Part 28 (1/2)
I know that there are people who don't mind running such chances; that is one reason why there are venereal diseases. All I can say is that the s.e.x-code set forth in this book is based upon the idea that to deliver mankind from the venereal plague, we wish to confine the s.e.x relations.h.i.+p within the narrowest limits consistent with health, happiness and spiritual development; and that to this end we take the young and teach them chast.i.ty, and we marry them early while they are clean, and then we call upon them to make the utmost effort to make a success of that union, and to make it a matter of honor to keep the marital faith. We do this with some hope of effectiveness, because we have made our program consistent with the requirements of nature, the genuine needs of love both physical and spiritual.
The second argument for monogamy is the economic one. We have dreamed a social order where every child will be guaranteed maintenance by the state, and where women will be free from dependence on men. What will be the love arrangements of men and women under this new order is another problem which we leave for them to decide, in the certainty that they will know more about it than we do. Meantime, we are for the present under the private property regime, and have to love and marry and raise our children accordingly. The children must have homes, and if they are to be normal children, they must have both the male and female influence in their lives; which means that their parents must be friends and partners, not quarreling in secret. This argument, I know, is one of expediency. I have adopted it, after watching a great number of people try other than monogamous s.e.x arrangements, and seeing their chances of happiness and success wrecked by the pressure of economic forces. To rebel against social compulsion may be heroism, and again it may be merely bad judgment. For my part, the world's greatest evil is poverty, the cause of crime, prost.i.tution and war. I concentrate my energies upon the abolis.h.i.+ng of that evil, and I let other problems wait.
The third reason is that monogamy is economical of human time and thought. The business of finding and wooing a mate takes a lot of energy, and adjustment after marriage takes more. To throw away the results of this labor and do it all over again is certainly not common sense. Of course, if you bake a cake and burn it, you have to get more material and make another try; but that is a different matter from baking a cake with the deliberate intention of throwing it away after a bite or two.
The advocates of varietism in love will here declare that we are begging the question. We are a.s.suming that love and the love chase are not worthy in themselves, but merely means to some other end. Can it be that love delights are the keenest and most intense that humans can experience, and that all other purposes of life are contributory to them? Certainly a great deal of art lends support to this idea, and many poets have backed up their words by their deeds. As Coleridge phrased it:
”All thoughts, all pa.s.sions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love And feed his sacred flame.”
This is a question not to be played with. Experimenting in love is costly, and millions have wrecked their lives by it. The s.e.x urge in us is imperious and cruel; it wants nothing less than the whole of us, body, mind and spirit, and ofttimes it behaves like the genii in the bottle--it gets out, and not all the powers in the universe can get it back. I have talked with many men about s.e.x and heard them say that it presents itself to them as an unmitigated torment, something they would give everything they own to be free of. And these, mind you, not men living in monasteries, trying to repress their natural impulses, but men of the world, who have lived freely, seeking pleasure and taking it as it came. The primrose path of dalliance did not lead them to peace, and the pursuit of variety in love brought them only monotony.
I stop and think of one after another of these s.e.x-ridden people, and I cannot think of one whom I would envy. I know one who in a frenzy of unhappiness seized a razor and castrated himself. I think of another, a certain cla.s.smate in college whom I once stopped in a conversation, remarking: ”Did you ever realize what a state you have got your mind into? Everything means s.e.x to you. Every phrase you hear, every idea that is suggested--you try to make some sort of pun, to connect it somehow or other with s.e.x.” The man thought and said, ”I guess that's true.” The idea had never occurred to him before; he had just gone on letting his instincts have their way with him, without ever putting his reason upon the matter.
That was a crude kind of s.e.x; but I think of another man, an idealist and champion of human liberty. One of the forms of liberty he maintained was the right to love as many women as he pleased, and although he was a married man, one hardly ever saw him that he was not courting some young girl. As a result, his mental powers declined, and he did little but talk about ideas. I do not know anyone today who respects him--except a few people who live the same sort of life. The thought of him brings to my mind a sentence of Nietzsche--a man who surely stood for freedom of personality: ”I pity the lovers who have nothing higher than their love.”
A question like this can be decided only by the experience of the race.
Some will make love the end and aim of life, and others will make it the means to other ends, and we shall see which kind of people achieve the best results, which kind are the most useful, the most dignified, the most original and vital. I have seen a great many young people try the experiment of ”free love,” and I have seen some get enough of it and quit; I could name among these half a dozen of our younger novelists. I know others who are still in it--and I watch their lives and find them to be restless, jealous, egotistical and idle. My defense of monogamy is based upon the fact that I have never known any happy or successful ”free lovers.” Of course, I know some n.o.ble and sincere people who do not believe in the marriage contract, and refuse to be bound by law; but these people are as monogamous as I am, even more tightly bound by honor than if they were duly married.
It seems to be in the very nature of true and sincere love to imagine permanence, to desire it and to pledge it. If you aren't that much in love, you aren't really in love at all, and you had better content yourself with strolling together and chatting together and dining together and playing music together. So many pleasant ways there are in which men and women can enjoy each other's company without entering upon the sacred intimacy of s.e.x! You can learn to take s.e.x lightly, of course, but if you do so, you reduce by so much the chances that true and deep love will ever come to you; for true and deep love requires some patience, some reverence, some tending at a shrine. The animals mate quickly and get it over with; but the great discoveries about love, and the possibilities of the human soul in love, have come because men and women have been willing to make sacrifices for it, to take it seriously--and more especially to take seriously the beloved person, the rights and needs and virtues of that person. From the lives of such we learn that love is nature's device for taking us out of ourselves, and making us truly social creatures.
Early in my life as a writer I undertook to answer Gertrude Atherton, in her glorification of the s.e.x-corruptions of capitalist society. She indicted American literature for its ”bourgeois” qualities--among these the fact that American authors had a prejudice in favor of living with their own wives. Mrs. Atherton set forth the joys of s.e.x promiscuity as they are understood by European artists, and I ventured in replying to remark that ”one woman can be more to a man than a dozen can possibly be.” That sounds like a paradox, but it is really a profound truth, and the person who does not understand it has missed the best there is in the s.e.x relation. There is a limit to the things of the body, but to those of the mind and spirit there is no limit, and so there is no reason why true love should ever fall prey to boredom and satiety.
CHAPTER XLV
THE PROBLEM OF JEALOUSY
(Discusses the question, to what extent one person may hold another to the pledge of love.)
Once upon a time I knew an Anarchist shoemaker, the same who had me sent to jail for playing tennis on Sunday, as I have narrated in ”The Bra.s.s Check.” I remember arguing with him concerning his ideas of s.e.x, which were of the freest. I can hear the very tones of his voice as he put the great unanswerable question: ”What are you going to do about the problem of jealousy?” And I had no response at hand; for jealousy is truly a most cruel and devastating and unlovely emotion; and yet, how can you escape it, if you are going to preserve monogamy?
The Anarchist shoemaker's solution was to break down all the prejudices against s.e.xual promiscuity. Free and unlimited license was every person's right, and for any other person to interfere was enslavement, for any other person to criticize was superst.i.tion. But the power of superst.i.tion is strong in the world, and the shoemaker found men resentful of his teachings, and disposed to confiscate the rights of their wives and daughters. Hence the shoemaker's disapproval of jealousy.
Other men, less purely physiological in their att.i.tude to s.e.x, have wrestled with this same problem of jealousy. H. G. Wells has a novel, ”In the Days of the Comet,” in which he portrays two men, both n.o.bly and truly in love with the same woman. One in a pa.s.sion of jealousy is about to murder the other, when a great social transformation is magically brought about, and the would-be murderer wakes up to universal love, and the two men n.o.bly and lovingly share the same woman. Sh.e.l.ley also dreamed this dream, inviting two women to share him. I have known others who tried it, but never permanently. I do not say that it never has succeeded, or that it never can succeed. In this book I am renouncing the future--I am trying to give practical advice to people, for the conduct of their lives here and now, and my advice on this point is that polygamous and polyandrous experiments in modern capitalist society cost more than they are worth.
I once knew a certain high school teacher, who believed religiously in every kind of freedom. When she married, she and her husband, an artist, made a vow against jealousy; but as it worked out, this vow meant that the wife had a steady job and took care of the husband, while he loafed and loved other women. When finally she grew tired of it, he accused her of being jealous; also, she had brought it down to the matter of money!
I know another woman, an Anarchist, widely known as a lecturer on s.e.x freedom. She laid down the general principle of unlimited personal freedom for all, and she tried to live up to her faith. She entered into a ”free union” with a certain man, and when she discovered that he was making love to another woman, in the presence of a friend of mine she threw a vase of flowers at his head. You see, her general principles had clashed with another general principle, to the effect that a person who feels deep and strong love inevitably desires that love to endure, and cannot but suffer to see it preyed upon and destroyed.
Let us first consider the question, just what are the true and proper implications of monogamous love? The Roman Catholic church advocates ”monogamy,” and understands thereby that a man and woman pledge themselves ”till death do us part,” and if either of them cancels this arrangement it is adultery and mortal sin. I hope that none of my readers understands by ”monogamy” any such system of spiritual strangulation. My own idea is rather what some churchman has sarcastically described by the term ”progressive polygamy.” I believe that a man and woman should pledge their faith in love, and should keep that faith, and endeavor with all their best energies to make a success of it; they should strive each to understand the other's needs, and unselfishly to fulfill them, within the limits of fair play. But if, after such an effort has been truly made, it becomes clear that the union does not mean health and happiness for one of the parties, that party has a right to withdraw from it, and for any government or church or other power to deny that right is both folly and cruelty.
Now, on the basis of this definition of monogamy--or, if you prefer, of progressive polygamy--we are in position to say what we think about jealousy. If two people pledge their faith, and one breaks it, and the other complains, we do not call that jealousy, but just common decency.
Neither do we call it jealousy if one expects the other to avoid the appearance of guilt; for love is a serious thing, not to be played with, and I think that a person who truly loves will do everything possible to make clear to the beloved that he is keeping and means to keep the plighted faith.
You may say that I am using words arbitrarily, in endeavoring thus to distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable jealousy, and calling the former by some other name. It does not make much difference about words, provided I make clear my meaning. I could point out a whole string of words which have good meanings and bad meanings, and cannot be discussed without preliminary explanations and distinctions; religion, for example, and morality, and aristocracy, and justice, to name only a few. Most people's thinking about marriage and love has been made like soup in a cheap restaurant, by dumping in all kinds of sc.r.a.ps and notions from such opposite poles of human thought as Christian monkery and Renaissance license, absurdly called ”romance.” So before you can do any thinking about a problem like jealousy, you have to agree to use the word to mean something definite, whether good or bad.
We shall take jealousy as a ”bad” word, and use it to mean the setting up, by a man or woman, of some claim to the love of another person, which claim cannot be justified in the court of reason and fair play.