“See, beloved; all that is mine is thine. However much I give you, I shall always be your debtor, for you have given me your love.” All this is noble and grand, and every man who is conscious of the power of his own moral and physical manhood would wish to say so. But how many really can?
Exceedingly few; hardly any.
And then the young man who would seek to love in the way of the Lord is discouraged and renounces marriage, in which he only sees the door to misery or cowardice. He renounces it frankly and forever. Are celibates more honest, and how far does their honesty extend?
With the most honest, virtue extends to an unwillingness to betray the purity of the maiden, or the faithfulness of other men’s wives; extends or rather descends, to making the service of love a question of periodical hygiene regulated by the rubric of the calendar and by that most imperative one of the lunar month. Poor love, poor translation of the most epic poem of life! It is as though one were to translate Homer into some Australian dialect!
These bachelor hygienists are however a small minority. Others pretend to something more and better, and make love in the houses of others, and live by abject and cowardly seduction, and perhaps usury.
This is the most sordid and cancerous sore in our modern marriage; this is the gangrene of our society, which spreads an asphyxiating fetor of domestic treachery, of moral infection, which contaminates and infests everything. Woe to us if in every family the newly born could proclaim aloud the name of their father! How many false, living bills of exchange would be protested, what long faces amongst biologists who ingeniously study the law of heredity; what a terrible picture of treachery and dissembling! human and civilized society would appear all at once like a band of false coiners, and the woman’s womb nothing but a mint of false money.
But the newly born can only weep—the first salutation to life—and the wombs of women are silent, and continue their business of false coinage.
And yet I do not blame the woman more than the man, in this galley of treachery, this wide-spread and clandestine manufactory of bastards. If man assails the woman, and plots against her virtue, he avails himself of the rights of life. If society does not permit him to take a wife, why should he not share the bread of him who has too much to eat? Do not the workmen of Europe declare daily, that one of the first rights is that of work? And is not the right of loving perhaps more sacred; the work of works; that for which nature sacrifices the individual, and to which it consecrates the best of its energies? Husbands defend these rights, we attack them. If they are conquered—tant pis pour eux!
And the poor wives, why should they not brighten the ennui of the nuptial bed with some little love affair? Were they not bound forever to a man they had never loved, whom they had perhaps seen only once? Were they not sold by their parents, guardians, and matrons, like merchandise? Was not their dowry rated at the weight of a coat of arms? and have not they also the right to love? And all the others who have had the good fortune to love the man who has given them his name, and have thrown themselves into his arms, giving him their whole hearts, happy to be able to transform themselves in him and for him; who dreamt of making marriage a synonym of love, and who instead found the husband in a few months in the arms of an old love; have not all these women the right of vengeance? This is matrimony as it is daily represented in the many small theaters which we call men’s houses.
In these theaters, however (one must be just and not exaggerate), there are more farces played than comedies, more comedies than dramas. Tragedies are rare. For this high form of dramatic art heroes are required, and they are very scarce in modern society. We have made our houses, statues, pictures, and gardens smaller, and have been compelled to reduce our feelings also.