Chapter VII: Part 7

"For it seemed as if this fragile being was absorbed and consumed
by his affection. . . . Others seek happiness in their attachments;
when they no longer find it, the attachment gently vanishes. But he
loved for the sake of loving. No amount of suffering was sufficient
to discourage him. He could enter upon a new phase, that of woe;
but the phase of coldness he could never arrive at. It would have
been indeed a phase of physical agony,--for his love was his life,
and, delicious or bitter, he had not the power of withdrawing
himself a single moment from its domination."

Chopin, suffering from severe sickness, was ordered to a warmer climate; and in the fall of 1837 Madame Sand accompanied him to the Island of Majorca, where she nursed him back to life, although his friends at the time of his departure never thought to see him again, and although he was dangerously ill for a long time after their arrival. This solitude, surrounded by the blue waves of the Mediterranean, and shaded by groves of orange, seemed fitted by its exceeding loveliness for the ardent vows of youthful lovers, still believing in their naive and sweet illusions, sighing for happiness in some desert isle. In this case it was the refuge of those who had grown weary and disenchanted with life, but who hoped in deep devotion to each other to find some solace for their sadness. The memory of those days, like the remembrance of an entrancing ecstasy which Fate grants but once in a lifetime to her most favored children, always remained dear to the heart of Chopin. When he was restored to health they returned to Paris, where their friendship was continued for about eight years. She then severed her connection with him. Liszt asks in regard to this, in his life of Chopin:--

"Has genius ever attained that utter self-abnegation, that sublime
humility of heart which gives the power to make those strange
sacrifices of the entire Past, of the whole Future; those
immolations as courageous as mysterious; those mystic and utter
holocausts of self, not temporary and changing, but monotonous and
constant,--through whose might alone tenderness may justly claim
the higher word devotion? Has not the force of genius its own
exclusive and legitimate exactions, and does not the force of woman
consist in the abdication of all exactions? Can the purple and
burning flames of genius ever float over the immaculate azure of a
woman's destiny?"

Liszt also tells us that--

"Chopin spoke frequently and almost by preference of Madame Sand,
without bitterness or recrimination. Tears always filled his eyes
when he named her; but with a kind of bitter sweetness he gave
himself up to the memories of past days, alas, now stripped of
their manifold significance. . . . All attempts to fix his
attention upon other objects were made in vain; he refused to be
comforted, and would constantly speak of the one engrossing
subject. . . . He was another great and illustrious victim to the
transitory attachments occurring between persons of different
character, who, experiencing a surprise full of delight in their
first sudden meeting, mistake it for a durable feeling, and build
hopes and illusions upon it which can never be realized. It is
always the nature the most deeply moved, the most absolute in its
hopes and attachments, for which all transplantation is impossible,
which is destroyed and ruined in the painful awakening from the
absorbing dream. . . . Chopin felt, and often repeated, that the
sundering of this long friendship, the rupture of this strong tie,
broke all the cords which bound him to life."

Her friends say, upon her part, that he was a morbid, dreary invalid, jealous beyond endurance, and that she suffered much at his hands, and separated from him only when she could endure his exactions no longer. He did not long survive the sundering of their relations, and died in Paris in 1849, very deeply deplored by all admirers of his genius. Chopin was a wonderfully gifted and very remarkable man, exceedingly reserved, and with little of the egotism of genius. His eyes were blue and dreamy, his smile very sweet, his complexion very fair and delicate, his hair light in color, soft and silky, his nose slightly aquiline. His bearing was so distinguished, and his manners stamped with so much high breeding, that involuntarily he was always treated _en prince_. His gestures were many and graceful, yet he was on the whole serene in his bearing, and generally gay in company, though subject to moods of deep melancholy. He was passionately devoted to Poland all his life, and when he was dying requested the Countess Potocka to sing to him the melodies of his country. He was deeply religious in nature, a devout Catholic.

It was during the years of which we have been speaking that George Sand produced her most famous works. "Indiana" was followed by "Valentine," "Lelia," and "Lettres d'un Voyageur." Others followed in quick succession, many of them dealing with the subject of marriage in such a manner as to raise a most violent storm about her head. People who had never read these books described them as being of revolting indecency; and that impression prevails in many quarters even yet. In point of fact, she is no more open to the charge of indelicacy than any prominent English novelist of the day. The opinions are bad enough many times, but the style is always pure and perfect. This is the answer she herself made to her critics:--

"I was astounded when a few Saint Simonians, conscientious and
sincere philanthropists, estimable and sincere seekers of truth,
asked me what I would put in the place of husbands. I answered them
naively that it was marriage; in the same way as in the place of
priests who have so much compromised religion, I believe it is
religion which ought to be put. . . . That _love_ which I erect and
crown over the ruins of the infamous, is my Utopia, my dream, my
poetry. That love is grand, noble, beautiful, voluntary, eternal;
but that love is marriage such as Jesus made it, such as Saint Paul
explained it. This I ask of society as an innovation, as an
institution lost in the night of ages, which it would be opportune
to revive, to draw from the dust of aeons, and the shrine of habits,
if it wishes to see real conjugal fidelity, real repose, and the
real sanctity of the family, replace the species of shameful
contract and stupid despotism bred by the infamous decrepitude of
the world."

It must always be remembered that she wrote of French marriages, in which there is no pretence of having love to start with; and if we remember this, her language can scarcely be considered too strong. The system is utterly vile, and her hatred of it an honor to her in every sense. Had she done nothing worse than to protest against this form of marriage few would condemn her; her condemnation comes rather from the life she felt it consistent with her theories to live for many years.

What the world said was: "The welfare of the human family demands that a marriage legally made shall never be questioned or undone. Marriage is not a union depending on love, or congeniality, or any such condition. It is just as sacred when made for money, or for ambition, or for lust of the flesh, or for any other purpose, however ignoble or base, as when contracted in the spirit of the purest mutual love." Against all this, George Sand, both with pen and life, protested. She contended that it was love alone which made marriage anything but a disgusting sin. We have heard much of this in these latter days, even in our own country, but it was George Sand who first struck the keynote; the doctrine is essentially hers in all its parts. That she denounced the whole system of marriages of convenience, is an honor to her; that she proclaimed love as the only true foundation for marriage, is equally an honor; but that she assailed the institution of legal marriage as a whole, and overleaped its bounds and became a law to herself in the matter, is her weakness and her shame. It is frequently denied that she did this. It is said that she did not assail the institution of marriage, but only the things that are perpetrated in its name.

"But all the same [as another has well said], her eloquent
expositions of ill-assorted unions, her daring appeals from the
obligations they impose to the affections they outrage, her
assertion of the rights of nature over the conventions of society,
have the final effect of justifying the violation of duty on the
precarious ground of passion and inclination.

"Nobody who knows what the actual life of George Sand has been can
doubt for a moment the true nature of her opinions on the subject
of marriage. It is not a pleasant subject to touch, and we should
shrink from it if it were not as notorious as everything else by
which she has become famous in her time. It forms in reality as
much a part of the philosophy she desires to impress upon the world
as the books through which she has expanded her theory. It is
neither more nor less than her theory of freedom and independence
in the matter of passion (we dare not dignify it by any higher
name) put into action,--rather vagrant action, we fear, but on that
account all the more decisive."

Society and she were naturally at war from the beginning of her career; and she suffered from it, though she dealt many bitter blows at it even while she suffered. "What has it done," she says in one place,--

"what has it done for our moral education, and what is it doing for
our children, this society shielded with such care? Nothing. Those
whom it calls vain complainers, and rebels, and madmen, may reply:
Suffer us to bewail our martyrs, poets without a country that we
are, forlorn singers well versed in the causes of their misery and
of our own. You do not comprehend the malady which killed them;
they themselves did not comprehend it. If one or two of us at the
present day open our eyes to a new light, is it not by a strange
and unaccountable good Providence? and have we not to seek our
grain of faith in storm and darkness, combated by doubt, irony, the
absence of all sympathy, all example, all brotherly aid, all
protection and countenance in high places? Try yourselves to speak
to your brethren heart to heart, conscience to conscience! Try it!
but you cannot, busied as you are with watching and patching up in
all directions your dykes which the flood is invading: the material
existence of this society of yours absorbs all your cares, and
requires more than all your efforts. Meanwhile the powers of human
thought are growing into strength and rise on all sides around you.
Among these threatening apparitions there are some which fade away
and re-enter the darkness, because the hour of life has not yet
struck, and the fiery spirit which quickened them could strive no
longer with the horrors of the present chaos; but there are others
that can wait, and you will find them confronting you, up and
alive, to say, 'You have allowed the death of our brethren, and we,
we do not mean to die.'"

But she rises after a while out of her depths of passionate contention with a world out of joint, with the reign of stupidity and the tyranny of convention, into serener heights; and in her later books she gives us exquisite pictures of nature, with which she has the closest sympathy; lovely stories of rural life and gentle tales of perfectly pure love. Her passionate resentment against the world has worn itself out, and she is calmer, wiser now. Her daughter, too, Solange, has grown to be a woman and has a lover of her own, and the household thoughts and cares, and the tenderness of a serious and unselfish cast which creep into a mother's heart upon such occasions, shed their sweetness upon this wayward soul, and inspire it with congenial utterances. Now she looks back and says:--

"My poor children, my own flesh and blood, will perhaps turn upon
me and say: 'You are leading us wrong; you mean to ruin us as well
as yourself. Are you not unhappy, reprobated, evil spoken of? What
have you gained by these unequal struggles, by these much-trumpeted
duels of yours with Custom and Belief? Let us do as others do; let
us get what is to be got from this easy and tolerant world.' This
is what they will say to me. Or at best, if, out of tenderness for
me, or from their own natural disposition, they give ear to my
words and believe me, whither should I guide them? Into what
abysses shall we go and plunge ourselves, we three? for we shall be
our own three upon earth, and not one soul with us. What shall I
reply to them, if they come and say to me: 'Yes, life is unbearable
in a world like this. Let us die together. Show us the path of
Bernica, or the Lake of Stenio, or the glaciers of Jacques'?"

Again, in the later times, she said:--

"Let us all try to be saints, and if we succeed we will know all
the more how difficult a thing it is, and what indulgence is owed
to those who are not yet saints. Then we shall acknowledge that
there is something to be modified, either in law or opinion; for
the aim of society should be to render perfection accessible to
all, and man is very feeble when he struggles alone against the mad
torrent of custom and of ideas."

A very wise, saying truly, written out of her own experience. Sad, too, as is much of her later writing, though there is not in it the passionate despair of her earlier work.

She lived to be seventy-two years old, and had known and experienced many phases of life,--the tumultuous passions and the wild revolt of youth, the cooler and more self-contained life of middle age, and the sombre color of a rather hopeless old age. Even in age she had her pleasures, however. She delighted in her grandchildren, in books, in pictures, in nature, and in work. Her unwearied pen moved until the last, and did not lose its cunning. There was much of the old strength and power to the last. But she had ceased to desire to destroy; she sought at last to build up.

Here are two descriptions of her as she appeared to different observers, in youth and in later life. Heine, who saw with the eye of an artist and wrote with the pen of a critic, described her in youth:--

"George Sand, the greatest of French writers, is a woman of
remarkable beauty. Like the genius revealed in her writings, her
countenance may rather be called beautiful than fascinating. The
face of George Sand has precisely the character of Grecian
regularity. The cut of her features has not exactly the severity of
antique models; her face is softened by modern sentiment, which
veils it with sadness. Her forehead is not high, and her rich and
luxuriant brown hair falls from either side of her head upon her
shoulders. Her eyes are not brilliant; has their fire gone out
under frequent tears, or only in her writings? George Sand's eyes
are soft and tranquil. Her nose is neither aquiline, nor spiritual,
nor pugged; it is a straight and ordinary nose. Around her mouth
habitually plays a smile of kindness and benevolence, but not very
bewitching: her inferior lip protrudes a little, and seems to
reveal a fatigue of the senses. Her chin is finely formed. Her
shoulders are magnificent; also her hands, her arms, her feet,
which are very small. George Sand is beautiful like the Venus of
Milo."

Now hear one who described her in old age:--

"She was not at all like the woman of my imagination; she looked
very little like the bold and vigorous thinker she is; one would
have taken her at first sight for a gentle, serene old grandmother.
She is short, and inclined to _embonpoint_. Her hair, which is
still abundant, though faded by time, was simply arranged. Her
features are not striking; her eyes have that vague, dreamy look
which she herself refers to in her 'Histoire de Ma Vie' as one of
her marked characteristics."

Most people in her youth found her beautiful, though some thought her face heavy, and even coarse; but she had a matchless charm of manner which had far more effect than any mere beauty. She seemed to enslave men at her will. Poets, artists, statesmen, and priests, were all at her side, or at her feet. Her manner, at least in later life, was very retiring, and she was singularly modest and free from literary vanity. When asked once which of her works she preferred, she answered, apparently quite sincerely, "Mon Dieu, I detest them all."

Let us close with Matthew Arnold's tribute of respect:--

"It is silent, that eloquent voice; it is sunk, that noble, that
speaking head; we sum up as we best can what she said to us, and we
bid her adieu. From many hearts, in many lands, a troop of tender
and grateful regrets converge toward her humble churchyard in
Berry. Let them be joined by these words of sad homage from one of
a nation which she esteemed, and which knew her very little and
very ill. Her guiding thought, the guiding thought which she did
her best to make ours too, 'the sentiment of the ideal life, which
is none other than man's normal life as we shall one day know it,'
is in harmony with words and promises familiar to that sacred place
where she lies."

Over her grave might well be written those words over another grave in Pere-la-Chaise:--

HE KNOWETH.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY.

In the beginning of the eighteenth century the great-grandfather of the famous Lord Macaulay, the author of the glowing and impassioned History of England, was minister of Tiree and Coll, when his stipend was taken from him at the instance of the Laird of Ardchattan. The slight inconvenience of having nothing to live upon did not seem to incline the old minister in the least degree to resign his charge and to seek a flock who could feed their shepherd. He stayed valiantly on, doing his duty faithfully by his humble people. But after some time had elapsed, "his health being much impaired, and there being no church or meeting-house, he was exposed to the violence of the weather at all seasons; and having no manse or glebe, and no fund for communion elements, and having no mortification for schools or other pious purposes in either of the islands, and the air being unwholesome,"--he was finally compelled to leave, much to his own regret and that of his poor little flock.

The reasons enumerated certainly seem sufficient to us in these later days for a change of parishes; and indeed some modern ministers have been known to change upon provocations less than these. There was fine stuff in the old Scotch ministers of that day, and it is pleasant to hear that this one found a new charge to which he ministered for half a century. There were many other ministers in the Macaulay family during several generations; but Zachary Macaulay, the father of the historian, seemed born with a taste for business, and was accordingly sent out to Jamaica to learn mercantile affairs, when quite young. Here he saw much of negro slavery, and became so much impressed with its horrors, and so filled with sympathy for the black race, that he resolved to devote himself to their interests. He accordingly resigned his position in Jamaica and returned to Scotland, where until his death he labored in the unpopular and misunderstood ranks of the abolitionists. A colony was projected in Sierra Leone for freed slaves, and young Macaulay was appointed a member of the council, and sailed for Africa to take practical part in the work for the negro. Soon after his arrival there he succeeded to the position of Governor, and for some time worked heroically in that capacity. But in the very midst of the Reign of Terror in France, a French fleet bore down upon the little colony and almost wiped it out of existence. Zachary Macaulay stayed for a year after the attack, heroically trying to rehabilitate the little colony, and partially succeeded in doing so, when, his health failing, he returned to England, where he gave almost the entire remaining years of his life to the work of negro emancipation in one form or another.

Thomas Babington Macaulay was born the 25th of October, 1800, the day of St. Crispin and the anniversary of Agincourt. He drew in the love of freedom with his earliest breath, and he was reared with the utmost care by those high moralists, his noble parents. He was a prodigy from babyhood. From the time he was three years old he read incessantly, for the most part lying on the rug before the fire. Many laughable stories are told of his precocity, particularly of the fine language he used when a mere infant. For instance, when four years old some hot coffee was spilled on his legs, and after a little time a lady inquired of him if he felt better now, when the phenomenon replied, "Thank you, madam, the agony is abated." Of course so quaint and remarkable a child was much petted and spoiled, and probably rendered somewhat conceited and priggish. But he was docile and affectionate, and was then, as always thereafter, the idol of his family.

After he left Cambridge he went up to London, and soon after wrote his article on Milton for the "Edinburgh Review." Like Byron, he awoke one morning and found himself famous. Compliments and enthusiastic letters poured in upon him from all sides. The one compliment which he said gave him the most pleasure was Jeffrey's word at the end of a business note: "The more I think, the less I can conceive where you picked up that style." And no wonder; that style was not a thing to be picked up every day. Jeffrey did well to wonder. Macaulay at once became the fashion, and invitations were showered upon him from every side, many of which he accepted. The first flush of such a success as Macaulay's must have been very sweet to a young man of his genial nature. He was thus described by Praed:--

"There came up a short, manly figure, marvellously upright, with a
bad neckcloth, and one hand in his waistcoat pocket. Of regular
beauty he had little to boast; but in faces where there is an
expression of great power or of great good-humor, or both, you do
not regret its absence."

He had a massive head, and features powerful and rugged, but peculiarly expressive. His face was oftentimes all aglow with emotion. He dressed badly but not cheaply; indeed, his wardrobe, Trevelyan tells us, was always enormously overstocked. "Later in life he indulged himself in an apparently inexhaustible succession of handsome embroidered waistcoats, which he used to regard with much complacency."

Among the first places to which the new lion was invited was of course the famous resort of celebrities, Holland House; and in his letters to his two younger sisters,--to whom he was always the most devoted of brothers,--he frequently narrates his experiences there. Let us glance at a few of these pictures:--

"Well, my dear, I have been to Holland House. I took a glass coach,
and arrived, through a fine avenue of elms, at the great entrance
about seven o'clock. The house is delightful, the very perfection
of the old Elizabethan style,--a considerable number of very large
and very comfortable rooms, rich with antique carving and gilding,
but carpeted and furnished with all the skill of the best modern
upholsterers. Lady Holland is certainly a woman of considerable
talent and great acquirements. To me she was excessively courteous;
yet there was a haughtiness in her courtesy which, even after all
that I had heard of her, surprised me. The centurion did not keep
his soldiers in better order than she keeps her guests. It is to
one, 'Go,' and he goeth; and to another, 'Do this,' and it is done.
'Ring the bell, Mr. Macaulay.' 'Lay down that screen, Lord Russell;
you will spoil it.' 'Mr. Allen, take a candle and show Mr. Cradock
the picture of Bonaparte.' Her ladyship used me as well, I believe,
as it is her way to use anybody. . . .

"I had a good deal of pleasant conversation with Rogers. He was
telling me of the curiosity and interest which attached to the
persons of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. When Scott dined at a
gentleman's house in London not long ago, all the servant-maids in
the house asked leave to stand in the passage and see him pass. He
was, as you may conceive, greatly flattered. About Lord Byron, whom
he knew well, he told me some curious anecdotes. When Byron passed
through Florence, Rogers was there. The inn had fifty windows in
front. All were crowded with women, mostly Englishwomen, to catch a
glimpse of their favorite poet. Among them were some at whose
houses he had been in England oftentimes, and with whom he had
lived on friendly terms. He would not notice them or return their
salutations. Rogers was the only person he spoke to. The worst
thing that I know about Lord Byron is the very unfavorable
impression which he made on men who certainly were not inclined to
judge him harshly, and who were not personally ill-used by him.
Sharp and Rogers both speak of him as an unpleasant, affected,
splenetic person. I have heard hundreds and thousands of persons
who never knew him rant about him, but I never heard a single
expression of fondness for him fall from the lips of any one who
knew him well. Yet even now there are those who cannot talk a
quarter of an hour about Charles Fox without tears--after
twenty-five years. . . .

"In the evening Lord John Russell came, and old Talleyrand. I had
seen Talleyrand before. I now had the pleasure of listening to his
conversation. He is certainly the greatest curiosity I ever fell in
with. His head is sunk down between two high shoulders. One of his
feet is hideously distorted. His face is pale as that of a corpse,
and wrinkled to a frightful degree. His eyes have an odd, glassy
stare. His hair, thickly powdered and pomatumed, hangs down his
shoulders on each side as straight as a pound of tallow candles.
His conversation, however, soon makes you forget his ugliness and
infirmities."

One more glimpse of Lady Holland:--

"Her ladyship is all courtesy and kindness to me; but her demeanor
to some others, particularly to poor Allen, is such as quite pains
me to witness. He is really treated like a negro slave. 'Mr. Allen,
go into my drawing-room and bring my reticule.' 'Mr. Allen, go and
see what can be the matter that they do not bring up dinner.' 'Mr.
Allen, there is not turtle-soup enough for you. You must take
gravy-soup or none.' Yet I scarcely pity the man. He has an
independent income, and if he can stoop to be ordered about like a
footman I cannot so much blame her for the contempt with which she
treats him."

Here are one or two touches of nature:--

"Get Blackwood's new number. There is a description of me in it: 'A
little, splay-footed, ugly dumpling of a fellow, with a mouth from
ear to ear.' Conceive how such a charge must affect a man so
enamoured of his own beauty as I am."

"After the debate I walked about the streets with Bulwer till near
three o'clock. I spoke to him about his novels with perfect
sincerity, praising warmly and criticising freely. He took the
praise as a greedy boy takes an apple-pie, and the criticism as a
good, dutiful boy takes senna-tea. At all events I shall expect him
to puff me well. I do not see why I should not have my puffers as
well as my neighbors."

Here is a glimpse of the domestic economy of the great Holland House:--

"The dinner was not as good as usual, and her ladyship kept up a
continued lamentation during the whole repast. I should never have
found out that everything was not as it should be, but for her
criticisms. The soup was too salt; the cutlets were not exactly
_comme il faut_; and the pudding was hardly enough boiled. I was
amused to hear from the splendid mistress of such a house the same
sort of apologies which ---- made when her cook forgot the joint
and sent too small a dinner to table."

All these artless details were given to amuse his young sisters at home,--the beings he loved best on earth, not only at this time but throughout life. If he ever had any deeper love for another, there is no hint given of it in his life or letters. Probably for many reasons he never contemplated marriage. When he was young he was too poor to think of it; when he was older he had his own family upon his hands, and cared for them munificently to the end. He was very generous with his money and never learned the art of saving. It would seem scarcely possible that a man of his warm heart and ardent temperament could have gone through life with no romance; but if he had any such experience it has not been given to the world. He loved his sisters, and his nephews and nieces, with the most passionate devotion, and was in turn idolized by them. His nephew says:--

"It must be acknowledged that where he loved, he loved more
entirely and more exclusively than was well for himself. It was
improvident in him to consecrate such intensity of feeling upon
relations who, however deeply they were attached to him, could not
always be in a position to requite him with the whole of their time
and the whole of their heart. He suffered much for that
improvidence, but he was too just and kind to permit others to
suffer with him; and it is not for one who obtained by inheritance
a share of his inestimable affection to regret a weakness such as
this."

This refers to his grief at the marriage of his sisters, which was really great and enduring. He had planned to have them in his home, and not to be in theirs; and when it turned out otherwise he could not at first be reconciled to it. His sister Nancy went out with him to India after his appointment there, and soon fell in with young Trevelyan,--to whom she became engaged, with her brother's approval but to his great grief. He calls it "a tragical denouement to an absurd plot." After the marriage they formed one household during his stay in India, and her home was to all intents and purposes his own during life. His youngest sister died during his stay abroad, and of her he thus writes:--

"The last month has been the most painful I ever went through.
Indeed, I never knew before what it was to be miserable. Early in
January letters from England brought me news of the death of my
sister. What she was to me no words can express. I will not say
that she was dearer to me than anything in the world, for my sister
who was with me was equally dear; but she was as dear to me as one
human being can be to another. Even now, when time has begun to do
its healing work, I cannot write about her without being altogether
unmanned."

His only solace was found in books. He could at any time bury himself in these and forget all the world. Probably there never was such a reader before. He devoured books like a gourmand. He read everything--Greek, Latin, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese; and books of all kinds in these languages,--history, _belles-lettres_, poetry, novels, old chronicles. He seemed to have a passion for all. He would read a book in an hour which it would take any one else half a day to get through in the poorest shape. And he would know what was in it, too. He read enormous quantities of novels always, and was very fond of poor ones,--none too poor for him were written at that time. It is a question whether if he had lived till this day the same thing could have been said of him. It is not recorded whether he ever encountered any of Anthony Trollope's works during his life.

If Macaulay had not been known as a great man of letters he would probably have been known as a great orator. He was, indeed, one of the best speakers of his day, and the House of Commons, that listens to so few speakers, always gave its attention to him. It seems a great pity that he should have given so many years of his life to Parliament, and to official work, when his true career undoubtedly was literature pure and simple, for which no man of his time was so splendidly equipped, both by nature and by preparation. We ought to have had from him more enduring historical works, and more of his masterly estimates of the works of other men. After his retirement into private life, in 1847, he enjoyed his freedom intensely, and much regretted that he had not obtained it sooner. He enjoyed the pleasures of society greatly at this time. He was the centre of a gifted circle of men--the most brilliant of their time--all of whom were his close friends and admirers. How brilliantly these men talked is already a matter of tradition. Macaulay was the most wonderful conversationalist, probably, since Dr. Johnson, not even excepting Carlyle, or Sydney Smith, or Coleridge. Very laughable stories are told, of course, of a man who would talk three hours without pause, and undoubtedly there were many people sadly bored by him in his day; but to those who could appreciate the remarkable stores of information he possessed, and the lucidity with which he could deal them forth,--to say nothing of his rhetorical splendors,--those discourses of his were never tedious, but full of supreme interest. To be sure, Sydney Smith sneered at his "wonderful stores of very accurate--misinformation," but he was one who did not like a rival near the throne; and in Macaulay's absence he was himself the sun around which the social universe revolved. Thackeray wrote after Macaulay's death:--

"Now that wonderful tongue is to speak no more, will not many a man
grieve that he no longer can listen? To remember the talk is to
wonder, to think not only of the treasures he had stored, but of
the trifles which he could produce with equal readiness. What a
vast, brilliant, wonderful store of learning he had; what strange
lore would he not fetch at your bidding."

No report of these conversations exists, except such as is found scattered in private diaries. In these there are records of many an Attic night, and still more agreeable morning. Lord Carlisle's journal contains as many of these records, perhaps, as any one's. He makes glowing mention of Macaulay and his eloquence, after nearly every meeting of the famous circle. The only criticism he made, and it is one that was frequently made on Macaulay, was that it was remarkable what quantities of trash he remembered. He could repeat pages of the very dreariest stuff that ever was written, and was in danger of doing so on small provocation,--an infliction it must have been hard for his friends to have endured sometimes. Great stories are told of his remarkable memory,--one seldom equalled by any man. He was always willing to accept a friendly challenge to a feat of memory. One day in the board-room of the British Museum he handed to Lord Aberdeen a sheet of foolscap covered with writing arranged in parallel columns down each of the four pages. This document, on which the ink was still wet, proved to be a full list of the Senior Wranglers at Cambridge, with their dates and colleges for the hundred years during which the names of Senior Wranglers had been recorded in the University Calendar. On another occasion Sir David Dundas asked:--

"'Macaulay, do you know your Popes?' 'No,' was the answer; 'I
always get wrong among the Innocents.' 'But you can say your
Archbishops of Canterbury?' 'Any fool,' said Macaulay, 'could say
his Archbishops of Canterbury backwards;' and he went off at a
score, drawing breath only once in order to remark on some oddity."

He was easily bored in general society, and in later life rarely went beyond his little circle of intimates. Children were the only people of whom he never tired, and he was a royal companion to them always. He was unrivalled in the invention of games, and never wearied of repeating them. He had an inexhaustible repertory of small dramas for his nieces, and sustained a great variety of parts with much skill. An old friend of the family writes:--

"There was one never-failing game of building up a den with
newspapers behind the sofa, and of enacting robbers and tigers; we
shrieking with terror, but always begging him to begin again, of
which we never grew weary."

He writes to a friend concerning Dickens, that he did not think it possible for fiction to affect him as the death of little Nell had done, and adds:--

"Have you seen the first number of 'Dombey'? There is not much in
it, but there is one passage which made me cry as if my heart would
break. It is the description of a little girl who has just lost her
mother, and is unkindly treated by everybody. Images of that kind
always overpower me even when the artist is less skilful than
Dickens."

In truth, his extreme sensibility was often a great annoyance to him. He strove very hard to overcome it, but in vain; and he was moved to tears upon a great many occasions, when he would have given much to be able to control himself.

Let us quote a little more from Thackeray's tribute to him.

"All sorts of successes were easy to him. As a lad he goes down
into the arena with others, and wins all the prizes to which he has
a mind. A place in the Senate is straightway offered to the young
man. He takes his seat there, he speaks when so minded, without
party anger or intrigue, but not without party faith and a sort of
heroic enthusiasm for his cause; and speech is also a success to
him. Still he is a poet and philosopher even more than orator. . . .
Years ago there was a wretched outcry raised because he dated a
letter from Windsor Castle, where he was staying. Immortal gods!
was not this man a fit guest for any palace in the world, or a fit
companion for any man or woman in it? The place of such a natural
chief was among the first in the land."

Macaulay died, in 1860, a sudden and painless death, and lies buried in Westminster Abbey, in the Poet's Corner, near the west wall of the South Transept, at the feet of Addison.

EDWARD BULWER LYTTON.

The British aristocracy has given to literature a few names which the world will not willingly let die. But its contribution to the world's genius has not been great in proportion to its numbers, its exceptional opportunities for culture, and the great prominence which has naturally been given to its achievements. From out its ranks have come few of the great names in English literature.

Among these the name of Lord Lytton, or Bulwer, as he is more generally known in literature, holds a prominent place. For the period of a long life he lived in the world's eye, and the world feels a great interest in the character of the man as well as in his writings.

His paternal ancestors had been settled in Norfolk since the Conquest. The name of Bulwer attests the Scandinavian origin of the Norman soldier. The great-grandfather of Edward Bulwer married the heiress of the Earles of Heydon Hall, which became the family residence. Our hero's father "contracted a romantic, if illicit, attachment to a young person of great beauty, who eloped with him from a boarding-school in which she was a teacher, and, though too haughty a man to marry beneath him, he had at least the justice to say that while she lived he would never marry any one else. And when the hand of a great and noble heiress was offered him, although a very ambitious man, he refused her upon the ground that he was not quite satisfied with the shape of her ladyship's nose." General Bulwer built for his mistress a villa in the neighborhood of London, and as he was driving into the yard on his return from some military duties which had detained him longer than usual, she ran out to meet him. In this hurried action she received a kick from one of the horses, and died of the injury.

After this, the General, who is described by his son as being of a very powerful, self-willed nature, wholly uncultivated by literature, but with that ability for action which takes lessons from life,--married the mother of our hero, a delicate girl, with intelligent, dark-blue eyes, with shy sensitive temper, passionately fond of poetry, and deeply under the influences of religion. Her family was as ancient as that of the Bulwers, the Lyttons having intermarried with many houses famous in history. But family concord was not one of the characteristics of the Lytton family, and Bulwer's grandfather and grandmother had lived stormily together for a few years, and separated by mutual consent. The essential faults are said to have been all on the side of the grandfather. The only daughter of the uncongenial pair was not permitted to dwell permanently with either. She was sent at the age of five to a large school, where she lived a sad life for a long time, without any of the tender care and affection which such a child craves, and must have, for anything like a healthful child-life. After a while she went to live with her father, and still later with her mother, from whose house she was married to General Bulwer. He was not a man who could appreciate the rarer qualities of Miss Lytton. He could have no share in her intellectual life and no sympathy with her religious nature. But the elegance of her manners satisfied his pride, her domestic habits gave him promise of a peaceful home, and, greatest merit of all, her features suited him. He liked an aquiline nose. A nose that turned up the least bit, his son tells us, would have disgusted him with a Venus. The lady's nose in this instance proving satisfactory, a happy marriage was anticipated, although the bridegroom had buried his heart in the grave of a mistress, and the bride had but partially recovered from an unhappy attachment for a man beneath herself in rank,--in fact, a merchant's son. But the marriage proved far from a happy one, and was closed after a few years by the sudden death of General Bulwer. Our hero thus writes of him:--

"Peace to thy dust, O my father! Faults thou hadst, but those
rather of temper than of heart,--of deficient education and the
manlike hardness of imperious will than of ungenerous disposition
or epicurean corruption. If thou didst fail to give happiness to
the woman whom thou didst love, many a good man is guilty of a
similar failure. It had been otherwise, I verily believe, hadst
thou chosen a partner of intellectual cultivation more akin to
thine own,--of hardier nerve and coarser fibre,--one whom thy wrath
would less have terrified, whom thy converse would more have
charmed; of less moral spirit and more physical courage."

Verily we are tempted to ask when we read of this marriage--as well as of the son's own marriage and the marriages of many other members of the English aristocracy whose domestic lives have latterly seen the light of day--whether less of moral spirit and more of physical courage is not the great need among women who aspire to the peerage. Strong nerves and a martial spirit, if they could not secure peace, would at least place the combatants upon a more equal footing, and the world would be spared the spectacle of the mild-mannered and meek bullied by the overbearing and violent.

As for Bulwer himself, he had the hot blood, imperious temper, and remorseless will of the combined Bulwers and Lyttons; and, it must be added, a vanity and egotism so boundless as to be peculiarly his own, and an arrogance and superciliousness which throughout life were a constant drawback, and which interfered materially with the acknowledgment by the world of his really great powers.

At the early age of seventeen this precocious young man, who had already been several years in society, felt his first sensations of love; and he talked of it to the end of his days as being the one genuine passion of his life. He tells the pretty story very feelingly, and no doubt it was a genuine boyish romance. Hear him:--

"Ah, God! how palpably, even in hours the least friendly to
remembrance, there rises before me when I close my eyes that
singularly dwarfed tree which overshadowed the little stream,
throwing its boughs half-way to the opposite margin. I dare not
revisit that spot, for there we were wont to meet (poor children
that we were!), thinking not of the world we had scarce entered,
dreaming not of fate and chance, full only of our first-born, our
ineffable love. It was so unlike the love of grown-up people; so
pure that not one wrong thought ever crossed it, and yet so
passionate that never again have I felt any emotion comparable to
the intensity of its tumultuous tenderness."

When the meetings so feelingly described became known to the lady's father, she was sent away at once, and Bulwer never saw her again. Very soon after, she was forced into a marriage against which her heart protested. For three years she strove to smother the love which consumed her; and when she sunk under the conflict, and death was about to relieve her, she wrote to Bulwer informing him of the sufferings she had undergone, affirming her deathless love, and begging him to visit her grave.

His son says:--

"The impressions left on my father by this early phantom of delight
were indelible and colored the whole of his afterlife. He
believed that far beyond all other influences they shaped his
character, and they never ceased to haunt his memory. Allusions to
it are constantly recurring in all his published works, and in none
of them more than in the last of all. He was much affected by them,
and not knowing to what they referred, we wondered that the
creations of his fancy should exercise such power over him. They
were not creations of fancy, but the memories of fifty years past."

After the abrupt end of his first romance he conceived a sort of friendship for Lady Caroline Lamb, which came very near the verge of love. Lady Caroline was between thirty and forty years old at this time, it being subsequent to her intrigue with Lord Byron. She looked much younger than her age,--thanks, perhaps, to a slight rounded figure and a child-like mode of wearing her pale golden hair in loose curls. She had large hazel eyes, good teeth, and a pleasant laugh. She had to a surpassing degree the qualities that charm, and never failed to please. Her conversation was remarkable, and she was the only woman, Byron said, who never bored him. She was a creature of caprice, and impulse, and whim, and had been known to send a page around to all her guests at Brocket at three o'clock in the morning to say that she was playing the great organ on the staircase, and requested the pleasure of their company. And it is added that the invitation was never refused, and that daylight would find them listening, spellbound and without a thought of bed. Here is Bulwer's own account of the close of this little episode with Lady Caroline. He was staying at her house, and had become very jealous of a Mr. Russell.

"I went downstairs. Russell sat opposite me. He wore a ring. It was
one which Lord Byron had given Lady Caroline: one which was to be
worn only by those she loved. I had often worn it myself. She had
wanted me to accept it, but I would not, because it was so costly.
And now _he_ wore it. Can you conceive my resentment, my
wretchedness? After dinner I threw myself upon a sofa. Music was
playing. Lady Caroline came to me. 'Are you mad?' said she. I
looked up. The tears stood in my eyes. I could not have spoken a
word for the world. What do you think she said aloud? 'Don't play
this melancholy air,--it affects Mr. Bulwer so that he is actually
weeping.' My tears, my softness, my love were over in a moment.
When we broke up in the evening I said to her, 'Farewell forever.
It is over. Now I see you in your true light. Instead of jealousy I
only feel contempt. Farewell. Go and be happy.'"

This account reads very much like a page from "Pelham" or "Devereux," and the whole account of his affairs of the heart is written in a similar manner.

All this had passed before he was twenty-two. At that age he first met Rosina Wheeler, at an evening party. He was talking busily to his mother when she suddenly exclaimed: "O Edward, what a singularly beautiful face! Do look. Who can she be?"

An elderly gentleman was leading through the room in which they sat a young lady of remarkable beauty, who, from the simplicity of her costume, seemed to be unmarried. He turned his head languidly, as he says, with a strangely troubled sensation, and beheld his fate before him,--in other words, his future wife.

Rosina Wheeler was at this time twenty-three, and in the full blossom of a very remarkable beauty. Her father was an Irish squire, who at the age of seventeen had married a very beautiful girl two years younger than himself. The natural result of this marriage was a separation, after the birth of two children, one of them the future Lady Lytton. Domestic infelicity seems to have been the heritage of every one connected with the Bulwer family even in the remotest manner.

And now it appears again in the family of the woman to whom the latest scion of the old house is to be united. Bulwer's mother opposed the match strenuously from the first. Her pride, her prudence, her forebodings, and her motherly susceptibilities all rose up against it. And she never gave her consent to it, or became really reconciled to it after it had taken place. Although very unwilling to displease his mother in so vital a matter, Bulwer seems to have gone steadily on to such a consummation; not borne away certainly by strong passion, but rather influenced, it would seem, by a tender regard for the feelings of Miss Wheeler, who had grown much attached to him. Not without many a struggle with himself, however, did he yield. He was tenderly attached to his mother, and it was a great grief to him to do so important a thing without her approval; and, moreover, his income and all his worldly prospects depended upon her. He does not seem to have been particularly happy over his own prospects, for in one of the last letters he wrote before marriage he says:--

"My intended is very beautiful, very clever, very good; but, alas!
the human heart is inscrutable. I love and am loved. My heart is
satisfied, my judgment, too. And still I am wretched."