Back Aa

Book of Life, The

<h2>CHAPTER XLVI THE PROBLEM OF DIVORCE</h2> <div class="blockquot">(Defends divorce as a protection to monogamous love, and one of the means of preventing infidelity and prostitution.) </div> You will hear sermons and read newspaper editorials about the "divorce evil," and you will find that to the preacher or editor this "evil" consists of the fact that more and more people are refusing to stay unhappily married. It does not interest these moralizers if the statistics show that it is women who are getting most of the divorces, and that the meaning of the phenomenon is that women are refusing to continue living with drunken and dissolute men. To the clergy, the breaking of a marriage is an evil per se, and regardless of circumstances. They know this because God has told them so, and in the name of God they seek to keep people tied in sex unions which have come to mean loathing instead of love. Now, I will assert it as a mathematical certainty that a considerable percentage of marriages must fail. It is essential to progress that human beings should grow, both mentally and spiritually, and manifestly they cannot all grow in the same way. If they grow differently, must they not sometimes lose the power to make each other happy in the marital bonds? Who does not know the man who masters life and becomes a vital force, while his wife remains dull and empty? If such a man changes wives, the world in general denounces him as a selfish beast; but the world does not know nor does it care about those thousands of men who, not caring to be branded as selfish beasts, fulfill the needs of their lives by keeping mistresses in secret. I knew a certain country school teacher, one of the most narrowly conventional young women imaginable, who was engaged to a middle-aged business man. He went to New York on a business trip, and stayed a couple of months, and wrote her that he had met some Anarchists, and had discovered that all he had read about them in the newspapers was false, and that they were the true and pure idealists to whom the rest of his life must be devoted. The young lady was horrified; nor was she any happier when she came to New York and met her fianc�'s new friends. She ought in common sense to have broken the engagement; but she was in love, and she married, as many another fool woman does, with the idea of "reforming" the man. She failed, and was utterly and unspeakably wretched. I know another man, a conservative capitalist of narrow and aggressive temper, whose wife turned into an ardent Bolshevik. The man thinks that all Bolsheviks should be shut up in jail for life, while the wife is equally certain that all jails should be razed to the ground and all Bolsheviks placed in control of the government. These two people have got to a point where they cannot sit down to the breakfast table without flying into a quarrel. I know another case of a modern scientist, an agnostic, whose wife, a half-educated, sentimental woman, took to dabbling in mysticism, and drove him wild by setting up an image of Buddha in her bedroom, and consorting with "swamis" in long yellow robes. I know another whose wife turned into an ultra-pious Catholic, and turned over the care of his domestic life to a priest. Is it not obvious that the only possible solution of such problems lies in divorce? Unless, indeed, we are all of us going to turn over the care of our domestic lives to the priests! Our grandfathers and grandmothers believed one thing, and believed the same thing when they were seventy as when they were twenty; so it was possible for them to dwell in domestic security and permanence till death did them part. But we are learning to change our minds; and whether what we believe is better or worse than what our ancestors believed, at least it is different. Also we are coming to take what we believe with more seriousness; the intellectual life means more and more to us, and it becomes harder and harder for us to find sexual and domestic happiness with a partner who does not share our convictions, but, on the contrary, may be contributing to the campaign funds of the opposition party. I do not mean by this that people should get a divorce as soon as they find they differ about some intellectual idea; on the contrary, I have advocated that they should do everything possible to understand and to tolerate each other. But it is a fact that intellectual convictions are the raw material out of which characters and lives are made, and it is inevitable that some characters and lives that fit quite well at twenty should fit very badly at thirty or forty. When we refuse divorce under such circumstances we are not fostering marriage, as we fondly imagine; we are really fostering adultery. It is a fact that not one person in ten who is held by legal or social force in an unhappy sex union will refrain from seeking satisfaction outside; and because these outside satisfactions are disgraceful, and in some cases criminal, they seldom have any permanence. Therefore it follows that "strict" divorce laws, such as the clerical propaganda urges upon us, are in reality laws for the promotion of fornication and prostitution. There is a short story by Edith Wharton, in which the "divorce evil" is exhibited to us in its naked horror; the story called "The Other Two," in the volume "The Descent of Man." A society woman has been divorced twice and married three times, and by an ingenious set of circumstances the woman and all three of the men are brought into the same drawing-room at the same time. Just imagine, if you can, such an excruciating situation: a woman, her husband, and two men who used to be her husbands, all compelled to meet together and think of something to say! I cite this story because it is a perfect illustration of the extent to which the "divorce problem" is a problem of our lack of sense. Mrs. Wharton will, I fear, consider me a very vulgar person if I assert that there is absolutely no reason whatever why any of those four people in her story should have had a moment's discomfort of mind, except that they thought there was. There is absolutely nothing to prevent a man and woman who used to be married from meeting socially and being decent to each other, or to prevent two men from being decent to each other under such circumstances. I would not say that they should choose to be intimate friends—though even that may be possible occasionally. I know, because I have seen it happen. In Holland I met a certain eminent novelist and poet, a great and lovable man. I visited his home, and met his wife and two little children, and saw a man and woman living in domestic happiness. The man had also two grown sons, and after a few days he remarked that he would like me to meet the mother of these young men. We went for a walk of a mile or so, and met a lady who lived in a small house by herself, and who received us with a friendly welcome and talked with us for a couple of hours about music and books and art. This lady had been the writer's wife for ten years or so, and there had been a terrible uproar when they voluntarily parted. But they had refused to pay attention to this uproar; they understood why they did not wish to remain husband and wife any longer, but they did not consider it necessary to quarrel about it, nor even to break off the friendship which their common interests made possible. The two women in the case were not intimate, I gathered, but they frequently met at the homes of others, and found no difficulty in being friendly. I suggest to Mrs. Wharton that this story is at least as interesting as the one she has told; but I fear she will not care to write it, because apparently she considers it necessary that people who are well bred and refined should be the helpless victims of destructive manias. <h2>CHAPTER XLVII THE RESTRICTION OF DIVORCE</h2> <div class="blockquot">(Discusses the circumstances under which society has the right to forbid divorce, or to impose limitations upon it.) </div> We have quoted the old maxim, "Marry in haste and repent at leisure," and we suggested that parents and guardians should have the right to ask the young to wait before marriage, and make certain of the state of their hearts. We have now the same advice to give concerning divorce; the same claim to enter on behalf of society—that it has and should assert the right to ask people to delay and think carefully before breaking up a marriage. What interest has society in the restriction of divorce? What affair is it of any other person if I choose to get a divorce and marry a new wife once a month? There are many reasons, not in any way based upon religious superstition or conventional prejudice. In the first place, there are or may be children, and society should try to preserve for every child a home with a father and a mother in it. Second, there are property rights, of which every marriage is a tangle, and the settlement of which the law should always oversee. Third, there is the question of venereal disease, which society has an unquestionable right to keep down, by every reasonable restriction upon sexual promiscuity. And finally, there is the respect which all men and women owe to love. It seems to me that society has the same right to protect love against extreme outrage, as it has to forbid indecent exposure of the person on the street. There is in successful operation in Switzerland a wise and sane divorce law, based upon common sense and not upon superstition. A couple wish to break their marriage, and they go before a judge, and in private session, as to a friendly adviser, they tell their troubles. He gives them advice about their disagreement, and sends them away for three months to think it over. At the end of three months, if they still desire a divorce, they meet with him again. If he still thinks there is a chance of reconciliation, he has the right to require them to wait another three months. But if at the end of this second period they are still convinced that the case is hopeless, and that they should part, the judge is required to grant the divorce. You may note that this is exactly what I have suggested concerning young couples who become engaged. In both cases, the parties directly interested have the right to decide their own fate, but the rest of the world requires them to think carefully about it, and to listen to counsel. Except for grave offenses, such as adultery, insanity, crime or venereal disease, I do not think that anyone should receive a divorce in less than six months, nor do I think that any personal right is contravened by the imposing of such a delay. Next, what are we going to say to the right, or the claim to the right, on the part of a man or woman, to be married once a year throughout a lifetime? In order to illustrate this problem, I will tell you about a certain man known to me. In his early life he spent a couple of years in a lunatic asylum. He lays claim to extraordinary spiritual gifts, and uses the language of the highest idealism known. He is a man of culture and good family, and thus exerts a peculiar charm upon young women of refinement and sensitiveness. To my knowledge he was three times married in six years, and each time he deserted the woman, and forced her to divorce him, and to take care of herself, and in one case of a child. In addition, he had begotten one child out of marriage, and left the mother and child to starve. For ten years or so I used to see him about once in six months, and invariably he had a new woman, a young girl of fine character, who had been ensnared by him, and was in the agonizing process of discovering his moral and mental derangement. Yet there was absolutely nothing in the law to place restraint upon this man; he could wander from state to state, or to the other side of the world, preying upon lovely young girls wherever he went. This particular man happens to call himself a "radical"; but I could tell you of similar men in the highest social circles, or in the political world, the theatrical world, the "sporting" world; they are in every rank of life, and are just as definitely and certainly menaces to human welfare and progress as pirates on the high seas or highwaymen on the road. Nor are they confined to the males; the world is full of women who use their sex charms for predatory purposes, and some of them are far too clever for any law that you or I can contrive at present. But I think we might begin by refusing to let any man or woman have more than two divorces in one lifetime, in any state or part of the world. If any man or woman tries three times to find happiness in love, and fails each time, we have a right to assume that the fault must lie with that person, and not with the three partners. I think we may go further yet; having made wise laws of love and marriage, taking into consideration all human needs, we have a right to require that men and women shall obey the laws. At present the great mass of the public has sympathy for the law-breaker; just as, in old days, the peasants could not help admiring the outlaw who resisted unjust land laws and robbed the rich, or as today, under the capitalist r�gime, we can not withhold our sympathy from political prisoners, even though they have committed acts of violence which we deplore. But when we have made sex laws that we know are just and sensible—then we shall consider that we have the right to restrain sex criminals, and in extreme cases we shall avail ourselves of the skill of science to perform a surgical operation which will render him unable in future to prey upon the love needs of people who are placed at his mercy by their best qualities, their unselfishness and lack of suspicion. We clear out foul-smelling weeds from our garden, because we wish to raise beautiful flowers and useful herbs therein. There lives in California a student of plant life, who has shown us what we can do, not by magic or by superhuman efforts, but simply by loving plants, by watching them ceaselessly, understanding their ways, and guiding their sex-life to our own purposes. We can perform what to our ignorant ancestors would have seemed to be miracles; we can actually make all sorts of new plants, which will continue to breed their own kind, and survive forever if we give them proper care. In other words, Luther Burbank has shown us that we can "change plant nature." There flash back upon my memory all those dull, weary, sick human creatures, who have repeated to me that dull, weary, sick old formula, "You cannot change human nature." I do not think I am indulging either in religious superstition or in blind optimism, but am speaking precisely, in saying that whenever human beings get ready to apply experimental science to themselves, they can change human nature just as they now change plant nature. By putting human bodies together in love, we make new bodies of children more beautiful than any who have yet romped on the earth; and in the same way, by putting minds and souls together, we can make new kinds of minds and souls, different from those we have previously known, and greater than either the man-soul or the woman-soul alone. Also, by that magic which is the law of mind and soul life, each new creation can be multiplied to infinity, and shared by all other minds and souls that live in the present or may live in the future. We have shown elsewhere how genius multiplies to infinity the joy and power of life by means of the arts; and one of the greatest of the arts is the art of love. Consider the great lovers, the true lovers, of history—how they have enriched the lives of us all. It does not make any difference whether these men and women lived in the flesh, or in the brain of a poet—we learn alike from Dante and Beatrice, from Ab�lard and H�lo�se, from Robert and Elizabeth Browning, from Tristan and Isolde, from Romeo and Juliet, what is the depth and the splendor of this passion which lies hidden within us, and how it may enrich and vivify and glorify all life. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.