B I 1 ■ 1 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library PN 481. L49 Loves of the poets 3 1924 026 925 762 The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026925762 THE LOVES OF THE POETS The Love Story of Robert Browning AND Elizabeth Barrett Frederic Chopest and George- Sand . Michael Angelo and Vittoria Colonna Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth SiDDAL . . .... Legendary Ladies of the Poets Mary Stuart and Pierre Chastelard . " Est-Elle Brune ? Est-Elle Blonde ? " 145 181 207 243 . LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Elizabeth Barrett Browning . Frontispiece PAGE Frederic Chopin 61 George Sand 67 Vittoria Colonna 113 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 147 Petrarch 187 Sacharissa 199 Mary Stuart 209 J; ROBERT BROWNING AND ELIZABETH BARRETT N addition to its own intrinsic beauty and completeness, its perfection as an achievement in human happiness, the love story of the Brownings brings us the minor, but real satisfaction of seeing love once again triumphantly demolish- ing one more platitude of so-called worldly wisdom — the matrimonial incompati- bility of artistic temperaments and, above all, of literary persons. Once again the wisdom of this world is shown to be foolishness with love. The idea of two poets living together in harmony, and making a shining success of their marriage, has been immemorially re- garded as an impossibility in nature. One poet in a household is popularly considered as a sufficient trial of human nerves, but two under the same nuptial , < »JS= THE BROWNINGS roof would seem to be merely a theme for the Comic Muse. Even Wordsworth turns humorist at the thought. "So Robert Browning and Miss Barrett have gone off together," he said, when the news of their marriage, with which all literary London of 1846 was humming, came to him. "I hope they understand each other — nobody else would." And even an intimate friend and confidante, Mrs. Jameson, has her doubts and fears. "I have here," she wrote from Paris to a friend, "a poet and a poetess — two celebrities who have run away and mar- ried under circumstances peculiarly inter- esting, and such as to render imprudence the height of prudence. Both excel- lent; but God help them! for I know not how the two poet heads and poet hearts will get on through this prosaic world." We need not trouble ourselves further with this general preconception as to the incompatibility of poets, except to say that it seems to be a part of the absurd wide-spread notion that two of TEE BROWNINGS &« n a trade make bad companions, and that similarity of temperaments and com- munity of tasks are to be avoided rather than sought in marriage. Such is the wild nonsense that passes from lip to lip as proverbial wisdom. Far from being surprised that two poets should make a success of it, one might surmise that the union of two whose very business is with beauty and love and the things of the spirit would be on that very account the more sensitively complete; and that even in the marriages of those who are not poets, it is the poetic element in them which is their vitality, which, in fact, makes them marriages at all. But the Brownings were not merely poets — they were such learned poets as well. In spite of the examples of Abelard and Heloise, of Pericles and Aspasia, Greek scholarship and the simple emotions are not popularly supposed to go together, and, at first sight, the loves of learned persons are apt to be asso- ciated with "the loves of the triangles." It is not commonly realized that one TEE BROWNINGS may be all the more human for being learned, and that love itself, for that very reason, be thus the better furnished with the varied material of mutual sym- pathy and expression. " Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also." Love is likely to be all the fuller when two can enjoy iEschylus together, and even Greek itself, as the Browning letters most humanly prove to us, may become one of love's playthings. Nor, I presume, can it be a disadvantage for love to be able to declare itself after the manner of Sonnets from the Portuguese. Great love poetry is usually a lonely, one-sided thing. Most often it is the ideal utterance of ideal feelings, feelings directed towards an imaginary, or an unattainable, or an unresponsive object, the voice of unrequited passion; or it is a purely dramatic utterance — such as that of Romeo and Juliet — the ideal converse of ideal beings. So, we say, men and women make love in poetry or in novels; but in real life love must be satisfied with a more homespun ex- c pression. Now herein is the romantic thrill and satisfaction of the loves of the Brownings. Here are two modern Londoners simply, and so to say prosa- ically, in love, like other ordinary human beings, but whose natural way of telling each other happens to be great poetry. The unlettered heart must have recourse to ready-made poetry to express its inex- pressible — poets are born to this end, to serve as the mouthpieces of lovers; but here we have two lovers who in- stinctively express themselves in master- pieces, two royal natures making love royally, in the speech of gods, in the language of angels. Here we have great poetry, not merely as unrelated expression, for the use of this or that according to his needs, but great poetry springing from the hearts of two great poets as the natural means of communi- cation between them. When we read: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways — '. THE BROWNINGS God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures Boasts two soul sides, one to face the world with, One to show a woman when he loves her! we are not only reading great poetry, with its universal message and applica- tion, we are also reading the actual words which an actual woman and an actual man created and employed for the use of their own private hearts. Not Romeo and Juliet at a moonlit window in Verona, but Elizabeth Barrett, living at 50 Wimpole Street, London, in the year 1845, and Robert Browning, living at New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey, in the same year. Surely the poetry thus gains an added thrill for us, as we realize its first employment by two flesh and blood human beings of our own time. Appropriately, though indeed invol- untarily enough, it was a poem of Eliza- beth Barrett's own that began the whole beautiful story. In 1844 she had fol- lowed up her first success of The Seraphim volume by the publication of two vol- ,^ THE BROWNINGS umes of Poems containing work such as A Drama of Exile, The Cry of the Chil- dren, The Rhyme of the Duchess May, The Lay of the Brown Rosary, A Vision of Poets, and Lady Geraldine's Courtship, work which had given her an immediate wide popularity. Robert Browning had admired these poems, as Miss Barrett had admired his Paracelsus and that series of masterpieces which in 1841 he had published in cheap and actual serial form, under the symbolic title of Bells and Pomegranates, Pippa Passes being in- cluded amongst them, A mutual friend of the two poets, John Kenyon, a school-fellow of Browning's father and a kinsman of Miss Barrett, who after- wards referred to him as her "fairy God-father," had urged Browning to write to her of his appreciation, an ap- preciation including, one cannot but surmise, some personal gratification in this verse, which must have pulled him up with a pleased start as he read Lady Geraldine's Courtship: TBE BROWNINGS Or at times a modern volume, Wordsworth's solemn-thoughted idyl, Howitt's ballad-verse, or Tennyson's enchanted reverie, — Or from Browning some 'Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the middle. Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity. Browning took his friend's advice and on January 11, 1845, mailed this whole- hearted letter: "New Choss, Hatcham, Suhbey. (Post-mark, January 10, 1845) "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett, — and this is no off- hand complimentary letter that I shall write, — whatever else, no prompt mat- ter-of-course recognition of your genius, and there a natural and graceful end of the thing. Since the day last week when I first read your poems, I quite laugh to remember how I have been turn- ing and turning again in my mind what I should be able to tell you of their effect upon me, for in the first flush of delight I thought I would this once get out of \l my habit of purely passive enjoyment when I do really enjoy, and thoroughly justify my admiration, — perhaps even, as a loyal fellow-craftsman should, try and find fault and do you some little good to be proud of hereafter ! — but nothing comes of it all — so into me has it gone, and part of me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew — oh, how different that is from lying to be dried and pressed flat, and prized highly, and put in a book with a proper account at top and bottom, and shut up and put away . . . and the book called a 'Flora' besides! After all, I need not give up the thought of doing that, too, in time; because even now, talking with whoever is worthy, I can give a reason for my faith in one and another excellence, the fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos, and true new brave thought; but in this addressing myself to you — your own self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do, as I THE BROWNINGS say, love these books with all my heart — and I love you too. Do you know I was once not very far from seeing — really seeing you? Mr. Kenyon said to me one morning, 'Would you like to see Miss Barrett.''' Then he went to an- nounce me, — then he returned . . . you were too unwell, and now it is years ago, and I feel as at some untoward passage in my travels, as if I had been close, so close, to some world's wonder in chapel or crypt, only a screen to push and I might have entered, but there was some slight, so it now seems, slight and just sufficient bar to admission, and the half-opened door shut, and I went home my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be.f* "Well, these Poems were to be, and this true thankful joy and pride with which I feel myself Yours ever faithfully, Robert Browning." Miss Barrett, 50 Wimpole St. R. Browning. Miss Barrett answered this letter by return mail, but, before we quote her answer, we are able to take a glimpse behind the scenes at the delightfully- girlish excitement and heart-flutter which it brought into her invalid solitude. "I had a letter," we find her writing to her close friend Mrs, Martin, "from Browning the poet last night, which threw me into ecstasies — Browning, the author of 'Paracelsus,' and king of the mystics." And to her friend Miss Mit- ford she had even confided the clause "and I love you too," as she confesses to Browning a year and a half after, when they had long been affianced to each other and could look back, after the manner of lovers, with a tender retro- spective curiosity at love's beginning, before it knew itself for love. Browning had written, "Do you remember that the first word I ever wrote to you was, 'I love you, dear Miss Barrett'? It was so, — could not but be so, — and I always loved you, as I shall always." "Do I remember.? Yes indeed, I remember," , 12 was the answer. "How I recurred and wondered afterwards, though at the moment it seemed very simple and what was to be met within our philosophy every day. But there, you see, there's the danger of using mala verba! The Fates catch them up and knit them into the web!" Then she goes on to tell of that early "imprudence." "I was writ- ing to Miss Mitford and of you," she says; "we differed about you often . . . because she did not appreciate you properly, and was fond of dwelling on the 'obscurity' when I talked of the light, — and I, just then writing of you, added in my headlong, unreflecting way that I had had a real letter from you which said that you loved me — ' Oh — but,' I wrote on, 'you are not to mistake this, not to repeat it — for, of course, it is simply the 'purest of philanthropies' . . . some words to that effect — and if yours was the purest of philanthropies, mine was the purest of innocences, as you may well believe . . . for if I had had the shadow of a foresight, I should THE BROWNINGS not have fallen into the snare. So vexed I was afterwards ! Not that she thought anything at the time, or has referred to it since, or remembers a word now. Only I was vexed in my innermost heart . . . and am ... do you know? . . . that I should have spoken lightly of such an expression of yours — though you meant it lightly too, dearest! It was a disguised angel, and I should have known it by its wings though they did not fly." So she could write out of the fulness of knowledge in June, 1846, and thus we are able to read the letter which she sent on January 11, 1845, smiling to ourselves in knowing what "Mr. Browning" natu- rally could not know and how much more feeling went with it than either was con- scious of. "I thank you, dear Mr. Browning," the letter begins, "from the bottom of my heart. You meant to give me pleas- ure by your letter — and even if the object had not been answered, I ought still to thank you. But it is thoroughly mdJiW) ' L TEE BROWNINQS answered. Such a letter from such a hand ! sympathy is dear, — very dear to me: but the sympathy of a poet, and of such a poet, is the quintessence of sympathy to me ! . . . For the rest you draw me on with your kindness. It is difficult to get rid of people when you once have given them too much pleasure — that is a fact, and we will not stop for the moral of it. What I was going to say — after a little natural hesitation — is, that if ever you emerge without inconvenient eflFort from your 'passive state,' and will tell me of such faults as rise to the surface and strike you as important in my poems . . . you will confer a lasting obligation on me, and one which I shall value so much, that I covet it at a distance. I do not pre- tend to any extraordinary meekness under criticism and it is possible enough that I might not be altogether obedient to yours." More of this, and then, with the womanly playfulness which is the charm of all her letters, she takes teasing ad- THE BROWNINGS vantage of that perhaps not over-fortu- nate image of "the crypt." "Is it indeed true that I was so near to the pleasure and honor of mak- ing your acquaintance? And can it be true that you look back upon the lost opportunity with any regret? But — you know — if you had entered the 'crypt,' you might have caught cold, or been tired to death, and wished your- self 'a thousand miles oflf'; which would have been worse than traveling then. It is not my interest, however, to put such thought in your head about its be- ing 'all for the best'; and I could rather hope (as I do) that what I lost by one chance I may recover by some future one. Winters shut me up as they do dormouse's eyes; in the spring, we shall see; and I am so much better that I seem to be turning round to the outward world again. And in the meantime I have learnt to know your voice, not merely from the poetry, but from the kindness in it. Mr. Kenyon often speaks of you — dear Mr. Kenyon! — I am 16 writing too much, — and notwithstand- ing that I am writing too much, I will write of one thing more. I will say that I am your debtor, not only for this cordial letter and for all the pleasure which came with it, but in other ways, and those the highest; and I will say that while I love to follow this divine art of poetry, in proportion to my love for it and my devotion to it, I must be a devout admirer and student of your works. This is in my heart to say to you — and I say it. "And, for the rest, I am proud to remain Yours obliged and faithful Elizabeth B. Barrett." So began a correspondence which was thenceforth carried on copiously, even voluminously, and with increasing in- timacy, hardly a day missed, for nearly two years, till the day came which made letters no longer necessary, that Sep- tember 12, 1846, on which the two cor- respondents became husband and wife. in Marylebone Church, a gloomy sanc- tuary thus transformed into a shrine to which in after years Robert Browning was frequently a votive pilgrim. But this happy consummation had not come about without much travail and searching of heart, and Elizabeth Barrett, at least, had little foreseen such outcome of even so ardent a literary friendship. She was thirty -eight years old. Browning thirty-two, when they had begun writing to each other, and, as the result of an accident to her spine in early womanhood, she had been compelled to lead the life of a recluse, seldom venturing out of doors, seeing few beyond her immediate family, and keeping up her eager friend- ship, chiefly by correspondence. Her permanent invalidism had become all too much of an institution in the Brown- ing household, and was especially so regarded by her father, a type of parent hard to conceive of nowadays, and par- ticularly in relation to such a daughter — a man who combined domestic des- potism with a charnel-house piety. . , < ". autocratically regarding his children, particularly his hushed and cloistered daughters — of whom there were two besides Elizabeth, both devoted to her — as the unquestioning ministrants of his gloomy will and pleasure. For them to have any wishes that ran counter to his was regarded as unfilial selfishness, and nothing less than a complete subor- dination of their lives to his grim routine satisfied his monomaniac ideal of filial duty. Of this the marriage of any one of them was proved in two instances to be a sternly unforgivable transgression. The man was one of those unconscious moral monsters which a narrow Puri- tanism and the "business habits" of middle-class commercialism occasionally breed, and in his case the autocracy encouraged by his administration in his earlier manhood of West Indian planta- tions, from which he inherited consid- erable wealth, contributed to complete him as a dull and stupid tyrant in whom egotism had finally culminated in the cruelty of mental disease. It is tl ^ita TEE BROWNINGS 9 19 painful to think of the existence of such people at all, but that a nature so sensi- tive, so eagerly affectionate, as Elizabeth Barrett's should have been subject to so preposterous a despotism makes one dreary to recall, and impotently furious to realize that the shade of Edward Moulton Barrett is long since out of the reach of appropriate castigation; as it is im- possible with patience to read of the gentle submissiveness and tender con- scienced solicitude with which his great- hearted daughter respected his strange feelings, till the moment when she at last became sorrowfully aware that what she had mistaken for parental love was merely a lunatic form of parental selfishness. It says no little for her mental vigor that she was able to maintain her soul alive at all in such an atmosphere, not to speak of projecting it in a poetic creativeness so abounding; for her sofa was so evidently regarded in the house- hold as little short of a mattress grave, over which her lugubrious parent was N TEE BROWNINGS i 1 I \ accustomed unctuously to pray with her each evening. The hght was hardly allowed to enter her room, and it was a plain tempting of Providence for her to walk across the floor. Thoroughly indeed must she have learned that lesson of spiritual detachment which she so finely expresses in Aurora Leigh: I was not, therefore, sad; My soul was singing at a work apart Behind the wall of sense, as safe from harm As sings the lark when sucked up out of sight In vortices of glory and blue air. Yet with everyone about her — includ- ing a conspiracy of family physicians — so complacently convinced of and even resigned to her moribund destiny, what wonder if her naturally buoyant spirit grew shadowed by her surroundings and that dark images of cypresses and poppies and "the funeral shears" should come readily to her pen when her lover, blow- ing his Roland's horn beneath the walls of her dark tower, would summon her out into the sunshine and the future: \^ THE BROWNINGS P / Look up and see the casement broken in. The bats and owlets builders in the roof! My cricket chirps against thy mandolin. Hush, call no echo up in further proof Of desolation! There's a voice within That weeps ... as thou must sing . . . alone, aloof. "In the spring — we shall see." It seems a simple thing that Browning should follow up his letter by calling on a correspondent who had thus immedi- ately and open-handedly accepted him for a friend; but such a proceeding was no slight matter with the Barrett house- hold, and it is not difficult to understand that it might take on the aspect of a somewhat seriously exciting adventure to an imaginative woman made un- naturally sensitive to contact with the outer world by her exotic seclusion. "And as to seeing you besides," she writes two months after their first letter, "I observe that you distrust me, and that perhaps you penetrate my morbidity and guess how when the moment comes to see a living human face to which I ', H THE BROWNINGS am not accustomed, I shrink and grow pale in the spirit. Do you? ... if you think that I shall not like to see you, you are wrong, for all your learning. But I shall be afraid of you at first, — though I am not, in writing thus. You are Paracelsus, and I am a recluse with nerves that have been all broken on the rack, and now hang loosely — quivering at a step and breath." Again and again she pleads for delay, urging "this east wind that seems to blow through the sun and moon." To which Browning answers, with a protecting ring already in his voice, "If my truest heart's wishes avail, you shall laugh at east winds yet as I do"; and again, with something of an approach to a lover's fancifulness, "I am sure I never knew till now whether the East or West or South were the quarter to pray for — But surely the weather was a little better last week, and you, were you not better? And do you know — but it's all self -flattery I believe, — still I cannot help fancying the East wind does my head harm too!" 1 And yet again playfully pleading, grow- ing bolder from letter to letter: "Surely the wind that sets my chestnut-tree dancing, all its baby -cone-blossoms, green now, rocking like fairy castles on a hill in an earthquake, — that is South-west, surely ! " But how charming is the tender tact with which he submissively waits her pleasmre, and at what courtly pains he is to make her feel his reverent regard for the spirit as well as the letter of her wish. In mid-April he writes, "Yester- day I had occasion to go your way — past, that is, Wimpole Street, the end of it, — and, do you know, I did not seem to have leave from you to go down it yet, much less count number after number till I came to yours, — much least than less, look up when I did come there." Surely in such passages as these we feel that the sky is growing rosy with danger hints of dawn. Already she, on her side, had, woman-like, taken to lecturing him on taking proper care of himself: "So when wise people happen to be ill, they sit up till six o'clock in THE BROWNINGS the morning and get up again at nine?' and lie in return had promised to be good, and so "the day," when, as he wrote, "I shall see you with my own, own eyes," naturally grew in significance for both the longer it was put off. To the last she protests, and in finally giving in, pathetically warns him: "There is noth- ing to see in me; nor to hear in me — I never learnt to talk as you do in London; although I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr. Kenyon and others. If my poetry is worth anything to my eye, it is the flower of me. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my colors; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and the dark. . . . Not that I am not touched by your caring so at all! I am deeply touched now; and presently . . . I shall understand. Come then. There will be truth and simplicity, for you in any case; and a friend." So the mo- mentous day is fixed, and on Tuesday, May 20, 1845, the two poets did at last meet. One is accustomed to think of THE BBOWNINOS | 25 1 Browning by the portraits of him in his later years, leonine and magisterial; but it is necessary to picture him on this occasion as "slim and dark and very handsome — just a trifle of a dandy." It is easy to realize that in early manhood his would be a personality victoriously vital and magnetic, radiating joyous strength, tempered with courtly gentle- ness, in that hushed, expectant, rather frightened room in Wimpole Street. And the charm of the little frail silk -clad figure that awaited "Paracelsus" is easy to recapture from the well-known por- trait, shadowed as it seems to me it is with sickness, but with such a warmth and depth of concentrated life in the strange great eyes, looking out almost startlingly from a cave of lustrous hair. One is naturally left to one's own fancies to fill in that fateful afternoon, but, on returning home. Browning wrote a note full of a charming boyish solicitude as to the impression he had made: "I trust to you for a true account of how you are — if tired, if not tired, if I did wrong in r\ any thing, — or, if you please, right in any thing." Was his voice too loud? His own people said it was apt to be! "And did I stay too long?" To which comes reassuring answer; but evidently Browning's good behavior was of short duration, for two days after he seems to have written a letter full of "wild speaking" which she can only return and beg him to destroy, warning him never to refer to it again, on pain of their ceasing to see each other. "Now, if there should be one word of answer attempted to this; or of reference; I must not ... I will not see you again — and you will justify me later in your heart." Browning was duly submissive, destroyed the letter, and was allowed to call again — continues to do so from then on, once, sometimes twice, a week, and the correspondence, hardly a day missed, goes on, growing insensibly in intimacy — for all its learned interests, playful squabbles over Dante and so forth — till the suppressed fire at length breaks forth again, to be deprecated once TEE BROWNINGS J 27 more, but with a fashion of appeal that rather encourages than stays it, rouses, that is, an ever deeper tenderness in Browning's heart. Indeed nothing could be more gentle, more exquisitely con- siderate than the manner in which Brown- ing keeps himself in hand, allowing the silent pressure of his unspoken love in- sensibly to enfold and sustain her, with the delicate patience that only pro- found feeling is master of. And long before there is outspoken mention of love, the words have the accent of love on both sides. "Ever your own R. B." "Not a word, even under the little blue flowers! ! ! E. B. B." One thinks of: Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers ! Plucked in the garden, all the summer through. And we know now that while, with such passionate renunciation, she was pushing this masterful gentle love away from her, as a feeling she had no right to accept or indulge, all the time, un- known to her lover, her heart was cry- ing out to itself in secret sonnets one > J day to be known as Sonnets from the Portuguese. It is a fascinating study of two noble natures in travail to read these sonnets, and the poems that be- long to them — such as A Denial and Insufficiency — side by side with these letters which to the condensed star-like utterance of the poetry are as the raw material of the stellar turmoil, the nebu- lar process, from which at last a new world was to emerge with steady shining. To take perhaps the most famous of the sonnets : If thou must love me, let it be for naught Except for love's sake only . . . Neither love me for Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry . . . How even more real still the poetry seems to be made by annotating it with such passages as these from Miss Barrett's letters: "Shall I tell you be- sides? — The first moment in which I seemed to admit to myself in a flash of lightning the possibility of your affection for me being more than dream-work . . . J. M THE BROWNINGS PC the first moment was that when you intimated (as you have done since re- peatedly) that you cared for me not for a reason, but because you cared for me. . . . And when unreasonableness stands for a reason, it is a promising state of things, we may both admit." And again: "I have sometimes felt jealous of myself ... of my own in- firmities . . . and thought that you cared for me only because your chivalry touched them with a silver sound." To which Browning: "You see, you thought, if but for a moment, I loved your intel- lect — or what predominates in your poetry and is most distinct from your heart — better, or as well as you — did you not.'' and I have told you every- thing — explained everything . . . have I not? And now I will dare . . . yes, dearest, kiss you back to my heart again, my own. There — and there!" It is the author of Sordello writing so, and the delight and surprise of this correspondence is in its rather unexpected every-day humanity — unless ye be as ( / ", these little ones! And these learned lovers can be as childish, as boy-and- girlish as the most unlettered lovers that ever wrote baby -talk. They can be just as happy and silly as if they never knew a word of Greek. "Dearest, dearestest!" writes the author of Aurora Leigh, signing herself, as she came to do, by her child's pet name, "Ba." Yes, call me by my pet-name! let me hear The name I used to run at, when a child. "Ba" is a contraction for "Baby," and in one letter we find the abstruse poet of Aristophanes^ Apology writing it play- fully in Greek letters! Such toys are all the more appealing from their spring- ing, like children's flowers amid the rocks, out of pages of true Browningesque obscurity, prose marvelously contorted and dark as a thicket, which even the by no means pellucid Miss Barrett has occasionally to give up. "People say of you and of me, dear Mr. Browning, that we love the darkness and use a sphinxine idiom in our talk; and really TBE BROWNINGS 31 you do talk a little like a sphinx in your argument drawn from 'Vivian Gray'"; and poor Browning sometimes antici- pates for some of his dark sayings that they are "pretty sure to meet the usual fortune of my writings — you will ask what it means!" Certainly, one some- times recalls Wordsworth's gibe and hopes "that they understand each other"; for their almost painful solicitude that, lover-like, each should by no means miss the exact shade and refinement of their feelings and even words sometimes pro- duces passages of agonized qualification worthy of George Meredith or Mr. Henry James. But, after all, their case was one that needed delicate and subtle presentation, for, under the circum- stances, their love could not be an aflfair of plain sailing. With Miss Bar- rett's health as it was, and still more as it was superstitiously supposed to be, love had, or seemed to have, excep- tional need of anxious self-justification. Perplexity, however, was to be resolved and conclusion at length precipitated ■ TEE BROWNINGS by circumstances the least promising. Fortunately, in this, as in other love stories, the tyrant was to have his uses. Early in the autumn of 1845 the family doctors had urged that Miss Barrett should spend the winter in Italy. So she would escape her annual winter relapse, and probably find permanent benefit. The trip was easy to arrange. Her brothers were ready to accompany her, and all her friends seconded the physicians in urging the experiment. But here the true nature of the egregious Mr. Barrett's parental affection declared itself. After sullenly, week after week, refusing to say yea or nay on the subject, thus keeping his daughter on the rack of suspense, he implacably refused his permission. Doctors and friends in vain expostulated, and the courtly Mr. Ken- yon spoke his mind in an unwonted outburst. To no avail. Mr. Barrett continued foolish adamant. Then at last his daughter's eyes were opened and the exasperating patience of her love for him gave way — "the bitterest 'fact' of all \ THE BROWNINGS -~— «f 33 is, that I had believed Papa to have loved me more than he obviously does: but I never regret knowledge" — and at last she opens her arms to that other love, the noble truth of which admits no further denial. In the same letter in which she tells of her father's decision she writes: "In the meantime your letter comes — and if I could seem to be very unhappy after reading it . . . why it would be 'all pretence' on my part, believe me. Can you care for me so much you? Then that is light enough to account for all the shadows, and to make them almost unregarded — the shadows of the life behind." Already, some days before, she had written, "You have touched me more profoundly than I thought even you could have touched me — my heart was full when you came here to-day. Henceforward I am yours for anything but to do you harm — and I am yours too much, in my heart, ever to consent to do you harm in that way. If I could consent to do it, not only should I be less loyal . . . but in one sense, less H^ THE BROWNINGS . ) yours." She meant, as her reluctance had meant all along, that she felt it wrong to Browning to bring a sick wife to his arms. "Your life!" she had said over and over again, "if you gave it to me and I put my whole heart into it, what should I put but anxiety, and more sadness than you were born to.? What could I give you, which it would not be ungenerous to give?" We have met late — it is too late to meet, O friend, not more than friend! Death's forecome shroud is tangled round my feet. And if I step or stir, I touch the end. In this last jeopardy Can I approach thee, I, who cannot move? How shall I answer thy request for love? Look in my face and see. To which Browning had but the one unwavering answer: "Let me say now — this once only — that I loved you from my soul, and gave you my life, so much of it as you would take, — and all that is done, not to be altered now: it was, in the nature of the proceeding, wholly independent of any return on your part," \i THE BROWNINGS and again, "It is not since yesterday, nor ten nor twenty years before, that I began to look into my own life, and study its end, and requirements, what would turn to its good or its loss — and I know, if one may know anything, that to make that life yours and increase it by union with yours, would render me supremely happy, as I said, and say, and feel. My whole suit to you is, in that sense, selfish." Mr. Barrett's veto on the Italian trip, however, provoked a crisis of feeling sufficiently decisive for his daughter to give Browning her promise that, if the coming winter should prove favorable to her health, she would consent to their engagement. The winter was fortunately a mild one, and when the momentous spring at length arrived, she had so far improved that, when Browning claimed her promise, she, still a little fearfully, but without any further reservation, laid her hand in his: "It is your hand, while you hold it: while you choose to hold it, and while it is a living hand." ''Do ^^S you she continues. are to me . . . "We talk of the mild weather doing me good ... of the sun doing me good ... of going into the air as a means of good! Have you done me no good, do you fancy, in loving me up.'' Has the unac- customed divine love and tenderness been nothing to me? Think! Mrs. Jameson says earnestly . . . said to me the other day . . . that 'love was only magnetism.' And I say in my heart, that, magnet or no magnet, I have been drawn back into life by your means and for you . . . that I see the dancing mystical lights which are seen through the eyelids . . . and I think of you with an unspeakable grati- tude always — always ! No other could have done this for me — it was not possible, except by you." Of course, this was the simple, one might say the scientific, truth of the matter. In after years, no doubt, even the family physi- cians would have agreed that it was love that had saved, as it was to prolong so fruitfully their patient's life. THE BROWNINGS tP I find thee; I am safe, and strong, and glad. As one who stands in dewless asphodel, Looks backward on the tedious time he had In the upper life, — so I, with bosom-swell, Make witness, here, between the good and bad. That Love, as strong as Death, retrieves as well. It was on May 6, 1846, that Miss Barrett finally answered yes to life and love, and henceforth we have no more talk of cypresses and poppies, but the letters, from now on, are gay with a sense of nest building, talkative of plans and ways and means. Here Browning's character comes out in its most attractive manliness and simplicity. He is much exercised as to methods of increasing his income, though she is ever wifely reassuring that, with their joint resources, they will be comfortably enough oflf, and will not hear of his doing violence to his genius by any activities likely to distract it. The friendly dis- cussions of this question give rise to one utterance on Browning's part which, when one considers his intellectual greatness and distinction, is really touching, almost ,■ 38 TEE BROWNINGS pathetic, in its child-hearted humility: "I feel sure," he writes, "that whenever I make up my mind to that, I can be rich enough and to spare — because along with what you have thought genius in me, is certainly talent, what the world recognizes as such; and I have tried it in various ways, just to be sure that I was a little magnanimous in never intend- ing to use it. Thus, in more than one of the reviews and newspapers that laughed my 'Paracelsus' to scorn ten years ago — in the same column, often, of these reviews, would follow a most laudatory notice of an Elementary French book, on a new plan, which I 'did' for my old French Master, and he published — 'that was really an useful work'!" Surely, "greater love than this . . ."! And could anything be more deliciously naive than Robert Browning humbly priding himself on his success with an Elementary French grammar! Miss Barrett's two sisters are now partially let into the secret, but neither they nor any other friend are entirely taken into confidence, not even the fairy godfather, Mr. Kenyon, for fear of their being involved in Mr. Barrett's certain displeasure. His consent they do not even consider asking, knowing that it would be asked in vain and that it would provoke a painful scene which his daughter's frail nerves could not support. Thus, almost farcical as it sounds, a woman of thirty-nine and a man of thirty-three, such a woman and such a man too, are forced to plot an elopement as though they were runaway boy and girl. September is finally de- cided upon for the great adventure, and meanwhile she, somewhat pathetically, tests her strength and courage by ventur- ing out into the open air with her sister — an unheard-of escapade. On the first occasion they drove together to Regent's Park, and, when there, she stepped out of the carriage and stood on the grass a few moments in a dream. It had been so long since she had felt the earth under her feet and the air on her cheek. On another occasion, we find the sisters i^3P^ > \ THE BROWNINGS going to service to Paddington Chapel, possibly to accustom the timid recluse to the feeling of a church. "Now, that is over," she writes, "and the next time I shall care less." As the day approaches we have little human touches as to "the ring" and the marriage license, their wedding-cards, and the framing of the advertisement of their marriage — which Browning asks her to write for him! They have a good deal of youthful fun over these details. "Wilson," Miss Barrett's devoted maid, must by no means miss her "place in the story," for she it was that on the morning of Saturday, September 12, 1846, accom- panied her mistress, as they slipped out of the Wimpole Street house together, and hailed a fly to drive them to Maryle- bone Church — stopping on the way at a chemist's to steady their nerves with a dose of sal volatile. At a quarter past eleven Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett were man and wife. After the ceremony, as agreed upon between them, Mrs. Browning returned to her own home. TEE BROWNINGS 41 and at one o'clock Browning too was at home again and writing: "I look back, and in every one point, every word and gesture, every letter, every silence — you have been entirely perfect to me — I would not change one word, one look, . . . Take every care of my life which is in that dearest little hand; try and be composed, my beloved. Remember to thank Wilson for me." Mrs. Brown- ing remained a few days longer under her father's roof, during which interval it was Browning's characteristic punctilio not to call upon her, because he could not ask for her by her proper name; but on Saturday, September 19, once more accompanied by the faithful Wilson and her beloved dog "Flush," who was discreet enough not to bark as his fellow fugitives stole away, she left Wimpole Street forever, and having met her hus- band, the two poets, henceforth to be named by the one illustrious name, caught the nine o'clock packet from Southamp- ton, and, to her delighted surprise, joined their friend Mrs. Jameson in Paris. After 42 rff£; BROWNINGS , a brief rest there, the three friends jour- neyed on to Italy, a land to be immortally associated with their love story, hence- forth to be their home, and to be loved by them with a passionate adopted patriotism — thus adding their names and fames to those other illustrious poets who have counted England well lost in that they found Italy. At Avignon they took advantage of a brief halt in their journey to make a pious pilgrimage to Vaucluse, in memory of Petrarch and Laura, and "there," as has been prettily described by Mrs. Browning's niece, Mrs. Macpherson, in her "Memoirs," "at the very source of the 'chiare, fresche, e dolci acque,' Mr. Browning took his wife up in his arms, and carrying her across the shallow, curling water, seated her on a rock that rose throne-like in the middle of the stream." Browning must have felt elated indeed and justified of the responsibility for that loved life which he had undertaken, not without grave self-examination, to watch the immediate rejuvenescence ^ami p TEE BROWNINGS 1 43 wrought in his wife by their divine adven- ture. "Mrs. Jameson," she writes to her friend Miss Mitford, "says 'she won't call me improved, but transformed rather'"; and her letters to all her friends at this time are radiant with the high spirits of a new life which must have seemed to her nothing short of a veritable resurrection. Persephone, back again from one of her annual seclusions in Hades, cannot have rejoiced more in the recovered sense of sun and blowing grass and all the good green world. Their destination had been Pisa, and here they are to settle for six months, in rooms close to the Duomo and the Lean- ing Tower. In the same letter to Miss Mitford is this gay picture of poetic housekeeping after two months of marriage: "Our housekeeping may end perhaps in being a proverb among the nations, for at the beginning it makes Mrs. Jameson laugh heartily. It disap- points her theories, she admits — find- ing that, albeit poets, we abstain from burning candles at both ends at once. TEE BROWNINGS just as if we did statistics and historical abstracts by nature instead. And do not think that the trouble falls on me. Even the pouring out of the coffee is a divided labor, and the ordering of the dinner is quite out of my hands. As for me, when I am so good as to let myself be carried upstairs, and so angelical as to sit still on the sofa, and so considerate, moreover, as not to put my foot into a puddle, why, my duty is considered done to a perfection which is worthy of all adoration; it really is not very hard work to please this taskmaster." It was during this stay at Pisa that Mrs. Browning plucked up courage to reveal to her husband, with a shrinking reluctance which witnesses the sensitive sacredness with which she regarded her love for him, certain sonnets which during the months of their courtship she had written in secret, hardly meaning that even his eyes should ever see them. Mr. Gosse has told the pretty story so well from Browning's own account that I shall quote his words: "Their custom was, Mr. Browning said, to write alone, and not to show each other what they had written. This was a rule which he sometimes broke through, but she never. He had the habit of working in a down- stairs room, where their meals were spread, while Mrs. Browning studied in a room on the floor above. One day, early in 1847, their breakfast being over, Mrs. Browning went upstairs, while her husband stood at a window watching the street till the table should be cleared. He was presently aware of someone behind him, although the servant was gone. It was Mrs. Browning, who held him by the shoulder to prevent his turn- ing to look at her, and at the same time pushed a packet of papers into the pocket of his coat. She told him to read that, and to tear it up if he did not like it; and then she fled again to her own room." Need one say that the "packet of papers " was the Sonnets from the Portu- double joy as lover and poet in so divine TEE BROWNINGS a gift. Such indeed are the gifts of the gods one to the other. In later years Browning was to bring his Men and Women and The Ring and the Book as his offerings to her feet, though, to his thinking, no gift of his could equal hers, and it is one of the most attractive of all the attractive features of this perfect union that each of the two poets genu- inely regarded the other as the greater. "You are wrong — quite wrong," said Browning on one occasion to an acquaint- ance who had expressed a preference for his poetry over that of his wife's; "she has genius; I am only a painstaking fellow. Can't you imagine a clever sort of angel who plots and plans, and tries to build up something — he wants to make you see it as he sees it — shows you one point of view, carries you off to another, hammering into your head the thing he wants you to understand; and whilst this bother is going on, God Almighty turns you off a little star — that's the difference between us. The true creative power is hers, not mine." q THE BROWNINGS J So on this occasion his enthusiasm masterfully overruled his wife's desire to keep the sonnets to themselves. "I dared not," he said, "reserve to myself the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's." But, at first, his wife would only consent to a private edi- tion. This their friend. Miss Mitford, undertook for them, and a slender vol- ume entitled "Sonnets, by E. B. B.," with the imprint, "Reading 1847," and marked "not for publication," was the first re- tiring form of what have since become the most popular love poems in the English language. Not till three years after did they appear under their present title, which was a suggestion of Brown- ing's in preference to his wife's proposal to call them "Sonnets translated from the Bosnian," an allusion to her poem Catarina to Camoens, one of Browning's own favorites. So in Pisa began that beautiful life together as it was to continue for fifteen happy years. Love has few histories more inspiring, more entirely satisfying THE BROWNINGS n to contemplate, than this harmony of two natures, each so richly endowed with spiritual and intellectual gifts, and each, at the same time, so fortunately pos- sessed of gracious human qualities, heart wed with heart, as brain with brain, life shared in completest sympathy on its humblest as on its loftiest level. If ever there was a marriage made in heaven, it was this one, and certainly Wordsworth might set his mind at rest, for no two people ever more thoroughly "understood" each other than these whom the rest of the world found so humorously incomprehensible. Mrs. Browning's sense of humor must have counted for no little in this harmony, as it is one of the most attractive qualities of her delightfully natural letters. In these may be read as in a gossipy diary the history of the ensuing years, years lived mostly in their Florentine home, that Casa Guidi immortally associated with their names, with occasional trips to England and Paris; years of an even tenor, work done side by side, a vivid TBE BROWNINGS J social intercourse with a few warmly re- garded friends, the struggle for Italian liberty an ever-present burning interest passionately shared, and Mrs. Browning's preoccupation with spiritualism the only shadow of a shade of difference ever between them. On March 9, 1849, a son had been born to them, and here again Mrs. Browning was to manifest her versatility by proving that a woman could be at once a great poet and the most human of mothers. Indeed their intellectual dis- tinction seems to be the last thing these two "great minds" were troubled about. Browning's chief pride seems to have been in his wife's health, and his one ambition to be a good husband, while her one vanity seems to have been in his good looks. On one occasion he had driven her to despair by capriciously shaving his beard. Here is her delightful womanly outburst in a confidential letter to Brown- ing's sister: "A comfort is that Robert is considered to be looking better than he ever was known to look — and this not- '. k THE BROWNINGS withstanding the grayness of his beard . . . which indeed is, in my own mind, very becoming to him, the argentine touch giving a character of elevation and thought to the whole physiognomy. "This grayness was suddenly developed — let me tell you how. He was in a state of bilious irritability on the morning of his arrival in Rome, from exposure to the sun or some such cause, and in a fit of suicidal impatience shaved away his whole beard . . . whiskers and all ! I cried when I saw him, I was so horror- struck. I might have gone into hysterics, and still been reasonable — for no human being was ever so disfigured by so simple an act. Of course I said when I recov- ered heart and voice, that everything was at an end between him and me if he didn't let it all grow again directly, and (upon the further advice of his looking- glass) he yielded the point — and the beard grew — but it grew white — which was the just punishment of the gods. Our sins leave their traces." So the years go by, but no lapse of ^ \ THE BROWNINGS 51 years can tame Mrs. Browning's in- domitable youthfulness. "Be sure," we find her writing to a friend in 1853, "that it is highly moral to be young as long as possible. Women who throw up the game early (or even late) and wear dresses 'suitable to their years' (that is, as hideous as possible) are a disgrace to their sex." Certainly she herself had received from nature the gift of a divine girlishness, and the radiance of a spirit eagerly young to the last seems to have transformed her frail sensitive form as with an interior light, as its white flame, during these happy, ardent years, was too surely consuming its tenement of clay. That very intensity of her nature, which for so long had seemed to animate and sus- tain her physical life by purely spiritual energy, was, rather than any physical ill, to wear it out. Probably the death of one of her sisters and — so vitally were her sympathies engaged in Italy's struggle for freedom — the death of Cavour were as accountable for her last N^ ' TEE BROWNINGS illness as an attack of bronchitis, the like of which she had come safely through before on more than one occasion. But alas! indeed the allotted span of one of the most beautiful realized dreams in the history of human lives had been reached, and it was still "with a face like a girl's," to use Browning's own words, that she died suddenly in his arms in the night of June 29, 1861. Browning, writing to his friend Miss Haworth, thus memorably describes her end and un- locks his bereaved heart. His wife had made light of her illness and was entirely without presentiment of its seriousness, and on the last evening they had talked over plans for the coming summer. "I sent the servants away," writes Brown- ing, "and her maid to bed — so little reason for disquietude did there seem. Through the night she slept heavily and brokenly — that was the bad sign — but then she would sit up, take her medicine, say unrepeatable things to me, and sleep again. At four o'clock there were symp- toms that alarmed me. I called the THE BROWNINGS 53 maid and sent for the doctor. She smiled as I proposed to bathe her feet. 'Well, you are determined to make an exaggerated case of it!' Then came what my heart will keep till I see her again and longer — the most perfect expression of her love to me within my whole knowledge of her. Always smilingly, happily, and with a face like a girl's — and in a few minutes she died in my arms; her head on my cheek. These incidents so sustain me that I tell them to her beloved ones as their right: there was no lingering, no acute pain, no consciousness of separation, but God took her to himself as you would lift a sleeping child from a dark, uneasy bed into your arms and the light . . . Her last word was when I asked, 'How do you feel?' — 'Beautiful.' You know I have her dearest wishes and interest to attend to at once — her child to care for, educate, establish properly; and my own life to fulfil as properly — all just as she would require were she here. I shall leave Italy altogether for years — ', THE BROWNINGS go to London for a few days' talk with Arabel — then go to my father and begin to try leisurely what will be best for Peni [his son] — but no more 'house- keeping' for me, even with my family. I shall grow, still, I hope — but my root is taken and remains." For twenty-eight years Browning was to live on and fulfil himself, growing to that crowning height of his genius, The Ring and the Book, which seven years later he was to bring to her grave, praying that the ring to which he likens it, might Lie outside thine. Lyric Love, Thy rare gold ring of verse (the poet praised) Linking our England to his Italy. To this sacred task of fatherhood he brought a devotion only comparable with that of his own father before him, and in the social world of London he became a memorable, distinguished figure; but, as he had written, "my root is taken and remains," and, as has been finely said, "none ever saw Browning upon earth again, but only a splendid surface." THE BROWNINGS 55 How faithfully beneath that "splendid surface" the fire of his love burned on through the years is proved by an explo- sion of anger which in the very year of his own death, 1889, astonished the liter- ary world with its vehemence. His eye had fallen on an old letter of Edward FitzGerald's, which FitzGerald's editor had carelessly included in his "Life and Letters." In this letter FitzGerald, writing confidentially, of course, to one of his friends, had spoken slightingly of Mrs. Browning. "Mrs. Browning's death is rather a relief to me, I must say: no more Aurora Leighs, thank God! " were the unlucky words on which Brown- ing's eye had fallen. That such words should cause him intense pain and arouse his fierce indignation is surely not sur- prising, and the savagely vituperative form these feelings took, while considered indecorous at the time, will, I think, find full justification with any who have realized the fervor and the sacredness of the worship thus casually profaned. At all events, this sonnet, To Edward 7 J 56 THE BROWNINGS FitzGerald, appeared in The Athenceum of July 13, 1889: I chanced upon a new book yesterday; I opened it, and, where my finger lay Twixt page and uncut page, these words I read — Some six or seven at most — and learned thereby That you, FitzGerald, whom by ear and eye She never knew, ' thanked God my wife was dead.' Ay, dead! and were yourself alive, good Fitz, How to return your thanks would task my wits. Kicking you seems the common lot of curs — While more appropriate greeting lends you grace. Surely to spit there glorifies your face — Spitting from lips once sanctified by hers. FitzGerald's words Lad affected him "with the directness of a sharp phys- ical blow." "I felt as if she had died yesterday," he said to a friend. Five months after (December 12, 1889) he him- self lay dead in Venice. The foregoing summer he had expressed the wish that he might be buried "wherever he might die: if in England, with his mother; if in France, with his father; if in Italy, with his wife." This wish, however, could THE BROWNINGS J 57 not be fulfilled, as the English Ceme- tery in Florence, where Mrs. Brown- ing lies, had been closed and might not open its gates even to so illustrious a guest. Venice, thereupon, sought the honor of being his resting-place, but finally England and Westminster Abbey claimed him for their own. That senti- ment from which it is hard, and scarcely necessary, to escape would feel better satisfied if we could think of these two great poets and lovers lying side by side, either in that Italian soil for which they had so deep an affection, or in their native land, to whose bede-roU of great poets they add their laureled names; but, after all, it is easy to forego the grati- fication of such earth-born fancies in the case of two who were so essentially children of the spirit, and whom we may more appropriately think of as rexmited in that "abode where the eternal are." .' ; J ■^EW love stories have suffered so H much from the vulgarization of gossip as that of Frederic Chopin and George Sand. A whole literature of anecdote and reminiscence has sprung up like a bewildering thicket about their names, till the comparative simplicity of their relationship has been obscured by a cloud of witnesses who continually pour confusion on each other, and the essential value of it, whatever it may have been to the two most concerned, has been all but lost sight of. That for a long period it brought satisfactions of a rare and deep kind to two people gifted alike with the difiScult nature of genius is the important thing to know about it. External criticism on its irregularity, or any other comment that forgets this \ 60 FREDERIC CHOPIN central fact, is irrelevant. That it was to good purpose in the lives of Chopin and George Sand seems to be sufficiently- proved by its enduring so long; for, had it not been so, having nothing to insure its continuance but the will and pleasure of the two lovers, it would have come to a speedier end. George Sand's affair with Alfred de Musset had, it will be remembered, burned itself out in a year, and, apart from the distinction of the poet concerned, demands no more serious consideration than the rank and file of George Sand's numerous polyg- amous fancies. An attachment, how- ever, which, on one side at least, has ten years of faithfulness to its credit is only superficially to be denied the importance of domesticity. It is to be feared that the spiritual life of most legal marriages is exhausted in a much shorter period. And indeed the quality of the attach- ment of Chopin and George Sand is hardly less domestic than its longevity. It hardly belongs indeed to the great passions, or the ideal devotions of the 63 world, but is rather the story of a matri- monial comradeship, the "mothering" element on George Sand's side, at all events, being perhaps its most conspicu- ous feature. George Sand seems to have been more of a nurse and a mother to Chopin than a mistress or a muse, and to have supplied his clinging protection- seeking nature rather with a sheltering companionship than with any more in- tense or romantic preoccupation; though, indeed, the feeling seems to have gone deepest with Chopin, if one may judge from his reference to George Sand two days before his death. To his friend Franchomme he had said: "She had said to me that I would die in no arms but hers." But the cry was perhaps more that of a sick child, missing the comfort of a familiar presence, than that of a heart-broken lover. Yet, of course, George Sand's conquering magnetism, a mag- netism rather masculine than feminine in its power — not unlike Catherine of Russia's, one may surmise — must have had its share in the attachment, particu- , I < V FREDERIC CHOPIN larly at its beginning; as Chopin's some- what feminine grace and distinction, no doubt, first took George Sand's fancy, his genius and his fame playing no small part — for it must not be forgotten that such attributes always went for much with George Sand, whose emotions were closely bound up with her ambition and her love of conquest. The fact of a man being a genius and famous was sufficient for her to set her conquering cap at him, and there were few men who could resist her great black eyes and her "strange soft ways." Her first impression upon Chopin, however, had been the reverse of favor- able. Various stories are told of their first meeting, but Chopin's biographer, Niecks, places most credit on Liszt's ac- count. "I ought to know best," Liszt had said, "seeing that I was instrumental in bringing the two together." George Sand, it appears, having been interested in what she had heard of the Polish musician's personality, interested too in his compositions, had asked Liszt to «3 GEORGE SAND 65 make them acquainted. Chopin, however, had held back, frankly confessing his dislike of literary women. But George Sand had persisted, and finally Liszt had brought her, along with others, to a little party at Chopin's rooms, on an occasion when Chopin, elated with some new compositions, had expressed the de- sire to play them to some of his friends. So little like love at first sight was this first meeting that Chopin had written to one friend: "Yesterday I met George Sand . . . she made a very disagreeable impression upon me"; and to another he had said: "What a repellent woman the Sand is ! But is she really a woman? I am inclined to doubt it." It is not difficult to understand Chopin's first feelings of antipathy when one remembers his aristocratic super-refinement, on the one hand, and George Sand's somewhat blatant Bohemi- anism on the other, so at variance with Chopin's delicate and somewhat finicky ideal of femininity. George Sand scorned all that feminine finesse he valued, smoked ^ FREDERIC CHOPIN strong cigars, and frequently wore men's clothes. Chopin, the spoiled protege of aristocracy, was accustomed to exquisite court-ladies and was a severe critic of their dressmakers. Still, when George Sand had made up her mind to charm, she seldom failed, and whether or not we can find it in her portraits or divine it from descriptions of her, her magnet- ism must have been very extraordinary. Heine has described her with great par- ticularity, but at too great length to quote, and with too much whimsicality really to portray. But he calls her "as beautiful as the Venus of Milo" — whom she hardly seems to suggest — and allows her almost every gift and grace except wit in conversation, in which she seems to have been oddly lacking. "George Sand never says anything witty; she is indeed one of the most unwitty French- women I know." The charm was evi- dently, then, not in her conversation. But beautiful, of a dark, masculine — say rather boyish — type she certainly seems to have been. Liszt succeeds in ^ ^p] GEORGE SAND 69 suggesting her better than anyone, and suggests, too, the secret of the power she was soon to win over the sensitive, feminiae Chopin. "Dark and olive-complexioned Leha," he writes, "thou hast walked in solitary places, sombre as Lara, distracted as Manfred, rebellious as Cain, but more fierce, more pitiless, more inconsolable than they, because thou hast found among the hearts of men none feminine enough to love thee as they have been loved, to pay to thy virile charms the tribute of a confiding and blind submission, of a silent and ardent devotion, to suffer his allegiance to be protected by thy Ama- zonian strength." With this impression of George Sand we may contrast Niecks' description of Chopin: "A slim frame of middle height; fragile but wonderfully flexible limbs; delicately formed hands; very small feet; an oval softly-outlined head; a pale, transparent complexion; long silken hair of a light chestnut color, parted on one side; tender brown eyes, intelligent rather V "{ FREDERIC CEOPIN \ than dreamy; a finely carved aquiline nose; a sweet subtle smile; graceful and varied gestures: such was the outward presence of Chopin." "Couleur de biere" is one curiously unpoetic description of his eyes — though, aside from its asso- ciations, it must be remembered that beer is a beautifully colored liquid. Liszt again adds an evocative touch or two: "The timbre of his voice was sub- dued and often muffled; and his move- ments had such a distinction and his manners such an impress of good society that one treated him unconsciously like a prince. His whole appearance made one think of that of the convolvuli, which on incredibly slender stems balance divinely-colored chalices of such vaporous tissue that the slightest touch destroys them." ! 1 The first meeting of these two strongly contrasted beings was in the early part of 1837, — Chopin being at that time twenty-eight and George Sand five years his senior, — and whatever had been Chopin's first antipathy, it is evident GEORGE SAND that it was of no long duration; for by the find summer of the same year him one of her guests down at Nohant, George Sand's country home, where in the summer time she was accustomed to gather about her, in what must have been house parties of uncommon inter- est, most of the brilliant men and women of the day. All and sundry were wel- come there, on the one condition of their possessing genius or charm. Liszt's heart friend, the Comtesse d'Agoult — "Marie" — was staying with George Sand when she thus sent, through Liszt, this characteristic invitation: "Marie told me that there was some hope of Chopin. Tell Chopin that I beg of him to accompany you; that Marie cannot live without him, and that I adore him.", And a few days later she wrote again, to the Comtesse d'Agoult, who had evidently, in the interval, returned to Paris: "I want the fellows [Liszt and a pupil of his] I want them as soon and as long as possible. I want them a mort. I want also Chopin and all the Mickie- I < f s wiczs and Grzymalas in the world. I want even Sue if you want him. What more would I not want if that were your fancy? For instance, M. de Suzannet or Victor Schoelcher! Everything, a lover excepted." George Sand loved to have people about her, enjoyed being the good hostess, a characteristic again in which she was at the opposite pole to Chopin, who cared little for society — except that of le haut noblesse, a leaning which, if second nature to him from his early petting by grand dukes and duchesses, was not, his artistic confreres had the right to com- plain, without a touch of snobbishness. George Sand — that is Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin — on the other hand, was, by inheritance, a singular blend of aristo- crat and democrat, the royal bloods of Augustus the Strong and Louis XV running in her veins on her father's side, her mother being "the daughter of a Paris bird-seller" and, "by the force of circumstances," something not far removed from a cocotte, when General 1 GEORGE SAND 73 Dupin first saw and loved her at a small theater in Italy, during Napoleon's Italian campaign. George Sand, whose devotion to her mother was a fine trait of her generous character, used, perhaps not unreasonably, to boast of this fusion of bloods, linking her on the one hand with kings and on the other with the people. She was unmistakably by turns a true daughter of both; and, if the pro- miscuity of her attachments may seem to suggest the maternal strain, yet the high-handed manner in which she in- dulged them suggested rather the imperi- ous, above-criticism wantonness of a great lady. If she was libertine, at least it was after the manner of princes. When she met Chopin she had already run the gamut of many experiences, and the affair of Alfred de Musset was three years in the background. Chopin him- self had but recently put behind him his devotion to Maria Wodzinska, a devotion that still lives for us in the waltz num- bered "Op. 69, No. 1." A still earlier inspiration had been Constantia Glad- ^ 74 FREDERIC CHOPIN kowska, and, as is the way of poets and musicians, other less important fancies had Hved and died to contribute their share towards the evolution of his tem- perament and the refinement of that peculiar sentiment of blended sorrow and beauty we call Chopinesque. "If," as Shakespeare's duke says, "music be the food of love," love is as certainly the necessary food of music, and, if society objects to the process, it must, logically, be content to go without the product; for an intense susceptibility to persons of the opposite sex is one of the first conditions of all artistic genius, perhaps of any kind of genius. In this respect Chopin and George Sand were one, though the susceptibility in Chopin's case seems to have been more purely, so to say, for artistic purposes, less violent and unbridled in its vitality. It pushed him to no excesses and seems to have been largely superficial and easily wearied. More than with most musicians or poets, the sadness and beauty of Chopin's music seems to have come \ GEORGE SAND -Jl 75 of his sensitiveness to the impersonal world-sadness of the world-beauty than to have been dependent on his personal history. George Sand is quoted as say- ing of him that "although his heart was ardent and devoted, it was not contin- 'Pi uously so to any one person, but sur- rendered itself alternately to five or six affections, each of which, as they struggled within it, got by turns the mastery over all the others. He would passionately love three women in the course of one evening party and for- get them as soon as he had turned his back, while each of them imagined that she had exclusively charmed him." And George Sand goes on to tell this quaint story illustrative of the perisha- bility of feelings which he actually i deemed serious: "He had taken," she says, "a great fancy to the grand- daughter of a celebrated master. He thought of asking her in marriage at the same time that he entertained the idea of another marriage in Poland. — his loyalty being engaged nowhere and , FREDERIC CHOPIN his fickle heart floating from one passion to the other. The young Parisian re- ceived him very kindly, and all went as well as could be, till on going to visit her one day in company with another musi- cian who was of more note in Paris than he at that time, she offered a chair to this gentleman before thinking of inviting Chopin to be seated. He never called on her again, and forgot her immediately." Marriage for such a nature is obviously an absurd irrelevance. To such a fair face is merely the passing accident of inspiration, the symbol of universal feel- ings, with as little individual claim on the musician as the particular skylark that inspired Shelley or the particular daisy that inspired Wordsworth. In this respect, then, Chopin and George Sand appear to have been well- matched, and on neither side does there seem to have been opportunity for heart- break. Whatever power George Sand held over him, Chopin, therefore, ran no tragic risk in visiting Nohant, and that first visit of his there in the summer of 1837 •^ \l has less the aspect of a dawning love affair than the beginning of a semi- matrimonial comradeship. Details of this visit, as also of a second visit in the following summer of 1838, are wanting. In the winter of 1837, however, we first hear of Chopin's consumptive tendency, and it was the fear of spending another winter in the inclement air of Paris that brought about the famous Sand-Chopin sojourn in Majorca, of which so much has been written and which first set the gossips going. Actually, there seems little in the episode so outrageously de- fiant of les convenances, when the plain facts are considered. George Sand, who had recently won legal freedom from her boorish husband — a husband who had for years been calmly living on her inheritance and making her the paltry allowance of three thousand francs from her own money — had won with it the guardianship of her son Maurice and her daughter Solange, to whom she was ten- derly devoted. The lad suffered from rheumatism, and his mother had planned ': to take him south for the winter. Seeing that Chopin stood in like need of a warmer climate, it seems natural and proper that the friends should join forces. Here is George Sand's account of the matter, which seems reasonable enough: "As I was making my plans and prepa- rations for departure, Chopin, whom I saw every day and whose genius and character I tenderly loved, said to me that if he were in Maurice's place he would soon recover. I believed it, and I was mistaken. I did not put him in the place of Maurice on the journey, but beside Maurice. His friends had for long urged him to go and spend some time in the south of Europe. People believed that he was consumptive. Gaubert ex- amined him and declared to me that he was not. 'You will save him in fact,' he said to me, 'if you give him air, exercise, and rest.' Others, knowing well that Chopin would never make up his mind to leave the society and the life of Paris without being carried off by a person whom he loved and who was devoted GEORGE SAND 79 Pn J; to him, urged me strongly not to oppose the desire he showed so a propos and in a quite unhoped-for way. As time showed, I was wrong in yielding to their hopes and my own solicitude. It was indeed enough to go abroad alone with two children, one already ill, the other full of exuberant health and spirits, without taking upon myself also a terrible anxiety and a physician's responsibility." George Sand, therefore, set out for the south of France with her two chil- dren in November, 1838, stopping at various places of interest on the way, leaving Chopin to make up his mind whether or not he would join her in Perpignan. This he did not faU to do. " Chopin arrived at Perpignan last night," wrote George Sand to her friend Madame Marliani, in that "mothering" vein which characterizes all her references to her friend, "fresh as a rose, and rosy as a turnip; moreover, in good health, having stood his four nights of the mail- coach heroically." Thence they took ship to Barcelona, whence, after a day 80 1| FREDERIC CHOPIN r\ or two of sight-seeing, they shipped again for Palma, the capital of Majorca, where they arrived without mishap, to find the anticipated summer heat awaiting them — but with it, alas, a pitiful paucity of accommodation, not to mention "ver- min in their beds and scorpions in their soup." In the neighborhood of the town, however, they found a small villa to rent, which, at first sight, seemed promis- ing. "I am leaving the town," wrote George Sand to her friend Madame Marliani once more, "and shall estab- lish myself in the country: I have a pretty furnished house, with a garden and a magnificent view, for fifty francs per month. Besides, two leagues from there I have a cell, that is to say, three rooms and a garden full of oranges and lemons, for thirty-five francs iper year, in the large monastery of Valdemosa." All seemed delightful for the moment, and Chopin wrote thus enthusiastically to his friend Fontana: "My dear friend, — I am at Palma, among palms, cedars, cactuses, aloes, GEORGE SAND and olive, orange, lemon, fig, and pome- granate trees, etc., whicli the Jardin des Plantes possesses only thanks to its stoves. The sky is like a turquoise, the sea is like lazuli, and the mountains are like emeralds. The air? The air is just as in heaven. During the day there is sunshine, and consequently it is warm — everybody wears summer clothes. During the night guitars and songs are heard everywhere and at all hours. Enormous balconies with vines overhead, Moorish walls. . . . The town, like everything here, looks towards Africa. . . . In one word, a charming life! "Dear Julius, go to Pleyel — the piano has not yet arrived — and ask him by what route they have sent it. The Preludes you shall have sent. " I shall probably take up my quarters in a delightful monastery in one of the most beautiful sites in the world: sea, mountains, palm trees, cemetery, church of the Knights of the Cross, ruins of mosques, thousand-year-old olive trees! . . . Ah, my dear friend, I am now enjoy- ' . . ing life a little more; I am near what is most beautiful — I am a better man." But clouds were soon to darken this paradise. The piano referred to was to be one of their first troubles. Not only had it "not yet arrived," but was not to arrive for another two months, being held up by the exorbitancy of the Palma customs, who demanded no less than seven hundred francs duty upon it. A compromise at three himdred francs, however, was eventually reached and the desired instrument at last housed in the great haunted monastery, to contrib- ute its share in one of the most famous compositions of the great composer, whose sensitive soul had in the interval suffered no little vexation from a wretched native instrument, which was probably as great a hardship to him as the rainy season setting in shortly after their arrival, the miserable food, and a sudden alarming attack of his complaint, brought on by the inclement weather. Chopin's illness, far from winning sympathy from the inhospitable islanders, who had begun GEORGE SAND 83 to look on the party askance and to make provisioning difficult, because of their non-attendance at church, brought an imperative notice to quit from the Spanish landlord, ignorantly panic- stricken with fear of infection, and a preposterous bill for whitewashing and replastering his house. Chopin's refusal to be bled had prejudiced the medical authorities, so the distinguished refugees were only too glad to find lodging in the old Valdemosa monastery, where, if there were plenty of inconveniences, there was at least no little compensating romance. A more dramatic retreat can hardly be imagined than this huge pile of deserted buildings, with its endless cells and chapels and cloisters, and gar- dens high up among the hills, screamed over by eagles and echoing with the roar of mountain torrents and the sound of the sea. In her book, " Un Hiver a Ma- jorque," George Sand has described the place and their various experiences there in her splendidly vivid way. Here is one of her pictures: I , "I never heard the wind sound so like mournful voices and utter such despair- ing howls as in these empty and sonorous galleries. The noise of the torrents, the swift motion of the clouds, the grand, monotonous sound of the sea, interrupted by the whistling of the storm and the plaintive cries of sea-birds which passed, quite terrified and bewildered, in the squalls; then thick fogs which fell sud- denly like a shroud and which, pene- trating into the cloisters through the broken arcades, rendered us invisible, and made the little lamp we carried to guide us appear like a will-o'-the-wisp wander- ing under the galleries; and a thousand other details of this monastic life which crowd all at once into my memory: all combined made indeed this monastery the most romantic abode in the world. "I was not sorry to see for once fully and in reality what I had seen only in a dream, or in the fashionable ballads, and in the nuns' scene in Robert le Diablo at the opera. Even fantastic apparitions were not wanting to us." ^^ittiag; But life at the monastery was not all storms and screaming eagles, and had it not been for Chopin's cough, the trouble with the piano, and the difficulty of food supplies, these further idyllic-domestic glimpses prove how ideal it might well have been, and now and again actually was. Writing on January 15, 1839, to Madame Marliani, George Sand says: "We inhabit the Carthusian monastery of Valdemosa, a really sublime place, which I have hardly the time to admire, so many occupations have I with my children, their lessons, and my work. . . . "Happily, Maurice is in admirable health; his constitution is only afraid of frost, a thing unknown here. But the little Chopin is very depressed and always coughs much. For his sake I await with impatience the return of fine weather, which will not be long in com- ing. ... I am plunged with Maurice in Thucydides and company; with Solange in the indirect object and the agreement of the participle. Chopin plays on a poor Majorcan piano which reminds me of that of Bouffe in Pauvre Jacques. I pass my nights generally in scrawling. When I raise my nose, it is to see through the sky-light of my cell the moon which shines in the midst of the rain on the orange-trees, and I think no more of it than she." Again, a few days later: "The climate is delicious. At the time I am writing, Maurice is gardening in his shirt-sleeves, and Solange, seated under an orange-tree loaded with fruit, studies her lesson with a grave air. We have bushes covered with roses, and spring is coming in. Our winter lasted six weeks, not cold, but rainy to a degree to frighten us. It is a deluge!" Still again, a month later, the Pleyel piano having now arrived: "You see me at my Carthusian mon- astery, still sedentary, and occupied dur- ing the day with my children, at night with my work. In the midst of all this, the warbling of Chopin, who goes his usual pretty way, and whom the walls of the cell are much astonished to hear." M® aa GEORGE SAND On the whole, this Majorca experi- ence, whatever its drawbacks, had many- poetic compensations, and one may well echo the sentiment of Chopin's biographer, Niecks, when he says: "I like to picture to myself the vaulted cell, in which Pleyel's piano sounded so magnificently, illumined by a lamp, the rich traceries of the Gothic chair shadowed on the wall, George Sand absorbed in her studies, her children at play, and Chopin pouring out his soul in music." Genius has certainly been less for- tunately circumstanced, nor was the time by any means unmomentous for Chopin's art. In fact, though musical critics disagree on the matter, there seems little doubt that some of the master's most characteristic compositions were either written, perfected, or inspired, to the accompaniment of those winter tempests that so sorely tried his lungs and depressed his spirits. It seems likely that we owe some of the Preludes and the great G Minor Ballade to this winter with George Sand in Valdemosa. George Sand gives H H FREDERIC CHOPIN a vivid account of the composition of the famous sixth prelude, and though the accuracy of her memory has been doubted, and her "novelist's" method somewhat over-criticised, an extract from it, at all events, makes delightful reading: "The poor great artist was a detestable patient. What I had feared, but un- fortunately not enough, happened. He became completely demoralized. Bear- ing pain courageously enough, he could not overcome the disquietude of his imagination. The monastery for him was full of terrors and phantoms, even when he was well. He did not say so, and I had to guess it. On returning from my nocturnal explorations in the ruins with my children, I found him at ten o'clock at night before his piano, his face pale, his eyes wild, and his hair almost standing on end. It was some moments before he could recognize us. He then made an attempt to laugh, and played to us sublime things he had just composed, or rather, to be more accurate, terrible or heart-rending ideas which had GEORGE SAND 89 taken possession of him, as it were, without his knowledge, in that hour of sohtude, sadness, and terror. "It was there that he composed the most beautiful of those short pages he modestly entitled 'Preludes.' They are masterpieces. Several present to the mind visions of deceased monks and the sounds of the funeral chants which beset his imagination; others are melancholy and sweet — they occurred to him in the hours of sunshine and of health, with the noise of the childrens' laughter under the window, the distant sound of guitars, the warbling of the birds among the humid foliage, and the sight of the pale little full-blown roses on the snow. "Others again are of a mournful sad- ness, and while charming the ear, rend the heart. There is one of them which occurred to him on a dismal rainy even- ing which produces a terrible mental depression. We had left him well that day, Maurice and I, and had gone to Palma to buy things we required for our encampment. The rain had come FREDERIC CHOPIN on, the torrents had overflowed, we had traveled three leagues in six hours to return in the midst of the inundation, and we arrived in the dead of night, without boots, abandoned by our driver, having passed through unheard-of dangers. We made haste, anticipating the anxiety of our invalid. It had been indeed great, but it had become, as it were, congealed into a kind of calm despair, and he played his wonderful prelude weeping. On seeing us enter he rose, uttering a great cry, then he said to us, with a wild look and in a strange tone: 'Ah! I knew well that you were dead!' "When he had come to himself again and saw the state in which we were, he was ill at the retrospective spectacle of our dangers; but he confessed to me afterwards that while waiting for our return he had seen all this in a dream and that, no longer distinguishing this dream from reality, he had grown calm and been almost lulled to sleep while playing the piano, believing that he was dead himself. He saw himself drowned in a }) GEORGE SAND 91 lake; heavy and ice-cold drops of water fell at regular intervals upon his breast, and when I drew his attention to those drops of water which were actually fall- ing at regular intervals upon the roof, he denied having heard them. He was even vexed at what I translated by the term imitative harmony. He protested with all his might, and he was right, against the puerility of these imitations for the ear. His genius was full of mysterious harmonies of nature, trans- lated by sublime equivalents into his musical thought, and not by a servile repetition of external sounds. His com- position of this evening was indeed full of the drops of rain which resounded on the sonorous tiles of the monastery, but they were transformed in his imagina- tion and his music into tears falling from heaven on his heart." Still, in spite of the fascinations of spring, civilized France was beginning to seem good again. Chopin, too, was spitting blood. So, after a stay in Mar- seilles and a trip to Genoa, the scene <, <. once more shifts to Nohant. At Nohant lived an excellent physician, Dr. Papet, a friend of George Sand's, who was good for Chopin, if only for the reason that he took a cheerful view of his case, which seems for the time to have lost its serious aspect, and there, too, were many friends in whose society Chopin took pleasure and who were, George Sand says, "disposed to spoil him as I did," Considerable petting and spoiling seems to have been a necessity of the great composer's exist- ence; and herein, no doubt, George Sand found a congenial metier, though there seems no doubt that her "detestable patient" to a great degree came justly by the adjective. "All, then, went very well at first," George Sand continues, "and I enter- tained eventually the idea that Chopin might rest and regain his health by spend- ing a few summers with us, his work necessarily calling him back to Paris in the winter." As it proved, that work called George Sand back to Paris too, and from now on \l GEORGE SAND -J 93 to the final rupture of their friendship, and to within a year of Chopin's death, their two lives were to be lived side by side, in Paris as neighbors and at Nohant as hostess and guest. For, to glance again at the supposedly outraged con- venances, Chopin "lived with" George Sand, both in Paris and at Nohant, neither more nor less, on the surface at least, than any other of her intimate acquaintance. At Nohant he was one among other of her visitors, and in Paris, though he was her next-door neigh- bor, occupying one of her pavilions in the Rue Pigalle and later a house of his own next to hers, Madame Marliani occupying a third, in the Cite (Court or Square) d'Orleans, his establishment was always distinct from hers and his regard for the seemliness of their relationship was scrupulous. "Chopin," say Niecks, "treated George Sand with the greatest respect and devotion; he was always aux petits soins with her. It is char- acteristic of the man and exemplifies strikingly the delicacy of his taste and feeling that his demeanor in her house showed in no way the intimate relation in which he stood to the mistress of it: he seemed to be a guest like any other occasional visitor." Niecks tells one or two anecdotes which give charming glimpses of the two together among their friends. On one occasion George Sand had been rhapsodizing on the charms of country life. "How well you have spoken!" said Chopin, naively. "You think so?" she replied. "Well, then, set me to music!" Hereupon Chopin improvised a veri- table pastoral symphony, and George Sand, placing herself beside him and laying her hand gently on his shoulder, said: "Go on, velvet fingers. [Courage, doigts de velours!]" Here is another anecdote. "George Sand had a little dog which was in the habit of turning round and round in the endeavor to catch its tail. One evening when it was thus }) GEORGE SAND engaged she said to Chopin: 'If I had your talent, I would compose a piano- forte piece for this dog.' Chopin at once sat down to the piano and impro- vised the charming Waltz in D flat (Op. 64) which hence has obtained the name of Valse du Petit Chien." An apparently incongruous gift which must have contributed no little to Chopin's social charm was a talent for mimicry, to which Balzac has alluded in "Un Homme d'Affaires," and to which he would occasionally have recourse, as with a sudden right-about-face, whim- sically to relieve the tension after his playing of some particularly overwrought composition. "After having plunged his audience," writes George Sand, "into a profound recueillement or into a painful sadness, for his music sometimes dis- couraged one's soul terribly, especially when he improvised, he would suddenly, as if to take away the impression and remembrance of his sorrow from others and from himself, turn stealthily to a glass, arrange his hair and his cravat. .' - 1. FREDERIC CHOPIN and show himself suddenly transformed into a phlegmatic Englishman, into an impertinent old man, into a sentimental and ridiculous Englishwoman, into a sordid Jew. The types were always sad, however comical they might be, but perfectly conceived, and so delicately rendered that one could not grow weary of admiring them. "All these sublime, charming, or bizarre things that he knew how to evolve out of himself made him the soul of select society, and there was literally a contest for his company, his noble character, his disinterestedness, his self-respect, his proper pride, enemy of every variety of bad taste and of every insolent reclame, the security of intercourse with him, and the exquisite delicacy of his manners, making him a friend equally serious and agreeable." George Sand, too, gives an admirable account of Chopin's travail of composi- tion, which incidentally illustrates the service to his art of her sympathetic comradeship. "His creation was spon- GEORGE SAND 97 taneous and miraculous. He found it without seeking it, without foreseeing it. It came on his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he was impatient to play it to himself. But then began the most heart-rending labor I ever saw. It was a series of efforts, of irresolutions, and of frettings to seize again certain details of the theme he had heard; what he had conceived as a whole he analyzed too much when wishing to write it, and his regret at not finding it again, in his opinion, clearly defined, threw him into a kind of despair. He shut himself up in his room for whole days, weeping, walking, breaking his pens, repeating and altering a bar a hundred times, writing and eflFacing it as many times, and recom- mencing the next day with a minute and desperate perseverance. He spent six weeks over a single page, to write it at last as he had noted it down at the very first. "I had for a long time been able to make him consent to trust to this first FREDERIC CHOPIN inspiration. But when he was no longer disposed to believe me, he reproached me gently with having spoiled him and with not being severe enough for him. I tried to amuse him, to take him out for walks. Sometimes, taking away all my brood in a country char a bancs, I dragged him away in spite of himself from this agony. I took him to the banks of the Creuse, and after being for two or three days lost amid sunshine and rain in frightful roads, we arrived, cheerful and famished, at some mag- nificently situated place where he seemed to revive. These fatigues knocked him up for the first day, but he slept. The last day he was quite revived, quite rejuvenated in returning to Nohant, and he found the solution of his work without too much effort; but it was not always possible to prevail upon him to leave that piano which was much oftener his torment than his joy, and by degrees he showed temper when I disturbed him. I dared not insist. Chopin when angry was alarming, and as, with me, he GEORGE SAND 99 always restrained himself, he seemed almost to choke and die." I must make room for one or two glimpses of the summer-life at Nohant, brilliant as it must have been with the associated gifts of the many clever and charming people forever coming and going. Writes Charles RoUinat, a friend of George Sand's: "The hospitality there was comfortable, and the freedom abso- lute. There were guns and dogs for those who loved hunting, boats and nets for those who loved fishing, a splendid garden to walk in. Everyone did as he liked. Liszt and Chopin composed; Pauline Garcia studied her role of the Prophete; the mistress of the house wrote a romance or a drama; and it was the same with the others. At six o'clock they assembled again to dine, and did not part company till two or three o'clock in the morning. Chopin rarely played. He could only be prevailed upon to play when he was sure of perfection. Nothing in the world would have made him consent to play indiflFerently. Liszt, on f . FREDERIC CHOPIN the contrary, played always, well or badly." Chopin, in some of his gayer moods, would invent a pantomime and impro- vise at the piano to the antics of the various performers. Says George Sand: "The whole thing began by panto- mime, and this was of Chopin's inven- tion; he occupied the place at the piano and improvised, while the young people gesticulated scenes and danced comic ballets. . . . He led them as he pleased and made them pass, according to his fancy, from the droll to the severe, from the burlesque to the solemn, from the graceful to the passionate. We impro- vised costumes in order to play succes- sively several roles. As soon as the artist saw them appear, he adapted his theme and his accent in a marvelous manner to their respective characters. This went on for three evenings, and then the master, setting out for Paris, left us thoroughly stirred up, enthusiastic, and determined not to suffer the spark which had electrified us to be lost." \ GEORGE SAND / Here is another glimpse, given by the great painter Eugene Delacroix: "The place is very pleasant, and the hosts do their utmost to please me. When we are not assembled to dine, breakfast, play at billiards, or walk, we are in our rooms, reading, or resting on our sofas. Now and then there come to you through the window opening on the garden whiffs of the music of Chopin, who is working in his room; this mingles with the song of the nightingales and the odor of the roses. You see that so far I am not much to be pitied, and, nevertheless, work must come to give the grain of salt to all this. This life is too easy, I must purchase it with a little racking of my brains; and like the huntsman who eats with more appetite when he has got his skin torn by bushes, one must strive a little after ideas in order to feel the charm of doing nothing," Such was this famous love affair, or sentimental comradeship, such its even, unsensational tenor. For ten years it lasted, a long life for any heart relation- f . FREDERIC CHOPIN L < ship; and then, probably in June, 1847, came the end, suddenly for the spectator, but perhaps, for some time previous, anticipated by George Sand. Various versions are given of the incidental cause, but the probability is that, on George Sand's side at all events, its emotional vitality had died out, and that she had grown tired of her "detestable patient," with his wayward moods and his per- petual drain on her consideration. She writes thus of the rupture to her friend Charles Poncy, whose wife is the "De- sirez" referred to: "You have understood, Desirez and you, you whose soul is delicate because it is ardent, that I passed through the gravest and most painful phase of my life. I nearly succumbed, although I had foreseen it for a long time. But you know one is not always under the pres- sure of a sinister foresight, however evident it may be. There are days, weeks, entire months even, when one lives on illusions, and when one flatters one's self one is turning aside the blow GEORGE SAND which threatens one. At last, the most probable misfortune always surprises us disarmed and unprepared. In addition to this development of the unhappy germ, which was going on unnoticed, there have arisen several very bitter and altogether unexpected accessory circumstances. The result is that I am broken in soul and body with chagrin. I believe that this chagrin is incurable; for the better I succeed in freeing myself from it for some hours, the more sombre and poign- ant does it re-enter into me in the fol- lowing hours. . . ." The "several very bitter and alto- gether unexpected accessory circum- stances" referred to are variously given by various acquaintances. Some attrib- uted the separation to Chopin's anger at what he and others considered a caricature of him as "Prince Karol" in George Sand's novel of "Lucrezia Floriani." Others hint that she was jeal- ous of her own daughter Solange, whose marriage with the sculptor Clesinger Chopin is said to have violently opposed ", FREDERIC CHOPIN — though this latter statement does not seem compatible with the better authen- ticated story that, shortly after their marriage, George Sand had quarreled with her daughter and son-in-law and turned them both out of the Nohant house, writing to Chopin at the time forbidding him to receive them in Paris. On receiving this command of his mistress, Chopin had turned to his friend Fran- chomme and said, "They have only me, and should I close my door upon them? No, I shall not do it!" "And he did not do it," adds Franchomme, "and yet he knew that this creature whom he adored would not forgive it him. Poor friend, how I have seen him suffer!" And George Sand did not forgive him. Niecks accepts this incident as the final determining cause, but considers that the end had been for some time on the way, and that Liszt has accurately expressed the psychology of the situation in this passage: "These commencements, of which Madame de Stael spoke [en amour, il ) n*y a que des commencemens], had already for a long time been exhausted between the Polish artist and the French poet. They had only survived with the one by a violent effort of respect for the ideal which he had gilded with its fatal bril- liancy; with the other by a false shame which sophisticated on the pretension to preserve constancy in fidelity. The time came when this factitious existence, which succeeded no longer in galvanizing fibers dried up under the eyes of the spiritual- istic artist, seemed to him to surpass what honor permitted him not to per- ceive. No one knew what was the cause or the pretext of the sudden rupture; one saw only that after a violent opposi- tion to the marriage of the daughter of the house, Chopin abruptly left Nohant never to return again." However it had come about, the end had come, and George Sand and Chopin met but once again, and then but for an agitated moment in the salon of a friend. "I held his hand," wrote George Sand of the occasion, "trembling and FREDERIC CHOPIN cold as ice. I wished to speak to him, but he escaped me." And that was all. Chopin's life too was near its end. He had always been superstitious, we are told, in regard to the number seven, would not have taken a house which bore the number seven, or set out on a journey on a date including the number. He had met George Sand in a year including the fatal number (1837), had parted from her in a year similarly inauspicious (1847), and the date of his death was to include a seven — being October 17, 1849. It seems certain that George Sand was much in his thoughts in his closing hours, for, as has been said above, two days before the end, he had turned to his friend Franchomme with the words, "She had said to me that I would die in no arms but hers." Once more evidence conflicts as to whether or not George Sand at- tempted to fulfil this promise. One ver- sion is that she sent someone to inquire after him, being too occupied with the production of a new play to go herself; another that she did actu- ally go, but was dissuaded by those in attendance, one of those being her own daughter Solange. One prefers to believe the kinder version, which seems more likely to be true and to be more in keeping with George Sand's charac- ter, which, whatever its faults, was gen- erous and the reverse of unforgiving. That character has perhaps never had full justice done to it, and in regard to her relations with Chopin too many critics have been all too ready to believe the worst. That she should tire of him, however painfully it may have affected him, was surely not a crime. "The world takes it for granted," says Niecks with welcome commonsense, "that the wife or paramour of a man of genius is in duty bound to sacrifice herself for him. But how does the matter stand when there is genius on both sides and self-sacrifice of either party entails loss to the world? By the way, is it not very selfish and hypocritical of this world, which generally does so little for men of genius, to demand that women shall ". entirely, self-denyingly devote them- selves to their gifted lovers? Well, both George Sand and Chopin had to do work worth doing, and if one of them was hampered by the other in doing it, the dissolution of the union was justified." Actually, it seems to me that George Sand gave more to Chopin than she ever received in return. With her own burden of genius to carry, she attempted lovingly and faithfully to carry his too, through ten of the most fruitful years of his life; and we who care nowadays more for his music than for her books should gratefully remember this to her everlasting credit. OPHOCLES is credited by Plato with the saying, in regard to the fading of the passions with the advance of age, that it is "like being set free from service to a band of mad- men." This saying fitly comes to mind with the mention of the names of Michael Angelo and Vittoria Colonna, for it is the significance of the legend which thus links their names together that it is the record of a feeling, an impassioned friend- ship, which could only have been experi- enced by two who had arrived at that tranquil period of life when, freed from the turmoil of the senses, it is first pos- sible to realize a love the ardors of which shall be purely of the spirit. The character of Michael Angelo's work, the cosmic austerity of the beauty that ', , informs it — a beauty such as Words- worth saw upon the face of Duty — Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; And the most ancient Heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong does not suggest him as ever, at any time during his long Ufe, having been a votary of any goddess more luxurious than the Uranian Aphrodite. Perhaps, in the mysterious economy of Provi- dence, it was the fist of his fellow-pupil, Torrigiano, breaking his nose, that early day in the Medici gardens, that pro- tected him by the disfigurement of which he was life-long sensitive, and preserved his passionate sense of beauty, from the wasteful diffusion of light loves. Not improbably, too, his grave, ambitious boyhood had come under the influence of the Platonic ideal of beauty, as he could have heard it expounded any day by the humanist Marsilio Ficino at the learned reunions in his patron's mansion. On one of these occasions he may well have had his feet set upon that ladder ^ VITTORIA COLONNA 111 of ideal Love, which Plato so vividly pictures in The Symposium: "Begin- ning from these beautiful objects here below ever to be going up higher, with that other beauty in view; using them as steps of a ladder; mounting from the love of one fair person to the love of two; and from the love of two to the love of all; and from the love of beautiful persons to the love of beautiful employ- ments, and from the love of beautiful employments to the love of beautiful kinds of knowledge; till he passes from degrees of knowledge to that knowledge which is the knowledge of nothing else save the absolute Beauty itself, and knows it at length as in itself it really is." Dante too, and Savonarola, were the stern mentors of his young manhood, as their spirit and teachings continued to sustain him throughout the whole of his lonely and turbulent existence. It is true that in his later years he hints remorsefully at "confusions of a wasted youth," and that some of his sonnets and madrigals are unplatonically warm 112 MICHAEL ANGELO 1 in coloring; yet austere old age is apt thus retrospectively to indulge in fanci- ful repentance, and it is probable that the poetry thus warmly colored was ad- dressed to no specific individuals, but followed the poetic fashion of the time, in thus concretely embodying abstract ideas and enthusiasms. Passionate wor- shiper of physical beauty as Michael Angelo's work proves him to have been, the spirit in which he worshiped it is shown by that very work to have been that of one for whom visible beauty was first and last the sacramental symbol of the invisible eternal beauty; and whether or not his life had known infidelities to his ideal, the loftiness of that ideal is not to be questioned. Nor, outside the negligible innuendoes of the vile Pietro Aretino, was any found to speak ill of his personal life. On the contrary the testimony is all of the tenor of the annalist Ammirati, who, under the year 1564, writes: "Buonarroti having lived for ninety years, there was never found through all that length of time, and with VITTORIA COLONNA 115 all that liberty to sin, anyone who could with right and justice impute to him a stain or any ugliness of manners." The testimony of his beloved pupil and bi- ographer, Condivi, is to the same eflfect. "Oftentimes have I heard Michelangelo discoursing and expounding on the theme of love, and have afterwards gathered from those who were present upon these occasions that he spoke precisely as Plato wrote — I am sure, too, that no vile thoughts were born in him, by this token, that he loved not only the beauty of human beings, but in general all fair things, as a beautiful horse, a beautiful dog, a beautiful piece of country, a beautiful plant, a beautiful mountain, a beautiful wood, and every site or thing in its kind fair and rare, admiring them with marvelous affection." Indeed, one of his most beautiful sonnets might well be regarded as a commentary upon the passage of Plato above quoted: I saw no mortal beauty with these eyes When perfect peace in thy fair eyes I found ; But far within, where all is holy ground. My soul felt Love, her comrade of the skies: For she was born with God in Paradise; Else should we still to transient loves be bound; But, finding these so false, we pass beyond Unto the Love of Loves that never dies. Nay, things that die cannot assuage the thirst Of souls undying; nor Eternity Serves Time, where all must fade that flourisheth. Sense is not love, but lawlessness accurst: This kills the soul; while our love lifts on high Our friends on earth — higher in heaven through death. When or to whom this sonnet was written we have no record. It may well have been written to Vittoria Colonna, but whether, or not, it faithfully repre- sents the quality of the only "love" for a woman which is known to have entered into the life of the apocalyptic creator of sibyls and demi-gods. Vittoria Colonna, indeed, in character and by reason of all the circumstances of her life, seems, so to say, Michel- angelesque in stature and general impres- VITTORIA COLONNA 117 siveness, an heroic figure of a woman, filled with the large spirit of his own creations. Princess of one of the proud- est families of Italy, illustrious for beauty and learning, a poet whom Ariosto had praised, a great lady who united all the ^ brilliance of this world with a picturesque piety, romantic both by personality and position, lit too by the stormy and sor- rowful lights of her own history and that of her house, just then at a tragic turn of its fortunes, her figure stands out with more than individual significance, a veritable sibyl of the Renaissance. Married at nineteen to the Marchese de Pescara, she had, in her passionate devo- tion for him, known all of love in the earthly sense she was to know. Early left a widow, her sorrow had made her a poet and turned her thoughts to God — so seriously that Pope Clement VII had to prevent her by force from taking the veil. It is impossible to name with certainty the year in which Vittoria Colonna and Michael Angelo first met. In 1534, on the death of Clement VII, Michael Angelo had left Florence forever and taken up his residence in Rome. If, then, as seems most probable, he had not made Vittoria's acquaintance, during previous visits there, it seems hardly doubtful that he must now have done so and have naturally been offered a dis- tinguished welcome in that circle of philosophers and literati which it was the widowed Marchesa's pleasure to gather about her in the cloistered retire- ment of her Roman villa. Michael Angelo was then fifty-nine years old, Vittoria forty-four, and one immediate bond of sympathy between the two would be their common interest in relig- ious matters, particularly the reform of the church, a restoration of it to evangelical purity, that "reformation from within," the leading spirits of which, before long to be crushed by the Catholic reaction as embodied in the Inquisition, were Vittoria's most intimate friends. These friendships were later on to bring Vittoria herself into grave danger, from \ f COLONNA which only her rank protected her; but meanwhile the reforming party was powerful and the pious reunions at the Villa Colonna were left in peace. There exists a very charming description of one of these reunions in the reminiscences of the miniature-painter Francisco d'Ol- landa, who resided in Rome during the years 1530 and 1540, on an artistic mission from his master the King of Portugal. Francisco was persona grata in Vittoria's circle, and he gives so living a picture of the gracious way of life of that noble lady as he recalls her one Sunday aftternoon in the spring of 1537, seated in the quiet little convent church of San Silvestro on Monte Cavallo, in the company of Michael Angelo and others, listening to an exposition of St. Paul's epistles by a famous divine of her own persuasion, that I wish it were possible to quote the whole. One or two extracts, however, will convey some of the beautiful calm of that far-away afternoon. The church still stands, and one may still trace the path up the hill- 7 J MICHAEL ANGELO n side through the Colonna gardens so often taken by Vittoria in search of contemplation and spiritual intercourse with the quiet sisters, she herself hardly- less a nun than they. Francisco tells how, on that particular afternoon, calling at the house of his friend Lattantio Tolomei, he had found a message left for him to the eflfect that Tolomei had accompanied the Marchesa to the church of San Silvestro for the purpose of hearing Brother Ambrose of Siena dis- course upon Saint Paul. Francisco was invited to follow on. "And so," writes Francisco, "I started oflf for San Sil- vestro. Vittoria Colonna, the Marchesa di Pescara, and sister of Ascanio Colonna, is one of the noblest and most famous women in Italy, and in the whole world. She is beautiful, pure in conduct, and acquainted with the Latin tongue; in short, she is adorned with every grace which can redound to a woman's praise. Weary of the brilliant life which she formerly led, she has quite devoted her- self, since the death of her husband, to VITTORIA COLONNA thoughts on Christ and to study; she supports the needy of her sex, and stands forth as a model of genuine Catholic piety. She was the intimate friend of Tolomei, and I owe her acquaintance to him. "I entered: they asked me to take a place, and the reading and exposition of the Epistles was continued. When it was ended the Marchesa spoke; and, looking at me and Tolomei, she said, 'I am not quite wrong if I imagine that Messer Francisco would rather listen to Michael Angelo upon painting than Fra Ambrosio upon the Pauline Epistles.' " This was a playful dig at Francisco, as he was well known among his ac- quaintance for the assiduity with which he button-holed Michael Angelo on all occasions, perhaps, as he himself half hints, somewhat to the great man's weariness. The Marchesa followed up her suggestion, by calling one of her retinue: "'Do you know Michael Angelo's dwelling.'' Go, and tell him that I and Messer Tolomei are here in the chapel, where it is beautifully cool, — the church, too, is private and agreeable; and that I beg to ask him whether he is inclined to lose a few hours here in our society, and to turn them into gain for us. But not a word that the gentleman from Spain is here.' "I could not refrain from remarking, in a low tone, to Tolomei, with what art the Marchesa knew how to treat the slightest thing. She inquired what we were saying. 'Oh!' answered Tolomei, 'he said with what wisdom Your Excel- lency went to work even in so trifling a message. For, as Michael Angelo knows, that, when he once meets Messer Fran- cisco, there is no possibility of separating: he avoids him wherever he can.' "'I have remarked it,' said the Marchesa; 'I know Michael Angelo. But it will be difficult to bring him to speak upon painting. . . .' "The Marchesa and Tolomei laughed. After some moments, in which neither of them spoke, we heard knocking at VITTORIA COLONNA 123 the door. Everyone feared that it could not be Michael Angelo, who lived down below on Monte Cavallo. Fortunately, however, the servant met him close by San Silvestro, as he was just on the point of going to the Thermae. He was coming up the Esquiline Way, in conversation with his color-grinder, Urbino: he fell at once into the snare, and it was he who knocked at the door. "The Marchesa rose to receive him, and remained standing some time until she had made him take a place between herself and Tolomei. I now also seated myself at a little distance from them. At first they were silent; then, however, the Marchesa, who could never speak without elevating those with whom she conversed and even the place where she was, began to lead the conversation with the greatest art upon all possible things, without, however, touching even re- motely upon painting. She wished to give Michael Angelo assurance. She pro- ceeded as if approaching an unassailable fortress, so long as he was on his guard. ; i MICHAEL ANGELO n But at last he yielded. 'It is an old experience,' she said, 'that no one can rise against Michael Angelo, who would contend against him with his own weapons; that is, with mind and art. And so you will see there is only one means of having the last word with him; and that is to speak of law-suits or paint- ing, and he shall say not a word more.' "'Or rather,' I now remarked from my corner, 'the very best means of wearying Michael Angelo out, would be simply to let him know that I am here; for he has not seen me up to this moment. Of course, the surest means of conceal- ing from him anything as unimportant as I am, was to come close under his eyes.' '"Pardon, Messer Francisco,' he called out, turning with astonishment to me, 'it was impossible to see you. I saw no one here but the Marchesa. But, since you are providentially there, come as a colleague to my help. . . .' "'His Holiness,' said the Marchesa, again renewing the conversation, 'has had the goodness to grant me permission ]3 125 to build a new convent in this immediate neighborhood, half-way up Monte Ca- vallo, where the tower stands from which Nero looked down on the burning city. The footsteps of pious women are to efface the traces of the wicked. I don't know, Michael Angelo, how I shall have the building erected, — how large, and facing which side. The old wall, perhaps, might still be employed.' " ' Certainly,' he replied ; ' the old tower might hold the bells. I see no difficulty in this building. We would, if your Ex- cellency likes, take a view of the place on the way home.' "'I had not ventured to ask this,' answered she; 'but I see the words of our Lord, "Everyone that exalteth him- self shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted," are true under all circumstances. But you understand how to give conscientiously where others only lavish at random, and therefore your friends rank yourself so much higher than your works; and those who only know your works and not yourself, value MICHAEL ANOELO ' that in you which can be only called perfect on a lower scale. I cannot but admire the manner in which you with- draw yourself from the world, from use- less conversation, and from all the ofiFers of princes, who desire paintings from your hand, — how you avoid it all, and how you have disposed the labor of your whole life as one single great work.' "'Gracious lady,' replied Michael Angelo, 'these are undeserved praises; but, as the conversation has taken this turn, I must here complain of the public. A thousand silly reproaches are brought against artists of importance. They say that they are strange people, that they are not to be approached, that there is no bearing with them. No one, on the contrary, can be so natural and human as great artists.'" How clearly, as in a painting, the various personalities come before us in this delightful dialogue, and how natu- rally the whole atmosphere, even the tones of the voices, are conveyed to us, and the very accent of the courtly affec- VITTORIA COLONNA J tionate intimacy between the two illus- trious friends, so marked on each side with a sort of tender reverence, invol- untarily caught. It seems evident that they must have been familiar friends for some time, and from other references it is certain that they had been in corre- spondence before Vittoria's final settle- ment in Rome, during her frequent absences on her estates at Ischia, or in conventual retirement at Orvieto and Viterbo. Some years after her death, Michael Angelo writes of his being in possession of many letters written to him by her from those cities, together with a parchment volume of one hundred and forty-three sonnets which she had from time to time given or sent to him. Of their correspondence but six letters re- main, two from Michael Angelo and four from Vittoria, and the first of these is dated as late as 1545. This is from Michael Angelo, written in response to certain poems, for which he desires to make some return. "I desired, lady," the letter runs. MICHAEL ANGELO L i "before I accepted the things which your ladyship has often expressed the will to give me — I desired to produce something for you with my own hand, in order to be as little as possible un- worthy of this kindness. I have now come to recognize that the grace of God is not to be bought, and that to keep it waiting is a grievous sin. Therefore I acknowledge my error, and willingly accept your favors. When I possess them, not indeed because I shall have them in my house, but for that I myself shall dwell in them, the place will seem to encircle me with Paradise. For which felicity I shall remain evermore obliged to your ladyship than I am already, if that is possible. The bearer of this letter will be Urbino, who lives in my service. Your ladyship may inform him when you would like me to come and see the head you promised to show me." The letter was accompanied by a sonnet, expressing the same diffidence. Seeking at least to be not all unfit For thy sublime and boundless courtesy. 129 My lowly thoughts at first were fain to try What they could yield for grace so infinite. But now I know my unassisted wit Is all too weak to make me soar so high. For pardon, lady, for this fault I cry. And wiser still I grow remembering it. Yea, well I see what folly, 'twere to think That largess dropped from thee like dews from heaven Could e'er be paid by work so frail as mine! To nothingness may art and talent sink; He fails who from his mortal stores hath given A thousandfold to match one gift divine. i Michael Angelo's biographer, Condivi, speaks of two drawings made by his master for Vittoria, one a Pieta repre- senting Christ being taken from the cross by two angels in the presence of his mother, and one a Crucifixion. Both designs have been preserved, and the sketch by the latter now at Oxford is supposed to be the original. It is of this that Michael Angelo writes in his other surviving letter: "Lady Marchioness, — Being myself in Rome, I thought it hardly fitting to give the crucified Christ to Messer Tom- , H MICHAEL ANGELO maso, and to make him an intermediary between your ladyship and me, your servant; especially because it has been my earnest wish to perform more for you than for any one I ever knew upon the world. But absorbing occupations, which still engage me, have prevented my informing your ladyship of this. Moreover, knowing that you know that love needs no task-master, and that he who loves doth not sleep, I thought the less of using go-betweens. And though I seem to have forgotten, I was doing what I did not talk about in order to effect a thing that was not looked for. My purpose has been spoiled: He sins who faith like this so soon forgets." Mr. Symonds prints in connection with this letter the following sonnet, which may well have accompanied it: Blest spirit, who with loving tenderness Quickenest my heart, so old and near to die. Who 'mid thy joys on me dost bend an eye. Though many nobler men around thee press! As thou wert erewhile wont my sight to bless. So to console my mind thou now dost fly; VITTORIA COLONNA Hope therefore stills the pangs of memory. Which, coupled with desire, my soul distress. So finding in thee grace to plead for me — Thy thoughts for me sunk in so sad a case — He who now writes returns thee thanks for these. Lo! it were foul and monstrous usury To send thee ugliest paintings in the place Of thy fair spirit's living phantasies. The letters from Vittoria are in ac- knowledgment of the two sketches, and the first is probably aji acknowledgment of the letter from Michael Angelo last quoted, "Unique Master Michelangelo, and my most singular friend," it runs, "I have received your letter, and examined the crucifix, which truly hath crucified in my memory every other picture I ever saw. Nowhere could one find an- other figure of our Lord so well executed, so liA^ng, and so exquisitely finished. Certes, I cannot express in words how subtly and marvelously it is designed. Wherefore I am resolved to take the work as coming from no other hand but yours, and accordingly I beg you to L^^&]^W <, \ assure me whether this really is yours or another's. Excuse the question. If it is yours, I must possess it under any conditions. In case it is not yours, and you want to have it carried out by your assistant, we will talk the matter over first. I know how extremely difficult it would be to copy it, and therefore I would rather let him finish something else than this. But if it be in fact yours, rest assured, and make the best of it, that it will never come again into your keeping. I have examined it minutely in full light and by the lens and mirror, and never saw anything more perfect. Yours to command. The Marchioness of Pescara." The meaning, so tactfully conveyed, seems to be that Michael Angelo had merely sent his sketch for her approval, intending to have it executed by one of his workmen, but that Vittoria valued it too much to allow it again out of her hands, delicately hinting that no hand «3 VITTORIA COLONNA but the master's own entrusted to model it. A second letter refers to the drawing of Christ upon the cross supported by- two angels: "Your works forcibly stimulate the judgment of all who look at them. My study of them made me speak of adding goodness to things perfect, in themselves, and I have seen now that 'all is possible to him who believes.' I had the greatest faith in God that He would bestow upon you supernatural grace for the making of this Christ. When I came to examine it, I found it so marvelous that it sur- passes all my expectations. Wherefore, emboldened by your miracles, I conceived a great desire for that which I now see marvelously accomplished. I mean that the design is in all parts perfect and con- summate, and one could not desire more, nor could desire attain to demanding so much. I tell you that I am mighty pleased that the angel on the right hand is by far the fairer, since Michael will place you, Michael Angelo, upon the right r\ MICHAEL AN6EL0 hand of our Lord at that last day. Meanwhile, I do not know how else to serve you than by making orisons to this sweet Christ, whom you have drawn so well and exquisitely, and praying you to hold me yours to command as yours in all and for all." From the following brief note it would appear that Michael Angelo had taken his friend's hint and set to work to model the crucifix: "I beg you to let me have the crucifix a short while in my keeping, even though it be unfinished. I want to show it to some gentlemen who have come from the Most Reverend the Cardinal of Mantua. If you are not working, will you not come to-day at your leisure and talk with me? Yours to command. The Marchioness of Pescara." The one other letter of Vittoria that remains to us strikes a more personal note than the rest. It is evident that, during Vittoria's absence in Viterbo, ^ \ VITTORIA COLONNA 135 / Michael Angelo's letters had been en- thusiastically frequent, and it is possible even that the gentle rebuke given here with such playful tact — revealing, as did Francisco's picture of her in the con- vent chapel, an attractive archness of humor among Vittoria's other qualities — was directed against a growing ardor of tone in her correspondent; though this in a man past seventy is surely improb- able. But here is the letter: "Magnificent Messer Michelangelo, — I did not reply earlier to your letter, because, it was, as one might say, an answer to my last: for I thought that if you and I were to go on writing with- out intermission according to my obli- gation and your courtesy, I should have to neglect the Chapel of S. Catherine here, and be absent at the appointed hours for company with my sisterhood, while you would have to leave the Chapel of S. Paul, and be absent from morning through the day from your sweet usual colloquy with painted forms, the which with their natural accents do not speak MICHAEL ANQELO , < to you less clearly than the living per- sons round me speak to me. Thus we should both of us fail in our duty, I to the brides, you to the vicar of Christ. For these reasons, inasmuch as I am well assured of our steadfast friendship and firm affection, bound by knots of Chris- tian kindness, I do not think it necessary to obtain the proof of your good-will in letters by writing on my side, but rather to await with well-prepared mind some substantial occasion for serving you. Meanwhile I address my prayers to that Lord of whom you spoke to me with so fervent and humble a heart when I left Rome, that when I return thither I may find you with His image renewed and enlivened by true faith in your soul, in like measure as you have painted it with perfect art in my Samaritan. Be- lieve me to remain always yours and your Urbino's." Though, as has been said, Michael Angelo's age seems to preclude such warmth of feeling as it is possible Vit- toria discourages in this letter, yet it «>3 p 137 must not be forgotten that age in a great artist is a very diflferent thing, retains more essential youthfulness, than age in ordinary cases; for a Hfe-long preoccu- pation with beautiful forms and ideal interests does unquestionably make for a prolonged youth of the whole nature. Browning and Tennyson wrote love poetry till the last, and we have not considered it strange in them; and "age" which was capable of expressing itself in the giant energy of a Last Judgment needs some other name. Therefore the essential Platonism of Michael Angelo's feeling for Vittoria may have exhibited in its expression a somewhat more than Platonic fire, and there is one sonnet that might so be interpreted, a sonnet which, though it is not known to have been addressed to Vittoria, can hardly have been meant for anyone else: What though long waiting wins more happiness Than petulant desire is wont to gain. My luck in latest age hath brought me pain. Thinking how brief must be an old man's bliss. MICHAEL \ Heaven, if it heed our lives, can hardly bless This fire of love when frosts are wont to reign: For so I love thee, lady, and my strain Of tears through age exceeds in tenderness. Yet peradventure though my day is done, — Though nearly past the setting mid thick cloud And frozen exhalations sinks my sun, — If love to only mid-day be allowed. And I an old man in my evening burn. You, lady, still my night to noon may turn. In addition to the two sonnets quoted in connection with his letters, there are but two others which are known with certainty to have been addressed to Vittoria. The first has reference to Vit- toria's chastening influence over "the fierce heat" of his stormy passionate nature: When divine Art conceives a form and face. She bids the craftsman for his first essay To shape a simple model in mere clay: This is the earliest birth of Art's embrace. From the live marble in the second place His mallet brings into the light of day A thing so beautiful that who can say When time shall conquer that immortal grace? Thus my own model I was born to be — The model of that nobler self, whereto Schooled by your pity, lady, I shall grow; Each overplus and each deficiency You will make good. What penance then is due For my fierce heat, chastened and taught by you? The second is more conceited: He who is bound by some great benefit. As to be raised from death to Ufe again. How shall he recompense that gift, or gain Freedom from servitude so infinite? Yet if 'twere possible to pay the debt. He'd lose that kindness which we entertain For those who serve us well; since it is plain That kindness needs some boon to quicken it. Wherefore, O lady, to maintain thy grace. So far above my fortune, what I bring Is rather thanklessness than courtesy: For if both met as equals face to face. She whom I love could not be called my king; — There is no lordship in equality. There remains one madrigal evidently written to Vittoria during her lifetime, in which, lamenting the vacillations of MICHAEL ANGELO ■ i \ ' his soul in search of truth, "now to the right, now to the left hand driven," "both vice and virtue" making appeal to his perplexed heart, he once more seeks her spiritual guidance: I send you paper, beg you take a quill. And with your sacred ink Make love give light, and mercy truth impart. So that my soul, delivered, purged of ill. Shall not be drawn to error's brink. Through life's brief remnant, by a blinded heart. Such is all that remains of the written intercourse of these two who were lovers in the high sense that both loved God and sought Him together, becoming mu- tually dear one to the other by fellowship in that thrilling quest. Vittoria was not far from the end of her pilgrimage when these lines were written, and her death in 1547, she being fifty -seven and Michael Angelo seventy, seems to have plunged her forsaken friend in grief uncontrollable as it was deep. He appears to have been at her side at the last, and his disciple Condivi records that "he, for his part. VITTORIA COLONNA 141 loved her so, that I remember to have heard him say that he regretted nothing except that when he went to visit her upon the moment of her passage from this life, he did not kiss her forehead or her face, as he did kiss her hand. Her death was the cause that often- times he dwelt astonied, thinking of it, even as a man bereft of sense." Michael Angelo himself, writing immediately after her death, says, "She felt the warmest aflFection for me, and I not less for her. Death has robbed me of a great friend." Mr. Symonds has pointed out as curious that he here uses the masculine gender: "un grande amico." His grief found expression also in sonnets and madrigals, in one of which he speaks of her as the sculptor of his soul, which by her death is thus left unfinished: When my rude hammer to the stubborn stone Gives human shape, now that, now this, at will. Following his hand who wields and guides it still. It moves upon another's feet alone: ; MICHAEL But that wMch dwells in heaven, the world doth fill With beauty by pure motions of its own; And since tools fashion tools which else where none, Its life makes all that lives with living skill. Now, for that every stroke excels the more The higher at the forge it doth ascend. Her soul that fashioned mine hath sought the skies: Wherefore unfinished I must meet my end. If God, the great artificer, denies That aid which was unique on earth before. And again, in these forceful lines, he pays tribute to her regenerating power over his spirit: A man within a woman, nay, a god. Speaks through her spoken word: I therefore, who have heard. Must suffer change, and shall be mine no more. She lured me from the paths I whilom trod. Borne from my former state by her away, I stand aloof, and mine own self deplore. Above all vain desire The beauty of her face doth lift my clay; All lesser loveliness seems charnel mire. O lady, who through fire And water leadest souls to joys eterne. Let me no more unto myself return. "^ 143 Vittoria's life had ended under the shadow of a great sorrow, Httle less than the downfall of the great house of Colonna, which in its struggle with its papal rivals, the Farnese, found itself finally worsted. The castles of the Co- lonna were seized, and Vittoria, herself under the surveillance of the Holy Office, retired to the Benedictine Convent of St. Anne dei Funari (now Dei Falegnami), where she remained till her death. Michael Angelo is supposed to have sketched her during these last sad years, and the portrait of her which survives, with the mark of his pupil Marcelo Venusti upon it, is judged to have been merely colored by that artist. Grimm, who says, "I believe none other but Michael Angelo could thus have repre- sented Vittoria," gives this vivid de- scription of the portrait: "We have before us an aged woman. There is no longer the fair hair, which once invested her with such charm: a white, widow's veil, brought low down upon her brow, en- velops her head, and falls over her bosom MICHAEL ANGELO and shoulders. A tall figure, dressed in black velvet, upright, and sitting with- out support on a chair, the circular, simply formed back of which is grasped in front by her right hand, while the other is lying on an open book in her lap. There is a grand repose in her features, a slightly painful compression about the eyes and mouth. She appears aged, but not decrepit; and the deep lines which fate had drawn are noble and energetic." Michael Angelo was to survive his friend for twenty years, years in which he was still to produce some of his finest drawings; but, great as his artistic ac- tivity continued to be, his soul withdrew itself more and more into that life of re- ligious contemplation in which, though separated from her in space and time, he must have felt himself growing ever nearer to his "comrade of the skies." °^0 come near to a legend in the making, with the creative "wonder not yet quite gone" from the mythopoeic process, to catch a glimpse of the very process by which an actual personal history becomes a universal symbol — that, in a peculiar degree, one is able to do in contemplating the love story of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal. The famous lovers of old-time have so long been "enskied and sainted" in the high heaven of romance that, however authentic their earthly histories, it is difficult to con- ceive of their having actually lived and loved in the same human world as our- selves. They are too far off for us to think of them otherwise than as dream figures in a dream-world; and though 7 i 146 T GABRIEL ROSSETTI we know, for example, that in the very- flesh Dante and Beatrice once gazed at each other in the streets of Florence, though we know the very year and day and street, yet no documents, no pious pilgrimage of Florence streets, can make their story seem other than a dream. They are as real to us as Romeo and Juliet, but no more real — realities of the imagination. Realities of the imagina- tion also, by the power of their love and the magic of Rossetti's genius, have these two of whom I have to write already become; but as yet we are near enough to them to see them before they escape entirely into mythology; to catch a glimpse, I repeat, of the process by which the mortal puts on immortality, the actual personal history becomes a uni- versal symbol. It seems not unlikely that the two mystical faces that look out most con- stantly from Rossetti's canvases will haunt the imagination of mankind in the same manner as the classic faces of other painters immortally haunt it — ■ ELIZABETH SIDDAL 149 the women of Leonardo, Botticelli, Gains- borough, Reynolds. Already such faces as Beata Beatrix and Pandora have long since become as the faces of legend; and indeed, almost at their first revelation to the world, it had seemed impossible that they could be other than the faces of a dream, with such an atmosphere of glamour had the painter invested them, with such an intensity of spiritual impres- siveness. Yet on one of these two won- derful faces the present writer has been privileged to look in the actual light of the common day, and many live still whose eyes have beheld the other, as Elizabeth Siddal was first made known to him the history of whose genius came to be the history of her face. I suppose that no moment or period of time, however poetic in the retrospect, has ever seemed poetic at the moment; those who lived in it, particularly the young people, have, no doubt, been conscious only of its prose, and it has seemed impossible that anything romantic could be happening just then. The age ( ? K of marvels is always past, or possibly to come — but never now. So it seems in 1911, and so, no doubt, it seemed in 1850, a year indeed which has been pil- loried as the very culminating moment of mid-Victorian mediocrity and materi- alism. Yet the world has perhaps seldom had so many remarkable people in it at one time — so it seems to us now, look- ing back — and not since the Renais- sance, perhaps, has there been a period so big with new creative forces, so rich in what one may call prophetic personal- ities. One of the most potent of those prophetic personalities was surely Dante Gabriel Rossetti, then twenty-two, but already, four years since, the poet of The Blessed Damosel, the most masterful of a little group of dreaming young painters, already knocking loudly at the academic doors in the name of the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848, and busily at work in shattering to bits the smug scheme of things about them and remolding it nearer to the heart's i; ELIZABETH SIDDAL 151 desire; daring architects of a magical new Palace of Art, and creators of such an Earthly Paradise of beauty and dream as had never before existed on English ground — a palace and a paradise that remain for us and for the future, and shall forever give sanctuary and refresh- ment to the human spirit. Beauty, always religious in its intensest mani- festations, has never perhaps come to us as so veritably a religion as in the poetry and painting we call Pre-Raphaelite. These young poets and painters are priests as well, priests of a new religion of beauty, of which Keats was the lonely prophet, when, as a voice crying in the wilderness, he proclaimed the oneness of beauty and truth; and if Rossetti was the high-priest of this religion, as beyond all question he was, Elizabeth Siddal was its young Madonna. How strange it is to think that if, some sixty-one years ago, one had stepped into a bonnet shop in Cranborne Alley, Leicester Square, one could have seen this future Madonna, a grave, stately. '. beautiful girl, going about her daily tasks, busied among bonnets and bonnet boxes and, no doubt, with a certain dis- dain, which seems to have been charac- teristic of her, waiting on the humors of bourgeois customers, who saw nothing in her but a milliner's assistant insuf- ficiently humble. Fateful moment for Rossetti and the art of the future was that day in 1850 when one of these feminine customers stepped into the little shop, accompanied by one with an eye for beauty rather than bonnets, her handsome son, Walter Deverell, an en- thusiastic young painter closely affiliated with the Brotherhood and on terms of cordial companionship with Rossetti. One can imagine the young man's en- thusiasm at the discovery of this beauti- ful unknown face, there, as it were, in hiding in the purlieus of Leicester Square. We can see young Deverell imploring his mother to ask the proud girl if she would sit for her artist son, and one can imagine the eagerness with which, the permission given, he would hasten to ELIZABETH SIDDAL 153 rhapsodize with his fellow-painters on his fairy -tale discovery. Soon the beauti- ful face was to begin its romantic history as one of Shakespeare's dream-women, Viola, in Deverell's painting of Viola listening to the Court Minstrels, in which picture Rossetti is one of her companions as the jester. Then Holman Hunt was to paint her as Sylvia in The Two Gentle- men of Verona, and again, another of the Brotherhood, Millais, in still another Shakespearean character, his famous drowning Ophelia. But her face was to belong to none of these painters, for very soon Rossetti had claimed and won it for his own: Let all men note That in all years (O Love, thy gift is this!) They that would look on her must come to me. So far his sister Christina had been his model. It is her sorrow-dedicated face that looks out from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and The Annunciation, the two notable first-fruits of his art; GABRIEL ROSSETTI - ', but from now on it is the face of Eliza- beth Siddal that, for him, like a governing star. Gathers and garners from all things that are Their silent penetrative loveliness. It is her beauty, even when the face is the face of another model, that suffuses all his work, that beauty through which that high revelation had been made to him — "the worship of that Love through thee made known" — for which he strove ever after in picture and poem to find thrilling and hallowed and lovely expres- sion. As one stands hushed before the spiritual ecstasy of the Beata Bea- trix, or ponders the mystical passion of The House of Life — that chapel of beautiful words built by Rossetti to house the memory of his "late espoused saint" — does it not quicken one's sense of the spiritual values of human expe- rience to recall in contrast that little bonnet shop near Leicester Square and the beautiful milliner's assistant, so little l^;i 155 aware of the romantic destiny already on its way to her, so Httle suspecting the transcendental meaning her beauty is one day to have for the whole world and the future days? One naturally asks: How did that beauty affect other observers? What was Elizabeth Siddal actually like as seen in the light of every day, untransfigured by love or genius? Rossetti's brother and biographer, William Michael, is at hand with this characteristically minute de- scription of her. "She was," he says, *'a most beautiful creature, with an air between dignity and sweetness, mixed with something which exceeded modest self-respect, and partook of disdainful reserve; tall, finely formed, with a lofty neck, and regular yet somewhat uncom- mon features, greenish-blue unsparkling eyes, large perfect eyelids, brilliant com- plexion, and a lavish heavy wealth of coppery-golden hair. It was what many people call red hair, and abuse under that name — but the color, when not rank and flagrant, happens to have been GABRIEL ROSSETTI always much admired by Dante Ros- setti. Her voice was clear and low, but with a certain sibilant tendency which reduced its attractiveness. . . ." This is a description of her at the time of Rossetti's first meeting her, when she was scarcely seventeen years old; but I think that a description made by Lady Burne-Jones much later, when she had become Rossetti's wife, gives a more re- alizable, as certainly a very sympathetic, picture of her. The Burne-Joneses had been on a visit to the Rossettis at some lodgings in Hampstead. "I see her," writes Lady Burne-Jones, "in the little upstairs bedroom, with its lattice window, to which she carried me when we arrived, and the mass of her beautiful deep-red hair as she took off her bonnet: she wore her hair very loosely fastened up, so that it fell in soft, heavy wings. Her complexion looked as if a rose tint lay beneath the white skin, producing a most soft and delicate pink for the darkest flesh-tones. Her eyes were of a kind of golden brown \L Pi 157 — agate color is the only word I can think of to describe them — and wonder- fully luminous: in all Gabriel's drawings of her, and in the type she created in his mind, this is to be seen. The eye- lids were deep, but without any languor or drowsiness, and had the peculiarity of seeming scarcely to veil the light in her eyes when she was looking down." It will be observed that the two de- scriptions differ as to the color of the eyes. "Greenish-blue unsparkling eyes," says her brother-in-law; "a kind of golden brown," says Lady Burne- Jones, adding "agate color," which is hardly the same thing, though it reinforces the " unspark- ling" of the first description. Rossetti himself, in one of the sonnets of The House of Life, writes of "Thine eyes gray-lit in shadowing hair above." Evidently part of the beauty of the eyes he loved was their quality of enig- matic sea-like changefulness, as also that abstracted impenetrable gaze which dominates her face in the portrait painted by herself. That portrait is declared GABRIEL ROSSETTI by William Michael Rossetti to be "an absolute likeness," and, writing of it to Madox Brown in 1853, Dante Gabriel enthusiastically says: "Lizzie has made a perfect wonder of her portrait, which is nearly done, and which I think we shall send to the winter exhibition." From this it will be gathered that Miss Siddal possessed other natural gifts be- sides her beauty. Indeed her gift for painting must have been very consider- able, none the less so because it ap- pears to have remained unrevealed till her chance introduction into that world of eager young artists, the atmosphere of which must have been charged with contagious aspiration. Naturally, Ros- setti was her master for such training as she had, as her work in some measure reflected his mood and manner, though it seems to have had no little personal force and quality, an ingenuity and grace of romantic invention in particular. "Her fecundity of invention," writes Rossetti, "and facility are quite wonder- ful — much greater than mine." "This," ELIZABETH SIDDAL J Pi comments his brother, "may have been a lover's exaggeration, but it was not mere nonsense." Surely not, as it is easy to judge by looking at that portrait of herself to be found reproduced in the Rossetti memoir. She was but twenty when she painted it, and to have achieved so much mastery in three years — during which Rossetti had been continually painting and drawing her with the ardent worship of a lover — indicates exceptional natural powers. Her favorite subjects were taken from romantic poetry such as Wordsworth's We are Seven, Brown- ing's Pippa Passes, Tennyson's Eve of St. Agnes, the old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens; and, as we shall see presently, she had the further gift of a certain sad poetry herself. One of the prettiest passages in Miss Siddal's short life is Ruskin's aflfectionate interest in her and her work. Rossetti had taken her to visit the Ruskin family one day in April, 1855, and thus writes to Madox Brown of the impression she had made. "All the Ruskins were most delighted with Guggums," he says — one likes to think of "Beata Beatrix" as "Guggums" too! — "John Ruskin said she was a noble, glorious creature, and his father said by her look and manner she might have been a countess." Ruskin had already, some two or three years before, launched his famous and most helpful manifesto in favor of the Pre-Raphaelites, and he had also made Rossetti's future particularly his care by generously under- taking to buy all the young painter's work that was to his taste, thus providing an art likely in its beginning to find little financial encouragement, with a sustain- ing market. Now, evidently taking a fatherly interest in the love of the two young people, he proposed to buy Miss Siddal's work also, arranging to pay her an annual sum (a hundred and fifty pounds) and leaving her to produce her drawings at leisure. This arrangement lasted for two or three years, and seems only to have lapsed because Miss Siddal's frail health had not allowed her to work ELIZABETH SIDDAL 161 with any regularity. Yes! that com- plexion which "looked," as Lady Burne- Jones had said, "as if a rose tint lay be- neath the white skin" was all too ominous of the physical fragility which too often lurks beneath such fairness. The shadow of consumption was over this beauty, and the fear of death became early the companion of love in Rossetti's heart. Very soon doctors and precautionary "changes of air" and actual illness enter into the story, saddening even to de- spair Rossetti's letters to his family and friends; and this sad poem, entitled A Year and a Day, to which I referred above, is painful evidence, in the almost physical weariness of the verses, how sick the writer felt herself to be. Slow days have passed that make a year. Slow hours that make a day, Since I could take my first dear love. And kiss him the old way: Yet the green leaves touch me on the cheek, Dear Christ, this month of May. I lie among the tall green grass That bends above my head, And covers up my wasted face, And folds me in its bed Tenderly and lovingly Like grass above the dead. Dim phantoms of an unknown ill Float through my tiring brain; The unformed visions of my life Pass by in ghostly train; Some pause to touch me on the cheek, Some scatter tears like rain. The river ever running down Between its grassy bed. The voices of a thousand birds That clang above my head, Shall bring to me a sadder dream When this sad dream is dead. A silence falls upon my heart. And hushes all its pain. I stretch my hands in the long grass, And fall to sleep again. There to lie empty of all love. Like beaten corn of grain. Poor girl ! one involuntarily exclaims — the poem is so expressively weighted with the helpless lassitude of a life felt to be fading away, which it pictures with such pathetic simplicity and even detail. It was this precarious health, combined with the uncertainty of Rossetti's finan- cial resources, that accounts for the strangely long-drawn lapse of time be- tween the engagement of the two young people, within a few months after their meeting in 1850, and their marriage at last in 1860, ten years after. Yet this delay would, doubtless, press less hardly upon them than upon lovers in a more formal social environment; the world they belonged to was an artistic world favorable to a human freedom of inter- course, a little world too of friends all intimately associated in their work and dreams, a studio-restaurant life, paying little heed to conventions or domesticities; and thus we may think of those ten years as years of happy comradeship, of pursuits shared together, and work done side by side, with all the passionate zest and sympathetic fusion, of young roman- tic lives. But illness too often marred this happy intercourse, and spells of it grew more frequent as the years went on, too 164 GABRIEL ROSSETTI \ r\ often taking "Lizzie" away from London in search of more clement air. Too often the poet had to console himself with the philosophy of a Farted Presence, and the haunting Song of the Bower is the poign- ant record of one of these separations more than usually prolonged: Say, is it day, is it dusk in thy bower. Thou whom I long for, who longest for me? During these years, Rossetti had been fitfully producing some of his most characteristic work, both in painting and poetry, and, though he employed other models as well, "Lizzie" was con- stantly his sitter. It is her face we find in the dream-wrought triptych of Paolo and Francesca, as she is always the Beatrice in his numerous pictures from Dante — the earliest of which was the Beatrice at a Marriage Feast denies Dante her Salutation. The very first picture in which she appears was a little water- color called Rossovestita (Redclad) made in the year of their meeting, and the last time Rossetti was tc ^ ELIZABETH SIDDAL 165 few days before her death, was as the Princess Sabra in the water-color of St. George and the Dragon. "Ida" was one of Ruskin's names for her, and in a letter congratulating them on their mar- riage, he thus testifies to what he con- siders her influence upon her husband's art. "I think," he writes, "Ida should be very happy to see how much more beautifully, perfectly, and tenderly, you draw when you are drawing her than when you draw anybody else. She cures you of all your worst faults when you only look at her." Seldom, indeed, has a man's genius been so inspired and de- termined throughout by one passionate dream as that of Rossetti. In this he and his great master and namesake are spiritual brothers; for each it was the one first pure love of youth that, invisible as visible, whatever external incongruities their lives may here and there present, that made for them their vision of the world and, starlike, shone on them from beginning to end of their mystic pilgrim- age. Rossetti's youth had been singularly n pure. He had, we are told, "no juvenile amours, liaisons, or flirtations." Elizabeth Siddal was his first love — and from that fact comes surely that atmosphere of hushed wonder, that awe of virgin passion, that sense of trance-like rapture and wor- ship, that breathes through all his work, picture or poem, a quality to be found elsewhere in literature in but one book — that Vita Nvx)va, his translation of which was, for the most part, one of the masterly achievements of his marvelous boyhood. After ten years of a love thus vitally sacramental and a comradeship so com- plete, their formal marriage seems a com- paratively minor detail; but it took place at last on May 23, 1860, at St. Clement's Church, Hastings, whither "Lizzie," with her lover as companion and nurse, had gone for the sea-air. Till the last mo- ment it had looked as if it must still be deferred. So miserable was his sweet- heart's health that Rossetti had feared that she might not be able "to enter the cold church with safety." In a letter to his mother he seems to reproach him- 7 ELIZABETH SIDDAL 167 self for the long anterior delay: "Like all the important things I ever meant to do — to fulfil duty or secure happi- ness — this one has been deferred almost beyond possibility. I have hardly de- served that Lizzie should still consent to it, but she has done so, and I trust I may still have time to prove my thank- fulness to her." Is this the meaning of the last verse of The Song of the Bower: Shall I not one day remember thy bower. One day when all days are one day to me? — Thinking, "I stirred not, and yet had the power," Yearning, "Ah God, if again it might be!" But it is the truest love that is apt, on occasion, to be thus self-reproachful, and at all events, "the hour for which the years did sigh" had come at last. Paris had previously proved favorable to his wife's health, so it was thither they set off to spend their honeymoon, "Lizzie's" health did actually improve, and the holiday passed happily in visiting galleries and looking up old friends. GABRIEL ROSSETTI ' I < Rossetti also did some work, turning again to an old fancy of his and complet- ing the strangely fascinating little draw- ing, How they met Themselves. In this drawing, it will be remembered, two lovers walking together in a dark wood are represented as meeting face to face their wraiths similarly walking together. A ghostly light surrounds the phantom forms, and the living woman is repre- sented as swooning at her lover's side. Certainly this was an uncanny ill-omened theme to treat at such a time, with the shadow of "Lizzie's" illness still over them and no little superstitious as Ros- setti is said to have been. But it was the kind of fancy they both delighted in, and the newly made wife seems to have had no misgivings as to being the model. The swooning girl is said by Mr. W. M. Rossetti to be "very like her." One is reminded of Rossetti's treatment of a similar theme in a water-color called Bonafazio's Mistress, which represents a girl dying while sitting for her portrait to her lover — the proposed ending of ^ ELIZABETH SIDDAL J his unfinished story, St. Agnes of Inter- cession. To have been thus regardless of omens, one may conclude that the lovers were feeling very secure in their new happiness and that Paris had put Rossetti's fears for his wife's health momentarily at rest. She was but scarcely twenty-seven, he thirty-two. Life may well have seemed fair and full of romantic promise, as they returned to London and took it up together in their pleasant studio in Chatham Place, near Blackfriars Bridge, with the motley river traffic of the Thames for picturesque outlook at their window. A little while a little love The hour yet bears for thee and me. . . . When Rossetti wrote that I do not know — it stands next to The Song of the Bower in his poems — but he may well have gone with its valedictory refrain singing in his heart during the months that followed; for love's hours were all too surely numbered. His wife's spurt of renewed health was not long main- f ■• tained, and now to her phthisical weak- ness was added a wearing neuralgia which necessitated recourse to laudanum for its relief. Her constant sickness was the more cruel, as the life of their little circle was daily growing fuller in interest and success. In 1861 Rossetti's trans- lations from The Early Italian Poets was published, and the epoch-making decora- tive firm of "Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co." was inaugurated. They were stirring days for the four friendly house- holds, the Burne-Joneses, the Morrises, the Madox Browns, and the Rossettis; and Swinburne, one of their nearest friends, was in the first splendid spring of his powers. It must have been hard to have been sick, with such a creative ferment about one; and to this constant suflfering was to be added the sharp sorrow, a year after their marriage, of a still-born child. From this blow and its attendant illness, the failing wife seems to have rapidly recovered, but the neuralgia remained, and the laudanum bottle. Rossetti had been led by Ruskin 171 to take an interest in a certain Working Men's College, and there occasionally he still conducted a drawing class. On the evening of February 10, 1862, he was due at one of these classes, but before going there he had taken his wife to dine in company with Swinburne at the Sabloniere Hotel in Leicester Square — that little bonnet shop of sacred memory, it may be recalled, this night of all nights, not far away ! After dinner, dur- ing which "Lizzie" had been bright and animated, Rossetti had taken her home and gone on to his drawing class. He returned shortly after eleven to find his wife insensible, and at her bedside an empty laudanum bottle. Four doctors did all there was to do, but in vain, and at twenty minutes past seven the follow- ing morning she died. Realizing what a tragic significance that moment of Elizabeth Siddal Ros- setti's death was to have for future time, it is strange to read the contemporary newspaper account of it as given in Mr. W. M. Rossetti's memoir. It is L < evident that Rossetti's was still an un- known name to the public at large. Little did the reporter realize what sacred historical material he was dealing with when, as part of his day's work, he thus wrote of the "Death of a lady from an overdose of Laudanum": "On Thursday Dr. Payne held an inquest at Bridewell Hospital on the body of Eliza Eleanor Rossetti, aged twenty-nine, wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Artist, of No. 14 Chatham Place, Blackfriars, who came to her death under very melancholy circumstances. Mr. Rossetti stated that on Monday afternoon, between six and seven o'clock, he and his wife went out in the carriage for the purpose of dining with a friend at the Sabloniere Hotel, Leicester Square, when they had got about half-way there his wife appeared to be very drowsy, and he wished her to return. She objected to their doing so, and they proceeded to the Hotel, and dined there. They returned home at eight o'clock, when she appeared some- what excited. He left home again at ^ J; 173 nine o'clock, his wife being then about to go to bed. On his return at half-past eleven o'clock he found his wife in bed, utterly unconscious. She was in the habit of taking laudanum, and he had known her to take as much as 100 drops at a time, and he thought she had been taking it before they went out. He found a phial on a table at the bedside, which had contained laudanum, but it was then empty. A doctor was sent for, and promptly attended. She had expressed no wish to die, but quite the reverse. Indeed she contemplated going out of town in a day or two, and had ordered a new mantle which she intended wearing on the occasion. He believed she took the laudanum to soothe her nerves. She could not sleep or take food unless she used it. Dr. Hutchinson, of Bridge Street, Blackfriars, said he had attended the deceased in her confine- ment in April with a still-born child. He saw her on Monday night at half- past eleven o'clock, and found her in a comatose state. He tried to rouse her. GABRIEL BOSSETTI but could not, and then tried the stomach- pump without avail. He injected several quarts of water into the stomach, and washed it out, when the smell of lauda- num was very distinct. He and three other medical gentlemen stayed with her all night, and she died at twenty minutes past seven o'clock on Tuesday morning. The jury returned a verdict of Acci- dental Death." The ever helpful Ford Madox Brown had come to his friend's side on that dark morning, and William Michael Rossetti had touchingly written in his diary : "The poor thing looks wonderfully calm now and beautiful. f*3 '"Ed avea in se umilta si verace Che parea che dicesse, lo sono in pace.'" (And with her was such very humbleness That she appeared to say, I am at peace.) "I could not but think of that all the time I looked at her, it is so exactly like." 175 As his wife lay thus at peace, Rossetti's grief prompted an act of singular elegiac loveliness, romantically impressive with the solemn poetry of death. Between her cheek and her beautiful hair he lay the manuscript volume of his poems, the only copy of them in the world. The loveliest had been written for her. They had no meaning but their love, and now they had no life for him apart from her. They belonged immortally to her — the last most precious gift he could bring. It was fitting that she should take them with her, that his heart should thus lie beside her in the grave. What had he to do with poetry any more! Was there ever a scene more thrilling to the imagination with the mysterious glamour, the terrible star-like music of death? Only, it would seem, when love and death thus meet together in the death chamber of a poet's heart, do we know the tragic meaning of the strange word Life. There is no recorded act of love more symbolic of the very heart of love than this gift of Rossetti's to his GABRIEL ROSSETTI r\ dead wife, — a gift in later years only seemingly taken back and actually, so to say, but momentarily borrowed, to the end that he might further enrich it, make it the more immortally hers. A touch of self-reproach may seem to have entered into this sacrifice. "I have often," he said to Madox Brown, "been writing at those poems when Lizzie was ill and suffering, and I might have been attending to her, and now they shall go." But deep grief is ever thus self-reproach- ful. There always seems something un- done that we might have done for the dead we love. It is the deepest love that is ever thus retrospectively scrupulous and self -torturing, and it would be unjust to Rossetti to allow too much weight to such words spoken in such an hour. No human love is quite perfect, and in its own heart love the most pure and devoted will always be conscious of shortcoming in this and that. It is by the whole history of a feeling that it must be judged, not by a small failure here and there; and, so judged, who can study ^ \ Rossetti's paintings and poems without realizing that his love for Elizabeth Siddal was not only the one passion, but the enduring religion of his life, a religion which gave his work an unusual sacramental significance, the importance of a spiritual message: Yea, in God's name, and Love's, and would I Draw from one loving heart such evidence As to all hearts all things shall signify. . . . These lines were certainly among the poems that lay between her hair and her cheek that sad morning, and though she had left him thus early to continue the rest of his journey alone, all his sub- sequent work was to be the fulfilment of this youthful ideal; "and to this end," he might have said, with Dante at the bier of Beatrice, "I labour all I can; as she well knoweth." Three other lines from that same sonnet must have come home to him with terrible truth, as he stood hushed at the side of her marble peace. Lady, I fain would tell how evermore Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor Thee from myself, neither our love from God. There, rightly understood, is the mys- tical message of all his work: the appre- hension of visible beauty as the key to, the "signature" of, the invisible, the transjBguration of the senses by the soul, "the meaning of all things that are" revealed in one beautiful, beloved face; and in the love of one fair, fleeting form the divination of the celestial love with- out beginninig and without end. For us here it is not necessary to pursue the story of Rossetti's after life, sick and haunted as in later years it was to become — A thicket hung with masks of mockery And watered with the wasteful warmth of tears; and yet, for all its "soul-struck widow- hood,'' so starred with momentous and enduring achievement. Our concern has been with that human love story which, from now on, could only be continued in the poet's soul, with the successive crea- \ tions of his genius for its subsequent history; that history told in master- pieces of poem or painting, in The House of Life, in Dante's Dream, this last a paint- ing in which Rossetti immortalized and universalized that hour of his wife's loss in one superb symbol of tragic sorrow, so strangely charged with the enchanted hush, the dark magnificence, and the regal beauty of death; in Beata Beatrix, where we see the other side of the bitter- ness of death, and enter with the parting soul that spiritual ecstasy of rebirth into another plane of being, which is one conception of our mortal change. It is said that in painting Beata Beatrix Ros- setti allowed himself to recall his wife's face for the first time after her death, and of it he himself has said that it is "not intended at all to represent death, but to render it under the resemblance of a trance in which . . . she is suddenly rapt from earth to heaven." When Rossetti painted this, the inevit- able processes of grief had brought him to that more peaceful mood in which he could conceive of death, the infant child Life had brought him, as "full grown the helpful daughter of my heart," and lay his hand in hers not without hope that she was leading him through "the devious coverts of dismay," and the dolorous paths of "Willowwood," back to the lost face and the one dream: When vain desire at last and vain regret Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain. What shall assuage the unforgotten pain And teach the unforgetful to forget? Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet, — Or may the soul at once in a green plain Stoop through the spray of some sweet life- fountain And cull the dew-drenched flowering amulet? Ah! when the wan soul in that golden air Between the scriptured petals softly blown Peers breathless for the gift of grace un- known, — Ah! let none other alien spell soe'er But only the one Hope's one name be there, — Not less nor more, but even that word alone. q \ N addition to the well authenticated of certain poets, women of IL known name and history who have been loved and sung into that literary legend we grandiosely speak of as "im- mortality," the world of poetry is haunted by less defined shapes of womanhood, women who live for us only in the verse which they have ostensibly inspired, often mere decorative names at the head of a poem, flowery nominations, pretty labels, as it were, on the conserves of past emotions. Such are Petrarch's Laura, Herrick's Julia, Waller's Sacha- rissa, and, more shadowy still, the fragrant sisterhood of Lesbias, Chloes, and Corinnas from the days of Catullus, Horace, and Ovid to the coming of I LEGENDARY LADIES Wordsworth's Lucy and Tennyson's Mariana. The question "Who is Sylvia?" may be asked equally in vain of many another name lyrically illustrious, and it is to be feared that such pretty names too often stand for no one faithfully loved girl, but for many girls loved faithlessly and thus collectively honored — or, to put it more magnificently, "not woman — but the angel that is the type of all women." As a matter of fact, all love poems, how- ever sincerely addressed to one woman, who may indeed be the immediate provo- cation of them, are actually inspired by and written to all women. The poet is by nature a born lover of women, and however faithfully he may deem himself to be celebrating the one woman of the moment, or even of a lifetime, it is his general sentiment for the sex at large that really floods his poem with vitality and gives it universality. Usually, too, the one great love of a poet's life is the culmination of other lesser loves, which are absorbed in it, as by a process of OF TEE POETS 183 transmigration. The dead passion for Chloe lives again in the live passion for Corinna, and even the casual tenderness learnt from a forgotten Amaryllis may contribute to the perfection of that deeper emotion reserved for the heart's Beatrice and Laura. "How many suns it takes to make one speedwell blue!" Besides, woman in general must also share with a still more universal muse the credit of a poet's inspiration, no less a muse than Nature herself, which is a poet's first and last passion, and of whom woman is but one, though the chief, accident. In the inspiration of all great love-poems woman must consent to di- vide honors with the universe, with the starry night, with the sea's mystery, or the singing of some April bird. She is so much to the poet because she stands for so much more, mysteriously gathering up in her strange being the diffused thrill and marvel of existence. Probably, if a poet told the truth, he would admit that the moon or the sea is more to him than any woman however wonderful; . H LEGENDARY LADIES but a woman is as near as he can get to those mysteries: Sometimes thou seemest not as thyself alone But as the meaning of all things that are. It is in that mood that a poet loves his beloved best — when, that is, she tran- scends herself and becomes the sacra- mental vessel of the universe. One might compare a woman's eyes to those magic crystals employed by seers for the pur- poses of divination. The poet's rapt gaze is not at them, but through them into that spiritual azure of which they are the fairy windows. For this reason, per- haps then, a poet's ranging fancy, from one fair face to another, should not be imputed to him for a vulgar inconstancy, but rather for a divine instinctive con- stancy to the spirit of beauty in all things, which he was born to seek, to worship, and to celebrate. It is this universal quality of a poet's love that in its turn gives to its acci- dental objects their universal significance and appeal, thus charging the beloved's J; OF THE POETS 185 name with more than a merely personal historical meaning, and making it sym- bolize for all men certain types of beauty and certain ways of loving. Even where the poet's mistress is historically indi- vidualized, as in the case of Beatrice Portinari, she ceases to be one individual woman and becomes the symbol for all time of love in its loftiest spiritual exaltation; as that Clodia, the pleasure- loving wife of Quintus Metellus Aler, who wept so bitterly at the death of her sparrow and likewise poisoned her hus- band, becomes for all time, as the Lesbia of Catullus, the symbol of love whose joys are mainly of the senses. "The poet's Lesbia, the poet's Beatrice, ours is the choice," it comes naturally to Meredith to write; for these two names have become fixed formulae of expression, a part of the picture-language of mankind. Similarly Petrarch's Laura is not re- membered for herself, for any of those gifts and graces Petrarch so industriously sang, but as the symbol of the life-long faithfulness and high-flown adoration of %m tfW '^ K^ f ,■ 1 186 LEGENDARY LADIES her lover. Laura may, I think, be said to have survived Petrarch, and his fame to have died in giving her immortahty; so it seems to some of us nowadays, striving in vain to appreciate at its ancient valuation the monument of sugar so patiently piled up and elaborately fretted through so many years in her honor. The interest that survives for us in Laura and Petrarch to-day is not in the poetry, or even in the lovers them- selves, but in the spiritual and social conditions of a time which could make such a kind of fame possible, could ele- vate a private love affair into a matter of public European importance. Con- sider this incident and its significance. When Charles of Luxemburg paid a visit to Avignon — Laura's city — being entertained at a great festival in his honor, at which all the local nobility attended, he desired that, among the ladies present, Laura should be pointed out to him. This being done, he mo- tioned the other ladies aside, and ap- proaching Laura, he gazed with reverent OF THE POETS A r 189 interest into her face for a moment and then respectfully kissed her on the fore- head and on the eyelids. Thus even in her own lifetime had Laura become a canonized figure, and nearly two hun- dred years after, when her tomb was dis- covered and opened, no less a king than Francis the First was there to do her honor. How impossible to imagine any such ceremonies in our time, or to parallel in any form so public a participation in any lofty spiritual sentiment whatsoever. Through Laura alone we realize how real and influential a fact was that troubadour convention of which Petrarch's poetry was the supreme culmination, and what a genuine force it must have been in the spiritual development of the time. The love of Petrarch for Laura was not indeed regarded as a merely private aflfair, but as a crowning conspicuous example of what one might call the public worship of Womanhood, just then elevated by the troubadours into a sort of poetic religion. The fact of Laura being the wife of another man, Hugh de Sade, a 1. 190 LEGENDARY LADIES noble of her own rank, was, of course, but in keeping with the curious trouba- dour convention, which, in the choice of a married woman for its muse, implied the high platonism of its adoration; for it is not necessary to say that the essence of troubadour passion was its hopeless- ness of the customary amorous rewards. Love of an object too high for its attainment, and therefore a love of pure spirit, though expressed in the language of passion, was its ideal. That is the reason why troubadour poetry for the most part, Petrarch's included, is such dreary reading. It is so evidently mere literary ingenuity displaying itself in a vacuum of feeling, the bloodless euphuism born of the feigned worship of an abstrac- tion. Thus Laura, for all Petrarch's pro- testation, became less a woman than a theme, much as in our time the death of Arthur Hallam grew to be less a grief to Tennyson than a starting-point for medi- tation on death and immortality. Yet Pe- trarch was very positive that none should doubt either the reality of his mistress \ OF THE POETS 191 or his passion. There is extant a letter of his to his friend the Bishop of Lombes, who, it would appear, had manifested a modern skepticism on the subject of his grand passion. "Would to God," writes Petrarch, "that my Laura were indeed but an imaginary person, and my pas- sion for her but sport! Alas! it is rather a madness! hard would it have been, and painful, to feign so long a time — and what extravagance to play such a farce in the world! No! we may coun- terfeit the action and voice of a sick man, but not the paleness and wasted looks of the sufferer; and how often have you witnessed both in me." Petrarch has recorded his first meeting with Laura in a famous inscription in his copy of Virgil preserved at Milan. After the manner of Dante in the Vita Nuova, he writes: "Laura, illustrious by her own virtues, and long celebrated by my verses, I beheld for the first time, in my early youth, on the 6th of April, 1327, about the first hour of the day, in the church of Saint Claire in Avignon: and , < LEGENDARY LADIES in the same city, in the same month of April, the same day and hour, in the year 1348, this light of my life was with- drawn from the world while I was in Verona, ignorant, alas! of what had befallen me." Petrarch had, therefore, been writing sonnets to Laura for twenty-one years, as he was to continue doing at intervals for another twenty-six. Surely a mon- strous constancy. Schlegel has said that Laura herself might well have been ennuye had she been compelled to read the whole of Petrarch's sonnets to her at a sitting; and Byron has his own cynical explanation of the matter — Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife He would have written sonnets all his life? Though it seems to be a general truth that the voice of the nightingale is hushed by marriage — as sings George Meredith: . . . the nightingale scarce ever charms the long twilight: Mute with the cares of the nest" — 11 OF THE POETS 193 yet some married men have written exceedingly long and dull poems on their wives, as some wives have inspired some excellent poetry too. The once famous Castara of William Habington is an example of the Muse Matrimonial. Habington was a pious man of the meta- physical school of poets that enjoyed a certain vogue during the first half of the seventeenth century, and he prides him- self on the propriety of his inspiration. "If," he says ironically in a preface, "the innocency of a chaste muse should be more acceptable and weigh heavier in the balance of esteem, than a fame begot in adultery of study, I doubt I shall leave no hope of competition"; and again he says, "when love builds upon the rock of chastity, it may safely contemn the battery of the waves and threatenings of the wind, since time, that makes a mockery of the firmest structures, shall itself be ruinated before that be demolished." Would that the poet were as good as the husband, yet Castara — in life Lucia, daughter of the LEGENDARY LADIES ' ^ first Lord Powis — has contrived to live in literary history through verses such as these: Like the violet which, alone, Prospers in some happy shade. My Castara lives unknown. To no looser eye betray'd. For she's to herself untrue. Who delights i' th' public view. . . . She her throne makes reason climb. While wild passions captive lie: And each article of time. Her pure thoughts to heaven fly: All her vows religious be. And her love she vows to me. Another very different champion of the Muse Matrimonial is John Donne. Through all the crust of metaphysical conceits there breaks in Donne's poetry the flame of white interior fires, set alight by one of the bravest and most attractive wives in the history of love. Aniie More was the daughter of Sir George More, Lord Lieutenant of the Tower, a father whose sternness made a runaway marriage necessary, and whose 195 implacability hampered the devoted couple for years. Yet, through all, their love wore a gallant feather of romance, romance productive of no less than twelve children, as well as Donne's finest poems, and living still in one or two anecdotes of a peculiarly vivid humanity. Such is the story of Donne during an absence from England seeing his wife in a vision. She was in childbed at the time, but did not die. "I have seen," he told a friend who was with him, "my dead wife pass twice by me through this room, with her hair hanging about her shoulders, and a dead child in her arms." We get a glimpse of her spirit in her wish, on the occasion of one of Donne's enforced business visits abroad, to accompany her husband dressed as a page. One has a childish wish that he had given in to her whim and taken her with him. He wrote her a charming lyric instead: Sweetest love, I do not go, For weariness of thee. Nor in hope the world can show A fitter love for me; \ LEGENDARY LADIES But since that I At the last must part, 'tis best, Thus to use myself in jest By feigned deaths to die. For another absence he has this gayer solace: By absence this good means I gain. That I can catch her Where none can watch her. In some close corner of my brain. There I embrace and kiss her; And so I both enjoy and miss her. But the brave story, like all brave stories, had to end, and she was to leave Donne alone, with a new-born child, their twelfth, when he was but forty- two. Her death was to make him a great divine, as her love had made him a great poet. Who does not know those solemn lines written against his burial: Whoever comes to shroud me, do not harm Nor question much That subtle wreath of hair about mine arm; The mystery, the sign, you must not touch. For 'tis my outward soul i OF TBE POETS Viceroy to that, which unto Heav'n being gone. Will leave this to control. And keep these limbs, these provinces from dissolution. As some of these half legendary women live as the symbols of the great ways of loving, love's passion, love's idealism, love's faithfulness; so others stand for the more tender, playful aspects of love, or survive by some trait of manner, some one charm, or even some trick of dress. So Lesbia, as we have said, lives by her little sparrow, which still chirps so pret- tily and pathetically — ad solam dominant itsqtie pipilabat — in royal Latin till this day: O it was sweet to hear him twitter-twitter In the dear bosom where he made his nest! Lesbia, sweetheart, who shall say how bitter This grief to us — so small to all the rest? . . . And in no other bosom would he sing. But sometimes sitting here and sometimes there. On one bough and another, would he sing — Faithful to Lesbia — as I am to her. . . . LEGENDARY LADIES Foul shades of Orcus, evil you befall! 'Tis true you smote her little sparrow dead — But this you did to Lesbia worse than all: You made her eyes with weeping — O so red ! Ben Jonson's Celia, who seems to have been no one in particular, lives for us only with her eyes, as Sir John Suckling's "dearest princess, Aglaura" by her deli- cious feet, those feet that beneath her petticoat Like little mice, stole in and out, As if they fear'd the light. and Waller's Sacharissa by her famous f girdle: A narrow compass! and yet there Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair. Give me but what this ribbon bound. Take all the rest the sun goes round. Waller's great fame as a poet is hard to realize nowadays, and even the name of "Sacharissa" seems to survive with a sort of silent derision as being an extreme example, almost a parody, of the affected names under which it was once the fashion for poets to celebrate their mis- tresses. Probably the "Sophonisba" of James Thomson — O Sophonisba ! Sophonisba ! — reached the limit of affectation. Lady Dorothea Sydney, eldest daughter of the Earl of Leicester, whose hand Waller in vain sought, in his frigid, courtly fashion, was a personality deserving a more warm-blooded immortality. But true passion was as lacking to Waller's nature as it is to his poetry. He was, by the way, the first poet to abstain from intoxicating drink. He was almost as well known as a "water-drinker" as a wit, and of his "wit" one ungallant example does not show him in a very favorable light, either as a lover or even a gentleman. It is said that, when both he and Sacharissa, then the widowed Lady Sunderland, had grown somewhat elderly, she had met him at some recep- tion, and smilingly reminding him of their yoimg days, had asked him, "When LEGENDARY LADIES r\ will you write such fine verses on me again?" "When you are as young, madam, and as handsome as you were then," was the brutal answer of her one- time lover. Very evidently she had done well in bestowing her hand elsewhere, and it is presumed that Waller was then too old to be called out for his insolence. It is rather the reverse of an honor that "Sacharissa" should live by association with such a coxcomb. It is pleasanter to think of her as the sister of Algernon Sydney. As Sacharissa by her girdle, so Her- rick's Julia lives by her "tempestuous petticoat," that most bewitching and gallant of all immortal garments. Julia's mortal identity is even more completely hidden in her anonymous immortality than her buxom comeliness was hidden in "the winning wave" of her famous petticoat, and there is no reason to wish her more definitely individualized. Her- rick was not the man to have a great love affair. Woman was to him a seduc- tive impersonality, a being of bloom and OF THE POETS bright eyes, red lips, pearly teeth, and rounded contours, good to go a-Maying with — just a woman, but not "a spirit too." He confessed that he never wished for marriage, and though he wrote some fine religious poetry, he was, as a rule, very well contented with the charming surfaces, the flower-like forms and per- fumes of things, and he loved women as he loved his daffodils, with a pagan simplicity of satisfaction in their beauty and freshness, an enjoyment untainted with cynicism, and, though touched with pathos, never troubled with those Words- worthian thoughts too deep for tears. It is a healthy, sweet-smelling, May- morning world, a veritable Hesperides, of golden apples and "golden lads and girls," in which he invites us to go a-Maying, — whether it be with Julia or Corinna is all one to the easy-going, light-hearted vicar — Rise, and put on your foliage, and be seen To come forth, like the spring time, fresh and green. And sweet as Flora. Take no care For jewels for your gown or hair; Fear not, the leaves will strew Gems in abundance upon you. . . He might well have preached worse sermons, don't you think, to his Devon- shire parishioners? As one turns over the leaves of any collection of old love songs, many another flower-like name "pleads against obliv- ion," surely not in vain; for in nothing is the preservative magic of words more strikingly illustrated than the manner in which, by little more than the musical mention of a name, they contrive to make it live for us with a creative sug- gestiveness. All that is needed is a name — not necessarily a beautiful one — - and a lyrical word or two, a brief rhythm sincerely accented with feeling, enough stalk, so to speak, to carry the flower, and we have evoked for us as by enchant- ment an undying face of legend. Such is old Skelton's "merry Mar- garet": . . . merry Margaret As midsummer flower. OF THE POETS Gentle as falcon. Or hawk on the tower. Such too is Campion's Amarillis I care not for these ladies. That must be wooed and prayed: Give me kind AmarUIis, The wanton country maid. Such sometimes even is the power of the mere title of a poem, as Lovelace's "To Lucasta on going to the wars" or Cleveland's "On Phyllis — Walking be- fore Sunrise." Such, to come to later times, is Lamb's magic with "When maidens such as Hester die" or Landor's immortalizing sigh over Rose Aylmer. Alfred deMusset and Rossetti — with those names that are "five sweet symphonies" — employ this gift with charming results. All that seems to be necessary is for the poet to love the name enough and to speak it, or sing it, or sigh it, as though he loved it, to carve it like Rosalind's on some tree in the forest, and the miracle f , LEGENDARY LADIES : is done. Next to nothing need be said, except her name, called out on that wind of Time that blows so many beautiful names about the world. Not idly, there- fore, have the poets claimed to set the names of their beloved among the stars. Their lightest song has proved their power >* to keep their word, and only those women are forgotten who have been as unfor- tunate as she of whom it was said — She had no poet — and she died. "^HEIR far-reaching political conse- quences have given a prominence ,1 to two of Queen Mary's love affairs out of proportion to their gen- uine romantic qualities. Rizzio and the blood-stained floor at Holyrood, Both- well and the Casket Letters, have occu- pied our imaginations in the forefront of the story, to the semi-oblivion of other names more truly deserving the tragic laurel which was Mary's one invariable gift to her lovers; the name of men who loved her with no arriere pensee of selfish ambition, men whose eyes were less on her crown than on her fair disastrous face, glorious madmen who loved that face as men love the moon, fated servitors of Za belle dame sans merci. Modern historical criticism has sadly . V tarnished the Rizzio and Bothwell legends. Nowadays we think less of the decorative Italian artist and his chamber-music, and more of the rather elderly, somewhat fattish, Italian sec- retary, deep in political intrigue and perilous foreign correspondence, objec- tionably familiar in manner with his royal mistress, and exasperatingly up- start in his general ways. We have rather ceased, I think, to blame Darnley for his murder, and begin to wonder that he was let live so long. As to Both- well, seeing so clearly the cold self- seeking and brutal commonness of the man, we have lost all patience with Mary for wrecking her fortunes on so coarse a bully; and her disordered infatuation seems to belong less to poetry than to disiagreeable pathology. Rizzio and Bothwell are only romantic by position, by their relation to the dramatic dispo- sition of events, and by association with the romantic personality of Mary, as vulgar objects grow poetic in the moon- light. Those other wearers of Mary's PIERRE CHASTELARD J 211 tragic laurel, however, are essentially romantic, by the fire and the purity of their devotion, as well. Such was that young Lord John Gor- don who was to be the first, literally, to lose his head over Mary soon after her arrival in Scotland. There were many to say that she had smiled over-kindly on the handsome youth, with such potent magic indeed that, when she had com- mitted him to Edinburgh castle, for his truculent swordsmanship in the city streets, he had not only broken his word, but dared to gather his clansmen about him and plan her abduction. For this he was to mount the scaffold, and Mary, not without tears, but without mercy, was to see him die. With the dream still in his eyes, he called to her, before the ax fell: "Most lovely but most cruel of her sex!" Happier than he, perhaps the happi- est of all Mary's minor lovers, was that young George Douglas, the gallant lad of eighteen who managed her escape from Lochleven Castle. Him she had even MARY STUART ! S expressed a wish to marry. She had said so frankly to the Regent Murray on one of his visits to his precarious prisoner, young George being the Regent's brother, and at that time an inmate of the castle, his mother Lady Douglas and another brother. Sir William Douglas, being the queen's jailers. The immedi- ate result of Mary's frankness was to banish George Douglas from the castle; only, however, that he should the more actively plan Mary's escape. A few weeks later it was his loving arms that carried his queen ashore from the dark- ling boat and set her on his waiting horse — proud and happy George Douglas, riding by her side through the rushing night. Nearly twenty years later another gallant moth was to hurl himself into the magic dazzle, young English Anthony Babington, who was found ready to murder his queen for Mary's sake, and so passes in his dream to Tower Hill. And to these might be added other names, humbler lovers still, who had been eager to dare all and lose all for PIERRE CHASTELARD 213 a smile from those strange eyes, a touch of that too thoughtlessly caressing hand. Ah! those soft bird-like ways of hers, those artless arts of casual tenderness so easy to mistake, that made all her slaves and drove some mad. I know how folk would gibe If one of us pushed courtesy so far, says one of her four "Maries," in Swinburne's honied play, striving to tell where lay her mistress's all-conquer- ing charm. She has always loved love's fashions well; you wot, The marshal, head friend of this Chastelard's, She used to talk with ere he brought her here. And sow their talk with little kisses thick As roses iu rose-harvest. For, myself, I cannot see which side of her that lurks Which snares iu such wise all the sense of men; What special beauty, subtle as man's eye And tender as the inside of the eyelid is. There grows about her. So Mary Hamilton, but Mary Carmi- chael deems it is he: h M 214 MARY STUART In talking — the rare tender little laugh — The pitiful sweet sound like a bird's sigh When her voice breaks; her talking does it all. But Mary Seyton will have it that the charm is in her eyes: I say, her eyes with those clear perfect brows: It is the playing of those eyelashes, The lure of amorous looks as sad as love. Plucks all souls toward her like a net. So a poet strives to formulate a fasci- nation which Mary's portraits only hint at, but fall short of conveying; a gift of personal enchantment to which even her enemies bore witness, but which, while all could praise, none could with exactness analyze. After naming this feature and that characteristic, the last secret still escapes them; as perhaps it always does in the beauty that has done the most divine damage in the world — for the essence of a spell is its mystery, and wizardry knows no why or where- fore. Plain miracle is alike the only explanation of a rose or of a "tragic Mary," and plain madness is perhaps \ PIERRE CHASTELARD the most logical worship of such beauty. Divine beauty, divine madness, divine death! Such, at all events, would seem to have been the desperate logic of that other quite unpolitic lover of the queen, Pierre Boscobel de Chastelard, gentle- man of Dauphine, descendant of Bayard, and poet of the Pleiade. Outside Mr. Swinburne's noble tragedy, Chastelard's divine madness, his really fine frenzy, has not, it seems to me, received its fair due at the hands of romance, not to speak of history. His- tory indeed has treated Chastelard as a crazy fribble, much in the spirit of Hamlet's manner towards Osric: "Dost know this water-fly?" — and romance has seemed scarcely aware of his existence. The egregious S. W. H. Ireland, of the famous "Ireland forgeries," attempted, in Chastelard's name, one more mysti- fication of the guileless public of 1805 with a nauseous confection entitled Effu- sions of Love from Chatelar to Mary Queen of Scotland — Translated from a Gallic manuscript in the Scotch College at Paris. Interspersed with songs, sonnets, and notes explanatory — hy the Trans- lator. One would need the command of that explosively polysyllabic literary Billingsgate, which Swinburne employed in a very ecstasy of vituperative mud- throwing, to characterize the unimagi- nable silliness of Ireland's production. Merely as a literary curiosity, one may quote a typical passage — the highfalutin of a "man of feeling" in 1805. Chatelar, so called, is represented as having stolen Mary's rosary. These are his sublime raptures over his treasure: "This rosary was the theft of love — surely 'tis forgiven. I stole the secret moment, and in the absence of my love, I made myself possessor of these beads unseen. Heavenly powers! they were Mary's, her ivory fingers with love- thrilling touch, have pressed these little amber studs! her lips! love, love, om- niscient love! her lips too have kissed them! Come, come to mine — thus — and thus — and thus I scent their fra- grance, and I suck their sweets! Oh! In \ 217 balmy essence! nectareous juice! tinged with the vermeil dye of those moist rubies, which, moving, utter dulcet mu- sic, and dispense around the violet's rich perfume. O mouth more exquisite than fragrant May! more luscious than the honey bee's rich store! Thus, thus, I taste thee!" Even Mr. Maurice Hewlett, friendly by nature to euphuistic forms of gal- lantry, declines the opportunity, in his brilliant The Queen's Quair, to give poor Chastelard a chance with posterity; though he admits that he died like a gentleman, which, after all, is an epitaph worth dying for. A glittering gentleman of France, the perfection, the coxcombical exaggeration of the sworded butterfly type characteristic of the Renaissance, Chastelard undoubtedly was; one whose fine clothes and posturing elegancies of speech and manners, all the satin and sugar and general high-flown dandyism of him, masked the genuine virility and strength of soul not infrequently to be found beneath such externals in those / L MARY STUART . , < days, when life, so stern at core, went so often in such fantastic masquerade. Surely to those sour Scotch eyes that so grimly watched the landing of all those "French popinjays," that heart- sick misty morning of Mary's first arrival at Leith, he may well have seemed the very personification of those "Baby- lonian" iniquities so unpleasing to the godly Mr. Knox, have seemed indeed the very prince of that papistical company of "skippers and dancers and dalliers with dames." Let us pause a moment to indulge our modern sympathy — a sympathy which history has insufficiently bestowed — with that shivering chap-fallen company of exquisites new come from singing France over the weary sea, so laughably out of place, so absurdly misunderstood in this land of inhospitable rock and dripping mist, prison-like houses, funereal cos- tumes, raw-bones, sour faces, and harsh outlandish speech. Well might the little queen cry herself to sleep, looking her last, her literal last, poor Mary, on \ \ laughing France, — "Farewell, beloved France! I shall never, never see you more!" — as movingly described Brantome, who was one of the many illustrious French "dancing-masters" — otherwise the fine flower of the chivalry and culture of France — that formed Mary's brilliant suite. No less than three of her uncles of the redoubtable house of Guise, the Due d'Aumale, the Marquis d' Elboeuf , and the Grand Prior, were of this company preposterously regarded by these supercilious hyper- borean saints as though they were a troupe of strolling players; not to speak of some six-score noble French gentle- men, amongst them the chief ornaments of the court of the Louvre, and that "garden of girls," the four Maries, her immortal maids of honor. To our eyes that little fleet riding at anchor in the fog and drizzle of Leith harbor, with its strange foreign sailors and its gay-gar- mented courtly folk, trying to keep up their spirits with half -frightened laughter, — a snatch of flowery song and a touched MARY STUART 'r S 220 lute maybe here and there, to deepen the disapproving gaze of Scotch fish- wives and glooming zealots — seems a veritable argosy of romance; so much of vivid, forceful, fated personality lay packed between its decks, so much bril- liant human story, so much of the beauti- ful tragic stuff of life; strong men, fair faces, fluttering hearts, and plotting and dreaming brains. One likes to think too of the priests with their sacred ves- sels — be sure the grim folk ashore thought of little but that! Mr, Knox's "idol of the mass" — the musicians with their delicate old-world instruments, their lutes and viols, their "citherns and citoles"; and a specially precious charge is in the keeping of grave Servais de Conde — no less than the library of the learned young queen. That library itself was to have a romantic history, probably the first library of any account, and surely of belles-lettres, ever housed in Scotland. An uncouth catalogue made by no sympathetic hand, years after, when Mary had fled to England, still 221 exists, and has been piously edited and annotated by a modern bibliophile. It was a delightfully varied collection, con- centrating every form of "sweet learning" dear to the Renaissance. Though "the Decameron of Bocas" was there, and many a quaint Arthurian romance, "The First Bulk of Amades of Gaule," "Two Volumes of Lancilot de Laik," "The First Buik of RoUand Amoreuse," and so forth; and though the "gay science" of the fashionable Ronsardist poetry is well represented, Pontus de Tyard with his "Errores Amoreuses," Du Bellay, and the master Ronsard himself — her own familiar friend — with an "Art Poetik in French, " the library was by no means a frivolous one. "Vergilius" was there, and "The First Volume of Horos," likewise "Herodote," "The Symposie of Plato," and Marcus Aurelius in Italian; and there were weighty theological treatises which the Scotch cataloguer must have taken up with a pair of tongs, such as "Ane Treatie of the Premicie of the Peap" and "The Answer of Johnne \ L. MARY STUART Calvynis Epistle," together with volume which, doubtless, he approved, a translation of the Psalms by her Latin Master, George Buchanan. Books of hunting, the game of chess, and "Thre Buikis of Musik" (perhaps Rizzio's) are found side by side with Saint Augustine and lives of the saints. And there is one book absurdly catalogued as "Frenche Sonnattis in Writt," which may well have been a manuscript volume of Chaste- lard's own poems. Such were the vol- umes that M. Servais de Conde had in keeping between decks, in fair bindings — Mary had probably caught a taste for fine bindings from Diane de Poictiers — blazoned with her arms and those of her dead boy-king Francis, for whom her tears were scarcely yet dried and whom she had mourned in pretty pathetic verses of her own: Si en quelque sejour, Soit en Bois ou en Free, Soit pour I'aube du jour, Ou soit pour la vespree. Sans cesse mon cceur sent Le regret d'un absent. PIERRE CEASTELARD 22a Brantome tells us that during the voyage the gallant Chastelard had not feared to rally the queen on her obstinate widowhood, and had written her a sonnet "tres bien faict" in Italian, beginning che giova posseder cittadi e regni, of which the substance was: "Of what use is it to possess widespreading domains, cities, crowns, and bowing people, to be admired, respected, feared and gazed at, and yet sleep alone in glacial widow- hood ? " Brantome evidently thought no little of Chastelard as a poet. " He made many other very beautiful rhymes," he says, " which I have read in his own handwriting, but they have never been printed, so far as I have seen." He adds that the queen, "who herself loved letters, and particularly rhymes, and sometimes made pretty ones her- self," was much pleased with Chastelard's poetry, and even wrote back verses in reply, generally "making him good cheer and entertaining him." Brantome has this further praise of Chastelard. " The Lord Chastelard," he says, " was a knight M of polished manners, as good a swords- man as he was good at letters. He was very adroit with arms, and was expert in all manly sports and exercises, such as fencing, tennis, jumping and dancing. In short, he was a very accomplished gentleman; and in spirit he was no less charming, he talked well, and wrote even better, and as well even in rhyme as any gentleman of France, making very sweet and graceful poetry with ease." Chastelard's wit and gay spirits had evidently been very welcome to Mary on that voyage dolorous, to the cus- tomary hardships of which had been added the fear of capture by Elizabeth's warships, and Brant6me records one high-flown conceit of his — "ce gentil mot" — much, one can imagine, in his usual dandiacal manner. As, one even- ing, the sailors were lighting the ship's lanterns, the voice of Chastelard was heard declaring that there was no need of lantern or flambeau to light up the sea, for the beautiful eyes of the queen were bright enough to illuminate, with PIERRE CHASTELARD 225 J; their lovely fires, the wide waters and gave all the light he needed to see by. There were other poets aboard to say similar pretty things to the queen — Chastelard's own patron, M. d'Anville, of the great house of Montmorenci for one — and then we hear too of five "violars" to make music. So, doubt- less, these poor French butterflies con- trived to keep up a certain gaiety on the voyage, and the fog was interpreted into a providence as hiding them from the sea-dogs of Elizabeth. How Knox inter- preted that fog it is interesting to recall. "The very face of the heavens," he says, "the time of her arrival, did mani- festly speak what comfort was brought unto this country with her, to wit, sorrow, darkness, dolor, and all impiety; for, in the memory of man, that day of the year, was never seen a more dolorous face of the heaven than was at her arrival, which two days after did so continue. . . . That fore-warning gave God unto us, but, alas, the most part were blind." So did the genial John read the celestial 226 MARY STUART signs, and such in the main was the mood of welcome awaiting Mary and her "dames, damoisellis, and maidinnis"; though it is recorded that a certain human element in the sermon-ridden population did its poor best to provide a serenade for the queen beneath her palace win- dows. The graceful arts, however, might well be a little rusty in a city where a poor rascal had recently been hung for "making a Robin Hood" (a sort of merry England carnival mummery), and though John Knox speaks highly of the enter- tainment — "a company," he says, "of most honest men with instruments of music, and with musicians, gave salu- tations at her chamber window" — Mary and her courtiers seem to have held their ears. "There came under her window," writes Brantome, "five or six hundred ragamufiins of that town, who gave her a concert of the vilest fiddles and little rebecs, which are as bad as they can be in that country, and accompanied them with singing of psalms, but so wretchedly out of tune that nothing could be worse. ^ }) Ah! what melody it was! lullaby for the night!" Mary, however, accepted the good intentions and professed herself pleased; and, poor soul, the crudest attempt at anything so human as music may well have been grateful to her in a people who, she was soon to find, were dourly on the watch to misinterpret the most innocent gaiety as "French" depravity. Alas! for the joyeusete, in which, she wailed, she had been brought up; "so termed she," Knox grimly explains, "her dancing, and other things thereto belonging." There was, however, a wistful section of society in kirk-ridden Edinburgh to whom Mary's advent must have come Uke a burst of sunshine, youthful lords and ladies to whom the queen's "French fiUokes and fiddlers" were anything but anathema; and one can imagine that the sojourn of Mary's little French court at Holyrood, with its consequent round of festivities, was an oasis of natural joy in their bleak sermon-charged atmosphere. Strange that such found more fun I i L MARY STUART fiddling and flinging than in reading or hearing of God's most blessed word; and fiddlers and flatterers more precious in their eyes than men of wisdom and gravity." Youthful levity incomprehen- sible to Knox and other "sober men," whose "wholesome admonition" young Edinburgh, oddly enough, found far less attractive. In the center of this godless gaiety, one of the most brilliant figures was our Chastelard, whose gifts and graces had evidently by this time, from the report of various witnesses, made him some- what too conspicuously persona grata with the heedlessly demonstrative queen. Mary's indiscreet complaisance seems to have turned the head of the inflammable poet, who henceforth made no secret of his passion for the queen. No doubt she discounted his raptures as the euphu- istic exaggeration which poets were privi- leged to employ towards noble ladies at that period, but Chastelard was to prove them all too tragically, however idiotic- ally, sincere. When the time came for >^ \l Hi I PIERRE CHASTELARD the French visitors to return home, Chastelard, with lyrical reluctance, ac- companied his patron, the Marechal d'Anville; but, before very long, he had found an excuse to be back in Scotland once more. His family were Huguenot, but he had been brought up by the Montmorencis, and a religious war break- ing out at this time, Chastelard escaped from the dilemma of having to choose sides between his co-religionists and his patrons by gaining permission for this timely absence in Scotland. Meanwhile, he had not ceased to proclaim his hope- less love for the queen in open talk as well as sugared sonnets, and, as he passed through London on his way north, he was coxcomb enough to boast that he was going to Scotland "to see his lady love." Mary seems to have received him with a graciousness he was all too ready to misunderstand. "He is well entertained, and hath great confidence with the Queen," wrote Randolph, the English ambassador, to Cecil, "riding upon the sorrel gelding that my Lord Robert (Stuart) gave her grace." Poli- ticians had their eye on the affair, as we shall presently see, and there were many to censure "the over-great famil- iarity that any such personage (as the Queen) showeth to so unworthy a creature and abject a varlet." We are told that he had on his first audience presented Mary with "a book of his own making written in metre." This is probably those "Frenche Sonnattis in Writt" cata- logued in Mary's library at Holyrood. This book is no longer in existence, and little or nothing of Chastelard's poetry seems to have found its way into print. Some few verses are to be found in Le Laboureur's "Additions" to Castelnau's "Memoirs," Castelnau having been one, not the least brilliant, of Mary's escort to Scotland. Here are the first and last verses of a lament which may well have been written with the thought of Mary: Adieu, prez monts et plalnes, Rochers, forets et bois, Ruisseaux, fleuves, fontaines, Ou perdre je m'en vois: vl PIERRE CHASTELA. 231 D'une plainte incertaine De sanglots toute plaine, Je veux chanter La miserable peine Qui me fait lamenter. Ces buissons et ces arbres Qui sont autour de moy, Cest roehers et ces marbres Scavent bien mon esmoy; Bref, rien de la nature, N'ignore la blessure, Fors seulement Toys, qui prends nourriture En mon cruel tourment. J Chastelard was doubtless all the more welcome at court for being Mary's one remaining link with that joyeusete of the Louvre forever lost to her, and at all events there seems to have been more godless joyeusete at Holyrood than ever during this winter of his return in 1562, and John Knox is not the only authority for the statement that Mary's manners towards the infatuated poet were of a perilous familiarity and warmth. John Knox, however, is always so MARY STUART piquantly trenchant in his disapproval that he becomes attractive to quote by his very vehemence. "Amongst the minions of the court," he says, "there was one named Monsieur Chatelet, a Frenchman, that at that time passed all others in credit with the queen. In dancing of the purpose — so term they that dance, in the which man and woman talketh secretly; wise men would judge such fashions more like the bordell than to the comeliness of honest women. In this dance, the queen chose Chatelet, and Chatelet took the queen, for he had the best dress. All the winter Chatelet was so familiar in the queen's cabinet, early and late, that scarcely could any of the nobility have access unto her. The queen would lie upon Chatelet's shoulder, and sometimes privily would steal a kiss of his neck," "And all this," Knox adds with a fine snort, so to say, of indignant scorn "was honest enough; for it was the gentle entreatment of a stranger." Whether or not these dances, of which Knox has so much to say, really passed q \l PIERRE CHASTELARD J; beyond decorum is a doubtful question, but we may be very sure that a very little levity would go a long way with the great reformer, better versed in the wrath to come than in the pleasure-fashions of the moment; and it is probable that Mrs. Oliphant comes near the truth when she says, commenting on this passage: "Dancing was in those days the most decorous of performances: but if Mary had been proved to have danced a stately 'pas seul' in a minuet, it was to Knox, who knew no better, as if she had indulged in the wildest bobbing of a country fair — nay, he would probably have thought the high-skipping rural performance by far the most innocent of the two." Poor Mary's passion for dancing might almost be said to be a matter of inter- national politics in those days. Eliza- beth, who was fond of dancing herself and jealous of Mary's much bruited charms and accomplishments, had asked the Scotch ambassador Melville's opinion as to which was the better dancer, herself r\ MARY STUART or Mary. Melville had answered, with Scotch caution, that they danced differ- ently. "The queen" Mary, he said, "danced not so high and disposedly" as Elizabeth did. Elizabeth too had asked if "his mistress played well." "Reason- ably, as a queen," had been his answer. Though Knox and other such severe onlookers doubtless exaggerated Mary's levity, and unjustly, or ignorantly, put the worst construction upon it, there seems to be no question that her "enter- tainment" of Chastelard was such as a man wildly in love might too easily mis- understand and presume upon, though, had his eyes been less drugged, he might have noted that, in her moods of affec- tionate expansion, such favors as she showed him were somewhat indiscrim- inately lavished on all who pleased her, her young pages and her maids of honor alike. Mary too was unquestionably a born coquette, was avid of admiration, and unhappy unless she had everyone around her in love with her, unmindful of consequences. Chastelard, who had >^ known her at the court of France, should have been sufficiently forewarned against her "strange soft ways; " but he had "kissed the sea-witch on her eyes," "La belle dame sans merci" had him in thrall, and he was determined to win all or lose all on one desperate cast. What Knox sarcastically calls Mary's "gentle entreatment of a stranger" had wrought such madness in him that, on the night of February 12, 1562, while Mary was in close conference with her ministers Murray and Lethington, he secreted him- self, fully armed with sword and dagger, in the queen's bedchamber. There, be- fore the queen's retiring, he was dis- covered by her maids, who said nothing of his intrusion until the morning. When Mary heard of it, she angrily ordered him from her presence, but apparently she must have consented to overlook his offense, for he was allowed to follow the court when, later in the day, it removed from Holyrood to Saint An- drews. Alas! Mary's clemency seems to have further misled the love-crazed T Ti poet, for on the following night he repeated the same egregious offense. This time it was not to be overlooked, for the queen's cries of alarm brought her attendants, followed presently by the grim Earl of Murray, all too glad, doubt- less, in his heart, to have such colorable matter against the queen, who had cried out on him to plunge his dagger in the intruder. But, according to Knox, his friend Murray was too God-fearing a man for such summary work. He promised that Chastelard should be brought to trial instead, and so the doomed poet, putting a gallant face on his tragic dilemma, was removed by the guards. Knox seems to have a sort of pity for "poor Chatelet," as he calls him; but perhaps his intention is rather to point his moral against the queen, of whose levity, he hints, the poet was made the victim. He represents Murray as falling on his knees before Mary, and the scene proceeds in this fashion: 'Madam, I beseech your grace, cause me not to take the blood of this man PIERRE CHASTELARD 237 p J; upon me; your grace has entreated him so familiarly before, that ye have offended all your nobility; and now if he shall be secretly slain at your own command- ment, what shall the world judge of it? I shall bring him to the presence of justice, and let him suffer by law accord- ing to his deserving.' 'O,' said the queen, 'ye will never let him speak?' 'I shall do,' said he, 'madam, what in me lieth to save your honor.'" Chastelard's shrift was short. This is Knox's account of the end: "Poor Chatelet was brought back from King- horn to St. Andrews, examined, put to an assize, and so beheaded the 22nd of February, 1562. He begged license to write to France the cause of his death, 'which,' said he, in his tongue, was 'Pour etre trouve en lieu trop suspect'; that is, 'Because I was found in a place too much suspected.' At the place of execution, when he saw that there was no remedy but death, he made a godly confession, and granted, that his declining from the truth of God, and following of MARY STUART . <. vanity and impiety, was justly recom- pensed upon him. But in the end he concluded, looking unto the heavens, with these words, 'O cruelle dame!' that is, 'cruel mistress.' What that complaint imported, lovers may divine." "And so," concludes Knox, with a Puri- tanical snuffle of satisfaction and a final fling at the queen, "received Chatelet the reward of his dancing; for he lacked his head, that his tongue should not utter the secrets of our queen. 'Deliver us, O Lord, from the rage of such inordinate rulers.'" Strange indeed as it seems to our modern notions, Mary was present at Chastelard's execution — the second lover she has seen die within six months for her sake. "Most lovely, but most cruel of her sex," had been Lord John Gordon's last cry to her, only a short while before, and now Chastelard takes farewell of her from the same scafifold in almost identical words: "Adieu to thee so beautiful and so cruel — who kills me, and yet whom I shall never PIERRE CBASTELARD 239 cease to love." So runs one version, slightly elaborating on Knox, as also on Brantome, who was also present at the execution, and supplements, or rather corrects, Knox's account of Chastelard's good end with a picturesque and appro- priate variant. According to him it was not the consolations of religion that Chastelard found at the end, but the consolation of poetry, with a volume of Ronsard for his breviary. "Executed," says Brant6me, "for his presumption, and not for any crime (the presumption of Phaeton), he stood on the scaffold with the hymns of Ronsard in his hand, and for his eternal consolation, he read through the Hymn of Death, which is very well made, and very suitable to bring peace to the dying, seeking the support of no other spiritual book, nor any minister or confessor. Coming to an end of his reading, he turned towards the place where he believed the queen to be, and cried aloud, 'Adieu, most beautiful and most cruel princess in the world!' And then, very calmly offering H MARY STUART his neck to the executioner, he allowed himself to be dispatched with the utmost ease." Years after, when Mary herself had come to the block at Fotheringay, there were those who had recalled Chastelard's last words and Mary's cruelty in thus allowing him to die. Brantome, however, would justify the queen against such censure. " Some," he says, " have wished to discover why he had called her so cruel — was it because she had had no pity on his love — or not pity on his life? But how was it possible to have shown that last? If, after her first pardon, she had pardoned him still a second time, she would have been entirely compromised; and so to save her honor, it was necessary that the law should take its course." There, one cannot but feel, speaks the man of sense, as well as the man of the world. Chastelard, as Brantome had said, had played at Phaeton and must take the consequences; as it must be admitted he did with cour- age and dignity and with a proper sense PIERRE CHASTELARD of that dramatic demanded. There were those who hinted, and indeed said, what one cannot beheve, nay! will not even think of believing, that there was political method in Chas- telard's madness, and that his tragic escapade was a deliberate affront put upon the queen by her Huguenot enemies in France, with a view to fouling her good name with Philip of Spain, whose son was looked upon at that time as her possible husband. It is possible, indeed, that such enemies may, without his sus- picion of their motives, have inflamed Chastelard's passion and worked on his vanity for such hidden ends, but, tragic fool as Chastelard undoubtedly was, the whole picture we get of him forbids any such mean shadow upon his splen- did folly. A glorious and graceful fool, maybe, but surely no worse than that; and one cannot but feel that the man who loved Mary so wildly that he was willing to give his life for a kiss compares well, after all, with a coarse, rough-riding Bothwell whose so-called love was not for Mary, but her throne. Standing there on his scaffold, with that volume of Ronsard in his hand, and his eyes with their last long look seeking his queen, surely he cuts no such sorry fig- ure, after all, and deserves his "place in the story." ROM time to time there is revived H a very ancient controversy, old as that of light and darkness. Certain prophets of evil toll the passing bell of blonde beauty and foresee its ulti- mate eclipse in a night of raven locks and coal-black eyes. This was predicted some fourteen years ago by Henry T. Finck, in his treatise on "Romantic Love and Personal Beauty," wherein he saw, so to speak, the finish of the last blonde in a dime museum. With Mr. Finck, it is the Spanish beauty first, and the rest nowhere. His passion for "the ladies of Cadiz" equals Lord Byron's, and he .m^. 244 writes as if inspired by a love-potion brewed by one of those Andalusian bru- nettes, who, to his mind, prefigure "the perfected woman of the millennium." "Who round the North for paler dames would sfeek?" he quotes, contemptuously; and that his is no hasty conclusion, five hundred odd, closely printed pages of erudition on his pleasant and witty sub- ject bear witness. The brunettes may rejoice in so well- equipped a champion; but, doughty as Mr. Finck is, the blondes — need one say it? — are no less well defended. As a matter of fact, they seem to have had it pretty much their own way in litera- ture, from the time of Eve, of whose blondness Milton seems to have had no doubt. He says that she — As a veil, down to the slender waist Her unadorned golden tresses wore Dishevel'd, but in wanton ringlets waved. As the vine curls her tendrils. Adam's legendary first wife, Lilith, 'the witch he loved before the gift of EST-ELLE BLONDE? 245 Eve," seems to have been of the same complexion, if we may trust Rossetti, who seems to have known more about her than any other poet, and who tells us that "her enchanted hair was the first gold." The same poet, in another place, sings of — Youth with still some single golden hair Unto his shoulder clinging. Yes, that famous authority. Youth, is mostly "solid" for blondes — the youth of the world and the youth of the indi- vidual alike. One might venture, I think, on the dictum that a man's first love is always blonde, but his last love brunette. Dante speaks of the blonde tresses of Beatrice, and is not Venus herself always Venus aurea, "the golden Aphrodite".'' Ceres, the bounteous earth-mother, might almost be called the mother of blondes, whereas brunettes might unkindly be said to trace their descent from her daughter, Proserpine, the unhappy queen of Pluto's realm. So Mr. Finck might say; but surely not I. I have not the temerity 7 J . 1 to take sides in so dangerous an encoun- ter. Safer to be on both sides at once, like the witty Frenchman who sang: Est-elle brune? Est-elle blonde? Rien ne I'egale dans ce monde, Rien n'egale aussi mon amour; Et, sans etre inconstant, j'ai la bonne fortune D'etre amant en un m^me jour Et d'une belle blonde, et d'une belle brune. I have just come upon the above stanza in a dehghtful treatise which I have un- earthed in a desultory ramble round my shelves, dipping into this volume and that in search of light on this great sub- ject; one of those delicately ordered dis- quisitions made only in France on the blonde beauties of the Venetian school of painting — "Les Femmes Blondes, selon les Peintres de VEcole de Venise." The anonymous writers — "deux Vene- tiens" they call themselves — have made the masterpieces of Venetian painting the appropriate peg on which to hang various charming learning in celebration of blonde beauty, and they supplement EST-ELLE BLONDEf their essay with a fragrant garland of poetry in praise of blonde womanhood, from Hesiod to Sainte-Beuve — "La Guirlande Poetique des Femmes Blondes." They add a charming bundle of quaint "recettes," collected from old Italian sources, recipes for the making of what we should nowadays call "peroxide blondes" — a process which sounds ever so much prettier and more respectable as they used to say it in Latin, ad faci- endum capillos aureos. We shall help ourselves to the learning of our two Venetians from time to time, as we go on; but is not the very existence of such a treatise, to start with, curiously significant of the seriousness with which this old warfare of blonde versus brunette has been waged? Certainly it is a well- foughten field, and, trivial as at first sight the dispute may seem, there can be no question that it has the mysterious depth and bitterness of a natural enmity. From time immemorial, blondes and brunettes have cordially despised and hated each other; and lovers of beauty, according / ii^ , i to unexplained natural affinities, have taken sides, Guelf and Ghibelline, in this world-old struggle. Color, anyhow, is a mystery. Scien- tists do not pretend — or only pretend — to explain it. That it has some pro- found meaning hidden away in the depth of things, and that differences of color stand for spiritual differences correspond- ingly marked or subtle, no sensitive person doubts. There are, as we know, highly gifted beings who profess to see the colors of the soul. Indeed, there is a whole mystic literature on the subject worthy the attention of the curious. From the beginning, mankind seems to have had a marked preference for blonde things, a sense of security in their pres- ence, a feeling that their blondness stood for a central beneficence and innocence in their nature; whereas darkness of hue has been similarly suspect as standing for hidden and possibly evil qualities and powers. It is not, I think, too fantastic to see in this man's primitive fear of the dark, and to trace the universal preference for blonde wigs in artificial periods to his primitive worship of the sun. The deities to which, in the terrifying mystery of his childhood, he has turned for protection have usually been blonde, as have most of those gracious personifi- cations which embodied his notions of unseen beneficent influences. Apollo in the south and Balder in the north were both golden-haired gods; so was Diony- sos, "the spirit of fire and dew, alive, and leaping in a thousand vines." Angels and saviors of the world have usually been imagined as blonde. Man's most appeal- ing symbol of divine love, the Madonna, from Raphael to Rossetti, comes to us in a halo of her own golden hair. Athena is always "the gray-eyed"; Aurora, Flora, Pomona, and the Graces are all blondes. The brunettes, however, may claim Juno, the most royal lady of Olympus, for their own, as also, it is not without significance to note, the nine Muses. The mysterious Hecate, too, is theirs, and all sinister, beautiful deities of magic arts and tragic dooms. The Furies were brunettes, and likewise the Fates; but, on the other hand, the Norns were gray- eyed, and the Valkyries, "the choosers of the slain," were redoubtable blondes, with their streaming, blood-stained locks of northern gold. It is impossible to imagine Cupid with black hair and olive skin, and his beloved Psyche was doubt- less as blonde as a ray of sunshine playing amid her tendriled curls. , Then again, so many natural things useful to and dear to man are blonde, such as honey, and corn, and oil, springing grass, and running water, and the shelter- ing foliage of trees, with their golden fruits. The flowers man loves best are blue or white; and, of the birds, is not the soul a white bird, and the bluebird man's symbol of happiness.'' Dark-hued flowers bring with them a certain fear, such as the deadly nightshade — the belladonna of brunette beauty — or they suggest sorrow. Black plumage always marks the bird of ill omen; though we may parenthesize in passing that it is persons of dark complexion who are in demand to bring good luck on such occasions as New Year's Eve. Money, it is perhaps not impertinent to observe, is a blonde commodity; though Sparta, I believe, had an iron coinage. And, not inappropriately, the old school- history legend of Gregory the Great and the English captives comes to one's mind. "From what country do these slaves come?" he had asked the trader, as he had noted with admiration the white bodies, the fair faces, the golden hair, of some youths ranged for sale in the mar- ket-place. "They are English, Angles!" was the answer. "Not Angles, but angels, with faces so angel-like," the great pope smilingly retorted, and his pious pun represents the immemorial attitude of humanity toward blondes. They look so like angels! How far history bears out this instinc- tive sentiment we shall have occasion to inquire, but we may remark in passing that one of the most illustrious of beauti- ful blondes was Lucrezia Borgia. There I < k EST-ELLE BRUNE? is extant a dazzling description of her as she drew all eyes on one of her glittering progresses through Italy; and record is made of her stopping at Imola, that she might wash her hair, that golden hair which she wore sometimes in a coif of golden net sown with jewels and tied with a black ribbon, while at other times she rode horseback, with it streaming loose across her glorious shoulders. A propos this, our two Venetians above mentioned tell us that, in the sixteenth century, the roofs of houses in Venice were crowned with little wooden erections, shaped Belvidere fashion, where the Vene- tian ladies used to sit the day long with their beautiful tresses spread out in the sun. They more than hint, however, that the glitter of these tresses might be de- scribed, in Swinburne's phrase, as "not golden, but gilded"; and this, indeed, will be a fitting place to quote one of those quaint Venetian recipes for the guidance of the feminine alchemist: Take an ounce and a half of lupins, one of myrrh, half an ounce of larkspur, half an ounce of dry lees of white wine; steep the whole in water which you have made to boil with red-hot cinders of the vine. Leave it to steep all night, and, the follow morning, bathe your hair in it. You wiU thus obtain tresses so blonde that golden thread will be put to shame. The virtue of lupins, for this object, is marvelous, and there comes to mind another means no less perfect. When, in the spring, the buds of the poplar first appear, and they begin to put forth those Hght shoots which will later become leaves, gather some of them, say about two ounces, and place them in eight or a dozen ounces of oil; heat them over the fire until they thicken; then expose in a phial in the sun. When used, in a very short time, from the effect of this oil, your hair will become very blonde and very beautiful. Were there space, I might also copy for the fair — or dark — reader particulars of the manner of making the face "as white as the albatross," or tell "how a certain balm makes the complexion whiter than snow." These delightful recipes, something like a hundred in number, sufficiently explain the disappointment of a certain gallant Abbe de.Bernis, who, about the time of the Revolution, made / 1 254 T EST-ELLE BRUNE? a pilgrimage to Venice in quest of the glorious blondes he had worshiped in Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese; not the red and white blondes of the north, as found in Germany, in Scandinavia, and, above all, in England, "that Eldo- rado of blondes, where the word 'fair' is a synonym for beautiful," but blondes, as Maurice Hewlett has since described them, "splendidly colored as a sunburnt nectarine, crowned with a mass of red- gold hair." Alas for the traveler's dreams — the women he saw in the streets were beautiful indeed, but black as crows! Was some caprice of nature, subsequent to the age of the great painters, respon- sible for this disappointment? Surely not, exclaim our two ingenious Venetians. The answer is in the writings of those old beauty doctors, and the disquieting con- clusion forced upon one is that beauty so victoriously golden has seldom been the unassisted creation of nature in any time or country, and that the preponderance of blonde beauty in all ages has been t E8T-ELLE BLONDEf rather one of the illusions of art than one of the eternal verities of ethnology. Theophile Gautier, it may be recalled, had a similar disillusionizing experience to that of the Abbe de Bernis. He gives the history of it in a short story, called, "The Fleece of Gold," in which you may read how a young French artist, surfeited with the brunette beauty of his own and other brunette lands, determined to go to Antwerp in quest of the blondes beloved by Rubens. "It is decided," he said to himself. "I will love a Fleming!" So he takes the diligence to Brussels, and, as soon as possible after his arrival, he posts himself in a spot suitable for observation, and scrutinizes the prome- nading fair. But, alas! "he met an incalculable number of negresses, mulat- tresses, quadroons, half-breeds, griffs, yel- low women, copper-colored, green women, women of the color of a boot-flap — but not a single blonde." In disgust, he determines to try Antwerp, but at first the like ill-success follows him, darting EST-ELLE BRUNEf from street to street, "seeking the blonde with an ardor worthy of the knights errant of old." At last — but how he came at last to discover his Gretchen the reader must find out for himself by read- ing the story. Suffice it that it ends with this dialogue: "Well!" said Gretchen, when he had finished his great picture of "Aphrodite rising from the sea," "are you satisfied with your model?" "When would you like to publish our banns?" was the painter's significant reply. If, then, such sleuth-hounds of femi- nine loveliness as the Abbe de Bernis and Theophile Gautier found the aurea puella so shy a quarry in the lands of Rubens and of Paul Veronese alike, are we not, as I said, forced to the conclusion that nature is by no means so blonde in her preference and productiveness as art has led us to suppose, and that her laws of "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" are rather on the side of the bru- nette. Mr. Finck has no doubt whatever as to this, and has ready to hand statistics on his side, as follows: EST-ELLE BLONDEr 257 Almost eleven million school children were ex- amined in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Belgium, and the results showed that Switzerland has only 11.10, Austria 19.79, and Germany 31.80 per cent, of pure blondes. Thus the very country which since the days of ancient Rome has been proverbially known as the home of yellow hair and blue eyes, has to-day only 32 pure blondes in a hundred; while the average of pure brunettes is already 14.05 per cent., and in some regions as high as 25 per cent. The 53.15 per cent, of the mixed type are evidently being slowly transformed into pure brunettes, thanks to intermarriages with neighbors of the dark variety. In England, Dr. Beddoe has collected a number of statistics which also bear out the theory that brunettes are gaining on blondes. Among 726 women examined, he found 369 brunettes and 357 blondes. Of the brunettes he found that 78.5 per cent, were married, while of the blondes only 68 per cent, were married. Thus it would seem that a brunette has ten chances of getting married in England to a blonde's nine. Hence Dr. Beddoe reasons that the English are becoming darker be- cause the men persist in selecting the darker- haired women as wives. Wigs, then, and peroxide would seem to be the explanation of the apparent predominance of blondes on our carbonif- "^ erous planet; but this fact, if it be a fact, impresses one with another — the curious observation that, whatever their com- plexion, the majority of women have either wished to be blonde, or that the prevailing taste of the world has preferred them to be so, or to seem so. To call a woman "dark" would seem often to have been considered by her as a term of re- proach. Says Phoebe, in "As You Like It": I have more cause to hate him than to love him; For what had he to do to chide at me? He said mine eyes were black and my hair black. And, now I am remembered, scorned at me. Even the beautiful Shulamite felt it necessary to explain that, though she was black, yet was she comely; and how tenderly a shepherd, in one of the idyls of Theocritus, consoles his love for being swarthy: They call thee a gipsy, gracious Bombyca, and lean and sunburnt. 'Tis only I that call thee honey-pale. Yea, and the violet is swart, and swart the lettered hyacinth, but yet these flowers are chosen the first in garlands. EST-ELLE BLONDE* 259 P All the same, if hair-dressers had been forced to exist on the manufacture of black wigs, the fraternity would hardly have been as prosperous as it has ever been. Surely, in classical days, it would have gone barefoot; for the manufacture of blonde wigs and the traffic in blonde hair was one of the great commercial industries of antiquity. The ghostly Ro- man ladies on the Pompeian frescoes all wear the same shade of yellow, and emperors and poets alike set the fashion for blonde hair, which the more luxurious were accustomed to powder with gold- dust. Nero's queen was blonde; blonde also was the Faustina of Marcus Aure- lius — With state of splendid hair that droops Each side, Faustine. The locks that Horace loved best to see bound up with elegant simplicity — simplex munditiis — were yellow. Those were Pyrrha's, but the tresses of his Phyllis and Chloe were of the same fash- ionable tint. Catullus has celebrated "the > ^ EST-ELLE BRUNE? yellow crown" of his Berenice, Propertius the like adornment of his Cynthia, and TibuUus also has sung to the same color. Homer's Helen was golden — not, one likes to think in her case, gilded — and the blondness of Virgil's Dido would seem to hint that iEneas had a preference for brunettes. In the days when the witty Apuleius, another philo-blonde, wrote his "Golden Ass," country maidens with blonde hair had literally, as Christina Rossetti says, "much gold upon their heads," for great ladies were eager to buy it up at good prices. In much later days, at Neris, a certain village in France, there used to be an annual fair, where the peasant girls came to barter their locks with enterpris- ing pedlers; and who has not agonized with Victor Hugo's poor Fantine! But need one say that the blondes did not have it quite all their own way with antiquity? If the brunettes were numeri- cally outclassed, yet it may be held that, in quality, they more than made good. Cleopatra, it will be remembered, did v! EST-ELLE BLONDE? not feel it necessary to wear a yellow wig, but, possibly in irony, loved to surround herself with blonde slaves. Zenobia, too, seems to have been imperiously raven- locked and black-eyed; and Sappho is no inconsiderable asset to the brunette side of the account. Swinburne sings of — The small dark body's Lesbian loveliness That held the fire eternal. If, as one of her editors suggests, one may accept an alternative reading of the phrase" violet- weaving," applied to her by Alcseus, and substitute "violet-tressed," she would seem to have been distinguished by that beautiful, blue-black hair — black hair with blue reflections in it — attrib- uted to the Muses. Of other fair women of antiquity dow- ered with that "supreme beauty" which Lamartine has finely called "a royalty of the senses," the famous Phryne, who con- vinced a court of law by the loveliness of her form, seems to have been golden as honey. Calypso, too, and the Sirens were undoubtedly minted of human gold; and EST-ELLE BRVNE? of ladies in the same Siren class in later times Nell Gwynn and Lady Hamilton must be counted as natural blondes. On the other hand, Diane de Poitiers, whose beauty recipes seem to have been chiefly cold baths and early rising, had "rich purple-black hair, which took a golden tint in the sunshine." Of Greek women who added learning to beauty, Aspasia goes to the brunettes, but Hypatia's eyes were blue and her hair yellow. Of later learned ladies who were beautiful as well, Vittoria Colonna had "large, bright eyes and golden hair"; Beatrice d'Este was a sunbright beauty; and the eyes of the great-hearted Heloise "reflected the azure tints of heaven." Coming to later times, Mme. de Main- tenon, the recording angel of Louis XIV, had "sparkling black eyes and a fine complexion." Mme. Recamier is cata- logued as "complexion brilliant, little rosy mouth, pearly teeth, black curling hair, soft expressive eyes." Mme. de Sevigne, mark you, is portrayed for us by Mignard, and by Lamartine, in words no "^ EST~ELLE BLONDEf less glowing than the painting, with "rich locks of fair hair, dreamy blue eyes, fine folding eyelids of alabaster veined with azure, and a complexion in the fresh flower which neither time nor sorrow ever faded." Lamartine adds other enthusiastic details: "making her image seem in our eyes to fill aU space, and reach even to heaven," and suggesting a regret that other illus- trious women, of whom we have but meager and unrealizable details, had been equally fortunate in their portrayers — Joan of Arc, for example, for whom we must content ourselves with generaliza- tions, and the spiritual vision of Bastien Lepage. Returning for a moment to learned women — remembering, as we said above, that the Muses themselves are "violet- tressed" — we find them rather tire- somely indeterminate. Charlotte Bronte, for example, may be classed as inter- mediate, with "soft, thick brown hair, and peculiar eyes difficult to describe." Sonya Kovalevsky, too, may be charac- terized, I hope without disrespect, as a EST-ELLE BRVNE? ■ Slavonic nondescript, though her coun- try-woman, Marie Bashkirtseff, in spite of her dark eyebrows, must rank as a militant blonde. Jane Austen is common-sensibly defi- nite, "a clear brunette, with a rich color, hazel eyes, and curling brown hair," resembling, we are told, her own Emma Woodhouse. George Eliot is somewhat less definitely blonde, "hair pale brown, worn in ringlets, complexion pale, eyes gray-blue." But there is, characteristically, no middle course with George Sand. Of the tragic muse of Chopin and Alfred de Musset, we read: Her large dark eyes sparkle with genius, her hair, black as ebony, falls on her shoulders in wavy ringlets. A few queens may as well be here clas- sified. Catherine de' Medici and Mary Queen of Scots are unmistakable "chil- dren of the dark star"; whereas Cassan- dra, Guinevere, Isabella of Spain, Eliza- beth of England, Marie Antoinette, and •3 265 Catherine of Russia are all so much capi- tal for the blondes. It may be added of Elizabeth that it has been ungallantly declared that "she wore false hair, and that red." What would Spenser have said to such a libel on his peerless Glori- ana? But possibly Spenser was like those twenty-one men of Cincinnati of whom Mr. Finck maliciously tells. These had all married red-haired women, but were found, on examination, to be color- blind. They had, therefore, mistaken their wives for brunettes! However, if to love red hair is to be color-blind, no few poets and painters must have been color-blind — particu- larly the painters of the Preraphaelite school. Though many of Rossetti's most impressive faces look out of caves of hair black and mysterious as night — • chiefly those he painted from the wonder- ful face of Mrs. William Morris, one of the world's regal brunettes — yet the in- spiring face of his life, the muse of his poetry as well as of his painting, Eliza- beth Siddal, first caught his fancy by the f : EST-ELLE BRUNE? wealth of her coppery-red hair and her strange blue-green eyes, like those of that queen Alaciel of whom Swinburne sings: I am the queen Alaciel. My mouth was like that moist gold cell Whereout the thickest honey drips; Mine eyes were as a gray-green sea. It is a marvelous blonde head that lies in the last solemn sleep of Beatrice in "Dante's Dream." The poets, as one would expect, are characteristically eclectic in the color scheme of their loves. It is to be feared that they have frequently proved capa- ble of equally impassioned adoration for blonde and brunette beauty, like the French singer quoted above, in one and the same day. Even so grave a poet as Milton — who, in his youth, like Polonius, suflFered much extremity from love — was moved alike by dark and fair, though one of his most decisive utterances bears out my suggestion that a man's first love will usually be blonde and his last bru- nette. In one of his Italian sonnets. EST-ELLE BLONDE? / translated by Cowper, he writes to a friend of a beautiful singer whom he had met during his visit to Italy — Leonora Baroni: Yet think me not thus dazzled by the flow Of golden locks, or damask rose; more rare The heartfelt beauties of my foreign fair! Yet two of Milton's wives appear to have been blondes. The famous Laura of Petrarch is de- scribed as "a fair. Madonna-like beauty, with soft, dark eyes, and a profusion of pale golden hair parted on her brow and falling in rich curls over her neck." Another famous Italian blonde was By- ron's Countess Guiccioli, though Byron, we know, had a passion for black eyes. Spenser's own personal Elizabeth, whom he married, and whom he celebrates in his lovely "Epithalamion" and "Pro- thalamion," was blonde, as was the Rosalind of his earlier affection: That golden wire, those sparkling stars so bright Shall turn to dust, and lose their goodly light. 7 , \ < EST-ELLE BRUNE? That Stella, thinking of whom Sidney wrote his lovely — With how sad steps, O moon, thou cllmb'st the sky! How silently, and with how wan a face! — — is described with "dark, sparkling eyes; pale brown hair; a rich, vivid com- plexion." Another Stella, she of Swift's strange love, was also brunette, "with silky black hair, brilliant eyes, and delicate fea- tures"; but in Vanessa Swift seems to have sought for contrast. Pope's Martha Blount was fair, with blue eyes. Coming again to later days, that ver- satile lover, Heine, has thus put himself on record for the brunettes, a propos the women of Trent, in the Austrian Tyrol: I do love these pale, elegiac faces with the large black eyes that gaze at you so love-sick; I love also the dusk tint of those proud necks which Phoebus already has loved and browned with his kisses. Alfred de Musset's Mimi Pinson, need one say, was blonde: EST-ELLE BLONDE? Mimi Pinson est une blonde, Une blonde que Ton connalt. But Musset was young and gay when he sang thus; his tragic muse, as we know, was to come later with George Sand. Novehsts seem, for the most part, to favor brunette heroines, as being more impressive — particularly, though not al- ways, when their stories are tragic, thus following tradition and popular instinct. Take Hawthorne's Hester Prynne,with her "dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw oflF the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from the regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes." Again, Thomas Hardy's Eustada Vye is the very apotheosis of the brunette. "To see her hair," writes Mr. Hardy, "was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow. It closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow." The Dark Lady of Shakespeare's N^ L. EST-ELLE BRUNE? idolatry can tardly have been more Stygian than that. George Eliot has a fine picture of tragic Hetty Sorrel combing her "dark, hyacin- thic " curls before her mirror. Fielding's Sophia was a most uncompromising bru- nette. "Her hair, which was black, was so luxuriant that it reached her middle," and "few could believe it to be her own"; while "her black eyes had a luster in them which all her softness could not extin- guish." Balzac's dangerous "Woman of Thirty" is pictured with "brown tresses and beautiful, almond-shaped dark eyes"; but perhaps the most dangerous woman in fiction, Becky Sharp, is described by Thackeray as "pale, sandy-haired, and with eyes habitually cast down. When they looked up, they were very large, odd, and attractive." From this desultory survey of prefer- ences, one way and the other, which could be almost indefinitely extended — what conclusion? It seems to me that only a very hard- ened or biased generalizer could arrive ^ Pn at any; the historic honors are so evenly distributed. Yet, perhaps, one does gain a certain impression that, while less showy in some respects than that of the blonde, the record of the brunette is one of more serious and stable values, and that per- haps there is something in the fancy of the old German mystic quoted by Walter Pater, who, speaking of "the mystery of so-called white things," says that "the red rose came first," and that "white things" are "ever an afterthought — the doubles, or seconds, of real things, and themselves but half-real, half-material." A greater force and depth, a more stable concreteness, seem to belong to brunette types and things. Dark colors, as we know, represent a greater absorp- tion of the solar energy; what is coal but solidified sunshine? Do the black hair and the brown skin, according to Mr. Finck's idea, represent a greater amount of stored-up sunshine than the gold hair and the white skin, and, therefore, a larger endowment of vital force? Cer- tainly, we involuntarily associate more L \ "' EST-ELLE BRUNE? dynamic qualities with brunette types; and the word "swart," as applied to men, has usually carried with it the sense of a sort of uncanny physical strength. From the point of view of beauty, per- haps the ideal type would be that dreamed of by some artists, in which blond hair will be combined with dark eyes, eye- brows, and eyelashes, and skin like "the nut-brown maid." Nature, of course, does occasionally produce fascinating ex- amples of that type, and perhaps evolu- tion is going in that direction. At all events, those of us who live long enough here in America should see some interest- ing developments in the course of the next two or three generations. As with so many old conflicts, America seems to be the natural battle-ground for the final struggle, the Armageddon, in the world-old fight between blonde and bru- nette, being, as it is, the melting-pot of races. Every kind of color is being dashed hourly on the gigantic palette. What will that mysterious artist. Nature, bring out of them all, as he blends them N \l EST~ELLE BLONDE? 273 in his slap-dash way with the cosmic brush? If he is really on the side of the brunette, America will soon be in a posi- tion to tell us; and, perhaps, time will prove Shakespeare, true prophet in so many things, once more on the winning side, when, with his eyes on the mysteri- ous Dark Lady of his sonnets, he wrote: In the old time, black was not counted fair. Or, if it were, it bore not beauty's name; But now is black beauty's successive heir. ! i ill !»■ !!!!!!!!!!!!l!!|i ■iiiiinniMiiiiiii llili ill M" lllliiiH