ed by
_Bradshaw's Railway Guide_ or even by the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, he
would have felt at least that he might be wrong. But if he had found
himself contradicted by his father and mother, he would have thought it
all the more probable that he was right. If the issue of the last
evening paper contradicted him he might be troubled to investigate or
explain. That the human tradition of two thousand years contradicted him
did not trouble him for an instant. That Marx was not with him was
important. That Man was not with him was an irrelevant prehistoric joke.
People have talked far too much about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw.
Perhaps his only pure paradox is this almost unconscious one; that he
has tended to think that because something has satisfied generations of
men it must be untrue.

Shaw is wrong about nearly all the things one learns early in life and
while one is still simple. Most human beings start with certain facts of
psychology to which the rest of life must be somewhat related. For
instance, every man falls in love; and no man falls into free love. When
he falls into that he calls it lust, and is always ashamed of it even
when he boasts of it. That there is some connection between a love and a
vow nearly every human being knows before he is eighteen. That there is
a solid and instinctive connection between the idea of sexual ecstasy
and the idea of some sort of almost suicidal constancy, this I say is
simply the first fact in one's own psychology; boys and girls know it
almost before they know their own language. How far it can be trusted,
how it can best be dealt with, all that is another matter. But lovers
lust after constancy more than after happiness; if you are in any sense
prepared to give them what they ask, then what they ask, beyond all
question, is an oath of final fidelity. Lovers may be lunatics; lovers
may be children; lovers may be unfit for citizenship and outside human
argument; you can take up that position if you will. But lovers do not
only desire love; they desire marriage. The root of legal monogamy does
not lie (as Shaw and his friends are for ever drearily asserting) in the
fact that the man is a mere tyrant and the woman a mere slave. It lies
in the fact that _if_ their love for each other is the noblest and
freest love conceivable, it can only find its heroic expression in both
becoming slaves. I only mention this matter here as a matter which most
of us do not need to be taugh