When I write my book, _I caratteri umani_, which I have been meditating and working at for so many years, perhaps I may be able to get more light upon this obscure point of individual and national psychology. But at present I am satisfied to treat the problem on wide lines, and only as far as it contributes to the happiness of marriage. In the mean time let me state the terrible fact, once and for all, that among the many discords which are possible between the man and the woman, none exercises a more weighty influence than that which arises from want of union in character. There may be happiness between a rich man and a poor woman; between a poor man and a rich woman; an elderly woman and a young man; an old man and a young woman; between two different intellects and educations; we have rare but well-confirmed examples of harmony between all these contemporaneous discords. But when characters cry out against and strike one another, _Lasciate ogni speranza o voi che entrate_; then desperation will be the habitual state of the dual existence. ⁂ Incompatibility of character does not mean a difference of taste, affections, aspirations; for differences are necessary to perfect harmony, and the man and woman (we have repeated it a hundred times) love each other better and better the more the man is a man and the woman a woman—which is as much as to say the more different they are. In common language incompatibility of character means, for example, to harness an ox and a horse of Arab breed to the same carriage; to put a tortoise and a deer to walk together; to tie a goose and a swallow to the same cord, and condemn them to fly together; and if these comparisons fall short of the reality, it is because their enormity does not reach by a very long way the psychical discords of men and women. In that monstrous pairing of the deer with the tortoise, the horse with the ox, the swallow with the goose, only locomotion is treated of; but for the race that a man and a woman must take through life it is a matter not only of velocity, but of environment and measure; of all that can modify senses, sentiments, and thoughts. To find a comparison which at all suits or pictures truthfully the tortures of two badly matched individuals who must live together, I can only take that of a fish and a bird condemned to live together. But this comparison is not even good, for either the fish or the bird would die surely and quickly, but of the man or woman neither dies, but live a death in life, feeling nothing of life but disgust, pain, and wrong.