Miss America; pen and camera sketches of the American girl

by Alexander Black

One day when the Professor had called a bachelor a bird without feet, and I had retorted that an old maid was a bird without wings, the Professor remarked significantly: “the old maid at least settles better,” and we fell to talking of settling as a proposition. Between the predicament of a bird who cannot fly and that of a bird who cannot alight, there might not be much of a choice, though the Professor did her utmost to prove that the bird condemned to perpetual flitting was in the more pitiful situation. But it occurred to me as significant that the man should dread to lose the privilege of flight, and the woman the privilege of settling. I wondered if there was anything more in it than the accident of contention.

We had agreed with Tolstoi, that “nothing complicates the difficulties of life so much as a lack of harmony between married people”; we had agreed that much of complication arose from a lack of antecedent harmony as to the matrimonial proposition.

“Do you not think, Professor,” I asked, “that much of the trouble comes—that most of the trouble comes—from the simple error of forgetting that an institution cannot be better than those who represent or expound it? Is there not a tendency, a very old one, doubtless, to expect that marriage, in itself, will somehow, transmute the participants? Can marriage be more of a success than people, or less of a failure than people? Marriage is a bond, with a benediction, if you like; but it is not a translation. Surely we cannot take from marriage more than we carry to it—unless it might be the reasonable and natural interest on the combined capital.”

Seeing that I was entirely serious, the Professor said: “My feeling always has been that the chief reason for the want of success in marriage and the deterrent spectacle it so often has presented, is the tradition that any legerdemain of sentiment or ritual can make two people one. Understand me, I believe wholly in the ideal of a spiritual oneness. I have no quarrel with the Scriptures on that score. But we cannot walk the path toward a spiritual oneness with our eyes shut, by lying to ourselves. The interests of two people may be one in the highest sense, they may have one aim, if they are absolutely congenial they may have one wish; but nothing conceivable under the sky ever can make them more or less than two people. The other day some of us were debating whether we should say ‘seven-and-five is twelve’ or ‘seven and five are twelve.’ They called seven and five here a ‘singular concept’ and some were for is in consequence. But at least man and woman are. One and one do not make one, they make two. Indeed, after marriage, the two are more definitely two than they were before. Personal sacrifice proceeds in the order of intimacy. Society is built upon individual sacrifice. Friendship lives by concession, and the intimacy of marriage carries to the extreme point the idea of inter-personal compromise, the recognition of the personality of another. To expect two people to lose, without effort, by the mere fact of marriage, the individuality which they had before the compact, is as absurd as it would be to take two clocks and tie them together with a piece of pink string and expect them instantly to begin keeping absolutely the same time. What would you find in the case of the clocks? They might be mated clocks, and on opposite sides of the room might pass for two clocks keeping precisely the same time. But when you put them side by side you would discover, unless they were supernatural clocks, that they were running some seconds apart, and those few seconds would be as potent in visibly differentiating the clocks thus married as a full minute or more would be on opposite sides of the room. So that when two lovers, who have made elaborate concession to each other before marriage, anticipating each other’s desires, yielding to each other’s prejudices, proceed after marriage to throw the whole burden of preserving harmony upon some vaguely defined potentiality in the marriage relation itself, they certainly are tempting Providence into impatience. It is the lesson of sociology that man must pay something—yield something—for the companionship of the other man, and the closer you wish to be to the other man the more you must pay, the more you must yield. When it comes to the companionship of the man and the woman, and when the woman receives or demands equal rights and privileges, the need of concession is vastly complicated, for now the association is not only between two persons but between two sexes; there is both the individual equation and the sex equation.”

“Should you not be afraid, Professor, to take away this illusion? Should we not be striking a further blow at marriage if we withheld from those about to marry the hope, false though it be, that something beyond themselves is going to bestow its benediction upon marriage?”

“I cannot agree,” protested the Professor, “that any kind of ignorance can be a good thing in the end. Moreover, I think this false hope, after doing little good, does a vast deal of harm. The trouble comes when the two who are married, and who have looked for this magic, find it not, find that they still are two; and when they are three, the momentous equation must be carried forward.”

I suggested that probably there was no sex in the illusion, that the man and the woman were alike sentimental in the matter.

“Probably,” admitted the Professor; “but as woman suffers the more by it we are likely at times to think that her illusions must have been deeper. I think the American girl has fewer illusions than some others, and I think that somehow she is going to work out a higher plan than the world has had the luck to exploit hitherto.”

“Let us hope so,” I said fervently.