Of all paradoxes man is the cleverest and most untiring. He says he is a worm of the earth, but believes himself to be a son of God; his own person he clothes modestly, but revels in discovering the nakedness of the greatest possible number of his sisters in Christ. The more he humiliates himself, the prouder he is; the more he vaunts [Pg 2] his generosity, so much the more is he egotistical; an adorer of liberty in theory, but in practice a daily contriver of tyrannies.
For the present I will confine myself to this last form of his madness. If one only listens to him, he places liberty above all the good things of the world. If Adam has lost the earthly paradise, it is because he did not know how to tolerate the yoke of a divine prohibition; if man has spattered his planet with blood, it is because he preferred the hard bread of the free citizen to the golden chains of despotism; if he has raised monuments to Spartacus, Bahilla, Garibaldi, and Washington, it is because his first glory is to be free; but the monuments forgotten, [Pg 3] the tyrants killed, he raises new ones on his own account; perhaps for the pleasure of destroying them hereafter. If he does not seek some innocent and pleasant occupation, what can he do after having slept and loved and eaten?
Numbers must take the first place among the early tyrants of our own making.
When God made the world, he entirely forgot to make numbers, and we have corrected this fault of creation by making them ourselves. God had not numbered the stars in heaven, or the drops of water in the sea, the leaves on the trees or the ants on the ground. Infinity above, infinity below, the ineffable and immeasurable everywhere.
[Pg 4]
Instead, we have repaired this great forgetfulness of the Creator, by placing numbers above everything else, and making them our masters in the world of living things and dead; we allow them to tyrannize over us in every act of our humble daily life, as well as in the pages of history and in dogmas of philosophy. If there have been sanguinary revolutions in order to obtain the liberty of the press, why as yet has no one rebelled against the tyranny of numbers?
Quien sabe?
Whoever would think of buying eleven or thirteen eggs?
No one, for 10 and 12 are our small tyrants.
Who would make a present of nine or ninety-nine francs to his own son?
[Pg 5]
No one, for 10 is a great tyrant, and 100 greater than 10.
Who has never felt the yoke of numbers one thousand and one hundred thousand? who is never in subjection to the tyranny of the million, both in language and mode of life?
And centuries, too, which are only so many figures, what a number of theories they have evoked from the depths of history; how many false names have they not written in the anagraphs of time; how many revolutions have they not postponed; how many others have they aroused, merely on account of the tyranny of a number?
For some years we have had before our eyes one of the most deplorably humiliating examples of our view of [Pg 6] this arithmetical incubus, the decline of the nineteenth century to make room for the twentieth.
Six years are still wanting till this numerical cataclysm. Who knows how many books will be written on the century dying out, how many prophecies on the century following it; what torrents of philosophy and ink to discuss the passing of the number 19 to that of 20?
Yet centuries only exist on paper, and after having made them ourselves, we adore and freely elect them to be our tyrants; only to deride the poor savages who, like us, make their own gods of wood and stone, fall on their knees before them and fear them.
And we fear numbers—only another idol of thought, made for our use [Pg 7] and necessity, and in the similitude of our wretchedness and intellectual weakness.
For my part I only see around me an infinite continuity of things and of time, nor do I allow myself to be overawed by the cabal of numbers, with which we ought to amuse ourselves as with a pack of cards, esteeming them for what they are worth; a poor example of a thing yet poorer!
The dying century, fin de siècle, and all such sensational phrases, which are intended to express a great deal, because they mean nothing—these exclamations, the eloquence of the non-eloquent, move me little, if at all. I look back and see a yesterday; I look around and see a to-day; forward and I see a to-morrow; the three tenses [Pg 8] of the to become, which have no numbers, nor will ever have. For they succeed each other unceasingly, following the mighty strides of our journey, not with the figures of a century, but with a regret that becomes a hope, and will be a faith; to be succeeded again and forever by regret, hope, and faith—unceasingly.
I wished to write this in the first pages of my book to let you know that if I attempt to delineate marriage in modern society I renounce the dying century, the fin de siècle, and all such effective phrases, which would give me, based on numbers, so many resources of rhetoric and sentimentality. I have hated and always shall hate all forms of tyranny, including that of numbers. I look around and [Pg 9] say, this is the way men marry to-day. They do so because they are sons of a yesterday, which is the father of to-day; then I look forward and hope that to-morrow will be better than yesterday or to-day, and I endeavour to promote the good as quickly as possible and with a minimum of pain, by my pen, my experience, and my studies, cito tute et jucunde, as Celsus has it.
?
In our civilized society, marriage is the least evil of all the different modes of union between man and woman for the preservation of the race. It is the result of many historic evolutions, many sensual, moral, religious, and legislative elements, which have come into conflict with each other in the course of time.
[Pg 10]
Remote atavism of the ravishment of the female, holy words of inspired prophets, imperiousness of feudatories, avarice of usurers, transports of love and heroism of hearts, have all left something of their own upon the altar of matrimony. But before the sacrament was finished and the priest sent up the fumes of his incense, animal man came leering and saying:
“This is my affair. I am the sole and true priest of this rite. I am the only minister of this religion.” And mixing the divine and human vows on the altar with his hairy hands—perhaps, too, with his tail—he formed a chaos of things most opposite, from the highest to the lowest, from the most sublime to the most ignoble. And this, then, is marriage.
[Pg 11]
To curse this love sanctified by vows is useless, to suppress it is impossible, to substitute something better is absurd (at least for the present), and nothing remains but to accept it as the least evil of sexual unions, and to ameliorate it gradually, prudently, and wisely.
By free choice on both sides, enlightened by reason.
By the guarantee of divorce.
?
Neither the prince nor the proletariate needs this book of mine. The first marries worse than any citizen in his kingdom, for dynastic reasons, without love or sympathy. With him it is first the throne, then the family; first the alliance of his colours, and then [Pg 12] if there is room, the kisses of love. It is true he may console himself with the vulgar and easily won embraces of a pandering Venus; he may also take advantage of one of the most ridiculous remnants of the Middle Ages, the morganatic marriage. In all cases the ministers, deputies, nay, even journalists provide him with a wife. The art of taking a wife is for him, therefore, nonsense.
The proletariate, more fortunate than the prince, may choose the woman it loves, and in its choice may take advantage of the counsels of those who have loved and sinned much. But it does not read books, for they cost too much; and when by law its individuality is cancelled from the statistics of the illiterate, it has no [Pg 13] time to read, for the tyranny of bread oppresses it.
Therefore I write for neither prince nor proletariate, but for all that human multitude who live and move between the extreme poles of modern society and who constitute the true nerve of the nation.
In what way do all these millions of males and females combine?
In different ways, but amongst them marriage is the only legal foundation of the family permitted by morality and approved by religion. All others are contraband, moving on cross-roads either alone or in company, but all, in one way or the other, defrauding nature, with an eternal envy for those who have honestly paid custom dues on entering the city.
[Pg 14]
Without fear of going far wrong, one may say that in whatever society there are the greatest number of married people, there one will find more morality and decorum, and consequently the number of those who love and nourish their love by seduction, whether it be with the armed hand on the public road, or clandestinely under the form of domestic robbery, will be less.
Besides this, our modern society is suffering from gold fever; a disease which is as old as man himself and has taken the form and course of a real epidemic; this contributes more than any other element to corrupt the roots of marriage.
Diffused instruction and the many social exigencies have increased our [Pg 15] needs beyond measure; more especially those which are more costly, that is, those of the intellect and the higher ?sthetic emotions, without in any way enlarging the sources of production.
From birth to death, the balance of home life oppresses us, torments us; its arithmetic pierces through the skin with the acute points of its figures, reaches our very viscera and, alas, our hearts also; poisoning every pleasure, spoiling all the holy and happy poetry of life. Invited as all are to the genial table of modern civilization which offers us so many new delights, we are like the poor government official, who, for appearance’s sake, allows himself to be carried off to a ball, and between the [Pg 16] bars of music and the full glasses, feels his pocket anxiously, wondering how and when he will be able to pay the score.
With what difficulty some of the money is drawn from the poor purse of a middle-class man! How many pangs has it not caused before it sees the light of day, accompanied by the last caress of the convulsive fingers! How unequal the comparison between those who live on an income of one thousand and three thousand francs! And, from the ever increasing fever of desires, the gnawing of all vanities, and the vanity of the classes, how these figures increase daily until they reach to ten, twenty, or thirty thousand francs!
And this is the reason that whilst [Pg 17] love alone should prompt to marriage, it is nearly always the last party in the contract, in which money judges and directs according to the need of it, with all the imperiousness of one who knows himself to be unconquerable.
Money, money, always money! It is the first and supreme arbiter of the greater number of marriages.
To take a wife means to become poor, if the wife does not help to build the new family nest; it means to walk with open eyes into a bottomless and dark abyss; it signifies condemning one’s self to the daily torture of poverty, and to dedicate the children yet unborn to the same struggle.
Our dignity would demand that the [Pg 18] wife’s dowry should not enter into our choice at all. The true ideal would be the ability to offer to our companion riches, or, at least, a competency with our heart and hand, so that we could say:
“See, beloved; all that is mine is thine. However much I give you, I shall always be your debtor, for you have given me your love.” All this is noble and grand, and every man who is conscious of the power of his own moral and physical manhood would wish to say so. But how many really can?
Exceedingly few; hardly any.
And then the young man who would seek to love in the way of the Lord is discouraged and renounces marriage, in which he only sees the [Pg 19] door to misery or cowardice. He renounces it frankly and forever. Are celibates more honest, and how far does their honesty extend?
With the most honest, virtue extends to an unwillingness to betray the purity of the maiden, or the faithfulness of other men’s wives; extends or rather descends, to making the service of love a question of periodical hygiene regulated by the rubric of the calendar and by that most imperative one of the lunar month. Poor love, poor translation of the most epic poem of life! It is as though one were to translate Homer into some Australian dialect!
These bachelor hygienists are however a small minority. Others pretend to something more and [Pg 20] better, and make love in the houses of others, and live by abject and cowardly seduction, and perhaps usury.
This is the most sordid and cancerous sore in our modern marriage; this is the gangrene of our society, which spreads an asphyxiating fetor of domestic treachery, of moral infection, which contaminates and infests everything. Woe to us if in every family the newly born could proclaim aloud the name of their father! How many false, living bills of exchange would be protested, what long faces amongst biologists who ingeniously study the law of heredity; what a terrible picture of treachery and dissembling! human and civilized society would appear [Pg 21] all at once like a band of false coiners, and the woman’s womb nothing but a mint of false money.
But the newly born can only weep—the first salutation to life—and the wombs of women are silent, and continue their business of false coinage.
And yet I do not blame the woman more than the man, in this galley of treachery, this wide-spread and clandestine manufactory of bastards. If man assails the woman, and plots against her virtue, he avails himself of the rights of life. If society does not permit him to take a wife, why should he not share the bread of him who has too much to eat? Do not the workmen of Europe declare daily, that one of the first rights is that of work? And [Pg 22] is not the right of loving perhaps more sacred; the work of works; that for which nature sacrifices the individual, and to which it consecrates the best of its energies? Husbands defend these rights, we attack them. If they are conquered—tant pis pour eux!
And the poor wives, why should they not brighten the ennui of the nuptial bed with some little love affair? Were they not bound forever to a man they had never loved, whom they had perhaps seen only once? Were they not sold by their parents, guardians, and matrons, like merchandise? Was not their dowry rated at the weight of a coat of arms? and have not they also the right to love? And all the others [Pg 23] who have had the good fortune to love the man who has given them his name, and have thrown themselves into his arms, giving him their whole hearts, happy to be able to transform themselves in him and for him; who dreamt of making marriage a synonym of love, and who instead found the husband in a few months in the arms of an old love; have not all these women the right of vengeance? This is matrimony as it is daily represented in the many small theaters which we call men’s houses.
In these theaters, however (one must be just and not exaggerate), there are more farces played than comedies, more comedies than dramas. Tragedies are rare. For [Pg 24] this high form of dramatic art heroes are required, and they are very scarce in modern society. We have made our houses, statues, pictures, and gardens smaller, and have been compelled to reduce our feelings also.
The pistol and dagger, too, figure in the chronicles of matrimony, but as phenomena. In the home-theater, on the contrary, the punishment of retaliation, the little basenesses, the stirring of conscience, under all forms and at all sorts of prices, are in common use. The ménages à trois (aye, even four) are pretty pictures in kind; and the hypocrisy of husbands who will not see, because they detest scenes, figure every day in the running account of modern matrimony.
[Pg 25]
Live and let live—to apply the noble modern institution of co-operative societies to the family; and raise aloft the banner of the association of forces. One for all, and all for one!
?
Infidelity and treachery are not the only moths which corrode marriage. We have all the domestic discords which spring from the inequality of the needs of intelligence, heart, and habits of thought; we have the partisans of the wife and those of the husband, who quarrel amongst themselves, complicating the problem, poisoning the wounds, opening with every touch the cicatrices which time and love were so pitifully healing.
If war is an exception in matrimony, [Pg 26] peace is still more rare; and one may safely say that in the greater number of cases it is an armed peace, an atmosphere which relaxes the strength, dries up the purest sources of tenderness, and destroys its happiness. In a word, as our society is constituted in the present day, hell is not common in the family circle, paradise exceedingly rare, but purgatory is almost universal.
And yet marriage is still the least evil amongst the unions of the man and woman; it can and ought to grow continually better and increase human happiness; which is for me the highest and truest end of progress.
What is the use of being able to run through space at the velocity of seventy kilometres an hour, or to go [Pg 27] round the world in seventy days; what the use of being able to talk through the telephone or see the clouds in the sky of Mars; what the use of so great a fecundity of books, of such a deluge of journals, if one is unable to increase the patrimony of human happiness by even a farthing?
At the present day marriage may be happy, just as one may become rich by playing in the lottery, but whilst one door opens to the possibility of good, two open to that of evil. He who utters the fatal yes before the Syndic girded with the three national colors, lets a grain fall in the scale that holds our happiness and two in the scale that holds our misfortunes. It is his duty to do the opposite; it is the duty of society to defend matrimony [Pg 28] from the perils which threaten it, by wise laws not inspired by the arcadian tendency of the heart, nor by theocratical mysticism, but by a profound knowledge of man.
?
About twenty years ago I broke a lance in favour of divorce in my “Fisiologia dell’ amore,” and hoped at that time to have seen it by now included in the laws of my country.
Twenty years ago I wrote:
“Divorce ought to be included among our laws as soon as possible: happy couples solicit it to secure their dignity, wounded by a tyrannical tie; the unhappy implore it on their bended knees, those who by misfortune or fault are condemned [Pg 29] to the most supreme of human tortures: that of a slavery without redemption, of a yoke without rest, of a scourge without balm, of a grief without hope.”[1] Even to-day divorce is not made a law among us, but public opinion demands and will have it. No one in the present day dare defend it with the broken arms of the Church; but many defend it still in the name of the children and of the sanctity of the family.
[1] “Fisiologia dell’ amore,” Milano, 1873, p. 338.
There are too many innocent victims of matrimony for their voices not to be heard; and when the law-giver knows how to surround divorce with all the most delicate guarantees, he will increase the sanctity of the family and free the children from [Pg 30] the cruelly abject spectacle of their two parents living under the same roof hating each other, with homicide in their thoughts, bearing the chains of convicts, without the courage or the strength to break them.
?
Legislators must do this, the rest of the duty lies with those directors of the mind who are called writers, masters, and educators. They ought to teach the woman to know what love is, and what matrimony is, so that she should not give herself, bound hand and foot, to a contract which she knows by hearsay only, nor enter the dim future guided by paternal, maternal, or religious authority alone.
[Pg 31]
The possibilities of misfortune are a hundred times greater for the woman than for the man, for she is always more ignorant of things genital than we are, and goes to the altar or municipality ignorant of all, dragged like a lamb to the slaughter-house.
At the present day, under the customs to which our society conforms, the only profession of woman is that of wife and mother; and to this calling she is instructed from infancy, not to be an exemplary wife or perfect mother, but, if possible, to find a husband, and that an ideal one, one who is handsome, young, and above all rich. She is secretly and cleverly instructed in the art of hunting that rare game, a good husband; not in [Pg 32] order to make him or herself happy, but to increase her income and to rise a step or two in the social scale. If in comfortable circumstances, she must become rich; if rich, a millionaire; if civilian, a countess; if countess, marchioness or princess. This is what she is to aim at; all her education has been directed to this end. Now, marriage should rise from its lower position of a business transaction to the higher one of a union of hearts and thoughts, and neither of the two companions ought to be able to look at each other with anger and think:
You bought me.
I sold myself.
Nothing can cleanse us from this original sin, which contaminates matrimony. [Pg 33] In vain do the comforts of riches, the pride of a high position, the excitements of domestic sensuality, throw flowers over the wound to hide it. At the least quibble, the least cloud that covers the heaven of the double life, one hears the fatal words:
You bought me,
I sold myself,
arising from the depths of the troubled conscience like a voice evoked by some evil spirit.
And when neither riches, sensuality, nor vanity have a rag wherewith to cover the cancerous sore, the naked and dreadful spectre of an unsuccessful speculation, of unsuccessful business—then bitterness is added to [Pg 34] bitterness, and the domestic warfare which has become permanent, angry, and poisonous, developes into a chronic despair, the most heart-rending form of human pain. Even this is not all; as in an attack of neuralgia the deep-seated and continual pains become sharper and more intolerable at certain moments, taking on a piercing and stab-like character, so it is with the deep-seated and dumb despair of those two unfortunate beings. Every now and then the inexorable cry sounds, and thus it goes on until the last breath.
Let divorce come then, and quickly, to set all these slaves free; let there be a wiser and more liberal education, to teach girls what they do not [Pg 35] know or know indifferently; so that they, like ourselves, can freely say their yes before the altar or the magistrate with perfect knowledge and understanding.