Monogamy has a sentimental basis which is quite distinct from the
political one of equal numbers of the sexes. Equal numbers in the sexes
are quite compatible with a change of partners every day or every
hour Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the
farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than
chickens and calves, and that men and women are not so completely
enslaved as farm stock. Accordingly, the people whose conception of
marriage is a farm-yard or slave-quarter conception are always more
or less in a panic lest the slightest relaxation of the marriage laws
should utterly demoralize society; whilst those to whom marriage is a
matter of more highly evolved sentiments and needs (sometimes said to
be distinctively human, though birds and animals in a state of freedom
evince them quite as touchingly as we) are much more liberal, knowing as
they do that monogamy will take care of itself provided the parties are
free enough, and that promiscuity is a product of slavery and not of
liberty.
The solid foundation of their confidence is the fact that the
relationship set up by a comfortable marriage is so intimate and so
persuasive of the whole life of the parties to it, that nobody has room
in his or her life for more than one such relationship at a time. What
is called a household of three is never really of three except in the
sense that every household becomes a household of three when a child is
born, and may in the same way become a household of four or fourteen
if the union be fertile enough. Now no doubt the marriage tie means so
little to some people that the addition to the household of half a dozen
more wives or husbands would be as possible as the addition of half a
dozen governesses or tutors or visitors or servants. A Sultan may have
fifty wives as easily as he may have fifty dishes on his table, because
in the English sense he has no wives at all; nor have his wives any
husband: in short, he is not what we call a married man. And there are
sultans and sultanas and seraglios existing in England under English
forms. But when you come to the real modern marriage of sentiment, a
relation is created which has never to my knowledge been shared by three
persons except when all three have been extraordinarily fond of one
another. Take for example the famous case of Nelson and Sir William and
Lady Hamilton. The secret of this household of three was not only that
both the husband and Nelson were devoted to Lady Hamilton, but that they
were also apparently devoted to one another. When Hamilton died both
Nelson and Emma seem to have been equally heartbroken. When there is a
successful household of one man and two women the same unusual condition
is fulfilled: the two women not only cannot live happily without the man
but cannot live happily without each other. In every other case known
to me, either from observation or record, the experiment is a hopeless
failure: one of the two rivals for the really intimate affection of the
third inevitably drives out the other. The driven-out party may accept
the situation and remain in the house as a friend to save appearances,
or for the sake of the children, or for economic reasons; but such an
arrangement can subsist only when the forfeited relation is no longer
really valued; and this indifference, like the triple bond of affection
which carried Sir William Hamilton through, is so rare as to be
practicably negligible in the establishment of a conventional morality
of marriage. Therefore sensible and experienced people always assume
that when a declaration of love is made to an already married person,
the declaration binds the parties in honor never to see one another
again unless they contemplate divorce and remarriage. And this is a
sound convention, even for unconventional people. Let me illustrate by
reference to a fictitious case: the one imagined in my own play Candida
will do as well as another. Here a young man who has been received as a
friend into the house of a clergyman falls in love with the clergyman's
wife, and, being young and inexperienced, declares his feelings, and
claims that he, and not the clergyman, is the more suitable mate for
the lady. The clergyman, who has a temper, is first tempted to hurl the
youth into the street by bodily violence: an impulse natural, perhaps,
but vulgar and improper, and, not open, on consideration, to decent men.
Even coarse and inconsiderate men are restrained from it by the fact
that the sympathy of the woman turns naturally to the victim of physical
brutality and against the bully, the Thackerayan notion to the contrary
being one of the illusions of literary masculinity. Besides, the husband
is not necessarily the stronger man: an appeal to force has resulted
in the ignominious defeat of the husband quite as often as in poetic
justice as conceived in the conventional novelet. What an honorable and
sensible man does when his household is invaded is what the Reverend
James Mavor Morell does in my play. He recognizes that just as there is
not room for two women in that sacredly intimate relation of sentimental
domesticity which is what marriage means to him, so there is no room
for two men in that relation with his wife; and he accordingly tells
her firmly that she must choose which man will occupy the place that is
large enough for one only. He is so far shrewdly unconventional as to
recognize that if she chooses the other man, he must give way, legal tie
or no legal tie; but he knows that either one or the other must go. And
a sensible wife would act in the same way. If a romantic young lady came
into her house and proposed to adore her husband on a tolerated footing,
she would say "My husband has not room in his life for two wives: either
you go out of the house or I go out of it." The situation is not at
all unlikely: I had almost said not at all unusual. Young ladies and
gentlemen in the greensickly condition which is called calf-love,
associating with married couples at dangerous periods of mature life,
quite often find themselves in it; and the extreme reluctance of proud
and sensitive people to avoid any assertion of matrimonial rights, or to
condescend to jealousy, sometimes makes the threatened husband or wife
hesitate to take prompt steps and do the apparently conventional thing.
But whether they hesitate or act the result is always the same. In a
real marriage of sentiment the wife or husband cannot be supplanted by
halves; and such a marriage will break very soon under the strain of
polygyny or polyandry. What we want at present is a sufficiently clear
teaching of this fact to ensure that prompt and decisive action shall
always be taken in such cases without any false shame of seeming
conventional (a shame to which people capable of such real marriage
are specially susceptible), and a rational divorce law to enable
the marriage to be dissolved and the parties honorably resorted and
recoupled without disgrace and scandal if that should prove the proper
solution.
It must be repeated here that no law, however stringent, can prevent
polygamy among groups of people who choose to live loosely and be
monogamous only in appearance. But such cases are not now under
consideration. Also, affectionate husbands like Samuel Pepys, and
affectionate wives of the corresponding temperaments may, it appears,
engage in transient casual adventures out of doors without breaking
up their home life. But within doors that home life may be regarded as
naturally monogamous. It does not need to be protected against polygamy:
it protects itself.