Volume I Part 11 (2/2)
The ideal honeymoon is of course an Elysian time, during which nothing works rusty nor gets out of joint; and the ideal marriage is only a life-long honeymoon, where the happiness is more secure and the love deeper, if more sober; but the prose reality of one and the other has often a terrible dash of weariness in it, even under the most favourable conditions. Boredom begins in the very honeymoon itself. At first starting in married life there are many dangers to be encountered, not a shadow of which was seen in the wooing. There are odd freaks of temper turning up quite unexpectedly; there is the sense, so painful to some men, of being tied for life, of never being able to be alone again, never free and without responsibilities; there are misunderstandings to-day and the struggle for mastery to-morrow--the cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, which may prove to be the tempest that will destroy all; there is the unrest of travelling, and the awkwardness of unusual a.s.sociation, to help in the general discomfort; or, if the happy pair have settled down in a vale and a cottage for their month, there is the 'sad satiety' which all men feel after a time when they have had one companion only, with no outside diversion to cause a break. But the honeymoon at last draws to a close, and the relieved bridegroom gets back to his old haunts, to his work, his friends, and his club; and though he takes to all these things again with a difference, still they are helps and additions.
This is the time of trial to a woman. If she gets over this pinch, and is sensible enough to understand that human nature cannot be kept up at high pressure, even in love, and that a man must sooner or later come down from romance to work-a-day prose, from the pa.s.sionate lover to the cool and sober husband--if she can understand this, and settle into his pace, without fretting on the one hand or casting about for unhealthy distractions on the other--she will do well, and will probably make a pleasant home, and thereby diminish the boredom of life. But unfortunately, not every woman can do this; and it is just during this time of the man's transition from the lover to the friend that so many women begin to make s.h.i.+pwreck of their own happiness and his. They think to keep him a romantic wooer still, by their tears at his prosaic indifference to the little sentimentalities once so eagerly accepted and offered; they try to hold him close by their flattering but somewhat tiresome exactions; their jealousies--very pretty perhaps, and quite as flattering--are infinite, and as baseless as they are infinite; all of which is very nice up to a certain point and in the beginning of things, but all of which gets wearisome as time goes on, and a man wants both a little change and a little rest.
But women do not see this; or seeing it, they cannot accept it as a necessary condition of things; wherefore they go on in their fatal way, and by the very unwisdom of their own love bore their husband out of his. Or they grow substantially cold because he is superficially cooler, and think themselves justified in ceasing to love him altogether because he takes their love for granted, and so has ceased to woo it.
If they are jealous, or shy, or unsocial, as so many women are, they make life very heavy by their exclusiveness, and the monastic character they give the home. A man married to a woman of this kind is, in fact, a house prisoner, whose only free s.p.a.ces lie beyond the four walls of home. His bachelor friends are shut out. They smoke; or entice him to drink more than his wife thinks is good for him; or they induce him to bet on the Derby; or to play for half-crowns at whist or billiards; or they lead him in some other way of offence abhorrent to women. So the bachelor friends are shouldered out; and when the husband wants to entertain them, he must invite them to his club--if he has one--and pay the penalty when he gets home. In a few years' time his wife will be glad to encourage her sons' young friends to the house, for the sake of the daughters on hand; but husbands and sons are in a different category, and there are few fathers who do not learn, as time goes on, how much the mother will allow that the wife refused.
If bachelor friends are shouldered out of the house, all female friends are forbidden anything like an intimate footing, save those few whom the wife thinks specially devoted to herself and of whom she is not jealous. And these are very few. There are perhaps no women in the world so exclusive in their dealings with their husbands as are Englishwomen. A husband is bound to one woman only, no doubt; but the average wife thinks him also bound to have no affection whatever outside her and perhaps her family. If he meets an intelligent woman, pleasant to talk to, of agreeable manners and ready wit, and if he talks to her in consequence with anything like persistency or interest, he offends against the unwritten law; and his wife, whose utmost power of conversation consists in putting in a yes or no with tolerable accuracy of aim, thinks herself slighted and ill-used. She may be young and pretty, and dearly loved for her own special qualities; and her husband may not have a thought towards his new friend, or any other woman, in the remotest degree trenching on his allegiance to her; but the fact that he finds pleasure, though only of an intellectual and aesthetic kind, in the society of any other woman, that he feels an interest in her life, chooses her for his friend, or finds community of pursuits or sympathy in ideas, makes his wife by just so much a victim and aggrieved.
And yet what a miserably monotonous home is that to which she would confine him! He is at his office all day, badgered and worried with various business complications, and he comes home tired, perhaps cross--even well-conducted husbands have that way sometimes. He finds his wife tired and cross too; so that they begin the evening together mutually at odds, she irritated by small cares and he disturbed by large anxieties. Or he finds her preoccupied and absorbed in her own pursuits, and quite disinclined to make any diversion for his sake. He asks her for some music; she used to be ready enough to sing and play to him in the old love-making days; but she refuses now. Either she has some needlework to do, which might have been done during the day when he was out, or baby is asleep in the nursery, and music in the drawing-room would disturb him--at all events she cannot sing or play to-night; and even if she does--he has heard all her pieces so often! If he is not a reading-man, those long, dull, silent evenings are very trying. She works, and drives him wild with the click of her needle; or she reads the last new novel, and he hates novels, and gets tired to death when she insists on telling him all about the story and the characters; or she chooses the evening for letter-writing, and if the noise of her pen scratching over the paper does not irritate him, perhaps it sends him to sleep, when at least he is not bored. But dull, objectless, and vacant as their evenings are, his wife would not hear of any help from without to give just that little fillip which would prevent boredom and not create ceremony. She would think her life had gone to pieces, and that only desolation was before her, if he hinted that his home was dull, and that though he loves her very dearly and wants no other wife but her, yet that her society only--_toujours perdrix_, without change or addition--is a little stupid, however nice the partridge may be, and that things would be bettered if Mrs. or Miss So-and-So came in sometimes, just to brighten up the hours. And if he were to make a practice of bringing home his men friends, she would probably let all parties concerned feel pretty distinctly that she considered the home her special sanctuary, and that guests whom she did not invite were intruders. She would perhaps go willingly enough to a ball or crowded _soiree_, or she might like to give one; but that intimate form of society, which is a mere enlargement of the home life, she dreads as the supplementing of deficiencies, and thinks her married happiness safer in boredom than in any diversion from herself as the sole centre of her husband's pleasure.
Home life stagnates in England; and in very few families is there any mean between dissipation and this stagnation. We can scarcely wonder that so many husbands think matrimony a mistake as we have it in our insular arrangements; that they look back regretfully to the time when they were unfettered and not bored; or that their free friends, who watch them as wild birds watch their caged companions, curiously and reflectively, share their opinion. Wife and home, after all, make up but part of a man's life; they are not his all, and do not satisfy the whole of his social instinct; nor is any one woman the concentration of all womanhood to a man, leaving nothing that is beautiful, nor in its own unconjugal way desirable, on the outside. Besides, when with his wife a man is often as much isolated as when alone, for any real companions.h.i.+p there is between them. Few women take a living interest in the lives of men, and fewer still understand them. They expect the husband to sympathize with them in the kitchen gossip and the nursery chatter, the neighbours' doings and all the small household politics; but they are utterly unable to comprehend his pleasures, his thoughts, his duties, the responsibilities of his profession, or the bearings of any public question in which he takes a part.
Even if this were not so, and granting that they could enter fully into his life and sympathize with him as intelligent equals, not only as compa.s.sionate saints or loving children, there would still be the need of novelty, and still the certainty of boredom without it. For human life, like all other forms of life, must have a due proportion of fresh elements continually added to keep it sweet and growing, else it becomes stagnant and stunted. And daily intercourse undeniably exhausts the moral ground. After the close companions.h.i.+p of years no one can remain mentally fresh to the other, unless indeed one or both be of the rarest order of mind and of a practically inexhaustible power of acquiring knowledge. Save these exceptional instances, we must all of necessity get worn out by constant intercourse. We know every thought, every opinion, and almost every square inch of information possessed; we have heard the old stories again and again, and know exactly what will lead up to them, and at what point they will begin; we have measured the whole sweep of mind, and have probed its depths; and though we may love and value what we have learnt, yet we want something new--fresh food for interest, though not necessarily a new love for the displacement of the old. But this is what very few Englishwomen can understand or will allow. They hold so intensely by the doctrine of unity that they are even jealous of a man's pursuits, if they think these take up any place in his mind which might also be theirs. They must be good for every part of his life; and the poorest of them all must be his only source of interest, suffering no other woman to share his admiration nor obtain his friends.h.i.+p, though this would neither touch his love nor interfere with their rights. Friends.h.i.+p is a hard saying to them, and one they cannot receive. Wherefore they keep a tight grasp on the marital collar, and suffer no relief of monotony by judicious loosening, nor by generous faith in integral fidelity. The practical result of which is that most men are horribly bored at home, and that the ma.s.s of them really suffer from the domestic stagnation to which national customs and the exclusiveness of women doom them so soon as they become family men. It must however, in fairness be added, that in general they obtain some kind of compensation; and that very few walk meekly in their bonds without at times slipping them off, with or without the concurrence of their wives.
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
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