Shrewdom
By SIR CARLETON ALLEN, Q.C. THE ignorance of town-dwellers about common British fauna, other than bipeds, is truly deplorable. I have better acquaintance (like Young Albert) with " lions and tigers and camels " than I have with badgers and weasels and stoats. I have gazed, at a discreet distance, on a python in its habitat, but I have never come face to face with an otter. And never in my life have I seen a shrew, and I doubt whether many of my readers have done so, either. Had I not recently chanced on a photograph of this creature in an illustrated paper, I should have been hard put to it to say whether it was bird, beast or insect.
However, I have done a little research and I am now in a position to inform the unlearned that a shrew is a kind of long-nosed mouse with a taste for lepidoptera rather than cheese, and afflicted with B.O. Whether it frequents houses, or is to be found only in woods and fields, I am not informed, but I am sure that it has never visited any house of mine, or I should have heard of it. An ordinary mouse can create quite enough upheaval in the best-regulated family; a spear- snouted mouse with a notoriously nasty temper would produce much the same effect as a sabre-toothed tiger.
This proverbial ill-temper of the shrew is confirmed by my encyclopaedia, which describes the sorex araneus as " pug- nacious and very voracious." Other creatures, like the wasp and the wild-cat, also have a reputation for irritability, but they do not usually attack unless provoked or alarmed. The shrew needs no provocation to be shrewish. It is just born bad, with a grudge against the world. That, at least, is the impression which I gather from Shakespeare, my chief authority on natural as well as national history.
From Shakespeare we may also learn another interesting characteristic of the shrew which has escaped the zoologists. It is the unisexual mammal. Nobody ever heard of a male shrew. Conversely, while lion-tamers are, I believe, of both sexes, shrew-tamers are of one only, said by poets to be the less deadly. Unlike other animal trainers, they do not tame by kindness and reward, but by methods which no person of refinement can approve. I have always thought Petruchio a coarse-grained fellow, and I cannot imagine what Katharine saw in him. But women are notoriously peculiar in this respect. It is well known that the wife with the black eye always stands up for the eye-blacker, and according to one school of film and fiction no man is a hero to his beloved until he has slapped her face or thrown her into a pond. I am evidently not masculine enough to understand or admire this technique. Frankly, I should expect reprisals—an eye (black) for an eye and a tooth (broken) for a tooth—and I am not sure that I should know how to deal with them. At all events, I think that a black eye or a loose tooth would have been quite good for Petruchio.
I dwell on these aspects of shrewdom because they play an important part in our modern matrimonial law, and serve to illustrate the advance of civilisation. The Katharine of our times, far from succumbing to Petruchio's irresistible way of making love, would go to her solicitor, who would advise her that, after an appropriate interval, she would have a water- tight case for divorce on the ground of persistent cruelty. She would, for example, be able to show that her husband deliberately starved her; that his injurious acts were consciously "aimed at" her, to cause her pain; that, in the alternative, if they were not so consciously aimed (i.e., if that was just the way he naturally behaved), nevertheless he must be deemed to have intended the natural consequences of his acts; and that inasmuch as she was extremely hungry—a " very voracious " shrew, in fact—and saw no prospect of a square meal, her health was injured, or, in the alternative, that she went in reasonable apprehension of such injury. No doctor worth his National Health registration would hesitate to certify to that effect. She might even allege that the cele- brated cave-manly "Kiss me, Kate" was another aggravation, in the nature of " excessive demands," after all he had done to her. Things have moved far since Shakespeare's day, and those who are foolish or unfortunate enough to marry shrews will be well-advised to avoid Elizabethan methods.
All this, however, does not mean that the latter-day Petruchio has no rights and remedies on his side. He, too, has a good case for persistent cruelty. Katharine was un- doubtedly a nagger, and, with the utmost charity, it is impos- sible to regard her as an efficient or dutiful housewife. Naggers have engaged much attention in the courts of recent years, and an unruly tongue is, or may be, a dissolver of marriage. As we have seen, naggers, being shrews, ate of one sex only, but occasionally there have been dark hints from the Bench that, contrary to the order of nature, husbands may some- times nag wives. Even chronic sulks and long moody silences on the part of a temperamental husband have been sufficient to release a spouse from his sombre company. Marriage certainly becomes a difficult affair when either talking too much or talking too little may amount to persistent cruelty.
When one asks: What is cruelty, and what makes it per- sistent, there is no answer. The courts find it impossible to commit themselves to definitions, and this policy of caution has been adopted by the House of Lords in a recent leading case of cruelty-by-nagging. We know that the ill-treatment must be such as to cause actual or apprehended injury to health, but since the health may be either physical or mental or nervous or " emotional," there is never much difficulty in proving that it has suffered in some way. Then the unkindness must be so " grave and weighty " (the law loves these tautologies !) as to show an intention to break up the marriage; but, since the intention may be inferred from the kind of conduct, that too is not a very difficult matter of proof. Judges have tried to confine marital cruelty to that which is " injurious," " wilful," " unjustifiable," " inexcusable," but all the House of Lords has to say about that is that you cannot apply any of these adjectives until you have considered them " in the light of the whole history of the marriage."
And that is the dreary, sordid and well-nigh impossible task which our courts are trying to discharge day after day. Harsh words, unjust accusations, suspicions, losses of temper, slaps and punches and missiles, naggings and sulkings—in short, lack of all patience and forbearance on both sides— these are responsible for a large proportion of our 30,000 annual divorces, to take no account of the vast number of separations granted by magistrates on the same grounds. And yet we wonder that there are so many broken homes and so many potential young criminals as the fruit of them. Once upon a time there was a summary remedy for a " common scold "—the ducking (or, more correctly, the tucking) stool, or trebucket. It must have been a sharp penalty in winter weather, and Lord Chief Justice Holt, a humane man, is reported to have said in one old case that " it was better ducking in a Trinity than in a Michaelmas Term." (I do not know whether the maxim has been adopted at Oxford and Cambridge.) A shrew was never exactly the same species as a scold, because a scold had to be " common "—a nagger not of one but of all—in short, a common nuisance. Nevertheless, I suggest that a little legal ingenuity might easily interpret shrewdom as a common nuisance (as it undoubtedly is at present), and that it would be a great improvement in our matrimonial law if the trebucket, which I think has never been actually abolished, could be revived—for both sexes.
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