Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Scanned and proofed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





"VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE"




Contents
    Virginibus Puerisque
    Crabbed Age and Youth
    An Apology For Idlers
    Ordered South
    Aes Triplex
    El Dorado
    The English Admirals
    Some Portraits by Raeburn
    Child's Play
    Walking Tours
    Pan's Pipes
    A Plea For Gas Lamps



CHAPTER I - "VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE"



WITH the single exception of Falstaff, all Shakespeare's 
characters are what we call marrying men.  Mercutio, as he was 
own cousin to Benedick and Biron, would have come to the same 
end in the long run.  Even Iago had a wife, and, what is far 
stranger, he was jealous.  People like Jacques and the Fool in 
LEAR, although we can hardly imagine they would ever marry, 
kept single out of a cynical humour or for a broken heart, and 
not, as we do nowadays, from a spirit of incredulity and 
preference for the single state.  For that matter, if you turn 
to George Sand's French version of AS YOU LIKE IT (and I think 
I can promise you will like it but little), you will find 
Jacques marries Celia just as Orlando marries Rosalind.

At least there seems to have been much less hesitation 
over marriage in Shakespeare's days; and what hesitation there 
was was of a laughing sort, and not much more serious, one way 
or the other, than that of Panurge.  In modern comedies the 
heroes are mostly of Benedick's way of thinking, but twice as 
much in earnest, and not one quarter so confident.  And I take 
this diffidence as a proof of how sincere their terror is.  
They know they are only human after all; they know what gins 
and pitfalls lie about their feet; and how the shadow of 
matrimony waits, resolute and awful, at the cross-roads.  They 
would wish to keep their liberty; but if that may not be, why, 
God's will be done!  "What, are you afraid of marriage?" asks 
Cecile, in MAITRE GUERIN.  "Oh, mon Dieu, non!" replies 
Arthur; "I should take chloroform."  They look forward to 
marriage much in the same way as they prepare themselves for 
death: each seems inevitable; each is a great Perhaps, and a 
leap into the dark, for which, when a man is in the blue 
devils, he has specially to harden his heart.  That splendid 
scoundrel, Maxime de Trailles, took the news of marriages much 
as an old man hears the deaths of his contemporaries.  "C'est 
desesperant," he cried, throwing himself down in the arm-chair 
at Madame Schontz's; "c'est desesperant, nous nous marions 
tous!"  Every marriage was like another gray hair on his head; 
and the jolly church bells seemed to taunt him with his fifty 
years and fair round belly.

The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our 
ancestors, and cannot find it in our hearts either to marry or 
not to marry.  Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and 
forlorn old age.  The friendships of men are vastly agreeable, 
but they are insecure.  You know all the time that one friend 
will marry and put you to the door; a second accept a 
situation in China, and become no more to you than a name, a 
reminiscence, and an occasional crossed letter, very laborious 
to read; a third will take up with some religious crotchet and 
treat you to sour looks thence-forward.  So, in one way or 
another, life forces men apart and breaks up the goodly 
fellowships for ever.  The very flexibility and ease which 
make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make 
them the easier to destroy and forget.  And a man who has a 
few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so 
wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base 
his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate - a 
death, a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman's 
bright eyes - he may be left, in a month, destitute of all.  
Marriage is certainly a perilous remedy.  Instead of on two or 
three, you stake your happiness on one life only.  But still, 
as the bargain is more explicit and complete on your part, it 
is more so on the other; and you have not to fear so many 
contingencies; it is not every wind that can blow you from 
your anchorage; and so long as Death withholds his sickle, you 
will always have a friend at home.  People who share a cell in 
the Bastile, or are thrown together on an uninhabited isle, if 
they do not immediately fall to fisticuffs, will find some 
possible ground of compromise.  They will learn each other's 
ways and humours, so as to know where they must go warily, and 
where they may lean their whole weight.  The discretion of the 
first years becomes the settled habit of the last; and so, 
with wisdom and patience, two lives may grow indissolubly into 
one.

But marriage, if comfortable, is not at all heroic.  It 
certainly narrows and damps the spirits of generous men.  In 
marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a 
fatty degeneration of his moral being.  It is not only when 
Lydgate misallies himself with Rosamond Vincy, but when 
Ladislaw marries above him with Dorothea, that this may be 
exemplified.  The air of the fireside withers out all the fine 
wildings of the husband's heart.  He is so comfortable and 
happy that he begins to prefer comfort and happiness to 
everything else on earth, his wife included.  Yesterday he 
would have shared his last shilling; to-day "his first duty is 
to his family," and is fulfilled in large measure by laying 
down vintages and husbanding the health of an invaluable 
parent.  Twenty years ago this man was equally capable of 
crime or heroism; now he is fit for neither.  His soul is 
asleep, and you may speak without constraint; you will not 
wake him.  It is not for nothing that Don Quixote was a 
bachelor and Marcus Aurelius married ill.  For women, there is 
less of this danger.  Marriage is of so much use to a woman, 
opens out to her so much more of life, and puts her in the way 
of so much more freedom and usefulness, that, whether she 
marry ill or well, she can hardly miss some benefit.  It is 
true, however, that some of the merriest and most genuine of 
women are old maids; and that those old maids, and wives who 
are unhappily married, have often most of the true motherly 
touch.  And this would seem to show, even for women, some 
narrowing influence in comfortable married life.  But the rule 
is none the less certain: if you wish the pick of men and 
women, take a good bachelor and a good wife.

I am often filled with wonder that so many marriages are 
passably successful, and so few come to open failure, the more 
so as I fail to understand the principle on which people 
regulate their choice.  I see women marrying indiscriminately 
with staring burgesses and ferret-faced, white-eyed boys, and 
men dwell in contentment with noisy scullions, or taking into 
their lives acidulous vestals.  It is a common answer to say 
the good people marry because they fall in love; and of course 
you may use and misuse a word as much as you please, if you 
have the world along with you.  But love is at least a 
somewhat hyperbolical expression for such luke-warm 
preference.  It is not here, anyway, that Love employs his 
golden shafts; he cannot be said, with any fitness of 
language, to reign here and revel.  Indeed, if this be love at 
all, it is plain the poets have been fooling with mankind 
since the foundation of the world.  And you have only to look 
these happy couples in the face, to see they have never been 
in love, or in hate, or in any other high passion, all their 
days.  When you see a dish of fruit at dessert, you sometimes 
set your affections upon one particular peach or nectarine, 
watch it with some anxiety as it comes round the table, and 
feel quite a sensible disappointment when it is taken by some 
one else.  I have used the phrase "high passion."  Well, I 
should say this was about as high a passion as generally leads 
to marriage.  One husband hears after marriage that some poor 
fellow is dying of his wife's love.  "What a pity!" he 
exclaims; "you know I could so easily have got another!"  And 
yet that is a very happy union.  Or again: A young man was 
telling me the sweet story of his loves.  "I like it well 
enough as long as her sisters are there," said this amorous 
swain; "but I don't know what to do when we're alone."  Once 
more: A married lady was debating the subject with another 
lady.  "You know, dear," said the first, "after ten years of 
marriage, if he is nothing else, your husband is always an old 
friend."  "I have many old friends," returned the other, "but 
I prefer them to be nothing more."  "Oh, perhaps I might 
PREFER that also!"  There is a common note in these three 
illustrations of the modern idyll; and it must be owned the 
god goes among us with a limping gait and blear eyes.  You 
wonder whether it was so always; whether desire was always 
equally dull and spiritless, and possession equally cold.  I 
cannot help fancying most people make, ere they marry, some 
such table of recommendations as Hannah Godwin wrote to her 
brother William anent her friend, Miss Gay.  It is so 
charmingly comical, and so pat to the occasion, that I must 
quote a few phrases.  "The young lady is in every sense formed 
to make one of your disposition really happy.  She has a 
pleasing voice, with which she accompanies her musical 
instrument with judgment.  She has an easy politeness in her 
manners, neither free nor reserved.  She is a good housekeeper 
and a good economist, and yet of a generous disposition.  As 
to her internal accomplishments, I have reason to speak still 
more highly of them: good sense without vanity, a penetrating 
judgment without a disposition to satire, with about as much 
religion as my William likes, struck me with a wish that she 
was my William's wife."  That is about the tune: pleasing 
voice, moderate good looks, unimpeachable internal 
accomplishments after the style of the copy-book, with about 
as much religion as my William likes; and then, with all 
speed, to church.

To deal plainly, if they only married when they fell in 
love, most people would die unwed; and among the others, there 
would be not a few tumultuous households.  The Lion is the 
King of Beasts, but he is scarcely suitable for a domestic 
pet.  In the same way, I suspect love is rather too violent a 
passion to make, in all cases, a good domestic sentiment.  
Like other violent excitements, it throws up not only what is 
best, but what is worst and smallest, in men's characters.  
Just as some people are malicious in drink, or brawling and 
virulent under the influence of religious feeling, some are 
moody, jealous, and exacting when they are in love, who are 
honest, downright, good-hearted fellows enough in the everyday 
affairs and humours of the world.

How then, seeing we are driven to the hypothesis that 
people choose in comparatively cold blood, how is it they 
choose so well?  One is almost tempted to hint that it does 
not much matter whom you marry; that, in fact, marriage is a 
subjective affection, and if you have made up your mind to it, 
and once talked yourself fairly over, you could "pull it 
through" with anybody.  But even if we take matrimony at its 
lowest, even if we regard it as no more than a sort of 
friendship recognised by the police, there must be degrees in 
the freedom and sympathy realised, and some principle to guide 
simple folk in their selection.  Now what should this 
principle be?  Are there no more definite rules than are to be 
found in the Prayer-book?  Law and religion forbid the bans on 
the ground of propinquity or consanguinity; society steps in 
to separate classes; and in all this most critical matter, has 
common sense, has wisdom, never a word to say?  In the absence 
of more magisterial teaching, let us talk it over between 
friends: even a few guesses may be of interest to youths and 
maidens.

In all that concerns eating and drinking, company, 
climate, and ways of life, community of taste is to be sought 
for.  It would be trying, for instance, to keep bed and board 
with an early riser or a vegetarian.  In matters of art and 
intellect, I believe it is of no consequence.  Certainly it is 
of none in the companionships of men, who will dine more 
readily with one who has a good heart, a good cellar, and a 
humorous tongue, than with another who shares all their 
favourite hobbies and is melancholy withal.  If your wife 
likes Tupper, that is no reason why you should hang your head.  
She thinks with the majority, and has the courage of her 
opinions.  I have always suspected public taste to be a 
mongrel product, out of affectation by dogmatism; and felt 
sure, if you could only find an honest man of no special 
literary bent, he would tell you he thought much of 
Shakespeare bombastic and most absurd, and all of him written 
in very obscure English and wearisome to read.  And not long 
ago I was able to lay by my lantern in content, for I found 
the honest man.  He was a fellow of parts, quick, humorous, a 
clever painter, and with an eye for certain poetical effects 
of sea and ships.  I am not much of a judge of that kind of 
thing, but a sketch of his comes before me sometimes at night.  
How strong, supple, and living the ship seems upon the 
billows!  With what a dip and rake she shears the flying sea!  
I cannot fancy the man who saw this effect, and took it on the 
wing with so much force and spirit, was what you call 
commonplace in the last recesses of the heart.  And yet he 
thought, and was not ashamed to have it known of him, that 
Ouida was better in every way than William Shakespeare.  If 
there were more people of his honesty, this would be about the 
staple of lay criticism.  It is not taste that is plentiful, 
but courage that is rare.  And what have we in place?  How 
many, who think no otherwise than the young painter, have we 
not heard disbursing second-hand hyperboles?  Have you never 
turned sick at heart, O best of critics! when some of your own 
sweet adjectives were returned on you before a gaping 
audience?  Enthusiasm about art is become a function of the 
average female being, which she performs with precision and a 
sort of haunting sprightliness, like an ingenious and well-
regulated machine.  Sometimes, alas! the calmest man is 
carried away in the torrent, bandies adjectives with the best, 
and out-Herods Herod for some shameful moments.  When you 
remember that, you will be tempted to put things strongly, and 
say you will marry no one who is not like George the Second, 
and cannot state openly a distaste for poetry and painting.

The word "facts" is, in some ways, crucial.  I have 
spoken with Jesuits and Plymouth Brethren, mathematicians and 
poets, dogmatic republicans and dear old gentlemen in bird's-
eye neckcloths; and each understood the word "facts" in an 
occult sense of his own.  Try as I might, I could get no 
nearer the principle of their division.  What was essential to 
them, seemed to me trivial or untrue.  We could come to no 
compromise as to what was, or what was not, important in the 
life of man.  Turn as we pleased, we all stood back to back in 
a big ring, and saw another quarter of the heavens, with 
different mountain-tops along the sky-line and different 
constellations overhead.  We had each of us some whimsy in the 
brain, which we believed more than anything else, and which 
discoloured all experience to its own shade.  How would you 
have people agree, when one is deaf and the other blind?  Now 
this is where there should be community between man and wife.  
They should be agreed on their catchword in "FACTS OF 
RELIGION," or "FACTS OF SCIENCE," or "SOCIETY, MY DEAR"; for 
without such an agreement all intercourse is a painful strain 
upon the mind.  "About as much religion as my William likes," 
in short, that is what is necessary to make a happy couple of 
any William and his spouse.  For there are differences which 
no habit nor affection can reconcile, and the Bohemian must 
not intermarry with the Pharisee.  Imagine Consuelo as Mrs. 
Samuel Budget, the wife of the successful merchant!  The best 
of men and the best of women may sometimes live together all 
their lives, and, for want of some consent on fundamental 
questions, hold each other lost spirits to the end.

A certain sort of talent is almost indispensable for 
people who would spend years together and not bore themselves 
to death.  But the talent, like the agreement, must be for and 
about life.  To dwell happily together, they should be versed 
in the niceties of the heart, and born with a faculty for 
willing compromise.  The woman must be talented as a woman, 
and it will not much matter although she is talented in 
nothing else.  She must know her METIER DE FEMME, and have a 
fine touch for the affections.  And it is more important that 
a person should be a good gossip, and talk pleasantly and 
smartly of common friends and the thousand and one nothings of 
the day and hour, than that she should speak with the tongues 
of men and angels; for a while together by the fire, happens 
more frequently in marriage than the presence of a 
distinguished foreigner to dinner.  That people should laugh 
over the same sort of jests, and have many a story of "grouse 
in the gun-room," many an old joke between them which time 
cannot wither nor custom stale, is a better preparation for 
life, by your leave, than many other things higher and better 
sounding in the world's ears.  You could read Kant by 
yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some 
one else.  You can forgive people who do not follow you 
through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife 
laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you 
were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a 
dissolution of the marriage.

I know a woman who, from some distaste or disability, 
could never so much as understand the meaning of the word 
POLITICS, and has given up trying to distinguish Whigs from 
Tories; but take her on her own politics, ask her about other 
men or women and the chicanery of everyday existence - the 
rubs, the tricks, the vanities on which life turns - and you 
will not find many more shrewd, trenchant, and humorous.  Nay, 
to make plainer what I have in mind, this same woman has a 
share of the higher and more poetical understanding, frank 
interest in things for their own sake, and enduring 
astonishment at the most common.  She is not to be deceived by 
custom, or made to think a mystery solved when it is repeated.  
I have heard her say she could wonder herself crazy over the 
human eyebrow.  Now in a world where most of us walk very 
contentedly in the little lit circle of their own reason, and 
have to be reminded of what lies without by specious and 
clamant exceptions - earthquakes, eruptions of Vesuvius, 
banjos floating in mid-air at a SEANCE, and the like - a mind 
so fresh and unsophisticated is no despicable gift.  I will 
own I think it a better sort of mind than goes necessarily 
with the clearest views on public business.  It will wash.  It 
will find something to say at an odd moment.  It has in it the 
spring of pleasant and quaint fancies.  Whereas I can imagine 
myself yawning all night long until my jaws ached and the 
tears came into my eyes, although my companion on the other 
side of the hearth held the most enlightened opinions on the 
franchise or the ballot.

The question of professions, in as far as they regard 
marriage, was only interesting to women until of late days, 
but it touches all of us now.  Certainly, if I could help it, 
I would never marry a wife who wrote.  The practice of letters 
is miserably harassing to the mind; and after an hour or two's 
work, all the more human portion of the author is extinct; he 
will bully, backbite, and speak daggers.  Music, I hear, is 
not much better.  But painting, on the contrary, is often 
highly sedative; because so much of the labour, after your 
picture is once begun, is almost entirely manual, and of that 
skilled sort of manual labour which offers a continual series 
of successes, and so tickles a man, through his vanity, into 
good humour.  Alas! in letters there is nothing of this sort. 
You may write as beautiful a hand as you will, you have always 
something else to think of, and cannot pause to notice your 
loops and flourishes; they are beside the mark, and the first 
law stationer could put you to the blush.  Rousseau, indeed, 
made some account of penmanship, even made it a source of 
livelihood, when he copied out the HELOISE for DILETTANTE 
ladies; and therein showed that strange eccentric prudence 
which guided him among so many thousand follies and 
insanities.  It would be well for all of the GENUS IRRITABILE 
thus to add something of skilled labour to intangible brain-
work.  To find the right word is so doubtful a success and 
lies so near to failure, that there is no satisfaction in a 
year of it; but we all know when we have formed a letter 
perfectly; and a stupid artist, right or wrong, is almost 
equally certain he has found a right tone or a right colour, 
or made a dexterous stroke with his brush.  And, again, 
painters may work out of doors; and the fresh air, the 
deliberate seasons, and the "tranquillising influence" of the 
green earth, counterbalance the fever of thought, and keep 
them cool, placable, and prosaic.

A ship captain is a good man to marry if it is a marriage 
of love, for absences are a good influence in love and keep it 
bright and delicate; but he is just the worst man if the 
feeling is more pedestrian, as habit is too frequently torn 
open and the solder has never time to set.  Men who fish, 
botanise, work with the turning-lathe, or gather sea-weeds, 
will make admirable husbands and a little amateur painting in 
water-colour shows the innocent and quiet mind.  Those who 
have a few intimates are to be avoided; while those who swim 
loose, who have their hat in their hand all along the street, 
who can number an infinity of acquaintances and are not 
chargeable with any one friend, promise an easy disposition 
and no rival to the wife's influence.  I will not say they are 
the best of men, but they are the stuff out of which adroit 
and capable women manufacture the best of husbands.  It is to 
be noticed that those who have loved once or twice already are 
so much the better educated to a woman's hand; the bright boy 
of fiction is an odd and most uncomfortable mixture of shyness 
and coarseness, and needs a deal of civilising.  Lastly (and 
this is, perhaps, the golden rule), no woman should marry a 
teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke.  It is not for 
nothing that this "ignoble tabagie," as Michelet calls it, 
spreads over all the world.  Michelet rails against it because 
it renders you happy apart from thought or work; to provident 
women this will seem no evil influence in married life.  
Whatever keeps a man in the front garden, whatever checks 
wandering fancy and all inordinate ambition, whatever makes 
for lounging and contentment, makes just so surely for 
domestic happiness.

These notes, if they amuse the reader at all, will 
probably amuse him more when he differs than when he agrees 
with them; at least they will do no harm, for nobody will 
follow my advice.  But the last word is of more concern.  
Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts 
light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.  They have 
been so tried among the inconstant squalls and currents, so 
often sailed for islands in the air or lain becalmed with 
burning heart, that they will risk all for solid ground below 
their feet.  Desperate pilots, they run their sea-sick, weary 
bark upon the dashing rocks.  It seems as if marriage were the 
royal road through life, and realised, on the instant, what we 
have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at 
night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living.  They 
think it will sober and change them.  Like those who join a 
brotherhood, they fancy it needs but an act to be out of the 
coil and clamour for ever.  But this is a wile of the devil's.  
To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing faces 
leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep calling 
and calling in their ears.  For marriage is like life in this 
- that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.


II


HOPE, they say, deserts us at no period of our existence.  
From first to last, and in the face of smarting disillusions, 
we continue to expect good fortune, better health, and better 
conduct; and that so confidently, that we judge it needless to 
deserve them.  I think it improbable that I shall ever write 
like Shakespeare, conduct an army like Hannibal, or 
distinguish myself like Marcus Aurelius in the paths of 
virtue; and yet I have my by-days, hope prompting, when I am 
very ready to believe that I shall combine all these various 
excellences in my own person, and go marching down to 
posterity with divine honours.  There is nothing so monstrous 
but we can believe it of ourselves.  About ourselves, about 
our aspirations and delinquencies, we have dwelt by choice in 
a delicious vagueness from our boyhood up.  No one will have 
forgotten Tom Sawyer's aspiration: "Ah, if he could only die 
TEMPORARILY!"  Or, perhaps, better still, the inward 
resolution of the two pirates, that "so long as they remained 
in that business, their piracies should not again be sullied 
with the crime of stealing."  Here we recognise the thoughts 
of our boyhood; and our boyhood ceased - well, when? - not, I 
think, at twenty; nor, perhaps, altogether at twenty-five; nor 
yet at thirty; and possibly, to be quite frank, we are still 
in the thick of that arcadian period.  For as the race of man, 
after centuries of civilisation, still keeps some traits of 
their barbarian fathers, so man the individual is not 
altogether quit of youth, when he is already old and honoured, 
and Lord Chancellor of England.  We advance in years somewhat 
in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age 
that we have reached, as the phrase goes, we but hold with an 
outpost, and still keep open our communications with the 
extreme rear and first beginnings of the march.  There is our 
true base; that is not only the beginning, but the perennial 
spring of our faculties; and grandfather William can retire 
upon occasion into the green enchanted forest of his boyhood.

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.