In three months' time the volume was ready for publication. It was a collection of stories of matrimonial life with an introduction in which I voiced a great number of disagreeable home-truths.
"Woman," I contended, "is not a slave, for she and her children are supported by her husband's work. She is not oppressed, for nature has ordained that she should live under the protection of the man while she fulfills her mission in life as mother. Woman is not man's intellectual equal; the man, on the other hand, cannot bear children. She is not an essential factor in the great work of civilisation; this is man's domain, for he is better fitted to grapple with spiritual problems than she is. Evolution teaches us that the greater the difference between the sexes, the stronger and more fit will be the resulting offspring. Consequently the aping of the masculine, the equality of the sexes, means retrogression, and is utter folly, the last dream of romantic and idealistic socialism.
"Woman, man's necessary complement, the spiritual creation of man, has no right to the privileges of her husband, for she can only be called 'the other half of humanity' by virtue of her numbers, proportionally she is merely the sixth part of a sixth. She should not, therefore, invade the labour market as long as it falls to the lot of the man to provide for his wife and family. And the fact should not be lost sight of that every time a woman wrests an appointment from a man, there is one more old maid or prostitute."
The fury of the feminists, and the formidable party which they formed, may easily be imagined when one realises that they demanded the confiscation of my book and brought a lawsuit against me.
But despite their attempt to represent my attack as an offence against religion (the folly of the unsexed actually aspired to raise their cause to the dignity of a religion), they were not clever enough to win their case.
Marie obstinately opposed my intention to go to Sweden unaccompanied by her; to take my family with me was out of the question on account of my limited means. Secretly she was afraid that I might escape from her strict guardianship and, worse still, that my appearance in court, before the public, would give the lie to the rumours concerning my mental condition which she had so sedulously disseminated.
She pleaded illness, without, however, being able to make a definite statement as to the nature of her illness, and kept her bed. Nevertheless I decided to appear personally in court, and left for Sweden.
The letters which I wrote to her during the following six weeks, while I was threatened with two years' penal servitude, were full of love, love rekindled by our separation. My overwrought brain cast a glamour over her fragile form, wove a resplendent halo round her sweet face; restraint and longing clothed her with the white garments of the guardian angel. Everything that was base, ugly, evil, disappeared; the madonna of my first love-dream reappeared. I went so far as to admit to an old friend, a journalist, "that the influence of a good woman had made me more humble and pure-minded." Probably this confession made the round of the papers of the United Kingdoms.
Did the unfaithful wife laugh when she read it?
The public got its money's worth, at any rate.