IV. AMERICAN HUSBANDS.

There is nothing new under the sun; nothing whatever.

If that is not a new saying, it is a very true one, and most true things are old, and most old things are true, so that the wonder is why they have not been accepted and done with long ago. The reason, I suppose, is that every new generation, every new individual, in fact, insists upon acquiring his own information for himself, and scorns “other men’s leavings.”

Certainly this question of international marriages is old. I remember as a little child sitting up at a table to look at the pictures in a big Bible, and my favorite was a very spirited cartoon, representing the Benjaminites descending upon the vineyards of Shiloh, I believe it was, and each man seizing a struggling maiden to carry away to be made his wife. I used to clamor, they tell me, to be shown the “Gentlemen of Benjamin,” as I called it.

There in that same old Bible we are told that the sons of God married the daughters of men, probably the earliest recorded instance of international marriages.

Later on in life I learned the story of the rape of the Sabines, and pondered much upon the probable after-life of those unwilling brides, and even ventured in my cynical young mind to wish that a fleet of Sabines might sail into the Gulf of Mexico, and carry away certain obnoxious elderly maids from the environs of New Orleans, my native city.

Neither history nor tradition tells us how any of these international marriages prospered, but I am inclined to judge, badly. I dare say the sons of God, whoever they may have been, were prim and priggish, and soon concluded that the daughters of men were a bad lot, and they were sorry they had undertaken their conversion. And I dare say those merry maids of Shiloh sighed more than once for the pleasant vineyards whence they had been torn, and the careless dances which had been their principal occupation.

As for the Sabine brides, one can well imagine the remarks they would upon occasion make to their bridegrooms, or rather to their masters, upon the rude fashion of their wooing, and how often, in whatever language Sabines used, they would say:

“What else could I expect from such a brute as you showed yourself that day?” And probably the Sabine gentleman responded with a contemptuous flip of his callous fingers or perhaps a touch of his whip.

William of Normandy, wishing to make an international marriage with Matilda of Flanders, waylaid her as she came from church, dragged her from her palfrey, rolled her in the dirt, and gave her a good beating with his stirrup leathers. I believe it was after that episode that she and her maidens embroidered the Bayeux tapestries in his honor, so I suppose that she was neither maimed in body nor unforgiving in spirit. But, for all that, I have not the smallest doubt that, in moments of conjugal unreserve, Matilda often alluded to the leathering scene, and William as often lamented that their acquaintance had not ended there.

But if one goes into royal international marriages there is no end really to the unhappy histories written between the lines of grave annals of State.

The French brides of English kings, with their pathetic attempts to import a little of their national gayety and grace into insular commonplace; the devout Spanish infantas, who found their religion either the deadly horror or the flippant scorn of the French and English courts; the haughty Austrian, Maria Louisa, scorning the Corsican-Frenchman to whom she had been bartered; that other unfortunate arch-duchess, Marie Antoinette, whom the French accused before all things of being an Austrian (l’Autrichienne)—in fact, the list is endless of unhappy royal international marriages, and we leave them as we find them for warning lights.

In our own day and time we have plenty of examples ready at hand. Probably every one of us is personally cognizant of some international marriage and can answer for ourselves whether, as a general thing, these marriages have been successful. Those which I have observed have not, or at least not when the bride was an American and the bridegroom of another nationality. The truth is, that American men make the very best husbands of any men in the world, and American girls are trained in their ideas of the relative obligations of husbands and wives by what they observe at home of their own parents, and are utterly ignorant of what any other than an American man expects of his wife.

The American, sincerely and unconsciously, respects and admires woman as a class. He feels that she is a creature to be shielded, protected, petted, caressed, not only while she is a young maiden whom he is wooing, but after she becomes a wife and mother. I suppose there is no civilized woman in the world possessed of so much honorable freedom as the American wife. I say honorable freedom as distinguishing her condition from that of the women of the demi monde in Paris and other places, who have secured for themselves a sort of freedom, or rather lawlessness, which can certainly not be styled honorable. No, certainly, there is no woman in the world with more possibilities of happiness before her than an American woman married to a typical American man. There are other men in the world who make better lovers. Romeo, the pattern and model of lovers, could not possibly have been an American. Othello wooed Desdemona as never American wooed or could woo.

One can hardly imagine General Lee, for instance, recapitulating his battles and making much of his “hairbreadth escapes by sea and land” for the edification of a young lady whom he wished to marry. And yet I, for one, would rather have been Mrs. Lee than Mrs. Othello, or even Mrs. Romeo Montague, for even as the Moor killed his wife from jealousy, the Italian certainly would have neglected and slighted his while he sang under the balcony of some other Juliet. True, he would have expected her to take the same liberty so long as she didn’t get found out, but that state of things can hardly be classed under the head of happy marriages.

All men of the Latin races—Italians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese—are endowed by nature with the gift of love-making. They can cast a look across the room a hundred times more eloquent than any word a Saxon could say on the fairest moonlight night that ever shone. Give him the moonlight night, and he not only looks but speaks like Apollo, like the sirens, like Mephistopheles himself, who is, as all accounts agree, the most fascinating creature in the world until you become too well acquainted with him.

But this irresistible Latin lover makes an extremely poor husband. In fact, the honeymoon is scarcely over before he resumes the occupation of love-making, only now those glances, those whispers, those adoring protestations, are devoted to somebody else. He has coursed his hare and captured her; he has charmed the bird off the bough and caged her. Now he looks for a hare and a bird who are still at liberty, and still can give him the pleasure of the chase.

Make love to one’s wife! He laughs in good-natured contempt at the absurd suggestion, and with a final twist of his mustache, a final survey of his invincible self in the mirror, he walks away, leaving la signora or madame to pass her lonely hours as she will.

As a general thing, she contrives that they shall not be lonely. But, after all, this is not the ideal marriage, is it? Now, if the signora or madame is an American girl, accustomed to an American father and his domestic manners, she doesn’t take to the new ways at all kindly. She does not want to have some other woman’s husband come and sentimentally console her for the desertion of her own spouse. Although in Rome, she declines to do what the Romans do, but persists in demanding that Rome should do as New York or Boston or Philadelphia does. She doesn’t succeed in creating a new code of international marriage relations, poor little soul, and the result is, as a usual thing, tragic. Either she beats or bruises herself to pieces in dashing against the walls of the inevitable, or she accepts her fate in a reckless spirit that carries her a great deal too far. She does “console herself” with a vengeance—and misery, warfare, perhaps divorce, perhaps death, are the results.

But the more common form of international marriage is not between an American and a Latin, but a sort of cousinly alliance between an English, Irish or Scotchman with the American girl, whose blood is generally derived from one or the other of these divisions of the Anglo-Saxon race.

This arrangement does better than the Latin alliance, for there are points in common between the mother country and her independent daughter which make more harmony. There is a common language, generally a common religion, and an unwritten code of ethics and manners, which is pretty generally shared by each.

The British lover and the American lover are about on a par, although the Englishman, as a general thing, assumes as soon as he is engaged a certain air of authority and proprietorship which the American never dreams of at any period of his career as a lover and husband.

I feel sure that in the English marriage service the “obey” is spelled with a big “O,” for it seems the principal point of the bride’s new duties, and the fiancée is cheerfully ready to begin to practice her obligations. If she tries to rebel, her mother and friends, perhaps her betrothed himself, call her to account with the threat that if she doesn’t take care she will lose her opportunity. Jack, or Tom, or Ned, will feel that so untractable a girl will make a poor wife, and he will be off his bargain.

Say that to an American girl, and what walls or roofs would contain her scorn? She would return that young man’s rings and letters before the hour was out, and not know him the next time she met him. But with the English girl a different heredity and a different training have produced an entirely different temperament. She also has insensibly gathered from the mutual demeanor of her father and mother the standard of matrimonial manners and obligations. She perceives that her mother’s first duty is to defer in all things to her father; to provide for his physical comfort at the expense perhaps of her own; to coax, cajole, persuade or deceive him into consenting to an entertainment, an expedition, a new gown or a new visitor. The father is a little Jupiter, and the mother is an “ox-eyed Juno,” whose principal virtue is amiable submission, and whose principal study is how to circumvent the Thunderer.

Of course the girl accepts her father as the highest and noblest type of husband, and her mother as the inevitable type of wife, and her character molds itself insensibly to these limitations and upon these lines. She becomes another attentive, submissive, furtive wife like her mother, the charming English wife of an Englishman.

But make the marriage international, and the domestic machine declines to run in any such time honored ruts. A broad-gauge engine will not, cannot, adapt itself to a narrow gauge road, and some fearful bolting, with very likely a catastrophe at the end, will be the result of trying to make it.

The Englishman’s estimate of women, her rights, her privileges, her duties, is altogether different from that of an American. Whatever his outward demeanor in his own or other countries, his underlying conviction is that—

If the woman is bright, keen and well educated, he looks upon her as a phenomenon and rather undesirable as a wife. His highest praise of her achievements is that they are “almost worthy of a man.”

Perhaps—for, of course neither all Englishmen nor all Americans follow one undeviating rule—perhaps he does honestly admire and appreciate this intellectual phenomenon and wishes to marry her—that is, if she has money—for not even in the Sublime Porte is marriage more of a commercial transaction than in England. Walpole’s famous utterance that “every man has his price” is most applicable to the matrimonial market. Has the American bride of an Englishman a fortune (and she is not likely to become his bride if she has none), she is expected to relinquish it into his hands either entirely, or with the reserve of a certain amount settled upon herself and her children. If the property is not of a nature to be definitely settled, she binds herself to make over a stated portion of her income for his sole use, and perhaps in addition she pays all the expenses of the ménage—in fact, an Englishman is not ashamed to allow his wife to pay for his bread and butter, and in addition to give him the money to buy his cigars.

But women—that is to say, American women—do not generally care much about money, and are very willing to give it to the man who professes to love them, and whom they intend to love for life, honor so far as he is worthy of honor, and obey in love’s sweet humility so long as obedience is the reasonable and voluntary expression of love.

But long before the honeymoon is over the young wife discovers her mistake. The lever-like attitude of the Englishman drops away like the petals of an overblown rose, and leaves nothing but sturdy wood and pitiless thorns. The irksome deference he has, through the season of courtship, felt obliged to pay to the delicacy or the prejudices of his fiancée is thrown aside with the wedding coat, and the most négligé of smoking jackets and slippers are figuratively assumed. He tells his wife stories that would startle a messroom or a club parlor. He flatly contradicts her; he leaves her to get around by herself, or to be escorted by any one who will take pity on her; he gruffly demands why this or that matter has not been attended to; he leaves her at home while he enjoys himself abroad; he allows her, if she will do it, to wait upon him like a servant, while he lounges upon a sofa; he lets her carry her own wraps and escort herself to her carriage. In fact, he utterly fails in that tender deference and ever-present care, that prevoyance which is so natural to the American gentleman, the American husband in every class, that American women often fail to appreciate it unless through observing or experiencing an international marriage, they discover how precious a birth-right they have sold for a mess of pottage and go mourning all their lives.

Every rule has its exceptions, no doubt, but, as a rule the American husband is the best husband in the world.