I never could join the young men of my time in feeling what they
called the general sentiment of REVOLT. I should have resisted,
let us hope, any rules that were evil, and with these and their
definition I shall deal in another chapter. But I did not feel
disposed to resist any rule merely because it was mysterious.
Estates are sometimes held by foolish forms, the breaking of a stick
or the payment of a peppercorn: I was willing to hold the huge
estate of earth and heaven by any such feudal fantasy. It could not
well be wilder than the fact that I was allowed to hold it at all.
At this stage I give only one ethical instance to show my meaning.
I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation
against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and
unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make
love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own
moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion's)
a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for
so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be
married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.
It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one
was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex,
but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains
that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack
of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears
in mere absence of mind. The aesthetes touched the last insane
limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things. The thistledown
made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their knees.
Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason,
that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any
sort of symbolic sacrifice. Men (I felt) might fast forty days
for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing. Men might go through fire
to find a cowslip. Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep
sober for the blackbird. They would not go through common Christian
marriage by way of recompense to the cowslip. Surely one might
pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals. Oscar Wilde said
that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets.
But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them
by not being Oscar Wilde.

Well, I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nur