XXX. A CONUNDRUM WITHOUT AN ANSWER.

It is always a pretty sure sign that a subject is alive, and although much discussed, never settled when it keeps coming up for fresh discussions, and is always receiving fresh settlements.

Men do not earnestly and angrily discuss the question of the sun rising in the east, although, to be sure, it is not very long since a prophet arose in Pennsylvania to declare that the earth is stationary and the sun revolvant, but as a general thing that subject, as well as the fact that two and two make four, has been settled and laid away some time since along with the veraciousness of George Washington and the supremacy of the American eagle over all the fowl that fly.

Among these ever to be debated and never settled subjects there is not one, especially in our own country, so impossible to decide, so keenly debated, so vehemently decided, first on the one side and then on the other, as divorce.

A large body of persons, and many of them among the very best and wisest of our people, clergymen, statesmen and leaders of public thought, have banded themselves in an anti-divorce league, pledged to use their best endeavors to procure a uniform divorce law in all our States, and that law to be of the most stringent, only allowing divorce for the Scriptural offense, and even in that case not without final proof and great and protracted effort.

Our English cousins, always prone to the conservative course, and as fond of red tape as they are of red beef, until the establishment of Sir Cresswell’s divorce court, have tried this method of rigid legislation upon divorce, and not with the most fortunate results. Look, for instance, at the life of George Eliot. If the English law had set Mr. Lewes free from his profligate wife, he and Mary Ann Evans would have been quietly married according to law, and the great novelist would not have left upon her name a stain which, however affection and respect may gild it, remains precisely the same stain attaching to the name of any other woman who lives with a man legally married to another woman. Or look at Charles Mordaunt, whom the English law refused to set free from a woman whose excesses had driven her to insanity.

On that trial and from other sources it has been all too plainly proven that the rigid English law of divorce of fifty years ago did not succeed in guarding the sanctity of the marriage covenant, or the honor and peace of the family any more effectually that the laxest of our Western State regulations. To say a divorce is more easily procured in New York than in London is absurd—our State being especially rigid—and a New York divorce puts the blame where it is deserved, smirching only the character of the one against whom the judgment is rendered, and forbidding a subsequent marriage by the offending party.

In some parts of the far West it is said one may get a divorce for almost any conceivable cause. I do not vouch for the exactness of this statement, but can well believe it after some “incidents of travel” in the West. Among these was a brief companionship with a young girl of seventeen, hailing from Chicago. After half an hour’s acquaintance this young lady, who was as pretty and as silly as any girl I have ever met anywhere, confided to me that she and “Charlie” made two of a party to visit Milwaukee for the day, and as the theater “kept late” they missed the train they had planned to take home. In this dilemma some one suggested that the young men had better marry the girls, and then it would be quite correct to go to a hotel. Three couples accepted the proposition, and she and Charlie became man and wife after an acquaintance of about a fortnight.

“And where is Charlie now?” ventured I, seeing that the poor child was evidently alone.

“Oh, he’s at home in Chicago,” replied she carelessly. “He’s in a store and don’t get enough to buy his salt, let alone my hats. I reckon I’ll stop East awhile with some friends, and then get a divorce. We were only fooling when we got married, you know, and we don’t get along first-rate anyhow.”

“And what do your parents say about it?” asked I. But the girl tossed her head in pretty scorn at the idea of parental interference.

“I guess they haven’t got much to say about it. Pa’s gone off to Mexico or somewhere, and ma’s just got married again, and is glad to be shut of me. Reckon I can paddle my own canoe without their help.”

Now, between the laxity which renders such a story as this possible—and I assure you it is absolutely a true story—and the rigidity which drove George Lewes and Mary Ann Evans to open defiance of law, there lies a vast distance, a happy medium, wherein, to my mind, the true solution of the problem lies, which again reminds me of a learned joke first narrated and then explained to me by a “gentleman from Boston” during my late Western tour.

It seems that Professor Agassiz, with some other learned pundits of Boston, was unwrapping a recently imported mummy, and disputing as to its being that of a priest, a fact presently established by their coming upon the mummy of an ibis in the midst of the swathings of the human mummy, whereupon Agassiz triumphantly exclaimed:

“Veritas, in medias res tutissima ibis!”

By way of coming down softly from these Athenian heights I will add to this anecdote one from my own experience more familiarly illustrating the same theory. I was having my photograph taken by a very charming foreigner, recently acquainted with the English tongue, and he, after various efforts to get the proper expression upon my face, exclaimed:

“Not too severe and not too smiling, but let us find a happy middling if we would be perfect.”

One would not of course be flippant upon a subject like this, involving as it does the deepest and most vital interests of so many human beings, and although it has undeniably its humorous side, the general aspect is one of profound sadness and perplexity.

Two persons marry. Perhaps they are in the first flush of youth, with all sorts of rose-colored ideals confidently set before their eyes, or perhaps they are older, and having already known sorrow and disappointment and disillusionment, fancy they have at last found a companion whose sympathy and comradeship are to make up for a great deal of what is forever lost. In either case the contract, at least on the woman’s part, is made with full intention of fulfilling its obligations. She repeats her vow of constancy “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, till death do us part,” with a sense of joyful security and certainty. The drifting is over, the loneliness and forlornness past. Never, never again will she stand in the twilight, murmuring that threadbare yet ever new lament:

And the man, if he be a true and honorable man, as he turns from the altar tells himself that in this hour a new life must begin for him—the old follies and vices must be forsworn, the old companions forgotten, the old crooked ways be made straight and clean. He has promised to “love, cherish and protect” this woman, “and forsaking all others keep himself only unto her so long as both shall live”—solemn words and a large promise, but he means it all—at least we will hope most bridegrooms do.

They go home, and life begins, and for some, perhaps one-half of those wedded couples, the early promise and the solemn vows become realities—at least, we will say, approximate realities—and time, the effacer and the reconciler, smooths over the shortcomings and buries the memory of those lofty ideals, and brings a certain cynical philosophy into the life and so makes of it not what was expected, not what was planned, but something tolerable and moderately satisfactory—at least as good as the lives of other people around about, and—yes, well enough, let us say.

Out of this great mass of mankind there are a few, a very few, married couples who do really fulfill their ideals and find life just what they had hoped, just what they had planned. They are fully satisfied and go about the world gloating over their own happiness and flaunting it in the faces of other people in a fashion that would be exasperating, if it were not so pathetic.

Now, this class of persons look upon divorce as near akin to murder or sacrilege or madness. They cannot in the least understand how anybody once admitted to the paradise of matrimony could ever wish to leave it or to drive their other self out of its dear inclosure. They speak with bated breath or with uplifted eye-brows and whispers of holy horror and dismay as they wonder what strange sort of beings those may be, and finally giving up the gloomy conundrum, turn with a sigh of relief to throw themselves into each other’s arms and “thank with brief thanksgiving whatever powers may be” that they are not like other men.

Returning to that great class of married people who just get on after a fashion, with a good deal of bickering and a good many spoken or unspoken doubts as to whether marriage is worth while or not, we find them also opposed to divorce, but from a different standpoint than the little clique of paradisians just described. They thoroughly recognize why some people wish to be divorced. They are more or less frankly conscious of occasionally wishing to be so themselves, but they have never said so aloud, and the bitterness of their opposition to this mode of relief is that they do not care to see others rid themselves of a burden which they have made up their minds to bear. It is just the dog in the manger over again. “I can’t eat this clover, and so you sha’n’t,” says the dog to the ox, and sometimes the ox is scared away and gives up his proposed banquet.

“If I can get along with Tom, I imagine you can with Dick, and so can you with Harry,” says one of these philosophers to her sisters who are whispering about divorce, and then, warming with her topic, she reads them a lecture upon the sinfulness and the shamefulness and the general depravity of the woman who will see her name “dragged through a divorce court,” and the duty of every wife to submit with patience and sweetness to her marriage lot, whatever it may turn out to be, and if she can’t reform her husband, to win him over by the exhibition of her own virtues until he falls in love with goodness and forsakes vice, and “all goes happy ever after.”

Yes, these discontented and yet obstinately “staying” wives are the bitterest and most virulent opposers of divorce, and do very possibly effect some good by dragooning their feebler sisters into a submission that not infrequently ends in a half bitter, half indifferent acquiescence in a fate very different from what was hoped, and yet not too bad to be endured with some sort of philosophical content. To wives of this class—in fact, of all three of the classes just described—I say: Stay where you are. Be satisfied with the frying-pan and don’t jump into fire. Bear the ills you have and do all that you can to alleviate them. Above all, if you have children, sacrifice your own worn and weary life to their fresh young promise. A woman who has borne a child has in a manner pledged herself to bear for that child what she would not bear for herself; and great strength comes from a heavy burden well borne. That is the way the Italian women acquire their queenly poise.

But there is still another class, and a large one, to whom I would not proffer this advice; to whom I would rather say: Save yourselves while you can—women without children and without obligations except the marriage vows, which have been flung back upon them, shattered and soiled by him who had sworn to hold them sacred and inviolate “so long as ye both shall live,” When this day comes to any wife, the day when she finds her home ruined, her womanhood insulted, her self-respect outraged; when she finds that her petitions, her tears, her arguments and her warnings alike are scoffed and disregarded; when she sees that she can do nothing to elevate the man who persistently degrades himself and drags her down with him; when she fears that blows may be added to cursing and coarseness, then my advice to that woman is, appeal to the law for a release from a union which has become a slavery; annul the contract broken and despised by the other contracting party; be free.

Every legal covenant is made dependent upon the mutual honesty and good faith of the covenanters, and if one fails to fulfill his stipulated obligation the other is released, often with a compensation for his disappointment.

Is not marriage a contract worthy of as much protection as the copartnership agreement of a firm of grocers or brokers?

Let us do nothing either rashly or with too much prejudice or conservatism. Let us, if we would achieve success, seek “the happy middling” between these two extremes.

While harmless as doves do not let us forget to be also wise as serpents.