No truly positive woman, however—particularly if she has remained uninfected by modern brain-worship—ever takes any notice of a man’s spiritual gifts, provided that he be savoury, exuberant, and in a sound material position; and the very fact that she does not do so is a sign of the wise and penetrating vision of Life behind her. Men have to take spiritual gifts into consideration in their dealings with one another; it is essential that they should. They may be pardoned, therefore, if they all too frequently extend this habit to their relations with the other sex. But the woman who takes a man for his brains is a ninny, or else a poor deluded victim of the madness of the Age. All she wants, I repeat, is exuberance with savouriness and a sound position; and if brains enter into the bargain as well, they are usually accepted quite unsuspectingly by the really positive and sane woman as one of those incidental details concerning her husband which, like his number in gloves or his taste in ties, she bears in mind simply as part of his general identity. Truth to tell, however, most women are saved from the mistake of marrying brains alone, owing to the readiness which most of them show to impute brains to the dullest male, provided he pleases them.
This explains why so many wives of gifted men have loved and eloped with males infinitely inferior to their husbands where brains were concerned; it also explains why so many wives of gifted men, who have been faithful, have been bitterly unhappy in their fidelity.
Where the artist is concerned perhaps we might make an exception, because the artist’s peculiar gifts are so frequently allied with an exceptionally exuberant sexuality. One German writer has suggested that the creative power itself is the outcome of an excess of absorbed semen in the blood. But even the artist’s mental gifts, though correlated with a quality that is frequently irresistible to women, are an unsound reason for a girl’s mating with him. All women should remember that artists cannot marry them without committing adultery. For, if Woman is wed to Life before she marries, the artist is certainly wed to his particular muse.
All this the positive girl knows more or less instinctively, because Life in her knows every word of it. It is only when she has become infected with the stupid modern worship of brains that her conscious bias sometimes overrides her better bodily feelings.
But to return to our positive couple—the condition of mutual attraction in which they now find themselves is one of tremendous fascination, because it constitutes an enhancement of the feeling of power, and a deepening of the feeling of surrender. So intense is this feeling of power and of slavery at the same time, so exquisite is the scale of emotions that run from the bottom note of absolute subjection to a human being to the top note of supreme sovereignty over a human being—so that the girl bids and her bidding is done, and the man bids and his bidding is done—that it is probably the richest experience, as spiritual sensations go, that anyone can have. While it is being undergone the self-preservative instinct of both parties is entirely suspended. The male’s must be in any case, because no male throughout the animal kingdom can approach sex without making a substantial sacrifice in self-preservation. He cannot join the stream of Life without paying it tribute, and this to begin with is hostile to his self-preservative instinct inasmuch as it reduces his surviving power for the time being. But there is this fact in addition: his social instinct cannot face the responsibilities of a wife and her offspring unless his self-preservative instinct is prepared to make a good many reluctant concessions.
The woman, too, readily sacrifices all her self-preservative instinct to her first-husband Life, and to her second husband, her lover. In fact, to speak with levity, but with some profound truth as well, in every respectable love-marriage, the legal husband is the dupe or breadwinning agent who keeps the girl while she does her first mate—Life’s business.
Child-birth is not always successful even in the most healthy communities, and a woman’s reproductive instinct often has to clap its hand on the mouth of her self-preservative instinct before she can consent to having a second child.
With the self-preservative instincts both of the man and the girl in abeyance, then, we have what is always a dramatic situation. We have a situation in which neither the man nor the girl cares what happens provided that each can get the other. Pain, hardship, parental hostility, parental injustice, privation, dangers of all kinds, fire, water, exile—all these things, even to Death itself, will be faced with determination by the positive couple who are waiting only to be united, if only they help a step forward, or put an end for ever to all doubt and misgivings.
How often in the history of our race have not a chaste and positive couple, kept apart by unfavourable circumstances and in the midst of appalling difficulties, whispered to each other passionately: “One long embrace from you and I should be content to die!” This shows that the self-preservative instinct is as good as dead in such cases. Dead in the woman, because when her reproductive instinct is “meaning business,” nothing else can live beside it; and dead in the man, because (1) he knows that love and his girl expect him to be determined and unrelenting in his worship and his desire, and (2) because his very positiveness itself makes him set the multiplication of Life higher than his own existence for the time being.
Moreover, when the girl and the man insist upon an attitude of complete and unreserved “unselfishness” in each other, they are simply betraying the fact that they expect the self-preservative instinct in each other to be for the time being in a state of suspended animation. This is a proof of what they understand by love. As a matter of fact, it is a proof only of the circumstance that the reproductive instinct is expected for the moment to become all-powerful or to suppress every other feeling.