I stop and think of one after another of these sex-ridden people, and I cannot think of one whom I would envy. I know one who in a frenzy of unhappiness seized a razor and castrated himself. I think of another, a certain classmate in college whom I once stopped in a conversation, remarking: "Did you ever realize what a state you have got your mind into? Everything means sex to you. Every phrase you hear, every idea that is suggested—you try to make some sort of pun, to connect it somehow or other with sex." The man thought and said, "I guess that's true." The idea had never occurred to him before; he had just gone on letting his instincts have their way with him, without ever putting his reason upon the matter.
That was a crude kind of sex; but I think of another man, an idealist and champion of human liberty. One of the forms of liberty he maintained was the right to love as many women as he pleased, and although he was a married man, one hardly ever saw him that he was not courting some young girl. As a result, his mental powers declined, and he did little but talk about ideas. I do not know anyone today who respects him—except a few people who live the same sort of life. The thought of him brings to my mind a sentence of Nietzsche—a man who surely stood for freedom of personality: "I pity the lovers who have nothing higher than their love."
A question like this can be decided only by the experience of the race. Some will make love the end and aim of life, and others will make it the means to other ends, and we shall see which kind of people achieve the best results, which kind are the most useful, the most dignified, the most original and vital. I have seen a great many young people try the experiment of "free love," and I have seen some get enough of it and quit; I could name among these half a dozen of our younger novelists. I know others who are still in it—and I watch their lives and find them to be restless, jealous, egotistical and idle. My defense of monogamy is based upon the fact that I have never known any happy or successful "free lovers." Of course, I know some noble and sincere people who do not believe in the marriage contract, and refuse to be bound by law; but these people are as monogamous as I am, even more tightly bound by honor than if they were duly married.
It seems to be in the very nature of true and sincere love to imagine permanence, to desire it and to pledge it. If you aren't that much in love, you aren't really in love at all, and you had better content yourself with strolling together and chatting together and dining together and playing music together. So many pleasant ways there are in which men and women can enjoy each other's company without entering upon the sacred intimacy of sex! You can learn to take sex lightly, of course, but if you do so, you reduce by so much the chances that true and deep love will ever come to you; for true and deep love requires some patience, some reverence, some tending at a shrine. The animals mate quickly and get it over with; but the great discoveries about love, and the possibilities of the human soul in love, have come because men and women have been willing to make sacrifices for it, to take it seriously—and more especially to take seriously the beloved person, the rights and needs and virtues of that person. From the lives of such we learn that love is nature's device for taking us out of ourselves, and making us truly social creatures.
Early in my life as a writer I undertook to answer Gertrude Atherton, in her glorification of the sex-corruptions of capitalist society. She indicted American literature for its "bourgeois" qualities—among these the fact that American authors had a prejudice in favor of living with their own wives. Mrs. Atherton set forth the joys of sex promiscuity as they are understood by European artists, and I ventured in replying to remark that "one woman can be more to a man than a dozen can possibly be." That sounds like a paradox, but it is really a profound truth, and the person who does not understand it has missed the best there is in the sex relation. There is a limit to the things of the body, but to those of the mind and spirit there is no limit, and so there is no reason why true love should ever fall prey to boredom and satiety.
CHAPTER XLV
THE PROBLEM OF JEALOUSY
(Discusses the question, to what extent one person may hold another to the pledge of love.)
Once upon a time I knew an Anarchist shoemaker, the same who had me sent to jail for playing tennis on Sunday, as I have narrated in "The Brass Check." I remember arguing with him concerning his ideas of sex, which were of the freest. I can hear the very tones of his voice as he put the great unanswerable question: "What are you going to do about the problem of jealousy?" And I had no response at hand; for jealousy is truly a most cruel and devastating and unlovely emotion; and yet, how can you escape it, if you are going to preserve monogamy?
The Anarchist shoemaker's solution was to break down all the prejudices against sexual promiscuity. Free and unlimited license was every person's right, and for any other person to interfere was enslavement, for any other person to criticize was superstition. But the power of superstition is strong in the world, and the shoemaker found men resentful of his teachings, and disposed to confiscate the rights of their wives and daughters. Hence the shoemaker's disapproval of jealousy.
Other men, less purely physiological in their attitude to sex, have wrestled with this same problem of jealousy. H. G. Wells has a novel, "In the Days of the Comet," in which he portrays two men, both nobly and truly in love with the same woman. One in a passion of jealousy is about to murder the other, when a great social transformation is magically brought about, and the would-be murderer wakes up to universal love, and the two men nobly and lovingly share the same woman. Shelley also dreamed this dream, inviting two women to share him. I have known others who tried it, but never permanently. I do not say that it never has succeeded, or that it never can succeed. In this book I am renouncing the future—I am trying to give practical advice to people, for the conduct of their lives here and now, and my advice on this point is that polygamous and polyandrous experiments in modern capitalist society cost more than they are worth.