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 soirée, 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 companionship 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 compassionate 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 companionship 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 friendship, though this would neither touch his love nor interfere with their rights. Friendship 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 mass 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.
S. & H.
LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET
Transcriber's note:
Minor spelling and punctuation inconsistencies, mainly hyphenated words, have been harmonized. Any lacking page numbers are those given to blank pages in the original text.