35. A Mythical Dare-Devil
The truth is that the picture of male carnality that such women
conjure up belongs almost wholly to fable, as I have already
observed in dealing with the sophistries of Dr. Eliza Burt
Gamble, a paralogist on a somewhat higher plane. As they
depict him in their fevered treatises on illegitimacy, white-slave
trading and
ophthalmia neonatorum, the average male adult of the
Christian and cultured countries leads a life of gaudy lubricity,
rolling magnificently from one liaison to another, and with an almost
endless queue of ruined milliners, dancers, charwomen,
parlour-maids and waitresses behind him, all dying of poison and
despair. The life of man, as these furiously envious ones see it, is
the life of a leading actor in a boulevard revue. He is a polygamous,
multigamous, myriadigamous; an insatiable and unconscionable
debauche, a monster of promiscuity; prodigiously unfaithful to his
wife, and even to his friends' wives; fathomlessly libidinous and
superbly happy.
Needless to say, this picture bears no more relation to the facts than
a dissertation on major strategy by a military "expert" promoted
from dramatic critic. If the chief suffragette scare mongers (I speak
without any embarrassing naming of names) were attractive enough
to men to get near enough to enough men to know enough about
them for their purpose they would
paralyze the Dorcas societies
with no such cajoling libels. As a matter of sober fact, the average
man of our time and race is quite incapable of all these incandescent
and intriguing divertisements. He is far more virtuous than they
make him out, far less schooled in sin far less enterprising and
ruthless. I do not say, of course, that he is pure in heart, for the
chances are that he isn't; what I do say is that, in the overwhelming
majority of cases, he is pure in act, even in the face of temptation.
And why? For several main reasons, not to go into minor ones.
One is that he lacks the courage. Another is that he lacks the
money. Another is that he is fundamentally moral, and has a
conscience. It takes more sinful initiative than he has in him to
plunge into any affair save the most casual and sordid; it takes more
ingenuity and intrepidity than he has in him to carry it off; it takes
more money than he can conceal from his consort to finance it.
A man may force his actual wife to share the direst poverty, but
even the least vampirish woman of the third part demands to be
courted in what, considering his station in life, is the grand manner,
and the expenses of that grand manner scare off all save
a small
minority of specialists in deception. So long, indeed, as a wife
knows her husband's in come accurately, she has a sure means of
holding him to his oaths.
Even more effective than the fiscal barrier is the barrier of
poltroonery. The one character that distinguishes man from the
other higher vertebrate, indeed, is his excessive timorousness, his
easy yielding to alarms, his incapacity for adventure without a crowd
behind him. In his normal incarnation he is no more capable of
initiating an extra-legal affair--at all events, above the mawkish
harmlessness of a flirting match with a cigar girl in a cafe-than he is
of scaling the battlements of hell. He likes to think of himself doing
it, just as he likes to think of himself leading a cavalry charge or
climbing the Matterhorn. Often, indeed, his vanity leads him to
imagine the thing done, and he admits by winks and blushes that he
is a bad one. But at the bottom of all that tawdry pretence there is
usually nothing more material than an oafish smirk at some
disgusted shop-girl, or a scraping of shins under the table. Let any
woman who is disquieted by reports of her husband's derelictions
figure to herself how long
it would have taken him to propose
to her if left to his own enterprise, and then let her ask herself if so
pusillanimous a creature could be imaged in the role of Don Giovanni.
Finally, there is his conscience--the accumulated sediment of
ancestral faintheartedness in countless generations, with vague
religious fears and superstitions to leaven and mellow it. What! a
conscience? Yes, dear friends, a conscience. That conscience may
be imperfect, inept, unintelligent, brummagem. It may be
indistinguishable, at times, from the mere fear that someone may be
looking. It may be shot through with hypocrisy, stupidity,
play-acting. But nevertheless, as consciences go in Christendom, it
is genuinely entitled to the name--and it is always in action. A man,
remember, is not a being in vacuo; he is the fruit and slave of the
environment that bathes him. One cannot enter the House of
Commons, the United States Senate, or a prison for felons without
becoming, in some measure, a rascal. One cannot fall overboard
without shipping water. One cannot pass through a modern
university without carrying away scars. And by the same token one
cannot live and have one's being in a modern
democratic state,
year in and year out, without falling, to some extent at least, under
that moral obsession which is the hall-mark of the mob-man set
free. A citizen of such astate, his nose buried in Nietzsche, "Man
and Superman," and other such advanced literature, may caress
himself with the notion that he is an immoralist, that his soul is full
of soothing sin, that he has cut himself loose from the revelation of
God. But all the while there is a part of him that remains a sound
Christian, a moralist, a right thinking and forward-looking man.
And that part, in times of stress, asserts itself. It may not worry him
on ordinary occasions. It may not stop him when he swears, or
takes a nip of whiskey behind the door, or goes motoring on
Sunday; it may even let him alone when he goes to a leg-show. But
the moment a concrete Temptress rises before him, her noses
now-white, her lips rouged, her eyelashes drooping provokingly--the
moment such an abandoned wench has at him, and his lack of ready
funds begins to conspire with his lack of courage to assault and
wobble him--at that precise moment his conscience flares into
function, and so finishes his business. First he sees difficulty, then
he
sees the danger, then he sees wrong. The result is that he
slinks off in trepidation, and another vampire is baffled of her prey.
It is, indeed, the secret scandal of Christendom, at least in the
Protestant regions, that most men are faithful to their wives. You
will a travel a long way before you find a married man who will
admit that he is, but the facts are the facts, and I am surely not one
to flout them.
