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Title: The Superstition of Divorce

Author: G. K. Chesterton

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE ***

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Superstition of Divorce,
by G. K. Chesterton

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
IRISH IMPRESSIONS
HERETICS
ORTHODOXY
THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
MAN ALIVE
THE FLYING INN
THE BALL AND THE CROSS
THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN
THE WISDOM OF FATHER BROWN
THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL
——
POEMS
THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE

THE SUPERSTITION
OF DIVORCE
BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

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

NEW YORK
JOHN LANE COMPANY
MCMXX

Copyright, 1920,
By John Lane Company

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

Introductory Note

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

CONTENTS

PAGE

The Superstition of Divorce 11
The Story of the Family 61
The Story of the Vow 83
The Tragedies of Marriage 105
The Vista of Divorce 127
Conclusion 147

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

I.—The Superstition of Divorce

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

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

modern people, especially after the recent experiments in America, think
divorce is a social disease, without having ever bothered about any text. It
may be maintained that even in these, or in any one, the idea of marriage is
ultimately mystical; and the same may be maintained about the idea of
brotherhood. It is obvious that a husband and wife are not visibly one flesh,
in the sense of being one quadruped. It is equally obvious that Paderewski
and Jack Johnson are not twins, and probably have not played together at
their mother’s knee. There is indeed a very important admission, or
addition, to be realised here. What is true is this: that if the nonsense of
Nietzsche or some such sophist submerged current culture, so that it was the
fashion to deny the duties of fraternity; then indeed it might be found that
the group which still affirmed fraternity was the original group in whose
sacred books was the text about Adam and Eve. Suppose some Prussian
professor has opportunely discovered that Germans and lesser men are
respectively descended from two such very different monkeys that they are
in no sense brothers, but barely cousins (German) any number of times
removed. And suppose he proceeds to remove them even further with a
hatchet; suppose he bases on this a repetition of the conduct of Cain, saying
not so much “Am I my brother’s keeper?” as “Is he really my brother?” And
suppose this higher philosophy of the hatchet becomes prevalent in colleges
and cultivated circles, as even more foolish philosophies have done. Then I
agree it probably will be the Christian, the man who preserves the text
about Cain, who will continue to assert that he is still the professor’s
brother; that he is still the professor’s keeper. He may possibly add that, in
his opinion, the professor seems to require a keeper.
And that is doubtless the situation in the controversies about divorce and
marriage to-day. It is the Christian church which continues to hold strongly,
when the world for some reason has weakened on it, what many others hold
at other times. But even then it is barely picking up the shreds and scraps of
the subject to talk about a reliance on texts. The vital point in the
comparison is this: that human brotherhood means a whole view of life,
held in the light of life, and defended, rightly or wrongly, by constant
appeals to every aspect of life. The religion that holds it most strongly will
hold it when nobody else holds it; that is quite true, and that some of us may
be so perverse as to think a point in favour of the religion. But anybody
who holds it at all will hold it as a philosophy, not hung on one text but on a
hundred truths. Fraternity may be a sentimental metaphor; I may be

suffering a delusion when I hail a Montenegrin peasant as my long lost
brother. As a fact, I have my own suspicions about which of us it is that has
got lost. But my delusion is not a deduction from one text, or from twenty;
it is the expression of a relation that to me at least seems a reality. And what
I should say about the idea of a brother, I should say about the idea of a
wife.
It is supposed to be very unbusinesslike to begin at the beginning. It is
called “abstract and academic principles with which we English, etc., etc.”
It is still in some strange way considered unpractical to open up inquiries
about anything by asking what it is. I happen to have, however, a fairly
complete contempt for that sort of practicality; for I know that it is not even
practical. My ideal business man would not be one who planked down fifty
pounds and said “Here is hard cash; I am a plain man; it is quite indifferent
to me whether I am paying a debt, or giving alms to a beggar, or buying a
wild bull or a bathing machine.” Despite the infectious heartiness of his
tone, I should still, in considering the hard cash, say (like a cabman)
“What’s this?” I should continue to insist, priggishly, that it was a highly
practical point what the money was; what it was supposed to stand for, to
aim at or to declare; what was the nature of the transaction; or, in short,
what the devil the man supposed he was doing. I shall therefore begin by
asking, in an equally mystical manner, what in the name of God and the
angels a man getting married supposes he is doing. I shall begin by asking
what marriage is; and the mere question will probably reveal that the act
itself, good or bad, wise or foolish, is of a certain kind; that it is not an
inquiry or an experiment or an accident; it may probably dawn on us that it
is a promise. It can be more fully defined by saying it is a vow.
Many will immediately answer that it is a rash vow. I am content for the
moment to reply that all vows are rash vows. I am not now defending but
defining vows; I am pointing out that this is a discussion about vows; first,
of whether there ought to be vows; and second, of what vows ought to be.
Ought a man to break a promise? Ought a man to make a promise? These
are philosophic questions; but the philosophic peculiarity of divorce and re-
marriage, as compared with free love and no marriage, is that a man breaks
and makes a promise at the same moment. It is a highly German
philosophy; and recalls the way in which the enemy wishes to celebrate his
successful destruction of all treaties by signing some more. If I were
breaking a promise, I would do it without promises. But I am very far from

minimising the momentous and disputable nature of the vow itself. I shall
try to show, in a further article, that this rash and romantic operation is the
only furnace from which can come the plain hardware of humanity, the
cast-iron resistance of citizenship or the cold steel of common sense; but I
am not denying that the furnace is a fire. The vow is a violent and unique
thing; though there have been many besides the marriage vow; vows of
chivalry, vows of poverty, vows of celibacy, pagan as well as Christian. But
modern fashion has rather fallen out of the habit; and men miss the type for
the lack of the parallels. The shortest way of putting the problem is to ask
whether being free includes being free to bind oneself. For the vow is a tryst
with oneself.
I may be misunderstood if I say, for brevity, that marriage is an affair of
honour. The sceptic will be delighted to assent, by saying it is a fight. And
so it is, if only with oneself; but the point here is that it necessarily has the
touch of the heroic, in which virtue can be translated by virtus. Now about
fighting, in its nature, there is an implied infinity, or at least a potential
infinity. I mean that loyalty in war is loyalty in defeat or even disgrace; it is
due to the flag precisely at the moment when the flag nearly falls. We do
already apply this to the flag of the nation; and the question is whether it is
wise or unwise to apply it to the flag of the family. Of course, it is tenable
that we should apply it to neither; that misgovernment in the nation or
misery in the citizen would make the desertion of the flag an act of reason
and not treason. I will only say here that, if this were really the limit of
national loyalty, some of us would have deserted our nation long ago.

II.—The Superstition of Divorce

T O the two or three articles appearing here on this subject I have given
the title of the Superstition of Divorce; and the title is not taken at
random. While free love seems to me a heresy, divorce does really seem
to me a superstition. It is not only more of a superstition than free love, but
much more of a superstition than strict sacramental marriage; and this point
can hardly be made too plain. It is the partisans of divorce, not the
defenders of marriage, who attach a stiff and senseless sanctity to a mere
ceremony, apart from the meaning of the ceremony. It is our opponents, and
not we, who hope to be saved by the letter of ritual, instead of the spirit of

reality. It is they who hold that vow or violation, loyalty or disloyalty, can
all be disposed of by a mysterious and magic rite, performed first in a law-
court and then in a church or a registry office. There is little difference
between the two parts of the ritual; except that the law court is much more
ritualistic. But the plainest parallels will show anybody that all this is sheer
barbarous credulity. It may or may not be superstition for a man to believe
he must kiss the Bible to show he is telling the truth. It is certainly the most
grovelling superstition for him to believe that, if he kisses the Bible,
anything he says will come true. It would surely be the blackest and most
benighted Bible-worship to suggest that the mere kiss on the mere book
alters the moral quality of perjury. Yet this is precisely what is implied in
saying that formal re-marriage alters the moral quality of conjugal
infidelity. It may have been a mark of the Dark Ages that Harold should
swear on a relic, though he were afterwards foresworn. But surely those
ages would have been at their darkest, if he had been content to be sworn on
a relic and forsworn on another relic. Yet this is the new altar these
reformers would erect for us, out of the mouldy and meaningless relics of
their dead law and their dying religion.
Now we, at any rate, are talking about an idea, a thing of the intellect
and the soul; which we feel to be unalterable by legal antics. We are talking
about the idea of loyalty; perhaps a fantastic, perhaps only an unfashionable
idea, but one we can explain and defend as an idea. Now I have already
pointed out that most sane men do admit our ideal in such a case as
patriotism or public spirit; the necessity of saving the state to which we
belong. The patriot may revile but must not renounce his country; he must
curse it to cure it, but not to wither it up. The old pagan citizens felt thus
about the city; and modern nationalists feel thus about the nation. But even
mere modern internationalists feel it about something; if it is only the nation
of mankind. Even the humanitarian does not become a misanthrope and live
in a monkey-house. Even a disappointed Collectivist or Communist does
not retire into the exclusive society of beavers, because beavers are all
communists of the most class-conscious solidarity. He admits the necessity
of clinging to his fellow creatures, and begging them to abandon the use of
the possessive pronoun; heart-breaking as his efforts must seem to him after
a time. Even a Pacifist does not prefer rats to men, on the ground that the rat
community is so pure from the taint of Jingoism as always to leave the

sinking ship. In short, everybody recognises that there is some ship, large
and small, which he ought not to leave, even when he thinks it is sinking.
We may take it then that there are institutions to which we are attached
finally; just as there are others to which we are attached temporarily. We go
from shop to shop trying to get what we want; but we do not go from nation
to nation doing this; unless we belong to a certain group now heading very
straight for Pogroms. In the first case it is the threat that we shall withdraw
our custom; in the second it is the threat that we shall never withdraw
ourselves; that we shall be part of the institution to the last. The time when
the shop loses its customers is the time when the city needs its citizens; but
it needs them as critics who will always remain to criticise. I need not now
emphasise the deadly need of this double energy of internal reform and
external defence; the whole towering tragedy which has eclipsed our earth
in our time is but one terrific illustration of it. The hammer-strokes are
coming thick and fast now;[A] and filling the world with infernal thunders;
and there is still the iron sound of something unbreakable deeper and louder
than all the things that break. We may curse the kings, we may distrust the
captains, we may murmur at the very existence of the armies; but we know
that in the darkest days that may come to us, no man will desert the flag.
Now when we pass from loyalty to the nation to loyalty to the family,
there can be no doubt about the first and plainest difference. The difference
is that the family is a thing far more free. The vow is a voluntary loyalty;
and the marriage vow is marked among ordinary oaths of allegiance by the
fact that the allegiance is also a choice. The man is not only a citizen of the
city, but also the founder and builder of the city. He is not only a soldier
serving the colours, but he has himself artistically selected and combined
the colours, like the colours of an individual dress. If it be admissible to ask
him to be true to the commonwealth that has made him, it is at least not
more illiberal to ask him to be true to the commonwealth he has himself
made. If civic fidelity be, as it is, a necessity, it is also in a special sense a
constraint. The old joke against patriotism, the Gilbertian irony,
congratulated the Englishman on his fine and fastidious taste in being born
in England. It made a plausible point in saying “For he might have been a
Russian”; though indeed we have lived to see some persons who seemed to
think they could be Russians when the fancy took them. If commonsense
considers even such involuntary loyalty natural, we can hardly wonder if it
thinks voluntary loyalty still more natural. And the small state founded on

the sexes is at once the most voluntary and the most natural of all self-
governing states. It is not true of Mr. Brown that he might have been a
Russian; but it may be true of Mrs. Brown that she might have been a
Robinson.
Now it is not at all hard to see why this small community, so specially
free touching its cause, should yet be specially bound touching its effects. It
is not hard to see why the vow made most freely is the vow kept most
firmly. There are attached to it, by the nature of things, consequences so
tremendous that no contract can offer any comparison. There is no contract,
unless it be that said to be signed in blood, that can call spirits from the
vasty deep; or bring cherubs (or goblins) to inhabit a small modern villa.
There is no stroke of the pen which creates real bodies and souls, or makes
the characters in a novel come to life. The institution that puzzles
intellectuals so much can be explained by the mere material fact
(perceptible even to intellectuals) that children are, generally speaking,
younger than their parents. “Till death do us part” is not an irrational
formula, for those will almost certainly die before they see more than half
of the amazing (or alarming) thing they have done.
Such is, in a curt and crude outline, this obvious thing for those to whom
it is not obvious. Now I know there are thinking men among those who
would tamper with it; and I shall expect some of these to reply to my
questions. But for the moment I only ask this question: whether the
parliamentary and journalistic divorce movement shows even a shadowy
trace of these fundamental truths, regarded as tests. Does it even discuss the
nature of a vow, the limits and objects of loyalty, the survival of the family
as a small and free state? The writers are content to say that Mr. Brown is
uncomfortable with Mrs. Brown, and the last emancipation, for separated
couples, seems only to mean that he is still uncomfortable without Mrs.
Brown. These are not days in which being uncomfortable is felt as the final
test of public action. For the rest, the reformers show statistically that
families are in fact so scattered in our industrial anarchy, that they may as
well abandon hope of finding their way home again. I am acquainted with
that argument for making bad worse and I see it everywhere leading to
slavery. Because London Bridge is broken down, we must assume that
bridges are not meant to bridge. Because London commercialism and
capitalism have copied hell, we are to continue to copy them. Anyhow,

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

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

escape from his old Christian code about sex? What is the meaning of this
mysterious immunity, this special permit for adultery; and why is running
away with his neighbour’s wife to be the only exhilaration still left open to
him? Why must he love as he pleases; when he may not even live as he
pleases?
The answer is, I regret to say, that this social campaign, in most though
by no means all of its most prominent campaigners, relies in this matter on
a very smug and pestilent piece of cant. There are some advocates of
democratic divorce who are really advocates of general democratic
freedom; but they are the exceptions; I might say, with all respect, that they
are the dupes. The omnipresence of the thing in the press and in political
society is due to a motive precisely opposite to the motive professed. The
modern rulers, who are simply the rich men, are really quite consistent in
their attitude to the poor man. It is the same spirit which takes away his
children under the pretence of order, which takes away his wife under the
pretence of liberty. That which wishes, in the words of the comic song, to
break up the happy home, is primarily anxious not to break up the much
more unhappy factory. Capitalism, of course, is at war with the family, for
the same reason which has led to its being at war with the Trade Union.
This indeed is the only sense in which it is true that capitalism is connected
with individualism. Capitalism believes in collectivism for itself and
individualism for its enemies. It desires its victims to be individuals, or (in
other words) to be atoms. For the word atom, in its clearest meaning (which
is none too clear) might be translated as “individual.” If there be any bond,
if there be any brotherhood, if there be any class loyalty or domestic
discipline, by which the poor can help the poor, these emancipators will
certainly strive to loosen that bond or lift that discipline in the most liberal
fashion. If there be such a brotherhood, these individualists will redistribute
it in the form of individuals; or in other words smash it to atoms.
The masters of modern plutocracy know what they are about. They are
making no mistake; they can be cleared of the slander of inconsistency. A
very profound and precise instinct has led them to single out the human
household as the chief obstacle to their inhuman progress. Without the
family we are helpless before the State, which in our modern case is the
Servile State. To use a military metaphor, the family is the only formation in
which the charge of the rich can be repulsed. It is a force that forms twos as
soldiers form fours; and, in every peasant country, has stood in the square

house or the square plot of land as infantry have stood in squares against
cavalry. How this force operates thus, and why, I will try to explain in the
last of these articles. But it is when it is most nearly ridden down by the
horsemen of pride and privilege, as in Poland or Ireland, when the battle
grows most desperate and the hope most dark, that men begin to understand
why that wild oath in its beginnings was flung beyond the bounds of the
world; and what would seem as passing as a vision is made permanent as a
vow.

III.—The Superstition of Divorce

T HERE has long been a curiously consistent attempt to conceal the fact
that France is a Christian country. There have been Frenchmen in the
plot, no doubt, and no doubt there have been Frenchmen—though I
have myself only found Englishmen—in the derivative attempt to conceal
the fact that Balzac was a Christian writer. I began to read Balzac long after
I had read the admirers of Balzac; and they had never given me a hint of
this truth. I had read that his books were bound in yellow and “quite
impudently French”; though I may have been cloudy about why being
French should be impudent in a Frenchman. I had read the truer description
of “the grimy wizard of the Comedie Humaine,” and have lived to learn the
truth of it; Balzac certainly is a genius of the type of that artist he himself
describes, who could draw a broomstick so that one knew it had swept the
room after a murder. The furniture of Balzac is more alive than the figures
of many dramas. For this I was prepared; but not for a certain spiritual
assumption which I recognised at once as a historical phenomenon. The
morality of a great writer is not the morality he teaches, but the morality he
takes for granted. The Catholic type of Christian ethics runs through
Balzac’s books, exactly as the Puritan type of Christian ethics runs through
Bunyan’s books. What his professed opinions were I do not know, any more
than I know Shakespeare’s; but I know that both those great creators of a
multitudinous world made it, as compared with other and later writers, on
the same fundamental moral plan as the universe of Dante. There can be no
doubt about it for any one who can apply as a test the truth I have
mentioned; that the fundamental things in a man are not the things he
explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain. But here and there
Balzac does explain; and with that intellectual concentration Mr. George

Moore has acutely observed in that novelist when he is a theorist. And the
other day I found in one of Balzac’s novels this passage; which, whether or
no it would precisely hit Mr. George Moore’s mood at this moment, strikes
me as a perfect prophecy of this epoch, and might also be a motto for this
book: “With the solidarity of the family society has lost that elemental force
which Montesquieu defined and called ‘honour.’ Society has isolated its
members the better to govern them, and has divided in order to weaken.”
Throughout our youth and the years before the War, the current criticism
followed Ibsen in describing the domestic system as a doll’s house and the
domestic woman as a doll. Mr. Bernard Shaw varied the metaphor by
saying that mere custom kept the woman in the home as it keeps the parrot
in the cage; and the plays and tales of the period made vivid sketches of a
woman who also resembled a parrot in other particulars, rich in raiment,
shrill in accent and addicted to saying over and over again what she had
been taught to say. Mr. Granville Barker, the spiritual child of Mr. Bernard
Shaw, commented in his clever play of “The Voysey Inheritance” on
tyranny, hypocrisy and boredom, as the constituent elements of a “happy
English home.” Leaving the truth of this aside for the moment, it will be
well to insist that the conventionality thus criticised would be even more
characteristic of a happy French home. It is not the Englishman’s house, but
the Frenchman’s house that is his castle. It might be further added, touching
the essential ethical view of the sexes at least, that the Irishman’s house is
his castle; though it has been for some centuries a besieged castle. Anyhow,
those conventions which were remarked as making domesticity dull, narrow
and unnaturally meek and submissive, are particularly powerful among the
Irish and the French. From this it will surely be easy, for any lucid and
logical thinker, to deduce the fact that the French are dull and narrow, and
that the Irish are unnaturally meek and submissive. Mr. Bernard Shaw,
being an Irishman who lives among Englishmen, may be conveniently
taken as the type of the difference; and it will no doubt be found that the
political friends of Mr. Shaw, among Englishmen, will be of a wilder
revolutionary type than those whom he would have found among Irishmen.
We are in a position to compare the meekness of the Fenians with the fury
of the Fabians. This deadening monogamic ideal may even, in a larger
sense, define and distinguish all the flat subserviency of Clare from all the
flaming revolt of Clapham. Nor need we now look far to understand why
revolutions have been unknown in the history of France; or why they

happen so persistently in the vaguer politics of England. This rigidity and
respectability must surely be the explanation of all that incapacity for any
civil experiment or explosion, which has always marked that sleepy hamlet
of very private houses, which we call the city of Paris. But the same things
are true not only of Parisians but of peasants; they are even true of other
peasants in the great Alliance. Students of Serbian traditions tell us that the
peasant literature lays a special and singular curse on the violation of
marriage; and this may well explain the prim and sheepish pacifism
complained of in that people.
In plain words, there is clearly something wrong in the calculation by
which it was proved that a housewife must be as much a servant as a
housemaid; or which exhibited the domesticated man as being as gentle as
the primrose or as conservative as the Primrose League. It is precisely those
who have been conservative about the family who have been revolutionary
about the state. Those who are blamed for the bigotry or bourgeois
smugness of their marriage conventions are actually those blamed for the
restlessness and violence of their political reforms. Nor is there seriously
any difficulty in discovering the cause of this. It is simply that in such a
society the government, in dealing with the family, deals with something
almost as permanent and self-renewing as itself. There can be a continuous
family policy, like a continuous foreign policy. In peasant countries the
family fights, it may almost be said that the farm fights. I do not mean
merely that it riots in evil and exceptional times; though this is not
unimportant. It was a savage but a sane feature when, in the Irish evictions,
the women poured hot water from the windows; it was part of a final falling
back on private tools as public weapons. That sort of thing is not only war
to the knife, but almost war to the fork and spoon. It was in this grim sense
perhaps that Parnell, in that mysterious pun, said that Kettle was a
household word in Ireland (it certainly ought to be after its subsequent
glories), and in a more general sense it is certain that meddling with the
housewife will ultimately mean getting into hot water. But it is not of such
crises of bodily struggle that I speak, but of a steady and peaceful pressure
from below of a thousand families upon the framework of government. For
this a certain spirit of defence and enclosure is essential; and even
feudalism was right in feeling that any such affair of honour must be a
family affair. It was a true artistic instinct that pictured the pedigree on a
coat that protects the body. The free peasant has arms if he has not armorial

bearings. He has not an escutcheon; but he has a shield. Nor do I see why,
in a freer and happier society than the present, or even the past, it should not
be a blazoned shield. For that is true of pedigree which is true of property;
the wrong is not in its being imposed on men, but rather in its being denied
to them. Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too
few capitalists; and so aristocracy sins, not in planting a family tree, but in
not planting a family forest.
Anyhow, it is found in practice that the domestic citizen can stand a
siege, even by the State; because he has those who will stand by him
through thick and thin—especially thin. Now those who hold that the State
can be made fit to own all and administer all, can consistently disregard this
argument; but it may be said with all respect that the world is more and
more disregarding them. If we could find a perfect machine, and a perfect
man to work it, it might be a good argument for State Socialism, though an
equally good argument for personal despotism. But most of us, I fancy, are
now agreed that something of that social pressure from below which we call
freedom is vital to the health of the State; and this it is which cannot be
fully exercised by individuals, but only by groups and traditions. Such
groups have been many; there have been monasteries; there may be guilds;
but there is only one type among them which all human beings have a
spontaneous and omnipresent inspiration to build for themselves; and this
type is the family.
I had intended this article to be the last of those outlining the elements of
this debate; but I shall have to add a short concluding section on the way in
which all this is missed in the practical (or rather unpractical) proposals
about divorce. Here I will only say that they suffer from the modern and
morbid weaknesses of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal. As a
fact the “tyranny, hypocrisy and boredom” complained of are not
domesticity, but the decay of domesticity. The case of that particular
complaint, in Mr. Granville Barker’s play, is itself a proof. The whole point
of “The Voysey Inheritance” was that there was no Voysey inheritance. The
only heritage of that family was a highly dishonourable debt. Naturally their
family affections had decayed when their whole ideal of property and
probity had decayed; and there was little love as well as little honour among
thieves. It has yet to be proved that they would have been as much bored if
they had had a positive and not a negative heritage; and had worked a farm
instead of a fraud. And the experience of mankind points the other way.

IV.—The Superstition of Divorce

I HAVE touched before now on a famous or infamous Royalist who
suggested that the people should eat grass; an unfortunate remark perhaps
for a Royalist to make; since the regimen is only recorded of a Royal
Personage. But there was certainly a simplicity in the solution worthy of a
sultan or even a savage chief; and it is this touch of autocratic innocence on
which I have mainly insisted touching the social reforms of our day, and
especially the social reform known as divorce. I am primarily more
concerned with the arbitrary method than with the anarchic result. Very
much as the old tyrant would turn any number of men out to grass, so the
new tyrant would turn any number of women into grass-widows. Anyhow,
to vary the legendary symbolism, it never seems to occur to the king in this
fairy tale that the gold crown on his head is a less, and not a more, sacred
and settled ornament than the gold ring on the woman’s finger. This change
is being achieved by the summary and even secret government which we
now suffer; and this would be the first point against it, even if it were really
an emancipation; and it is only in form an emancipation. I will not
anticipate the details of its defence, which can be offered by others, but I
will here conclude for the present by roughly suggesting the practical
defences of divorce, as generally given just at present, under four heads.
And I will only ask the reader to note that they all have one thing in
common; the fact that each argument is also used for all that social reform
which plain men are already calling slavery.
First, it is very typical of the latest practical proposals that they are
concerned with the case of those who are already separated, and the steps
they must take to be divorced. There is a spirit penetrating all our society
to-day by which the exception is allowed to alter the rule; the exile to
deflect patriotism, the orphan to depose parenthood, and even the widow or,
in this case as we have seen the grass-widow, to destroy the position of the
wife. There is a sort of symbol of this tendency in that mysterious and
unfortunate nomadic nation which has been allowed to alter so many things,
from a crusade in Russia to a cottage in South Bucks. We have been told to
treat the wandering Jew as a pilgrim, while we still treat the wandering
Christian as a vagabond. And yet the latter is at least trying to get home,
like Ulysses; whereas the former is, if anything, rather fleeing from home,

like Cain. He who is detached, disgruntled, nondescript, intermediate, is
everywhere made the excuse for altering what is common, corporate,
traditional and popular. And the alteration is always for the worse. The
mermaid never becomes more womanly, but only more fishy. The centaur
never becomes more manly, but only more horsy. The Jew cannot really
internationalise Christendom; he can only denationalise Christendom. The
proletarian does not find it easy to become a small proprietor; he is finding
it far easier to become a slave. So the unfortunate man, who cannot tolerate
the woman he has chosen from all the women in the world, is not
encouraged to return to her and tolerate her, but encouraged to choose
another woman whom he may in due course refuse to tolerate. And in all
these cases the argument is the same; that the man in the intermediate state
is unhappy. Probably he is unhappy, since he is abnormal; but the point is
that he is permitted to loosen the universal bond which has kept millions of
others normal. Because he has himself got into a hole, he is allowed to
burrow in it like a rabbit and undermine a whole countryside.
Next we have, as we always have touching such crude experiments, an
argument from the example of other countries, and especially of new
countries. Thus the Eugenists tell me solemnly that there have been very
successful Eugenic experiments in America. And they rigidly retain their
solemnity (while refusing with many rebukes to believe in mine) when I tell
them that one of the Eugenic experiments in America is a chemical
experiment; which consists of changing a black man into the allotropic form
of white ashes. It is really an exceedingly Eugenic experiment; since its
chief object is to discourage an inter-racial mixture of blood which is not
desired. But I do not like this American experiment, however American;
and I trust and believe that it is not typically American at all. It represents, I
conceive, only one element in the complexity of the great democracy; and
goes along with other evil elements; so that I am not at all surprised that the
same strange social sections, which permit a human being to be burned
alive, also permit the exalted science of Eugenics. It is the same in the
milder matter of liquor laws; and we are told that certain rather crude
colonials have established prohibition laws, which they try to evade; just as
we are told they have established divorce laws, which they are now trying
to repeal. For in this case of divorce, at least, the argument from distant
precedents has recoiled crushingly upon itself. There is already an agitation

for less divorce in America, even while there is an agitation for more
divorce in England.
Again, when an argument is based on a need of population, it will be
well if those supporting it realise where it may carry them. It is exceedingly
doubtful whether population is one of the advantages of divorce; but there
is no doubt that it is one of the advantages of polygamy. It is already used in
Germany as an argument for polygamy. But the very word will teach us to
look even beyond Germany for something yet more remote and repulsive.
Mere population, along with a sort of polygamous anarchy, will not appear
even as a practical ideal to any one who considers, for instance, how
consistently Europe has held the headship of the human race, in face of the
chaotic myriads of Asia. If population were the chief test of progress and
efficiency, China would long ago have proved itself the most progressive
and efficient state. De Quincey summed up the whole of that enormous
situation in a sentence which is perhaps more impressive and even appalling
than all the perspectives of orient architecture and vistas of opium vision in
the midst of which it comes. “Man is a weed in those regions.” Many
Europeans, fearing for the garden of the world, have fancied that in some
future fatality those weeds may spring up and choke it. But no Europeans
have really wished that the flowers should become like the weeds. Even if it
were true, therefore, that the loosening of the tie necessarily increased the
population; even if this were not contradicted, as it is, by the facts of many
countries, we should have strong historical grounds for not accepting the
deduction. We should still be suspicious of the paradox that we may
encourage large families by abolishing the family.
Lastly, I believe it is part of the defence of the new proposal that even its
defenders have found its principle a little too crude. I hear they have added
provisions which modify the principle; and which seem to be in substance,
first, that a man shall be made responsible for a money payment to the wife
he deserts, and second, that the matter shall once again be submitted in
some fashion to some magistrate. For my purpose here, it is enough to note
that there is something of the unmistakable savour of the sociology we
resist, in these two touching acts of faith, in a cheque-book and in a lawyer.
Most of the fashionable reformers of marriage would be faintly shocked at
any suggestion that a poor old charwoman might possibly refuse such
money, or that a good kind magistrate might not have the right to give such
advice. For the reformers of marriage are very respectable people, with

some honourable exceptions; and nothing could fit more smoothly into the
rather greasy groove of their respectability than the suggestion that treason
is best treated with the damages, gentlemen, heavy damages, of Mr.
Serjeant Buzfuz; or that tragedy is best treated by the spiritual arbitrament
of Mr. Nupkins.
One word should be added to this hasty sketch of the elements of the
case. I have deliberately left out the loftiest aspect and argument, that which
sees marriage as a divine institution; and that for the logical reason that
those who believe in this would not believe in divorce; and I am arguing
with those who do believe in divorce. I do not ask them to assume the worth
of my creed or any creed; and I could wish they did not so often ask me to
assume the worth of their worthless, poisonous plutocratic modern society.
But if it could be shown, as I think it can, that a long historical view and a
patient political experience can at last accumulate solid scientific evidence
of the vital need of such a vow, then I can conceive no more tremendous
tribute than this, to any faith, which made a flaming affirmation from the
darkest beginnings, of what the latest enlightenment can only slowly
discover in the end.

THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

V.—The Story of the Family

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

abolish males. Prussians can go out of Poland or negroes can be repatriated
to Africa; but a man and a woman must remain together in one way or
another; and must learn to put up with each other somehow.
These are very simple truths; that is why nobody nowadays seems to
take any particular notice of them; and the truth that follows next is equally
obvious. There is no dispute about the purpose of Nature in creating such an
attraction. It would be more intelligent to call it the purpose of God; for
Nature can have no purpose unless God is behind it. To talk of the purpose
of Nature is to make a vain attempt to avoid being anthropomorphic, merely
by being feminist. It is believing in a goddess because you are too sceptical
to believe in a god. But this is a controversy which can be kept apart from
the question, if we content ourselves with saying that the vital value
ultimately found in this attraction is, of course, the renewal of the race
itself. The child is an explanation of the father and mother; and the fact that
it is a human child is the explanation of the ancient human ties connecting
the father and mother. The more human, that is the less bestial, is the child,
the more lawful and lasting are the ties. So far from any progress in culture
or the sciences tending to loosen the bond, any such progress must logically
tend to tighten it. The more things there are for the child to learn, the longer
he must remain at the natural school for learning them; and the longer his
teachers must at least postpone the dissolution of their partnership. This
elementary truth is hidden to-day in vast masses of vicarious, indirect and
artificial work, with the fundamental fallacy of which I shall deal in a
moment. Here I speak of the primary position of the human group, as it has
stood through unthinkable ages of waxing and waning civilisations; often
unable to delegate any of its work, always unable to delegate all of it. In
this, I repeat, it will always be necessary for the two teachers to remain
together, in proportion as they have anything to teach. One of the shapeless
sea-beasts, that merely detaches itself from its offspring and floats away,
could float away to a submarine divorce court, or an advanced club founded
on free-love for fishes. The sea-beast might do this, precisely because the
sea-beast’s offspring need do nothing; because it has not got to learn the
polka or the multiplication table. All these are truisms but they are also
truths, and truths that will return; for the present tangle of semi-official
substitutes is not only a stop-gap, but one that is not big enough to stop the
gap. If people cannot mind their own business, it cannot possibly be more
economical to pay them to mind each other’s business; and still less to mind

each other’s babies. It is simply throwing away a natural force and then
paying for an artificial force; as if a man were to water a plant with a hose
while holding up an umbrella to protect it from the rain. The whole really
rests on a plutocratic illusion of an infinite supply of servants. When we
offer any other system as a “career for women,” we are really proposing
that an infinite number of them should become servants, of a plutocratic or
bureaucratic sort. Ultimately, we are arguing that a woman should not be a
mother to her own baby, but a nursemaid to somebody else’s baby. But it
will not work, even on paper. We cannot all live by taking in each other’s
washing, especially in the form of pinafores. In the last resort, the only
people who either can or will give individual care, to each of the individual
children, are their individual parents. The expression as applied to those
dealing with changing crowds of children is a graceful and legitimate
flourish of speech.
This triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed;
it can only destroy those civilisations which disregard it. Most modern
reformers are merely bottomless sceptics, and have no basis on which to
rebuild; and it is well that such reformers should realise that there is
something they cannot reform. You can put down the mighty from their
seat; you can turn the world upside down, and there is much to be said for
the view that it may then be the right way up. But you cannot create a world
in which the baby carries the mother. You cannot create a world in which
the mother has not authority over the baby. You can waste your time in
trying; by giving votes to babies or proclaiming a republic of infants in
arms. You can say, as an educationist said the other day, that small children
should “criticise, question authority and suspend their judgment.” I do not
know why he did not go on to say that they should earn their own living,
pay income tax to the state, and die in battle for the fatherland; for the
proposal evidently is that children shall have no childhood. But you can, if
you find entertainment in such games, organise “representative
government” among little boys and girls, and tell them to take their legal
and constitutional responsibilities as seriously as possible. In short, you can
be crazy; but you cannot be consistent. You cannot really carry your own
principle back to the aboriginal group, and really apply it to the mother and
the baby. You will not act on you own theory in the simplest and most
practical of all possible cases. You are not quite so mad as that.

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

also; as suggested in that tradition of the southern fields fertilised by larva.
It has a creative as well as a destructive side; and it only remains, in this
part of the analysis, to note the political effect of this extra-political
institution, and the political ideals of which it has been the champion; and
perhaps the only permanent champion.
The ideal for which it stands in the state is liberty. It stands for liberty for
the very simple reason with which this rough analysis started. It is the only
one of these institutions that is at once necessary and voluntary. It is the
only check on the state that is bound to renew itself as eternally as the state,
and more naturally than the state. Every sane man recognises that unlimited
liberty is anarchy, or rather is nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give
the citizen a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a
king. This the only way in which truth can ever find refuge from public
persecution, and the good man survive the bad government. But the good
man by himself is no match for the city. There must be balanced against it
another ideal institution, and in that sense an immortal institution. So long
as the state is the only ideal institution, the state will call on the citizen to
sacrifice himself, and therefore will not have the smallest scruple in
sacrificing the citizen. The state consists of coercion; and must always be
justified from its own point of view in extending the bounds of coercion; as,
for instance, in the case of conscription. The only thing that can be set up to
check or challenge this authority is a voluntary law and a voluntary loyalty.
That loyalty is the protection of liberty, in the only sphere where liberty can
fully dwell. It is a principle of the constitution that the King never dies. It is
the whole principle of the family that the citizen never dies. There must be a
heraldry and heredity of freedom; a tradition of resistance to tyranny. A man
must be not only free, but free-born.
Indeed, there is something in the family that might loosely be called
anarchist; and more correctly called amateur. As there seems something
almost vague about its voluntary origin, so there seems something vague
about its voluntary organisation. The most vital function it performs,
perhaps the most vital function that anything can perform, is that of
education; but its type of early education is far too essential to be mistaken
for instruction. In a thousand things it works rather by rule of thumb than
rule of theory. To take a commonplace and even comic example, I doubt if
any text-book or code of rules has ever contained any directions about
standing a child in a corner. Doubtless when the modern process is

complete, and the coercive principle of the state has entirely extinguished
the voluntary element of the family, there will be some exact regulation or
restriction about the matter. Possibly it will say that the corner must be an
angle of at least ninety-five degrees. Possibly it will say that the converging
line of any ordinary corner tends to make a child squint. In fact I am certain
that if I said casually, at a sufficient number of tea-tables, that corners made
children squint, it would rapidly become a universally received dogma of
popular science. For the modern world will accept no dogmas upon any
authority; but it will accept any dogmas upon no authority. Say that a thing
is so, according to the Pope or the Bible, and it will be dismissed as a
superstition without examination. But preface your remark merely with
“they say” or “don’t you know that?” or try (and fail) to remember the name
of some professor mentioned in some newspaper; and the keen rationalism
of the modern mind will accept every word you say. This parenthesis is not
so irrelevant as it may appear, for it will be well to remember that when a
rigid officialism breaks in upon the voluntary compromises of the home,
that officialism itself will be only rigid in its action and will be exceedingly
limp in its thought. Intellectually it will be at least as vague as the amateur
arrangements of the home, and the only difference is that the domestic
arrangements are in the only real sense practical; that is, they are founded
on experiences that have been suffered. The others are what is now
generally called scientific; that is, they are founded on experiments that
have not yet been made. As a matter of fact, instead of invading the family
with the blundering bureaucracy that mismanages the public services, it
would be far more philosophical to work the reform the other way round. It
would be really quite as reasonable to alter the laws of the nation so as to
resemble the laws of the nursery. The punishments would be far less
horrible, far more humorous, and far more really calculated to make men
feel they had made fools of themselves. It would be a pleasant change if a
judge, instead of putting on the black cap, had to put on the dunce’s cap; or
if we could stand a financier in his own corner.
Of course this opinion is rare, and reactionary—whatever that may
mean. Modern education is founded on the principle that a parent is more
likely to be cruel than anybody else. It passes over the obvious fact that he
is less likely to be cruel than anybody else. Anybody may happen to be
cruel; but the first chances of cruelty come with the whole colourless and
indifferent crowd of total strangers and mechanical mercenaries, whom it is

now the custom to call in as infallible agents of improvement; policemen,
doctors, detectives, inspectors, instructors, and so on. They are
automatically given arbitrary power because there are here and there such
things as criminal parents; as if there were no such things as criminal
doctors or criminal school-masters. A mother is not always judicious about
her child’s diet; so it is given into the control of Dr. Crippen. A father is
thought not to teach his sons the purest morality; so they are put under the
tutorship of Eugene Aram. These celebrated criminals are no more rare in
their respective professions than the cruel parents are in the profession of
parenthood. But indeed the case is far stronger than this; and there is no
need to rely on the case of such criminals at all. The ordinary weaknesses of
human nature will explain all the weaknesses of bureaucracy and business
government all over the world. The official need only be an ordinary man to
be more indifferent to other people’s children than to his own; and even to
sacrifice other people’s family prosperity to his own. He may be bored; he
may be bribed; he may be brutal, for any one of the thousand reasons that
ever made a man a brute. All this elementary common sense is entirely left
out of account in our educational and social systems of today. It is assumed
that the hireling will not flee, and that solely because he is a hireling. It is
denied that the shepherd will lay down his life for the sheep; or for that
matter, even that the she-wolf will fight for the cubs. We are to believe that
mothers are inhuman; but not that officials are human. There are unnatural
parents, but there are no natural passions; at least, there are none where the
fury of King Lear dared to find them—in the beadle. Such is the latest light
on the education of the young; and the same principle that is applied to the
child is applied to the husband and wife. Just as it assumes that a child will
certainly be loved by anybody except his mother, so it assumes that a man
can be happy with anybody except the one woman he has himself chosen
for his wife.
Thus the coercive spirit of the state prevails over the free promise of the
family, in the shape of formal officialism. But this is not the most coercive
of the coercive elements in the modern commonwealth. An even more rigid
and ruthless external power is that of industrial employment and
unemployment. An even more ferocious enemy of the family is the factory.
Between these modern mechanical things the ancient natural institution is
not being reformed or modified or even cut down; it is being torn in pieces.
It is not only being torn in pieces in the sense of a true metaphor, like a

living thing caught in a hideous clockwork of manufacture. It is being
literally torn in pieces, in that the husband may go to one factory, the wife
to another, and the child to a third. Each will become the servant of a
separate financial group, which is more and more gaining the political
power of a feudal group. But whereas feudalism received the loyalty of
families, the lords of the new servile state will receive only the loyalty of
individuals; that is, of lonely men and even of lost children.
It is sometimes said that Socialism attacks the family; which is founded
on little beyond the accident that some Socialists believe in free-love. I have
been a Socialist, and I am no longer a Socialist, and at no time did I believe
in free-love. It is true, I think in a large and unconscious sense, that State
Socialism encourages the general coercive claim I have been considering.
But if it be true that Socialism attacks the family in theory, it is far more
certain that Capitalism attacks it in practice. It is a paradox, but a plain fact,
that men never notice a thing as long as it exists in practice. Men who will
note a heresy will ignore an abuse. Let any one who doubts the paradox
imagine the newspapers formally printing along with the Honours’ List a
price list, for peerages and knighthoods; though everybody knows they are
bought and sold. So the factory is destroying the family in fact; and need
depend on no poor mad theorist who dreams of destroying it in fancy. And
what is destroying it is nothing so plausible as free-love; but something
rather to be described as an enforced fear. It is economic punishment more
terrible than legal punishment, which may yet land us in slavery as the only
safety.
From its first days in the forest this human group had to fight against
wild monsters; and so it is now fighting against these wild machines. It only
managed to survive then, and it will only manage to survive now, by a
strong internal sanctity; a tacit oath or dedication deeper than that of the city
or the tribe. But though this silent promise was always present, it took at a
certain turning point of our history a special form which I shall try to sketch
in the next chapter. That turning point was the creation of Christendom by
the religion which created it. Nothing will destroy the sacred triangle; and
even the Christian faith, the most amazing revolution that ever took place in
the mind, served only in a sense to turn that triangle upside down. It held up
a mystical mirror in which the order of the three things was reversed; and
added a holy family of child, mother and father to the human family of
father, mother and child.

THE STORY OF THE VOW

VI.—The Story of the Vow

C HARLES LAMB, with his fine fantastic instinct for combinations that
are also contrasts, has noted somewhere a contrast between St.
Valentine and valentines. There seems a comic incongruity in such
lively and frivolous flirtations still depending on the date and title of an
ascetic and celibate bishop of the Dark Ages. The paradox lends itself to his
treatment, and there is a truth in his view of it. Perhaps it may seem even
more of a paradox to say there is no paradox. In such cases unification
appears more provocative than division; and it may seem idly contradictory
to deny the contradiction. And yet in truth there is no contradiction. In the
deepest sense there is a very real similarity, which puts St. Valentine and his
valentines on one side, and most of the modern world on the other. I should
hesitate to ask even a German professor to collect, collate and study
carefully all the valentines in the world, with the object of tracing a
philosophical principle running through them. But if he did, I have no doubt
about the philosophic principle he would find. However trivial, however
imbecile, however vulgar or vapid or stereotyped the imagery of such
things might be, it would always involve one idea, the same idea that makes
lovers laboriously chip their initials on a tree or a rock, in a sort of
monogram of monogamy. It may be a cockney trick to tie one’s love on a
tree; though Orlando did it, and would now doubtless be arrested by the
police for breaking the bye-laws of the Forest of Arden. I am not here
concerned especially to commend the habit of cutting one’s own name and
private address in large letters on the front of the Parthenon, across the face
of the Sphinx, or in any other nook or corner where it may chance to arrest
the sentimental interest of posterity. But like many other popular things, of
the sort that can generally be found in Shakespeare, there is a meaning in it
that would probably be missed by a less popular poet, like Shelley. There is
a very permanent truth in the fact that two free persons deliberately tie
themselves to a log of wood. And it is the idea of tying oneself to something
that runs through all this old amorous allegory like a pattern of fetters.

There is always the notion of hearts chained together, or skewered together,
or in some manner secured; there is a security that can only be called
captivity. That it frequently fails to secure itself has nothing to do with the
present point. The point is that every philosophy of sex must fail, which
does not account for its ambition of fixity, as well as for its experience of
failure. There is nothing to make Orlando commit himself on the sworn
evidence of the nearest tree. He is not bound to be bound; he is under
constraint, but nobody constrains him to be under constraint. In short,
Orlando took a vow to marry precisely as Valentine took a vow not to
marry. Nor could any ascetic, without being a heretic, have asserted in the
wildest reactions of asceticism, that the vow of Orlando was not lawful as
well as the vow of Valentine. But it is a notable fact that even when it was
not lawful, it was still a vow. Through all that mediæval culture, which has
left us the legend of romance, there ran this pattern of a chain, which was
felt as binding even where it ought not to bind. The lawless loves of
mediæval legends all have their own law, and especially their own loyalty,
as in the tales of Tristram or Lancelot. In this sense we might say that
mediæval profligacy was more fixed than modern marriage. I am not here
discussing either modern or mediæval ethics, in the matter of what they did
say or ought to say of such things. I am only noting as a historical fact the
insistence of the mediæval imagination, even at its wildest, upon one
particular idea. That idea is the idea of the vow. It might be the vow which
St. Valentine took; it might be a lesser vow which he regarded as lawful; it
might be a wild vow which he regarded as quite lawless. But the whole
society which made such festivals and bequeathed to us such traditions was
full of the idea of vows; and we must recognise this notion, even if we think
it nonsensical, as the note of the whole civilisation. And Valentine and the
valentine both express it for us; even more if we feel them both as
exaggerated, or even as exaggerating opposites. Those extremes meet; and
they meet in the same place. Their trysting place is by the tree on which the
lover hung his love-letters. And even if the lover hung himself on the tree,
instead of his literary compositions, even that act had about it also an
indefinable flavour of finality.
It is often said by the critics of Christian origins that certain ritual feasts,
processions or dances are really of pagan origin. They might as well say
that our legs are of pagan origin. Nobody ever disputed that humanity was
human before it was Christian; and no Church manufactured the legs with

which men walked or danced, either in a pilgrimage or a ballet. What can
really be maintained, so as to carry not a little conviction, is this: that where
such a Church has existed it has preserved not only the processions but the
dances; not only the cathedral but the carnival. One of the chief claims of
Christian civilisation is to have preserved things of pagan origin. In short, in
the old religious countries men continue to dance; while in the new
scientific cities they are often content to drudge.
But when this saner view of history is realised, there does remain
something more mystical and difficult to define. Even heathen things are
Christian when they have been preserved by Christianity. Chivalry is
something recognisably different even from the virtus of Virgil. Charity is
something exceedingly different from the plain city of Homer. Even our
patriotism is something more subtle than the undivided lover of the city;
and the change is felt in the most permanent things, such as the love of
landscape or the love of woman. To define the differentiation in all these
things will always be hopelessly difficult. But I would here suggest one
element in the change which is perhaps too much neglected; which at any
rate ought not to be neglected; the nature of a vow. I might express it by
saying that pagan antiquity was the age of status; that Christian
mediævalism was the age of vows; and that sceptical modernity has been
the age of contracts; or rather has tried to be, and has failed.
The outstanding example of status was slavery. Needless to say slavery
does not mean tyranny; indeed it need only be regarded relatively to other
things to be regarded as charity. The idea of slavery is that large numbers of
men are meant and made to do the heavy work of the world, and that others,
while taking the margin of profits, must nevertheless support them while
they do it. The point is not whether the work is excessive or moderate, or
whether the condition is comfortable or uncomfortable. The point is that his
work is chosen for the man, his status fixed for the man; and this status is
forced on him by law. As Mr. Balfour said about Socialism, that is slavery
and nothing else is slavery. The slave might well be, and often was, far
more comfortable than the average free labourer; and certainly far more
lazy than the average peasant. He was a slave because he had not reached
his position by choice, or promise, or bargain, but merely by status.
It is admitted that when Christianity had been for some time at work in
the world, this ancient servile status began in some mysterious manner to
disappear. I suggest here that one of the forms which the new spirit took

was the importance of the vow. Feudalism, for instance, differed from
slavery chiefly because feudalism was a vow. The vassal put his hands in
those of his lord, and vowed to be his man; but there was an accent on the
noun substantive as well as on the possessive pronoun. By swearing to be
his man, he proved he was not his chattel. Nobody exacts a promise from a
pickaxe, or expects a poker to swear everlasting friendship with the tongs.
Nobody takes the word of a spade; and nobody ever took the word of a
slave. It marks at least a special stage of transition that the form of freedom
was essential to the fact of service, or even of servitude. In this way it is not
a coincidence that the word homage actually means manhood. And if there
was vow instead of status even in the static parts of Feudalism, it is needless
to say that there was a wilder luxuriance of vows in the more adventurous
part of it. The whole of what we call chivalry was one great vow. Vows of
chivalry varied infinitely from the most solid to the most fantastic; from a
vow to give all the spoils of conquest to the poor to a vow to refrain from
shaving until the first glimpse of Jerusalem. As I have remarked, this rule of
loyalty, even in the unruly exceptions which proved the rule, ran through all
the romances and songs of the troubadours; and there were always vows
even when they were very far from being marriage vows. The idea is as
much present in what they called the Gay Science, of love, as in what they
called the Divine Science, of theology. The modern reader will smile at the
mention of these things as sciences; and will turn to the study of sociology,
ethnology and psycho-analysis; for if these are sciences (about which I
would not divulge a doubt) at least nobody would insult them by calling
them either gay or divine.
I mean here to emphasise the presence, and not even to settle the
proportion, of this new notion in the middle ages. But the critic will be quite
wrong if he thinks it enough to answer that all these things affected only a
cultured class, not corresponding to the servile class of antiquity. When we
come to workmen and small tradesmen, we find the same vague yet vivid
presence of the spirit that can only be called the vow. In this sense there was
a chivalry of trades as well as a chivalry of orders of knighthood; just as
there was a heraldry of shop-signs as well as a heraldry of shields. Only it
happens that in the enlightenment and liberation of the sixteenth century,
the heraldry of the rich was preserved, and the heraldry of the poor
destroyed. And there is a sinister symbolism in the fact that almost the only
emblem still hung above a shop is that of the three balls of Lombardy. Of

all those democratic glories nothing can now glitter in the sun; except the
sign of the golden usury that has devoured them all. The point here,
however, is that the trade or craft had not only something like the crest, but
something like the vow of knighthood. There was in the position of the
guildsman the same basic notion that belonged to knights and even to
monks. It was the notion of the free choice of a fixed estate. We can realise
the moral atmosphere if we compare the system of the Christian guilds, not
only with the status of the Greek and Roman slaves, but with such a scheme
as that of the Indian castes. The oriental caste has some of the qualities of
the occidental guild; especially the valuable quality of tradition and the
accumulation of culture. Men might be proud of their castes, as they were
proud of their guilds. But they had never chosen their castes, as they have
chosen their guilds. They had never, within historic memory, even
collectively created their castes, as they collectively created their guilds.
Like the slave system, the caste system was older than history. The heathens
of modern Asia, as much as the heathens of ancient Europe, lived by the
very spirit of status. Status in a trade has been accepted like status in a tribe;
and that in a tribe of beasts and birds rather than men. The fisherman
continued to be a fisherman as the fish continued to be a fish; and the hunter
would no more turn into a cook than his dog would try its luck as a cat.
Certainly his dog would not be found prostrated before the mysterious altar
of Pasht, barking or whining a wild, lonely, and individual vow that he at all
costs would become a cat. Yet that was the vital revolt and innovation of
vows, as compared with castes or slavery; as when a man vowed to be a
monk, or the son of a cobbler saluted the shrine of St. Joseph, the patron
saint of carpenters. When he had entered the guild of the carpenters he did
indeed find himself responsible for a very real loyalty and discipline; but
the whole social atmosphere surrounding his entrance was full of the sense
of a separate and personal decision. There is one place where we can still
find this sentiment; the sentiment of something at once free and final. We
can feel it, if the service is properly understood, before and after the
marriage vows at any ordinary wedding in any ordinary church.
Such, in very vague outline, has been the historical nature of vows; and
the unique part they played in that mediæval civilisation out of which
modern civilisation rose—or fell. We can now consider, a little less cloudily
than it is generally considered nowadays, whether we really think vows are
good things; whether they ought to be broken; and (as would naturally

follow) whether they ought to be made. But we can never judge it fairly till
we face, as I have tried to suggest, this main fact of history; that the
personal pledge, feudal or civic or monastic, was the way in which the
world did escape from the system of slavery in the past. For the modern
break-down of mere contract leaves it still doubtful if there be any other
way of escaping it in the future.
The idea, or at any rate the ideal, of the thing called a vow is fairly
obvious. It is to combine the fixity that goes with finality with the self-
respect that only goes with freedom. The man is a slave who is his own
master, and a king who is his own ancestor. For all kinds of social purposes
he has the calculable orbit of the man in the caste or the servile state; but in
the story of his own soul he is still pursuing, at great peril, his own
adventure. As seen by his neighbours, he is as safe as if immured in a
fortress; but as seen by himself he may be for ever careering through the
sky or crashing towards the earth in a flying-ship. What is socially
humdrum is produced by what is individually heroic; and a city is made not
merely of citizens but knight-errants. It is needless to point out the part
played by the monastery in civilising Europe in its most barbaric
interregnum; and even those who still denounce the monasteries will be
found denouncing them for these two extreme and apparently opposite
eccentricities. They are blamed for the rigid character of their collective
routine; and also for the fantastic character of their individual fanaticism.
For the purposes of this part of the argument, it would not matter if the
marriage vow produced the most austere discomforts of the monastic vow.
The point for the present is that it was sustained by a sense of free will; and
the feeling that its evils were not accepted but chosen. The same spirit ran
through all the guilds and popular arts and spontaneous social systems of
the whole civilisation. It had all the discipline of an army; but it was an
army of volunteers.
The civilisation of vows was broken up when Henry the Eighth broke his
own vow of marriage. Or rather, it was broken up by a new cynicism in the
ruling powers of Europe, of which that was the almost accidental
expression in England. The monasteries, that had been built by vows, were
destroyed. The guilds, that had been regiments of volunteers, were
dispersed. The sacramental nature of marriage was denied; and many of the
greatest intellects of the new movement, like Milton, already indulged in a
very modern idealisation of divorce. The progress of this sort of

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

If we may extend the doubtful metaphor of an army of industry to cover
the yet weaker phrase about captains of industry, there is no doubt about
what those captains at present command. They work for a centralised
discipline in every department. They erect a vast apparatus of supervision
and inspection; they support all the modern restrictions touching drink and
hygiene. They may be called the friends of temperance or even of
happiness; but even their friends would not call them the friends of
freedom. There is only one form of freedom which they tolerate; and that is
the sort of sexual freedom which is covered by the legal fiction of divorce.
If we ask why this liberty is alone left, when so many liberties are lost, we
shall find the answer in the summary of this chapter. They are trying to
break the vow of the knight as they broke the vow of the monk. They
recognise the vow as the vital antithesis to servile status; the alternative and
therefore the antagonist. Marriage makes a small state within the state,
which resists all such regimentation. That bond breaks all other bonds; that
law is found stronger than all later and lesser laws. They desire the
democracy to be sexually fluid, because the making of small nuclei is like
the making of small nations. Like small nations, they are a nuisance to the
mind of imperial scope. In short, what they fear, in the most literal sense, is
home rule.
Men can always be blind to a thing so long as it is big enough. It is so
difficult to see the world in which we live, that I know that many will see
all I have said here of slavery as a nonsensical nightmare. But if my
association of divorce with slavery seems only a far-fetched and theoretical
paradox, I should have no difficulty in replacing it by a concrete and
familiar picture. Let them merely remember the time when they read
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and ask themselves whether the oldest and simplest
of the charges against slavery has not always been the breaking up of
families.

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

VII.—The Tragedies of Marriage

T HERE is one view very common among the liberal-minded which is
exceedingly fatiguing to the clear-headed. It is symbolised in the sort of
man who says, “These ruthless bigots will refuse to bury me in
consecrated ground, because I have always refused to be baptised.” A clear-
headed person can easily conceive his point of view, in so far as he happens
to think that baptism does not matter. But the clear-headed will be
completely puzzled when they ask themselves why, if he thinks that
baptism does not matter, he should think that burial does matter. If it is in
no way imprudent for a man to keep himself from a consecrated font, how
can it be inhuman for other people to keep him from a consecrated field? It
is surely much nearer to mere superstition to attach importance to what is
done to a dead body than to a live baby. I can understand a man thinking
both superstitious, or both sacred; but I cannot see why he should grumble
that other people do not give him as sanctities what he regards as
superstitions. He is merely complaining of being treated as what he declares
himself to be. It is as if a man were to say, “My persecutors still refuse to
make me king, out of mere malice because I am a strict republican.” Or it is
as if he said, “These heartless brutes are so prejudiced against a teetotaler,
that they won’t even give him a glass of brandy.”
The fashion of divorce would not be a modern fashion if it were not full
of this touching fallacy. A great deal of it might be summed up as a most
illogical and fanatical appetite for getting married in churches. It is as if a
man should practice polygamy out of sheer greed for wedding cake. Or it is
as if he provided his household with new shoes, entirely by having them
thrown after the wedding carriage when he went off with a new wife. There
are other ways of procuring cake or purchasing shoes; and there are other
ways of setting up a human establishment. What is unreasonable is the
request which the modern man really makes of the religious institutions of
his fathers. The modern man wants to buy one shoe without the other; to

obtain one half of a supernatural revelation without the other. The modern
man wants to eat his wedding cake and have it, too.
I am not basing this book on the religious argument, and therefore I will
not pause to inquire why the old Catholic institutions of Christianity seem
to be especially made the objects of these unreasonable complaints. As a
matter of fact nobody does propose that some ferocious Anti-Semite like M.
Drumont should be buried as a Jew with all the rites of the Synagogue. But
the broad-minded were furious because Tolstoi, who had denounced
Russian orthodoxy quite as ferociously, was not buried as orthodox, with all
the rites of the Russian Church. Nobody does insist that a man who wishes
to have fifty wives when Mahomet allowed him five, must have his fifty
with the full approval of Mahomet’s religion. But the broad-minded are
extremely bitter because a Christian who wishes to have several wives
when his own promise bound him to one, is not allowed to violate his vow
at the same altar at which he made it. Nobody does insist on Baptists totally
immersing people who totally deny the advantages of being totally
immersed. Nobody ever did expect Mormons to receive the open mockers
of the Book of Mormon, nor Christian Scientists to let their churches be
used for exposing Mrs. Eddy as an old fraud. It is only of the forms of
Christianity making the Catholic claim that such inconsistent claims are
made. And even the inconsistency is, I fancy, a tribute to the acceptance of
the Catholic idea in a catholic fashion. It may be that men have an obscure
sense that nobody need belong to the Mormon religion and every one does
ultimately belong to the Church; and though he may have made a few dozen
Mormon marriages in a wandering and entertaining life, he will really have
nowhere to go to if he does not somehow find his way back to the
churchyard. But all this concerns the general theological question and not
the matter involved here, which is merely historical and social. The point
here is that it is at least superficially inconsistent to ask institutions for a
formal approval, which they can only give by an inconsistency.
I have put first the question of what is marriage. And we are now in a
position to ask more clearly what is divorce. It is not merely the negation or
neglect of marriage; for any one can always neglect marriage. It is not the
dissolution of the legal obligation of marriage, or even the legal obligation
of monogamy; for the simple reason that no such obligation exists. Any
man in modern London may have a hundred wives if he does not call them
wives; or rather, if he does not go through certain more or less mystical

ceremonies in order to assert that they are wives. He might create a certain
social coolness round his household, a certain fading of his general
popularity. But that is not created by law, and could not be prevented by
law. As the late Lord Salisbury very sensibly observed about boycotting in
Ireland, “How can you make a law to prevent people going out of the room
when somebody they don’t like comes into it?” We cannot be forcibly
introduced to a polygamist by a policeman. It would not be an assertion of
social liberty, but a denial of social liberty, if we found ourselves practically
obliged to associate with all the profligates in society. But divorce is not in
this sense mere anarchy. On the contrary divorce is in this sense
respectability; and even a rigid excess of respectability. Divorce in this
sense might indeed be not unfairly called snobbery. The definition of
divorce, which concerns us here, is that it is the attempt to give
respectability, and not liberty. It is the attempt to give a certain social status,
and not a legal status. It is indeed supposed that this can be done by the
alteration of certain legal forms; and this will be more or less true according
to the extent to which law as such overawed public opinion, or was valued
as a true expression of public opinion. If a man divorced in the large-
minded fashion of Henry the Eighth pleaded his legal title among the
peasantry of Ireland, for instance, I think he would find a difference still
existing between respectability and religion. But the peculiar point here is
that many are claiming the sanction of religion as well as of respectability.
They would attach to their very natural and sometimes very pardonable
experiments a certain atmosphere, and even glamour, which has
undoubtedly belonged to the status of marriage in historic Christendom. But
before they make this attempt, it would be well to ask why such a dignity
ever appeared or in what it consisted. And I fancy we shall find ourselves
confronted with the very simple truth, that the dignity arose wholly and
entirely out of the fidelity; and that the glamour merely came from the vow.
People were regarded as having a certain dignity because they were
dedicated in a certain way; as bound to certain duties and, if it be preferred,
to certain discomforts. It may be irrational to endure these discomforts; it
may even be irrational to respect them. But it is certainly much more
irrational to respect them, and then artificially transfer the same respect to
the absence of them. It is as if we were to expect uniforms to be saluted
when armies were disbanded; and ask people to cheer a soldier’s coat when
it did not contain a soldier. If you think you can abolish war, abolish it; but

do not suppose that when there are no wars to be waged, there will still be
warriors to be worshipped. If it was a good thing that the monasteries were
dissolved, let us say so and dismiss them. But the nobles who dissolved the
monasteries did not shave their heads, and ask to be regarded as saints
solely on account of that ceremony. The nobles did not dress up as abbots
and ask to be credited with a potential talent for working miracles, because
of the austerity of their vows of poverty and chastity. They got inside the
houses, but not the hoods, and still less the haloes. They at least knew that it
is not the habit that makes the monk. They were not so superstitious as
those moderns, who think it is the veil that makes the bride.
What is respected, in short, is fidelity to the ancient flag of the family,
and a readiness to fight for what I have noted as its unique type of freedom.
I say readiness to fight, for fortunately the fight itself is the exception rather
than the rule. The soldier is not respected because he is doomed to death,
but because he is ready for death; and even ready for defeat. The married
man or woman is not doomed to evil, sickness or poverty; but is respected
for taking a certain step for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in
sickness or in health. But there is one result of this line of argument which
should correct a danger in some arguments on the same side.
It is very essential that a stricture on divorce, which is in fact simply a
defence of marriage, should be independent of sentimentalism, especially in
the form called optimism. A man justifying a fight for national
independence or civic freedom is neither sentimental nor optimistic. He
explains the sacrifice, but he does not explain it away. He does not say that
bayonet wounds are pin-pricks, or mere scratches of the thorns on the rose
of pleasure. He does not say that the whole display of firearms is a festive
display of fireworks. On the contrary, when he praises it most, he praises it
as pain rather than pleasure. He increases the praise with the pain; it is his
whole boast that militarism, and even modern science, can produce no
instrument of torture to tame the soul of man. It is idle, in speaking of war,
to pit the realistic against the romantic, in the sense of the heroic; for all
possible realism can only increase the heroism; and therefore, in the highest
sense, increase the romance. Now I do not compare marriage with war, but I
do compare marriage with law or liberty or patriotism or popular
government, or any of the human ideals which have often to be defended by
war. Even the wildest of those ideals, which seem to escape from all the
discipline of peace, do not escape from the discipline of war. The

Bolshevists may have aimed at pure peace and liberty; but they have been
compelled, for their own purpose, first to raise armies and then to rule
armies. In a word, however beautiful you may think your own visions of
beatitude, men must suffer to be beautiful, and even suffer a considerable
interval of being ugly. And I have no notion of denying that mankind suffers
much from the maintenance of the standard of marriage; as it suffers much
from the necessity of criminal law or the recurrence of crusades and
revolutions. The only question here is whether marriage is indeed, as I
maintain, an ideal and an institution making for popular freedom; I do not
need to be told that anything making for popular freedom has to be paid for
in vigilance and pain, and a whole army of martyrs.
Hence I am far indeed from denying the hard cases which exist here, as
in all matters involving the idea of honour. For indeed I could not deny
them without denying the whole parallel of militant morality on which my
argument rests. But this being first understood, it will be well to discuss in a
little more detail what are described as the tragedies of marriage. And the
first thing to note about the most tragic of them is that they are not tragedies
of marriage at all. They are tragedies of sex; and might easily occur in a
highly modern romance in which marriage was not mentioned at all. It is
generally summarised by saying that the tragic element is the absence of
love. But it is often forgotten that another tragic element is often the
presence of love. The doctors of divorce, with an air of the frank and
friendly realism of men of the world, are always recommending and
rejoicing in a sensible separation by mutual consent. But if we are really to
dismiss our dreams of dignity and honour, if we are really to fall back on
the frank realism of our experience as men of the world, then the very first
thing that our experience will tell us is that it very seldom is a separation by
mutual consent; that is, that the consent very seldom is sincerely and
spontaneously mutual. By far the commonest problem in such cases is that
in which one party wishes to end the partnership and the other does not.
And of that emotional situation you can make nothing but a tragedy,
whichever way you turn it. With or without marriage, with or without
divorce, with or without any arrangements that anybody can suggest or
imagine, it remains a tragedy. The only difference is that by the doctrine of
marriage it remains both a noble and a fruitful tragedy; like that of a man
who falls fighting for his country, or dies testifying to the truth. But the
truth is that the innovators have as much sham optimism about divorce as

any romanticist can have had about marriage. They regard their story, when
it ends in the divorce court, through as rosy a mist of sentimentalism as
anybody ever regarded a story ending with wedding bells. Such a reformer
is quite sure that when once the prince and princess are divorced by the
fairy godmother, they will live happily ever after. I enjoy romance, but I
like it to be rooted in reality; and any one with a touch of reality knows that
nine couples out of ten, when they are divorced, are left in an exceedingly
different state. It will be safe to say in most cases that one partner will fail
to find happiness in an infatuation, and the other will from the first accept a
tragedy. In the realm of reality and not of romance, it is commonly a case of
breaking hearts as well as breaking promises; and even dishonour is not
always a remedy for remorse.
The next limitation to be laid down in the matter affects certain practical
forms of discomfort, on a level rather lower than love or hatred. The cases
most commonly quoted concern what is called “drink” and what is called
“cruelty.” They are always talked about as matters of fact; though in
practice they are very decidedly matters of opinion. It is not a flippancy, but
a fact, that the misfortune of the woman who has married a drunkard may
have to be balanced against the misfortune of the man who has married a
teetotaler. For the very definition of drunkenness may depend on the dogma
of teetotalism. Drunkenness, it has been very truly observed,[B] “may mean
anything from delirium tremens to having a stronger head than the official
appointed to conduct the examination.” Mr. Bernard Shaw once professed,
apparently seriously, that any man drinking wine or beer at all was
incapacitated from managing a motorcar; and still more, therefore, one
would suppose, from managing a wife. The scales are weighted here, of
course, with all those false weights of snobbishness which are the curse of
justice in this country. The working class is forced to conduct almost in
public a normal and varying festive habit, which the upper class can afford
to conduct in private; and a certain section of the middle class, that which
happens to concern itself most with local politics and social reforms, really
has or affects a standard quite abnormal and even alien. They might go any
lengths of injustice in dealing with the working man or working woman
accused of too hearty a taste in beer. To mention but one matter out of a
thousand, the middle class reformers are obviously quite ignorant of the
hours at which working people begin to work. Because they themselves, at
eleven o’clock in the morning, have only recently finished breakfast and the

full moral digestion of the Daily Mail, they think a charwoman drinking
beer at that hour is one of those arising early in the morning to follow after
strong drink. Most of them really do not know that she has already done
more than half a heavy day’s work, and is partaking of a very reasonable
luncheon. The whole problem of proletarian drink is entangled in a network
of these misunderstandings; and there is no doubt whatever that, when
judged by these generalisations, the poor will be taken in a net of injustices.
And this truth is as certain in the case of what is called cruelty as of what is
called drink. Nine times out of ten the judgment on a navvy for hitting a
woman is about as just as a judgment on him for not taking off his hat to a
lady. It is a class test; it may be a class superiority; but it is not an act of
equal justice between the classes. It leaves out a thousand things; the
provocation, the atmosphere, the harassing restrictions of space, the
nagging which Dickens described as the terrors of “temper in a cart,” the
absence of certain taboos of social training, the tradition of greater
roughness even in the gestures of affection. To make all marriage or
divorce, in the case of such a man, turn upon a blow is like blasting the
whole life of a gentleman because he has slammed the door. Often a poor
man cannot slam the door; partly because the model villa might fall down;
but more because he has nowhere to go to; the smoking-room, the billiard-
room and the peacock music-room not being yet attached to his premises.
I say this in passing, to point out that while I do not dream of suggesting
that there are only happy marriages, there will quite certainly, as things
work nowadays, be a very large number of unhappy and unjust divorces.
They will be cases in which the innocent partner will receive the real
punishment of the guilty partner, through being in fact and feeling the
faithful partner. For instance, it is insisted that a married person must at
least find release from the society of a lunatic; but it is also true that the
scientific reformers, with their fuss about “the feeble-minded,” are
continually giving larger and looser definitions of lunacy. The process
might begin by releasing somebody from a homicidal maniac, and end by
dealing in the same way with a rather dull conversationalist. But in fact
nobody does deny that a person should be allowed some sort of release
from a homicidal maniac. The most extreme school of orthodoxy only
maintains that anybody who has had that experience should be content with
that release. In other words, it says he should be content with that
experience of matrimony, and not seek another. It was put very wittily, I

think, by a Roman Catholic friend of mine, who said he approved of release
so long as it was not spelt with a hyphen.
To put it roughly, we are prepared in some cases to listen to the man who
complains of having a wife. But we are not prepared to listen, at such
length, to the same man when he comes back and complains that he has not
got a wife. Now in practice at this moment the great mass of the complaints
are precisely of this kind. The reformers insist particularly on the pathos of
a man’s position when he has obtained a separation without a divorce. Their
most tragic figure is that of the man who is already free of all those ills he
had, and is only asking to be allowed to fly to others that he knows not of. I
should be the last to deny that, in certain emotional circumstances, his
tragedy may be very tragic indeed. But his tragedy is of the emotional kind
which can never be entirely eliminated; and which he has himself, in all
probability, inflicted on the partner he has left. We may call it the price of
maintaining an ideal or the price of making a mistake; but anyhow it is the
point of our whole distinction in the matter; it is here that we draw the line,
and I have nowhere denied that it is a line of battle. The battle joins on the
debatable ground, not of the man’s doubtful past but of his still more
doubtful future. In a word, the divorce controversy is not really a
controversy about divorce. It is a controversy about re-marriage; or rather
about whether it is marriage at all.
And with that we can only return to the point of honour which I have
compared here to a point of patriotism; since it is both the smallest and the
greatest kind of patriotism. Men have died in torments during the last five
years for points of patriotism far more dubious and fugitive. Men like the
Poles or the Serbians, through long periods of their history, may be said
rather to have lived in torments. I will never admit that the vital need of the
freedom of the family, as I have tried to sketch it here, is not a cause as
valuable as the freedom of any frontier. But I do willingly admit that the
cause would be a dark and terrible one, if it really asked these men to suffer
torments. As I have stated it, on its most extreme terms, it only asks them to
suffer abnegations. And those negative sufferings I do think they may
honourably be called upon to bear, for the glory of their own oath and the
great things by which the nations live. In relation to their own nation most
normal men will feel that this distinction between release and “re-lease” is
neither fanciful nor harsh, but very rational and human. A patriot may be an
exile in another country; but he will not be a patriot of another country. He

will be as cheerful as he can in an abnormal position; he may or may not
sing his country’s songs in a strange land; but he will not sing the strange
songs as his own. And such may fairly be also the attitude of the citizen
who has gone into exile from the oldest of earthly cities.

THE VISTA OF DIVORCE

VIII.—The Vista of Divorce

T HE case for divorce combines all the advantages of having it both ways;
and of drawing the same deduction from right or left, and from black or
white. Whichever way the programme works in practice, it can still be
justified in theory. If there are few examples of divorce, it shows how little
divorce need be dreaded; if there are many, it shows how much it is
required. The rarity of divorce is an argument in favour of divorce; and the
multiplicity of divorce is an argument against marriage. Now, in truth, if we
were confined to considering this alternative in a speculative manner, if
there were no concrete facts but only abstract probabilities, we should have
no difficulty in arguing our case. The abstract liberty allowed by the
reformers is as near as possible to anarchy, and gives no logical or legal
guarantee worth discussing. The advantages of their reform do not accrue to
the innocent party, but to the guilty party; especially if he be sufficiently
guilty. A man has only to commit the crime of desertion to obtain the
reward of divorce. And if they are entitled to take as typical the most
horrible hypothetical cases of the abuse of the marriage laws, surely we are
entitled to take equally extreme possibilities in the abuse of their own
divorce laws. If they, when looking about for a husband, so often hit upon a
homicidal maniac, surely we may politely introduce them to the far more
human figure of the gentleman who marries as many women as he likes and
gets rid of them as often as he pleases. But in fact there is no necessity for
us to argue thus in the abstract; for the amiable gentleman in question
undoubtedly exists in the concrete. Of course, he is no new figure; he is a
very recurrent type of rascal; his name has been Lothario or Don Juan; and
he has often been represented as a rather romantic rascal. The point of
divorce reform, it cannot be too often repeated, is that the rascal should not
only be regarded as romantic, but regarded as respectable. He is not to sow
his wild oats and settle down; he is merely to settle down to sowing his wild
oats. They are to be regarded as tame and inoffensive oats; almost, if one
may say so, as Quaker oats. But there is no need, as I say, to speculate about

whether the looser view of divorce might prevail; for it is already
prevailing. The newspapers are full of an astonishing hilarity about the
rapidity with which hundreds or thousands of human families are being
broken up by the lawyers; and about the undisguised haste of the “hustling
judges” who carry on the work. It is a form of hilarity which would seem to
recall the gaiety of a grave-digger in a city swept by a pestilence. But a few
details occasionally flash by in the happy dance; from time to time the court
is moved by a momentary curiosity about the causes of the general violation
of oaths and promises; as if there might, here and there, be a hint of some
sort of reason for ruining the fundamental institution of society. And
nobody who notes those details, or considers those faint hints of reason, can
doubt for a moment that masses of these men and women are now simply
using divorce in the spirit of free-love. They are very seldom the sort of
people who have once fallen tragically into the wrong place, and have now
found their way triumphantly to the right place. They are almost always
people who are obviously wandering from one place to another, and will
probably leave their last shelter exactly as they have left their first. But it
seems to amuse them to make again, if possible in a church, a promise they
have already broken in practice and almost avowedly disbelieve in
principle.
In face of this headlong fashion, it is really reasonable to ask the divorce
reformers what is their attitude towards the old monogamous ethic of our
civilisation; and whether they wish to retain it in general, or to retain it at
all. Unfortunately even the sincerest and most lucid of them use language
which leaves the matter a little doubtful. Mr. E. S. P. Haynes is one of the
most brilliant and most fair-minded controversialists on that side; and he
has said, for instance, that he agrees with me in supporting the ideal of
indissoluble or, at least, of undissolved marriage. Mr. Haynes is one of the
few friends of divorce who are also real friends of democracy; and I am
sure that in practice this stands for a real sympathy with the home,
especially the poor home. Unfortunately, on the theoretic side, the word
“ideal” is far from being an exact term, and is open to two almost opposite
interpretations. For many would say that marriage is an ideal as some would
say that monasticism is an ideal, in the sense of a counsel of perfection.
Now certainly we might preserve a conjugal ideal in this way. A man might
be reverently pointed out in the street as a sort of saint, merely because he
was married. A man might wear a medal for monogamy; or have letters

after his name similar to V.C. or D.D.; let us say L.W. for “Lives With His
Wife,” or “N.D.Y.” for “Not Divorced Yet.” We might, on entering some
strange city, be struck by a stately column erected to the memory of a wife
who never ran away with a soldier, or the shrine and image of a historical
character, who had resisted the example of the man in the “New Witness”
ballade in bolting with the children’s nurse. Such high artistic hagiology
would be quite consistent with Mr. Haynes’ divorce reform; with re-
marriage after three years, or three hours. It would also be quite consistent
with Mr. Haynes’ phrase about preserving an ideal of marriage. What it
would not be consistent with is the perfectly plain, solid, secular and social
usefulness which I have here attributed to marriage. It does not create or
preserve a natural institution, normal to the whole community, to balance
the more artificial and even more arbitrary institution of the state; which is
less natural even if it is equally necessary. It does not defend a voluntary
association, but leaves the only claim on life, death and loyalty with a more
coercive institution. It does not stand, in the sense I have tried to explain,
for the principle of liberty. In short, it does not do any of the things which
Mr. Haynes himself would especially desire to see done. For humanity to be
thus spontaneously organised from below, it is necessary that the
organisation should be almost as universal as the official organisation from
above. The tyrant must find not one family but many families defying his
power; he must find mankind not a dust of atoms, but fixed in solid blocks
of fidelity. And those human groups must support not only themselves but
each other. In this sense what some call individualism is as corporate as
communism. It is a thing of volunteers; but volunteers must be soldiers. It is
a defence of private persons; but we might say that the private persons must
be private soldiers. The family must be recognised as well as real; above all,
the family must be recognised by the families. To expect individuals to
suffer successfully for a home apart from the home, that is for something
which is an incident but not an institution, is really a confusion between two
ideas; it is a verbal sophistry almost in the nature of a pun. Similarly, for
instance, we cannot prove the moral force of a peasantry by pointing to one
peasant; we might almost as well reveal the military force of infantry by
pointing to one infant.
I take it, however, that the advocates of divorce do not mean that
marriage is to remain ideal only in the sense of being almost impossible.
They do not mean that a faithful husband is only to be admired as a fanatic.

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

which so many others are content merely to accept and employ. It is
admittedly a frantic and farcical thing that a good man should find or think
it necessary to pretend to commit a sin. Some of the divorce moralists seem
to deduce from this that he ought really to commit the sin. They may
possibly be aware, however, that there are some who do not agree with
them.
For this latter fact is the next step in the speculative progress of the new
morality. The divorce advocates must be well aware that modern
civilisation still contains strong elements, not the least intelligent and
certainly not the least vigorous, which will not accept the new respectability
as a substitute for the old religious vow. The Roman Catholic Church, the
Anglo-Catholic school, the conservative peasantries, and a large section of
the popular life everywhere, will regard the riot of divorce and re-marriage
as they would any other riot of irresponsibility. The consequence would
appear to be that two different standards will appear in ordinary morality,
and even in ordinary society. Instead of the old social distinction between
those who are married and those who are unmarried, there will be a
distinction between those who are married and those who are really
married. Society might even become divided into two societies; which is
perilously approximate to Disraeli’s famous exaggeration about England
divided into two nations. But whether England be actually so divided or
not, this note of the two nations is the real note of warning in the matter. It
is in this connection, perhaps, that we have to consider most gravely and
doubtfully the future of our own country.
Anarchy cannot last, but anarchic communities cannot last either. Mere
lawlessness cannot live, but it can destroy life. The nations of the earth
always return to sanity and solidarity; but the nations which return to it first
are the nations which survive. We in England cannot afford to allow our
social institutions to go to pieces, as if this ancient and noble country were
an ephemeral colony. We cannot afford it comparatively, even if we could
afford it positively. We are surrounded by vigorous nations mainly rooted in
the peasant or permanent ideals; notably in the case of France and Ireland. I
know that the detested and detestably undemocratic parliamentary clique,
which corrupts France as it does England, was persuaded or bribed by a Jew
named Naquet to pass a crude and recent divorce law, which was full of the
hatred of Christianity. But only a very superficial critic of France can be
unaware that French parliamentarism is superficial. The French nation as a

whole, the most rigidly respectable nation in the world, will certainly go on
living by the old standards of domesticity. When Frenchmen are not
Christians they are heathens; the heathens who worshipped the household
gods. It might seem strange to say, for instance, that an atheist like M.
Clemenceau has for his chief ideal a thing called piety. But to understand
this it is only necessary to know a little Latin—and a little French.
A short time ago, as I am well aware, it would have sounded very
strange to represent the old religious and peasant communities either as a
model or a menace. It was counted a queer thing to say, in the days when
my friends and I first said it; in the days of my youth when the republic of
France and the religion of Ireland were regarded as alike ridiculous and
decadent. But many things have happened since then; and it will not now be
so easy to persuade even newspaper readers that Foch is a fool, either
because he is a Frenchman or because he is a Catholic. The older tradition,
even in the most unfashionable forms, has found champions in the most
unexpected quarters. Only the other day Dr. Saleeby, a distinguished
scientific critic who had made himself the special advocate of all the
instruction and organisation that is called social science, startled his friends
and foes alike by saying that the peasant families in the West of Ireland
were far more satisfactory and successful than those brooded over by all the
benevolent sociology of Bradford. He gave his testimony from an entirely
rationalistic and even materialistic point of view; indeed, he carried
rationalism so far as to give the preference to Roscommon because the
women are still mammals. To a mind of the more traditional type it might
seem sufficient to say they are still mothers. To a memory that lingers over
the legends and lyrical movements of mankind, it might seem no great
improvement to imagine a song that ran “My mammal bids me bind my
hair,” or “I’m to be Queen of the May, mammal, I’m to be Queen of the
May.” But indeed the truth to which he testified is all the more arresting,
because for him it was materialistic and not mystical. The brute biological
advantage, as well as other advantages, was with those for whom that truth
was a truth; and it was all the more instinctive and automatic where that
truth was a tradition. The sort of place where mothers are still something
more than mammals is the only sort of place where they still are mammals.
There the people are still healthy animals; healthy enough to hit you if you
call them animals. I also have, on this merely controversial occasion, used
throughout the rationalistic and not the religious appeal. But it is not

unreasonable to note that the materialistic advantages are really found
among those who most repudiate materialism. This one stray testimony is
but a type of a thousand things of the same kind, which will convince any
one with the sense of social atmospheres that the day of the peasantries is
not passing, but rather arriving. It is the more complex types of society that
are now entangled in their own complexities. Those who tell us, with a
monotonous metaphor, that we cannot put the clock back, seem to be
curiously unconscious of the fact that their own clock has stopped. And
there is nothing so hopeless as clockwork when it stops. A machine cannot
mend itself; it requires a man to mend it; and the future lies with those who
can make living laws for men and not merely dead laws for machinery.
Those living laws are not to be found in the scatter-brained scepticism
which is busy in the great cities, dissolving what it cannot analyse. The
primary laws of man are to be found in the permanent life of man; in those
things that have been common to it in every time and land, though in the
highest civilisation they have reached an enrichment like that of the divine
romance of Cana in Galilee. We know that many critics of such a story say
that its elements are not permanent; but indeed it is the critics who are not
permanent. A hundred mad dogs of heresy have worried man from the
beginning; but it was always the dog that died. We know there is a school of
prigs who disapprove of the wine; and there may now be a school of prigs
who disapprove of the wedding. For in such a case as the story of Cana, it
may be remarked that the pedants are prejudiced against the earthly
elements as much as, or more than, the heavenly elements. It is not the
supernatural that disgusts them, so much as the natural. And those of us
who have seen all the normal rules and relations of humanity uprooted by
random speculators, as if they were abnormal abuses and almost accidents,
will understand why men have sought for something divine if they wished
to preserve anything human. They will know why common sense, cast out
from some academy of fads and fashions conducted on the lines of a
luxurious madhouse, has age after age sought refuge in the high sanity of a
sacrament.

CONCLUSION

IX.—Conclusion

T HIS is a pamphlet and not a book; and the writer of a pamphlet not only
deals with passing things, but generally with things which he hopes will
pass. In that sense it is the object of a pamphlet to be out of date as soon
as possible. It can only survive when it does not succeed. The successful
pamphlets are necessarily dull; and though I have no great hopes of this
being successful, I dare say it is dull enough for all that. It is designed
merely to note certain fugitive proposals of the moment, and compare them
with certain recurrent necessities of the race; but especially the necessity for
some spontaneous social formation freer than that of the state. If it were
more in the nature of a work of literature, with anything like an ambition of
endurance, I might go deeper into the matter, and give some suggestions
about the philosophy or religion of marriage, and the philosophy or religion
of all these rather random departures from it. Some day perhaps I may try to
write something about the spiritual or psychological quarrel between faith
and fads. Here I will only say, in conclusion, that I believe the universal
fallacy here is a fallacy of being universal. There is a sense in which it is
really a human if heroic possibility to love everybody; and the young
student will not find it a bad preliminary exercise to love somebody. But the
fallacy I mean is that of a man who is not even content to love everybody,
but really wishes to be everybody. He wishes to walk down a hundred roads
at once; to sleep in a hundred houses at once; to live a hundred lives at
once. To do something like this in the imagination is one of the occasional
visions of art and poetry; to attempt it in the art of life is not only anarchy
but inaction. Even in the arts it can only be the first hint and not the final
fulfillment; a man cannot work at once in bronze and marble, or play the
organ and the violin at the same time. The universal vision of being such a
Briareus is a nightmare of nonsense even in the merely imaginative world;
and ends in mere nihilism in the social world. If a man had a hundred
houses, there would still be more houses than he had days in which to
dream of them; if a man had a hundred wives, there would still be more

women than he could ever know. He would be an insane sultan jealous of
the whole human race, and even of the dead and the unborn. I believe that
behind the art and philosophy of our time there is a considerable element of
this bottomless ambition and this unnatural hunger; and since in these last
words I am touching only lightly on things that would need much larger
treatment, I will admit that the rending of the ancient roof of man is
probably only a part of such an endless and empty expansion. I asked in the
last chapter what those most wildly engaged in the mere dance of divorce,
as fantastic as the dance of death, really expected for themselves or for their
children. And in the deepest sense I think this is the answer; that they expect
the impossible, that is the universal. They are not crying for the moon,
which is a definite and therefore a defensible desire. They are crying for the
world; and when they had it, they would want another one. In the last resort
they would like to try every situation, not in fancy but in fact; but they
cannot refuse any and therefore cannot resolve on any. In so far as this is the
modern mood, it is a thing so deadly as to be already dead. What is vitally
needed everywhere, in art as much as in ethics, in poetry as much as in
politics, is choice; a creative power in the will as well as in the mind.
Without that self-limitation of somebody, nothing living will ever see the
light.

FOOTNOTES:
[A] Written at the time of the last great German assaults.
[B] The late Cecil Chesterton, in the “New Witness.”

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