The marriage of a first-rate man, when it takes place at all, commonly
takes place relatively late. He may succumb in the end, but he is
almost always able to postpone the disaster a good deal longer than the
average poor clodpate, or normal man. If he actually marries early, it
is nearly always proof that some intolerable external pressure has been
applied to him, as in Shakespeare’s case, or that his mental
sensitiveness approaches downright insanity, as in Shelley’s. This
fact, curiously enough, has escaped the observation of an otherwise
extremely astute observer, namely Havelock Ellis. In his study of
British genius he notes the fact that most men of unusual capacities
are the sons of relatively old fathers, but instead of exhibiting the
true cause thereof, he ascribes it to a mysterious quality whereby a
man already in decline is capable of begetting better offspring than
one in full vigour. This is a palpable absurdity, not only because it
goes counter to facts long established by animal breeders, but also
because it tacitly assumes that talent, and hence the capacity for
transmitting it, is an acquired character, and that this character may
be transmitted. Nothing could be more unsound. Talent is not an
acquired character, but a congenital character, and the man who is born
with it has it in early life quite as well as in later life, though Its
manifestation may have to wait. James Mill was yet a young man when his
son, John Stuart Mill, was born, and not one of his principle books had
been written. But though the “Elements of Political Economy” and the
“Analysis of the Human Mind” were thus but vaguely formulated in his
mind, if they were actually so much as formulated at all, and it was
fifteen years before he wrote them, he was still quite able to transmit
the capacity to write them to his son, and that capacity showed itself,
years afterward, in the latter’s “Principles of Political Economy” and
“Essay on Liberty.”
But Ellis’ faulty inference is still based upon a sound observation, to
wit, that the sort of man capable of transmitting high talents to a son
is ordinarily a man who does not have a son at all, at least in
wedlock, until he has advanced into middle life. The reasons which
impel him to yield even then are somewhat obscure, but two or three of
them, perhaps, may be vaguely discerned. One lies in the fact that
every man, whether of the first-class or of any other class, tends to
decline in mental agility as he grows older, though in the actual range
and profundity of his intelligence he may keep on improving until he
collapses into senility. Obviously, it is mere agility of mind, and not
profundity, that is of most value and effect in so tricky and deceptive
a combat as the duel of sex. The aging man, with his agility gradually
withering, is thus confronted by women in whom it still luxuriates as a
function of their relative youth. Not only do women of his own age
aspire to ensnare him, but also women of all ages back to adolescence.
Hence his average or typical opponent tends to be progressively younger
and younger than he is, and in the end the mere advantage of her youth
may be sufficient to tip over his tottering defences. This, I take it,
is why oldish men are so often intrigued by girls in their teens. It is
not that age calls maudlinly to youth, as the poets would have it; it
is that age is no match for youth, especially when age is male and
youth is female. The case of the late Henrik Ibsen was typical. At
forty Ibsen was a sedate family man, and it is doubtful that he ever so
much as glanced at a woman; all his thoughts were upon the composition
of “The League of Youth,” his first social drama. At fifty he was
almost as preoccupied; “A Doll’s House” was then hatching. But at
sixty, with his best work all done and his decline begun, he succumbed
preposterously to a flirtatious damsel of eighteen, and thereafter,
until actual insanity released him, he mooned like a provincial actor
in a sentimental melodrama. Had it not been, indeed, for the fact that
he was already married, and to a very sensible wife, he would have run
off with this flapper, and so made himself publicly ridiculous.
Another reason for the relatively late marriages of superior men is
found, perhaps, in the fact that, as a man grows older, the
disabilities he suffers by marriage tend to diminish and the advantages
to increase. At thirty a man is terrified by the inhibitions of
monogamy and has little taste for the so-called comforts of a home; at
sixty he is beyond amorous adventure and is in need of creature ease
and security. What he is oftenest conscious of, in these later years,
is his physical decay; he sees himself as in imminent danger of falling
into neglect and helplessness. He is thus confronted by a choice
between getting a wife or hiring a nurse, and he commonly chooses the
wife as the less expensive and exacting. The nurse, indeed, would
probably try to marry him anyhow; if he employs her in place of a wife
he commonly ends by finding himself married and minus a nurse, to his
confusion and discomfiture, and to the far greater discomfiture of his
heirs and assigns. This process is so obvious and so commonplace that I
apologize formally for rehearsing it. What it indicates is simply this:
that a man’s instinctive aversion to marriage is grounded upon a sense
of social and economic self-sufficiency, and that it descends into a
mere theory when this self-sufficiency disappears. After all, nature is
on the side of mating, and hence on the side of marriage, and vanity is
a powerful ally of nature. If men, at the normal mating age, had half
as much to gain by marriage as women gain, then, all men would be as
ardently in favour of it as women are.