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]
[Footnote 3: In 1903 one tenth of all the children born in France were illegitimate. In Paris alone the percentage was higher still--about one in every four.]
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 n.o.ble nature--well, n.o.bility would be decidedly less rare than at present!
IV
WILD OATS FOR WIVES
"Nothing that is worth saying is proper." --G. BERNARD SHAW.
"I don"t believe in the existence of Puritan women. I don"t think there is a woman in the world who would not be a little flattered if one made love to her. It is that which makes woman so irresistibly adorable." --OSCAR WILDE.
If there be any readers whose susceptibilities are shocked by this headline, they are respectfully requested--nay, commanded--to read no further. If there be any whose susceptibilities waver without as yet experiencing any actual shock, they are affectionately asked--nay, implored--to re-read several times the above quotation from Mr Shaw"s immortal _Candida_, to thereupon pull themselves together and take the plunge. I can promise them it won"t be anything like as terrible as they half hope--in fact its essential propriety will probably disappoint them bitterly!
Curiously enough, though women are more anxious to marry than men, and do everything in their power to achieve what men often strive to resist--after marriage it is generally the woman who is most discontented. Of late years a spirit of strange unrest has come over married women, and they frequently rebel against conditions which our grandmothers would never have dreamed of murmuring at. There are a variety of causes for this: one that marriage falls short of women"s expectations, as I said in the opening chapter, another that they have had no _feminine_ wild oats. Please note the qualifying adjective, duly italicised, and do not attempt to misunderstand me. I am no advocate of the licence generally accorded to men being extended to women.
"Wild oats" of this nature, otherwise an ante-hymeneal "fling," was certainly not a necessity of our grandmothers, but a certain (fairly numerous) type of modern women seem to make better wives when they have reaped this harvest. Take for example the cases of Yvonne and Yvette which are personally known to me. Yvette was engaged at eighteen and married at twenty-one. At the age of twenty-six she was the mother of four children. She had scarcely time to realise what youth meant and begin to enjoy it before her girlhood was stifled under the responsibilities of marriage and maternity. She had accepted her first offer, and he was practically the only man she knew anything of. Beyond him she had seen nothing of men, or of the world; certainly she had never flirted or had men friends or enjoyed any admiration but that of her _fiance_.
At twenty-six Yvette began to realise that she had been cheated out of a very precious part of life and an invaluable experience. Though a fairly happy wife and a devoted mother, she felt that she might have had those lost delights as well as the domestic joys, and the knowledge enraged her.
A dangerous spirit of curiosity entered her heart, and a still more dangerous longing for adventure and excitement. She realised that there were other men in the world who admired her besides her Marcus, and that she was pretty and still quite a young woman. At thirty Yvette was a mistress of the art of intrigue--had engineered several dangerous _affaires_, and might have come to serious grief had not Marcus been a singularly wise, tender, and understanding husband.
"It isn"t that I don"t love him dearly," she confided in me when resolving to turn over a new leaf. "I wouldn"t exchange him for anyone in the world, and you know what the children are to me--but somehow I want something else as well--some excitement. I feel I"ve had no _fun_ in my life, and I wanted to have a fling before it was too late. When I was engaged I scarcely ever even danced with anyone but Marcus, and for the first four years of my married life I had a baby every eighteen months--it was nothing but babies, nursing the old one and getting ready for the new one! Not that I didn"t love it, but the reaction was bound to come, and it did. If only I could have had the excitement and the gaiety and the glamour first, and then married when I was about twenty-five, I should have been perfectly satisfied then, like Yvonne!"
Yvonne certainly managed her affairs better. Fate saved her from the misfortune of falling in love too soon. She always had a train of admirers, and was enabled to enjoy the power of her womanhood to the full; she travelled, made delightful friendships with both s.e.xes, learnt to know the world and acquired a philosophy of life. When she married, at twenty-nine, she had seen enough of other men to know exactly the kind of husband she wanted, and had had enough excitement to make her appreciate the peace and calm of matrimony.
The secrets of many wives lie heavily on my soul as I write, and more than one woman, with some real reason for remorse, has confided in me that it was only that fatal desire for excitement that primarily caused her undoing. I shall instruct my son to be sure to marry a woman who has got her wild oats safely over, or select a wife of the more old-fashioned type who does not require them. With the modern temperament they must almost inevitably come sooner or later, and to what extent the modern temperament will have evolved by the time the Boy of Boys is marriageable, the ironical G.o.ds alone know!
Bachelors take note! A woman--new style--who has knocked about over half the world and sown a mild crop of the delectable cereal will prove a far better wife, a more cheery friend and faithful comrade than the girl _of more or less the same type_ whose first experience you are, and who will make enormous claims on your love and patience by reason of her utter ignorance of men. You will possibly even have to live up to an ideal founded on novel-reading, and that you will find very wearing, my friend! The experienced woman knows men so thoroughly, she will expect nothing more of you than you can give her, and will appreciate your virtues to the utmost and make the best of your vices. "But she has flirted so outrageously," you say? Well, so much the better, she is less likely to do it after marriage. "But, hang it all, she has been kissed by other men," you say? Well then, she has no need for further experiences of this kind and is not likely ever to give her lips again to others once she is yours... . How can you be sure? That is one of the innumerable risks of marriage. How can _she_ be sure that _your_ last crop is sown, still less reaped? ... Oh, my dear man, you really make me very angry--do for heaven"s sake try and get away from conventional ideas of right and wrong! Judge things _for yourself_, and as they would seem, say, at the edge of an active volcano! ... All the things we fuss so much about would doubtless quickly a.s.sume their real value if viewed from this perilous situation.
And even in the sad cases where a woman has sown real wild oats in the man"s sense of the word, how different the little moral rules and regulations which we keep for these occasions would appear in the face of an immediate and violent death. I heard not long ago of a very sad story which bears this out. A man very narrowly escaped death from drowning, shortly after he had broken his engagement with a girl he genuinely loved, on her confessing to him that, many years before, she had once yielded to the importunities of a pa.s.sionate lover. I do not know what were his emotions in the awful moment when the waters closed over him, and he was experiencing that horrible fight for breath which those who have known it describe as the most terrible sensation conceivable. Apparently his hairbreadth escape from death tore from his eyes the swathings of conventional opinion with which he had been blinded. Instead of regarding himself as a deeply wronged man he realised that he had behaved horribly to the unfortunate girl, who had thus been doubly outraged by his s.e.x. He sought her at once and begged to be taken back again, but she happened to be a woman of some spirit, and she refused to trust herself to a man of such narrow views, and given to such harsh judgment.
Of course this treatment increased his love a thousandfold. It obsessed him to a painful degree, and in the end his desperate entreaties prevailed on her deep affection for him and she relented. Their marriage was not very happy, as may be imagined; they both loved to madness and the ghost of that dead pa.s.sion stood ever between them, an invisible, poisonous presence that killed their joy in each other. After a time a deep melancholy settled on the woman, and she allowed some trifling illness to take such a hold on her that it caused her death.
When she was dying, I am told, she said to her faithful friend: "If ever you meet another woman who has made one little slip--a thing which at the time seemed so natural and inevitable as not to be sin at all--tell her never _never_ to confess it to the man she is going to marry, least of all if she loves him. If that confession doesn"t part them altogether, it will always be between them. One does it wishing to be straight, but it"s the most dreadful mistake a woman can make."
Her wish to be straight had cost this poor woman not only her whole life"s happiness, and her very life itself, but the happiness of the man she loved, in whose interests she had made the confession that wrought the harm. "How dearly I have paid! how dearly I have paid!" she used to say over and over again in her last illness.
This is an absolutely true story, and it seems to me a burning injustice that a woman should suffer so bitterly for what would be absolutely disregarded in a man. I have no doubt there are many similar cases, and emphatically I say that such confessions are ill-advised. The ordinary conventional-thinking man placed in these circ.u.mstances would either throw a woman over, or marry her against his convictions. The extraordinary masculine code, for some reason beyond my feminine powers of comprehension, will not admit that a spinster who has had a lover, or even made one "false step," is a fit person to wed, though no man would object to marrying a widow, and many men take respondent _divorcees_ to wife.
Even in the case of a rarely generous-minded, tolerant and understanding man, who judged the offence at its true computation, such knowledge would only prove disturbing and a source of insecurity to conjugal happiness. No good purpose of any kind can be served, and the ease which confession is proverbially supposed to gain for the sinner would be bought at a very heavy price.
"But two wrongs don"t make a right, and surely it can"t be proper for a woman to deceive a man on such a vital point," the stern moralist may exclaim. Possibly not, according to the strictly ideal standard of ethics; but, viewed from the larger standpoints of life and of commonsense, this "deceit" would appear to be advisable. And be a.s.sured, my unpleasant moralist (I"m sure you are an unpleasant person), that the sinner will not get off "scot free," as you seem to fear. Many and many a stab will be her portion, for memory is a potent poison, and every expression of love and trust from her husband will most likely carry its own special sting, whilst the round, innocent eyes of adoring little children, to whom she is a being that can do no wrong, will be a meet punishment for an infinitely greater fault. Meanwhile the man is _in all probability_ in every way a gainer by the woman"s silence, for doubtless he is doubly dear to her for the very fact that the first man treated her badly, and she may perhaps be a better wife, a stronger and sweeter woman, a more capable mother, by reason of the suffering she has undergone.
Now let no maliciously obtuse person attribute to me the pernicious doctrine that a woman with a past is the best wife for a man. I merely say that a good woman who has surrendered herself to an ardent lover and been afterwards deserted by him must necessarily have gone through such intense suffering that her character is probably deepened thereby and her capacity for love and faithfulness increased. It is another truism that suffering is necessary to bring out the best qualities in women.
Men too should keep the details of their wild oats severely to themselves. In married life there are bound to be secrets and the happiest couples are those who know how to keep them, each to him or her self. A very good motto for the newly betrothed would be that of Tom Broadbent in _John Bull"s Other Island_--"Let us have no tellings--perfect confidence, but no tellings: that"s the way to avoid rows!"
V
A PLEA FOR THE WISER TRAINING OF GIRLS
If girls were more reasonably trained with regard to matters of s.e.x, there would be far fewer miserable wives in the world, and fewer husbands would be driven to seek happiness outside their home circle.
If, when girls reach years of discretion, they were systematically taught some rudimentary outline of the fundamental principles of existence, instead of being left in utter ignorance as at present, the extraordinarily false notions of s.e.x which they now pick up would cease to obtain, and a great deal of harm would thus be avoided. As it is, maidens are now given tacitly to understand that the subject of s.e.x is a repulsive one, wholly unfit for their consideration, and the functions of s.e.x are loathsome, though necessary. I write tacitly with intention, for little if anything is ever said to a girl on this subject; indeed, it is extraordinary how the ideas are conveyed to her without words, but inculcated somehow they certainly are, and it is difficult to understand how mothers manage to reconcile this teaching with their evident wish that their girls should marry. The ideal held up to girls nowadays is apparently the s.e.xless sort of Diana one--not merely chast.i.ty, but sterility.
Most girls are aware from a very early age of the social advantages and importance of marriage, and grow up with a keen desire to accomplish it in due course, although secretly dreading it, because of their absurd perverted ideas of its physical side. Why cannot girls--and boys too, for that matter--be taught the plain truth (in suitable language of course) that s.e.x is the pivot on which the world turns, that the instincts and emotions of s.e.x are common to humanity, and in themselves not base or degrading, nor is there any cause for shame in possessing them, although it is necessary that they should be strenuously controlled. Why cannot girls be taught that _all love_, even the romantic love which occupies so large a portion of their dreams, _springs from the instinct of s.e.x_?[4] This may be thought a dangerous lesson, but the present policy of silence on this subject is far more dangerous, inducing as it does a tendency to brood over the forbidden theme.
[Footnote 4: Schopenhauer"s _Metaphysics of Love_.]
I remember when in my early teens a schoolfellow of about fifteen confided in me that "a man"--he was a harmless boy of about twenty--had kissed her hand when pa.s.sing her a tennis racquet. She drew her hand indignantly away, and said: "How dare you insult me!" then left the tennis court and refused to play any more. I do not think many girls are so silly as this, but the incident ill.u.s.trates the general tone inculcated at that school. And it shows what an emphasis on s.e.x matters the girl"s mind had received, when she saw an insult in a perfectly innocent and courteous act of admiring homage. What a harmful preparation for life such training must be! This is the kind of teaching that results in those wretched honeymoons which one occasionally hears of in secret, and which produces unwilling wives whose disdainful coldness is their husbands" despair. This lack of feeling and lack of comprehension of the needs of stronger, warmer natures is one of the deepest and most incurable causes of married misery.
Let us teach our girls to regard s.e.x as a _natural_ and _ordinary_ fact, and the infinite evils which spring from regarding it as extraordinary and repulsive will thus be avoided. Let us bring them up to think that loving wifehood, pa.s.sionate motherhood are the proper expression of a woman"s nature and the best possible life for her.
In a very interesting book called _Woman in Transition_, recently published, this view of woman"s destiny is repeatedly scoffed at. The writer, Annette B. Meakin, is a fellow of the Anthropological Inst.i.tute, and evidently widely read and travelled. I will give a few quotations: "In the happy future when higher womanly ideals have spread around us we shall all realise, no matter to which s.e.x we belong, that to hold unqualified motherhood before every girl"s eyes as her highest ideal is to play the traitor to our race and to humanity." ... "English Head Mistresses--though often unmarried themselves--still consider it their pious duty to tell their pupils that motherhood is woman"s highest destiny, and the pupils ... make marriage their first aim, and other success in life has consequently to take a second place." ... "Some very good women in England are still telling our young girls that motherhood is, for every woman, the worthiest goal, without suspecting that the doctrine they preach is dangerously conducive to that legal prost.i.tution euphemistically known as loveless marriage, if not to greater evils." ... "How can any girl who has been taught that maternity is woman"s only destiny dare to run the risk of losing it?"
In answer to these objections: of course no sane person would hold _unqualified_ motherhood up to girls as their n.o.blest ideal. Nor does any thoughtful individual believe that maternity is woman"s _only_ destiny. But as to _highest_ (_i.e._ most n.o.ble) destiny--if worthy motherhood (and by the word worthy I wish to imply all the fine qualities of body and mind that go to produce healthy, intelligent, and well-trained children) does not fulfil it, I should like to know what does? In answer to this question that naturally springs to the mind of every reader, Miss Meakin contents herself with the statement: "In Finland and Australia, as in America and Norway, the young girl is taught that woman"s highest destiny is within the reach of every woman; that her highest destiny and her highest ideals depend, not on some man who may or may not come her way, but on herself; and that the highest ideal of womanhood is to be a true woman." This is well enough, but it is far too vague to be held up as woman"s standard. We want a more definite ideal than this to aim at. What, for instance, _is_ a "true woman" specifically? I should have thought the most essential part of such a one"s outfit was her potentialities for wifehood and motherhood.
Miss Meakin blames teachers for inculcating the importance of motherhood into their pupils" minds with the result that "other success in life has to take a second place." What then does this writer consider ought to take the first place? Does she seriously think the success of women in business or politics, as munic.i.p.al councillors, as writers, artists, thinkers, is of more importance than the success of women as mothers?
_Is it possible?_ ... I recall a poem of W. E. Henley"s on the woman question, one line of which runs "G.o.d in the garden laughed outright."
Surely there must often be uproarious laughter in heaven nowadays when the woman question is being discussed on earth!
So much for abstract ideals, but when we come to facts I must admit the lady"s argument is sound. "In a country where there are a million and a half more women than men," she pertinently states, "it is worse than foolish to teach young girls that motherhood is their highest destiny.