LETTER II.
TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO CONTEMPLATED MARRIAGE.
The foundations of the intellectual marriage—Marriage not a snare or pitfall for the intellectual—Men of culture, who marry badly, often have themselves to blame—For every grade of the masculine intellect there exists a corresponding grade of the feminine intellect—Difficulty of finding the true mate—French University Professors—An extreme case of intellectual separation—Regrets of a widow—Women help us less by adding to our knowledge than by understanding us.
In several letters which have preceded this I have indicated some of the differences between the female sex and ours, and it is time to examine the true foundations of the intellectual marriage. Let me affirm, to begin with, my profound faith in the natural arrangement. There is in nature so much evident care for the development of the intellectual life, so much protection of it in the social order, there are such admirable contrivances for continuing it from century to century, that we may fairly count upon some provision for its necessities in marriage. Intellectual men are not less alive to the charms of women than other men are; indeed the greatest of them have always delighted in the society of women. If marriage were really dangerous to the intellectual life, it would be a moral snare or pitfall, from which the best and noblest would be least likely to escape. It is hard to believe that the strong passions which so often accompany high intellectual gifts were intended either to drive their possessors into immorality or else to the misery of ill-assorted unions.
No, there is such a thing as the intellectual marriage, in which the intellect itself is married. If such marriages are not frequent, it is that they are not often made the deliberate purpose of a wise alliance. Men choose their wives because they are pretty, or because they are rich, or because they are well-connected, but rarely for the permanent interest of their society. Yet who that had ever been condemned to the dreadful embarrassments of a tête-à-tête with an uncompanionable person, could reflect without apprehension on a lifetime of such tête-à-têtes?
When intellectual men suffer from this misery they have themselves to blame. What is the use of having any mental superiority, if, in a matter so enormously important as the choice of a companion for life, it fails to give us a warning when the choice is absurdly unsuitable? When men complain, as they do not unfrequently, that their wives have no ideas, the question inevitably suggests itself, why the superiority of the masculine intellect did not, in these cases, permit it to discover the defect in time? If we are so clever as to be bored by ordinary women, why cannot our cleverness find out the feminine cleverness which would respond to it?
What I am going to say now is in its very nature incapable of proof, and yet the longer I live the more the truth of it is “borne in upon me.” I feel convinced that for every grade of the masculine intellect there exists a corresponding grade of the feminine intellect, so that a precisely suitable intellectual marriage is always possible for every one. But since the higher intellects are rare, and rare in proportion to their elevation, it follows that the difficulty of finding the true mate increases with the mental strength and culture of the man. If the “mental princes,” as Blake called himself, are to marry the mental princesses, they will not always discover them quite so easily as kings’ sons find kings’ daughters.
This difficulty of finding the true mate is the real reason why so many clever men marry silly or stupid women. The women about them seem to be all very much alike, mentally; it seems hopeless to expect any real companionship, and the clever men are decided by the color of a girl’s eyes, or a thousand pounds more in her dowry, or her relationship to a peer of the realm.
It was remarked to me by a French university professor, that although men in his position had on the whole much more culture than the middle class, they had an extraordinary talent for winning the most vulgar and ignorant wives. The explanation is, that their marriages are not intellectual marriages at all. The class of French professors is not advantageously situated; it has not great facilities for choice. Their incomes are so small that, unless helped by private means, the first thing they can prudently look to in a wife is her utility as a domestic servant, which, in fact, it is her destiny to become. The intellectual disparity is from the beginning likely to be very great, because the professor is confined to the country-town where his Lycée happens to be situated, and in that town he does not always see the most cultivated society. He may be an intellectual prince, but where is he to find his princess? The marriage begins without the idea of intellectual companionship, and it continues as it began. The girl was uneducated: it seems hopeless to try to educate the woman; and then there is the supreme difficulty, only to be overcome by two wills at once most resolute and most persistent, namely, how to find the time. Years pass; the husband is occupied all day, the wife needs to cheer herself with a little society, and goes to sit with neighbors who are not likely to add anything valuable to her knowledge or to give any elevation to her thoughts. Then comes the final fixing and crystallization of her intellect, after which, however much pains and labor might be taken by the pair, she is past the possibility of change.
These women are often so good and devoted that their husbands enjoy great happiness; but it is a kind of happiness curiously independent of the lady’s presence. The professor may love his wife, and fully appreciate her qualities as a housekeeper, but he passes a more interesting evening with some male friend whose reading is equal to his own. Sometimes the lady perceives this, and it is an element of sadness in her life.
“I never see my husband,” she tells you, not in anger. “His work occupies him all day, and in the evening he sees his friends.” The pair walk out together twice a week. I sometimes wonder what they say to each other during those conjugal promenades. They talk about their children, probably, and the little recurring difficulties about money. He cannot talk about his studies, or the intellectual speculations which his studies continually suggest.
The most extreme cases of intellectual separation between husband and wife that ever came under my observation was, however, not that of a French professor, but a highly-cultivated Scotch lawyer. He was one of the most intellectual men I ever knew—a little cynical, but full of original power, and uncommonly well-informed. His theory was, that women ought not to be admitted into the region of masculine thought—that it was not good for them; and he acted so consistently up to this theory, that although he would open his mind with the utmost frankness to a male acquaintance over the evening whisky-toddy, there was not whisky enough in all Scotland to make him frank in the presence of his wife. She really knew nothing whatever about his intellectual existence; and yet there was nothing in his ways of thinking which an honorable man need conceal from an intelligent woman. His theory worked well enough in practice, and his reserve was so perfect that it may be doubted whether even feminine subtlety ever suspected it. The explanation of his system may perhaps have been this. He was an exceedingly busy man; he felt that he had not time to teach his wife to know him as he was, and so preferred to leave her with her own conception of him, rather than disturb that conception when he believed it impossible to replace it by a completely true one. We all act in that way with those whom we consider quite excluded from our private range of thought.
All this may be very prudent and wise: there may be degrees of conjugal felicity, satisfactory in their way, without intellectual intercourse, and yet I cannot think that any man of high culture could regard his marriage as altogether a successful one so long as his wife remained shut out from his mental life. Nor is the exclusion always quite agreeable to the lady herself. A widow said to me that her husband had never thought it necessary to try to raise her to his own level, yet she believed that with his kindly help she might have attained it.
You with your masculine habits, may observe, as to this, that if the lady had seriously cared to attain a higher level she might have achieved it by her own private independent effort. But this is exactly what the feminine nature never does. A clever woman is the best of pupils, when she loves her teacher, but the worst of solitary learners.
It is not by adding to our knowledge, but by understanding us, that women are our helpers. They understand us far better than men do, when once they have the degree of preliminary information which enables them to enter into our pursuits. Men are occupied with their personal works and thoughts, and have wonderfully little sympathy left to enable them to comprehend us; but a woman, by her divine sympathy—divine indeed, since it was given by God for this—can enter into our inmost thought, and make allowances for all our difficulties. Talk about your work and its anxieties to a club of masculine friends, they will give very little heed to you; they are all thinking about themselves, and they will dislike your egotism because they have so much egotism of their own, which yours invades and inconveniences. But talk in the same way to any woman who has education enough to enable her to follow you, and she will listen so kindly, and so very intelligently, that you will be betrayed into interminable confidences.
Now, although an intellectual man may not care to make himself understood by all the people in the street, it is not a good thing for him to feel that he is understood by nobody. The intellectual life is sometimes a fearfully solitary one. Unless he lives in a great capital the man devoted to that life is more than all other men liable to suffer from isolation, to feel utterly alone beneath the deafness of space and the silence of the stars. Give him one friend who can understand him, who will not leave him, who will always be accessible by day and night—one friend, one kindly listener, just one, and the whole universe is changed. It is deaf and indifferent no longer, and whilst she listens, it seems as if all men and angels listened also, so perfectly his thought is mirrored in the light of her answering eyes.