If we adopt the common romantic assumption that the object of marriage
is bliss, then the very strongest reason for dissolving a marriage is
that it shall be disagreeable to one or other or both of the parties.
If we accept the view that the object of marriage is to provide for
the production and rearing of children, then childlessness should be a
conclusive reason for dissolution. As neither of these causes entitles
married persons to divorce it is at once clear that our marriage law is
not founded on either assumption. What it is really founded on is the
morality of the tenth commandment, which English women will one day
succeed in obliterating from the walls of our churches by refusing to
enter any building where they are publicly classed with a man's house,
his ox, and his ass, as his purchased chattels. In this morality female
adultery is malversation by the woman and theft by the man, whilst male
adultery with an unmarried woman is not an offence at all. But though
this is not only the theory of our marriage laws, but the practical
morality of many of us, it is no longer an avowed morality, nor does
its persistence depend on marriage; for the abolition of marriage would,
other things remaining unchanged, leave women more effectually enslaved
than they now are. We shall come to the question of the economic
dependence of women on men later on; but at present we had better
confine ourselves to the theories of marriage which we are not ashamed
to acknowledge and defend, and upon which, therefore, marriage reformers
will be obliged to proceed.
We may, I think, dismiss from the field of practical politics the
extreme sacerdotal view of marriage as a sacred and indissoluble
covenant, because though reinforced by unhappy marriages as all
fanaticisms are reinforced by human sacrifices, it has been reduced to
a private and socially inoperative eccentricity by the introduction of
civil marriage and divorce. Theoretically, our civilly married couples
are to a Catholic as unmarried couples are: that is, they are living in
open sin. Practically, civilly married couples are received in society,
by Catholics and everyone else, precisely as sacramentally married
couples are; and so are people who have divorced their wives or husbands
and married again. And yet marriage is enforced by public opinion with
such ferocity that the least suggestion of laxity in its support is
fatal to even the highest and strongest reputations, although laxity
of conduct is winked at with grinning indulgence; so that we find the
austere Shelley denounced as a fiend in human form, whilst Nelson, who
openly left his wife and formed a menage a trois with Sir William and
Lady Hamilton, was idolized. Shelley might have had an illegitimate
child in every county in England if he had done so frankly as a
sinner. His unpardonable offence was that he attacked marriage as an
institution. We feel a strange anguish of terror and hatred against
him, as against one who threatens us with a mortal injury. What is the
element in his proposals that produces this effect?
The answer of the specialists is the one already alluded to: that
the attack on marriage is an attack on property; so that Shelley was
something more hateful to a husband than a horse thief: to wit, a wife
thief, and something more hateful to a wife than a burglar: namely, one
who would steal her husband's house from over her head, and leave her
destitute and nameless on the streets. Now, no doubt this accounts for
a good deal of anti-Shelleyan prejudice: a prejudice so deeply rooted
in our habits that, as I have shewn in my play, men who are bolder
freethinkers than Shelley himself can no more bring themselves to commit
adultery than to commit any common theft, whilst women who loathe sex
slavery more fiercely than Mary Wollstonecraft are unable to face the
insecurity and discredit of the vagabondage which is the masterless
woman's only alternative to celibacy. But in spite of all this there
is a revolt against marriage which has spread so rapidly within my
recollection that though we all still assume the existence of a huge and
dangerous majority which regards the least hint of scepticism as to the
beauty and holiness of marriage as infamous and abhorrent, I sometimes
wonder why it is so difficult to find an authentic living member of this
dreaded army of convention outside the ranks of the people who never
think about public questions at all, and who, for all their numerical
weight and apparently invincible prejudices, accept social changes
to-day as tamely as their forefathers accepted the Reformation under
Henry and Edward, the Restoration under Mary, and, after Mary's death,
the shandygaff which Elizabeth compounded from both doctrines and called
the Articles of the Church of England. If matters were left to these
simple folk, there would never be any changes at all; and society would
perish like a snake that could not cast its skins. Nevertheless the
snake does change its skin in spite of them; and there are signs that
our marriage-law skin is causing discomfort to thoughtful people and
will presently be cast whether the others are satisfied with it or not.
The question therefore arises: What is there in marriage that makes the
thoughtful people so uncomfortable?