Chapter 6
For there has been no special race made for this era; what Adam, Jacob, Samson, and David were, what Eve, Sarah, Rachel, Jael, and Bathsheba were, the men and women of to-day are, in all their essentials. Circumstances only have made them to differ; and nature laughs at circumstances, and goes back at any crisis to her first principles. Indeed, the good mother of to-day, instead of relaxing, must increase her care over her children. For never since the world began has youth been so catered to, never has it been surrounded by so many open temptations, never so much flattered, and yet at the same time never have the reins of discipline been so far relaxed. Now the spirit we evoke we must control, or else we must become its slave. If we are no longer to reverence the gray hairs of age; if young men are to drive the chariot of the sun, and young women are to be allowed to strip the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, then it is high time some system of education was invented which will put old heads upon young shoulders. Alas, this can never be, for education is a long and composite process, made up of home influences, surrounding circumstances, and early associations. When books and schools and teachers shall have done all they possibly can, high above every Gamaliel will sit the good mother,--the first influence, the first teacher, the first friend, and the last.
Unequal Marriages
If there is a mistake peculiarly fatal to a young man's or a girl's future, it is that supreme act of social destruction called a _mésalliance_. Indeed it is not measurable by any of the usual conditions of life, and death itself would be a kindness compared with the long misery of some kinds of _mésalliances_. They may arise from inequalities of birth, differences in religious faith, or great discrepancies in age; but whatever their occasion, they are always a far-reaching and irretrievable mistake; the mistake _par excellence_ of any life.
An unequal marriage is not only the most fatal blunder of life, it is also the most common one; and although it is not very easy for a man to ruin himself with a single act, a foolish marriage will afford him at least one decided way. In regard to men's _mésalliances_, they cannot be said to be specially the temptation of youth. Foolish old men who marry their cooks, and foolish young men who burden themselves with some Casino divinity, keep up a very steady average. But the young man's mistake is much the worst of the two; for he has his whole life before him, and has probably made no provision against such a social suicide.
If an old man marries beneath his station and culture, he believes he is getting the wife he most desires; and if he is disappointed, he is at any rate near the end of life, and he either has no children to suffer from his folly, or they have already grown beyond its most painful reach. But a young man who binds himself to a woman who is every way beneath his own station, education, and professional ambition, is in a different case. In a very short time the disillusion of those senses begins under which he permitted mere physical beauty to bind him; and he knows that, as far as his future progress is concerned, he has put a millstone about his neck.
The effect of a social _mésalliance_ on a girl is still worse. In the first place, it ought to be so; for she has to sin against the natural instinct of a good woman, which is always to marry above herself, an instinct which is, both physiologically and socially, noble. For a woman is less than a woman who does not consider the consequence of marriage, and provide in every way possible to her the best father for her offspring. And if she marries beneath herself socially, the almost certain presumption is that the social status of her husband is the measure of his intellectual abilities, and of his personal refinement also. And when a woman considers herself only in her marriage, and has no care for the circumstances to which she may doom her unborn children, she is an incarnation of animal selfishness.
Without stopping to analyze the sources of its disapproval, this is undoubtedly an instinctive motive for the persistent cold shouldering which society gives girls who degrade themselves by a _mésalliance_. It is obvious to every one that she has sinned against herself, her family, her class, and the highest instincts of her sex. Women have no pardon for such sinners; for they see not only the present wrong, they look forward also to the possible children of such a union. They understand that they will have to suffer all the limitations of poverty when they ought to have had all the advantages of wealth. They may possibly inherit their father's vulgar tastes and tendencies, or they may have to endure the misery of fine tastes without any opportunity to gratify them. For this premeditated sin against motherhood and against posterity, good women find it hard to tolerate the offender; for they know that a woman's honor is in her husband, and that her social station and her social life is determined by his.
When a girl is guilty of a _mésalliance_, it is sometimes said in extenuation that "she has married a man of noble disposition; and it is better to marry a poor, ignorant man, with a noble disposition, than a rich man who is selfish and vicious." If the alternative was a positive one, yes, but there is no need to make a choice between these characters. Men of refined habits and manners and good education may also have noble dispositions; and poor, ill-bred men have not always noble ones; at any rate, a good woman will always find in her own class just as good men as she will find in a class below her own.
All this danger is evident to parents. They know how fleeting passion and fancy are; and they rightly conceive that it is their duty by all possible means to prevent their daughter making an unworthy marriage. How far parents may lawfully interfere is a question not yet decided, nor yet easy to decide. The American idea of marriage is, theoretically, that every soul finds its companion soul, and lives happily ever after; and in this romantic search for a companion soul, young girls are allowed to roam about society, just when their instincts are the strongest and their reason the weakest. The French theory--to which the English is akin somewhat--is that a mother's knowledge is better than a girl's fancy; and that the wisdom that has hitherto chosen her teachers, physicians, spiritual guides, and companions, that has guided her through sickness and health, is not likely to fail in selecting the man most suitable for her husband.
This latter theory supposes women to love naturally any personable man who is their own, and who is kind to them; that is, if she has a virgin heart, and comes in this state from her lessons to her marriage duties. The American theory supposes girls to love by sympathy, and through soul attraction and personal attraction; consequently, our girls are let loose early--too early--to choose among a variety of Wills and Franks and Charlies; and the natural result is a great number of what are called "love matches" to which it must be acknowledged _mésalliances_ are too often the corollary. Between these two theories, it is impossible to make a positive selection; for the bad of each is so bad, and the good of each so good that both alike are capable of the most unqualified praise and blame. It may, however, be safely asserted that the confidence every American girl has in her own power to choose her own husband helps to lessen the danger and to keep things right. For an honorable girl may be trusted with her own honor; and a dishonorable one, amid a number to choose from, may peradventure fare better than she deserves; for Fortune does sometimes bring in the bark that is not steered.
Most girls make _mésalliances_ in sheer thoughtlessness, or through self-will, or in that youthful passion for romance which thinks it fine to lose their world for love. Foolish novels are as often to blame for their social crime as foolish men,--novels which are an apotheosis of love at any cost! Love against every domestic and social obligation! Love in spite of all prudent thought of meat and money matters! Love in a cottage, and nightingales and honeysuckles to pay the rent! And if parents object to their daughter marrying ruin, then they are represented as monsters of cruelty; while the girl who flies stealthily to her misery, and breaks every moral tie to do so, is idealized into an angel of truth and suffering.
In real life what are parents to do with a daughter whose romantic folly has made her marry their groom or their footman? We have outlived the inexorable passions of our ancestors, and their undying loves and hatreds, sacrifices and revenges. Our social code tolerates no passion swallowing up all the rest; and we must be content with a decent expression of feeling. What their daughter has done they cannot undo; nor can they relieve her from the social consequences of her act. She has chosen to put their servant above and before them, and to humiliate her whole family, that she may please her low-born lover and herself, and she has therefore no right to any more consideration than she has given. Her parents may not cease to love her, and they may spare her all reproaches, knowing that her punishment is certain; but they cannot, for the sake of their other children, treat her socially above the station she has chosen. She has become the wife of a servant, and they cannot accept her husband as their equal nor can they insult their friends by introducing him to them. How wretched is the position she has put herself in; for if the man she married be naturally a low man, he will probably drag her to his level by the "grossness of his nature." If she be a woman of strong character she may lift her husband upward, but she accepts such a labor at the peril of her own higher life. And if she finds it impossible either to lift him to her level or to sink herself to his level, what then remains? Life-long regrets, bitter shame and self-reproach, or else a forcible setting of herself free. But the latter remedy carries desperation instead of hope with it. Never can she quite regain her maiden place, and an _aura_ of a doubtful kind influences every effort of her future life.
After all, though men have not the reputation of being romantic, it is certain that in the matter of unequal marriage, they are more frequently imprudent than women. There is some possibility of lifting a low-born woman to the level of a cultivated man, and men dare this possibility far more frequently than is generally supposed. Perhaps after a long season they find the fine ladies with whom they have flirted and danced a weariness; and in this mood they are suddenly taken with some simple, unfashionable girl, who does not know either how to dress, or flirt, or dance. So they make the grave error of thinking that because fine ladies are insupportable, women who are not fine ladies will be sweet and companionable. But if the one be a blank, will that prove the other a prize? The dulness or folly of a polite woman is bad enough; but the dulness and folly of an uneducated woman is worse. Very soon they find this out, and then comes indifference, neglect, cruelty, and all the misery that attends two ruined lives.
The result of unequal marriage in both sexes is certain wretchedness, and this verdict is not to be altered by its exceptions, however brilliant they may seem to be. For when a man of means and education marries an uneducated girl of low birth, or a woman of apparent culture and high social position marries her servant, and the marriages are reasonably happy, then it may be positively said, "_There has been no mésalliance_." The husband and wife were unequal only in their externals. The real characters of both must have been vulgar and naturally low and under-bred.
It is folly to talk of two beings unequally married "growing together," or of "time welding their differences," and making things comfortable. Habit indeed reconciles us to much suffering, and to many trials; but an unequal marriage is a trial no one has any business to have. It is without excuse, and therefore without comfort. When the Almighty decrees us a martyrdom he blends his peace and consolations therewith; but when we torture ourselves our sufferings rage like a conflagration. Perhaps the chain may be worn, as a tight shoe is worn into shape until it no longer lames; but oh, the misery in the process! And even in such case the resigned sufferer has no credit in his patience; quite the contrary, for he knows as well as others know, though submission to what God ordains is the very height of energy and nobility, submission to the mistakes we ourselves make is the very climax of cowardice and weakness.
Discontented Women
Discontent is a vice six thousand years old, and it will be eternal; because it is in the race. Every human being has a complaining side, but discontent is bound up in the heart of woman; it is her original sin. For if the first woman had been satisfied with her conditions, if she had not aspired to be "as gods," and hankered after unlawful knowledge, Satan would hardly have thought it worth his while to discuss her rights and wrongs with her. That unhappy controversy has never ceased; and, with or without reason woman has been perpetually subject to discontent with her conditions, and, according to her nature, has been moved by its influence. Some it has made peevish, some plaintive, some ambitious, some reckless, while a noble majority have found in its very control that serene composure and cheerfulness which is granted to those who conquer, rather than to those who inherit.
But, with all its variations of influence and activity, there has never been a time in the world's history when female discontent has assumed so much and demanded so much as at the present day; and both the satisfied and the dissatisfied woman may well pause to consider whether the fierce fever of unrest which has possessed so large a number of the sex is not rather a delirium than a conviction; whether indeed they are not just as foolishly impatient to get out of their Eden, as was the woman Eve six thousand years ago.
We may premise, in order to clear the way, that there is a noble discontent which has a great work to do in the world; a discontent which is the antidote to conceit and self-satisfaction, and which urges the worker of every kind continually to realize a higher ideal. Springing from Regret and Desire, between these two sighs, all horizons lift; and the very passion of its longing gives to those who feel this divine discontent the power to overleap whatever separates them from their hope and their aspiration.
Having acknowledged so much in favor of discontent, we may now consider some of the most objectionable forms in which it has attacked certain women of our own generation. In the van of these malcontents are the women dissatisfied with their home duties. One of the saddest domestic features of the day is the disrepute into which housekeeping has fallen; for that is a woman's first natural duty and answers to the needs of her best nature. It is by no means necessary that she should be a Cinderella among the ashes, or a Nausicaa washing linen, or a Penelope forever at her needle, but all women of intelligence now understand that good cooking is a liberal science, and that there is a most intimate connection between food and virtue, and food and health, and food and thought. Indeed, many things are called crimes that are not as bad as the savagery of an Irish cook or the messes of a fourth-rate confectioner.
It must be noted that this revolt of certain women against housekeeping is not a revolt against their husbands; it is simply a revolt against their duties. They consider housework hard and monotonous and inferior, and confess with a cynical frankness that they prefer to engross paper, or dabble in art, or embroider pillow-shams, or sell goods, or in some way make money to pay servants who will cook their husband's dinner and nurse their babies for them. And they believe that in this way they show themselves to have superior minds, and ask credit for a deed which ought to cover them with shame. For actions speak louder than words, and what does such action say? In the first place, it asserts that any stranger--even a young uneducated peasant girl hired for a few dollars a month--is able to perform the duties of the house-mistress and the mother. In the second place, it substitutes a poor ambition for love, and hand service for heart service. In the third place, it is a visible abasement of the loftiest duties of womanhood to the capacity of the lowest-paid service. A wife and mother cannot thus absolve her own soul; she simply disgraces and traduces her holiest work.
Suppose even that housekeeping is hard and monotonous, it is not more so than men's work in the city. The first lesson a business man has to learn is to do pleasantly what he does not like to do. All regular, useful work must be monotonous, but love ought to make it easy; and at any rate the tedium of housework is not any greater than the tedium of office work. As for housekeeping being degrading, that is the veriest nonsense. Home is a little royalty; and if the housewife and mother be of elements finely mixed and loftily educated, all the more she will regard the cold-mutton question of importance, and consider the quality of the soup, and the quantity of chutnee in the curry, as requiring her best attention. It is only the weakest, silliest women who cannot lift their work to the level of their thoughts, and so ennoble both.
There are other types of the discontented wife, with whom we are all too familiar: for instance, the wife who is stunned and miserable because she discovers that marriage is not a lasting picnic; who cannot realize that the husband must be different from the lover, and spends her days in impotent whining. She is always being neglected, and always taking offence; she has an insatiable craving for attentions, and needs continual assurances of affection, wasting her time and feelings in getting up pathetic scenes of accusation, which finally weary, and then alienate her husband. Her own fault! There is nothing a man hates more than a woman going sobbing and complaining about the house with red eyes; unless it be a woman with whom he must live in a perpetual fool's paradise of perfection.
There are also discontented wives, who goad their husbands into extravagant expenditure, and urge them to projects from which they would naturally recoil. There are others, whose social ambitions slay their domestic ones, and who strain every nerve, in season and out of season, and lose all their self-respect, for a few crumbs of contemptuous patronage from some person of greater wealth than their own. Some wives fret if they have no children, others just as much if children come. In the first case, they are disappointed; in the second, inconvenienced; and in both, discontented. Some lead themselves and others wretched lives because they have not three times as many servants as are necessary; a still greater number because they cannot compass a life of constant amusement and excitement.
A very disagreeable kind of discontented woman is the wife who, instead of having a God to love and worship, makes a god of her religion, alienates love for an ecclesiastical idea, or neglects her own flesh and blood to carry the religious needs of the world; forgetting that the good wife keeps her sentiments very close to her own heart and hearth. But perhaps the majority of discontented wives have no special thing to complain of; they fret because they are "so dull." If they took the trouble to look for the cause of this "dulness," they would find it in the want of some definite plan of life, and some vigorous aim or object. Of course any aim implies limitation, but limitation implies both virtue and pleasure. Without rule and law, not even the games of children could exist, and the more strictly the rules of a game are obeyed, the greater the satisfaction. A wife's duty is subject to the same conditions. If aimless, plaintive women would make strict laws for their households, and lay out some possible vigorous plan for their own lives, they would find that those who love and work have no leisure for complaining.
But from whatever cause domestic discontent springs, it makes the home full of idleness, ennui, and vagrant imaginations, or of fierce extravagance, and passionate love of amusement. And as a wife holds the happiness of many in her hands, discontent with her destiny is peculiarly wicked. If it is resented, she gets what she deserves; if it is quietly endured, her shame is the greater. For nothing does so much honor to a wife as her patience; and nothing does her so little honor as the patience of her husband. And however great his patience may be, she will not escape personal injury; since none are to be held innocent who do harm even to their own soul and body. Besides, it is the inflexible order of things that voluntary faults are followed by inevitable pain.
Married women, however, are by no means the only complainers. There is a great army of discontents who, having no men to care for them, are clamoring, and with justice, for their share of the world's work and wages. Such women have a perfect right to make a way for themselves, in whatever direction they best can. Brains are of no sex or condition, and at any rate, there is no use arguing either their ability or their right, for necessity has taken the matter beyond the reach of controversy. Thousands of women have now to choose between work, charity, or starvation, for the young man of to-day is not a marrying man. He has but puny passions, and his love is such a very languid preference that he cannot think of making any sacrifice for it. So women do not marry, they work; and as the world will take good work from whoever will give it, the world's custom is flowing to them by a natural law.
Now, earnest, practical women-workers are blessed, and a blessing; but the discontented among them, by much talking and little doing, continually put back the cause they say they wish to advance. No women are in the main so discontented as women-workers. They go into the arena, and, fettered by old ideas belonging to a different condition, they are not willing to be subject to the laws of the arena. They want, at the same time, the courtesy claimed by weakness and the honor due to prowess. They complain of the higher wages given to men, forgetting that the first article of equal payment is equal worth and work. They know nothing about what Carlyle calls "the silences;" and the babble of their small beginnings is, to the busy world, irritating and contemptible. It never seems to occur to discontented working-women that the best way to get what they want is to act, and not to talk. One silent woman who quietly calculates her chances and achieves success does more for her sex than any amount of pamphleteering and lecturing. For nothing is more certain than that good work, either from man or woman, will find a market; and that bad work will be refused by all but those disposed to give charity and pay for it.