LOVE AND MARRIAGE
LOVE AND MARRIAGE
BY LUDWIG LEWISOHN
Utopia is the loveliest of all countries; it is also the farthest away. One may make magnificent generalizations concerning the future of the relations of the sexes; one may set down truths that are theoretically unanswerable. Only one will change nothing, help not a single soul. Let me cling to a few humble facts....
So far as any one can see the habit of one man living with one woman will persist. The young will hear of nothing else, since they are under the sway of romantic passion which is, subjectively, exclusive and final; those who are older will hear of nothing else because experience has shown this method of life capable of securing the healthiest freedom from preoccupation with sex and the maximum amount of ordered activity. To be a rake or even a fastidious “varietist” is the costliest of occupations. Rational monogamy is in no danger. The trouble lies elsewhere; itlies in the fact that current notions of monogamy are, I use the word advisedly, insane.
Local bill-board advertisements of moving pictures have recently shown a ball-room in which an irate gentleman in evening-dress grasped the shoulder of another gentleman who looked crushed and crest-fallen. With an inimitable gesture of moral indignation the first gentleman pointed to a quivering female on the other side of the room. The caption of this stirring lithograph was “His Forgotten Wife.” The exquisite absurdity of this picture is clear. It is significant of the way in which we are all brow-beaten by the sodden nonsense of the tribe that it took me some minutes of reflection to come upon the unreason of the thing. If the crushed looking gentleman had forgotten the lady, she was not, of course, his wife and could never have truly been. If we are dealing with a euphemism and are to understand that he wanted to forget her, she may once have been his wife, but had, quite obviously, ceased to be.
In this moving picture there is illustrated what I call the insane view of monogamic marriage, namely, that it is put on like a shirt or acoat and must be kept on however ill-fitting, comfortless, unclean, or dangerous, and that in this mere keeping on there is virtue. There is the further implication that marriage has nothing to do with good behavior, which is rewarded even in penitentiaries, or with ill; that it is, indeed, an abstract kind of fate, a magical or infernal machine, a metaphysical trap. Once you are caught in it, you must stay caught. To wriggle is sin.
Do I seem to be discussing the matter on too low a plane? I wish I were. The truth is that cultivated and liberal people have not yet freed their minds from the concepts with which that amusing picture deals. It is in action, not in fireside talk that these things are tested. And it is true that even such people will pay an uninhibited respect to a depraved character, cruel, treacherous, stupid, who practices that moving-picture theory of marriage which, in ways no less real for being subtle and but half-conscious, they will be tempted to withhold from a person of the utmost spiritual grace and charm who practices that kind of marriage of which, theoreticallyand outspokenly, they so eloquently approve.
This very tentative argument, then, is not directed against marriage. I am not even ready to plead—that would be Utopian—that the relations of the sexes be withdrawn from social control. Our first step, at least in America, must be an attempt to sanitate marriage. This can be done—if it can be done at all—by relating marriage and its practice to certain notions of good and decency and honor that already have a tenure, however feeble, upon the public consciousness. Marriage, in brief, should be held to be created by love and sustained by love. I shall, of course, be accused of meaning passion. I mean that precise blending of passion and spiritual harmony and solid friendship without which, as even those who will not admit it know, the close association of a man and a woman is as disgusting as it is degrading. And marriage should be dependent, though this matter is included in the first, on good behavior. I will not keep a man or a woman as my friend whom I discover to be a liar, slanderer, thief. Much less ought one to keep such a person as husband orwife. Who is to judge, it will be asked? No objective judgment is needed. A subjective conviction of this sort suffices to reduce the union in question to dust and ashes.
Here is the one practical point; here the one possibility of hope. To frame a rational theory of the relations of men and women is easy and agreeable. The very fashioners of such theories, being human, will be brought, under the discomforts of social pressure, toseemto assent to all that their minds most passionately deny. A man or a woman of the highest philosophic insight will struggle through the ignominy of the divorce courts not so much in order to dissolve a meaningless legal bond as to save some one whom he or she loves and reveres from the criticism of the vulgar. For we live in a vulgar world. There is no safe and ultimate escape; its vulgarity in precisely these matters will often affront us where we least expected it. To mitigate that vulgarity must be our first task.
I do not know whether it can be done at all. But if so, then it must be done by making an unhappy union disgraceful. People who are always bickering with each other, who are obviouslyunhappy in each other’s presence, who always hold opinions acridly opposed, who are always trying either subtly or obviously to escape from each other—such couples must fall under social disapproval. And this disapproval must apply even though one of the two prefers possessiveness to either happiness or decency or self-respect. Similarly those who are deliberately unfaithful should be disgraced—not for the act of unfaith but for the hypocrisy of remaining in a union which that very act, which the temptation to that very act, shows to have lost its purpose and its meaning.
This sort of social control is not my ideal. Love is like religion, a matter for the individual soul. To change partners in love is very much like changing one’s opinion on some deep and vital matter. The spirit must bear its own inherent witness. But I promised myself not to be Utopian. And may it not conceivably be brought home to a few people to begin with that the men who laugh so spontaneously when the song-and-dance man sings “My wife’s gone to the country, hurray, hurray!” are leading immoral lives and reducing their partners to therôle of disagreeable prostitutes and unsatisfactory servants?
I am not prepared to stress the point unendurably. True marriage, the true and lovely union of a man and a woman, body and spirit, is rare. But to-day it is not even an ideal, not even something admired and striven for. Love in itself is rare and married love is perhaps as rare as beauty or genius. Happiness, too, is rare, happiness in any relation. But even as a man or a woman has made an obvious and shattering mistake if his or her chosen work does not produce a reasonable minimum of lasting inner satisfaction, so may marriage also be tested by a reasonable minimum of lasting—let us say, preference and blessedness. To fall below that minimum is to cheat both the self and society, both the present and posterity, to sacrifice honor to a fetish and vitality to decay.