Unit 13MarriageRobert Lynd1 “Conventional people,” says Mr. Bertrand Russell, “like to pretend that difficulties in regard to marriage are a new thing.” I could not help wondering, as I read this sentence, where one can meet these conventional people who think, or pretend to think, as conventional people do. I have known hundreds of conventional people, and I cannot remember one of them who thought the things conventional people seem to think. They were all, for example, convinced that marriage was a state beset with difficulties, and that these difficulties were as old, if not as the hills, at least as the day on which Adam lost a rib and gained a wife. A younger generation of conventional people has grown up in recent years, and it may be that they have a rosier conception of marriage than their ancestors; but the conventional people of the Victorian era were under no illusions on the subject. Their cynical attitude to marriage may be gathered from the enthusiastic reception they gave to Punchs advice to those about to marry “Dont.”2 I doubt, indeed, whether the horrors of marriage were ever depicted more cruelly than during the conventional nineteenth century. The comic papers and music-halls made the miseries a standing dish. “You can always tell whether a mans married or single from the way hes dressed,” said the comedian. “Look at the single man: no buttons on his shirt. Look at the married man: no shirt.” The humour was crude; but it went home to the honest Victorian heart. If marriage were to be judged by the songs conventional people used to sing about it in the music-halls, it would seem a hell mainly populated by twins and leech-like mothers-in-law. The rare experiences of Darby and Joan were, it is true, occasionally hymned, reducing strong men smelling strongly of alcohol to reverent silence; but, on the whole, the audience felt more normal when a comedian came out with an anti-marital refrain such as: O why did I leave my little back room In Bloomsbury,Where I could live on a pound a week In luxury(I forget the next line).But since I have married Maria,Ive jumped out of the frying-panInto the blooming fire.3 No difficulties? Why, the very nigger-minstrels of my boyhood used to open their performance with a chorus which began: Married! Married! O pity those whore married.Those who go and take a wife must be very green.4 It is possible that the comedians exaggerated, and that Victorian wives were not all viragos with pokers, who beat their tipsy husbands for staying out too late. But at least they and their audiences refrained from painting marriage as an inevitable Paradise. Even the clergy would go no farther than to say that marriages were made in Heaven. That they did not believe that marriage necessarily ended there is shown by the fact that one of them wrote a “best-seller” bearing the title How to Be Happy Though Married.5 I doubt, indeed, whether common opinion in any age has ever looked on marriage as an untroubled Paradise. I consulted a dictionary of quotations on the subject and discovered that few of the opinions quoted were rose-coloured. These opinions, it may be objected, are the opinions of unconventional people, but it is also true that they are opinions treasured and kept alive by conventional people. We have the reputed saying of the henpecked Socrates, for example, when asked whether it was better to marry or not: “Whichever you do, you will repent.” We have Montaigne writing: “It happens as one sees in cages. The birds outside despair of ever getting in; those inside are equally desirous of getting out.” Bacon is no more prenuptial with his caustic quotation: “He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question when a man should marry: A young man not yet; an elder man not at all.” Burton is far from encouraging! “One was never married, and thats his hell; another is, and thats his plague.” Pepys scribbled in his diary: “Strange to say what delight we married people have to see these poor folk decoyed into our condition.”6 The pious Jeremy Taylor was as keenly aware that marriage is not all bliss. “Marriage,” he declared, “hath in it less of beauty and more of safety than the single life it hath more care but less danger; it is more merry and more sad; it is fuller of sorrows and fuller of joys.” The sentimental and optimistic Steele can do no better than: “The marriage state, with and without the affection suitable to it, is the completest image of Heaven and Hell we are capable of receiving in this life.”7 Rousseau denied that a perfect marriage had ever been known. “I have often thought,” he wrote, “that if only one could prolong the joy of love in marriage we should have paradise on earth. That is a thing which has never been hitherto.” Dr. Johnson is not quoted in the dictionary; but everyone will remember how, devoted husband though he was, he de