It is necessary to make allowance for variations, thereby shunning the extreme theorists who insist on moulding all facts to their theories, but we may conclude that—as the approximately equal number of the sexes indicates—in the human species, as among many of the higher animals, a more or less permanent monogamy has on the whole tended to prevail. That is a fact of great significance in its implications. For we have to realize that we are here in the presence of a natural fact. Sexual relationships, in human as in animal societies, follow a natural law, oscillating on each side of the norm, and there is no place for the theory that that law was imposed artificially. If all artificial "laws" could be abolished the natural order of the sexual relationships would continue to subsist substantially as at present. Virtue, said Cicero, is but Nature carried out to the utmost. Or, as Holbach put it, arguing that our institutions tend whither Nature tends, "art is only Nature acting by the help of the instruments she has herself made." Shakespeare had already seen much the same truth when he said that the art which adds to Nature "is an art that Nature makes." Law and religion have buttressed monogamy; it is not based on them but on the needs and customs of mankind, and these constitute its completely adequate sanctions.[[313]] Or, as Cope put it, marriage is not the creation of law but the law is its creation.[[314]] Crawley, again, throughout his study of primitive sex relationships, emphasizes the fact that our formal marriage system is not, as so many religious and moral writers once supposed, a forcible repression of natural impulses, but merely the rigid crystallization of those natural impulses, which in a more fluid form have been in human nature from the first. Our conventional forms, we must believe, have not introduced any elements of value, while in some respects they have been mischievous.
It is necessary to bear in mind that the conclusion that monogamic marriage is natural, and represents an order which is in harmony with the instincts of the majority of people, by no means involves agreement with the details of any particular legal system of monogamy. Monogamic marriage is a natural biological fact, alike in many animals and in man. But no system of legal regulation is a natural biological fact. When a highly esteemed alienist, Dr. Clouston, writes (The Hygiene of Mind, p. 245) "there is only one natural mode of gratifying sexual nisus and reproductive instinct, that of marriage," the statement requires considerable exegesis before it can be accepted, or even receive an intelligible meaning, and if we are to understand by "marriage" the particular form and implications of the English marriage law, or even of the somewhat more enlightened Scotch law, the statement is absolutely false. There is a world of difference, as J. A. Godfrey remarks (The Science of Sex, 1901, p. 278), between natural monogamous marriage and our legal system; "the former is the outward expression of the best that lies in the sexuality of man; the latter is a creation in which religious and moral superstitions have played a most important part, not always to the benefit of individual and social health."
We must, therefore, guard against the tendency to think that there is anything rigid or formal in the natural order of monogamy. Some sociologists would even limit the naturalness of monogamy still further. Thus Tarde ("La Morale Sexuelle," Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, Jan., 1907), while accepting as natural under present conditions the tendency for monogamy, mitigated by more or less clandestine concubinage, to prevail over all other forms of marriage, considers that this is not due to any irresistible influence, but merely to the fact that this kind of marriage is practiced by the majority of people, including the most civilized.
With the acceptance of the tendency to monogamy we are not at the end of sexual morality, but only at the beginning. It is not monogamy that is the main thing, but the kind of lives that people lead in monogamy. The mere acceptance of a monogamic rule carries us but a little way. That is a fact which cannot fail to impress itself on those who approach the questions of sex from the psychological side.
If monogamy is thus firmly based it is unreasonable to fear, or to hope for, any radical modification in the institution of marriage, regarded, not under its temporary religious and legal aspects but as an order which appeared on the earth even earlier than man. Monogamy is the most natural expression of an impulse which cannot, as a rule, be so adequately realized in full fruition under conditions involving a less prolonged period of mutual communion and intimacy. Variations, regarded as inevitable oscillations around the norm, are also natural, but union in couples must always be the rule because the numbers of the sexes are always approximately equal, while the needs of the emotional life, even apart from the needs of offspring, demand that such unions based on mutual attraction should be so far as possible permanent.
It must here again be repeated that it is the reality, and not the form or the permanence of the marriage union, which is its essential and valuable part. It is not the legal or religious formality which sanctifies marriage, it is the reality of the marriage which sanctifies the form. Fielding has satirized in Nightingale, Tom Jones's friend, the shallow-brained view of connubial society which degrades the reality of marriage to exalt the form. Nightingale has the greatest difficulty in marrying a girl with whom he has already had sexual relations, although he is the only man who has had relations with her. To Jones's arguments he replies: "Common-sense warrants all you say, but yet you well know that the opinion of the world is so contrary to it, that were I to marry a whore, though my own, I should be ashamed of ever showing my face again." It cannot be said that Fielding's satire is even yet out of date. Thus in Prussia, according to Adele Schreiber ("Heirathsbeschränkungen," Die Neue Generation, Feb., 1909), it seems to be still practically impossible for a military officer to marry the mother of his own illegitimate child.
The glorification of the form at the expense of the reality of marriage has even been attempted in poetry by Tennyson in the least inspired of his works, The Idylls of the King. In "Lancelot and Elaine" and "Guinevere" (as Julia Magruder points out, North American Review, April, 1905) Guinevere is married to King Arthur, whom she has never seen, when already in love with Lancelot, so that the "marriage" was merely a ceremony, and not a real marriage (cf., May Child, "The Weird of Sir Lancelot," North American Review, Dec., 1908).
It may seem to some that so conservative an estimate of the tendencies of civilization in matters of sexual love is due to a timid adherence to mere tradition. That is not the case. We have to recognize that marriage is firmly held in position by the pressure of two opposing forces. There are two currents in the stream of our civilization: one that moves towards an ever greater social order and cohesion, the other that moves towards an ever greater individual freedom. There is real harmony underlying the apparent opposition of these two tendencies, and each is indeed the indispensable complement of the other. There can be no real freedom for the individual in the things that concern that individual alone unless there is a coherent order in the things that concern him as a social unit. Marriage in one of its aspects only concerns the two individuals involved; in another of its aspects it chiefly concerns society. The two forces cannot combine to act destructively on marriage, for the one counteracts the other. They combine to support monogamy, in all essentials, on its immemorial basis.
It must be added that in the circumstances of monogamy that are not essential there always has been, and always must be, perpetual transformation. All traditional institutions, however firmly founded on natural impulses, are always growing dead and rigid at some points and putting forth vitally new growths at other points. It is the effort to maintain their vitality, and to preserve their elastic adjustment to the environment, which involves this process of transformation in non-essentials.
The only way in which we can fruitfully approach the question of the value of the transformations now taking place in our marriage-system is by considering the history of that system in the past. In that way we learn the real significance of the marriage-system, and we understand what transformations are, or are not, associated with a fine civilization. When we are acquainted with the changes of the past we are enabled to face more confidently the changes of the present.