THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

2

I look back now across the detaching intervention of sixteen crowded

years, critically and I fancy almost impartially, to those

beginnings of my married life. I try to recall something near to

their proper order the developing phases of relationship. Iam

struck most of all by the immense unpremeditated, generous-spirited

insincerities upon which Margaret and I were building.

It seems to me that here I have to tell perhaps the commonest

experience of all among married educated people, the deliberate,

shy, complex effort to fill the yawning gaps in temperament as they

appear, the sustained, failing attempt to bridge abysses, level

barriers, evade violent pressures. I have come these latter years

of my life to believe that it is possible for a man and woman to be

absolutely real with one another, to stand naked souled to each

other, unashamed and unafraid, because of the natural all-glorifying

love between them. It is possible to love and be loved untroubling,

as a bird flies through the air. But it is a rare and intricate

chance that brings two people within sight of that essential union,

and for the majority marriage must adjust itself on other terms.

Most coupled people never really look at one another. They look a

little away to preconceived ideas. And each from the first days of

love-making HIDES from the other, is afraid of disappointing, afraid

of offending, afraid of discoveries in either sense. They build not

solidly upon the rock of truth, but upon arches and pillars and

queer provisional supports that are needed to make a common

foundation, and below in the imprisoned darknesses, below the fine

fabric they sustain together begins for each of them a cavernous

hidden life. Down there things may be prowling that scarce ever

peep out to consciousness except in the grey half-light of sleepless

nights, passions that flash out for an instant in an angry glance

and are seen no more, starved victims and beautiful dreams bricked

up to die. For the most of us there is no jail delivery of those

inner depths, and the life above goes on to its honourable end.

I have told how I loved Margaret and how I came to marry her.

Perhaps already unintentionally I have indicated the quality of the

injustice our marriage did us both. There was no kindred between us

and no understanding. We were drawn to one another by the

unlikeness of our quality, by the things we misunderstood in each

other. I know a score of couples who have married in that fashion.

Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser

and subtler perceptions of modern life, press more and more heavily

upon a marriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less

discriminating time. When the wife was her husband's subordinate,

meeting him simply and uncritically for simple ends, when marriage

was a purely domestic relationship, leaving thought and the vivid

things of life almost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and

temperamental incompatibilities mattered comparatively little. But

now the wife, and particularly the loving childless wife,

unpremeditatedly makes a relentless demand for a complete

association, and the husband exacts unthought of delicacies of

understanding and co-operation. These are stupendous demands.

People not only think more fully and elaborately about life than

they ever did before, but marriage obliges us to make that ever more

accidented progress a three-legged race of carelessly assorted

couples…

Our very mental texture was different. I was rough-minded, to use

the phrase of William James, primary and intuitive and illogical;

she was tender-minded, logical, refined and secondary. She was

loyal to pledge and persons, sentimental and faithful; Iam loyal to

ideas and instincts, emotional and scheming. My imagination moves

in broad gestures; her's was delicate with a real dread of

extravagance. My quality is sensuous and ruled by warm impulses;

hers was discriminating and essentially inhibitory. I like the

facts of the case and to mention everything; I like naked bodies and

the jolly smells of things. She abounded in reservations, in

circumlocutions and evasions, in keenly appreciated secondary

points. Perhaps the reader knows that Tintoretto in the National

Gallery, the Origin of the Milky Way. It is an admirable test of

tempera-mental quality. In spite of my early training I have come

to regard that picture as altogether delightful; to Margaret it has

always been "needlessly offensive." In that you have our

fundamental breach. She had a habit, by no means rare, of damning

what she did not like or find sympathetic in me on the score that it

was not my "trueself," and she did not so much accept the universe

as select from it and do her best to ignore the rest. And also I

had far more initiative than had she. This is no catalogue of

rights and wrongs, or superiorities and inferiorities; it is a

catalogue of differences between two people linked in a relationship

that constantly becomes more intolerant of differences.

This is how we stood to each other, and none of it was clear to

either of us at the outset. To begin with, I found myself reserving

myself from her, then slowly apprehending a jarring between our

minds and what seemed to me at first a queer little habit of

misunderstanding in her…

It did not hinder my being very fond of her…

Where our system of reservation became at once most usual and most

astounding was in our personal relations. It is not too much to say

that in that regard we never for a moment achieved sincerity with

one another during the first six years of our life together. It

goes even deeper than that, for in my effort to realise the ideal of

my marriage I ceased even to attempt to be sincere with myself. I

would not admit my own perceptions and interpretations. I tried to

fit myself to her thinner and finer determinations. There are

people who will say with a note of approval that I was learning to

conquer myself. I record that much without any note of approval…

For some years I never deceived Margaret about any concrete fact

nor, except for the silence about my earlier life that she had

almost forced upon me, did I hide any concrete fact that seemed to

affect her, but from the outset I was guilty of immense spiritual

concealments, my very marriage was based, I see now, on a spiritual

subterfuge; I hid moods from her, pretended feelings…