Even with such men the practice was, often, widely different from the
mental faith. I say mental; for if the heart were thoroughly alive
with it, the practice could not be dissonant. Lord Herbert's was a
marriage of convention, made for him at fifteen; he was not
discontented with it, but looked only to the advantages it brought of
perpetuating his family on the basis of a great fortune. He paid, in
act, what he considered a dutiful attention to the bond; his thoughts
travelled elsewhere; and while forming a high ideal of the
companionship of minds in marriage, he seems never to have doubted
that its realization must be postponed to some other state of being.
Dante, almost immediately after the death of Beatrice, married a lady
chosen for him by his friends, and Boccaccio, in describing the
miseries that attended, in this case,
"The form of an union where union is none,"
speaks as if these were inevitable to the connection, and as if the
scholar and poet, especially, could expect nothing but misery and
obstruction in a domestic partnership with Woman.
Centuries have passed since, but civilized Europe is still in a
transition state about marriage; not only in practice but in thought.
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