The choice of a mate.

  • Anthony Ludovici
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details
    32/546 (page 2)
    This is a mistake, because the weakness of marriage to-day lies not so much in its failure to furnish what it was designed to furnish, as in its failure to furnish the paradise which unscrupu lous romantics have declared it promises. Disillusionment necessarily follows, and it is the more intolerable seeing that, owing to the high expectations that have been fostered, each party tends to blame the other for the ultimately cruel dis appointment. It may be that marriage, as we know it, has always been an undertaking too difficult and exacting for ordinary people. Where families have a dynasty or proprietary rights to secure, it is not unfair that a price should be paid for such enviable pre occupations. Where, however, no such preoccupations exist, marriage certainly loses much of its meaning and many of its advantages. 1 The lower it descends in the social scale, the smaller the advantages, and the greater the burdens of matrimony be come ; for the poor man has none of the paramount interests and motives which tend to reconcile the rich and the ruler to the condition. Indeed, there are some grounds for supposing that marriage was once the exclusive privilege of a class or caste, and that it was restricted to kings and very important people, 1 2 of whom it was reasonable to expect tiresome and lifelong feats of endurance in exchange for the benefits they enjoyed. It seems probable, moreover, that it was only the invincible snobbery of the com mon people and the middle-classes that ever led them to imitate their betters and thus to universalize the institution. 3 There is certainly much evidence in Ernest Crawley, 4 in Hocart himself, 5 and in Ploss and Bartels 6 in support of Hocart’s theory, and Rabindranath Tagore also makes an important state ment to the same effect. 7 Nor do our own wedding ceremonies 1 Thus Balzac spoke of “ la plaie profonde de nos mariages ,” as if marriage were a Western plague, and says, “ le mariage ne vaut pas tout ce qu’il coûte.” The last remark may be true of poor people’s marriages. It is not true of those of rulers and the rich, who secure by marriage something that bears no necessary relation to happiness. See P.M., p. 145. 2 See A. H. Hocart : Kingship (Oxford, 1927, pp. 100-112). 3 According to Hocart, some of the lower orders have escaped : “ Originally a ceremony observed by the King and Queen, it spread downwards to the lower classes ; but not always so far down ” (op. cit., p. 101). And he gives various instances of peoples whose lower classes have no marriage. 4 C.M.R., p. 300. 6 Op. cit., p. 100. e D.W., II, pp. 198-199. 7 B.M., p. 108.