HOPE, they say, deserts us at no period of our existence. From first to
last, and in the face of smarting disillusions, we continue to expect
good fortune, better health, and better conduct; and that so confidently,
that we judge it needless to deserve them. I think it improbable that I
shall ever write like Shakespeare, conduct an army like Hannibal, or
distinguish myself like Marcus Aurelius in the paths of virtue; and yet I
have my by-days, hope prompting, when I am very ready to believe that I
shall combine all these various excellences in my own person, and go
marching down to posterity with divine honours. There is nothing so
monstrous but we can believe it of ourselves. About ourselves, about our
aspirations and delinquencies, we have dwelt by choice in a delicious
vagueness from our boyhood up. No one will have forgotten Tom Sawyer’s
aspiration: “Ah, if he could only die _temporarily_!” Or, perhaps,
better still, the inward resolution of the two pirates, that “so long as
they remained in that business, their piracies should not again be
sullied with the crime of stealing.” Here we recognise the thoughts of
our boyhood; and our boyhood ceased—well, when?—not, I think, at twenty;
nor, perhaps, altogether at twenty-five; nor yet at thirty; and possibly,
to be quite frank, we are still in the thick of that arcadian period.
For as the race of man, after centuries of civilisation, still keeps some
traits of their barbarian fathers, so man the individual is not
altogether quit of youth, when he is already old and honoured, and Lord
Chancellor of England. We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an
invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the
phrase goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open our
communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march.
There is our true base; that is not only the beginning, but the perennial
spring of our faculties; and grandfather William can retire upon occasion
into the green enchanted forest of his boyhood.
The unfading boyishness of hope and its vigorous irrationality are
nowhere better displayed than in questions of conduct. There is a
character in the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, one Mr. _Linger-after-Lust_ with
whom I fancy we are all on speaking terms; one famous among the famous
for ingenuity of hope up to and beyond the moment of defeat; one who,
after eighty years of contrary experience, will believe it possible to
continue in the business of piracy and yet avoid the guilt of theft.
Every sin is our last; every 1st of January a remarkable turning-point in
our career. Any overt act, above all, is felt to be alchemic in its
power to change. A drunkard takes the pledge; it will be strange if that
does not help him. For how many years did Mr. Pepys continue to make and
break his little vows? And yet I have not heard that he was discouraged
in the end. By such steps we think to fix a momentary resolution; as a
timid fellow hies him to the dentist’s while the tooth is stinging.
But, alas, by planting a stake at the top of flood, you can neither
prevent nor delay the inevitable ebb. There is no hocus-pocus in
morality; and even the “sanctimonious ceremony” of marriage leaves the
man unchanged. This is a hard saying, and has an air of paradox. For
there is something in marriage so natural and inviting, that the step has
an air of great simplicity and ease; it offers to bury for ever many
aching preoccupations; it is to afford us unfailing and familiar company
through life; it opens up a smiling prospect of the blest and passive
kind of love, rather than the blessing and active; it is approached not
only through the delights of courtship, but by a public performance and
repeated legal signatures. A man naturally thinks it will go hard with
him if he cannot be good and fortunate and happy within such august
circumvallations.
And yet there is probably no other act in a man’s life so hot-headed and
foolhardy as this one of marriage. For years, let us suppose, you have
been making the most indifferent business of your career. Your
experience has not, we may dare to say, been more encouraging than Paul’s
or Horace’s; like them, you have seen and desired the good that you were
not able to accomplish; like them, you have done the evil that you
loathed. You have waked at night in a hot or a cold sweat, according to
your habit of body, remembering with dismal surprise, your own
unpardonable acts and sayings. You have been sometimes tempted to
withdraw entirely from this game of life; as a man who makes nothing but
misses withdraws from that less dangerous one of billiards. You have
fallen back upon the thought that you yourself most sharply smarted for
your misdemeanours, or, in the old, plaintive phrase, that you were
nobody’s enemy but your own. And then you have been made aware of what
was beautiful and amiable, wise and kind, in the other part of your
behaviour; and it seemed as if nothing could reconcile the contradiction,
as indeed nothing can. If you are a man, you have shut your mouth hard
and said nothing; and if you are only a man in the making, you have
recognised that yours was quite a special case, and you yourself not
guilty of your own pestiferous career.
Granted, and with all my heart. Let us accept these apologies; let us
agree that you are nobody’s enemy but your own; let us agree that you are
a sort of moral cripple, impotent for good; and let us regard you with
the unmingled pity due to such a fate. But there is one thing to which,
on these terms, we can never agree:—we can never agree to have you marry.
What! you have had one life to manage, and have failed so strangely, and
now can see nothing wiser than to conjoin with it the management of some
one else’s? Because you have been unfaithful in a very little, you
propose yourself to be a ruler over ten cities. You strip yourself by
such a step of all remaining consolations and excuses. You are no longer
content to be your own enemy; you must be your wife’s also. You have
been hitherto in a mere subaltern attitude; dealing cruel blows about you
in life, yet only half responsible, since you came there by no choice or
movement of your own. Now, it appears, you must take things on your own
authority: God made you, but you marry yourself; and for all that your
wife suffers, no one is responsible but you. A man must be very certain
of his knowledge ere he undertake to guide a ticket-of-leave man through
a dangerous pass; you have eternally missed your way in life, with
consequences that you still deplore, and yet you masterfully seize your
wife’s hand, and, blindfold, drag her after you to ruin. And it is your
wife, you observe, whom you select. She, whose happiness you most
desire, you choose to be your victim. You would earnestly warn her from
a tottering bridge or bad investment. If she were to marry some one
else, how you would tremble for her fate! If she were only your sister,
and you thought half as much of her, how doubtfully would you entrust her
future to a man no better than yourself!
Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path
meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and
straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and
even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you
have a wife to support. Suppose, after you are married, one of those
little slips were to befall you. What happened last November might
surely happen February next. They may have annoyed you at the time,
because they were not what you had meant; but how will they annoy you in
the future, and how will they shake the fabric of your wife’s confidence
and peace! A thousand things unpleasing went on in the _chiaroscuro_ of
a life that you shrank from too particularly realising; you did not care,
in those days, to make a fetish of your conscience; you would recognise
your failures with a nod, and so, good day. But the time for these
reserves is over. You have wilfully introduced a witness into your life,
the scene of these defeats, and can no longer close the mind’s eye upon
uncomely passages, but must stand up straight and put a name upon your
actions. And your witness is not only the judge, but the victim of your
sins; not only can she condemn you to the sharpest penalties, but she
must herself share feelingly in their endurance. And observe, once more,
with what temerity you have chosen precisely _her_ to be your spy, whose
esteem you value highest, and whom you have already taught to think you
better than you are. You may think you had a conscience, and believed in
God; but what is a conscience to a wife? Wise men of yore erected
statues of their deities, and consciously performed their part in life
before those marble eyes. A god watched them at the board, and stood by
their bedside in the morning when they woke; and all about their ancient
cities, where they bought and sold, or where they piped and wrestled,
there would stand some symbol of the things that are outside of man.
These were lessons, delivered in the quiet dialect of art, which told
their story faithfully, but gently. It is the same lesson, if you
will—but how harrowingly taught!—when the woman you respect shall weep
from your unkindness or blush with shame at your misconduct. Poor girls
in Italy turn their painted Madonnas to the wall: you cannot set aside
your wife. To marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel. Once you are
married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be good.
And goodness in marriage is a more intricate problem than mere single
virtue; for in marriage there are two ideals to be realised. A girl, it
is true, has always lived in a glass house among reproving relatives,
whose word was law; she has been bred up to sacrifice her judgments and
take the key submissively from dear papa; and it is wonderful how swiftly
she can change her tune into the husband’s. Her morality has been, too
often, an affair of precept and conformity. But in the case of a
bachelor who has enjoyed some measure both of privacy and freedom, his
moral judgments have been passed in some accordance with his nature. His
sins were always sins in his own sight; he could then only sin when he
did some act against his clear conviction; the light that he walked by
was obscure, but it was single. Now, when two people of any grit and
spirit put their fortunes into one, there succeeds to this comparative
certainty a huge welter of competing jurisdictions. It no longer matters
so much how life appears to one; one must consult another: one, who may
be strong, must not offend the other, who is weak. The only weak brother
I am willing to consider is (to make a bull for once) my wife. For her,
and for her only, I must waive my righteous judgments, and go crookedly
about my life. How, then, in such an atmosphere of compromise, to keep
honour bright and abstain from base capitulations? How are you to put
aside love’s pleadings? How are you, the apostle of laxity, to turn
suddenly about into the rabbi of precision; and after these years of
ragged practice, pose for a hero to the lackey who has found you out? In
this temptation to mutual indulgence lies the particular peril to
morality in married life. Daily they drop a little lower from the first
ideal, and for a while continue to accept these changelings with a gross
complacency. At last Love wakes and looks about him; finds his hero sunk
into a stout old brute, intent on brandy pawnee; finds his heroine
divested of her angel brightness; and in the flash of that first
disenchantment, flees for ever.
Again, the husband, in these unions, is usually a man, and the wife
commonly enough a woman; and when this is the case, although it makes the
firmer marriage, a thick additional veil of misconception hangs above the
doubtful business. Women, I believe, are somewhat rarer than men; but
then, if I were a woman myself, I daresay I should hold the reverse; and
at least we all enter more or less wholly into one or other of these
camps. A man who delights women by his feminine perceptions will often
scatter his admirers by a chance explosion of the under side of man; and
the most masculine and direct of women will some day, to your dire
surprise, draw out like a telescope into successive lengths of
personation. Alas! for the man, knowing her to be at heart more candid
than himself, who shall flounder, panting, through these mazes in the
quest for truth. The proper qualities of each sex are, indeed, eternally
surprising to the other. Between the Latin and the Teuton races there
are similar divergences, not to be bridged by the most liberal sympathy.
And in the good, plain, cut-and-dry explanations of this life, which pass
current among us as the wisdom of the elders, this difficulty has been
turned with the aid of pious lies. Thus, when a young lady has angelic
features, eats nothing to speak of, plays all day long on the piano, and
sings ravishingly in church, it requires a rough infidelity, falsely
called cynicism, to believe that she may be a little devil after all.
Yet so it is: she may be a tale-bearer, a liar, and a thief; she may have
a taste for brandy, and no heart. My compliments to George Eliot for her
Rosamond Vincy; the ugly work of satire she has transmuted to the ends of
art, by the companion figure of Lydgate; and the satire was much wanted
for the education of young men. That doctrine of the excellence of
women, however chivalrous, is cowardly as well as false. It is better to
face the fact, and know, when you marry, that you take into your life a
creature of equal, if of unlike, frailties; whose weak human heart beats
no more tunefully than yours.
But it is the object of a liberal education not only to obscure the
knowledge of one sex by another, but to magnify the natural differences
between the two. Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but
principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is
astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the
girls and another to the boys. To the first, there is shown but a very
small field of experience, and taught a very trenchant principle for
judgment and action; to the other, the world of life is more largely
displayed, and their rule of conduct is proportionally widened. They are
taught to follow different virtues, to hate different vices, to place
their ideal, even for each other, in different achievements. What should
be the result of such a course? When a horse has run away, and the two
flustered people in the gig have each possessed themselves of a rein, we
know the end of that conveyance will be in the ditch. So, when I see a
raw youth and a green girl, fluted and fiddled in a dancing measure into
that most serious contract, and setting out upon life’s journey with
ideas so monstrously divergent, I am not surprised that some make
shipwreck, but that any come to port. What the boy does almost proudly,
as a manly peccadillo, the girl will shudder at as a debasing vice; what
is to her the mere common sense of tactics, he will spit out of his mouth
as shameful. Through such a sea of contrarieties must this green couple
steer their way; and contrive to love each other; and to respect,
forsooth; and be ready, when the time arrives, to educate the little men
and women who shall succeed to their places and perplexities.
And yet, when all has been said, the man who should hold back from
marriage is in the same case with him who runs away from battle. To
avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to
push forward pluckily and make a fall. It is lawful to pray God that we
be not led into temptation; but not lawful to skulk from those that come
to us. The noblest passage in one of the noblest books of this century,
is where the old pope glories in the trial, nay, in the partial fall and
but imperfect triumph, of the younger hero. {1} Without some such manly
note, it were perhaps better to have no conscience at all. But there is
a vast difference between teaching flight, and showing points of peril
that a man may march the more warily. And the true conclusion of this
paper is to turn our back on apprehensions, and embrace that shining and
courageous virtue, Faith. Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant
fellow, good to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave,
experienced, yet smiling man. Hope lives on ignorance; open-eyed Faith
is built upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of circumstance and
the frailty of human resolution. Hope looks for unqualified success; but
Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a
form of victory. Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in
Christian days, and early learnt humility. In the one temper, a man is
indignant that he cannot spring up in a clap to heights of elegance and
virtue; in the other, out of a sense of his infirmities, he is filled
with confidence because a year has come and gone, and he has still
preserved some rags of honour. In the first, he expects an angel for a
wife; in the last, he knows that she is like himself—erring, thoughtless,
and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling radiancy of
better things, and adorned with ineffective qualities. You may safely go
to school with hope; but ere you marry, should have learned the mingled
lesson of the world: that dolls are stuffed with sawdust, and yet are
excellent play-things; that hope and love address themselves to a
perfection never realised, and yet, firmly held, become the salt and
staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of infirmities, perfect,
you might say, in imperfection, and yet you have a something in you
lovable and worth preserving; and that, while the mass of mankind lies
under this scurvy condemnation, you will scarce find one but, by some
generous reading, will become to you a lesson, a model, and a noble
spouse through life. So thinking, you will constantly support your own
unworthiness, and easily forgive the failings of your friend. Nay, you
will be I wisely glad that you retain the sense of blemishes; for the
faults of married people continually spur up each of them, hour by hour,
to do better and to meet and love upon a higher ground. And ever,
between the failures, there will come glimpses of kind virtues to
encourage and console.