GENIUS AND DOMESTIC LIFE.
MR. LESLIE STEPHEN, in his lecture upon Coleridge, delivered yesterday week at the Royal Institution, partly borrowed and partly mutilated the criticism which Mr. Traill passed upon women's danger in choosing men of genius as husbands, in his little study of Coleridge published in Mr. John Morley's series on " English Men of Letters." "Mrs. Carlyle," said Mr. Trail], " has left on record her pathetic lament over the fate of a woman who marries a man of genius; but a man of genius of the coldly selfish and exacting type of the Chelsea philosopher would probably be a less severe burden to a woman of house- wifely instincts than the weak, unmethodical, irresolute, shift- less being that Coleridge had by this time [1806] become. After the arrival of the Southeys, Mrs. Coleridge would, indeed, have • been more than human, if she had not looked with an envious -eye upon the contrast between her sister Edith's lot and her -own. For this would give her the added pang of per- ceiving that she was specially unlucky in the matter, and that men of genius could (' if they chose,' as she would probably, though not quite justly, have put it) make very good husbands indeed. If one poet could finish his poems and pay his tradesmen's bills, and work steadily for the pub- lishers in his own house, without the necessity of periodical fittings to various parts of the United Kingdom or the Con- tinent, why so could another." But Mr. Leslie Stephen appears, if we may trust the Times' report, to have adopted only that part of this criticism which is unfavourable to men of genius in every domestic light, and to have told his audience to regard this as the moral of Coleridge's career,—" Never marry a man of genius; don't be his brother-in-law, or his publisher, or his editor, or anything that is his." That is a truly transcendental generalisation from Coleridge's career, and we had always -supposed that Mr. Stephen detests transcendental generalisa- tions. And considering that, as Mr. Traill had pointed out, the marriages of two sisters with men of genius pro- duced so marked a contrast of results, it was, we think, not quite reasonable in Mr. Stephen to use the awful warning which one of these marriages had furnished against choosing a man of genius for a husband, without any reference to the example of domestic happiness which the other of them had fur- nished. Indeed, though in marriages with men of genius, there is always this for the woman to consider, that if -the marriage is not more than usually happy, it is more than probable that it will be more than usually unhappy, yet the prospect that marriage with a man of genius will result in happiness far above the average ought fairly to be taken into account to balance the fear that it may turn out, as Coleridge's and Byron's marriages and Shelley's first marriage certainly did turn out, one of singular, if not even calamitous misery. Men of genius make either singularly good husbands or husbands of the most uncomfortable, if not of the most disastrous kind. Scott, Southey, and Wordsworth evidently made homes which, as regards the happiness of those who shared -them, were far fuller of life and fascination and delight than could have been extracted from the experience of a score of average English homes. But it is, of course, equally true that Coleridge's marriage yielded a real home for only about six years out of the thirty-nine daring which the poet survived his marriage; that -Carlyle's home was one of great and sometimes even over- whelming trouble; that Byron's was not a home at all, but a source of something like permanent anguish to the wife who had hoped to brighten it ; and that Shelley was the real cause of his first wife's suicide, whatever excuses may be found for 'him. There are not a few other instances,—Dickens's marriage,
for example, is one in point,—where it is clear that the genius of the man told very much against the happiness of marriage, at all events with the particular wife chosen. Nor does it need any particular discrimination to see that any quality not purely intel- lectual, but full of social consequences, which separates a man from all other men, must make the most intimate of all his relations quite different from the same relations of ordinary men, and change those relations either for good or for evil, or, in some cases, perhaps for both good and evil. But it is obviously just as easy for a man or woman of genius to have a special genius for domestic life as it is to have a special genius for disturbing domestic life. Sir Walter Scott, for instance, clearly had what may be called a splendid genius for making his home a centre of all kinds of interest and happiness, and the same may be said in a less degree of the genius of such men as the American poet Longfellow, or such women as the Swedish lady whose expression of the highest emotions through the medium of music all Englishmen recognised and marvelled at in Jenny Lind. What is needful, we take it, to qualify un- questionable genius for the domestic sphere, is either its com- bination with very great magnanimity and bonhomie combined, as in the case of Sir Walter Scott, or at the very least moral elevation sufficient to control that sensitive egotism and self-will which are so often and so naturally combined with genius, and which, when not so controlled, are almost sure to wreck domestic peace. This is perhaps the reason why statesmen of genius have so much oftener than men of literary genius enjoyed a high kind of domestic happiness. Statesmen must usually possess a certain largeness of mind, and a capacity at least for self-control, if they would succeed in their own sphere at all; and their duties carry them so much away from home, that they are not as exacting in their homes as the man of literary genius frequently is. Men of the type of President Lincoln, or even Mr. Cobden, have thoughts and interests too large to be open to all the irritating susceptibilities which sour so many a home ; but though, of course, it is true that men of genius whose great qualities are essentially attracted to public rather than to private interests, are not exposed to all the dangers which threaten the domestic peace of men of literary genius only, it is equally true that genius of this type has no special tendency to brighten the home ; it is because genius of this type more or less drives those who possess it out of the home life, that they are raised above the special dangers which beset it.
Probably, Mr. Leslie Stephen would not maintain that his general moral would apply equally to the other sex, that it would be wise to say,—" Never marry a woman of genius; don't be her brother-in-law, or her publisher, or her editor, or anything that is hers." We fancy that even recent English experience would produce plenty of evidence against such a maxim as that, and very little in its favour. And yet, as a rule, women of genius are probably possessed, less frequently than men, of that magnanimity and bonhomie which are the best possible securities against the paltry egotism and exactingness of the love of praise. Perhaps, however, they have a still better security against that exacting- ness in their much more frequent humility, their much more frequent habit of loving to look up rather than to look down. Miss Brontë obviously made a hero of the man whom she ultimately married, though he had no genius, and she had much. Jenny Lind loved the self-forgetfulness of domestic life better than she loved the storms of passionate admiration which her power to express the highest moods of human feeling had been accustomed to excite in her earlier days. Miss Austen seems hardly to have realised that her genius was anything more than a special source of interest and amusement to herself. In other words, genius in women, instead of generating exactingness or multiplying the forms of caprice, has generally rather gone to aid the self- forgetfulness as well as to increase the insight which are, for women at least, the best protections against self-will and dictatorial impulses such as stimulated the wayward im- petuousness of Shelley, or the insane pride that utterly possessed and degraded the career of Byron. But the very fact that this is so, shows most plainly that Mr. Leslie Stephen's maxim is not founded on anything in the nature of genius itself, but solely on the tendency of special genius to stimulate the self-will and arrogance of the more self- willed and arrogant of the two sexes. In all cases where genius is either so commanding as to be raised above egotism and vanity, as it was in Sir Walter Scott, or, again, so full of prophetic fire as to ally itself with the passion of devotion, as it evidently did, for instance, in the case of the prophet Ezekiel, instead of spoiling, it has deepened, and deepened as nothing perhaps but this great gift could have deepened, the force of domestic feeling. What can exceed in intensity of pathos the glimpse which the prophet Ezekiel gives us of the tenderness of his own domestic life, when he describes the announcement made to him of his wife's approaching death ?—" The word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man, behold, I take away from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke : yet neither shalt thou mourn nor weep, neither shall thy tears run down. Forbear to cry, make no mourning for the dead, bind the tire of thine head upon thee, and pat on thy shoes upon thy feet, and cover not thy lips, and eat not the bread of men. So I spake unto the people in the morning : and at even my wife died ; and I did in the morning as I was commanded." There, at least, was a man of the most lofty genius concerning whom we may conjecture with some confidence, that his wife did not think it a misfortune that she had married him, even though, at the bidding of a higher will, he did not put on for her conventional mourning, or indulge the luxury of grief. It is only genius of the pettier and more egotistic kind to which Mr. Leslie Stephen's cynical maxim really applies.
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