Certain Personal Matters | Page 6

as a piece of worldly wisdom, that has
nothing to do with wives, always leave a few duties neglected for the
comfort of your age. There are such a lot of other things one can do
when one is young.
Now, the kind of wife a young fellow of eight- or nine-and-twenty
insists on selecting is something of one-and-twenty or less,
inexperienced, extremely pretty, graceful, and well dressed, not too
clever, accomplished; but I need not go on, for the youthful reader can
fill in the picture himself from his own ideal. Every young man has his
own ideal, as a matter of course, and they are all exactly alike. Now, I
do not intend to repeat all the stale old saws of out-of-date wiseacres.
Most of them are even more foolish than the follies they reprove. Take,
for instance, the statement that "beauty fades." Absurd; everyone
knows perfectly well that, as the years creep on, beauty simply gets
more highly coloured. And then, "beauty is only skin-deep."
Fantastically wrong! Some of it is not that; and, for the rest, is a woman
like a toy balloon?--just a surface? To hear that proverb from a man is
to know him at once for a phonographic kind of fool. The fundamental
and enduring grace of womanhood goes down to the skeleton; you
cannot have a pretty face without a pretty skull, just as you cannot have
one without a good temper.
Yet all the same there is an excellent reason why one should shun
beauty in a prospective wife, at anyrate obvious beauty--the kind of
beauty people talk about, and which gets into the photographers'
windows. The common beautiful woman has a style of her own, a
favourite aspect. After all, she cannot be perfect. She comes upon you,
dazzles you, marries you; there is a time of ecstasy. People envy you,

continue to envy you. After a time you envy yourself--yourself of the
day before yesterday. For the imperfection, the inevitable
imperfection--in one case I remember it was a smile--becomes visible
to you, becomes your especial privilege. That is the real reason. No
beauty is a beauty to her husband. But with the plain woman--the
thoroughly plain woman--it is different. At first--I will not mince
matters--her ugliness is an impenetrable repulse. Face it. After a time
little things begin to appear through the violent discords: little scraps of
melody--a shy tenderness in her smile that peeps out at you and
vanishes, a something that is winning, looking out of her eyes. You
find a waviness of her hair that you never saw at the beginning, a
certain surprising, pleasing, enduring want of clumsiness in part of her
ear. And it is yours. You can see she strikes the beholder with
something of a shock; and while the beauty of the beauty is common
for all the world to rejoice in, you will find in your dear, plain wife
beauty enough and to spare; exquisite--for it is all your own, your
treasure-trove, your safely-hidden treasure....
Then, in the matter of age; though young fellows do not imagine it, it is
very easy to marry a wife too young. Marriage has been defined as a
foolish bargain in which one man provides for another man's daughter,
but there is no reason why this should go so far as completing her
education. If your conception of happiness is having something pretty
and innocent and troublesome about you, something that you can
cherish and make happy, a pet rabbit is in every way preferable. At the
worst that will nibble your boots. I have known several cases of the
girl-wife, and it always began like an idyll, charmingly; the tenderest
care on one hand, winsome worship on the other--until some little thing,
a cut chin or a missing paper, startled the pure and natural man out of
his veneer, dancing and blaspheming, with the most amazing
consequences. Only a proven saint should marry a girl-wife, and his
motives might be misunderstood. The idyllic wife is a beautiful thing to
read about, but in practice idylls should be kept episodes; in practice
the idyllic life is a little too like a dinner that is all dessert. A common
man, after a time, tires of winsome worship; he craves after
companionship, and a sympathy based on experience. The ordinary
young man, with the still younger wife, I have noticed, continues to

love her with all his heart--and spends his leisure telling somebody
else's wife all about it. If in these days of blatant youth an experienced
man's counsel is worth anything, it would be to marry a woman
considerably older than oneself, if one must marry at all. And while
upon this topic--and I have lived long--the ideal wife, I am persuaded,
from the close observation of many