| | | | | | Acute ladies who concern themselves much with the | superficial social currents of the time are beginning to | perceive, or at least to think that they perceive, a fatal and | growing tendency to mesalliances on the part of | men who ought to know better. They complain not merely | of the doting old gentleman who has been a bachelor long | enough to lose his wits, and so marries his cook or his | housemaid, nor of the debauched young simpleton who | takes a wife from a casino or the bar of a night-cafe. | Actions of this sort are as common at one time as at | another. Old fools and young fools maintain a pretty steady | average. Their silly exploits are the issue, not of the | tendencies of the age, but of their own individual and | particular lack of wits. They do not affect the general | direction of social feeling, nor have we any right to argue | up from their preposterous connexions to the influences and | conditions of the society of which they are only the | abnormal and irregular growths. What people mean, when | they talk of an increase in the number of men who marry | beneath them, is that men otherwise sensible and | respectable and sober-minded perpetrate the irregularity in | something like cold blood, and with a measure of | deliberation. Whether | | observers who have formed this opinion are right, or are | only anticipating their own apprehensions and alarms, is | difficult to ascertain. A good deal depends on the accidental | range of the observer’s own acquaintances, and still more | on their candor or discreet reticence. | Besides, how are we to know how far one generation is | worse than generations which have gone before it? Men | are, after due time, forgiven for this defiance of social | usage, and women who were barely presentable in youth | become presentable enough by the time they reach middle | age. People may seem to us to be very equally and justly | mated who five-and-twenty years ago were the town’s talk. | It is practically impossible, therefore, to compare the actual | number of unequal marriages in our day with those of a | generation back. People may have their ideas, but | verification is not to be had. All we can do is to estimate | the increase in the conditions which are likely to make men | find wives in a rank below their own. If we look at these, | there may be a good many reasons for believing that the | apprehensions of the shrewd and alarmed observers are not | without justification. | When a wise man with a living or a name to make, or both, | looks for a wife, he certainly does not desire a person who | shall be troublesome and an impediment to him. He wants a | cheerful, sensible, and decently thrifty person. He probably | has no inclination for a bluestocking, nor for a lady with | aggressive views on points of theology, nor for one who | can | | beat him in political discussion. Strong intellectual power | he can most heartily dispense with. But then, on the other | hand, he has no fancy for sitting day after day at table with | a vapid, flippant, frivolous empty soul who can neither talk | nor listen, who takes no interest in things herself, and | cannot understand why other people should take interest in | them, who is penetrated with feeble little egoisms. An | aggressive woman with opinions about prevenient grace, or | the advantages of female emigration, or the functions of the | deaconess, would be far preferable to this. She would | irritate, but she would not fill the soul with everlasting | despair, as the pretty vapid creature does. To discuss | predestination and election over dinner is not nice, but still | less is it nice to have to make talk with a fool, and to be | obliged to answer her according to her folly. | As the education of modern girls of fashion chiefly aims at | making them either very fast or very slow, it is not to be | wondered at that men find it hard to realize their ideals | among their equals in position. It is not merely that so | many marriageable young ladies are ignorant. They are | this, but they are more. They are exacting and pretentious, | and uneducated in the worst sense, for they are ignorant | how ignorant they are, or even that they are ignorant at all. | Then there is a still more obvious, palpable, and impressive | circumstance. A man with ordinary means looks with alarm | on the too visible and too unbounded extravagance of the | ladies from among whom he is expected to take a partner. | The thought | | of the apparel, of the luxuries, of the attendants, of the | restless moving about, to which they have been | accustomed, fills him with deep consternation. He might | perhaps deceive himself into thinking that he could get on | very well with an empty-minded woman. But he cannot | forget the stern facts of arithmetic, nor hoodwink himself as | to what would be left out of his income after he had paid | for dresses, servants, house-hold charges, carriages, parties, | opera-boxes, traveling, and all the rest. | Besides the flippancy of so many women, and the | extravagance of most women, arising from their | inexperience of the trouble with which money is made and | of the importance of keeping it after it has been made, there | is something in the characteristics of modern social | intercourse which makes men of a certain temper intensely | anxious to avoid a sort of marriage which would, among | other things, have the effect of committing them more | deeply to this kind of intercourse. Such men shrink with | affright from giving hostages to society for a more faithful | compliance with its most dismal exactions. To them there is | nothing more unendurable than the monotonous round of | general hospitalities and ceremonials, ludicrously | misnamed pleasure. A detestation of wearisome formalities | does not imply any clownish or misanthropic reluctance to | remember that those who feel it live in a world with other | people, and that a thoroughly social life is the only just and | full life. | But there is all the difference between a really social life | and a hollow phantasmic imitation of it. | | A person may have the pleasantest possible circle of | friends, and may like their society above all things. This is | one thing. But to have to mix much with numbers of | thoroughly indifferent people, and in a superficial, hollow | way, is a very different thing. Of course, men who take life | just as it comes, who are not very sedulous about making | the most of it in their own way, and are quite willing to do | all that their neighbors do just because their neighbors do it, | find no annoyance in this. Men cast in another mould find | not only annoyance but absolute misery. They know also | that marriage with a woman who is in the full tide of | society means an infinite augmentation of this round of | tiresome and thoroughly useless ceremonies. Add this | consideration to the two other considerations of elaborate | vapidness and unfathomable extravagance, and you have | three tolerably good arguments why a man with large | discourse of reason, looking before and after, should be | slow to fasten upon himself bonds which threaten to prove | so leaden. | The faults of the women of his own position, however, are | a very poor reason why he should marry a woman beneath | his own position. A man must be very weak to believe that, | because fine ladies are often inane and extravagant, | therefore women who are not fine ladies must be wise, | clever, prudent, and everything else that belongs to the type | of companionable womanhood. The fact of the mistress | being a blank does not prove that the maid would be a | prize. It may be wise to avoid the one, but it | | is certainly folly to seek the other. Granting that the | housemaid or the cook or the daughter of the coachman is | virtuous, high-minded, refined, thoughtful, thrifty, and | everything else that is desirable under the sun, all will fail | to counterbalance the draw-backs that flow from the first | inequality of position. | The misguided husband believes that he is going to live a | plain unsophisticated life, according to nature and common | sense, in company with one whom the hollowness and | trickishness of society has never infected. He is not long in | finding out his irreparable blunder. The lady is not | received. People do not visit her, and although one of his | motives in choosing a sort of wife whom people do not | visit was the express desire of avoiding visits, yet he no | sooner gets what he wished than this success begins to | make him miserable. What he expected to please him as a | relief mortifies him as a slight. Even if he be unsympathetic | enough in nature not to care much for the disapproval of his | fellows, he will rapidly find that his wife is a good deal less | of a philosopher in these points, and that, though he may | relish his escape from the miseries of society, she will | vigorously resent her exclusion from its supposed delights. | Again, from another point of view, he is tolerably sure to | find that the common opinion of society about unequal | unions is not so unsound as he used scornfully to suppose it | to be. The vapidity of a polite woman is bad, but the | vapidity of a woman who is not polite is decidly worse. A | simpering unthinking woman with good manners is | decidedly | | better than an unthinking woman with imperfect manners; | and if polish can spoil nature among one set of people, | certainly among another set nature may be as much spoilt | by lack of polish. It does not follow, from a person being | indifferently well-bred, that therefore she is profoundly | wise and thoughtful and poetic, and capable of estimating | the things of this world at their worth. Boys at college | indulge in this too generous fallacy. For grown-up men | there is less excuse. They ought to know that obscure | uneducated women are all the more likely on that account | to fall short of magnanimity, self-control, self-containing | composure, than girls who have grown up with a | background of bright and gracious tradition, however little | their education may have done to stimulate them to make | the foreground like it. To have a common past is the first | secret of happy association ~~ a past common in ideas, | sentiments, and growth, if not common in external | incidents. | One reason why a cultivated man is wretched with a vapid | woman is that she has not traveled over a yard of that | ground of knowledge and feeling which has in truth made | his nature what it is. But a woman in his own station is | more likely to have shared a past of this sort than a woman | of lower station. Mere community of general circumstances | and surrounding does something. The obscure woman | taken from inferior place has not the common past of | culture, nor of circumstance either. The foolish man who | has married away from his class trusts that | | somehow or other nature will repair this. He assumes, in a | real paroxysm of folly, that obscurity is the fostering | condition of a richness of character which could not be got | by culture. He pays the price of his blindness. Untended | nature is more likely to produce weeds than choice fruits, | and the chances in such cases as this are beyond calculation | in favor of his having got a weed ~~ in other words, having | wedded himself to a life of wrangling, gloom, and swift | deterioration of character. This result may not be | invariable, but it must be more usual than not. | In the exceptional cases where a man does not repent of an | unequal match of this sort, you will mostly find that the | match was unequal only in externals, and that his character | had been a very fit counterpart for that of a vulgar and | uneducated woman before he made her his wife. This may | lead one to think that there is something to be said for the | woman in morganatic marriages. The men who do these | things are not always, not even generally, philosophic men | in search of an unsophisticated life, but unamiable, defiant | persons, who only hate society either because it has failed | to appreciate their qualities, or because they cannot be at | the trouble to go through the ordinary amount of polite | usage.