'DON’T MARRY LITERARY MEN.’

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 44, 31 October 1891, Page 527

'DON’T MARRY LITERARY MEN.’

In the September number of Longman’s Magazine, Mr Lang, speaking of the ‘ New Life of Mrs Carlyle,’ ‘ with all the sad repeated tale of bugs, crowing cocks, groundless frantic jealousies, howls of woe over the most trivial discomforts, shrewish bickerings, brief reconciliations, and all the other too familiar sorrows of that self-tormenting household,’ says:— ‘The moral for ladies is, “Don’t marry literary men.” The marriages of authors have been wretched out of all proportion to the common lot. The reason is not only that authors are vain, and irritable, and flighty, and absorbed, like artists, in their work. The true, or chief cause of married misery among writers is probably this : they do their work at home. Now bricklayers, soldiers, doctors, barristers, clerks, and most men do their work away from home. Domestic troubles about servants, children, butchers, dressmakers, cannot be launched on them while they are occupied with their business. Nor do they, in turn, bring preoccupation with briefs, or bricks, or clients, or what not, into their domestic circle. But Mrs Literary Man is apt to rush in upon the solitude of Genius with some “ terrible tale from the baker’s,” while Genius, when summoned to his meals, has his head full of rhymes, or of the persons in his novel, or, to take Mr Carlyle’s case, of Frederick the Great or < (liver Cromwell. His mind is absent when he should be lending the pleased ear to feminine prattle, and, later, when examined therein, he is miserably plucked. He is convicted of not having attended to what was said —a crime of insult. I dare say Mrs Carlyle often found Mr Carlyle an unconcerned and impatient hearer of her witty conversation, whereas he did listen when away from home in a country house to Lady Ashburton. Hencethesetearsof Mrs Carlyle’s, and the confidences which she inflicted on Mazzini and others. The unlucky pair, as Mrs Carlyle said, had thinner skins than other people, and were profusely profane, to begin with. But if Mr Carlyle had been wise enough to keep his books and papers in a remote studio, and to walk thither every morning, he and his wife would have given less handle to the gossip and the biographer. Young ladies about to marry literary men, young men engaged to literary ladies, should ponder on these things and arrange to do their work away from home, unless they have much better tempers and digestions than the Carlyles enjoyed. “ Home industries” may be salutary when they are mechanical, but not when they are mental, especially if the labourer has the irritability of some—luckily not of all—geniuses.’