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Yet discord of character is the gravest peril, and unfortunately the commonest to marriage, and it may reach such a degree as to oblige husband and wife to separate. Where the law permits divorce, it becomes the terrible situation which, in official and legal language, is called incompatibility of temper.
And what does this dreadful word mean? What monster is this, that can divide what love has joined, that can transform sensual pleasure to torture, honey to gall, heaven to hell?
When I write my book, I caratteri umani, which I have been meditating and working at for so many years, perhaps I may be able to get more light upon this obscure point of individual and national psychology. But at present I am satisfied to treat the problem on wide lines, and only as far as it contributes to the happiness of marriage. In the mean time let me state the terrible fact, once and for all, that among the many discords which are possible between the man and the woman, none exercises a more weighty influence than that which arises from want of union in character.
There may be happiness between a rich man and a poor woman; between a poor man and a rich woman; an elderly woman and a young man; an old man and a young woman; between two different intellects and educations; we have rare but well-confirmed examples of harmony between all these contemporaneous discords. But when characters cry out against and strike one another, Lasciate ogni speranza o voi che entrate; then desperation will be the habitual state of the dual existence.
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Incompatibility of character does not mean a difference of taste, affections, aspirations; for differences are necessary to perfect harmony, and the man and woman (we have repeated it a hundred times) love each other better and better the more the man is a man and the woman a woman—which is as much as to say the more different they are.
In common language incompatibility of character means, for example, to harness an ox and a horse of Arab breed to the same carriage; to put a tortoise and a deer to walk together; to tie a goose and a swallow to the same cord, and condemn them to fly together; and if these comparisons fall short of the reality, it is because their enormity does not reach by a very long way the psychical discords of men and women.