--guessed it all without another word! --When your mother, I say, came and told her mother she was engaged, and your grandmother told your grandfather, how much did they know of the intimate nature of the young gentleman to whom she had pledged her existence? I will not be so hard as to ask how much your respected mamma knew at that time of the intimate nature of your respected papa, though, if we should compare a young girl's man-as-she-thinks-him with a forty-summered matron's man-as-she-finds-him, I have my doubts as to whether the second would be a facsimile of the first in most cases.
The idea that in this world each young person is to wait until he or she finds that precise counterpart who alone of all creation was meant for him or her, and then fall instantly in love with it, is pretty enough, only it is not Nature's way.It is not at all essential that all pairs of human beings should be, as we sometimes say of particular couples, "born for each other." Sometimes a man or a woman is made a great deal better and happier in the end for having had to conquer the faults of the one beloved, and make the fitness not found at first, by gradual assimilation.There is a class of good women who have no right to marry perfectly good men, because they have the power of saving those who would go to ruin but for the guiding providence of a good wife.I have known many such cases.It is the most momentous question a woman is ever called upon to decide, whether the faults of the man she loves are beyond remedy and will drag her down, or whether she is competent to be his earthly redeemer and lift him to her own level.
A person of genius should marry a person of character.Genius does not herd with genius.The musk-deer and the civet-cat are never found in company.They don't care for strange scents,--they like plain animals better than perfumed ones.Nay, if you will have the kindness to notice, Nature has not gifted my lady musk-deer with the personal peculiarity by which her lord is so widely known.
Now when genius allies itself with character, the world is very apt to think character has the best of the bargain.A brilliant woman marries a plain, manly fellow, with a simple intellectual mechanism;--we have all seen such cases.The world often stares a good deal and wonders.She should have taken that other, with a far more complex mental machinery.She might have had a watch with the philosophical compensation-balance, with the metaphysical index which can split a second into tenths, with the musical chime which can turn every quarter of an hour into melody.She has chosen a plain one, that keeps good time, and that is all.
Let her alone! She knows what she is about.Genius has an infinitely deeper reverence for character than character can have for genius.To be sure, genius gets the world's praise, because its work is a tangible product, to be bought, or had for nothing.It bribes the common voice to praise it by presents of speeches, poems, statues, pictures, or whatever it can please with.Character evolves its best products for home consumption; but, mind you, it takes a deal more to feed a family for thirty years than to make a holiday feast for our neighbors once or twice in our lives.You talk of the fire of genius.Many a blessed woman, who dies unsung and unremembered, has given out more of the real vital heat that keeps the life in human souls, without a spark flitting through her humble chimney to tell the world about it, than would set a dozen theories smoking, or a hundred odes simmering, in the brains of so many men of genius.It is in latent caloric, if I may borrow a philosophical expression, that many of the noblest hearts give out the life that warms them.Cornelia's lips grow white, and her pulse hardly warms her thin fingers,--but she has melted all the ice out of the hearts of those young Gracchi, and her lost heat is in the blood of her youthful heroes.We are always valuing the soul's temperature by the thermometer of public deed or word.Yet the great sun himself, when he pours his noonday beams upon some vast hyaline boulder, rent from the eternal ice-quarries, and floating toward the tropics, never warms it a fraction above the thirty-two degrees of Fahrenheit that marked the moment when the first drop trickled down its side.
How we all like the spirting up of a fountain, seemingly against the law that makes water everywhere slide, roll, leap, tumble headlong, to get as low as the earth will let it! That is genius.But what is this transient upward movement, which gives us the glitter and the rainbow, to that unsleeping, all-present force of gravity, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, (if the universe be eternal,)--the great outspread hand of God himself, forcing all things down into their places, and keeping them there? Such, in smaller proportion, is the force of character to the fitful movements of genius, as they are or have been linked to each other in many a household, where one name was historic, and the other, let me say the nobler, unknown, save by some faint reflected ray, borrowed from its lustrous companion.