IS MARRIAGE REFORMATORY?
To no other estate are there so many varieties of phases as to that of
matrimony. Like the music of Saint Cæcilia and old Timotheus combined,
it is capable of raising "a mortal to the skies," or of bringing "an
angel down" to the lowest depths of misery. At the best the betrothed
couple can never say with absolute certainty--"After marriage we shall
be happy." The experience of wedded life is alarmingly like that of
dying--each man and woman must know it for himself and herself, and no
other human being can share its trials or its joys.
The mistake the prospective wife makes is in obstinately closing her
eyes to the fact that married life has any trials which are not far
outbalanced by its pleasures. Marriage does not change man or woman.
The impressive ceremony over, the bridal finery laid aside, the last
strain of the wedding-march wafted into space, and the orange-flowers
dead and scentless,--John becomes once more plain, everyday John, with
the same good traits which first won his Mary's heart, and the many
disagreeable characteristics that exasperated his mother and sisters.
And Mary, being a woman, and no more of a saint than is her
life-partner, will also be exasperated. If John is an honest gentleman
who loves Mary, the chances for her happiness depend upon her
common-sense and her love for John. It is utterly impossible to have
too much of the last-named commodity. It will be all needed,
well-blended with the divine attribute of patience, and judiciously
seasoned with woman's especial gift--tact, to enable man and wife to
live together peaceably for one year.
Moreover, Mary must understand that John the lover and John the
husband have very different ways of showing affection. The lover would
loiter evening after evening waiting for other guests to go home that
he might have time for a few tender words with his sweetheart. Woman's
logic reasons,--"what more natural when he has hours of time than for
him to keep on saying those same tender words, only very many more of
them?" The fact remains that he does not. After the kiss of welcome on
his arrival home at the close of day, he is unsentimental enough to
want his dinner, and, that disposed of, he buries himself behind his
newspaper, from which perhaps he does not emerge before nine o'clock
when he is ready to talk to Mary and to be entertained by her.
And yet this John of whom I am talking is as good morally, as faithful
and conscientious in his manly way as Mary in her womanly.
But--suppose he were not a good man, what then? Could the mere fact of
his union with her change his entire nature?
A good man may be made better by association with a good woman; a man
with repressed evil tendencies may have them held more firmly in check
by his wife's restraining influence, but no woman should undertake to
"make over" a man who has given way to the wicked passions of his
being until they are beyond his control. He will not be made a
reputable member of society and a bright and shining light to the
community in which he dwells, by marrying. He does not go into the new
life as a sort of Keeley cure,--a reformatory institution. A woman's
strongest and weakest point is her power of idealizing every cold fact
with which she comes in contact. She loves a handsome roué. He tells
her that if she will but take him in training she can make a new man
of him; that her fair hand can wipe all the dark spots from his past
life, smooth the rough places and elevate the depressions in his
character until it will be once more goodly to contemplate. And over
the stereopticon view of the man his fiancée throws the rosecolored
light of her idealistic lantern, and believes all he says. Of course
during their engagement he frequently slips back into the old path,
sometimes has a downfall that shocks and horrifies her who would
reform him, but, once more trimming and turning up the wick, she
bathes him in the pink light and remembers that he is not yet as
entirely under her influence as he will be some day. She would think
it cruel injustice were some unprejudiced observer to suggest that if
he cannot change his life when the possibilities of winning her are at
stake, he will hardly do so when the prize is his own.
It is doubtful if a man whose whole nature has become stunted, warped
and foul by sin, has in him the ability to love a true woman as she
deserves to be loved. I do not mean to intimate that his devotion to
her is feigned, but it is only such attachment as he is capable of,
and is no more to be compared with the unselfish love that she freely
lavishes upon him, than the mud-begrimed slush which settles in city
gutters to the snowy blanket covering country fields.
Beauty and the Beast may be a pretty fairy-tale, but in the realism of
practical life it assumes the guise of a tragedy that makes the
looker-on shudder with disgustful pity. My heart aches when I think of
the women who began the work of reformation with hope and laid it
down with despair at the end of a life that made them "turn weary arms
to death" with a sigh of welcome. On the table before me stands the
portrait of one such woman. When she was a merry-hearted girl, she
fell in love with a handsome, brilliant young fellow, whose only
failing was a dangerous fondness for liquor. He loved her
deeply--better than anything else in the world--except drink.
Nevertheless, he promised to overcome even this passion for her sake.
During the month immediately preceding their marriage, he came twice
into her presence intoxicated. In vain did her family plead and
protest. Her only answer was:
"Harry cannot keep straight without some one to help him. I must marry
him now. He needs me!"
Two years after her marriage she died of a broken heart, whispering at
the last to a dear friend that she "was not sorry to go, but would be
thankful life was over if she were only sure that her year-old baby
would not be left to Harry's care."
Yet he was in most respects tender and considerate. The trouble was
that his devotion to her remained at the point at which it stood when
he became her husband. The habit of intemperance grew.
Suppose that, added to this great fault, had been others still more
vicious. Had his been a coarse brutal nature, would not the idea of
reformation have been still more hopeless?
A woman, in tying herself for life to an unprincipled man who has
yielded to the dictates of sin year after year, forgets that he has
lost to a great extent his better nature and is now hardly responsible
for his actions. The spirit may indeed be willing, but the flesh is
lamentably weak. The appetites that have been long indulged do not
relinquish their claims after only a few months' restraint, and when
the girl for whose sake they have been repressed is won, they will
return to the swept and garnished room, and the last end of their
victim will be worse than the first.
I often wonder what a good, pure woman promises herself when she
proposes to entwine her clean life with one that is scarred, seamed
and blackened. Evade the truth as she may, there are but two courses
for her to pursue. She must either live a lonely life apart from her
husband's, frowning down, or silently showing disapproval of his
habits, or she must, to preserve peace and the semblance of happiness,
bring herself down to his level and become even less delicate and more
degraded than he. For is not a coarse woman always more abhorrent
than a coarse man? There are the instincts of her entire moral and
physical nature to be cast aside before she can descend to vulgarity.
In the one case her husband will hate her, while in the other she will
lose his respect and will despise herself.
An evil life so blunts the conscience that the wife of an unreformed
man need hardly expect him to be faithful to her. If a man will sin
against common decency, morality and social codes, he will sin against
his wife.
There is another aspect of the case to be considered. The American
girl of to-day seldom takes the possibility of offspring into her
matrimonial plans. They are not only a possibility, but a probability,
and it behooves every woman to cast aside false modesty, and with a
pure heart and honest soul seriously consider if she is not doing
irreparable wrong to unborn children in giving them an unprincipled
father. Is she willing to see her children's blood tainted by his
vices, their lives wrecked by evil temptations inherited from him? She
must, indeed, be a reckless woman and a soulless, who, with this
thought uppermost can still say, "I will marry this man--let the
consequences be what they may!"
That a man has some redeeming qualities does not make him a
life-companion to be desired above all others. Said a poor Irish
woman:
"Pat is always a good husband, savin' the toimes he's in liquor!"
"When is he sober?" asked a bystander.
"Sure an' his money gin'rally gives out by Friday mornin', and from
that on to Saturday night, he can't git a dhrop. Faith, but he's koind
and consid'rate at sich a time!"
Did the loyal soul find that marriage paid?
One great mistake that many silly women make is to think that a dash
of wickedness makes a man more attractive. Years ago I heard a girl
say:
"I want to know Jack S. He has been very wild, and a man is so much
more interesting for being a little naughty, you know."
I did not "know," nor do I now understand why pearls should plead to
be thrown before swine, or fresh-blown roses upon the dung-hill.