A great deal has been said and written in favor of early marriage; and,
in a general way, early marriage may be an admirable thing. Young men
and young women who have no special gift of imagination, and who have
practically reached their full mental development at twenty-one or
twenty-two--or earlier, even in their teens--may marry safely; because
they are already what they will be. They are not going to experience
any growth upward and outward. Passing years simply bring them more
closely together, until they have settled down into a sort of domestic
unity, by which they think alike, act alike, and even gradually come to
look alike.
But early wedlock spells tragedy to the man or the woman of genius. In
their teens they have only begun to grow. What they will be ten years
hence, no one can prophesy. Therefore, to mate so early in life is to
insure almost certain storm and stress, and, in the end, domestic
wreckage.
As a rule, it is the man, and not the woman, who makes the false step;
because it is the man who elects to marry when he is still very young.
If he choose some ill-fitting, commonplace, and unresponsive nature to
match his own, it is he who is bound in the course of time to learn his
great mistake. When the splendid eagle shall have got his growth, and
shall begin to soar up into the vault of heaven, the poor little
barn-yard fowl that he once believed to be his equal seems very far
away in everything. He discovers that she is quite unable to follow him
in his towering flights.
The story of Percy Bysshe Shelley is a singular one. The circumstances
of his early marriage were strange. The breaking of his marriage-bond
was also strange. Shelley himself was an extraordinary creature. He was
blamed a great deal in his lifetime for what he did, and since then
some have echoed the reproach. Yet it would seem as if, at the very
beginning of his life, he was put into a false position against his
will. Because of this he was misunderstood until the end of his brief
and brilliant and erratic career.