 There is one view very common among the liberal minded which is exceedingly fatiguing to the clearheaded. It is symbolized in the sort of man who says, These ruthless bigots will refuse to bury me in consecrated ground because I have always refused to be baptized. A clearheaded person can easily conceive his point of view, insofar as he happens to think that baptism does not matter. But the clearheaded will be completely puzzled when they ask themselves why, if he thinks that baptism does not matter, he should think that burial does matter. If it is in no way imprudent for a man to keep himself from consecrated font, how can it be inhuman for other people to keep him from a consecrated field? It is surely much nearer to mere superstition to attach importance to what is done to a dead body than to a live baby. I can understand a man thinking both superstitious or both sacred, but I cannot see why he should grumble that other people do not give him as sanctity what he regards as superstitions. He is merely complaining of being treated as what he himself declares to be. It is if a man were to say, My persecutors still refuse to make me king out of mere malice because I am a strict Republican. Or as if he said, These heartless brutes are so prejudiced against the teetotaler they won't even give him a glass of brandy. The fashion of divorce would not be a modern fashion if it were not full of this touching fallacy. A great deal might be summed up as a most illogical and fanatical appetite for getting married in churches. It is if a man should practice polygamy out of sheer greed for wedding cake. Or it is as if he provided his household with new shoes entirely by having them thrown after the wedding carriage when he went off with a new wife. There are other ways of procuring cake or procuring shoes, and there are other ways of setting up a human establishment. What is unreasonable is the request which the modern man really makes of the religious institutions of his fathers. The modern man wants to buy one shoe without the other, to obtain one half of a supernatural revelation without the other. The modern man wants to eat his wedding cake and have it too. I am not basing this book on the religious argument and therefore I will not pause to inquire why the old Catholic institutions of Christianity seem to be especially made the objects of these unreasonable complaints. As a matter of fact nobody does propose that some ferocious anti-Semite like M. Jermont should be buried as a Jew with all the rights of the synagogue. But the broad-minded were furious because Tolstoy, who had denounced Russian orthodoxy quite as ferociously, was not buried as an orthodox with all the rights of the Russian church. Nobody does insist that a man who wishes to have fifty wives, when Muhammad allowed him five, must have his fifty with the full approval of Muhammad's religion. But the broad-minded are extremely bitter because a Christian who wishes to have several wives when his own promise bound him to one is not allowed to violate his vow at the same altar at which he made it. Nobody does insist on Baptists totally immersing people who totally deny the advantage of being totally immersed. Nobody ever did expect Mormons to receive the open mockers of the Book of Mormon, nor Christian scientists to let their churches be used for exposing Mrs. Eddy as an old fraud. It is only of the forms of Christianity making the Catholic claim that such inconsistent claims are made. And even the inconsistency is, as I fancy, a tribute to an acceptance of the Catholic idea in the Catholic fashion. It may be that men have an obscure sense that nobody need belong to the Mormon religion, and everyone does ultimately belong to the church. And though he may have made a few dozen Mormon marriages in a wandering and entertaining life, he will really have nowhere to go if he does not somehow find his way back to the church yard. But all this concerns the general theological question, and not the matter involved here, which is merely historical and social. The point here is that it is at least superficially inconsistent to ask institutions for a formal approval which they can only give by inconsistency. I have put first the question of what is marriage, and we are now in a position to ask more clearly what is divorce. It is not merely the negation or neglect of marriage, for anyone can always neglect marriage. It is not the dissolution of the legal obligation of marriage, or even the legal obligation of monogamy, for the simple reason that no such obligation exists. Any man in modern London may have a hundred wives if he does not call them wives, or rather, if he does not go through certain, more or less mystical ceremonies in order to assert that they are wives. He might create a certain social coolness round his household, a certain fading of his general popularity, but that is not created by law, and could not be prevented by law. As the late Lord Salisbury very sensibly observed about boycotting in Ireland, how can you make a law to prevent people going out of a room when somebody they don't like comes into it? We cannot be forcibly introduced to a polygamist by a policeman. It would not be an assertion of social liberty, but a denial of social liberty, if we found ourselves practically obliged to associate with all the profligates in society. But divorce is not in this sense mere anarchy. On the contrary, divorce is in this sense respectability, and even a rigid excess of respectability. Divorce in this sense might indeed be not unfairly called snobbery. The definition of divorce, which concerns us here, is that it is the attempt to give respectability and not liberty. It is the attempt to give a certain social status and not a legal status. It is indeed supposed that this can be done by the alteration of certain legal forms, and this will be more or less true according to the extent to which law as such overawed public opinion, or was valued as a true expression of public opinion. If a man divorced in the large-minded fashion of Henry VIII pleaded his legal title among the peasantry of Ireland, for instance, I think he would find a difference still existing between respectability and religion. But the peculiar point here is that many are claiming the sanction of religion as well as of respectability. They would attach to their very natural and sometimes very pardonable experiments a certain atmosphere and even glamour which has undoubtedly belonged to the status of marriage in historic Christendom. But before they make this attempt it would be well to ask why such a dignity ever appeared or in what it consisted. And I fancy we shall find ourselves confronted with the very simple truth that the dignity arose wholly and entirely out of the fidelity and that the glamour merely came from the vow. People were regarded as having a certain dignity because they were dedicated in a certain way, as bound to certain duties, and if it be preferred to certain discomforts. It may be irrational to endure these discomforts, it may even be irrational to respect them, but it is certainly much more irrational to respect them and then artificially transfer the same respect to the absence of them. It is if we were to expect uniforms to be saluted when armies were disbanded and ask people to cheer a soldier's coat when it did not contain a soldier. If you think you can abolish war, abolish it, but do not suppose that when there are no wars to be waged there will still be warriors to be worshipped. If it was a good thing that the monasteries were dissolved let us say so and dismiss them. But the nobles who dissolved the monasteries did not shave their heads and asked to be regarded as saints solely on account of that ceremony. The nobles did not dress up as abbots and asked to be credited with the potential talent for working miracles because of the austerity of their vows of poverty and chastity. They got inside the houses, but not inside the hoods, and still less the halos. They at least knew that it is not the habit that makes the monk. They were not so superstitious as those moderns who think it is the veil that makes the bride. What is respected, in short, is the fidelity to the ancient flag of the family and a readiness to fight for what I have noted as its unique type of freedom. I say readiness to fight for fortunately the fight itself is the exception rather than the rule. The soldier is not respected because he is doomed to death, but because he is ready for death and even ready for defeat. The married man or woman is not doomed to evil, sickness or poverty, but is respected for taking a certain step for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness or in health. But there is one result of this line of argument which should correct a danger in some arguments on the same side. It is very essential that a stricture on divorce, which is in fact simply a defensive marriage, should be independent of sentimentalism, especially in the form called optimism. A man justifying a fight for national independence or civic freedom is neither sentimental nor optimistic. He explains the sacrifice, but he does not explain it away. He does not say that bayonet wounds are pinpricks or mere scratches of the thorns of a rose of pleasure. He does not say that the whole display of firearms is a festive display of fireworks. On the contrary, when he praises it most he praises it as pain rather than pleasure. He increases the praise with pain. It is his whole boast that militarism and even modern science can produce no instrument of torture to tame the soul of a man. It is idle in speaking of war to pit the realistic against the romantic in the sense of the heroic. For all possible realism can only increase the heroism and therefore in the highest sense increase the romance. Now I do not compare marriage with war, but I do compare marriage with law or liberty or patriotism or popular government or any of the human ideals which have often to be defended by war. Even the wildest of those ideals which seem to escape from all the discipline of peace, do not escape from the discipline of war. The Bolshevists may have aimed at pure peace and liberty, but they have been compelled for their own purpose first to raise armies and then to rule armies. In a word, however beautiful you may think your own visions of the attitude, men must suffer to be beautiful, and even suffer a considerable interval of being ugly. And I have known notion of denying that mankind suffers much from the maintenance of the standard of marriage as it suffers from the necessity of criminal law or the recurrence of crusades and revolutions. The only question here is whether marriage is indeed, as I maintain, an ideal and an institution for making popular freedom. I do not need to be told that anything making for popular freedom has to be paid for in vigilance and pain and a whole army of martyrs. Hence I am far indeed from denying the hard cases which exist here, as in all matters involving the idea of honor. For indeed I could not deny them without denying the whole parallel of militant morality on which my argument rests. But this being first understood, it will be well to discuss in a little more detail what are described as the tragedies of marriage. And the first thing to note about the most tragic of them is that they are not tragedies of marriage at all. They are tragedies of sex, and might easily occur in a highly modern romance in which marriage was not mentioned at all. It is generally summarized by saying that the tragic element is the absence of love. But it is often forgotten that another tragic element is often the presence of love. The doctors of divorce with an air of the frank and friendly realism of men of the world are always recommending and rejoicing in a sensible separation by mutual consent. But if we are really to dismiss our dreams of dignity and honor, if we are really to fall back on the frank realism of our experience as men of the world, then the very first thing that our experience will tell us is that it very seldom is a separation by mutual consent. That is, that the consent very seldom is sincerely and spontaneously mutual. By far the commonest problem in such cases is that in which one party wishes to end the partnership and the other does not. And of that emotional situation you can make nothing but a tragedy, whichever way you turn it. With or without marriage, with or without divorce, with or without any arrangements that anybody can suggest or imagine, it remains a tragedy. The only difference is that by the doctrine of marriage it remains both a noble and a fruitful tragedy, like that of a man who falls fighting for his country or dies testifying to the truth. But the truth is that the innovators have as much sham optimism about divorce as any romanticist can have about marriage. They regard their story when it ends in the divorce court through as rosy a mist of sentimentalism as anybody ever regarded a story ending with wedding bells. Such a reformer is quite sure that when once the prince and princess are divorced by the fairy godmother they will live happily ever after. I enjoy romance, but I like it to be rooted in reality, and anyone with a touch of reality knows that nine couples out of ten when they are divorced are left in an exceedingly different state. It will be safe to say in most cases that one partner will fail to find happiness in an infatuation, and the other will from the first accept the tragedy. In the realm of reality and not romance, it is commonly a case of breaking hearts as well as breaking promises, and even dishonor is not always a remedy for remorse. The next limitation to be laid down in the matter affects certain practical forms of discomforts on a level rather lower than love or hatred. The cases most commonly quoted concern what is called drink and what is called cruelty. They are always talked about as matters of fact, though in practice they are very decidedly matters of opinion. It is not a flippancy but a fact that the misfortune of the woman who has married a drunkard may have to be balanced against the misfortune of the man who has married a teetotaler. For the very definition of drunkenness may depend on the dogma of teetotalism. Drunkenness that has been truly observed may mean anything from delirium treatments to having a stronger head than the official appointed to conduct the examination. Mr. Bernard Shaw once professed apparently seriously that any man drinking wine or beer at all was incapacitated from managing a motor car, and still more therefore one would suppose from managing a wife. The scales are weighed here, of course, with all those false weights of snobbishness which are the curse of justice in this country. The working class is forced to conduct almost in public a normal and varying festive habit which the upper class can afford to conduct in private, and a certain section of the middle class that which happens to concern itself most with local politics and social reforms really has or affects the standard quite abnormal and even alien. They might go to any length of injustice in dealing with the working man or working woman accused of too harding a taste in beer. To mention but one matter out of a thousand, the middle class reformers are obviously quite ignorant of the hours at which working people begin to work because they themselves at eleven o'clock in the morning have only recently finished breakfast and the full moral digestion of the daily mail. They think a charwoman drinking beer at that hour is one of those arising early in the morning to follow after strong drink. Most of them really do not know that she has already done more than half a day's heavy work and is partaking of a very reasonable luncheon. The whole problem with proletarian drink is entangled in a network of these misunderstandings. And there's no doubt whatever that when judged by these generalizations the poor will be taken in a net of injustices. And this truth is as certain in the cases of what is called cruelty as of what is called drink. Nine times out of ten the judgment on a navvy for hitting a woman is about as just as a judgment on him for not taking off his hat to a lady. It is a class test. It may be a class superiority but it is not an act of equal justice between classes. It leaves out a thousand things, the provocation, the atmosphere, the harassing restrictions of space, the nagging which Dickens described as the terrors of temper in a cart, the absence of certain taboos of social training, the tradition of greater roughness even in the gestures of affection. To make all marriage or divorce in the case of such a man turn upon a blow is like blasting the whole life of a gentleman because he has slammed the door. Often a poor man cannot slam the door partly because the model villa might fall down but more because he has nowhere to go. The smoking room, the billiard room, and the peacock music room not being yet attached to his premises. I say this in passing to point out that while I do not dream of suggesting that there are only happy marriages, there will quite certainly as things work nowadays be a very large number of unhappy and unjust divorces. There will be cases in which the innocent partner will receive the real punishment of the guilty partner, though being in fact and feeling the faithful partner. For instance, it is insisted that a married person must at least find release from the society of a lunatic, but it is also true that the scientific reformers with their fuss about the feeble-minded are continually giving larger and looser definitions of lunacy. The process might begin by releasing somebody from a homicidal maniac and end by dealing in the same way with a rather dull conversationalist, but in fact nobody does deny that a person should be allowed some sort of release from a homicidal maniac. The most extreme school of orthodoxy only maintains that anybody who has had that experience should be content with that release. In other words it says he should be content with that experience of mandrimony and not seek another. It was put very wittily, I think, by a Roman Catholic friend of mine who said he approved of release so long as it was not spelled with a hyphen. To put it roughly, we are prepared in some cases to listen to the man who complains of having a wife, but we are not prepared to listen at such length to the same man when he comes back and complains that he has not got a wife. Now in practice at this moment the great mass of the complaints are precisely of this kind. The reformers insist particularly on the pathos of a man's position when he has obtained a separation without a divorce. Their most tragic figure is that of the man who is already free of all those ills he has had and is only asking to be allowed to fly to others that he knows not of. I should be the last to deny that in certain emotional circumstances his tragedy may be very tragic indeed, but his tragedy is of the emotional kind which can never be entirely eliminated and which he himself in all probability inflicted on the partner he has left. We may call it the price of maintaining an ideal or the price of making a mistake, but anyhow it is the point of our whole distinction in the matter. It is here that we draw the line, and I have nowhere denied that it is a line of battle. The battle joins on the debatable ground not of the man's doubtful past but of his still more doubtful future. In a word, the divorce controversy is not really a controversy about divorce. It is a controversy about remarriage, or rather about whether it is marriage at all. And with that we can only return to the point of honor which I have compared here to the point of patriotism. Since it is both the smallest and greatest kind of patriotism, men have died in torments during the last five years for points of patriotism far more dubious and fugitive. Men like the Poles or the Servians, through long periods of their history, may be said rather to have lived in torments. I will never admit that the vital need of the freedom of the family, as I have tried to sketch it here, is not a cause as valuable as the freedom of any frontier. But I do willingly admit that the cause would be a dark and terrible one if it really asked these men to suffer torments. As I have stated it on its most extreme terms, it only asked them to suffer abdignations. And those negative sufferings I do think they may honorably be called upon to bear for the glory of their own oath and the great things by which nations live. In relation to their own nation, most normal men will feel that this distinction between release and re-hyphen lease is neither fanciful nor harsh, but very rational and human. A patriot may be in exile in another country, but he will not be a patriot of another country. He will be as cheerful as he can in an abnormal position, or he may or may not sing his country's songs in a strange land, but he will not sing the strange songs as his own. And such may fairly be also the attitude of the citizen who has gone into exile from the oldest of earthly cities. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Superstition of Divorce by G. K. Chesterton. CHAPTER VIII. THE VISTA OF DIVORCE. The case for divorce combines all the advantages of having it both ways, and of drawing the same deduction from right or left and from black or white. Whichever way the program works in practice it can still be justified in theory. If there are few examples of divorce, it shows how little divorce need be dreaded. If there are many, it shows how much it is required. The rarity of divorce is an argument in favor of divorce, and the multiplicity of divorce is an argument against marriage. Now in truth, if we were confined to considering this alternative in a speculative manner, and there were no concrete facts but only abstract probabilities, we should have no difficulty in arguing our case. The abstract liberty allowed by the reformers is as near as possible to anarchy, and gives no logical or legal guarantee worthy of discussing. The advantages of their reform do not accrue to the innocent party but to the guilty party, especially if he be sufficiently guilty. A man has only to commit the crime of desertion to obtain the reward of divorce. And if they are entitled to take as typical the most horrible hypothetical cases of the abuse of marriage laws, surely we are entitled to take equally extreme possibilities in the abuse of their own divorce laws. If they, when looking about for a husband, so often hit upon a homicidal maniac, surely we may politely introduce them to the far more human figure of the gentleman who marries as many women as he likes and gets rid of them as often as he pleases. But in fact there is no necessity for us to argue thus in the abstract for the amiable gentleman in question undoubtedly exists in the concrete. Of course he has no new figure. He is a very recurrent type of rascal. His name has been Lothario or Don Juan, and he has often been represented as a rather romantic rascal. The point of divorce reform that cannot too often be repeated is that the rascal should not only be regarded as romantic, but regarded as respectable. He is not to sow his wild oats and settle down. He is merely to settle down to sowing his wild oats. They are to be regarded as tame and inoffensive oats, almost as if one may say so, as Quakeroats. But there is no need, as I say, to speculate about whether the looser view of divorce might prevail, for it is already prevailing. The newspapers are full of an astonishing hilarity about the rapidity with which hundreds of thousands of human families are being broken up by the lawyers, and about the undisguised haste of the hustling judges who carry on the work. It is a form of hilarity which would seem to recall the gaiety of a grave-digger in a city swept by pestilence. But a few details occasionally flash by in the happy dance. Sometimes a time the court is moved by a momentary curiosity about the causes of the general violation of oats and promises, as if there might here and there be a hint of some sort of reason for ruining the fundamental institution of society. And nobody who notes these details or considers those faint hints of reason can doubt for a moment that masses of these men and women are now simply using divorce in the spirit of free love. They are very seldom the sort of people who have once fallen tragically into the wrong place and have now found their way triumphantly to the right place. They are almost always people who are obviously wandering from one place to another, and will probably leave their last shelter exactly as they have left their first. But it seems to amuse them to make again if possible in a church, a promise they have already broken in practice and almost avowedly disbelieve in principle. In face of this headlong fashion it is really reasonable to ask the divorce reformers what is their attitude toward the old monogamous ethic of our civilization, and whether they wish to retain it in general or to retain it at all. Unfortunately, even the sincerest and most lucid of them use language which leaves the matter a little doubtful. Mr. E. S. P. Haynes is one of the most brilliant and most fair-minded controversialists on that side, and he has said for instance that he agrees with me in supporting the ideal of indissoluble, or at least of undissolved, marriage. Mr. Haynes is one of the few friends of divorce who are also real friends of democracy, and I'm sure that in practice this stands for a real sympathy with the home, especially the poor home. Unfortunately, on the theoretic side the word ideal is far from being an exact term, and is open to two almost opposite interpretations. For many would say that marriage is an ideal, as some would say that monasticism is an ideal, in the sense of a council of perfection. Now certainly we might preserve a conjugial idea in this way. A man might be reverently pointed out in the street as a sort of saint, merely because he was married. A man might wear a medal for monogamy or have letters after his name similar to V.C. or D.D., let us say, L.W., for lives with his wife, or N.D.Y., for not divorced yet. We might, on entering some strange city, be struck by a stately column erected to the memory of a wife who never ran away with a soldier, or the shrine in image of a historical character who had resisted the example of the man in the new witness ballad in Bolting with the children's nurse. Such high artistic hagiology would be quite consistent with Mr. Haines' divorce reform with remarriage after three years or three hours. It would also be quite consistent with Mr. Haines' phrase about preserving an ideal of marriage. What it would not be consistent with is the perfectly plain, solid, secular, and social usefulness which I have here attributed to marriage. It does not create or preserve a natural institution, normal to the whole community, to balance the more artificial and even more arbitrary institution of the state, which is less natural even if it is equally necessary. It does not defend a voluntary association, but leaves the only claim on life, death, and loyalty with a more coercive institution. It does not stand, in the sense I have tried to explain for the principle of liberty, in short it does not do any of the things which Mr. Haines himself would especially desire to see done. For humanity to be thus spontaneously organized from below, it is necessary that the organization should be almost as universal as the official organization from above. The tyrant must find not one family but many families defying his power. He must find mankind not a dust of atoms, but fixed in solid blocks of fidelity, and those human groups must support not only themselves but each other. In this sense what some call individualism is as corporate as communism. It is a thing of volunteers, but volunteers must be soldiers. It is a defense of private persons, but we might say that the private persons must be private soldiers. The family must be recognized as well as real. Above all, the family must be recognized by the families. To expect individuals to suffer successfully for a home, apart from the home, that is for something which is an incident, but not an institution, is really a confusion between two ideas. It is a verbal sophistry almost in the nature of a pun. Similarly, for instance, we cannot prove the moral force of a peasantry by pointing to one peasant. We might almost as well reveal the military force of infantry by pointing to one infant. I take it, however, that the advocates of divorce do not mean that marriage is to remain ideal only in the sense of being almost impossible. They do not mean that a faithful husband is only to be admired as a fanatic. The reasonable men among them do really mean that a divorced person shall be tolerated as something unusually unfortunate, not merely that a married person shall be admired as something unusually blessed and inspired. But whatever they desire, it is as well that they should realize exactly what they do. And in this case I should like to hear the criticisms in the manner of what they see. They must surely see that in England at present, as in many parts of America in the past, the new liberty is being taken in the spirit of license, as if the exception were to be the rule, or rather perhaps the absence of rule. This will especially be made manifest if we consider that the effect of the process is accumulative like a snowball and returns on itself like a snowball. The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people can be separated for no reason, they will feel it all the easier to be united for no reason. A man might quite clearly foresee that a sensual infatuation would be fleeting and console himself with the knowledge that the connection could be equally fleeting. There seems no particular reason why he should not elaborately calculate that he could stand a particular lady's temper for ten months, or reckon that he could have enjoyed and exhausted her repertoire of drawing Roman songs in two years. The old joke about choosing the wife to fit the furniture or the fashions might quite logically return not as an old joke, but as a new solemnity. Indeed, it will be found that new religion is generally the return of the old joke. A man might quite consistently see a woman as suited to the period of the hobble-skirt and as less suited to the threatened recurrence of the Gryndolin. These fancies are fantastic enough, but they are not a shade more fantastic than the facts of many a divorce controversy as urged in the divorce courts. And this is to leave out altogether the most fantastic fact of all, the winking at widespread and conspicuous collusion. Collusion has become not so much an illegal evasion as a legal fiction, and even a legal institution, as it is admirably satirized in Mr. Somerset Mom's brilliant play Home in Beauty. The fact was very frankly brought before the public by a man who was imminently calculated to disarm satire by sincerity. Colonel Wedgwood is a man who can never be too much honored by all who have any hope of popular liberties, still finding champions in the midst of parliamentary corruption. He is one of the very few men alive who have shown both military and political courage, the courage of the camp and the courage of the forum, and doubtless he showed a third type of social courage in avowing the absurd expedient which so many others are content merely to accept and employ. It is admittedly a frank and farcical thing that a good man should find or think it necessary to pretend to commit a sin. Some of the divorce moralists seem to deduce from this that he ought really to commit the sin. They may possibly be aware, however, that there are some who do not agree with them. For this latter fact is the next step in the speculative progress of the new morality. The divorce advocates must be well aware that modern civilization still contains strong elements, not the least intelligent and certainly not the least vigorous, which will not accept the new respectability as a substitute for the old religious vow. The Roman Catholic Church, the Anglo-Catholic school, the conservative peasantries, and a large section of the popular life everywhere, will regard the riot of divorce and remarriage as they would any other riot of irresponsibility. The consequence would appear to be that two different standards will appear in ordinary morality and even in ordinary society. Instead of the old social distinction between those who are married and those who are unmarried, there will be a distinction between those who are married and those who are really married. Society might even become divided into two societies, which is perilously approximate to Disraeli's famous exaggeration about England divided into two nations. But whether England be actually so divided or not, this note of the two nations is the real note of warning in the matter. It is in this connection perhaps that we have to consider most gravely and doubtfully the future of our own country. Anarchy cannot last, but anarchic communities cannot last either. Mere lawlessness cannot live, but it can destroy life. The nations of the earth always return to sanity and solidarity, but the nations which return to it first are the nations which survive. We in England cannot afford to allow our social institutions to go to pieces as if this ancient and noble country were an ephemeral colony. We cannot afford it comparatively, even if we could afford it positively. We are surrounded by vigorous nations mainly rooted in the peasant or permanent ideals, notably in the case of France and Ireland. I know that the detested and detestably undemocratic parliamentary clique, which corrupts France, as it does England, was persuaded or bribed by a Jew named Naquist to pass a crude and recent divorce law which was full of the hatred of Christianity. But only a very superficial critic of France can be unaware that French parliamentarianism is superficial. The French nation as a whole, the most rigidly respectable nation in the world, will certainly go on living by the old standards of domesticity. When French men are not Christians, they are heathens, the heathens who worship the household gods. It might seem strange to say, for instance, that an atheist like Monsieur Clemenceau has, for his chief ideal, a thing called piety. But to understand this it is only necessary to know a little Latin and a little French. A short time ago, as I am well aware, it would have sounded very strange to represent the old religion and peasant communities, either as a model or a menace. It was counter to queer thing to say, in the days when my friends and I first said it, in the days of my youth, when the Republic of France and the religion of Ireland were regarded as alike, ridiculous and decadent. But many things have happened since then, and it will not now be so easy to persuade even newspaper readers that Foch is a fool, either because he is a Frenchman or because he is a Catholic. The older tradition, even in the most unfashionable forms, has found champions in the most unexpected quarters. Only the other day, Dr. Salibi, a distinguished scientific critic who had made himself the special advocate of all the instruction and organization that is called social science, startled his friends and foes alike by saying that the peasant families in the west of Ireland were far more satisfactory and successful than those brooded over by all the benevolent sociology of Bradford. He gave his testimony from an entirely rationalistic and even materialistic point of view. Indeed, he carried rationalism so far as to give the preferences to Ross Common because the women are still mammals. To a mind of the more traditional type it might seem sufficient to say that they are still mothers. To a memory that lingers over the legends and lyrical movements of mankind it might seem no great improvement to imagine a song that ran, my mammal bids me bind to my hair, or I'm to be queen of the may mammal. I'm to be queen of the may. But indeed the truth to which he testified is all the more arresting, because for him it was materialistic and not mystical. The brute biological advantage as well as other advantages was with those for whom that truth was a truth, and it was all the more instinctive and automatic where that truth was a tradition. The sort of place where mothers are still something more than mammals is the only sort of place where they are still mammals. There the people are still healthy animals, healthy enough to hit you if you call them animals. I also have on this merely controversial occasion used throughout the rationalistic and not the religious appeal. But it is not unreasonable to note that the materialistic advantages are really found among those who most repudiate materialism. The one stray testimony is but a type of a thousand things of the same kind which will convince any one with a sense of social atmosphere that the day of the peasantries is not passing but rather arriving. It is the more complex types of society that are now entangled in their own complexities. Those who tell us with a monotonous metaphor that we cannot put the clock back seem to be curiously unconscious of the fact that their own clock has stopped. And there is nothing so hopeless as a clockwork when it stops. A machine cannot mend itself, it requires a man to mend it. And the future lies with those who can make living laws for men and not merely dead laws for machinery. Those living laws are not to be found in the scatterbrained skepticism which is busy in the great cities, dissolving what it cannot analyze. The primary laws of man are to be found in the permanent life of man, in those things that have been common to it in every time and land, though in the highest civilization they have reached an enrichment like that of the divine romance of Cana in Galilee. We know that many critics of such a story say that its elements are not permanent, but indeed it is the critics who are not permanent. A hundred mad dogs of heresy have worried man from the beginning, but it was always the dog that died. We know there is a school of prigs who disapprove of the wine, and there may now be a school of prigs who disapprove of the wedding. For in such a case as the story of Cana, it may be remarked that the pedants are prejudiced against the earthly elements as much as or more than the heavenly elements. It is not the supernatural that discuss them so much as the natural. And those of us who have seen all the normal rules and relations of humanity uprooted by random speculators as if they were abnormal abuses and almost accidents, will understand why men have sought for something divine if they wish to preserve anything human. They will know why, common sense, cast out from some academy of fads and fashions conducted on the lines of a luxurious madhouse, has age after age sought refuge in the highest sanity of a sacrament. Chapter 9 Conclusion This is a pamphlet, and not a book, and the writer of a pamphlet not only deals with passing things, but generally with things which he hopes will pass. In that sense it is the object of a pamphlet to be out of date as soon as possible. It can only survive when it does not succeed. The successful pamphlets are necessarily dull, though I have no great hope of this being successful. I dare say it is dull enough for all that. It is designed merely to note certain fugitive proposals of the moment and compare them with certain recurrent necessities of the race. But especially the necessity for some spontaneous social formation freer than that of the state. If it were more in the nature of a work of literature with anything like an ambition of endurance, I might go deeper into the matter and give some suggestions about the philosophy or religion of marriage and the philosophy or religion of all these rather random departures from it. Some day perhaps I may try to write something about the spiritual or psychological quarrel between faith and fads. Here I will only say in conclusion that I believe the universal fallacy here is a fallacy of being universal. There is a sense in which it is a really human, if heroic, possibility to love everybody. And the young student will not find it a bad preliminary exercise to love somebody. But the fallacy, I mean, is that of a man who is not even content to love everybody, but really wishes to be everybody. He wishes to walk down a hundred roads at once, to sleep in a hundred houses at once, to live a hundred lives at once. To do something like this in the imagination is one of the occasional visions of art and poetry. To attempt it in the art of life is not only anarchy, but in action. Even in the arts it can only be the first hint and not the final fulfillment. A man cannot work at once in bronze and marble or play the organ and the violin at the same time. The universal vision of being such a bryarius is a nightmare of nonsense, even in the merely imaginative world, and ends in myrnillism in the social world. If a man had a hundred houses there would still be more houses than he had days in which to dream of them. If a man had a hundred wives there would still be more women than he could ever know. He would be an insane sultan, jealous of the whole human race and even of the dead and the unborn. I believe that behind the art and philosophy of our time there is a considerable element of this bottomless ambition and this unnatural hunger. And since in the last words I am touching only lightly on things that would need much larger treatment, I will admit that the rending of the ancient roof of man is probably only part of such an endless and empty expansion. I asked in the last chapter what those most wildly engaged in the mere dance of divorce, as fantastic as the dance of death, really expected for themselves or for their children. And in the deepest sense I think this is the answer that they expect the impossible. That is the universal. They are not crying for the moon, which is a definite and therefore a defensible desire. They are crying for the world, and when one had it they would want another one. In the last resort they would like to try every situation, not in fancy but in fact, but they cannot refuse any and therefore cannot resolve on any. In so far as this is the modern mood it is a thing so deadly as to be already dead. What is vitally needed everywhere in art as much as in ethics, in poetry as much as in politics is choice, a creative power in the will as well as in the mind. Without that self-limitation of somebody nothing living will ever see the light. The End of Chapter 9 The End of the Superstition of Divorce by G. K. Chesterton