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Getting Married

by Bernard Shaw · English · Gutenberg #5604 · 354,641 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Getting Married

Author: Bernard Shaw


        
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #5604]
                Most recently updated: April 11, 2013

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GETTING MARRIED ***




Produced by Eve Sobol and Distributed Proofreaders






GETTING MARRIED

Preface To "Getting Married"

By Bernard Shaw

1908


Transcriber's Note -- The edition from which this play was taken was
printed without most contractions, such as dont for don't and so forth.
These have been left as printed in the original text. Also, abbreviated
honorifics have no trailing period, and the word show is spelt shew.




PREFACE TO GETTING MARRIED




THE REVOLT AGAINST MARRIAGE

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and
thought than marriage. If the mischief stopped at talking and thinking
it would be bad enough; but it goes further, into disastrous anarchical
action. Because our marriage law is inhuman and unreasonable to the
point of downright abomination, the bolder and more rebellious spirits
form illicit unions, defiantly sending cards round to their friends
announcing what they have done. Young women come to me and ask me
whether I think they ought to consent to marry the man they have decided
to live with; and they are perplexed and astonished when I, who am
supposed (heaven knows why!) to have the most advanced views attainable
on the subject, urge them on no account to compromize themselves without
the security of an authentic wedding ring. They cite the example of
George Eliot, who formed an illicit union with Lewes. They quote
a saying attributed to Nietzsche, that a married philosopher is
ridiculous, though the men of their choice are not philosophers. When
they finally give up the idea of reforming our marriage institutions by
private enterprise and personal righteousness, and consent to be led to
the Registry or even to the altar, they insist on first arriving at an
explicit understanding that both parties are to be perfectly free to sip
every flower and change every hour, as their fancy may dictate, in
spite of the legal bond. I do not observe that their unions prove
less monogamic than other people's: rather the contrary, in fact;
consequently, I do not know whether they make less fuss than ordinary
people when either party claims the benefit of the treaty; but the
existence of the treaty shews the same anarchical notion that the law
can be set aside by any two private persons by the simple process of
promising one another to ignore it.




MARRIAGE NEVERTHELESS INEVITABLE

Now most laws are, and all laws ought to be, stronger than the
strongest individual. Certainly the marriage law is. The only people
who successfully evade it are those who actually avail themselves of its
shelter by pretending to be married when they are not, and by Bohemians
who have no position to lose and no career to be closed. In every other
case open violation of the marriage laws means either downright ruin or
such inconvenience and disablement as a prudent man or woman would get
married ten times over rather than face. And these disablements and
inconveniences are not even the price of freedom; for, as Brieux has
shewn so convincingly in Les Hannetons, an avowedly illicit union is
often found in practice to be as tyrannical and as hard to escape from
as the worst legal one.

We may take it then that when a joint domestic establishment, involving
questions of children or property, is contemplated, marriage is in
effect compulsory upon all normal people; and until the law is altered
there is nothing for us but to make the best of it as it stands. Even
when no such establishment is desired, clandestine irregularities are
negligible as an alternative to marriage. How common they are nobody
knows; for in spite of the powerful protection afforded to the parties
by the law of libel, and the readiness of society on various other
grounds to be hoodwinked by the keeping up of the very thinnest
appearances, most of them are probably never suspected. But they are
neither dignified nor safe and comfortable, which at once rules them out
for normal decent people. Marriage remains practically inevitable; and
the sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we shall set to work to make
it decent and reasonable.




WHAT DOES THE WORD MARRIAGE MEAN

However much we may all suffer through marriage, most of us think
so little about it that we regard it as a fixed part of the order of
nature, like gravitation. Except for this error, which may be regarded
as constant, we use the word with reckless looseness, meaning a dozen
different things by it, and yet always assuming that to a respectable
man it can have only one meaning. The pious citizen, suspecting the
Socialist (for example) of unmentionable things, and asking him heatedly
whether he wishes to abolish marriage, is infuriated by a sense of
unanswerable quibbling when the Socialist asks him what particular
variety of marriage he means: English civil marriage, sacramental
marriage, indissoluble Roman Catholic marriage, marriage of divorced
persons, Scotch marriage, Irish marriage, French, German, Turkish, or
South Dakotan marriage. In Sweden, one of the most highly civilized
countries in the world, a marriage is dissolved if both parties wish it,
without any question of conduct. That is what marriage means in Sweden.
In Clapham that is what they call by the senseless name of Free Love.
In the British Empire we have unlimited Kulin polygamy, Muslim polygamy
limited to four wives, child marriages, and, nearer home, marriages
of first cousins: all of them abominations in the eyes of many worthy
persons. Not only may the respectable British champion of marriage mean
any of these widely different institutions; sometimes he does not
mean marriage at all. He means monogamy, chastity, temperance,
respectability, morality, Christianity, anti-socialism, and a dozen
other things that have no necessary connection with marriage. He often
means something that he dare not avow: ownership of the person of
another human being, for instance. And he never tells the truth about
his own marriage either to himself or any one else.

With those individualists who in the mid-XIXth century dreamt of doing
away with marriage altogether on the ground that it is a private concern
between the two parties with which society has nothing to do, there
is now no need to deal. The vogue of "the self-regarding action" has
passed; and it may be assumed without argument that unions for the
purpose of establishing a family will continue to be registered and
regulated by the State. Such registration is marriage, and will continue
to be called marriage long after the conditions of the registration
have changed so much that no citizen now living would recognize them as
marriage conditions at all if he revisited the earth. There is therefore
no question of abolishing marriage; but there is a very pressing
question of improving its conditions. I have never met anybody really
in favor of maintaining marriage as it exists in England to-day. A Roman
Catholic may obey his Church by assenting verbally to the doctrine of
indissoluble marriage. But nobody worth counting believes directly,
frankly, and instinctively that when a person commits a murder and is
put into prison for twenty years for it, the free and innocent husband
or wife of that murderer should remain bound by the marriage. To put it
briefly, a contract for better for worse is a contract that should not
be tolerated. As a matter of fact it is not tolerated fully even by the
Roman Catholic Church; for Roman Catholic marriages can be dissolved,
if not by the temporal Courts, by the Pope. Indissoluble marriage is an
academic figment, advocated only by celibates and by comfortably married
people who imagine that if other couples are uncomfortable it must be
their own fault, just as rich people are apt to imagine that if other
people are poor it serves them right. There is always some means of
dissolution. The conditions of dissolution may vary widely, from those
on which Henry VIII. procured his divorce from Katharine of Arragon to
the pleas on which American wives obtain divorces (for instance, "mental
anguish" caused by the husband's neglect to cut his toenails); but
there is always some point at which the theory of the inviolable
better-for-worse marriage breaks down in practice. South Carolina has
indeed passed what is called a freak law declaring that a marriage shall
not be dissolved under any circumstances; but such an absurdity will
probably be repealed or amended by sheer force of circumstances before
these words are in print. The only question to be considered is, What
shall the conditions of the dissolution be?




SURVIVALS OF SEX SLAVERY

If we adopt the common romantic assumption that the object of marriage
is bliss, then the very strongest reason for dissolving a marriage is
that it shall be disagreeable to one or other or both of the parties.
If we accept the view that the object of marriage is to provide for
the production and rearing of children, then childlessness should be a
conclusive reason for dissolution. As neither of these causes entitles
married persons to divorce it is at once clear that our marriage law is
not founded on either assumption. What it is really founded on is the
morality of the tenth commandment, which English women will one day
succeed in obliterating from the walls of our churches by refusing to
enter any building where they are publicly classed with a man's house,
his ox, and his ass, as his purchased chattels. In this morality female
adultery is malversation by the woman and theft by the man, whilst male
adultery with an unmarried woman is not an offence at all. But though
this is not only the theory of our marriage laws, but the practical
morality of many of us, it is no longer an avowed morality, nor does
its persistence depend on marriage; for the abolition of marriage would,
other things remaining unchanged, leave women more effectually enslaved
than they now are. We shall come to the question of the economic
dependence of women on men later on; but at present we had better
confine ourselves to the theories of marriage which we are not ashamed
to acknowledge and defend, and upon which, therefore, marriage reformers
will be obliged to proceed.

We may, I think, dismiss from the field of practical politics the
extreme sacerdotal view of marriage as a sacred and indissoluble
covenant, because though reinforced by unhappy marriages as all
fanaticisms are reinforced by human sacrifices, it has been reduced to
a private and socially inoperative eccentricity by the introduction of
civil marriage and divorce. Theoretically, our civilly married couples
are to a Catholic as unmarried couples are: that is, they are living in
open sin. Practically, civilly married couples are received in society,
by Catholics and everyone else, precisely as sacramentally married
couples are; and so are people who have divorced their wives or husbands
and married again. And yet marriage is enforced by public opinion with
such ferocity that the least suggestion of laxity in its support is
fatal to even the highest and strongest reputations, although laxity
of conduct is winked at with grinning indulgence; so that we find the
austere Shelley denounced as a fiend in human form, whilst Nelson, who
openly left his wife and formed a menage a trois with Sir William and
Lady Hamilton, was idolized. Shelley might have had an illegitimate
child in every county in England if he had done so frankly as a
sinner. His unpardonable offence was that he attacked marriage as an
institution. We feel a strange anguish of terror and hatred against
him, as against one who threatens us with a mortal injury. What is the
element in his proposals that produces this effect?

The answer of the specialists is the one already alluded to: that
the attack on marriage is an attack on property; so that Shelley was
something more hateful to a husband than a horse thief: to wit, a wife
thief, and something more hateful to a wife than a burglar: namely, one
who would steal her husband's house from over her head, and leave her
destitute and nameless on the streets. Now, no doubt this accounts for
a good deal of anti-Shelleyan prejudice: a prejudice so deeply rooted
in our habits that, as I have shewn in my play, men who are bolder
freethinkers than Shelley himself can no more bring themselves to commit
adultery than to commit any common theft, whilst women who loathe sex
slavery more fiercely than Mary Wollstonecraft are unable to face the
insecurity and discredit of the vagabondage which is the masterless
woman's only alternative to celibacy. But in spite of all this there
is a revolt against marriage which has spread so rapidly within my
recollection that though we all still assume the existence of a huge and
dangerous majority which regards the least hint of scepticism as to the
beauty and holiness of marriage as infamous and abhorrent, I sometimes
wonder why it is so difficult to find an authentic living member of this
dreaded army of convention outside the ranks of the people who never
think about public questions at all, and who, for all their numerical
weight and apparently invincible prejudices, accept social changes
to-day as tamely as their forefathers accepted the Reformation under
Henry and Edward, the Restoration under Mary, and, after Mary's death,
the shandygaff which Elizabeth compounded from both doctrines and called
the Articles of the Church of England. If matters were left to these
simple folk, there would never be any changes at all; and society would
perish like a snake that could not cast its skins. Nevertheless the
snake does change its skin in spite of them; and there are signs that
our marriage-law skin is causing discomfort to thoughtful people and
will presently be cast whether the others are satisfied with it or not.
The question therefore arises: What is there in marriage that makes the
thoughtful people so uncomfortable?




A NEW ATTACK ON MARRIAGE

The answer to this question is an answer which everybody knows and
nobody likes to give. What is driving our ministers of religion and
statesmen to blurt it out at last is the plain fact that marriage is now
beginning to depopulate the country with such alarming rapidity that we
are forced to throw aside our modesty like people who, awakened by an
alarm of fire, rush into the streets in their nightdresses or in no
dresses at all. The fictitious Free Lover, who was supposed to attack
marriage because it thwarted his inordinate affections and prevented him
from making life a carnival, has vanished and given place to the very
real, very strong, very austere avenger of outraged decency who declares
that the licentiousness of marriage, now that it no longer recruits the
race, is destroying it.

As usual, this change of front has not yet been noticed by our newspaper
controversialists and by the suburban season-ticket holders whose minds
the newspapers make. They still defend the citadel on the side on which
nobody is attacking it, and leave its weakest front undefended.

The religious revolt against marriage is a very old one. Christianity
began with a fierce attack on marriage; and to this day the celibacy
of the Roman Catholic priesthood is a standing protest against its
compatibility with the higher life. St. Paul's reluctant sanction of
marriage; his personal protest that he countenanced it of necessity and
against his own conviction; his contemptuous "better to marry than to
burn" is only out of date in respect of his belief that the end of the
world was at hand and that there was therefore no longer any population
question. His instinctive recoil from its worst aspect as a slavery to
pleasure which induces two people to accept slavery to one another has
remained an active force in the world to this day, and is now stirring
more uneasily than ever. We have more and more Pauline celibates whose
objection to marriage is the intolerable indignity of being supposed
to desire or live the married life as ordinarily conceived. Every
thoughtful and observant minister of religion is troubled by the
determination of his flock to regard marriage as a sanctuary for
pleasure, seeing as he does that the known libertines of his parish are
visibly suffering much less from intemperance than many of the married
people who stigmatize them as monsters of vice.




A FORGOTTEN CONFERENCE OF MARRIED MEN

The late Hugh Price Hughes, an eminent Methodist divine, once organized
in London a conference of respectable men to consider the subject.
Nothing came of it (nor indeed could have come of it in the absence of
women); but it had its value as giving the young sociologists present,
of whom I was one, an authentic notion of what a picked audience
of respectable men understood by married life. It was certainly a
staggering revelation. Peter the Great would have been shocked; Byron
would have been horrified; Don Juan would have fled from the conference
into a monastery. The respectable men all regarded the marriage ceremony
as a rite which absolved them from the laws of health and temperance;
inaugurated a life-long honeymoon; and placed their pleasures on exactly
the same footing as their prayers. It seemed entirely proper and natural
to them that out of every twenty-four hours of their lives they should
pass eight shut up in one room with their wives alone, and this, not
birdlike, for the mating season, but all the year round and every year.
How they settled even such minor questions as to which party should
decide whether and how much the window should be open and how many
blankets should be on the bed, and at what hour they should go to
bed and get up so as to avoid disturbing one another's sleep, seemed
insoluble questions to me. But the members of the conference did not
seem to mind. They were content to have the whole national housing
problem treated on a basis of one room for two people. That was the
essence of marriage for them.

Please remember, too, that there was nothing in their circumstances to
check intemperance. They were men of business: that is, men for the most
part engaged in routine work which exercized neither their minds nor
their bodies to the full pitch of their capacities. Compared with
statesmen, first-rate professional men, artists, and even with laborers
and artisans as far as muscular exertion goes, they were underworked,
and could spare the fine edge of their faculties and the last few inches
of their chests without being any the less fit for their daily routine.
If I had adopted their habits, a startling deterioration would have
appeared in my writing before the end of a fortnight, and frightened me
back to what they would have considered an impossible asceticism. But
they paid no penalty of which they were conscious. They had as much
health as they wanted: that is, they did not feel the need of a doctor.
They enjoyed their smokes, their meals, their respectable clothes,
their affectionate games with their children, their prospects of larger
profits or higher salaries, their Saturday half holidays and Sunday
walks, and the rest of it. They did less than two hours work a day and
took from seven to nine office hours to do it in. And they were no good
for any mortal purpose except to go on doing it. They were respectable
only by the standard they themselves had set. Considered seriously
as electors governing an empire through their votes, and choosing and
maintaining its religious and moral institutions by their powers of
social persecution, they were a black-coated army of calamity. They were
incapable of comprehending the industries they were engaged in, the
laws under which they lived, or the relation of their country to other
countries. They lived the lives of old men contentedly. They were
timidly conservative at the age at which every healthy human being ought
to be obstreperously revolutionary. And their wives went through the
routine of the kitchen, nursery, and drawing-room just as they went
through the routine of the office. They had all, as they called it,
settled down, like balloons that had lost their lifting margin of gas;
and it was evident that the process of settling down would go on until
they settled into their graves. They read old-fashioned newspapers
with effort, and were just taking with avidity to a new sort of paper,
costing a halfpenny, which they believed to be extraordinarily bright
and attractive, and which never really succeeded until it became
extremely dull, discarding all serious news and replacing it by vapid
tittle-tattle, and substituting for political articles informed by
at least some pretence of knowledge of economics, history, and
constitutional law, such paltry follies and sentimentalities, snobberies
and partisaneries, as ignorance can understand and irresponsibility
relish.

What they called patriotism was a conviction that because they were born
in Tooting or Camberwell, they were the natural superiors of Beethoven,
of Rodin, of Ibsen, of Tolstoy and all other benighted foreigners. Those
of them who did not think it wrong to go to the theatre liked above
everything a play in which the hero was called Dick; was continually
fingering a briar pipe; and, after being overwhelmed with admiration
and affection through three acts, was finally rewarded with the legal
possession of a pretty heroine's person on the strength of a staggering
lack of virtue. Indeed their only conception of the meaning of the word
virtue was abstention from stealing other men's wives or from refusing
to marry their daughters.

As to law, religion, ethics, and constitutional government, any
counterfeit could impose on them. Any atheist could pass himself off on
them as a bishop, any anarchist as a judge, any despot as a Whig, any
sentimental socialist as a Tory, any philtre-monger or witch-finder as
a man of science, any phrase-maker as a statesman. Those who did not
believe the story of Jonah and the great fish were all the readier to
believe that metals can be transmuted and all diseases cured by radium,
and that men can live for two hundred years by drinking sour milk. Even
these credulities involved too severe an intellectual effort for many of
them: it was easier to grin and believe nothing. They maintained their
respect for themselves by "playing the game" (that is, doing what
everybody else did), and by being good judges of hats, ties, dogs,
pipes, cricket, gardens, flowers, and the like. They were capable
of discussing each other's solvency and respectability with some
shrewdness, and could carry out quite complicated systems of paying
visits and "knowing" one another. They felt a little vulgar when they
spent a day at Margate, and quite distinguished and travelled when
they spent it at Boulogne. They were, except as to their clothes, "not
particular": that is, they could put up with ugly sights and sounds,
unhealthy smells, and inconvenient houses, with inhuman apathy and
callousness. They had, as to adults, a theory that human nature is so
poor that it is useless to try to make the world any better, whilst as
to children they believed that if they were only sufficiently lectured
and whipped, they could be brought to a state of moral perfection such
as no fanatic has ever ascribed to his deity. Though they were not
intentionally malicious, they practised the most appalling cruelties
from mere thoughtlessness, thinking nothing of imprisoning men and
women for periods up to twenty years for breaking into their houses; of
treating their children as wild beasts to be tamed by a system of blows
and imprisonment which they called education; and of keeping pianos in
their houses, not for musical purposes, but to torment their daughters
with a senseless stupidity that would have revolted an inquisitor.

In short, dear reader, they were very like you and me. I could fill a
hundred pages with the tale of our imbecilities and still leave much
untold; but what I have set down here haphazard is enough to condemn the
system that produced us. The corner stone of that system was the family
and the institution of marriage as we have it to-day in England.




HEARTH AND HOME

There is no shirking it: if marriage cannot be made to produce something
better than we are, marriage will have to go, or else the nation
will have to go. It is no use talking of honor, virtue, purity, and
wholesome, sweet, clean, English home lives when what is meant is simply
the habits I have described. The flat fact is that English home life
to-day is neither honorable, virtuous, wholesome, sweet, clean, nor
in any creditable way distinctively English. It is in many respects
conspicuously the reverse; and the result of withdrawing children from
it completely at an early age, and sending them to a public school and
then to a university, does, in spite of the fact that these institutions
are class warped and in some respects quite abominably corrupt, produce
sociabler men. Women, too, are improved by the escape from home provided
by women's colleges; but as very few of them are fortunate enough to
enjoy this advantage, most women are so thoroughly home-bred as to
be unfit for human society. So little is expected of them that in
Sheridan's School for Scandal we hardly notice that the heroine is a
female cad, as detestable and dishonorable in her repentance as she is
vulgar and silly in her naughtiness. It was left to an abnormal critic
like George Gissing to point out the glaring fact that in the remarkable
set of life studies of XIXth century women to be found in the novels of
Dickens, the most convincingly real ones are either vilely unamiable
or comically contemptible; whilst his attempts to manufacture admirable
heroines by idealizations of home-bred womanhood are not only absurd but
not even pleasantly absurd: one has no patience with them.

As all this is corrigible by reducing home life and domestic sentiment
to something like reasonable proportions in the life of the individual,
the danger of it does not lie in human nature. Home life as we
understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a
cockatoo. Its grave danger to the nation lies in its narrow views, its
unnaturally sustained and spitefully jealous concupiscences, its
petty tyrannies, its false social pretences, its endless grudges and
squabbles, its sacrifice of the boy's future by setting him to earn
money to help the family when he should be in training for his adult
life (remember the boy Dickens and the blacking factory), and of the
girl's chances by making her a slave to sick or selfish parents, its
unnatural packing into little brick boxes of little parcels of humanity
of ill-assorted ages, with the old scolding or beating the young for
behaving like young people, and the young hating and thwarting the old
for behaving like old people, and all the other ills, mentionable and
unmentionable, that arise from excessive segregation. It sets these
evils up as benefits and blessings representing the highest attainable
degree of honor and virtue, whilst any criticism of or revolt against
them is savagely persecuted as the extremity of vice. The revolt, driven
under ground and exacerbated, produces debauchery veiled by hypocrisy,
an overwhelming demand for licentious theatrical entertainments which no
censorship can stem, and, worst of all, a confusion of virtue with
the mere morality that steals its name until the real thing is loathed
because the imposture is loathsome. Literary traditions spring up in
which the libertine and profligate--Tom Jones and Charles Surface
are the heroes, and decorous, law-abiding persons--Blifil and Joseph
Surface--are the villains and butts. People like to believe that Nell
Gwynne has every amiable quality and the Bishop's wife every odious one.
Poor Mr. Pecksniff, who is generally no worse than a humbug with a turn
for pompous talking, is represented as a criminal instead of as a very
typical English paterfamilias keeping a roof over the head of himself
and his daughters by inducing people to pay him more for his services
than they are worth. In the extreme instances of reaction against
convention, female murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage; and when
Nature throws up that rare phenomenon, an unscrupulous libertine, his
success among "well brought-up" girls is so easy, and the devotion
he inspires so extravagant, that it is impossible not to see that
the revolt against conventional respectability has transfigured
a commonplace rascal into a sort of Anarchist Saviour. As to the
respectable voluptuary, who joins Omar Khayyam clubs and vibrates to
Swinburne's invocation of Dolores to "come down and redeem us from
virtue," he is to be found in every suburb.




TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING

We must be reasonable in our domestic ideals. I do not think that life
at a public school is altogether good for a boy any more than barrack
life is altogether good for a soldier. But neither is home life
altogether good. Such good as it does, I should say, is due to its
freedom from the very atmosphere it professes to supply. That atmosphere
is usually described as an atmosphere of love; and this definition
should be sufficient to put any sane person on guard against it. The
people who talk and write as if the highest attainable state is that of
a family stewing in love continuously from the cradle to the grave, can
hardly have given five minutes serious consideration to so outrageous a
proposition. They cannot have even made up their minds as to what they
mean by love; for when they expatiate on their thesis they are sometimes
talking about kindness, and sometimes about mere appetite. In either
sense they are equally far from the realities of life. No healthy man
or animal is occupied with love in any sense for more than a very small
fraction indeed of the time he devotes to business and to recreations
wholly unconnected with love. A wife entirely preoccupied with her
affection for her husband, a mother entirely preoccupied with her
affection for her children, may be all very well in a book (for people
who like that kind of book); but in actual life she is a nuisance.
Husbands may escape from her when their business compels them to be
away from home all day; but young children may be, and quite often are,
killed by her cuddling and coddling and doctoring and preaching: above
all, by her continuous attempts to excite precocious sentimentality,
a practice as objectionable, and possibly as mischievous, as the worst
tricks of the worst nursemaids.




LARGE AND SMALL FAMILIES

In most healthy families there is a revolt against this tendency. The
exchanging of presents on birthdays and the like is barred by general
consent, and the relations of the parties are placed by express treaty
on an unsentimental footing.

Unfortunately this mitigation of family sentimentality is much more
characteristic of large families than small ones. It used to be said
that members of large families get on in the world; and it is certainly
true that for purposes of social training a household of twenty
surpasses a household of five as an Oxford College surpasses an
eight-roomed house in a cheap street. Ten children, with the necessary
adults, make a community in which an excess of sentimentality is
impossible. Two children make a doll's house, in which both parents and
children become morbid if they keep to themselves. What is more, when
large families were the fashion, they were organized as tyrannies much
more than as "atmospheres of love." Francis Place tells us that he kept
out of his father's way because his father never passed a child within
his reach without striking it; and though the case was an extreme
one, it was an extreme that illustrated a tendency. Sir Walter Scott's
father, when his son incautiously expressed some relish for his
porridge, dashed a handful of salt into it with an instinctive sense
that it was his duty as a father to prevent his son enjoying himself.
Ruskin's mother gratified the sensual side of her maternal passion, not
by cuddling her son, but by whipping him when he fell downstairs or
was slack in learning the Bible off by heart; and this grotesque
safety-valve for voluptuousness, mischievous as it was in many ways,
had at least the advantage that the child did not enjoy it and was not
debauched by it, as he would have been by transports of sentimentality.

But nowadays we cannot depend on these safeguards, such as they were.
We no longer have large families: all the families are too small to give
the children the necessary social training. The Roman father is out of
fashion; and the whip and the cane are becoming discredited, not so much
by the old arguments against corporal punishment (sound as these were)
as by the gradual wearing away of the veil from the fact that flogging
is a form of debauchery. The advocate of flogging as a punishment is now
exposed to very disagreeable suspicions; and ever since Rousseau rose
to the effort of making a certain very ridiculous confession on the
subject, there has been a growing perception that child whipping, even
for the children themselves, is not always the innocent and high-minded
practice it professes to be. At all events there is no getting away
from the facts that families are smaller than they used to be, and
that passions which formerly took effect in tyranny have been largely
diverted into sentimentality. And though a little sentimentality may be
a very good thing, chronic sentimentality is a horror, more dangerous,
because more possible, than the erotomania which we all condemn when we
are not thoughtlessly glorifying it as the ideal married state.




THE GOSPEL OF LAODICEA

Let us try to get at the root error of these false domestic doctrines.
Why was it that the late Samuel Butler, with a conviction that increased
with his experience of life, preached the gospel of Laodicea, urging
people to be temperate in what they called goodness as in everything
else? Why is it that I, when I hear some well-meaning person exhort
young people to make it a rule to do at least one kind action every
day, feel very much as I should if I heard them persuade children to
get drunk at least once every day? Apart from the initial absurdity of
accepting as permanent a state of things in which there would be in this
country misery enough to supply occasion for several thousand million
kind actions per annum, the effect on the character of the doers of the
actions would be so appalling, that one month of any serious attempt
to carry out such counsels would probably bring about more stringent
legislation against actions going beyond the strict letter of the law
in the way of kindness than we have now against excess in the opposite
direction.

There is no more dangerous mistake than the mistake of supposing that we
cannot have too much of a good thing. The truth is, an immoderately good
man is very much more dangerous than an immoderately bad man: that is
why Savonarola was burnt and John of Leyden torn to pieces with red-hot
pincers whilst multitudes of unredeemed rascals were being let off with
clipped ears, burnt palms, a flogging, or a few years in the galleys.
That is why Christianity never got any grip of the world until it
virtually reduced its claims on the ordinary citizen's attention to a
couple of hours every seventh day, and let him alone on week-days. If
the fanatics who are preoccupied day in and day out with their salvation
were healthy, virtuous, and wise, the Laodiceanism of the ordinary man
might be regarded as a deplorable shortcoming; but, as a matter of fact,
no more frightful misfortune could threaten us than a general spread of
fanaticism. What people call goodness has to be kept in check just as
carefully as what they call badness; for the human constitution will not
stand very much of either without serious psychological mischief, ending
in insanity or crime. The fact that the insanity may be privileged,
as Savonarola's was up to the point of wrecking the social life of
Florence, does not alter the case. We always hesitate to treat a
dangerously good man as a lunatic because he may turn out to be a
prophet in the true sense: that is, a man of exceptional sanity who is
in the right when we are in the wrong. However necessary it may have
been to get rid of Savonarola, it was foolish to poison Socrates and
burn St. Joan of Arc. But it is none the less necessary to take a firm
stand against the monstrous proposition that because certain attitudes
and sentiments may be heroic and admirable at some momentous crisis,
they should or can be maintained at the same pitch continuously through
life. A life spent in prayer and alms giving is really as insane as a
life spent in cursing and picking pockets: the effect of everybody doing
it would be equally disastrous. The superstitious tolerance so long
accorded to monks and nuns is inevitably giving way to a very general
and very natural practice of confiscating their retreats and expelling
them from their country, with the result that they come to England and
Ireland, where they are partly unnoticed and partly encouraged because
they conduct technical schools and teach our girls softer speech and
gentler manners than our comparatively ruffianly elementary teachers.
But they are still full of the notion that because it is possible for
men to attain the summit of Mont Blanc and stay there for an hour, it is
possible for them to live there. Children are punished and scolded for
not living there; and adults take serious offence if it is not assumed
that they live there.

As a matter of fact, ethical strain is just as bad for us as physical
strain. It is desirable that the normal pitch of conduct at which men
are not conscious of being particularly virtuous, although they feel
mean when they fall below it, should be raised as high as possible; but
it is not desirable that they should attempt to live above this pitch
any more than that they should habitually walk at the rate of five
miles an hour or carry a hundredweight continually on their backs. Their
normal condition should be in nowise difficult or remarkable; and it
is a perfectly sound instinct that leads us to mistrust the good man
as much as the bad man, and to object to the clergyman who is pious
extra-professionally as much as to the professional pugilist who is
quarrelsome and violent in private life. We do not want good men and bad
men any more than we want giants and dwarfs. What we do want is a high
quality for our normal: that is, people who can be much better than what
we now call respectable without self-sacrifice. Conscious goodness,
like conscious muscular effort, may be of use in emergencies; but for
everyday national use it is negligible; and its effect on the character
of the individual may easily be disastrous.




FOR BETTER FOR WORSE

It would be hard to find any document in practical daily use in which
these obvious truths seem so stupidly overlooked as they are in the
marriage service. As we have seen, the stupidity is only apparent:
the service was really only an honest attempt to make the best of a
commercial contract of property and slavery by subjecting it to some
religious restraint and elevating it by some touch of poetry. But the
actual result is that when two people are under the influence of
the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of
passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that
excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do
them part. And though of course nobody expects them to do anything
so impossible and so unwholesome, yet the law that regulates their
relations, and the public opinion that regulates that law, is actually
founded on the assumption that the marriage vow is not only feasible but
beautiful and holy, and that if they are false to it, they deserve no
sympathy and no relief. If all married people really lived together, no
doubt the mere force of facts would make an end to this inhuman nonsense
in a month, if not sooner; but it is very seldom brought to that test.
The typical British husband sees much less of his wife than he does of
his business partner, his fellow clerk, or whoever works beside him
day by day. Man and wife do not as a rule, live together: they only
breakfast together, dine together, and sleep in the same room. In most
cases the woman knows nothing of the man's working life and he
knows nothing of her working life (he calls it her home life). It is
remarkable that the very people who romance most absurdly about the
closeness and sacredness of the marriage tie are also those who are most
convinced that the man's sphere and the woman's sphere are so entirely
separate that only in their leisure moments can they ever be together. A
man as intimate with his own wife as a magistrate is with his clerk,
or a Prime Minister with the leader of the Opposition, is a man in ten
thousand. The majority of married couples never get to know one another
at all: they only get accustomed to having the same house, the same
children, and the same income, which is quite a different matter. The
comparatively few men who work at home--writers, artists, and to some
extent clergymen--have to effect some sort of segregation within
the house or else run a heavy risk of overstraining their domestic
relations. When the pair is so poor that it can afford only a single
room, the strain is intolerable: violent quarrelling is the result.
Very few couples can live in a single-roomed tenement without exchanging
blows quite frequently. In the leisured classes there is often no real
family life at all. The boys are at a public school; the girls are in
the schoolroom in charge of a governess; the husband is at his club or
in a set which is not his wife's; and the institution of marriage enjoys
the credit of a domestic peace which is hardly more intimate than the
relations of prisoners in the same gaol or guests at the same garden
party. Taking these two cases of the single room and the unearned income
as the extremes, we might perhaps locate at a guess whereabout on the
scale between them any particular family stands. But it is clear enough
that the one-roomed end, though its conditions enable the marriage vow
to be carried out with the utmost attainable exactitude, is far less
endurable in practice, and far more mischievous in its effect on the
parties concerned, and through them on the community, than the other
end. Thus we see that the revolt against marriage is by no means only a
revolt against its sordidness as a survival of sex slavery. It may even
plausibly be maintained that this is precisely the part of it that
works most smoothly in practice. The revolt is also against its
sentimentality, its romance, its Amorism, even against its enervating
happiness.




WANTED: AN IMMORAL STATESMAN

We now see that the statesman who undertakes to deal with marriage will
have to face an amazingly complicated public opinion. In fact, he will
have to leave opinion as far as possible out of the question, and deal
with human nature instead. For even if there could be any real public
opinion in a society like ours, which is a mere mob of classes, each
with its own habits and prejudices, it would be at best a jumble of
superstitions and interests, taboos and hypocrisies, which could not
be reconciled in any coherent enactment. It would probably proclaim
passionately that it does not matter in the least what sort of children
we have, or how few or how many, provided the children are legitimate.
Also that it does not matter in the least what sort of adults we have,
provided they are married. No statesman worth the name can possibly act
on these views. He is bound to prefer one healthy illegitimate child
to ten rickety legitimate ones, and one energetic and capable unmarried
couple to a dozen inferior apathetic husbands and wives. If it could
be proved that illicit unions produce three children each and marriages
only one and a half, he would be bound to encourage illicit unions
and discourage and even penalize marriage. The common notion that the
existing forms of marriage are not political contrivances, but sacred
ethical obligations to which everything, even the very existence of the
human race, must be sacrificed if necessary (and this is what the vulgar
morality we mostly profess on the subject comes to) is one on which no
sane Government could act for a moment; and yet it influences, or is
believed to influence, so many votes, that no Government will touch
the marriage question if it can possibly help it, even when there is
a demand for the extension of marriage, as in the case of the recent
long-delayed Act legalizing marriage with a deceased wife's sister. When
a reform in the other direction is needed (for example, an extension of
divorce), not even the existence of the most unbearable hardships will
induce our statesmen to move so long as the victims submit sheepishly,
though when they take the remedy into their own hands an inquiry is soon
begun. But what is now making some action in the matter imperative is
neither the sufferings of those who are tied for life to criminals,
drunkards, physically unsound and dangerous mates, and worthless and
unamiable people generally, nor the immorality of the couples condemned
to celibacy by separation orders which do not annul their marriages, but
the fall in the birth rate. Public opinion will not help us out of this
difficulty: on the contrary, it will, if it be allowed, punish anybody
who mentions it. When Zola tried to repopulate France by writing a novel
in praise of parentage, the only comment made here was that the book
could not possibly be translated into English, as its subject was too
improper.




THE LIMITS OF DEMOCRACY

Now if England had been governed in the past by statesmen willing to be
ruled by such public opinion as that, she would have been wiped off the
political map long ago. The modern notion that democracy means governing
a country according to the ignorance of its majorities is never more
disastrous than when there is some question of sexual morals to be dealt
with. The business of a democratic statesman is not, as some of us seem
to think, to convince the voters that he knows no better than they as
to the methods of attaining their common ends, but on the contrary to
convince them that he knows much better than they do, and therefore
differs from them on every possible question of method. The voter's duty
is to take care that the Government consists of men whom he can trust
to devize or support institutions making for the common welfare. This
is highly skilled work; and to be governed by people who set about it
as the man in the street would set about it is to make straight for "red
ruin and the breaking up of laws." Voltaire said that Mr Everybody is
wiser than anybody; and whether he is or not, it is his will that must
prevail; but the will and the way are two very different things. For
example, it is the will of the people on a hot day that the means
of relief from the effects of the heat should be within the reach of
everybody. Nothing could be more innocent, more hygienic, more important
to the social welfare. But the way of the people on such occasions is
mostly to drink large quantities of beer, or, among the more luxurious
classes, iced claret cup, lemon squashes, and the like. To take a moral
illustration, the will to suppress misconduct and secure efficiency
in work is general and salutary; but the notion that the best and only
effective way is by complaining, scolding, punishing, and revenging is
equally general. When Mrs Squeers opened an abscess on her pupil's head
with an inky penknife, her object was entirely laudable: her heart was
in the right place: a statesman interfering with her on the ground that
he did not want the boy cured would have deserved impeachment for gross
tyranny. But a statesman tolerating amateur surgical practice with inky
penknives in school would be a very bad Minister of Education. It is
on the question of method that your expert comes in; and though I am
democrat enough to insist that he must first convince a representative
body of amateurs that his way is the right way and Mrs Squeers's way
the wrong way, yet I very strongly object to any tendency to flatter Mrs
Squeers into the belief that her way is in the least likely to be the
right way, or that any other test is to be applied to it except the test
of its effect on human welfare.




THE SCIENCE AND ART OF POLITICS

Political Science means nothing else than the devizing of the best ways
of fulfilling the will of the world; and, I repeat, it is skilled work.
Once the way is discovered, the methods laid down, and the machinery
provided, the work of the statesman is done, and that of the official
begins. To illustrate, there is no need for the police officer who
governs the street traffic to be or to know any better than the
people who obey the wave of his hand. All concerted action involves
subordination and the appointment of directors at whose signal the
others will act. There is no more need for them to be superior to the
rest than for the keystone of an arch to be of harder stone than the
coping. But when it comes to devizing the directions which are to be
obeyed: that is, to making new institutions and scraping old ones, then
you need aristocracy in the sense of government by the best. A military
state organized so as to carry out exactly the impulses of the average
soldier would not last a year. The result of trying to make the Church
of England reflect the notions of the average churchgoer has reduced it
to a cipher except for the purposes of a petulantly irreligious
social and political club. Democracy as to the thing to be done may
be inevitable (hence the vital need for a democracy of supermen); but
democracy as to the way to do it is like letting the passengers drive
the train: it can only end in collision and wreck. As a matter of act,
we obtain reforms (such as they are), not by allowing the electorate
to draft statutes, but by persuading it that a certain minister and his
cabinet are gifted with sufficient political sagacity to find out how to
produce the desired result. And the usual penalty of taking advantage of
this power to reform our institutions is defeat by a vehement "swing of
the pendulum" at the next election. Therein lies the peril and the glory
of democratic statesmanship. A statesman who confines himself to popular
legislation--or, for the matter of that, a playwright who confines
himself to popular plays--is like a blind man's dog who goes wherever
the blind man pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to
the same place.




WHY STATESMEN SHIRK THE MARRIAGE QUESTION

The reform of marriage, then, will be a very splendid and very hazardous
adventure for the Prime Minister who takes it in hand. He will be posted
on every hoarding and denounced in every Opposition paper, especially
in the sporting papers, as the destroyer of the home, the family, of
decency, of morality, of chastity and what not. All the commonplaces of
the modern anti-Socialist Noodle's Oration will be hurled at him. And he
will have to proceed without the slightest concession to it, giving the
noodles nothing but their due in the assurance "I know how to attain our
ends better than you," and staking his political life on the conviction
carried by that assurance, which conviction will depend a good deal on
the certainty with which it is made, which again can be attained only
by studying the facts of marriage and understanding the needs of the
nation. And, after all, he will find that the pious commonplaces on
which he and the electorate are agreed conceal an utter difference in
the real ends in view: his being public, far-sighted, and impersonal,
and those of multitudes of the electorate narrow, personal, jealous, and
corrupt. Under such circumstances, it is not to be wondered at that the
mere mention of the marriage question makes a British Cabinet shiver
with apprehension and hastily pass on to safer business. Nevertheless
the reform of marriage cannot be put off for ever. When its hour comes,
what are the points the Cabinet will have to take up?




THE QUESTION OF POPULATION

First, it will have to make up its mind as to how many people we want in
the country. If we want less than at present, we must ascertain how
many less; and if we allow the reduction to be made by the continued
operation of the present sterilization of marriage, we must settle how
the process is to be stopped when it has gone far enough. But if we
desire to maintain the population at its present figure, or to increase
it, we must take immediate steps to induce people of moderate means to
marry earlier and to have more children. There is less urgency in the
case of the very poor and the very rich. They breed recklessly: the rich
because they can afford it, and the poor because they cannot afford
the precautions by which the artisans and the middle classes avoid big
families. Nevertheless the population declines, because the high birth
rate of the very poor is counterbalanced by a huge infantile-mortality
in the slums, whilst the very rich are also the very few, and are
becoming sterilized by the spreading revolt of their women against
excessive childbearing--sometimes against any childbearing.

This last cause is important. It cannot be removed by any economic
readjustment. If every family were provided with 10,000 pounds a year
tomorrow, women would still refuse more and more to continue bearing
children until they are exhausted whilst numbers of others are bearing
no children at all. Even if every woman bearing and rearing a valuable
child received a handsome series of payments, thereby making motherhood
a real profession as it ought to be, the number of women able or willing
to give more of their lives to gestation and nursing than three or
four children would cost them might not be very large if the advance in
social organization and conscience indicated by such payments involved
also the opening up of other means of livelihood to women. And it must
be remembered that urban civilization itself, insofar as it is a method
of evolution (and when it is not this, it is simply a nuisance), is a
sterilizing process as far as numbers go. It is harder to keep up the
supply of elephants than of sparrows and rabbits; and for the same
reason it will be harder to keep up the supply of highly cultivated men
and women than it now is of agricultural laborers. Bees get out of this
difficulty by a special system of feeding which enables a queen bee
to produce 4,000 eggs a day whilst the other females lose their sex
altogether and become workers supporting the males in luxury and
idleness until the queen has found her mate, when the queen kills
him and the quondam females kill all the rest (such at least are the
accounts given by romantic naturalists of the matter).




THE RIGHT TO MOTHERHOOD

This system certainly shews a much higher development of social
intelligence than our marriage system; but if it were physically
possible to introduce it into human society it would be wrecked by an
opposite and not less important revolt of women: that is, the revolt
against compulsory barrenness. In this two classes of women are
concerned: those who, though they have no desire for the presence or
care of children, nevertheless feel that motherhood is an experience
necessary to their complete psychical development and understanding of
themselves and others, and those who, though unable to find or unwilling
to entertain a husband, would like to occupy themselves with the rearing
of children. My own experience of discussing this question leads me
to believe that the one point on which all women are in furious secret
rebellion against the existing law is the saddling of the right to a
child with the obligation to become the servant of a man. Adoption,
or the begging or buying or stealing of another woman's child, is no
remedy: it does not provide the supreme experience of bearing the child.
No political constitution will ever succeed or deserve to succeed unless
it includes the recognition of an absolute right to sexual experience,
and is untainted by the Pauline or romantic view of such experience as
sinful in itself. And since this experience in its fullest sense must be
carried in the case of women to the point of childbearing, it can only
be reconciled with the acceptance of marriage with the child's father by
legalizing polygyny, because there are more adult women in the country
than men. Now though polygyny prevails throughout the greater part of
the British Empire, and is as practicable here as in India, there is a
good deal to be said against it, and still more to be felt. However,
let us put our feelings aside for a moment, and consider the question
politically.




MONOGAMY, POLYGYNY AND POLYANDRY

The number of wives permitted to a single husband or of husbands to
a single wife under a marriage system, is not an ethical problem: it
depends solely on the proportion of the sexes in the population. If in
consequence of a great war three-quarters of the men in this country
were killed, it would be absolutely necessary to adopt the Mohammedan
allowance of four wives to each man in order to recruit the population.
The fundamental reason for not allowing women to risk their lives in
battle and for giving them the first chance of escape in all dangerous
emergencies: in short, for treating their lives as more valuable than
male lives, is not in the least a chivalrous reason, though men may
consent to it under the illusion of chivalry. It is a simple matter of
necessity; for if a large proportion of women were killed or
disabled, no possible readjustment of our marriage law could avert the
depopulation and consequent political ruin of the country, because a
woman with several husbands bears fewer children than a woman with one,
whereas a man can produce as many families as he has wives. The
natural foundation of the institution of monogamy is not any inherent
viciousness in polygyny or polyandry, but the hard fact that men and
women are born in about equal numbers. Unfortunately, we kill so many
of our male children in infancy that we are left with a surplus of adult
women which is sufficiently large to claim attention, and yet not large
enough to enable every man to have two wives. Even if it were, we should
be met by an economic difficulty. A Kaffir is rich in proportion to the
number of his wives, because the women are the breadwinners. But in our
civilization women are not paid for their social work in the bearing and
rearing of children and the ordering of households; they are quartered
on the wages of their husbands. At least four out of five of our men
could not afford two wives unless their wages were nearly doubled. Would
it not then be well to try unlimited polygyny; so that the remaining
fifth could have as many wives apiece as they could afford? Let us see
how this would work.




THE MALE REVOLT AGAINST POLYGYNY

Experience shews that women do not object to polygyny when it is
customary: on the contrary, they are its most ardent supporters. The
reason is obvious. The question, as it presents itself in practice to
a woman, is whether it is better to have, say, a whole share in a
tenth-rate man or a tenth share in a first-rate man. Substitute the word
Income for the word Man, and you will have the question as it presents
itself economically to the dependent woman. The woman whose instincts
are maternal, who desires superior children more than anything else,
never hesitates. She would take a thousandth share, if necessary, in a
husband who was a man in a thousand, rather than have some comparatively
weedy weakling all to herself. It is the comparatively weedy weakling,
left mateless by polygyny, who objects. Thus, it was not the women of
Salt Lake City nor even of America who attacked Mormon polygyny. It
was the men. And very naturally. On the other hand, women object to
polyandry, because polyandry enables the best women to monopolize all
the men, just as polygyny enables the best men to monopolize all the
women. That is why all our ordinary men and women are unanimous in
defence of monogamy, the men because it excludes polygyny, and the women
because it excludes polyandry. The women, left to themselves, would
tolerate polygyny. The men, left to themselves, would tolerate
polyandry. But polygyny would condemn a great many men, and polyandry a
great many women, to the celibacy of neglect. Hence the resistance any
attempt to establish unlimited polygyny always provokes, not from the
best people, but from the mediocrities and the inferiors. If we
could get rid of our inferiors and screw up our average quality until
mediocrity ceased to be a reproach, thus making every man reasonably
eligible as a father and every woman reasonably desirable as a mother,
polygyny and polyandry would immediately fall into sincere disrepute,
because monogamy is so much more convenient and economical that nobody
would want to share a husband or a wife if he (or she) could have a
sufficiently good one all to himself (or herself). Thus it appears that
it is the scarcity of husbands or wives of high quality that leads woman
to polygyny and men to polyandry, and that if this scarcity were cured,
monogamy, in the sense of having only one husband or wife at a
time (facilities for changing are another matter), would be found
satisfactory.




DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ORIENTAL AND OCCIDENTAL POLYGYNY

It may now be asked why the polygynist nations have not gravitated to
monogamy, like the latter-day saints of Salt Lake City. The answer is
not far to seek: their polygyny is limited. By the Mohammedan law a man
cannot marry more than four wives; and by the unwritten law of necessity
no man can keep more wives than he can afford; so that a man with
four wives must be quite as exceptional in Asia as a man with a
carriage-and-pair or a motor car is in Europe, where, nevertheless we
may all have as many carriages and motors as we can afford to pay for.
Kulin polygyny, though unlimited, is not really a popular institution:
if you are a person of high caste you pay another person of very august
caste indeed to make your daughter momentarily one of his sixty or
seventy momentary wives for the sake of ennobling your grandchildren;
but this fashion of a small and intensely snobbish class is negligible
as a general precedent. In any case, men and women in the East do not
marry anyone they fancy, as in England and America. Women are secluded
and marriages are arranged. In Salt Lake City the free unsecluded woman
could see and meet the ablest man of the community, and tempt him
to make her his tenth wife by all the arts peculiar to women in
English-speaking countries. No eastern woman can do anything of the
sort. The man alone has any initiative; but he has no access to the
woman; besides, as we have seen, the difficulty created by male license
is not polygyny but polyandry, which is not allowed.

Consequently, if we are to make polygyny a success, we must limit it.
If we have two women to every one man, we must allow each man only two
wives. That is simple; but unfortunately our own actual proportion is,
roughly, something like 1 1/11 woman to 1 man. Now you cannot enact that
each man shall be allowed 1 1/11 wives, or that each woman who cannot
get a husband all to herself shall divide herself between eleven already
married husbands. Thus there is no way out for us through polygyny.
There is no way at all out of the present system of condemning the
superfluous women to barrenness, except by legitimizing the children of
women who are not married to the fathers.




THE OLD MAID'S RIGHT TO MOTHERHOOD

Now the right to bear children without taking a husband could not be
confined to women who are superfluous in the monogamic reckoning. There
is the practical difficulty that although in our population there
are about a million monogamically superfluous women, yet it is quite
impossible to say of any given unmarried woman that she is one of the
superfluous. And there is the difficulty of principle. The right to bear
a child, perhaps the most sacred of all women's rights, is not one that
should have any conditions attached to it except in the interests of
race welfare. There are many women of admirable character, strong,
capable, independent, who dislike the domestic habits of men; have no
natural turn for mothering and coddling them; and find the concession of
conjugal rights to any person under any conditions intolerable by their
self-respect. Yet the general sense of the community recognizes in these
very women the fittest people to have charge of children, and trusts
them, as school mistresses and matrons of institutions, more than women
of any other type when it is possible to procure them for such work. Why
should the taking of a husband be imposed on these women as the price of
their right to maternity? I am quite unable to answer that question.
I see a good deal of first-rate maternal ability and sagacity spending
itself on bees and poultry and village schools and cottage hospitals;
and I find myself repeatedly asking myself why this valuable strain in
the national breed should be sterilized. Unfortunately, the very women
whom we should tempt to become mothers for the good of the race are the
very last people to press their services on their country in that way.
Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with
sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties
to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing; and yet we
have taken his instruction so little to heart that we are at present
suffering acutely from government by gentlemen who will stoop to all the
mean shifts of electioneering and incur all its heavy expenses for the
sake of a seat in Parliament. But what our sentimentalists have not
yet been told is that exactly the same thing applies to maternity as to
government. The best mothers are not those who are so enslaved by their
primitive instincts that they will bear children no matter how hard the
conditions are, but precisely those who place a very high price on their
services, and are quite prepared to become old maids if the price is
refused, and even to feel relieved at their escape. Our democratic and
matrimonial institutions may have their merits: at all events they are
mostly reforms of something worse; but they put a premium on want of
self-respect in certain very important matters; and the consequence is
that we are very badly governed and are, on the whole, an ugly, mean,
ill-bred race.




IBSEN'S CHAIN STITCH

Let us not forget, however, in our sympathy for the superfluous women,
that their children must have fathers as well as mothers. Who are the
fathers to be? All monogamists and married women will reply hastily:
either bachelors or widowers; and this solution will serve as well as
another; for it would be hypocritical to pretend that the difficulty is
a practical one. None the less, the monogamists, after due reflection,
will point out that if there are widowers enough the superfluous women
are not really superfluous, and therefore there is no reason why the
parties should not marry respectably like other people. And they might
in that case be right if the reasons were purely numerical: that is,
if every woman were willing to take a husband if one could be found
for her, and every man willing to take a wife on the same terms; also,
please remember, if widows would remain celibate to give the unmarried
women a chance. These ifs will not work. We must recognize two classes
of old maids: one, the really superfluous women, and the other, the
women who refuse to accept maternity on the (to them) unbearable
condition of taking a husband. From both classes may, perhaps, be
subtracted for the present the large proportion of women who could
not afford the extra expense of one or more children. I say "perhaps,"
because it is by no means sure that within reasonable limits mothers do
not make a better fight for subsistence, and have not, on the whole, a
better time than single women. In any case, we have two distinct cases
to deal with: the superfluous and the voluntary; and it is the voluntary
whose grit we are most concerned to fertilize. But here, again,
we cannot put our finger on any particular case and pick out Miss
Robinson's as superfluous, and Miss Wilkinson's as voluntary. Whether we
legitimize the child of the unmarried woman as a duty to the superfluous
or as a bribe to the voluntary, the practical result must be the same:
to wit, that the condition of marriage now attached to legitimate
parentage will be withdrawn from all women, and fertile unions outside
marriage recognized by society. Now clearly the consequences would not
stop there. The strong-minded ladies who are resolved to be mistresses
in their own houses would not be the only ones to take advantage of the
new law. Even women to whom a home without a man in it would be no home
at all, and who fully intended, if the man turned out to be the right
one, to live with him exactly as married couples live, would, if they
were possessed of independent means, have every inducement to adopt the
new conditions instead of the old ones. Only the women whose sole means
of livelihood was wifehood would insist on marriage: hence a tendency
would set in to make marriage more and more one of the customs imposed
by necessity on the poor, whilst the freer form of union, regulated,
no doubt, by settlements and private contracts of various kinds, would
become the practice of the rich: that is, would become the fashion.
At which point nothing but the achievement of economic independence by
women, which is already seen clearly ahead of us, would be needed to
make marriage disappear altogether, not by formal abolition, but by
simple disuse. The private contract stage of this process was reached in
ancient Rome. The only practicable alternative to it seems to be such
an extension of divorce as will reduce the risks and obligations of
marriage to a degree at which they will be no worse than those of the
alternatives to marriage. As we shall see, this is the solution to which
all the arguments tend. Meanwhile, note how much reason a statesman has
to pause before meddling with an institution which, unendurable as its
drawbacks are, threatens to come to pieces in all directions if a
single thread of it be cut. Ibsen's similitude of the machine-made chain
stitch, which unravels the whole seam at the first pull when a single
stitch is ripped, is very applicable to the knot of marriage.




REMOTENESS OF THE FACTS FROM THE IDEAL

But before we allow this to deter us from touching the sacred fabric,
we must find out whether it is not already coming to pieces in all
directions by the continuous strain of circumstances. No doubt, if it
were all that it pretends to be, and human nature were working smoothly
within its limits, there would be nothing more to be said: it would
be let alone as it always is let alone during the cruder stages of
civilization. But the moment we refer to the facts, we discover that the
ideal matrimony and domesticity which our bigots implore us to preserve
as the corner stone of our society is a figment: what we have really got
is something very different, questionable at its best, and abominable
at its worst. The word pure, so commonly applied to it by thoughtless
people, is absurd; because if they do not mean celibate by it, they
mean nothing; and if they do mean celibate, then marriage is legalized
impurity, a conclusion which is offensive and inhuman. Marriage as a
fact is not in the least like marriage as an ideal. If it were, the
sudden changes which have been made on the continent from indissoluble
Roman Catholic marriage to marriage that can be dissolved by a box on
the ear as in France, by an epithet as in Germany, or simply at the wish
of both parties as in Sweden, not to mention the experiments made
by some of the American States, would have shaken society to its
foundations. Yet they have produced so little effect that Englishmen
open their eyes in surprise when told of their existence.




DIFFICULTY OF OBTAINING EVIDENCE

As to what actual marriage is, one would like evidence instead
of guesses; but as all departures from the ideal are regarded as
disgraceful, evidence cannot be obtained; for when the whole community
is indicted, nobody will go into the witness-box for the prosecution.
Some guesses we can make with some confidence. For example, if it be
objected to any change that our bachelors and widowers would no longer
be Galahads, we may without extravagance or cynicism reply that many
of them are not Galahads now, and that the only change would be that
hypocrisy would no longer be compulsory. Indeed, this can hardly be
called guessing: the evidence is in the streets. But when we attempt to
find out the truth about our marriages, we cannot even guess with
any confidence. Speaking for myself, I can say that I know the inside
history of perhaps half a dozen marriages. Any family solicitor knows
more than this; but even a family solicitor, however large his practice,
knows nothing of the million households which have no solicitors, and
which nevertheless make marriage what it really is. And all he can say
comes to no more than I can say: to wit, that no marriage of which I
have any knowledge is in the least like the ideal marriage. I do not
mean that it is worse: I mean simply that it is different. Also, far
from society being organized in a defence of its ideal so jealous and
implacable that the least step from the straight path means exposure
and ruin, it is almost impossible by any extravagance of misconduct to
provoke society to relax its steady pretence of blindness, unless you do
one or both of two fatal things. One is to get into the newspapers; and
the other is to confess. If you confess misconduct to respectable men or
women, they must either disown you or become virtually your accomplices:
that is why they are so angry with you for confessing. If you get into
the papers, the pretence of not knowing becomes impossible. But it is
hardly too much to say that if you avoid these two perils, you can do
anything you like, as far as your neighbors are concerned. And since we
can hardly flatter ourselves that this is the effect of charity, it
is difficult not to suspect that our extraordinary forbearance in the
matter of stone throwing is that suggested in the well-known parable of
the women taken in adultery which some early free-thinker slipped into
the Gospel of St John: namely, that we all live in glass houses. We may
take it, then, that the ideal husband and the ideal wife are no more
real human beings than the cherubim. Possibly the great majority keeps
its marriage vows in the technical divorce court sense. No husband or
wife yet born keeps them or ever can keep them in the ideal sense.




MARRIAGE AS A MAGIC SPELL

The truth which people seem to overlook in this matter is that the
marriage ceremony is quite useless as a magic spell for changing in an
instant the nature of the relations of two human beings to one another.
If a man marries a woman after three weeks acquaintance, and the day
after meets a woman he has known for twenty years, he finds, sometimes
to his own irrational surprise and his wife's equally irrational
indignation, that his wife is a stranger to him, and the other woman an
old friend. Also, there is no hocus pocus that can possibly be devized
with rings and veils and vows and benedictions that can fix either a
man's or woman's affection for twenty minutes, much less twenty years.
Even the most affectionate couples must have moments during which they
are far more conscious of one another's faults than of one another's
attractions. There are couples who dislike one another furiously for
several hours at a time; there are couples who dislike one another
permanently; and there are couples who never dislike one another; but
these last are people who are incapable of disliking anybody. If they
do not quarrel, it is not because they are married, but because they
are not quarrelsome. The people who are quarrelsome quarrel with their
husbands and wives just as easily as with their servants and relatives
and acquaintances: marriage makes no difference. Those who talk and
write and legislate as if all this could be prevented by making
solemn vows that it shall not happen, are either insincere, insane,
or hopelessly stupid. There is some sense in a contract to perform or
abstain from actions that are reasonably within voluntary control; but
such contracts are only needed to provide against the possibility of
either party being no longer desirous of the specified performance or
abstention. A person proposing or accepting a contract not only to do
something but to like doing it would be certified as mad. Yet popular
superstition credits the wedding rite with the power of fixing our
fancies or affections for life even under the most unnatural conditions.




THE IMPERSONALITY OF SEX

It is necessary to lay some stress on these points, because few realize
the extent to which we proceed on the assumption that marriage is a
short cut to perfect and permanent intimacy and affection. But there
is a still more unworkable assumption which must be discarded before
discussions of marriage can get into any sort of touch with the facts
of life. That assumption is that the specific relation which marriage
authorizes between the parties is the most intimate and personal of
human relations, and embraces all the other high human relations.
Now this is violently untrue. Every adult knows that the relation in
question can and does exist between entire strangers, different
in language, color, tastes, class, civilization, morals, religion,
character: in everything, in short, except their bodily homology and
the reproductive appetite common to all living organisms. Even hatred,
cruelty, and contempt are not incompatible with it; and jealousy and
murder are as near to it as affectionate friendship. It is true that it
is a relation beset with wildly extravagant illusions for inexperienced
people, and that even the most experienced people have not always
sufficient analytic faculty to disentangle it from the sentiments,
sympathetic or abhorrent, which may spring up through the other
relations which are compulsorily attached to it by our laws, or
sentimentally associated with it in romance. But the fact remains that
the most disastrous marriages are those founded exclusively on it, and
the most successful those in which it has been least considered, and in
which the decisive considerations have had nothing to do with sex,
such as liking, money, congeniality of tastes, similarity of habits,
suitability of class, &c., &c.

It is no doubt necessary under existing circumstances for a woman
without property to be sexually attractive, because she must get married
to secure a livelihood; and the illusions of sexual attraction
will cause the imagination of young men to endow her with every
accomplishment and virtue that can make a wife a treasure. The
attraction being thus constantly and ruthlessly used as a bait, both by
individuals and by society, any discussion tending to strip it of its
illusions and get at its real natural history is nervously discouraged.
But nothing can well be more unwholesome for everybody than the
exaggeration and glorification of an instinctive function which clouds
the reason and upsets the judgment more than all the other instincts put
together. The process may be pleasant and romantic; but the consequences
are not. It would be far better for everyone, as well as far honester,
if young people were taught that what they call love is an appetite
which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the moment by its
gratification; that no profession, promise, or proposal made under its
influence should bind anybody; and that its great natural purpose so
completely transcends the personal interests of any individual or even
of any ten generations of individuals that it should be held to be an
act of prostitution and even a sort of blasphemy to attempt to turn it
to account by exacting a personal return for its gratification,
whether by process of law or not. By all means let it be the subject of
contracts with society as to its consequences; but to make marriage an
open trade in it as at present, with money, board and lodging, personal
slavery, vows of eternal exclusive personal sentimentalities and the
rest of it as the price, is neither virtuous, dignified, nor decent. No
husband ever secured his domestic happiness and honor, nor has any
wife ever secured hers, by relying on it. No private claims of any sort
should be founded on it: the real point of honor is to take no corrupt
advantage of it. When we hear of young women being led astray and the
like, we find that what has led them astray is a sedulously inculcated
false notion that the relation they are tempted to contract is so
intensely personal, and the vows made under the influence of its
transient infatuation so sacred and enduring, that only an atrociously
wicked man could make light of or forget them. What is more, as the
same fantastic errors are inculcated in men, and the conscientious ones
therefore feel bound in honor to stand by what they have promised,
one of the surest methods to obtain a husband is to practise on his
susceptibilities until he is either carried away into a promise of
marriage to which he can be legally held, or else into an indiscretion
which he must repair by marriage on pain of having to regard himself as
a scoundrel and a seducer, besides facing the utmost damage the lady's
relatives can do him.

Such a transaction is not an entrance into a "holy state of matrimony":
it is as often as not the inauguration of a lifelong squabble, a
corroding grudge, that causes more misery and degradation of character
than a dozen entirely natural "desertions" and "betrayals." Yet the
number of marriages effected more or less in this way must be enormous.
When people say that love should be free, their words, taken literally,
may be foolish; but they are only expressing inaccurately a very
real need for the disentanglement of sexual relations from a mass of
exorbitant and irrelevant conditions imposed on them on false pretences
to enable needy parents to get their daughters "off their hands" and to
keep those who are already married effectually enslaved by one another.




THE ECONOMIC SLAVERY OF WOMEN

One of the consequences of basing marriage on the considerations stated
with cold abhorrence by Saint Paul in the seventh chapter of his epistle
to the Corinthians, as being made necessary by the unlikeness of most
men to himself, is that the sex slavery involved has become complicated
by economic slavery; so that whilst the man defends marriage because he
is really defending his pleasures, the woman is even more vehement on
the same side because she is defending her only means of livelihood.
To a woman without property or marketable talent a husband is more
necessary than a master to a dog. There is nothing more wounding to our
sense of human dignity than the husband hunting that begins in every
family when the daughters become marriageable; but it is inevitable
under existing circumstances; and the parents who refuse to engage in it
are bad parents, though they may be superior individuals. The cubs of a
humane tigress would starve; and the daughters of women who cannot bring
themselves to devote several years of their lives to the pursuit of
sons-in-law often have to expatiate their mother's squeamishness by
life-long celibacy and indigence. To ask a young man his intentions when
you know he has no intentions, but is unable to deny that he has paid
attentions; to threaten an action for breach of promise of marriage; to
pretend that your daughter is a musician when she has with the greatest
difficulty been coached into playing three piano-forte pieces which she
loathes; to use your own mature charms to attract men to the house when
your daughters have no aptitude for that department of sport; to coach
them, when they have, in the arts by which men can be led to compromize
themselves; and to keep all the skeletons carefully locked up in the
family cupboard until the prey is duly hunted down and bagged: all this
is a mother's duty today; and a very revolting duty it is: one that
disposes of the conventional assumption that it is in the faithful
discharge of her home duties that a woman finds her self-respect. The
truth is that family life will never be decent, much less ennobling,
until this central horror of the dependence of women on men is done
away with. At present it reduces the difference between marriage and
prostitution to the difference between Trade Unionism and unorganized
casual labor: a huge difference, no doubt, as to order and comfort, but
not a difference in kind.

However, it is not by any reform of the marriage laws that this can
be dealt with. It is in the general movement for the prevention
of destitution that the means for making women independent of the
compulsory sale of their persons, in marriage or otherwise, will be
found; but meanwhile those who deal specifically with the marriage laws
should never allow themselves for a moment to forget this abomination
that "plucks the rose from the fair forehead of an innocent love,
and sets a blister there," and then calmly calls itself purity, home,
motherhood, respectability, honor, decency, and any other fine name
that happens to be convenient, not to mention the foul epithets it hurls
freely at those who are ashamed of it.




UNPOPULARITY OF IMPERSONAL VIEWS

Unfortunately it is very hard to make an average citizen take impersonal
views of any sort in matters affecting personal comfort or conduct. We
may be enthusiastic Liberals or Conservatives without any hope of seats
in Parliament, knighthoods, or posts in the Government, because party
politics do not make the slightest difference in our daily lives and
therefore cost us nothing. But to take a vital process in which we are
keenly interested personal instruments, and ask us to regard it, and
feel about it, and legislate on it, wholly as if it were an impersonal
one, is to make a higher demand than most people seem capable of
responding to. We all have personal interests in marriage which we are
not prepared to sink. It is not only the women who want to get married:
the men do too, sometimes on sentimental grounds, sometimes on the
more sordid calculation that bachelor life is less comfortable and more
expensive, since a wife pays for her status with domestic service as
well as with the other services expected of her. Now that children are
avoidable, this calculation is becoming more common and conscious than
it was: a result which is regarded as "a steady improvement in general
morality."




IMPERSONALITY IS NOT PROMISCUITY

There is, too, a really appalling prevalence of the superstition that
the sexual instinct in men is utterly promiscuous, and that the
least relaxation of law and custom must produce a wild outbreak of
licentiousness. As far as our moralists can grasp the proposition that
we should deal with the sexual relation as impersonal, it seems to
them to mean that we should encourage it to be promiscuous: hence their
recoil from it. But promiscuity and impersonality are not the same
thing. No man ever fell in love with the entire female sex, nor any
woman with the entire male sex. We often do not fall in love at all;
and when we do we fall in love with one person and remain indifferent
to thousands of others who pass before our eyes every day. Selection,
carried even to such fastidiousness as to induce people to say quite
commonly that there is only one man or woman in the world for them, is
the rule in nature. If anyone doubts this, let him open a shop for the
sale of picture postcards, and, when an enamoured lady customer demands
a portrait of her favorite actor or a gentleman of his favorite actress,
try to substitute some other portrait on the ground that since the
sexual instinct is promiscuous, one portrait is as pleasing as another.
I suppose no shopkeeper has ever been foolish enough to do such a thing;
and yet all our shopkeepers, the moment a discussion arises on marriage,
will passionately argue against all reform on the ground that nothing
but the most severe coercion can save their wives and daughters from
quite indiscriminate rapine.




DOMESTIC CHANGE OF AIR

Our relief at the morality of the reassurance that man is not
promiscuous in his fancies must not blind us to the fact that he is (to
use the word coined by certain American writers to describe themselves)
something of a Varietist. Even those who say there is only one man or
woman in the world for them, find that it is not always the same man or
woman. It happens that our law permits us to study this phenomenon among
entirely law-abiding people. I know one lady who has been married five
times. She is, as might be expected, a wise, attractive, and interesting
woman. The question is, is she wise, attractive, and interesting because
she has been married five times, or has she been married five times
because she is wise, attractive, and interesting? Probably some of the
truth lies both ways. I also know of a household consisting of three
families, A having married first B, and then C, who afterwards married
D. All three unions were fruitful; so that the children had a change
both of fathers and mothers. Now I cannot honestly say that these and
similar cases have convinced me that people are the worse for a change.
The lady who has married and managed five husbands must be much
more expert at it than most monogamic ladies; and as a companion and
counsellor she probably leaves them nowhere. Mr Kipling's question,

"What can they know of England that only England know?"

disposes not only of the patriots who are so patriotic that they never
leave their own country to look at another, but of the citizens who are
so domestic that they have never married again and never loved anyone
except their own husbands and wives. The domestic doctrinaires are
also the dull people. The impersonal relation of sex may be judicially
reserved for one person; but any such reservation of friendship,
affection, admiration, sympathy and so forth is only possible to
a wretchedly narrow and jealous nature; and neither history nor
contemporary society shews us a single amiable and respectable character
capable of it. This has always been recognized in cultivated society:
that is why poor people accuse cultivated society of profligacy, poor
people being often so ignorant and uncultivated that they have nothing
to offer each other but the sex relationship, and cannot conceive why
men and women should associate for any other purpose.

As to the children of the triple household, they were not only on
excellent terms with one another, and never thought of any distinction
between their full and their half brothers and sisters; but they had
the superior sociability which distinguishes the people who live in
communities from those who live in small families.

The inference is that changes of partners are not in themselves
injurious or undesirable. People are not demoralized by them when they
are effected according to law. Therefore we need not hesitate to alter
the law merely because the alteration would make such changes easier.




HOME MANNERS ARE BAD MANNERS

On the other hand, we have all seen the bonds of marriage vilely abused
by people who are never classed with shrews and wife-beaters: they are
indeed sometimes held up as models of domesticity because they do
not drink nor gamble nor neglect their children nor tolerate dirt and
untidiness, and because they are not amiable enough to have what
are called amiable weaknesses. These terrors conceive marriage as a
dispensation from all the common civilities and delicacies which they
have to observe among strangers, or, as they put it, "before company."
And here the effects of indissoluble marriage-for-better-for-worse are
very plainly and disagreeably seen. If such people took their domestic
manners into general society, they would very soon find themselves
without a friend or even an acquaintance in the world. There are women
who, through total disuse, have lost the power of kindly human speech
and can only scold and complain: there are men who grumble and nag from
inveterate habit even when they are comfortable. But their unfortunate
spouses and children cannot escape from them.




SPURIOUS "NATURAL" AFFECTION

What is more, they are protected from even such discomfort as the
dislike of his prisoners may cause to a gaoler by the hypnotism of the
convention that the natural relation between husband and wife and
parent and child is one of intense affection, and that to feel any other
sentiment towards a member of one's family is to be a monster. Under the
influence of the emotion thus manufactured the most detestable people
are spoilt with entirely undeserved deference, obedience, and even
affection whilst they live, and mourned when they die by those whose
lives they wantonly or maliciously made miserable. And this is what we
call natural conduct. Nothing could well be less natural. That such a
convention should have been established shews that the indissolubility
of marriage creates such intolerable situations that only by beglamoring
the human imagination with a hypnotic suggestion of wholly unnatural
feelings can it be made to keep up appearances.

If the sentimental theory of family relationship encourages bad manners
and personal slovenliness and uncleanness in the home, it also, in
the case of sentimental people, encourages the practice of rousing
and playing on the affections of children prematurely and far too
frequently. The lady who says that as her religion is love, her children
shall be brought up in an atmosphere of love, and institutes a system of
sedulous endearments and exchanges of presents and conscious and studied
acts of artificial kindness, may be defeated in a large family by the
healthy derision and rebellion of children who have acquired hardihood
and common sense in their conflicts with one another. But the small
families, which are the rule just now, succumb more easily; and in
the case of a single sensitive child the effect of being forced in a
hothouse atmosphere of unnatural affection may be disastrous.

In short, whichever way you take it, the convention that marriage and
family relationship produces special feelings which alter the nature of
human intercourse is a mischievous one. The whole difficulty of bringing
up a family well is the difficulty of making its members behave as
considerately at home as on a visit in a strange house, and as frankly,
kindly, and easily in a strange house as at home. In the middle classes,
where the segregation of the artificially limited family in its little
brick box is horribly complete, bad manners, ugly dresses, awkwardness,
cowardice, peevishness, and all the petty vices of unsociability
flourish like mushrooms in a cellar. In the upper class, where families
are not limited for money reasons; where at least two houses and
sometimes three or four are the rule (not to mention the clubs); where
there is travelling and hotel life; and where the men are brought up,
not in the family, but in public schools, universities, and the naval
and military services, besides being constantly in social training in
other people's houses, the result is to produce what may be called, in
comparison with the middle class, something that might almost pass as a
different and much more sociable species. And in the very poorest class,
where people have no homes, only sleeping places, and consequently
live practically in the streets, sociability again appears, leaving
the middle class despised and disliked for its helpless and offensive
unsociability as much by those below it as those above it, and yet
ignorant enough to be proud of it, and to hold itself up as a model
for the reform of the (as it considers) elegantly vicious rich and
profligate poor alike.




CARRYING THE WAR INTO THE ENEMY'S COUNTRY

Without pretending to exhaust the subject, I have said enough to make
it clear that the moment we lose the desire to defend our present
matrimonial and family arrangements, there will be no difficulty in
making out an overwhelming case against them. No doubt until then we
shall continue to hold up the British home as the Holy of Holies in the
temple of honorable motherhood, innocent childhood, manly virtue, and
sweet and wholesome national life. But with a clever turn of the hand
this holy of holies can be exposed as an Augean stable, so filthy that
it would seem more hopeful to burn it down than to attempt to sweep
it out. And this latter view will perhaps prevail if the idolaters of
marriage persist in refusing all proposals for reform and treating those
who advocate it as infamous delinquents. Neither view is of any use
except as a poisoned arrow in a fierce fight between two parties
determined to discredit each other with a view to obtaining powers of
legal coercion over one another.




SHELLEY AND QUEEN VICTORIA

The best way to avert such a struggle is to open the eyes of the
thoughtlessly conventional people to the weakness of their position in a
mere contest of recrimination. Hitherto they have assumed that they
have the advantage of coming into the field without a stain on their
characters to combat libertines who have no character at all. They
conceive it to be their duty to throw mud; and they feel that even if
the enemy can find any mud to throw, none of it will stick. They are
mistaken. There will be plenty of that sort of ammunition in the other
camp; and most of it will stick very hard indeed. The moral is, do not
throw any. If we can imagine Shelley and Queen Victoria arguing out
their differences in another world, we may be sure that the Queen has
long ago found that she cannot settle the question by classing Shelley
with George IV. as a bad man; and Shelley is not likely to have called
her vile names on the general ground that as the economic dependence of
women makes marriage a money bargain in which the man is the purchaser
and the woman the purchased, there is no essential difference between
a married woman and the woman of the streets. Unfortunately, all the
people whose methods of controversy are represented by our popular
newspapers are not Queen Victorias and Shelleys. A great mass of them,
when their prejudices are challenged, have no other impulse than to call
the challenger names, and, when the crowd seems to be on their side, to
maltreat him personally or hand him over to the law, if he is vulnerable
to it. Therefore I cannot say that I have any certainty that the
marriage question will be dealt with decently and tolerantly. But dealt
with it will be, decently or indecently; for the present state of things
in England is too strained and mischievous to last. Europe and America
have left us a century behind in this matter.




A PROBABLE EFFECT OF GIVING WOMEN THE VOTE

The political emancipation of women is likely to lead to a comparatively
stringent enforcement by law of sexual morality (that is why so many of
us dread it); and this will soon compel us to consider what our sexual
morality shall be. At present a ridiculous distinction is made between
vice and crime, in order that men may be vicious with impunity.
Adultery, for instance, though it is sometimes fiercely punished by
giving an injured husband crushing damages in a divorce suit (injured
wives are not considered in this way), is not now directly prosecuted;
and this impunity extends to illicit relations between unmarried persons
who have reached what is called the age of consent. There are other
matters, such as notification of contagious disease and solicitation,
in which the hand of the law has been brought down on one sex only.
Outrages which were capital offences within the memory of persons still
living when committed on women outside marriage, can still be inflicted
by men on their wives without legal remedy. At all such points the code
will be screwed up by the operation of Votes for Women, if there be any
virtue in the franchise at all. The result will be that men will find
the more ascetic side of our sexual morality taken seriously by the law.
It is easy to foresee the consequences. No man will take much trouble
to alter laws which he can evade, or which are either not enforced or
enforced on women only. But when these laws take him by the collar and
thrust him into prison, he suddenly becomes keenly critical of them, and
of the arguments by which they are supported. Now we have seen that our
marriage laws will not stand criticism, and that they have held out
so far only because they are so worked as to fit roughly our state of
society, in which women are neither politically nor personally free, in
which indeed women are called womanly only when they regard themselves
as existing solely for the use of men. When Liberalism enfranchises them
politically, and Socialism emancipates them economically, they will no
longer allow the law to take immorality so easily. Both men and women
will be forced to behave morally in sex matters; and when they find that
this is inevitable they will raise the question of what behavior really
should be established as moral. If they decide in favor of our present
professed morality they will have to make a revolutionary change
in their habits by becoming in fact what they only pretend to be
at present. If, on the other hand, they find that this would be
an unbearable tyranny, without even the excuse of justice or sound
eugenics, they will reconsider their morality and remodel the law.




THE PERSONAL SENTIMENTAL BASIS OF MONOGAMY

Monogamy has a sentimental basis which is quite distinct from the
political one of equal numbers of the sexes. Equal numbers in the sexes
are quite compatible with a change of partners every day or every
hour Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the
farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than
chickens and calves, and that men and women are not so completely
enslaved as farm stock. Accordingly, the people whose conception of
marriage is a farm-yard or slave-quarter conception are always more
or less in a panic lest the slightest relaxation of the marriage laws
should utterly demoralize society; whilst those to whom marriage is a
matter of more highly evolved sentiments and needs (sometimes said to
be distinctively human, though birds and animals in a state of freedom
evince them quite as touchingly as we) are much more liberal, knowing as
they do that monogamy will take care of itself provided the parties are
free enough, and that promiscuity is a product of slavery and not of
liberty.

The solid foundation of their confidence is the fact that the
relationship set up by a comfortable marriage is so intimate and so
persuasive of the whole life of the parties to it, that nobody has room
in his or her life for more than one such relationship at a time. What
is called a household of three is never really of three except in the
sense that every household becomes a household of three when a child is
born, and may in the same way become a household of four or fourteen
if the union be fertile enough. Now no doubt the marriage tie means so
little to some people that the addition to the household of half a dozen
more wives or husbands would be as possible as the addition of half a
dozen governesses or tutors or visitors or servants. A Sultan may have
fifty wives as easily as he may have fifty dishes on his table, because
in the English sense he has no wives at all; nor have his wives any
husband: in short, he is not what we call a married man. And there are
sultans and sultanas and seraglios existing in England under English
forms. But when you come to the real modern marriage of sentiment, a
relation is created which has never to my knowledge been shared by three
persons except when all three have been extraordinarily fond of one
another. Take for example the famous case of Nelson and Sir William and
Lady Hamilton. The secret of this household of three was not only that
both the husband and Nelson were devoted to Lady Hamilton, but that they
were also apparently devoted to one another. When Hamilton died both
Nelson and Emma seem to have been equally heartbroken. When there is a
successful household of one man and two women the same unusual condition
is fulfilled: the two women not only cannot live happily without the man
but cannot live happily without each other. In every other case known
to me, either from observation or record, the experiment is a hopeless
failure: one of the two rivals for the really intimate affection of the
third inevitably drives out the other. The driven-out party may accept
the situation and remain in the house as a friend to save appearances,
or for the sake of the children, or for economic reasons; but such an
arrangement can subsist only when the forfeited relation is no longer
really valued; and this indifference, like the triple bond of affection
which carried Sir William Hamilton through, is so rare as to be
practicably negligible in the establishment of a conventional morality
of marriage. Therefore sensible and experienced people always assume
that when a declaration of love is made to an already married person,
the declaration binds the parties in honor never to see one another
again unless they contemplate divorce and remarriage. And this is a
sound convention, even for unconventional people. Let me illustrate by
reference to a fictitious case: the one imagined in my own play Candida
will do as well as another. Here a young man who has been received as a
friend into the house of a clergyman falls in love with the clergyman's
wife, and, being young and inexperienced, declares his feelings, and
claims that he, and not the clergyman, is the more suitable mate for
the lady. The clergyman, who has a temper, is first tempted to hurl the
youth into the street by bodily violence: an impulse natural, perhaps,
but vulgar and improper, and, not open, on consideration, to decent men.
Even coarse and inconsiderate men are restrained from it by the fact
that the sympathy of the woman turns naturally to the victim of physical
brutality and against the bully, the Thackerayan notion to the contrary
being one of the illusions of literary masculinity. Besides, the husband
is not necessarily the stronger man: an appeal to force has resulted
in the ignominious defeat of the husband quite as often as in poetic
justice as conceived in the conventional novelet. What an honorable and
sensible man does when his household is invaded is what the Reverend
James Mavor Morell does in my play. He recognizes that just as there is
not room for two women in that sacredly intimate relation of sentimental
domesticity which is what marriage means to him, so there is no room
for two men in that relation with his wife; and he accordingly tells
her firmly that she must choose which man will occupy the place that is
large enough for one only. He is so far shrewdly unconventional as to
recognize that if she chooses the other man, he must give way, legal tie
or no legal tie; but he knows that either one or the other must go. And
a sensible wife would act in the same way. If a romantic young lady came
into her house and proposed to adore her husband on a tolerated footing,
she would say "My husband has not room in his life for two wives: either
you go out of the house or I go out of it." The situation is not at
all unlikely: I had almost said not at all unusual. Young ladies and
gentlemen in the greensickly condition which is called calf-love,
associating with married couples at dangerous periods of mature life,
quite often find themselves in it; and the extreme reluctance of proud
and sensitive people to avoid any assertion of matrimonial rights, or to
condescend to jealousy, sometimes makes the threatened husband or wife
hesitate to take prompt steps and do the apparently conventional thing.
But whether they hesitate or act the result is always the same. In a
real marriage of sentiment the wife or husband cannot be supplanted by
halves; and such a marriage will break very soon under the strain of
polygyny or polyandry. What we want at present is a sufficiently clear
teaching of this fact to ensure that prompt and decisive action shall
always be taken in such cases without any false shame of seeming
conventional (a shame to which people capable of such real marriage
are specially susceptible), and a rational divorce law to enable
the marriage to be dissolved and the parties honorably resorted and
recoupled without disgrace and scandal if that should prove the proper
solution.

It must be repeated here that no law, however stringent, can prevent
polygamy among groups of people who choose to live loosely and be
monogamous only in appearance. But such cases are not now under
consideration. Also, affectionate husbands like Samuel Pepys, and
affectionate wives of the corresponding temperaments may, it appears,
engage in transient casual adventures out of doors without breaking
up their home life. But within doors that home life may be regarded as
naturally monogamous. It does not need to be protected against polygamy:
it protects itself.




DIVORCE

All this has an important bearing on the question of divorce. Divorce
reformers are so much preoccupied with the injustice of forbidding a
woman to divorce her husband for unfaithfulness to his marriage vow,
whilst allowing him that power over her, that they are apt to overlook
the pressing need for admitting other and far more important grounds for
divorce. If we take a document like Pepys' Diary, we learn that a woman
may have an incorrigibly unfaithful husband, and yet be much better off
than if she had an ill-tempered, peevish, maliciously sarcastic one,
or was chained for life to a criminal, a drunkard, a lunatic, an idle
vagrant, or a person whose religious faith was contrary to her own.
Imagine being married to a liar, a borrower, a mischief maker, a teaser
or tormentor of children and animals, or even simply to a bore! Conceive
yourself tied for life to one of the perfectly "faithful" husbands who
are sentenced to a month's imprisonment occasionally for idly leaving
their wives in childbirth without food, fire, or attendance! What woman
would not rather marry ten Pepyses? what man a dozen Nell Gwynnes?
Adultery, far from being the first and only ground for divorce, might
more reasonably be made the last, or wholly excluded. The present law is
perfectly logical only if you once admit (as no decent person ever does)
its fundamental assumption that there can be no companionship between
men and women because the woman has a "sphere" of her own, that of
housekeeping, in which the man must not meddle, whilst he has all the
rest of human activity for his sphere: the only point at which the
two spheres touch being that of replenishing the population. On this
assumption the man naturally asks for a guarantee that the children
shall be his because he has to find the money to support them. The power
of divorcing a woman for adultery is this guarantee, a guarantee that
she does not need to protect her against a similar imposture on his
part, because he cannot bear children. No doubt he can spend the
money that ought to be spent on her children on another woman and her
children; but this is desertion, which is a separate matter. The
fact for us to seize is that in the eye of the law, adultery without
consequences is merely a sentimental grievance, whereas the planting
on one man of another man's offspring is a substantial one. And so, no
doubt, it is; but the day has gone by for basing laws on the assumption
that a woman is less to a man than his dog, and thereby encouraging and
accepting the standards of the husbands who buy meat for their bull-pups
and leave their wives and children hungry. That basis is the penalty we
pay for having borrowed our religion from the East, instead of building
up a religion of our own out of our western inspiration and western
sentiment. The result is that we all believe that our religion is on its
last legs, whereas the truth is that it is not yet born, though the age
walks visibly pregnant with it. Meanwhile, as women are dragged down by
their oriental servitude to our men, and as, further, women drag down
those who degrade them quite as effectually as men do, there are moments
when it is difficult to see anything in our sex institutions except a
police des moeurs keeping the field for a competition as to which sex
shall corrupt the other most.




IMPORTANCE OF SENTIMENTAL GRIEVANCE

Any tolerable western divorce law must put the sentimental grievances
first, and should carefully avoid singling out any ground of divorce in
such a way as to create a convention that persons having that ground are
bound in honor to avail themselves of it. It is generally admitted that
people should not be encouraged to petition for a divorce in a fit of
petulance. What is not so clearly seen is that neither should they be
encouraged to petition in a fit of jealousy, which is certainly the most
detestable and mischievous of all the passions that enjoy public credit.
Still less should people who are not jealous be urged to behave as if
they were jealous, and to enter upon duels and divorce suits in which
they have no desire to be successful. There should be no publication of
the grounds on which a divorce is sought or granted; and as this would
abolish the only means the public now has of ascertaining that every
possible effort has been made to keep the couple united against their
wills, such privacy will only be tolerated when we at last admit that
the sole and sufficient reason why people should be granted a divorce is
that they want one. Then there will be no more reports of divorce
cases, no more letters read in court with an indelicacy that makes
every sensitive person shudder and recoil as from a profanation, no more
washing of household linen, dirty or clean, in public. We must learn
in these matters to mind our own business and not impose our individual
notions of propriety on one another, even if it carries us to the length
of openly admitting what we are now compelled to assume silently, that
every human being has a right to sexual experience, and that the law is
concerned only with parentage, which is now a separate matter.




DIVORCE WITHOUT ASKING WHY

The one question that should never be put to a petitioner for divorce
is "Why?" When a man appeals to a magistrate for protection from someone
who threatens to kill him, on the simple ground that he desires to live,
the magistrate might quite reasonably ask him why he desires to live,
and why the person who wishes to kill him should not be gratified. Also
whether he can prove that his life is a pleasure to himself or a benefit
to anyone else, and whether it is good for him to be encouraged to
exaggerate the importance of his short span in this vale of tears rather
than to keep himself constantly ready to meet his God.

The only reason for not raising these very weighty points is that we
find society unworkable except on the assumption that every man has a
natural right to live. Nothing short of his own refusal to respect that
right in others can reconcile the community to killing him. From this
fundamental right many others are derived. The American Constitution,
one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were
forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had
to face instead of chopping logic in a university classroom, specifies
"liberty and the pursuit of happiness" as natural rights. The terms are
too vague to be of much practical use; for the supreme right to life,
extended as it now must be to the life of the race, and to the quality
of life as well as to the mere fact of breathing, is making short work
of many ancient liberties, and exposing the pursuit of happiness as
perhaps the most miserable of human occupations. Nevertheless, the
American Constitution roughly expresses the conditions to which modern
democracy commits us. To impose marriage on two unmarried people who
do not desire to marry one another would be admittedly an act of
enslavement. But it is no worse than to impose a continuation of
marriage on people who have ceased to desire to be married. It will
be said that the parties may not agree on that; that one may desire
to maintain the marriage the other wishes to dissolve. But the same
hardship arises whenever a man in love proposes marriage to a woman and
is refused. The refusal is so painful to him that he often threatens to
kill himself and sometimes even does it. Yet we expect him to face his
ill luck, and never dream of forcing the woman to accept him. His case
is the same as that of the husband whose wife tells him she no longer
cares for him, and desires the marriage to be dissolved. You will
say, perhaps, if you are superstitious, that it is not the same--that
marriage makes a difference. You are wrong: there is no magic in
marriage. If there were, married couples would never desire to separate.
But they do. And when they do, it is simple slavery to compel them to
remain together.




ECONOMIC SLAVERY AGAIN THE ROOT DIFFICULTY

The husband, then, is to be allowed to discard his wife when he is tired
of her, and the wife the husband when another man strikes her fancy?
One must reply unhesitatingly in the affirmative; for if we are to
deny every proposition that can be stated in offensive terms by its
opponents, we shall never be able to affirm anything at all. But the
question reminds us that until the economic independence of women is
achieved, we shall have to remain impaled on the other horn of the
dilemma and maintain marriage as a slavery. And here let me ask the
Government of the day (1910) a question with regard to the Labor
Exchanges it has very wisely established throughout the country. What do
these Exchanges do when a woman enters and states that her occupation is
that of a wife and mother; that she is out of a job; and that she wants
an employer? If the Exchanges refuse to entertain her application, they
are clearly excluding nearly the whole female sex from the benefit of
the Act. If not, they must become matrimonial agencies, unless, indeed,
they are prepared to become something worse by putting the woman down as
a housekeeper and introducing her to an employer without making marriage
a condition of the hiring.




LABOR EXCHANGES AND THE WHITE SLAVERY

Suppose, again, a woman presents herself at the Labor Exchange, and
states her trade as that of a White Slave, meaning the unmentionable
trade pursued by many thousands of women in all civilized cities. Will
the Labor Exchange find employers for her? If not, what will it do with
her? If it throws her back destitute and unhelped on the streets to
starve, it might as well not exist as far as she is concerned; and the
problem of unemployment remains unsolved at its most painful point. Yet
if it finds honest employment for her and for all the unemployed wives
and mothers, it must find new places in the world for women; and in so
doing it must achieve for them economic independence of men. And when
this is done, can we feel sure that any woman will consent to be a wife
and mother (not to mention the less respectable alternative) unless her
position is made as eligible as that of the women for whom the Labor
Exchanges are finding independent work? Will not many women now engaged
in domestic work under circumstances which make it repugnant to them,
abandon it and seek employment under other circumstances? As unhappiness
in marriage is almost the only discomfort sufficiently irksome to
induce a woman to break up her home, and economic dependence the
only compulsion sufficiently stringent to force her to endure such
unhappiness, the solution of the problem of finding independent
employment for women may cause a great number of childless unhappy
marriages to break up spontaneously, whether the marriage laws are
altered or not. And here we must extend the term childless marriages to
cover households in which the children have grown up and gone their own
way, leaving the parents alone together: a point at which many worthy
couples discover for the first time that they have long since lost
interest in one another, and have been united only by a common interest
in their children. We may expect, then, that marriages which are
maintained by economic pressure alone will dissolve when that pressure
is removed; and as all the parties to them will certainly not accept a
celibate life, the law must sanction the dissolution in order to prevent
a recurrence of the scandal which has moved the Government to appoint
the Commission now sitting to investigate the marriage question: the
scandal, that is, of a great number matter of the evils of our
marriage law, to take care of the pence and let the pounds take care of
themselves. The crimes and diseases of marriage will force themselves
on public attention by their own virulence. I mention them here only
because they reveal certain habits of thought and feeling with regard to
marriage of which we must rid ourselves if we are to act sensibly when
we take the necessary reforms in hand.




CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE

First among these is the habit of allowing ourselves to be bound not
only by the truths of the Christian religion but by the excesses and
extravagances which the Christian movement acquired in its earlier days
as a violent reaction against what it still calls paganism. By far the
most dangerous of these, because it is a blasphemy against life, and,
to put it in Christian terms, an accusation of indecency against God, is
the notion that sex, with all its operations, is in itself absolutely
an obscene thing, and that an immaculate conception is a miracle.
So unwholesome an absurdity could only have gained ground under two
conditions: one, a reaction against a society in which sensual luxury
had been carried to revolting extremes, and, two, a belief that the
world was coming to an end, and that therefore sex was no longer a
necessity. Christianity, because it began under these conditions,
made sexlessness and Communism the two main practical articles of its
propaganda; and it has never quite lost its original bias in these
directions. In spite of the putting off of the Second Coming from
the lifetime of the apostles to the millennium, and of the great
disappointment of the year 1000 A.D., in which multitudes of Christians
seriously prepared for the end of the world, the prophet who announces
that the end is at hand is still popular. Many of the people who
ridicule his demonstrations that the fantastic monsters of the book
of Revelation are among us in the persons of our own political
contemporaries, and who proceed sanely in all their affairs on the
assumption that the world is going to last, really do believe that there
will be a Judgment Day, and that it MIGHT even be in their own time.
A thunderstorm, an eclipse, or any very unusual weather will make them
apprehensive and uncomfortable.

This explains why, for a long time, the Christian Church refused to have
anything to do with marriage. The result was, not the abolition of sex,
but its excommunication. And, of course, the consequences of persuading
people that matrimony was an unholy state were so grossly carnal, that
the Church had to execute a complete right-about-face, and try to make
people understand that it was a holy state: so holy indeed that it could
not be validly inaugurated without the blessing of the Church. And by
this teaching it did something to atone for its earlier blasphemy. But
the mischief of chopping and changing your doctrine to meet this or that
practical emergency instead of keeping it adjusted to the whole scheme
of life, is that you end by having half-a-dozen contradictory doctrines
to suit half-a-dozen different emergencies. The Church solemnized and
sanctified marriage without ever giving up its original Pauline doctrine
on the subject. And it soon fell into another confusion. At the point at
which it took up marriage and endeavored to make it holy, marriage was,
as it still is, largely a survival of the custom of selling women to
men. Now in all trades a marked difference is made in price between
a new article and a second-hand one. The moment we meet with this
difference in value between human beings, we may know that we are in the
slave-market, where the conception of our relations to the persons sold
is neither religious nor natural nor human nor superhuman, but simply
commercial. The Church, when it finally gave its blessing to marriage,
did not, in its innocence, fathom these commercial traditions.
Consequently it tried to sanctify them too, with grotesque results. The
slave-dealer having always asked more money for virginity, the Church,
instead of detecting the money-changer and driving him out of the
temple, took him for a sentimental and chivalrous lover, and, helped by
its only half-discarded doctrine of celibacy, gave virginity a heavenly
value to ennoble its commercial pretensions. In short, Mammon, always
mighty, put the Church in his pocket, where he keeps it to this day,
in spite of the occasional saints and martyrs who contrive from time to
time to get their heads and souls free to testify against him.




DIVORCE A SACRAMENTAL DUTY

But Mammon overreached himself when he tried to impose his doctrine
of inalienable property on the Church under the guise of indissoluble
marriage. For the Church tried to shelter this inhuman doctrine and
flat contradiction of the gospel by claiming, and rightly claiming,
that marriage is a sacrament. So it is; but that is exactly what makes
divorce a duty when the marriage has lost the inward and spiritual grace
of which the marriage ceremony is the outward and visible sign. In vain
do bishops stoop to pick up the discarded arguments of the atheists of
fifty years ago by pleading that the words of Jesus were in an obscure
Aramaic dialect, and were probably misunderstood, as Jesus, they think,
could not have said anything a bishop would disapprove of. Unless they
are prepared to add that the statement that those who take the sacrament
with their lips but not with their hearts eat and drink their own
damnation is also a mistranslation from the Aramaic, they are most
solemnly bound to shield marriage from profanation, not merely by
permitting divorce, but by making it compulsory in certain cases as the
Chinese do.

When the great protest of the XVI century came, and the Church was
reformed in several countries, the Reformation was so largely
a rebellion against sacerdotalism that marriage was very nearly
excommunicated again: our modern civil marriage, round which so many
fierce controversies and political conflicts have raged, would have been
thoroughly approved of by Calvin, and hailed with relief by Luther. But
the instinctive doctrine that there is something holy and mystic in
sex, a doctrine which many of us now easily dissociate from any priestly
ceremony, but which in those days seemed to all who felt it to need a
ritual affirmation, could not be thrown on the scrap-heap with the sale
of Indulgences and the like; and so the Reformation left marriage where
it was: a curious mixture of commercial sex slavery, early Christian sex
abhorrence, and later Christian sex sanctification.




OTHELLO AND DESDEMONA

How strong was the feeling that a husband or a wife is an article of
property, greatly depreciated in value at second-hand, and not to be
used or touched by any person but the proprietor, may be learnt from
Shakespear. His most infatuated and passionate lovers are Antony and
Othello; yet both of them betray the commercial and proprietary
instinct the moment they lose their tempers. "I found you," says Antony,
reproaching Cleopatra, "as a morsel cold upon dead Caesar's trencher."
Othello's worst agony is the thought of "keeping a corner in the thing
he loves for others' uses." But this is not what a man feels about the
thing he loves, but about the thing he owns. I never understood the full
significance of Othello's outburst until I one day heard a lady, in
the course of a private discussion as to the feasibility of "group
marriage," say with cold disgust that she would as soon think of lending
her toothbrush to another woman as her husband. The sense of outraged
manhood with which I felt myself and all other husbands thus reduced to
the rank of a toilet appliance gave me a very unpleasant taste of what
Desdemona might have felt had she overheard Othello's outburst. I was so
dumfounded that I had not the presence of mind to ask the lady whether
she insisted on having a doctor, a nurse, a dentist, and even a priest
and solicitor all to herself as well. But I had too often heard men
speak of women as if they were mere personal conveniences to feel
surprised that exactly the same view is held, only more fastidiously, by
women.

All these views must be got rid of before we can have any healthy
public opinion (on which depends our having a healthy population) on
the subject of sex, and consequently of marriage. Whilst the subject is
considered shameful and sinful we shall have no systematic instruction
in sexual hygiene, because such lectures as are given in Germany,
France, and even prudish America (where the great Miltonic tradition
in this matter still lives) will be considered a corruption of that
youthful innocence which now subsists on nasty stories and whispered
traditions handed down from generation to generation of school-children:
stories and traditions which conceal nothing of sex but its dignity, its
honor, its sacredness, its rank as the first necessity of society and
the deepest concern of the nation. We shall continue to maintain the
White Slave Trade and protect its exploiters by, on the one hand,
tolerating the white slave as the necessary breakwater of marriage; and,
on the other, trampling on her and degrading her until she has nothing
to hope from our Courts; and so, with policemen at every corner, and law
triumphant all over Europe, she will still be smuggled and cattle-driven
from one end of the civilized world to the other, cheated, beaten,
bullied, and hunted into the streets to disgusting overwork, without
daring to utter the cry for help that brings, not rescue, but exposure
and infamy, yet revenging herself terribly in the end by scattering
blindness and sterility, pain and disfigurement, insanity and death
among us with the certainty that we are much too pious and genteel to
allow such things to be mentioned with a view to saving either her or
ourselves from them. And all the time we shall keep enthusiastically
investing her trade with every allurement that the art of the novelist,
the playwright, the dancer, the milliner, the painter, the limelight
man, and the sentimental poet can devize, after which we shall continue
to be very much shocked and surprised when the cry of the youth, of the
young wife, of the mother, of the infected nurse, and of all the other
victims, direct and indirect, arises with its invariable refrain: "Why
did nobody warn me?"




WHAT IS TO BECOME OF THE CHILDREN?

I must not reply flippantly, Make them all Wards in Chancery; yet that
would be enough to put any sensible person on the track of the reply.
One would think, to hear the way in which people sometimes ask the
question, that not only does marriage prevent the difficulty from ever
arising, but that nothing except divorce can ever raise it. It is true
that if you divorce the parents, the children have to be disposed
of. But if you hang the parents, or imprison the parents, or take the
children out of the custody of the parents because they hold Shelley's
opinions, or if the parents die, the same difficulty arises. And as
these things have happened again and again, and as we have had plenty of
experience of divorce decrees and separation orders, the attempt to
use children as an obstacle to divorce is hardly worth arguing with. We
shall deal with the children just as we should deal with them if their
homes were broken up by any other cause. There is a sense in which
children are a real obstacle to divorce: they give parents a common
interest which keeps together many a couple who, if childless, would
separate. The marriage law is superfluous in such cases. This is shewn
by the fact that the proportion of childless divorces is much larger
than the proportion of divorces from all causes. But it must not be
forgotten that the interest of the children forms one of the most
powerful arguments for divorce. An unhappy household is a bad nursery.
There is something to be said for the polygynous or polyandrous
household as a school for children: children really do suffer from
having too few parents: this is why uncles and aunts and tutors
and governesses are often so good for children. But it is just the
polygamous household which our marriage law allows to be broken up, and
which, as we have seen, is not possible as a typical institution in
a democratic country where the numbers of the sexes are about equal.
Therefore polygyny and polyandry as a means of educating children fall
to the ground, and with them, I think, must go the opinion which has
been expressed by Gladstone and others, that an extension of divorce,
whilst admitting many new grounds for it, might exclude the ground of
adultery. There are, however, clearly many things that make some of our
domestic interiors little private hells for children (especially
when the children are quite content in them) which would justify any
intelligent State in breaking up the home and giving the custody of the
children either to the parent whose conscience had revolted against the
corruption of the children, or to neither.

Which brings me to the point that divorce should no longer be confined
to cases in which one of the parties petitions for it. If, for instance,
you have a thoroughly rascally couple making a living by infamous means
and bringing up their children to their trade, the king's proctor,
instead of pursuing his present purely mischievous function of
preventing couples from being divorced by proving that they both desire
it, might very well intervene and divorce these children from
their parents. At present, if the Queen herself were to rescue some
unfortunate child from degradation and misery and place her in a
respectable home, and some unmentionable pair of blackguards claimed the
child and proved that they were its father and mother, the child
would be given to them in the name of the sanctity of the home and the
holiness of parentage, after perpetrating which crime the law would
calmly send an education officer to take the child out of the parents'
hands several hours a day in the still more sacred name of compulsory
education. (Of course what would really happen would be that the couple
would blackmail the Queen for their consent to the salvation of the
child, unless, indeed, a hint from a police inspector convinced them
that bad characters cannot always rely on pedantically constitutional
treatment when they come into conflict with persons in high station).

The truth is, not only must the bond between man and wife be made
subject to a reasonable consideration of the welfare of the parties
concerned and of the community, but the whole family bond as well. The
theory that the wife is the property of the husband or the husband of
the wife is not a whit less abhorrent and mischievous than the theory
that the child is the property of the parent. Parental bondage will go
the way of conjugal bondage: indeed the order of reform should rather
be put the other way about; for the helplessness of children has already
compelled the State to intervene between parent and child more than
between husband and wife. If you pay less than 40 pounds a year rent,
you will sometimes feel tempted to say to the vaccination officer, the
school attendance officer, and the sanitary inspector: "Is this child
mine or yours?" The answer is that as the child is a vital part of
the nation, the nation cannot afford to leave it at the irresponsible
disposal of any individual or couple of individuals as a mere small
parcel of private property. The only solid ground that the parent can
take is that as the State, in spite of its imposing name, can, when all
is said, do nothing with the child except place it in the charge of
some human being or another, the parent is no worse a custodian than a
stranger. And though this proposition may seem highly questionable at
first sight to those who imagine that only parents spoil children, yet
those who realize that children are as often spoilt by severity and
coldness as by indulgence, and that the notion that natural parents are
any worse than adopted parents is probably as complete an illusion as
the notion that they are any better, see no serious likelihood that
State action will detach children from their parents more than it does
at present: nay, it is even likely that the present system of taking
the children out of the parents' hands and having the parental duty
performed by officials, will, as poverty and ignorance become the
exception instead of the rule, give way to the system of simply
requiring certain results, beginning with the baby's weight and ending
perhaps with some sort of practical arts degree, but leaving parents and
children to achieve the results as they best may. Such freedom is, of
course, impossible in our present poverty-stricken circumstances. As
long as the masses of our people are too poor to be good parents or good
anything else except beasts of burden, it is no use requiring much more
from them but hewing of wood and drawing of water: whatever is to be
done must be done FOR them mostly, alas! by people whose superiority
is merely technical. Until we abolish poverty it is impossible to push
rational measures of any kind very far: the wolf at the door will compel
us to live in a state of siege and to do everything by a bureaucratic
martial law that would be quite unnecessary and indeed intolerable in a
prosperous community. But however we settle the question, we must make
the parent justify his custody of the child exactly as we should make
a stranger justify it. If a family is not achieving the purposes of a
family it should be dissolved just as a marriage should when it, too, is
not achieving the purposes of marriage. The notion that there is or
ever can be anything magical and inviolable in the legal relations of
domesticity, and the curious confusion of ideas which makes some of our
bishops imagine that in the phrase "Whom God hath joined," the word
God means the district registrar or the Reverend John Smith or William
Jones, must be got rid of. Means of breaking up undesirable families are
as necessary to the preservation of the family as means of dissolving
undesirable marriages are to the preservation of marriage. If our
domestic laws are kept so inhuman that they at last provoke a furious
general insurrection against them as they already provoke many private
ones, we shall in a very literal sense empty the baby out with the bath
by abolishing an institution which needs nothing more than a little
obvious and easy rationalizing to make it not only harmless but
comfortable, honorable, and useful.




THE COST OF DIVORCE

But please do not imagine that the evils of indissoluble marriage can
be cured by divorce laws administered on our present plan. The very
cheapest undefended divorce, even when conducted by a solicitor for its
own sake and that of humanity, costs at least 30 pounds out-of-pocket
expenses. To a client on business terms it costs about three times
as much. Until divorce is as cheap as marriage, marriage will remain
indissoluble for all except the handful of people to whom 100 pounds is
a procurable sum. For the enormous majority of us there is no difference
in this respect between a hundred and a quadrillion. Divorce is the one
thing you may not sue for in forma pauperis.

Let me, then, recommend as follows:

1. Make divorce as easy, as cheap, and as private as marriage.

2. Grant divorce at the request of either party, whether the other
consents or not; and admit no other ground than the request, which
should be made without stating any reasons.

3. Confine the power of dissolving marriage for misconduct to the
State acting on the petition of the king's proctor or other suitable
functionary, who may, however, be moved by either party to intervene in
ordinary request cases, not to prevent the divorce taking place, but to
enforce alimony if it be refused and the case is one which needs it.

4. Make it impossible for marriage to be used as a punishment as it
is at present. Send the husband and wife to penal servitude if you
disapprove of their conduct and want to punish them; but do not send
them back to perpetual wedlock.

5. If, on the other hand, you think a couple perfectly innocent and well
conducted, do not condemn them also to perpetual wedlock against their
wills, thereby making the treatment of what you consider innocence on
both sides the same as the treatment of what you consider guilt on both
sides.

6. Place the work of a wife and mother on the same footing as other
work: that is, on the footing of labor worthy of its hire; and provide
for unemployment in it exactly as for unemployment in shipbuilding or an
other recognized bread-winning trade.

7. And take and deal with all the consequences of these acts of justice
instead of letting yourself be frightened out of reason and good sense
by fear of consequences. We must finally adapt our institutions to human
nature. In the long run our present plan of trying to force human nature
into a mould of existing abuses, superstitions, and corrupt interests,
produces the explosive forces that wreck civilization.

8. Never forget that if you leave your law to judges and your religion
to bishops, you will presently find yourself without either law or
religion. If you doubt this, ask any decent judge or bishop. Do NOT ask
somebody who does not know what a judge is, or what a bishop is, or
what the law is, or what religion is. In other words, do not ask your
newspaper. Journalists are too poorly paid in this country to know
anything that is fit for publication.




CONCLUSIONS

To sum up, we have to depend on the solution of the problem of
unemployment, probably on the principles laid down in the Minority
Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, to make the sexual
relations between men and women decent and honorable by making women
economically independent of men, and (in the younger son section of the
upper classes) men economically independent of women. We also have to
bring ourselves into line with the rest of Protestant civilization by
providing means for dissolving all unhappy, improper, and inconvenient
marriages. And, as it is our cautious custom to lag behind the rest
of the world to see how their experiments in reform turn out before
venturing ourselves, and then take advantage of their experience to get
ahead of them, we should recognize that the ancient system of specifying
grounds for divorce, such as adultery, cruelty, drunkenness, felony,
insanity, vagrancy, neglect to provide for wife and children, desertion,
public defamation, violent temper, religious heterodoxy, contagious
disease, outrages, indignities, personal abuse, "mental anguish,"
conduct rendering life burdensome and so forth (all these are examples
from some code actually in force at present), is a mistake, because the
only effect of compelling people to plead and prove misconduct is that
cases are manufactured and clean linen purposely smirched and washed
in public, to the great distress and disgrace of innocent children
and relatives, whilst the grounds have at the same time to be made so
general that any sort of human conduct may be brought within them by a
little special pleading and a little mental reservation on the part of
witnesses examined on oath. When it conies to "conduct rendering life
burdensome," it is clear that no marriage is any longer indissoluble;
and the sensible thing to do then is to grant divorce whenever it is
desired, without asking why.




GETTING MARRIED

By Bernard Shaw

1908

_______________________________________________________________

N.B.--There is a point of some technical interest to be noted in this
play. The customary division into acts and scenes has been disused, and
a return made to unity of time and place, as observed in the ancient
Greek drama. In the foregoing tragedy, The Doctor's Dilemma, there are
five acts; the place is altered five times; and the time is spread over
an undetermined period of more than a year. No doubt the strain on the
attention of the audience and on the ingenuity of the playwright is
much less; but I find in practice that the Greek form is inevitable when
drama reaches a certain point in poetic and intellectual evolution.
Its adoption was not, on my part, a deliberate display of virtuosity
in form, but simply the spontaneous falling of a play of ideas into the
form most suitable to it, which turned out to be the classical form.
Getting Married, in several acts and scenes, with the time spread over a
long period, would be impossible.

_______________________________________________________________


On a fine morning in the spring of 1908 the Norman kitchen in the Palace
of the Bishop of Chelsea looks very spacious and clean and handsome and
healthy.

The Bishop is lucky enough to have a XII century palace. The palace
itself has been lucky enough to escape being carved up into XV century
Gothic, or shaved into XVIII century ashlar, or "restored" by a XIX
century builder and a Victorian architect with a deep sense of the
umbrella-like gentlemanliness of XIV century vaulting. The present
occupant, A. Chelsea, unofficially Alfred Bridgenorth, appreciates
Norman work. He has, by adroit complaints of the discomfort of the
place, induced the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to give him some money
to spend on it; and with this he has got rid of the wall papers, the
paint, the partitions, the exquisitely planed and moulded casings with
which the Victorian cabinetmakers enclosed and hid the huge black beams
of hewn oak, and of all other expedients of his predecessors to make
themselves feel at home and respectable in a Norman fortress. It is
a house built to last for ever. The walls and beams are big enough to
carry the tower of Babel, as if the builders, anticipating our modern
ideas and instinctively defying them, had resolved to show how much
material they could lavish on a house built for the glory of God,
instead of keeping a competitive eye on the advantage of sending in the
lowest tender, and scientifically calculating how little material would
be enough to prevent the whole affair from tumbling down by its own
weight.

The kitchen is the Bishop's favorite room. This is not at all because
he is a man of humble mind; but because the kitchen is one of the finest
rooms in the house. The Bishop has neither the income nor the appetite
to have his cooking done there. The windows, high up in the wall, look
north and south. The north window is the largest; and if we look into
the kitchen through it we see facing us the south wall with small Norman
windows and an open door near the corner to the left. Through this door
we have a glimpse of the garden, and of a garden chair in the sunshine.
In the right-hand corner is an entrance to a vaulted circular chamber
with a winding stair leading up through a tower to the upper floors of
the palace. In the wall to our right is the immense fireplace, with
its huge spit like a baby crane, and a collection of old iron and brass
instruments which pass as the original furniture of the fire, though
as a matter of fact they have been picked up from time to time by the
Bishop at secondhand shops. In the near end of the left hand wall
a small Norman door gives access to the Bishop's study, formerly a
scullery. Further along, a great oak chest stands against the wall.
Across the middle of the kitchen is a big timber table surrounded by
eleven stout rush-bottomed chairs: four on the far side, three on the
near side, and two at each end. There is a big chair with railed back
and sides on the hearth. On the floor is a drugget of thick fibre
matting. The only other piece of furniture is a clock with a wooden
dial about as large as the bottom of a washtub, the weights, chains, and
pendulum being of corresponding magnitude; but the Bishop has long since
abandoned the attempt to keep it going. It hangs above the oak chest.

The kitchen is occupied at present by the Bishop's lady, Mrs
Bridgenorth, who is talking to Mr William Collins, the greengrocer. He
is in evening dress, though it is early forenoon. Mrs Bridgenorth is a
quiet happy-looking woman of fifty or thereabouts, placid, gentle, and
humorous, with delicate features and fine grey hair with many white
threads. She is dressed as for some festivity; but she is taking things
easily as she sits in the big chair by the hearth, reading The Times.

Collins is an elderly man with a rather youthful waist. His muttonchop
whiskers have a coquettish touch of Dundreary at their lower ends. He is
an affable man, with those perfect manners which can be acquired only
in keeping a shop for the sale of necessaries of life to ladies whose
social position is so unquestionable that they are not anxious about
it. He is a reassuring man, with a vigilant grey eye, and the power of
saying anything he likes to you without offence, because his tone always
implies that he does it with your kind permission. Withal by no
means servile: rather gallant and compassionate, but never without a
conscientious recognition, on public grounds, of social distinctions. He
is at the oak chest counting a pile of napkins.

Mrs Bridgenorth reads placidly: Collins counts: a blackbird sings in
the garden. Mrs Bridgenorth puts The Times down in her lap and considers
Collins for a moment.


  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Do you never feel nervous on these occasions,
  Collins?

  COLLINS. Lord bless you, no, maam. It would be a joke, after
  marrying five of your daughters, if I was to get nervous over
  marrying the last of them.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. I have always said you were a wonderful man,
  Collins.

  COLLINS [almost blushing] Oh, maam!

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Yes. I never could arrange anything--a wedding
  or even dinner--without some hitch or other.

  COLLINS. Why should you give yourself the trouble, maam? Send for
  the greengrocer, maam: thats the secret of easy housekeeping.
  Bless you, it's his business. It pays him and you, let alone the
  pleasure in a house like this [Mrs Bridgenorth bows in
  acknowledgment of the compliment]. They joke about the
  greengrocer, just as they joke about the mother-in-law. But they
  cant get on without both.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. What a bond between us, Collins!

  COLLINS. Bless you, maam, theres all sorts of bonds between all
  sorts of people. You are a very affable lady, maam, for a
  Bishop's lady. I have known Bishop's ladies that would fairly
  provoke you to up and cheek them; but nobody would ever forget
  himself and his place with you, maam.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Collins: you are a flatterer. You will
  superintend the breakfast yourself as usual, of course, wont you?

  COLLINS. Yes, yes, bless you, maam, of course. I always do. Them
  fashionable caterers send down such people as I never did set
  eyes on. Dukes you would take them for. You see the relatives
  shaking hands with them and asking them about the family--
  actually ladies saying "Where have we met before?" and all sorts
  of confusion. Thats my secret in business, maam. You can always
  spot me as the greengrocer. It's a fortune to me in these days,
  when you cant hardly tell who any one is or isnt. [He goes out
  through the tower, and immediately returns for a moment to
  announce] The General, maam.

  Mrs Bridgenorth rises to receive her brother-in-law, who enters
  resplendent in full-dress uniform, with many medals and orders.
  General Bridgenorth is a well set up man of fifty, with large
  brave nostrils, an iron mouth, faithful dog's eyes, and much
  natural simplicity and dignity of character. He is ignorant,
  stupid, and prejudiced, having been carefully trained to be so;
  and it is not always possible to be patient with him when his
  unquestionably good intentions become actively mischievous; but
  one blames society, not himself, for this. He would be no worse a
  man than Collins, had he enjoyed Collins's social opportunities.
  He comes to the hearth, where Mrs Bridgenorth is standing with
  her back to the fireplace.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Good morning, Boxer. [They shake hands]. Another
  niece to give away. This is the last of them.

  THE GENERAL [very gloomy] Yes, Alice. Nothing for the old warrior
  uncle to do but give away brides to luckier men than himself.
  Has--[he chokes] has your sister come yet?

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Why do you always call Lesbia my sister? Dont
  you know that it annoys her more than any of the rest of your
  tricks?

  THE GENERAL. Tricks! Ha! Well, I'll try to break myself of it;
  but I think she might bear with me in a little thing like that.
  She knows that her name sticks in my throat. Better call her your
  sister than try to call her L-- [he almost breaks down] L-- well,
  call her by her name and make a fool of myself by crying. [He
  sits down at the near end of the table].

  MRS BRIDGENORTH [going to him and rallying him] Oh come, Boxer!
  Really, really! We are no longer boys and girls. You cant keep up
  a broken heart all your life. It must be nearly twenty years
  since she refused you. And you know that it's not because she
  dislikes you, but only that she's not a marrying woman.

  THE GENERAL. It's no use. I love her still. And I cant help
  telling her so whenever we meet, though I know it makes her avoid
  me. [He all but weeps].

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. What does she say when you tell her?

  THE GENERAL. Only that she wonders when I am going to grow out of
  it. I know now that I shall never grow out of it.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Perhaps you would if you married her. I
  believe youre better as you are, Boxer.

  THE GENERAL. I'm a miserable man. I'm really sorry to be a
  ridiculous old bore, Alice; but when I come to this house for a
  wedding--to these scenes--to--to recollections of the past--
  always to give the bride to somebody else, and never to have my
  bride given to me--[he rises abruptly] May I go into the garden
  and smoke it off?

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Do, Boxer.

  Collins returns with the wedding cake.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Oh, heres the cake. I believe it's the same one
  we had for Florence's wedding.

  THE GENERAL. I cant bear it [he hurries out through the garden
  door].

  COLLINS [putting the cake on the table] Well, look at that,
  maam! Aint it odd that after all the weddings he's given away at,
  the General cant stand the sight of a wedding cake yet. It always
  seems to give him the same shock.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Well, it's his last shock. You have married the
  whole family now, Collins. [She takes up The Times again and
  resumes her seat].

  COLLINS. Except your sister, maam. A fine character of a lady,
  maam, is Miss Grantham. I have an ambition to arrange her wedding
  breakfast.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. She wont marry, Collins.

  COLLINS. Bless you, maam, they all say that. You and me said it,
  I'll lay. I did, anyhow.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. No: marriage came natural to me. I should have
  thought it did to you too.

  COLLINS [pensive] No, maam: it didnt come natural. My wife had to
  break me into it. It came natural to her: she's what you might
  call a regular old hen. Always wants to have her family within
  sight of her. Wouldnt go to bed unless she knew they was all safe
  at home and the door locked, and the lights out. Always wants her
  luggage in the carriage with her. Always goes and makes the
  engine driver promise her to be careful. She's a born wife and
  mother, maam. Thats why my children all ran away from home.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Did you ever feel inclined to run away, Collins?

  COLLINS. Oh yes, maam, yes: very often. But when it came to the
  point I couldnt bear to hurt her feelings. Shes a sensitive,
  affectionate, anxious soul; and she was never brought up to know
  what freedom is to some people. You see, family life is all the
  life she knows: she's like a bird born in a cage, that would die
  if you let it loose in the woods. When I thought how little it
  was to a man of my easy temper to put up with her, and how deep
  it would hurt her to think it was because I didnt care for her, I
  always put off running away till next time; and so in the end I
  never ran away at all. I daresay it was good for me to be took
  such care of; but it cut me off from all my old friends something
  dreadful, maam: especially the women, maam. She never gave them a
  chance: she didnt indeed. She never understood that married
  people should take holidays from one another if they are to keep
  at all fresh. Not that I ever got tired of her, maam; but my! how
  I used to get tired of home life sometimes. I used to catch
  myself envying my brother George: I positively did, maam.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. George was a bachelor then, I suppose?

  COLLINS. Bless you, no, maam. He married a very fine figure of a
  woman; but she was that changeable and what you might call
  susceptible, you would not believe. She didnt seem to have any
  control over herself when she fell in love. She would mope for a
  couple of days, crying about nothing; and then she would up and
  say--no matter who was there to hear her--"I must go to him,
  George"; and away she would go from her home and her husband
  without with-your-leave or by-your-leave.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. But do you mean that she did this more than
  once? That she came back?

  COLLINS. Bless you, maam, she done it five times to my own
  knowledge; and then George gave up telling us about it, he got so
  used to it.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. But did he always take her back?

  COLLINS. Well, what could he do, maam? Three times out of four
  the men would bring her back the same evening and no harm done.
  Other times theyd run away from her. What could any man with a
  heart do but comfort her when she came back crying at the way
  they dodged her when she threw herself at their heads, pretending
  they was too noble to accept the sacrifice she was making. George
  told her again and again that if she'd only stay at home and hold
  off a bit theyd be at her feet all day long. She got sensible at
  last and took his advice. George always liked change of company.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. What an odious woman, Collins! Dont you think
  so?

  COLLINS [judicially] Well, many ladies with a domestic turn
  thought so and said so, maam. But I will say for Mrs George that
  the variety of experience made her wonderful interesting. Thats
  where the flighty ones score off the steady ones, maam. Look at
  my old woman! She's never known any man but me; and she cant
  properly know me, because she dont know other men to compare me
  with. Of course she knows her parents in--well, in the way one
  does know one's parents not knowing half their lives as you might
  say, or ever thinking that they was ever young; and she knew her
  children as children, and never thought of them as independent
  human beings till they ran away and nigh broke her heart for a
  week or two. But Mrs George she came to know a lot about men of
  all sorts and ages; for the older she got the younger she liked
  em; and it certainly made her interesting, and gave her a lot of
  sense. I have often taken her advice on things when my own poor
  old woman wouldnt have been a bit of use to me.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. I hope you dont tell your wife that you go
  elsewhere for advice.

  COLLINS. Lord bless you, maam, I'm that fond of my old Matilda
  that I never tell her anything at all for fear of hurting her
  feelings. You see, she's such an out-and-out wife and mother that
  she's hardly a responsible human being out of her house, except
  when she's marketing.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Does she approve of Mrs George?

  COLLINS. Oh, Mrs George gets round her. Mrs George can get round
  anybody if she wants to. And then Mrs George is very particular
  about religion. And shes a clairvoyant.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH [surprised] A clairvoyant!

  COLLINS [calm] Oh yes, maam, yes. All you have to do is to
  mesmerize her a bit; and off she goes into a trance, and says the
  most wonderful things! not things about herself, but as if it was
  the whole human race giving you a bit of its mind. Oh, wonderful,
  maam, I assure you. You couldnt think of a game that Mrs George
  isnt up to.

  Lesbia Grantham comes in through the tower. She is a tall,
  handsome, slender lady in her prime; that is, between 36 and 55.
  She has what is called a well-bred air, dressing very carefully
  to produce that effect without the least regard for the latest
  fashions, sure of herself, very terrifying to the young and shy,
  fastidious to the ends of her long finger-tips, and tolerant and
  amused rather than sympathetic.

  LESBIA. Good morning, dear big sister.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Good morning, dear little sister. [They kiss].

  LESBIA. Good morning, Collins. How well you are looking! And how
  young! [She turns the middle chair away from the table and sits
  down].

  COLLINS. Thats only my professional habit at a wedding, Miss. You
  should see me at a political dinner. I look nigh seventy.
  [Looking at his watch] Time's getting along, maam. May I send up
  word from you to Miss Edith to hurry a bit with her dressing?

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Do, Collins.

  Collins goes out through the tower, taking the cake with him.

  LESBIA. Dear old Collins! Has he told you any stories this
  morning?

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Yes. You were just late for a particularly
  thrilling invention of his.

  LESBIA. About Mrs George?

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Yes. He says she's a clairvoyant.

  LESBIA. I wonder whether he really invented George, or stole her
  out of some book.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. I wonder!

  LESBIA. Wheres the Barmecide?

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. In the study, working away at his new book. He
  thinks no more now of having a daughter married than of having an
  egg for breakfast.

  The General, soothed by smoking, comes in from the garden.

  THE GENERAL [with resolute bonhomie] Ah, Lesbia!

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. How do you do? [They shake hands; and he takes
  the chair on her right].

  Mrs Bridgenorth goes out through the tower.

  LESBIA. How are you, Boxer? You look almost as gorgeous as the
  wedding cake.

  THE GENERAL. I make a point of appearing in uniform whenever I
  take part in any ceremony, as a lesson to the subalterns. It is
  not the custom in England; but it ought to be.

  LESBIA. You look very fine, Boxer. What a frightful lot of
  bravery all these medals must represent!

  THE GENERAL. No, Lesbia. They represent despair and cowardice. I
  won all the early ones by trying to get killed. You know why.

  LESBIA. But you had a charmed life?

  THE GENERAL. Yes, a charmed life. Bayonets bent on my buckles.
  Bullets passed through me and left no trace: thats the worst of
  modern bullets: Ive never been hit by a dum-dum. When I was only
  a company officer I had at least the right to expose myself to
  death in the field. Now I'm a General even that resource is cut
  off. [Persuasively drawing his chair nearer to her] Listen to me,
  Lesbia. For the tenth and last time--

  LESBIA [interrupting] On Florence's wedding morning, two years
  ago, you said "For the ninth and last time."

  THE GENERAL. We are two years older, Lesbia. I'm fifty: you
  are--

  LESBIA. Yes, I know. It's no use, Boxer. When will you be old
  enough to take no for an answer?

  THE GENERAL. Never, Lesbia, never. You have never given me a real
  reason for refusing me yet. I once thought it was somebody else.
  There were lots of fellows after you; but now theyve all given it
  up and married. [Bending still nearer to her] Lesbia: tell me
  your secret. Why--

  LESBIA [sniffing disgustedly] Oh! Youve been smoking. [She rises
  and goes to the chair on the hearth] Keep away, you wretch.

  THE GENERAL. But for that pipe, I could not have faced you
  without breaking down. It has soothed me and nerved me.

  LESBIA [sitting down with The Times in her hand] Well, it has
  nerved me to tell you why I'm going to be an old maid.

  THE GENERAL [impulsively approaching her] Dont say that, Lesbia.
  It's not natural: it's not right: it's--

  LESBIA. [fanning him off] No: no closer, Boxer, please. [He
  retreats, discouraged]. It may not be natural; but it happens all
  the time. Youll find plenty of women like me, if you care to look
  for them: women with lots of character and good looks and money
  and offers, who wont and dont get married. Cant you guess why?

  THE GENERAL. I can understand when there is another.

  LESBIA. Yes; but there isnt another. Besides, do you suppose I
  think, at my time of life, that the difference between one decent
  sort of man and another is worth bothering about?

  THE GENERAL. The heart has its preferences, Lesbia. One image,
  and one only, gets indelibly--

  LESBIA. Yes. Excuse my interrupting you so often; but your
  sentiments are so correct that I always know what you are going
  to say before you finish. You see, Boxer, everybody is not like
  you. You are a sentimental noodle: you dont see women as they
  really are. You dont see me as I really am. Now I do see men as
  they really are. I see you as you really are.

  THE GENERAL [murmuring] No: dont say that, Lesbia.

  LESBIA. I'm a regular old maid. I'm very particular about my
  belongings. I like to have my own house, and to have it to
  myself. I have a very keen sense of beauty and fitness and
  cleanliness and order. I am proud of my independence and jealous
  for it. I have a sufficiently well-stocked mind to be very good
  company for myself if I have plenty of books and music. The one
  thing I never could stand is a great lout of a man smoking all
  over my house and going to sleep in his chair after dinner, and
  untidying everything. Ugh!

  THE GENERAL. But love--

  LESBIA. Ob, love! Have you no imagination? Do you think I have
  never been in love with wonderful men? heroes! archangels!
  princes! sages! even fascinating rascals! and had the strangest
  adventures with them? Do you know what it is to look at a mere
  real man after that? a man with his boots in every corner, and
  the smell of his tobacco in every curtain?

  THE GENERAL [somewhat dazed] Well but--excuse my mentioning
  it--dont you want children?

  LESBIA. I ought to have children. I should be a good mother to
  children. I believe it would pay the country very well to pay me
  very well to have children. But the country tells me that I cant
  have a child in my house without a man in it too; so I tell the
  country that it will have to do without my children. If I am to
  be a mother, I really cannot have a man bothering me to be a wife
  at the same time.

  THE GENERAL. My dear Lesbia: you know I dont wish to be
  impertinent; but these are not the correct views for an English
  lady to express.

  LESBIA. That is why I dont express them, except to gentlemen who
  wont take any other answer. The difficulty, you see, is that I
  really am an English lady, and am particularly proud of being
  one.

  THE GENERAL. I'm sure of that, Lesbia: quite sure of it. I never
  meant--

  LESBIA [rising impatiently] Oh, my dear Boxer, do please try to
  think of something else than whether you have offended me, and
  whether you are doing the correct thing as an English gentleman.
  You are faultless, and very dull. [She shakes her shoulders
  intolerantly and walks across to the other side of the kitchen].

  THE GENERAL [moodily] Ha! thats whats the matter with me. Not
  clever. A poor silly soldier man.

  LESBIA. The whole matter is very simple. As I say, I am an
  English lady, by which I mean that I have been trained to do
  without what I cant have on honorable terms, no matter what it
  is.

  THE GENERAL. I really dont understand you, Lesbia.

  LESBIA [turning on him] Then why on earth do you want to marry a
  woman you dont understand?

  THE GENERAL. I dont know. I suppose I love you.

  LESBIA. Well, Boxer, you can love me as much as you like,
  provided you look happy about it and dont bore me. But you cant
  marry me; and thats all about it.

  THE GENERAL. It's so frightfully difficult to argue the matter
  fairly with you without wounding your delicacy by overstepping
  the bounds of good taste. But surely there are calls of nature--
  LESBIA. Dont be ridiculous, Boxer.

  THE GENERAL. Well, how am I to express it? Hang it all, Lesbia,
  dont you want a husband?

  LESBIA. No. I want children; and I want to devote myself entirely
  to my children, and not to their father. The law will not allow
  me to do that; so I have made up my mind to have neither husband
  nor children.

  THE GENERAL. But, great Heavens, the natural appetites--

  LESBIA. As I said before, an English lady is not the slave of her
  appetites. That is what an English gentleman seems incapable of
  understanding. [She sits down at the end of the table, near the
  study door].

  THE GENERAL [huffily] Oh well, if you refuse, you refuse. I shall
  not ask you again. I'm sorry I returned to the subject. [He
  retires to the hearth and plants himself there, wounded and
  lofty].

  LESBIA. Dont be cross, Boxer.

  THE GENERAL. I'm not cross, only wounded, Lesbia. And when you
  talk like that, I dont feel convinced: I only feel utterly at a
  loss.

  LESBIA. Well, you know our family rule. When at a loss consult
  the greengrocer. [Opportunely Collins comes in through the
  tower]. Here he is.

  COLLINS. Sorry to be so much in and out, Miss. I thought Mrs
  Bridgenorth was here. The table is ready now for the breakfast,
  if she would like to see it.

  LESBIA. If you are satisfied, Collins, I am sure she will be.

  THE GENERAL. By the way, Collins: I thought theyd made you an
  alderman.

  COLLINS. So they have, General.

  THE GENERAL. Then wheres your gown?

  COLLINS. I dont wear it in private life, General.

  THE GENERAL. Why? Are you ashamed of it?

  COLLINS. No, General. To tell you the truth, I take a pride in
  it. I cant help it.

  THE GENERAL. Attention, Collins. Come here. [Collins comes to
  him]. Do you see my uniform--all my medals?

  COLLINS. Yes, General. They strike the eye, as it were.

  THE GENERAL. They are meant to. Very well. Now you know, dont
  you, that your services to the community as a greengrocer are as
  important and as dignified as mine as a soldier?

  COLLINS. I'm sure it's very honorable of you to say so, General.

  THE GENERAL [emphatically] You know also, dont you, that any man
  who can see anything ridiculous, or unmanly, or unbecoming in
  your work or in your civic robes is not a gentleman, but a
  jumping, bounding, snorting cad?

  COLLINS. Well, strictly between ourselves, that is my opinion,
  General.

  THE GENERAL. Then why not dignify my niece's wedding by wearing
  your robes?

  COLLINS. A bargain's a bargain, General. Mrs Bridgenorth sent for
  the greengrocer, not for the alderman. It's just as unpleasant to
  get more than you bargain for as to get less.

  THE GENERAL. I'm sure she will agree with me. I attach importance
  to this as an affirmation of solidarity in the service of the
  community. The Bishop's apron, my uniform, your robes: the
  Church, the Army, and the Municipality.

  COLLINS [retiring] Very well, General. [He turns dubiously to
  Lesbia on his way to the tower]. I wonder what my wife will say,
  Miss?

  THE GENERAL. What! Is your, wife ashamed of your robes?

  COLLINS. No, sir, not ashamed of them. But she grudged the money
  for them; and she will be afraid of my sleeves getting into the
  gravy.

  Mrs Bridgenorth, her placidity quite upset, comes in with a
  letter; hurries past Collins; and comes between Lesbia and the
  General.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Lesbia: Boxer: heres a pretty mess!

  Collins goes out discreetly.

  THE GENERAL. Whats the matter?

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Reginald's in London, and wants to come to the
  wedding.

  THE GENERAL [stupended] Well, dash my buttons!

  LESBIA. Oh, all right, let him come.

  THE GENERAL. Let him come! Why, the decree has not been made
  absolute yet. Is he to walk in here to Edith's wedding, reeking
  from the Divorce Court?

  MRS BRIDGENORTH [vexedly sitting down in the middle chair] It's
  too bad. No: I cant forgive him, Lesbia, really. A man of
  Reginald's age, with a young wife--the best of girls, and as
  pretty as she can be--to go off with a common woman from the
  streets! Ugh!

  LESBIA. You must make allowances. What can you expect? Reginald
  was always weak. He was brought up to be weak. The family
  property was all mortgaged when he inherited it. He had to
  struggle along in constant money difficulties, hustled by his
  solicitors, morally bullied by the Barmecide, and physically
  bullied by Boxer, while they two were fighting their own way and
  getting well trained. You know very well he couldnt afford to
  marry until the mortgages were cleared and he was over fifty. And
  then of course he made a fool of himself marrying a child like
  Leo.

  THE GENERAL. But to hit her! Absolutely to hit her! He knocked
  her down--knocked her flat down on a flowerbed in the presence of
  his gardener. He! the head of the family! the man that stands
  before the Barmecide and myself as Bridgenorth of Bridgenorth! to
  beat his wife and go off with a low woman and be divorced for it
  in the face of all England! in the face of my uniform and
  Alfred's apron! I can never forget what I felt: it was only the
  King's personal request--virtually a command--that stopped me
  from resigning my commission. I'd cut Reginald dead if I met him
  in the street.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Besides, Leo's coming. Theyd meet. It's
  impossible, Lesbia.

  LESBIA. Oh, I forgot that. That settles it. He mustnt come.

  THE GENERAL. Of course he mustnt. You tell him that if he enters
  this house, I'll leave it; and so will every decent man and woman
  in it.

  COLLINS [returning for a moment to announce] Mr Reginald, maam.
  [He withdraws when Reginald enters].

  THE GENERAL [beside himself] Well, dash my buttons!!

  Reginald is just the man Lesbia has described. He is hardened and
  tough physically, and hasty and boyish in his manner and speech,
  belonging as he does to the large class of English gentlemen of
  property (solicitor-managed) who have never developed
  intellectually since their schooldays. He is a muddled,
  rebellious, hasty, untidy, forgetful, always late sort of man,
  who very evidently needs the care of a capable woman, and has
  never been lucky or attractive enough to get it. All the same, a
  likeable man, from whom nobody apprehends any malice nor expects
  any achievement. In everything but years he is younger than his
  brother the General.

  REGINALD [coming forward between the General and Mrs Bridgenorth]
  Alice: it's no use. I cant stay away from Edith's wedding. Good
  morning, Lesbia. How are you, Boxer? [He offers the General his
  hand].

  THE GENERAL [with crushing stiffness] I was just telling Alice,
  sir, that if you entered this house, I should leave it.

  REGINALD. Well, dont let me detain you, old chap. When you start
  calling people Sir, youre not particularly good company.

  LESBIA. Dont you begin to quarrel. That wont improve the
  situation.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. I think you might have waited until you got my
  answer, Rejjy.

  REGINALD. It's so jolly easy to say No in a letter. Wont you let
  me stay?

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. How can I? Leo's coming.

  REGINALD. Well, she wont mind.

  THE GENERAL. Wont mind!!!!

  LESBIA. Dont talk nonsense, Rejjy; and be off with you.

  THE GENERAL [with biting sarcasm] At school you lead a theory
  that women liked being knocked down, I remember.

  REGINALD. Youre a nice, chivalrous, brotherly sort of swine, you
  are.

  THE GENERAL. Mr Bridgenorth: are you going to leave this house or
  am I?

  REGINALD. You are, I hope. [He emphasizes his intention to stay
  by sitting down].

  THE GENERAL. Alice: will you allow me to be driven from Edith's
  wedding by this--

  LESBIA [warningly] Boxer!

  THE GENERAL. --by this Respondent? Is Edith to be given away by
  him?

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Certainly not. Reginald: you were not asked to
  come; and I have asked you to go. You know how fond I am of Leo;
  and you know what she would feel if she came in and found you
  here.

  COLLINS [again appearing in the tower] Mrs Reginald, maam.

  LESBIA            {No, no. Ask her to--   } [All three
  MRS BRIDGENORTH   {Oh,  how unfortunate!  } clamoring
  THE GENERAL       {Well, dash my buttons! } together].

  It is too late: Leo is already in the kitchen. Collins goes out,
  mutely abandoning a situation which he deplores but has been
  unable to save.

  Leo is very pretty, very youthful, very restless, and
  consequently very charming to people who are touched by youth and
  beauty, as well as to those who regard young women as more or
  less appetizing lollipops, and dont regard old women at all.
  Coldly studied, Leo's restlessness is much less lovable than the
  kittenishness which comes from a rich and fresh vitality. She is
  a born fusser about herself and everybody else for whom she feels
  responsible; and her vanity causes her to exaggerate her
  responsibilities officiously. All her fussing is about little
  things; but she often calls them by big names, such as Art, the
  Divine Spark, the world, motherhood, good breeding, the Universe,
  the Creator, or anything else that happens to strike her
  imagination as sounding intellectually important. She has more
  than common imagination and no more than common conception and
  penetration; so that she is always on the high horse about words
  and always in the perambulator about things. Considering herself
  clever, thoughtful, and superior to ordinary weaknesses and
  prejudices, she recklessly attaches herself to clever men on that
  understanding, with the result that they are first delighted,
  then exasperated, and finally bored. When marrying Reginald she
  told her friends that there was a great deal in him which needed
  bringing out. If she were a middle-aged man she would be the
  terror of his club. Being a pretty young woman, she is forgiven
  everything, proving that "Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner"
  is an error, the fact being that the secret of forgiving
  everything is to understand nothing.

  She runs in fussily, full of her own importance, and swoops on
  Lesbia, who is much less disposed to spoil her than Mrs
  Bridgenorth is. But Leo affects a special intimacy with Lesbia,
  as of two thinkers among the Philistines.

  LEO [to Lesbia, kissing her] Good morning. [Coming to Mrs
  Bridgenorth] How do, Alice? [Passing on towards the hearth] Why
  so gloomy, General? [Reginald rises between her and the General]
  Oh, Rejjy! What will the King's Proctor say?

  REGINALD. Damn the King's Proctor!

  LEO. Naughty. Well, I suppose I must kiss you; but dont any of
  you tell. [She kisses him. They can hardly believe their eyes].
  Have you kept all your promises?

  REGINALD. Oh, dont begin bothering about those--

  LEO [insisting] Have? You? Kept? Your? Promises? Have you rubbed
  your head with the lotion every night?

  REGINALD. Yes, yes. Nearly every night.

  LEO. Nearly! I know what that means. Have you worn your liver
  pad?

  THE GENERAL [solemnly] Leo: forgiveness is one of the most
  beautiful traits in a woman's nature; but there are things that
  should not be forgiven to a man. When a man knocks a woman down
  [Leo gives a little shriek of laughter and collapses on a chair
  next Mrs Bridgenorth, on her left]

  REGINALD [sardonically] The man that would raise his hand to a
  woman, save in the way of a kindness, is unworthy the name of
  Bridgenorth. [He sits down at the end of the table nearest the
  hearth].

  THE GENERAL [much huffed] Oh, well, if Leo does not mind, of
  course I have no more to say. But I think you might, out of
  consideration for the family, beat your wife in private and not
  in the presence of the gardener.

  REGINALD [out of patience] Whats the good of beating your wife
  unless theres a witness to prove it afterwards? You dont suppose
  a man beats his wife for the fun of it, do you? How could she
  have got her divorce if I hadnt beaten her? Nice state of things,
  that!

  THE GENERAL [gasping] Do you mean to tell me that you did it in
  cold blood? simply to get rid of your wife?

  REGINALD. No, I didn't: I did it to get her rid of me. What would
  you do if you were fool enough to marry a woman thirty years
  younger than yourself, and then found that she didnt care for
  you, and was in love with a young fellow with a face like a
  mushroom.

  LEO. He has not. [Bursting into tears] And you are most unkind to
  say I didnt care for you. Nobody could have been fonder of you.

  REGINALD. A nice way of shewing your fondness! I had to go out
  and dig that flower bed all over with my own hands to soften it.
  I had to pick all the stones out of it. And then she complained
  that I hadnt done it properly, because she got a worm down her
  neck. I had to go to Brighton with a poor creature who took a
  fancy to me on the way down, and got conscientious scruples about
  committing perjury after dinner. I had to put her down in the
  hotel book as Mrs Reginald Bridgenorth: Leo's name! Do you know
  what that feels like to a decent man? Do you know what a decent
  man feels about his wife's name? How would you like to go into a
  hotel before all the waiters and people with--with that on your
  arm? Not that it was the poor girl's fault, of course; only she
  started crying because I couldnt stand her touching me; and now
  she keeps writing to me. And then I'm held up in the public court
  for cruelty and adultery, and turned away from Edith's wedding by
  Alice, and lectured by you! a bachelor, and a precious green one
  at that. What do you know about it?

  THE GENERAL. Am I to understand that the whole case was one of
  collusion?

  REGINALD. Of course it was. Half the cases are collusions: what
  are people to do? [The General, passing his hand dazedly over his
  bewildered brow, sinks into the railed chair]. And what do you
  take me for, that you should have the cheek to pretend to believe
  all that rot about my knocking Leo about and leaving her for--for
  a--a-- Ugh! you should have seen her.

  THE GENERAL. This is perfectly astonishing to me. Why did you do
  it? Why did Leo allow it?

  REGINALD. Youd better ask her.

  LEO [still in tears] I'm sure I never thought it would be so
  horrid for Rejjy. I offered honorably to do it myself, and let
  him divorce me; but he wouldnt. And he said himself that it was
  the only way to do it--that it was the law that he should do it
  that way. I never saw that hateful creature until that day in
  Court. If he had only shewn her to me before, I should never have
  allowed it.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. You did all this for Leo's sake, Rejjy?

  REGINALD [with an unbearable sense of injury] I shouldnt mind a
  bit if it were for Leo's sake. But to have to do it to make room
  for that mushroom-faced serpent--!

  THE GENERAL [jumping up] What right had he to be made room for?
  Are you in your senses? What right?

  REGINALD. The right of being a young man, suitable to a young
  woman. I had no right at my age to marry Leo: she knew no more
  about life than a child.

  LEO. I knew a great deal more about it than a great baby like
  you. I'm sure I dont know how youll get on with no one to take
  care of you: I often lie awake at night thinking about it. And
  now youve made me thoroughly miserable.

  REGINALD. Serve you right! [She weeps]. There: dont get into a
  tantrum, Leo.

  LESBIA. May one ask who is the mushroom-faced serpent?

  LEO. He isnt.

  REGINALD. Sinjon Hotchkiss, of course.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Sinjon Hotchkiss! Why, he's coming to the
  wedding!

  REGINALD. What! In that case I'm off [he makes for the tower].

  LEO          }                 { [seizing him] No you shant.
                                   You promised to be nice to
                   (all four       him.
  THE GENERAL  }    rushing      { No, dont go, old chap. Not
                    after him      from Edith's wedding.
                    and capturing
                    him on the
  MRS. BRIDGE-      threshold)
  NORTH        }                 { Oh, do stay, Benjjy. I shall
                                   really be hurt if you desert
                                   us.
  LESBIA       }                 { Better stay, Reginald. You must
                                   meet him sooner or later.


  REGINALD. A moment ago, when I wanted to stay, you were all
  shoving me out of the house. Now that I want to go, you wont let
  me.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. I shall send a note to Mr Hotchkiss not to come.

  LEO [weeping again] Oh, Alice! [She comes back to her chair,
  heartbroken].

  REGINALD [out of patience] Oh well, let her have her way. Let her
  have her mushroom. Let him come. Let them all come.

  He crosses the kitchen to the oak chest and sits sulkily on it.
  Mrs Bridgenorth shrugs her shoulders and sits at the table in
  Reginald's neighborhood listening in placid helplessness. Lesbia,
  out of patience with Leo's tears, goes into the garden and sits
  there near the door, snuffing up the open air in her relief from
  the domestic stuffness of Reginald's affairs.

  LEO. It's so cruel of you to go on pretending that I dont care
  for you, Rejjy.

  REGINALD [bitterly] She explained to me that it was only that she
  had exhausted my conversation.

  THE GENERAL [coming paternally to Leo] My dear girl: all the
  conversation in the world has been exhausted long ago. Heaven
  knows I have exhausted the conversation of the British Army these
  thirty years; but I dont leave it on that account.

  LEO. It's not that Ive exhausted it; but he will keep on
  repeating it when I want to read or go to sleep. And Sinjon
  amuses me. He's so clever.

  THE GENERAL [stung] Ha! The old complaint. You all want geniuses
  to marry. This demand for clever men is ridiculous. Somebody must
  marry the plain, honest, stupid fellows. Have you thought of
  that?

  LEO. But there are such lots of stupid women to marry. Why do
  they want to marry us? Besides, Rejjy knows that I'm quite fond
  of him. I like him because he wants me; and I like Sinjon because
  I want him. I feel that I have a duty to Rejjy.

  THE GENERAL. Precisely: you have.

  LEO. And, of course, Sinjon has the same duty to me.

  THE GENERAL. Tut, tut!

  LEO. Oh, how silly the law is! Why cant I marry them both?

  THE GENERAL [shocked] Leo!

  LEO. Well, I love them both. I should like to marry a lot of men.
  I should like to have Rejjy for every day, and Sinjon for
  concerts and theatres and going out in the evenings, and some
  great austere saint for about once a year at the end of the
  season, and some perfectly blithering idiot of a boy to be quite
  wicked with. I so seldom feel wicked; and, when I do, it's such a
  pity to waste it merely because it's too silly to confess to a
  real grown-up man.

  REGINALD. This is the kind of thing, you know [Helplessly] Well,
  there it is!

  THE GENERAL [decisively] Alice: this is a job for the Barmecide.
  He's a Bishop: it's his duty to talk to Leo. I can stand a good
  deal; but when it comes to flat polygamy and polyandry, we ought
  to do something.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH [going to the study door] Do come here a moment,
  Alfred. We're in a difficulty.

  THE BISHOP [within] Ask Collins, I'm busy.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Collins wont do. It's something very serious. Do
  come just a moment, dear. [When she hears him coming she takes a
  chair at the nearest end of the table].

  The Bishop comes out of his study. He is still a slim active man,
  spare of flesh, and younger by temperament than his brothers. He
  has a delicate skin, fine hands, a salient nose with chin to
  match, a short beard which accentuates his sharp chin by
  bristling forward, clever humorous eyes, not without a glint of
  mischief in them, ready bright speech, and the ways of a
  successful man who is always interested in himself and generally
  rather well pleased with himself. When Lesbia hears his voice she
  turns her chair towards him, and presently rises and stands in
  the doorway listening to the conversation.

  THE BISHOP [going to Leo] Good morning, my dear. Hullo! Youve
  brought Reginald with you. Thats very nice of you. Have you
  reconciled them, Boxer?

  THE GENERAL. Reconciled them! Why, man, the whole divorce was a
  put-up job. She wants to marry some fellow named Hotchkiss.

  REGINALD. A fellow with a face like--

  LEO. You shant, Rejjy. He has a very fine face.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. And now she says she wants to marry both of
  them, and a lot of other people as well.

  LEO. I didnt say I wanted to marry them: I only said I should
  like to marry them.

  THE BISHOP. Quite a nice distinction, Leo.

  LEO. Just occasionally, you know.

  THE BISHOP [sitting down cosily beside her] Quite so. Sometimes a
  poet, sometimes a Bishop, sometimes a fairy prince, sometimes
  somebody quite indescribable, and sometimes nobody at all.

  LEO. Yes: thats just it. How did you know?

  THE BISHOP. Oh, I should say most imaginative and cultivated
  young women feel like that. I wouldnt give a rap for one who
  didnt. Shakespear pointed out long ago that a woman wanted a
  Sunday husband as well as a weekday one. But, as usual, he didnt
  follow up the idea.

  THE GENERAL [aghast] Am I to understand--

  THE BISHOP [cutting him short] Now, Boxer, am I the Bishop or are
  you?

  THE GENERAL [sulkily] You.

  THE BISHOP. Then dont ask me are you to understand. "Yours not to
  reason why: yours but to do and die"--

  THE GENERAL. Oh, very well: go on. I'm not clever. Only a silly
  soldier man. Ha! Go on. [He throws himself into the railed chair,
  as one prepared for the worst].

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Alfred: dont tease Boxer.

  THE BISHOP. If we are going to discuss ethical questions we must
  begin by giving the devil fair play. Boxer never does. England
  never does. We always assume that the devil is guilty; and we
  wont allow him to prove his innocence, because it would be
  against public morals if he succeeded. We used to do the same
  with prisoners accused of high treason. And the consequence is
  that we overreach ourselves; and the devil gets the better of us
  after all. Perhaps thats what most of us intend him to do.

  THE GENERAL. Alfred: we asked you here to preach to Leo. You are
  preaching at me instead. I am not conscious of having said or
  done anything that calls for that unsolicited attention.

  THE BISHOP. But poor little Leo has only told the simple truth;
  whilst you, Boxer, are striking moral attitudes.

  THE GENERAL. I suppose thats an epigram. I dont understand
  epigrams. I'm only a silly soldier man. Ha! But I can put a plain
  question. Is Leo to be encouraged to be a polygamist?

  THE BISHOP. Remember the British Empire, Boxer. Youre a British
  General, you know.

  THE GENERAL. What has that to do with polygamy?

  THE BISHOP. Well, the great majority of our fellow-subjects are
  polygamists. I cant as a British Bishop insult them by speaking
  disrespectfully of polygamy. It's a very interesting question.
  Many very interesting men have been polygamists: Solomon,
  Mahomet, and our friend the Duke of--of--hm! I never can remember
  his name.

  THE GENERAL. It would become you better, Alfred, to send that
  silly girl back to her husband and her duty than to talk clever
  and mock at your religion. "What God hath joined together let no
  man put asunder." Remember that.

  THE BISHOP. Dont be afraid, Boxer. What God hath joined together
  no man ever shall put asunder: God will take care of that. [To
  Leo] By the way, who was it that joined you and Reginald, my
  dear?

  LEO. It was that awful little curate that afterwards drank, and
  travelled first class with a third-class ticket, and then tried
  to go on the stage. But they wouldnt have him. He called himself
  Egerton Fotheringay.

  THE BISHOP. Well, whom Egerton Fotheringay hath joined, let Sir
  Gorell Barnes put asunder by all means.

  THE GENERAL. I may be a silly soldier man; but I call this
  blasphemy.

  THE BISHOP [gravely] Better for me to take the name of Mr Egerton
  Fotheringay in earnest than for you to take a higher name in
  vain.

  LESBIA. Cant you three brothers ever meet without quarrelling?

  THE BISHOP [mildly] This is not quarrelling, Lesbia: it's only
  English family life. Good morning.

  LEO. You know, Bishop, it's very dear of you to take my part; but
  I'm not sure that I'm not a little shocked.

  THE BISHOP. Then I think Ive been a little more successful than
  Boxer in getting you into a proper frame of mind.

  THE GENERAL [snorting] Ha!

  LEO. Not a bit; for now I'm going to shock you worse than ever.
  I think Solomon was an old beast.

  THE BISHOP. Precisely what you ought to think of him, my dear.
  Dont apologize.

  THE GENERAL [more shocked] Well, but hang it! Solomon was in the
  Bible. And, after all, Solomon was Solomon.

  LEO. And I stick to it: I still want to have a lot of interesting
  men to know quite intimately--to say everything I think of to
  them, and have them say everything they think of to me.

  THE BISHOP. So you shall, my dear, if you are lucky. But you know
  you neednt marry them all. Think of all the buttons you would
  have to sew on. Besides, nothing is more dreadful than a husband
  who keeps telling you everything he thinks, and always wants to
  know what you think.

  LEO [struck by this] Well, thats very true of Rejjy: In fact,
  thats why I had to divorce him.

  THE BISHOP [condoling] Yes: he repeats himself dreadfully, doesnt
  he?

  REGINALD. Look here, Alfred. If I have my faults, let her find
  them out for herself without your help.

  THE BISHOP. She has found them all out already, Reginald.

  LEO [a little huffily] After all, there are worse men than
  Reginald. I daresay he's not so clever as you; but still he's not
  such a fool as you seem to think him!

  THE BISHOP. Quite right, dear: stand up for your husband. I hope
  you will always stand up for all your husbands. [He rises and
  goes to the hearth, where he stands complacently with his back to
  the fireplace, beaming at them all as at a roomful of children].

  LEO. Please dont talk as if I wanted to marry a whole regiment.
  For me there can never be more than two. I shall never love
  anybody but Rejjy and Sinjon.

  REGINALD. A man with a face like a--

  LEO. I wont have it, Rejjy. It's disgusting.

  THE BISHOP. You see, my dear, youll exhaust Sinjon's conversation
  too in a week or so. A man is like a phonograph with half-a-dozen
  records. You soon get tired of them all; and yet you have to sit
  at table whilst he reels them off to every new visitor. In the
  end you have to be content with his common humanity; and when you
  come down to that, you find out about men what a great English
  poet of my acquaintance used to say about women: that they all
  taste alike. Marry whom you please: at the end of a month he'll
  be Reginald over again. It wasnt worth changing: indeed it wasnt.

  LEO. Then it's a mistake to get married.

  THE BISHOP. It is, my dear; but it's a much bigger mistake not to
  get married.

  THE GENERAL [rising] Ha! You hear that, Lesbia? [He joins her at
  the garden door].

  LESBIA. Thats only an epigram, Boxer.

  THE GENERAL. Sound sense, Lesbia. When a man talks rot, thats
  epigram: when he talks sense, then I agree with him.

  REGINALD [coming off the oak chest and looking at his watch] It's
  getting late. Wheres Edith? Hasnt she got into her veil and
  orange blossoms yet?

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Do go and hurry her, Lesbia.

  LESBIA [going out through the tower] Come with me, Leo.

  LEO [following Lesbia out] Yes, certainly.

  The Bishop goes over to his wife and sits down, taking her hand
  and kissing it by way of beginning a conversation with her.

  THE BISHOP. Alice: Ive had another letter from the mysterious
  lady who cant spell. I like that woman's letters. Theres an
  intensity of passion in them that fascinates me.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. Do you mean Incognita Appassionata?

  THE BISHOP. Yes.

  THE GENERAL [turning abruptly; he has been looking out into the
  garden] Do you mean to say that women write love-letters to you?

  THE BISHOP. Of course.

  THE GENERAL. They never do to me.

  THE BISHOP. The army doesnt attract women: the Church does.

  REGINALD. Do you consider it right to let them? They may be
  married women, you know.

  THE BISHOP. They always are. This one is. [To Mrs Bridgenorth]
  Dont you think her letters are quite the best love-letters I get?
  [To the two men] Poor Alice has to read my love-letters aloud to
  me at breakfast, when theyre worth it.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. There really is something fascinating about
  Incognita. She never gives her address. Thats a good sign.

  THE GENERAL. Mf! No assignations, you mean?

  THE Bishop. Oh yes: she began the correspondence by making a very
  curious but very natural assignation. She wants me to meet her in
  heaven. I hope I shall.

  THE GENERAL. Well, I must say I hope not, Alfred. I hope not.

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. She says she is happily married, and that love
  is a necessary of life to her, but that she must have, high above
  all her lovers--

  THE BISHOP. She has several apparently--

  MRS BRIDGENORTH. --some great man who will never know her, never
  touch her, as she is on earth, but whom she can meet in Heaven
  when she has risen above all the everyday vulgarities of earthly
  love.

  THE BISHOP [rising] Excellent. Very good f

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