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Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 13

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Title: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 13

Author: Elbert Hubbard


        
Release date: November 12, 2007 [eBook #23458]

Language: English

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LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF THE GREAT, VOLUME 13

Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers

by

ELBERT HUBBARD

Memorial Edition

New York

1916.




CONTENTS

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON AND FANNY OSBOURNE
  JOSIAH AND SARAH WEDGWOOD
  WILLIAM GODWIN AND MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
  DANTE AND BEATRICE
  JOHN STUART MILL AND HARRIET TAYLOR
  PARNELL AND KITTY O'SHEA
  PETRARCH AND LAURA
  DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI AND ELIZABETH ELEANOR SIDDAL
  BALZAC AND MADAME HANSKA
  FENELON AND MADAME GUYON
  FERDINAND LASSALLE AND HELENE VON DONNIGES
  LORD NELSON AND LADY HAMILTON




ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON AND FANNY OSBOURNE


    We thank Thee for this place in which we dwell; for the love that
    unites us; for the peace accorded us this day; for the hope with
    which we expect the morrow; for the health, the work, the food, and
    the bright skies that make our lives delightful; for our friends in
    all parts of the earth, and our friendly helpers in this foreign
    isle. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare to us our
    friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all
    our innocent endeavors. If it may not, give us the strength to
    encounter that which is to come, that we be brave in peril, constant
    in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune,
    and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another.

                                                --_Vailima Prayers_

[Illustration: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON]


There is a libel leveled at the Scotch and encouraged, I am very sorry
to say, by Chauncey Depew, when he told of approaching the docks in
Glasgow and seeing the people on shore convulsed with laughter, and was
told that their mirth was the result of one of his jokes told the year
before, the point just being perceived.

Bearing on the same line we have the legend that the adage, "He laughs
best who laughs last," was the invention of a Scotchman who was
endeavoring to explain away a popular failing of his countrymen.

An adage seems to be a statement the reverse of which is true--or not.
In all the realm of letters, where can be found anything more
delightfully whimsical and deliciously humorous than James Barrie's
"Peter Pan"? And as a writer of exquisite humor, as opposed to English
wit, that other Scotchman, Robert Louis Stevenson, stands supreme.

To Robert Louis life was altogether too important a matter to be taken
seriously. The quality of fine fooling shown in the creation of a
mythical character called "John Libbel" remained with Stevenson to the
end of his days.

Stevenson never knew the value of money, because he was not brought up
to earn money. Very early he was placed on a small allowance, which he
found could be augmented by maternal embezzlements and the kindly
co-operation of pawnbrokers.

Once on a trip from home with his cousin he found they lacked just five
shillings of the required amount to pay their fare. They boarded the
train and paid as far as they could. The train stopped at Crewe fifteen
minutes for lunch. Lunch is a superfluity if you haven't the money to
pay for it--but stealing a ride in Scotland is out of the question.
Robert Louis hastily took a pair of new trousers from his valise and ran
up the main street of the town anxiously looking for a pawnshop. There
at the end of the thoroughfare he saw the three glittering, welcome
balls. He entered, out of breath, threw down the trousers and asked for
five shillings. "What name?" asked the pawnbroker. "John Libbel," was
the reply, given without thought. "How do you spell it?" "Two b's!"

He got the five shillings and hastened back to the station, where his
cousin Bob was anxiously awaiting him. Robert Louis did not have to
explain that his little run up the street was a financial success--that
much was understood. But what pleased him most was that he had
discovered a new man, a very important man, John Libbel, the man who
made pawnbrokers possible, the universal client of the craft. "You mean
patient, not client," interposed Bob.

Then they invented the word libbelian, meaning one with pawnbroker
inclinations. Libbelattos meant the children of John Libbel, and so it
went.

The boys had an old font of type, and they busied themselves printing
cards for John Libbel, giving his name and supposed business and
address. These they gave out on the street, slipped under doors, or
placed mysteriously in the hands of fussy old gentlemen.

Finally the boys got to ringing doorbells and asking if John Libbel
lived within. They sought Libbel at hotels, stopped men on the street
and asked them if their name wasn't John Libbel, and when told no,
apologized profusely and declared the resemblance most remarkable.

They tied up packages of ashes or sawdust, very neatly labeled,
"Compliments of John Libbel," and dropped them on the street. This was
later improved on by sealing the package and marking it, "Gold Dust, for
Assayer's Office, from John Libbel." These packages would be placed
along the street, and the youthful jokers would watch from doorways and
see the packages slyly slipped into pockets, or if the finder were
honest he would hurry away to the Assayer's Office with his precious
find to claim a reward.

The end of this particular kind of fun came when the two boys walked
into a shop and asked for John Libbel. The clerk burst out laughing and
said, "You are the Stevenson boys who have fooled the town!" Jokes
explained cease to be jokes, and the young men sorrowfully admitted that
Libbel was dead and should be buried.

       *       *       *       *       *

Robert Louis was an only son, and alternately was disciplined and then
humored, as only sons usually are.

His father was a civil engineer in the employ of the Northern Lights
Company, and it was his business to build and inspect lighthouses. At
his office used to congregate a motley collection of lighthouse-keepers,
retired sea-captains, mates out of a job--and with these sad dogs of the
sea little Robert used to make close and confidential friendships.

While he was yet a child he made the trip to Italy with his mother, and
brought back from Rome and from Venice sundry crucifixes, tear-bottles
and "Saint Josephs," all duly blessed, and these he sold to his
companions at so many whacks apiece. That is to say, the purchaser had
to pay for the gift by accepting on his bare hand a certain number of
whacks with a leather strap. If the recipient winced, he forfeited the
present.

The boy was flat-chested and spindle-shanked and used to bank on his
physical weakness when lessons were to be evaded. He was two years at
the Edinburgh Academy, where he reduced the cutting of lectures and
recitations to a system, and substituted Dumas and Scott for more
learned men who prepared books for the sole purpose of confounding boys.

As for making an engineer of the young man, the stern, practical father
grew utterly discouraged when he saw mathematics shelved for Smollett.
Robert was then put to studying law with a worthy barrister.

Law is business, and to suppose that a young man who religiously spent
his month's allowance the day it was received, could make a success at
the bar shows the vain delusion that often fills the parental head.

Stevenson's essay, "A Defense of Idlers," shows how no time is actually
lost, not even that which is idled away. But this is a point that is
very hard to explain to ambitious parents.

The traditional throwing overboard of the son the day he is twenty-one,
allowing him to sink or swim, survive or perish, did not prevail with
the Stevensons. At twenty-two Robert Louis still had his one guinea a
month, besides what he could cajole, beg or borrow from his father and
mother. He grew to watch the mood of his mother, and has recorded that
he never asked favors of his father before dinner.

At twenty-three he sold an essay for two pounds, and referred gaily to
himself as "one of the most popular and successful essayists in Great
Britain." He was still a child in spirit, dependent upon others for
support. He looked like a girl with his big wide-open eyes and long
hair. As for society, in the society sense, he abhorred it and would
have despised it if he had despised anything. The soft platitudes of
people who win distinction by being nothing, doing nothing, and saying
nothing except what has been said before, moved him to mocking mirth.
From childhood he was a society rebel. He wore his hair long, because
society men had theirs cut close.

His short velvet coat, negligee shirt and wide-awake hat were worn for
no better reason. His long cloak gave him a look of haunting mystery,
and made one think of a stage hero or a robber you read of in books.
Motives are mixed, and foolish folks who ask questions about why certain
men do certain things, do not know that certain men do certain things
because they wish to, and leave to others the explanation of the whyness
of the wherefore.

People who always dress, talk and act alike do so for certain reasons
well understood, but the man who does differently from the mass is not
so easy to analyze and formulate.

The feminine quality in Robert Louis' nature shows itself in that he
fled the company of women, and with them held no converse if he could
help it. He never wrote a love-story, and once told Crockett that if he
ever dared write one it would be just like "The Lilac Sunbonnet."

Yet it will not do to call Stevenson effeminate, even if he was
feminine. He had a courage that outmatched his physique. Once in a cafe
in France, a Frenchman made the remark that the English were a nation of
cowards.

The words had scarcely passed his lips before Robert Louis flung the
back of his hand in the Frenchman's face. Friends interposed and cards
were passed, but the fire-eating Frenchman did not call for his revenge
or apology--much to the relief of Robert Louis.

Plays were begun, stories blocked out, and great plans made by Robert
Louis and his cousin for passing a hawser to literature and taking it in
tow.

When Robert Louis was in his twenty-fourth year he found a copy of
"Leaves of Grass," and he and his cousin Bob reveled in what they called
"a genuine book." They heard that Michael Rossetti was to give a lecture
on Whitman in a certain drawing-room.

The young men attended, without invitation, and walked in coatless, just
as they had heard that Walt Whitman appeared at the Astor House in New
York, when he went by appointment to meet Emerson. After hearing
Rossetti discuss Whitman they got the virus fixed in their systems.

They walked up and down Princess Street in their shirt-sleeves, and saw
fair ladies blush and look the other way. Next they tried sleeveless
jerseys for street wear, and speculated as to just how much clothing
they would have to abjure before women would entirely cease to look at
them.

       *       *       *       *       *

The hectic flush was upon the cheek of Robert Louis, and people said he
was distinguished. "Death admires me, even if the publishers do not," he
declared. The doctors gave orders that he should go South and he seized
upon the suggestion and wrote "Ordered South"--and started. Bob went
with him, and after a trip through Italy, they arrived at Barbizon to
see the scene of "The Angelus," and look upon the land of
Millet--Millet, whom Michael Rossetti called "The Whitman of Art."

Bob was an artist: he could paint, write, and play the flageolet. Robert
Louis declared that his own particular velvet jacket and big coat would
save him at Barbizon, even if he could not draw any to speak of. "In art
the main thing is to look the part--or else paint superbly well," said
Robert Louis.

The young men got accommodations at "Siron's." This was an inn for
artists, artists of slender means--and the patrons at Siron's held that
all genuine artists had slender means. The rate was five francs a day
for everything, with a modest pro-rata charge for breakage. The rules
were not strict, which prompted Robert Louis to write the great line,
"When formal manners are laid aside, true courtesy is the more rigidly
exacted." Siron's was an inn, but it was really much more like an
exclusive club, for if the boarders objected to any particular arrival,
two days was the outside limit of his stay. Buttinsky the bounder was
interviewed and the early coach took the objectionable one away
forever.

And yet no artist was ever sent away from Siron's--no matter how bad his
work or how threadbare his clothes--if he was a worker; if he really
tried to express beauty, all of his eccentricities were pardoned and his
pot-boiling granted absolution. But the would-be Bohemian, or the man in
search of a thrill, or if in any manner the party on probation suggested
that Madame Siron was not a perfect cook and Monsieur Siron was not a
genuine grand duke in disguise, he was interviewed by Bailley Bodmer,
the local headsman of the clan, and plainly told that escape lay in
flight.

At Siron's there were several Americans, among them being Whistler;
nevertheless Americans as a class were voted objectionable, unless they
were artists, or perchance would-bes who supplied unconscious
entertainment by an excess of boasting. Women, unless accompanied by a
certified male escort, were not desired under any circumstances. And so
matters stood when the "two Stensons" (the average Frenchman could not
say Stevenson) were respectively Exalted Ruler and Chief Councilor of
Siron's.

At that time one must remember that the chambermaid and the landlady
might be allowed to mince across the stage, but men took the leading
parts in life. The cousins had been away on a three-days' tramping tour
through the forest. When they returned they were informed that something
terrible had occurred--a woman had arrived: an American woman with a
daughter aged, say, fourteen, and a son twelve. They had paid a month in
advance and were duly installed by Siron. Siron was summoned and
threatened with deposition. The poor man shrugged his shoulders in
hopeless despair. Mon Dieu! how could he help it--the "Stensons" were
not at hand to look after their duties--the woman had paid for
accommodations, and money in an art colony was none too common! But
Bailley Bodmer--had he, too, been derelict? Bailley appeared, his
boasted courage limp, his prowess pricked.

He asked to have a man pointed out--any two or three men--and he would
see that the early stage should not go away empty. But a woman, a woman
in half-mourning, was different, and besides, this was a different
woman. She was an American, of course, but probably against her will.
Her name was Osbourne and she was from San Francisco. She spoke good
French and was an artist. One of the Stevensons sneezed; the other took
a lofty and supercilious attitude of indifference. It was tacitly
admitted that the woman should be allowed to remain, her presence being
a reminder to Siron of remissness, and to Bailley of cowardice.

So the matter rested, the Siron Club being in temporary disgrace, the
unpleasant feature too distasteful even to discuss. As the days passed,
however, it was discovered that Mrs. Osbourne did not make any demands
upon the Club. She kept her own counsel, rose early and worked late,
and her son and daughter were very well behaved and inclined to be
industrious in their studies and sketching.

It was discovered one day that Robert Louis had gotten lunch from the
Siron kitchen and was leading the Osbourne family on a little excursion
to the wood back of Rosa Bonheur's. Self-appointed scouts who happened
to be sketching over that way came back and reported that Mrs. Osbourne
was seen painting, while Robert Louis sat on a rock near by and told
pirate tales to Lloyd, the twelve-year-old boy. A week later Robert
Louis had one of his "bad spells," and he told Bob to send for Mrs.
Osbourne. Nobody laughed after this. It was silently and unanimously
voted that Mrs. Osbourne was a good fellow, and soon she was enjoying
all the benefits of the Siron Club. When a frivolous member suggested
that it be called the Siren Club he was met with an oppressive stillness
and black looks.

Mrs. Osbourne was educated, amiable, witty and wise. She evidently knew
humanity, and was on good terms with sorrow, although sorrow never
subdued her; what her history was nobody sought to inquire.

When she sketched, Robert Louis told pirate tales to Lloyd.

The Siron Club took on a degree of sanity that it had not known before.
Little entertainments were given now and then, where Mrs. Osbourne read
to the company from an unknown American poet, Joaquin Miller by name,
and Bob expounded Walt Whitman.

The Americans as a people evidently were not wholly bad--at least there
was hope for them. Bob began to tire of Barbizon, and finally went back
to Edinburgh alone. Arriving there he had to explain why Robert Louis
did not come too.

Robert Louis had met an American woman, and they seemed to like each
other. The parents of Robert Louis did not laugh: they were grieved.
Their son, who had always kept himself clear from feminine
entanglements, was madly, insanely, in love with a woman, the mother of
two grown-up children, and a married woman and an American at that--it
was too much!

Just how they expostulated and how much will never be known. They
declined to go over to France to see her, and they declined to have her
come to see them: a thing Mrs. Osbourne probably would not have done--at
that time, anyway.

But there was a comfort in this: their son was in much better health,
and several of his articles had been accepted by the great London
magazines.

So three months went by, when suddenly and without notice Robert Louis
appeared at home, and in good spirits. As for Mrs. Osbourne, she had
sailed for America with her two children. And the elder Stevensons
breathed more freely.

       *       *       *       *       *

On August Tenth, Eighteen Hundred Seventy-nine, Robert Louis sailed from
Glasgow for New York on the steamship "Devonia." It was a sudden move,
taken without the consent of his parents or kinsmen. The young man wrote
a letter to his father, mailing it at the dock.

When the missive reached the father's hands, that worthy gentleman was
unspeakably shocked and terribly grieved. He made frantic attempts to
reach the ship before it had passed out of the Clyde and rounded into
the North Sea, but it was too late. He then sent two telegrams to the
Port of Londonderry, one to Louis begging him to return at once as his
mother was very sick, and the other message to the captain of the ship
ordering him to put the wilful son ashore bag and baggage.

The things we do when fear and haste are at the helm are usually wrong,
and certainly do not mirror our better selves.

Thomas Stevenson was a Scotchman, and the Scotch, a certain man has told
us, are the owners of a trinity of bad things--Scotch whisky, Scotch
obstinacy and Scotch religion. What the first-mentioned article has to
do with the second and the third, I do not know, but certain it is that
the second and the third are hopelessly intertwined--this according to
Ian MacLaren, who ought to know.

This obstinacy in right proportion constitutes will, and without will
life languishes and projects die a-borning. But mixed up with this
religious obstinacy is a goodly jigger of secretiveness, and in order to
gain his own point the religion of the owner does not prevent him from
prevarication. In "Margaret Ogilvie," that exquisite tribute to his
mother by Barrie, the author shows us a most religious woman who was
well up to the head of the Sapphira class. The old lady had been reading
a certain book, and there was no reason why she should conceal the fact.
The son suddenly enters and finds the mother sitting quietly looking out
of the window. She was suspiciously quiet. The son questions her
somewhat as follows:

"What are you doing, mother?"

"Nothing," was the answer.

"Have you been reading?"

"Do I look like it?"

"Why, yes--the book on your lap!"

"What book?"

"The book under your apron."

And so does this sweetly charming and deeply religious old lady prove
her fitness in many ways to membership in the liar's league. She
secretes, prevaricates, quibbles, lays petty traps and mouses all day
long. The Eleventh Commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Snoop," evidently had
never been called to her attention, and even her gifted son is seemingly
totally unaware of it. So Thomas Stevenson, excellent man that he was,
turned to subterfuge, and telegraphed his runaway son that his mother
was sick, appealing to his love for his mother to lure him back.

However, children do not live with their forebears for nothing--they
know their parents just as well as their parents know them. Robert Louis
reasoned that it was quite as probable that his father lied as that his
mother was sick. He yielded to the stronger attraction--and stuck to the
ship.

He was sailing to America because he had received word that Fanny
Osbourne was very ill. Half a world divided them, but attraction to
lovers is in inverse ratio to the square of the distance. He must go to
her!

She was sick and in distress. He must go to her. The appeals of his
parents--even their dire displeasure--the ridicule of relatives, all
were as naught. He had some Scotch obstinacy of his own. Every fiber of
his being yearned for her. She needed him. He was going to her!

Of course his action in thus sailing away to a strange land alone was a
shock to his parents. He was a man in years, but they regarded him as
but a child, as indeed he was. He had never earned his own living. He
was frail in body, idle, erratic, peculiar. His flashing wit and subtle
insight into the heart of things were quite beyond his parents--in this
he was a stranger to them. Their religion to him was gently amusing, and
he congratulated himself on not having inherited it. He had a pride,
too, but Graham Balfour said it was French pride, not the Scotch brand.
He viewed himself as a part of the passing procession. His own velvet
jacket and marvelous manifestations in neckties added interest to the
show. And that he admired his own languorous ways there is no doubt.

His "Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde" he declared in sober earnest, in which was
concealed a half-smile, was autobiography. And this is true, for all
good things that every writer writes are a self-confession.

Stevenson was a hundred men in one and "his years were anything from
sixteen to eighty," says Lloyd Osbourne in his "Memoirs." But when a
letter came from San Francisco saying Fanny Osbourne was sick, all of
that dilatory, procrastinating, gently trifling quality went out of his
soul and he was possessed by one idea--he must go to her!

The captain of the ship had no authority to follow the order of an
unknown person and put him ashore, so the telegram was given to the man
to whom it referred.

He read the message, smiled dreamily, tore it into bits and dropped it
on the tide. And the ship turned her prow toward America and sailed
away. So this was the man who had no firmness, no decision, no will!
Aye, heretofore he had only lacked a motive. Now love supplied it.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is life supplies the writer his theme. People who have not lived, no
matter how grammatically they may write, have no real message. Robert
Louis had now severed the umbilical cord. He was going to live his own
life, to earn his own living. He could do but one thing, and that was to
write. He may have been a procrastinator in everything else, but as a
writer he was a skilled mechanic. And so straightway on that ship he
began to work his experiences up into copy. Just what he wrote the world
will never know, for although the manuscript was sold to a publisher,
yet Barabbas did not give it to the people. There are several ways by
which a publisher can thrive.

To get paid for not publishing is easy money--it involves no risk. In
this instance an Edinburgh publisher bought the manuscript for thirty
pounds, intending to print it in book form, showing the experience of a
Scotchman in search of a fortune in New York.

In order to verify certain dates and data, the publisher submitted the
manuscript to Thomas Stevenson. Great was that gentleman's interest in
the literary venture of his son. He read with a personal interest, for
he was the author of the author's being. But as he read he felt that he
himself was placed in a most unenviable light, for although he was not
directly mentioned, yet the suffering of the son on the emigrant ship
seemed to point out the father as one who disregarded his parental
duties. And above all things Thomas Stevenson prided himself on being a
good provider. Thomas Stevenson straightway bought the manuscript from
the publisher for one hundred pounds.

On hearing of the fate of his book, Robert Louis intimated to his father
that thereafter it would be as well for them to deal direct with each
other and thus save the middleman's profits.

However, the father and son got together on the manuscript question some
years later, and the over-sensitive parent was placated by striking out
certain passages that might be construed as aspersions, and a few direct
complimentary references inserted, and the printer got the book on
payment of two hundred pounds. The transaction turned out so well that
Thomas Stevenson said, "I told you so," and Robert Louis saw the patent
fact that hindsight, accident and fear sometimes serve us quite as well
as insight and perspicacity, not to mention perspicuity. We aim for one
target and hit the bull's-eye on another. We sail for a certain port,
where, unknown to us, pirates lie in wait, and God sends His storms and
drives us upon Treasure Island. There we load up with ingots; the high
tide floats us, and we sail away for home with our unearned increment to
tell the untraveled natives how we most surely are the people and that
wisdom will die with us.

       *       *       *       *       *

Robert Louis was a sick man. The ship was crowded and the fare and
quarters were far from being what he always had been used to. The people
he met in the second cabin were neither literary nor artistic, but some
of them had right generous hearts. On being interrogated by one of his
messmates as to his business, Robert Louis replied that he was a
stone-mason. The man looked at his long, slim, artistic fingers and knew
better, but he did not laugh.

He respected this young man with the hectic flush, reverenced his secret
whatever it might be, and smuggled delicacies from the cook's galley for
the alleged stone-mason. "Thus did he shovel coals of fire on my head
until to ease my heart I called him aft one moonlight night and told him
I was no stone-mason, and begged him to forgive me for having sought to
deceive one of God's own gentlemen." Meantime, every day our emigrant
turned out a little good copy, and this made life endurable, for was it
not Robert Louis himself who gave us this immortal line, "I know what
pleasure is, for I have done good work"?

He was going to her. Arriving in New York he straightway invested two
good dollars in a telegram to San Francisco, and five cents in postage
on a letter to Edinburgh. These two things done he would take time to
rest up for a few days in New York. One of the passengers had given him
the address of a plain and respectable tavern, where an honest laborer
of scanty purse could find food and lodging. This was Number Ten West
Street.

Robert Louis dare not trust himself to the regular transfer-company, so
he listened to the siren song of the owner of a one-horse express-wagon
who explained that the distance to Number Ten West Street was something
to be dreaded, and that five dollars for the passenger and his two tin
boxes was like doing it for nothing. The money was paid; the boxes were
loaded into the wagon, and Robert Louis seated upon one of them, with a
horse-blanket around him, in the midst of a pouring rain, the driver
cracked his whip and started away. He drove three blocks to the
starboard and one to port, and backed up in front of Number Ten West
Street, which proved to be almost directly across the street from the
place where the "Devonia" was docked. But strangers in a strange country
can not argue--they can only submit.

The landlord looked over the new arrival from behind the bar, and then
through a little window called for his wife to come in from the kitchen.
The appearance of the dripping emigrant who insisted in answer to their
questions that he was not sick, and that he needed nothing, made an
appeal to the mother-heart of this wife of an Irish saloonkeeper.

Straightway she got dry clothes from her husband's wardrobe for the poor
man, and insisted that he should at once go to his room and change the
wet garments for the dry ones. She then prepared him supper which he ate
in the kitchen, and choked for gratitude when this middle-aged, stout
and illiterate woman poured his tea and called him "dear heart."

She asked him where he was going and what he was going to do. He dare
not repeat the story that he was a stone-mason--the woman knew he was
some sort of a superior being, and his answer that he was going out West
to make his fortune was met by the Irish-like response, "And may the
Holy Mother grant that ye find it."

It is very curious how gentle and beautiful souls find other gentle and
beautiful souls even in barrooms, and among the lowly--I really do not
understand it! In his book Robert Louis paid the landlord of Number Ten
West Street such a heartfelt compliment that the traditions still invest
the place, and the present landlord is not forgetful that his
predecessor once entertained an angel unawares.

When the literary pilgrim enters the door, scrapes his feet on the
sanded floor, and says "Robert Louis Stevenson," the barkeeper and
loafers straighten up and endeavor to put on the pose and manner of
gentlemen and all the courtesy, kindness and consideration they can
muster are yours. The man who could redeem a West Street barkeeper and
glorify a dock saloon must indeed have been a most remarkable
personality.

[Illustration: FANNY OSBOURNE]

       *       *       *       *       *

To get properly keelhauled for his overland emigrant trip across the
continent, Robert Louis remained in New York three days. The kind
landlady packed a big basket of food--not exactly the kind to tempt the
appetite of an invalid, but all flavored with good-will, and she also at
the last moment presented him a pillow in a new calico pillowcase that
has been accurately described, and the journey began.

There was no sleeping-car for the author of "A Lodging for the Night."
He sat bolt upright and held tired babies on his knees, or tumbled into
a seat and wooed the drowsy god. The third night out he tried sleeping
flat in the aisle of the car on the floor until the brakeman ordered him
up, and then two men proposed to fight the officious brakeman if he did
not leave the man alone. To save a riot Robert Louis agreed to obey the
rules. It was a ten-day trip across the continent, filled with
discomforts that would have tried the constitution of a strong man.

Robert Louis arrived "bilgy," as he expressed it, but alive. Mrs.
Osbourne was better. The day she received the telegram was the
turning-point in her case.

The doctor perceived that his treatment was along the right line, and
ordered the medicine continued.

She was too ill to see Robert Louis--it was not necessary, anyway. He
was near and this was enough. She began to gain. Just here seems a good
place to say that the foolish story to the effect that Mr. Osbourne was
present at the wedding and gave his wife away has no foundation in fact.
Robert Louis never saw Mr. Osbourne and never once mentioned his name to
any one so far as we know. He was a mine-prospector and speculator,
fairly successful in his work. That he and his wife were totally
different in their tastes and ambitions is well understood. They whom
God has put asunder no man can join together.

The husband and wife had separated, and Mrs. Osbourne went to France to
educate her children--educate them as far from their father as possible.
Also, she wished to study art on her own account. So, blessed be
stupidity--and heart-hunger and haunting misery that drive one out and
away.

She returned to California to obtain legal freedom and make secure her
business affairs. There are usually three parties to a divorce, and this
case was no exception. It is a terrible ordeal for a woman to face a
divorce-court and ask the State to grant her a legal separation from the
father of her children. Divorce is not a sudden, spontaneous affair--it
is the culmination of a long train of unutterable woe. Under the storm
and stress of her troubles Mrs. Osbourne had been stricken with fever.
Sickness is a result, and so is health.

When Robert Louis arrived in San Francisco Mrs. Osbourne grew better. In
a few months she pushed her divorce case to a successful conclusion.

Mr. Osbourne must have been a man with some gentlemanly instincts, for
he made no defense, provided a liberal little fortune for his former
family, and kindly disappeared from view.

Robert Louis did desultory work on newspapers in San Francisco and later
at Monterey, with health up and down as hope fluctuated. In the interval
a cablegram had come from his father saying, "Your allowance is two
hundred and fifty pounds a year." This meant that he had been forgiven,
although not very graciously, and was not to starve.

Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Osbourne were married May Tenth,
Eighteen Hundred Eighty. "The Silverado Squatters" shows how to spend a
honeymoon in a miner's deserted cabin, a thousand miles from nowhere.
The Osbourne children were almost grown, and were at that censorious age
when the average youngster feels himself capable of taking mental and
moral charge of his parents.

But these children were different; then, they had a different mother,
and as for Robert Louis, he certainly was a different proposition from
that ever evolved from creation's matrix. He belongs to no class, evades
the label, and fits into no pigeonhole.

The children never called him "father": he was always "Louis"--simply
one of them. He married the family and they married him. He had captured
their hearts in France by his story-telling, his flute-playing and his
skilful talent with the jackknife. Now he was with them for all time,
and he was theirs. It was the most natural thing in the world.

Mrs. Stevenson was the exact opposite of her husband in most things. She
was quick, practical, accurate, and had a manual dexterity in a
housekeeping way beyond the lot of most women. With all his
half-invalid, languid, dilettante ways, Robert Louis adored the man or
woman who could do things. Perhaps this was why his heart went out to
those who go down to the sea in ships, the folk whose work is founded
not on theories, but on absolute mathematical laws.

In their fourteen years of married life, Robert Louis never tired of
watching Fanny at her housekeeping. "To see her turn the flapjacks by a
simple twist of the wrist is a delight not soon to be forgotten, and my
joy is to see her hanging clothes on the line in a high wind."

The folks at home labored under the hallucination that Robert Louis had
married "a native Californian," and to them a "native" meant a
half-breed Indian. The fact was that Fanny was born in Indiana, but this
explanation only deepened the suspicion, for surely people who lived in
Indiana are Indians--any one would know that! Cousin Robert made
apologies and explanations, although none was needed, and placed himself
under the ban of suspicion of being in league to protect Robert Louis,
for the fact that the boys had always been quite willing to lie for
each other had been very well known.

Mrs. Stevenson made good all that Robert Louis lacked. In physique she
was small, but sturdy and strong.

Mentally she was very practical, very sensible, very patient. Then she
had wit, insight, sympathy and that fluidity of spirit which belongs
only to the Elect Few who know that nothing really matters much either
way. Such a person does not contradict, set folks straight as to dates,
and shake the red rag of wordy warfare, even in the interests of truth.

Then keeping house on Silverado Hill was only playing at "keep-house,"
and the way all hands entered into the game made it the genuine thing.
People who keep house in earnest or do anything else in dead earnest are
serious, but not sincere. Sincere people are those who can laugh--even
laugh at themselves--and thus are they saved from ossification of the
heart and fatty degeneration of the cerebrum. The Puritans forgot how to
play, otherwise they would never have hanged the witches or gone after
the Quakers with fetters and handcuffs. Uric acid and crystals in the
blood are bad things, but they are worse when they get into the soul.

That most delightful story of "Treasure Island" was begun as a tale for
Lloyd Osbourne, around the evening campfire. Then the hearers begged
that it be written out, and so it was begun, one chapter a day. As fast
as a chapter was written it was read in the evening to an audience that
hung on every word and speculated as to what the characters would do
next. All applauded, all criticized--all made suggestions as to what was
"true," that is to say, as to what the parties actually did and said.
"Treasure Island" is the best story of adventure ever written, and if
anybody knows a better recipe for story-writing than the plan of writing
just for fun, for some one else, it has not yet been discovered.

The miracle is that Robert Louis the Scotchman should have been so
perfectly understood and appreciated by this little family from the
other side of the world.

The Englishman coming to America speaks a different language from
ours--his allusions, symbols, aphorisms belong to another sphere. He
does not understand us, nor we him. But Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny
Osbourne must have been "universals," for they never really had to get
acquainted: they loved the same things, spoke a common language, and
best of all recognized that what we call "life" isn't life at the last,
and that an anxious stirring, clutching for place, pelf and power is not
nearly so good in results as to play the flute, tell stories and keep
house just for fun.

The Stevenson spirit of gentle raillery was well illustrated by Mrs.
Strong in an incident that ran somewhat thus: A certain boastful young
person was telling of a funeral where among other gorgeous things were
eight "pallberries."

Said Mrs. Stevenson in admiration, "Just now, a-think, pallberries at a
funeral; how delightful!" "My dear," said Robert Louis, reprovingly,
"you know perfectly well that we always have pallberries at our funerals
in Samoa."

"Quite true, my dear, provided it is pallberry season."

"And suppose it is not pallberry season, do we not have them tinted?"

"Yes, but there is a tendency to pick them green--that is awful!"

"But not so awful as to leave them on the bushes until they get rotten."

Finck in his fine book, "Romantic Love and Personal Beauty," says that
not once in a hundred thousand times do you find man and wife who have
reached a state of actual understanding.

Incompatibility comes from misunderstanding and misconstruing motives,
and more often, probably, attributing motives where none exists. And
until a man and a woman comprehend the working of each other's mind and
"respect the mood," there is no mental mating, and without a mental
mating we can talk of rights and ownership, but not of marriage.

The delight of creative work lies in self-discovery: you are mining
nuggets of power out of your own cosmos, and the find comes as a great
and glad surprise. The kindergarten baby who discovers he can cut out a
pretty shape from colored paper, and straightway wants to run home to
show mamma his find, is not far separated from the literary worker who
turns a telling phrase, and straightway looks for Her, to read it to
double his joy by sharing it. Robert Louis was ever discovering new
beauties in his wife and she in him. Eliminate the element of surprise
and anticipate everything a person can do or say, and love is a mummy.
Thus do we get the antithesis--understanding and surprise.

Marriage worked a miracle in Robert Louis; suddenly he became
industrious. He ordered that a bell should be tinkled at six o'clock
every morning or a whistle blown as a sign that he should "get away,"
and at once he began the work of the day. More probably he had begun it
hours before, for he had the bad habit of the midnight brain. Kipling
calls Robert Louis our only perfect artist in letters--the man who filed
down to a hair.

Robert Louis knew no synonyms; for him there was the right word and none
other. He balanced the sentence over and over on his tongue, tried and
tried again until he found the cadence that cast the prophetic purple
shadow--that not only expressed a meaning, but which tokened what would
follow.

He was always assiduously graceful, always desiring to present his idea
in as persuasive a light as possible, and with as much harmony as
possible. That self-revelatory expression of Stevenson's is eminently
characteristic of the man: "I know what pleasure is, for I have done
good work."

"Treasure Island" opened the market for Stevenson, and thereafter there
was a steadily increasing demand for his wares.

Health came back; and the folks at home seeing that Robert Louis was
getting his name in the papers, and noting the steady, triumphant tone
of sanity in all he wrote, came to the conclusion that his marriage was
not a failure.

       *       *       *       *       *

Above all men in the realm of letters Robert Louis had that peculiar and
divine thing called "charm." To know him was to love him, and those who
did not love him did not know him.

This welling grace of spirit was also the possession of his wife.

In his married life Stevenson was always a lover, never the loved. The
habit of his mind is admirably shown in these lines:

             TO MY WIFE

    Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,
    With eyes of gold and bramble dew,
    Steel true and blade straight,
    The Great Artisan made my mate.

    Honor, courage, valor, fire,
    A love that life could never tire,
    Death quench nor evil stir,
    The Mighty Master gave to her.

    Teacher, pupil, comrade, wife,
    A fellow-farer true through life,
    Heart-whole and soul free,
    The august Father gave to me.

Edmund Gosse gives a pen-picture of Stevenson thus:

    I came home dazzled with my new friend, saying as Constance does of
    Arthur, "Was ever such a gracious creature born?" That impression of
    ineffable mental charm was formed the first moment of acquaintance,
    about Eighteen Hundred Seventy-seven, and it never lessened or
    became modified. Stevenson's rapidity in the sympathetic interchange
    of ideas was, doubtless, the source of it. He has been described as
    an "egotist," but I challenge the description. If ever there was an
    altruist it was Louis Stevenson; he seemed to feign an interest in
    himself merely to stimulate you to be liberal in your confidences.
    Those who have written about him from later impressions than those
    of which I speak seem to me to give insufficient prominence to the
    gaiety of Stevenson. It was his cardinal quality in those early
    days. A childlike mirth leaped and danced in him; he seemed to skip
    the hills of life. He was simply bubbling with quips and jest; his
    inherent earnestness or passion about abstract things was
    incessantly relieved by jocosity; and when he had built one of his
    intellectual castles in the sand, a wave of humor was certain to
    sweep in and destroy it. I can not, for the life of me, recall any
    of his jokes; and written down in cold blood, they might not seem
    funny if I did. They were not wit so much as humanity, the
    many-sided outlook upon life. I am anxious that his laughter-loving
    mood should not be forgotten, because later on it was partly
    quenched by ill health, responsibility and the advance of years. He
    was often, in the old days, excessively, delightfully silly--silly
    with the silliness of an inspired schoolboy; I am afraid our
    laughter sometimes sounded ill in the ears of age.

       *       *       *       *       *

A visit to Scotland and the elders capitulated, apologized, and asked
for quarter. So delighted was Thomas Stevenson with Lloyd Osbourne that
he made the boy his chief heir, and declared in the presence of Robert
Louis that he only regretted that his own son was never half so likely a
lad. To which Robert Louis made reply, "Genius always skips one
generation."

Health had come to Robert Louis in a degree he had never before known.
He also had dignity and a precision such as his parents and kinsmen had
despaired of seeing in one so physically and mentally vacillating.

Stevenson was once asked by a mousing astrologer to state the date of
his birth. Robert Louis looked at his wife soberly and slowly answered,
"May Tenth, Eighteen Hundred Eighty." And not even a smile crossed the
countenance of either. Each understood.

That the nature of Stevenson was buoyed up, spiritualized, encouraged
and given strength by his marriage, no quibbler has ever breathed the
ghost of a doubt. His wife supplied him the mothering care that gave his
spirit wing. He loved her children as his own, and they reciprocated the
affection in a way that embalms their names in amber forevermore.

When Robert Louis, after a hemorrhage, sat propped up in bed, forbidden
to speak, he wrote on a pad with pencil: "Mr. Dumbleigh presents his
compliments and praises God that he is sick so he has to be cared for by
two tender, loving fairies. Was ever a man so blest?"

Again he begins the day by inditing a poem, "To the bare, brown feet of
my wife and daughter dear." And this, be it remembered, was after the
bare, brown feet had been running errands for him for thirteen years.
And think you that women so loved, and by such a man, would not fetch
and carry and run and find their highest joy in ministering to him? If
he were thrice blest in having them, as he continually avowed, how about
them? It only takes a small dole of love when fused with loyalty to win
the abject, doglike devotion of a good woman. On the day of his death
Stevenson said to his wife, "You have already given me fourteen years of
life." And this is the world's verdict--fourteen years of life and love,
and without these fourteen years the name and fame of Robert Louis
Stevenson were writ in water; with them "R. L. S." has been cut deep in
the granite of time, but better still, the gentle spirit of Stevenson
lives again in the common heart of the world in lives made better.




JOSIAH AND SARAH WEDGWOOD


    Admitting my inexperience, I must say that I think the instinct for
    beauty and all the desire to produce beautiful things, which you and
    Goethe refer to as the "Art Impulse," is a kind of sex quality, not
    unlike the song of birds or their beautiful plumage.

                               --_Josiah Wedgwood to Doctor Erasmus Darwin_

[Illustration: JOSIAH WEDGWOOD]


Once upon a day a financial panic was on in Boston. Real estate was
rapidly changing hands, most all owners making desperate efforts to
realize. Banks which were thought to be solvent and solid went soaring
skyward, and even collapsed occasionally, with a loud, ominous, R. G.
Dun report. And so it happened that about this time Henry Thoreau
strolled out of his cabin and looking up at the placid moon, murmured,
"Moonshine, after all, is the only really permanent thing we possess."

This is the first in the series of twelve love-stories--or "tales of
moonshine," to use the phrase of Thomas Carlyle.

In passing, let us note the fact that the doughty Thomas was not a
lover, and he more than once growled out his gratitude in that he had
never lost either his head or his heart, for men congratulate themselves
on everything they have, even their limitations. Thomas Carlyle was not
a lover.

A great passion is a trinitarian affair. And I sometimes have thought it
a matter of regret, as well as of wonder, that a strong man did not
appear on the scene and fall in love with the winsome Jeannie Welsh.
Conditions were ripe there for a great drama. I know it would have
blown the roof off that little house in Cheyne Row, but it might have
crushed the heart of Thomas Carlyle and made him a lover, indeed. After
death had claimed Jeannie as a bride, the fastnesses of the old Sartor
Resartus soul were broken up, and Carlyle paced the darkness, crying
aloud, "Oh, why was I cruel to her?" He manifested a tenderness toward
the memory of the woman dead which the woman alive had never been able
to bring forth.

Love demands opposition and obstacle. It is the intermittent or
obstructed current that gives power.

The finest flowers are those transplanted; for transplanting means
difficulty, a readjusting to new conditions, and through the effort put
forth to find adjustment does the plant progress. Transplanted men are
the ones who do the things worth while, and transplanted girls are the
only ones who inspire a mighty passion. Audrey transplanted might have
evolved into a Nell Gwynn or a Lady Hamilton.

In such immortal love-stories as Romeo and Juliet, Tristram and Isolde,
and Paolo and Francesca, a love so mad in its wild impetus is pictured
that it dashes itself against danger; and death for the lovers, we feel
from the beginning, is the sure climax when the curtain shall fall on
the fifth act.

The sustained popular interest in these tragedies proves that the
entranced auditors have dabbled in the eddies, so they feel a fervent
interest in those hopelessly caught in the current, and from the snug
safety of the parquette live vicariously their lives and the loves that
might have been.

But let us begin with a life-story, where love resolved its "moonshine"
into life, and justified itself even to stopping the mouths of certain
self-appointed censors, who caviled much and quibbled overtime. Here is
a love so great that in its beneficent results we are all yet
partakers.

       *       *       *       *       *

About all the civilization England has she got from the Dutch; her
barbarisms are all her own. It was the Dutch who taught the English how
to print and bind books and how to paint pictures.

It was the Dutch who taught the English how to use the potter's wheel
and glaze and burn earthenware. Until less than two hundred years ago,
the best pottery in use in England came from Holland. It was mostly made
at Delft, and they called it Delftware.

Finally they got to making Delftware in Staffordshire. This was about
the middle of the Eighteenth Century. And it seems that, a little before
this time, John Wesley, a traveling preacher, came up this way on
horseback, carrying tracts in his saddlebags, and much love in his
heart. He believed that we should use our religion in our life--seven
days in the week, and not save it up for Sunday. In ridicule, some one
had called him a "Methodist," and the name stuck.

John Wesley was a few hundred years in advance of his time. He is the
man who said, "Slavery is the sum of all villainies." John Wesley had a
brother named Charles, who wrote hymns, but John did things. He had
definite ideas about the rights of women and children, also on
temperance, education, taxation and exercise, and whether his followers
have ever caught up with him, much less gone ahead of him, is not for
me, a modest farmer, to say.

In the published "Journal of John Wesley," is this: "March 8, 1760.
Preached at Burslem, a town made up of potters. The people are poor,
ignorant, and often brutal, but in due time the heart must be moved
toward God, and He will enlighten the understanding."

And again: "Several in the congregation talked out loud and laughed
continuously. And then one threw at me a lump of potter's clay that
struck me in the face, but it did not disturb my discourse."

This whole section was just emerging out of the Stone Age, and the
people were mostly making stoneware. They worked about four days in a
week. The skilful men made a shilling a day--the women one shilling a
week. And all the money they got above a meager living went for folly.
Bear-baiting, bullfighting and drunkenness were the rule. There were
breweries at Staffordshire before there were potteries, but now the
potters made jugs and pots for the brewers.

These potters lived in hovels, and, what is worse, were quite content
with their lot. In the potteries women often worked mixing the mud, and
while at work wore the garb of men.

Wesley referred to the fact of the men and women dressing alike, and
relates that once a dozen women wearing men's clothes, well plastered
with mud, entered the chapel where he was preaching, and were urged on
by the men to affront him and break up the meeting.

Then comes this interesting item: "I met a young man by the name of J.
Wedgwood, who had planted a flower-garden adjacent to his pottery. He
also had his men wash their hands and faces and change their clothes
after working in the clay. He is small and lame, but his soul is near to
God."

I think that John Wesley was a very great man. I also think he was great
enough to know that only a man who is in love plants a flower-garden.

Yes, such was the case--Josiah Wedgwood was in love, madly, insanely,
tragically in love! And he was liberating that love in his work. Hence,
among other forms that his "insanity" took, he planted a flower-garden.

And of course, the garden was for the lady he loved.

Love must do something--it is a form of vital energy and the best thing
it does, it does for the beloved. Flowers are love's own properties. And
so flowers, natural or artificial, are a secondary sex manifestation.

I said Josiah Wedgwood was tragically in love--the word was used
advisedly. One can play comedy; two are required for melodrama; but a
tragedy demands three.

A tragedy means opposition, obstacle, objection. Josiah Wedgwood was
putting forth a flower-garden, not knowing why, possibly, but as a form
of attraction. And John Wesley riding by, reined in, stopped and after
talking with the owner of the flower-garden wrote, "He is small and
lame, but his soul is near to God."

       *       *       *       *       *

Josiah Wedgwood, like Richard Arkwright, his great contemporary, was the
thirteenth child of his parents.

Let family folk fear no more about thirteen being an unlucky number. The
common law of England, which usually has some good reason based on
commonsense for its existence, makes the eldest son the heir: this on
the assumption that the firstborn inherits brain and brawn plus. If the
firstborn happened to be a girl, it didn't count.

The rest of the family grade down until we get "the last run of shad."
But Nature is continually doing things just as if to smash our theories.
The Arkwrights and the Wedgwoods are immortal through Omega and not
Alpha.

Thomas Wedgwood, the father of Josiah, was a potter who made butter-pots
and owned a little pottery that stood in the yard behind the house. He
owned it, save for a mortgage, and when he died, he left the mortgage
and the property to his eldest son Thomas, to look after.

Josiah was then nine years old, but already he was throwing clay on the
potter's wheel. It would not do to say that he was clay in the hand of
the potter, for while the boys of his age were frolicking through the
streets of the little village of Burslem where he lived, he was learning
the three R's at his mother's knee.

I hardly suppose we can speak of a woman who was the mother of thirteen
children before she was forty, and taking care of them all without a
servant, as highly cultivated. Several of Josiah's brothers and sisters
never learned to read and write, for like Judith Shakespeare, the
daughter of William, they made their mark: which shows us that there are
several ways of turning that pretty trick. Children born of the same
parents are not necessarily related to each other, nor to their parents.

Mary Wedgwood, Josiah's mother, wrote for him his name in clay, and some
years after he related how he copied it a hundred times every day for a
week, writing with a stick in the mud.

Lame children or weakly ones seem to get their quota of love all right,
so let us not feel sorry for them--everything is equalized.

When Josiah was fourteen he could write better than either his mother or
his brother Thomas; for we have the signatures of all three appended to
an indenture of apprenticeship, wherein Josiah was bound to his brother
Thomas for five years. The youngster was to be taught the "mystery,
trade, occupation and secrets of throwing and handling clay, and also
burning it." But the fact was that as he was born in the pottery and had
lived and worked in it, and was a most alert and impressionable child,
he knew quite as much about the work as his brother Thomas, who was
twenty years older. Years are no proof of ability.

At nineteen, Josiah's apprenticeship to his brother expired. "I have my
trade, a lame leg and the marks of smallpox--and I never was
good-looking, anyway," he wrote in his commonplace-book.

The terrific attack of smallpox that he had undergone had not only
branded his face, but had left an inflammation in his right knee that
made walking most difficult. This difficulty was no doubt aggravated by
his hard work turning the potter's wheel with one foot. During the
apprenticeship the brother had paid him no wages, simply "booarde,
meate, drink and cloatheing."

Now he was sick, lame and penniless. His mother had died the year
before. He was living with his brothers and sisters, who were poor, and
felt that he was more or less of a burden to them and to the world: the
tide was at ebb. And about this time it was that Richard Wedgwood,
Esquire, from Cheshire, came over to Burslem on horseback. Richard has
been mentioned as a brother of Thomas, the father of Josiah, but the
fact seems to be that they were cousins.

Richard was a gentleman in truth, if not in title. He had made a fortune
as a cheesemonger and retired. He went to London once a year, and had
been to Paris. He was decently fat, was senior warden of his village
church, and people who knew their business addressed him as Squire. The
whole village of Burslem boasted only one horse and a mule, but Squire
Wedgwood of Cheshire owned three horses, all his own. He rode only one
horse though, when he came to Burslem, and behind him, seated on a
pillion, was his only and motherless daughter Sarah, aged fourteen,
going on fifteen, with dresses to her shoe-tops.

He brought her because she teased to come, and in truth he loved the
girl very much and was extremely proud of her, even if he did reprove
her more than was meet. But she usually got even by doing as she
pleased.

Now they were on their way to Liverpool and just came around this way
a-cousining.

And among others on whom they called were the Wedgwood potters. In the
kitchen, propped up on a bench, with his lame leg stretched out before
him, sat Josiah, worn, yellow and wan, all pitted with smallpox-marks.
The girl looked at the young man and asked him how he got hurt--she was
only a child. Then she asked him if he could read. And she was awful
glad he could, because to be sick and not to be able to read was awful!

Her father had a copy of Thomson's "Seasons" in his saddlebags. She went
and got the book and gave it to Josiah, and told her father about it
afterward. And when the father and daughter went away, the girl stroked
the sick boy's head, and said she hoped he would get well soon. She
would not have stroked the head of one of those big, burly potters; but
this potter was different--he was wofully disfigured, and he was sick
and lame. Woman's tenderness goes out to homely and unfortunate
men--read your Victor Hugo!

And Josiah--he was speechless, dumb--his tongue paralyzed! The room swam
and then teetered up and down, and everything seemed touched with a
strange, wondrous light. And in both hands Josiah Wedgwood tenderly held
that precious copy of James Thomson's "Seasons."

       *       *       *       *       *

In Eighteen Hundred Sixty, just one hundred years after John Wesley
visited Burslem, Gladstone came here and gave an address on the founding
of the Wedgwood Memorial Institute.

Among other things said in the course of his speech was this: "Then
comes the well-known smallpox, the settling of the dregs of the disease
in the lower part of the leg, and the eventual amputation of the limb,
rendering him lame for life. It is not often that we have such palpable
occasion to record our obligations to calamity. But in the wonderful
ways of Providence, that disease which came to him as a twofold scourge
was probably the occasion of his subsequent excellence. It prevented him
from growing up to be the active, vigorous workman, possessed of all his
limbs, and knowing right well the use of them; but it put him upon
considering whether, as he could not be that, he might not be something
else, and something greater. It sent his mind inward; it drove him to
meditate upon the laws and secrets of his art. The result was that he
arrived at a perception and grasp of them which might, perhaps, have
been envied, certainly have been owned, by an Athenian potter.
Relentless criticism has long since torn to pieces the old legend of
King Numa receiving in a cavern, from the nymph of Egeria, the laws
which were to govern Rome. But no criticism can shake the record of that
illness and that mutilation of the boy Josiah Wedgwood, which made a
cavern of his bedroom, and an oracle of his own inquiring, searching,
meditative mind."

You remember how that great and good man, Richard Maurice Bucke, once
said, "After I had lost my feet in the Rocky Mountain avalanche, I lay
for six weeks in a cabin, and having plenty of time to think it over, I
concluded that, now my feet were gone, I surely could no longer depend
upon them, so I must use my head." And he did.

The loss of an arm in a sawmill was the pivotal point that gave us one
of the best and strongest lawyers in Western New York. And heaven knows
we need good lawyers: the other kind are so plentiful!

Gladstone thought it was smallpox that drove Josiah Wedgwood to books
and art. But other men have had the smallpox--bless me!--and they never
acquired much else.

Josiah kept Thomson's "Seasons" three months, and then returned it to
Sarah Wedgwood, with a letter addressing her as "Dear Cousin." You will
find it set down in most of the encyclopedias that she was his cousin,
but this seems to be because writers of encyclopedias are literalists,
and lovers are poets.

Josiah said he returned the book for two reasons: first, inasmuch as he
had committed it to memory, he no longer needed it; second, if he sent
it back, possibly another book might be sent him instead. Squire
Wedgwood answered this letter himself, and sent two books, with a good,
long letter of advice about improving one's time, and "not wasting life
in gambling and strong drink, as most potters do."

Six months had passed since the Squire and his daughter had been to
Burslem. Josiah was much better. He was again at work in the pottery.
And now, instead of making brown butter-crocks and stone jugs all of the
time, he was experimenting in glazes. In fact, he had made a little
wooden workbox and covered it over with tiny pieces of ornamental
"porcelain" in a semi-transparent green color, that he had made himself.
And this pretty box he sent to Sarah. Unfortunately, the package was
carried on horseback in a bag by the mail-carrier, and on the way the
horse lay down, or fell down and rolled on the mail-bag, reducing the
pretty present to fragments. When the wreck was delivered to Sarah, she
consulted with her father about what should be done.

We ask advice, not because we want it, but because we wish to be backed
up in the thing we desire to do.

Sarah wrote to Josiah, acknowledging receipt of the box, praising its
beauty in lavish terms, but not a word about the condition in which it
arrived. A few weeks afterward the Squire wrote on his own account and
sent ten shillings for two more boxes--"just like the first, only
different." Ten shillings was about what Josiah was getting for a
month's work.

Josiah was now spending all of his spare time and money in
experimenting with new clays and colors, and so the ten shillings came
in very handy.

He had made ladles, then spoons, and knife-handles to take the place of
horn, and samples of all his best work he sent on to his "Uncle
Richard."

His brother Thomas was very much put out over this trifling. He knew no
way to succeed, save to stick to the same old ways and processes that
had always been employed. Josiah chafed under the sharp chidings of his
brother, and must have written something about it to Sarah, for the
Squire sent some of the small wares made by Josiah over to Sheffield to
one of the big cutlers, and the cutler wrote back saying he would like
to engage the services of so talented a person as the young man who
could make a snuffbox with beautiful leaves modeled on it. Thomas
Wedgwood, however, refused to allow his brother to leave, claiming the
legal guardianship over him until he was twenty-one. From this we assume
that Josiah's services were valuable.

Josiah had safely turned his twenty-first year before he decided to go
down to Cheshire and see his Uncle Richard. He had anticipated the visit
for weeks, but now as he was on the verge of starting he was ready to
back out. A formal letter of excuse and apology was written, but never
dispatched. On the appointed day, Josiah was duly let down from the
postman's cart at the gate of Squire Wedgwood, Spen Green, Cheshire.
The young woman who came down the steps to meet him at the gate might
indeed be Sarah Wedgwood, but she wasn't the same little girl who had
ridden over to Burslem on a pillion behind her father! She was tall,
slender, and light of step. She was a dream of grace and beauty, and her
presence seemed to fill the landscape. Over Josiah's being ran a bitter
regret that he had come at all. He looked about for a good place to
hide, then he tried to say something about "how glad I am to be here,"
but there was a bur on his tongue and so he stammered, "The roads are
very muddy." In his pocket he had the letter of regret, and he came near
handing it to her and climbing into the postman's cart that still stood
there.

He started to go through the gate, and the postman coughed, and asked
him for his fare. When the fare was paid, Josiah felt sure that Sarah
thought he had tried to cheat the poor postman.

He protested to her that he hadn't, in a strange falsetto voice that was
not his own.

As they walked toward the house, Josiah was conscious he was limping,
and as he passed his hand over his forehead he felt the pockmarks stand
out like moles.

And she was so gracious and sprightly and so beautiful! He knew she was
beautiful, although he really had not looked at her; but he realized the
faint perfume of her presence, and he knew her dress was a light
blue--the color of his favorite glaze.

He decided he would ask her for a sample of the cloth that he might make
her a plate just like it.

When they were seated on the veranda, over which were climbing-roses,
the young lady addressed him as "Mr. Wedgwood," whereas in her letters
she had called him "Dear Cousin" or "Josiah."

It was now Sarah's turn to be uncomfortable, and this was a great relief
to him. He felt he must put her at ease, so he said, "These roses would
look well on a platter--I will model one for you when I go home." This
helped things a little, and the girl offered to show him the garden.
There were no flowers in Burslem. People had no time to take care of
them.

And just then the Squire appeared, bluff, bold and hearty, and soon
everything was all right. That evening the young lady played for them on
the harpsichord; the father told stories and laughed heartily at them
because nobody else did; and Josiah seated in a dim corner recited pages
from Thomson's "Seasons," and the next day was frightened at his
temerity.

       *       *       *       *       *

When Josiah returned to Burslem, it was with the firm determination that
he must get away from his brother and branch out for himself. That he
loved Sarah or had any idea of wedding her, he was not conscious. Yet
her life to him was a great living presence, and all of his plans for
the future were made with her in mind. Brown butter-crocks were
absolutely out of the question! It was blue plates, covered with vines
and roses, or nothing; and he even had visions of a tea-set covered with
cupids and flying angels.

In a few weeks we find Josiah over near Sheffield making knife-handles
for a Mr. Harrison, an ambitious cutler. Harrison lacked the art spirit
and was found too mercenary for our young man, who soon after formed a
partnership with a man named Whieldon, "to make tortoise-shell and ivory
from ground flint and other stones by processes secret to said
Wedgwood." Whieldon furnished the money and Wedgwood the skill. Up to
this time the pottery business in England had consisted in using the
local clays. Wedgwood invented a mill for grinding stone, and
experimented with every kind of rock he could lay his hands on.

He also became a skilled modeler, and his success at ornamenting the
utensils and pretty things they made caused the business to prosper. In
a year he had saved up a hundred pounds of his own. This certainly was
quite a fortune, and Sarah had written him, "I am so proud of your
success--we all predict for you a great future."

Such assurances had a sort of undue weight with Josiah, for we find him
not long after making bold to call on Squire Wedgwood on "a matter of
most important business."

The inspired reader need not be told what that business was. Just let it
go that the Squire told Josiah he was a fool to expect that the only
daughter of Richard Wedgwood, Esquire, retired monger in Cheshire
cheese, should think of contracting marriage with a lame potter from
Burslem. Gadzooks! The girl would some day be heiress to ten thousand
pounds or so, and the man she would marry must match her dowry, guinea
for guinea. And another thing: a nephew of Lord Bedford, a rising young
barrister of London, had already asked for her hand.

To be a friend to a likely potter wasn't the same as asking him into the
family!

Josiah's total sum of assurance had been exhausted when he blurted out
his proposal to the proud father; there was now nothing he could do but
to grow first red and then white. He was suppressed, undone, and he
could not think of a thing to say, or an argument to put forth. The air
seemed stifling. He stumbled down the steps and started down the road as
abruptly as he had appeared.

What he would do or where he would go were very hazy propositions in
his mind. He limped along and had gone perhaps a mile. Things were
getting clearer in his mind. His first decision as sanity returned was
that he would ask the first passer-by which way it was to the river.

Now he was getting mad. "A Burslem potter!" that is what the Squire
called him, and a lame one at that! It was a taunt, an epithet, an
insult! To call a person a Burslem potter was to accuse him of being
almost everything that was bad.

The stage did not go until the next day--Josiah had slackened his pace
and was looking about for an inn. He would get supper first anyway, and
then the river--it would only be one Burslem potter less.

And just then there was a faint cry of "Oh, Josiah!" and a vision of
blue. Sarah was right there behind him, all out of breath from running
across the meadows. "Oh, Josiah--I--I just wanted to say that I hate
that barrister! And then you heard papa say that you must match my
dowry, guinea for guinea--I am sorry it is so much, but you can do it,
Josiah, you can do it!"

She held out her hand and Josiah clutched and twisted it, and then
smacked at it, but smacked into space.

And the girl was gone! She was running away from him. He could not hope
to catch her--he was lame, and she was agile as a fawn. She stepped upon
a stile that led over through the meadow, and as she stood there she
waved her hand, and Josiah afterward thought she said, "Match my dowry,
guinea for guinea, Josiah: you can do it, you can do it." Just an
instant she stood there, and then she ran across the meadow and
disappeared amid the oaks.

An old woman came by and saw him staring at the trees, but he did not
ask her the way to the river.

       *       *       *       *       *

From a shy youth, Josiah Wedgwood had evolved into a man of affairs, and
was surely doing a man's work. He had spent about five years making
curious earthenware ornaments for the Sheffield cutlers; and then with
full one thousand pounds he had come back to Burslem and started
business on his own account. He had read and studied and worked, and he
had evolved. He was an educated man; that is to say, he was a competent
and useful man. He determined to free Burslem from the taint that had
fallen upon it. "Burslem?" he once wrote to Sarah, "Burslem? the name
shall yet be a symbol of all that is beautiful, honest and true; we
shall see! I am a potter--yes, but I'll be the best one that England has
ever seen."

And the flower-garden was one of the moves in the direction of
evolution.

Occasionally, Josiah made visits to Cheshire, riding forty miles on
horseback, for he now had horses of his own. The roads in Spring and
Winter were desperately bad, but Josiah by persistent agitation had
gotten Parliament to widen and repair, at the expense of several hundred
pounds, the road between Lawton in Cheshire to Cliffe Bank at
Staffordshire.

And it so happened that this was the road which led from where Wedgwood
lived to where lived his lady-love. Josiah and Sarah had many a smile
over the fact that Cupid had taken a hand in road-building. Evidently
Dan Cupid is a very busy and versatile individual.

Sarah was her father's housekeeper. She had one brother, a young man of
meager qualities. These two were joint heirs to their father's estate of
something over twenty thousand pounds. Josiah and Sarah thought what a
terrible blow it would be if this brother should die and Sarah thus have
her dowry doubled!

The Squire depended upon Sarah in many ways. She wrote his letters and
kept his accounts; and his fear for her future was founded on a selfish
wish not to lose her society and services, quite as much as a solicitude
for her happiness.

For a year after Josiah had exploded his bombshell by asking Squire
Richard for his daughter's hand, the lover was forbidden the house.

Then the Squire relaxed so far that he allowed Josiah and Sarah to meet
in his presence. And finally there was a frank three-cornered
understanding. And that was that, when Josiah could show that he had ten
thousand pounds in his own name, the marriage would take place. This
propensity on the part of parents to live their children's lives is very
common. Few be the parents and very great are they who can give liberty
and realize that their children are only loaned to them. I fear we
parents are prone to be perverse and selfish.

Josiah and Sarah reviewed their status from all sides. They could have
thrown the old gentleman overboard entirely and cut for Gretna Green,
but that would have cost them an even ten thousand pounds. It would
also have secured the Squire's enmity, and might have caused him a fit
of apoplexy. And surely, as it was, the lovers were not lost to each
other. To wed is often fatal to romance; but it is expecting too much to
suppose that lovers will reason that too much propinquity is often worse
than obstacle. The road between them was a good one--the letter-carrier
made three trips a week, and an irascible parent could not stop dreams,
nor veto telepathy, even if he did pass a law that one short visit a
month was the limit.

Lovers not only laugh at locksmiths, but at most everything else. Josiah
and Sarah kept the line warm with a stream of books, papers, manuscripts
and letters. By meeting the mail-carrier a mile out of the village, the
vigilant Squire's censorship was curtailed by Sarah to reasonable
proportions.

And so the worthy Richard had added the joys of smuggling to the natural
sweets of a grand passion. In thus giving zest to the chase, no thanks,
however, should be sent his way. Even stout and stubborn old gentlemen
with side-whiskers have their uses.

And it was about this time that John Wesley came to Burslem and was
surprised to find a flower-garden in a community of potters. He looked
at the flowers, had a casual interview with the owner and wrote, "His
soul is near to God."

       *       *       *       *       *

Wedgwood knew every part of his business. He modeled, made designs,
mixed clay, built kilns, and at times sat up all night and fed fuel into
a refractory furnace. Nothing was quite good enough--it must be better.
And to make better pottery, he said, we must produce better people. He
even came very close to plagiarizing Walt Whitman by saying, "Produce
great people--the rest follows!"

Wedgwood instituted a class in designing and brought a young man from
London to teach his people the rudiments of art.

Orders were coming in from nobility for dinner-sets, and the English
middle class, instead of dipping into one big pot set in the center of
the table, were adopting individual plates.

Knives and forks came into use in England about the time of Good Queen
Bess, who was only fairly good. Sir Walter Raleigh, who never posted
signs reading, "No Smoking," records, "Tiny forks are being used to
spear things at table, instead of the thumb-and-finger method sanctified
by long use." But until the time of Wedgwood a plate and a cup for each
person at the table was a privilege only of the nobility, and napkins
and finger-bowls were on the distant horizon.

Wedgwood had not only to educate his workmen, but he had also to educate
the public. But he made head. He had gotten a good road to Cheshire, and
an equally good one to Liverpool, and was shipping crockery in large
quantities to America. Occasionally, Wedgwood taught the designing
classes, himself. As a writer he had developed a good deal of facility,
for three love-letters a week for five years will educate any man. To
know the right woman is a liberal education. Wedgwood also had given
local addresses on the necessity of good roads, and the influence of a
tidy back-yard on character.

He was a little past thirty years old, sole owner of a prosperous
business and was worth pretty near the magic sum of ten thousand pounds.

Squire Wedgwood had been formally notified to come over to Burslem and
take an inventory. He came, coughed and said that pottery was only a
foolish fashion, and people would soon get enough of it. Richard felt
sure that common folks would never have much use for dishes.

On being brought back to concrete reasons, he declared that his
daughter's dowry had increased, very much increased, through wise
investments of his own. The girl had a good home--better than she would
have at Burslem. The man who married her must better her condition,
etc., etc.

It seems that Josiah and Sarah had a little of the good Semitic instinct
in their make-up. The old gentleman must be managed; the dowry was too
valuable to let slip. They needed the money in their business, and had
even planned just what they would do with it. They were going to found
a sort of Art Colony, where all would work for the love of it, and where
would take place a revival of the work of the Etruscans. As classic
literature had been duplicated, and the learning of the past had come
down to us in books, so would they duplicate in miniature the statues,
vases, bronzes and other marvelous beauty of antiquity.

And the name of the new center of art was chosen--it should be
"Etruria." It was a great dream; but then lovers are given to dreams: in
fact, they have almost a monopoly on the habit!

       *       *       *       *       *

Great people have great friends. Wedgwood had a friend in Liverpool
named Bentley. Bentley was a big man--a gracious, kindly, generous,
receptive, broad, sympathetic man. Your friend is the lengthened shadow
of yourself.

Bentley was both an artist and a businessman. Bentley had no quibble or
quarrel with himself, and therefore was at peace with the world; he had
eliminated all grouch from his cosmos. Bentley began as Wedgwood's
agent, and finally became his partner, and had a deal to do with the
evolution of Etruria.

When Bentley opened a showroom in London and showed the exquisite,
classic creations of Flaxman and the other Wedgwood artists, carriages
blocked the streets, and cards of admission had to be issued to keep
back the crowds. Bentley dispatched a messenger to Wedgwood with the
order, "Turn every available man on vases--London is vase mad!"

A vase, by the way, is a piece of pottery that sells for from one to ten
shillings; if it sells for more than ten shillings, you should pronounce
it vawse.

On the ninth of January, Seventeen Hundred Sixty-four, Wedgwood wrote
Bentley this letter: "If you know my temper and sentiments on these
affairs, you will be sensible how I am mortified when I tell you I have
gone through a long series of bargain-making, of settlements,
reversions, provisions and so on. 'Gone through it,' did I say? Would to
Hymen that I had! No! I am still in the attorney's hands, from which I
hope it is no harm to pray, 'Good Lord, Deliver me!' Sarah and I are
perfectly agreed, and would settle the whole affair in three minutes;
but our dear papa, over-careful of his daughter's interest, would by
some demands which I can not comply with, go near to separate us if we
were not better determined.

"On Friday next, Squire Wedgwood and I are to meet in great form, with
each of us our attorney, which I hope will prove conclusive. You shall
then hear further from your obliged and very affectionate friend, Josiah
Wedgwood."

On January Twenty-ninth, Sarah and Josiah walked over to the little
village of Astbury, Cheshire, and were quietly married, the witnesses
being the rector's own family, and the mail-carrier. Just why the latter
individual was called in to sign the register has never been explained,
but I imagine most lovers can. He surely had been "particeps criminis"
to the event.

And so they were married, and lived happily afterward. Josiah was
thirty-four, and Sarah twenty-nine when they were married. The ten years
of Laban service was not without its compensation. The lovers had lived
in an ideal world long enough to crystallize their dreams.

In just a year after the marriage a daughter was born to Mr. and Mrs.
Josiah Wedgwood, and they called her name Susannah.

And Susannah grew up and became the mother of Charles Darwin, the
greatest scientist the world has ever produced.

Writers of romances have a way of leaving their lovers at the
church-door, a cautious and wise expedient, since too often love is one
thing and life another. But here we find a case where love was worked
into life. From the date of his marriage Wedgwood's business moved
forward with never a reverse nor a single setback.

When Wedgwood and Bentley were designated "Potters to the Queen," and
began making "queensware," coining the word, they laid the sure
foundation for one of the greatest business fortunes ever accumulated in
England.

Two miles from Burslem, they built the little village of Etruria--a
palpable infringement on the East Aurora caveat. And so the dream all
came true, and in fact was a hundred times beyond what the lovers had
ever imagined.

Sarah's brother accommodatingly died a few years after her marriage, and
so she became sole heiress to a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, and
this went to the building up of Etruria.

Wedgwood, toward the close of his life, was regarded as the richest man
in England who had made his own fortune. And better still, he was rich
in intellect and all those finer faculties that go into the making of a
great and generous man.

Twenty-two years after his marriage, Wedgwood wrote to his friend Lord
Gower: "I never had a great plan that I did not submit to my wife. She
knew all the details of the business, and it was her love for the
beautiful that first prompted and inspired me to take up Grecian and
Roman Art, and in degree, reproduce the Classic for the world. I worked
for her approval, and without her high faith in me I realize that my
physical misfortunes would have overcome my will, and failure would have
been written large where now England has carved the word Success."




WILLIAM GODWIN AND MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT


    If children are to be educated to understand the true principle of
    patriotism, their mother should be a patriot; and the love of
    mankind, from which an orderly train of virtues springs, can only be
    produced by considering the moral and civil interest of the race.
    Woman should be prepared by education to become the companion of
    man, or she will stop the progress of knowledge, for truth must be
    common to all, or it will be inefficacious with respect to its
    influence on general practise.

                                                 --_Mary Wollstonecraft_

[Illustration: WILLIAM GODWIN]


Others may trace the love-tales of milkmaids and farmhands; I deal with
the people who have made their mark upon the times; people who have
tinted the world's thought-fabric and to whose genius we are all heirs.
And the reason the story of their love is vital to us is because their
love was vital to them. Thought is born of parents, and literature is
the child of married minds. So this, then, is the love-story of William
Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.

History and literature are very closely related. If one sets down the
chief events in political history, and over against these writes the
names of the radical authors and orators of the time, he can not but be
convinced that literature leads, and soldiers and politicians are
puppets tossed on the tide of time. A thought, well expressed, is a bomb
that explodes indefinitely.

Two men, Rousseau and Voltaire, lighted the fuse that created the
explosion known as the French Revolution. Luther's books and sermons
brought about the Reformation.

Thomas Paine's little book, "The Crisis," of which half a million copies
were printed and distributed from Virginia to Maine, stirred the
Colonists to the sticking-point; and George Washington, who was neither
a writer nor an orator, paid "Letters and Truth" the tribute of saying,
"Without the pamphlets of Thomas Paine the hearts and minds of the
people would never have been prepared to respond to our call for
troops." No one disputes now that it was a book written by a woman, of
which a million copies were sold in the North, that prepared the way for
Lincoln's call for volunteers.

Literature and oratory are arsenals that supply the people their
armament of reasons. And through the use and exercise of these borrowed
reasons, we learn to create new ones for ourselves. Thinkers prepare the
way for thinkers, and every John the Baptist uttering his cry in the
wilderness is heard.

And the fate of John the Baptist, and the fate of the Man whom he
preceded, are typical of the fate of all who are bold enough to carry
the standard of revolt into the camp of the entrenched enemy. The Cross
is a mighty privilege; and only the sublimely great are able to pay the
price at which hemlock is held.

Buddha said that the finest word in any language is "Equanimity." This
is a paradox, and like every paradox implies that the reverse is equally
true. Equanimity in the face of opposition, steadfastness in time of
stress, and wise and useful purpose, are truly godlike.

And there is only one thing worth fighting for, talking for, or writing
for; and all literature and all oratory have this for their central
theme--Freedom. It was only Freedom that could lure Cincinnatus from his
plow or Lincoln from his law-office.

And so Mary Wollstonecraft's book, "The Rights of Woman," was the first
strong, earnest, ringing word on the subject. She summed up the theme
once and for all, just as an essay by Herbert Spencer anticipates and
answers every objection, exhausting the theme. And that the author had a
whimsical touch of humor in her composition is shown in that she
dedicates the book to that Prince of Woman-Haters, "Talleyrand, Late
Bishop of Autun."

"Political Justice," by William Godwin, was published in Seventeen
Hundred Ninety-three. The work, on its first appearance, created a
profound impression among English thinking people, although orthodoxy
has almost succeeded in smothering it in silence since John Stuart Mill
declared that this book created an epoch and deserved to rank with
Milton's "Speech for Unlicensed Printing," Locke's "Essay on Human
Understanding" or Jean Jacques' "Emile." That it was a positive force in
Mill's own life he always admitted.

However, it is only within our own time--only, in fact, since Eighteen
Hundred Seventy-six--that the views of Godwin as expressed in "Political
Justice" have been adopted by the spirit of Christendom. Godwin believed
in the perfectibility of the race, and proved that man's career has
been a constant movement forward. That is, there never was a "Fall of
Man." Man has always fallen upward, and when he has kicked the ball it
has always been toward the goal. Godwin believed that it was well to
scan the faults of our fellows closely, in order to see, forsooth,
whether they are not their virtues. The belief that mankind should by
nature tend to evil, he considered absurd and unscientific, for the
strongest instinct in all creation is self-preservation; and that
certain men should love darkness rather than light was mainly because
governments and religions have warped man's nature through oppression
and coercion until it no longer acts normally. "Normal man seeks the
light, just as the flowers do. Man, if not too much interfered with,
will make for himself the best possible environment and create for his
children right conditions because the instinct for peace and liberty is
deeply rooted in his nature. Control by another has led to revolt, and
revolt has led to oppression, and oppression occasions grief and
deadness: hence bruises and distortion follow. When we view humanity, we
behold not the true and natural man, but a deformed and pitiable
product, undone by the vices of those who have sought to improve on
Nature by shaping his life to feed the vanity of a few and minister to
their wantonness. In our plans for social betterment, let us hold in
mind the healthy and unfettered man, and not the cripple that
interference and restraint have made."

Godwin, like Robert Ingersoll, was the son of a clergyman, which reminds
me that liberal thought is under great obligations to the clergy, since
their sons, taught by antithesis, are often shining lights of
radicalism. Godwin was a non-resistant, philosophic anarchist. He was
the true predecessor of George Eliot, Walt Whitman, Henry Thoreau and
Leo Tolstoy, and the best that is now being expressed from advanced
Christian pulpits harks back to him. All that the foremost of our
contemporary thinkers have written and said was suggested and touched
upon by William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, with like conclusions.

       *       *       *       *       *

Carnegie is credited with this: "There is only one generation between
shirt-sleeves and shirt-sleeves." Now, the grandfather of Mary
Wollstonecraft was an employing-weaver who did his work so well that his
wares commanded a price.

He grew rich, and when he died he left a fortune of some thirty thousand
pounds, not being able to take it with him. This fortune descended to
his eldest son.

Samuel Johnson thought the law of primogeniture a most excellent thing,
since it insured there being only one fool in the family. The
Wollstonecraft boys who had no money went to work, and in taking care of
themselves became strong, sturdy and prosperous men. The one who
succeeded to the patrimony was at first a gentleman, then a
shabby-genteel, and at forty his time was taken up with schemes to dodge
the debtors' prison, and with plans to pay off the National Debt; for it
seems that men who can not manage their own affairs are not deterred
thereby from volunteering to look after those of the nation.

It appears, also, that Mr. Wollstonecraft wrote a book entitled, "How to
Command Success," and by its sale hoped to retrieve the fortune now
lost--but alas! he ran in debt to the printer and finally sold the
copyright to that worthy for five shillings, and on the proceeds got
plain drunk.

The family moved as often as landlords demanded, which was about every
three months. There were three girls in the family--Mary, Everina and
Eliza--all above the average in intelligence. Whether there is any such
thing in Nature as justice for the individual is a question, but cosmic
justice is beyond cavil. The stupidity of a parent is often a very
precious factor in the evolution of his children. He teaches them by
antithesis. So if a man can not be useful and strong, all is not lost:
he can still serve humanity as a horrible example--like the honest hobo
who volunteered to pay the farmer for his dinner by acting as a
scarecrow. Children of drunkards make temperance fanatics; and those who
have a shiftless father stand a better chance of developing into
financiers than if they had a parent who would set them up in business,
stand between them and danger, and meet the deficit.

Women married to punk husbands need not be discouraged, nor should
husbands with nagging wives be cast down, for was it not Emerson who
said, "It is better to be a nettle in the side of your friend than his
echo?"

Thus do all things work together for good, whether you love the Lord or
not.

The Wollstonecraft family traversed London with their handcart, from
Chelsea to East End; they also roamed through Essex, Yorkshire and Kent.
When matters became strained they fell back on London, paid one month's
rent in advance and then stayed three, when their goods and chattels
were gently landed on the curb, and the handcart came in handy.

As the girls grew up they worked at weaving, served as house-girls and
nurses, and finally Mary became a governess in the family of Lord
Kingsborough, an Irish nobleman. This gave her access to her employer's
library, and she went at it as a hungry colt enters a clover-field. Not
knowing how long her good fortune would last, she eagerly improved her
time. She wrote frequent letters to her sisters, telling what she was
doing and what she was reading. She was eminently superior to any of the
females in the family, and acknowledged it. A tutor in the house taught
her French; and whether the nobleman's children learned much or not, we
do not know, but Mary soon equaled her teacher.

Knowledge is a matter of desire.

The next year the Wollstonecraft girls opened a private school, a kind
of "Young Ladies' Establishment," quite on the Mrs. Nickleby order. And
indeed, if a Micawber had been wanting, Mary knew where to look for him.

About this time Mary met Ursa Major, who may have treated men very
rudely, but not your petite, animated and clever women.

Doctor Johnson quite liked little Mary Wollstonecraft. She matched her
wit against his and put him on his mettle, and when Mary once expressed
a desire to become an authoress he encouraged her by saying, "Yes, my
dear, you should write, for that is the way to learn; and no matter how
badly you write, you can always be encouraged by finding men who write
worse." And another time he said, "Women have quite as much interest in
life as men, and see things just as clearly, and why they should not
write the last word as well as speak it, I do not know."

That settled it with Mary: She gave up her part in the school; and very
soon after, the sisters gave up theirs; one of them wedding a
ne'er-do-well scion of nobility, and the other marrying an orthodox
curate with a harelip. Through the help of Doctor Johnson, Mary got a
position as proofreader with a publisher. Here her knowledge of French
was valuable, and she assisted in translations. Then she became literary
adviser and reader for different publishers. She was making money, and
had accumulated a little fortune of near a hundred pounds by the sweat
of her brain. Her close acquaintanceship with printers and publishers
thus placed her where she became acquainted with several statesmen who
had speeches to make, and for these she constructed arguments and also
helped them out of dire difficulties by rounding out their periods, and
by introducing flights of fancy for men whose fancies were wingless.

On her own account she had written various stories and essays. She had
met the wits and thinkers of London and had learned to take care of
herself. She was an honest, industrious, and highly intelligent woman,
and commanded the respect of those who knew her best. "To know her,"
says Godwin in his Memoirs, "was to love her, and those who did not love
her, did not know her."

Of course, she was an exceptional person, for have I not intimated that
she was a thinker? This was over a hundred years ago, and thinkers were
as scarce then as now, for even so-called educated folk, for the most
part, only think that they think. Frederic Harrison did not stray far
a-field when he referred to Charlotte Perkins Gilman as a reincarnation
of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Mary Wollstonecraft had translated Rousseau's "Emile" into English, and
had read Voltaire closely and with appreciation.

The momentous times of Seventeen Hundred Ninety-two were on in Paris.
That mob of women, ragged and draggled, had tramped out to Versailles,
and Marie Antoinette, a foolish girl who rattled around in a place that
should have been occupied by a Queen, had looked out of the window and
propounded her immortal question, "What do they want?"

"Bread!" was the answer.

"Why don't they eat cake?" asked Her Chatterbox.

Mary Wollstonecraft was a revolutionary by nature. Looking about her she
saw London seething with swarms of humanity just one day's rations
removed from starvation. A few miles away she saw acres upon
acres--thousands of acres--kept and guarded for private parks and
game-preserves. Then it was that she supplied Henry George that fine
phrase, "Man is a land animal." And she fully comprehended that the
question of human rights will never be ended until we settle the land
question. She said: "Man is a land animal, and to deprive the many of
the right to till the soil is like depriving fishes of the right to swim
in the sea. You force fish into a net, and they cease to thrive; you
entrap men, through economic necessity, in cities, and allow a few to
control the land, and you perpetuate ignorance and crime. And eventually
you breed a race of beings who take no joy in Nature, never having
gotten acquainted with her. The problem is not one of religion, but of
commonsense in economics. Back to the land!" Of course a writing woman
who could think like this was deeply interested in the unrest across the
Channel.

And so Mary packed up and went over to Paris, lured by three things: a
curiosity concerning the great social experiment being there worked out;
an ambition to perfect herself in the French language by speaking only
French; a writer's natural thirst for good copy.

In all these things the sojourn of Mary Wollstonecraft in Paris was an
eminent success, but tragedy was lurking and lying in wait for her. And
it came to her as it has come for women ever since time began--through
that awful handicap, her nature's crying need for affection.

       *       *       *       *       *

In Paris martial law reigned supreme; in the streets the death-tumbrel
rattled, and through a crack in the closed casement Mary Wollstonecraft
peered cautiously out and saw Louis the Sixteenth riding calmly to his
death. The fact that she was an Englishwoman brought Mary Wollstonecraft
under suspicion, for the English sympathized with royalty. When men with
bloody hands come to your door, and question you concerning your
business and motives, the mind is not ripe for literature!

The letters Mary Wollstonecraft had written for English journals she now
destroyed, since she could not mail them, and to keep them was to run
the risk of having them misinterpreted. The air was full of fear and
fever.

No one was allowed to leave the city unless positively necessary, and to
ask permission to go was to place one's self under surveillance.

It was at this time that Mary Wollstonecraft met Gilbert Imlay, an
American, who had fought with Lafayette and Washington. He was a man of
some means, alert, active and of good address. On account of his
relationship with Lafayette, he stood well with the revolutionaries of
Paris. He was stopping at the same hotel where Mary lodged, and very
naturally, speaking the same language, they became acquainted. She
allowed herself to be placed under his protection, and their simple
friendship soon ripened into a warmer feeling. Love is largely a matter
of propinquity.

It was a time when all formal rites were in abeyance; and in England any
marriage-contract made in France, and not sanctified by the clergy, was
not regarded as legal. Mary Wollstonecraft became Mrs. Mary Imlay, and
that she regarded herself as much the wife of Imlay as God and right
could command, there is no doubt.

In a few months the tempest and tumult subsided so they got away from
Paris to Havre, where Imlay was interested in a shipping-office. At
Havre their daughter Fanny was born.

Imlay had made investments in timber-lands in Norway, and was shipping
lumber to France. Some of these ventures turned out well, and Imlay
extended his investments on borrowed capital. The man was a nomad by
nature--generous, extravagant and kind--but he lacked the patience and
application required to succeed as a businessman. He could not wait--he
wanted quick returns.

The wife had insight and intellect, and could follow a reason to its
lair. Imlay skimmed the surface.

Leaving his wife and babe at Havre, he went across to London. Mary once
made a trip to Norway for him, with the power of attorney, to act as she
thought best in his interests. In Norway she found that much of the land
that Imlay had bought was worthless, being already stripped of its
timber. However, she improved the time by writing letters for London
papers, and these eventually found form in her book entitled, "Letters
From Norway."

Arriving at Havre she found that Imlay had dismantled their home, and
for a time she did not know his whereabouts. Later they met in London.

When the time of separation came, however, she was sufficiently
disillusioned to make the actual parting without pain. When Imlay saw
she would no longer consent to be his wife, he proposed to provide for
her, but she declined the offer, fearing it would give him some claim
upon her and upon their child. And so Gilbert Imlay sailed away to
America and out of the life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Exit Imlay.

[Illustration: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT]

       *       *       *       *       *

In London the position of Mary Wollstonecraft was most trying.

Penniless, deserted by Imlay, her husband, with a hungry babe at her
breast, she was looked at askance by most of her old acquaintances.
There were not wanting good folks who gathered their skirts about them,
sneezed as she passed, and said, "I told you so."

Her brother Charles--a degenerate, pettifogging barrister, with all his
father's faults and none of his grandfather's virtues--for whom Mary had
advanced money so that he could go to college, came to her in her dire
extremity and proffered help. But it was on condition that she should
give up her babe and allow him to place it in a foundlings' home. This
being done, the virtuous Charles would get Mary a position as weaver in
a woolen-mill, under an assumed name, and the past would be as if it
never had been. This in the face of the assertion of Pliny, who said,
eighteen hundred years before, that one of the things even God could not
do, was to obliterate the past; and of Omar's words, "Nor all your tears
shall blot a line of it."

The mental processes of Charles are shown in his suggestion of a
pleasant plan whereby Imlay could be lured back to England, arrested,
and with the assistance of a bumbailiff, marriage forced upon him. His
scheme was rejected by the obdurate Mary, who held that the very essence
of marriage was freedom.

The tragic humor of the action of Charles turns on his assumption that
his sister was "a fallen woman," and must be saved from disgrace. This
opinion was shared by various other shady respectables, who kept the
matter secret by lifting a soprano wail of woe from the housetops,
declaring that Mary had smirched their good names and those of their
friends by her outrageous conduct. These people also busied themselves
in spreading a report that Mary had gone into "French ways," it being
strongly held, then as now, by the rank and file of burly English
beef-eaters, male and female, that morality in France is an iridescent
dream--only that is not the exact expression they use.

Hope sank in the heart of the lone woman, and for a few weeks it
appeared that suicide was the only way out. As for parting with her
child, or with her brother Charles and his kin, Mary would stand by her
child. It is related that on one occasion her sister Everina came to
visit her, and Mary made bold to minister to her babe in the beautiful
maternal way sanctified by time, before bottle-babies became the vogue
and Nature was voted vulgar. The sight proved too much for Everina's
nerves, and she fainted, first loudly calling for the camphor.

The family din evidently caused Mary to go a step further than she
otherwise might, and she dropped the name Imlay and called herself plain
Mary Wollstonecraft, thus glorifying the disgrace. This increased
fortitude had come about by discovering that she could still work and
earn enough money to live on by proofreading and translations; and it
seemed that she had a head full of ideas. There in her lonely lodgings
at Blackfriars, in the third story back, she was writing "The Rights of
Woman." The book in places shows heat and haste, and its fault is not
that it leads people in the wrong direction, but that it leads them too
far in the right direction--that is, further than a sin-stained and
hypocritical world can follow.

When men deserve the ideal, it will be here. If mankind were honest and
unselfish, then every proposition held out by Mary Wollstonecraft would
hold true. Her book is a vindication, in one sense, of her own
position--for at the last, all literature is a confession. But Mary
Wollstonecraft's book is also a plea for faith in the Divinity that
shapes humanity and "leads us on amid the encircling gloom."

It is moreover a protest against the theological idea that woman is the
instrument of the Devil, who tempted man to his ruin. Very frank is the
entire expression, all written by a Tess of the D'Urbervilles, a pure
woman whom Fate had freed from the conventional, and who, wanting little
and having nothing to lose, not even a reputation, was placed in a
position where she could speak the truth.

Parts of the book seem trite enough to us at this day, since many of the
things advocated have come about, and we accept them as if they always
were. For instance, there is an argument in favor of women being
employed as schoolteachers; then there is the plea for public schools
and for co-education.

       *       *       *       *       *

William and Mary first met in February, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-six. In
this matter dates are authentic, for Godwin kept a diary for forty-eight
years, in which he set down his acts, gave the titles of books he read,
and named the distinguished people he met. This diary is nearly as
valuable as that of Samuel Pepys, save that unfortunately it does not
record the inconsequential and amplify the irrelevant, for it is the
seemingly trivial that pictures character. Godwin's diary forms a
continuous history of literary and artistic London.

William was not favorably impressed with Mary, the first time they met
each other. Tom Paine was present, and Godwin wanted to hear him talk
about America, and instead Mary insisted upon talking about Paris, and
Tom preferred to listen to her rather than to talk himself.

"The drawing-room was not big enough for this precious pair," says
Godwin, and passes on to minor themes, not realizing that destiny was
waiting for him around the corner.

The next time they met, William liked Mary better, for he did most of
the talking, and she listened. When we are pleased with ourselves we are
pleased with others. "She has wondrous eyes, and they welled with tears
as we conversed. She surely has suffered, for her soul is all alive,"
wrote Godwin.

The third time they met, she asked permission to quote from his book,
"Political Justice," in her own book, "The Rights of Woman," upon which
she was hard at work. They were getting quite well acquainted, and he
was so impressed with her personality that he ceased to mention her in
his diary.

Godwin's book had placed him upon the topmost turret of contemporary
literary fame. Since the publication of the work he was fairly
prosperous, although his temperament was of that gently procrastinating
and gracious kind that buys peace with a faith in men and things. Mary
had an eager, alert and enthusiastic way of approaching things that grew
on the easy-going Godwin. Her animation was contagious.

The bold stand Mary had taken on the subject of marriage; her frankness
and absolute honesty; her perfect willingness at all times to abide by
the consequences of her mistakes, all pleased Godwin beyond words.

He told Coleridge that she was the greatest woman in England, and
Coleridge looked her over with a philosopher's eye, and reported her
favorably to Southey. In a letter to Cottle, Robert Southey says: "Of
all the lions or literati I have seen here, Mary Imlay's countenance is
the best, infinitely the best; the only fault in it is an expression
somewhat similar to what the prints of Horne Tooke display--an
expression indicating superiority; not haughtiness, not sarcasm, in Mary
Imlay, but still it is unpleasant. Her eyes are light brown, and
although the lid of one of them is affected by a little paralysis, they
are the most meaning I ever saw. As for Godwin himself, he has large,
noble eyes, and a nose--oh, a most abominable nose! Language is not
vituperatious enough to describe the effect of its downward elongation."
In mentioning the matter of Godwin's nose, it is perhaps well to
remember that Southey merely gave a pretty good description of his own.

In August, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-six, Godwin borrowed fifty pounds
from Thomas Wedgwood, son of Josiah Wedgwood of Etruria, which money was
to tide Mary over a financial stress, and afford her the necessary
leisure to complete "The Rights of Woman." The experience that Mary
Wollstonecraft had in the publishing business, now enabled her to make
favorable arrangements for the issue of her book. The radicalism of
America and France had leavened England until there was quite a market
for progressive literature. Twenty years later, the work would have been
ignored in silence or censored out of existence, so zigzag is the path
of progress.

As it was, the work sold so that in six months from the time it was put
on sale, Mary had received upwards of two hundred pounds in royalties.
Recognition and success are hygienic. Mrs. Blood, an erstwhile friend,
saw Mary about this time, and wrote to an acquaintance: "I declare if
she isn't getting handsome and knows it. She has well turned thirty and
has a sprinkling of gray hair and a few wrinkles, but she is doing her
best to retrieve her youth."

Mary had now quit Blackfriars for better quarters near Hyde Park. Her
health was fully restored, and she moved in her own old circle of
writers and thinkers.

At this time William and Mary were both well out of the kindergarten. He
was forty and she was thirty-seven. Several years before, William had
issued a sort of proclamation to the public, and a warning to women of
the quest that bachelordom was his by choice, and that he was wedded to
philosophy. Very young people are given to this habit of declaration, "I
intend never to wed," and it seems that older heads are just as absurd
as young ones. It is well to refrain from mentioning what we intend to
do, or intend not to do, since we are all sailing under sealed orders
and nothing is so apt to occur as the unexpected.

Towards the last of the year Seventeen Hundred Ninety-six, William was
introducing Mary as his wife, and congratulations were in order. To
them, mutual love constituted marriage, and when love died, marriage was
at an end.

A sharp rebuke was printed about this time by Mary, evidently prompted
by that pestiferous class of law-breakers who do not recognize that the
opposites of things are alike, and that there is a difference between
those who rise above law and those who burst through it. Said Mary,
"Freedom without a sense of responsibility, is license, and license is
a ship at sea without rudder or sail." That the careless, mentally
slipshod, restless, and morally unsound should look upon her as one of
them caused Mary more pain than the criticisms of the unco guid. It was
this persistent pointing out by the crowd, as well as regard for the
unborn, that caused William and Mary to go quietly in the month of
March, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-seven, to Saint Pancras Church and be
married all according to the laws of England.

Godwin wrote of the mating thus: "The partiality we conceived for each
other was in that mode which I have always considered as the purest and
most refined quality of love. It grew with equal advances in the minds
of each. It would have been impossible for the most minute observer to
have said who was before and who was after. One sex did not take the
priority which long-established custom had awarded it, nor the other
overstep that delicacy which is so severely imposed. I am not conscious
that either part can assume to have been the principal agent in the
affair. When, in the course of things, the disclosure came, there was
nothing, in a manner, for either party to disclose to the other. There
was no period of throes and resolute explanation attendant on the tale.
It was friendship melting into love."

Mary was now happier than she had ever been before in her life. She
wrote to a friend: "My bark has at last glided out upon the smooth
waters. Married to a man whom I respect, revere and love, who
understands my highest flights of fancy, and with whom complete
companionship exists, my literary success assured, and the bugaboo of
poverty at last removed, you can imagine how serene is my happiness."
But this time of joy was to be short.

She died three months later, September Tenth, Seventeen Hundred
Ninety-seven, leaving behind her a baby girl eleven days old.

This girl, grown to womanhood, was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wife of
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and without whom the name of Shelley would be to
us unknown.

In writing of the mother who died in giving her birth, Mary Shelley
says: "Mary Wollstonecraft was one of those rare beings who appear once,
perhaps, in a generation, to gild humanity with a ray which no
difference of opinion nor chance of circumstance can cloud. Her genius
was undeniable. She had been bred in the hard school of adversity, and
having experienced the sorrows entailed on the poor and oppressed, an
earnest desire was kindled within her to diminish these sorrows.

"Her sound understanding, her intrepidity, her sensibility and eager
sympathy, stamped all her writings with force and truth, and endowed
them with a tender charm that enchants while it enlightens. Many years
have passed since that beating heart has been laid in the cold, still
grave, but no one who has ever seen her speaks of her without
enthusiastic love and veneration. Was there discord among friends or
relatives, she stood by the weaker party, and by her earnest appeals and
kindliness awoke latent affection, and healed all wounds. Open as day to
melting charity, with a heart brimming with generous affection, yearning
for sympathy, helpful, hopeful and self-reliant, such was Mary
Wollstonecraft." And here let us leave her.




DANTE AND BEATRICE


    What should be said of him can not be said;
    By too great splendor is his name attended;
    To blame is easier those who him offended,
    Than reach the faintest glory round him shed.
    This man descended to the doomed and dead
    For our instruction; then to God ascended;
    Heaven opened wide to him its portals splendid,
    Who from his country's, closed against him, fled.
    Ungrateful land! To its own prejudice
    Nurse of his fortunes; and this showeth well,
    That the most perfect, most of grief shall see.
    Among a thousand proofs let one suffice,
    That as his exile hath no parallel,
    Ne'er walked the earth a greater man than he.

                                    --_Longfellow_

[Illustration: DANTE]


It was George Bernard Shaw who placed in the pillory of letters what he
was pleased to call "The Disagreeable Girl."

And he has done the deed by a dry-plate, quick-shutter process in a way
that surely lays him liable for criminal libel in society's assize.

I say society's assize advisedly, because it is only in society that the
Disagreeable Girl plays a prominent part, assuming the center of the
stage. Society, in the society sense, is built on vacuity, its favors
being for those who reveal a fine capacity to waste and consume. Those
who would write their names high on society's honor-roll need not be
either useful or intelligent--they need only seem.

And this gives the Disagreeable Girl her opportunity. In the paper-box
factory she would have to make good; Cluett, Coon and Company ask for
results; the stage demands a modicum at least of intellect, in addition
to shape; but society asks for nothing but pretense, and the palm is
awarded to palaver.

But do not, if you please, imagine that the Disagreeable Girl does not
wield an influence.

That is the very point: her influence is so far-reaching that George
Bernard Shaw, giving cross-sections of life, in the form of dramas, can
not write a play and leave her out.

She is ubiquitous, omniscient and omnipresent--is the Disagreeable Girl.
She is a disappointment to her father, a humiliation to her mother, a
pest to brothers and sisters, and when she finally marries, she saps the
inspiration of her husband and often converts a proud and ambitious man
into a weak and cowardly cur.

Only in society does the Disagreeable Girl shine: everywhere else she is
an abject failure. The much-vaunted Gibson Girl is a kind of deluxe
edition of Shaw's Disagreeable Girl. The Gibson Girl lolls, loafs,
pouts, weeps, talks back, lies in wait, dreams, eats, drinks, sleeps and
yawns. She rides in a coach in a red jacket, plays golf in a secondary
sexual sweater, dawdles on a hotel veranda, and tum-tums on a piano, but
you never hear of her doing a useful thing or saying a wise one. She
reveals a beautiful capacity for avoiding all useful effort.

Gibson gilds the Disagreeable Girl. Shaw paints her as she is. In the
"Doll's House" Henrik Ibsen has given us Nora Hebler, a Disagreeable
Girl of mature age, who beyond a doubt first set George Bernard Shaw
a-thinking. Then looking about, Shaw saw her at every turn in every
stage of her moth-and-butterfly existence.

And the Disagreeable Girl being everywhere, Shaw, dealer in human
character, can not write a play and leave her out, any more than Turner
could paint a picture and leave man out, or Paul Veronese produce a
canvas and omit the dog.

The Disagreeable Girl is a female of the genus homo persuasion, built
around a digestive apparatus with marked marshmallow proclivities.

She is, moreover, pretty, pug-nosed, poetical, pert and pink; and at
first glance to the unwary, she shows signs of gentleness and
intelligence. Her age is anywhere from eighteen to twenty-eight. At
twenty-eight she begins to evolve into something else, and her capacity
for harm is largely curtailed, because by this time spirit has written
itself in her form and features, and the grossness and animality which
before were veiled are now becoming apparent. Habit writes itself on the
face, and the body is an automatic recording-machine.

To have a beautiful old age, you must live a beautiful youth, for we
ourselves are posterity and every man is his own ancestor. I am today
what I am because I was yesterday what I was.

The Disagreeable Girl is always pretty--at least she has been told she
is pretty, and she fully accepts the dictum. She has also been told she
is clever, and she thinks she is. The actual fact is she is only
"sassy."

The fine flaring-up of youth has set sex rampant, but she is not
"immoral," except in her mind. She has caution to the verge of
cowardice, and so she is "sans reproche." In public she pretends to be
dainty; but alone, or with those for whose good opinion she does not
care, she is gross, coarse and sensual in every feature of her life. She
eats too much, does not exercise enough, and considers it amusing to let
others wait upon her, and do for her the things she should do for
herself. Her room is a jumble of disorder, a fantasy of dirty clothes, a
sequinarium of unmentionables--that is, if the care of it is left to
herself. The one gleam of hope for her lies in the fact that out of
shame she will allow no visitor to enter the apartment if she can help
it. Concrete selfishness is her chief mark. She avoids responsibility;
sidesteps every duty that calls for honest effort; is secretive,
untruthful, indolent, evasive and dishonest.

"What are you eating?" asks Nora Hebler's husband as she enters the
room, not expecting to see him.

"Nothing," is the answer, and she hides the box of bonbons behind her,
and presently backs out of the room.

I think Mr. Hebler had no business to ask her what she was eating: no
man should ask any woman such a question--and really it was no
difference anyway. But Nora is always on the defensive, and fabricates
when it is necessary--and when it isn't, just through habit. She will
hide a letter written by her grandmother, as quickly and deftly as if it
were a missive from a guilty lover. The habit of her life is one of
suspicion; for, being inwardly guilty herself, she suspects everybody,
although it is quite likely that crime with her has never broken through
thought into deed. Nora rifles her husband's pockets, reads his
notebook, examines his letters, and when he goes on a trip she spends
the day checking up his desk, for her soul delights in duplicate keys.

At times she lets drop hints of knowledge concerning little nothings
that are none of hers, just to mystify folks. She does strange, annoying
things, simply to see what others will do.

In degree, Nora's husband fixed the vice of finesse in her nature, for
even a "good" woman accused parries by the use of trickery and wins her
point by the artistry of the bagnio. Women and men are never really far
apart anyway, and women are what men have made them.

We are all just getting rid of our shackles: listen closely anywhere,
even among honest and intellectual people, if such there be, and you can
detect the rattle of chains.

The Disagreeable Girl's mind and soul have not kept pace with her body.
Yesterday she was a slave, sold in Circassian mart, and freedom to her
is so new and strange that she does not know what to do with it.

The tragedy she works, according to George Bernard Shaw, is through the
fact that very often good men, blinded by the glamour of sex, imagine
they love the Disagreeable Girl, when what they love is their own ideal.

Nature is both a trickster and a humorist and sets the will of the
species beyond the discernment of the individual. The picador has to
blindfold his horse in order to get him into the bull-ring, and
likewise Dan Cupid exploits the myopic to a purpose.

For aught we know, the lovely Beatrice of Dante was only a Disagreeable
Girl clothed in a poet's fancy. Fortunate, indeed, was Dante that he
never knew her well enough to get undeceived, and so walked through life
in love with love, sensitive, saintly, sweetly sad and divinely happy in
his melancholy.

       *       *       *       *       *

There be simple folks and many, who think that the tragedy of love lies
in its being unrequited.

The fact is, the only genuinely unhappy love--the only tragedy--is when
love wears itself out.

Thus tragedy consists in having your illusions shattered.

The love-story of Dante lies in the realm of illusion and represents an
eternal type of affection. It is the love of a poet--a Pygmalion who
loves his own creation. It is the love that is lost, but the things we
lose or give away are the things we keep. That for which we clutch we
lose.

Love like that of Dante still exists everywhere, and will until the end
of time. One-sided loves are classic and know neither age nor place; and
to a degree--let the fact be stated softly and never hereafter be so
much as whispered--all good men and women have at some time loved
one-sidedly, the beloved being as unaware of the love as a star is of
the astronomer who discovers it.

This kind of love, carried on discreetly, is on every hand, warming into
life the divine germs of art, poetry and philosophy. Of it the world
seldom hears. It creates no scandal, never is mentioned in court
proceedings, nor is it featured by the newspapers. Indeed, the love of
Dante would have been written in water, were it not for the fact that
the poet took the world into his confidence, as all poets do--for
literature is only confession.

Many who have written of Dante, like Boccaccio and Rossetti, have shown
as rare a creative ability as some claim Dante revealed in creating his
Beatrice.

"Paint me with the moles on," said Lincoln to the portrait-man. I'll
show Dante with moles, wrinkles and the downward curve of the corners of
his mouth, duly recording the fact that the corners of his mouth did not
turn down always.

I think, somewhere, I have encouraged the idea of women marrying the
second time, and I have also given tangible reasons. Let me now say as
much for men.

The father of Dante married and raised a family of seven. On the death
of his wife he sought consolation for his sorrow in the love of a lass
by the name of Bella--her family-name is to us unknown. They were
married, and had one child, and this child was Dante.

Dante, at times, had a way of mourning over the fact that his father and
mother ever met, but the world has never especially sympathized in this
regret. Dante was born in the year Twelve Hundred Sixty-five, in the
city of Florence, which was then the artistic and intellectual capital
of the world.

Dante seemed to think that the best in his nature was derived from his
mother, who was a most gentle, sensitive and refined spirit. Such a
woman married to a man old enough to be her father is not likely to be
absurdly happy. This has been said before, but it will bear repeating.
Yet disappointment has its compensation, since it drives the mind on to
the ideal, and thus is a powerful stimulant for the imagination. Deprive
us of our heritage here, and we will conjure forth castles in Spain--you
can not place an injunction on that!

Dante was not born in a castle, nor yet in a house with portcullis and
battlements.

Time was when towers and battlements on buildings were something more
than mere architectural appendenda. They had a positive use. Towers and
courtyards were only for the nobility, and signified that the owner was
beyond the reach of law; he could lock himself in and fight off the
world, the flesh and the devil, if he wished.

Dante's father lived in a house that had neither tower nor court that
closed with iron gate. He was a lawyer, a hard-headed man who looked
after estates, collected rents and gave advice to aristocratic nobodies
for a consideration. He did not take snuff, for obvious reasons, but he
was becomingly stout, carried a gold-headed cane or staff with a tassel
on it, and struck this cane on the ground, coughing slightly, when about
to give advice, as most really great lawyers do.

When little Durante--or Dante, as we call him--was nine years old, his
father took him to a lawn fete held at the suburban home of Folco de
Portinari, one of the lawyer's rich clients.

Now Signor Portinari in social station was beyond Alighieri the lawyer,
and of course nobody for a moment suspected that the dark-skinned,
half-scared little boy, clutching his father's forefinger as they
walked, was going to write "The Divine Comedy." No one paid any
particular attention to the father and child, as they strolled beneath
the trees, rested on the benches, and were served chocolate and
cheese-straws by the servants.

But on this occasion the boy caught a passing glimpse of Beatrice
Portinari, the daughter of the host. The girl was just nine years old:
the boy must have been told this by his father as he pointed out the
fair one. The boy did not speak to her nor did she speak to him: this
was quite out of the question, for they were on a totally different
social plane.

Amid the dim lights of the flaming torches he saw her--just for an
instant! The whole surroundings were strangely unreal, but well
calculated to impress the youthful imagination, and out of it all the
boy carried with him this vision of loveliness.

In his "New Life"--what an appropriate title for a love-story!--Dante
tells of this first sight of the beloved somewhat thus: "Nine times
already since my birth had the heaven of light returned to the selfsame
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 so long as that, within her time the starry heaven had moved
toward the Eastern quarter one of the twelve parts of the degree; so
that she appeared to me at the beginning of her ninth year, and I saw
her almost at the end of my ninth year. Her dress on that day was of the
most noble color, a subdued and goodly crimson, girdled and adorned in
such sort as best suited her very tender age. At that moment, I say most
truly that the spirit of life, which has its dwelling in the secretest
chamber of my heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses
of my body shook therewith; and in trembling it said these words: Here
is a deity stronger than I who coming shall rule over me."

       *       *       *       *       *

Nine was a sacred number with Dante. He was nine years old when he first
saw his lady-love, and she too was nine, having not yet reached the age
of indiscretion.

Nine years were to elapse before he was to speak to her. It is quite
possible that he had caught glimpses of her in the interval, at church.

Churches have their uses as trysting-places for the unquenched spirit:
vows are repeated there that have no witnesses and do not go into the
register. There lovers meet in soul, and feed upon a glance, when heads
are bowed in prayer. Love lends a deep religious air to the being, and
when we are in love we love God. At other times we only fear Him.

I am told that there be young men and maidens fair who walk on air and
live in paradise until Sunday comes again, all on account of a loving
look into eyes that look love again, in the dim religious light while
the music plays soft and low.

    The lover watched his graceful maid
    As mid the virgin train she strayed,
    Nor knew her beauty's best attire
    Was woven still in the snow-white choir.

And where is the gray-bearded prophet who has yet been wise enough to
tell us where love ends and religion begins! But in all these nine years
Beatrice and Dante had never met. She had not heard his voice, nor he
hers--only glances, or a hand lifted in a way that spoke tomes. He had
developed into a dark, dashing youth, given to falconry, painting and
music. He had worked with Cimabue, the father of Italian art, and had
been chum of Giotto, to whom all cherubim and seraphim trace.

At that time people with money who wanted to educate their sons sent
them out, at what seems to us a very tender age, to travel and tramp the
earth alone. They were remittance-men who shifted from university to
university, and took lessons in depravity, being educated by the boys.

Dean Pluntre says that there were universities in the Middle Ages at
Padua, Bologna, Paris and Oxford carried on in a very desultory way by
pious monks, where the boys were divided by nationalities, so as to
afford a kind of police system--Italian, Spanish, French and English.

They caroused, occasionally fought, studied when they felt like it, and
made love to married women--all girls being under lock and key for
safe-keeping.

So there you get the evolution of the modern university: a mendicant
monastery where boys were sent, in the hope that they might absorb a
little of the religious spirit and a desire to know.

Finally, there were enough students so that they organized cliques,
clubs and secret societies, and by a process of natural selection
governed themselves, as well as visited punishment upon offenders.

Next, on account of a laxity of morals and an indifference to books, a
military system of discipline was enforced: lights had to be out at ten
o'clock, and a student caught off the grounds without leave was
punished. The teacher was a vicarious soldier. At that time each school
had a prison attached, of which the "carcer" at Heidelberg is the
surviving type. Up to the Sixteenth Century, every university was a kind
of castle or fort, and the students might at any time be compelled to do
military duty. The college had its towers for fighting-men, its high
walls, its fortressed fronts and iron gates. These gates and walls still
survive in rudimentary form, and the sixteen-foot spiked steel fence at
Harvard is the type of a condition that once was an actual necessity:
the place was a law unto itself, paid no taxes, and at any time might be
raided. Colleges yet pay no taxes and are also quasi-mendicant
institutions.

It was not until well into the Sixteenth Century that requirements,
examinations, system and discipline began to dawn upon the world. Before
that, a student was a kind of troubadour, a cross between a monk and a
crusader, a knight-errant of love and letters, and the moral code for
him did not apply. An argument can be made for his chivalric tendencies,
and his pretense for learning had its place, for affectation is better
than indifference. The roistering student is not wholly bad.

Poetry and love-making were to the velvet-breeched youth the real
business of life. Like knights in armor, he often wore the colors of a
lady who merely smiled at him from a latticed window. If she dropped for
him her glove or handkerchief, he was in the seventh heaven. As his
intents were not honorable nor his purpose marriage, it made no
difference whether the lady was married or single, young or old. Whether
the love remained upon a Platonic and purely poetic basis depended, of
course, entirely upon the lady and her watchful relatives. If the family
were poor and the lover rich, these things might have a bearing. We hear
of alliances in those days, not dishonorable, where the husband was
complacent and looked upon it as a distinction to have worthy scions of
greatness pay court to his wife. Such men were referred to as
"fribblers" or "tame-cats." The woman was often much older than the
alleged student, and this seems to have been no disadvantage, for charms
o'erripe are oft alluring to a certain type of youth.

Such things now would lead to headlines in the daily papers and
snapshots of all parties concerned, followed by divorce-court
proceedings. Then, even among honorable husbands, the only move was to
hire an extra Pinkerton duenna to attend the fair one, and to smile in
satisfaction over the possession of a wife so much coveted--the joy of
all ownership being largely the ability to excite envy.

College rowdyism, cane-rushes, duels, bloody Monday, the fag system and
hazings are all surviving traditions of these so-called universities
where people who had the price sent their sons into the pedagogic
bull-pen.

As, for centuries, youths who were destined for the priesthood were the
only ones educated, so the monks were the first teachers, and the
monastery was the college.

In the Twelfth Century a college was merely a monkery that took in
boarders, and learning was acquired by absorption.

No records were kept of the students--they simply paid a small fee, were
given a badge and attended lectures when they got ready.

Some students stayed and studied for years, thinking the business of
life was to cram with facts. Such bachelor grubbers with fixed incomes,
like pensioners in a soldiers' home, old and gray, are now to be seen
occasionally in European universities, sticklers for technicalities, hot
after declensions, and happy when they close in on a new exception to a
Greek verb, giving it no quarter. When they come to die, they leave
earth with but a single regret: they have never been able fully to
compass the ablative. But the rough-and-tumble student was the rule,
with nose deep into stein, exaggerating little things into great, making
woful ballad to his mistress' eyebrow.

Such was Milord Hamlet, to whom young Dante bears a strange
resemblance.

A university like this, where the students governed themselves, and the
duties of the faculty consisted largely in protecting the property, had
its advantages. We will come back to self-government yet, but higher up
in the scale. It was like a big country school, in a country town, where
lessons in self-reliance are handed out with the bark on. The survival
of the fittest prevails, and out of the mass emerges now and then a
strong man who makes his mark upon the times.

Dante was back home in Florence from his sojourn abroad, a bit of a
dandy no doubt, with a becoming dash and a touch of sophomoric boldness.
He had not forgotten Beatrice Portinari: often had he thought of her,
the princess of his dreams, and all the dames he had met had been
measured with her as a standard.

She had been married about a year before to a rich banker, Simone de
Bardi. This did not trouble Dante: she was too far removed from him to
be an actual reality, and so he just waived her husband and dismissed
him with a shrug. Beside that, young married women have a charm all
their own; they are wiser than maidens, more companionable; innocence is
not wholly commendable--at least, not to a university student.

And now face to face Dante and Beatrice meet. It is the first, the last,
the only time they are to meet on earth. They meet. She is walking with
two women friends, one on each side.

She is clothed in pure white--her friends in darker raiment. She looks
like an angel of light. Dante and Beatrice are not expected to
meet--there is no time for embarrassment. How did she know that young
Dante Alighieri had returned--she must have been dreaming of
him--thinking of him! There she stands right before him--tall, graceful,
intellectual, smiling. Eyes look into eyes and flash recognition. The
earth seems to swirl under Dante's feet. He uncovers his head and is
about to sink to his knees, but she sustains him with a word of welcome
and holds out the tips of her fingers for him to touch.

She is older now than he: she is married, and a married woman of
eighteen may surely reassure a boy who is only eighteen! "We have missed
you from the church and from our streets--you look well, Gentle Sir!
Welcome back to our Florence! Good evening!"

The three women move on: Dante tries to, but stands rooted like one of
those human trees he was afterward to see in Purgatory. He follows her
with his eyes, and just once she looks back and smiles as the three
women are lost in the throng.

But that chance, unexpected meeting, the salutation and the smile were
to write themselves into the "Vita Nuova." Dante had indeed begun a New
Life.

       *       *       *       *       *

The City of Florence at this time was prosperous. The churches had their
pagan holidays, fetes and festivals, and gaiety was the rule.

Out at Vallambrosa and Fiesole, where the leaves fall, there were Courts
of Love where poets chanted their lays and singers sang. In all this
life Dante took a prominent part, for while he was not of noble birth he
was of noble bearing.

There were rival political parties then in Florence, and instead of
settling their difficulties at the polls they had recourse to the
cobblestone and club.

When the Guelfs routed the Ghibellines from the city, Dante served as a
soldier, or was sworn in as a deputy sheriff, and did some valiant
fighting for the Guelfs, for which privilege he was to pay when the
Ghibellines came back.

Just what his every-day occupation was we are not sure, but as he was
admitted a member of the Guild of Apothecaries we assume that he clerked
in a drugstore, and often expressed himself thus: "Lady, I am all out of
liverwort today, but I have something just as good!"--and he read her a
few stanzas from the "Vita Nuova," which he had just written behind the
screen at the prescription-counter.

In the year Twelve Hundred Eighty-five, Charles of Anjou, brother of
Saint Louis, came to Florence, and Dante was appointed one of the
committee to look after his entertainment.

Charles was a man of intelligence and discrimination, a lover of letters
and art. He and Dante became fast friends, and it seems Dante became a
kind of honorary member of his court.

Dante could paint a little, he played on the harp, and he also recited
his own poems. His love of Beatrice de Bardi was an open secret--all
Florence knew of it. He had sung her beauty, her art, her intelligence
in a way that made both locally famous.

He had written a poem on the sixty chief belles of Florence, and in this
list he had not placed Beatrice first, but ninth. Just why he did this,
unless to emphasize his favorite number, we do not know. In any event it
made more talk than if he had placed her first.

And once at church where he had followed Beatrice, he made eyes openly
at another lady, to distract the attention of the observing public. The
plan worked so well that Beatrice, seeing the flirtation, shortly
afterward met Dante and cut him dead, or, to use his own phrase,
"withheld her salutation."

This caused the young man such bitter pain that he wrote a veiled poem,
explaining the actual facts. These facts were that out of his great love
for Beatrice, in order to protect her good name, he had openly made love
to another.

I said that the fact that Beatrice had declined to speak to Dante as
they passed by had caused him bitter pain. This is true; but after a few
days the matter took on a new light. If Beatrice was indifferent to
him, why should she be displeased when he had made eyes at another? She
evidently was jealous, and Dante was in a paradise of delight, or in
purgatory, or both, according to the way the wind sat.

There is no reason to suppose that Dante and Beatrice ever met and
talked things over. She was closely guarded, and evidently ran no risk
of smirching her good name by associating with a troubadour student. He
could sing songs about her--this she could not help--but beyond this
there was nothing doing.

Only once after this did they come near meeting. It was at a
wedding-party where Dante had gone evidently without an invitation. He
inwardly debated whether he should remain to the feast or not, and the
ayes had it. He was about to be seated at the table, when a sudden sense
of first heat and then cold came over him and he grasped his chair for
support. The light seemed blinding. He closed his eyes, and then opened
them; and looking up, on the opposite side of the room he saw his
Beatrice!

A friend seeing his agitation and thinking him ill, led him forth into
the open air and there chafed his icy fingers asking, "What can it
be--what is the matter?"

And Dante answered, "Of a surety I have set my feet on a point of life
beyond which he must not pass who would return!"

Immediately thereafter--probably the next day--Dante began a poem, very
carefully thought out, in celebration of the beauty and virtue of
Beatrice. He had written but one stanza when he tells us that, "The Lord
God of Justice called my most gracious Lady to Himself." And Beatrice
was dead, aged twenty-five years.

Through her death Dante was indeed wedded to her memory. He calls her
the bride of his soul.

       *       *       *       *       *

We can not resign from life gracefully. Work has to be performed, even
when calamity comes, and we stand by an open grave and ask old Job's
question, "If a man die shall he live again?"

Dante felt sure that Beatrice must live again in all her loveliness.
"Heaven had need of her," he cries in his grief. And then again, "She
belonged not here, and so God took her to Himself." At first he was dumb
with sorrow, and then tears came to his relief, and a little later he
eased his soul through expression: he indited an open letter, a kind of
poetic proclamation to the citizens of Florence, in which he rehearsed
their loss and offered them consolation in the thought that they now had
a guardian angel in Heaven.

The lover, like an artist or skilled workman, always exaggerates the
importance of his passion, and links his love with the universal welfare
of mankind.

And stay! after all he may be right--who knows! So a year passed away in
sadness, with a few bad turnings into sensuality, followed by repenting
in verse. It was the anniversary of her death, and Dante was outlining
angels to illustrate his sonnets wherein he apotheosized Beatrice. And
behold! as he day-dreamed of his Beatrice sweet consolation came in
double form. First he saw a gentle lady who looked very much like the
lady he lost. Lovers are always looking for resemblances--on the street,
in churches, at the theater or the concert, in travel--looking always,
ever looking for the face and form of the beloved. Strange resemblances
are observed--persons are followed--the gait, height, attire, carriage
of the head are noted, and hearts beat fast!

So Dante saw a lady who seemed to have the same dignity of carriage, a
like nobility of feature, a look as luminous and a glance as telling as
those of Beatrice. Evidently he paid court to her with so much success
that he turned from her and recriminated himself for having his passion
aroused by a counterfeit. She looked the part, but her feet were clay
and so were heart and head, and Dante turned again to his ideal,
Beatrice in Heaven.

And with the turning came the thought of Paradise! He would visit
Beatrice in Heaven, and she would meet him at the gates and guide the
way. The visit was to be one personally conducted.

Every great and beautiful thing was once an unuttered thought; and we
know the time and almost the place where Dante conceived the idea of
"The Divine Comedy."

The new Beatrice he had found was only a plaster-of-Paris cast of the
original: Dante's mind recoiled from her to the genuine--that is, to the
intangible--which proves that even commonplace women have their uses. At
this time, while he was revolving the nebulous "Commedia" in his mind,
he read Cicero's "Essay on Friendship," and dived deep into the
philosophy of Epictetus and Plato. Then he printed a card in big
letters and placed it on his table where he could see it continually:
"Philosophy is the cure for love!"

But it wasn't--except for a few days when he wrote some stanzas directed
to the world, declaring that his former poems referring to Beatrice
pictured her merely as "Philosophy, the beautiful woman, daughter of the
Great Emperor of the Universe." He declared that all of his odes to his
gentle lady were odes to Philosophy, to which all wise men turn for
consolation in time of trouble.

Nothing matters much--pish! It was the struggle of the poet and the
good man, trying to convince himself that he travels fastest who travels
alone.

Dante must have held the stern and placid pose of Plato, the confirmed
bachelor, for a full week, then tears came and melted his artificial
granite.

And as for Plato, the confirmed bachelor, legend has it that he was
confirmed by a woman.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the train of Boccaccio traveled a nephew of Dante who had his
illustrious uncle's interesting history at his tongue's end. By this
nephew we are told that the marriage of Dante and Gemma Donati, in
Twelve Hundred and Ninety-two, when Dante was twenty-seven, was a little
matter arranged by the friends of both parties. Dante was dreamy,
melancholy and unreliable: marriage would sober his poetic debauch and
cause him to settle down!

Ruskin, it will be remembered, was also looked after by the matchmakers
in much the same way.

So Dante was married. Some say that his wife was the gentle lady who
looked like Beatrice, but this is pure conjecture. Four children were
born to them in seven years. One of these was named Beatrice, which
seems to prove that the wife of Dante was aware of his great passion.
One of the sons became a college professor, and wrote a commentary on
"The Commedia," and also an unneeded defense of his father's character
and motives in making love to a married lady.

Dante was a man of influence in the affairs of the city. He occupied
civic offices of distinction, wrote addresses and occasionally poems, in
which he glorified his friends and referred scathingly to his political
adversaries.

Gemma must have been a woman of more than average brain and
intelligence, for when her husband was banished from Florence by the
successful Ghibellines, she kept her little family together, worked
hard, educated her children, and it is said by Boccaccio lived honorably
and indulged in no repining.

So far as we know, Dante sent no remittances home. He moved from one
university to another, and accepted invitations from nobility to tarry
at their castles. He dressed in melancholy black and read his poems to
polite assemblies. Now and then he gave lectures. He was followed by
spies, or thought he was, and now and then quarreled with his associates
or host, and made due note of the fact, leaving the matter to be
adjusted when he had time and wanted raw stock for his writings.

And all the time he mourned not for the loss of Gemma and his children,
but for Beatrice. She it was who met him and Vergil at the gates of
Paradise and guided them about the place, explaining its art, ethics and
economics, and pointing out the notables.

Dante placed in Paradise all those who had befriended him most and
praised his poems. People he did not like he deposited in Hell, for
Dante was human. That is what Hell is for--a place to put people who
disagree with us.

Milton was profoundly influenced by Dante, and in fact was very much
like him, save that, though he had the felicity to be legally married
three times, yet there is no sign of passionate love in his life. Henley
says that without Dante we should have had no Milton, and how much Dante
and Milton have influenced the popular conception of the Christian
religion, no man can say. Even as conservative a man as Archdeacon
Farrar, in one of his Clark lectures, said, "Our orthodox faith seems to
trace a genesis to the genius of Dante, with Saint Paul and Jesus as
secondary or contributing influences."

After five years' wandering, Dante was notified that he could return to
Florence on making due apology to the reigning powers and walking in the
procession of humble transgressors.

The letter he wrote in reply is still in existence. He scorned pardon,
since he had been guilty of no offense, and he would return with honor
or not at all.

This letter secured him a second indictment, wherein it was provided
that he should be burned alive if he set foot inside the republic.

This sentence was not revoked until Fourteen Hundred Ninety-four, and as
Dante had then been dead more than a hundred years, it was of small
avail on earth. The plan, however, of pardoning dead men was so that
their souls could be gotten out of Purgatory legally, the idea being
that man's law and justice were closely woven with the Law of God, and
that God punished offenses against the State, just as He would offenses
against the Church. Hence it was necessary for the State and Church to
quash their indictment before God could do the same.

People who think that governments and religious denominations are
divine institutions will see the consistency and necessity of Lorenzo de
Medici and Pope Alexander the Fourth combining and issuing a pardon in
Dante's favor one hundred seventy years after his death. He surely had
been in Purgatory long enough.

Dante died at Ravenna in Thirteen Hundred Twenty-one, aged fifty-six
years. It seems that he had gone there to see his daughter, Beatrice,
who was in a nunnery just outside the city walls. There his dust rests.

If it be true that much of modern Christianity traces to Dante, it is no
less true that he is the father of modern literature. He is the first
writer of worth to emerge out of that night of darkness called the
Middle Ages.

His language is tender and full of sweet, gentle imagery. He knew the
value of symbols, and his words often cast a purple shadow. His style is
pliable, flexible, fluid, and he shows rare skill in suggesting a thing
that it would be absurd to describe.

Dante was an artist in words, and in imagination a master. The history
of literature can never be written and the name of Dante left out. And
he, of all writers, both ancient and modern, most vividly portrays the
truth that without human love, there would be no such thing as poetry.




JOHN STUART MILL AND HARRIET TAYLOR


    To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and
    in part the author, of all that is best in my writings--the friend
    and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest
    incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward--I dedicate
    this volume. Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs
    as much to her as to me; but the work as it stands has had, in a
    very insufficient degree, the inestimable advantage of her revision;
    some of the most important portions having been reserved for a more
    careful examination, which they are now destined never to receive.
    Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one-half the great
    thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should
    be the medium of a greater benefit to it, than is ever likely to
    arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted by
    her all but unrivaled wisdom.

                        --_Dedication to "On Liberty," by John Stuart Mill_

[Illustration: JOHN STUART MILL]


So this then is the love-story of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor,
who first met in the year Eighteen Hundred Thirty. He was twenty-five
and a clerk in the East India House. She was twenty-three, and happily
married to a man with a double chin.

They saw each other for the first time at Mrs. Taylor's house at a
function given in honor of a Right Honorable Nobody from Essex. The
Right Honorable has gone down into the dust of forgetfulness, his very
name lost to us, like unto that of the man who fired the Alexandrian
Library.

All we know is that he served as a pivotal point in the lives of two
great people, and then passed on, unwittingly, into the obscurity from
whence he came.

On this occasion the Right Honorable read an original paper on an
Important Subject. Mrs. Taylor often gave receptions to eminent and
learned personages, because her heart was a-hungered to know and to
become, and she vainly thought that the society of learned people would
satisfy her soul.

She was young. She was also impulsive, vivacious, ambitious. John Stuart
Mill says she was rarely beautiful, but she wasn't. Beauty is in the eye
of the beholder. All things are comparative, and John Stuart Mill
regarded Mrs. Taylor from the first night he saw her as the standard of
feminine perfection. All women scaled down as they varied from her. As
an actual fact, her features were rather plain, mouth and nose large,
cheek-bones in evidence, and one eye was much more open than the other,
and this gave people who did not especially like her, excuse for saying
that her eyes were not mates. As for John Stuart Mill he used, at times,
to refer to the wide-open orb as her "critical eye."

Yet these eyes were lustrous, direct and honest, and tokened the rare
quality of mental concentration. Her head was square and long, and had
corners. She carried the crown of her head high, and her chin in.

We need not dally with old Mr. Taylor here--for us he was only Mrs.
Taylor's husband, a kind of useful marital appendendum. He was a
merchant on 'Change, with interests in argosies that plied to
Tripoli--successful, busy, absorbed, with a twinge of gout, and a habit
of taking naps after dinner with a newspaper over his face. Moreover, he
was an Oxford man, and this was his chief recommendation to the
eighteen-year-old girl, when she married him four years before. But
education to him was now only a reminiscence. He had sloughed the old
Greek spirit as a bird molts its feathers, with this difference: that a
bird molts its feathers because it is growing a better crop, while Mr.
Taylor wasn't growing anything but a lust after "L. s. d."

Once in two years there was an excursion to Oxford to attend a reunion
of a Greek-letter society, and perhaps twice in the winter certain
ancient cronies came, drank musty ale, and smoked long clay pipes, and
sang college songs in cracked falsetto.

Mrs. Taylor was ashamed of them--disappointed. Was this the college
spirit of which she had read so much? The old cronies leered at her as
she came in to light the candles--they leered at her; and the one seated
next to her husband poked that fortunate gentleman in the ribs and
congratulated him on his matrimonial estate.

Yet Mr. and Mrs. Taylor were happy, or reasonably so. He took much pride
in her intellect, indulged her in all material things she wanted, and
never thwarted her little ambitions to give functions to great men who
came up from the provinces.

She organized a Literary Coterie, to meet every Saturday and study Mary
Wollstonecraft's book on the "Rights of Woman."

Occasionally, she sat in the visitors' gallery at Parliament, but always
behind the screen. And constantly she wrote out her thoughts on the
themes of the time. Her husband never regarded these things as proof
that she was inwardly miserable, unsatisfied, and in spirit was roaming
the universe seeking a panacea for soul-nostalgia; not he! Nor she.

And so she gave the function to the Right Honorable Nobody from Essex.
And among thirty or forty other people was one John Stuart Mill, son of
the eminent James Mill, historian and philosopher, also Head Examiner of
the East India House. Mr. and Mrs. Taylor had made out the list of
people between them, choosing those whom they thought had sufficient
phosphorus so they would enjoy meeting a great theological meteoric
personality from Essex.

Mr. Taylor had seen young Mr. Mill in the East India House, where young
Mr. Mill made out invoices with big seals on them. Mr. Taylor had said
to Mr. Mill that it was a fine day, to which proposition Mr. Mill
agreed.

The Honorable James Mill was invited, too, but could not come, as he was
President of the Land Tenure League, and a meeting was on for the same
night.

Mr. Taylor introduced to the company the eminent visitor from
Essex--they had been chums together at Oxford--and then Mr. Taylor
withdrew into a quiet corner and enjoyed a nap as the manuscript was
being read in sonorous orotund.

The subject was, "The Proper Sphere of Woman in the Social Cosmogony."
By chance Mrs. Taylor and John Stuart Mill sat next to each other.

The speaker moved with stately tread through his firstly to his
seventhly, and then proceeded to sum up. The argument was that of Saint
Paul amplified, "Let woman learn in subjection"--"For the husband is the
head of the wife, as Christ is also the head of the Church"--"God made
woman for a helpmeet to man," etc.

Mrs. Taylor looked at young Mr. Mill, and Mr. Mill looked at Mrs.
Taylor. They were both thinking hard, and without a word spoken they
agreed with each other on this, that the speaker had no message.

Young Mr. Mill noted that one of Mrs. Taylor's eyes was much wider open
than the other, and that her head had corners. She seemed much beyond
him in years and experience, although actually she was two years
younger--a fact he did not then know.

"Does not a woman need a helpmeet, too?" she wrote on the fly-leaf of a
book she held in her lap. And young Mr. Mill took the book and wrote
beneath in a copper-plate East India hand, "I do not know what a woman
needs; but I think the speaker needs a helpmeet."

And then Mrs. Taylor wrote: "All help must be mutual. No man can help a
woman unless she helps him--the benefit of help lies as much in the
giving as in the receiving."

After the function Mrs. Taylor asked Mr. Mill to call. It is quite
likely that on this occasion she asked a good many of the other guests
to call.

Mr. Mill called the next evening.

       *       *       *       *       *

John Stuart Mill was not a university man. He was an intellectual
cosset, and educated in a way that made the English pedagogues stand
aghast. So, probably thousands of parents said, "Go to! we will educate
our own children," and went at their boys in the same way that James
Mill treated his son, but the world has produced only one John Stuart
Mill.

Axtell, the trotter, in his day held both the two-year-old and the
three-year-old record. He was driven in harness from the time he was
weaned, and was given work that would have cocked most ankles and sent
old horses over on their knees. But Axtell stood the test and grew
strong.

Certain horsemen, seeing the success of Axtell, tried his driver's plan,
and one millionaire I know ruined a thousand colts and never produced a
single racehorse by following the plan upon which Axtell thrived.

The father of John Stuart Mill would now be considered one of England's
great thinkers, had he not been so unfortunate as to be thrown
completely into the shadow by his son. As it is, James Mill lives in
history as the man who insisted that his baby three years old should be
taught the Greek alphabet. When five years old, this baby spoke with an
Attic accent, and corrected his elders who dropped the aspirate. With
unconscious irony John Stuart Mill wrote in his "Autobiography," "I
learned no Latin until my eighth year, at which time, however, I was
familiar with 'AEsop's Fables,' most of the 'Anabasis,' the 'Memorabilia'
of Xenophon, and the 'Lives of the Philosophers' by Diogenes Laertius,
part of Lucian, and the 'Ad Demonicum' and 'Ad Nicoclem' of Isocrates."
Besides these he had also read all of Plato, Plutarch, Gibbon, Hume and
Rollin, and was formulating in his mind a philosophy of history.

Whether these things "educated" the boy or not will always remain an
unsettled question for debating-societies.

But that he learned and grew through constant association with his
father there is no doubt. Wherever the father went, the boy trotted
along, a pad in one hand and a pencil in the other, always making notes,
always asking questions, and always answering propositions.

The long out-of-door walks doubtless saved him from death. He never had
a childhood, and if he ever had a mother, the books are silent
concerning her. He must have been an incubator baby, or else been found
under a cabbage-leaf. James Mill treated his wife as if her office and
opinions were too insignificant to consider seriously--she was only an
unimportant incident in his life. James Mill was the typical beef-eating
Englishman described by Taine.

According to Doctor Bain's most interesting little book on John Stuart
Mill, the youth at nine was appointed to supervise the education of the
rest of the family, "a position more pleasing to his vanity than
helpful to his manners." That he was a beautiful prig at this time goes
without saying.

The scaffolding of learning he mistook for the edifice, a fallacy
borrowed from his father. At the age of fourteen he knew as much as his
father, and acknowledged it. He was then sent to France to study the
science of government under Sir Samuel Bentham.

His father's intent was that he should study law, and in his own mind
was the strong conviction that he was set apart, and that his life was
sacred to the service of humanity. A year at the study of law, and a
more or less intimate association with barristers, relieved him of the
hallucination that a lawyer's life is consecrated to justice and the
rights of man--quips, quirks and quillets were not to his taste.

James Mill held the office of Chief Examiner in the East India House, at
a salary equal to seven thousand five hundred dollars a year. The gifted
son was now nineteen, and at work as a junior clerk under his father at
twenty pounds a year. Before the year was up he was promoted, and when
he was twenty-one his salary was one hundred pounds a year.

There are people who will say, "Of course his father pushed him along."
But the fact that after his father's death he was promoted by the
Directors to Head of the Office disposes of all suspicion of favoritism.
The management of the East India Company was really a matter of
statesmanship, and the direct, methodical and practical mind of Mill
fitted him for the place.

Thomas Carlyle, writing to his wife in Scotland in the year Eighteen
Hundred Thirty-one, said: "This young Mill, I fancy and hope, is a being
one can love. A slender, rather tallish and elegant youth, with
Roman-nosed face, earnestly smiling blue eyes, modest, remarkably
gifted, great precision of utterance, calm--a distinctly able and
amiable youth."

So now behold him at twenty-five, a student and scholarly recluse,
delving all day in accounts and dispatches, grubbing in books at night,
and walking an hour before sunrise in the park every morning. It was
about then that he accepted the invitation of Mrs. Taylor to call.

I do not find that James Mill ever disputed the proposition that women
have souls: he evidently considered the matter quite beyond
argument--they hadn't. His son, at this time, was of a like opinion.

John Stuart Mill had not gone into society, and women to him were simply
undeveloped men, to be treated kindly and indulgently. As mental
companions, the idea was unthinkable. And love was entirely out of his
orbit--all of his energies had been worked up into great thoughts.
Doctor Bain says that at twenty-five John Stuart Mill was as ignorant of
sex as a girl of ten.

He called on Mrs. Taylor because she had pleased him when she said, "The
person who helps another gets as much out of the transaction as the one
who is helped." This was a thought worth while. Perhaps Mrs. Taylor had
borrowed the idea. But anyway it was something to repeat it. He revolved
it over in his mind all day, off and on. "To help another is to help
yourself. A helpmeet must grow by the exercise of being useful.
Therefore, a woman grows as her husband grows--she can not stand if she
puts forth intelligent effort. All help is mutual."

"One eye was wider than the other--her head had corners--she carried her
chin in!"

John Stuart Mill wished the day would not drag so; after supper he would
go and call on Mrs. Taylor, and ask her to explain what she meant by all
help being mutual--it was a trifle paradoxical!

The Taylors were just finishing tea when young Mr. Mill called. They
were surprised and delighted to see him. He was a bit abashed, and could
not quite remember what it was he wanted to ask Mrs. Taylor, but he
finally got around to something else just as good. Mrs. Taylor had
written an article on the "Subjugation of Women"--would Mr. Mill take it
home with him and read it, or would he like to hear her read a little of
it now?

Mr. Mill's fine face revealed his delight at the prospect of being read
to. So Mrs. Taylor read a little aloud to Mr. Mill, while Mr. Taylor
took a much-needed nap in the corner.

In a few days Mr. Mill called to return Mrs. Taylor's manuscript and
leave a little essay he himself had written on a similar theme. Mr.
Taylor was greatly pleased at this fine friendship that had sprung up
between his gifted wife and young Mr. Mill--Mrs. Taylor was so much
improved in health, so much more buoyant! Thursday night soon became
sacred at the Taylors' to Mr. Mill, and Sunday he always took dinner
with them.

Goldwin Smith, a trifle grumpy, with a fine forgetfulness as to the
saltness of time, says that young Mr. Mill had been kept such a recluse
that when he met Mrs. Taylor he considered that he was the first man to
discover the potency of sex, and that he thought his experience was
unique in the history of mankind.

Perhaps love does make a fool of a man--I really can not say. If so,
then John Stuart Mill never recovered his sanity. Suppose we let John
speak for himself--I quote from his "Autobiography":

    It was at the period of my mental progress which I have now reached
    that I formed the friendship which has been the honor and chief
    blessing of my existence, as well as the source of a great part of
    all that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for
    human improvement.

    My first introduction to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty
    years, consented to become my wife, was in Eighteen Hundred Thirty,
    when I was in my twenty-fifth and she in her twenty-third year.

            *       *       *       *       *

    I very soon felt her to be the most admirable person I had ever
    known.

    It is not to be supposed that she was, or that any one, at the age
    at which I first saw her, could be, all that she became afterwards.
    Least of all could this be true of her, with whom self-improvement,
    progress in the highest and in all senses, was a law of her nature;
    a necessity equally from the ardor with which she sought it, and
    from the spontaneous tendency of faculties which could not receive
    an impression or an experience without making it the source or
    occasion of an accession of wisdom.

            *       *       *       *       *

    In her, complete emancipation from every kind of superstition
    (including that which attributes a pretended perfection to the order
    of Nature and the universe) and an earnest protest against many
    things which are still part of the established constitution of
    society, resulted not from the intellect, but from strength, a noble
    and elevated feeling, and co-existent with a highly reverential
    nature. In general spiritual characteristics, as well as in
    temperament and organization, I have often compared her, as she was
    at that time, to Shelley: but in thought and intellect, Shelley, so
    far as his powers were developed in his short life, was but a child
    compared with what she ultimately became.

    Alike in the highest regions of speculation and in the smaller
    practical concerns of daily life, her mind was the same perfect
    instrument, piercing to the heart and marrow of the matter, always
    seizing the essential idea or principle.

    The same exactness and rapidity of operation, pervading as it did
    her sensitive as well as her mental qualities, would, with her gifts
    of feeling and imagination, have fitted her for a consummate
    artist, as her fiery and tender soul and her vigorous eloquence
    would certainly have made her a great orator. And her profound
    knowledge of human nature, and discernment and sagacity in practical
    life, would, in the times when such a career was open to women, have
    made her eminent among the rulers of mankind.

    Her intellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character at once
    the noblest and the best balanced which I have ever met with in my
    life. Her unselfishness was not that of a taught system of duties,
    but of a heart which thoroughly identified itself with the feelings
    of others, and often went to excess in consideration for them by
    imaginatively investing their feelings with the intensity of her
    own.

    The passion of justice might have been thought to be her strongest
    feeling, but for her boundless generosity, and a lovingness ever
    ready to pour itself forth upon any or all human beings who were
    capable of giving the smallest feelings in return. The rest of her
    moral characteristics were such as naturally accompany these
    qualities of mind and heart: the most genuine modesty combined with
    the loftiest pride; a simplicity and sincerity which were absolute
    towards all who were fit to receive them; the utmost scorn for
    whatever was mean and cowardly, and a burning indignation at
    everything brutal or tyrannical, faithless or dishonorable in
    conduct and character, while making the broadest distinction between
    "mala in se" and mere "mala prohibita"--between acts giving evidence
    of intrinsic badness in feeling and character, and those which are
    only violations of conventions either good or bad, violations which
    whether in themselves right or wrong are capable of being committed
    by persons in every other respect lovable and admirable.

    To be admitted into any degree of mental intercourse with a being of
    these qualities could not but have a most beneficial influence on my
    development; though the effect was only gradual, and several years
    elapsed before her mental progress and mine went forward in the
    complete companionship they at last attained. The benefit I received
    was far greater than any which I could hope to give; though to her,
    who had at first reached her opinions by the moral intuition of a
    character of strong feeling, there was doubtless help as well as
    encouragement to be derived from one who had arrived at many of the
    same results by study and reasoning: and in the rapidity of her
    intellectual growth, her mental activity, which converted everything
    into knowledge, doubtless drew from me, as it did from other
    sources, many of its materials. What I owe, even intellectually, to
    her is, in its detail, almost infinite; of its general character a
    few words will give some, though a very imperfect, idea.

    With those who, like the best and wisest of mankind, are
    dissatisfied with human life as it is, and whose feelings are wholly
    identified with its radical amendment, there are two main regions of
    thought. One is the region of ultimate aims--the constituent
    elements of the highest realizable ideal of human life.

    The other is that of the immediately useful and practically
    attainable. In both these departments, I have acquired more from her
    teaching than from all other sources taken together. And, to say
    truth, it is in these two extremes principally, that real certainty
    lies. My own strength lay wholly in the uncertain and slippery
    intermediate region, that of theory, or moral and political science;
    respecting the conclusions of which, in any of the forms in which I
    have received or originated them, whether as political economy,
    analytic psychology, logic, philosophy or history, or anything else,
    it is not the least of my intellectual obligations to her that I
    have derived from her a wise skepticism, which, while it has not
    hindered me from following out the honest exercise of my thinking
    faculties to whatever conclusions might result from it, has put me
    on my guard against holding or announcing these conclusions with a
    degree of confidence which the nature of such speculations does not
    warrant, and has kept my mind not only open to admit, but prompt to
    welcome and eager to seek, even on the questions on which I have
    most meditated, any prospect of clearer perceptions and better
    evidence. I have often received praise, which in my own right I only
    partially deserve, for the greater practicality that is supposed to
    be found in my writings, compared with those of most thinkers who
    have been equally addicted to large generalizations. The writings in
    which this quality has been observed, were not the work of one mind,
    but of the fusion of two: one as eminently practical in its
    judgments and perceptions of things present, as it was high and bold
    in its anticipations for futurity.

       *       *       *       *       *

The social functions at the Taylor home now became less frequent, and
finally ceased. Women looked upon the friendship of John Stuart Mill and
Mrs. Taylor with some resentment and a slight tinge of jealousy. Men
lifted an eyebrow and called it "equivocal"--to use the phrase of
Clement Shorter.

"The plan of having a husband and also a lover is not entirely without
precedent," said Disraeli in mock apology, and took snuff solemnly.
Meantime manuscripts were traveling back and forth between the East
India House and the Taylors'.

John Stuart Mill was contributing essays to the magazines that made the
thinkers think. He took a position opposed to his father, and maintained
the vast importance of the sentiments and feelings in making up the sum
of human lives. When Mill was mentioned, people asked which one.

The Carlyles, who at first were very proud of the acquaintanceship of
Mill, dropped him. Then he dropped them. Years after, the genial Tammas,
writing to his brother John, confirmed his opinion of Mill, "after Mill
took up with that Taylor woman." Says Tammas: "You have lost nothing by
missing the 'Autobiography' of Mill. I never read a more uninteresting
book, nor should I say a sillier."

James Mill protested vehemently against his son visiting at the
Taylors', and even threatened the young man with the loss of his
position, but John Stuart made no answer. The days John did not see
Harriet he wrote her a letter and she wrote him one.

To protect himself in his position, John now ceased to do any literary
work or to write any personal letters at the office. While there he
attended to business and nothing else. In the early morning he wrote or
walked. Evenings he devoted to Mrs. Taylor; either writing to her or for
her, or else seeing her. On Saturday afternoons they would usually go
botanizing, for botany is purely a lovers' invention.

Old acquaintances who wanted to see Mill had to go to the East India
House, and there they got just five minutes of his dignified presence.
Doctor Bain complains, "I could no longer get him to walk with me in the
park--he had reduced life to a system, and the old friends were shelved
and pigeonholed."

When Mill was thirty his salary was raised to five hundred pounds a
year. His father died the same year, and his brothers and sisters
discarded him. His literary fame had grown, and he was editor of the
London "Review." The pedantry of youth had disappeared--practical
business had sobered him, and love had relieved him of his idolatry for
books. Heart now meant more to him than art. His plea was for liberty,
national and individual. The modesty, gentleness and dignity of the man
made his presence felt wherever he went. A contemporary said: "His
features were refined and regular--the nose straight and finely shaped,
his lips thin and compressed--the face and body seemed to represent the
inflexibility of the inner man. His whole aspect was one of high and
noble achievement--invincible purpose, iron will, unflinching
self-oblivion--a world's umpire!"

Mill felt that life was such a precious heritage that we should be
jealous of every moment, so he shut himself in from every disturbing
feature. All that he wrote he submitted to Mrs. Taylor--she corrected,
amended, revised. She read for him, and spent long hours at the British
Museum in research work, while he did the business of the East India
Company.

When his "Logic" was published, in Eighteen Hundred Forty, he had known
Mrs. Taylor nine years. That she had a considerable hand in this
comprehensive work there is no doubt. The book placed Mill upon the very
pinnacle of fame. John Morley declared him "England's foremost thinker,"
a title to which Gladstone added the weight of his endorsement, a thing
we would hardly expect from an ardent churchman, since Mill was always
an avowed freethinker, and once declared in Gladstone's presence, "I am
one of the few men in England who have not abandoned their religious
beliefs, because I never had any."

Justin McCarthy says in his reminiscences: "A wiser and more virtuous
man than Mill I never knew nor expect to know; and yet I have had the
good fortune to know many wise and virtuous men. I never knew any man
of really great intellect, who carried less of the ways of ordinary
greatness about him. There was an added charm to the very shyness of his
manner when one remembers how fearless he was, if the occasion called
for fortitude or courage."

After the publication of the "Logic," Mill was too big a man for the
public to lose sight of.

He went his simple way, but to escape being pointed out, he kept from
all crowds, and public functions were to him tabu.

When Mrs. Taylor gave birth to a baby girl, an obscure London newspaper
printed, "A Malthusian Warning to the East India Company," which no
doubt reflected a certain phase of public interest, but Mill continued
his serene way undisturbed.

To this baby girl, Helen Taylor, Mill was always most devotedly
attached. As she grew into childhood he taught her botany, and people
who wanted a glimpse of Mill were advised to "look for him with a
flaxen-haired little sprite of a girl any Saturday afternoon on Hampton
Heath."

Mr. Taylor died in July, Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine, and in April,
Eighteen Hundred Fifty-one, Mrs. Taylor and Mill were quietly married.
The announcement of the marriage sent a spasm over literary England, and
set the garrulous tongues a-wagging.

George Mill, a brother of John Stuart, with unconscious humor placed
himself on record thus, "Mrs. Taylor was never to anybody else what she
was to John." Bishop Spalding once wrote out this strange, solemn,
emasculate proposition, "Mill's 'Autobiography' contains proof that a
soul, with an infinite craving for God, not finding Him, will worship
anything--a woman, a memory!"

This almost makes one think that the good Bishop was paraphrasing and
reversing Voltaire's remark, "When a woman no longer finds herself
acceptable to man she turns to God."

What the world thought of Mill's wife is not vital--what he thought of
her, certainly was. I quote from the "Autobiography," which Edward
Everett Hale calls "two lives in one--written by one of them":

    Between the time of which I have now spoken, and the present, took
    place the most important events of my life.

    The first of these was my marriage to the lady whose incomparable
    worth had made her friendship the greatest source to me both of
    happiness and of improvement. For seven and a half years that
    blessing was mine; for seven and a half only! I can say nothing
    which could describe, even in the faintest manner, what that loss
    was, and is. But because I know that she would have wished it, I
    endeavor to make the best of what life I have left, and to work on
    for her purposes with such diminished strength as can be derived
    from the thoughts of her, and communion with her memory.

    When two persons have thoughts and speculations completely in
    common; when all subjects of intellectual and moral interests are
    discussed between them in daily life, and probed to much greater
    depths than are usually or conveniently sounded in writings intended
    for general readers; when they set out from the same principles, and
    arrive at their conclusions by processes pursued jointly, it is of
    little consequence, in respect to the question of originality, which
    of them holds the pen; the one who contributes the least to the
    composition may contribute most of the thought; the writings which
    result are the joint product of both, and it must often be
    impossible to disentangle their respective parts, and affirm that
    this belongs to one and that to the other. In this wide sense, not
    only during the years of our married life, but during many of the
    years of confidential friendship which preceded, all my published
    writings were as much her work as mine, her share in them constantly
    increasing as years advanced. But in certain cases, what belongs to
    her can be distinguished and specially identified. Over and above
    the general influence which her mind had over mine, the most
    valuable ideas and features in these joint productions (those which
    have been most fruitful of important results, and which have
    contributed most to the success and reputation of the works
    themselves) originated with her, were emanations from her mind, my
    part of them being no greater than in any of the thoughts which I
    found in previous writings, and made my own only by incorporating
    them with my own system of Thought. During the greater part of my
    literary life I have performed the office in relation to her, which
    from a rather early period I had considered as the most useful part
    that I was qualified to take in the domain of thought: that of an
    interpreter of original thinkers, and mediator between them and the
    public.

            *       *       *       *       *

    Thus prepared, it will easily be believed that when I came into
    close intellectual communion with a person of the most eminent
    faculties, whose genius, as it grew and unfolded itself in thought,
    continually struck out truths far in advance of me, but in which I
    could not, as I had done in those others, detect any mixture of
    error, the greatest part of my mental growth consisted in the
    assimilation of those truths, and the most valuable part of my
    intellectual work was in building the bridges and clearing the paths
    which connected them with my general system of thought.

    The steps in my mental growth for which I was indebted to her were
    far from being those which a person wholly uninformed on the subject
    would probably suspect. It might be supposed, for instance, that my
    strong convictions on the complete equality in all legal, political
    social and domestic relations, which ought to exist between men and
    women, may have been adopted or learned from her. This was so far
    from being the fact that those convictions were among the earliest
    results of the application of my mind to political subjects, and the
    strength with which I held them was, as I believe, more than
    anything else, the originating cause of the interest she felt in me.
    What is true is, that, until I knew her, the opinion was in my mind,
    little more than an abstract principle. I saw no more reason why
    women should be held in legal subjection to other people, than why
    men should. I was certain that their interests required fully as
    much protection as those of men, and were quite as little likely to
    obtain it without an equal voice in making the laws by which they
    were to be bound. But that perception of the vast practical bearings
    of women's disabilities which found expression in the book on the
    "Subjection of Women" was acquired mainly through her teaching. But
    for her rare knowledge of human nature and comprehension of moral
    and social influences, though I doubtless should have held my
    present opinions, I should surely have had a very insufficient
    perception of the mode in which the consequences of the inferior
    position of women intertwine themselves with all the evils of
    existing society and with all the difficulties of human improvement.
    I am indeed painfully conscious of how much of her best thoughts on
    the subject I have failed to reproduce, and how greatly that little
    treatise falls short of what would have been if she had put on paper
    her entire mind on the question, or had lived to devise and improve,
    as she certainly would have done, my imperfect statement of the
    case.

    The first of my books in which her share was conspicuous was the
    "Principles of Political Economy." The "System of Logic" owed little
    to her except in the minute matters of composition, in which respect
    my writings both great and small have largely benefited by her
    accurate and clear-sighted criticism. The chapter of the "Political
    Economy" which has had a greater influence on opinion than all the
    rest, that on "The Probable Future of the Laboring Classes," is
    entirely due to her: in the first draft of the book, that chapter
    did not exist.

    She pointed out the need of a chapter, and the extreme imperfection
    of the book without it: she was the cause of my writing it; and the
    more general part of the chapter--the statement and discussion of
    the two opposite theories respecting the proper condition of the
    laboring classes--was wholly an exposition of her thoughts, often in
    words taken from her own lips.

    The purely scientific part of the "Political Economy" I did not
    learn from her; but it was chiefly her influence that gave to the
    book that general tone by which it is distinguished from all
    previous expositions of "Political Economy" that had any pretension
    to being scientific, and which has made it so useful to conciliating
    minds which those previous expositions had repelled.

            *       *       *       *       *

    What was abstract and purely scientific was generally mine; the
    properly human element came from her: in all that concerned the
    application of philosophy to the exigencies of human society and
    progress, I was her pupil, alike in boldness of speculation and
    cautiousness of practical judgment. For, on the one hand, I was much
    more courageous and farsighted than without her I should have been,
    in anticipation of an order of things to come, in which many of the
    limited generalizations now so often confounded with universal
    principles will cease to be applicable. Those parts of my writings,
    and especially of the "Political Economy," which contemplate
    possibilities in the future such as, when affirmed by socialists,
    have in general been fiercely denied by political economists, would,
    but for her, either have been absent, or the suggestions would have
    been made much more timidly and in a more qualified form. But while
    she thus rendered me bolder in speculation on human affairs, her
    practical turn of mind, and her almost unerring estimate of
    practical obstacles, repressed in me all tendencies that were really
    visionary.

    Her mind invested all ideas in a concrete shape, and formed itself a
    conception of how they would actually work: and her knowledge of the
    existing feelings and conduct of mankind was so seldom at fault,
    that the weak point in any unworkable suggestion seldom escaped her.

            *       *       *       *       *

    During the two years which immediately preceded the cessation of my
    official life, my wife and I were working together at the "Liberty."
    I had first planned and written it as a short essay in Eighteen
    Hundred Fifty-four. None of my writings have been either so
    carefully composed, or so sedulously corrected as this. After it had
    been written as usual, twice over, we kept it by us, bringing it out
    from time to time, and going through it "de novo," reading, weighing
    and criticizing every sentence. Its final revision was to have been
    a work of the winter of Eighteen Hundred Fifty-eight and Fifty-nine,
    the first after my retirement, which we had arranged to pass in the
    South of Europe. That hope and every other were frustrated by the
    most unexpected and bitter calamity of her death, at Avignon, on our
    way to Montpellier, from a sudden attack of pulmonary congestion.

    Since then I have sought for such alleviation as my state admitted
    of, by the mode of life which most enabled me to feel her still near
    me. I bought a cottage as close as possible to the place where she
    is buried, and there her daughter (my fellow-sufferer and now my
    chief comfort) and I live constantly during a great portion of the
    year. My objects in life are solely those which were hers; my
    pursuits and occupations those in which she shared or
    sympathized--which are indissolubly associated with her. Her memory
    is to me a religion, and her approbation the standard by which,
    summing up as it does all worthiness, I endeavor to regulate my
    life.

    After my irreparable loss, one of my earliest cares was to print and
    publish the treatise, so much of which was the work of her whom I
    had lost, and consecrate it to her memory. I have made no
    alterations or additions to it, nor shall I ever. Though it wants
    the last touch of her hand, no substitute for that touch shall ever
    be attempted by mine.

    The "Liberty" was more directly and literally our joint production
    than anything else which bears my name, for there was not a sentence
    of it which was not several times gone through by us together,
    turned over in many ways, and carefully weeded of any faults, either
    in thought or expression, that we detected in it. It is in
    consequence of this that, although it never underwent her final
    revision, it far surpasses, as a mere specimen of composition,
    anything which has proceeded from me either before or since. With
    regard to the thoughts, it is difficult to identify any particular
    part or element as being more hers than all the rest. The whole mood
    of thinking, of which the book was the expression, was emphatically
    hers.

    But I also was so thoroughly imbued with it that the same thoughts
    naturally occurred to us both. That I was thus penetrated with it,
    however, I owe in a great degree to her. There was a moment in my
    mental progress when I might easily have fallen into a tendency
    towards over-government, both social and political; as there was
    also a moment when, by reaction from a contrary excess, I might have
    become a less thorough radical and democrat than I am. In both these
    points as in many others, she benefited me as much by keeping me
    right where I was right, as by leading me to new truths, and ridding
    me of errors.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Mill died suddenly, at Avignon, France, while on a journey with Mr.
Mill. There she was buried.

The stricken husband and daughter rented a cottage in the village, to be
near the grave of the beloved dead. They intended to remain only a few
weeks, but after a year they concluded they could "never be content to
go away and leave the spot consecrated by her death," unlike Robert
Browning, who left Florence forever on the death of his wife, not having
the inclination or the fortitude even to visit her grave.

Mill finally bought the Avignon cottage, refitted it, brought over from
England all his books and intimate belongings, and Avignon was his home
for fifteen years--the rest of his life.

Mill always referred to Helen Taylor as "my wife's daughter," and the
daughter called him "Pater." The love between these two was most tender
and beautiful. The man could surely never have survived the shock of his
wife's death had it not been for Helen. She it was who fitted up the
cottage, and went to England bringing over his books, manuscripts and
papers, luring him on to live by many little devices of her ready wit.
She built a portico all around the cottage, and in Winter this was
enclosed in glass. Helen called it, "Father's semi-circumgyratory," and
if he failed to pace this portico forty times backward and forward each
forenoon, she would take him gently by the arm and firmly insist that
he should fill the prescription. They resumed their studies of botany,
and Helen organized classes which went with them on their little
excursions.

In Eighteen Hundred Sixty-five, Mill was induced to stand for Parliament
for Westminster. The move was made by London friends in the hope of
winning him back to England. He agreed to the proposition on condition
that he should not be called upon to canvass for votes or take any part
in the campaign.

He was elected by a safe majority, and proved a power for good in the
House of Commons. The Speaker once remarked, "The presence of Mr. Mill
in this body I perceive has elevated the tone of debate." This sounds
like the remark of Wendell Phillips when Dogmatism was hot on the heels
of the Sage of Concord: "If Emerson goes to Hell, his presence there
will surely change the climate."

Yet when Mill ran for re-election he was defeated, it having leaked out
that he was an "infidel," since he upheld Charles Bradlaugh in his
position that the affirmation of a man who does not believe in the Bible
should be accepted as freely as the oath of one who does. In passing it
is worth while to note that the courts of Christendom have now accepted
the view of Bradlaugh and of Mill on this point.

The best resume of Mill's philosophy is to be found in Taine's "English
Literature," a fact to which Mill himself attested.

The dedication of "On Liberty," printed as a preface to this "Little
Journey," rivals in worth the wonderful little classic of Ernest Renan
to his sister, Henriette.

Mill died at Avignon in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-three, his last days
soothed by the tender ministrations of the daughter Helen. His body,
according to his wish, was bu

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