Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 – 1864)
Hawthorne was born at Salem, Mass., in 1804. He came of an old Puritan family, and to the end of his life was influenced by his early environment and his New England temperamental heritage. Before he went abroad as consul for the American government he had written a number of stories and sketches of New England life, and in 1850 had won many readers and considerable fame with his novel, The Scarlet Letter. Hawthornes stories, which are essentially American in subject matter, are among the masterpieces of our literature of fiction. Hawthorne understood, as few others have done, the limitations and the possibilities of the form.
Mrs. Bullfrog is one of his most delightful tales. It is reprinted from Mosses from an Old Manse, 1837, by permission of Houghton Mifflin & Company.
Mrs. Bullfrog
From Mosses from an Old Manse
It makes me melancholy to see how like fools some very sensible people act in the matter of choosing wives. They perplex their judgments by a most undue attention to little niceties of personal appearance, habits, disposition, and other trifles which concern nobody but the lady herself. An unhappy gentleman resolving to wed nothing short of perfection keeps his heart and hand till both get so old and withered that no tolerable woman will accept them. Now, this is the very height of absurdity.
A kind Providence has so skillfully adapted sex to sex and the mass of individuals to each other that, with certain obvious exceptions, any male and female may be moderately happy in the married state. The true rule is to ascertain that the match is fundamentally a good one, and then to take it for granted that all minor objections, should there be such, will vanish if you let them alone. Only put yourself beyond hazard as to the real basis of matrimonial bliss, and it is scarcely to be imagined what miracles in the way of reconciling smaller incongruities connubial love will effect.
For my own part, I freely confess that in my bachelorship I was precisely such an over-curious simpleton as I now advise the reader not to be. My early habits had gifted me with a feminine sensibility and too exquisite refinement. I was the accomplished graduate of a dry-goods store where by dint of ministering to the whims of the fine ladies, and suiting silken hose to delicate limbs, and handling satins, ribbons, chintzes, calicoes, tapes, gauze and cambric needles, I grew up a very ladylike sort of a gentleman. It is not assuming too much to affirm that the ladies themselves were hardly so ladylike as Thomas Bullfrog. So painfully acute was my sense of female imperfection, and such varied excellence did I require in the woman whom I could love, that there was an awful risk of my getting no wife at all or of being driven to perpetrate matrimony with my own image in the looking glass.
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