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Like Shakespeare, I would be the last one to admit an impediment to the marriage of true minds. Unquestionably in this world in spite of endless liaisons, sex diversions, divorces, marital conflicts innumerable, the right people do occasionally find each other. There are true chemical-physical affinities, which remain so until death and dissolution undo their mysterious spell. Yet, on the other hand, I should say this is the rarest of events and if I should try to formulate the mystery of the marital trouble of this earth I should devote considerable percentages to: a—ungovernable passion not willed or able to be controlled by the individual; b—dull, thick-hided irresponsiveness which sees nothing in the emotional mood of another and knows no guiding impulse save self-interest and gluttony; c—fickleness of that unreasoning, unthinking character which is based on shallowness of soul and emotions—the pains resulting from such a state are negligible; d—diverging mental conceptions of life due to the hastened or retarded mental growth of one or the other of the high contracting parties; e—mistaken unions, wrong from the beginning, based on mistaken affections—cases where youth, inexperience, early ungovernable desire lead to a union based on sex and end, of course, in mental incompatibility; f—a hounding compulsion to seek for a high spiritual and intellectual ideal which almost no individual can realize for another and which yet may be realized in a lightning flash, out of a clear sky, as it were. In which case the last two will naturally forsake all others and cleave only the one to the other. Such is sex’s affection, mental and spiritual compatibility.
But in marriage, as in no other trade, profession, or contract, once a bargain is struck—a mistake made—society suggests that there is no solution save in death. You cannot back out. It is almost the only place where you cannot correct a mistake and start all over. Until death do us part! Think of that being written and accepted of a mistaken marriage! My answer is that death would better hurry up. If the history of human marriage indicates anything, it is that the conditions which make for the union of two individuals, male and female, are purely fortuitous, that marriages are not made in heaven but in life’s conditioning social laboratory, and that the marriage relation, as we understand it, is quite as much subject to modification and revision as anything else. Radical as it may seem, I predict a complete revision of the home standards as we know them. I would not be in the least surprised if the home, as we know it, were to disappear entirely. New, modifying conditions are daily manifesting themselves. Aside from easy divorce which is a mere safety valve and cannot safely (and probably will not) be dispensed with, there are other things which are steadily undermining the old home system as it has been practised. For instance, endless agencies which tend to influence, inspire, and direct the individual or child, entirely apart from the control and suggestion of parents, are now at work. In the rearing of the average child the influence of the average parent is steadily growing less. Intellectual, social, spiritual freedom are constantly being suggested to the individual, but not by the home. People are beginning to see that they have a right to seek and seek until they find that which is best suited to their intellectual, physical, spiritual development, home or no home. No mistake, however great, or disturbing in its consequences, it is beginning to be seen, should be irretrievable. The greater the mistake, really, the easier it should be to right it. Society must and is opening the prison doors of human misery, and old sorrows are walking out into the sunlight where they are being dispelled and forgotten. As sure as there are such things as mental processes, spiritual affinities, significant individualities and as sure as these things are increasing in force, volume, numbers, so sure, also, is it that the marriage state and the sex relation with which these things are so curiously and indissolubly involved will be modified, given greater scope, greater ease of adjustment, greater simplicity of initiation, greater freedom as to duration, greater kindliness as to termination. And the state will guarantee the right, privileges and immunities of the children to the entire satisfaction of the state, the parents, and the children. It cannot be otherwise.
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Mynheer J. joined us presently. He was rather spare, very waxy, very intellectual, very unattached philosophically—apparently—and yet very rigid in his feeling for established principle. The type is quite common among intellectuals. Much reading had not made him mad but a little pedantic. He was speculatively interested in international peace though he did not believe that it could readily be established. Much more, apparently, he was interested in the necessity of building up a code or body of international laws which would be flexible and binding on all nations. Imaginatively I could see him at his heavy tomes. He had thin, delicate, rather handsome hands; a thin, dapper, wiry body. He was older than Madame J.,—say fifty-five or sixty. He had nice, well-barbered, short gray whiskers, a short, effective mustache, loose, well-trained, rather upstanding hair. Some such intellectual Northman Ibsen intended to give Hedda.
CHAPTER LI
“SPOTLESS TOWN”
At three o’clock I left these pleasant people to visit the Ryks Museum and the next morning ran over to Haarlem, a half-hour away, to look at the Frans Hals in the Stadhuis. Haarlem was the city, I remember with pleasure, that once suffered the amazing tulip craze that swept over Holland in the sixteenth century—the city in which single rare tulips, like single rare carnations to-day, commanded enormous sums of money. Rare species, because of the value of the subsequent bulb sale, sold for hundreds of thousands of gulden. I had heard of the long line of colored tulip beds that lay between here and Haarlem and The Hague and I was prepared to judge for myself whether they were beautiful—as beautiful as the picture post-cards sold everywhere indicated. I found this so, but even more than the tulip beds I found the country round about from Amsterdam to Haarlem, The Hague and Rotterdam delightful. I traveled by foot and by train, passing by some thirty miles of vari-colored flower-beds in blocks of red, white, blue, purple, pink, and yellow, that lie between the several cities. I stood in the old Groote Kerk of St. Bavo in Haarlem, the Groote Kerk of St. James in The Hague—both as bare of ornament as an anchorite’s cell—I wandered among the art treasures of the Ryks Museum in Amsterdam and the Mauritshuis and the Mesdag Museum in The Hague; I walked in the forests of moss-tinted trees at Haarlem and again at The Hague; my impression was that compact little Holland had all the charm of a great private estate, beautifully kept and intimately delightful.
But the canals of Holland—what an airy impression of romance, of pure poetry, they left on my mind! There are certain visions or memories to which the heart of every individual instinctively responds. The canals of Holland are one such to me. I can see them now, in the early morning, when the sun was just touching them with the faintest pearls, pinks, lavenders, blues, their level surfaces as smooth as glass, their banks rising no whit above the level of the water, but lying even with it like a black or emerald frame, their long straight lines broken at one point or another by a low brown or red or drab cottage or windmill! I can see them again at evening, the twilight hour, when in that poetically suffused mood of nature, which obtains then, they lie, liquid masses of silver, a shred of tinted cloud reflected in their surface, the level green grass turning black about them, a homing bird, a mass of trees in the distance, or humble cottage, its windows faintly gold from within, lending those last touches of artistry which make the perfection of nature. As in London and Venice the sails of their boats were colored a soft brown, and now and again one appeared in the fading light, a healthy Hollander smoking his pipe at the tiller, a cool wind fanning his brow. The world may hold more charming pictures but I have not encountered them.
And across the level spaces of lush grass that seemingly stretch unbroken for miles—bordered on this side or that with a little patch of filigree trees; ribboned and segmented by straight silvery threads of water; ornamented in the foreground by a cow or two, perhaps, or a boatman steering his motor-power canal boat; remotely ended by the seeming outlines of a distant city, as delicately penciled as a line by Vierge—stand the windmills. I have seen ten, twelve, fifteen, marching serenely across the fields in a row, of an afternoon, like great, heavy, fat Dutchmen, their sails going in slow, patient motions, their great sides rounding out like solid Dutch ribs,—naïve, delicious things. There were times when their outlines took on classic significance. Combined with the utterly level land, the canals and the artistically martialed trees, they constitute the very atmosphere of Holland.