The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage.  It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject.  They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves.  They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words—­’free-love’—­as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.  It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.  Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-flavoured grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens, as the record of his highest moment.  They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants.

In Mr. Bernard Shaw’s brilliant play ‘The Philanderer,’ we have a vivid picture of this state of things.  Charteris is a man perpetually endeavouring to be a free-lover, which is like endeavouring to be a married bachelor or a white negro.  He is wandering in a hungry search for a certain exhilaration which he can only have when he has the courage to cease from wandering.  Men knew better than this in old times—­in the time, for example, of Shakespeare’s heroes.  When Shakespeare’s men are really celibate they praise the undoubted advantages of celibacy, liberty, irresponsibility, a chance of continual change.  But they were not such fools as to continue to talk of liberty when they were in such a condition that they could be made happy or miserable by the moving of someone else’s eyebrow.  Suckling classes love with debt in his praise of freedom.

  ’And he that’s fairly out of both
  Of all the world is blest. 
  He lives as in the golden age,
  When all things made were common;
  He takes his pipe, he takes his glass,
  He fears no man or woman.’

This is a perfectly possible, rational and manly position.  But what have lovers to do with ridiculous affectations of fearing no man or woman?  They know that in the turning of a hand the whole cosmic engine to the remotest star may become an instrument of music or an instrument of torture.  They hear a song older than Suckling’s, that has survived a hundred philosophies.  ’Who is this that looketh out of the window, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners?’