Hymen, says Chamfort, comes after love, like smoke after flame. It is the high sea, observes Heine, for which no compass has yet been invented. Its melancholy uncertainty is illustrated by the remark of Samuel Rogers, that it does not matter whom you marry—she will be quite another woman the next day. It was Rogers, too, who, when he heard of a certain person’s nuptials, declared that if his friends were pleased his enemies were delighted. Selden’s complaint against marriage was that it is ‘a desperate thing,’ out of which it is impossible to extract one’s self; but then he lived before the era of Sir Cresswell Cresswell. And the utmost that the conventional detractor will admit is, that the institution gives to man two happy hours. ‘Cursed be the hour I first became your wife,’ cries the lady in the well-known quotation; to which her spouse replies that—‘That’s too bad; you’ve cursed the only happy hour we’ve had.’ But Palladas, the Greek, as translated by Mr. J. H. Merivale, goes a little farther than this, declaring that
‘All wives are bad; yet two blest hours they give:
When first they wed, and when they cease to live.’
A favourite notion with the satirists is that marriage is a state of mutual recrimination. John Heywood has the couplet:
‘“Wife, I perceive thy tongue was made at Edgware.”
“Yes, sir, and your’s made at Rayly, hard by there.”’
And this is typical of many another utterance; for example, this:
‘Know ye not all, the Scripture saith,
That man and wife are one till death?
But Peter and his scolding wife
Wage such an endless war of strife,
You’d swear, on passing Peter’s door,
That man and wife at least were four.’
Doctor Johnson, too, draws attention to the fact—if it be one—that all the reasons which a man and a woman have for remaining in the estate of matrimony, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together. Or, as Mr. William Allingham has, of recent years, more pithily put it:
‘If any two can live together well,
’Tis (and yet such things are) a miracle!’
If we are to believe the aforesaid satirists, this is all the fault of the wives. Now and again one comes across a jest in which the lady has the better of the gentleman, as in the following:
‘“Wife, from all evil, when shalt thou delivered be?”
“Sir, when I” (said she) “shall be delivered from thee.”’