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—