MORE CONCERNING LOVE AND MARRIAGE, AND MARRIAGE WITHOUT LOVE.
Nay Cupid, pitch thy trammel where thou please,
Thou canst not fail to catch such fish as these.
QUARLES.
Whether chance or choice have most to do in the weighty concerns of
love and matrimony, is as difficult a question, as whether chance or
skill have most influence upon a game at backgammon. Both enter into
the constitution of the game; and choice will always have some little
to do with love, though so many other operating motives may be
combined with it, that it sometimes bears a very insignificant part:
but from marriage it is too frequently precluded on the one side,
unwilling consent, and submission to painful circumstances supplying
its place; and there is one sect of Christians, (the Moravians,) who
where they hold to the rigour of their institute, preclude it on both
sides. They marry by lot; and if divorces ever take place among them,
the scandal has not been divulged to the profaner world.
Choice however is exercised among all other Christians; or where not
exercised, it is presumed by a fiction of law or of divinity, call it
which you will. The husband even insists upon it in China where the
pig is bought in a poke; for when pigsnie arrives and the purchaser
opens the close sedan chair in which she has been conveyed to his
house, if he does not like her looks at first sight, he shuts her up
again and sends her back.
But when a batchelor who has no particular attachment, makes up his
mind to take unto himself a wife, for those reasons to which Uncle
Toby referred the Widow Wadman as being to be found in the Book of
Common Prayer, how then to choose is a matter of much more difficulty,
than one who has never considered it could suppose. It would not be
paradoxical to assert that in the sort of choice which such a person
makes, chance has a much greater part than either affection or
judgement. To set about seeking a wife is like seeking ones fortune,
and the probability of finding a good one in such a quest is less,
though poor enough Heaven knows, in both cases.
The bard has sung, God never form'd a soul
Without its own peculiar mate, to meet
Its wandering half, when ripe to crown the whole
Bright plan of bliss, most heavenly, most compleat!
But thousand evil things there are that hate
To look on happiness; these hurt, impede,
And leagued with time, space, circumstance and fate,
Keep kindred heart from heart, to pine and pant and bleed.
And as the dove to far Palmyra flying,
From where her native founts of Antioch beam,
Weary, exhausted, longing, panting, sighing,
Lights sadly at the desert's bitter stream;
So many a soul o'er life's drear desert faring,
Love's pure congenial spring unfound, unquaff'd,
Suffers, recoils, then thirsty and despairing
Of what it would, descends and sips the nearest draught.[1]
So sings Maria del Occidente, the most empassioned and most
imaginative of all poetesses.
[Footnote 1: ZOPHIEL.]
According to the new revelation of the Saint Simonians, every
individual human being has had a fitting mate created, the one and
only woman for every individual man, and the one and only man for
every individual woman; and unless the persons so made, fitted and
intended for each other, meet and are joined together in matrimonial
bonds, there can be no perfect marriage for either, that harmonious
union for which they were designed being frustrated for both. Read the
words of the Chief of the New Hierarchy himself, Father Bazard: _Il
n'y a sur la terre pour chaque homme qu'une seule femme, et pour
chaque femme qu'un seul homme, qui soient destinés à former dans le
mariage l'union harmonique du couple.—Grâce aux lumieres de cette
revelation, les individus les plus avancés peuvent aussi dès
aujourd'hui sentir et former le lien qui doit les unir dans le
mariage._
But if Sinner Simon and his disciples,—(most assuredly they ought to
be unsainted!) were right in this doctrine, happy marriages would be
far more uncommon than they are; the man might with better likelihood
of finding it look for a needle in a bottle of hay, than seek for his
other half in this wide world; and the woman's chance would be so
immeasurably less, that no intelligible form of figures could express
her fraction of it.
The man who gets in love because he has determined to marry, instead
of marrying because he is in love, goes about to private parties and
to public places in search of a wife; and there he is attracted by a
woman's appearance, and the figure which she makes in public, not by
her amiable deportment, her domestic qualities and her good report.
Watering places might with equal propriety be called fishing places,
because they are frequented by female anglers, who are in quest of
such prey, the elder for their daughters, the younger for themselves.
But it is a dangerous sport, for the fair Piscatrix is not more likely
to catch a bonito, or a dorado, than she is to be caught by a shark.
Thomas Day, not old Thomas Day of the old glee, nor the young Thomas
Day either,—a father and son whose names are married to immortal
music,—but the Thomas Day who wrote Sandford and Merton, and who had a
heart which generally led him right, and a head which as generally led
him wrong; that Thomas Day thought that the best way of obtaining a
wife to his mind, was to breed one up for himself. So he selected two
little orphan girls from a charity school, with the intention of
marrying in due time the one whom he should like best. Of course such
proper securities as could alone justify the managers of the charity
in consenting to so uncommon a transaction, were required and given.
The experiment succeeded in every thing—except its specific object;
for he found at last that love was not a thing thus to be bespoken on
either side; and his Lucretia and Sabrina, as he named them, grew up
to be good wives for other men. I do not know whether the life of
Thomas Day has yet found its appropriate place in the Wonderful
Magazine, or in the collection entitled Eccentric Biography,—but the
Reader may find it livelily related in Miss Seward's Life of Darwin.
The experiment of breeding a wife is not likely to be repeated. None
but a most determined theorist would attempt it; and to carry it into
effect would require considerable means of fortune, not to mention a
more than ordinary share of patience: after which there must needs be
a greater disparity of years than can be approved in theory upon any
due consideration of human nature, and any reasonable estimate of the
chances of human life.