“It is not good that the man should be alone.” Venerable maxim! First reflection of the Creator on the species! Standing condemnation of all schemes of celibacy, of all orders of monks and nuns, vestals and spiritual eunuchs!
The character of any man or woman who leads the single life is incomplete, lacking in fullness of sympathy for certain aspects of our common nature, not perfectly rounded to the orb of man’s whole life. All examples, even the highest, give evidence of this. No man who has not had a wife whom he loved can understand what love is; he who is not a parent, can never appreciate the feelings of a father.
The fruition of life, even on the lowest terms, is impossible without the union of the sexes. The first Napoleon, in one of his letters, describing the essential needs of man, numbered them as three,—food, shelter, woman. All doctrines and social theories which conflict with this primordial law of the life of the species are unnatural, and their tendency is lowering to the progress of the race. Maternity, not virginity, is the holier state. Celibate orders have proved as sterile in intellectual as in physical offspring.
Love, marriage, children, the family,—the emotions and feelings, the affections and the ideas, which centre around these foci of human activity are essential elements in every life which is lived to the full measure of its powers. Nothing can take their places. Happiness without them is not human.
The emotion of Love belongs to those whose aims are ideal, because it is concerned with the future evolution of the species. In the iridescent glow of this master-passion its object never seems a mere human being, a man or a woman, but is invested with a charm unseen by the eye, not expressed in form or color, endowed with the power of exciting the soul to an indefinite and passionate expansion. It is the inaudible appeal of unborn posterity for its share in the world of Being.
Hence it is that Love is so powerfully excited by Beauty, by the symmetry and traits which foreshadow the final physical perfection of the race, the unconscious but unceasing struggle of organic nature toward nobler transformations, toward the building of a tabernacle fit to be a shrine for the activities of a higher life.
Though hundreds of volumes have been written in poetry and prose on the subject of Love, it remains unexhausted, because it is inexhaustible. Its seed-field is the boundless future, its message concerns all posterity. There is something in it deeper than the emotion of any single heart, farther reaching than any individual effort. There is a secret about it which can never be wholly told, which it were a profanation to try to express. Even between loving ones, it is better not to talk much of it, nor too curiously to think about it. When true and pure, it will be manifested without words in ennobling the character and elevating its aims and actions.
The attraction of woman for man is her invisible presage of motherhood. This it is which lends the nameless charm to the maiden and the sacred dignity to the matron. Around her, centre all those sentiments which constitute the Home, the family, and the parental affections. These find their proper expression in Marriage.
The history of the institution of marriage is a curious narrative. Every conceivable relation of the sexes has been established by one community or another, and sanctioned by the moral sense of the time and place. There have been hordes where the relations have been communal or miscellaneous; others, where a man had many wives; others, as in Thibet to-day, where the woman would have many husbands; sometimes the woman selects the man, at others the man the woman, and elsewhere the marriage is arranged by third parties; in some, marriage is indissoluble, in others, more or less easily annulled; while in certain religious societies in our own country the method of selective and temporary unions has been practiced. The result of all these experiments has been to show that the happiness of both parties is best consulted by strictly monogamous or pairing marriages, where each exerts a certain amount but not entire freedom of selection, and where the lien can be canceled when it proves clearly detrimental to the felicity of either.
Very few words will be necessary to defend the first of these three conditions. Under whatever form we find polygamy, whether legalized, as in Mohammedan countries, or sanctioned by religion, as among the Mormons, or winked at by usage, as in mistress-keeping, it inevitably results in the degradation of the woman and her subjection to the dominion of lower impulses. To every one who believes that her happiness demands equal attention to that of the man, all schemes of polygamy stand condemned.
The second condition I have stated will need more defense. Especially in our country is it unpopular to oppose the course of love. “Let me not,” exclaims the great dramatist, “to the marriage of true minds admit impediment.” Yet all will admit certain impediments. The laws of many States prohibit the marriage of near of kin, of first cousins, and of uncles with nieces, although in Germany unions of the latter class are very common.
Immature age does legally, and should always, act as a bar to marriage. At what period of life marriage is likely to prove most happy is a curious question, which has never been properly studied. The physiologist, basing his opinion on grounds of his science, would say that the woman should be between twenty and thirty, and the man between twenty-five and thirty-five. Dr. Johnson, regarding the question from another point of view, made the wise observation,—“Those who marry late are best pleased with their children, and those who marry early with their partners.”
Apart from questions of immature age and near relationship, marriages in the United States are generally contracted without restriction. The young of both sexes are usually conceded full liberty to make their own selection, the burden of the support of both being generally assumed by the husband. The consequence is that such unions are frequently entered upon with slight real acquaintance of each other, the wife is wholly dependent, and the husband has a heavy load to carry,—conditions calculated to intensify the struggle for existence and diminish the happiness of home.
From considerable observation of family life in both countries, I believe that the French system is superior to ours. In a French family of the middle or upper classes, the parent who desires to marry a daughter, for instance, takes pains to introduce and recommend young men of suitable station. No coercion is used on either side. Only when an affection naturally springs up is the union decided upon. A marriage-settlement is drawn by which each of the young couple receives a certain amount of property, wholly independent of the control of the other. Thus they are freed from the severest pressure of monetary anxiety, and, what is especially valuable, the wife has a recognized place of power, and secures her rightful prestige in the family circle. I have often observed how superior is the position of the wife in France to what it is in this country. The reason is in the better method of forming marriages.
A sympathetic marriage is the happiest condition of human life; but one without sympathy is a hateful servitude. How distressing to be obliged to live for those whom we cannot bear to live with!
The number of unhappy marriages in the United States may be guessed from the records of the divorce courts, which register only some of the most unhappy. The divorces granted annually sever nearly thirty thousand couples, and this although in many States such separation is costly, slow, and difficult. These figures represent, therefore, but a small fraction of the marriages which are galling the backs of one or both of the parties concerned.
When we reflect what the true foundations of the marital relations should be,—love, affection, sympathy,—it would appear wholly foreign to its character that it should be made an obligatory fetter and a continued curse by any law, civil or religious. The moral sense, personal affection, parental feeling, and the sentiment of society, would seem to be sufficient to preserve all those unions which should be preserved. Their severance should be left to the option of the parties concerned alone. Surely the happiness of the individual would be better consulted by such an arrangement than by that which now prevails.
Marriages, so far from being entered upon with greater recklessness, would then be more cautiously undertaken, because their durability would depend on mutual satisfaction. The woman would have full equality of rights, and not be a miserable sacrifice to unjust laws, as now she often is. It would be a step toward the ideal of the marriage state, which is a union based on love, in which each party has absolutely equal rights and stands pledged to equal duties, and neither is bound to the other longer than love and duty are respected. Neither government nor religion should put obstacles in the way of the dissolution of marriage other than those safeguards of the interests involved, which attend the termination of all important contracts.
Deep thinkers on the relations of life in goodly number have long advocated these views. They have been those of John Milton, of William von Humboldt, of John Stuart Mill. Nor is there anything in them which an enlightened moral or religious sentiment should oppose; rather the contrary. As Milton so well says in his Treatise on Divorce,—“Where Love cannot be, there can be left of wedlock nothing but the empty husk of an outside matrimony, as undelightful and unpleasing to God as any other kind of hypocrisy.”
The object of marriage is the Family. Love claims immortality through posterity. The hidden though ever-present purpose of the union of the sexes is the perpetuation and evolution of the species. Any union which avoids this object is destructive, and not creative of true happiness. We are told of the ancient ascetic sect of the Essenes that the sexes united in marriage, but remained chaste; and had families of children, but gathered them from among the foundlings and homeless orphans of the highways. Their impossible example does not merit the praise, as it has not enlisted the imitation of, later generations. The maternal and paternal affections, the love of family and the pleasures derived from the ties of kindred, are enjoyments which the properly constituted individual will never be willing to sacrifice unless constrained thereto by mighty and exceptional conditions. The tacit assumption of mutual aid and confidence between brothers and sisters, and the intimacy which is fostered by even remoter degrees of relationship, are beneficent elements of the social compact, and contribute largely to the happiness of the individual.
The Family, as we understand it, is distinctly a product of high civilization. In savage tribes the ties of consanguinity are quite different. In many, for instance, the father is scarcely regarded as a relation, blood kin being counted through the mother only. The rise of the paternal or patriarchial form of the family appears at a higher stage of culture; and when, as among the Etruscans and Romans, it was coincident with a recognized equality in marriage, society advanced with rapid strides.
Some believe that the theory of the family, as it has so long prevailed in Europe, is inappropriate for this country, and hence that it is disappearing among us, as unsuited to the development of our forms of culture. Children desire their liberty earlier, and parents are ready to comply with their requests. No ties other than material ones are recognized as constituting a family unit. It will be for the future to decide whether the greater personal independence thus secured has been of more value to the happiness of the race than the elements of affection sacrificed in obtaining it.
Law is the bond of the state, love, of the family. The former rules best by precept, the latter by example.
Those marriages are ominous which transmit miseries.
The family tie differs from the tie of friendship in that it binds together interests rather than sympathies.
Love, says Michael Angelo in one of his Sonnets, is the mental impression of ideal beauty:—
The aims of the child centre around his maturity; those of the man around his posterity.
The generations unborn are the sovereigns of the world, and the goals we are running for are invisible. Posthumous aims are the potent.
The heart of every woman is like a page written with sympathetic ink. It seems blank, but warm it sufficiently, and you will find a love-letter written on it.
Cara amica, beware of that tendency in your nature to repose utter confidence. Learn that nought is so fragile as Faith. It is like those delicate vases of Venetian glass which a single drop of poison is said to shiver into atoms. Better the homely ware which will toss it out, and fill again with wine. It is a law of reasoning that full belief is disproved by a single event, but partial belief only by a series of events. But what have you to do with reasoning? you who must trust “not at all, or all in all”? and bless you for it, fated, foolish friend.
A man weeps for the lost loved one; a woman for the lost love.
Love is the language in which the gods speak to man, observes Plato. Unfortunate is he who hears it not; doubly unfortunate he who hears, but comprehends it not.
True love is love of love; not love of the pleasures of love.