486 



The Review of Reviews, 



GREAT MEN'S CHOICE OF WIVES. 



The perennial question why brilliant men so often 

 choose wives that are reputed to be dull comes n[) 

 in an Edtnbnrgli Rcvimi of famous autobiographies. 

 The biographies selected are those of Rousseau, 

 Gibbon, Goethe, J. S. Mill and Spencer. In the 

 Oi.tober number the writer says : — 



We are immediately struck by llie very remarkable circum- 

 slaiice lliat not one of these \vi iters of great aulobiographies stood 

 in absolutely normal relations \\itli their women. Spencer never 

 married, and never even fell in love. Cellini, Rousseau, and 

 Goethe all married women from the lower classes, by whom 

 they had already had children. Mill's pre-marital relations 

 with his wife were such as to cause much scandal. In all these 

 cases (except Cellini's, of which there is no record) the marriage 

 was looked upon as a disaster, and the wife was for long not 

 received in society, in spite of the extreme distinction oi' the 

 husbands, 'i'he women had not in any of these cases unusual 

 qualities, either physical or mental, that were apparent to 

 outsiders. On the contrary, in the cases of Goethe and Rousseau 

 she had had only a rudimentary education, and sprang from 

 the very lowest classes. Rousseau selected as his partner for 

 life a wholly illiterate general servant, worked to death in a 

 low tavern. Described by Lord Morley as of " brutish under- 

 standing," she could neither read nor write nor add up figures. 

 She never even could attain to the mastery of the order in 

 which the months follow one another. Goethe selected a young 

 woman who maintained herself by making artificial flowers ; 

 having escaped from her father, who had been brought by 

 drunkenness to absolute ruin and degradation. Vet both 

 Rousseau and Goethe had had much previous association with 

 cultivated women of high station and great attraction, whom 

 they deliberately abandoned. Mnre. de Warens and the 

 Frau von Stein were thrown over in I'avour of Therese Le 

 Vasseur and Christiane Vulpius, with their unamiable mothers 

 thrown in. Here surely is material for the philosopher of 

 biography to work upon. 



The writer chivalrously challenges the judgment 

 generally pronounced upon these wives of famous 

 men. He says : — • 



It is tolerably plain that the verdict of contemporaries 

 must have been wrong. It is absurd to present these women 

 as utterly useless, hanging like millstones round their husbands' 

 necks. They must in some way have been powerful aids and 

 even essential elements in the fame of which they appeared 

 to share so little. Perhaps the explanation is not after all ^o 

 very diflicult to understand. Goethe and Rousseau both 

 exhibit an intensely individualistic character in their writings. 

 Not only were they the greatest writers of their time unsur- 

 passed by any writers of any time, but they each have a 

 distinctive characteristic note, which is not to be found in 

 any other writings but their own. This note cm.anates from 

 a personality that has been developed to an extreme degree 

 along its own lines ; and it seems probable that any close 

 literary influence might have diverted that development from 

 its own into some more commonplace channel. It is cleai 

 that not so much individuality is likely to be found in a work 

 collaborated by two people, as in a work that is the product 

 of a single mind. It is a well-established statistical law that 

 the average of two characters will always diverge less from the 

 commonplace than a single character. It may therefore he 

 inferred that Rousseau and Goethe were more distinctly 

 Rousseauitc and Goctheian than they would have been had they 

 been less free from outer influence. I3ut in addition to this 

 negative advantage, they probably gathered high positive 

 benefits from their .association with these women. .'\11 the 

 knowledge we possess of the women goes to show that they 

 were oveiflowing with vitality and mental robustness. Constant 

 association with a vigorous personality cannot but have an 

 invigorating ctfect. No one alive could have rendered (o such 

 great authors any assistance in the formation or expression of 



their ideas. The only help possible to them was just that 

 environment of healthy, robust-minded persons, whose outlook 

 on life was free from trepidation or the vacillation that comes 

 from unrealised ambitions and hopes. This conscious efficiency 

 and success in dealing with life must have, by its infective 

 character, far outweighed the deficiencies wJiich are so much 

 discussed. And we may be sure these deficiencies have been 

 greatly ex.aggeraled. 



The writer proceeds to point out that high educa- 

 tion too often has an emasculating efiect upon 

 moderately endowed minds, especially among women. 

 Therefore Goethe and Rousseau were far better with 

 women who had no ambitions of their own to be fed 

 at the expense of their husbands, whose outlook on 

 life was simple, robust, and confident, than with 

 women who would have had pretensions to intellec- 

 tual interests alongside of their husbands. The 

 writer finds John Stuart Mill's an instance in point: — 



Mrs. Taylor and thereafter Miss Helen Taylor had intellec- 

 tual pretensions and did exercise an influence upon Mill which 

 can only be considered as deleterious. The nature of this 

 influence will be perceived by anyone who closely compares 

 those of Mill's published letters which were written indepen- 

 dently of Taylor influence ami those which weje under the 

 influence. That Mill never wrote any great work after the 

 " I'olitical Economy," published when he was thirty-nine, is 

 perhaps attributable to the same cause. Ills fame was made 

 long before he married, and he never afterwards greatly 

 increased it. 



These extracts will be read with great satisfaction 

 by all the " dull " wives of clever husbands, and 

 clever husbands of " dull " wives. 



WOMAN IN THE TRAGEDY OF TRANSITION. 



'' The Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero, writing in 

 the October Ceiitvry on Agrippina, the mother of Nero, 

 and her terrible end, dwells on the fact that " the 

 progress of the world is one of the most tragic of its 

 phenomena. When an old world is disappearing and 

 a new one making its way, men are then called upon 

 to solve insoluble problems and to attempt enter- 

 prises which are both necessary and impossible ": — 



At such times women generally sufier more than men, for 

 every chmge which occurs in their situation seems more danger- 

 ous, and it is right that it should be so. For woman is by 

 nature the vestal of our species, and for that reason she must be- 

 more conservative, more circumspect, and more virtuous than 

 man. There is no state or civilisation which has comprehended 

 the highest things in life which h.is not been forced to instil into 

 its women rather than into its men the sense for all those viitues 

 upon which depend the stability of the family and the future of 

 the race. And for every era thisjsa question of life and death. 

 In such periods when one world is dying and another coming to ' 

 birth, all conceptions become confused, and all attempts bring 

 forth bizarre results. He who h ishes to preserve, often destroys, 

 so that virtue seems vice, and vice seems virtue. Precisely for 

 this reason it is more diflicult for a woman than for a man to 

 succeed in fulfilling her proper mission, for she is more exposed 

 to the danger of losing her way and of missing her particular 

 function ; and since she is more likely to fail in realising 

 her natural destiny, she is more likely to be doomed to a life of 

 misfortune. 



The Journal of the Fi. Ik- Lore Soc'uiy for October 

 contains in full the very interesting paper on Hamp- 

 shire Folk-Lore, read before the Society by Mr. D. 

 H. Montrav Read. 



