GREAT MEN'S WIVES.
Probably, greatness does not conform with domesticity. The literary man is wrapped up in his books, and the wife does not brook a divided affection. He lives in the past or the future, and his mind can with difficulty be brought to condescend to the carking cares of the present—perhaps not even to its quiet daily life. His lofty meditations are disturbed by the puling infant, or it may be, by a call for house-rent, or the amount of the chandler's bill. Or, take the leader of some great political or social movement; or the commander of armies, at whose nod ten thousand swords are unsheathed, and the air made blatant with the discharge of artillery; can you expect such a person to subside into the quiet, husband-life, like any common, ordinary man, and condescend to inquire into the state of the children's teething, Johnny's progress at school, and the thousand little domestic attentions which constitute a wife's happiness?
We shall not, however, discuss the question of whether happiness in marriage be compatible with genius, or not, but proceed to set forth a few traits of the wives of great men.
We shall not dwell on Xantippe, the wife of Socrates, whose name has become familiar to us almost as a proverb. But she was not without her uses, for she taught her great husband at least the virtue of patience. Many of the great Greeks and Romans, like Socrates, were unhappy in their wives. Possibly, however, we have heard only of the bad ones among them; for the life of good wives is rarely made matter of comment by the biographer, either in ancient or modern times.
The advent of Christianity placed woman in a greatly improved position, as regarded marriage. Repudiation, as among the Greeks and Romans, was no longer permitted; the new religion enforced the unity and indissolubility of marriage; it became a sacrament, dispensed at the altar, where woman had formerly been a victim, but was now become an idol. The conjugal union was made a religious contract; the family was constituted by the priest; the wife was elevated to the function of Educator of the Family—the alma mater; and thus, through her instrumentality, was the regeneration of the world secured.
But it did not follow that all women were good, or that all were happy. Life is but a tangled yarn at the best; there are blanks and prizes drawn by women still, and not unfrequently "great men" have proved the greatest of blanks to them. Henry the Eighth was not, perhaps, entitled to the appellation of a great man, though he was an author, for which the Pope conferred on him the title, still retained by our monarchs, of "Defender of the Faith." The history of his six wives is well known. Nor was the married life of Peter the Great, and his three wives, of a more creditable complexion.
Luther married Catharine de Bora, an escaped nun—a remarkably handsome woman. In his letters to his friends, he spoke of her as "My rib Kitty, my loved Kitty, my Empress Kitty." A year after his marriage, when struggling with poverty, he said, in one of these letters, "Catharine, my dear rib, salutes you. She is quite well, thank God; gentle, obedient, and kind, in all things; quite beyond my hopes. I would not exchange my poverty with her, for all the riches of Crœsus without her." A dozen years after, he said, "Catharine, thou hast a pious man, who loves thee; thou art a very empress!" Yet Luther had his little troubles in connection with his married life. Catharine was fond of small-talk, and, when Luther was busily engaged in solving the difficulties of the Bible, she would interrupt him with such questions as—whether the king of France was richer than his cousin the emperor of Germany? if the Italian women were more beautiful than the German? if Rome was as big as Wittenberg? and so on. To escape these little inquiries, Luther saw no other way than to lock himself up in his study, with a quantity of bread and cheese, and there hold to his work. But Catharine still pursued him. One day, when he was thus locked up, laboring at his translation of the twenty-second Psalm, the door was assailed by the wife. No answer was given. More knocking followed, accompanied by Catharine's voice, shouting—"if you don't open the door, I will go fetch the locksmith." The Doctor entreated his wife not to interrupt his labors. "Open! open!" repeated Catharine. The doctor obeyed. "I was afraid," said she, on entering, "that something had vexed you, locked up in this room alone." To which Luther replied, "the only thing that vexes me now is yourself." But Luther, doubtless, entertained a steady, though sober affection for his wife; and in his will, in which he left her sole executrix, bequeathing to her all his property, he speaks of her as "always a gentle, pious, and faithful wife to me, and that has loved me tenderly. Whatever," he adds, "may happen to her after my death, I have, I say, full confidence that she will ever conduct herself as a good mother towards her children, and will conscientiously share with them whatever she possesses."
The great Genevese Reformer, Calvin, proceeded in his search for a wife in a matter-of-fact way. He wrote to his friends, describing to them what sort of an article he wanted, and they looked up a proper person for him. Writing to Farel, one of his correspondents, on this subject, he said,—"I beseech you ever to bear in mind what I seek for in a wife. I am not one of your mad kind of lovers, who dote even upon faults, when once they are taken by beauty of person. The only beauty that entices me is, that she be chaste, obedient, humble, economical, patient; and that there be hopes that she wilt be solicitous about my health. If, therefore, you think it expedient that I should marry, bestir yourself, lest somebody else anticipate you. But, if you think otherwise, let us drop the subject altogether." A rich young German lady, of noble birth, was proposed; but Calvin objected, on the ground of the high birth. Another was proposed to him, but another failure resulted. At last a widow, with a considerable family of children, Odelette de Bures, the relict of a Strasburg Anabaptist, whom he had converted, was discovered, suited to his notions, and he married her. Nothing is said about their wedded life, and, therefore, we presume it went on in the quiet, jog-trot way. At her death, he did not shed a tear; and he spoke of the event only as an ordinary spectator would have done.
The brothers Corneille married the two sisters Lampèrière; and the love of the whole family was cemented by the double union. They lived in contiguous houses, which opened into each other, and there they lived in a community of taste and sentiment. They worked together, and shared each other's fame; the sisters, happy in the love and admiration of their husbands, and in each other's sympathy. The poet Racine was greatly blessed in his wife; she was pious, good, sweet-tempered, and made his life happy. And yet she had no taste for poetry, scarcely knowing what verse was; and knew little of her husband's great tragedies except by name. She had an utter indifference for money. One day, Racine brought from Versailles a purse of a thousand golden louis; and running to his wife, embraced her: "Congratulate me," said he, "here is a purse of a thousand louis that the king has presented to me!" She complained to him of one of the children, who would not learn his lessons for two days together. "Let us talk of that another time," said he, "to-day we give ourselves up to joy." She again reverted to the disobedient child, and requested the parent to reprimand him; when Boileau (at whose house she was on a visit) lost patience, and cried, "what insensibility! Can't you think of a purse of a thousand louis?" Yet these two characters, though so opposite, consorted admirably, and they lived long and happily together.
To please his friends, La Fontaine married Mary Hericat, the daughter of a lieutenant-general. It was a marriage of convenience, and the two preferred living separate,—he at Paris, she in the country. Once a year La Fontaine paid her a visit, in the month of September. If he did not see her, he returned home as happy as he had gone. He went some other day. Once, when he visited her house, he was told she was quite well, and he returned to Paris, and told his friends he had not seen his wife, because he understood she was in very good health. It was a state of indifference on both sides. Yet the wife was a woman of virtue, beauty, and intelligence; and La Fontaine himself was a man of otherwise irreproachable character. There were many such marriages of indifference in France in those days. Boileau and Racine both tried to bring the married pair together, but without success; and, in course of time La Fontaine almost forgot that he was married.
Moliere was extremely unhappy in his marriage. He espoused an actress, and she proved a coquette. He became extremely jealous, and, perhaps, he had reason. Yet he loved her passionately, and bore long with her frailties. He thus himself describes her: "She has small eyes, but they are full of fire, brilliant, and the most penetrating in the world. She has a large mouth, but one can discern beauties in it that one does not see in other mouths. Her figure is not large, but easy and well-proportioned. She affects a nonchalance in her speech and carriage; but there is grace in her every act, and an indescribable charm about her, by which she never fails to work her way to the heart. Her mental gifts are exquisite; her conversation is charming, and, if she be capricious more than any other can be, all sits gracefully on the beautiful,—one bears any thing from the beautiful." She was an excellent actress, and was run after by the town. Moliere, her husband, was neglected by her, and suffered agonies of torture. He strove against his passion as long as he could. At last, his patience was exhausted, and a separation took place.
We know nothing of the married life of Shakspeare; indeed, we know but little of any portion of that great man's life. But we know that he married young, and we know the name of his wife, Anne Hathawaye, the daughter of a yeoman, in the neighborhood of Stratford-on-Avon. He was little more than eighteen when he married her, and she was twenty-six. The marriage was hastened by circumstances which need not be explained here. He seems to have gone alone to London, leaving her with her little family of children at Stratford-on-Avon, (for her name does not once appear in his married life;) and yet she survived him seven years. In his will he left her only his "second-best bed." Judging from his sonnets one would be disposed to infer that Shakspeare's life was not more chaste than that of his age; for we find him, in one of these, excusing his friend for robbing him of his mistress,—a married woman. One could almost wish, with Mr. Hallam, that Shakspeare had not written many of those sonnets, beautiful in language and imagery though they unquestionably are.
Milton was three times married,—the first time very unhappily. Mary Powell was the daughter of a royalist cavalier of Oxfordshire, and Milton was a zealous republican. He was, moreover, a studious man, whereas his wife was possessed by a love of gayety and pleasure. They had only been married a month, when she grew tired of the studious habits and philosophical seclusion of the republican poet, and requested his permission to return to her father's house. She went, but refused to return to him, preferring the dissipated society of the brawling cavaliers who surrounded her. He beseeched her to come back, but she persistently refused, treating his messengers with contumely and contempt. He bore this for a long time; but at last he grew angry, and repudiated her. He bethought himself of the social mischiefs resulting from ill-assorted marriages like his own; and, full of the subject, he composed and published his celebrated treatise on divorce. On public grounds he pleaded his own cause in this work, which contains, perhaps, the finest passages that are to be found in his prose writings. He proceeded to solicit the hand of another young and beautiful lady, the daughter of Dr. Dawes; but his wife, hearing of this, became repentant, and, returning to him, fell upon her knees, and entreated his forgiveness. Milton, like his own Adam, was "fondly overcome with female charms," and consented. Four children were born to them, but the wife died in child-bed of the fifth infant. It is to Milton's honor, that he behaved to his deceased wife's relatives with great generosity, when, a short time after, they became involved in ruin in the progress of the civil wars. His second wife, Catharine Woodcock, also died in child-bed, only a year after marriage. He seems to have loved her fondly, and most readers will remember his beautiful sonnet, consecrated to her memory.
With his third wife he seems to have lived happily; the young wife devoted herself to his necessities—for he was now blind—"in darkness, and with dangers compassed round, and solitude."
Dr. Richard Hooker, was very unfortunate in his wife. He was betrayed into marrying her by his extraordinary simplicity and ignorance of the world. The circumstances connected with the marriage were these: Having been appointed to preach at St. Paul's Cross, he went up to London from Oxford, and proceeded to the house set apart for the reception of the preachers. He was very wet and weary on his arrival, and experienced much kindness from the housekeeper. She persuaded him that he was a man of very tender constitution, and urged that he ought, above all things, to have a wife, to nurse and take care of him. She professed to be able to furnish him with such, if he thought fit to marry. Hooker authorized her to select a wife for him, and the artful woman presented her own daughter—"a silly, clownish woman, and withal a mere Xantippe." Hooker, who had promised to marry whomsoever she should select, thought himself bound to marry her, and he did so. They led a most uncomfortable life, but he resigned himself as he best could, lamenting that "saints have usually a double share in the miseries of this life." When Cranmer and Sandys went to see him at his rectory in Buckinghamshire, they found him reading Horace and tending sheep, in the absence of the servant. When they were conversing with him in the house, his wife would break in upon them, and call him away to rock the cradle and perform other menial offices. The guests were glad to get away. This unfortunate wife was long a thorn in his side.
The famous Earl of Rochester appears in very favorable light in his letters to his wife: they are remarkably tender, affectionate, and gentle. In one of them, he says: "'Tis not an easy thing to be entirely happy; but to be kind is very easy, and that is the greatest measure of happiness. I say not this to put you in mind of being kind to me—you have practised that so long, that I have a joyful confidence you will never forget it—but to show that I myself have a sense of what the method of my life seemed so utterly to contradict."
Dryden married Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. The match added little to his wealth, and less to his happiness. It was an altogether unhappy union. On one occasion, his wife wished to be a book, that she might enjoy more of his company. Dryden's reply was: "Be an almanac, then, my dear, that I may change you once a year." In his writings afterwards, he constantly inveighed against matrimony.
Addison also "married discord in a noble wife." He was tutor to the young Earl of Warwick, and aspired to the hand of the Dowager Countess. She married him, and treated him like a lacquey. She never saw in him more than her son's tutor. Swift (his contemporary) cruelly flirted with two admirable women; he heartlessly killed one of them, and secretly married the other, but never publicly recognized her; she, too, shortly after died.
Sterne treated his wife with such severity, that she abandoned him, and took retreat in a convent with her daughter; she never saw him after. Who would have suspected this from the author of "Lefevre" and "The Sentimental Journey?" Farquhar, the play-writer, married, early in life, a woman who deceived him by pretending to be possessed of a fortune, and he sunk, a victim to disappointment and over-exertion, in his thirtieth year, leaving behind him "two helpless girls;" his widow died in the utmost indigence.
These are rather unhappy instances of the wives of great men; but there are others of a happier kind. Indeed we hear but little of the happy unions: it is the brawling, rocky brook that is the most noisy: the slow, deep waters are dump. Every one will remember the wife of Lord William Russell, whose conduct by the side of her husband, on his trial, stands out as one of the most beautiful pictures in all history. How devotedly her husband loved her need not be said: when he had taken his final farewell, all he could say was: "The bitterness of death is now past!" She lived many years after the execution of her husband, and a delightful collection of her letters has since been published.
Bunyan speaks with the greatest tenderness of his wife, who helped to lead him into the paths of peace. He says: "My mercy was to light upon a wife, whose father and mother were counted godly: this woman and I, though we came together as poor as poor might be (not having so much household stuff as a dish or a spoon betwixt us both); yet this she had for her part, 'The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven,' and 'The Practice of Piety,' which her father had left her when he died." And the perusal of these books, together with his good wife's kindly influence, at last implanted in him strong desires to reform his vicious life, in which he eventually succeeded.
Parnell and Steele were both happy in their wives. The former married a young woman of beauty and merit, but she lived only a few years, and his grief at his loss so preyed on his mind, that he never recovered his wonted spirits and health. Steele's letters to his wife, both before and after his marriage, are imbued with the most tender feeling, and exhibit his affection for her in the most beautiful light. Young, the poet, like Dryden and Addison, married into a noble house, espousing the daughter of the Earl of Litchfield; but he was happier than they. It was out of the melancholy produced by her death that his famous "Night Thoughts" took their rise.
When Johnson married Mrs. Porter, her age was twice his own; yet the union proved a happy one. It was not a love-match, but it was one of inclination and of reciprocal esteem. Johnson was any thing but graceful or attractive, yet he possessed admirable qualities. Mrs. Porter was rather ungainly; but Johnson was very shortsighted, and could not detect personal faults. In his eyes, she was beautiful; and, in an affectionate epitaph which he devoted to her, he painted her in glowing colors. Indeed, his writings contain many proofs of the lively and sincere affection which he entertained for her.
While such have been the wives of a few of the great men of past times, it must be stated that, probably, the greatest of them all led a single life. The greatest of the philosophers were bachelors, such as Bacon, Newton, Gassendi, Galileo, Descartes, Bayle, Locke, Leibnitz, Hume, Gibbon; and many poets also as Pope, Goldsmith, and Thompson. Bacon says that wife and children are "impediments to great enterprises;" and that "certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men, which, both in affection and reason, have married and endowed the public." But these were the words of a bachelor, and, perhaps, not strictly correct. The great men of more recent times have generally been married; and, at another time, we shall probably complete this paper by a brief account of the more distinguished of their wives.
A LEGEND OF ST. MARY'S.
BY ALICE CAREY.
One night, when bitterer winds than ours
On hill-sides and in valleys low,
Built sepulchres for the dead flowers,
And buried them in sheets of snow,—
When over ledges dark and cold,
The sweet moon rising high and higher,
Tipped with a dimly burning gold
St. Mary's old cathedral spire,—
The lamp of the confessional,
(God grant it did not burn in vain,)
After the solemn midnight bell,
Streamed redly through the lattice-pane.
And kneeling at the father's feet,
Whose long and venerable hairs,
Now whiter than the mountain sleet,
Could not have numbered half his prayers,
Was one—I cannot picture true
The cherub beauty of his guise;
Lilies, and waves of deepest blue,
Were something like his hands and eyes!
Like yellow mosses on the rocks,
Dashed with the ocean's milk-white spray,
The softness of his golden locks
About his cheek and forehead lay.
Father, thy tresses, silver-sleet,
Ne'er swept above a form so fair;
Surely the flowers beneath his feet
Have been a rosary of prayer!
We know not, and we cannot know,
Why swam those meek blue eyes with tears;
But surely guilt, or guiltless wo,
Had bowed him earthward more than years.
All the long summer that was gone,
A cottage maid, the village pride,
Fainter and fainter smiles had worn,
And on that very night she died!
As soft the yellow moonbeams streamed
Across her bosom, snowy fair,
She said, (the watchers thought she dreamed,)
"'Tis like the shadow of his hair!"
And they could hear, who nearest came,
The cross to sign and hope to lend,
The murmur of another name
Than that of mother, brother, friend.
An hour—and St. Mary's spires,
Like spikes of flame, no longer glow—
No longer the confessional fires
Shine redly on the drifted snow.
An hour—and the saints had claimed
That cottage maid, the village pride;
And he, whose name in death she named,
Was darkly weeping by her side.
White as a spray-wreath lay her brow
Beneath the midnight of her hair,
But all those passionate kisses now
Wake not the faintest crimson there!
Pride, honor, manhood, cannot check
The vehemence of love's despair—
No soft hand steals about his neck,
Or bathes its beauty in his hair!
Almost upon the cabin walls
Wherein the sweet young maiden died,
The shadow of a castle falls,
Where for her young lord waits a bride!
With clear blue eyes and flaxen hair,
In her high turret still she sits;
But, ah! what scorn her ripe lips wear—
What shadow to her bosom flits!
From that low cabin tapers flash,
And, by the shimmering light they spread,
She sees beneath its mountain ash,
Leafless, but all with berries red,
Impatient of the unclasped rein,
A courser that should not be there—
The silver whiteness of his mane
Streaming like moonlight on the air!
Oh, love! thou art avenged too well—
The young heart, broken and betrayed,
Where thou didst meekly, sweetly dwell,
For all its sufferings is repaid.
Not the proud beauty, nor the frown
Of her who shares the living years
From her the winding-sheet wraps down,
Can ever buy away the tears!