(1) ANALYSIS OF THE MARRIED LIFE OF POSITIVE PEOPLE

In the chapter on Marriage we saw that the married state is a difficult one for both parties, but that monogamy is more tolerable to the woman than to the man, provided always that children are born regularly. It was there seen that woman must not be falsely likened to man in the claims she makes on monogamy for a perfect sexual life. The coitus is relatively so unimportant to her, that the man himself, her husband, holds only a secondary or tertiary place in her life. That which chiefly matters to the healthy positive woman is that, at stated intervals, her body should be allowed to experience the whole female cycle of sex, from the coitus to the weaning of the child.

Indeed, woman’s unconscious demand for the experience of this whole cycle is so persistent and clamorous that they may be excused who, like Schopenhauer, perceive in it the importunate voice of the Will of the Species (Wille der Gattung) resolutely demanding Life, and ever more and more guarantees of its survival.[70]

It is owing to the secondary, tertiary, or, at any rate, minor position of importance that her husband occupies in the life of a woman who is bearing him children at regular intervals, that his individual characteristics do not really require to be very striking in order to prove satisfactory to her. It is for this reason that he must be a brute indeed, or a drunken sot, or a maniac, if he is to provoke her active hatred while child-bearing continues. Finding, as she does, her principal pleasure in the experiences of motherhood—provided that he behaves with average decency and earns a comfortable living—she asks but little more.[71]

Short of impossible conduct on his part, therefore, it may be taken for granted that it never occurs to the positive healthy married woman, who bears children at regular intervals, to make any effort to seek another love affair, and even if the opportunity for such a love affair should come her way, and be set before her with all the persuasiveness that deep desire in the other party can lend it, she will, as a rule, resist it and let it pass by without very much of a struggle. She is finding the consummation of her being in the life she is leading, and let her husband be ever so besotted, ignorant, boring and uncompanionable, it will never occur to her to go in search of another love.

This conclusion is, I think, borne out by the statistics of divorce in England and Wales, where separations between people who do not attempt to limit the family, is extremely rare. It is usually said with reference to such cases that it is the children who “strengthen the union.” This is the popular and even the learned opinion.[72] The prevalence of this opinion, and the high authority behind it, however, should not lead us to misunderstand the true nature of the actual forces at work. It is to some extent true that the presence of children does induce parents, who might be tempted to separate, to think twice about it. The father pauses before he decides to deprive his offspring of their mother, and vice versâ. But these wholly impersonal considerations binding a couple together are as nothing compared with the vital forces that are actually at work. The impersonal considerations may weigh, but only if supported by the far more potent promptings of healthy and normal conditions. Nor should it be concluded too hastily from the low figures of divorce among people who have large families, that the presence of children operates in causing the parents to feel a deeper “love” for each other. It is possible for a fruitful couple to be almost entirely indifferent to each other, as many thousands are, and yet to remain together, partly because of the impersonal considerations already referred to, partly from pure conservatism, and also from fear of publicity, or scandal, or a feeling of shyness, or a certain cynicism which leads them to prefer the devil they know before the devil they know not.

We must not allow ourselves to be blinded by sentimental tears, therefore, to the extent of supposing that offspring invariably increase conjugal affection. A long observation of our fellow-creatures convinces us, on the contrary, that the presence of children operates in precisely the opposite direction, and that if we are going in search of “romantic” love, lasting long after the first years of marriage, we are much more likely to find it among infertile than among fertile couples. Children, far from cementing the affection existing between their parents, are rather inclined to supply its most potent and infallible corrosive.

The alacrity with which a young mother becomes absorbed in her young ones, the lightning speed with which all her activities, mental and physical, concentrate upon her brood, their wants and their development, is hardly calculated to effect that “cementing” which is believed to take place in marital relations from the moment children begin to appear.

Very soon after the birth of the first children there occurs in all decent positive women a certain definition of the maternal side of their nature, which tends to convert them ever more and more into the nun, miser, or prophet type—that is to say, self-centred, impatient of distracting forces, and fanatical. They listen to matters foreign to the nursery and their children, as if they had been wakened out of a dream or roused from some thrilling meditation. A certain vagueness comes over them in regard to all matters not strictly domestic, which, while it may please the wise and understanding husband, as furnishing a conclusive proof of their perfect femininity, nevertheless can hardly fail to inform him that his rank in the household has suffered noticeable degradation.[73]

When he speaks concerning topics which interest him, he is no longer listened to with the same attention—not to mention eagerness. Indeed, he soon finds that strangers outside his home are very much more inclined to vouchsafe him an attentive hearing than the spouse of his heart, and more ready to give serious consideration to his more thoughtful expressions of opinion. Now, it requires all the philosophy and understanding in the world—particularly to the man who may cherish certain ideals about marriage as companionship—to accept this secondary position in the home of his own creating, without a feeling of resentment or mortification. How, then, can the full realization of the position be said to “cement” or “strengthen” the affection between the couple?

It is true that the normal father acquires a deep fondness for his children, and that this attaches him to the home in which he has suffered his degradation of rank.[74] It is also true that, as the children grow older and realize him as their father, he may enjoy a fresh access of the very importance of which their arrival deprived him. But, while all these facts are readily admitted, they can hardly be used to prove that the presence of children “strengthens” the union between the parents as lovers. That has been shaken once and for all beyond any hope of recovery. Economic reasons, the attitude of each parent to the children, reasons of policy, etc., may now attach each parent individually to the home; but that does not mean that the other parent is the lasting attracting force.

Later on, when the children grow old enough to discriminate or to draw comparisons, and the original dependence, which makes filial affection so fanatical, is beginning to wane, certain members of the growing brood may, and frequently do, exhibit preferences for one parent or the other—preferences which nine times out of ten are reciprocated. The more passionate the attachment between the parents and the children has been in infancy and childhood, the more likely is this to occur. But distinctions of this sort drawn by children in favour of one parent only tend to increase the cleavage already existing; and wherever in such circumstances an occasion for any divergence of opinion happens to arise between the parents and sides are taken, as they must be taken where preferences have already been mutually proclaimed, the declaration of allegiance by becoming overt amounts to little less than a frankly acknowledged feud with the other side.

Quite apart, however, from the possibility of particular children appealing more to one parent than the other, and the cleavage which such factions confirm or start in the home, children and their multifarious wants are, in themselves, an inexhaustible source of contention. Their particular foibles, their wilfulness, their education, are matters which, while they are constantly to the fore among the problems of the home, as constantly give rise to friction, or, to say the least, to differences of opinion between their parents. When once, therefore, one of the parents—the father—has naturally and inevitably suffered so marked a degradation in rank that his word, his opinion, his judgment, is no longer attended to with the respect and eagerness which he encountered in his wife in their early childless days, it is not surprising that discussions or arguments, from being merely amicable exchanges of opinion, should degenerate into acrimonious and heated quarrels—the husband resenting every minute more and more the cavalier manner in which his views are rejected as worthless by the “spouse of his heart,” the wife resenting every moment more and more the presumption with which the mere means to an end, this sparking-plug and breadwinner, is daring to assume supreme authority over her brood, her babes, the fruit of her womb.

Now, in view of all this, can it any longer be maintained that this element in the home—the children—actually contributes to the affection between the parents? In the happiest cases the ardent love of the father for one child, and the ardent love of the mother for another, may attach each parent individually to the common hearth; but to argue as the two judges, above quoted, argued before the Divorce Commission of 1912,[75] that this proves that children “strengthen the union,” or “keep it together,” without explaining more narrowly how they effect this end, is to deliver the whole question over into the hands of the romanticists and sentimentalists, who will not scruple to arrive at the foolish conclusion that children perforce increase the affection existing between parents.

I have stated the extreme case in order to make the nature of the cleavage, in so far as it arises from the presence of the children, as plain as possible. In all families it does not become acute, because there is too much at stake; and much is therefore suffered in silence, swallowed down or repressed, for the sake of the home. The only point it is necessary to make clear is, that when it is also argued here that the presence of children in the home does contribute to a very great extent to the stability of that home, something very different is meant from what sentimentalists and other muddlers are likely to infer. I most emphatically do not mean that the presence of the children increases the mutual love of the parents—nay, I would go farther and say that it leads to exactly the opposite result.

What, then, is the precise influence of children?

My reply is, that in all homes where the wife is a positive, healthy and desirable woman, the repeated birth of a child at regular intervals thoroughly adapts the woman by giving her a full physiological and spiritual life, and thus reconciles the principal member of the household (as far as stability is concerned) to the monogamic state and to the home.

She can afford to control her temper when she is enjoying the perfect serenity of mind and body that complete adaptation brings. She can afford to pretend devotion, for economic and other reasons, to a creature who has long ceased from holding even that space in her heart, which is occupied by her first baby’s smallest toe. She can afford to put up with years, not to mention hours, of a boring companion, seeing that he secures her this perfect serenity, and, by his daily labours, guarantees her own and her precious children’s survival. If she is clever, she realizes how much is at stake, and she makes allowances for his peculiarities. If she is shrewd enough to appreciate the true nature of her happiness, she does her utmost, in order that her bliss may be uninterrupted, to delude him into thinking that he is not merely the fifth wheel of the family coach. And while all the world points the moral that it is the children who have “cemented” the affection between herself and her husband, she knows perfectly well that this affection has long ago been transmuted into a curious compound of which the principal ingredients are: a desire to play a safe game, a deep attachment to her children impelling her to secure by fair means or foul someone who will supply them with all they need, and a patient toleration of a creature whom she does her best to regard as something more precious than a necessary evil.

The fact that this curious compound appears to the outside world in the false light of connubial affection does not disturb her, because, as a rule, she is constitutionally and congenitally predisposed herself to a romantic interpretation of phenomena, and eagerly seizes the tinselly cloak the world gives her, in order to conceal the sordid truth.

In such circumstances the union might last for ever. The only event that can bring it to an end is the demise of one of the parties to it.

The husband, actuated by habit, timidity, a sense of duty and propriety, attached to his home by his deep affection for one or more of his many children, and deluded both by the voice of the world and by the repeated asseverations of his wife into believing that there is a deep affection uniting them, endeavours to act up to the part, and as a rule succeeds extraordinarily well. But is that all? There must, of course, be something else. Just as the woman is induced to accept the situation, because it provides her with the only prize that is really worth securing in life—complete physical adaptation[76]—so the man must also be deriving some deeper satisfaction from the position than the mere pleasure of conforming to a social ideal. It is otherwise inconceivable that he should persist in “playing up” to his spouse with the histrionic zeal of a paid actor.

Truth to tell, the father of a large family is attracted to the position he holds by very deep and very powerful appeals to his most primitive instincts. But again, it requires emphasizing that these deep and powerful appeals are as a rule quite independent of his attitude towards his wife, and provided that she do not actively conspire to displease or to harass him, they will continue to bind him to his home long after all genuine affection for her has entirely subsided.

These appeals are: The sense of power he derives from the visible extension of his own identity in his offspring, and: The silent tribute that the presence of offspring makes daily and hourly to the deepest source of his self-esteem—virile potency.[77]

Both of these appeals act secretly, and chiefly through the least conscious functions of his mind, so that he may never be perfectly aware of them. Nevertheless, they give rise to a constant feeling of self-assurance and self-confidence which is pleasant and fortifying, and which, being interpreted roughly by the conscious mind, appears to his intelligent perception in the form of a very profound attachment to his home and family. This pleasant feeling, like the complete physical adaptation of his wife, also fills him with a certain calmness and serenity which enable him to suffer kindly any exasperating peculiarity in his spouse, to endure with patience her ill-concealed indifference to him as being little more important than a sparking-plug or breadwinner, and to meet in a conciliating spirit any opposition with which she may encounter his plans for their children, or for any other feature of their joint lives. It should not be forgotten either that this feeling helps him to resign himself also to the conscious depreciation in his own affection towards her.

The world speaks of him as “unselfish,” “devoted,” “self-sacrificing,” “good-natured,” etc., and his children are reared, sometimes by their mother, but always by strangers, in the belief that he is entitled to all these epithets, because there are so many men who have not acted as he has. He himself, however, accepts these epithets with a mild pretence of modest deprecation, for in his heart of hearts he realizes that somehow they ring strangely by the side of his intimate knowledge of the deep satisfaction he has derived from the whole business.

Now statistics and legal authorities tell us that this kind of marriage is the best, the most lasting, and the happiest kind of marriage. The judges say that it is because “children strengthen the union” or “keep the home together.” We have seen in what way a growing family effects this end. We have seen that it has very little to do with the attitude of the parents towards each other. Now we have to discover how it is that, according to statistics, divorces are more frequent where there are only one, two, or three children, and where child-birth may be said to have stopped.

(2) UNHAPPINESS IN THE HOME OF THE POSITIVE COUPLE

In another chapter the positive woman has been called “the custodian of Life”; we have already seen that Schopenhauer has graphically described her unconscious insistence on experiencing the whole physical cycle from the coitus to the weaning of the child as the Will of the Species (Wille der Gattung) demanding more Life and thus achieving human survival. We have also spoken of the voice of nature in her, clamouring not only for Life, but also for Life’s multiplication.

These are only different more or less successful attempts at describing that instinct which in the positive woman is paramount—the instinct to employ her elaborate reproductive equipment effectively. The fact that when this equipment remains idle the existence of the species is imperilled, evidently led Schopenhauer to discern the unconscious will of the species in the positive woman’s restlessness in awaiting fertilization. But we should always be careful in using these descriptions of woman, to remember that in her the end, which is the multiplication of life, is quite unrealized by her conscious mind. She acts in a way that brings about the multiplication of life; her instincts impel her to achieve that end; but she is not intelligently concerned with anything so remote as the will of the species or its preservation.[78] She is much more concerned with her own personal wishes, her own personal notion of pleasure, and her own sensations. When once these are gratified, the fact that the demands of the species are also satisfied is, as far as woman is concerned, merely a happy coincidence, in which she can have but an academic interest.

Nevertheless, in judging of her conduct, and in drawing moral conclusions from it, we must be careful to allow her the full benefit of the view that, in acting as she does, she is securing the survival of the species in ultimate fact. More than nine-tenths of the abuse to which women have been subjected throughout the ages has been due precisely to man’s omission to allow her the full benefit of this view. The gratification of woman’s passions serves her own end, inasmuch as it affords her pleasure—Yes!—but it also serves the purpose of the race. That is the fundamental fact to remember.

In another chapter I have described how Life itself is woman’s hardest taskmaster, and that her first impulse in all circumstances is to be faithful to this taskmaster, even at the cost of infidelity to human pledges.

(a) Adultery of the positive spouse through absence of the mate.

Long absences of husbands, therefore, during wars, transoceanic voyages, explorations, etc., should always be viewed in the light of a rebuff to woman’s hardest taskmaster. The prolonged absence of the male imposes idleness on the female’s reproductive organs, and, since the best women are primarily faithful to Life itself, and only secondarily so to their mates, it must follow that in all cases in which husbands are absent for long periods, that the call of Life in positive women becomes too imperious to be ignored—hence the thousands of wives who were unfaithful to their husbands during the last war, both in England and on the Continent.[79]

Ignorant, pious people, and even experienced Divorce-Court judges expressed their horror at the thought that while their men were nobly risking their lives in defence of “King and Country,” these women in their thousands calmly sought fertilization elsewhere. But a woman’s character as a woman would be almost forfeited if she did not act in this way![80] Where else would you have her transfer her allegiance? Would you invite her to break the whole valuable tradition of her sex which has been consistently devoted to the multiplication of life, in order to show allegiance—say to an oath, or to an ideal, or to a moral precept? But even Schopenhauer himself, with all his detestation of women, would defend them here, and say, “Surely the species is more important than your trumpery moral codes, your ephemeral oaths, and your pretentious ideals!”

The English world is almost comic in the light of its most cherished illusions. It does not base its outlook upon the unalterable laws of life, consequently it is constantly receiving the rudest shocks and the most unpleasant surprises. The fact that so many thousands of women in England and Wales were unfaithful to their husbands during the war came as a shock to the dear Puritanical and ignorant old ladies, chiefly unmarried, that rule public opinion in England.

Had they ever dreamt, or had they ever been told, that the best women, the most desirable women, must be unfaithful to their husbands when, through what cause soever, the latter are forcing them to be unfaithful to Life itself, they might have shown less righteous indignation and more understanding when the women of the country in their legions turned adulteresses in war-time.

As it was, the phenomenon was quite unexpected, and proved a most terrible blow to the national conscience. For it was realized only too shrewdly that if thousands of these women were ultimately found out, many more thousands must have escaped the discovery; and thus the character of the nation seemed to have suffered very severe deterioration.

Truth to tell, the parties to blame were not the women at all, but the hopelessly vain men who were the co-respondents in the actions, and who understood so little of female psychology that they interpreted these adulteresses’ fidelity to Life and its multiplication, as a preference, if you please, for themselves before their legal spouses. Not knowing of the positive woman’s inveterate fidelity to Life, they arrogantly imagined that their personal and irresistible attractions were the cause of these adulteresses’ infidelity to their husbands.

They—these men—were the people against whom the world ought to have inveighed; for the man who is capable of so misunderstanding the human female as to flatter himself that it is his personal attractions that are seducing her, when all the time it is the Will of the Species, neglected by her absent husband, that is impelling her to go in search of fertilization elsewhere, is not worth the rope with which he ought to be hanged.

The mistake, as a mistake, is all the more monstrous, seeing that it is the outcome of maniacal vanity. For no man who was not too much elated by a woman’s attention to retain calm reflection, could ever be such a fool as to imagine that his triumph over her husband was due to his own personal charm.

There is no need, however, to labour the question any longer, if once the true nature of woman be properly grasped; for then it is seen immediately that, in the best and most vital women, fidelity to Life must take precedence of fidelity to the mate, to a pledge, to an oath, to a vow, to a custom, or to anything else.[81]

Would the reader perhaps have it otherwise? Would he have a race of women reared (we are unfortunately not so very far from the attainment of this ideal to-day) to whom the claims of Life are secondary—women, that is to say, who are so constituted that they could hesitate between Life’s call and some trumpery human convention? Would he have women so constituted that their self-preservative instinct is more powerful than their reproductive? Because that is what it amounts to. A woman who, when confronted by Life’s call, can calmly discriminate between that and her own safety, her own future, her own smug ease, and can proceed to select the latter in preference to the former, is not a desirable woman in the best sense, for she cannot be trusted to do the right thing for the species in all circumstances. The spark of vitality in her does not glow with sufficient ardour to compel her to serve Life’s interests before her own. She is the kind of woman that is rapidly coming into power in all classes above the working class, but hers is a bad character, not a good character, for a woman to possess.

No, we want to keep the best women as they are. We do not want to tame the life out of them. But since we cannot have it both ways, if we insist on women remaining desirable—that is to say, faithful primarily to Life itself, we must breed a race of men who understand them, and who in the absence of their fellows on wars or expeditions can see what is happening when young wives “make eyes at them.” Any man who in such circumstances imagines he is irresistible and falls in with the woman’s designs through sheer vanity, deserves a punishment very much more severe than being mulcted in damages; he has qualified himself for some disciplinary correction which ought at least to include a term of hard labour. For it is not his understanding of woman alone that is at fault—although this in a full-grown man would be unpardonable enough—but his estimate of himself, which leads him to the gross presumption of imagining himself capable of conquering another man’s wife single-handed without the assistance of Life itself, pushing her violently into his arms the whole time.[82] Why, he might just as well flatter himself that a flea has bitten him, not because it was too hungry to wait, but because there was something exceptionally delicate or precious in the composition of his vile blood!

Thus adultery, when the wife is the defaulter, is always a case of a man betraying another man, and never that of a woman betraying her man. Woman, if she is the right sort, remains throughout faithful to Life. Only if she betrays Life does she cease to be desirable.

Continuing our consideration of the positive couple, we must now examine the forces which operate in causing a woman to be unfaithful to her husband while yet living and cohabiting with him in apparent peace and happiness.

(b) Adultery of the positive spouse through impotence of the male or through childlessness.

If the positive female cannot tolerate long absences on the part of the male without endeavouring to seek fertilization elsewhere (because her equipment for Life’s multiplication is otherwise reduced to inaction) it is obvious that, since male impotence is tantamount to a complete absence of the male (from the standpoint of reproduction), she can hardly be expected to tolerate it any more gladly.

Truth to tell, I have known cases of male impotence where the natural modesty and fear of publicity in the wife prevented an action for nullity and also all adulterous liaisons; both parties to the match having advanced quite peaceably and resignedly to middle, and ultimately to old age, without anyone, except the couple themselves and their immediate relatives, knowing the truth;[83] and it is probable that in many cases of childless marriages, in modern England, impotence on the part of the male may be suspected as the cause, although the wife may have been too timid or too shamefast to drag the misery of their married life before the courts. But in almost all marriages where this occurs without adultery on the part of the wife, it is safe to infer that the female of the match is herself partly or wholly negative, or that she has become so in process of time, otherwise it is inconceivable that her timidity or shame should thus override the deepest force within her, which, as we have seen, is the Will of the Species for Life and its multiplication.

In the case of most positive and desirable women it is safe to argue that, where the husband is impotent, either adultery or a suit for nullity will be the inevitable result.[84]

Among the positive couples where, although the male may be potent, childlessness is secured by some contraceptive method, for reasons of economy, or because it is thought that three, four, or even five years of connubial bliss without children will allow both parties to have what is known as a “good time,” it is obvious that the toleration of the positive female may last longer than in cases where the male is impotent; but since the orgasm does not supply the female with her complete sexual experience, it is equally clear that the state of childlessness cannot last an unlimited time without causing trouble. As, however, in these peculiar circumstances, the psychological processes in the female, which lead her to adultery, are more subtle than in the event of male impotence, I shall be obliged to enter into them with more detail.

When the male is impotent the positive woman knows that this is so, and she consciously realizes the need of seeking fertilization elsewhere, lest she remain childless for the rest of her life. This alternative is presented plainly to her consciousness and there is no doubt about it.

In the case of the couple using contraceptives while cohabiting affectionately together, however, the female is not conscious of a desire to seek fertilization elsewhere. Not realizing clearly that, in fact, her life is equivalent (but for the repeated orgasms) to that of the married woman whose male is impotent, she has no conscious motive or warrant for seeking fertilization outside her home. Very few women indeed know that the orgasm forms such an insignificant part of their sexual experience as to leave their bodies completely unsatisfied and disappointed.[85] It follows, therefore, that if her love for her husband be very deep and guileless, she may continue living with him for years without taking any notice of other men. If her positiveness persist, however, despite the deleterious influence of the contraceptive habit, and she and her husband still continue to pursue their policy of childlessness, she will eventually find that other men do begin to interest her a good deal, although this interest at first will appear to herself as entirely involuntary and innocent. It will begin to show itself by a certain childish eagerness to see her husband’s friends, to meet them at bridge, at golf, or at tennis. She may suggest dancing lessons, or regular attendances at public and private entertainments, where she can meet and talk with other men.[86] All this time her affection for her husband will continue as strong as ever, and she will not be conscious of his having declined in her esteem by one iota. If the men she meets at this period in her married life happen to be men of the world, they will note the eager interest with which she looks at them, laughs at their clumsiest sallies, and applauds their most trifling manifestations of intellect, and they will be on their guard and remain punctiliously formal. If, on the other hand, they belong to the modern herd of arrogant, overdressed townsmen, whose only mainspring is vanity, and who find in the favour of a poor starved female body the highest flattery that their stupid, fatuous lives can offer them, they will fancy that this young wife’s eager attention when they speak, and her delirious laughter when they attempt to be witty, constitute a tribute to their intellect and wit. They will flatter themselves that the little woman has been captivated by them. And from that time onward the little woman in question will be in great danger.

Now let us try to ascertain precisely what has occurred in the body of the young wife in question, in order that we may follow and understand her conduct.

We will suppose she has been married three or four years, and all this time has been living in perfect concord with her husband. Occasional differences there have been, of course; but they have been unimportant. They have all turned, as is customary in English houses, upon the ridiculous words “selfish” and “unselfish.” When the young wife has wanted her way against her man she has endeavoured to make him yield by giving him a guilty conscience over the matter, and calling his opposition “selfish”; and when at last he has yielded, she has declared both to his face and to the world, that he was the most “unselfish” of husbands.[87] Likewise the man, when he has wanted to exert some leverage upon his wife’s mind, has warned her that resistance on her part would be “selfish,” and upon her yielding has admitted that she was “unselfish.” But apart from these foolish verbal quibbles around the utterly fantastic antithesis “selfish” and “unselfish,” they have had no quarrels.

Meanwhile, however, although the husband’s sexual experience has been complete, his wife’s has been of the most fragmentary order. Her reproductive organs and functions, though repeatedly stimulated as if their important business were about to begin, have been robbed each time of the natural sequel to that stimulation. Despite hundreds of alarms and starts, the complete cycle has never been experienced. As a result, this large reproductive equipment has not only remained idle, but in this very idleness has also been cheated again and again of its legitimate expectations, when those expectations seemed most certain of being fulfilled. These repeated rebuffs, together with the continued inactivity of this important mechanism, has not been suffered with impunity. Gradually, as the idleness came to be felt more and more acutely, and the sense of physiological disappointment became insistent, vague messages were sent up through the young wife’s subconsciousness to her brain. These messages we can decipher without any serious inaccuracy as follows:—“We are still idle; we are still inactive. When are we going to function? We ache to function.”

It must not be supposed, however, that these messages are deciphered as accurately as this by the woman’s conscious mind. She is vaguely conscious of the importunate calls from her dissatisfied reproductive equipment; but she is aware of them only as dissatisfaction. Whence they hail, what they mean, she has not the slightest idea. If you told her that they amounted to protests from her inactive reproductive equipment, she would probably feel so utterly outraged that she would never speak to you or see you again. She would need to be a psychologist herself to interpret them accurately.

Now it is when this vague feeling of dissatisfaction first becomes insistent in her conscious mind that she proceeds to act upon it in the manner already described (see p. 196).

Quite unsuspecting, her husband falls in eagerly with her plans. Truth to tell, any such marked change in a young married woman is a very serious sign; but the husband knowing nothing of these matters, and concluding after a review of the last three years that he has perhaps invited his wife to lead too dull a life, acquiesces with alacrity in her schemes.

Now if we suppose that the new régime, with its constant round of gaiety and variety, has lasted a further six months or a year, and still nothing has happened—that is to say, the young wife’s reproductive equipment is still inactive—a second and more dangerous phase very rapidly sets in.

The young woman suddenly finds one morning or evening that she is unaccountably exasperated by the way her husband fingers his tie while he talks to her or to a friend, or by his habit of knocking his pipe out against the iron of the grate, or by his manner of clearing his throat, or by any other peculiarity which, twenty-four hours previously, she was not even aware of having noticed particularly.

At first she is a little alarmed and suppresses her feeling of irritation. She feels that it is unfriendly, and that he does not deserve a rebuke for something so ridiculously trifling. Very soon, however, after she has continued to note the exasperating peculiarity for four or five days, her irritation begins to choke her, and she feels she must express it. The next time she observes him doing the fatal thing, therefore, she snaps sharply at him with a “Don’t, Harry, you fidget me with that constant noise!” or “Don’t, Harry, you always finger your tie in that ridiculous manner when you are talking—why do you do it?” etc.

She has not the faintest suspicion that this irritation and exasperation over a trifling aspect of her husband’s behaviour is only a surface ripple of a very much deeper and more bitter exasperation, down somewhere in her body; and the young husband, who is even less conscious of the matter than she is, turns to her in a manner utterly dumbfounded, and wonders what on earth can have happened.

He sees that she is serious. He has noted the strain of bitterness in her rebuke and its threatening note of anger, and, if he is a man of spirit, he points out to her that if she is out of sorts she had better go to bed, but that it is absurd for her to start now, after four years of marriage, rebuking him for something he has done regularly every day of their married life.

This discussion may end in a serious quarrel—the first serious quarrel in which words very much more stinging than “selfish” and “unselfish” are used freely for the first time; and both may retire to bed utterly bewildered by what has happened.

It is about this time that the young wife shows the eagerness described above in her attitude towards other men. These men may be, and usually are, a hundred times plainer, prosier and less potent than her husband; but this does not disturb her. She looks into their faces as if in their countenances alone she expected to find a spark of intelligence or manliness. Her husband’s superior witticisms fall flat, while at the grossest pun from his friends she contorts herself with laughter. She organizes games, picnics, excursions, and even summer holidays, in which some of her husband’s friends always contribute their share to the entertainment. Quiet lanes in Devonshire alone with her husband are no longer her ideal. She wants to organize a “jolly” party for the holidays, and learn to dive and swim with the other girls and young men of the party.

It is usually at this juncture that some prize fool of a man comes forward, who, in his superlative vanity and his crass ignorance of the true state of affairs, sets all the young woman’s restless eagerness, and particularly her attentiveness to himself, down to the credit of his own irresistible charm.

This sums up the psychology of all co-respondents. They are fatuously vain, they are criminally ignorant of female psychology, and they eagerly place to the credit account of their wit, their good looks, their intelligence, and their virility, a so-called conquest in which the part they have played is no more than that of an old horse’s leg that is taken into a stagnant pond to catch hungry leeches with.

At all events, if such a dangerous fool happens to be in the neighbourhood at such a juncture, and the young wife is thrown much into his company, the chances are that, encouraged by his eager acceptation of a situation in which his personal characteristics count for nothing, she is likely to imagine herself both “loved” and “in love”; and then nothing can save her from matrimonial ruin.

Her blind manœuvres will have achieved what her reproductive equipment most ardently desired; they will have removed her from a male who abused without satisfying this equipment, and will have thrown her into the arms of a man who, though possibly inferior to her husband in every respect (as she herself would have realized had her reproductive organs been content), or at any rate not so very much superior to him to justify all this fuss, was at least holding out to her reproductive equipment a fresh promise of fertilization.[88]

And since fertilization is what the will of the species insists upon, and woman is that will, she must be forgiven if, in the circumstances, she goes over to the vain ass who imagines he has captivated her affections. At any rate, she herself is in no way to blame. She has been true to the power to which she owes all her fidelity. The blame, if any, lies, in the first place, with her husband for having deprived a positive and desirable woman of her full sexual experience for a number of years, and for not having realized that this was her trouble when she first became restless; and secondly, with the co-respondent for having mistaken an exasperated woman’s longing for fertilization—not for “companionship,” for “understanding” or for a “kindred soul” as she has declared—for a triumph attributable to his irresistible attractions. The illicit lover in this case, besides being a vain fool, betrays his own sex in the man whose wife he robs.

In such cases a little knowledge of sex psychology will, as a rule, save the situation. But so long as the world continues to be thronged with jackasses who are ready to go hot all over with pride at every woman’s smile, the ridiculous spectacle of a co-respondent in every way the inferior, or at least no more than the equal, of the wronged husband, will continue to be common in our midst.

The strange part of the whole affair is that the young wife’s notion of promised bliss with the co-respondent is based entirely upon her unconscious or bodily hope that fertilization is now sure to follow. Unless it do follow, therefore, she finds herself a twofold dupe; for she has exchanged a man to whom she is at least legally attached for a man who in nine cases out of ten is either no more than her husband’s equal, or his inferior; and she is no better off; because, the moment the novelty of the situation will have died down, the same dissatisfaction that takes its root in her rebuffed reproductive organs will make itself felt again.

Now the above analysis of the workings of a positive married woman’s mind in all cases of adultery resulting from physiological disappointment, is typical, and may stand as the unalterable frame or pattern which all similar cases may be made to fit. For it matters not whether the marriage is a childless one, or whether it be one in which, from motives of economy, child-birth has been stopped after the birth of one, two, or three children; the phases which mark the approach to adultery are always the same. And it may be said with perfect accuracy that, where positiveness persists in the woman, and child-birth is stopped while she is still too young for her reproductive equipment to tolerate idleness gladly, some kind of unhappiness is bound to enter the home, and as a rule this unhappiness will lead to adultery.

When we note in the statistics of divorce the comparatively high figures shown for marriages in which there have been one or two children only, therefore, we may take it that unhappiness began to enter the home in the third, fourth, or fifth year after the birth of the last child—that is to say, at a period when the idleness of her reproductive organs was beginning to prove a source of intolerable exasperation to the young female. And in these cases, as in the classical instance detailed above, the same phases occur. There is the same sudden interest in matters outside the home—either golf, tennis, acting, bridge, dancing, a new religion, a new philosophy, or a Cause. This brings the young wife into touch with a number of strange men, and as her interest in these increases, she begins to be aware of a vague feeling of irritation concerning certain aspects of her husband’s person or behaviour, of which theretofore she had not been conscious. Finally, she becomes infatuated with one of the strange men, and her feelings for her husband suffer a corresponding change for the worse. Then only cowardice, caution, or extreme devotion to her small family, can possibly prevent her from compromising herself.

This is now the time and the place to consider whether there are not perhaps other physiological and psychical conditions resulting from deliberate childlessness, or from the deliberate limitation of the family, besides those discussed above, which hasten the rupture between the positive couple.

There are certainly many such physiological and psychical conditions, and the foremost of these is the deleterious effect which the constant use of contraceptives has upon the happy sexual relations of the young couple. That there should be no known contraceptive which does not in some way mar the complete happiness of marital intercourse, will perhaps be regarded by some as a very wise dispensation of Providence;—for certainly the best brains of all nations for many thousands of years have concerned themselves with the problem, and it seems astonishing that, so far, nothing really perfect should have been discovered;—but at all events this fact goes a considerable way towards making the marriage-bed of people who deliberately limit the family at least a breeding-place of very serious trouble.

Secondly, the very fact that childlessness as an end is incessantly present to the minds of the young couple—whether they have had no children at all, or only one, two, or three—during the cohabitation, constitutes in itself an influence which in time is certain to destroy the savour of their relations at a pace commensurate with their positiveness.

The reduction of any human function to the plane of sensationalism alone has this strange result that, in the end, the very sensations it provides tend to decline in intensity. It is as if sensation alone were an insufficient psychical foundation to support the whole arch of any permanent human interest or effort, and that where it is not correlated with the feelings of power or purposefulness, it tends to crumble and to perish.

The woman in such cases suffers even more quickly than the man, because in her the physiological disappointment sings in chorus with the psychical disillusionment. But in the man too ultimate anæsthesia is inevitable; for, sooner or later, the fact that the natural consequences of his act (offspring) are not forthcoming, will begin to tell on his self-esteem and his sense of power, with which elements more than half the savour of sexual relations must certainly have been associated by his ancestors.[89]

A further psychological factor must be reckoned with, which has its share in bringing about matrimonial difficulties in the state of deliberate childlessness, or of the limitation of the family, and that is the feeling of aimlessness that ultimately supervenes, when any two people associate together without any further object in life than that of eating, drinking, or making merry. This is not due to the fact that eating, drinking, and making merry are in themselves bad, as the Puritans would have us believe; but that they are at least monotonous if unrelieved by any other interests. Life, as we have seen, is repetition with a modicum of variation, and so is happiness. Nothing that can introduce variety into the home of the young couple, therefore, ought to be eschewed, for fear lest that lack of variety should be realized which causes life to lose its interest and its savour. Now children are obviously a constant source of variety in the home. Each child, in its turn, gives the home a different aspect, a different outlook, a different responsibility. Children, moreover, give the family unit a superior aim and purpose, which increases in importance with the number of the offspring. In this sense alone, therefore, a state of childlessness or of family limitation (when the number of children is small), in an ordinary home, where there are no compensating features such as ardent artistic, scientific or religious preoccupations, constitutes a dangerous state from the standpoint of connubial stability.

Before concluding this discussion of the positive couple in relation to divorce, which we propose to do with an examination of the statistics, it will now be necessary to consider the circumstances under which the positive man himself becomes unfaithful.[90]

From the statistics it would appear that more women than men go wrong in a childless marriage. This is only what, from our argument, we should have expected; because since the coitus represents a complete physiological experience to the man, he is less likely to become vaguely dissatisfied with childlessness than the woman. Nevertheless, should the childless state be continued too long—that is to say, for five, six, or more years—there are sure to arise certain indistinct feelings of dissatisfaction in the man, which will cause him to become restless and interested in other women. These feelings will be the result of the total lack of those “appeals” to his primitive instincts, which the regular procreation of children provides for almost all men without exception. He will miss the sense of power which he would derive from the material and visible extension of his own identity in his offspring, and he will also feel the need of that silent tribute which children would make to the deepest source of his self-esteem—virile potency.

It should also be borne in mind that, where there are no children, the man is more likely, owing to the absence of heavy responsibilities, to indulge that inclination to varied sexual experiences, to which every positive man is subject after some years of marriage. We have seen how entirely man’s sexual experience depends for its savour upon desire—the desire he feels for the object of his sexual passion. When, therefore, through years of regular intimacy with his wife, this desire tends to decline, there naturally follows a corresponding decline in the savour of his sexual experience. To correct this he is tempted to go in search of change, of novelty. Now, when this inclination arises in monogamic marriages, it is frequently checked out of consideration for the children, and more especially by the secret satisfaction derived from their presence. Where there are no children, it is much more likely to be given free rein.

Another factor which ought to be given due weight in the sexual psychology of man, is his love of protecting and patronizing. The wife who gives him a number of children not only makes a strong appeal to this love in her own person but also in the persons of her offspring. He becomes, figuratively, a huge buttress supporting the dependent members of his family, and this gratifies the self-esteem of the average simple-minded man, and in innumerable cases induces him not only to accept the burden, but also to love it deeply and passionately for giving him such a delightful and constant sense of real importance.

Finally, in the conduct of the man of high ethical development, there will enter the factor of moral ideals. When once he feels his family about him, he will be conscious of certain duties, certain obligations, which will preclude all idea, all velleity, of not abiding by his original pledges. This man will be able to live till the end of his days with a woman, however much his feelings may have changed towards her, and still give the world the impression of being a most dutiful and most devoted husband. Temptation, sexual passion, the desire for variety, will simply not enter within his purview. The moment an irregular thought occurs to his mind, it will be, as it were, “switched off.” It should, however, be remembered that when such men are positive by nature, they will usually be found to practise in their leisure hours some kind of sport (hard walking, cycling, golf, riding) or industry (carpentry—true of thousands of Englishmen to-day; wood-cutting, e.g. Gladstone and the ex-Emperor of Germany; stamp-collecting and numismatics—true of thousands of modern Englishmen) or religious activity (Christian, Spiritualistic or other propaganda) in which much of their sex becomes absorbed.

In Chart I, I have given figures covering a period of twenty-one years—from 1899 to 1919 inclusive, for England and Wales; and the most important conclusions to be drawn from them at a glance are the following:—

(a) The preponderance of divorces which occur as the result of husbands’ petitions over those which occur as the result of wives’ petitions.

Bearing in mind the more insistent impulse to variety in sexual experience which harasses the male throughout life, this preponderance of husbands’ petitions only tends to show the extreme difficulty with which women can tolerate either the premature cessation of child-birth or no child-birth at all. For although it may be argued that in order to obtain a divorce the woman must charge her husband with something more than the mere indulgence of his craving for variety, and therefore that proportions are misleading from this point of view, it should also be remembered that, where there has been a transference of affection with adultery on the male’s part, desertion would necessarily follow, and therefore supply the minimum grounds for the woman’s petition.

Chart I. NUMBER OF CHILDREN AT TIME OF FILING PETITION OF DIVORCE.