John Todhunter

“ Men live too much in the sensuous, and women in the supersensuous, to meet fairly. Love, the reconciler, himself is too weak fully to reconcile them and to bring them together in that perfect ecstasy, body to body, spirit to spirit, soul to soul, that “unreserve of mingled being,” which Shelley, giving a voice to the desire of all ages, but especially to modern desire, sighed for. To understand Shelley’s protest against marriage, we must understand his ideal of love—the unconstrained rush together of two personalities of opposite sexes, in whom the body is but the vehicle of the spirit. ”

“ The kingdom of heaven was, for him, at the very doors, ready to take shape as soon as man willed it; and man would will it as soon as the mind-forged fetters of his mind were loosed. Accordingly he endeavoured to loose them. He dethroned God that the Spirit of Nature might be enthroned; and then he proceeded to abolish marriage that free love might regenerate mankind. He believed in regeneration by incantation—a few words murmured in men’s ears would make them as obedient to the ideas those sacred words represented as spirits to the spells of a magician. ”

“ No, no, my dear sir, the good of society demands fidelity to incurred responsibilities, and we find by practical experience that both men and women, but especially men, are inclined to shirk the responsibilities which indulgence of the sexual passion brings in its train. Hence the marriage contract. It does not concern itself primarily with either love or lovers, but it helps to keep husbands and wives together, and women and children maintained decently without coming upon the rates. And, mind you, it does not by any means leave love out in the cold. ”

“ He did, however, see clearly that the bringing of men and women into more complete harmony, by raising the ideal of love, was the most important step towards that renewal of the world, that living of the most perfect life attainable by man, for which he sighed and after which he strove; and he saw clearly that our solution of the marriage problem was imperfect, not merely in practice, but to some extent in theory. ”

“ He, like the socialist, thought that we might go on increasing and multiplying ad libitum, till we reached the ultimate limit of standing-room on the earth, and of miraculous chemical food out of the air, and began, as astral bodies, to emigrate to Mars. Women know better than this; and feel the pinch of population, when what they just now consider their higher life is hampered by children. ”

“ Love goes wantonly about with the Mænads of licentiousness at his heels. But the divine Logos, incarnate as the Son of man, always comes not to destroy but to fulfil.
Just now that highly moral being, Man in the masculine gender, is much shocked at the strangely immoral conduct of his feminine counterpart. In the first place, she has dared to look at the realities of things with her own eyes, not through the rose-coloured spectacles with which he has been at pains to provide her; and not only that, but to peep behind the sacred veil which man has modestly cast over many ugly things. ”

“ We may call these the masculine and feminine elements in love; though of course both exist in all love, whether of man to woman or woman to man. Both sexes give more than they receive, and receive [Pg 13] more than they give. In all love, from the first step beyond mere physical appetite, to the most transcendental Platonism, there are these two antagonistic elements. If the merely self-indulgent element prevails, we tend in the direction of lust, one of the most cruel diseases that plague humanity, which Milton rightly places “hard by hate.” ”

“ Now, of all the bitter cries ringing in the air at the present time, about the bitterest and most persistent is that not merely of women, but of woman with a capital W. It is the most appalling note of change that can pierce the ear of self-satisfied Conservatism. The patient Griselda has begun to protest against the tyranny of her lord and master. Love’s martyr has at last begun to think that her martyrdom must have its limits. ”

“ Shelley, than all the fantastic Epipsychidions you ever put upon paper. Hang it all, sir, let a man make love to his own wife, and stick to her when he has got her. I’m a plain man, sir, but I hope a moral man, and them’s my sentiments. ”

“ Abolish marriage (and what could be easier?) , and love, being set free, prostitution would cease. We may pass by such puerilities of inexperienced idealism, to be found by the score in Queen Mab, and pass on to Shelley’s more mature utterances, always remembering that he died, as the Triumph of Life shows, in the very process of maturation. His whole history is that of an idealist, who first seeks his ideal in the actual, and not finding it endeavours to bring the actual into harmony with his ideal. ”

“ The Cythnas of the present day have felt their burthens more directly than Shelley did. Hence their demand for economic independence, that they may not be forced into marriage or prostitution by the various degrees of starvation. Their demand is a just one, and must be satisfied somehow, even if we have to put a bonus upon womanhood and pay women, not merely fair wages for their work of all kinds, but a tribute to them as women, as potential mothers, which shall fairly handicap the sexes [Pg 18] in the struggle for existence, and put men more on their good behaviour. ”

“ If the merely self-renouncing, we tend in the direction of monastic chastity, which though not so distinctly an evil thing, may become cruel and inhuman, and a bar to human progress. Asceticism is not, like lust, a disease, physical and spiritual, but it may lead to disease, spiritual if not physical. There is an asceticism, the Greek ασχησις, a training of the lower faculties to act in subordination to the higher, which is the strait gate by which we enter upon the arduous ascent toward noble passion and noble action. ”

“ As regards the subjection of women, he seems to have considered this wholly an artificial product of religious dogma, and not, as it is, the natural result of an imperfect civilization. Man protects woman because, on the whole, she adds to his comfort. Protection implies subjection, and subjection to a tyrant is slavery; and man, if not altogether a tyrant in these later times, has always the temptation to become one, and the tyrannical traditions of bygone times have a strong tendency to persist. Laws and even customs lag far behind the highest public opinion of the day. ”

“ It is really in its best aspect an unselfish age, an age in which sympathy and justice are vital forces, in which the miseries of others are felt as our own. There are thousands now who feel themselves “as nerves o’er which do creep the else unfelt oppressions of the earth.” ”

“ The marriage problem is a complex one, involving many questions not very easy to answer offhand or even after much consideration. What is marriage? Of divine or human institution? For what ends was it instituted? ”

“ It has indeed been much more than Shelley [Pg 16] seems to have realized, the nidus of a love pure and wholesome, if not very passionate. Theoretically strictly monogamic, it has been so practically to a very respectable extent. It has put a perceptible curb upon the strong polygamous instinct of men, and it has fostered the monogamous habit in women enormously. English women are for the most part faithful wives. Even transitory prostitution does not kill the monogamous propensity in them. They settle down into marriage, or live faithfully with one man, if they get the chance. ”

“ Here are pure women making common cause with prostitutes, married women crying out against the holy institution of matrimony, mothers rebelling against the tyranny of the beatific baby—nay, absolutely on strike against child-bearing, or at least demanding limited liability as regards that important function. ”

“ His imagination hacks at the rude block of the world with the divine fury of a Pygmalion; thinking at first that he has but to remove the dull superfluous husks of custom to find the living idea in the centre ”

“ They must do what their employers require of them on pain of starvation, and there is no true freedom of contract. And so far men have almost without exception required of them concubinage or menial service, or a mixture of both. English marriage, while recognizing the existing fact of the subjection of women, has done something to raise their status, chiefly by making the bond between the contracting parties theoretically, and to a great extent practically, one of love and mutual service. ”

“ And the worst of it is that there are so many men, traitors to their sex, who are casting in their lot with women in this terrible Women’s Rights movement—“unsexing themselves,” too, no doubt—so that we shall all soon become either a-sexual or hermaphrodite beings! ”

“ Shelley, the mystic, who looked for a miraculous change in nature coincident with a miraculous change in man, seems to have seen, almost as little as the average socialist of the present day, who believes in the spiritual efficacy of a purely material revolution, that the ideals and interests of the two sexes are widely apart, more so now than ever before probably. ”

“ The very idea of marriage implies some kind of bond imposed by society upon the sexual relations of its members, male and female; some kind of restriction upon the absolute promiscuity and absolute instability of these relations—such restriction taking the form of a contract between individuals, endorsed by society, and enforced with more or less stringency by public opinion. ”

“ But, unfortunately, law and society are the most impertinent things in the world, always binding with briers our joys and desires, and poking their ugly noses into our private affairs in the interests of the British ratepayer. ”

“ To the present day the average man’s, or at least the average Englishman’s great temptation is to sin against love, through dull unimaginative lust, the average Englishwoman’s through dull unimaginative chastity. ”

“ Caird’s demand for greater laxity of the marriage bond ab initio, the nature of the contract being left to the contracting parties, like a marriage settlement, is quite outside the sphere of practical politics, as she is herself quite aware. If men were but educated up to the Shelleyan ideal, then we might try all sorts of delightful experiments in marriage, and gradually arrive at absolute freedom of contract, which would not mean that absolutely unsentimental hygienic promiscuity which is the ideal of the highly advanced physiologist. ”

“ Then, as civilization progressed, the wife and children became less and less the mere slaves, more and more the respected subjects, of the patriarch. The paternal instinct (like the maternal) became developed, and family affection came into existence. At present the whirligig of time is bringing its revenges. The patriarchal tyranny begins to totter; [Pg 8] parents are often more the slaves than the masters of their children. ”

“ Finally, here is Woman, whether as virgin, wife, or widow, demanding independence as to property and a fair share of the world’s goods in return for a fair share of the general work of the world outside of her special womanly functions. “D——n it, sir, I say that women are unsexing themselves—unsexing themselves, by Jove!” ”

“ And even wives begin to rebel against wifedom, and threaten to revolutionize marriage in their own interest. Woman, like everybody else, is beginning to strike for higher wages. There are more than the first mutterings of that revolution in the Golden City of Divine institutions prophesied of by Shelley in Laon and Cythna. ”

“ I trust in more delicate adjustments, a higher and more wholesome life all round; but the ascent of man is always a painful process. Meanwhile it is quite time for this bald, disjointed chat of mine to come to an end. ”

“ He does not like stray women and children going about the world. But after all, adultery is only a particular, perhaps even a minor, case of incompatibility. Marriage was made for man, and not man for marriage, and although marriage may work well in nine cases out of ten, the tenth case must be considered, and relief given if possible. ”

“ We have become very conscious of our pain, and are not ashamed to cry out and proclaim it on the house-tops in these hysterical times—simply because the ancient sanctions and anodynes have lost their sanctity and comfort for us. ”

“ He did not see that the abolition of marriage would no more get rid of lust than the abolition of private property would get rid of selfishness. We have already, in monogamic marriage, struggled painfully upward to the level of the higher animals ”

“ We cry out because, having neither the old repressions nor the old opiates to restrain us, there is no valid reason why we should hold our tongues. By crying loud enough and long enough we may get some help. We may even find some good-natured person to stop crying himself and help us ”

“ We shall never be happy until we have got rid of them—if even then, and it is quite impossible to get rid of them for some time to come. Now the British ratepayer cares nothing about women and children, except in so far as there is a danger of their coming upon the rates. ”