University of Virginia Library

THE HISTORIC ASPECT

MATRIMONY," sings Homer, the poet, "is a holy estate and not lightly to be entered into." The "old Roman" is right.

A modern wedding is one of the most intricate and exhausting of social customs. Young men and women of our better classes are now forced to devote a large part of their lives to acting as brides, grooms, ushers and bridesmaids at various elaborate nuptials. Weeks are generally required in preparation for an up-to-date wedding; months are necessary in recovering from such an affair. Indeed, some of the participants, notably the bride and groom, never quite get over the effects of a marriage.

It was not "always thus." Time was when the wedding was a comparatively simple affair.

In the Paleolithic Age, for example, (as Mr. H. G. Wells of England points out in his able "Outline of History"), there is no evidence of any particular ceremony conjunctive with the marriage of "a male and a female." Even with the advent of Neolithic man, a wedding seems to have been consummated by the rather simple process of having the bridegroom crack the bride over the head with a plain, unornamented stone ax. There were no ushers—no bridesmaids. But shortly after that (c. 10,329—30 B.C. to be exact) two young Neoliths named Haig, living in what is now supposed to be Scotland, discovered that the prolonged distillation of common barley resulted in the creation of an amber-colored liquid which, when taken internally, produced a curious and not unpleasant effect.

This discovery had—and still has—a remarkable effect upon the celebration of the marriage rite. Gradually there grew up around the wedding a number of customs. With the Haig brothers' discovery of Scotch whiskey began, as a matter of course, the institution

of the "bachelor dinner." "Necessity is the mother of invention," and exactly twelve years after the first "bachelor dinner" came the discovery of bicarbonate of soda. From that time down to the present day the history of the etiquette of weddings has been that of an increasing number of intricate forms and ceremonies, each age having added its particular bit of ritual. The modern wedding may be said to be, therefore, almost an "Outline of History" itself.