Outside of the English-speaking peoples the nineteenth century witnessed the rise and triumphant progress of three great tragic actresses. The first two of these—Rachel Felix and Sarah Bernhardt—were of Jewish extraction; the third, Eleanor Duse, is Italian. All of them made their way from pauperism to fame; but perhaps the rise of Rachel was the most striking.
In the winter of 1821 a wretched peddler named Abraham—or Jacob—Felix sought shelter at a dilapidated inn at Mumpf, a village in Switzerland, not far from Basel. It was at the close of a stormy day, and his small family had been toiling through the snow and sleet. The inn was the lowest sort of hovel, and yet its proprietor felt that it was too good for these vagabonds. He consented to receive them only when he learned that the peddler's wife was to be delivered of a child. That very night she became the mother of a girl, who was at first called Elise. So unimportant was the advent of this little waif into the world that the burgomaster of Mumpf thought it necessary to make an entry only of the fact that a peddler's wife had given birth to a female child. There was no mention of family or religion, nor was the record anything more than a memorandum.
Under such circumstances was born a child who was destined to excite the wonder of European courts—to startle and thrill and utterly amaze great audiences by her dramatic genius. But for ten years the family—which grew until it consisted of one son and five daughters—kept on its wanderings through Switzerland and Germany. Finally, they settled down in Lyons, where the mother opened a little shop for the sale of second-hand clothing. The husband gave lessons in German whenever he could find a pupil. The eldest daughter went about the cafes in the evening, singing the songs that were then popular, while her small sister, Rachel, collected coppers from those who had coppers to spare.
Although the family was barely able to sustain existence, the father and mother were by no means as ignorant as their squalor would imply. The peddler Felix had studied Hebrew theology in the hope of becoming a rabbi. Failing this, he was always much interested in declamation, public reading, and the recitation of poetry. He was, in his way, no mean critic of actors and actresses. Long before she was ten years of age little Rachel—who had changed her name from Elise—could render with much feeling and neatness of eloquence bits from the best-known French plays of the classic stage.
The children's mother, on her side, was sharp and practical to a high degree. She saved and scrimped all through her period of adversity. Later she was the banker of her family, and would never lend any of her children a sou except on excellent security. However, this was all to happen in after years.
When the child who was destined to be famous had reached her tenth year she and her sisters made their way to Paris. For four years the second-hand clothing-shop was continued; the father still taught German; and the elder sister, Sarah, who had a golden voice, made the rounds of the cafes in the lowest quarters of the capital, while Rachel passed the wooden plate for coppers.
One evening in the year 1834 a gentleman named Morin, having been taken out of his usual course by a matter of business, entered a BRASSERIE for a cup of coffee. There he noted two girls, one of them singing with remarkable sweetness, and the other silently following with the wooden plate. M. Morin called to him the girl who sang and asked her why she did not make her voice more profitable than by haunting the cafes at night, where she was sure to meet with insults of the grossest kind.
"Why," said Sarah, "I haven't anybody to advise me what to do."
M. Morin gave her his address and said that he would arrange to have her meet a friend who would be of great service to her. On the following day he sent the two girls to a M. Choron, who was the head of the Conservatory of Sacred Music. Choron had Sarah sing, and instantly admitted her as a pupil, which meant that she would soon be enrolled among the regular choristers. The beauty of her voice made a deep impression on him.
Then he happened to notice the puny, meager child who was standing near her sister. Turning to her, he said:
"And what can you do, little one?"
"I can recite poetry," was the reply.
"Oh, can you?" said he. "Please let me hear you."
Rachel readily consented. She had a peculiarly harsh, grating voice, so that any but a very competent judge would have turned her away. But M. Choron, whose experience was great, noted the correctness of her accent and the feeling which made itself felt in every line. He accepted her as well as her sister, but urged her to study elocution rather than music.
She must, indeed, have had an extraordinary power even at the age of fourteen, since not merely her voice but her whole appearance was against her. She was dressed in a short calico frock of a pattern in which red was spotted with white. Her shoes were of coarse black leather. Her hair was parted at the back of her head and hung down her shoulders in two braids, framing the long, childish, and yet gnome-like face, which was unusual in its gravity.
At first she was little thought of; but there came a time when she astonished both her teachers and her companions by a recital which she gave in public. The part was the narrative of Salema in the "Abufar" of Ducis. It describes the agony of a mother who gives birth to a child while dying of thirst amid the desert sands. Mme. de Barviera has left a description of this recital, which it is worth while to quote:
While uttering the thrilling tale the thin face seemed to lengthen with horror, the small, deep-set black eyes dilated with a fixed stare as though she witnessed the harrowing scene; and the deep, guttural tones, despite a slight Jewish accent, awoke a nameless terror in every one who listened, carrying him through the imaginary woe with a strange feeling of reality, not to be shaken, off as long as the sounds lasted.
Even yet, however, the time had not come for any conspicuous success. The girl was still so puny in form, so monkey-like in face, and so gratingly unpleasant in her tones that it needed time for her to attain her full growth and to smooth away some of the discords in her peculiar voice.
Three years later she appeared at the Gymnase in a regular debut; yet even then only the experienced few appreciated her greatness. Among these, however, were the well-known critic Jules Janin, the poet and novelist Gauthier, and the actress Mlle. Mars. They saw that this lean, raucous gutter-girl had within her gifts which would increase until she would be first of all actresses on the French stage. Janin wrote some lines which explain the secret of her greatness:
All the talent in the world, especially when continually applied to the same dramatic works, will not satisfy continually the hearer. What pleases in a great actor, as in all arts that appeal to the imagination, is the unforeseen. When I am utterly ignorant of what is to happen, when I do not know, when you yourself do not know what will be your next gesture, your next look, what passion will possess your heart, what outcry will burst from your terror-stricken soul, then, indeed, I am willing to see you daily, for each day you will be new to me. To-day I may blame, to-morrow praise. Yesterday you were all-powerful; to-morrow, perhaps, you may hardly win from me a word of admiration. So much the better, then, if you draw from me unexpected tears, if in my heart you strike an unknown fiber; but tell me not of hearing night after night great artists who every time present the exact counterpart of what they were on the preceding one.
It was at the Theatre Francais that she won her final acceptance as the greatest of all tragedians of her time. This was in her appearance in Corneille's famous play of "Horace." She had now, in 1838, blazed forth with a power that shook her no, less than it stirred the emotions and the passions of her hearers. The princes of the royal blood came in succession to see her. King Louis Philippe himself was at last tempted by curiosity to be present. Gifts of money and jewels were showered on her, and through sheer natural genius rather than through artifice she was able to master a great audience and bend it to her will.
She had no easy life, this girl of eighteen years, for other actresses carped at her, and she had had but little training. The sordid ways of her old father excited a bitterness which was vented on the daughter. She was still under age, and therefore was treated as a gold-mine by her exacting parents. At the most she could play but twice a week. Her form was frail and reed-like. She was threatened with a complaint of the lungs; yet all this served to excite rather than to diminish public interest in her. The newspapers published daily bulletins of her health, and her door was besieged by anxious callers who wished to know her condition. As for the greed of her parents, every one said she was not to blame for that. And so she passed from poverty to riches, from squalor to something like splendor, and from obscurity to fame.
Much has been written about her that is quite incorrect. She has been credited with virtues which she never possessed; and, indeed, it may be said with only too much truth that she possessed no virtues whatsoever. On the stage while the inspiration lasted she was magnificent. Off the stage she was sly, treacherous, capricious, greedy, ungrateful, ignorant, and unchaste. With such an ancestry as she had, with such an early childhood as had been hers, what else could one expect from her?
She and her old mother wrangled over money like two pickpockets. Some of her best friends she treated shamefully. Her avarice was without bounds. Some one said that it was not really avarice, but only a reaction from generosity; but this seems an exceedingly subtle theory. It is possible to give illustrations of it, however. She did, indeed, make many presents with a lavish hand; yet, having made a present, she could not rest until she got it back. The fact was so well known that her associates took it for granted. The younger Dumas once received a ring from her. Immediately he bowed low and returned it to her finger, saying:
"Permit me, mademoiselle, to present it to you in my turn so as to save you the embarrassment of asking for it."
Mr. Vandam relates among other anecdotes about her that one evening she dined at the house of Comte Duchatel. The table was loaded with the most magnificent flowers; but Rachel's keen eyes presently spied out the great silver centerpiece. Immediately she began to admire the latter; and the count, fascinated by her manners, said that he would be glad to present it to her. She accepted it at once, but was rather fearful lest he should change his mind. She had come to dinner in a cab, and mentioned the fact. The count offered to send her home in his carriage.
"Yes, that will do admirably," said she. "There will be no danger of my being robbed of your present, which I had better take with me."
"With pleasure, mademoiselle," replied the count. "But you will send me back my carriage, won't you?"
Rachel had a curious way of asking every one she met for presents and knickknacks, whether they were valuable or not. She knew how to make them valuable.
Once in a studio she noticed a guitar hanging on the wall. She begged for it very earnestly. As it was an old and almost worthless instrument, it was given her. A little later it was reported that the dilapidated guitar had been purchased by a well-known gentleman for a thousand francs. The explanation soon followed. Rachel had declared that it was the very guitar with which she used to earn her living as a child in the streets of Paris. As a memento its value sprang from twenty francs to a thousand.
It has always been a mystery what Rachel did with the great sums of money which she made in various ways. She never was well dressed; and as for her costumes on the stage, they were furnished by the theater. When her effects were sold at public auction after her death her furniture was worse than commonplace, and her pictures and ornaments were worthless, except such as had been given her. She must have made millions of francs, and yet she had very little to leave behind her.
Some say that her brother Raphael, who acted as her personal manager, was a spendthrift; but if so, there are many reasons for thinking that it was not his sister's money that he spent. Others say that Rachel gambled in stocks, but there is no evidence of it. The only thing that is certain is the fact that she was almost always in want of money. Her mother, in all probability, managed to get hold of most of her earnings.
Much may have been lost through her caprices. One instance may be cited. She had received an offer of three hundred thousand francs to act at St. Petersburg, and was on her way there when she passed through Potsdam, near Berlin. The King of Prussia was entertaining the Russian Czar. An invitation was sent to her in the shape of a royal command to appear before these monarchs and their guests. For some reason or other Rachel absolutely refused. She would listen to no arguments. She would go on to St. Petersburg without delay.
"But," it was said to her, "if you refuse to appear before the Czar at Potsdam all the theaters in St. Petersburg will be closed against you, because you will have insulted the emperor. In this way you will be out the expenses of your journey and also the three hundred thousand francs."
Rachel remained stubborn as before; but in about half an hour she suddenly declared that she would recite before the two monarchs, which she subsequently did, to the satisfaction of everybody. Some one said to her not long after:
"I knew that you would do it. You weren't going to give up the three hundred thousand francs and all your travelling expenses."
"You are quite wrong," returned Rachel, "though of course you will not believe me. I did not care at all about the money and was going back to France. It was something that I heard which made me change my mind. Do you want to know what it was? Well, after all the arguments were over some one informed me that the Czar Nicholas was the handsomest man in Europe; and so I made up my mind that I would stay in Potsdam long enough to see him."
This brings us to one phase of Rachel's nature which is rather sinister. She was absolutely hard. She seemed to have no emotions except those which she exhibited on the stage or the impish perversity which irritated so many of those about her. She was in reality a product of the gutter, able to assume a demure and modest air, but within coarse, vulgar, and careless of decency. Yet the words of Jules Janin, which have been quoted above, explain how she could be personally very fascinating.
In all Rachel's career one can detect just a single strand of real romance. It is one that makes us sorry for her, because it tells us that her love was given where it never could be openly requited.
During the reign of Louis Philippe the Comte Alexandre Walewski held many posts in the government. He was a son of the great Napoleon. His mother was that Polish countess who had accepted Napoleon's love because she hoped that he might set Poland free at her desire. But Napoleon was never swerved from his well-calculated plans by the wish of any woman, and after a time the Countess Walewska came to love him for himself. It was she to whom he confided secrets which he would not reveal to his own brothers. It was she who followed him to Elba in disguise. It was her son who was Napoleon's son, and who afterward, under the Second Empire, was made minister of fine arts, minister of foreign affairs, and, finally, an imperial duke. Unlike the third Napoleon's natural half-brother, the Duc de Moray, Walewski was a gentleman of honor and fine feeling. He never used his relationship to secure advantages for himself. He tried to live in a manner worthy of the great warrior who was his father.
As minister of fine arts he had much to do with the subsidized theaters; and in time he came to know Rachel. He was the son of one of the greatest men who ever lived. She was the child of roving peddlers whose early training had been in the slums of cities and amid the smoke of bar-rooms and cafes. She was tainted in a thousand ways, while he was a man of breeding and right principle. She was a wandering actress; he was a great minister of state. What could there be between these two?
George Sand gave the explanation in an epigram which, like most epigrams, is only partly true. She said:
"The count's company must prove very restful to Rachel."
What she meant was, of course, that Walewski's breeding, his dignity and uprightness, might be regarded only as a temporary repose for the impish, harsh-voiced, infinitely clever actress. Of course, it was all this, but we should not take it in a mocking sense. Rachel looked up out of her depths and gave her heart to this high-minded nobleman. He looked down and lifted her, as it were, so that she could forget for the time all the baseness and the brutality that she had known, that she might put aside her forced vivacity and the self that was not in reality her own.
It is pitiful to think of these two, separated by a great abyss which could not be passed except at times and hours when each was free. But theirs was, none the less, a meeting of two souls, strangely different in many ways, and yet appealing to each other with a sincerity and truth which neither could show elsewhere.
The end of poor Rachel was one of disappointment. Tempted by the fact that Jenny Lind had made nearly two million francs by her visit to the United States, Rachel followed her, but with slight success, as was to be expected. Music is enjoyed by human beings everywhere, while French classical plays, even though acted by a genius like Rachel, could be rightly understood only by a French-speaking people. Thus it came about that her visit to America was only moderately successful.
She returned to France, where the rising fame of Adelaide Ristori was very bitter to Rachel, who had passed the zenith of her power. She went to Egypt, but received no benefit, and in 1858 she died near Cannes. The man who loved her, and whom she had loved in turn, heard of her death with great emotion. He himself lived ten years longer, and died a little while before the fall of the Second Empire.
END OF VOLUME THREE
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 be 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!"
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."