MARRIAGE AND GENIUS.

Patea Mail, Volume VIII, Issue 91, 2 August 1895, Page 3

MARRIAGE AND GENIUS.

The author of “John Halifax” has positive opinions on marriage as connected with genius. Two people,” she says, “ man and wife, of whom one was supposed to be, and both really were, wonderfully gifted, succeed in making one another thoroughly miserable. Why ? Because the woman married out of a wounded feminine pride or (she owned) for * ambition,’ a self-absorbed, egotistical and bad tempered man, who had ruined his constitution by his persistent breaking of every law of* health. Disappointed, neglected, she does her wifely duty in a literal sense, but she seasons it with incessant complaints and the cruel use of that weapon which is a gentlewoman’s instinctive defence against a boor — sarcasm. He, too, lives a life unimpeachable externally, but within full of rancour, malice, and a selfishness which approaches absolute cruelty: his pleasant nature perpetually blinding him to the sufferings of his wife, more gently born and gently bred; while her morbid sensitiveness exaggerates trivial vexatious into great misfortunes, and mere follies into actual crimes. All this wretchedness sprung, not from the man’s genius, but his other bad qualities, which, had he been a brainless ass, would have made bis wife’s life and his own just as miserable. Yet cociety moans out the moral, ‘ Never marry a genius!’ or the worse one, ‘lf you do marry a genius, you must condone all his shortcomings, lay yourself down as a mat for him to rub his shoes on; give him everything and expect nothing, not even the commonest rules of domestic courtesy and social morality.”