The Artist and Marriage

THE familiar fact that marriage is not, in the long run, a romantic relationship may be the reason of its amazing lack of influence upon the work of the artist. Possibly there is a surer reason, based on the nature of men, whatever their occupation. From the testimony of time, not less than from the myth of Adam, it would seem that the imperious need of men is, not to love, but to work ; that they seek to express themselves, not in romance, but in labor. The artist with his heightened temperament is peculiarly under the rule of this need of self-expression. More susceptible than other men, perhaps, to the influence of the woman, he is less in danger of her interference with his life task. In this task are combined at once his business and the food for his idealism. His work is ultimate, his temper of mind all-embracing, leaving no margins of unfulfilled desire on which to record whole epics of dissatisfaction. If he love happily, his work goes on apace ; if he do not love, it still goes on. If he marry, he loves his wife and is glad of her presence in the intervals of rest between labor on novel or portrait.

The matter as far as the man is concerned ends here ; but the case of the woman begins, and its end is lost in the mists of the future. Nor can Nature throw light ahead upon this dimness. Concerning the domestic functions of women her voice is heard around the world, but in regard to their ambitious alien to these functions she is as mute as the Sphinx. Nothing can be expected from her toward the solution of a problem that seems the peculiar product of this century.

Except in the question of finance, a man has never been obliged to consider marriage in its relation to his art. On the other hand, when a woman painter or poet loves and marries she is confronted with a problem of personality that has to do with the very essence of her relationship to the man. He becomes, to a greater or less degree, the rival of her art. To review with Villon the “ dear, dead women ” of many a golden past, to study the women of the present, is to feel, against one’s will perhaps, that the primal need of a woman’s nature is, not to work, but to love. She must earn her bread in the service of love, as she has done in marriage for a thousand generations.

Men are not, as a rule, rivals of those occupations of women which do not bring the æsthetic forces into play, which do not demand an output of feeling. A woman who keeps books or sells goods may do her work heartily, but in the majority of cases she looks forward to marriage as a not unwelcome end to her labors. She would be an unnatural woman, indeed, who would prefer bookkeeping to marriage with a man she loved. In the case of art it is different, demanding as art does the passion of its devotee as well as the intellect. A man can satisfy these large demands because he is by nature dedicated to labor. But a woman, if she love her art, must ordinarily give up dreams of wifehood and maternity and be content with her rich shadows.

Her problem in this matter is essentially modern. The nineteenth century has brought forth a new type, a woman highly organized, sensitive to beauty, nervous to sublimity, and, sometimes, devoid of humor. Her imperative need is an outlet for her too abundant energy. If she love very early, she marries as a St. Theresa might marry, in tremulous idealism, becomes a mother, lives for her children, and is satisfied, if not actively happy. If she do not marry, she is likely to seek self-expression and happiness in painting, in modeling, in novel-writing, in the so-called artistic career. Paris and New York swarm with young women whose enthusiasm for their chosen work is only another form of what might have been maternal feeling. When to this zeal is added the necessity for breadwinning, the absorption becomes complete. The more vital the hold that the work takes upon a woman, the less likely she is to marry. She becomes too detached in spirit to attract men, or she herself does not feel the need of love. It makes no difference in the effect, that only one in a thousand, perhaps, of these enthusiasts is really gifted. The dream and not the achievement changes the course of life. It is not that this century has produced more women of genius than any other, but that it has produced more women who find other outlets for their feeling than marriage.

If, however, a man should stride across the threshold of the woman’s carefully built house of art, she is at once obliged to divide her allegiance, and confusion ensues. If marriage result, the complexity is so much increased that, after a time, the woman may give up in weariness the effort to be both an artist and a woman, and, by sheer reaction, revel in being a woman ; or else she may endeavor to keep up the dual life in the time that she can spare from child-bearing and the ordering of the house. She may, indeed, sacrifice the domestic ideal to what she considers higher obligations than those of motherhood, but she is not then on natural ground, and her case is not the case of the normal wife.

When women have carried on their mental labors within marriage, they have had, as a rule, the concurrence of their husbands ; or these husbands were themselves poets with impossible ideals of life, — as it may seem to the majority. Mary Shelley lived an intellectual rather than a domestic life, but to be married to Shelley was a good deal like not being married at all. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote some of her finest poems as a wife, but she, too, was the wife of a poet, and of a poet whose ideal of women made them the supreme artificers of life. The rank and file of men, however, cannot be poets ; and, to say the least, it is not desirable that they should be. The average man may be pardoned for believing that his wife’s domestic virtues are of more consequence than her ability to write sonnets. If she possess a strong interest which does not concern her household or himself, he is inclined to be jealous ; the men of this generation, especially, have more cause to be jealous of a woman’s soul than of her person. They are not always sure of her spiritual allegiance. This part of her nature may be least understood by them ; and mystery is the mother of resentment. In past centuries, when the mass of women had not attained selfconsciousness, this cause for jealousy did not exist; but the women of the present day are nothing if not self-conscious. They have, perhaps, too great an intimacy with their own souls. Even a French danseuse begins to feel that her spirit may be of greater potency to charm than mere prettiness of face ; she is dimly divining the sensuousness of the spirit. A moral gulf may be fixed between her and the wife who seeks some form of self-expression other than the domestic, but they are alike baffling to the lover and husband. Given these conditions, it is difficult to foresee the future of the woman artist in her relations to marriage. The question, after all, will resolve itself finally into one of happiness. The divine right of joy is no longer disputed by the majority, however wistful they may be in contemplation of their heritage. The woman must decide, then, whether to pursue her chosen art or to marry will make her happier. In most cases she cannot be both an artist and a wife. If she do not marry, she misses the strange, unspeakable joys of wifehood, with their delicate margin of pain ; the rapture of maternity ; the wholesomeness of daily living as the centre and inspiration of a household. If she marry and put her ambitions from her, she misses a rare companionship with beautiful ghosts; she misses, it may be, the flavor of lonely triumphs, the ennobling vision of the unattainable. She must choose between two orders of experience as diverse as the poles.

Presumably, that which is better adapted to her nature will afford her greater happiness. Goethe believed in the Eternal Woman, but time plays tricks with eternity, and the woman nature itself might be changed by centuries of training. As it is now, it seems that the woman is happier if she marry. In the long run, her idealism is more domestic than æsthetic.