Granted, and with all my heart.Let us accept these apologies; let us agree that you are nobody's enemy but your own; let us agree that you are a sort of moral cripple, impotent for good; and let us regard you with the unmingled pity due to such a fate.But there is one thing to which, on these terms, we can never agree: - we can never agree to have you marry.What! you have had one life to manage, and have failed so strangely, and now can see nothing wiser than to conjoin with it the management of some one else's? Because you have been unfaithful in a very little, you propose yourself to be a ruler over ten cities.You strip yourself by such a step of all remaining consolations and excuses.You are no longer content to be your own enemy; you must be your wife's also.You have been hitherto in a mere subaltern attitude; dealing cruel blows about you in life, yet only half responsible, since you came there by no choice or movement of your own.Now, it appears, you must take things on your own authority: God made you, but you marry yourself; and for all that your wife suffers, no one is responsible but you.A man must be very certain of his knowledge ere he undertake to guide a ticket-of-leave man through a dangerous pass; you have eternally missed your way in life, with consequences that you still deplore, and yet you masterfully seize your wife's hand, and, blindfold, drag her after you to ruin.And it is your wife, you observe, whom you select.She, whose happiness you most desire, you choose to be your victim.You would earnestly warn her from a tottering bridge or bad investment.
If she were to marry some one else, how you would tremble for her fate! If she were only your sister, and you thought half as much of her, how doubtfully would you entrust her future to a man no better than yourself!
Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave.Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.
Suppose, after you are married, one of those little slips were to befall you.What happened last November might surely happen February next.They may have annoyed you at the time, because they were not what you had meant; but how will they annoy you in the future, and how will they shake the fabric of your wife's confidence and peace! A thousand things unpleasing went on in the CHIAROSCURO of a life that you shrank from too particularly realising; you did not care, in those days, to make a fetish of your conscience; you would recognise your failures with a nod, and so, good day.But the time for these reserves is over.You have wilfully introduced a witness into your life, the scene of these defeats, and can no longer close the mind's eye upon uncomely passages, but must stand up straight and put a name upon your actions.And your witness is not only the judge, but the victim of your sins; not only can she condemn you to the sharpest penalties, but she must herself share feelingly in their endurance.And observe, once more, with what temerity you have chosen precisely HER to be your spy, whose esteem you value highest, and whom you have already taught to think you better than you are.You may think you had a conscience, and believed in God;but what is a conscience to a wife? Wise men of yore erected statues of their deities, and consciously performed their part in life before those marble eyes.A god watched them at the board, and stood by their bedside in the morning when they woke; and all about their ancient cities, where they bought and sold, or where they piped and wrestled, there would stand some symbol of the things that are outside of man.These were lessons, delivered in the quiet dialect of art, which told their story faithfully, but gently.It is the same lesson, if you will - but how harrowingly taught! - when the woman you respect shall weep from your unkindness or blush with shame at your misconduct.Poor girls in Italy turn their painted Madonnas to the wall: you cannot set aside your wife.To marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel.Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be good.