Besides the flippancy of so many women, and the extravagance of most women, arising from their inexperience of the trouble with which money is made and of the importance of keeping it after it has been made, there is something in the characteristics of modern social intercourse which makes men of a certain temper intensely anxious to avoid a sort of marriage which would, among other things, have the effect of committing them more deeply to this kind of intercourse. Such men shrink with affright from giving hostages to society for a more faithful compliance with its most dismal exactions. To them there is nothing more unendurable than the monotonous round of general hospitalities and ceremonials, ludicrously misnamed pleasure. A detestation of wearisome formalities does not imply any clownish or misanthropic reluctance to remember that those who feel it live in a world with other people, and that a thoroughly social life is the only just and full life.
But there is all the difference between a really social life and a hollow phantasmic imitation of it. A person may have the pleasantest possible circle of friends, and may like their society above all things. This is one thing. But to have to mix much with numbers of thoroughly indifferent people, and in a superficial, hollow way, is a very different thing. Of course, men who take life just as it comes, who are not very sedulous about making the most of it in their own way, and are quite willing to do all that their neighbors do just because their neighbors do it, find no annoyance in this. Men cast in another mould find not only annoyance but absolute misery. They know also that marriage with a woman who is in the full tide of society means an infinite augmentation of this round of tiresome and thoroughly useless ceremonies. Add this consideration to the two other considerations of elaborate vapidness and unfathomable extravagance, and you have three tolerably good arguments why a man with large discourse of reason, looking before and after, should be slow to fasten upon himself bonds which threaten to prove so leaden.
The faults of the women of his own position, however, are a very poor reason why he should marry a woman beneath his own position. A man must be very weak to believe that, because fine ladies are often inane and extravagant, therefore women who are not fine ladies must be wise, clever, prudent, and everything else that belongs to the type of companionable womanhood. The fact of the mistress being a blank does not prove that the maid would be a prize. It may be wise to avoid the one, but it is certainly folly to seek the other. Granting that the housemaid or the cook or the daughter of the coachman is virtuous, high-minded, refined, thoughtful, thrifty, and everything else that is desirable under the sun, all will fail to counterbalance the drawbacks that flow from the first inequality of position.
The misguided husband believes that he is going to live a plain unsophisticated life, according to nature and common sense, in company with one whom the hollowness and trickishness of society has never infected. He is not long in finding out his irreparable blunder. The lady is not received. People do not visit her, and although one of his motives in choosing a sort of wife whom people do not visit was the express desire of avoiding visits, yet he no sooner gets what he wished than his success begins to make him miserable. What he expected to please him as a relief mortifies him as a slight. Even if he be unsympathetic enough in nature not to care much for the disapproval of his fellows, he will rapidly find that his wife is a good deal less of a philosopher in these points, and that, though he may relish his escape from the miseries of society, she will vigorously resent her exclusion from its supposed delights.
Again, from another point of view, he is tolerably sure to find that the common opinion of society about unequal unions is not so unsound as he used scornfully to suppose it to be. The vapidity of a polite woman is bad, but the vapidity of a woman who is not polite is decidedly worse. A simpering unthinking woman with good manners is decidedly better than an unthinking woman with imperfect manners; and if polish can spoil nature among one set of people, certainly among another set nature may be as much spoilt by lack of polish. It does not follow, from a person being indifferently well-bred, that therefore she is profoundly wise and thoughtful and poetic, and capable of estimating the things of this world at their worth. Boys at college indulge in this too generous fallacy. For grown-up men there is less excuse. They ought to know that obscure uneducated women are all the more likely on that account to fall short of magnanimity, self-control, self-containing composure, than girls who have grown up with a background of bright and gracious tradition, however little their education may have done to stimulate them to make the foreground like it. To have a common past is the first secret of happy association—a past common in ideas, sentiments, and growth, if not common in external incidents.
One reason why a cultivated man is wretched with a vapid woman is that she has not traveled over a yard of that ground of knowledge and feeling which has in truth made his nature what it is. But a woman in his own station is more likely to have shared a past of this sort than a woman of lower station. Mere community of general circumstances and surrounding does something. The obscure woman taken from inferior place has not the common past of culture, nor of circumstance either. The foolish man who has married away from his class trusts that somehow or other nature will repair this. He assumes, in a real paroxysm of folly, that obscurity is the fostering condition of a richness of character which could not be got by culture. He pays the price of his blindness. Untended nature is more likely to produce weeds than choice fruits, and the chances in such cases as this are beyond calculation in favor of his having got a weed—in other words, having wedded himself to a life of wrangling, gloom, and swift deterioration of character. This result may not be invariable, but it must be more usual than not.
In the exceptional cases where a man does not repent of an unequal match of this sort, you will mostly find that the match was unequal only in externals, and that his character had been a very fit counterpart for that of a vulgar and uneducated woman before he made her his wife. This may lead one to think that there is something to be said for the woman in morganatic marriages. The men who do these things are not always, not even generally, philosophic men in search of an unsophisticated life, but unamiable, defiant persons, who only hate society either because it has failed to appreciate their qualities, or because they cannot be at the trouble to go through the ordinary amount of polite usage.
