Part 13 (1/2)
[Sidenote: ”Unequal Marriages”]
We hear a great deal of ”unequal marriages,” not merely in degree of fortune, but in taste and mental equipment. A man steeped to his finger-tips in the lore of the ancients chooses a pretty b.u.t.terfly who does not know the difference between a hieroglyph and a Greek verb, and to whom Rome and Carthage are empty names. His friends predict misery, and wonder at his blindness in pa.s.sing by the young woman of equal outward charm who delivered a scholarly thesis at her commencement and has the degree of Master of Arts.
A talented woman marries a man without proportionate gifts and the tabbies call a special session. It is decided at this conclave that ”she is throwing herself away and will regret it.” To everyone's surprise, she is occasionally very happy with the man she has chosen, though about some things of no particular importance she knows much more than he.
The law of compensation is as certain in its action as that of gravitation, though it is not so widely understood. Nature demands balance and equality. She is constantly chiselling at the mountain to lower it to the level of the plain, and welding heterogeneous elements into h.o.m.ogeneous groups.
[Sidenote: The Certain Instinct]
The pretty b.u.t.terfly may easily prove a balance wheel to the man of much wisdom. She will add a vivid human interest to his abstract pursuits and keep him from growing narrow-minded. He chose the element he needed to make him symmetrical, with the certain instinct which impels isolated atoms of hydrogen and oxygen to combine in the proportion of two to one.
It never occurs to the tabbies that no talent or facility can ever stifle a woman's nature. The simple need of her heart is never taken into account in the criticism of these marriages which are deemed ”unequal.” If a woman holds an a.s.sistant professors.h.i.+p of mathematics in a university, it is a foregone conclusion that she should fall in love with someone who is proficient in trigonometry and holds his tangents and cosines in high esteem. Happy evenings could then be spent with a book of logarithms and sheets of paper specially cut to accommodate a problem.
Similarity of tastes may sometimes prove an attraction, but very seldom similarity of pursuit. Musicians do not often intermarry, and artists and writers are more apt to choose each other than exponents of their own cult.
[Sidenote: Appreciation and Accomplishment]
It is not surprising if a man who is pa.s.sionately fond of music falls in love with a woman who has a magnificent voice, or a power which amounts to magic over the strings of her violin. Appreciation is as essential to happiness as accomplishment, and when the two are balanced in marriage, comrades.h.i.+p is inevitable. An artist may marry a woman who does not understand his pictures, but if she had not appreciated him in ways more vital to his happiness, there would have been no marriage.
It is pathetic to see what marriage sometimes is, compared with what it might be--to see it degraded to the level of a business transaction when it was meant to be infinitely above the sordid touch of the dollar and the dime. It is a perverted instinct which leads one to marry for money, for it will not buy happiness, though it may secure an imitation which pleases some people for a little while.
There is nothing so beautiful as a girl's dream of her marriage, and nothing so sad as the same girl, if Time brings her disillusion instead of the true marriage which is ”a mutual concord and agreement of souls, a harmony in which discord is not even imagined; the uniting of two mornings that hope to reach the night together.”
The world is full of pain and danger for those who face it alone, and home, that sanctuary where one may find strength and new courage, must be built upon a foundation of mutual helpfulness and trust. No one can make a home alone. It needs a man's strong hands, a woman's tender hands, and two true hearts.
[Sidenote: The Light upon the Altar]
The light which s.h.i.+nes upon the bridal altar is either the white flame of eternal devotion or the sacrificial fire which preys hungrily upon someone's disappointment and someone's broken heart. But to the utter rout of the cynic, the dream which led the two souls thither sometimes becomes divinely true.
Marriage is said to be sufficient ”career” for any woman, and it is equally true of men. Like Emerson's vision of friends.h.i.+p, it is fit ”not only for serene days and pleasant rambles, but for all the pa.s.sages of life and death.”
It is to make one the stronger because one does not have to go alone. It is to make one's joy the sweeter because it is shared. It is to take the sting away from grief because it is divided, and the dear comfort of the other's love lies forever around the sore and doubting heart.
[Sidenote: Fire and Snow]
It is to be the light in the darkness, the belief in the distrust, the never-failing source of consolation. It is to be the gentlest of forgiveness for all of one's mistakes--strength and tenderness, pa.s.sion and purity, the fire and the snow.
It is to make one generous to all the world with one's sympathy and compa.s.sion, because in the sanctuary there is no lack of love. It is ”the joining together of two souls for life, to strengthen each other in all peril, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting.”
The Physiology of Vanity
[Ill.u.s.tration]
The Physiology of Vanity
[Sidenote: Conceit and Vanity]
”Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” It is the common human emotion, the root of the personal equation, the battling residuum in the last a.n.a.lysis of social chemistry. There is a wide difference between conceit and vanity. Conceit is lovable and unconcealed; vanity is supreme selfishness, usually hidden. Conceit is based upon an unselfish desire to please; vanity takes no thought of others which is not based upon egotism.