Very often, indeed, it involves not only a
confession of failure in one particular marriage but of failure for
marriage generally. One notes how often the people who fail in a first
marriage fail even more hopelessly in the second. They have chosen the
wrong partners; but one suspects that for them all partners will prove
the wrong partners. One sometimes hears nowadays that a succession of
marriage relationships is desirable in order to develop character. But
that depends on many things. It very much depends on what character
there is to develop. A man may have relationships with a hundred women
and develop much less character out of his experience, and even acquire
a much less intimate knowledge of women, than the man who has spent his
life in an endless series of adventures with one woman. It depends a
good deal on the man and not a little on the woman.
Thus the work of marriage in the world must depend entirely on the
nature of that world. A fine marriage system can only be produced by a
fine civilisation of which it is the exquisite flower. Laws cannot
better marriage; even education, by itself, is powerless, necessary as
it is in conjunction with other influences. The love-relationships of
men and women must develop freely, and with due allowance for the
variations which the complexities of civilisation demand. But these
relationships touch the whole of life at so infinite a number of points
that they cannot even develop at all save in a society that is itself
developing graciously and harmoniously.
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