Marriage

( Originally Published 1919 )

IF society exists to protect human beings from their appetites, nowhere is the operation of society more imperative than with regard to that appetite which is so imperious that individual passions can produce general tragedies. If Cleopatra's nose had been shorter the face of the whole world would have been different. Through marriage the social contract touches the living core of humanity, and has its most direct influence upon the life of the generations. Unfortunately, marriage has been of all contracts the most lop-sided, be-cause women have not been regarded as capable of entering upon the social contract. Woman could only have a relationship with the community through a patriarch, her father or her husband. Other communities, other laws, but hitherto all communities have agreed to keep women either in slavery or in tutelage, so that the contract of marriage has been everywhere a festering source of injustice and a denial of the spiritual equality from which the health of humanity springs, and until that equality is established here it is not likely to prevail anywhere else: for however well-meaning a man may be in his public character, he cannot act vigorously and freely if his private life is based upon injustice. Equality must exist in the home before it can appear in the life of the commonwealth, and men cry in vain for freedom so long as women are trammelled.

Marriage is a natural merger of two lives to create a holy state that is greater than either, and this state is fortified by daily habits and responsibilities. With the best will in the world a man and a woman in their relationship may fail to bring this holy state into being, and therefore no marriage has taken place. Churches and laws have evolved a system by which marriage is regarded as existing through patriarchal blessing, and they make no provision for dissolution in the event of failure, leaving it to daily habit and responsibility to preserve the tie. But when there is no spiritual bond the tie of habit is irksome and devastating.

Nature in her desire for reproduction cares not a rap whether her couples are married or no, and of course society cannot emulate the indifference of Nature. But to society the spiritual creativeness of marriage is of even more importance than the production of children, and it is the spiritual principle of marriage that needs protection. By making a legal contract indissoluble, society denies that principle and commits self-injury through confusing a voracious appetite with a creative force. A mere appetite is easily sated, but a creative force will not desist until it has seen the farthest consequence of its actions. The one separates : the other binds. A man and a woman joined in a brief sensuality soon part in hatred, bitterness or contempt, or, worse still, in an indifferent nullity. If they happen by force of circumstances, or under a heated illusion most frequently from pity on one side or the other to have entered upon a legal contract, it is most cruelly anti-social to insist that they shall remain together through innumerable crises of nauseated reaction. It is worse than that : it is a degrading mockery which almost invariably leads to seeking relief in dissipation and adultery, to suffering for many innocent parties, and to the waste often of fine energies and qualities.

Society, while not emulating the indiffierence, should learn something from the largeness and generosity of Nature. Poor human beings struggling with their most overmastering instinct need all the succour they can gain from each other: they need far more than the patriarchal Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not. Very few are the men and women who are sunk so far in degradation that sexual gratification is' become a light thing to them. Even the most idiotic lovers believe on the first impulse that it may be for ever; but unless love becomes a creative force with them it cannot endure. Men desire marriage because they do not wish to be plagued all their lives with dissatisfaction; but that dissatisfaction is only aggravated by a marriage that has failed, and, now that science has shown how intimately linked are the brain and the sexual apparatus in men and women, it is surely time that tyranny was removed from an element in society so vital to the happiness of its members.

A woman can no longer be regarded as a man's property. With that conception gone there is an end of the idea of marriage as a contract that cannot be reconsidered, and the legal and religious view of that contract has been rendered untenable by the artificial sterilisation of conjugation. A man and a woman married can no longer be regarded as delivered up to the mercies of their own fecundity. This, more than anything else, has contributed to the emancipation of women who now, as well as men, have a will in the matter. Until she had a will in the business of child-bearing a woman could not very well have a will in anything else, and to this has been due her subservience to patriarchalism and to laws made to protect her disabilities. The artificial sanction of marriage being removed, the natural sanction must be sought, and that sanction can only be found in the relationship of the parties themselves : a pragmatic sanction. A creative marriage will endure of its own deep satisfaction: a sterile marriage should be as easily dissoluble as any other form of partnership.

Ephemeral relationships between men and women, adultery and concubinage, exist and will exist whatever the law. It is right that the nobler relationship should be given honourable acknowledgment and treated, as in-deed it is, as the basis of society, the guarantee of the home and the family; but relationships registered in mistake or under illusion should be subject to revision and dissolution, other-wise the standard of morality in the matter is degraded and the institution of marriage is called into contempt, and can be used, as in-deed it too often is, for nefarious purposes, to gain money or influence, or to consolidate interests.

The institution of marriage, like indeed even more than anything else, has to be called in question now when we have to rid ourselves of everything that cramps our energies if we are to overtake the harm done by so many generations of moral indolence, which accepted the artificially established difference between the sexes, a tradition so ancient as to have won almost the sanction of a natural law. But with the increased division of labour the disabilities of women have been reduced almost to vanishing point, and their status has practically reached equality with men. Yet the laws and prejudices which govern marriage remain based upon the old inequality, and about no subject are prejudices so rampant.

This is because, as a rule, human beings cannot think of other people's love affairs without jealousy or disgust, and a scientific attitude towards sex is repulsive to the sentiment with which the subject is coated. Yet people who have to live scientifically in all other matters cannot afford to remain in ignorance or a state of inflamed distortion about the central passion of their lives. Men and women will no doubt lie to each other to the end of time, but if they lie with knowledge the game gains in piquancy and charm : and here hitherto women have had the advantage over men. They have of necessity been liars because they have known the truth, while men have been confused between lies and truth, and for this reason, as the laws relating to marriage have been made by men, they have remained muddled, ineffective, and are in a modern community a perpetual nuisance.

At present in Great Britain two people who have acknowledged the failure of their marriage can quite easily be divorced; but at the cost of degradation and unnecessary scandal, and the risk of a mess being made of their affairs by an incompetent or unscrupulous attorney. The one fatal bar to a divorce is the desire of the parties for it. Therefore the woman must perjure herself and swear that she desires the return of her husband, while the man must commit an open act of adultery. This method is pursued every day, yet a demand for the introduction of plain, simple honesty is met with cries of indignation, laments for the destruction and corruption of society, and denunciations of intelligent re-formers as professors of license and abettors of libertinism: whereas, in fact, disgust for the operation of a divorce, drives many unhappy people to any lengths to avoid it, and they prefer to live in a veiled polygamy and polyandry with all the corruption of looseness added to the exasperation of secrecy. A society parched for honesty cannot afford to leave so rich a source of hypocrisy untouched. The trouble is that human beings are hypocrites and enjoy hypocrisy so long as it is profitable to them, and even after it has become injurious it is difficult to persuade them of the fact. Marriage being the profoundest of human relation-ships gives the greatest room for hypocrisy, and the more degraded it is the more room. A hard-and-fast law degrades marirage. If the parties to it cannot rescind an irksome contract, they have somehow to make it tolerable, and the easiest way of doing that is by lying to each other and resorting to the game of bluff, by which human affairs are for the most part conducted. But marriage is a more delicate affair than most. It is through marriage that men and women are in most immediate contact with humanity, and through humanity with the creative will, and as Russell Lowell put it ----

"You've got to git up airly
Ef you're goin' to take in God."

Here most often the game of bluff breaks down and lives are wasted in years of barren suffering. Time may bring the tolerance of mute despair, but than this nothing could be more stultifying and sterilising to the human spirit which is at last through women every-where in organised revolt. Laws made to protect women as property have to be amended in favour of laws to emancipate women as human beings, and with this change comes a fundamental alteration of the conception of property, the long overdue shift from owner-ship to trusteeship. Marriage also is a trust. Men and women are trustees for each other, and above all for the most sacred emanation of the human spirit, true wedded love, of which a child is the glorious symbol. No law is needed to protect this beauty, but only to protect those unfortunates who fail in its pursuit, and here again the difficulty is economic. Who is to protect the child that is only a child and not a symbol, and to see that the failure or the folly of its parents does not weigh too heavily upon it? Out of love a home will grow as naturally as a nest will grow out of the mating of birds. To clap a loveless man and woman into a joint existence is to breed disaster. Society is responisble for them as for all sufferers, and the immediate concern of society, which exists to abet the physical well-being of its members so that they may be free to pursue their spiritual welfare, is with the mother and the child, who in an ordered community might well be taken as the social unit, the home based upon true marriage being well able to take care of itself. By protecting the mother and the child society would be going far to save for marriage many unhappy people who are at present thrust out of it, and are, therefore, unable to contribute their keenest forces to the service of humanity. An immense amount of immorality could be saved by such a revaluation of moral ideas; and the division of women into two classes, those for pleasure and those for child-bearing, which so odiously grew up under the conception of women as property, would disappear, with the result that vast numbers of women would be released for work through which their sexual needs would be tamed. They would no longer be dependent for their career and their prosperity upon their sex. True marriage would remain untouched because it is unassailable. Those who defend indissoluble marriage do so out of their concern for the sanctity of property, and from their point of view they are right, for once the conception of marriage is elevated the conception of property must follow. If the moral code is lowered still further by an increase of legal tyranny and private license, then the value of property is heightened and economic tyranny gains in force. Human energy that is diverted from liberty creates tyranny. Conception, as Hamlet said, is a blessing, and there is no liberty without it. In true marriage each of the lovers is conceived and released by the other. So it is in all pure relationships into which love enters. That is love's activity, to conceive and bear liberty. If it is thwarted there is either barrenness or an abortion. Marriage is a principle which prevails everywhere and not only in the sexes. It prevails in the region of ideas, in art, in science, in politics, even in commerce. A bargain is a kind of marriage: fruitful if it be just and equitable, barren or abortive if it be dishonest. In all true work the principle of marriage prevails : the labourer is wedded to the earth, the craftsman to his materials, and the operation of this principle depends vitally upon its free working in the relations of men and women.

Society at present is very like the man in Swift, who on being informed that there was a mistake in the Bible, cried, "What! A mistake in the Bible? . . . Then I can go on with my drinking and whoring." "What!" men seem to say, "kings and priests are just fools like ourselves; Tsars can be murdered and Emperors exiled'! Then we can do what we damn please." And as what ignorant men please is generally to their hurt, it suits those who find patriarchalism profitable to encourage them in their doing, with the result that wealth, material and spiritual, is consumed, and things that were holy lose their sanction. But a greater book than the Bible has been opened, the Book of Nature, and a greater power than the wisdom of princes has been discovered, the heart of the people. Men are beginning to read the one and to honour the other, finding at last that the one true marriage is that between man and humanity. . . . It is for this reason that the words of governors appointed by years of intrigue are so vain and empty. Reforms can no longer be imposed from with-out in favour of a class who can see their ad-vantage in it. Reform grows from within. Three generations of industrialism have created. hideous abuses, but they have liberated man from the tyranny of the earth. In the struggle to achieve this the freedom of humanity has been conceived, and men will no longer submit to the tyranny of men. That was necessary until the tyranny of the earth was broken. It had its purpose and its sanction, but both are gone. Humanity aims higher now to break first the tyranny of men, then the tyranny of the human mind, that the human spirit may at last know its freedom and live in unison with the creative spirit by whose will all that lives has its being.

Marriage, then, is symbolical of the greatest mystery. It is the fiery principle from which all other social principles emanate. It is the consummation of the social contract, the only begetter of liberty. How mistaken, then, is that view which would make it a clog upon the passions of men and women which only in liberty can find the coolness to reduce them to order ! By suppression society deprives itself of that which it most needs : force and spontaneity, and defiles the social spirit at its source. By making the contract of marriage indissoluble, society robs men and women of the incentive to preserve the joy without which their relationship cannot endure. When joy goes nothing but the tie of money and habit is left. That may bind a tolerant affection, but that makes for stagnation, which is of all states the most injurious to society and the most blasphemous upon the principle of marriage. Yet it is the state most suited to the patriarchal system which brooks no questioning of authority, and sees it only in power. Most admirable from the point of view of that system are the innumerable streets in the innumerable cities of the world where life is stagnant; but from the point of view of the dwellers in those streets and those towns the outlook is very different. Their work is given back to them in a lie that every day grows more savourless: the pleasures they are allowed are thin and empty: marriage claps them into a little prison of a house and opens up to them no communal life: the de-light they should expend in civic works and duties is diverted to vast undertakings directed by remote personages for which they have to pay in unintelligibly assessed taxes. In their own cramped lives they have to seek that which the ill organisation of society denies them, and so perverse has that organisation become that it has arrived at a flat denial of the principle of marriage and aims at the use of the males for the purposes of war, of the females for breeding. Their mutual joy counts for nothing: this community, calling it-self the State, ignores that and claims the little it has left under the pretext that it fears the designs and ambitions of other communities where the great mass of men and women are in much the same plight. Meanwhile the patriarchal system forbids communication between the communities, except through very narrow channels, and information about them is circulated in prejudicial sheets financed to maintain the system. Thus, as far as possible, by the system individuals and communities are kept apart, so that the world is like one vast cartel, a system by which huge firms are kept in competition and are only joined together by the fact that the same financiers extract profits from all of them. The patriarchs, in fact, have learned to profit even from feuds, so successful has been their usurpation. They keep humanity perpetually at war, whether with lethal or commercial weapons, so that nothing but profits are created. But humanity does not exist to create profits which are only a by-product. Humanity lives to release and create a spirit, and the time is coming when that purpose will be too strong for the patriarchs and their sycophants, who will stand convicted of mischievous futility; and society will then have its responsibility wrested away from them and diverted to the individual for whom the application of the principle of marriage in every walk of life is a necessity: for only through it can his conscience be kept alive, and society's only source of authority is the individual conscience expressing itself through the supple and efficient machinery of democratic control. If the individual conscience is suffered to exist there need be no fear of Ole religious and reverential emotions in men and women ceasing to be operative in human affairs. It is when that conscience is stifled that materialism becomes rampant and men become parasitic upon humanity. To a healthy con-science nothing is more abominable than a parasitic existence, and it is only because con-science is derided and defiled everywhere that the present extraordinary social system exists for the exploitation of mankind by man. With the past nearly exhausted the present generation, like its predecessor, has become parasitic upon the future, which must inevitably repudiate it and reassert the elementary principles that have been forgotten. The fantastic con-fusion of the present will fade from men's minds as they emerge into a clearer air, and in the huge effort to pay off the debts of their fathers they will learn that joy is won through persons and not through things; and that the denial of marriage leads to separation, and that separation leads to slavery.

The individual by himself is soon caught in his tyrannous desire: wedded to his beloved, be it a dream, a vision, a man, or a woman, he is one with humanity, and is sustained by a force that is unconquerable. The parasite upon humanity perishes of his own greed : the servant of humanity is master of the world, for all things yield up to him the treasure of their marriage love, and join their creative will to his to his life in sorrow and in delight a marriage song.