Non-Fiction > Uncollected essays > Volumes 33-38, 1876-1878 - Cornhill magazine > Volume 34

176 "VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE."
It is to le notice:! that those who have loved once or twice ah-cady 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 coarse-
ness, and needs a deal of civilising. Lastly (and this is, j^erhaps, 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 veiy awfulness. They have been so
tried among the inconstant squalls and currents, so often sailed for
islands in the air or lain becalmed with bui'ning heai-t, 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 desii-e of living. They think it
will sober and change them. Like those who join a brothei'hood, 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, sjiring Avinds will sow
disquietude, passing faces leave a regi-et 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.
E. L. S.