Examples of this tendency to amorous licence have been furnished by the complications of War-"widows," who, on report of the death of soldier-husbands, remarried in unseemly haste—only to find the husband return. So too, by the widespread infidelity of wives to absent soldier-husbands. If the grave and moving circumstance of a husband facing death or mutilation in the trenches, for his country's defence, was not grave nor moving enough to keep his wife faithful to him, then we should congratulate ourselves upon a marriage-law which, by exacting penalties whereby such a wife suffers material damage, supplies the only argument likely to stiffen the morale of so light-minded and callous a creature.
Nothing less binding than a lifelong contract is coercive enough or is sufficiently chastening to bridle woman's native changefulness and curb her instinctive emotionalism. The realisation that there is no way out of a situation is her finest incentive to nobility. She bruises her impulses against the iron of circumstance, and the essences of her intrinsic Woman-soul distil in patience and in sweetness. Under the harrow of sacrifice, she feels herself martyred. And yet without the sense of martyrdom, as may be also without the conditions thereof, no true woman is ever wholly content that she is fulfilling her destiny.
Ellen Key writes of "all the impurity that the sexual life shuts up within the whited sepulchre of legal marriage." She falls here into the common error of assuming such evil to be restricted solely to the state of marriage. Whereas the higher interests, the duties and affections of the family life—purifying and inspiring influences lacking in unsanctioned unions—make inevitably for the uplifting of the relation. That some husbands and wives fall short of the pure intensity of passion possible to some others between whom love is the sole bond, is true, of course. But as are most other human developments, this is a matter of the character of individuals rather than of the terms of the bond uniting them. Certainly, high and tender passion is scarcely to be expected in a union for no better reason than that this is illicit.
VIII
Were life designed for happiness and pleasure merely, the case would be different. Were one life our sole portion, it might be different too. Having one life only, we might be justified in claiming for it the joy of the best love available. An unhappy or a less than happy marriage is only one, however, of the many expedients for the evolution of faculty.
If the evolution of the individual progresses by way of countless earth-existences strung upon a thread of spiritual continuity, one life is but a brief and single page of everybody's great Life-serial. That is, doubtless, why all feel their lot to be an episode merely—unexplained, and incomplete, rather than a finished story. And in our innumerable pages and innumerable episodes, we must resign ourselves to sundry matrimonial vicissitudes.
Says the author of The World-Soul, "The more function is specialised in either sex the less able either is to stand alone." This is argument for further and fuller specialisation of their respective functions, in both sexes, because so great is the happiness of fulfilling for that other his or her great need of us, and of being blessed by that other in our own need. But too, it raises the voluntary surrender of such happiness for honour's sake, for holiness' sake, for God's sake, or for children's sake, to the height of a renunciation which transfigures human life and character, and proportionally ennobles both.
That both man and woman should be entitled to divorce for infidelity, for incorrigible drunkenness, criminality or insanity on the part of the mate, would be just and reasonable clauses in the marriage-code. Because, apart from the unmerited cruelty and shame of such bondages, is the risk of entailing degenerate offspring. Otherwise, it appears that relaxation of the Divorce-Law would result in evils far worse than any it would remedy. And these evils would re-act inevitably far more cruelly—both temperamentally and materially—upon women and children than upon men.
The conjugal and the paternal instincts being traits the sex has acquired by long ages of developmental progress, for men to lose these would be as easy as the loss would be degenerative to themselves and to those others. Folly to suppose that having reached a certain stage of human character-building, we can, with impunity, kick away the foundations whereon our house of evolution has been raised; and on which it must rest for all time.
The irrevocability of the marriage-contract is woman's greatest security. Realisation of that sex-lawlessness which is an innate Male-trait—relic of the promiscuous and cursory nature of the primal male-instinct—should set us on guard against weakening, in the least degree, this covenant, which is the best among those privileges whereby man, in the teeth of his inherent instincts, has chivalrously protected woman and the family. In the teeth of these, he has applied his natural intelligent bent for Conformity in concrete affairs to the repression and regulation of his impulses by the institution of Marriage. And this—the apotheosis of masculine conformity to the exactions of Progress—is now menaced by the native Non-conformity of woman, exploited by Feminism.