Virginibus Puerisque | Page 9

than in questions of conduct. There is a
character in the PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, one Mr.
LINGER-AFTER-LUST with whom I fancy we are all on speaking
terms; one famous among the famous for ingenuity of hope up to and
beyond the moment of defeat; one who, after eighty years of contrary
experience, will believe it possible to continue in the business of piracy
and yet avoid the guilt of theft. Every sin is our last; every 1st of
January a remarkable turning-point in our career. Any overt act, above
all, is felt to be alchemic in its power to change. A drunkard takes the
pledge; it will be strange if that does not help him. For how many years
did Mr. Pepys continue to make and break his little vows? And yet I
have not heard that he was discouraged in the end. By such steps we
think to fix a momentary resolution; as a timid fellow hies him to the
dentist's while the tooth is stinging.
But, alas, by planting a stake at the top of flood, you can neither
prevent nor delay the inevitable ebb. There is no hocus-pocus in
morality; and even the "sanctimonious ceremony" of marriage leaves
the man unchanged. This is a hard saying, and has an air of paradox.
For there is something in marriage so natural and inviting, that the step
has an air of great simplicity and ease; it offers to bury for ever many

aching preoccupations; it is to afford us unfailing and familiar company
through life; it opens up a smiling prospect of the blest and passive
kind of love, rather than the blessing and active; it is approached not
only through the delights of courtship, but by a public performance and
repeated legal signatures. A man naturally thinks it will go hard with
him if he cannot be good and fortunate and happy within such august
circumvallations.
And yet there is probably no other act in a man's life so hot-headed and
foolhardy as this one of marriage. For years, let us suppose, you have
been making the most indifferent business of your career. Your
experience has not, we may dare to say, been more encouraging than
Paul's or Horace's; like them, you have seen and desired the good that
you were not able to accomplish; like them, you have done the evil that
you loathed. You have waked at night in a hot or a cold sweat,
according to your habit of body, remembering with dismal surprise,
your own unpardonable acts and sayings. You have been sometimes
tempted to withdraw entirely from this game of life; as a man who
makes nothing but misses withdraws from that less dangerous one of
billiards. You have fallen back upon the thought that you yourself most
sharply smarted for your misdemeanours, or, in the old, plaintive
phrase, that you were nobody's enemy but your own. And then you
have been made aware of what was beautiful and amiable, wise and
kind, in the other part of your behaviour; and it seemed as if nothing
could reconcile the contradiction, as indeed nothing can. If you are a
man, you have shut your mouth hard and said nothing; and if you are
only a man in the making, you have recognised that yours was quite a
special case, and you yourself not guilty of your own pestiferous career.
Granted, and with all my heart. Let us accept these apologies; let us
agree that you are nobody's enemy but your own; let us agree that you
are a sort of moral cripple, impotent for good; and let us regard you
with the unmingled pity due to such a fate. But there is one thing to
which, on these terms, we can never agree: - we can never agree to
have you marry. What! you have had one life to manage, and have
failed so strangely, and now can see nothing wiser than to conjoin with
it the management of some one else's? Because you have been

unfaithful in a very little, you propose yourself to be a ruler over ten
cities. You strip yourself by such a step of all remaining consolations
and excuses. You are no longer content to be your own enemy; you
must be your wife's also. You have been hitherto in a mere subaltern
attitude; dealing cruel blows about you in life, yet only half responsible,
since you came there by no choice or movement of your own. Now, it
appears, you must take things on your own authority: God made you,
but you marry yourself; and for all that your wife suffers, no one is
responsible but you. A man must be very certain of his knowledge ere
he undertake to guide a ticket-of-leave man through a dangerous pass;
you have eternally