SEXUAL CHOICE IN MARRIAGE.—THE ART OF CHOOSING WELL.
There are two principal ways by which we may arrive at the fatal
_yes_, that terrible monosyllable which must decide our happiness or
misfortune; that _yes_ which may make for us a paradise on earth, or a
hell of twenty-four hours for every day in the 365.
_Either love first and marriage after, or marriage first and love
after._ Which of these two ways is the better, and the most certain to
lead us to the paradise of two?
Theoretically, the answer cannot be doubted; one ought to love first
and marry after.
In practice, however, it is not always so. Many marriages inspired by
love end badly, while others, planned by reason more than the heart,
turn out well.
And why? If the theory is true, it ought to accord with the practice,
and if it contradicts the practice the theory must be mistaken.
The apparent contradiction can be explained at once if we reflect
that love is every day spoken of as the desire for the possession of
the woman, and this alone is certainly not sufficient to make two
people happy. Give love and lust their real names and every difficulty
immediately disappears, and we then see the happy dogma, _Love first
and marriage after_, shine out in all its splendour. If by legal means
alone a man can possess the woman he loves and if the passion be
violent, the greatest libertine, and even the enemy of matrimony, bow
their heads under the _Furcæ Caudinæ_ of female virtue and the civil
code, and marry. It is a stony road and full of pitfalls, but one
which, nevertheless, may sometimes lead to the happiness of the two.
Gradually there becomes associated with the desire of the senses, that
more valuable sense of the affinity of hearts, and when the desire
is satisfied there remains still the enjoyment of the more delicate
dainties of the understanding and affection. To transform lust into
love is a difficult work, but worthy of woman’s holy virtue, and the
woman can succeed in doing so, even when possession has cooled desire
and age dimmed her beauty; but she must be a sublime being and possess
lasting gifts of sentiment and thought; if her companion be also an
elect soul, who knows how to value this lasting and solid virtue, and
who understands ideality of spirit as well as grace of form, so much
the better.
Sublime beings and elect souls are always exceptional, and if, in the
innumerable crowd of husbands and wives, they have reached the _yes_
by the way of desire of the flesh, they soon find that the game was
not worth the candle, and that the muddy swamp of weariness and animal
familiarity of sex follows upon the first outburst of voluptuousness.
The woman sometimes succeeds in fanning and reviving it with
inexhaustible coquetry, but one gets scorched, and the distaste may
become even more obstinate the more ingenious are the remedies used
to oppose it. A marriage inspired only by the desires of the flesh,
maintained only by the bread of lust, is a very poor and abject thing,
that can very rarely give peace to the mind, and much less happiness.
Even in the most vulgar and sensual natures, there is something that
rebels against the permanent animal, and raises its voice in demand
for a more human form of food. Man, like the swine, wallows in the
mud, but with this difference: he likes to wash himself, and to look
up to the heavens from the trough. It must be added that in marriage
the dignities of father and mother only increase the responsibility of
the two consorts to animate and enlarge the human nut at the expense
of the animal pulp. The spirituality of the family impresses itself
upon the coarsest nature and the most obtuse nerves, by warming the
atmosphere and revealing a streak of blue in the heaven above.
Woe to the man who, in solitary and sad contemplation of his wife,
says to himself: _My companion is only a female!_
Much worse is it, and woe to that woman who, in the night watches,
looking at her husband as he snores, says in a low, fretful voice:
_My husband is only a male!_
⁂
There is hardly a man who would confess to his friends, or even to
himself, that he married a woman to possess her. Even if it were true,
modesty and pride fight against the confession, and with one of those
clever self-deceptions with which we know how to embellish and deceive
our own consciences, we exclaim in a decided and convinced tone, _I
love her!_
If it be so difficult a thing to distinguish between gold and its
alloy, true and false diamonds, eastern and Roman pearls, imagine
whether it is easy to distinguish between the desire of the flesh and
true love. Yet this is just one of those most dangerous and hidden
pitfalls which bring death to happiness in the battle waged in our
minds between the to be or not to be, when we have to decide whether
or no we ought to give the holy name of wife to the woman we desire.
In other books of mine I have ventured to give some advice to those
aspiring to matrimony to enable them to distinguish between true love
and carnal excitement, which only affects one organ.
As I believe, however, that we have here before our eyes one of the
gravest and most vital questions in the art of taking a wife, I may be
allowed to enter more minutely into particulars.
Always doubt a sudden impression, so called a _coup de foudre_, if it
has seized you after long abstinence from woman’s society.
⁂
For love also, and perhaps more for love than for the brain, it is
prudent to remember the fasting Philip.
⁂
If you fear being enamoured of a young girl and are not disposed
toward marriage, go and see all the married and young ladies most
famed for beauty, grace, and elegance, and make your comparisons. If
they be unfavourable to her, doubt directly the seriousness and depth
of your passion.
This has to do only with what we call physical love, but I speak of
it at some length as it is the first door opened when a man and woman
see each other for the first time. But I do not mean that it is the
only one which leads you to the fatal _yes_. It ought only to give you
an entrance into the ante-chamber where you must wait patiently until
heart and mind open the doors of the inner rooms, where you will have
to live all your life.
If there has been no _coup de foudre_, but the sympathy came
gradually, developed and grew until it became a real passion, then
all my counsels of examination and experiment will be perfectly
useless. At each visit you unconsciously, and without thinking of it
at all, correct or confirm the first impression—now trimming, now
increasing the warmth of the original sympathy. How many wooings,
how many marriages have miscarried in our fancy without our knowing
a word of it, or even having spoken an affectionate word to the
person who awakened so sudden and strong an impression in us! A being
suddenly appeared on the horizon, perhaps in an hour in which we felt
the weight of solitude, the tortures of abstinence, and we said to
ourselves directly: What a charming and sweet creature! Why do I not
take her for mine ... and forever?
The apparition passed from our gaze, but we carried it home with us
carved, or rather written, on our minds in fire. We saw her between
the lines of the book we read, in our dreams, everywhere.
A few days later we see her in the street, or in society, and we
vainly endeavor to reconcile the reality with the figure we saw in
our imagination. The discord is complete. The woman is not the same,
and smiling to ourselves over the love which we had dreamt of in the
silence of our minds, we exclaim, “How could I ever have admired this
vulgar, ugly, faded creature and wished to have her for my own!”
It is well, indeed, when the sketch can be corrected so soon;
unfortunately it sometimes occurs after several visits, when we may
have compromised our heart and perhaps our word.
Prudence, then, _adelante Pedro con juicio!_
⁂
Science teaches that no force in the world is lost, no energy
consumed, but that force and energy transform themselves one into the
other without loss at all. Then I ask myself—but all the desires that
men and women breathe out in the streets, in society, in theatres, or
wherever they meet, where do they end? All those glances of the eyes
which carry fire enough in their rays to burn and consume the whole
planetary system; all those heart beatings which make the face burn
and attract two beings, two organisms, two lives to each other; when
(as in most cases) they pass like meteors without fructifying the
earth, where do they go? Those terrible energies, the fruit of the
most intricate and sublime mechanism of our brains and nerves; into
what do they transport themselves when they produce neither words,
tears, lust, crime, matrimony, nor sin?
And yet these desires are many; they meet day and night in the crowded
streets, in the whirl of railway carriages, in the dense crowd, in the
solitary mountain paths; they plough through space, and if we were
able to see them we should see the air lighted up by them as by the
convulsive lightning of a tropical tempest.
But where do they go? Where is so much light consumed? Who warms
himself with all this mighty heat? And where are the ashes of such a
fire?
I know not; perhaps biologists and physicists of the future will tell
us.
⁂
Another elementary, but most important aid toward the wise choice of
a wife, is to see a large number of women before choosing her to whom
you wish to give name, heart, and life.
If you have chosen your companion in the narrow circle of a village
without leaving it, you may be proud to have gained the prettiest girl
among a dozen companions. But woe to you, should you suddenly go to
other villages, or still worse to some large city; you may find the
comparison odious, most odious, and yet irremediable.
This is why men who have seen and travelled a great deal generally
make the best husbands; for making their choice on a larger basis,
there is great probability of their choosing well, and perhaps also
for another reason, women more easily pardon some former gallantry in
their fiancés than a too ingenuous virtue. Don Giovanni has always
seemed more pleasing to them than the chaste Joseph.
A woman who knows that she is preferred and chosen as a companion, by
one who has seen and known a hundred or a thousand other women, is
proud of it, and with reason.
I do not know if all women will share my opinion, but those who know
most of the science of love will most certainly think with me. Were
I a woman, my ideal of a husband would be a man who had travelled in
all the six parts of the world, and had seen and admired all the women
there.
And continuing my Utopia, but bringing it down to the level of earth;
were I a woman and had I doubts about the sincerity of the passion
awakened in my fiancé, I should wish him to make a journey through
all Europe which should last a year, and if on his return he still
found me worthy of him, I would give him my hand with the certainty of
having a loving and faithful husband.
Time is a valuable element to add weight to our choice; it is one
of the best gauges of comparison by which to distinguish true love
from carnal excitement. It is an old axiom, confirmed by universal
experience, that time cools and extinguishes the small attacks of
love, but strengthens and invigorates the more serious ones. The
fatal brevity of our lives, the natural impatience of all those in
love, conspire together to hasten marriage, but as far as I know and
am able, I recommend men and women to acquire the sainted virtue of
patience. I pray women again and again in their love affairs (in which
as people say they are more _men_ than we are), to follow the tactics
of Fabius the temporizer: wait, wait, and still wait. Love is centred
in a most serious moment, one most pregnant with consequences to our
whole lives, and a month or two more will only increase the dignity
of the choice, and be a guarantee for the future. The honeymoon will
shine all the longer above our horizon, the more we wait for it, with
the poetry of desire and the ideality of hope.