The conception of faithfulness to one has been created by man. It arises from the masculine idea of individuality which remains unchanged by time, and, therefore, needs as its complement always one and the same person. The conception of faithfulness to one person is a lofty one, and finds a worthy expression in the sacramental marriage of the Catholic Church. I am not going to discuss the question of marriage or free-love. Marriage in its existing form is as incompatible as free-love with the highest interpretations of the moral law. And so divorce came into the world with marriage.
None the less marriage could have been invented only by man. No proprietary institution originated with women. The introduction of order into chaotic sexual relations could have come only through man’s desire for it, and his power to establish it. There have been periods in the history of many primitive races in which women had great influence; but the period of matriarchy was a period of polyandry.
The dissimilarity in the relations of mother and prostitute to their child is rich in important conclusions. A woman in whom the prostitute element is strong will perceive her son’s manhood and always stand in a sexual relation to him. But as no woman is the perfect type of mother, there is something sexual in the relation of every mother and son. For this reason, I chose the relation of the mother to her daughter and not to her son, as the best measure of her type. There are many well-known physiological parallels between the relations of a mother to her children and of a wife to her husband.
Motherliness, like sexuality, is not an individual relation. When a woman is motherly the quality will be exercised not only on the child of her own body, but towards all men, although later on her interest in her own child may become all-absorbing and make her narrow, blind, and unjust in the event of a quarrel.
The relation of a motherly girl to her lover is interesting. Such a girl is inclined to be motherly towards the man she loves, especially towards that man who will afterwards become the father of her child; in fact, in a certain sense the man is her child. The deepest nature of the mother-type reveals itself in this identity of the mother and loving wife; the mothers form the enduring root-stock of our race from which the individual man arises, and in the face of which he recognises his own impermanence. It is this idea which enables the man to see in the mother, even while she is still a girl, something eternal, and which gives the pregnant woman a tremendous significance. The enduring security of the race lies in the mystery of this figure, in the presence of which man feels his own fleeting impermanence.
In such minutes there may come to him a sense of freedom and peace, and in the mysterious silence of the idea, he may think that it is through the woman that he is in true relation with the universe. He becomes the child of his beloved one, a child whose mother smiles on him, understands him, and takes care of him (Siegfried and Brünnhilde, Act III.). But this does not last long. (Siegfried tears himself from Brünnhilde). For a man only comes to his fulness when he frees himself from the race, when he raises himself above it. For paternity cannot satisfy the deepest longings of a man, and the idea that he is to be lost in the race is repellent to him. The most terrible chapter in the most comfortless of all the great books that have been written, the chapter on “Death and its Relation to the Indestructibility of our Nature,” in Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Idea,” is where the permanence of the will to maintain the species is set down as the only real permanence.
It is the permanence of the race that gives the mother her courage and fearlessness in contrast with the cowardliness and fear of the prostitute. It is not the courage of individuality, the moral courage arising from an inner sense of freedom and personal value, but rather the desire that the race should be maintained which, acting through the mother, protects the husband and child. As courage and cowardice belong respectively to the mother and the prostitute, so is it with that other pair of contrasting ideas, hope and fear. The absolute mother stands in a persisting relation to hope; as she lives on through the race, she does not quail before death, whilst the prostitute has a lasting fear of it.
The mother feels herself in a sense superior to the man; she knows herself to be his anchor; as she is in a secure place, linked in the chain of the generations, she may be likened to a harbour from which each new individual sails forth to wander on the high seas. From the moment of conception onwards the mother is psychically and physically ready to feed and protect her child. And this protective superiority extends itself to her lover; she understands all that is simple and naïve and childlike in him, whilst the prostitute understands best his caprices and refinements. The mother has the craving to teach her child, to give him everything, even when the child is represented by the lover; the prostitute strives to impose herself on the man, to receive everything from him. The mother as the upholder of the race is friendly to all its members; it is only when there is an exclusive choice to be made between her child and others that she becomes hard and relentless; and so she can be both more full of love and more bitter than the prostitute.
The mother is in complete relation with the continuity of the race; the prostitute is completely outside it. The mother is the sole advocate and priestess of the race. The will of the race to live is embodied in her, whilst the existence of the prostitute shows that Schopenhauer was pushing a generalisation too far when he declared that all sexuality had relation only to the future generation. That the mother cares only for the life of her own race is plain from the absence of consideration for animals shown by the best of mothers. A good mother, with the greatest peace of mind and content, will slaughter fowl after fowl for her family. The mother of children is a cruel step-mother to all other living things.
Another striking aspect of the mother’s relation to the preservation of the race reveals itself in the matter of food. She cannot bear to see food wasted, however little may be left over; whilst the prostitute wilfully squanders the quantities of food and drink she demands. The mother is stingy and mean; the prostitute open-handed and lavish. The mother’s object in life is to preserve the race, and her delight is to see her children eat and to encourage their appetites. And so she becomes the good housekeeper. Ceres was a good mother, a fact expressed in her Greek name, Demeter. The mother takes care of the body, but does not trouble about the mind.[15] The relation between mother and child remains material from the kissing and hugging of childhood to the protective care of maturity. All her devotion is for the success and prosperity of her child in material things.
[15] Compare the conversation in Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt,” Act ii., between the father of Solveig and Aase (perhaps the best-drawn mother in all literature) when they were discussing the search for their son:
Aase. “We shall find him.”
Her Husband. “And save his soul.”
Aase. “And his body.”
Maternal love, then, cannot be truly represented as resting on moral grounds. Let any one ask himself if he does not believe that his mother’s love would not be just as great for him if he were a totally different person. The individuality of the child has no part in the maternal love; the mere fact of its being her own child is sufficient, and so the love cannot be regarded as moral. In the love of a man for a woman, or between persons of the same sex, there is always some reference to the personal qualities of the individual; a mother’s love extends itself indifferently to anything that she has borne. It destroys the moral conception if we realise that the love of a mother for her child remains the same whether the child becomes a saint or a sinner, a king or a beggar, an angel or a fiend.
Precisely the same conclusion will be reached from reflecting how children think that they have a claim on their mother’s love simply because she is their mother. Maternal love is non-moral because it has no relation to the individuality of the being on which it is bestowed, and there can be an ethical relation only between two individualities. The relation of mother and child is always a kind of physical reflex. If the little one suddenly screams or cries when the mother is in the next room, she will at once rush to it as if she herself had been hurt; and, as the children grow up, every wish or trouble of theirs is directly assumed and shared by the mother as if they were her own.
There is an unbreakable link between the mother and child, physical, like the cord that united the two before childbirth. This is the real nature of the maternal relation; and, for my part, I protest against the
