The Intellectual Life Part 11

Surely they deserve consideration by all who value culture.

I believe that for an intellectual man, only two courses are open; either he ought to marry some simple dutiful woman who will bear him children, and see to the household matters, and love him in a trustful spirit without jealousy of his occupations; or else, on the other hand, he ought to marry some highly intelligent lady, able to carry her education far beyond school experiences, and willing to become his companion in the arduous paths of intellectual labor. The danger in the first of the two cases is that pointed out by Wordsworth in some verses addressed to lake-tourists who might feel inclined to buy a peasant's cottage in Westmorland. The tourist would spoil the little romantic spot if he bought it; the charm of it is subtly dependent upon the poetry of a simple life, and would be brushed away by the influence of the things that are necessary to people in the middle cla.s.s. I remember dining in a country inn with an English officer whose ideas were singularly unconventional. We were waited upon by our host's daughter, a beautiful girl, whose manners were remarkable for their natural elegance and distinction. It seemed to us both that no lady of rank could be more distinguished than she was; and my companion said that he thought a gentleman might do worse than ask that girl to marry him, and settle down quietly in that quiet mountain village, far from the cares and vanities of the world. That is a sort of dream which has occurred no doubt to many an honorable man. Some men have gone so far as to try to make the dream a reality, and have married the beautiful peasant. But the difficulty is that she does not remain what she was; she becomes a sort of make-belief lady, and then her ignorance, which in her natural condition was a charming _navete_, becomes an irritating defect. If, however it were possible for an intellectual man to marry some simple-hearted peasant girl, and keep her carefully in her original condition, I seriously believe that the venture would be less perilous to his culture than an alliance with some woman of our Philistine cla.s.ses, equally incapable of comprehending his pursuits, but much more likely to interfere with them. I once had a conversation on this subject with a distinguished artist, who is now a widower, and who is certainly not likely to be prejudiced against marriage by his own experience, which had been an unusually happy one. His view was that a man devoted to art might marry either a plain-minded woman, who would occupy herself exclusively with household matters and shield his peace by taking these cares upon herself, or else a woman quite capable of entering into his artistic life; but he was convinced that a marriage which exposed him to unintelligent criticism and interference would be dangerous in the highest degree. And of the two kinds of marriage which he considered possible he preferred the former, that with the entirely ignorant and simple person from whom no interference was to be apprehended. He considered the first Madame Ingres the true model of an artist's wife, because she did all in her power to guard her husband's peace against the daily cares of life and never herself disturbed it, acting the part of a breakwater which protects a s.p.a.ce of calm, and never destroys the peace that it has made. This may be true for artists whose occupation is rather aesthetic than intellectual, and does not get much help or benefit from talk; but the ideal marriage for a man of great literary culture would be one permitting some equality of companionship, or, if not equality, at least interest. That this ideal is not a mere dream, but may consolidate into a happy reality, several examples prove; yet these examples are not so numerous as to relieve me from anxiety about your chances of finding such companionship. The different education of the two s.e.xes separates them widely at the beginning, and to meet on any common ground of culture a second education has to be gone through. It rarely happens that there is resolution enough for this.

The want of thoroughness and reality in the education of both s.e.xes, but especially in that of women, may be attributed to a sort of policy which is not very favorable to companionship in married life. It appears to be thought wise to teach boys things which women do not learn, in order to give women a degree of respect for men's attainments, which they would not be so likely to feel if they were prepared to estimate them critically; whilst girls are taught arts and languages which until recently were all but excluded from our public schools, and won no rank at our universities. Men and women had consequently scarcely any common ground to meet upon, and the absence of serious mental discipline in the training of women made them indisposed to submit to the irksomeness of that earnest intellectual labor which might have remedied the deficiency. The total lack of accuracy in their mental habits was then, and is still for the immense majority of women, the least easily surmountable impediment to culture. The history of many marriages which have failed to realize intellectual companionship is comprised in a sentence which was actually uttered by one of the most accomplished of my friends: "She knew nothing when I married her. I tried to teach her something; it made her angry, and I gave it up."

LETTER II.

TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO CONTEMPLATED MARRIAGE.

The foundations of the intellectual marriage--Marriage not a snare or pitfall for the intellectual--Men of culture, who marry badly, often have themselves to blame--For every grade of the masculine intellect there exists a corresponding grade of the feminine intellect--Difficulty of finding the true mate--French University Professors--An extreme case of intellectual separation--Regrets of a widow--Women help us less by adding to our knowledge than by understanding us.

In several letters which have preceded this I have indicated some of the differences between the female s.e.x and ours, and it is time to examine the true foundations of the intellectual marriage. Let me affirm, to begin with, my profound faith in the natural arrangement. There is in nature so much evident care for the development of the intellectual life, so much protection of it in the social order, there are such admirable contrivances for continuing it from century to century, that we may fairly count upon some provision for its necessities in marriage.

Intellectual men are not less alive to the charms of women than other men are; indeed the greatest of them have always delighted in the society of women. If marriage were really dangerous to the intellectual life, it would be a moral snare or pitfall, from which the best and n.o.blest would be least likely to escape. It is hard to believe that the strong pa.s.sions which so often accompany high intellectual gifts were intended either to drive their possessors into immorality or else to the misery of ill-a.s.sorted unions.

No, there _is_ such a thing as the intellectual marriage, in which the intellect itself is married. If such marriages are not frequent, it is that they are not often made the deliberate purpose of a wise alliance.

Men choose their wives because they are pretty, or because they are rich, or because they are well-connected, but rarely for the permanent interest of their society. Yet who that had ever been condemned to the dreadful embarra.s.sments of a _tete-a-tete_ with an uncompanionable person, could reflect without apprehension on a lifetime of such _tete-a-tetes_?

When intellectual men suffer from this misery they have themselves to blame. What is the use of having any mental superiority, if, in a matter so enormously important as the choice of a companion for life, it fails to give us a warning when the choice is absurdly unsuitable? When men complain, as they do not unfrequently, that their wives have no ideas, the question inevitably suggests itself, why the superiority of the masculine intellect did not, in these cases, permit it to discover the defect in time? If we are so clever as to be bored by ordinary women, why cannot our cleverness find out the feminine cleverness which would respond to it?

What I am going to say now is in its very nature incapable of proof, and yet the longer I live the more the truth of it is "borne in upon me." I feel convinced that for every grade of the masculine intellect there exists a corresponding grade of the feminine intellect, so that a precisely suitable intellectual marriage is always possible for every one. But since the higher intellects are rare, and rare in proportion to their elevation, it follows that the difficulty of finding the true mate increases with the mental strength and culture of the man. If the "mental princes," as Blake called himself, are to marry the mental princesses, they will not always discover them quite so easily as kings'

sons find kings' daughters.

This difficulty of finding the true mate is the real reason why so many clever men marry silly or stupid women. The women about them seem to be all very much alike, mentally; it seems hopeless to expect any real companionship, and the clever men are decided by the color of a girl's eyes, or a thousand pounds more in her dowry, or her relationship to a peer of the realm.

It was remarked to me by a French university professor, that although men in his position had on the whole much more culture than the middle cla.s.s, they had an extraordinary talent for winning the most vulgar and ignorant wives. The explanation is, that their marriages are not intellectual marriages at all. The cla.s.s of French professors is not advantageously situated; it has not great facilities for choice. Their incomes are so small that, unless helped by private means, the first thing they can prudently look to in a wife is her utility as a domestic servant, which, in fact, it is her destiny to become. The intellectual disparity is from the beginning likely to be very great, because the professor is confined to the country-town where his _Lycee_ happens to be situated, and in that town he does not always see the most cultivated society. He may be an intellectual prince, but where is he to find his princess? The marriage begins without the idea of intellectual companionship, and it continues as it began. The girl was uneducated: it seems hopeless to try to educate the woman; and then there is the supreme difficulty, only to be overcome by two wills at once most resolute and most persistent, namely, how to find the time. Years pa.s.s; the husband is occupied all day, the wife needs to cheer herself with a little society, and goes to sit with neighbors who are not likely to add anything valuable to her knowledge or to give any elevation to her thoughts. Then comes the final fixing and crystallization of her intellect, after which, however much pains and labor might be taken by the pair, she is past the possibility of change.

These women are often so good and devoted that their husbands enjoy great happiness; but it is a kind of happiness curiously independent of the lady's presence. The professor may love his wife, and fully appreciate her qualities as a housekeeper, but he pa.s.ses a more interesting evening with some male friend whose reading is equal to his own. Sometimes the lady perceives this, and it is an element of sadness in her life.

"I never see my husband," she tells you, not in anger. "His work occupies him all day, and in the evening he sees his friends." The pair walk out together twice a week. I sometimes wonder what they say to each other during those conjugal promenades. They talk about their children, probably, and the little recurring difficulties about money. He cannot talk about his studies, or the intellectual speculations which his studies continually suggest.

The most extreme cases of intellectual separation between husband and wife that ever came under my observation was, however, not that of a French professor, but a highly-cultivated Scotch lawyer. He was one of the most intellectual men I ever knew--a little cynical, but full of original power, and uncommonly well-informed. His theory was, that women ought not to be admitted into the region of masculine thought--that it was not good for them; and he acted so consistently up to this theory, that although he would open his mind with the utmost frankness to a male acquaintance over the evening whisky-toddy, there was not whisky enough in all Scotland to make him frank in the presence of his wife. She really knew nothing whatever about his intellectual existence; and yet there was nothing in his ways of thinking which an honorable man need conceal from an intelligent woman. His theory worked well enough in practice, and his reserve was so perfect that it may be doubted whether even feminine subtlety ever suspected it. The explanation of his system may perhaps have been this. He was an exceedingly busy man; he felt that he had not time to teach his wife to know him as he was, and so preferred to leave her with her own conception of him, rather than disturb that conception when he believed it impossible to replace it by a completely true one. We all act in that way with those whom we consider _quite_ excluded from our private range of thought.

All this may be very prudent and wise: there may be degrees of conjugal felicity, satisfactory in their way, without intellectual intercourse, and yet I cannot think that any man of high culture could regard his marriage as altogether a successful one so long as his wife remained shut out from his mental life. Nor is the exclusion always quite agreeable to the lady herself. A widow said to me that her husband had never thought it necessary to try to raise her to his own level, yet she believed that with his kindly help she might have attained it.

You with your masculine habits, may observe, as to this, that if the lady had seriously cared to attain a higher level she might have achieved it by her own private independent effort. But this is exactly what the feminine nature never does. A clever woman is the best of pupils, when she loves her teacher, but the worst of solitary learners.

It is not by adding to our knowledge, but by understanding us, that women are our helpers. They understand us far better than men do, when once they have the degree of preliminary information which enables them to enter into our pursuits. Men are occupied with their personal works and thoughts, and have wonderfully little sympathy left to enable them to comprehend us; but a woman, by her divine sympathy--divine indeed, since it was given by G.o.d for this--can enter into our inmost thought, and make allowances for all our difficulties. Talk about your work and its anxieties to a club of masculine friends, they will give very little heed to you; they are all thinking about themselves, and they will dislike your egotism because they have so much egotism of their own, which yours invades and inconveniences. But talk in the same way to any woman who has education enough to enable her to follow you, and she will listen so kindly, and so very intelligently, that you will be betrayed into interminable confidences.

Now, although an intellectual man may not care to make himself understood by all the people in the street, it is not a good thing for him to feel that he is understood by n.o.body. The intellectual life is sometimes a fearfully solitary one. Unless he lives in a great capital the man devoted to that life is more than all other men liable to suffer from isolation, to feel utterly alone beneath the deafness of s.p.a.ce and the silence of the stars. Give him one friend who can understand him, who will not leave him, who will always be accessible by day and night--one friend, one kindly listener, just one, and the whole universe is changed. It is deaf and indifferent no longer, and whilst _she_ listens, it seems as if all men and angels listened also, so perfectly his thought is mirrored in the light of her answering eyes.

LETTER III.

TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO CONTEMPLATED MARRIAGE.

The intellectual ideal of marriage--The danger of dulness--To be counteracted only by the renewal of both minds--Example of Lady Baker--Separation of the s.e.xes by an old prejudice about education--This prejudice on the decline--Influence of the late Prince Consort.

How far may you hope to realize the intellectual ideal of marriage? Have I ever observed in actual life any approximate realization of that ideal?

These are the two questions which conclude and epitomize the last of your recent letters. Let me endeavor to answer them as satisfactorily as the obscurity of the subject will permit.

The intellectual ideal seems to be that of a conversation on all the subjects you most care about, which should never lose its interest. Is it possible that two people should live together and talk to each other every day for twenty years without knowing each other's views too well for them to seem worth expressing or worth listening to? There are friends whom we know _too_ well, so that our talk with them has less of refreshment and entertainment than a conversation with the first intelligent stranger on the quarter-deck of the steamboat. It is evident that from the intellectual point of view this is the great danger of marriage. It may become dull, not because the mental force of either of the parties has declined, but because each has come to know so accurately beforehand what the other will say on any given topic, that inquiry is felt to be useless. This too perfect intimacy, which has ended many a friendship outside of marriage, may also terminate the intellectual life in matrimony itself.

Let us not pa.s.s too lightly over this danger, for it is not to be denied. Unless carefully provided against, it will gradually extinguish the light that plays between the wedded intelligences as the electric light burns between two carbon points.

I venture to suggest, however, that this evil may be counteracted by persons of some energy and originality. This is one of those very numerous cases in which an evil is sure to arrive if nothing is done to prevent it, yet in which the evil need not arrive when those whom it menaces are forewarned. To take an ill.u.s.tration intelligible in these days of steam-engines. We know that if the water is allowed to get very low in the boiler a destructive explosion will be the consequence; yet, since every stoker is aware of this, such explosions are not of frequent occurrence. That evil is continually approaching and yet continually averted by the exercise of human foresight.

Let us suppose that a married couple are clearly aware that in the course of years their society is sure to become mutually uninteresting unless something is done to preserve the earlier zest of it. What is that something?

That which an author does for the unknown mult.i.tude of his readers.

Every author who succeeds takes the trouble to renew his mind either by fresh knowledge or new thoughts. Is it not at least equally worth while to do as much to preserve the interest of marriage? Without undervaluing the friendly adhesion of many readers, without affecting any contempt for fame, which is dearer to the human heart than wealth itself whenever it appears to be not wholly unattainable, may not I safely affirm that the interest of married life, from its very _nearness_, has a still stronger influence upon the mind of any thinking person, of either s.e.x, than the approbation of unnumbered readers in distinct countries or continents? You never _see_ the effect of your thinking on your readers; they live and die far away from you, a few write letters of praise or criticism, the thousands give no sign. But the wife is with you always, she is almost as near to you as your own body; the world, to you, is a figure-picture in which there is one figure, the rest is merely background. And if an author takes pains to renew his mind for the people in the background, is it not at least equally worth your while to bring fresh thought for the renewal of your life with her?

This, then, is my theory of the intellectual marriage, that the two wedded intellects ought to renew themselves continually for each other.

And I argue that if this were done in earnest, the otherwise inevitable dulness would be perpetually kept at bay.

To the other question, whether in actual life I have ever seen this realized, I answer yes, in several instances.

Not in very many instances, yet in more than one. Women, when they have conceived the idea that this renewal is necessary, have resolution enough for the realization of it. There is hardly any task too hard for them, if they believe it essential to the conjugal life. I could give you the name and address of one who mastered Greek in order not to be excluded from her husband's favorite pursuit; others have mastered other languages for the same object, and even some branch of science for which the feminine mind has less natural affinity than it has for imaginative literature. Their remarkable incapacity for independent mental labor is accompanied by an equally remarkable capacity for labor under an accepted masculine guidance. In this connection I may without impropriety mention one Englishwoman, for she is already celebrated, the wife of Sir Samuel Baker, the discoverer of the Albert Nyanza. She stood with him on the sh.o.r.e of that unknown sea, when first it was beheld by English eyes; she had pa.s.sed with him through all the hard preliminary toils and trials. She had learned Arabic with him in a year of necessary but wearisome delay; her mind had travelled with his mind as her feet had followed his footsteps. Scarcely less beautiful, if less heroic, is the picture of the geologist's wife, Mrs. Buckland, who taught herself to reconstruct broken fossils, and did it with a surprising delicacy, and patience, and skill, full of science, yet more than science, the perfection of feminine art.

The privacy of married life often prevents us from knowing the extent to which intelligent women have renewed their minds by fresh and varied culture for the purpose of retaining their ascendency over their husbands, or to keep up the interest of their lives. It is done much more frequently by women than by men. They have so much less egotism, so much more adaptability, that they fit themselves to us oftener than we adapt ourselves to them. But in a quiet perfect marriage these efforts would be mutual. The husband would endeavor to make life interesting to his companion by taking a share in some pursuit which was really her own. It is easier for us than it was for our ancestors to do this--at least for our immediate ancestors. There existed, fifty years ago, a most irrational prejudice, very strongly rooted in the social conventions of the time, about masculine and feminine accomplishments.

The educations of the two s.e.xes were so trenchantly separated that neither had access to the knowledge of the other. The men had learned Latin and Greek, of which the women were ignorant; the women had learned French or Italian, which the men could neither read nor speak. The ladies studied fine art, not seriously, but it occupied a good deal of their time and thoughts; the gentlemen had a manly contempt for it, which kept them, as contempt always does, in a state of absolute ignorance. The intellectual separation of the s.e.xes was made as complete as possible by the conventionally received idea that a man could not learn what girls learned without effeminacy, and that if women aspired to men's knowledge they would forfeit the delicacy of their s.e.x. This illogical prejudice was based on a bad syllogism of this kind:--

Girls speak French, and learn music and drawing.

Benjamin speaks French, and learns music and drawing.

Benjamin is a girl.

And the prejudice, powerful as it was, had not even the claim of any considerable antiquity. Think how strange and unreasonable it would have seemed to Lady Jane Grey and Sir Philip Sidney! In their time, ladies and gentlemen studied the same things, the world of culture was the same for both, and they could meet in it as in a garden.

Happily we are coming back to the old rational notion of culture as independent of the question of s.e.x. Latin and Greek are not unfeminine; they were spoken by women in Athens and Rome; the modern languages are fit for a man to learn, since men use them continually on the battle-fields and in the parliaments and exchanges of the world. Art is a manly business, if ever any human occupation could be called manly, for the utmost efforts of the strongest men are needed for success in it.

The increasing interest in the fine arts, the more important position given to modern languages in the universities, the irresistible attractions and growing authority of science, all tend to bring men and women together on subjects understood by both, and therefore operate directly in favor of intellectual interests in marriage. You will not suspect me of a sn.o.bbish desire to pay compliments to royalty if I trace some of these changes in public opinion to the example and influence of the Prince Consort, operating with some effect during his life, yet with far greater force since he was taken away from us. The truth is, that the most modern English ideal of gentlemanly culture is that which Prince Albert, to a great extent, realized in his own person. Perhaps his various accomplishments may be a little embellished or exaggerated in the popular belief, but it is unquestionable that his notion of culture was very large and liberal, and quite beyond the narrow pedantry of the preceding age. There was nothing in it to exclude a woman, and we know that she who loved him entered largely into the works and recreations of his life.

LETTER IV.

TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO CONTEMPLATED MARRIAGE.

Women do not of themselves undertake intellectual labor--Their resignation to ignorance--Absence of scientific curiosity in women--They do not acc.u.mulate accurate knowledge--Archimedes in his bath--Rarity of inventions due to women--Exceptions.

Before saying much about the influence of marriage on the intellectual life, it is necessary to make some inquiry into the intellectual nature of women.

The first thing to be noted is that, with exceptions so rare as to be practically of no importance to an argument, women do not of themselves undertake intellectual labor. Even in the situations most favorable for labor of that kind, women do not undertake it unless they are urged to it, and directed in it, by some powerful masculine influence. In the absence of that influence, although their minds are active, that activity neither tends to discipline nor to the acc.u.mulation of knowledge. Women who are not impelled by some masculine influence are not superior, either in knowledge or discipline of the mind, at the age of fifty to what they were at the age of twenty-five. In other words, they have not in themselves the motive powers which can cause an intellectual advance.

The best ill.u.s.tration of this is a sisterhood of three or four rich old maids, with all the advantages of leisure. You will observe that they invariably remain, as to their education, where they were left by their teachers many years before. They will often lament, perhaps, that in their day education was very inferior to what it is now; but it never occurs to them that the large leisure of subsequent years might, had it been well employed, have supplied those deficiencies of which they are sensible. Nothing is more curiously remote from masculine habits than the resignation to particular degrees of ignorance, as to the inevitable, which a woman will express in a manner which says: "You know I am so; you know that I cannot make myself better informed." They are like perfect billiard-b.a.l.l.s on a perfect table, which stop when no longer impelled, wherever they may happen to be.