MOCKING AT MATRIMONY.
he world has reason to be grateful to the writer who lately demonstrated the possibility of being happy ‘though married.’ Some exposition of the sort was sadly needed. Hitherto the estate of matrimony has met with a long succession of jibes and sneers. It has had its apologists, even its prophets and eulogists; but it has had many more detractors. There is, indeed, no subject on which the satirists of the world, both great and small, have so largely and so persistently made merry. It has been a stock subject with them. It is as if they had said to themselves, ‘When at a loss, revile the connubial condition.’ Married life has been the sport of every wit, and, sorrowful to relate, society has been well content to join in the pastime. There is nothing so common as sarcasm on matrimony, and nothing, apparently, so welcome, even to the married.
The banter in question has been of all sorts—sometimes vague, sometimes particular, in its import. A few censors have confined themselves to simple condemnation. ‘A fellow that’s married’s a felo-de-se,’ wrote the late Shirley Brooks; and he had been anticipated in the stricture. An anonymous satirist had written:
‘“Wedlock’s the end of life,” one cried;
“Too true, alas!” said Jack, and sigh’d—
“’Twill be the end of mine.”’
And if matrimony was not suicide, it was ruin. Old Sir Thomas More had said of a student who had married that ‘in knitting of himself so fast, himself he had undone.’ And a later rhymer, contrasting wedding with hanging, had come to the conclusion that
‘Hanging is better of the twain—
Sooner done and shorter pain.’
To the suggestion that a youth should not marry till he has more wisdom, the Italian epigrammatist replies that if he waits till he has sense he will not wed at all. Marriage, said the famous Marshal Saxe, in effect, is a state of penance; Rome declares there are seven sacraments, but there are really only six, because penance and matrimony are one.