Amongst these examples, both of lapse and of toleration, the Tolerated Husband holds a foremost place. Certain conditions are necessary for his proper production. He must be not only easy-going, but unprincipled,—unprincipled, that is, rather in the sense of having no particular principles of any kind than in that of possessing and practising notoriously bad ones. He must have a fine contempt for steady respectability, and an irresistible inclination to that glittering style of untrammelled life which is believed by those who live it to be the true Bohemianism. He should be weak in character, he may be pleasant in manner and appearance, and he must be both poor and extravagant. If to these qualities be added, first a wife, young, good-looking, and in most respects similar to her husband, though of a stronger will, and secondly a friend, rich, determined, strictly unprincipled, and thoroughly unscrupulous, the conditions which produce the Tolerated Husband may be said to be complete.
The Tolerated Husband may have been at one time an officer in a good regiment. Having married, he finds that his pay, combined with a moderate private income, and a generous allowance of indebtedness, due to the gratification of expensive tastes, is insufficient to maintain him in that position of comfort to which he conceives himself to be entitled. He therefore abandons the career of arms, and becomes one of those who attempt spasmodically to redeem commercial professions from the taint of mere commercialism by becoming commercial themselves. It is certain that the gilded society which turns up a moderately aristocratic nose at trade and tradesmen, looks with complete indulgence upon an ex-officer who dabbles in wine, or associates himself with a new scheme for the easy manufacture of working-men's boots. An agency to a Fire and Life Assurance Society is, of course, above reproach, and the Stock Exchange, an institution which, in the imagination of reckless fools, provides as large a cover as charity, is positively enviable—a reputation which it owes to the fancied ease with which half-a-crown is converted into one hundred thousand pounds by the mere stroke of an office pen.
The Tolerated Husband tries all these methods, one after another, with a painful monotony of failure in each. Yet, somehow or other, he still keeps up appearances, and manages to live in a certain style not far removed from luxury. He entertains his friends at elaborate dinners, both at home and at expensive restaurants; he is a frequent visitor at theatres, where he often pays for the stalls of many others as well as for his own. He takes a small house in the country, and fills it with guests, to whom he offers admirable wines, and excellent cigars. His wife is always beautifully dressed, and glitters with an array of jewels which make her the envy of many a steady leader of fashion. The world begins to ask, vaguely at first, but with a constantly increasing persistence, how the thing is done. Respectability and malice combine to whisper a truthful answer. Starting from the axiom that the precarious income which is produced by a want of success in many branches of business cannot support luxury or purchase diamonds, they arrive, per saltum, at the conclusion that there must be some third party to provide the wife and the husband with means for their existence. His name is soon fixed upon, and his motives readily inferred. It can be none other than the husband's rich bachelor friend, the same who accompanies the pair on all their expeditions, who is a constant guest at their house, and is known to be both lavish and determined in the prosecution of any object on which he has set his heart. His heart, in this instance, is set upon his friend's wife, and the obstacles in his way do not seem to be very formidable. The case, indeed, is soon too manifest for any one but a born idiot to feign ignorance of it. The husband is not a born idiot—he either sees it plainly, or (it may be, after a struggle) he looks another way, and resigns himself to the inevitable. For inevitable it is, if he is to continue in that life of indolence and extravagant comfort which habit has made a necessity for him. So he submits to the constant companionship of a third party, and, in order to be truly tolerated in his own household, becomes tolerant in a manner that is almost sublime. He allows his friend to help him with large subventions of money; he lets him cover his wife with costly jewels. He is content to be supplanted without fuss, provided the supplanter never decreases the stream of his benevolence; and the supplanter, having more wealth than he knows what to do with, is quite content to secure his object on such extremely easy terms. And thus the Tolerated Husband is created.
It is curious to notice how cheerfully, to all outward appearance, he accepts what other men would consider a disaster. Before the world he carries his head high with an assumption of genial frankness and easy good temper. "Come and dine with us to-morrow, my boy," he will say to an old acquaintance, "there'll only be yourself and a couple of others besides ourselves. We'll go to the play afterwards." And the acquaintance will most certainly discover, if he accepts the invitation, that the "ourselves" included not only husband and wife, but friend as well. He will also notice that the last is even more at home in the house, and speaks in a tone of greater authority than the apparent host. Everything is referred to him for decision, and the master of the house treats him with a deferential humility which goes far to contradict the cynical observation that there is no gratitude on earth. The Tolerated Husband, indeed, never tires of dispensing hospitality at the cost of his friend, and though the whole world knows the case, there will never be a lack of guests to accept what is offered.
At last, however, in spite of his toleration, he becomes an encumbrance in his own house, and, like most encumbrances, he has to be paid off, the friend providing the requisite annual income. One after another he puts off the last remaining rags of his pretended self-respect. He haunts his Clubs less and less frequently, and seems to wither under the open dislike of those who are repelled by the mean and sordid details of his despicable story. And thus he drags on his life, a degraded and comparatively impoverished outcast, untidy, haggard and shunned, having forfeited by the restriction of his spending powers even the good-natured contempt of those who were not too proud to be at one time mistaken for his friends.
LABOURS FOR LENT.
Emperor of Germany.—To conciliate the great men who have had to prefix "Ex" to their official titles since he ascended the Throne.
Emperor of Russia.—To find a resting-place safe from the Nihilists.