re may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after
the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore
of learning him; the glow of the sea-bather comes after the icy shock of
the sea bath; and the success of the marriage comes after the failure of
the honeymoon. All human vows, laws, and contracts are so many ways of
surviving with success this breaking point, this instant of potential
surrender.

In everything on this earth that is worth doing, there is a stage when
no one would do it, except for necessity or honor. It is then that the
Institution upholds a man and helps him on to the firmer ground ahead.
Whether this solid fact of human nature is sufficient to justify the
sublime dedication of Christian marriage is quite an other matter, it is
amply sufficient to justify the general human feeling of marriage as a
fixed thing, dissolution of which is a fault or, at least, an ignominy.
The essential element is not so much duration as security. Two people
must be tied together in order to do themselves justice; for twenty
minutes at a dance, or for twenty years in a marriage In both cases the
point is, that if a man is bored in the first five minutes he must go on
and force himself to be happy. Coercion is a kind of encouragement; and
anarchy (or what some call liberty) is essentially oppressive, because
it is essentially discouraging. If we all floated in the air like
bubbles, free to drift anywhere at any instant, the practical result
would be that no one would have the courage to begin a conversation. It
would be so embarrassing to start a sentence in a friendly whisper,
and then have to shout the last half of it because the other party was
floating away into the free and formless ether. The two must hold each
other to do justice to each other. If Americans can be divorced for
"incompatibility of temper" I cannot conceive why they are not all
divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one.
The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant
when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as
such, are incompatible.

*****

VIII. THE WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY

In the course of this crude study we shall have to touch on what is
called the problem of poverty, especially the dehumanized poverty
of modern industrialism. But in this primary matter of the ideal the
difficulty is not the problem of poverty, but the problem of wealt