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 sort 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 the spring of pleasant and quaint fancies.Whereas I can imagine myself yawning all night long until my jaws ached and the tears came into my eyes, although my companion on the other side of the hearth held the most enlightened opinions on the franchise or the ballot.
The question of professions, in as far as they regard marriage, was only interesting to women until of late days, but it touches all of us now.Certainly, if I could help it, I would never marry a wife who wrote.The practice of letters is miserably harassing to the mind; and after an hour or two's work, all the more human portion of the author is extinct; he will bully, backbite, and speak daggers.Music, I hear, is not much better.But painting, on the contrary, is often highly sedative; because so much of the labour, after your picture is once begun, is almost entirely manual, and of that skilled sort of manual labour which offers a continual series of successes, and so tickles a man, through his vanity, into good humour.Alas! in letters there is nothing of this sort.
You may write as beautiful a hand as you will, you have always something else to think of, and cannot pause to notice your loops and flourishes; they are beside the mark, and the first law stationer could put you to the blush.Rousseau, indeed, made some account of penmanship, even made it a source of livelihood, when he copied out the HELOISE for DILETTANTEladies; and therein showed that strange eccentric prudence which guided him among so many thousand follies and insanities.It would be well for all of the GENUS IRRITABILEthus to add something of skilled labour to intangible brain-work.To find the right word is so doubtful a success and lies so near to failure, that there is no satisfaction in a year of it; but we all know when we have formed a letter perfectly; and a stupid artist, right or wrong, is almost equally certain he has found a right tone or a right colour, or made a dexterous stroke with his brush.And, again, painters may work out of doors; and the fresh air, the deliberate seasons, and the "tranquillising influence" of the green earth, counterbalance the fever of thought, and keep them cool, placable, and prosaic.
A ship captain is a good man to marry if it is a marriage of love, for absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate; but he is just the worst man if the feeling is more pedestrian, as habit is too frequently torn open and the solder has never time to set.Men who fish, botanise, work with the turning-lathe, or gather sea-weeds, will make admirable husbands and a little amateur painting in water-colour shows the innocent and quiet mind.Those who have a few intimates are to be avoided; while those who swim loose, who have their hat in their hand all along the street, who can number an infinity of acquaintances and are not chargeable with any one friend, promise an easy disposition and no rival to the wife's influence.I will not say they are the best of men, but they are the stuff out of which adroit and capable women manufacture the best of husbands.It is to be noticed that those who have loved once or twice already are so much the better educated to a woman's hand; the bright boy of fiction is an odd and most uncomfortable mixture of shyness and coarseness, and needs a deal of civilising.Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden rule), no woman should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke.It is not for nothing that this "ignoble tabagie," as Michelet calls it, spreads over all the world.Michelet rails against it because it renders you happy apart from thought or work; to provident women this will seem no evil influence in married life.
Whatever keeps a man in the front garden, whatever checks wandering fancy and all inordinate ambition, whatever makes for lounging and contentment, makes just so surely for domestic happiness.
These notes, if they amuse the reader at all, will probably amuse him more when he differs than when he agrees with them; at least they will do no harm, for nobody will follow my advice.But the last word is of more concern.
Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.They have been so tried among the inconstant squalls and currents, so often sailed for islands in the air or lain becalmed with burning heart, that they will risk all for solid ground below their feet.Desperate pilots, they run their sea-sick, weary bark upon the dashing rocks.It seems as if marriage were the royal road through life, and realised, on the instant, what we have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living.They think it will sober and change them.Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamour for ever.But this is a wile of the devil's.
To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep calling and calling in their ears.For marriage is like life in this - that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.
II
HOPE, they say, deserts us at no period of our existence.
