THE INKY WAY

Southland Times, Issue 20172, 7 May 1927, Page 13 (Supplement)

THE INKY WAY

STANDARDISATION

By

K. A. Fea.

Susan Lee, in “The Young Idea,” cast a lengthy line, and baited it only at the end, which is orthodox fishing practice. Nevertheless. although seeing plainly the art employed and sensing the barb within the lure. 1 rise to swallow it, line, sinker and all, largely because it is never my practice —at least so late in life—to resist a temptation. Only the young can afford to do that, for they may be reasonably certain that others equally alluring will be providW in due course; but age must take what it can, and savours such little pleasure as comes its way on the tongue with a fine relish which it calls epicureanism in order to bide from itself its essential pathos. And yet another reason why I take Susan Lee’s bait is this; that at the end of a long life, mostly mis-spent as lives mostly are, I I realise that there is no experience so unsatisfactory in retrospect as a temptation resisted. So, have at you, Susan Lee! Firstly, I must congratulate Susan Lee on the choice of her subjects, and, one might almost say, the manner in which she correlates them for her last article was on “Love,” and the one before on “Lying,” two subjects which are so indissolubly intermixed as to have made it really more proper to deal with them under one heading. It is unnecessary, however, to pursue this point as being foreign to the subject in hand. Her article, if I remember it aright, dealt with, and was largely a precis, of some articles by one Dorothy Dix, who has set out to instruct young America in “how to I>£ happy though married.” A fitting heading for the work would be “Maxims for the Immature,” but then as most people when getting married are immature, the title would not be politic, as above all things the youthful object to any suggestion of immaturity. Always they would play the hare to Time’s tortoise, and generation by generation they marvel afresh to find how unaccountably as the years go by Time has quickened his pace in direct proportion to lheir desire for a slackening of speed. To deal with Susan Lee’s article it is only necessary to deal with Dorothy Dix, and in dealing with Dorothy Dix, the most pertinent question is, “Is it worth while?” I do not ask is it worth Dorothy Dix’s while to write such articles; I do not doubt for a moment that it is, but one can ask, and reasonably, what useful purpose they achieve. Her cheery optimism after all is no more than an expansion of the old Biblical injunction to increase and multiply, and to that end, neither Biblical injunction nor Dorothy Dix is necessary. As an old Maori philosopher friend of mind once said, “Man's love was given to him as a pain so that in seeking easement of it, the race may be perpetuated!” It was G. K. Chesterton, than whom no man has ever written more sanely, who makes one of his characters ask the girl whom he has asked Io marry him and who doubts whether they will be happy together “Who the devil are you that you should not be unhappy, as your mother was before you?” “Man is born to sorrow as the .-parks fly upward,” saith the prophet—l think it was the prophet ; at any rate it is a profitable saying and in admitting the fact- it is difficult, as it always is, to decide which is the cause and which the effect. Man’s essential inability to maintain a state of happiness, even when the primary cause of that happiness remains constant, is exemplified in the fact that his conception of Heaven is a place where he will attain to that desideratum. -On this fact rests the reason for the failures of so many marriages, for even where both of the contract ants remain very much as they were at the beginning, raptures become habit from repetition, and sustained joy settles into monotony. It is when this stage has been reached that the modern analytical novel, written by neurotic perverts with an “esoteric” urge, conies in to disclose to the person who is really, in most cases, merely bored, that—usually she—is the victim of soul—or sex—complexes (such writers generally get the two words mixed), hitherto unsuspected. After that it is merely a case of “cherchez I’homme,” and the marriage-machine, set in reverse gear, jangles an accompaniment to tragedy and tears. You will note, Susan Lee, that I place most of the blame for the failure of marriage on the woman. Largely this is the result of heredity, for it was an ancestor of mine who said, under circumstances in which any man might be excused for being slightly rattled, “the woman tempted me and I fell.” And lest you accuse me of. unfairness and an avoidance of the fact that in many instances, and perhaps in the man’s case more than the woman’s, both parties do not remain constant, I hasten to agree with you, but. hasten also to supply an explanation. Women writers I know place almost the entire blame on the man, but then they are women, which is in itself an explanation. They cannot project themselves into' the place, the feelings of the man in Ihe case; they fail to realise that when a man is unfaithful to one woman, browsing in the masculine way over fields that belong not to him, he is merely culling flowers to lay as a chaplet on the altar of his abstract conception of womanhood.

For every man is an idealist—one wonders how many women are—and from his dawning years sets up in his heart a shrine on which is placed an image mistily outlined, taking first one shape and then another. Each time that he loves (and few men there are who do not love more than once), the mists clear a little, and he sees the image more plainly. Or perhaps that is hardly correct; rather he sees the woman a little less clearly than does he the average of womankind, since love presupposes a state of suspended judgment, and in that

opaqueness of vision sees in her an approximation to his ideal. Some few there are, and they are blessed, who find with the passing of the years that the vision is constant; to others, and these are a larger body, a kindly astigmatism is given, but for the average man the mists that have hindered his sight, blow by, and then he goes back to his neglected shrine, and, striking his breast, humbly prays “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!”

It was very kind of you, Susan Lee, to offer me your copy of Dorothy Dix, and I thank you for it, but I shall not bother to read it. I have read her aphorisms all before —in Sophocles, and Aristotle, and further back in the Chinese Philosopher LingPo, who flourished a matter of 4,000 years ago, and who was probably himself a plagiarist from an older writer.

After all, Dorothy Dix and people of her kidney do a great, though perhaps unconscious wrong: they seek to standardise love as they seek to standardise life, and thereby rob us of our last comforting shred of self-deception. From the experience of the gnarled age which you mention—oh, kindly I am sure —I will confess to you that the lie w’hich I have always found a hundred per cent, winner in my dealings with women has been to assure them that they are totally different from any and every other woman that I have ever known, “that they are the most wonderful thing that God has ever wrought, with joy in the new skill that had come to His lingers!” Why

attempt to dissipate an illusion so pleasantly conceived and kindly consented to? By disclosing each pitfall into which the feet of inexperience may stray, some few may be saved, but against that there is done the infinitely greater wrong of assuring the youthfully married that their trials are not the first of their kind that have ever been experienced, the most wonderful because special to themselves, and when sorrow is robbed of good honest misery by an assurance that it is only a passing phase which will must experience, how would you prevent the conviction that must inevitably follow that rapture also is fleeting? No, let each person discover the great secret for himself. Each couple sets out on a great voyage of discovery; would you rob such hardy voyagers of the thrills before them by assuring them that after all they are sailing a charted sea? Even the lighthouses that you set up to warn them of the rocks on to which they may peradventure lie cast, do not compensate for that •injury.,