XV
MEN'S WIVES.
BITS OF COMMON SENSE AND WISDOM ON A GREAT SUBJECT.
Homely phrases sometimes carry in them a truth which is passed over on account of its frequent repetition, and thus they fail to effect the good they are intended to do. For instance, there is one with reference to woman, which asserts that she is man's "better half;" and this is said so often, half in satire and half in jest, that few stop to inquire whether woman really be so. Yet she is in good truth his better half; and the phrase, met with in French or Latin, looks not only true but poetical, and in its foreign dress is cherished and quoted. She is not the wiser--in a worldly sense--certainly not the stronger, nor the cleverer, notwithstanding what the promoters of the Woman's Rights movements may say; but she is the better. All must feel, indeed, that, if the whole sins of the present world could be, and were, parceled into two huge heaps, those committed by the men would far exceed those of the women. We doubt whether any reflective man will deny this. On the other hand, the active virtues of man, his benevolence and good deeds, might equal those of woman; but his passive virtues, his patience and his endurance, would be much smaller. On the whole, therefore, woman is the much better half; and there is no good man but owes an immense deal to the virtues of the good women about him. He owes, too, a considerable deal of evil to their influence, not only of the absolutely bad, for those a pure man shuns, but the half-good and respectably selfish women of society--these are they who undermine his honesty, his benevolence, and his purity of mind.
The influence man receives from woman is of a very mixed character. But of all the influence which woman has over man, that which is naturally most permanent, for good or evil, arises from the marriage tie. How we of the cold North have been able to emancipate woman from the deplorable depth into which polygamy would place her, it is not easy to say. That it is a state absolutely countenanced--nay, enjoined--in the Old Testament, it would be useless to deny. But custom and fair usance are stronger than the Old Testament; and the Jews, who readily adopt the laws of the country under which they live, forbid polygamy to their brethren in Christian lands, whilst they permit and practice it where it exists, as with the Mahometan and Hindoo. Under its influence the character of woman is terribly dwarfed. She sinks to nothing where she would be, as she should be, of half the importance of life at least.
To preserve her position, it will be necessary for all good women to try and elevate the condition of their sisters. With all of us, "the world is too much with us, day by day;" and worldly success plays so large a part in the domestic drama, that woman is everywhere perceptibly influenced by it. Hence, to return to the closer consideration of the subject from our own point of view, the majority of men's wives in the upper and middle classes fall far short of that which is required of a good wife. They are the wives not made by love, but by the chance of a good match. They are the products of worldly prudence, not of a noble passion; and, although they may be very comfortable and very well clad, though they may think themselves happy, and wear the very look of health and beauty, they can never be to their husbands what a wife of true and real tender love would be.
The consequence is that, after the first novelty has passed away, the chain begins to rub and the collar to gall. "The girl who has married for money," writes a clergyman, "has not by that rash and immoral act blinded her eyes to other and nobler attractions. She may still love wisdom, though the man of her choice may be a fool; she will none the less desire gentle, chivalrous affection because he is purse-proud and haughty; she may sigh for manly beauty all the more because he is coarse and ugly; she will not be able to get rid of her own youth, and all it longs for, by watching his silver hair." No; and, while there comes a curse upon her union--whilst in the long, long evenings, in the cold Spring mornings, and in the still Summer days, she feels that all worth living for is gone, while she is surrounded by all her body wants--her example is corrupting others. The scorned lover, who was rejected because he was poor, goes away to curse woman's fickleness and to marry some one whom he can not love; and the thoughtless girls, by whom the glitter of fortune is taken for the real gold of happiness, follow the venal example, and flirt and jilt till they fancy that they have secured a good match.
Many women, after they have permanently attached a husband of this sort, sit down, with all the heroism of martyrs, to try to love the man they have accepted, but not chosen. They find it a hard, almost an impossible task. Then comes the moment so bitterly predicted by Milton, who no doubt drew from his own feeling and experience, when he put into the mouths of our first parents the prophecy that either man should never find the true partner of his choice, or that, having found her, she should be in possession of another. This is far too often true, and can not fail to be the source of a misery almost too bitter to be long endured.
It says much for our Anglo-Saxon wives that their constancy has passed into many proverbs. When a woman really loves the man who marries her, the match is generally a happy one; but, even where it is not, the constancy of the wife's affection is something to be wondered at and admired. No after ill-usage, no neglect, or want of love, will remove the affection once given. No doubt all women, when they fall in love, do so with that which they conceive to be great and noble in the character of the object. But they still love on when all the glitter of novelty has fallen off, and when they have been behind the scenes and found how bare and gloomy was the framework of the scene they admired. All illusions may be gone; the hero may have sunk into the cowardly braggart; the saint into the hypocritical sinner; the noble aspirant into a man whose mouth alone utters but empty words which his heart can never feel; but still true love remains, "nor alters where it alteration finds." The duration of this passion, the constancy of this affection, surprises many; but, adds a writer, such persons--
"Know not woman, the blest being
Who, like a pitying angel, gifts the mean
And sordid nature even with more love
Than falls to the lot of him who towers above
His fellow-men; like parasitic flowers
That grow not on high temples, where the showers
And light of heaven might nourish, but alone
Cloth the rent altar and the fallen stone."