Getting Married | Page 5

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