MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE

“Whom does not love rule? And where is he not Lord?”

Epiphanes Soter.

“There is no advisable love unless it is as reverent as it is romantic, as permanent as it is passionate.”

George M. Gould.

“Faithful monogamy must ever be woman’s standard in love, because only in its still certainty can she fitly prepare and keep the place for her child.”

Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale.

“Too many have forgotten that love is as much a subject of the law of evolution or progressive development as any other biologic thing.”

Haeckel.

N. B. The attached six questions, to which I have appended answers, were once submitted to me by an American publication for comment or solution! At the time I was unable to make an intelligible reply, but having since given the matter thought I have answered them, largely for my own satisfaction. They are submitted with no faith in any possible fixed solution but merely as meat for passing discussion.

I

Why is it, when there are so many evidences in favor of marriage as we practice it, that so many marriages fall short of just the purpose they seem meant to serve?

In the first place, are there so many evidences in favor of marriage as we practice it? In part the question contains its own answer when it states that so many marriages fall short of just the purpose they seem meant to serve. Statistics for marriage and divorce show that one out of every seven marriages ends in the divorce court. For every one thus openly disrupted, how many others are restrained or concealed for reasons of religion, morality, children, society and business policy or permitted license? Many a couple agree to go their ways separately, doing as they please and shielding each other in their privileges. Others drift into a quarrelsome or unhappy state from sheer inertia or lack of means or charm or courage to establish or create a new condition. Millions sink in the slough of despond because they have not strength of any kind. Age, poverty, thickness of wit does for them completely.

Now there is no need, and should be no desire, to evade the biologic necessity implied by marriage. Children must be brought into the world and reared if life is to go on. All the why-fors of this are given in a thousand biologic and anthropologic volumes, and so no need to discuss them here. But this much may be said, that among animals the limits of the control of the maternal feeling or instinct are rigidly confined to simple necessity. Love seems to disappear as soon as the young can possibly walk or fly and get their food—proof of its mechanistic or chemic quality and origin and its lack of any sacrosanct and “for eternity” spiritual character. Indeed, under most phases of animal life the father is absolutely indifferent to the fate of his offspring. In many, perhaps most, animals he seems to care no more for his children than if they were moving bushes. Certainly he cares no more for his own than for those of another, and the idea of any love toward grandchildren is absurd. Not even the mother shows this.

But it is of the greatest interest to note that with the appearance of humanity and its ideas of home and property (both products of maternal instinct or the chemic necessity in her for the care of her young) there has arisen a natural extension of the scope and control of the family instinct, so that the interest of the parents continues into or through adult life. Support and protection of the mother continues beyond the child-bearing period, grandchildren are beloved, more distant relatives are held within the family affection, and the patriarchal type of society is established. Since the higher ideals of society and civilization have been permitted to arise the ægis of love has extended over the nation, and patriotism, with its great influence in war and history, has appeared. Finally that highest development of humanity, ethics or love of humanity, has arisen (still an actual outgrowth and extension of maternal instinct or love apparently), as well as the theory of the existence of a Divine Father-Mother of humanity and of all life.

Yes, since the period of the law and the influence of Rome and the idea of love, the practice of it by enduring families has become rapidly more complex. To the force of sex compulsion and instinct, never omitted, have been added permanency, monogamy, home-keeping virtues, pedagogy, public health, civic and political honor, democracy and a thousand such compounds. Has it stood up well under them? Is the load too great? Our riotous divorce practices and statistics, as well as the so-called sex or prostitution problem, raises a sharp question. Does the average strong successful man confine himself to one woman? Has he ever? Does the exceptionally beautiful and dynamic woman confine herself to one man? Has she ever? Has not fear frightened the weak into a kind of rat-like dodging or a sniveling, quarreling, complaining compliance? It may be and no doubt is true that the so-called “building of the future,” contemplated by the mechanistic or biologic impulse, if by anything, cannot be based on sensuality entirely; but the retort may be that Nature never seems to desire or achieve a wholesale debauchery any more than she desires a cold and narrow monogamy—the religionists and ethic-mongers to the contrary notwithstanding. At best she strikes a balance, wishes apparently virtue opposed to debauchery, and vice versa, for ends of her own.

But to return. However mechanically and instinctively it may have started, Life has since developed the more or less gorgeous chemistry of love with which now, if never in the past, it is invested. Human beings are apparently capable of higher and more enduring synthetic and chemic affinities, and this to many has seemed to warrant the second thought wherewith this interview is prefaced. Yet, for all this higher development, the strain of practical life appears to be too much for it. Besides the compulsion imposed by the biologic process which draws two people together there is a process of self-evolution and variation which seems to conflict with the marriage tie. How subtle is that problem which is to keep two people, subject to internal and external chemical and physical changes, harmonious for the eternity for which they are supposed to be linked? Nothing short of this is the theory which the religionist propounds. The moralist, not bound by religious dogma, will make the bond for life only. The philosopher or chemist transmutes the bond into a problem and speculates on how many weeks, or months, or years, the unstable equation may endure.

In considering the validity of our ideas in regard to marriage we either accept the current religionistic or moralistic theory, or we do not. For those who do there is no problem: they must accept their chains and slavery, if so they find marriage to be, and make a virtue of their sufferings. For those who do not there is the agonizing problem of the need of an equation in the matter of change. Somewhere they must draw the line, or necessity, increasing age, the difficulty of living in a moving-van, will fix the line for them. Again, there is a limit to any individual’s capacity for change, however kaleidoscopic that may be. After all, any individual, male or female, however attractive, is but single in quantity, and the choice offered to either of a suitable helpmate or companion is not so very large. One may be forever lowering a hook into the water, but not all the fishes in the sea may take it even if they would. Solomon may have had three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines, but it can scarcely be said that he needed them or that they got much out of it; and while it is conceivable that a man or woman in swift kaleidoscopic search, and devoting him or herself strictly to the task in hand, might enjoy as many as a thousand or so of the opposite sex in the course of a lifetime, it can scarcely be considered valuable from the point of view of public policy and little less than difficult and, as it would seem to one at least, profitless from the point of view of the individual himself.

On the other hand there enters into the matter the very serious problem suggested by question IV, which I will include and touch on here for a moment only: “Are the children of any union better served by successive marriages than by a home where parents are held together, even though not by love but rather by a sense of duty to their children?” Obviously, Nature intended marriage for the reproduction and care of children, but I beg to call attention to the fact that Nature, or God, or the biologic process, or what you will, is no better planner or executor of any given theory or scheme it may have in mind than man himself. If this were not true there would be no physically imperfect men or women. The student of the pathology of sex, as well as of the sources of life itself, is confronted by a thousand variations from that happy norm on which the moralistic marriage must be based. Nature has not provided all its creatures with the capacity for a happy marriage. Plainly, it has cursed or endowed many of them with strange and horrible vices, with vast and self-torturing passions, with immeasurable longings and desires, which unfit them for the proper fulfillment of the monogamic conception of the perfect marriage, hence of the care of the ensuing children. What then is to be done? Who is to blame—Nature or man? And if Nature is to blame, or God, cannot we charge the presumed misery of the children up to Him also?

Personally, I am not prepared to admit that children are made miserable or destroyed by divorce and change. But granting that, certainly man is not to blame, for from the very beginning he has been crucified upon a rood which is not of his devising. He did not institute marriage; it was instituted for him, the biologic process having devised it long before he appeared apparently. I would gladly have all living creatures endowed with every capacity which would fit them for a peaceful and contented enjoyment of a moralistic life, if that were intended or important, but since in the vast and secret laboratory of Nature alone can man be properly outfitted for the adventure, and since, obviously, in many cases he is not, I submit that the matter of matrimony and the welfare of the ensuing children cannot be solved by talk and that Nature and its concomitants, change and divorce, must be permitted to take their free and unlimited way as they will. The great tides and forces of life which burst upon men and animals and change them do not always give notice that they are about to rise and change things. They rise in their great strength, and man, to his bewilderment, finds himself changing and changed. Hence I would say that the trouble with marriage is that in its extreme interpretation it conflicts with the law of change, or balance and equation, and hence suffers a severe and seemingly destructive defeat.

II

What would be the result were we generally to adopt Ellen Key’s conception of marriage: “Marriage is only moral when it grows from an inner necessity, and not from outward pressure?”

Very pleasant, I should say, if logic and ideal syllogism ruled in life. The trouble with this world is that no ideal, however eagerly pursued, is guaranteed a happy fruition. You may lay down your formula for happiness and say: “Thus and so being done all will be well,” but can you make human nature do anything according to any one finite individual theory? Man does not make or regulate Nature: Nature makes and regulates man, and She makes him any way She pleases—vile, lovely, strong, weak, simple, complex, and so on. There is no one theory that fits all climates or types of people. Life would be very dull if this were true.

But I presume by “inner necessity” Ellen Key means intense desire plus a marked affinity of two people for each other, and if the union is for only so long as this endures I should see no drawback to it whatever. I should say that humanity would be much better able to endure the stresses and difficulties of the world if they were all so happily mated, and indeed there might not be so many stresses and difficulties to endure. No doubt we all wish that this would come true, but not all people are motivated by either love or passion. They would not marry for love if they could but rather for social precedence, material luxuries and the like. They accept children as a somewhat unfortunate concomitant, and so you have the curious problem of whether this state and its results are good, bad or indifferent in so far as society is concerned. For my part I would paraphrase Christ’s idea and say: “Render unto Materiality the things that are Material, and to Love the things that are Love’s.” Then the world would remain just about as it is now.

III

Would a succession of unions, expressing different phases of true love, be of higher value to the individual soul and to the life of the race than one unbroken although loveless marriage?

My answer to this question, based on my own individual temperament, would be Yes, but I cannot help speculating as to the opinions of those whose temperaments are so cool or so unemotional that they can put social precedence, material comfort, or the general welfare of the state, as they see it, above affection or passion. Thousands of people are by temperament sacrificial, one might almost say masochistic. They never put themselves first, and that for the very simple reason that their emotions or desires do not compel them so to do. The religionist, the moralist and the fanatic, for reasons of order or material development, as he sees them, would and does look upon love and passion as a disturbing, unsatisfactory and almost unnecessary element in life. Passion is sin or weakness to him, and the individual who requires more than one union to express his emotional necessities is either a lunatic or a criminal. His first impulse is to drive him out of society, to lock him up and reform him by some iron system of training; failing this he will shun him and form little communities of his own into which the victims of emotion and passion must never venture save as thieves steal into a house at night. This last is well and as it should be no doubt in his special case, but on the other hand he is the type of man who is determined that there shall be no divorce for others very unlike himself, who would make wife-desertion a criminal offense of the first order and who would almost punish adultery with death if he could. He is a puritan soul. He does not see Nature in all Her subtle ramifications and climatic and chemic variations, and he helps to make that endless war between the so-called light and darkness of life—between sin and virtue—and these special phases of asceticism or temperamental coolness are the foundation of all religions apparently.

Such individuals would argue, for instance, that the child of a loveless marriage is as well off as a child of a marriage of any other kind, provided he is clothed and fed, washed and schooled and thoroughly inculcated with the belief that sex is a crime. The less love enters into the child’s life at any time the better, say they. Children will do better, make better men and women, and make more money, if they do not love too much. Thus stands the world, divided between the hot and the cold, the stern and the tender, the fools of passion and the fools of material order and well-being. Is the one better or wiser than the other? I do not know. You may pay your money and take your choice, for you cannot well serve passion and materiality at the same time. Personally I stand with the fools of love, because I think for all their follies and errors and Lear-like ends they are happier.

IV

If the answer is Yes, are the children better served by successive marriages than by a home where parents are held together if not by love by a sense of duty to their children?

I would not say that children are, in the main, better served by successive marriages due to changes of temperament, because I do not know, but I can truly say that I am fairly well satisfied, from my personal observation, that they are no worse served. In the first place the fate of the modern child is not nearly so much in the hands of individual parents as it is in those of the state, the public schools and their teachers, the newspapers and their editors, the judges of courts and public and private citizens generally; for the modern child can almost say to-day that the state is both my father and my mother and it will take care of me. When it can really say this we will be much better off, for we are all going to be happier. The extremes of misery in childhood are going to be done away with.

In the next place it is a part of my personal observation that children of warring or troubled homes, where they are made to endure them, are worse off than are those who have escaped through fracture and been thrown on their own resources or are assisted by the charity of the state, or relatives, or the citizens of the country generally, to say nothing of the love or obligation of one or both of the separated parents. There is a deal too much sentiment attaching to the home as such to-day, sentiment not justified by facts. All homes are not ideal rearing-places for children, by any means. Consider the vast factory communities everywhere, too easily forgotten by the comfortable intellectual classes, and again the slums. The homes in these are, if one were to pay strict attention to the moralist, as ideal rearing-places for children as any other; yet we know that life offers pits of horror as well as abodes of sweetness and light in the guise of the modern so-called home. Again, it should be remembered that the home was made for man, not man for the home, and when the home fails as a vehicle of comfort and aid it should be done away with. It is, after all, only wood or stone or plaster, an economic convenience at best. And, anyhow, where the heart is is home, though it be a bed under the open sky or in a new lodging-house every hour. And this generalization is not intended to exclude children either. The children of troubled warring homes live in a kind of hell of temperament from which they are glad enough to escape as they grow older, and from which they evolve the dream of building something better for themselves, for they realize the horror of the thing they have endured.

The basic reason for destroying many a home is that the children may not be injured. All life administers its sternest reprimands to those who abuse children. Life loves children. It really prefers them to their elders—the biologic process so does. There is a public obligation to them which we all acknowledge. But this is not to say that all parents should therefore be compelled to rear their children. It may well be that they are not fitted economically or mentally or otherwise so to do. Their whole duty is, or might well be, done when they support them properly. The state should do the rest, for, as I have just suggested, most people are not fit to rear their children; and I say this with the greatest respect for the human and very charming impulse which causes them to wish to. The intellectual standards of the average individual are not much; those of the state are in the main better and should and may be trusted to do better by the children than any of millions of parents.

V

Under what circumstance is divorce justifiable?

When there is inharmony, schism, and in consequence bitter contention. I recommend this question, first, to the religious dogmatists of all creeds; second, to the anarchists, socialists and economic thinkers generally. They represent purely individual, and to them justifiable, points of view. Hence the world’s collection of dogmatic and radical literature.

VI

What is the key to making marriage do its work in the world?

???? Unchanging love possibly, or an ingrowing and harmonious sense of duty. Without Napoleonic skill or tact, however, I fear me much even then, and so would end with——

P. S. To sum it all up I should like to advance another theory of mine in regard to the duality of sex. It is quite probable that in the beginning (biologically speaking) the sexual progenitor of the human race or of evoluted species contained in itself the full chemical content of what has since been evoluted into the so-called male and female. Such being the case its chemical responsiveness to the movements of the universe, chemical, physical, spiritual, or let us say emotional, and to its immediate surroundings, was complete in itself. It was not divided into two sexes and therefore not dependent on any alienated portion of itself for its chemical, spiritual, emotional or physical satiation. What happened to it individually and momentarily was all that could happen to it. It needed no complementary organism, no other half, to make its understanding of, its reaction to, life complete. That is not true to-day. Man (male or female) appears to be individual and complete, but it is an illusion. He is complete and separate as an organism in everything save his chemical responsiveness to the universe which requires his union, not merely physically but spiritually, with his sexual companion to be complete. Their union sexually, temperamentally, emotionally, intellectually and so on is required before a full measure of chemical responsiveness to life can be attained in either. It may seem otherwise in individual cases, but it is not so. Such being the case (and a world of biological data might be here introduced), you have the amazing spectacle of love which confounds all theories of life, which laughs at death, and, in its fullest expression, defies all human theory and understanding, acting as a new non-understandable thing, and letting in dreams, emotions, conditions from a deeper world than any we know and whereby this shadow called existence is resolved, modified, made over into something else so that it bears no resemblance to its former state. It becomes apparently what it well may be: a dream and an illusion of beauty or pain or delight, or all. Evolutionary progress seems to be based on this non-understandable, mysterious, idealistic reaction and contact which baffles the most searching suggestions and intuitions of the imagination and leaves us awed and dumb before the great classics of desire and passion.

But the great fact, not to be lost sight of, is that love, complete chemical responsiveness to the universe, is only attained in the reunion of the separated chemical constituents of the original asexual individual, and without love or this union there is no full chemical-spiritual responsiveness to the universe. Man does not soar emotionally into the empyrean except in love, and by “in love” I mean when stirred by the sex impulse which makes for mate-seeking and union. It does not follow that there need ever be physical satiation to complete this union. Spiritual pollination can spring from the merest accidental contact for a moment with a mate. But the fact remains that the greatest, most complete spiritual and physical responsiveness to the universe (which after all is a mere matter of chemical reaction) springs from this responsiveness, which springs from love, and as such our so-called love (desire, passionate chemical response, physical and spiritual) becomes the most significant fact in the universe as we now understand it. For what is the universe without intellectual perception on our part, the beholding of it with the eye, the perception of it with the senses, the responsiveness to it through the emotions?