Getting Married | Page 9

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