| <Saturday Review, 14 September 1872, 337-8>
| <CHOOSING OR FINDING.>
| <Eliza Lynn Linton>
| <etext downloaded from Project Gutenberg with thanks>
| The controversy as to which is the better of the two methods of
| marrying one's daughter, in use in France and England respectively,
| has not yet been decided by any preponderating evidence. Whether the
| parents ~~ especially the mother ~~ ought to find a husband for the
| daughter, or whether the girl, young and inexperienced as she is,
| should seek one for herself, with the chance of not knowing her own
| mind in the first place, and of not understanding the real nature of
| the man she chooses in the second ~~ these are the two principles
| contended for by the rival methods; and the fight is still going on.
| The truth is, the worst of either is so infinitely bad that there is
| nothing to choose between them; and the same is true, inversely, of
| the best. When things go well, the advocates of the particular system
| involved sing their pæans, and show how wise they were; when they go
| ill, the opponents howl their condemnation, and say: We told you so.
| The French method is based on the theory that a woman's knowledge of
| the world, and a mother's intimate acquaintance with her daughter's
| special temper and requirements, are likely to be truer guides in the
| choice of a husband than the callow fancy of a girl. It is assumed
| that the former will be better able than the latter to separate the
| reality from the appearance, to winnow the grain from the chaff. She
| will appraise at its true value a fascinating manner with a shaky
| moral character at its back; and a handsome face will go for little
| when the family lawyer confesses the poverty of the family purse. To
| the girl, a fluent tongue, flattering ways, a taking presence, would
| have included everything in heaven and earth that a man should be; and
| no dread of future poverty, no evidence of the bushels of wild oats
| sown broadcast, would have convinced her that 
| Don Juan was a <hi> mauvais
| parti </hi> and a scamp into the bargain. Again, 
| the mother usually knows
| her daughters' dispositions better than the daughters themselves, and
| can distinguish between idiosyncrasies and needs as no young people
| are able to do. Laura is romantic, sentimental, imaginative; but Laura
| cannot mend a stocking nor make a shirt, nor do any kind of work
| requiring strength of grasp or deftness of touch. She has no power of
| endurance, no persistency of will, no executive ability; but she falls
| in love with a younger son just setting out to seek his fortunes in
| Australia; and, if allowed, she marries him, full of enthusiasm and
| delight, and goes out with him. In a year's time she is
| dead ~~ literally killed by hardship; or, if she has vitality enough to
| survive the hard experience of roughing it in the bush, she collapses
| into a wretched, haggard, faded woman, prematurely old, hopeless and
| dejected; the miserable victim of circumstances sinking under a burden
| too heavy for her to bear.
| Now a French mother would have foreseen all these dangers, and would
| have provided against them. She would have known the unsubstantial
| quality of Laura's romance, and the reality of her physical weakness
| and incapacity. She would have kept her out of sight and hearing of
| that fascinating younger son just off to Australia to dig out his
| rough fortunes in the bush, and would have quietly assigned her to
| some conventional well-endowed man of mature age ~~ who might not have
| been a soul's ideal, and whose rheumatism would have made him chary of
| the moonlight ~~ but who would have taken care of the poor little frail
| body, dressed it in dainty gowns and luxurious furs, given it a soft
| couch to lie on and a luxurious carriage to drive in, and provided it
| with food convenient and ease unbroken. And in the end, Laura would
| have found that mamma had known what was best for her; and that her
| ordinary-looking, middle-aged caretaker was a better husband for her
| than would have been that adventurous young Adonis, who could have
| given her nothing better than a shakedown of dried leaves, a deal box
| for an arm-chair, and a cup of brick tea for the sparkling wines of
| her youth.
| It may be a humiliating confession to make, but the old saying about
| poverty coming in at the door and love flying out of the window holds
| true in all cases where there is not strength enough to rough it; for
| the body holds the spirit captive, and, however willing the one may
| be, the weakness of the other conquers in the end.
| On the other hand, Maria, square-set, defying, adventurous, brave, as
| the wife of a rich man here in England, would be as one smothered in
| rose leaves. The dull monotony of conventional life would half madden
| her; and her uncompromising temper would break out in a thousand
| eccentricities, and make her countless enemies. 
| Let <hi> her </hi> go to the bush if you like. 
| She is of the stamp which bears heroes; and her sons
| will be a stalwart race fit for the work before them. The wise mother
| who had it in hand to organize the future of her daughters would take
| care to find her a man and a fortune that would utilize her energy and
| courage; but Maria, if left to herself, might perhaps fall in love
| with some cavalry officer of good family and expectations, whose
| present dash would soon have to be exchanged for the stereotyped
| conventionalities of the owner of a place, where, as his wife, her
| utmost limit of physical action would be riding to hounds and taking
| off the prize for archery.
| Such well-fitting arrangements as these are the ideal of the French
| system; just as the union of two hearts, the one soul finding its
| companion soul and both living happily ever after, is the ideal of the
| English system. Against the French lies the charge of the cruel sale,
| for so much money, of a young creature who has not been allowed a
| choice, scarcely even the right of rejection; against the English the
| cruelty of suffering a girl's foolish fancy to destroy her whole life,
| and the absurdity of treating such a fancy as a fact. For the French
| there is the plea of the enormous power of instinct and habit, and
| that really it signifies very little to a girl what man she marries;
| provided only that he is kind to her and that she has not fallen in
| love with <reg orig=”any one”> anyone </reg> else; 
| seeing that she is sure to love the first
| presented. For the English there is the counter plea of individual
| needs and independent choice, and the theory that women do not love by
| instinct but by sympathy. The French make great account of the
| absolute virginity in heart of the young girl they marry; and few
| Frenchmen would think they had got the kind of woman warranted if they
| married one who had been engaged two or three times already ~~ to whose
| affianced lovers had been accorded the familiarities which we in
| England hold innocent and as matters of course. The English, in
| return, demand a more absolute fidelity after marriage, and are
| generous enough to a few false starts before. To them the contract is
| more a matter of free choice than it is in France; consequently
| failure in carrying out the stipulations carries with it more
| dishonour. The French, taking into consideration that the wife had
| nothing to say to the bargain which gave her away, are inclined
| to be more lenient when the theory of instinctive love fails to
| work, and the individuality of the woman expresses itself in an
| after-preference; always provided, of course, that the 
| <hi bienséances </hi> are respected, and that no scandal is created.
| Among the conflicting rights and wrongs of the two systems it is very
| difficult to say which is the better, which the wiser. If it seems a
| horrible thing to marry a young girl without her consent, or without
| any more knowledge of the man with whom she is to pass her life than
| can be got by seeing him once or twice in formal family conclave, it
| seems quite as bad to let our women roam about the world at the age
| when their instincts are strongest and their reason weakest ~~ open to
| the flatteries of fools and fops ~~ the prey of professed
| lady-killers ~~ the objects of lover-like attentions by men who mean
| absolutely nothing but the amusement of making love ~~ the subjects for
| erotic anatomists to study at their pleasure. Who among our girls
| after twenty carries an absolutely untouched heart to the man she
| marries? Her former predilection may have been a dream, 
| a fancy ~~ still
| it was there; and there are few wives who, in their little tiffs and
| moments of irritation, do not feel, <p> 'If I had married 
| my first love,
| <hi> he </hi> would not have treated me so.' </p> 
| Perhaps a wise man does not care
| for a mere baseless thought; but all men are not wise, and to some a
| spiritual condition is as real as a physical fact. Others however, do
| not trouble themselves for what has gone before if they can but secure
| what follows after; but we imagine that most men would rather not
| know their wives' dreams; and <hi> cet autre </hi>, 
| however shadowy, is a rival not specially desired 
| by the average husband.
| If the independence of life and free intercourse between young men and
| maidens is in its degree dangerous in England, what must it be in
| America, where anything like chaperonage is unknown, and where girls
| and boys flock together without a mamma or a guardian among them?
| where engaged couples live under the same roof for months at a time,
| also without a mamma or a guardian? and where the young men take the
| young women about on night excursions alone, and no harm thought by
| <reg orig=”any one”> anyone </reg>? Is human nature 
| really different in America from what it is
| in the Old World? Are Columbia's sons in truth like Erin's of old
| time, so good or so cold? It is a saying hard of acceptance to us who
| are accustomed to regard our daughters as precious things to be taken
| care of ~~ if not quite so frail as the French regard theirs, yet not
| too secure, and certainly not to be left too much to themselves with
| only young men for their guardians. They are our lambs, and we look
| out for wolves. To be sure the comparative paucity of women in the
| United States, and the conviction which every girl has that she may
| pretty well make her own choice, help to keep matters straight. That
| is easy to be understood. There is no temptation to eat green berries
| in an orchard full of ripe fruit. But if this be true of America, then
| the converse must be true of England, where the redundancy of women
| is one of the most patent facts of the time, and where consequently
| they cannot so well afford to indulge that pride of person which
| hesitates among many before selecting one. In America this pride of
| person of itself erects a barrier between the wolves and the lambs;
| but where the very groundwork of it is wanting, as in England, it
| behoves the natural guardians to be on the watch, and to take care of
| those who cannot take care of themselves. Whether or not that care
| should be carried to the extent to which French parents carry
| theirs ~~ and especially in the matter of making the marriage for the
| daughter and not letting her make it for herself ~~ we leave an open
| question. Perhaps a little modification in the practice of both
| nations would be the best for all concerned. Without trusting quite so
| much to instinct as the French, we might profitably curtail a little
| more than we do the independent choice of those who are too young and
| too ignorant to know what they want, or what they have got when they
| have chosen; and without letting their young girls run all abroad
| without direction, the French might, in turn, allow them some kind of
| human preference, and not treat them as mere animals bound to be
| grateful to the hand that feeds them, and docile to the master who
| governs them.