THE

NINETEENTH

CENTURY.

No. CLXXI.-MAY 1891.

THE JUDICIAL SHOCK TO MARRIAGE.

MARRIAGE, as hitherto understood in England, was suddenly abolished one fine morning last month! The compulsory union of two persons for life was reduced to a voluntary union during pleasure! Henceforth any wife may walk off any day from any husband without assigning any reason, and there remains no legal power to compel her return at any time to fulfil her contract. A decree for the restitution of conjugal rights turns out to be mere waste paper. The husband may be left without a wife and without the possibility of taking another.

Police magistrates, as in duty bound, are already proceeding to act in cases brought before them, upon the law as now declared. But a deep shock of surprise and indignation is thrilling through the country. If the law be thus, no time should be lost in amending it.

We know where the prancing desires of the free lovers and the grimmer designs of the woman's rights women would lead us-the one to the destruction of the family by the virtual abolition of marriage, the other to the absolute supremacy of women over men and justice alike. The more sober-minded citizens have hitherto contented themselves with a weighty protest against the mad claims of these two bodies of insurgents, then have put the questions by as idle fancies of no real danger to society-as merely the irresponsible utterances of a few wild women and their hysterical champions on the press. That chaos and universal topsyturvydom should be the ultimate attainment of civilisation seemed too self-stultifying a thesis VOL. XXIX.-No. 171. 3 B

to be worth serious thought; and the natural inclination of the wise to leave folly alone carried the day over that other inclination, just as natural, to stub up young weeds when they begin to grow and before they have seeded, and to knock little serpents on the head.

But it was reserved for a deliberate judgment from the grave judicial bench to show the inexpediency of trusting to natural wisdom and the tendency of things to right themselves. This judgment, upsetting the previous decision of acute reasoners and sound lawyers, has pushed forward by a long stage the exciting struggle for social anarchy which the free lovers and the emancipated women have begun. By it the insurgents have scored. If they have not got all they want they have pocketed a large number of the concessions they have striven for; and the wedge, driven right into the heart of the rooftree of society, has made a very respectable rift indeed.

Now, reluctant wives may not only dance in but may dance off their slack chains to a merry tune. They can snap their fingers in the face of that effete and humiliated old law which once regulated the conditions of married life. That law which suppressed the individual in favour of the institution, and did not attempt the impossible feat of including exceptions in the rule and providing for individual fancies as well as for general conformity, that law is dead. and done with; and in its place the merriest little grig that ever capered over a morass-the very Puck of pleasure and disorderheads the reel to the tune of 'Go as you please.' The wife may now pledge her husband's credit and not contribute to his comfort. She may withdraw herself from his home and not give him the power of a substitute. The law has nothing to say against it. She may break her vows and play at ninepins with her duties, and so long as she keeps clear of the seventh commandment, that one solitary sentinel left to guard the temple of marriage and the sanctities of the home, she may make mince-meat of all the rest. She may live her own life and play for her own hand, and have no more regard for her partner's than the traditional four at bumble-puppy'-those who never answer the call and who head their partner's thirteenth card with the last trump in.

What an exciting time all the discontented Emmas and unappreciated Angelinas are going to have of it! It will be interesting to watch the issue, and what the good sense of society and that somewhat discredited thing we call morality will make of the new rules-whether that good sense, that morality, will prevail over the disastrous license consecrated by our judges, or whether the centrifugal force of the undutiful and selfish will sweep the board.

The worst of the new ruling is the supremacy given to a woman's caprice, while leaving untouched certain evil circumstances which destroy the essential value of marriage. A woman gets bored with her husband and her home-it is a way some women have. She

gets tired of housekeeping-of ordering the day's dinner; of looking after the moths in the blankets, the week's tale of towels; of sewing on tapes and buttons. She therefore betakes herself to some happy hunting-ground where domestic duties exist no more than lions in Lapland. The 'bereaved' cannot get her back again. His mutton chops and beef-steaks may be done to a cinder, or sent up like a Tartar's steak, cooked between the horse and the saddle. Cook, like libellula, may lightly range at her will over the stewpan and the gridiron; and Mary, the housemaid, may neglect her brooms and brushes while she leans out of the window and flirts with the passers-by. There is no one to control, to check, to prevent; and the man who is neither bachelor nor husband drifts over the domestic sea a veritable rudderless and water-logged derelict. The core of his marriage is destroyed, leaving the husk entire, like a tree eaten by white ants. But with the seventh commandment duly honoured he has no redress and she has all freedom. The proverb 'Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée' is as untrue now as is that other about the black swan; for the door of matrimony is neither open nor shut, and he who would close it cannot, and she who will not may keep it as far ajar as she will. Yet, with this wide range given to woman's fancies, drunkenness and madness and felony are kept on the statute book as rational conditions of continuance and as insufficient causes for divorce. The chains binding the miserable partners to these several bodies of death are not unloosed. The gain is solely to the caprice of women, not to anything more solid or important.

6

Not anticipating that the lawless prancers and uneasy malcontents will swamp the main body of faithful, noble-hearted, duty-doing women who make the very life of the nation and keep the sacred fire alight, there is yet no doubt but that this disastrous decision. will be utilised by many who else might have conquered their crisscross impulses and rubbed on with more or less success in the art of self-control. And, indeed, where are the causes of feminine dissatisfaction to cease? Does a husband indulge in that meteorological metropolitan tobacco,' which so strongly roused the royal Gossip's wrath, and has the wife an objection to the filthy weed'? She has but to pack her trunks and retire to some sweet bower of roses and myrtles belonging to a friend, where she will be free from her husband's importunities of affection and impertinencies of selfindulgence. As she has nothing against her moral character and is neither a light o' love nor an atheist, her children while at school will probably be allowed to spend half their holidays with her. When they are sixteen they can choose their own guardian, and may then, if they will, throw over the father and the pipe for the mother and the myrtles.

Again, the aesthetic sense in some women is a powerful factor in

the sum of modern life. Fancy a devotee to half-tones bound to a monster who will wear aniline dyes-say a Magenta tie and a bluestriped flannel shirt with broad-checked green and grey trousers! Think of the delicate ears of a Wagnerian doomed to endure the scraping of a violin, the tootling of a French horn, the groans of a 'cello playing "The girl I left behind me,' with flats for sharps, and twists and twirls like so many ramping worms flipping the strings.. What Rhadamanthus would compel such a one to listen to all these horrors, and not allow her the key of the fields and the right of flight into space? A Soul mismatched with one of the same kind and calibre as the twopenny 'bus young man ; a natural grisette bound to a Psychical Society young man; a thick-skinned rhinoceros who will stick to his bachelor friends-that lumbering old Jack and that h-less 'Arry-on the plea that they have been staunch to him in dark times past, and a fine lady wife with thin nostrils and a short upper lip; a father-in-law who takes snuff; a mother-in-law with her own ideas about perquisites and Sundays out, frankly expressed; a step-son who demands a latch-key, which the father grants and the step-mother would deny all these and more to the back of them are grievances more substantial than the shadowy distaste of the famous Clitheroe paradigm, which seems to have been founded on nothing more solid than the froth of caprice and I have changed my mind.'

Thus the woman wins all round and the man has to digest, as he best can, the bitter herbs offered him by a partial fortune. Bound hand and foot, the humiliated slave at the triumph, the man will now be the true captive of the woman, even more than he is already by the sweets of her bosom and hair,' and the conditions of old Egypt will be repeated. Her fancy will be the working law between them; and what she does not like he must not adopt, under pain of her displeasure and probable withdrawal. She, on her side, may do as she likes-wear her own hideous fashions and follow her own rasping pursuits-but he has no redress. She may prevent his having an heir to his estate-a family to inherit his fortune and carry on his name— and he can only bite his fingers, like an imprisoned giant looking through the bars of his iron cage at the free-skipping wife who, with the help of the law, has put him there, as unable to indemnify as to free himself. If she holds the purse she takes it with her, and the husband may whistle for it-rather longer than the sailor whistles for the wind, which must come at last if only he holds on long enough. If she is penniless he is bound to support her according to the scale of his state and means. Thus the poor down-trodden woman has the best of it all round, according to the late decision. She has the good of both states and the crown of the causeway, thanks to the judgment which allows a wife to free herself from her obligations, but keeps her husband strictly held to his to the end of the chapter.

So now part of the dream of the wild woman, as part of the grim

design of the emancipated, is fulfilled; the sceptre of sovereignty is in the hands of the weaker, and the stronger has to beg for bare justice. Our law lords have destroyed the old balance as completely as if a tornado had passed over a stately shrine and flung the holy image to the winds. No one seems able to exactly predict the result, but that there will be grave results everyone can foresee. Old enactments and time-honoured traditions are not destroyed without some kind of convulsion in the body politic; and radical revolutions are not made as easily as spinning a teetotum along a groove. From that stick no bigger than a man's thumb, and that brutal distich about a woman, a spaniel, and a walnut tree, to absolute freedom from all the obligations of a solemn contract is a wide jumpas wide as the Rubicon and nearly as momentous as the ferry across the Styx. Baron and feme' have lost their signification; and what chivalry did for the ideal world, where all the working conditions of life were inverted, the new decree has done for the actual present.

Modern feeling does not countenance any form of compulsion. We have become soft-hearted and weak-nerved, and pain is more abhorrent than dishonour. 'Fay ce que vouldras' is written on more doors than those of the Abbey of Theleme; and whether you ought or ought not to do what you wish, influences modern action no more than the law of elemental justice influences the cuckoo when it shoulders out the hedge-sparrow's nestlings. Marriage by capture is obsolete. Cows are more to the purpose. To carry off vi et armis a reluctant spouse hurts the public sentiment as much as if the spouse were a spinster and the reclaiming husband a marauding savage with his club in his hand. So far from willing obedience to the bond she herself has voluntarily undertaken to fulfil, the modern wife has been known to throw over the husband altogether, after she has got from the man what she wantede.g. that grand historic title which not so long ago an astute lady purchased with the mere appearance of her wealth-her part of the contract being on all-fours with the sound of the clinked money which paid for the smell of the cook's roast. Like a fool with the instincts of a gentleman and the inconsequence of a rattlebrain, that young étourdi, who had run through all his possessions but his name and title, forgot to demand settlements; in consequence of which, after a few days of matrimony-a very few days— the translated Miss snapped the slender ties she had undertaken to maintain, and went back to her own world as Madame la Duchesse, which was that for which she had married. The young étourdi was emphatically enfoncé. He had nothing for it but to follow his inclinations as they might lead him-devote himself to baccarat or lionnes, or imitate my lord and call to his own special Jerningham for his garters. His interest in the marriage into which he had been duped was at an end. He had no wife; he might have no heir