MODERN MARRIAGE
May 3, 19—.
My dear Alexa,—
I resist gallantly the temptation to begin much less formally, much more sentimentally than that; but I feel that marriage is the one subject on which a man may not be sentimental. In matters of marriage it is always sentiment that undoes us.
He called here yesterday afternoon, as by this time you are no doubt aware, for I feel pretty sure that as soon as he left he scribbled a note to you from the nearest post-office. If I know anything about men I know that. I should not be at all surprised if he telegraphed; but I hope not, for it is bad to begin matrimonial enterprises by a present to the Post Office.
So you see I have had a whole evening in which to think him over; a night to sleep upon my thoughts and a morning in which to recast them, as it were. When I tell youthat I really did sleep and that I found my breakfast this morning not more hateful than usual, you will realise that all is pretty much as you would wish.
Yes, the man will do. Except that he is a man, and that he wants to marry my daughter, my critical eye can find no serious fault in him. Of course I wish he were dead or in some distant colony—but no, no, I don’t dislike him quite so much as that last would imply—but that wish of mine means little or nothing that need worry you. One so often does wish dead people in whom one can find no fault—indeed, they are more often than not the very people one can do so well without.
I tried him by all the tests. I offered him one of my very best cigars, the sort I never have enough of in the house, and he smoked it like a fellow of taste. Even when we were talking seriously about serious matters—you are a serious matter to him and to me—he held it now and then so that the perfumed smoke could titillate his nostrils. Had it been a bad cigar and he had done that, I should have known him for a charlatan and sent him about his business.
He came in a frock coat too, a frock coat fullish in the skirts—I hope you didn’t put him up to that. Had he worn one of those cut-away things that fasten with one button in the middle of the waistcoat! Words fail me as to what would have happened had he worn one of those.
He knows how to sit in an arm chair without getting into trouble with his elbows or showing too much sock. Has it ever occurred to you, Alexa, that in the matter of the disclosure of ankles a man should be as discreet as a woman?
We did not talk of you all the time. I should have learnt little by permitting that, for the veriest oaf can say the right things about a girl with whom he is in love; but we talked of books, of pictures, of music, of cathedrals, of the things that really matter, and he was all right there.
He has a good deal to learn, but then he has some time in which to learn it; and if you do justice to your upbringing he will not lack a competent tutor. There—that’s the prettiest compliment I have paid you for many a long day.
Your mother was charmed with him. Irather think she is writing to you at this moment to tell you so. I confess that fact does not vastly impress me, because mothers look always with a friendly eye upon their daughters’ suitors, supposing, of course, that they are anywhere near the mark.
Has it ever struck you as queer and rather significant that while women are always anxious for their daughters to marry, men, for the most part, boggle at the thought of it? It looks almost as though your sex got more out of the arrangement than ours, doesn’t it? That if they stand to lose more, as they indubitably do, they stand to win more too?
The inveterate belief of women in the glory and beauty of marriage always stupefies me. I suppose there is not one married woman alive who does not know at least half a dozen others who have come hopelessly to grief in their marriages, and yet they go on believing! Such robust faith is touching and a tremendous compliment to us.
Indeed, it is a wonderful institution this marriage—marriage as it exists among civilised people, I mean: civilised Western people, I should add.
I suppose if a committee of ingenious men and women of the world had met together to devise the scheme of sex relationship best calculated to ensure unhappiness to the two parties concerned, they could not have hit upon anything more likely to secure this object ... well, perhaps not unhappiness exactly, but uncomfortableness, let us say ... than modern marriage, monogamic marriage.
From that point of view it is almost perfection. The object of it would seem to be to destroy as quickly as possible all the feelings with which people start off on it. The end, it would seem, is the negation of the beginning. Rum!
Think, now. What is it that gives the quintessential charm to that state of mind we call being in love? What is the magic of it? You can’t be expected to know just now, because you are not in an analytical mood; emotion of any kind is fatal to accurate analysis.
Well then, I’ll tell you. It is romance—a sense of strangeness, of something to be discovered, of infinite, thrilling, and perilous possibilities.
Why do sisters and brothers not fall in love with each other? Not because to do so would be “unnatural,” not a bit of it, never believe that. Nature has nothing whatever to do with it. It is because they have been brought up together in close and daily intimacy; because there is no romance, no glamour of the undiscovered, no possibilities just beyond the horizon line.
Now marriage, as we know it, is the inevitable slayer of romance. Before the intimacy of marriage romance disappears like a mist wreath in the blazing sun.
Mind, I do not say that in losing romance you lose everything; there are many other things that are worth having, perhaps even more worth having, but you lose romance, and lose it in something less than six weeks.
And when you have lost romance you are no longer “in love.” You may still love and be loved. You do and are, if all things go well with you, both; but you are no longer “in love.” The very feelings which attracted you to start with, which brought you together, are gone, and gone for ever.
That is the stupendous fact of marriage; it kills the thing that made it. It is theoutcome of illusion. People in love imagine that marriage is a continuance of the feelings, intensified, which they have for each other before they enter upon it. That, Alexa, is exactly what it is not. It is the very opposite of that.
Most people will tell you—one hears it said all about, especially just now—that the reason why marriage is not the success it might be is that married people “see too much of each other.” There is something in that, no doubt, but there is more not in it, so to speak. It is not, I am convinced, so much because married folk see each other every day that romance takes wings; it is rather becausethey can make sureof seeing each other every day. It is the sense of security that kills.
I verily believe that an odalisque in an Oriental harem, for whom a visit from her lord is some sort of an event, a thing which may or may not happen on any particular day, has a better emotional time of it than the wife in a suburban villa who knows that her husband will appear at the front door, little black bag and all, ten minutes after she has heard his train puff into the station, orthe still more unfortunate lady who can always get speech of him by just calling up the stairs.
Your poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti once told a friend of his, and of mine, that all those exquisite sonnets of his, dedicated to his wife and to wedded love, were written when Mrs Rossetti was away on long visits. That I can well believe, and I believe moreover that they were written not only when she was away, but when he was not at all sure when she would come back.
Once in a little walled town in the South of France I saw a play in which the husband and wife used to make assignations to meet and dine in a private room at a restaurant, although they had an excellent cook at home. It was a silly little play, but the dramatist knew something of human nature and of marriage, all the same. Poor dears, they were trying after something which they could not get, of course, but still, the very fact that they did try proves something, doesn’t it?
Intimacy, security—these are the fatal diseases of marriage. I think I see you gibe a little at the word “security,” and murmursomething cynical about divorce. You are right in a way and wrong in another way. One has only to look around one to learn that marriage is by no means synonymous with security; but all of us, when we marry, believe it is, and so the result is the same.
Mention of divorce suggests to me to say this. I don’t believe that the sort of thing which leads to the divorce court, and, where quite uncivilised people are concerned, to the Old Bailey, is half so often, as most suppose, the outcome of wilful incontinence or of sheer naughtiness, no, nor even of the waning of love. It is the passion for something that marriage does not satisfy—the passion for Romance. The unfortunates yearn, yearn with an irresistible yearning, for something to happen, something unusual, something with a spice of danger in it, something which pulls at the heart’s strings, something to make one wake up in the morning with a feeling that the eggs and bacon for breakfast are not the most exciting prospect of the day. Ah, heaven! Don’t we all know it—the coldest, the oldest, the most austere of us!
I formed this opinion entirely out of myown head years ago, and it was curiously confirmed by an experience of three days I once spent in the divorce court. It was when I had that tiresome Chancery suit—you remember, about Ida’s marriage settlement—and I had to waste a lot of time in the law courts.
I could not sit and listen to the Chancery counsel prosing over technicalities, and so I passed the days in a court which touches human nature a trifle more shrewdly and less expensively.
In those three days I saw about a dozen cases tried and disposed of. And what sort of people do you think they were who came there with and against their wills? The gay, the frivolous, the debonnair? Oh, dear me, no; not in the least. I saw not one gallant gentleman, not one lovely lady. On the contrary, they were the dusty, the dowdy, the humdrum, and, this is the odd thing, the middle-aged! They were the kind of women who make their own hats, make them very badly, and talk about their servants at afternoon tea; and of men who go up to town at 8-45 of a morning, and come home by the 6-15. Some of them, of course, hadoccasionally lost the 6-15, and that was where the trouble began.
It is grossly unfair to the aristocracy to say that it is they who keep the divorce court going. “Aristocratic divorce cases,” as the Radical papers absurdly call them, make not one per cent. of the whole. It is the dull, stodgy middle-class among whom immorality is rampant! And it is just because they are dull, stodgy, and middle-class.
The pleasures, the emotional outlets of art, the distractions which intelligence can always find in the world, are closed against them. Meanwhile, beneath their commonplace domesticity the passion for Romance, though smothered, smoulders on. One fine day, on the most ridiculously inadequate provocation, it bursts into a flame and then—“decreenisiwith costs.”
Poor devils, poor, poor devils, they haven’t brains enough to outwit a Slaters’ detective or even a prying housemaid.
Brains, ah! yes. Brains are your stand-by in marriage as in most other of life’s perplexities, Alexa. It is brains that keep you out of matrimonial troubles, and even, when in a slack moment, you do get into difficulties,it is brains that will pull you out of them.
Looking at those of my personal acquaintances who have come bad croppers over their marriages, I find that in every case there has been want of wit on one side or the other, often on both. Brains! That is why I have considerable confidence in your future, my daughter.
One word more. Romance, in-loveness, cannot survive six weeks of the appalling intimacy of marriage. That is past praying for. What shall follow its departure then? Mere emptiness, a tramp across a sandy desert or a treacherous bog? That depends. The thing that should follow is friendship, friendship of a peculiar, a unique, sort; friendship touched by tenderness, mixed with memories, coloured by emotion.
But again remember this—it takes as much brains to build up and to maintain a friendship of that kind as it does to ... well ... more than it does to do anything else in the world so well worth doing. Fools may make satisfactory lovers, only the wise can be lasting friends.
You return on Friday, isn’t it? I shall be at Paddington to meet you. See to it that He is not there—just for this once!
Your
Father.