XXXII. WEDLOCK IN DANGER.

“Why don’t you marry and have a house of your own to oversee and children to bring up and a husband to take care of? I’ll warrant there’d soon be an end of all these fads about ‘higher education’ and woman’s mission and the ‘emancipation of the enslaved sex,’ and all the rest of the rubbish I hear you talk.”

Thus in my hearing not long since did a certain grandmamma, whom I extremely admire and love, address her namesake, a bright girl of twenty summers, who at once replied frankly and succinctly:

“We don’t marry nowadays, grandmamma, because the men don’t ask us to. It’s out of fashion.”

“Out of fashion! Nonsense. The world isn’t going to stop growing, is it? If the men don’t ask you, why, you must ask them, that’s all.”

“It wasn’t so in your day, was it, grandmamma?” pursued the girl mischievously; and the dear old lady bridled a little and set off upon a train of reminiscences more exciting than a fairy story.

Nor was she a solitary instance in my experience. Ask almost any woman of seventy years and over as to the opportunities of matrimony that were offered to her before twenty-five, and if she has been a pretty girl she will tell you much the same story, and veraciously, too, for I have heard old gentlemen tell the same stories from their own side. If a girl was young and comely and gay and bright, it was a foregone conclusion three quarters of a century ago that she would have what they called “beaux” in abundance, and would marry whenever she was tired of her position as queen of hearts. If they did not care to abdicate too early, they favored now one and now another of their courtiers, played off one swain against another, broke hearts and caused Wertherlike tragedies, for in those days people read “The Sorrows of Werther” with tearful sympathy instead of with peals of laughter, as do we modern cynics.

If you don’t believe all this, go and ask your own grandmamma if she ever had an admirer except grandpapa, and if she is one of the right sort of old ladies—an old lady with soft blue eyes and a pretty smile and fine white skin, all covered with a lace pattern of tiny wrinkles, and silvery, wavy hair—if she is that sort of a grandmamma, you will spend at least one delightful twilight hour in hearing of the old times, the good old times when girls were queens of love and beauty and men were their humble adorers, and only withheld their proposals from a very becoming sense of their unworthiness.

To be sure, if you are a girl, these stories may have the effect that novels did upon Gloriana, who, instead of lining amused at the tales of romance she read, only wept into her checked apron because “there were so many good times and she not in them.”

But if you are a young man you will feel the same sort of self-congratulation you do in reading the “Lives of the Martyrs.” You would not have liked to throw incense upon a heathen altar and trample the cross under your feet, but you don’t feel at all sure that you would have withstood the temptation to escape the rack and the boiling oil.

Certainly the times have changed, and men change with them, for us as well as for Ulysses, and I say “men” advisedly, for I don’t think women have changed as much. Most girls—that is, the dear, rosy, dimpling darlings, who are papa’s pet and mamma’s blessing, and who do not insist upon becoming civil engineers or doctors of law, medicine or theology—these girls, pure and simple, are willing enough to marry if some one whom they love asks them to do so. But the men do not propose, and the good old methods are out of vogue, and the times are out of joint.

Young men have extended their privileges and contracted their liabilities. Formerly if an unmarried man paid particular attention to a girl or a young widow, it was understood by all observers that he was a candidate for her hand if he could gain her reluctant consent to accept him. The girl’s parents looked serenely on, conscious that their daughter was mistress of the situation, and needed neither assistance nor protection—conscious, too, that the young man would be a very fortunate fellow if he gained so desirable a wife—and they would not stand in his way, although they were sincerely sorry to lose the flower of their family.

After awhile the girl shyly told her mother that Reuben and she were going to be married about Thanksgiving time, and although there was not often any open announcement of the engagement, and certainly no receptions or presents to mark the occasion, the bride’s family began preparations for the wedding and the setting up of the young couple at housekeeping. It was all so simple and honest and natural that to hear of those times is like reading of the golden age or the lost Atlanta, or any other of those dreams of some bygone perfection, or some coming millennium.

Occasionally in those days the young man behaved in a manner which is now the rule, but then was the exception, and proved himself a trifler and a male flirt, amusing himself for the hour, but with no serious intentions. But he was not then, as he now is, suffered to get off scot free from this sort of pleasantry. If, after a due period of courtship, the youth made no offer of matrimony, but showed symptoms of transferring his attentions to some other shrine, the father or brother of the slighted fair one called him to account, demanding an explanation of his conduct, and giving him to understand that if he had no serious intentions, they had, and that, having danced to pleased himself, he was now to pay the piper to please them.

Generally a little conversation of this sort was effectual, and the tardy swain insisted that he had only been waiting for encouragement to declare himself, but if the trifler really tried to cry off and escape without penalty, the brother or father significantly handled a heavy riding whip or cane or glanced at the stout boots he might chance to be wearing. Sometimes indeed a marriage has been solemnized at the muzzle of a loaded pistol, with an angry father at its other end, and I have heard of an old-time marriage where the bridegroom, being asked, “Do you take this woman for your wedded wife?” replied, “Not if I can help it,” and the bride’s brother deliberately cocked and aimed his pistol, demanding, “What was your reply, sirrah?” “Yes, I do,” returned the other, grinding his teeth, and the marriage proceeded. One does not envy that unfortunate bride, however, and in point of fact she died before the year was over of a broken heart. However, the family honor was saved, and in those old days they placed a good deal of value upon family honor. So old-fashioned!

But these extremities of persuasion were very rare. Generally speaking, the young man asked for no greater privilege than an early wedding, and the father had only to open his pocketbook, and the brother to make himself agreeable, and the mother to buy and cut whole bolts of linen and cambric and cotton into the trousseau which the pretty bride helped to make up with her own fingers.

And now all this is changed. Instead of placidly looking on to see her daughter hold a little court and select the one she means to favor from a crowd of eager aspirants, the mother must be, like the early bird, very early on the ground to capture the biggest and richest worm before any other mother bird can grab him and carry him to drop into her nestling’s open mouth. No wonder she gets an anxious and eager look herself and worries and frets and twitters and chirps overmuch and keeps the home nest in a condition of turmoil, for the worm has grown very wary, and if in taking his early walks abroad he espies the flitting form of the mother bird or even hears her sweet if sharpened song of greeting, he is apt to precipitately retire to his burrow or hide beneath some stem or clump of weeds.

Worse than this, should the bachelor chance to be, instead of a mere worm of earth, a beautiful gold or silver fish disporting himself in the waters of matrimony, then mamma, instead of a bird, is seen as a fisher, a veritable fisher of men, baiting her hook with her daughter’s charms, her accomplishments, her virtues, and her affectionate and submissive temperament; but, alas, the gold-fish has grown as “gamy” as a brook trout, and worse, for he can often keep a most experienced angler “in play” for a whole season, and at the end give a sprightly and humorous twist to his glittering tail and fly off at a tangent, to be no more seen in those waters.

Now, why are these things thusly? “Why don’t the men propose, mamma?” as runs the cynically comic song.

Surely girls are as sweet and as pretty and as affectionate and as gay as they were a century or so ago, and as grandmamma sensibly remarks, “The world must go on,” and if the young men, born and brought up in our own land will not assist in propelling the national chariot they must not object later on, when, as Mrs. Gamp has it, “most wotes carried the day,” and the descendants of the Knickerbockers and the Puritans and the F. F. V.’s find themselves in an unconsidered minority.

But why, I again ask, why should it be so, and why do our young men need to be urged, from political or any other reasons, to make themselves the “happiest of men?”

Of course I know that the question has been asked before and variously answered. But no answer that ever I have heard has met the requirements, and I almost fancy that it must remain one of the conundrums without reply which, like snags and bowlders, still obstruct the stream of time.

One reason, doubtless, is the one most frequently given—the necessities of modern life are too many and too expensive for a young man to rashly undertake.

“The luxuries of one generation become the necessities of the next.” It is a sharply true aphorism and none the less true because it is a well-worn truism. It might indeed be amplified, for the luxuries of three generations ago are almost disdained by us. Our great-grandmothers were carried about in sedan chairs, our grandmothers drove in chaises and sometimes chariots, our mothers had family “carryalls,” and the lady of fashion to-day has her brougham and victoria, with liveried coachman and foot-man, and a pair of magnificent horses.

Naturally a young man would feel more sure of being able to provide his wife with a sedan chair, a chaise, or even a chariot, than with a brougham. This is one reason; and another is that girls enter upon matrimony with very different intentions and plans of life than they used to. To be a good housekeeper, a good wife, a good mother, was formerly the ambition of a bride, even in the highest circle, and where the husband was yet to come, the young wife knew how to economize in all sorts of pretty ways, and to do a good deal with her own hands, not only to beautify the home but to make it comfortable.

Yet another reason is that both men and maidens know more about the world and about each other than they used to. “Knowledge is power,” they say, but to my mind knowledge is warning in matters of sex. I am not speaking of the ideal man and woman, nor of those delightful exceptions to the rule among whom I cheerfully class your best beloved and my own, but with regard to the general run of men I freely confess that an intimate acquaintance with their peculiarities, “their tricks and their manners,” their standards of morality and of conscience, their tastes and pursuits, is liable to make a thoughtful woman a little cautious about intrusting her life to any man. And I dare say that the young men who get their ideas of womanhood from Zola and his living models, or from the conversation of their club associates after club hours, are less anxious to bind themselves in the chains of matrimony than were their grandfathers. In that day—that is, in the grandfather’s day, a young girl was in the eyes of young men a holy mystery, a something to be protected, admired, delicately shielded from the knowledge of evil, a being intended to lead the man she loved to higher and nobler life, to be his blessing on earth and his guide to heaven.

But the clubman of to-day laughs in gently pitying scorn at such ideas, and tells you with cynical frankness how the reality differs from his grandfather’s ideal. When you have listened to him for a few moments, you no longer wonder that he does not care to marry. You only wonder how any decent woman can be found to marry him.

To sum it all up in the moral of the old allegory of the garden of Eden:

“Man and woman have eaten of the tree of knowledge and see each other as they are, and they are afraid.”

More reasons there are, and more intricate ones, but with a little thought you will see them for yourself, and at the end, instead of asking “Why don’t they marry?” you will inquire,

“Is marriage becoming obsolete?”