MARRIAGE
The beautiful saying of Newton, that
he felt like a child who had been picking up a few
pebbles on the shore of the great ocean of undiscovered
truth, may well occur to any writer who attempts to
say something on the vast subject of marriage.
The infinite variety of circumstances and characters
affects it in infinitely various ways, and all that
can here be done is to collect a few somewhat isolated
and miscellaneous remarks upon it. Yet it is
a subject which cannot be omitted in a book like this.
In numerous cases it is the great turning-point of
a life, and in all cases when it takes place it is
one of the most important of its events. Whatever
else marriage may do or fail to do, it never leaves
a man unchanged. His intellect, his character,
his happiness, his way of looking on the world, will
all be influenced by it. If it does not raise
or strengthen him it will lower or weaken. If
it does not deepen happiness it will impair it.
It brings with it duties, interests, habits, hopes,
cares, sorrows, and joys that will penetrate into every
fissure of his nature and modify the whole course of
his life.
It is strange to think with how much
levity and how little knowledge a contract which is
so indissoluble and at the same time so momentous is
constantly assumed; sometimes under the influence of
a blinding passion and at an age when life is still
looked upon as a romance or an idyll; sometimes as
a matter of mere ambition and calculation, through
a desire for wealth or title or position. Men
and women rely on the force of habit and necessity
to accommodate themselves to conditions they have
never really understood or realised.
In most cases different motives combine,
though in different degrees. Sometimes an overpowering
affection for the person is the strongest motive and
eclipses all others. Sometimes the main motive
to marriage is a desire to be married. It is
to obtain a settled household and position; to be
relieved from the ‘unchartered freedom’
and the ’vague desires’ of a lonely life;
to find some object of affection; to acquire the steady
habits and the exemption from household cares which
are essential to a career; to perpetuate a race; perhaps
to escape from family discomforts, or to introduce
a new and happy influence into a family. With
these motives a real affection for a particular person
is united, but it is not of such a character as to
preclude choice, judgment, comparison, and a consideration
of worldly advantages.
It is a wise saying of Swift that
there would be fewer unhappy marriages in the world
if women thought less of making nets and more of making
cages. The qualities that attract, fascinate,
and dazzle are often widely different from those which
are essential to a happy marriage. Sometimes
they are distinctly hostile to it. More frequently
they conduce to it, but only in an inferior or subsidiary
degree. The turn of mind and character that makes
the accomplished flirt is certainly not that which
promises best for the happiness of a married life;
and distinguished beauty, brilliant talents, and the
heroic qualities that play a great part in the affairs
of life, and shine conspicuously in the social sphere,
sink into a minor place among the elements of married
happiness. In marriage the identification of two
lives is so complete that it brings every faculty
and gift into play, but in degrees and proportions
very different from public life or casual intercourse
and relations. The most essential are often wanting
in a brilliant life, and are largely developed in
lives and characters that rise little, if at all,
above the commonplace. In the words of a very
shrewd man of the world: ’Before marriage
the shape, the figure, the complexion carry all before
them; after marriage the mind and character unexpectedly
claim their share, and that the largest, of importance.’
The relation is one of the closest
intimacy and confidence, and if the identity of interest
between the two partners is not complete, each has
an almost immeasurable power of injuring the other.
A moral basis of sterling qualities is of capital
importance. A true, honest, and trustworthy nature,
capable of self-sacrifice and self-restraint, should
rank in the first line, and after that a kindly, equable,
and contented temper, a power of sympathy, a habit
of looking at the better and brighter side of men
and things. Of intellectual qualities, judgment,
tact, and order are perhaps the most valuable.
Above almost all things, men should seek in marriage
perfect sanity, and dread everything like hysteria.
Beauty will continue to be a delight, though with much
diminished power, but grace and the charm of manner
will retain their full attraction to the last.
They brighten in innumerable ways the little things
of life, and life is mainly made up of little things,
exposed to petty frictions, and requiring small decisions
and small sacrifices. Wide interests and large
appreciations are, in the marriage relation, more
important than any great constructive or creative talent,
and the power to soothe, to sympathise, to counsel,
and to endure, than the highest qualities of the hero
or the saint. It is by these alone that the married
life attains its full measure of perfection.
’Tu mihi curarum
requies, tu nocte vel atra
Lumen, et
in solis tu mihi turba locis.’
But while this is true of all marriages,
it is obvious that different professions and circumstances
of life will demand different qualities. A hard-working
labouring man, or a man who, though not labouring with
his hands, is living a life of poverty and struggle,
will not seek in marriage a type of character exactly
the same as a man who is born to a great position,
and who has large social and administrative duties
to discharge. The wife of a clergyman immersed
in the many interests of a parish; the wife of a soldier
or a merchant, who may have to live in many lands,
with long periods of separation from her husband, and
perhaps amid many hardships; the wife of an active
and ambitious politician; the wife of a busy professional
man incessantly occupied outside his home; the wife
of a man whose health or business or habits keep him
constantly in his house, will each need some special
qualities. There are few things in which both
men and women naturally differ more than in the elasticity
and adaptiveness of their natures, in their power
of bearing monotony, in the place which habit, routine,
and variety hold in their happiness; and in different
kinds of life these things have very different degrees
of importance. Special family circumstances, such
as children by a former marriage, or difficult and
delicate relations with members of the family of one
partner, will require the exercise of special qualities.
Such relations, indeed, are often one of the most
searching and severe tests of the sterling qualities
of female character.
Probably, on the whole, the best presumption
of a successful choice in marriage will be found where
the wife has not been educated in circumstances or
ideas absolutely dissimilar from those of her married
life. Marriages of different races or colours
are rarely happy, and the same thing is true of marriages
between persons of social levels that are so different
as to entail great differences of manners and habits.
Other and minor disparities of circumstances between
girl life and married life will have their effect,
but they are less strong and less invariable.
Some of the happiest marriages have been marriages
of emancipation, which removed a girl from uncongenial
family surroundings, and placed her for the first
time in an intellectual and moral atmosphere in which
she could freely breathe. At the same time, in
the choice of a wife, the character, circumstances,
habits, and tone of the family in which she has been
brought up will always be an important element.
There are qualities of race, there are pedigrees
of character, which it is never prudent to neglect.
Franklin quotes with approval the advice of a wise
man to choose a wife ‘out of a bunch,’
as girls brought up together improve each other by
emulation, learn mutual self-sacrifice and forbearance,
rub off their angularities, and are not suffered to
develop overweening self-conceit. A family where
the ruling taste is vulgar, where the standard of
honour is low, where extravagance and self-indulgence
and want of order habitually prevail, creates an atmosphere
which it needs a strong character altogether to escape.
There is also the great question of physical health.
A man should seek in marriage rather to raise than
to depress the physical level of his family, and above
all not to introduce into it grave, well-ascertained
hereditary disease. Of all forms of self-sacrifice
hardly any is at once so plainly right and so plainly
useful as the celibacy of those who are tainted with
such disease.
There is no subject on which religious
teachers have dwelt more than upon marriage and the
relation of the sexes, and it has been continually
urged that the propagation of children is its first
end. It is strange, however, to observe how almost
absolutely in the popular ethics of Christendom such
considerations as that which I have last mentioned
have been neglected. If one of the most responsible
things that a man can do is to bring a human being
into the world, one of his first and most obvious
duties is to do what he can to secure that it shall
come into the world with a sound body and a sane mind.
This is the best inheritance that parents can leave
their children, and it is in a large degree within
their reach. Immature marriage, excessive child-bearing,
marriages of near relations, and, above all, marriages
with some grave hereditary physical or mental disease
or some great natural defect, may bring happiness
to the parents, but can scarcely fail to entail a
terrible penalty upon their children. It is clearly
recognised that one of the first duties of parents
to their children is to secure them in early life
not only good education, but also, as far as is within
their power, the conditions of a healthy being.
But the duty goes back to an earlier stage, and in
marriage the prospects of the unborn should never
be forgotten. This is one of the considerations
which in the ethics of the future is likely to have
a wholly different place from any that it has occupied
in the past.
A kindred consideration, little less
important and almost equally neglected in popular
teaching, is that it is a moral offence to bring children
into the world with no prospect of being able to provide
for them. It is difficult to exaggerate the extent
to which the neglect of these two duties has tended
to the degradation and unhappiness of the world.
The greatly increased importance which
the Darwinian theory has given to heredity should
tend to make men more sensible of the first of these
duties. In marriage there are not only reciprocal
duties between the two partners; there are also, more
than in any other act of life, plain duties to the
race. The hereditary nature of insanity and of
some forms of disease is an indisputable truth.
The hereditary transmission of character has not,
it is true, as yet acquired this position; and there
is a grave schism on the subject in the Darwinian school.
But that it exists to some extent few close observers
will doubt, and it is in a high degree probable that
it is one of the most powerful moulding influences
of life. No more probable explanation has yet
been given of the manner in which human nature has
been built up, and of the various instincts and tastes
with which we are born, than the doctrine that habits
and modes of thought and feeling indulged in and produced
by circumstances in former generations have gradually
become innate in the race, and exhibit themselves
spontaneously and instinctively and quite independently
of the circumstances that originally produced them.
According to this theory the same process is continually
going on. Man has slowly emerged from a degraded
and bestial condition. The pressure of long-continued
circumstances has moulded him into his special type;
but new feelings and habits, or modifications of old
feelings and habits, are constantly passing not only
into his life but into his nature, taking root there,
and in some degree at least reproducing themselves
by the force of heredity in the innate disposition
of his offspring. If this be true, it gives a
new and terrible importance both to the duty of self-culture
and to the duty of wise selection in marriage.
It means that children are likely to be influenced
not only by what we do and by what we say, but also
by what we are, and that the characters of the parents
in different degrees and combinations will descend
even to a remote posterity.
It throws a not less terrible light
upon the miscalculations of the past. On this
hypothesis, as Mr. Galton has truly shown, it is scarcely
possible to exaggerate the evil which has been brought
upon the world by the religious glorification of celibacy
and by the enormous development and encouragement
of the monastic life. Generation after generation,
century after century, and over the whole wide surface
of Christendom, this conception of religion drew into
a sterile celibacy nearly all who were most gentle,
most unselfish, most earnest, studious, and religious,
most susceptible to moral and intellectual enthusiasm,
and thus prevented them from transmitting to posterity
the very qualities that are most needed for the happiness
and the moral progress of the race. Whenever
the good and evil resulting from different religious
systems come to be impartially judged, this consideration
is likely to weigh heavily in the scale.
Returning, however, to the narrower
sphere of particular marriages, it may be observed
that although full confidence, and, in one sense,
complete identification of interests, are the characteristics
of a perfect marriage, this does not by any means
imply that one partner should be a kind of duplicate
of the other. Woman is not a mere weaker man;
and the happiest marriages are often those in which,
in tastes, character, and intellectual qualities,
the wife is rather the complement than the reflection
of her husband. In intellectual things this is
constantly shown. The purely practical and prosaic
intellect is united with an intellect strongly tinged
with poetry and romance; the man whose strength is
in facts, with the woman whose strength is in ideas;
the man who is wholly absorbed in science or politics
or economical or industrial problems and pursuits,
with a woman who possesses the talent or at least
the temperament of an artist or musician. In such
cases one partner brings sympathies or qualities,
tastes or appreciations or kinds of knowledge in which
the other is most defective; and by the close and
constant contact of two dissimilar types each is, often
insensibly, but usually very effectually, improved.
Men differ greatly in their requirements of intellectual
sympathy. A perfectly commonplace intellectual
surrounding will usually do something to stunt or lower
a fine intelligence, but it by no means follows that
each man finds the best intellectual atmosphere to
be that which is most in harmony with his own special
talent.
To many, hard intellectual labour
is an eminently isolated thing, and what they desire
most in the family circle is to cast off all thought
of it. I have known two men who were in the first
rank of science, intimate friends, and both of them
of very domestic characters. One of them was
accustomed to do nearly all his work in the presence
of his wife, and in the closest possible co-operation
with her. The other used to congratulate himself
that none of his family had his own scientific tastes,
and that when he left his work and came into his family
circle he had the rest of finding himself in an atmosphere
that was entirely different. Some men of letters
need in their work constant stimulus, interest, and
sympathy. Others desire only to develop their
talent uncontrolled, uninfluenced, and undisturbed,
and with an atmosphere of cheerful quiet around them.
What is true of intellect is also
in a large degree true of character. Two persons
living constantly together should have many tastes
and sympathies in common, and their characters will
in most cases tend to assimilate. Yet great disparities
of character may subsist in marriage, not only without
evil but often with great advantage. This is especially
the case where each supplies what is most needed in
the other. Some natures require sedatives and
others tonics; and it will often be found in a happy
marriage that the union of two dissimilar natures stimulates
the idle and inert, moderates the impetuous, gives
generosity to the parsimonious and order to the extravagant,
imparts the spirit of caution or the spirit of enterprise
which is most needed, and corrects, by contact with
a healthy and cheerful nature, the morbid and the
desponding.
Marriage may also very easily have
opposite effects. It is not unfrequently founded
on the sympathy of a common weakness, and when this
is the case it can hardly fail to deepen the defect.
On the whole, women, in some of the most valuable
forms of strength in the power of endurance
and in the power of perseverance are at
least the equals of men. But weak and tremulous
nerves, excessive sensibility, and an exaggerated
share of impulse and emotion, are indissolubly associated
with certain charms, both of manner and character,
which are intensely feminine, and to many men intensely
attractive. When a nature of this kind is wedded
to a weak or a desponding man, the result will seldom
be happiness to either party, but with a strong man
such marriages are often very happy. Strength
may wed with weakness or with strength, but weakness
should beware of mating itself with weakness.
It needs the oak to support the ivy with impunity,
and there are many who find the constant contact of
a happy and cheerful nature the first essential of
their happiness.
As it is not wise or right that either
partner in marriage should lose his or her individuality,
so it is right that each should have an independent
sphere of authority. It is assumed, of course,
that there is the perfect trust which should be the
first condition of marriage and also a reasonable
judgment. Many marriages have been permanently
marred because the woman has been given no independence
in money matters and is obliged to come for each small
thing to her husband. In general the less the
husband meddles in household matters, or the wife in
professional ones, the better. The education
of very young children of both sexes, and of girls
of a mature age, will fall almost exclusively to the
wife. The education of the boys when they have
emerged from childhood will be rather governed by
the judgment of the man. Many things will be
regulated in common; but the larger interests of the
family will usually fall chiefly to one partner, the
smaller and more numerous ones to the other.
On such matters, however, generalisations
have little value, as exceptions are very numerous.
Differences of character, age, experience, and judgment,
and countless special circumstances, will modify the
family type, and it is in discovering these differences
that wisdom in marriage mainly consists. The
directions in which married life may influence character
are also very many; but in the large number of cases
in which it brings with it a great weight of household
cares and family interests it will usually be found
with both partners, but especially with the woman,
at once to strengthen and to narrow unselfishness.
She will live very little for herself, but very exclusively
for her family. On the intellectual side such
marriages usually give a sounder judgment and a wider
knowledge of the world rather than purely intellectual
tastes. It is a good thing when the education
which precedes marriage not only prepares for the
duties of the married life, but also furnishes a fair
share of the interests and tastes which that state
will probably tend to weaken. The hard battle
of life, and the anxieties and sorrows that a family
seldom fails to bring, will naturally give an increased
depth and seriousness to character. There are,
however, natures which, though they may be tainted
by no grave vice, are so incurably frivolous that
even this education will fail to influence them.
As Emerson says, ‘A fly is as untameable as
a hyaena.’
The age that is most suited for marriage
is also a matter which will depend largely on individual
circumstances. The ancients, as is well known,
placed it, in the case of the man, far back, and they
desired a great difference of age between the man
and the woman. Plato assigned between thirty
and thirty-five, and Aristotle thirty-seven, as the
best age for a man to marry, while they would have
the girls married at eighteen or twenty. In their
view, however, marriage was looked upon very exclusively
from the side of the man and of the State. They
looked on it mainly as the means of producing healthy
citizens, and it was in their eyes almost wholly dissociated
from the passion of love. Montaigne, in one of
his essays, has expounded this view with the frankest
cynicism. Yet few things are so important in marriage
as that the man should bring into it the freshness
and the purity of an untried nature, and that the
early poetry and enthusiasm of life should at least
in some degree blend with the married state. Nor
is it desirable that a relation in which the formation
of habits plays so large a part should be deferred
until character has lost its flexibility, and until
habits have been irretrievably hardened.
On the other hand there are invincible
arguments against marriages entered into at an age
when neither partner has any real knowledge of the
world and of men. Only too often they involve
many illusions and leave many regrets. Some kinds
of knowledge, such as that given by extended travel,
are far more easily acquired before than after marriage.
Usually very early marriages are improvident marriages,
made with no sufficient provision for the children,
and often they are immature marriages, bringing with
them grave physical evils. In those cases in
which a great place or position is to be inherited,
it is seldom a good thing that the interval of age
between the owner and his heir should be so small
that inheritance will probably be postponed till the
confines of old age.
Marriages entered into in the decline
of life stand somewhat apart from others, and are
governed by other motives. What men chiefly seek
in them is a guiding hand to lead them gently down
the last descent of life.
On this, as on most subjects connected
with marriage, no general or inflexible rule can be
laid down. Moralists have chiefly dilated on the
dangers of deferred marriages; economists on the evils
of improvident marriages. Each man’s circumstances
and disposition must determine his course. On
the whole, however, in most civilised countries the
prevailing tendencies are in the direction of an increased
postponement of marriage. Among the rich, the
higher standard of luxury and requirements, the comforts
of club life, and also, I think, the diminished place
which emotion is taking in life, all lead to this,
while the spread of providence and industrial habits
among the poor has the same tendency.
A female pen is so much more competent
than a masculine one for dealing with marriage from
the woman’s point of view that I do not attempt
to enter on that field. It is impossible, however,
to overlook the marked tendency of nineteenth-century
civilisation to give women, both married and unmarried,
a degree of independence and self-reliance far exceeding
that of the past. The legislation of most civilised
countries has granted them full protection for their
property and their earnings, increased rights of guardianship
over their children, a wider access to professional
life, and even a very considerable voice in the management
of public affairs; and these influences have been strengthened
by great improvement in female education, and by a
change in the social tone which has greatly extended
their latitude of independent action. For my
own part, I have no doubt that this movement is, on
the whole, beneficial, not only to those who have
to fight a lonely battle in life, but also to those
who are in the marriage state. Larger interests,
wider sympathies, a more disciplined judgment, and
a greater power of independence and self-control naturally
accompany it; and these things can never be wholly
wasted. They will often be called into active
exercise by the many vicissitudes of the married life.
They will, perhaps, be still more needed when the
closest of human ties is severed by the great Divorce
of Death.