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Show SINGLE OR DOUBLE? The joys of celibacy and matrimony contrasted. Mrs. Frank Leslie says sensible marriages lead to atrophy, romantic marriages to murder and suicide, single blessedness to melancholy madness. Copyright, 1892, by the American Press Association. All rights reserved. To want what he hasn't got is the normal condition of man. Probably it is a good thing for the world that this is so, for unsatisfied desire is the spring of exertion, and we all know that the man who can lie all day under his banana trees and eat their luscious fruit without even the labor of plucking it will not be likely to toil all day in the sun to raise a crop of corn. Similarly a man who does not wish to marry and is deaf to the voice of the charmer, who is perfectly satisfied with his home in a boarding house and the family covered by his own hat, will not labor and plan and push for money and place as will he who ardently desires to take to himself a wife, to provide for that wife a fitting home, and to see that home filled with his own children. Of course the exertion he makes for his own selfish end rebounds to the benefit of the world at large. His work provides work for other people, and the results of his labor enrich society in one way or another. Nature has planted deep in the constitution of either sex an impulse toward the other. Around this impulse, which nature simply bestows as part of her economy of self preservation, we have thrown a great deal of romantic drapery and pretty sentiment; have buried it in thickets of roses and lilies; have drowned its voice in songs of nightingales and tinkle of lutes and mandolins; have called upon the stars to witness to its loftiness and the moon to admire its parity in fact, we have deified ourselves and our natural desires into some sort of impossible creation quite unfit for this mundane sphere, while all the time good old matter of fact Mother Nature smiles and says: "Go on, my dears; be as romantic and ridiculous as you please, only in the end marry, have children and keep the world going just as it always has gone." Prosaic individuals there are in the world, principally ??? swathed around with the good things of this earth that they have very little freedom of individual action, that they recognize this simple law of nature and follow it without self deception or sentimental pretense. Kings, queens and their families; nobles concerned in the transmission of their titles; very wealthy persons who have the ambition of founding a family and perpetuating a name all these marry just as nature intended for the sake of the children likely to come of such marriage, and they choose their partners with the deliberate consideration of their fitness for the position they have to offer. Once in awhile some poor little princess rebels and claims her privilege of flowers and birds and stars and moon and all the other pretty adornments of courtship, and once in awhile some self willed young duke or prince asserts his self will by marrying quite the wrong person for his duchess or princess, but on the whole these highborn unfortunates are pretty submissive to their hereditary destiny and follow out their appointed law with stolid submissiveness. In this country few citizens feel themselves under these hereditary obligations, and as a general thing an American of either sex marries from pure inclination, and not with an special obligation to posterity. From this independent social condition arises far more freedom of choice than is dreamed of by our unfortunate titled brethren across the seas, and not only freedom of choice among various candidates, but freedom of choice between the two sates of matrimony and celibacy. Nobody here in America need marry if he doesn't want to, and consequently most marriages are those of inclination. Now the question is, Are these marriages likely to be happier than those contracted from motives of policy? Some persons will add, Is any marriage likely to be happier than no marriage? It is a common saying that marriage is a lottery, and, like most other trite sayings, it is so true that it has been worn to rags by the constant usage of those who found the coat so well fitted to their own backs that they could not resist putting it on. Marriage is a lottery, and when we ask, Is it better to marry or to remain single? It is as if we asked, Is it better to give all that we possess for a ticket which may entitle us to a splendid fortune, and which may turn up - blank? Every one knows in buying the lottery ticket that the most likely chance is of the b lank; but yet the possibility of the fortune is so alluring that lotteries drive a thriving business all over the world, and many a man who cannot buy a coat will manage to pay for at least the fraction of a ticket. Just so with marriage. One cannot take up a newspaper without reading of divorces, of wife murders, of domestic treachery and wild revenge, of all sorts of misery and sin and shame that in one way or another have resulted from marriage. Without going to the public prints one looks through the list of their own acquaintance, and for one happy marriage does not one find two that conduce more to the misery than the bliss of one or the other of the parties? And yet the lottery tickets sell a great deal better than Bibles, and yet the churches, the offices of justices or registrars - every place where people may be married or marry themselves - are thronged with impatient applicants for the means of self destruction, and if you capture any one of these self devoted couples and point out to them the fate of two-thirds of their predecessors they wave you aside and blandly declare: "Ours is an entirely different case, and nothing of the kind you mention will ever befall us." And would it be better if the cynical philosopher supposed to thus address them succeeded in convincing them of their mistake? Suppose they turn back from the door where he encounters them and leave the expectant person to wait for them in vain? As life goes on and man and maid shrivel into middle aged celibacy, do they bless that kind friend who stood in their way or do they curse him for a meddling fool? Probably the latte, for there is no proverb so pregnant with melancholy truth as that "there is no cream so rich as that which rises on spilled milk? Mr. Whittier put the same idea into prettier phrase when he wrote: Of all sad words of tongue or pen The saddest are these - "It might have been." But the idea is the same, and there is no truer one afloat. Whatever you do, you will wish you had done the other thing. Suppose, for instance, that you are a sensible man and have chosen your wife as the Vicar of Wakefield says he did his partner, and she did her wedding gown, not so much for present attractiveness as for its likelihood of wearing well, or suppose you are a sensible girl and accepted from among your many suitors the one most likely to become wealthy and to make for you and himself such a name and place in the world as your ambition led you to desire. Well, you two sensible persons are married, and what is the result? Why, you are both pining or grumbling or scolding, as your temperament suggests, because, having all that you bargained for in your matrimonial venture, you have not also secured quite another set of advantages which you had no right to expect. The man, tired and disgusted with his day among his fellow men, comes home with a feeling that here is, or should be, a refuge from the selfishness, the hardness, the indifference to his interests or pleasure, which have all day surrounded him and kept his wits upon the stretch lest some one should get the advantage of him. He vaguely and unconsciously expects to find sympathy, tact, sweetness, forbearance and tenderness enshrined within the precincts of the place he calls home, even though it be but a room in a boarding house. Well, he does not find them, and he is cruelly, bitterly disappointed, even though he may not know just how or why. He fins what he bargained for - a shrewd, capable partner of his purse and prospects? not ??? all of his heart and his soul. She inquires how his business has gone; gives her opinion as to what he has done, left undone or ought to have done; puts her finger unshrinkingly upon the weak spot which he has vainly tried to hide from her, and when he confesses that the man he trusted has disappointed and cheated him she calmly replies: "I told you so! Really I wonder you will not take my advice sometimes about these things." And she? Well, was there ever a woman who did not want somebody upon whose shoulder she could cry her unreasonable tears and be petted back into joyousness and smiles? Was there ever a woman who did not want a man's indorsement [endorsement] of her new bonnet or a man's opinion upon the set of her new gown, and perhaps the girdle of a man's arm around the waist as he whispers that nothing coud help fitting well to so pretty a figure or suiting so sweet a face? Some of my readers who have made the other kind of marriage from a sensible one will understand what I mean. Well, the woman who has made the sensible marriage would doubtless like this sort of thing as well as her weaker sister, and although she may not know what it is that is lacking, she feels the lack, she frets and pines for she knows not what, and finally, if she has good luck, grows cold and hard and numb and buries the best part of her woman nature so deep that it ceases to trouble her. That is a sensible marriage, but I am not prepared to say that it is not preferable to a love marriage, for the disappointments, if more withering and hardening, are not so intense and not so apt to lead to destruction. In the love marriage both parties set out with an absolutely impossible ideal, not only of the character and capabilities of the chosen partner, but as to the conditions under which they are to live together. The marriage relation as formulated by a pair of true lovers is one that never was and never will be realized on earth, and, as we are told upon the best authority that there are no marriages I heaven, we may fairly conclude that it is absolutely ideal and never to be realized anywhere. It is a pity, for I suppose the human mind is unable to conceive of anything more satisfactory than an ideal marriage - a husband noble, lofty, wise and powerful among men, tender, deferential and protective toward his wife - a sort of combination of Napoleon, Solomon and Romeo. I do not now remember meeting such a gentleman, but he is one well known in feminine chateaux en espague. With such a man is mated, in the ideal marriage, a woman compounded of Penelope, Aspasia, Griselda, Recamier and the Joan who saw no man in the world but her Darby. She is endowed with beauty, wit, grace and sense enough to make him an intelligent companion for her husband, yet feminine humility enough to make her always look up to him as her head and lawgiver. She is as good tempered as an angel, as sweet of voice and manner and thought as a seraph, as innocent as a dove and as wise as a serpent; skilled in all accomplishments and a queen I society, yet always preferring the domestic hearth and a tete-a-tete with a tired husband to the most brilliant entertainment. Well when two average persons marry, each expecting to find in the other some such ideal as here depicted, there is apt to ensure a very severe disappointment on both sides, and the married pair are fortunate indeed if in the revulsion from absurd delusion they do not fall into the opposite extreme of unreasonable discontent, ending in recrimination, suspicion, contempt, dislike and final alienation. "If, then, neither a reasonable marriage nor a romantic marriage is likely to be satisfactory, is it not the part of wisdom to avoid both and accept the part of single blessedness?" inquires some one. Ah, my friend, there is no class of beings so covetous of the cream upon the spilled milk of their youthful possibilities as the old maid or the old bachelor. They do not talk about it - especially the old maids do not - but if one could see the bitter pangs of lonlieness [lonliness] they silently endure; if one could hear the inarticulate moans of envy and regret uttered by their sorrowing hearts at sight of what appears the wedded bliss of some former companion, one could not doubt the sharpness of these jagged teeth of Charybdis on which they have thrown themselves to avoid the black gulf of Scylla. Which, then, is better - or, to put it a little cynically, which is the lesser evil - the Scylla of matrimony or the Charybdis of single loneliness? And if one decides for matrimony, which is the blacker gulf - that of a marriage de convenance, which we have styled a sensible marriage, or that of a marriage of romance and delusion, sure to end in bitter disillusion? I do not pretend to answer. Like the sphinx, I only ask and wait for a reply. Mrs. Frank Leslie |