Women who are too ugly to inspire Love may nevertheless feel proud of being a class of Vestal Virgins who serve the cause of Love by abstaining from adding to the number of unattractive people in the world by hereditary transmission. On the other hand, Old Maids who are blessed with beauty, owe it to the cause of Love to make every effort, consistent with feminine modesty, to get married. Not only because their children will be beautiful, but because a woman who never marries can never experience the two emotions which do more than any others to ennoble and mature the feminine mind—conjugal and maternal love.
Those Old Maids, however, who have not yet passed their thirtieth year, may even claim that they represent the most perfect and advanced type of maidenhood, and look down on girls who marry before twenty-five as little better than savages. For it is well known that the age of marriage advances with civilisation. Among Australians and other savages girls marry at eleven, ten, or even nine years; among semi-civilised Egyptians, Hindoos, etc., the age is from twelve to fourteen; southern European peoples marry their girls between the ages of fifteen and eighteen; while with those nations who lead modern civilisation, the average age of marriage for a woman is now twenty-one, with a tendency to rise. Does it not follow from this, by inexorable logic, that girls who remain single at twenty-five or twenty-nine are forerunners of a still higher type of civilisation? and that the only trouble with them is that they are so far in advance of their age and civilisation? True, ungrateful man does not look upon them in that light; but herein they share the fate of all true greatness. There is one difference, however, between undervalued men of genius and Old Maids: the men of genius admit they are in advance of their age, and are proud of it; the Old Maids never, at least, hardly ever.
In one of his most fascinating essays on The Main Currents of Modern Literature, the Danish critic, Dr. Georg Brandes, discusses the proper age of feminine Love in a manner which Old Maids will especially appreciate. He points out that Eleonore, the heroine of Benjamin Constant’s novel Adolphe, is the first specimen of a modern type subsequently made fashionable by Balzac and George Sand, namely, the woman of thirty in Love. Formerly, as Jules Janin remarks, the woman between thirty and forty years of age was lost for passion, for romance, and the drama; now she rules alone. The girl of sixteen, as adored by Racine, Shakspere, Molière, Voltaire, Ariosto, Byron, Lesage, Scott, is no more to be found. And Mme. Emile de Girardin thus attempts to defend Balzac: “Is it Balzac’s fault that the age of thirty to-day is the age of love? Balzac is compelled to depict passion where he finds it, and at this day it is not to be found in the heart of a girl of sixteen.”
So far as these remarks are true they afford a new confirmation of my assertions that true Romantic Love is dependent on a certain amount of intellectual power and maturity, and that in consequence man loves more deeply than woman at the age preceding marriage. In England and America novelists still persist in making women love at any age from eighteen, and they have a right to do so, because in these two countries women are well enough educated and experienced in life at eighteen to be able to love. In France girls receive such a superficial education that they are ordinarily quite impervious to any deep emotions before they are either Old Maids or married. But in most cases they are married before twenty without regard to their own wishes. And then happens what is indicated in Fuller’s aphorism: “It is to be feared that they who marry where they do not love, will love where they do not marry.” And hence it is that the only love depicted by French novelists and playwrights is the adulterous love of a faithless wife. Could anything more vividly illustrate the criminal absurdities of French education and the French system of chaperonage?
In France a girl is not even allowed to cross the street alone until she is willing to assume the name and with it the comparative freedom of an Old Maid. In Spain, the author of Cosas de España tells us, Old Maids are rare because a girl generally accepts her first offer; and there are probably not many girls who do not receive at least one offer in their life—masculine women always excepted. In Russia, where women, according to Schweiger-Lerchenfeld, enjoy almost as much liberty as in America, a curious custom prevails by which a girl of uncertain age may escape the appellation of Old Maid. She may leave home and become lost for two or three years in Paris, London, or some other howling wilderness of humanity. Then she may return to her friends neither as maid nor wife, but as a widow. And it is “good form” in Russian society to accept this myth without asking for details.
Finally the important question remains: “What is an Old Maid?” That depends very much on individuals and the care they take of their Health and Beauty. Some women are Old Maids at twenty, the majority at thirty, and some not before forty; while those girls who will read the chapters on Personal Beauty in the last part of this treatise, and follow all the advice there given, will never become Old Maids at all, but will be gobbled up before twenty-three by eager bachelors previously considered hopeless cases of celibacy.
Even if it were possible to name a definite age as that when a girl begins to be an Old Maid, it would be a bit of useless information, because nobody ever knows how old a woman is. Often it is easier to tell a woman’s age by her conversation than by her looks: some incipient Old Maids constantly hint at their former numerous flirtations, which they never did while they really had them.
BACHELORS
“Pirates of Love who know no duty.”
Of all the brutes enumerated in the human branch of zoology the deliberate bachelor is the most unreasonable and selfish. Unreasonable, because he voluntarily deprives himself of connubial bliss, domestic comforts, and the prospect of being cheered and cared for in his old age by a family of loving children. Selfish, because at present the bread-winning arrangements are almost entirely framed for man’s convenience alone, wherefore it is his duty to support a wife.