. millionaire will rush by rail from his country house to his offices, spend the day there in grubbing up materials for more millions (effodiuntur opes), rush back just in time for his splendid unscientific dinner, fall asleep after it, and be as dull as a hog or a log till it is time to breakfast and go to business again. To a man of this sort a wife is merely an apparatus for exhibiting his wealth by wearing fine dresses, riding in fine equipages, presiding at superb banquets. He has no idea of her use in lifebut then he has no idea of his own. These opulent gentry, who amass gold without any notion of how to spend it, are like the pigs employed to hunt for truffles: the ring in the porcine nose preserves the tuber for a daintier palate . . . and the and the money these people get together and lavish in ostentation, though it brings them no happiness, confers happiness on the humbler folk they employ. Acquisitive power scarce ever coëxists with : power to enjoy the money-maker resembles a pump, which brings the water from the depths of the earth to quench the people's thirst. . . but has no palate of its own. I believe that mercantile life can be of a far higher type than this: indeed there is ample proof that it has been so. There have been merchant-princes in England as well as in Venice; men who were the equals of barons and the friends of kings. I will not say that there are none such now; but they are few. Haste to grow rich and a foolish fondness for show are the tendencies which degrade the mercantile character in this century: whether they will diminish it is hard to say-scarcely, I fear, in times of peace and prosperity. I return to what I have called the marriage of completion, contracted between two persons of marriageable age. With health of mind and body, this ought to bring perfect happiness; and clearly it is in the highest degree conducive to health of mind and body. What a man wants in his wife is a second self-a creature whose desires and opinions are gradually fused into an identity with his own. In this process there is no loss of individuality: a girl does not become a woman until she is a wife, does not develop her true character. As I have written elsewhere, this is prefigured in the stories of Pygmalion and of Undine. Every marriage of completion is also a marriage of creation : the husband creates for himself a new entity. This thing must remain a mystery to the uninitiated to those who have not married, or have married only in name: even as in Egypt and in Greece so now there are esoteric truths which cannot be apprehended by all. That what I maintain is true will be acknowledged by all men and women who are truly married. But I can no more show the significance of it to the outer world than I can delight deaf ears with music, or open the windows of infinitude to those who have not the poetic vision. This however I may say to the lover who has found his right companion: when she becomes his wife he will find in her new beauty and intellect and goodness, daily developing under his hand, as the statue grows to perfection in the marble. What there is excellent in him will become hers, though in a softened and feminine form as a great oak by the water side looks the same yet lovelier as reflected in the tranquil depth of the mere. The process doubtless is interpenetrative; he also is changed, but not in the same way, for woman's nature is receptive. An unwedded girl is like the world under a crescent moon -lovely, mysterious, fantastic, capricious, colourless, cold. Lo, the sun rises . . . the bridegroom rejoicing in his strength. . . and the forests tremble with delight, and ocean laughs with infinite foam, and the air is full of the larks' wild songs, and life and love are renewed throughout the land. Every sun rise is a new creation: even so is every marriage of the true kind. It is of primary hymeneal import that the production of children should not be regarded as the chief end of marriage. Life in the present is the only true life. If you prefer your children to yourself, you are living in an uncertain future. Young mothers often make the unfortunate mistake of allowing their children to lessen their attention to their husbands; hence arises a gradual severance between husband and wife, which leads them in time to regard each other with a kind of affectionate indifference. If any maiden who thinks herself in love reads these pages, let me ask her whether she deems it possible that when she is a wife she will love her firstborn better than the man who now seems to her the noblest creature in the world? If she admits such a possibility, either she is incapable of she has not yet met her master. true love, or And if |