The matrimonial state of literature.--Matrimony said not to be well suited
to the domestic life of genius.--Celibacy a concealed cause of the early
querulousness of men of genius.--Of unhappy unions.--Not absolutely
necessary that the wife should be a literary woman.--Of the docility and
susceptibility of the higher female character.--A picture of a literary
wife.
Matrimony has often been considered as a condition not well suited to the
domestic life of genius, accompanied as it must be by many embarrassments
for the head and the heart. It was an axiom with Fuessli, the Swiss
artist, that the marriage state is incompatible with a high cultivation of
the fine arts; and such appears to have been the feeling of most artists.
When MICHAEL ANGELO was asked why he did not marry, he replied, "I have
espoused my art; and it occasions me sufficient domestic cares, for my
works shall be my children. What would Bartholomeo Ghiberti have been, had
he not made the gates of St. John? His children consumed his fortune, but
his gates, worthy to be the gates of Paradise, remain." The three
Caraccis refused the conjugal bond on the same principle, dreading the
interruptions of domestic life. Their crayons and paper were always on
their dining-table. Careless of fortune, they determined never to hurry
over their works in order that they might supply the ceaseless demands of
a family. We discover the same principle operating in our own times. When
a young painter, who had just married, told Sir Joshua that he was
preparing to pursue his studies in Italy, that great painter exclaimed,
"Married! then you are ruined as an artist!"
The same principle has influenced literary men. Sir THOMAS BODLEY had a
smart altercation with his first librarian, insisting that he should not
marry, maintaining its absurdity in the man who had the perpetual care of
a public library; and Woodward left as one of the express conditions of
his lecturer, that he was not to be a married man. They imagined that
their private affairs would interfere with their public duties. PEIRESC,
the great French collector, refused marriage, convinced that the cares of
a family were too absorbing for the freedom necessary to literary
pursuits, and claimed likewise a sacrifice of fortune incompatible with
his great designs. BOYLE, who would not suffer his studies to be
interrupted by "household affairs," lived as a boarder with his sister,
Lady Ranelagh. Newton, Locke, Leibnitz, Bayle, and Hobbes, and Hume, and
Gibbon, and Adam Smith, decided for celibacy. These great authors placed
their happiness in their celebrity.
This debate, for the present topic has sometimes warmed into one, is in
truth ill adapted for controversy. The heart is more concerned in its
issue than any espoused doctrine terminating in partial views. Look into
the domestic annals of genius--observe the variety of positions into which
the literary character is thrown in the nuptial state. Cynicism will not
always obtain a sullen triumph, nor prudence always be allowed to
calculate away some of the richer feelings of our nature. It is not an
axiom that literary characters must necessarily institute a new order of
celibacy. The sentence of the apostle pronounces that "the forbidding to
marry is a doctrine of devils." WESLEY, who published "Thoughts on a
Single Life," advised some "to remain single for the kingdom of heaven's
sake; but the precept," he adds, "is not for the many." So indecisive have
been the opinions of the most curious inquirers concerning the matrimonial
state, whenever a great destination has engaged their consideration.
One position we may assume, that the studies, and even the happiness of
the pursuits of men of genius, are powerfully influenced by the domestic
associate of their lives.
They rarely pass through the age of love without its passion. Even their
Delias and their Amandas are often the shadows of some real object; for as
Shakspeare's experience told him,
"Never durst poet touch a pen to write,
Until his ink were temper'd with love's sighs."
Their imagination is perpetually colouring those pictures of domestic
happiness on which they delight to dwell. He who is no husband sighs for
that tenderness which is at once bestowed and received; and tears will
start in the eyes of him who, in becoming a child among children, yet
feels that he is no father! These deprivations have usually been the
concealed cause of the querulous melancholy of the literary character.
Such was the real occasion of SHENSTONE'S unhappiness. In early life he
had been captivated by a young lady adapted to be both the muse and the
wife of the poet, and their mutual sensibility lasted for some years. It
lasted until she died. It was in parting from her that he first sketched
his "Pastoral Ballad." SHENSTONE had the fortitude to refuse marriage.
His spirit could not endure that she should participate in that life of
self-privations to which he was doomed; but his heart was not locked up in
the ice of celibacy, and his plaintive love songs and elegies flowed from
no fictitious source. "It is long since," said he, "I have considered
myself as _undone_. The world will not perhaps consider me in that light
entirely till I have married my maid."[A]
[Footnote A: The melancholy tale of Shenstone's life is narrated in the
third volume "Curiosities of Literature,"--ED.]
THOMSON met a reciprocal passion in his Amanda, while the full tenderness
of his heart was ever wasting itself like waters in a desert. As we have
been made little acquainted with this part of the history of the poet of
the "Seasons," I shall give his own description of those deep feelings
from a manuscript letter written to Mallet. "To turn my eyes a softer way,
to you know who--absence sighs it to me. What is my heart made of? a soft
system of low nerves, too sensible for my quiet--capable of being very
happy or very unhappy, I am afraid the last will prevail. Lay your hand
upon a kindred heart, and despise me not. I know not what it is, but she
dwells upon my thought in a mingled sentiment, which is the sweetest, the
most intimately pleasing the soul can receive, and which I would wish
never to want towards some dear object or another. To have always some
secret darling idea to which one can still have recourse amidst the noise
and nonsense of the world, and which never fails to touch us in the most
exquisite manner, is an art of happiness that fortune cannot deprive us
of. This may be called romantic; but whatever the cause is, the effect is
really felt. Pray, when you write, tell me when you saw her, and with the
pure eye of a friend, when you see her again, whisper that I am her most
humble servant."
Even POPE was enamoured of a "scornful lady;" and, as Johnson observed,
"polluted his will with female resentment." JOHNSON himself, we are told
by one who knew him, "had always a metaphysical passion for one princess
or other,--the rustic Lucy Porter, or the haughty Molly Aston, or the
sublimated methodistic Hill Boothby; and, lastly, the more charming Mrs.
Thrale." Even in his advanced age, at the height of his celebrity, we hear
his cries of lonely wretchedness. "I want every comfort; my life is very
solitary and very cheerless. Let me know that I have yet a friend--let us
be kind to one another." But the "kindness" of distant friends is like
the polar sun--too far removed to warm us. Those who have eluded the
individual tenderness of the female, are tortured by an aching void in
their feelings. The stoic AKENSIDE, in his "Odes," has preserved the
history of a life of genius in a series of his own feelings. One entitled,
"At Study," closes with these memorable lines:--
Me though no peculiar fair
Touches with a lover's care;
Though the pride of my desire
Asks immortal friendship's name,
Asks the palm of honest fame
And the old heroic lyre;
Though the day have smoothly gone,
Or to letter'd leisure known,
Or in social duty spent;
Yet at the eve my lonely breast
_Seeks in vain for perfect rest,
Languishes for true content._
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.
But in the character of the higher female we may discover a constitutional
faculty of docility and enthusiasm which has varied with the genius of
different ages. It is the opinion of an elegant metaphysician, that the
mind of the female adopts and familiarises itself with ideas more easily
than that of man, and hence the facility with which the sex contract or
lose habits, and accommodate their minds to new situations. Politics, war,
and learning, are equally objects of attainment to their delightful
susceptibility. Love has the fancied transparency of the cameleon. When
the art of government directed the feelings of a woman, we behold Aspasia,
eloquent with the genius of Pericles, instructing the Archons; Portia, the
wife of the republican Brutus, devouring burning coals; and the wife of
Lucan, transcribing and correcting the Pharsalia, before the bust of the
poet, which she had placed on her bed, that his very figure might never be
absent. When universities were opened to the sex, they acquired academic
glory. The wives of military men have shared in the perils of the field;
or like Anna Comnena and our Mrs. Hutchinson, have become even their
historians. In the age of love and sympathy, the female often receives an
indelible pliancy from her literary associate. His pursuits become the
objects of her thoughts, and he observes his own taste reflected in his
family; much less through his own influence, for his solitary labours
often preclude him from forming them, than by that image of his own
genius--the mother of his children! The subjects, the very books which
enter into his literary occupation, are cherished by her imagination; a
feeling finely opened by the lady of the author of "Sandford and Merton:"
"My ideas of my husband," she said, "are so much associated with his
_books_, that to part with them would be as it were breaking some of the
last ties which still connect me with so beloved an object. The being in
the midst of books he has been accustomed to read, and which contain his
_marks_ and _notes_, will still give him _a sort of existence_ with _me_.
Unintelligible as such fond chimeras may appear to many people, I am
persuaded they are not so to you."
With what simplicity Meta Hollers, the wife of Klopstock, in her
German-English, describes to Richardson, the novelist, the manner in
which she passes her day with her poet! she tells him that "she is always
present at the birth of the young verses, which begin by fragments, here
and there, of a subject with which his soul is just then filled. Persons
who live as we do have no need of two chambers; we are always in the same:
I with my little work, still! still! only regarding sometimes my husband's
face, which is so venerable at that time with tears of devotion, and all
the sublimity of the subject--my husband reading me his young verses, and
suffering my criticisms."
The picture of a literary wife of antiquity has descended to us, touched
by the domestic pencil of genius, in the susceptible CALPHUENIA, the lady
of the younger PLINY. "Her affection for me," he says, "has given her a
turn to books: her passion will increase with our days, for it is not my
youth or my person, which time gradually impairs, but my reputation and my
glory, of which she is enamoured."
I have been told that BUFFON, notwithstanding his favourite seclusion of
his old tower in his garden, acknowledged to a friend that his lady had a
considerable influence over his compositions: "Often," said he, "when I
cannot please myself, and am impatient at the disappointment, Madame de
Buffon reanimates my exertion, or withdraws me to repose for a short
interval; I return to my pen refreshed, and aided by her advice."
GESNER declared that whatever were his talents, the person who had most
contributed to develope them was his wife. She is unknown to the public;
but the history of the mind of such a woman is discovered in the "Letters
of Gesner and his Family." While GESNER gave himself up entirely to his
favourite arts, drawing, painting, etching, and poetry, his wife would
often reanimate a genius that was apt to despond in its attempts, and
often exciting him to new productions, her sure and delicate taste was
attentively consulted by the poet-painter--but she combined the most
practical good sense with the most feeling imagination. This forms the
rareness of the character; for this same woman, who united with her
husband in the education of their children, to relieve him from the
interruptions of common business, carried on alone the concerns of his
house in _la librairie_.[A] Her correspondence with her son, a young
artist travelling for his studies, opens what an old poet comprehensively
terms "a gathered mind." Imagine a woman attending to the domestic
economy, and to the commercial details, yet withdrawing out of this
business of life into the more elevated pursuits of her husband, and at
the same time combining with all this the cares and counsels which she
bestowed on her son to form the artist and the man.
[Footnote A: Gesner's father was a bookseller of Zurich; descended from a
family of men learned in the exact sciences, he was apprenticed to a
bookseller at Berlin, and afterwards entered into his father's business.
The best edition of his "Idylls" is that published by himself, in two
volumes, 4to, illustrated by his own engravings.--ED.]
To know this incomparable woman we must hear her. "Consider your father's
precepts as oracles of wisdom; they are the result of the experience he
has collected, not only of life, but of that art which he has acquired
simply by his own industry." She would not have her son suffer his strong
affection to herself to absorb all other sentiments. "Had you remained at
home, and been habituated under your mother's auspices to employments
merely domestic, what advantage would you have acquired? I own we should
have passed some delightful winter evenings together; but your love for
the arts, and my ambition to see my sons as much distinguished for their
talents as their virtues, would have been a constant source of regret at
your passing your time in a manner so little worthy of you."
How profound is her observation on the strong but confined attachments
of a youth of genius! "I have frequently remarked, with some regret,
the excessive attachment you indulge towards those who see and feel
as you do yourself, and the total neglect with which you seem to treat
every one else. I should reproach a man with such a fault who was
destined to pass his life in a small and unvarying circle; but in an
artist, who has a great object in view, and whose country is the whole
world, this disposition seems to be likely to produce a great number of
inconveniences. Alas! my son, the life you have hitherto led in your
father's house has been in fact a pastoral life, and not such a one as was
necessary for the education of a man whose destiny summons him to the
world."
And when her son, after meditating on some of the most glorious
productions of art, felt himself, as he says, "disheartened and cast down
at the unattainable superiority of the artist, and that it was only by
reflecting on the immense labour and continued efforts which such
masterpieces must have required, that I regained my courage and my
ardour," she observes, "This passage, my dear son, is to me as precious
as gold, and I send it to you again, because I wish you to impress it
strongly on your mind. The remembrance of this may also be a useful
preservative from too great confidence in your abilities, to which a warm
imagination may sometimes be liable, or from the despondence you might
occasionally feel from the contemplation of grand originals. Continue,
therefore, my dear son, to form a sound judgment and a pure taste from
your own observations: your mind, while yet young and flexible, may
receive whatever impressions you wish. Be careful that your abilities do
not inspire in you too much confidence, lest it should happen to you as it
has to many others, that they have never possessed any greater merit than
that of having good abilities."
One more extract, to preserve an incident which may touch the heart of
genius. This extraordinary woman, whose characteristic is that of strong
sense combined with delicacy of feeling, would check her German
sentimentality at the moment she was betraying those emotions in which the
imagination is so powerfully mixed up with the associated feelings.
Arriving at their cottage at Sihlwald, she proceeds--"On entering the
parlour three small pictures, painted by you, met my eyes. I passed some
time in contemplating them. It is now a year, I thought, since I saw him
trace these pleasing forms; he whistled and sang, and I saw them grow
under his pencil; now he is far, far from us. In short, I had the weakness
to press my lips on one of these pictures. You well know, my dear son,
that I am not much addicted to scenes of a sentimental turn; but to-day,
while I considered your works, I could not restrain this little impulse of
maternal feelings. Do not, however, be apprehensive that the tender
affection of a mother will ever lead me too far, or that I shall suffer my
mind to be too powerfully impressed with the painful sensations to which
your absence gives birth. My reason convinces me that it is for your
welfare that you are now in a place where your abilities will have
opportunities of unfolding, and where you can become great in your art."
Such was the incomparable wife and mother of the GESNERS! Will it now be a
question whether matrimony be incompatible with the cultivation of the
arts? A wife who reanimates the drooping genius of her husband, and a
mother who is inspired by the ambition of beholding her sons eminent, is
she not the real being which the ancients personified in their Muse?