第47章 CHAPTER 4(7)

Unlikeness may attract, but it is likeness which retains; and in proportionto the likeness is the suitability of the individuals to give each othera happy life. While women are so unlike men, it is not wonderful that selfishmen should feel the need of arbitrary power in their own hands, to arrestin limine the life-long conflict of inclinations, by deciding every questionon the side of their own preference. When people are extremely unlike, therecan be no real identity of interest. Very often there is conscientious differenceof opinion between married people, on the highest points of duty. Is thereany reality in the marriage union where this takes place? Yet it is not uncommonanywhere, when the woman has any earnestness of character; and it is a verygeneral case indeed in Catholic countries, when she is supported in her dissentby the only other authority to which she is taught to bow, the priest. Withthe usual barefacedness of power not accustomed to find itself disputed,the influence of priests over women is attacked by Protestant and Liberalwriters, less for being bad in itself, than because it is a rival authorityto the husband, and raises up a revolt against his infallibility. In England,similar differences occasionally exist when an Evangelical wife has alliedherself with a husband of a different quality; but in general this sourceat least of dissension is got rid of, by reducing the minds of women to sucha nullity, that they have no opinions but those of Mrs. Grundy, or thosewhich the husband tells them to have. When there is no difference of opinion,differences merely of taste may be sufficient to detract greatly from thehappiness of married life. And though it may stimulate the amatory propensitiesof men, it does not conduce to married happiness, to exaggerate by differencesof education whatever may be the native differences of the sexes. If themarried pair are well-bred and well-behaved people, they tolerate each other'stastes; but is mutual toleration what people look forward to, when they enterinto marriage? These differences of inclination will naturally make theirwishes different, if not restrained by affection or duty, as to almost alldomestic questions which arise. What a difference there must be in the societywhich the two persons will wish to frequent, or be frequented by! Each willdesire associates who share their own tastes: the persons agreeable to one,will be indifferent or positively disagreeable to the other; yet there canbe none who are not common to both, for married people do not now live indifferent parts of the house and have totally different visiting lists, asin the reign of Louis XV. They cannot help having different wishes as tothe bringing up of the children: each will wish to see reproduced in themtheir own tastes and sentiments: and there is either a compromise, and onlya half satisfaction to either, or the wife has to yield -- often with bittersuffering; and, with or without intention, her occult influence continuesto counterwork the husband's purposes.

It would of course be extreme folly to suppose that these differencesof feeling and inclination only exist because women are brought up differentlyfrom men, and that there would not be differences of taste under any imaginablecircumstances. But there is nothing beyond the mark in saying that the distinctionin bringing up immensely aggravates those differences, and renders them whollyinevitable. While women are brought up as they are, a man and a woman willbut rarely find in one another real agreement of tastes and wishes as todaily life. They will generally have to give it up as hopeless, and renouncethe attempt to have, in the intimate associate of their daily life, thatidem velle, idem nolle, which is the recognised bond of any society thatis really such: or if the man succeeds in obtaining it, he does so by choosinga woman who is so complete a nullity that she has no velle or nolle at all,and is as ready to comply with one thing as another if anybody tells herto do so. Even this calculation is apt to fail; dullness and want of spiritare not always a guarantee of the submission which is so confidently expectedfrom them. But if they were, is this the ideal of marriage? What, in thiscase, does the man obtain by it, except an upper servant, a nurse, or a mistress? on the contrary, when each of two persons, instead of being a nothing, isa something; when they are attached to one another, and are not too muchunlike to begin with; the constant partaking in the same things, assistedby their sympathy, draws out the latent capacities of each for being interestedin the things which were at first interesting only to the other; and worksa gradual assimilation of the tastes and characters to one another, partlyby the insensible modification of each, but more by a real enriching of thetwo natures, each acquiring the tastes and capacities of the other in additionto its own. This often happens between two friends of the same sex, who aremuch associated in their daily life: and it would be a common, if not thecommonest, case in marriage, did not the totally different bringing up ofthe two sexes make it next to an impossibility to form a really well-assortedunion. Were this remedied, whatever differences there might still be in individualtastes, there would at least be, as a general rule, complete unity and unanimityas to the great objects of life. When the two persons both care for greatobjects, and are a help and encouragement to each other in whatever regardsthese, the minor matters on which their tastes may differ are not all-importantto them; and there is a foundation for solid friendship, of an enduring character,more likely than anything else to make it, through the whole of life, a greaterpleasure to each to give pleasure to the other, than to receive it.