on under conditions involving a less prolonged
period of mutual communion and intimacy. Variations, regarded as
inevitable oscillations around the norm, are also natural, but union in
couples must always be the rule because the numbers of the sexes are
always approximately equal, while the needs of the emotional life, even
apart from the needs of offspring, demand that such unions based on mutual
attraction should be so far as possible permanent.

It must here again be repeated that it is the reality, and not
the form or the permanence of the marriage union, which is its
essential and valuable part. It is not the legal or religious
formality which sanctifies marriage, it is the reality of the
marriage which sanctifies the form. Fielding has satirized in
Nightingale, Tom Jones's friend, the shallow-brained view of
connubial society which degrades the reality of marriage to exalt
the form. Nightingale has the greatest difficulty in marrying a
girl with whom he has already had sexual relations, although he
is the only man who has had relations with her. To Jones's
arguments he replies: "Common-sense warrants all you say, but yet
you well know that the opinion of the world is so contrary to it,
that were I to marry a whore, though my own, I should be ashamed
of ever showing my face again." It cannot be said that Fielding's
satire is even yet out of date. Thus in Prussia, according to
Adele Schreiber ("Heirathsbeschraenkungen," _Die Neue Generation_,
Feb., 1909), it seems to be still practically impossible for a
military officer to marry the mother of his own illegitimate
child.

The glorification of the form at the expense of the reality of
marriage has even been attempted in poetry by Tennyson in the
least inspired of his works, _The Idylls of the King_. In
"Lancelot and Elaine" and "Guinevere" (as Julia Magruder points
out, _North American Review_, April, 1905) Guinevere is married
to King Arthur, whom she has never seen, when already in love
with Lancelot, so that the "marriage" was merely a ceremony, and
not a real marriage (cf., May Child, "The Weird of Sir Lancelot,"
_North American Review_, Dec., 1908).

It may seem to some that so conservative an estimate of the tendencies of
civilization in matters of sexual love is due to a timid adherence to mere
tradition. That is not the case. We have to recognize