COMPANIONSHIP IN MARRIAGE.

If the reader has ever had for a travelling-companion some person totally unsuited to his nature and quite unable to enter into the ideas that chiefly interest him, unable, even, to see the things that he sees and always disposed to treat negligently or contemptuously the thoughts and preferences that are most his own, he may have some faint conception of what it must be to find one’s self tied to an unsuitable companion for the tedious journey of this mortal life; and if, on the other hand, he has ever enjoyed the pleasure of wandering through a country that interested him along with a friend who could understand his interest, and share it, and whose society enhanced the charm of every prospect and banished dulness from the dreariest inns, he may in some poor and imperfect degree realize the happiness of those who have chosen the life-companion wisely.

When, after an experiment of months or years, the truth becomes plainly evident that a great mistake has been committed, that there is really no companionship, that there never will be, never can be, any mental communion between the two, but that life in common is to be like a stiff morning call when the giver and the receiver of the visit are beating their brains to find something to say, and dread the gaps of silence, then in the blank and dreary outlook comes the idea of separation, and sometimes, in the loneliness that follows, a wild rebellion against social order, and a reckless attempt to find in some more suitable union a compensation for the first sad failure.

The world looks with more indulgence on these attempts when it sees reason to believe that the desire was for intellectual companionship than when inconstant passions are presumed to have been the motives; and it has so happened that a few persons of great eminence have set an example in this respect which has had the unfortunate effect of weakening in a perceptible degree the ancient social order. It is not possible, of course, that there can be many cases like that of George Eliot and Lewes, for the simple reason that persons of their eminence are so rare; but if there were only a few more cases of that kind it is evident that the laws of society would either be confessedly powerless, or else it would be necessary to modify them and bring them into harmony with new conditions. The importance of the case alluded to lies in the fact that the lady, though she was excluded (or willingly excluded herself) from general society, was still respected and visited not only by men but by ladies of blameless life. Nor was she generally regarded as an immoral person even by the outer world. The feeling about her was one of regret that the faithful companionship she gave to Lewes could not be legally called a marriage, as it was apparently a model of what the legal relation ought to be. The object of his existence was to give her every kind of help and to spare her every shadow of annoyance. He read to her, wrote letters for her, advised her on everything, and whilst full of admiration for her talents was able to do something for their most effectual employment. She, on her part, rewarded him with that which he prized above riches, the frank and affectionate companionship of an intellect that it is needless to describe and of a heart full of the most lively sympathy and ready for the most romantic sacrifices.

In the preceding generation we have the well-known instances of Shelley, Byron, and Goethe, all of whom sought companionship outside of social rule, and enjoyed a sort of happiness probably not unembittered by the false position in which it placed them. The sad story of Shelley’s first marriage, that with Harriett Westbrook, is one of the best instances of a deplorable but most natural mistake. She is said to have been a charming person in many ways. “Harriett,” says Mr. Rossetti, “was not only delightful to look at but altogether most agreeable. She dressed with exquisite neatness and propriety; her voice was pleasant and her speech cordial; her spirits were cheerful and her manners good. She was well educated, a constant and agreeable reader; adequately accomplished in music.” But in spite of these qualities and talents, and even of Harriett’s willingness to learn, Shelley did not find her to be companionable for him; and he unfortunately did discover that another young lady, Mary Godwin, was companionable in the supreme degree. That this latter idea was not illusory is proved by his happy life afterwards with Mary so far as a life could be happy that was poisoned by a tragic recollection.[3] Before that miserable ending, before the waters of the Serpentine had closed over the wretched existence of Harriett, Shelley said, “Every one who knows me must know that the partner of my life should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriett is a noble animal, but she can do neither.” Here we have a plain statement of that great need for companionship which was a part of Shelley’s nature. It is often connected with its apparent opposite, the love of solitude. Shelley was a lover of solitude, which means that he liked full and adequate human intercourse so much that the insufficient imitation of it was intolerable to him. Even that sweetest solitude of all, when he wrote the “Revolt of Islam” in summer shades, to the sound of rippling waters, was willingly exchanged for the society of the one dearest and best companion:—

“So now my summer-task is ended, Mary,
And I return to thee, mine own heart’s home;
As to his Queen some victor Knight of FaËry,
Earning bright spoils for her enchanted dome.
Nor thou disdain that, ere my fame become
A star among the stars of mortal night
(If it indeed may cleave its native gloom),
Its doubtful promise thus I would unite
With thy beloved name, thou child of love and light.

“The toil which stole from thee so many an hour
Is ended, and the fruit is at thy feet.
No longer where the woods to frame a bower
With interlaced branches mix and meet,
Or where, with sound like many voices sweet,
Waterfalls leap among wild islands green
Which framed for my lone boat a lone retreat
Of moss-grown trees and weeds, shall I be seen:
But beside thee, where still my heart has ever been.”

It is not surprising that the companionship of conjugal life should be like other friendships in this, that a first experiment may be a failure and a later experiment a success. We are all so fallible that in matters of which we have no experience we generally commit great blunders. Marriage unites all the conditions that make a blunder probable. Two young people, with very little conception of what an unsurmountable barrier a difference of idiosyncrasy may be, are pleased with each other’s youth, health, natural gayety, and good looks, and fancy that it would be delightful to live together. They marry, and in many cases discover that somehow, in spite of the most meritorious efforts, they are not companions. There is no fault on either side; they try their best, but the invisible demon, incompatibility, is too strong for them.

From all that we know of the characters of Lord and Lady Byron it seems evident that they never were likely to enjoy life together. He committed the mistake of marrying a lady on the strength of her excellent reputation. “She has talents and excellent qualities,” he said before marriage; as if all the arts and sciences and all the virtues put together could avail without the one quality that is never admired, never understood by others,—that of simple suitableness. She was “a kind of pattern in the North,” and he “heard of nothing but her merits and her wonders.” He did not see that all these excellencies were dangers, that the consciousness of them and the reputation for them would set the lady up on a judgment seat of her own, from which she would be continually observing the errors, serious or trivial, of that faulty specimen of the male sex that it was her lofty mission to correct or to condemn. All this he found out in due time and expressed in the bitter lines,—

“Oh! she was perfect past all parallel
Of any modern female saint’s comparison
······
Perfect she was.”

The story of his subsequent life is too well known to need repetition here. All that concerns our present subject is that ultimately, in the Countess Guiccioli, he found the woman who had, for him, that one quality, suitableness, which outweighs all the perfections. She did not read English, but, though ignorant alike of the splendor and the tenderness of his verse, she knew the nature of the man; and he enjoyed in her society, probably for the first time in his life, the most exquisite pleasure the masculine mind can ever know, that of being looked upon by a feminine intelligence with clear sight and devoted affection at the same time. The relation that existed between Byron and the Countess Guiccioli is one outside of our morality, a revenge of Nature against a marriage system that could take a girl not yet sixteen and make her the third wife of a man more than old enough to be her grandfather. In Italy this revenge of Nature against a bad social system is accepted, within limits, and is an all but inevitable consequence of marriages like that of Count Guiccioli, which, however they may be approved by custom and consecrated by religious ceremonies, remain, nevertheless, amongst the worst (because the most unnatural) immoralities. All that need be said in his young wife’s defence is that she followed the only rule habitually acted upon by mankind, the custom of her country and her class, and that she acted, from beginning to end, with the most absolute personal abnegation. On Byron her influence was wholly beneficial. She raised him from a mode of life that was deplored by all his true friends, to the nearest imitation of a happy marriage that was accessible to him; but the irregularity of their position brought upon them the usual Nemesis, and after a broken intercourse, during which he never could feel her to be really his own, he went to Missolonghi and wrote, under the shadow of Death,—

“The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
The exalted portion of the pain
And power of love, I cannot share,
But wear the chain.”

The difference between Byron and Goethe in regard to feminine companionship lies chiefly in this,—that whilst Byron does not seem to have been very susceptible of romantic love (though he was often entangled in liaisons more or less degrading), Goethe was constantly in love and imaginative in his passions, as might be expected from a poet. He appears to have encouraged himself in amorous fancies till they became almost or quite realities, as if to give himself that experience of various feeling out of which he afterwards created poems. He was himself clearly conscious that his poetry was a transformation of real experiences into artistic forms. The knowledge that he came by his poetry in this way would naturally lead him to encourage rather than stifle the sentiments which gave him his best materials. It is quite within the comprehensive powers of a complex nature that a poet might lead a dual life; being at the same time a man, ardent, very susceptible of all passionate emotions, and a poet, observing this passionate life and accumulating its results. In all this there is very little of what occupies us just now, the search for a satisfactory companionship. The woman with whom he most enjoyed that was the Baroness von Stein, but even this friendship was not ultimately satisfying and had not a permanent character. It lasted ten or eleven years, till his return from the Italian journey, when “she thought him cold, and her resource was—reproaches. The resource was more feminine than felicitous. Instead of sympathizing with him in his sorrow at leaving Italy, she felt the regret as an offence; and perhaps it was; but a truer, nobler nature would surely have known how to merge its own pain in sympathy with the pain of one beloved. He regretted Italy; she was not a compensation to him; she saw this, and her self-love suffered.”[4] And so it ended. “He offered friendship in vain; he had wounded the self-love of a vain woman.” Goethe’s longest connection was with Christiane Vulpius, a woman quite unequal to him in station and culture, and in that respect immeasurably inferior to the Baroness von Stein, but superior to her in the power of affection, and able to charm and retain the poet by her lively, pleasant disposition and her perfect constancy. Gradually she rose in his esteem, and every year increased her influence over him. From the precarious position of a mistress out of his house she first attained that of a wife in all but the legal title, as he received her under his roof in defiance of all the good society of Weimar; and lastly she became his lawful wife, to the still greater scandal of the polite world. It may even be said that her promotion did not end here, for the final test of love is death; and when Christiane died she left behind her the deep and lasting sorrow that is happiness still to those who feel it, though happiness in its saddest form.

The misfortune of Goethe appears to have been that he dreaded and avoided marriage in early life, perhaps because he was instinctively aware of his own tendency to form many attachments of limited duration; but his treatment of Christiane Vulpius, so much beyond any obligations which, according to the world’s code, he had incurred, is sufficient proof that there was a power of constancy in his nature; and if he had married early and suitably it is possible that this constancy might have stayed and steadied him from the beginning. It is easy to imagine that a marriage with a cultivated woman of his own class would have given him, in course of time, by mutual adaptation, a much more complete companionship than either of those semi-associations with the Frau von Stein and Christiane, each of which only included a part of his great nature. Christiane, however, had the better part, his heartfelt affection.

The case of John Stuart Mill and the remarkable woman by whose side he lies buried at Avignon, is the most perfect instance of thorough companionship on record; and it is remarkable especially because men of great intellectual power, whose ways of thinking are quite independent of custom, and whose knowledge is so far outside the average as to carry their thoughts continually beyond the common horizon, have an extreme difficulty in associating themselves with women, who are naturally attached to custom, and great lovers of what is settled, fixed, limited, and clear. The ordinary disposition of women is to respect what is authorized much more than what is original, and they willingly, in the things of the mind, bow before anything that is repeated with circumstances of authority. An isolated philosopher has no costume or surroundings to entitle him to this kind of respect. He wears no vestment, he is not magnified by any architecture, he is not supported by superiors or deferred to by subordinates. He stands simply on his abilities, his learning, and his honesty. There is, however, this one chance in his favor, that a certain natural sympathy may possibly exist between him and some woman on the earth,—if he could only find her,—and this woman would make him independent of all the rest. It was Stuart Mill’s rare good-fortune to find this one woman, early in life, in the person of Mrs. Taylor; and as his nature was intellectual and affectionate rather than passionate, he was able to rest contented with simple friendship for a period of twenty years. Indeed this friendship itself, considered only as such, was of very gradual growth. “To be admitted,” he wrote, “into any degree of mental intercourse with a being of these qualities, could not but have a most beneficial influence on my development; though the effect was only gradual, and many years elapsed before her mental progress and mine went forward in the complete companionship they at last attained. The benefit I received was far greater than any I could hope to give.... What I owe, even intellectually, to her, is in its detail almost infinite.”

Mill speaks of his marriage, in 1851 (I use his words), to the lady whose incomparable worth had made her friendship the greatest source to him both of happiness and of improvement during many years in which they never expected to be in any closer relation to one another. “For seven and a half years,” he goes on to say, “that blessing was mine; for seven and a half only! I can say nothing which could describe, even in the faintest manner, what that loss was and is. But because I know that she would have wished it, I endeavor to make the best of what life I have left and to work on for her purposes with such diminished strength as can be derived from thoughts of her and communion with her memory.... Since then I have sought for such alleviation as my state admitted of, by the mode of life which most enabled me to feel her still near me. I bought a cottage as close as possible to the place where she is buried, and there her daughter (my fellow-sufferer and now my chief comfort) and I live constantly during a great portion of the year. My objects in life are solely those which were hers; my pursuits and occupations those in which she shared, or sympathized, and which are indissolubly associated with her. Her memory is to me a religion, and her approbation the standard by which, summing up as it does all worthiness, I endeavor to regulate my life.”

The examples that I have selected (all purposely from the real life of well-known persons) are not altogether encouraging. They show the difficulty that there is in finding the true companion. George Eliot found hers at the cost of a rebellion against social order to which, with her regulated mind and conservative instincts, she must have been by nature little disposed. Shelley succeeded only after a failure and whilst the failure still had rights over his entire existence. His life was like one of those pictures in which there is a second work over a first, and the painter supposes the first to be entirely concealed, which indeed it is for a little time, but it reappears afterwards and spoils the whole. Nothing could be more unsatisfactory than the domestic arrangements of Byron. He married a lady from a belief in her learning and virtue, only to find that learning and virtue were hard stones in comparison with the daily bread of sympathy. Then, after a vain waste of years in error, he found true love at last, but on terms which involved too heavy sacrifices from her who gave it, and procured him no comfort, no peace, if indeed his nature was capable of any restfulness in love. Goethe, after a number of attachments that ended in nothing, gave himself to one woman by his intelligence and to another by his affections, not belonging with his whole nature to either, and never in his long life knowing what it is to have equal companionship in one’s own house. Stuart Mill is contented, for twenty years, to be the esteemed friend of a lady married to another, without hope of any closer relation; and when his death permits them to think of marriage, they have only seven years and a half before them, and he is forty-five years old.

Cases of this kind would be discouraging in the extreme degree, were it not that the difficulty is exceptional. High intellect is in itself a peculiarity, in a certain sense it is really an eccentricity, even when so thoroughly sane and rational as in the cases of George Eliot, Goethe, and Mill. It is an eccentricity in this sense, that its mental centre does not coincide with that of ordinary people. The mental centre of ordinary people is simply the public opinion, the common sense, of the class and locality in which they live, so that, to them, the common sense of people in another class, another locality, appears irrational or absurd. The mental centre of a superior person is not that of class and locality. Shelley did not belong to the English aristocracy, though he was born in it; his mind did not centre itself in aristocratic ideas. George Eliot did not belong to the middle class of the English midlands, nor Stuart Mill to the London middle classes. So far as Byron belonged to the aristocracy it was a mark of inferiority in him, owing to a touch of vulgarity in his nature, the same vulgarity which made him believe that he could not be a proper sort of lord without a prodigal waste of money. Yet even Byron was not centred in local ideas; that which was best in him, his enthusiasm for Greece, was not an essential part of Nottinghamshire common sense. Goethe lived much more in one locality, and even in a small place; but if anything is remarkable in him it is his complete independence of Weimar ideas. It was the Duke, his friend and master, not the public opinion of Weimar, that allowed Goethe to be himself. He refused even to be classed intellectually, and did not recognize the vulgar opinion that a poet cannot be scientific. In all these cases the mental centre was not in any local common sense. It was a result of personal studies and observations acting upon an individual idiosyncrasy.

We may now perceive how infinitely easier it is for ordinary people to meet and be companionable than for these rare and superior minds. Ordinary people, if bred in the same neighborhood and class, are sure to have a great fund of ideas in common, all those ideas that constitute the local common sense. If you listen attentively to their conversations you will find that they hardly ever go outside of that. They mention incidents and actions, and test them one after another by a tacit reference to the public opinion of the place. Therefore they have a good chance of agreeing, of considering each other reasonable; and this is why it is a generally received opinion that marriages between people of the same locality and the same class offer the greatest probability of happiness. So they do, in ordinary cases, but if there is the least touch of any original talent or genius in one of the parties, it is sure to result in many ideas that will be outside of any local common sense, and then the other party, living in that sense, will consider those ideas peculiar, and perhaps deplorable. Here, then, are elements of dissension lying quite ready like explosive materials, and the merest accident may shatter in a moment the whole fabric of affection. To prevent such an accident an artificial kind of intercourse is adopted which is not real companionship, or anything resembling it.

The reader may imagine, and has probably observed in real life, a marriage in which the husband is a man of original power, able to think forcibly and profoundly, and the wife a gentle being quite unable to enter into any thought of that quality. In cases of that kind the husband may be affectionate and even tender, but he is careful to utter nothing beyond the safest commonplaces. In the presence of his wife he keeps his mind quite within the circle of custom. He has, indeed, no other resource. Custom and commonplace are the protection of the intelligent against misapprehension and disapproval.

Marriages of this unequal kind are an imitation of those equal marriages in which both parties live in the local common sense; but there is this vast difference between them, that in the imitation the more intelligent of the two parties has to stifle half his nature. An intelligent man has to make up his mind in early life whether he has courage enough for such a sacrifice or not. Let him try the experiment of associating for a short time with people who cannot understand him, and if he likes the feeling of repression that results from it, if he is able to stop short always at the right moment, if he can put his knowledge on the shelf as one puts a book in a library, then perhaps he may safely undertake the long labor of companionship with an unsuitable wife.

This is sometimes done in pure hopelessness of ever finding a true mate. A man has no belief in any real companionship, and therefore simply conforms to custom in his marriage, as Montaigne did, allying himself with some young lady who is considered in the neighborhood to be a suitable match for him. This is the mariage de convenance. Its purposes are intelligible and attainable. It may add considerably to the dignity and convenience of life and to that particular kind of happiness which results from satisfaction with our own worldly prudence. There is also the probability that by perfect courtesy, by a scrupulous observance of the rules of intercourse between highly civilized persons who are not extremely intimate, the parties who contract a marriage of this kind may give each other the mild satisfactions that are the reward of the well-bred. There is a certain pleasure in watching every movement of an accomplished lady, and if she is your wife there may also be a certain pride. She receives your guests well; she holds her place with perfect self-possession at your table and in her drawing-room; she never commits a social solecism; and you feel that you can trust her absolutely. Her private income is a help in the maintenance of your establishment and so increases your credit in the world. She gives you in this way a series of satisfactions that may even, in course of time, produce rather affectionate feelings. If she died you would certainly regret her loss, and think that life was, on the whole, decidedly less agreeable without her.

But alas for the dreams of youth if this is all that is to be gained by marriage! Where is the sweet friend and companion who was to have accompanied us through prosperous or adverse years, who was to have charmed and consoled us, who was to have given us the infinite happiness of being understood and loved at the same time? Were all those dreams delusions? Is the best companionship a mere fiction of the fancy, not existing anywhere upon the earth?

I believe in the promises of Nature. I believe that in every want there is the promise of a possible satisfaction. If we are hungry there is food somewhere, if we are thirsty there is drink. But in the things of the world there is often an indication of order rather than a realization of it, so that in the confusion of accidents the hungry man may be starving in a beleaguered city and the thirsty man parched in the Sahara. All that the wants indicate is that their satisfaction is possible in nature. Let us believe that, for every one, the true mate exists somewhere in the world. She is worth seeking for at any cost of trouble or expense, worth travelling round the globe to find, worth the endurance of labor and pain and privation. Men suffer all this for objects of far inferior importance; they risk life for the chance of a ribbon, and sacrifice leisure and peace for the smallest increase of social position. What are these vanities in comparison with the priceless benefit, the continual blessing, of having with you always the one person whose presence can deliver you from all the evils of solitude without imposing the constraints and hypocrisies of society? With her you are free to be as much yourself as when alone; you say what you think and she understands you. Your silence does not offend her; she only thinks that there will be time enough to talk together afterwards. You know that you can trust her love, which is as unfailing as a law of nature. The differences of idiosyncrasy that exist between you only add interest to your intercourse by preventing her from becoming a mere echo of yourself. She has her own ways, her own thoughts that are not yours and yet are all open to you, so that you no longer dwell in one intellect only but have constant access to a second intellect, probably more refined and elegant, richer in what is delicate and beautiful. There you make unexpected discoveries; you find that the first instinctive preference is more than justified by merits that you had not divined. You had hoped and trusted vaguely that there were certain qualities; but as a painter who looks long at a natural scene is constantly discovering new beauties whilst he is painting it, so the long and loving observation of a beautiful human mind reveals a thousand unexpected excellences. Then come the trials of life, the sudden calamities, the long and wearing anxieties. Each of these will only reveal more clearly the wonderful endurance, fidelity, and fortitude that there is in every noble feminine nature, and so build up on the foundation of your early love an unshakable edifice of esteem and respect and love commingled, for which in our modern tongue we have no single term, but which our forefathers called “worship.”