The weekly Shasta courier. [volume] (Shasta, Calif.) 1872-190?, 1873-09-13
Women and Marriage.
LETTER TO A SOLITARY STUDENT.

Isolated as you are, by the very SUPERIOR
ty of your culture, from the ignorant pro-
vincial world around you, 1 cannot but be-
lieve that marriage is essential to your in
tellectual health and welfare. If you mar
ried some cultivated woman, bred in the
cultivated society of great capital, that
companionship would give you an indepen-
dence of surrounding influences which moth
ing else can give. You fancy that, by shut
ting yourself up in country house, you are
uninhuenced by the world around. 1t is
great error. You know that you are iso-
lated that you are looked upon and prob
ably ridculed as an eccentric, and this
knowledge, which it Is impossible to ban
ish from your mind. deprives your thinking
of elaaticity and grace. You urgently need
the support of an intellectual friendship
quite near to you, under your own roof.
Bachelors in great cities feel this necessity
less.
Still, remember that, whoever has ar
ranged his life independent of CUSTOM runs
peculiar risk in marriage. Women
are by nature far more subservient to Gus
tom as we are; more than we can easily
conceive. The danger of marriage for a
person of your tastes is, that woman en-
terng your house might enter it as the rep
resentatlve of that infinitely interfering au-
thority which you continually ignore. And
let us never forget that a perfect obedience
to custom requires great secrafices of time
and money that you might not be disposed
to make, and which certainly would interfere
with study. You value and enjoy your SOL
itude, well knowing how great thing it is
to be master of all your hours. 1t is diff
cult to conciliate solitude. or even wise
and suitable selection of acquaintance,
with the semi-publicity of marriage. Heads
OF families receive many persons in their
house whom they would never have invited,
and from whose society they derive little
pleasure and no profit. De Senancour had
plans of studious retirement, and hoped that
the "d0uce intimite" of marriage might be
compatible with these cherished projects.
But marriage he found, drew him into the
circle of ordinary provincial life, and he al
ways suffered from its influences.
You are necessarily an eccentric. In the
tricity to study, for nobody but you studies
any thing. A man so situated is fortunate
when this feeling of eccentricity is allevi-
ated, and unfortunate when it is increased.
A wife would certainly do one or the other.
Married to a very superior woman. able to
understand the devotion to intellectual aims,
you would be much relieved of the painful
consciousness of eccentricity; but woman
of less capacity would intensity it.
So far as we can observe the married life
of Others, it seems to me that have met
with instances of men, constituted and occu-
pied very much as you are, who have found
in marriage strong protection against the
ignorant judgments of their neighbors. and
an assurance of intellectual peace while in
other cases it has appeared rather as if their
solitude were made more cause of con-
scious suffering, as if the walls of their cabi-
nets were pulled down for the boobies out
side to stare at them and laugh at them. A
woman will either take your side against
the customs of the little world around, or
she will take the side ofcustom against you.
If she loves you deeply, and if there is some
visible result of your labors in fame and
money. she may possibly do the first, and
then she will protect your tranquility better
than force of policemen, and give you a
delightful sense of reconciliation and human
ity; but many of her most powerful in
tincts tend the other wav. She has natU-
raj sympathy with all the observances of
custom. and you neglect them /; she is fitted
for social life, which You are not. Unless
you win her solely to your side, she may I'M
dertake the enterprise of curing your eccen-
tricities and adapting you to the ideal of her
caste. This may be highly satisfactory to
the operator, but is full of Inconvenience
for the patient.-Hdmerton's Intellectual
Tifo'