And this is a sound
convention, even for unconventional people. Let me illustrate by
reference to a fictitious case: the one imagined in my own play
Candida will do as well as another. Here a young man who has been
received as a friend into the house of a clergyman falls in love
with the clergyman's wife, and, being young and inexperienced,
declares his feelings, and claims that he, and not the clergyman,
is the more suitable mate for the lady. The clergyman, who has a
temper, is first tempted to hurl the youth into the street by
bodily violence: an impulse natural, perhaps, but vulgar and
improper, and, not open, on consideration, to decent men. Even
coarse and inconsiderate men are restrained from it by the fact
that the sympathy of the woman turns naturally to the victim of
physical brutality and against the bully, the Thackerayan notion
to the contrary being one of the illusions of literary
masculinity. Besides, the husband is not necessarily the stronger
man: an appeal to force has resulted in the ignominious defeat of
the husband quite as often as in poetic justice as conceived in
the conventional novelet. What an honorable and sensible man does
when his household is invaded is what the Reverend James Mavor
Morell does in my play.
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