MARRIAGE
The beautiful saying of Newton, that he felt like a child who had been
picking up a few pebbles on the shore of the great ocean of undiscovered
truth, may well occur to any writer who attempts to say something on the
vast subject of marriage. The infinite variety of circumstances and
characters affects it in infinitely various ways, and all that can here
be done is to collect a few somewhat isolated and miscellaneous remarks
upon it. Yet it is a subject which cannot be omitted in a book like
this. In numerous cases it is the great turning-point of a life, and in
all cases when it takes place it is one of the most important of its
events. Whatever else marriage may do or fail to do, it never leaves a
man unchanged. His intellect, his character, his happiness, his way of
looking on the world, will all be influenced by it. If it does not raise
or strengthen him it will lower or weaken. If it does not deepen
happiness it will impair it. It brings with it duties, interests,
habits, hopes, cares, sorrows, and joys that will penetrate into every
fissure of his nature and modify the whole course of his life.
It is strange to think with how much levity and how little knowledge a
contract which is so indissoluble and at the same time so momentous is
constantly assumed; sometimes under the influence of a blinding passion
and at an age when life is still looked upon as a romance or an idyll;
sometimes as a matter of mere ambition and calculation, through a desire
for wealth or title or position. Men and women rely on the force of
habit and necessity to accommodate themselves to conditions they have
never really understood or realised.
In most cases different motives combine, though in different degrees.
Sometimes an overpowering affection for the person is the strongest
motive and eclipses all others. Sometimes the main motive to marriage is
a desire to be married. It is to obtain a settled household and
position; to be relieved from the 'unchartered freedom' and the 'vague
desires' of a lonely life; to find some object of affection; to acquire
the steady habits and the exemption from household cares which are
essential to a career; to perpetuate a race; perhaps to escape from
family discomforts, or to introduce a new and happy influence into a
family. With these motives a real affection for a particular person is
united, but it is not of such a character as to preclude choice,
judgment, comparison, and a consideration of worldly advantages.
It is a wise saying of Swift that there would be fewer unhappy marriages
in the world if women thought less of making nets and more of making
cages. The qualities that attract, fascinate, and dazzle are often
widely different from those which are essential to a happy marriage.
Sometimes they are distinctly hostile to it. More frequently they
conduce to it, but only in an inferior or subsidiary degree. The turn of
mind and character that makes the accomplished flirt is certainly not
that which promises best for the happiness of a married life; and
distinguished beauty, brilliant talents, and the heroic qualities that
play a great part in the affairs of life, and shine conspicuously in the
social sphere, sink into a minor place among the elements of married
happiness. In marriage the identification of two lives is so complete
that it brings every faculty and gift into play, but in degrees and
proportions very different from public life or casual intercourse and
relations. The most essential are often wanting in a brilliant life, and
are largely developed in lives and characters that rise little, if at
all, above the commonplace. In the words of a very shrewd man of the
world: 'Before marriage the shape, the figure, the complexion carry all
before them; after marriage the mind and character unexpectedly claim
their share, and that the largest, of importance.'[68]
The relation is one of the closest intimacy and confidence, and if the
identity of interest between the two partners is not complete, each has
an almost immeasurable power of injuring the other. A moral basis of
sterling qualities is of capital importance. A true, honest, and
trustworthy nature, capable of self-sacrifice and self-restraint, should
rank in the first line, and after that a kindly, equable, and contented
temper, a power of sympathy, a habit of looking at the better and
brighter side of men and things. Of intellectual qualities, judgment,
tact, and order are perhaps the most valuable. Above almost all things,
men should seek in marriage perfect sanity, and dread everything like
hysteria. Beauty will continue to be a delight, though with much
diminished power, but grace and the charm of manner will retain their
full attraction to the last. They brighten in innumerable ways the
little things of life, and life is mainly made up of little things,
exposed to petty frictions, and requiring small decisions and small
sacrifices. Wide interests and large appreciations are, in the marriage
relation, more important than any great constructive or creative talent,
and the power to soothe, to sympathise, to counsel, and to endure, than
the highest qualities of the hero or the saint. It is by these alone
that the married life attains its full measure of perfection.
'Tu mihi curarum requies, tu nocte vel atrâ
Lumen, et in solis tu mihi turba locis.'[69]
But while this is true of all marriages, it is obvious that different
professions and circumstances of life will demand different qualities. A
hard-working labouring man, or a man who, though not labouring with his
hands, is living a life of poverty and struggle, will not seek in
marriage a type of character exactly the same as a man who is born to a
great position, and who has large social and administrative duties to
discharge. The wife of a clergyman immersed in the many interests of a
parish; the wife of a soldier or a merchant, who may have to live in
many lands, with long periods of separation from her husband, and
perhaps amid many hardships; the wife of an active and ambitious
politician; the wife of a busy professional man incessantly occupied
outside his home; the wife of a man whose health or business or habits
keep him constantly in his house, will each need some special qualities.
There are few things in which both men and women naturally differ more
than in the elasticity and adaptiveness of their natures, in their power
of bearing monotony, in the place which habit, routine, and variety hold
in their happiness; and in different kinds of life these things have
very different degrees of importance. Special family circumstances, such
as children by a former marriage, or difficult and delicate relations
with members of the family of one partner, will require the exercise of
special qualities. Such relations, indeed, are often one of the most
searching and severe tests of the sterling qualities of female
character.
Probably, on the whole, the best presumption of a successful choice in
marriage will be found where the wife has not been educated in
circumstances or ideas absolutely dissimilar from those of her married
life. Marriages of different races or colours are rarely happy, and the
same thing is true of marriages between persons of social levels that
are so different as to entail great differences of manners and habits.
Other and minor disparities of circumstances between girl life and
married life will have their effect, but they are less strong and less
invariable. Some of the happiest marriages have been marriages of
emancipation, which removed a girl from uncongenial family surroundings,
and placed her for the first time in an intellectual and moral
atmosphere in which she could freely breathe. At the same time, in the
choice of a wife, the character, circumstances, habits, and tone of the
family in which she has been brought up will always be an important
element. There are qualities of race, there are pedigrees of character,
which it is never prudent to neglect. Franklin quotes with approval the
advice of a wise man to choose a wife 'out of a bunch,' as girls brought
up together improve each other by emulation, learn mutual self-sacrifice
and forbearance, rub off their angularities, and are not suffered to
develop overweening self-conceit. A family where the ruling taste is
vulgar, where the standard of honour is low, where extravagance and
self-indulgence and want of order habitually prevail, creates an
atmosphere which it needs a strong character altogether to escape. There
is also the great question of physical health. A man should seek in
marriage rather to raise than to depress the physical level of his
family, and above all not to introduce into it grave, well-ascertained
hereditary disease. Of all forms of self-sacrifice hardly any is at once
so plainly right and so plainly useful as the celibacy of those who are
tainted with such disease.
There is no subject on which religious teachers have dwelt more than
upon marriage and the relation of the sexes, and it has been continually
urged that the propagation of children is its first end. It is strange,
however, to observe how almost absolutely in the popular ethics of
Christendom such considerations as that which I have last mentioned have
been neglected. If one of the most responsible things that a man can do
is to bring a human being into the world, one of his first and most
obvious duties is to do what he can to secure that it shall come into
the world with a sound body and a sane mind. This is the best
inheritance that parents can leave their children, and it is in a large
degree within their reach. Immature marriage, excessive child-bearing,
marriages of near relations, and, above all, marriages with some grave
hereditary physical or mental disease or some great natural defect, may
bring happiness to the parents, but can scarcely fail to entail a
terrible penalty upon their children. It is clearly recognised that one
of the first duties of parents to their children is to secure them in
early life not only good education, but also, as far as is within their
power, the conditions of a healthy being. But the duty goes back to an
earlier stage, and in marriage the prospects of the unborn should never
be forgotten. This is one of the considerations which in the ethics of
the future is likely to have a wholly different place from any that it
has occupied in the past.
A kindred consideration, little less important and almost equally
neglected in popular teaching, is that it is a moral offence to bring
children into the world with no prospect of being able to provide for
them. It is difficult to exaggerate the extent to which the neglect of
these two duties has tended to the degradation and unhappiness of the
world.
The greatly increased importance which the Darwinian theory has given to
heredity should tend to make men more sensible of the first of these
duties. In marriage there are not only reciprocal duties between the two
partners; there are also, more than in any other act of life, plain
duties to the race. The hereditary nature of insanity and of some forms
of disease is an indisputable truth. The hereditary transmission of
character has not, it is true, as yet acquired this position; and there
is a grave schism on the subject in the Darwinian school. But that it
exists to some extent few close observers will doubt, and it is in a
high degree probable that it is one of the most powerful moulding
influences of life. No more probable explanation has yet been given of
the manner in which human nature has been built up, and of the various
instincts and tastes with which we are born, than the doctrine that
habits and modes of thought and feeling indulged in and produced by
circumstances in former generations have gradually become innate in the
race, and exhibit themselves spontaneously and instinctively and quite
independently of the circumstances that originally produced them.
According to this theory the same process is continually going on. Man
has slowly emerged from a degraded and bestial condition. The pressure
of long-continued circumstances has moulded him into his special type;
but new feelings and habits, or modifications of old feelings and
habits, are constantly passing not only into his life but into his
nature, taking root there, and in some degree at least reproducing
themselves by the force of heredity in the innate disposition of his
offspring. If this be true, it gives a new and terrible importance both
to the duty of self-culture and to the duty of wise selection in
marriage. It means that children are likely to be influenced not only by
what we do and by what we say, but also by what we are, and that the
characters of the parents in different degrees and combinations will
descend even to a remote posterity.
It throws a not less terrible light upon the miscalculations of the
past. On this hypothesis, as Mr. Galton has truly shown, it is scarcely
possible to exaggerate the evil which has been brought upon the world by
the religious glorification of celibacy and by the enormous development
and encouragement of the monastic life. Generation after generation,
century after century, and over the whole wide surface of Christendom,
this conception of religion drew into a sterile celibacy nearly all who
were most gentle, most unselfish, most earnest, studious, and religious,
most susceptible to moral and intellectual enthusiasm, and thus
prevented them from transmitting to posterity the very qualities that
are most needed for the happiness and the moral progress of the race.
Whenever the good and evil resulting from different religious systems
come to be impartially judged, this consideration is likely to weigh
heavily in the scale.[70]
Returning, however, to the narrower sphere of particular marriages, it
may be observed that although full confidence, and, in one sense,
complete identification of interests, are the characteristics of a
perfect marriage, this does not by any means imply that one partner
should be a kind of duplicate of the other. Woman is not a mere weaker
man; and the happiest marriages are often those in which, in tastes,
character, and intellectual qualities, the wife is rather the complement
than the reflection of her husband. In intellectual things this is
constantly shown. The purely practical and prosaic intellect is united
with an intellect strongly tinged with poetry and romance; the man whose
strength is in facts, with the woman whose strength is in ideas; the man
who is wholly absorbed in science or politics or economical or
industrial problems and pursuits, with a woman who possesses the talent
or at least the temperament of an artist or musician. In such cases one
partner brings sympathies or qualities, tastes or appreciations or kinds
of knowledge in which the other is most defective; and by the close and
constant contact of two dissimilar types each is, often insensibly, but
usually very effectually, improved. Men differ greatly in their
requirements of intellectual sympathy. A perfectly commonplace
intellectual surrounding will usually do something to stunt or lower a
fine intelligence, but it by no means follows that each man finds the
best intellectual atmosphere to be that which is most in harmony with
his own special talent.
To many, hard intellectual labour is an eminently isolated thing, and
what they desire most in the family circle is to cast off all thought of
it. I have known two men who were in the first rank of science, intimate
friends, and both of them of very domestic characters. One of them was
accustomed to do nearly all his work in the presence of his wife, and in
the closest possible co-operation with her. The other used to
congratulate himself that none of his family had his own scientific
tastes, and that when he left his work and came into his family circle
he had the rest of finding himself in an atmosphere that was entirely
different. Some men of letters need in their work constant stimulus,
interest, and sympathy. Others desire only to develop their talent
uncontrolled, uninfluenced, and undisturbed, and with an atmosphere of
cheerful quiet around them.
What is true of intellect is also in a large degree true of character.
Two persons living constantly together should have many tastes and
sympathies in common, and their characters will in most cases tend to
assimilate. Yet great disparities of character may subsist in marriage,
not only without evil but often with great advantage. This is especially
the case where each supplies what is most needed in the other. Some
natures require sedatives and others tonics; and it will often be found
in a happy marriage that the union of two dissimilar natures stimulates
the idle and inert, moderates the impetuous, gives generosity to the
parsimonious and order to the extravagant, imparts the spirit of caution
or the spirit of enterprise which is most needed, and corrects, by
contact with a healthy and cheerful nature, the morbid and the
desponding.
Marriage may also very easily have opposite effects. It is not
unfrequently founded on the sympathy of a common weakness, and when this
is the case it can hardly fail to deepen the defect. On the whole,
women, in some of the most valuable forms of strength--in the power of
endurance and in the power of perseverance--are at least the equals of
men. But weak and tremulous nerves, excessive sensibility, and an
exaggerated share of impulse and emotion, are indissolubly associated
with certain charms, both of manner and character, which are intensely
feminine, and to many men intensely attractive. When a nature of this
kind is wedded to a weak or a desponding man, the result will seldom be
happiness to either party, but with a strong man such marriages are
often very happy. Strength may wed with weakness or with strength, but
weakness should beware of mating itself with weakness. It needs the oak
to support the ivy with impunity, and there are many who find the
constant contact of a happy and cheerful nature the first essential of
their happiness.
As it is not wise or right that either partner in marriage should lose
his or her individuality, so it is right that each should have an
independent sphere of authority. It is assumed, of course, that there is
the perfect trust which should be the first condition of marriage and
also a reasonable judgment. Many marriages have been permanently marred
because the woman has been given no independence in money matters and is
obliged to come for each small thing to her husband. In general the less
the husband meddles in household matters, or the wife in professional
ones, the better. The education of very young children of both sexes,
and of girls of a mature age, will fall almost exclusively to the wife.
The education of the boys when they have emerged from childhood will be
rather governed by the judgment of the man. Many things will be
regulated in common; but the larger interests of the family will usually
fall chiefly to one partner, the smaller and more numerous ones to the
other.
On such matters, however, generalisations have little value, as
exceptions are very numerous. Differences of character, age, experience,
and judgment, and countless special circumstances, will modify the
family type, and it is in discovering these differences that wisdom in
marriage mainly consists. The directions in which married life may
influence character are also very many; but in the large number of cases
in which it brings with it a great weight of household cares and family
interests it will usually be found with both partners, but especially
with the woman, at once to strengthen and to narrow unselfishness. She
will live very little for herself, but very exclusively for her family.
On the intellectual side such marriages usually give a sounder judgment
and a wider knowledge of the world rather than purely intellectual
tastes. It is a good thing when the education which precedes marriage
not only prepares for the duties of the married life, but also furnishes
a fair share of the interests and tastes which that state will probably
tend to weaken. The hard battle of life, and the anxieties and sorrows
that a family seldom fails to bring, will naturally give an increased
depth and seriousness to character. There are, however, natures which,
though they may be tainted by no grave vice, are so incurably frivolous
that even this education will fail to influence them. As Emerson says,
'A fly is as untameable as a hyæna.'
The age that is most suited for marriage is also a matter which will
depend largely on individual circumstances. The ancients, as is well
known, placed it, in the case of the man, far back, and they desired a
great difference of age between the man and the woman. Plato assigned
between thirty and thirty-five, and Aristotle thirty-seven, as the best
age for a man to marry, while they would have the girls married at
eighteen or twenty.[71] In their view, however, marriage was looked
upon very exclusively from the side of the man and of the State. They
looked on it mainly as the means of producing healthy citizens, and it
was in their eyes almost wholly dissociated from the passion of love.
Montaigne, in one of his essays, has expounded this view with the
frankest cynicism.[72] Yet few things are so important in marriage as
that the man should bring into it the freshness and the purity of an
untried nature, and that the early poetry and enthusiasm of life should
at least in some degree blend with the married state. Nor is it
desirable that a relation in which the formation of habits plays so
large a part should be deferred until character has lost its
flexibility, and until habits have been irretrievably hardened.
On the other hand there are invincible arguments against marriages
entered into at an age when neither partner has any real knowledge of
the world and of men. Only too often they involve many illusions and
leave many regrets. Some kinds of knowledge, such as that given by
extended travel, are far more easily acquired before than after
marriage. Usually very early marriages are improvident marriages, made
with no sufficient provision for the children, and often they are
immature marriages, bringing with them grave physical evils. In those
cases in which a great place or position is to be inherited, it is
seldom a good thing that the interval of age between the owner and his
heir should be so small that inheritance will probably be postponed till
the confines of old age.
Marriages entered into in the decline of life stand somewhat apart from
others, and are governed by other motives. What men chiefly seek in them
is a guiding hand to lead them gently down the last descent of life.
On this, as on most subjects connected with marriage, no general or
inflexible rule can be laid down. Moralists have chiefly dilated on the
dangers of deferred marriages; economists on the evils of improvident
marriages. Each man's circumstances and disposition must determine his
course. On the whole, however, in most civilised countries the
prevailing tendencies are in the direction of an increased postponement
of marriage. Among the rich, the higher standard of luxury and
requirements, the comforts of club life, and also, I think, the
diminished place which emotion is taking in life, all lead to this,
while the spread of providence and industrial habits among the poor has
the same tendency.
A female pen is so much more competent than a masculine one for dealing
with marriage from the woman's point of view that I do not attempt to
enter on that field. It is impossible, however, to overlook the marked
tendency of nineteenth-century civilisation to give women, both married
and unmarried, a degree of independence and self-reliance far exceeding
that of the past. The legislation of most civilised countries has
granted them full protection for their property and their earnings,
increased rights of guardianship over their children, a wider access to
professional life, and even a very considerable voice in the management
of public affairs; and these influences have been strengthened by great
improvement in female education, and by a change in the social tone
which has greatly extended their latitude of independent action. For my
own part, I have no doubt that this movement is, on the whole,
beneficial, not only to those who have to fight a lonely battle in life,
but also to those who are in the marriage state. Larger interests, wider
sympathies, a more disciplined judgment, and a greater power of
independence and self-control naturally accompany it; and these things
can never be wholly wasted. They will often be called into active
exercise by the many vicissitudes of the married life. They will,
perhaps, be still more needed when the closest of human ties is severed
by the great Divorce of Death.
FOOTNOTES:
[68] _Melbourne Papers_, p. 72.
[69] Tibullus.
[70] Galton's _Hereditary Genius_, pp. 357-8. It may be argued, on the
other side, that the monasteries consigned to celibacy a great
proportion of the weaker physical natures, who would otherwise have left
sickly children behind them. This, and the much greater mortality of
weak infant life, must have strengthened the race in an age when
sanitary science was unknown and when external conditions were very
unfavourable.
[71] _Republic_, Book V. _Politics_, Book VII.
[72] _Livre_ III. Ch. 5.