It is customary for the self-righteous moralists who puff themselves
into a state of Jingo complacency over the failings of foreign
nations, to declare with considerable unction that the domestic
hearth, which every Frenchman habitually tramples upon, is maintained
in unviolated purity in every British household. The rude shocks which
Mr. Justice BUTT occasionally administers to the national conscience
are readily forgotten, and the chorus of patriotic adulation is
stimulated by the visits which the British censor finds it necessary
to pay (in mufti) to the courts of wickedness in continental capitals.
It may be that among our unimaginative race the lack of virtue is
not presented in the gaudy trappings that delight our neighbours. Our
wickedness is coarser and less attractive. It gutters like a cheap
candle when contrasted with the steady brilliancy of the Parisian
article. Public opinion, too, holds amongst us a more formidable lash,
and wields it with a sterner and more frequent severity. But it is
impossible to deny that our society, however strict its professed code
may be, can and does produce examples of those lapses from propriety
which the superficial public deems to be typically and exclusively
continental. Not only are they produced, but their production and
their continuance are tolerated by a certain class, possibly limited,
but certainly influential.
[Illustration]
Amongst these examples, both of lapse and of toleration, the Tolerated
Husband holds a foremost place. Certain conditions are necessary
for his proper production. He must be not only easy-going, but
unprincipled,--unprincipled, that is, rather in the sense of having
no particular principles of any kind than in that of possessing
and practising notoriously bad ones. He must have a fine contempt
for steady respectability, and an irresistible inclination to that
glittering style of untrammelled life which is believed by those who
live it to be the true Bohemianism. He should be weak in character,
he may be pleasant in manner and appearance, and he must be both poor
and extravagant. If to these qualities be added, first a wife, young,
good-looking, and in most respects similar to her husband, though of
a stronger will, and secondly a friend, rich, determined, strictly
unprincipled, and thoroughly unscrupulous, the conditions which
produce the Tolerated Husband may be said to be complete.
The Tolerated Husband may have been at one time an officer in a good
regiment. Having married, he finds that his pay, combined with a
moderate private income, and a generous allowance of indebtedness, due
to the gratification of expensive tastes, is insufficient to maintain
him in that position of comfort to which he conceives himself to be
entitled. He therefore abandons the career of arms, and becomes one of
those who attempt spasmodically to redeem commercial professions from
the taint of mere commercialism by becoming commercial themselves.
It is certain that the gilded society which turns up a moderately
aristocratic nose at trade and tradesmen, looks with complete
indulgence upon an ex-officer who dabbles in wine, or associates
himself with a new scheme for the easy manufacture of working-men's
boots. An agency to a Fire and Life Assurance Society is, of course,
above reproach, and the Stock Exchange, an institution which, in the
imagination of reckless fools, provides as large a cover as charity,
is positively enviable--a reputation which it owes to the fancied ease
with which half-a-crown is converted into one hundred thousand pounds
by the mere stroke of an office pen.
The Tolerated Husband tries all these methods, one after another, with
a painful monotony of failure in each. Yet, somehow or other, he still
keeps up appearances, and manages to live in a certain style not far
removed from luxury. He entertains his friends at elaborate dinners,
both at home and at expensive restaurants; he is a frequent visitor at
theatres, where he often pays for the stalls of many others as well as
for his own. He takes a small house in the country, and fills it with
guests, to whom he offers admirable wines, and excellent cigars. His
wife is always beautifully dressed, and glitters with an array of
jewels which make her the envy of many a steady leader of fashion.
The world begins to ask, vaguely at first, but with a constantly
increasing persistence, how the thing is done. Respectability and
malice combine to whisper a truthful answer. Starting from the axiom
that the precarious income which is produced by a want of success in
many branches of business cannot support luxury or purchase diamonds,
they arrive, _per saltum_, at the conclusion that there must be some
third party to provide the wife and the husband with means for their
existence. His name is soon fixed upon, and his motives readily
inferred. It can be none other than the husband's rich bachelor
friend, the same who accompanies the pair on all their expeditions,
who is a constant guest at their house, and is known to be both lavish
and determined in the prosecution of any object on which he has set
his heart. His heart, in this instance, is set upon his friend's wife,
and the obstacles in his way do not seem to be very formidable. The
case, indeed, is soon too manifest for any one but a born idiot to
feign ignorance of it. The husband is not a born idiot--he either sees
it plainly, or (it may be, after a struggle) he looks another way,
and resigns himself to the inevitable. For inevitable it is, if he is
to continue in that life of indolence and extravagant comfort which
habit has made a necessity for him. So he submits to the constant
companionship of a third party, and, in order to be truly tolerated
in his own household, becomes tolerant in a manner that is almost
sublime. He allows his friend to help him with large subventions of
money; he lets him cover his wife with costly jewels. He is content
to be supplanted without fuss, provided the supplanter never decreases
the stream of his benevolence; and the supplanter, having more wealth
than he knows what to do with, is quite content to secure his object
on such extremely easy terms. And thus the Tolerated Husband is
created.
It is curious to notice how cheerfully, to all outward appearance, he
accepts what other men would consider a disaster. Before the world
he carries his head high with an assumption of genial frankness and
easy good temper. "Come and dine with us to-morrow, my boy," he will
say to an old acquaintance, "there'll only be yourself and a couple
of others besides ourselves. We'll go to the play afterwards." And
the acquaintance will most certainly discover, if he accepts the
invitation, that the "ourselves" included not only husband and wife,
but friend as well. He will also notice that the last is even more at
home in the house, and speaks in a tone of greater authority than the
apparent host. Everything is referred to him for decision, and the
master of the house treats him with a deferential humility which goes
far to contradict the cynical observation that there is no gratitude
on earth. The Tolerated Husband, indeed, never tires of dispensing
hospitality at the cost of his friend, and though the whole world
knows the case, there will never be a lack of guests to accept what
is offered.
At last, however, in spite of his toleration, he becomes an
encumbrance in his own house, and, like most encumbrances, he has to
be paid off, the friend providing the requisite annual income. One
after another he puts off the last remaining rags of his pretended
self-respect. He haunts his Clubs less and less frequently, and seems
to wither under the open dislike of those who are repelled by the
mean and sordid details of his despicable story. And thus he drags on
his life, a degraded and comparatively impoverished outcast, untidy,
haggard and shunned, having forfeited by the restriction of his
spending powers even the good-natured contempt of those who were
not too proud to be at one time mistaken for his friends.
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