In een lange reeks over korte verhalen mag de Brit George Gissing (1857-1903) niet ontbreken. Hij heeft er welgeteld (door Google, niet door mij) 111 geschreven. Op mijn onvolprezen e-reader lees ik momenteel de bundel ‘The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories’, dat posthuum is verschenen in 1906. In het verhaal ‘A Lodger in Maze Pond’ trof mij onderstaande passage.
Ik geef Gissings opvattingen voor wat ze waard zijn, maar interessant vond ik dat hij hier het een en ander van zich af tracht te schrijven.
Als student raakte hij in de ban van een prostituee. Hij wilde haar redden, had echter geen geld, begon kleine bedragen van collega’s te stelen, werd betrapt en tot een maand dwangarbeid veroordeeld. In 1877 trouwde hij met een meisje uit de arbeidsklasse, dat aan de drank was. De twee scheidden in 1883, de alcohol sleepte haar vijf jaar nadien ten grave. Drie jaar later huwde hij een arbeidster die geestelijk niet helemaal in orde was. De echt hield slechts zes jaar stond, zij overleed in 1902 in het gekkenhuis.
Hier het citaat:
‘I am a fool about women. I don't know what it is--certainly not a sensual or passionate nature; mine is nothing of the sort. It's sheer sentimentality, I suppose. I can't be friendly with a woman without drifting into mawkish tenderness--there's the simple truth. If I had married happily, I don't think I should have been tempted to go about philandering. The society of a wife I loved and respected would be sufficient. But there's that need in me--the incessant hunger for a woman's sympathy and affection. Such a hideous mistake as mine when I married would have made a cynic of most men; upon me the lesson has been utterly thrown away. I mean that, though I can talk of women rationally enough with a friend, I am at their mercy when alone with them--at the mercy of the silliest, vulgarest creature. After all, isn't it very much the same with men in general? The average man--how does he come to marry? Do you think he deliberately selects? Does he fall in love, in the strict sense of the phrase, with that one particular girl? No; it comes about by chance--by the drifting force of circumstances. Not one man in ten thousand, when he thinks of marriage, waits for the ideal wife--for the woman who makes capture of his soul or even of his senses. Men marry without passion. Most of us have a very small circle for choice; the hazard of everyday life throws us into contact with this girl or that, and presently we begin to feel either that we have compromised ourselves, or that we might as well save trouble and settle down as soon as possible, and the girl at hand will do as well as another. More often than not it is the girl who decides for us. In more than half the marriages it's the woman who has practically proposed. She puts herself in a man's way. With her it rests almost entirely whether a man shall think of her as a possible wife or not. She has endless ways of putting herself forward without seeming to do so. As often as not, it's mere passivity that effects the end. She has only to remain seated instead of moving away; to listen with a smile instead of looking bored; to be at home instead of being out,--and she is making love to a man. In a Palace of Truth how many husbands would have to confess that it decidedly surprised them when they found themselves engaged to be married? The will comes into play only for a moment or two now and then. Of course it is made to seem responsible, and in a sense it _is_ responsible, but, in the vast majority of cases, purely as an animal instinct, confirming the suggestion of circumstances.'
