Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/324

310 to be the case, for they were both very young, very passionate, very unreasonable and very excitable, and a love which springs into existence at a ball, caused by the first sight of a beautiful physical form, does not usually last through many nights, in whose morning hours it believes it hears "the nightingale and not the lark." But did not Romeo and Juliet therefore, love each other? I should like to see any one who would venture to assert this! And ought they not to have married? That would have been a deadly sin not only from the standpoint of the perfecting of the race, but also from that of romance. If their marriage would have turned out badly, this fact is no proof against their love, but it is a proof against the anthropological justification of marriage.

The truth is, that among ten thousand pairs of lovers, there is barely one in which the man and woman love each other throughout their entire lives, to the exclusion of all others, not a single couple who would invent the perpetual, single marriage to answer to their own requirement, if it did not already exist. But there are sure to be nine thousand, nine hundred, who at some period of their lives experienced a strong desire to unite themselves with a certain individual, were happy if able to gratify this desire, suffered bitterly if it remained unfulfilled, and notwithstanding feeling, the sincerity of the original, after a longer or shorter period, developed until they came to have entirely different, often diametrically opposite sentiments for the object of their former passionate affection. Have these couples the right to get married? Undoubtedly. Their union must be promoted in the interests of the race. But will a lifelong single marriage be compatible permanently with their happiness! No honest observer of real life can reply affirmatively to this question. The fact is, that man is not a monogamous animal