Getting Married | Page 4

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burn" is only out of date in respect of his belief that the end of the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