UC-NRLF B M 1D5 M5E H. -i^- OLD LOVE STORIES RETOLD CHARD LEGALLIEi^ixE 'tr-^ -^H b^^ OLD LOVE STORIES RETOLD Tlie iSccond Mcetiuy of Dante and Beatrice Old Love Stories Retold By Richard Le Gallienne Author of ''The ^uest of the Golden Girl," ''How to Get the Best Out of Books,"' "An Old Country House," etc., etc. Panel Designs by George W. Hood New To7^k The Baker & Taylor Co, 33-37 East 17th Street (Union Sq., N .) Copyrijrht, lOOl, l)y The Baker d- Taylor Co. Aucassin and Xicoletc," copyright, 1901, by Cosmopolitan Magazine Co. Dante and Beatrice," "Sir Philip Sidney and Lady Penelope Devereux," " Heine and Mathilde," " La Salle and Helen von Donniges," copyright, 1002, by Cosmopolitan Magazine Co. " Shelley and Mary Godwin," copyright, 1903, by Cosmopoli'an Magazine Co. Published, Ovfober, 1904 The Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass., U. S. A. Dante and Beatrice ■/Wc- a m^ CONTENTS II Aucassin and Nicolete III Sir Philip Sidney and Lady Penelope Devereux IV Shelley and Mary Godwin John Keats and Fanny Braivne VI Heine and Mathilde VII Ferdinand Lassalle and Helen von Donniges VIII Ahelard and Heloise [5] 29 44 66 85 101 122 161 The ivritcr desires to iJutnk ^Ir. John Brisben Walker /or Jiis kindness in allowing him to re- frint seven of the following stories, together with certain of the illustrations, whicJi originally ap- peared in The Cosmopolitan. The paper on '' Abe lard and Ileloise'' Jias not been printed before. The Second Meeting of Dante and Bea trice Frontispiece Facing Page Sahitation of Beatrice Dante's Dream Dante on the Anniversary of Beatrice' Death Nicolete Weighs How She Mag Escape from the Tower Aucassin Finds Nicolete in a Bower 24 36 in the Wood 40 Portrait of Sidney in Armor 52 Sidney's Birthplace 60 Percy Bysshe Shelley 68 Field Place, Sussex. The Poet's Birth- place 76 John Keats 92 Heinrich Heine 112 Ferdinand Lassalle 148 [^] To my friend Charles Hanson Towne OLD LOVE STORIES RETOLD Dante and Beatrice THE great historic love stories of the workl are hke the great classics of art and litera- ture. They have become universal symbols of human experience. There are many ways of loving, many shapes of story taken by the fate- ful passion of love in a difficult world, which, though it may love a lover, seldom shows its love in the form of active sympathy while the story is in the making. The great love stories fix either the type of loving after the manner of one or another temperament, or the type of dramatic expression imposed upon love by circumstance. Thus the story of Tristram and Iseult stands for a love irresistibly passionate, stormily sensual, a very madness of loving. It represents a quality of, a way of, loving. The significance of the [S>] Old Love Stories Retold story of Paolo and Francesca, on the otlier liand, is less in the love of the lovers themselves than in the shape of destiny which it took under the pressure of cir- cumstance. Lanciotto is no less impor- tant, is even more important, to the story than the lovers themselves, whereas in the case of Tristram and Iseult we never give a second thought to King Mark. Our eyes are held by the spectacle of the superb passion of the lovers, as by some awe-inspiring display of the elements. The love of Paolo and Francesca, how- ever, strikes no individual characteristic note — the lovers themselves have no personality — and it is merely one of the elements in the making of a pic- turesque shape of tragedy, a shape which, before and since, love-history has been constantly taking, and to which in the case of Paolo and Francesca the genius of a great poet has given an accidental immortality. Dante's own love-story belongs t^LJhe Dante and Beatrice first, more significant, class. His love for Beatrice is important because it stands for a way of loving. As many have loved and still go on loving the way of Tristram and Iseult, so many have loved and still go on loving Dante's way, though such a fashion of loving is perhaps less common. Yet, is it so rare, after all, for a man to carry enshrined in his heart from boyhood to manhood, and on to old age, the holy face of some little girl seen for a brief while in the magic dawn of life, lost al- most as soon as seen, yet seen in that short moment with such an ecstasy of sight as to become for him a deathless angel of the imagination, a lifelong dream to keep pure the heart .^ A poet's love is apt to be a lonely, sub- jective passion, even when it is returned; for the woman whom the poet loves is often as much his own creation as one of his own poems. Like Pygmalion he loves the work of his own dreams. But never was any poet's love — not even that -.^.m Old Love Stories Retold of John Keats for Fanny Brawne — so entirely one-sided as that of Dante for Beatrice. Save as the object of Dante's worship, Beatrice has no share in the story at all. She seems to have had no more care for Dante's love, and indeed to have been hardly more aware of its existence, than a new star has care for, or is aware of, its discoverer. *'The beloved," says Hafiz, "is in no need of our imperfect love." Dante was free to worship her afar off if he pleased. It was not her fault if she preferred the less portentous attentions of the society young fellows of her set. A lover like Dante might well bewilder, and even alarm, a young miss, whose thoughts, for all her mystical beauty, ran — innocently and properly enouffh — on her sweetmeats and her next dance. But, if that saying of Hafiz be true, it is open to the retort that a lover like Dante can dispense with a return of his affection. All he asks is to dream his dream. To have his love returned might be disastrous to his dream. It is no mere flippancy to suppose that had Dante had fuller opportunities of knowing the real earth-born Beatrice, the divine Beatrice would have been [12] »- WM Salutation of Beatrice Da?itc and Beatrice lost to him and to us. Fortunately, their inter- course seems to have been of the slightest. For Beatrice Dante was hardly more than an ac- quaintance, who, after the fashion of his day, paid court to her in sonnet and ballata — forms of devotion at that time hardly so serious as a serenade. For it was the period of the courts and colleges of love, when a poet might write in the name of a strictly poetical " mistress," with hardly more thought of scandalous realities be- hind his song than if to-day a poet should dedi- cate his new volume, by permission, to some noble lady. Dante's uniquely beautiful record of his love-story, the " Vita Nuova," is cast in just that formal fanciful mould of literary and mystical love-making which was then fashionable, and were it not that the form of it is quite power- less to suppress the intense sincerity and youth- ful freshness of an evidently real feeling, it might have passed for a brilliant piece of troubadour make-believe. As it is, however, the very arti- ficiality of the form is turned to account, and seems rather to accentuate than detract from the impression of youthful ecstasy. Young love is [13] Old Love Stories Retold ever curious to invent some form of ex- quisite ritual for the expression of its wor- ship. Common words are not rare enough for the fastidious young priest who thus bows his head in the awful sanctuary of his first love. So the very artifice with which in the "Vita Nuova" we see Dante delighting to fret little golden "chambers of imagery" for the honey, and delicate lachrimatories for the sorrow, of his love, is in itself an added touch of reality. Very youthful and lover-like is the vein of mystical superstition which runs through the confession, as, for example, the insistence on the number nine in the opening sentences and throughout. Not without hidden significance, it seemed to the young poet, was it that he should have met Beatrice when she was almost beginning her ninth year and he almost ending his. Here alone was an evidence that they were born for each other. Who can forget his hushed account of his 14. J Dante and Beatrice first meeting with that "youngest of the angels " ? *' Nine times ah'eady since my birth had the heaven of hght returned to the self- same point almost, as concerns its own revolution, when first the glorious Lady of my mind was made manifest to my eyes, even she who was called Beatrice by many who knew not wherefore. She had already been in this life for so long as that, within her time, the starry heaven had moved towards the eastern quarter one of the twelve parts of a degree; so that she appeared to me at the beginning of her ninth year almost, and I saw her almost at the end of my ninth year. Her dress, on that day, was of a most noble colour, a subdued and goodly crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited with her very tender age. At that moment, I say most truly that the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses Old Love Stories Retold of my })()(ly shook tliorewitli; and in treml)ling it said these words: Ecce deus fortior me, cjui veniens dominabitur mihi [Here is a deity stronger than I; who, coming, shall rule over me]." It is probable that this historic meeting thus mystically described had come of Dante's father one day taking the boy with him to a festa — or, as we should say, a party — given by his neigh- bour Folco de Portinari. Dante's father was, it would appear, a well-to-do lawyer, with old blood in his veins, but still of the burgher class; whereas Portinari was probably richer and in a higher social position. Another nine years was to pass before Dante and Beatrice were even to speak to each other — for it does not appear that they had spoken on that first meeting — and by that time she had been given in marriage to a banker of Florence, one Simon de Bardi. Meanwhile, Dante may have caught glimpses of her in church or on the street, but beyond such slight sustenance his love had had nothing to feed on all those years. Once again Dante dwells on the recurrence of the significant number nine in his history. " After [Hi] Dante and Beatrice the lapse," says he, "of so many days tlial nine years exactly were completed since the above- written appearance of this most gracious being, on the last of those days it happened that the same wonderful lady appeared to me dressed all in pure white, between two gentle ladies elder than she. And passing through a street, she turned her eyes thither where I stood sorely abashed; and by her unspeakable courtesy, which is now guerdoned in the Great Cycle, she saluted me with so virtuous a bearing that I seemed then and there to behold the very limits of blessedness. The hour of her most sweet salutation was exactly the ninth of that day; and because it was the first time that any w^ords from her reached mine ears, I came into such sweetness that I parted thence as one intoxicated." What were the words, one wonders, that sent the poet walking on air through the streets of Florence, and shut him up in the loneliness of his own room to dream of her, and to write mysti- cal sonnets for the interpretation of his fellow poets, as was the manner of that day .^ They can hardly have been more than a " Good-morn- [17] Old hove Stot'ies Retold ino^, Messer Alighieri. We have missed your face in Florence for ever so long." But then the voice and the smile that went with the ordinary words! It al- most seems as though they must have conveyed a rarer message to the poet's heart. -Or did the poet merely misin- terpret according to his hopes an act of conventional graciousness "? It is to be feared that he did. But, be that as it may, that " most sweet saluta- tion" sufficed so to fan the flame of love in the poet's heart that he grew thin and pale from very lovesickness, so that his friends began to wonder at him and make guesses at the lady. Dante, perceivmg this, and seeing that he must protect Beatrice from any breath of gossip, con- ceived the plan of making another lady the screen for his love. It chanced that, one day Dante being in the same church with Beatrice, a lady sat in a direct line between Beatrice and himself, and, as she looked round at him several times, Dante and Beatrice and his eyes, in reality l)iirniii<;' upon Beatrice, niinlit well seem to be answering hers, the gossips concluded that she it was who had brought him to such a pass of love. Becoming aware of the mistake, Dante saw in it the needed means of shielding Beatrice, and he diligently set about confirming the gossips in their error by writing poems which seemed to point to the other lady, but were in reality in- spired by Beatrice. At this time, he tells us, he made a list in the form of a " sir- vente" of the names of the sixty most beautiful women in Florence, and he bids us take note of a strange thing : " that hav- ing written the list, I found my lady's name would not stand otherwise than ninth in order among the names of these ladies!" In course of time, travel took his beau- tiful "screen" from Florence, and it be- came necessary for him to find a substi- tute. This he was presently enabled to do, and soon he became so identified with mrn^ Old Love Stories Retold his fictitious lady, and rumour began to speak such evil of them both, that his own true huly, "the destroyer of all evil and the queen of all good," meeting him one day, denied him her salutation. Thereon, in bitter grief, Dante took counsel of Love, and composed a veiled song which should reveal the truth to Beatrice and yet hide it. But how she received it, or whether or not she took him l)ack into her favour, is not made clear. It hardly seems as though she had done so from the next occasion on which we see them in each other's company. This was one of great sorrow and bitterness, and is described so vividly by Dante himself that I will transcri}>e his own words : "After this battling with many thoughts, it chanced on a day that my most gracious lady was with a gathering of ladies in a certain place; to the which I was conducted by a friend of mine. . . . And they were assembled around a gentlewoman who was given in marriage that day; the custom of the city being that these should bear her company when she sat down for the first time at table in the house of her hus- [20] Dante and Beatrice band. Therefore I, as was my friend's pleasure, resolved to stay with him and do honour to those ladies. " But as soon as I had thus resolved, I began to feel a faintness and a throbbing at my left side, which soon took possession of my whole body. Whereupon I remember that I covertly leaned my l)ack unto a painting that ran round the walls of that house ; and being fearful lest my trembling should be discerned of them, I lifted mine eyes to look upon those ladies, and then first perceived among them the excellent Beatrice. And when I perceived her, all my senses were overpowered by the great lordship that Love obtained, finding himself so near unto that most gracious being, until nothing but the spirits of sight remained to me. . . . By this, many of her friends, having discerned my confusion, began to w^onder; and, together with herself, kept whispering of me and mocking me. Whereupon my friend, who knew not what to conceive, took me by the hands, and drawing me forth from among them, required to know what ailed me. Then, having first held me at quiet for a space until my perceptions were [21] L Old hove Stories come hack to nie, I made answer to my friend: 'Of a surety I have now set my feet on tliat point of Hfe heyond the which he must not pass who would re- turn.'" From that moment Dante's passion was an open secret among his acquaint- ance, and his lovelorn looks were matter of jest among them. We read of no more meetings with Beatrice, except a chance encounter in the street as she walked with a beautiful friend named Joan. Whether she gave or withheld her saluta- tion on this occasion, Dante does not tell us. Meanwhile, her father had died, and Dante had written her a poem of sympathy; also he himself had been so sick that thoughts of death had come close to him, and with them a prophetic vision of the death of Beatrice, all too soon to be fulfilled. Dante tells how he was busied with a long, carefully con- ceived poem in celebration of her beauty and her virtue, and had composed but 22 Da?ite and Beatrice one stanza, " when the Lord God of jus- tice called my most gracious lady unto Himself, that she might be glorious under the banner of tliat blessed Queen Mary whose name had always a deep reverence in the words of holy Beatrice." Heaven had need of her. Earth was no fit place for so fair a spirit. A love such as Dante's, dream-born and dream-fed, and never at any time nourished on the realities of earthly lov- ing, would necessarily be intensified by the death of the beloved. That mysteri- ous consecration which death always brings with it especially transfigures the memories of the young and the beautiful. She had come nearer to him rather than gone farther away. So, at least, he could feign in his imagination, where he was now free to enthrone her forever as the bride of his soul — without the thought of any Simon de Bardi to break in upon his dream. In life she could never be his, but in her death they were no longer divided. J Old Love Sto?'ies Retold Yet before this dream could grow into an assured reality for him, bringing firmness and peace to his heart, there were many months of bitter human grief to pass through. Beatrice was indeed a saint in heaven, but ah! she no longer walked the streets of Florence. Like any other bereaved lover, he sought many anodynes for his grief — some unworthy ones, for which his conscience reproached him at the time and long years after. With the instinct of the poet, he first soup:ht the consolation of beautiful words. As some men fly to wine in sorrow, the poet flies to verse. "When my eyes," he says, "had wept for some while, until they were so weary with weeping that I could no longer through them give ease to my sorrow, I bethought me that a few mournful words might stand me instead of tears. And therefore I proposed to make a poem, that weeping I might speak therein of her for whom so much sorrow had destroyed my spirit; and I then began 'The eyes that weep.'" Beatrice is f?one up into high Heaven, The kingdom where the angels are at peace; And lives with them: and to her friends is dead. [U] Dante and Beatrice *' Not by the frost of winter was she driven Away, Hke otliers; nor by suninier-heats; But thr()U^;;>^;s.^^;i»:^;i>^^5>^^5i.^;i?^^.;j>;^^>^?>^^>^-?>:s^>^^>^.^s.^ Ill Sir Philip Sidney and Lady Penelope Devereux 'f IT is strange that a love story connected with so illustrious a name as that of Sir Philip Sidney should, practically, be forgotten. Sidney lives in the popular imagination by the famous anecdote of the cup of cold water, and as the type of all that was gallant and gentle in the Elizabethan gentleman. But it is doubtful whether, in spite of Charles Lamb's attempt to refresh the memory of time, any one, outside scholars and enthusiasts for the old-fashioned gardens of English poetry, ever reads either his once famous romance of " Arcadia " or his much more important poems. Sonnet anthologies usually contain the sonnet, " With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the sky," but the sequence of which it is but one constituent, that fascinat- ing, heartfelt sequence of sonnets and songs which tells of the loves of "Astrophel and Stella," is, [44] Sir Philip Sidney & Lady Devereux I imagine, very seldom taken from its dusty shelf. Yet, what an ever-fragrant garden it is, and how vividly its old passionate story still tells itself in the old, ever young, words. Doubtless it suffers with the general reader from its old spelling and its euphuistic coneeits, and its general air of archaism. Nothing frightens your general reader like long " s's " and unnecessary "e's." It may be said that when a poet is great enough, he is sure to be printed without these marks of the antiquity from which he comes. Shakespeare's sonnets, for example, are in their original spelling no less ruffed and doubleted than Sidney's, but we know them in the spelling of our own time. Chaucer, however, is a great poet whom we have to take as he himself spelled or not at all. And so with Sidney — though, of course, his archaism is nothing like so difficult. Actually, of course, to the true lover of old poetry there is a positive charm in the quaint look of the old spelling, and a real gain in atmosphere. There is, too, some- thing naive and appealing about it, similar to the charm that sometimes belongs to the accent [45] t 5 OA/ Love Stones Retold of a foreigner talking English. It is the fascinating broken accent of antiquity. Take this sonnet with which the love- journal of " Astrophel and Stella " opens : *' Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show. That she, deare She, might take some pleasure of my paine, — Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine, — I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe; Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertaine, Oft turning other's leaves, to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitfull showers upon my sunne- burn'd braine. But words came halting forth, wanting Inven- tion's stay; Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Studie's blowes; And others' feete still seem'd but strangers in my way. Thus, great with childe to speak, and helplesse in my throwes, Biting my trewand pen, beating myselfe for spite; Foole, said my Muse to me, looke in thy heart, and write." Thus Sidney looked into his heart and wrote, so sincerely and simply that we, Sir Philip Sidney & Lady Devereux all these years after, can, if we care, look- ing into his book, look into his heart also. Many of the sonnets are affected after the manner of the time, stuck full of "vain amatorious" fancies, as Milton said, })ut no more so than Shakespeare's own, and very soon, underneath all the literary laces and fripperies, we are aware of a brave heart beating, and almost breaking, with a love " that never found its earthly close." Certain editors and biographers have protested against the natural interpretation of Sidney's sonnets, as interested editors and biographers will, but the editor of Sidney whose opinion matters most, Mr. A. W. Pollard, is in favor of the natural reading. Most editors seem to consider it a point of honour to whitewash their heroes out of all their common humanity and to reduce them as much as possible to models of abstract power and perfec- tion. In Sidney's case, some of us may find a character of such legendary ex- cellence gain rather than lose by a story Old Love Stories Retold wliicli reveals him possessed too of like human passion and frailty with ourselves. Sidney's grace and gentleness, as often happens with people of gentle manners and delicate natures, have somewhat unfairly sweetened and sanctified his memory, so that the world has forgotten that he was a brave soldier as well as a graceful courtier; a man of stern moral courage — as witness his outspoken criticism of Queen Eliza- beth's proposed Spanish match; an impulsive and intrepid antagonist — as witness his un- accepted challenge to the brutal and bullying Earl of Oxford; and a fiery and fearless lover whose passion was far from expending itself in sonnets. It appears probable that Astrophel first set eyes upon his Stella in the summer of 1575, at Chartley Castle, the seat of the Earl of Essex, on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth's visit there. Sidney, though as yet not twenty-one, was already a gallant and accomplished figure at court, and persona grata with the Queen, in whose train he arrived at Chartley, fresh from Kenilworth and those historic festivities of his magnificent uncle, [iS] Sir Philip Sidney & Lady Devereiix the Earl of Leicester. The httle Lady Penelope Devereux, eldest daughter of his host and hostess, was only twelve, but already of a strange and striking beauty. Being, too, as her subsequent career proved, of a romantic temperament, she could hardly fail to have been interested in the brilliant young courtier, though indeed, so far as we can judge, neither Sidney nor she appears to have fallen in love at first sight. Sidney definitely speaks for himself on this point in his second sonnet: Not at the first sight, nor with a dribbed shot, Love gave the wound, which, while I breathe, \\\\\ bleed; But knowne worth did in mine of time proceed. Till by degrees it had full conquest got. I saw, and liked; I liked, but loved not; I loved, but straight did not what Love decreed : At length, to Love's decrees I, forc'd, agreed. Yet with repining at so partiall lot." And there seems good reason to think that Penelope's love was of even still slower growth. Nevertheless, Sidney appears to have lost no time in following up the acquaintance thus be- gun at Chartley, and very soon we find him a frequent visitor at Durham House and high in [49] Old Love Stories Retold the afFcctions of Penelope's father, who, it is said, was wont to call him his "son by adoption " and who, on his death-bed, in the September of 1576 — when Sidney was hastening toward him, to arrive, alas ! too late — left him this touching message: "Oh, that good gentleman, have me commended unto him. And tell him I sent him nothing, but I wish him well — so well, that if God do move their hearts, I wish that he might match with my daughter. I call him son — he is so wise, virtuous, and godly. If he go on in the course he hath begun, he will be as famous and worthy a gentle- man as ever England bred." It appears soon to have been common talk at court that the dying Earl's wish was to take, or had already taken, the form of a definite engagement. So matters stood in the autumn of 1576, when the darkness of time suddenly falls upon the story, and the historian is left to conjecture; till once more, in 1581, Sir Philip Sid?iey & Lady Devereux the startling fact emerges that Penelope has been married, not to Sidney, but to Lord Rich, a man of very different type, coarse and cruel, and, it would appear, by no means Penelope's own choice. There exists a letter from the Earl of Devonshire to James I. in which the Earl states that, Penelope "being in the power of her friends, she was by them married against her will unto one against whom she did protest at the very solemnity and ever after." The reason of this en- forced marriage is very plausibly sug- gested by Mr. Pollard, who has pieced together the whole story with skill. Two years after her husband's death, the Dowager Countess of Essex (that is, Penelope's mother) was married to Philip's uncle, the Earl of Leicester. Up to that time Philip had been his uncle's heir, and, therefore, one of the best matches in England, but with that mar- riage and the subsequent arrival of a cousin, Philip, as Mr. Pollard points out, Old Love Stones Retold became a poor, even a very j)oor, gentleman. Penelope's mother and friends might, therefore, be anxious to find her a wealthier husband. So ]Mr. Pollard, with great pro})ability, accounts for Lord Rich's place in the story. Surely, if this conjecture be correct, it must have seemed the bitterest of ironies for the two lovers that the marriage of Stella's mother to her lover's uncle should thus destroy the happiness of their lives. Whether or not Philip and Penelope had been formally engaged during this interval, it is cer- tain that he and she saw much of each other at the houses of mutual relatives and friends, and that they Avere still seeing each other in the sum- mer and the late autumn of 1580. Though the love up till then seems to have been mainly, if not entirely, on Sidney's side, and Penelope's atti- tude rather that of a coquette, attracted but still unwon, there seems no reason for thinking that Lord Rich was as yet a factor in her future ; and, indeed, her forced marriage with him may have come to her with no less shock of cruel surprise than it appears to have come with to Sidney him- self. Judging by one of Sidney's songs, his first [52] Portrait of Sidney in Armor From Original Engraving Sir Philip Sidney & Lady Devereux anger seems to have been directed against Penel- ope herself, and one may add that a man of Sidney's calibre would hardly inveigh against a woman in the fashion of this stanza without her having given him the excuse of at least great hopes of her love: "Ring out your belles, let mourning shewes be spread; For Love is dead: All Love is dead, infected With plague of deep disdaine: Worth, as nought worth, rejected. And Faith faire scorne doth gaine. From so ungratefull fancie. From such a femall franzie, From them that use men thus, Good Lord, deliver us!" Before writing the last stanza of the poem, however, which reads like a postscript, Sidney appears to have realized the truth: that Stella was not unfaithful to him, but that she, rather than he, was the victim: "Alas, I lie: rage hath this errour bred; Love is not dead ; Love is not dead, but sleepeth In her unmatched mind. Where she his counsell keepeth. Till due desert she find. [53] 1 Old Love Stories Retold " Therefore from so vile fancie, To call sucli wit a franzie. Who Love can temper thus, Good Lord, deHver us!" And, witli tlie realization that she was in no true sense the wife of Lord Rich, he seems to have determined that such a so-called marriage should be no bar to his true love, but that Penelope Devereux virtually, and even virtuously, remained Penelope Devereux still; a woman still honourably to be wooed and rightfully to be won. So, at least, it seems natural to interpret this stanza which concludes a poem entitled "The Smokes of Melancholy": "For me, alas, I am full resolv'd Those bands, alas, shall not be dissolv'd; Nor breake my word, though reward come late; Nor faile my faith in my failing fate; • Nor change in change, though change change my state: But alwayes one myselfe with eagle eyde Trueth, to flie Up to the sunne, although the sunne my wings do frie; For if those flames burne my desire. Yet shall I die in PhoenLx' fire." 54 Sir Philip Sidney & Lady Devereux That Sidney followed ii}) this resolve with a determination whieh liad perhaps never before marked his wooing is proved by something like two-thirds of the entire " xVstrophel and Stella." In these sonnets and songs the story of his heart can be read, as it were, from day to day. And if we can judge by two outspoken sonnets punning on the hated name of Rich, he appears to have made no secret of his hatred for the man who had bought the woman he loved against her will. Here is one of them : "Toward Aurora's Court a nymph doth dwell. Rich in all beauties which man's eye can see; Beauties so farre from reach of words, that we Abase her praise saying she doth excel!; Rich in the treasure of deserv'd renowne, Rich in the riches of a royall hart. Rich in those gifts which give th' eternall crowne; Who, though most rich in these and everie part Which make the patents of true worldly bhsse, Hath no misfortune but that Rich she is." If no true blame attaches to Sidney for his refusal to recognize such a mar- riage, surely it was not wrong in Penelope 55 Old Love Stories Retold (who, it must be remembered, was so lately a woman — she was only eighteen on her marriage) to realize for the first time by the cruel contrast of her marriage what she had lost by her possible previous coquetry with Sidney, and to give to his wooing a value and a hearing such as, in her unawakened, irresponsible girlhood, she had never thought or cared to give it before. A girl married, as she was married, brutally against her will, could hardly be blamed for even more serious forms of rebellion than giving ear to a noble lover whom too late she had learned to love. We can, therefore, do no injustice to Penelope in deducing from Sidney's sonnets that it was not till after she became Lady Rich that her love for Sidney really awoke. We may do this with the less fear of injustice for two good reasons. Sidney was not the man to pursue Stella with a love which she had manifestly and definitely shown him she did not desire; nor, therefore, was he the man to write falsely about the incidents of his wooing, even in the licensed form of the sonnet. Again, everything he tells us is eminently in Stella's favour. He reveals [56] Sh^ Philip Sid?iey & Lady Devereux indeed that, after patient importunity, he had persuaded her to acknowledge her love, but he reveals too with what reluctance the confession had been drawn from her, how innocent were the tokens she had given of her love, and how she had striven with his more lawless passion — striven, as the lofty feeling and resolution of the concluding sonnets prove, with a gentle firmness far from in vain. To illustrate the story by adequate quotations would take up too much space, and indeed many of the sonnets most significant historically are of least worth poetically, and may well be left for the reader to peruse for himself. Here, how- ever, is one that can hardly be omitted, as it proves at once Stella's love for Sidney and the fine nature of that love: "Late tyr'd with wo, even ready for to pine With rage of love, I cald my Love unkind; She in whose eyes love, though unfelt, doth shine. Sweet said, that I true love in her should find. I joyed; but straight thus watred was my wine: That love she did, but loved a love not blind. Which would not let me, whom she loved, decline From nobler course, fit for my birth and mind : And therefore, by her love's authority, [57] Old Love Stories Retold " Wild Mie these tempests of vaiiie love to flie, And anchor fast my seH'e on Vertue's shore. Alas, it" tliis the only mettall he OF love new-c'oind to helpe my h<'((et me, fed with helHsh an^e>^e>^^i?^S.5i»^<>^;ai«^;5?^<5»^^S-^--5?=^^i'^^?^J^>=3J.^iS»^ IV Shelley and Mary Godwin THE piteous end of Shelley's first wife, Harriet Westbrook, has nat- urally deflected the sympathy of the world in her direction; and it is, of course, well that we should give ear to the ])ka on her behalf so beautifully made l)y Mr. William Watson: "A star looked down from heaven and loved a flower Grown in earth's garden — loved it for an hour; O you that watch his orbit in the spheres. Refuse not to a ruined rosebud tears." Yet there was really no danger of the world refusing its tears to that ruined rosebud. The danger has rather been that in giving its sympathy to Harriet it has somewhat forgotten that Shelley and Mary had a claim on its sympathy too. and really a more serious claim. Stars have their rights as weW as rosebuds, Shelley and Mary Godwin and if Shelley's marriage with Harriet was a tragic mistake for Harriet, it was surely no less tragic a mistake for Shelley. To find oneself married to the wrong woman at the early age of nineteen is a terrible enough mistake to begin one's life with for any man. For a nature such as Shelley's it was a spiritual tragedy of the most serious kind. When, at last, it was clearly seen that the mistake was past mending — and seen the more clearly by Shelley, because in meeting Mary Godwin he felt, and felt rightly, that he had met his true mate — Shelley saw but one way out, and surely there was no other way. Life with Harriet had become impossible for both of them. That they had made a school- boy and schoolgirl mistake seemed no reason for their perpetuating and aggra- vating it. Love could alone justify their continuing together, and their illusive love was dead. WaF a false marriage to stand in the 111 MP ^'^ ■ 67 F ^^ ^ r 'o. Old Love Stories Retold way of a true marriage ? Shelley and Mary de- cided that it should not, and though the world of their day was against them, time has been on their side. Their love story has come to have a value for humanity at large. It belongs to the important world-series of First Examples. Many lovers, indeed, before Shelley and ]Marv, had taken the law into their own hands, but the dif- ference between their stories and this story is that they have rather represented lawlessness, whereas Shelley and Mary break an old law only to make a new and better law, or, at least, merely to illustrate its necessity. Shelley and Mary stand, not so much for rebellious passion, as for common sense in the regulation of the difficult partnership of the sexes. They represent the right of human beings to correct their matrimonial mistakes, a right even yet stupidly and super- stitiously denied. Their example was not, as often misrepresented, in favour of any facile promiscuity. Quite the reverse, its significance was that of a marriage conceived on the principles of the only real monogamy, an instinctive monog- amy, based on natural selection, spiritual, mental, [C8] Percy Bysshc Slielley Shelley and Mary Godwhi and physical — a spontaneous, even an eager, monogamy, and not merely an arbitrary legal fiat. Of all people, Shelley and Mary held the doctrine of One Man for One Woman — only, they insisted, it must be the Right Man for the Right Woman. Shelley first became acquainted with Harriet through his sister Mary, who was her schoolmate at Mrs. Fenning's genteel academy for young ladies, at Church House, Clapham. In January, 1811, Shelley had called at the schoolhouse with a letter of introduction to Harriet, and also a present to her from Mary. Harriet was then about fifteen and a half, Shelley about eighteen and a half. Harriet was sixteen on August first, and Shelley nineteen on August fourth. Harriet appears to have been a pretty, attractive girl, of what one might call the May queen type. Good- natured, bright in her manner, and accomplished after polite boarding-school standards, she was the typical, pretty, popular queen of the school. Her nature, while essentially commonplace, was sympathetically open to the influence of more definite natures, and capable, chameleon-like, [09] Old Love Stories Retold of taking its colour from lier intimates — a pleasing but dangerous gift. She was the daughter of one John Westhrook, a retired " coffee-house " keeper — other- wise publican — a man so Jewish in appearance as to be nicknamed "Jew Westl)rook." Her mother counted for nothing, and her home was ruled jointly by her father and a forbidding sister, Eliza Westbrook, a narrow-minded, strong-willed and common-natured wom- an, at least twice her age. It was, of course, well known at Mrs. Fenning's school that the fantastic yoinig poet, who occasionally called there to see his sisters, was heir to a baronetcy and six thousand pounds a year. Shelley, very susceptible — and pathetically young — was quickly attracted by Harriet's en- gaging, popular ways and her pretty simulation of a mind; and it was only human nature that Eliza Westbrook sliould dream of, and even plan for, this possible aristocratic alliance for her sister. Shelley and Mary Godwin Shelley had h).st no time in fiUino^ poor Harriet's head witli his very youtliful rationalism on every su})ject, from the- ology to vegetarianism. At first, Harriet had been horrified to hear him call him- self an "atheist" — one of his favourite misrepresentations of himself. If ever there was a mind less accurately answer- ino- to all that the word " atheist " carries with it, it was Shelley's — but Harriet became accustomed to the terrible word before long, and in a few weeks began really to think that she thought the same as Shelley. She had, at all events, super- ficially assimilated his views sufficiently to suffer some persecution for them at school, and, it was said, in her own home. This "persecution" was all that was needed to make Shelley conceive himself her champion and protector, and it was a boyish chivalry, as noble as it was unwise, rather than the impulse of love, that prompted Shelley to take the false step of marryingHarriet. Old Love Stories Retold Long })efore Shelley had met Mary, life with Harriet had become impossible for him, and even if Mary had not entered into the story, it is highly improbable that Shelley and Harriet could have continued to live together. It must be added, too, that before he finally parted from her, Shelley firmly believed, rightly or wrongly, that Harriet had been unfaithful to him; also that he was scrupulously careful to make proper provision for her after their separation; that he believed, too, that she desired the separation no less than himself; and finally, that Harriet's suicide was not the direct result of Shelley's leaving her, but the result of her desertion by a subsequent lover. Shelley had been married to Harriet on August 28, 1811 — "the united ages of bride and bride- groom," as has been said, *' making thirty-five." It was in May or June of 1814 that he first saw Mary, when already the distress and disappoint- ment of his marriage were weighing heavily on his heart and mind. The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, brought up in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom, and, indeed, so to say, heiress to a revolutionary tra- [72] Shelley and Mary Godw'm dition, was naturally predisposed toward the sad young rebel, who not only looked up to her father as his master, but was giving such unselfish proof of his reverence by that generous financial assist- ance which Godwin was never ashamed to seek — even when, with preposterous moral loftiness, he was ostentatiously disapproving of Shelley's love for his daughter. It was during one of Shelley's calls on Godwin, for the purpose of thus assisting him, that he saw Mary for the first time. She was in her seventeenth year, and is thus de- scribed by Professor Dowden: "Shapely, golden head, a face very pale and pure, great forehead, earnest hazel eyes, and an expression at once of sensibility and firmness about her delicately curved lips." Her nature was more conserva- tive than that of either her father or her mother, which made her all the more suitable as a wife for Shelley, with his inflammable idealism and headlong experimentalism. She seems, too, to have combined a firm mental balance with powers of strong feeling which were deep, but not de- monstrative, and Hogg, a shrewd observer, was struck by the impressive quietness of her manner. [73] Old Love Stories Retold Here is an extract from his account of a call which he and Shelley made at God- win's house, in Skinner Street, on June 8, 1814. Godwin was out, and while they awaited his return, Shelley impatiently paced up and down the room. *' He appeared to be displeased," writes Hogg, in his ironical manner, " at not finding the fountain of Political Justice. ' Where is Godwin ? ' he asked me several times, as if I knew. I did not know , and, to say the truth, I did not care. He con- tinued his uneasy promenade; and I stood reading the names of old English authors on the backs of the venerable volumes, when the door was partially and softly opened. A thrilling voice called : ' Shelley ! ' A thrilling voice an- swered: 'Mary!' And he darted out of the room, like an arrow from the bow of the far-shooting king. A very young female, fair and fair-haired, pale indeed, and with a piercing look, wearing a frock of tartan, an unusual dress in London at w 74 Shelley and Mary Godwin that time, had called him out of the room. He was absent a very short time — a minute or two ; and then returned. ' God- win is out; there is no use in waiting.' So we continued our walk along Holborn. * Who was that, pray .^ ' I asked; ' a daugh- ter.^' 'Yes.' *iV daughter of Wilham Godwin } ' ' The daughter of Godwin and Mary.' This was the first time . . . that I beheld a very distinguished lady, of whom I have much to say hereafter. It was but the glance of a moment, through a door partly opened. Her quietness cer- tainly struck me, and possibly also, for I am not quite sure on that point, her pale, piercing look." Before the end of June, Shelley was writing verses to her like these: " Mine eyes were dim with tears unshed; Yes, I was firm — thus wert not thou; My baffled looks did fear yet dread To meet thy looks — I could not know How anxiously they sought to shine With soothing pity upon mine. " To sit and curb the soul's mute rage Which preys upon itself alone; Old Love Stories Retold •' To curse the life which is the cage Of fettered tijrief that dares not groan. Hiding from many a careless eye The scorned load of agony. " Upon my heart thy accents sweet, Of peace and pity, fell like dew On flowers half dead; — thy lips did meet Mine tremblingly; thy dark eyes threw Thy soft persuasion on my brain, Charming away its dream of pain. "We are not happy! sweet; our state Is strange and full of d()ul)t and fear; More need of words that ills abate; Reserve or censure come not near Our sacred friendship, lest there be No solace left for thee and me." Mary was devoted to the memory of her mother whom she had never seen, as she had died when Mary was born. Her step-mother, the second Mrs. Godwin, was not sympathetic to her, and one of Mary's favourite haunts was her mother's grave in St. Pancras churchyard, then situated among green fields, and not as now in the lap of raihvay termini. She would often sit there, read- ing and enjoying that solitude which is so hard to get among the living; and it is not improbable that Shelley was aware of her solitude. And, sentiment apart, could there have been a more [70] o Shelley mid Mary Goikchi appropriate altar for their love than the tomb of the brave woman who liad courage when such unconventional courage as Mary Wollstonecraft's really meant something, not as now, when it is not only a drug in the market, but a hackneyed feminine device ? To the dispassionate onlooker Mary Godwin may lack certain qualities which are popularly supposed to inspire great passions in men. There was a certain primness about her. She had been begotten, so to say, on revolutionary principles, and there was the taint of propaganda about her. Still Shelley, assuredly, had no distaste for prop- aganda, and Mary was a woman too. Any one capable of comprehending the situa- tion can well understand, and sympathize in, the joy Shelley must have felt at meeting, for the first time in his life, the positive — not merely the placidly corroborative — feminine of himself. Harriet had been the prettiest of mental parrots. But Shelley — who, for all his idealism, was no fool — knew that he had made her, knew that she was to him merely a ventriloquist's dummy of the mind. To meet a woman who could really [77] 1 Old Love Stones Retold talk l)ack to him, a woman who had not learnt all from him, a woman whose mind was no mere feminine clay in the hands of the masculine potter, and a woman, too, who w^as also — a woman, gifted with charm and mystery and motherhood! Surely Shelley, of all men, merited the true wife of himself. It was as absurd as it was unhappy that he should have mated with a plump, little, rose-pink schoolgirl like Harriet. And oh, the wonderful refreshment and stimu- lus of Mary! A copy of " Queen Mab " is in exist- ence, given by Shelley to Mary, thus in- scribed: "Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, P. B. S. . . . You see, Mary, I have not forgotten you." On a fly-leaf, at the end of the volume, is this impassioned avowal, in Mary's handwriting, dated July, 1814: "This book is sacred to me, and as no other creature shall ever look into it, I may write in it what I please — yet, what shall I write — that I love Shelley and Ma?j Godwin the author beyond all powers of expres- sion, and that I am parted from him, dearest and only love. By that love we have promised to each other, although I may not be yours, I can never be an- other's. But I am thine, exclusively thine. "'By the kiss of love, the glance none saw beside. The smile none else might understand, The whispered thought of hearts allied. The pressure of the thrilling hand,' I have pledged myself to thee, and sacred is the gift. I remember your words — • ' You are now, Mary, going to mix with many, and, for a moment, I shall depart, but in the solitude of your chamber I shall be with you ' — yes, you are ever with me, sacred vision — " ' But ah ! I feel in this was given A blessing never meant for me; Thou art too like a dream from heaven For earthly love to merit thee.'" Very soon Shelley was definitely to admit that there was no life for him apart from Mary. Harriet was out of London in July, and on July 14 Shelley wrote, beg- ""^ Old Love Stories Retold ging lier to come to town. When she came, he opened his mind and lieart to her. Their mar- riage was a failure, and he suggested that they should part, though he would, of course, con- tinue to provide for her, and saw no reason why they should not remain true and affectionate friends to each other. Harriet, who was ex- pecting her second child in December, was made quite ill by the disclosure, and, for some days, Shelley was distracted between tenderness and pity for her, and his love for Mary. Harriet, woman-like, threw all the blame on Mary, though we know that Mary was in no way the initial cause of Shelley's separation from Harriet, a separation to which it would seem Harriet had not explicitly agreed, though she may have ac- cepted it as the inevitable. The presence of her sister at her sick bedside would not help to mend matters, and, therefore, by July 27, 1814, Shelley and Mary had decided that they must act coura- geously, according to their own sense of right. Between four and five o'clock on the morning of July 28, 1814, Mary and Shelley — accompanied by Jane Clairmont, the second Mrs. Godwin's [80] Shelley and Mary Godwin daughter, by a former marriage — were starting for Dover, on their way to the Continent. Mary and Jane Chiirmont left the house as if for a morning walk, and met Shelley at the corner of Hatton Garden, William Godwin having no suspicion of what was afoot. Shelley's account of their flight in his journal still beats like a heart with the breathless excite- ment, the tremulous joy and fear, of the occasion. Here are one or two extracts: " July 28 — The night preceding this morning, all being decided, I ordered a chaise to be ready by four o'clock. I watched until the lightning and the stars became pale. At length it was four. I believed it not possible that we should succeed; still there appeared to lurk some danger even in certainty. I went; I saw her; she came to me. Yet one quarter of an hour remained. Still some arrangement must be made, and she left me for a short time. How dreadful did this time appear; it seemed that we trifled with life and hope; a few minutes passed; she was in my arms — we were safe ; we were on our road to Dover. . . . [81] Old Love Stories Retold *' At Dartford we took four horses, that we might outstrip pursuit. We arrived at Dover before four o'clock. Some time was necessarily expended in con- sideration — in dinner — in bargaining with sailors and custom-house officers. At length we engaged a small boat to convey us to Calais; it was ready by six o'clock. The evening was most beauti- ful; the sands slowly receded; we felt safe. ..." They had a stormy and even dangerous passage. Shelley continues: "Mary did not know our danger; she Avas resting, between my knees, that were unable to support her; she did not speak or look, but I felt that she was there. . . . The morning broke, the light- ning died away, the violence of the wind abated. We arrived at Calais, whilst Mary still slept; we drove upon the sands. Suddenly, the broad sun rose over France. "Friday, July 29 — 1 said, 'Mary, Shelley and Mary Godwin look; the sun rises over Fninee.' We walked over the sands to the inn. . . ." *' ^lary, look ; the sun rises over France." How full of hope and the exaltation of the new great life, at last really begun, are the words ! Nor was the future to dis- appoint the hopes of that happy dawn. Shelley and Mary had lived side by side for nearly eight years, when, on July 8, 1822, death so cruelly separated them, and though, indeed, their married life was not without some passing shadows such as must occasionally darken even the closest and happiest union of two natures each so strongly individual, there never seems to have been a doubt in either heart that they were each other's true and final mate, and that they had done what life meant them to do in taking each other in defiance of the common usages of the world. Mary, indeed, is clearly seen to have been the ideal wife for Shelley, par- ticularly in the wisdom Avith which she took the occasional — purely Platonic — ■\ ^. Old Love Stories Retold passions for other women to which his poet's sensibihty made him hable. Possibly his very enraptured feehng for the Countess Emiha Viviani made the greatest demands on Mary's powers of "understanding" him, but Mary loved his work too well to be jealous of a feeling that had inspired, perhaps, the loftiest love poem in English — "Epipsychidion." She knew of what a poet's heart is made, how passionately sensitive to beauty, how subject to passing emotional pos- sessions, and she knew that only so could a poet create for us his beautiful dreams. It was for a poet's wife to understand a poet's nature, and Mary understood. She knew that whatever light of beauty should attract his eyes for a moment, she was, as he had called her in the beautiful dedication to "The Revolt of Islam," — his " own heart's home " : "So now my summer task is ended, ^lary, And I return to thee, mine own heart's home; As to his Queen some victor Knight of Faery, Earning bright spoils for her enchanted dome. ..." [84 V John Keats and Fanny Brawne IT is surprising that the love stories of great poets should so often disappoint the romantic — and, one may add, the aesthetic — sense. From such lovers of love, and such passionists of beauty, one naturally expects not only the ideal passion, but the ideal object. Of all poets one would say this of John Keats, the one poet whose name has come to be synonymous with beauty; and it is certainly a particularly ironical paradox that the lady irritatingly associated with his name should be the least congruous of all the many commonplace women transfigured by the genius they could not understand, and the love of which they were not worthy. Most women honoured by the love of great poets have at least been inoffensive, placidly pretty, domesti- cally devoted. They have been that, or they have been — devils. To both statements, there [85] Old Love Stones Retold are, of course, exceptions. Generally speaking, they have been neither beauti- ful nor intelligent. The poor poet, of course, thought they were both, — })e- causc he was a poet. A poet would hardly be a poet if he did not make such divinely absurd mistakes, and one might almost state it as the first necessity of his being a poet at all that he should make that grand mistake about the woman he loves. In this respect, the English poets have been particularly fortunate. Beatrice and Laura were in- deed graceful nonentities, but there is something dainty and distinguished about their names that allows us to think of them without impatience as decorative and docile adjectives to the great names with which they are pathetically linked. One could mention no few poets of other nations who have succeeded in giving the names of the women they loved a significance hardly second to their own. But with such exceptions as, say Shelley 86 yohn Keats and Fanny Brawne and Browning, Rossetti and William Morris, the English poets have proved singularly unable to sing their loves up among the stars. Of course, there is — Ann Hathaway. And there is also — Fanny Brawne. Probably the reason of this is that most English poets have sprung from the middle classes, were born in the provinces, or lived in the suburbs. Beautiful women are born either among the very rich or the very poor. The English poet, as a rule, has been born between these ex- tremes, and his lines have fallen neither in Mayfair nor Whitechapel — but in Clap- ham. He has come in contact neither with the noble lady, nor the beautiful peasant. His German-silver fate has been the water-colour miss of the academies for young ladies. Shelley met such a fate in silly little Harriet Westbrook, and Keats met another in the still sillier Fanny Brawne. Fame, that loves to humour its poets, 87 Old Love Stories Retold has consented to glorify the names of many un- important poor relations of genius, hut there has never been a more insignificant name upon its lips than the name of Fanny Brawne. But John Keats loved a suburban miss of that name — and, perforce, Time, and perhaps even Eternity, must do her honour. One writes so, remembering not only the tortures to which she subjected a noble spirit with her dancing-class coquetries, but re- membering too this passage in Sir Charles Dilke's Memoirs of his grandfather: "Keats died admired only by his personal friends, and by Shelley; and even ten years after his death, when the first memoir was proposed, the woman he had loved had so little belief in his poetic reputation, that she wrote to Mr. Dilke, * The kindest act would be to let him rest for ever in the obscurity to which circumstances have condemned him.' " Ten years after his death the woman whom Endymion loved was still unable, not only to appreciate " the ode to a Grecian urn," but the immortal honour he had done her. Such an utterance makes one wish that Keats had lived [88] "yohn Keats and Fa?i?iy Brawne a year or two longer, not for the sake of his work — for he could have reached no higher perfec- tion — but to recover from an absurd infatuation, which began in calf-love and grew hysterical with the advance of inherited consumption. That Keats would have recovered from his suburban passion, and passed on to some higher and completer love, his letters to Fanny Brawne herself sufficiently prove. So long as he was comparatively well and occupied with poetry he absented himself from the felicity of her presence with a prosaic deliberation which must have seemed strangely unloverlike to " La Belle Dame Sans Merci." It was only when illness gave a neurotic intensity to all his feelings that Fanny Brawne gained a painful importance. The sick have many fancies. When Keats was himself, before that drop of arterial blood upon the sheet, which told the surgical-student poet that he must die, he wrote like this to his happily married brother George: "Notwithstanding your happi- ness and your recommendations, I hope I shall never marry: though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a [89] Old Love Stories Retold walk; though the carpet were of silk, and the curtains of the morning clouds, the chairs and sofas stuffed with cygnet's down, the food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on Winander- mere, I should not feel, or rather my happiness should not be, so fine; my solitude is sublime — for, instead of what I have described, there is a sub- limity to welcome me home; the roaring of the wind is my wife; and the stars through my window-panes are my chil- dren; the mighty abstract Idea of Beauty in all things, I have, stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. An amiable wife and sweet children I contemplate as part of that Beauty, but I must have a thousand of those beauti- ful particles to fill up my heart. . . . Those things, combined with the opin- ion I have formed of the generality of women, who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar-plum than my time, form 90 'John Keats and Fa? my Brawne a barrier against matrimony wliicli I rejoice in. ..." Yet before this he had met a beautiful girl whom history would fain substitute for Fanny Brawne, and for whom awhile she was mistaken, a beautiful girl whom he thus vividly descTi])es: "She is not a Cleopatra, but is, at least, a Charmian: she has a rich Eastern look; she has fine eyes, and fine manners. When she comes into a room she makes the same impres- sion as the beauty of a leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious of herself to re- pulse any man who may address her: from habit she thinks that nothing particular. I always find myself more at ease with such a woman: the picture before me al- ways gives me a life and animation which I cannot possibly feel with anything in- ferior. I am, at such times, too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble : I forget myself entirely, be- cause I live in her. You will, by this time, think I am in love with her, so, be- Old Love Stories Retold fore I go any further, I will tell you I am not. She kept me awake one night, as a tune of Mozart's might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very * yes ' and ' no ' of whose life is to me a banquet. I don't cry to take the moon home with me in my pocket, nor do I fret to leave her behind me. I like her, and her like, because one has no sensa- tions: what we both are is taken for granted." Critics for some time mistook this for a de- scription of Fanny Brawne, but it has since trans- pired that Keats was here describing a Miss Charlotte (or, according to Rossetti, Jane) Coxe. His first impression — or inventory — of Miss Brawne was, indeed, by no means so compli- mentary. " Shall I give you Miss ? She is about my height, with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort; she wants sentiment in every feature; she manages to make her hair look well; her nostrils are very fine, though a little painful; her mouth is bad and good; her profile is better than her full face, which, indeed, is not full, but [92] John Keats yohn Keats and Fanny Braivne pale and tliin, without showing any hone; Iier shape is very graceful, and so are her movements; her arms are good, her hands bad-ish, her feet tolerable. She is not seventeen, but she is igno- rant; monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions, calling people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the term — Minx: this is, I think, from no innate vice, but from a penchant she has for acting stylishly. I am, however, tired of such style, and shall de- cline any more of it. She had a friend to visit her lately ; you have known plenty such — she plays the music, but without one sensation but the feel of the ivory at her fingers; she is a down- right Miss, without one set-off. We hated her, and smoked her, and baited her, and, I think, drove her away. Miss thinks her a paragon of fashion, and says she is the only woman in the world she would change persons with. What a shape, — she is as superior as a rose to a dande- lion." This verbal description tallies, almost wath exactness, with the only extant portrait of Miss Brawne, a silhouette by M. Edouart, which Mr. [93] Old Love Stories Retold Sidney Colvin thus convincingly puts into words : " A brisk and blooming, very young beauty, of the far from uncommon English-hawk blonde type, with aquiline nose and retreating forehead, sharp-cut nostril and gray-blue eye, a slight, shapely figure rather short than tall, a taking smile and good hair, carriage and com- plexion." It is rather a pity that Miss Brawne's letters have not been preserved, though it would not be difficult, I think, to imagine them. It is not necessary to be Keats to have received such colourless young-lady-like scrawls — which, poor fellow, he, doubtless, kissed and treas- ured, "even as you and I." Yet, it must not be thought that Miss Brawne was without character or parts. On the contrary, she seems, from Mr. Buxton Forman's naive description, to have been something like a virago of the accom- plishments. "She had the gift of in- dependence or self-sufficingness in a high '^ohn Keats and Fanny Brawne degree, " says the good Mr. Forman, " and it was not easy to turn her from a settled purpose. Without being in general a sys- tematic student, she was a voluminous reader in widely varying branches of lit- erature; and some out-of-the-way sub- jects she followed up with great perse- verance. One of her strong points of learning was the history of costume, in which she was so well read as to be able to answer any question of detail at a moment's notice. . . . She was an eager politician, with very strong convictions, fiery and animated in discussion; a characteristic she preserved till the end." Whatever else Fanny Brawne lacked, Mr. Forman wishes us to remember that " one of her strong points of learning was the history of costume, etc. . . ." — also that " she was an eager politician. ..." O weep for Adonais ! Mr. Forman is nothing if not gallant — but now it is perhaps time to remember that John Keats loved this Fanny Brawne. Old Love Stories Retold He loved her — yes ! — and yet ! Yes! In his seeond letter [10 July, 1810] he writes : " I never knew before, what such a love as you have made me feel, was; I did not believe in it; my Fanny was afraid of it, lest it should burn me up." In his third letter [27 July, 1819] he writes : " You absorb me in spite of myself — you alone: for I look not forward with any pleasure to what is call'd being settled in the world; I tremble at domestic cares — yet for you I would meet them, though if it would leave you the hap- pier I would rather die than do so. I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveli- ness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute." In the fifth letter, dated Winchester, August 16th, however, we find that John Keats has been at Winchester four days, and yet has not written to his lady. With almost clumsy frankness — even harshness, as he admits — he confesses that poetry has got hold of him, with so imperious a preoccupation that he could at the moment no more write *'soothing words" to Fanny Brawne [06 1 "JoJm Keats cnid Fanny Braw?ie tlian if ho were "engaged in a charge of cavalry." Continually afterwards we find him placing his work on his poems before her. He dare not see her lest she should distract him from his master- piece. And later, when he falls ill, we find him, for a lover, curiously cautious. He seems indeed to have been as careful of his health as of his poetry; for, although the two lovers lived next door to each other at Hampstead, Keats w as so afraid of the perturbation of his lady's presence, that days and days went by without his ventur- ing to allow her to pay him a brief call; and he seems w ell content to have her written " Good- night," or to see her from his window. The only apparent vitality of his love was his unreasonable jealousy of his friend, Charles Browm; which was merely a sign of that coming neurosis through whose exaggeration Fanny Brawne w^as to seem so pathetically more important than she really w^as, or ever could have been, had he not been so sick a man. That Keats thought he loved Fanny Brawne his letters to others, rather than his official love- letters to her, vehemently, even hysterically, [97] w Old hove Stories Retold prove. There is no doubt that he beUeved he was dying of — her! To Charles Brown — the friend of whom he had been jealous, and yet to whom he wrote his last letters — he wrote on November 1, 1820: "As I have gone thus far into it, I must go on a little; — per- haps it may relieve the load of wretched- ness which presses upon me. The per- suasion that I shall see her no more will kill me. My dear Brown, I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well. I can bear to die — I cannot bear to leave her. Oh, God ! God ! God ! Everything that I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her — I see her — I hear her. There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest to divert me from her a moment. . . . O that I could be buried near where she lives ! I am afraid to write to her — •3^aapiaa»*«| "John Keats and Fa?i?iy Braic/ie to receive a letter from her — to see her handwriting would hreak my heart — even to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written, would be more than I can bear. My dear Brown, what am I to do ? Where can I look for consolation or ease ? If I had any chance of recovery, this pas- sion would kill me." Also, there need be no doubt that, when Keats sailed from England for the last time, on the Maria Croivther, bound for Pisa, on September 18, 1820, he was thinking of Fanny Brawne as he wrote his last and greatest sonnet: 'Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art! Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night, And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite, The mov-ing waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores. Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors: No — yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast. To feel for ever its soft fall and swell. Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender- taken breath. And so live ever — or else swoon to death." 99 AB^^raSaw^ Old Love Stories Retold It is strange to think that such infinitesimal femininity as Fanny Brawne should inspire a dying man to write such undying words — O ! why were they not written to Cleopatra — or " at least a Charmian ! " — but the heart of the poet is a divine mystery. [100] ^>^^5p^«?<;t^5>^^^>^^5>=^;5?^^i'^^S?^^>:^^>^»Jto^a>^>^H>^3H>^»^>^^ VI Heine and Mathilde THE love story of Heine and his Mathilde is another of those stories which fix a type of loving. It is the love of a man of the most brilliant genius, the most relentless, mock- ing intellect, for a simple, pretty woman, who could no more understand him than a cow can understand a comet. Many men of genius have loved just such women, and the world, of course, has Avondered. How is it that men of genius prefer some little Mathilde, when the presidents of so many women's clubs are theirs for the ask- ing ? Perhaps the problem is not so difficult as, at first sight, it may seem. After all, a man of genius is much like other men. He is no more anxious than any other man to marry an encyclo- pedia, or a university degree. And, more than most men, he is fitted to realize the mysterious importance and satisfaction of simple beauty — [101] Old Love Stories Retold thougli it may go quite unaccompained by " intellectual " conversation — and the value of simple woman-goodness, the woman-goodness that orders a household so skilfully that your home is a work of art, the woman-goodness that glories in that " simple " thing we call motherhood, the woman-goodness that is almost happy when you are ill because it will be so wonderful to nurse you. Superior per- sons often smile at these Mathildes of the great. They have smiled no little at Mathilde Crescence Mirat; but he who was perhaps the greatest mocker that ever lived knew l^etter than to laugh at Mathilde. The abysses of his brain no one can, or even dare, explore — but, listen as we will at the door of that in- fernal pit of laughter, we shall hear no laugh against his faithful Httle Mathilde. It is not at Mathilde he laughs, but at the precious little blue-stocking, who freshened the last months of his life with a final infatuation — that still unidenti- Heine and Mathilde fied " Camille Selden " wlioiii ho play- fully called "la Mouchc." "La Mouche," naturally, had a very poor opinion of INIadame Heine, and you need not be a cynic to enjoy this passage with which she opens her famous remem- brances of " The Last Days of Heinrich Heine": " When I first saw Heinrich Heine he lived on the fifth floor of a house situated on the Avenue Matignon, not far from the Rond-Point of the Champs-Elysees. His windows, overlooking the avenue, opened on a narrow balcony, covered in hot weather with a striped linen awning, such as appears in front of small cafes. The apartments consisted of three or four rooms — the dining-room and two rooms used by the master and the mistress of the house. A very low couch, behind a screen encased in wall-paper, several chairs, and opposite the door a walnut- wood secretary, formed the entire furni- ture of the invalid's chamber. I nearly Old Love Stof'ies Retold forgot to mention two framed engravings, dated from the early years of Louis Philippe's reign — the ' Reapers ' and the ' Fisherman,' after Leopold Robert. So far the arrangements of the rooms evidenced no trace of a woman's presence, which showed itself in the adjoining chamber by a dis- play of imitation lace, lined with transparent yellow muslin, and a corner-cupboard covered with brown velvet, and more especially by a full- length portrait, placed in a good light, of ]\Ime. Heine, with dress and hair as worn in her youth — a low-necked black bodice, and bands of hair plastered down her cheeks — a style in the fashion of about 1840. "She by no means realized my ideal Mme. Heine. I had fancied her refined, elegant, lan- guishing, with a pale, earnest face, animated by large, perfidious, velvety eyes. I saw, instead, a homely, dark, stout lady, with a high colour and a jovial countenance, a person of whom you would say she required plenty of exercise in the open air. What a painful contrast between the robust woman and the pale, dying man, who, with one foot already in the grave, summoned [104] Heine and Mathilde sufficient ener \ Old Love Stones Retold in the conventional sense, but ''kept house" together in the fashion of the Quarter, there seems no question that Heine was faithful to Mathilde — to whom in his letters to his friends he al- ways referred as his *' wife " — and that their relation, in everything but name, was a true marriage. Just before he met Mathilde, Heine had written to his friend and publisher, Campe, that he was at last sick to death of the poor pleasures which had held him too long. "I beUeve," he writes, "that my soul is at last purified of all its dross; hence- forth my verses will be the more beauti- ful, my books the more harmonious. At all events, I know this — that at the present moment everything impure and vulgar fills me with positive disgust." It was at this moment, disgusted with those common illusions miscalled pleas- ure, that Heine met Mathilde, and was attracted by what one might call the fresh elementalism of her nature. That Heine a?id Mathilde his love began with that fine intoxication of wonder and passion without which no love can endure, this letter to his friend August Lewald will show : " How can I apologize for not writing to you ? And you are kind enough to offer me the good excuse that your letter must have been lost. No, I will confess the whole truth. I duly received it — but at a time when I was up to my neck in a love affair that I have not yet got out of. Since October nothing has been of any account with me that was not directly connected with this. I have neglected everything, I see nobody, and give a sigh whenever I think of my friends. ... So I have often sighed to think that you must misunderstand my silence, yet I could not fairly set myself down to write. And that is all I can tell you to-day; for my cheeks are in such a flame, and my brain reels so with the scent of flowers, that I am in no condition to talk sensibly to you. "Did you ever read King Solomon's 111 t X Old Love Stories Retold Song? Just read it. and you will there find all I could say to-day." So wrote Heine at the beginning of his love. When that love had been living for eight years, he was still writing in no less lover-like a fashion. " My wife," says he to his brother ]Max in a letter dated April 12, 1843, " is a good child — natural, gay, capricious, as only French women can be, and she never allows me for one moment to sink into those melancholy reveries for which I have so strong a disposition." When Heine wrote this letter, Mathilde had been his "legal" wife for something like a year and a half. Heine had resorted to the formaliz- ing of their union under the pressure of one of those circumstances which compel a man to think more of a woman than of an idea. He was going to fight a duel with one of his and her cowardly German traducers, and that there should be no doubt of her position in the event of his death, he duly married her. Writing to his friend Lewald once more, on the 13th of October, 1841, he says: "You will have learned that, a few days before the duel, to make [112] Heinrich H eiup- Hehie and Mathilde Mathilde's position secure, I felt it right to turn my free marriage into a lawful one. Tins con- jugal duel, which will never cease till the death of one or the other of us, is far more perilous than any brief meeting with a Solomon Straus of Jew Lane, Frankfort." His friend Campe had been previously ad- vised of " my marriage with the lovely and honest creature who has lived by my side for years as Mathilde Heine, was always respected and looked upon as my wife, and was defiled by foul names only by some scandal-loving Germans of the Frankfort clique." Heine's duel resulted in nothing more serious than a flesh-wound on the hip. But alas! the wild months of dissipation before he had met ]\Iathilde were before long to be paid for by that long, excruciating suffering which is one of the most heroic spectacles in the history of literature. It is the paradox of the mocker that he often dis- plays the virtues and sentiments which he mocks, much more manfully than the professional sen- timentalist. Courage and laughter are old friends, and Heine's laughter — his later laughter, at [113] Old Love Sto?'ies Retold least — was perhaps mostly courage. If for no other reason, one would hope for a hereafter — so that Charles II. and Heine may have met and compared notes upon dying. Heine was indeed an "un- conscionable long time a-dying," but then he died with such brilliant patience, with such good humour, and, in the meanwhile, contrived to write such haunt- ing poetry, such saturnine criticism. And, all the time, during those ten years of dying, his faithful "Treasure" was by his side. The people who " under- stood" him better, who read his books and delighted in his genius, somehow or other seemed to forget the lonely Prome- theus on the mattress-rock at No. 3 Avenue Matignon. It was 1854 when Heine was painfully removed there. It was so long ago as the May of 1848 that he had walked out for the last time. His difficult steps had taken him to the Louvre, and, broken in body and nerves — but never in spirit — he had burst Heine cnid Mathilde into tears before the Venus of Milo. It was a characteristic pilgrimage — though it was only a " Mouche " who could have taken Heine seriously when he said that he loved only statues and dead women. There was obviously a deep strain of the macabre and the bizarre in Heine's na- ture ; but it must never be forgotten that he loved his Mathilde as well. That Heine was under no illusion about Mathilde, his letters show. He would laugh at her on occasion, and even be a little bitter; but if we are not to laugh at those we love, whom are we to laugh at ? So, at all events, thought Heine. Su- perior people might wonder that a man with Heine's "intellect," et cetera, could put up, day after day, with a little bour- geoise like Mathilde. But Heine might easily have retorted : " Where anywhere in the world are you going to find me a woman who is my equal, who is my true mate "i You will bring me cultivated governesses, or titled ladies who preside Old Love Stories Retold over salons, or anemic little literary women with their imitative verse or their amateurish political dreams. No, thank you. I am a man. I am a sick, sad man. I need a kind, beautiful woman to love and take care of me. She must be beauti- ful, remember, as well as kind — and she must be not merely a nurse, but a woman I can love. If she shouldn't understand my writings, what does it matter '■f We don't marry a wife for that. I am not looking for some little patronizing blue- stocking — who, in her heart, thinks herself a better writer than myself — but for a simple woman of the elements, no more learned than a rose, and as meaningless, if you will, as the rising moon." Just such a woman Heine found in his Mathilde, and it is to be remembered that for years before the illness which left him, so to speak, at her mercy, he had loved and been faithful to her. There are letters which seem to show that Mathilde had the defects of those qualities of buxom light-heartedness, of eternal sunshine, which had kept a fickle Heine so faithful. Some- times, one gathers, she as little realized the [116] Heine and Mathilde tragedy of Heine's suffering as she understood his writings. As such a woman must, she often left Heine very lonely; and seemed to feel more for her cat, or her parrot " Cocotte," than her immortal, dying huslmnd. " Oh, what a night we have had ! " Heine exclaimed one day to his friend Meissner. "I have not been able to close an eye. We have had an accident in our house; the cat fell from the mantelpiece and scratched her right ear; it even bled a little. That gave us great sorrow. My good Mathilde remained up and applied cold poultices to the cat all night long. For mc she never remains awake." And another time, he said, even more bitterly, to another friend: "I felt rather anxious yester- day. My wife had finished her toilet as early as two o'clock and had gone to take a drive. She promised to be back at four o'clock. It struck half-past five and she had not got })ack yet. The clock struck eight and my anxiety increased. Had she, perhaps, got tired of her sick husband, and eloped with a cunning seducer .^ In my pain- ful doubt I sent the sick-nurse to her chamber to [117] Old Love Stories Retold see whether ' Cocotte ' the parrot was still there. Yes, ' Cocotte ' was still there. That set me at ease again, and I began to breathe more freely. AVith- out ' Cocotte ' the dear woman would never go away." A great man like Heine must neces- sarily have such moods about a little woman like Mathilde; but the important fact remains that for some twenty years Heine was Mathilde's faithful husband, and that the commonplace, pretty, igno- rant, pleasure-loving, bourgeoise Mathilde was good and faithful to a crippled, in- comprehensible mate. Perhaps, after all, the wonder in this marriage is even more on the side of Mathilde than of Heine. Think what such a woman must have had to forego, to suffer, to " put up with," with such a man — a man, re- member, whose real significance must have been Chinese to her. Surely, all of us who truly love love by faith, and the love of Heine for Mathilde, and of Heine and Mathilde Mathilde for Heine, alike is only to be explained by that mysterious explanation — faith. That Heine understood his love for Mathilde, so far as any man of genius can understand his love, and was satisfied with it so far as any man of genius can be with any love, we may be quite sure. His many letters about her, and to her, prove it. All the elemental simplicities of her nature — the very bourgeoise traits which made his friends wonder — alike inter- ested him, and drew him closer toward her. When she weaves a rug for his friend Lewald, how seriously he takes it! He could laugh at all things in heaven and earth, but when Mathilde weaves a rug for his friend he takes life seriously. How " domestic " Heine could be is witnessed by a letter of his — to Mathilde from Hamburg in 1823 — in regard to her buying a hat for his sister and another for his niece — giving careful directions as to style and price. Mathilde and he had Old hove Stories Retold then been each other's for over eight years, but none tlie less — nay, let us say all the more — he ended his letter: "Adieu! I think only of thee, and I love thee like the madman that I am." Perhaps the truest proof of Heine's love for Mathilde is the way in which, in his will, he flattered his despicable cousin, Carl Heine, for her sake, so that she might not suffer any loss of his inheritance. There is no doubt that Heine knew the worth of his Mathilde. If so terrible a critic of human nature was satisfied to love and live with her for so many years, we may be sure that Mathilde was a remarkable woman. She didn't indeed talk poetry and philosophy, like little "Mouche," but then the women who do that are legion ; and Mathilde was one of those rarer women who are just women, and love they know not why. In saying this, we mustn't forget that " Camille Selden" said it was ridiculous to sentimentalize about Mme. Heine. Yet, at the same time, we must remember Heine's point of view. When " Camille Selden " first sought his acquaintance, he had been living with ^lathilde for some [120] Hehie and Mathilde twenty years. Men of genius — and even ordi- nary men — are not apt to live with women they do not love for twenty years; and that Heine did perhaps the one wise thing of his life in marrying his Mathilde there can be very little doubt. To a man such as Heine a woman is not so much a personality as a beautiful embodiment of the elements : " Earth, air, fire and water met together in a rose." If she is beautiful, he will waive "intellectual sympathy"; if she is good, he will not mind her forgetting the titles of his books. When she becomes a mother, he — being a man of genius — understands that she is a more wonderful being than he can ever hope to be. Much has been said about the unhappy mar- riages of great writers. The true reason too often has been that they have married literary amateurs instead of women and wives. Heine was wiser. No one would, of course, pretend that Mathilde was his mate. But, then, what woman could have been ? Certainly not that little literary prig he called his "Mouche." [121] VII Ferdinand Lassalle and Helene von Donniges THERE are two women still living somewhere in the world whom I always think of as figures peculiarly tragic, and whom I often find myself thinking of together. They are both women with historic love stories, and love stories — here is the link of associa- tion between them — in which not only their own destinies were concerned but great national issues disastrously in- volved. There was a moment, a few years ago, when it really seemed possible that Ireland's long dream of freedom was about to come true. Parnell's pa- tient strength had suddenly found a Titanic ally in Gladstone's tremendous 122 Lassalle and Hele?ie von D'ofmiges moral prestige, and for a brief moment the issue hung tremulous in the scales of Time. It was a fateful moment in Ireland's history which can hardly come again. It was her one desperate oppor- tunity in a hundred years. How and why she lost it, the world well knows. The story of Ferdinand Lassalle and Helene Von Donniges is similarly the story of a " lost leader " and his great passion; and, if the fall of Parnell was the deathblow to Irish liberty, who shall say what the great democratic movement throughout the world has lost by the tragically frivolous death of Lassalle.'^ He, too, fell at one of those fortunate, fateful moments in the history of a great cause when the moment can only be seized by some magnetic, masterful leader and if not so seized is lost, the advance that might have been made indefinitely postponed, and even the ground already won reconquered by reaction. In remarking these tragic interfer- Old hove Stones Retold ences of the passion of love in national destinies, it is, I hope, needless to say that none but narrow natures can feel bitterly toward the sad women so disastrously beloved, or hold the absurd doc- trine that public men should keep themselves aloof from the inspiring passions of our common nature. I say " inspiring " advisedly, for whereas such stories as the one I have to retell illustrate the sheer malignity of ill-luck which sometimes attends the loves of even private, as well as pub- lic, persons, the instances are far more numerous where lives of great public usefulness have been throughout secretly nourished and inspired by the love that moves not only the sun and stars but even parliaments and field-guns. Thus is a man created — to do all his work for some woman, Do it for her, and her only, only to lay at her feet; Yet in his talk to pretend, shyly and fiercely maintain it. That all is for love of the work — toil just for love of the toil. Yet was there never a battle, but side by side with the soldiers. Stern like the serried corn, fluttered the souls of the women, As in and out through the corn go the blue-eyed shapes of the flowers: [ 12-t ] Lassalle and Helene von D'dnniges Yet was there never a strength but a woman's softness upheld it, Never a Thebes of our dreams, but it rose to the music of women — Iron and steel it might stand, but the women had breathed on the building: Yea, no man shall make or unmake, ere some woman hath made him a man. One occasionally encounters in history a great career in which woman has played no such part, but the rule unquestionably is that the greater personalities of the world, whether they be states- men, soldiers, artists, or even philosophers, have been exceptionally subject to the influence of woman. Of no famous man has this ever been truer than of Lassalle. Years before he met Helene von Donniges he was as well known for his love affairs as his politics; for, strikingly hand- some and masterful, he possessed, too, just that dash and brilliancy which women find irresistible. He was born on April 11, 1825, in Breslau, Prussia, of Jewish parents, and himself outwardly always professed the Jewish religion. His father, being a merchant, had destined him for a busi- ness career, but the son's inclinations were in other directions, and he went to the university [1^5] Old hove Stories Retold instead. Philosophy and philology were the studies most attractive to him. From tlio university he went to Dlisseldorf, and thence to Paris, where, at the age of nineteen, he made the acquaintance of Heine, who, with his customary insight, divined the force and significance of his nature, and, with his customary aptness, found for him tlie appropriate phrase. He was born to die like a gladiator, he said, with a smile on his lips. A gladiator indeed he was, though it was hardly a gladiator's death a blundering destiny called upon him so ignominiously and wastefully to die. So impressed was Heine with the work he deemed Lassalle capable of doing, that he even hailed him as "The Messiah of the Nineteenth Century." As Lassalle's public life ends with the name of a woman, so does it begin. From Paris I.assalle returned to Dlissel- dorf, and there made the acquaintance of a woman who was to be intimately Lassalle and Hclcne vo?i Dmniges associated witli him continuously till his death. This was the Countess Hatzfeldt, a woman who was suffering at the hands of a brutal husband just such a wrong as was calculated to set Lassalle's chival- rous, combative nature on fire. Count Hatzfeldt, a dissolute nobleman of im- mense wealth, lived openly with his mis- tress, Baroness von Meyerdorf, at his castle near Dusseldorf; and his Countess, who had left him, taking her two children with her, tried in vain to obtain a divorce and a suitable settlement for herself and the children. On becoming her friend, Lassalle took up the fight with charac- teristic energy, — a fight which was to last nine years, — and won it at last by his brilliant and patient advocacy. Mean- while, Lassalle lived with the Countess in her Dusseldorf home, and one cannot wonder that the world had something to say on the matter, for, though indeed the Countess was twice his age, a beautiful woman of thirty-eight might well be ■m-f^ Old Love Stories Retold something more tlian a mother to a handsome young man of nineteen. During these years Lassalle also threw him- self vehemently into politics, becoming one of the leaders of the Social-Democratic party, and undergoing a six-months' imprisonment for one of his daring speeches. At the conclusion of the Countess' case he was a marked man, and uni- versally regarded as one of the most powerful and dangerous personalities in the Liberal camp. The Countess and he now left Diisseldorf, and settled in Berlin, where Lassalle speedily made a place for himself in the best intellectual society of the capital. Humboldt called him a " Wunder- kind," and became his close friend; and Bis- marck, though so opposed to his political theo- ries, made no secret of his admiration for his great gifts, and of the interest he took in his conversation. Although, as I have said, Lassalle was highly susceptible to the charms of women, none of his earlier love affairs seem to have taken any serious hold upon him. The women to whom he made love were aware that ambition held the first [128] Lassalle and Hele?ie von Dd?iniges place in his heart, and he took care to make it clear that marriage did not enter into the scheme of his life. One story goes, however, that some two years before he met Helene, the possible charm of the married state had been momentarily revealed to him by a brief attachment to a young Russian lady named Sophie Solutzeff. But Sophie, it is said, while admiring Lassalle as a genius, was not drawn to him as a lover, and his own feeling for her being half-hearted, the relationship died a natural death. An acute critic of Lassalle's story (Mr. Clement Shorter in his interesting intro- duction to Mr. George Meredith's "Tragic Comedians") throws discredit at this tale, com- ing as it does through Countess Hatzfeldt, who, as will be seen later, had her own reasons for wishing to show that the passion which proved fatal to Lassalle was no isolated experience in his life, but rather one of a number and of a nature to which his friends were so accustomed that they grew naturally to underrate their seriousness. Those friends, alas ! from first to last were to play an unfortunate part in the tragedy — no doubt, [1^9] ^ Old Love Stones Retold after tlie nianner of friends, with the best intentions. It was friends who, before Ferdinand Lassalle and Helene von Donniges had met or even heard of each other, prepared them to fall into each other's arms by stimulating Helene's curiosity in a certain brilliant and dangerous "Lassalle." Why, they were so evidently born for each other! They must meet! " Surely you know Lassalle If " said young Baron Korff to Helene at a ball, one evening in 1862. "Only a woman who knows him, and shares his opinions, can speak like that!" But Helene apparently had never even heard the name of the man who was soon to mean so much in her life. "Then I pity you both every hour that you remain apart, for you were made for each other, " was Korff's prophetic reply. Again, at a dinner-party, Dr. Karl Oldenberg had exclaimed: "You are the TBU" Lassallc and Helenc ""con Donntges only woman I ever met who seems fitted to be Lassalle's wife!" If only other friends of the two fated ones had realized their ordained affinity, their story might have been different; and what wonder, with such stimulating pre- dictions in her mind, that Helene — prac- tised coquette, too, as she already was — should have developed a mood of inflam- matory expectancy for the moment when she did actually meet her man of destiny. That fateful meeting at last took place at an evening party given by a friend, Frau Hirsemenzel, who was in Helene's confidence, and so dramatically instan- taneous was their recognition of affinity that their fellow guests were conscious of it, too, and remembered the electrical flash and suddenness of it years after. "And this is how you look! This is you ! Yes, yes, it is as I thought, and it is all right!" were Lassalle's first words, as he looked at her, even before they had been introduced to each other. Intro- 131 Old Love Stones Retold duced! What need had they of introduc- tion ! " What is the use ? " Lassalle had added, lay- ing his hand on her arm. " We know each other already. You know who I am; and you are 'Brlinhilde,' Adrienne Cardoville, the 'fox' Korff has told me about — in one word — Helene ! " Never was such a whirlwind wooing. Helene felt herself, as Meredith phrases it, " carried off on the back of a centaur." Each felt so abso- lutely and irrevocably each other's that formali- ties seemed silly. Lassalle spoke to Helene with the famihar " Du," as though they had been each other's for years, and when the party broke up at four in the morning, he carried her in liis arms down the steps of the house, — and yet even to her chaperon, a lady quite demure and strict in her opinions, it all seemed the natural thing to do — as, of course, it was. "It was rather bold and unusual," this lady had said afterward, " but if he had taken you by the hand, and walked off with you altogether, I should not have thought it strange; you seemed to belong to each other so entirely." [132] Lassalle and Helene von Donniges In fact, Lassalle and Helene had acted with the simplicity of a great feeling, and such sim- plicity always brings with it its own fitness, and, however astonishing, compels our respect, like any other masterful play of the elements. Nature had thus manifestly joined these two people. It was now for man to put them asunder. Lassalle was for immediately making formal application for her hand, but Helene, with that vacillation which was to prove their ruin, begged him to wait. She was already aware of the probable attitude of her family toward Lassalle. When she had first heard his name, she had in- quired about him of her grandmother, with whom she was living in Berlin, and had been told that he was a shameless demagogue, whom it would be impossible for her to know. Stories, too, about his relations with Countess Hatzfeldt had been brought to her; and how her father, a stern old aristocrat, high in the diplomatic ser- vice, would entertain the idea of an alliance w^ith the Socialist Messiah she could surmise. Besides, she was already half engaged to a young Wallachian prince, Yanko von Racowitza, [133] r . Old hove Stories Retold a gentle lad, whom she treated much like a pet animal, and called her " Moorish page.'* Yanko was the last of a long series of amourettes which had no doubt somewhat sapped her power of serious loving. He was an engaging companion, a fine musician, and her devoted slave, fetching and carrying for her, and obe- dient to her every whim. There is something appealingly pathetic about this young prince, and of all the secondary actors in the tragedy now about to be- gin, he is the only gracious, if piteous, figure. Helene was nineteen and Lassalle thirty-eight when they first met. Their second meeting did not take place for some months. Meanwhile, Helene's family had "cut" the lady at whose house the first eventful meeting had taken place, and Lassalle had tried in vain to see her. Chance brought them together again at a concert in Berlin. Helene was then with Lawyer Holthoff Lassal/e and Helene von D'onniges and his wife, old friends of her family, and friends, too, of Lassalle. The Holthoffs, therefore, played good angels to the lovers, and several times connived at their meet- ing, with the result that their first feeling for each other was confirmed and deep- ened. Still, Helene weakly kept up her relationship with Yanko, telling him, however, that if ever Lassalle should want her, she would break their engagement, and give up everything, to go to him. Yanko docilely accepted the situation, saying she must do what was best for her own happiness. If the issue had been left to poor Yanko, our lovers would never have been tragic comedians. But sterner and more selfish personali- ties than Helene's Moorish page were soon to be engaged on both sides, and even friends who wished their story well were to blunder on their behalf. Holt- hoff , surely with the best will in the world, had approached Helene's grandmother in Lassalle's interest. Th e grand mother had Old Love Stories Retold written to Herr von Donniges, and from him had come an uncompromising refusal to consider Lassalle's offer under any circumstances. The idea of his daughter marrying one who was at once a Jew and a " shameless demagogue " would naturally seem preposterous to him. At this point of the story it is impossible not to feel a certain lull in the feelings of both lovers. For several months they were both within reach of each other in Berlin, and, though no doubt there were social difficulties in the way of their meeting, they do not seem to have been insu- perable. Yet they never met, though they continued to hear of each other through the Holt- hoffs. When one remembers their first fiery meeting, with all its wild vows, and then sees these months going by, with Helene apparently content with her life as a social butterfly, and Lassalle whole-heartedly absorbed in his political career, we cannot help wondermg if the two were, after all, as much in love as they thought. For, when they really wished to meet, there seems to have been no trouble about arranging it, as be- fore, through the Holthoffs. Lassalle's sister, [136] Lassalle cuid Helcne vo?i Do?i?iiges Frail von Friedland, was on a visit to Berlin, and desired to meet Helene, so Helene and she met, to their mutual liking, at the Holthoffs'. Presently it was suggested that Helene should call Herr Holthoff from his library. On opening the door she found him there — with Lassalle. From this interview we miss the splendid im- patience of the night of the whirlwind wooing. A leisurely diplomacy had taken its place. It was March now — March, 1863. Helene had just had a birthday, which Lassalle had remem- bered with violets and rosebuds and a poem. When the summer came, he was, as if accident- ally, to make the acquaintance of Helene's parents, and rely on his conquering charm to win them round. When the summer did come, Helene was busily nursing her grandmother, who remained ill all the rest of the year, and died early in the winter; and, also in that summer, with that culpably frivolous vacillation which character- ized her throughout, she had, strangely enough, formally betrothed herself to Yanko von Raco- witza. After the grandmother's death, Helene [137] Old Love Stories Retold returned with her mother to Geneva, where the family now hved, Ilerr von Donniges having been appointed charge d'affaires at Berne. In March, 1864, Yanko joined them, and, with his pleasant ways and various social accomplishments, won himself into the good graces of Herr von Donniges and the whole family circle. In May, Helene fell ill with a fever, and on her convalescence, still being weak and nervous, she was sent by her doctor to a mountain resort near Berne, where she lived with some English and American friends. Meanwhile, Lassalle had been working like a giant, fighting lawsuits with which the government vainly attempted to para- lyze his political activity, founding his great Working Men's Society, and mak- ing an almost regal campaign through the country, punctuated with daring speeches and wild popular enthusiasm. For one of these speeches he was sen- Lassalk and Helene von Dormiges tenced to a year's imprisonment, which his brilHant appeal succeeded in reduc- ing to six months. Pending his imprison- ment, however, feehng the need of rest after the long strain upon his energies, he sought his favorite retreat, Rigi-Kaltbad, in Switzerland. He had been there a few days, when, one afternoon — the afternoon of July 25, 1864 — while he was busy on his cor- respondence with his political colleagues, a message was brought to him that a lady wished to see him. It was Helene. She had ridden up the mountain with her two lady friends, having heard from the friendly Holthoff that Lassalle was stay- ing there. Lassalle proceeded with the party to Rigi-Kulm, where they were to spend the night and see the sunrise. But they were to be disappointed of their sunrise by a fog. *' How often," Helene writes in her subsequent reminiscences, " when in later years I have stood upon the summit of Old Love Stories Retold Rigi, and seen the day break in all its splendour, have I recalled this foggy, damp morning, and Lassalle's disappointment." On this occasion, they discussed their future more seriously than ever before, and though Helene still pleaded for further compromise in- stead of an immediate marriage, which Lassalle strongly urged as their wisest course, she seems on this occasion to have been braced by contact with his strong spirit into a mood of firmness which promised him loyalty against whatever opposition. They parted, elate and confident in the power of their love to win their battle. At every stage of her journey, the post and the telegraph brought her fiery and tender messages from her lover, and three days later Lassalle him- self followed her to Wabern. Meanwliile, she had written him a passionate letter in which she solemnly promised to become his wife, whatever difficulties might stand in their way. " You said to me yesterday : ' Say but a sensible and decided "yes!" — et je me charge du resfe. Good: I say "yes" — chargez vons done du reste. I only require that we first do all in our power to [140] Lassalle and Helene von Donniges win my parents to a friendly attitude. To me belongs, however, a painful task. I must slay in cold blood the true heart of Yanko von Raco- witza, who has given me the purest love, the noblest devotion. With heartless egotism I must destroy the day-dream of a noble youth. But, for your sake, I will even do what is wrong." For eight days, Lassalle and Helene were at Wabern together — eight days of happy, unin- terrupted companionship — in which, as they learnt more and more of each other, every moment taught them how unerring had been their first swift sense of their instinctive affinity. In Helene Lassalle found that exquisitely matched wife of heart and l^rain, of spirit and sense, who is the dream of every man of genius — a dream not fulfilled once in a hundred years; and in Lassalle Helene had found her "eagle of men," that dominating, strong lord of her hfe, who was her dream, as he is the dream of every woman, but of whose existence her girl's career of easy con- quest had made her somewhat confidently skep- tical. Life seldom brings together two human beings so absolutely mated, so surely born for [141] .J^^r^/'^- y I- i 1 Old Love Stories Retold each other. It was elated with a very solemn sense of this union that Helene and Lassalle bade each other good-by at Wabern station on the morning of August 3, 1864. Helene was due at Geneva at two o'clock, Lassalle was to follow by a later train. "Here end my happy memories," is Helene's sigh in her record of this time. Neither indeed could have thought that before August had ended Lassalle would have done wdth work and dreams, and that the rooms of the Working Men's Society in Dusseldorf, as he had strangely prophe- sied, would be "hung in black." Helene found her family in festival spirits, and her mother in an unwonted mood of tenderness, owing to the recent betrothal of her sister Margaretha to Count Kayserling. Alas ! this rare genial- ity not unnaturally prompted Helene to take a false step against which Lassalle had specifically warned her. She con- fided in her seldom-softened mother — Lassalle and HcJcjie vo?i 'Domuges with the result that, as with the advent of some wicked fairy, all the merriment suddenly fled with shrieking, and with horror-lifted hands. An alliance with that unspeakable Jew, that shameless demagogue! Why, the mere thought of it was enough to frighten away the ar- duously captured count ! How could she, abandoned girl, ruin her sister's pros- pects, and smirch the social record of the whole family! The father, called to the rescue, made a terrifying scene, heaped filthy slanders on Lassalle's name, and forbade Helene to leave the house. The battle had now begun in real earnest, and her father's violence finally awakened Helene to the radical impos- sibility of her dreams of peaceable com- promise. Lassalle was right. There was only one way, and here Helene rose strongly to the situation, and acted with instant resolution and courage. Lassalle was to have left Wabern for Geneva by a train starting a few h ours later than jl^K' i Old hove Stof'ies Retold Helene's, and on raising the storm at home, but before her father's interference, she had imme- diately despatched a letter l)y her maid to meet him on his arrival. Her father's treatment, how- ever, decided her to leave home instantly, and, once for all, to unite her life with Lassalle's. Slipping some money and a small dagger into her pocket, she managed to escape from the house unobserved, and arrived at Lassalle's hotel just as he was reading her letter. He received her somewhat sternly, reproaching her for having disobeyed him by the confidence in her mother; and, to her intense astonishment and disappoint- ment, refused to go away with her, though he himself, during the days they had just spent to- gether, had pleaded so forcibly for that very course. He insisted that she should return home, and leave him to win her from her parents — a feat which, with liis sul^lime confidence in him- self, he was sure of accomplishing. Helene, still vibrating with the scene she had just gone through, and too truly measuring the force of the resistance to be encountered, endeavoured to convince Las- salle of the utter hopelessness of his attempt, and [144] Lass a lie a? id Heleiie von Dhinlgcs besought him with tears to take advantage of the nioment. But, alas, Lassalle's fighting-blood was up, and his haughty pride on its mettle. Arrogantly sure of his strength, fatally underestimating the task before him, he remained obdurate, and presently escorted Helene to the house of a lady who was not only Helene's own friend, but a friend, too, of the family. They had hardly ar- rived there when Helene's mother and sister also arrived. Lassalle declared the meeting most opportune, and immediately applied all his fa- mous resources of persuasive eloquence to the situation, only to prove how right Helene's judg- ment had been. Lassalle's usually victorious arts were not only utterly wasted on Frau von Donniges, but that lady assailed and insulted him in the most violent and contemptuous fashion. Helene, thus more than ever confirmed in her foresight, again begged him, in her mother's presence, to take her away with him, but alas! the gods had already bound his eyes for the stroke of his doom, and he paid no heed. Though Frau von Donniges insolently told him that, should he [ 145 ] Old Love Stories Retold attempt to call on her husband, the ser- vants would throw him out of the house, and that, should he write, his letters would be returned unopened, he still maintained a pacificatory attitude of punctilious courtesy, and still insisted on surrender- ing Helene to the care of such a mother, with a fanatical gallantry which was no doubt very satisfying to his pride, but which was certainly most disastrously ill-timed. Helene's eagle among men had indeed made a very unaquiline mis- take. Here, if ever, was his moment to swoop and carry the white lamb of the house of von Donniges safe to his un- scalable eyrie. But no! he chose instead to pose picturesquely in an attitude of nobly surrendering a prey which it was obviously in his power any moment to recapture. Nothing, indeed, would sat- isfy his aquiline pride but that the family which had dared thus to scorn him should beg him upon its knees to do it the honour of flying away with one of its daughters! Lassalle a?id Helen vo?i Dofmiges The image does indeed not unfairly repre- sent the hopelessness of the demands of his pride. There was to be a conflict of wills. His could not fail to be the stronger. " I give you back your child," said he, magnificently, to Frau von Donniges. *' Listen to me. I, who can do with your daughter what I wish, resign her to your care, but only for a short time. She goes with you because I wish her to ; never for- get that. And now, farewell!" Then, turning to Helene, and tenderly embracing her, he said : " Farewell, for a little while! What you are doing for me now, I will never forget. I can never thank you enough for your compliance. I require nothing more from your will, your strength. I know this is much to ask; all the rest is my affair. Do not allow yourself to be maltreated; otherwise, submit to what is required of you. I shall know all that happens, and on the slightest ill-treatment, I will take you away at once: in any case, they shall not Old Love Stories Retold keep you long. Resign yourself for a short time to their will; mine is stronger; we shall conquer at last. And now, good-hy for a little while." It was magnificent, but, indeed, it was not war; and what Lassalle failed to see was that the pride which thus prompted him so desperately to hazard not only his own but also Helene's happiness was in its essence as bourgeois as the pride he was fighting, was indeed identical. All that he could hope to accomplish was the wresting of an empty formality from a society whose conventions both himself and Helene professed to despise, a sanc- tion gained at the sword's point of which neither felt any need, an authority, in the opinion of both, obsolete and ridiculous. But such are the occa- sional paradoxes of the revolutionary. Can we wonder if in Helene's eyes her eagle moulted some feathers for this unlooked-for action, and that her love was set a-thinking .^ Could he really love her and act so .^ and if in- deed he loved her, her brain told her that he had made a mistake at a critical moment. Eagles among men should never make mistakes. Pos- sibly, too, her fine, feminine sense found some- ru8i Ferdinand Lassalle Lassalle and Hclcne von Ddn?iiges thing underbred in this anxious assertion of pride in a situation where a truer pride wouhl have disdained to measure itself with such vulgar standards. Some such half-formed thoughts may well have worked in Helene's mind, and con- tributed to the slackening of a will all too suscep- tible to varying influences and changes of mood; and soon she was to be a prisoner, cut off from the spiritual fount of her being, and instead daily and hourly breathing an atmosphere of her own doubts and her father's lies. Herr von Donniges was an opponent whose obstinacy and resource Lassalle had not counted with, and whose brutal and unscrupulous methods he could not have been expected to conceive. An ordinarily severe parent Lassalle might well have considered himself a match for; but Herr von Donniges was to display a barbarity, a ferocity, of disapproval which one does not expect to en- counter in a modern parent, however tyrannical, and he at once set about the subjugation of his disobedient daughter in the thoroughgoing spirit of a medieval baron. Lassalle had hardly left the house before this terrific parent appeared, [149] Old Love Stories Retold hatless, so to speak, with rage, and with a hirge knife in his hand. Seizing Helene by the hair, he dragged her home, and locked her in her room, the window of which he nailed up with his own hand. Here she was kept close prisoner, her food was pushed in at the door, without her seeing who brought it, and her father threatened to shoot any one who should hold communication with her, or act as go-between for her and Lassalle. At short intervals, he would come, and ask her decision, always receiving the answer: *'I shall marry Lassalle." Had Helene continued steadfast as she thus began, and opposed her father's bugaboo methods with quiet determina- tion, the story could only have ended one way. Disquieting and even alarm- ing as Herr von Donniges' fury might be, her common sense might have told her that it was mainly stage thunder, and that there was really nothing to fear, so Lassalle a?id Helene vo?i Dojiniges long as she and Lassalle remained true to each other. After all, she was not really living in the Middle Ages, and her father knew quite well that he could only fulfil his threats at the risk of his public position. Here was Lassalle's point of vantage, and he lost no time in setting in motion the high forces at his disposal — for, revolu- tionary though he was, he was not with- out powerful friends. That he would have fulfilled his boast, and forced Herr von Donniges to restore his daughter's freedom, there can be no doubt. Alas! it was Helene herself who had made his spirited tactics of no avail. Space does not permit of my following, step by step, the development of a struggle to which Herr von Donniges presently brought not only violence but brilliant, unscrupulous cunning. On the side of the lovers it is a heartbreaking tragedy of errors and misunderstandings, compli- cated, too, with such cross-purposes as 151 Old Love Stories Retold those of the Countess Hatzfeldt, whose jealousy of Helene is clearly seen to have been one of the cruel threads in the fatal web. Of course, the greatest danger of all in such a situation is that the lovers, cut off from direct communication, may lose faith in each other. At the best, love is a feeling childishly sensitive to doubts and fears. For the truest lovers separation is full of anxious disquiet. Time and Distance are evil fairies. They have been known to work sad mischief with the greatest passions. Who would dare answer for the love of another across say a year of separation and silence ? " Canst thou be true across so many miles — • So many days that keep us still apart ? " What lover would dare to answer the question to his own heart with an affirmative ? Had Helene but kept her lover's parting words in mind, and done nothing but sit firm in quiet determination, awaiting her cer- tain deliverance, all would have been well; but, unfortunately, the fibres of her will all too soon relaxed; and, whatever she still felt in her heart, the threats of her father and the entreaties of her [152] Lassalle and Helene von Donniges sisters presently liiid their way with her. Not only did she promise to give up Lassalle, but she set her name to letters to family friends announ- cing that determination, letters which her father had written for her to sign. She has pleaded intimidation as an excuse for this; but, even when the opportunity was given to her of free speech with one of Lassalle's most pow^erful ambassa- dors. Colonel Riistow, and of transmitting through him a letter to Lassalle, she used it coldly to repudiate her lover. Herr von Donniges, with the specious diplomacy which char- acterized his clever management of the af- fair at this stage, had sought an interview with Colonel Riistow, for the purpose of convincing him that Helene was acting with her own free-will. Asked if Helene might receive and read for herself a letter from Lassalle, Herr von Donniges promptly agreed, and Helene, entering the room, left it to read her letter. Soon she returned, and without a trace of emotion said to Colonel Riistow as she handed him a note: "Tell Herr Lassalle that I have read his letter; but it makes no difference [153] Old Love Stot'ies Retold as regards the contents of the note I have just given you for him." This was the note: " Herr Lassalle : — "Having with all sincerity and with the deepest regret acknowledged my fault to my betrothed bridegroom, Yanko von Racowitza, and been comforted by his forgiveness and the assurance of his unchanged affection; having also in- formed your friend Holthoff of my de- cision before receiving his letter advising me to give you up, I now declare to you, of my own free-will, that a union with you is not to be thought of, that I con- sider myself released from my engage- ment to you, and that I am determined to devote my future life to my betrothed husband in true and faithful love. "Helene vox DOXXIGES." Though this may well have shaken Lassalle 's faith in Helene, he refused to believe that it was written of her own Lassal/c and Helene vo?i T)onniges free-will — and, in fact, according to Helene's own statement later, the whole scene had been carefully planned by her father for the purpose of impressing Colonel Rlistow. He himself had dic- tated the letter, and made her promise that in the event of Colonel Rustow bring- ing a letter from Lassalle, she was to leave the room, give it unread into the hands of Yanko von Racowitza, and re- turn, after a proper interval, with the previously prepared note. We cannot but feel that a nature so easily dominated was, after all, no true mate for Lassalle. A similar scene a few days later, still more diabolically conceived and callously acted, proved even too much for Lassalle's stubborn faith in her loyalty. Her letter had only moved him to fresh efforts. He had come so far as to win the assistance of the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Munich, who authorized an advocate, Doctor Haenle, to endeavor to arrange the affair amicably with Herr von Don- 155 Old Love Stories Retold niges, and, if that proved impossible, to summon Helene before a notary to declare her decision in Lassalle's presence, and away from her father's influence. So little, for all her father's medieval methods, was there any need for Helene to fear them. She had not only Lassalle, but the law on her side — and yet, w ill it be believed, she declined in the presence of Doctor Haenle and Colonel Rlistow the proffered chance of freedom. She would not go before a notary, and refused to meet Lassalle. " What good would it do 1^ " she said. *' I know what he wants to say, and I am tired of the whole business." In addition, she spoke with incredible levity of Lassalle: "Lassalle likes to talk; he would scarcely get through what he has to say in two hours," — and generally conducted the inter- view with such heartless frivolity that no wonder Lassalle's ambassadors w^ent back to their friend, convinced that a woman who could talk so was utterly unworthy of him. And, certainly, though Helene was acting once more under intimidation, and, as she afterward explained, from a misunder- [156 ] Lassalle and Helene von Dhmigcs standing of Rustow's and Haenle's relations to Lassalle (for her father kept her throughout ignorant of the chances in her favor, and she feared " false friends " of Lassalle among the dangers that surrounded her), yet it was surely unnecessary to play her part with such sincerity. Can we wonder that Lassalle's faith in Helene was unequal to this cruel blow ? At last he must agree with his friends. She was not worth the struggle. "I have given up the aifair," he telegraphed Richard Wagner, who had stood his friend throughout, "on account of the utter unworthi- ness of the person. But thanks for kind inten- tions. Do nothing more. Lassalle." So he advised his other friends; and then, in his natural anger, he sent the following challenge to Helene's father: " Herr von Donniges : — *' Having learned through the report of Colonel Riistow and Doctor Haenle that your daughter is a shameless hussy, and having therefore no intentions of dishonouring myself by marrying [157] Old hove Stories Retold her, there is no longer any reason for withhokling a demand for satisfaction on account of the various insults which you have offered me. I therefore request you to make the necessary arrangements for a duel with my two friends })y whom I send this message. F. Lassalle." And it had been one of Lassalle's cardinal principles never, under any circum- stances, to fight a duel! So had love enervated the strong thinker. Herr von Donniges refused to fight, and fled to Berne, but young Racowitza took on him to defend the family honour. Lassalle was known to be a fine shot, and Helene has since told us how she looked on Racowitza as already dead. She had already pictured his being car- ried to her home, and planned that in the confusion that would ensue she would steal out of the house — to Lassalle. Such was her weak and wdtless depend- ._J Lassallc cuid Hcloic vo?i Donniges ence on circumstances. But the issue was to be otherwise. At the first ex- chanoje of shots, I^assallc was fatally wounded ; and he died two days later — August 31, 1864 — aged thirty-nine years and five months. He is buried in the Jewish cemetery at Breslau, and on the headstone is this short epitaph: "Here rests what was mortal of Ferdinand Lassalle, Thinker and Fighter." So a weak woman and a tyrannical father had })rouo-ht to nothino; one of the strongest personalities and the most valu- able intellects of the nineteenth century. So ended that stormy, starry wooing of that night in May; and surely there never was a story filled with more cruel reading, with so much pitiful matter of wantonly tangled complication, and, it would seem, easily avoidable tragic mistakes. Cer- tainly no story in the history of love more terribly illustrates the mad and criminal folly of arbitrary interference with that ^ Shasta Old Love Stories Retold elemental instinct of liuman hearts. For not even Herr von Donniges achieved his end. The disgrace he feared came upon him tenfold. His daugliter left him. Racowitza died a year or two after — though Helene had once more illus- trated her curious nature by becoming his wife. The Countess Hatzfeldt was heartbroken. Not a single actor in the story was happy — and all because society, in the person of Herr von Don- niges, wickedly, cruelly insisted on putting asunder two whom Nature had so manifestly joined together. Such is the revenge of a thwarted natural force — and such is the lesson society seems eternally incapable of learning. [160] VIII Abelard and Heloise r "^ I ^HERE lived in Paris a young girl named J^ Heloise." So Abelard in his autobio- graphical letter to an unknown, and possibly hypothetical friend, tells in one sentence, more eloquent even than his wonted eloquence of the schools, a whole history. He wrote in Latin, but it sounds prettier in his own lan- guage, as most things are apt to sound in French: "// existait a Paris line jenne fille nommee Heloise y x\h me! what long-lost joy, what ancient heart-break, are contained in that simple statement. Yet all would have been well — or not so well ! — if there had not also lived in Paris at the same time a certain brilliant teacher of philosophy named Peter Abelard. The year was 1118 and Abelard not only lived in Paris, but in a real sense may almost be said [1611 i Old Love Stories Retold to have been one of its makers. As the walls of Thel)es rose to music, Paris biiilded itself to the music of Abelard's tongue: for on his lips, indeed, of all men, philosophy was not " Harsh and crabbed, as (hill fools suppose, But musical as in Apollo's lute." Think of the wonder of the teacher on the one hand, and the wonder of the student thirst for knowledge on the other, that between them could build a city — all out of enchanting speech and en- chanted hearing. For Paris literally be- gan that way. So many scholars flocked from all parts of Europe to listen to that nig;htino;ale of knowledo^e, that Paris, a mere embryo city when Abelard first came there, had to grow bigger and bigger to hold them. It seems fitting that our modern Alexandria should have been made out of learning and a love story. Abelard was a young nobleman from Pallet in Brittany, of an old family, and with much confidence in himself. Though Abelard and Heloise the eldest son of his father, a man of con- sideral)le euUiire for his day, he early chose for himself the wandering pilgrimage of the scholar rather than that military way of life most affected hy young men of his class. Wherever the reputation of some famous teacher drew him, he rambled, and of all his teachers, Jean Roscelin, Canon of Compiegne, was probably the earliest, as he was certainly the most in- fluential. From him it may well be that Abelard's natural bent towards taking the common-sense rationalistic view of the hair- splitting scholastic controversies of his day gained strength and direction ; for Roscelin was a well-known champion of freedom of thought, and looked upon as anything but 50und on the question of the Trinity. With a rationalistic temper of mind thus already well-formed, Abelard at length arrived in Paris, and put himself under the teaching of a scholar of a very dif- ferent type, the famous William of Cham- laux, a brilliant pillar of orthodox-^ 163 ■m ^i^/fc'^'*"^ 0^ ^ "d k Si^-^-.-^^^ Old Love Stories Retold A certain philosophic controversy of supreme importance then, of supreme unimportance now, was agitating the learned world. We needn't pause even to state what it was. All that con- cerns us is that William of Champeaux cham- pioned the orthodox, logic-chopping side of the controversy, and that Abelard, by a sudden flash of his radiant common sense, won such a victory for the other side that the authority of his teacher was disastrously impaired, and his own reputation as a daring thinker and subtle dialectician made with a single blow. Abelard's success decided him to open a school of his own, and at Melun, some thirty miles from Paris, and presently at Corbeil, he began to draw the world of wandering scholars to his chair. Suddenly his health gave way, and seven years of exile in his country home followed. ^leanwhile, William of Champeaux had delegated his chair to a substitute, and himself retired into the priory of Saint Victor. In his retirement, however, he gave lectures on rhetoric, which Abelard, on his return to Paris, cynically attended — to the further discomfiture of the teacher. So the [ i«i ] Abe lard a) id Heloise battle between the rival teachers went on. With its details we need not here concern ourselves. Suffice it that, at length, in the year 1118, after various twists and turns of the scholastic conflict, Abelard found himself firmly seated in William of Champeaux's long-coveted chair of the Episco- pal school, under the shadow of Notre Dame. Soon there were some five thousand students, a motley picturesque crowd indeed, thronging Paris just to hear Abelard talk. "It has been esti- mated," says his most recent and most luminous biographer, " that a pope, nineteen cardinals, and more than fifty archbishops and bishops w^ere at one time among his pupils." The handsome, brilliant, and somewhat worldly young teacher was the idol of the city, and Heloise, in a passage of her letters pathetic with womanly worship, recalls how the women used to run to see him as he passed from his lodging on the hill of Ste. Genevieve (now the Latin Quarter and the scene of the greatest of his earlier triumphs) to the schools. "Who was there," she cries, "that did not hasten to observe when you went abroad, and did not follow you with strained neck and [105] Old Love Stories Retold staring eyes as you passed along ? What wife, what virgin, did not burn ? What queen or no})le dame did not envy my fortune ? " In 1118 Abelard was in his thirty-ninth year, and at the height of his fame. The intoxication of fulfilled ambition and personal popularity was his daily and hourly drink. W^ealth as well as fame was his, but so far he had not known love. Now Abelard, by rumour of her rare gifts and graces, and unusual accom- plishments of learning, had by this time become aware that // existait a Paris line jeune fille nommee Heloise, and, by his own confession, he presently set himself to win her love. Heloise lived with her " uncle " — gossip tongues said her father — Fulbert, a canon of Paris. Abelard found himself in need of a new lodging, and Fulbert was glad to welcome so dis- tinguished a boarder. It is not difficult to imagine the excitement in the heart of Abelard and Heloise Heloise. For it had been arranged that Abelard should partly repay Fulbert for his hospitality by giving various learned lessons to his niece. Heloise was but seventeen or eighteen — so much a child (though, indeed, she had been brought up by the somewhat worldly nuns of Argenteuil — a fact not to be forgotten in Abelard's defence) that her guardian gave x'Vbelard permission to chastise her if she neglected her lessons ! Neither seem to have entirely neglected their lessons, for it is probable that He- loise' s knowledge of Greek and Hebrew came from Abelard, who also instructed her in theology and dialectics. But soon, as with Paolo and Francesca, the books were forgotten, and Abelard confesses that before long there were " more kisses than theses," and that "love was the inspirer of his tongue." Yet, if the books were temporarily forgotten, they were not merely "love's purveyors," for this love of Abelard and Heloise was one of those Old Love Stories Retold rare loves in which the rapture of union is not merely in the heart, but in the brain. Each could say to the other, as Robert Browning wrote to Elizabeth Browning — " Where the heart is, let the brain lie also." Theirs was that keen, com- plete love which unites the spirit and the senses and the intellect in an ecstasy which no tongue, not even Abelard's, can tell. But, if A})elard did not entirely neglect the mental training of his beloved pupil, she was soon the only pupil to whom he paid any regard; too soon his love for her so completely possessed him that he half forgot his lecture-room and the five thousand pilgrim scholars, and, when he did lecture, lectured in a weary, unprepared fashion very unlike the old spirited way which had won him his fame. But, if his lectures were dis- appointing, there were soon love songs of his making on all the singing lips of Paris; and every one knew what and who it was that had wrought this change in the master. Every one, for a long time, except — Fulbert ; and then at last Fulbert too. With Fulbert's discovery of the attach- ment, Abelard and Heloise ceased to live under [168] Abe lard and Heloise the same roof. The happy lessons violently ceased, and the lovers might only meet rarely and with difficulty. As usual, however, the guardian had made his discovery too late, and there came a day when Heloise realized that she was soon to become a mother, and wrote telling Abelard the wonderful news — " with transports of joy." It is necessary to emphasize Heloise's attitude in presence of a contingency which most women would naturally, and necessarily, regard as tragic, as it is characteristic of her part — so much the nobler part — in the whole story. What was she to do ? she asked. Abelard' s answer was to take her one night, during Fulbert's absence, to his home at Pallet, where, under his sister's care, she, in due course, gave birth to a boy, to whom the parents gave the name of " Astrolabe " — a name which bears curious wit- ness to that love of learning which had meant so much in bringing them together. Fulbert's rage at these circumstances may be judged too well from his subsequent action. To appease it Abelard at length proposed marriage with Heloise, though it is impossible to say that [1C9] old Love Stones Retold the form of his proposal, as reported by himself, raises liini in one's esteem. He had done notJiing, he urged, that need surprise anyone who understood the violence of love and knew into what abysses, since the beginning of the w^orld, women had hurled the greatest of men ! Remembering his own earlier state- ment that he had deliberately sought the love of Heloise, he was hardly in a position to make this oldest and meanest of all masculine pleas — the woman tempted me! Still, he was willing to make a reparation which, he quaintly says, went beyond anything Fulbert could have hoped! He would marry Heloise — on condition that the marriage w^as kept a secret. For, you see, Heloise knew but one love — the love of Abelard ; Abelard loved two, and I fear that for him Ambition was the greater of the two. Think of a man who loved a woman considering, at such a crisis of their lives, and at a moment when even an evident Abelard and Heloise duty might be expected to appear attrac- tive — think of him coldly thinking of his "reputation." "I proposed to him,'* says he, " to marry her whom I had se- duced, on the sole condition that the mar- riage was to be kept secret, so that it should not injure my reputation!" If, as I have said before, the love of Dante and Beatrice was entirely the love of Dante, it is surely equally certain that the love of Abelard and Heloise was mainly the love of Heloise. It is a hu- miliating comment on Abelard to hear how differently Heloise took the situation. With all her womanly eloquence, backed by no end of learned authority, she pleaded with him — not to marry her ! What odium the marriage would bring upon the Church. What tears it would cost philosophy! Think, too, how de- plorable for a man whom nature had created for the whole world thus to be enslaved by a woman and bent under a dishonourable yoke! Old Love Stories Retold Reasoning all too much after Abelard's own heart ! — but all the same the marriage really took place. Leaving little Astrolabe with Abe- lard's sister at Pallet, the two lovers returned to Paris, and after a night of vigil in a church, were married, on a certain dawn, in presence of Fulbert and many friends of both parties. At the church door they separated, Abelard going his way, Heloise hers. For the world was not to know! However, according to Abelard, Fulbert was determined that it should — and can we blame him ! — and, in consequence of his various loud whispers, Abelard had Heloise secretly conveyed to her old convent of x\rgenteuil, near Paris, where, without taking the veil, she was to live the life of a nun. This act of Abelard's was misunderstood, wilfully maybe, by Fulbert, who professed to regard it as a first step to Abelard's annulment of the marriage, in the interests of his ecclesiasti- cal ambitions — for this natural enemy of priests and priestly sophistry appears really to have had his heart set upon church preferment, after all. Acting on this, possible, misconception, Fulbert [172] Abelaj'd and Heloise took his terrible historic revenge upon Abelard; and Abelard and Heloise saw each other no more for many years. Beside himself with rage and shame, it was not unnatural that Abelard — selfish as it actually was of him — should com- mand Heloise to consummate her uncompleted vows, and take the veil in earnest. This she did, her warm human heart protesting, as it still re- mained warm enough to protest after years of monastic life, and, who can doubt that reads her wonderful letters, protested to the end. Abelard's life in the long interval belongs rather to the literature of theology than to the literature of love. Though the rich human spring in him which had given that worldly charm to his lec- tures, and turned a philosopher into a troubadour, was for ever dried up; and though, indeed, he was soon to wither to an asceticism which re- garded his love for Heloise as a sinful lust of the flesh, yet his head retained enough of its vital originality to keep him still and always a pioneer of honest thinking, and, therefore, a rebel in the eyes of the church. To-day iVbelard's heresies have become a part of official Christian doctrines, [ 173 ] i } Old hove St07'ies Retold as is the way with any heresies whatso- ever; but several centuries have gone by in the interval, and the way of the honest thinker is easier to-day — if he is careful to choose his subjects! Though Abelard grew more and more of an ascetic moralist, he does not appear to have lost his courage as a masculine thinker, and, as long as he lived, he was ever ready to take the perilous chances of truth. This, necessarily, made his life eventful, and even stormy, for the next few years, and finally drove him into a sort of exile, resulting in the foundation of that lonely little monastery, in the valley of Arduzon, the name of which, the Paraclete, is so consecrated to romance. Once more the old miracle of his silver speech took place. Distant and almost uninhabitable as was the valley where, with a brother or two, he had taken up his exile, though, as he tells us, you had to build your rough cabin for yourself, and had to be content with moss and mud to lie on. Ahclard and Hcloise and tlie gnissy bank to eat from, still the pilgrim audience somehow found its way, as inevitably the sleuth-hounds of heresy found theirs also. For there is no spot on the earth, however lonely, where it is absolutely safe to tell the truth. It was that popular and industrious Saint Ber- nard of Clairvaux that this time made things uncomfortable for Abelard; and with that usual luck of his, which seemed to make every change in his life for the worse, Abelard accepted an invitation to preside over the Abbey of St. Gildas at Rhuys in Brittany. The Abbey of St. Gildas was rich and worldly, and it is more than likely that the good monks had been attracted to x\belard rather by the heterodoxy of his reputation than by his piety. Their disappointment was to be keen and bitter, for how different was this austere, atrophied Abelard to the gay monk of the world they had looked for- ward to see. Nor were they long in ex- pressing their disappo intment. Soon Old Love Stot'ies Retold they were violently to oppose his authority and even to drop poison into his food. Abelard had been abbot of Saint Gildas but three or four years when news came to him that Heloise was in trouble too. The nuns of Ar- genteuil, of which monastery she had been prioress, had been turned out of their home, owing more to the ecclesiastical avarice of the Abbot Suger of St. Denis — who fished up an old document to prove that Argenteuil really belonged to the monastery of St. Denis — than to the probably ex- aggerated accounts of the worldliness of the nuns. On hearing this news, Abelard transferred the Paraclete, still his property, into Heloise's keep- ing, and, within a year or two, the nunnery thus founded became one of the most famous in the kingdom, respected, and, as we would say, fashionable. The goodness and high-minded- ness of Heloise are as apparent in her success as is her charm. Nobles and prelates smiled gifts upon her little abbey, and noble ladies anxious to take the veil thought first of the Paraclete. Well might a world-weary, perhaps love-thwarted, girl seek out siich a spiritual mother; for, good [176] Abclard and Heloise and pure and spiritual as Heloise was, her letters tell us that the spring of an undying love still kept her nature sweet and sympathetic to the human needs. A young monk seeking Abelard would indeed have made no such happy choice of spiritual director. Ask the monks of St. Gildas ! These perhaps over-human fathers seem a't length to have so violently resisted Abelard's stern purpose to reform them, as to have driven him from the iVbbey in very fear for his life; though it must not be forgotten that in the midst of all these various "calamities" of which pres- ently he was so feelingly to write, Abelard still remained Abbot of St. Gildas, and enjoyed an abbot's revenue. The monks, however, found it possible still to make his life a burden, and his calumniators were not slow to take their side against him One day, sick at heart, and ap- parently anxious to tell his own truth about him- self, Abelard sat down and wrote to an unknown friend "The Story of my Calamities," a document of the first importance to our understanding of his nature, but more important still, because, accidentally being read by Heloise in her quiet [177] Old Love Stories Retold nunnery, it prompted her to write the first of her beautiful heartfelt letters: "To her lord, yea, father; to her spouse, yea, brother; from his servant, yea, daughter — his wife, his sister; to Abe- lard from Heloise." His spiritual daugh- ters, the good sisters of the Paraclete, — " they who have given themselves to God in the person of her who has given her- self exclusively to thee," — were alarmed to hear such news of him, and begged that he would write to ease their anxious hearts. "A letter would cost thee so little," cried Heloise reproachfully, and quotes Seneca on the epistolary duties of friends. In the interval between Abelard's making over the Paraclete to Heloise, and the writing of " The Story of my Calamities," he had paid many visits to her abbey, very strictly in the character of her spiritual patron and director. The tongues of the world wagged over these visits, but we have only to read Abelard's " dusty answers Abelard and H'cloise to Heloise's letters to realize that the world was all too wrontr. The Abelard that had taught Ileloise her Greek and Hebrew, and floated love-songs through the lattice to the ears of an eaves-drop- ping Paris, was dead. He was now a serious doctor of divinity, with a strong leaning towards asceticism. The old warm-blooded, angel-eyed dream that Heloise could still write of with stirring bosom, after so many years, and still re- gard — for all her ecclesiastical diginity — as the crown of her woman's life, was for poor Abelard a folly and a foulness. To her burning words he answered with dry counsels of perfection — in letters which, from the human point of view, are the most pitiful things in literature. But, on the other hand, where in litera- ture has a woman so daringly laid bare her heart with so splendid and so pure a shamelessness ! When we consider, too, the time in which she lived, all the dis- abilities under which a woman eager to Old Love Stoj'ies Retold *' utter all herself upon the air" must have laboured, the courage of such an emotional sin- cerity constitutes an achievement before which Abelard's intellectual audacities seem mere col- lege triumphs. Ah, listen how this twelfth cen- tury abbess dared to love: "... All your wishes I have blindly fulfilled, even to the point that, not lacing al)le to bring myself to offer you the least resistance, I have had the courage, on a word from you, to lose myself. I have done still more : ah ! — strange indeed — my love has turned to such madness that it has sacrificed, without hope of ever re- covering it, that Avhich was the one object of its desire; at your command, I have, with a new habit, taken another heart, just to show you that you are as much the only master of my heart as of my body. Never, God is my witness, have I ever sought from you anything but just yourself; it is you only, and not your possessions, that I love. I have never given a thought either to any questions of marriage or marriage dower, or in- deed to any joys or wishes of my own. It has been yours alone, as you well know, that I have [180] Abelard a?id Heloise had at heart. Although the name of wife ap- pears more sacred and more binding, I myself would have liked better the name of mistress, or even — let us say it — that of concubine or courtesan: in the thought that the more I humbled myself for you, the more I should win the right to your good graces, and the less impaired the glorious renown of your genius. ' ' You yourself in writing that letter of consola- tion to a friend have not entirely forgotten these sentiments of mine. You have not disdained to recall some of those reasons for which I did my best to dissuade you from our fatal marriage, but you have passed over in silence almost all those which made me prefer love to marriage, liberty to a chain. I take God to witness that if Augus- tus, master of the world, had deemed me worthy of the honour of his alliance, and assured me of the Empire of the universe for ever, the name of courtesan with thee would have seemed sweeter and nobler than the name of empress with him; for it is not riches, not power, that makes great- ness: riches and power are things of fortune; greatness depends upon merit." [181] Old Love Stories Retold Abelard has his place in the history of philosophy, but his name would hardly have attained its familiarity on the lips of men, had it not been for his love story, and the real love in the story was that of Heloise. For such a love the history of love has but few parallels, and what pic- ture could be more dramatically poign- ant than that with which the story closes. At last, all his battles fought, Abelard came to die, and Heloise, by connivance of a friendly abbot, con- trived that his body should be brought in secret to the Paraclete. The Abbot of Cluny deserves well of romance for that good deed. Heloise survived iVbe- lard twenty-one years, and much of that time she must have w^atched over his sleep in that quiet chapel in the lonely valley of Arduzon. Surely no love story in the world has a more touching end than this, an end more picturesque in its pathos. As time passed, that vigil must have grown less and less the vigil 182 Abelard and Heloise of a wife's heartbreak, and more and more the vigil of a mother over the sleep of her tired child. For a woman's love is always a mother's love — most of all, perhaps, the love for her husband. A pretty story tells that when Heloise died she was buried in the same tomb as her husband, and that the dead man opened wide his arms to receive her. Certain it seems that the ashes of the two lovers were, at one time or another, mingled, and that Abelard and Heloise now rest together in Pere La Chaise. 183 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY WILL INCREASE TO SO CENTS ON THE FOURTH DAY AND TO $1.00 ON THE SEVENTH DAY OVERDUE. 24 1947 Z^ k