| | | | | The French system of parents arranging the marriage of | their children without the consent of the girl even being | asked, but assumed as granted, is not so wholly | monstrous as many people in England believe. It seems | to be founded on the idea that, given a young girl who has | been kept shut up from all possibility of forming the most | shadowy attachment for any man whatsoever, and present | to her as her husband a sufficiently well-endowed and | nice-looking man, with whom come liberty, pretty | dresses, balls, admiration, and social standing, the | chances are that she will love him and live with him in | tolerable harmony to the end of the chapter; and this idea | is by no means wholly beside the truth, as we find it in | practice. The parents, who are better judges of character | and circumstance than the daughter can possibly be, are | supposed to take care that their future son-in-law is up to | their standard, whatever that may be, and that the | connexion is not of a kind to bring discredit on their | house; and on this, and the joint income, as the solid | bases, they build the not very unreasonable hypothesis | that one man is as good as another for the satisfaction of a | quite untouched and virginal fancy, and that suitable | external conditions go further and last longer than | passion. They trust to the force of instinct to make all | square with the affections, while they themselves arrange | for the smooth running of the social circumstances; and | they are not far out in their calculations. The young | people of the two lonely lighthouse islands, who made | love to each other through telescopes, are good examples | of the way in which instinct simulates the impulse which | calls itself love when there are two or three instead of one | to look at; for we may be quite sure that had the | lighthouse island youth been John instead of James, fair | instead of dark, garrulous instead of reticent, short and fat | instead of tall and slender, the lighthouse island girl | would have loved him all the same, and would have quite | believed that this man was the only man she ever could | have loved, and that her instinctive gravitation was her | free choice. The French system of marriage, then, based | on this accommodating instinct, works well for women | who are not strongly individual, not inconstant by | temperament, and not given to sentimentality. But, | seeing that all women are not merely negative, and that | passions and affections do sometimes assert themselves | inconveniently, the system has had the effect of making | society lenient to the little follies of married women, | unless too strongly pronounced ~~ partly because the | human heart insists on a certain amount of free will, | which fact must be recognised; but partly, we must | remember, because of the want of the young-lady element | in society. In England, where our girls are let loose early, | we have free-trade in flirting; consequently, we think that | all that sort of thing ought to be done with before | marriage, and that, when once a woman has made her | choice and put her neck under the yoke, she ought to stick | to her bargain, and loyally fulfil her self-imposed | engagement. | One consequence of this free-trade in flirting and this | large amount of personal liberty is that love-marriages are | more frequent with us than with the French, with whom | indeed, in the higher classes, they are next to impossible; | and, unfortunately, the corollary to this is that love-marriages | are too often mesalliances. | There is of course no question, ethically, between | virtuous vulgarity and refined vice. A groom who smells | of the stable, and who speaks broad Somersetshire or | racier Cumberland, but who is brave, faithful, honest, | incapable of a lie, or of meanness in any form, is a better | man than the best-bred gentleman whose life is as vicious | as his soul is mean. The most undeniable taste in dress, | and the most correct pronunciation, would scarcely | reconcile us to cruelty, falsehood, or cowardice; and yet | we do not know a father who would prefer to give his girl | to the groom, and who would think horny-handed virtue, | dressed in fustian and smelling of the stables, the fitter | husband of the two. If we take the same case out of our | own time and circumstances, we have no doubt as to the | choice to be made. It seems to us a very little matter that | honest Charicles should tell his love to Aglae in the broad | Doric tongue instead of in the polished Athenian accents | to which she was accustomed; that he should wear his | chiton a hand's breadth too long or a span too short; that | his chlamys should be flung across his brawny chest in a | way which the young bloods of the time thought | ungraceful; or that, as he assisted at a symposium, he | should not hold the rhyton at quite the proper angle, but | in a fashion at which the refined Cleon laughed as he | nudged his neighbour. Yet all these conventional | solecisms, of no account whatever now, would have | weighed heavily against poor Charicles when he went to | demand Aglae's hand; and the balance would probably | have gone down in favour of that scampish Cleon, who | was an Athenian of the Athenians, perfect in all the | graces of the age, but not to be compared to his rival in | anything that makes a man noble or respectable. We, | who read only from a distance, and do not see, think that | Aglae's father made a mistake, and that the honester man | would have been the better choice of the two. It is only | when we bring the same circumstances home to ourselves | that we realize the immense importance of the social | element; and how, in this complex life of ours, we are | unable to move in a single line independent of all it | touches. Imagine a fine old county family with a son-in-law | who ate peas with his knife, said

"you was" |

and

"they is,"

and came down to dinner in | a shooting-jacket and a blue bird's-eye tied in a wisp | about his throat! He might be the possessor of all | imaginable virtues, and, if occasion required, a very hero | and a , however rough; but occasions in which a | man can be a hero or a are rare, whereas dinner | comes every day, and the senses are never shut. The core | within a conventionally ungainly envelope may be as | sound as is possible to a corrupt humanity, but social life | requires manners as well as principles; and though eating | peas with a knife is not so bad as telling falsehoods, still | we should all agree in saying, Give us truth that does not | eat peas with its knife, let us have honesty in a dress coat | and pureheartedness in a clean shirt, seeing that there is | no absolute necessity for these several things to be | disunited. | Love-marriages, made against the will of the parents | before the character is formed, and while the obligations | of society are still unrealized, are generally | mesalliances founded on passion and | fancy only. A man or woman of mature age who knows | what he or she wants may make a | misalliance, but it is made with a full understanding | and deliberate choice; and, if the thing turns out badly, | they can blame themselves less for precipitancy than for | wrong calculation. The man of fifty who marries his | cook knows what he most values in women. It is not | manners, and it is not accomplishments perhaps it is | usefulness, perhaps good-temper; at all events it is | something that the cook has and that the ladies of his | acquaintance have not, and he is content to take the | disadvantages of his choice with its advantages. But the | boy who runs away with his mother's maid neither | calculates nor sees any disadvantages. He marries a | pretty girl because her beauty has touched his senses, or | he is got hold of by an artful woman | | who has bamboozled and seduced him. It is only when | his passion has worn off that he wakes to the full | consequences of his mistake, and understands then how | right his parents were when they cashiered his pretty Jane | as soon as they became aware of what was going on, and | sent that artful Sarah to the right about ~~ just a week too | late. It is the same with girls; but in a far greater extent. | If a youth's mesalliance is a | millstone round his neck for life, a girl's is simply | destruction. The natural instinct with all women is to | marry above themselves; and we know on what | physiological basis this instinct stands, and what useful | social ends it serves. And the natural instinct is as true in | its social as in its physiological expression. A woman's | honour is in her husband; her status, her social life, are | determined by his; and even the few women who, having | made a bad marriage, have nerve and character enough to | set themselves free from the personal association, are | never able to thoroughly regain their maiden place. | There is always something about them that clogs and | fetters them, always a kind of aura of a doubtful and | depressing kind that surrounds and influences them. If | they have not strength to free themselves, they never | cease to feel the mistake they have made, until the old sad | process of degeneration is accomplished, and the

| "grossness of his nature"

has had strength to drag | her down. After a time, if her ladyhood has been of a | superficial kind only, a woman who has married beneath | herself may ease down into her groove, and be like the | man she has married; if, however, she has sufficient force | to resist outside influences she will not sink, but she will | never cease to suffer. She has sinned against herself, her | class, and her natural instincts; and so has done | substantially a worse thing than has the boy who married | his mother's maid. Society understands this, and, not | unjustly, if harshly, punishes the one while it lets the | other go scot-free; so that the woman who makes a | mesalliance suffers on every side, | and destroys her life almost as much as the woman who | goes wrong. All this is as evident to parents and elders as | that the sun shines. They understand the imperative | needs of social life, and they know how fleeting the | passions of youth are, and how they fade by time and use | and inharmonious conditions; and they feel that their first | duty to their children is to prevent a | mesalliance which has nothing, and can have | nothing, but passion for its basis. But novelists and poets | are against the hard dull dictates of worldly wisdom, and | join in the apotheosis of love at any cost ~~ all for love | and the world well lost; love in a cottage, with | nightingales and honeysuckles as the chief means of | paying the rent; Libussa and her ploughman; the princess | and the swineherd, &c. And the fathers who stand out | against the ruin of their girls by means of estimable men | of inferior condition and with not enough to live on, are | stony-hearted and cruel, while the daughters who take to | cold poison in the back-garden, if they cannot compass a | secret honeymoon or an open flight, have all the | sympathy and none of the censure. The cruel parent is | the favourite whipping-boy of poetry and fiction; and yet | which is likely to be the better guide ~~ reason or | passion? experience or ignorance? calculation or | impulse? the maturity which can judge, or the youth | which can only feel? There would be no hesitation in any | other case than that of love, but the love instinct is | generally considered to be superior to every other | consideration, and to be obeyed as a divine voice, no | matter at what cost or consequence. | The ideal of life, according to some, is founded on early | marriages. But men are slower in the final setting of their | character than women, and one never knows how a young | fellow of twenty or so will turn out. If he is devout now, | he may be an infidel at forty; if, under home influences, | he is temperate and pure, when these are withdrawn he | may become a rake of the fastest kind. His temper, | morals, business power, ability to resist temptation, all | are as yet inchoate and undefined nothing is sure; and the | girl's fancy that makes him perfect in proportion to his | good looks, is a mere instinct determined by chance | association. A girl, too, has more character to come out | than she has shown in her girlhood. Though she sets | sooner than men, she does not set unalterably, and | marriage and maternity bring to the depths of her nature | as nothing else can. It is only common sense, then, to | marry her to a man whose character is already somewhat | formed, rather than to one who is still fluid and floating. | It is all very well to talk of fighting the battle of life | together, and welding together by time. Many a man has | been ruined by these detestable metaphors. The theory, | partly true and partly pretty, is good enough in its degree; | and, so far as the welding goes, we weld together in | almost all things by time. We wear our shoe till we wear | it into shape and it ceases to pinch us; but, in the process, | we go through a vast deal of pain, and are liable to make | corns that will last long after the shoe itself fits easily. | We do not advocate the French system of marrying off | our girls according to our own ideas of suitableness, and | without consulting them; but we not the less think that, of | all fatal social mistakes, mesalliances | are the most fatal, and, in the case of women, to be | avoided and prevented at any cost short of a broken heart | or a premature death. And even death sometimes would | be better than the life-long misery, the enduring shame | and humiliation, of certain | mesalliances.