Part 1 (1/2)

Modern marriage and how to bear it.

by Maud Churton Braby.

PART I

SIGNS OF UNREST

'The Subject of Marriage is kept too much in the dark. Air it!

Air it!'--GEORGE MEREDITH.

MODERN MARRIAGE

I

THE MUTUAL DISSATISFACTION OF THE s.e.xES

'The shadow of marriage waits, resolute and awful, at the cross-roads.' --R. L. STEVENSON.

Ever since the time, nineteen years ago, when Mrs Mona Caird attacked the inst.i.tution of matrimony in the _Westminster Review_ and led the way for the great discussion on 'Is Marriage a Failure?' in the _Daily Telegraph_--marriage has been the hardy perennial of newspaper correspondence, and an unfailing resource to worried sub-editors. When seasons are slack and silly, the humblest member of the staff has but to turn out a column on this subject, and whether it be a serious dissertation on 'The Perfections of Polygamy' or a ba.n.a.l discussion on 'Should husbands have tea at home?' it will inevitably achieve the desired result, and fill the spare columns of the papers with letters for weeks to come. People are always interested in matrimony, whether from the objective or subjective point of view, and that is my excuse for perpetrating yet another book on this well-worn, but ever fertile topic.

Marriage indeed seems to be in the air more than ever in this year of grace; everywhere it is discussed, and very few people seem to have a good word to say for it. The most superficial observer must have noticed that there is being gradually built up in the community a growing dread of the conjugal bond, especially among men; and a condition of discontent and unrest among married people, particularly women. What is the matter with this generation that wedlock has come to a.s.sume so distasteful an aspect in their eyes? On every side one hears it vilified and its very necessity called in question. From the pulpit, the clergy endeavour to uphold the sanct.i.ty of the inst.i.tution, and unceasingly exhort their congregations to respect it and abide by its laws. But the Divorce Court returns make ominous reading; every family solicitor will tell you his personal experience goes to prove that happy unions are considerably on the decrease, and some of the greatest thinkers of our day join in a chorus of condemnation against latter-day marriage.

Tolstoy says: 'The relations between the s.e.xes are searching for a new form, the old one is falling to pieces.' Among the ma.n.u.script 'remains'

of Ibsen, that profound student of human nature, the following noteworthy pa.s.sage occurs: '”Free-born men” is a phrase of rhetoric.

They do not exist, for marriage, the relation between man and wife, has corrupted the race and impressed the mark of slavery upon all.' Not long ago, too, our greatest living novelist, George Meredith, created an immense sensation by his suggestion that marriage should become a temporary arrangement, with a minimum lease of, say, ten years.

That the time has not yet come for any such revolutionary change is obvious, but if the signs and portents of the last decade or two do not lie, we may safely a.s.sume that the time _will_ come, and that the present legal conditions of wedlock will be altered in some way or other.

Fifteen years ago there was a sudden wave of rebellion against these conditions, and a renewed interest in the s.e.x question showed itself in an outbreak of problem novels--a term which later came to be used as one of reproach. Perhaps the most important of these was Grant Allen's _The Woman Who Did_. I can recall as a schoolgirl the excitement it aroused and my acute disappointment when it was forcibly commandeered from me by an irate governess who apparently took no interest in these enthralling subjects. A host of imitators followed _The Woman Who Did_; some of them entirely illiterate, all of them offering some infallible key to the difficult maze of marriage.

Worse still was the reaction that inevitably followed, when realism was tabooed in fiction, and sickly romance possessed the field. _The Yellow Book_ and similar strange exotics of the first period withered and died, and the cult of literature (!) for the British Home was shortly afterwards in full blast. There followed an avalanche of insufferably dull and puerile magazines, in which the word _s.e.x_ was strictly taboo, and the ideal aimed at was apparently the extreme opposite to real life.

It was odd how suddenly the s.e.x note--(as I will call it for want of a better word)--disappeared from the press. Psychology was p.r.o.nounced 'off,' and plots were the order of the day. Many names well-known at that time and a.s.sociated with a _flair_ for delicate delineation of character, disappeared from the magazine contents bill and the publisher's list, whilst facile writers who could turn out mild detective yarns or tales of adventure and gore were in clover.

Signs are not wanting that the pendulum of public interest has now swung back again, and another wave of realism in fiction and inquiry into the re-adjustment of the conjugal bond is imminent. But the pendulum will have to swing back and forth a good many times however, before the relations between the s.e.xes succeed in finding that new form of which Tolstoy speaks. What the revival I have foretold will accomplish remains to be seen. What did the last agitation achieve? Practically nothing; a few women may have been impelled to follow in the footsteps of Grant Allen's Herminia to their undying sorrow, and possibly a good many precocious young girls, who read the literature of that day, may have given their parents some anxiety by their revolutionary ideas on the value of the holy estate. But when that trio so irresistible to the feminine heart came along--the Ring, the Trousseau, and the House of My Own, to say nothing of the solid, twelve-stone, prospective husband--which among these advanced damsels remembered the sermon on the hill-top?

Yet in the fourteen years that have elapsed since the publication of _The Woman Who Did_, there have certainly been some changes. For one thing, it is still harder apparently to earn a decent living. Times are bad and money scarce; men are even more reluctant than before to 'domesticate the recording angel' by marrying, and a type of woman has sprung up amongst us who is shy of matrimony and honestly reluctant to risk its many perils for the sake of its problematical joys. Most noticeable of all is the growing dissatisfaction of the s.e.xes with each other. Men do not shun marriage only because of unfavourable financial conditions, or because the restrictions of wedlock are any more irksome to them than formerly, but because they cannot find a wife sufficiently near their ideal. Woman has progressed to such an extent within the last generation or two: her outlook has so broadened, her intellect so developed that she has strayed very far from man's ideal and, consequently, man hesitates to marry her. There is something comic about the situation, and at Olympian dinner-tables I feel sure the G.o.ds would laugh at this twentieth-century conjugal deadlock.

Another reason why men fall in love so much less than they used to do is largely due to the decay of the imaginative faculty. As for women, although they are in the main as anxious to marry as ever, although it is universally acknowledged that the modern young woman does cultivate the modern young man unduly, their reasons for doing so are less and less concerned with the time-honoured motives of love. Marriage brings independence and a certain social importance; for these reasons women desire it. H. B. Marriot Watson has put the case neatly thus: 'Women desire to marry _a_ man; men to marry _the_ woman.' Nevertheless women are even now more p.r.o.ne to fall in love than are men, because they have better preserved this imaginative faculty, which is possibly also the cause of the disillusionment and discontent of wives after marriage.

The upshot of it all is that men and women appear to have become antagonistic to each other. However much they love the individual of their fancy, a kind of veiled distrust seems to obtain between the s.e.xes collectively, but more especially on the part of men--perhaps because man is more necessary to woman than woman is to man. This hostility towards woman is particularly noticeable in the pages of the press.

Scarcely a week pa.s.ses but some journalist of the n.o.bler s.e.x pours out his scorn for the inferior one of his mother in columns of masterly abuse on one score or another. Each article is followed by a pa.s.sionate correspondence in which 'Disgusted Dad,' 'Hopeless Hubby,' 'Browbeaten Brother,' and the inevitable 'Cynicus' express high approval of the writer, whilst 'Happy Mother of Seven Girls' and 'Lover of the s.e.x'

write to demand his instant execution and public disgrace.

The range of men's fault-finding is endless; one will a.s.sert that women are mere domestic machines, unfit companions for any intelligent man, and with no soul above conversation about their servants and children; another that they are mere blue-stockings striving after an unattainable intellectuality; a third that they are mere frivolous dolls without brain or heart, engrossed in the pursuit of pleasure, a fourth that they are s.e.xless, slangy, misclad masculine monsters.

Judged by the a.s.sertions of newspaper correspondents, women are at one and the same time preposterously masculine, contemptibly feminine, ridiculously intellectual, repulsively athletic, and revoltingly frivolous. In appearance they are either lank, gaunt, flat-footed lamp-posts, or else over-dressed, unnaturally-shaped, painted dolls.