Negativeness being the outcome of an atonic condition of the body, or, at least, of the genital organs, and negative women being less likely to function properly than their more positive sisters, there will naturally arise a tendency, in all such matches (owing to the small amount of pleasure and gratification that is derived from the whole of the physical side of marriage and motherhood), to discount the physiological side, and to exalt only states of the soul and the mind. These people will have the old maids of all Puritanical communities with them when they cast scorn upon the pleasures of the body; and as their number is increasing daily, the chorus of body-despisers grows steadily louder and louder in all the countries enjoying Western Civilization.
The women in these matches are likely to confound motherhood with self-sacrifice and martyrdom, and their husbands to confound the birth of a child with the threat of financial ruin. Science, costly and inefficient science, helps them at every step, and when finally child-birth stops, which is never too soon (for the women in any case), and nurses and perambulators take their leave, science remains to the last to try to repair or neutralize the debility that unwelcome fertility has left behind.
In their most private moments the women of such matches speak of the “horrible sensuality” of men, and of the havoc this sensuality has made of their lives; and in thought and in action they incline to everything that emphasizes the soulful or spiritual side of life. They cultivate a taste for extremely soulful literature or poetry (Maeterlinck’s Serres Chaudes, for instance) and tend to gravitate towards those forms of Christianity that are most quintessential.
Divorce, if it is ever resorted to by such couples, is usually the fault of the husbands. They may at length manifest a desire to have a breath of air untainted by sickness or debility, and in that case usually become entangled with a woman quite as negative as their wife. The women hardly ever go further than to cultivate an apparently ardent but platonic attachment to some poet, musician, or other artist, to whom they write long soulful letters, full of hints about a non-physical kind of bliss in love, which they have longed all their lives to experience. But in a large majority of cases, negative couples of precisely this kind tend to finish their days more or less tiresomely together, each bewailing the fact that such a white elephant as the body ever became associated with the more “exalted” spiritual side of man.
In regard to (b) it can only be said that the type is so very prevalent that it is becoming almost the norm of modern civilization. Its principal characteristic is that both the male and the female tend to choose each other for reasons which are as remote as possible from the body. The men of this type choose “clever,” “artistic,” sylph-like, narrow-hipped “sweet” women, with thin slender hands, spiritual interests, and probably a history of some intestinal irregularity in their past. The women, while aspiring to a high ideal of health and manliness in their mates, have not the instinct to pick out the passionate man, but usually select one, who though he may be big of body and limb, intellectual and “breezy,” is quite fireless, unpassionate and dull.
The couples belonging to this type can also endure childlessness or a cessation of child-birth with almost perfect equanimity; the man being very much more concerned about the figure he is cutting as a chivalrous, sporting mate, who observes the rules of “cricket” with his spouse, than about any other aspect of their married life. He studies with asinine perplexity the so-called inscrutable complexities of his wife’s mind, and is always making “allowances” and preaching the doctrine of give and take. His great charm, according to modern values, is the fact that he regards women as utterly incomprehensible. Women are so powerful nowadays in determining opinion, and have so often and so emphatically called the men who show some insight into women’s nature “prigs,” that at the present day both women and men unanimously call any man who voices penetrating views about woman, an out-and-out prig. In fact, in order to be a prig it is necessary to have shown some ability in analysing the true nature of woman.[97]
The women in such unions very frequently outstrip their male companions in mental nimbleness, and this disturbance of the proper balance frequently leads them, in their vague discontent, to become prominent exponents and defenders of all those claims of sex-equality and sex-levelling, which have agitated the home life of northern European countries (where most negative people are to be found) for the last hundred years. The spectacle of their lady-like and unobtrusive male, there can be no doubt, is usually the first incentive towards these kinds of activities, and, seeing that they have the constant substantiation of their claims in the tame animal with whom they cohabit, it is not surprising that they frequently enter into “Woman’s Cause” with a conviction and a fervour very much more intense than the more academic enthusiasm of the old maid who is usually their associate in the movement.
Indeed, it not infrequently happens that the “male” of these militant women is himself an active collaborator in his wife’s public work, and so complete is their intellectual and sentimental agreement on the question, that he will echo her words with the docility of a parrot.
The type (c) is also common enough and is growing more plentiful in all classes of society. It is the negative type which approximates most to the passionate, tragic type of real life and fiction; because, while it possesses no deep passions, its extreme vanity makes it capable of the wildest excesses.
In all the possible situations of married life, this type never consults any other arbiter than vanity, and it is only when its caution, cowardice or indolence can overpower its vanity that the latter does not decide the issue.