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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Famous Affinities of History V4, by Lyndon Orr
+#4 in our series by Lyndon Orr
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+Title: Famous Affinities of History V4
+       The Romance of Devotion
+ŒFú‰^øëeÄ^ø&€uN&Ä_&ƒ
+Author: Lyndon Orr
+
+Release Date: November, 2003 [Etext #4692]
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+FAMOUS AFFINITIES OF HISTORY
+
+THE ROMANCE OF DEVOTION
+
+BY LYNDON ORR
+
+VOLUME IV OF IV.
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+DEAN SWIFT AND THE TWO ESTHERS
+PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY AND MARY GODWIN
+THE STORY OF THE CARLYLES
+THE STORY OF THE HUGOS
+THE STORY OF GEORGE SAND
+THE MYSTERY OF CHARLES DICKENS
+HONORE DE BALZAC AND EVELINA HANSKA
+CHARLES READE AND LAURA SEYMOUR
+
+
+
+
+
+DEAN SWIFT AND THE TWO ESTHERS
+
+
+The story of Jonathan Swift and of the two women who gave their
+lives for love of him is familiar to every student of English
+literature. Swift himself, both in letters and in politics, stands
+out a conspicuous figure in the reigns of King William III and
+Queen Anne. By writing Gulliver's Travels he made himself
+immortal. The external facts of his singular relations with two
+charming women are sufficiently well known; but a definite
+explanation of these facts has never yet been given. Swift held
+his tongue with a repellent taciturnity. No one ever dared to
+question him. Whether the true solution belongs to the sphere of
+psychology or of physiology is a question that remains unanswered.
+
+But, as the case is one of the most puzzling in the annals of
+love, it may be well to set forth the circumstances very briefly,
+to weigh the theories that have already been advanced, and to
+suggest another.
+
+Jonathan Swift was of Yorkshire stock, though he happened to be
+born in Dublin, and thus is often spoken of as "the great Irish
+satirist," or "the Irish dean." It was, in truth, his fate to
+spend much of his life in Ireland, and to die there, near the
+cathedral where his remains now rest; but in truth he hated
+Ireland and everything connected with it, just as he hated
+Scotland and everything that was Scottish. He was an Englishman to
+the core.
+
+High-stomached, proud, obstinate, and over-mastering, independence
+was the dream of his life. He would accept no favors, lest he
+should put himself under obligation; and although he could give
+generously, and even lavishly, he lived for the most part a
+miser's life, hoarding every penny and halfpenny that he could.
+Whatever one may think of him, there is no doubt that he was a
+very manly man. Too many of his portraits give the impression of a
+sour, supercilious pedant; but the finest of them all--that by
+Jervas--shows him as he must have been at his very prime, with a
+face that was almost handsome, and a look of attractive humor
+which strengthens rather than lessens the power of his brows and
+of the large, lambent eyes beneath them.
+
+At fifteen he entered Trinity College, in Dublin, where he read
+widely but studied little, so that his degree was finally granted
+him only as a special favor. At twenty-one he first visited
+England, and became secretary to Sir William Temple, at Moor Park.
+Temple, after a distinguished career in diplomacy, had retired to
+his fine country estate in Surrey. He is remembered now for
+several things--for having entertained Peter the Great of Russia;
+for having, while young, won the affections of Dorothy Osborne,
+whose letters to him are charming in their grace and archness; for
+having been the patron of Jonathan Swift; and for fathering the
+young girl named Esther Johnson, a waif, born out of wedlock, to
+whom Temple gave a place in his household.
+
+When Swift first met her, Esther Johnson was only eight years old;
+and part of his duties at Moor Park consisted in giving her what
+was then an unusual education for a girl. She was, however, still
+a child, and nothing serious could have passed between the raw
+youth and this little girl who learned the lessons that he imposed
+upon her.
+
+Such acquaintance as they had was rudely broken off. Temple, a man
+of high position, treated Swift with an urbane condescension which
+drove the young man's independent soul into a frenzy. He returned
+to Ireland, where he was ordained a clergyman, and received a
+small parish at Kilroot, near Belfast.
+
+It was here that the love-note was first seriously heard in the
+discordant music of Swift's career. A college friend of his named
+Waring had a sister who was about the age of Swift, and whom he
+met quite frequently at Kilroot. Not very much is known of this
+episode, but there is evidence that Swift fell in love with the
+girl, whom he rather romantically called "Varina."
+
+This cannot be called a serious love-affair. Swift was lonely, and
+Jane Waring was probably the only girl of refinement who lived
+near Kilroot. Furthermore, she had inherited a small fortune,
+while Swift was miserably poor, and had nothing to offer except
+the shadowy prospect of future advancement in England. He was
+definitely refused by her; and it was this, perhaps, that led him
+to resolve on going back to England and making his peace with Sir
+William Temple.
+
+On leaving, Swift wrote a passionate letter to Miss Waring--the
+only true love-letter that remains to us of their correspondence.
+He protests that he does not want Varina's fortune, and that he
+will wait until he is in a position to marry her on equal terms.
+There is a smoldering flame of jealousy running through the
+letter. Swift charges her with being cold, affected, and willing
+to flirt with persons who are quite beneath her.
+
+Varina played no important part in Swift's larger life thereafter;
+but something must be said of this affair in order to show, first
+of all, that Swift's love for her was due only to proximity, and
+that when he ceased to feel it he could be not only hard, but
+harsh. His fiery spirit must have made a deep impression on Miss
+Waring; for though she at the time refused him, she afterward
+remembered him, and tried to renew their old relations. Indeed, no
+sooner had Swift been made rector of a larger parish, than Varina
+let him know that she had changed her mind, and was ready to marry
+him; but by this time Swift had lost all interest in her. He wrote
+an answer which even his truest admirers have called brutal.
+
+"Yes," he said in substance, "I will marry you, though you have
+treated me vilely, and though you are living in a sort of social
+sink. I am still poor, though you probably think otherwise.
+However, I will marry you on certain conditions. First, you must
+be educated, so that you can entertain me. Next, you must put up
+with all my whims and likes and dislikes. Then you must live
+wherever I please. On these terms I will take you, without
+reference to your looks or to your income. As to the first,
+cleanliness is all that I require; as to the second, I only ask
+that it be enough."
+
+Such a letter as this was like a blow from a bludgeon. The
+insolence, the contempt, and the hardness of it were such as no
+self-respecting woman could endure. It put an end to their
+acquaintance, as Swift undoubtedly intended it should do. He would
+have been less censurable had he struck Varina with his fist or
+kicked her.
+
+The true reason for Swift's utter change of heart is found, no
+doubt, in the beginning of what was destined to be his long
+intimacy with Esther Johnson. When Swift left Sir William Temple's
+in a huff, Esther had been a mere schoolgirl. Now, on his return,
+she was fifteen years of age, and seemed older. She had blossomed
+out into a very comely girl, vivacious, clever, and physically
+well developed, with dark hair, sparkling eyes, and features that
+were unusually regular and lovely.
+
+For three years the two were close friends and intimate
+associates, though it cannot he said that Swift ever made open
+love to her. To the outward eye they were no more than fellow
+workers. Yet love does not need the spoken word and the formal
+declaration to give it life and make it deep and strong. Esther
+Johnson, to whom Swift gave the pet name of "Stella," grew into
+the existence of this fiery, hold, and independent genius. All
+that he did she knew. She was his confidante. As to his writings,
+his hopes, and his enmities, she was the mistress of all his
+secrets. For her, at last, no other man existed.
+
+On Sir William Temple's death, Esther John son came into a small
+fortune, though she now lost her home at Moor Park. Swift returned
+to Ireland, and soon afterward he invited Stella to join him
+there.
+
+Swift was now thirty-four years of age, and Stella a very
+attractive girl of twenty. One might have expected that the two
+would marry, and yet they did not do so. Every precaution was
+taken to avoid anything like scandal. Stella was accompanied by a
+friend--a widow named Mrs. Dingley--without whose presence, or
+that of some third person, Swift never saw Esther Johnson. When
+Swift was absent, how ever, the two ladies occupied his
+apartments; and Stella became more than ever essential to his
+happiness.
+
+When they were separated for any length of time Swift wrote to
+Stella in a sort of baby-talk, which they called "the little
+language." It was made up of curious abbreviations and childish
+words, growing more and more complicated as the years went on. It
+is interesting to think of this stern and often savage genius, who
+loved to hate, and whose hate was almost less terrible than his
+love, babbling and prattling in little half caressing sentences,
+as a mother might babble over her first child. Pedantic writers
+have professed to find in Swift's use of this "little language"
+the coming shadow of that insanity which struck him down in his
+old age.
+
+As it is, these letters are among the curiosities of amatory
+correspondence. When Swift writes "oo" for "you," and "deelest"
+for "dearest," and "vely" for "very," there is no need of an
+interpreter; but "rettle" for "let ter," "dallars" for "girls,"
+and "givar" for "devil," are at first rather difficult to guess.
+Then there is a system of abbreviating. "Md" means "my dear,"
+"Ppt" means "poppet," and "Pdfr," with which Swift sometimes
+signed his epistles, "poor, dear, foolish rogue."
+
+The letters reveal how very closely the two were bound together,
+yet still there was no talk of marriage. On one occasion, after
+they had been together for three years in Ireland, Stella might
+have married another man. This was a friend of Swift's, one Dr.
+Tisdall, who made energetic love to the sweet-faced English girl.
+Tisdall accused Swift of poisoning Stella's mind against him.
+Swift replied that such was not the case. He said that no feelings
+of his own would ever lead him to influence the girl if she
+preferred another.
+
+It is quite sure, then, that Stella clung wholly to Swift, and
+cared nothing for the proffered love of any other man. Thus
+through the years the relations of the two remained unchanged,
+until in 1710 Swift left Ireland and appeared as a very brilliant
+figure in the London drawing-rooms of the great Tory leaders of
+the day.
+
+He was now a man of mark, because of his ability as a
+controversialist. He had learned the manners of the world, and he
+carried him self with an air of power which impressed all those
+who met him. Among these persons was a Miss Hester--or Esther--
+Vanhomrigh, the daughter of a rather wealthy widow who was living
+in London at that time. Miss Vanhomrigh--a name which she and her
+mother pronounced "Vanmeury"--was then seventeen years of age, or
+twelve years younger than the patient Stella.
+
+Esther Johnson, through her long acquaintance with Swift, and from
+his confidence in her, had come to treat him almost as an
+intellectual equal. She knew all his moods, some of which were
+very difficult, and she bore them all; though when he was most
+tyrannous she became only passive, waiting, with a woman's wisdom,
+for the tempest to blow over.
+
+Miss Vanhomrigh, on the other hand, was one of those girls who,
+though they have high spirit, take an almost voluptuous delight in
+yielding to a spirit that is stronger still. This beautiful
+creature felt a positive fascination in Swift's presence and his
+imperious manner. When his eyes flashed, and his voice thundered
+out words of anger, she looked at him with adoration, and bowed in
+a sort of ecstasy before him. If he chose to accost a great lady
+with "Well, madam, are you as ill-natured and disagreeable as when
+I met you last?" Esther Vanhomrigh thrilled at the insolent
+audacity of the man. Her evident fondness for him exercised a
+seductive influence over Swift.
+
+As the two were thrown more and more together, the girl lost all
+her self-control. Swift did not in any sense make love to her,
+though he gave her the somewhat fanciful name of "Vanessa"; but
+she, driven on by a high-strung, unbridled temperament, made open
+love to him. When he was about to return to Ireland, there came
+one startling moment when Vanessa flung herself into the arms of
+Swift, and amazed him by pouring out a torrent of passionate
+endearments.
+
+Swift seems to have been surprised. He did what he could to quiet
+her. He told her that they were too unequal in years and fortune
+for anything but friendship, and he offered to give her as much
+friendship as she desired.
+
+Doubtless he thought that, after returning to Ireland, he would
+not see Vanessa any more. In this, however, he was mistaken. An
+ardent girl, with a fortune of her own, was not to be kept from
+the man whom absence only made her love the more. In addition,
+Swift carried on his correspondence with her, which served to fan
+the flame and to increase the sway that Swift had already
+acquired.
+
+Vanessa wrote, and with every letter she burned and pined. Swift
+replied, and each reply enhanced her yearning for him. Ere long,
+Vanessa's mother died, and Vanessa herself hastened to Ireland and
+took up her residence near Dublin. There, for years, was enacted
+this tragic comedy--Esther Johnson was near Swift, and had all his
+confidence; Esther Vanhomrigh was kept apart from him, while still
+receiving missives from him, and, later, even visits.
+
+It was at this time, after he had become dean of St. Patrick's
+Cathedral, in Dublin, that Swift was married to Esther Johnson--
+for it seems probable that the ceremony took place, though it was
+nothing more than a form. They still saw each other only in the
+presence of a third person. Nevertheless, some knowledge of their
+close relationship leaked out. Stella had been jealous of her
+rival during the years that Swift spent in London. Vanessa was now
+told that Swift was married to the other woman, or that she was
+his mistress. Writhing with jealousy, she wrote directly to
+Stella, and asked whether she was Dean Swift's wife. In answer
+Stella replied that she was, and then she sent Vanessa's letter to
+Swift himself.
+
+All the fury of his nature was roused in him; and he was a man who
+could be very terrible when angry. He might have remembered the
+intense love which Vanessa bore for him, the humility with which
+she had accepted his conditions, and, finally, the loneliness of
+this girl.
+
+But Swift was utterly unsparing. No gleam of pity entered his
+heart as he leaped upon a horse and galloped out to Marley Abbey,
+where she was living--"his prominent eyes arched by jet-black
+brows and glaring with the green fury of a cat's." Reaching the
+house, he dashed into it, with something awful in his looks, made
+his way to Vanessa, threw her letter down upon the table and,
+after giving her one frightful glare, turned on his heel, and in a
+moment more was galloping back to Dublin.
+
+The girl fell to the floor in an agony of terror and remorse. She
+was taken to her room, and only three weeks afterward was carried
+forth, having died literally of a broken heart.
+
+Five years later, Stella also died, withering away a sacrifice to
+what the world has called Swift's cruel heartlessness and egotism.
+His greatest public triumphs came to him in his final years of
+melancholy isolation; but in spite of the applause that greeted
+The Drapier Letters and Gulliver's Travels, he brooded morbidly
+over his past life. At last his powerful mind gave way, so that he
+died a victim to senile dementia. By his directions his body was
+interred in the same coffin with Stella's, in the cathedral of
+which he had been dean.
+
+Such is the story of Dean Swift, and it has always suggested
+several curious questions. Why, if he loved Stella, did he not
+marry her long before? Why, when he married her, did he treat her
+still as if she were not his wife? Why did he allow Vanessa's love
+to run like a scarlet thread across the fabric of the other
+affection, which must have been so strong?
+
+Many answers have been given to these questions. That which was
+formulated by Sir Walter Scott is a simple one, and has been
+generally accepted. Scott believed that Swift was physically
+incapacitated for marriage, and that he needed feminine sympathy,
+which he took where he could get it, without feeling bound to give
+anything in return.
+
+If Scott's explanation be the true one, it still leaves Swift
+exposed to ignominy as a monster of ingratitude. Therefore, many
+of his biographers have sought other explanations. No one can
+palliate his conduct toward Vanessa; but Sir Leslie Stephen makes
+a plea for him with reference to Stella. Sir Leslie points out
+that until Swift became dean of St. Patrick's his income was far
+too small to marry on, and that after his brilliant but
+disappointing three years in London, when his prospects of
+advancement were ruined, he felt himself a broken man.
+
+Furthermore, his health was always precarious, since he suffered
+from a distressing illness which attacked him at intervals,
+rendering him both deaf and giddy. The disease is now known as
+Meniere's disease, from its classification by the French
+physician, Meniere, in 1861. Swift felt that he lived in constant
+danger of some sudden stroke that would deprive him either of life
+or reason; and his ultimate insanity makes it appear that his
+forebodings were not wholly futile. Therefore, though he married
+Stella, he kept the marriage secret, thus leaving her free, in
+case of his demise, to marry as a maiden, and not to be regarded
+as a widow.
+
+Sir Leslie offers the further plea that, after all, Stella's life
+was what she chose to make it. She enjoyed Swift's friendship,
+which she preferred to the love of any other man.
+
+Another view is that of Dr. Richard Garnett, who has discussed the
+question with some subtlety. "Swift," says Dr. Garnett, "was by
+nature devoid of passion. He was fully capable of friendship, but
+not of love. The spiritual realm, whether of divine or earthly
+things, was a region closed to him, where he never set foot." On
+the side of friendship he must greatly have preferred Stella to
+Vanessa, and yet the latter assailed him on his weakest side--on
+the side of his love of imperious domination.
+
+Vanessa hugged the fetters to which Stella merely submitted.
+Flattered to excess by her surrender, yet conscious of his
+obligations and his real preference, he could neither discard the
+one beauty nor desert the other.
+
+Therefore, he temporized with both of them, and when the choice
+was forced upon him he madly struck down the woman for whom he
+cared the less.
+
+One may accept Dr. Garnett's theory with a somewhat altered
+conclusion. It is not true, as a matter of recorded fact, that
+Swift was incapable of passion, for when a boy at college he was
+sought out by various young women, and he sought them out in turn.
+His fiery letter to Miss Waring points to the same conclusion.
+When Esther Johnson began to love him he was heart-free, yet
+unable, because of his straitened means, to marry. But Esther
+Johnson always appealed more to his reason, his friendship, and
+his comfort, than to his love, using the word in its material,
+physical sense. This love was stirred in him by Vanessa. Yet when
+he met Vanessa he had already gone too far with Esther Johnson to
+break the bond which had so long united them, nor could he think
+of a life without her, for she was to him his other self.
+
+At the same time, his more romantic association with Vanessa
+roused those instincts which he had scarcely known himself to be
+possessed of. His position was, therefore, most embarrassing. He
+hoped to end it when he left London and returned to Ireland; but
+fate was unkind to him in this, because Vanessa followed him. He
+lacked the will to be frank with her, and thus he stood a
+wretched, halting victim of his own dual nature.
+
+He was a clergyman, and at heart religious. He had also a sense of
+honor, and both of these traits compelled him to remain true to
+Esther Johnson. The terrible outbreak which brought about
+Vanessa's death was probably the wild frenzy of a tortured soul.
+It recalls the picture of some fierce animal brought at last to
+bay, and venting its own anguish upon any object that is within
+reach of its fangs and claws.
+
+No matter how the story may be told, it makes one shiver, for it
+is a tragedy in which the three participants all meet their doom--
+one crushed by a lightning-bolt of unreasoning anger, the other
+wasting away through hope deferred; while the man whom the world
+will always hold responsible was himself destined to end his years
+blind and sleepless, bequeathing his fortune to a madhouse, and
+saying, with his last muttered breath:
+
+"I am a fool!"
+
+
+
+
+
+PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY AND MARY GODWIN
+
+
+A great deal has been said and written in favor of early marriage;
+and, in a general way, early marriage may be an admirable thing.
+Young men and young women who have no special gift of imagination,
+and who have practically reached their full mental development at
+twenty-one or twenty-two--or earlier, even in their teens--may
+marry safely; because they are already what they will be. They are
+not going to experience any growth upward and outward. Passing
+years simply bring them more closely together, until they have
+settled down into a sort of domestic unity, by which they think
+alike, act alike, and even gradually come to look alike.
+
+But early wedlock spells tragedy to the man or the woman of
+genius. In their teens they have only begun to grow. What they
+will be ten years hence, no one can prophesy. Therefore, to mate
+so early in life is to insure almost certain storm and stress,
+and, in the end, domestic wreckage.
+
+As a rule, it is the man, and not the woman, who makes the false
+step; because it is the man who elects to marry when he is still
+very young. If he choose some ill-fitting, commonplace, and
+unresponsive nature to match his own, it is he who is bound in the
+course of time to learn his great mistake. When the splendid eagle
+shall have got his growth, and shall begin to soar up into the
+vault of heaven, the poor little barn-yard fowl that he once
+believed to be his equal seems very far away in everything. He
+discovers that she is quite unable to follow him in his towering
+flights.
+
+The story of Percy Bysshe Shelley is a singular one. The
+circumstances of his early marriage were strange. The breaking of
+his marriage-bond was also strange. Shelley himself was an
+extraordinary creature. He was blamed a great deal in his lifetime
+for what he did, and since then some have echoed the reproach. Yet
+it would seem as if, at the very beginning of his life, he was put
+into a false position against his will. Because of this he was
+misunderstood until the end of his brief and brilliant and erratic
+career.
+
+SHELLEY AND MARY GODWIN
+
+In 1792 the French Revolution burst into flame, the mob of Paris
+stormed the Tuileries, the King of France was cast into a dungeon
+to await his execution, and the wild sons of anarchy flung their
+gauntlet of defiance into the face of Europe. In this tremendous
+year was born young Shelley; and perhaps his nature represented
+the spirit of the time.
+
+Certainly, neither from his father nor from his mother did he
+derive that perpetual unrest and that frantic fondness for revolt
+which blazed out in the poet when he was still a boy. His father,
+Mr. Timothy Shelley, was a very usual, thick-headed, unromantic
+English squire. His mother--a woman of much beauty, but of no
+exceptional traits--was the daughter of another squire, and at the
+time of her marriage was simply one of ten thousand fresh-faced,
+pleasant-spoken English country girls. If we look for a strain of
+the romantic in Shelley's ancestry, we shall have to find it in
+the person of his grandfather, who was a very remarkable and
+powerful character.
+
+This person, Bysshe Shelley by name, had in his youth been
+associated with some mystery. He was not born in England, but in
+America--and in those days the name "America" meant almost
+anything indefinite and peculiar. However this might be, Bysshe
+Shelley, though a scion of a good old English family, had wandered
+in strange lands, and it was whispered that he had seen strange
+sights and done strange things. According to one legend, he had
+been married in America, though no one knew whether his wife was
+white or black, or how he had got rid of her.
+
+He might have remained in America all his life, had not a small
+inheritance fallen to his share. This brought him back to England,
+and he soon found that England was in reality the place to make
+his fortune. He was a man of magnificent physique. His rovings had
+given him ease and grace, and the power which comes from a wide
+experience of life. He could be extremely pleasing when he chose;
+and he soon won his way into the good graces of a rich heiress,
+whom he married.
+
+With her wealth he became an important personage, and consorted
+with gentlemen and statesmen of influence, attaching himself
+particularly to the Duke of Northumberland, by whose influence he
+was made a baronet. When his rich wife died, Shelley married a
+still richer bride; and so this man, who started out as a mere
+adventurer without a shilling to his name, died in 1813, leaving
+more than a million dollars in cash, with lands whose rent-roll
+yielded a hundred thousand dollars every year.
+
+If any touch of the romantic which we find in Shelley is a matter
+of heredity, we must trace it to this able, daring, restless, and
+magnificent old grandfather, who was the beau ideal of an English
+squire--the sort of squire who had added foreign graces to native
+sturdiness. But young Shelley, the future poet, seemed scarcely to
+be English at all. As a young boy he cared nothing for athletic
+sports. He was given to much reading. He thought a good deal about
+abstractions with which most schoolboys never concern themselves
+at all.
+
+Consequently, both in private schools and afterward at Eton, he
+became a sort of rebel against authority. He resisted the fagging-
+system. He spoke contemptuously of physical prowess. He disliked
+anything that he was obliged to do, and he rushed eagerly into
+whatever was forbidden.
+
+Finally, when he was sent to University College, Oxford, he broke
+all bounds. At a time when Tory England was aghast over the French
+Revolution and its results, Shelley talked of liberty and equality
+on all occasions. He made friends with an uncouth but able fellow
+student, who bore the remarkable name of Thomas Jefferson Hogg--a
+name that seems rampant with republicanism--and very soon he got
+himself expelled from the university for publishing a little tract
+of an infidel character called "A Defense of Atheism."
+
+His expulsion for such a cause naturally shocked his father. It
+probably disturbed Shelley himself; but, after all, it gave him
+some satisfaction to be a martyr for the cause of free speech. He
+went to London with his friend Hogg, and took lodgings there. He
+read omnivorously--Hogg says as much as sixteen hours a day. He
+would walk through the most crowded streets poring over a volume,
+while holding another under one arm.
+
+His mind was full of fancies. He had begun what was afterward
+called "his passion for reforming everything." He despised most of
+the laws of England. He thought its Parliament ridiculous. He
+hated its religion. He was particularly opposed to marriage. This
+last fact gives some point to the circumstances which almost
+immediately confronted him.
+
+Shelley was now about nineteen years old--an age at which most
+English boys are emerging from the public schools, and are still
+in the hobbledehoy stage of their formation. In a way, he was
+quite far from boyish; yet in his knowledge of life he was little
+more than a mere child. He knew nothing thoroughly--much less the
+ways of men and women. He had no visible means of existence except
+a small allowance from his father. His four sisters, who were at a
+boarding-school on Clapham Common, used to save their pin-money
+and send it to their gifted brother so that he might not actually
+starve. These sisters he used to call upon from time to time, and
+through them he made the acquaintance of a sixteen-year-old girl
+named Harriet Westbrook.
+
+Harriet Westbrook was the daughter of a black-visaged keeper of a
+coffee-house in Mount Street, called "Jew Westbrook," partly
+because of his complexion, and partly because of his ability to
+retain what he had made. He was, indeed, fairly well off, and had
+sent his younger daughter, Harriet, to the school where Shelley's
+sisters studied.
+
+Harriet Westbrook seems to have been a most precocious person. Any
+girl of sixteen is, of course, a great deal older and more mature
+than a youth of nineteen. In the present instance Harriet might
+have been Shelley's senior by five years. There is no doubt that
+she fell in love with him; but, having done so, she by no means
+acted in the shy and timid way that would have been most natural
+to a very young girl in her first love-affair. Having decided that
+she wanted him, she made up her mind to get Mm at any cost, and
+her audacity was equaled only by his simplicity. She was rather
+attractive in appearance, with abundant hair, a plump figure, and
+a pink-and-white complexion. This description makes of her a
+rather doll-like girl; but doll-like girls are just the sort to
+attract an inexperienced young man who has yet to learn that
+beauty and charm are quite distinct from prettiness, and
+infinitely superior to it.
+
+In addition to her prettiness, Harriet Westbrook had a vivacious
+manner and talked quite pleasingly. She was likewise not a bad
+listener; and she would listen by the hour to Shelley in his
+rhapsodies about chemistry, poetry, the failure of Christianity,
+the national debt, and human liberty, all of which he jumbled up
+without much knowledge, but in a lyric strain of impassioned
+eagerness which would probably have made the multiplication-table
+thrilling.
+
+For Shelley himself was a creature of extraordinary fascination,
+both then and afterward. There are no likenesses of him that do
+him justice, because they cannot convey that singular appeal which
+the man himself made to almost every one who met him.
+
+The eminent painter, Mulready, once said that Shelley was too
+beautiful for portraiture; and yet the descriptions of him hardly
+seem to bear this out. He was quite tall and slender, but he
+stooped so much as to make him appear undersized. His head was
+very small-quite disproportionately so; but this was counteracted
+to the eye by his long and tumbled hair which, when excited, he
+would rub and twist in a thousand different directions until it
+was actually bushy. His eyes and mouth were his best features. The
+former were of a deep violet blue, and when Shelley felt deeply
+moved they seemed luminous with a wonderful and almost unearthly
+light. His mouth was finely chiseled, and might be regarded as
+representing perfection.
+
+One great defect he had, and this might well have overbalanced his
+attractive face. The defect in question was his voice. One would
+have expected to hear from him melodious sounds, and vocal tones
+both rich and penetrating; but, as a matter of fact, his voice was
+shrill at the very best, and became actually discordant and
+peacock-like in moments of emotion.
+
+Such, then, was Shelley, star-eyed, with the delicate complexion
+of a girl, wonderfully mobile in his features, yet speaking in a
+voice high pitched and almost raucous. For the rest, he arrayed
+himself with care and in expensive clothing, even though he took
+no thought of neatness, so that his garments were almost always
+rumpled and wrinkled from his frequent writhings on couches and on
+the floor. Shelley had a strange and almost primitive habit of
+rolling on the earth, and another of thrusting his tousled head
+close up to the hottest fire in the house, or of lying in the
+glaring sun when out of doors. It is related that he composed one
+of his finest poems--"The Cenci"--in Italy, while stretched out
+with face upturned to an almost tropical sun.
+
+But such as he was, and though he was not yet famous, Harriet
+Westbrook, the rosy-faced schoolgirl, fell in love with him, and
+rather plainly let him know that she had done so. There are a
+thousand ways in which a woman can convey this information without
+doing anything un-maidenly; and of all these little arts Miss
+Westbrook was instinctively a mistress.
+
+She played upon Shelley's feelings by telling him that her father
+was cruel to her, and that he contemplated actions still more
+cruel. There is something absurdly comical about the grievance
+which she brought to Shelley; but it is much more comical to note
+the tremendous seriousness with which he took it. He wrote to his
+friend Hogg:
+
+Her father has persecuted her in a most horrible way, by
+endeavoring to compel her to go to school. She asked my advice;
+resistance was the answer. At the same time I essayed to mollify
+Mr. Westbrook, in vain! I advised her to resist. She wrote to say
+that resistance was useless, but that she would fly with me and
+throw herself on my protection.
+
+Some letters that have recently come to light show that there was
+a dramatic scene between Harriet Westbrook and Shelley--a scene in
+the course of which she threw her arms about his neck and wept
+upon his shoulder. Here was a curious situation. Shelley was not
+at all in love with her. He had explicitly declared this only a
+short time before. Yet here was a pretty girl about to suffer the
+"horrible persecution" of being sent to school, and finding no
+alternative save to "throw herself on his protection"--in other
+words, to let him treat her as he would, and to become his
+mistress.
+
+The absurdity of the situation makes one smile. Common sense
+should have led some one to box Harriet's ears and send her off to
+school without a moment's hesitation; while as for Shelley, he
+should have been told how ludicrous was the whole affair. But he
+was only nineteen, and she was only sixteen, and the crisis seemed
+portentous. Nothing could be more flattering to a young man's
+vanity than to have this girl cast herself upon him for
+protection. It did not really matter that he had not loved her
+hitherto, and that he was already half engaged to another Harriet
+--his cousin, Miss Grove. He could not stop and reason with
+himself. He must like a true knight rescue lovely girlhood from
+the horrors of a school!
+
+It is not unlikely that this whole affair was partly managed or
+manipulated by the girl's father. Jew Westbrook knew that Shelley
+was related to rich and titled people, and that he was certain, if
+he lived, to become Sir Percy, and to be the heir of his
+grandfather's estates. Hence it may be that Harriet's queer
+conduct was not wholly of her own prompting.
+
+In any case, however, it proved to be successful. Shelley's ardent
+and impulsive nature could not bear to see a girl in tears and
+appealing for his help. Hence, though in his heart she was very
+little to him, his romantic nature gave up for her sake the
+affection that he had felt for his cousin, his own disbelief in
+marriage, and finally the common sense which ought to have told
+him not to marry any one on two hundred pounds a year.
+
+So the pair set off for Edinburgh by stagecoach. It was a weary
+and most uncomfortable journey. When they reached the Scottish
+capital, they were married by the Scottish law. Their money was
+all gone; but their landlord, with a jovial sympathy for romance,
+let them have a room, and treated them to a rather promiscuous
+wedding-banquet, in which every one in the house participated.
+
+Such is the story of Shelley's marriage, contracted at nineteen
+with a girl of sixteen who most certainly lured him on against his
+own better judgment and in the absence of any actual love.
+
+The girl whom he had taken to himself was a well-meaning little
+thing. She tried for a time to meet her husband's moods and to be
+a real companion to him. But what could one expect from such a
+union? Shelley's father withdrew the income which he had
+previously given. Jew Westbrook refused to contribute anything,
+hoping, probably, that this course would bring the Shelleys to the
+rescue. But as it was, the young pair drifted about from place to
+place, getting very precarious supplies, running deeper into debt
+each day, and finding less and less to admire in each other.
+
+Shelley took to laudanum. Harriet dropped her abstruse studies,
+which she had taken up to please her husband, but which could only
+puzzle her small brain. She soon developed some of the unpleasant
+traits of the class to which she belonged. In this her sister
+Eliza--a hard and grasping middle-aged woman--had her share. She
+set Harriet against her husband, and made life less endurable for
+both. She was so much older than the pair that she came in and
+ruled their household like a typical stepmother.
+
+A child was born, and Shelley very generously went through a
+second form of marriage, so as to comply with the English law; but
+by this time there was little hope of righting things again.
+Shelley was much offended because Harriet would not nurse the
+child. He believed her hard because she saw without emotion an
+operation performed upon the infant.
+
+Finally, when Shelley at last came into a considerable sum of
+money, Harriet and Eliza made no pretense of caring for anything
+except the spending of it in "bonnet-shops" and on carriages and
+display. In time--that is to say, in three years after their
+marriage--Harriet left her husband and went to London and to Bath,
+prompted by her elder sister.
+
+This proved to be the end of an unfortunate marriage. Word was
+brought to Shelley that his wife was no longer faithful to him.
+He, on his side, had carried on a semi-sentimental platonic
+correspondence with a schoolmistress, one Miss Hitchener. But
+until now his life had been one great mistake--a life of
+restlessness, of unsatisfied longing, of a desire that had no
+name. Then came the perhaps inevitable meeting with the one whom
+he should have met before.
+
+Shelley had taken a great interest in William Godwin, the writer
+and radical philosopher. Godwin's household was a strange one.
+There was Fanny Imlay, a child born out of wedlock, the offspring
+of Gilbert Imlay, an American merchant, and of Mary
+Wollstonecraft, whom Godwin had subsequently married. There was
+also a singularly striking girl who then styled herself Mary Jane
+Clairmont, and who was afterward known as Claire Clairmont, she
+and her brother being the early children of Godwin's second wife.
+
+One day in 1814, Shelley called on Godwin, and found there a
+beautiful young girl in her seventeenth year, "with shapely golden
+head, a face very pale and pure, a great forehead, earnest hazel
+eyes, and an expression at once of sensibility and firmness about
+her delicately curved lips." This was Mary Godwin--one who had
+inherited her mother's power of mind and likewise her grace and
+sweetness.
+
+From the very moment of their meeting Shelley and this girl were
+fated to be joined together, and both of them were well aware of
+it. Each felt the other's presence exert a magnetic thrill. Each
+listened eagerly to what the other said. Each thought of nothing,
+and each cared for nothing, in the other's absence. It was a great
+compelling elemental force which drove the two together and bound
+them fast. Beside this marvelous experience, how pale and pitiful
+and paltry seemed the affectations of Harriet Westbrook!
+
+In little more than a month from the time of their first meeting,
+Shelley and Mary Godwin and Miss Clairmont left Godwin's house at
+four o 'clock in the morning, and hurried across the Channel to
+Calais. They wandered almost like vagabonds across France, eating
+black bread and the coarsest fare, walking on the highways when
+they could not afford to ride, and putting up with every possible
+inconvenience. Yet it is worth noting that neither then nor at any
+other time did either Shelley or Mary regret what they had done.
+To the very end of the poet's brief career they were inseparable.
+
+Later he was able to pension Harriet, who, being of a morbid
+disposition, ended her life by drowning--not, it may be said,
+because of grief for Shelley. It has been told that Fanny Imlay,
+Mary's sister, likewise committed suicide because Shelley did not
+care for her, but this has also been disproved. There was really
+nothing to mar the inner happiness of the poet and the woman who,
+at the very end, became his wife. Living, as they did, in Italy
+and Switzerland, they saw much of their own countrymen, such as
+Landor and Leigh Hunt and Byron, to whose fascinations poor Miss
+Clairmont yielded, and became the mother of the little girl
+Allegra.
+
+But there could have been no truer union than this of Shelley's
+with the woman whom nature had intended for him. It was in his
+love-life, far more than in his poetry, that he attained
+completeness. When he died by drowning, in 1822, and his body was
+burned in the presence of Lord Byron, he was truly mourned by the
+one whom he had only lately made his wife. As a poet he never
+reached the same perfection; for his genius was fitful and
+uncertain, rare in its flights, and mingled always with that which
+disappoints.
+
+As the lover and husband of Mary Godwin, there was nothing left to
+wish. In his verse, however, the truest word concerning him will
+always be that exquisite sentence of Matthew Arnold:
+
+"A beautiful and ineffectual angel beating his luminous wings
+against the void in vain."
+
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF THE CARLYLES
+
+
+To most persons, Tennyson was a remote and romantic figure. His
+homes in the Isle of Wight and at Aldworth had a dignified
+seclusion about them which was very appropriate to so great a
+poet, and invested him with a certain awe through which the
+multitude rarely penetrated. As a matter of fact, however, he was
+an excellent companion, a ready talker, and gifted with so much
+wit that it is a pity that more of his sayings have not been
+preserved to us.
+
+One of the best known is that which was drawn from him after he
+and a number of friends had been spending an hour in company with
+Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle. The two Carlyles were unfortunately at their
+worst, and gave a superb specimen of domestic "nagging." Each
+caught up whatever the other said, and either turned it into
+ridicule, or tried to make the author of it an object of contempt.
+
+This was, of course, exceedingly uncomfortable for such strangers
+as were present, and it certainly gave no pleasure to their
+friends. On leaving the house, some one said to Tennyson:
+
+"Isn't it a pity that such a couple ever married?"
+
+"No, no," said Tennyson, with a sort of smile under his rough
+beard. "It's much better that two people should be made unhappy
+than four."
+
+The world has pretty nearly come around to the verdict of the poet
+laureate. It is not probable that Thomas Carlyle would have made
+any woman happy as his wife, or that Jane Baillie Welsh would have
+made any man happy as her husband.
+
+This sort of speculation would never have occurred had not Mr.
+Froude, in the early eighties, given his story about the Carlyles
+to the world. Carlyle went to his grave, an old man, highly
+honored, and with no trail of gossip behind him. His wife had died
+some sixteen years before, leaving a brilliant memory. The books
+of Mr. Froude seemed for a moment to have desecrated the grave,
+and to have shed a sudden and sinister light upon those who could
+not make the least defense for themselves.
+
+For a moment, Carlyle seemed to have been a monster of harshness,
+cruelty, and almost brutish feeling. On the other side, his wife
+took on the color of an evil-speaking, evil-thinking shrew, who
+tormented the life of her husband, and allowed herself to be
+possessed by some demon of unrest and discontent, such as few
+women of her station are ever known to suffer from.
+
+Nor was it merely that the two were apparently ill-mated and
+unhappy with each other. There were hints and innuendos which
+looked toward some hidden cause for this unhappiness, and which
+aroused the curiosity of every one. That they might be clearer,
+Froude afterward wrote a book, bringing out more plainly--indeed,
+too plainly--his explanation of the Carlyle family skeleton. A
+multitude of documents then came from every quarter, and from
+almost every one who had known either of the Carlyles. Perhaps the
+result to-day has been more injurious to Froude than to the two
+Carlyles.
+
+Many persons unjustly speak of Froude as having violated the
+confidence of his friends in publishing the letters of Mr. and
+Mrs. Carlyle. They take no heed of the fact that in doing this he
+was obeying Carlyle's express wishes, left behind in writing, and
+often urged on Froude while Carlyle was still alive. Whether or
+not Froude ought to have accepted such a trust, one may perhaps
+hesitate to decide. That he did so is probably because he felt
+that if he refused, Carlyle might commit the same duty to another,
+who would discharge it with less delicacy and less discretion.
+
+As it is, the blame, if it rests upon any one, should rest upon
+Carlyle. He collected the letters. He wrote the lines which burn
+and scorch with self-reproach. It is he who pressed upon the
+reluctant Froude the duty of printing and publishing a series of
+documents which, for the most part, should never have been
+published at all, and which have done equal harm to Carlyle, to
+his wife, and to Froude himself.
+
+Now that everything has been written that is likely to be written
+by those claiming to possess personal knowledge of the subject,
+let us take up the volumes, and likewise the scattered fragments,
+and seek to penetrate the mystery of the most ill-assorted couple
+known to modern literature.
+
+It is not necessary to bring to light, and in regular order, the
+external history of Thomas Carlyle, or of Jane Baillie Welsh, who
+married him. There is an extraordinary amount of rather fanciful
+gossip about this marriage, and about the three persons who had to
+do with it.
+
+Take first the principal figure, Thomas Carlyle. His life until
+that time had been a good deal more than the life of an ordinary
+country-man. Many persons represent him as a peasant; but he was
+descended from the ancient lords of a Scottish manor. There was
+something in his eye, and in the dominance of his nature, that
+made his lordly nature felt. Mr. Froude notes that Carlyle's hand
+was very small and unusually well shaped. Nor had his earliest
+appearance as a young man been commonplace, in spite of the fact
+that his parents were illiterate, so that his mother learned to
+read only after her sons had gone away to Edinburgh, in order that
+she might be able to enjoy their letters.
+
+At that time in Scotland, as in Puritan New England, in each
+family the son who had the most notable "pairts" was sent to the
+university that he might become a clergyman. If there were a
+second son, he became an advocate or a doctor of medicine, while
+the sons of less distinction seldom went beyond the parish school,
+but settled down as farmers, horse-dealers, or whatever might
+happen to come their way.
+
+In the case of Thomas Carlyle, nature marked him out for something
+brilliant, whatever that might be. His quick sensibility, the way
+in which he acquired every sort of learning, his command of logic,
+and, withal, his swift, unerring gift of language, made it certain
+from the very first that he must be sent to the university as soon
+as he had finished school, and could afford to go.
+
+At Edinburgh, where he matriculated in his fourteenth year, he
+astonished every one by the enormous extent of his reading, and by
+the firm hold he kept upon it. One hesitates to credit these so-
+called reminiscences which tell how he absorbed mountains of Greek
+and immense quantities of political economy and history and
+sociology and various forms of metaphysics, as every Scotsman is
+bound to do. That he read all night is a common story told of many
+a Scottish lad at college. We may believe, however, that Carlyle
+studied and read as most of his fellow students did, but far
+beyond them, in extent.
+
+When he had completed about half of his divinity course, he
+assured himself that he was not intended for the life of a
+clergyman. One who reads his mocking sayings, or what seemed to be
+a clever string of jeers directed against religion, might well
+think that Carlyle was throughout his life an atheist, or an
+agnostic. He confessed to Irving that he did not believe in the
+Christian religion, and it was vain to hope that he ever would so
+believe.
+
+Moreover, Carlyle had done something which was unusual at that
+time. He had taught in several local schools; but presently he
+came back to Edinburgh and openly made literature his profession.
+It was a daring thing to do; but Carlyle had unbounded confidence
+in himself--the confidence of a giant, striding forth into a
+forest, certain that he can make his way by sheer strength through
+the tangled meshes and the knotty branches that he knows will meet
+him and try to beat him back. Furthermore, he knew how to live on
+very little; he was unmarried; and he felt a certain ardor which
+beseemed his age and gifts.
+
+Through the kindness of friends, he received some commissions to
+write in various books of reference; and in 1824, when he was
+twenty-nine years of age, he published a translation of Legendre's
+Geometry. In the same year he published, in the London Magazine,
+his Life of Schiller, and also his translation of Goethe's Wilhelm
+Meister. This successful attack upon the London periodicals and
+reviews led to a certain complication with the other two
+characters in this story. It takes us to Jane Welsh, and also to
+Edward Irving.
+
+Irving was three years older than Carlyle. The two men were
+friends, and both of them had been teaching in country schools,
+where both of them had come to know Miss Welsh. Irving's seniority
+gave him a certain prestige with the younger men, and naturally
+with Miss Welsh. He had won honors at the university, and now, as
+assistant to the famous Dr. Chalmers, he carried his silk robes in
+the jaunty fashion of one who has just ceased to be an
+undergraduate. While studying, he met Miss Welsh at Haddington,
+and there became her private instructor.
+
+This girl was regarded in her native town as something of a
+personage. To read what has been written of her, one might suppose
+that she was almost a miracle of birth and breeding, and of
+intellect as well. As a matter of fact, in the little town of
+Haddington she was simply prima inter pares. Her father was the
+local doctor, and while she had a comfortable home, and doubtless
+a chaise at her disposal, she was very far from the "opulence"
+which Carlyle, looking up at her from his lowlier surroundings,
+was accustomed to ascribe to her. She was, no doubt, a very clever
+girl; and, judging from the portraits taken of her at about this
+time, she was an exceedingly pretty one, with beautiful eyes and
+an abundance of dark glossy hair.
+
+Even then, however, Miss Welsh had traits which might have made it
+certain that she would be much more agreeable as a friend than as
+a wife. She had become an intellectuelle quite prematurely--at an
+age, in fact, when she might better have been thinking of other
+things than the inwardness of her soul, or the folly of religious
+belief.
+
+Even as a young girl, she was beset by a desire to criticize and
+to ridicule almost everything and every one that she encountered.
+It was only when she met with something that she could not
+understand, or some one who could do what she could not, that she
+became comparatively humble. Unconsciously, her chief ambition was
+to be herself distinguished, and to marry some one who could be
+more distinguished still.
+
+When she first met Edward Irving, she looked up to him as her
+superior in many ways. He was a striking figure in her small
+world. He was known in Edinburgh as likely to be a man of mark;
+and, of course, he had had a careful training in many subjects of
+which she, as yet, knew very little. Therefore, insensibly, she
+fell into a sort of admiration for Irving--an admiration which
+might have been transmuted into love. Irving, on his side, was
+taken by the young girl's beauty, her vivacity, and the keenness
+of her intellect. That he did not at once become her suitor is
+probably due to the fact that he had already engaged himself to a
+Miss Martin, of whom not much is known.
+
+It was about this time, however, that Carlyle became acquainted
+with Miss Welsh. His abundant knowledge, his original and striking
+manner of commenting on it, his almost gigantic intellectual
+power, came to her as a revelation. Her studies with Irving were
+now interwoven with her admiration for Carlyle.
+
+Since Irving was a clergyman, and Miss Welsh had not the slightest
+belief in any form of theology, there was comparatively little
+that they had in common. On the other hand, when she saw the
+profundities of Carlyle, she at once half feared, and was half
+fascinated. Let her speak to him on any subject, and he would at
+once thunder forth some striking truth, or it might be some
+puzzling paradox; but what he said could never fail to interest
+her and to make her think. He had, too, an infinite sense of
+humor, often whimsical and shot through with sarcasm.
+
+It is no wonder that Miss Welsh was more and more infatuated with
+the nature of Carlyle. If it was her conscious wish to marry a man
+whom she could reverence as a master, where should she find him--
+in Irving or in Carlyle?
+
+Irving was a dreamer, a man who, she came to see, was thoroughly
+one-sided, and whose interests lay in a different sphere from
+hers. Carlyle, on the other hand, had already reached out beyond
+the little Scottish capital, and had made his mark in the great
+world of London, where men like De Quincey and Jeffrey thought it
+worth their while to run a tilt with him. Then, too, there was the
+fascination of his talk, in which Jane Welsh found a perpetual
+source of interest:
+
+The English have never had an artist, except in poetry; no
+musician; no painter. Purcell and Hogarth are not exceptions, or
+only such as confirm the rule.
+
+Is the true Scotchman the peasant and yeoman--chiefly the former?
+
+Every living man is a visible mystery; he walks between two
+eternities and two infinitudes. Were we not blind as molea we
+should value our humanity at infinity, and our rank, influence and
+so forth--the trappings of our humanity--at nothing. Say I am a
+man, and you say all. Whether king or tinker is a mere appendix.
+
+Understanding is to reason as the talent of a beaver--which can
+build houses, and uses its tail for a trowel--to the genius of a
+prophet and poet. Reason is all but extinct in this age; it can
+never be altogether extinguished.
+
+The devil has his elect.
+
+Is anything more wonderful than another, if you consider it
+maturely? I have seen no men rise from the dead; I have seen some
+thousands rise from nothing. I have not force to fly into the sun,
+but I have force to lift my hand, which is equally strange.
+
+Is not every thought properly an inspiration? Or how is one thing
+more inspired than another?
+
+Examine by logic the import of thy life, and of all lives. What is
+it? A making of meal into manure, and of manure into meal. To the
+cui bono there is no answer from logic.
+
+In many ways Jane Welsh found the difference of range between
+Carlyle and Irving. At one time, she asked Irving about some
+German works, and he was obliged to send her to Carlyle to solve
+her difficulties. Carlyle knew German almost as well as if he had
+been born in Dresden; and the full and almost overflowing way in
+which he answered her gave her another impression of his potency.
+Thus she weighed the two men who might become her lovers, and
+little by little she came to think of Irving as partly shallow and
+partly narrow-minded, while Carlyle loomed up more of a giant than
+before.
+
+It is not probable that she was a woman who could love profoundly.
+She thought too much about herself. She was too critical. She had
+too intense an ambition for "showing off." I can imagine that in
+the end she made her choice quite coolly. She was flattered by
+Carlyle's strong preference for her. She was perhaps repelled by
+Irving's engagement to another woman; yet at the time few persons
+thought that she had chosen well.
+
+Irving had now gone to London, and had become the pastor of the
+Caledonian chapel in Hatton Garden. Within a year, by the
+extraordinary power of his eloquence, which, was in a style
+peculiar to himself, he had transformed an obscure little chapel
+into one which was crowded by the rich and fashionable. His
+congregation built for him a handsome edifice on Regent Square,
+and he became the leader of a new cult, which looked to a second
+personal advent of Christ. He cared nothing for the charges of
+heresy which were brought against him; and when he was deposed his
+congregation followed him, and developed a new Christian order,
+known as Irvingism.
+
+Jane Welsh, in her musings, might rightfully have compared the two
+men and the future which each could give her. Did she marry
+Irving, she was certain of a life of ease in London, and an
+association with men and women of fashion and celebrity, among
+whom she could show herself to be the gifted woman that she was.
+Did she marry Carlyle, she must go with him to a desolate, wind-
+beaten cottage, far away from any of the things she cared for,
+working almost as a housemaid, having no company save that of her
+husband, who was already a dyspeptic, and who was wont to speak of
+feeling as if a rat were tearing out his stomach.
+
+Who would have said that in going with Carlyle she had made the
+better choice? Any one would have said it who knew the three--
+Irving, Carlyle, and Jane Welsh.
+
+She had the penetration to be certain that whatever Irving might
+possess at present, it would be nothing in comparison to what
+Carlyle would have in the coming future. She understood the
+limitations of Irving, but to her keen mind the genius of Carlyle
+was unlimited; and she foresaw that, after he had toiled and
+striven, he would come into his great reward, which she would
+share. Irving might be the leader of a petty sect, but Carlyle
+would be a man whose name must become known throughout the world.
+
+And so, in 1826, she had made her choice, and had become the bride
+of the rough-spoken, domineering Scotsman who had to face the
+world with nothing but his creative brain and his stubborn
+independence. She had put aside all immediate thought of London
+and its lures; she was going to cast in her lot with Carlyle's,
+largely as a matter of calculation, and believing that she had
+made the better choice.
+
+She was twenty-six and Carlyle was thirty-two when, after a brief
+residence in Edinburgh, they went down to Craigenputtock. Froude
+has described this place as the dreariest spot in the British
+dominions:
+
+The nearest cottage is more than a mile from it; the elevation,
+seven hundred feet above the sea, stunts the trees and limits the
+garden produce; the house is gaunt and hungry-looking. It stands,
+with the scanty fields attached, as an island in a sea of morass.
+The landscape is unredeemed by grace or grandeur--mere undulating
+hills of grass and heather, with peat bogs in the hollows between
+them.
+
+Froude's grim description has been questioned by some; yet the
+actual pictures that have been drawn of the place in later years
+make it look bare, desolate, and uninviting. Mrs. Carlyle, who
+owned it as an inheritance from her father, saw the place for the
+first time in March, 1828. She settled there in May; but May, in
+the Scottish hills, is almost as repellent as winter. She herself
+shrank from the adventure which she had proposed. It was her
+husband's notion, and her own, that they should live there in
+practical solitude. He was to think and write, and make for
+himself a beginning of real fame; while she was to hover over him
+and watch his minor comforts.
+
+It seemed to many of their friends that the project was quixotic
+to a degree. Mrs. Carlyle delicate health, her weak chest, and the
+beginning of a nervous disorder, made them think that she was
+unfit to dwell in so wild and bleak a solitude. They felt, too,
+that Carlyle was too much absorbed with his own thought to be
+trusted with the charge of a high-spirited woman.
+
+However, the decision had been made, and the newly married couple
+went to Craigenputtock, with wagons that carried their household
+goods and those of Carlyle's brother, Alexander, who lived in a
+cottage near by. These were the two redeeming features of their
+lonely home--the presence of Alexander Carlyle, and the fact that,
+although they had no servants in the ordinary sense, there were
+several farmhands and a dairy-maid.
+
+Before long there came a period of trouble, which is easily
+explained by what has been already said. Carlyle, thinking and
+writing some of the most beautiful things that he ever thought or
+wrote, could not make allowance for his wife's high spirit and
+physical weakness. She, on her side--nervous, fitful, and hard to
+please--thought herself a slave, the servant of a harsh and brutal
+master. She screamed at him when her nerves were too unstrung; and
+then, with a natural reaction, she called herself "a devil who
+could never be good enough for him." But most of her letters were
+harsh and filled with bitterness, and, no doubt, his conduct to
+her was at times no better than her own.
+
+But it was at Craigenputtock that he really did lay fast and firm
+the road to fame. His wife's sharp tongue, and the gnawings of his
+own dyspepsia, were lived down with true Scottish grimness. It was
+here that he wrote some of his most penetrating and sympathetic
+essays, which were published by the leading reviews of England and
+Scotland. Here, too, he began to teach his countrymen the value of
+German literature.
+
+The most remarkable of his productions was that strange work
+entitled Sartor Resartus (1834), an extraordinary mixture of the
+sublime and the grotesque. The book quivers and shakes with tragic
+pathos, with inward agonies, with solemn aspirations, and with
+riotous humor.
+
+In 1834, after six years at Craigenputtock, the Carlyles moved to
+London, and took up their home in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, a far from
+fashionable retreat, but one in which the comforts of life could
+be more readily secured. It was there that Thomas Carlyle wrote
+what must seem to us the most vivid of all his books, the History
+of the French Revolution. For this he had read and thought for
+many years; parts of it he had written in essays, and parts of it
+he had jotted down in journals. But now it came forth, as some one
+has said, "a truth clad in hell-fire," swirling amid clouds and
+flames and mist, a most wonderful picture of the accumulated
+social and political falsehoods which preceded the revolution, and
+which were swept away by a nemesis that was the righteous judgment
+of God.
+
+Carlyle never wrote so great a book as this. He had reached his
+middle style, having passed the clarity of his early writings, and
+not having yet reached the thunderous, strange-mouthed German
+expletives which marred his later work. In the French Revolution
+he bursts forth, here and there, into furious Gallic oaths and
+Gargantuan epithets; yet this apocalypse of France seems more true
+than his hero-worshiping of old Frederick of Prussia, or even of
+English Cromwell.
+
+All these days Thomas Carlyle lived a life which was partly one of
+seclusion and partly one of pleasure. At all times he and his
+dark-haired wife had their own sets, and mingled with their own
+friends. Jane had no means of discovering just whether she would
+have been happier with Irving; for Irving died while she was still
+digging potatoes and complaining of her lot at Craigenputtock.
+
+However this may be, the Carlyles, man and wife, lived an
+existence that was full of unhappiness and rancor. Jane Carlyle
+became an invalid, and sought to allay her nervous sufferings with
+strong tea and tobacco and morphin. When a nervous woman takes to
+morphin, it almost always means that she becomes intensely
+jealous; and so it was with Jane Carlyle.
+
+A shivering, palpitating, fiercely loyal bit of humanity, she took
+it into her head that her husband was infatuated with Lady
+Ashburton, or that Lady Ashburton was infatuated with him. She
+took to spying on them, and at times, when her nerves were all a
+jangle, she would lie back in her armchair and yell with paroxysms
+of anger. On the other hand, Carlyle, eager to enjoy the world,
+sought relief from his household cares, and sometimes stole away
+after a fashion that was hardly guileless. He would leave false
+addresses at his house, and would dine at other places than he had
+announced.
+
+In 1866 Jane Carlyle suddenly died; and somehow, then, the
+conscience of Thomas Carlyle became convinced that he had wronged
+the woman whom he had really loved. His last fifteen years were
+spent in wretchedness and despair. He felt that he had committed
+the unpardonable sin. He recalled with anguish every moment of
+their early life at Craigenputtock--how she had toiled for him,
+and waited upon him, and made herself a slave; and how, later, she
+had given herself up entirely to him, while he had thoughtlessly
+received the sacrifice, and trampled on it as on a bed of flowers.
+
+Of course, in all this he was intensely morbid, and the diary
+which he wrote was no more sane and wholesome than the screamings
+with which his wife had horrified her friends. But when he had
+grown to be a very old man, he came to feel that this was all a
+sort of penance, and that the selfishness of his past must be
+expiated in the future. Therefore, he gave his diary to his
+friend, the historian, Froude, and urged him to publish the
+letters and memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. Mr. Froude, with an
+eye to the reading world, readily did so, furnishing them with
+abundant footnotes, which made Carlyle appear to the world as
+more or less of a monster.
+
+First, there was set forth the almost continual unhappiness of the
+pair. In the second place, by hint, by innuendo, and sometimes by
+explicit statement, there were given reasons to show why Carlyle
+made his wife unhappy. Of course, his gnawing dyspepsia, which she
+strove with all her might to drive away, was one of the first and
+greatest causes. But again another cause of discontent was stated
+in the implication that Carlyle, in his bursts of temper, actually
+abused his wife. In one passage there is a hint that certain blue
+marks upon her arm were bruises, the result of blows.
+
+Most remarkable of all these accusations is that which has to do
+with the relations of Carlyle and Lady Ashburton. There is no
+doubt that Jane Carlyle disliked this brilliant woman, and came to
+have dark suspicions concerning her. At first, it was only a sort
+of social jealousy. Lady Ashburton was quite as clever a talker as
+Mrs. Carlyle, and she had a prestige which brought her more
+admiration.
+
+Then, by degrees, as Jane Carlyle's mind began to wane, she
+transferred her jealousy to her husband himself. She hated to be
+out-shone, and now, in some misguided fashion, it came into her
+head that Carlyle had surrendered to Lady Ashburton his own
+attention to his wife, and had fallen in love with her brilliant
+rival.
+
+On one occasion, she declared that Lady Ashburton had thrown
+herself at Carlyle's feet, but that Carlyle had acted like a man
+of honor, while Lord Ashburton, knowing all the facts, had passed
+them over, and had retained his friendship with Carlyle.
+
+Now, when Froude came to write My Relations with Carlyle, there
+were those who were very eager to furnish him with every sort of
+gossip. The greatest source of scandal upon which he drew was a
+woman named Geraldine Jewsbury, a curious neurotic creature, who
+had seen much of the late Mrs. Carlyle, but who had an almost
+morbid love of offensive tattle. Froude describes himself as a
+witness for six years, at Cheyne Row, "of the enactment of a
+tragedy as stern and real as the story of Oedipus." According to
+his own account:
+
+I stood by, consenting to the slow martyrdom of a woman whom I
+have described as bright and sparkling and tender, and I uttered
+no word of remonstrance. I saw her involved in a perpetual
+blizzard, and did nothing to shelter her.
+
+But it is not upon his own observations that Froude relies for his
+most sinister evidence against his friend. To him comes Miss
+Jewsbury with a lengthy tale to tell. It is well to know what Mrs.
+Carlyle thought of this lady. She wrote:
+
+It is her besetting sin, and her trade of novelist has aggravated
+it--the desire of feeling and producing violent emotions. ...
+Geraldine has one besetting weakness; she is never happy unless
+she has a grande passion on hand.
+
+There were strange manifestations on the part of Miss Jewsbury
+toward Mrs. Carlyle. At one time, when Mrs. Carlyle had shown some
+preference for another woman, it led to a wild outburst of what
+Miss Jewsbury herself called "tiger jealousy." There are many
+other instances of violent emotions in her letters to Mrs.
+Carlyle. They are often highly charged and erotic. It is unusual
+for a woman of thirty-two to write to a woman friend, who is
+forty-three years of age, in these words, which Miss Jewsbury used
+in writing to Mrs. Carlyle:
+
+You are never out of my thoughts one hour together. I think of you
+much more than if you were my lover. I cannot express my feelings,
+even to you--vague, undefined yearnings to be yours in some way.
+
+Mrs. Carlyle was accustomed, in private, to speak of Miss Jewsbury
+as "Miss Gooseberry," while Carlyle himself said that she was
+simply "a flimsy tatter of a creature." But it is on the testimony
+of this one woman, who was so morbid and excitable, that the most
+serious accusations against Carlyle rest. She knew that Froude was
+writing a volume about Mrs. Carlyle, and she rushed to him, eager
+to furnish any narratives, however strange, improbable, or
+salacious they might be.
+
+Thus she is the sponsor of the Ashburton story, in which there is
+nothing whatsoever. Some of the letters which Lady Ashburton wrote
+Carlyle have been destroyed, but not before her husband had
+perused them. Another set of letters had never been read by Lord
+Ashburton at all, and they are still preserved--friendly,
+harmless, usual letters. Lord Ashburton always invited Carlyle to
+his house, and there is no reason to think that the Scottish
+philosopher wronged him.
+
+There is much more to be said about the charge that Mrs. Carlyle
+suffered from personal abuse; yet when we examine the facts, the
+evidence resolves itself into practically nothing. That, in his
+self-absorption, he allowed her to Sending Completed Page, Please
+Wait ... overflowed toward a man who must have been a manly,
+loving lover. She calls him by the name by which he called her--a
+homely Scottish name.
+
+GOODY, GOODY, DEAR GOODY:
+
+You said you would weary, and I do hope in my heart you are
+wearying. It will be so sweet to make it all up to you in kisses
+when I return. You will take me and hear all my bits of
+experiences, and your heart will beat when you find how I have
+longed to return to you. Darling, dearest, loveliest, the Lord
+bless you! I think of you every hour, every moment. I love you and
+admire you, like--like anything. Oh, if I was there, I could put
+my arms so close about your neck, and hush you into the softest
+sleep you have had since I went away. Good night. Dream of me. I
+am ever YOUR OWN GOODY.
+
+It seems most fitting to remember Thomas Carlyle as a man of
+strength, of honor, and of intellect; and his wife as one who was
+sorely tried, but who came out of her suffering into the arms of
+death, purified and calm and worthy to be remembered by her
+husband's side.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF THE HUGOS
+
+
+Victor Hugo, after all criticisms have been made, stands as a
+literary colossus. He had imaginative power which makes his finest
+passages fairly crash upon the reader's brain like blasting
+thunderbolts. His novels, even when translated, are read and
+reread by people of every degree of education. There is something
+vast, something almost Titanic, about the grandeur and
+gorgeousness of his fancy. His prose resembles the sonorous blare
+of an immense military band. Readers of English care less for his
+poetry; yet in his verse one can find another phase of his
+intellect. He could write charmingly, in exquisite cadences, poems
+for lovers and for little children. His gifts were varied, and he
+knew thoroughly the life and thought of his own countrymen; and,
+therefore, in his later days he was almost deified by them.
+
+At the same time, there were defects in his intellect and
+character which are perceptible in what he wrote, as well as in
+what he did. He had the Gallic wit in great measure, but he was
+absolutely devoid of any sense of humor. This is why, in both his
+prose and his poetry, his most tremendous pages often come
+perilously near to bombast; and this is why, again, as a man, his
+vanity was almost as great as his genius. He had good reason to be
+vain, and yet, if he had possessed a gleam of humor, he would
+never have allowed his egoism to make him arrogant. As it was, he
+felt himself exalted above other mortals. Whatever he did or said
+or wrote was right because he did it or said it or wrote it.
+
+This often showed itself in rather whimsical ways. Thus, after he
+had published the first edition of his novel, The Man Who Laughs,
+an English gentleman called upon him, and, after some courteous
+compliments, suggested that in subsequent editions the name of an
+English peer who figures in the book should be changed from Tom
+Jim-Jack.
+
+"For," said the Englishman, "Tom Jim-Jack is a name that could not
+possibly belong to an English noble, or, indeed, to any
+Englishman. The presence of it in your powerful story makes it
+seem to English readers a little grotesque."
+
+Victor Hugo drew himself up with an air of high disdain.
+
+"Who are you?" asked he.
+
+"I am an Englishman," was the answer, "and naturally I know what
+names are possible in English."
+
+Hugo drew himself up still higher, and on his face there was a
+smile of utter contempt.
+
+"Yes," said he. "You are an Englishman; but I--I am Victor Hugo."
+
+In another book Hugo had spoken of the Scottish bagpipes as
+"bugpipes." This gave some offense to his Scottish admirers. A
+great many persons told him that the word was "bagpipes," and not
+"bugpipes." But he replied with irritable obstinacy:
+
+"I am Victor Hugo; and if I choose to write it 'bugpipes,' it IS
+'bugpipes.' It is anything that I prefer to make it. It is so,
+because I call it so!"
+
+So, Victor Hugo became a violent republican, because he did not
+wish France to be an empire or a kingdom, in which an emperor or a
+king would be his superior in rank. He always spoke of Napoleon
+III as "M. Bonaparte." He refused to call upon the gentle-mannered
+Emperor of Brazil, because he was an emperor; although Dom Pedro
+expressed an earnest desire to meet the poet.
+
+When the German army was besieging Paris, Hugo proposed to fight a
+duel with the King of Prussia, and to have the result of it settle
+the war; "for," said he, "the King of Prussia is a great king, but
+I am Victor Hugo, the great poet. We are, therefore, equal."
+
+In spite, however, of his ardent republicanism, he was very fond
+of speaking of his own noble descent. Again and again he styled
+himself "a peer of France;" and he and his family made frequent
+allusions to the knights and bishops and counselors of state with
+whom he claimed an ancestral relation. This was more than
+inconsistent. It was somewhat ludicrous; because Victor Hugo's
+ancestry was by no means noble. The Hugos of the fifteenth and
+sixteenth centuries were not in any way related to the poet's
+family, which was eminently honest and respectable, but by no
+means one of distinction. His grandfather was a carpenter. One of
+his aunts was the wife of a baker, another of a barber, while the
+third earned her living as a provincial dressmaker.
+
+If the poet had been less vain and more sincerely democratic, he
+would have been proud to think that he sprang from good, sound,
+sturdy stock, and would have laughed at titles. As it was, he
+jeered at all pretensions of rank in other men, while he claimed
+for himself distinctions that were not really his. His father was
+a soldier who rose from the ranks until, under Napoleon, he
+reached the grade of general. His mother was the daughter of a
+ship owner in Nantes.
+
+Victor Hugo was born in February, 1802, during the Napoleonic
+wars, and his early years were spent among the camps and within
+the sound of the cannon-thunder. It was fitting that he should
+have been born and reared in an age of upheaval, revolt, and
+battle. He was essentially the laureate of revolt; and in some of
+his novels--as in Ninety-Three--the drum and the trumpet roll and
+ring through every chapter.
+
+The present paper has, of course, nothing to do with Hugo's public
+life; yet it is necessary to remember the complicated nature of
+the man--all his power, all his sweetness of disposition, and
+likewise all his vanity and his eccentricities. We must remember,
+also, that he was French, so that his story may be interpreted in
+the light of the French character.
+
+At the age of fifteen he was domiciled in Paris, and though still
+a schoolboy and destined for the study of law, he dreamed only of
+poetry and of literature. He received honorable mention from the
+French Academy in 1817, and in the following year took prizes in a
+poetical competition. At seventeen he began the publication of a
+literary journal, which survived until 1821. His astonishing
+energy became evident in the many publications which he put forth
+in these boyish days. He began to become known. Although poetry,
+then as now, was not very profitable even when it was admired, one
+of his slender volumes brought him the sum of seven hundred
+francs, which seemed to him not only a fortune in itself, but the
+forerunner of still greater prosperity.
+
+It was at this time, while still only twenty years of age, that he
+met a young girl of eighteen with whom he fell rather
+tempestuously in love. Her name was Adele Foucher, and she was the
+daughter of a clerk in the War Office. When one is very young and
+also a poet, it takes very little to feed the flame of passion.
+Victor Hugo was often a guest at the apartments of M. Foucher,
+where he was received by that gentleman and his family. French
+etiquette, of course, forbade any direct communication between the
+visitor and Adele. She was still a very young girl, and was
+supposed to take no share in the conversation. Therefore, while
+the others talked, she sat demurely by the fireside and sewed.
+
+Her dark eyes and abundant hair, her grace of manner, and the
+picture which she made as the firelight played about her, kindled
+a flame in the susceptible heart of Victor Hugo. Though he could
+not speak to her, he at least could look at her; and, before long,
+his share in the conversation was very slight. This was set down,
+at first, to his absent-mindedness; but looks can be as eloquent
+as spoken words. Mme. Foucher, with a woman's keen intelligence,
+noted the adoring gaze of Victor Hugo as he silently watched her
+daughter. The young Adele herself was no less intuitive than her
+mother. It was very well understood, in the course of a few
+months, that Victor Hugo was in love with Adele Foucher.
+
+Her father and mother took counsel about the matter, and Hugo
+himself, in a burst of lyrical eloquence, confessed that he adored
+Adele and wished to marry her. Her parents naturally objected. The
+girl was but a child. She had no dowry, nor had Victor Hugo any
+settled income. They were not to think of marriage. But when did a
+common-sense decision, such as this, ever separate a man and a
+woman who have felt the thrill of first love! Victor Hugo was
+insistent. With his supreme self-confidence, he declared that he
+was bound to be successful, and that in a very short time he would
+be illustrious. Adele, on her side, created "an atmosphere" at
+home by weeping frequently, and by going about with hollow eyes
+and wistful looks.
+
+The Foucher family removed from Paris to a country town. Victor
+Hugo immediately followed them. Fortunately for him, his poems had
+attracted the attention of Louis XVIII, who was flattered by some
+of the verses. He sent Hugo five hundred francs for an ode, and
+soon afterward settled upon him a pension of a thousand francs.
+Here at least was an income--a very small one, to be sure, but
+still an income. Perhaps Adele's father was impressed not so much
+by the actual money as by the evidence of the royal favor. At any
+rate, he withdrew his opposition, and the two young people were
+married in October, 1822--both of them being under age, unformed,
+and immature.
+
+Their story is another warning against too early marriage. It is
+true that they lived together until Mme. Hugo's death--a married
+life of forty-six years--yet their story presents phases which
+would have made this impossible had they not been French.
+
+For a time, Hugo devoted all his energies to work. The record of
+his steady upward progress is a part of the history of literature,
+and need not be repeated here. The poet and his wife were soon
+able to leave the latter's family abode, and to set up their own
+household god in a home which was their own. Around them there
+were gathered, in a sort of salon, all the best-known writers of
+the day--dramatists, critics, poets, and romancers. The Hugos knew
+everybody.
+
+Unfortunately, one of their visitors cast into their new life a
+drop of corroding bitterness. This intruder was Charles Augustin
+Sainte-Beuve, a man two years younger than Victor Hugo, and one
+who blended learning, imagination, and a gift of critical
+analysis. Sainte-Beuve is to-day best remembered as a critic, and
+he was perhaps the greatest critic ever known in France. But in
+1830 he was a slender, insinuating youth who cultivated a gift for
+sensuous and somewhat morbid poetry.
+
+He had won Victor Hugo's friendship by writing an enthusiastic
+notice of Hugo's dramatic works. Hugo, in turn, styled Sainte-
+Beuve "an eagle," "a blazing star," and paid him other compliments
+no less gorgeous and Hugoesque. But in truth, if Sainte-Beuve
+frequented the Hugo salon, it was less because of his admiration
+for the poet than from his desire to win the love of the poet's
+wife.
+
+It is quite impossible to say how far he attracted the serious
+attention of Adele Hugo. Sainte-Beuve represents a curious type,
+which is far more common in France and Italy than in the countries
+of the north. Human nature is not very different in cultivated
+circles anywhere. Man loves, and seeks to win the object of his
+love; or, as the old English proverb has it:
+
+    It's a man's part to try,
+    And a woman's to deny.
+
+But only in the Latin countries do men who have tried make their
+attempts public, and seek to produce an impression that they have
+been successful, and that the woman has not denied. This sort of
+man, in English-speaking lands, is set down simply as a cad, and
+is excluded from people's houses; but in some other countries the
+thing is regarded with a certain amount of toleration. We see it
+in the two books written respectively by Alfred de Musset and
+George Sand. We have seen it still later in our own times, in that
+strange and half-repulsive story in which the Italian novelist and
+poet, Gabriele d'Annunzio, under a very thin disguise, revealed
+his relations with the famous actress, Eleanora Duse. Anglo-Saxons
+thrust such books aside with a feeling of disgust for the man who
+could so betray a sacred confidence and perhaps exaggerate a
+simple indiscretion into actual guilt. But it is not so in France
+and Italy. And this is precisely what Sainte-Beuve attempted.
+
+Dr. George McLean Harper, in his lately published study of Sainte-
+Beuve, has summed the matter up admirably, in speaking of The Book
+of Love:
+
+He had the vein of emotional self-disclosure, the vein of romantic
+or sentimental confession. This last was not a rich lode, and so
+he was at pains to charge it secretly with ore which he exhumed
+gloatingly, but which was really base metal. The impulse that led
+him along this false route was partly ambition, partly sensuality.
+Many a worse man would have been restrained by self-respect and
+good taste. And no man with a sense of honor would have permitted
+The Book of Love to see the light--a small collection of verses
+recording his passion for Mme. Hugo, and designed to implicate
+her.
+
+He left two hundred and five printed copies of this book to be
+distributed after his death. A virulent enemy of Sainte-Beuve was
+not too expressive when he declared that its purpose was "to leave
+on the life of this woman the gleaming and slimy trace which the
+passage of a snail leaves on a rose." Abominable in either case,
+whether or not the implication was unfounded, Sainte-Beuve's
+numerous innuendoes in regard to Mme. Hugo are an indelible stain
+on his memory, and his infamy not only cost him his most precious
+friendships, but crippled him in every high endeavor.
+
+How monstrous was this violation of both friendship and love may
+be seen in the following quotation from his writings:
+
+In that inevitable hour, when the gloomy tempest and the jealous
+gulf shall roll over our heads, a sealed bottle, belched forth
+from the abyss, will render immortal our two names, their close
+alliance, and our double memory aspiring after union.
+
+Whether or not Mme. Hugo's relations with Sainte-Beuve justified
+the latter even in thinking such thoughts as these, one need not
+inquire too minutely. Evidently, though, Victor Hugo could no
+longer be the friend of the man who almost openly boasted that he
+had dishonored him. There exist some sharp letters which passed
+between Hugo and Sainte-Beuve. Their intimacy was ended.
+
+But there was something more serious than this. Sainte-Beuve had
+in fact succeeded in leaving a taint upon the name of Victor
+Hugo's wife. That Hugo did not repudiate her makes it fairly plain
+that she was innocent; yet a high-spirited, sensitive soul like
+Hugo's could never forget that in the world's eye she was
+compromised. The two still lived together as before; but now the
+poet felt himself released from the strict obligations of the
+marriage-bond.
+
+It may perhaps be doubted whether he would in any case have
+remained faithful all his life. He was, as Mr. H.W. Wack well
+says, "a man of powerful sensations, physically as well as
+mentally. Hugo pursued every opportunity for new work, new
+sensations, fresh emotion. He desired to absorb as much on life's
+eager forward way as his great nature craved. His range in all
+things--mental, physical, and spiritual--was so far beyond the
+ordinary that the gage of average cannot be applied to him. The
+cavil of the moralist did not disturb him."
+
+Hence, it is not improbable that Victor Hugo might have broken
+through the bonds of marital fidelity, even had Sainte-Beuve never
+written his abnormal poems; but certainly these poems hastened a
+result which may or may not have been otherwise inevitable. Hugo
+no longer turned wholly to the dark-haired, dark-eyed Adele as
+summing up for him the whole of womanhood. A veil was drawn, as it
+were, from before his eyes, and he looked on other women and found
+them beautiful.
+
+It was in 1833, soon after Hugo's play "Lucrece Borgia" had been
+accepted for production, that a lady called one morning at Hugo's
+house in the Place Royale. She was then between twenty and thirty
+years of age, slight of figure, winsome in her bearing, and one
+who knew the arts which appeal to men. For she was no
+inexperienced ingenue. The name upon her visiting-card was "Mme.
+Drouet"; and by this name she had been known in Paris as a clever
+and somewhat gifted actress. Theophile Gautier, whose cult was the
+worship of physical beauty, wrote in almost lyric prose of her
+seductive charm.
+
+At nineteen, after she had been cast upon the world, dowered with
+that terrible combination, poverty and beauty, she had lived
+openly with a sculptor named Pradier. This has a certain
+importance in the history of French art. Pradier had received a
+commission to execute a statue representing Strasburg--the statue
+which stands to-day in the Place de la Concorde, and which
+patriotic Frenchmen and Frenchwomen drape in mourning and half
+bury in immortelles, in memory of that city of Alsace which so
+long was French, but which to-day is German--one of Germany's
+great prizes taken in the war of 1870.
+
+Five years before her meeting with Hugo, Pradier had rather
+brutally severed his connection with her, and she had accepted the
+protection of a Russian nobleman. At this time she was known by
+her real name--Julienne Josephine Gauvin; but having gone upon the
+stage, she assumed the appellation by which she was thereafter
+known, that of Juliette Drouet.
+
+Her visit to Hugo was for the purpose of asking him to secure for
+her a part in his forth-coming play. The dramatist was willing,
+but unfortunately all the major characters had been provided for,
+and he was able to offer her only the minor one of the Princesse
+Negroni. The charming deference with which she accepted the
+offered part attracted Hugo's attention. Such amiability is very
+rare in actresses who have had engagements at the best theaters.
+He resolved to see her again; and he did so, time after time,
+until he was thoroughly captivated by her.
+
+She knew her value, and as yet was by no means infatuated with
+him. At first he was to her simply a means of getting on in her
+profession--simply another influential acquaintance. Yet she
+brought to bear upon him the arts at her command, her beauty and
+her sympathy, and, last of all, her passionate abandonment.
+
+Hugo was overwhelmed by her. He found that she was in debt, and he
+managed to see that her debts were paid. He secured her other
+engagements at the theater, though she was less successful as an
+actress after she knew him. There came, for a time, a short break
+in their relations; for, partly out of need, she returned to her
+Russian nobleman, or at least admitted him to a menage a trois.
+Hugo underwent for a second time a great disillusionment.
+Nevertheless, he was not too proud to return to her and to beg her
+not to be unfaithful any more. Touched by his tears, and perhaps
+foreseeing his future fame, she gave her promise, and she kept it
+until her death, nearly half a century later.
+
+Perhaps because she had deceived him once, Hugo never completely
+lost his prudence in his association with her. He was by no means
+lavish with money, and he installed her in a rather simple
+apartment only a short distance from his own home. He gave her an
+allowance that was relatively small, though later he provided for
+her amply in his will. But it was to her that he brought all his
+confidences, to her he entrusted all his interests. She became to
+him, thenceforth, much more than she appeared to the world at
+large; for she was his friend, and, as he said, his inspiration.
+
+The fact of their intimate connection became gradually known
+through Paris. It was known even to Mme. Hugo; but she,
+remembering the affair of Sainte-Beuve, or knowing how difficult
+it is to check the will of a man like Hugo, made no sign, and even
+received Juliette Drouet in her own house and visited her in turn.
+When the poet's sons grew up to manhood, they, too, spent many
+hours with their father in the little salon of the former actress.
+It was a strange and, to an Anglo-Saxon mind, an almost impossible
+position; yet France forgives much to genius, and in time no one
+thought of commenting on Hugo's manner of life.
+
+In 1851, when Napoleon III seized upon the government, and when
+Hugo was in danger of arrest, she assisted him to escape in
+disguise, and with a forged passport, across the Belgian frontier.
+During his long exile in Guernsey she lived in the same close
+relationship to him and to his family. Mme. Hugo died in 1868,
+having known for thirty-three years that she was only second in
+her husband's thoughts. Was she doing penance, or was she merely
+accepting the inevitable? In any case, her position was most
+pathetic, though she uttered no complaint.
+
+A very curious and poignant picture of her just before her death
+has been given by the pen of a visitor in Guernsey. He had met
+Hugo and his sons; he had seen the great novelist eating enormous
+slices of roast beef and drinking great goblets of red wine at
+dinner, and he had also watched him early each morning, divested
+of all his clothing and splashing about in a bath-tub on the top
+of his house, in view of all the town. One evening he called and
+found only Mme. Hugo. She was reclining on a couch, and was
+evidently suffering great pain. Surprised, he asked where were her
+husband and her sons.
+
+"Oh," she replied, "they've all gone to Mme. Drouet's to spend the
+evening and enjoy themselves. Go also; you'll not find it amusing
+here."
+
+One ponders over this sad scene with conflicting thoughts. Was
+there really any truth in the story at which Sainte-Beuve more
+than hinted? If so, Adele Hugo was more than punished. The other
+woman had sinned far more; and yet she had never been Hugo's wife;
+and hence perhaps it was right that she should suffer less. Suffer
+she did; for after her devotion to Hugo had become sincere and
+deep, he betrayed her confidence by an intrigue with a girl who is
+spoken of as "Claire." The knowledge of it caused her infinite
+anguish, but it all came to an end; and she lived past her
+eightieth year, long after the death of Mme. Hugo. She died only a
+short time before the poet himself was laid to rest in Paris with
+magnificent obsequies which an emperor might have envied. In her
+old age, Juliette Drouet became very white and very wan; yet she
+never quite lost the charm with which, as a girl, she had won the
+heart of Hugo.
+
+The story has many aspects. One may see in it a retribution, or
+one may see in it only the cruelty of life. Perhaps it is best
+regarded simply as a chapter in the strange life-histories of men
+of genius.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF GEORGE SAND
+
+
+To the student of feminine psychology there is no more curious and
+complex problem than the one that meets us in the life of the
+gifted French writer best known to the world as George Sand.
+
+To analyze this woman simply as a writer would in itself be a
+long, difficult task. She wrote voluminously, with a fluid rather
+than a fluent pen. She scandalized her contemporaries by her
+theories, and by the way in which she applied them in her novels.
+Her fiction made her, in the history of French literature, second
+only to Victor Hugo. She might even challenge Hugo, because where
+he depicts strange and monstrous figures, exaggerated beyond the
+limits of actual life, George Sand portrays living men and women,
+whose instincts and desires she understands, and whom she makes us
+see precisely as if we were admitted to their intimacy.
+
+But George Sand puzzles us most by peculiarities which it is
+difficult for us to reconcile. She seemed to have no sense of
+chastity whatever; yet, on the other hand, she was not grossly
+sensual. She possessed the maternal instinct to a high degree, and
+liked better to be a mother than a mistress to the men whose love
+she sought. For she did seek men's love, frankly and shamelessly,
+only to tire of it. In many cases she seems to have been swayed by
+vanity, and by a love of conquest, rather than by passion. She had
+also a spiritual, imaginative side to her nature, and she could be
+a far better comrade than anything more intimate.
+
+The name given to this strange genius at birth was Amantine Lucile
+Aurore Dupin. The circumstances of her ancestry and birth were
+quite unusual. Her father was a lieutenant in the French army. His
+grandmother had been the natural daughter of Marshal Saxe, who was
+himself the illegitimate son of Augustus the Strong of Poland and
+of the bewitching Countess of Konigsmarck. This was a curious
+pedigree. It meant strength of character, eroticism, stubbornness,
+imagination, courage, and recklessness.
+
+Her father complicated the matter by marrying suddenly a Parisian
+of the lower classes, a bird-fancier named Sophie Delaborde. His
+daughter, who was born in 1804, used afterward to boast that on
+one side she was sprung from kings and nobles, while on the other
+she was a daughter of the people, able, therefore, to understand
+the sentiments of the aristocracy and of the children of the soil,
+or even of the gutter.
+
+She was fond of telling, also, of the omen which attended on her
+birth. Her father and mother were at a country dance in the house
+of a fellow officer of Dupin's. Suddenly Mme. Dupin left the room.
+Nothing was thought of this, and the dance went on. In less than
+an hour, Dupin was called aside and told that his wife had just
+given birth to a child. It was the child's aunt who brought the
+news, with the joyous comment:
+
+"She will be lucky, for she was born among the roses and to the
+sound of music."
+
+This was at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Lieutenant Dupin was
+on the staff of Prince Murat, and little Aurore, as she was
+called, at the age of three accompanied the army, as did her
+mother. The child was adopted by one of those hard-fighting,
+veteran regiments. The rough old sergeants nursed her and petted
+her. Even the prince took notice of her; and to please him she
+wore the green uniform of a hussar.
+
+But all this soon passed, and she was presently sent to live with
+her grandmother at the estate now intimately associated with her
+name--Nohant, in the valley of the Indre, in the midst of a rich
+country, a love for which she then drank in so deeply that nothing
+in her later life could lessen it. She was always the friend of
+the peasant and of the country-folk in general.
+
+At Nohant she was given over to her grand-mother, to be reared in
+a strangely desultory sort of fashion, doing and reading and
+studying those things which could best develop her native gifts.
+Her father had great influence over her, teaching her a thousand
+things without seeming to teach her anything. Of him George Sand
+herself has written:
+
+Character is a matter of heredity. If any one desires to know me,
+he must know my father.
+
+Her father, however, was killed by a fall from a horse; and then
+the child grew up almost without any formal education. A tutor,
+who also managed the estate; believed with Rousseau that the young
+should be reared according to their own preferences. Therefore,
+Aurore read poems and childish stories; she gained a smattering of
+Latin, and she was devoted to music and the elements of natural
+science. For the rest of the time she rambled with the country
+children, learned their games, and became a sort of leader in
+everything they did.
+
+Her only sorrow was the fact that her mother was excluded from
+Nohant. The aristocratic old grandmother would not allow under her
+roof her son's low-born wife; but she was devoted to her little
+grandchild. The girl showed a wonderful degree of sensibility.
+
+This life was adapted to her nature. She fed her imagination in a
+perfectly healthy fashion; and, living so much out of doors, she
+acquired that sound physique which she retained all through her
+life.
+
+When she was thirteen, her grandmother sent the girl to a convent
+school in Paris. One might suppose that the sudden change from the
+open woods and fields to the primness of a religious home would
+have been a great shock to her, and that with her disposition she
+might have broken out into wild ways that would have shocked the
+nuns. But, here, as elsewhere, she showed her wonderful
+adaptability. It even seemed as if she were likely to become what
+the French call a devote. She gave herself up to mythical
+thoughts, and expressed a desire of taking the veil. Her
+confessor, however, was a keen student of human nature, and he
+perceived that she was too young to decide upon the renunciation
+of earthly things. Moreover, her grandmother, who had no intention
+that Aurore should become a nun, hastened to Paris and carried her
+back to Nohant.
+
+The girl was now sixteen, and her complicated nature began to make
+itself apparent. There was no one to control her, because her
+grandmother was confined to her own room. And so Aurore Dupin, now
+in superb health, rushed into every sort of diversion with all the
+zest of youth. She read voraciously--religion, poetry, philosophy.
+She was an excellent musician, playing the piano and the harp.
+Once, in a spirit of unconscious egotism, she wrote to her
+confessor:
+
+Do you think that my philosophical studies are compatible with
+Christian humility?
+
+The shrewd ecclesiastic answered, with a touch of wholesome irony:
+
+I doubt, my daughter, whether your philosophical studies are
+profound enough to warrant intellectual pride.
+
+This stung the girl, and led her to think a little less of her own
+abilities; but perhaps it made her books distasteful to her. For a
+while she seems to have almost forgotten her sex. She began to
+dress as a boy, and took to smoking large quantities of tobacco.
+Her natural brother, who was an officer in the army, came down to
+Nohant and taught her to ride--to ride like a boy, seated astride.
+She went about without any chaperon, and flirted with the young
+men of the neighborhood. The prim manners of the place made her
+subject to a certain amount of scandal, and the village priest
+chided her in language that was far from tactful. In return she
+refused any longer to attend his church.
+
+Thus she was living when her grandmother died, in 1821, leaving to
+Aurore her entire fortune of five hundred thousand francs. As the
+girl was still but seventeen, she was placed under the
+guardianship of the nearest relative on her father's side--a
+gentleman of rank. When the will was read, Aurore's mother made a
+violent protest, and caused a most unpleasant scene.
+
+"I am the natural guardian of my child," she cried. "No one can
+take away my rights!"
+
+The young girl well understood that this was really the parting of
+the ways. If she turned toward her uncle, she would be forever
+classed among the aristocracy. If she chose her mother, who,
+though married, was essentially a grisette, then she must live
+with grisettes, and find her friends among the friends who visited
+her mother. She could not belong to both worlds. She must decide
+once for all whether she would be a woman of rank or a woman
+entirely separated from the circle that had been her father's.
+
+One must respect the girl for making the choice she did.
+Understanding the situation absolutely, she chose her mother; and
+perhaps one would not have had her do otherwise. Yet in the long
+run it was bound to be a mistake. Aurore was clever, refined, well
+read, and had had the training of a fashionable convent school.
+The mother was ignorant and coarse, as was inevitable, with one
+who before her marriage had been half shop-girl and half
+courtesan. The two could not live long together, and hence it was
+not unnatural that Aurore Dupin should marry, to enter upon a new
+career.
+
+Her fortune was a fairly large one for the times, and yet not
+large enough to attract men who were quite her equals. Presently,
+however, it brought to her a sort of country squire, named Casimir
+Dudevant. He was the illegitimate son of the Baron Dudevant. He
+had been in the army, and had studied law; but he possessed no
+intellectual tastes. He was outwardly eligible; but he was of a
+coarse type--a man who, with passing years, would be likely to
+take to drink and vicious amusements, and in serious life cared
+only for his cattle, his horses, and his hunting. He had, however,
+a sort of jollity about him which appealed to this girl of
+eighteen; and so a marriage was arranged. Aurore Dupin became his
+wife in 1822, and he secured the control of her fortune.
+
+The first few years after her marriage were not unhappy. She had a
+son, Maurice Dudevant, and a daughter, Solange, and she loved them
+both. But it was impossible that she should continue vegetating
+mentally upon a farm with a husband who was a fool, a drunkard,
+and a miser. He deteriorated; his wife grew more and more clever.
+Dudevant resented this. It made him uncomfortable. Other persons
+spoke of her talk as brilliant. He bluntly told her that it was
+silly, and that she must stop it. When she did not stop it, he
+boxed her ears. This caused a breach between the pair which was
+never healed. Dudevant drank more and more heavily, and jeered at
+his wife because she was "always looking for noon at fourteen
+o'clock." He had always flirted with the country girls; but now he
+openly consorted with his wife's chambermaid.
+
+Mme. Dudevant, on her side, would have nothing more to do with
+this rustic rake. She formed what she called a platonic
+friendship--and it was really so--with a certain M. de Seze, who
+was advocate-general at Bordeaux. With him this clever woman could
+talk without being called silly, and he took sincere pleasure in
+her company. He might, in fact, have gone much further, had not
+both of them been in an impossible situation.
+
+Aurore Dudevant really believed that she was swayed by a pure and
+mystic passion. De Seze, on the other hand, believed this mystic
+passion to be genuine love. Coming to visit her at Nohant, he was
+revolted by the clownish husband with whom she lived. It gave him
+an esthetic shock to see that she had borne children to this boor.
+Therefore he shrank back from her, and in time their relation
+faded into nothingness.
+
+It happened, soon after, that she found a packet in her husband's
+desk, marked "Not to be opened until after my death." She wrote of
+this in her correspondence:
+
+I had not the patience to wait till widowhood. No one can be sure
+of surviving anybody. I assumed that my husband had died, and I
+was very glad to learn what he thought of me while he was alive.
+Since the package was addressed to me, it was not dishonorable for
+me to open it.
+
+And so she opened it. It proved to be his will, but containing, as
+a preamble, his curses on her, expressions of contempt, and all
+the vulgar outpouring of an evil temper and angry passion. She
+went to her husband as he was opening a bottle, and flung the
+document upon the table. He cowered at her glance, at her
+firmness, and at her cold hatred. He grumbled and argued and
+entreated; but all that his wife would say in answer was:
+
+"I must have an allowance. I am going to Paris, and my children
+are to remain here."
+
+At last he yielded, and she went at once to Paris, taking her
+daughter with her, and having the promise of fifteen hundred
+francs a year out of the half-million that was hers by right.
+
+In Paris she developed into a thorough-paced Bohemian. She tried
+to make a living in sundry hopeless ways, and at last she took to
+literature. She was living in a garret, with little to eat, and
+sometimes without a fire in winter. She had some friends who
+helped her as well as they could, but though she was attached to
+the Figaro, her earnings for the first month amounted to only
+fifteen francs.
+
+Nevertheless, she would not despair. The editors and publishers
+might turn the cold shoulder to her, but she would not give up her
+ambitions. She went down into the Latin Quarter, and there shook
+off the proprieties of life. She assumed the garb of a man, and
+with her quick perception she came to know the left bank of the
+Seine just as she had known the country-side at Nohant or the
+little world at her convent school. She never expected again to
+see any woman of her own rank in life. Her mother's influence
+became strong in her. She wrote:
+
+The proprieties are the guiding principle of people without soul
+and virtue. The good opinion of the world is a prostitute who
+gives herself to the highest bidder.
+
+She still pursued her trade of journalism, calling herself a
+"newspaper mechanic," sitting all day in the office of the Figaro
+and writing whatever was demanded, while at night she would prowl
+in the streets haunting the cafes, continuing to dress like a man,
+drinking sour wine, and smoking cheap cigars.
+
+One of her companions in this sort of hand-to-mouth journalism was
+a young student and writer named Jules Sandeau, a man seven years
+younger than his comrade. He was at that time as indigent as she,
+and their hardships, shared in common, brought them very close
+together. He was clever, boyish, and sensitive, and it was not
+long before he had fallen at her feet and kissed her knees,
+begging that she would requite the love he felt for her. According
+to herself, she resisted him for six months, and then at last she
+yielded. The two made their home together, and for a while were
+wonderfully happy. Their work and their diversions they enjoyed in
+common, and now for the first time she experienced emotions which
+in all probability she had never known before.
+
+Probably not very much importance is to be given to the earlier
+flirtations of George Sand, though she herself never tried to stop
+the mouth of scandal. Even before she left her husband, she was
+credited with having four lovers; but all she said, when the
+report was brought to her, was this: "Four lovers are none too
+many for one with such lively passions as mine."
+
+This very frankness makes it likely that she enjoyed shocking her
+prim neighbors at Nohant. But if she only played at love-making
+then, she now gave herself up to it with entire abandonment,
+intoxicated, fascinated, satisfied. She herself wrote:
+
+How I wish I could impart to you this sense of the intensity and
+joyousness of life that I have in my veins. To live! How sweet it
+is, and how good, in spite of annoyances, husbands, debts,
+relations, scandal-mongers, sufferings, and irritations! To live!
+It is intoxicating! To love, and to be loved! It is happiness! It
+is heaven!
+
+In collaboration with Jules Sandeau, she wrote a novel called Rose
+et Blanche. The two lovers were uncertain what name to place upon
+the title-page, but finally they hit upon the pseudonym of Jules
+Sand. The book succeeded; but thereafter each of them wrote
+separately, Jules Sandeau using his own name, and Mme. Dudevant
+styling herself George Sand, a name by which she was to be
+illustrious ever after.
+
+As a novelist, she had found her real vocation. She was not yet
+well known, but she was on the verge of fame. As soon as she had
+written Indiana and Valentine, George Sand had secured a place in
+the world of letters. The magazine which still exists as the Revue
+des Deux Mondes gave her a retaining fee of four thousand francs a
+year, and many other publications begged her to write serial
+stories for them.
+
+The vein which ran through all her stories was new and piquant. As
+was said of her:
+
+In George Sand, whenever a lady wishes to change her lover, God is
+always there to make the transfer easy.
+
+In other words, she preached free love in the name of religion.
+This was not a new doctrine with her. After the first break with
+her husband, she had made up her mind about certain matters, and
+wrote:
+
+One is no more justified in claiming the ownership of a soul than
+in claiming the ownership of a slave.
+
+According to her, the ties between a man and a woman are sacred
+only when they are sanctified by love; and she distinguished
+between love and passion in this epigram:
+
+Love seeks to give, while passion seeks to take.
+
+At this time, George Sand was in her twenty-seventh year. She was
+not beautiful, though there was something about her which
+attracted observation. Of middle height, she was fairly slender.
+Her eyes were somewhat projecting, and her mouth was almost sullen
+when in repose. Her manners were peculiar, combining boldness with
+timidity. Her address was almost as familiar as a man's, so that
+it was easy to be acquainted with her; yet a certain haughtiness
+and a touch of aristocratic pride made it plain that she had drawn
+a line which none must pass without her wish. When she was deeply
+stirred, however, she burst forth into an extraordinary vivacity,
+showing a nature richly endowed and eager to yield its treasures.
+
+The existence which she now led was a curious one. She still
+visited her husband at Nohant, so that she might see her son, and
+sometimes, when M. Dudevant came to town, he called upon her in
+the apartments which she shared with Jules Sandeau. He had
+accepted the situation, and with his crudeness and lack of feeling
+he seemed to think it, if not natural, at least diverting. At any
+rate, so long as he could retain her half-million francs, he was
+not the man to make trouble about his former wife's arrangements.
+
+Meanwhile, there began to be perceptible the very slightest rift
+within the lute of her romance. Was her love for Sandeau really
+love, or was it only passion? In his absence, at any rate, the old
+obsession still continued. Here we see, first of all, intense
+pleasure shading off into a sort of maternal fondness. She sends
+Sandeau adoring letters. She is afraid that his delicate appetite
+is not properly satisfied.
+
+Yet, again, there are times when she feels that he is irritating
+and ill. Those who knew them said that her nature was too
+passionate and her love was too exacting for him. One of her
+letters seems to make this plain. She writes that she feels
+uneasy, and even frightfully remorseful, at seeing Sandeau "pine
+away." She knows, she avows, that she is killing him, that her
+caresses are a poison, and her love a consuming fire.
+
+It is an appalling thought, and Jules will not understand it. He
+laughs at it; and when, in the midst of his transports of delight,
+the idea comes to me and makes my blood run cold, he tells me that
+here is the death that he would like to die. At such moments he
+promises whatever I make him promise.
+
+This letter throws a clear light upon the nature of George Sand's
+temperament. It will be found all through her career, not only
+that she sought to inspire passion, but that she strove to gratify
+it after fashions of her own. One little passage from a
+description of her written by the younger Dumas will perhaps make
+this phase of her character more intelligible, without going
+further than is strictly necessary:
+
+Mme. Sand has little hands without any bones, soft and plump. She
+is by destiny a woman of excessive curiosity, always disappointed,
+always deceived in her incessant investigation, but she is not
+fundamentally ardent. In vain would she like to be so, but she
+does not find it possible. Her physical nature utterly refuses.
+
+The reader will find in all that has now been said the true
+explanation of George Sand. Abounding with life, but incapable of
+long stretches of ardent love, she became a woman who sought
+conquests everywhere without giving in return more than her
+temperament made it possible for her to do. She loved Sandeau as
+much as she ever loved any man; and yet she left him with a sense
+that she had never become wholly his. Perhaps this is the reason
+why their romance came to an end abruptly, and not altogether
+fittingly.
+
+She had been spending a short time at Nohant, and came to Paris
+without announcement. She intended to surprise her lover, and she
+surely did so. She found him in the apartment that had been
+theirs, with his arms about an attractive laundry-girl. Thus
+closed what was probably the only true romance in the life of
+George Sand. Afterward she had many lovers, but to no one did she
+so nearly become a true mate.
+
+As it was, she ended her association with Sandeau, and each
+pursued a separate path to fame. Sandeau afterward became a well-
+known novelist and dramatist. He was, in fact, the first writer of
+fiction who was admitted to the French Academy. The woman to whom
+he had been unfaithful became greater still, because her fame was
+not only national, but cosmopolitan.
+
+For a time after her deception by Sandeau, she felt absolutely
+devoid of all emotions. She shunned men, and sought the friendship
+of Marie Dorval, a clever actress who was destined afterward to
+break the heart of Alfred de Vigny. The two went down into the
+country; and there George Sand wrote hour after hour, sitting by
+her fireside, and showing herself a tender mother to her little
+daughter Solange.
+
+This life lasted for a while, but it was not the sort of life that
+would now content her. She had many visitors from Paris, among
+them Sainte-Beuve, the critic, who brought with him Prosper
+Merimee, then unknown, but later famous as master of revels to the
+third Napoleon and as the author of Carmen. Merimee had a certain
+fascination of manner, and the predatory instincts of George Sand
+were again aroused. One day, when she felt bored and desperate,
+Merimee paid his court to her, and she listened to him. This is
+one of the most remarkable of her intimacies, since it began,
+continued, and ended all in the space of a single week. When
+Merimee left Nohant, he was destined never again to see George
+Sand, except long afterward at a dinner-party, where the two
+stared at each other sharply, but did not speak. This affair,
+however, made it plain that she could not long remain at Nohant,
+and that she pined for Paris.
+
+Returning thither, she is said to have set her cap at Victor Hugo,
+who was, however, too much in love with himself to care for any
+one, especially a woman who was his literary rival. She is said
+for a time to have been allied with Gustave Planche, a dramatic
+critic; but she always denied this, and her denial may be taken as
+quite truthful. Soon, however, she was to begin an episode which
+has been more famous than any other in her curious history, for
+she met Alfred de Musset, then a youth of twenty-three, but
+already well known for his poems and his plays.
+
+Musset was of noble birth. He would probably have been better for
+a plebeian strain, since there was in him a touch of the
+degenerate. His mother's father had published a humanitarian poem
+on cats. His great-uncle had written a peculiar novel. Young
+Alfred was nervous, delicate, slightly epileptic, and it is
+certain that he was given to dissipation, which so far had
+affected his health only by making him hysterical. He was an
+exceedingly handsome youth, with exquisite manners, "dreamy rather
+than dazzling eyes, dilated nostrils, and vermilion lips half
+opened." Such was he when George Sand, then seven years his
+senior, met him.
+
+There is something which, to the Anglo-Saxon mind, seems far more
+absurd than pathetic about the events which presently took place.
+A woman like George Sand at thirty was practically twice the age
+of this nervous boy of twenty-three, who had as yet seen little of
+the world. At first she seemed to realize the fact herself; but
+her vanity led her to begin an intrigue, which must have been
+almost wholly without excitement on her part, but which to him,
+for a time, was everything in the world.
+
+Experimenting, as usual, after the fashion described by Dumas, she
+went with De Musset for a "honeymoon" to Fontainebleau. But they
+could not stay there forever, and presently they decided upon a
+journey to Italy. Before they went, however, they thought it
+necessary to get formal permission from Alfred's mother!
+
+Naturally enough, Mme. de Musset refused consent. She had read
+George Sand's romances, and had asked scornfully:
+
+"Has the woman never in her life met a gentleman?"
+
+She accepted the relations between them, but that she should be
+asked to sanction this sort of affair was rather too much, even
+for a French mother who has become accustomed to many strange
+things. Then there was a curious happening. At nine o'clock at
+night, George Sand took a cab and drove to the house of Mme. de
+Musset, to whom she sent up a message that a lady wished to see
+her. Mme. de Musset came down, and, finding a woman alone in a
+carriage, she entered it. Then George Sand burst forth in a
+torrent of sentimental eloquence. She overpowered her lover's
+mother, promised to take great care of the delicate youth, and
+finally drove away to meet Alfred at the coach-yard.
+
+They started off in the mist, their coach being the thirteenth to
+leave the yard; but the two lovers were in a merry mood, and
+enjoyed themselves all the way from Paris to Marseilles. By
+steamer they went to Leghorn; and finally, in January, 1834, they
+took an apartment in a hotel at Venice. What had happened that
+their arrival in Venice should be the beginning of a quarrel, no
+one knows. George Sand has told the story, and Paul de Musset--
+Alfred's brother--has told the story, but each of them has
+doubtless omitted a large part of the truth.
+
+It is likely that on their long journey each had learned too much
+of the other. Thus, Paul de Musset says that George Sand made
+herself outrageous by her conversation, telling every one of her
+mother's adventures in the army of Italy, including her relations
+with the general-in-chief. She also declared that she herself was
+born within a month of her parents' wedding-day. Very likely she
+did say all these things, whether they were true or not. She had
+set herself to wage war against conventional society, and she did
+everything to shock it.
+
+On the other hand, Alfred de Musset fell ill after having lost ten
+thousand francs in a gambling-house. George Sand was not fond of
+persons who were ill. She herself was working like a horse,
+writing from eight to thirteen hours a day. When Musset collapsed
+she sent for a handsome young Italian doctor named Pagello, with
+whom she had struck up a casual acquaintance. He finally cured
+Musset, but he also cured George Sand of any love for Musset.
+
+Before long she and Pagello were on their way back to Paris,
+leaving the poor, fevered, whimpering poet to bite his nails and
+think unutterable things. But he ought to have known George Sand.
+After that, everybody knew her. They knew just how much she cared
+when she professed to care, and when she acted as she acted with
+Pagello no earlier lover had any one but himself to blame.
+
+Only sentimentalists can take this story seriously. To them it has
+a sort of morbid interest. They like to picture Musset raving and
+shouting in his delirium, and then, to read how George Sand sat on
+Pagello's knees, kissing him and drinking out of the same cup. But
+to the healthy mind the whole story is repulsive--from George
+Sand's appeal to Mme. de Musset down to the very end, when Pagello
+came to Paris, where his broken French excited a polite ridicule.
+
+There was a touch of genuine sentiment about the affair with Jules
+Sandeau; but after that, one can only see in George Sand a half-
+libidinous grisette, such as her mother was before her, with a
+perfect willingness to experiment in every form of lawless love.
+As for Musset, whose heart she was supposed to have broken, within
+a year he was dangling after the famous singer, Mme. Malibran, and
+writing poems to her which advertised their intrigue.
+
+After this episode with Pagello, it cannot be said that the life
+of George Sand was edifying in any respect, because no one can
+assume that she was sincere. She had loved Jules Sandeau as much
+as she could love any one, but all the rest of her intrigues and
+affinities were in the nature of experiments. She even took back
+Alfred de Musset, although they could never again regard each
+other without suspicion. George Sand cut off all her hair and gave
+it to Musset, so eager was she to keep him as a matter of
+conquest; but he was tired of her, and even this theatrical trick
+was of no avail.
+
+She proceeded to other less known and less humiliating adventures.
+She tried to fascinate the artist Delacroix. She set her cap at
+Franz Liszt, who rather astonished her by saying that only God was
+worthy to be loved. She expressed a yearning for the affections of
+the elder Dumas; but that good-natured giant laughed at her, and
+in fact gave her some sound advice, and let her smoke
+unsentimentally in his study. She was a good deal taken with a
+noisy demagogue named Michel, a lawyer at Bourges, who on one
+occasion shut her up in her room and harangued her on sociology
+until she was as weary of his talk as of his wooden shoes, his
+shapeless greatcoat, his spectacles, and his skull-cap, Balzac
+felt her fascination, but cared nothing for her, since his love
+was given to Mme. Hanska.
+
+In the meanwhile, she was paying visits to her husband at Nohant,
+where she wrangled with him over money matters, and where he would
+once have shot her had the guests present not interfered. She
+secured her dowry by litigation, so that she was well off, even
+without her literary earnings. These were by no means so large as
+one would think from her popularity and from the number of books
+she wrote. It is estimated that her whole gains amounted to about
+a million francs, extending over a period of forty-five years. It
+is just half the amount that Trollope earned in about the same
+period, and justifies his remark--"adequate, but not splendid."
+
+One of those brief and strange intimacies that marked the career
+of George Sand came about in a curious way. Octave Feuillet, a man
+of aristocratic birth, had set himself to write novels which
+portrayed the cynicism and hardness of the upper classes in
+France. One of these novels, Sibylle, excited the anger of George
+Sand. She had not known Feuillet before; yet now she sought him
+out, at first in order to berate him for his book, but in the end
+to add him to her variegated string of lovers.
+
+It has been said of Feuillet that he was a sort of "domesticated
+Musset." At any rate, he was far less sensitive than Musset, and
+George Sand was about seventeen years his senior. They parted
+after a short time, she going her way as a writer of novels that
+were very different from her earlier ones, while Feuillet grew
+more and more cynical and even stern, as he lashed the abnormal,
+neuropathic men and women about him.
+
+The last great emotional crisis in George Sand's life was that
+which centers around her relations with Frederic Chopin. Chopin
+was the greatest genius who ever loved her. It is rather odd that
+he loved her. She had known him for two years, and had not
+seriously thought of him, though there is a story that when she
+first met him she kissed him before he had even been presented to
+her. She waited two years, and in those two years she had three
+lovers. Then at last she once more met Chopin, when he was in a
+state of melancholy, because a Polish girl had proved unfaithful
+to him.
+
+It was the psychological moment; for this other woman, who was a
+devourer of hearts, found him at a piano, improvising a
+lamentation. George Sand stood beside him, listening. When he
+finished and looked up at her, their eyes met. She bent down
+without a word and kissed him on the lips.
+
+What was she like when he saw her then? Grenier has described her
+in these words:
+
+She was short and stout, but her face attracted all my attention,
+the eyes especially. They were wonderful eyes--a little too close
+together, it may be, large, with full eyelids, and black, very
+black, but by no means lustrous; they reminded me of unpolished
+marble, or rather of velvet, and this gave a strange, dull, even
+cold expression to her countenance. Her fine eyebrows and these
+great placid eyes gave her an air of strength and dignity which
+was not borne out by the lower part of her face. Her nose was
+rather thick and not over shapely. Her mouth was also rather
+coarse, and her chin small. She spoke with great simplicity, and
+her manners were very quiet.
+
+Such as she was, she attached herself to Chopin for eight years.
+At first they traveled together very quietly to Majorca; and
+there, just as Musset had fallen ill at Venice, Chopin became
+feverish and an invalid. "Chopin coughs most gracefully," George
+Sand wrote of him, and again:
+
+Chopin is the most inconstant of men. There is nothing permanent
+about him but his cough.
+
+It is not surprising if her nerves sometimes gave way. Acting as
+sick nurse, writing herself with rheumatic fingers, robbed by
+every one about her, and viewed with suspicion by the peasants
+because she did not go to church, she may be perhaps excused for
+her sharp words when, in fact, her deeds were kind.
+
+Afterward, with Chopin, she returned to Paris, and the two lived
+openly together for seven years longer. An immense literature has
+grown around the subject of their relations. To this literature
+George Sand herself contributed very largely. Chopin never wrote a
+word; but what he failed to do, his friends and pupils did
+unsparingly.
+
+Probably the truth is somewhat as one might expect. During the
+first period of fascination, George Sand was to Chopin what she
+had been to Sandeau and to Musset; and with her strange and subtle
+ways, she had undermined his health. But afterward that sort of
+love died out, and was succeeded by something like friendship. At
+any rate, this woman showed, as she had shown to others, a vast
+maternal kindness. She writes to him finally as "your old woman,"
+and she does wonders in the way of nursing and care.
+
+But in 1847 came a break between the two. Whatever the mystery of
+it may be, it turns upon what Chopin said of Sand:
+
+"I have never cursed any one, but now I am so weary of life that I
+am near cursing her. Yet she suffers, too, and more, because she
+grows older as she grows more wicked."
+
+In 1848, Chopin gave his last concert in Paris, and in 1849 he
+died. According to some, he was the victim of a Messalina.
+According to others, it was only "Messalina" that had kept him
+alive so long.
+
+However, with his death came a change in the nature of George
+Sand. Emotionally, she was an extinct volcano. Intellectually, she
+was at her very best. She no longer tore passions into tatters,
+but wrote naturally, simply, stories of country life and tales for
+children. In one of her books she has given an enduring picture of
+the Franco-Prussian War. There are many rather pleasant
+descriptions of her then, living at Nohant, where she made a
+curious figure, bustling about in ill-fitting costumes, and
+smoking interminable cigarettes.
+
+She had lived much, and she had drunk deep of life, when she died
+in 1876. One might believe her to have been only a woman of
+perpetual liaisons. Externally she was this, and yet what did
+Balzac, that great master of human psychology, write of her in the
+intimacy of a private correspondence?
+
+She is a female bachelor. She is an artist. She is generous. She
+is devoted. She is chaste. Her dominant characteristics are those
+of a man, and therefore, she is not to be regarded as a woman. She
+is an excellent mother, adored by her children. Morally, she is
+like a lad of twenty; for in her heart of hearts, she is more than
+chaste--she is a prude. It is only in externals that she comports
+herself as a Bohemian. All her follies are titles to glory in the
+eyes of those whose souls are noble.
+
+A curious verdict this! Her love-life seems almost that of neither
+man nor woman, but of an animal. Yet whether she was in reality
+responsible for what she did, when we consider her strange
+heredity, her wretched marriage, the disillusions of her early
+life--who shall sit in judgment on her, since who knows all?
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MYSTERY OF CHARLES DICKENS
+
+
+Perhaps no public man in the English-speaking world, in the last
+century, was so widely and intimately known as Charles Dickens.
+From his eighteenth year, when he won his first success in
+journalism, down through his series of brilliant triumphs in
+fiction, he was more and more a conspicuous figure, living in the
+blaze of an intense publicity. He met every one and knew every
+one, and was the companion of every kind of man and woman. He
+loved to frequent the "caves of harmony" which Thackeray has
+immortalized, and he was a member of all the best Bohemian clubs
+of London. Actors, authors, good fellows generally, were his
+intimate friends, and his acquaintance extended far beyond into
+the homes of merchants and lawyers and the mansions of the
+proudest nobles. Indeed, he seemed to be almost a universal
+friend.
+
+One remembers, for instance, how he was called in to arbitrate
+between Thackeray and George Augustus Sala, who had quarreled. One
+remembers how Lord Byron's daughter, Lady Lovelace, when upon her
+sick-bed, used to send for Dickens because there was something in
+his genial, sympathetic manner that soothed her. Crushing pieces
+of ice between her teeth in agony, she would speak to him and he
+would answer her in his rich, manly tones until she was comforted
+and felt able to endure more hours of pain without complaint.
+
+Dickens was a jovial soul. His books fairly steam with Christmas
+cheer and hot punch and the savor of plum puddings, very much as
+do his letters to his intimate friends. Everybody knew Dickens. He
+could not dine in public without attracting attention. When he
+left the dining-room, his admirers would descend upon his table
+and carry off egg-shells, orange-peels, and other things that
+remained behind, so that they might have memorials of this much-
+loved writer. Those who knew him only by sight would often stop
+him in the streets and ask the privilege of shaking hands with
+him; so different was he from--let us say--Tennyson, who was as
+great an Englishman in his way as Dickens, but who kept himself
+aloof and saw few strangers.
+
+It is hard to associate anything like mystery with Dickens, though
+he was fond of mystery as an intellectual diversion, and his last
+unfinished novel was The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Moreover, no one
+admired more than he those complex plots which Wilkie Collins used
+to weave under the influence of laudanum. But as for his own life,
+it seemed so normal, so free from anything approaching mystery,
+that we can scarcely believe it to have been tinged with darker
+colors than those which appeared upon the surface.
+
+A part of this mystery is plain enough. The other part is still
+obscure--or of such a character that one does not care to bring it
+wholly to the light. It had to do with his various relations with
+women.
+
+The world at large thinks that it knows this chapter in the life
+of Dickens, and that it refers wholly to his unfortunate
+disagreement with his wife. To be sure, this is a chapter that is
+writ large in all of his biographies, and yet it is nowhere
+correctly told. His chosen biographer was John Forster, whose Life
+of Charles Dickens, in three volumes, must remain a standard work;
+but even Forster--we may assume through tact--has not set down all
+that he could, although he gives a clue.
+
+As is well known, Dickens married Miss Catherine Hogarth when he
+was only twenty-four. He had just published his Sketches by Boz,
+the copyright of which he sold for one hundred pounds, and was
+beginning the Pickwick Papers. About this time his publisher
+brought N. P. Willis down to Furnival's Inn to see the man whom
+Willis called "a young paragraphist for the Morning Chronicle."
+Willis thus sketches Dickens and his surroundings:
+
+In the most crowded part of Holborn, within a door or two of the
+Bull and Mouth Inn, we pulled up at the entrance of a large
+building used for lawyers' chambers. I followed by a long flight
+of stairs to an upper story, and was ushered into an uncarpeted
+and bleak-looking room, with a deal table, two or three chairs and
+a few books, a small boy and Mr. Dickens for the contents.
+
+I was only struck at first with one thing--and I made a memorandum
+of it that evening as the strongest instance I had seen of English
+obsequiousness to employers--the degree to which the poor author
+was overpowered with the honor of his publisher's visit! I
+remember saying to myself, as I sat down on a rickety chair:
+
+"My good fellow, if you were in America with that fine face and
+your ready quill, you would have no need to be condescended to by
+a publisher."
+
+Dickens was dressed very much as he has since described Dick
+Swiveller, minus the swell look. His hair was cropped close to his
+head, his clothes scant, though jauntily cut, and, after changing
+a ragged office-coat for a shabby blue, he stood by the door,
+collarless and buttoned up, the very personification of a close
+sailer to the wind.
+
+Before this interview with Willis, which Dickens always
+repudiated, he had become something of a celebrity among the
+newspaper men with whom he worked as a stenographer. As every one
+knows, he had had a hard time in his early years, working in a
+blacking-shop, and feeling too keenly the ignominious position of
+which a less sensitive boy would probably have thought nothing.
+Then he became a shorthand reporter, and was busy at his work, so
+that he had little time for amusements.
+
+It has been generally supposed that no love-affair entered his
+life until he met Catherine Hogarth, whom he married soon after
+making her acquaintance. People who are eager at ferreting out
+unimportant facts about important men had unanimously come to the
+conclusion that up to the age of twenty Dickens was entirely
+fancy-free. It was left to an American to disclose the fact that
+this was not the case, but that even in his teens he had been
+captivated by a girl of about his own age.
+
+Inasmuch as the only reproach that was ever made against Dickens
+was based upon his love-affairs, let us go back and trace them
+from this early one to the very last, which must yet for some
+years, at least, remain a mystery.
+
+Everything that is known about his first affair is contained in a
+book very beautifully printed, but inaccessible to most readers.
+Some years ago Mr. William K. Bixby, of St. Louis, found in London
+a collector of curios. This man had in his stock a number of
+letters which had passed between a Miss Maria Beadnell and Charles
+Dickens when the two were about nineteen and a second package of
+letters representing a later acquaintance, about 1855, at which
+time Miss Beadnell had been married for a long time to a Mr. Henry
+Louis Winter, of 12 Artillery Place, London.
+
+The copyright laws of Great Britain would not allow Mr. Bixby to
+publish the letters in that country, and he did not care to give
+them to the public here. Therefore, he presented them to the
+Bibliophile Society, with the understanding that four hundred and
+ninety-three copies, with the Bibliophile book-plate, were to be
+printed and distributed among the members of the society. A few
+additional copies were struck off, but these did not bear the
+Bibliophile book-plate. Only two copies are available for other
+readers, and to peruse these it is necessary to visit the
+Congressional Library in Washington, where they were placed on
+July 24, 1908.
+
+These letters form two series--the first written to Miss Beadnell
+in or about 1829, and the second written to Mrs. Winter, formerly
+Miss Beadnell, in 1855.
+
+The book also contains an introduction by Henry H. Harper, who
+sets forth some theories which the facts, in my opinion, do not
+support; and there are a number of interesting portraits,
+especially one of Miss Beadnell in 1829--a lovely girl with dark
+curls. Another shows her in 1855, when she writes of herself as
+"old and fat"--thereby doing herself a great deal of injustice;
+for although she had lost her youthful beauty, she was a very
+presentable woman of middle age, but one who would not be
+particularly noticed in any company.
+
+Summing up briefly these different letters, it may be said that in
+the first set Dickens wrote to the lady ardently, but by no means
+passionately. From what he says it is plain enough that she did
+not respond to his feeling, and that presently she left London and
+went to Paris, for her family was well-to-do, while Dickens was
+living from hand to mouth.
+
+In the second set of letters, written long afterward, Mrs. Winter
+seems to have "set her cap" at the now famous author; but at that
+time he was courted by every one, and had long ago forgotten the
+lady who had so easily dismissed him in his younger days. In 1855,
+Mrs. Winter seems to have reproached him for not having been more
+constant in the past; but he replied:
+
+You answered me coldly and reproachfully, and so I went my way.
+
+Mr. Harper, in his introduction, tries very hard to prove that in
+writing David Copperfield Dickens drew the character of Dora from
+Miss Beadnell. It is a dangerous thing to say from whom any
+character in a novel is drawn. An author takes whatever suits his
+purpose in circumstance and fancy, and blends them all into one
+consistent whole, which is not to be identified with any
+individual. There is little reason to think that the most intimate
+friends of Dickens and of his family were mistaken through all the
+years when they were certain that the boy husband and the girl
+wife of David Copperfield were suggested by any one save Dickens
+himself and Catherine Hogarth.
+
+Why should he have gone back to a mere passing fancy, to a girl
+who did not care for him, and who had no influence on his life,
+instead of picturing, as David's first wife, one whom he deeply
+loved, whom he married, who was the mother of his children, and
+who made a great part of his career, even that part which was
+inwardly half tragic and wholly mournful?
+
+Miss Beadnell may have been the original of Flora in Little
+Dorrit, though even this is doubtful. The character was at the
+time ascribed to a Miss Anna Maria Leigh, whom Dickens sometimes
+flirted with and sometimes caricatured.
+
+When Dickens came to know George Hogarth, who was one of his
+colleagues on the staff of the Morning Chronicle, he met Hogarth's
+daughters--Catherine, Georgina, and Mary--and at once fell
+ardently in love with Catherine, the eldest and prettiest of the
+three. He himself was almost girlish, with his fair complexion and
+light, wavy hair, so that the famous sketch by Maclise has a
+remarkable charm; yet nobody could really say with truth that any
+one of the three girls was beautiful. Georgina Hogarth, however,
+was sweet-tempered and of a motherly disposition. It may be that
+in a fashion she loved Dickens all her life, as she remained with
+him after he parted from her sister, taking the utmost care of his
+children, and looking out with unselfish fidelity for his many
+needs.
+
+It was Mary, however, the youngest of the Hogarths, who lived with
+the Dickenses during the first twelvemonth of their married life.
+To Dickens she was like a favorite sister, and when she died very
+suddenly, in her eighteenth year, her loss was a great shock to
+him.
+
+It was believed for a long time--in fact, until their separation--
+that Dickens and his wife were extremely happy in their home life.
+His writings glorified all that was domestic, and paid many tender
+tributes to the joys of family affection. When the separation came
+the whole world was shocked. And yet rather early in Dickens's
+married life there was more or less infelicity. In his
+Retrospections of an Active Life, Mr. John Bigelow writes a few
+sentences which are interesting for their frankness, and which
+give us certain hints:
+
+Mrs. Dickens was not a handsome woman, though stout, hearty, and
+matronly; there was something a little doubtful about her eye, and
+I thought her endowed with a temper that might be very violent
+when roused, though not easily rousable. Mrs. Caulfield told me
+that a Miss Teman--I think that is the name--was the source of the
+difficulty between Mrs. Dickens and her husband. She played in
+private theatricals with Dickens, and he sent her a portrait in a
+brooch, which met with an accident requiring it to be sent to the
+jeweler's to be mended. The jeweler, noticing Mr. Dickens's
+initials, sent it to his house. Mrs. Dickens's sister, who had
+always been in love with him and was jealous of Miss Teman, told
+Mrs. Dickens of the brooch, and she mounted her husband with comb
+and brush. This, no doubt, was Mrs. Dickens's version, in the
+main.
+
+A few evenings later I saw Miss Teman at the Haymarket Theatre,
+playing with Buckstone and Mr. and Mrs. Charles Mathews. She
+seemed rather a small cause for such a serious result--passably
+pretty, and not much of an actress.
+
+Here in one passage we have an intimation that Mrs. Dickens had a
+temper that was easily roused, that Dickens himself was interested
+in an actress, and that Miss Hogarth "had always been in love with
+him, and was jealous of Miss Teman."
+
+Some years before this time, however, there had been growing in
+the mind of Dickens a certain formless discontent--something to
+which he could not give a name, yet which, cast over him the
+shadow of disappointment. He expressed the same feeling in David
+Copperfield, when he spoke of David's life with Dora. It seemed to
+come from the fact that he had grown to be a man, while his wife
+had still remained a child.
+
+A passage or two may be quoted from the novel, so that we may set
+them beside passages in Dickens's own life, which we know to have
+referred to his own wife, and not to any such nebulous person as
+Mrs. Winter.
+
+The shadow I have mentioned that was not to be between us any
+more, but was to rest wholly on my heart--how did that fall? The
+old unhappy feeling pervaded my life. It was deepened, if it were
+changed at all; but it was as undefined as ever, and addressed me
+like a strain of sorrowful music faintly heard in the night. I
+loved my wife dearly; but the happiness I had vaguely anticipated,
+once, was not the happiness I enjoyed, AND THERE WAS ALWAYS
+SOMETHING WANTING.
+
+What I missed I still regarded as something that had been a dream
+of my youthful fancy; that was incapable of realization; that I
+was now discovering to be so, with some natural pain, as all men
+did. But that it would have been better for me if my wife could
+have helped me more, and shared the many thoughts in which I had
+no partner, and that this might have been I knew.
+
+What I am describing slumbered and half awoke and slept again in
+the innermost recesses of my mind. There was no evidence of it to
+me; I knew of no influence it had in anything I said or did. I
+bore the weight of all our little cares and all my projects.
+
+"There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind
+and purpose." These words I remembered. I had endeavored to adapt
+Dora to myself, and found it impracticable. It remained for me to
+adapt myself to Dora; to share with her what I could, and be
+happy; to bear on my own shoulders what I must, and be still
+happy.
+
+Thus wrote Dickens in his fictitious character, and of his
+fictitious wife. Let us see how he wrote and how he acted in his
+own person, and of his real wife.
+
+As early as 1856, he showed a curious and restless activity, as of
+one who was trying to rid himself of unpleasant thoughts. Mr.
+Forster says that he began to feel a strain upon his invention, a
+certain disquietude, and a necessity for jotting down memoranda in
+note-books, so as to assist his memory and his imagination. He
+began to long for solitude. He would take long, aimless rambles
+into the country, returning at no particular time or season. He
+once wrote to Forster:
+
+I have had dreadful thoughts of getting away somewhere altogether
+by myself. If I could have managed it, I think I might have gone
+to the Pyrenees for six months. I have visions of living for half
+a year or so in all sorts of inaccessible places, and of opening a
+new book therein. A floating idea of going up above the snow-line,
+and living in some astonishing convent, hovers over me.
+
+What do these cryptic utterances mean? At first, both in his novel
+and in his letters, they are obscure; but before long, in each,
+they become very definite. In 1856, we find these sentences among
+his letters:
+
+The old days--the old days! Shall I ever, I wonder, get the frame
+of mind back as it used to be then? Something of it, perhaps, but
+never quite as it used to be.
+
+I find that the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a
+pretty big one.
+
+His next letter draws the veil and shows plainly what he means:
+
+Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no
+help for it. It is not only that she makes me uneasy and unhappy,
+but that I make her so, too--and much more so. We are strangely
+ill-assorted for the bond that exists between us.
+
+Then he goes on to say that she would have been a thousand times
+happier if she had been married to another man. He speaks of
+"incompatibility," and a "difference of temperaments." In fact, it
+is the same old story with which we have become so familiar, and
+which is both as old as the hills and as new as this morning's
+newspaper.
+
+Naturally, also, things grow worse, rather than better. Dickens
+comes to speak half jocularly of "the plunge," and calculates as
+to what effect it will have on his public readings. He kept back
+the announcement of "the plunge" until after he had given several
+readings; then, on April 29, 1858, Mrs. Dickens left his home. His
+eldest son went to live with the mother, but the rest of the
+children remained with their father, while his daughter Mary
+nominally presided over the house. In the background, however,
+Georgina Hogarth, who seemed all through her life to have cared
+for Dickens more than for her sister, remained as a sort of guide
+and guardian for his children.
+
+This arrangement was a private matter, and should not have been
+brought to public attention; but it was impossible to suppress all
+gossip about so prominent a man. Much of the gossip was
+exaggerated; and when it came to the notice of Dickens it stung
+him so severely as to lead him into issuing a public justification
+of his course. He published a statement in Household Words, which
+led to many other letters in other periodicals, and finally a long
+one from him, which was printed in the New York Tribune, addressed
+to his friend Mr. Arthur Smith.
+
+Dickens afterward declared that he had written this letter as a
+strictly personal and private one, in order to correct false
+rumors and scandals. Mr. Smith naturally thought that the
+statement was intended for publication, but Dickens always spoke
+of it as "the violated letter."
+
+By his allusions to a difference of temperament and to
+incompatibility, Dickens no doubt meant that his wife had ceased
+to be to him the same companion that she had been in days gone by.
+As in so many cases, she had not changed, while he had. He had
+grown out of the sphere in which he had been born, "associated
+with blacking-boys and quilt-printers," and had become one of the
+great men of his time, whose genius was universally admired.
+
+Mr. Bigelow saw Mrs. Dickens as she really was--a commonplace
+woman endowed with the temper of a vixen, and disposed to
+outbursts of actual violence when her jealousy was roused.
+
+It was impossible that the two could have remained together, when
+in intellect and sympathy they were so far apart. There is nothing
+strange about their separation, except the exceedingly bad taste
+with which Dickens made it a public affair. It is safe to assume
+that he felt the need of a different mate; and that he found one
+is evident enough from the hints and bits of innuendo that are
+found in the writings of his contemporaries.
+
+He became a pleasure-lover; but more than that, he needed one who
+could understand his moods and match them, one who could please
+his tastes, and one who could give him that admiration which he
+felt to be his due; for he was always anxious to be praised, and
+his letters are full of anecdotes relating to his love of praise.
+
+One does not wish to follow out these clues too closely. It is
+certain that neither Miss Beadnell as a girl nor Mrs. Winter as a
+matron made any serious appeal to him. The actresses who have been
+often mentioned in connection with his name were, for the most
+part, mere passing favorites. The woman who in life was Dora made
+him feel the same incompleteness that he has described in his
+best-known book. The companion to whom he clung in his later years
+was neither a light-minded creature like Miss Beadnell, nor an
+undeveloped, high-tempered woman like the one he married, nor a
+mere domestic, friendly creature like Georgina Hogarth.
+
+Ought we to venture upon a quest which shall solve this mystery in
+the life of Charles Dickens! In his last will and testament, drawn
+up and signed by him about a year before his death, the first
+paragraph reads as follows:
+
+I, Charles Dickens, of Gadshill Place, Higham, in the county of
+Kent, hereby revoke all my former wills and codicils and declare
+this to be my last will and testament. I give the sum of one
+thousand pounds, free of legacy duty, to Miss Ellen Lawless
+Ternan, late of Houghton Place, Ampthill Square, in the county of
+Middlesex.
+
+In connection with this, read Mr. John Bigelow's careless jottings
+made some fifteen years before. Remember the Miss "Teman," about
+whose name he was not quite certain; the Hogarth sisters' dislike
+of her; and the mysterious figure in the background of the
+novelist's later life. Then consider the first bequest in his
+will, which leaves a substantial sum to one who was neither a
+relative nor a subordinate, but--may we assume--more than an
+ordinary friend?
+
+
+
+
+
+HONORE DE BALZAC AND EVELINA HANSKA
+
+
+I remember once, when editing an elaborate work on literature,
+that the publisher called me into his private office. After the
+door was closed, he spoke in tones of suppressed emotion.
+
+"Why is it," said he, "that you have such a lack of proportion? In
+the selection you have made I find that only two pages are given
+to George P. Morris, while you haven't given E. P. Roe any space
+at all! Yet, look here--you've blocked out fifty pages for Balzac,
+who was nothing but an immoral Frenchman!"
+
+I adjusted this difficulty, somehow or other--I do not just
+remember how--and began to think that, after all, this publisher's
+view of things was probably that of the English and American
+public. It is strange that so many biographies and so many
+appreciations of the greatest novelist who ever lived should still
+have left him, in the eyes of the reading public, little more than
+"an immoral Frenchman."
+
+"In Balzac," said Taine, "there was a money-broker, an
+archeologist, an architect, an upholsterer, a tailor, an old-
+clothes dealer, a journeyman apprentice, a physician, and a
+notary." Balzac was also a mystic, a supernaturalist, and, above
+all, a consummate artist. No one who is all these things in high
+measure, and who has raised himself by his genius above his
+countrymen, deserves the censure of my former publisher.
+
+Still less is Balzac to be dismissed as "immoral," for his life
+was one of singular self-sacrifice in spite of much temptation.
+His face was strongly sensual, his look and bearing denoted almost
+savage power; he led a free life in a country which allowed much
+freedom; and yet his story is almost mystic in its fineness of
+thought, and in its detachment, which was often that of another
+world.
+
+Balzac was born in 1799, at Tours, with all the traits of the
+people of his native province--fond of eating and drinking, and
+with plenty of humor. His father was fairly well off. Of four
+children, our Balzac was the eldest. The third was his sister
+Laure, who throughout his life was the most intimate friend he
+had, and to whom we owe his rescue from much scandalous and untrue
+gossip. From her we learn that their father was a combination of
+Montaigne, Rabelais, and "Uncle Toby."
+
+Young Balzac went to a clerical school at seven, and stayed there
+for seven years. Then he was brought home, apparently much
+prostrated, although the good fathers could find nothing
+physically amiss with him, and nothing in his studies to account
+for his agitation. No one ever did discover just what was the
+matter, for he seemed well enough in the next few years, basking
+on the riverside, watching the activities of his native town, and
+thoroughly studying the rustic types that he was afterward to make
+familiar to the world. In fact, in Louis Lambert he has set before
+us a picture of his own boyish life, very much as Dickens did of
+his in David Copperfield.
+
+For some reason, when these years were over, the boy began to have
+what is so often known as "a call"--a sort of instinct that he was
+to attain renown. Unfortunately it happened that about this time
+(1814) he and his parents removed to Paris, which was his home by
+choice, until his death in 1850. He studied here under famous
+teachers, and gave three years to the pursuit of law, of which he
+was very fond as literary material, though he refused to practise.
+
+This was the more grievous, since a great part of the family
+property had been lost. The Balzacs were afflicted by actual
+poverty, and Honore endeavored, with his pen, to beat the wolf
+back from the door. He earned a little money with pamphlets and
+occasional stories, but his thirst for fame was far from
+satisfied. He was sure that he was called to literature, and yet
+he was not sure that he had the power to succeed. In one of his
+letters to his sister, he wrote:
+
+I am young and hungry, and there is nothing on my plate. Oh,
+Laure, Laure, my two boundless desires, my only ones--to be
+famous, and to be loved--they ever be satisfied?
+
+For the next ten years he was learning his trade, and the artistic
+use of the fiction writer's tools. What is more to the point, is
+the fact that he began to dream of a series of great novels, which
+should give a true and panoramic picture of the whole of human
+life. This was the first intimation of his "Human Comedy," which
+was so daringly undertaken and so nearly completed in his after
+years. In his early days of obscurity, he said to his readers:
+
+Note well the characters that I introduce, since you will have to
+follow their fortunes through thirty novels that are to come.
+
+Here we see how little he had been daunted by ill success, and how
+his prodigious imagination had not been overcome by sorrow and
+evil fortune. Meantime, writing almost savagely, and with a
+feeling combined of ambition and despair, he had begun, very
+slowly indeed, to create a public. These ten years, however, had
+loaded him with debts; and his struggle to keep himself afloat
+only plunged him deeper in the mire. His thirty unsigned novels
+began to pay him a few hundred francs, not in cash, but in
+promissory notes; so that he had to go still deeper into debt.
+
+In 1827 he was toiling on his first successful novel, and indeed
+one of the best historic novels in French literature--The Chouans.
+He speaks of his labor as "done with a tired brain and an anxious
+mind," and of the eight or ten business letters that he had to
+write each day before he could begin his literary work.
+
+"Postage and an omnibus are extravagances that I cannot allow
+myself," he writes. "I stay at home so as not to wear out my
+clothes. Is that clear to you?"
+
+At the end of the next year, though he was already popular as a
+novelist, and much sought out by people of distinction, he was at
+the very climax of his poverty. He had written thirty-five books,
+and was in debt to the amount of a hundred and twenty-four
+thousand francs. He was saved from bankruptcy only by the aid of
+Mme. de Berny, a woman of high character, and one whose moral
+influence was very strong with Balzac until her early death.
+
+The relation between these two has a sweetness and a purity which
+are seldom found. Mme. de Berny gave Balzac money as she would
+have given it to a son, and thereby she saved a great soul for
+literature. But there was no sickly sentiment between them, and
+Balzac regarded her with a noble love which he has expressed in
+the character of Mme. Firmiani.
+
+It was immediately after she had lightened his burdens that the
+real Balzac comes before us in certain stories which have no
+equal, and which are among the most famous that he ever wrote.
+What could be more wonderful than his El Verdugo, which gives us a
+brief horror while compelling our admiration? What, outside of
+Balzac himself, could be more terrible than Gobseck, a frightful
+study of avarice, containing a deathbed scene which surpasses in
+dreadfulness almost anything in literature? Add to these A Passion
+in the Desert, The Girl with the Golden Eyes, The Droll Stories,
+The Red Inn, and The Magic Skin, and you have a cluster of
+masterpieces not to be surpassed.
+
+In the year 1829, when he was just beginning to attain a slight
+success, Balzac received a long letter written in a woman's hand.
+As he read it, there came to him something very like an
+inspiration, so full of understanding were the written words, so
+full of appreciation and of sympathy with the best that he had
+done. This anonymous note pointed out here and there such defects
+as are apt to become chronic with a young author. Balzac was
+greatly stirred by its keen and sympathetic criticism. No one
+before had read his soul so clearly. No one--not even his devoted
+sister, Laure de Surville--had judged his work so wisely, had come
+so closely to his deepest feeling.
+
+He read the letter over and over, and presently another came, full
+of critical appreciation, and of wholesome, tonic, frank, friendly
+words of cheer. It was very largely the effect of these letters
+that roused Balzac's full powers and made him sure of winning the
+two great objects of his first ambition--love and fame--the ideals
+of the chivalrous, romantic Frenchman from Caesar's time down to
+the present day.
+
+Other letters followed, and after a while their authorship was
+made known to Balzac. He learned that they had been written by a
+young Polish lady, Mme. Evelina Hanska, the wife of a Polish
+count, whose health was feeble, and who spent much time in
+Switzerland because the climate there agreed with him.
+
+He met her first at Neuchatel, and found her all that he had
+imagined. It is said that she had no sooner raised her face, and
+looked him fully in the eyes, than she fell fainting to the floor,
+overcome by her emotion. Balzac himself was deeply moved. From
+that day until their final meeting he wrote to her daily.
+
+The woman who had become his second soul was not beautiful.
+Nevertheless, her face was intensely spiritual, and there was a
+mystic quality about it which made a strong appeal to Balzac's
+innermost nature. Those who saw him in Paris knocking about the
+streets at night with his boon companions, hobnobbing with the
+elder Dumas, or rejecting the frank advances of George Sand, would
+never have dreamed of this mysticism.
+
+Balzac was heavy and broad of figure. His face was suggestive only
+of what was sensuous and sensual. At the same time, those few who
+looked into his heart and mind found there many a sign of the fine
+inner strain which purified the grosser elements of his nature. He
+who wrote the roaring Rabelaisian Contes Drolatiques was likewise
+the author of Seraphita.
+
+This mysticism showed itself in many things that Balzac did. One
+little incident will perhaps be sufficiently characteristic of
+many others. He had a belief that names had a sort of esoteric
+appropriateness. So, in selecting them for his novels, he gathered
+them with infinite pains from many sources, and then weighed them
+anxiously in the balance. A writer on the subject of names and
+their significance has given the following account of this trait:
+
+The great novelist once spent an entire day tramping about in the
+remotest quarters of Paris in search of a fitting name for a
+character just conceived by him. Every sign-board, every door-
+plate, every affiche upon the walls, was scrutinized. Thousands of
+names were considered and rejected, and it was only after his
+companion, utterly worn out by fatigue, had flatly refused to drag
+his weary limbs through more than one additional street, that
+Balzac suddenly saw upon a sign the name "Marcas," and gave a
+shout of joy at having finally secured what he was seeking.
+
+Marcas it was, from that moment; and Balzac gradually evolved a
+Christian name for him. First he considered what initial was most
+appropriate; and then, having decided upon Z, he went on to expand
+this into Zepherin, explaining minutely just why the whole name
+Zepherin Marcas, was the only possible one for the character in
+the novel.
+
+In many ways Balzac and Evelina Hanska were mated by nature.
+Whether they were fully mated the facts of their lives must
+demonstrate. For the present, the novelist plunged into a whirl of
+literary labor, toiling as few ever toiled--constructing several
+novels at the same time, visiting all the haunts of the French
+capital, so that he might observe and understand every type of
+human being, and then hurling himself like a giant at his work.
+
+He had a curious practise of reading proofs. These would come to
+him in enormous sheets, printed on special paper, and with wide
+margins for his corrections. An immense table stood in the midst
+of his study, and upon the top he would spread out the proofs as
+if they were vast maps. Then, removing most of his outer garments,
+he would lie, face down, upon the proof-sheets, with a gigantic
+pencil, such as Bismarck subsequently used to wield. Thus
+disposed, he would go over the proofs.
+
+Hardly anything that he had written seemed to suit him when he saw
+it in print. He changed and kept changing, obliterating what he
+disliked, writing in new sentences, revising others, and adding
+whole pages in the margins, until perhaps he had practically made
+a new book. This process was repeated several times; and how
+expensive it was may be judged from the fact that his bill for
+"author's proof corrections" was sometimes more than the
+publishers had agreed to pay him for the completed volume.
+
+Sometimes, again, he would begin writing in the afternoon, and
+continue until dawn. Then, weary, aching in every bone, and with
+throbbing head, he would rise and turn to fall upon his couch
+after his eighteen hours of steady toil. But the memory of Evelina
+Hanska always came to him; and with half-numbed fingers he would
+seize his pen, and forget his weariness in the pleasure of writing
+to the dark-eyed woman who drew him to her like a magnet.
+
+These are very curious letters that Balzac wrote to Mme. Hanska.
+He literally told her everything about himself. Not only were
+there long passages instinct with tenderness, and with his love
+for her; but he also gave her the most minute account of
+everything that occurred, and that might interest her. Thus he
+detailed at length his mode of living, the clothes he wore, the
+people whom he met, his trouble with his creditors, the accounts
+of his income and outgo. One might think that this was egotism on
+his part; but it was more than that. It was a strong belief that
+everything which concerned him must concern her; and he begged her
+in turn to write as freely and as fully.
+
+Mme. Hanska was not the only woman who became his friend and
+comrade, and to whom he often wrote. He made many acquaintances in
+the fashionable world through the good offices of the Duchesse de
+Castries. By her favor, he studied with his microscopic gaze the
+beau monde of Louis Philippe's rather unimpressive court.
+
+In a dozen books he scourged the court of the citizen king--its
+pretensions, its commonness, and its assemblage of nouveaux
+riches. Yet in it he found many friends--Victor Hugo, the
+Girardins--and among them women who were of the world. George Sand
+he knew very well, and she made ardent love to him; but he laughed
+her off very much as the elder Dumas did.
+
+Then there was the pretty, dainty Mme. Carraud, who read and
+revised his manuscripts, and who perhaps took a more intimate
+interest in him than did the other ladies whom he came to know so
+well. Besides Mme. Hanska, he had another correspondent who signed
+herself "Louise," but who never let him know her name, though she
+wrote him many piquant, sunny letters, which he so sadly needed.
+
+For though Honore de Balzac was now one of the most famous writers
+of his time, his home was still a den of suffering. His debts kept
+pressing on him, loading him down, and almost quenching hope. He
+acted toward his creditors like a man of honor, and his physical
+strength was still that of a giant. To Mme. Carraud he once wrote
+the half pathetic, half humorous plaint:
+
+Poor pen! It must be diamond, not because one would wish to wear
+it, but because it has had so much use!
+
+And again:
+
+Here I am, owing a hundred thousand francs. And I am forty!
+
+Balzac and Mme. Hanska met many times after that first eventful
+episode at Neuchatel. It was at this time that he gave utterance
+to the poignant cry:
+
+Love for me is life, and to-day I feel it more than ever!
+
+In like manner he wrote, on leaving her, that famous epigram:
+
+It is only the last love of a woman that can satisfy the first
+love of a man.
+
+In 1842 Mme. Hanska's husband died. Balzac naturally expected that
+an immediate marriage with the countess would take place; but the
+woman who had loved him mystically for twelve years, and with a
+touch of the physical for nine, suddenly draws back. She will not
+promise anything. She talks of delays, owing to the legal
+arrangements for her children. She seems almost a prude. An
+American critic has contrasted her attitude with his:
+
+Every one knows how utterly and absolutely Balzac devoted to this
+one woman all his genius, his aspiration, the thought of his every
+moment; how every day, after he had labored like a slave for
+eighteen hours, he would take his pen and pour out to her the most
+intimate details of his daily life; how at her call he would leave
+everything and rush across the continent to Poland or to Italy,
+being radiantly happy if he could but see her face and be for a
+few days by her side. The very thought of meeting her thrilled him
+to the very depths of his nature, and made him, for weeks and even
+months beforehand, restless, uneasy, and agitated, with an almost
+painful happiness.
+
+It is the most startling proof of his immense vitality, both
+physical and mental, that so tremendous an emotional strain could
+be endured by him for years without exhausting his fecundity or
+blighting his creativeness.
+
+With Balzac, however, it was the period of his most brilliant
+work; and this was true in spite of the anguish of long
+separations, and the complaints excited by what appears to be
+caprice or boldness or a faint indifference. Even in Balzac one
+notices toward the last a certain sense of strain underlying what
+he wrote, a certain lack of elasticity and facility, if of nothing
+more; yet on the whole it is likely that without this friendship
+Balzac would have been less great than he actually became, as it
+is certain that had it been broken off he would have ceased to
+write or to care for anything whatever in the world.
+
+And yet, when they were free to marry, Mme. Hanska shrank away.
+Not until 1846, four years after her husband's death, did she
+finally give her promise to the eager Balzac. Then, in the
+overflow of his happiness, his creative genius blazed up into a
+most wonderful flame; but he soon discovered that the promise was
+not to be at once fulfilled. The shock impaired that marvelous
+vitality which had carried him through debt, and want, and endless
+labor.
+
+It was at this moment, by the irony of fate, that his country
+hailed him as one of the greatest of its men of genius. A golden
+stream poured into his lap. His debts were not all extinguished,
+but his income was so large that they burdened him no longer.
+
+But his one long dream was the only thing for which he cared; and
+though in an exoteric sense this dream came true, its truth was
+but a mockery. Evelina Hanska summoned him to Poland, and Balzac
+went to her at once. There was another long delay, and for more
+than a year he lived as a guest in the countess's mansion at
+Wierzchownia; but finally, in March, 1850, the two were married. A
+few weeks later they came back to France together, and occupied
+the little country house, Les Jardies, in which, some decades
+later, occurred Gambetta's mysterious death.
+
+What is the secret of this strange love, which in the woman seems
+to be not precisely love, but something else? Balzac was always
+eager for her presence. She, on the other hand, seems to have been
+mentally more at ease when he was absent. Perhaps the explanation,
+if we may venture upon one, is based upon a well-known
+physiological fact.
+
+Love in its completeness is made up of two great elements--first,
+the element that is wholly spiritual, that is capable of sympathy,
+and tenderness, and deep emotion. The other element is the
+physical, the source of passion, of creative energy, and of the
+truly virile qualities, whether it be in man or woman. Now, let
+either of these elements be lacking, and love itself cannot fully
+and utterly exist. The spiritual nature in one may find its mate
+in the spiritual nature of another; and the physical nature of one
+may find its mate in the physical nature of another. But into
+unions such as these, love does not enter in its completeness. If
+there is any element lacking in either of those who think that
+they can mate, their mating will be a sad and pitiful failure.
+
+It is evident enough that Mme. Hanska was almost wholly spiritual,
+and her long years of waiting had made her understand the
+difference between Balzac and herself. Therefore, she shrank from
+his proximity, and from his physical contact, and it was perhaps
+better for them both that their union was so quickly broken off by
+death; for the great novelist died of heart disease only five
+months after the marriage.
+
+If we wish to understand the mystery of Balzac's life--or, more
+truly, the mystery of the life of the woman whom he married--take
+up and read once more the pages of Seraphita, one of his poorest
+novels and yet a singularly illuminating story, shedding light
+upon a secret of the soul.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES READE AND LAURA SEYMOUR
+
+
+The instances of distinguished men, or of notable women, who have
+broken through convention in order to find a fitting mate, are
+very numerous. A few of these instances may, perhaps, represent
+what is usually called a Platonic union. But the evidence is
+always doubtful. The world is not possessed of abundant charity,
+nor does human experience lead one to believe that intimate
+relations between a man and a woman are compatible with Platonic
+friendship.
+
+Perhaps no case is more puzzling than that which is found in the
+life-history of Charles Reade and Laura Seymour.
+
+Charles Reade belongs to that brilliant group of English writers
+and artists which included Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Wilkie Collins,
+Tom Taylor, George Eliot, Swinburne, Sir Walter Besant, Maclise,
+and Goldwin Smith. In my opinion, he ranks next to Dickens in
+originality and power. His books are little read to-day; yet he
+gave to the English stage the comedy "Masks and Faces," which is
+now as much a classic as Goldsmith's "She Stoops to Conquer" or
+Sheridan's "School for Scandal." His power as a novelist was
+marvelous. Who can forget the madhouse episodes in Hard Cash, or
+the great trial scene in Griffith Gaunt, or that wonderful
+picture, in The Cloister and the Hearth, of Germany and Rome at
+the end of the Middle Ages? Here genius has touched the dead past
+and made it glow again with an intense reality.
+
+He was the son of a country gentleman, the lord of a manor which
+had been held by his family before the Wars of the Boses. His
+ancestors had been noted for their services in warfare, in
+Parliament, and upon the bench. Reade, therefore, was in feeling
+very much of an aristocrat. Sometimes he pushed his ancestral
+pride to a whimsical excess, very much as did his own creation,
+Squire Raby, in Put Yourself in His Place.
+
+At the same time he might very well have been called a Tory
+democrat. His grandfather had married the daughter of a village
+blacksmith, and Reade was quite as proud of this as he was of the
+fact that another ancestor had been lord chief justice of England.
+From the sturdy strain which came to him from the blacksmith he,
+perhaps, derived that sledge-hammer power with which he wrote many
+of his most famous chapters, and which he used in newspaper
+controversies with his critics. From his legal ancestors there may
+have come to him the love of litigation, which kept him often in
+hot water. From those who had figured in the life of royal courts,
+he inherited a romantic nature, a love of art, and a very delicate
+perception of the niceties of cultivated usage. Such was Charles
+Reade--keen observer, scholar, Bohemian--a man who could be both
+rough and tender, and whose boisterous ways never concealed his
+warm heart.
+
+Reade's school-days were Spartan in their severity. A teacher with
+the appropriate name of Slatter set him hard tasks and caned him
+unmercifully for every shortcoming. A weaker nature would have
+been crushed. Reade's was toughened, and he learned to resist pain
+and to resent wrong, so that hatred of injustice has been called
+his dominating trait.
+
+In preparing himself for college he was singularly fortunate in
+his tutors. One of them was Samuel Wilberforce, afterward Bishop
+of Oxford, nicknamed, from his suavity of manner, "Soapy Sam"; and
+afterward, when Reade was studying law, his instructor was Samuel
+Warren, the author of that once famous novel, Ten Thousand a Year,
+and the creator of "Tittlebat Titmouse."
+
+For his college at Oxford, Reade selected one of the most
+beautiful and ancient--Magdalen--which he entered, securing what
+is known as a demyship. Reade won his demyship by an extraordinary
+accident. Always an original youth, his reading was varied and
+valuable; but in his studies he had never tried to be minutely
+accurate in small matters. At that time every candidate was
+supposed to be able to repeat, by heart, the "Thirty-Nine
+Articles." Reade had no taste for memorizing; and out of the whole
+thirty-nine he had learned but three. His general examination was
+good, though not brilliant. When he came to be questioned orally,
+the examiner, by a chance that would not occur once in a million
+times, asked the candidate to repeat these very articles. Reade
+rattled them off with the greatest glibness, and produced so
+favorable an impression that he was let go without any further
+questioning.
+
+It must be added that his English essay was original, and this
+also helped him; but had it not been for the other great piece of
+luck he would, in Oxford phrase, have been "completely gulfed." As
+it was, however, he was placed as highly as the young men who were
+afterward known as Cardinal Newman and Sir Robert Lowe (Lord
+Sherbrooke).
+
+At the age of twenty-one, Reade obtained a fellowship, which
+entitled him to an income so long as he remained unmarried. It is
+necessary to consider the significance of this when we look at his
+subsequent career. The fellowship at Magdalen was worth, at the
+outset, about twelve hundred dollars annually, and it gave him
+possession of a suite of rooms free of any charge. He likewise
+secured a Vinerian fellowship in law, to which was attached an
+income of four hundred dollars. As time went on, the value of the
+first fellowship increased until it was worth twenty-five hundred
+dollars. Therefore, as with many Oxford men of his time, Charles
+Reade, who had no other fortune, was placed in this position--if he
+refrained from marrying, he had a home and a moderate income for
+life, without any duties whatsoever. If he married, he must give
+up his income and his comfortable apartments, and go out into the
+world and struggle for existence.
+
+There was the further temptation that the possession of his
+fellowship did not even necessitate his living at Oxford. He might
+spend his time in London, or even outside of England, knowing that
+his chambers at Magdalen were kept in order for him, as a resting-
+place to which he might return whenever he chose.
+
+Reade remained a while at Oxford, studying books and men--
+especially the latter. He was a great favorite with the
+undergraduates, though less so with the dons. He loved the boat-
+races on the river; he was a prodigious cricket-player, and one of
+the best bowlers of his time. He utterly refused to put on any of
+the academic dignity which his associates affected. He wore loud
+clothes. His flaring scarfs were viewed as being almost
+scandalous, very much as Longfellow's parti-colored waistcoats
+were regarded when he first came to Harvard as a professor.
+
+Charles Reade pushed originality to eccentricity. He had a passion
+for violins, and ran himself into debt because he bought so many
+and such good ones. Once, when visiting his father's house at
+Ipsden, he shocked the punctilious old gentleman by dancing on the
+dining-table to the accompaniment of a fiddle, which he scraped
+delightedly. Dancing, indeed, was another of his diversions, and,
+in spite of the fact that he was a fellow of Magdalen and a D.C.L.
+of Oxford, he was always ready to caper and to display the new
+steps.
+
+In the course of time, he went up to London; and at once plunged
+into the seething tide of the metropolis. He made friends far and
+wide, and in every class and station--among authors and
+politicians, bishops and bargees, artists and musicians. Charles
+Reade learned much from all of them, and all of them were fond of
+him.
+
+But it was the theater that interested him most. Nothing else
+seemed to him quite so fine as to be a successful writer for the
+stage. He viewed the drama with all the reverence of an ancient
+Greek. On his tombstone he caused himself to be described as
+"Dramatist, novelist, journalist."
+
+"Dramatist" he put first of all, even after long experience had
+shown him that his greatest power lay in writing novels. But in
+this early period he still hoped for fame upon the stage.
+
+It was not a fortunate moment for dramatic writers. Plays were
+bought outright by the managers, who were afraid to risk any
+considerable sum, and were very shy about risking anything at all.
+The system had not yet been established according to which an
+author receives a share of the money taken at the box-office.
+Consequently, Reade had little or no financial success. He adapted
+several pieces from the French, for which he was paid a few bank-
+notes. "Masks and Faces" got a hearing, and drew large audiences,
+but Reade had sold it for a paltry sum; and he shared the honors
+of its authorship with Tom Taylor, who was then much better known.
+
+Such was the situation. Reade was personally liked, but his plays
+were almost all rejected. He lived somewhat extravagantly and ran
+into debt, though not very deeply. He had a play entitled
+"Christie Johnstone," which he believed to be a great one, though
+no manager would venture to produce it. Reade, brooding, grew thin
+and melancholy. Finally, he decided that he would go to a leading
+actress at one of the principal theaters and try to interest her
+in his rejected play. The actress he had in mind was Laura
+Seymour, then appearing at the Haymarket under the management of
+Buckstone; and this visit proved to be the turning-point in
+Reade's whole life.
+
+Laura Seymour was the daughter of a surgeon at Bath--a man in
+large practise and with a good income, every penny of which he
+spent. His family lived in lavish style; but one morning, after he
+had sat up all night playing cards, his little daughter found him
+in the dining-room, stone dead. After his funeral it appeared that
+he had left no provision for his family. A friend of his--a Jewish
+gentleman of Portuguese extraction--showed much kindness to the
+children, settling their affairs and leaving them with some money
+in the bank; but, of course, something must be done.
+
+The two daughters removed to London, and at a very early age Laura
+had made for herself a place in the dramatic world, taking small
+parts at first, but rising so rapidly that in her fifteenth year
+she was cast for the part of Juliet. As an actress she led a life
+of strange vicissitudes. At one time she would be pinched by
+poverty, and at another time she would be well supplied with
+money, which slipped through her fingers like water. She was a
+true Bohemian, a happy-go-lucky type of the actors of her time.
+
+From all accounts, she was never very beautiful; but she had an
+instinct for strange, yet effective, costumes, which attracted
+much attention. She has been described as "a fluttering, buoyant,
+gorgeous little butterfly." Many were drawn to her. She was
+careless of what she did, and her name was not untouched with
+scandal. But she lived through it all, and emerged a clever,
+sympathetic woman of wide experience, both on the stage and off
+it.
+
+One of her admirers--an elderly gentleman named Seymour--came to
+her one day when she was in much need of money, and told her that
+he had just deposited a thousand pounds to her credit at the bank.
+Having said this, he left the room precipitately. It was the
+beginning of a sort of courtship; and after a while she married
+him. Her feeling toward him was one of gratitude. There was no
+sentiment about it; but she made him a good wife, and gave no
+further cause for gossip.
+
+Such was the woman whom Charles Reade now approached with the
+request that she would let him read to her a portion of his play.
+He had seen her act, and he honestly believed her to be a dramatic
+genius of the first order. Few others shared this belief; but she
+was generally thought of as a competent, though by no means
+brilliant, actress. Reade admired her extremely, so that at the
+very thought of speaking with her his emotions almost choked him.
+
+In answer to a note, she sent word that he might call at her
+house. He was at this time (1849) in his thirty-eighth year. The
+lady was a little older, and had lost something of her youthful
+charm; yet, when Reade was ushered into her drawing-room, she
+seemed to him the most graceful and accomplished woman whom he had
+ever met.
+
+She took his measure, or she thought she took it, at a glance.
+Here was one of those would-be playwrights who live only to
+torment managers and actresses. His face was thin, from which she
+inferred that he was probably half starved. His bashfulness led
+her to suppose that he was an inexperienced youth. Little did she
+imagine that he was the son of a landed proprietor, a fellow of
+one of Oxford's noblest colleges, and one with friends far higher
+in the world than herself. Though she thought so little of him,
+and quite expected to be bored, she settled herself in a soft
+armchair to listen. The unsuccessful playwright read to her a
+scene or two from his still unfinished drama. She heard him
+patiently, noting the cultivated accent of his voice, which proved
+to her that he was at least a gentleman. When he had finished, she
+said:
+
+"Yes, that's good! The plot is excellent." Then she laughed a sort
+of stage laugh, and remarked lightly: "Why don't you turn it into
+a novel?"
+
+Reade was stung to the quick. Nothing that she could have said
+would have hurt him more. Novels he despised; and here was this
+woman, the queen of the English stage, as he regarded her,
+laughing at his drama and telling him to make a novel of it. He
+rose and bowed.
+
+"I am trespassing on your time," he said; and, after barely
+touching the fingers of her outstretched hand, he left the room
+abruptly.
+
+The woman knew men very well, though she scarcely knew Charles
+Reade. Something in his melancholy and something in his manner
+stirred her heart. It was not a heart that responded to emotions
+readily, but it was a very good-natured heart. Her explanation of
+Reade's appearance led her to think that he was very poor. If she
+had not much tact, she had an abundant store of sympathy; and so
+she sat down and wrote a very blundering but kindly letter, in
+which she enclosed a five-pound note.
+
+Reade subsequently described his feelings on receiving this letter
+with its bank-note. He said:
+
+"I, who had been vice-president of Magdalen--I, who flattered
+myself I was coming to the fore as a dramatist--to have a five-
+pound note flung at my head, like a ticket for soup to a pauper,
+or a bone to a dog, and by an actress, too! Yet she said my
+reading was admirable; and, after all, there is much virtue in a
+five-pound note. Anyhow, it showed the writer had a good heart."
+
+The more he thought of her and of the incident, the more comforted
+he was. He called on her the next day without making an
+appointment; and when she received him, he had the five-pound note
+fluttering in his hand.
+
+She started to speak, but he interrupted her.
+
+"No," he said, "that is not what I wanted from you. I wanted
+sympathy, and you have unintentionally supplied it."
+
+Then this man, whom she had regarded as half starved, presented
+her with an enormous bunch of hothouse grapes, and the two sat
+down and ate them together, thus beginning a friendship which
+ended only with Laura Seymour's death.
+
+Oddly enough, Mrs. Seymour's suggestion that Reade should make a
+story of his play was a suggestion which he actually followed. It
+was to her guidance and sympathy that the world owes the great
+novels which he afterward composed. If he succeeded on the stage
+at all, it was not merely in "Masks and Faces," but in his
+powerful dramatization of Zola's novel, L'Assommoir, under the
+title "Drink," in which the late Charles Warner thrilled and
+horrified great audiences all over the English-speaking world. Had
+Reade never known Laura Seymour, he might never have written so
+strong a drama.
+
+The mystery of Reade's relations with this woman can never be
+definitely cleared up. Her husband, Mr. Seymour, died not long
+after she and Reade became acquainted. Then Reade and several
+friends, both men and women, took a house together; and Laura
+Seymour, now a clever manager and amiable hostess, looked after
+all the practical affairs of the establishment. One by one, the
+others fell away, through death or by removal, until at last these
+two were left alone. Then Reade, unable to give up the
+companionship which meant so much to him, vowed that she must
+still remain and care for him. He leased a house in Sloane Street,
+which he has himself described in his novel A Terrible Temptation.
+It is the chapter wherein Reade also draws his own portrait in the
+character of Francis Bolfe:
+
+The room was rather long, low, and nondescript; scarlet flock
+paper; curtains and sofas, green Utrecht velvet; woodwork and
+pillars, white and gold; two windows looking on the street; at the
+other end folding-doors, with scarcely any woodwork, all plate
+glass, but partly hidden by heavy curtains of the same color and
+material as the others.
+
+At last a bell rang; the maid came in and invited Lady Bassett to
+follow her. She opened the glass folding-doors and took them into
+a small conservatory, walled like a grotto, with ferns sprouting
+out of rocky fissures, and spars sparkling, water dripping. Then
+she opened two more glass folding-doors, and ushered them into an
+empty room, the like of which Lady Bassett had never seen; it was
+large in itself, and multiplied tenfold by great mirrors from
+floor to ceiling, with no frames but a narrow oak beading;
+opposite her, on entering, was a bay window, all plate glass, the
+central panes of which opened, like doors, upon a pretty little
+garden that glowed with color, and was backed by fine trees
+belonging to the nation; for this garden ran up to the wall of
+Hyde Park.
+
+The numerous and large mirrors all down to the ground laid hold of
+the garden and the flowers, and by double and treble reflection
+filled the room with delightful nooks of verdure and color.
+
+Here are the words in which Reade describes himself as he looked
+when between fifty and sixty years of age:
+
+He looked neither like a poet nor a drudge, but a great fat
+country farmer. He was rather tall, very portly, smallish head,
+commonplace features, mild brown eye not very bright, short beard,
+and wore a suit of tweed all one color.
+
+Such was the house and such was the man over both of which Laura
+Seymour held sway until her death in 1879. What must be thought of
+their relations? She herself once said to Mr. John Coleman:
+
+"As for our positions--his and mine--we are partners, nothing
+more. He has his bank-account, and I have mine. He is master of
+his fellowship and his rooms at Oxford, and I am mistress of this
+house, but not his mistress! Oh, dear, no!"
+
+At another time, long after Mr. Seymour's death, she said to an
+intimate friend:
+
+"I hope Mr. Reade will never ask me to marry him, for I should
+certainly refuse the offer."
+
+There was no reason why he should not have made this offer,
+because his Oxford fellowship ceased to be important to him after
+he had won fame as a novelist. Publishers paid him large sums for
+everything he wrote. His debts were all paid off, and his income
+was assured. Yet he never spoke of marriage, and he always
+introduced his friend as "the lady who keeps my house for me."
+
+As such, he invited his friends to meet her, and as such, she even
+accompanied him to Oxford. There was no concealment, and
+apparently there was nothing to conceal. Their manner toward each
+other was that of congenial friends. Mrs. Seymour, in fact, might
+well have been described as "a good fellow." Sometimes she
+referred to him as "the doctor," and sometimes by the nickname
+"Charlie." He, on his side, often spoke of her by her last name as
+"Seymour," precisely as if she had been a man. One of his
+relatives rather acutely remarked about her that she was not a
+woman of sentiment at all, but had a genius for friendship; and
+that she probably could not have really loved any man at all.
+
+This is, perhaps, the explanation of their intimacy. If so, it is
+a very remarkable instance of Platonic friendship. It is certain
+that, after she met Reade, Mrs. Seymour never cared for any other
+man. It is no less certain that he never cared for any other
+woman. When she died, five years before his death, his life became
+a burden to him. It was then that he used to speak of her as "my
+lost darling" and "my dove." He directed that they should be
+buried side by side in Willesden churchyard. Over the monument
+which commemorates them both, he caused to be inscribed, in
+addition to an epitaph for himself, the following tribute to his
+friend. One should read it and accept the touching words as
+answering every question that may be asked:
+
+Here lies the great heart of Laura Seymour, a brilliant artist, a
+humble Christian, a charitable woman, a loving daughter, sister,
+and friend, who lived for others from her childhood. Tenderly
+pitiful to all God's creatures--even to some that are frequently
+destroyed or neglected--she wiped away the tears from many faces,
+helping the poor with her savings and the sorrowful with her
+earnest pity. When the eye saw her it blessed her, for her face
+was sunshine, her voice was melody, and her heart was sympathy.
+
+This grave was made for her and for himself by Charles Reade,
+whose wise counselor, loyal ally, and bosom friend she was for
+twenty-four years, and who mourns her all his days.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Famous Affinities of History V4, by Lyndon Orr
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+End of Project Gutenberg's Famous Affinities of History V4, by Lyndon Orr
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