What's Wrong with the World
the shape of a man; but he can cut earth into the shape of a garden; and
though he arranges it with red geraniums and blue potatoes in alternate
straight lines, he is still an artist; because he has chosen. The
average man cannot paint the sunset whose colors be admires; but he can
paint his own house with what color he chooses, and though he paints it
pea green with pink spots, he is still an artist; because that is his
choice. Property is merely the art of the democracy. It means that every
man should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is
shaped in the image of heaven. But because he is not God, but only a
graven image of God, his self-expression must deal with limits; properly
with limits that are strict and even small.
I am well aware that the word “property” has been defied in our time by
the corruption of the great capitalists. One would think, to hear people
talk, that the Rothchilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of
property. But obviously they are the enemies of property; because they
are enemies of their own limitations. They do not want their own land;
but other people’s. When they remove their neighbor’s landmark, they
also remove their own. A man who loves a little triangular field ought
to love it because it is triangular; anyone who destroys the shape, by
giving him more land, is a thief who has stolen a triangle. A man with
the true poetry of possession wishes to see the wall where his garden
meets Smith’s garden; the hedge where his farm touches Brown’s. He
cannot see the shape of his own land unless he sees the edges of his
neighbor’s. It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland
should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the
negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem.
*****
VII. THE FREE FAMILY
As I have said, I propose to take only one central instance; I will take
the institution called the private house or home; the shell and organ of
the family. We will consider cosmic and political tendencies simply as
they strike that ancient and unique roof. Very few words will suffice
for all I have to say about the family itself. I leave alone the
speculations about its animal origin and the details of its social
reconstruction; I am concerned only with its palpable omnipresence. It
is a necessity far mankind; it is (if you like to put it so) a trap for
mankind. Only by the hypocritical ignoring of a huge fact can any
one contrive to talk of “free love”; as if love were an episode like
lighting a cigarette, or whistling a tune. Suppose whenever a man lit a
cigarette, a towering genie arose from the rings of smoke and followed
him everywhere as a huge slave. Suppose whenever a man whistled a tune
he “drew an angel down” and had to walk about forever with a seraph on
a string. These catastrophic images are but faint parallels to the
earthquake consequences that Nature has attached to sex; and it is
perfectly plain at the beginning that a man cannot be a free lover; he
is either a traitor or a tied man. The second element that creates
the family is that its consequences, though colossal, are gradual; the
cigarette produces a baby giant, the song only an infant seraph. Thence
arises the necessity for some prolonged system of co-operation; and
thence arises the family in its full educational sense.
It may be said that this institution of the home is the one anarchist
institution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside
the State. By its nature it is refreshed or corrupted by indefinable
forces of custom or kinship. This is not to be understood as meaning
that the State has no authority over families; that State authority
is invoked and ought to be invoked in many abnormal cases. But in most
normal cases of family joys and sorrows, the State has no mode of entry.
It is not so much that the law should not interfere, as that the law
cannot. Just as there are fields too far off for law, so there are
fields too near; as a man may see the North Pole before he sees his own
backbone. Small and near matters escape control at least as much as vast
and remote ones; and the real pains and pleasures of the family form
a strong instance of this. If a baby cries for the moon, the policeman
cannot procure the moon--but neither can he stop the baby. Creatures so
close to each other as husband and wife, or a mother and children, have
powers of making each other happy or miserable with which no public
coercion can deal. If a marriage could be dissolved every morning it
would not give back his night’s rest to a man kept awake by a curtain
lecture; and what is the good of giving a man a lot of power where he
only wants a little peace? The child must depend on the most imperfect
mother; the mother may be devoted to the most unworthy children; in such
relations legal revenges are vain. Even in the abnormal cases where
the law may operate, this difficulty is constantly found; as many a
bewildered magistrate knows. He has to save children from starvation by
taking away their breadwinner. And he often has to break a wife’s heart
because her husband has already broken her head. The State has no tool
delicate enough to deracinate the rooted habits and tangled affections
of the family; the two sexes, whether happy or unhappy, are glued
together too tightly for us to get the blade of a legal penknife in
between them. The man and the woman are one flesh--yes, even when they
are not one spirit. Man is a quadruped. Upon this ancient and anarchic
intimacy, types of government have little or no effect; it is happy or
unhappy, by its own sexual wholesomeness and genial habit, under the
republic of Switzerland or the despotism of Siam. Even a republic in
Siam would not have done much towards freeing the Siamese Twins.
The problem is not in marriage, but in sex; and would be felt under the
freest concubinage. Nevertheless, the overwhelming mass of mankind has
not believed in freedom in this matter, but rather in a more or less
lasting tie. Tribes and civilizations differ about the occasions on
which we may loosen the bond, but they all agree that there is a bond to
be loosened, not a mere universal detachment. For the purposes of this
book I am not concerned to discuss that mystical view of marriage in
which I myself believe: the great European tradition which has made
marriage a sacrament. It is enough to say here that heathen and
Christian alike have regarded marriage as a tie; a thing not normally
to be sundered. Briefly, this human belief in a sexual bond rests on a
principle of which the modern mind has made a very inadequate study. It
is, perhaps, most nearly paralleled by the principle of the second wind
in walking.
The principle is this: that in everything worth having, even in every
pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so
that the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after
the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore
of learning him; the glow of the sea-bather comes after the icy shock of
the sea bath; and the success of the marriage comes after the failure of
the honeymoon. All human vows, laws, and contracts are so many ways of
surviving with success this breaking point, this instant of potential
surrender.
In everything on this earth that is worth doing, there is a stage when
no one would do it, except for necessity or honor. It is then that the
Institution upholds a man and helps him on to the firmer ground ahead.
Whether this solid fact of human nature is sufficient to justify the
sublime dedication of Christian marriage is quite an other matter, it is
amply sufficient to justify the general human feeling of marriage as a
fixed thing, dissolution of which is a fault or, at least, an ignominy.
The essential element is not so much duration as security. Two people
must be tied together in order to do themselves justice; for twenty
minutes at a dance, or for twenty years in a marriage In both cases the
point is, that if a man is bored in the first five minutes he must go on
and force himself to be happy. Coercion is a kind of encouragement; and
anarchy (or what some call liberty) is essentially oppressive, because
it is essentially discouraging. If we all floated in the air like
bubbles, free to drift anywhere at any instant, the practical result
would be that no one would have the courage to begin a conversation. It
would be so embarrassing to start a sentence in a friendly whisper,
and then have to shout the last half of it because the other party was
floating away into the free and formless ether. The two must hold each
other to do justice to each other. If Americans can be divorced for
“incompatibility of temper” I cannot conceive why they are not all
divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one.
The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant
when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as
such, are incompatible.
*****
VIII. THE WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY
In the course of this crude study we shall have to touch on what is
called the problem of poverty, especially the dehumanized poverty
of modern industrialism. But in this primary matter of the ideal the
difficulty is not the problem of poverty, but the problem of wealth.
It is the special psychology of leisure and luxury that falsifies life.
Some experience of modern movements of the sort called “advanced” has
led me to the conviction that they generally repose upon some experience
peculiar to the rich. It is so with that fallacy of free love of which I
have already spoken; the idea of sexuality as a string of episodes. That
implies a long holiday in which to get tired of one woman, and a motor
car in which to wander looking for others; it also implies money for
maintenances. An omnibus conductor has hardly time to love his own
wife, let alone other people’s. And the success with which nuptial
estrangements are depicted in modern “problem plays” is due to the fact
that there is only one thing that a drama cannot depict--that is a
hard day’s work. I could give many other instances of this plutocratic
assumption behind progressive fads. For instance, there is a plutocratic
assumption behind the phrase “Why should woman be economically dependent
upon man?” The answer is that among poor and practical people she isn’t;
except in the sense in which he is dependent upon her. A hunter has to
tear his clothes; there must be somebody to mend them. A fisher has
to catch fish; there must be somebody to cook them. It is surely quite
clear that this modern notion that woman is a mere “pretty clinging
parasite,” “a plaything,” etc., arose through the somber contemplation
of some rich banking family, in which the banker, at least, went to the
city and pretended to do something, while the banker’s wife went to the
Park and did not pretend to do anything at all. A poor man and his
wife are a business partnership. If one partner in a firm of publishers
interviews the authors while the other interviews the clerks, is one of
them economically dependent? Was Hodder a pretty parasite clinging to
Stoughton? Was Marshall a mere plaything for Snelgrove?
But of all the modern notions generated by mere wealth the worst is
this: the notion that domesticity is dull and tame. Inside the home
(they say) is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and
variety. This is indeed a rich man’s opinion. The rich man knows that
his own house moves on vast and soundless wheels of wealth, is run by
regiments of servants, by a swift and silent ritual. On the other hand,
every sort of vagabondage of romance is open to him in the streets
outside. He has plenty of money and can afford to be a tramp. His