Generally the woman expands and beautifies, rises with the occasion, and puts on new beauty with the confidence of an augmenting wardrobe 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 of young men, and has not been admitted among the husbands of the community; he hangs between two states; is not of that, nor yet quite of this.
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. Thomass or St. Bartholomews, 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 dentists room with a tooth-ache similar to that which made Burns and some of us have watched for an editors decision with feelings which would gladly have annihilated the interval.
Cast the wee stools owre the meikle;
But it is not alone the prosaic and the impatient who are averse to a long engagement: the methodical, whose arrangements it tumbles upside 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 are really in love they gain more than they lose by a reasonable delay. There is time for the reading and writing of 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 theres nothing half so sweet in life
As Loves 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 so happy 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 a mésalliance. Now, to a man a mésalliance is 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 her whole 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; an aura of 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 is not well 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 unmarried readers 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 wood, but married and a. Now begins their real life, and for the woman the first step is renunciation. 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 mans 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 own fireside 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 wifes 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
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 own fireside 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 wifes 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.
Shall our Daughters have Dowries?
Those who 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 $1,100 a 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 circle some 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 womans 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 handed over to her husband with nothing but 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 mans 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. Messingers argument is the servile and mercenary aspect in which it places marriage. What equality can exist, he asks, where one (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 husbands 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 a dozen 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 wifes 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 gentlemans 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 wifes 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 the age. 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 daughters 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, where 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.