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_--
‘Let the woman take
An elder than herself: so wears she to him;
So sways she level in her husband’s heart:
For, boy (however we do praise ourselves),
Our fancies are more giddy and infirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn,
Than women’s are.
Then let thy love be younger than thyself,
Or thy affection cannot hold the bent.’
But do not put too much faith in the biographical value of literary
expression, nor assume that these views have much bearing upon
Shakespeare’s married life. His sonnets breathed love and passion
for ladies dark or fair, and very various; but then ’twas his trade
to assume what he did not feel, and to trick it out in glowing pages
of dainty poesy. I, for one, would not regard them nor their like as
arguments or evidence in favour of divorce. So, in all charity to
sweet Will, let us scout the suggestion of a writer who wrote some
years since on the unhappy marriages of men of genius, even as I do
here, that ‘we have the internal evidence of his sonnets that he was
not a faithful husband.’ We had far better keep to the scanty facts
which have come down to us respecting Shakespeare’s life. We know, for
instance, that he left Stratford-on-Avon and settled in London but four
years after his marriage. It cannot be said with certainty whether
or not his wife came up with him from Warwickshire, but it is likely
enough that she did not. And yet can we reasonably blame any one less
impersonal than Thalia or Melpomene for his leaving his wife behind him
in that old town beside the Avon? I would suppose that Ann Hathaway
was uncongenial to him in so far that, and because she had no sort of
appreciation of, nor any love of, the medium of words in which her
husband worked.
It was not until he had reached his forty-eighth year that Shakespeare
returned to his native town. He lived there with his wife and his
daughter Judith for four years, and then died.
Dryden’s wife must have been, no less than Carlyle, ‘gey ill to live
wi’.’ He married, in his thirty-third year, the Lady Eliza Howard,
daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, a woman whose intellect was as
cloudy as her reputation, and whose violence ofttimes caused the
poet to wish her dead. He wrote an epitaph in anticipation of that
consummation he most devoutly wished; but she survived him, and,
singularly enough, the epitaph which was never used has survived them
both to the present day. He said--
‘Here lies my wife; here let her lie;
Now she’s at rest--and so am I.’
And so they are.
Wycherley, too, had his connubial infelicities. He married the widowed
Countess of Drogheda, whom Macaulay describes as ill-tempered,
imperious, and extravagantly jealous. Nothing is more likely than that
she had due cause for jealousy, for Wycherley was no saint. But she
managed to keep him under restraint, and only permitted him to meet his
cronies under her surveillance. That is, he was suffered to entertain
his fellow-dramatists in a room of the tavern that stood opposite their
house, whence she could observe him through the open windows, and
assure herself that no woman was of the company.
Wycherley had, doubtless, himself to blame for this espionage and
suspicion; but jealousy is, perhaps, as frequently unfounded as
deserved. Berlioz, for instance, who married the charming Henrietta
Smithson, an Irish operatic singer, was driven, through his wife’s
unreasonable jealousy, to elope with the first pretty girl he met. He
had been madly infatuated with her, and she seems to have wed him, not
from affection, but because of his importunity; and, even so, she did
not comply until after an accident had unfitted her for the stage,
and she was fain to retire. But indifference changed to an acute
jealousy after marriage. She so wearied the musician with her baseless
suspicions, that at last he felt the absurdity of bearing the odium
of sin without having experienced its pleasures. So, one fine day, he
packed a portmanteau and sped to Brussels in company with ‘another,’ to
speak in the manner of the lady novelists.
Comte, the founder of the Positivist religion, and the defender of
marriage, led a wretched married life. Hooker, the ‘judicious,’ seems
not to have deserved that epithet in so far as his choice of a domestic
tyrant was concerned. Sir Richard Steele should not have married a
second time; he might have known that the good fortune of his first
choice militated against the chance of equal luck on another occasion.
Montaigne--good soul--declared that he would not marry again after his
untoward experiences; no, not if he had the choice of wisdom incarnate.
Man who has once been wed deserves the consolations of heaven,
according to the story in which a soul (masculine) comes to the gates
of Paradise and knocks. Peter catechises him, but finds his record
inadequate, and is about to turn him away. ‘Stay, though,’ says the
saint; ‘have you been married?’ ‘Yes,’ replies the soul. ‘Enter, then,’
rejoins the janitor, compassionately; ‘you have deserved much from your
sufferings on earth!’ ‘Ah!’ cries the spirit, enlarging upon its claims
to present bliss from past ills; ‘I have been married twice!’ ‘Twice?’
shouts Peter, indignantly; ‘away with you. Paradise is not for fools!’
How little, then, did Milton deserve the Paradise of which he wrote,
for he was married no less than three times, and that, too, after the
unpleasant experiences of his first alliance. Mary Powell, his first
wife, was a shrew. She was the daughter of an Oxfordshire Royalist,
and, disgusted and alarmed at the severity with which Milton, who was
then a dominie, treated the boys under his charge, she left him after
the honeymoon and returned home. For three years she kept apart, paying
no attention to his requests for her to return, and she only rejoined
him after Naseby, when, the Royalist hopes being shattered, it seemed
advisable that she and her people should seek the shelter that the roof
of so uncompromising a Puritan afforded. He received her, and for the
remaining fifteen years she made his life miserable.
Addison made a great social triumph for eighteenth-century literature
when he married the widowed Countess of Warwick, but in doing so he
sowed the whirlwind for his own reaping. Her arrogance was monumental,
and she made her stately house at Kensington so unbearable to him, that
he was used to fly her presence and take refuge in a little country
tavern that stood in those days on the high road to London, at the
corner of a lane which is now the Earl’s Court Road. Domestic strife
drove him to the bottle, and the ‘Spectator’ died ‘like a Christian,’
indeed, but with an intellect clouded by drink.
In more recent times, the marriages of Byron, Bulwer-Lytton, and
Dickens were notoriously unhappy; but, certainly, these three men of
genius must have been almost insufferable husbands. Dickens had as
good a conceit of himself as ever Scot desired or prayed for--and
genius that can usurp the functions of the critics and calculate the
candle-power of its effulgence to a ray more or less must needs be
intolerable either at the club or in the home. Byron took advantage of
that independence of moral laws which is supposed to be the especial
attribute of genius--and indeed (although one need not have any absurd
prejudices in favour of morality) he was but a sordid scamp, with a bee
in his bonnet and a fluent facile gift of versification. His person,
his title, and (above all) his reputation for immorality made his fame
and sold his works: and what unholy trinity more powerful than this for
popularity?
Bulwer-Lytton was an odious fellow, a ‘curled darling,’ jewelled,
scented, and self-centred. He wrote, presumably of himself: ‘Clever
men, as a rule, do choose the oddest wives. The cleverer a man is the
more easily, I believe, a woman can take him in.’ That, doubtless, was
a piece of special pleading on behalf of his own extreme cleverness,
for he was the victim of a virago who was the more terrible for being a
little less than sane and more than eccentric. He bought her off with
an annuity of 400_l._, but lawsuits directed against him afforded a
spice to her life, and persecutions in the form of novels written ‘with
a purpose’--the purpose of abusing him--and of public altercations,
rendered Lytton’s marriage with Rosina Wheeler one of the most bitterly
regretted actions of his life. ‘There were faults on both sides’--to
adopt the saying of the gossips: he was irritable and violent, and she
was--violent and irritable! Nor was she readily put aside. For years
after their separation she never wearied of drawing attention to her
wrongs, and it was in 1858, during Lytton’s candidature for Hertford,
that she appeared before the hustings on which he was preparing to
address the free and enlightened voters, and burst upon his vision, an
excited female, dressed in yellow satin and flourishing an umbrella,
while she denounced him at the top of her voice as a perjured villain.
She was no meek and uncomplaining martyr: she proclaimed her wrongs
_urbi et orbi_, and compelled attention.
Had Coleridge such a wife, his digestion would have been a great deal
more disordered than it was used to be in the conjugal difficulties
that led him to leave his home. Had Romney been wed to so strenuous
a shrew, he had not deserted his wife for over thirty years without
some public scandal; and had Tommy Moore espoused any but the most
easy-going and long-suffering of wives, his amorous verse would have
purchased him many a wigging, I warrant. That modern Anacreon wrote
a poem on the origin of woman which would have been impossible to the
uxorious, and is sufficient to set the Modern Woman shrieking with
indignation. And yet the women of his time delighted in his society!
Those verses are, for some unexplained reason, not to be found in the
later editions of his works. In them he versifies the Rabbinical theory
of woman’s origin--that Adam had a tail, and it was cut off to make
Eve. This legend may be found by those who understand Hebrew, and would
like to read the original version, in the Talmud; but these are Moore’s
lines--
‘They tell us that woman was made of a rib
Just picked from a corner so snug in the side;
But the Rabbins swear to you that this is a fib,
And ’twas not so at all that the sex was supplied.
‘The old Adam was fashioned, the first of his kind,
With a tail like a monkey, full yard and a span;
And when Nature cut off this appendage behind,
Why, then woman was made of the tail of the man.
‘If such is the tie between women and men,
The ninny who weds is a pitiful elf;
For he takes to his tail, like an idiot, again,
And makes a most damnable ape of himself.
‘Yet, if we may judge as the fashion prevails,
Ev’ry husband remembers the original plan,
And, knowing his wife is no more than his tail,
Why, he leaves her behind him as much as he can.’
And certainly Moore left _his_ wife as much as possible, while he
hob-nobbed with princes and was the lion of London salons.
But search the ranks of married men who have achieved fame, and
few shall you find who found, and wed, their affinity. Affinities,
it should seem, are rare when once you come to brains of more than
ordinary calibre: your dull dog more readily finds his match than
wits or witlings, and the community of the commonplace is an easier
consummation than the happy combination of the unconventional.
[Illustration: THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BREECHES.]
V.--DOMESTIC STRIFE.
Married life is one long series of compromises--when, indeed, it is
not a state of open warfare. The ‘mere man’ must be a little less than
just, and more than a little selfish, who would assure himself of
retaining his authority over the (more or less) ‘pleasing partner of
his heart;’ for woman, be she never so sweet and gracious, is always
greedy of power and domination, and though with ‘sweet Nellie,’ your
‘heart’s delight,’ the wish to rule may be possibly but a harmless
and altogether amiable eccentricity, and your abandonment to her
humours the wearing of golden and purely ornamental fetters, yet in
process of time your benevolent despot may become more despotic and
less benevolent, and your chains transmuted to more sordid guise. But
with imperious Julia or haughty Georgina ’tis another matter from
the first; your initial complaisance spells infirmity of purpose, and
having once abdicated your authority, you are undone for always, and
may for ever tarry in attendance upon the good lady’s whims and ‘ways,’
while acquaintances sit in the seat of the scorner and opine that not
you but the woman ‘wears the breeches.’
O! most miserable and ineffectual of men; you who have the will-power
of a jelly-fish and the courage of a cockroach! The ‘better half’ is
not yourself; your partner has achieved her own ‘betterment,’ and your
compensation is all to seek for the ‘worsement’ that remains your
portion.
Life is compact of compromise, but keep it outside the home and rule
absolute beneath your roof-tree. Then shall one have satisfaction and
the other be convinced of orthodoxy in observing apostolic precepts.
Compromise, as Captain de Valabrèque found, is pleasing to neither
side. A friend discovered him dressing for dinner at an unusual hour,
and, in reply to the friend’s inquiry, he said: ‘It suits my wife to
dine at four, and it is convenient for me to dine at six; and so we sit
down to table at five, which suits neither of us.’
Dual control, in fact, works smoothly neither socially nor politically,
and though there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, folly
abides in divided authority everywhere, and nowhere more certainly than
in domestic matters.
The New Women--female gendarmes, censors of morals, and would-be
domestic tyrants--are quite alive to these objections against the
division of authority, but their agreement goes no further. ‘Woman
ought to be and shall be’ the head of the family, they say, and no
statement is too rash for woman on the war-path to make or subscribe.
Woman has ever been a religious animal, and even the modern woman
differs little from her forbears in this respect; but do just remind
her of St. Paul’s views on the silence and subjection of her sex, and
you learn that the militant saint was an ass--no less! And yet Paul
remains the patron saint of the foremost diocese in Christendom. See
to it, O New Woman! Disestablish him, and erect some more complaisant
saint in his stead. Certainly his opinions and teaching flout the
feminine Ego.[2]
‘No sensible woman,’ wrote one of the most sensible of her sex,[3]
‘objects to acknowledging what is the fact, that she is physically and
mentally inferior to man.... The position of woman has always been, and
will be, a subject one.... The man has always been, and will continue
to be, the head of the family, and the position of the woman, to my
mind, is perfectly summed up in the words, “Her desire shall be to her
husband, and he shall rule over her.”’
For women to claim supremacy comes somewhat too late in the day to be
effectual. There is a very pretty paradox concealed in the fact that
their numbers constitute their weakness, for numerical preponderance is
usually found to be an increase of strength; but the converse is the
case where women are concerned. A wife may be had for the mere asking
by any man, so great is the excess of women, and still so widespread
the old-fashioned and right-minded notion that marriage rounds off and
completes a woman’s life. Scarce a man so ill-formed in mind or body,
or so ill-found in worldly estate but could become a Benedick on the
morrow, an he chose. Man’s supremacy must infallibly last while he
remains in a minority. He is already perfectly conscious that there are
not enough of him to go round, and that this fact puts a premium upon
his sex; and he can afford to smile at the women who have theories and
air them so persistently. For himself there is no occasion to protest
so loudly, while nature continues to endow him with a larger quantity
and a superior quality of brains: gives him greater bodily strength,
and--best boon of all--keeps him in a minority.
And yet, although women are inferior to men in such important matters
as intellect and strength, the ‘hen-pecked husband’ has ever been
common, and the ‘wearing of the breeches’ by the wife has been a
phrase, time out of mind, to denote
‘She who with furious blows and loud-tongued noise
Doth tempests in her quiet household raise.’
‘There is a proverbial phrase to signify that the wife is master
in the household, by which it is intimated that “she wears the
breeches.”’ The phrase is, it must be confessed, an odd one, and is
only half-understood by modern explanations; but in mediæval story we
learn how ‘she’ first put in her claim to wear this particular article
of dress, how it was first disputed and contested, how she was at times
defeated; but how, as a general rule, the claim was enforced. There
was a French poet of the thirteenth century, Hugues Piancelles, two of
whose _faiblaux_, or metrical tales, entitled the _Faiblau d’Estaumi_
and the _Faiblau de Sire Hains et de Dame Anieuse_, are preserved in
manuscript, and have been printed in the collection of Barbazan. The
second of these relates some of the adventures of a mediæval couple,
whose household was not the best regulated in the world. The name
of the heroine of this story, Anieuse, is simply an old form of the
French word _ennuyeuse_, and certainly Dame Anieuse was sufficiently
_ennuyeuse_ to her lord and husband. ‘Sire Hains,’ her husband, was, it
appears, a maker of ‘cottes’ and mantles, and we should judge, also, by
the point on which the quarrel turned, that he was partial to a good
dinner. Dame Anieuse was of that disagreeable temper that, whenever
Sire Hains told her of some particularly nice thing which he wished her
to buy for his meal, she bought instead something which she knew was
disagreeable to him. If he ordered boiled meat, she invariably roasted
it, and further contrived that it should be so covered with cinders and
ashes that he could not eat it. ‘This,’ observes Mr. Wright, ‘would
show that people in the Middle Ages, except, perhaps, professional
cooks, were very unapt at roasting meat.’ This state of things had gone
on for some time, when one day Sire Hains gave orders to his wife to
buy him fish for his dinner. The disobedient wife, instead of buying
fish, provided nothing for his meal but a dish of spinach, telling
him falsely that all the fish stank. This led to a violent quarrel,
in which, after some fierce wrangling, especially on the part of the
lady, Sire Hains proposes to decide their difference in a novel manner.
‘Early in the morning,’ he said, ‘I will take off my breeches and lay
them down in the middle of the court, and the one who can win them
shall be acknowledged to be master or mistress of the house.’
‘_Le matinet sans contredire_
_Voudrai mes braies deschaucier,_
_Et enmui nostre cort couchier;_
_Et qui conquerre les porra,_
_Par bone reson monsterra_
_Qu’il est sire ou dame du nostre._’
Dame Anieuse accepted the challenge with eagerness, and each prepared
for the struggle. After due preparation, two neighbours, friend Symon
and Dame Aupais, having been called in as witnesses, and the breeches,
the object of dispute, having been placed on the pavement of the court,
the battle began, with some slight parody on the formalities of the
judicial combat.
The first blow was given by the Dame, who was so eager for the fray
that she struck her husband before he had put himself on his guard; and
the war of tongues, in which at least Dame Anieuse had the best of it,
went on at the same time as the other battle. Sire Hains ventured a
slight expostulation on her eagerness for the fray, in answer to which
she only threw in his teeth a fierce defiance to do his worst. Provoked
at this, Sire Hains struck at her, and hit her over the eyebrows so
effectively that the skin was discoloured; and, overconfident in the
effect of this first blow, he began rather too soon to exult over
his wife’s defeat. But Dame Anieuse was less disconcerted than he
expected, and recovering quickly from the effect of the blow, she
turned upon him and struck him on the same part of his face with such
force, that she nearly knocked him over the sheepfold. Dame Anieuse, in
her turn, now sneered over him, and while he was recovering from his
confusion, her eyes fell upon the object of contention, and she rushed
to it, and laid her hands upon it to carry it away. This movement
roused Sire Hains, who instantly seized another part of the article
of his dress of which he was thus in danger of being deprived, and
began a struggle for possession, in which the said article underwent
considerable dilapidation, and fragments of it were scattered about
the court. In the midst of this struggle the actual fight recommenced,
by the husband giving his wife so heavy a blow on the teeth, that
her mouth was filled with blood. The effect was such that Sire Hains
already reckoned on the victory, and proclaimed himself lord of the
breeches.
‘_Hains fiert sa fame enmi les denz_
_Tel cop, que la bouche dedenz_
_Li a toute emplie de sancz_
_“Tien ore,” dist Sire Hains, “anc_
_Je cuit que je t’ai bien atainte,_
_Or t’ai-je de deux colors tainte--_
_J’aurai les braies toutes voies.”_’