THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
IRISH IMPRESSIONS
HERETICS
ORTHODOXY
THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
MAN ALIVE
THE FLYING INN
THE BALL AND THE CROSS
THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN
THE WISDOM OF FATHER BROWN
THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL
POEMS
THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE
THE SUPERSTITION
OF DIVORCE
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
AUTHOR OF
“HERETICS,” “ORTHODOXY,” “IRISH IMPRESSIONS,” ETC.
NEW YORK
JOHN LANE COMPANY
MCMXX
Copyright, 1920,
BY JOHN LANE COMPANY
Press of
J. J. Little & Ives Company
New York, U. S. A.
_Introductory Note_
The earlier part of this book appeared in the form of five articles
which came out in the “New Witness” at the crisis of the recent
controversy in the Press on the subject of divorce. Crude and sketchy as
they confessedly were, they had a certain rude plan of their own, which
I find it very difficult to recast even in order to expand. I have
therefore decided to reprint the original articles as they stood, save
for a few introductory words; and then, at the risk of repetition, to
add a few further chapters, explaining more fully any conceptions that
may seem to have been too crudely assumed or dismissed. I have set forth
the original matter as it appeared, under a general heading, without
dividing it into chapters.
G. K. C.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE 11
THE STORY OF THE FAMILY 61
THE STORY OF THE VOW 83
THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE 105
THE VISTA OF DIVORCE 127
CONCLUSION 147
THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE
_I.--The Superstition of Divorce_
It is futile to talk of reform without reference to form. To take a
case from my own taste and fancy, there is nothing I feel to be so
beautiful and wonderful as a window. All casements are magic casements,
whether they open on the foam or the front-garden; they lie close to
the ultimate mystery and paradox of limitation and liberty. But if I
followed my instinct towards an infinite number of windows, it would
end in having no walls. It would also (it may be added incidentally)
end in having no windows either; for a window makes a picture by making
a picture-frame. But there is a simpler way of stating my more simple
and fatal error. It is that I have wanted a window, without considering
whether I wanted a house. Now many appeals are being made to us to-day
on behalf of that light and liberty that might well be symbolised by
windows; especially as so many of them concern the enlightenment and
liberation of the house, in the sense of the home. Many quite
disinterested people urge many quite reasonable considerations in the
case of divorce, as a type of domestic liberation; but in the
journalistic and general discussion of the matter there is far too much
of the mind that works backwards and at random, in the manner of all
windows and no walls. Such people say they want divorce, without asking
themselves whether they want marriage. Even in order to be divorced it
has generally been found necessary to go through the preliminary
formality of being married; and unless the nature of this initial act
be considered, we might as well be discussing haircutting for the bald
or spectacles for the blind. To be divorced is to be in the literal
sense unmarried; and there is no sense in a thing being undone when we
do not know if it is done.
There is perhaps no worse advice, nine times out of ten, than the advice
to do the work that’s nearest. It is especially bad when it means, as
it generally does, removing the obstacle that’s nearest. It means that
men are not to behave like men but like mice; who nibble at the thing
that’s nearest. The man, like the mouse, undermines what he cannot
understand. Because he himself bumps into a thing, he calls it the
nearest obstacle; though the obstacle may happen to be the pillar that
holds up the whole roof over his head. He industriously removes the
obstacle; and in return the obstacle removes him, and much more valuable
things than he. This opportunism is perhaps the most unpractical thing
in this highly unpractical world. People talk vaguely against
destructive criticism; but what is the matter with this criticism is not
that it destroys, but that it does not criticise. It is destruction
without design. It is taking a complex machine to pieces bit by bit, in
any order, without even knowing what the machine is for. And if a man
deals with a deadly dynamic machine on the principle of touching the
knob that’s nearest, he will find out the defects of that cheery
philosophy. Now leaving many sincere and serious critics of modern
marriage on one side for the moment, great masses of modern men and
women, who write and talk about marriage, are thus nibbling blindly at
it like an army of mice. When the reformers propose, for instance, that
divorce should be obtainable after an absence of three years (the
absence actually taken for granted in the first military arrangements of
the late European War) their readers and supporters could seldom give
any sort of logical reason for the period being three years, and not
three months or three minutes. They are like people who should say “Give
me three feet of dog”; and not care where the cut came. Such persons
fail to see a dog as an organic entity; in other words, they cannot make
head or tail of it. And the chief thing to say about such reformers of
marriage is that they cannot make head or tail of it. They do not know
what it is, or what it is meant to be, or what its supporters suppose it
to be; they never look at it, even when they are inside it. They do the
work that’s nearest; which is poking holes in the bottom of a boat under
the impression that they are digging in a garden. This question of what
a thing is, and whether it is a garden or a boat, appears to them
abstract and academic. They have no notion of how large is the idea they
attack; or how relatively small appear the holes that they pick in it.
Thus, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an intelligent man in other matters, says
that there is only a “theological” opposition to divorce, and that it is
entirely founded on “certain texts” in the Bible about marriages. This
is exactly as if he said that a belief in the brotherhood of men was
only founded on certain texts in the Bible, about all men being the
children of Adam and Eve. Millions of peasants and plain people all over
the world assume marriage to be static, without having ever clapped eyes
on any text. Numbers of more modern people, especially after the recent
experiments in America, think divorce is a social disease, without
having ever bothered about any text. It may be maintained that even in
these, or in any one, the idea of marriage is ultimately mystical; and
the same may be maintained about the idea of brotherhood. It is obvious
that a husband and wife are not visibly one flesh, in the sense of
being one quadruped. It is equally obvious that Paderewski and Jack
Johnson are not twins, and probably have not played together at their
mother’s knee. There is indeed a very important admission, or addition,
to be realised here. What is true is this: that if the nonsense of
Nietzsche or some such sophist submerged current culture, so that it was
the fashion to deny the duties of fraternity; then indeed it might be
found that the group which still affirmed fraternity was the original
group in whose sacred books was the text about Adam and Eve. Suppose
some Prussian professor has opportunely discovered that Germans and
lesser men are respectively descended from two such very different
monkeys that they are in no sense brothers, but barely cousins (German)
any number of times removed. And suppose he proceeds to remove them even
further with a hatchet; suppose he bases on this a repetition of the
conduct of Cain, saying not so much “Am I my brother’s keeper?” as “Is
he really my brother?” And suppose this higher philosophy of the
hatchet becomes prevalent in colleges and cultivated circles, as even
more foolish philosophies have done. Then I agree it probably will be
the Christian, the man who preserves the text about Cain, who will
continue to assert that he is still the professor’s brother; that he is
still the professor’s keeper. He may possibly add that, in his opinion,
the professor seems to require a keeper.
And that is doubtless the situation in the controversies about divorce
and marriage to-day. It is the Christian church which continues to hold
strongly, when the world for some reason has weakened on it, what many
others hold at other times. But even then it is barely picking up the
shreds and scraps of the subject to talk about a reliance on texts. The
vital point in the comparison is this: that human brotherhood means a
whole view of life, held in the light of life, and defended, rightly or
wrongly, by constant appeals to every aspect of life. The religion that
holds it most strongly will hold it when nobody else holds it; that is
quite true, and that some of us may be so perverse as to think a point
in favour of the religion. But anybody who holds it at all will hold it
as a philosophy, not hung on one text but on a hundred truths.
Fraternity may be a sentimental metaphor; I may be suffering a delusion
when I hail a Montenegrin peasant as my long lost brother. As a fact, I
have my own suspicions about which of us it is that has got lost. But my
delusion is not a deduction from one text, or from twenty; it is the
expression of a relation that to me at least seems a reality. And what I
should say about the idea of a brother, I should say about the idea of a
wife.
It is supposed to be very unbusinesslike to begin at the beginning. It
is called “abstract and academic principles with which we English, etc.,
etc.” It is still in some strange way considered unpractical to open up
inquiries about anything by asking what it is. I happen to have,
however, a fairly complete contempt for that sort of practicality; for I
know that it is not even practical. My ideal business man would not be
one who planked down fifty pounds and said “Here is hard cash; I am a
plain man; it is quite indifferent to me whether I am paying a debt, or
giving alms to a beggar, or buying a wild bull or a bathing machine.”
Despite the infectious heartiness of his tone, I should still, in
considering the hard cash, say (like a cabman) “What’s this?” I should
continue to insist, priggishly, that it was a highly practical point
what the money _was_; what it was supposed to stand for, to aim at or to
declare; what was the nature of the transaction; or, in short, what the
devil the man supposed he was doing. I shall therefore begin by asking,
in an equally mystical manner, what in the name of God and the angels a
man getting married supposes he is doing. I shall begin by asking what
marriage is; and the mere question will probably reveal that the act
itself, good or bad, wise or foolish, is of a certain kind; that it is
not an inquiry or an experiment or an accident; it may probably dawn on
us that it is a promise. It can be more fully defined by saying it is a
vow.
Many will immediately answer that it is a rash vow. I am content for the
moment to reply that all vows are rash vows. I am not now defending but
defining vows; I am pointing out that this is a discussion about vows;
first, of whether there ought to be vows; and second, of what vows ought
to be. Ought a man to break a promise? Ought a man to make a promise?
These are philosophic questions; but the philosophic peculiarity of
divorce and re-marriage, as compared with free love and no marriage, is
that a man breaks and makes a promise at the same moment. It is a highly
German philosophy; and recalls the way in which the enemy wishes to
celebrate his successful destruction of all treaties by signing some
more. If I were breaking a promise, I would do it without promises. But
I am very far from minimising the momentous and disputable nature of the
vow itself. I shall try to show, in a further article, that this rash
and romantic operation is the only furnace from which can come the plain
hardware of humanity, the cast-iron resistance of citizenship or the
cold steel of common sense; but I am not denying that the furnace is a
fire. The vow is a violent and unique thing; though there have been many
besides the marriage vow; vows of chivalry, vows of poverty, vows of
celibacy, pagan as well as Christian. But modern fashion has rather
fallen out of the habit; and men miss the type for the lack of the
parallels. The shortest way of putting the problem is to ask whether
being free includes being free to bind oneself. For the vow is a tryst
with oneself.
I may be misunderstood if I say, for brevity, that marriage is an affair
of honour. The sceptic will be delighted to assent, by saying it is a
fight. And so it is, if only with oneself; but the point here is that it
necessarily has the touch of the heroic, in which virtue can be
translated by _virtus_. Now about fighting, in its nature, there is an
implied infinity, or at least a potential infinity. I mean that loyalty
in war is loyalty in defeat or even disgrace; it is due to the flag
precisely at the moment when the flag nearly falls. We do already apply
this to the flag of the nation; and the question is whether it is wise
or unwise to apply it to the flag of the family. Of course, it is
tenable that we should apply it to neither; that misgovernment in the
nation or misery in the citizen would make the desertion of the flag an
act of reason and not treason. I will only say here that, if this were
really the limit of national loyalty, some of us would have deserted our
nation long ago.
_II.--The Superstition of Divorce_
To the two or three articles appearing here on this subject I have given
the title of the Superstition of Divorce; and the title is not taken at
random. While free love seems to me a heresy, divorce does really seem
to me a superstition. It is not only more of a superstition than free
love, but much more of a superstition than strict sacramental marriage;
and this point can hardly be made too plain. It is the partisans of
divorce, not the defenders of marriage, who attach a stiff and senseless
sanctity to a mere ceremony, apart from the meaning of the ceremony. It
is our opponents, and not we, who hope to be saved by the letter of
ritual, instead of the spirit of reality. It is they who hold that vow
or violation, loyalty or disloyalty, can all be disposed of by a
mysterious and magic rite, performed first in a law-court and then in a
church or a registry office. There is little difference between the two
parts of the ritual; except that the law court is much more ritualistic.
But the plainest parallels will show anybody that all this is sheer
barbarous credulity. It may or may not be superstition for a man to
believe he must kiss the Bible to show he is telling the truth. It is
certainly the most grovelling superstition for him to believe that, if
he kisses the Bible, anything he says will come true. It would surely be
the blackest and most benighted Bible-worship to suggest that the mere
kiss on the mere book alters the moral quality of perjury. Yet this is
precisely what is implied in saying that formal re-marriage alters the
moral quality of conjugal infidelity. It may have been a mark of the
Dark Ages that Harold should swear on a relic, though he were afterwards
foresworn. But surely those ages would have been at their darkest, if he
had been content to be sworn on a relic and forsworn on another relic.
Yet this is the new altar these reformers would erect for us, out of the
mouldy and meaningless relics of their dead law and their dying
religion.
Now we, at any rate, are talking about an idea, a thing of the intellect
and the soul; which we feel to be unalterable by legal antics. We are
talking about the idea of loyalty; perhaps a fantastic, perhaps only an
unfashionable idea, but one we can explain and defend as an idea. Now I
have already pointed out that most sane men do admit our ideal in such a
case as patriotism or public spirit; the necessity of saving the state
to which we belong. The patriot may revile but must not renounce his
country; he must curse it to cure it, but not to wither it up. The old
pagan citizens felt thus about the city; and modern nationalists feel
thus about the nation. But even mere modern internationalists feel it
about something; if it is only the nation of mankind. Even the
humanitarian does not become a misanthrope and live in a monkey-house.
Even a disappointed Collectivist or Communist does not retire into the
exclusive society of beavers, because beavers are all communists of the
most class-conscious solidarity. He admits the necessity of clinging to
his fellow creatures, and begging them to abandon the use of the
possessive pronoun; heart-breaking as his efforts must seem to him after
a time. Even a Pacifist does not prefer rats to men, on the ground that
the rat community is so pure from the taint of Jingoism as always to
leave the sinking ship. In short, everybody recognises that there is
_some_ ship, large and small, which he ought not to leave, even when he
thinks it is sinking.
We may take it then that there are institutions to which we are attached
finally; just as there are others to which we are attached temporarily.
We go from shop to shop trying to get what we want; but we do not go
from nation to nation doing this; unless we belong to a certain group
now heading very straight for Pogroms. In the first case it is the
threat that we shall withdraw our custom; in the second it is the threat
that we shall never withdraw ourselves; that we shall be part of the
institution to the last. The time when the shop loses its customers is
the time when the city needs its citizens; but it needs them as critics
who will always remain to criticise. I need not now emphasise the deadly
need of this double energy of internal reform and external defence; the
whole towering tragedy which has eclipsed our earth in our time is but
one terrific illustration of it. The hammer-strokes are coming thick and
fast now;[A] and filling the world with infernal thunders; and there is
still the iron sound of something unbreakable deeper and louder than all
the things that break. We may curse the kings, we may distrust the
captains, we may murmur at the very existence of the armies; but we know
that in the darkest days that may come to us, no man will desert the
flag.
Now when we pass from loyalty to the nation to loyalty to the family,
there can be no doubt about the first and plainest difference. The
difference is that the family is a thing far more free. The vow is a
voluntary loyalty; and the marriage vow is marked among ordinary oaths
of allegiance by the fact that the allegiance is also a choice. The man
is not only a citizen of the city, but also the founder and builder of
the city. He is not only a soldier serving the colours, but he has
himself artistically selected and combined the colours, like the colours
of an individual dress. If it be admissible to ask him to be true to the
commonwealth that has made him, it is at least not more illiberal to ask
him to be true to the commonwealth he has himself made. If civic
fidelity be, as it is, a necessity, it is also in a special sense a
constraint. The old joke against patriotism, the Gilbertian irony,
congratulated the Englishman on his fine and fastidious taste in being
born in England. It made a plausible point in saying “For he might have
been a Russian”; though indeed we have lived to see some persons who
seemed to think they could be Russians when the fancy took them. If
commonsense considers even such involuntary loyalty natural, we can
hardly wonder if it thinks voluntary loyalty still more natural. And the
small state founded on the sexes is at once the most voluntary and the
most natural of all self-governing states. It is not true of Mr. Brown
that he might have been a Russian; but it may be true of Mrs. Brown
that she might have been a Robinson.
Now it is not at all hard to see why this small community, so specially
free touching its cause, should yet be specially bound touching its
effects. It is not hard to see why the vow made most freely is the vow
kept most firmly. There are attached to it, by the nature of things,
consequences so tremendous that no contract can offer any comparison.
There is no contract, unless it be that said to be signed in blood, that
can call spirits from the vasty deep; or bring cherubs (or goblins) to
inhabit a small modern villa. There is no stroke of the pen which
creates real bodies and souls, or makes the characters in a novel come
to life. The institution that puzzles intellectuals so much can be
explained by the mere material fact (perceptible even to intellectuals)
that children are, generally speaking, younger than their parents. “Till
death do us part” is not an irrational formula, for those will almost
certainly die before they see more than half of the amazing (or
alarming) thing they have done.
Such is, in a curt and crude outline, this obvious thing for those to
whom it is not obvious. Now I know there are thinking men among those
who would tamper with it; and I shall expect some of these to reply to
my questions. But for the moment I only ask this question: whether the
parliamentary and journalistic divorce movement shows even a shadowy
trace of these fundamental truths, regarded as tests. Does it even
discuss the nature of a vow, the limits and objects of loyalty, the
survival of the family as a small and free state? The writers are
content to say that Mr. Brown is uncomfortable with Mrs. Brown, and the
last emancipation, for separated couples, seems only to mean that he is
still uncomfortable without Mrs. Brown. These are not days in which
being uncomfortable is felt as the final test of public action. For the
rest, the reformers show statistically that families are in fact so
scattered in our industrial anarchy, that they may as well abandon hope
of finding their way home again. I am acquainted with that argument for
making bad worse and I see it everywhere leading to slavery. Because
London Bridge is broken down, we must assume that bridges are not meant
to bridge. Because London commercialism and capitalism have copied hell,
we are to continue to copy them. Anyhow, some will retain the conviction
that the ancient bridge built between the two towers of sex is the
worthiest of the great works of the earth.
It is exceedingly characteristic of the dreary decades before the War
that the forms of freedom in which they seemed to specialise were
suicide and divorce. I am not at the moment pronouncing on the moral
problem of either; I am merely noting, as signs of those times, those
two true or false counsels of despair; the end of life and the end of
love. Other forms of freedom were being increasingly curtailed. Freedom
indeed was the one thing that progressives and conservatives alike
contemned. Socialists were largely concerned to prevent strikes, by
State arbitration; that is, by adding another rich man to give the
casting vote between rich and poor. Even in claiming what they called
the right to work they tacitly surrendered the right to leave off
working. Tories were preaching conscription, not so much to defend the
independence of England as to destroy the independence of Englishmen.
Liberals, of course, were chiefly interested in eliminating liberty,
especially touching beer and betting. It was wicked to fight, and unsafe
even to argue; for citing any certain and contemporary fact might land
one in a libel action. As all these doors were successfully shut in our
faces along the chilly and cheerless corridor of progress (with its
glazed tiles) the doors of death and divorce alone stood open, or rather
opened wider and wider. I do not expect the exponents of divorce to
admit any similarity in the two things; yet the passing parallel is not
irrelevant. It may enable them to realise the limits within which our
moral instincts can, even for the sake of argument, treat this desperate
remedy as a normal object of desire. Divorce is for us at best a
failure, of which we are more concerned to find and cure the cause than
to complete the effects; and we regard a system that produces many
divorces as we do a system that drives men to drown and shoot
themselves. For instance, it is perhaps the commonest complaint against
the existing law that the poor cannot afford to avail themselves of it.
It is an argument to which normally I should listen with special
sympathy. But while I should condemn the law being a luxury, my first
thought will naturally be that divorce and death are only luxuries in a
rather rare sense. I should not primarily condole with the poor man on
the high price of prussic acid; or on the fact that all precipices of
suitable suicidal height were the private property of the landlords.
There are other high prices and high precipices I should attack first. I
should admit in the abstract that what is sauce for the goose is sauce
for the gander; that what is good for the rich is good for the poor; but
my first and strongest impression would be that prussic acid sauce is
not good for anybody. I fear I should, on the impulse of the moment,
pull a poor clerk or artisan back by the coat-tails, if he were jumping
over Shakespeare’s Cliff, even if Dover sands were strewn with the
remains of the dukes and bankers who had already taken the plunge.
But in one respect, I will heartily concede, the cult of divorce has
differed from the mere cult of death. The cult of death is dead. Those I
knew in my youth as young pessimists are now aged optimists. And, what
is more to the point at present, even when it was living it was limited;
it was a thing of one clique in one class. We know the rule in the old
comedy, that when the heroine went mad in white satin, the confidante
went mad in white muslin. But when, in some tragedy of the artistic
temperament, the painter committed suicide in velvet, it was never
implied that the plumber must commit suicide in corduroy. It was never
held that Hedda Gabler’s housemaid must die in torments on the carpet
(trying as her term of service may have been); or that Mrs. Tanqueray’s
butler must play the Roman fool and die on his own carving knife. That
particular form of playing the fool, Roman or otherwise, was an
oligarchic privilege in the decadent epoch; and even as such has largely
passed with that epoch. Pessimism, which was never popular, is no
longer even fashionable. A far different fate has awaited the other
fashion; the other somewhat dismal form of freedom. If divorce is a
disease, it is no longer to be a fashionable disease like appendicitis;
it is to be made an epidemic like small-pox. As we have already seen,
papers and public men to-day make a vast parade of the necessity of
setting the poor man free to get a divorce. Now why are they so mortally
anxious that he should be free to get a divorce, and not in the least
anxious that he should be free to get anything else? Why are the same
people happy, nay almost hilarious, when he gets a divorce, who are
horrified when he gets a drink? What becomes of his money, what becomes
of his children, where he works, when he ceases to work, are less and
less under his personal control. Labour Exchanges, Insurance Cards,
Welfare Work, and a hundred forms of police inspection and supervision,
have combined for good or evil to fix him more and more strictly to a
certain place in society. He is less and less allowed to go to look for
a new job; why is he allowed to go to look for a new wife? He is more
and more compelled to recognise a Moslem code about liquor; why is it
made so easy for him to escape from his old Christian code about sex?
What is the meaning of this mysterious immunity, this special permit for
adultery; and why is running away with his neighbour’s wife to be the
only exhilaration still left open to him? Why must he love as he
pleases; when he may not even live as he pleases?
The answer is, I regret to say, that this social campaign, in most
though by no means all of its most prominent campaigners, relies in this
matter on a very smug and pestilent piece of cant. There are some
advocates of democratic divorce who are really advocates of general
democratic freedom; but they are the exceptions; I might say, with all
respect, that they are the dupes. The omnipresence of the thing in the
press and in political society is due to a motive precisely opposite to
the motive professed. The modern rulers, who are simply the rich men,
are really quite consistent in their attitude to the poor man. It is
the same spirit which takes away his children under the pretence of
order, which takes away his wife under the pretence of liberty. That
which wishes, in the words of the comic song, to break up the happy
home, is primarily anxious not to break up the much more unhappy
factory. Capitalism, of course, is at war with the family, for the same
reason which has led to its being at war with the Trade Union. This
indeed is the only sense in which it is true that capitalism is
connected with individualism. Capitalism believes in collectivism for
itself and individualism for its enemies. It desires its victims to be
individuals, or (in other words) to be atoms. For the word atom, in its
clearest meaning (which is none too clear) might be translated as
“individual.” If there be any bond, if there be any brotherhood, if
there be any class loyalty or domestic discipline, by which the poor can
help the poor, these emancipators will certainly strive to loosen that
bond or lift that discipline in the most liberal fashion. If there be
such a brotherhood, these individualists will redistribute it in the
form of individuals; or in other words smash it to atoms.
The masters of modern plutocracy know what they are about. They are
making no mistake; they can be cleared of the slander of inconsistency.
A very profound and precise instinct has led them to single out the
human household as the chief obstacle to their inhuman progress. Without
the family we are helpless before the State, which in our modern case is
the Servile State. To use a military metaphor, the family is the only
formation in which the charge of the rich can be repulsed. It is a force
that forms twos as soldiers form fours; and, in every peasant country,
has stood in the square house or the square plot of land as infantry
have stood in squares against cavalry. How this force operates thus, and
why, I will try to explain in the last of these articles. But it is when
it is most nearly ridden down by the horsemen of pride and privilege, as
in Poland or Ireland, when the battle grows most desperate and the hope
most dark, that men begin to understand why that wild oath in its
beginnings was flung beyond the bounds of the world; and what would seem
as passing as a vision is made permanent as a vow.
_III.--The Superstition of Divorce_
There has long been a curiously consistent attempt to conceal the fact
that France is a Christian country. There have been Frenchmen in the
plot, no doubt, and no doubt there have been Frenchmen--though I have
myself only found Englishmen--in the derivative attempt to conceal the
fact that Balzac was a Christian writer. I began to read Balzac long
after I had read the admirers of Balzac; and they had never given me a
hint of this truth. I had read that his books were bound in yellow and
“quite impudently French”; though I may have been cloudy about why being
French should be impudent in a Frenchman. I had read the truer
description of “the grimy wizard of the _Comedie Humaine_,” and have
lived to learn the truth of it; Balzac certainly is a genius of the type
of that artist he himself describes, who could draw a broomstick so
that one knew it had swept the room after a murder. The furniture of
Balzac is more alive than the figures of many dramas. For this I was
prepared; but not for a certain spiritual assumption which I recognised
at once as a historical phenomenon. The morality of a great writer is
not the morality he teaches, but the morality he takes for granted. The
Catholic type of Christian ethics runs through Balzac’s books, exactly
as the Puritan type of Christian ethics runs through Bunyan’s books.
What his professed opinions were I do not know, any more than I know
Shakespeare’s; but I know that both those great creators of a
multitudinous world made it, as compared with other and later writers,
on the same fundamental moral plan as the universe of Dante. There can
be no doubt about it for any one who can apply as a test the truth I
have mentioned; that the fundamental things in a man are not the things
he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain. But here and
there Balzac does explain; and with that intellectual concentration Mr.
George Moore has acutely observed in that novelist when he is a
theorist. And the other day I found in one of Balzac’s novels this
passage; which, whether or no it would precisely hit Mr. George Moore’s
mood at this moment, strikes me as a perfect prophecy of this epoch, and
might also be a motto for this book: “With the solidarity of the family
society has lost that elemental force which Montesquieu defined and
called ‘honour.’ Society has isolated its members the better to govern
them, and has divided in order to weaken.”
Throughout our youth and the years before the War, the current criticism
followed Ibsen in describing the domestic system as a doll’s house and
the domestic woman as a doll. Mr. Bernard Shaw varied the metaphor by
saying that mere custom kept the woman in the home as it keeps the
parrot in the cage; and the plays and tales of the period made vivid
sketches of a woman who also resembled a parrot in other particulars,
rich in raiment, shrill in accent and addicted to saying over and over
again what she had been taught to say. Mr. Granville Barker, the
spiritual child of Mr. Bernard Shaw, commented in his clever play of
“The Voysey Inheritance” on tyranny, hypocrisy and boredom, as the
constituent elements of a “happy English home.” Leaving the truth of
this aside for the moment, it will be well to insist that the
conventionality thus criticised would be even more characteristic of a
happy French home. It is not the Englishman’s house, but the Frenchman’s
house that is his castle. It might be further added, touching the
essential ethical view of the sexes at least, that the Irishman’s house
is his castle; though it has been for some centuries a besieged castle.
Anyhow, those conventions which were remarked as making domesticity
dull, narrow and unnaturally meek and submissive, are particularly
powerful among the Irish and the French. From this it will surely be
easy, for any lucid and logical thinker, to deduce the fact that the
French are dull and narrow, and that the Irish are unnaturally meek and
submissive. Mr. Bernard Shaw, being an Irishman who lives among
Englishmen, may be conveniently taken as the type of the difference;
and it will no doubt be found that the political friends of Mr. Shaw,
among Englishmen, will be of a wilder revolutionary type than those whom
he would have found among Irishmen. We are in a position to compare the
meekness of the Fenians with the fury of the Fabians. This deadening
monogamic ideal may even, in a larger sense, define and distinguish all
the flat subserviency of Clare from all the flaming revolt of Clapham.
Nor need we now look far to understand why revolutions have been unknown
in the history of France; or why they happen so persistently in the
vaguer politics of England. This rigidity and respectability must surely
be the explanation of all that incapacity for any civil experiment or
explosion, which has always marked that sleepy hamlet of very private
houses, which we call the city of Paris. But the same things are true
not only of Parisians but of peasants; they are even true of other
peasants in the great Alliance. Students of Serbian traditions tell us
that the peasant literature lays a special and singular curse on the
violation of marriage; and this may well explain the prim and sheepish
pacifism complained of in that people.
In plain words, there is clearly something wrong in the calculation by
which it was proved that a housewife must be as much a servant as a
housemaid; or which exhibited the domesticated man as being as gentle as
the primrose or as conservative as the Primrose League. It is precisely
those who have been conservative about the family who have been
revolutionary about the state. Those who are blamed for the bigotry or
_bourgeois_ smugness of their marriage conventions are actually those
blamed for the restlessness and violence of their political reforms. Nor
is there seriously any difficulty in discovering the cause of this. It
is simply that in such a society the government, in dealing with the
family, deals with something almost as permanent and self-renewing as
itself. There can be a continuous family policy, like a continuous
foreign policy. In peasant countries the family fights, it may almost be
said that the farm fights. I do not mean merely that it riots in evil
and exceptional times; though this is not unimportant. It was a savage
but a sane feature when, in the Irish evictions, the women poured hot
water from the windows; it was part of a final falling back on private
tools as public weapons. That sort of thing is not only war to the
knife, but almost war to the fork and spoon. It was in this grim sense
perhaps that Parnell, in that mysterious pun, said that Kettle was a
household word in Ireland (it certainly ought to be after its subsequent
glories), and in a more general sense it is certain that meddling with
the housewife will ultimately mean getting into hot water. But it is not
of such crises of bodily struggle that I speak, but of a steady and
peaceful pressure from below of a thousand families upon the framework
of government. For this a certain spirit of defence and enclosure is
essential; and even feudalism was right in feeling that any such affair
of honour must be a family affair. It was a true artistic instinct that
pictured the pedigree on a coat that protects the body. The free peasant
has arms if he has not armorial bearings. He has not an escutcheon; but
he has a shield. Nor do I see why, in a freer and happier society than
the present, or even the past, it should not be a blazoned shield. For
that is true of pedigree which is true of property; the wrong is not in
its being imposed on men, but rather in its being denied to them. Too
much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few
capitalists; and so aristocracy sins, not in planting a family tree, but
in not planting a family forest.
Anyhow, it is found in practice that the domestic citizen can stand a
siege, even by the State; because he has those who will stand by him
through thick and thin--especially thin. Now those who hold that the
State can be made fit to own all and administer all, can consistently
disregard this argument; but it may be said with all respect that the
world is more and more disregarding them. If we could find a perfect
machine, and a perfect man to work it, it might be a good argument for
State Socialism, though an equally good argument for personal despotism.
But most of us, I fancy, are now agreed that something of that social
pressure from below which we call freedom is vital to the health of the
State; and this it is which cannot be fully exercised by individuals,
but only by groups and traditions. Such groups have been many; there
have been monasteries; there may be guilds; but there is only one type
among them which all human beings have a spontaneous and omnipresent
inspiration to build for themselves; and this type is the family.
I had intended this article to be the last of those outlining the
elements of this debate; but I shall have to add a short concluding
section on the way in which all this is missed in the practical (or
rather unpractical) proposals about divorce. Here I will only say that
they suffer from the modern and morbid weaknesses of always sacrificing
the normal to the abnormal. As a fact the “tyranny, hypocrisy and
boredom” complained of are not domesticity, but the decay of
domesticity. The case of that particular complaint, in Mr. Granville
Barker’s play, is itself a proof. The whole point of “The Voysey
Inheritance” was that there was no Voysey inheritance. The only
heritage of that family was a highly dishonourable debt. Naturally their
family affections had decayed when their whole ideal of property and
probity had decayed; and there was little love as well as little honour
among thieves. It has yet to be proved that they would have been as much
bored if they had had a positive and not a negative heritage; and had
worked a farm instead of a fraud. And the experience of mankind points
the other way.
_IV.--The Superstition of Divorce_
I have touched before now on a famous or infamous Royalist who suggested
that the people should eat grass; an unfortunate remark perhaps for a
Royalist to make; since the regimen is only recorded of a Royal
Personage. But there was certainly a simplicity in the solution worthy
of a sultan or even a savage chief; and it is this touch of autocratic
innocence on which I have mainly insisted touching the social reforms of
our day, and especially the social reform known as divorce. I am
primarily more concerned with the arbitrary method than with the
anarchic result. Very much as the old tyrant would turn any number of
men out to grass, so the new tyrant would turn any number of women into
grass-widows. Anyhow, to vary the legendary symbolism, it never seems to
occur to the king in this fairy tale that the gold crown on his head is
a less, and not a more, sacred and settled ornament than the gold ring
on the woman’s finger. This change is being achieved by the summary and
even secret government which we now suffer; and this would be the first
point against it, even if it were really an emancipation; and it is only
in form an emancipation. I will not anticipate the details of its
defence, which can be offered by others, but I will here conclude for
the present by roughly suggesting the practical defences of divorce, as
generally given just at present, under four heads. And I will only ask
the reader to note that they all have one thing in common; the fact that
each argument is also used for all that social reform which plain men
are already calling slavery.
First, it is very typical of the latest practical proposals that they
are concerned with the case of those who are already separated, and the
steps they must take to be divorced. There is a spirit penetrating all
our society to-day by which the exception is allowed to alter the rule;
the exile to deflect patriotism, the orphan to depose parenthood, and
even the widow or, in this case as we have seen the grass-widow, to
destroy the position of the wife. There is a sort of symbol of this
tendency in that mysterious and unfortunate nomadic nation which has
been allowed to alter so many things, from a crusade in Russia to a
cottage in South Bucks. We have been told to treat the wandering Jew as
a pilgrim, while we still treat the wandering Christian as a vagabond.
And yet the latter is at least trying to get home, like Ulysses; whereas
the former is, if anything, rather fleeing from home, like Cain. He who
is detached, disgruntled, nondescript, intermediate, is everywhere made
the excuse for altering what is common, corporate, traditional and
popular. And the alteration is always for the worse. The mermaid never
becomes more womanly, but only more fishy. The centaur never becomes
more manly, but only more horsy. The Jew cannot really internationalise
Christendom; he can only denationalise Christendom. The proletarian does
not find it easy to become a small proprietor; he is finding it far
easier to become a slave. So the unfortunate man, who cannot tolerate
the woman he has chosen from all the women in the world, is not
encouraged to return to her and tolerate her, but encouraged to choose
another woman whom he may in due course refuse to tolerate. And in all
these cases the argument is the same; that the man in the intermediate
state is unhappy. Probably he is unhappy, since he is abnormal; but the
point is that he is permitted to loosen the universal bond which has
kept millions of others normal. Because he has himself got into a hole,
he is allowed to burrow in it like a rabbit and undermine a whole
countryside.
Next we have, as we always have touching such crude experiments, an
argument from the example of other countries, and especially of new
countries. Thus the Eugenists tell me solemnly that there have been very
successful Eugenic experiments in America. And they rigidly retain their
solemnity (while refusing with many rebukes to believe in mine) when I
tell them that one of the Eugenic experiments in America is a chemical
experiment; which consists of changing a black man into the allotropic
form of white ashes. It is really an exceedingly Eugenic experiment;
since its chief object is to discourage an inter-racial mixture of blood
which is not desired. But I do not like this American experiment,
however American; and I trust and believe that it is not typically
American at all. It represents, I conceive, only one element in the
complexity of the great democracy; and goes along with other evil
elements; so that I am not at all surprised that the same strange social
sections, which permit a human being to be burned alive, also permit the
exalted science of Eugenics. It is the same in the milder matter of
liquor laws; and we are told that certain rather crude colonials have
established prohibition laws, which they try to evade; just as we are
told they have established divorce laws, which they are now trying to
repeal. For in this case of divorce, at least, the argument from distant
precedents has recoiled crushingly upon itself. There is already an
agitation for less divorce in America, even while there is an agitation
for more divorce in England.
Again, when an argument is based on a need of population, it will be
well if those supporting it realise where it may carry them. It is
exceedingly doubtful whether population is one of the advantages of
divorce; but there is no doubt that it is one of the advantages of
polygamy. It is already used in Germany as an argument for polygamy. But
the very word will teach us to look even beyond Germany for something
yet more remote and repulsive. Mere population, along with a sort of
polygamous anarchy, will not appear even as a practical ideal to any one
who considers, for instance, how consistently Europe has held the
headship of the human race, in face of the chaotic myriads of Asia. If
population were the chief test of progress and efficiency, China would
long ago have proved itself the most progressive and efficient state. De
Quincey summed up the whole of that enormous situation in a sentence
which is perhaps more impressive and even appalling than all the
perspectives of orient architecture and vistas of opium vision in the
midst of which it comes. “Man is a weed in those regions.” Many
Europeans, fearing for the garden of the world, have fancied that in
some future fatality those weeds may spring up and choke it. But no
Europeans have really wished that the flowers should become like the
weeds. Even if it were true, therefore, that the loosening of the tie
necessarily increased the population; even if this were not
contradicted, as it is, by the facts of many countries, we should have
strong historical grounds for not accepting the deduction. We should
still be suspicious of the paradox that we may encourage large families
by abolishing the family.