Ellen.
From the Baroness Von Eulaw to Miss Fanny Fielding, Denver, Colorado.
Berlin, May 1, 1893.
My Dear Old Schoolmate: Your kind letter makes me homesick. Can you imagine a homesick bride? Even before fruitage appears from the orange bloom, dismated for the decking of my nuptial robes, or even the fragrance departed from the yellowing buds on the garniture laid away to rest and rust, I am sitting with an unwilling face to the open door of the future, and groping with a blind but eager hand among the rustling leaves of a near past, for some familiar touch or sound to summon back the half-tasted joys which I so ruthlessly flung away.
You ask me for some advice concerning marriage, illumined, as you tersely put it, by experience. My sweet friend, what a useless task you impose upon me. Whenever was woman directed by the experiences of others, however wise or however bitter such experiences may have been? Always some suggestion or exception to change the verdict. “Mine has black eyes, yours has blue, which makes all the difference.” Or, “one is fat, the other lean.” Or, “this one walks, the other rides”—so infinite the variety of excuses, so single the faith of woman.
What else, then, shall we call marriage but destiny? The heart knows its wants and we know its plaintive cry, as a mother knows the wail of her famishing babe; yet for some frivolous fancy or conceit, some wound to our vanity, some plethoric ambition, or some glittering paste or bauble, we stifle the natural cry of the human heart, and wait for the mystic note upon which is to be constructed the music of our future. Alas! in the metaphor you understand so well, we too often touch only the diminished seventh, and the sure, complete, resolving chord is never sounded.
Somewhat, too, our institutions of marriage are at fault, or at least the laws and customs which control them. With a nation of men, free, rational, and liberal, we have a nation of women enslaved, dishonest, and miserable, and it is among her noblest and most common phases of fate that she goes mutely to her grave, a victim of such weak social prejudices as have grown to be even a subject of satire among Europeans.
Conscientiousness is a boasted virtue among Boston people of certain high cult, yet how many of her beautiful women go to the altar with a lie upon their maidenly lips? Why?—For the reason that there is some man whom she loves and dares not declare it. For the reason that society sets a seal upon her lips and turns her life into a drain-channel for misbegotten vows. For the reason that she cannot break the frost-bound usages of cowardly error with one stroke of her puny fist, and openly propose to join fortunes with the man after her own heart and her own high convictions. And so she rakes over the cold, unfruitful soil in her own soul, and plants the germ of a falsehood or a folly, and waits for the accident of some quickening power, in slavish and unheroic patience.
Witness the result: Some masculine hand, more or less clumsy or more or less cunning, little matter if it bring a wedding ring, sheds ephemeral warmth upon the unsanctified ground, and the victim starts upon her lonely, loveless journey toward race building and sacrifice.
As I indicated, dear Fanny, I have not drawn for my picture largely upon individual experiences, neither are my opinions stimulated by any observations taken from this side the water. Indeed, I even prefer, of kindred evils, the insipid method which leaves the marriage question in the hands of the parents. But let me leave this for subsequent discussion, for my letter is already too long, and I have not gossiped at all, and I remember, dear girl, how you do love innocent gossip.