Chapter XIX: Amiel 432 (17)

And now, indeed, it was to become true that if from the inflammable Shelley’s devotion to the Boinville family poor Harriet had had “something to endure,” yet this was “not much” compared with what was to follow. At Godwin’s house Shelley met Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, his future wife, then in her seventeenth year. She was a gifted person, but, as Professor Dowden says, she “had breathed during her entire life an atmosphere of free thought.” On the 8th of June Hogg called at Godwin’s with Shelley; Godwin was out, but “a door was partially and softly opened, a thrilling voice called ‘Shelley!’ a thrilling voice answered ‘Mary!’” Shelley’s summoner was “a very young female, fair and fair-haired, pale indeed, and with a piercing look, wearing a frock of tartan.” Already they were “Shelley” and “Mary” to one another; “before the close of June they knew and felt,” says Professor Dowden, “that each was to the other inexpressibly dear.” The churchyard of St. Pancras, where her mother was buried, became “a place now doubly sacred to Mary, since on one eventful day Bysshe here poured forth his griefs, his hopes, his love, and she, in sign of everlasting union, placed her hand in his.” In July Shelley gave her a copy of _Queen Mab_, printed but not published, and under the tender dedication to Harriet he wrote: “Count Slobendorf was about to marry a woman who, attracted solely by his fortune, proved her selfishness by deserting him in prison.” Mary added an inscription on her part: “I love the author beyond all powers of expression ... by that love we have promised to each other, although I may not be yours I can never be another’s,”—and a good deal more to the same effect.

Amid these excitements Shelley was for some days without writing to Harriet, who applied to Hookham the publisher to know what had happened. She was expecting her confinement; “I always fancy something dreadful has happened,” she wrote, “if I do not hear from him ... I cannot endure this dreadful state of suspense.” Shelley then wrote to her, begging her to come to London; and when she arrived there, he told her the state of his feelings, and proposed separation. The shock made Harriet ill; and Shelley, says Peacock, “between his old feelings towards Harriet, and his new passion for Mary, showed in his looks, in his gestures, in his speech, the state of a mind ‘suffering, like a little kingdom, the nature of an insurrection.’” Godwin grew uneasy about his daughter, and after a serious talk with her, wrote to Shelley. Under such circumstances, Professor Dowden tells us, “to youth, swift and decisive measures seem the best.” In the early morning of the 28th of July 1814 “Mary Godwin stepped across her father’s threshold into the summer air,” she and Shelley went off together in a post-chaise to Dover, and from thence crossed to the Continent.

On the 14th of August the fugitives were at Troyes on their way to Switzerland. From Troyes Shelley addressed a letter to Harriet, of which the best description I can give is that it is precisely the letter which a man in the writer’s circumstances should not have written.

“MY DEAREST HARRIET (he begins). I write to you from this detestable
town; I write to show that I do not forget you; I write to urge you to
come to Switzerland, where you will at last find one firm and constant
friend to whom your interests will be always dear—by whom your
feelings will never wilfully be injured. From none can you expect this
but me—all else are either unfeeling or selfish, or have beloved
friends of their own.”

Then follows a description of his journey with Mary from Paris, “through a fertile country, neither interesting from the character of its inhabitants nor the beauty of the scenery, with a mule to carry our baggage, as Mary, who has not been sufficiently well to walk, fears the fatigue of walking.” Like St. Paul to Timothy, he ends with commissions:—

“I wish you to bring with you the two deeds which Tahourdin has to
prepare for you, as also a copy of the settlement. Do not part with
any of your money. But what shall be done about the books? You can
consult on the spot. With love to my sweet little Ianthe, ever most
affectionately yours, S.

“I write in great haste; we depart directly.”

Professor Dowden’s flow of sentiment is here so agitating, that I relieve myself by resorting to a drier world. Certainly my comment on this letter shall not be his, that it “assures Harriet that her interests were still dear to Shelley, though now their lives had moved apart.” But neither will I call the letter an odious letter, a hideous letter. I prefer to call it, applying an untranslated French word, a _bête_ letter. And it is _bête_ from what is the signal, the disastrous want and weakness of Shelley, with all his fine intellectual gifts—his utter deficiency in humour.

Harriet did not accept Shelley’s invitation to join him and Mary in Switzerland. Money difficulties drove the travellers back to England in September. Godwin would not see Shelley, but he sorely needed, continually demanded and eagerly accepted, pecuniary help from his erring “spiritual son.” Between Godwin’s wants and his own, Shelley was hard pressed. He got from Harriet, who still believed that he would return to her, twenty pounds which remained in her hands. In November she was confined; a son and heir was born to Shelley. He went to see Harriet, but “the interview left husband and wife each embittered against the other.” Friends were severe; “when Mrs. Boinville wrote, her letter seemed cold and even sarcastic,” says Professor Dowden. “Solitude,” he continues, “unharassed by debts and duns, with Mary’s companionship, the society of a few friends, and the delights of study and authorship, would have made these winter months to Shelley months of unusual happiness and calm.” But, alas! creditors were pestering, and even Harriet gave trouble. In January, 1815, Mary had to write in her journal this entry: “Harriet sends her creditors here; nasty woman. Now we must change our lodgings.”

One day about this time Shelley asked Peacock, “Do you think Wordsworth could have written such poetry if he ever had dealings with money-lenders?” Not only had Shelley dealings with money-lenders, he now had dealings with bailiffs also. But still he continued to read largely. In January, 1815, his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, died. Shelley went down into Sussex; his father would not suffer him to enter the house, but he sat outside the door and read _Comus_, while the reading of his grandfather’s will went on inside. In February was born Mary’s first child, a girl, who lived but a few days. All the spring Shelley was ill and harassed, but by June it was settled that he should have an allowance from his father of £1000 a year, and that his debts (including £1200 promised by him to Godwin) should be paid. He on his part paid Harriet’s debts and allowed her £200 a year. In August he took a house on the borders of Windsor Park, and made a boating excursion up the Thames as far as Lechlade, an excursion which produced his first entire poem of value, the beautiful _Stanza in Lechlade Churchyard_. They were followed, later in the autumn, by _Alastor_. Henceforth, from this winter of 1815 until he was drowned between Leghorn and Spezzia in July, 1822, Shelley’s literary history is sufficiently given in the delightful introductions prefixed by Mrs. Shelley to the poems of each year. Much of the history of his life is there given also; but with some of those “occurrences of his private life” on which Mrs. Shelley forbore to touch, and which are now made known to us in Professor Dowden’s book, we have still to deal.

Mary’s first son, William, was born in January, 1816, and in February we find Shelley declaring himself “strongly urged, by the perpetual experience of neglect or enmity from almost every one but those who are supported by my resources, to desert my native country, hiding myself and Mary from the contempt which we so unjustly endure.” Early in May he left England with Mary and Miss Clairmont; they met Lord Byron at Geneva and passed the summer by the Lake of Geneva in his company. Miss Clairmont had already in London, without the knowledge of the Shelleys, made Byron’s acquaintance and become his mistress. Shelley determined, in the course of the summer, to go back to England, and, after all, “to make that most excellent of nations my perpetual resting-place.” In September he and his ladies returned; Miss Clairmont was then expecting her confinement. Of her being Byron’s mistress the Shelleys were now aware; but “the moral indignation,” says Professor Dowden, “which Byron’s act might justly arouse, seems to have been felt by neither Shelley nor Mary.” If Byron and Claire Clairmont, as she was now called, loved and were happy, all was well.

The eldest daughter of the Godwin household, the amiable Fanny, was unhappy at home and in deep dejection of spirits. Godwin was, as usual, in terrible straits for money. The Shelleys and Miss Clairmont settled themselves at Bath; early in October Fanny Godwin passed through Bath without their knowing it, travelled on to Swansea, took a bedroom at the hotel there, and was found in the morning dead, with a bottle of laudanum on the table beside her and these words in her handwriting:—

“I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an
end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate,[45] and
whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have
hurt their health in endeavoring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to
hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the
blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as ...”

There is no signature.

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Footnote 45:

She was Mary Wollstonecraft’s natural daughter by Imlay.

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A sterner tragedy followed. On the 9th of November 1816 Harriet Shelley left the house in Brompton where she was then living, and did not return. On the 10th of December her body was found in the Serpentine; she had drowned herself. In one respect Professor Dowden resembles Providence: his ways are inscrutable. His comment on Harriet’s death is: “There is no doubt she wandered from the ways of upright living.” But he adds: “That no act of Shelley’s, during the two years which immediately preceded her death, tended to cause the rash act which brought her life to its close, seems certain.” Shelley had been living with Mary all the time; only that!

On the 30th of December, 1816, Mary Godwin and Shelley were married. I shall pursue “the occurrences of Shelley’s private life” no further. For the five years and a half which remain, Professor Dowden’s book adds to our knowledge of Shelley’s life much that is interesting; but what was chiefly important we knew already. The new and grave matter which we did not know, or knew in the vaguest way only, but which Shelley’s family and Professor Dowden have now thought it well to give us in full, ends with Shelley’s second marriage.

I regret, I say once more, that it has been given. It is a sore trial for our love of Shelley. What a set! what a world! is the exclamation that breaks from us as we come to an end of this history of “the occurrences of Shelley’s private life.” I used the French word _bête_ for a letter of Shelley’s; for the world in which we find him I can only use another French word, _sale_. Godwin’s house of sordid horror, and Godwin’s preaching and holding the hat, and the green-spectacled Mrs. Godwin, and Hogg the faithful friend, and Hunt the Horace of this precious world, and, to go up higher, Sir Timothy Shelley, a great country gentleman, feeling himself safe while “the exalted mind of Norfolk [the drinking Duke] protects me with the world,” and Lord Byron with his deep grain of coarseness and commonness, his affectation, his brutal selfishness—what a set! The history carries us to Oxford, and I think of the clerical and respectable Oxford of those old times, the Oxford of Copleston and the Kebles and Hawkins, and a hundred more, with the relief Keble declares himself to experience from Izaak Walton,

“When, wearied with the tale thy times disclose,
The eye first finds thee out in thy secure repose.”

I am not only thinking of morals and the house of Godwin, I am thinking also of tone, bearing, dignity. I appeal to Cardinal Newman, if perchance he does me the honor to read these words, is it possible to imagine Copleston or Hawkins declaring himself safe “while the exalted mind of the Duke of Norfolk protects me with the world”?

Mrs. Shelley, after her marriage and during Shelley’s closing years, becomes attractive; up to her marriage her letters and journal do not please. Her ability is manifest, but she is not attractive. In the world discovered to us by Professor Dowden as surrounding Shelley up to 1817, the most pleasing figure is Poor Fanny Godwin; after Fanny Godwin, the most pleasing figure is Harriet Shelley herself.

Professor Dowden’s treatment of Harriet is not worthy—so much he must allow me in all kindness, but also in all seriousness, to say—of either his taste or his judgment. His pleading for Shelley is constant, and he does more harm than good to Shelley by it. But here his championship of Shelley makes him very unjust to a cruelly used and unhappy girl. For several pages he balances the question whether or not Harriet was unfaithful to Shelley before he left her for Mary, and he leaves the question unsettled. As usual Professor Dowden (and it is his signal merit) supplies the evidence decisive against himself. Thornton Hunt, not well disposed to Harriet, Hogg, Peacock, Trelawny, Hookham, and a member of Godwin’s own family, are all clear in their evidence that up to her parting from Shelley Harriet was perfectly innocent. But that precious witness, Godwin, wrote in 1817 that “she had proved herself unfaithful to her husband before their separation.... Peace be to her shade!” Why, Godwin was the father of Harriet’s successor. But Mary believed the same thing. She was Harriet’s successor. But Shelley believed it too. He had it from Godwin. But he was convinced of it earlier. The evidence for this is, that, in writing to Southey in 1820, Shelley declares that “the single passage of a life, otherwise not only spotless but spent in an impassioned pursuit of virtue, which looks like a blot,” bears that appearance “merely because I regulated my domestic arrangements without deferring to the notions of the vulgar, although I might have done so quite as conveniently had I descended to their base thoughts.” From this Professor Dowden concludes that Shelley believed he could have got a divorce from Harriet had he so wished. The conclusion is not clear. But even were the evidence perfectly clear that Shelley believed Harriet unfaithful when he parted from her, we should have to take into account Mrs. Shelley’s most true sentence in her introduction to _Alastor_: “In all Shelley did, he, at the time of doing it, believed himself justified to his own conscience.”

Shelley’s asserting a thing vehemently does not prove more than that he chose to believe it and did believe it. His extreme and violent changes of opinion about people show this sufficiently. Eliza Westbrook is at one time “a diamond not so large” as her sister Harriet but “more highly polished;” and then: “I certainly hate her with all my heart and soul. I sometimes feel faint with the fatigue of checking the overflowings of my unbounded abhorrence for this miserable wretch.” The antipathy, Hogg tells us, was as unreasonable as the former excess of deference. To his friend Miss Hitchener he says: “Never shall that intercourse cease, which has been the day-dawn of my existence, the sun which has shed warmth on the cold drear length of the anticipated prospect of life.” A little later, and she has become “the Brown Demon, a woman of desperate views and dreadful passions, but of cool and undeviating revenge!” Even Professor Dowden admits that this is absurd; that the real Miss Hitchener was not seen by Shelley, either when he adored or when he detested.

Shelley’s power of persuading himself was equal to any occasion; but would not his conscientiousness and high feeling have prevented his exerting this power at poor Harriet’s expense? To abandon her as he did, must he not have known her to be false! Professor Dowden insists always on Shelley’s “conscientiousness.” Shelley himself speaks of his “impassioned pursuit of virtue.” Leigh Hunt compared his life to that of “Plato himself, or, still more, a Pythagorean,” and added that he “never met a being who came nearer, perhaps so near, to the height of humanity,” to being an “angel of charity.” In many respects Shelley really resembled both a Pythagorean and an angel of charity. He loved high thoughts, he cared nothing for sumptuous lodging, fare, and raiment, he was poignantly afflicted at the sight of misery, he would have given away his last farthing, would have suffered in his own person, to relieve it. But in one important point he was like neither a Pythagorean nor an angel: he was extremely inflammable. Professor Dowden leaves no doubt on the matter. After reading his book, one feels sickened for ever of the subject of irregular relations; God forbid that I should go into the scandals about Shelley’s “Neapolitan charge,” about Shelley and Emilia Viviani, about Shelley and Miss Clairmont, and the rest of it! I will say only that it is visible enough that when the passion of love was aroused in Shelley (and it was aroused easily) one could not be sure of him, his friends could not trust him. We have seen him with the Boinville family. With Emilia Viviani he is the same. If he is left much alone with Miss Clairmont, he evidently makes Mary uneasy; nay, he makes Professor Dowden himself uneasy. And I conclude that an entirely human inflammability, joined to an inhuman want of humor and a superhuman power of self-deception, are the causes which chiefly explain Shelley’s abandonment of Harriet in the first place, and then his behavior to her and his defense of himself afterwards.

His misconduct to Harriet, his want of humor his self-deception, are fully brought before us for the first time by Professor Dowden’s book. Good morals and good criticism alike forbid that when all this is laid bare to us we should deny, or hide, or extenuate it. Nevertheless I go back after all to what I said at the beginning; still our ideal Shelley, the angelic Shelley, subsists. Unhappily the data for this Shelley we had and knew long ago, while the data for the unattractive Shelley are fresh; and what is fresh is likely to fix our attention more than what is familiar. But Professor Dowden’s volumes, which give so much, which give too much, also afford data for picturing anew the Shelley who delights, as well as for picturing for the first time a Shelley who, to speak plainly, disgusts; and with what may renew and restore our impression of the delightful Shelley I shall end.

The winter at Marlow, and the ophthalmia caught among the cottages of the poor, we knew, but we have from Professor Dowden more details of this winter and of Shelley’s work among the poor; we have above all, for the first time I believe, a line of verse of Shelley’s own which sums up truly and perfectly this most attractive side of him—

“I am the friend of the unfriended poor.”

But that in Shelley on which I would especially dwell is that in him which contrasts most with the ignobleness of the world in which we have seen him living, and with the pernicious nonsense which we have found him talking. The Shelley of “marvelous gentleness,” of feminine refinement with gracious and considerate manners, “a perfect gentleman, entirely without arrogance or aggressive egotism,” completely devoid of the proverbial and ferocious vanity of authors and poets, always disposed to make little of his own work and to prefer that of others, of reverent enthusiasm for the great and wise, of high and tender seriousness, of heroic generosity, and of a delicacy in rendering services which was equal to his generosity—the Shelley who was all this is the Shelley with whom I wish to end. He may talk nonsense about tyrants and priests, but what a high and noble ring in such a sentence as the following, written by a young man who is refusing £2000 a year rather than consent to entail a great property!

“That I should entail £120,000 of command over labour, of power to
remit this, to employ it for benevolent purposes, on one whom I know
not—who might, instead of being the benefactor of mankind, be its
bane, or use this for the worst purposes, which the real delegates of
my chance-given property might convert into a most useful instrument
of benevolence! No! this you will not suspect me of.”

And again:—

“I desire money because I think I know the use of it. It commands
labor, it give leisure; and to give leisure to those who will employ
it in the forwarding of truth is the noblest present an individual can
make to the whole.”

If there is extravagance here, it is extravagance of a beautiful and rare sort, like Shelley’s “underhand ways” also, which differed singularly, the cynic Hogg tells us, from the underhand ways of other people; “the latter were concealed because they were mean, selfish, sordid; Shelley’s secrets, on the contrary (kindnesses done by stealth), were hidden through modesty, delicacy, generosity, refinement of soul.”

His forbearance to Godwin, to Godwin lecturing and renouncing him and at the same time holding out, as I have said, his hat to him for alms, is wonderful; but the dignity with which he at last, in a letter perfect for propriety of tone, reads a lesson to his ignoble father-in-law, is in the best possible style:—

“Perhaps it is well that you should be informed that I consider your
last letter to be written in a style of haughtiness and encroachment
which neither awes nor imposes on me; but I have no desire to
transgress the limits which you place to our intercourse, nor in any
future instance will I make any remarks but such as arise from the
strict question in discussion.”

And again—

“My astonishment, and, I will confess, when I have been treated with
most harshness and cruelty by you, my indignation, has been extreme,
that, knowing as you do my nature, any considerations should have
prevailed on you to have been thus harsh and cruel. I lamented also
over my ruined hopes of all that your genius once taught me to expect
from your virtue, when I found that for yourself, your family, and
your creditors, you would submit to that communication with me which
you once rejected and abhorred, and which no pity for my poverty or
suffering, assumed willingly for you, could avail to extort.”

Moreover, though Shelley has no humor, he can show as quick and sharp a tact as the most practised man of the world. He has been with Byron and the Countess Guiccioli, and he writes of the latter—

“La Guiccioli is a very pretty, sentimental, innocent Italian, who has
sacrificed an immense future for the sake of Lord Byron, and who, if I
know anything of my friend, of her, and of human nature, will
hereafter have plenty of opportunity to repent her rashness,”

Tact also, and something better than tact, he shows in his dealings, in order to befriend Leigh Hunt, with Lord Byron. He writes to Hunt:—

“Particular circumstances, or rather, I should say, particular
dispositions in Lord Byron’s character, render the close and exclusive
intimacy with him, in which I find myself, intolerable to me; thus
much, my best friend, I will confess and confide to you. No feelings
of my own shall injure or interfere with what is now nearest to
them—your interest; and I will take care to preserve the little
influence I may have over this Proteus, in whom such strange extremes
are reconciled, until we meet.”

And so we have comeback again, at last, to our original Shelley—to the Shelley of the lovely and well-known picture, to the Shelley with “flushed, feminine, artless face,” the Shelley “blushing like a girl,” of Trelawny. Professor Dowden gives us some further attempts at portraiture. One by a Miss Rose, of Shelley at Marlow:—

“He was the most interesting figure I ever saw; his eyes like a
deer’s, bright but rather wild; his white throat unfettered; his
slender but to me almost faultless shape; his brown long coat with
curling lambs’ wool collar and cuffs—in fact, his whole appearance—are
as fresh in my recollection as an occurrence of yesterday.”

Feminine enthusiasm may be deemed suspicious, but a Captain Kennedy must surely be able to keep his head. Captain Kennedy was quartered at Horsham in 1813, and saw Shelley when he was on a stolen visit, in his father’s absence, at Field Place:—

“He received me with frankness and kindliness, as if he had known me
from childhood, and at once won my heart. I fancy I see him now as he
sate by the window, and hear his voice, the tones of which impressed
me with his sincerity and simplicity. His resemblance to his sister
Elizabeth was as striking as if they had been twins. His eyes were
most expressive; his complexion beautifully fair, his features
exquisitely fine; his hair was dark, and no peculiar attention to its
arrangement was manifest. In person he was slender and gentlemanlike,
but inclined to stoop; his gait was decidedly not military. The
general appearance indicated great delicacy of constitution. One would
at once pronounce of him that he was different from other men. There
was an earnestness in his manner and such perfect gentleness of
breeding and freedom from everything artificial as charmed every one.
I never met a man who so immediately won upon me.”

Mrs. Gisborne’s son, who knew Shelley well at Leghorn, declared Captain Kennedy’s description of him to be “the best and most truthful I have ever seen.”

To all this we have to add the charm of the man’s writings—of Shelley’s poetry. It is his poetry, above everything else, which for many people establishes that he is an angel. Of his poetry I have not space now to speak. But let no one suppose that a want of humor and a self-delusion such as Shelley’s have no effect upon a man’s poetry. The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley’s poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is “a beautiful _and ineffectual_ angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”

VIII.

COUNT LEO TOLSTOI.[46]

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Footnote 46:

Published in the _Fortnightly Review_, December, 1887.

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In reviewing at the time of its first publication, thirty years ago, Flaubert’s remarkable novel of _Madame Bovary_, Sainte-Beuve observed that in Flaubert we come to another manner, another kind of inspiration, from those which had prevailed hitherto; we find ourselves dealing, he said, with a man of a new and different generation from novelists like George Sand. The ideal has ceased, the lyric vein is dried up; the new men are cured of lyricism and the ideal; “a severe and pitiless truth has made its entry, as the last word of experience, even into art itself.” The characters of the new literature of fiction are “science, a spirit of observation, maturity, force, a touch of hardness.” _L’idéal a cessé, le lyrique a tari._

The spirit of observation and the touch of hardness (let us retain these mild and inoffensive terms) have since been carried in the French novel very far. So far have they been carried, indeed, that in spite of the advantage which the French language, familiar to the cultivated classes everywhere, confers on the French novel, this novel has lost much of its attraction for those classes; it no longer commands their attention as it did formerly. The famous English novelists have passed away, and have left no successors of like fame. It is not the English novel, therefore, which has inherited the vogue lost by the French novel. It is a novel of a country new to literature, or at any rate unregarded, till lately, by the general public of readers: it is the novel of Russia. The Russian novel has now the vogue, and deserves to have it. If fresh literary productions maintain this vogue and enhance it, we shall all be learning Russian.

The Slav nature, or at any rate the Russian nature, the Russian nature as it shows itself in the Russian novels, seems marked by an extreme sensitiveness, a consciousness most quick and acute both for what the man’s self is experiencing, and also for what others in contact with him are thinking and feeling. In a nation full of life, but young, and newly in contact with an old and powerful civilization, this sensitiveness and self-consciousness are prompt to appear. In the Americans, as well as in the Russians, we see them active in a high degree. They are somewhat agitating and disquieting agents to their possessor, but they have, if they get fair play, great powers for evoking and enriching a literature. But the Americans, as we know, are apt to set them at rest in the manner of my friend Colonel Higginson of Boston. “As I take it, Nature said, some years since: “Thus far the English is my best race; but we have had Englishmen enough; we need something with a little more buoyancy than the Englishman; let us lighten the structure, even at some peril in the process. Put in one drop more of the nervous fluid, and make the American.” With that drop, a new range of promise opened on the human race, and a lighter, finer, more highly organized type of mankind was born.” People who by this sort of thing give rest to their sensitive and busy self-consciousness may very well, perhaps, be on their way to great material prosperity, to great political power; but they are scarcely on the right way to a great literature, a serious art.

The Russian does not assuage his sensitiveness in this fashion. The Russian man of letters does not make Nature say: “The Russian is my best race.” He finds relief to his sensitiveness in letting his perceptions have perfectly free play, and in recording their reports with perfect fidelity. The sincereness with which the reports are given has even something childlike and touching. In the novel of which I am going to speak there is not a line, not a trait, brought in for the glorification of Russia, or to feel vanity; things and characters go as nature takes them, and the author is absorbed in seeing how nature takes them and in relating it. But we have here a condition of things which is highly favorable to the production of good literature, of good art. We have great sensitiveness, subtlety, and finesse, addressing themselves with entire disinterestedness and simplicity to the representation of human life. The Russian novelist is thus master of a spell to which the secrets of human nature—both what is external and what is internal, gesture and manner no less than thought and feeling—willingly make themselves known. The crown of literature is poetry, and the Russians have not yet had a great poet. But in that form of imaginative literature which in our day is the most popular and the most possible, the Russians at the present moment seem to me to hold, as Mr. Gladstone would say, the field. They have great novelists, and one of their great novelists I wish now to speak.

Count Leo Tolstoi is about sixty years old, and tells us that he shall write novels no more. He is now occupied with religion and with the Christian life. His writings concerning these great matters are not allowed, I believe, to obtain publication in Russia, but instalments of them in French and English reach us from time to time. I find them very interesting, but I find his novel of _Anna Karénine_ more interesting still. I believe that many readers prefer to _Anna Karénine_ Count Tolstoi’s other great novel, _La Guerre et la Paix_. But in the novel one prefers, I think, to have the novelist dealing with the life which he knows from having lived it, rather than with the life which he knows from books or hearsay. If one has to choose a representative work of Thackeray, it is _Vanity Fair_ which one could take rather than _The Virginians_. In like manner I take _Anna Karénine_ as the novel best representing Count Tolstoi. I use the French translation; in general, as I long ago said, work of this kind is better done in France than in England, and _Anna Karénine_ is perhaps also a novel which goes better into French than into English, just as Frederika Bremer’s _Home_ goes into English better than into French. After I have done with _Anna Karénine_ I must say something of Count Tolstoi’s religious writings. Of these too I use the French translation, so far as it is available. The English translation, however, which came into my hands late, seems to be in general clear and good. Let me say in passing that it has neither the same arrangement, nor the same titles, nor altogether the same contents, with the French translation.

There are many characters in _Anna Karénine_—too many if we look in it for a work of art in which the action shall be vigorously one, and to that one action everything shall converge. There are even two main actions extending throughout the book, and we keep passing from one of them to the other—from the affairs of Anna and Wronsky to the affairs of Kitty and Levine. People appear in connection with these two main actions whose appearance and proceedings do not in the least contribute to develop them; incidents are multiplied which we expect are to lead to something important, but which do not. What, for instance, does the episode of Kitty’s friend Warinka and Levine’s brother Serge Ivanitch, their inclination for one another and its failure to come to anything, contribute to the development of either the character or the fortunes of Kitty and Levine? What does the incident of Levine’s long delay in getting to church to be married, a delay which as we read of it seems to have significance, really import? It turns out to import absolutely nothing, and to be introduced solely to give the author the pleasure of telling us that all Levine’s shirts had been packed up.

But the truth is we are not to take _Anna Karénine_ as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life. A piece of life it is. The author has not invented and combined it, he has seen it; it has all happened before his inward eye, and it was in this wise that it happened. Levine’s shirts were packed up, and he was late for his wedding in consequence; Warinka and Serge Ivanitch met at Levine’s country-house and went out walking together; Serge was very near proposing, but did not. The author saw it all happening so—saw it, and therefore relates it; and what his novel in this way loses in art it gains in reality.

For this is the result which, by his extraordinary fineness of perception, and by his sincere fidelity to it, the author achieves; he works in us a sense of the absolute reality of his personages and their doings. Anna’s shoulders, and masses of hair, and half-shut eyes; Alexis Karénine’s up-drawn eyebrows, and tired smile, and cracking finger-joints; Stiva’s eyes suffused with facile moisture—these are as real to us as any of those outward peculiarities which in our own circle of acquaintance we are noticing daily, while the inner man of our own circle of acquaintance, happily or unhappily, lies a great deal less clearly revealed to us than that of Count Tolstoi’s creations.

I must speak of only a few of these creations, the chief personages and no more. The book opens with “Stiva,” and who that has once made Stiva’s acquaintance will ever forget him? We are living, in Count Tolstoi’s novel, among the great people of Moscow and St. Petersburg, the nobles and the high functionaries, the governing class of Russia. Stépane Arcadiévitch—“Stiva”—is Prince Oblonsky, and descended from Rurik, although to think of him as anything except “Stiva” is difficult. His _air souriant_, his good looks, his satisfaction; his “ray,” which made the Tartar waiter at the club joyful in contemplating it; his pleasure in oysters and champagne, his pleasure in making people happy and in rendering services; his need of money, his attachment to the French governess, his distress at his wife’s distress, his affection for her and the children; his emotion and suffused eyes, while he quite dismisses the care of providing funds for household expenses and education; and the French attachment, contritely given up to-day only to be succeeded by some other attachment to-morrow—no never, certainly, shall we come to forget Stiva. Anna, the heroine, is Stiva’s sister. His wife Dolly (these English diminutives are common among Count Tolstoi’s ladies) is daughter of the Prince and Princess Cherbatzky, grandees who show us Russian high life by its most respectable side; the Prince, in particular, is excellent—simple, sensible, right-feeling; a man of dignity and honor. His daughters, Dolly and Kitty, are charming. Dolly, Stiva’s wife, is sorely tried by her husband, full of anxieties for the children, with no money to spend on them or herself, poorly dressed, worn and aged before her time. She has moments of despairing doubt whether the gay people may not be after all in the right, whether virtue and principle answer; whether happiness does not dwell with adventuresses and profligates, brilliant and perfectly dressed adventuresses and profligates, in a land flowing with roubles and champagne. But in a quarter of an hour she comes right again and is herself—a nature straight, honest, faithful, loving, sound to the core; such she is and such she remains; she can be no other. Her sister Kitty is at bottom of the same temper, but she has her experience to get, while Dolly, when the book begins, has already acquired hers. Kitty is adored by Levine, in whom we are told that many traits are to be found of the character and history of Count Tolstoi himself. Levine belongs to the world of great people by his birth and property, but he is not at all a man of the world. He has been a reader and thinker, he has a conscience, he has public spirit and would ameliorate the condition of the people, he lives on his estate in the country, and occupies himself zealously with local business, schools and agriculture. But he is shy, apt to suspect and to take offence, somewhat impracticable, out of his element in the gay world of Moscow. Kitty likes him, but her fancy has been taken by a brilliant guardsman, Count Wronsky, who has paid her attentions. Wronsky is described to us by Stiva; he is “one of the finest specimens of the _jeunesse dorée_ of St. Petersburg; immensely rich, handsome, aide-de-camp to the emperor, great interest at his back, and a good fellow notwithstanding; more than a good fellow, intelligent besides and well read—a man who has a splendid career before him.” Let us complete the picture by adding that Wronsky is a powerful man, over thirty, bald at the top of his head, with irreproachable manners, cool and calm, but a little haughty. A hero, one murmurs to oneself, too much of the Guy Livingstone type, though without the bravado and exaggeration. And such is, justly enough perhaps, the first impression, an impression which continues all through the first volume; but Wronsky, as we shall see, improves towards the end.

Kitty discourages Levine, who retires in misery and confusion. But Wronsky is attracted by Anna Karénine, and ceases his attentions to Kitty. The impression made on her heart by Wronsky was not deep; but she is so keenly mortified with herself, so ashamed, and so upset, that she falls ill, and is sent with her family to winter abroad. There she regains health and mental composure, and discovers at the same time that her liking for Levine was deeper than she knew, that it was a genuine feeling, a strong and lasting one. On her return they meet, their hearts come together, they are married; and in spite of Levine’s waywardness, irritability, and unsettlement of mind, of which I shall have more to say presently, they are profoundly happy. Well, and who could help being happy with Kitty? So I find myself adding impatiently. Count Tolstoi’s heroines are really so living and charming that one takes them, fiction though they are, too seriously.

But the interest of the book centers in Anna Karénine. She is Stiva’s sister, married to a high official at St. Petersburg, Alexis Karénine. She has been married to him nine years, and has one child, a boy named Serge. The marriage had not brought happiness to her, she had found in it no satisfaction to her heart and soul, she had a sense of want and isolation; but she is devoted to her boy, occupied, calm. The charm of her personality is felt even before she appears, from the moment when we hear of her being sent for as the good angel to reconcile Dolly with Stiva. Then she arrives at the Moscow station from St. Petersburg, and we see the gray eyes with their long eyelashes, the graceful carriage, the gentle and caressing smile on the fresh lips, the vivacity restrained but waiting to break through, the fulness of life, the softness and strength joined, the harmony, the bloom, the charm. She goes to Dolly, and achieves, with infinite tact and tenderness, the task of reconciliation. At a ball a few days later, we add to our first impression of Anna’s beauty, dark hair, a quantity of little curls over her temples and at the back of her neck, sculptural shoulders, firm throat, and beautiful arms. She is in a plain dress of black velvet with a pearl necklace, a bunch of forget-me-nots in the front of her dress, another in her hair. This is Anna Karénine.

She had traveled from St. Petersburg with Wronsky’s mother; had seen him at the Moscow station, where he came to meet his mother, had been struck with his looks and manner, and touched by his behavior in an accident which happened while they were in the station to a poor workman crushed by a train. At the ball she meets him again; she is fascinated by him and he by her. She had been told of Kitty’s fancy, and had gone to the ball meaning to help Kitty; but Kitty is forgotten, or any rate neglected; the spell which draws Wronsky and Anna is irresistible. Kitty finds herself opposite to them in a quadrille together:—

“She seemed to remark in Anna the symptoms of an over-excitement which
she herself knew from experience—that of success. Anna appeared to her
as if intoxicated with it. Kitty knew to what to attribute that
brilliant and animated look, that happy and triumphant smile, those
half-parted lips, those movements full of grace and harmony.”

Anna returns to St. Petersburg, and Wronsky returns there at the same time; they meet on the journey, they keep meeting in society, and Anna begins to find her husband, who before had not been sympathetic, intolerable. Alexis Karénine is much older than herself, a bureaucrat, a formalist, a poor creature; he has conscience, there is a root of goodness in him, but on the surface and until deeply stirred he is tiresome, pedantic, vain, exasperating. The change in Anna is not in the slightest degree comprehended by him; he sees nothing which an intelligent man might in such a case see, and does nothing which an intelligent man would do. Anna abandons herself to her passion for Wronsky.

I remember M. Nisard saying to me many years ago at the École Normale in Paris, that he respected the English because they are _une nation qui sait se gêner_—people who can put constraint on themselves and go through what is disagreeable. Perhaps in the Slav nature this valuable faculty is somewhat wanting; a very strong impulse is too much regarded as irresistible, too little as what can be resisted and ought to be resisted however difficult and disagreeable the resistance may be. In our high society with its pleasure and dissipation, laxer notions may to some extent prevail; but in general an English mind will be startled by Anna’s suffering herself to be so overwhelmed and irretrievably carried away by her passion, by her almost at once regarding it, apparently, as something which it was hopeless to fight against. And this I say irrespectively of the worth of her lover. Wronsky’s gifts and graces hardly qualify him, one might think, to be the object of so instantaneous and mighty a passion on the part of a woman like Anna. But that is not the question. Let us allow that these passions are incalculable; let us allow that one of the male sex scarcely does justice, perhaps, to the powerful and handsome guardsman and his attractions. But if Wronsky had been even such a lover as Alcibiades or the Master of Ravenswood, still that Anna, being what she is and her circumstances being what they are, should show not a hope, hardly a thought, of conquering her passion, of escaping from its fatal power, is to our notions strange and a little bewildering.

I state the objection; let me add that it is the triumph of Anna’s charm that it remains paramount for us nevertheless; that throughout her course, with its failures, errors, and miseries, still the impression of her large, fresh, rich, generous, delightful nature, never leaves us—keeps our sympathy, keeps even, I had almost said, our respect.

To return to the story. Soon enough poor Anna begins to experience the truth of what the Wise Man told us long ago, that “the way of transgressors is hard.” Her agitation at a steeple-chase where Wronsky is in danger attracts her husband’s notice and provokes his remonstrance. He is bitter and contemptuous. In a transport of passion Anna declares to him that she is his wife no longer; that she loves Wronsky, belongs to Wronsky. Hard at first, formal, cruel, thinking only of himself, Karénine, who, as I have said, has a conscience, is touched by grace at the moment when Anna’s troubles reach their height. He returns to her to find her with a child just born to her and Wronsky, the lover in the house and Anna apparently dying. Karénine has words of kindness and forgiveness only. The noble and victorious effort transfigures him, and all that her husband gains in the eyes of Anna, her lover Wronsky loses. Wronsky comes to Anna’s bedside, and standing there by Karénine, buries his face in his hands. Anna says to him, in the hurried voice of fever:—

“‘Uncover your face; look at that man; he is a saint. Yes, uncover
your face; uncover it,’ she repeated with an angry air. ‘Alexis,
uncover his face; I want to see him.’

“Alexis took the hands of Wronsky and uncovered his face, disfigured
by suffering and humiliation.

“‘Give him your hand; pardon him.’

“Alexis stretched out his hand without even seeking to restrain his
tears.

“‘Thank God, thank God!’ she said; ‘all is ready now. How ugly those
flowers are.’ she went on, pointing to the wallpaper; ‘they are not a
bit like violets. My God, my God! when will all this end? Give me
morphine, doctor—I want morphine. Oh, my God, my God!’”

She seems dying, and Wronsky rushes out and shoots himself. And so, in a common novel, the story would end. Anna would die, Wronsky would commit suicide, Karénine would survive, in possession of our admiration and sympathy. But the story does not always end so in life; neither does it end so in Count Tolstoi’s novel. Anna recovers from her fever, Wronsky from his wound. Anna’s passion for Wronsky reawakens, her estrangement from Karénine returns. Nor does Karénine remain at the height at which in the forgiveness scene we saw him. He is formal, pedantic, irritating. Alas! even if he were not all these, perhaps even his _pince-nez_, and his rising eyebrows, and his cracking finger-joints, would have been provocation enough. Anna and Wronsky depart together. They stay for a time in Italy, then return to Russia. But her position is false, her disquietude incessant, and happiness is impossible for her. She takes opium every night, only to find that “not poppy nor mandragora shall ever medicine her to that sweet sleep which she owed yesterday.” Jealousy and irritability grow upon her; she tortures Wronsky, she tortures herself. Under these trials Wronsky, it must be said, comes out well, and rises in our esteem. His love for Anna endures; he behaves, as our English phrase is, “like a gentleman”; his patience is in general exemplary. But then Anna, let us remember, is to the last, through all the fret and misery, still Anna; always with something which charms; nay, with something in her nature, which consoles and does good. Her life, however, was becoming impossible under its existing conditions. A trifling misunderstanding brought the inevitable end. After a quarrel with Anna, Wronsky had gone one morning into the country to see his mother; Anna summons him by telegraph to return at once, and receives an answer from him that he cannot return before ten at night. She follows him to his mother’s place in the country, and at the station hears what leads her to believe that he is not coming back. Maddened with jealousy and misery, she descends the platform and throws herself under the wheels of a goods train passing through the station. It is over—the graceful head is untouched, but all the rest is a crushed, formless heap. Poor Anna!

We have been in a world which misconducts itself nearly as much as the world of a French novel all palpitating with “modernity.” But there are two things in which the Russian novel—Count Tolstoi’s novel at any rate—is very advantageously distinguished from the type of novel now so much in request in France. In the first place, there is no fine sentiment, at once tiresome and false. We are not told to believe, for example, that Anna is wonderfully exalted and ennobled by her passion for Wronsky. The English reader is thus saved from many a groan of impatience. The other thing is yet more important. Our Russian novelist deals abundantly with criminal passion and with adultery, but he does not seem to feel himself owing any service to the goddess Lubricity, or bound to put in touches at this goddess’s dictation. Much in _Anna Karénine_ is painful, much is unpleasant, but nothing is of a nature to trouble the senses, or to please those who wish their senses troubled. This taint is wholly absent. In the French novels where it is so abundantly present its baneful effects do not end with itself. Burns long ago remarked with deep truth that it _petrifies feeling._ Let us revert for a moment to the powerful novel of which I spoke at the outset, _Madame Bovary_. Undoubtedly the taint in question is present in _Madame Bovary_, although to a much less degree than in more recent French novels, which will be in every one’s mind. But _Madame Bovary_, with this taint, is a work of _petrified feeling_; over it hangs an atmosphere of bitterness, irony, impotence; not a personage in the book to rejoice or console us; the springs of freshness and feeling are not there to create such personages. Emma Bovary follows a course in some respects like that of Anna, but where, in Emma Bovary, is Anna’s charm? The treasures of compassion, tenderness, insight, which alone, amid such guilt and misery, can enable charm to subsist and to emerge, are wanting to Flaubert. He is cruel with the cruelty of petrified feeling, to his poor heroine; he pursues her without pity or pause, as with malignity; he is harder upon her himself than any reader even, I think, will be inclined to be.

But where the springs of feeling have carried Count Tolstoi, since he created Anna ten or twelve years ago, we have now to see.