Excerpt from Beyond Disillusion

No question is more interesting to us in America than that of the perpetuation of the family. With the constant insistence upon the rights of the individual, not only to life, but to happiness, we find ourselves forgetting the value of hardship and discipline to the individual himself. We are disposed to regard all higher engagements and contracts in the light of their immediate reaction, gauged in terms of pleasure. There is with us still operative a goodly amount of the old utilitarian philosophy, which mingles most singularly with a popularized Darwinism.

No wonder then our ideals of marriage are somewhat vague. And yet withal we are a conservative people, loyal and very sentimental. We are not prepared to jeopardize the old home virtues, at least not to confess that we do. So our conscience is divided and our mind confused, in all that concerns the hearth and the cradle.

Most of the discussion of marriage which has taken dramatic form has seemed to be, on the whole, negative and destructive, not only because it is far easier to criticise than to create, but because the art form of drama itself makes any positive presentment of human interests, which cannot come to adequate expression in sudden acts or explosions of passion, extraordinarily difficult, not to say impossible. Even an Ibsen, past master of the craft, and a genius to boot, can carry his argument successfully to the slamming of the door and the exit of the lady and the bewildered reaction of the husband, as in the Doll's House, but he is not able to make himself anything like so well understood when he struggles with the subtler problem of the master builder's soul, or even John Gabriel Borkmann's, and much less yet can he make his point when, as in When We Dead Awaken, he suggests through unconventional and futile rebellion a reconsideration of the requisites for an honorable and psychologically and sociologically valuable marriage.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.