WHY MEN MARRY

Evening Star, Issue 20778, 28 April 1931, Page 1

WHY MEN MARRY

HOUSEKEEPER OR LOVE? What marriage was and is and why it should be, two learned anthropologists have been discussing for the edification of those who listen to broadcast homilies. If these matrimonial experts were rightly heard, they had the greatest difficulty in agreeing about anything, which is usual when men talk about marriage, writes H. C,; Bailey in th© * Daily Telegraph.’ The theory. of matrimony is even more. productive of discord than its practice. The learned who devote themselves to discovering how primitive man married, or refrained from marrying, have fought many a feud. Did man begin, with one wife or many? Were there in' the beginning any wives at all ? Or was the primitive woman th© wife of many husbands ? These little questions still rouse wrath in many minds. Our last debate was, however, quite amiable. Professor Malinowski, with la courage which I admire but dare not imitate. put. forward a general definition of marriage! Always, eveiywhere, and to everybody it is a “legal.contract for parenthood.” Dr Briffault seems to have been shyer. He would agree that the central point of the institution is maternity, which is but another way of putting the familiar doctrine of the Prayer Book that marriage was ordained for the children. But his notions of the beginnings of matrimony appears to be that our rude forefather wanted a housekeeper. To some excellent people these speculations are shocking'. The suggestion thajj th© institution of marriage which they know and hold sacred should bo connected with savage customs is to them intolerable So they insist .that ‘ the savages whom the anthropologists now investigate, and from whose nude practices’ the freshness of the early world is inferred are not really primitive, but decadent. If anyone insists upon. believing in this, there is no way of demonstrating that he is wrong. We have to go by probabilities. Man of the Stone Age, living a hard life, seems likely to-have had a much harder and cruder notion of a married man's duties and a wife’s ! obligations than is fashionable in England in 1931. But the fact that marriage arose out of a rather brutal arrangement is no sort of argument against any more spiritual significance it may have developed. We all arise out of rather brutal things—babies. It used to be sound anthropology ,to believe that marriage was a product of habit. In the : beginnings of humanity a man and a woman, or possibly a man and several, women used to live together by habit, just'as the sexes do among some of the lower animals. The system was found to work, and so persisted and developed This does nob correspond very exactly with the theory that the central point of marriage is maternity, or the other notion that the need of a housekeeper is at the bottom of it, but includes both, and a good deal more besides. Comfort, protection, family interest, personal gain, all these purposes have been potent. Dr Briffault assures us that “Tailing in love ” is quite a modern motive. Yet with every respect to the powers of divination-in anthropology, how can he be sure? “Doant ’e marry for money, but go where money is,” says Tennyson’s farmer, and countless men and maids have followed that excellant advice. Did they marry for monev or for love?

Five hundred years ago a girl wrote to her lover- “My,father will no more money part withal but £IOO, which is right'far from the accomplishment of your desire. Wherefore if that yon could bo content with that good and my poor person, I would bo the merriest maiden on ground.” The young man was so content, and they married—but was that a marriage of love, or of convenience ?. Nobody can toll. . What is insoluble in one case becomes a hopeless mystery, when we try to generalise about marriage at large. I suspect that Stone Age man married for love.