PART ISIGNS OF UNREST

PART ISIGNS OF UNREST‘The Subject of Marriage is kept too much in the dark.Air it! Air it!’—George Meredith.MODERN MARRIAGEITHE MUTUAL DISSATISFACTION OFTHE SEXES‘The shadow of marriage waits, resolute and awful, at the cross-roads.’—R. L. Stevenson.Eversince the time, nineteen years ago, when Mrs Mona Caird attacked the institution of matrimony in theWestminster Reviewand led the way for the great discussion on ‘Is Marriage a Failure?’ in theDaily Telegraph—marriage has been the hardy perennial of newspaper correspondence, and an unfailing resource to worried sub-editors. When seasons are slack and silly, the humblest member of the staff has but to turn out a column on this subject, and whether it be a serious dissertation on ‘The Perfections of Polygamy’ or a banal discussion on ‘Should husbands have tea at home?’ it will inevitablyachieve the desired result, and fill the spare columns of the papers with letters for weeks to come. People are always interested in matrimony, whether from the objective or subjective point of view, and that is my excuse for perpetrating yet another book on this well-worn, but ever fertile topic.Marriage indeed seems to be in the air more than ever in this year of grace; everywhere it is discussed, and very few people seem to have a good word to say for it. The most superficial observer must have noticed that there is being gradually built up in the community a growing dread of the conjugal bond, especially among men; and a condition of discontent and unrest among married people, particularly women. What is the matter with this generation that wedlock has come to assume so distasteful an aspect in their eyes? On every side one hears it vilified and its very necessity called in question. From the pulpit, the clergy endeavour to uphold the sanctity of the institution, and unceasingly exhort their congregations to respect it and abide by its laws. But the Divorce Court returns makeominous reading; every family solicitor will tell you his personal experience goes to prove that happy unions are considerably on the decrease, and some of the greatest thinkers of our day join in a chorus of condemnation against latter-day marriage.Tolstoy says: ‘The relations between the sexes are searching for a new form, the old one is falling to pieces.’ Among the manuscript ‘remains’ of Ibsen, that profound student of human nature, the following noteworthy passage occurs: ‘“Free-born men” is a phrase of rhetoric. They do not exist, for marriage, the relation between man and wife, has corrupted the race and impressed the mark of slavery upon all.’ Not long ago, too, our greatest living novelist, George Meredith, created an immense sensation by his suggestion that marriage should become a temporary arrangement, with a minimum lease of, say, ten years.That the time has not yet come for any such revolutionary change is obvious, but if the signs and portents of the last decade or two do not lie, we may safely assume that the timewillcome, and that the presentlegal conditions of wedlock will be altered in some way or other.Fifteen years ago there was a sudden wave of rebellion against these conditions, and a renewed interest in the sex question showed itself in an outbreak of problem novels—a term which later came to be used as one of reproach. Perhaps the most important of these was Grant Allen’sThe Woman Who Did. I can recall as a schoolgirl the excitement it aroused and my acute disappointment when it was forcibly commandeered from me by an irate governess who apparently took no interest in these enthralling subjects. A host of imitators followedThe Woman Who Did; some of them entirely illiterate, all of them offering some infallible key to the difficult maze of marriage.Worse still was the reaction that inevitably followed, when realism was tabooed in fiction, and sickly romance possessed the field.The Yellow Bookand similar strange exotics of the first period withered and died, and the cult of literature (!) for the British Home was shortly afterwards in full blast. There followed an avalanche of insufferably dull and puerile magazines, in which thewordSexwas strictly taboo, and the ideal aimed at was apparently the extreme opposite to real life. It was odd how suddenly the sex note—(as I will call it for want of a better word)—disappeared from the press. Psychology was pronounced ‘off,’ and plots were the order of the day. Many names well-known at that time and associated with aflairfor delicate delineation of character, disappeared from the magazine contents bill and the publisher’s list, whilst facile writers who could turn out mild detective yarns or tales of adventure and gore were in clover.Signs are not wanting that the pendulum of public interest has now swung back again, and another wave of realism in fiction and inquiry into the re-adjustment of the conjugal bond is imminent. But the pendulum will have to swing back and forth a good many times however, before the relations between the sexes succeed in finding that new form of which Tolstoy speaks. What the revival I have foretold will accomplish remains to be seen. What did the last agitation achieve? Practically nothing; a few women may have been impelled to follow in the footsteps of Grant Allen’s Herminiato their undying sorrow, and possibly a good many precocious young girls, who read the literature of that day, may have given their parents some anxiety by their revolutionary ideas on the value of the holy estate. But when that trio so irresistible to the feminine heart came along—the Ring, the Trousseau, and the House of My Own, to say nothing of the solid, twelve-stone, prospective husband—which among these advanced damsels remembered the sermon on the hill-top?Yet in the fourteen years that have elapsed since the publication ofThe Woman Who Did, there have certainly been some changes. For one thing, it is still harder apparently to earn a decent living. Times are bad and money scarce; men are even more reluctant than before to ‘domesticate the recording angel’ by marrying, and a type of woman has sprung up amongst us who is shy of matrimony and honestly reluctant to risk its many perils for the sake of its problematical joys. Most noticeable of all is the growing dissatisfaction of the sexes with each other. Men do not shun marriage only because of unfavourable financial conditions, or becausethe restrictions of wedlock are any more irksome to them than formerly, but because they cannot find a wife sufficiently near their ideal. Woman has progressed to such an extent within the last generation or two: her outlook has so broadened, her intellect so developed that she has strayed very far from man’s ideal and, consequently, man hesitates to marry her. There is something comic about the situation, and at Olympian dinner-tables I feel sure the gods would laugh at this twentieth-century conjugal deadlock.Another reason why men fall in love so much less than they used to do is largely due to the decay of the imaginative faculty. As for women, although they are in the main as anxious to marry as ever, although it is universally acknowledged that the modern young woman does cultivate the modern young man unduly, their reasons for doing so are less and less concerned with the time-honoured motives of love. Marriage brings independence and a certain social importance; for these reasons women desire it. H. B. Marriot Watson has put the case neatly thus: ‘Women desire to marryaman; men tomarrythewoman.’ Nevertheless women are even now more prone to fall in love than are men, because they have better preserved this imaginative faculty, which is possibly also the cause of the disillusionment and discontent of wives after marriage.The upshot of it all is that men and women appear to have become antagonistic to each other. However much they love the individual of their fancy, a kind of veiled distrust seems to obtain between the sexes collectively, but more especially on the part of men—perhaps because man is more necessary to woman than woman is to man. This hostility towards woman is particularly noticeable in the pages of the press. Scarcely a week passes but some journalist of the nobler sex pours out his scorn for the inferior one of his mother in columns of masterly abuse on one score or another. Each article is followed by a passionate correspondence in which ‘Disgusted Dad,’ ‘Hopeless Hubby,’ ‘Browbeaten Brother,’ and the inevitable ‘Cynicus’ express high approval of the writer, whilst ‘Happy Mother of Seven Girls’ and ‘Lover of theSex’ write to demand his instant execution and public disgrace.The range of men’s fault-finding is endless; one will assert that women are mere domestic machines, unfit companions for any intelligent man, and with no soul above conversation about their servants and children; another that they are mere blue-stockings striving after an unattainable intellectuality; a third that they are mere frivolous dolls without brain or heart, engrossed in the pursuit of pleasure, a fourth that they are sexless, slangy, misclad masculine monsters.Judged by the assertions of newspaper correspondents, women are at one and the same time preposterously masculine, contemptibly feminine, ridiculously intellectual, repulsively athletic, and revoltingly frivolous. In appearance they are either lank, gaunt, flat-footed lamp-posts, or else over-dressed, unnaturally-shaped, painted dolls. Their extravagance exhausts expletive! When they belong to the class of society generally denoted with a capital S, they invariably smoke, drink, gamble and swear. They neglect their homes and their children. They have little principle and less sense, nomorals, no heart and absolutelynosense of humour!‘But,’ the observant reader may possibly exclaim, ‘there is nothing new about this. Woman has ever been man’s favourite grumble-vent, from the day when the first man got out of his first scrape by blaming the only available woman!’ True enough, age cannot stale the infinite variety of women’s misdemeanours, as viewed by men; tradition has hallowed the subject, custom carries it on; and probably when the last trump shall sound, the last living man will be found grumbling loudly at the abominable selfishness of woman for leaving him alone, and the last dead man to rise will awake cursing because his wife did not call him sooner!But formerly man’s fault-finding was more of the nature of genial chaff, as when we affectionately laugh at those we love. There was nearly always a certain good humour about his diatribes, which now is lacking. In its stead can be noted a bitterness, a distinct animus. Men apparently take with an ill-grace women’s rebellion against the old man-made conditions, and they retaliate by falling in love less frequently, and showingstill more reluctance to enter the arena of matrimony.Nevertheless, they get there all the same, albeit in a different spirit. Timorous and trembling, our faint-hearted modern lovers gird on their new frock-coats and step shrinkingly into the arena where awaits them—radiant and triumphant—the determined being whose will has brought them thither. No, notherwill, but the mysterious will of Nature which remains steadfast and of unswerving purpose, indifferent to our sex-warfare and the progress of our petty loves and hates. The institution of marriage battered, abused, scarred with countless thousands of attacks, stained with the sins of centuries still continues to flourish, for, as Schopenhauer says; ‘It is the future generation in its entire individual determination which forces itself into existence through the medium of all this strife and trouble.’TheWill-to-Livewill always have the last word!IIWHY MEN DON’T MARRY‘If you wish the pick of mankind, take a good bachelor and a good wife.’‘There is probably no other act in a man’s life so hot-headed and foolish as this of marriage.’—R. L. Stevenson.‘Whatever may be said against marriage, it is certainly an experience.’—Oscar Wilde.‘Allthe men are getting married and none of the girls,’ a volatile lady is once reported to have said, and one understands what she meant to convey. In a newspaper correspondence on marriage I once noted the following significant passage: ‘But in these days it is different from what it was when I was a girl. Then every boy had his sweetheart and every girl her chap. Now it seems to me the boys don’t want sweethearts and the girls can’t get chaps. For one youth who means honestly to marry a girl, you will find twenty whose game is mere flirtation, regardlessof how the girl may be injured. The times are ungallant and they want mending.’This letter is signed ‘A Workman’s Wife,’ but it bears ample evidence of having been written by a member of the staff, who seemed to consider sufficientvraisemblancehad been given to the signature by the inclusion of an occasional vulgarism, such as ‘chap.’ But in spite of being penned to order, the statements expressed appear to be only too true. The times are ungallant indeed and growing more so every year.Not long ago I was at a cheery social gathering where the non-marrying tendency of modern men was being discussed. Someone put all the men into a good humour with the reminder that ‘by persistently remaining single, a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation,’ and as there were fifteen bachelors present, the conversation naturally became personal.One whom I will call Vivian, gallantly remarked that all the nice women were married, so he perforce remained single. I happen to know that he is deeply in love with a married woman. Another, Lucian, a very handsome and popular man of thirty,said he fully meant to marry some day, but wanted a few more years’ freedom first. Dorian gravely asserted that he was waiting for my daughter (aged eighteen months), but being in his confidence, I know that his case is similar to Vivian’s. Hadrian’s health would make his marriage a crime; we are all aware of that fortunately, so no one asked him. The same discretion was observed with regard to Julien of whom it is well known that he has formed an ‘unfortunate’ attachment and has practically not the right to marry. Florian was jilted years ago, and is shy and distrustful of the sex, which is a great pity, as he is the kind of man born for fireside and nursery joys, and would make a wife very happy.Of Augustin and Fabian it may be truly said that ‘the more they have known of the others, the less they will settle to one;’ and indeed I fear they have spoilt themselves for matrimony, unless there is truth in the old saying that a reformed rake makes the best husband. Endymion is altogether too ineligible, his blue eyes and broad shoulders being his only fortune; he makes plenty of capital out of these adjuncts: they bring himin a rich return of feminine favour, but are nevertheless hardly sufficient to support a wife.Claudian is really anxious to marry, but suffers from a fatal faithlessness and, as he engagingly explains, can’t love a girl long enough to get the preliminaries settled. One day he is sure to be caught by some determined and probably very unsuitable woman and led reluctant to the altar. Galahad won’t marry until he has found ‘the one woman,’ and I fear he will prove a husband wasted, for poor Galahad already wears spectacles and a bald spot; his devotion to an unrealisable ideal bids fair to spoil his life.When I put the question to Aurelian, he smiled his evil smile, which makes him more like an embittered vulture than ever, and remarked that he was thinking over his offers and hadn’t yet decided which was the best. As the fact that he has been refused by seven women is well-known, we really rather admire the persistence of his pose as a lady-killer. He has even been known to write passionate letters to himself, in an assumed hand, and drop cleverly-manufactured tearshere and there upon them, to give an air of greater realism to these amorous masterpieces, which he uses as a proof of his wild stories of conquest. When dry, the tears look most life-like; of course it is a dodge that every schoolgirl knows, but I have never known a man have recourse to it before, and hope never to again!Both Cyprian and Valerian gave as the reason for their continued bachelorhood, the fact that they were too comfortable as bachelors and had never felt the need of a wife. The latter added that if he could find justthegirl, he would think it over, but as matters stood he preferred certainty to chance and was taking no risks. Between ourselves, both these two are very self-satisfied and egotistical persons, and I don’t think any woman has lost much by their resolve.The fourteenth man was Bayard, who belongs to a very exasperating type of philanderer. Most women of the world have met and been bored by him to their sorrow. It is his grievous habit to go about professing a yearning for matrimony of the most ideal kind, and confiding at great length to safely attached young matrons how he longs tofind a home in one good woman’s heart, and what a great, pure, passionate, wild love he is capable of. There is something rather engaging about him, and his pose is naturally very attractive to unsuspecting spinsters. He is always getting desperately entangled, but makes a great parade of his poverty when theaffairereaches the critical point, and wriggles out successfully—generally without any too unpleasant explanation. If, however, things have gone too far for this, he can always make good his escape under cover of the ‘I love you too much, darling, to drag you down to poverty’ plea. How many girls, wounded to the heart’s core, have listened to this hoary lie when they are more than willing to be poor, if but with him, willing to economise and save, and forego for his sake.Not, of course, that Bayard and his like inspire such devotion; I mean that the essentials of this particular excuse are given by very many unmarried men nowadays as the reason of their single state. Generally speaking, there are two main reasons why men do not marry: 1. Because they have not yet met a woman they care for sufficiently;2.—and these constitute a large majority—because they are too selfish. Of course men don’t spell it that way. Like Bayard, they say they ‘can’t afford it.’ They think of all the things they would have to give up—how difficult it is to get enough for their pleasure now, how impossible it would be then, with the support of a wife and potential family added; how they would hate having to knock off poker, find a cheaper tailor, and economise in golf balls. They shudder at the prospect, and decide in the expressively vulgar parlance of the day that it’s ‘not good enough.’ The things that are beyond price are weighed against the things that are bought with money—and found wanting!It would, however, be the last word of foolishness to encourage improvident marriages, already a source of so much misery, and of course my remarks do not apply to the genuine poverty of the man who really cannot afford to wed. For him I have a very real sympathy, since he is missing the best things of life probably through no fault of his own. The above strictures are intended solely for the man of moderate means,who could afford to marry if he loved himself less and some woman more. Five hundred a year, for instance, is a comfortable income for a bachelor not in the inner circle of Society. On this sum a middle-class man can do himself well, provided he has no particularly expensive vices or hobbies—but it certainly means self-denial when stretched to provide for a wife and two or three children. It means a small house in one of the cheaper suburbs, instead of a bachelor flat in town, ’buses instead of cabs, upper boxes instead of stalls, a fortnighten familleat Broadstairs instead of a month’s fishingen garçonin Norway. It means no more suppers at the Savoy, no more week-ends in Paris, no more ‘running’ over to Monte Carlo; but itcanbe done, and done happily, provided a man puts love above luxuries. Almost every man can afford to marry—the right woman!Of course, if a man has still to meet the woman of his fancy, all is well, but it is the despicable plea of Bayard that so incenses me. If men would own the truth, it would not be so bad, but, Adam-like, as usual, they lay the blame on women and say: ‘Girls expect so much nowadays, it is impossible to makeenough money to satisfy them.’ This is one of the many lies men tell about women, or perhaps they are under a delusion and really believe the statement to be true. Let them be undeceived, girlsdon’texpect so much; they are perfectly willing to be poor, as I have said before, if only they care for the man enough. At anyrate, once they have reached that stage of wanting the real things of life they would sooner have wifehood and comparative poverty than ease and empty hearts in their parents’ home. They would sooner, in short, be ‘tired wives than restful spinsters.’Another delusion men spread about women is that they’re too fond of pleasure to settle down. How often one hears statements such as ‘Juno Jones wouldn’t make a good wife, she’s out all day playing golf;’ or ‘I couldn’t afford to marry Sappho Smith, she’s too fond of dress and theatre-going.’ God bless the man! What else have the poor girls to do? Sappho has a taste for dainty clothes and a love for the theatre; she fills her empty existence with these things as far as she can; Juno has nothing in the wide world to do all day long, but she loves the open air, and so concentrates her magnificentenergies on a game with a stick and ball, because any active part in the great game of life is denied her. Marry her—if she will have you—and see what a grand comrade she will make, and what splendid children she will bear you. Or marry Sappho, and you will find she will never want any but simple pleasures within your means, as long as you are kind to her and adore her as she requires to be adored. She will cheerfully make her own clothes, and find her greatest joy in planning out your income and adorning your home.Everyone can recall having known frivolous and pleasure-loving girls settle down into admirable wives whose nurseries are models and whose households are beyond reproach. Doubtless their friends all predicted disaster when these butterflies were led to the altar. I honestly believe women only want extravagant pleasures when they are miserable. It is generally the wretched wives, the unhappy, restless spinsters who run up bills and fling away money. They feel that life is cheating them and they must have some compensations.But to return to my fifteen bachelors. There only remains Florizel, whose attitudetowards wedlock is a blend of that of Bayard and Claudian. He is genuinely eager to marry, ardent, affectionate, anxious to do right, but lacking in moral courage and egotistical to the point of disease. I would much like to see him happily wedded, as he then would doubtless quickly lose that intense self-centredness, but I question if any attractive woman exists who would be unselfish enough to cope with him in his present state of egomania. His mind is always inflamed with some woman or other, and he hovers about on the edge of desperateamours, anxious to fall head over ears into the sea of love and cast out an anchor of matrimony to hold him fast where he can swerve no more. Unfortunately he cannot forget himself enough to take the fatal plunge. With all his faults there is something very lovable about Florizel, and I should like to see him knocked into shape, though it would be a brave and patient woman who would take the task in hand.When all the fifteen bachelors had ceased to talk about themselves and settled down to bridge with the rest of the company, an old lady who, like myself, preferred to be alooker-on, came and sat beside me. ‘How theydotalk,’ she said! ‘But I can tell you why they don’t marry, in six words, my dear: because they don’t fall in love! And why don’t they fall in love? Because the girls are too eager; because the girls meet them all the way—that’s why! I’ve seven sons, all unmarried, andIknow!’Note.—It is interesting to note that Westermarck in hisHistory of Human Marriagequotes a number of authorities to prove that among many ancient nations marriage was a religious duty incumbent upon all. Among Mohammedan people generally it is still considered a duty. Hebrew celibacy was unheard of, and they have a proverb, ‘He who has no wife is no man.’ In Egypt it is improper and even disreputable for a man to abstain from marriage when there is no just impediment. For an adult to die unmarried is regarded as a deplorable misfortune by the Chinese, and among the Hindus of the present day a man who remains single is considered to be almost a useless member of society, and is looked upon as beyond the pale of nature.IIIWHY WOMEN DON’T MARRY‘It’s a woman’s business to get married as soon as possible and a man’s to remain unmarried as long as he can.’—G. Bernard Shaw.‘Marriage is of so much use to a woman, opens out to her so much 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.’—R. L. Stevenson.‘Whywomen don’t marry? But they do—whenever they can!’ the intelligent reader will naturally exclaim. Not ‘whenever they get the chance,’ mark you; nointelligentreader would make this mistake, though it is a common enough error among the non-comprehending. Most spinsters over thirty must have winced at one time or another at the would-be genial rallying of some elderly man relative: ‘What! you not married yet? Well, well, I wonder what all the young men are thinking of.’ I writesome manadvisedly, for no woman, howevercattishly inclined, however desirous of planting arrows in a rival’s breast, would utter this peculiarly deadly form of insult, which, strangely enough, is always intended as a high compliment by the masculine blunderer. The fact that the unfortunate spinster thus assailed may have had a dozen offers, and yet, for reasons of her own, prefer to remain single, seems entirely beyond their range of comprehension.But the main reason why women don’t marry is obviously because men don’t ask them. Most women will accept when a sufficiently pleasing man offers them a sufficiently congenial life. If the offers they receive fall below a certain standard, then they prefer to remain single, wistfully hoping, no doubt, that the right man may come along before it is too late. The preservation of the imaginative faculty in women, to which I have previously alluded, doubtless accounts for many spinsters. It must also be remembered that the more educated women become, the less likely they are to marry for marrying’s sake as their grandmothers did.Then there are a few women, quite asmall section, who, unless they can realise their ideal in its entirety, will not be content with second best. By an irony of fate, it happens that these are often the noblest of their sex. Yet another small section remain single from an honest dislike of marriage and its duties. It is perhaps not too severe to say that a woman who has absolutely no vocation for wifehood and motherhood must be a degenerate, and so lacking in the best feminine instincts as to deserve the reproach of being ‘sexless.’ This type is apparently increasing! I shall deal with it further in Part IV.Then there are those—I should not like to make a guess at their number—who will marryanyman, however undesirable and uncongenial, rather than be left ‘withering on the stalk.’ It is an acutely humiliating fact that there exists no man too ugly, too foolish, too brutal, too conceited and too vile to find a wife.Anyman can findsomewoman to wed him. In this connection, one recalls the famous cook, who, when condoled with on the defection of a lover, replied: ‘It don’t matter; thank God I can love any man!’One cannot help being amused by the serious articles on this subject in feminine journals. We are gravely told that women don’t marry nowadays because they price their liberty too high, because those who have money prefer to be independent and enjoy life, and those who have none prefer bravely wringing a living from the world to being a man’s slave, a mere drudge, entirely engrossed in housekeeping, etc., etc.; and so on—pages of it! All this may possibly be true of a very small portion of the community, but the uncontrovertible fact remains that the principal reason for woman’s spinsterhood is man’s indifference.I have every sympathy with the women who wish to postpone taking up the heavy responsibilities of matrimony till they have had what in the opposite sex is termed ‘a fling,’ that is until they have enjoyed a period of freedom wherein to study, to travel, to enjoy their youth fully, to meet many men, to look life in the eyes and learn something of its meaning. But there comes a period in the life of almost every woman—except the aforesaid degenerate—when she feels it is time to ‘put away childish things,’and into her heart there steals a longing for the real things of life—the things that matter, the things that last—wedded love and little children, and that priceless possession, a home of one’s own.It is the fashion nowadays to discredit the home, and it has been jestingly alluded to by Mr Bernard Shaw as ‘the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse;’ but what a wonderful sanctuary it really is!—and exactly how much it means to a woman, only those who have felt the need of it can tell. In our youth, home is the place where hampers come from, where string and stamps and magazines grow on the premises, a place generally where love is, but nevertheless essentially a place we take for granted and for which we never dream of being grateful. Later on it is sometimes associated with irksome duties; to some it even becomes a place to get away from; but when we have lost it, how we long for it! How reverently we think of each room and the things that happened there; how we yearn in thought over the old garden and dream about the beloved trees. No matter how mean a home it may have been, every bit ofit is sacred and dear—from the box-room, where on wet days we played at robbers, to the toolshed, where on fine days we played at everything under the sun. To this day if I chance on a badly-cooked potato it almost brings tears to my eyes, not because of its badness, but because it recalls the potatoes that three small children used to cook with gladness and eat with silent awe, in the ashes of a bonfire, in an old garden, long, long ago—whilst the smell of a bonfire itself makes me feel seven years old again!But whether she has a home with her parents or not, every normal woman longs for a home of her own, and a girl who resents even arranging the flowers on her mother’s dinner-table will after marriage cheerfully do quite distasteful housework in the place she calls her own.This passionate love of home is one of the most marked feminine characteristics; I don’t mean love of beingathome, as modern women’s tastes frequently lie elsewhere, but love of the place itself and the desire to possess it. A great number of women marry solely to obtain this coveted possession. As for those who don’t, the advertisementcolumns of theChurch Times, theChristian World, and other papers tell a pitiful story of their need. Ladies ‘by birth’ (pathetic and foolish little phrase!) are willing to do almost anything in return for just a modest corner, a very subordinate place even in someone else’s home. They will be housekeepers, servants, companions, secretaries, helps for ‘a small salary and a home,’ and sometimes for no salary at all. They will pack, sew, mend, teach, supervise; they offer their knowledge of every kind, such as it is, their music, their languages, their health and strength, their subservience and all their virtues, real or acquired—all in return for a little food and fire, and the sheltering of four walls, which constitute their extreme need, their utmost desire—a home! Beautiful women, gifted and good women, sell themselves daily just to gain a home. Even Hedda Gabler, most degenerate of modern heroines, who shot herself rather than be a mother, sold herself in a loveless marriage only for a home. And yet constantly we read a list of trivial and fantastic reasons why women don’t marry!A girl-bachelor who was compelled tospend most of her time in that uncomfortable place technically known as ‘one’s boxes,’ once told me that her greatest desire was a spot just big enough for a wardrobe in which to keep her spare clothes and little possessions. She did without a home, but she longed intensely for that wardrobe. ‘I shall have to marry Tony soon,’ she said, ‘just for the convenience of having room for my clothes. I don’t like him, and I want to wait till someone I do like comes, but if ever I take him, it will be for wardrobe room, you just see.’ I must add that ‘someone’didcome, and she now possesses several wardrobes and three bouncing babies, and Tony cuts her when he meets her in the Park!This home passion is even more noticeable in that class of society usually referred to as the lower. I have occasionally employed a poor woman who has been in service as cook since her husband died nineteen years ago. All that time, she has ‘kept on the home,’i.e.a single room which contains her furniture. She has scarcely ever had to use the room, except for an odd day or two, and has had to spend much of her scanty leisure in cleaning it. For nineteen years she haspaid three-and-six a week for the room sooner than sell her furniture. The £172 thus expended would have paid for the furniture over and over again. The woman quite realises the absurdity of it, but ‘I simply couldn’t part with the ’ome,’ is her explanation.Yet another instance. Once when staying in seaside lodgings, I had the misfortune to break a homely vessel of thick blue glass which had evidently begun life as a fancy jam jar, but had been relegated, for some reason obscure to me, to the proud position of mantel ‘ornament,’ if that be the term. To my surprise the worthy landlady wept bitterly over the pieces, and when I spoke of gorgeous objects wherewith to replace her treasure, explained snappishly: ‘Nothing won’t make it good to me! Why, that there blue vorse was the beginning of the ’ome!’I must ask pardon for this digression and return to the subject in hand. The most depressing aspect of the question is that even if every man over twenty-five were married there would be still an enormous number of women left husbandless. This is really veryserious, and is a condition that gives rise to many evils. To make up for it as far as possible, every man of sound health and in receipt of sufficient income ought to marry. If it is merely ‘not good’ for man to be alone, then it is very bad indeed for women! Every woman should have a man companion, a man to live with—if only to take the tickets, carry the bags and get up in the night to see what that noise is. Since society as at present constituted does not countenance men and women living together for companionship, then clearly every woman ought to have a husband!Mr Bernard Shaw has written: ‘Give women the vote and in five years there will be a crushing tax on bachelors.’ So there should be, subject to certain qualifications of age and income; this is one of the many matters in which we should take a lesson from the Japanese where all bachelors over a certain age are taxed; in France too, a bill, to this effect, is being discussed. At the time of writing, women are full of anticipation of being speedily enfranchised, and there is a good deal of talk about what use they will make of the vote. I regret to say thatalthough there have been some utterly idiotic threats to abolish that boon to wives—the man’s club—yet so far, with one exception, nothing has appeared in print as to the advisability of taxing bachelors. The exception is a very interesting anonymous novel calledStar of the Morning, which strongly advocates such a tax, among several other thoughtful suggestions for political reform.It is obviously only just that the man who is doing nothing for the State in the way of rearing a family should be taxed to relieve the man who is. We hear so much about the falling birth-rate, and the duty of every married couple to have a family, yet everything is done to discourage those who do. The professional man slaving to earn, say, £1000 a year, and bring up three or four children for the State, is taxed exactly as much as the bachelor in receipt of the same income who does nothing at all for the State, and can even avoid the other taxes by being a lodger, if he choose.But even if we eventually get reasonable legislation, which would offer rewards instead of additional burdens to those whodo their share in keeping up the birth-rate; even if a bachelor over twenty-five became as rare an object in these islands as an old maid in a Mohammedan country, still there would be this enormous superfluity of spinsters. Why is it? Why should Great Britain be regarded as a paradise of old maids? Why should we have more spinsters than other countries? Is it because our colonies swallow up so many men? Then why can’t they swallow up an equal number of women? I should like this most important matter to be taken up by the State and an Institution for Encouraging Marriage started under State auspices. One of the duties of this institution would be to induce numbers of suitable women to emigrate, so as to preserve the proper balance of the sexes in the home country, and that every colonist might have a chance to get a wife. I heard the other day of a very ordinary colonial girl who had eleven men all wanting to marry her at once. Eleven men! And yet there are scores of charming English girls who grow old and soured without having had a single offer of marriage.Another duty of the Institution for Encouraging Marriage would be to try and reach and bring together the thousands of lonely middle-class men and women in large towns, who are engaged at work all day and have no means of meeting members of the opposite sex. I have just been reading Francis Gribble’s very interesting novel,The Pillar of Cloud, in which he describes the existence of half a dozen girls in ‘Stonor House’ one of those dreary barracks for homeless females engaged during the day. The frantic desire of these girls to meet men of their own class is painfully true, and this desire is not so much the outcome of young women’s natural tendency to cultivate young men, but because all such men to them are possible husbands, and marriage is the only way out from Stonor House and the joyless existence there.InThe Pathway of the Pioneerpublished a few years ago, Dolf Wyllarde breaks similar ground, but her young women are more morbid and less frankly anxious to meet men with a view to matrimony. Both books, however, give one a good idea of the cheerless,unnatural lives led by young middle-class women, whose relatives, if any, are far away, and who work for their living in large towns—condemned almost inevitably to celibacy by these unfavourable social conditions.That large numbers of daintily-bred women should be condemned to such an existence is the strongest possible argument in favour of the establishment of two French institutions, viz., strictly limited families and the system ofdots. Of late years, the former has been largely adopted in England, and until the latter custom also becomes the rule, the Institution for Encouraging Matrimony could take the matter in hand. Two or three unusually sensible philanthropists have already given their attention to this important subject, but any movement of this nature at once assumes too much the aspect of a matrimonial agency to be approved by the class for whose welfare it is destined. However, the I.F.E.M. would have to deal with this obstacle and conceal its real intentions under another name. I am sure if its object were sufficiently wrapped-up that refined men and womencould take advantage of it without loss of self-respect—the response to such an institution by both sexes would be enormous. A club, ostensibly for promoting social intercourse, might be the solution, and subscription dances, concerts, organised excursions would not be difficult to arrange, and would make a source of brightness and interest in many drab lives. Country branches could be started if the thing proved a success.One constantly sees in the newspapers proof of the fact that there are a very large number of middle-class young men able and anxious to marry, who lack feminine acquaintances of their own social standing from whom to make a choice. Unfortunatemésalliancesare often the result, and it seems to me a sad and wasteful thing that these uxoriously-inclined men cannot be brought into contact with some of the thousands of young women whose lives are passed in uncongenial toil and who are eating out their hearts in their anxiety for a home and a husband of their own. Until the I.F.E.M. becomes fact, here is splendid work ready to hand for a philanthropistof infinite tact, and large, sympathetic heart. What a chance to add to the sum of human joy! What a rich reward for the expenditure of but a little time and money!IVTHE TRAGEDY OF THE UNDESIRED‘So man and woman will keep their trust,Till the very Springs of the Sea run dust.‘Yea, each with the other will lose and win,For the Strife of Love’s the abysmal Strife,And the Word of Love is the Word of Life.‘And they that go with the Word unsaid,Though they seem of the living, are damned and dead.’—W. E. Henley.Thisis a tragedy of which few men know the existence and certainly no man in these woman-ridden isles can ever have experienced. Men always treat with derision the woman anxious for matrimony, and gibe equally at the spinster who fails to attain it. Heaven alone knows why, since by men’s laws and traditions the married state has been made to mean everything desirable for a woman, and the unmarried condition everything undesirable. ‘People think women who do not want to marry unfeminine; people think women who do want to marryimmodest; people combine both opinions by regarding it as unfeminine for women not to look longingly forward to wifehood as the hope and purpose of their lives, and ridiculing andcontemningany individual woman of their acquaintance whom they suspect of entertaining such a longing. They must wish and not wish; they must not give, and certainly must not withhold, encouragement—and so it goes on, each precept cancelling the last, and most of them negative.’1Both Mr Bernard Shaw and Mr George Moore have stated in print that women frequently propose to men, and several men have confided in me details of the proposals they have received from forward fair ones. I believe it is one of the tenets of advanced women that the sex that bears the child has a right to choose the husband. Although unpleasantly revolutionary this seems eminently sane. That the right to choose a mate should be open to all adults, instead of being the sole privilege of the most selfish and least observant sex, will possibly be acknowledged in the future, when the woman question shall be set at rest for ever.In those far-off days there will, let us hope, be no more tragedy of the undesired. It seems almost indelicate to apply this phrase to the noble army of British spinsters, for the most part dignified, worthy women, comprising ratepayers, householders, philanthropists, mothers-in-all-but-fact—working parochially, among the poor, in hospitals, schools, homes, offices, and studios—on public bodies, on the staff of newspapers—generally cheerful and helpful, sometimes clever, often charming, occasionally a little narrow perhaps, but on the whole upholding the best traditions of their sex, and of courseneveradmitting that they would like to have married. Deep in their own hearts, however, almost all of them must feel the sadness of their unfulfilment, comfort themselves how they may with other interests. Those that have engrossing occupations should be thankful, for the woman whose whole heart is set on finding a husband and who fails to attain this object generally becomes fretful, bitter, disappointed and useless in every way. But women whose minds are sufficiently broad to hold other ideals than the matrimonial one find other work to do, and do itcapably and faithfully. Loving and sympathetic women are always wanted. Marriage is not essential to such a woman’s life, though it may be to the highest development of her happiness.Again, the large number of women who have had chances of marrying can comfort themselves that they chose to be single for their ideal’s sake—or for whatever the reason was. Larger still is the number of those possessing the non-marrying temperament of which Bernard Shaw has written: ‘Barren—the Life-Force passes it by.’ This rarely troubles them; they have a host of minor pleasures and interests which suffice; no storms of feeling, no pangs of stifled mother-longing ruffle the placid surface of their lives. The real tragedy of the undesired does not touch either of these classes; it is reserved in all its poignancy for those who belong to the type of thegrande amoureuse, whom lack of opportunity generally, lack of attractiveness sometimes, has prevented from fulfilling the deepest need of their nature.I once met at a hotel on the Riviera an elderly spinster who was always incredibly depressed. However bravely shone the sun,however fair seemed the world in that fairest spot, nothing had the power to cheer her. I tried once to get her to join in an excursion which a party of us were going to make on donkey-back to a neighbouring village in the hills, but she refused. Another time I invited her to accompany me to the rooms at Monte Carlo, but she again refused, and after several well-meant efforts on my part to cheer her had led to the same result, the poor soul told me in hesitating words that she shunned gay places and lively gatherings. ‘They always make me discontented and remind me of what I might have had; it brings home to me the—what shall I call it?—thetragedy of the might-have-been.’ I understood what she meant, and no further words on the subject passed between us, much to my relief, as confidences of this nature are very painful to both sides. My readers will probably despise this poor lady as morbid, selfish and unbalanced. Possibly they are right, but the sadness of an empty heart, a lonely life, was the cause of her warped nature. Fortunately hers is an extreme case; the majority of spinsters I imagine can take a delight in seeing girlshappy, and are generally deeply interested in the love affairs of others. I recall a beautiful line of Fiona Macleod’s to the effect that ‘a secret vision in the soul will hallow life.’ This will suffice to keep many spinsters happy—the memory of some love and tenderness, a romance of some kind to sweeten life; women need it.To give another instance: a woman once asked me why men fell in love. ‘I wonder if you can tell me what it is about women that makes men propose to them,’ she said. ‘I’ve known numbers of plain women married and numbers of penniless ones, and some quite horrid ones without a single quality likely to make a man happy, yet there must have beensomethingabout them that attracted—some reason for it.’She went on to tell me in such a pathetic way how she longed to have a home and a ‘nice, kind man,’ to care for her, and yet no man had ever asked her; no man had ever desired her or looked on her with love; she had never known the clasp of a man’s passionate arms, nor the ecstasy of a lover’s kiss. It seemed very strange to me,strangely painful and horribly humiliating. I could scarcely bear to look at her while she told me these things.‘I would make a man so happy,’ she said, and her mournful dark eyes filled with tears; she had rather fine eyes, and was quite a nice-looking woman with a most sweet and gentle manner. ‘I would be so good to him,’ she went on; ‘I’d simply live for him. I try to put it out of my mind, but as I grow older, and it’s more hopeless, I think of it more and more and sometimes I feel I shall go mad with the misery of it. The future is so utterly grey and it’s all so unjust. I’m so fitted for love, and now my life’s going and I’ve had nothing,nothing!’She wept bitterly and I wept too in sympathy with her. Curiously enough, this woman was not only attractive, as I have said, and anxious to please, and thoroughly feminine, but she had had ample opportunities of meeting men. I suppose she lacked what the Scotch peasant-woman called the ‘come hither in the ’ee’—some subtle sex-magnetism which had been possessed by those ‘plain, penniless, and horrid women’ whom she talked about. Or perhaps it was that the‘will to live’ was absent and therefore no mate came to the woman.There are thousands of women who feel the same, though in most cases they would scorn to own it. We hear a good deal of man’s right to live; what about woman’s right to love? Women are so constituted that the need for loving and being loved is the strongest factor of their being, the essential of their existence. All over the country there are lonely women of every class, leisured and working women, pretty and plain, good and bad, who are hungering and thirsting for love, for a man to take care of them, for the right to wifehood and the thrice blessed right to motherhood. In the Press the parrot cry of men echoes ceaselessly: ‘Women shouldn’t meddle in politics; women shouldn’t do this or that—let them mind their homes and their children.’ But the restless women who do these things have generally no homes or children to mind; what is the use of preaching the sacredness of motherhood when you will not allow them to be mothers? To what end prate of the duties of wifehood when you do not ask them to be wives?It is a well-known physiological fact that numbers of women become insane in middle life who would not have done so if they had enjoyed the ordinary duties, pleasures and preoccupations of matrimony—if their women’s natures had not been starved by an unnatural celibacy. This is not a suitable subject to go into here, but I recommend it to the attention of my more thoughtful readers and those who concern themselves with the amelioration of the wretched social conditions of our glorious twentieth-century civilisation.Hardest of all is the case of the woman who longs not merely for wifehood and ‘a kind man,’ but more especially for motherhood, the bitter-sweet crown of the sex that celibate priests preach ceaselessly as woman’s first duty and highest good, but which thousands of women in this country are debarred from fulfilling! Surely no bitterness must be so poignant as the bitterness of the woman who longs for motherhood—ceaselessly in her ears the Life Force is calling, and deep in her heart the dream children are stirring, crying, ‘Give us life! give us life!’ becoming more importunate everyyear, as each year finds the divine possibilities unrealised.I often think how everything combines to torment a generous-hearted, full-blooded, mother-woman whose nature is starved thus. She has, of course, to suppress all emotion on the subject, to hold her head high, and endure with a smile the ‘experienced’ airs of girls, much younger than herself, who happen to wear that magical golden ring that changes all life for a woman; to pretend generally that she has no wish to marry, never had, and could have if she chose, to laugh at this page if she should happen to read it, and call the writer a morbid idiot—in short, she always has to act a part before a world which professes to find exquisitely humorous the fact of a woman being cheated out of the birthright of her sex. Every paper and book she picks up nowadays contains some reference to the glories of motherhood, the joys of love. Music, pictures, novels and plays, all speak of sex fulfilled and triumphant, not starved and denied like hers. The same principle is everywhere in Nature—the sky, the sea, the flowers, the green trees, the sound of summer rain—all beautiful sightsand sounds have the same meaning, the same burden, the same sharp sting for her. If she is inclined to be morbid, every child’s face seen in the street turns the knife in the wound; every sweet baby’s cooing is another pang. ‘Not for me—not for me!’ must be the perpetual refrain in her mind. Her arms are empty, her heart is cold; she belongs to the vast, sad army of the undesired.Do you wonder the madhouses are full of single women?Note.—A clever and delightful friend of mine, a spinster by choice, takes exception to my views on the single estate. I should be deeply grieved if any words of mine were to cause pain to other women. I have said before that some of the best women are spinsters, which is sad to a believer in marriage like myself. Two of the sweetest and noblest women I know are unmarried; one of them especially seems absolutely without a thought of self, and has worked hard for others all her life, giving her powers of brain and body to their utmost limit, and the treasures of her beautiful heart generouslyand without stint. I beg my readers to note that I have tried to differentiate between those spinsters who do not want to marry and those who do; between the rich spinster who can command all the amenities of life, and the poor one compelled to a relentless and unceasing round of uncongenial toil. Still more do I wish to distinguish between the placid contented woman who can adapt herself to circumstances and find a quiet sort of happiness in any life—and the less well-balanced, more passionate natures, with deeper desires and an imperious need of loving. It is this need of loving stifled, crushed and fought against that awakens my profound compassion—a compassion which my friend informs me is wasted and misplaced. My readers must judge.

PART ISIGNS OF UNREST‘The Subject of Marriage is kept too much in the dark.Air it! Air it!’—George Meredith.

‘The Subject of Marriage is kept too much in the dark.Air it! Air it!’—George Meredith.

‘The shadow of marriage waits, resolute and awful, at the cross-roads.’—R. L. Stevenson.

Eversince the time, nineteen years ago, when Mrs Mona Caird attacked the institution of matrimony in theWestminster Reviewand led the way for the great discussion on ‘Is Marriage a Failure?’ in theDaily Telegraph—marriage has been the hardy perennial of newspaper correspondence, and an unfailing resource to worried sub-editors. When seasons are slack and silly, the humblest member of the staff has but to turn out a column on this subject, and whether it be a serious dissertation on ‘The Perfections of Polygamy’ or a banal discussion on ‘Should husbands have tea at home?’ it will inevitablyachieve the desired result, and fill the spare columns of the papers with letters for weeks to come. People are always interested in matrimony, whether from the objective or subjective point of view, and that is my excuse for perpetrating yet another book on this well-worn, but ever fertile topic.

Marriage indeed seems to be in the air more than ever in this year of grace; everywhere it is discussed, and very few people seem to have a good word to say for it. The most superficial observer must have noticed that there is being gradually built up in the community a growing dread of the conjugal bond, especially among men; and a condition of discontent and unrest among married people, particularly women. What is the matter with this generation that wedlock has come to assume so distasteful an aspect in their eyes? On every side one hears it vilified and its very necessity called in question. From the pulpit, the clergy endeavour to uphold the sanctity of the institution, and unceasingly exhort their congregations to respect it and abide by its laws. But the Divorce Court returns makeominous reading; every family solicitor will tell you his personal experience goes to prove that happy unions are considerably on the decrease, and some of the greatest thinkers of our day join in a chorus of condemnation against latter-day marriage.

Tolstoy says: ‘The relations between the sexes are searching for a new form, the old one is falling to pieces.’ Among the manuscript ‘remains’ of Ibsen, that profound student of human nature, the following noteworthy passage occurs: ‘“Free-born men” is a phrase of rhetoric. They do not exist, for marriage, the relation between man and wife, has corrupted the race and impressed the mark of slavery upon all.’ Not long ago, too, our greatest living novelist, George Meredith, created an immense sensation by his suggestion that marriage should become a temporary arrangement, with a minimum lease of, say, ten years.

That the time has not yet come for any such revolutionary change is obvious, but if the signs and portents of the last decade or two do not lie, we may safely assume that the timewillcome, and that the presentlegal conditions of wedlock will be altered in some way or other.

Fifteen years ago there was a sudden wave of rebellion against these conditions, and a renewed interest in the sex question showed itself in an outbreak of problem novels—a term which later came to be used as one of reproach. Perhaps the most important of these was Grant Allen’sThe Woman Who Did. I can recall as a schoolgirl the excitement it aroused and my acute disappointment when it was forcibly commandeered from me by an irate governess who apparently took no interest in these enthralling subjects. A host of imitators followedThe Woman Who Did; some of them entirely illiterate, all of them offering some infallible key to the difficult maze of marriage.

Worse still was the reaction that inevitably followed, when realism was tabooed in fiction, and sickly romance possessed the field.The Yellow Bookand similar strange exotics of the first period withered and died, and the cult of literature (!) for the British Home was shortly afterwards in full blast. There followed an avalanche of insufferably dull and puerile magazines, in which thewordSexwas strictly taboo, and the ideal aimed at was apparently the extreme opposite to real life. It was odd how suddenly the sex note—(as I will call it for want of a better word)—disappeared from the press. Psychology was pronounced ‘off,’ and plots were the order of the day. Many names well-known at that time and associated with aflairfor delicate delineation of character, disappeared from the magazine contents bill and the publisher’s list, whilst facile writers who could turn out mild detective yarns or tales of adventure and gore were in clover.

Signs are not wanting that the pendulum of public interest has now swung back again, and another wave of realism in fiction and inquiry into the re-adjustment of the conjugal bond is imminent. But the pendulum will have to swing back and forth a good many times however, before the relations between the sexes succeed in finding that new form of which Tolstoy speaks. What the revival I have foretold will accomplish remains to be seen. What did the last agitation achieve? Practically nothing; a few women may have been impelled to follow in the footsteps of Grant Allen’s Herminiato their undying sorrow, and possibly a good many precocious young girls, who read the literature of that day, may have given their parents some anxiety by their revolutionary ideas on the value of the holy estate. But when that trio so irresistible to the feminine heart came along—the Ring, the Trousseau, and the House of My Own, to say nothing of the solid, twelve-stone, prospective husband—which among these advanced damsels remembered the sermon on the hill-top?

Yet in the fourteen years that have elapsed since the publication ofThe Woman Who Did, there have certainly been some changes. For one thing, it is still harder apparently to earn a decent living. Times are bad and money scarce; men are even more reluctant than before to ‘domesticate the recording angel’ by marrying, and a type of woman has sprung up amongst us who is shy of matrimony and honestly reluctant to risk its many perils for the sake of its problematical joys. Most noticeable of all is the growing dissatisfaction of the sexes with each other. Men do not shun marriage only because of unfavourable financial conditions, or becausethe restrictions of wedlock are any more irksome to them than formerly, but because they cannot find a wife sufficiently near their ideal. Woman has progressed to such an extent within the last generation or two: her outlook has so broadened, her intellect so developed that she has strayed very far from man’s ideal and, consequently, man hesitates to marry her. There is something comic about the situation, and at Olympian dinner-tables I feel sure the gods would laugh at this twentieth-century conjugal deadlock.

Another reason why men fall in love so much less than they used to do is largely due to the decay of the imaginative faculty. As for women, although they are in the main as anxious to marry as ever, although it is universally acknowledged that the modern young woman does cultivate the modern young man unduly, their reasons for doing so are less and less concerned with the time-honoured motives of love. Marriage brings independence and a certain social importance; for these reasons women desire it. H. B. Marriot Watson has put the case neatly thus: ‘Women desire to marryaman; men tomarrythewoman.’ Nevertheless women are even now more prone to fall in love than are men, because they have better preserved this imaginative faculty, which is possibly also the cause of the disillusionment and discontent of wives after marriage.

The upshot of it all is that men and women appear to have become antagonistic to each other. However much they love the individual of their fancy, a kind of veiled distrust seems to obtain between the sexes collectively, but more especially on the part of men—perhaps because man is more necessary to woman than woman is to man. This hostility towards woman is particularly noticeable in the pages of the press. Scarcely a week passes but some journalist of the nobler sex pours out his scorn for the inferior one of his mother in columns of masterly abuse on one score or another. Each article is followed by a passionate correspondence in which ‘Disgusted Dad,’ ‘Hopeless Hubby,’ ‘Browbeaten Brother,’ and the inevitable ‘Cynicus’ express high approval of the writer, whilst ‘Happy Mother of Seven Girls’ and ‘Lover of theSex’ write to demand his instant execution and public disgrace.

The range of men’s fault-finding is endless; one will assert that women are mere domestic machines, unfit companions for any intelligent man, and with no soul above conversation about their servants and children; another that they are mere blue-stockings striving after an unattainable intellectuality; a third that they are mere frivolous dolls without brain or heart, engrossed in the pursuit of pleasure, a fourth that they are sexless, slangy, misclad masculine monsters.

Judged by the assertions of newspaper correspondents, women are at one and the same time preposterously masculine, contemptibly feminine, ridiculously intellectual, repulsively athletic, and revoltingly frivolous. In appearance they are either lank, gaunt, flat-footed lamp-posts, or else over-dressed, unnaturally-shaped, painted dolls. Their extravagance exhausts expletive! When they belong to the class of society generally denoted with a capital S, they invariably smoke, drink, gamble and swear. They neglect their homes and their children. They have little principle and less sense, nomorals, no heart and absolutelynosense of humour!

‘But,’ the observant reader may possibly exclaim, ‘there is nothing new about this. Woman has ever been man’s favourite grumble-vent, from the day when the first man got out of his first scrape by blaming the only available woman!’ True enough, age cannot stale the infinite variety of women’s misdemeanours, as viewed by men; tradition has hallowed the subject, custom carries it on; and probably when the last trump shall sound, the last living man will be found grumbling loudly at the abominable selfishness of woman for leaving him alone, and the last dead man to rise will awake cursing because his wife did not call him sooner!

But formerly man’s fault-finding was more of the nature of genial chaff, as when we affectionately laugh at those we love. There was nearly always a certain good humour about his diatribes, which now is lacking. In its stead can be noted a bitterness, a distinct animus. Men apparently take with an ill-grace women’s rebellion against the old man-made conditions, and they retaliate by falling in love less frequently, and showingstill more reluctance to enter the arena of matrimony.

Nevertheless, they get there all the same, albeit in a different spirit. Timorous and trembling, our faint-hearted modern lovers gird on their new frock-coats and step shrinkingly into the arena where awaits them—radiant and triumphant—the determined being whose will has brought them thither. No, notherwill, but the mysterious will of Nature which remains steadfast and of unswerving purpose, indifferent to our sex-warfare and the progress of our petty loves and hates. The institution of marriage battered, abused, scarred with countless thousands of attacks, stained with the sins of centuries still continues to flourish, for, as Schopenhauer says; ‘It is the future generation in its entire individual determination which forces itself into existence through the medium of all this strife and trouble.’

TheWill-to-Livewill always have the last word!

‘If you wish the pick of mankind, take a good bachelor and a good wife.’

‘There is probably no other act in a man’s life so hot-headed and foolish as this of marriage.’—R. L. Stevenson.

‘Whatever may be said against marriage, it is certainly an experience.’—Oscar Wilde.

‘Allthe men are getting married and none of the girls,’ a volatile lady is once reported to have said, and one understands what she meant to convey. In a newspaper correspondence on marriage I once noted the following significant passage: ‘But in these days it is different from what it was when I was a girl. Then every boy had his sweetheart and every girl her chap. Now it seems to me the boys don’t want sweethearts and the girls can’t get chaps. For one youth who means honestly to marry a girl, you will find twenty whose game is mere flirtation, regardlessof how the girl may be injured. The times are ungallant and they want mending.’

This letter is signed ‘A Workman’s Wife,’ but it bears ample evidence of having been written by a member of the staff, who seemed to consider sufficientvraisemblancehad been given to the signature by the inclusion of an occasional vulgarism, such as ‘chap.’ But in spite of being penned to order, the statements expressed appear to be only too true. The times are ungallant indeed and growing more so every year.

Not long ago I was at a cheery social gathering where the non-marrying tendency of modern men was being discussed. Someone put all the men into a good humour with the reminder that ‘by persistently remaining single, a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation,’ and as there were fifteen bachelors present, the conversation naturally became personal.

One whom I will call Vivian, gallantly remarked that all the nice women were married, so he perforce remained single. I happen to know that he is deeply in love with a married woman. Another, Lucian, a very handsome and popular man of thirty,said he fully meant to marry some day, but wanted a few more years’ freedom first. Dorian gravely asserted that he was waiting for my daughter (aged eighteen months), but being in his confidence, I know that his case is similar to Vivian’s. Hadrian’s health would make his marriage a crime; we are all aware of that fortunately, so no one asked him. The same discretion was observed with regard to Julien of whom it is well known that he has formed an ‘unfortunate’ attachment and has practically not the right to marry. Florian was jilted years ago, and is shy and distrustful of the sex, which is a great pity, as he is the kind of man born for fireside and nursery joys, and would make a wife very happy.

Of Augustin and Fabian it may be truly said that ‘the more they have known of the others, the less they will settle to one;’ and indeed I fear they have spoilt themselves for matrimony, unless there is truth in the old saying that a reformed rake makes the best husband. Endymion is altogether too ineligible, his blue eyes and broad shoulders being his only fortune; he makes plenty of capital out of these adjuncts: they bring himin a rich return of feminine favour, but are nevertheless hardly sufficient to support a wife.

Claudian is really anxious to marry, but suffers from a fatal faithlessness and, as he engagingly explains, can’t love a girl long enough to get the preliminaries settled. One day he is sure to be caught by some determined and probably very unsuitable woman and led reluctant to the altar. Galahad won’t marry until he has found ‘the one woman,’ and I fear he will prove a husband wasted, for poor Galahad already wears spectacles and a bald spot; his devotion to an unrealisable ideal bids fair to spoil his life.

When I put the question to Aurelian, he smiled his evil smile, which makes him more like an embittered vulture than ever, and remarked that he was thinking over his offers and hadn’t yet decided which was the best. As the fact that he has been refused by seven women is well-known, we really rather admire the persistence of his pose as a lady-killer. He has even been known to write passionate letters to himself, in an assumed hand, and drop cleverly-manufactured tearshere and there upon them, to give an air of greater realism to these amorous masterpieces, which he uses as a proof of his wild stories of conquest. When dry, the tears look most life-like; of course it is a dodge that every schoolgirl knows, but I have never known a man have recourse to it before, and hope never to again!

Both Cyprian and Valerian gave as the reason for their continued bachelorhood, the fact that they were too comfortable as bachelors and had never felt the need of a wife. The latter added that if he could find justthegirl, he would think it over, but as matters stood he preferred certainty to chance and was taking no risks. Between ourselves, both these two are very self-satisfied and egotistical persons, and I don’t think any woman has lost much by their resolve.

The fourteenth man was Bayard, who belongs to a very exasperating type of philanderer. Most women of the world have met and been bored by him to their sorrow. It is his grievous habit to go about professing a yearning for matrimony of the most ideal kind, and confiding at great length to safely attached young matrons how he longs tofind a home in one good woman’s heart, and what a great, pure, passionate, wild love he is capable of. There is something rather engaging about him, and his pose is naturally very attractive to unsuspecting spinsters. He is always getting desperately entangled, but makes a great parade of his poverty when theaffairereaches the critical point, and wriggles out successfully—generally without any too unpleasant explanation. If, however, things have gone too far for this, he can always make good his escape under cover of the ‘I love you too much, darling, to drag you down to poverty’ plea. How many girls, wounded to the heart’s core, have listened to this hoary lie when they are more than willing to be poor, if but with him, willing to economise and save, and forego for his sake.

Not, of course, that Bayard and his like inspire such devotion; I mean that the essentials of this particular excuse are given by very many unmarried men nowadays as the reason of their single state. Generally speaking, there are two main reasons why men do not marry: 1. Because they have not yet met a woman they care for sufficiently;2.—and these constitute a large majority—because they are too selfish. Of course men don’t spell it that way. Like Bayard, they say they ‘can’t afford it.’ They think of all the things they would have to give up—how difficult it is to get enough for their pleasure now, how impossible it would be then, with the support of a wife and potential family added; how they would hate having to knock off poker, find a cheaper tailor, and economise in golf balls. They shudder at the prospect, and decide in the expressively vulgar parlance of the day that it’s ‘not good enough.’ The things that are beyond price are weighed against the things that are bought with money—and found wanting!

It would, however, be the last word of foolishness to encourage improvident marriages, already a source of so much misery, and of course my remarks do not apply to the genuine poverty of the man who really cannot afford to wed. For him I have a very real sympathy, since he is missing the best things of life probably through no fault of his own. The above strictures are intended solely for the man of moderate means,who could afford to marry if he loved himself less and some woman more. Five hundred a year, for instance, is a comfortable income for a bachelor not in the inner circle of Society. On this sum a middle-class man can do himself well, provided he has no particularly expensive vices or hobbies—but it certainly means self-denial when stretched to provide for a wife and two or three children. It means a small house in one of the cheaper suburbs, instead of a bachelor flat in town, ’buses instead of cabs, upper boxes instead of stalls, a fortnighten familleat Broadstairs instead of a month’s fishingen garçonin Norway. It means no more suppers at the Savoy, no more week-ends in Paris, no more ‘running’ over to Monte Carlo; but itcanbe done, and done happily, provided a man puts love above luxuries. Almost every man can afford to marry—the right woman!

Of course, if a man has still to meet the woman of his fancy, all is well, but it is the despicable plea of Bayard that so incenses me. If men would own the truth, it would not be so bad, but, Adam-like, as usual, they lay the blame on women and say: ‘Girls expect so much nowadays, it is impossible to makeenough money to satisfy them.’ This is one of the many lies men tell about women, or perhaps they are under a delusion and really believe the statement to be true. Let them be undeceived, girlsdon’texpect so much; they are perfectly willing to be poor, as I have said before, if only they care for the man enough. At anyrate, once they have reached that stage of wanting the real things of life they would sooner have wifehood and comparative poverty than ease and empty hearts in their parents’ home. They would sooner, in short, be ‘tired wives than restful spinsters.’

Another delusion men spread about women is that they’re too fond of pleasure to settle down. How often one hears statements such as ‘Juno Jones wouldn’t make a good wife, she’s out all day playing golf;’ or ‘I couldn’t afford to marry Sappho Smith, she’s too fond of dress and theatre-going.’ God bless the man! What else have the poor girls to do? Sappho has a taste for dainty clothes and a love for the theatre; she fills her empty existence with these things as far as she can; Juno has nothing in the wide world to do all day long, but she loves the open air, and so concentrates her magnificentenergies on a game with a stick and ball, because any active part in the great game of life is denied her. Marry her—if she will have you—and see what a grand comrade she will make, and what splendid children she will bear you. Or marry Sappho, and you will find she will never want any but simple pleasures within your means, as long as you are kind to her and adore her as she requires to be adored. She will cheerfully make her own clothes, and find her greatest joy in planning out your income and adorning your home.

Everyone can recall having known frivolous and pleasure-loving girls settle down into admirable wives whose nurseries are models and whose households are beyond reproach. Doubtless their friends all predicted disaster when these butterflies were led to the altar. I honestly believe women only want extravagant pleasures when they are miserable. It is generally the wretched wives, the unhappy, restless spinsters who run up bills and fling away money. They feel that life is cheating them and they must have some compensations.

But to return to my fifteen bachelors. There only remains Florizel, whose attitudetowards wedlock is a blend of that of Bayard and Claudian. He is genuinely eager to marry, ardent, affectionate, anxious to do right, but lacking in moral courage and egotistical to the point of disease. I would much like to see him happily wedded, as he then would doubtless quickly lose that intense self-centredness, but I question if any attractive woman exists who would be unselfish enough to cope with him in his present state of egomania. His mind is always inflamed with some woman or other, and he hovers about on the edge of desperateamours, anxious to fall head over ears into the sea of love and cast out an anchor of matrimony to hold him fast where he can swerve no more. Unfortunately he cannot forget himself enough to take the fatal plunge. With all his faults there is something very lovable about Florizel, and I should like to see him knocked into shape, though it would be a brave and patient woman who would take the task in hand.

When all the fifteen bachelors had ceased to talk about themselves and settled down to bridge with the rest of the company, an old lady who, like myself, preferred to be alooker-on, came and sat beside me. ‘How theydotalk,’ she said! ‘But I can tell you why they don’t marry, in six words, my dear: because they don’t fall in love! And why don’t they fall in love? Because the girls are too eager; because the girls meet them all the way—that’s why! I’ve seven sons, all unmarried, andIknow!’

Note.—It is interesting to note that Westermarck in hisHistory of Human Marriagequotes a number of authorities to prove that among many ancient nations marriage was a religious duty incumbent upon all. Among Mohammedan people generally it is still considered a duty. Hebrew celibacy was unheard of, and they have a proverb, ‘He who has no wife is no man.’ In Egypt it is improper and even disreputable for a man to abstain from marriage when there is no just impediment. For an adult to die unmarried is regarded as a deplorable misfortune by the Chinese, and among the Hindus of the present day a man who remains single is considered to be almost a useless member of society, and is looked upon as beyond the pale of nature.

‘It’s a woman’s business to get married as soon as possible and a man’s to remain unmarried as long as he can.’—G. Bernard Shaw.

‘Marriage is of so much use to a woman, opens out to her so much 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.’—R. L. Stevenson.

‘Whywomen don’t marry? But they do—whenever they can!’ the intelligent reader will naturally exclaim. Not ‘whenever they get the chance,’ mark you; nointelligentreader would make this mistake, though it is a common enough error among the non-comprehending. Most spinsters over thirty must have winced at one time or another at the would-be genial rallying of some elderly man relative: ‘What! you not married yet? Well, well, I wonder what all the young men are thinking of.’ I writesome manadvisedly, for no woman, howevercattishly inclined, however desirous of planting arrows in a rival’s breast, would utter this peculiarly deadly form of insult, which, strangely enough, is always intended as a high compliment by the masculine blunderer. The fact that the unfortunate spinster thus assailed may have had a dozen offers, and yet, for reasons of her own, prefer to remain single, seems entirely beyond their range of comprehension.

But the main reason why women don’t marry is obviously because men don’t ask them. Most women will accept when a sufficiently pleasing man offers them a sufficiently congenial life. If the offers they receive fall below a certain standard, then they prefer to remain single, wistfully hoping, no doubt, that the right man may come along before it is too late. The preservation of the imaginative faculty in women, to which I have previously alluded, doubtless accounts for many spinsters. It must also be remembered that the more educated women become, the less likely they are to marry for marrying’s sake as their grandmothers did.

Then there are a few women, quite asmall section, who, unless they can realise their ideal in its entirety, will not be content with second best. By an irony of fate, it happens that these are often the noblest of their sex. Yet another small section remain single from an honest dislike of marriage and its duties. It is perhaps not too severe to say that a woman who has absolutely no vocation for wifehood and motherhood must be a degenerate, and so lacking in the best feminine instincts as to deserve the reproach of being ‘sexless.’ This type is apparently increasing! I shall deal with it further in Part IV.

Then there are those—I should not like to make a guess at their number—who will marryanyman, however undesirable and uncongenial, rather than be left ‘withering on the stalk.’ It is an acutely humiliating fact that there exists no man too ugly, too foolish, too brutal, too conceited and too vile to find a wife.Anyman can findsomewoman to wed him. In this connection, one recalls the famous cook, who, when condoled with on the defection of a lover, replied: ‘It don’t matter; thank God I can love any man!’

One cannot help being amused by the serious articles on this subject in feminine journals. We are gravely told that women don’t marry nowadays because they price their liberty too high, because those who have money prefer to be independent and enjoy life, and those who have none prefer bravely wringing a living from the world to being a man’s slave, a mere drudge, entirely engrossed in housekeeping, etc., etc.; and so on—pages of it! All this may possibly be true of a very small portion of the community, but the uncontrovertible fact remains that the principal reason for woman’s spinsterhood is man’s indifference.

I have every sympathy with the women who wish to postpone taking up the heavy responsibilities of matrimony till they have had what in the opposite sex is termed ‘a fling,’ that is until they have enjoyed a period of freedom wherein to study, to travel, to enjoy their youth fully, to meet many men, to look life in the eyes and learn something of its meaning. But there comes a period in the life of almost every woman—except the aforesaid degenerate—when she feels it is time to ‘put away childish things,’and into her heart there steals a longing for the real things of life—the things that matter, the things that last—wedded love and little children, and that priceless possession, a home of one’s own.

It is the fashion nowadays to discredit the home, and it has been jestingly alluded to by Mr Bernard Shaw as ‘the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse;’ but what a wonderful sanctuary it really is!—and exactly how much it means to a woman, only those who have felt the need of it can tell. In our youth, home is the place where hampers come from, where string and stamps and magazines grow on the premises, a place generally where love is, but nevertheless essentially a place we take for granted and for which we never dream of being grateful. Later on it is sometimes associated with irksome duties; to some it even becomes a place to get away from; but when we have lost it, how we long for it! How reverently we think of each room and the things that happened there; how we yearn in thought over the old garden and dream about the beloved trees. No matter how mean a home it may have been, every bit ofit is sacred and dear—from the box-room, where on wet days we played at robbers, to the toolshed, where on fine days we played at everything under the sun. To this day if I chance on a badly-cooked potato it almost brings tears to my eyes, not because of its badness, but because it recalls the potatoes that three small children used to cook with gladness and eat with silent awe, in the ashes of a bonfire, in an old garden, long, long ago—whilst the smell of a bonfire itself makes me feel seven years old again!

But whether she has a home with her parents or not, every normal woman longs for a home of her own, and a girl who resents even arranging the flowers on her mother’s dinner-table will after marriage cheerfully do quite distasteful housework in the place she calls her own.

This passionate love of home is one of the most marked feminine characteristics; I don’t mean love of beingathome, as modern women’s tastes frequently lie elsewhere, but love of the place itself and the desire to possess it. A great number of women marry solely to obtain this coveted possession. As for those who don’t, the advertisementcolumns of theChurch Times, theChristian World, and other papers tell a pitiful story of their need. Ladies ‘by birth’ (pathetic and foolish little phrase!) are willing to do almost anything in return for just a modest corner, a very subordinate place even in someone else’s home. They will be housekeepers, servants, companions, secretaries, helps for ‘a small salary and a home,’ and sometimes for no salary at all. They will pack, sew, mend, teach, supervise; they offer their knowledge of every kind, such as it is, their music, their languages, their health and strength, their subservience and all their virtues, real or acquired—all in return for a little food and fire, and the sheltering of four walls, which constitute their extreme need, their utmost desire—a home! Beautiful women, gifted and good women, sell themselves daily just to gain a home. Even Hedda Gabler, most degenerate of modern heroines, who shot herself rather than be a mother, sold herself in a loveless marriage only for a home. And yet constantly we read a list of trivial and fantastic reasons why women don’t marry!

A girl-bachelor who was compelled tospend most of her time in that uncomfortable place technically known as ‘one’s boxes,’ once told me that her greatest desire was a spot just big enough for a wardrobe in which to keep her spare clothes and little possessions. She did without a home, but she longed intensely for that wardrobe. ‘I shall have to marry Tony soon,’ she said, ‘just for the convenience of having room for my clothes. I don’t like him, and I want to wait till someone I do like comes, but if ever I take him, it will be for wardrobe room, you just see.’ I must add that ‘someone’didcome, and she now possesses several wardrobes and three bouncing babies, and Tony cuts her when he meets her in the Park!

This home passion is even more noticeable in that class of society usually referred to as the lower. I have occasionally employed a poor woman who has been in service as cook since her husband died nineteen years ago. All that time, she has ‘kept on the home,’i.e.a single room which contains her furniture. She has scarcely ever had to use the room, except for an odd day or two, and has had to spend much of her scanty leisure in cleaning it. For nineteen years she haspaid three-and-six a week for the room sooner than sell her furniture. The £172 thus expended would have paid for the furniture over and over again. The woman quite realises the absurdity of it, but ‘I simply couldn’t part with the ’ome,’ is her explanation.

Yet another instance. Once when staying in seaside lodgings, I had the misfortune to break a homely vessel of thick blue glass which had evidently begun life as a fancy jam jar, but had been relegated, for some reason obscure to me, to the proud position of mantel ‘ornament,’ if that be the term. To my surprise the worthy landlady wept bitterly over the pieces, and when I spoke of gorgeous objects wherewith to replace her treasure, explained snappishly: ‘Nothing won’t make it good to me! Why, that there blue vorse was the beginning of the ’ome!’

I must ask pardon for this digression and return to the subject in hand. The most depressing aspect of the question is that even if every man over twenty-five were married there would be still an enormous number of women left husbandless. This is really veryserious, and is a condition that gives rise to many evils. To make up for it as far as possible, every man of sound health and in receipt of sufficient income ought to marry. If it is merely ‘not good’ for man to be alone, then it is very bad indeed for women! Every woman should have a man companion, a man to live with—if only to take the tickets, carry the bags and get up in the night to see what that noise is. Since society as at present constituted does not countenance men and women living together for companionship, then clearly every woman ought to have a husband!

Mr Bernard Shaw has written: ‘Give women the vote and in five years there will be a crushing tax on bachelors.’ So there should be, subject to certain qualifications of age and income; this is one of the many matters in which we should take a lesson from the Japanese where all bachelors over a certain age are taxed; in France too, a bill, to this effect, is being discussed. At the time of writing, women are full of anticipation of being speedily enfranchised, and there is a good deal of talk about what use they will make of the vote. I regret to say thatalthough there have been some utterly idiotic threats to abolish that boon to wives—the man’s club—yet so far, with one exception, nothing has appeared in print as to the advisability of taxing bachelors. The exception is a very interesting anonymous novel calledStar of the Morning, which strongly advocates such a tax, among several other thoughtful suggestions for political reform.

It is obviously only just that the man who is doing nothing for the State in the way of rearing a family should be taxed to relieve the man who is. We hear so much about the falling birth-rate, and the duty of every married couple to have a family, yet everything is done to discourage those who do. The professional man slaving to earn, say, £1000 a year, and bring up three or four children for the State, is taxed exactly as much as the bachelor in receipt of the same income who does nothing at all for the State, and can even avoid the other taxes by being a lodger, if he choose.

But even if we eventually get reasonable legislation, which would offer rewards instead of additional burdens to those whodo their share in keeping up the birth-rate; even if a bachelor over twenty-five became as rare an object in these islands as an old maid in a Mohammedan country, still there would be this enormous superfluity of spinsters. Why is it? Why should Great Britain be regarded as a paradise of old maids? Why should we have more spinsters than other countries? Is it because our colonies swallow up so many men? Then why can’t they swallow up an equal number of women? I should like this most important matter to be taken up by the State and an Institution for Encouraging Marriage started under State auspices. One of the duties of this institution would be to induce numbers of suitable women to emigrate, so as to preserve the proper balance of the sexes in the home country, and that every colonist might have a chance to get a wife. I heard the other day of a very ordinary colonial girl who had eleven men all wanting to marry her at once. Eleven men! And yet there are scores of charming English girls who grow old and soured without having had a single offer of marriage.

Another duty of the Institution for Encouraging Marriage would be to try and reach and bring together the thousands of lonely middle-class men and women in large towns, who are engaged at work all day and have no means of meeting members of the opposite sex. I have just been reading Francis Gribble’s very interesting novel,The Pillar of Cloud, in which he describes the existence of half a dozen girls in ‘Stonor House’ one of those dreary barracks for homeless females engaged during the day. The frantic desire of these girls to meet men of their own class is painfully true, and this desire is not so much the outcome of young women’s natural tendency to cultivate young men, but because all such men to them are possible husbands, and marriage is the only way out from Stonor House and the joyless existence there.

InThe Pathway of the Pioneerpublished a few years ago, Dolf Wyllarde breaks similar ground, but her young women are more morbid and less frankly anxious to meet men with a view to matrimony. Both books, however, give one a good idea of the cheerless,unnatural lives led by young middle-class women, whose relatives, if any, are far away, and who work for their living in large towns—condemned almost inevitably to celibacy by these unfavourable social conditions.

That large numbers of daintily-bred women should be condemned to such an existence is the strongest possible argument in favour of the establishment of two French institutions, viz., strictly limited families and the system ofdots. Of late years, the former has been largely adopted in England, and until the latter custom also becomes the rule, the Institution for Encouraging Matrimony could take the matter in hand. Two or three unusually sensible philanthropists have already given their attention to this important subject, but any movement of this nature at once assumes too much the aspect of a matrimonial agency to be approved by the class for whose welfare it is destined. However, the I.F.E.M. would have to deal with this obstacle and conceal its real intentions under another name. I am sure if its object were sufficiently wrapped-up that refined men and womencould take advantage of it without loss of self-respect—the response to such an institution by both sexes would be enormous. A club, ostensibly for promoting social intercourse, might be the solution, and subscription dances, concerts, organised excursions would not be difficult to arrange, and would make a source of brightness and interest in many drab lives. Country branches could be started if the thing proved a success.

One constantly sees in the newspapers proof of the fact that there are a very large number of middle-class young men able and anxious to marry, who lack feminine acquaintances of their own social standing from whom to make a choice. Unfortunatemésalliancesare often the result, and it seems to me a sad and wasteful thing that these uxoriously-inclined men cannot be brought into contact with some of the thousands of young women whose lives are passed in uncongenial toil and who are eating out their hearts in their anxiety for a home and a husband of their own. Until the I.F.E.M. becomes fact, here is splendid work ready to hand for a philanthropistof infinite tact, and large, sympathetic heart. What a chance to add to the sum of human joy! What a rich reward for the expenditure of but a little time and money!

‘So man and woman will keep their trust,Till the very Springs of the Sea run dust.‘Yea, each with the other will lose and win,For the Strife of Love’s the abysmal Strife,And the Word of Love is the Word of Life.‘And they that go with the Word unsaid,Though they seem of the living, are damned and dead.’—W. E. Henley.

‘So man and woman will keep their trust,

Till the very Springs of the Sea run dust.

‘Yea, each with the other will lose and win,

For the Strife of Love’s the abysmal Strife,

And the Word of Love is the Word of Life.

‘And they that go with the Word unsaid,

Though they seem of the living, are damned and dead.’

—W. E. Henley.

Thisis a tragedy of which few men know the existence and certainly no man in these woman-ridden isles can ever have experienced. Men always treat with derision the woman anxious for matrimony, and gibe equally at the spinster who fails to attain it. Heaven alone knows why, since by men’s laws and traditions the married state has been made to mean everything desirable for a woman, and the unmarried condition everything undesirable. ‘People think women who do not want to marry unfeminine; people think women who do want to marryimmodest; people combine both opinions by regarding it as unfeminine for women not to look longingly forward to wifehood as the hope and purpose of their lives, and ridiculing andcontemningany individual woman of their acquaintance whom they suspect of entertaining such a longing. They must wish and not wish; they must not give, and certainly must not withhold, encouragement—and so it goes on, each precept cancelling the last, and most of them negative.’1

Both Mr Bernard Shaw and Mr George Moore have stated in print that women frequently propose to men, and several men have confided in me details of the proposals they have received from forward fair ones. I believe it is one of the tenets of advanced women that the sex that bears the child has a right to choose the husband. Although unpleasantly revolutionary this seems eminently sane. That the right to choose a mate should be open to all adults, instead of being the sole privilege of the most selfish and least observant sex, will possibly be acknowledged in the future, when the woman question shall be set at rest for ever.

In those far-off days there will, let us hope, be no more tragedy of the undesired. It seems almost indelicate to apply this phrase to the noble army of British spinsters, for the most part dignified, worthy women, comprising ratepayers, householders, philanthropists, mothers-in-all-but-fact—working parochially, among the poor, in hospitals, schools, homes, offices, and studios—on public bodies, on the staff of newspapers—generally cheerful and helpful, sometimes clever, often charming, occasionally a little narrow perhaps, but on the whole upholding the best traditions of their sex, and of courseneveradmitting that they would like to have married. Deep in their own hearts, however, almost all of them must feel the sadness of their unfulfilment, comfort themselves how they may with other interests. Those that have engrossing occupations should be thankful, for the woman whose whole heart is set on finding a husband and who fails to attain this object generally becomes fretful, bitter, disappointed and useless in every way. But women whose minds are sufficiently broad to hold other ideals than the matrimonial one find other work to do, and do itcapably and faithfully. Loving and sympathetic women are always wanted. Marriage is not essential to such a woman’s life, though it may be to the highest development of her happiness.

Again, the large number of women who have had chances of marrying can comfort themselves that they chose to be single for their ideal’s sake—or for whatever the reason was. Larger still is the number of those possessing the non-marrying temperament of which Bernard Shaw has written: ‘Barren—the Life-Force passes it by.’ This rarely troubles them; they have a host of minor pleasures and interests which suffice; no storms of feeling, no pangs of stifled mother-longing ruffle the placid surface of their lives. The real tragedy of the undesired does not touch either of these classes; it is reserved in all its poignancy for those who belong to the type of thegrande amoureuse, whom lack of opportunity generally, lack of attractiveness sometimes, has prevented from fulfilling the deepest need of their nature.

I once met at a hotel on the Riviera an elderly spinster who was always incredibly depressed. However bravely shone the sun,however fair seemed the world in that fairest spot, nothing had the power to cheer her. I tried once to get her to join in an excursion which a party of us were going to make on donkey-back to a neighbouring village in the hills, but she refused. Another time I invited her to accompany me to the rooms at Monte Carlo, but she again refused, and after several well-meant efforts on my part to cheer her had led to the same result, the poor soul told me in hesitating words that she shunned gay places and lively gatherings. ‘They always make me discontented and remind me of what I might have had; it brings home to me the—what shall I call it?—thetragedy of the might-have-been.’ I understood what she meant, and no further words on the subject passed between us, much to my relief, as confidences of this nature are very painful to both sides. My readers will probably despise this poor lady as morbid, selfish and unbalanced. Possibly they are right, but the sadness of an empty heart, a lonely life, was the cause of her warped nature. Fortunately hers is an extreme case; the majority of spinsters I imagine can take a delight in seeing girlshappy, and are generally deeply interested in the love affairs of others. I recall a beautiful line of Fiona Macleod’s to the effect that ‘a secret vision in the soul will hallow life.’ This will suffice to keep many spinsters happy—the memory of some love and tenderness, a romance of some kind to sweeten life; women need it.

To give another instance: a woman once asked me why men fell in love. ‘I wonder if you can tell me what it is about women that makes men propose to them,’ she said. ‘I’ve known numbers of plain women married and numbers of penniless ones, and some quite horrid ones without a single quality likely to make a man happy, yet there must have beensomethingabout them that attracted—some reason for it.’

She went on to tell me in such a pathetic way how she longed to have a home and a ‘nice, kind man,’ to care for her, and yet no man had ever asked her; no man had ever desired her or looked on her with love; she had never known the clasp of a man’s passionate arms, nor the ecstasy of a lover’s kiss. It seemed very strange to me,strangely painful and horribly humiliating. I could scarcely bear to look at her while she told me these things.

‘I would make a man so happy,’ she said, and her mournful dark eyes filled with tears; she had rather fine eyes, and was quite a nice-looking woman with a most sweet and gentle manner. ‘I would be so good to him,’ she went on; ‘I’d simply live for him. I try to put it out of my mind, but as I grow older, and it’s more hopeless, I think of it more and more and sometimes I feel I shall go mad with the misery of it. The future is so utterly grey and it’s all so unjust. I’m so fitted for love, and now my life’s going and I’ve had nothing,nothing!’

She wept bitterly and I wept too in sympathy with her. Curiously enough, this woman was not only attractive, as I have said, and anxious to please, and thoroughly feminine, but she had had ample opportunities of meeting men. I suppose she lacked what the Scotch peasant-woman called the ‘come hither in the ’ee’—some subtle sex-magnetism which had been possessed by those ‘plain, penniless, and horrid women’ whom she talked about. Or perhaps it was that the‘will to live’ was absent and therefore no mate came to the woman.

There are thousands of women who feel the same, though in most cases they would scorn to own it. We hear a good deal of man’s right to live; what about woman’s right to love? Women are so constituted that the need for loving and being loved is the strongest factor of their being, the essential of their existence. All over the country there are lonely women of every class, leisured and working women, pretty and plain, good and bad, who are hungering and thirsting for love, for a man to take care of them, for the right to wifehood and the thrice blessed right to motherhood. In the Press the parrot cry of men echoes ceaselessly: ‘Women shouldn’t meddle in politics; women shouldn’t do this or that—let them mind their homes and their children.’ But the restless women who do these things have generally no homes or children to mind; what is the use of preaching the sacredness of motherhood when you will not allow them to be mothers? To what end prate of the duties of wifehood when you do not ask them to be wives?

It is a well-known physiological fact that numbers of women become insane in middle life who would not have done so if they had enjoyed the ordinary duties, pleasures and preoccupations of matrimony—if their women’s natures had not been starved by an unnatural celibacy. This is not a suitable subject to go into here, but I recommend it to the attention of my more thoughtful readers and those who concern themselves with the amelioration of the wretched social conditions of our glorious twentieth-century civilisation.

Hardest of all is the case of the woman who longs not merely for wifehood and ‘a kind man,’ but more especially for motherhood, the bitter-sweet crown of the sex that celibate priests preach ceaselessly as woman’s first duty and highest good, but which thousands of women in this country are debarred from fulfilling! Surely no bitterness must be so poignant as the bitterness of the woman who longs for motherhood—ceaselessly in her ears the Life Force is calling, and deep in her heart the dream children are stirring, crying, ‘Give us life! give us life!’ becoming more importunate everyyear, as each year finds the divine possibilities unrealised.

I often think how everything combines to torment a generous-hearted, full-blooded, mother-woman whose nature is starved thus. She has, of course, to suppress all emotion on the subject, to hold her head high, and endure with a smile the ‘experienced’ airs of girls, much younger than herself, who happen to wear that magical golden ring that changes all life for a woman; to pretend generally that she has no wish to marry, never had, and could have if she chose, to laugh at this page if she should happen to read it, and call the writer a morbid idiot—in short, she always has to act a part before a world which professes to find exquisitely humorous the fact of a woman being cheated out of the birthright of her sex. Every paper and book she picks up nowadays contains some reference to the glories of motherhood, the joys of love. Music, pictures, novels and plays, all speak of sex fulfilled and triumphant, not starved and denied like hers. The same principle is everywhere in Nature—the sky, the sea, the flowers, the green trees, the sound of summer rain—all beautiful sightsand sounds have the same meaning, the same burden, the same sharp sting for her. If she is inclined to be morbid, every child’s face seen in the street turns the knife in the wound; every sweet baby’s cooing is another pang. ‘Not for me—not for me!’ must be the perpetual refrain in her mind. Her arms are empty, her heart is cold; she belongs to the vast, sad army of the undesired.

Do you wonder the madhouses are full of single women?

Note.—A clever and delightful friend of mine, a spinster by choice, takes exception to my views on the single estate. I should be deeply grieved if any words of mine were to cause pain to other women. I have said before that some of the best women are spinsters, which is sad to a believer in marriage like myself. Two of the sweetest and noblest women I know are unmarried; one of them especially seems absolutely without a thought of self, and has worked hard for others all her life, giving her powers of brain and body to their utmost limit, and the treasures of her beautiful heart generouslyand without stint. I beg my readers to note that I have tried to differentiate between those spinsters who do not want to marry and those who do; between the rich spinster who can command all the amenities of life, and the poor one compelled to a relentless and unceasing round of uncongenial toil. Still more do I wish to distinguish between the placid contented woman who can adapt herself to circumstances and find a quiet sort of happiness in any life—and the less well-balanced, more passionate natures, with deeper desires and an imperious need of loving. It is this need of loving stifled, crushed and fought against that awakens my profound compassion—a compassion which my friend informs me is wasted and misplaced. My readers must judge.

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