The late Hugh Price Hughes, an eminent Methodist divine, once organized
in London a conference of respectable men to consider the subject.
Nothing came of it (nor indeed could have come of it in the absence of
women); but it had its value as giving the young sociologists present,
of whom I was one, an authentic notion of what a picked audience
of respectable men understood by married life. It was certainly a
staggering revelation. Peter the Great would have been shocked; Byron
would have been horrified; Don Juan would have fled from the conference
into a monastery. The respectable men all regarded the marriage ceremony
as a rite which absolved them from the laws of health and temperance;
inaugurated a life-long honeymoon; and placed their pleasures on exactly
the same footing as their prayers. It seemed entirely proper and natural
to them that out of every twenty-four hours of their lives they should
pass eight shut up in one room with their wives alone, and this, not
birdlike, for the mating season, but all the year round and every year.
How they settled even such minor questions as to which party should
decide whether and how much the window should be open and how many
blankets should be on the bed, and at what hour they should go to
bed and get up so as to avoid disturbing one another's sleep, seemed
insoluble questions to me. But the members of the conference did not
seem to mind. They were content to have the whole national housing
problem treated on a basis of one room for two people. That was the
essence of marriage for them.
Please remember, too, that there was nothing in their circumstances to
check intemperance. They were men of business: that is, men for the most
part engaged in routine work which exercized neither their minds nor
their bodies to the full pitch of their capacities. Compared with
statesmen, first-rate professional men, artists, and even with laborers
and artisans as far as muscular exertion goes, they were underworked,
and could spare the fine edge of their faculties and the last few inches
of their chests without being any the less fit for their daily routine.
If I had adopted their habits, a startling deterioration would have
appeared in my writing before the end of a fortnight, and frightened me
back to what they would have considered an impossible asceticism. But
they paid no penalty of which they were conscious. They had as much
health as they wanted: that is, they did not feel the need of a doctor.
They enjoyed their smokes, their meals, their respectable clothes,
their affectionate games with their children, their prospects of larger
profits or higher salaries, their Saturday half holidays and Sunday
walks, and the rest of it. They did less than two hours work a day and
took from seven to nine office hours to do it in. And they were no good
for any mortal purpose except to go on doing it. They were respectable
only by the standard they themselves had set. Considered seriously
as electors governing an empire through their votes, and choosing and
maintaining its religious and moral institutions by their powers of
social persecution, they were a black-coated army of calamity. They were
incapable of comprehending the industries they were engaged in, the
laws under which they lived, or the relation of their country to other
countries. They lived the lives of old men contentedly. They were
timidly conservative at the age at which every healthy human being ought
to be obstreperously revolutionary. And their wives went through the
routine of the kitchen, nursery, and drawing-room just as they went
through the routine of the office. They had all, as they called it,
settled down, like balloons that had lost their lifting margin of gas;
and it was evident that the process of settling down would go on until
they settled into their graves. They read old-fashioned newspapers
with effort, and were just taking with avidity to a new sort of paper,
costing a halfpenny, which they believed to be extraordinarily bright
and attractive, and which never really succeeded until it became
extremely dull, discarding all serious news and replacing it by vapid
tittle-tattle, and substituting for political articles informed by
at least some pretence of knowledge of economics, history, and
constitutional law, such paltry follies and sentimentalities, snobberies
and partisaneries, as ignorance can understand and irresponsibility
relish.
What they called patriotism was a conviction that because they were born
in Tooting or Camberwell, they were the natural superiors of Beethoven,
of Rodin, of Ibsen, of Tolstoy and all other benighted foreigners. Those
of them who did not think it wrong to go to the theatre liked above
everything a play in which the hero was called Dick; was continually
fingering a briar pipe; and, after being overwhelmed with admiration
and affection through three acts, was finally rewarded with the legal
possession of a pretty heroine's person on the strength of a staggering
lack of virtue. Indeed their only conception of the meaning of the word
virtue was abstention from stealing other men's wives or from refusing
to marry their daughters.
As to law, religion, ethics, and constitutional government, any
counterfeit could impose on them. Any atheist could pass himself off on
them as a bishop, any anarchist as a judge, any despot as a Whig, any
sentimental socialist as a Tory, any philtre-monger or witch-finder as
a man of science, any phrase-maker as a statesman. Those who did not
believe the story of Jonah and the great fish were all the readier to
believe that metals can be transmuted and all diseases cured by radium,
and that men can live for two hundred years by drinking sour milk. Even
these credulities involved too severe an intellectual effort for many of
them: it was easier to grin and believe nothing. They maintained their
respect for themselves by "playing the game" (that is, doing what
everybody else did), and by being good judges of hats, ties, dogs,
pipes, cricket, gardens, flowers, and the like. They were capable
of discussing each other's solvency and respectability with some
shrewdness, and could carry out quite complicated systems of paying
visits and "knowing" one another. They felt a little vulgar when they
spent a day at Margate, and quite distinguished and travelled when
they spent it at Boulogne. They were, except as to their clothes, "not
particular": that is, they could put up with ugly sights and sounds,
unhealthy smells, and inconvenient houses, with inhuman apathy and
callousness. They had, as to adults, a theory that human nature is so
poor that it is useless to try to make the world any better, whilst as
to children they believed that if they were only sufficiently lectured
and whipped, they could be brought to a state of moral perfection such
as no fanatic has ever ascribed to his deity. Though they were not
intentionally malicious, they practised the most appalling cruelties
from mere thoughtlessness, thinking nothing of imprisoning men and
women for periods up to twenty years for breaking into their houses; of
treating their children as wild beasts to be tamed by a system of blows
and imprisonment which they called education; and of keeping pianos in
their houses, not for musical purposes, but to torment their daughters
with a senseless stupidity that would have revolted an inquisitor.
In short, dear reader, they were very like you and me. I could fill a
hundred pages with the tale of our imbecilities and still leave much
untold; but what I have set down here haphazard is enough to condemn the
system that produced us. The corner stone of that system was the family
and the institution of marriage as we have it to-day in England.