MARRIAGE CONSIDERED AS A DISCIPLINE OF CHARACTER.
"Certainly wife and children are a kind of Discipline of
Humanity."--_Bacon._
"I well remember the bright assenting laugh which she (Mrs.
Carlyle) once responded to some words of mine, when the propriety
was being discussed of relaxing the marriage laws. I had said
that the true way to look at marriage was as a discipline of
character."--_Froude._
"Did you ever see anything so absurd as a horse sprawling like that?"
This was the hasty exclamation of a connoisseur on taking up a small
cabinet picture. "Excuse me," replied the owner, "you hold it the wrong
way: it is a horse galloping." So much depends upon the way we look at
things. In the preceding chapter we spoke of making the best of bad
matrimonial bargains. Perhaps it would help some people to do this if
they looked at marriage from a different point of view--if they
considered it as a discipline of character rather than as a short cut
to the highest heaven of happiness. Certainly this is a practical point
of view, and it may be that those who marry in this spirit are more
likely to use their matrimony rightly than those who start with
happiness as their only goal. That people get happiness by being willing
to pass it by and do without it rather than by directly pursuing it, is
as true of domestic felicity as of other kinds.
"Ven you're a married man, Samivel," says Mr. Weller to his son Sam,
"you'll understand a good many things as you don't understand now; but
vether it's worth while going through so much to learn so little, as the
charity boy said ven he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter o'
taste: I rayther think it isn't." Strange that a philosopher of the
senior Mr. Weller's profundity should underestimate in this way the
value of matrimony as a teacher. We have it on the authority of a
widower who was thrice married, that his first wife cured his romance,
the second taught him humility, and the third made him a philosopher.
Another veteran believes that five or six years of married life will
often reduce a naturally irascible man to so angelic a condition that it
would hardly be safe to trust him with a pair of wings.
Webster asks--
"What do you think of marriage?
I think, as those do who deny purgatory,
It locally contains either heaven or hell,
There is no third place in it."
Is this true? We think not, for we know many married people who live in
a third place, the existence of which is here denied. They are neither
intensely happy nor intensely miserable; but they lose many faults, and
are greatly developed in character by passing through a purgatorial
existence. Nor is this an argument against matrimony, except to those
who deny that "it is better to be seven times in the furnace than to
come out unpurified."
Sweet are the uses of this and every other adversity when these words of
Sir Arthur Helps are applicable to its victims or rather victors: "That
man is very strong and powerful who has no more hopes for himself, who
looks not to be loved any more, to be admired any more, to have any more
honour or dignity, and who cares not for gratitude; but whose sole
thought is for others, and who only lives on for them."
The young husband may imagine that he only takes a wife to add to his
own felicity; taking no account of the possibility of meeting a
disposition and temper which may, without caution, mar and blight his
own. Women are not angels, although in their ministrations they make a
near approach to them. Women, no more than men, are free from human
infirmities; the newly-married man must therefore calculate upon the
necessity of amendment in his wife as well as of that necessity in
himself. The process, however, as well as the result of the process,
will yield a rich reward. At a minister's festival meeting "Our Wives"
was one of the toasts. One of the brethren, whose wife had a temper of
her own, on being sportively asked if he would drink it, exclaimed,
"Aye, heartily; Mine brings me to my knees in prayer a dizzen times a
day, an' nane o' you can say the same o' yours."
If even bad matrimonial bargains have so much influence in disciplining
character, how much more may be learned from a happy marriage! Without
it a man or woman is "Scarce half made up." The enjoyments of celibacy,
whatever they may be, are narrow in their range, and belong to only a
portion of our nature; and whatever the excellences of the bachelor's
character, he can never attain to a perfected manhood so long as such a
large and important part of his nature as the affections for the
gratification of which marriage provides, is unexercised and
undeveloped. There are in his nature latent capabilities, both of
enjoyment and affection, which find no expression. He is lacking in
moral symmetry. The motives from which he keeps himself free from
marriage responsibilities may be worthy of the highest respect, but this
does not hinder his character from being less disciplined than it might
have been.
"For indeed I know
Of no more subtle master under heaven
Than is the maiden passion for a maid,
Not only to keep down the base in man,
But teach high thoughts and amiable words,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man."
On both sides marriage brings into play some of the purest and loftiest
feelings of which our nature is capable. The feeling of identity of
interest implied in the marriage relation--the mutual confidence which
is the natural result--the tender, chivalrous regard of the husband for
his wife as one who has given herself to him--the devotion and respect
of the wife for the husband as one to whom she has given herself--their
mutual love attracted first by the qualities seen or imagined by each in
the other, and afterwards strengthened by the consciousness of being
that object's best beloved--these feelings exert a purifying, refining,
elevating influence, and are more akin to the religious than any other
feelings. Love, like all things here, is education. It renders us wise
by expanding the soul and stimulating the mental powers.
"Yes, love indeed is light from heaven:
A spark of that immortal fire
With angels shared, by Allah given,
To lift from earth our low desire.
Devotion wafts the mind above,
But heaven itself descends in love;
A feeling from the Godhead caught,
To wean from self each sordid thought;
A ray of Him who formed the whole;
A glory circling round the soul!"
It has been well said, "The first condition of human goodness is
something to love; the second, something to reverence." Both these
conditions meet in a well-chosen alliance.
Married people may so abuse matrimony as to make it a very school for
scandal; but it may and ought to be what Sir Thomas More's home was said
to be, "a school and exercise of the Christian religion." "No wrangling,
no angry word, was heard in it; no one was idle; every one did his duty
with alacrity and not without a temperate cheerfulness." This atmosphere
of love and duty which pervaded his home must have been owing in a great
measure to the household goodness of Sir Thomas himself. For though his
first wife was all that he could have desired, his second was
ill-tempered and little capable of appreciating the lofty principles
that actuated her husband. "I have lived--I have laboured--I have loved.
I have lived in them I loved, laboured for them I loved, loved them for
whom I laboured." Well might Sir Thomas add after this reflection, "My
labour hath not been in vain;" for to say nothing of its effect upon
others, how it must have disciplined his own character!
"There is nothing," you say, "in the drudgery of domestic life to
soften." No; but, as Robertson of Brighton says, "a great deal to
strengthen with the sense of duty done, self-control, and power. Besides
you cannot calculate how much corroding rust is kept off, how much of
disconsolate, dull despondency is hindered. Daily use is not the
jeweller's mercurial polish, but it will keep your little silver pencil
from tarnishing."
"Family life," says Sainte-Beuve, "may be full of thorns and cares; but
they are fruitful: all others are dry thorns." And again: "If a man's
home at a certain period of life does not contain children, it will
probably be found filled with follies or with vices."
Even if it were a misfortune to be married, which we emphatically deny,
has not the old Roman moralist taught us that, "to escape misfortune is
to want instruction, and that to live at ease is to live in ignorance"?
Misfortune to be married? Rather not.
"Life with all it yields of joy and woe
And hope and fear....
Is just our chance o' the prize of the learning love--
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is."