The English world is almost comic in the light of its most cherished illusions. It does not base its outlook upon the unalterable laws of life, consequently it is constantly receiving the rudest shocks and the most unpleasant surprises. The fact that so many thousands of women in England and Wales were unfaithful to their husbands during the war came as a shock to the dear Puritanical and ignorant old ladies, chiefly unmarried, that rule public opinion in England.
Had they ever dreamt, or had they ever been told, that the best women, the most desirable women, must be unfaithful to their husbands when, through what cause soever, the latter are forcing them to be unfaithful to Life itself, they might have shown less righteous indignation and more understanding when the women of the country in their legions turned adulteresses in war-time.
As it was, the phenomenon was quite unexpected, and proved a most terrible blow to the national conscience. For it was realized only too shrewdly that if thousands of these women were ultimately found out, many more thousands must have escaped the discovery; and thus the character of the nation seemed to have suffered very severe deterioration.
Truth to tell, the parties to blame were not the women at all, but the hopelessly vain men who were the co-respondents in the actions, and who understood so little of female psychology that they interpreted these adulteresses’ fidelity to Life and its multiplication, as a preference, if you please, for themselves before their legal spouses. Not knowing of the positive woman’s inveterate fidelity to Life, they arrogantly imagined that their personal and irresistible attractions were the cause of these adulteresses’ infidelity to their husbands.
They—these men—were the people against whom the world ought to have inveighed; for the man who is capable of so misunderstanding the human female as to flatter himself that it is his personal attractions that are seducing her, when all the time it is the Will of the Species, neglected by her absent husband, that is impelling her to go in search of fertilization elsewhere, is not worth the rope with which he ought to be hanged.
The mistake, as a mistake, is all the more monstrous, seeing that it is the outcome of maniacal vanity. For no man who was not too much elated by a woman’s attention to retain calm reflection, could ever be such a fool as to imagine that his triumph over her husband was due to his own personal charm.
There is no need, however, to labour the question any longer, if once the true nature of woman be properly grasped; for then it is seen immediately that, in the best and most vital women, fidelity to Life must take precedence of fidelity to the mate, to a pledge, to an oath, to a vow, to a custom, or to anything else.[81]
Would the reader perhaps have it otherwise? Would he have a race of women reared (we are unfortunately not so very far from the attainment of this ideal to-day) to whom the claims of Life are secondary—women, that is to say, who are so constituted that they could hesitate between Life’s call and some trumpery human convention? Would he have women so constituted that their self-preservative instinct is more powerful than their reproductive? Because that is what it amounts to. A woman who, when confronted by Life’s call, can calmly discriminate between that and her own safety, her own future, her own smug ease, and can proceed to select the latter in preference to the former, is not a desirable woman in the best sense, for she cannot be trusted to do the right thing for the species in all circumstances. The spark of vitality in her does not glow with sufficient ardour to compel her to serve Life’s interests before her own. She is the kind of woman that is rapidly coming into power in all classes above the working class, but hers is a bad character, not a good character, for a woman to possess.
No, we want to keep the best women as they are. We do not want to tame the life out of them. But since we cannot have it both ways, if we insist on women remaining desirable—that is to say, faithful primarily to Life itself, we must breed a race of men who understand them, and who in the absence of their fellows on wars or expeditions can see what is happening when young wives “make eyes at them.” Any man who in such circumstances imagines he is irresistible and falls in with the woman’s designs through sheer vanity, deserves a punishment very much more severe than being mulcted in damages; he has qualified himself for some disciplinary correction which ought at least to include a term of hard labour. For it is not his understanding of woman alone that is at fault—although this in a full-grown man would be unpardonable enough—but his estimate of himself, which leads him to the gross presumption of imagining himself capable of conquering another man’s wife single-handed without the assistance of Life itself, pushing her violently into his arms the whole time.[82] Why, he might just as well flatter himself that a flea has bitten him, not because it was too hungry to wait, but because there was something exceptionally delicate or precious in the composition of his vile blood!
Thus adultery, when the wife is the defaulter, is always a case of a man betraying another man, and never that of a woman betraying her man. Woman, if she is the right sort, remains throughout faithful to Life. Only if she betrays Life does she cease to be desirable.