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which hundreds of social units are implicated and enormous sums of money are necessarily risked, we inquire what has the British race done in a much smaller way to give fresh vigour to its daily existence and improve the structure of its social life? Spontaneity is of the very essence of a high civilization, and originality is certain to be manifest in any nation brimful of healthy vital energy. What we see, however, within our own nation speaks but little for either its high civilization or its vital energy. I should like, for instance, to know how many individuals have feared to enter into married life for the simple reason that the customary habits in that relation appeared unsatisfactory, and yet in how few cases has any trifling alteration in method been adopted!

The noble Mary Wollstonecraft and her philosophic husband, William Godwin, give us one little example of originality in the minor arrangements of domestic life, on which so much of individual comfort and happiness depend. Mary Wollstonecraft's extreme sensitiveness and quickness of temper were likely to be tried by Godwin's bachelor habits and far more callous nature. To guard the precious love that held them together from too great a strain in the early days of wedded life, before habit had brought about mutual adaptation, was to their bright intellects the wisest policy. When they married, therefore, "Godwin took rooms in a house about twenty doors from that in the Polygon, Somers Town, which was their joint home." To these rooms he repaired as soon as he rose in the morning, rarely even breakfasting at the Polygon, and here also he often slept. Each was engaged in his or her own literary occupations, and they seldom met, unless they walked together, till dinner-time each day.* "We agreed also," says Godwin, "in condemning the notion prevalent in many situations in life that a man and his wife cannot visit in mixed society but in company with each other, and we rather sought occasions of deviating from than complying with this rule." Mrs. Godwin's sentiments are expressed in a letter to her husband during his first absence from home with a delicious frankness and childlike simplicity. "I am not fatigued with solitude," she says, "yet I have not relished my solitary dinner. A husband is a convenient part of the furniture of a house, unless he be a clumsy fixture. I wish you from my soul to be rivetted in my heart, but I do not desire to "William Godwin, his Friends and Contemporaries," vol. i.

*

p. 233.

ESTABLISHMENT AT MARRIAGE.

241

have you always at my elbow, although at this moment I should not care if you were. Yours truly and tenderly, Mary."

The universal custom in this country of setting up a separate and often expensive establishment at marriage has this twofold effect. Thousands of young men, who desire at two or three and twenty to marry, delay for years, and in the interim suffer so greatly as to hurt the health, temper, and disposition, and render them at last unfit to become open-hearted, generous-minded, warmly sympathetic husbands. On the other hand, a girl is taken from a domestic life without responsibility (perhaps out of a merry group of sisters and brothers), and planted in her separate establishment, where, if her husband is a commercial or professional man and out all day, she feels very desolate. The management of servants, to which she is unaccustomed, worries her, the hours of solitude depress her, and when the married pair come together in the evening, the mental atmosphere surrounding them is one of fretfulness, vague discomfort, or nerve fatigue. This may seem an exaggerated picture. But I allege that thoughtful middle-aged married ladies have frequently remarked to me, that the first years of married life are always more or less miserable to a girl, and have spoken as though this were a necessity of nature to be calmly faced and acquiesced in.

During my whole life, I have only in one single instance seen a new method adopted. A young man was encouraged to marry early and bring his bride into his father's large and commodious dwelling-house, where the young couple remained until their family had become numerous, and the pecuniary position admitted of a separate establishment. Whether this arrangement was satisfactory I cannot tell. That would depend, of course, upon the dispositions of the various members of the household. In associated homes, happiness is sure to be proportionate to the absence of jealousy, dominancy, and all anti-social emotions, and the presence of the kindly, gentle, and sympathetic feelings. But to my mind, the experiment was a noble one, indicating elevated character on the part of father, mother, son, and daughter-in-law; and such experiments are in the direct line of social progress. If the drawbacks can be overcome, conceive how great are the advantages of such associated homes. Marriage would be made. possible at an early period of life, without improvidence and without overwhelming care and anxiety. A young man's whole emotional nature might be satisfied, his tender domestic quali

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ties exercised before the shadow of remorse or disappointment had touched him, or any hard struggle for existence had embittered his nature. A girl would be protected from worry and dreary monotony in the first years of her married life, and would have leisure to fill up her education, and adapt her intellectual studies to her husband's tastes, prompted by affection and the desire to think and feel as he does; she would have leisure also to devote herself to all the sacred joys and duties of motherhood. These advantages, weighed in the balance against the mere honour and glory of separate establishments—the highly extolled British manliness that must be master in its own house-are worth contending for, worth putting forth our highest efforts to obtain.

Experiments of the kind may fail. One single semibarbarous individual may mar the harmony of an entire household; nevertheless, it is in the above direction that reason and hope will continue to point; for observe, as humanity becomes more and more civilized, the anti-social emotions all tend to disappear, and happiness results from the exercise of all social feelings, including the emotional, the intellectual, the æsthetic. Now, the exercise of these is absolutely dependent upon intimate intercourse and association; ergo, associated homes are in the line of social progress. Again, as humanity becomes more and more civilized, the social feelings grow stronger, the craving for sympathetic relations of every kind more intense, and solitude more painful and depressing; ergo, to persist in a line of action which produces isolation and desolation is contrary to the laws of our own being, it is adverse to progress, it tends to individual misery and to social decay.

But to return to experiments. The custom of a tour immediately after marriage, a honeymoon spent in wandering from place to place, is all but universally practised by the British, and all but equally universally condemned! by some individuals on the ground of its discomfort, by others on the ground of its expense. The Americans frequently discard this practice and spend their honeymoon quietly at home, delaying travel till adaptation to the new life has been established, and a thorough knowledge of each other's tastes and habits fit the married pair for encountering the little irritations and discomforts of an extended tour. With what result is prettily, and I think truly, told in Mr. Howell's charming little sketch of "A Wedding Journey."

BRITISH SUBSERVIENCE TO CUSTOM.

243

But John Bull, in his manly independence, keeps steadily to the prevailing fashion. Custom with him is always best, and to alter an old habit implies admission that John Bull is capable of error. It hurts his manly pride-a pride which, alas! makes him callous to individual suffering under the galling thraldom of the tyranny of custom. The British race has bowed the neck and bent the knee to Mrs. Grundy. She is the Moloch upon whose altar John Bull is ready to sacrifice the happiness of his children and his children's children. And when the breath of unsatisfied desires disturbs his equanimity, the impression is momentary; he will not let it seriously impair his self-complacency or destroy his peace, still less will he alter one iota of his practice. He hugs to himself the fond belief that British ways are admirable; that the habits and customs of British social life are perfect, or nearly so; that national wealth proves national prosperity and health; and he, John Bull, may laugh to scorn the warning given by his high-souled, pureminded son, whose presence has passed from us" that so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.'

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CHAPTER XIV.

LEGISLATIVE VERSUS VOLUNTARY METHODS OF REFORM.

"Though the truth may not be felt or generally acknowledged for generations to come, the only school of genuine moral sentiment is society between equals."-J. S. MILL.

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Ar the close of the seventeenth or the beginning of the eighteenth century, a fencing-master named Machrie introduced into Scotland the old Greek game of cock-fighting. In England, it was a fashionable amusement at the period, and Henry VIII. had built a cock-pit at Whitehall. James I. was accustomed to amuse himself with cock-fighting twice a week. It was not regarded as more inhuman than hunting, coursing, or shooting, and Machrie was looked upon as a benefactor to Scotland for having started a new, cheap, and innocent amuseHe had written, 66 ment. in 1705, an Essay on the Innocent and Royal Recreation and Art of Cocking,' in which he expressed his hope that 'in cock-war village may be engaged against village, city against city, kingdom against kingdom, nay, the father against the son, until all the wars of Europe, wherein so much innocent Christian blood is spilt, be turned into the innocent pastime of cocking.' The Welsh main, which was the most sanguinary form of the amusement, was exclusively English and of modern origin. . . . As many as sixteen cocks were sometimes matched against each other, at each side, and they fought till all on one side were killed. The victors were then divided and fought, and the process repeated till but a single cock remained. County engaged county in cocking matches, and the church bells are said to have been sometimes rung in honour of the victor in the Welsh main." *

* "History of England in the Eighteenth Century," Lecky, vol. i. P. 554.

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