I.

WITH the single exception of Falstaff, all Shakespeare’s characters are

what we call marrying men. Mercutio, as he was own cousin to Benedick

and Biron, would have come to the same end in the long run. Even Iago

had a wife, and, what is far stranger, he was jealous. People like

Jacques and the Fool in _Lear_, although we can hardly imagine they would

ever marry, kept single out of a cynical humour or for a broken heart,

and not, as we do nowadays, from a spirit of incredulity and preference

for the single state. For that matter, if you turn to George Sand’s

French version of _As You Like It_ (and I think I can promise you will

like it but little), you will find Jacques marries Celia just as Orlando

marries Rosalind.

At least there seems to have been much less hesitation over marriage in

Shakespeare’s days; and what hesitation there was was of a laughing sort,

and not much more serious, one way or the other, than that of Panurge.

In modern comedies the heroes are mostly of Benedick’s way of thinking,

but twice as much in earnest, and not one quarter so confident. And I

take this diffidence as a proof of how sincere their terror is. They

know they are only human after all; they know what gins and pitfalls lie

about their feet; and how the shadow of matrimony waits, resolute and

awful, at the cross-roads. They would wish to keep their liberty; but if

that may not be, why, God’s will be done! “What, are you afraid of

marriage?” asks Cécile, in _Maître Guerin_. “Oh, mon Dieu, non!” replies

Arthur; “I should take chloroform.” They look forward to marriage much

in the same way as they prepare themselves for death: each seems

inevitable; each is a great Perhaps, and a leap into the dark, for which,

when a man is in the blue devils, he has specially to harden his heart.

That splendid scoundrel, Maxime de Trailles, took the news of marriages

much as an old man hears the deaths of his contemporaries. “C’est

désespérant,” he cried, throwing himself down in the arm-chair at Madame

Schontz’s; “c’est désespérant, nous nous marions tous!” Every marriage

was like another gray hair on his head; and the jolly church bells seemed

to taunt him with his fifty years and fair round belly.

The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and

cannot find it in our hearts either to marry or not to marry. Marriage

is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age. The friendships of

men are vastly agreeable, but they are insecure. You know all the time

that one friend will marry and put you to the door; a second accept a

situation in China, and become no more to you than a name, a

reminiscence, and an occasional crossed letter, very laborious to read; a

third will take up with some religious crotchet and treat you to sour

looks thence-forward. So, in one way or another, life forces men apart

and breaks up the goodly fellowships for ever. The very flexibility and

ease which make men’s friendships so agreeable while they endure, make

them the easier to destroy and forget. And a man who has a few friends,

or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth),

cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by

a stroke or two of fate—a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped

paper, a woman’s bright eyes—he may be left, in a month, destitute of

all. Marriage is certainly a perilous remedy. Instead of on two or

three, you stake your happiness on one life only. But still, as the

bargain is more explicit and complete on your part, it is more so on the

other; and you have not to fear so many contingencies; it is not every

wind that can blow you from your anchorage; and so long as Death

withholds his sickle, you will always have a friend at home. People who

share a cell in the Bastile, or are thrown together on an uninhabited

isle, if they do not immediately fall to fisticuffs, will find some

possible ground of compromise. They will learn each other’s ways and

humours, so as to know where they must go warily, and where they may lean

their whole weight. The discretion of the first years becomes the

settled habit of the last; and so, with wisdom and patience, two lives

may grow indissolubly into one.

But marriage, if comfortable, is not at all heroic. It certainly narrows

and damps the spirits of generous men. In marriage, a man becomes slack

and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being. It

is not only when Lydgate misallies himself with Rosamond Vincy, but when

Ladislaw marries above him with Dorothea, that this may be exemplified.

The air of the fireside withers out all the fine wildings of the

husband’s heart. He is so comfortable and happy that he begins to prefer

comfort and happiness to everything else on earth, his wife included.

Yesterday he would have shared his last shilling; to-day “his first duty

is to his family,” and is fulfilled in large measure by laying down

vintages and husbanding the health of an invaluable parent. Twenty years

ago this man was equally capable of crime or heroism; now he is fit for

neither. His soul is asleep, and you may speak without constraint; you

will not wake him. It is not for nothing that Don Quixote was a bachelor

and Marcus Aurelius married ill. For women, there is less of this

danger. Marriage is of so much use to a woman, opens out to her so much

more of life, and puts her in the way of so much more freedom and

usefulness, that, whether she marry ill or well, she can hardly miss some

benefit. It is true, however, that some of the merriest and most genuine

of women are old maids; and that those old maids, and wives who are

unhappily married, have often most of the true motherly touch. And this

would seem to show, even for women, some narrowing influence in

comfortable married life. But the rule is none the less certain: if you

wish the pick of men and women, take a good bachelor and a good wife.

I am often filled with wonder that so many marriages are passably

successful, and so few come to open failure, the more so as I fail to

understand the principle on which people regulate their choice. I see

women marrying indiscriminately with staring burgesses and ferret-faced,

white-eyed boys, and men dwell in contentment with noisy scullions, or

taking into their lives acidulous vestals. It is a common answer to say

the good people marry because they fall in love; and of course you may

use and misuse a word as much as you please, if you have the world along

with you. But love is at least a somewhat hyperbolical expression for

such luke-warm preference. It is not here, anyway, that Love employs his

golden shafts; he cannot be said, with any fitness of language, to reign

here and revel. Indeed, if this be love at all, it is plain the poets

have been fooling with mankind since the foundation of the world. And

you have only to look these happy couples in the face, to see they have

never been in love, or in hate, or in any other high passion, all their

days. When you see a dish of fruit at dessert, you sometimes set your

affections upon one particular peach or nectarine, watch it with some

anxiety as it comes round the table, and feel quite a sensible

disappointment when it is taken by some one else. I have used the phrase

“high passion.” Well, I should say this was about as high a passion as

generally leads to marriage. One husband hears after marriage that some

poor fellow is dying of his wife’s love. “What a pity!” he exclaims;

“you know I could so easily have got another!” And yet that is a very

happy union. Or again: A young man was telling me the sweet story of his

loves. “I like it well enough as long as her sisters are there,” said

this amorous swain; “but I don’t know what to do when we’re alone.” Once

more: A married lady was debating the subject with another lady. “You

know, dear,” said the first, “after ten years of marriage, if he is

nothing else, your husband is always an old friend.” “I have many old

friends,” returned the other, “but I prefer them to be nothing more.”

“Oh, perhaps I might _prefer_ that also!” There is a common note in

these three illustrations of the modern idyll; and it must be owned the

god goes among us with a limping gait and blear eyes. You wonder whether

it was so always; whether desire was always equally dull and spiritless,

and possession equally cold. I cannot help fancying most people make,

ere they marry, some such table of recommendations as Hannah Godwin wrote

to her brother William anent her friend, Miss Gay. It is so charmingly

comical, and so pat to the occasion, that I must quote a few phrases.

“The young lady is in every sense formed to make one of your disposition

really happy. She has a pleasing voice, with which she accompanies her

musical instrument with judgment. She has an easy politeness in her

manners, neither free nor reserved. She is a good housekeeper and a good

economist, and yet of a generous disposition. As to her internal

accomplishments, I have reason to speak still more highly of them: good

sense without vanity, a penetrating judgment without a disposition to

satire, with about as much religion as my William likes, struck me with a

wish that she was my William’s wife.” That is about the tune: pleasing

voice, moderate good looks, unimpeachable internal accomplishments after

the style of the copy-book, with about as much religion as my William

likes; and then, with all speed, to church.

To deal plainly, if they only married when they fell in love, most people

would die unwed; and among the others, there would be not a few

tumultuous households. The Lion is the King of Beasts, but he is

scarcely suitable for a domestic pet. In the same way, I suspect love is

rather too violent a passion to make, in all cases, a good domestic

sentiment. Like other violent excitements, it throws up not only what is

best, but what is worst and smallest, in men’s characters. Just as some

people are malicious in drink, or brawling and virulent under the

influence of religious feeling, some are moody, jealous, and exacting

when they are in love, who are honest, downright, good-hearted fellows

enough in the everyday affairs and humours of the world.

How then, seeing we are driven to the hypothesis that people choose in

comparatively cold blood, how is it they choose so well? One is almost

tempted to hint that it does not much matter whom you marry; that, in

fact, marriage is a subjective affection, and if you have made up your

mind to it, and once talked yourself fairly over, you could “pull it

through” with anybody. But even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even

if we regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recognised by the

police, there must be degrees in the freedom and sympathy realised, and

some principle to guide simple folk in their selection. Now what should

this principle be? Are there no more definite rules than are to be found

in the Prayer-book? Law and religion forbid the bans on the ground of

propinquity or consanguinity; society steps in to separate classes; and

in all this most critical matter, has common sense, has wisdom, never a

word to say? In the absence of more magisterial teaching, let us talk it

over between friends: even a few guesses may be of interest to youths and

maidens.

In all that concerns eating and drinking, company, climate, and ways of

life, community of taste is to be sought for. It would be trying, for

instance, to keep bed and board with an early riser or a vegetarian. In

matters of art and intellect, I believe it is of no consequence.

Certainly it is of none in the companionships of men, who will dine more

readily with one who has a good heart, a good cellar, and a humorous

tongue, than with another who shares all their favourite hobbies and is

melancholy withal. If your wife likes Tupper, that is no reason why you

should hang your head. She thinks with the majority, and has the courage

of her opinions. I have always suspected public taste to be a mongrel

product, out of affectation by dogmatism; and felt sure, if you could

only find an honest man of no special literary bent, he would tell you he

thought much of Shakespeare bombastic and most absurd, and all of him

written in very obscure English and wearisome to read. And not long ago

I was able to lay by my lantern in content, for I found the honest man.

He was a fellow of parts, quick, humorous, a clever painter, and with an

eye for certain poetical effects of sea and ships. I am not much of a

judge of that kind of thing, but a sketch of his comes before me

sometimes at night. How strong, supple, and living the ship seems upon

the billows! With what a dip and rake she shears the flying sea! I

cannot fancy the man who saw this effect, and took it on the wing with so

much force and spirit, was what you call commonplace in the last recesses

of the heart. And yet he thought, and was not ashamed to have it known

of him, that Ouida was better in every way than William Shakespeare. If

there were more people of his honesty, this would be about the staple of

lay criticism. It is not taste that is plentiful, but courage that is

rare. And what have we in place? How many, who think no otherwise than

the young painter, have we not heard disbursing second-hand hyperboles?

Have you never turned sick at heart, O best of critics! when some of your

own sweet adjectives were returned on you before a gaping audience?

Enthusiasm about art is become a function of the average female being,

which she performs with precision and a sort of haunting sprightliness,

like an ingenious and well-regulated machine. Sometimes, alas! the

calmest man is carried away in the torrent, bandies adjectives with the

best, and out-Herods Herod for some shameful moments. When you remember

that, you will be tempted to put things strongly, and say you will marry

no one who is not like George the Second, and cannot state openly a

distaste for poetry and painting.

The word “facts” is, in some ways, crucial. I have spoken with Jesuits

and Plymouth Brethren, mathematicians and poets, dogmatic republicans and

dear old gentlemen in bird’s-eye neckcloths; and each understood the word

“facts” in an occult sense of his own. Try as I might, I could get no

nearer the principle of their division. What was essential to them,

seemed to me trivial or untrue. We could come to no compromise as to

what was, or what was not, important in the life of man. Turn as we

pleased, we all stood back to back in a big ring, and saw another quarter

of the heavens, with different mountain-tops along the sky-line and

different constellations overhead. We had each of us some whimsy in the

brain, which we believed more than anything else, and which discoloured

all experience to its own shade. How would you have people agree, when

one is deaf and the other blind? Now this is where there should be

community between man and wife. They should be agreed on their catchword

in “_facts of religion_,” or “_facts of science_,” or “_society_, _my

dear_”; for without such an agreement all intercourse is a painful strain

upon the mind. “About as much religion as my William likes,” in short,

that is what is necessary to make a happy couple of any William and his

spouse. For there are differences which no habit nor affection can

reconcile, and the Bohemian must not intermarry with the Pharisee.

Imagine Consuelo as Mrs. Samuel Budget, the wife of the successful

merchant! The best of men and the best of women may sometimes live

together all their lives, and, for want of some consent on fundamental

questions, hold each other lost spirits to the end.

A certain sort of talent is almost indispensable for people who would

spend years together and not bore themselves to death. But the talent,

like the agreement, must be for and about life. To dwell happily

together, they should be versed in the niceties of the heart, and born

with a faculty for willing compromise. The woman must be talented as a

woman, and it will not much matter although she is talented in nothing

else. She must know her _métier de femme_, and have a fine touch for the

affections. And it is more important that a person should be a good

gossip, and talk pleasantly and smartly of common friends and the

thousand and one nothings of the day and hour, than that she should speak

with the tongues of men and angels; for a while together by the fire,

happens more frequently in marriage than the presence of a distinguished

foreigner to dinner. That people should laugh over the same sort of

jests, and have many a story of “grouse in the gun-room,” many an old

joke between them which time cannot wither nor custom stale, is a better

preparation for life, by your leave, than many other things higher and

better sounding in the world’s ears. You could read Kant by yourself, if

you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else. You can

forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical

disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your

eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way

towards a dissolution of the marriage.

I know a woman who, from some distaste or disability, could never so much

as understand the meaning of the word _politics_, and has given up trying

to distinguish Whigs from Tories; but take her on her own politics, ask

her about other men or women and the chicanery of everyday existence—the

rubs, the tricks, the vanities on which life turns—and you will not find

many more shrewd, trenchant, and humorous. Nay, to make plainer what I

have in mind, this same woman has a share of the higher and more poetical

understanding, frank interest in things for their own sake, and enduring

astonishment at the most common. She is not to be deceived by custom, or

made to think a mystery solved when it is repeated. I have heard her say

she could wonder herself crazy over the human eyebrow. Now in a world

where most of us walk very contentedly in the little lit circle of their

own reason, and have to be reminded of what lies without by specious and

clamant exceptions—earthquakes, eruptions of Vesuvius, banjos floating in

mid-air at a _séance_, and the like—a mind so fresh and unsophisticated

is no despicable gift. I will own I think it a better sort of mind than

goes necessarily with the clearest views on public business. It will

wash. It will find something to say at an odd moment. It has in it the

spring of pleasant and quaint fancies. Whereas I can imagine myself

yawning all night long until my jaws ached and the tears came into my

eyes, although my companion on the other side of the hearth held the most

enlightened opinions on the franchise or the ballot.

The question of professions, in as far as they regard marriage, was only

interesting to women until of late days, but it touches all of us now.

Certainly, if I could help it, I would never marry a wife who wrote. The

practice of letters is miserably harassing to the mind; and after an hour

or two’s work, all the more human portion of the author is extinct; he

will bully, backbite, and speak daggers. Music, I hear, is not much

better. But painting, on the contrary, is often highly sedative; because

so much of the labour, after your picture is once begun, is almost

entirely manual, and of that skilled sort of manual labour which offers a

continual series of successes, and so tickles a man, through his vanity,

into good humour. Alas! in letters there is nothing of this sort. You

may write as beautiful a hand as you will, you have always something else

to think of, and cannot pause to notice your loops and flourishes; they

are beside the mark, and the first law stationer could put you to the

blush. Rousseau, indeed, made some account of penmanship, even made it a

source of livelihood, when he copied out the _Héloïse_ for _dilettante_

ladies; and therein showed that strange eccentric prudence which guided

him among so many thousand follies and insanities. It would be well for

all of the _genus irritabile_ thus to add something of skilled labour to

intangible brain-work. To find the right word is so doubtful a success

and lies so near to failure, that there is no satisfaction in a year of

it; but we all know when we have formed a letter perfectly; and a stupid

artist, right or wrong, is almost equally certain he has found a right

tone or a right colour, or made a dexterous stroke with his brush. And,

again, painters may work out of doors; and the fresh air, the deliberate

seasons, and the “tranquillising influence” of the green earth,

counterbalance the fever of thought, and keep them cool, placable, and

prosaic.

A ship captain is a good man to marry if it is a marriage of love, for

absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate;

but he is just the worst man if the feeling is more pedestrian, as habit

is too frequently torn open and the solder has never time to set. Men

who fish, botanise, work with the turning-lathe, or gather sea-weeds,

will make admirable husbands; and a little amateur painting in

water-colour shows the innocent and quiet mind. Those who have a few

intimates are to be avoided; while those who swim loose, who have their

hat in their hand all along the street, who can number an infinity of

acquaintances and are not chargeable with any one friend, promise an easy

disposition and no rival to the wife’s influence. I will not say they

are the best of men, but they are the stuff out of which adroit and

capable women manufacture the best of husbands. It is to be noticed that

those who have loved once or twice already are so much the better

educated to a woman’s hand; the bright boy of fiction is an odd and most

uncomfortable mixture of shyness and coarseness, and needs a deal of

civilising. Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden rule), no woman

should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke. It is not for

nothing that this “ignoble tabagie,” as Michelet calls it, spreads over

all the world. Michelet rails against it because it renders you happy

apart from thought or work; to provident women this will seem no evil

influence in married life. Whatever keeps a man in the front garden,

whatever checks wandering fancy and all inordinate ambition, whatever

makes for lounging and contentment, makes just so surely for domestic

happiness.

These notes, if they amuse the reader at all, will probably amuse him

more when he differs than when he agrees with them; at least they will do

no harm, for nobody will follow my advice. But the last word is of more

concern. Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts

light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness. They have been so

tried among the inconstant squalls and currents, so often sailed for

islands in the air or lain becalmed with burning heart, that they will

risk all for solid ground below their feet. Desperate pilots, they run

their sea-sick, weary bark upon the dashing rocks. It seems as if

marriage were the royal road through life, and realised, on the instant,

what we have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at

night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will

sober and change them. Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it

needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamour for ever. But this is

a wile of the devil’s. To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude,

passing faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep

calling and calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in

this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.