THE PERSONAL SENTIMENTAL BASIS OF MONOGAMY

Monogamy has a sentimental basis which is quite distinct from the
political one of equal numbers of the sexes. Equal numbers in the
sexes are quite compatible with a change of partners every day or
every hour Physically there is nothing to distinguish human
society from the farm-yard except that children are more
troublesome and costly than chickens and calves, and that men and
women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock. Accordingly,
the people whose conception of marriage is a farm-yard or slave-
quarter conception are always more or less in a panic lest the
slightest relaxation of the marriage laws should utterly
demoralize society; whilst those to whom marriage is a matter of
more highly evolved sentiments and needs (sometimes said to be
distinctively human, though birds and animals in a state of
freedom evince them quite as touchingly as we) are much more
liberal, knowing as they do that monogamy will take care of itself
provided the parties are free enough, and that promiscuity is a
product of slavery and not of liberty.

The solid foundation of their confidence is the fact that the
relationship set up by a comfortable marriage is so intimate and
so persuasive of the whole life of the parties to it, that nobody
has room in his or her life for more than one such relationship at
a time. What is called a household of three is never really of
three except in the sense that every household becomes a household
of three when a child is born, and may in the same way become a
household of four or fourteen if the union be fertile enough. Now
no doubt the marriage tie means so little to some people that the
addition to the household of half a dozen more wives or husbands
would be as possible as the addition of half a dozen governesses
or tutors or visitors or servants. A Sultan may have fifty wives
as easily as he may have fifty dishes on his table, because in the
English sense he has no wives at all; nor have his wives any
husband: in short, he is not what we call a married man. And there
are sultans and sultanas and seraglios existing in England under
English forms. But when you come to the real modern marriage of
sentiment, a relation is created which has never to my knowledge
been shared by three persons except when all three have been
extraordinarily fond of one another. Take for example the famous
case of Nelson and Sir William and Lady Hamilton. The secret of
this household of three was not only that both the husband and
Nelson were devoted to Lady Hamilton, but that they were also
apparently devoted to one another. When Hamilton died both Nelson
and Emma seem to have been equally heartbroken. When there is a
successful household of one man and two women the same unusual
condition is fulfilled: the two women not only cannot live happily
without the man but cannot live happily without each other. In
every other case known to me, either from observation or record,
the experiment is a hopeless failure: one of the two rivals for
the really intimate affection of the third inevitably drives out
the other. The driven-out party may accept the situation and
remain in the house as a friend to save appearances, or for the
sake of the children, or for economic reasons; but such an
arrangement can subsist only when the forfeited relation is no
longer really valued; and this indifference, like the triple bond
of affection which carried Sir William Hamilton through, is so
rare as to be practicably negligible in the establishment of a
conventional morality of marriage. Therefore sensible and
experienced people always assume that when a declaration of love
is made to an already married person, the declaration binds the
parties in honor never to see one another again unless they
contemplate divorce and remarriage. And this is a sound
convention, even for unconventional people. Let me illustrate by
reference to a fictitious case: the one imagined in my own play
Candida will do as well as another. Here a young man who has been
received as a friend into the house of a clergyman falls in love
with the clergyman's wife, and, being young and  inexperienced,
declares his feelings, and claims that he, and not the clergyman,
is the more suitable mate for the lady. The clergyman, who has a
temper, is first tempted to hurl the youth into the street by
bodily violence: an impulse natural, perhaps, but vulgar and
improper, and, not open, on consideration, to decent men. Even
coarse and inconsiderate men are restrained from it by the fact
that the sympathy of the woman turns naturally to the victim of
physical brutality and against the bully, the Thackerayan notion
to the contrary being one of the illusions of literary
masculinity. Besides, the husband is not necessarily the stronger
man: an appeal to force has resulted in the ignominious defeat of
the husband quite as often as in poetic justice as conceived in
the conventional novelet. What an honorable and sensible man does
when his household is invaded is what the Reverend James Mavor
Morell does in my play. He recognizes that just as there is not
room for two women in that sacredly intimate relation of
sentimental domesticity which is what marriage means to him, so
there is no room for two men in that relation with his wife; and
he accordingly tells her firmly that she must choose which man
will occupy the place that is large enough for one only. He is so
far shrewdly unconventional as to recognize that if she chooses
the other man, he must give way, legal tie or no legal tie; but he
knows that either one or the other must go. And a sensible wife
would act in the same way. If a romantic young lady came into
her house and proposed to adore her husband on a tolerated
footing, she would say "My husband has not room in his life for
two wives: either you go out of the house or I go out of it." The
situation is not at all unlikely: I had almost said not at all
unusual. Young ladies and gentlemen in the greensickly condition
which is called calf-love, associating with married couples at
dangerous periods of mature life, quite often find themselves
in it; and the extreme reluctance of proud and sensitive people to
avoid any assertion of matrimonial rights, or to condescend to
jealousy, sometimes makes the threatened husband or wife hesitate
to take prompt steps and do the apparently conventional thing. But
whether they hesitate or act the result is always the same. In a
real marriage of sentiment the wife or husband cannot be
supplanted by halves; and such a marriage will break very soon
under the strain of polygyny or polyandry. What we want at present
is a sufficiently clear teaching of this fact to ensure that
prompt and decisive action shall always be taken in such cases
without any false shame of seeming conventional (a shame to
which people capable of such real marriage are specially
susceptible), and a rational divorce law to enable the
marriage to be dissolved and the parties honorably resorted
and recoupled without disgrace and scandal if that should prove
the proper solution.

It must be repeated here that no law, however stringent, can
prevent polygamy among groups of people who choose to live loosely
and be monogamous only in appearance. But such cases are not now
under consideration. Also, affectionate husbands like Samuel
Pepys, and affectionate wives of the corresponding temperaments
may, it appears, engage in transient casual adventures out of
doors without breaking up their home life. But within doors that
home life may be regarded as naturally monogamous. It does not
need to be protected against polygamy: it protects itself.


DIVORCE

All this has an important bearing on the question of divorce.
Divorce reformers are so much preoccupied with the injustice of
forbidding a woman to divorce her husband for unfaithfulness to
his marriage vow, whilst allowing him that power over her, that
they are apt to overlook the pressing need for admitting other and
far more important grounds for divorce. If we take a document like
Pepys' Diary, we learn that a woman may have an incorrigibly
unfaithful husband, and yet be much better off than if she had an
ill-tempered, peevish, maliciously sarcastic one, or was chained
for life to a criminal, a drunkard, a lunatic, an idle vagrant, or
a person whose religious faith was contrary to her own. Imagine
being married to a liar, a borrower, a mischief maker, a teaser or
tormentor of children and animals, or even simply to a bore!
Conceive yourself tied for life to one of the perfectly "faithful"
husbands who are sentenced to a month's imprisonment occasionally
for idly leaving their wives in childbirth without food, fire, or
attendance! What woman would not rather marry ten Pepyses? what
man a dozen Nell Gwynnes? Adultery, far from being the first and
only ground for divorce, might more reasonably be made the last,
or wholly excluded. The present law is perfectly logical only if
you once admit (as no decent person ever does) its fundamental
assumption that there can be no companionship between men and
women because the woman has a "sphere" of her own, that of
housekeeping, in which the man must not meddle, whilst he has all
the rest of human activity for his sphere: the only point at which
the two spheres touch being that of replenishing the population.
On this assumption the man naturally asks for a guarantee that the
children shall be his because he has to find the money to support
them. The power of divorcing a woman for adultery is this
guarantee, a guarantee that she does not need to protect her
against a similar imposture on his part, because he cannot bear
children. No doubt he can spend the money that ought to be spent
on her children on another woman and her children; but this is
desertion, which is a separate matter. The fact for us to seize is
that in the eye of the law, adultery without consequences is
merely a sentimental grievance, whereas the planting on one man of
another man's offspring is a substantial one. And so, no doubt, it
is; but the day has gone by for basing laws on the assumption that
a woman is less to a man than his dog, and thereby encouraging and
accepting the standards of the husbands who buy meat for their
bull-pups and leave their wives and children hungry. That basis is
the penalty we pay for having borrowed our religion from the East,
instead of building up a religion of our own out of our western
inspiration and western sentiment. The result is that we all
believe that our religion is on its last legs, whereas the truth
is that it is not yet born, though the age walks visibly pregnant
with it. Meanwhile, as women are dragged down by their oriental
servitude to our men, and as, further, women drag down those who
degrade them quite as effectually as men do, there are moments
when it is difficult to see anything in our sex institutions
except a police des moeurs keeping the field for a competition as
to which sex shall corrupt the other most.


IMPORTANCE OF SENTIMENTAL GRIEVANCE

Any tolerable western divorce law must put the sentimental
grievances first, and should carefully avoid singling out any
ground of divorce in such a way as to create a convention that
persons having that ground are bound in honor to avail themselves
of it. It is generally admitted that people should not be
encouraged to petition for a divorce in a fit of petulance. What
is not so clearly seen is that neither should they be encouraged
to petition in a fit of jealousy, which is certainly the most
detestable and mischievous of all the passions that enjoy public
credit. Still less should people who are not jealous be urged to
behave as if they were jealous, and to enter upon duels and
divorce suits in which they have no desire to be successful. There
should be no publication of the grounds on which a divorce is
sought or granted; and as this would abolish the only means the
public now has of ascertaining that every possible effort has been
made to keep the couple united against their wills, such privacy
will only be tolerated when we at last admit that the sole and
sufficient reason why people should be granted a divorce is that
they want one. Then there will be no more reports of divorce
cases, no more letters read in court with an indelicacy that makes
every sensitive person shudder and recoil as from a profanation,
no more washing of household linen, dirty or clean, in public.
We must learn in these matters to mind our own business and not
impose our individual notions of propriety on one another, even if
it carries us to the length of openly admitting what we are now
compelled to assume silently, that every human being has a right
to sexual experience, and that the law is concerned only with
parentage, which is now a separate matter.


DIVORCE WITHOUT ASKING WHY

The one question that should never be put to a petitioner for
divorce is "Why?" When a man appeals to a magistrate for
protection from someone who threatens to kill him, on the simple
ground that he desires to live, the magistrate might quite
reasonably ask him why he desires to live, and why the person who
wishes to kill him should not be gratified. Also whether he can
prove that his life is a pleasure to himself or a benefit to
anyone else, and whether it is good for him to be encouraged to
exaggerate the importance of his short span in this vale of tears
rather than to keep himself constantly ready to meet his God.

The only reason for not raising these very weighty points is that
we find society unworkable except on the assumption that every man
has a natural right to live. Nothing short of his own refusal to
respect that right in others can reconcile the community to
killing him. From this fundamental right many others are derived.
The American Constitution, one of the few modern political
documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest
circumstances to think out what they really had to face instead of
chopping logic in a university classroom, specifies "liberty and
the pursuit of happiness" as natural rights. The terms are too
vague to be of much practical use; for the supreme right to life,
extended as it now must be to the life of the race, and to the
quality of life as well as to the mere fact of breathing, is
making short work of many ancient liberties, and exposing the
pursuit of happiness as perhaps the most miserable of human
occupations. Nevertheless, the American Constitution roughly
expresses the conditions to which modern democracy commits us. To
impose marriage on two unmarried people who do not desire to marry
one another would be admittedly an act of enslavement. But it is
no worse than to impose a continuation of marriage on people who
have ceased to desire to be married. It will be said that the
parties may not agree on that; that one may desire to maintain the
marriage the other wishes to dissolve. But the same hardship
arises whenever a man in love proposes marriage to a woman and is
refused. The refusal is so painful to him that he often threatens
to kill himself and sometimes even does it. Yet we expect him to
face his ill luck, and never dream of forcing the woman to accept
him. His case is the same as that of the husband whose wife tells
him she no longer cares for him, and desires the marriage to be
dissolved. You will say, perhaps, if you are superstitious, that
it is not the same--that marriage makes a difference. You are
wrong: there is no magic in marriage. If there were, married
couples would never desire to separate. But they do. And when they
do, it is simple slavery to compel them to remain together.


ECONOMIC SLAVERY AGAIN THE ROOT DIFFICULTY

The husband, then, is to be allowed to discard his wife when he is
tired of her, and the wife the husband when another man strikes
her fancy? One must reply unhesitatingly in the affirmative; for
if we are to deny every proposition that can be stated in
offensive terms by its opponents, we shall never be able to affirm
anything at all. But the question reminds us that until the
economic independence of women is achieved, we shall have to
remain impaled on the other horn of the dilemma and maintain
marriage as a slavery. And here let me ask the Government of the
day (1910) a question with regard to the Labor Exchanges it has
very wisely established throughout the country. What do these
Exchanges do when a woman enters and states that her occupation is
that of a wife and mother; that she is out of a job; and that she
wants an employer? If the Exchanges refuse to entertain her
application, they are clearly excluding nearly the whole female
sex from the benefit of the Act. If not, they must become
matrimonial agencies, unless, indeed, they are prepared to become
something worse by putting the woman down as a housekeeper and
introducing her to an employer without making marriage a condition
of the hiring.


LABOR EXCHANGES AND THE WHITE SLAVERY

Suppose, again, a woman presents herself at the Labor Exchange,
and states her trade as that of a White Slave, meaning the
unmentionable trade pursued by many thousands of women in all
civilized cities. Will the Labor Exchange find employers for her?
If not, what will it do with her? If it throws her back destitute
and unhelped on the streets to starve, it might as well not exist
as far as she is concerned; and the problem of unemployment
remains unsolved at its most painful point. Yet if it finds honest
employment for her and for all the unemployed wives and mothers,
it must find new places in the world for women; and in so doing it
must achieve for them economic independence of men. And when this
is done, can we feel sure that any woman will consent to be a wife
and mother (not to mention the less respectable alternative)
unless her position is made as eligible as that of the women for
whom the Labor Exchanges are finding independent work? Will not
many women now engaged in domestic work under circumstances
which make it repugnant to them, abandon it and seek employment
under other circumstances? As unhappiness in marriage is almost
the only discomfort sufficiently irksome to induce a woman to
break up her home, and economic dependence the only compulsion
sufficiently stringent to force her to endure such unhappiness,
the solution of the problem of finding independent employment
for women may cause a great number of childless unhappy marriages
to break up spontaneously, whether the marriage laws are altered
or not. And here we must extend the term childless marriages to
cover households in which the children have grown up and gone
their own way, leaving the parents alone together: a point at
which many worthy couples discover for the first time that they
have long since lost interest in one another, and have been united
only by a common interest in their children. We may expect, then,
that marriages which are maintained by economic pressure alone
will dissolve when that pressure is removed; and as all the
parties to them will certainly not accept a celibate life, the law
must sanction the dissolution in order to prevent a recurrence of
the scandal which has moved the Government to appoint the
Commission now sitting to investigate the marriage question: the
scandal, that is, of a great number  matter of the evils of our
marriage law, to take care of the pence and let the pounds take
care of themselves. The crimes and diseases of marriage will force
themselves on public attention by their own virulence. I mention
them here only because they reveal certain habits of thought and
feeling with regard to marriage of which we must rid ourselves if
we are to act sensibly when we take the necessary reforms in hand.


CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE

First among these is the habit of allowing ourselves to be bound
not only by the truths of the Christian religion but by the
excesses and extravagances which the Christian movement acquired
in its earlier days as a violent reaction against what it still
calls paganism. By far the most dangerous of these, because it is
a blasphemy against life, and, to put it in Christian terms, an
accusation of indecency against God, is the notion that sex, with
all its operations, is in itself absolutely an obscene thing, and
that an immaculate conception is a miracle. So unwholesome an
absurdity could only have gained ground under two conditions: one,
a reaction against a society in which sensual luxury had been
carried to revolting extremes, and, two, a belief that the world
was coming to an end, and that therefore sex was no longer a
necessity. Christianity, because it began under these conditions,
made sexlessness and Communism the two main practical articles of
its propaganda; and it has never quite lost its original bias in
these directions. In spite of the putting off of the Second Coming
from the lifetime of the apostles to the millennium, and of the
great disappointment of the year 1000 A.D., in which multitudes of
Christians seriously prepared for the end of the world, the
prophet who announces that the end is at hand is still popular.
Many of the people who ridicule his demonstrations that the
fantastic monsters of the book of Revelation are among us in the
persons of our own political contemporaries, and who proceed
sanely in all their affairs on the assumption that the world is
going to last, really do believe that there will be a Judgment
Day, and that it MIGHT even be in their own time. A thunderstorm,
an eclipse, or any very unusual weather will make them
apprehensive and uncomfortable.

This explains why, for a long time, the Christian Church refused
to have anything to do with marriage. The result was, not the
abolition of sex, but its excommunication. And, of course, the
consequences of persuading people that matrimony was an unholy
state were so grossly carnal, that the Church had to execute a
complete right-about-face, and try to make people understand that
it was a holy state: so holy indeed that it could not be validly
inaugurated without the blessing of the Church. And by this
teaching it did something to atone for its earlier blasphemy. But
the mischief of chopping and changing your doctrine to meet this
or that practical emergency instead of keeping it adjusted to the
whole scheme of life, is that you end by having half-a-dozen
contradictory doctrines to suit half-a-dozen different
emergencies. The Church solemnized and sanctified marriage without
ever giving up its original Pauline doctrine on the subject. And
it soon fell into another confusion. At the point at which it took
up marriage and endeavored to make it holy, marriage was, as it
still is, largely a survival of the custom of selling women to
men. Now in all trades a marked difference is made in price
between a new article and a second-hand one. The moment we meet
with this difference in value between human beings, we may know
that we are in the slave-market, where the conception of our
relations to the persons sold is neither religious nor natural nor
human nor superhuman, but simply commercial. The Church, when
it finally gave its blessing to marriage, did not, in its
innocence, fathom these commercial traditions. Consequently it
tried to sanctify them too, with grotesque results. The slave-
dealer having always asked more money for virginity, the Church,
instead of detecting the money-changer and driving him out of the
temple, took him for a sentimental and chivalrous lover, and,
helped by its only half-discarded doctrine of celibacy, gave
virginity a heavenly value to ennoble its commercial pretensions.
In short, Mammon, always mighty, put the Church in his pocket,
where he keeps it to this day, in spite of the occasional saints
and martyrs who contrive from time to time to get their heads and
souls free to testify against him.


DIVORCE A SACRAMENTAL DUTY

But Mammon overreached himself when he tried to impose his
doctrine of inalienable property on the Church under the guise of
indissoluble marriage. For the Church tried to shelter this
inhuman doctrine and flat contradiction of the gospel by claiming,
and rightly claiming, that marriage is a sacrament. So it is; but
that is exactly what makes divorce a duty when the marriage has
lost the inward and spiritual grace of which the marriage ceremony
is the outward and visible sign. In vain do bishops stoop to pick
up the discarded arguments of the atheists of fifty years ago by
pleading that the words of Jesus were in an obscure Aramaic
dialect, and were probably misunderstood, as Jesus, they think,
could not have said anything a bishop would disapprove of. Unless
they are prepared to add that the statement that those who take
the sacrament with their lips but not with their hearts eat and
drink their own damnation is also a mistranslation from the
Aramaic, they are most solemnly bound to shield marriage from
profanation, not merely by permitting divorce, but by making it
compulsory in certain cases as the Chinese do.

When the great protest of the XVI century came, and the Church was
reformed in several countries, the Reformation was so largely a
rebellion against sacerdotalism that marriage was very nearly
excommunicated again: our modern civil marriage, round which so
many fierce controversies and political conflicts have raged,
would have been thoroughly approved of by Calvin, and hailed with
relief by Luther. But the instinctive doctrine that there is
something holy and mystic in sex, a doctrine which many of us now
easily dissociate from any priestly ceremony, but which in those
days seemed to all who felt it to need a ritual affirmation, could
not be thrown on the scrap-heap with the sale of Indulgences
and the like; and so the Reformation left marriage where it was: a
curious mixture of commercial sex slavery, early Christian sex
abhorrence, and later Christian sex sanctification.


OTHELLO AND DESDEMONA

How strong was the feeling that a husband or a wife is an article
of property, greatly depreciated in value at second-hand, and not
to be used or touched by any person but the proprietor, may be
learnt from Shakespear. His most infatuated and passionate lovers
are Antony and Othello; yet both of them betray the commercial and
proprietary instinct the moment they lose their tempers. "I found
you," says Antony, reproaching Cleopatra, "as a morsel cold upon
dead Caesar's trencher." Othello's worst agony is the thought of
"keeping a corner in the thing he loves for others' uses." But
this is not what a man feels about the thing he loves, but about
the thing he owns. I never understood the full significance of
Othello's outburst until I one day heard a lady, in the
course of a private discussion as to the feasibility of "group
marriage," say with cold disgust that she would as soon think of
lending her toothbrush to another woman as her husband. The sense
of outraged manhood with which I felt myself and all other
husbands thus reduced to the rank of a toilet appliance gave me a
very unpleasant taste of what Desdemona might have felt had
she overheard Othello's outburst. I was so dumfounded that I had
not the presence of mind to ask the lady whether she insisted on
having a doctor, a nurse, a dentist, and even a priest and
solicitor all to herself as well. But I had too often heard men
speak of women as if they were mere personal conveniences to feel
surprised that exactly the same view is held, only more
fastidiously, by women.

All these views must be got rid of before we can have any healthy
public opinion (on which depends our having a healthy population)
on the subject of sex, and consequently of marriage. Whilst the
subject is considered shameful and sinful we shall have no
systematic instruction in sexual hygiene, because such lectures as
are given in Germany, France, and even prudish America (where
the great Miltonic tradition in this matter still lives) will be
considered a corruption of that youthful innocence which now
subsists on nasty stories and whispered traditions handed down
from generation to generation of school-children: stories and
traditions which conceal nothing of sex but its dignity, its
honor, its sacredness, its rank as the first necessity of society
and the deepest concern of the nation. We shall continue to
maintain the White Slave Trade and protect its exploiters by, on
the one hand, tolerating the white slave as the necessary
breakwater of marriage; and, on the other, trampling on her and
degrading her until she has nothing to hope from our Courts; and
so, with policemen at every corner, and law triumphant all over
Europe, she will still be smuggled and cattle-driven from one end
of the civilized world to the other, cheated, beaten, bullied, and
hunted into the streets to disgusting overwork, without daring to
utter the cry for help that brings, not rescue, but exposure and
infamy, yet revenging herself terribly in the end by scattering
blindness and sterility, pain and disfigurement, insanity and
death among us with the certainty that we are much too pious and
genteel to allow such things to be mentioned with a view to saving
either her or ourselves from them. And all the time we shall
keep enthusiastically investing her trade with every
allurement that the art of the novelist, the playwright, the
dancer, the milliner, the painter, the limelight man, and the
sentimental poet can devize, after which we shall continue to be
very much shocked and surprised when the cry of the youth, of the
young wife, of the mother, of the infected nurse, and of all the
other victims, direct and indirect, arises with its invariable
refrain: "Why did nobody warn me?"


WHAT IS TO BECOME OF THE CHILDREN?

I must not reply flippantly, Make them all Wards in Chancery; yet
that would be enough to put any sensible person on the track of
the reply. One would think, to hear the way in which people
sometimes ask the question, that not only does marriage prevent
the difficulty from ever arising, but that nothing except divorce
can ever raise it. It is true that if you divorce the parents, the
children have to be disposed of. But if you hang the parents, or
imprison the parents, or take the children out of the custody of
the parents because they hold Shelley's opinions, or if the
parents die, the same difficulty arises. And as these things have
happened again and again, and as we have had plenty of experience
of divorce decrees and separation orders, the attempt to use
children as an obstacle to divorce is hardly worth arguing with.
We shall deal with the children just as we should deal with them
if their homes were broken up by any other cause. There is a sense
in which children are a real obstacle to divorce: they give
parents a common interest which keeps together many a couple who,
if childless, would separate. The marriage law is superfluous in
such cases. This is shewn by the fact that the proportion of
childless divorces is much larger than the proportion of divorces
from all causes. But it must not be forgotten that the interest of
the children forms one of the most powerful arguments for divorce.
An unhappy household is a bad nursery. There is something to be
said for the polygynous or polyandrous household as a school for
children: children really do suffer from having too few parents:
this is why uncles and aunts and tutors and governesses are often
so good for children. But it is just the polygamous household
which our marriage law allows to be broken up, and which, as we
have seen, is not possible as a typical institution in a
democratic country where the numbers of the sexes are about equal.
Therefore polygyny and polyandry as a means of educating children
fall to the ground, and with them, I think, must go the opinion
which has been expressed by Gladstone and others, that an
extension of divorce, whilst admitting many new grounds for it,
might exclude the ground of adultery. There are, however, clearly
many things that make some of our domestic interiors little
private hells for children (especially when the children are quite
content in them) which would justify any intelligent State in
breaking up the home and giving the custody of the children either
to the parent whose conscience had revolted against the
corruption of the children, or to neither.

Which brings me to the point that divorce should no longer be
confined to cases in which one of the parties petitions for it.
If, for instance, you have a thoroughly rascally couple making a
living by infamous means and bringing up their children to their
trade, the king's proctor, instead of pursuing his present purely
mischievous function of preventing couples from being divorced
by proving that they both desire it, might very well intervene and
divorce these children from their parents. At present, if the
Queen herself were to rescue some unfortunate child from
degradation and misery and place her in a respectable home, and
some unmentionable pair of blackguards claimed the child and
proved that they were its father and mother, the child would be
given to them in the name of the sanctity of the home and the
holiness of parentage, after perpetrating which crime the law
would calmly send an education officer to take the child out of
the parents' hands several hours a day in the still more sacred
name of compulsory education. (Of course what would really happen
would be that the couple would blackmail the Queen for their
consent to the salvation of the child, unless, indeed, a hint from
a police inspector convinced them that bad characters cannot
always rely on pedantically constitutional treatment when they
come into conflict with persons in high station).

The truth is, not only must the bond between man and wife be made
subject to a reasonable consideration of the welfare of the
parties concerned and of the community, but the whole family bond
as well. The theory that the wife is the property of the husband
or the husband of the wife is not a whit less abhorrent and
mischievous than the theory that the child is the property of the
parent. Parental bondage will go the way of conjugal bondage:
indeed the order of reform should rather be put the other way
about; for the helplessness of children has already compelled the
State to intervene between parent and child more than between
husband and wife. If you pay less than 40 pounds a year rent, you will
sometimes feel tempted to say to the vaccination officer, the
school attendance officer, and the sanitary inspector: "Is this
child mine or yours?" The answer is that as the child is a vital
part of the nation, the nation cannot afford to leave it at the
irresponsible disposal of any individual or couple of individuals
as a mere small parcel of private property. The only solid ground
that the parent can take is that as the State, in spite of its
imposing name, can, when all is said, do nothing with the child
except place it in the charge of some human being or another,
the parent is no worse a custodian than a stranger. And though
this proposition may seem highly questionable at first sight to
those who imagine that only parents spoil children, yet those who
realize that children are as often spoilt by severity and coldness
as by indulgence, and that the notion that natural parents are any
worse than adopted parents is probably as complete an illusion as
the notion that they are any better, see no serious likelihood
that State action will detach children from their parents more
than it does at present: nay, it is even likely that the present
system of taking the children out of the parents' hands and having
the parental duty performed by officials, will, as poverty and
ignorance become the exception instead of the rule, give way to
the system of simply requiring certain results, beginning with the
baby's weight and ending perhaps with some sort of practical arts
degree, but leaving parents and children to achieve the results as
they best may. Such freedom is, of course, impossible in our
present poverty-stricken circumstances. As long as the masses of
our people are too poor to be good parents or good anything else
except beasts of burden, it is no use requiring much more from
them but hewing of wood and drawing of water: whatever is to be
done must be done FOR them mostly, alas! by people whose
superiority is merely technical. Until we abolish poverty it is
impossible to push rational measures of any kind very far: the
wolf at the door will compel us to live in a state of siege and to
do everything by a bureaucratic martial law that would be quite
unnecessary and indeed intolerable in a prosperous community. But
however we settle the question, we must make the parent justify
his custody of the child exactly as we should make a stranger
justify it. If a family is not achieving the purposes of a family
it should be dissolved just as a marriage should when it, too, is
not achieving the purposes of marriage. The notion that there is
or ever can be anything magical and inviolable in the legal
relations of domesticity, and the curious confusion of ideas which
makes some of our bishops imagine that in the phrase "Whom God
hath joined," the word God means the district registrar or the
Reverend John Smith or William Jones, must be got rid of. Means
of breaking up undesirable families are as necessary to the
preservation of the family as means of dissolving undesirable
marriages are to the preservation of marriage. If our domestic
laws are kept so inhuman that they at last provoke a furious
general insurrection against them as they already provoke many
private ones, we shall in a very literal sense empty the baby out
with the bath by abolishing an institution which needs nothing
more than a little obvious and easy rationalizing to make it not
only harmless but comfortable, honorable, and useful.


THE COST OF DIVORCE

But please do not imagine that the evils of indissoluble marriage
can be cured by divorce laws administered on our present plan. The
very cheapest undefended divorce, even when conducted by a
solicitor for its own sake and that of humanity, costs at least 30
pounds out-of-pocket expenses. To a client on business terms it
costs about three times as much. Until divorce is as cheap as
marriage, marriage will remain indissoluble for all except the
handful of people to whom 100 pounds is a procurable sum. For the
enormous majority of us there is no difference in this respect
between a hundred and a quadrillion. Divorce is the one thing you
may not sue for in forma pauperis.

Let me, then, recommend as follows:

1. Make divorce as easy, as cheap, and as private as marriage.

2. Grant divorce at the request of either party, whether the other
consents or not; and admit no other ground than the request, which
should be made without stating any reasons.

3. Confine the power of dissolving marriage for misconduct to the
State acting on the petition of the king's proctor or other
suitable functionary, who may, however, be moved by either party
to intervene in ordinary request cases, not to prevent the divorce
taking place, but to enforce alimony if it be refused and the case
is one which needs it.

4. Make it impossible for marriage to be used as a punishment as
it is at present. Send the husband and wife to penal servitude if
you disapprove of their conduct and want to punish them; but do
not send them back to perpetual wedlock.

5. If, on the other hand, you think a couple perfectly innocent
and well conducted, do not condemn them also to perpetual wedlock
against their wills, thereby making the treatment of what you
consider innocence on both sides the same as the treatment of what
you consider guilt on both sides.

6. Place the work of a wife and mother on the same footing as
other work: that is, on the footing of labor worthy of its hire;
and provide for unemployment in it exactly as for unemployment in
shipbuilding or an other recognized bread-winning trade.

7. And take and deal with all the consequences of these acts of
justice instead of letting yourself be frightened out of reason
and good sense by fear of consequences. We must finally adapt our
institutions to human nature. In the long run our present plan of
trying to force human nature into a mould of existing abuses,
superstitions, and corrupt interests, produces the explosive
forces that wreck civilization.

8. Never forget that if you leave your law to judges and your
religion to bishops, you will presently find yourself without
either law or religion. If you doubt this, ask any decent judge or
bishop. Do NOT ask somebody who does not know what a judge is, or
what a bishop is, or what the law is, or what religion is. In
other words, do not ask your newspaper. Journalists are too poorly
paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication.


CONCLUSIONS

To sum up, we have to depend on the solution of the problem of
unemployment, probably on the principles laid down in the Minority
Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, to make the sexual
relations between men and women decent and honorable by making
women economically independent of men, and (in the younger son
section of the upper classes) men economically independent of
women. We also have to bring ourselves into line with the rest of
Protestant civilization by providing means for dissolving all
unhappy, improper, and inconvenient marriages. And, as it is our
cautious custom to lag behind the rest of the world to see how
their experiments in reform turn out before venturing ourselves,
and then take advantage of their experience to get ahead of them,
we should recognize that the ancient system of specifying grounds
for divorce, such as adultery, cruelty, drunkenness, felony,
insanity, vagrancy, neglect to provide for wife and children,
desertion, public defamation, violent temper, religious
heterodoxy, contagious disease, outrages, indignities, personal
abuse, "mental anguish," conduct rendering life burdensome and so
forth (all these are examples from some code actually in force at
present), is a mistake, because the only effect of compelling
people to plead and prove misconduct is that cases are
manufactured and clean linen purposely smirched and washed in
public, to the great distress and disgrace of innocent children
and relatives, whilst the grounds have at the same time to be made
so general that any sort of human conduct may be brought within
them by a little special pleading and a little mental reservation
on the part of witnesses examined on oath. When it conies to
"conduct rendering life burdensome," it is clear that no marriage
is any longer indissoluble; and the sensible thing to do then is
to grant divorce whenever it is desired, without asking why.





GETTING MARRIED

Bernard Shaw

1908

_______________________________________________________________

N.B.--There is a point of some technical interest to be noted
in this play. The customary division into acts and scenes has
been disused, and a return made to unity of time and place, as
observed in the ancient Greek drama. In the foregoing tragedy,
The Doctor's Dilemma, there are five acts; the place is altered
five times; and the time is spread over an undetermined period
of more than a year. No doubt the strain on the attention of
the audience and on the ingenuity of the playwright is much
less; but I find in practice that the Greek form is inevitable
when drama reaches a certain point in poetic and intellectual
evolution. Its adoption was not, on my part, a deliberate
display of virtuosity in form, but simply the spontaneous
falling of a play of ideas into the form most suitable to it,
which turned out to be the classical form. Getting Married, in
several acts and scenes, with the time spread over a long
period, would be impossible.

_______________________________________________________________


On a fine morning in the spring of 1908 the Norman kitchen in the
Palace of the Bishop of Chelsea looks very spacious and clean and
handsome and healthy.

The Bishop is lucky enough to have a XII century palace. The
palace itself has been lucky enough to escape being carved up
into XV century Gothic, or shaved into XVIII century ashlar, or
"restored" by a XIX century builder and a Victorian architect
with a deep sense of the umbrella-like gentlemanliness of XIV
century vaulting. The present occupant, A. Chelsea, unofficially
Alfred Bridgenorth, appreciates Norman work. He has, by adroit
complaints of the discomfort of the place, induced the
Ecclesiastical Commissioners to give him some money to spend on
it; and with this he has got rid of the wall papers, the paint,
the partitions, the exquisitely planed and moulded casings with
which the Victorian cabinetmakers enclosed and hid the huge black
beams of hewn oak, and of all other expedients of his
predecessors to make themselves feel at home and respectable in a
Norman fortress. It is a house built to last for ever. The walls
and beams are big enough to carry the tower of Babel, as if the
builders, anticipating our modern ideas and instinctively defying
them, had resolved to show how much material they could lavish on
a house built for the glory of God, instead of keeping a
competitive eye on the advantage of sending in the lowest tender,
and scientifically calculating how little material would be
enough to prevent the whole affair from tumbling down by its own
weight.

The kitchen is the Bishop's favorite room. This is not at all
because he is a man of humble mind; but because the kitchen is
one of the finest rooms in the house. The Bishop has neither the
income nor the appetite to have his cooking done there. The
windows, high up in the wall, look north and south. The north
window is the largest; and if we look into the kitchen through it
we see facing us the south wall with small Norman windows and an
open door near the corner to the left. Through this door we have
a glimpse of the garden, and of a garden chair in the sunshine.
In the right-hand corner is an entrance to a vaulted circular
chamber with a winding stair leading up through a tower to the
upper floors of the palace. In the wall to our right is the
immense fireplace, with its huge spit like a baby crane, and a
collection of old iron and brass instruments which pass as the
original furniture of the fire, though as a matter of fact they
have been picked up from time to time by the Bishop at secondhand
shops. In the near end of the left hand wall a small Norman door
gives access to the Bishop's study, formerly a scullery. Further
along, a great oak chest stands against the wall. Across the
middle of the kitchen is a big timber table surrounded by eleven
stout rush-bottomed chairs: four on the far side, three on the
near side, and two at each end. There is a big chair with railed
back and sides on the hearth. On the floor is a drugget of thick
fibre matting. The only other piece of furniture is a clock with
a wooden dial about as large as the bottom of a washtub, the
weights, chains, and pendulum being of corresponding magnitude;
but the Bishop has long since abandoned the attempt to keep it
going. It hangs above the oak chest.

The kitchen is occupied at present by the Bishop's lady, Mrs
Bridgenorth, who is talking to Mr William Collins, the
greengrocer. He is in evening dress, though it is early forenoon.
Mrs Bridgenorth is a quiet happy-looking woman of fifty or
thereabouts, placid, gentle, and humorous, with delicate features
and fine grey hair with many white threads. She is dressed as for
some festivity; but she is taking things easily as she sits in
the big chair by the hearth, reading The Times.

Collins is an elderly man with a rather youthful waist. His
muttonchop whiskers have a coquettish touch of Dundreary at their
lower ends. He is an affable man, with those perfect manners
which can be acquired only in keeping a shop for the sale of
necessaries of life to ladies whose social position is so
unquestionable that they are not anxious about it. He is a
reassuring man, with a vigilant grey eye, and the power of saying
anything he likes to you without offence, because his tone always
implies that he does it with your kind permission. Withal by no
means servile: rather gallant and compassionate, but never
without a conscientious recognition, on public grounds, of social
distinctions. He is at the oak chest counting a pile of napkins.

Mrs Bridgenorth reads placidly: Collins counts: a blackbird sings
in the garden. Mrs Bridgenorth puts The Times down in her lap and
considers Collins for a moment.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Do you never feel nervous on these occasions,
Collins?

COLLINS. Lord bless you, no, maam. It would be a joke, after
marrying five of your daughters, if I was to get nervous over
marrying the last of them.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. I have always said you were a wonderful man,
Collins.

COLLINS [almost blushing] Oh, maam!

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Yes. I never could arrange anything--a wedding
or even dinner--without some hitch or other.

COLLINS. Why should you give yourself the trouble, maam? Send for
the greengrocer, maam: thats the secret of easy housekeeping.
Bless you, it's his business. It pays him and you, let alone the
pleasure in a house like this [Mrs Bridgenorth bows in
acknowledgment of the compliment]. They joke about the
greengrocer, just as they joke about the mother-in-law. But they
cant get on without both.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. What a bond between us, Collins!

COLLINS. Bless you, maam, theres all sorts of bonds between all
sorts of people. You are a very affable lady, maam, for a
Bishop's lady. I have known Bishop's ladies that would fairly
provoke you to up and cheek them; but nobody would ever forget
himself and his place with you, maam.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Collins: you are a flatterer. You will
superintend the breakfast yourself as usual, of course, wont you?

COLLINS. Yes, yes, bless you, maam, of course. I always do. Them
fashionable caterers send down such people as I never did set
eyes on. Dukes you would take them for. You see the relatives
shaking hands with them and asking them about the family--
actually ladies saying "Where have we met before?" and all sorts
of confusion. Thats my secret in business, maam. You can always
spot me as the greengrocer. It's a fortune to me in these days,
when you cant hardly tell who any one is or isnt. [He goes out
through the tower, and immediately returns for a moment to
announce] The General, maam.