Getting Married | Page 7

the real thing is loathed because the imposture is
loathsome. Literary traditions spring up in which the libertine and
profligate--Tom Jones and Charles Surface are the heroes, and
decorous, law-abiding persons--Blifil and Joseph Surface--are the
villains and butts. People like to believe that Nell Gwynne has every
amiable quality and the Bishop's wife every odious one. Poor Mr.
Pecksniff, who is generally no worse than a humbug with a turn for
pompous talking, is represented as a criminal instead of as a very
typical English paterfamilias keeping a roof over the head of himself
and his daughters by inducing people to pay him more for his services
than they are worth. In the extreme instances of reaction against
convention, female murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage; and
when Nature throws up that rare phenomenon, an unscrupulous
libertine, his success among "well brought-up" girls is so easy, and the
devotion he inspires so extravagant, that it is impossible not to see that
the revolt against conventional respectability has transfigured a
commonplace rascal into a sort of Anarchist Saviour. As to the
respectable voluptuary, who joins Omar Khayyam clubs and vibrates to
Swinburne's invocation of Dolores to "come down and redeem us from
virtue," he is to be found in every suburb.
TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING
We must be reasonable in our domestic ideals. I do not think that life at
a public sehool is altogether good for a boy any more than barrack life
is altogether good for a soldier. But neither is home life altogether good.

Such good as it does, I should say, is due to its freedom from the very
atmosphere it professes to supply. That atmosphere is usually described
as an atmosphere of love; and this definition should be sufficient to put
any sane person on guard against it. The people who talk and write as if
the highest attainable state is that of a family stewing in love
continuously from the cradle to the grave, can hardly have given five
minutes serious consideration to so outrageous a proposition. They
cannot have even made up their minds as to what they mean by love;
for when they expatiate on their thesis they are sometimes talking about
kindness, and sometimes about mere appetite. In either sense they are
equally far from the realities of life. No healthy man or animal is
occupied with love in any sense for more than a very small fraction
indeed of the time he devotes to business and to recreations wholly
unconnected with love. A wife entirely preoccupied with her affection
for her husband, a mother entirely preoccupied with her affection for
her children, may be all very well in a book (for people who like that
kind of book); but in actual life she is a nuisance. Husbands may escape
from her when their business compels them to be away from home all
day; but young children may be, and quite often are, killed by her
cuddling and coddling and doctoring and preaching: above all, by her
continuous attempts to excite precocious sentimentality, a practice as
objectionable, and possibly as mischievous, as the worst tricks of the
worst nursemaids.
LARGE AND SMALL FAMILIES
In most healthy families there is a revolt against this tendency. The
exchanging of presents on birthdays and the like is barred by general
consent, and the relations of the parties are placed by express treaty on
an unsentimental footing.
Unfortunately this mitigation of family sentimentality is much more
characteristic of large families than small ones. It used to be said that
members of large families get on in the world; and it is certainly true
that for purposes of social training a household of twenty surpasses a
household of five as an Oxford College surpasses an eight-roomed
house in a cheap street. Ten children, with the necessary adults, make a
community in which an excess of sentimentality is impossible. Two
children make a doll's house, in which both parents and children
become morbid if they keep to themselves. What is more, when large

families were the fashion, they were organized as tyrannies much more
than as "atmospheres of love." Francis Place tells us that he kept out of
his father's way because his father never passed a child within his reach
without striking it; and though the case was an extreme one, it was an
extreme that illustrated a tendency. Sir Walter Scott's father, when his
son incautiously expressed some relish for his porridge, dashed a
handful of salt into it with an instinctive sense that it was his duty as a
father to prevent his son enjoying himself. Ruskin's mother gratified the
sensual side of her maternal passion, not by cuddling her son, but by
whipping him when he fell downstairs or was slack in learning