I believe that marriage can be studied as a science, and practiced as an art; that like every other natural phenomenon, it has its laws, psychological, moral, and economic. At present it would seem that many others hold this belief. We have seen the rise of marriage counselors, and I have heard that marriage is even the subject of courses in college. But when I was young, it was generally taken for granted that marriages had to be ill-assorted and that married couples had to quarrel and deceive each other. Here is a case record, an example of what happens when marriage is entered into in utter ignorance of all its practical problems.
The story was told in Love’s Pilgrimage, with the variation of a few details. In ancient Greek pastorals, Corydon and Thyrsis were two shepherds; but the lines in Milton’s “L’Allegro” caught my fancy:
Where Corydon and Thyrsis met
Are at their savory supper set,
Of herbs and other country messes.
And so I said, “For purposes of this tale let Corydon be a girl.”
In writing the book, I told the story as the girl wanted it told. If it seemed to her that the manuscript failed to give a sufficiently vivid account of the hardheadedness and unreasonableness of Thyrsis, I would say, “You write it the way it ought to be.” So Corydon would write a paragraph, or maybe a page or a scene, and in it would go. I was so sorry for the fate of women that I found it hard to contend with them.
The marriage of Corydon and Thyrsis was dominated by the most pitiful ignorance. Both parties had been taught very little, and most of that was wrong. Corydon had lived the solitary life of a child of the city nomads; her father had been a newspaper reporter, then deputy clerk of a court, and she had been moved about from boardinghouses to apartments; and in the course of twenty years of life she had picked up one intimate girl friend, a poor stenographer dying of tuberculosis, and no men friends whatever. As for Thyrsis, he had, besides Corydon, one girl friend.
Let not Laura Stedman fail of her due place in this story: little Laura, golden-haired and pretty, prim and precise. She was the granddaughter of Edmund Clarence Stedman, the poet, and happened to live in the apartment house next to me for two or three years. We had our childish “scrap,” and I vaguely remember pulling her pigtail, or something brutal like that. Later, at the age of fifteen or so, I would go to call upon her, and experience tumultuous thrills; I recall one occasion when I purchased a new hat, of a seductive pearl gray, and went walking with Laura in this regalia, so excited that my knees would hardly hold me up.
We discoursed learnedly about the books we were reading, among these Romola, a “classic.” First there is a Greek seducer named Tito Melema, and I remarked sapiently that I considered him “magnificent.” Laura flushed and exclaimed, “I think he is a perfect beast!” I had to explain that I was speaking from the technical point of view; the character was well drawn. So then the little lady from New England consented to forgive me.
II
Between Corydon and Thyrsis the determining factor, as in nine tenths of marriages, was propinquity. Corydon came to the place where Thyrsis was writing his great novel; she visited the romantic cabin in the Fairy Glen; and since someone had to read the manuscript, she carried it off, and came back flushed with the discovery that this hateful, egotistical, self-centered youth whom she had known and disliked for ten years or more was a hothearted dreamer, engaged in pouring out a highly romantic love story destined soon to be recognized as the great American novel. “Oh, it is wonderful!” she exclaimed; and the rest of the scene tells itself. Literary feelings turned quickly into personal ones, and the solitary poet had a companion and supporter.