There is no shirking it: if marriage cannot be made to produce something
better than we are, marriage will have to go, or else the nation
will have to go. It is no use talking of honor, virtue, purity, and
wholesome, sweet, clean, English home lives when what is meant is simply
the habits I have described. The flat fact is that English home life
to-day is neither honorable, virtuous, wholesome, sweet, clean, nor
in any creditable way distinctively English. It is in many respects
conspicuously the reverse; and the result of withdrawing children from
it completely at an early age, and sending them to a public school and
then to a university, does, in spite of the fact that these institutions
are class warped and in some respects quite abominably corrupt, produce
sociabler men. Women, too, are improved by the escape from home provided
by women's colleges; but as very few of them are fortunate enough to
enjoy this advantage, most women are so thoroughly home-bred as to
be unfit for human society. So little is expected of them that in
Sheridan's School for Scandal we hardly notice that the heroine is a
female cad, as detestable and dishonorable in her repentance as she is
vulgar and silly in her naughtiness. It was left to an abnormal critic
like George Gissing to point out the glaring fact that in the remarkable
set of life studies of XIXth century women to be found in the novels of
Dickens, the most convincingly real ones are either vilely unamiable
or comically contemptible; whilst his attempts to manufacture admirable
heroines by idealizations of home-bred womanhood are not only absurd but
not even pleasantly absurd: one has no patience with them.
As all this is corrigible by reducing home life and domestic sentiment
to something like reasonable proportions in the life of the individual,
the danger of it does not lie in human nature. Home life as we
understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a
cockatoo. Its grave danger to the nation lies in its narrow views, its
unnaturally sustained and spitefully jealous concupiscences, its
petty tyrannies, its false social pretences, its endless grudges and
squabbles, its sacrifice of the boy's future by setting him to earn
money to help the family when he should be in training for his adult
life (remember the boy Dickens and the blacking factory), and of the
girl's chances by making her a slave to sick or selfish parents, its
unnatural packing into little brick boxes of little parcels of humanity
of ill-assorted ages, with the old scolding or beating the young for
behaving like young people, and the young hating and thwarting the old
for behaving like old people, and all the other ills, mentionable and
unmentionable, that arise from excessive segregation. It sets these
evils up as benefits and blessings representing the highest attainable
degree of honor and virtue, whilst any criticism of or revolt against
them is savagely persecuted as the extremity of vice. The revolt, driven
under ground and exacerbated, produces debauchery veiled by hypocrisy,
an overwhelming demand for licentious theatrical entertainments which no
censorship can stem, and, worst of all, a confusion of virtue with
the mere morality that steals its name until the real thing is loathed
because the imposture is loathsome. Literary traditions spring up in
which the libertine and profligate--Tom Jones and Charles Surface
are the heroes, and decorous, law-abiding persons--Blifil and Joseph
Surface--are the villains and butts. People like to believe that Nell
Gwynne has every amiable quality and the Bishop's wife every odious one.
Poor Mr. Pecksniff, who is generally no worse than a humbug with a turn
for pompous talking, is represented as a criminal instead of as a very
typical English paterfamilias keeping a roof over the head of himself
and his daughters by inducing people to pay him more for his services
than they are worth. In the extreme instances of reaction against
convention, female murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage; and when
Nature throws up that rare phenomenon, an unscrupulous libertine, his
success among "well brought-up" girls is so easy, and the devotion
he inspires so extravagant, that it is impossible not to see that
the revolt against conventional respectability has transfigured
a commonplace rascal into a sort of Anarchist Saviour. As to the
respectable voluptuary, who joins Omar Khayyam clubs and vibrates to
Swinburne's invocation of Dolores to "come down and redeem us from
virtue," he is to be found in every suburb.