AGE AND HEALTH.

If a man were only a generating animal, the problem of age in marriage would be very simple, and reducible to this formula: That as long as men or women can relight the flame of life they are marriageable.

That means that a man may marry from sixteen to sixty, and in exceptional cases up to seventy and eighty; and that he may marry a woman of from fifteen to forty-five.

Man, however, is not solely a generating animal, but a thinking, reasoning, sentient, cavilling, wrangling being; a political, commercial, and religious creature; he manufactures brakes to curb the exhilaration of the gallop downhill, creates sophisms to spoil truth, and crutches to make athletes rickety; he tells many lies for amusement; in short he is the most clever and ingenious artificer in things of which he knows very little, in the whole planetary universe. Notwithstanding all these precious virtues, man finds the problem of age most complicated, when he wishes to take one of the daughters of Eve and say to her: “Will you give me your hand, so that we may form a little future for ourselves?”

All other elements being favourable, the ideal perfection in age as regards marriage would be as follows:

The man to be from twenty-five to thirty-five.

The woman from eighteen to twenty-five.

The man should always be a few years older than the woman, that is from five to ten years older, and this for many reasons. Man grows older more slowly than woman, and keeps his power of reproduction longer.

Before twenty-five or thirty years of age a man, unless he be a born libertine, knows comparatively little of the world of woman, and that only the worst, and in his choice of a wife may make a terrible mistake.

Then, also, the products of a too early union are weak and inferior; the statistics of all countries show that there are more deaths among children of young parents than of older, or if they live, they are more weakly.

In the most simple problems of marriage, as in the most complex and metaphysical, it is always better to remember the fundamental doctrine, that harmony and happiness are founded on the agreement of two very different instruments, which ought always to accord with each other. We should pay attention, then, to false notes! If in an orchestra two instruments do not strike the right notes, or if one goes too fast and the other too slow, it is a very small matter, and ends in a grimace upon the brow of the few who understand music.

But in marriage the slight discord is a wound in the heart of two beings, who had joined hands for a happy life; and there is always a cicatrix left, which, like the wounds of veterans, acts as a barometer to the least change of temperature, of moisture, or of an atmosphere charged with electricity. The restless hand seeks to stop the sharp irritation, and lacerates the cicatrix, changing it to a chronic sore, which is always painful, but never healed.

Oh, men! oh, women, study counterpoint, the harmony and melody of the heart, body, and soul, day and night, if you wish to gather the blessed and perfumed rose of married happiness, in the garden of life.

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Beyond the ideal perfection of number represented by the beautiful figure of two flowering and fragrant young lives, you may have all these possible combinations, which, with a crescendo of perils and accidents, render the accordance of hearts and bodies always more difficult:

Two beings equally mature in age.

Two old people.

A mature or old man and a young woman.

A young man and a middle-aged or old woman.

We see all these combinations pass daily beyond our eyes, paired according to one or the other of these arithmetical formulÆ—formulÆ in which numbers weigh and govern human happiness with so tremendous an influence.

Let us study them one by one.

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Man adult—woman adult:

This is one of the most favorable combinations, the freest from danger and painful discovery. If it be true that for this combination there is rarer access to the Olympus of ardent love, it is also true that shipwreck and cataclysm are rarer also. The navigation is nearly always on a tranquil lake, in a safe boat, under the guidance of that best of helmsmen, good sense.

The majority of such cases consists of old attachments interrupted by unsurmountable obstacles, favoured again by some fortunate circumstance. The two who had loved and hoped for each other in their youth, find themselves free and their own masters, and all at once, at a single glance, have called up from the depths a bright panorama of fond visions, which for some time seemed to have disappeared in that abyss which buries and consumes all.

Do you remember, dear?

Yes, indeed I do! I seem to see you still at your window on that Sunday, when, after looking at me so long, you threw me a kiss across the street, when I believed I was hidden by the convolvulus on my balcony.

Ah, yes, yes; that kiss was the beginning of a long idyl which I seem to see rising from the mists of the past as though by enchantment————

And from remembrance to remembrance a living and speaking world appears before those two once more, but more beautiful and more rose-coloured in semblance than it was in reality; enlarged by fancy, the first of artists, gilded by distant reminiscence, which is ever optimist.

The old couple have some wrinkles on their faces and some threads of silver in their hair, but they see each other as they were twenty years ago; and if desires are indolent, and the clasp of the hands does not set the heart beating; if at night ardent dreams no longer disturb the peace of the passions, an odour of loving friendship surrounds them and binds them closer to each other day by day, and grows hourly more like love and less like friendship. They have so many remembrances in common. They have twenty years of life to recount to each other, and relating the sad and joyful events they alternately recount their recollections as though they had in reality lived together all the while, so that mine becomes thine and then ours, and without declaration or trepidation the happy day arrives when, without any necessity of finishing the phrase or dotting the i, the two right hands find themselves clasped together, the lips join between a sigh that questions and one that answers:

Really you wish————?

And why not?

And the why not becomes because I do on the morrow, and the man and woman become husband and wife; and almost without agitation, without accident, they reach in safety the port of sure and tranquil happiness.

I recall two such marriages with emotion, those of Stuart Mill and Hillebrandt.

To these serene and tranquil unions children are not necessary, but if they come they brighten and bless the house, bringing with them a nosegay of flowers and an odour of spring which makes those two happy mortals young once more.

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Two old people.

Add some ten years to the arithmetical combination just studied and you will have a lower temperature, but still less danger to the happiness of the two beings who, defying ridicule and prejudice, wish to consecrate an old friendship upon the altar of matrimony.

I do not say altar as a matter of phraseology, nor to do homage to the religious ceremony of marriage, but because I am deeply convinced that if there be nothing beyond the union of bodies or association of capital marriage is a sacrilege. The troth of two should always be plighted on an altar, whether it be that of Christ or of some ideal, of Moses or Mahomet, of poetry or religion.

Old people only marry once, either to win legitimacy for an old contraband love, or to give a legal status to the children. They are marriages of reparation, corrections of proof-sheets set aside for many years and forgotten. They merit our approbation and belong to those good actions of which Christ speaks, which, if done at the last hour, make death less hard and allow us to die at peace and at rest with the faith, which illuminates our souls and prepares us to start in the train that bears us to eternal silence, or to the golden gates of the Christian paradise.

In the marriage of two old people who love each other, love is no intoxicating flower, but a friendship slightly gilded by sexual sympathy, which endures longer than the reproductive function even as it precedes it.

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A middle-aged man and a young woman: If theory, hygiene, logical concords, and compacts proclaim the truth—which has all the force of a dogma—that an old man ought not to marry a young woman, daily practice shows us that all these combinations are possible:

40 ? + 20 ?
50 ? + 18 ?
60 ? + 30 ?
60 ? + 15 ?
70 ? + 30 ?
70 ? + 20 ?
80 ? + 40 ?
80 ? + 30 ?
80 ? + 15 or 18 ?

All formulÆ, cold and precise as the numbers that make them up, but full of a terrible crescendo of precipices and cataclysms! They arouse before us the phantom of a perfect pandemonium, and show us the horrors of a hell more dreadful than that of Dante.

How many tears, how much blood, bathe the path which divides those figures! What deep and hidden hatred, how much revenge premeditated during the night and put into practice in the clear light of day; how many deceptions planned with the cruelty of art; what repentance, crimes, intrigues, bitterness of soul; how many tortures and struggles are written between those silent and lifeless figures? Yet, still, you will find the rarest, most complete, and perfect happiness lying close to this hell, like an oasis in the midst of a desert.

For example, there are marriages of which the formula is 60 + 30, and even 50 + 18, that are real Edens of delight, where neither the most lovely and fragrant flowers of spring-time, nor the sweet tendernesses of voluptuousness, illimitable prospects, painless sighs, conversation without words, nor all indescribable delights, are wanting; and where you have also the charm that belongs to difficulty, and all the fascination which surrounds things sacred.

But why among these mute and dead numbers do we find the extremes of human misery and blessedness? Why do we see the most noble sacrifices and meannesses, the most ignoble baseness and the highest ideality, bound together, with a cruel irony, by a malignant fate; why do we see angels and demons dancing together as though enchanted by some fantastic waltz?

For a very simple reason.

Because the happiness of marriage between an old man and a young woman is nothing but an unstable and difficult balance granted to few. But to those who are capable of feeling it, it brings the sublime giddiness of the great heights. Everyone walks, but few take the leap to death. All climb the hills; exceedingly few have stood on the top of Mont Blanc. But those who do not break their necks, nor fall into the crevasses, experience, as they mount the highest and most difficult summit of the Alps, strong and fascinating emotions which make them proud and glad. All problems of life, whether great or small or indifferent, always have this dilemma hidden within them:

To dare or not to dare.

The Rubicon is either an historical fact, a myth, or a romance.

I leave it to historians to decide; but every practical problem of happiness has its rubicon, at which the whole world pauses.

Some turn back.

Some leap over it.

The most of them remain still on the bank all their lives, looking at the other side and scratching their heads. After forty years of age bachelors or widows stand before the rubicon of marriage and say:

Shall I go over or not?

The larger number wait so long to decide that the forty years become fifty and then sixty. The limbs become weaker and the river grows wider by the inundations and floods of so many autumns, and thus the problem is resolved by want of resolution.

Others instead, after a short and earnest meditation, exclaim:

No, I will not leap it.

And both do well, because although the calculation of probabilities is rarely applicable to moral problems, yet it proves that the combination of an old man and a young woman is a very frail one; at the least shock it is separated, as with fulminant mercury, chloride of azote, and all the infinite array of explosives; then comes a detonation, a disaster, more often a putrid and fetid dissolution.

Some do not scratch their heads, but decide resolutely on the great step and leap.

A difficult and perilous leap in which but few reach the other side unscathed. The majority of these intrepid individuals fall into the middle of the stream, which carries them away in its turbid and rough waters; others plunge directly into the mud up to the body and are fixed there, without being able to get out, a ridicule to others, a desperation to themselves.

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In that garden of Gethsemane, where all men drink of the cup of doubt, in that garden of perplexity which we ought to leave with a yes or no and turn to the right or left, knowing that one path leads to happiness, the other to desperation, without knowing, however, which of the two ways leads whither; in that garden, I say, my little book ought to serve as a guide to resolve one of the most difficult problems of marriage.

And I, who have arrogated to myself this right of counsel, will tell with a loud voice those who do care for my advice, my fundamental and organic precept on which all the other minor points must rest.

Marriage between an old man and a young woman may lead to happiness, if inspired on both sides by love.

Less surely will it lead to the same end if the love that leads them to the altar is all on one side.

It nearly always leads to unhappiness and ruin if the man is induced by sensuality, or the woman by the desire of riches or by ambition.

And as this third case is the most common, I will explain at once why those terrible arithmetical combinations are so fruitful in domestic misery, adultery, and let us say crime, including those which the code does not regard.

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At this point I see a malicious reader smiling, and hear him say that I ought to be classed among those madmen and deceivers who think they have solved the problem of squaring the circle or of perpetual motion.

You tell me a marriage between an old man and a young woman may be happy, provided there be love on both sides. But this is an impudent joke. You may assure me with equal seriousness that I can catch a sparrow if I put salt upon its tail. How, when, and where can a young woman, fragrant of spring, who seeks with eyes, mouth, nostrils, with all senses, the pollen which will fructify her and make her a mother; how can she desire or love a man who is already on the decline of life and can offer his companion nothing but lasciviousness framed by rheumatism, catarrh, dyspepsia, and cough?

No, malicious reader, I do not joke; neither have I endeavoured to solve insoluble problems. I sincerely believe a young woman can love an old man, but he must still be a man and handsome; for robust, flourishing, and cheerful old age has a beauty of its own, and if much is wanting it has the greatest resources and a certain delicate virtue, too, which a young man does not possess.

Love, too, has so many and such different forms, and is composed of so many different elements, that it can vibrate and burn even in the gray-headed.

The last love of Goethe speaks of all these; and the many warm and enduring passions awakened in young women by men eminent in politics, arts, letters, and science join in the chorus.

If in these loves the ardour of the senses fails—and it must fail—we find much veneration, tenderness, and often a sweet compassion, a sentiment that always predominates in the female breast.

Young men are often bad husbands because they assume too much; they pretend that love should be laid at their feet, as a tribute due to their beauty and transcendent vigour. They claim that they have the right to be loved for themselves, even when they on their side fulfil none of their duties.

The old man, on the contrary, feels his own weakness and implores love as a favour, and responds to it with a warm and inexhaustible gratitude every hour and every minute. He knows that little is due to him, and contents himself with a smile, a kiss, or a caress, which he doubles and centriples with his unfailing gratitude. He guards his love as a treasure, which may be taken from him from one moment to another; he defends it with all his strength, encloses it in a tabernacle, and adores it as a god. His companion, therefore, has always the peaceful surety that she will not be betrayed by other women.

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That these unions may be blessed by happiness, the husband and wife, above all things, must be gentle-people; that is persons of honour, who frankly accept the compact sworn to, without reticence or subterfuge.

Before the old man utters the tremendous yes he ought to present his account, even increasing the credit and diminishing the debit; explain himself clearly and dot every i. Therefore I entreat you when you make your fiancÉe acquainted with your financial position, be careful that each i has its dot, aye, even two.

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Such marriages as we are studying are far more frequent than we should at first suppose, and the fortunate cases are also less rare than the theory would lead us to believe; because women are far greater idealists in love than we are, and whilst we chiefly seek beauty and carnal gratification, they seek other things of a superior order, which they appease with the heart of the artist, and the phantasy of the poet. The love of a man for an illustrious but ugly woman is a phenomenon rarer than a white fly. The love of a young woman for a great, but gray-headed man is tolerably common, and is sufficient to do honour to the female sex.

But a man of mature age has other things besides to offer a young woman: riches, a high social position, many ambitions he can satisfy; and he has a whole world of high, good, and pleasant things to lay at the foot of the woman, and can say to her: All this for a little love!

I, of course, understand that these are international exchanges, which are far removed from love, and approach more nearly to commerce; but the sacred books have often used the words carnal commerce without blushing, and why can there not be a little commerce in matrimony? Provided the balance does not incline too much to one side, and there is no deceit—in a word provided the one who weighs be a gentleman—such marriages may be happy, too.

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When a man marries a woman very much younger than himself, people smile maliciously and point their fingers as if to ward off the evil eye, and to show the daring individual that the Minotaur awaits him. In this case the populace cuts not one, but a hundred gordian knots with a brutal and bestial sword.

Adultery is a plant that grows in every clime, but more especially where a woman fails in esteem for her companion, and the clever sower and cultivator of these plants is always the husband.

I am so convinced of this truth, that if statistics of adultery were possible, I am certain I should find the greatest number amongst the unions of young people: for they also make contracts of buying and selling, of exchange of titles and dollars, in their marriages.

If you, with your white hairs, have the courage to marry a young woman, study her character most of all. If she be a thorough lady in education she will be less likely to betray you than if you were young; for she is proud of herself and would not willingly commit a sin toward which the world would be so indulgent; for women also like difficult things, heroic undertakings; because they like to say in their own hearts or throw in the face of their seducer the sublime motto: noblesse oblige.

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Then in conclusion:

If, with your white hairs, you have the courage to bind your life to blond or brown tresses fragrant with youthfulness, place yourself naked before the mirror in your chamber and look at yourself for some time. Then for a longer time put yourself before that other mirror of conscience which reflects us so inexorably; and, having balanced the accounts of your physical I and your moral and intellectual me, see if you are still a possible man, a handsome and strong man; and if you find yourself a young woman who is more an angel than a woman, more woman than female, offer her your hand without too many scruples or false reticences, and who knows but that when you die, you may then be able to say: “The last years of my life have been my happiest. In my youth I knew a hundred women, in my old age I have only known one; and she alone was worth the other hundred. Woman is the benediction of life.”

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A young man and old woman:

Amongst the discordances of age between husband and wife, none astonish us so much, or I ought to say disgust us more, than when an old woman marries a young man.

There is the kernel of a great truth at the root of this scorn, which springs from the very heart of nature.

A man may be a man even at eighty years of age; and I cannot resist smiling when I remember a lady who complained of the exactions of her companion, a man over seventy. We all remember Fontenelle and the Duke of Richelieu, in whom virility was only extinguished with life: in the first case the life lasting for a century, in the second for more than eighty years.

A woman, on the contrary, after forty-five, or at the most after fifty years of age, is no longer a woman, and the reproductive faculty is entirely destroyed. Hence the marriage of a young man and old woman is more contrary to the laws of nature than that of an old man and a young woman. The one may be fruitful, the other never. Add to the Æsthetic exigencies of the man the rapid decadence of the woman after the change of life, and you will understand that the union we are discussing is one of the most repugnant and repulsive. The motives which bring such a man and such a woman together are nearly always the most abject, and amongst those that offend the moral sense the most. On one side carnal gratification; on the other the thirst for gold; hence, prostitution on the part of the man, the most filthy and disgusting in the commerce of love. The man sells his youth, his virility, in exchange for money; and the woman who no longer has a right to love, buys it as a merchandise, and is satisfied with the voluptuousness given her by one whom she ought to be the first to despise! A market of lasciviousness and vileness, gold gathered from the mud—a mud, however, which cannot be washed off, and which soils hand, conscience, everything it touches.

However, for the honour of humanity, such unions are exceedingly rare: those who buy and sell and are satisfied with a clandestine concubinage, hide the sin in the deep folds of our modern hypocrisy.

Maintained, yes; a husband, no!

A woman, on the contrary, always desires marriage, because she has the pride of proclaiming to all the world, that, notwithstanding her many years and innumerable wrinkles, the wreck of her form which assails her on all sides, she has known how to find a companion at bed and board, who makes her happy.

Man, on the contrary, hides himself on account of the modesty which is never wanting, even in the vilest delinquents; and hiding his shame in the darkness of a clandestine concubinage, hopes to preserve the esteem of men, and the gold he has gained with that reddened face of his. I will persist no longer on this theme because I hope that no young husbands of old women will ever read my book—they would soil it too much with their filthy hands—and because I have a great hope that they are all illiterate.

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However, before leaving this lurid argument, I ought to say, for the love of truth, that ancient and modern history register some exceedingly rare cases of union between old women and young men, in which neither the desires of the flesh nor the thirst for gold entered at all; they treat of intellectual unions in which the concord of souls, the sympathy of hearts and thoughts, the harmony of taste, the affinity of humane propositions, most charmingly unite two persons whom the difference in age would generally divide.

Love is the greatest and most powerful worker of miracles, it is the thaumaturgus of thaumaturgists, and I in the small circle of my experiences know a young man, who has never been able to desire or love a young woman, but adores old women; and if he does not marry any of his venerable friends, it is from fear of ridicule. It is true that in this case we treat of an aberration of sexual instinct to be classed with sodomy and incest; but this pathological nomad is seated in an otherwise normal and perfect brain.

Intellectual unions on the other hand are physiological facts which offend no rights of nature, and ought to be respected and studied, as rare, but most noble phenomena of the human heart.

With regard to the health of those desiring to take a wife, and the health of our companion, I will recommend to them my Elementi d’igiene, and more especially Igiene d’amore, where I have fully treated this vital side of the great problem.