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OVERRULED
OVERRULED GEORGE BERNARD SHAW THE ALLEVIATIONS OF MONOGAMY.
This piece is not an argument for or against polygamy. It is a
clinical study of how the thing actually occurs among quite
ordinary people innocent of all unconventional views concerning
it. The enormous majority of cases in real life are those of
people in that position. Those who deliberately and
conscientiously profess what are oddly called advanced views by
those others who believe them to be retrograde are often and
indeed mostly the last people in the world to engage in
unconventional adventures of any kind not only because they have
neither time nor disposition for them but because the friction
set up between the individual and the community by the expression
of unusual views of any sort is quite enough hindrance to the
heretic without being complicated by personal scandals. Thus the
theoretic libertine is usually a person of blameless family life
whilst the practical libertine is mercilessly severe on all other
libertines and excessively conventional in professions of social
principle.
What is more these professions are not hypocritical: they are
for the most part quite sincere. The common libertine like the
drunkard succumbs to a temptation which he does not defend and
against which he warns others with an earnestness proportionate
to the intensity of his own remorse. He (or she) may be a liar
and a humbug pretending to be better than the detected
libertines and clamoring for their condign punishment; but this
is mere self-defence. No reasonable person expects the burglar to
confess his pursuits or to refrain from joining in the cry of
Stop Thief when the police get on the track of another burglar.
If society chooses to penalize candor it has itself to thank if
its attack is countered by falsehood. The clamorous virtue of the
libertine is therefore no more hypocritical than the plea of Not
Guilty which is allowed to every criminal. But one result is that
the theorists who write most sincerely and favorably about
polygamy know least about it; and the practitioners who know most
about it keep their knowledge very jealously to themselves. Which
is hardly fair to the practice.
INACCESSIBILITY OF THE FACTS.
Also it is impossible to estimate its prevalence. A practice to
which nobody confesses may be both universal and unsuspected
just as a virtue which everybody is expected under heavy
penalties to claim may have no existence. It is often assumed--
indeed it is the official assumption of the Churches and the
divorce courts that a gentleman and a lady cannot be alone
together innocently. And that is manifest blazing nonsense
though many women have been stoned to death in the east and
divorced in the west on the strength of it. On the other hand
the innocent and conventional people who regard the gallant
adventures as crimes of so horrible a nature that only the most
depraved and desperate characters engage in them or would listen
to advances in that direction without raising an alarm with the
noisiest indignation are clearly examples of the fact that most
sections of society do not know how the other sections live.
Industry is the most effective check on gallantry. Women may as
Napoleon said be the occupation of the idle man just as men are
the preoccupation of the idle woman; but the mass of mankind is
too busy and too poor for the long and expensive sieges which the
professed libertine lays to virtue. Still wherever there is
idleness or even a reasonable supply of elegant leisure there is
a good deal of coquetry and philandering. It is so much
pleasanter to dance on the edge of a precipice than to go over it
that leisured society is full of people who spend a great part of
their lives in flirtation and conceal nothing but the
humiliating secret that they have never gone any further. For
there is no pleasing people in the matter of reputation in this
department: every insult is a flattery; every testimonial is a
disparagement: Joseph is despised and promoted Potiphar's wife
admired and condemned: in short you are never on solid ground
until you get away from the subject altogether. There is a
continual and irreconcilable conflict between the natural and
conventional sides of the case between spontaneous human
relations between independent men and women on the one hand and
the property relation between husband and wife on the other not
to mention the confusion under the common name of love of a
generous natural attraction and interest with the murderous
jealousy that fastens on and clings to its mate (especially a
hated mate) as a tiger fastens on a carcase. And the confusion is
natural; for these extremes are extremes of the same passion; and
most cases lie somewhere on the scale between them and are so
complicated by ordinary likes and dislikes by incidental wounds
to vanity or gratifications of it and by class feeling that A
will be jealous of B and not of C and will tolerate infidelities
on the part of D whilst being furiously angry when they are
committed by E.
THE CONVENTION OF JEALOUSY
That jealousy is independent of sex is shown by its intensity in
children and by the fact that very jealous people are jealous of
everybody without regard to relationship or sex and cannot bear
to hear the person they "love" speak favorably of anyone under
any circumstances (many women for instance are much more
jealous of their husbands' mothers and sisters than of unrelated
women whom they suspect him of fancying); but it is seldom
possible to disentangle the two passions in practice. Besides
jealousy is an inculcated passion forced by society on people in
whom it would not occur spontaneously. In Brieux's Bourgeois aux
Champs the benevolent hero finds himself detested by the
neighboring peasants and farmers not because he preserves game
and sets mantraps for poachers and defends his legal rights over
his land to the extremest point of unsocial savagery but
because being an amiable and public-spirited person he refuses
to do all this and thereby offends and disparages the sense of
property in his neighbors. The same thing is true of matrimonial
jealousy; the man who does not at least pretend to feel it and
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