7. The Feminine Attitude
This sentimentality in marriage is seldom, if ever, observed in
women. For reasons that we shall examine later, they have much
more to gain by the business than men, and so they are prompted by
their cooler sagacity tenter upon it on the most favourable terms
possible, and with the minimum admixture of disarming emotion.
Men almost invariably get their mates by the process called falling in
love; save among the aristocracies of the North and Latin men, the
marriage of convenience is relatively rare; a hundred men marry
"beneath" them to every woman who perpetrates the same folly.
And what is meant by this so-called falling in love? What is meant
by it is a procedure whereby a man accounts for the fact of his
marriage, after feminine initiative and generalship have made it
inevitable, by enshrouding it in a purple maze of romance--in brief,
by setting up the doctrine that an obviously self-possessed and
mammalian woman, engaged deliberately in the most important
adventure of her life, and with the
keenest understanding of its
utmost implications, is a naive, tender, moony and almost
disembodied creature, enchanted and made perfect by a passion that
has stolen upon her unawares, and which she could not
acknowledge, even to herself, without blushing to death. By this
preposterous doctrine, the defeat and enslavement of the man is
made glorious, and even gifted with a touch of flattering
naughtiness. The sheer horsepower of his wooing has assailed and
overcome her maiden modesty; she trembles in his arms; he has
been granted a free franchise to work his wicked will upon her.
Thus do the ambulant images of God cloak their shackles proudly,
and divert the judicious with their boastful shouts.
Women, it is almost needless to point out, are much more cautious
about embracing the conventional hocus-pocus of the situation.
They never acknowledge that they have fallen in love, as the phrase
is, until the man has formally avowed the delusion, and so cut off
his retreat; to do otherwise would be to bring down upon their heads
the mocking and contumely of all their sisters. With them, falling in
love thus appears in the light of an afterthought, or,
perhaps more accurately, in the light of a contagion. The theory, it would
seem, is that the love of the man, laboriously avowed, has inspired it
instantly, and by some unintelligible magic; that it was non-existent
until the heat of his own flames set it off. This theory, it must be
acknowledged, has a certain element of fact in it. A woman seldom
allows herself to be swayed by emotion while the principal business
is yet afoot and its issue still in doubt; to do so would be to expose a
degree of imbecility that is confined only to the half-wits of the sex.
But once the man is definitely committed, she frequently unbends a
bit, if only as a relief from the strain of a fixed purpose, and so,
throwing off her customary inhibitions, she, indulges in the luxury
of a more or less forced and mawkish sentiment. It is, however,
almost unheard of for her to permit herself this relaxation before the
sentimental intoxication of the man is assured. To do
otherwise--that is, to confess, even post facto, to an anterior
descent,--would expose her, as I have said, to the scorn of all other
women. Such a confession would be an admission that emotion had
got the better of her at a critical intellectual moment, and in the
eyes of women, as in the eyes of the small minority of genuinely
intelligent men, no treason to the higher cerebral centres could be
more disgraceful.
