THE RAKE’S WIFE

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4811, 16 February 1925, Page 4

THE RAKE’S WIFE

CAN WIVES REFORM HUSBANDS?

A DEBATABLE QUESTION. At a recent inquest ou a deceased drunkard the Coroner told the widow’ that to marry a man with the object of reforming him was “one of the greatest mistakes a woman could make.” But it also seemw to be one of the commonest; Tor one has only to ofllow the proceedings in the courts to discover how many women there are who not only make the attempt, by marriage, to reform a vicious main, but renew the attempt again and again in the face of repeated failure, writes Evelyn Sharp in “The Manchester Guardian.” Not long ago one of ou.. 1 judges, trying the case of a man whose wife had offered to forgive him though he had attacked her with a hatchet, said : “My experience bf women in the courts is that they are always willing to forgive ” Seeking for an explanation of .this feminine idiosyncracy, he suggeisted that “a wife commonly depends upon her husband 1 for a home.” But he need hot have done so.

. There is abundant evidence that wives stay with husbands who ill-use them for other reasons than the economic one. There was, for instance, a Bow Street case not very long ago of a woman who summoned her 1 husband, not for the first time, for desertion. and frankly confessed to the magistrate, “I know he its the worst man in the world, but I want him. I have always wanted him." It is true that this endurance breaks down sometimes, and in a tragic manner, as in the case of that other woman who, when her waster of a husband was at last arrested for theft, felt this was the last straw, and, with a kind of Greek fatalism, took her two children by the hand and walked into the river with .them ; but she , did not turn on him first, and the evidence at the inquest showed, how much ishe had endured from, him without complaint. But lest these instances of the incorrigible Griselda—to women the most detestable and traitorous lit-" tic worm ever conceived by mortal poet!—should strain modern credulity too far it is refreshing to remember also the case of the girl, brought up in the same court and on the same day tis : - the case of the waster just mentioned, who refused haughtily the offer of marriage made to her by her betrayer (only made, I am afraid, because he thought marriage cheaper than an affiliation order, as it is), and said : “I don’t want to marry him; he isn’t good enough for me I” One is inclined, to suspect, however, that men forgive their wives quite as •readily as wives forgive their nushahds, though perhaps not so often for the same class of offence and, therefore, only, rarely in the limelight of the courts. Of forgiveness no tiucr saying exists than that of George Herbert's; "He that cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself, for all men have need to be forgiven” , and, fortunately for all of' us, forgiveness, like sin, is a: human quality comhion to both sexes. The accepted idea that women are more tolerant of men s shortcomings than men. are of women’s is only partly supported by evidence, and has grown, I fancy, out of the universal tendency to' place infidelity .in. the forefront of the offences that estrange husbands and wives; .though, as Maude Royden once pointed out very wisely, a nagging temper

can be far harder to bear and can cause far more constant unhappiness in the home In the days now hap-

pily receding, when sex equality was unrecognised in the courts, it must have been to the interests of a manordered community to exalt and encourage the fiction of woman’s unfailing . forgiveness, , because this would operate iso conveniently in a society where man was never expected to he moral. Amelia as a heroine is even less conceivable in a novel of to-day than Tom Jones is as a hero.

AVliat concerns the really progressive woman is, therefore, not the place of forgiveness in marriage, which should be a mutual matter,, but rather the initial Question whether a woman ought to marry a rake, in the hope of reforming him, or whether she is betraying other women, tosay nothing of the race, by doing so. 'Every man at heart loves a rake—but lie does not marry one nearly iso often as women do ; so the fitness or otherwise on general principles of marrying rakes does not arise,m his case so constantly. Drink, the other common vice that brings unhappily married couplfifc into court, is like immorality, more a masculine than a feminine failing, for it is pretty gencra’ly conceded that more homes are ruined by tlie intemperance of men than of women. In the case of botn, the greater rfek is to the .race ; and, leaving human issues on one side, all reformers would probably agree that where there is a risk of passing bn

the sins from the parent to the children the duty of the woman is plain. But human issues cannot be put aside. Human' nature hardly evei proceeds along the lines so nicely laid down for it by the reformer, especially wehn the reformer does not happen to be the woman who is very simply : in love—and with the undesirable person i The human person remains incurably liable to fall in love with the uhdeisirable, and incurably inconsistent when human issues and human passions are at stake. Those superhuman cases where two persons part sooner than hand on the sins of the fathers to the children, or seek some other heroic solution to tne problem of possible heredity, are usualiv as in Elizabeth Robins’ greatest' novel, “The Open Question,” io be found in books. Great changes are in progress; greater, I sometimes think, than arc realised cither by the women wno grew grey in initiating them or 0V those who have come into their heritage ‘by birth. I do not feel, however, that ;he progress of the rake’s wife ic quite so rapid as the more rigid feminist would perhaps like to see following upon women’s enfranchisement. Or, taking a longer view, sliovld one' rather say that the coroner was wrong, that it is not a mistake to marry a man in order to lefbrm him, but merely another .manifestation of the belief that it is always worth while to try to reform the other person, and thereby, with luck find one’s own salvation ? Really, the question of the rake’s wife is the most