----There
Shall sweet Bianca practise how to bride it.
SHAKSPEARE.
So this begins our happy honeymoon.
Honour, high honour, and renown to Hymen!
A Honeymoon! ’Tis a strange term!--an ambiguous definition of the
period of time which it describes: a singular compound of two
incongruous parts--honey and moon. What has the moon, “the inconstant
moon,” to do with that whose “sweets do pall with sameness?” Is there
any sly sarcasm conveyed in the term?--any lurking insinuation,
that where a blessing has been “daily swallowed by men’s eyes, they
surfeited with honey;” and that, as the match-making Friar Lawrence
says, “is loathsome in its own deliciousness?” But, no--it cannot
be. When at sea for a meaning, one seeks the aid of a Dictionary to
pilot one back to sense, and Johnson defines a honeymoon as “the
first month after marriage, when there is nothing but tenderness and
pleasure;” and as this lexicographical lover had tried it himself,
he must have spoken from an experience of his own sensations,--for,
with all the merits of his laborious compilation, he is never known
to have given a signification in direct opposition to his own
feelings and prejudices. It is a curious image this raises to one’s
mind--Doctor Johnson passing a whole month in which there was nothing
but “tenderness and pleasure!”
For these sensations also must, to exist, have been reciprocal;
he must have found another who would lavish similar tenderness
on him,--derive parallel pleasure from him. And our wonderment
increases that such should have been the impression which he chose to
perpetuate in folio sheets for ever, when one recollects that he was
married to a woman twice his own age; and as it is insinuated by one
of his female gossips, he had begun by being in love with his future
bride’s daughter. Add to this, that his own account of his ride to
church does not accord with the immediate prelude to a honied sequel.
Johnson, about to become a bridegroom, in love, and on horseback, at
one and the same time, is an image almost to upset gravity. He states
that on their ride from Birmingham to Derby, they quarrelled two or
three times about the pace, and says, “I was not to be made the slave
of caprice, and I resolved to begin as I meant to end; I therefore
pushed on briskly till I was fairly out of her sight; I contrived
that she should soon come up with me; when she did, I observed her to
be in tears.”
Here does not seem to have been much tenderness on his part, or
one would think much pleasure on hers: but there is no disputing
about tastes; and even after this unpropitious beginning, Johnson,
upon experience, defines the honey-moon as “a month in which there
is nothing but tenderness and pleasure.” There have been, however,
others not so well calculated to pamper themselves with such
unalloyed lusciousness, who have found the taste of the honey infused
with a well-known taint of bitterness; and others may have suspected
that some of the wax had, in that honied space, somewhat clogged the
wings of time. For, admitting to the fullest extent--
“Domestic happiness, the only bliss
Of Paradise that has survived the fall;”
yet it is not the growth of an hour. It is not slipped on with the
wedding-ring. At the altar the staple only is riveted, for which
habit has yet to forge, link by link, those imperceptible bonds which
chain the heart within the domestic circle. Mutual good understanding
must be established by slow degrees. In the vegetable world a graft
is an unsightly excrescence at first; and no more in temper and
tastes, than in trees, is the fruit of such an experiment borne on
the instant. How much tacit, perhaps unconscious, compromise must
gradually be matured, before, as Thomson says--
“Thought meeting thought, and will preventing will,
With boundless confidence;”
he pronounces--
“Happy they the happiest of their kind.”
If, therefore, as I suspect, even amongst those who have afterwards
experienced the most perfect domestic happiness, there have
occasionally been in some of the four-and-twenty hours of some of the
eight-and-twenty days of this mellifluous month some moments when
slight restraint and transient disappointment have mixed themselves
up with that tenderness and pleasure which are said to monopolise it;
if it is a probationary period, which is not sufficient to establish
the whole foundation of happiness for the future, it is sometimes
quite sufficient to dispel some of the bright illusions of the past;
this variegated month will sometimes make sad inroads into the
permanence of that sort of love that--
“Is but a bright beguiling spell,
Which only lives whilst passion glows.”
The passion of love sometimes revels in contradiction. It gains
strength by opposition; it attracts by separation; it smiles most
upon its exacted sacrifices; it entrenches itself most behind broken
duties; its fairest hopes are gathered in the wildest field of fear,
but its vigour is apt to be lost in regular set garden culture; it
pines upon stated indulgence; it dwindles when its shoots are in set
form nailed to the wall; when its early blossom is success, its only
fruit is satiety.
If there ever was a blissful honey-moon! If?--There have been
myriads; those of a mixed character, for which I have been
endeavouring to account, are but the exceptions. In the very first
class of blissful honey-moons, was that of Castleton and Lucy;--most
happy positively, in its exemptions from any of the causes which I
have mentioned as occasionally chequering that happiness: and most
happy comparatively, with their mutual experience of the past: and
I fear I must forestall so far as to add, also comparatively with
their future wedded life. Here there was no unsettled compromise of
tastes, no gradual adaptation of former habits; for the companion was
no more new to Lucy, than was the existence to which she had been
transferred. The very atmosphere she breathed was strange to her; and
in entering upon that new existence, she had but one all-engrossing
object--to study in her own manner the happiness of him to whose
destiny she was united.
Castleton was by nature affectionate; but he must have been
insensible indeed, if he had not shared with more fervour, and
almost equal freshness, every feeling of one so beautiful and so
gracious, so tender and so devoted, as his gentle bride. Besides, he
had another security against her fondness palling upon possession,
if such a thing could otherwise have been possible. It was an
original experiment he had attempted, so far successful, whose
future progress he had to watch; and this blended occupation with his
enjoyment. And there was certainly occupation enough in explaining
many rudiments of conduct in her present sphere, of which Lucy was
completely ignorant. Anxious as she was to learn, and eager as
she was to adopt, any suggestion of his, in spite of her natural
quickness, he sometimes found it difficult to make her comprehend
his meaning, from some ideas being perfectly new to her, which were
so interwoven with his early nature that he could not recollect and
identify their first impression. Castleton being, himself, a person
of very cultivated mind, and having been much in a society famed for
ready memory and apt illustration, had adopted, perhaps more than any
one else, a sort of shorthand turn of conversation, a comprehensive
cypher, known only to the initiated; in which a half-hinted
allusion, or trite quotation, was often meant to awaken a whole train
of ideas: such an inclination he was, of course, obliged to check in
all his communications with Lucy. This made his instructions often
much more circumlocutory, and consequently protracted, than they
would otherwise have been; and though it was impossible to imagine a
more gentle tutor, or a more docile pupil, yet even blended as it was
with the soft dalliance of those first days of exclusive devotion,
there was something irksome to both parties, in the perpetual
recurrence of such topics.
Instruction, however mildly conveyed, infallibly destroys that
feeling of equality, in exact proportion to which confidence is
generally found to exist. Every day Castleton felt more and more
how impossible it would be to ask Lucy’s opinion on any of those
subjects on which she was profoundly ignorant; and every day Lucy
became more aware of her deficiencies, and more anxious therefore to
conceal them from him; and that she could only do by acquiescing in
her ignorance, for there was no one else from whom she could seek
information. There were some points on which she would even have
endeavoured to extract knowledge from the servants; but dreading,
from her former habits, nothing so much as too great a familiarity
in this respect, Castleton had made it one of his first desires to
her, that she would confine her communications with them, to asking
for what she wanted. To this, as to every other desire of his, she
yielded, as far as she could, implicit obedience; but it was often
a great exertion on her part to do so. Of her own maid she had felt
from the first a considerable awe; and to such a degree did this
continue, that she could not conceive any fatigue from labour equal
to the burthen of her assistance. Being naturally of a disposition
both active and obliging, it was quite new to her to have any thing
done for her which she could do for herself. For some time she had as
great a horror of touching a bell-rope, as others have in touching
the string of a shower-bath; and when services were obtruded on her
by the domestics as a matter of course, she had much difficulty in
checking the exuberance of her gratitude.
At home, Big Betsey, mentioned above as the maid of all work,
never considered as any part of her multitudinous duties the
waiting on Miss Lucy, who she not only said “mought moind herself,”
but sometimes called to her, almost authoritatively, to “lend a
hauping haund.” It was, probably, in consequence of the habit thus
engendered, that Lady Castleton was one day caught “lending a helping
hand” to an overloaded under laundry-maid, who had been sent by her
superior with a wicker-bound snowy freight of her Ladyship’s own
superfine linen. But of all the irksome feelings caused by Lucy’s
new position, there was none from which she suffered more, than
_waiting_ to be _waited on_. And it was hinted in the hall, that when
my Lord was not in the room, my Lady got up to help herself to what
she wanted from the sideboard!! And it was whispered in the female
conclave of the housekeeper’s room, that her Ladyship seemed even to
like to--lace her own stays!!