Philosophers on Marriage

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 4, Issue 10, 1 April 1926, Page 33

Philosophers on Marriage

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When Mr. Bernard Shaw was asked to contribute to “The Book of Marriage,” which Count Kevserling has just given to the world, he sent this message in reply “No man dare write the truth about marriage while his wife lives. Unless, that is, he hates her, like Strindberg, and I don’t. I shall read the volume with interest, knowing that it will consist chiefly of evasions, but I will not contribute to it.” With this intimation Count Keyserling ushers in a distinguished company of professors of ethnography and psychiatry, doctors of medicine and letters, of both sexes, whom he asked to help him to compile a “symphony of marriage,” illuminating all the spiritual aspects, and those only, of man and woman in their legalised relation to one another as creatures of different sex, not merely as the mothers and fathers of the next generation. The result is a book of real importance. A mystic and a visionary, Count Keyserling desires to help mankind to solve the problem of why marriage is so difficult an undertaking. Loiv Percentage of the Hen-pecked / T'HE newest and most intriguing aspects of the problem are those presented by Dr. Kretschmer, Professor of Psychiatry at Tubingen. Under the heading “The Body in Relation to the Soul in Marriage,” he discusses marriage according to type, and gives concrete examples of well and ill-matched pairs well on in married life, a hundred in number, whom he has studied with exhaustive thoroughness. Of this hundred he found that only thirteen were a justification of the popular superstition that men and women grow alike, even in externals, after many years of living together. Sixtythree were still the extremes in temperament and appearance they had always been, while the other twentyfour were “indifferent,” offering no striking signs of having reacted either way. It is the short, plump, active, serenely-balanced, cheerful pair who grow to look alike, it —probably, one imagines, as stoutness increases. But as two very lively people do not attract one another, this cheerful type seldom finds the proper mate. Only eight men of the hundred were of the domestic tyrant or “Sheik” type, which, the Professor

assures us, when not due to nervous disturbance, is out of date. Four of these had wives who possessed humour •' and , managed them; the other four had reduced their wives to pale, resentful, depressed shadows. On the other hand that popular couple of the comic papers, the hen-pecked husband and his Xantippe partner, were only once represented among the hundred. The Tzvo Fidelities ORINCESS Mechtild Lichnowsky, one of the most brilliant women writing in .Germany to-day, on “Marriage as a Work of Art,” gives food for thought. “Sexual fidelity means less in marriage than fidelity in regard to pulling together as a social and economic entity. Whichever partner breaks up a home for the sake of a new passion is more immoral than Messalina, who remained empress by day, wherever she chose to spend her nights,” says the Count. “Let married couples keep strict regard with regard to what they let their surroundings see and hear,” says the Princess, and advocates a certain amount of reserve as regards private thoughts and actions towards one another. Uncertainty enhances the charm of life. Her basis of the perfect homelife is perfect politeness. Woman’s “ Common-Sense pOUNT Keyserling is easily the most provocative writer of the twenty-four. He considers the nonintellectual aristocrat who only seeks a life-partner of his own standing the most easily satisfied in marriage, and of all nationalities on earth the Englishman of this type the wisest in his choice. He sees marriage as a masculine problem only. Woman, he thinks, endowed by nature with more practical realism and common-sense, and also more capable of altruism and sacrifice, was obviously destined to make the best of things as she finds them. This, he argues, should be easy, as she originally chose the man, supporting , his view of woman’s predatory qualities by citing Germany’s leading feminine psychologist, Dr. Mathilde von Kemnitz, who has long pleaded for protective associations not for young girls but for adolescent boys. One misses a Latin point of view in a book predominantly German in tone in spite of the foreign collaborators.