Part 7 (2/2)
Yes, but with what nature? No thinker, from Socrates to Kant, from Buddha to Hegel, ever had a doubt but that man's nature was twofold, and that the law of reason must be supreme in him. Let an animal live for sense; it is its nature; but for man another law is ordained, which bids him think last of enjoyment, and to partake only of that in obedience to the law of the mind. The modern evangel of the apotheosis of the unstable we understand to convey the teaching, ”Live in accordance with sense, or the feeling of the moment”. Be like the _dame du monde_ whom Mrs. Ward has so accurately drawn in _Madame de Netteville_, who did not hold herself responsible to our petty codes, and judged that feeling was guidance enough for her. That may be all very well for Madame de Netteville, but how does such teaching look in the light of Kant's solemn injunction: ”Act so that thy conduct may become a law unto all men”? Could any one seriously propose to erect feeling into a supreme criterion whereby to judge of the conduct of life?
And, to show that the line of argument here adopted is no mere false asceticism surviving from an undisciplined and pre-scientific age, as the solemn verbiage of so much second-rate talking expresses it to-day, we may quote some words of David Hume, Huxley's ”prince of agnostics,”
from the _Essay on Polygamy and Divorce_. The least emotional of philosophers--a hard-headed Scotsman--he makes short work of the sentimentality which is invoked now-a-days against the natural law of marriage:--
”We need not be afraid of drawing the marriage knot . . . the closest possible. The unity between the persons, where it is solid and sincere, will rather gain by it; and where it is wavering and uncertain that is the best method for fixing it. How many frivolous quarrels and disgusts are there, which people of common prudence endeavour to forget, when they lie under the necessity of pa.s.sing their lives together; but which would soon be inflamed into the most deadly hatred, were they pursued to the utmost under the prospect of an easy separation! We must consider that nothing is more dangerous than to unite two persons so closely in all their interests and concerns, as man and wife, without rendering the union entire and total. The least possibility of a separate interest must be the source of endless quarrels and suspicions. The wife, not secure of her establishment, will still be driving some separate end or project; and the husband's selfishness, being accompanied by no power, may be still more dangerous.” Thus our conception of marriage as a nature sacrament, a permanent contract in Nature's original intention, is abundantly confirmed by the sceptical philosopher of the eighteenth century.
Whatever man may make of the contract, there stands the fact that that Nature meant it to be enduring which whispered into the lover's heart that ”love should be for evermore”.
It is a far cry from the abstractions of philosophy to the realisms of French fiction, but we could not better conclude this portion of our subject than by citing one single sentence from Balzac, in the judgment of many the first romancer of this century, and one of the greatest masters of the social sciences. ”Nothing,” he declares, ”more conclusively proves the necessity of indissoluble marriage than the instability of pa.s.sion.”
But here our difficulties begin. Though it may be abundantly clear that Nature's ideal is Hume's and Balzac's, is it not a fact that this ”high has proved too high, this heroic for earth too hard”? Is it not true that there are murmurs and mutterings of revolt both amongst men and women against a burden too grievous to be borne? Does not the fiction of the day represent a tendency to allow an increased laxity in the interpretation of the matrimonial contract? And where there is smoke there is fire. What novelists write other people are thinking.
Has the time come to reconsider our position with regard to marriage and the permanent obligations. .h.i.therto a.s.sociated with it?
We answer decisively, No. It is not the inst.i.tution which is at fault, but the individuals who embrace it. We spoke of marriage as Nature's great sacrament, and so it is. And as with ”the Lord's Supper” the unworthy partic.i.p.ant is said to ”eat and drink only condemnation to himself,” so is it with they who draw near to Nature's banquet and attempt, unprepared, to partake of the deepest joys of life. Their profanity smites them with a curse. We hold up our hands in no Pharisaic spirit of holy horror, but we ask the men and women of this generation and of those cla.s.ses from which these mutterings and threatenings of revolt mainly emanate--we ask them, whether marriage, as they understand the term, can be other than a bloodless martyrdom?
If that individual who gave her name to a novel two or three seasons ago, if the young woman known as _Dodo_ be a type--and it was noted by the critics of the time that such was the character of the fas.h.i.+onable young _mondaine_ of the day, greedy for nothing but excitement and sensuous existence, incapable of serious thought, rebellious against, I will not say the restraints, but even the _convenances_ of civilised life, with no pretension to anything remotely resembling character or moral earnestness, a wild, gay, frittering, helpless creature, whom it were blasphemy to think of in the same day with n.o.ble womanhood as we all have known it--if _that_, I say, is the type of the young _mondaine_ of the hour, then I have no doubt they will give the novelists and playwrights plenty of employment in describing their self-imposed torments, the insufferable bondage to which they are subjected. But does any one propose to alter the moral law for them?
If mothers in modern Babylon are ready to labour day and night in attempting to catch as husbands for their daughters men in whom one and one only qualification is asked, namely, that of wealth, then their perdition be upon their own heads and on those of the luckless pair who are literally speaking ”crucified on a cross of gold”. If girls continue to be brought up with the preposterous notion that marriage is the one profession open to them, and that therefore they are by no means to risk the loss of an ”engagement,” no matter who the employer may be, and that the wealthier he is the more suitable he is to be adjudged, then let us abandon all attempts at reaching our ideal. But let us at the same time prepare for the overthrow of the home and the family; for the destruction of ”pure religion breathing household laws,” and of the stately, dignified, domestic life, which has been the glory of every land where Nature's true ideal has been worthily upheld.
If boys are brought up at school, or taught by the social atmosphere they breathe on first entering into early manhood, to conceive of marriage as in no wise n.o.bler or loftier in essence than any of those _mariages apres la nature_, those ephemeral a.s.sociations, terminable at will; that the only difference between them is, that the one is legal and permanent, the other voluntary and dissoluble, then so long will the scandals of divorce and the revolt against marriage continue to be heard. What one complains of is the utter lack of reverence in the view which is taken of this most solemn of all acts. There is no idealism in the contract. The thoughtless youth who has grown up in what one may call the ”wild oats” theory is, we suggest, utterly incapable of appreciating the absolutely inestimable blessings which wedded love might have brought him. How can he? He has ”wasted his substance, living riotously,” and the most precious of all the treasures he has squandered is that of his idealism. _His wife can scarcely be to him what she might have been had he come to her as he expected her to come to him_. ”The golden gates are closed,” ”a glory has pa.s.sed from the earth”. This is pain enough to make hearts weep, but it is the operation of that inflexible law of Compensation, that not all the tears of sorrow, not all the absolutions and sacrificial atonements of Churches, can undo that past, can make that young man to be as in the days of his youth, before the experimental ”knowledge of good and evil” touched him.
Our remedy is, therefore, not to destroy the inst.i.tution of Nature, but to reform the candidates who undertake to embrace it. An ethical religion would reprobate the sacrilegious bargains in which bodies are exchanged for gold, and refuse to accord them the honorific t.i.tle of marriage, which is first and foremost a union of souls. Time and again have we seen that the springs of all things are in the invisible world, from the breath of a flower to the energy that pulsates in the great bosom of the ocean, or governs the movements of the uttermost star. It is so here. Not the transference of bodies, of t.i.tles, of wealth or station, are the sacrament. They are merely the accessories, the outward form, the symbol of something higher and Diviner far, of the invisible love, which is everywhere, yet manifests itself in especial manner in these two souls, speaking even in their very countenances of an emotion supreme and irresistible. An ethical religion, wholly based upon and identified with morality, would refuse to sanction any marriage but that we have described, a union based upon a supreme affection between two who had worthily prepared themselves for its consummation, and believed in the permanence of their tie.
With regard to the modern maiden--the _Dodos_ and their kindred swains--it would be infinitely preferable that they did not degrade the sanct.i.ty of a natural sacrament by profanely prost.i.tuting it to their temporal and social convenience. Far better that they betook themselves to ”the marriage after the truth of nature” than to the great human inst.i.tution of which Milton sang:--
Hail, wedded love, mysterious law, True source of human offspring!
They do but defile it by their patronage, and having manifestly spoiled themselves by their reckless lives for the entertainment of any emotion deeper than mere sensuousness, they are bound at length to bring a n.o.ble inst.i.tution into contempt, and drag it down in their own fall.
You do not believe, we would say to them, in the eternity of soul and love, and therefore the nature sacrament is not for you. But having presented yourselves at its sacred table, and partaken of its rites, do not, if only for motives of mere decency, betake yourselves to the denunciation of that of which, indeed, you were never worthy.
Week by week, at the services of the ethical Church, we see numbers of young men who doubtless aspire one day to share in the benediction which a true marriage alone can bring them. Their presence is welcome as a testimony to the virility and inspiration of the ethic creed which is strong enough to prevail over other inducements which would take them far afield. It shows that spirit overcomes the flesh, and that the culture of the mind is not postponed to the relaxation and enjoyment of the body.
What the ethical religion says to all such as they is this: Live so as to be worthy of that which you one day hope to receive at Nature's hands--a pure, good and true wife. Somewhere, in some corner of this earth, unknown to you, unknown to her, she is being made ready for the hour of your espousals. You will know her when you see her. Wait until you do. Remember the requisite preparation of the body, and now forget not the preparation of the mind.
Marriage is based on friends.h.i.+p, that true kinsman of love, which made a poet call his friend ”O thou half of my own soul!” [2] Your wife must be your friend. True love, the love of which true marriages are made, is friends.h.i.+p transfigured--the halo, the glory, of a supreme emotion coming to crown that which is most enduring on this earth.
Just as we say that our religion is morality, is duty, only etherealised by viewing it as the expressed mind and will of the Soul of all souls, the World-intelligence, so do we think of marriage as based on a union of souls by friends.h.i.+p, inspired by a deep mutual respect, not for what the partners have, but for what they are, and finally made glorious in the light of an unfading love. Live, we would counsel you, so as to be worthy one day of the reverence of a woman's pure and untried soul.
And our message to womanhood is not dissimilar. Live, we would say, so that you be worthy of the respect, of the homage of all men. Your nature is such that virtue in you has a double charm, wherefore you are visibly marked out as the treasury wherein the ideal is enshrined and handed down through all the generations of men.
A nation is, ethically speaking, worth just what its women are worth, and we must therefore rejoice, and greatly rejoice, to know that the contention which is being increasingly put forth by women, that the men who demand their sisters' hands should themselves be arrayed in suitable wedding garment, is convincing evidence of a strong ethical enthusiasm which is beginning to pervade the s.e.x, and a determination to enn.o.ble more and more that one great sacramental ordinance of Nature, marriage.
All things transitory But as symbols are sent; Earth's insufficiency grows to event; The indescribable, Here it is done, _The ever-womanly leadeth us_ _Upward and on._ --GOETHE.
[1] Pp. 431-443.
[2] ”Dimidium animae meae” (Horace).
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