Talent has its categorical imperatives. An artist cannot help feeling that his first duty is towards his art, and that he does wrong if he allows any but the most supremely important non-artistic considerations to stand in the way of its accomplishment.
(In his middle years Milton deliberately abandoned his artistic mission, but only for a cause which seemed, at the moment, even higher. What supported him in the years when “these eyes their seeing had forgot”?
The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
In Liberty’s defence, my noble task,
Of which all Europe rings from side to side.)
For the majority of artists, at any rate of male artists, marriage will not seem a cause sufficiently important to make sacrifices for. But marriage can be almost as much of an undertaking as the defence of liberty. For the essence of monogamous marriage consists in the assuming of responsibilities—not merely social and economic, but also, and above all, emotional. To a greater or less extent these emotional responsibilities must almost inevitably interfere with the artist’s performance of his primary artistic duties. If he obeys his categorical imperatives and ignores his emotional responsibilities, he is a bad monogamist. If his emotional responsibilities are heavy and he accepts them in spite of his categorical imperatives, he is a bad artist. In practice, most artists make some sort of more or less (generally less) satisfactory compromise.
Polygamy is a state in which there are no emotional responsibilities—only emotional excitements. So far from preventing the artist from doing his aesthetic duty, polygamy may actually, by providing him with constant stimulation, make the doing of it more easy. Add to this the natural tendency of very sensitive, energetic and inquisitive men to be strongly affected by female charms and you will understand why Milton yearned back so nostalgically to Abraham and Solomon; why Blake wanted “handmaidens” in the house and, when Mrs. Blake objected, wrote so feelingly of the golden girls of Golgonooza; why Shelley not only preached polygamy in his Epipsychidion, but even to some extent practised it—with what generally agonizing results, the biographies duly set forth.
If God had laid all common, certainly
Man would have been th’ incloser; but since now
God hath impaled us, on the contrary
Man breaks the fence and every ground will plough.
GEORGE HERBERT.
In the first ruder age, when love was wild,
Nor yet by laws reclaimed, nor reconciled
To order, nor by reason manned, but flew
Full-summed by nature, on the instant view,
Upon the wings of appetite, at all
The eye could fair or sense delightful call;
Election was not yet; but as their cheap
Food from the oak or the next acorn-heap,
As water from the nearest spring or brook,
So men their undistinguished females took
By chance, not choice. But soon the heavenly spark,
That in man’s bosom lurked, broke through the dark
Confusion: then the noblest heart first felt
Itself for its own proper object melt.
THOMAS CAREW.
Marriage
My love is strengthened, though more weak in seeming;
I love not less, though less the show appear;
That love is merchandized, whose rich esteeming
The owner’s tongue doth publish everywhere.
Our love was new, and then but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays;
As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing,
And stops her pipe in growth of later days:
Not that the summer is less pleasant now
Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night,
But that wild music burthens every bough,
And sweets grown common lose their dear delight;
Therefore, like her, I sometimes hold my tongue,
Because I would not dull you with my song.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
Sleep on, my love, in thy cold bed
Never to be disquieted!
My last good night! Thou wilt not wake
Till I thy fate shall overtake;
Till age, or grief, or sickness must
Marry my body to that dust
It so much loves, and fill the room
My heart keeps empty in thy tomb.
Stay for me there; I will not fail
To meet thee in that hollow vale;
And think not much of my delay;
I am already on the way,
And follow thee with all the speed
Desire can make, or sorrows breed.
HENRY KING.
Out of the chambre hath every wight him dressed.
And Januarie hath faste in armes take
His fresshe May, his paradys, his make.
He lulleth her, he kisseth her ful ofte
With thikke bristles of his berd unsofte,
Like to the skin of houndfish, sharp as brere,
For he was shave al newe in his manere. . . .
Thus laboureth he til that the day gan dawe;
And then he taketh a sop in fyn clarree,
And upright in his bed then sitteth he,
And after that he sang ful loude and clere,
And kiste his wyf, and made wantoun chere.
He was al coltish, ful of ragerye,
And ful of jargon as a flekked pye.
The slakke skin about his nekke shaketh,
Whyl that he sang, so chaunteth he and craketh.
But god wot what that May thoughte in her herte,
When she him saw up sittinge in his sherte,
In his night-cappe and with his nekke lene;
She preyseth not his pleying worth a bene.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER.
What a fearful picture of marriage as it should not be!
Chaucer was doing things before 1400 which no other narrative artist did for nearly four centuries. Perhaps I should have said five centuries. For, in this tale of January and May, there are passages for which one can find no parallel outside modern fiction. For example, when May receives a love letter, she hurries off, in order to read it, to the W.C. Which is, of course, exactly where any one who wanted to be quite certain of privacy would go. But what author before Flaubert would have stated this obvious fact? Except for Chaucer, I can think of none.
Why should a foolish marriage vow,
Which long ago was made,
Oblige us to each other now,
When passion is decayed?
We loved and we loved, as long as we could,
Till our love was loved out of us both;
But our marriage is dead, now the pleasures are fled;
’Twas pleasure first made it an oath.
If I have pleasures for a friend
And further love in store,
What wrong has he, whose joys did end,
And who could give no more?
’Tis a madness that he should be jealous of me,
Or that I should bar him of another.
For all we can gain is to give ourselves pain,
When neither can hinder the other.
JOHN DRYDEN.
This song summarizes the whole, rather squalid philosophy of modern marriage, as expounded—at what length and in how many volumes!—by a small army of earnest publicists on either side of the Atlantic. Why do people persist in saying, yet once more, in thousands of pages, what may, as Dryden proves, be said in sixteen lines? The sole valid reason is an economic one. Only a fool would concentrate what he has to say into a poem, for which he might, with luck, get paid a guinea, when, by spreading it out thinly into eighty thousand words, he can earn several hundred pounds. One does not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Love and Literature
And what is Love? It is a doll, dressed up
For idleness to cosset, nurse and dandle;
A thing of soft misnomers, so divine
That silly youth doth think to make itself
Divine by loving, and so goes on
Yawning and doting a whole summer long,
Till Miss’s comb is made a pearl tiara,
And common Wellingtons turn Romeo boots;
Then Cleopatra lives at number seven,
And Antony resides in Brunswick Square.
Fools! if some passions high have warmed the world,
If Queens and Soldiers have played deep for hearts,
It is no reason why such agonies
Should be more common than the growth of weeds.
Fools! make me whole again that weighty pearl
The Queen of Egypt melted, and I’ll say
That ye may love in spite of beaver hats.
JOHN KEATS.
If it were not for literature, how many people would ever fall in love? Precious few, I should guess. Zuckerman has shown that even the apes and monkeys must learn the sexual behaviour which is normal in their respective communities. Isolate a new-born rat, then, when it is mature, introduce it to another rat of the opposite sex. It will know exactly what to do—will behave as all other rats behave.
Not so an ape. Instinct does not tell it how to behave. Congenital ignorance is the condition of intelligence. The ape is intelligent, therefore knows fewer things by instinct than does the rat. It is not born with a knowledge of normal sex-behaviour, it must acquire this knowledge from its fellows.
Now if the simple sexuality of an ape is an affair of education, how much more so must be the complicated love-making of men and women! Literature is their principal teacher. Even the most wildly passionate lovers have studied in that school.
The difference between the great lovers and the Cleopatras of number seven, the Antonys of Brunswick Square, is not a difference between the untaught and the taught; it is a difference between those who have responded wholeheartedly to their erotic education and those whose response is inadequate and forced. The latter, as Keats insists, are by far the more common.
Let us remember, however, that genuine Antonys and Cleopatras may be more numerous than would at first sight appear. No observer has any means of directly gauging the quality of other people’s emotion. He can only infer it from their actions and words. The actions of people in an inconspicuous social position are mostly almost unobservable. (The number of those who can lose the world for love is at all times strictly limited.) As for their words—these are generally of a pretty poor quality. But this does not necessarily mean that
