In general, of course, mixed marriages, whether the mixture be of religion or of country, would be viewed by a wise adviser with apprehension, although Lord Curzon's experience is only one of very many as to the possible happiness of marriages between persons of different nationalities, much more alike as are the nationalities of Lord and Lady Curzon than any other two nationalities.
Dr. Johnson's famous saying that marriages would be happier if they were arranged by the Lord Chancellor, due regard being paid to the ages and conditions of the parties, has never been accepted as a working rule in his own country. In France, again, there is the wholly "reasonable" and extremely circumspect Count Boni Castellane, whose marriage of reason has so lately been shown to be so far from a success.
There are quite enough more failures of the same kind to offset the unhappy marriages of romance. It is of these, of course, that Burton declares that matches are made in heaven, though matches of the sulfurous kind, of which all of us know some instances, suggest a very different place of manufacture.
The Marriage of Reason.
Swift's saying that the reason why so few marriages are happy is that "young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages," is doubly outrageous. In the first place, it is an outrageous begging of the question. The testimony of less cynical observers in our day and country is that most marriages are entitled to be called happy.
In the second place, it outrageously puts the whole blame for unhappy marriages on the female partner, contrary alike to probability and to fact. But at least as many of the marriages are failures in which men "choose" their wives, or think they do, as in cases in which men become the prey of their own imaginations.
And there is this to be said from the point of view of reason in favor of marriages with which reason has nothing to do. In the first months of married life there are necessarily very many differences to be adjusted and small incompatibilities of ways of thinking and feeling to be reconciled. That, as all experienced spouses know, is the trying period.
Marriage is like life in that it is a school wherein whoso does not learn must suffer. Now, to diminish the friction of this trying time no better lubricant could possibly be provided than the romantic love, which cannot be expected to last forever, but which may very probably outlast this greatest necessity for it of the early connubial period.
When the glamour of the romance "fades into the light of common day," and a real man and a real woman take the places of the creatures of each other's fancy, and passion cools into at best the tenderest of friendships, both parties are better off, and will acknowledge themselves to be better off because the romance has been.