If ever a man of letters lived in a state of energy and excitement which might raise him above the atmosphere of social love, it was assuredly the enthusiast, THOMAS HOLLIS, who, solely devoted to literature and to republicanism, was occupied in furnishing Europe and America with editions of his favourite authors. He would not marry, lest marriage should interrupt the labours of his platonic politics. But his extraordinary memoirs, while they show an intrepid mind in a robust frame, bear witness to the self-tormentor who had trodden down the natural bonds of domestic life. Hence the deep "dejection of his spirits;" those incessant cries, that he has "no one to advise, assist, or cherish those magnanimous pursuits in him." At length he retreated into the country, in utter hopelessness. "I go not into the country for attentions to agriculture as such, nor attentions of interest of any kind, which I have ever despised as such; but as a used man, to pass the remainder of a life in tolerable sanity and quiet, after having given up the flower of it, voluntarily, day, week, month, year after year, successive to each other, to public service, and being no longer able to sustain, in body or mind, the labours that I have chosen to go through without falling speedily into the greatest disorders, and it might be imbecility itself. This is not colouring, but the exact plain truth."
Poor moralist, and what art thou?
A solitary fly!
Thy joys no glittering female meets,
No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets.
Assuredly it would not have been a question whether these literary characters should have married, had not MONTAIGNE, when a widower, declared that "he would not marry a second time, though it were Wisdom itself;" but the airy Gascon has not disclosed how far Madame was concerned in this anathema.
If the literary man unite himself to a woman whose taste and whose temper are adverse to his pursuits, he must courageously prepare for a martyrdom. Should a female mathematician be united to a poet, it is probable that she would be left amidst her abstractions, to demonstrate to herself how many a specious diagram fails when brought into its mechanical operation; or discovering the infinite varieties of a curve, she might take occasion to deduce her husband's versatility. If she become as jealous of his books as other wives might be of his mistresses, she may act the virago even over his innocent papers. The wife of Bishop COOPER, while her husband was employed on his Lexicon, one day consigned the volume of many years to the flames, and obliged that scholar to begin a second siege of Troy in a second Lexicon. The wife of WHITELOCKE often destroyed his MSS., and the marks of her nails have come down to posterity in the numerous lacerations still gaping in his "Memorials." The learned Sir HENRY SAVILLE, who devoted more than half his life and nearly ten thousand pounds to his magnificent edition of St. Chrysostom, led a very uneasy life between the saint and her ladyship. What with her tenderness for him, and her own want of amusement, Saint Chrysostom, it appears, incurred more than one danger.
Genius has not preserved itself from the errors and infirmities of matrimonial connexions. The energetic character of DANTE could neither soften nor control the asperity of his lady; and when that great poet lived in exile, she never cared to see him more, though he was the father of her six children. The internal state of the house of DOMENICHINO afflicted that great artist with many sorrows. He had married a beauty of high birth and extreme haughtiness, and of the most avaricious disposition. When at Naples he himself dreaded lest the avaricious passion of his wife should not be able to resist the offers she received to poison him, and he was compelled to provide and dress his own food. It is believed that he died of poison. What a picture has Passeri left of the domestic interior of this great artist! Così fra mille crepacuori mori uno de' più eccellenti artefici del mundo; che oltre al suo valore pittorìco avrebbe più d'ogni altri maritato di viver sempre per l'onestà personale. "So perished, amidst a thousand heart-breakings, the most excellent of artists; who besides his worth as a painter, deserved as much as any one to have lived for his excellence as a man."
MILTON carried nothing of the greatness of his mind in the choice of his wives. His first wife was the object of sudden fancy. He left the metropolis, and unexpectedly returned a married man, and united to a woman of such uncongenial dispositions, that the romp was frightened at the literary habits of the great poet, found his house solitary, beat his nephews, and ran away after a single month's residence! To this circumstance we owe his famous treatise on Divorce; and a party (by no means extinct), who having made as ill choices in their wives, were for divorcing as fast as they had been for marrying, calling themselves Miltonists.
When we find that MOLIÈRE, so skilful in human life, married a girl from his own troop, who made him experience all those bitter disgusts and ridiculous embarrassments which he himself played off at the theatre; that ADDISON'S fine taste in morals and in life could suffer the ambition of a courtier to prevail with himself to seek a countess, whom he describes under the stormy character of Oceana, and who drove him contemptuously into solitude, and shortened his days; and that STEELE, warm and thoughtless, was united to a cold precise "Miss Prue," as he himself calls her, and from whom he never parted without bickerings; in all these cases we censure the great men, not their wives.[A] ROUSSEAU has honestly confessed his error. He had united himself to a low, illiterate woman; and when he retreated into solitude, he felt the weight which he carried with him. He laments that he had not educated his wife: "In a docile age, I could have adorned her mind with talents and knowledge, which would have more closely united us in retirement. We should not then have felt the intolerable tedium of a tête-à-tête; it is in solitude one feels the advantage of living with another who can think." Thus Rousseau confesses the fatal error, and indicates the right principle.
[Footnote A: See "Curiosities of Literature," for anecdotes of "Literary
Wives.">[
Yet it seems not absolutely necessary for the domestic happiness of the literary character, that his wife should be a literary woman. TYCHO BRAHE, noble by birth as well as genius, married the daughter of a peasant. By which means that great man obtained two points essential for his abstract pursuits; he acquired an obedient wife, and freed himself of his noble relatives, who would no longer hold an intercourse with the man who was spreading their family honours into more ages than perhaps they could have traced them backwards. The lady of WIELAND was a pleasing domestic person, who, without reading her husband's works, knew he was a great poet. Wieland was apt to exercise his imagination in declamatory invectives and bitter amplifications; and the writer of this account, in perfect German taste, assures us, "that many of his felicities of diction were thus struck out at a heat." During this frequent operation of his genius, the placable temper of Mrs. Wieland overcame the orgasm of the German bard, merely by persisting in her admiration and her patience. When the burst was over, Wieland himself was so charmed by her docility, that he usually closed with giving up all his opinions.
There is another sort of homely happiness, aptly described in the plain words of Bishop NEWTON. He found "the study of sacred and classic authors ill agreed with butchers' and bakers' bills;" and when the prospect of a bishopric opened on him, "more servants, more entertainments, a better table, &c.," it became necessary to look out for "some clever, sensible woman to be his wife, who would lay out his money to the best advantage, and be careful and tender of his health; a friend and companion at all hours, and who would be happier in staying at home than be perpetually gadding abroad." Such are the wives not adapted to be the votaries, but who may be the faithful companions through life, even of a man of genius.