When I dine out and look around me, or when I am present at any other social function at which men and their wives appear in unmistakeable couples, the infinite variety of married people affects me strongly. There they all are, Mrs Anderson who simply exists to provide a stout and comfortable background for her picturesque husband, fragile Mrs Conkling whose pathetic anxiety to bring out her angular husband’s laboured wit would be tiresome if it were not so genuinely maternal, Lady Manville of the truly refined apprehensions who puts up so complacently with an irritable snob, Mrs Fitzmaurice who pants to live up, and Mrs Dobbs who does not trouble to live down, to the man whose name she carries, Mrs Cantelupe who mentally embraces the doctor, and Mrs Martingale who openly snubs the Major, and many more of them, all with nothing in common but that they are English wives. One might imagine the existence of some subtle common bond that would unite the persons who had gone in for so definite a profession—at least for a woman—as matrimony. Yet it does not seem obvious even to the most acute perception. If it were more obvious the question would not so often insolubly put itself how such and such persons ever come to marry at all. True, there are many married people who have to so successful a measure assimilated one another that it is an impossible effort to imagine them otherwise than married, yet in their case a more subtle form of the question is often suggested, as to the spirit and the emotion with which they first determined to unite their destinies. Further investigations into the subconscious may in time reveal the deep mysteries of affinity, real or imagined, but at present a dark curtain hangs over them. It cannot be mere luck that makes an English wife. The Englishman has a national, as well as an individual, quality. His chief consoler and supporter, therefore, is likely to have some national quality too, whether it dimly exists from the beginning in a maidenly consciousness, or whether it grows in the married state as a natural result of the contiguity. A Frenchman, or a French woman, who had as sure a touch as the author of “Les Silences du Colonel Bramble,” might throw some light on the nature of this essential quality, but for an Englishman the task is too difficult to be formally attempted. The best he could contribute would be sidelights and reflections.

A man may well ponder, as he seldom does, on the change of identity undergone by a woman who takes another name on signing the register. In general, the sacrifices and accommodations involved in marriage are mutual. If the woman loses some independence, the man loses more; the elimination of caprice is equal for both, though one may eliminate more freely than the other; the community of goods and persons hits, on the whole, both sides equally; both are vulnerable in the same degree by ills affecting their complement. But a woman loses her maiden name, and the man makes no equivalent sacrifice. The possibility of so doing would hardly strike him, for the assumption of a new identity is to him almost inconceivable. It would appear strange to him, indeed, if the case were reversed, and that ever after marriage he should feel about himself the implied question “Who was he?” Men feel that there is so little about themselves that requires explanation, a fact which accounts for what is to women their extraordinary want of curiosity about one another. Men take one another for granted as they take themselves: were this state of things altered it would be tantamount to a revolution. Men’s clubs, which flourish on the assumption of the individual’s unalterable identity and a nebulous tolerance of most of his general social connections, would find the new flavour of enigma too disruptive for their continuance in comfort. There is no getting over this difference by any amount of tact. The most unassuming of men, the most diffident, amplifies his personality in marriage, casting his name, like a protective cloak, round the person whom he has chosen with a generous finality which makes any inquiry as to the nature of her former covering theoretically superfluous. But the woman, however fondly she may cherish the garment of her maiden name, even to the extent of showing it at every opportunity through the chance openings of her new covering, has accepted a restriction as she has accepted a label. A man’s appellation or title reveals nothing of his private state, but a married woman’s name is a sign to all the world that she is, or has been, wrapped in the mantle of a man.

This act of envelopment, performed in the marriage ceremony, is infinitely symbolic, allegorical, susceptible of amplification to any sentimental or moral tune that you please. It is the commonplace of the “few well-chosen words” to which married couples have to submit from the steps of the altar. The symbol and the allegory, the moral and the sentiment, are, however, less interesting than the actual degree of reality which attends and follows the act. The grace or otherwise which a wife imparts to the folds of the mantle around her is one of the tests of proficiency in the married profession. It is a test out of which the English wife comes very well; much better for instance than the German, who accepts the covering with thankfulness and humility, poking out a meek head now and then but otherwise only amplifying, as the years go on, the circumference of the garment; whereas the American assimilates the whole garment to herself with any amount of dash, leaving it to her partner to supply the motive power and fill the pockets, while taking up as little room as he conveniently can,—and the American man’s capacity for social compression is as striking as his capacity for commercial expansion.

The Englishwoman wears her mantle neither selfishly nor cringingly: she appropriates her part of it with a natural dignity which so incorporates it with herself that the imagination almost fails to grasp the fact of her ever having been without it. She is by no means indifferent to the fall of its folds round her own figure, taking a good deal of pride and trouble in the arrangement of them, but her self-consciousness in this respect does not make her forgetful of the figure cut by her partner. She insists that the elegance of his posture, which she would be the first to exaggerate, shall be unimpaired by any extravagance on her part which might strain the buttons or mar the flowing lines of the side which he presents to the world. It is rather a heavy mantle that the Englishman throws, a solid article in tweed or homespun, not lightly to be shifted and apt to be impervious to gentle breezes as well as to more blustering elements: but if the Englishwoman inevitably feels at times a trifle overpowered and would gratefully welcome the respite of a button or two, she is not given to any awkward wriggles of betrayal or to moppings of the brow in public. In private the owner of the mantle may have, for his good, to be aware of sharp elbows, and even to submit in domestic seclusion to the terrifying total emergence from the common garment of an overheated partner; but, after this salutary breathing space, he usually finds no reluctance on her part to re-assume and rearrange the folds. He can, in fact, rely upon his wife to minimise any possible appearance of misfit, since an Englishwoman resents above all any diminution of the common dignity, by which she means her husband’s dignity more than her own. No wives are more proud of their husbands nor more anxious that the world should appreciate them at their true worth: for failure in this respect they are readier to blame the world’s obtuseness than any defect in their own estimate.

The English wife’s greatest disappointment, perhaps, is that her husband should fail to do himself justice by any fault of his own. She will carry him gaily through failure after failure so long as her own confidence is unimpaired, repairing the cuts and mending the holes worn by unlucky tumbles so skilfully, in the happiest instances, as even to escape his own eye; but if he slip through mere blundering awkwardness, through diffidence or through shortsightedness in missing the step obviously to be taken, then indeed she is smitten to the heart, for has it not destroyed the great illusion, which she might be the first to suspect but the last to give up, that it is he who is carrying her through?

It is remarkable how this illusion persists, when it is an illusion, on the part of a man, without his suspecting the reverse of the illusion to be the truth, as it may sometimes be. The indignant refusal to desert Mr Micawber was less, we may suspect (though he did not), due to a sense of his protection than to an agonised fear on his behalf. Yet, even at the best, when a man does his fair share, even to a degree of enviable brilliance, of carrying through, the amount contributed by his wife towards diminishing her own and his dead weight is not so widely recognised. A man, certainly an Englishman, is a costly engine which requires a great deal of attention if the best is to be got out of it: the feeding, coaxing, tuning up, adjustment and lubrication that he constantly needs is enough to occupy one woman’s time for most of a year. If he has never had it, he contrives to run along smoothly enough with the attentions of well paid hirelings who see to his physical lubrication, leaving the mental and emotional gear to look after itself. But once he has it, he surrenders to its need. Thenceforward he has nothing to do but to make his daily run in the outer world knowing that a far more efficient and faithful attendant is waiting to adjust any part of his gear that may have got shaken or damaged in the course of the day. He would pretend to himself, I dare say, that he performs similar services in return to his attendant, but he would find it hard to substantiate his claim. The man returns from the day’s work with the sense of having thrown off a burden till the next morning. Seldom has a woman any similar sensation. Her burden, if less exhausting, is practically continuous: she must sort out her pile of cares and get to the bottom of them daily, for a household will not tolerate the arrears which grow with impunity in a man’s office. If a man felt the same responsibility for his wife’s welfare as she for his, his burden, too, would be continuous. Nature is kind to him in this respect, or perhaps she is only wise. If he is to do most of the public work of the world, he must be allowed to be a trifle impervious to the need for the private adjustments which are, strictly speaking, in his province. He will be excused, even profusely visited with thanks, if he show sympathy and gratitude. Who knows if the English wife gets enough of these commodities, since she will seldom confess to their deficiency? That her deserts are great no Englishman will deny, more than ever since the war, which saw poignant anxiety, intensity of nervous strain, every kind of economic difficulty and an incalculable increase in the coefficient of domestic friction added to her normal lot. She bore it all with courage, neither losing her presence of mind nor diminishing her dignity; and though some hastily assumed and badly stitched matrimonial mantles may have shown the strain of the violent disruption during periods of the war, the majority showed what very serviceable garments in time of stress they really were, capable of almost infinite elasticity without the straining of a fibre, warming him in the camp and her in her lonely bed.

During the war the English wife kept the English home going, and at all times it is she who is the centre of the English home. This fact alone would give her a unique position among wives, for the English home is unique. If the man maintains it, the woman gives it its peculiar character, and the character is one which at once impresses itself upon all foreign observers. What the Englishwoman preserves, what she warms, one might almost say, with her blood, is not a dining-room for her husband, a nursery for her children, a drawing-room for herself and a sleeping place for them all; it is not even only a focus for purely family radiations to concentrate themselves upon; still less is it just a background to set off the more agreeable side of life, carefully concealing the obscure and dusty delvings that make it possible. All these elements come into it, but there is much more. It is the symbol of British hospitality, that spring of unsuspected warmth in a traditionally cold nation, which guards its privacy fiercely that it may share it without embarrassment. There is no stiffness in its welcome, no constraint in its entertainment: that its guests should for a moment forget their guesthood is its wish and its triumph. In this triumph the woman has the greater share. However much her husband may have invited, it is she who entertains. Her husband’s friendships are to that extent in her keeping, for the masculine link that he has strained in marrying cannot be reforged by his own good fellowship alone.

Charles Lamb complained humorously of the behaviour of married people in this respect, but his complaints have no great body in them. A friendship that depended mainly upon bachelor roysterings must inevitably suffer by a roysterer’s marriage, but to accuse the English wife of wishing to destroy what is valuable in her husband’s feelings for other men or women is to do her an injustice. Indeed, I have often found the anxiety of English wives to prove the contrary almost pathetic, and it may be advanced as a reasonable proposition that the man who exchanges his welcome in a bachelor flat for one in an English home has the better of the exchange. The note of the English home, except in its most ceremonial moments, is domesticity, not a domesticity of shirtsleeves and happy-go-luckydom, but one in which the domestic affections do not find it necessary to run and hide themselves in the closet when the frontdoor bell rings, and in which an increase in the steam pressure of the domestic machinery is not obviously made for the comfort of added society. The guest slides into an English home, be it for an evening or for a month, as easily as a new leaf is slid into the dining-room table. If any sacrifices are made on his behalf, it is a matter of pride that he should be unaware of them: if his pleasures are consulted it is, for him, with the assurance that the meeting of them would only be an extension, the most natural in the world, of the admirable activities of his host and hostess.

Few Englishwomen, perhaps, could preside in a salon, but nearly all can infuse cheerful ease into a gathering of guests, whether it be at a house party or a humble Sunday supper. Lady Monkshood, who puts me at once at ease when I am ushered into a room full of opulent and unknown strangers of a Saturday afternoon at The Hall, sheds no ray by one atom warmer than little Mrs Periwinkle who keeps a piece of cold beef and some stewed fruit going on Thursdays in the Temple for any scribbling folk who care to drop in. And both of them, Lady Monkshood and Mrs Periwinkle, have this in common, that there is no corner of the globe in which they show to greater advantage than in the room where they welcome their friends. The Englishwoman’s home is her most perfect setting, and those who do not know her in it know her not. She grows into it, by some wonderful instinct of Englishwomen, irradiating it and letting it irradiate her. Her husband may show to more advantage in spacious and crowded scenes, but if she look not well at her own table she will look well nowhere: for in the house that she has made her own, built up and ruled, among the “things” that are so part of herself that she can hardly leave them without a pang, even for the joy of returning to them with rapture, watching the service which answers her will and the faces which reflect her love, an added grace is given to her figure, a brightness to her eyes and a melody to her voice. The homes of England go far to make England herself, they are her mystic source of strength, her pledge of security. Not all are splendid, not all have ease; care knocks daily at the door of too many, as poverty too often dims their lustre: but within them all the same essential quality shines out, of hospitality without ceremony, comfort without extravagance, intercourse without parade; and the Englishwoman with her unostentatious pride, her wistful solicitude, her rather unresponsive mind and her extremely sensitive heart is there at the centre.

Wherefore those misguided women are to be reprobated who, having the means at their disposal to create an English home, use them to produce the illusion of a cosmopolitan hotel. This crime, whether it be due to American influence and example, or only inspired by the mad desire to spend an unnecessary amount of money, must fortunately be rare, if it is unfortunately conspicuous. It is almost impossible to believe that one of English blood who in youth has known any of the spell thrown over the existence of those who share it by an English home can have the misguided courage to banish voluntarily so much that is precious from their life. A home can be rich as well as poor, as complete in a palace as in a cottage, but those who land themselves in great houses which they cannot assimilate, filling them with objects for which they have neither affection nor reverence, creating no atmosphere but that of magnificence, asking for no service but that of well-paid but stingily given obsequiousness, who gather guests as carelessly as the footman shovels coal and disperse them as nonchalantly as the housemaid scatters ashes, having thrown before them all the impersonal luxuries of which a Ritz can boast—those are the people who have forgotten what home, what comfort, what cosiness, what an English hearth, an English gathering round an English fire, an English muffin, an English welcome can be to those who have not lost one of the most desirable sweets of their nationality, how gracious their appeal to the happily present, how warm and soothing their memory to the unwillingly absent.

The inner light, however, the participation in a perfect spirit and a peculiar, fine-flavoured quality, which distinguishes the English home does not, I fear, carry with it an irreproachability in externals. Here the English wife is perhaps less admirable. The temperamental harmony of the home so often is somewhat oddly contrasted with the decorative inharmoniousness of its material objects. Let me hasten to admit that when the Englishwoman has taste in her choice of a setting for herself she has very good taste indeed. She can achieve, at her best, with her mise en scÈne, her hangings, her furniture, her colours, her pictures, her ornaments, the same successful temperamental fusion that she achieves in her personal relations. She can create the appearance in a room of being continuously and gracefully inhabited, of having come together in all its parts inevitably, not for show but for the plainer usages of life, and yet keep it fresh and unruffled, free from the dusty footmarks of yesterday as from the odour of yesterday’s meals. The drawing-room or sitting-room of an enlightened English woman is neither a salon, awful in its bleak precision, nor simply a feminine boudoir, beflowered and rustling like a robe de chambre to which the entry of a man, even of a husband, takes on the air of a gallantry or an intrusion. It remains sacred to the woman, yet rather as the main sanctuary of the household of which she is the priestess than as the holy of holies; and, in this connection, it is interesting to remark that the English woman, as a rule, has no visible inner sanctuary. She carries it, I suspect, so securely in her own heart that her writing table and her workbox are sufficient to contain its material overflow. This capacity for fusion is naturally most remarkable when it is Æsthetic as well as temperamental, but striking success on the side of temperament will carry off a wonderful measure of Æsthetic incongruity. There are rooms that I know full of conventional horrors, all photographs and sham Chippendale, easy chairs and uneasy tables, that I would not have changed for the world for the sake of the friend who animates them. Yet it must be confessed that the majority of our women have little taste in the appointments of a house. A long and bad Victorian tradition may to some extent account for this, but it is due also to a want of clearness in balancing the claims of comfort and beauty, and to a certain practical hastiness, a kind of unselfish frugality, which forbids them to spend too much forethought on what is not in itself immediately useful.

Much may be forgiven, no doubt, to those who can afford little, but might they not at least make better use of the space which the builder has given them, not by filling every inch of it, but by letting it do a little more work unhindered? Most English rooms give one the sense of being hemmed in on every side by the furniture and of being at all points afflicted by a multiplicity of objects which seem unable to give any satisfactory explanation of their presence to any interested observer. This mania for overcrowding rooms is not confined to any one stratum of society: the millionairess who encumbers herself with Chinese porcelain, Chelsea figures, brocade cushions and satinwood tables suffers from it just as badly as the greengrocer’s wife whose parlour, with its photographs of all possible relations, its glass vases dangling prisms, its presents from various seasides, its mats, antimacassars and footstools, has hardly a spare inch of space uncovered. We have not much to learn from the Japanese, I believe, but a touch of their unfailing eye for the proper effect of simplicity and congruity would be an excellent addition to the Æsthetic equipment of the Englishwoman, just as in dress she owes herself a lesson from the Frenchwoman in the art of completeness in every detail from hat and hair to shoes. In matters of decoration, domestic as well as personal, the Englishwoman is a good improviser but a bad composer.

It might seem unnecessary to dwell at all on what the English wife takes from her husband and what she gives him, seeing that we are a race of the most frantic writers and readers of novels under the sun. Nevertheless it would be impossible in this chapter to omit the conjugal relation which, while it reflects in its changes the manners of different generations, remains all through something essentially English. The humility of the mediÆval chÂtelaine which persisted in the ceremonious respect of a Duchess of Newcastle for her “dear lord,” and the rather pompous solemnity of the early nineteenth century with which Mrs Briggs addressed “Mr Briggs” as such even in his portly presence are now things of the past, having fled scandalised before the easy familiarity of more modern husbands and wives: but there would appear less difference than might be supposed if the Duchess of Newcastle beloved by Lamb could exchange sentiments with a wife of to-day. They would find, in particular, a common fund of that protective tenderness which is characteristic in the attitude of an Englishwoman to her husband, whom she regards in some aspects as a mother regards her son strutting in his first pair of trousers before admiring friends: she adores his grown up airs and would not reveal to him for worlds that he is not yet quite capable of looking after himself. It is for this that she puts up so kindly with his idiosyncracies, not because he is a man whose will is law and whose whims are not to be questioned. She feels that she is to some extent responsible for him, not only in the home, but in the outer world: to the wise fairy who orders his domestic interior she adds the character of interpreter whose aim is to reveal his promising social exterior to a possibly unappreciative audience, much in the manner that a bilingual Hottentot, producing a white man before his tribe, would give them to understand that he came in every way up to the best Hottentot standards of good manners and capability. In the same spirit she is ever ready to act as his shock-absorber, ready to undergo every compression on her own part for the sake of his smoother daily progress.

A man, though he might naturally wish to do so, cannot act as a buffer for his wife except in the greater shocks of life where the strain on the joint machine is much eased by any elasticity on his part: the smaller jars and jolts occur in the home where he is inevitably the passenger. It is she upon whom falls the daily impact of breakages, leakages of domestic energy, minor and unceasing adjustments and all the host of inquiries which may be generically described as the "Pleas’m"s. If she is occasionally exasperated at the complacency with which he receives the service, she has the good sense to reflect that if the passenger were continually worrying about the feelings of the springs he would never have the heart to drive anywhere at all; and, since he is unavoidably there in the seat, it is better that he should get up some momentum than subject the springs to the motionless pressure of his own dead weight.

The English wife does not exact a punctilious politeness from her husband, which is only an instance of the general difficulty that English people experience in associating polished manners with familiarity. Politeness for them is a mark of distance, and its use in any degree of social proximity has the air of hoisting a telescope to see one’s friends across a table: it is a source, even, of suspicion, and there are few of us sufficiently enlightened not to feel almost unconsciously the “Garn, ’oo are yer gettin’ at?” which rises to the lips of our less cultured citizens on being treated to any address at all elaborately flavoured. There is sound sense, not merely boorishness, at the bottom of this instinctive suspicion, for forms and ceremonies are at their best a mask to conceal more natural emotions, though we do not always too nicely judge the moments when these emotions might be more profitably concealed than revealed. At the same time, the English wife expects a good deal of attention from the man who, presumably, first won her by his attentions, and feels aggrieved if she does not get it. The English husband—and he would be the first to admit it—is expected to remain l’amant de sa femme and to abound in those attentions great and small which are easily prompted by the emotion of passionate love, but sprout less eagerly from the more solid but less exciting relation of the ami, in the conjugal sense of that word. The happiest wife has her amant and ami in one, and she is slow, for all that the novelists and dramatists may say, to look for the former away from home. Most of our country women are more ready to face the great disillusionment with resignation than to seek a new revelation as an antidote. But it is not easy to destroy the illusions of an Englishwoman or, as it may be better put, they are not often totally destroyed. One reason for this, perhaps the chief, is that neither the Englishman nor Englishwoman have, in early life, formed a passionate ideal of l’amour to be destroyed in the process of daily realisation. They regard the prospect of “settling down” with equanimity, having usually had before their eyes an example of the amount of tenderness and affection which attend the settlement, and being too practical to imagine themselves ever taking desperate and decisive action to assuage a merely emotional longing for an intangible something. We are too ready adventurers in the realm of the concrete to waste our energy on less promising quests in the realm of ideas. All our adventures, marriage included, have a practical aim which keeps our roving desires in a fairly domesticated condition, like house terriers who hunt a rabbit now and then rather than greyhounds for ever straining at the leash. The English wife views her husband’s rabbit hunts with the complacency of a good mistress, quite ready to admire the good figure that he cuts, provided the chase is not tiresomely prolonged. She will even allow the rabbits to make a polite semblance of being caught, so long as it is perfectly understood that it is all a game and so long as they do not too shamelessly wait for their pursuer. She does not claim so much indulgence for herself, knowing that her husband’s progress is a serious walk rather than an amiable constitutional, and that the distraction caused by having to turn and whistle after a rabbit-hunting companion would be too trying for his temper. It is usually enough for her to let him suspect her virtuously avoided opportunities, with a hint of her successful chases before she caught him.

Mr H. G. Wells, in a series of novels after the “New Machiavelli,” tried to make us believe that the triangular drama was as common in England as in other nations, and quite as well suited to our ordinary habits. It was a foolish attempt to ascribe the passions of the few to the temperaments of the many. Wives of Sir Isaac Harman and Passionate Friends are no more characteristically English than Don Quixote, except in an extremely attenuated sense. There are people in London, also conspicuous at the Russian ballet, who find a diversion in a display of promiscuity, though they are a small and despicable section of the community: but the seeker after a maximum of loves and lovers is not the typical Englishman or woman, just as Mr Walter Sickert’s back bedrooms and lumbar nudities are not typical English scenery. No doubt, as a nation, we are sexually unimaginative, which leads us into a false puritanism, makes our marriage laws grossly unfair, hinders enlightened attempts to amend them, and complacently allows the worst of all diseases to do its fell work upon the population. But eroticism, we may be thankful, is alien to us, particularly as any attempt to translate eroticism into adequate or possible social terms is bound to be, as Mr Wells shows, a dismal failure. The English woman and the English man, like all others of the species, are liable to be misled by their physical desires, but their good sense and their innate domesticity are too strong to countenance any hasty experiments in the relations which they consider sacred and vital. It is good philosophy, surely, to take things as they are, not as you might wish them to be. It is the athletic activity, the courage, the practical energy of the Englishwoman which make her, possibly, ascetic in her imagination and prim even in her abandonments. To a Frenchman it is always problematical whether a given woman is virtuous, to an Englishman her virtue is a natural assumption: the difference indicated in the women of the two nations is obvious. The Englishwoman can answer the reliance of the man with a self-reliance which is one of her most charming qualities; the Frenchwoman can only answer her countrymen’s suspicion by an elaborate avoidance of any appearance of justifying it: and the mind of the latter is occupied with infinite possibilities the absence of which from the mind of the average Englishwoman allows her to be more spontaneous, if also more frivolous. In the future of feminism, they will get over their frivolity quicker than their French sisters with their excessive caution, and, without the showy exuberance of the American sister, will give the most solid contribution to the welfare of the human race. In marriage, which also purges frivolity, the Englishwoman has already shown the measure of her strength and of her wisdom. If, prone to material waste and putting sentiment before utility, she has yet to become an adept in the theory of social economy, her practical instinct, aided by her admirable economy of emotion, make her by temperament and by experience a woman of action, a staunch comrade and an agreeable companion. She is fitted to teach as much, at least, as she will ever have to learn, nor has she anything to fear from any comparison made over the whole ground of womanly activities, capabilities and graces.