WHAT is wrong with marriage, anyhow? I find myself pondering this
question so often, when reading high-class literature. I put it to
myself again the other evening, during a performance of Faust. Why could
not Faust have married the girl? I would not have married her myself for
any consideration whatsoever; but that is not the argument. Faust,
apparently, could not see anything amiss with her. Both of them were mad
about each other. Yet the idea of a quiet, unostentatious marriage with
a week’s honeymoon, say, in Vienna, followed by a neat little cottage
_orné_, not too far from Nürnberg, so that their friends could have come
out to them, never seems to have occurred to either of them.
There could have been a garden. Marguerite might have kept chickens and
a cow. That sort of girl, brought up to hard work and by no means too
well educated, is all the better for having something to do. Later, with
the gradual arrival of the family, a good, all-round woman might have
been hired in to assist. Faust, of course, would have had his study and
got to work again; that would have kept him out of further mischief. The
idea that a brainy man, his age, was going to be happy with nothing to do
all day but fool round a petticoat was ridiculous from the beginning.
Valentine—a good fellow, Valentine, with nice ideas—would have spent his
Saturdays to Monday with them. Over a pipe and a glass of wine, he and
Faust would have discussed the local politics.
He would have danced the children on his knee, have told them tales about
the war—taught the eldest boy to shoot. Faust, with a practical man like
Valentine to help him, would probably have invented a new gun. Valentine
would have got it taken up.
Things might have come of it. Sybil, in course of time, would have
married and settled down—perhaps have taken a little house near to them.
He and Marguerite would have joked—when Mrs. Sybil was not around—about
his early infatuation. The old mother would have toddled over from
Nürnberg—not too often, just for the day.
The picture grows upon one the more one thinks of it. Why did it never
occur to them? There would have been a bit of a bother with the Old Man.
I can imagine Mephistopheles being upset about it, thinking himself
swindled. Of course, if that was the reason—if Faust said to himself:
“I should like to marry the girl, but I won’t do it; it would not be fair
to the Old Man; he has been to a lot of trouble working this thing up; in
common gratitude I cannot turn round now and behave like a decent,
sensible man; it would not be playing the game”—if this was the way Faust
looked at the matter there is nothing more to be said. Indeed, it shows
him in rather a fine light—noble, if quixotic.
If, on the other hand, he looked at the question from the point of view
of himself and the girl, I think the thing might have been managed. All
one had to do in those days when one wanted to get rid of the Devil was
to show him a sword hilt. Faust and Marguerite could have slipped into a
church one morning, and have kept him out of the way with a sword hilt
till the ceremony was through. They might have hired a small boy:
“You see the gentleman in red? Well, he wants us and we don’t want him.
That is the only difference between us. Now, you take this sword, and
when you see him coming show him the hilt. Don’t hurt him; just show him
the sword and shake your head. He will understand.”
The old gentleman’s expression, when subsequently Faust presented him to
Marguerite, would have been interesting:
“Allow me, my wife. My dear, a—a friend of mine. You may remember
meeting him that night at your aunt’s.”
As I have said, there would have been ructions; but I do not myself see
what could have been done. There was nothing in the bond to the effect
that Faust should not marry, so far as we are told. The Old Man had a
sense of humour. My own opinion is that, after getting over the first
annoyance, he himself would have seen the joke. I can even picture him
looking in now and again on Mr. and Mrs. Faust. The children would be
hurried off to bed. There would be, for a while, an atmosphere of
constraint.
But the Old Man had a way with him. He would have told one or two
stories at which Marguerite would have blushed, at which Faust would have
grinned. I can see the old fellow occasionally joining the homely social
board. The children, awed at first, would have sat silent, with staring
eyes. But, as I have said, the Old Man had a way with him. Why should
he not have reformed? The good woman’s unconsciously exerted
influence—the sweet childish prattle! One hears of such things. Might
he not have come to be known as “Nunkie”?
Myself—I believe I have already mentioned it—I would not have married
Marguerite. She is not my ideal of a good girl. I never liked the way
she deceived her mother. And that aunt of hers! Well, a nice girl would
not have been friends with such a woman. She did not behave at all too
well to Sybil, either. It is clear to me that she led the boy on. And
what was she doing with that box of jewels, anyhow? She was not a fool.
She could not have gone every day to that fountain, chatted with those
girl friends of hers, and learnt nothing. She must have known that
people don’t go leaving twenty thousand pounds’ worth of jewels about on
doorsteps as part of a round game. Her own instinct, if she had been a
good girl, would have told her to leave the thing alone.
I don’t believe in these innocent people who do not know what they are
doing half their time. Ask any London magistrate what he thinks of the
lady who explains that she picked up the diamond brooch:—
“Not meaning, of course, your Worship, to take it. I would not do such a
thing. It just happened this way, your Worship. I was standing as you
might say here, and not seeing anyone about in the shop I opened the case
and took it out, thinking as perhaps it might belong to someone; and then
this gentleman here, as I had not noticed before, comes up quite suddenly
and says; ‘You come along with me,’ he says. ‘What for,’ I says, ‘when I
don’t even know you?’ I says. ‘For stealing,’ he says. ‘Well, that’s a
hard word to use to a lady,’ I says; ‘I don’t know what you mean, I’m
sure.’”
And if she had put them all on, not thinking, what would a really nice
girl have done when the gentleman came up and assured her they were hers?
She would have been thirty seconds taking them off and flinging them back
into the box.
“Thank you,” she would have said, “I’ll trouble you to leave this garden
as quickly as you entered it and take them with you. I’m not that sort
of girl.”
Marguerite clings to the jewels, and accepts the young man’s arm for a
moonlight promenade. And when it does enter into her innocent head that
he and she have walked that shady garden long enough, what does she do
when she has said good-bye and shut the door? She opens the ground-floor
window and begins to sing!
Maybe I am not poetical, but I do like justice. When other girls do
these sort of things they get called names. I cannot see why this
particular girl should be held up as an ideal. She kills her mother.
According to her own account this was an accident. It is not an original
line of defence, and we are not allowed to hear the evidence for the
prosecution. She also kills her baby. You are not to blame her for
that, because at the time she was feeling poorly. I don’t see why this
girl should have a special line of angels to take her up to heaven.
There must have been decent, hard-working women in Nürnburg more entitled
to the ticket.
Why is it that all these years we have been content to accept Marguerite
as a type of innocence and virtue? The explanation is, I suppose, that
Goethe wrote at a time when it was the convention to regard all women as
good. Anything in petticoats was virtuous. If she did wrong it was
always somebody else’s fault. _Cherchez la femme_ was a later notion.
In the days of Goethe it was always _Cherchez l’homme_. It was the man’s
fault. It was the devil’s fault. It was anybody’s fault you liked, but
not her’s.
The convention has not yet died out. I was reading the other day a most
interesting book by a brilliant American authoress. Seeing I live far
away from the lady’s haunts, I venture to mention names. I am speaking
of “Patience Sparhawk,” by Gertrude Atherton. I take this book because
it is typical of a large body of fiction. Miss Sparhawk lives a troubled
life: it puzzles her. She asks herself what is wrong. Her own idea is
that it is civilisation.
If it is not civilisation, then it is the American man or Nature—or
Democracy. Miss Sparhawk marries the wrong man. Later on she gets
engaged to another wrong man. In the end we are left to believe she is
about to be married to the right man. I should be better satisfied if I
could hear Miss Sparhawk talking six months after that last marriage.
But if a mistake has again been made I am confident that, in Miss
Sparhawk’s opinion, the fault will not be Miss Sparhawk’s. The argument
is always the same: Miss Sparhawk, being a lady, can do no wrong.
If Miss Sparhawk cared to listen to me for five minutes, I feel I could
put her right on this point.
“It is quite true, my dear girl,” I should say to her, “something is
wrong—very wrong. But it is not the American man. Never you mind the
American man: you leave him to worry out his own salvation. You are not
the girl to put him right, even where he is wrong. And it is not
civilisation. Civilisation has a deal to answer for, I admit: don’t you
load it up with this additional trouble. The thing that is wrong in this
case of yours—if you will forgive my saying so—is you. You make a fool
of yourself; you marry a man who is a mere animal because he appeals to
your animal instincts. Then, like the lady who cried out ‘Alack, I’ve
married a black,’ you appeal to heaven against the injustice of being
mated with a clown. You are not a nice girl, either in your ideas or in
your behaviour. I don’t blame you for it; you did not make yourself.
But when you set to work to attract all that is lowest in man, why be so
astonished at your own success? There are plenty of shocking American
men, I agree. One meets the class even outside America. But nice
American girls will tell you that there are also nice American men.
There is an old proverb about birds of a feather. Next time you find
yourself in the company of a shocking American man, you just ask yourself
how he got there, and how it is he seems to be feeling at home. You
learn self-control. Get it out of your head that you are the centre of
the universe, and grasp the idea that a petticoat is not a halo, and you
will find civilisation not half as wrong as you thought it.”