advocate, almost as if it were a pleasure in itself. It may be, indeed,
that all the flowers and festivities will now be transferred from the
fashionable wedding to the fashionable divorce. A superb iced and
frosted divorce-cake will be provided for the feast, and in military
circles will be cut with the co-respondent’s sword. A dazzling display
of divorce presents will be laid out for the inspection of the company,
watched by a detective dressed as an ordinary divorce guest. Perhaps the
old divorce breakfast will be revived; anyhow, toasts will be drunk, the
guests will assemble on the doorstep to see the husband and wife go off
in opposite directions; and all will go merry as a divorce-court bell.
All this, though to some it might seem a little fanciful, would really
be far less fantastic than the sort of things that are really said on
the subject. I am not going to discuss the depth and substance of that
subject. I myself hold a mystical view of marriage; but I am not going
to debate it here. But merely in the interests of light and logic I
would protest against the way in which it is frequently debated. The
process cannot rationally be called a debate at all. It is a sort of
chorus of sentimentalists in the sensational newspapers, perpetually
intoning some such formula as this: “We respect marriage, we reverence
marriage, holy, sacred, ineffably exquisite and ideal marriage. True
marriage is love, and when love alters, marriage alters, and when love
stops or begins again, marriage does the same; wonderful, beautiful,
beatific marriage.”
Now, with all reasonable sympathy with everything sentimental, I may
remark that all that talk is tosh. Marriage is an institution like any
other, set up deliberately to have certain functions and limitations; it
is an institution like private property, or conscription, or the legal
liberties of the subject. To talk as if it were made or melted with
certain changing moods is a mere waste of words. The object of private
property is that as many citizens as possible should have a certain
dignity and pleasure in being masters of material things. But suppose a
dog-stealer were to say that as soon as a man was bored with his dog it
ceased to be his dog, and he ceased to be responsible for it. Suppose he
were to say that by merely coveting the dog, he could immediately
morally possess the dog. The answer would be that the only way to make
men responsible for dogs was to make the relation a legal one, apart
from the likes and dislikes of the moment. Suppose a burglar were to
say: “Private property I venerate, private property I revere; but I am
convinced that Mr. Brown does not truly value his silver Apostle spoons
as such sacred objects should be valued; they have therefore ceased to
be his property; in reality they have already become my property, for I
appreciate their precious character as nobody else can do.” Suppose a
murderer were to say: “What can be more amiable and admirable than
human life lived with a due sense of its priceless opportunity! But I
regret to observe that Mr. Robinson has lately been looking decidedly
tired and melancholy; life accepted in this depressing and demoralizing
spirit can no longer truly be called life; it is rather my own exuberant
and perhaps exaggerated joy of life which I must gratify by cutting his
throat with a carving-knife.”
It is obvious that these philosophers would fail to understand what we
mean by a rule, quite apart from the problem of its exceptions. They
would fail to grasp what we mean by an institution, whether it be the
institution of law, of property, or of marriage. A reasonable person
will certainly reply to the burglar: “You will hardly soothe us by
merely poetical praises of property; because your case would be much
more convincing if you denied, as the Communists do, that property ought
to exist at all. There may be, there certainly are, gross abuses in
private property; but, so long as it is an institution at all, it cannot
alter merely with moods and emotions. A farm cannot simply float away
from a farmer, in proportion as his interest in it grows fainter than it
was. A house cannot shift away by inches from a householder, by certain
fine shades of feeling that he happens to have about it. A dog cannot
drift away like a dream, and begin to belong to somebody else who
happens just then to be dreaming of him. And neither can the serious
social relation of husband and wife, of mother and father, or even of
man and woman, be resolved in all its relations by passions and
reactions of sentiment.” This question is quite apart from the question
of whether there are exceptions to the rule of loyalty, or what they
are. The primary point is that there is an institution to which to be
loyal. If the new sentimentalists mean what they say, when they say they
venerate that institution, they must not suggest that an institution can
be actually identical with an emotion. And that is what their rhetoric
does suggest, so far as it can be said to suggest anything.
These writers are always explaining to us why they believe in divorce. I
think I can easily understand why they believe in divorce. What I do not
understand is why they believe in marriage. Just as the philosophical
burglar would be more philosophical if he were a Bolshevist, so this
sort of divorce advocate would be more philosophical if he were a
free-lover. For his arguments never seem to touch on marriage as an
institution, or anything more than an individual experience. The real
explanation of this strange indifference to the institutional idea is, I
fancy, something not only deeper, but wider; something affecting all the
institutions of the modern world. The truth is that these sociologists
are not at all interested in promoting the sort of social life that
marriage does promote. The sort of society of which marriage has always
been the strongest pillar is what is sometimes called the distributive
society; the society in which most of the citizens have a tolerable
share of property, especially property in land. Everywhere, all over the
world, the farm goes with the family and the family with the farm.
Unless the whole domestic group hold together with a sort of loyalty or
local patriotism, unless the inheritance of property is logical and
legitimate, unless the family quarrels are kept out of the courts of
officialism, the tradition of family ownership cannot be handed on
unimpaired. On the other hand, the Servile State, which is the opposite
of the distributive state, has always been rather embarrassed by the
institution of marriage. It is an old story that the negro slavery of
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” did its worst work in the breaking-up of families.
But, curiously enough, the same story is told from both sides. For the
apologists of the Slave States, or, at least, of the Southern States,
made the same admission even in their own defence. If they denied
breaking up the slave family, it was because they denied that there was
any slave family to break up.
Free love is the direct enemy of freedom. It is the most obvious of all
the bribes that can be offered by slavery. In servile societies a vast
amount of sexual laxity can go on in practice, and even in theory, save
when now and then some cranky speculator or crazy squire has a fad for
some special breed of slaves like a breed of cattle. And even that
lunacy would not last long; for lunatics are the minority among
slave-owners. Slavery has a much more sane and a much more subtle appeal
to human nature than that. It is much more likely that, after a few such
fads and freaks, the new Servile State would settle down into the sleepy
resignation of the old Servile State; the old pagan repose in slavery,
as it was before Christianity came to trouble and perplex the world with
ideals of liberty and chivalry. One of the conveniences of that pagan
world is that, below a certain level of society, nobody really need
bother about pedigree or paternity at all. A new world began when slaves
began to stand on their dignity as virgin martyrs. Christendom is the
civilization that such martyrs made; and slavery is its returning enemy.
But of all the bribes that the old pagan slavery can offer, this luxury
and laxity is the strongest; nor do I deny that the influences desiring
the degradation of human dignity have here chosen their instrument
well.
Street Cries and Stretching the Law
About a hundred years ago some enemy sowed among our people the heresy
that it is more practical to use a corkscrew to open a sardine-tin, or
to employ a door-scraper as a paperweight. Practical politics came to
mean the habit of using everything for some other purpose than its own;
of snatching up anything as a substitute for something else. A law that
had been meant to do one thing, and had conspicuously failed to do it,
was always excused because it might do something totally different and
perhaps directly contrary. A custom that was supposed to keep everything
white was allowed to survive on condition that it made everything black.
In reality this is so far from being practical that it does not even
rise to the dignity of being lazy. At the best it can only claim to save
trouble, and it does not even do that. What it really means is that some
people will take every other kind of trouble in the world, if they are
saved the trouble of thinking. They will sit for hours trying to open a
tin with a corkscrew, rather than make the mental effort of pursuing the
abstract, academic, logical connexion between a corkscrew and a cork.
Here is an example of the sort of thing I mean, which I came across in a
daily paper to-day. A headline announces in staring letters, and with
startled notes of exclamation, that some abominable judicial authority
has made the monstrous decision that musicians playing in the street are
not beggars. The journalist bitterly remarks that they may shove their
hats under our very noses for money, but yet we must not call them
beggars. He follows this remark with several notes of exclamation, and I
feel inclined to add a few of my own. The most astonishing thing about
the matter, to my mind, is that the journalist is quite innocent in his
own indignation. It never so much as crosses his mind that
organ-grinders are not classed as beggars because they are not beggars.
They may be as much of a nuisance as beggars; they may demand special
legislation like beggars; it may be right and proper for every
philanthropist to stop them, starve them, harry them, and hound them to
death just as if they were beggars. But they are not beggars, by any
possible definition of begging. Nobody can be said to be a mere
mendicant who is offering something in exchange for money, especially if
it is something which some people like and are willing to pay for. A
street singer is no more of a mendicant than Madame Clara Butt, though
the method (and the scale) of remuneration differs more or less. Anybody
who sells anything, in the streets or in the shops, is begging in the
sense of begging people to buy. Mr. Selfridge is begging people to buy;
the Imperial International Universal Cosmic Stores is begging people to
buy. The only possible definition of the actual beggar is not that he is
begging people to buy, but that he has nothing to sell.
Now, it is interesting to ask ourselves what the newspaper really
meant, when it was so wildly illogical in what it said. Superficially
and as a matter of mood or feeling, we can all guess what was meant. The
writer meant that street musicians looked very much like beggars,
because they wore thinner and dirtier clothes than his own; and that he
had grown quite used to people who looked like that being treated anyhow
and arrested for everything. That is a state of mind not uncommon among
those whom economic security has kept as superficial as a varnish. But
what was intellectually involved in his vague argument was more
interesting. What he meant was, in that deeper sense, that it would be a
great convenience if the law that punishes beggars could be _stretched_
to cover people who are certainly not beggars, but who may be as much of
a botheration as beggars. In other words, he wanted to use the mendicity
laws in a matter quite unconnected with mendicity; but he wanted to use
the old laws because it would save the trouble of making new laws--as
the corkscrew would save the trouble of going to look for the
tin-opener. And for this notion of the crooked and anomalous use of
laws, for ends logically different from their own, he could, of course,
find much support in the various sophists who have attacked reason in
recent times. But, as I have said, it does not really save trouble; and
it is becoming increasingly doubtful whether it will even save disaster.
It used to be said that this rough-and-ready method made the country
richer; but it will be found less and less consoling to explain why the
country is richer when the country is steadily growing poorer. It will
not comfort us in the hour of failure to listen to long and ingenious
explanations of our success. The truth is that this sort of practical
compromise has not led to practical success. The success of England came
as the culmination of the highly logical and theoretical eighteenth
century. The method was already beginning to fail by the time we came to
the end of the compromising and constitutional nineteenth century.
Modern scientific civilization was launched by logicians. It was only
wrecked by practical men. Anyhow, by this time everybody in England has
given up pretending to be particularly rich. It is, therefore, no
appropriate moment for proving that a course of being consistently
unreasonable will always lead to riches.
In truth, it would be much more practical to be more logical. If street
musicians are a nuisance, let them be legislated against for being a
nuisance. If begging is really wrong, a logical law should be imposed on
all beggars, and not merely on those whom particular persons happen to
regard as being also nuisances. What this sort of opportunism does is
simply to prevent any question being considered as a whole. I happen to
think the whole modern attitude towards beggars is entirely heathen and
inhuman. I should be prepared to maintain, as a matter of general
morality, that it is intrinsically indefensible to punish human beings
for asking for human assistance. I should say that it is intrinsically
insane to urge people to give charity and forbid people to accept
charity. Nobody is penalized for crying for help when he is drowning;
why should he be penalized for crying for help when he is starving?
Every one would expect to have to help a man to save his life in a
shipwreck; why not a man who has suffered a shipwreck of his life? A man
may be in such a position by no conceivable fault of his own; but in any
case his fault is never urged against him in the parallel cases. A man
is saved from shipwreck without inquiry about whether he has blundered
in the steering of his ship; and we fish him out of a pond before asking
whose fault it was that he fell into it. A striking social satire might
be written about a man who was rescued again and again out of mere
motives of humanity in all the wildest places of the world; who was
heroically rescued from a lion and skilfully saved out of a sinking
ship; who was sought out on a desert island and scientifically recovered
from a deadly swoon; and who only found himself suddenly deserted by all
humanity when he reached the city that was his home.
In the ultimate sense, therefore, I do not myself disapprove of
mendicants. Nor do I disapprove of musicians. It may not unfairly be
retorted that this is because I am not a musician. I allow full weight
to the fairness of the retort, but I cannot think it a good thing that
even musicians should lose all their feelings except the feeling for
music. And it may surely be said that a man must have lost most of his
feelings if he does not feel the pathos of a barrel-organ in a poor
street. But there are other feelings besides pathos covered by any
comprehensive veto upon street music and minstrelsy. There are feelings
of history, and even of patriotism. I have seen in certain rich and
respectable quarters of London a notice saying that all street cries are
forbidden. If there were a notice up to say that all old tombstones
should be carted away like lumber, it would be rather less of an act of
vandalism. Some of the old street cries of London are among the last
links that we have with the London of Shakespeare and the London of
Chaucer. When I meet a man who utters one I am so far from regarding him
as a beggar; it is I who should be a beggar, and beg him to say it
again.
But in any case it should be made clear that we cannot make one law do
the work of another. If we have real reasons for forbidding something
like a street cry, we should give the reasons that are real; we should
forbid it because it is a cry, because it is a noise, because it is a
nuisance, or perhaps, according to our tastes, because it is old,
because it is popular, because it is historic and a memory of Merry
England. I suspect that the subconscious prejudice against it is rooted
in the fact that the pedlar or hawker is one of the few free men left in
the modern city; that he often sells his own wares directly to the
consumer, and does not pay rent for a shop. But if the modern spirit
wishes to veto him, to harry him, or to hang, draw and quarter him for
being free, at least let it so far recognize his dignity as to define
him; and let the law deal with him in principle as well as in practice.
The Revolt of the Spoilt Child
Everybody says that each generation revolts against the last. Nobody
seems to notice that it generally revolts against the revolt of the
last. I mean that the latest grievance is really the last reform. To
take but one example in passing. There is a new kind of novel which I
have seen widely reviewed in the newspapers. No; it is not an improper
novel. On the contrary, it is more proper--almost in the sense of
prim--than its authors probably imagine. It is really a reaction towards
a more old-fashioned morality, and away from a new-fashioned one. It is
not so much a revolt of the daughters as a return of the grandmothers.
Miss May Sinclair wrote a novel of the kind I mean, about a spinster
whose life had been blighted by a tender and sensitive touch in her
education, which had taught her--or rather, expected her--always to
“behave beautifully.” Mrs. Delafield wrote a story with the refreshing
name of “Humbug” on somewhat similar lines. It suggests that children
are actually trained to deception, and especially self-deception, by a
delicate and considerate treatment that continually appealed to their
better feelings, which was always saying, “You would not hurt father.”
Now, certainly a more old-fashioned and simple style of education did
not invariably say “You would not hurt father.” Sometimes it preferred
to say, “Father will hurt you.” I am not arguing for or against the
father with the big stick. I am pointing out that Miss Sinclair and the
modern novelists really _are_ arguing for the father with the big stick,
and against a more recent movement that is supposed to have reformed
him. I myself can remember the time when the progressives offered us, as
a happy prospect, the very educational method which the novelists now
describe so bitterly in retrospect. We were told that true education
would only appeal to the better feelings of children; that it would
devote itself entirely to telling them to live beautifully; that it
would use no argument more arbitrary than saying “You would not hurt
father.” That ethical education was the whole plan for the rising
generation in the days of my youth. We were assured beforehand how much
more effective such a psychological treatment would be than the bullying
and blundering idea of authority. The hope of the future was in this
humanitarian optimism in the training of the young; in other words, the
hope was set on something which, when it is established, Mrs. Delafield
instantly calls humbug and Miss Sinclair appears to hate as a sort of
hell. What they are suffering from, apparently, is not the abuses of
their grandfathers, but the most modern reforms of their fathers. These
complaints are the first fruits of reformed education, of ethical
societies and social idealists. I repeat that I am for the moment
talking about their opinions and not mine. I am not eulogizing either
big sticks or psychological scalpels; I am pointing out that the outcry
against the scalpel inevitably involves something of a case for the
stick. I have never tied myself to a final belief in either; but I
point out that the progressive, generation after generation, does
elaborately tie himself up in new knots, and then roar and yell aloud to
be untied.
It seems a little hard on the late Victorian idealist to be so bitterly
abused merely for being kind to his children. There is something a
little unconsciously comic about the latest generation of critics, who
are crying out against their parents, “Never, never can I forgive the
tenderness with which my mother treated me.” There is a certain irony in
the bitterness which says, “My soul cries for vengeance when I remember
that papa was always polite at the breakfast-table; my soul is seared by
the persistent insolence of Uncle William in refraining from clouting me
over the head.” It seems harsh to blame these idealists for idealizing
human life, when they were only following what was seriously set before
them as the only ideal of education. But, if this is to be said for the
late Victorian idealist, there is also something to be said for the
early Victorian authoritarian. Upon their own argument, there is
something to be said for Uncle William if he did clout them over the
head. It is rather hard, even on the great-grandfather with the big
stick, that we should still abuse him merely for having neglected the
persuasive methods that we have ourselves abandoned. It is hard to
revile him for not having discovered to be sound the very
sentimentalities that we have since discovered to be rotten.
For the case of these moderns is worst of all when they do try to find
any third ideal, which is neither the authority which they once
condemned for not being persuasion, nor the persuasion which they now
condemn for being worse than authority. The nearest they can get to any
other alternative is some notion about individuality; about drawing out
the true personality of the child, or allowing a human being to find his
real self. It is, perhaps, the most utterly meaningless talk in the
whole muddle of the modern world. How is a child of seven to decide
whether he has or has not found his true individuality? How, for that
matter, is any grown-up person to tell it for him? How is anybody to
know whether anybody has become his true self? In the highest sense it
can only be a matter of mysticism; it can only mean that there was a
purpose in his creation. It can only be the purpose of God, and even
then it is a mystery. In anybody who does not accept the purpose of God,
it can only be a muddle. It is so unmeaning that it cannot be called
mystery but only mystification. Humanly considered, a human personality
is only the thing that does in fact emerge out of a combination of the
forces inside the child and the forces outside. The child cannot grow up
in a void or vacuum with no forces outside. Circumstances will control
or contribute to his character, whether they are the grandfather’s stick
or the father’s persuasion or the conversations among the characters of
Miss May Sinclair. Who in the world is to say positively which of these
things has or has not helped his real personality?
What is his real personality? These philosophers talk as if there was a
complete and complex animal curled up inside every baby, and we had
nothing to do but to let it come out with a yell. As a matter of fact,
we all know, in the case of the finest and most distinguished
personalities, that it would be very difficult to disentangle them from
the trials they have suffered, as well as from the truths they have
found. But, anyhow, these thinkers must give us some guidance as to how
they propose to tell whether their transcendental notion of a true self
has been realized or no. As it is, anybody can say of any part of any
personality that it is or is not an artificial addition obscuring that
personality. In fiction, most of the wild and anarchical characters
strike me as entirely artificial. In real life they would no doubt be
much the same, if they could ever be met with in real life. But anyhow,
they would be the products of experience as well as of elemental
impulses; they would be influenced in some way by all they had gone
through; and anybody would be free to speculate on what they would have
been like if they had never had such experiences. Anybody might amuse
himself by trying to subtract the experiences and find the self; anybody
who wanted to waste his time.