Book: Virginibus Puerisque

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The unfading boyishness of hope and its vigorous
irrationality are nowhere better displayed than in questions
of conduct. There is a character in the PILGRIM'S PROGRESS,
one Mr. LINGER-AFTER-LUST with whom I fancy we are all on
speaking terms; one famous among the famous for ingenuity of
hope up to and beyond the moment of defeat; one who, after
eighty years of contrary experience, will believe it possible
to continue in the business of piracy and yet avoid the guilt
of theft. Every sin is our last; every 1st of January a
remarkable turning-point in our career. Any overt act, above
all, is felt to be alchemic in its power to change. A
drunkard takes the pledge; it will be strange if that does not
help him. For how many years did Mr. Pepys continue to make
and break his little vows? And yet I have not heard that he
was discouraged in the end. By such steps we think to fix a
momentary resolution; as a timid fellow hies him to the
dentist's while the tooth is stinging.

But, alas, by planting a stake at the top of flood, you
can neither prevent nor delay the inevitable ebb. There is no
hocus-pocus in morality; and even the "sanctimonious ceremony"
of marriage leaves the man unchanged. This is a hard saying,
and has an air of paradox. For there is something in marriage
so natural and inviting, that the step has an air of great
simplicity and ease; it offers to bury for ever many aching
preoccupations; it is to afford us unfailing and familiar
company through life; it opens up a smiling prospect of the
blest and passive kind of love, rather than the blessing and
active; it is approached not only through the delights of
courtship, but by a public performance and repeated legal
signatures. A man naturally thinks it will go hard with him
if he cannot be good and fortunate and happy within such
august circumvallations.

And yet there is probably no other act in a man's life so
hot-headed and foolhardy as this one of marriage. For years,
let us suppose, you have been making the most indifferent
business of your career. Your experience has not, we may dare
to say, been more encouraging than Paul's or Horace's; like
them, you have seen and desired the good that you were not
able to accomplish; like them, you have done the evil that you
loathed. You have waked at night in a hot or a cold sweat,
according to your habit of body, remembering with dismal
surprise, your own unpardonable acts and sayings. You have
been sometimes tempted to withdraw entirely from this game of
life; as a man who makes nothing but misses withdraws from
that less dangerous one of billiards. You have fallen back
upon the thought that you yourself most sharply smarted for
your misdemeanours, or, in the old, plaintive phrase, that you
were nobody's enemy but your own. And then you have been made
aware of what was beautiful and amiable, wise and kind, in the
other part of your behaviour; and it seemed as if nothing
could reconcile the contradiction, as indeed nothing can. If
you are a man, you have shut your mouth hard and said nothing;
and if you are only a man in the making, you have recognised
that yours was quite a special case, and you yourself not
guilty of your own pestiferous career.

Granted, and with all my heart. Let us accept these
apologies; let us agree that you are nobody's enemy but your
own; let us agree that you are a sort of moral cripple,
impotent for good; and let us regard you with the unmingled
pity due to such a fate. But there is one thing to which, on
these terms, we can never agree: - we can never agree to have
you marry. What! you have had one life to manage, and have
failed so strangely, and now can see nothing wiser than to
conjoin with it the management of some one else's? Because
you have been unfaithful in a very little, you propose
yourself to be a ruler over ten cities. You strip yourself by
such a step of all remaining consolations and excuses. You
are no longer content to be your own enemy; you must be your
wife's also. You have been hitherto in a mere subaltern
attitude; dealing cruel blows about you in life, yet only half
responsible, since you came there by no choice or movement of
your own. Now, it appears, you must take things on your own
authority: God made you, but you marry yourself; and for all
that your wife suffers, no one is responsible but you. A man
must be very certain of his knowledge ere he undertake to
guide a ticket-of-leave man through a dangerous pass; you have
eternally missed your way in life, with consequences that you
still deplore, and yet you masterfully seize your wife's hand,
and, blindfold, drag her after you to ruin. And it is your
wife, you observe, whom you select. She, whose happiness you
most desire, you choose to be your victim. You would
earnestly warn her from a tottering bridge or bad investment.
If she were to marry some one else, how you would tremble for
her fate! If she were only your sister, and you thought half
as much of her, how doubtfully would you entrust her future to
a man no better than yourself!

Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more
by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road
lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness,
which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins
to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.
Suppose, after you are married, one of those little slips were
to befall you. What happened last November might surely
happen February next. They may have annoyed you at the time,
because they were not what you had meant; but how will they
annoy you in the future, and how will they shake the fabric of
your wife's confidence and peace! A thousand things
unpleasing went on in the CHIAROSCURO of a life that you
shrank from too particularly realising; you did not care, in
those days, to make a fetish of your conscience; you would
recognise your failures with a nod, and so, good day. But the
time for these reserves is over. You have wilfully introduced
a witness into your life, the scene of these defeats, and can
no longer close the mind's eye upon uncomely passages, but
must stand up straight and put a name upon your actions. And
your witness is not only the judge, but the victim of your
sins; not only can she condemn you to the sharpest penalties,
but she must herself share feelingly in their endurance. And
observe, once more, with what temerity you have chosen
precisely HER to be your spy, whose esteem you value highest,
and whom you have already taught to think you better than you
are. You may think you had a conscience, and believed in God;
but what is a conscience to a wife? Wise men of yore erected
statues of their deities, and consciously performed their part
in life before those marble eyes. A god watched them at the
board, and stood by their bedside in the morning when they
woke; and all about their ancient cities, where they bought
and sold, or where they piped and wrestled, there would stand
some symbol of the things that are outside of man. These were
lessons, delivered in the quiet dialect of art, which told
their story faithfully, but gently. It is the same lesson, if
you will - but how harrowingly taught! - when the woman you
respect shall weep from your unkindness or blush with shame at
your misconduct. Poor girls in Italy turn their painted
Madonnas to the wall: you cannot set aside your wife. To
marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel. Once you are
married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but
to be good.

And goodness in marriage is a more intricate problem than
mere single virtue; for in marriage there are two ideals to be
realised. A girl, it is true, has always lived in a glass
house among reproving relatives, whose word was law; she has
been bred up to sacrifice her judgments and take the key
submissively from dear papa; and it is wonderful how swiftly
she can change her tune into the husband's. Her morality has
been, too often, an affair of precept and conformity. But in
the case of a bachelor who has enjoyed some measure both of
privacy and freedom, his moral judgments have been passed in
some accordance with his nature. His sins were always sins in
his own sight; he could then only sin when he did some act
against his clear conviction; the light that he walked by was
obscure, but it was single. Now, when two people of any grit
and spirit put their fortunes into one, there succeeds to this
comparative certainty a huge welter of competing
jurisdictions. It no longer matters so much how life appears
to one; one must consult another: one, who may be strong, must
not offend the other, who is weak. The only weak brother I am
willing to consider is (to make a bull for once) my wife. For
her, and for her only, I must waive my righteous judgments,
and go crookedly about my life. How, then, in such an
atmosphere of compromise, to keep honour bright and abstain
from base capitulations? How are you to put aside love's
pleadings? How are you, the apostle of laxity, to turn
suddenly about into the rabbi of precision; and after these
years of ragged practice, pose for a hero to the lackey who
has found you out? In this temptation to mutual indulgence
lies the particular peril to morality in married life. Daily
they drop a little lower from the first ideal, and for a while
continue to accept these changelings with a gross complacency.
At last Love wakes and looks about him; finds his hero sunk
into a stout old brute, intent on brandy pawnee; finds his
heroine divested of her angel brightness; and in the flash of
that first disenchantment, flees for ever.

Again, the husband, in these unions, is usually a man,
and the wife commonly enough a woman; and when this is the
case, although it makes the firmer marriage, a thick
additional veil of misconception hangs above the doubtful
business. Women, I believe, are somewhat rarer than men; but
then, if I were a woman myself, I daresay I should hold the
reverse; and at least we all enter more or less wholly into
one or other of these camps. A man who delights women by his
feminine perceptions will often scatter his admirers by a
chance explosion of the under side of man; and the most
masculine and direct of women will some day, to your dire
surprise, draw out like a telescope into successive lengths of
personation. Alas! for the man, knowing her to be at heart
more candid than himself, who shall flounder, panting, through
these mazes in the quest for truth. The proper qualities of
each sex are, indeed, eternally surprising to the other.
Between the Latin and the Teuton races there are similar
divergences, not to be bridged by the most liberal sympathy.
And in the good, plain, cut-and-dry explanations of this life,
which pass current among us as the wisdom of the elders, this
difficulty has been turned with the aid of pious lies. Thus,
when a young lady has angelic features, eats nothing to speak
of, plays all day long on the piano, and sings ravishingly in
church, it requires a rough infidelity, falsely called
cynicism, to believe that she may be a little devil after all.
Yet so it is: she may be a tale-bearer, a liar, and a thief;
she may have a taste for brandy, and no heart. My compliments
to George Eliot for her Rosamond Vincy; the ugly work of
satire she has transmuted to the ends of art, by the companion
figure of Lydgate; and the satire was much wanted for the
education of young men. That doctrine of the excellence of
women, however chivalrous, is cowardly as well as false. It
is better to face the fact, and know, when you marry, that you
take into your life a creature of equal, if of unlike,
frailties; whose weak human heart beats no more tunefully than
yours.

But it is the object of a liberal education not only to
obscure the knowledge of one sex by another, but to magnify
the natural differences between the two. Man is a creature
who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords;
and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened
by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and
another to the boys. To the first, there is shown but a very
small field of experience, and taught a very trenchant
principle for judgment and action; to the other, the world of
life is more largely displayed, and their rule of conduct is
proportionally widened. They are taught to follow different
virtues, to hate different vices, to place their ideal, even
for each other, in different achievements. What should be the
result of such a course? When a horse has run away, and the
two flustered people in the gig have each possessed themselves
of a rein, we know the end of that conveyance will be in the
ditch. So, when I see a raw youth and a green girl, fluted
and fiddled in a dancing measure into that most serious
contract, and setting out upon life's journey with ideas so
monstrously divergent, I am not surprised that some make
shipwreck, but that any come to port. What the boy does
almost proudly, as a manly peccadillo, the girl will shudder
at as a debasing vice; what is to her the mere common sense of
tactics, he will spit out of his mouth as shameful. Through
such a sea of contrarieties must this green couple steer their
way; and contrive to love each other; and to respect,
forsooth; and be ready, when the time arrives, to educate the
little men and women who shall succeed to their places and
perplexities.

And yet, when all has been said, the man who should hold
back from marriage is in the same case with him who runs away
from battle. To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse
degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a
fall. It is lawful to pray God that we be not led into
temptation; but not lawful to skulk from those that come to
us. The noblest passage in one of the noblest books of this
century, is where the old pope glories in the trial, nay, in
the partial fall and but imperfect triumph, of the younger
hero. (1) Without some such manly note, it were perhaps
better to have no conscience at all. But there is a vast
difference between teaching flight, and showing points of
peril that a man may march the more warily. And the true
conclusion of this paper is to turn our back on apprehensions,
and embrace that shining and courageous virtue, Faith. Hope
is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good to chase
swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet
smiling man. Hope lives on ignorance; open-eyed Faith is
built upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of
circumstance and the frailty of human resolution. Hope looks
for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on
failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a form of victory.
Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in Christian days,
and early learnt humility. In the one temper, a man is
indignant that he cannot spring up in a clap to heights of
elegance and virtue; in the other, out of a sense of his
infirmities, he is filled with confidence because a year has
come and gone, and he has still preserved some rags of honour.
In the first, he expects an angel for a wife; in the last, he
knows that she is like himself - erring, thoughtless, and
untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling
radiancy of better things, and adorned with ineffective
qualities. You may safely go to school with hope; but ere you
marry, should have learned the mingled lesson of the world:
that dolls are stuffed with sawdust, and yet are excellent
play-things; that hope and love address themselves to a
perfection never realised, and yet, firmly held, become the
salt and staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of
infirmities, perfect, you might say, in imperfection, and yet
you have a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and
that, while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy
condemnation, you will scarce find one but, by some generous
reading, will become to you a lesson, a model, and a noble
spouse through life. So thinking, you will constantly support
your own unworthiness, and easily forgive the failings of your
friend. Nay, you will be I wisely glad that you retain the
sense of blemishes; for the faults of married people
continually spur up each of them, hour by hour, to do better
and to meet and love upon a higher ground. And ever, between
the failures, there will come glimpses of kind virtues to
encourage and console.

(1) Browning's RING AND BOOK.


III. - ON FALLING IN LOVE


"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"


THERE is only one event in life which really astonishes a
man and startles him out of his prepared opinions. Everything
else befalls him very much as he expected. Event succeeds to
event, with an agreeable variety indeed, but with little that
is either startling or intense; they form together no more
than a sort of background, or running accompaniment to the
man's own reflections; and he falls naturally into a cool,
curious, and smiling habit of mind, and builds himself up in a
conception of life which expects to-morrow to be after the
pattern of to-day and yesterday. He may be accustomed to the
vagaries of his friends and acquaintances under the influence
of love. He may sometimes look forward to it for himself with
an incomprehensible expectation. But it is a subject in which
neither intuition nor the behaviour of others will help the
philosopher to the truth. There is probably nothing rightly
thought or rightly written on this matter of love that is not
a piece of the person's experience. I remember an anecdote of
a well-known French theorist, who was debating a point eagerly
in his CENACLE. It was objected against him that he had never
experienced love. Whereupon he arose, left the society, and
made it a point not to return to it until he considered that
he had supplied the defect. "Now," he remarked, on entering,
"now I am in a position to continue the discussion." Perhaps
he had not penetrated very deeply into the subject after all;
but the story indicates right thinking, and may serve as an
apologue to readers of this essay.

When at last the scales fall from his eyes, it is not
without something of the nature of dismay that the man finds
himself in such changed conditions. He has to deal with
commanding emotions instead of the easy dislikes and
preferences in which he has hitherto passed his days; and he
recognises capabilities for pain and pleasure of which he had
not yet suspected the existence. Falling in love is the one
illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to
think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The
effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons,
neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful,
meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's
eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the
experience of either with no great result. But on this
occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state
in which another person becomes to us the very gist and
centrepoint of God's creation, and demolishes our laborious
theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with
the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own
person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life
itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world
with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature. And all the
while their acquaintances look on in stupor, and ask each
other, with almost passionate emphasis, what so-and-so can see
in that woman, or such-an-one in that man? I am sure,
gentlemen, I cannot tell you. For my part, I cannot think
what the women mean. It might be very well, if the Apollo
Belvedere should suddenly glow all over into life, and step
forward from the pedestal with that godlike air of his. But
of the misbegotten changelings who call themselves men, and
prate intolerably over dinner-tables, I never saw one who
seemed worthy to inspire love - no, nor read of any, except
Leonardo da Vinci, and perhaps Goethe in his youth. About
women I entertain a somewhat different opinion; but there, I
have the misfortune to be a man.

There are many matters in which you may waylay Destiny,
and bid him stand and deliver. Hard work, high thinking,
adventurous excitement, and a great deal more that forms a
part of this or the other person's spiritual bill of fare, are
within the reach of almost any one who can dare a little and
be patient. But it is by no means in the way of every one to
fall in love. You know the difficulty Shakespeare was put
into when Queen Elizabeth asked him to show Falstaff in love.
I do not believe that Henry Fielding was ever in love. Scott,
if it were not for a passage or two in ROB ROY, would give me
very much the same effect. These are great names and (what is
more to the purpose) strong, healthy, high-strung, and
generous natures, of whom the reverse might have been
expected. As for the innumerable army of anaemic and
tailorish persons who occupy the face of this planet with so
much propriety, it is palpably absurd to imagine them in any
such situation as a love-affair. A wet rag goes safely by the
fire; and if a man is blind, he cannot expect to be much
impressed by romantic scenery. Apart from all this, many
lovable people miss each other in the world, or meet under
some unfavourable star. There is the nice and critical moment
of declaration to be got over. From timidity or lack of
opportunity a good half of possible love cases never get so
far, and at least another quarter do there cease and
determine. A very adroit person, to be sure, manages to
prepare the way and out with his declaration in the nick of
time. And then there is a fine solid sort of man, who goes on
from snub to snub; and if he has to declare forty times, will
continue imperturbably declaring, amid the astonished
consideration of men and angels, until he has a favourable
answer. I daresay, if one were a woman, one would like to
marry a man who was capable of doing this, but not quite one
who had done so. It is just a little bit abject, and somehow
just a little bit gross; and marriages in which one of the
parties has been thus battered into consent scarcely form
agreeable subjects for meditation. Love should run out to
meet love with open arms. Indeed, the ideal story is that of
two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered
consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into
a dark room. From the first moment when they see each other,
with a pang of curiosity, through stage after stage of growing
pleasure and embarrassment, they can read the expression of
their own trouble in each other's eyes. There is here no
declaration properly so called; the feeling is so plainly
shared, that as soon as the man knows what it is in his own
heart, he is sure of what it is in the woman's.

This simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial
as it is astonishing. It arrests the petrifying influence of
years, disproves cold-blooded and cynical conclusions, and
awakens dormant sensibilities. Hitherto the man had found it
a good policy to disbelieve the existence of any enjoyment
which was out of his reach; and thus he turned his back upon
the strong sunny parts of nature, and accustomed himself to
look exclusively on what was common and dull. He accepted a
prose ideal, let himself go blind of many sympathies by
disuse; and if he were young and witty, or beautiful, wilfully
forewent these advantages. He joined himself to the following
of what, in the old mythology of love, was prettily called
NONCHALOIR; and in an odd mixture of feelings, a fling of
self-respect, a preference for selfish liberty, and a great
dash of that fear with which honest people regard serious
interests, kept himself back from the straightforward course
of life among certain selected activities. And now, all of a
sudden, he is unhorsed, like St. Paul, from his infidel
affectation. His heart, which has been ticking accurate
seconds for the last year, gives a bound and begins to beat
high and irregularly in his breast. It seems as if he had
never heard or felt or seen until that moment; and by the
report of his memory, he must have lived his past life between
sleep and waking, or with the preoccupied attention of a brown
study. He is practically incommoded by the generosity of his
feelings, smiles much when he is alone, and develops a habit
of looking rather blankly upon the moon and stars. But it is
not at all within the province of a prose essayist to give a
picture of this hyperbolical frame of mind; and the thing has
been done already, and that to admiration. In ADELAIDE, in
Tennyson's MAUD, and in some of Heine's songs, you get the
absolute expression of this midsummer spirit. Romeo and
Juliet were very much in love; although they tell me some
German critics are of a different opinion, probably the same
who would have us think Mercutio a dull fellow. Poor Antony
was in love, and no mistake. That lay figure Marius, in LES
MISERABLES, is also a genuine case in his own way, and worth
observation. A good many of George Sand's people are
thoroughly in love; and so are a good many of George
Meredith's. Altogether, there is plenty to read on the
subject. If the root of the matter be in him, and if he has
the requisite chords to set in vibration, a young man may
occasionally enter, with the key of art, into that land of
Beulah which is upon the borders of Heaven and within sight of
the City of Love. There let him sit awhile to hatch
delightful hopes and perilous illusions.

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