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 income
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 a
man from the other higher vertebrata, 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 usu-
ally 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 he imagined in the role of Don
Griovanni.
Finally, there is his conscience--the accumulated
sediment of ancestral faint-heartedness 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 some
one 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 a state, 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 nose snow-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 danger, then he sees wrong. The result? 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 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.
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"In Defense Of Women" by H. L. Mencken, 1922