The root of family life is not mutual affection between man and woman, because that, alas!—whether it be founded on physical attraction or mental affinity—is subject to change. Age withers, and custom stales it: circumstance blights it, a diversity of spiritual growth rends it apart, and no man or woman can say with certainty that it will endure for a lifetime. But the fluctuations to which wedded love is subject are unknown to the self-abnegating instinct of parenthood. Mutual affection for the offspring will hold together the most opposite natures; it will rivet for all existence two lives that must otherwise inevitably spring asunder by instinctive repulsion.
Love of offspring is in man a cultivated emotion; in woman an instinct. There are women lacking the instinct as there are calves born with two heads, but for purposes of generalization these exceptions may be ignored. In many of the lower orders of life the female is obliged to protect the young from the enmity of the male parent. The alligator finds no meal so refreshing as a light lunch off his newly hatched children, and the male swine shares this epicurean taste for tender offspring. The stallion is a dangerous companion for the mare with colt at foot, though the colt be of his own get, and many species of male appear to experience a similar jealousy of the young while absorbing the attentions of the female. Speaking generally of the animal world, the young are obliged to look to the mother entirely for food and care during the period of helplessness. With savage man of the lower grade the paternal instinct is still faint and rudimentary, and even where the woman has, through long ages of endeavour, succeeded in cultivating in the heart of the other parent a fair imitation of her own affection, this affection, being a cultivated emotion and not an instinct, frequently breaks down under stress of misbehaviour or frowardness on the part of the child.
To this end, then,—that end "toward which the whole creation moves,"—to effect this result of an equal care and affection for the offspring, all the energies of women have been bent for ages.
She has fought polygamy with incessant hatred; not only for its injury to herself, but its constant menace to her children. The secret strings of the woman's heart are wrapped about the fruit of her own flesh, but the desire of the man is to the woman, and this desire she has used as a lever to work her will—not consciously, perhaps, not with reasoned forethought, but with the iron tenacity of blind instinct. Reasoned will may be baffled or deflected, but water can by no means be induced to run up hill; and so while woman has been apparently as fluidly yielding as water—to be led here and driven there according to the will of her master—she has stuck to her own ends with a silent persistency that has always tired out opposition at last. She has, like Charity, suffered all things, endured all things; she has been all things to all men. She has yielded all outward show of authority; she has submitted to be scoffed at as an inferior creation, to be sneered at for feebleness and shallow-mindedness, to be laughed at for chattering inconsequence, and to be regarded as a toy and trifle to amuse man's leisure hours, or as a dull drudge for his convenience, for ends are not achieved by talking about them. All the ages of masculine discussion of the Eternal Feminine show no reply from her, but to-day the world is a woman's world. Civilization has, under the unrelaxing pressure of endless generations of her persistent will, been bent to her ends. Polygamy is routed, and the errant fancy of the male tamed to yield itself to a single yoke. She has, "with bare and bloody feet, climbed the steep road of wide empire," but to-day she stands at the top—mistress of the world. Man, with his talents, his strength, and his selfishness, has been tamed to her hand. The sensual, dominant brute with whom she began what Max Nordau calls "the toilsome, slow ascent of the long curve leading up to civilization," stands beside her to-day, hat in hand, her lover—husband; tender, faithful, courteous, and indulgent.
This is the conquest that has been made, the crown and throne achieved by the silent, uneducated woman of the past.
Monogamous marriage is the foundation stone on which has been built her power; a power which, while it has endured to her own benefit, has not been exercised for selfish ends. She has raised the relation between man and herself from a mere contract of sensuality or convenience to a spiritual sacrament within whose limits the purest and most exalted of human emotions find play. For the coarse indulgence and bitter enmities of polygamy has been substituted the happiest of bonds, in which the higher natures find room for the subtlest and completest felicities, and within which the man, the woman, and the child form a holy trinity of mutual love and well-being.
To this jewel, so hardly won, so long toiled for, it would be natural to suppose that woman would cling with all the force of her nature; all the more as education broadened her capacity for reflection and deepened her consciousness of self. On the contrary, the little learning she has so far acquired seems, as usual, a dangerous thing, and with the development of self-consciousness the keen, unerring flair of her instinct for the one thing needful has been blunted and enfeebled. It is not necessary to give undue weight to the blatant and empty-headed crew who announce marriage to be a failure, and that women are tired of, and will no longer submit to, child-bearing. There are crowing hens in all barnyards, and their loud antics never materially affect the price of eggs.
But that the women of our own time should treat marriage—that hard-won, dear-bought triumph—with such profligate recklessness amazes me. We are making ducks and drakes of the treasure heaped up for us by our mothers. How long will this imperfectly monogamous animal respect an institution which is all for our benefit, if we ourselves regard it so lightly?
The modern woman is so spoiled, so indulged, that she does not realize how much a man gives and how little he gets in marriage. He gives a half, sometimes—indeed often—more than half, of his earnings, his name and its honour, his protection and defence of her person, and a lifelong responsibility for her and her children, and he gets—what? Her person, and it is to be hoped her affection. The woman of the present day lays too much stress upon this gift of her person. She appears to think that this gift alone renders man her eternal debtor. To speak a little brutally, he knows that he can easily buy a like gift elsewhere and for a less price.
I remember that last year Alice complained of some of Ned's small foibles.