Is it I? A book for every man.

by Horatio Robinson Storer

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,—

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Loc. cit., p. 76.