“Matrimony,” sings Homer, the poet, “is a holy estate and not
lightly to be entered into.” The “old Roman” is right.
A modern wedding is one of the most intricate and exhausting of
social customs. Young men and women of our better classes are now
forced to devote a large part of their lives to acting as brides,
grooms, ushers and bridesmaids at various elaborate nuptials.
Weeks are generally required in preparation for an up-to-date
wedding; months are necessary in recovering from such an affair.
Indeed, some of the participants, notably the bride and groom,
never quite get over the effects of a marriage.
It was not “always thus.” Time was when the wedding was a
comparatively simple affair. In the Paleolithic Age, for example,
(as Mr. H. G. Wells of England points out in his able “Outline of
History”), there is no evidence of any particular ceremony
conjunctive with the marriage of “a male and a female.” Even with
the advent of Neolithic man, a wedding seems to have been
consummated by the rather simple process of having the bridegroom
crack the bride over the head with a plain, unornamented stone
ax. There were no ushers—no bridesmaids. But shortly after that
(c- 10,329—30 B.C. to be exact) two young Neoliths named Haig,
living in what is now supposed to be Scotland, discovered that
the prolonged distillation of common barley resulted in the
creation of an amber-colored liquid which, when taken internally,
produced a curious and not unpleasant effect.
This discovery had—and still has—a remarkable effect upon the
celebration of the marriage rite. Gradually there grew up around
the wedding a number of customs. With the Haig brothers’
discovery of Scotch whiskey began, as a matter of course, the
institution of the “bachelor dinner.” “Necessity is the mother of
invention,” and exactly twelve years after the first “bachelor
dinner” came the discovery of bicarbonate of soda. From that time
down to the present day the history of the etiquette of weddings
has been that of an increasing number of intricate forms and
ceremonies, each age having added its particular bit of ritual.
The modern wedding may be said to be, therefore, almost an
“Outline of History” itself.