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 æsthetes 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