Second Mencken Chrestomathy (25 page)

Unluckily, I find myself out of sympathy with most of these reformers, and especially with those of the suffragette wing. Where they run aground is in mistaking the nature of marriage. They seem to believe that it is a purely contractual relation and that its terms, in consequence, may be changed like those of any other contractual relations—either by free bargaining, or by duress of law. It is, in fact, nothing of the sort. Marriage is not a contract; it is a way of life. Its essence, when it is sound, is a complete surrender of many of the natural rights of the individual. It is not comparable to buying an automobile or joining the Elks; it is comparable to entering a monastery or enlisting for war.

Most of the malaises that now afflict it among us are palpably due, it seems to me, to imprudent efforts to change its unescapable terms. Of such sort are all the dodges that sentimentality has put upon the law books of late years, each and every one of them designed to lighten the alleged burdens of the wife. Have they actually benefited wives? I doubt it. They have simply increased the number of rebellious and fugitive husbands. For they are all based upon the assumption that the husband dislikes his wife, and is trying to escape from her clutches. So long as that assumption is false they are supererogatory and insulting. And the moment it becomes true they are useless. Here, as in other fields, legislation is mainly nonsense. Its basic theory seems to be that when a man is uncomfortable and trying to rid himself of the things that make him so, the way to cure him is to make him more uncomfortable. Human nature, I fear, does not really work in that manner. So long as a man loves his wife and children, there is no need of laws to make him support and cherish them; he will do it at any cost to himself. Contrariwise, when he hates the one and is indifferent to the other, no conceivable law can wring out of him the full measure, nor even a tenth measure, of the devotion that he owes to them.

The trouble with the divorce laws in most American states, it seems to me, is not that they facilitate the breakup of marriages, but that they make it difficult, and often almost impossible, to break up marriages completely. The average decree, far from resolving the matter, is simply the beginning of even worse raids and
forays than those that have gone before. The wife has a claim on her husband’s property—not infrequently a very vexatious and burdensome claim—and the husband continues to have a vested interest in his wife’s conduct. Each can annoy the other, and three times out of four they do so. The worst hatreds that I have ever encountered in this world issued out of just such post-connubial combats.

Are they unavoidable? I don’t think so. They could be avoided by abandoning half measures for whole ones—that is, by making every divorce complete and absolute, with each party restored to the
status quo ante
, and neither, in consequence, with any claim on the other. But suppose the wife has no means of support? Then let her find one: women without husbands have to do it. If marriage has been simply her device for making a living, and nothing more, then let her marry again, just as a lady of joy, losing one client, seeks another. Certainly it is unfair to ask her husband to go on paying for services that he is no longer getting.

But the children? My belief is that their sufferings are far more poignant in moral statistics than they are in real life. In nine divorce cases out of ten, no children are heard of. When they exist, they have been grossly damaged already, and perhaps incurably. Their disposition should not be beyond the talents of a judge of reasonable sense. In cases wherein neither of their parents volunteers to care for them, prudence will suggest sending them to some comfortable orphan asylum or reformatory, where they will at least encounter decenter adults than they have been living with.

My point is that the law, like the social reformer, is quite unable to introduce conditions and precautions into so ancient and instinctive an institution as marriage. It is, perhaps, essentially a banality, but it is a banality of the most powerful authority. If it is not swallowed whole, it had better not be swallowed at all. Every effort to attach reservations to its complete submergence of interests and personalities is bound to lead to disaster. If it is a true marriage, those reservations are irrelevant and impertinent. And if it is not, they can do nothing to preserve it against the natural forces that seek its destruction.

In this department the reformers are even more unwise than the lawmakers. They are forever suggesting modifications of what they
call the marriage contract, to the end that neither party may be put under any duress by the desires of the other. But that is simply trying to convert marriage into something that it is not. In anything rationally describable as a true marriage, it must be obvious that each party is not only willing, but eager to yield to the desires of the other. That, indeed, is the essential basis of the relationship. It is not a mere exchange of bribes and concessions. It is a mutual renunciation, with mutual happiness as its end. I am romantic enough to believe that this happiness is very often attained, though it is, at least in part, of such a character that it does not appeal very forcibly to my private tastes. But the happy wife is not that one who has driven a hard bargain with her husband, supported by laws that put him at her mercy; she is that one whose main desire is to be amiable and charming to him, and whose technic is sufficient to accomplish it. And the happy husband is not that one who has wrung from his wife a franchise to disport himself without regard to her peace and dignity, but that one whose devotion to her makes it impossible for him to imagine himself willingly wounding her.

From the New York
World
, Jan. 26, 1930. This was a contribution to a symposium. The other contributors were H. G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis, Fannie Hurst, Floyd Dell and Bertrand Russell

I see no chance of dealing with the divorce question rationally until the discussion is purged of religious considerations. Certainly the world should have learned by this time that theologians make a mess of everything they touch, including even religion. Yet in the United States they are still allowed, against all reason and experience, to have their say in a great variety of important matters, and everywhere they go they leave their sempiternal trail of folly and confusion. Why those of the Christian species should be consulted about marriage and divorce is more than I can make out. It would be only a little less absurd to consult members of the W.C.T.U. about the mixing of drinks, for orthodox Christianity, as
every one knows, views even the most decorous kind of marriage with lubricious suspicion, and countenances it only as a means of escape from something worse. In the whole New Testament there is but one message that speaks of it as an honorable estate, and that one is in the most dubious of the Epistles. Elsewhere it is always assumed to be something intrinsically and incurably vile. The really virtuous man avoids it as a plague; his ideal is complete chastity. If, tempted by Satan, he finds that chastity unbearable, he may take a wife to escape something worse, but that is only a poor compromise with his baser nature.

Modern theologians, of course, do not put the thing as coarsely as Paul did, but they still subscribe to his basic idea, however mellifluous and disarming their statement of it. A wife is primarily a sexual instrument, and as such must not flinch from her lowly duty. If she tries to avoid having children, then she is doomed to Hell again. As for a husband, he is bound in the same way and under the same penalties. Both would be better off if they were chaste, but as long as that is impossible they must be unchaste only with each other, and accept with resignation all the more painful consequences, whether biological or theological. Such notions, plainly stated, must needs seem barbaric to every civilized man; nevertheless, they continue to color the legislation of nearly all so-called Christian States. In New York, for example, the only general ground for divorce is adultery. A man may beat his wife all he pleases, but she cannot divorce him for it. In her turn she may waste his money, insult him in public and chase his friends out of the house, and he cannot get rid of her. So long as neither turns from the venal unchastity of marriage to the mortal unchastity outside they are indissolubly bound together, though their common life be intolerable to themselves and a scandal to every one else.

Obviously, it will be impossible to come to any sensible rearrangement of the relation between man and woman so long as such ancient imbecilities corrupt all thinking on the subject. The first thing necessary, then, is to get rid of the theologians. Let them be turned out politely but firmly; let us pay no further heed to their archaic nonsense. They will, to be sure, resist going, perhaps very stoutly, but their time has come and they must be on their way. What is needed is a purely realistic view of the whole question,
uncontaminated by false assumptions and antediluvian traditions. That review must begin, not with remedies but with causes. Why, as a matter of actual practise, do men and women marry? And what are the factors that hold them together when marriage turns out to be endurable? Here there is a great gap in the assembled facts. The sociologists, like their brethren of medicine, have devoted themselves so ardently to the pathological that they have forgotten to study the normal. But no inquiry into the marriage that breaks up can be worth anything unless it is based upon a sound understanding of the marriage that lasts.

This fact explains the shallowness of many of the remedies currently whooped up—for example, companionate marriage. To propose that marriage be abandoned and half-marriage substituted is like advising a man with a sty to get a glass eye. He doesn’t want a glass eye; he wants his own natural and perfect eye, with the sty plucked out. All such reformers forget that the real essence of marriage is not the nature of the relation but the performance of that relation. It is a device for time-binding, like every other basic human institution. Its one indomitable purpose is to endure. Plainly enough, divorce ought to be easy when the destruction of a marriage is an accomplished fact, but it would be folly to set up conditions tending to make that destruction more likely. Too much, indeed, has been done in that direction already. The way out for people who are incapable of the concessions and compromises that go with every contract is not to fill the contract with snakes but to avoid it altogether. There are, indeed, many men and women to whom marriage is a sheer psychic impossibility. But to the majority it is surely not. They find it quite bearable; they like it; they want it to endure. What they need is help in making it endurable.

My own programme I withhold, and for a sound reason—I have none. The problem is not going to be solved by prescribing a swift swallow out of this or that jug. It is going to be solved, if it is ever solved at all, by sitting down calmly and examining all the relevant facts, and by following out all their necessary and inevitable implications. In other words, it is going to be solved scientifically, not romantically or theologically. What marriage needs above all is hard, patient, impartial study. Before we may hope to cure even
the slightest of its ills we must first find out precisely what it is, and how and why it works when it works at all.

From P
REJUDICES
: F
OURTH
S
ERIES
, 1924, p. 67

Love, in the romantic sense, is based upon a view of women that is impossible to any man who has had any extensive experience of them. Such a man may, to the end of his life, enjoy their society vastly, and even respect them and admire them, but, however much he respects and admires them, he nevertheless sees them more or less clearly, and seeing them clearly is fatal to the true romance. Find a man of forty who heaves and moans over a woman in the manner of a poet and you will behold either a man who ceased to develop intellectually at twenty-four or thereabout, or a fraud who has his eye on the lands, tenements and hereditaments (and perhaps also the clothes) of the lady’s deceased first husband. Or upon her talents as nurse, cook, amanuensis and audience. This, no doubt, is what George Bernard Shaw meant when he said that every man over forty is a scoundrel.

From P
REJUDICES
: S
IXTH
S
ERIES
, 1927, pp. 281–89.
First printed in the
American Mercury
, Aug., 1927, pp. 411–13

T
HE NAME
of the man who first made a slave of fire, like the name of the original Franklin Pierce man, is unknown to historians: burrow and sweat as they will, their efforts to unearth it are always baffled. And no wonder. For isn’t it easy to imagine how infamous that name must have been while it was still remembered, and how diligent and impassioned the endeavor to erase it from the tablets of the race? One pictures the indignation of the clergy when so vast an improvement upon their immemorial magic confronted them, and their herculean and unanimous struggle, first to put it down as unlawful and against God, and then to collar it for themselves. Bonfires were surely not unknown in the morning of the Pleistocene, for there were lightnings then as now, but the first one kindled by mortal hands must have shocked humanity. One pictures the news flashing from cave to cave and from tribe to tribe—out of Central Asia and then across the grasslands, and then around the feet of the glaciers into the gloomy, spook-haunted wilderness that is now Western Europe, and so across into Africa. Something new and dreadful was upon the human race, and by the time the
Ur
-Mississippians of the Neander Valley heard of it, you may be sure, the discoverer had sprouted horns and was in the pay of the Devil.