rom
comfort. When each emulates, and desires and endeavours to acquire,
the other's peculiar qualities, the difference does not produce
diversity of interest, but increased identity of it, and makes each
still more valuable to the other. But when one is much the inferior
of the two in mental ability and cultivation, and is not actively
attempting by the other's aid to rise to the other's level, the whole
influence of the connexion upon the development of the superior of
the two is deteriorating: and still more so in a tolerably happy
marriage than in an unhappy one. It is not with impunity that the
superior in intellect shuts himself up with an inferior, and elects
that inferior for his chosen, and sole completely intimate,
associate. Any society which is not improving, is deteriorating: and
the more so, the closer and more familiar it is. Even a really
superior man almost always begins to deteriorate when he is
habitually (as the phrase is) king of his company: and in his most
habitual company the husband who has a wife inferior to him is always
so. While his self-satisfaction is incessantly ministered to on the
one hand, on the other he insensibly imbibes the modes of feeling,
and of looking at things, which belong to a more vulgar or a more
limited mind than his own. This evil differs from many of those which
have hitherto been dwelt on, by being an increasing one. The
association of men with women in daily life is much closer and more
complete than it ever was before. Men's life is more domestic.
Formerly, their pleasures and chosen occupations were among men, and
in men's company: their wives had but a fragment of their lives. At
the present time, the progress of civilization, and the turn of
opinion against the rough amusements and convivial excesses which
formerly occupied most men in their hours of relaxation--together
with (it must be said) the improved tone of modern feeling as to the
reciprocity of duty which binds the husband towards the wife--have
thrown the man very much more upon home and its inmates, for his
personal and social pleasures: while the kind and degree of
improvement which has been made in women's education, has made them
in some degree capable of being his companions in ideas and mental
tastes, while leaving them, in most cases, still hopelessly inferior
to him. His desire of mental communion is thus in general satisfied
by a communion from which he learns nothing. An unimproving and
unstim