The Superstition of Divorce

The Superstition of Divorce

(1920)

by G.K. Chesterton

      Introductory Note
    I The Superstition of Divorce (1)
   II The Superstition of Divorce (2)
  III The Superstition of Divorce (3)
   IV The Superstition of Divorce (4)
    V The Story of the Family
   VI The Story of the Vow
  VII The Tragedies of Marriage
 VIII The Vista of Divorce
   IX Conclusion

--/--

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.

--/--

I

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE (1)

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 (2)

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 forsworn.
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; 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 vastly 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 let 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 this, 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 bonds of the world; and what would seem
as passing as a vision is made permanent as a vow.

--/--

III

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE (3)

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 English men,
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 (4)

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, non descript, 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.

--/--

V

THE STORY OF THE FAMlLY

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 made 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 your
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 with out
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 colour;
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 mole-hill;
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 lava.
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 is 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 on 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.

--/--

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 byelaws 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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval
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 mediaeval profligacy was more fixed than modern marriage.
I am not here discussing either modern or mediaeval 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
mediaeval 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 pity of Homer.
Even our patriotism is something more subtle than the undivided love
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 mediaevalism 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 mediaeval
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 breakdown 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 forever 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 mediaeval estates; just as no
more was heard of the standard wages of the mediaeval 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.

--/--

VII

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRlAGE

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 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 the 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 a 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, how ever 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 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 discomforts 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,
"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 char-woman 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.

--/--

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 counsel 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 some thing
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.

--/--

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.