Man has less tact in judging his surroundings, and often gives a cuff when he means a caress; woman, on the contrary, like a delicate galvanometer, feels the slightest electric or magnetic oscillation in the air which surrounds her, and for this reason she is a most valuable instrument to a politician, a writer, or an artist who attempts new roads to beauty, and must conquer the resistance of the majority. Unhappy the man who before printing a book, exhibiting a picture, or making a speech in parliament has no loved woman from whom to draw life and warmth. If a sailor never leaves port without consulting the barometer, so man never ought to prepare himself for any undertaking without having first consulted that barometer of all barometers, the woman who loves him. How many ships have been wrecked from want of this precaution, neglecting to take it, through pride or inattention!
You may be the greatest man of genius and your work the fruit of long and profound meditation; and yet you may rest assured that in the great polyhedron of truth some plane has escaped your sight which will be seen by the woman who loves you, because she is a woman, and sees many little things a man does not see; and because she loves you she has a magnifying lens before the eyes of her heart which makes all that may injure or benefit you appear gigantic.
⁂
It is very rare when a woman has conquered our moral and physical sympathies that we love her less for some discord of thought; but if we want ideal perfection we must marry bodies, hearts, and intellects. In this case we must seek in our companion a discreet culture, an exquisite taste for the beautiful, a delicate spirit of observation, a divination of human character. If you find all this in one woman, and if she is beautiful and good, you may deem yourself the most fortunate man in the world, and may declare to the whole earth that you have not one but three wives, having married intellect, heart, and thought.
CHAPTER VII.
THE FINANCIAL QUESTION IN MARRIAGE.
Before breeding time birds build their nests to receive their future young and to protect them from the weather. Many men, more improvident than the birds, marry without knowing where and how they can house the children of their love. Air, earth, and forest afford food to birds gratuitously; to man only the butcher, the baker, and eating-house keeper give food, and they have the weakness to ask payment for their services. Economic improvidence in marriage is the bane of all social decadence, and it is precisely amongst workmen and the unemployed, or amongst those who are always struggling and succumbing, that one finds it most, for they have become thoughtless fatalists, to whom the day is sufficient. Fatalism has many forms, but it is always a cowardly emasculation of self, or an even more cruel mutilation, for it undermines the strength of the will and leads us to renounce all that is best in us. In individuals it is emasculation or mutilation, in nations it is suicide; the Ottoman Empire will soon show us whither Turkish fatalism leads.