The Golden Censer Part 21

BACHELORS.

I would not my unhoused free condition Put into circ.u.mspection and confine, For the sea's worth.--Shakspeare.

When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.--Shakspeare.

Nothing is further from the single man's thoughts than that he will continue in the single state all his life. He expects, when the young woman meets his gaze who satisfies either his esthetic or pecuniary ideas, generally the latter, or both, to take that young woman to his bosom and begin married life. This is a natural state of mind, and there is no harm in indulging it. It shall be the object of a few of these pages to present such aspects of the unmarried state of man as have princ.i.p.ally commended themselves to general attention. The bachelor has plenty of arguments to keep him single while he is not in love. He thinks the arguments keep him single, good fellow. He says, as I heard one of them say: "I would ask the unbiased observer what there is in the world, after all, to induce a man to commit matrimony. Some one will say: 'To have some one to care for him when sick.' This is complimentary to woman--indicating that she marries to become a nurser of the sick and old. And must a man endure all the pains and throes of years of matrimonial cyclones that he may have some one to stew his gruel during the brief s.p.a.ce of his last illness? If a bachelor have money, he will have friends to care for him, no fear, and if he be poor, a wife is the last thing in the world he needs. She divides his pleasures and doubles his sorrows.

HE MUST DANCE TO FAs.h.i.+ON'S TUNE--

a palatial residence, a corps of servants, a livery, and dresses from Paris--for the sake of having some one to receive and entertain his friends' wives. He must support his wife's relations, and endure no end of feminine abuse, which is not always so feminine. The world is divided into two cla.s.ses: Those who are unmarried, but wish they were, and those who are married, but wish they were not."

THIS IS A FAIR SPECIMEN

of the argument by which the bachelor convinces himself that he is happy. If it _does_ contribute to his peace of mind, why should the world care? And the world really does not care. When he comes to have his gruel stewed for him in a hospital, or, worse yet, a boarding-house, he finds out, all of a sudden, that he is really in the way, and that, in his life of perfect selfishness, he has never secured that thing which cannot be bought, yet which he so yearns for now in the hour of his feebleness, a woman's love. A good long sickness has greatly enlarged many a man's philosophy!

Still, it is not in the destiny of every man to have a wife, or to keep her if he get one. It is not unwise, therefore to consider that state as one of the phases of life, and to contemplate its various aspects, good and bad, as we have the other conditions of existence. "A man unattached and without wife," says Bruyere, "if he have any genius at all, may raise himself above his original position, may mingle with the world of fas.h.i.+on, and hold himself on a level with the highest; this is less easy for him who is engaged; it seems as if marriage put the whole world in their proper rank." "I have" says Burton, the melancholy, "no wife or children, good or bad, to provide for, and am a mere spectator of other men's fortunes and adventures."

THE ONE GRAND RESULT OF SINGLE LIFE,

so far as is generally noticeable, is selfishness. The chief lesson of marriage is self-denial. Which is the more pleasing of the two traits?

When the bachelor views life, he sees nothing good in it, for it all looks selfish. Being so deeply jaundiced, the eye tints everything with yellow. At forty he is heartily sick of it all. Why? Because he has learned that he has squeezed the orange dry. The faculties which G.o.d gave him to be pleased with when a recipient have been worked to death.

HE HAS BEEN A RECIPIENT WITHOUT CEASE.

He has chewed on one side of his mouth all his life. The teeth on the other side have loosened and are ready to fall out, while the overworked molars on the other are about to run into decay. The faculties whereby he was expected to please other people have become rudimentary, and he can now no more fascinate other people than he can sing soprano. He makes an effort to engage the interest of a young lady. The hollowness of his attack at once arrests her attention. The ease with which he speaks long sentences of admiration proclaims his long practice in the art, and the utter lack of real meaning in them. He knows that the girl will

LAUGH BEHIND HIS BACK,

and it irritates him, and disposes him to attribute her act to "the falseness of her s.e.x," when it is merely her keen intelligence in such matters. The fact of the matter is, that though an old bachelor is seemingly greatly smitten with nearly every young girl he sees, he does not succeed in marrying because he is a hard man to catch. The young woman takes his measurement. His devotion is overpowering, but she easily sees that it is a sham. The bachelor looks at her glove, and, instead of admiring the hand, as the "marrying young man" does, he says "Dollar and a half!"

HE LOOKS INTO HER EYES AND FIGURES

on the probable cost of board for two. The time of mating is past with him, and that young woman can see it "as quick as a flash of lightning."

He may be the man she could love if she "let go of herself," but his slippery words do not mean "marry," and she "pa.s.ses him around." He loves to go to picnics and church sociables, for he must be amused, and he hopes to find that pleasure in next Tuesday's donation party which he did not get at last Friday's rehearsal.

THE TROUBLE ALL LIES

in his intense love of self. Society in general regards him as useful, and pities him. The older women generally suppose he would marry the first girl who would have him, and he himself hopes to sooner or later to come across a lady who is superior to all others, and who has money enough to pay her share of the expense of living. I wish him success, for

HE IS GENERALLY A GOOD FELLOW,

and strictly a creature of circ.u.mstances. If we catch the small-pox nothing is surer than that we will have it in spite of our pride. If a man is cast into a mold of events where he is bound to be taught nothing but selfishness, and to see nothing but the selfishness of others, the wonder is that he will a.s.sume, in the matter of self-denial, those relations, even for a day, which he so a.s.siduously avoids for life.

SCHOLASTIC OPPORTUNITIES.

The single man has a fine chance to be "a scholar and a ripe good one."

Having been denied the joys of a household all dependent on him, he may surround himself with books, he may pursue investigations, he may gather the ideas of the wits and the thinkers, and he may thus broaden his brains until he is the honored a.s.sociate of the best minds in his region. This form of happiness is, to those who are within reach of it, one of the most satisfying within the gift of G.o.d. There is no reaction, there is no sorrow.

MAN LIVES TO LEARN,

after all. If the mind goes on in the culture of those high qualities which have been inwoven with his weak frame, it seems to me his selfishness has been well disposed of. The dollar which, in the cautious mind, was begrudged to a wee toddler who never lived, for a pair of shoes, has been placed where it has brought new knowledge of the power and wisdom of G.o.d, the Creator and Conservator of the Universe. The wisdom thus born out of selfishness will inculcate in those to follow him the folly of selfishness, and the tastelessness of its brightest apples of gold.

BE KIND TO THE OLD BACHELOR.

When he tries to be friendly, give him a lift. His mode of life has left him with many advantages for usefulness which married people have not got. On committees and in preliminary work he is often the best man in the neighborhood. At funerals, in sickness, he has been known to be almost the very instrument of the merciful Father. Teach the young ladies that he is harder to "catch" than they suppose, and perhaps they will turn toward him a portion of their character which will please him better with womankind.

TO HEAR SOME MEN TALK,

and from experience, too, you would think that a breed of creatures born from such women as are now living would be a herd of monsters, incapable of civilization and refinement. And yet the world will go on, and we know, almost, that our posterity will bring about wonders in the arts and sciences, and perhaps even in society itself,--wonders which will even surpa.s.s the triumph of our own generation. We are on the eve of both traveling and talking through the bare air. We are in a way to avoid the worst of our wars. It cannot be that the women who will bear the men who will do all these things are to be

JUDGED AS THE BACHELORS VIEW THEM.

The bachelor sees as through a gla.s.s, darkly. Being, for the time, incapable of the pa.s.sion of love, having failed to exercise it when it came upon him, he thus rails at woman. If you are young enough, watch the events of the next thirty years, and see how they will give the lie to such a tirade as this, from

THE SAME BACHELOR

I quoted at the start: "Not one-half of our marriages have unbiased love as a foundation on both sides. (The love is usually on the man's side.) A woman marries for money, position, spite, pride, contrariness, fear of being an old maid, or for a home which she thinks will afford her more pleasure than the one she leaves. Love is the last thing to enter her head, and never her heart. Men of real sound judgment in business throw this judgment entirely aside when they come to select a wife. A man might better remain single than marry with the chances nine out of ten in favor of his making a mistake for life."

SEE HOW LITTLE KNOWLEDGE

of anybody's good points this gentleman displays. The young woman who has worked at ironing in the forenoon until her feet were swollen and her head has got dizzy, comes into the parlor in the evening, all frills and tucks, all "highty-tighty," all full of fun and G.o.d's good humor, and impresses my friend with the belief that she has never done an honest hour's labor in her life! Pshaw! she has got more pluck, and nerve, and "sand," than half a dozen men, when it comes to where the need is! She is going to be

THE MOTHER OF AN AMERICAN,

and Americans are not noted for their servility, their laziness, their mediocrity, or their lack of brains! For shame, then to judge a young woman as she appears to you when she is anxious to get rid of you! How would you like to be judged solely at those times when you were "carrying on," and "didn't care whether school kept or not"? That is precisely the way this gentleman has spoken of young women a page back.

He thinks they love no one because they have never loved him! He never loved them, and how could he expect them to be swindled? Read his remarks over again, and see how events themselves deny his correctness.