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Short-story Marriages
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (July 22, 1911) : 26
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Fiction drags a century behind life, and so retains the atmosphere of preposterous romance expected of it. If it is of a time too far behind we call it dry or quaint. If it lags merely a generation or two in its fundamental ideas we adore it and read omnivorously. We like to think that we would choose to behave in the absurd manner of our short-story heroes and heroines, and it never upsets our enjoyment of a perusal that, if we knew anything about ourselves, we would, before all else, know the invariability with which we avoid imitating a single one of their ways. We like to think that we would choose to behave in the absurd manner of our short-story heroes and heroines, and it never upsets our enjoyment of a perusal that, if we knew anything about ourselves, we would, before all else, know the invariability with which we avoid imitating a single one of their ways.
Most strikingly contradictory is our contentment in reading hundreds of versions of what can be called nothing but immediate marriage. In this age, when marriage terrifies and repels us more than anything else, we read endless accounts of young people who meet without introductions, fall in love instantaneously, and marry on the third page. As most of us are unable to face matrimony until the advanced age of thirty, and then submit to it principally from exhaustion at weighing the pros and cons of the subject, it may be that nothing else strikes us as so daring and refreshingly fool-hardy as marrying in this offhand manner, We go to fiction to have our jaded conception of life set tingling by pictures of people who do what we would never dare. Hairbreadth escapes, setting off to the wars, and encounters with wild animals are stale episodes, as we take expensive journeys every autumn for the express purpose of encountering wild animals, while setting ofj to modern wars is such a serious business that it is generally done under the protection of the Associated Press, and every act of our daily life has within it the elements of a miraculously hairbreadth escape.
If our taste is to be flicked sharply by a short story it must tell of something novel and unknown, something the existence of which we a little doubt and yet fear and long to encounter. There are so few subjects left that at all retain these characteristics. Arabian Nights Tales of great riches are boresome things, as everyone knows two or three harassed millionaires to whom she occasionally tries to be nice. Eccentric uncles making demented wills, so that their heirs find themselves entangled in the meshes of an entirely mad situation, no longer enthrall us. We only feel irritated, for nowadays no one indulges the whim of any relative. We are sternly frank with them while they live, and we break their wills when they die. We, at least, contest to the bitter end of the amount willed. Mistaken identity, that venerable premise which has stoutly seen to a successful denouement hundreds of farces, mystery tales, and romantic dramas, has, of necessity, been discarded in the face of our modern scepticism. We never believe any one is what or who he says he is, and even though we are confronted with a king in all his splendor of his robes we snort our disbelief. We suspect reformers of being politicians, ideas of being affectations, and conversation of being a trap. We suspect everything... We never believe any one is what or who he says he is, and even though we are confronted with a king in all his splendor of his robes we snort our disbelief. We suspect reformers of being politicians, ideas of being affectations, and conversation of being a trap. We suspect everything, and so the possibilities of romantic fiction narrow down until there seems but the one marvel still left in the pack, and that is the marvel of people who marry with spirit, speed, and vim, as though it were a simple and natural matter.
The dash of the creatures takes our cautious breath away, and when two young things encounter in colliding aeroplanes and marry next day in the hospital our pulses throb beatifically at such inconceivable courage. We have been worried for years into a state of perturbed anaemia over the problem of finding some one who complements precisely our complex and sensitive temperament, who likes everything we do in the exact way we do, and dislikes with the identical shudder all that disturbs our calm. We read books on marriage, we discuss it with all but unmarried people of the opposite sex, we look with frightened eyes at the difficulties of feeding children hygienically, of educating them scientifically, of living with their other parent harmoniously, of furnishing one’s home artistically and in “the period,” of entertaining friends with no touch of dullness or banality. The whole thing is too appalling. The chances of not managing it perfectly are too great. The years spent in airing opinions regarding it are but one more thing which helps to jeopardize any attempt we make. Nothing but weakness, absent-mindedness, or strong attack of atavism will ever accomplish the awful feat for us, and so, until one of these three things happens, we read wistfully, gloatingly, admiringly, and breathlessly of short-story marriages. We take them in little constant sips, ashamed of being so addicted to a habit which we feel may be a childish one , yet hoping that a continuance of it may in time so accustom us to the idea involved that we shall some day rise superior to our timidity.
Of course the great mistake was made and marriage endangered when writers of fiction gave up their time-honored habit of ending all at the altar. As long as the altar was a happy void that engulfed one, and going to it did not involve any mentioned consequences, people married, and stories dwelled for three volumes on the period before marriage. Then dreadful lurid lights were thrown on the state of marriage itself, and we were thrown into great agitation by definitions being made, finesse recommended, and the statement made that life and complications continued, if they did not actually increase, after marriage. The thing was naturally postponed by the majority and given up entirely by the few. The next stage was being told we ought to do it no matter what our private preferences. Now we spend our lives searching among second-hand data, hoping to find a precedence that we can follow in a way a little suited to the amount of daring we possess.
7 August 2026