attempt to bring that vast, complex, unique Being, its subject, into
clear, true relations with the individual intelligence. Now, since
individual intelligences are individual, and each is a little
differently placed in regard to the subject under consideration, since
the personal angle of vision is much wider towards humanity than towards
the circumambient horizon of matter, it should be manifest that no
sociology of universal compulsion, of anything approaching the general
validity of the physical sciences, is ever to be hoped for—at least upon
the metaphysical assumptions of this paper. With that conceded, we may
go on to consider the more hopeful ways in which that great Being may be
presented in a comprehensible manner. Essentially this presentation must
involve an element of self-expression, must partake quite as much of the
nature of art as of science. One finds in the first conference of the
Sociological Society, Professor Stein, speaking, indeed, a very
different philosophical dialect from mine, but coming to the same
practical conclusion in the matter, and Mr. Osman Newland counting
“evolving ideals for the future” as part of the sociologist’s work. Mr.
Alfred Fouillée also moves very interestingly in the region of this same
idea; he concedes an essential difference between sociology and all
other sciences in the fact of a “certain kind of liberty belonging to
society in the exercise of its higher functions.” He says further: “If
this view be correct, it will not do for us to follow in the steps of
Comte and Spencer, and transfer, bodily and ready-made, the conceptions
and the methods of the natural sciences into the science of society. For
here the fact of _consciousness_ entails a reaction of the whole
assemblage of social phenomena upon themselves, such as the natural
sciences have no example of.” And he concludes: “Sociology ought,
therefore, to guard carefully against the tendency to crystallise that
which is essentially fluid and moving, the tendency to consider as given
fact or dead data that which creates itself and gives itself into the
world of phenomena continually by force of its own ideal conception.”
These opinions do, in their various keys, sound a similar _motif_ to
mine. If, indeed, the tendency of these remarks is justifiable, then
unavoidably the subjective element, which is beauty, must coalesce with
the objective, which is truth; and sociology must be neither art simply,
nor science in the narrow meaning of the word at all, but knowledge
rendered imaginatively, and with an element of personality; that is to
say, in the highest sense of the term, literature.
If this contention is sound, if therefore we boldly set aside Comte and
Spencer altogether, as pseudo-scientific interlopers rather than the
authoritative parents of sociology, we shall have to substitute for the
classifications of the social sciences an inquiry into the chief
literary forms that subserve sociological purposes. Of these there are
two, one invariably recognised as valuable, and one which, I think,
under the matter-of-fact scientific obsession, is altogether underrated
and neglected. The first, which is the social side of history, makes up
the bulk of valid sociological work at the present time. Of history
there is the purely descriptive part, the detailed account of past or
contemporary social conditions, or of the sequence of such conditions;
and, in addition, there is the sort of historical literature that seeks
to elucidate and impose general interpretations upon the complex of
occurrences and institutions, to establish broad historical
generalisations, to eliminate the mass of irrelevant incident, to
present some great period of history, or all history, in the light of
one dramatic sequence, or as one process. This Dr. Beattie Crozier, for
example, attempts in his _History of Intellectual Development_. Equally
comprehensive is Buckle’s _History of Civilisation_. Lecky’s _History of
European Morals_, during the onset of Christianity again, is essentially
sociology. Numerous works—Atkinson’s _Primal Law_,[2] for example—are,
as it were, fragments to the same purport. In the great design of
Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, or Carlyle’s _French
Revolution_, you have a greater insistence upon the dramatic and
picturesque elements in history, but in other respects an altogether
kindred endeavour to impose upon the vast confusions of the past a
scheme of interpretation, valuable just to the extent of its literary
value, of the success with which the discrepant masses have been fused
and cast into the shape the insight of the writer has determined. The
writing of great history is entirely analogous to fine portraiture, in
which fact is indeed material, but material entirely subordinate to
vision. One main branch of the work of a Sociological Society therefore
should surely be to accept and render acceptable, to provide
understanding, criticism, and stimulus for such literary activities as
restore the dead bones of the past to a living participation in our
lives.
Footnote 2:
_Social Origins_, by Andrew Lang; _Primal Law_, by J. J. Atkinson.
(Longmans).
But it is in the second and at present neglected direction that I
believe the predominant attack upon the problem implied by the word
“sociology” must lie; the attack that must be finally driven home. There
is no such thing in sociology as dispassionately considering what _is_,
without considering what is _intended to be_. In sociology, beyond any
possibility of evasion, ideas are facts. The history of civilisation is
really the history of the appearance and reappearance, the tentatives
and hesitations and alterations, the manifestations and reflections in
this mind and that, of a very complex, imperfect, elusive idea, the
Social Idea. It is that idea struggling to exist and realise itself in a
world of egotisms, animalisms, and brute matter. Now I submit it is not
only a legitimate form of approach, but altogether the most promising
and hopeful form of approach, to endeavour to disentangle and express
one’s personal version of that idea, and to measure realities from the
standpoint of that idealisation. I think, in fact, that the creation of
Utopias—and their exhaustive criticism—is the proper and distinctive
method of sociology.
Suppose now the Sociological Society, or some considerable proportion of
it, were to adopt this view, that sociology is the description of the
Ideal Society and its relation to existing societies, would not this
give the synthetic framework Professor Durkheim, for example, has said
to be needed?
Almost all the sociological literature beyond the province of history
that has stood the test of time and established itself in the esteem of
men is frankly Utopian. Plato, when his mind turned to schemes of social
reconstruction, thrust his habitual form of dialogue into a corner; both
the _Republic_ and the _Laws_ are practically Utopias in monologue; and
Aristotle found the criticism of the Utopian suggestions of his
predecessors richly profitable. Directly the mind of the world emerged
again at the Renascence from intellectual barbarism in the brief
breathing time before Sturm and the schoolmasters caught it and birched
it into scholarship and a new period of sterility, it went on from Plato
to the making of fresh Utopias. Not without profit did More discuss
pauperism in this form and Bacon the organisation of research; and the
yeast of the French Revolution was Utopias. Even Comte, all the while
that he is professing science, fact, precision, is adding detail after
detail to the intensely personal Utopia of a Western Republic that
constitutes his one meritorious gift to the world. Sociologists cannot
help making Utopias; though they avoid the word, though they deny the
idea with passion, their very silences shape a Utopia. Why should they
not follow the precedent of Aristotle, and accept Utopias as material?
There used to be in my student days, and probably still flourishes, a
most valuable summary of fact and theory in comparative anatomy, called
Rolleston’s _Forms of Animal Life_. I figure to myself a similar book, a
sort of dream book of huge dimensions, in reality perhaps dispersed in
many volumes by many hands, upon the Ideal Society. This book, this
picture of the perfect state, would be the backbone of sociology. It
would have great sections devoted to such questions as the extent of the
Ideal Society, its relation to racial differences, the relations of the
sexes in it, its economic organisations, its organisation for thought
and education, its “Bible”—as Dr. Beattie Crozier would say—its housing
and social atmosphere, and so forth. Almost all the divaricating work at
present roughly classed together as sociological could be brought into
relation in the simplest manner, either as new suggestions, as new
discussion or criticism, as newly ascertained facts bearing upon such
discussions and sustaining or eliminating suggestions. The institutions
of existing states would come into comparison with the institutions of
the Ideal State, their failures and defects would be criticised most
effectually in that relation, and the whole science of collective
psychology, the psychology of human association, would be brought to
bear upon the question of the practicability of this proposed ideal.
This method would give not only a boundary shape to all sociological
activities, but a scheme of arrangement for text books and lectures, and
points of direction and reference for the graduation and postgraduate
work of sociological students.
Only one group of inquiries commonly classed as sociological would have
to be left out of direct relationship with this Ideal State; and that is
inquiries concerning the rough expedients to meet the failure of
imperfect institutions. Social emergency work of all sorts comes under
this head. What to do with the pariah dogs of Constantinople, what to do
with the tramps who sleep in the London parks, how to organise a soup
kitchen or a Bible coffee van, how to prevent ignorant people, who have
nothing else to do, getting drunk in beer-houses, are no doubt serious
questions for the practical administrator, questions of primary
importance to the politician; but they have no more to do with sociology
than the erection of a temporary hospital after the collision of two
trains has to do with railway engineering.
So much for my second and most central and essential portion of
sociological work. It should be evident that the former part, the
historical part, which conceivably will be much the bulkier and more
abundant of the two, will in effect amount to a history of the
suggestions in circumstance and experience of that Idea of Society of
which the second will consist, and of the instructive failures in
attempting its incomplete realisation.
DIVORCE
The time is fast approaching when it will be necessary for the general
citizen to form definite opinions upon proposals for probably quite
extensive alterations of our present divorce laws, arising out of the
recommendations of the recent Royal Commission on the subject. It may
not be out of place, therefore, to run through some of the chief points
that are likely to be raised, and to set out the main considerations
affecting these issues.
Divorce is not one of those things that stand alone, and neither divorce
law nor the general principles of divorce are to be discussed without a
reference to antecedent arrangements. Divorce is a sequel to marriage,
and a change in the divorce law is essentially a change in the marriage
law. There was a time in this country when our marriage was a
practically divorceless bond, soluble only under extraordinary
circumstances by people in situations of exceptional advantage for doing
so. Now it is a bond under conditions, and in the event of the adultery
of the wife, or of the adultery plus cruelty or plus desertion of the
husband, and of one or two other rarer and more dreadful offences, it
can be broken at the instance of the aggrieved party. A change in the
divorce law is a change in the dissolution clauses, so to speak, of the
contract for the marriage partnership. It is a change in the marriage
law.
A great number of people object to divorce under any circumstances
whatever. This is the case with the orthodox Catholic and with the
orthodox Positivist. And many religious and orthodox people carry their
assertion of the indissolubility of marriage to the grave; they demand
that the widow or widower shall remain unmarried, faithful to the vows
made at the altar until death comes to the release of the lonely
survivor also. Remarriage is regarded by such people as a posthumous
bigamy. There is certainly a very strong and logical case to be made out
for a marriage bond that is indissoluble even by death. It banishes
step-parents from the world. It confers a dignity of tragic
inevitability upon the association of husband and wife, and makes a love
approach the gravest, most momentous thing in life. It banishes for ever
any dream of escape from the presence and service of either party, or of
any separation from the children of the union. It affords no alternative
to “making the best of it” for either husband or wife; they have taken a
step as irrevocable as suicide. And some logical minds would even go
further, and have no law as between the members of a family, no rights,
no private property within that limit. The family would be the social
unit and the father its public representative, and though the law might
intervene if he murdered or ill-used wife or children, or they him, it
would do so in just the same spirit that it might prevent him from
self-mutilation or attempted suicide, for the good of the State simply,
and not to defend any supposed independence of the injured member. There
is much, I assert, to be said for such a complete shutting up of the
family from the interference of the law, and not the least among these
reasons is the entire harmony of such a view with the passionate
instincts of the natural man and woman in these matters. All
unsophisticated human beings appear disposed to a fierce proprietorship
in their children and their sexual partners, and in no respect is the
ordinary mortal so easily induced to vehemence and violence.
For my own part, I do not think the maintenance of a marriage that is
indissoluble, that precludes the survivor from remarriage, that gives
neither party an external refuge from the misbehaviour of the other, and
makes the children the absolute property of their parents until they
grow up, would cause any very general unhappiness. Most people are
reasonable enough, good-tempered enough, and adaptable enough to shake
down even in a grip so rigid, and I would even go further and say that
its very rigidity, the entire absence of any way out at all, would
oblige innumerable people to accommodate themselves to its conditions
and make a working success of unions that, under laxer conditions, would
be almost certainly dissolved. We should have more people of what I may
call the “broken-in” type than an easier release would create, but to
many thinkers the spectacle of a human being thoroughly “broken-in” is
in itself extremely satisfactory. A few more crimes of desperation
perhaps might occur, to balance against an almost universal effort to
achieve contentment and reconciliation. We should hear more of the
“natural law” permitting murder by the jealous husband or by the jealous
wife, and the traffic in poisons would need a sedulous attention—but
even there the impossibility of remarriage would operate to restrain the
impatient. On the whole, I can imagine the world rubbing along very well
with marriage as unaccommodating as a perfected steel trap. Exceptional
people might suffer or sin wildly—to the general amusement or
indignation.
But when once we part from the idea of such a rigid and eternal marriage
bond—and the law of every civilised country and the general thought and
sentiment everywhere have long since done so—then the whole question
changes. If marriage is not so absolutely sacred a bond, if it is not an
eternal bond, but a bond we may break on this account or that, then at
once we put the question on a different footing. If we may terminate it
for adultery or cruelty, or any cause whatever, if we may suspend the
intimacy of husband and wife by separation orders and the like, if we
recognise their separate property and interfere between them and their
children to ensure the health and education of the latter, then we open
at once the whole question of a terminating agreement. Marriage ceases
to be an unlimited union and becomes a definite contract. We raise the
whole question of “What are the limits in marriage, and how and when may
a marriage terminate?”
Now, many answers are being given to that question at the present time.
We may take as the extremest opposite to the eternal marriage idea the
proposal of Mr. Bernard Shaw, that marriage should be terminable at the
instance of either party. You would give due and public notice that your
marriage was at an end, and it would be at an end. This is marriage at
its minimum, as the eternal indissoluble marriage is marriage at its
maximum, and the only conceivable next step would be to have a marriage
makeable by the oral declaration of both parties and terminable by the
oral declaration of either, which would be, indeed, no marriage at all,
but an encounter. You might marry a dozen times in that way in a day....
Somewhere between these two extremes lies the marriage law of a
civilised state. Let us, rather than working down from the eternal
marriage of the religious idealists, work up from Mr. Shaw. The former
course is, perhaps, inevitable for the legislator, but the latter is
much more convenient for our discussion.
Now, the idea of a divorce so easy and wilful as Mr. Shaw proposes
arises naturally out of an exclusive consideration of what I may call
the amorous sentimentalities of marriage. If you regard marriage as
merely the union of two people in love, then, clearly, it is
intolerable, an outrage upon human dignity, that they should remain
intimately united when either ceases to love. And in that world of Mr.
Shaw’s dreams, in which everybody is to have an equal income, and nobody
is to have children, in that culminating conversazione of humanity, his
marriage law will, no doubt, work with the most admirable results. But
if we make a step towards reality and consider a world in which incomes
are unequal, and economic difficulties abound—for the present we will
ignore the complication of offspring—we at once find it necessary to
modify the first fine simplicity of divorce at either partner’s request.
Marriage is almost always a serious economic disturbance for both man
and woman: work has to be given up and rearranged, resources have to be
pooled; only in the rarest cases does it escape becoming an indefinite
business partnership. Accordingly, the withdrawal of one partner raises
at once all sorts of questions of financial adjustment, compensation for
physical, mental, and moral damage, division of furniture and effects
and so forth. No doubt a very large part of this could be met if there
existed some sort of marriage settlement providing for the dissolution
of the partnership. Otherwise the petitioner for a Shaw-esque divorce
must be prepared for the most exhaustive and penetrating examination
before, say, a court of three assessors—representing severally the
husband, the wife, and justice—to determine the distribution of the
separation. This point, however, leads me to note in passing the need
that does exist even to-day for a more precise business supplement to
marriage as we know it in England and America. I think there ought to be
a very definite and elaborate treaty of partnership drawn up by an
impartial private tribunal for every couple that marries, providing for
most of the eventualities of life, taking cognizance of the earning
power, the property and prospects of either party, insisting upon due
insurances, ensuring private incomes for each partner, securing the
welfare of the children, and laying down equitable conditions in the
event of a divorce or separation. Such a treaty ought to be a necessary
prelude to the issue of a licence to marry. And given such a basis to go
upon, then I see no reason why, in the case of couples who remain
childless for five or six years, let us say, and seem likely to remain
childless, the Shaw-esque divorce at the instance of either party,
without reason assigned, should not be a very excellent thing indeed.
And I take up this position because I believe in the family as the
justification of marriage. Marriage to me is no mystical and eternal
union, but a practical affair, to be judged as all practical things are
judged—by its returns in happiness and human welfare. And directly we
pass from the mists and glamours of amorous passion to the warm
realities of the nursery, we pass into a new system of considerations
altogether. We are no longer considering A. in relation to Mrs. A., but
A. and Mrs. A. in relation to an indefinite number of little A.’s, who
are the very life of the State in which they live. Into the case of Mr.
A. _v._ Mrs. A. come Master A. and Miss A. intervening. They have the
strongest claim against both their parents for love, shelter and
upbringing, and the legislator and statesman, concerned as he is chiefly
with the future of the community, have the strongest reasons for seeing
that they get these things, even at the price of considerable vexation,
boredom or indignity to Mr. and Mrs. A. And here it is that there arises
the rational case against free and frequent divorce and the general
unsettlement and fluctuation of homes that would ensue.
At this point we come to the verge of a jungle of questions that would
demand a whole book for anything like a complete answer. Let us try as
swiftly and simply as possible to form a general idea at least of the
way through. Remember that we are working upward from Mr. Shaw’s
question of “Why not separate at the choice of either party?” We have
got thus far, that no two people who do not love each other should be
compelled to live together, except where the welfare of their children
comes in to override their desire to separate, and now we have to
consider what may or may not be for the welfare of the children. Mr.
Shaw, following the late Samuel Butler, meets this difficulty by the
most extravagant abuse of parents. He would have us believe that the
worst enemies a child can have are its mother and father, and that the
only civilised path to citizenship is by the incubator, the crêche, and
the mixed school and college. In these matters he is not only ignorant,
but unfeeling and unsympathetic, extraordinarily so in view of his great
capacity for pity and sweetness in other directions and of his indignant
hatred of cruelty and unfairness, and it is not necessary to waste time
in discussing what the common experience confutes. Neither is it
necessary to fly to the other extreme, and indulge in preposterous
sentimentalities about the magic of fatherhood and a mother’s love.
These are not magic and unlimited things, but touchingly qualified and
human things. The temperate truth of the matter is that in most parents
there are great stores of pride, interest, natural sympathy, passionate
love and devotion which can be tapped in the interests of the children
and the social future, and that it is the mere commonsense of statecraft
to use their resources to the utmost. It does not follow that every
parent contains these reservoirs, and that a continual close association
with the parents is always beneficial to children. If it did, we should
have to prosecute everyone who employed a governess or sent away a
little boy to a preparatory school. And our real task is to establish a
test that will gauge the desirability and benefit of a parent’s
continued parentage. There are certainly parents and homes from which
the children might be taken with infinite benefit to themselves and to
society, and whose union it is ridiculous to save from the divorce-court
shears.
Suppose, now, we made the willingness of a parent to give up his or her
children the measure of his beneficialness to them. There is no reason
why we should restrict divorce only to the relation of husband and wife.
Let us broaden the word and make it conceivable for a husband or wife to
divorce not only the partner, but the children. Then it might be
possible to meet the demands of the Shaw-esque extremist up to the point
of permitting a married parent, who desired freedom, to petition for a
divorce, not from his or her partner simply, but from his or her family,
and even for a widow or widower to divorce a family. Then would come the
task of the assessors. They would make arrangements for the dissolution
of the relationship, erring from justice rather in the direction of
liberality towards the divorced group, they would determine
contributions, exact securities, appoint trustees and guardians.... On
the whole, I do not see why such a system should not work very well. It
would break up many loveless homes, quarrelling and bickering homes, and
give a safety-valve for that hate which is the sinister shadow of love.
I do not think it would separate one child from one parent who was
really worthy of its possession.