Some Distinguished Writers, Artists, and Composers Who Were Rather Less
Fortunate in Choosing Wives With Congenial Temperaments Than in Following
the Paths That Led Them On to Fame.
In writing on the subject of the influence of matrimony on men of genius,
E.P. Whipple, the Boston essayist and lecturer, mentioned the cases of
several who, like Moliere and Rousseau, have had unsympathetic wives.
Among these was Sir Walter Scott, who while walking with his wife in the
fields called her attention to some lambs, remarking that they were
beautiful.
"Yes," echoed she, "lambs are beautiful--boiled!"
That incomparable essayist and chirping philosopher, Montaigne, married
but once. When his good wife left him, he shed the tears usual on such
occasions, and said he would not marry again, though it were to Wisdom
herself.
A young painter of great promise once told Sir Joshua Reynolds that he had
taken a wife. "Married!" ejaculated the horrified Sir Joshua; "then you
are ruined as an artist."
Michelangelo, when asked why he never married, replied:
"I have espoused my art, and that occasions me sufficient domestic cares;
for my works shall be my children."
The wives of Dante, Milton, Dryden, Addison, and Steele shed no glory on
the sex, and brought no peace to their firesides.
The list of "unhappily married" is large and brilliant. It includes
William Beckford, the author of "Vathek," who, however, does not seem to
have deserved a happy life, and whose enormous fortune and great talents
were alike wasted.
Lord Lytton was also unhappily, though romantically, married, and a large
part, at least, of the subsequent misery was due to his temper and
conduct. But perhaps full justice has not been done to the ill effects of
the long and hard struggle with poverty, which he maintained with such
success, but with such constant labor, during many years.
The temperaments of Charles Dickens and his wife were so different that
they lived apart for several years preceding the great novelist's death.
Lord and Lady Byron separated about a year after their marriage, and they
never met again.
Sir Henry Irving and his wife spent the last years of their married life
in separate homes.
Haydn's marriage was unhappy. In 1758 the young composer had, after great
struggles, got so far as to obtain a musical directorship with Count
Morzin, and settled in Vienna. His salary was only two hundred florins,
but he had board and lodging free. Many pupils came to him, and among
others two daughters of the hairdresser Keller.
Haydn fell deeply in love with the younger, but his affection was not
returned, for she entered a convent and became a nun.
Father Keller, who was very familiar with Haydn and had helped him
oftentimes with small loans in his early struggles, persuaded the young
composer to marry his elder daughter, and the marriage, after awhile, was
celebrated November 26, 1760.
Maria Anna was, however, no wife for Joseph Haydn. She was extravagant,
bigoted, scolded all day, and was utterly uncompanionable to a musician.
Finally she became so bad that she only did what she thought would annoy
her husband. She dressed in a fashion quite unsuited to her position,
invited clerical men to her table, tore Haydn's written musical scores and
made curl-papers of them, etc., and yet the great composer bore it all as
well as he could.
In one letter he says: "My wife is mostly sick, and is always in a bad
temper. It is the same to her whether her husband is a shoemaker or an
artist."
After he had suffered this state of things in a miserable marriage of
thirty-two years he seemed exhausted, and wrote, then a renowned composer,
to a friend from London:
"My wife, that infernal woman, has written me such horrible things that I
will not return home again."
At last Haydn separated from his wife and placed her as a boarder with a
schoolmaster in Baden, where she died in 1810. Her memory was always
disagreeable to him, even after her death.
A Chapter on Puns.