But this is not all. Nature, as beneficent to those who obey her precepts as she is merciless to those who disregard them, has added to this sentiment of love a physical pleasure in its gratification,—an honourable and proper pleasure, which none but the hypocrite or the ascetic will affect to condemn, none but the coarse or the lewd will regard as the object of love. There is, indeed, a passion which is the love of the body. We call it by its proper name of lust. There is another emotion, for which the rich tongue of the ancient Greeks had a word, to which we have nothing to correspond. Call it, if you will, Platonic love, and define it to be an exalted friendship. But understand that neither the one nor the other is love, in the true sense of the word, and that both are inferior to it.
Does the father, watching, with moistened eyes, his child at its mother's breast; does the husband, bending with solicitude over the sick-bed of his wife; does the wife, clinging to her husband through evil report and good report, through broken fortunes and failing health, indicate no loftier emotion than lust, no warmer sentiment than friendship? What ignorance, what perversity is so gross as not to perceive something here nobler than either? Do you say that such scenes are, alas, rare? We deny it. We see them daily in the streets; we meet them daily in our rounds. Admitted, by our calling, to the sacred precincts of many houses in the trying hours of sickness and death, we speak advisedly, and know that this is the prevailing meaning of love in domestic life.
A warm, rich affection blesses the one who gives and the one who receives. Character developes under it as the plant beneath the sunlight. Happiness is an unknown word without it. Love and marriage are the only normal conditions of life. Without them, both man and woman for ever miss the best part of themselves. They suffer more, they sin more, they perish sooner. These are not hasty assertions. As a social law, let it be well understood that science pronounces that
LOVE IS A NECESSITY.
The single life is forced upon many of both sexes, in our present social condition. Many choose it from motives of economy, from timidity, or as a religious step, pleasing to God. The latter is a notion which probably arose from a belief that, somehow, celibacy, strictly observed, means chastity. It simply means continence. The chastest persons have been, and are, not the virgins and celibates, but the married. When this truth is known better, we shall have fewer sects and more religion.
We know women who refrain from marrying to keep out of trouble. The old saying is, that every sigh drives a nail in one's coffin. They are not going to worry themselves to death bearing children and nursing them! It is too great a risk, too much suffering. How often have we been told this! Yet how false the reasoning is! Very carefully prepared statistics show that between the ages of twenty and forty-five years, more unmarried women die than married, and few instances of remarkable longevity in an old maid are known. The celebrated Dr. Hufeland, therefore, in his treatise on the Art of Prolonging Life, lays it down as a rule, that to attain a great age, one must be married.
As for happiness, those who think they can best attain it outside the gentle yoke of matrimony are quite as wide of the mark. Their selfish and solitary pleasures do not gratify them. With all the resources of clubs, billiard-rooms, saloons, narcotics, and stimulants, single men make but a mock show of satisfaction. At heart every one of them envies his married friends. How much more monotonous and more readily exhausted are the resources of woman's single life! No matter what 'sphere' she is in, no matter in what 'circle' she moves, no matter what 'mission' she invents, it will soon pall on her. Would you see the result? We invoke once more those dry volumes, full of lines and figures, on vital statistics. Stupid as they look, they are full of the strangest stories; and what is more, the stories are all true. Some of them are sad stories, and this is one of the saddest: Of those unfortunates who, out of despair and disgust of the world, jump from bridges, or take arsenic, or hang themselves, or in other ways rush unbidden and unprepared before the great Judge of all, nearly two-thirds are unmarried, and in some years nearly three-fourths. And of those other sad cases—dead, yet living—who people the madhouses and asylums, what of them? Driven crazy by their brutal husbands, do you suggest? Not at all! In France, Bavaria, Prussia, Hanover, four out of every five are unmarried; and throughout the civilised world there are everywhere three or four single to one married woman in the establishments for the insane, in proportion to the whole number of the two classes above twenty-one years of age.
Other women decline to marry because they have, forsooth, a 'life work' to accomplish. Some great project fills their mind. Perchance they emulate Madame de Staël, and would electrify the country by their novel views in politics; or they have a literary vein they fain would exploit; or they feel called upon to teach the freedmen, or to keep their position as leaders of fashion. A husband would trammel them. If they did marry, they would take the very foolish advice of a contemporary, and go through life with an indignant protest at its littleness. Let such women know that they underrate the married state, its powers and its opportunities. There are no loftier missions than can there be carried out, no nobler games than can there be played. When we think of these objections, coming, as they have to us, from high-spirited, earnest girls, the queens of their sex, our memory runs back to the famous women of history, the brightest jewels in the coronet of time, and we find as many, ay, more, married women than single who pursued to their ends mighty achievements.
If you speak of Judith and Joan of Arc, who delivered their fatherlands from the enemy by a daring no man can equal, we shall recall the peaceful victories of her, wife of the barbarian Chlodwig, who taught the rude Franks the mild religion of Nazareth, and of her who extended from Byzantium the holy symbol of the cross over the wilds of Russia. The really great women of this age, are they mostly married or single? They are mostly married, and they are good wives and tender mothers.
What we have just written, we read to an amiable woman.