Virginibus Puerisque | Page 8

hand all along the street, who can number an infinity of
acquaintances and are not chargeable with any one friend, promise an
easy disposition and no rival to the wife's influence. I will not say they
are the best of men, but they are the stuff out of which adroit and
capable women manufacture the best of husbands. It is to be noticed
that those who have loved once or twice already are so much the better
educated to a woman's hand; the bright boy of fiction is an odd and
most uncomfortable mixture of shyness and coarseness, and needs a
deal of civilising. Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden rule), no
woman should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke. It is
not for nothing that this "ignoble tabagie," as Michelet calls it, spreads
over all the world. Michelet rails against it because it renders you
happy apart from thought or work; to provident women this will seem
no evil influence in married life. Whatever keeps a man in the front
garden, whatever checks wandering fancy and all inordinate ambition,
whatever makes for lounging and contentment, makes just so surely for
domestic happiness.

These notes, if they amuse the reader at all, will probably amuse him
more when he differs than when he agrees with them; at least they will
do no harm, for nobody will follow my advice. But the last word is of
more concern. Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts
light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness. They have been so
tried among the inconstant squalls and currents, so often sailed for
islands in the air or lain becalmed with burning heart, that they will risk
all for solid ground below their feet. Desperate pilots, they run their
sea-sick, weary bark upon the dashing rocks. It seems as if marriage
were the royal road through life, and realised, on the instant, what we
have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at night
when we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will sober
and change them. Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it
needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamour for ever. But this is a
wile of the devil's. To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude,
passing faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep
calling and calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in this - that it
is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.
II
HOPE, they say, deserts us at no period of our existence. From first to
last, and in the face of smarting disillusions, we continue to expect
good fortune, better health, and better conduct; and that so confidently,
that we judge it needless to deserve them. I think it improbable that I
shall ever write like Shakespeare, conduct an army like Hannibal, or
distinguish myself like Marcus Aurelius in the paths of virtue; and yet I
have my by-days, hope prompting, when I am very ready to believe
that I shall combine all these various excellences in my own person,
and go marching down to posterity with divine honours. There is
nothing so monstrous but we can believe it of ourselves. About
ourselves, about our aspirations and delinquencies, we have dwelt by
choice in a delicious vagueness from our boyhood up. No one will have
forgotten Tom Sawyer's aspiration: "Ah, if he could only die
TEMPORARILY!" Or, perhaps, better still, the inward resolution of
the two pirates, that "so long as they remained in that business, their
piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing." Here

we recognise the thoughts of our boyhood; and our boyhood ceased -
well, when? - not, I think, at twenty; nor, perhaps, altogether at
twenty-five; nor yet at thirty; and possibly, to be quite frank, we are
still in the thick of that arcadian period. For as the race of man, after
centuries of civilisation, still keeps some traits of their barbarian fathers,
so man the individual is not altogether quit of youth, when he is already
old and honoured, and Lord Chancellor of England. We advance in
years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the
age that we have reached, as the phrase goes, we but hold with an
outpost, and still keep open our communications with the extreme rear
and first beginnings of the march. There is our true base; that is not
only the beginning, but the perennial spring of our faculties; and
grandfather William can retire upon occasion into the green enchanted
forest of his boyhood.
The unfading boyishness of hope and its vigorous irrationality are
nowhere better displayed