The Tyranny of Shams

by Joseph McCabe

English people are proud of their national concern for purity, yet they tolerate, and their priests defend as something sacred, a state of law which is medieval in its crudeness and barbarity. When two people have obeyed our counsel to marry early, and they discover that they have misjudged each other, we tell them that there is no relief for them unless they commit adultery: which, when it is committed, we brand as the darkest sin. To the husband we give the further injunction that he must be cruel to his wife before we will release him. We then, although we take especial pride in the “cleanness” of our press and literature, print whole columns about their conduct in suspicious situations,—sometimes entitling the account, in large type, to attract attention, “A Horrible Case,”—and we ask each other whether England is not in a state of decay and contracting the continental spirit. If there are any who do not choose to commit adultery, or do not choose to have their servants bribed to describe their conduct for the entertainment of the public, we grant them a legal permit to be happy and vicious, or miserable and virtuous, for the remainder of their lives: the thing we call a judicial separation.

This extraordinary situation is certainly a slight improvement on indissoluble marriage, but the pride of our bishops and puritans in it is peculiar. One may not expect them to take into account the suffering which hundreds of thousands endure under the law, but the adultery to which it leads would seem to be a proper subject for their consideration. As a rule, they entreat us to maintain religion, whether it be true or no, in the name of morality: here they ask us to maintain immorality in the name of religion,—in the name of a supposed Christian precept,—and we obey even more readily. When a Royal Commission recommends that our law be brought into line with the law of other civilised nations, they burn with indignation and inspire a Minority Report: a remarkable mixture of contradictions, worthless quotations, and irrelevant rhetoric. The question of immorality they shirk; and to the unhappiness which large numbers of our people endure under the present law they are so insensitive that they hardly mention it.

Such consequences are to be expected as long as we borrow our social legislation from an ancient polygamous nation with a great disdain for women. It is said, however, as usual, that our social interest coincides with the supposed command of Christ. We have here one of the most singular confusions of the whole controversy. Marriage is held to be the foundation of the State, because it is believed to be the surest way to supply it with citizens. This duty of procreation is, in fact, the only feature which disposes priests to give their blessing to so distasteful a thing as sexual union. Yet when a majority of the Commissioners recommend that people should be free to remarry if the desertion, cruelty, insanity, or imprisonment of one spouse defrauds the State of its supply of little citizens, the bishops raise their crosiers. Even so ascetic and anti-feminist a divine as St. Augustine could not deny that a man had a right to take a concubine when his wife proved sterile. Our divines speak much more fervently than St. Augustine did of our social interest, yet they forbid us to consult it.

In sum, we have generally rejected the view that marriage ought to be indissoluble, and we pride ourselves on curbing the influence of priests; but our whole attitude toward divorce is shaped by the old superstition and the clergy. In the name of that superstition we condemn large numbers of our fellow-citizens to live in deep and acute misery. Which of our social interests would be prejudiced by granting relief to the man or woman whose life is embittered by the desertion, incurable insanity, cruelty, or criminal conduct of his or her partner? The suggestion is preposterous; and, if we do not grant this relief, adultery is in their case a venial offence, if not a right.

Some explain that they fear “the thin edge of the wedge.” As if wedges had a way of pressing deeper by their own weight, once we have admitted them! If England chooses to grant these reforms, and no others, she need not be deterred by empty phrases. But I believe that the alert and resolute race which is coming will go much further than this. Before many generations, if not in ours, there will be divorce for incompatibility of temperament in every civilised country. Men and women will be divorced, after due delay, because they wish, or when one of them can show grave cause to separate from the other. Ill-informed people express a concern about the children or the social consequences. They do not take the trouble to inquire what happens in some of the American States, or in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland, where there is long and ample experience of divorce by mutual consent. The social consequences are just what any unprejudiced person would expect: happier homes, and more healthily engendered and reared children. But the puritan does not want to inquire: he is not sincere. Would he agree to divorce by mutual consent where there are no children or where either or both parents make adequate provision for them? He would not. I will, however, return later to the question of children.

Europe will be far happier when some such humane law as the Danish is generally adopted, and, after a few years’ separation, the discontented are free to remarry. But no one who is acquainted with the tendency and influence of modern literature can fancy that this will be the last state of the old ideal of the family. From the first years when men were free to declare their opinions without fear of the stake, writers of great power have claimed the right of what has come to be called “free love.” Some would abolish marriage, but the normal shape of the demand is that men and women shall be free to love and beget children whether or no they ask the blessing of Church or State. By the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Goethe took a concubine on the pagan model, many of the first literary men in Europe pressed this demand, and it is sustained by some of the most brilliant writers in every country to-day. The movement exhibits the slow and steady growth characteristic of reforms which eventually triumph. It is no mere bubble on the surface of our effervescent life; it is the new intelligence of the race examining the old traditions.

Moralists, lay and clerical, have a preposterous way of representing this as a surging of selfish passion against the barriers which human experience or superhuman wisdom has erected. There is, it is true, much in our rebellious literature itself which misrepresents the movement. You get the impression that, as the eighteenth century questioned the divine right of kings and the nineteenth century that of priests, the twentieth century is challenging the divine right of moralists. But this is due to the common practice of giving a narrow meaning to the word “immorality.” Goethe and Swinburne became zealous for “morality,” but they never altered their opinions on “free love.” Sudermann and Anatole France and Pérez Galdós and d’Annunzio, G. B. Shaw and T. Hardy and E. Carpenter and H. G. Wells, are sincere moralists: they inculcate honour, truthfulness, kindliness, and justice as firmly as our bishops, and more effectively than most of our clergy. It is not morality that stands at the bar. The real question is whether any sound moral principle implies that marriage alone sanctions sex-union: whether social good or social evil would result from an alteration of our standards.

This is a quite natural and legitimate question, and any healthy-minded person ought to be able to discuss it without hysteria or vituperation. Christian moralists have made some very grave mistakes during the last thousand years. Humility and disdain of the flesh were for centuries extolled by them as the supreme virtues: cruelty was classified as a venial offence. Already the bulk of our divines reject the virtue of asceticism, and they forbear to press on the modern world the kind of humility which turns the other cheek, or the other pocket, to the hooligan. They discover that social justice has been singularly neglected by their predecessors, and they begin to suspect that war or sweating may be worse than unbelief or Sabbath-breaking. It is not at all unnatural to inquire whether there may not also be some element of error in their sex-ethic.

We do not go far in such an inquiry before our suspicion is confirmed. The evolution of the virtue of chastity may some day be traced by a cold scientific investigator, and in its earlier stages it will prove extremely interesting. It is primarily connected with an ancient superstition or “tabu” in regard to sex-life: the kind of primitive and unreasoning feeling which once drove women to the temples of Ishtar in parts of the East, and still survives, baldly and ludicrously, in the “purification” process to which a recent mother must submit in the Roman and Anglican Churches. This old idea that there was something “unclean” or mysterious about sex-life, was more or less discarded when men passed out of the barbaric stage, but it quite evidently survived in part in the virtue of purity. A man or woman, it was thought, had a certain mystic superiority if he or she did not use the organs of sex. Hence the widespread veneration of Vestal Virgins, Pythagorean and Serapean recluses, priestesses of Isis, Aztec and Christian nuns. I call attention particularly to the notion that these celibates were in some sense superior to their fellows, because it shows clearly the connection with the older idea of a mystic uncleanness about sex. There is, of course, no rational ground for this superstition, though even philosophers have entertained it. There is a large and elegant literature about it, from the Enneads of Plotinus to Bulwer Lytton’s Zanoni or the works of Miss Corelli.

Most of us see quite clearly the barbaric strain lingering in this admiration of virginity, but we do not perceive how far our virtue of purity is a compromise with this ancient superstition. I mean that, together with sound elements which I will discuss presently, the sentiment of purity or chastity retained a good deal of the old irrational view of sex. Luther boldly attacked the theoretical asceticism of the medieval Church, but in the end Protestantism compromised with the old tradition. This again is quite plainly seen when we reflect on the way in which Church people, and many of our modern mystics and feminists, breathe the word “lust.” It means merely pleasure in sexual intercourse, but it has to be mentioned as rarely as possible, and with downcast eyes and an air of very distinct disapproval. The impression is conveyed that it is a thing invented by the devil, but reluctantly permitted by the Almighty because the race had to be maintained. The blessing of the Church made it a barely permissible luxury. We have only to reflect that “lust” does not mean unwedded love, but sexual pleasure or desire under any conditions, to recognise the trail of the old tabu over the whole range of these sentiments.