Yet centuries only exist on paper, and after having made them ourselves, we adore and freely elect them to be our tyrants; only to deride the poor savages who, like us, make their own gods of wood and stone, fall on their knees before them and fear them.
And we fear numbers—only another idol of thought, made for our use and necessity, and in the similitude of our wretchedness and intellectual weakness.
For my part I only see around me an infinite continuity of things and of time, nor do I allow myself to be overawed by the cabal of numbers, with which we ought to amuse ourselves as with a pack of cards, esteeming them for what they are worth; a poor example of a thing yet poorer!
The dying century, fin de siècle, and all such sensational phrases, which are intended to express a great deal, because they mean nothing—these exclamations, the eloquence of the non-eloquent, move me little, if at all. I look back and see a yesterday; I look around and see a to-day; forward and I see a to-morrow; the three tenses of the to become, which have no numbers, nor will ever have. For they succeed each other unceasingly, following the mighty strides of our journey, not with the figures of a century, but with a regret that becomes a hope, and will be a faith; to be succeeded again and forever by regret, hope, and faith—unceasingly.
I wished to write this in the first pages of my book to let you know that if I attempt to delineate marriage in modern society I renounce the dying century, the fin de siècle, and all such effective phrases, which would give me, based on numbers, so many resources of rhetoric and sentimentality. I have hated and always shall hate all forms of tyranny, including that of numbers. I look around and say, this is the way men marry to-day. They do so because they are sons of a yesterday, which is the father of to-day; then I look forward and hope that to-morrow will be better than yesterday or to-day, and I endeavour to promote the good as quickly as possible and with a minimum of pain, by my pen, my experience, and my studies, cito tute et jucunde, as Celsus has it.
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In our civilized society, marriage is the least evil of all the different modes of union between man and woman for the preservation of the race. It is the result of many historic evolutions, many sensual, moral, religious, and legislative elements, which have come into conflict with each other in the course of time.
Remote atavism of the ravishment of the female, holy words of inspired prophets, imperiousness of feudatories, avarice of usurers, transports of love and heroism of hearts, have all left something of their own upon the altar of matrimony. But before the sacrament was finished and the priest sent up the fumes of his incense, animal man came leering and saying:
“This is my affair. I am the sole and true priest of this rite. I am the only minister of this religion.” And mixing the divine and human vows on the altar with his hairy hands—perhaps, too, with his tail—he formed a chaos of things most opposite, from the highest to the lowest, from the most sublime to the most ignoble. And this, then, is marriage.