Three Things

by Elinor Glyn

Secondly. It is admitted by great philosophers and deep thinkers that the welfare of the community is of more importance than the fluctuating desires of the individual.

Thirdly. A fine ideal, however impossible of attainment, is a force for good to be held up before the eyes of the mass of the people, who, however much actual education has advanced, are still too unendowed with personal brain to have any judgment themselves—their capacities only allowing them to see the effects of things upon their immediate surroundings without perceiving the causes, and therefore leaving them incapable of judging what could be good for the country, the race, or humanity in general.

After all these centuries, legal marriage still holds, because no one has been able to suggest any other union which could take its place without bringing chaos. And it seems more than likely that no one will ever be sufficiently inspired so to do! Thus let us now consider the present legal marriage as still being a stable fact, and see how we can make the best of it. In it there are two things which both man and woman forget—or refuse to face—and which are perhaps the chief causes of most unhappiness. Man forgets that his kind words of love and sympathy matter far more to the actual happiness of the woman than any of his deeds: because words fill and satisfy her imagination, which is active whenever she is alone; and kind deeds, with few or indifferent words, make very little impression upon it. Woman forgets—or will not face—the fact that man is by nature a polygamous animal. There is no use in arguing about this and saying he ought not to be, and that it is a horrible idea. It is a physiological fact, and to dispute it is to criticise the Almighty’s scheme for ensuring a continued population. That man should have polygamous instincts is essential for this scheme to work against any odds.

Whatever we choose to say in contradiction to this resolves itself into empty words, the fact of nature remaining. It would be just as sensible to try to argue that, because we do not like to drink sea water, it has no business to be salt! and to decide that it is not salt! and that we will not recognise that it is salt! The ocean would just laugh at us, and remain briny! And no doubt Nature laughs at silly woman too, when she tries to judge man without understanding the elementary principle of creation.

This being grasped clearly, it must be seen that monogamous marriage is an ideal state, not a natural state, and it must be admitted to be such, and lived up to as an ideal, not undertaken with the notion that fidelity in man is natural, and infidelity an unnatural thing. It is the other way about because of the fundamental instincts of man, which continuously and subconsciously suggest to him the necessity for self-preservation, and in its larger sense self-preservation means species-preservation.

Woman, on the other hand, although unconsciously inspired by this same fundamental instinct of species-preservation, is not naturally polygamous, or rather polyandrous, because such a state would militate against this end by eventually destroying pure offspring. She only becomes so under certain conditions. Fidelity, then, is, so to speak, a natural state for woman, and she has not to fight against any fundamental instinct of her sex in order to preserve it—she has only to resist perverted desire, which is an exotic growth, the outcome of civilisation. Thus fidelity is much harder for man, who, to succeed in being faithful, is obliged to dominate a natural instinct, which is a far more difficult thing to do than to fight against an exotic desire; because all natural things are governed by inexorable and eternal laws, and are not at the mercy of circumstance. Thus the natural instinct of man is at work all the time in continuous activity—and the exotic desire of woman is intermittent, and the result of circumstance.

Of course, all this has been said before by every serious thinker, and I am only reiterating these facts because the general readers may have forgotten them, and I must bring them to their recollection to make the rest of our discussion upon marriage clear.

These nature instincts being admitted, we can get on to a survey of legal marriage. At first, it must have been an affair of expediency. The woman was probably expected to be faithful, and brute force took care that she was so, or that she immediately paid the price of possible contamination of offspring by being killed. She was expected to be faithful for a natural reason, not for a spiritual or sentimental one; the reason being, as already inferred, to ensure the purity of the offspring. Man had no need to be faithful to one woman to secure this end, and never, in consequence, dreamed of being so.

All through Pagan times infidelity in man was rampant and recognised, and not looked upon as sin. And when woman became civilised enough to have exotic desires, she lost her natural instinct, that of preservation of pure offspring, and became liable to vagrant fancies and often a vicious creature.

Then the Church arrived and turned marriage into a sacrament; presumably with the noble intention of trying to elevate man and overcome his carnal nature. Man outwardly conformed, and, with his whole soul’s desire to be true and to uplift himself, each individual who really believed no doubt did war with his instincts, and numbers probably succeeded in conquering them. While woman, always a creature of more delicate nervous susceptibilities, flung herself with furore under the influences of spiritual things, and in the truly devout cases overcame her grafted desires and returned to natural instincts. But in beings of both sexes who were unconvinced by religion, infidelity continued to flourish, as it does even to this day. A man who truly believes that he is sinning in being unfaithful, and who understands that outside opinion is nothing in the soiling of his own soul, but that the matter is between himself and God, will always be faithful in body to a woman he has wedded, whether he cares for her or not. But a man who has not this conviction, and who does not live in this intimate relation to God, has no reason to hold him from indulging his natural instinct, except the fear of being found out, and when his sagacity has suggested safeguards against this, his instinct will certainly give itself expression. It is all a question of personal belief. There are numbers of good and honest characters who do not feel convinced that entire fidelity in man to one woman was intended by the Creator, and who therefore feel no degradation in the latitude they allow themselves. It is not for us to argue which are right and which are wrong, but to stick to the subject of marriage and how it can perhaps be made happier in these present days, when all other conditions of life are changing, by a better comprehension of fundamental instincts and laws of nature.