Virginibus Puerisque | Page 7

wanted; but you must share a
joke with some one else. You can forgive people who do not follow
you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing
when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of
laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.
I know a woman who, from some distaste or disability, could never so
much as understand the meaning of the word POLITICS, and has given
up trying to distinguish Whigs from Tories; but take her on her own
politics, ask her about other men or women and the chicanery of
everyday existence - the rubs, the tricks, the vanities on which life turns

- and you will not find many more shrewd, trenchant, and humorous.
Nay, to make plainer what I have in mind, this same woman has a share
of the higher and more poetical understanding, frank interest in things
for their own sake, and enduring astonishment at the most common.
She is not to be deceived by custom, or made to think a mystery solved
when it is repeated. I have heard her say she could wonder herself crazy
over the human eyebrow. Now in a world where most of us walk very
contentedly in the little lit circle of their own reason, and have to be
reminded of what lies without by specious and clamant exceptions -
earthquakes, eruptions of Vesuvius, banjos floating in mid-air at a
SEANCE, and the like - a mind so fresh and unsophisticated is no
despicable gift. I will own I think it a better sort of mind than goes
necessarily with the clearest views on public business. It will wash. It
will find something to say at an odd moment. It has in it the spring of
pleasant and quaint fancies. Whereas I can imagine myself yawning all
night long until my jaws ached and the tears came into my eyes,
although my companion on the other side of the hearth held the most
enlightened opinions on the franchise or the ballot.
The question of professions, in as far as they regard marriage, was only
interesting to women until of late days, but it touches all of us now.
Certainly, if I could help it, I would never marry a wife who wrote. The
practice of letters is miserably harassing to the mind; and after an hour
or two's work, all the more human portion of the author is extinct; he
will bully, backbite, and speak daggers. Music, I hear, is not much
better. But painting, on the contrary, is often highly sedative; because
so much of the labour, after your picture is once begun, is almost
entirely manual, and of that skilled sort of manual labour which offers a
continual series of successes, and so tickles a man, through his vanity,
into good humour. Alas! in letters there is nothing of this sort. You may
write as beautiful a hand as you will, you have always something else
to think of, and cannot pause to notice your loops and flourishes; they
are beside the mark, and the first law stationer could put you to the
blush. Rousseau, indeed, made some account of penmanship, even
made it a source of livelihood, when he copied out the HELOISE for
DILETTANTE ladies; and therein showed that strange eccentric
prudence which guided him among so many thousand follies and

insanities. It would be well for all of the GENUS IRRITABILE thus to
add something of skilled labour to intangible brain- work. To find the
right word is so doubtful a success and lies so near to failure, that there
is no satisfaction in a year of it; but we all know when we have formed
a letter perfectly; and a stupid artist, right or wrong, is almost equally
certain he has found a right tone or a right colour, or made a dexterous
stroke with his brush. And, again, painters may work out of doors; and
the fresh air, the deliberate seasons, and the "tranquillising influence"
of the green earth, counterbalance the fever of thought, and keep them
cool, placable, and prosaic.
A ship captain is a good man to marry if it is a marriage of love, for
absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate;
but he is just the worst man if the feeling is more pedestrian, as habit is
too frequently torn open and the solder has never time to set. Men who
fish, botanise, work with the turning-lathe, or gather sea-weeds, will
make admirable husbands and a little amateur painting in water-colour
shows the innocent and quiet mind. Those who have a few intimates
are to be avoided; while those who swim loose, who have their hat in
their