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Transcriber's Note -- The edition from which this play was taken
was printed without most contractions, such as dont for don't and
so forth. These have been left as printed in the original text.
Also, abbreviated honorifics have no trailing period, and the word
show is spelt shew.
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GETTING MARRIED, PREFACE TO

Bernard Shaw

1908


THE REVOLT AGAINST MARRIAGE

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and
thought than marriage. If the mischief stopped at talking and
thinking it would be bad enough; but it goes further, into
disastrous anarchical action. Because our marriage law is inhuman
and unreasonable to the point of downright abomination, the bolder
and more rebellious spirits form illicit unions, defiantly sending
cards round to their friends announcing what they have
done. Young women come to me and ask me whether I think they ought
to consent to marry the man they have decided to live with; and
they are perplexed and astonished when I, who am supposed (heaven
knows why!) to have the most advanced views attainable on the
subject, urge them on no account to compromize themselves without
the security of an authentic wedding ring. They cite the example
of George Eliot, who formed an illicit union with Lewes. They
quote a saying attributed to Nietzsche, that a married philosopher
is ridiculous, though the men of their choice are not
philosophers. When they finally give up the idea of reforming our
marriage institutions by private enterprise and personal
righteousness, and consent to be led to the Registry or even to
the altar, they insist on first arriving at an explicit
understanding that both parties are to be perfectly free to sip
every flower and change every hour, as their fancy may dictate, in
spite of the legal bond. I do not observe that their unions prove
less monogamic than other people's: rather the contrary, in fact;
consequently, I do not know whether they make less fuss than
ordinary people when either party claims the benefit of the
treaty; but the existence of the treaty shews the same anarchical
notion that the law can be set aside by any two private persons by
the simple process of promising one another to ignore it.


MARRIAGE NEVERTHELESS INEVITABLE

Now most laws are, and all laws ought to be, stronger than the
strongest individual. Certainly the marriage law is. The only
people who successfully evade it are those who actually avail
themselves of its shelter by pretending to be married when they
are not, and by Bohemians who have no position to lose and no
career to be closed. In every other case open violation of the
marriage laws means either downright ruin or such inconvenience
and disablement as a prudent man or woman would get married ten
times over rather than face. And these disablements and
inconveniences are not even the price of freedom; for, as Brieux
has shewn so convincingly in Les Hannetons, an avowedly illicit
union is often found in practice to be as tyrannical and as hard
to escape from as the worst legal one.

We may take it then that when a joint domestic establishment,
involving questions of children or property, is contemplated,
marriage is in effect compulsory upon all normal people; and until
the law is altered there is nothing for us but to make the best of
it as it stands. Even when no such establishment is desired,
clandestine irregularities are negligible as an alternative to
marriage. How common they are nobody knows; for in spite of the
powerful protection afforded to the parties by the law of libel,
and the readiness of society on various other grounds to be
hoodwinked by the keeping up of the very thinnest appearances,
most of them are probably never suspected. But they are neither
dignified nor safe and comfortable, which at once rules them out
for normal decent people. Marriage remains practically inevitable;
and the sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we shall set to
work to make it decent and reasonable.


WHAT DOES THE WORD MARRIAGE MEAN

However much we may all suffer through marriage, most of us think
so little about it that we regard it as a fixed part of the order
of nature, like gravitation. Except for this error, which may be
regarded as constant, we use the word with reckless looseness,
meaning a dozen different things by it, and yet always assuming
that to a respectable man it can have only one meaning. The pious
citizen, suspecting the Socialist (for example) of unmentionable
things, and asking him heatedly whether he wishes to abolish
marriage, is infuriated by a sense of unanswerable quibbling when
the Socialist asks him what particular variety of marriage he
means: English civil marriage, sacramental marriage, indissoluble
Roman Catholic marriage, marriage of divorced persons, Scotch
marriage, Irish marriage, French, German, Turkish, or South
Dakotan marriage. In Sweden, one of the most highly civilized
countries in the world, a marriage is dissolved if both parties
wish it, without any question of conduct. That is what marriage
means in Sweden. In Clapham that is what they call by the
senseless name of Free Love. In the British Empire we have
unlimited Kulin polygamy, Muslim polygamy limited to four wives,
child marriages, and, nearer home, marriages of first cousins: all
of them abominations in the eyes of many worthy persons. Not only
may the respectable British champion of marriage mean any of these
widely different institutions; sometimes he does not mean marriage
at all. He means monogamy, chastity, temperance, respectability,
morality, Christianity, anti-socialism, and a dozen other things
that have no necessary connection with marriage. He often means
something that he dare not avow: ownership of the person of
another human being, for instance. And he never tells the truth
about his own marriage either to himself or any one else.

With those individualists who in the mid-XIXth century dreamt of
doing away with marriage altogether on the ground that it is a
private concern between the two parties with which society has
nothing to do, there is now no need to deal. The vogue of "the
self-regarding action" has passed; and it may be assumed without
argument that unions for the purpose of establishing a family
will continue to be registered and regulated by the State.
Such registration is marriage, and will continue to be called
marriage long after the conditions of the registration have
changed so much that no citizen now living would recognize them as
marriage conditions at all if he revisited the earth. There is
therefore no question of abolishing marriage; but there is a very
pressing question of improving its conditions. I have never met
anybody really in favor of maintaining marriage as it exists in
England to-day. A Roman Catholic may obey his Church by assenting
verbally to the doctrine of indissoluble marriage. But nobody
worth counting believes directly, frankly, and instinctively that
when a person commits a murder and is put into prison for twenty
years for it, the free and innocent husband or wife of that
murderer should remain bound by the marriage. To put it briefly, a
contract for better for worse is a contract that should not be
tolerated. As a matter of fact it is not tolerated fully even by
the Roman Catholic Church; for Roman Catholic marriages can be
dissolved, if not by the temporal Courts, by the Pope.
Indissoluble marriage is an academic figment, advocated only by
celibates and by comfortably married people who imagine that if
other couples are uncomfortable it must be their own fault, just
as rich people are apt to imagine that if other people are poor it
serves them right. There is always some means of dissolution. The
conditions of dissolution may vary widely, from those on which
Henry VIII. procured his divorce from Katharine of Arragon to the
pleas on which American wives obtain divorces (for instance,
"mental anguish" caused by the husband's neglect to cut his
toenails); but there is always some point at which the theory
of the inviolable better-for-worse marriage breaks down in
practice. South Carolina has indeed passed what is called a freak
law declaring that a marriage shall not be dissolved under any
circumstances; but such an absurdity will probably be repealed or
amended by sheer force of circumstances before these words are in
print. The only question to be considered is, What shall the
conditions of the dissolution be?


SURVIVALS OF SEX SLAVERY

If we adopt the common romantic assumption that the object of
marriage is bliss, then the very strongest reason for dissolving a
marriage is that it shall be disagreeable to one or other or both
of the parties. If we accept the view that the object of marriage
is to provide for the production and rearing of children, then
childlessness should be a conclusive reason for dissolution. As
neither of these causes entitles married persons to divorce it is
at once clear that our marriage law is not founded on either
assumption. What it is really founded on is the morality of the
tenth commandment, which English women will one day succeed in
obliterating from the walls of our churches by refusing to enter
any building where they are publicly classed with a man's house,
his ox, and his ass, as his purchased chattels. In this morality
female adultery is malversation by the woman and theft by the man,
whilst male adultery with an unmarried woman is not an offence at
all. But though this is not only the theory of our marriage laws,
but the practical morality of many of us, it is no longer an
avowed morality, nor does its persistence depend on marriage; for
the abolition of marriage would, other things remaining unchanged,
leave women more effectually enslaved than they now are. We shall
come to the question of the economic dependence of women on men
later on; but at present we had better confine ourselves to the
theories of marriage which we are not ashamed to acknowledge and
defend, and upon which, therefore, marriage reformers will be
obliged to proceed.

We may, I think, dismiss from the field of practical politics the
extreme sacerdotal view of marriage as a sacred and indissoluble
covenant, because though reinforced by unhappy marriages as all
fanaticisms are reinforced by human sacrifices, it has been
reduced to a private and socially inoperative eccentricity by the
introduction of civil marriage and divorce. Theoretically, our
civilly married couples are to a Catholic as unmarried couples
are: that is, they are living in open sin. Practically, civilly
married couples are received in society, by Catholics and everyone
else, precisely as sacramentally married couples are; and so are
people who have divorced their wives or husbands and married
again. And yet marriage is enforced by public opinion with such
ferocity that the least suggestion of laxity in its support is
fatal to even the highest and strongest reputations, although
laxity of conduct is winked at with grinning indulgence; so that
we find the austere Shelley denounced as a fiend in human form,
whilst Nelson, who openly left his wife and formed a menage a
trois with Sir William and Lady Hamilton, was idolized. Shelley
might have had an illegitimate child in every county in England if
he had done so frankly as a sinner. His unpardonable offence was
that he attacked marriage as an institution. We feel a strange
anguish of terror and hatred against him, as against one who
threatens us with a mortal injury. What is the element in his
proposals that produces this effect?

The answer of the specialists is the one already alluded to: that
the attack on marriage is an attack on property; so that Shelley
was something more hateful to a husband than a horse thief: to
wit, a wife thief, and something more hateful to a wife than a
burglar: namely, one who would steal her husband's house from over
her head, and leave her destitute and nameless on the streets.
Now, no doubt this accounts for a good deal of anti-Shelleyan
prejudice: a prejudice so deeply rooted in our habits that, as I
have shewn in my play, men who are bolder freethinkers than
Shelley himself can no more bring themselves to commit adultery
than to commit any common theft, whilst women who loathe sex
slavery more fiercely than Mary Wollstonecraft are unable to face
the insecurity and discredit of the vagabondage which is the
masterless woman's only alternative to celibacy. But in spite of
all this there is a revolt against marriage which has spread so
rapidly within my recollection that though we all still assume the
existence of a huge and dangerous majority which regards the least
hint of scepticism as to the beauty and holiness of marriage as
infamous and abhorrent, I sometimes wonder why it is so difficult
to find an authentic living member of this dreaded army of
convention outside the ranks of the people who never think about
public questions at all, and who, for all their numerical weight
and apparently invincible prejudices, accept social changes to-day
as tamely as their forefathers accepted the Reformation under
Henry and Edward, the Restoration under Mary, and, after Mary's
death, the shandygaff which Elizabeth compounded from both
doctrines and called the Articles of the Church of England. If
matters were left to these simple folk, there would never be any
changes at all; and society would perish like a snake that could
not cast its skins. Nevertheless the snake does change its skin in
spite of them; and there are signs that our marriage-law skin is
causing discomfort to thoughtful people and will presently be cast
whether the others are satisfied with it or not. The question
therefore arises: What is there in marriage that makes the
thoughtful people so uncomfortable?


A NEW ATTACK ON MARRIAGE

The answer to this question is an answer which everybody knows and
nobody likes to give. What is driving our ministers of religion
and statesmen to blurt it out at last is the plain fact that
marriage is now beginning to depopulate the country with such
alarming rapidity that we are forced to throw aside our modesty
like people who, awakened by an alarm of fire, rush into the
streets in their nightdresses or in no dresses at all. The
fictitious Free Lover, who was supposed to attack marriage
because it thwarted his inordinate affections and prevented him
from making life a carnival, has vanished and given place to the
very real, very strong, very austere avenger of outraged decency
who declares that the licentiousness of marriage, now that it no
longer recruits the race, is destroying it.

As usual, this change of front has not yet been noticed by our
newspaper controversialists and by the suburban season-ticket
holders whose minds the newspapers make. They still defend the
citadel on the side on which nobody is attacking it, and leave its
weakest front undefended.

The religious revolt against marriage is a very old one.
Christianity began with a fierce attack on marriage; and to this
day the celibacy of the Roman Catholic priesthood is a standing
protest against its compatibility with the higher life. St. Paul's
reluctant sanction of marriage; his personal protest that he
countenanced it of necessity and against his own conviction; his
contemptuous "better to marry than to burn" is only out of date in
respect of his belief that the end of the world was at hand and
that there was therefore no longer any population question. His
instinctive recoil from its worst aspect as a slavery to pleasure
which induces two people to accept slavery to one another has
remained an active force in the world to this day, and is now
stirring more uneasily than ever. We have more and more Pauline
celibates whose objection to marriage is the intolerable indignity
of being supposed to desire or live the married life as ordinarily
conceived. Every thoughtful and observant minister of religion is
troubled by the determination of his flock to regard marriage as a
sanctuary for pleasure, seeing as he does that the known
libertines of his parish are visibly suffering much less from
intemperance than many of the married people who stigmatize them
as monsters of vice.


A FORGOTTEN CONFERENCE OF MARRIED MEN

The late Hugh Price Hughes, an eminent Methodist divine, once
organized in London a conference of respectable men to consider
the subject. Nothing came of it (nor indeed could have come of it
in the absence of women); but it had its value as giving the young
sociologists present, of whom I was one, an authentic notion of
what a picked audience of respectable men understood by married
life. It was certainly a staggering revelation. Peter the Great
would have been shocked; Byron would have been horrified; Don Juan
would have fled from the conference into a monastery. The
respectable men all regarded the marriage ceremony as a rite which
absolved them from the laws of health and temperance; inaugurated
a life-long honeymoon; and placed their pleasures on exactly the
same footing as their prayers. It seemed entirely proper and
natural to them that out of every twenty-four hours of their lives
they should pass eight shut up in one room with their wives alone,
and this, not birdlike, for the mating season, but all the year
round and every year. How they settled even such minor questions
as to which party should decide whether and how much the window
should be open and how many blankets should be on the bed, and at
what hour they should go to bed and get up so as to avoid
disturbing one another's sleep, seemed insoluble questions to me.
But the members of the conference did not seem to mind. They were
content to have the whole national housing problem treated on a
basis of one room for two people. That was the essence of marriage
for them.

Please remember, too, that there was nothing in their
circumstances to check intemperance. They were men of business:
that is, men for the most part engaged in routine work which
exercized neither their minds nor their bodies to the full pitch
of their capacities. Compared with statesmen, first-rate
professional men, artists, and even with laborers and artisans as
far as muscular exertion goes, they were underworked, and could
spare the fine edge of their faculties and the last few inches of
their chests without being any the less fit for their daily
routine. If I had adopted their habits, a startling deterioration
would have appeared in my writing before the end of a fortnight,
and frightened me back to what they would have considered an
impossible asceticism. But they paid no penalty of which they were
conscious. They had as much health as they wanted: that is, they
did not feel the need of a doctor. They enjoyed their smokes,
their meals, their respectable clothes, their affectionate games
with their children, their prospects of larger profits or higher
salaries, their Saturday half holidays and Sunday walks, and the
rest of it. They did less than two hours work a day and took from
seven to nine office hours to do it in. And they were no good for
any mortal purpose except to go on doing it. They were respectable
only by the standard they themselves had set. Considered seriously
as electors governing an empire through their votes, and choosing
and maintaining its religious and moral institutions by their
powers of social persecution, they were a black-coated army of
calamity. They were incapable of comprehending the industries they
were engaged in, the laws under which they lived, or the relation
of their country to other countries. They lived the lives of old
men contentedly. They were timidly conservative at the age at
which every healthy human being ought to be obstreperously
revolutionary. And their wives went through the routine of the
kitchen, nursery, and drawing-room just as they went through the
routine of the office. They had all, as they called it, settled
down, like balloons that had lost their lifting margin of gas; and
it was evident that the process of settling down would go on until
they settled into their graves. They read old-fashioned newspapers
with effort, and were just taking with avidity to a new sort of
paper, costing a halfpenny, which they believed to be
extraordinarily bright and attractive, and which never really
succeeded until it became extremely dull, discarding all serious
news and replacing it by vapid tittle-tattle, and substituting for
political articles informed by at least some pretence of knowledge
of economics, history, and constitutional law, such paltry follies
and sentimentalities, snobberies and partisaneries, as ignorance
can understand and irresponsibility relish.

What they called patriotism was a conviction that because they
were born in Tooting or Camberwell, they were the natural
superiors of Beethoven, of Rodin, of Ibsen, of Tolstoy and all
other benighted foreigners. Those of them who did not think it
wrong to go to the theatre liked above everything a play in which
the hero was called Dick; was continually fingering a briar pipe;
and, after being overwhelmed with admiration and affection
through three acts, was finally rewarded with the legal possession
of a pretty heroine's person on the strength of a staggering lack
of virtue. Indeed their only conception of the meaning of the word
virtue was abstention from stealing other men's wives or from
refusing to marry their daughters.

As to law, religion, ethics, and constitutional government, any
counterfeit could impose on them. Any atheist could pass himself
off on them as a bishop, any anarchist as a judge, any despot as a
Whig, any sentimental socialist as a Tory, any philtre-monger or
witch-finder as a man of science, any phrase-maker as a statesman.
Those who did not believe the story of Jonah and the great fish
were all the readier to believe that metals can be transmuted and
all diseases cured by radium, and that men can live for two
hundred years by drinking sour milk. Even these credulities
involved too severe an intellectual effort for many of them: it
was easier to grin and believe nothing. They maintained their
respect for themselves by "playing the game" (that is, doing what
everybody else did), and by being good judges of hats, ties, dogs,
pipes, cricket, gardens, flowers, and the like. They were capable
of discussing each other's solvency and respectability with some
shrewdness, and could carry out quite complicated systems of
paying visits and "knowing" one another. They felt a little vulgar
when they spent a day at Margate, and quite distinguished and
travelled when they spent it at Boulogne. They were, except as to
their clothes, "not particular": that is, they could put up with
ugly sights and sounds, unhealthy smells, and inconvenient houses,
with inhuman apathy and callousness. They had, as to adults, a
theory that human nature is so poor that it is useless to try to
make the world any better, whilst as to children they believed
that if they were only sufficiently lectured and whipped, they
could be brought to a state of moral perfection such as no fanatic
has ever ascribed to his deity. Though they were not intentionally
malicious, they practised the most appalling cruelties from mere
thoughtlessness, thinking nothing of imprisoning men and women for
periods up to twenty years for breaking into their houses; of
treating their children as wild beasts to be tamed by a system of
blows and imprisonment which they called education; and of keeping
pianos in their houses, not for musical purposes, but to torment
their daughters with a senseless stupidity that would have
revolted an inquisitor.

In short, dear reader, they were very like you and me. I could
fill a hundred pages with the tale of our imbecilities and still
leave much untold; but what I have set down here haphazard is
enough to condemn the system that produced us. The corner stone of
that system was the family and the institution of marriage as we
have it to-day in England.


HEARTH AND HOME

There is no shirking it: if marriage cannot be made to produce
something better than we are, marriage will have to go, or else
the nation will have to go. It is no use talking of honor, virtue,
purity, and wholesome, sweet, clean, English home lives when what
is meant is simply the habits I have described. The flat fact is
that English home life to-day is neither honorable, virtuous,
wholesome, sweet, clean, nor in any creditable way distinctively
English. It is in many respects conspicuously the reverse; and the
result of withdrawing children from it completely at an early age,
and sending them to a public school and then to a university,
does, in spite of the fact that these institutions are class
warped and in some respects quite abominably corrupt, produce
sociabler men. Women, too, are improved by the escape from home
provided by women's colleges; but as very few of them are
fortunate enough to enjoy this advantage, most women are so
thoroughly home-bred as to be unfit for human society. So little
is expected of them that in Sheridan's School for Scandal we
hardly notice that the heroine is a female cad, as detestable and
dishonorable in her repentance as she is vulgar and silly in her
naughtiness. It was left to an abnormal critic like George Gissing
to point out the glaring fact that in the remarkable set of life
studies of XIXth century women to be found in the novels of
Dickens, the most convincingly real ones are either vilely
unamiable or comically contemptible; whilst his attempts to
manufacture admirable heroines by idealizations of home-bred
womanhood are not only absurd but not even pleasantly absurd: one
has no patience with them.

As all this is corrigible by reducing home life and domestic
sentiment to something like reasonable proportions in the life of
the individual, the danger of it does not lie in human nature.
Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage
is natural to a cockatoo. Its grave danger to the nation lies in
its narrow views, its unnaturally sustained and spitefully jealous
concupiscences, its petty tyrannies, its false social pretences,
its endless grudges and squabbles, its sacrifice of the boy's
future by setting him to earn money to help the family when he
should be in training for his adult life (remember the boy Dickens
and the blacking factory), and of the girl's chances by making her
a slave to sick or selfish parents, its unnatural packing into
little brick boxes of little parcels of humanity of ill-assorted
ages, with the old scolding or beating the young for behaving like
young people, and the young hating and thwarting the old for
behaving like old people, and all the other ills, mentionable and
unmentionable, that arise from excessive segregation. It sets
these evils up as benefits and blessings representing the highest
attainable degree of honor and virtue, whilst any criticism of or
revolt against them is savagely persecuted as the extremity of
vice. The revolt, driven under ground and exacerbated, produces
debauchery veiled by hypocrisy, an overwhelming demand for
licentious theatrical entertainments which no censorship can stem,
and, worst of all, a confusion of virtue with the mere morality
that steals its name until the real thing is loathed because the
imposture is loathsome. Literary traditions spring up in which the
libertine and profligate--Tom Jones and Charles Surface are the
heroes, and decorous, law-abiding persons--Blifil and Joseph
Surface--are the villains and butts. People like to believe that
Nell Gwynne has every amiable quality and the Bishop's wife every
odious one. Poor Mr. Pecksniff, who is generally no worse than a
humbug with a turn for pompous talking, is represented as a
criminal instead of as a very typical English paterfamilias
keeping a roof over the head of himself and his daughters by
inducing people to pay him more for his services than they are
worth. In the extreme instances of reaction against convention,
female murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage; and when
Nature throws up that rare phenomenon, an unscrupulous libertine,
his success among "well brought-up" girls is so easy, and the
devotion he inspires so extravagant, that it is impossible not to
see that the revolt against conventional respectability has
transfigured a commonplace rascal into a sort of Anarchist
Saviour. As to the respectable voluptuary, who joins Omar Khayyam
clubs and vibrates to Swinburne's invocation of Dolores to "come
down and redeem us from virtue," he is to be found in every
suburb.


TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING

We must be reasonable in our domestic ideals. I do not think that
life at a public school is altogether good for a boy any more than
barrack life is altogether good for a soldier. But neither is home
life altogether good. Such good as it does, I should say, is due
to its freedom from the very atmosphere it professes to supply.
That atmosphere is usually described as an atmosphere of love; and
this definition should be sufficient to put any sane person on
guard against it. The people who talk and write as if the highest
attainable state is that of a family stewing in love continuously
from the cradle to the grave, can hardly have given five minutes
serious consideration to so outrageous a proposition. They cannot
have even made up their minds as to what they mean by love; for
when they expatiate on their thesis they are sometimes talking
about kindness, and sometimes about mere appetite. In either sense
they are equally far from the realities of life. No healthy man or
animal is occupied with love in any sense for more than a very
small fraction indeed of the time he devotes to business and to
recreations wholly unconnected with love. A wife entirely
preoccupied with her affection for her husband, a mother entirely
preoccupied with her affection for her children, may be all very
well in a book (for people who like that kind of book); but in
actual life she is a nuisance. Husbands may escape from her when
their business compels them to be away from home all day; but
young children may be, and quite often are, killed by her cuddling
and coddling and doctoring and preaching: above all, by her
continuous attempts to excite precocious sentimentality, a
practice as objectionable, and possibly as mischievous, as the
worst tricks of the worst nursemaids.


LARGE AND SMALL FAMILIES

In most healthy families there is a revolt against this tendency.
The exchanging of presents on birthdays and the like is barred by
general consent, and the relations of the parties are placed by
express treaty on an unsentimental footing.

Unfortunately this mitigation of family sentimentality is much
more characteristic of large families than small ones. It used to
be said that members of large families get on in the world; and it
is certainly true that for purposes of social training a household
of twenty surpasses a household of five as an Oxford College
surpasses an eight-roomed house in a cheap street. Ten children,
with the necessary adults, make a community in which an excess of
sentimentality is impossible. Two children make a doll's house, in
which both parents and children become morbid if they keep to
themselves. What is more, when large families were the fashion,
they were organized as tyrannies much more than as "atmospheres of
love." Francis Place tells us that he kept out of his father's way
because his father never passed a child within his reach without
striking it; and though the case was an extreme one, it was an
extreme that illustrated a tendency. Sir Walter Scott's father,
when his son incautiously expressed some relish for his porridge,
dashed a handful of salt into it with an instinctive sense that it
was his duty as a father to prevent his son enjoying himself.
Ruskin's mother gratified the sensual side of her maternal
passion, not by cuddling her son, but by whipping him when he fell
downstairs or was slack in learning the Bible off by heart; and
this grotesque safety-valve for voluptuousness, mischievous as it
was in many ways, had at least the advantage that the child did
not enjoy it and was not debauched by it, as he would have been by
transports of sentimentality.

But nowadays we cannot depend on these safeguards, such as they
were. We no longer have large families: all the families are too
small to give the children the necessary social training. The
Roman father is out of fashion; and the whip and the cane are
becoming discredited, not so much by the old arguments against
corporal punishment (sound as these were) as by the gradual
wearing away of the veil from the fact that flogging is a form of
debauchery. The advocate of flogging as a punishment is now
exposed to very disagreeable suspicions; and ever since Rousseau
rose to the effort of making a certain very ridiculous confession
on the subject, there has been a growing perception that child
whipping, even for the children themselves, is not always the
innocent and high-minded practice it professes to be. At all
events there is no getting away from the facts that families are
smaller than they used to be, and that passions which formerly
took effect in tyranny have been largely diverted into
sentimentality. And though a little sentimentality may be a very
good thing, chronic sentimentality is a horror, more dangerous,
because more possible, than the erotomania which we all condemn
when we are not thoughtlessly glorifying it as the ideal married
state.


THE GOSPEL OF LAODICEA

Let us try to get at the root error of these false domestic
doctrines. Why was it that the late Samuel Butler, with a
conviction that increased with his experience of life, preached
the gospel of Laodicea, urging people to be temperate in what they
called goodness as in everything else? Why is it that I, when I
hear some well-meaning person exhort young people to make it a
rule to do at least one kind action every day, feel very much as I
should if I heard them persuade children to get drunk at least
once every day? Apart from the initial absurdity of accepting as
permanent a state of things in which there would be in this
country misery enough to supply occasion for several thousand
million kind actions per annum, the effect on the character of the
doers of the actions would be so appalling, that one month of any
serious attempt to carry out such counsels would probably bring
about more stringent legislation against actions going beyond the
strict letter of the law in the way of kindness than we have now
against excess in the opposite direction.

There is no more dangerous mistake than the mistake of supposing
that we cannot have too much of a good thing. The truth is, an
immoderately good man is very much more dangerous than an
immoderately bad man: that is why Savonarola was burnt and John of
Leyden torn to pieces with red-hot pincers whilst multitudes of
unredeemed rascals were being let off with clipped ears, burnt
palms, a flogging, or a few years in the galleys. That is why
Christianity never got any grip of the world until it virtually
reduced its claims on the ordinary citizen's attention to a couple
of hours every seventh day, and let him alone on week-days. If the
fanatics who are preoccupied day in and day out with their
salvation were healthy, virtuous, and wise, the Laodiceanism of
the ordinary man might be regarded as a deplorable shortcoming;
but, as a matter of fact, no more frightful misfortune could
threaten us than a general spread of fanaticism. What people call
goodness has to be kept in check just as carefully as what they
call badness; for the human constitution will not stand very much
of either without serious psychological mischief, ending in
insanity or crime. The fact that the insanity may be privileged,
as Savonarola's was up to the point of wrecking the social life of
Florence, does not alter the case. We always hesitate to treat a
dangerously good man as a lunatic because he may turn out to be a
prophet in the true sense: that is, a man of exceptional sanity
who is in the right when we are in the wrong. However necessary it
may have been to get rid of Savonarola, it was foolish to poison
Socrates and burn St. Joan of Arc. But it is none the less
necessary to take a firm stand against the monstrous proposition
that because certain attitudes and sentiments may be heroic and
admirable at some momentous crisis, they should or can be
maintained at the same pitch continuously through life. A life
spent in prayer and alms giving is really as insane as a life
spent in cursing and picking pockets: the effect of everybody
doing it would be equally disastrous. The superstitious tolerance
so long accorded to monks and nuns is inevitably giving way to a
very general and very natural practice of confiscating their
retreats and expelling them from their country, with the result
that they come to England and Ireland, where they are partly
unnoticed and partly encouraged because they conduct technical
schools and teach our girls softer speech and gentler manners than
our comparatively ruffianly elementary teachers. But they are
still full of the notion that because it is possible for men to
attain the summit of Mont Blanc and stay there for an hour, it is
possible for them to live there. Children are punished and scolded
for not living there; and adults take serious offence if it is not
assumed that they live there.

As a matter of fact, ethical strain is just as bad for us as
physical strain. It is desirable that the normal pitch of conduct
at which men are not conscious of being particularly virtuous,
although they feel mean when they fall below it, should be raised
as high as possible; but it is not desirable that they should
attempt to live above this pitch any more than that they should
habitually walk at the rate of five miles an hour or carry a
hundredweight continually on their backs. Their normal condition
should be in nowise difficult or remarkable; and it is a
perfectly sound instinct that leads us to mistrust the good man as
much as the bad man, and to object to the clergyman who is pious
extra-professionally as much as to the professional pugilist who
is quarrelsome and violent in private life. We do not want good
men and bad men any more than we want giants and dwarfs. What we
do want is a high quality for our normal: that is, people who can
be much better than what we now call respectable without self-
sacrifice. Conscious goodness, like conscious muscular effort, may
be of use in emergencies; but for everyday national use it is
negligible; and its effect on the character of the individual may
easily be disastrous.


FOR BETTER FOR WORSE

It would be hard to find any document in practical daily use in
which these obvious truths seem so stupidly overlooked as they are
in the marriage service. As we have seen, the stupidity is only
apparent: the service was really only an honest attempt to make
the best of a commercial contract of property and slavery by
subjecting it to some religious restraint and elevating it by some
touch of poetry. But the actual result is that when two people are
under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most
delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to
swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and
exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. And
though of course nobody expects them to do anything so impossible
and so unwholesome, yet the law that regulates their relations,
and the public opinion that regulates that law, is actually
founded on the assumption that the marriage vow is not only
feasible but beautiful and holy, and that if they are false to it,
they deserve no sympathy and no relief. If all married people
really lived together, no doubt the mere force of facts would make
an end to this inhuman nonsense in a month, if not sooner; but it
is very seldom brought to that test. The typical British husband
sees much less of his wife than he does of his business partner,
his fellow clerk, or whoever works beside him day by day. Man and
wife do not as a rule, live together: they only breakfast
together, dine together, and sleep in the same room. In most cases
the woman knows nothing of the man's working life and he knows
nothing of her working life (he calls it her home life). It is
remarkable that the very people who romance most absurdly about
the closeness and sacredness of the marriage tie are also those
who are most convinced that the man's sphere and the woman's
sphere are so entirely separate that only in their leisure moments
can they ever be together. A man as intimate with his own wife as
a magistrate is with his clerk, or a Prime Minister with the
leader of the Opposition, is a man in ten thousand. The majority
of married couples never get to know one another at all: they only
get accustomed to having the same house, the same children, and
the same income, which is quite a different matter. The
comparatively few men who work at home--writers, artists, and to
some extent clergymen--have to effect some sort of segregation
within the house or else run a heavy risk of overstraining their
domestic relations. When the pair is so poor that it can afford
only a single room, the strain is intolerable: violent quarrelling
is the result. Very few couples can live in a single-roomed
tenement without exchanging blows quite frequently. In the
leisured classes there is often no real family life at all. The
boys are at a public school; the girls are in the schoolroom in
charge of a governess; the husband is at his club or in a set
which is not his wife's; and the institution of marriage enjoys
the credit of a domestic peace which is hardly more intimate than
the relations of prisoners in the same gaol or guests at the same
garden party. Taking these two cases of the single room and the
unearned income as the extremes, we might perhaps locate at a
guess whereabout on the scale between them any particular family
stands. But it is clear enough that the one-roomed end, though its
conditions enable the marriage vow to be carried out with the
utmost attainable exactitude, is far less endurable in practice,
and far more mischievous in its effect on the parties concerned,
and through them on the community, than the other end. Thus we see
that the revolt against marriage is by no means only a revolt
against its sordidness as a survival of sex slavery. It may even
plausibly be maintained that this is precisely the part of it that
works most smoothly in practice. The revolt is also against its
sentimentality, its romance, its Amorism, even against its
enervating happiness.


WANTED: AN IMMORAL STATESMAN

We now see that the statesman who undertakes to deal with marriage
will have to face an amazingly complicated public opinion. In
fact, he will have to leave opinion as far as possible out of the
question, and deal with human nature instead. For even if there
could be any real public opinion in a society like ours, which is
a mere mob of classes, each with its own habits and prejudices, it
would be at best a jumble of superstitions and interests, taboos
and hypocrisies, which could not be reconciled in any coherent
enactment. It would probably proclaim passionately that it does
not matter in the least what sort of children we have, or how few
or how many, provided the children are legitimate. Also that it
does not matter in the least what sort of adults we have, provided
they are married. No statesman worth the name can possibly act on
these views. He is bound to prefer one healthy illegitimate child
to ten rickety legitimate ones, and one energetic and capable
unmarried couple to a dozen inferior apathetic husbands and wives.
If it could be proved that illicit unions produce three children
each and marriages only one and a half, he would be bound to
encourage illicit unions and discourage and even penalize
marriage. The common notion that the existing forms of marriage
are not political contrivances, but sacred ethical obligations to
which everything, even the very existence of the human race, must
be sacrificed if necessary (and this is what the vulgar morality
we mostly profess on the subject comes to) is one on which no sane
Government could act for a moment; and yet it influences, or is
believed to influence, so many votes, that no Government will
touch the marriage question if it can possibly help it, even when
there is a demand for the extension of marriage, as in the case of
the recent long-delayed Act legalizing marriage with a deceased
wife's sister. When a reform in the other direction is needed (for
example, an extension of divorce), not even the existence of the
most unbearable hardships will induce our statesmen to move so
long as the victims submit sheepishly, though when they take the
remedy into their own hands an inquiry is soon begun. But what is
now making some action in the matter imperative is neither the
sufferings of those who are tied for life to criminals, drunkards,
physically unsound and dangerous mates, and worthless and
unamiable people generally, nor the immorality of the couples
condemned  to celibacy by separation orders which do not annul
their marriages, but the fall in the birth rate. Public opinion
will not help us out of this difficulty: on the contrary, it will,
if it be allowed, punish anybody who mentions it. When Zola tried
to repopulate France by writing a novel in praise of parentage,
the only comment made here was that the book could not possibly be
translated into English, as its subject was too improper.


THE LIMITS OF DEMOCRACY

Now if England had been governed in the past by statesmen willing
to be ruled by such public opinion as that, she would have been
wiped off the political map long ago. The modern notion that
democracy means governing a country according to the ignorance of
its majorities is never more disastrous than when there is some
question of sexual morals to be dealt with. The business of a
democratic statesman is not, as some of us seem to think, to
convince the voters that he knows no better than they as to the
methods of attaining their common ends, but on the contrary to
convince them that he knows much better than they do, and
therefore differs from them on every possible question of method.
The voter's duty is to take care that the Government consists of
men whom he can trust to devize or support institutions making for
the common welfare. This is highly skilled work; and to be
governed by people who set about it as the man in the street would
set about it is to make straight for "red ruin and the breaking up
of laws." Voltaire said that Mr Everybody is wiser than anybody;
and whether he is or not, it is his will that must prevail; but
the will and the way are two very different things. For example,
it is the will of the people on a hot day that the means of relief
from the effects of the heat should be within the reach of
everybody. Nothing could be more innocent, more  hygienic, more
important to the social welfare. But the way of the people on such
occasions is mostly to drink large quantities of beer, or, among
the more luxurious classes, iced claret cup, lemon squashes, and
the like. To take a moral illustration, the will to suppress
misconduct and secure efficiency in work is general and salutary;
but the notion that the best and only effective way is by
complaining, scolding, punishing, and revenging is equally
general. When Mrs Squeers opened an abscess on her pupil's head
with an inky penknife, her object was entirely laudable: her heart
was in the right place: a statesman interfering with her on the
ground that he did not want the boy cured would have deserved
impeachment for gross tyranny. But a statesman tolerating amateur
surgical practice with inky penknives in school would be a very
bad Minister of Education. It is on the question of method that
your expert comes in; and though I am democrat enough to insist
that he must first convince a representative body of amateurs that
his way is the right way and Mrs Squeers's way the wrong way, yet
I very strongly object to any tendency to flatter Mrs Squeers into
the belief that her way is in the least likely to be the right
way, or that any other test is to be applied to it except the test
of its effect on human welfare.


THE SCIENCE AND ART OF POLITICS

Political Science means nothing else than the devizing of the best
ways of fulfilling the will of the world; and, I repeat, it is
skilled work. Once the way is discovered, the methods laid down,
and the machinery provided, the work of the statesman is done, and
that of the official begins. To illustrate, there is no need for
the police officer who governs the street traffic to be or to know
any better than the people who obey the wave of his hand. All
concerted action involves subordination and the appointment of
directors at whose signal the others will act. There is no more
need for them to be superior to the rest than for the keystone of
an arch to be of harder stone than the coping. But when it comes
to devizing the directions which are to be obeyed: that is, to
making new institutions and scraping old ones, then you need
aristocracy in the sense of government by the best. A military
state organized so as to carry out exactly the impulses of the
average soldier would not last a year. The result of trying to
make the Church of England reflect the notions of the average
churchgoer has reduced it to a cipher except for the purposes of a
petulantly irreligious social and political club. Democracy as to
the thing to be done may be inevitable (hence the vital need for a
democracy of supermen); but democracy as to the way to do it is
like letting the passengers drive the train: it can only end in
collision and wreck. As a matter of act, we obtain reforms (such
as they are), not by allowing the electorate to draft statutes,
but by persuading it that a certain minister and his cabinet are
gifted with sufficient political sagacity to find out how to
produce the desired result. And the usual penalty of taking
advantage of this power to reform our institutions is defeat by a
vehement "swing of the pendulum" at the next election. Therein
lies the peril and the glory of democratic statesmanship. A
statesman who confines himself to popular legislation--or, for the
matter of that, a playwright who confines himself to popular
plays--is like a blind man's dog who goes wherever the blind man
pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to the same
place.