Stories of Authors, British and American Part 8

My first sight of d.i.c.kens, writes Herman Merivale in a gossipy article in an English magazine, was characteristic enough. I was in the second or third row of seats with some friends, at one of his readings of _Oliver Twist_. As Thackeray was a gossip on the platform, so d.i.c.kens was an actor. Like all speakers and actors, he longed for sympathy somewhere; an unanswering audience kills us, on whichever side the fault may lie. In the days of my political measles I have harangued a London audience for an hour and twenty minutes when I have meant to speak for a quarter of an hour; and in an out-of-the-way Hamps.h.i.+re district, where I had gone on purpose to address the rurals for a set hour, I have sate down, covered with confusion, in ten minutes, not being able to hit on anything that interested them at all. I saw too plainly, in all their good-natured faces, that they regarded me as the greatest a.s.s they had ever seen, or as an odd kind of cow gone wrong, and of no use to the three acres. d.i.c.kens's audience that night was dull, and he became so, too. I was disappointed. His characters were not lifelike, and his acting was not good, and got worse as he went on. It was the inevitable law of reaction. His audience bored him, and he began to bore me, amongst the rest. He was not "in touch" with us, that is all; and his eyes wandered as hopelessly in search of some sympathetic eye to catch them, as the gladiators of old, for mercy in the circus. Then suddenly, at one point of his reading, he had to introduce the pa.s.sing character of a nameless individual in a London crowd, a choleric old gentleman who has only one short sentence to fire off. This he gave so spontaneously, so inimitably, that the puppet became an absolute reality in a second. I saw him, crowd, street, man, temper, and all. For I am, I may say, what is called a very good audience. I like what I like, and I hate what I hate; and on one occasion growled at the theater so audibly at what I thought some very bad acting that I began to hear ominous cries of "Turn him out!"

It was the first night of one of my own plays, d.i.c.kens's electric flash bowled me over so completely and instantly that I broke into a peal of laughter, and as we sometimes do when hard hit, kept on laughing internally, which is half tears, and half hiccough, for some time afterwards. Upon my word, I am laughing now, as I recall it. It was so funny. The audience of course glared at me with the well-known look of rebuke. "How _dare_ you express your feelings out loud, and disturb us!"

But d.i.c.kens's eye--I wasn't much more than a boy, and he didn't know me from Adam--went at once straight for mine. "Here's somebody who likes me, anyhow," it said. For the next few minutes he read at me, if ever man did. The sympathetic unit is everything to us. And on my word the result was that he so warmed to his work that he got the whole audience in his hand, and dispensed with me. Only once again--oh, how like him it was!--he fixed me with his eye just towards the end of the reading, and made a short but perceptible pause. I wondered what was coming--and soon knew. The choleric old party in the street had to appear for one pa.s.sing instant more, and fire off one more pa.s.sing sentence. Which he did--with the same results. Good heavens! what an actor d.i.c.kens was.

When that reading ended--with the success which it deserved--never did that most expressive of all human features, the eye, thank a boy more expressively. Over all things cultivate sympathy. If antipathy goes with it, so much the better. If the magnet must attract, it likewise must repel. d.i.c.kens was a magnet of the magnets; but in his case I must confess, that when a modern specimen tells me he can't laugh at him, he makes me feel rather as Heine felt when somebody told him that he--the somebody--was an atheist; frightened.

... d.i.c.kens is perhaps best described as to my immense amus.e.m.e.nt, and by the most delicious misprint I ever saw, I found myself once described in the "Visitors' List" in an English paper abroad--"Human Marvel, and family." It looked like some new kind of acrobat. Of Charles d.i.c.kens's great kindnesses to me in after days, and of some personal experiences of his stage pa.s.sion, at the end of his life, I ventured to gossip with readers of the _Bar_, some months ago, in a paper called "With the Majority." In one sense, yes; but in another--in what a minority, Thackeray and he!

XXVI

ON THE DEATH OF d.i.c.kENS

When Charles d.i.c.kens died the English papers and magazines were filled with criticisms and appreciations of the great writer. It may be interesting to glance at a few extracts from these:

From _Fraser's Magazine_.--On the eighth of June, 1870, the busiest brain and the busiest hand that ever guided pen over paper finished their appointed work, and that pen was laid aside forever. Words of its inditing were sure of immediately reaching and being welcomed by a larger number of men and women than those of any other living writer--perhaps of any writer who has ever lived.

About six o'clock on that summer evening, having done his day's work with habitual a.s.siduity, Charles d.i.c.kens sat down to dinner with some members of his family. He had complained of headache, but neither he nor any one felt the least apprehension. The pain increased, the head drooped forward, and he never spoke again. Breathing went on for four-and-twenty hours, and then there was nothing left but ... dismay and sorrow. When the sad news was made public it fell with the shock of a personal loss on the hearts of countless millions, to whom the name of the famous author was like that of an intimate and dear friend....

Anthony Trollope in _St. Paul's_.--It seems to have been but the other day that, sitting where I now sit, in the same chair, at the same table, with the same familiar things around me, I wrote for the _Cornhill Magazine_ a few lines in remembrance of Thackeray, who had then been taken from us, and when those lines appeared they were preceded by others, very full of feeling, from his much older friend, Charles d.i.c.kens. Now I take up my pen again because Charles d.i.c.kens has also gone, and because it is not fit that this publication should go forth without a word spoken to his honor.

It is singular that two men in age so nearly equal, in career so nearly allied, friends so old, and rivals so close, should each have left us so suddenly, without any of that notice, first doubting and then a.s.sured, which illness gives; so that in the case of the one as of the other, the tidings of death's dealings have struck us a hard and startling blow, inflicting not only sorrow, but for a while that positive, physical pain which comes from evil tidings which are totally unexpected. It was but a week or two since that I was discussing at the club that vexed question of American copyright with Mr. d.i.c.kens, and while differing from him somewhat, was wondering at the youthful vitality of the man who seemed to have done his forty years of work without having a trace of it left upon him to lessen his energy, or rob his feelings of their freshness. It was but the other day that he spoke at the Academy dinner, and those who heard him then heard him at his best; and those who did not hear him, but only read his words, felt how fortunate it was that there should be such a man to speak for literature on such an occasion. When he took farewell of the public as a public reader, a few months since, the public wondered that a man in the very prime of his capacity should retire from such a career. But though there was to be an end to his readings, there was not, therefore, to be an end of his labors. He was to resume, and did resume, his old work, and when the first number of _Edwin Drood's Mystery_ was bought up with unprecedented avidity by the lovers of d.i.c.kens's stories, it was feared, probably, by none but one that he might not live to finish his chronicle. He was a man, as we all thought, to live to be a hundred. He looked to be full of health, he walked vigorously, he stood, and spoke, and, above all, he laughed like a man in the full vigor of his life....

He would attempt nothing--show no interest in anything--which he could not do, and which he did not understand. But he was not on that account forced to confine himself to literature. Every one knows how he read. Most readers of these lines, though they may never have seen him act,--as I never did,--still know that his acting was excellent.

As an actor he would have been at the top of his profession. And he had another gift,--had it so wonderfully, that it may almost be said that he has left no equal behind him. He spoke so well, that a public dinner became a blessing instead of a curse, if he was in the chair,--had its compensating twenty minutes of pleasure, even if he were called upon to propose a toast, or to thank the company for drinking his health. For myself, I never could tell how far his speeches were ordinarily prepared:--but I can declare that I have heard him speak admirably when he has had to do so with no moment of preparation.

A great man has gone from us--such a one that we may surely say of him that we shall not look upon his like again. As years roll on, we shall learn to appreciate his loss. He now rests in the spot consecrated to the memory of our greatest and n.o.blest; and Englishmen would certainly not have been contented had he been laid elsewhere.

XXVII

RUSKIN'S CHILDHOOD

We are fortunate in having Ruskin's own account of how he pa.s.sed his childhood days. In _Praeterita_ we have his autobiography. His description of his early days runs as follows:

"I am and my father was before me a violent Tory of the old school (Walter Scott's school, that is to say, and Homer's); I name these two out of the numberless great Tory writers, because they were my own two masters. I had Walter Scott's novels and the _Iliad_ (Pope's translation), for my only reading when I was a child, on weekdays; on Sunday their effect was tempered by _Robinson Crusoe_ and the _Pilgrim's Progress_, my mother having it deeply in her heart to make an evangelical clergyman of me. Fortunately, I had an aunt more evangelical than her mother, and my aunt gave me cold mutton for Sunday's dinner, which, as I much preferred it hot, greatly diminished the influence of the _Pilgrim's Progress_, and the end of the matter was, that I got all of the imaginative teachings of De Foe and Bunyan, and yet--am not an evangelical clergyman.

"I had, however, still better teaching than theirs, and that compulsorily, and every day of the week.

"Walter Scott and Pope's Homer were reading of my own election, but my mother forced me, by steady daily toil, to learn long chapters of the Bible by heart, as well as to read it every syllable through, aloud, hard names and all, from Genesis, to the Apocalypse, about once a year: and to that discipline--patient, accurate, and resolute--I owe, not only a knowledge of the book, which I find occasionally serviceable, but much of my general power of taking pains, and the best part of my taste in literature. From Walter Scott's novels I might easily, as I grew older, have fallen to other people's novels; and Pope might, perhaps, have led me to take Johnson's English, or Gibbon's, as types of language; but once knowing the 32d of Deuteronomy, or the 119th Psalm, the 15th of 1st Corinthians, the Sermon on the Mount, and most of the Apocalypse, every syllable by heart, and having always a way of thinking with; myself what words meant, it was not possible for me, even in the foolishest times of youth, to write entirely superficial or formal English, and the affectation of trying to write like Hooker or George Herbert was the most innocent I could have fallen into."

"As years went on, and I came to be four or five years old he (the father) could command a post-chaise and pair for two months in the summer, by help of which, with my mother and me, he went the round of his country customers (who liked to see the princ.i.p.al of the house, his own traveler); so that, at a jog-trot pace, and through the panoramic opening of the four windows of a post-chaise, made more panoramic still to me because my seat was a little bracket in front (for we used to hire the chaise regularly for the two months out of Long Acre, and so could have it bracketed and pocketed as we liked), I saw all the highroads, and most of the cross ones, of England and Wales, and great part of lowland Scotland, as far as Perth, where every other year we spent the whole summer; and I used to read the _Abbot_ at Kinross, and the _Monastery_ at Glen Farg, which I used to confuse with 'Glendearg,' and thought that the White Lady had as certainly lived by the streamlet in the glen of the Ochlis, as the Queen of Scots in the island of Loch Leven.

"To my farther benefit, as I grew older, I thus saw nearly all the n.o.blemen's houses in England, in reverent and healthy delight of uncovetous admiration,--perceiving, as soon as I could perceive any political truth at all, that it was probably much happier to live in a small house, and have Warwick castle to be astonished at, than to live in Warwick castle and have nothing to be astonished at; but that, at all events, it would not make Brunswick Square in the least more pleasantly habitable, to pull Warwick castle down."

"Contented, by reason of these occasional glimpses of the rivers of Paradise, I lived until I was more than four years old in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, the greater part of the year; for a few weeks in the summer breathing country air, by taking lodgings in small cottages (real cottages, not villas, so-called) either about Hampstead, or at Dulwich, at 'Mrs. Ridley's,' the last of a row in a lane which led out into the Dulwich fields on one side, and was itself full of b.u.t.tercups in spring, and blackberries in autumn. But my chief remaining impressions of those days are attached to Hunter Street. My mother's general principles of first treatment were, to guard me with steady watchfulness from all avoidable pain or danger, and, for the rest, to let me amuse myself as I liked, provided I was neither fretful or troublesome. But the law was, that I should find my own amus.e.m.e.nt. No toys of any kind were at first allowed, and the pity of my Croydon aunt for my monastic poverty in this respect was boundless. On one of my birthdays, thinking to overcome my mother's resolution by splendor of temptation, she bought the most radiant Punch and Judy she could find in the Soho bazaar, as big as a real Punch and Judy, all dressed in scarlet and gold, and that would dance, tied to the leg of a chair. I must have been greatly impressed, for I remember well the look of the two figures, as my aunt herself exhibited their virtues. My mother was obliged to accept them, but afterward quietly told me it was not right that I should have them, and I never saw them again.

"Nor did I painfully wish, what I was never permitted for an instant to hope, or even imagine, the possession of such things as one saw in toyshops. I had a bunch of keys to play with, as long as I was capable only of pleasure in what glittered and jingled, as I grew older I had a cart and a ball, and when I was five or six years old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks. With these modest, but I still think, entirely sufficient possessions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon attained serene and secure methods of life and motion, and could pa.s.s my days contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colors of my carpet; examining the knots in the wood of the floor or counting the bricks in the opposite houses; with rapturous intervals of excitement during the filling of the water-cart, through its leathern pipe, from the dripping iron post at the pavement edge; or the still more admirable proceedings of the turnc.o.c.k, when he turned and turned till a fountain sprang up in the middle of the street. But the carpet, and what patterns I could find in bed-covers, dresses, or wall papers to be examined, were my chief resources, and my attention to the particulars in these was soon so accurate, that when at three and a half I was taken to have my portrait painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been ten minutes alone with him before I asked him why there were holes in his carpet."

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROBERT BROWNING From the portrait by Field Talfourd]

XXVIII

THE MARRIAGE OF THE BROWNINGS

When Wordsworth heard of the marriage of Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett, he is reported to have said, "So Robert Browning and Miss Barrett have gone off together. I hope they understand each other--n.o.body else would." When Wordsworth said this he was an old man and like most old men unable to appreciate the new. Compared with the simplicity of much of Wordsworth's poetry a poem like _A Death in the Desert_ might seem unintelligible; but surely the same objection cannot be urged against the poetry of Mrs. Browning.

The marriage of Robert Browning to Miss Barrett is the one dramatic event in his quiet life. To one who has read his pa.s.sionate and at times fiery, unconventional poetry, the runaway, unconventional marriage is not unaccountable, but altogether consistent. The manner of it was thus:

In her youth Miss Barrett became an invalid through an injury to her spine, an accident occurring while she was fixing the saddle of her riding horse. As she grew older she was confined to her room. To move from a bed to a sofa seemed a perilous adventure requiring a family discussion. Her father was a strange unaccountable man, selfish and obstinate, and pa.s.sionately jealous of the affection of his children.

In the meantime Miss Barrett had written poetry that attracted the attention of a kindred spirit. Robert Browning in 1845 wrote to her saying that he had once nearly met her and that his sensations then were those of one who had come to the outside of a chapel of marvelous illumination and found the door barred against him. A little later he suggested that he would like to call on her. This commonplace and altogether natural suggestion threw the invalid into a state of tremulous disapproval. With robust insistence Robert replied, "If my truest heart's wishes avail, you shall laugh at east winds yet as I do." Miss Barrett replied, "There is nothing to see in me nor to hear in me. I never learned 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 any 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 dark." A reply such as this would be construed by any gentleman as a challenge. The substance of Browning's reply was, "I will call at two on Tuesday."

On May 20, 1845, they met. In September, 1846, Miss Barrett walked quietly out of her father's house, was married in a church, and afterwards returned to her father's house as though nothing had happened. Between the marriage and the elopement Robert Browning did not call at the Barrett house on Wimpole Street. One of his biographers says that this absence was due to an inability of Browning to ask the maid at the door for Miss Barrett when there no longer was a Miss Barrett whom he wished to see.

In pa.s.sing judgment upon the elopement of this remarkable couple one must remember that they were no longer giddy and rash youth. Browning was thirty-four and the romantic Juliet was three years older. Again it must be remembered that the objecting father was a most unreasonable and selfish man. The climax of his selfishness was reached when in opposition to the advice of the physicians Mr. Barrett refused to allow his daughter to go to Italy. "In the summer of 1846,"

writes Mr. Chesterton, "Elizabeth Barrett was still living under the great family convention which provided her with nothing but an elegant deathbed, forbidden to move, forbidden to see proper daylight, forbidden to see a friend lest the shock should destroy her suddenly.

A year or two later, in Italy, as Mrs. Browning, she was being dragged up hill in a wine hamper, toiling up the crests of mountains at four o'clock in the morning, riding for five miles on to what she calls 'an inaccessible volcanic ground not far from the stars.'"

Miss Mitford, the literary gossip of the period, writes a letter to Charles Bonar, in which she gives expression to an opinion concerning Browning's poetry which is not dissimilar to the one we quoted from Wordsworth. Miss Mitford was an intimate friend of Elizabeth Barrett:

"The great news of the season is the marriage of my beloved friend Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning. I have seen him once only, many years ago. He is, I hear from all quarters, a man of immense attainment and great conversational power. As a poet I think him overrated.... Those things on which his reputation rests, _Paracelsus_ and _Bells and Pomegranates_, are to me as so many riddles."

In a later letter she writes to the same correspondent: "I at Miss Barrett's wedding! Ah, dearest Mr. Bonar, it was a runaway match.

Never was I so much astonished. He prevailed on her to meet him at church with only the two necessary witnesses. They went to Paris.

There they stayed a week. Happening to meet with Mrs. Jameson, she joined them in their journey to Pisa; and accordingly they traveled by diligence, by Rhone boat,--anyhow,--to Ma.r.s.eilles, thence took s.h.i.+pping to Leghorn, and then settled themselves at Pisa for six months. She says she is very happy. G.o.d grant it continue! I felt just exactly as if I had heard that Dr. Chambers had given her over when I got the letter announcing her marriage, and found that she was about to cross to France. I never had an idea of her reaching Pisa alive.

She took her own maid and her (dog) Flush. I saw Mr. Browning once.

Many of his friends and mine, William Harness, John Kenyon, and Henry Chorley, speak very highly of him. I suppose he is an accomplished man, and if he makes his angelic wife happy, I shall of course learn to like him."

The runaway match proved to be a most happy one. This is in disproof of the common thought that a poet is of so sensitive and irritable a disposition that no woman should expect a calm life with a poet. But in this case we have two distinguished poets joining hands. They lived in great happiness, nor was this peace and harmony purchased at the price of servitude and humility of the one. Each respected the other. Their romantic pa.s.sion was based on a spiritual affinity. The love letters of the Brownings may have some degree of obscurity, but it should be said that the obscurity is one of expression, not the obscurity of misunderstanding in the sense in which some of the Carlyle letters are obscure. The list of literary men whose marriages have proved unhappy is not so long and distinguished as is commonly supposed. Milton, Landor, Coleridge, Sh.e.l.ley, Byron, and Ruskin are conspicuous examples of men who made s.h.i.+pwreck of marriage, but in contrast s.h.i.+ne forth the names of Browning, Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Shakspere, for there is no evidence against the belief that Shakspere's marriage was a happy one; then add to these the American names, Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Holmes, and the list is still incomplete.

In verse Mrs. Browning has most exquisitely expressed the power of love to transform the gloom of her sick-room into the wholesome suns.h.i.+ne of life,--

I saw in gradual vision through my tears, The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, Those of my own life, who by turn had flung A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware, So weeping, how a mystic shape did move Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair; And a voice said in mastery, while I strove, "Guess now who holds thee?"--"Death!" I said. But, there, The silver answer rang. "Not Death, but Love."