THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

                          BY THE SAME AUTHOR


                           IRISH IMPRESSIONS
                               HERETICS
                               ORTHODOXY
                         THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
                      A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND
                         ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
                          GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
                               MAN ALIVE
                            THE FLYING INN
                        THE BALL AND THE CROSS
                     THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN
                      THE WISDOM OF FATHER BROWN
                     THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL


                                 POEMS

                     THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE




                           THE SUPERSTITION
                              OF DIVORCE

                                  BY

                           G. K. CHESTERTON

                               AUTHOR OF
          “HERETICS,” “ORTHODOXY,” “IRISH IMPRESSIONS,” ETC.


                               NEW YORK
                           JOHN LANE COMPANY
                                 MCMXX




                           Copyright, 1920,
                         BY JOHN LANE COMPANY


                               Press of
                      J. J. Little & Ives Company
                          New York, U. S. A.




_Introductory Note_


The earlier part of this book appeared in the form of five articles
which came out in the “New Witness” at the crisis of the recent
controversy in the Press on the subject of divorce. Crude and sketchy as
they confessedly were, they had a certain rude plan of their own, which
I find it very difficult to recast even in order to expand. I have
therefore decided to reprint the original articles as they stood, save
for a few introductory words; and then, at the risk of repetition, to
add a few further chapters, explaining more fully any conceptions that
may seem to have been too crudely assumed or dismissed. I have set forth
the original matter as it appeared, under a general heading, without
dividing it into chapters.

                                                               G. K. C.




CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE                                           11

THE STORY OF THE FAMILY                                               61

THE STORY OF THE VOW                                                  83

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE                                            105

THE VISTA OF DIVORCE                                                 127

CONCLUSION                                                           147




THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE




_I.--The Superstition of Divorce_


It is futile to talk of reform without reference to form. To take a
case from my own taste and fancy, there is nothing I feel to be so
beautiful and wonderful as a window. All casements are magic casements,
whether they open on the foam or the front-garden; they lie close to
the ultimate mystery and paradox of limitation and liberty. But if I
followed my instinct towards an infinite number of windows, it would
end in having no walls. It would also (it may be added incidentally)
end in having no windows either; for a window makes a picture by making
a picture-frame. But there is a simpler way of stating my more simple
and fatal error. It is that I have wanted a window, without considering
whether I wanted a house. Now many appeals are being made to us to-day
on behalf of that light and liberty that might well be symbolised by
windows; especially as so many of them concern the enlightenment and
liberation of the house, in the sense of the home. Many quite
disinterested people urge many quite reasonable considerations in the
case of divorce, as a type of domestic liberation; but in the
journalistic and general discussion of the matter there is far too much
of the mind that works backwards and at random, in the manner of all
windows and no walls. Such people say they want divorce, without asking
themselves whether they want marriage. Even in order to be divorced it
has generally been found necessary to go through the preliminary
formality of being married; and unless the nature of this initial act
be considered, we might as well be discussing haircutting for the bald
or spectacles for the blind. To be divorced is to be in the literal
sense unmarried; and there is no sense in a thing being undone when we
do not know if it is done.

There is perhaps no worse advice, nine times out of ten, than the advice
to do the work that’s nearest. It is especially bad when it means, as
it generally does, removing the obstacle that’s nearest. It means that
men are not to behave like men but like mice; who nibble at the thing
that’s nearest. The man, like the mouse, undermines what he cannot
understand. Because he himself bumps into a thing, he calls it the
nearest obstacle; though the obstacle may happen to be the pillar that
holds up the whole roof over his head. He industriously removes the
obstacle; and in return the obstacle removes him, and much more valuable
things than he. This opportunism is perhaps the most unpractical thing
in this highly unpractical world. People talk vaguely against
destructive criticism; but what is the matter with this criticism is not
that it destroys, but that it does not criticise. It is destruction
without design. It is taking a complex machine to pieces bit by bit, in
any order, without even knowing what the machine is for. And if a man
deals with a deadly dynamic machine on the principle of touching the
knob that’s nearest, he will find out the defects of that cheery
philosophy. Now leaving many sincere and serious critics of modern
marriage on one side for the moment, great masses of modern men and
women, who write and talk about marriage, are thus nibbling blindly at
it like an army of mice. When the reformers propose, for instance, that
divorce should be obtainable after an absence of three years (the
absence actually taken for granted in the first military arrangements of
the late European War) their readers and supporters could seldom give
any sort of logical reason for the period being three years, and not
three months or three minutes. They are like people who should say “Give
me three feet of dog”; and not care where the cut came. Such persons
fail to see a dog as an organic entity; in other words, they cannot make
head or tail of it. And the chief thing to say about such reformers of
marriage is that they cannot make head or tail of it. They do not know
what it is, or what it is meant to be, or what its supporters suppose it
to be; they never look at it, even when they are inside it. They do the
work that’s nearest; which is poking holes in the bottom of a boat under
the impression that they are digging in a garden. This question of what
a thing is, and whether it is a garden or a boat, appears to them
abstract and academic. They have no notion of how large is the idea they
attack; or how relatively small appear the holes that they pick in it.

Thus, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an intelligent man in other matters, says
that there is only a “theological” opposition to divorce, and that it is
entirely founded on “certain texts” in the Bible about marriages. This
is exactly as if he said that a belief in the brotherhood of men was
only founded on certain texts in the Bible, about all men being the
children of Adam and Eve. Millions of peasants and plain people all over
the world assume marriage to be static, without having ever clapped eyes
on any text. Numbers of more modern people, especially after the recent
experiments in America, think divorce is a social disease, without
having ever bothered about any text. It may be maintained that even in
these, or in any one, the idea of marriage is ultimately mystical; and
the same may be maintained about the idea of brotherhood. It is obvious
that a husband and wife are not visibly one flesh, in the sense of
being one quadruped. It is equally obvious that Paderewski and Jack
Johnson are not twins, and probably have not played together at their
mother’s knee. There is indeed a very important admission, or addition,
to be realised here. What is true is this: that if the nonsense of
Nietzsche or some such sophist submerged current culture, so that it was
the fashion to deny the duties of fraternity; then indeed it might be
found that the group which still affirmed fraternity was the original
group in whose sacred books was the text about Adam and Eve. Suppose
some Prussian professor has opportunely discovered that Germans and
lesser men are respectively descended from two such very different
monkeys that they are in no sense brothers, but barely cousins (German)
any number of times removed. And suppose he proceeds to remove them even
further with a hatchet; suppose he bases on this a repetition of the
conduct of Cain, saying not so much “Am I my brother’s keeper?” as “Is
he really my brother?” And suppose this higher philosophy of the
hatchet becomes prevalent in colleges and cultivated circles, as even
more foolish philosophies have done. Then I agree it probably will be
the Christian, the man who preserves the text about Cain, who will
continue to assert that he is still the professor’s brother; that he is
still the professor’s keeper. He may possibly add that, in his opinion,
the professor seems to require a keeper.

And that is doubtless the situation in the controversies about divorce
and marriage to-day. It is the Christian church which continues to hold
strongly, when the world for some reason has weakened on it, what many
others hold at other times. But even then it is barely picking up the
shreds and scraps of the subject to talk about a reliance on texts. The
vital point in the comparison is this: that human brotherhood means a
whole view of life, held in the light of life, and defended, rightly or
wrongly, by constant appeals to every aspect of life. The religion that
holds it most strongly will hold it when nobody else holds it; that is
quite true, and that some of us may be so perverse as to think a point
in favour of the religion. But anybody who holds it at all will hold it
as a philosophy, not hung on one text but on a hundred truths.
Fraternity may be a sentimental metaphor; I may be suffering a delusion
when I hail a Montenegrin peasant as my long lost brother. As a fact, I
have my own suspicions about which of us it is that has got lost. But my
delusion is not a deduction from one text, or from twenty; it is the
expression of a relation that to me at least seems a reality. And what I
should say about the idea of a brother, I should say about the idea of a
wife.

It is supposed to be very unbusinesslike to begin at the beginning. It
is called “abstract and academic principles with which we English, etc.,
etc.” It is still in some strange way considered unpractical to open up
inquiries about anything by asking what it is. I happen to have,
however, a fairly complete contempt for that sort of practicality; for I
know that it is not even practical. My ideal business man would not be
one who planked down fifty pounds and said “Here is hard cash; I am a
plain man; it is quite indifferent to me whether I am paying a debt, or
giving alms to a beggar, or buying a wild bull or a bathing machine.”
Despite the infectious heartiness of his tone, I should still, in
considering the hard cash, say (like a cabman) “What’s this?” I should
continue to insist, priggishly, that it was a highly practical point
what the money _was_; what it was supposed to stand for, to aim at or to
declare; what was the nature of the transaction; or, in short, what the
devil the man supposed he was doing. I shall therefore begin by asking,
in an equally mystical manner, what in the name of God and the angels a
man getting married supposes he is doing. I shall begin by asking what
marriage is; and the mere question will probably reveal that the act
itself, good or bad, wise or foolish, is of a certain kind; that it is
not an inquiry or an experiment or an accident; it may probably dawn on
us that it is a promise. It can be more fully defined by saying it is a
vow.

Many will immediately answer that it is a rash vow. I am content for the
moment to reply that all vows are rash vows. I am not now defending but
defining vows; I am pointing out that this is a discussion about vows;
first, of whether there ought to be vows; and second, of what vows ought
to be. Ought a man to break a promise? Ought a man to make a promise?
These are philosophic questions; but the philosophic peculiarity of
divorce and re-marriage, as compared with free love and no marriage, is
that a man breaks and makes a promise at the same moment. It is a highly
German philosophy; and recalls the way in which the enemy wishes to
celebrate his successful destruction of all treaties by signing some
more. If I were breaking a promise, I would do it without promises. But
I am very far from minimising the momentous and disputable nature of the
vow itself. I shall try to show, in a further article, that this rash
and romantic operation is the only furnace from which can come the plain
hardware of humanity, the cast-iron resistance of citizenship or the
cold steel of common sense; but I am not denying that the furnace is a
fire. The vow is a violent and unique thing; though there have been many
besides the marriage vow; vows of chivalry, vows of poverty, vows of
celibacy, pagan as well as Christian. But modern fashion has rather
fallen out of the habit; and men miss the type for the lack of the
parallels. The shortest way of putting the problem is to ask whether
being free includes being free to bind oneself. For the vow is a tryst
with oneself.

I may be misunderstood if I say, for brevity, that marriage is an affair
of honour. The sceptic will be delighted to assent, by saying it is a
fight. And so it is, if only with oneself; but the point here is that it
necessarily has the touch of the heroic, in which virtue can be
translated by _virtus_. Now about fighting, in its nature, there is an
implied infinity, or at least a potential infinity. I mean that loyalty
in war is loyalty in defeat or even disgrace; it is due to the flag
precisely at the moment when the flag nearly falls. We do already apply
this to the flag of the nation; and the question is whether it is wise
or unwise to apply it to the flag of the family. Of course, it is
tenable that we should apply it to neither; that misgovernment in the
nation or misery in the citizen would make the desertion of the flag an
act of reason and not treason. I will only say here that, if this were
really the limit of national loyalty, some of us would have deserted our
nation long ago.




_II.--The Superstition of Divorce_


To the two or three articles appearing here on this subject I have given
the title of the Superstition of Divorce; and the title is not taken at
random. While free love seems to me a heresy, divorce does really seem
to me a superstition. It is not only more of a superstition than free
love, but much more of a superstition than strict sacramental marriage;
and this point can hardly be made too plain. It is the partisans of
divorce, not the defenders of marriage, who attach a stiff and senseless
sanctity to a mere ceremony, apart from the meaning of the ceremony. It
is our opponents, and not we, who hope to be saved by the letter of
ritual, instead of the spirit of reality. It is they who hold that vow
or violation, loyalty or disloyalty, can all be disposed of by a
mysterious and magic rite, performed first in a law-court and then in a
church or a registry office. There is little difference between the two
parts of the ritual; except that the law court is much more ritualistic.
But the plainest parallels will show anybody that all this is sheer
barbarous credulity. It may or may not be superstition for a man to
believe he must kiss the Bible to show he is telling the truth. It is
certainly the most grovelling superstition for him to believe that, if
he kisses the Bible, anything he says will come true. It would surely be
the blackest and most benighted Bible-worship to suggest that the mere
kiss on the mere book alters the moral quality of perjury. Yet this is
precisely what is implied in saying that formal re-marriage alters the
moral quality of conjugal infidelity. It may have been a mark of the
Dark Ages that Harold should swear on a relic, though he were afterwards
foresworn. But surely those ages would have been at their darkest, if he
had been content to be sworn on a relic and forsworn on another relic.
Yet this is the new altar these reformers would erect for us, out of the
mouldy and meaningless relics of their dead law and their dying
religion.

Now we, at any rate, are talking about an idea, a thing of the intellect
and the soul; which we feel to be unalterable by legal antics. We are
talking about the idea of loyalty; perhaps a fantastic, perhaps only an
unfashionable idea, but one we can explain and defend as an idea. Now I
have already pointed out that most sane men do admit our ideal in such a
case as patriotism or public spirit; the necessity of saving the state
to which we belong. The patriot may revile but must not renounce his
country; he must curse it to cure it, but not to wither it up. The old
pagan citizens felt thus about the city; and modern nationalists feel
thus about the nation. But even mere modern internationalists feel it
about something; if it is only the nation of mankind. Even the
humanitarian does not become a misanthrope and live in a monkey-house.
Even a disappointed Collectivist or Communist does not retire into the
exclusive society of beavers, because beavers are all communists of the
most class-conscious solidarity. He admits the necessity of clinging to
his fellow creatures, and begging them to abandon the use of the
possessive pronoun; heart-breaking as his efforts must seem to him after
a time. Even a Pacifist does not prefer rats to men, on the ground that
the rat community is so pure from the taint of Jingoism as always to
leave the sinking ship. In short, everybody recognises that there is
_some_ ship, large and small, which he ought not to leave, even when he
thinks it is sinking.

We may take it then that there are institutions to which we are attached
finally; just as there are others to which we are attached temporarily.
We go from shop to shop trying to get what we want; but we do not go
from nation to nation doing this; unless we belong to a certain group
now heading very straight for Pogroms. In the first case it is the
threat that we shall withdraw our custom; in the second it is the threat
that we shall never withdraw ourselves; that we shall be part of the
institution to the last. The time when the shop loses its customers is
the time when the city needs its citizens; but it needs them as critics
who will always remain to criticise. I need not now emphasise the deadly
need of this double energy of internal reform and external defence; the
whole towering tragedy which has eclipsed our earth in our time is but
one terrific illustration of it. The hammer-strokes are coming thick and
fast now;[A] and filling the world with infernal thunders; and there is
still the iron sound of something unbreakable deeper and louder than all
the things that break. We may curse the kings, we may distrust the
captains, we may murmur at the very existence of the armies; but we know
that in the darkest days that may come to us, no man will desert the
flag.

Now when we pass from loyalty to the nation to loyalty to the family,
there can be no doubt about the first and plainest difference. The
difference is that the family is a thing far more free. The vow is a
voluntary loyalty; and the marriage vow is marked among ordinary oaths
of allegiance by the fact that the allegiance is also a choice. The man
is not only a citizen of the city, but also the founder and builder of
the city. He is not only a soldier serving the colours, but he has
himself artistically selected and combined the colours, like the colours
of an individual dress. If it be admissible to ask him to be true to the
commonwealth that has made him, it is at least not more illiberal to ask
him to be true to the commonwealth he has himself made. If civic
fidelity be, as it is, a necessity, it is also in a special sense a
constraint. The old joke against patriotism, the Gilbertian irony,
congratulated the Englishman on his fine and fastidious taste in being
born in England. It made a plausible point in saying “For he might have
been a Russian”; though indeed we have lived to see some persons who
seemed to think they could be Russians when the fancy took them. If
commonsense considers even such involuntary loyalty natural, we can
hardly wonder if it thinks voluntary loyalty still more natural. And the
small state founded on the sexes is at once the most voluntary and the
most natural of all self-governing states. It is not true of Mr. Brown
that he might have been a Russian; but it may be true of Mrs. Brown
that she might have been a Robinson.

Now it is not at all hard to see why this small community, so specially
free touching its cause, should yet be specially bound touching its
effects. It is not hard to see why the vow made most freely is the vow
kept most firmly. There are attached to it, by the nature of things,
consequences so tremendous that no contract can offer any comparison.
There is no contract, unless it be that said to be signed in blood, that
can call spirits from the vasty deep; or bring cherubs (or goblins) to
inhabit a small modern villa. There is no stroke of the pen which
creates real bodies and souls, or makes the characters in a novel come
to life. The institution that puzzles intellectuals so much can be
explained by the mere material fact (perceptible even to intellectuals)
that children are, generally speaking, younger than their parents. “Till
death do us part” is not an irrational formula, for those will almost
certainly die before they see more than half of the amazing (or
alarming) thing they have done.

Such is, in a curt and crude outline, this obvious thing for those to
whom it is not obvious. Now I know there are thinking men among those
who would tamper with it; and I shall expect some of these to reply to
my questions. But for the moment I only ask this question: whether the
parliamentary and journalistic divorce movement shows even a shadowy
trace of these fundamental truths, regarded as tests. Does it even
discuss the nature of a vow, the limits and objects of loyalty, the
survival of the family as a small and free state? The writers are
content to say that Mr. Brown is uncomfortable with Mrs. Brown, and the
last emancipation, for separated couples, seems only to mean that he is
still uncomfortable without Mrs. Brown. These are not days in which
being uncomfortable is felt as the final test of public action. For the
rest, the reformers show statistically that families are in fact so
scattered in our industrial anarchy, that they may as well abandon hope
of finding their way home again. I am acquainted with that argument for
making bad worse and I see it everywhere leading to slavery. Because
London Bridge is broken down, we must assume that bridges are not meant
to bridge. Because London commercialism and capitalism have copied hell,
we are to continue to copy them. Anyhow, some will retain the conviction
that the ancient bridge built between the two towers of sex is the
worthiest of the great works of the earth.

It is exceedingly characteristic of the dreary decades before the War
that the forms of freedom in which they seemed to specialise were
suicide and divorce. I am not at the moment pronouncing on the moral
problem of either; I am merely noting, as signs of those times, those
two true or false counsels of despair; the end of life and the end of
love. Other forms of freedom were being increasingly curtailed. Freedom
indeed was the one thing that progressives and conservatives alike
contemned. Socialists were largely concerned to prevent strikes, by
State arbitration; that is, by adding another rich man to give the
casting vote between rich and poor. Even in claiming what they called
the right to work they tacitly surrendered the right to leave off
working. Tories were preaching conscription, not so much to defend the
independence of England as to destroy the independence of Englishmen.
Liberals, of course, were chiefly interested in eliminating liberty,
especially touching beer and betting. It was wicked to fight, and unsafe
even to argue; for citing any certain and contemporary fact might land
one in a libel action. As all these doors were successfully shut in our
faces along the chilly and cheerless corridor of progress (with its
glazed tiles) the doors of death and divorce alone stood open, or rather
opened wider and wider. I do not expect the exponents of divorce to
admit any similarity in the two things; yet the passing parallel is not
irrelevant. It may enable them to realise the limits within which our
moral instincts can, even for the sake of argument, treat this desperate
remedy as a normal object of desire. Divorce is for us at best a
failure, of which we are more concerned to find and cure the cause than
to complete the effects; and we regard a system that produces many
divorces as we do a system that drives men to drown and shoot
themselves. For instance, it is perhaps the commonest complaint against
the existing law that the poor cannot afford to avail themselves of it.
It is an argument to which normally I should listen with special
sympathy. But while I should condemn the law being a luxury, my first
thought will naturally be that divorce and death are only luxuries in a
rather rare sense. I should not primarily condole with the poor man on
the high price of prussic acid; or on the fact that all precipices of
suitable suicidal height were the private property of the landlords.
There are other high prices and high precipices I should attack first. I
should admit in the abstract that what is sauce for the goose is sauce
for the gander; that what is good for the rich is good for the poor; but
my first and strongest impression would be that prussic acid sauce is
not good for anybody. I fear I should, on the impulse of the moment,
pull a poor clerk or artisan back by the coat-tails, if he were jumping
over Shakespeare’s Cliff, even if Dover sands were strewn with the
remains of the dukes and bankers who had already taken the plunge.

But in one respect, I will heartily concede, the cult of divorce has
differed from the mere cult of death. The cult of death is dead. Those I
knew in my youth as young pessimists are now aged optimists. And, what
is more to the point at present, even when it was living it was limited;
it was a thing of one clique in one class. We know the rule in the old
comedy, that when the heroine went mad in white satin, the confidante
went mad in white muslin. But when, in some tragedy of the artistic
temperament, the painter committed suicide in velvet, it was never
implied that the plumber must commit suicide in corduroy. It was never
held that Hedda Gabler’s housemaid must die in torments on the carpet
(trying as her term of service may have been); or that Mrs. Tanqueray’s
butler must play the Roman fool and die on his own carving knife. That
particular form of playing the fool, Roman or otherwise, was an
oligarchic privilege in the decadent epoch; and even as such has largely
passed with that epoch. Pessimism, which was never popular, is no
longer even fashionable. A far different fate has awaited the other
fashion; the other somewhat dismal form of freedom. If divorce is a
disease, it is no longer to be a fashionable disease like appendicitis;
it is to be made an epidemic like small-pox. As we have already seen,
papers and public men to-day make a vast parade of the necessity of
setting the poor man free to get a divorce. Now why are they so mortally
anxious that he should be free to get a divorce, and not in the least
anxious that he should be free to get anything else? Why are the same
people happy, nay almost hilarious, when he gets a divorce, who are
horrified when he gets a drink? What becomes of his money, what becomes
of his children, where he works, when he ceases to work, are less and
less under his personal control. Labour Exchanges, Insurance Cards,
Welfare Work, and a hundred forms of police inspection and supervision,
have combined for good or evil to fix him more and more strictly to a
certain place in society. He is less and less allowed to go to look for
a new job; why is he allowed to go to look for a new wife? He is more
and more compelled to recognise a Moslem code about liquor; why is it
made so easy for him to escape from his old Christian code about sex?
What is the meaning of this mysterious immunity, this special permit for
adultery; and why is running away with his neighbour’s wife to be the
only exhilaration still left open to him? Why must he love as he
pleases; when he may not even live as he pleases?

The answer is, I regret to say, that this social campaign, in most
though by no means all of its most prominent campaigners, relies in this
matter on a very smug and pestilent piece of cant. There are some
advocates of democratic divorce who are really advocates of general
democratic freedom; but they are the exceptions; I might say, with all
respect, that they are the dupes. The omnipresence of the thing in the
press and in political society is due to a motive precisely opposite to
the motive professed. The modern rulers, who are simply the rich men,
are really quite consistent in their attitude to the poor man. It is
the same spirit which takes away his children under the pretence of
order, which takes away his wife under the pretence of liberty. That
which wishes, in the words of the comic song, to break up the happy
home, is primarily anxious not to break up the much more unhappy
factory. Capitalism, of course, is at war with the family, for the same
reason which has led to its being at war with the Trade Union. This
indeed is the only sense in which it is true that capitalism is
connected with individualism. Capitalism believes in collectivism for
itself and individualism for its enemies. It desires its victims to be
individuals, or (in other words) to be atoms. For the word atom, in its
clearest meaning (which is none too clear) might be translated as
“individual.” If there be any bond, if there be any brotherhood, if
there be any class loyalty or domestic discipline, by which the poor can
help the poor, these emancipators will certainly strive to loosen that
bond or lift that discipline in the most liberal fashion. If there be
such a brotherhood, these individualists will redistribute it in the
form of individuals; or in other words smash it to atoms.

The masters of modern plutocracy know what they are about. They are
making no mistake; they can be cleared of the slander of inconsistency.
A very profound and precise instinct has led them to single out the
human household as the chief obstacle to their inhuman progress. Without
the family we are helpless before the State, which in our modern case is
the Servile State. To use a military metaphor, the family is the only
formation in which the charge of the rich can be repulsed. It is a force
that forms twos as soldiers form fours; and, in every peasant country,
has stood in the square house or the square plot of land as infantry
have stood in squares against cavalry. How this force operates thus, and
why, I will try to explain in the last of these articles. But it is when
it is most nearly ridden down by the horsemen of pride and privilege, as
in Poland or Ireland, when the battle grows most desperate and the hope
most dark, that men begin to understand why that wild oath in its
beginnings was flung beyond the bounds of the world; and what would seem
as passing as a vision is made permanent as a vow.




_III.--The Superstition of Divorce_


There has long been a curiously consistent attempt to conceal the fact
that France is a Christian country. There have been Frenchmen in the
plot, no doubt, and no doubt there have been Frenchmen--though I have
myself only found Englishmen--in the derivative attempt to conceal the
fact that Balzac was a Christian writer. I began to read Balzac long
after I had read the admirers of Balzac; and they had never given me a
hint of this truth. I had read that his books were bound in yellow and
“quite impudently French”; though I may have been cloudy about why being
French should be impudent in a Frenchman. I had read the truer
description of “the grimy wizard of the _Comedie Humaine_,” and have
lived to learn the truth of it; Balzac certainly is a genius of the type
of that artist he himself describes, who could draw a broomstick so
that one knew it had swept the room after a murder. The furniture of
Balzac is more alive than the figures of many dramas. For this I was
prepared; but not for a certain spiritual assumption which I recognised
at once as a historical phenomenon. The morality of a great writer is
not the morality he teaches, but the morality he takes for granted. The
Catholic type of Christian ethics runs through Balzac’s books, exactly
as the Puritan type of Christian ethics runs through Bunyan’s books.
What his professed opinions were I do not know, any more than I know
Shakespeare’s; but I know that both those great creators of a
multitudinous world made it, as compared with other and later writers,
on the same fundamental moral plan as the universe of Dante. There can
be no doubt about it for any one who can apply as a test the truth I
have mentioned; that the fundamental things in a man are not the things
he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain. But here and
there Balzac does explain; and with that intellectual concentration Mr.
George Moore has acutely observed in that novelist when he is a
theorist. And the other day I found in one of Balzac’s novels this
passage; which, whether or no it would precisely hit Mr. George Moore’s
mood at this moment, strikes me as a perfect prophecy of this epoch, and
might also be a motto for this book: “With the solidarity of the family
society has lost that elemental force which Montesquieu defined and
called ‘honour.’ Society has isolated its members the better to govern
them, and has divided in order to weaken.”

Throughout our youth and the years before the War, the current criticism
followed Ibsen in describing the domestic system as a doll’s house and
the domestic woman as a doll. Mr. Bernard Shaw varied the metaphor by
saying that mere custom kept the woman in the home as it keeps the
parrot in the cage; and the plays and tales of the period made vivid
sketches of a woman who also resembled a parrot in other particulars,
rich in raiment, shrill in accent and addicted to saying over and over
again what she had been taught to say. Mr. Granville Barker, the
spiritual child of Mr. Bernard Shaw, commented in his clever play of
“The Voysey Inheritance” on tyranny, hypocrisy and boredom, as the
constituent elements of a “happy English home.” Leaving the truth of
this aside for the moment, it will be well to insist that the
conventionality thus criticised would be even more characteristic of a
happy French home. It is not the Englishman’s house, but the Frenchman’s
house that is his castle. It might be further added, touching the
essential ethical view of the sexes at least, that the Irishman’s house
is his castle; though it has been for some centuries a besieged castle.
Anyhow, those conventions which were remarked as making domesticity
dull, narrow and unnaturally meek and submissive, are particularly
powerful among the Irish and the French. From this it will surely be
easy, for any lucid and logical thinker, to deduce the fact that the
French are dull and narrow, and that the Irish are unnaturally meek and
submissive. Mr. Bernard Shaw, being an Irishman who lives among
Englishmen, may be conveniently taken as the type of the difference;
and it will no doubt be found that the political friends of Mr. Shaw,
among Englishmen, will be of a wilder revolutionary type than those whom
he would have found among Irishmen. We are in a position to compare the
meekness of the Fenians with the fury of the Fabians. This deadening
monogamic ideal may even, in a larger sense, define and distinguish all
the flat subserviency of Clare from all the flaming revolt of Clapham.
Nor need we now look far to understand why revolutions have been unknown
in the history of France; or why they happen so persistently in the
vaguer politics of England. This rigidity and respectability must surely
be the explanation of all that incapacity for any civil experiment or
explosion, which has always marked that sleepy hamlet of very private
houses, which we call the city of Paris. But the same things are true
not only of Parisians but of peasants; they are even true of other
peasants in the great Alliance. Students of Serbian traditions tell us
that the peasant literature lays a special and singular curse on the
violation of marriage; and this may well explain the prim and sheepish
pacifism complained of in that people.

In plain words, there is clearly something wrong in the calculation by
which it was proved that a housewife must be as much a servant as a
housemaid; or which exhibited the domesticated man as being as gentle as
the primrose or as conservative as the Primrose League. It is precisely
those who have been conservative about the family who have been
revolutionary about the state. Those who are blamed for the bigotry or
_bourgeois_ smugness of their marriage conventions are actually those
blamed for the restlessness and violence of their political reforms. Nor
is there seriously any difficulty in discovering the cause of this. It
is simply that in such a society the government, in dealing with the
family, deals with something almost as permanent and self-renewing as
itself. There can be a continuous family policy, like a continuous
foreign policy. In peasant countries the family fights, it may almost be
said that the farm fights. I do not mean merely that it riots in evil
and exceptional times; though this is not unimportant. It was a savage
but a sane feature when, in the Irish evictions, the women poured hot
water from the windows; it was part of a final falling back on private
tools as public weapons. That sort of thing is not only war to the
knife, but almost war to the fork and spoon. It was in this grim sense
perhaps that Parnell, in that mysterious pun, said that Kettle was a
household word in Ireland (it certainly ought to be after its subsequent
glories), and in a more general sense it is certain that meddling with
the housewife will ultimately mean getting into hot water. But it is not
of such crises of bodily struggle that I speak, but of a steady and
peaceful pressure from below of a thousand families upon the framework
of government. For this a certain spirit of defence and enclosure is
essential; and even feudalism was right in feeling that any such affair
of honour must be a family affair. It was a true artistic instinct that
pictured the pedigree on a coat that protects the body. The free peasant
has arms if he has not armorial bearings. He has not an escutcheon; but
he has a shield. Nor do I see why, in a freer and happier society than
the present, or even the past, it should not be a blazoned shield. For
that is true of pedigree which is true of property; the wrong is not in
its being imposed on men, but rather in its being denied to them. Too
much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few
capitalists; and so aristocracy sins, not in planting a family tree, but
in not planting a family forest.

Anyhow, it is found in practice that the domestic citizen can stand a
siege, even by the State; because he has those who will stand by him
through thick and thin--especially thin. Now those who hold that the
State can be made fit to own all and administer all, can consistently
disregard this argument; but it may be said with all respect that the
world is more and more disregarding them. If we could find a perfect
machine, and a perfect man to work it, it might be a good argument for
State Socialism, though an equally good argument for personal despotism.
But most of us, I fancy, are now agreed that something of that social
pressure from below which we call freedom is vital to the health of the
State; and this it is which cannot be fully exercised by individuals,
but only by groups and traditions. Such groups have been many; there
have been monasteries; there may be guilds; but there is only one type
among them which all human beings have a spontaneous and omnipresent
inspiration to build for themselves; and this type is the family.

I had intended this article to be the last of those outlining the
elements of this debate; but I shall have to add a short concluding
section on the way in which all this is missed in the practical (or
rather unpractical) proposals about divorce. Here I will only say that
they suffer from the modern and morbid weaknesses of always sacrificing
the normal to the abnormal. As a fact the “tyranny, hypocrisy and
boredom” complained of are not domesticity, but the decay of
domesticity. The case of that particular complaint, in Mr. Granville
Barker’s play, is itself a proof. The whole point of “The Voysey
Inheritance” was that there was no Voysey inheritance. The only
heritage of that family was a highly dishonourable debt. Naturally their
family affections had decayed when their whole ideal of property and
probity had decayed; and there was little love as well as little honour
among thieves. It has yet to be proved that they would have been as much
bored if they had had a positive and not a negative heritage; and had
worked a farm instead of a fraud. And the experience of mankind points
the other way.




_IV.--The Superstition of Divorce_


I have touched before now on a famous or infamous Royalist who suggested
that the people should eat grass; an unfortunate remark perhaps for a
Royalist to make; since the regimen is only recorded of a Royal
Personage. But there was certainly a simplicity in the solution worthy
of a sultan or even a savage chief; and it is this touch of autocratic
innocence on which I have mainly insisted touching the social reforms of
our day, and especially the social reform known as divorce. I am
primarily more concerned with the arbitrary method than with the
anarchic result. Very much as the old tyrant would turn any number of
men out to grass, so the new tyrant would turn any number of women into
grass-widows. Anyhow, to vary the legendary symbolism, it never seems to
occur to the king in this fairy tale that the gold crown on his head is
a less, and not a more, sacred and settled ornament than the gold ring
on the woman’s finger. This change is being achieved by the summary and
even secret government which we now suffer; and this would be the first
point against it, even if it were really an emancipation; and it is only
in form an emancipation. I will not anticipate the details of its
defence, which can be offered by others, but I will here conclude for
the present by roughly suggesting the practical defences of divorce, as
generally given just at present, under four heads. And I will only ask
the reader to note that they all have one thing in common; the fact that
each argument is also used for all that social reform which plain men
are already calling slavery.

First, it is very typical of the latest practical proposals that they
are concerned with the case of those who are already separated, and the
steps they must take to be divorced. There is a spirit penetrating all
our society to-day by which the exception is allowed to alter the rule;
the exile to deflect patriotism, the orphan to depose parenthood, and
even the widow or, in this case as we have seen the grass-widow, to
destroy the position of the wife. There is a sort of symbol of this
tendency in that mysterious and unfortunate nomadic nation which has
been allowed to alter so many things, from a crusade in Russia to a
cottage in South Bucks. We have been told to treat the wandering Jew as
a pilgrim, while we still treat the wandering Christian as a vagabond.
And yet the latter is at least trying to get home, like Ulysses; whereas
the former is, if anything, rather fleeing from home, like Cain. He who
is detached, disgruntled, nondescript, intermediate, is everywhere made
the excuse for altering what is common, corporate, traditional and
popular. And the alteration is always for the worse. The mermaid never
becomes more womanly, but only more fishy. The centaur never becomes
more manly, but only more horsy. The Jew cannot really internationalise
Christendom; he can only denationalise Christendom. The proletarian does
not find it easy to become a small proprietor; he is finding it far
easier to become a slave. So the unfortunate man, who cannot tolerate
the woman he has chosen from all the women in the world, is not
encouraged to return to her and tolerate her, but encouraged to choose
another woman whom he may in due course refuse to tolerate. And in all
these cases the argument is the same; that the man in the intermediate
state is unhappy. Probably he is unhappy, since he is abnormal; but the
point is that he is permitted to loosen the universal bond which has
kept millions of others normal. Because he has himself got into a hole,
he is allowed to burrow in it like a rabbit and undermine a whole
countryside.

Next we have, as we always have touching such crude experiments, an
argument from the example of other countries, and especially of new
countries. Thus the Eugenists tell me solemnly that there have been very
successful Eugenic experiments in America. And they rigidly retain their
solemnity (while refusing with many rebukes to believe in mine) when I
tell them that one of the Eugenic experiments in America is a chemical
experiment; which consists of changing a black man into the allotropic
form of white ashes. It is really an exceedingly Eugenic experiment;
since its chief object is to discourage an inter-racial mixture of blood
which is not desired. But I do not like this American experiment,
however American; and I trust and believe that it is not typically
American at all. It represents, I conceive, only one element in the
complexity of the great democracy; and goes along with other evil
elements; so that I am not at all surprised that the same strange social
sections, which permit a human being to be burned alive, also permit the
exalted science of Eugenics. It is the same in the milder matter of
liquor laws; and we are told that certain rather crude colonials have
established prohibition laws, which they try to evade; just as we are
told they have established divorce laws, which they are now trying to
repeal. For in this case of divorce, at least, the argument from distant
precedents has recoiled crushingly upon itself. There is already an
agitation for less divorce in America, even while there is an agitation
for more divorce in England.

Again, when an argument is based on a need of population, it will be
well if those supporting it realise where it may carry them. It is
exceedingly doubtful whether population is one of the advantages of
divorce; but there is no doubt that it is one of the advantages of
polygamy. It is already used in Germany as an argument for polygamy. But
the very word will teach us to look even beyond Germany for something
yet more remote and repulsive. Mere population, along with a sort of
polygamous anarchy, will not appear even as a practical ideal to any one
who considers, for instance, how consistently Europe has held the
headship of the human race, in face of the chaotic myriads of Asia. If
population were the chief test of progress and efficiency, China would
long ago have proved itself the most progressive and efficient state. De
Quincey summed up the whole of that enormous situation in a sentence
which is perhaps more impressive and even appalling than all the
perspectives of orient architecture and vistas of opium vision in the
midst of which it comes. “Man is a weed in those regions.” Many
Europeans, fearing for the garden of the world, have fancied that in
some future fatality those weeds may spring up and choke it. But no
Europeans have really wished that the flowers should become like the
weeds. Even if it were true, therefore, that the loosening of the tie
necessarily increased the population; even if this were not
contradicted, as it is, by the facts of many countries, we should have
strong historical grounds for not accepting the deduction. We should
still be suspicious of the paradox that we may encourage large families
by abolishing the family.

Lastly, I believe it is part of the defence of the new proposal that
even its defenders have found its principle a little too crude. I hear
they have added provisions which modify the principle; and which seem to
be in substance, first, that a man shall be made responsible for a money
payment to the wife he deserts, and second, that the matter shall once
again be submitted in some fashion to some magistrate. For my purpose
here, it is enough to note that there is something of the unmistakable
savour of the sociology we resist, in these two touching acts of faith,
in a cheque-book and in a lawyer. Most of the fashionable reformers of
marriage would be faintly shocked at any suggestion that a poor old
charwoman might possibly refuse such money, or that a good kind
magistrate might not have the right to give such advice. For the
reformers of marriage are very respectable people, with some honourable
exceptions; and nothing could fit more smoothly into the rather greasy
groove of their respectability than the suggestion that treason is best
treated with the damages, gentlemen, heavy damages, of Mr. Serjeant
Buzfuz; or that tragedy is best treated by the spiritual arbitrament of
Mr. Nupkins.

One word should be added to this hasty sketch of the elements of the
case. I have deliberately left out the loftiest aspect and argument,
that which sees marriage as a divine institution; and that for the
logical reason that those who believe in this would not believe in
divorce; and I am arguing with those who do believe in divorce. I do
not ask them to assume the worth of my creed or any creed; and I could
wish they did not so often ask me to assume the worth of their
worthless, poisonous plutocratic modern society. But if it could be
shown, as I think it can, that a long historical view and a patient
political experience can at last accumulate solid scientific evidence of
the vital need of such a vow, then I can conceive no more tremendous
tribute than this, to any faith, which made a flaming affirmation from
the darkest beginnings, of what the latest enlightenment can only slowly
discover in the end.




THE STORY OF THE FAMILY




_V.--The Story of the Family_


The most ancient of human institutions has an authority that may seem as
wild as anarchy. Alone among all such institutions it begins with a
spontaneous attraction; and may be said strictly and not sentimentally
to be founded on love instead of fear. The attempt to compare it with
coercive institutions complicating later history has led to infinite
illogicality in later times. It is as unique as it is universal. There
is nothing in any other social relations in any way parallel to the
mutual attraction of the sexes. By missing this simple point, the modern
world has fallen into a hundred follies. The idea of a general revolt of
women against men has been proclaimed with flags and processions, like a
revolt of vassals against their lords, of niggers against
nigger-drivers, of Poles against Prussians or Irishmen against
Englishmen; for all the world as if we really believed in the fabulous
nation of the Amazons. The equally philosophical idea of a general
revolt of men against women has been put into a romance by Sir Walter
Besant, and into a sociological book by Mr. Belfort Bax. But at the
first touch of this truth of an aboriginal attraction, all such
comparisons collapse and are seen to be comic. A Prussian does not feel
from the first that he can only be happy if he spends his days and
nights with a Pole. An Englishman does not think his house empty and
cheerless unless it happens to contain an Irishman. A white man does not
in his romantic youth dream of the perfect beauty of a black man. A
railway magnate seldom writes poems about the personal fascination of a
railway porter. All the other revolts against all the other relations
are reasonable and even inevitable, because those relations are
originally only founded upon force or self-interest. Force can abolish
what force can establish; self-interest can terminate a contract when
self-interest has dictated the contract. But the love of man and woman
is not an institution that can be abolished, or a contract that can be
terminated. It is something older than all institutions or contracts,
and something that is certain to outlast them all. All the other revolts
are real, because there remains a possibility that the things may be
destroyed, or at least divided. You can abolish capitalists; but you
cannot abolish males. Prussians can go out of Poland or negroes can be
repatriated to Africa; but a man and a woman must remain together in one
way or another; and must learn to put up with each other somehow.

These are very simple truths; that is why nobody nowadays seems to take
any particular notice of them; and the truth that follows next is
equally obvious. There is no dispute about the purpose of Nature in
creating such an attraction. It would be more intelligent to call it the
purpose of God; for Nature can have no purpose unless God is behind it.
To talk of the purpose of Nature is to make a vain attempt to avoid
being anthropomorphic, merely by being feminist. It is believing in a
goddess because you are too sceptical to believe in a god. But this is
a controversy which can be kept apart from the question, if we content
ourselves with saying that the vital value ultimately found in this
attraction is, of course, the renewal of the race itself. The child is
an explanation of the father and mother; and the fact that it is a human
child is the explanation of the ancient human ties connecting the father
and mother. The more human, that is the less bestial, is the child, the
more lawful and lasting are the ties. So far from any progress in
culture or the sciences tending to loosen the bond, any such progress
must logically tend to tighten it. The more things there are for the
child to learn, the longer he must remain at the natural school for
learning them; and the longer his teachers must at least postpone the
dissolution of their partnership. This elementary truth is hidden to-day
in vast masses of vicarious, indirect and artificial work, with the
fundamental fallacy of which I shall deal in a moment. Here I speak of
the primary position of the human group, as it has stood through
unthinkable ages of waxing and waning civilisations; often unable to
delegate any of its work, always unable to delegate all of it. In this,
I repeat, it will always be necessary for the two teachers to remain
together, in proportion as they have anything to teach. One of the
shapeless sea-beasts, that merely detaches itself from its offspring and
floats away, could float away to a submarine divorce court, or an
advanced club founded on free-love for fishes. The sea-beast might do
this, precisely because the sea-beast’s offspring need do nothing;
because it has not got to learn the polka or the multiplication table.
All these are truisms but they are also truths, and truths that will
return; for the present tangle of semi-official substitutes is not only
a stop-gap, but one that is not big enough to stop the gap. If people
cannot mind their own business, it cannot possibly be more economical to
pay them to mind each other’s business; and still less to mind each
other’s babies. It is simply throwing away a natural force and then
paying for an artificial force; as if a man were to water a plant with a
hose while holding up an umbrella to protect it from the rain. The
whole really rests on a plutocratic illusion of an infinite supply of
servants. When we offer any other system as a “career for women,” we are
really proposing that an infinite number of them should become servants,
of a plutocratic or bureaucratic sort. Ultimately, we are arguing that a
woman should not be a mother to her own baby, but a nursemaid to
somebody else’s baby. But it will not work, even on paper. We cannot all
live by taking in each other’s washing, especially in the form of
pinafores. In the last resort, the only people who either can or will
give individual care, to each of the individual children, are their
individual parents. The expression as applied to those dealing with
changing crowds of children is a graceful and legitimate flourish of
speech.

This triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be
destroyed; it can only destroy those civilisations which disregard it.
Most modern reformers are merely bottomless sceptics, and have no basis
on which to rebuild; and it is well that such reformers should realise
that there is something they cannot reform. You can put down the mighty
from their seat; you can turn the world upside down, and there is much
to be said for the view that it may then be the right way up. But you
cannot create a world in which the baby carries the mother. You cannot
create a world in which the mother has not authority over the baby. You
can waste your time in trying; by giving votes to babies or proclaiming
a republic of infants in arms. You can say, as an educationist said the
other day, that small children should “criticise, question authority and
suspend their judgment.” I do not know why he did not go on to say that
they should earn their own living, pay income tax to the state, and die
in battle for the fatherland; for the proposal evidently is that
children shall have no childhood. But you can, if you find entertainment
in such games, organise “representative government” among little boys
and girls, and tell them to take their legal and constitutional
responsibilities as seriously as possible. In short, you can be crazy;
but you cannot be consistent. You cannot really carry your own
principle back to the aboriginal group, and really apply it to the
mother and the baby. You will not act on you own theory in the simplest
and most practical of all possible cases. You are not quite so mad as
that.

This nucleus of natural authority has always existed in the midst of
more artificial authorities. It has always been regarded as something in
the literal sense individual; that is, as an absolute that could not
really be divided. A baby was not even a baby apart from its mother; it
was something else, most probably a corpse. It was always recognised as
standing in a peculiar relation to government; simply because it was one
of the few things that had not been made by government; and could to
some extent come into existence without the support of government.
Indeed the case for it is too strong to be stated. For the case for it
is that there is nothing like it; and we can only find faint parallels
to it in those more elaborate and painful powers and institutions that
are its inferiors. Thus the only way of conveying it is to compare it to
a nation; although, compared to it, national divisions are as modern
and formal as national anthems. Thus I may often use the metaphor of a
city; though in its presence a citizen is as recent as a city clerk. It
is enough to note here that everybody does know by intuition and admit
by implication that a family is a solid fact, having a character and
colour like a nation. The truth can be tested by the most modern and
most daily experiences. A man does say “That is the sort of thing the
Browns will like”; however tangled and interminable a psychological
novel he might compose on the shades of difference between Mr. and Mrs.
Brown. A woman does say “I don’t like Jemima seeing so much of the
Robinsons”; and she does not always, in the scurry of her social or
domestic duties, pause to distinguish the optimistic materialism of Mrs.
Robinson from the more acid cynicism which tinges the hedonism of Mr.
Robinson. There is a colour of the household inside, as conspicuous as
the colour of the house outside. That colour is a blend, and if any tint
in it predominate it is generally that preferred by Mrs. Robinson. But,
like all composite colours, it is a separate color, as separate as green
is from blue and yellow. Every marriage is a sort of wild balance; and
in every case the compromise is as unique as an eccentricity.
Philanthropists walking in the slums often see the compromise in the
street, and mistake it for a fight. When they interfere, they are
thoroughly thumped by both parties; and serve them right, for not
respecting the very institution that brought them into the world.

The first thing to see is that this enormous normality is like a
mountain; and one that is capable of being a volcano. Every abnormality
that is now opposed to it is like a molehill; and the earnest
sociological organisers of it are exceedingly like moles. But the
mountain is a volcano in another sense also; as suggested in that
tradition of the southern fields fertilised by larva. It has a creative
as well as a destructive side; and it only remains, in this part of the
analysis, to note the political effect of this extra-political
institution, and the political ideals of which it has been the
champion; and perhaps the only permanent champion.

The ideal for which it stands in the state is liberty. It stands for
liberty for the very simple reason with which this rough analysis
started. It is the only one of these institutions that is at once
necessary and voluntary. It is the only check on the state that is bound
to renew itself as eternally as the state, and more naturally than the
state. Every sane man recognises that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or
rather is nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a
province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king. This
the only way in which truth can ever find refuge from public
persecution, and the good man survive the bad government. But the good
man by himself is no match for the city. There must be balanced against
it another ideal institution, and in that sense an immortal institution.
So long as the state is the only ideal institution, the state will call
on the citizen to sacrifice himself, and therefore will not have the
smallest scruple in sacrificing the citizen. The state consists of
coercion; and must always be justified from its own point of view in
extending the bounds of coercion; as, for instance, in the case of
conscription. The only thing that can be set up to check or challenge
this authority is a voluntary law and a voluntary loyalty. That loyalty
is the protection of liberty, in the only sphere where liberty can fully
dwell. It is a principle of the constitution that the King never dies.
It is the whole principle of the family that the citizen never dies.
There must be a heraldry and heredity of freedom; a tradition of
resistance to tyranny. A man must be not only free, but free-born.

Indeed, there is something in the family that might loosely be called
anarchist; and more correctly called amateur. As there seems something
almost vague about its voluntary origin, so there seems something vague
about its voluntary organisation. The most vital function it performs,
perhaps the most vital function that anything can perform, is that of
education; but its type of early education is far too essential to be
mistaken for instruction. In a thousand things it works rather by rule
of thumb than rule of theory. To take a commonplace and even comic
example, I doubt if any text-book or code of rules has ever contained
any directions about standing a child in a corner. Doubtless when the
modern process is complete, and the coercive principle of the state has
entirely extinguished the voluntary element of the family, there will be
some exact regulation or restriction about the matter. Possibly it will
say that the corner must be an angle of at least ninety-five degrees.
Possibly it will say that the converging line of any ordinary corner
tends to make a child squint. In fact I am certain that if I said
casually, at a sufficient number of tea-tables, that corners made
children squint, it would rapidly become a universally received dogma of
popular science. For the modern world will accept no dogmas upon any
authority; but it will accept any dogmas upon no authority. Say that a
thing is so, according to the Pope or the Bible, and it will be
dismissed as a superstition without examination. But preface your remark
merely with “they say” or “don’t you know that?” or try (and fail) to
remember the name of some professor mentioned in some newspaper; and the
keen rationalism of the modern mind will accept every word you say. This
parenthesis is not so irrelevant as it may appear, for it will be well
to remember that when a rigid officialism breaks in upon the voluntary
compromises of the home, that officialism itself will be only rigid in
its action and will be exceedingly limp in its thought. Intellectually
it will be at least as vague as the amateur arrangements of the home,
and the only difference is that the domestic arrangements are in the
only real sense practical; that is, they are founded on experiences that
have been suffered. The others are what is now generally called
scientific; that is, they are founded on experiments that have not yet
been made. As a matter of fact, instead of invading the family with the
blundering bureaucracy that mismanages the public services, it would be
far more philosophical to work the reform the other way round. It would
be really quite as reasonable to alter the laws of the nation so as to
resemble the laws of the nursery. The punishments would be far less
horrible, far more humorous, and far more really calculated to make men
feel they had made fools of themselves. It would be a pleasant change if
a judge, instead of putting on the black cap, had to put on the dunce’s
cap; or if we could stand a financier in his own corner.

Of course this opinion is rare, and reactionary--whatever that may mean.
Modern education is founded on the principle that a parent is more
likely to be cruel than anybody else. It passes over the obvious fact
that he is _less_ likely to be cruel than anybody else. Anybody may
happen to be cruel; but the first chances of cruelty come with the whole
colourless and indifferent crowd of total strangers and mechanical
mercenaries, whom it is now the custom to call in as infallible agents
of improvement; policemen, doctors, detectives, inspectors, instructors,
and so on. They are automatically given arbitrary power because there
are here and there such things as criminal parents; as if there were no
such things as criminal doctors or criminal school-masters. A mother is
not always judicious about her child’s diet; so it is given into the
control of Dr. Crippen. A father is thought not to teach his sons the
purest morality; so they are put under the tutorship of Eugene Aram.
These celebrated criminals are no more rare in their respective
professions than the cruel parents are in the profession of parenthood.
But indeed the case is far stronger than this; and there is no need to
rely on the case of such criminals at all. The ordinary weaknesses of
human nature will explain all the weaknesses of bureaucracy and business
government all over the world. The official need only be an ordinary man
to be more indifferent to other people’s children than to his own; and
even to sacrifice other people’s family prosperity to his own. He may be
bored; he may be bribed; he may be brutal, for any one of the thousand
reasons that ever made a man a brute. All this elementary common sense
is entirely left out of account in our educational and social systems of
today. It is assumed that the hireling will _not_ flee, and that solely
because he is a hireling. It is denied that the shepherd will lay down
his life for the sheep; or for that matter, even that the she-wolf will
fight for the cubs. We are to believe that mothers are inhuman; but not
that officials are human. There are unnatural parents, but there are no
natural passions; at least, there are none where the fury of King Lear
dared to find them--in the beadle. Such is the latest light on the
education of the young; and the same principle that is applied to the
child is applied to the husband and wife. Just as it assumes that a
child will certainly be loved by anybody except his mother, so it
assumes that a man can be happy with anybody except the one woman he has
himself chosen for his wife.

Thus the coercive spirit of the state prevails over the free promise of
the family, in the shape of formal officialism. But this is not the most
coercive of the coercive elements in the modern commonwealth. An even
more rigid and ruthless external power is that of industrial employment
and unemployment. An even more ferocious enemy of the family is the
factory. Between these modern mechanical things the ancient natural
institution is not being reformed or modified or even cut down; it is
being torn in pieces. It is not only being torn in pieces in the sense
of a true metaphor, like a living thing caught in a hideous clockwork of
manufacture. It is being literally torn in pieces, in that the husband
may go to one factory, the wife to another, and the child to a third.
Each will become the servant of a separate financial group, which is
more and more gaining the political power of a feudal group. But whereas
feudalism received the loyalty of families, the lords of the new servile
state will receive only the loyalty of individuals; that is, of lonely
men and even of lost children.

It is sometimes said that Socialism attacks the family; which is founded
on little beyond the accident that some Socialists believe in free-love.
I have been a Socialist, and I am no longer a Socialist, and at no time
did I believe in free-love. It is true, I think in a large and
unconscious sense, that State Socialism encourages the general coercive
claim I have been considering. But if it be true that Socialism attacks
the family in theory, it is far more certain that Capitalism attacks it
in practice. It is a paradox, but a plain fact, that men never notice a
thing as long as it exists in practice. Men who will note a heresy will
ignore an abuse. Let any one who doubts the paradox imagine the
newspapers formally printing along with the Honours’ List a price list,
for peerages and knighthoods; though everybody knows they are bought and
sold. So the factory is destroying the family in fact; and need depend
on no poor mad theorist who dreams of destroying it in fancy. And what
is destroying it is nothing so plausible as free-love; but something
rather to be described as an enforced fear. It is economic punishment
more terrible than legal punishment, which may yet land us in slavery as
the only safety.

From its first days in the forest this human group had to fight against
wild monsters; and so it is now fighting against these wild machines. It
only managed to survive then, and it will only manage to survive now, by
a strong internal sanctity; a tacit oath or dedication deeper than that
of the city or the tribe. But though this silent promise was always
present, it took at a certain turning point of our history a special
form which I shall try to sketch in the next chapter. That turning point
was the creation of Christendom by the religion which created it.
Nothing will destroy the sacred triangle; and even the Christian faith,
the most amazing revolution that ever took place in the mind, served
only in a sense to turn that triangle upside down. It held up a mystical
mirror in which the order of the three things was reversed; and added a
holy family of child, mother and father to the human family of father,
mother and child.




THE STORY OF THE VOW




_VI.--The Story of the Vow_


Charles Lamb, with his fine fantastic instinct for combinations that are
also contrasts, has noted somewhere a contrast between St. Valentine and
valentines. There seems a comic incongruity in such lively and frivolous
flirtations still depending on the date and title of an ascetic and
celibate bishop of the Dark Ages. The paradox lends itself to his
treatment, and there is a truth in his view of it. Perhaps it may seem
even more of a paradox to say there is no paradox. In such cases
unification appears more provocative than division; and it may seem idly
contradictory to deny the contradiction. And yet in truth there is no
contradiction. In the deepest sense there is a very real similarity,
which puts St. Valentine and his valentines on one side, and most of the
modern world on the other. I should hesitate to ask even a German
professor to collect, collate and study carefully all the valentines in
the world, with the object of tracing a philosophical principle running
through them. But if he did, I have no doubt about the philosophic
principle he would find. However trivial, however imbecile, however
vulgar or vapid or stereotyped the imagery of such things might be, it
would always involve one idea, the same idea that makes lovers
laboriously chip their initials on a tree or a rock, in a sort of
monogram of monogamy. It may be a cockney trick to tie one’s love on a
tree; though Orlando did it, and would now doubtless be arrested by the
police for breaking the bye-laws of the Forest of Arden. I am not here
concerned especially to commend the habit of cutting one’s own name and
private address in large letters on the front of the Parthenon, across
the face of the Sphinx, or in any other nook or corner where it may
chance to arrest the sentimental interest of posterity. But like many
other popular things, of the sort that can generally be found in
Shakespeare, there is a meaning in it that would probably be missed by
a less popular poet, like Shelley. There is a very permanent truth in
the fact that two free persons deliberately tie themselves to a log of
wood. And it is the idea of tying oneself to something that runs through
all this old amorous allegory like a pattern of fetters. There is always
the notion of hearts chained together, or skewered together, or in some
manner secured; there is a security that can only be called captivity.
That it frequently fails to secure itself has nothing to do with the
present point. The point is that every philosophy of sex must fail,
which does not account for its ambition of fixity, as well as for its
experience of failure. There is nothing to make Orlando commit himself
on the sworn evidence of the nearest tree. He is not bound to be bound;
he is under constraint, but nobody constrains him to be under
constraint. In short, Orlando took a vow to marry precisely as Valentine
took a vow not to marry. Nor could any ascetic, without being a heretic,
have asserted in the wildest reactions of asceticism, that the vow of
Orlando was not lawful as well as the vow of Valentine. But it is a
notable fact that even when it was not lawful, it was still a vow.
Through all that mediæval culture, which has left us the legend of
romance, there ran this pattern of a chain, which was felt as binding
even where it ought not to bind. The lawless loves of mediæval legends
all have their own law, and especially their own loyalty, as in the
tales of Tristram or Lancelot. In this sense we might say that mediæval
profligacy was more fixed than modern marriage. I am not here discussing
either modern or mediæval ethics, in the matter of what they did say or
ought to say of such things. I am only noting as a historical fact the
insistence of the mediæval imagination, even at its wildest, upon one
particular idea. That idea is the idea of the vow. It might be the vow
which St. Valentine took; it might be a lesser vow which he regarded as
lawful; it might be a wild vow which he regarded as quite lawless. But
the whole society which made such festivals and bequeathed to us such
traditions was full of the idea of vows; and we must recognise this
notion, even if we think it nonsensical, as the note of the whole
civilisation. And Valentine and the valentine both express it for us;
even more if we feel them both as exaggerated, or even as exaggerating
opposites. Those extremes meet; and they meet in the same place. Their
trysting place is by the tree on which the lover hung his love-letters.
And even if the lover hung himself on the tree, instead of his literary
compositions, even that act had about it also an indefinable flavour of
finality.

It is often said by the critics of Christian origins that certain ritual
feasts, processions or dances are really of pagan origin. They might as
well say that our legs are of pagan origin. Nobody ever disputed that
humanity was human before it was Christian; and no Church manufactured
the legs with which men walked or danced, either in a pilgrimage or a
ballet. What can really be maintained, so as to carry not a little
conviction, is this: that where such a Church has existed it has
_preserved_ not only the processions but the dances; not only the
cathedral but the carnival. One of the chief claims of Christian
civilisation is to have preserved things of pagan origin. In short, in
the old religious countries men _continue_ to dance; while in the new
scientific cities they are often content to drudge.

But when this saner view of history is realised, there does remain
something more mystical and difficult to define. Even heathen things are
Christian when they have been preserved by Christianity. Chivalry is
something recognisably different even from the _virtus_ of Virgil.
Charity is something exceedingly different from the plain city of Homer.
Even our patriotism is something more subtle than the undivided lover of
the city; and the change is felt in the most permanent things, such as
the love of landscape or the love of woman. To define the
differentiation in all these things will always be hopelessly difficult.
But I would here suggest one element in the change which is perhaps too
much neglected; which at any rate ought not to be neglected; the nature
of a vow. I might express it by saying that pagan antiquity was the age
of status; that Christian mediævalism was the age of vows; and that
sceptical modernity has been the age of contracts; or rather has tried
to be, and has failed.

The outstanding example of status was slavery. Needless to say slavery
does not mean tyranny; indeed it need only be regarded relatively to
other things to be regarded as charity. The idea of slavery is that
large numbers of men are meant and made to do the heavy work of the
world, and that others, while taking the margin of profits, must
nevertheless support them while they do it. The point is not whether the
work is excessive or moderate, or whether the condition is comfortable
or uncomfortable. The point is that his work is chosen for the man, his
status fixed for the man; and this status is forced on him by law. As
Mr. Balfour said about Socialism, that is slavery and nothing else is
slavery. The slave might well be, and often was, far more comfortable
than the average free labourer; and certainly far more lazy than the
average peasant. He was a slave because he had not reached his position
by choice, or promise, or bargain, but merely by status.

It is admitted that when Christianity had been for some time at work in
the world, this ancient servile status began in some mysterious manner
to disappear. I suggest here that one of the forms which the new spirit
took was the importance of the vow. Feudalism, for instance, differed
from slavery chiefly because feudalism was a vow. The vassal put his
hands in those of his lord, and vowed to be his man; but there was an
accent on the noun substantive as well as on the possessive pronoun. By
swearing to be his man, he proved he was not his chattel. Nobody exacts
a promise from a pickaxe, or expects a poker to swear everlasting
friendship with the tongs. Nobody takes the word of a spade; and nobody
ever took the word of a slave. It marks at least a special stage of
transition that the form of freedom was essential to the fact of
service, or even of servitude. In this way it is not a coincidence that
the word homage actually means manhood. And if there was vow instead of
status even in the static parts of Feudalism, it is needless to say
that there was a wilder luxuriance of vows in the more adventurous part
of it. The whole of what we call chivalry was one great vow. Vows of
chivalry varied infinitely from the most solid to the most fantastic;
from a vow to give all the spoils of conquest to the poor to a vow to
refrain from shaving until the first glimpse of Jerusalem. As I have
remarked, this rule of loyalty, even in the unruly exceptions which
proved the rule, ran through all the romances and songs of the
troubadours; and there were always vows even when they were very far
from being marriage vows. The idea is as much present in what they
called the Gay Science, of love, as in what they called the Divine
Science, of theology. The modern reader will smile at the mention of
these things as sciences; and will turn to the study of sociology,
ethnology and psycho-analysis; for if these are sciences (about which I
would not divulge a doubt) at least nobody would insult them by calling
them either gay or divine.

I mean here to emphasise the presence, and not even to settle the
proportion, of this new notion in the middle ages. But the critic will
be quite wrong if he thinks it enough to answer that all these things
affected only a cultured class, not corresponding to the servile class
of antiquity. When we come to workmen and small tradesmen, we find the
same vague yet vivid presence of the spirit that can only be called the
vow. In this sense there was a chivalry of trades as well as a chivalry
of orders of knighthood; just as there was a heraldry of shop-signs as
well as a heraldry of shields. Only it happens that in the enlightenment
and liberation of the sixteenth century, the heraldry of the rich was
preserved, and the heraldry of the poor destroyed. And there is a
sinister symbolism in the fact that almost the only emblem still hung
above a shop is that of the three balls of Lombardy. Of all those
democratic glories nothing can now glitter in the sun; except the sign
of the golden usury that has devoured them all. The point here, however,
is that the trade or craft had not only something like the crest, but
something like the vow of knighthood. There was in the position of the
guildsman the same basic notion that belonged to knights and even to
monks. It was the notion of the free choice of a fixed estate. We can
realise the moral atmosphere if we compare the system of the Christian
guilds, not only with the status of the Greek and Roman slaves, but with
such a scheme as that of the Indian castes. The oriental caste has some
of the qualities of the occidental guild; especially the valuable
quality of tradition and the accumulation of culture. Men might be proud
of their castes, as they were proud of their guilds. But they had never
chosen their castes, as they have chosen their guilds. They had never,
within historic memory, even collectively created their castes, as they
collectively created their guilds. Like the slave system, the caste
system was older than history. The heathens of modern Asia, as much as
the heathens of ancient Europe, lived by the very spirit of status.
Status in a trade has been accepted like status in a tribe; and that in
a tribe of beasts and birds rather than men. The fisherman continued to
be a fisherman as the fish continued to be a fish; and the hunter would
no more turn into a cook than his dog would try its luck as a cat.
Certainly his dog would not be found prostrated before the mysterious
altar of Pasht, barking or whining a wild, lonely, and individual vow
that he at all costs would become a cat. Yet that was the vital revolt
and innovation of vows, as compared with castes or slavery; as when a
man vowed to be a monk, or the son of a cobbler saluted the shrine of
St. Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters. When he had entered the
guild of the carpenters he did indeed find himself responsible for a
very real loyalty and discipline; but the whole social atmosphere
surrounding his entrance was full of the sense of a separate and
personal decision. There is one place where we can still find this
sentiment; the sentiment of something at once free and final. We can
feel it, if the service is properly understood, before and after the
marriage vows at any ordinary wedding in any ordinary church.

Such, in very vague outline, has been the historical nature of vows; and
the unique part they played in that mediæval civilisation out of which
modern civilisation rose--or fell. We can now consider, a little less
cloudily than it is generally considered nowadays, whether we really
think vows are good things; whether they ought to be broken; and (as
would naturally follow) whether they ought to be made. But we can never
judge it fairly till we face, as I have tried to suggest, this main fact
of history; that the personal pledge, feudal or civic or monastic, was
the way in which the world did escape from the system of slavery in the
past. For the modern break-down of mere contract leaves it still
doubtful if there be any other way of escaping it in the future.

The idea, or at any rate the ideal, of the thing called a vow is fairly
obvious. It is to combine the fixity that goes with finality with the
self-respect that only goes with freedom. The man is a slave who is his
own master, and a king who is his own ancestor. For all kinds of social
purposes he has the calculable orbit of the man in the caste or the
servile state; but in the story of his own soul he is still pursuing,
at great peril, his own adventure. As seen by his neighbours, he is as
safe as if immured in a fortress; but as seen by himself he may be for
ever careering through the sky or crashing towards the earth in a
flying-ship. What is socially humdrum is produced by what is
individually heroic; and a city is made not merely of citizens but
knight-errants. It is needless to point out the part played by the
monastery in civilising Europe in its most barbaric interregnum; and
even those who still denounce the monasteries will be found denouncing
them for these two extreme and apparently opposite eccentricities. They
are blamed for the rigid character of their collective routine; and also
for the fantastic character of their individual fanaticism. For the
purposes of this part of the argument, it would not matter if the
marriage vow produced the most austere discomforts of the monastic vow.
The point for the present is that it was sustained by a sense of free
will; and the feeling that its evils were not accepted but chosen. The
same spirit ran through all the guilds and popular arts and spontaneous
social systems of the whole civilisation. It had all the discipline of
an army; but it was an army of volunteers.

The civilisation of vows was broken up when Henry the Eighth broke his
own vow of marriage. Or rather, it was broken up by a new cynicism in
the ruling powers of Europe, of which that was the almost accidental
expression in England. The monasteries, that had been built by vows,
were destroyed. The guilds, that had been regiments of volunteers, were
dispersed. The sacramental nature of marriage was denied; and many of
the greatest intellects of the new movement, like Milton, already
indulged in a very modern idealisation of divorce. The progress of this
sort of emancipation advanced step by step with the progress of that
aristocratic ascendancy which has made the history of modern England;
with all its sympathy with personal liberty, and all its utter lack of
sympathy with popular life. Marriage not only became less of a sacrament
but less of a sanctity. It threatened to become not only a contract, but
a contract that could not be kept. For this one question has retained a
strange symbolic supremacy amid all the similar questions, which seems
to perpetuate the coincidence of the origin. It began with divorce for a
king; and it is now ending in divorces for a whole kingdom.

The modern era that followed can be called the era of contract; but it
can still more truly be called the era of leonine contract. The nobles
of the new time first robbed the people, and then offered to bargain
with them. It would not be an exaggeration to say that they first robbed
the people, and then offered to cheat them. For their rents were
competitive rents, their economics competitive economics, their ethics
competitive ethics; they applied not only legality but pettifogging. No
more was heard of the customary rents of the mediæval estates; just as
no more was heard of the standard wages of the mediæval guilds. The
object of the whole process was to isolate the individual poor man in
his dealings with the individual rich man; and then offer to buy and
sell with him, though it must necessarily be himself that was bought
and sold. In the matter of labour, that is, though a man was supposed
to be in the position of a seller, he was more and more really in the
possession of a slave. Unless the tendency be reversed, he will probably
become admittedly a slave. That is to say, the word slave will never be
used; for it is always easy to find an inoffensive word; but he will be
admittedly a man legally bound to certain social service, in return for
economic security. In other words, the modern experiment of mere
contract has broken down. Trusts as well as Trades’ Unions express the
fact that it has broken down. Social reform, Socialism, Guild Socialism,
Syndicalism, even organised philanthropy, are so many ways of saying
that it has broken down. The substitute for it may be the old one of
status; but it must be something having some of the stability of status.
So far history has found only one way of combining that sort of
stability with any sort of liberty. In this sense there is a meaning in
the much misused phrase about the army of industry. But the army must be
stiffened either by the discipline of conscripts or by the vows of
volunteers.

If we may extend the doubtful metaphor of an army of industry to cover
the yet weaker phrase about captains of industry, there is no doubt
about what those captains at present command. They work for a
centralised discipline in every department. They erect a vast apparatus
of supervision and inspection; they support all the modern restrictions
touching drink and hygiene. They may be called the friends of temperance
or even of happiness; but even their friends would not call them the
friends of freedom. There is only one form of freedom which they
tolerate; and that is the sort of sexual freedom which is covered by the
legal fiction of divorce. If we ask why this liberty is alone left, when
so many liberties are lost, we shall find the answer in the summary of
this chapter. They are trying to break the vow of the knight as they
broke the vow of the monk. They recognise the vow as the vital
antithesis to servile status; the alternative and therefore the
antagonist. Marriage makes a small state within the state, which
resists all such regimentation. That bond breaks all other bonds; that
law is found stronger than all later and lesser laws. They desire the
democracy to be sexually fluid, because the making of small nuclei is
like the making of small nations. Like small nations, they are a
nuisance to the mind of imperial scope. In short, what they fear, in the
most literal sense, is home rule.

Men can always be blind to a thing so long as it is big enough. It is so
difficult to see the world in which we live, that I know that many will
see all I have said here of slavery as a nonsensical nightmare. But if
my association of divorce with slavery seems only a far-fetched and
theoretical paradox, I should have no difficulty in replacing it by a
concrete and familiar picture. Let them merely remember the time when
they read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and ask themselves whether the oldest and
simplest of the charges against slavery has not always been the breaking
up of families.




THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE




_VII.--The Tragedies of Marriage_


There is one view very common among the liberal-minded which is
exceedingly fatiguing to the clear-headed. It is symbolised in the sort
of man who says, “These ruthless bigots will refuse to bury me in
consecrated ground, because I have always refused to be baptised.” A
clear-headed person can easily conceive his point of view, in so far as
he happens to think that baptism does not matter. But the clear-headed
will be completely puzzled when they ask themselves why, if he thinks
that baptism does not matter, he should think that burial does matter.
If it is in no way imprudent for a man to keep himself from a
consecrated font, how can it be inhuman for other people to keep him
from a consecrated field? It is surely much nearer to mere superstition
to attach importance to what is done to a dead body than to a live
baby. I can understand a man thinking both superstitious, or both
sacred; but I cannot see why he should grumble that other people do not
give him as sanctities what he regards as superstitions. He is merely
complaining of being treated as what he declares himself to be. It is as
if a man were to say, “My persecutors still refuse to make me king, out
of mere malice because I am a strict republican.” Or it is as if he
said, “These heartless brutes are so prejudiced against a teetotaler,
that they won’t even give him a glass of brandy.”

The fashion of divorce would not be a modern fashion if it were not full
of this touching fallacy. A great deal of it might be summed up as a
most illogical and fanatical appetite for getting married in churches.
It is as if a man should practice polygamy out of sheer greed for
wedding cake. Or it is as if he provided his household with new shoes,
entirely by having them thrown after the wedding carriage when he went
off with a new wife. There are other ways of procuring cake or
purchasing shoes; and there are other ways of setting up a human
establishment. What is unreasonable is the request which the modern man
really makes of the religious institutions of his fathers. The modern
man wants to buy one shoe without the other; to obtain one half of a
supernatural revelation without the other. The modern man wants to eat
his wedding cake and have it, too.

I am not basing this book on the religious argument, and therefore I
will not pause to inquire why the old Catholic institutions of
Christianity seem to be especially made the objects of these
unreasonable complaints. As a matter of fact nobody does propose that
some ferocious Anti-Semite like M. Drumont should be buried as a Jew
with all the rites of the Synagogue. But the broad-minded were furious
because Tolstoi, who had denounced Russian orthodoxy quite as
ferociously, was not buried as orthodox, with all the rites of the
Russian Church. Nobody does insist that a man who wishes to have fifty
wives when Mahomet allowed him five, must have his fifty with the full
approval of Mahomet’s religion. But the broad-minded are extremely
bitter because a Christian who wishes to have several wives when his
own promise bound him to one, is not allowed to violate his vow at the
same altar at which he made it. Nobody does insist on Baptists totally
immersing people who totally deny the advantages of being totally
immersed. Nobody ever did expect Mormons to receive the open mockers of
the Book of Mormon, nor Christian Scientists to let their churches be
used for exposing Mrs. Eddy as an old fraud. It is only of the forms of
Christianity making the Catholic claim that such inconsistent claims are
made. And even the inconsistency is, I fancy, a tribute to the
acceptance of the Catholic idea in a catholic fashion. It may be that
men have an obscure sense that nobody need belong to the Mormon religion
and every one does ultimately belong to the Church; and though he may
have made a few dozen Mormon marriages in a wandering and entertaining
life, he will really have nowhere to go to if he does not somehow find
his way back to the churchyard. But all this concerns the general
theological question and not the matter involved here, which is merely
historical and social. The point here is that it is at least
superficially inconsistent to ask institutions for a formal approval,
which they can only give by an inconsistency.

I have put first the question of what is marriage. And we are now in a
position to ask more clearly what is divorce. It is not merely the
negation or neglect of marriage; for any one can always neglect
marriage. It is not the dissolution of the legal obligation of marriage,
or even the legal obligation of monogamy; for the simple reason that no
such obligation exists. Any man in modern London may have a hundred
wives if he does not call them wives; or rather, if he does not go
through certain more or less mystical ceremonies in order to assert that
they are wives. He might create a certain social coolness round his
household, a certain fading of his general popularity. But that is not
created by law, and could not be prevented by law. As the late Lord
Salisbury very sensibly observed about boycotting in Ireland, “How can
you make a law to prevent people going out of the room when somebody
they don’t like comes into it?” We cannot be forcibly introduced to a
polygamist by a policeman. It would not be an assertion of social
liberty, but a denial of social liberty, if we found ourselves
practically obliged to associate with all the profligates in society.
But divorce is not in this sense mere anarchy. On the contrary divorce
is in this sense respectability; and even a rigid excess of
respectability. Divorce in this sense might indeed be not unfairly
called snobbery. The definition of divorce, which concerns us here, is
that it is the attempt to give respectability, and not liberty. It is
the attempt to give a certain social status, and not a legal status. It
is indeed supposed that this can be done by the alteration of certain
legal forms; and this will be more or less true according to the extent
to which law as such overawed public opinion, or was valued as a true
expression of public opinion. If a man divorced in the large-minded
fashion of Henry the Eighth pleaded his legal title among the peasantry
of Ireland, for instance, I think he would find a difference still
existing between respectability and religion. But the peculiar point
here is that many are claiming the sanction of religion as well as of
respectability. They would attach to their very natural and sometimes
very pardonable experiments a certain atmosphere, and even glamour,
which has undoubtedly belonged to the status of marriage in historic
Christendom. But before they make this attempt, it would be well to ask
why such a dignity ever appeared or in what it consisted. And I fancy we
shall find ourselves confronted with the very simple truth, that the
dignity arose wholly and entirely out of the fidelity; and that the
glamour merely came from the vow. People were regarded as having a
certain dignity because they were dedicated in a certain way; as bound
to certain duties and, if it be preferred, to certain discomforts. It
may be irrational to endure these discomforts; it may even be irrational
to respect them. But it is certainly much more irrational to respect
them, and then artificially transfer the same respect to the absence of
them. It is as if we were to expect uniforms to be saluted when armies
were disbanded; and ask people to cheer a soldier’s coat when it did
not contain a soldier. If you think you can abolish war, abolish it; but
do not suppose that when there are no wars to be waged, there will still
be warriors to be worshipped. If it was a good thing that the
monasteries were dissolved, let us say so and dismiss them. But the
nobles who dissolved the monasteries did not shave their heads, and ask
to be regarded as saints solely on account of that ceremony. The nobles
did not dress up as abbots and ask to be credited with a potential
talent for working miracles, because of the austerity of their vows of
poverty and chastity. They got inside the houses, but not the hoods, and
still less the haloes. They at least knew that it is not the habit that
makes the monk. They were not so superstitious as those moderns, who
think it is the veil that makes the bride.

What is respected, in short, is fidelity to the ancient flag of the
family, and a readiness to fight for what I have noted as its unique
type of freedom. I say readiness to fight, for fortunately the fight
itself is the exception rather than the rule. The soldier is not
respected because he is doomed to death, but because he is ready for
death; and even ready for defeat. The married man or woman is not doomed
to evil, sickness or poverty; but is respected for taking a certain step
for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness or in health.
But there is one result of this line of argument which should correct a
danger in some arguments on the same side.

It is very essential that a stricture on divorce, which is in fact
simply a defence of marriage, should be independent of sentimentalism,
especially in the form called optimism. A man justifying a fight for
national independence or civic freedom is neither sentimental nor
optimistic. He explains the sacrifice, but he does not explain it away.
He does not say that bayonet wounds are pin-pricks, or mere scratches of
the thorns on the rose of pleasure. He does not say that the whole
display of firearms is a festive display of fireworks. On the contrary,
when he praises it most, he praises it as pain rather than pleasure. He
increases the praise with the pain; it is his whole boast that
militarism, and even modern science, can produce no instrument of
torture to tame the soul of man. It is idle, in speaking of war, to pit
the realistic against the romantic, in the sense of the heroic; for all
possible realism can only increase the heroism; and therefore, in the
highest sense, increase the romance. Now I do not compare marriage with
war, but I do compare marriage with law or liberty or patriotism or
popular government, or any of the human ideals which have often to be
defended by war. Even the wildest of those ideals, which seem to escape
from all the discipline of peace, do not escape from the discipline of
war. The Bolshevists may have aimed at pure peace and liberty; but they
have been compelled, for their own purpose, first to raise armies and
then to rule armies. In a word, however beautiful you may think your own
visions of beatitude, men must suffer to be beautiful, and even suffer a
considerable interval of being ugly. And I have no notion of denying
that mankind suffers much from the maintenance of the standard of
marriage; as it suffers much from the necessity of criminal law or the
recurrence of crusades and revolutions. The only question here is
whether marriage is indeed, as I maintain, an ideal and an institution
making for popular freedom; I do not need to be told that anything
making for popular freedom has to be paid for in vigilance and pain, and
a whole army of martyrs.

Hence I am far indeed from denying the hard cases which exist here, as
in all matters involving the idea of honour. For indeed I could not deny
them without denying the whole parallel of militant morality on which my
argument rests. But this being first understood, it will be well to
discuss in a little more detail what are described as the tragedies of
marriage. And the first thing to note about the most tragic of them is
that they are not tragedies of marriage at all. They are tragedies of
sex; and might easily occur in a highly modern romance in which marriage
was not mentioned at all. It is generally summarised by saying that the
tragic element is the absence of love. But it is often forgotten that
another tragic element is often the presence of love. The doctors of
divorce, with an air of the frank and friendly realism of men of the
world, are always recommending and rejoicing in a sensible separation by
mutual consent. But if we are really to dismiss our dreams of dignity
and honour, if we are really to fall back on the frank realism of our
experience as men of the world, then the very first thing that our
experience will tell us is that it very seldom is a separation by mutual
consent; that is, that the consent very seldom is sincerely and
spontaneously mutual. By far the commonest problem in such cases is that
in which one party wishes to end the partnership and the other does not.
And of that emotional situation you can make nothing but a tragedy,
whichever way you turn it. With or without marriage, with or without
divorce, with or without any arrangements that anybody can suggest or
imagine, it remains a tragedy. The only difference is that by the
doctrine of marriage it remains both a noble and a fruitful tragedy;
like that of a man who falls fighting for his country, or dies
testifying to the truth. But the truth is that the innovators have as
much sham optimism about divorce as any romanticist can have had about
marriage. They regard their story, when it ends in the divorce court,
through as rosy a mist of sentimentalism as anybody ever regarded a
story ending with wedding bells. Such a reformer is quite sure that when
once the prince and princess are divorced by the fairy godmother, they
will live happily ever after. I enjoy romance, but I like it to be
rooted in reality; and any one with a touch of reality knows that nine
couples out of ten, when they are divorced, are left in an exceedingly
different state. It will be safe to say in most cases that one partner
will fail to find happiness in an infatuation, and the other will from
the first accept a tragedy. In the realm of reality and not of romance,
it is commonly a case of breaking hearts as well as breaking promises;
and even dishonour is not always a remedy for remorse.

The next limitation to be laid down in the matter affects certain
practical forms of discomfort, on a level rather lower than love or
hatred. The cases most commonly quoted concern what is called “drink”
and what is called “cruelty.” They are always talked about as matters
of fact; though in practice they are very decidedly matters of opinion.
It is not a flippancy, but a fact, that the misfortune of the woman who
has married a drunkard may have to be balanced against the misfortune of
the man who has married a teetotaler. For the very definition of
drunkenness may depend on the dogma of teetotalism. Drunkenness, it has
been very truly observed,[B] “may mean anything from _delirium tremens_
to having a stronger head than the official appointed to conduct the
examination.” Mr. Bernard Shaw once professed, apparently seriously,
that any man drinking wine or beer at all was incapacitated from
managing a motorcar; and still more, therefore, one would suppose, from
managing a wife. The scales are weighted here, of course, with all those
false weights of snobbishness which are the curse of justice in this
country. The working class is forced to conduct almost in public a
normal and varying festive habit, which the upper class can afford to
conduct in private; and a certain section of the middle class, that
which happens to concern itself most with local politics and social
reforms, really has or affects a standard quite abnormal and even alien.
They might go any lengths of injustice in dealing with the working man
or working woman accused of too hearty a taste in beer. To mention but
one matter out of a thousand, the middle class reformers are obviously
quite ignorant of the hours at which working people begin to work.
Because they themselves, at eleven o’clock in the morning, have only
recently finished breakfast and the full moral digestion of the _Daily
Mail_, they think a charwoman drinking beer at that hour is one of those
arising early in the morning to follow after strong drink. Most of them
really do not know that she has already done more than half a heavy
day’s work, and is partaking of a very reasonable luncheon. The whole
problem of proletarian drink is entangled in a network of these
misunderstandings; and there is no doubt whatever that, when judged by
these generalisations, the poor will be taken in a net of injustices.
And this truth is as certain in the case of what is called cruelty as
of what is called drink. Nine times out of ten the judgment on a navvy
for hitting a woman is about as just as a judgment on him for not taking
off his hat to a lady. It is a class test; it may be a class
superiority; but it is not an act of equal justice between the classes.
It leaves out a thousand things; the provocation, the atmosphere, the
harassing restrictions of space, the nagging which Dickens described as
the terrors of “temper in a cart,” the absence of certain taboos of
social training, the tradition of greater roughness even in the gestures
of affection. To make all marriage or divorce, in the case of such a
man, turn upon a blow is like blasting the whole life of a gentleman
because he has slammed the door. Often a poor man cannot slam the door;
partly because the model villa might fall down; but more because he has
nowhere to go to; the smoking-room, the billiard-room and the peacock
music-room not being yet attached to his premises.

I say this in passing, to point out that while I do not dream of
suggesting that there are only happy marriages, there will quite
certainly, as things work nowadays, be a very large number of unhappy
and unjust divorces. They will be cases in which the innocent partner
will receive the real punishment of the guilty partner, through being in
fact and feeling the faithful partner. For instance, it is insisted that
a married person must at least find release from the society of a
lunatic; but it is also true that the scientific reformers, with their
fuss about “the feeble-minded,” are continually giving larger and looser
definitions of lunacy. The process might begin by releasing somebody
from a homicidal maniac, and end by dealing in the same way with a
rather dull conversationalist. But in fact nobody does deny that a
person should be allowed some sort of release from a homicidal maniac.
The most extreme school of orthodoxy only maintains that anybody who has
had that experience should be content with that release. In other words,
it says he should be content with that experience of matrimony, and not
seek another. It was put very wittily, I think, by a Roman Catholic
friend of mine, who said he approved of release so long as it was not
spelt with a hyphen.

To put it roughly, we are prepared in some cases to listen to the man
who complains of having a wife. But we are not prepared to listen, at
such length, to the same man when he comes back and complains that he
has not got a wife. Now in practice at this moment the great mass of the
complaints are precisely of this kind. The reformers insist particularly
on the pathos of a man’s position when he has obtained a separation
without a divorce. Their most tragic figure is that of the man who is
already free of all those ills he had, and is only asking to be allowed
to fly to others that he knows not of. I should be the last to deny
that, in certain emotional circumstances, his tragedy may be very tragic
indeed. But his tragedy is of the emotional kind which can never be
entirely eliminated; and which he has himself, in all probability,
inflicted on the partner he has left. We may call it the price of
maintaining an ideal or the price of making a mistake; but anyhow it is
the point of our whole distinction in the matter; it is here that we
draw the line, and I have nowhere denied that it is a line of battle.
The battle joins on the debatable ground, not of the man’s doubtful past
but of his still more doubtful future. In a word, the divorce
controversy is not really a controversy about divorce. It is a
controversy about re-marriage; or rather about whether it is marriage at
all.

And with that we can only return to the point of honour which I have
compared here to a point of patriotism; since it is both the smallest
and the greatest kind of patriotism. Men have died in torments during
the last five years for points of patriotism far more dubious and
fugitive. Men like the Poles or the Serbians, through long periods of
their history, may be said rather to have lived in torments. I will
never admit that the vital need of the freedom of the family, as I have
tried to sketch it here, is not a cause as valuable as the freedom of
any frontier. But I do willingly admit that the cause would be a dark
and terrible one, if it really asked these men to suffer torments. As I
have stated it, on its most extreme terms, it only asks them to suffer
abnegations. And those negative sufferings I do think they may
honourably be called upon to bear, for the glory of their own oath and
the great things by which the nations live. In relation to their own
nation most normal men will feel that this distinction between release
and “re-lease” is neither fanciful nor harsh, but very rational and
human. A patriot may be an exile in another country; but he will not be
a patriot of another country. He will be as cheerful as he can in an
abnormal position; he may or may not sing his country’s songs in a
strange land; but he will not sing the strange songs as his own. And
such may fairly be also the attitude of the citizen who has gone into
exile from the oldest of earthly cities.




THE VISTA OF DIVORCE




_VIII.--The Vista of Divorce_


The case for divorce combines all the advantages of having it both ways;
and of drawing the same deduction from right or left, and from black or
white. Whichever way the programme works in practice, it can still be
justified in theory. If there are few examples of divorce, it shows how
little divorce need be dreaded; if there are many, it shows how much it
is required. The rarity of divorce is an argument in favour of divorce;
and the multiplicity of divorce is an argument against marriage. Now, in
truth, if we were confined to considering this alternative in a
speculative manner, if there were no concrete facts but only abstract
probabilities, we should have no difficulty in arguing our case. The
abstract liberty allowed by the reformers is as near as possible to
anarchy, and gives no logical or legal guarantee worth discussing. The
advantages of their reform do not accrue to the innocent party, but to
the guilty party; especially if he be sufficiently guilty. A man has
only to commit the crime of desertion to obtain the reward of divorce.
And if they are entitled to take as typical the most horrible
hypothetical cases of the abuse of the marriage laws, surely we are
entitled to take equally extreme possibilities in the abuse of their own
divorce laws. If they, when looking about for a husband, so often hit
upon a homicidal maniac, surely we may politely introduce them to the
far more human figure of the gentleman who marries as many women as he
likes and gets rid of them as often as he pleases. But in fact there is
no necessity for us to argue thus in the abstract; for the amiable
gentleman in question undoubtedly exists in the concrete. Of course, he
is no new figure; he is a very recurrent type of rascal; his name has
been Lothario or Don Juan; and he has often been represented as a rather
romantic rascal. The point of divorce reform, it cannot be too often
repeated, is that the rascal should not only be regarded as romantic,
but regarded as respectable. He is not to sow his wild oats and settle
down; he is merely to settle down to sowing his wild oats. They are to
be regarded as tame and inoffensive oats; almost, if one may say so, as
Quaker oats. But there is no need, as I say, to speculate about whether
the looser view of divorce might prevail; for it is already prevailing.
The newspapers are full of an astonishing hilarity about the rapidity
with which hundreds or thousands of human families are being broken up
by the lawyers; and about the undisguised haste of the “hustling judges”
who carry on the work. It is a form of hilarity which would seem to
recall the gaiety of a grave-digger in a city swept by a pestilence. But
a few details occasionally flash by in the happy dance; from time to
time the court is moved by a momentary curiosity about the causes of the
general violation of oaths and promises; as if there might, here and
there, be a hint of some sort of reason for ruining the fundamental
institution of society. And nobody who notes those details, or
considers those faint hints of reason, can doubt for a moment that
masses of these men and women are now simply using divorce in the spirit
of free-love. They are very seldom the sort of people who have once
fallen tragically into the wrong place, and have now found their way
triumphantly to the right place. They are almost always people who are
obviously wandering from one place to another, and will probably leave
their last shelter exactly as they have left their first. But it seems
to amuse them to make again, if possible in a church, a promise they
have already broken in practice and almost avowedly disbelieve in
principle.

In face of this headlong fashion, it is really reasonable to ask the
divorce reformers what is their attitude towards the old monogamous
ethic of our civilisation; and whether they wish to retain it in
general, or to retain it at all. Unfortunately even the sincerest and
most lucid of them use language which leaves the matter a little
doubtful. Mr. E. S. P. Haynes is one of the most brilliant and most
fair-minded controversialists on that side; and he has said, for
instance, that he agrees with me in supporting the ideal of indissoluble
or, at least, of undissolved marriage. Mr. Haynes is one of the few
friends of divorce who are also real friends of democracy; and I am sure
that in practice this stands for a real sympathy with the home,
especially the poor home. Unfortunately, on the theoretic side, the word
“ideal” is far from being an exact term, and is open to two almost
opposite interpretations. For many would say that marriage is an ideal
as some would say that monasticism is an ideal, in the sense of a
council of perfection. Now certainly we might preserve a conjugal ideal
in this way. A man might be reverently pointed out in the street as a
sort of saint, merely because he was married. A man might wear a medal
for monogamy; or have letters after his name similar to V.C. or D.D.;
let us say L.W. for “Lives With His Wife,” or “N.D.Y.” for “Not Divorced
Yet.” We might, on entering some strange city, be struck by a stately
column erected to the memory of a wife who never ran away with a
soldier, or the shrine and image of a historical character, who had
resisted the example of the man in the “New Witness” ballade in bolting
with the children’s nurse. Such high artistic hagiology would be quite
consistent with Mr. Haynes’ divorce reform; with re-marriage after three
years, or three hours. It would also be quite consistent with Mr.
Haynes’ phrase about preserving an ideal of marriage. What it would not
be consistent with is the perfectly plain, solid, secular and social
usefulness which I have here attributed to marriage. It does not create
or preserve a natural institution, normal to the whole community, to
balance the more artificial and even more arbitrary institution of the
state; which is less natural even if it is equally necessary. It does
not defend a voluntary association, but leaves the only claim on life,
death and loyalty with a more coercive institution. It does not stand,
in the sense I have tried to explain, for the principle of liberty. In
short, it does not do any of the things which Mr. Haynes himself would
especially desire to see done. For humanity to be thus spontaneously
organised from below, it is necessary that the organisation should be
almost as universal as the official organisation from above. The tyrant
must find not one family but many families defying his power; he must
find mankind not a dust of atoms, but fixed in solid blocks of fidelity.
And those human groups must support not only themselves but each other.
In this sense what some call individualism is as corporate as communism.
It is a thing of volunteers; but volunteers must be soldiers. It is a
defence of private persons; but we might say that the private persons
must be private soldiers. The family must be recognised as well as real;
above all, the family must be recognised by the families. To expect
individuals to suffer successfully for a home apart from the home, that
is for something which is an incident but not an institution, is really
a confusion between two ideas; it is a verbal sophistry almost in the
nature of a pun. Similarly, for instance, we cannot prove the moral
force of a peasantry by pointing to one peasant; we might almost as well
reveal the military force of infantry by pointing to one infant.

I take it, however, that the advocates of divorce do not mean that
marriage is to remain ideal only in the sense of being almost
impossible. They do not mean that a faithful husband is only to be
admired as a fanatic. The reasonable men among them do really mean that
a divorced person shall be tolerated as something unusually unfortunate,
not merely that a married person shall be admired as something unusually
blessed and inspired. But whatever they desire, it is as well that they
should realise exactly what they do; and in this case I should like to
hear their criticisms in the matter of what they see. They must surely
see that in England at present, as in many parts of America in the past,
the new liberty is being taken in the spirit of licence as if the
exception were to be the rule, or, rather, perhaps the absence of rule.
This will especially be made manifest if we consider that the effect of
the process is accumulative like a snowball, and returns on itself like
a snowball. The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous
marriage. If people can be separated for no reason they will feel it
all the easier to be united for no reason. A man might quite clearly
foresee that a sensual infatuation would be fleeting, and console
himself with the knowledge that the connection could be equally
fleeting. There seems no particular reason why he should not elaborately
calculate that he could stand a particular lady’s temper for ten months;
or reckon that he would have enjoyed and exhausted her repertoire of
drawing-room songs in two years. The old joke about choosing the wife to
fit the furniture or the fashions might quite logically return, not as
an old joke but as a new solemnity; indeed, it will be found that a new
religion is generally the return of an old joke. A man might quite
consistently see a woman as suited to the period of the hobble skirt,
and as less suited to the threatened recurrence of the crinoline. These
fancies are fantastic enough, but they are not a shade more fantastic
than the facts of many a divorce controversy as urged in the divorce
courts. And this is to leave out altogether the most fantastic fact of
all: the winking at widespread and conspicuous collusion. Collusion has
become not so much an illegal evasion as a legal fiction, and even a
legal institution, as it is admirably satirised in Mr. Somerset
Maugham’s brilliant play of “Home and Beauty.” The fact was very frankly
brought before the public, by a man who was eminently calculated to
disarm satire by sincerity. Colonel Wedgewood is a man who can never be
too much honoured, by all who have any hope of popular liberties still
finding champions in the midst of parliamentary corruption. He is one of
the very few men alive who have shown both military and political
courage; the courage of the camp and the courage of the forum. And
doubtless he showed a third type of social courage, in avowing the
absurd expedient which so many others are content merely to accept and
employ. It is admittedly a frantic and farcical thing that a good man
should find or think it necessary to pretend to commit a sin. Some of
the divorce moralists seem to deduce from this that he ought really to
commit the sin. They may possibly be aware, however, that there are some
who do not agree with them.

For this latter fact is the next step in the speculative progress of the
new morality. The divorce advocates must be well aware that modern
civilisation still contains strong elements, not the least intelligent
and certainly not the least vigorous, which will not accept the new
respectability as a substitute for the old religious vow. The Roman
Catholic Church, the Anglo-Catholic school, the conservative
peasantries, and a large section of the popular life everywhere, will
regard the riot of divorce and re-marriage as they would any other riot
of irresponsibility. The consequence would appear to be that two
different standards will appear in ordinary morality, and even in
ordinary society. Instead of the old social distinction between those
who are married and those who are unmarried, there will be a distinction
between those who are married and those who are really married. Society
might even become divided into two societies; which is perilously
approximate to Disraeli’s famous exaggeration about England divided into
two nations. But whether England be actually so divided or not, this
note of the two nations is the real note of warning in the matter. It
is in this connection, perhaps, that we have to consider most gravely
and doubtfully the future of our own country.

Anarchy cannot last, but anarchic communities cannot last either. Mere
lawlessness cannot live, but it can destroy life. The nations of the
earth always return to sanity and solidarity; but the nations which
return to it first are the nations which survive. We in England cannot
afford to allow our social institutions to go to pieces, as if this
ancient and noble country were an ephemeral colony. We cannot afford it
comparatively, even if we could afford it positively. We are surrounded
by vigorous nations mainly rooted in the peasant or permanent ideals;
notably in the case of France and Ireland. I know that the detested and
detestably undemocratic parliamentary clique, which corrupts France as
it does England, was persuaded or bribed by a Jew named Naquet to pass a
crude and recent divorce law, which was full of the hatred of
Christianity. But only a very superficial critic of France can be
unaware that French parliamentarism is superficial. The French nation
as a whole, the most rigidly respectable nation in the world, will
certainly go on living by the old standards of domesticity. When
Frenchmen are not Christians they are heathens; the heathens who
worshipped the household gods. It might seem strange to say, for
instance, that an atheist like M. Clemenceau has for his chief ideal a
thing called piety. But to understand this it is only necessary to know
a little Latin--and a little French.

A short time ago, as I am well aware, it would have sounded very strange
to represent the old religious and peasant communities either as a model
or a menace. It was counted a queer thing to say, in the days when my
friends and I first said it; in the days of my youth when the republic
of France and the religion of Ireland were regarded as alike ridiculous
and decadent. But many things have happened since then; and it will not
now be so easy to persuade even newspaper readers that Foch is a fool,
either because he is a Frenchman or because he is a Catholic. The older
tradition, even in the most unfashionable forms, has found champions in
the most unexpected quarters. Only the other day Dr. Saleeby, a
distinguished scientific critic who had made himself the special
advocate of all the instruction and organisation that is called social
science, startled his friends and foes alike by saying that the peasant
families in the West of Ireland were far more satisfactory and
successful than those brooded over by all the benevolent sociology of
Bradford. He gave his testimony from an entirely rationalistic and even
materialistic point of view; indeed, he carried rationalism so far as to
give the preference to Roscommon because the women are still mammals. To
a mind of the more traditional type it might seem sufficient to say they
are still mothers. To a memory that lingers over the legends and lyrical
movements of mankind, it might seem no great improvement to imagine a
song that ran “My mammal bids me bind my hair,” or “I’m to be Queen of
the May, mammal, I’m to be Queen of the May.” But indeed the truth to
which he testified is all the more arresting, because for him it was
materialistic and not mystical. The brute biological advantage, as well
as other advantages, was with those for whom that truth was a truth; and
it was all the more instinctive and automatic where that truth was a
tradition. The sort of place where mothers are still something more than
mammals is the only sort of place where they still are mammals. There
the people are still healthy animals; healthy enough to hit you if you
call them animals. I also have, on this merely controversial occasion,
used throughout the rationalistic and not the religious appeal. But it
is not unreasonable to note that the materialistic advantages are really
found among those who most repudiate materialism. This one stray
testimony is but a type of a thousand things of the same kind, which
will convince any one with the sense of social atmospheres that the day
of the peasantries is not passing, but rather arriving. It is the more
complex types of society that are now entangled in their own
complexities. Those who tell us, with a monotonous metaphor, that we
cannot put the clock back, seem to be curiously unconscious of the fact
that their own clock has stopped. And there is nothing so hopeless as
clockwork when it stops. A machine cannot mend itself; it requires a man
to mend it; and the future lies with those who can make living laws for
men and not merely dead laws for machinery. Those living laws are not to
be found in the scatter-brained scepticism which is busy in the great
cities, dissolving what it cannot analyse. The primary laws of man are
to be found in the permanent life of man; in those things that have been
common to it in every time and land, though in the highest civilisation
they have reached an enrichment like that of the divine romance of Cana
in Galilee. We know that many critics of such a story say that its
elements are not permanent; but indeed it is the critics who are not
permanent. A hundred mad dogs of heresy have worried man from the
beginning; but it was always the dog that died. We know there is a
school of prigs who disapprove of the wine; and there may now be a
school of prigs who disapprove of the wedding. For in such a case as the
story of Cana, it may be remarked that the pedants are prejudiced
against the earthly elements as much as, or more than, the heavenly
elements. It is not the supernatural that disgusts them, so much as the
natural. And those of us who have seen all the normal rules and
relations of humanity uprooted by random speculators, as if they were
abnormal abuses and almost accidents, will understand why men have
sought for something divine if they wished to preserve anything human.
They will know why common sense, cast out from some academy of fads and
fashions conducted on the lines of a luxurious madhouse, has age after
age sought refuge in the high sanity of a sacrament.




CONCLUSION




_IX.--Conclusion_


This is a pamphlet and not a book; and the writer of a pamphlet not only
deals with passing things, but generally with things which he hopes will
pass. In that sense it is the object of a pamphlet to be out of date as
soon as possible. It can only survive when it does not succeed. The
successful pamphlets are necessarily dull; and though I have no great
hopes of this being successful, I dare say it is dull enough for all
that. It is designed merely to note certain fugitive proposals of the
moment, and compare them with certain recurrent necessities of the race;
but especially the necessity for some spontaneous social formation freer
than that of the state. If it were more in the nature of a work of
literature, with anything like an ambition of endurance, I might go
deeper into the matter, and give some suggestions about the philosophy
or religion of marriage, and the philosophy or religion of all these
rather random departures from it. Some day perhaps I may try to write
something about the spiritual or psychological quarrel between faith and
fads. Here I will only say, in conclusion, that I believe the universal
fallacy here is a fallacy of being universal. There is a sense in which
it is really a human if heroic possibility to love everybody; and the
young student will not find it a bad preliminary exercise to love
somebody. But the fallacy I mean is that of a man who is not even
content to love everybody, but really wishes to be everybody. He wishes
to walk down a hundred roads at once; to sleep in a hundred houses at
once; to live a hundred lives at once. To do something like this in the
imagination is one of the occasional visions of art and poetry; to
attempt it in the art of life is not only anarchy but inaction. Even in
the arts it can only be the first hint and not the final fulfillment; a
man cannot work at once in bronze and marble, or play the organ and the
violin at the same time. The universal vision of being such a Briareus
is a nightmare of nonsense even in the merely imaginative world; and
ends in mere nihilism in the social world. If a man had a hundred
houses, there would still be more houses than he had days in which to
dream of them; if a man had a hundred wives, there would still be more
women than he could ever know. He would be an insane sultan jealous of
the whole human race, and even of the dead and the unborn. I believe
that behind the art and philosophy of our time there is a considerable
element of this bottomless ambition and this unnatural hunger; and since
in these last words I am touching only lightly on things that would need
much larger treatment, I will admit that the rending of the ancient roof
of man is probably only a part of such an endless and empty expansion. I
asked in the last chapter what those most wildly engaged in the mere
dance of divorce, as fantastic as the dance of death, really expected
for themselves or for their children. And in the deepest sense I think
this is the answer; that they expect the impossible, that is the
universal. They are not crying for the moon, which is a definite and
therefore a defensible desire. They are crying for the world; and when
they had it, they would want another one. In the last resort they would
like to try every situation, not in fancy but in fact; but they cannot
refuse any and therefore cannot resolve on any. In so far as this is the
modern mood, it is a thing so deadly as to be already dead. What is
vitally needed everywhere, in art as much as in ethics, in poetry as
much as in politics, is choice; a creative power in the will as well as
in the mind. Without that self-limitation of somebody, nothing living
will ever see the light.


FOOTNOTES:

[A] Written at the time of the last great German assaults.

[B] The late Cecil Chesterton, in the “New Witness.”