Part 6

But it seems likely that this, like most of her sayings and doings, was merely a pose, meant to attract attention and make her notorious. It was doubtless to the same end that she professed to dabble in magic and astrology, and that she affected a belief in the proximate coming of the Messiah. Awaiting His arrival, she kept two Arabian mares constantly saddled which had never been ridden, and these mares had each a special attendant whose business was to keep everything ready for the celestial visitor, who should ride thence in triumph to Jerusalem with Lady Hester Stanhope as a kind of lady-guide!

And so to end this galaxy of shining lights in the whole art and mystery of shrewishness and termagancy. Many more there be, but these are the most notorious of that unblessed company.

Turn we now to the unhappy marriages of men of genius, whose careers in literature and art are public property.

The instances are so numerous in which men of genius or great mental activity have embittered their lives by marriages which have proved fruitful of discord and strife, that the proposition, ‘Should Genius be mated?’ might well be negatived in discussion.

Warning examples, from Socrates with his shrewish Xanthippe, to the morose and bearish Thomas Carlyle, who rendered his wife’s existence miserable with his acerbity and ill-humours, are frequent throughout the centuries, and sufficient, one might think, to deter Genius from mating with Common-sense, or to hinder Common-sense from running the risks of a lifelong companionship with Genius. And yet artists and literary men, musicians and philosophers, marry after the repeated failures of their predecessors to secure domestic happiness; and women, in their ambition to marry men who show evidences of successful careers in intellectual occupations, have no hesitancy in risking a martyrdom of mental solitude and loneliness that is certainly less directly painful and agonising than the fate of those stalwarts who died for conscience sake, but which is drawn out indefinitely in years of apparent neglect and obvious aloofness from all the interests of their husbands’ lives.

But, in considering the unhappy relations that have often existed between the men of genius who have married women of ordinary, or less than ordinary, mental capacity, the indictment must fall far heavier upon the women, because--as will be shown--the active ill-humours and spiteful opposition of their wives have far outweighed the indifference or want of thought of which these men of parts may have been unconsciously guilty in their homes. It is, and has always been, the especial attribute or misfortune of genius that it should be mentally isolated and solitary, impatient of and uncaring for petty domestic details and the sordid cares of housekeeping. Pegasus is a brute transcended beyond the dray-horse that pounds the earth with vibrant hoofs. He soars above the mountain-tops and breathes the rarefied air of the most Alpine heights. He does not go well in double harness and so has no companion on his journeys.

The wives of great geniuses, of the inspired among poets, painters, musicians, or _litterateurs_, cannot accompany them in their exaltations of thought or help them in technique; nor, to do those ladies the merest justice, have they often essayed the feat; having been, like the wife of Racine, content to regard their husbands as journeymen who earned their living and kept the household going by the production of so much painted canvas or so many written sheets of paper for which incomprehensible people absurdly gave large sums of money. Racine’s wife made it a stupid boast that she had never read a line of her husband’s verse; Heine’s Parisian grisette never attempted to understand her great man’s genius; and many other wives of genius have remained incapable of understanding the merits or demerits of their husbands’ work. But these comparatively harmless freaks of stupidity and silly lack of appreciation, though mortifying to one’s vanity, were nothing in comparison with such active revolts and exhibitions of termagancy as were indulged in by the wife of Young, author of the _Night Thoughts_, who threw her husband’s manuscripts on the fire, or by Dante’s wife--he had better have remained in celibacy, mourning Beatrice all his life--who gave him some sort of insight to an earthly _Inferno_. She had no notion of allowing him to have his own way in anything, and ‘he had to account for every sigh which he heaved.’ Banishment could not really have harmed him, since his wife remained behind.

Sir Thomas More was another unhappy Benedick, if we are to believe the gossips. His first marriage was peaceful enough; but his second, when he married a widow, one Alice Middleton, was all strife and contention. Perhaps, he wrote his _Utopia_, ‘A fruteful and pleasaunt Worke of the beste State of a publyque Weale, and of the newe yle called Utopia,’ as a welcome relief from domestic broils. His conscience would not allow him to recognise the validity of Henry the Eighth’s marriage with Anne Boleyn, and he was cast into the Tower for his pains, presently to be executed on that spot rich in the blood of martyrs for all manner of adequate and inadequate causes--Tower Hill. His wife, with the essentially Jesuitical feminine mind, came daily to where he lay in the Tower and abused him soundly for not giving in his adherence to the King’s wishes. ‘Thou mightest,’ said she, ‘be in thine own house, hadst thou but done as others:’ and I am not sure but what she was in the right; for life is pleasant and self-preservation the whole duty of man. An unruly conscience has been the sole undoing of many a worthy man, both before and since the time of Sir Thomas More.

They say that Shakespeare’s was an unhappy wedded life. Ann Hathaway--

‘She hath a will, she hath a way’--

was twenty-six when he married her, while he was but eighteen. How eloquent, then, this excerpt from _Twelfth Night_--

‘Let the woman take An elder than herself: so wears she to him; So sways she level in her husband’s heart: For, boy (however we do praise ourselves), Our fancies are more giddy and infirm, More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn, Than women’s are. Then let thy love be younger than thyself, Or thy affection cannot hold the bent.’

But do not put too much faith in the biographical value of literary expression, nor assume that these views have much bearing upon Shakespeare’s married life. His sonnets breathed love and passion for ladies dark or fair, and very various; but then ’twas his trade to assume what he did not feel, and to trick it out in glowing pages of dainty poesy. I, for one, would not regard them nor their like as arguments or evidence in favour of divorce. So, in all charity to sweet Will, let us scout the suggestion of a writer who wrote some years since on the unhappy marriages of men of genius, even as I do here, that ‘we have the internal evidence of his sonnets that he was not a faithful husband.’ We had far better keep to the scanty facts which have come down to us respecting Shakespeare’s life. We know, for instance, that he left Stratford-on-Avon and settled in London but four years after his marriage. It cannot be said with certainty whether or not his wife came up with him from Warwickshire, but it is likely enough that she did not. And yet can we reasonably blame any one less impersonal than Thalia or Melpomene for his leaving his wife behind him in that old town beside the Avon? I would suppose that Ann Hathaway was uncongenial to him in so far that, and because she had no sort of appreciation of, nor any love of, the medium of words in which her husband worked.

It was not until he had reached his forty-eighth year that Shakespeare returned to his native town. He lived there with his wife and his daughter Judith for four years, and then died.

Dryden’s wife must have been, no less than Carlyle, ‘gey ill to live wi’.’ He married, in his thirty-third year, the Lady Eliza Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, a woman whose intellect was as cloudy as her reputation, and whose violence ofttimes caused the poet to wish her dead. He wrote an epitaph in anticipation of that consummation he most devoutly wished; but she survived him, and, singularly enough, the epitaph which was never used has survived them both to the present day. He said--

‘Here lies my wife; here let her lie; Now she’s at rest--and so am I.’

And so they are.

Wycherley, too, had his connubial infelicities. He married the widowed Countess of Drogheda, whom Macaulay describes as ill-tempered, imperious, and extravagantly jealous. Nothing is more likely than that she had due cause for jealousy, for Wycherley was no saint. But she managed to keep him under restraint, and only permitted him to meet his cronies under her surveillance. That is, he was suffered to entertain his fellow-dramatists in a room of the tavern that stood opposite their house, whence she could observe him through the open windows, and assure herself that no woman was of the company.

Wycherley had, doubtless, himself to blame for this espionage and suspicion; but jealousy is, perhaps, as frequently unfounded as deserved. Berlioz, for instance, who married the charming Henrietta Smithson, an Irish operatic singer, was driven, through his wife’s unreasonable jealousy, to elope with the first pretty girl he met. He had been madly infatuated with her, and she seems to have wed him, not from affection, but because of his importunity; and, even so, she did not comply until after an accident had unfitted her for the stage, and she was fain to retire. But indifference changed to an acute jealousy after marriage. She so wearied the musician with her baseless suspicions, that at last he felt the absurdity of bearing the odium of sin without having experienced its pleasures. So, one fine day, he packed a portmanteau and sped to Brussels in company with ‘another,’ to speak in the manner of the lady novelists.

Comte, the founder of the Positivist religion, and the defender of marriage, led a wretched married life. Hooker, the ‘judicious,’ seems not to have deserved that epithet in so far as his choice of a domestic tyrant was concerned. Sir Richard Steele should not have married a second time; he might have known that the good fortune of his first choice militated against the chance of equal luck on another occasion. Montaigne--good soul--declared that he would not marry again after his untoward experiences; no, not if he had the choice of wisdom incarnate.

Man who has once been wed deserves the consolations of heaven, according to the story in which a soul (masculine) comes to the gates of Paradise and knocks. Peter catechises him, but finds his record inadequate, and is about to turn him away. ‘Stay, though,’ says the saint; ‘have you been married?’ ‘Yes,’ replies the soul. ‘Enter, then,’ rejoins the janitor, compassionately; ‘you have deserved much from your sufferings on earth!’ ‘Ah!’ cries the spirit, enlarging upon its claims to present bliss from past ills; ‘I have been married twice!’ ‘Twice?’ shouts Peter, indignantly; ‘away with you. Paradise is not for fools!’

How little, then, did Milton deserve the Paradise of which he wrote, for he was married no less than three times, and that, too, after the unpleasant experiences of his first alliance. Mary Powell, his first wife, was a shrew. She was the daughter of an Oxfordshire Royalist, and, disgusted and alarmed at the severity with which Milton, who was then a dominie, treated the boys under his charge, she left him after the honeymoon and returned home. For three years she kept apart, paying no attention to his requests for her to return, and she only rejoined him after Naseby, when, the Royalist hopes being shattered, it seemed advisable that she and her people should seek the shelter that the roof of so uncompromising a Puritan afforded. He received her, and for the remaining fifteen years she made his life miserable.

Addison made a great social triumph for eighteenth-century literature when he married the widowed Countess of Warwick, but in doing so he sowed the whirlwind for his own reaping. Her arrogance was monumental, and she made her stately house at Kensington so unbearable to him, that he was used to fly her presence and take refuge in a little country tavern that stood in those days on the high road to London, at the corner of a lane which is now the Earl’s Court Road. Domestic strife drove him to the bottle, and the ‘Spectator’ died ‘like a Christian,’ indeed, but with an intellect clouded by drink.

In more recent times, the marriages of Byron, Bulwer-Lytton, and Dickens were notoriously unhappy; but, certainly, these three men of genius must have been almost insufferable husbands. Dickens had as good a conceit of himself as ever Scot desired or prayed for--and genius that can usurp the functions of the critics and calculate the candle-power of its effulgence to a ray more or less must needs be intolerable either at the club or in the home. Byron took advantage of that independence of moral laws which is supposed to be the especial attribute of genius--and indeed (although one need not have any absurd prejudices in favour of morality) he was but a sordid scamp, with a bee in his bonnet and a fluent facile gift of versification. His person, his title, and (above all) his reputation for immorality made his fame and sold his works: and what unholy trinity more powerful than this for popularity?

Bulwer-Lytton was an odious fellow, a ‘curled darling,’ jewelled, scented, and self-centred. He wrote, presumably of himself: ‘Clever men, as a rule, do choose the oddest wives. The cleverer a man is the more easily, I believe, a woman can take him in.’ That, doubtless, was a piece of special pleading on behalf of his own extreme cleverness, for he was the victim of a virago who was the more terrible for being a little less than sane and more than eccentric. He bought her off with an annuity of 400_l._, but lawsuits directed against him afforded a spice to her life, and persecutions in the form of novels written ‘with a purpose’--the purpose of abusing him--and of public altercations, rendered Lytton’s marriage with Rosina Wheeler one of the most bitterly regretted actions of his life. ‘There were faults on both sides’--to adopt the saying of the gossips: he was irritable and violent, and she was--violent and irritable! Nor was she readily put aside. For years after their separation she never wearied of drawing attention to her wrongs, and it was in 1858, during Lytton’s candidature for Hertford, that she appeared before the hustings on which he was preparing to address the free and enlightened voters, and burst upon his vision, an excited female, dressed in yellow satin and flourishing an umbrella, while she denounced him at the top of her voice as a perjured villain. She was no meek and uncomplaining martyr: she proclaimed her wrongs _urbi et orbi_, and compelled attention.

Had Coleridge such a wife, his digestion would have been a great deal more disordered than it was used to be in the conjugal difficulties that led him to leave his home. Had Romney been wed to so strenuous a shrew, he had not deserted his wife for over thirty years without some public scandal; and had Tommy Moore espoused any but the most easy-going and long-suffering of wives, his amorous verse would have purchased him many a wigging, I warrant. That modern Anacreon wrote a poem on the origin of woman which would have been impossible to the uxorious, and is sufficient to set the Modern Woman shrieking with indignation. And yet the women of his time delighted in his society! Those verses are, for some unexplained reason, not to be found in the later editions of his works. In them he versifies the Rabbinical theory of woman’s origin--that Adam had a tail, and it was cut off to make Eve. This legend may be found by those who understand Hebrew, and would like to read the original version, in the Talmud; but these are Moore’s lines--

‘They tell us that woman was made of a rib Just picked from a corner so snug in the side; But the Rabbins swear to you that this is a fib, And ’twas not so at all that the sex was supplied.

‘The old Adam was fashioned, the first of his kind, With a tail like a monkey, full yard and a span; And when Nature cut off this appendage behind, Why, then woman was made of the tail of the man.

‘If such is the tie between women and men, The ninny who weds is a pitiful elf; For he takes to his tail, like an idiot, again, And makes a most damnable ape of himself.

‘Yet, if we may judge as the fashion prevails, Ev’ry husband remembers the original plan, And, knowing his wife is no more than his tail, Why, he leaves her behind him as much as he can.’

And certainly Moore left _his_ wife as much as possible, while he hob-nobbed with princes and was the lion of London salons.

But search the ranks of married men who have achieved fame, and few shall you find who found, and wed, their affinity. Affinities, it should seem, are rare when once you come to brains of more than ordinary calibre: your dull dog more readily finds his match than wits or witlings, and the community of the commonplace is an easier consummation than the happy combination of the unconventional.

V.--DOMESTIC STRIFE.

Married life is one long series of compromises--when, indeed, it is not a state of open warfare. The ‘mere man’ must be a little less than just, and more than a little selfish, who would assure himself of retaining his authority over the (more or less) ‘pleasing partner of his heart;’ for woman, be she never so sweet and gracious, is always greedy of power and domination, and though with ‘sweet Nellie,’ your ‘heart’s delight,’ the wish to rule may be possibly but a harmless and altogether amiable eccentricity, and your abandonment to her humours the wearing of golden and purely ornamental fetters, yet in process of time your benevolent despot may become more despotic and less benevolent, and your chains transmuted to more sordid guise. But with imperious Julia or haughty Georgina ’tis another matter from the first; your initial complaisance spells infirmity of purpose, and having once abdicated your authority, you are undone for always, and may for ever tarry in attendance upon the good lady’s whims and ‘ways,’ while acquaintances sit in the seat of the scorner and opine that not you but the woman ‘wears the breeches.’

O! most miserable and ineffectual of men; you who have the will-power of a jelly-fish and the courage of a cockroach! The ‘better half’ is not yourself; your partner has achieved her own ‘betterment,’ and your compensation is all to seek for the ‘worsement’ that remains your portion.

Life is compact of compromise, but keep it outside the home and rule absolute beneath your roof-tree. Then shall one have satisfaction and the other be convinced of orthodoxy in observing apostolic precepts. Compromise, as Captain de Valabrèque found, is pleasing to neither side. A friend discovered him dressing for dinner at an unusual hour, and, in reply to the friend’s inquiry, he said: ‘It suits my wife to dine at four, and it is convenient for me to dine at six; and so we sit down to table at five, which suits neither of us.’

Dual control, in fact, works smoothly neither socially nor politically, and though there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, folly abides in divided authority everywhere, and nowhere more certainly than in domestic matters.

The New Women--female gendarmes, censors of morals, and would-be domestic tyrants--are quite alive to these objections against the division of authority, but their agreement goes no further. ‘Woman ought to be and shall be’ the head of the family, they say, and no statement is too rash for woman on the war-path to make or subscribe. Woman has ever been a religious animal, and even the modern woman differs little from her forbears in this respect; but do just remind her of St. Paul’s views on the silence and subjection of her sex, and you learn that the militant saint was an ass--no less! And yet Paul remains the patron saint of the foremost diocese in Christendom. See to it, O New Woman! Disestablish him, and erect some more complaisant saint in his stead. Certainly his opinions and teaching flout the feminine Ego.[2]

‘No sensible woman,’ wrote one of the most sensible of her sex,[3] ‘objects to acknowledging what is the fact, that she is physically and mentally inferior to man.... The position of woman has always been, and will be, a subject one.... The man has always been, and will continue to be, the head of the family, and the position of the woman, to my mind, is perfectly summed up in the words, “Her desire shall be to her husband, and he shall rule over her.”’

For women to claim supremacy comes somewhat too late in the day to be effectual. There is a very pretty paradox concealed in the fact that their numbers constitute their weakness, for numerical preponderance is usually found to be an increase of strength; but the converse is the case where women are concerned. A wife may be had for the mere asking by any man, so great is the excess of women, and still so widespread the old-fashioned and right-minded notion that marriage rounds off and completes a woman’s life. Scarce a man so ill-formed in mind or body, or so ill-found in worldly estate but could become a Benedick on the morrow, an he chose. Man’s supremacy must infallibly last while he remains in a minority. He is already perfectly conscious that there are not enough of him to go round, and that this fact puts a premium upon his sex; and he can afford to smile at the women who have theories and air them so persistently. For himself there is no occasion to protest so loudly, while nature continues to endow him with a larger quantity and a superior quality of brains: gives him greater bodily strength, and--best boon of all--keeps him in a minority.

And yet, although women are inferior to men in such important matters as intellect and strength, the ‘hen-pecked husband’ has ever been common, and the ‘wearing of the breeches’ by the wife has been a phrase, time out of mind, to denote

‘She who with furious blows and loud-tongued noise Doth tempests in her quiet household raise.’