Part 12

No, I am not sorry for old-fashioned men. They remain so childishly blind. Let them grow up, or at least, conceal their paleolithic ideas.

The new types of modern women face the future with laughter and the present with quickly responsive feeling. They give still to the world the essential gift of the eternal feminine, though they are cutting away the worn-out unreasonable exaggerations of perverted femininity—the coldness of the vicious woman, the unkindness of the grabbing woman, the ignorance and submission of the old-fashioned good woman. They are able to see everything and to help in everything, without being deceitful, without being dulled.

THE TEMPORARY GENTLEMAN AND HIS YOUNG WIFE

Everyone is busily trying to explain why there are so many unhappy marriages at the present time, but few people seem to realise that one of the most prolific causes has been the comparatively recent tendency of women to marry out of their class. We all know that all social distinctions were in abeyance during the war, and even afterwards. Normal class separations, conventional standards, old careful habits of conduct have been largely broken through at a time of great uncertainty and many changes.

Some of us hoped that this new co-operation which seemed to be springing up between men and women of different social classes would lead to permanent changes. We forgot that excitement is the most potent intoxicant, and that after excitement there is usually a falling back into dullness and apathy. But certainly for a time there was quite a new loosening of the guiding-rein of reason, that has allowed the horses of impulse and instinct freer than ever before to pull the car of ourselves and our fates in this direction and in that, just as they chose.

The many misfit marriages bear witness to the excited condition of women.

And it ought not to be difficult to realise, with the least gift of imagination, the conflict and the unhappiness, almost necessarily resulting, from such unions, entered into during that period of topsy-turvy conditions, between the man who had “risen” and the more complicated type of modern girl—the girl of brains and nerves, passionate, intellectually emancipated and delighting in her new-gained freedom; yet, at the same time, fastidious, ruled by traditions and inherited habits, which crop up unexpectedly, with a conservatism that is neither acknowledged nor reckoned with.

The men who in commerce or in war had a meteoric success have, in many cases, fallen back; they are but clerks, shop-assistants, artisans. They themselves, and everything belonging to them seem different. While they were accepted as gentlemen, because of what they had done or the money they had made, they married “above them” as the phrase is. And now when the money is spent and what they did no longer remembered, they cannot find work that will enable them to maintain the outward show of being a gentleman. The intoxication of excitement is over, and their wives complain, not only of their position, but of them.

The temporary gentleman and his young wife, in many cases, are finding that it needs a lot of grit and a lot of duty to keep in love. For the rose-coloured glasses of courtship have been replaced by the blue goggles of matrimony. They are already unhappy, though they expected happiness. You see, their love has been tested by the love-destroying test of poverty. And these difficult days have cast their homes into disorder.

We have all felt the world’s wave of trade depression: the world’s difficulties have dealt a blow, causing a leak to spring in many a frail boat of domestic happiness, so that its inexperienced navigators no longer can exercise control over the journey.

Now it is customary to blame the wife. Always it is the woman’s fault. She is, or ought to be, the home-maker. While no one seems to consider how much depends on the character, or conditions, of the home she is asked to make.

The boarding-school-educated and college girl has never been trained to perform or to endure the difficult, necessary duties of the poor man’s home. In their girlhood’s homes and luxurious schools, everything was done for them. That was in the old, almost-forgotten days of cheap domestic service.

In no other direction, perhaps, has there been so great and so far reaching changes as in the homes of the so-called upper classes. In a sense, to-day we have no homes, only places in which we sleep, and sometimes eat. For the domestic work of preparing the food and keeping the home as a place to live in and not to escape from has, in great measure, ended; duties which once it was every woman’s pride to do well, have been allowed to slip, as far as possible, into the hands of hired experts. In the old days cooking and housekeeping, and even house-cleaning, were known to all women. Every wife was expected to enter into competition with other wives in the important matters of making bread and cakes, and in making jams and jellies and puddings.

But the home, with its old full activities, has passed out of the hands of the mistress. So to-day a girl often finds herself forced to learn the very elements of the routine day of the wage-earner’s wife. And the duties that have to be learnt are many of them disagreeable as well as immensely tiring and monotonous to unaccustomed hands.

I do not, however, believe that the knife-and-fork aspect of these marriages is the fundamental aspect. It is love itself that is at fault. The strain and the jar of daily living under these difficult restless conditions have been too great, especially for the women.

The passing from one way of living, from one station of society to another, is always a hard and unpleasant process. We do not always know it or admit it, even if we _do know_, but the small, almost unnoticed differences in habits and manners are harder to tolerate than many a more fundamental cleavage.

I want to labour this point. The most frequent causes of trouble in those marriages where there is poverty and a restricted life, are born, I am certain, out of the daily fret of uncomfortable and cheap living together, out of small ugly minor habits of omissions, and stupidities.

Romantics may deny this, but what most wears and frays the love of wives are just trifles so small that very rarely is their adverse action directly noticed. But they give an escape for the concealed hostility, and set up an almost indecent and fearfully intolerant irritation. Dirty finger nails, the murdering of words, or making a noise when you eat soup, may be much harder to bear than real unkindness and anger. The failure to rise and give up a chair or to open a closed door may seem greater neglect to a wife than the absence of money to buy presents. The roughness of the “rough diamond” becomes unbearable. Things that once did not seem to matter, now matter tremendously.

Of course this is illogical, but then love is illogical.

And month by month as it passes makes the marriage more broken. The disappointment goes deeper though the irritation may, perhaps, be less frankly expressed. This is the time of the real danger. It is the wife’s own love that is failing her, much more than anything her husband may do or not do.

The difficulty of finding suitable work, the differences in friends and in the accustomed spheres of life, could be overcome were it not for the _unconscious want of will to overcome them_. The man may feel that he would do better farming in Canada than here. It is a very certain indication that the woman has ceased to love him wholeheartedly if she objects to accompany him on the ground that all her friends are in England.

Love does not hesitate: it delights to give up and to sacrifice.

You will see what this means: It is rather the _hidden feelings that make conscious social difference_, that act and are far stronger than the difference itself.

The unacknowledged failure in Love, not anything that happens outwardly, is the real trouble that gnaws at the root of content in their marriages, and rots and breaks the bond.

Yet there is a bright side to these marriages even when they fail. The socially adventurous, the breakers of conventions, must expect trouble; but they may console themselves by reflecting that they are pioneers in opposing dead traditions. Only the tall trees sway in the breeze, the dwarf plants are ingloriously safe.

IS MARRIAGE TOO EASY?

On the subject of marriage I have written again and again, not alone in these essays, but in many of my other books. I would, however, wish to say now, and with all the power I have, that in England, marriage is made too easy. If some of the restrictions which are placed against the breaking of the marriage bond were transferred to the time when the bond is made it would be well.

We prevent too late. Always we run to shut the stable door after the horse is stolen.

Many amazing marriages are made, in particular, by the very young who to-day refuse, more fiercely than even before, any guidance from the old; reckless marriages, entered into by those who have known each other for a few days only before marrying for life.

An ever-increasing freedom and independence for the young has certainly had rather a startling moral result. It has been shewn that for all ordinary young men and women intimate association with each other in college, in business, in workshops, and factories, and in play, turns them with extreme readiness to love making. Now I am very far indeed from wishing to apportion blame, but I do hold that new conditions demand—not only changes in our thoughts and judgment, but revision of the laws formulated to restrict conduct.

A minister of religion stated publicly, not very long ago, “I have had to marry many couples who admitted to me they knew little about each other. I could do nothing. I was not allowed to refuse marriage.”

The many marriages made in haste and under the pressure of sudden emotional urgencies, are a sign of the nervous condition of the times. The customary criticisms of reason are not heard, or not until the emotional storm has subsided. This is, of course, a condition not infrequent in love, but in these rushing and exciting days of dancing-partners and jazz courtships, it is greatly exaggerated, such marriages may not unfortunately bear the scrutiny of minds restored to reason. Living together is found to be a different and far harder thing than dancing together. And this has led to the unprecedented demand for divorce which should cause no surprise or lamentation, but should urge us forward to face the situation, like spurs in the flesh of a tired horse. For the disgrace is, not that these marriages should end, but that they should ever have begun.

We English are too afraid of preventative interference: we wait until something is very wrong indeed and then we punish.

It would be salutary for us to consider the more careful regulations of other lands. In France, for instance, and in Belgium no encouragement is given for hurried marriages such as we permit. Official enquiries and the consent of parents and guardians are considered necessary. From the start the greatest care is exercised. _Fiançailles_ (engagements) are regarded as serious family events, more binding and more sacred than anything to which we are accustomed. Both the engagement and the marriage are affairs of the utmost importance to the two families concerned as well as to the young people themselves. There are discussions and careful arrangements, and months of testing of suitability for life-partnership, during which the future husband and wife get to know one another before being tied by marriage. Perhaps, this is why the crime of bigamy is very rare in France, and there is no such thing known as cases for breach of promise of marriage.

I know, of course, the many and great evils that are attendant on the French system, but to me it seems that these could easily be avoided as they arise entirely out of property considerations and the wife’s dowry—considerations which so inevitably act disastrously on moral conduct.

It would, I am certain, lessen the chance of endless unhappiness in marriage and prevent many divorces if some more fixed inquiries, with—in the case of any one (shall I say, under twenty-five?) the consent of one parent of either party, if living, if not, that of a guardian, were obligatory before the marriage could be entered into. Or if the young will not accept this parental authority, marriage could be made conditional, except under very special reasons, on the betrothal months having lasted for a fixed and sufficiently long period: at least inquiry should be made as to the amount of knowledge the partners have gained of each other. I would recommend these reforms to all who are concerned for the future of marriage.

Nor need the change be difficult or would it entail any great alterations in the machinery of the law. We appoint a King’s Proctor to inquire into domestic details to prevent unsuitable marriages being broken, why not change his duties to prevent unsuitable marriages being made?

I would urge also that Commandments of Marriage are formulated to be read to every couple at their betrothal and again before the wedding ceremony takes place, as is done to some limited extent in France and Belgium and in one or two other countries. This is another duty which might be undertaken by the department of the King’s Proctor.

Here, then, is a practical way in which we might wisely copy other civilisations whose customs are more carefully planned to safeguard marriage and help the young in right living.

I must press home this question of the dangers of too easy marriage, though I risk wearying my readers by repetition. The facilities we give the young for marrying in haste, is, I affirm again, the cause mainly responsible in the greater number of marriages that come to the disaster of the Divorce Courts. This I have proved already. It is responsible also for many cases of bigamy, a crime which has increased alarmingly in the last years. Our law of breaches of marriage promises, with its frequent misuse and extortion of hushmoney, is another cause dependent on our stupid neglect to regulate marriage. It leads to many unsuitable marriages being made, which very often have their fatal sequel of separation or divorce.

Nor does the disaster end here. Our present careless laws are certainly acting to bring marriage itself to discredit. We hurry young people within its bonds, freeing them from all obligations to their families or to society in this matter of choosing their life’s partner, and then later, if disaster overtakes them, with callous irony we say, “you have made your bed, you must lie on it.”

If we desire really to preserve marriage, let us treat marriage with seriousness. As I have said in another of these essays—Marriage is not considered a vocation: it has become a game. I would urge practical and prompt action. We are, I think, bound to realise that if we are to succeed in freeing our society from the evils which all of us are deploring, our attention must shift from attempts to _punish after wrong has been done_, to removing the causes that _lead certainly to wrong being done_.

In other words we have to formulate more practical and helpful laws. Even more important is to change public thought, cleansing men and women from their desire to punish and replacing instead the desire to help and to understand. Nothing else, in my opinion, can avert even greater disasters of license in the future than those we are facing.

PASSIONATE FRIENDSHIPS

I had wished to write these essays without too frequent mention of the war. I find, however, that such avoidance is almost impossible. For the war has, in the most effective way, made prominent all the problems of sexual conduct with which I am dealing, has done this so effectively that some way out must be found. New and even startling changes have come and are coming, and have to be faced. Certainly our judgments can never be the same. Many who never before thought about these things have been made to think. All of us have seen more plainly the ineffectiveness of much that always before we had accepted. No longer can we cover our eyes with the comfortable mid-Victorian bandages. There has ended for every one of us our blind-man’s-buff game with life.

We are caught: and it is well. The unwritten commandment of sexual conduct, that anything may be done as long as the doing of it may be hidden, can never, I think, again be accepted, unless, indeed, by the very good, whose entire lack of humour makes them able to accept anything.

Whether we like it or not most of us have got now to muck-rake into the dark bye-paths of conduct.

Now, it is easy to say that this urgent concern with sexual questions arises from decadence. I do not believe it. To me it has always seemed that this growing demand for inquiry affords the surest hope for the future. Much is being thrown on to the scrap-heap of life. This is done only when there is need for it. We, who have come to see and in some measure to understand, have got to be concerned with sex and its problems, until some of its wrongs are righted.

Here I must digress to make a necessary explanation. The special problem of sexual conduct which now I wish to consider—the very difficult problem of passionate friendships between men and women who, for one reason or another, are unable or do not wish to marry, is a question to which my interest has for very long been directed. I was first asked to write about it in 1913 (how remote that time now seems) in answer to two articles that had appeared in the _English Review_, in July and August of that year, _Women and Morals_ and _Men and Morals_, supposed to have been written, the one by “A Mother,” and the other by “A Father;” but which, as later transpired, were thought out and transcribed in the office, by the Editor and sub-Editor of that then courageous journal.

But to whatever journalistic trickery they owed their origin, the interest of those articles remained unchanged. I need not wait to describe them; their importance rested in the courage and truth with which they faced the difficult problem, at that time almost always hidden or sentimentalised over, of the sex-needs of men and women apart from marriage.

I was asked to answer—I had, as it were, to sum up, sift out, weigh and judge, what was said in both articles. I did not then know anything of their bastard authorship, and I accepted. My answer appeared in the September number of the Review. At the time it gained some attention. In America the three articles were republished together. The little book, called “Women and Morals” had an exceedingly attractive cover and an excellent preface: I believe it sold widely. More amusing and also, I think, more witness to the power of my work, was a very different kind of notoriety which, in one quarter at least, it achieved in this country. It aroused anger. The number of the _English Review_ in which it appeared was, I believe, burnt publicly in an Advanced Club for women by order of the ladies who then formed the committee. For their intense virtue considered my views too horrible to remain uncleansed by fire. (Excuse my laughing, but the fact is I always do laugh when I picture this incident—those splendidly blinkered women holding solemnly in extended fire-tongs that burning review!)

My work was immoral!

Immoral! What is it that people mean? I do not know. I am for morality and always shall be. That is, indeed, why I offend. I am always wanting to turn out dirty places and to spring-clean life. And I have to show things as I find them, not as I would like them to be. It is so easy if you drug your soul and place blinkers over your intelligence. But you cannot be moral if you are over-occupied with being nice.

It is the young, not the old, who are thinking and writing to-day. Let me give you an example that exactly fits this question we are considering.

By a somewhat suggestive coincidence there appeared an article on “Youth and Marriage” in the _English Review_ for May, 1923—the last number issued under the editorship of Mr. Austin Harrison—which very strikingly repeats, but more openly and with cruder emphasis, almost everything that was said in the three articles published in 1913. It treats the same difficult and still unsettled question of sexual relationships outside of marriage. The article gives the answer of youth to the old, who are criticising and condemning the friendships and new freedom of sex intimacy between young women and young men: they are told frankly that they fail to realise the changed conditions of present-day life. The name of the writer of this interesting article, Vera M. Garrell, is unknown to me, but I take this opportunity of thanking her. Her article has given me the greatest pleasure. All the facts are considered in a refreshingly candid, if not always entirely adequate way. (1) The increased enormous disparity between the numbers of the sexes, which the writer comments upon as “an outstanding tragedy of the war;” leading as it must do, to “an unhealthy competition to attract men,” under the urge of which girls are drawn “to use coarser measures and act on bolder lines,” if they are to escape “the dark dread that haunts the average girl of being ‘left on the shelf.’” (2) The economic factors, which cause marriage to become increasingly difficult, and thus act in lowering the marriage ideal by making a permanent union so remote that it comes to be regarded as “practically impossible.” “The young people of to-day are very much realists. They intensely dislike poverty.” A great deal is said about this “economic blockade against marriage,” and the writer maintains that “much of the laxity in sexual morals is the direct outcome of this position.” (3) Yet, even deeper in their action are the inner reasons. War has left the youth of to-day “with a kind of sexual neurosis.” For years it kept life “entirely physical;” “morality was at a discount,” the inescapable result has been that “youth has been lured into sexual compromise.” The old code of morality has failed: it does not meet the new demands.

I have been impressed and sharply hurt at the bitterness and fatalism underneath what is written. Let me quote one or two sentences. “The charge against youth is correct. He is in revolt against conventional morality. _Young men and young women are sex conscious, not on the old lines of retiring from intimacy, but rather in the opposite direction of intimacy._” And again, “Every sex companionship is born of _mutual recognition of social grievances_. Where it is possible for men and women to come together and form friendships they do so, _without any regard for the commital convention that marriage must be the object_.” (The italics in the passages are mine.)

It is insisted upon that every normal person has a right to self-expression in the sex-function, while further frank acknowledgement is made that when sex-friendship “_is unregulated it ends in vice_.” “_We shall not marry so why not enjoy ourselves_,” is the prevailing philosophy of those who have ceased to regard the sexual act as immoral. (Again the italics are mine).