before breeding time birds build their nests to receive their future young and to protect them from the weather. many men, more improvident than the birds, marry without knowing where and how they can house the children of their love. air, earth, and forest afford food to birds gratuitously; to man only the butcher, the baker, and eating-house keeper give food, and they have the weakness to ask payment for their services. economic improvidence in marriage is the bane of all social [pg 172] decadence, and it is precisely amongst workmen and the unemployed, or amongst those who are always struggling and succumbing, that one finds it most, for they have become thoughtless fatalists, to whom the day is sufficient. fatalism has many forms, but it is always a cowardly emasculation of self, or an even more cruel mutilation, for it undermines the strength of the will and leads us to renounce all that is best in us. in individuals it is emasculation or mutilation, in nations it is suicide; the ottoman empire will soon show us whither turkish fatalism leads.
i am compassionate, and believe that i pay my debts of charity toward those who have wrecked their life; but when a starving fellow begs alms [pg 173] of me, or pleads his large family or many children as an excuse for his moral and physical demoralisation, anger gets the better of me and i exclaim: why, then, did you have so many?
and this exclamation is not an insult to misery nor a curse; it is the voice of reason, which if it could be heard in the homes of the poor would suffice to solve the social problem. i am a malthusian impenitent, and as long as i live i shall always say to those struggling with poverty:
love, but do not beget children.
in vain priests and rugged moralists of providence combat malthusianism, which has now become a social institution, and without the need of written codes governs the economy of [pg 174] the family in france, italy, germany, and even in chaste and fecund albion.
in vain my elementi d’igiene were put ad indice, for from year to year the malthusian apostolate has made new disciples, and will continue to do so.
neither do i side with those who believe, with too great a faith or fanaticism, that a restriction in the number of births is sufficient to resolve the social problem. no, certainly not; it is not enough; but it clears the ground of the most thorny brambles among which human felicity gets entangled; and a comparison between the proletariat in the populous cities of europe and that of the desert regions of south america is sufficient to convince us that prolific improvidence [pg 175] is also the prolific mother of hunger, disease, and death.
if, then, you are not a malthusian, nor desire to be converted to the new doctrine, if you have no straw to build your nest, do not take a wife, but increase the glorious number of the animals of rapine and cuckoos.
?
i know very well that the most hateful and disagreeable problem of matrimony is the economic, but we cannot avoid nor solve it by shutting our eyes and disregarding it.
to love and be loved, to feel that our life is doubled and the horizons of the future enlarged, to drink from the eyes of a woman who is a perfect fountain of delight, to feel the doors of [pg 176] paradise opened to us by her lips; and then all at once to be obliged to speak of income and dowry amidst such intoxicating pleasures; then to remember between one kiss and another that to harbour all this paradise we do not possess, i cannot say a house, but not even the most modest of rooms! it is hard, cruel, abominable, but it is necessary!
the quart d’heure de rabelais in the affairs of love, and the exclamation of the trappists who at table say to their brethren: remember we must all die, are the waiters who, entering the guest chamber, present the bill to the gay and thoughtless merry-makers. but in matrimony the accounts must be made out before, and drawn up seriously, calmly, and inexorably.
[pg 177]
there is only one man in whose case i could overlook a want of this prudence, and it is he who feels that he has the strength to fight for and the energy to gain a position, and to the man who strikes his forehead and exclaims, numen adest. what does it matter if such a man has no fortune, nor even a dowry with her whom he loves? he has faith in himself founded not upon pride, but upon the consciousness of knowledge and power; and this is more than a patrimony, for neither phylloxera, bank failures, nor shipwreck can assail it. it will last as long as life itself, and its results still longer.
but how many such men are there? with the experience of more than half a century i recommend all others [pg 178] to use such foresight as is near akin to fear. the whole history of italian finance, and the whole chronology of our innumerable ministers of finance, teach us that the balance of expenditure is always greater than that of the income. just fancy when these are added up by that maddest of treasury ministers whose name is love!
the following words must have been repeated more than a thousand times between a kiss and a sigh, a cottage and your heart!
but common sense has succeeded in throwing so much cold water on the phrase as to render it ridiculous, and to relegate it to the museum of comic virtues. however, notwithstanding the many years i have lived, i still [pg 179] have the ingenuous good nature to believe this phrase when it comes warmly and spontaneously from two loving hearts, and when those two hearts live in two organisms superior in intelligence and sentiment it may yet be true; the cottage may soon become a house, perhaps even a palace.
but how many such are there?
the rest no longer say, a cottage and your heart; but, a palace even without your heart. a hundred thousand francs income, with or without the heart.
in the first pages of this book we have seen how and why the economic consideration dominates marriage in civilised society with all the rigour of a tyrant, how it commands everything, [pg 180] and is the “to be or not to be” of a family.
?
as regards the balance of fortune, the ideal in marriage would be that both husband and wife should be equally rich, or both have moderate means. it is not necessary that there should be absolute equality, but it ought to approach it. in these fortunate cases the equality of the income increases the dignity of the family to a fellowship, and is necessarily accompanied by many other harmonies of habits, tastes, and needs.
an hyper-ideal of perfection would be this, that although the amount of these incomes may be the same, the separate units should be of a different [pg 181] nature. thus if the husband be a rich land owner the wife should hold house property; and if she has a large share of money in the funds the other should own lands or houses. in this way even the most unexpected political or meteoric disturbances would never strand the family. in many cases a good profession in the hands of the husband is equivalent to a rich dowry in the wife; but even here one must remember that life is uncertain, death certain. and, in truth, where the income proceeds entirely from the work of the father of the family this very fact is often a cause of ruin to the family well-being. they have no land, houses, nor money in the funds; a lucrative employment gives them riches, and parents and [pg 182] children live upon them without putting a penny aside. then a railway accident or some illness unexpectedly kills the father, and from a gay, rich life they are reduced to the most squalid misery.
empleomania is a spanish word, and it sprung up in spain as if in its native soil, but if we have not registered it in our classical dictionaries we have the equivalent in the speech of the common people. and above all we unfortunately have the thing it represents; and it is one of the most exact measures of our inertia of intellect and will. in the middle class, and especially in its lower ranks, the daily dream of the good mother of a family is to give her daughter to a government official, [pg 183] and it is the dream of a thousand small men, young, short-sighted fellows of slight phrenic development, to have some official situation, no matter what, so that in the morning they are not obliged to think how they can pass the day or to make any itinerary, but just go to the office at fixed hours, and at fixed hours return home. to do what others desire them to do, without the trouble of thinking themselves, and to muse on the sweets of the sunday rest for six days in advance; for eleven months to feel the delights of the twelfth, that of the vacation, and to be able to think that every month of the year has a certain day which bears the number 27: a blessed day on which, [pg 184] whether it rains or pours, whether liberals or conservatives are in power, whether crispi or rudini is ruling, the paymaster is ready and they receive their salary—ah! these are serene and tranquil pleasures which make mothers weep for joy, wives leap for pleasure, and the hearts dance in nine-tenths of those italian bipeds who love the peace and security of the morrow ... and the 27th of the month.
?
if there be an inequality in the riches of two married people it is a hundred times better that it should be in favour of the husband.
a woman is never humiliated when she is poor and marries a rich man, [pg 185] or when, with moderate means, she marries a millionaire. however much she may be oppressed by social laws, however often she be placed below man in position, she brings him so many treasures with her beauty, youth, grace, and all the prizes of her womanhood that they weigh in equal value to gold, millions, and coats of arms rich with a hundred emblazonings.
there is perhaps another less noble, but more human, reason, which explains the inequality of our judgment on the subject of matrimony between persons with different amounts of income.
it is precisely because the woman is set a peg below us by law and custom that she can accept riches [pg 186] from us without any feeling of shame; besides, it is very difficult, if not often impossible, for her to gain sufficient by hand or brain work to maintain the family. everything, then, conspires to enable her to give her hand to a rich man without selling or prostituting herself.
when instead of this it is the man who accepts the riches from the woman, without balancing them by great genius or by a very high social position, he always renounces that manly dignity which ought to be his nobility; he stands degraded before his wife, lowered, and at the least collision with vanity or passion he may be struck full in the face by an insult which ought to sink into his very heart.
[pg 187]
i know several cases in which a very rich woman fell desperately in love with a handsome, cultivated, but poor young man, and he to save his own dignity fled from her love. and the lady followed and conquered him, trusting courageously to the proverb, ce que femme veut, dieu le veut!
they were married, and he loved her, working constantly with his pen, brush, or chisel, having sworn to himself and to her that he would only live by his work. noble and touching struggles for personal dignity, of love and pride, which one but seldom sees, but which console our sight, daily saddened by so many simonies of luxuries, so many pretences of heroism, so many individual, social, and political lies, which darken the [pg 188] air so heavily that it is difficult for the sun to penetrate the cloud.
whoever makes a business of marriage will laugh cordially at me, and at my sentimental fantasies.
let him laugh! i do not pretend to teach him how to make marriage a paradise on earth. he will continue to seek a golden dowry, and if he has a great coat of arms and an empty purse he will put the first up at auction in order to fill the second; and if the game should succeed he will carry his wife’s money to the gaming table, the turf, or to the cabinet of the cocotte, and feel himself happy to have gained in one day that which others cannot obtain with all the hard work of a laborious and pure life.
lying on a turkish divan, smoking [pg 189] a perfumed havana, he will raise to himself a monument of admiration and acknowledgment amidst the blue fumes of his cigar.
and is he happy? happy, perhaps, but never enviable; for i know no true and durable happiness which degrades dignity, which hides itself in the depths of the soul, which can silence itself with the gag of sophism and the accommodation of conscience, but that, like a steel spring, it will burst and spring from its bonds the more unexpectedly the greater the repression. a man who in the inexorable soliloquies of his own conscience has something on which he dare not think, or has a room in his house which he can never visit without a shudder or remorse, is never happy.
and even if the long training in cynicism succeeds in silencing the cry of repressed dignity, there will come a day of domestic discord, of duels fought between husband and wife, with the weapon of bitter smiles, cruel compliments, and insinuations full of perfidy and venom, a day when the wife, striking her fan on the arm-chair with little convulsive blows, will cry: but in short, my good fellow, i keep you.... if that man, in such a moment does not redden to the roots of his hair, if at that moment his saliva is not changed to gall, nor forms a lump in his throat, if he does not feel his very heart and source of life poisoned, that man is not a man, but an unclean animal who has sold his manhood for a [pg 191] handful of gold; he is a most abject being, a hundred times more despicable than the poor prostitute who sells her body to gain her daily bread.