Married Life as a Theme for Poets [pp. 443-452]

Married Life as a Theme for Poets.
of romance; and that where the circumstances of life are most favourable for
the development of these qualities in action, they are romantic circumstances,
whether the person displaying them be,
like Alton Locke, a tailor; or, like King
Arthur, a man of stalwart arm and lordly presence. Nor do we see that the giants, dragons, and other monsters of the
old romance, are in themselves one whit
more interesting than the obstacles that
beset the true modern knight in his
struggles to perform manfully the duties
of his life, and to carry out the noble
spirit of that vow which he has solemnly
taken at the altar, to love, comfort, honour, and keep in sickness and in health,
the woman who has put her youth, her
beauty, her life, and happiness into his
hands.
It may, however, be said that married
life, when it is not utterly corrupted into
crime and wretchedness; when, that is,
it in any degree answers to its ideal-is
necessarily monotonous; and that,
though to the husband and wife it may
be a perpetual source of discipline and
delight, it offers no scope to the poet,
whose story must march, his characters
develop, and their passions and affections
exhibit change, graduation, and culmination. We have already admitted so
much of this objection, as to concede to
the period before marriage greater facilities for marked gradations of interest depending -on changes in the outward relations of the persons whose fortunes and
feelings are being narrated. We have
said that those outward relations once
fixed by marriage, the action of the poem
which is to depict married love must lie
within narrow limits, and that its interest must depend on more subtile delineation of shades of character and feeling,
on a perception, in a word, of those effects which spring from the conduct of
the affections in married life, and those
influences which circumstance and character combine to work in the affections,
and which, slight and commonplace as
some persons may choose to think them,
are important enough to make human beings happy or miserable, and varied
enough to account for all the differences
that an observant eye can find in modern
family life. And the fact, which few
persons will dispute, that in our actual
family life there is found, quite irrespec tive of distinctions of class and differen ces of wealth, every possible gradation
of happiness and misery, of vulgarity
and refinement, of folly and wisdom, of
genial sense and fantastic absurdity, is a
sufficient answer to those who talk of the
monotony of married life as an objection
to its fitness for yielding materials for po etry. In real truth, there is much more
monotony in courtship than in marriage.
A sort of spasmodic and, to spectators
well acquainted with the parties, a somewhat comic amiability is the general mask
under the genuine features of the character are hidden. Moreover, the ordinary
interests of life become throughout that
period, comparatively insipid; and lovers are proverbially stupid and tiresome
to every one but themselves. No doubt
this has its compensating advantage for
the poet, who transforms his readers into
the lovers for the time being; but it certainly gives monotony to all manifestations of the passion in this its springtime, which is not found in the same passion when the character has recovered
from the first shock, and love, with all its
interests, again enters into the heart, but
invested with new charms and higher
responsibilities, and with the deeper, fuller affections swelling in a steady current
through the pulses.
So much for those more obvious objections that may in great measure account
for the almost universal rejection of married love as a theme for poetry. We do
not care to argue against any one who
says, much less any one who thinks, that
it is only young men and women who are
interesting. Even with respect to mere
sensuous beauty, it is a great absurdity
to suppose that its splendour and charm
are confined to two or three years of early
womanhood. " Beaucoup de femmes de
trente ans," says a shrewd French writer, after enumerating the supposed attractions of youth in women, "ont conserv6 ces avantages; beaucoup de femmes de dix-huit ans ne les ont plus ou ne
les ont jamais en." Certainly no English
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