It is, of course, a rhetorical exaggeration to say that all first-class
men escape marriage, and even more of an exaggeration to say that their
high qualities go wholly untransmitted to posterity. On the one hand it
must be obvious that an appreciable number of them, perhaps by reason
of their very detachment and preoccupation, are intrigued into the holy
estate, and that not a few of them enter it deliberately, convinced
that it is the safest form of liaison possible under Christianity. And
on the other hand one must not forget the biological fact that it is
quite feasible to achieve offspring without the imprimatur of Church
and State. The thing, indeed, is so commonplace that I need not risk a
scandal by uncovering it in detail. What I allude to, I need not add,
is not that form of irregularity which curses innocent children with
the stigma of illegitimacy, but that more refined and thoughtful form
which safeguards their social dignity while protecting them against
inheritance from their legal fathers. English philosophy, as I have
shown, suffers by the fact that Herbert Spencer was too busy to permit
himself any such romantic altruism—just as American literature gains
enormously by the fact that Walt Whitman adventured, leaving seven sons
behind him, three of whom are now well-known American poets and in the
forefront of the New Poetry movement.
The extent of this correction of a salient evil of monogamy is very
considerable; its operations explain the private disrepute of perhaps a
majority of first-rate men; its advantages have been set forth in
George Moore’s “Euphorion in Texas,” though in a clumsy and sentimental
way. What is behind it is the profound race sense of women—the instinct
which makes them regard the unborn in their every act—perhaps, too, the
fact that the interests of the unborn are here identical, as in other
situations, with their own egoistic aspirations. As a popular
philosopher has shrewdly observed, the objections to polygamy do not
come from women, for the average woman is sensible enough to prefer
half or a quarter or even a tenth of a first-rate man to the whole
devotion of a third-rate man. Considerations of much the same sort also
justify polyandry—if not morally, then at least biologically. The
average woman, as I have shown, must inevitably view her actual husband
with a certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence,
she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by
the fact that he is their father, nor can she help feeling guilty about
it; for she knows that he is their father only by reason of her own
initiative in the proceedings anterior to her marriage. If, now, an
opportunity presents itself to remove that handicap from at least some
of them, and at the same time to realize her ideal and satisfy her
vanity—if such a chance offers it is no wonder that she occasionally
embraces it.
Here we have an explanation of many lamentable and otherwise
inexplicable violations of domestic integrity. The woman in the case is
commonly dismissed as vicious, but that is no more than a new example
of the common human tendency to attach the concept of viciousness to
whatever is natural, and intelligent, and above the comprehension of
politicians, theologians and green-grocers.