2. The habit of match-making involves a false principle. This we see more
fully among the higher classes of society. It is the work of designing and
interested persons, who, for self-interest, intrude their unwelcome
interposition. Its whole procedure implies that marriage is simply a legal
matter, a piece of business policy, a domestic speculation. It strikes out
the great law of mutual, moral love, and personal adaptation. It makes
marriage artificial, and apprehends it as only a mechanical copartnership
of interest and life. It is sinister in spirit, and selfish in the end.
Many are prompted from motives of novelty to make matches among their
friends. All their schemes tend to wrest from the parties interested all
true judgment and dispassionate consideration. They are deceived by base
misrepresentation, allured by over-wrought pictures of conjugal felicity,
so that when the marriage is consummated, they soon find their golden
dreams vanish away, and with them, their hopes and their happiness forever.
But there are not only personal match-makers, in the form of tyrannical
fathers, sentimental mothers, amorous grandmothers, and obsequious friends;
but also book match-makers, in the form of love-sick tales and poetry,
containing Eugene-Aram adventures, and scrapes of languishing girls with
titled swains running off, calculated to heat the youthful imagination,
distort the pictures of fancy, giving to marriage the air of a romantic
adventure, and throwing over it a gaudy drapery, leading the young into a
world of dreams and nonentities, where all is but a bubble of variegated
colors and fantastic forms, which explodes before them as soon as it is
touched by the finger of reality and experience.
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