HAPPY MARRIAGES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume L, Issue 3925, 2 April 1929, Page 4

HAPPY MARRIAGES.

“The theme iof happy marriage defeats our novelists; it is too large for them,” says Miss Margaret Kennedy, in the London Evening News. “An unhappy marriage' is like a narrow cage. The cage is simple bo describe because it is small. The prisoners, heating vainly against the bars, are easy to observe because ,their activities are limited to bar-lbeating. They attract the story-teller because of the compact Smallness of their drama. A happy mamage is like a vast continent. No one has ever entirely explored it. To know it all would b« to know the whole of human life as experienced by .two people, both together and apart, from the cradle t the grave. Stevenson said that marriage is ‘not a bed of roses, but a field of battle.’ And this is true of all marriages, good and bad alike. For life is a held of battle to mlost of us, whether we face it singly or with an ally. And it is not in petty warfare between the wrongly mated, bult in the larger strife which comrades .wage together that the epic story of marriage is to: be found. That story cannot be told in a paltry 100,000 words, So we must not blame the novelists for their silence. The best they can do is to say, as we said in the nursery: ‘S'o they were married and lived happily ever afterwards.’ ” ’ ’ '