NOT GOOD HUSBANDS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 18275, 16 December 1922, Page 2 (Supplement)

NOT GOOD HUSBANDS.

THE LITERARY GENIUSES.

MANY LOVELESS MARRIAGES.

Should women marry literary geniuses ? Emphatically no. At any rate, that seems to be tho moral to be drawn from an interesting compilation of the matrimonial experiences of great men of letters, poets, essayists, and writers of immortal works, made by Sir Sidney Low. He. has shown that for them happiness in married life was a rare thing. Here is an extract from his analysis : —

Shakespeare.—.Married at 18, with hasty irregularity, a woman of humble origin, eight years older than himself. 'Hie union seems to have been unsympathetic, and the terms of the poet's will point to an estrangement between husband and wife.

Milton.—Married .three times. The poet's first wife left him after a fewweeks. He wrote tracts on divorce, and paid his addresses to a very handsome, and witty gentlewoman Until tho wife returned. ft

j Swift.—Secretly married to a woman : with whom he never lived, and whom ho •ardly ever saw except in the presence of a third person.

Samuel Johnson. —Married a vulgar and affected widow 20 years his senior.

Sterne. —Got on badly with his wife, and had various love affairs and sentimental philanderings.

Scott.—Married; not quite sympathetically.

Southey.—Married twice. First wife became insane. Married his second wife at the age of sixty-six, just before complete failure of his own mental faculties.

Coleridge.—Married: unsatisfactorily. Husband and wife became almost completely alienated, and lived apart.

Shelley.—Made an imprudent marriage early iu life. Separation from his wife, who committed suicide.

Keats.—Unmarried. Tormented by an unhappy love affair. Byron.—Separated from his wife after a great scandal, and entered into various irregular unions.

Carlyle.—Married; bickered a good deal with his wife.

Ruskin. —Marriage annulled.

Dickens.—Separated from his wife.

There are exceptions, of course. These great men, for instance, were all married satisfactorily:—Bunyan (twice), Wordsworth, Thomas Moore, Darwin, Froude, Matthew Arnold, Kingsley, Tennyson, and Sheridan.