Surely the thought that his romantic adoration will cease with marriage
ought to cure a rejected wooer. Unquestionably, marriage is the best
cure of Love. For though cynics are wrong in claiming that wedlock
changes Love to indifference, it does change it to conjugal affection,
which is an entirely different group of emotions. To the rejected lover,
unfortunately, matrimony is not available as a cure of his Love. But he
may give his overheated imagination an ice-bath by reflecting on the
dark side of conjugal life, the promised bliss of which has been
described as a mirage by so many great minds.
Professor Jowett thus discourses on how a modern Sokrates in a cynical
mood might discourse on the seamy side of married life:—
“How the inferior of the two drags the other down to his or her level;
how the cares of a family ‘breed meanness in their souls.’... They
cannot undertake any noble enterprise, such as makes the names of men
and women famous, from domestic considerations. Too late their eyes are
opened; they were taken unawares, and desire to part company. Better, he
would say, a ‘little love at the beginning,’ for heaven might have
increased it; but now their foolish fondness has changed into mutual
dislike.... How much nobler, in conclusion he will say, is friendship,
which does not receive unmeaning praises from novelists and poets, is
not exacting or exclusive, is not impaired by familiarity, is much less
expensive, is not so likely to take offence, seldom changes, and may be
dissolved from time to time without the assistance of the courts.”
Dr. Johnson, in a letter to Baretti, points out the difference between
Love and Marriage:
“In love, as in every other passion of which hope is the essence, we
ought always to remember the uncertainty of events. There is, indeed,
nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance as the thought of
passing life with an amiable woman; and if all would happen that a lover
fancies, I know not what other terrestrial happiness would deserve
pursuit. But love and marriage are different states. Those who are to
suffer the evils together, and to suffer often for the sake of one
another, _soon lose that tenderness of look_ and that benevolence of
mind which arose from the participation of unmingled pleasure and
successive amusement.”
“Lose that tenderness of look!” Have you reflected that it is that
exquisite tenderness of look which chiefly fascinated you, and have you
not noticed that, as Johnson implies, married people rarely regard one
another with that look which constantly intoxicated them during
Courtship? For “beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, fades in his
eye, and palls upon the sense,” says Addison; or, as Hazlitt puts it,
“though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of
admiration.”
“With most marriages,” says Goethe, “it is not long till things assume a
very piteous look.” Raleigh: “If thou marry beauty, thou bindest thyself
all thy life for that which, perchance, will neither last nor please
thee one year.” Seneca: “Beauty is such a fleeting blossom, how can
wisdom rely upon its momentary delight?” Howells: “Marian Butler was at
that period full of those airs of self-abnegation with which women adorn
themselves in the last days of betrothal and the first of marriage, and
never afterwards.” Alexander Walker: “It looks as if woman were in
possession of most enjoyments, and as if man had only an illusion held
out to him to make him labour for her.”
Montaigne: “As soon as women are ours we are no longer theirs.” “The
land of marriage has this peculiarity that strangers are desirous of
inhabiting it, while its natural inhabitants would willingly be banished
thence.” Boucicault: “I wish that Adam had died with all his ribs in his
body.” De Finod: “Marriage is the sunset of love.” Goldsmith: “Many of
the English marry in order to have one happy month in their lives.”
Hood: “You can’t wive and thrive both in the same year.” Southey: “There
are three things a wise man will not trust,—the wind, the sunshine of an
April day, and a woman’s plighted faith.” Byron: “I remarked in my
illness the complete inertion, inaction, and destruction of my chief
mental faculties. I tried to rouse them, and yet could not—and this is
the _Soul_!!! I should believe that it was married to the body if they
did not sympathise so much with each other.” Colley Cibber: “Oh, how
many torments lie in the small circle of a wedding-ring!” Alphonse Karr:
“Women for the most part do not love us. They do not choose a man
because they love him, but because it pleases them to be loved by him.”
Lady Montagu: “It goes far toward reconciling me to being a woman, when
I reflect that I am thus in no immediate danger of ever marrying one.”
Schopenhauer: “It is well known that happy marriages are rare.” “The
lover, contrary to expectation, finds himself no happier than before.”
Byron—
“Think you if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife
He would have written sonnets all his life?”
Burton: “Paul commended marriage, yet he preferred a single life.”
Buxton: “Juliet was a fool to kill herself, for in three months she’d
have married again, and been glad to be quit of Romeo.” Heine: “The
music at a marriage procession always reminds me of the music which
leads soldiers to battle.” Lessing—
“Ein einzig böses Weib gibt’s höchstens in der Welt,
Nur schade dass ein jeder es für das seine hält.”
“Of shrewish women in the world there’s surely only one,
A pity, though, that every man says she’s the wife he won.”
Selden: “Marriage is a desperate thing. The frogs in Æsop were extremely
wise; they had a great mind to some water, but they would not leap into
the well, because they could not get out again.”
When the Pope heard of Father Hyacinthe’s marriage, says Cheales, he
exclaimed: “The saints be praised! the renegade has taken his punishment
into his own hands. Truly the ways of Providence are inscrutable!”