position to ask more clearly what is divorce. It is not merely the
negation or neglect of marriage; for any one can always neglect
marriage. It is not the dissolution of the legal obligation of marriage,
or even the legal obligation of monogamy; for the simple reason that no
such obligation exists. Any man in modern London may have a hundred
wives if he does not call them wives; or rather, if he does not go
through certain more or less mystical ceremonies in order to assert that
they are wives. He might create a certain social coolness round his
household, a certain fading of his general popularity. But that is not
created by law, and could not be prevented by law. As the late Lord
Salisbury very sensibly observed about boycotting in Ireland, “How can
you make a law to prevent people going out of the room when somebody
they don’t like comes into it?” We cannot be forcibly introduced to a
polygamist by a policeman. It would not be an assertion of social
liberty, but a denial of social liberty, if we found ourselves
practically obliged to associate with all the profligates in society.
But divorce is not in this sense mere anarchy. On the contrary divorce
is in this sense respectability; and even a rigid excess of
respectability. Divorce in this sense might indeed be not unfairly
called snobbery. The definition of divorce, which concerns us here, is
that it is the attempt to give respectability, and not liberty. It is
the attempt to give a certain social status, and not a legal status. It
is indeed supposed that this can be done by the alteration of certain
legal forms; and this will be more or less true according to the extent
to which law as such overawed public opinion, or was valued as a true
expression of public opinion. If a man divorced in the large-minded
fashion of Henry the Eighth pleaded his legal title among the peasantry
of Ireland, for instance, I think he would find a difference still
existing between respectability and religion. But the peculiar point
here is that many are claiming the sanction of religion as well as of
respectability. They would attach to their very natural and sometimes
very pardonable experiments a certain atmosphere, and even glamour,
which has undoubtedly belonged to the status of marriage in historic
Christendom. But before they make this attempt, it would be well to ask
why such a dignity ever appeared or in what it consisted. And I fancy we
shall find ourselves confronted with the very simple truth, that the
dignity arose wholly and entirely out of the fidelity; and that the
glamour merely came from the vow. People were regarded as having a
certain dignity because they were dedicated in a certain way; as bound
to certain duties and, if it be preferred, to certain discomforts. It
may be irrational to endure these discomforts; it may even be irrational
to respect them. But it is certainly much more irrational to respect
them, and then artificially transfer the same respect to the absence of
them. It is as if we were to expect uniforms to be saluted when armies
were disbanded; and ask people to cheer a soldier’s coat when it did
not contain a soldier. If you think you can abolish war, abolish it; but
do not suppose that when there are no wars to be waged, there will still
be warriors to be worshipped. If it was a good thing that the
monasteries were dissolved, let us say so and dismiss them. But the
nobles who dissolved the monasteries did not shave their heads, and ask
to be regarded as saints solely on account of that ceremony. The nobles
did not dress up as abbots and ask to be credited with a potential
talent for working miracles, because of the austerity of their vows of
poverty and chastity. They got inside the houses, but not the hoods, and
still less the haloes. They at least knew that it is not the habit that
makes the monk. They were not so superstitious as those moderns, who
think it is the veil that makes the bride.
What is respected, in short, is fidelity to the ancient flag of the
family, and a readiness to fight for what I have noted as its unique
type of freedom. I say readiness to fight, for fortunately the fight
itself is the exception rather than the rule. The soldier is not
respected because he is doomed to death, but because he is ready for
death; and even ready for defeat. The married man or woman is not doomed
to evil, sickness or poverty; but is respected for taking a certain step
for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness or in health.
But there is one result of this line of argument which should correct a
danger in some arguments on the same side.
It is very essential that a stricture on divorce, which is in fact
simply a defence of marriage, should be independent of sentimentalism,
especially in the form called optimism. A man justifying a fight for
national independence or civic freedom is neither sentimental nor
optimistic. He explains the sacrifice, but he does not explain it away.
He does not say that bayonet wounds are pin-pricks, or mere scratches of
the thorns on the rose of pleasure. He does not say that the whole
display of firearms is a festive display of fireworks. On the contrary,
when he praises it most, he praises it as pain rather than pleasure. He
increases the praise with the pain; it is his whole boast that
militarism, and even modern science, can produce no instrument of
torture to tame the soul of man. It is idle, in speaking of war, to pit
the realistic against the romantic, in the sense of the heroic; for all
possible realism can only increase the heroism; and therefore, in the
highest sense, increase the romance. Now I do not compare marriage with
war, but I do compare marriage with law or liberty or patriotism or
popular government, or any of the human ideals which have often to be
defended by war. Even the wildest of those ideals, which seem to escape
from all the discipline of peace, do not escape from the discipline of
war. The Bolshevists may have aimed at pure peace and liberty; but they
have been compelled, for their own purpose, first to raise armies and
then to rule armies. In a word, however beautiful you may think your own
visions of beatitude, men must suffer to be beautiful, and even suffer a
considerable interval of being ugly. And I have no notion of denying
that mankind suffers much from the maintenance of the standard of
marriage; as it suffers much from the necessity of criminal law or the
recurrence of crusades and revolutions. The only question here is
whether marriage is indeed, as I maintain, an ideal and an institution
making for popular freedom; I do not need to be told that anything
making for popular freedom has to be paid for in vigilance and pain, and
a whole army of martyrs.
Hence I am far indeed from denying the hard cases which exist here, as
in all matters involving the idea of honour. For indeed I could not deny
them without denying the whole parallel of militant morality on which my
argument rests. But this being first understood, it will be well to
discuss in a little more detail what are described as the tragedies of
marriage. And the first thing to note about the most tragic of them is
that they are not tragedies of marriage at all. They are tragedies of
sex; and might easily occur in a highly modern romance in which marriage
was not mentioned at all. It is generally summarised by saying that the
tragic element is the absence of love. But it is often forgotten that
another tragic element is often the presence of love. The doctors of
divorce, with an air of the frank and friendly realism of men of the
world, are always recommending and rejoicing in a sensible separation by
mutual consent. But if we are really to dismiss our dreams of dignity
and honour, if we are really to fall back on the frank realism of our
experience as men of the world, then the very first thing that our
experience will tell us is that it very seldom is a separation by mutual
consent; that is, that the consent very seldom is sincerely and
spontaneously mutual. By far the commonest problem in such cases is that
in which one party wishes to end the partnership and the other does not.
And of that emotional situation you can make nothing but a tragedy,
whichever way you turn it. With or without marriage, with or without
divorce, with or without any arrangements that anybody can suggest or
imagine, it remains a tragedy. The only difference is that by the
doctrine of marriage it remains both a noble and a fruitful tragedy;
like that of a man who falls fighting for his country, or dies
testifying to the truth. But the truth is that the innovators have as
much sham optimism about divorce as any romanticist can have had about
marriage. They regard their story, when it ends in the divorce court,
through as rosy a mist of sentimentalism as anybody ever regarded a
story ending with wedding bells. Such a reformer is quite sure that when
once the prince and princess are divorced by the fairy godmother, they
will live happily ever after. I enjoy romance, but I like it to be
rooted in reality; and any one with a touch of reality knows that nine
couples out of ten, when they are divorced, are left in an exceedingly
different state. It will be safe to say in most cases that one partner
will fail to find happiness in an infatuation, and the other will from
the first accept a tragedy. In the realm of reality and not of romance,
it is commonly a case of breaking hearts as well as breaking promises;
and even dishonour is not always a remedy for remorse.
The next limitation to be laid down in the matter affects certain
practical forms of discomfort, on a level rather lower than love or
hatred. The cases most commonly quoted concern what is called “drink”
and what is called “cruelty.” They are always talked about as matters
of fact; though in practice they are very decidedly matters of opinion.
It is not a flippancy, but a fact, that the misfortune of the woman who
has married a drunkard may have to be balanced against the misfortune of
the man who has married a teetotaler. For the very definition of
drunkenness may depend on the dogma of teetotalism. Drunkenness, it has
been very truly observed,[B] “may mean anything from _delirium tremens_
to having a stronger head than the official appointed to conduct the
examination.” Mr. Bernard Shaw once professed, apparently seriously,
that any man drinking wine or beer at all was incapacitated from
managing a motorcar; and still more, therefore, one would suppose, from
managing a wife. The scales are weighted here, of course, with all those
false weights of snobbishness which are the curse of justice in this
country. The working class is forced to conduct almost in public a
normal and varying festive habit, which the upper class can afford to
conduct in private; and a certain section of the middle class, that
which happens to concern itself most with local politics and social
reforms, really has or affects a standard quite abnormal and even alien.
They might go any lengths of injustice in dealing with the working man
or working woman accused of too hearty a taste in beer. To mention but
one matter out of a thousand, the middle class reformers are obviously
quite ignorant of the hours at which working people begin to work.
Because they themselves, at eleven o’clock in the morning, have only
recently finished breakfast and the full moral digestion of the _Daily
Mail_, they think a charwoman drinking beer at that hour is one of those
arising early in the morning to follow after strong drink. Most of them
really do not know that she has already done more than half a heavy
day’s work, and is partaking of a very reasonable luncheon. The whole
problem of proletarian drink is entangled in a network of these
misunderstandings; and there is no doubt whatever that, when judged by
these generalisations, the poor will be taken in a net of injustices.
And this truth is as certain in the case of what is called cruelty as
of what is called drink. Nine times out of ten the judgment on a navvy
for hitting a woman is about as just as a judgment on him for not taking
off his hat to a lady. It is a class test; it may be a class
superiority; but it is not an act of equal justice between the classes.
It leaves out a thousand things; the provocation, the atmosphere, the
harassing restrictions of space, the nagging which Dickens described as
the terrors of “temper in a cart,” the absence of certain taboos of
social training, the tradition of greater roughness even in the gestures
of affection. To make all marriage or divorce, in the case of such a
man, turn upon a blow is like blasting the whole life of a gentleman
because he has slammed the door. Often a poor man cannot slam the door;
partly because the model villa might fall down; but more because he has
nowhere to go to; the smoking-room, the billiard-room and the peacock
music-room not being yet attached to his premises.
I say this in passing, to point out that while I do not dream of
suggesting that there are only happy marriages, there will quite
certainly, as things work nowadays, be a very large number of unhappy
and unjust divorces. They will be cases in which the innocent partner
will receive the real punishment of the guilty partner, through being in
fact and feeling the faithful partner. For instance, it is insisted that
a married person must at least find release from the society of a
lunatic; but it is also true that the scientific reformers, with their
fuss about “the feeble-minded,” are continually giving larger and looser
definitions of lunacy. The process might begin by releasing somebody
from a homicidal maniac, and end by dealing in the same way with a
rather dull conversationalist. But in fact nobody does deny that a
person should be allowed some sort of release from a homicidal maniac.
The most extreme school of orthodoxy only maintains that anybody who has
had that experience should be content with that release. In other words,
it says he should be content with that experience of matrimony, and not
seek another. It was put very wittily, I think, by a Roman Catholic
friend of mine, who said he approved of release so long as it was not
spelt with a hyphen.
To put it roughly, we are prepared in some cases to listen to the man
who complains of having a wife. But we are not prepared to listen, at
such length, to the same man when he comes back and complains that he
has not got a wife. Now in practice at this moment the great mass of the
complaints are precisely of this kind. The reformers insist particularly
on the pathos of a man’s position when he has obtained a separation
without a divorce. Their most tragic figure is that of the man who is
already free of all those ills he had, and is only asking to be allowed
to fly to others that he knows not of. I should be the last to deny
that, in certain emotional circumstances, his tragedy may be very tragic
indeed. But his tragedy is of the emotional kind which can never be
entirely eliminated; and which he has himself, in all probability,
inflicted on the partner he has left. We may call it the price of
maintaining an ideal or the price of making a mistake; but anyhow it is
the point of our whole distinction in the matter; it is here that we
draw the line, and I have nowhere denied that it is a line of battle.
The battle joins on the debatable ground, not of the man’s doubtful past
but of his still more doubtful future. In a word, the divorce
controversy is not really a controversy about divorce. It is a
controversy about re-marriage; or rather about whether it is marriage at
all.
And with that we can only return to the point of honour which I have
compared here to a point of patriotism; since it is both the smallest
and the greatest kind of patriotism. Men have died in torments during
the last five years for points of patriotism far more dubious and
fugitive. Men like the Poles or the Serbians, through long periods of
their history, may be said rather to have lived in torments. I will
never admit that the vital need of the freedom of the family, as I have
tried to sketch it here, is not a cause as valuable as the freedom of
any frontier. But I do willingly admit that the cause would be a dark
and terrible one, if it really asked these men to suffer torments. As I
have stated it, on its most extreme terms, it only asks them to suffer
abnegations. And those negative sufferings I do think they may
honourably be called upon to bear, for the glory of their own oath and
the great things by which the nations live. In relation to their own
nation most normal men will feel that this distinction between release
and “re-lease” is neither fanciful nor harsh, but very rational and
human. A patriot may be an exile in another country; but he will not be
a patriot of another country. He will be as cheerful as he can in an
abnormal position; he may or may not sing his country’s songs in a
strange land; but he will not sing the strange songs as his own. And
such may fairly be also the attitude of the citizen who has gone into
exile from the oldest of earthly cities.
THE VISTA OF DIVORCE
_VIII.--The Vista of Divorce_
The case for divorce combines all the advantages of having it both ways;
and of drawing the same deduction from right or left, and from black or
white. Whichever way the programme works in practice, it can still be
justified in theory. If there are few examples of divorce, it shows how
little divorce need be dreaded; if there are many, it shows how much it
is required. The rarity of divorce is an argument in favour of divorce;
and the multiplicity of divorce is an argument against marriage. Now, in
truth, if we were confined to considering this alternative in a
speculative manner, if there were no concrete facts but only abstract
probabilities, we should have no difficulty in arguing our case. The
abstract liberty allowed by the reformers is as near as possible to
anarchy, and gives no logical or legal guarantee worth discussing. The
advantages of their reform do not accrue to the innocent party, but to
the guilty party; especially if he be sufficiently guilty. A man has
only to commit the crime of desertion to obtain the reward of divorce.
And if they are entitled to take as typical the most horrible
hypothetical cases of the abuse of the marriage laws, surely we are
entitled to take equally extreme possibilities in the abuse of their own
divorce laws. If they, when looking about for a husband, so often hit
upon a homicidal maniac, surely we may politely introduce them to the
far more human figure of the gentleman who marries as many women as he
likes and gets rid of them as often as he pleases. But in fact there is
no necessity for us to argue thus in the abstract; for the amiable
gentleman in question undoubtedly exists in the concrete. Of course, he
is no new figure; he is a very recurrent type of rascal; his name has
been Lothario or Don Juan; and he has often been represented as a rather
romantic rascal. The point of divorce reform, it cannot be too often
repeated, is that the rascal should not only be regarded as romantic,
but regarded as respectable. He is not to sow his wild oats and settle
down; he is merely to settle down to sowing his wild oats. They are to
be regarded as tame and inoffensive oats; almost, if one may say so, as
Quaker oats. But there is no need, as I say, to speculate about whether
the looser view of divorce might prevail; for it is already prevailing.
The newspapers are full of an astonishing hilarity about the rapidity
with which hundreds or thousands of human families are being broken up
by the lawyers; and about the undisguised haste of the “hustling judges”
who carry on the work. It is a form of hilarity which would seem to
recall the gaiety of a grave-digger in a city swept by a pestilence. But
a few details occasionally flash by in the happy dance; from time to
time the court is moved by a momentary curiosity about the causes of the
general violation of oaths and promises; as if there might, here and
there, be a hint of some sort of reason for ruining the fundamental
institution of society. And nobody who notes those details, or
considers those faint hints of reason, can doubt for a moment that
masses of these men and women are now simply using divorce in the spirit
of free-love. They are very seldom the sort of people who have once
fallen tragically into the wrong place, and have now found their way
triumphantly to the right place. They are almost always people who are
obviously wandering from one place to another, and will probably leave
their last shelter exactly as they have left their first. But it seems
to amuse them to make again, if possible in a church, a promise they
have already broken in practice and almost avowedly disbelieve in
principle.
In face of this headlong fashion, it is really reasonable to ask the
divorce reformers what is their attitude towards the old monogamous
ethic of our civilisation; and whether they wish to retain it in
general, or to retain it at all. Unfortunately even the sincerest and
most lucid of them use language which leaves the matter a little
doubtful. Mr. E. S. P. Haynes is one of the most brilliant and most
fair-minded controversialists on that side; and he has said, for
instance, that he agrees with me in supporting the ideal of indissoluble
or, at least, of undissolved marriage. Mr. Haynes is one of the few
friends of divorce who are also real friends of democracy; and I am sure
that in practice this stands for a real sympathy with the home,
especially the poor home. Unfortunately, on the theoretic side, the word
“ideal” is far from being an exact term, and is open to two almost
opposite interpretations. For many would say that marriage is an ideal
as some would say that monasticism is an ideal, in the sense of a
counsel of perfection. Now certainly we might preserve a conjugal ideal
in this way. A man might be reverently pointed out in the street as a
sort of saint, merely because he was married. A man might wear a medal
for monogamy; or have letters after his name similar to V.C. or D.D.;
let us say L.W. for “Lives With His Wife,” or “N.D.Y.” for “Not Divorced
Yet.” We might, on entering some strange city, be struck by a stately
column erected to the memory of a wife who never ran away with a
soldier, or the shrine and image of a historical character, who had
resisted the example of the man in the “New Witness” ballade in bolting
with the children’s nurse. Such high artistic hagiology would be quite
consistent with Mr. Haynes’ divorce reform; with re-marriage after three
years, or three hours. It would also be quite consistent with Mr.
Haynes’ phrase about preserving an ideal of marriage. What it would not
be consistent with is the perfectly plain, solid, secular and social
usefulness which I have here attributed to marriage. It does not create
or preserve a natural institution, normal to the whole community, to
balance the more artificial and even more arbitrary institution of the
state; which is less natural even if it is equally necessary. It does
not defend a voluntary association, but leaves the only claim on life,
death and loyalty with a more coercive institution. It does not stand,
in the sense I have tried to explain, for the principle of liberty. In
short, it does not do any of the things which Mr. Haynes himself would
especially desire to see done. For humanity to be thus spontaneously
organised from below, it is necessary that the organisation should be
almost as universal as the official organisation from above. The tyrant
must find not one family but many families defying his power; he must
find mankind not a dust of atoms, but fixed in solid blocks of fidelity.
And those human groups must support not only themselves but each other.
In this sense what some call individualism is as corporate as communism.
It is a thing of volunteers; but volunteers must be soldiers. It is a
defence of private persons; but we might say that the private persons
must be private soldiers. The family must be recognised as well as real;
above all, the family must be recognised by the families. To expect
individuals to suffer successfully for a home apart from the home, that
is for something which is an incident but not an institution, is really
a confusion between two ideas; it is a verbal sophistry almost in the
nature of a pun. Similarly, for instance, we cannot prove the moral
force of a peasantry by pointing to one peasant; we might almost as well
reveal the military force of infantry by pointing to one infant.