But search the ranks of married men who have achieved fame, and few shall you find who found, and wed, their affinity. Affinities, it should seem, are rare when once you come to brains of more than ordinary calibre: your dull dog more readily finds his match than wits or witlings, and the community of the commonplace is an easier consummation than the happy combination of the unconventional.
The Struggle for the Breeches.
V.—Domestic Strife.
Married life is one long series of compromises—when, indeed, it is not a state of open warfare. The ‘mere man’ must be a little less than just, and more than a little selfish, who would assure himself of retaining his authority over the (more or less) ‘pleasing partner of his heart;’ for woman, be she never so sweet and gracious, is always greedy of power and domination, and though with ‘sweet Nellie,’ your ‘heart’s delight,’ the wish to rule may be possibly but a harmless and altogether amiable eccentricity, and your abandonment to her humours the wearing of golden and purely ornamental fetters, yet in process of time your benevolent despot may become more despotic and less benevolent, and your chains transmuted to more sordid guise. But with imperious Julia or haughty Georgina ’tis another matter from the first; your initial complaisance spells infirmity of purpose, and having once abdicated your authority, you are undone for always, and may for ever tarry in attendance upon the good lady’s whims and ‘ways,’ while acquaintances sit in the seat of the scorner and opine that not you but the woman ‘wears the breeches.’
O! most miserable and ineffectual of men; you who have the will-power of a jelly-fish and the courage of a cockroach! The ‘better half’ is not yourself; your partner has achieved her own ‘betterment,’ and your compensation is all to seek for the ‘worsement’ that remains your portion.
Life is compact of compromise, but keep it outside the home and rule absolute beneath your roof-tree. Then shall one have satisfaction and the other be convinced of orthodoxy in observing apostolic precepts. Compromise, as Captain de Valabrèque found, is pleasing to neither side. A friend discovered him dressing for dinner at an unusual hour, and, in reply to the friend’s inquiry, he said: ‘It suits my wife to dine at four, and it is convenient for me to dine at six; and so we sit down to table at five, which suits neither of us.’
Dual control, in fact, works smoothly neither socially nor politically, and though there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, folly abides in divided authority everywhere, and nowhere more certainly than in domestic matters.
The New Women—female gendarmes, censors of morals, and would-be domestic tyrants—are quite alive to these objections against the division of authority, but their agreement goes no further. ‘Woman ought to be and shall be’ the head of the family, they say, and no statement is too rash for woman on the war-path to make or subscribe. Woman has ever been a religious animal, and even the modern woman differs little from her forbears in this respect; but do just remind her of St. Paul’s views on the silence and subjection of her sex, and you learn that the militant saint was an ass—no less! And yet Paul remains the patron saint of the foremost diocese in Christendom. See to it, O New Woman! Disestablish him, and erect some more complaisant saint in his stead. Certainly his opinions and teaching flout the feminine Ego.[2]