I Leasehold Marriage à la Meredith
‘Twenty years of Romance make a woman look like a wreck; twenty years of Marriage make her look like a public building.’
—Oscar Wilde.
Leasehold marriage was one of the customs of early Roman society. Nowadays it has a revolutionary savour, and is so apparently impracticable that it would be hardly necessary to do more than touch upon it here, but for the fact that its most recent and most distinguished advocate in modern times is Mr George Meredith. Any suggestion from such a source must necessarily receive careful consideration. It was also advanced by the great philosopher Locke, and was considered by Milton.
It is scarcely three years since our veteran novelist cast this bombshell into a delighted, albeit disapproving Press; but as memories are so short nowadays, perhaps a brief recapitulation of the circumstances might not be amiss.
The beginning of the business was a letter to The Times by Mr Cloudesly Brereton complaining of the ‘growing handicap of marriage’ and, according to invariable custom, attacking women as the cause of it. He stated that in the middle classes ‘the exigences of modern wives are steadily undermining the attractions of matrimony; in her ever-growing demands on her husband’s time, energy, and money the modern married woman constitutes a very serious drag, and in the lower classes of society, marriage even seriously militates against a man’s finding work.’ How women can be held responsible for this last injustice was wisely not stated. It would have been difficult to prove the indictment, I think.
This document’s chief claim to interest was the discussion in The Daily Mail that followed it, and the curious fact that the writer was married a few weeks after its publication! The usual abuse on marriage in general and women in particular followed, until the late Mrs Craigie joined the discussion, and brought to bear on it that peculiar quality of tender understanding, that wonderful insight into women’s hearts, which were among the most striking characteristics of her brilliant work. It would be a pity to quote from such a letter, so I reproduce it in full.
‘Women, where their feelings are in question, are not selfish enough: they appraise themselves not too dearly, but too cheaply: it is the suicidal unselfishness of modern women which makes the selfishness of modern bachelors possible. Bachelors are not all misogynists, and the fact that a man remains unmarried is no proof that he is insensible to the charm of woman’s companionship, or that he does not have such companionship, on irresponsible terms, to a most considerable degree. Why should the average vain young man, egoistic by organism and education, work hard or make sacrifices for the sake of any particular woman, while so many are too willing to share his life without joining it, and so many more wait eagerly on his steps to destroy any chivalry or tenderness he may have been born with? Modern women give bachelors no time to miss them and no opportunity to need them. Their devotion is undisciplined and it becomes a curse rather than a blessing to its object. Why? Because women have this strange power of concentration and self-abnegation in their love; they cannot do enough to prove their kindness; and when they have done all and been at no pains to secure their own position, they realise they have erred through excess of generosity and the desire to please. This is the unselfishness shown towards bachelors.’
In answer to this letter, another woman novelist, Miss Florence Warden, challenged Mrs Craigie as to the existence of such women, but elicited no further reply. The Daily Mail commented on it thus: ‘Hundreds of thousands of our readers can give an answer to this remarkable statement out of their own experience, and we have little doubt as to what the tenor of that answer will be.’ One can imagine that this was written with a view to being read at the breakfast-tables of Villadom; but men and women of the world, whose experience is not confined to Villadom, nor their opinions of life coloured by the requirements of the Young Person, will recognise the undoubted truth of Mrs Craigie’s statements. Whilst agreeing that the state of things between the sexes which she describes is a true one, I venture respectfully to differ as to women’s motive for this ‘excess of generosity.’ There is an enormous amount of wonderful unselfishness among women, but it does not expend itself in this direction, in my opinion. Rather is the motive a passionate desire for their own enjoyment, the gratification of their own vanity by pleasing the opposite sex, often at the cost of their own self-respect. H. B. Marriott-Watson takes the same view in a subsequent letter, where he says: ‘Women’s unselfishness does not extend to the region of love. The sex attraction is practically inconsistent with altruism, and the measure of renunciation is inversely the measure of affection. This is the order which Nature has established, and it is no use trying to expel her. A woman may lay down her life for the man she loves, but she will not surrender him to a rival.’
Another letter of interest came from Miss Helen Mathers, who stated that ‘all women should marry, but no men!’—the advantages of the conjugal state being, in her opinion, entirely on the woman’s side.
At this point appeared Mr Meredith’s contribution to the discussion in the less authoritative form of an interview—not a letter or article, as, after this lapse of time, so many people seem to imagine. On re-reading this interview recently, I was struck with Mr Meredith’s peculiarly old-fashioned ideas about women. Where the woman question was concerned the clock of his observation seems to have stopped many decades ago.
‘The fault at the bottom of the business,’ he affirms, ‘is that women are so uneducated, so unready. Men too often want a slave, and frequently think they have got one, not because the woman has not often got more sense than her husband, but because she is so inarticulate, not educated enough to give expression to her real ideas and feelings.’
This was before the vogue of the suffragettes, but it is a sufficiently surprising statement for 1904. He continues: ‘It is a question to my mind whether a young girl, married, say, at eighteen, utterly ignorant of life, knowing little of the man she is marrying, or of any other man in the world at all, should be condemned to live with him for the rest of her life. She falls out of sympathy with him, say, has no common taste with him, nothing to share with him, no real communion except a physical one. The life is nearly intolerable, yet many women go on with it from habit, or because the world terrorises them.’
This is true enough, but Mr Meredith speaks as if it were still the rule, as in our grandmothers’ day, for a girl to marry in the teens, whereas it is now quite the exception. Every year the marrying age seems to advance, and blushing brides decked in orange blossoms are led to the altar at an age when, fifty years ago, they would be resigned old maids in cap and mittens. If a girl is foolish enough to marry immediately she is out of the schoolroom, she must be prepared to take the enormous risk which the choice of a husband at such an immature age must entail.
Elsewhere Mr Meredith says: ‘Marriage is so difficult, its modern conditions are so difficult, that when two educated people want it, nothing should be put in their way.... Certainly one day the present conditions of marriage will be changed. It will be allowed for a certain period, say ten years, or—well, I do not want to specify any particular period. The State will see sufficient money is put by to provide for and educate the children. Perhaps the State will take charge of this fund. There will be a devil of an uproar before such a change can be made. It will be a great shock, but look back and see what shocks there have been and what changes have nevertheless taken place in this marriage business in the past.’
‘The difficulty,’ he continues, ‘is to make English people face such a problem. They want to live under discipline more than any other nation in the world. They won’t look ahead, especially the governing people. And you must have philosophy, though it is more than you can hope to get English people to admit the bare name of philosophy into their discussion of such a question. Again and again, notably in their criticism of America, you see how English people will persist in regarding any new trait as a sign of disease. Yet it is a sign of health.’
It will be seen that Mr Meredith puts forward the ten-year limit merely as a suggestion. I recall in one of Stevenson’s essays an allusion to a lady who said: ‘After ten years one’s husband is at least an old friend,’ and her answer was: ‘Yes, and one would like him to be that and nothing more.’ The decade seems to have a special significance in marriage. After the trying first year is over, most couples settle down comfortably enough until nearing the tenth year. The president of the Divorce Court has called this the danger zone of married life. One of the subsequent letters in The Daily Mail, approving Mr Meredith’s suggestion, alluded to the present form of marriage as ‘the life-sentence,’ and suggested a still shorter time limit, five years for choice, since during that time a couple would have found happiness or the reverse, and in the latter case ten years was too long to wait for freedom.
A writer in another paper cited America as an example of terminable marriage in full working order. ‘It appears from the statement of an American bishop that the people of the United States are actually living under Mr Meredith’s conditions already. Last year (1903) as many as 600,000 American marriages were dissolved. This means that there was one divorce to every four marriages. In some districts the proportion was more like one to two. And the most frequent cause of divorce was a desire for change!’
It seems to me that the establishment of a leasehold marriage system would only result in wholesale wretchedness and confusion, beside which the present sum of marital misery would be but a drop in the ocean. If our marriage laws must be modified, let us trust it will not be in this direction, though it is obvious enough that such a change would come as a boon to thousands of men and women, who from one cause or another have come to loathe the tie that binds them. Whether it would not also disturb the prosaic content that passes for happiness with millions more is too big a question to be more than mentioned here.
The fate of those who are tied for life to lunatics, criminals, and drunkards is pitiable indeed, but an extension of the laws of divorce would meet their exceptional case, without disturbing the marriage bond of normal people. I have endeavoured to indicate some of the many difficulties of leasehold marriage in the following dialogue.