Lady Blessington's hands like water, and she could never be brought to
understand that what she had might not last for ever. Finally, it
was all gone, yet her extravagance continued. Debts were heaped up
mountain-high. She signed notes of hand without even reading them. She
incurred obligations of every sort without a moment's hesitation.
For a long time her creditors held aloof, not believing that her
resources were in reality exhausted; but in the end there came a crash
as sudden as it was ruinous. As if moved by a single impulse, those to
whom she owed money took out judgments against her and descended
upon Gore House in a swarm. This was in the spring of 1849, when Lady
Blessington was in her sixtieth year and D'Orsay fifty-one.
It is a curious coincidence that her earliest novel had portrayed the
wreck of a great establishment such as her own. Of the scene in Gore
House Mr. Madden, Lady Blessington's literary biographer, has written:
Numerous creditors, bill-discounters, money-lenders, jewelers,
lace-venders, tax-collectors, gas-company agents, all persons having
claims to urge pressed them at this period simultaneously. An execution
for a debt of four thousand pounds was at length put in by a house
largely engaged in the silk, lace, India-shawl, and fancy-jewelry
business.
This sum of four thousand pounds was only a nominal claim, but it opened
the flood-gates for all of Lady Blessington's creditors. Mr. Madden
writes still further:
On the 10th of May, 1849, I visited Gore House for the last time. The
auction was going on. There was a large assemblage of people of fashion.
Every room was thronged; the well-known library-salon, in which the
conversaziones took place, was crowded, but not with guests. The
arm-chair in which the lady of the mansion was wont to sit was occupied
by a stout, coarse gentleman of the Jewish persuasion, busily engaged
in examining a marble hand extended on a book, the fingers of which
were modeled from a cast of those of the absent mistress of the
establishment. People, as they passed through the room, poked the
furniture, pulled about the precious objects of art and ornaments of
various kinds that lay on the table; and some made jests and ribald
jokes on the scene they witnessed.
At this compulsory sale things went for less than half their value.
Pictures by Lawrence and Landseer, a library consisting of thousands
of volumes, vases of exquisite workmanship, chandeliers of ormolu, and
precious porcelains--all were knocked down relentlessly at farcical
prices. Lady Blessington reserved nothing for herself. She knew that
the hour had struck, and very soon she was on her way to Paris, whither
Count d'Orsay had already gone, having been threatened with arrest by a
boot-maker to whom he owed five hundred pounds.
D'Orsay very naturally went to Paris, for, like his father, he had
always been an ardent Bonapartist, and now Prince Louis Bonaparte had
been chosen president of the Second French Republic. During the prince's
long period of exile he had been the guest of Count d'Orsay, who had
helped him both with money and with influence. D'Orsay now expected
some return for his former generosity. It came, but it came too late. In
1852, shortly after Prince Louis assumed the title of emperor, the count
was appointed director of fine arts; but when the news was brought to
him he was already dying. Lady Blessington died soon after coming to
Paris, before the end of the year 1849.
Comment upon this tangled story is scarcely needed. Yet one may quote
some sayings from a sort of diary which Lady Blessington called her
"Night Book." They seem to show that her supreme happiness lasted only
for a little while, and that deep down in her heart she had condemned
herself.
A woman's head is always influenced by her heart; but a man's heart is
always influenced by his head.
The separation of friends by death is less terrible than the divorce of
two hearts that have loved, but have ceased to sympathize, while memory
still recalls what they once were to each other.
People are seldom tired of the world until the world is tired of them.
A woman should not paint sentiment until she has ceased to inspire it.
It is less difficult for a woman to obtain celebrity by her genius than
to be pardoned for it.
Memory seldom fails when its office is to show us the tombs of our
buried hopes.
BYRON AND THE COUNTESS GUICCIOLI
In 1812, when he was in his twenty-fourth year, Lord Byron was more
talked of than any other man in London. He was in the first flush of his
brilliant career, having published the early cantos of "Childe Harold."
Moreover, he was a peer of the realm, handsome, ardent, and possessing a
personal fascination which few men and still fewer women could resist.
Byron's childhood had been one to excite in him strong feelings of
revolt, and he had inherited a profligate and passionate nature. His
father was a gambler and a spendthrift. His mother was eccentric to a
degree. Byron himself, throughout his boyish years, had been morbidly
sensitive because of a physical deformity--a lame, misshapen foot.
This and the strange treatment which his mother accorded him left him
headstrong, wilful, almost from the first an enemy to whatever was
established and conventional.
As a boy, he was remarkable for the sentimental attachments which he
formed. At eight years of age he was violently in love with a young girl
named Mary Duff. At ten his cousin, Margaret Parker, excited in him a
strange, un-childish passion. At fifteen came one of the greatest
crises of his life, when he became enamored of Mary Chaworth, whose
grand-father had been killed in a duel by Byron's great-uncle. Young as
he was, he would have married her immediately; but Miss Chaworth was
two years older than he, and absolutely refused to take seriously the
devotion of a school-boy.
Byron felt the disappointment keenly; and after a short stay at
Cambridge, he left England, visited Portugal and Spain, and traveled
eastward as far as Greece and Turkey. At Athens he wrote the pretty
little poem to the "maid of Athens"--Miss Theresa Macri, daughter of
the British vice-consul. He returned to London to become at one leap the
most admired poet of the day and the greatest social favorite. He was
possessed of striking personal beauty. Sir Walter Scott said of him:
"His countenance was a thing to dream of." His glorious eyes, his
mobile, eloquent face, fascinated all; and he was, besides, a genius of
the first rank.
With these endowments, he plunged into the social whirlpool, denying
himself nothing, and receiving everything-adulation, friendship, and
unstinted love. Darkly mysterious stories of his adventures in the East
made many think that he was the hero of some of his own poems, such
as "The Giaour" and "The Corsair." A German wrote of him that "he was
positively besieged by women." From the humblest maid-servants up to
ladies of high rank, he had only to throw his handkerchief to make
a conquest. Some women did not even wait for the handkerchief to be
thrown. No wonder that he was sated with so much adoration and that he
wrote of women:
I regard them as very pretty but inferior creatures. I look on them as
grown-up children; but, like a foolish mother, I am constantly the slave
of one of them. Give a woman a looking-glass and burnt almonds, and she
will be content.
The liaison which attracted the most attention at this time was that
between Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb. Byron has been greatly blamed for
his share in it; but there is much to be said on the other side. Lady
Caroline was happily married to the Right Hon. William Lamb, afterward
Lord Melbourne, and destined to be the first prime minister of Queen
Victoria. He was an easy-going, genial man of the world who placed too
much confidence in the honor of his wife. She, on the other hand, was
a sentimental fool, always restless, always in search of some new
excitement. She thought herself a poet, and scribbled verses, which
her friends politely admired, and from which they escaped as soon as
possible. When she first met Byron, she cried out: "That pale face is my
fate!" And she afterward added: "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know!"
It was not long before the intimacy of the two came very near the point
of open scandal; but Byron was the wooed and not the wooer. This woman,
older than he, flung herself directly at his head. Naturally enough,
it was not very long before she bored him thoroughly. Her romantic
impetuosity became tiresome, and very soon she fell to talking always
of herself, thrusting her poems upon him, and growing vexed and peevish
when he would not praise them. As was well said, "he grew moody and she
fretful when their mutual egotisms jarred."
In a burst of resentment she left him, but when she returned, she was
worse than ever. She insisted on seeing him. On one occasion she made
her way into his rooms disguised as a boy. At another time, when she
thought he had slighted her, she tried to stab herself with a pair of
scissors. Still later, she offered her favors to any one who would kill
him. Byron himself wrote of her:
You can have no idea of the horrible and absurd things that she has said
and done.
Her story has been utilized by Mrs. Humphry Ward in her novel, "The
Marriage of William Ashe."
Perhaps this trying experience led Byron to end his life of dissipation.
At any rate, in 1813, he proposed marriage to Miss Anne Millbanke,
who at first refused him; but he persisted, and in 1815 the two were
married. Byron seems to have had a premonition that he was making a
terrible mistake. During the wedding ceremony he trembled like a leaf,
and made the wrong responses to the clergyman. After the wedding was
over, in handing his bride into the carriage which awaited them, he said
to her:
"Miss Millbanke, are you ready?"
It was a strange blunder for a bridegroom, and one which many regarded
at the time as ominous for the future. In truth, no two persons could
have been more thoroughly mismated--Byron, the human volcano, and his
wife, a prim, narrow-minded, and peevish woman. Their incompatibility
was evident enough from the very first, so that when they returned from
their wedding-journey, and some one asked Byron about his honeymoon, he
answered:
"Call it rather a treacle moon!"
It is hardly necessary here to tell over the story of their domestic
troubles. Only five weeks after their daughter's birth, they parted.
Lady Byron declared that her husband was insane; while after trying many
times to win from her something more than a tepid affection, he gave up
the task in a sort of despairing anger. It should be mentioned here, for
the benefit of those who recall the hideous charges made many decades
afterward by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe on the authority of Lady Byron,
that the latter remained on terms of friendly intimacy with Augusta
Leigh, Lord Byron's sister, and that even on her death-bed she sent an
amicable message to Mrs. Leigh.
Byron, however, stung by the bitter attacks that were made upon him,
left England, and after traveling down the Rhine through Switzerland,
he took up his abode in Venice. His joy at leaving England and ridding
himself of the annoyances which had clustered thick about him, he
expressed in these lines:
Once more upon the waters! yet once more!
And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
That knows his rider. Welcome to the roar!
Meanwhile he enjoyed himself in reckless fashion. Money poured in upon
him from his English publisher. For two cantos of "Childe Harold" and
"Manfred," Murray paid him twenty thousand dollars. For the fourth
canto, Byron demanded and received more than twelve thousand dollars.
In Italy he lived on friendly terms with Shelley and Thomas Moore; but
eventually he parted from them both, for he was about to enter upon a
new phase of his curious career.
He was no longer the Byron of 1815. Four years of high living and much
brandy-and-water had robbed his features of their refinement. His look
was no longer spiritual. He was beginning to grow stout. Yet the change
had not been altogether unfortunate. He had lost something of his wild
impetuosity, and his sense of humor had developed. In his thirtieth
year, in fact, he had at last become a man.
It was soon after this that he met a woman who was to be to him for
the rest of his life what a well-known writer has called "a star on the
stormy horizon of the poet." This woman was Teresa, Countess Guiccioli,
whom he first came to know in Venice. She was then only nineteen years
of age, and she was married to a man who was more than forty years her
senior. Unlike the typical Italian woman, she was blonde, with dreamy
eyes and an abundance of golden hair, and her manner was at once modest
and graceful. She had known Byron but a very short time when she found
herself thrilling with a passion of which until then she had never
dreamed. It was written of her:
She had thought of love but as an amusement; yet she now became its
slave.
To this love Byron gave an immediate response, and from that time until
his death he cared for no other woman. The two were absolutely mated.
Nevertheless, there were difficulties which might have been expected.
Count Guiccioli, while he seemed to admire Byron, watched him with
Italian subtlety. The English poet and the Italian countess met
frequently. When Byron was prostrated by an attack of fever, the
countess remained beside him, and he was just recovering when Count
Guiccioli appeared upon the scene and carried off his wife. Byron was in
despair. He exchanged the most ardent letters with the countess, yet he
dreaded assassins whom he believed to have been hired by her husband.
Whenever he rode out, he went armed with sword and pistols.
Amid all this storm and stress, Byron's literary activity was
remarkable. He wrote some of his most famous poems at this time, and he
hoped for the day when he and the woman whom he loved might be united
once for all. This came about in the end through the persistence of the
pair. The Countess Guiccioli openly took up her abode with him, not to
be separated until the poet sailed for Greece to aid the Greeks in
their struggle for independence. This was in 1822, when Byron was in his
thirty-fifth year. He never returned to Italy, but died in the historic
land for which he gave his life as truly as if he had fallen upon the
field of battle.
Teresa Guiccioli had been, in all but name, his wife for just three
years. Much, has been said in condemnation of this love-affair; but in
many ways it is less censurable than almost anything in his career. It
was an instance of genuine love, a love which purified and exalted this
man of dark and moody moments. It saved him from those fitful passions
and orgies of self-indulgence which had exhausted him. It proved to be
an inspiration which at last led him to die for a cause approved by all
the world.
As for the woman, what shall we say of her? She came to him unspotted by
the world. A demand for divorce which her husband made was rejected.
A pontifical brief pronounced a formal separation between the two. The
countess gladly left behind "her palaces, her equipages, society, and
riches, for the love of the poet who had won her heart."
Unlike the other women who had cared for him, she was unselfish in
her devotion. She thought more of his fame than did he himself. Emilio
Castelar has written:
She restored him and elevated him. She drew him from the mire and set
the crown of purity upon his brow. Then, when she had recovered this
great heart, instead of keeping it as her own possession, she gave it to
humanity.
For twenty-seven years after Byron's death, she remained, as it were,
widowed and alone. Then, in her old age, she married the Marquis de
Boissy; but the marriage was purely one of convenience. Her heart was
always Byron's, whom she defended with vivacity. In 1868, she published
her memoirs of the poet, filled with interesting and affecting
recollections. She died as late as 1873.
Some time between the year 1866 and that of her death, she is said to
have visited Newstead Abbey, which had once been Byron's home. She was
very old, a widow, and alone; but her affection for the poet-lover of
her youth was still as strong as ever.
Byron's life was short, if measured by years only. Measured by
achievement, it was filled to the very full. His genius blazes like
a meteor in the records of English poetry; and some of that splendor
gleams about the lovely woman who turned him away from vice and folly
and made him worthy of his historic ancestry, of his country, and of
himself.
THE STORY OF MME. DE STAEL
Each century, or sometimes each generation, is distinguished by some
especial interest among those who are given to fancies--not to call them
fads. Thus, at the present time, the cultivated few are taken up with
what they choose to term the "new thought," or the "new criticism," or,
on the other hand, with socialistic theories and projects. Thirty years
ago, when Oscar Wilde was regarded seriously by some people, there were
many who made a cult of estheticism. It was just as interesting when
their leader--
Walked down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily
In his medieval hand,
or when Sir William Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan guyed him as
Bunthorne in "Patience."
When Charles Kingsley was a great expounder of British common sense,
"muscular Christianity" was a phrase which was taken up by many
followers. A little earlier, Puseyism and a primitive form of socialism
were in vogue with the intellectuals. There are just as many different
fashions in thought as in garments, and they come and go without any
particular reason. To-day, they are discussed and practised everywhere.
To-morrow, they are almost forgotten in the rapid pursuit of something
new.
Forty years before the French Revolution burst forth with all its
thunderings, France and Germany were affected by what was generally
styled "sensibility." Sensibility was the sister of sentimentality and
the half-sister of sentiment. Sentiment is a fine thing in itself. It is
consistent with strength and humor and manliness; but sentimentality and
sensibility are poor cheeping creatures that run scuttering along the
ground, quivering and whimpering and asking for perpetual sympathy,
which they do not at all deserve.
No one need be ashamed of sentiment. It simply gives temper to the
blade, and mellowness to the intellect. Sensibility, on the other hand,
is full of shivers and shakes and falsetto notes and squeaks. It is, in
fact, all humbug, just as sentiment is often all truth.
Therefore, to find an interesting phase of human folly, we may look back
to the years which lie between 1756 and 1793 as the era of sensibility.
The great prophets of this false god, or goddess, were Rousseau in
France and Goethe with Schiller in Germany, together with a host of
midgets who shook and shivered in imitation of their masters. It is not
for us to catalogue these persons. Some of them were great figures
in literature and philosophy, and strong enough to shake aside the
silliness of sensibility; but others, while they professed to be great
as writers or philosophers, are now remembered only because their
devotion to sensibility made them conspicuous in their own time. They
dabbled in one thing and another; they "cribbed" from every popular
writer of the day. The only thing that actually belonged to them was a
high degree of sensibility.
And what, one may ask, was this precious thing--this sensibility?
It was really a sort of St. Vitus's dance of the mind, and almost of
the body. When two persons, in any way interested in each other, were
brought into the same room, one of them appeared to be seized with
a rotary movement. The voice rose to a higher pitch than usual, and
assumed a tremolo. Then, if the other person was also endowed with
sensibility, he or she would rotate and quake in somewhat the same
manner. Their cups of tea would be considerably agitated. They would
move about in as unnatural a manner as possible; and when they left the
room, they would do so with gaspings and much waste of breath.
This was not an exhibition of love--or, at least, not necessarily
so. You might exhibit sensibility before a famous poet, or a gallant
soldier, or a celebrated traveler--or, for that matter, before a
remarkable buffoon, like Cagliostro, or a freak, like Kaspar Hauser.
It is plain enough that sensibility was entirely an abnormal thing, and
denoted an abnormal state of mind. Only among people like the Germans
and French of that period, who were forbidden to take part in public
affairs, could it have flourished so long, and have put forth such
rank and fetid outgrowths. From it sprang the "elective affinities" of
Goethe, and the loose morality of the French royalists, which rushed
on into the roaring sea of infidelity, blasphemy, and anarchy of the
Revolution.
Of all the historic figures of that time, there is just one which
to-day stands forth as representing sensibility. In her own time she
was thought to be something of a philosopher, and something more of a
novelist. She consorted with all the clever men and women of her age.
But now she holds a minute niche in history because of the fact that
Napoleon stooped to hate her, and because she personifies sensibility.
Criticism has stripped from her the rags and tatters of the philosophy
which was not her own. It is seen that she was indebted to the brains of
others for such imaginative bits of fiction as she put forth in Delphine
and Corinne; but as the exponent of sensibility she remains unique. This
woman was Anne Louise Germaine Necker, usually known as Mme. de Stael.
There was much about Mile. Necker's parentage that made her interesting.
Her father was the Genevese banker and minister of Louis XVI, who failed
wretchedly in his attempts to save the finances of France. Her mother,
Suzanne Curchod, as a young girl, had won the love of the famous English
historian, Edward Gibbon. She had first refused him, and then almost
frantically tried to get him back; but by this time Gibbon was more
comfortable in single life and less infatuated with Mlle. Curchod, who
presently married Jacques Necker.
M. Necker's money made his daughter a very celebrated "catch." Her
mother brought her to Paris when the French capital was brilliant beyond
description, and yet was tottering to its fall. The rumblings of the
Revolution could be heard by almost every ear; and yet society and the
court, refusing to listen, plunged into the wildest revelry under the
leadership of the giddy Marie Antoinette.
It was here that the young girl was initiated into the most elegant
forms of luxury, and met the cleverest men of that time--Voltaire,
Rousseau, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Volney. She set herself to be the
most accomplished woman of her day, not merely in belles lettres, but in
the natural and political sciences. Thus, when her father was drawing
up his monograph on the French finances, Germaine labored hard over
a supplementary report, studying documents, records, and the most
complicated statistics, so that she might obtain a mastery of the
subject.
"I mean to know everything that anybody knows," she said, with an
arrogance which was rather admired in so young a woman.
But, unfortunately, her mind was not great enough to fulfil her
aspiration. The most she ever achieved was a fair knowledge of many
things--a knowledge which seemed surprising to the average man, but
which was superficial enough to the accomplished specialist.
In her twentieth year (1786) it was thought best that she should marry.
Her revels, as well as her hard studies, had told upon her health, and
her mother believed that she could not be at once a blue-stocking and a
woman of the world.
There was something very odd about the relation that existed between the
young girl and this mother of hers. In the Swiss province where they had
both been born, the mother had been considered rather bold and forward.
Her penchant for Gibbon was only one of a number of adventures that
have been told about her. She was by no means coy with the gallants of
Geneva. Yet, after her marriage, and when she came to Paris, she seemed
to be transformed into a sort of Swiss Puritan.