As I have said, I propose to take only one central instance; I will take
the institution called the private house or home; the shell and organ of
the family. We will consider cosmic and political tendencies simply as
they strike that ancient and unique roof. Very few words will suffice
for all I have to say about the family itself. I leave alone the
speculations about its animal origin and the details of its social
reconstruction; I am concerned only with its palpable omnipresence. It
is a necessity far mankind; it is (if you like to put it so) a trap for
mankind. Only by the hypocritical ignoring of a huge fact can any
one contrive to talk of “free love”; as if love were an episode like
lighting a cigarette, or whistling a tune. Suppose whenever a man lit a
cigarette, a towering genie arose from the rings of smoke and followed
him everywhere as a huge slave. Suppose whenever a man whistled a tune
he “drew an angel down” and had to walk about forever with a seraph on
a string. These catastrophic images are but faint parallels to the
earthquake consequences that Nature has attached to sex; and it is
perfectly plain at the beginning that a man cannot be a free lover; he
is either a traitor or a tied man. The second element that creates
the family is that its consequences, though colossal, are gradual; the
cigarette produces a baby giant, the song only an infant seraph. Thence
arises the necessity for some prolonged system of co-operation; and
thence arises the family in its full educational sense.
It may be said that this institution of the home is the one anarchist
institution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside
the State. By its nature it is refreshed or corrupted by indefinable
forces of custom or kinship. This is not to be understood as meaning
that the State has no authority over families; that State authority
is invoked and ought to be invoked in many abnormal cases. But in most
normal cases of family joys and sorrows, the State has no mode of entry.
It is not so much that the law should not interfere, as that the law
cannot. Just as there are fields too far off for law, so there are
fields too near; as a man may see the North Pole before he sees his own
backbone. Small and near matters escape control at least as much as vast
and remote ones; and the real pains and pleasures of the family form
a strong instance of this. If a baby cries for the moon, the policeman
cannot procure the moon--but neither can he stop the baby. Creatures so
close to each other as husband and wife, or a mother and children, have
powers of making each other happy or miserable with which no public
coercion can deal. If a marriage could be dissolved every morning it
would not give back his night’s rest to a man kept awake by a curtain
lecture; and what is the good of giving a man a lot of power where he
only wants a little peace? The child must depend on the most imperfect
mother; the mother may be devoted to the most unworthy children; in such
relations legal revenges are vain. Even in the abnormal cases where
the law may operate, this difficulty is constantly found; as many a
bewildered magistrate knows. He has to save children from starvation by
taking away their breadwinner. And he often has to break a wife’s heart
because her husband has already broken her head. The State has no tool
delicate enough to deracinate the rooted habits and tangled affections
of the family; the two sexes, whether happy or unhappy, are glued
together too tightly for us to get the blade of a legal penknife in
between them. The man and the woman are one flesh--yes, even when they
are not one spirit. Man is a quadruped. Upon this ancient and anarchic
intimacy, types of government have little or no effect; it is happy or
unhappy, by its own sexual wholesomeness and genial habit, under the
republic of Switzerland or the despotism of Siam. Even a republic in
Siam would not have done much towards freeing the Siamese Twins.
The problem is not in marriage, but in sex; and would be felt under the
freest concubinage. Nevertheless, the overwhelming mass of mankind has
not believed in freedom in this matter, but rather in a more or less
lasting tie. Tribes and civilizations differ about the occasions on
which we may loosen the bond, but they all agree that there is a bond to
be loosened, not a mere universal detachment. For the purposes of this
book I am not concerned to discuss that mystical view of marriage in
which I myself believe: the great European tradition which has made
marriage a sacrament. It is enough to say here that heathen and
Christian alike have regarded marriage as a tie; a thing not normally
to be sundered. Briefly, this human belief in a sexual bond rests on a
principle of which the modern mind has made a very inadequate study. It
is, perhaps, most nearly paralleled by the principle of the second wind
in walking.
The principle is this: that in everything worth having, even in every
pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so
that the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after
the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore
of learning him; the glow of the sea-bather comes after the icy shock of
the sea bath; and the success of the marriage comes after the failure of
the honeymoon. All human vows, laws, and contracts are so many ways of
surviving with success this breaking point, this instant of potential
surrender.
In everything on this earth that is worth doing, there is a stage when
no one would do it, except for necessity or honor. It is then that the
Institution upholds a man and helps him on to the firmer ground ahead.
Whether this solid fact of human nature is sufficient to justify the
sublime dedication of Christian marriage is quite an other matter, it is
amply sufficient to justify the general human feeling of marriage as a
fixed thing, dissolution of which is a fault or, at least, an ignominy.
The essential element is not so much duration as security. Two people
must be tied together in order to do themselves justice; for twenty
minutes at a dance, or for twenty years in a marriage In both cases the
point is, that if a man is bored in the first five minutes he must go on
and force himself to be happy. Coercion is a kind of encouragement; and
anarchy (or what some call liberty) is essentially oppressive, because
it is essentially discouraging. If we all floated in the air like
bubbles, free to drift anywhere at any instant, the practical result
would be that no one would have the courage to begin a conversation. It
would be so embarrassing to start a sentence in a friendly whisper,
and then have to shout the last half of it because the other party was
floating away into the free and formless ether. The two must hold each
other to do justice to each other. If Americans can be divorced for
“incompatibility of temper” I cannot conceive why they are not all
divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one.
The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant
when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as
such, are incompatible.
*****