and with little happiness in it save the spectacle of other
people's happiness. It is good for us to see happy people, good
for the symbols of happiness to be carried high amidst us on
occasion; for if they serve no other purpose, they inspire in us
the hope that we too may some day be happy, or remind our
discontented hearts that we have been.

If it were only for the sake of those quaint old women for whom
life would be entirely robbed of interest were it not for other
people's weddings and funerals, one feels the public ceremony of
marriage a sort of public duty, the happiness tax, so to say, due
to the somewhat impoverished revenues of public happiness. Other
forms of happiness are taxed; why not marriage?

In a village, particularly, two people who robbed the community
of its perquisites in this respect would be looked upon as
"enemies of the people," and their joint life would begin under
a social ban which it would cost much subsequent hospitality to
remove. The dramatic instinct to which the life of towns is
necessarily unfavourable, is kept alive in the country by the
smallness of the stage and the fewness of the actors. A village
is an organism, conscious of its several parts, as a town is not.

In a village everybody is a public man. The great events of his
life are of public as well as private significance,
appropriately, therefore, invested with public ceremonial. Thus
used to living in the public eye, the actors carry off their
parts at weddings and other dramatic ceremonials, with more
spirit than is easy to a townsman, who is naturally made
self-conscious by being suddenly called upon to fill for a day a