Chesterton on Monogamy

Chesterton (1874-1936) in Orthodoxy wrote the following on monogamy. It also speaks of marriage in beautiful terms. Chesterton references Endymion, a poem by John Keats published in 1818, which begins, "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:"

I find it interesting that people had opinions about sex back then that people who think of themselves as progressive do today. The reference to "fairy tales" below is in the context of an entire chapter by the same title which happens to be favorite for many from that book. I underlined my two favorite lines.

     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.