Ouida_Granville_de_Vigne.txt topic ['13', '324', '378', '393']
varied views. help, then, the man
who has taken to his heart, and into his life, a
wife who, fair in his eyes in all the glamour
of love, all the * purpureal light of youth,' is as
insufficient to him in his maturer years as are the
weaker thoughts, the cruder studies, the unformed
judgment, the boyish revelries of his youth.
thoughts might be well in their way, the studies
beneficial, the judgment generous and just, the
revels harmless, but he has outgrown them gone
beyond them left them far behind him; and he
can no more return to them, and find them suf-
ficient for him, than he can return to the
ad of his first school-days. the
wife, too, may be good in her way : he may strive
to be faithful to her and to cleave to her as he has
sworn to do ; he may seek with all his might to
come to her side, to bring back the old feeling, to
join the broken chain, to find her all he needs and
all he used to think her ; he may strive with all
his might to do this, but it is -labour; the
scales have fallen from his eyes, he loves her no
longer ! is not his fault ; she belongs to the
things of his youth which pleased a crude taste,
an immature judgment ; he sees her now as she is,
and she is far below him, far behind him ; if he
progress he goes on alone, if he fall back to
her level, his mind deteriorates with every day that
dawns! he bring to the no
arguments riper than the crude debates that were
his glory at the ; would he condemn him-
self in science never to discard the unsound
theories that were the delight of his early
speculations; would he deny himself the right
to fling aside the moonshine philosophies, the
cobweb metaphysics that he wove in his youth,
and forbid himself title to advance beyond them ?
not ! he would chain himself through
his lifelong to a yoke-fellow as unfit and insuflRcient
to his older years, as ever the theories and thoughts
of his youth can be ; as fatal to his peace while he
is bound to her, as they would be fetal to the
mind they dwarfed, to the brain they crammed
into a prison-cell!
youth seems very fair,
* else being by
poised with herself in either eye.'
young man meets a young girl in society, or
at the sea-side, or on the deck of a steamer;
she has nice fresh colouring, bright blue eyes, or
black ones, as the case may be, very nice ankles,
and a charming voice. is a pretty girl to
everybody ; to him, she is beautiful divine !
thinks, over his pipe, that she is just his ideal
of (, if he be of a poetic turn ; or meditates
that she's * a clipper of a girl, and, by !
what a pretty foot ! * if of a material disposition.
fells in love with her, as the phrase goes ; he
flirts with her at water-parties, and pays her a few
morning calls ; he sees her trifling with a bit of
fancy-work, and hears her pretty voice say a few
things about the weather. few oecillades, a
few waltzes, a few tete-k-tete, and he proposes.
is a pretty dream for a few months ; an easy
yoke, perhaps, for a few years ; then gradually the
illusions drop one by one, as the leaves drop from
a shaken rose, loth, yet forced to fall. finds
her mind narrowed, bigoted, ill-stored, with no
single thought in it akin to his own.
could he learn of it in those few morning calls,
those few ball-room talks, when the glamour
was on him, and he would have cared nothing
though she could not have spelled his name?
^he finds her a bad temper (when does
temper ever show in society, and how could
he 1 her ,itho societ/s l.romg e,e upon
her ?), snarling at her servants, her dogs, the soup,
the east winds ; meeting him with petulant acer-
bity, revenging on him her milliner's neglect, her
maid's stupidity, her migraine, or her torn !
he finds her a heartless coquette, cheapening
his honour, holding his name as carelessly as a
child holds a mirror, forgetting, like the child,
that a breath on it is a stain ; turning a deaf ear
to his remonstrance ; flinging at him, with a sneer,
some died-out folly * before / knew you, sir ! '
that she has ferreted out ; goading him to words
that he knows, for his own dignity, were best
unsaid, then turning to hysteria and se posant
en martyre 1 and this, take it, is the worst
case for both the wife is ii good wife, as many
(ladies say most) wives are ; he knows it, he feels
it, he honours her for it, but she is a bitter dis-
appointment to him ! comes home worn-out
with the day's labour, but successful from it ; he
sits down to a tete-a-tete dinner ; he tells her of
the hard-won election, the hot-worded debate in
the , the issue of a great law case that he
has brought off victorious, the compliment to his
corps from the commander-in-chief, of the one
thing that is the essence of his life and the end
of his ambition; she listens with a vague, amiable,
absent smile, but her heart is not with him, nor her
ear. *, dear ^indeed how very nice!
cook has ruined that splendid haunch. look !
it is really burnt to a cinder ! ' never gives
him any more than that ! cannot help it ;
her mission is emphatically to * suckle fools and
chronicle small-beer.' perpetual drop, drop,
of her small worries, her puerile pleasures, is like
the ceaseless dropping of water on his brain ; she
is less capable of understanding him in his defeats,
his victories, his struggles, than the senseless
writing-paper, which, though it cannot respond
to them, at least lets him score his thoughts on
its blank pages, and will bear them unobliterated !
this disunion in union is common enough in
this world, tr^s chers ; when a man marries early
it is too generally certain.
man early married, moreover, is prematurely
aged. he is yet young his wife is old;
while he is in the fullest vigour of his manhood,
she is gray, and faded, and ageing ; youth has long
gone ixom her, while in him it is still fresh ; and
while away from her he is young, by her side he
feels old. in youth he takes upon him-
self burdens that should never weigh save upon
middle age ; in middle age he plays the part that
should be reserved for age alone.
, to take it in a more practical senses
scarcely the less inevitably from every point is
^ a young man married a man that's marred.'
to men of fortune, with every opiate of pleasure
and excitement to drown the gall and fret of un-
congenial or unhappy union, early marriage blots
and mars life as it does, how much more bitter
still to those who are poor and struggling with the
burden of work, hardly done and scantily paid,
upon their shoulders, is its fatal error young
fellow starts in life with no capital, but a good
education and a profession, which, like all profes*
sions, cannot be lucrative to him till time has
mellowed his reputation, and experience made
him, more or less, a name in it. brings him
quite enough for his garqon wants ; he lives com-
fortably enough in his chambers or his lodgings,
with no weightier daily outlay than his
and his chop ; study comes easy to him, with a
brain that has no care gnawing on it ; society is
cheap, for his chums come contentedly for a pipe,
and some punch, or some beer, and think none the
worse of him because he does not give them turtle
and . can live for little if he
like ; if he want change and travel, he can take
his knapsack and a walking tour; nobody is de-
pendent on him ; if he be straitened by poverty,
the strain is on him alone ; he is not tortured by
the cry of those who look to him for daily bread,
the world is before him, to choose at least where
he will work in it ; in a word, he is free 1 , if
he marries, his up-hill career is fettered by a clog
which draws him backward every step he sets ; his
profession is inadequate to meet the expenses that
crowd in on him ; if he keep manfully and honestly
out of debt, economy and privation eat his very
life away, as, say what romancists may, they ever
must ; if he live beyond his income, as too many
professional men are almost driven to do in our
day, there is a pressure on him like the weights
they laid upon offenders in the old press-
yards. toils, he struggles, he works, as brain-
workers must, feverishly and at express speed to
keep in the van at all ; he is old, while by right of
years he should yet be young, in the constant
harassing rack and strain to ' keep up appearances,'
and seem well off while every shilling is of con-
sequence ; he writes for his bread with the bray of
brawling children above his head ; he goes to his
office turning over and over in wretched arith-
metic the sums he owes to the baker and the
butcher ; he smiles courteously upon his patients
or his clients with the iron in his soul and county-
court summonses hanging over his head. goes
back from his rounds or his office, or comes out of
his study after a long day, jaded, fagged, worn
out ; comes, not to quiet, to peace, to solitude,
with a weed and a book, to anything that would
soothe the fagged nerves and ease the strain for
an hour at least : but only for some miserable
petty worry, some fresh small care ; to hear his
wife going into mortal agonies because her
youngest son has the measles, or bear the leer of
the servants when they say *the tax-gatherer's
called again, and, please, must he go away ? '
are the old words of :
* bindest thyself for life, for that which will
perchance never last nor please thee one year :
for the desire dieth when it is obtained, and the
affection perisheth when it is satisfied ! *
literally dying in the heat and burden
of the day, of the weary weight, the torturing
rack of home-cares; his family and his poverty
dragging him downward and clogging his genius
as the drenching rains upon its wings clog the
flight of a bird ; is but sample of the death-in-life,
the age-in-youth, the self-begotten curse, the self-
lelected doom, that almost inevitably dog the steps
of a man who has married early, be his station
what it may, be his choice what it will.
^ spring of resembleth
uncertain glory of an day,
shows now all the beauty of the sun.
by-and-by a cloud takes all away ! '
is love, rarely anything better, scarcely
ever anything more durable. are all early
loves, invariably, inevitably. help, then,
though we may count them by the myriad, those
who in, and for, that one brief * day/ which,
warm and shadowless at morning, sees the frost
down long before night, pay, rashly as paid in
the moment of eager delight, when no price was
counted, and no value asked ; pay, with headstrong
thoughtlessness, in madman's haste, the one price-
less birthright upon earth !