marriage is to remain ideal only in the sense of being almost
impossible. They do not mean that a faithful husband is only to be
admired as a fanatic. The reasonable men among them do really mean that
a divorced person shall be tolerated as something unusually unfortunate,
not merely that a married person shall be admired as something unusually
blessed and inspired. But whatever they desire, it is as well that they
should realise exactly what they do; and in this case I should like to
hear their criticisms in the matter of what they see. They must surely
see that in England at present, as in many parts of America in the past,
the new liberty is being taken in the spirit of licence as if the
exception were to be the rule, or, rather, perhaps the absence of rule.
This will especially be made manifest if we consider that the effect of
the process is accumulative like a snowball, and returns on itself like
a snowball. The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous
marriage. If people can be separated for no reason they will feel it
all the easier to be united for no reason. A man might quite clearly
foresee that a sensual infatuation would be fleeting, and console
himself with the knowledge that the connection could be equally
fleeting. There seems no particular reason why he should not elaborately
calculate that he could stand a particular lady’s temper for ten months;
or reckon that he would have enjoyed and exhausted her repertoire of
drawing-room songs in two years. The old joke about choosing the wife to
fit the furniture or the fashions might quite logically return, not as
an old joke but as a new solemnity; indeed, it will be found that a new
religion is generally the return of an old joke. A man might quite
consistently see a woman as suited to the period of the hobble skirt,
and as less suited to the threatened recurrence of the crinoline. These
fancies are fantastic enough, but they are not a shade more fantastic
than the facts of many a divorce controversy as urged in the divorce
courts. And this is to leave out altogether the most fantastic fact of
all: the winking at widespread and conspicuous collusion. Collusion has
become not so much an illegal evasion as a legal fiction, and even a
legal institution, as it is admirably satirised in Mr. Somerset
Maugham’s brilliant play of “Home and Beauty.” The fact was very frankly
brought before the public, by a man who was eminently calculated to
disarm satire by sincerity. Colonel Wedgewood is a man who can never be
too much honoured, by all who have any hope of popular liberties still
finding champions in the midst of parliamentary corruption. He is one of
the very few men alive who have shown both military and political
courage; the courage of the camp and the courage of the forum. And
doubtless he showed a third type of social courage, in avowing the
absurd expedient which so many others are content merely to accept and
employ. It is admittedly a frantic and farcical thing that a good man
should find or think it necessary to pretend to commit a sin. Some of
the divorce moralists seem to deduce from this that he ought really to
commit the sin. They may possibly be aware, however, that there are some
who do not agree with them.
For this latter fact is the next step in the speculative progress of the
new morality. The divorce advocates must be well aware that modern
civilisation still contains strong elements, not the least intelligent
and certainly not the least vigorous, which will not accept the new
respectability as a substitute for the old religious vow. The Roman
Catholic Church, the Anglo-Catholic school, the conservative
peasantries, and a large section of the popular life everywhere, will
regard the riot of divorce and re-marriage as they would any other riot
of irresponsibility. The consequence would appear to be that two
different standards will appear in ordinary morality, and even in
ordinary society. Instead of the old social distinction between those
who are married and those who are unmarried, there will be a distinction
between those who are married and those who are really married. Society
might even become divided into two societies; which is perilously
approximate to Disraeli’s famous exaggeration about England divided into
two nations. But whether England be actually so divided or not, this
note of the two nations is the real note of warning in the matter. It
is in this connection, perhaps, that we have to consider most gravely
and doubtfully the future of our own country.
Anarchy cannot last, but anarchic communities cannot last either. Mere
lawlessness cannot live, but it can destroy life. The nations of the
earth always return to sanity and solidarity; but the nations which
return to it first are the nations which survive. We in England cannot
afford to allow our social institutions to go to pieces, as if this
ancient and noble country were an ephemeral colony. We cannot afford it
comparatively, even if we could afford it positively. We are surrounded
by vigorous nations mainly rooted in the peasant or permanent ideals;
notably in the case of France and Ireland. I know that the detested and
detestably undemocratic parliamentary clique, which corrupts France as
it does England, was persuaded or bribed by a Jew named Naquet to pass a
crude and recent divorce law, which was full of the hatred of
Christianity. But only a very superficial critic of France can be
unaware that French parliamentarism is superficial. The French nation
as a whole, the most rigidly respectable nation in the world, will
certainly go on living by the old standards of domesticity. When
Frenchmen are not Christians they are heathens; the heathens who
worshipped the household gods. It might seem strange to say, for
instance, that an atheist like M. Clemenceau has for his chief ideal a
thing called piety. But to understand this it is only necessary to know
a little Latin--and a little French.
A short time ago, as I am well aware, it would have sounded very strange
to represent the old religious and peasant communities either as a model
or a menace. It was counted a queer thing to say, in the days when my
friends and I first said it; in the days of my youth when the republic
of France and the religion of Ireland were regarded as alike ridiculous
and decadent. But many things have happened since then; and it will not
now be so easy to persuade even newspaper readers that Foch is a fool,
either because he is a Frenchman or because he is a Catholic. The older
tradition, even in the most unfashionable forms, has found champions in
the most unexpected quarters. Only the other day Dr. Saleeby, a
distinguished scientific critic who had made himself the special
advocate of all the instruction and organisation that is called social
science, startled his friends and foes alike by saying that the peasant
families in the West of Ireland were far more satisfactory and
successful than those brooded over by all the benevolent sociology of
Bradford. He gave his testimony from an entirely rationalistic and even
materialistic point of view; indeed, he carried rationalism so far as to
give the preference to Roscommon because the women are still mammals. To
a mind of the more traditional type it might seem sufficient to say they
are still mothers. To a memory that lingers over the legends and lyrical
movements of mankind, it might seem no great improvement to imagine a
song that ran “My mammal bids me bind my hair,” or “I’m to be Queen of
the May, mammal, I’m to be Queen of the May.” But indeed the truth to
which he testified is all the more arresting, because for him it was
materialistic and not mystical. The brute biological advantage, as well
as other advantages, was with those for whom that truth was a truth; and
it was all the more instinctive and automatic where that truth was a
tradition. The sort of place where mothers are still something more than
mammals is the only sort of place where they still are mammals. There
the people are still healthy animals; healthy enough to hit you if you
call them animals. I also have, on this merely controversial occasion,
used throughout the rationalistic and not the religious appeal. But it
is not unreasonable to note that the materialistic advantages are really
found among those who most repudiate materialism. This one stray
testimony is but a type of a thousand things of the same kind, which
will convince any one with the sense of social atmospheres that the day
of the peasantries is not passing, but rather arriving. It is the more
complex types of society that are now entangled in their own
complexities. Those who tell us, with a monotonous metaphor, that we
cannot put the clock back, seem to be curiously unconscious of the fact
that their own clock has stopped. And there is nothing so hopeless as
clockwork when it stops. A machine cannot mend itself; it requires a man
to mend it; and the future lies with those who can make living laws for
men and not merely dead laws for machinery. Those living laws are not to
be found in the scatter-brained scepticism which is busy in the great
cities, dissolving what it cannot analyse. The primary laws of man are
to be found in the permanent life of man; in those things that have been
common to it in every time and land, though in the highest civilisation
they have reached an enrichment like that of the divine romance of Cana
in Galilee. We know that many critics of such a story say that its
elements are not permanent; but indeed it is the critics who are not
permanent. A hundred mad dogs of heresy have worried man from the
beginning; but it was always the dog that died. We know there is a
school of prigs who disapprove of the wine; and there may now be a
school of prigs who disapprove of the wedding. For in such a case as the
story of Cana, it may be remarked that the pedants are prejudiced
against the earthly elements as much as, or more than, the heavenly
elements. It is not the supernatural that disgusts them, so much as the
natural. And those of us who have seen all the normal rules and
relations of humanity uprooted by random speculators, as if they were
abnormal abuses and almost accidents, will understand why men have
sought for something divine if they wished to preserve anything human.
They will know why common sense, cast out from some academy of fads and
fashions conducted on the lines of a luxurious madhouse, has age after
age sought refuge in the high sanity of a sacrament.
CONCLUSION
_IX.--Conclusion_
This is a pamphlet and not a book; and the writer of a pamphlet not only
deals with passing things, but generally with things which he hopes will
pass. In that sense it is the object of a pamphlet to be out of date as
soon as possible. It can only survive when it does not succeed. The
successful pamphlets are necessarily dull; and though I have no great
hopes of this being successful, I dare say it is dull enough for all
that. It is designed merely to note certain fugitive proposals of the
moment, and compare them with certain recurrent necessities of the race;
but especially the necessity for some spontaneous social formation freer
than that of the state. If it were more in the nature of a work of
literature, with anything like an ambition of endurance, I might go
deeper into the matter, and give some suggestions about the philosophy
or religion of marriage, and the philosophy or religion of all these
rather random departures from it. Some day perhaps I may try to write
something about the spiritual or psychological quarrel between faith and
fads. Here I will only say, in conclusion, that I believe the universal
fallacy here is a fallacy of being universal. There is a sense in which
it is really a human if heroic possibility to love everybody; and the
young student will not find it a bad preliminary exercise to love
somebody. But the fallacy I mean is that of a man who is not even
content to love everybody, but really wishes to be everybody. He wishes
to walk down a hundred roads at once; to sleep in a hundred houses at
once; to live a hundred lives at once. To do something like this in the
imagination is one of the occasional visions of art and poetry; to
attempt it in the art of life is not only anarchy but inaction. Even in
the arts it can only be the first hint and not the final fulfillment; a
man cannot work at once in bronze and marble, or play the organ and the
violin at the same time. The universal vision of being such a Briareus
is a nightmare of nonsense even in the merely imaginative world; and
ends in mere nihilism in the social world. If a man had a hundred
houses, there would still be more houses than he had days in which to
dream of them; if a man had a hundred wives, there would still be more
women than he could ever know. He would be an insane sultan jealous of
the whole human race, and even of the dead and the unborn. I believe
that behind the art and philosophy of our time there is a considerable
element of this bottomless ambition and this unnatural hunger; and since
in these last words I am touching only lightly on things that would need
much larger treatment, I will admit that the rending of the ancient roof
of man is probably only a part of such an endless and empty expansion. I
asked in the last chapter what those most wildly engaged in the mere
dance of divorce, as fantastic as the dance of death, really expected
for themselves or for their children. And in the deepest sense I think
this is the answer; that they expect the impossible, that is the
universal. They are not crying for the moon, which is a definite and
therefore a defensible desire. They are crying for the world; and when
they had it, they would want another one. In the last resort they would
like to try every situation, not in fancy but in fact; but they cannot
refuse any and therefore cannot resolve on any. In so far as this is the
modern mood, it is a thing so deadly as to be already dead. What is
vitally needed everywhere, in art as much as in ethics, in poetry as
much as in politics, is choice; a creative power in the will as well as
in the mind. Without that self-limitation of somebody, nothing living
will ever see the light.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Written at the time of the last great German assaults.
[B] The late Cecil Chesterton, in the “New Witness.”