Getting Married | Page 6

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