MARRIAGE AS IT SHOULD BE.

Dominion, Volume 16, Issue 224, 9 June 1923, Page 15

MARRIAGE AS IT SHOULD BE.

THE IDEAL AS MISS MAD DE BOYDEN SEES IT.

Going through my bookshelves in the course of a tidying up process I came across tho following article by Miss Maude Royden in "Public Opinion” upon marriage—marriage as it jnight be if it is entered into in the right writes: —“Marriage should be all that—shall 1 say?—the Brownings made of it. But when it is not, there is still often much that is left. Men and women, you cannot enter into one another’s lives -'in this deep and intimate way and go on your way as though nothing had happened. , .You cannot tear asunder people so united ■without bleeding. You cannot make a failure of it without immeasurable loss. “Marriage has always been regarded as a matter of public interest, to be recognised by law, celebrated by some public ceremony, protected by a legal contract. All are concerned in this matter, for it affects the race itself, through the children that may be born. “Human children need two .parents; they need a stable and permanent home; they need a spiritual marriage, a real harmony between their parents, as well as a physical one. A child is not provided for when you have given it food and clothing and a home — since it is a spirit as well as a body, a soul and spirit, a being craving for love and needing to live in an atmosphere of love. “To go further than that, though, she states, “I claim that it is really the concern of all of us that people who love should do so honestly, faithfully, responsibly. Marriage should be permanent; that is true in a sense that makes it important to all of us that it should succeed. “But what should be the nature of marriage? What should wo —the com-munity-hold up as tho right standard of sex-relationship, and what methods should we use to impose it on others? It should be the expression of a union of spirits so perfect that the union of the bodies of those who love follows as a kind of natural necessity. It should be the sacrament of love, ‘the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.’ And something of this perfection is to be found in many marriages that seem (and are) far from complete. “I often hear of the lives of married people where there has been very much to overcome, where perhaps the marriage has been entered into in ignorance and error; where the passion that brought .the two together has been very evanescent; where it has soon become evident that their temperaments do not ‘fit’; where it might easily be said, that they were not really married’ at ah; yet there has been in these two such a stubborn loyalty to responsibilities undertaken, such a magnificent sense of faithfulness. such a determination to make the best out of what they have rather lightly undertaken; 'sometimes even only on one side, there has been such faith, such honour, such loyalty, such a refusal to admit a final failure, that a relationship poor in promise, has become beautiful and sacred. In the face of such loyalty the theory that sex-relationship can' rightly be brief, evanescent, thrown aside as soon as passion has gone, seems to me very cheap and shoddy, very unworthy of human beings. “A deep passion cannot last in the nature of things, and, therefore, those

who marry do so, if they know anything at all of love and God help them if they do not—knowing that it is physically impossible for thia particular bond always to unite them. They must be aware that there is something more than that, something that must in the end transcend that physical union. “Looking at marriage from that point of view, can one desire that it should be anything less than permanent, indissoluble — that which God made, and, therefore, which no man should put asunder? “Let the community—both Church and State—teach this. Let them make it clear that men and women should not marry unless they do sincerely believe that their love for each other is of this character. Let them understand that physical union should be the expression of a spiritual union. Let them learn that love, though it includes passion, is more than passion, 1 and must transcend and outlive passion. And let us insist that all should learn the truth about themselves — about their own bodies and about their own natures — so that they may understand what they do, and may have all tho help that knowledge can give in doing it. I hold that on such knowledge and such understanding the community should insist, if it is to uphold the high and difficult standard of indissoluble monogamous marriage. So only can it be rightly upheld.”

CHILDHOOD’S FAVOURITE STORIES : :What work of fiction most impressed you when a child?” was the question put to a number of well-known writers by the “Teachers* World, which has published the replies. Edmund Gosse’s enjoyment of prose fiction was confined to Dickens, he says, and Joseph Conrad “confesses” that as his childhood was not passed in this country, the names of books he read up to the ago of 12 in Polish and French would mean nothing to the teachers and pupils of to-day. John Drinkwater favoured “Alice in Wonderland,” Ellis’s Deerfoot stories, “The Children of the New Forest,” Henty’s tales, “Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales,” and “Here ward tlie Wake.” “ ‘lvanhoQ must have been read to me when I was seven years old,” says Eden Phillpotts. “After that 1 only recollect the stories of Jules Verne as possessing a great'fascination for me in my youth.” Between the ages of seven and 12 John Galsworthy read “Alice in Wonderland,” and “Through the LookingGlass,” “Little Women,” and “Little Men,” “Tom Sawyer.” “Huckleberry Finn,” “Edward Lear,” “Tom Brown’s Schooldays,” and other well-known books; while John Buchan’s favourite novels were two or three of Sir Walter Scott’s—“ Old Mortality,” “Guy Mannering,” and “Quentin Durward” ; “Lorna Doone,” Stevenson’s “Kidnapped,” and Dumas’s “The Three Musketeers.” Sir Sidney Lee, another of the authors questioned, said he still recalled the immense interest with which he read, when quite a child, Captain Marryatt’s “Midshipman Easy,” Dickens’s “David Copperfield,” and Scott’s “Ivanhoe.”