Mocking At Matrimony

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Title:     Mocking At Matrimony
Author: William Davenport Adams [More Titles by Adams]

The world has reason to be grateful to the writer who lately demonstrated the possibility of being happy 'though married.' Some exposition of the sort was sadly needed. Hitherto the estate of matrimony has met with a long succession of jibes and sneers. It has had its apologists, even its prophets and eulogists; but it has had many more detractors. There is, indeed, no subject on which the satirists of the world, both great and small, have so largely and so persistently made merry. It has been a stock subject with them. It is as if they had said to themselves, 'When at a loss, revile the connubial condition.' Married life has been the sport of every wit, and, sorrowful to relate, society has been well content to join in the pastime. There is nothing so common as sarcasm on matrimony, and nothing, apparently, so welcome, even to the married.

The banter in question has been of all sorts--sometimes vague, sometimes particular, in its import. A few censors have confined themselves to simple condemnation. 'A fellow that's married's a felo-de-se,' wrote the late Shirley Brooks; and he had been anticipated in the stricture. An anonymous satirist had written:

'"Wedlock's the end of life," one cried;
"Too true, alas!" said Jack, and sigh'd--
"'Twill be the end of mine."'

And if matrimony was not suicide, it was ruin. Old Sir Thomas More had said of a student who had married that 'in knitting of himself so fast, himself he had undone.' And a later rhymer, contrasting wedding with hanging, had come to the conclusion that

'Hanging is better of the twain--
Sooner done and shorter pain.'

To the suggestion that a youth should not marry till he has more wisdom, the Italian epigrammatist replies that if he waits till he has sense he will not wed at all. Marriage, said the famous Marshal Saxe, in effect, is a state of penance; Rome declares there are seven sacraments, but there are really only six, because penance and matrimony are one.

Hymen, says Chamfort, comes after love, like smoke after flame. It is the high sea, observes Heine, for which no compass has yet been invented. Its melancholy uncertainty is illustrated by the remark of Samuel Rogers, that it does not matter whom you marry--she will be quite another woman the next day. It was Rogers, too, who, when he heard of a certain person's nuptials, declared that if his friends were pleased his enemies were delighted. Selden's complaint against marriage was that it is 'a desperate thing,' out of which it is impossible to extract one's self; but then he lived before the era of Sir Cresswell Cresswell. And the utmost that the conventional detractor will admit is, that the institution gives to man two happy hours. 'Cursed be the hour I first became your wife,' cries the lady in the well-known quotation; to which her spouse replies that--'That's too bad; you've cursed the only happy hour we've had.' But Palladas, the Greek, as translated by Mr. J. H. Merivale, goes a little farther than this, declaring that

'All wives are bad; yet two blest hours they give:
When first they wed, and when they cease to live.'

A favourite notion with the satirists is that marriage is a state of mutual recrimination. John Heywood has the couplet:

'"Wife, I perceive thy tongue was made at Edgware."
"Yes, sir, and your's made at Rayly, hard by there."'

And this is typical of many another utterance; for example, this:

'Know ye not all, the Scripture saith,
That man and wife are one till death?
But Peter and his scolding wife
Wage such an endless war of strife,
You'd swear, on passing Peter's door,
That man and wife at least were four.'

Doctor Johnson, too, draws attention to the fact--if it be one--that all the reasons which a man and a woman have for remaining in the estate of matrimony, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together. Or, as Mr. William Allingham has, of recent years, more pithily put it:

'If any two can live together well,
'Tis (and yet such things are) a miracle!'

If we are to believe the aforesaid satirists, this is all the fault of the wives. Now and again one comes across a jest in which the lady has the better of the gentleman, as in the following:

'"Wife, from all evil, when shalt thou delivered be?"
"Sir, when I" (said she) "shall be delivered from thee."'

But such things are rare. Usually the laugh is on the other side. As the Frenchman wrote:

'While Adam slept, Eve from his side arose:
Strange! his first sleep should be his last repose!'

Everybody knows the epitaph which Dryden intended for his wife; and side by side with it may be placed the lines by an anonymous author:

'God has to me sufficiently been kind,
To take my wife, and leave me here behind.'

So again:

'Brutus unmoved heard how his Portia fell;
Should Jack's wife die, he would behave as well.'

The story of the man who, at his spouse's funeral, deprecated hurry, on the ground that one should not make a toil of a pleasure, need only be alluded to.

The chief charge against the wives is that they will insist upon being the heads of the households. That is the refrain of many a flout hurled against them. To marry--such is the moral of some lines by Samuel Bishop--is to lose your liberty. The lady will have everything her way:

'For ne'er heard I of woman, good or ill,
But always loved best her own sweet will.'

So says a seventeenth-century writer; and the complaint is general.

'Men, dying, make their wills--why cannot wives?
Because wives have their wills during their lives.'

'Here,' wrote Burns--'here lies a man a woman ruled; the Devil ruled the woman.' And Landor makes someone say to a scholar about to marry:

'So wise thou art that I foresee
A wife will make a fool of thee.'

That wives are talkative is a venerable commonplace. The historic husband thought that the fact of his spouse's likeness not being a 'speaking' one was its principal merit. And Lessing makes a man excuse himself for marrying a deaf woman on the ground that she was also dumb. We all remember Hood's particular trouble:

'A wife who preaches in her gown,
And lectures in her night-dress.'

And so with those who are more than merely talkative--who are positively scolds; while sometimes the conventional helpmeet is as active with her fists as with her tongue--as in the case of the lady whose picture, her husband thought, would soon 'strike' him, it was so exceedingly like her.

It is, however, unnecessary to carry the tale further. This mocking at matrimony has always been a feature of life and literature, and probably will always remain so--partly because it is so easy of achievement; partly because it is not less easy of comprehension; and also, perhaps, because humanity has ever been inclined to chasten that which it loves. It rails against marriage, but it marries all the same. Or is it that it recognises the wedded life as a necessity, which cannot be put away, but which it is a pleasure to ridicule? Perhaps that is the best explanation one can offer. All this satire may be mankind's way of revenging itself upon one of the laws of nature.

[The end]
William Davenport Adams's essay: Mocking At Matrimony

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