Part 30

Musset was of noble birth. He would probably have been better for a plebeian strain, since there was in him a touch of the degenerate. His mother's father had published a humanitarian poem on cats. His great-uncle had written a peculiar novel. Young Alfred was nervous, delicate, slightly epileptic, and it is certain that he was given to dissipation, which so far had affected his health only by making him hysterical. He was an exceedingly handsome youth, with exquisite manners, "dreamy rather than dazzling eyes, dilated nostrils, and vermilion lips half opened." Such was he when George Sand, then seven years his senior, met him.

There is something which, to the Anglo-Saxon mind, seems far more absurd than pathetic about the events which presently took place. A woman like George Sand at thirty was practically twice the age of this nervous boy of twenty-three, who had as yet seen little of the world. At first she seemed to realize the fact herself; but her vanity led her to begin an intrigue, which must have been almost wholly without excitement on her part, but which to him, for a time, was everything in the world.

Experimenting, as usual, after the fashion described by Dumas, she went with De Musset for a "honeymoon" to Fontainebleau. But they could not stay there forever, and presently they decided upon a journey to Italy. Before they went, however, they thought it necessary to get formal permission from Alfred's mother!

Naturally enough, Mme. de Musset refused consent. She had read George Sand's romances, and had asked scornfully:

"Has the woman never in her life met a gentleman?"

She accepted the relations between them, but that she should be asked to sanction this sort of affair was rather too much, even for a French mother who has become accustomed to many strange things. Then there was a curious happening. At nine o'clock at night, George Sand took a cab and drove to the house of Mme. de Musset, to whom she sent up a message that a lady wished to see her. Mme. de Musset came down, and, finding a woman alone in a carriage, she entered it. Then George Sand burst forth in a torrent of sentimental eloquence. She overpowered her lover's mother, promised to take great care of the delicate youth, and finally drove away to meet Alfred at the coach-yard.

They started off in the mist, their coach being the thirteenth to leave the yard; but the two lovers were in a merry mood, and enjoyed themselves all the way from Paris to Marseilles. By steamer they went to Leghorn; and finally, in January, 1834, they took an apartment in a hotel at Venice. What had happened that their arrival in Venice should be the beginning of a quarrel, no one knows. George Sand has told the story, and Paul de Musset--Alfred's brother--has told the story, but each of them has doubtless omitted a large part of the truth.

It is likely that on their long journey each had learned too much of the other. Thus, Paul de Musset says that George Sand made herself outrageous by her conversation, telling every one of her mother's adventures in the army of Italy, including her relations with the general-in-chief. She also declared that she herself was born within a month of her parents' wedding-day. Very likely she did say all these things, whether they were true or not. She had set herself to wage war against conventional society, and she did everything to shock it.

On the other hand, Alfred de Musset fell ill after having lost ten thousand francs in a gambling-house. George Sand was not fond of persons who were ill. She herself was working like a horse, writing from eight to thirteen hours a day. When Musset collapsed she sent for a handsome young Italian doctor named Pagello, with whom she had struck up a casual acquaintance. He finally cured Musset, but he also cured George Sand of any love for Musset.

Before long she and Pagello were on their way back to Paris, leaving the poor, fevered, whimpering poet to bite his nails and think unutterable things. But he ought to have known George Sand. After that, everybody knew her. They knew just how much she cared when she professed to care, and when she acted as she acted with Pagello no earlier lover had any one but himself to blame.

Only sentimentalists can take this story seriously. To them it has a sort of morbid interest. They like to picture Musset raving and shouting in his delirium, and then, to read how George Sand sat on Pagello's knees, kissing him and drinking out of the same cup. But to the healthy mind the whole story is repulsive--from George Sand's appeal to Mme. de Musset down to the very end, when Pagello came to Paris, where his broken French excited a polite ridicule.

There was a touch of genuine sentiment about the affair with Jules Sandeau; but after that, one can only see in George Sand a half-libidinous grisette, such as her mother was before her, with a perfect willingness to experiment in every form of lawless love. As for Musset, whose heart she was supposed to have broken, within a year he was dangling after the famous singer, Mme. Malibran, and writing poems to her which advertised their intrigue.

After this episode with Pagello, it cannot be said that the life of George Sand was edifying in any respect, because no one can assume that she was sincere. She had loved Jules Sandeau as much as she could love any one, but all the rest of her intrigues and affinities were in the nature of experiments. She even took back Alfred de Musset, although they could never again regard each other without suspicion. George Sand cut off all her hair and gave it to Musset, so eager was she to keep him as a matter of conquest; but he was tired of her, and even this theatrical trick was of no avail.

She proceeded to other less known and less humiliating adventures. She tried to fascinate the artist Delacroix. She set her cap at Franz Liszt, who rather astonished her by saying that only God was worthy to be loved. She expressed a yearning for the affections of the elder Dumas; but that good-natured giant laughed at her, and in fact gave her some sound advice, and let her smoke unsentimentally in his study. She was a good deal taken with a noisy demagogue named Michel, a lawyer at Bourges, who on one occasion shut her up in her room and harangued her on sociology until she was as weary of his talk as of his wooden shoes, his shapeless greatcoat, his spectacles, and his skull-cap, Balzac felt her fascination, but cared nothing for her, since his love was given to Mme. Hanska.

In the meanwhile, she was paying visits to her husband at Nohant, where she wrangled with him over money matters, and where he would once have shot her had the guests present not interfered. She secured her dowry by litigation, so that she was well off, even without her literary earnings. These were by no means so large as one would think from her popularity and from the number of books she wrote. It is estimated that her whole gains amounted to about a million francs, extending over a period of forty-five years. It is just half the amount that Trollope earned in about the same period, and justifies his remark--"adequate, but not splendid."

One of those brief and strange intimacies that marked the career of George Sand came about in a curious way. Octave Feuillet, a man of aristocratic birth, had set himself to write novels which portrayed the cynicism and hardness of the upper classes in France. One of these novels, Sibylle, excited the anger of George Sand. She had not known Feuillet before; yet now she sought him out, at first in order to berate him for his book, but in the end to add him to her variegated string of lovers.

It has been said of Feuillet that he was a sort of "domesticated Musset." At any rate, he was far less sensitive than Musset, and George Sand was about seventeen years his senior. They parted after a short time, she going her way as a writer of novels that were very different from her earlier ones, while Feuillet grew more and more cynical and even stern, as he lashed the abnormal, neuropathic men and women about him.

The last great emotional crisis in George Sand's life was that which centers around her relations with Frederic Chopin. Chopin was the greatest genius who ever loved her. It is rather odd that he loved her. She had known him for two years, and had not seriously thought of him, though there is a story that when she first met him she kissed him before he had even been presented to her. She waited two years, and in those two years she had three lovers. Then at last she once more met Chopin, when he was in a state of melancholy, because a Polish girl had proved unfaithful to him.

It was the psychological moment; for this other woman, who was a devourer of hearts, found him at a piano, improvising a lamentation. George Sand stood beside him, listening. When he finished and looked up at her, their eyes met. She bent down without a word and kissed him on the lips.

What was she like when he saw her then? Grenier has described her in these words:

She was short and stout, but her face attracted all my attention, the eyes especially. They were wonderful eyes--a little too close together, it may be, large, with full eyelids, and black, very black, but by no means lustrous; they reminded me of unpolished marble, or rather of velvet, and this gave a strange, dull, even cold expression to her countenance. Her fine eyebrows and these great placid eyes gave her an air of strength and dignity which was not borne out by the lower part of her face. Her nose was rather thick and not over shapely. Her mouth was also rather coarse, and her chin small. She spoke with great simplicity, and her manners were very quiet.

Such as she was, she attached herself to Chopin for eight years. At first they traveled together very quietly to Majorca; and there, just as Musset had fallen ill at Venice, Chopin became feverish and an invalid. "Chopin coughs most gracefully," George Sand wrote of him, and again:

Chopin is the most inconstant of men. There is nothing permanent about him but his cough.

It is not surprising if her nerves sometimes gave way. Acting as sick nurse, writing herself with rheumatic fingers, robbed by every one about her, and viewed with suspicion by the peasants because she did not go to church, she may be perhaps excused for her sharp words when, in fact, her deeds were kind.

Afterward, with Chopin, she returned to Paris, and the two lived openly together for seven years longer. An immense literature has grown around the subject of their relations. To this literature George Sand herself contributed very largely. Chopin never wrote a word; but what he failed to do, his friends and pupils did unsparingly.

Probably the truth is somewhat as one might expect. During the first period of fascination, George Sand was to Chopin what she had been to Sandeau and to Musset; and with her strange and subtle ways, she had undermined his health. But afterward that sort of love died out, and was succeeded by something like friendship. At any rate, this woman showed, as she had shown to others, a vast maternal kindness. She writes to him finally as "your old woman," and she does wonders in the way of nursing and care.

But in 1847 came a break between the two. Whatever the mystery of it may be, it turns upon what Chopin said of Sand:

"I have never cursed any one, but now I am so weary of life that I am near cursing her. Yet she suffers, too, and more, because she grows older as she grows more wicked."

In 1848, Chopin gave his last concert in Paris, and in 1849 he died. According to some, he was the victim of a Messalina. According to others, it was only "Messalina" that had kept him alive so long.

However, with his death came a change in the nature of George Sand. Emotionally, she was an extinct volcano. Intellectually, she was at her very best. She no longer tore passions into tatters, but wrote naturally, simply, stories of country life and tales for children. In one of her books she has given an enduring picture of the Franco-Prussian War. There are many rather pleasant descriptions of her then, living at Nohant, where she made a curious figure, bustling about in ill-fitting costumes, and smoking interminable cigarettes.

She had lived much, and she had drunk deep of life, when she died in 1876. One might believe her to have been only a woman of perpetual liaisons. Externally she was this, and yet what did Balzac, that great master of human psychology, write of her in the intimacy of a private correspondence?

She is a female bachelor. She is an artist. She is generous. She is devoted. She is chaste. Her dominant characteristics are those of a man, and therefore, she is not to be regarded as a woman. She is an excellent mother, adored by her children. Morally, she is like a lad of twenty; for in her heart of hearts, she is more than chaste--she is a prude. It is only in externals that she comports herself as a Bohemian. All her follies are titles to glory in the eyes of those whose souls are noble.

A curious verdict this! Her love-life seems almost that of neither man nor woman, but of an animal. Yet whether she was in reality responsible for what she did, when we consider her strange heredity, her wretched marriage, the disillusions of her early life--who shall sit in judgment on her, since who knows all?

THE MYSTERY OF CHARLES DICKENS

Perhaps no public man in the English-speaking world, in the last century, was so widely and intimately known as Charles Dickens. From his eighteenth year, when he won his first success in journalism, down through his series of brilliant triumphs in fiction, he was more and more a conspicuous figure, living in the blaze of an intense publicity. He met every one and knew every one, and was the companion of every kind of man and woman. He loved to frequent the "caves of harmony" which Thackeray has immortalized, and he was a member of all the best Bohemian clubs of London. Actors, authors, good fellows generally, were his intimate friends, and his acquaintance extended far beyond into the homes of merchants and lawyers and the mansions of the proudest nobles. Indeed, he seemed to be almost a universal friend.

One remembers, for instance, how he was called in to arbitrate between Thackeray and George Augustus Sala, who had quarreled. One remembers how Lord Byron's daughter, Lady Lovelace, when upon her sick-bed, used to send for Dickens because there was something in his genial, sympathetic manner that soothed her. Crushing pieces of ice between her teeth in agony, she would speak to him and he would answer her in his rich, manly tones until she was comforted and felt able to endure more hours of pain without complaint.

Dickens was a jovial soul. His books fairly steam with Christmas cheer and hot punch and the savor of plum puddings, very much as do his letters to his intimate friends. Everybody knew Dickens. He could not dine in public without attracting attention. When he left the dining-room, his admirers would descend upon his table and carry off egg-shells, orange-peels, and other things that remained behind, so that they might have memorials of this much-loved writer. Those who knew him only by sight would often stop him in the streets and ask the privilege of shaking hands with him; so different was he from--let us say--Tennyson, who was as great an Englishman in his way as Dickens, but who kept himself aloof and saw few strangers.

It is hard to associate anything like mystery with Dickens, though he was fond of mystery as an intellectual diversion, and his last unfinished novel was The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Moreover, no one admired more than he those complex plots which Wilkie Collins used to weave under the influence of laudanum. But as for his own life, it seemed so normal, so free from anything approaching mystery, that we can scarcely believe it to have been tinged with darker colors than those which appeared upon the surface.

A part of this mystery is plain enough. The other part is still obscure--or of such a character that one does not care to bring it wholly to the light. It had to do with his various relations with women.

The world at large thinks that it knows this chapter in the life of Dickens, and that it refers wholly to his unfortunate disagreement with his wife. To be sure, this is a chapter that is writ large in all of his biographies, and yet it is nowhere correctly told. His chosen biographer was John Forster, whose Life of Charles Dickens, in three volumes, must remain a standard work; but even Forster--we may assume through tact--has not set down all that he could, although he gives a clue.

As is well known, Dickens married Miss Catherine Hogarth when he was only twenty-four. He had just published his Sketches by Boz, the copyright of which he sold for one hundred pounds, and was beginning the Pickwick Papers. About this time his publisher brought N. P. Willis down to Furnival's Inn to see the man whom Willis called "a young paragraphist for the Morning Chronicle." Willis thus sketches Dickens and his surroundings:

In the most crowded part of Holborn, within a door or two of the Bull and Mouth Inn, we pulled up at the entrance of a large building used for lawyers' chambers. I followed by a long flight of stairs to an upper story, and was ushered into an uncarpeted and bleak-looking room, with a deal table, two or three chairs and a few books, a small boy and Mr. Dickens for the contents.

I was only struck at first with one thing--and I made a memorandum of it that evening as the strongest instance I had seen of English obsequiousness to employers--the degree to which the poor author was overpowered with the honor of his publisher's visit! I remember saying to myself, as I sat down on a rickety chair:

"My good fellow, if you were in America with that fine face and your ready quill, you would have no need to be condescended to by a publisher."

Dickens was dressed very much as he has since described Dick Swiveller, minus the swell look. His hair was cropped close to his head, his clothes scant, though jauntily cut, and, after changing a ragged office-coat for a shabby blue, he stood by the door, collarless and buttoned up, the very personification of a close sailer to the wind.

Before this interview with Willis, which Dickens always repudiated, he had become something of a celebrity among the newspaper men with whom he worked as a stenographer. As every one knows, he had had a hard time in his early years, working in a blacking-shop, and feeling too keenly the ignominious position of which a less sensitive boy would probably have thought nothing. Then he became a shorthand reporter, and was busy at his work, so that he had little time for amusements.

It has been generally supposed that no love-affair entered his life until he met Catherine Hogarth, whom he married soon after making her acquaintance. People who are eager at ferreting out unimportant facts about important men had unanimously come to the conclusion that up to the age of twenty Dickens was entirely fancy-free. It was left to an American to disclose the fact that this was not the case, but that even in his teens he had been captivated by a girl of about his own age.

Inasmuch as the only reproach that was ever made against Dickens was based upon his love-affairs, let us go back and trace them from this early one to the very last, which must yet for some years, at least, remain a mystery.

Everything that is known about his first affair is contained in a book very beautifully printed, but inaccessible to most readers. Some years ago Mr. William K. Bixby, of St. Louis, found in London a collector of curios. This man had in his stock a number of letters which had passed between a Miss Maria Beadnell and Charles Dickens when the two were about nineteen and a second package of letters representing a later acquaintance, about 1855, at which time Miss Beadnell had been married for a long time to a Mr. Henry Louis Winter, of 12 Artillery Place, London.

The copyright laws of Great Britain would not allow Mr. Bixby to publish the letters in that country, and he did not care to give them to the public here. Therefore, he presented them to the Bibliophile Society, with the understanding that four hundred and ninety-three copies, with the Bibliophile book-plate, were to be printed and distributed among the members of the society. A few additional copies were struck off, but these did not bear the Bibliophile book-plate. Only two copies are available for other readers, and to peruse these it is necessary to visit the Congressional Library in Washington, where they were placed on July 24, 1908.

These letters form two series--the first written to Miss Beadnell in or about 1829, and the second written to Mrs. Winter, formerly Miss Beadnell, in 1855.

The book also contains an introduction by Henry H. Harper, who sets forth some theories which the facts, in my opinion, do not support; and there are a number of interesting portraits, especially one of Miss Beadnell in 1829--a lovely girl with dark curls. Another shows her in 1855, when she writes of herself as "old and fat"--thereby doing herself a great deal of injustice; for although she had lost her youthful beauty, she was a very presentable woman of middle age, but one who would not be particularly noticed in any company.

Summing up briefly these different letters, it may be said that in the first set Dickens wrote to the lady ardently, but by no means passionately. From what he says it is plain enough that she did not respond to his feeling, and that presently she left London and went to Paris, for her family was well-to-do, while Dickens was living from hand to mouth.

In the second set of letters, written long afterward, Mrs. Winter seems to have "set her cap" at the now famous author; but at that time he was courted by every one, and had long ago forgotten the lady who had so easily dismissed him in his younger days. In 1855, Mrs. Winter seems to have reproached him for not having been more constant in the past; but he replied:

You answered me coldly and reproachfully, and so I went my way.

Mr. Harper, in his introduction, tries very hard to prove that in writing David Copperfield Dickens drew the character of Dora from Miss Beadnell. It is a dangerous thing to say from whom any character in a novel is drawn. An author takes whatever suits his purpose in circumstance and fancy, and blends them all into one consistent whole, which is not to be identified with any individual. There is little reason to think that the most intimate friends of Dickens and of his family were mistaken through all the years when they were certain that the boy husband and the girl wife of David Copperfield were suggested by any one save Dickens himself and Catherine Hogarth.

Why should he have gone back to a mere passing fancy, to a girl who did not care for him, and who had no influence on his life, instead of picturing, as David's first wife, one whom he deeply loved, whom he married, who was the mother of his children, and who made a great part of his career, even that part which was inwardly half tragic and wholly mournful?

Miss Beadnell may have been the original of Flora in Little Dorrit, though even this is doubtful. The character was at the time ascribed to a Miss Anna Maria Leigh, whom Dickens sometimes flirted with and sometimes caricatured.