III.—How early in Life is Marriage to be advised?
The answer to the above question varies with the circumstances under which it is asked. Viewing the subject, as I am doing, solely from a medical point of observation, it is unnecessary for me to give much attention to the other arguments, for and against, that would else have to be considered.
Political economists, almost without exception, have inveighed against an early entrance into wedlock. I could give much evidence upon this point, were it necessary. They base their reasonings upon several assumptions, which are almost purely such. In some ancient states, as Sparta, it was by law forbidden to men to marry under the age of thirty. “And in this,” says Acton, “as in many other matters, Lycurgus, the old lawgiver, showed his wisdom.”[27] In some modern states, also, a time has been fixed, as twenty-five years, until which men must remain celibate.
These restrictions have frequently been established for the purpose of keeping alive a martial spirit. When a people are permitted to follow the dictates of their own hearts, they are apt to anchor themselves at home, tied down by the innumerable cords of affection and pecuniary necessity or advantage. If this is prevented, the youth remains for a certain number of years at the service of the state, is taught that first of all lessons of life, obedience, without a knowledge of which no man can himself come to rule; he is supposed less likely to form a hasty or injudicious conjugal alliance, and from having been sent hither or thither across the world at the command of his superior, to be finally more anxious to settle permanently down as a private citizen.
Again, in most countries, whether young or old, there is a tendency, exaggerated, no doubt, in many instances, to become overstocked by the human race; and theorists and lawgivers vie with each other in their efforts to keep down the population. Not only is it thought that by preventing the young from marriage, a direct check is thus given, but that when that condition is entered at a more advanced time of life, the man has become sobered by age, and what is technically called “more prudent.”
Many suppose that the children of persons in the prime of life are more likely to be sound in body and in mind than the offspring of earlier years,—a result that does not necessarily occur,—while others, among whom Mr. Acton, more or less distinctly denying the benefit of marriage as a sanitary measure, add to the above arguments a still more untenable one, that perfect continence is the only wise and true measure of life. “Marriage,” he says, “is not the panacea of all earthly woes, or the sole correction of all early vices. It often interferes with work and success in life, and its only result is that the poor man (poor in a pecuniary point of view) never reaches the bodily health or social happiness he might otherwise have reasonably expected. Under the age of twenty-five I have no scruple in enjoining perfect continence. The sighing, lackadaisical boy should be bidden to work and win his wife before he can hope to taste any of the happiness or benefits of married life.”[28]
There is much that may be said in favor, and much in disproval, of these several views. The great uprising of our own people, both North and South, during the late civil conflict, the long and patient endurance they exhibited, and the innumerable feats of great personal valor that they performed, sufficiently prove that early marriages, which are common in this country, and a national devotion for many years to the arts of peace, do not necessarily deprive a race of its most vigorous manhood. In our own instance, the conflict over, and the best blood of the country spilled, we were yet ready, if need had been, to defend our rights against the world.
As for becoming overstocked, there is for us no danger of this for many long years to come. Our fertile prairies, and the long reaches of arable land lying between the mountain ranges of the far West, are destined to cradle untold millions; and if to these we add the parched but still irrigable plains of the extreme Southwest, we see that our country is still in its infancy. If older nations had but followed the example of the Irish, the English, and the modern Jews, all over-crowding would be more than met by emigration, the peaceful transfer of colonists meeting the exigencies of the case far better than the former eruptions of northern hordes, thinned by disease, famine, and the sword.
Is it said, that contrary to the doctrines of physiologists and to the precepts of Scripture, a purely ascetic life is the only normal one? Acton has adverted to the fact, as he calls it, “that the intellectual qualities are usually in an inverse ratio to the sexual appetites. It would almost seem,” he continues, “as if the two were incompatible; the exercise of the one annihilating the other.”[29] With Thales, he would reply to those who ask when men should love, “A young man, not yet—an old man, not at all;” and he styles Lord Bacon the still wiser Englishman, quoting from him the following passages: “You may observe that amongst all the great and worthy persons whereof the memory remaineth, either ancient or recent, there is not one who hath been transported to the mad degree of love; which shows that great spirits and great business do keep out this weak passion. By how much more ought men to beware of this passion, which loseth not only other things, but itself. He that hath preferred Helena hath quitted the gifts of Juno and Pallas, for whosoever esteemeth too much of amorous affection quitteth both riches and wisdom. They do best who, if they cannot but admit love, yet make it keep quarter, and sever it wholly from their serious affairs and actions of life; for if it check once with business, it troubleth men’s fortunes, and maketh men that they can be no ways true to their own ends.”
As a fair offset to these remarks, I shall give a brief extract from a letter to Mr. Acton from a Cambridge graduate, whose experience will be found not so very different from that of intellectual and sedentary men this side the water. “Looking from the academic side of the question, the celibacy of Fellows would seem very desirable (for thus only can they retain their fellowships and the annual stipend pertaining), but no one can deny that such a principle involves the sacrifice of individual comfort. Is this fair to the celibate? I think not. It has always seemed to me that a single man is in an unnatural position; a being created by the Almighty to increase and multiply a race made from the beginning male and female, will, of course, have his natural instincts in accordance with this design; and mortify or control them as he may, they are still there, and cannot become extinct. The sufferings of an abstinent life I believe to be cruel to every man between five and twenty and five and forty; and though athletic exercises, regular diet, and so forth, supply some slight relief, still it is never permanent; and in any event of reaction, the sufferer will find himself the worse for his previous regularity. Of course a sedentary life aggravates the symptoms, and I cannot believe that any man of ordinary vigor, so living and so abstaining, will be free from nocturnal annoyance. Still, this would be among the least of his distresses; nay, in nine cases out of ten, I presume the safety valve of nature is a most happy and beneficial relief; and though I cannot fly in the face of medical authority, and deny that there is a pernicious class of the disorder, still I firmly believe all those cases immensely exaggerated by the sufferers, and capable of an easy cure, to wit, matrimony, unless the patient, by degrading practices, has reduced himself to a state of impotence. Meanwhile a man should go into training for a conflict with his appetites just as keenly as he does for the University Eight, the only difference being that the training will be more beneficial and more protracted. Besides diet and exercise, let him be constantly employed; in fact, let him have so many metaphorical irons in the fire that he will find it difficult to snatch ten minutes for private meditation; let his sleep be very limited, and the temperature he moves in as nearly cold as he can bear; let neither his eye nor his ear be voluntarily open to anything that could possibly excite the passions; if he see or hear accidentally what might have this tendency, let him at once resort to his dumb-bells, or any other muscular precaution, till he is quite fatigued; whenever any sensual image occurs involuntarily to his mind, let him fly to the same resource, or else to the intellectual company of friends, till he feels secure of no return on the enemy’s part. Lastly, I would fain add, let the sufferer from sexual causes make his affliction the subject of most earnest prayer, at any and all times, to that Ear where no supplication is made in vain. Thus armed, he may keep his assailant at bay, though I fear conquest is impossible, and the struggle a most severe one. Sound old Jeremy Taylor, after discoursing on chastity in something like the above strain, says, if I remember right, ‘These remedies are for extraordinary cases, but the ordinary remedy is good and holy marriage.”
As I have said, the time at which marriage may be entered upon must vary in accordance with the circumstances of each case. Love is proverbially blind, and I shall be told that regard ought to be had to the actual and relative ages of the parties, their health, their pecuniary circumstances and prospects, the advice and wishes of friends. All this is very true, to a certain extent, but far more depends upon the mental and spiritual strength of the husband; if he is determined to conquer adverse circumstances, he can generally do so, just in proportion as he curbs and keeps under control himself. Let him look forward and determine to use and not abuse his marital privileges, to respect his wife, and not make of her a mere plaything that will early wear out, and a man will find the lions that seemed to stand in his path the veriest illusion. The points, however, that I have referred to are worthy a moment’s consideration.
As to age, there can be no doubt that, for some reasons, it would be better for no man to marry before he has reached the age of twenty-five, and for no woman until she is twenty; for till this time neither party can be considered, physically, as really mature. To apply this rule, however, rigidly to practice, would, in this country, be very difficult. With us, such is the precocity of mental development, that the young child is often in many things the old man. Taken from the nursery almost before the first dentition has occurred, placed in business or upon the classics almost at the time of assuming the boy’s distinctive garments, many of our merchants and manufacturers have achieved a fortune, and many of our professional men a reputation, by the time they have hardly passed their majority. Precocity of youth, spent under the stimulus of the American atmosphere, climatic, intellectual, and moral, can but result in a certain kind of precocity of manhood.
The same is also true of our women. Subjected as they are to excessively early excitement of the mind, in school and in society, they rapidly press their mothers from the stage, and though physically not giving earlier signs of being nubile than the girls of other nations, they are far earlier in the market, as it were, for the sale, as it too often is in fact, of their charms and of their lives. No doubt this so early “coming out” from the chrysalid of youth is detrimental to both man and woman. An early bloom is too apt to presage an early decay; and though our mortuary statistics, thanks to the advance of medical and sanitary science, do undoubtedly show that the average duration of life is becoming more and more extended, and that the Golden Age, in this respect, is before us rather than in the past; yet, taking a given number of persons exposed and not exposed to all the excitements of modern American civilization, there can be no doubt that the unfashionable live longer than the fashionable, the steady than the unsteady, the slowly matured than the Pallas-like monstrosities of our own day and generation. Whether or no the slow and sedate life is the happier of the twain, and whether or no the life of threescore years and ten can be compressed within the limits of two twenties, are questions beyond the scope of the present inquiry. We all know that, at the best, life is but a quickly passing dream.
Provided, then, there exist sufficient self-control to wait a while, very early marriages are not so desirable as those where the ages I have mentioned have been attained; that is to say, provided the man has led a life of continence and purity, or has the strength to do so. If he has not, it may become advisable for him, in case circumstances otherwise favor, early to enter the married state; awake, as he should be, to the responsibilities this brings with it, to many of which I shall hereafter refer. And here let it be understood that extremes are always, almost without exception, to be condemned. The marriages of young children are very properly forbidden by the law; those of older children too often become necessary through their own indiscretion, and result in future as in present unhappiness. The marriage of very old people, permissible on platonic or economical grounds, is sanitarily to be disapproved, and in many instances is but the folly of the second childhood. Great disparities in age are almost always matches of interest rather than affection: the selfish greediness, the shameless yet impotent lechery, of old age joins itself well with that ambition or thirst for wealth which sells the young girl to her worse than slavery—this mating of youth to a virtual corpse.
I do not like to advise marriage to parties in ill health; and yet, as a medical measure, this is often advisable. We have seen that a single life is for men, and on sanitary grounds, not the best. There are many cases where it is as unadvisable for women. As a class they need marriage, for a different reason than ourselves. Constructed as evidently for companionship, their yearnings are more mental than physical. They are less conscious of any bodily needs, that is, in their normal condition, but more craving of a spiritual sympathy; more angelic than ourselves, we may truly call them. The point to which I would now refer, however, is the fact that, in many instances, women are deterred from consenting to marriage upon the ground of their own ill health; and I merely shall say that, in very many instances, far more than is usually supposed, marriage would prove for such ill health the most certain cure. I do not make this remark too sweepingly, for there are some affections under which women suffer that would only be aggravated by the change; there are certain bars, as that of cousinship, which, on some accounts, ought never to be passed, and there are certain physical evils of which marriage is only but too productive. Plainly I would avow my conviction that just as marriage should be avoided among blood relations, for the reason that any family taint, as scrofula, deformity, or insanity, is thus rendered nearly certain to their children, so should the same similarity of constitution be avoided, so far as possible, by Cœlebs in search of a wife. If, selfishly, he would avoid defects in her, is it not his duty also to see to it that he brings to her a constitution of his own unmarred, so far as he himself has been concerned? And when, as is too often the case, men who carry with them a system infected by that terrible disease of the licentious, marry pure and unsuspecting women, a great outrage is committed upon society, which no penance and no individual suffering can ever efface or atone for. One of the worst features of this whole matter, as I shall hereafter point out, is as yet generally unknown—that the most ineradicable form of the disease has its period of incubation; the primary sign of it may escape notice, the virus may lie latent, and when it does exhibit itself, the party really to blame may throw the whole enormity of the trouble upon an innocent person, and thus, on the wreck he has made of his home, immolate its guardian.
But I have not time to pursue these collateral lines of thought, manifold as they are, and as important as they are interesting. One of the great rules of life being to try to have and to preserve a sound mind in a sound body, and it being essential for this that the conscience should be sound also, we are forced to admit that, all things being equal, a comparatively early marriage is better for the man than a late one; this on its medical grounds, and uninfluenced by business, or other considerations. Were I to discuss these and push them to their legitimate conclusions, I am afraid I might bring grief to some of my readers—if, for instance, I should assert that it were better for the wives of many seafaring men, especially those going very long voyages, if their husbands had never married them at all, or at least had waited till their days of absence, and peril, and exposure, in foreign ports, to worse dangers than those of the sea, were permanently over. By this remark I am reminded of the question of long engagements—a very pertinent one to our present inquiry.
In presenting Mr. Acton’s opinion as to the advisability of early marriage. I might have said that this very writer contradicts himself, as must every one who undertakes to ignore the great underlying and controlling passions of men. I have quoted some of his remarks concerning continence. In another connection, however, he says, “If an adult is in a position to marry, by all means let him do so. If his sexual desires are strong, and his intellectual powers not great, early marriage will keep him out of much mischief and temptation.” He then goes on to say, what I myself hold, that “for any one, especially a young man, to enter into a long engagement without any immediate hope of fulfilling it, is physically an almost unmitigated evil. It is bad for any one to have sexual ideas and desires constantly before his mind, liable to be excited by every interview with the lady. The frequent correspondence, further, keeps up a morbid dwelling upon thoughts which it would be well to banish altogether from the mind; and I have reason to know that this condition of constant excitement has often caused most dangerous and painful affections. These results, to an alarming extent, often follow the progress of an ordinary courtship. The danger and distress may be much more serious when the marriage is postponed for years.”[30] The same evil results of hope deferred may also be observed in the female. Physicians devoted to the study of her diseases attribute the causation of some of them, or their increase, to the same identical influences. Mental emotions, even in the purest and chastest minded, are often reflected upon the reproductive system, acting as excitants, even where the mind is unconscious of anything like a bodily sensation; and, on the other hand, physical excitement, which may exist unconsciously as it were, constantly reflects itself back again upon the mind, increasing the force and intensity of its emotions. “It is no whim,” remarks that close student of minds, healthy and diseased, Dr. Isaac Ray, of Providence, “but a suggestion of sound physiology, that the nervous erethism, excited even by courtship, has a controlling influence over the female will.”[31]
I should do wrong, moreover, did I not here allude to the dangers, so often proved to exist by their results, of undue waiting, to the moral as well as the physical health. When parties have plighted to each other their faith, they often consider themselves as already one, and demean themselves together too much as such,—forgetting for the time that thus they are almost sure to lose their mutual and self-respect,—they are more likely, for this very reason, to take offence at some unintended trifle, or to become wearied of each other and so to break their engagement, and that they run great risk, by a forced and hasty marriage, of giving its tongue to scandal, and confessing each other’s shame.
The length of a betrothal, just as the time of its inception, is too often dependent upon circumstances of a trivial character. Where these endanger the happiness of the man alone, he himself should judge as to the propriety of allowing them undue weight. He has no right, however, as so often occurs, to drag or to coax a young girl to the altar, who is as yet but half matured, or to condemn her to remain for years half-mated, through his selfish fears that unless thus pledged she would elude his grasp. As I have said, too early bloom is apt to presage too early decay; and even with the best of care our American dames at fifty are prone to pass into the condition called old, even while their husbands, more advanced in years, are still in the very prime of life. A word to the wise should surely be sufficient. Let us hope that Lord Bacon erred in declaring love wholly inconsistent with wisdom, and now consider,—