WEDDING SYMBOLS

Dominion, Volume 16, Issue 148, 10 March 1923, Page 15

WEDDING SYMBOLS

The spirit of the age that pays no attention to tradition is manifesting itself even in the immemorial customs of our weddings- An English bride has clothed, herself as well as her attendants in silver; in Paris a bride has gone to the altar in blue shoes and stockings, and with a blue cavalier cloak slung over her white satin wedding dress. This break with tradition —which is at the same tme the defying of superstition—has been proceeding slowly for more than half a century (states a writer in the Manchester “Guardian”). When the Empress Eugenie married Napoleon it was nob only her own country-women who were horrified to see that to the diadem of six hundred brilliants which bound her head, and the diamond with three hundred rays which glittered in her corsage, she had added a rope of pearls wound four times round he? neck. The Castilian proverb'that the pearls women wear on their wedding day symbolise the tears they are fated to shed was a cardinal tenet in ir/r--riage beliefs. The Empress shed tears enough, but since that fateful wedding how many brides in every country have clasped a pearl chain round their necks! They have, too, cut‘the tradition that relegated marital good fortune only to the first half of the week. “Monday for health, Tuesday for wealth,, Wednesday tho best day ofall; Thursday for losses, Friday for crosses, Saturday no luck at all.” That philosophy was disregarded even in Victoria’s day. “Which day were you married?” asked Miss Earle, of Pot-Pourri fame, of Lady Waldegrave, of whose history she was not very Well aware. “Oh, my dear, I have been married nearly every day in the week!” Most of our wedding lore is drawn from Greece and Rome. From the •ilyer wedding-dress that stirs society ib is not a long step to the immense golden-yellow veil in which Greek, n.nd Roman brides were enveloped, and with the gold veil went a gold coronet, the “corona nuptials” which indicated triumph. It was the Crusaders who brought to England from the Saracens the wreath of orange blossoms with its symbol, not of victory, but of fertility—an emblem the Romans •ought in the harvest field. Our wedding-cake derives from the Roman austerity of salt, water, and flour eaten by the bride with the three wheat-ears in her hand, which were the Italian symbol of plenty. A character in Victorian fiction crannied up tersely both the ethics and the convenances of the wedding toilette. “If she’s a good girl she ought to wear a white dress, and if ghe isn’t she ought to wear a, black one.” The white wedding-dress, it seems to be agreed, comes to us from Mary Queen of Scots, who broke with the tradition of colour not because she was “good,” but because her dazzling beauty responded best to whiteness. Even in these days of finger-snapping at the conventions and historical foundations which support the bridal wreath of orange blossom, the bride-cake and even the white wedding-dress will not quickly yield—certainly a blue pavaher cloak in Paris and a silver bride in London will not accomplish the revolution. But Roman legacy does not end with a bride veiled and coroneted and the wedding cake. Married women of to-day wear their wedding-rings as they do because the Romans believed that a nerve ran through tho “ring-finger” to the heart.