by Grant Allen
Why did this imperial, overbearing, all-powerful man love to stay in retirement when all Europe was waiting for his word? Why did he spend days in sauntering in country lanes, and chatting during quiet evenings with one loved friend alone? That question goes to the root of my subject. Chatham was happily married; when he was torn by bitter rage and disappointment, when his sovereign repulsed him, and when not even the passionate love of an entire nation availed to further the ends on which the Titan had set his heart, he carried his sorrow with him, and drew comfort from the goodness of the sweet soul who was his true mate. It is a very sweet picture; and we see in history how the softening home influence finally converted the, awful, imposing, tyrannical Chatham into a yielding, fascinating man.
From the world’s arbiter to the bricklayer’s labourer, the same general law holds; the man who makes a happy marriage lives out his life at its best — he may fail in some things, but in the essential direction he is successful. The woman who makes a happy marriage may have trials and suffering to bear, but she also gains the best of life; and some of the purest and most joyous creatures I have known were women who had suffered in their day. When I think of some marriages whereof I know the full history, I am tempted to believe in human perfectibility; and at chance times there come to me vague dreams of a day when the majority of human beings will find life joyous and tranquil. What one wise and well-matched couple achieve in life may be achieved by others as the days go on. Surely jarring and misery are not necessary in the great world of nations or in the little world of the family? Confidence, generosity, and complete unselfishness on both sides are needed to make the life of a married pair serene and happy. I know that the demand is a heavy one; but, ah, when it is adequately met, is not the gain worth all the sacrifices a thousand times over? There may be petty and amusing differences of opinion, quiet banter, and an occasional grave conflict of judgment; but, so long as three central requirements — confidence, generosity, and unselfishness — are met, there can be no serious break in the procession of placid, happy days. I abhor the gushing talk sometimes heard about “married lovers;” the people who dignify life and honour the community are those who are lovers and something more. Of course we can all feel sympathy with Fanny Kemble when she says that the poetry of “Romeo and Juliet” went into her blood as she spoke on the stage; but there is something needed beyond wild Italian raptures before the ideal match is secured. Some of us are almost glad that Juliet passed away in swift fashion when the cup of life foamed most exquisitely at her lips. How would she have fared had that changeable firebrand Romeo taken to wandering once more? It is a grievously flippant question to ask when the most glorious of all love-poems is in question; yet I ask it very seriously, and merely in a symbolic way. Romeo is a shadow, the adored Juliet is a shadow; but the two immortal shades represent for all time the mad lovers whose lives end in bitterness. I say again that only reasonable and calm love brings happy marriages. It is as true as any other law of nature that “he never loved who loved not at first sight;” but the frantic, dissolute man of genius who wrote that line did not care to go further and speak of matters which wise men of the world cannot disregard. The first blinding shock of the supreme passion comes in the course of nature; but wise people live through the unspeakable tumult of the soul, and use their reason after they have resisted and subdued into calm strength the fierce impulse which has wrecked so many human creatures. When writing on “Ill-Assorted Marriages,” I urged that men and women who are about to take the terribly momentous steps towards marriage must be guided by reason, and I repeat my adjuration here. When Lord Beaconsfield said, “I observe those of my friends who married for love — some of them beat their wives, and the remainder are divorced,” he knew that he was uttering a piece of mockery which would have been blasphemous had it been set down in all seriousness. He meant to say that headlong marriages — marriages contracted in purblind passion — always end in misery. No marriage can bring a spark of happiness unless cool reason guides the choice of the contracting parties. A hot-headed stripling marries a handsome termagant — her brilliant face, her grace, and rude health attract him, and he does not quietly notice the ebullitions of her temper. She is divine to him; and, though she snarls at her younger brother, insults her mother, and to outsiders plainly exhibits all sorts of petty selfishness, yet the stripling rushes on to his fate; and at the end of a few miserable years he is either a broken and hen-pecked creature or a mean and ferocious squabbler.
How different is the case of those who are not precipitate! Take the case of the splendid cynic whose words we have quoted. With his usual sagacity, Lord Beaconsfield waited, watched, and finally succeeded in making an ideally happy marriage in circumstances which would have affrighted an ordinary person. All the world knows the story now. The brilliant young statesman dared not risk the imputation of fortune-hunting; but the lady knew his worth; she knew that she could aid him, and she frankly threw over all the traditions of her sex and of society and offered herself to him. No one in England who is interested in this matter can fail to know every detail of a bargain which makes one proud of one’s species, for Lord Ronald Gower has told us about the married life of the brilliant Hebrew who mastered England. The two kindred souls were bound up in each other. The lady was not learned or clever, and indeed her husband said, “She was the best of creatures; but she never could tell which came first — the Greeks or the Romans.” But she had something more than cleverness — she had the confidence, generosity, and unselfishness which I have set forth as the main conditions of happiness. I must repeat an old story; for it cannot too often be repeated. Think of the woman who gathered all her resolution and uttered no sound, although the end of her finger was smashed by the closing of the carriage-door! Mr. D’Israeli was about to make a great speech; so his wife would not disturb him on his way to Westminster, though flesh and bone of her finger were crushed. She fainted when the orator had gone to his task; but her fortitude did not forsake her until her beloved was out of danger of being perturbed. That one authentic story is worth a hundred dramatic tales of stagey heroism. And we must remember how the statesman repaid the simple devotion of his wife. All his spare time was passed in her company, and the quaint pair wandered in the woods like happy boy and girl. Then, when the indomitable man had raised himself to be head of the State, and was offered a peerage, he declined; but he begged that his wife might be created countess in her own right. Could anything be more graceful and courtly? “You are the superior,” the first man in England seemed to say; “and I am content to rejoice in your honours without rivalling them.” All the fanciful rhymes of the troubadours cannot furnish anything prettier than that.
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 m
ay 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.
But I am not minded to deal with the special instances of shrewism which have been pronounced enough to claim attention from powerful masters of fiction and history; I am rather interested in the swarms of totally commonplace shrews who live around us, and who do their very best — or worst — to make the earth a miserable place. I can laugh as heartily as anybody at Dickens’s “scolds” and female bullies; none the less however am I ready in all seriousness to reckon the shrew as an evil influence, as bad as some of the most subtle and malevolent scourges inflicted by physical nature. All of us have but a little span on earth, and we should be able to economise every minute, so as to extract the maximum of joy from existence; yet how many frail lives are embittered by the shrew! How many men, women, and children has she not forced to wish almost for death as a relief from morbid pain and keen humiliation! Our social conditions tend to foster shrewish temperament, for we are gradually changing the subjection of woman to the enslavement of man; gentle chivalry is developing into maudlin self-advertising self-abnegation on the part of the males who favour the new movement. The sweet and equable lady remains the same in all ages; Imogen and Desdemona and Rosalind and the Roaring Girl have their modern counterparts. The lady never takes advantage of the just homage bestowed on her; she never asserts herself; her good breeding is so absolute that she would not be uncontrolledly familiar with her nearest and dearest, and her thoughts are all for others. But the shrew must always be thrusting herself forward; her cankered nature turns kindness into poison; she resents a benefit conferred as though it were an insult; and yet, if she is not constantly noticed and made, at the least, the recipient of kindly offers, she contrives to cause every one within reach of her to feel the sting of her enraged vanity. When I think of some women who are to be met with in various quarters, from the “slum” to the drawing-room, I am driven to wonder — shocking as it may seem — that crimes of violence are not more frequent than they are. It is most melancholy to notice how well the shrew fares compared with some poor creatures of gentler nature. In the lower classes a meek, toil-worn, obliging woman is most foully ill-used by a vagabond of a husband in only too many cases; while a screaming selfish wretch who, in trying to madden her miserable husband, succeeds in maddening all within earshot, escapes unhurt, and continues to lead her odious life, setting a bad example to impressionable young girls, and perhaps corrupting a neighbourhood. England is the happy hunting-ground for the shrew at present; for in America the average social relation between the
sexes has come to be so frank and even that a shrew would be as severely treated as a discourteous man. In England a sham sentiment reigns which gives license to the vilest of women without protecting the martyrs, who, in all conscience, need protection. The scoundrel who maltreats a woman receives far less punishment than is inflicted on a teacher who gives a young Clerkenwell ruffian a stripe with a switch; while the howling shrew who spends a man’s money in drink, empties his house, screeches at him by the hour together, is not censured at all — nay, the ordinary “gusher” would say that “the agonised woman vents the feelings of her overcharged heart.”
Now let us glance at the various sorts of these awful scourges who dwell in our midst. It may be well to classify them at once, because, unless I mistake many symptoms, the stubborn English may shortly snuff out the sentimentalists who have raised up a plague among us. I may say as a preliminary that in my opinion a shrew may be fairly defined as “a female who takes advantage of the noblest impulses of men and the kindliest laws of nations in order that she may claim the social privileges of both sexes and vent her most wicked temper with freedom.” First, consider the doleful shrew. This is a person not usually found among the classes which lack leisure; she is an exasperating and most entirely selfish woman, and she cannot very well invent her refinements of whining cruelty unless she has a little time on hand; her speciality is to moan incessantly over the ingratitude of people for whom she has done some trivial service; and, as she always moans by choice in presence of the person whom she has afflicted by her generosity, the result is merely distracting. If the victim says, “I allow that you have been very kind, and I am grateful,” he commits an error in tactics, for the torturer is upon him at once. “Oh, you do own it then, and yet see how you behave!” — and then the torrent flows on with swift persistence. If, on the contrary, the sufferer cries, “Why on earth do you go on repeating what you have done? I owned your kindness once, and I do not intend to talk any more about it!” he is still more clearly delivered into the enemy’s hands. He lays himself open to a charge of ingratitude, and the charge is pressed home with relentless fluency. Then, as to the doleful one’s influence on children — the general modern tendency is towards making children happy, but the doleful one is a survival from some bad type, and takes a secret malign delight in wantonly inflicting pain on the minds or bodies of the young. Some dense people perhaps imagine that children cannot suffer mental agony; yet the merest mite may carry a whole tragedy in its innocent soul. We all know the wheedling ways of children; we know how they will coax little luxuries and privileges out of “papa” and “mamma,” and most of us rather like to submit with simulated reluctance to the harmless extortion. If I had heard a certain tiny youth say, “Papa, when I’m a big man, and you’re a little boy, I shall ask you to have some jam,” I should have failed entirely to smother my laughter. Do you think the doleful one would have seen the fun of the remark if she had any power over the body or soul of that devoted child? Nay. She would have whined about slyness, and cunning hints, and greediness, and the probabilities of utter ruin and disgrace overtaking underhand schemers, until that child would have been stunned, puzzled, deprived of self-respect, and rendered entirely wretched. Long ago I heard of a doleful one who turned suddenly on a merry boy who was playing on the floor. “You’re going straight to perdition!” observed the dolorous one; and the light went out of that boy’s life for a time. A gladsome party of young folk may be instantly wrecked by the doleful shrew’s entrance; and, if she cannot attract attention to herself amid a gathering even of sensible, cheerful adults, she will probably break up the evening by dint of a well-timed fit of spasms or something similar. Dickens made Mrs. Gummidge very funny; but the Gummidge of real life is not merely a limp, “lorn” creature — she is a woman who began by being unhealthily vain, and ends by being venomously malignant. I do not think that many people have passed through life very far without meeting with a specimen of the dolorous shrew, and I hope in all charity that the creature is not in the immediate circle of any one who reads this. In impassioned moments, when I have reckoned up all the misery caused by this species, I have been inclined to wish that every peculiarly malign specimen could be secured at the public expense in a safe asylum.
