I have considered, thus far, the effects on the pleasures and benefitsof the marriage union which depend on the mere unlikeness between the wifeand the husband: but the evil tendency is prodigiously aggravated when theunlikeness is inferiority. Mere unlikeness, when it only means differenceof good qualities, may be more a benefit in the way of mutual improvement,than a drawback from comfort. When each emulates, and desires and endeavoursto acquire, the other's peculiar qualities the difference does not producediversity of interest, but increased identity of it, and makes each stillmore valuable to the other. But when one is much the inferior of the to inmental ability and cultivation, and is not actively attempting by the other'said to rise to the other's level, the whole influence of the connexion uponthe development of the superior of the two is deteriorating: and still moreso in a tolerably happy marriage than in an unhappy one. It is not with impunitythat the superior in intellect shuts himself up with an inferior, and electsthat inferior for his chosen, and sole completely intimate, associate. Anysociety which is not improving is deteriorating: and the more so, the closerand more familiar it is. Even a really superior man almost always beginsto 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 himis always so. While his self-satisfaction is incessantly ministered to onthe one hand, on the other he insensibly imbibes the modes of feeling, andof looking at things, which belong to a more vulgar or a more limited mindthan his own. This evil differs from many of those which have hitherto beendwelt on, by being an increasing one. The association of men with women indaily life is much closer and more complete than it ever was before. Men'slife is more domestic. Formerly, their pleasures and chosen occupations wereamong men, and in men's company: their wives had but a fragment of theirlives. At the present time, the progress of civilisation, and the turn ofopinion against the rough amusements and convivial excesses which formerlyoccupied most men in their hours of relaxation -- together with (it mustbe said) the improved tone of modern feeling as to the reciprocity of dutywhich binds the husband towards the wife -- have thrown the man very muchmore upon home and its inmates, for his personal and social pleasures: whilethe 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 andmental taste, while leaving them, in most cases, still hopelessly inferiorto him. His desire of mental communion is thus in general satisfied by acommunion from which he learns nothing. An unimproving and unstimulatingcompanionship is substituted for (what he might otherwise have been obligedto seek) the society of his equals in powers and his fellows in the higherpursuits. We see, accordingly, that young men of the greatest promise generallycease to improve as soon as they marry, and, not improving, inevitably degenerate.
If the wife does not push the husband forward, she always holds him back.
He ceases to care for what she does not care for; he no longer desires, andends by disliking and shunning, society congenial to his former aspirations,and which would now shame his falling-off from them; his higher facultiesboth of mind and heart cease to be called into activity. And this changecoinciding with the new and selfish interests which are created by the family,after a few years he differs in no material respect from those who have neverhad wishes for anything but the common vanities and the common pecuniaryobjects.
What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated faculties,identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there exists that best kindof equality, similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal superiorityin them -- so that each can enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other,and can have alternately the pleasure of leading and of being led in thepath of development -- I will not attempt to describe. To those who can conceiveit, there is no need; to those who cannot, it would appear the dream of anenthusiast. But I maintain, with the profoundest conviction, that this, andthis only, is the ideal of marriage; and that all opinions, customs, andinstitutions which favour any other notion of it, or turn the conceptionsand aspirations connected with it into any other direction, by whatever pretencesthey may be coloured, are relics of primitive barbarism. The moral regenerationof mankind will only really commence, when the most fundamental of the socialrelations is placed under the rule of equal justice, and when human beingslearn to cultivate their strongest sympathy with an equal in nights and incultivation.
