Unit 13
Marriage
Robert Lynd
1 “Conventional people,” says Mr. Bertrand Rusll, “like to pretend that difficulties in regard to marriage are a new thing.” I could not help wondering, as I read this ntence, where one can meet the conventional people who think, or pretend to think, as conventional people do. I have known hundreds of conventional people, and I cannot remember one of them who thought the things conventional people em to think. They were all, for example, convinced that marriage was a state bet with difficulties, and that the difficulties were as old, if not as the hills, at least as the day on which Adam lost a rib and gained a wife. A younger generation of conventional people has grown up in recent years, and it may be that they have a rosier conception of marriage than their ancestors; but the conventional people of the Victorian era were under no illusions on the subject. Their cynical attitude to marriage may be gathered from the enthusiastic reception they gav
梯形拼图e to Punch’s advice to tho about to marry － “Don’t.”
2I doubt, indeed, whether the horrors of marriage were 发型设计与脸型搭配ever如何做好电话销售 depicted 贴对联的顺序more
cruelly than during the conventional nineteenth century. The comic papers and music-halls made the miries a standing dish. “You can always tell whether a man’s married or single from the way he’s dresd,” said the comedian. “Look at the single man: no buttons on his shirt. Look at the married man: no shirt.” The humour was crude; but it went home to the honest Victorian heart. If marriage were to be judged by the songs conventional people ud to sing about it in the music- halls, it would em a hell mainly populated by twins and leech-like mothers-in-law. The rare experiences of Darby and Joan were, it is true, occasionally hymned, reducing strong men smelling strongly of alcohol to reverent silence; but, on the whole, the audience felt more normal when a comedian came out with an anti- marital refrain such as:
O why did I leave my little back room In Bloomsbury,
Where I could live on a pound a week In luxury
(I forget the next line).
滚桶洗衣机
But since I have married Maria,
I’ve jumped out of the frying-pan Into the blooming fire.
3 No difficulties? Why, the very nigger-minstrels of my boyhood ud to open their performance with a chorus which began:
选种Married! Married! O pity tho who’re married. Tho who go and take a wife must be very green.
4 It is possible that the comedians exaggerated, and that Victorian wives were not all viragos with pokers, who beat their tipsy husbands for staying out too late. But at least they and their audiences refrained from painting marriage as an inevitable Paradi. Even the clergy would go no farther than to say that marriages were made in Heaven. Th
at they did not believe that marriage necessarily ended there is shown by the fact that one of them wrote a “best-ller” bearing the title How to Be Happy Though Married.
5 I doubt, indeed, whether common opinion in any age has ever looked on marriage as an untroubled Paradi. I consulted a dictionary of quotations on the subject and discovered that few of the opinions quoted were ro-coloured. The opinions, it may be objected, are the opinions of unconventional people, but it is also true that they are opinions treasured and kept alive by conventional people. We have the reputed saying of the henpecked Socrates, for example, when asked whether it was better to marry or not: “Whichever you do, you will repent.” We have Montaigne writing: “It happens as one es in cages. The birds outside despair of ever getting in; tho inside are equally desirous of getting out.” Bacon is no more prenuptial with his caustic quotation: “He was reputed one of the wi men that made answer to the question when a man should marry: ‘A young man not yet; an elder man not at all.’” Burton is far from encouraging! “One was never married, and that’s his hell; another is, and that’s his plague.” Pepys scribbled in his diary: “Strange to say what delight we married people have to e the poor folk decoyed into
our condition.”
6 The pious Jeremy Taylor was as keenly aware that marriage is not all bliss. “Marriage,” he declared, “hath in it less of beauty and more of safety than the single life － it hath more care but less danger; it is more merry and more sad; it is fuller of sorrows and fuller of joys.” The ntimental and optimistic Steele can do no better than: “The marriage state, with and without the affection suitable to it, is the completest image of Heaven and Hell we are capable of receiving in this life.”
7Rousau denied that a perfect marriage had ever 别浪费been known. “I have often
