The conduct dictated by such a passion must be of the worst kind. It begins with a mean espionage and ends with a maniacal violence. Its relentless cruelty compels its objects to have recourse to the most unprincipled methods to avert its suspicion and avoid its wrath, sinking self-respect and honorable frankness in hypocrisy and fraud. Why is the word or even the oath of any man or woman in regard to a question of chastity or fidelity to the marriage vow almost universally considered perfectly worthless? It is because the penalties of dereliction on the part of woman are so intolerable, so much worse than death, that to secure escape from them the social conscience justifies means which the social code condemns. Accordingly, we see the highest personages, the greatest dignitaries and popular favorites, go into court and openly perjure themselves, while society cries bravo! The woman is so fearfully imperilled that for her rescue the fashionable standard of honor sustains deliberate perjury, the debauching of religious conscience on the very shrine of public authority.
This wicked social exculpation of the male and immolation of the female is a lingering accompaniment of the historic evolution of man, the survival in human civilization of the selfish instincts which in the lower ranks of the animal kingdom cause the stronger to drive away the weaker and monopolize the weakest. Among the most potent and fearless beasts the male, seeing any other male sportively inclined, is seized with a frenzy to kill him and appropriate the object. Animal man has the same instinct, and it has smeared the entire course of history with broad trails of blood and victimized womanhood by the double weapons of force and fear. The spectacle of the harem of one man with a thousand imprisoned women guarded by eunuchs tells the whole story. But surely when human beings, no longer remaining mere instinctive animals, become free personalities, lords of thought and sentiment, each with a separate individual responsibility distinctly conscious and immortal, they should govern themselves by spontaneous choice from within and not be coerced by an artificial terror applied from without.
The method in history of giving the strongest males possession of the females is no doubt the mode in which nature selects and exalts her breeds. But as society refines it will be seen that the strength of brute instinct, the strength of position, the strength of money, the strength of every artificial advantage, should be put aside in favor of the diviner strength of genius, goodness, beauty, moral and physical completeness of harmony. Freedom would secure this as compulsion prevents it. Man is destined to outgrow the destructive monopolizing passion of jealousy native to his animality. This is shown by his capacity for chivalry, which is a self-abnegating identification of his personality with the personalities of others, not merely freeing them from his will, but aiding them to secure their own happiness in their own way.
The effort to suppress free choice by the use of terror has been tried terribly enough and long enough. It has always proved an utter failure, viewed on any large scale. Has the awful penalty affixed to any deviation from the prescribed legal method of sexual relations wholly prevented such deviation? It has often led to concealment and duplicity,—two lives carried on at once, a life of demure conformity in public, a life of passionate fulfilment in secret. The well-understood sacrifice of truth to appearance has ever served to inflame the mistrust and swell the vengeance of the jealous. The only real remedy will be found in perfect truth, frankness, and justice. In regard to the personal autonomy of the affections, woman should be raised to the same status and be tried by the same code as man. That code should not be as now the legacy of the brutish and despotic past, but the achievement of a scientific morality, those laws of universal order which express the will of the Creator, the collective harmony of Nature. Since the unions of the sexes are of all grades and qualities, all degrees of impurity and beastliness or of purity and sacredness, the parties to them cannot be justly judged by a single rigid rule of external technicality, and ought not to be sealed with one unvarying approval of respectable or branded with one monotonous stigma of illicit. They should be judged by the varying facts in the case as they are in the sight of God; and when those facts are not known in their true merits there is no competency or right to judge the man or the woman at all. The present judgments of society unquestionably ought in many cases to be reversed. For example, it is to be said that the women who consort with men they loathe, and against their will breed children infected with ferocious passions and diseased tendencies, no matter how regularly they are married or how proud their social position, should be condemned or rescued. Also it is to be said that persons filled with a true and divine love, whether sanctioned or unsanctioned by conventional usages, claim to be left to the inherent moral reactions of their acts, and to the unprejudiced judgments of the competent. This central truth, compromise whom it may, and encompassed with delicacies and with difficulties as it may be, is to be firmly maintained, although Pecksniff and Grundy shriek at it until the whole continent quivers.
The distinction of love and freedom from lust and license is obvious, and the unleashing of the latter in the disguise of the former cannot be too vehemently deprecated. But that a man or a woman may cherish in the wedded state an impure and detestable passion, or outside of it know a heavenly one, is a truth which can be denied only by a character of odious vulgarity. The rank and worth of a love are to be estimated by its moral and religious quality in the sight of God and its natural influence on character. To estimate it otherwise, as is usually done, is to violate morality and religion with conventionality, and in place of nature, sincerity and truth install arbitrary artifice, hypocrisy and falsehood. The grand desiderata in all relationships of affection are, first, the observance of open truth and honor, second, the recognition of their varying grades of intrinsic nobleness and charm or intrinsic foulness and criminality, and the treatment of the parties to them accordingly. Meanwhile, the frank and clear discussion of the subject is imperatively needed. The double system hitherto in vogue of at once enforcing ignorance and stimulating prurience by banishing the subject from confessed attention and study into the two regions of shamefacedness and obscenity has wrought immeasurable evil. For the sexual passion, morbidly excited by nearly all the influences of society, and then mercilessly repressed by public opinion, has a morbid development which breaks out in those monstrous forms of vice which are the open sores of civilization. Take away the inflaming lures of mystery and denial—shed the clear, cold light of scientific knowledge on the facts of the case and the principles properly regulative of conduct—and the passion will gradually become moderate and wholesome. Science has brought region after region of human life under the light and guidance of its benign methods. The region of the personal affections in society and the procreation of posterity, being most obstinately held by passions and prejudices, longest resists the application of impartial, fearless study to the usages imposed by traditional authority. The consistent doing of this will be one of the greatest steps ever taken. It will break the historic superstition that the conjunction of a pair married in seeming by a priest is necessarily holier than that of a pair married in reality by God, destroy the stupid prejudice which makes in the affectional relations of the sexes only the one discrimination that they are in or out of wedlock, and remove the cruel social ban which renders it impossible for straightforward sincerity of affection and honesty of speech to escape the dishonor which double-facedness of passion and duplicity of word and deed so easily shoulder aside. And when this is done, much will have been done to inaugurate the better era for which the expectation of mankind waits.
The principal reason why the married so frequently experience satiety and weariness, and the consequent sting of a foreign hunger provocative of the wandering which gives occasion for jealousy, is that in their long and close familiarity the partners come to feel that they have seen all through and all around each other, have exhausted each other of all fresh charm, piquancy, and interest. The genuine remedy for this, the only really adequate and enduring remedy, is the recognition in each other of the infinite mystery of all conscious being, a free personality on endless probation and destined for immortal adventures. Then each will be to the other—what every human being intrinsically is—a concentrated epitome of the Kosmos and an explicit revelation of God. There is no revelation of the free conscious God except in the free conscious creature, and in every such being there is one. Let a pair be worthy to see and feel this truth, and there can be no exhaustion of their mutual interest, because before their reverential observation there can be no end to the surprises of the infinite in the finite. Then the sweetness, the wonder, the varying lure of love will never wither and die into indifference, nor roil and perturb into jealousy and madness.
No doubt to many these views will seem a transcendental romance, a delusive dream. Not every one has the nature finely touched to fine issues capable of living in the ether of these ideal heights. But there are on the earth holy and entranced souls who live there. It is obvious enough how absurdly inapplicable all this class of considerations must be to the basest kinds of persons, those who, like brutes, wallow in styes of sensuality, or, like devils, surrender themselves to the tyranny of the lowest passions. Such must needs be relegated to an inferior standard. Those whose consciences are coarser and lower than the code of society may most properly be held in subjection by its laws. But those whose consciences are purer and higher than the current social code, the nobler natures who sincerely aspire to the fulfilment of their destiny as children of God, should be a law unto themselves. They will not be tyrants over or spies upon one another. Full of self-respect and mutual respect, owning the indefeasible sovereignty of each personality in the offices of its individual being, they will pass and repass shrouded in transparent royalty, exacting no subjection, making no inquiries.
And now this long and central chapter in the life of Forrest, with the essential lessons it has for others, may be ended by a brief statement of the moral scale of degrees in the conduct of different men under the provoking conditions of jealousy.
One man detects the woman to whom he is legally united, but whom he hates and loathes, in criminal relations with another. He takes an axe, chops them in pieces, then sets the house on fire, and, cutting his own throat, falls into the flames. In other cases his insane fury satiates itself with a single victim, the man or the woman, as caprice dictates. This is crazy ferocity, making its subject first a maniac, then a tiger, then a devil. Has not humanity by its smothered approval too long kept the diabolical horror of this style of behavior recrudescent?
Another mournful and shocking form of this tragedy there is. And it is a form repeated far more frequently in its essential features than ever comes to the open light of day. A man of a sombre, vivid, and proud nature, possessed with a passion so absorbing that it sways his being with tidal power, awakens to the fact that the love he thought all his own has wandered elsewhere. His heart stands still and his brain reels. His love is too true and deep to change. To injure her is as impossible as to restrain himself. He says not a word, makes not a sign, but his sad, dark purpose is fixed. He leaves directions that no questions be asked, no public notice taken of him or of his fate further than the most modest funeral, and that a plain stone be reared over him with the single word, Infelicissimus. Then a pistol-ball in his heart closes the throbbing of an agony too great to be borne. The suicide is the pathetic slave of his passion. Surely for such there must be a sequel in some choicer world, where the tangled plot will be cleared up and the soul not be thus helplessly self-entangled.