CHAPTER XXI
THE ENGLISH WIFE
Her position — Family life less attractive and piquant in England than in France, but more solid — The English wife is the goddess of a beautiful home.
The Englishman is no doubt cut out to make colonies, but less to make love, for the simple reason that he does not know how to forget himself, and spends the greater part of his life standing sentry at the door of his dignity.
The Englishman loves in his own fashion, in a true and manly way, according to his peculiar organization, which enables him to bring to the choice of a wife the very same cool reflection, care and discernment that he brings to all the other actions of his life. In a word, he seldom allows himself to be 'carried away.'
This is a great superiority he has over the Frenchman, because this cool and reflective way of loving has established the English family on a most solid basis. The Englishman does not seek beauty in a wife. After being married he wants to enjoy a perfect peace of mind, and, to do him justice, I will add that money will seldom make him take a wife who does not possess those moral and intellectual qualities that are the foundation-stone of happiness in matrimonial life. A cheerful face will attract him much more than a beautiful one. It is a cheerful and useful companion he wants, not a legal mistress or a well-dressed doll.
His honeymoon lasts a month. When he settles at home, he prepares to keep his wife in order and discipline, and to give her occupations to fill up all her time—a house to keep and a large family to bring up. Devotion and friendship are nowhere deeper than in the English family, but poetry and piquancy shine by their absence. It is a prosy life among the masses of the people.
Among these masses, even the well-to-do masses, of the people (I don't mention the upper tens, who are alike all the world over) there is no privacy between them—why, very often, not even a dressing-room.
The 'nonsense,' as I once heard an Englishman call the poetry of matrimony, is soon knocked out of them. One says, 'Oh, that's all right. It is not a man; it's only my husband'; while the other says, 'I would not do this or that before a woman for all the world; but this is the wife: it's all right.' And it is that kind of life that so often causes Englishwomen of the middle class to appear so unattractive. The blame is to be laid at the door of their husbands. In love the Englishman is a little selfish. He forgets that the sweetest pleasures are those we give.