and use whatever came to her, and I feverishly brought all I could to her. I passionately sought for her the widest experience, used my restlessness and my sociability to bring to her all I knew and loved and enjoyed. I wanted for her the fullest life, and yet when she responded to the charm and power of other men, my emotions were not those of unalloyed joy and satisfaction! I wanted that set of impulses, those spurs to life, to come through me alone!

No, not wholly so, for up to a certain painful point her imaginative impulses toward other men gave me a keen though sometimes painful relish. Up to the present stage in the story these impulses of hers had received no tangible expression. I saw them in her eyes, in her thought about other things, in that frequently unbreakable reserve toward me, that coolness, that aloofness that so often froze my soul and filled me with a violent desire to disturb her or to rush off into the slighter excitements of sex and of boon companionship. And when I did so--the actualities of which were few indeed as compared with my vagrant impulses--she knew it, for at that time I concealed nothing from her. It was a pleasure for me to try to disturb her in this way, too; but something I could hardly bear at times to see was how little she seemingly cared for my infidelities. Was it because she cared little for me in that relation, or because she knew how deeply I was bound to her? Or was it because she was still dreaming of the Lover, unrealized, unknown, that these my acts had little meaning for her? Perhaps all these were elements of her feeling, and perhaps I was wrong in attributing to her that indifference, for at a later time I suddenly realized that these acts of mine had meant more to her than I had thought. The simple truth is that I never knew and never shall know what her real feeling was or may be.

At times, indeed, even then, I obscurely felt that her remoteness, her frequent unwillingness was the condition of a greater love for me than I felt for her; it enabled her to see me more impersonally and perhaps to love me more unselfishly, to see me as apart from any necessary instinctive relation to me. From the start, a part of her attitude was that of a mother. The very intensity of my need for her gave me at times to her the appealing charm of a child. And as her children came to her, I became more of a child to her, and, a seeming contradiction, more of a sensual need, for that element is not absent from a mother’s love, and one strong feeling does not take from but adds to another.

I know in my cooler moments of sober thought that I could never have loved a woman who was my mistress merely. A strong permanent desire in me is and always has been to hold all things together, to combine steadily in the course of life all the elements of it. Whenever I saw in her an awakening love of a child, a greater going out to Nature, a richer social unfolding, or a developing feeling for things outside of our relation, at such moments there came a great inrushing of love for her, even a greater sensual desire, and a more exalted spiritual regard. And this broader love for her immediately re-acted upon all my other interests,--my work, my feeling about society and religion--giving to these greater warmth and passion. Thus the ocean swells to and fro, the tides roll in and out, and there is a strange, vibrating relation between all things, each enhancing the meaning of all else. So that it is impossible for a lover to have a mistress, in the sense of having a woman with whom he has a sensual relation only, for a lover loves all things. Otherwise he is no true lover. And whenever I saw anew the human being in her,--the mother, the artist, the life-critic--I loved the female in her more intensely than ever!

Yes, I loved the female in her more intensely than ever, but it is only the truth to add that I hated it more intensely too! As I re-read what I have written, I am impressed with my desire to tell the essentials, to lay bare the psychological facts of our relation, without sentimentality, nakedly. But I am also again impressed with the impossibility of it. As I read, it seems like fiction, even to me, who can supply much more than I can write down. I know I have not told enough about how I hated the female in her.

I indeed hated her bitterly at times. I was never indifferent, as she was, but my hatred swelled as my love did; it took possession of me, and though only once did I even take hold of her physically in anger, and then slightly, yet a thousand times have I broken loose in utter desire to hurt her to the foundations, to destroy her morally and spiritually.

I hated as I loved her perfect and never-failing egotism, the unconscious completeness with which she remained herself. I saw and loved the integrity of her nature, its unyielding simplicity, but I hated it too. She never spared me. She was as inexorable as even Nietzsche could desire. Whenever she was uncomfortable, the females’ claws were immediately in evidence. I could feel them there, even when she spoke no word. And when she did speak it was a relief, although the words might be rasping and impatient. Because it was unnatural for her to express herself in sound, when she did so, the sounds, if those of exasperated discomfort, were peculiarly irritating. And yet I preferred them to her intolerable silence, when that silence subtly breathed an entire abandonment to her outraged need of female comfort. When at peace her silence was balmy and adorable, but when her feline equilibrium was threatened, her silence was worse to me than all the torments of hell. Silence without positive peace is a plague more unbearable than any of the compartments of Dante’s Inferno.

No, never in any real sense did she ever spare me. She never yielded to my constant desire for what seemed to her, and perhaps were, the minor moralities of life. They were forced upon her by circumstances, and slowly and painfully she partly adapted herself to them, but never willingly. By nature she hated housekeeping, and the prattle and needs and noise of small children filled her with a wild yearning to go to the woods and to attain the peace of the savage state. If she could have lived in the sea, she would long ago have become a mermaiden, reveling in the salty, undemanding, sea-weedy, salad-like charm of that undifferentiated monster. Just as she withdrew herself at times from my social and amorous demands, to sink into the bowels of her earth, so she had wildly vicious moments when the children, cooks and neighbors--whose social calls she never returned, and for whom she generally had a blighting, cold contempt--appeared to her as scorpions made to torment her. She disliked them as she disliked bed-bugs and mosquitoes which to her were the most annoying of all the lower animals. And for her to dislike anything meant something far deeper than hatred. She seldom attributed to anything sufficient dignity to hate it. But dislike was a sensation she knew to the full. What irritated her comfort or her taste filled her with an inexpressible dislike.

I was by training and perhaps by nature susceptible to the minor claims of what is called civilization. I had a sense of responsibility about expenditures, about waste, and an anxious, foreboding soul that sometimes saved the children from disease and death, but irritated her beyond expression. I nagged and nagged her, and tried to fit her into the world of our meticulous society, and she, like a stubborn mare, kept the bit between her teeth and went her own intolerable way.

I spared her, indeed, as little as she spared me. I dinned nervously into her my demands. I insisted on economy and regularity, an affability towards neighbors and friends. I kept my many engagements with scrupulous care and I expected her, who had no sense of time or punctuality whatever, to keep hers. And when she did not, I fumed and fretted and stormed and acted like a petulant child.

For years and years I struggled to overcome her in these minor matters of moralities, rather than of morality; and there was constant nervous friction between us. It is possible that the friction helped to keep the spark of love alive; perhaps it was there for some obscure, beneficent purpose. It seems to me at times that it was I who did the yielding, gradually, unwillingly. At other times, when I see the deep harmony now in her relation with children and with her outside world, I feel the distance she has gone. In a way, the years have brought about a change in both of us and in our mutual relations and attitudes. In some measure the nagging soul is dead in me, and in her there is a far greater adjustment to children, neighbors and engagements, a greater feeling for what I have called the minor moralities of society. And as I see the outside world and the universe in grayer and grayer hues, her vision is brighter and more cheerful. Her love of life increasingly grows while mine is on the wane. So now we agree unusually in what Matthew Arnold calls the criticism of life. For my love of existence had a long way to ebb, hers a long way to flow!

_Chapter VII_

Spare one another we never did; each struggled to realize his own individuality, his egotistic need. Neither of us was considerate to the other. Those pale renunciations which hold many couples together in fragile relations neither of us would accept. In spite of the manifold connections of a life of work, children and responsibility shared, the deeper relation between us was founded not on compromise, but on attraction and repulsion, on a kind of interesting warfare. In the midst of the complexities of our common life, each of us has stood fiercely for the individual soul and its personal needs. Sometimes she has conquered and killed me, but I have never really yielded, and children, work and impinging society have at times overcome her and forced her warmly from her well of damp, withdrawing comfort; but never with her soul’s consent; never merely to be considerate or thoughtful of others. Our relation has been divinely lacking in sentimentality and in that kind of morality which takes the salt out of life. We both passionately demanded that our union should add to, not take from, abundance. So that whenever we have found an adjustment it has been a real one, based on unconscious necessity and not on the minor efforts of the deliberate will.

I have been more of a mother, more of a housekeeper than the great majority of men. This was due in large measure to my indifference to the usual ambitions of the male, to business, to conventional art and literature and to the standards of society; and to my practical lack and inabilities, as well as to her limitations in domestic and wifely qualities. And she has been more of a father than the great majority of women--she has gone out to the larger world in her thought, her imagination and her work, and has helped to make up for my deficiencies. So that though we never tried to compromise, each has departed in some degree from the conventional sphere and has contributed in the other’s fields. Or, more truly, neither of us has felt any limitation of sex, except the fundamental one, and we have worked out our common life as if there were no conventional career for either man or woman. It has been difficult and painful, but it has seemed to us the larger thing to do, the more exciting, the more amusing, procedure.

Amusing! That is the word she has taught me to use in her instinctively Gallic sense. Mentally, emotionally and temperamentally interesting is what she means by amusing, and to insist as we did upon our egotistic personalities as elements in every situation was invariably amusing, no matter how painful it might be. Sometimes the pain seemed almost to break the relation and separate us inevitably, but that which brought us back with a fuller emotion was the impersonal pleasure of contemplation, which to some extent enabled us to see ourselves as if we were others and to be pleased and amused by the spectacle. Art is a significant amusement, and as I have written, there was in each of us, an unconscious attempt to see life as art, impersonally though warmly. That is why we both disliked the sentimental and why we passionately rejected the considerate and the decent attitude toward each other, which was not good enough for our high instinctive resolve.

The deeper disturbance of our mutual life, there from the beginning as undertones, became more definite as time went on, grew into clear motifs in the symphony of our relation. The essential discord was strengthened, making the harmony more difficult but when maintained rendering it deeper; as it does in the operas of Strauss and Debussy.

About six years after the honeymoon we went, with our two children, to the Middle West where we passed an important year. To make clear the threatening new elements which came into our lives I need to refer to my deepening interest in what is called the labor movement of our day. This interest had grown out of my work as a journalist in New York, and had helped to bring out my natural love for what is called the under-dog. It was a love that had no need of a remoter charm. It had no relation to kindness or philanthropy. It had no pity or morality in it. It was a simple love for the unfamiliar, and for those instincts and basic ideas newly germinating which to my imagination seemed to hold out the promise of a more exciting and interesting and therefore a juster and better society. I was deeply tired of historical, platitudinous conventions and moralities in living and in art, and whenever I found the consciously or unconsciously rebellious I was strangely and pleasurably moved. It was for me an enjoyment second only in intensity to my love for the Woman, and, at bottom, these passions were connected. An intense temperamental element in the love for a woman is the exhilaration of a close relation with the primitive, the instinctive, and the ideal at once. He who has never desired a re-valuation of all values, who in his deeper emotions is not a revolutionist, has never fully loved a woman, for in the closest personal relation there lies a challenge and a threat to all that is meaningless or lifeless in organized society.

I have never been able to learn much from books; or from any other record of human experience. Only when I come in contact with men and women do I seem to myself to think. I then feel the strange inner excitement which is analogous to the thrill of the love adventure. What seems a new conception arouses me as does the kiss of the beloved! My life among the rebellious victims of the industrial system gave me some vital ideas which for a time played an unwarrantably important part in my life and have left a definitely sound and permanent effect. And these ideas deeply disturbed my relation with Her, and, as I now think, enriched and stimulated our lives both together and as individuals.

I saw how deep and all-embracing, and really how destructive of our conventions and minor moralities, the philosophy of the proletarian really is; how it strips society to the essential! It destroys the values we put on personal property as it points out with intensity the enslaving function of possessions. A conception of a social order whose morality, law, art and conventions are formed about the economic advantage of a dominant few startles the mind and the imagination and turns the strenuous soul to an analysis of the fundamentals. It puts him in a mood where respectability and all its institutions seem a higher form of injustice and robbery and makes him see the criminal, the outcast and the disinherited with a new and wondering sympathy; not a sympathy which expresses itself in benevolence and effort toward reform, but a mental and imaginative sympathy which sees in revolution the hope of a more vital art and literature, a deeper justice and a richer human existence; a sympathy which is in its character æsthetic--the sympathy of the social artist, not of the mere reformer or of the narrow labor agitator.

For a year I was deeply absorbed in these ideas and feelings, new and disturbing and enriching to me. And I, of course, brought them home to her, as I brought everything home to her. I took to her my feelings and my impressions, unbalanced and hot from their source; and she met the men and women who were the incarnations of these disturbing conceptions.

Ideas of marriage and the love relation in general were affected like everything else by this far-reaching proletarian philosophy. To free love from convention and from the economic incubus seemed a profoundly moral need. The fear that the love of one’s mistress was the indirect result of commercial necessity aroused a new variety of jealousy! In some strenuous lovers a strange passion was aroused--to break down all sex conventions in order to purify and strengthen the essential spiritual bond!

I met men and women who, with the energy of poets and idealists, attempted to free themselves from that jealousy which is founded on physical possession. They longed to have so strong a spiritual bond that it would be independent of any material event or any mere physical happening. They tried to rid themselves of all pain due to the physical infidelities of their lovers or mistresses!--believing that love is of the soul, and is pure and intense only when freed from the gross superstitions of the past. And one of the gross superstitions seemed to them the almost instinctive belief that a sexual episode or experience with any other except the beloved is of necessity a moral or spiritual infidelity. They traced this feeling to old theology and to the sense of ownership extended until it includes the body of the loved one!

They highly demanded that the love relation should be free and independent, that it should be one in which proud and individual equals commune and communicate, and give to each other rich gifts, but make no demands and accept no sacrifices, and claim no tangible possession in the personality of the other. Only so could each bring to the other his best, something racy and strange because his own, something so personal that it stimulated the other, though it might waylay, disturb and exasperate. Their voice was that of strenuous and idealistic youth bearing the burden of a general historical disillusionment.

A burden indeed it is! To accept well marked out conceptions of morality and norms of beauty is the easier way. To try to reconstruct the basis on which our feelings express themselves is a task indeed for the gods. And since men and women are not unlimited, these idealists among them fell frequently and bit the dust of humiliation and despair. Old tradition and old instinct proved stronger than they and, filled with commonplace jealousy, a new pain was added to the old--they were not only crudely and madly jealous but they also hated themselves for being so! Theirs was a new, deep pain indeed! They were no longer comforted by the conviction of being wronged, of their honor outraged, of being soldiers, though unhappy, in the cause of morality. They suffered and condemned themselves for suffering. They did not have even the consolation of thinking themselves justified!

These subtly-interrelated ideas connected with the whole field of the philosophy of total reconstruction with which I came in personal contact through association with expressive personalities among the industrial victims of conventionalized society, had a great and for a time an unbalancing influence on me, and, with my customary need for giving all I had, bad and good, I delivered to her my new passionate perceptions, my disturbing ideals and my fragmentary and idealistic hopes of a superior race of men and women--men and women capable of maintaining beautiful and intense relations and at the same time being superior to the time-worn and, as I thought, outworn tests of virtue and fidelity.

To try the impossible is the function of the idealist and of the fool. And I have certainly at times been a fool if not an idealist in my demands on myself and on her. She took these my new and excited feelings as she tended to take everything in her moral environment, to make it a part of her as far as she could harmonize it with what she already possessed, with what had gone before. And so she began to make experiments which had been in part instigated by me, but which, after all, was only the following out of her deeper nature, a nature more unconventional than mine, and less theoretical. She tended more than I to put into thorough practice what she had once mentally accepted. The ease and calmness with which she could take a mental proposition filled me with uneasiness. I felt that if she loved me she would have more in her instincts to overcome.

I encouraged her to have intimate friendships with other men; to be alone with my friends and with hers; but when I saw in her an eager readiness to take advantage of my initiative, the old racial feeling of jealousy would stir within me. When I saw that other men excited her, and that she often preferred their society to mine, deep pain would take possession of me! One day she coolly told me not to come home to luncheon as she wanted that time alone with one of my friends!

That was the occasion of a violent quarrel between us. When I expressed my dislike at being excluded she accused me of hopeless inconsistency.

Inconsistent I was, but not in the way she meant. My inconsistency lay in demanding from her what her nature could not give, even when I knew she could not give it! Perhaps a part of my love for her was this inability of hers to give herself to me, but I always have struggled desperately to secure from her that absolute devotion in passion of which she is incapable--at least to me.

It was not that she lunched alone with another man who was beginning with excitement to see her. It was not that that disturbed me. It was not so crude as that, though she ironically and contemptuously characterized it so. I loved to have her like other men, as I loved to have her like all of life. To taste and to enjoy and to be stimulated to greater thought and understanding and to more comprehensive emotion, I loved to feel that this was for her. It gave me a vicarious excitement, a warm secondary pleasure, and it fed my illusion, an illusion recognized by me as an illusion, of what she might one day be capable of with me.

And to have her know other men intimately, just as I continually wished to know other women intimately, was with me a genuine desire. I saw in this one of the conditions of greater social relations between her and me, of a richer material for conversation and for common life together. Whenever she showed an interest in other men I saw in it what I call the live line; it was to me an exciting sign of imaginative vitality--I saw the life spirit in her!