No Time for a Wife

MR. SPECTATOR,—I feel like beginning in eighteenth-century fashion, for the Contributors’ Club is a kind of monthly Spectator where one can air his grievances as well as his whimseys, — what are we college people to do about matrimony ? I am not, as one might possibly infer, complaining of the difficulties of low finance; they have been aired to dryness, and even a married instructor can afford the less nutritive meats. It is scholarship, German scholarship, that raises the particular bogey I am afraid of, and upon due consideration I believe that either German scholarship or the wedded life must go. Time was when a servant of the muses, and even a teacher of literature, might sit in his library, pen in hand, books before him, some high criticism in his thoughts, and with his wife cosily sewing in the rocker beside the desk, contrive to accomplish that “outside work” to which his desire and the hope of promotion urged him. But all such pleasant wanderings in the meadows of literature have become no better than so many primrose paths to the bonfire of reputation. Behold your modern scholar where he sits, with the Dictionary of National Biography, a dozen German theses, two rows of source books, a typewriter, and three drawers of notes. No room for a wife, no time if room.

But. this is but a mild and somewhat facetious presentation of the real danger. In our club (which is so academic that you may pass an evening without hearing Amalgamated mentioned more than once) there are a good dozen of the fine young men whom Stevenson describes as ready in the cause of toil to be driven off in a hearse with white plumes on it. They are bachelors, living in affluence and complaint upon the same salaries which our university provides for the support of families, and snugly housed in million-dollar dormitories, where they accept three rooms and a bath from the corporation, and stuff all but the bath with Oriental rugs, books, and good pipe-tobacco. If one should stir up their quarters as Burns’s coulter ripped up the mouse’s cell, one wonders whether they would run to cover in domestic life. But it is German scholarship which is the real difficulty. We sit (or sat when I was a bachelor) at the round table, sipping coffee and smoking. Talk goes cheerfully. You would think us all free men. Is the day’s work done ? If it had been mere teaching, mere thinking, yes, all but the fine flower of it. But scholarship — Smith there is studying the modal clause in Old Norse. He has his twenty pages to analyze before bedtime, and off he slinks with that careworn expression which means work first, then fame, and then happiness. Peterkin is reading through all Old French in the search for anything unnoted to be found there, traces of Celtic or plant names by choice. So off he trots with a memorandum of where he stopped on his hat check. Jamison is in the middle of a story when the hall boy whispers, “Telephone.” We hear him in the booth, his jolly after-dinner voice hardening into that “can’t you understand that I must work” tone we know so well, as he refuses an invitation to meet somebody’s sister. And the worst of it is that it can’t be helped. Here is the terrible cul-de-sac, here is the immovable body stopping short what used to be considered an irresistible force. How can these men be famous and married? Will 100,000 lines of Old Norse, with a scant year’s start of some German at the same job, permit of any other mistress ? Or fifty analogues to the seventh tale of the Nugis Curialium, which cry to be made a hundred by a search through all narrative, give leisure for courting, palliate the upset nervous system which is sure to follow a marriage ceremony, or pardon a horrid blank for the two weeks which is the least one can give to a wedding trip ? And there is more — for suppose she should like dining out, or going to bed early, or talking on sacred weekday evenings. Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that there were children, who cried, were ill, romped over one’s card catalogue. Obviously it can’t be done. For mark you, it is work that counts, hours as much as thoughts, routine more than ideas.

As I come home from late recitations I stem a vast current of grimy men and women hurrying through the early darkness toward a lodging for the night; and when some late-left preparation for an early lecture calls me up before the first dawn, I hear their footsteps, hurrying, hurrying back again to their work. They are the handlers of machines, the superintendent once told me. The cogs work just so fast, the good workman can feed their maw just so many strips of steel or brass each hour. A shorter day, a smaller output. Brains beyond the requisite amount make no odds, it is the time which counts. Well, so it is with modern scholarship, and so with all these fine young bachelor friends of mine. Sometimes I have wondered hopefully whether after all it is not a game of blind-man’s-buff played with your own eyes and handkerchief; whether Hymen does not have a case against those rooms “full benely stuffit,” that good club of ours with its comfortable servants, its meals that come without ordering, its deep-bottomed chairs where a man may digest without wondering whether the furnace is going out, the maid rioting with the gas-stove, or the snow deepening on the pavement.

But the reflection is needless. Scholarship is a Turk who bides no brother near the throne, though sadly unlike one in the matter of wives. If we are to labor in the German cause, where unsufficient to the day must always be the hours thereof, if we are to complete all essential and unessential knowledge, we must give up matrimony. To be sure I am married myself. But then I never cared for club life — and I do not believe in the preëminent excellence of German scholarship.