Now, no doubt this accounts for a good deal of anti-Shelleyan
prejudice: a prejudice so deeply rooted in our habits that, as I
have shewn in my play, men who are bolder freethinkers than
Shelley himself can no more bring themselves to commit adultery
than to commit any common theft, whilst women who loathe sex
slavery more fiercely than Mary Wollstonecraft are unable to face
the insecurity and discredit of the vagabondage which is the
masterless woman's only alternative to celibacy. But in spite of
all this there is a revolt against marriage which has spread so
rapidly within my recollection that though we all still assume the
existence of a huge and dangerous majority which regards the least
hint of scepticism as to the beauty and holiness of marriage as
infamous and abhorrent, I sometimes wonder why it is so difficult
to find an authentic living member of this dreaded army of
convention outside the ranks of the people who never think about
public questions at all, and who, for all their numerical weight
and apparently invincible prejudices, accept social changes to-day
as tamely as their forefathers accepted the Reformation under
Henry and Edward, the Restoration under Mary, and, after Mary's
death, the shandygaff which Elizabeth compounded from both
doctrines and called the Articles of the Church of England.
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