even its defenders have found its principle a little too crude. I hear
they have added provisions which modify the principle; and which seem to
be in substance, first, that a man shall be made responsible for a money
payment to the wife he deserts, and second, that the matter shall once
again be submitted in some fashion to some magistrate. For my purpose
here, it is enough to note that there is something of the unmistakable
savour of the sociology we resist, in these two touching acts of faith,
in a cheque-book and in a lawyer. Most of the fashionable reformers of
marriage would be faintly shocked at any suggestion that a poor old
charwoman might possibly refuse such money, or that a good kind
magistrate might not have the right to give such advice. For the
reformers of marriage are very respectable people, with some honourable
exceptions; and nothing could fit more smoothly into the rather greasy
groove of their respectability than the suggestion that treason is best
treated with the damages, gentlemen, heavy damages, of Mr. Serjeant
Buzfuz; or that tragedy is best treated by the spiritual arbitrament of
Mr. Nupkins.
One word should be added to this hasty sketch of the elements of the
case. I have deliberately left out the loftiest aspect and argument,
that which sees marriage as a divine institution; and that for the
logical reason that those who believe in this would not believe in
divorce; and I am arguing with those who do believe in divorce. I do
not ask them to assume the worth of my creed or any creed; and I could
wish they did not so often ask me to assume the worth of their
worthless, poisonous plutocratic modern society. But if it could be
shown, as I think it can, that a long historical view and a patient
political experience can at last accumulate solid scientific evidence of
the vital need of such a vow, then I can conceive no more tremendous
tribute than this, to any faith, which made a flaming affirmation from
the darkest beginnings, of what the latest enlightenment can only slowly
discover in the end.
THE STORY OF THE FAMILY
_V.--The Story of the Family_
The most ancient of human institutions has an authority that may seem as
wild as anarchy. Alone among all such institutions it begins with a
spontaneous attraction; and may be said strictly and not sentimentally
to be founded on love instead of fear. The attempt to compare it with
coercive institutions complicating later history has led to infinite
illogicality in later times. It is as unique as it is universal. There
is nothing in any other social relations in any way parallel to the
mutual attraction of the sexes. By missing this simple point, the modern
world has fallen into a hundred follies. The idea of a general revolt of
women against men has been proclaimed with flags and processions, like a
revolt of vassals against their lords, of niggers against
nigger-drivers, of Poles against Prussians or Irishmen against
Englishmen; for all the world as if we really believed in the fabulous
nation of the Amazons. The equally philosophical idea of a general
revolt of men against women has been put into a romance by Sir Walter
Besant, and into a sociological book by Mr. Belfort Bax. But at the
first touch of this truth of an aboriginal attraction, all such
comparisons collapse and are seen to be comic. A Prussian does not feel
from the first that he can only be happy if he spends his days and
nights with a Pole. An Englishman does not think his house empty and
cheerless unless it happens to contain an Irishman. A white man does not
in his romantic youth dream of the perfect beauty of a black man. A
railway magnate seldom writes poems about the personal fascination of a
railway porter. All the other revolts against all the other relations
are reasonable and even inevitable, because those relations are
originally only founded upon force or self-interest. Force can abolish
what force can establish; self-interest can terminate a contract when
self-interest has dictated the contract. But the love of man and woman
is not an institution that can be abolished, or a contract that can be
terminated. It is something older than all institutions or contracts,
and something that is certain to outlast them all. All the other revolts
are real, because there remains a possibility that the things may be
destroyed, or at least divided. You can abolish capitalists; but you
cannot abolish males. Prussians can go out of Poland or negroes can be
repatriated to Africa; but a man and a woman must remain together in one
way or another; and must learn to put up with each other somehow.
These are very simple truths; that is why nobody nowadays seems to take
any particular notice of them; and the truth that follows next is
equally obvious. There is no dispute about the purpose of Nature in
creating such an attraction. It would be more intelligent to call it the
purpose of God; for Nature can have no purpose unless God is behind it.
To talk of the purpose of Nature is to make a vain attempt to avoid
being anthropomorphic, merely by being feminist. It is believing in a
goddess because you are too sceptical to believe in a god. But this is
a controversy which can be kept apart from the question, if we content
ourselves with saying that the vital value ultimately found in this
attraction is, of course, the renewal of the race itself. The child is
an explanation of the father and mother; and the fact that it is a human
child is the explanation of the ancient human ties connecting the father
and mother. The more human, that is the less bestial, is the child, the
more lawful and lasting are the ties. So far from any progress in
culture or the sciences tending to loosen the bond, any such progress
must logically tend to tighten it. The more things there are for the
child to learn, the longer he must remain at the natural school for
learning them; and the longer his teachers must at least postpone the
dissolution of their partnership. This elementary truth is hidden to-day
in vast masses of vicarious, indirect and artificial work, with the
fundamental fallacy of which I shall deal in a moment. Here I speak of
the primary position of the human group, as it has stood through
unthinkable ages of waxing and waning civilisations; often unable to
delegate any of its work, always unable to delegate all of it. In this,
I repeat, it will always be necessary for the two teachers to remain
together, in proportion as they have anything to teach. One of the
shapeless sea-beasts, that merely detaches itself from its offspring and
floats away, could float away to a submarine divorce court, or an
advanced club founded on free-love for fishes. The sea-beast might do
this, precisely because the sea-beast’s offspring need do nothing;
because it has not got to learn the polka or the multiplication table.
All these are truisms but they are also truths, and truths that will
return; for the present tangle of semi-official substitutes is not only
a stop-gap, but one that is not big enough to stop the gap. If people
cannot mind their own business, it cannot possibly be more economical to
pay them to mind each other’s business; and still less to mind each
other’s babies. It is simply throwing away a natural force and then
paying for an artificial force; as if a man were to water a plant with a
hose while holding up an umbrella to protect it from the rain. The
whole really rests on a plutocratic illusion of an infinite supply of
servants. When we offer any other system as a “career for women,” we are
really proposing that an infinite number of them should become servants,
of a plutocratic or bureaucratic sort. Ultimately, we are arguing that a
woman should not be a mother to her own baby, but a nursemaid to
somebody else’s baby. But it will not work, even on paper. We cannot all
live by taking in each other’s washing, especially in the form of
pinafores. In the last resort, the only people who either can or will
give individual care, to each of the individual children, are their
individual parents. The expression as applied to those dealing with
changing crowds of children is a graceful and legitimate flourish of
speech.
This triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be
destroyed; it can only destroy those civilisations which disregard it.
Most modern reformers are merely bottomless sceptics, and have no basis
on which to rebuild; and it is well that such reformers should realise
that there is something they cannot reform. You can put down the mighty
from their seat; you can turn the world upside down, and there is much
to be said for the view that it may then be the right way up. But you
cannot create a world in which the baby carries the mother. You cannot
create a world in which the mother has not authority over the baby. You
can waste your time in trying; by giving votes to babies or proclaiming
a republic of infants in arms. You can say, as an educationist said the
other day, that small children should “criticise, question authority and
suspend their judgment.” I do not know why he did not go on to say that
they should earn their own living, pay income tax to the state, and die
in battle for the fatherland; for the proposal evidently is that
children shall have no childhood. But you can, if you find entertainment
in such games, organise “representative government” among little boys
and girls, and tell them to take their legal and constitutional
responsibilities as seriously as possible. In short, you can be crazy;
but you cannot be consistent. You cannot really carry your own
principle back to the aboriginal group, and really apply it to the
mother and the baby. You will not act on you own theory in the simplest
and most practical of all possible cases. You are not quite so mad as
that.
This nucleus of natural authority has always existed in the midst of
more artificial authorities. It has always been regarded as something in
the literal sense individual; that is, as an absolute that could not
really be divided. A baby was not even a baby apart from its mother; it
was something else, most probably a corpse. It was always recognised as
standing in a peculiar relation to government; simply because it was one
of the few things that had not been made by government; and could to
some extent come into existence without the support of government.
Indeed the case for it is too strong to be stated. For the case for it
is that there is nothing like it; and we can only find faint parallels
to it in those more elaborate and painful powers and institutions that
are its inferiors. Thus the only way of conveying it is to compare it to
a nation; although, compared to it, national divisions are as modern
and formal as national anthems. Thus I may often use the metaphor of a
city; though in its presence a citizen is as recent as a city clerk. It
is enough to note here that everybody does know by intuition and admit
by implication that a family is a solid fact, having a character and
colour like a nation. The truth can be tested by the most modern and
most daily experiences. A man does say “That is the sort of thing the
Browns will like”; however tangled and interminable a psychological
novel he might compose on the shades of difference between Mr. and Mrs.
Brown. A woman does say “I don’t like Jemima seeing so much of the
Robinsons”; and she does not always, in the scurry of her social or
domestic duties, pause to distinguish the optimistic materialism of Mrs.
Robinson from the more acid cynicism which tinges the hedonism of Mr.
Robinson. There is a colour of the household inside, as conspicuous as
the colour of the house outside. That colour is a blend, and if any tint
in it predominate it is generally that preferred by Mrs. Robinson. But,
like all composite colours, it is a separate color, as separate as green
is from blue and yellow. Every marriage is a sort of wild balance; and
in every case the compromise is as unique as an eccentricity.
Philanthropists walking in the slums often see the compromise in the
street, and mistake it for a fight. When they interfere, they are
thoroughly thumped by both parties; and serve them right, for not
respecting the very institution that brought them into the world.
The first thing to see is that this enormous normality is like a
mountain; and one that is capable of being a volcano. Every abnormality
that is now opposed to it is like a molehill; and the earnest
sociological organisers of it are exceedingly like moles. But the
mountain is a volcano in another sense also; as suggested in that
tradition of the southern fields fertilised by larva. It has a creative
as well as a destructive side; and it only remains, in this part of the
analysis, to note the political effect of this extra-political
institution, and the political ideals of which it has been the
champion; and perhaps the only permanent champion.
The ideal for which it stands in the state is liberty. It stands for
liberty for the very simple reason with which this rough analysis
started. It is the only one of these institutions that is at once
necessary and voluntary. It is the only check on the state that is bound
to renew itself as eternally as the state, and more naturally than the
state. Every sane man recognises that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or
rather is nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a
province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king. This
the only way in which truth can ever find refuge from public
persecution, and the good man survive the bad government. But the good
man by himself is no match for the city. There must be balanced against
it another ideal institution, and in that sense an immortal institution.
So long as the state is the only ideal institution, the state will call
on the citizen to sacrifice himself, and therefore will not have the
smallest scruple in sacrificing the citizen. The state consists of
coercion; and must always be justified from its own point of view in
extending the bounds of coercion; as, for instance, in the case of
conscription. The only thing that can be set up to check or challenge
this authority is a voluntary law and a voluntary loyalty. That loyalty
is the protection of liberty, in the only sphere where liberty can fully
dwell. It is a principle of the constitution that the King never dies.
It is the whole principle of the family that the citizen never dies.
There must be a heraldry and heredity of freedom; a tradition of
resistance to tyranny. A man must be not only free, but free-born.
Indeed, there is something in the family that might loosely be called
anarchist; and more correctly called amateur. As there seems something
almost vague about its voluntary origin, so there seems something vague
about its voluntary organisation. The most vital function it performs,
perhaps the most vital function that anything can perform, is that of
education; but its type of early education is far too essential to be
mistaken for instruction. In a thousand things it works rather by rule
of thumb than rule of theory. To take a commonplace and even comic
example, I doubt if any text-book or code of rules has ever contained
any directions about standing a child in a corner. Doubtless when the
modern process is complete, and the coercive principle of the state has
entirely extinguished the voluntary element of the family, there will be
some exact regulation or restriction about the matter. Possibly it will
say that the corner must be an angle of at least ninety-five degrees.
Possibly it will say that the converging line of any ordinary corner
tends to make a child squint. In fact I am certain that if I said
casually, at a sufficient number of tea-tables, that corners made
children squint, it would rapidly become a universally received dogma of
popular science. For the modern world will accept no dogmas upon any
authority; but it will accept any dogmas upon no authority. Say that a
thing is so, according to the Pope or the Bible, and it will be
dismissed as a superstition without examination. But preface your remark
merely with “they say” or “don’t you know that?” or try (and fail) to
remember the name of some professor mentioned in some newspaper; and the
keen rationalism of the modern mind will accept every word you say. This
parenthesis is not so irrelevant as it may appear, for it will be well
to remember that when a rigid officialism breaks in upon the voluntary
compromises of the home, that officialism itself will be only rigid in
its action and will be exceedingly limp in its thought. Intellectually
it will be at least as vague as the amateur arrangements of the home,
and the only difference is that the domestic arrangements are in the
only real sense practical; that is, they are founded on experiences that
have been suffered. The others are what is now generally called
scientific; that is, they are founded on experiments that have not yet
been made. As a matter of fact, instead of invading the family with the
blundering bureaucracy that mismanages the public services, it would be
far more philosophical to work the reform the other way round. It would
be really quite as reasonable to alter the laws of the nation so as to
resemble the laws of the nursery. The punishments would be far less
horrible, far more humorous, and far more really calculated to make men
feel they had made fools of themselves. It would be a pleasant change if
a judge, instead of putting on the black cap, had to put on the dunce’s
cap; or if we could stand a financier in his own corner.
Of course this opinion is rare, and reactionary--whatever that may mean.
Modern education is founded on the principle that a parent is more
likely to be cruel than anybody else. It passes over the obvious fact
that he is _less_ likely to be cruel than anybody else. Anybody may
happen to be cruel; but the first chances of cruelty come with the whole
colourless and indifferent crowd of total strangers and mechanical
mercenaries, whom it is now the custom to call in as infallible agents
of improvement; policemen, doctors, detectives, inspectors, instructors,
and so on. They are automatically given arbitrary power because there
are here and there such things as criminal parents; as if there were no
such things as criminal doctors or criminal school-masters. A mother is
not always judicious about her child’s diet; so it is given into the
control of Dr. Crippen. A father is thought not to teach his sons the
purest morality; so they are put under the tutorship of Eugene Aram.
These celebrated criminals are no more rare in their respective
professions than the cruel parents are in the profession of parenthood.
But indeed the case is far stronger than this; and there is no need to
rely on the case of such criminals at all. The ordinary weaknesses of
human nature will explain all the weaknesses of bureaucracy and business
government all over the world. The official need only be an ordinary man
to be more indifferent to other people’s children than to his own; and
even to sacrifice other people’s family prosperity to his own. He may be
bored; he may be bribed; he may be brutal, for any one of the thousand
reasons that ever made a man a brute. All this elementary common sense
is entirely left out of account in our educational and social systems of
today. It is assumed that the hireling will _not_ flee, and that solely
because he is a hireling. It is denied that the shepherd will lay down
his life for the sheep; or for that matter, even that the she-wolf will
fight for the cubs. We are to believe that mothers are inhuman; but not
that officials are human. There are unnatural parents, but there are no
natural passions; at least, there are none where the fury of King Lear
dared to find them--in the beadle. Such is the latest light on the
education of the young; and the same principle that is applied to the
child is applied to the husband and wife. Just as it assumes that a
child will certainly be loved by anybody except his mother, so it
assumes that a man can be happy with anybody except the one woman he has
himself chosen for his wife.
Thus the coercive spirit of the state prevails over the free promise of
the family, in the shape of formal officialism. But this is not the most
coercive of the coercive elements in the modern commonwealth. An even
more rigid and ruthless external power is that of industrial employment
and unemployment. An even more ferocious enemy of the family is the
factory. Between these modern mechanical things the ancient natural
institution is not being reformed or modified or even cut down; it is
being torn in pieces. It is not only being torn in pieces in the sense
of a true metaphor, like a living thing caught in a hideous clockwork of
manufacture. It is being literally torn in pieces, in that the husband
may go to one factory, the wife to another, and the child to a third.
Each will become the servant of a separate financial group, which is
more and more gaining the political power of a feudal group. But whereas
feudalism received the loyalty of families, the lords of the new servile
state will receive only the loyalty of individuals; that is, of lonely
men and even of lost children.
It is sometimes said that Socialism attacks the family; which is founded
on little beyond the accident that some Socialists believe in free-love.
I have been a Socialist, and I am no longer a Socialist, and at no time
did I believe in free-love. It is true, I think in a large and
unconscious sense, that State Socialism encourages the general coercive
claim I have been considering. But if it be true that Socialism attacks
the family in theory, it is far more certain that Capitalism attacks it
in practice. It is a paradox, but a plain fact, that men never notice a
thing as long as it exists in practice. Men who will note a heresy will
ignore an abuse. Let any one who doubts the paradox imagine the
newspapers formally printing along with the Honours’ List a price list,
for peerages and knighthoods; though everybody knows they are bought and
sold. So the factory is destroying the family in fact; and need depend
on no poor mad theorist who dreams of destroying it in fancy. And what
is destroying it is nothing so plausible as free-love; but something
rather to be described as an enforced fear. It is economic punishment
more terrible than legal punishment, which may yet land us in slavery as
the only safety.
From its first days in the forest this human group had to fight against
wild monsters; and so it is now fighting against these wild machines. It
only managed to survive then, and it will only manage to survive now, by
a strong internal sanctity; a tacit oath or dedication deeper than that
of the city or the tribe. But though this silent promise was always
present, it took at a certain turning point of our history a special
form which I shall try to sketch in the next chapter. That turning point
was the creation of Christendom by the religion which created it.
Nothing will destroy the sacred triangle; and even the Christian faith,
the most amazing revolution that ever took place in the mind, served
only in a sense to turn that triangle upside down. It held up a mystical
mirror in which the order of the three things was reversed; and added a
holy family of child, mother and father to the human family of father,
mother and child.
THE STORY OF THE VOW
_VI.--The Story of the Vow_