A second bit of advice given by Franklin is perhaps less unquestionable: “From the marriages that have fallen under my observation,” he says, "I am rather inclined to think that early ones stand the best chances of happiness. The temper and habits of the young are not become so stiff and uncomplying as when more advanced in life: they form more easily to each other, and hence many occasions of disgust are removed.... ‘Late children,’ says the Spanish proverb, ‘are early orphans.’ With us in America (1768) marriages are generally in the morning of life; our children are therefore educated and settled in the world by noon; and thus, our business being done, we have an afternoon and evening of cheerful leisure to ourselves.... By these early marriages we are blessed with more children; and from the mode among us founded by nature, every mother suckling and nursing her own child [1768], more of them are raised. Thence the swift progress of population among us, unparalleled in Europe."
“Marriages,” says Theodore Parker, “are best of dissimilar materials;” and Coleridge remarks, similarly: “You may depend upon it that a slight contrast of character is very material to happiness in marriage.” But would it be possible to find two individuals who did not present “a slight contrast of character”? Coleridge apparently did not think much of the average conjugal union of his day: “To the many of both sexes I am well aware,” he says, “this Eden of matrimony is but a kitchen-garden, a thing of profit and convenience, in an even temperature between indifference and liking.” What a married person wants is “a soul-mate as well as a house or yoke-mate.”
Young men are often warned not to marry for beauty, because it is but skin-deep. But surely a millimetre of beauty is worth more than a yard of ugliness, though whitewashed with rank, money, or general utility. “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”
OLD MAIDS
One way in which Romantic Love fulfils its mission of increasing the amount of Personal Beauty in the world, is by eliminating ugly and masculine women as Old Maids, and thus preventing them from transmitting their characteristics to the next generation. Were it not for the fact that the average man is quite devoid of æsthetic taste and incapable of ardent Romantic Love, and that therefore considerations of wealth and social advantages guide him in his choice of a wife, ugly women would rarely be found outside the ranks of Old Maids. As it is, it happens only too often that dowerless beautiful women are condemned to live and die in single blessedness, while the ugly people fill the world with photographic copies of themselves.
Why is it that every refined man feels an instinctive aversion to masculine women? Because a masculine woman is an exception to the laws of nature, a lusus naturæ, a monstrosity. We find even among the lower animals that the females differ widely, as a rule, in traits and appearance from the males—sometimes so much so that there are instances on record of females and males having been for a time supposed to belong to different species; and the differences grow greater the more the sexual functions are developed and specialised. Yet Amazons occur even among animals. “Characters common to the male,” says Darwin, “are occasionally developed in the female when she grows old or becomes diseased, as, for instance, when the common hen assumes the flowing tail-feathers, hackles, combs, spurs, voice, and even pugnacity of the cock.”
Among the warlike Greeks, who knew only masculine or mono-sexual love, Amazons were naturally esteemed, as they did not clash with their feminine ideal. “How popular a subject the Amazons were for sculptors,” says Grote, “we learn from the statement of Pliny that the most distinguished sculptors executed Amazons, and that this subject was the only one upon which a direct comparison could be made between them.” But the progress of time, as we have seen, has more and more differentiated men and women, in appearance and traits of character; and the modern ideal of woman is exclusively feminine, i.e. devoid of hackles, spurs, cock-a-doodle-doo, and pugnacity. Hence the political Virago movement is an evil which will never make any progress, thanks to the constant elimination of masculine women through that adorable process of Sexual Selection known as Modern Love.
Masculine women are always condemned to bury their unwomanly proclivities with their spinster-selves, unless they are very rich, or unless they can find a correspondingly effeminate man who wishes to neutralise his abnormalities in his children by marrying a spouse whose faults are an excess in the opposite direction. In such a case a virago may possibly even inspire Romantic Love, mirabile dictu!
An ugly woman, on the other hand, need never despair of finding a husband; she has at least eight chances of getting married. In the first place, she may, like a masculine woman, inspire true Love in a man whose faults are the opposite of hers; secondly, she may fall in love with a man of faultless proportions, and while in Love her features will be so transfigured and beautified that he cannot help returning her Love; thirdly, she may meet a man who, from want of æsthetic taste, prefers a chromo to a Titian; or a fourth, who would rather marry an amiable and useful ugly girl than a spoiled beauty. Wealth and social position supply two more resources. Accident may favour her, through the absence of prettier rivals, giving no opportunities for odious comparisons; and, finally, she may meet an elderly bachelor who has wearied of his single blessedness and longs for double strife.
As for those Old Maids who are neither ugly nor masculine, some of them are quondam coquettes who practised their arts just one season too long and “got left” in consequence; others are girls whom silly methods of chaperonage or ill-luck have prevented from making the acquaintance of men whom they could have respected and loved; so that it is often the most refined and intelligent women who are thus doomed to remain single because they are unwilling to marry beneath their station, socially or intellectually. They form that class of whom De Quincey says, that they “combine more intelligence, cultivation, and thoughtfulness than any other in Europe—the class of unmarried women above twenty-five—an increasing class, women who, from mere dignity of character, have renounced all prospects of conjugal and parental life rather than descend into habits unsuitable to their birth.”