The same principle applies to women, though it is not generally recognised. I am convinced that a great number of middle-class marriages prove unhappy merely because the woman has not enough to do. Possessed of sufficient servants, her household duties occupy a very small portion of her leisure, and if her children are at school (or perhaps she has none) she has nothing more engrossing to do than read novels and pay visits. The result is that one type of woman cultivates nerves and becomes a neurasthenic semi-invalid; another cultivates the opposite sex and fills her leisure hours with undesirable philandering; another develops temper or melancholy or jealous fancies; and so on—all of them spoilt as companions merely for want of sufficient occupation.
[III]
THE AGE TO MARRY
‘To me the extraordinary thing is not that so many people remain unmarried, but that so many rush into marriage, as they might rush into a station to catch a train. And if you catch the wrong train, what then? All you have to comfort you is the fact that you have travelled.’ —Robert Hichens.
A great many unhappy unions might be prevented if people could find their right age for marrying. As it differs with the individual, it is impossible to lay down any exact rule. Some men are capable of making a good choice at twenty-two; others don’t know their own minds at double that age. Some girls are fit for wifehood and maternity in their teens; others never.
In the interests of abstract morality early marriages are desirable, and in England everything the law can do is done to encourage them. In France the preservation of family authority is considered all-important, and the law apparently tries to check early unions by every means in its power, regardless of the high percentage of illegitimate births which is the direct consequence.[3]
Broadly speaking, no woman should wed until she understands something of life, has met a good many men, has acquired a certain knowledge of physiology and eugenics and a clear understanding of what marriage really means. No woman should marry until she has learnt the value of money, and how to manage a household—until she has had plenty of girlish fun and gaiety, and is thus ready for the more serious things of life. Not until then is she likely to be happy in the monotony of wedlock or capable of attuning her mind to the necessity of being faithful to one man only, in thought as well as in deed. Broadly speaking, also, no man is likely to marry happily until he has seen life and plenty of it, has hammered out for himself something of a philosophy and obtained considerable knowledge of women and a consequent understanding of how to make one happy.
This is not so easily done as men suppose, and it takes time to learn. Few men under thirty are fit to have the care of a wife, and Heaven preserve a girl from a young husband who is still a cub! No doubt she will have glorious moments, for there is something intoxicating about the ardour of a very young heart, and that is why we find boy and girl marriages so charming—in theory. Sometimes in the case of an exceptional couple, well suited to each other, they really are charming, and then it is the most beautiful marriage conceivable—two young things, starting off hand in hand on life’s journey, brave-hearted, loving, full of high hopes. But as a rule the glory is limited to moments only; young girls are mostly shallow and frivolous; very young men are often madly selfish and reckless. They are so proud of being the sole possessor of an attractive woman that their conceit, always immense, swells into monstrous proportions and they grow wholly unbearable. If dark days should come to the young couple, the boy-husband has no philosophy to support him, no knowledge of women to enable him to understand his wife and live happily with her, and little self-control for his help; she has the same defects of youth, and the result is failure. Stevenson puts it perfectly thus: ‘You may safely go to school with hope, but before you marry you should have learned the mingled lesson of the world.’ On the other hand, Grant Allen says that ‘the best of men are, so to speak, born married,’ and that it is only the selfish, mean, and calculating man who waits till he can afford to marry. ‘That vile phrase scarcely veils hidden depths of depravity,’ he continues. ‘The right sort of man doesn’t argue with himself at all on these matters. He doesn’t say, with selfish coldness: “I can’t afford a wife”; or “If I marry now I shall ruin my prospects.” He feels and acts. He mates like the birds, because he can’t help himself.’
I must say that these young men who do not think, but merely feel and act, scarcely seem of the highest type in my opinion, and if mating like the birds were to be generally accepted as a sign of a noble nature—well, nobility would be decidedly less rare than at present!
[IV]
WILD OATS FOR WIVES
‘Nothing that is worth saying is proper.’ —G. Bernard Shaw.