LETTER V.
TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO CONTEMPLATED MARRIAGE.
The danger of deviation—Danger from increased expenditure—Nowhere so great as in England—Complete absorption in business—Case of a tradesman—Case of a solicitor—The pursuit of comfort dangerous to the Intellectual Life—The meanness of its results—Fireside purposes—Danger of deviation in rich marriages—George Sand’s study of this in her story of “Valvèdre.”
Amongst the dangers of marriage, one of those most to be dreaded by a man given to intellectual pursuits is the deviation which, in one way or other, marriage inevitably produces. It acts like the pointsman on a railway, who, by pulling a lever, sends the train in another direction. The married man never goes, or hardly ever goes, exactly on the same intellectual lines which he would have followed if he had remained a bachelor. This deviation may or may not be a gain; it is always a most serious danger.
Sometimes the deviation is produced by the necessity for a stricter attention to money, causing a more unremitting application to work that pays well, and a proportionate neglect of that which can only give extension to our knowledge and clearness to our views.
In no country is this danger so great as it is in England, where the generally expensive manner of living, and the prevalent desire to keep families in an ideally perfect state of physical comfort, produce an absorption in business which in all but the rarest instances leaves no margin for intellectual labor. There are, no doubt, some remarkable examples of men earning a large income by a laborious profession, who have gained reputation in one of the sciences or in some branch of literature, but these are very exceptional cases. A man who works at his profession as most Englishmen with large families have to work, can seldom enjoy that surplus of nervous energy which would be necessary to carry him far in literature or science. I remember meeting an English tradesman in the railway between Paris and the coast, who told me that he was obliged to visit France very frequently, yet could not speak French, which was a great deficiency and inconvenience to him. “Why not learn?” I then asked, and received the following answer:
“I have to work at my business all day long, and often far into the night. When the day’s work is over I generally feel very tired, and want rest; but if I don’t happen to feel quite so tired, then it is not work that I need, but recreation, of which I get very little. I never feel the courage to set to work at the French grammar, though it would be both pleasant and useful to me to know French; indeed, I constantly feel the want of it. It might, perhaps, be possible to learn from a phrase-book in the railway train, but to save time I always travel at night. Being a married man, I have to give my whole attention to my business.”
A solicitor with a large practice in London held nearly the same language. He worked at his office all day, and often brought home the most difficult work for the quiet of his own private study after the household had gone to bed. The little reading that he could indulge in was light reading. In reality the profession intruded even on his few hours of leisure, for he read many of the columns in the Times which relate to law or legislation, and these make at the end of a few years an amount of reading sufficient for the mastery of a foreign literature. This gentleman answered very accurately to M. Taine’s description of the typical Englishman, absorbed in business and the Times.
In these cases it is likely that the effect of marriage was not inwardly felt as a deviation; but when culture has been fairly begun, and marriage hinders the pursuit of it, or makes it deviate from the chosen path, then there is often an inward consciousness of the fact, not without its bitterness.
A remarkable article on “Luxury,” in the second volume of the Cornhill Magazine, deals with this subject in a manner evidently suggested by serious reflection and experience. The writer considers the effects of the pursuit of comfort (never carried so far as it is now) on the higher moral and intellectual life. The comforts of a bachelor were not what the writer meant; these are easily procured, and seldom require the devotion of all the energies. The “comfort” which is really dangerous to intellectual growth is that of a family establishment, because it so easily becomes the one absorbing object of existence. Men who began life with the feeling that they would willingly devote their powers to great purposes, like the noble examples of past times who labored and suffered for the intellectual advancement of their race, and had starvation for their reward, or in some cases even the prison and the stake—men who in their youth felt themselves to be heirs of a nobility of spirit like that of Bruno, of Swammerdam, of Spinoza, have too often found themselves in the noon of life concentrating all the energies of body and soul on the acquisition of ugly millinery and uglier upholstery, and on spreading extravagant tables to feed uncultivated guests.
“It is impossible,” says the writer of the article just alluded to, “it is impossible to say why men were made, but assuming that they were made for some purpose, of which the faculties which they possess afford evidence, it follows that they were intended to do many other things besides providing for their families and enjoying their society. They were meant to know, to act, and to feel—to know everything which the mind is able to contemplate, to name, and to classify; to do everything which the will, prompted by the passions and guided by the conscience, can undertake; and, subject to the same guidance, to feel in its utmost vigor every emotion which the contemplation of the various persons and objects which surround us can excite. This view of the objects of life affords an almost infinite scope for human activity in different directions; but it also shows that it is in the highest degree dangerous to its beauty and its worth to allow any one side of life to become the object of idolatry; and there are many reasons for thinking that domestic happiness is rapidly assuming that position in the minds of the more comfortable classes of Englishmen.... It is a singular and affecting thing, to see how every manifestation of human energy bears witness to the shrewdness of the current maxim that a large income is a necessary of life. Whatever is done for money is done admirably well. Give a man a specific thing to make or to write, and pay him well for it, and you may with a little trouble secure an excellent article; but the ability which does these things so well, might have been and ought to have been trained to far higher things, which for the most part are left undone, because the clever workman thinks himself bound to earn what will keep himself, his wife, and his six or seven children, up to the established standard of comfort. What was at first a necessity, perhaps an unwelcome one, becomes by degrees a habit and a pleasure, and men who might have done memorable and noble things, if they had learnt in time to consider the doing of such things an object worth living for, lose the power and the wish to live for other than fireside purposes.”
But this kind of intellectual deviation, you may answer, is not strictly the consequence of marriage, quâ marriage; it is one of the consequences of a degree of relative poverty, produced by the larger expenditure of married life, but which might be just as easily produced by a certain degree of money-pressure in the condition of a bachelor. Let me therefore point out a kind of deviation which may be as frequently observed in rich marriages as in poor ones. Suppose the case of a bachelor with a small but perfectly independent income amounting to some hundreds a year, who is devoted to intellectual pursuits, and spends his time in study or with cultivated friends of his own, choosing friends whose society is an encouragement and a help. Suppose that this man makes an exceedingly prudent marriage, with a rich woman, you may safely predict, in this instance, intellectual deviations of a kind perilous to the highest culture. He will have new calls upon his time, his society will no longer be entirely of his own choosing, he will no longer be able to devote himself with absolute singleness of purpose to studies from which his wife must necessarily be excluded. If he were to continue faithful to his old habits, and shut himself up every day in his library or laboratory, or set out on frequent scientific expeditions, his wife would either be a lady of quite extraordinary perfection of temper, or else entirely indifferent in her feelings towards him, if she did not regard his pursuits with quickly-increasing jealousy. She would think, and justifiably think, that he ought to give more of his time to the enjoyment of her society, that he ought to be more by her side in the carriage and in the drawing-room, and if he loved her he would yield to these kindly and reasonable wishes. He would spend many hours of every day in a manner not profitable to his great pursuits, and many weeks of every year in visits to her friends. His position would be even less favorable to study in some respects than that of a professional man. It would be difficult for him, if an amateur artist, to give that unremitting attention to painting which the professional painter gives. He could not say, “I do this for you and for our children;” he could only say, “I do it for my own pleasure,” which is not so graceful an excuse. As a bachelor, he might work as professional people work, but his marriage would strongly accentuate the amateur character of his position. It is possible that if his labors had won great fame the lady might bear the separation more easily, for ladies always take a noble pride in the celebrity of their husbands; but the best and worthiest intellectual labor often brings no fame whatever, and notoriety is a mere accident of some departments of the intellectual life, and not its ultimate object.
George Sand, in her admirable novel “Valvèdre,” has depicted a situation of this kind with the most careful delicacy of touch. Valvèdre was a man of science, who attempted to continue the labors of his intellectual life after marriage had united him to a lady incapable of sharing them. The reader pities both, and sympathizes with both. It is hard, on the one hand, that a man endowed by nature with great talents for scientific work should not go on with a career already gloriously begun; and yet, on the other hand, a woman who is so frequently abandoned for science may blamelessly feel some jealousy of science.
Valvèdre, in narrating the story of his unhappy wedded life, said that Alida wished to have at her orders a perfect gentleman to accompany her, but that he felt in himself a more serious ambition. He had not aimed at fame, but he had thought it possible to become a useful servant, bringing his share of patient and courageous seekings to the edifice of the sciences. He had hoped that Alida would understand this. “’There is time enough for everything,’ she said, still retaining him in the useless wandering life that she had chosen. ‘Perhaps,’ he answered, ‘but on condition that I lose no more of it; and it is not in this wandering life, cut to pieces by a thousand unforeseen interruptions, that I can make the hours yield their profit.’
“’Ah! we come to the point!’ exclaimed Alida impetuously. ‘You wish to leave me, and to travel alone in impossible regions.’
“’No, I will work near you and abandon certain observations which it would be necessary to make at too great a distance, but you also will sacrifice something: we will not see so many idle people, we will settle somewhere for a fixed time. It shall be where you will, and if the place does not suit you, we will try another; but from time to time you will permit me a phase of sedentary work.’
“’Yes, yes, you want to live for yourself alone; you have lived enough for me. I understand; your love is satiated and at an end.’
“Nothing could conquer her conviction that study was her rival, and that love was only possible in idleness.
“’To love is everything,’ she said; ‘and he who loves has not time to concern himself with anything else. Whilst the husband is intoxicating himself with the marvels of science, the wife languishes and dies. It is the destiny which awaits me; and since I am a burden to you, I should do better to die at once.’
“A little later Valvèdre ventured to hint something about work, hoping to conquer his wife’s ennui, on which she proclaimed the hatred of work as a sacred right of her nature and position.
“’Nobody ever taught me to work,’ she said, ‘and I did not marry under a promise to begin again at the a, b, c of things. Whatever I know I have learned by intuition, by reading without aim or method. I am a woman; my destiny is to love my husband and bring up children. It is very strange that my husband should be the person who counsels me to think of something better.’”
I am far from suggesting that Madame Valvèdre is an exact representative of her sex, but the sentiments which in her are exaggerated, and expressed with passionate plainness, are in much milder form very prevalent sentiments indeed; and Valvèdre’s great difficulty, how to get leave to prosecute his studies with the degree of devotion necessary to make them fruitful, is not at all an uncommon difficulty with intellectual men after marriage. The character of Madame Valvèdre, being passionate and excessive, led her to an open expression of her feelings; but feelings of a like kind, though milder in degree, exist frequently below the surface, and may be detected by any vigilant observer of human nature. That such feelings are very natural it is impossible even for a savant to deny; but whilst admitting the clear right of a woman to be preferred by a man to science when once he has married her, let me observe that the man might perhaps do wisely, before the knot is tied, to ascertain whether her intellectual dowry is rich enough to compensate him for the sacrifices she is likely to exact.