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Page 24
If we leave the Beaconsfields and the Chathams and come among less
exalted folk, we find that the same laws regulate happy marriages.
Confidence, generosity, unselfishness--that is all. In this beautiful
England of ours there are happy households which are almost
numberless. The good folk do not care for fame or power; their
happiness is rounded off and completed within their own walls, and
they live as the lordly Chatham lived when he was free from the ties
of place and Parliament. On summer days, when the quiet evening is
closing, the wayfarer may obtain chance glimpses of such happy homes
here and there. Some are inhabited by wealthy men, some by poor
workmen; but the essential happiness of both classes is arrived at in
the same way.
A young man wisely waits until his judgment is matured, and then
proceeds to choose his mate; he does not blunder into heroic fooleries
in the way of self-abnegation; for, if his choice is judicious, the
lady will prevent him from hurting his own prospects. Whether he be
aristocrat or plebeian, he knows the worth of money, and he knows how
to despise the foolish beings who talk of "dross" and "filthy lucre"
and the rest. Mere craving for money he despises; but he knows that
the amount of "dross" in a man's possession roughly indicates his
resources in the way of energy, ability, and self-control. When he
marries, his wife is reasonably free from sordid cares. It may be that
he has only seventy pounds in a building society, it may be that his
cheque for fifty thousand pounds would be honoured; but the principle
is the same. When the woman settles in her new home, she is free from
sordid anxieties, and she can give the graces of her mind play. How
beautiful some such households are! An old railway-guard once said to
me--"Ah, there's no talk like your own wife's when she understands
you, and you sit one side of the fire, and she the other! It don't
matter what kind of day you've had, she puts all right." The man was
right--the most delightful conversation that can be held is between a
rational man and woman who love each other, who understand each other,
and who have sufficient worldly keenness to keep clear of lowering
cares. A man rightly mated feels it an absolute delight to confide the
innermost secrets of life to his wife; and the woman would feel almost
criminal if she kept the pettiest of petty secrets from her partner.
They are friends, gloriously mated, and all the glories of birth and
state ever imagined cannot equal their simple but perfect joy. When
the tired mechanic comes home at night and meets one whom he has
wisely chosen, he forgets his sharp day of labour as soon as his
overalls are off. No snappish word greets him; and he is incapable of
being ill-natured with the kind soul whom he worships in his rough
way. I have always found that the merriest and most profitable
evenings were passed in houses where neither of the principal parties
strove for mastery, and where the woman had the art of coaxing
imperceptibly and discreetly. I reject the suggestion made by cynic
men that no married pair can live without quarrelling. No married pair
who were fools before marriage can avoid dissension; but, when man and
wife make their choice wisely and cautiously, the notion of a quarrel
is too horrible to dream of.
IX.
SHREWS.
The greatest masters who ever made studies of the shrew in fiction or
in history have never, after all, given us a strictly scientific
definition of the creature. They let her exhibit herself in all her
drollery or her hatefulness, but they act in somewhat lordly fashion
by leaving us to frame our definition from the picturesque data which
they supply. Mrs. Mackenzie, in "The Newcomes," is repulsive to an
awful degree, but the figure is as true as true can be, and most of
us, no doubt, have seen the type in all its loathsomeness only too
many times. Mrs. Mackenzie is a shrew of one sort, but we could not
take her vile personality as the basis of a classification. Mrs.
Raddle is one of that lower middle-class which Dickens knew so well,
still she is not hateful or vile, or anything but droll. I know how
maddening that kind of woman can be in real life to those immediately
about her, but onlookers find her purely funny; they never think of
poor Bob Sawyer's cruel humiliation; they only laugh themselves
helpless over the screeching little woman on the stairs, who humbles
her wretched consort and routs the party with such consummate
strategy. Mrs. Raddle and Mrs. Mackenzie are as far apart as two
creatures may be; nevertheless they are veritable specimens of the
British shrew, and it should be within the resources of civilisation
to find a definition capable of fitting both of them. As for Queen
Elizabeth--that splendid, false, able, cruel, and inexorable
shrew--she requires the space of volumes to give even the shadow of
her personality and powers. She has puzzled some of the wisest and
most learned of men. She was truly royal, and wholly deceitful;
self-controlled at times, and madly passionate at others; a lover of
pure literature, and yet terribly free in her own writings; kind to
her dependants, yet capable of aiming a violent blow at some courtier
whom she had caressed a moment before the blow came; an icy virgin,
and a confirmed and audacious flirt; a generous mistress, and an
odious miser; a free giver to those near her, and a skinflint who let
the sailors who saved her country lie rotting to death in the open
streets of Ramsgate because she could not find in her heart to give
them either medical attendance or shelter. Was there ever such another
being known beneath the glimpses of the moon? Some might call her
superhuman; I am more inclined to regard her as inhuman, for her
blending of characteristics is not like anything ever seen before or
since among the children of men. She was a shrew--a magnificent,
enigmatic shrew, who was perhaps the more fitted to rule a kingdom
which was in a state of transition in that she was lacking in all
sense of pity, shame, or remorse. She was the apotheosis of the shrew,
and no one of the tribe can ever be like unto her again. Carlyle's
Termagant of Spain is a shadowy figure that flits through all the
note-books on Frederick, but we never get so near to her as we do to
Elizabeth, and she remains to us as a vast shape that gibbers and
threatens and gesticulates in the realms of the dead. Jael, the wife
of Heber the Kenite, must have been a terrible shrew, and I should
think that Heber was not master in the house where Sisera died. The
calm deliberation, the preliminary coaxing, the quick, cool
determination, and the final shrill exultation which was reflected in
Deborah's song all speak of the shrew. Thackeray had a morbid delight
in dwelling on the species, and we know that all of his portraits were
taken from real life. If he really was intimate with all of the cruel
figures that he draws, then I could pardon him for manifesting the
most ferocious of cynicisms even if he had been a cynic--which he was
not. The Campaigner, Mrs. Clapp, the landlady in "Vanity Fair," Mrs.
Baynes, and all the rest of the deplorable bevy rest like nightmares
upon our memory. Dickens always made the shrew laughable, so that we
can hardly spare pity for the poor Snagsbys and Raddles and Crupps, or
any of her victims in that wonderful gallery; but Thackeray's,
Trollope's, Charles Reade's, Mrs. Oliphant's, and even Miss
Broughton's shrews are always odious, and they all seem to start from
the page alive.
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