Finally: if absolutely happiness be held to lie largely in the unlimited control of a man over himself, and in the absolute right to do at every moment exactly that which is good in his own eyes, without being questioned or opposed, then the owner of an African farm is among the happiest of human creatures. The limited monarch is hedged round on every side by the conditions under which he is allowed to reign; the despot, whether he rules over a savage tribe or is Czar of all the Russias, has ultimately to consider at every moment whether he may not outrage the most subservient of his creatures so far that they may depose him, while for the ordinary citizen, in the conventional civilized society, life is so walled about with trivial Thou-shalts and Thou-shalt-nots, that for some of us it almost ceases to be worth living; but the owner of a solitary African farm reigns over land, bird, beast, and man as far as his eye reaches; as a small god, without opposition and without fear. Alexander Selkirk on his island was not more absolute than he. And if we except the eagle when she builds her eyrie on the inaccessible peak of a mountain, and dwells there alone with her mate and young, no intelligent thing drinks more deeply out of the cup of personal freedom or reigns so dominant in its own sphere.
CHAPTER V
THE BOER WOMAN AND THE MODERN WOMAN'S QUESTION
Even in matters of sex and the inter-relations of the sexes, which form the very core of human life, the Boer's primitive condition is not without its vast advantages.[57]
One who goes among these people expecting to find their sex relationships and their feeling with regard to sexual phenomena highly complex and poetical, will be disappointed. The æsthetic and intellectual transfiguration of sexual instinct is the result of a long course of intellectual evolution; and in the race or the individual it, perhaps, more certainly than anything else, indicates the height of development which the man or the society has reached, and the width of the chasm which divides it from the primitive conditions of life. It would be as rational to go into the woods and search on the wild rose-stems for a Maréchal Niel or a Queen of Roses, with their wealth of petals and perfume, as to go into a primitive up-country farmhouse expecting to find the woman's heart humming "Portuguese Sonnets" to her husband; or the man who, having lost his first wife, looks forward through the rest of life to the death which shall at last allow him to sleep beside her, and who shall have found every act of life sanctified by the remembrance of a close intellectual fellowship. These things are an efflorescence which can only appear on the branches very high on the tree of life; perhaps possible only to the philosopher or poet, or to those who are potentially such; and to look in any simple pastoral or agricultural people for the intense and individualized affection which is possible alone to the man or woman in whom the mental functions entirely predominate over the physical, is a delusion.
The young Boer, when at sixteen or eighteen he passes from childhood to manhood, looks about him for a female companion. "I am courting three," he may say, "and I am not yet sure which I shall take. So-and-so has the most stock, but she is very plain; so-and-so is pretty and white, but my mother does not like her; so I suppose I shall take so-and-so." Nor is there sometimes more intensity of individualized feeling expressed on the part of the woman. "Will you come to my wedding? I am going to be married in two months' time," a maiden may say. And when it is inquired to whom, she replies that there are several youths courting her, and she intends to decide within the next three or four weeks which she shall have, and has the material for the wedding dress already in her box.
Nor even after marriage is there sometimes more individualized intensity of feeling. Persons who have lived together with apparent satisfaction and contentment for ten or twenty years will not have lost their partners for three weeks before they are courting or being courted; and it is an understood thing immediately on the death of one spouse, the survivor shall as a rule look for another. Marriages after thirteen weeks of widowhood or widowership are not uncommon. "If it please the Lord to take him first," a very happily married wife once said, looking across the room at her conjugal companion, "I shall choose the man the likest him that I can get. I don't believe any woman ever had a better husband."
You may inquire at a farmhouse, at which you called a month before, after the house-mother who then sat in her elbow-chair. The husband with deep sorrow may tell you she is dead, and describe her death, then adds, brightening up, "But the week after next I am going to be married again to so-and-so, the daughter of so-and-so"; and he looks to you for congratulation.
"I am sick of all this talk of choosing and choosing," says the old-fashioned mother, whose children may have imbibed somewhat of the modern attitude on the subject. "If a man is healthy and does not drink, and has a good little handful of stock and good temper, and is a good Christian, what great difference can it make to a woman which man she takes? There is not so much difference between one man and another." Nor from her own standpoint is she wholly mistaken.
What the young man desires in a wife is a female companion who will bear his children, suckle them, attend to the servants, and make his moleskin clothing for him, and who will always be sitting in the chair opposite when he comes into the house, and be ready to pour out his coffee for him until his daughter is old enough; and who will save him from that feeling of weary solitude he would be oppressed by if he sat in the farmhouse quite alone; further, who will, if possible, bring as much to the common housekeeping in the way of sheep, cattle, and household goods as he himself brings; and, finally, be able to advise him over all matters of domestic economy and external business. Of the girls in the district many would probably be able to fulfil these obligations equally well. Out of the hundred girls in the countryside, eighty would make him almost equally happy, and the remaining twenty would only be unsuitable through some serious defect in health, or temper, or intelligence. Nor are the woman's needs in the direction of sex companionship very different. She requires a man to look after the common stock; to give her children; and if he do not drink (and he very seldom does), and so spend the household money when he goes to sell the wool; if he never buys or sells without asking her advice, and is not ill-tempered but affectionately inclined, all that which she most craves in a sexual partner is granted her. That essentially modern condition of mind, in which an individual remains sexually solitary and unmated because no other is found who satisfies the complex intellectual and emotional needs of a nature in which these needs are as imperative as the physical, and in which union with an individual not singled out by an almost immeasurable sympathy from the rest of their sex would be morally abhorrent, and union with such beloved individuality is regarded as the crowning good of existence—this is a condition of mind unintelligible to the primitive Boer.