 The Mystery of Charles Dickens Volume 4 of Famous Affinities of History This is a LibreVox recording. All LibreVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibreVox.org, recording by Ellie. Famous Affinities of History by Lyndon Orr. Volume 4, The Mystery of Charles Dickens Perhaps no public man in the English-speaking world in the last century was so widely an intimately known as Charles Dickens. From his eighteenth year, when he won his first success in journalism, down through his series of brilliant triumphs in fiction, he was more and more a conspicuous figure, living in the blaze of an intense publicity. He met everyone and knew everyone, and was the companion of every kind of man and woman. He loved to frequent the caves of Harmony, which Zachary has immortalized, and was a member of all the best Bohemia in clubs of London. Actors, authors, good fellows generally, were his intimate friends, and his acquaintance extended far beyond into the homes of merchants and lawyers, to the mansions of the proudest nobles. Indeed, he seemed to be almost a universal friend. One remembers, for instance, how he was called in to arbitrate between Zachary and George Augustus Seller, who had quarreled. One remembers how Lord Brian's daughter, Lady Laughless, when upon her sick bed, lost to Saint Fatikens, because there was something in his genius and ascetic manner that soothed her. Crushing pieces of ice between her teeth in agony, she would speak to him, and he would answer her in his rich, manly tones, until she was comforted and felt able to endure more hours of pain without complaint. Dickens was a jovial soul. His books fairly steam with Christmas cheer and hot punch and the savor of plum puddings, very much as do his letters to his intimate friends. Everybody knew Dickens. He could not dine in public without detracting attention. And when he left the dining-home, his admirers would descend upon his table and carry off eggshells, orange peels, and other things that remained behind, so that they might have memorials of this much loved writer. Those who knew him only by sight would often stop him in the streets and ask the privilege of shaking hands with him. So different was he from, let us say, Tennyson, who was his great and Englishman in his way as Dickens, but who kept himself a love and so few strangers. It is hard to associate anything like mystery with Dickens, though he was fond of mystery as an intellectual diversion, and his last unfinished novel was The Mystery of Edwin Drude. Moreover, no one admired more than he those complex plots which Wilkie Collins used to weave under the influence of Laudanum. But as for his own life, it seemed so normal, so free from anything approaching mystery, that we can scarcely believe it to have been tinged with darker colors than those which appeared upon the surface. A part of this mystery is plain enough. The other part is still obscure, or of such a character that one does not care to bring it wholly to the light. It had to do with his various relations with women. The world at large thinks that it knows this chapter in the life of Dickens, and that it refers wholly to his unfortunate disagreement with his wife. To be sure, this is a chapter that is quite large in all his biographies, and yet it is nowhere correctly told. His chosen biographer was John Forster, whose life of Charles Dickens in three volumes must remain the standard work. But even Forster, whom he assumes rotate, has not set down all that he could, although he gives a clue. As is well known, Dickens married Miss Catherine Hoggers when he was only 24. He had just published his sketches by boss, the copyright of which he sold for a hundred pounds, and was beginning the Pickwick Papers. About this time his publisher brought MP Willis down to Fernover's Inn to see the man whom Willis called a young paragraphist for the morning chronicle. Willis does sketches Dickens and his surroundings. In the most crowded part of Holborn, within a door or two of the bullet-mouse Inn, we pulled up at the entrance of a large building used for lawyers chambers. I followed by a long flight of stairs to an upper story and was ushered into an uncompetitive and bleak-looking room with a deal table, two or three chairs, and a few books. A small boy missed the Dickens for the contents. I was only struck at first with one thing, and I made a memorandum of it that evening as the strongest instance I had seen of English obsequiousness to employers. The decree to which the poor also was overpowered was the honor of his publisher's visit. I remember seeing to myself as I sat down on a rickety chair. My good fellow, if you were in America with that fine face and you're ready Quill, you would have no need to become descended by publisher. Dickens was stressed very much as he has since described the Xurula, minus the swell look. His hair was cropped close to his head, his clothes scant, though gently cut, and after changing a ragged office coat for a shabby blue, he stood by the door, colorless and buttoned up. The very personification of a closed sailor to the wind. Before his interview with Svelis, with Dickens always reputated, he had become something of a celebrity among the newspaper men with whom he worked as a stenographer. As everyone knows, he had had a hard time in his early years, working in a blackening shop and feeling too keenly the ignominious position of which a less sensitive boy would probably have sought nothing. Then he became a shortened reporter and was busy at his work so that he had little time for amusements. It was generally supposed that no love affair entered his life until he met Catherine Hogarth, whom he married soon after making her acquaintance. People who are eager at farthing out unimportant facts about important men had unanimously come to the conclusion that up to the age of 20, Dickens was entirely fancy-free. It was left to an American to disclose the fact that this was not the case, but that even in his teens he had been captivated by a girl of about his own age. Inasmuch as the only reproach that was ever made against Dickens was pasted upon his love affairs, let us go back and trace them from his early one to the very last, which must yet for some years at least remain a mystery. Everything that is known about his first affair is contained in a book very beautifully printed, but inaccessible to most readers. Some years ago, Mr. William K. Bixby of St. Louis found in London a collector of couriers. This man had in his stock a number of letters, which had passed between Ms. Maria Bitnell and Charles Dickens. When the two were about 19, the second package of letters representing a later acquaintance, about 1855, at which time Ms. Bitnell had been married for a long time to Mr. Henry Louis Winter, a 12-atellary blaze London. The copyright laws of Great Britain would not allow Mr. Bixby to publish the letter in that country, and he did not care to give them to the public here. Therefore he presented them to the Bibliophile Society with the understanding that 493 copies is the Bibliophile Book Plate where to be printed and distributed among the members of the Society. A few additional copies were struck off, but these did not be at the Bibliophile Book Plate. Only two copies are available for other readers and to peruse these, it is necessary to visit the Congressional Library in Washington where they were placed on July 24, 1908. These letters from two series, the first written to Ms. Bitnell in or about 1829 and the second written to Ms. Winter, formerly Ms. Bitnell, in 1855. The book also contains an introduction by Henry H. Harper who sets forth some series which the effects, in my opinion, do not support and there are a number of interesting portraits, especially one of Ms. Bitnell in 1829. A lovely girl with dark curls. Another shows her in 1855 when she writes of herself as old and fat, thereby doing herself a great deal of injustice. For although she had lost her useful beauty, she was a very presentable woman of middle age, but one who could not be particularly noticed in any company. Summing up briefly these different letters, it may be said in the first set Dickens hold to the lady eternally but by no means passionately. From what he says it is plain enough that she did not respond to his feeling and that presently she left London and went to Paris for her family was well to do while Dickens was living from hand to mouse. In the second set of letters, written long afterward, Ms. Winter seems to have set her cap at the now famous Orsa, but at that time he was courted by everyone and had long ago forgotten the lady who had so easily dismissed him in his younger days. In 1855, Ms. Winter seems to have reproached him for not having been more constant in the past, but he replied, you answered me coldly and reproachfully, and so I went my way. Mr. Harper in his introduction tries very hard to prove that in writing David Copperfield, Dickens drew the character of Dora from Ms. Bitnell. It is a dangerous thing to say from whom any character in a novel is drawn and Orsa takes whatever suits his purpose in circumstance and fancy and blends them all into one consistent whole, which is not to be identified with any individual. There is little reason to think that the most intimate friends of Dickens and of his family were mistaken through all the years when they were certain that the boy-husband and the girl-wife of David Copperfield were suggested by any one safe Dickens himself and Catherine Hoggers. Why should he have gone back to a mere passing fancy to a girl who did not care for him and who had no influence on his life? Instead of picturing, as David's first wife, one whom he deeply loved, whom he married, who was the mother of his children and whom he made a great part of his career, even that part which was invariably half-tragic and wholly mournful. Ms. Bitnell may have been the original of Flora and little Dora, though even this is doubtful. The character was at the time ascribed to Ms. Anna Marie-Lay, whom Dickens sometimes flirted with and sometimes caricatured. When Dickens came to know George Hoggers, who was one of his colleagues on the staff of the Morning Chronicle, he met Hoggers' daughters, Catherine, Chachinia and Mary, and at once fell deterrently and loved with Catherine, the eldest and prettiest of the three. He himself was almost girlish with his fair complexion and light wavy hair, so that the famous sketch by McLeese has a remarkable charm. Yet nobody could really say with truth that any one of the three girls was beautiful. Chachinia Hoggers however was sweet-tempered and of a motherly disposition. It may be that in a fashion she loved Dickens all her life as she remained with him after he parted from his sister taking the atmosphere of his children and looking out with a selfish fidelity for his many needs. It was Mary, however, the youngest of the Hoggers, who lived with the Dickenses during the first 12 months of their married life. Though Dickens, she was like a favorite sister and when she died very suddenly in her 18th year her loss was a great shock to him. It was believed for a long time in fact until the separation the Dickens and his wife were extremely happy in their home life. His writings glorified all that was domestic and paid many tender tributes to the choice of family affection. When the separation came the whole world was shocked and he had rather early in Dickens' married life there was more or less in felicity. In his retrospection of an active life Mr. John B. Glow writes a few sentences which are interesting for the frankness and which give us certain hints. Mrs. Dickens was not a handsome woman, though stout had him matronly. There was something a little doubtful about her eye and I thought her endowed is a temper that might be very violent when roused, though not easily rousable. Mrs. Kohlfeld told me that Ms. Thiemann I think that is the name was the source of the difficulty between Mrs. Dickens and her husband. He was married in private theatricals with Dickens and he sent her a portrait in approach which met with an accident requiring it to be sent to the Turalas to be mended. The Turala noticing Mr. Dickens' initials sent it to his house. Mrs. Dickens' sister who had always been in love with him and was tellers of Ms. Thiemann told Mrs. Dickens of the approach and she mounted her husband with common brush. This no doubt was Mrs. Dickens version in the main. A few evenings later I saw Ms. Thiemann in the Haymarket theater playing with Pakistan and Mr. and Mrs. Charles Messius. She seemed rather a small cause for such a serious result possibly pretty but not much of an actress. Here in one passage we have an imitation that Mrs. Dickens had a temper that was easily roused that Dickens himself was interested in an actress and that Ms. Hoggers had always been in love with him and was tellers of Ms. Thiemann. Some years before this time however they had been growing in the mind of Dickens a certain formless discontent something to which he could not give a name yet which cast over him the shadow of disappointment. He expressed the same feeling in David Copperfield in his book of David's life with Dora. It seemed to come from the fact that he had grown to be a man while his wife still remained a child. A passage or two may be quoted from the novel so that we may set them beside passages in Dickens own life which we know to have referred to his own wife and not to any such nebulous person as Mrs. Winter. The shadow I have mentioned was not to be between us anymore but was to rest wholly on my heart how did that fall? The old unhappy feeling pervaded my life. It was deepened if it were changed at all but it was as undefined as ever and addressed me like a strain of sorrowful music faintly heard in the night. I loved my wife dearly I had vaguely anticipated once was not the happiness I enjoyed and there was always something wanting what I missed I still regarded as something that had been a dream of my useful fancy that was incapable of realization that I was now discovering to be so with some natural pain as all men did but that it would have been better for me if my wife could have helped me more shared the many thoughts in which I had no partner and that this might have been I knew what I am describing slumbered and half evoked and slept again in the innermost recesses of my mind there was no evidence of it to me I knew of no influence it had in anything I said or did I bore the weight of all our little cares and all my projects there can be no little disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose these words I remembered I had endeavored to adopt Dora to myself and found it impracticable it remained for me to adapt myself to Dora to share with her what they could and be happy to be on my own shoulders what I must and be still happy that's what Dickens in his fixtures character of his fixtures wife let us see how he wrote and how he acted in his own person and of his real wife as early as 1856 he showed a curious and restless activity as a fun who was trying to rid himself of unpleasant thoughts Mr. Forster says that he began to fill the strain upon his invention to button this quietude and the necessity for shutting down memoranda in notebooks so as to assist his memory and his imagination he began to long for solitude he would take long, aimless rembless into the country returning at no particular time or season he once wrote to Forster I have had dreadful thoughts of getting away somewhere all together by myself if I could have managed it I think I might have gone to the Pyrenees for six months I've lived for half a year or so in all sorts of inaccessible places and of opening a new book therein a floating idea of going up above the snow line and living in some astonishing convent what do these cryptic utterances mean? at first both in his novel and his letters they are obscure but before long in each they become a definite in 1856 we find these sentences among his letters the old days shall I ever wonder get the frame of mind back as it used to be then something of it perhaps that never quite as it used to be I find that the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty big one his next letter draws the veil and shows plainly what he means for Catherine and I are not made for each other and there is no help for it it is not only that she makes me an easy and unhappy but that I make her so too and much more so that she is resorted for the bond that exists between us then he goes on to say that you would have been a thousand times happier if she had been married to another man he speaks of incompatibility the difference of temperaments in fact it is the same old story we switch with becomes of familiar and which is both as old as the hearth and as new as this morning's newspaper naturally also seems coverse rather than better thickness comes to speak of the plunge and calculates as to what effect it will have on his public readings he kept back the announcement of the plunge until after it given several readings then on April 29th, 1858 Mrs. Dickens left his home his eldest son went to live with his mother the rest of the children remained with their father while his daughter Mary nominally presided over the house in the background however Georgina Hoggers who seemed all through her life have cared for Dickens more than for his sister remained a sort of guided guardian for his children this arrangement was a private matter and should not have been brought to public attention but it was impossible to suppress all gossip about so prominent a man much of the gossip was exaggerated and when it came to the notice of Dickens it stung him so severely as to lead him into issuing a public justification of his cause he published a statement in household words which led to many other letters and other periodicals and finally a long one from him which was printed in the New York Tribune addressed to his friend Mr. Arthur Smith Dickens afterwards declared that he had written this letter as a strictly personal and private one in order to correct false rumors and scandals Mr. Smith naturally thought that the statement was intended for publication but Dickens always spoke of it as the violated letter by his allusions to a difference of temperament and to incompatibility Dickens no doubt meant that his wife had ceased to be to him the same companion that she had been in days gone by as in so many cases she had not changed while he had he had grown out of the sphere in which she had been born associated with blackening boys and quilt printers and had become one of the great men of his time whose genius was universally admired Mr. Big Lowe saw Mrs. Dickens as she rarely was a commonplace woman and owed with a temp of eviction when disposed to outbursts of actual violence and her jealousy was roused it was impossible that the two could have remained together when in intellect and sympathy they were so far apart there is nothing strange about their separation except the exceedingly bad taste in which Dickens made it a public affair it is safe to assume they felt the need for a different mate and that they found one is evident enough from the hints and bits of innuendo that are found in the writings of his contemporaries he became a pleasure lover but more than that he needed one who could understand his moods and match them one who could please his tastes and one who could give him that admiration she felt to be his true for he was always anxious to be praised and his letters are full of anecdotes relating to his love of praise one does not wish to follow out this clues too closely it is certain that neither Ms. Bidnail as a girl nor Mrs. Vint as a matron with any serious appeal to him the actresses who have been often mentioned in connection with his name were for the most part, mere passing favorites the woman who in his life for Stora made him feel the same incompleteness that he has described in his best known book the companion to whom he clung in his later years was neither a light-minded creature like Ms. Bidnail nor an undeveloped high-tempered woman like the one he married nor a mere domestic friendly creature like Georgina Hoggers with which she resolved this mystery in the life of Charles Dickens in his last will in testament drawn up and signed by him about the year before his death the first paragraph written as follows I had Charles Dickens of Glacier Place High Ham in the county of Kent he had by revoked all my former wills and courtesers and declared this to be my last will in testament I have the sum of one thousand pounds free of legacy duty to Ms. Ellen Lawler's turn in the face, empty her square in the county of Middlesex in connection with this, Mr. John Bigle of Scarlet Shuttings made some 15 years before remember the Ms. Themen about whose name he was not quite certain the Hogger's sister's dislike of her and the mysterious figure in the background of the novelist's later life then considered the first big question in his will which leaves a substantial sum to one who was neither a relative nor subordinate nor ordinary friend end of the mystery of Charles Dickens recording by Ellie August 2009 Anor de Balzac and Evelina Hanska Volume 4 of Famous Affinities of History this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Famous Affinities of History by Lyndon Orr Volume 4 Anor de Balzac and Evelina Hanska I remember once when editing an elaborate work on literature that the publisher called me into his private office after the door was closed he spoke in tones of suppressed emotion why is it, said he that you have such a lack of proportion in the selection you have made I find that only two pages are given to George P. Morris while you haven't given EPRO any space at all yet look here you've blocked out 50 pages for Balzac who was nothing but an immoral Frenchman I adjusted this difficulty somehow or other I do not just remember how and began to think that after all this publisher's view of things was probably that of the English and American public it is strange that so many biographies and so many appreciations of the greatest novelist who ever lived should still have left him reading public little more than an immoral Frenchman in Balzac, said Thane there was a money broker an archaeologist, an architect an upholsterer, a tailor an old clothes dealer, a journeyman apprentice, a physician, and a notary Balzac was also a mystic a supernaturalist and above all a consummate artist no one who is all these things in high measure and who has raised himself by his genius while his countrymen deserves the censure of my former publisher still less is Balzac to be dismissed as immoral for his life was one of singular self-sacrifice in spite of much temptation his face was strongly sensual his look and bearing denoted almost savage power he led a free life in a country which allowed much freedom and yet his story is almost mystic in its fineness of thought and in its detachment Balzac was born in 1799 at tour with all the traits of the people of his native province fond of eating and drinking and with plenty of humor his father was fairly well off of four children our Balzac was the eldest the third was his sister Lord who throughout his life was the most intimate friend he had and to whom we owe his rescue from a scandalous and untrue gossip from her we learned that their father was a combination of Mantaigne, Rebellé and Uncle Toby young Balzac went to a clerical school at 7 and stayed there for 7 years then he was brought home apparently much prostrated although the good fathers could find nothing physically amiss with him and nothing in his studies to account for his agitation no one ever did discover just what was the matter for he seemed well enough in the next few years basking on the riverside watching the activities of his native town and thoroughly studying the rustic types that he was afterward to make familiar to the world in fact in Louis Lambert he has said before us a picture of his own boyish life very much as Dickens did in his David Copperfield for some reason when these years were over the boy began to have what is so often known as a call a sort of instinct that he was to attain renown unfortunately it happened that about this time he and his parents moved to Paris which was his home by choice until his death in 1850 he studied here under famous teachers and gave three years to the pursuit of law of which he was very fond as literary material though he refused to practice this was the more grievous since a great part of the family property had been lost the Balzacs were afflicted by actual poverty and the Noor endeavored with his pen to beat the wolf back from the door he earned a little money with pamphlets and occasional stories but his thirst for fame was far from satisfied he was sure that he was called to literature and yet he was not sure that he had the power to succeed in one of his letters to his sister he wrote for the next 10 years he was learning his trade and the artistic use of the fiction writer's tools what is more to the point is the fact that he began to dream of a series of great novels which should give a true and panoramic picture of the whole of human life this was the first intimation of his human comedy which was so daredevil that he had no idea that he had no idea that he had no idea that he had no idea about that human comedy which was so daringly undertaken as so nearly completed in his after years in his early days of obscurity he said to his readers note well the characters that I introduce since you will have to follow their fortunes through 30 novels that are to come here we see how little he had been daunted by ill success and how his prodigous imagination had not been overcome by sorrow and evil fortune meantime, writing almost savagely And with the feeling combined of ambition and despair, he had begun, very slowly indeed, to create a public. These ten years, however, had loaded him with debts, and his struggle to keep himself afloat only plunged him deeper in the mire. His 30 unsigned novels began to pay him a few hundred francs, not in cash, but in promissory notes, so that he had to go still deeper into debt. In 1827 he was toiling on his first successful novel, and indeed one of the best historic novels in French literature, The Chouin. He speaks of his labor as done with a tired brain and an anxious mind, and of the eight or ten business letters that he had to write each day before he could begin his literary work. Postage and an omnibus are extravagances that I cannot allow myself, he writes. I stay at home so as not to wear out my clothes. Is that clear to you? At the end of the next year, though he was already popular as a novelist, and much sought out by people of distinction, he was at the very climax of his poverty. He had written 35 books, and was in debt to the amount of 124,000 francs. He was saved from bankruptcy only by the aid of Madame de Bernis, a woman of high character, and one whose moral influence was very strong with Balzac until her early death. The relation between these two has a sweetness and a purity which are seldom found. Madame de Bernis gave Balzac money as she would have given it to a son, and thereby she saved a great soul for literature. But there was no sickly sentiment between them, and Balzac regarded her with a noble love which she has expressed in the character of Madame Fermiani. It was immediately after she had lightened his burdens that the real Balzac comes before us in certain stories which have no equal, and which are among the most famous that he ever wrote. What could be more wonderful than his elver dugo, which gives us a brief horror while compelling our admiration? What, outside of Balzac himself, could be more terrible than Gopsec, a frightful study of avarice containing a deathbed scene which surpasses in dreadfulness almost anything in literature? Add to these a passion in the desert, the girl with the golden eyes, the droll series, the red inn, and the magic skin, and you have a cluster of masterpieces not to be surpassed. In the year 1829, when he was just beginning to attain a slight success, Balzac received a long letter written in a woman's hand. As he read it, there it came to him something very like an inspiration, so full of understanding were the written words so full of appreciation and of sympathy with the best that he had done. This anonymous note pointed out here and there such defects as our app to become chronic with a young author. Balzac was greatly stirred by its keen and sympathetic criticism. No one before had read his soul so clearly. No one, not even his devoted sister, Lorda Servi, had judged his work so wisely, had come so closely to his deepest feeling. He read the letter over and over, and presently another came, full of critical appreciation and of wholesome, tonic, frank, friendly words of cheer. It was very largely the effect of these letters that browsed Balzac's full powers and made him sure of winning the two great objects of his first ambition. With his love and fame, the ideals of the chivalrous, romantic Frenchman from Caesar's time down to the present day. Other letters followed and after a while their authorship was made known to Balzac. He learned that they had been written by a young Polish lady, Madame Evelina Hanska, the wife of a Polish count whose health was feeble and who spent much time in Switzerland because the climate there agreed with him. He met her first at Noschatel and found her all that he had imagined. It is said that she had no sooner erased her face and looked him fully in the eyes that she felt fainting to the floor, overcome by her emotion. Balzac himself was deeply moved from that day until their final meeting he wrote to her daily. The woman who had become his second soul was not beautiful. Nevertheless, her face was intensely spiritual and there was a mystic quality about it which made a strong appeal to Balzac's innermost nature. Those who saw him in Paris, talking about the streets at night with his boom companions, hobnobbing with the elder Dumas or rejecting the frank advances of George Sand would never have dreamed of this mysticism. Balzac was heavy and broad in figure. His face was suggestive only of what was sensuous and sensual. At the same time, those who looked into his heart and mind found their many a sign of the fine inner strain which purified the grosser elements of his nature. He who wrote the roaring Rebellesia and Cont de la Tique was likewise the author of Seraphita. This mysticism showed itself in many things that Balzac did. One little incident will perhaps be sufficiently characteristic of many others. He had a belief that names had a sort of esoteric appropriateness. So, in selecting them for his novels, he gathered them with infinite pains from many sources and then weighed them anxiously in the balance. A writer on the subject of names and their significance has given the following account of the straight. The great novelist once spent an entire day tramping about in the remotest quarters of fares in search of a fitting name for a character just conceived by him. Every signboard, every door plate, every a fish upon the walls was scrutinized. Thousands of names were considered and rejected and it was only after his companion, utterly worn out by fatigue, had flatly refused to drag his weary limbs through more than one additional street that Balzac suddenly saw upon a sign the name Marca and gave a shout of joy at having finally secured what he was seeking. Marca it was from that moment and Balzac gradually evolved a Christian name for him. First he considered what initial was most appropriate and then, having decided upon Zed, he went on to expand this into Zephyrin, explaining minutely just why the whole name Zephyrin Marca was the only possible one for the character in the novel. In many ways, Balzac and Evelina Hanska were mated by nature. Whether they were fully mated, the facts of their lives must demonstrate. For the present, the novelist plunged into a world of literary labor, toiling as few ever toiled, constructing several novels at the same time, visiting all the haunts of the French capital, so that he might observe and understand every type of human being and then hurling himself like a giant at his work. He had a curious practice of reading proofs. These would come to him in enormous sheets, printed on special paper and with wide margins for his corrections. An immense table stood in the midst of his study and upon the top he would spread out the proofs as if they were vast maps. Then, removing most of his outer garments, he would lie face down upon the proof sheets with a gigantic pencil, such as Bismarck subsequently used to wield. Thus disposed, he would go over the proofs. Hardly anything that he had written seemed to suit him when he saw it in print. He changed and kept changing, obliterating what he disliked, writing in new sentences, revising others, and adding whole pages in the margins, until perhaps he had practically made a new book. This process was repeated several times, and how expensive it was may be judged from the fact that his bill for author's proof corrections was sometimes more than the publishers had agreed to pay him for the completed volume. Sometimes, again, he would begin writing in the afternoon and continue until dawn. Then, wary, aching in every bone, and with throbbing head, he would rise and turn to fall upon his couch after his 18 hours of steady toil. But the memory of Avalina Hanska always came to him, and with half-numbed fingers he would seize his pen and forget his weariness and the pleasure of writing to the dark-eyed woman who drew him to her like a magnet. These are very curious letters that Balzac wrote to Madame Hanska. He literally told her everything about himself. Not only were there long passages instinct with tenderness, and with his love for her, but he also gave her the most minute account of everything that occurred, and that might interest her. Thus he detailed at length his mode of living, the clothes he wore, the people whom he met, his trouble with his creditors, the accounts of his income and outgo. One might think that this was egotism on his part, but it was more than that. It was a strong belief that everything which concerned him must concern her, and he begged her in turn to write as freely and as fully. Madame Hanska was not the only woman who became his friend and comrade, and to whom he often wrote. He made many acquaintances in the fashionable world through the good offices of the Duchess de Castille. By her favor, he studied with his microscopic gaze the Beaumont of Louis-Philippe's rather unimpressive court. In a dozen books, he scores the Court of the Citizen King, his pretensions, its commonness, and its assemblage of nouveau riches. Yet in it he found many friends, Victor Hugo, the Girardin, and among them women who were of the world. George Sand he knew very well, and she made ardent love to him, but he laughed her off very much as the elder Dumas did. Then there was the pretty dainty Madame Carol, who read and revised his manuscripts, and who perhaps took a more intimate interest in him than did the other ladies whom he came to know so well. Besides Madame Hanska, he had another correspondent who signed herself Louise, but who never let him know her name, though she wrote him many pecan, sunny letters, which he so sadly needed. For though Anor de Balzac was now one of the most famous writers of his time, his home was still a den of suffering. His debts kept pressing on him, loading him down, and almost quenching hope. He acted toward his creditors like a man of honor, and his physical strength was still that of a giant. To Madame Carol, he once wrote the half-pathetic, half-humorous plaint. Poor Pan, it must be diamond, not because one would wish to wear it, but because it has had so much use. And again, here I am, owing a hundred thousand francs, and I am forty. Balzac and Madame Hanska met many times after that first eventful episode at Neuchâtel. It was at this time that he gave utterance to the point and cry. Love for me is life, and today I feel it more than ever. In like manner, he wrote, unleaving her that famous epigram. It is only the last love of a woman that can satisfy the first love of a man. In 1842, Madame Hanska's husband died. Balzac naturally expected that an immediate marriage with the Countess would take place, but the woman who had loved him mystically for twelve years, and with a touch of the physical for nine, suddenly draws back. She will not promise anything. She talks of delays, owing to the legal arrangements for her children. She seems almost approved, and American critic has contrasted her attitude with his. Everyone knows how utterly and absolutely Balzac devoted to this one woman all his genius, his aspiration, the thought of his every moment, how every day, after he had labored like a slave for eighteen hours, he would take his pen and pour out to her the most intimate details of his daily life, how at her call he would leave everything and rush across the continent to Poland or to Italy, being radiantly happy if he could but see her face and be for a few days by her side. The very thought of meeting her thrills him to the very depths of his nature, and made him, for weeks and even months beforehand, restless, uneasy and agitated with an almost painful happiness. It is the most startling proof of his immense vitality, both physical and mental, that so tremendous and emotional strain could be endured by him for years without exhausting his fecundity or blighting his creativeness. With Balzac, however, it was the period of his most brilliant work, and this was true in spite of the anguish of long separations, and the complaints excited by what appears to be caprice or boldness or a faint indifference. Even in Balzac one notices toward the last a certain sense of strain underlying what he wrote, a certain lack of elasticity and facility, if of nothing more, yet on the whole it is likely that without his friendship Balzac would have been less great than he actually became. As it is certain that had it been broken off, he would have ceased to write or to care for anything whatever in the world. And yet, when they were free to marry, Madame Hanska shrank away. Not until 1846, four years after her husband's death, did she finally give her promise to the eager Balzac. Then, in the overflow of his happiness, his creative genius blazed up into a most wonderful flame, but he soon discovered that the promise was not to be at once fulfilled. The shock impaired that marvelous fatality which had carried him through death and want an endless labor. It was at this moment, by the irony of fate, that his country hailed him as one of the greatest of his men of genius. A golden stream poured into his lap, his debts were not all extinguished, but his income was so large that they burdened him no longer. But his one long dream was the only thing for which he cared, and though in an exoteric sense this dream came true, his truth was but a mockery. Evelina Hanska summoned him to Poland, and Balzac went to her at once. There was another long delay, and for more than a year, he lived as a guest in a Countess's mansion at Welshovnia, but finally in March 1850, the two were married. A few weeks later they came back to France together and occupied the little country house Le Jardin, in which, some decades later, occurred Gambetta's mysterious death. What is the secret of the strange love, which in the woman seems to be not precisely love, but something else? Balzac was always eager for her presence. She, on the other hand, seems to have been mentally more at ease when he was absent. Perhaps the explanation, if we may venture upon one, is based upon a well-known physiological fact. Love in its completeness is made up of two great elements. First, the element that is wholly spiritual, that is capable of sympathy and tenderness and deep emotion. The other element is the physical, the source of passion, of creative energy, and of the truly rural qualities, whether it be in man or woman. Now, let either of these elements be lacking, and love itself cannot fully and utterly exist. The spiritual nature in one may find its mate in the spiritual nature of another, and the physical nature of one may find its mate in the physical nature of another. But into unions such as these, love does not enter in its completeness. If there is any element lacking in either of those who think that they can mate, their mating will be a sad and pitiful failure. It is evident enough that Madame Hanske was almost wholly spiritual, and her long years of waiting had made her understand the difference between Balzac and herself. Therefore, she shrank from his proximity and from his physical contact, and it was perhaps better for them both that their union was so quickly broken off by death, for the great novelist died of heart disease only five months after the marriage. If we wish to understand the mystery of Balzac's life, or, more truly, the mystery of the life of the woman whom he married, take up and read once more the pages of Seraphita, one of his poorest novels, and yet a singularly illuminating story, shedding light upon the secret of the soul. End of Anor de Balzac and Evelina Hanska. The instances of distinguished men, or of notable women, who have broken through convention in order to find a fitting mate are very numerous. A few of these instances may, perhaps, represent what is usually called a platonic union, but the evidence is always doubtful. The world is not possessed of abundant charity, nor does human experience lead one to believe that intimate relations between a man and a woman are compatible with platonic friendship. Perhaps no case is more puzzling than that which is found in the life history of Charles Reed and Laura Seymour. Charles Reed belongs to that brilliant group of English writers and artists which include Dickens, Boerleiton, Wilkie Collins, Tom Taylor, George Elliott, Swinburne, Sir Walter Besant, McCleese, and Goldwyn Smith. In my opinion he ranks next to Dickens in originality and power. His books are a little red today, yet he gave to the English stage the comedy Masks and Faces which is now as much a classic as Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer or Sheridan's School for Scandal. His power as a novelist was marvelous. Who can forget the Madhouse episodes in Hard Cash or the great trial scene in Griffith Gaunt, or that wonderful picture in The Cloister and the Hearth of Germany and Rome at the end of the Middle Ages. Here genius has touched the dead past and made it glow again with an intense reality. He was the son of a country gentleman, the lord of a manor which had been held by his family before the wars of the Bozes. His ancestors had been noted for their services in warfare, in parliament, and upon the bench. Reed, therefore, was in feeling very much of an aristocrat. Sometimes he pushed his ancestral pride to a whimsical excess, very much as did his own creation, squire rabbi, and put yourself in his place. At the same time he might very well have been called a Tory Democrat. His grandfather had married the daughter of a village blacksmith, and Reed was quite as proud of this as he was of the fact that another ancestor had been Lord Chief Justice of England. From the sturdy strain which came to him from the blacksmith, he perhaps derived that sledgehammer power with which he wrote many of his most famous chapters and which he used in newspaper controversies with his critics. From his legal ancestors there may have come to him the love of litigation, which kept him often in hot water. From those who had figured in the life of royal courts he inherited a romantic nature, a love of art, and a very delicate perception of the niceties of cultured usage. Such was Charles Reed, keen observer, scholar, bohemian, a man who could be both rough and tender and whose boisterous ways never concealed his warm heart. Reed's school days were spartan in their severity. A teacher with the appropriate name of Slater set him hard task and caned him unmercifully for every shortcoming. A weaker nature would have been crushed. Reed's was toughened, and he learned to resist pain and to resent wrong, so that hatred of injustice has been called his dominating trait. In preparing himself for college he was singularly fortunate in his tutors. One of them was Samuel Wilberforce, afterward Bishop of Oxford, nicknamed from his suavity of manner, Soapy Sam, and afterward, when Reed was studying law, his instructor was Samuel Warren, the author of that once famous novel, Ten Thousand a Year, and the creator of Tittlebat Titmouse. For his college at Oxford, Reed selected one of the most beautiful and ancient, Magdalen, which he entered securing what is known as a demyship. Reed won his demyship by an extraordinary accident. Always in original youth, his reading was varied and valuable, but in his studies he had never tried to be minutely accurate in small matters. At that time every candidate was supposed to be able to repeat, by heart, the 39 articles. Reed had no taste for memorizing, and out of the whole 39 he had learned but three. His general examination was good, though not brilliant. When he came to be questioned orally, the examiner, by a chance that would not occur once in a million times, asked the candidate to repeat these very articles. Reed rattled them off with the greatest glibness and produced so favorable an impression that he was let go without any further questioning. It must be added that his English essay was original, and this also helped him, but had it not been for the other great piece of luck, he would, in Oxford phrase, had been completely golfed. As it was, however, he was placed as highly as the young men who were afterward known as Cardinal Newman and Sir Robert Low, Lord Shearbrook. At the age of 21, Reed obtained a fellowship, which entitled him to an income so long as he remained unmarried. It is necessary to consider the significance of this when we look at his subsequent career. The fellowship at Magdalen was worth, at the outset, about $1200 annually, and it gave him possession of a suite of rooms free of any charge. He likewise secured a Venerian fellowship in law, to which was attached an income of $400. As time went on, the value of the first fellowship increased until it was worth $2,500. Therefore, as with many Oxford men of his time, Charles Reed, who had no other fortune, was placed in this position. If he refrained from marrying, he had a home and a moderate income for life, without any duties whatsoever. If he married, he must give up his income and his comfortable apartments and go out into the world and struggle for existence. There was the further temptation that the possession of his fellowship did not even necessitate his living at Oxford. He might spend his time in London, or even outside of England, knowing that his chambers at Magdalen were kept in order for him, as a resting place to which he might return whenever he chose. Reed remained a while at Oxford, studying books and men, especially the latter. He was a great favorite with the undergraduates, though less so with the dons. He loved the boat races on the river. He was a prodigious cricket player and one of the best bowlers of his time. He utterly refused to put on any of the academic dignity which his associates affected. He wore loud clothes. His flaring scarves were viewed as being almost scandalous. Very much as Longfellow's party-colored waistcoats were regarded when he first came to Harvard as a professor. Charles Reed pushed originality to eccentricity. He had a passion for violins and ran himself into debt because he bought so many and such good ones. Once when visiting his father's house at Ipston, he shocked the punctualist old gentleman by dancing on the dining table to the accompaniment of a fiddle which he scraped delightedly. Dancing indeed was another of his diversions, and in spite of the fact that he was a fellow of Magdalene and a D.C.L. of Oxford, he was always ready to caper and to display the new steps. In the course of time, he went up to London, and at once plunged into the seething tide of the metropolis. He made friends far and wide and in every case and station, among authors and politicians, bishops and barges, artists and musicians. Charles Reed learned much from all of them, and all of them were fond of him. But it was the theatre that interested him most. Nothing else seemed to him quite so fine as to be a successful writer for the stage. He viewed the drama with all the reverence of an ancient Greek. On his tombstone, he caused himself to be described as dramatist, novelist, journalist. Dramatist, he put first of all, even after long experience had shown him that his greatest power lay in writing novels. But in this early period, he still hoped for fame upon the stage. It was not a fortunate moment for dramatic writers. Plays were bought outright by the managers, who were afraid to risk any considerable sum, and were very shy about risking anything at all. The system had not yet been established according to which an author receives a share of the money taken at the box office. Consequently, Reed had little or no financial success. He adapted several pieces from the French, for which he was paid a few banknotes. Masks and faces got a hearing, and drew large audiences, but Reed had sold it for a paltry sum, and he shared the honors of its authorship with Tom Taylor, who was then much better known. Such was the situation. Reed was personally liked, but his plays were almost all rejected. He lived somewhat extravagantly, and ran into debt, though not very deeply. He had a play entitled Christy Johnstone, which he believed to be a great one, though no manager would venture to produce it. Reed, Brooding, Ruth In and Mellon Collie. Finally, he decided he would go to a leading actress at one of the principal theaters and try to interest her in his rejected play. The actress he had in mind was Laura Seymour, then appearing at the hay market under the management of Buckstone, and this visit proved to be the turning point in Reed's whole life. Laura Seymour was the daughter of a surgeon at Bath, a man in large practice, and with a good income, every penny of which he spent. His family lived in lavish style, but one morning after he had sat up all night playing cards, his little daughter found him in the dining room, stone dead. After his funeral, it appeared that he had left no provision for his family. A friend of his, a Jewish gentleman of Portuguese extraction, showed much kindness to the children, settling their affairs and leaving them with some money in the bank. But of course something must be done. The two daughters removed to London, and at a very early age Laura had made for herself a place in the dramatic world, taking small parts at first, but rising so rapidly that in her fifteenth year she was cast for the part of Juliet. As an actress she led a life of strange vicissitudes. At one time she would be pinched by poverty, and at another time she would be well supplied with money, which slipped through her fingers like water. She was a true Bohemian, a happy-go-lucky type of the actors of her time. From all accounts she was never very beautiful, but she had an instinct for strange yet effective costumes which attracted much attention. She has been described as a fluttering, buoyant, gorgeous little butterfly. Many were drawn to her. She was careless of what she did, and her name was not untouched with scandal. But she lived through it all and emerged a clever, sympathetic woman of wide experience, both on the stage and off it. One of her admirers, an elderly gentleman named Seymour, came to her one day when she was in much need of money, and told her that he had just deposited a thousand pounds to her credit at the bank. Having said this, he left the room precipitately. It was the beginning of a sort of courtship, and after a while she married him. Her feeling toward him was one of gratitude. There was no sentiment about it, but she made him a good wife, and gave no further cause for gossip. Such was the woman whom Charles Reid now approached with requests that she would let him read to her a portion of his play. He had seen her act, and he honestly believed her to be a dramatic genius of the first order. Few others shared this belief, but she was generally thought of as a competent, though by no means brilliant, actress. Reid admired her extremely, so that at the very thought of speaking with her, his emotions almost choked him. In answer to a note she sent word that he might call it her house. He was at this time, 1849, in his thirty-eighth year. The lady was a little older, and had lost something of her youthful charm. Yet when Reid was ushered into her drawing-room, she seemed to him the most graceful and accomplished woman whom he had ever met. She took his measure, or she thought she took it at a glance. Here was one of those would-be playwrights who lived only to torment managers and actresses. His face was thin, from which she inferred that he was probably half-starved. His bashfulness led her to suppose that he was an inexperienced youth. Little did she imagine that he was the son of a landed proprietor, a fellow of one of Oxford's noblest colleges, and one with friends far higher in the world than herself. Though she thought so little of him, and quite expected to be bored, she settled herself in a soft arm chair to listen. The unsuccessful playwright read to her a scene or two from his still unfinished drama. She heard him patiently, noting the cultivated accent of his voice, which proved to her that he was at least a gentleman. When he had finished, she said, Yes, that's good. The plot is excellent. Then she laughed a sort of stage-left and remarked lightly, Why don't you turn it into a novel? Reed was stung to the quick. Nothing that she could have said would have hurt him more. Novels he despised, and here was this woman, the queen of the English stage, as he regarded her, laughing at his drama and telling him to make a novel of it. He rose and bowed. I am trespassing on your time, he said, and after barely touching the fingers of her outstretched hand, he left the room abruptly. The woman knew men very well, though she scarcely knew Charles Reed. Something in his melancholy, and something in his manner, stirred her heart. It was not a heart that responded to emotions readily, but it was a very good-natured heart. Her explanation of Reed's appearance led her to think that he was very poor. If she had not much tact, she had an abundant store of sympathy. And so she sat down and wrote a very blundering but kindly letter, in which she enclosed a five-pound note. Reed subsequently described his feelings on receiving this letter with its bank note. He said, I, who had been vice president of Magdalene, I, who flattered myself, I was coming to the fore as a dramatist, to have a five-pound note flung at my head, like a ticket for soup to a pauper, or a bone to a dog, and by an actress, too. Yet she said my reading was admirable, and, after all, there is much virtue in a five-pound note. Anyhow, it showed the writer had a good heart. The more he thought of her and of the incident, the more comforted he was. He called on her the next day without making an appointment, and when she received him, he had the five-pound note fluttering in his hand. She started to speak, but he interrupted her. No, he said, that is not what I wanted from you. I wanted sympathy, and you have unintentionally supplied it. Then this man, whom she had regarded as half-starved, presented her with an enormous bunch of hot-house grapes, and the two sat down and ate them together, thus beginning a friendship which ended only with Laura Seymour's death. Oddly enough, Mrs. Seymour's suggestion that Reed should make a story of his play was a suggestion which he actually followed. It was to her guidance and sympathy that the world owes the great novels which he afterward composed. If he succeeded on the stage at all, it was not merely in masks and faces, but in his powerful dramatization of Zola's novel La Asa More under the title Drink, in which the late Charles Warner thrilled and horrified great audiences all over the English-speaking world. Had Reed never known Laura Seymour, he might never have written so strong a drama. The mystery of Reed's relations with this woman can never be definitely cleared up. Her husband, Mr. Seymour, died not too long after she and Reed became acquainted. Then Reed and several friends, both men and women, took a house together, and Laura Seymour, now a clever manager and amiable hostess, looked after all the practical affairs of the establishment. One by one the others fell away through death or by removal, until at last these two were left alone. Then Reed, unable to give up the companionship, which meant so much to him, vowed that she must still remain and care for him. He leased a house in Sloan Street, which he himself described in his novel A Terrible Temptation. It is the chapter where in Reed also draws his own portrait in the character of Francis Balth. The room was rather long, low, and nondescript. Scarlet flock paper, curtains and sofas, green, uteric velvet, woodwork and pillars, white and gold, two windows looking on the street. At the other end, folding doors was scarcely any woodwork, all plate glass, but partly hidden by heavy curtains of the same color and material as the others. At last a bell rang. The maid came in and invited Lady Basset to follow her. She opened the glass folding doors and took them into a small conservatory, walled like a grotto, with fern sprouting out of rocky fissures, and sparse sparkling water dripping. Then she opened two more glass folding doors and ushered them into an empty room, the like of which Lady Basset had never seen. It was large in itself, and multiplied tenfold by great mirrors from floor to ceiling, with no frames but a narrow oak beating. Opposite her on entering was a bay window, all plate glass, the central panes of which opened like doors upon a pretty little garden that glowed with color, and was backed by fine trees belonging to the nation, for this garden ran up to the wall of Hyde Park. The numerous and large mirrors all down to the ground laid hold of the garden and the flowers, and by double and trouble reflection filled the room with delightful nooks of verter and color. Here are the words in which Reed describes himself as he looked when between fifty and sixty years of age. He looked neither like a poet nor a drudge, but a great fat country farmer. He was rather tall, very portly, smallish head, commonplace features, mild brown eye not very bright, short beard, and wore a suit of tweed all one color. Such was the house and such was the man over both of which Laura Seymour held sway until her death in 1879. What must be thought of their relations? She herself once said to Mr. John Coleman, As for our positions, his and mine, we are partners, nothing more. He has his bank account, and I have mine. He is master of his fellowship and his rooms at Oxford, and I am mistress of this house, but not his mistress. Oh dear, no. At another time, long after Mr. Seymour's death, she said to an intimate friend, I hope Mr. Reed will never ask me to marry him, for I should certainly refuse the offer. There was no reason why he should not have made this offer, because his Oxford fellowship ceased to be important to him after he had won fame as a novelist. Pulpashers paid him large sums for everything he wrote. His debts were all paid off, and his income was assured. Yet he never spoke of marriage, and he always introduced his friend as the lady who keeps my house for me. As such, he invited his friends to meet her, and as such she even accompanied him to Oxford. There was no concealment, and apparently there was nothing to conceal. Their manner toward each other was that of congenial friends. Mrs. Seymour, in fact, might well have been described as a good fellow. Sometimes she referred to him as the doctor, and sometimes by the nickname Charlie. He on his side often spoke of her by her last name as Seymour, precisely as if she had been a man. One of his relatives rather acutely remarked about her that she was not a woman of sentiment at all, but had a genius for friendship, and that she probably could not have really loved any man at all. This is perhaps the explanation of their intimacy. If so, it is a very remarkable instance of platonic friendship. It is certain that, after she met Reed, Mrs. Seymour never cared for any other man. It is no less certain that he never cared for any other woman. When she died, five years before his death, his life became a burden to him. It was then that he used to speak of her as my lost darling and my dove. He directed that they should be buried side by side in Williston Churchyard. Over the monument, which commemorates them both, he caused to be inscribed, in addition to an epitaph for himself, the following tribute to his friend. One should read it and accept the touching words as answering every question that may be asked. Here lies the great heart of Laura Seymour, a brilliant artist, a humble Christian, a charitable woman, a loving daughter, sister, and friend, who lived for others from her childhood. Tenderly pitiful to all God's creatures, even to some that are frequently destroyed or neglected, she wiped away the tears from many faces, helping the poor with her savings, and the sorrowful with her earnest pity. When the eye saw her, it blessed her, for her face was sunshine, her voice was melody, and her heart was sympathy. This grave was made for her and for himself by Charles Reed, whose wise counselor, loyal ally, and bosom friend she was for 24 years, and who mourns her all his days. The End End of Charles Reed and Laura Seymour End of Famous Affinities of History by Lyndon Orr