38On Falling in Love
“Something there is moves me to love; and IDo know I love, but know not how, or why.”
“Something there is moves me to love; and IDo know I love, but know not how, or why.”
“Something there is moves me to love; and I
Do know I love, but know not how, or why.”
Thereis in love no “wherefore;” and we scarcely expect it. The working-world around must indeed give us an account of their actions, but lovers are not worth much in the way of rendering a reason; for half the charm of love-making lies in the defiance of everything that is reasonable, in asserting the incredible, and in believing the impossible. And surely we may afford ourselves this little bit of glamour in an age judging everything by the unconditional and the positive; we may make little escapades into love-land, when all the old wonder-lands, from the equator to the pole, are being mapped out, and dotted over with railway depots, and ports of entry.
Falling in love is an eminently impractical piece of business, and yet Nature—who is39no blunderer—generally introduces the boy and girl into active adult life by this very door. In the depths of this delicious foolishness the boyish heart grows to the measure of manhood; bats and boats and “fellows” are forever deposed, and lovely woman reigns in their stead. To boys, first love is, perhaps, more of an event than to girls, for the latter have become familiar with the routine of love-making long before they are seriously in love. They sing about it in connection with flowers and angels and the moon; they read Moore and Tennyson; they have perhaps been the confidants of elder sisters. They are waiting for their lover, and even inclined to be critical; but the first love of a boy is generally a surprise—he is taken unawares, and surrenders at discretion.
Perhaps it is a good stimulant to faith in general, that in the very outset of it we should believe in such an unreasonable and wonderful thing as first love. Tertullian held some portions of his faith simply “because they were impossible.” It is no bad thing for a man to begin life with a grand passion,—to imagine that no one ever loved40before him, and that no one who comes after him will ever love to the same degree that he does.
This absolute passion, however, is not nearly so common as it might well be; and Rochefoucauld was not far wrong when he compared it to the ghosts that every one talks about, but very few see. It generally arises out of extreme conditions of circumstances or feelings; its food is contradiction and despair. It is doubtful if Romeo and Juliet would have cared much for each other if the Montagues and Capulets had been friends and allies, and the marriage of their children a necessary State arrangement; and Byron is supported by all reasonable evidence when he doubtfully inquires:
“If Laura, think you, had been Petrarch’s wife,Would he have written sonnets all his life?”
“If Laura, think you, had been Petrarch’s wife,Would he have written sonnets all his life?”
“If Laura, think you, had been Petrarch’s wife,
Would he have written sonnets all his life?”
This excessive passion does not thrive well either in a high state of civilization. “King Cophetua and the Beggar-maid” is the ballad of an age when love really “ruled the court, the camp, the grove.” The nineteenth century is not such an age. At the very41best, King Cophetua would now do pretty much as the judge did with regard to Maud Muller. Still no one durst say that even in such a case it was not better to have loved and relinquished than never to have loved at all.
“Better for all that some sweet hope liesDeeply buried from human eyes.”
“Better for all that some sweet hope liesDeeply buried from human eyes.”
“Better for all that some sweet hope lies
Deeply buried from human eyes.”
How can love be the be-all and the end-all of life with us, when steam-looms and litigation, railway shares and big bonanzas, cotton and corn, literature and art, politics and dry goods, and a thousand other interests share our affections and attentions? It is impossible that our life should be the mere machinery of a love plot; it is rather a drama in which love is simply one of thedramatis personæ.
This fact is well understood, even if not acknowledged in words; the sighs and the fevers, the hoarding of flowers and gloves, the broken hearts and shattered lives, all for the sake of one sweet face, still exist in literature, but not much in life. Lovers of to-day are more given to considering how to42make housekeeping as easy as matrimony than to writing sonnets to their mistresses’ eyebrows. The very devotion of ancient times would now be tedious, its long protestations a bore, and we lovers of the nineteenth century would be very apt to yawn in the very face of a sixteenth-century Cupid. Let the modern lover try one of Amadis’ long speeches to his lady, and she would likely answer, “Don’t be tiresome, Jack; let us go to Thomas’ and hear the music and eat an ice-cream.”
Is love, then, in a state of decay? By no means—it has merely accommodated itself to the spirit of the age; and this spirit demands that the lives of men shall be more affected by Hymen than by Cupid. Lovers interest society now solely as possible husbands and wives, fathers and mothers of the republic. Lord Lytton points out this fact as forcibly exemplified in our national dramas. Every one feels the love scenes in a play, the sentimental dialogues of the lovers, fatiguing; but a matrimonial quarrel excites the whole audience, and it sheds its pleasantest tears over their reconciliation.43For few persons in any audience ever have made, or ever will make, love as poets do; but the majority have had, or will have, quarrels and reconciliations with their wives.
“Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them—but not for love;” and if this was true of Shakespeare’s times, it is doubly so of ours. If there ever was any merit in dying for love, we fail to see it; occasionally a man will wildly admit that he is making a fool of himself for this or that woman, but though we may pity him, we don’t respect him for such a course. Women, still more rarely than men, “make fools of themselves” on this score; and in spite of all poets assert to the contrary, they are eminently reasonable, and their affections bear transplanting.
In other respects we quite ignore the inflation of old love terms. “Our fate,” “our destiny,” etc., resolve themselves into the simplest and most natural of events; a chat on a rainy afternoon, a walk home in the moonlight, mere contiguity for a season, are the agents which often decide our love affairs. And yet, below all this, lies that inexplicable44something which seems to place this bit of our lives beyond our wisest thoughts. We can’t fall in love to order, and all our reasoning on the subject resolves itself into a conviction that under certain inexplicable conditions, “it is possible for anybody to fall in love with anybody else.”
Perhaps this is a part of what Artemus Ward calls the “cussedness” of things in general; but at any rate we must admit that if “like attracts like,” it attracts unlike too. The scholar marries the foolish beauty; the beauty marries an ugly man, and admires him. Poverty intensifies itself by marrying poverty; plenty grows plethoric by marrying wealth. But how far love is to blame for these strange attractions, who can tell? Probably a great deal that passes for love is only reflected self-love, the passion to acquire what is generally admired or desired. Thus beautiful women are often married as the most decorous way of gratifying male vanity. A pleasant anecdote, as the Scotch say,anentthis view, is told of the Duc de Guise, who after a long courtship prevailed on a celebrated beauty to grant him her hand. The45lady observing him very restless, asked what ailed him. “Ah, madame,” answered the lover, “I ought to have been off long ago to communicate my good fortune to all my friends.”
But the motives and influences that go to make up so highly complex an emotion as love are beyond even indication, though the subject has been a tempting one to most philosophical writers. Even Comte descends from the positive and unconditional to deify the charmingly erratic feminine principle; Michelet, after forty volumes of history, rests and restores himself by penning a book on love; the pale, religious Pascal, terrified at the vastness of his own questions, comforts himself by an analysis of the same passion; and Herbert Spencer has gonecon amoreinto the same subject. But love laughs at philosophy, and delights in making fools of the wise for its sake.
It is easy to construct a theory, but the first touch of a white hand may demolish it; easy to make resolutions, but the first glance of a pair of bright eyes may send them packing. It is easy for men to be philosophers,46when they are not lovers; but when once they fall in love there is no distinction then between the fool and the wise man. However, we can be thankful that love no longer demands such outward and visible tokens of slavery as she used to. In this day lovers address their mistresses as women—not goddesses. Indeed we should say now of men who serve women on their knees, “When they get up, they go away.”
47Engaged To Be Married
“Woo’d and married and a’.Woo’d and married and a’:An’ is na she very weel affThat is woo’d and married and a’?”
“Woo’d and married and a’.Woo’d and married and a’:An’ is na she very weel affThat is woo’d and married and a’?”
“Woo’d and married and a’.
Woo’d and married and a’:
An’ is na she very weel aff
That is woo’d and married and a’?”
Itis a beautiful fancy that marriages are ordained in heaven; it is a practical fact that they are made on earth; and that what we call “our destiny,” or “our fate,” is generally the result of favorable opportunities, sympathetic circumstances, or even pleasant contiguity for a season. Hence we always expect after the summer vacation to hear of a number of “engagements.” The news is perennially interesting; we may have seen the parties a thousand times, but their first appearance in their new character excites all our curiosity.
Generally the woman expands and beautifies, rises with the occasion, and puts on new beauty with the confidence of an augmenting48wardrobe and an assured position. There is nothing ridiculous in her attitude; her wedding trousseau and marriage presents keep her in a delightful state of triumphant satisfaction, and if she has “done well unto herself,” she feels entitled to the gratitude of her family and the envy of all her female acquaintance.
The case is not so socially pleasant for her accomplice; it is always an awkward thing for a man to announce his engagement. His married friends ask him prosaic questions, and “wish him joy,”—a compliment which of itself implies a doubt; or they tell him he is going to do a wise thing, and treat him in the interval as if he was naturally in a state of semi-lunacy. His bachelor friends receive the news either with a fit of laughter, an expressive, long-drawn whistle, or at best with the assurance that they “consider marriage a good thing, though they are not able to carry out their principles.” But he is soon aware that they regard him virtually as a deserter; they make parties without including him; he drops out of their consultations; he has lost his caste among the order of49young men, and has not been admitted among the husbands of the community; he hangs between two states; is not ofthat, nor yet quite ofthis.
Naturally enough, there are a variety of opinions on the subject of prolonging or cutting as short as possible this preliminary stage. Those who regard marriage as a kind of commerce, whose clearing house is St. Thomas’s or St. Bartholomew’s, will, of course, prefer to clinch the contemplated arrangement as soon as possible. Their business is intelligible; there is “no nonsense about them;” and, upon the whole, the sooner they get to ordering dinner and paying taxes the better. Many of us have sat waiting in a dentist’s room with a tooth-ache similar to that which made Burns
“Cast the wee stools owre the meikle;”
“Cast the wee stools owre the meikle;”
“Cast the wee stools owre the meikle;”
and some of us have watched for an editor’s decision with feelings which would gladly have annihilated the interval.
But it is not alone the prosaic and the impatient who are averse to a long engagement: the methodical, whose arrangements it tumbles50upside down; the busy, whose time it appropriates; the selfish, who are compelled during it to make continual small sacrifices; the shy, who feel as if all the other relations of life had retired into the background in order to exhibit them as “engaged men;” the greedy, who look upon the expected love-offerings as so much tribute money,—these and many other varieties of lovers would gladly simplify matrimony by reducing its preliminaries to a question and a ceremony. Yet if Love is to have anything like the place in life that it has in poetry; if we really believe that marriage ought to be founded on sympathy of tastes and principles; if we have any faith in that mighty ruler of hearts and lives, a genuine love affair,—we shall not wish to dim the glory of marriage by denying it this sojourn in a veritable enchanted land; for in its atmosphere many fine feelings blossom that never would have birth at all if the niceties of courtship were superseded by the levelling rapidity of marriage. If people arereallyin love they gain more than they lose by a reasonable delay. There is time for the reading and writing51of love-letters, one of the sweetest experiences of life; the tongue and pen get familiar with affectionate and noble sentiments; indeed I doubt if there is any finer school for married life than a full course of love-letters. But if the marriage follow immediately on the engagement, all love-letters and all love-making must necessarily have a flavor of furniture and dress, and of “considerations.” I admit that love-making is an unreasonable and impractical piece of business; but in this lies all its charm. It delights in asserting the incredible and believing the impossible. But, after all, it is in the depths of this delicious foolishness that the heart attains its noblest growth. Life may have many grander hopes and calmer joys in store,—
“But there’s nothing half so sweet in lifeAs Love’s young dream.”
“But there’s nothing half so sweet in lifeAs Love’s young dream.”
“But there’s nothing half so sweet in life
As Love’s young dream.”
Therefore we ought to look with complaisance, if not with approbation, on young people serenely passing through this phase of their existence; but the fact is, we are apt to regard it as a little trial. Lovers are so52happy and self-satisfied that they do not understand why everybody else is not in the same supreme condition. If the house is ever so small, they expect a clear room to themselves.
Yet such an engagement, of reasonable length, is to be advised wherever young people are tender and constant in nature, and really in love with each other. I would only ask them to be as little demonstrative in public as possible, and to carry their happiness meekly, for, in any case, they will make large demands on the love, patience, and toleration of their friends. But perhaps one of the greatest advantages of a prolonged engagement is the security it brings against amésalliance. Now, to a man amésallianceis the heaviest weight he can carry through life; but to a woman it is simply destruction.
The best women have an instinctive wish to marry a man superior to themselves in some way or other; for their honor is in their husbands, and their status in society is determined by his. A woman who, for a passing fancy, marries a man in any way her inferior wrongs herself, her family, and her53whole life; for the “grossness of his nature” will most probably drag her to his level. Now and then a woman of great force of character may lift her husband upward, but she accepts such a labor at the peril of her own higher life. Should she find it equally impossible to lift him to her level or to sink to his, what remains? Life-long regrets, bitter shame and self-reproach, or a forcible setting of herself free. But the latter, like all severe remedies, carries desperation instead of hope, with it. Never can she quite regain her maiden place; anauraof a doubtful kind fetters and influences her in every effort or relation of her future life.
In the early glamour of a love affair, women do not see these things, but fathers and mothers do; they know that “the world isnotwell lost for love,” and they have a right to protest against such folly. In an imprudent love affair, every day is so much gained; therefore when this foolishness is bound up in the heart of a youth or a maiden, the best of all plans is to arrange for time,—as long an engagement as possible.
But I will suppose that all my unmarried54readers have found proper mates who will stand the test of parental wisdom and a fairly long and exacting engagement, and that after some happy months they will not only be “woo’d,” but “married and a’.” Now begins their real life, and for the woman the first step isrenunciation. She must give up with a good grace the exaggeration and romance of love-making, and accept in its place that far better tenderness which is the repose of passion, and which springs from the tranquil depths of a man’s best nature.
The warmest-hearted and most unselfish women soon learn to accept quiet trust and the loyalty of a loving life as the calmest and happiest condition of marriage; and the men who are sensible enough to rely on the good sense of such wives sail round the gushing adorers, both for true affection and comfortable tranquillity.
Just let a young wife remember that her husband necessarily is under a certain amount of bondage all day; that his interests compel him to look pleasant under all circumstances to offend none, to say no hasty word, and she will see that when he reaches his own55fireside he wants most of all to have this strain removed to be at ease; but this he cannot be if he is continually afraid of wounding his wife’s sensibilities by forgetting some outward and visible token of his affection for her. Besides, she pays him but a poor compliment in refusing to believe what he does not continually assert; and by fretting for what it is unreasonable to desire she deeply wrongs herself, for—
“A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty.”
“A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty.”
“A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty.”
56Shall our Daughters have Dowries?
Thosewho occupy themselves reading that writing on the wall which we call “signs of the times” may ponder awhile the question which Mr. Messinger puts with such plaintive appeal to the parents of this generation: “Shall our daughters have dowries?” But in the very commencement of his argument he abandons the case he has voluntarily taken up, and enters a plea, not for the daughters, but for the young men who may wish to marry the daughters. Also in urging upon parents the duty of endowing their daughters he seems to have lost sight of the fact that “dowry,” in its very spirit and intention, does not propose to care for the husband, but is solely in the interest of the wife.
He asserts, doubtless with accuracy, that the average income of young men is $1,10057a year, and he finds in this fact a sufficient reason for the decrease of marriage among them. It is no reason at all; for a large and sensible proportion of young men do marry and live happily and respectably on $1,100 a year, and those who cannot do so are very clearly portrayed by Mr. Messinger, and very little respected by any sensible young woman.
But it is not to be believed that they form any preponderating or influential part of that army of young men who are the to-morrow of our great republic. Let any reader count, from such young men as are known to him, the number who would divide their $1,100 as Mr. Messinger supposes them to do:—
I venture to say the proportion would be very small indeed.
For the majority of young men know that nothing worth having is lost in the sharing. They meet in their own circle58some modest, home-making girl whom they love so truly that they can tell her exactly what their income is, and then they find out that their own ideas of economy were crude and extravagant compared with the wondrous ways and means which reveal themselves to a loving woman’s comprehension of the subject. The Oranges, Rutherford, and every suburb of New York are full of pretty little homes supported without worry, and with infinite happiness, upon $1,100 a year, and perhaps, indeed, upon less money.
The difficulty with the class of young men whose case Mr. Messinger pleads is one deserving of no sympathy. It is a difficulty evoked by vanity and self-conceit, of which Fashion and Mrs. Grundy are the bugbears. Why should a young man capable of making only $1,100 a year expect to marry a girl whose parents are rich enough to guard her “from every wind of heaven, lest it visit her face too roughly”? “Is it fair treatment of the expected husband,” Mr. Messinger asks, that a girl “should be habituated to live without work and then be handedoverto her husband with nothing59but her clothing and bric-à-brac?” Yes, it is quite fair treatment. If the husband with his $1,100 a year elects to marry a girl not habituated to work, he does it of his own choice: the father of the girl is probably not at all desirous of his alliance; then why should the father deprive himself of the results of his own labor and economy to undo the folly and vanity of the young man’s selection? As for the girl, if she has deliberately preferred her lover to her father, mother, home, and to all the advantages of wealth, she has the desire of her heart. It may be quite fair that she should have this desire, but it may be very unfair that her father, mother, and perhaps her brothers and sisters, should be robbed to make her desire less self-sacrificing to her. For if the young man with his poverty is acceptable to both the daughter and her parents, the latter may be safely trusted to do all that is right in the circumstances.
The most objectionable part of Mr. Messinger’s argument is the servile and mercenary aspect in which it places marriage. “What equality can exist,” he asks, “where one60(the man) supplies all the means of subsistence and performs all the labor?” That a husband should provide the means of subsistence is the very Magna Charta of honorable marriage; and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand so accept it. It is the precise point on which all true husbands feel the most keenly sensitive. They want no other man—no matter what his relationship or friendship—to support their wives. And under no circumstances does the husband perform all the labor resulting from a marriage. That he may be a true man, a father and a citizen, it is necessary that he have a home; and in the care of the home, in the bringing-forth and the bringing-up of the family, in the constant demands upon her love and sympathy, the wife performs a never-ceasing multitude of duties that tax her heart and her body in every direction,—a labor of love in comparison with which her husband’s daily routine over his “entries” or his “orders” is a trifling drain of vitality. For a wife and mother must keep every faculty and feeling “at attention;” but a clerk over his ledger keeps a61dozen faculties on the premises to do the work of one. And in behalf of all true and trusted wives I deny in totality the idea that they go to their husbands with “painful shrinking” for the money necessary to carry on the mutual home, or that there is in any beloved wife’s heart the most fleeting thought of “dependence.” Mr. Messinger does a great and shameful wrong to the majority of husbands and wives by such an assertion.
Indeed, this gentleman’s experience seems to have been an unusually sad one, nine out of ten of his friends having died in early middle age from the undue expenditure of nerve and vital force in their efforts to provide for their families in what they doubtless considered a suitable manner; and he evidently thinks that if their wives had been dowered this result would probably have been averted. It is extremely improbable. The wife’s small income would far more likely have led to a still more extravagant way of living; for the genius of the American is to live for to-day and take care for the morrow when the morrow comes.
In many respects it is the genius of the62age. Old forms of thought and action are in a state of transition. No one can tell what to-morrow may bring forth. The social conditions which inspired the fathers of the past to save for their posterity are passing away; and I speak from knowledge when I assert that they were often conditions of domestic misery and wrong, and that growing children suffered much under them. Suppose a father has two daughters and three sons; must he curtail the daughters in the education and pleasures of their youth, must he limit the three boys at home and at college, in order to give a sum of money to some unknown young man who will doubtless vow that his daughter’s heart and person are more than all the world to him? If she be not more than all the world to him, he has no right to marry her; and if she be, what can be added to a gift so precious?
The tendency of the time is to dishonor marriage in every way; but the deepest wrong, the most degrading element that can be introduced, is to make it dependent upon dowries or any other financial consideration. We must remember also that in England,63where dowry has been a custom, it was one not particularly affecting those classes whose daughters are likely to marry clerks upon small salaries. It was the provision made by landed gentry for their daughters, and they exacted in return an equally suitable settlement from the expectant husband. If the father gave a sum of money to the bride, the bridegroom generally gave the dower-house, with the furniture, silver, linen, etc., which would make it a proper home for her widowhood. Many a marriage has been broken off because the bridegroom would not make such settlements as the father considered the dower demanded.
Mr. Messinger acknowledges that the cost of living was never so small as at this day, and that the difficulty in the way of young men marrying is “purely one of insane imitation and competition.” But there is no necessity for this insane competition; and why provide an unusual and special remedy for what is purely optional? Nobody compels the young husband to live as if his income was $11,000 instead of $1,100. Of his own free will he sacrifices his life to his vanity, and64there is no justice in attempting his relief by dowering his perhaps equally guilty wife out of the results of another man’s industry and economy.
Dowry is an antiquated provision for daughters, behind the genius of the age, incompatible with the dignity of American men and the intelligence and freedom of American women. Besides, there are very likely to be two, three, four, or more daughters in a house; how could a man of moderate means save for all of them? And what would become of the sons? The father who gives his children a loving, sensible mother, who provides them with a comfortable home, and who educates fully all their special faculties, and teaches them the cunning in their ten fingers, dowers his daughters far better than if he gave them money. He has funded for them a provision that neither a bad husband nor an evil fate can squander. He has done his full duty, and every good girl will thankfully so accept it.
As for the young men who could imagine themselves spending, out of $1,100, $70065upon dress and amusements, neither the world, nor any sensible woman in it, will be the worse for their celibacy. For if they take a wife, it will doubtless be some would-be stylish, foolish virgin, whose soft hands are of no earthly use except as ring-stands and glove-stretchers. It is such marriages that are failures. It is in such pretentious homes that love and moderate means cannot live happily together. It is in such weak hands that Pandora’s box shuts, not on hope, but on despair.
The brave, sensible youth does not fear to face life and all its obligations on $1,100 a year. With love it is enough to begin with. Hope, ambition, industry, good fortune, are his sureties for the future. However well educated he may be, he knows that in his own class he will find lovely women equally well educated. They may be teaching, clerking, sewing, but they are his peers. He has no idea of marrying a young lady accustomed to servants and luxury, and the question of dower never occurs to him. The good girl who supplements his industry by her economy, who cheers him with her66sympathy, who shares all his thoughts and feelings, and crowns his life with love and consolation, has all the dowry he wants. And this is an opinion founded on a long life of observation,—an opinion that fire cannot burn out of me.
67The Ring Upon the Finger
Ringswere probably the first ornaments ever worn, though in the earliest ages they had a meaning far beyond mere adornment. The stories of Judah and Tamar, of Pharaoh and Joseph, of Ahasuerus and Haman, show that as pledges of good faith, as marks of favor, and as tokens of authority, they were the recognized symbols. The fashion was an Eastern one, for the Jews were familiar with it before their sojourn in Egypt; indeed, it may have been one of those primeval customs which Shem, Ham, and Japhet saved from the wreck of an earlier world. Certainly the people of Syria and the lords of Palestine and Tyre used rings in the earliest times; and it is remarkable that they bore the same emblem which ancient Mexican rings bear,—the constellation of Pisces. As an68ornament, however, the ring is least important; it is an emblem. The charmed circle has potency and romance.
Great faith in all ages has been placed in charmed rings. Greeks and Romans possessed them, and the Scandinavian nations had a superstitious faith in such amulets; indeed, as chronicles declare, it is hard to compute how much William was indebted for his victory over Harold to the influence of the ring he wore, which had been blessed and hallowed. As curative agencies, rings have also played a curious part. Until the Georgian era, rings blessed by the King or Queen on Good Friday were thought to control epilepsy and other complaints, and something of this secret power is still acknowledged by the superstitious, who wear around their necks rings or coins that have been blessed. Rings have also been agencies for death, as well as for life. In all ages they have been receptacles for subtle poisons, and thus Hannibal and Demosthenes armed themselves against an extremity of evil fortune.
In the life of the English Queen Elizabeth,69rings had an extraordinary importance. She was notified of her ascension to the throne by the presentation of Mary’s ring. The withholding of the ring sent by Essex caused her to die in a passion of remorse and re-awakened affection; and no sooner was the great struggle over than her ring was taken from her scarcely cold finger and flung out of the window to Sir John Harrington, who hastened over the Border with it to the Scottish James.
There are some curious traditions regarding the stones usually set in rings. The ruby or carbuncle was thought to guard against illness. The sapphire was the favorite of churchmen, and was thought to inspire pure desires. Epiphanes says the first tables of the Law were written on sapphires. The emerald bestowed cheerfulness and increased wealth. The opal was said to make a man invisible, the jacinth to procure sleep, and the turquoise to appease quarrels between man and wife. Things are much changed, however, since heathen sages and Rosicrucian alchemists defined the qualities and powers of gems. We have commercial70“rings” now, which laugh emerald ones to scorn as means of procuring wealth. If the opal could make a man invisible, it might be popular on the first of a month, but we have better narcotics than the jacinth, while the elaborateness of our women’s toilets gives husbands manifold opportunities of peace-making, quite as successful as the turquoise.
The Jews first used it in marriage. For this purpose they required it to have a certain value, and to be finally and fully purchased. If it was bought on credit, or taken as a gift, its power was destroyed. The Christian Church early adopted the custom of the marriage ring. It was placed first on the thumb, in the name of the “Father;” then removed to the first finger, in the name of the “Son;” to the third with the name of the “Holy Ghost;” and the “Amen” fixed its place on the fourth.
Rings were also the emblem of spiritual marriage and dignity as early as the third century. In the Romish Church the Episcopal ring is of gold set with a rich gem. The Pope has two rings, one bearing the71likeness of St. Peter, used for ordinary business; the other bearing a cross, and the heads of both Peter and Paul, and the reigning Pope’s name and arms. It is used only for Bulls, and is broken at the death of the Pontiff; and a new one given by the city of Rome to his successor. These rings of spiritual office were frequently worn on the thumb, and when the tomb of Bede was opened in May, 1831, a large thumb-ring was found where the right hand had fallen to dust.
The ring has been used not only for carnal and spiritual weddings, but also for commercial ones. For six hundred years the Doges of Venice married, with a gold ring, the Adriatic and its rich commerce to their city on the sea. As an emblem of delegated or transmitted power, the ring has also played a remarkable part in human affairs. Pharaoh and Ahasuerus in Biblical records are examples. Alexander transferred his kingdom to Perdicas with his ring. When Cæsar received the head of Pompey, he also received his ring, and when Richard the Second resigned his crown to Henry of72Lancaster, he did so by giving him his ring. The coronation ring of England is of gold, in which is set a large violet ruby, carved with the cross of St. George. The custom of engraving sacred emblems upon rings for common wear was angrily reproved by so early a sage as Pythagoras; and this heathen’s delicacy about sacred things is commended to the notice of those women of our own day, who toss the holy symbol of our faith around the toilet tables, and wear it in very unconsecrated places.
However, I have said enough to prove that the ring upon our finger is a link between us and the centuries beyond the flood. We cannot escape this tremendous solidarity of the human race. We are part of all that has been, and the generations that follow us will look back to us and say, “They were our fathers, and we are their heirs, and lo, we are all one!”
73Flirting Wives
Ifsome good and thoughtful woman who died fifty years ago could return to this world, what in our present life would most astonish her? Would it be the wonders of steam, electricity, and science; the tyranny of the working classes, or the autocracy of servants? No! It would be the amazing development of her own sex,—the preaching, lecturing, political women; the women who are doctors and lawyers; who lose and win money on horses, or in stocks and real estate; the women who talk slang, and think it an accomplishment; who imitate men’s attire and manners; who do their athletic exercises in public; and, perhaps more astonishing than all, the women who make marriage the cloak for much profitable post-nuptial flirtation.
For her own sex engaged in business, she might find excuses or even admiration; and74even for the unfeminine girls of the era, she might plead Mrs. Poyser’s opinion, that “the women are made to suit the men.” But for young wives notorious for their flirting and their “followers,” she could have nothing but unqualified scorn and condemnation. For the sentiment demanding absolute fidelity in a wife may be said to have the force of a human instinct; in all ages it has exacted from her an avoidance of the very appearance of evil. Therefore a good woman in the presence of a frivolous flirting wife feels as if a law of nature were being broken before her eyes; since behind the wife stands the possible mother, and the claims of family, race, and caste, as well as of conjugal honor, are all in her keeping.
Without any exaggeration it may be said that wife-errantry is now as common as knight-errantry once was. The young men of to-day have discovered the personal advantage and safety there is in the society of another man’s wife. They transpose an old proverb, and practically say: “Fools marry, and wise men follow their wives.” For, if the husband be only complacent, it is such a75safe thing to flirt with a pretty wife. Young girls are dangerous and might lure them into matrimony; but they have no fear of bigamy. They can whisper sweet words to a gay, married flirt; they can walk, and talk, and dance, and ride with her; they can lounge in her dusky drawing-room or in her opera box, and no one will ask them the reason why, or make any suggestion about their “intentions.”
How far this custom affects the morals of the woman is not at first obvious; but we must insist on this recognized premise: “Society has laid down positive rules regarding the modesty of women, and apart from these rules it is hard to believe modesty can exist. For all conventional social laws are founded on principles of good morals and good sense; and to violate them without a sufficient reason destroys nicety of feeling, sweetness of mind, and self-respect.” It is no excuse to say that propriety is old-maidish, and that men like smart women, or that no harm is intended by their flirtations. The question is: Can married women preserve their delicacy of thought and their76nobleness of manner; can they be truly loyal to their husbands and to themselves throughout the different phases of a recognized flirtation? It is an impossible thing.
Suppose a beautiful girl to be wooed and won by a man in every way suitable to her desires. She has accepted his love and his name, and vowed to cleave to him, and to him only, till death parts them. The wooing has been mainly done in full dress, at balls and operas, or in hours tingling with the expectancy of such conditions. The aroma of roses, the rustle of silks and laces, the notes of music, the taste of bon-bons and sparkling wines, were the atmosphere; and the days and weeks went by to the sense of flying feet in a ballroom, or to enchanted loiterings in greenhouses, and behind palms and flowers on decorated stairways.
The young wife is unwilling to believe that marriage has other and graver duties. She has been taught to live in the present only, and she is, therefore, cynical and apathetic concerning all things but dress and amusements. The husband has to return to77business, which has been somewhat neglected; arrears of duty are to be met. He feels it necessary to attend to the question of supplies; he is, likely, a little embarrassed by the long holiday of wooing and honeymooning, and he would be grateful for some retrenchment and retirement, for the purpose of home-making.
The young wife has no such intentions; she resents and contradicts them on every occasion; and after the first pang of disappointment is over, he finds it the most prudent and comfortable plan to be indifferent to her continued frivolity. He is perhaps even flattered to find her so much admired; perhaps, in his heart, rather thankful to be relieved from the trouble of admiring her. As for any graver thoughts, he concludes that his wife is no worse than A’s and B’s and C’s wives; that she is quite able to take care of herself, and that in a multitude of adorers there is safety.
Thus, in a majority of cases, begins the career of the married flirt. But the character is not a corollary of marriage, if the proper conditions were present when the wife was78a young woman. There is no salvation in the Order of Matrimony; no miracles are wrought at the altar of Grace Church, or at St. Thomas’s. She that is frivolous, giddy, and selfish is likely to continue frivolous, giddy, and selfish; and marriage merely supplies her with a wider field and greater opportunities for the indulgence of her vanity and greed.
She re-enters society with every advantage of youth, beauty, wealth, and liberty; released from the disabilities under which unmarried girls lie; armed with new powers to dazzle and to conquer. No longer a competitor for a matrimonial prize, she is a rival ten times more dangerous than she was. Setting aside the wrong done to the sacredness of the connubial relation, she now becomes the most subtle enemy to the prospects of all the unmarried girls in her set. What is the bud to the perfect rose? The timid, blushing maiden pales and subsides before the married siren who has the audacity and charm of a conscious intelligence. It is not without good reason that special balls and parties have come into79fashion for social buds; they are the necessary sequence to the predominance of married sirens, with whom in a mixed society no young girl can cope. They have the floor and the partners; they monopolize all the attention, and their pleasure is of the greatest importance. And their pleasure is to flirt—to flirt in all places and at all hours.
In vain will some young aspirant to marriage display in the presence of the married flirt her pretty accomplishments. She may sing her songs, and play her mandolin never so sweetly, but the young men slip away with some one or other of the piquant brides of the past year. And in the privacy of the smoking-room it is the brides, and not the young girls, who are talked about—what dresses they wear or are likely to wear, how their hair is done, the history of the jewels which adorn them, and the clever things they have said or implied.
Before we condemn too much the society girls of the time, we ought to consider the new enemy who stands in the way of their advancement to marriage. Is it not quite natural that the most courageous girls should80refuse the secondary place to which married flirts assign them, and endeavor to meet these invaders with their own weapons? If so, much of the forwardness of the present young girl is traceable to the necessity forced upon her by these married competitors. For it is a fact that young men go to the latter for advice and sympathy. They tell them about the girls they like, and their fancies are nipped in the bud. For the married flirt’s first instinct is to divest all other women of that air of romance with which the nobility and chivalry of men have invested womanhood for centuries. So she points out with a pitiless exactness all the small arts which other women use; and is not only a rival to some young girl, but a traitor to her whole sex.
And yet she is not only tolerated but indulged. People giving entertainments know that their success will be in a large measure dependent upon the number of beautiful young wives present. They know the situation is all wrong, but they are sure they cannot either fight the wrong, or put it right; and in the meantime their particular81ball will not increase the evil very much. Not fifty years ago it was the young beauties that were considered and looked after, and the gentlemen asked to an entertainment were asked with reference to the unmarried girls; for it was understood that any married women present would, of course, be wrapped up in their own husbands. Then a wife accepting attentions from one young man after another would have aroused the contempt and disapproval of every man and woman present.
Vanity in the first place leads young wives to flirting, but grosser motives soon follow. For whatever other experiences matrimony brings, it generally stimulates a woman’s love of money; and the married siren soon makes her “followers” understand that she is “a very practical little woman, and does not care for a sonnet, or a serenade, or a bouquet of fresh flowers.” A summer’s cruise in a fine yacht, a seat on a coach, an opera box, a jewel, dinners, drives, and luncheons, are the blackmail which the married flirt expects, in return for her sighs, sentiment, and advice.