It may cost you, perhaps, some
disagreeable self-denial; but you will be certain of maintaining
your empire over him, if you can preserve it over yourself- what I
have already observed, also, shows me, that this difficult attempt
does not surpass your courage.
'Would you have your husband constantly at your feet? keep him at
some distance from your person. You will long maintain the authority
in love, if you know but how to render your favours rare and valuable.
It is thus you may employ even the arts of coquetry in the service
of virtue, and those of love in that of reason.'
I shall close my extracts with a just description of a comfortable
couple. 'And yet you must not imagine, that even such management
will always suffice. Whatever precaution be taken, enjoyment will,
by degrees, take off the edge of passion. But when love hath lasted as
long as possible, a pleasing habitude supplies its place, and the
attachment of a mutual confidence succeeds to the transports of
passion. Children often form a more agreeable and permanent connection
between married people than even love itself. When you cease to be the
mistress of Emilius, you will continue to be his wife and friend,
you will be the mother of his children.'*
* Rousseau's Emilius.
Children, he truly observes, form a much more permanent connexion
between married people than love. Beauty, he declares, will not be
valued, or even seen after a couple have lived six months together;
artificial graces and coquetry will likewise pall on the senses: why
then does he say that a girl should be educated for her husband with
the same care as for an eastern haram?
I now appeal from the reveries of fancy and refined licentiousness
to the good sense of mankind, whether, if the object of education be
to prepare women to become chaste wives and sensible mothers, the
method so plausibly recommended in the foregoing sketch, be the one
best calculated to produce those ends? Will it be allowed that the
surest way to make a wife chaste, is to teach her to practise the
wanton arts of a mistress, termed virtuous coquetry, by the sensualist
who can no longer relish the artless charms of sincerity, or taste the
pleasure arising from a tender intimacy, when confidence is
unchecked by suspicion, and rendered interesting by sense?
The man who can be contented to live with a pretty, useful
companion, without a mind, has lost in voluptuous gratifications a
taste for more refined enjoyments; he has never felt the calm
satisfaction, that refreshes the parched heart, like the silent dew of
heaven,- of being beloved by one who could understand him.
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