CHAPTER LIV. P. I.
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.
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.
