A Theory as to Disparity

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

IT is curious to notice how the age of parties contracting marriage is affected by economic institutions, as well as by the social influences which act upon the more purely emotional part of the natures of men and women. I would not venture to say that the suggestions that have occurred to me cover the whole truth as to the relations of the sexes, hut they may serve as hints that indicate the line along which research may be pleasantly, if not profitably, pursued.

In countries where daughters are a burden, fathers and mothers naturally marry them off as early as possible, though in China this method of securing parental relief is supplemented by the possibly preferable custom of infanticide.

George Sand, in her pretty story of La Mare an Diable, testilies to different customs among the French peasants whose life she describes. Her hero is about twenty-eight, and her heroine, who is sixteen or seventeen, thinks he is almost superannuated, and he dolefully feels that she has much cause for her opinion. She is represented as giving expression to the ideas prevalent in her class as to marriages where there is a disparity in age. It is certain that where, as in Russia, special peculiarities of institution do not unite to produce a different result, the simple domestic life of village and rural communities favors early unions between persons of nearly the same age. If the motive leading to marriage is the primitive instinct, and the happiness expected from it has no roots in the larger life of the world, wherever boys and girls are allowed to choose their own partners freely, they will usually choose each other, and will not seek their mates among those who are either much older or younger than themselves. The French Canadians who are domiciled in this country bear witness to the truth of this statement every Sunday, the couples that promenade our village streets are so young, so gay, so evenly matched.

As a people grow wealthy, they discover that life holds other possibilities of pleasure than those which are felt in providing and preparing food and shelter for husband or wife, and those which come from the rearing of offspring to walk in similar paths and toil to a like result. Lovers and ladies find that varied forms of enjoyment offer new chances for congenial companionship, and parents learn to hope more things for their children. Life becomes more complicated, and the extension of experience extends also the opportunity which selfishness has to play a dominant part in determining human action. Luxury and ambition make demands upon the married state which it is difficult for young men to supply; so they delay marriage, and girls are induced to accept older men, who have already acquired the means to gratify a love of sensuous ease as well as an æsthetic taste.

Undoubtedly pure and honorable motives often lead to the same result. There are women in whom the filial element is strong, and who easily develop a passion which is modified by the gentler sentiments of reverence and trust. Such love flows naturally towards a mature suitor. A high degree of intellectual activity in society also tends to produce marriages where the man is decidedly the senior of his wife. It is not only the woman who delights in maintaining an attitude of childlike docility, but the girl who is developed in intellect and character beyond her years is likely to find age more satisfying than youth is attractive, when it comes to a question of marrying. Moreover, if a girl chance to have a daring and positive mind united to an affectionate and sensitive disposition, site is very apt to yield to the charm of a lover whose added years have taught him to treat with halfpaternal tenderness and toleration the combination of arrogant self-assertion and timid self-distrust she is pretty sure to exhibit.

The more intensely people live in matters of thought and intellect, the more likely are young men of their own accord to marry women older than themselves. It is quite remarkable how many men of genius have found the companionship of older women congenial, and how many women of genius have preferred youthful to mature husbands. It seems as if women, like men, sometimes exercised a fascination which, though magnetic and personal, is not wholly dependent on attractiveness of person. Like Iseult’s “sweet charm,” in Matthew Arnold’s poem, “ it will not fade with the dull years away,” nor is it merged into some other sort of loveliness, like that of the ordinary maiden, which passes insensibly into a placid wifely and motherly beauty. The charm of which we speak continues to the end to be just itself, and to command intense affection and devotion. Its power is felt by all who come in contact with its possessor ; but when that possessor is a woman, it is more often necessary that a man should have some special quality of nature to enable him to enter the sphere of fascination. Margaret Fuller is said to have had many lovers, and she finally married a man ten or a dozen years her junior. These two do not seem to have met on the intellectual plane, but according to some principle of pure affinity. “Ossoli loves me,” she wrote, “as little children have loved me, — he loves to be near me.”

The world has recently been touched by the few words in which Mr. Cross discloses the secret of his marriage to George Eliot. " For she had,” he says, " the distinctively feminine qualities which lend a rhythm to the movement of life. . . . Add to these the crowning gift of genius, and in such companionship we may possess the world without belonging to it.”

The fact is that one of the most essential factors to happiness is agreeable companionship, and in the intellectual world such companionship is not always furnished to each other by contemporaries in age. Association in business also sometimes brings about marriages where the disparity is, according to the popular phrase, " on the wrong side,”but it is doubtful whether a large extension of feminine life into social and political affairs would have any marked tendency to increase the frequency of such marriages. Satisfactory companionship implies substantial unity in aim and sympathy in method ; and while a difference in age sometimes facilitates the approach of men and women to each other, if their mutual interest lies in thought and study, such unity of aim and sympathy as to method about practical and humanitarian matters are most likely to be found among people who belong to the same generation. I have heard of one case, for instance, where a sharply defined difference of opinion as to the mode of dealing with criminals led a young woman finally to break her engagement with a man older than herself. It was a difference which probably implied to her mind widely dissimilar views as to many ethical relations, and she realized that the life which her nature constrained her to lead would bring her into complications in which it would be necessary for her to be in full harmony with her husband on moral questions, if she was to be happy in marriage. In its social action and in the thought by which it directs such action, each generation is unlike those that precede and those that follow; and if men and women are to marry in consequence of their association in social thought and action, they should generally have been developed under the same influences, and hence at the same time.