| <Engagements>
| <pb n="235">
| A great writer has pathetically described the last days of a 
| man under sentence of death.  He has found appropriate 
| expression for every phase of the protracted agony with 
| characteristic richness and variety of language; we are 
| made to taste each drop in the bitter cup ~~ the remorse 
| and the awful expectation, and the desperate clinging to 
| deceitful straws of hope.  Indeed it scarcely requires the 
| eloquence of a first-rate writer to impress upon us the fact 
| that it is very unpleasant to expect to be hanged.  Every 
| man's imagination is sufficient to realize some of the 
| unpleasant consequences of such a state of mind; for 
| though the number of persons who have encountered this 
| particular experience is inconsiderable, most of us have 
| gone through something more or less analogous ~~ we 
| have been significantly told to wait after school, or have 
| paid visits to dentists, or have been candidates at 
| competitive examinations, or have been engaged to be 
| married.  These and many other situations, though 
| varying in the intrinsic pain or pleasure of the anticipated 
| event, have thus much in common, that they are all states 
| of abnormal suspense.  The nerves are kept in a state of 
| equal tension by the uncomfortable feeling that we are in 
| for it, whatever the <p> "it" </p> may turn out to be.
| <pb n="236">
| The first impression is simple; it resembles that felt by a 
| man who has just slipped upon the side of a mountain, 
| and knows that he is inevitably going to the bottom.  He 
| has not time to think whether he will fall upon snow or 
| rocks, whether he will have merely a pleasant slide or be 
| dashed into a thousand fragments; he does not make up 
| his mind to be heroic or to be frightened; the one thought 
| that flashes across his mind is that here at last is the 
| situation which he has so often feebly pictured to himself; 
| he will know all about it before he has time to reflect 
| upon its pains or pleasures.  People who have escaped 
| drowning sometimes assert that they have remembered 
| their whole lives in a few instants, though it does not 
| quite appear how they can remember that they 
| remembered the series of incidents without remembering 
| the incidents themselves.  But, so far as we have been 
| able to collect evidence, the general rule in any sudden 
| catastrophe is that which we have described.  There is 
| nothing but a dazzling flash of surprise, which almost 
| excludes any decided judgment as to the painfulness or 
| otherwise of the situation.
| If, then, we may venture to conjecture the frame of mind 
| in which a lady or gentleman first enters upon an 
| engagement, we should say that it was this sense of 
| startled suspense.  They feel as Guy Faux would have felt 
| after lighting the train of gunpowder ~~ that they have 
| done something which they may probably never repeat in 
| their lifetime, and every other emotion will be for the 
| moment absorbed.  But as engagements are generally 
| more protracted than
| <pb n="237">
| most of the critical situations we have mentioned, the 
| surprise dies away, and the victims have time to look 
| about them, and analyze more closely the emotions 
| produced by their position.  To do any justice to the 
| complicated and varying frame of mind into which even 
| an average lover may be thrown in the course of a few 
| weeks would of course require the pen, not of men, but of 
| angels.  It would involve a condensation of a large 
| fraction of all the poetry that has been written in the 
| world, and no small part of the cynical criticism by which 
| it has been opposed.  But, taking for granted the mass of 
| commonplaces which has been accumulated in the course 
| of centuries, there are a few special modifications of the 
| position under our present social arrangements which are 
| more fitted for remark.  The state of mind known as being 
| in love is confined to no particular race or period, but the 
| position of the engaged persons may vary indefinitely.  In 
| a good simple state of society, the gentleman pays down 
| his money or his sheep or his oxen, and taken away the 
| lady without any superfluous sentiment.  Even in more 
| civilized states, a marriage may be substantially a bargain 
| carried out in a business-like spirit.  However 
| unsatisfactory such a mode of proceeding may be from 
| certain points of view, it is at any rate intelligible; all 
| parties to the contract understand their relative positions, 
| and have a plain line of conduct traced for them.
| But in a modern English engagement the form is 
| necessarily different, even when the substance of the
| <pb n=<"238">
| arrangement is identical.  For once in his experience a 
| man feels called upon to accept that view of life for 
| which novelists are unjustly condemned.  We say 
| unjustly, for it is inevitable that a novelist should 
| frequently represent marriage as being the one great crisis 
| of a man's history.  It is not his function to give a 
| complete theory of life but to describe such scenes as are 
| most interesting and most dramatic.  He is quite justified 
| in often writing as though two lovers should really think 
| about nothing under heaven except their chances of 
| union, and should  be dismissed, when the happy event 
| has once taken place, in a certainty of living very happily 
| ever afterwards.  He has no concern with the lover's 
| briefs or sermons or operations on the Stock Exchange, 
| which may really take up by far the greater part of the 
| man's waking thoughts; and it would spoil the unity of his 
| work if he were to dwell upon them proportionately.  It 
| would be as absurd to mistake the novelist's views for a 
| complete one as to condemn it because it is incomplete.  
| In novels which depend, as ninety-nine out of a hundred 
| must depend, upon a love story, the importance of 
| marriage, or at least the degree in which it occupies the 
| thoughts of the characters, will necessarily be overstated.  
| The engaged persons, however, find that, in the eyes of 
| their friends, if not in their own, they are temporarily 
| accepting the novelist's ideal.  For the time they are 
| considered exclusively as persons about to marry, and all 
| their other relations in life retire into the background.
| The difficulty of the position depends upon the extent
| <pb n="239">
| to which this conventional assumption diverges from the 
| true facts of the case.  The lady, for example, suffers less 
| than the gentleman, because, in spite of Dr. Mary Walker 
| and other martyrs to the cause of woman's right, it is still 
| true that marriage fills a larger space in her life than in 
| that of the other sex.  She can take up the character with a 
| certain triumph, as of one who has more or less fulfilled 
| her mission and passed from the ranks of the aspirants to 
| those of the successful candidates for matrimony.  At any 
| rate, even if she takes a loftier view of feminine duties, 
| there is nothing ridiculous about her position.  She may 
| busy herself about trousseaux or wedding-dresses or 
| marriage-presents, with perfect satisfaction to herself and 
| to the envy of her female friends.  But her unfortunate 
| accomplice, especially if he is of mature age, is in a far 
| more uncomfortable position.
| Few men who have become immersed in any profession 
| or business can act the character without an unpleasantly 
| strong sense of being in a false position.  There is nothing 
| indeed intrinsically ludicrous about it; the chances are 
| that the lover is doing a very sensible thing, and that his 
| wisest friends approve of his conduct.  Still it is 
| undeniable that he moves about, to his own apprehension 
| at least, in a universal atmosphere of ridicule.  He feels 
| that he is really a quiet hard-working young man, full of 
| law it may be, or of plans for improving his parish, or of 
| Parliamentary notices of motion.  He can talk about his 
| own topics with interest and intelligence, and may
| <pb n="240">
| possibly be an authority in a small way.  He is quite 
| conscious, too, that there are many sides to his character 
| which do not come out in his ordinary everyday business.  
| Unluckily that is just the fact which his friends are apt to 
| ignore.
| We soon learn to associate our acquaintance with the 
| positions in which we have been accustomed to see them, 
| and forget that they may have sentiments and faculties of 
| which we know nothing.  Consequently an engagement 
| seems to imply an entire metamorphosis.  Our friend, or 
| his image in our minds, was a comparatively simple 
| compound of two or three characters at most; whereas 
| men generally have a far more complex organization.  In 
| business hours, perhaps, he was simply a machine for 
| grinding out law, and at other times a lively talker and a 
| good whist-player.  No process of transmutation will 
| convert either of these into the conventional lover, who 
| can think of nothing but the object of his affections; the 
| apparent incongruity is too violent not to produce a sense 
| of the ludicrous; and our friend is bound in decency to 
| make it as violent as possible.  From which it follows that 
| we laugh, and that he knows that we are laughing, at him.  
| Intensely awkward congratulations are exchanged, 
| according to two or three formulas which have been 
| handed down from distant generations.  If the 
| congratulator is a married man, he hopes that his friend 
| may enjoy as much happiness as he has found himself in 
| the married state; if a bachelor, he assures him that, 
| although unable hitherto to set up to his principles, he has 
| always
| <pb n="241">
| thought marriage the right thing.  There are persons who 
| can repeat one of these common forms with all the air of 
| making an original observation, as there are men who can 
| begin an oration by asserting that they are unaccustomed 
| to public speaking; but, as a rule, it is said in such a way 
| as to imply that the speaker, whilst admitting the 
| absurdity of connecting the ideas of his friend and 
| marriage, is willing to pay the necessary compliments, if 
| he may do it as cheaply as possible.
| In short, until a man is engaged to be married, he scarcely 
| knows how easily they are amused at what is after all 
| rather a commonplace proceeding.  When his own friends 
| look upon him so distinctly in the light of a joke, he of 
| course cannot expect much quarter from the friends of the 
| lady.  He has a painful impression that he is coming out 
| in a part for which he has had no practice, under the eyes 
| of hostile critics.  Every man thinks it only due to himself 
| to criticise a friend’s new purchases of horses or pictures 
| or wines; if he did not find fault with them he would miss 
| an opportunity of establishing his superior acumen.  And 
| of course the principle extends to lovers.  There is 
| probably a narrow circle who are bound officially to 
| approve; but the unfortunate victim feels that, outside of 
| it, every acquaintance of the lady will take pleasure in a 
| keen observation of his defects, and he trembles 
| accordingly.  It is said (rather unfairly, perhaps) that 
| shyness is a form of conceit; but the least self-conscious 
| of mankind can
| <pb n="242">
| hardly fail to feel uncomfortable when he is called upon 
| to perform such a highflown part under so severe a 
| scrutiny.
| Of course the torment is far greater in the case of a 
| middle-aged professional gentleman, who is habitually 
| employed upon some incongruous work, than to a youth 
| in whom any sort of folly is graceful; but there can be 
| few persons to whom the position is not to a certain 
| extent irksome.  When a man is married, or when he is a 
| bachelor, he is allowed to be a rational being, taking 
| rational views of life.  He feels it rather hard that in the 
| interval society insists upon his being in a state of 
| temporary insanity, and then laughs at him because it 
| doesn’t look natural.  He begins to long even for that 
| climax of misery when, if the custom be not already dead, 
| he will have to commit one of the most absurd actions of 
| which a human being can be guilty ~~ namely, making a 
| speech in the morning, at an anomalous and dreary meal, 
| exactly when his shamefacedness is at its highest pitch.  
| That so many people survive engagements without any 
| perceptible sourness of temper is some proof of the 
| goodness of human nature, or of the fact that there are 
| compensations in the state of being in love which go to 
| neutralize the discomfort of being engaged.