Non-Fiction > Uncollected essays > Volumes 33-38, 1876-1878 - Cornhill magazine > Volume 34

174 "VIEGINIBUS PUERISQUE."
"William and his spouse. For there are differences which no habit nor
affection can reconcile, and the Bohemian must not intermarry with the
Pharisee. Imagine Consuelo as Mrs. Samuel Budget, the wife of the
successful merchant! The best of men and the best of women may
sometimes live together all their lives, and, for want of some consent on
fundamental questions, hold each other lost spirits to the end.
A certain sort of talent is almost indispensable for people who would
spend years together and not bore themselves to death. But the talent,
like the agreement, must be for and about life. To dwell happily
together, they shovild be versed in the niceties of the heart, and born with
a faculty for willing compromise. The woman must be talented as a
woman, and it will not much matter although she is talented in nothing
else. She must know her metier clefemme, and have a fine touch for the
affections. And it is more important that a person shoidd be a good
gossip, and talk pleasantly and smartly of common friends and the thou-
sand and one nothings of the day and hoiu", than that she should speak
with the tongues of men and angels ; for a while together by the fii-e,
happens more frequently in marriage than the presence of a distinguished
foreigner to dinner. That people should laugh over the same sort of
jests, and have many a story of " grouse in the gun-room," many an old
joke between them which time cannot wither nor custom stale, is a better
preparation for life, by your leave, than many other things higher and
better sounding in the woi-ld's ears. You could read Kant by yourself,
if you wanted ; but you must share a joke with some one else. You can
forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisi-
tion ; but to find your wife laughing when you had teai-s in your eyes,
or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards
a dissokition 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 vip trying to distinguish Whigs from Toiies ;
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 tm-ns^and you will not find many more shrewd, trenchant,
and humoious. Nay, to make plainer what I have in mind, this same
woman has a share of the higher and more poetical imderstanding, 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 soi't 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