it; and they do not care to learn it. The few villagers who are
supposed to lead ill lives are spoken of below the breath, and
carefully avoided without being critically studied. When the railway
is to be carried past their quiet nest, there is an immense
excitement as the report goes that a knot of strange men have been
seen scattering themselves over the fields with their little white
flags and theodolites, their measuring lines and levels. But when the
army of navvies follows after, the excitement is changed to
consternation, and a general sense of evil to come advancing
ruthlessly towards them. The clergy of the district organize special
services, and the scared doves keep religiously away from the place
where the navvies are hutted. They think them little better than the
savages about whom the Deputation tell them once or twice a year; and
they create almost as much terror as an encampment of gipsies. They
represent the lawless forces of the world and the unknown sins of
strong men; and the wildest story about them is not too wild to be
believed. The railway altogether is a great offence to the
neighbourhood, and the line is assumed to destroy the whole scenic
beauty of the place. There are lamentations over the cockneys it will
bring down; over the high prices it will create, the immorality it
will cause. Only the sons who are out in the world and have learnt how
life goes on outside the dovecot, advocate keeping pace with the
times; and a few of the stronger minded of the sisters listen to them
with a timid admiration of their breadth and boldness, and think there
may be two sides to the question after all. When the dashing captain
and his fast wife suddenly appear in the village--as often happens in
these remote districts--the doves are in a state of great moral
tribulation. They are scandalized by Mrs. Highflyer's costume and
complexion, and think her manners odd and doubtful; her slang shocks
them; and when they meet her in the lanes, talking so loudly and
laughing so shrilly with that horrid-looking man in a green cutaway,
they feel as fluttered as their namesakes when a hawk is hovering over
the farmyard. The dashing captain, who does not use a prayer-book at
church, who stares at all the girls so rudely, and who has even been
seen to wink at some of the prettier cottage girls, and his handsome
wife with her equivocal complexion and pronounced fashions, who makes
eyes at the curate, are never heartily adopted by the local magnates,
though vouched for by some far-away backer; and the doves always feel
them to be strange bodies among them, and out of their rightful
element somehow. If things go quietly without an explosion, well and
good; but if the truth bursts to the surface in the shape of a London
detective, and the Highflyers are found to be no better than they
should be, the consternation and half-awed wonderment at the existence
of so much effrontery and villany in their atmosphere create an
impression which no time effaces. The first clash of innocence with
evil is an event in the life of the innocent the effect of which
nothing ever destroys.
The dovecot is rather dull in the winter, and the doves are somewhat
moped; but even then they have the church to decorate, and the
sentiment of Christmas to enliven them. The absent ones of the
family too, return to the old hearth while they can; and as the great
joy of the dovecot lies in the family union that is kept up, and in
the family love which is so strong, the visits of those who no longer
live at home bring a moral summer as warm and cheering as the physical
sunshine. But they do not all assemble. For many of the doves marry
men whose work lies abroad; these quiet country-houses being the
favourite matrimonial hunting-grounds for colonists and Anglo-Indians.
So that some are always absent whose healths are drunk in the
traditional punch, while eyes grow moist as the names are given. Doves
are not disinclined to marry men who have to go abroad, for all the
passionate family love common to them. Travel is a golden dream to
them in their still homes; but travel properly companioned. For even
the most adventurous among them are not independent, as we mean when
we speak of independence in women. They are essentially home-girls,
family-girls, doves who cannot exist without a dovecot, however
humble. The family is everything to them; and they are utterly unfit
for the solitude which so many of our self-supporting women can accept
quite resignedly. Not that they are necessarily useless even as
breadwinners. They could work, if pushed to it; but it must be in a
quiet womanly way, with the mother, the sister, the husband as the
helper--with the home as the place of rest and the refuge. Their whole
lines are laid in love and quietness; not by any means in inaction,
but all centred within the home circle. If they marry, they find
the love of their husband enough for them, and have no desire for
other men's admiration. Their babies are all the world to them, and
they do not think maternity an infliction, as so many of the miserably
fashionable think it. They like the occupation of housekeeping, and
feel pride in their fine linen and clean service, in their
well-ordered table and neatly-balanced accounts. They are kind to
their servants, who generally come from the old home, and whose
families they therefore know; but they keep up a certain dignity and
tone of superiority towards them in the midst of all their kindness,
which very few town-bred mistresses can keep to town-bred maids. They
have always been the aristocracy in their native place; and they carry
through life the ineffaceable stamp which being 'the best' gives.
Doves are essentially mild and gentle women; not queens of society
even when they are pretty, because not caring for social success and
therefore not laying themselves out for it; for if they please at home
that is all they care for, holding love before admiration, and the
esteem of one higher than the praise of many. If a fault is to be
found with them it is that they have not perhaps quite enough salt for
the general taste, used as it is to such highly-seasoned social food;
but do we really want our women to have so very much character? Do not
our splendid passionate creatures lead madly wretched lives and make
miserably uncomfortable homes? and are not our glorious heroines
better in pictures and in fiction than seated by the domestic fire, or
checking the baker's bill? No doubt the quiet home-staying doves seem
tame enough when we think of the gorgeous beings made familiar to us
by romance, and history, which is more romantic still; but as our
daily lives run chiefly in prose, our doves are better fitted for
things as they are; and to men who want wives and not playthings, and
who care for the peace of family life and the dignity of home, they
are beyond price when they can be found and secured. So that, on the
whole, we can dispense with the splendid creatures of character and
the magnificent queens of society sooner than with the quiet and
unobtrusive doves. And though they do spoil men most monstrously, they
know where to draw the line, and while petting their own at home they
keep strangers abroad at a distance, and make themselves respected as
only modest and gentle women are respected by men.
_BORED HUSBANDS._
The curtain falls on joined hands when it does not descend on a
tragedy; and novels for the most part end with a wreath of
orange-blossoms and a pair of high-stepping greys, as the last act
that claims to be recorded. For both novelists and playwrights assume
that with marriage all the great events of life have ceased, and that,
once wedded to the beloved object, there is sure to be smooth sailing
and halcyon seas to the end of time. It sounds very cynical and
shocking to question this pretty belief; but unfortunately for us who
live in the world as it is and not as it is supposed to be, we find
that even a union with the beloved object does not always ensure
perfect contentment in the home, and that bored husbands are by no
means rare.
The ideal honeymoon is of course an Elysian time, during which nothing
works rusty nor gets out of joint; and the ideal marriage is only a
life-long honeymoon, where the happiness is more secure and the love
deeper, if more sober; but the prose reality of one and the other has
often a terrible dash of weariness in it, even under the most
favourable conditions. Boredom begins in the very honeymoon
itself. At first starting in married life there are many dangers to be
encountered, not a shadow of which was seen in the wooing. There are
odd freaks of temper turning up quite unexpectedly; there is the
sense, so painful to some men, of being tied for life, of never being
able to be alone again, never free and without responsibilities; there
are misunderstandings to-day and the struggle for mastery
to-morrow--the cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, which may prove to
be the tempest that will destroy all; there is the unrest of
travelling, and the awkwardness of unusual association, to help in the
general discomfort; or, if the happy pair have settled down in a vale
and a cottage for their month, there is the 'sad satiety' which all
men feel after a time when they have had one companion only, with no
outside diversion to cause a break. But the honeymoon at last draws to
a close, and the relieved bridegroom gets back to his old haunts, to
his work, his friends, and his club; and though he takes to all these
things again with a difference, still they are helps and additions.
This is the time of trial to a woman. If she gets over this pinch, and
is sensible enough to understand that human nature cannot be kept up
at high pressure, even in love, and that a man must sooner or later
come down from romance to work-a-day prose, from the passionate lover
to the cool and sober husband--if she can understand this, and settle
into his pace, without fretting on the one hand or casting about
for unhealthy distractions on the other--she will do well, and will
probably make a pleasant home, and thereby diminish the boredom of
life. But unfortunately, not every woman can do this; and it is just
during this time of the man's transition from the lover to the friend
that so many women begin to make shipwreck of their own happiness and
his. They think to keep him a romantic wooer still, by their tears at
his prosaic indifference to the little sentimentalities once so
eagerly accepted and offered; they try to hold him close by their
flattering but somewhat tiresome exactions; their jealousies--very
pretty perhaps, and quite as flattering--are infinite, and as baseless
as they are infinite; all of which is very nice up to a certain point
and in the beginning of things, but all of which gets wearisome as
time goes on, and a man wants both a little change and a little rest.
But women do not see this; or seeing it, they cannot accept it as a
necessary condition of things; wherefore they go on in their fatal
way, and by the very unwisdom of their own love bore their husband out
of his. Or they grow substantially cold because he is superficially
cooler, and think themselves justified in ceasing to love him
altogether because he takes their love for granted, and so has ceased
to woo it.
If they are jealous, or shy, or unsocial, as so many women are, they
make life very heavy by their exclusiveness, and the monastic
character they give the home. A man married to a woman of this
kind is, in fact, a house prisoner, whose only free spaces lie beyond
the four walls of home. His bachelor friends are shut out. They smoke;
or entice him to drink more than his wife thinks is good for him; or
they induce him to bet on the Derby; or to play for half-crowns at
whist or billiards; or they lead him in some other way of offence
abhorrent to women. So the bachelor friends are shouldered out; and
when the husband wants to entertain them, he must invite them to his
club--if he has one--and pay the penalty when he gets home. In a few
years' time his wife will be glad to encourage her sons' young friends
to the house, for the sake of the daughters on hand; but husbands and
sons are in a different category, and there are few fathers who do not
learn, as time goes on, how much the mother will allow that the wife
refused.
If bachelor friends are shouldered out of the house, all female
friends are forbidden anything like an intimate footing, save those
few whom the wife thinks specially devoted to herself and of whom she
is not jealous. And these are very few. There are perhaps no women in
the world so exclusive in their dealings with their husbands as are
Englishwomen. A husband is bound to one woman only, no doubt; but the
average wife thinks him also bound to have no affection whatever
outside her and perhaps her family. If he meets an intelligent woman,
pleasant to talk to, of agreeable manners and ready wit, and if
he talks to her in consequence with anything like persistency or
interest, he offends against the unwritten law; and his wife, whose
utmost power of conversation consists in putting in a yes or no with
tolerable accuracy of aim, thinks herself slighted and ill-used. She
may be young and pretty, and dearly loved for her own special
qualities; and her husband may not have a thought towards his new
friend, or any other woman, in the remotest degree trenching on his
allegiance to her; but the fact that he finds pleasure, though only of
an intellectual and æsthetic kind, in the society of any other woman,
that he feels an interest in her life, chooses her for his friend, or
finds community of pursuits or sympathy in ideas, makes his wife by
just so much a victim and aggrieved.
And yet what a miserably monotonous home is that to which she would
confine him! He is at his office all day, badgered and worried with
various business complications, and he comes home tired, perhaps
cross--even well-conducted husbands have that way sometimes. He finds
his wife tired and cross too; so that they begin the evening together
mutually at odds, she irritated by small cares and he disturbed by
large anxieties. Or he finds her preoccupied and absorbed in her own
pursuits, and quite disinclined to make any diversion for his sake. He
asks her for some music; she used to be ready enough to sing and play
to him in the old love-making days; but she refuses now. Either she
has some needlework to do, which might have been done during the
day when he was out, or baby is asleep in the nursery, and music in
the drawing-room would disturb him--at all events she cannot sing or
play to-night; and even if she does--he has heard all her pieces so
often! If he is not a reading-man, those long, dull, silent evenings
are very trying. She works, and drives him wild with the click of her
needle; or she reads the last new novel, and he hates novels, and gets
tired to death when she insists on telling him all about the story and
the characters; or she chooses the evening for letter-writing, and if
the noise of her pen scratching over the paper does not irritate him,
perhaps it sends him to sleep, when at least he is not bored. But
dull, objectless, and vacant as their evenings are, his wife would not
hear of any help from without to give just that little fillip which
would prevent boredom and not create ceremony. She would think her
life had gone to pieces, and that only desolation was before her, if
he hinted that his home was dull, and that though he loves her very
dearly and wants no other wife but her, yet that her society
only--_toujours perdrix_, without change or addition--is a little
stupid, however nice the partridge may be, and that things would be
bettered if Mrs. or Miss So-and-So came in sometimes, just to brighten
up the hours. And if he were to make a practice of bringing home his
men friends, she would probably let all parties concerned feel pretty
distinctly that she considered the home her special sanctuary, and
that guests whom she did not invite were intruders. She would
perhaps go willingly enough to a ball or crowded _soirée_, or she
might like to give one; but that intimate form of society, which is a
mere enlargement of the home life, she dreads as the supplementing of
deficiencies, and thinks her married happiness safer in boredom than
in any diversion from herself as the sole centre of her husband's
pleasure.
Home life stagnates in England; and in very few families is there any
mean between dissipation and this stagnation. We can scarcely wonder
that so many husbands think matrimony a mistake as we have it in our
insular arrangements; that they look back regretfully to the time when
they were unfettered and not bored; or that their free friends, who
watch them as wild birds watch their caged companions, curiously and
reflectively, share their opinion. Wife and home, after all, make up
but part of a man's life; they are not his all, and do not satisfy the
whole of his social instinct; nor is any one woman the concentration
of all womanhood to a man, leaving nothing that is beautiful, nor in
its own unconjugal way desirable, on the outside. Besides, when with
his wife a man is often as much isolated as when alone, for any real
companionship there is between them. Few women take a living interest
in the lives of men, and fewer still understand them. They expect the
husband to sympathize with them in the kitchen gossip and the nursery
chatter, the neighbours' doings and all the small household politics;
but they are utterly unable to comprehend his pleasures, his
thoughts, his duties, the responsibilities of his profession, or the
bearings of any public question in which he takes a part.
Even if this were not so, and granting that they could enter fully
into his life and sympathize with him as intelligent equals, not only
as compassionate saints or loving children, there would still be the
need of novelty, and still the certainty of boredom without it. For
human life, like all other forms of life, must have a due proportion
of fresh elements continually added to keep it sweet and growing, else
it becomes stagnant and stunted. And daily intercourse undeniably
exhausts the moral ground. After the close companionship of years no
one can remain mentally fresh to the other, unless indeed one or both
be of the rarest order of mind and of a practically inexhaustible
power of acquiring knowledge. Save these exceptional instances, we
must all of necessity get worn out by constant intercourse. We know
every thought, every opinion, and almost every square inch of
information possessed; we have heard the old stories again and again,
and know exactly what will lead up to them, and at what point they
will begin; we have measured the whole sweep of mind, and have probed
its depths; and though we may love and value what we have learnt, yet
we want something new--fresh food for interest, though not necessarily
a new love for the displacement of the old. But this is what very few
Englishwomen can understand or will allow. They hold so intensely
by the doctrine of unity that they are even jealous of a man's
pursuits, if they think these take up any place in his mind which
might also be theirs. They must be good for every part of his life;
and the poorest of them all must be his only source of interest,
suffering no other woman to share his admiration nor obtain his
friendship, though this would neither touch his love nor interfere
with their rights. Friendship is a hard saying to them, and one they
cannot receive. Wherefore they keep a tight grasp on the marital
collar, and suffer no relief of monotony by judicious loosening, nor
by generous faith in integral fidelity. The practical result of which
is that most men are horribly bored at home, and that the mass of them
really suffer from the domestic stagnation to which national customs
and the exclusiveness of women doom them so soon as they become family
men. It must however, in fairness be added, that in general they
obtain some kind of compensation; and that very few walk meekly in
their bonds without at times slipping them off, with or without the
concurrence of their wives.
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
S. & H.
LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET
* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
Minor spelling and punctuation inconsistencies, mainly hyphenated
words, have been harmonized. In this version, the oe ligature is
represented by the separate characters oe, e.g. manoeuvre.