and peace, a capacious mind full of
grand aspirations, married, by some fatal chance, to a woman with a
petty soul, a teasing and tyrannical temper, a mendacious and rasping
tongue, whose taste is for small gossip and scandal, whose ambition
is for fashionable show and noise, whose life is one incessant fret
and sting, it may be doubted if this man's lot is not severer with
his ill matched consort than hers would be with the worst husband in
the world. He had better marry a vinegar cruet than such a Tartar.
When weary and seeking to rest, to be roused up by a scolding; when
searching for truth, or contemplating beauty, or communing with God,
or aspiring to perfection, or scheming some vast good for mankind, to
be aggravated by abuse, insulted by false charges, dragged down to
petty interests which he despises, and mixed up with wrongs and
passions which he loathes, these degrading injuries, these wasteful
vexations, are what he must endure. No wonder if he vehemently
resents a treatment so incongruous with his worth. No wonder if,
vexed, hurt, goaded half to madness, he gets enraged, and unseemly
contentions ensue, followed by painful depression and remorseful
grief. No wonder if he finds it hard indeed to forget or to forgive
the infliction of an evil so incomparably profound and frightful.
There is, to a high smiled man, no wrong more hurtful or more
difficult to pardon than to have mean motives falsely ascribed to
him, to be placed by misinterpretation on a lower plane than that
where he belongs. Every such experience stabs the moral source of
life, and draws blood from the soul itself. Husband and wife
powerfully tend to a common level and likeness. The higher must
redeem and lift the unequal mate, or live in strife and misery. If
the lower takes pattern after the superior one, the petty, frivolous,
false, and fretful becoming magnanimous, dedicated, truthful, and
serene, it is a divine triumph of grace, and the result will be full
of blessedness. But otherwise a wearing unhappiness is inevitable,
however carefully it be hidden, however bravely it be borne. George
Sand says very strikingly of Rousseau and Therese Levasseur, "His
true fault was in persevering in his attachment for that vulgar
woman, who turned to her own profit the weaknesses of his ill starred
character and his self torturing imagination. One does not with
impunity live in company with a little soul. When one is a Jean
Jacques Rousseau, one does no