Unit 13
Marriage
Robert Lynd
people who think, or
Conventional people, ”says Mr. Bertrand Rusll,珠宝鉴定师difficulties in regard to marriage are a new thing.
read this ntence, where one can meet the conventional 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 wer
e 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.
网格化管理系统Their cynical attitude to marriage may be gathered from the enthusiastic reception
they gave to Punch ?s advice to tho about to marry － “Don?t. ”
2 I doubt, indeed, whether the horrors of marriage were ever depicted more
cruelly than during the conventional nineteenth century. The comic papers and
music- halls made the miries a standing dish. “ 阅读区目标Youcan always tell whether a
测量角度
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).
ps通道磨皮三年级上册词语表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:
faceMarried! 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. Eve
n the clergy would go no farther than to say that marriages were made in Heaven. That they did not believe that marriage necessarily ended there is shown by the fact that one of them wrote a - ll“er be什么是灯谜”st bearing the titleHow 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: “ Hewas reputed one of the wi men that made answer to the question when a man should marry: ,A young man not ye t; an
