‘Twenty years of Romance make a woman look like a wreck; twenty years of Marriage make her look like a public building.’ —Oscar Wilde.
Leasehold marriage was one of the customs of early Roman society. Nowadays it has a revolutionary savour, and is so apparently impracticable that it would be hardly necessary to do more than touch upon it here, but for the fact that its most recent and most distinguished advocate in modern times is Mr George Meredith. Any suggestion from such a source must necessarily receive careful consideration. It was also advanced by the great philosopher Locke, and was considered by Milton.
It is scarcely three years since our veteran novelist cast this bombshell into a delighted, albeit disapproving Press; but as memories are so short nowadays, perhaps a brief recapitulation of the circumstances might not be amiss.
The beginning of the business was a letter to The Times by Mr Cloudesly Brereton complaining of the ‘growing handicap of marriage’ and, according to invariable custom, attacking women as the cause of it. He stated that in the middle classes ‘the exigences of modern wives are steadily undermining the attractions of matrimony; in her ever-growing demands on her husband’s time, energy, and money the modern married woman constitutes a very serious drag, and in the lower classes of society, marriage even seriously militates against a man’s finding work.’ How women can be held responsible for this last injustice was wisely not stated. It would have been difficult to prove the indictment, I think.
This document’s chief claim to interest was the discussion in The Daily Mail that followed it, and the curious fact that the writer was married a few weeks after its publication! The usual abuse on marriage in general and women in particular followed, until the late Mrs Craigie joined the discussion, and brought to bear on it that peculiar quality of tender understanding, that wonderful insight into women’s hearts, which were among the most striking characteristics of her brilliant work. It would be a pity to quote from such a letter, so I reproduce it in full.
‘Women, where their feelings are in question, are not selfish enough: they appraise themselves not too dearly, but too cheaply: it is the suicidal unselfishness of modern women which makes the selfishness of modern bachelors possible. Bachelors are not all misogynists, and the fact that a man remains unmarried is no proof that he is insensible to the charm of woman’s companionship, or that he does not have such companionship, on irresponsible terms, to a most considerable degree. Why should the average vain young man, egoistic by organism and education, work hard or make sacrifices for the sake of any particular woman, while so many are too willing to share his life without joining it, and so many more wait eagerly on his steps to destroy any chivalry or tenderness he may have been born with? Modern women give bachelors no time to miss them and no opportunity to need them. Their devotion is undisciplined and it becomes a curse rather than a blessing to its object. Why? Because women have this strange power of concentration and self-abnegation in their love; they cannot do enough to prove their kindness; and when they have done all and been at no pains to secure their own position, they realise they have erred through excess of generosity and the desire to please. This is the unselfishness shown towards bachelors.’
In answer to this letter, another woman novelist, Miss Florence Warden, challenged Mrs Craigie as to the existence of such women, but elicited no further reply. The Daily Mail commented on it thus: ‘Hundreds of thousands of our readers can give an answer to this remarkable statement out of their own experience, and we have little doubt as to what the tenor of that answer will be.’ One can imagine that this was written with a view to being read at the breakfast-tables of Villadom; but men and women of the world, whose experience is not confined to Villadom, nor their opinions of life coloured by the requirements of the Young Person, will recognise the undoubted truth of Mrs Craigie’s statements. Whilst agreeing that the state of things between the sexes which she describes is a true one, I venture respectfully to differ as to women’s motive for this ‘excess of generosity.’ There is an enormous amount of wonderful unselfishness among women, but it does not expend itself in this direction, in my opinion. Rather is the motive a passionate desire for their own enjoyment, the gratification of their own vanity by pleasing the opposite sex, often at the cost of their own self-respect. H. B. Marriott-Watson takes the same view in a subsequent letter, where he says: ‘Women’s unselfishness does not extend to the region of love. The sex attraction is practically inconsistent with altruism, and the measure of renunciation is inversely the measure of affection. This is the order which Nature has established, and it is no use trying to expel her. A woman may lay down her life for the man she loves, but she will not surrender him to a rival.’
Another letter of interest came from Miss Helen Mathers, who stated that ‘all women should marry, but no men!’—the advantages of the conjugal state being, in her opinion, entirely on the woman’s side.
At this point appeared Mr Meredith’s contribution to the discussion in the less authoritative form of an interview—not a letter or article, as, after this lapse of time, so many people seem to imagine. On re-reading this interview recently, I was struck with Mr Meredith’s peculiarly old-fashioned ideas about women. Where the woman question was concerned the clock of his observation seems to have stopped many decades ago.
‘The fault at the bottom of the business,’ he affirms, ‘is that women are so uneducated, so unready. Men too often want a slave, and frequently think they have got one, not because the woman has not often got more sense than her husband, but because she is so inarticulate, not educated enough to give expression to her real ideas and feelings.’