broached on all sides tending to impair the old respect for the marriage-tie. And much, very much, depends on the answer we give to them being dictated-not by the passion for being upto-date, as the phrase goes, for being in the van of contemporary thought; nor yet by what I must call the craven fear of being dubbed Philistine or reactionary-but by the simple, single-eyed desire for truth, and truth only. "Is it only inbred custom that revolts in me"-have we not all said it?" against this modern tendency to make light of marriage and the family, or is it something higher and better?"—Yes, believe me, it is something higher and better; it is the enlightened, the developed conscience of humanity recoiling from a false trend of thought, from a degenerate impulse at enmity with society, with progress, with civilisation, with the facts of life. It is the heart which will not have its affection degraded, knowing that to exchange legal marriage for mere voluntary unions, mere temporary partnerships, would be, not to set love free, but to give love its death-blow by divorcing it from that higher human element which is the note, as I said just now, of marriage rightly understood, and which places regard for order, regard for offspring, regard for the common weal above personal interest, and the mere selfish gratification of the moment.

"I forbid the Banns," by Mr Frankfort Moore, turns on much the same pivot as "The New

་

Antigone." Again the heroine is an enthusiastic, quixotic girl who objects to the shackles of wedlock and holds that any form of contract or of outward ceremony derogates from the dignity of the spiritual union. Again the man withstands her madness, as it seems to him, while he may, surrendering his own judgment only lest a worse fate befall her. We are not very clearly told how Mr Frankfort Moore's Bertha, the in all other respects sensible and womanly colonial beauty, came by her extremely "advanced" views, but if she has not Hippolyta's excuse for her waywardness, she has all Hippolyta's native purity and high-mindedness, and shares her instinctive horror of the state of matters which the reduction of their utopian theories to practice would infallibly bring about. With her, love and a lifelong constancy are synonymous terms. "Were we not married in spirit the first hour we met," she says to Julian Charlton, her lover, “ nay, were our souls not wedded from the instant they breathed the same air of this world, just as they were in that past existence of our souls of which we remember nothing? . . . . . Why should you hurt me by talking about our marriage as if it were something in the future? We are already wedded as indissolubly-nay, far more indissolubly than if the Archbishop were to give us his benison-sell us his benison, I should rather say; for I believe your special license is an article of commerce."

• .. •

Again, "It is the world and the prejudices of society that have led to the expulsion of everything that is spiritual and the cherishing of everything that is material. Marriage, according to society, is a social contract. Some good people call it a sacred, religious contract; others maintain that it is a purely civil matter—all agree however that it is a social contract; and all agree in the absolute necessity for having the machinery of the Divorce Court in good working order." Bertha's naïve schemes for converting society to her views would be mirth-provoking, if they did not border so closely on the tragic. "We shall get some well-known clergyman-a bishop, if necessary . . . to come and stay with us for a while, and we will convince him that it is possible for people to live a proper-nay, a noble life, if they only love one another truly as we do, Julian. We will show all the world that love is the foundation of all good on earth-not marriage."

The momentous experiment is made, only, of course, to end in disaster, the rock upon which the ménage is finally wrecked, after many storms and heartburnings, being jealousy, a passion, which, according to the author, is very much more liable to be engendered in the free union than in the married state. There is no real occasion for it in the case of Charlton and Bertha, but they quickly make each other so miserable

ertha leaves him, and we presently find him that, "if she has not . . . found out

that the sort of life we were leading . . . is

founded on an error. if she has not learned that it develops one's worst and not one's best nature, it is better that we should never meet again."

Bertha ends by recanting, somewhat illogically, from the point of view of her own theories, for, her main objection to marriage being the property in the wife which she supposes it to confer, it is odd that she should not regard this sense of lega ownership as an incentive to rather than as a cure for jealousy. Logically, her rejoinder should have been couched in some such terms as these: "For me to become your chattel, or if you will, for us each to become the other's property, is no remedy for evils which would scarcely exist but for this very notion of property, of exclusive possession. We are jealous, therefore we no longer trust, therefore we no longer love, therefore we should part, and, if we choose, mate again." Luckily for her, however, Bertha is not logical. Her heart, truer than her head, carries the day, and she surrenders and marries her lover, not for any sufficient reason that we can discover, but because her woman's instincts have proved more convincing than a whole arsenal of reasons.

On the whole the book is a blow on the right side in the discussion, though it could be wished that the author's standpoint had been rather less that of expediency and more that of principle. He takes what may be summed up in a word as the man-of-the-world view of marriage, and the

24

Marriage Questions

man-of-the-world's view of anything, although often a shrewd, is never a very penetrating, nor a very profound one. Mr Moore looks on marriage as a useful, nay an indispensable social safeguard, -not as the noblest factor in the highest civilisation of man. Sometimes it is merely a "prejudice." "If they meant to live among decent people," Charlton opines, "they must conform to the mode of life and the prejudices of decent people.' Repeatedly he alludes to marriage as a matter of social policy, a convenience, a convention, which you must accept or come to grief socially. And this is a mental attitude which does not go very far in moral crises, in such a moral crisis as the present, when the old props are falling, the old sanctions crumbling, and the cry goes forth once more, as so often before in many a religious crisis: If the foundations be destroyed the foundations of conduct, of morality, upon which our homes are built, upon which our hearts repose-what can the righteous do?

A mere appeal to the expediency of a legal contract to satisfy the shallow prejudices of a shallow society will never answer that question. The crying need of the day, the imperative demand of all serious thinkers who have reflected on sex questions at all is the re-instatement of marriage upon its old religious basis, though in a wider sense than the sacerdotalists ever knew, than Dante even ever dreamed-a sense which embraces all the discoveries of modern science and