Home Life of Great Authors Part 27

He died suddenly in middle life, leaving, like d.i.c.kens, an unfinished novel in the press. No other literary man, save perhaps Macaulay, has been mourned as Thackeray was mourned. There was universal sorrow for his premature loss, and great personal grief among his friends.

Twenty-three years have pa.s.sed since that time, and no successor has arisen to repay the world for that loss. When the curtain fell upon Becky Sharpe and Beatrix, upon Ethel Newcome and the good Colonel, upon Laura and Pendennis, upon Esmond and Warrington, and upon all the deeply studied characters of his mimic stage, that curtain fell to rise no more upon such creatures as his hands had made. He will have no successor. He is the One, the Only. Such pathos, such wit, such wisdom, will not dawn upon us again--in time.

When he wrote Finis for the last time at the close of one of those matchless volumes, it was an epoch closed in the history of literature.

When the recording angel wrote Finis at the close of that sad and weary but bravely spent and useful life, it was a sad day for the world of men, who will not look upon his like again. Who that felt a love for the writer and the man could fail to rejoice that the end was quick and painless? One of our own poets has well described the scene:--

"The angel came by night (Such angels still come down), And like a winter cloud Pa.s.sed over London Town, Along its lonesome streets, Where want had ceased to weep, Until it reached a house Where a great man lay asleep; The man of all his time Who knew the most of men,-- The soundest head and heart, The sharpest, kindest pen.

It paused beside his bed And whispered in his ear; He never turned his head, But answered, 'I am here.'

Into the night they went; At morning, side by side, They gained the sacred place Where the greatest dead abide; Where grand old Homer sits, In G.o.dlike state benign; Where broods in endless thought The awful Florentine; Where sweet Cervantes walks, A smile on his grave face; Where gossips quaint Montaigne, The wisest of his race; Where Goethe looks through all With that calm eye of his; Where--little seen, but light-- The only Shakspeare is!

When the new spirit came, They asked him, drawing near, 'Art thou become like us?'

He answered, 'I am here.'"

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHARLES d.i.c.kENS.

No novelist has dealt so directly with the home life of the world as Charles d.i.c.kens. He has painted few historic pictures; he has dealt mostly in interiors,--beautiful bits of home life, full of domestic feeling. Indeed, we may say that his background is always the home, and here he paints his portraits, often like those of Hogarth for strength and grotesque effect. Here, too, he limns the scenes of his comedy-tragedy, and depicts the changing fas.h.i.+ons of the time. The color is sometimes a little crude, laid on occasionally with too coa.r.s.e a brush; but the effect is always lifelike, and our interest in it is never known to flag.

Nowhere else in all the range of literature have we such tender description of home life and love, such intuitive knowledge of child life, such wonderful sympathy with every form of domestic wrong and suffering, such delicate appreciation of the shyest and most un.o.btrusive of social virtues; nowhere else such indignation at any neglect or desecration of the home, as in Mrs. Jellyby with her mission, in Mrs.

Pardiggle with her charities, Mr. Pecksniff with his hypocrisy, and Mr.

Dombey with his unfeeling selfishness. In short, d.i.c.kens is pre-eminently the prophet and the poet of the home.

Now, can it be possible that we must say of such a man as this, that in his own life he was the opposite of all that which he so feelingly describes,--that he desecrated the very home he so apostrophizes,--that he put all his warmth, geniality, and tenderness into his books and kept for his own fireside his sour humors and unhappy moods,--that he was "ill to live with," as Mrs. Carlyle puts it? We cannot believe it in so bald a form, but we are forced to admit that his married life seems to have been in every way unhappy and unfortunate. No one could state this more strongly than d.i.c.kens himself, in the letter he wrote at the time of the separation. He said:--

"Mrs. d.i.c.kens and I have lived unhappily for many years. Hardly any one who has known us intimately can fail to have known that we are in all respects of character and temperament wonderfully unsuited to each other. I suppose that no two people, not vicious in themselves, were ever joined together, who had greater difficulty in understanding one another, or who had less in common. An attached woman-servant (more friend to both of us than servant), who lived with us sixteen years and had the closest familiar experience of this unhappiness in London, in the country, in France, in Italy, wherever we have been, year after year, month after month, week after week, day after day, will bear testimony to this. Nothing has on many occasions stood between us and a separation but Mrs. d.i.c.kens's sister, Georgina Hogarth. From the age of fifteen, she has devoted herself to our home and our children. She has been their playmate, nurse, instructress, friend, protectress, adviser, companion. In the manly consideration towards Mrs. d.i.c.kens, which I owe to my wife, I will only remark of her that the peculiarity of her character has thrown all the children on some one else. I do not know, I cannot by any stretch of fancy imagine, what would have become of them but for this aunt, who has grown up with them, to whom they are devoted, and who has sacrificed the best part of her youth and life to them. She has remonstrated, reasoned, suffered, and toiled, and come again to prevent a separation between Mrs. d.i.c.kens and me. Mrs. d.i.c.kens has often expressed to her her sense of her affectionate care and devotion in the house,--never more strongly than within the last twelve months."

Again, in the public statement which he prepared for "Household Words,"

alluding to a mult.i.tude of damaging rumors which were quickly put in circulation, he says:--

"By some means, arising out of wickedness or out of folly or out of inconceivable wild chance, or out of all three, this trouble has been made the occasion of misrepresentations most grossly false, most monstrous, and most cruel,--involving not only me, but innocent persons dear to my heart, and innocent persons of whom I have no knowledge, if indeed they have any existence,--and so widely spread that I doubt if one reader in a thousand will peruse these lines by whom some touch of the breath of these slanderers will not have pa.s.sed like an unwholesome air.

"Those who know me and my nature need no a.s.surance under my hand that such calumnies are as irreconcilable with me as they are in their frantic incoherence with one another. But there is a great mult.i.tude who know me through my writings and who do not know me otherwise, and I cannot bear that one of them should be left in doubt or hazard of doubt through my poorly shrinking from taking the unusual means to which I now resort of circulating the truth. I most solemnly declare then--and this I do both in my own name and my wife's name--that all lately whispered rumors touching the trouble at which I have glanced are abominably false; and that whosoever repeats one of them, after this denial, will lie as wilfully and as foully as it is possible for any false witness to lie before heaven and earth."

This denial, coming from a man of truth and honor like Charles d.i.c.kens, must, once for all, dispose of that convenient way of accounting for the sad estrangement.

The reasons for the unhappy state of things were of a much more complicated nature than this. Only the most intimate of his friends ever knew them in full, and of course they were debarred from making them public. But Professor Ward of Cambridge University, who has written a very kind and appreciative Life of d.i.c.kens, and one which gives a far more pleasing idea of his character than the bulky and egotistical Life by Forster, gives a clue to the whole trouble in the following statement. He says:--

"If he ever loved his wife with that affection before which so-called incompatibilities of habits, temper, or disposition fade into nothingness, there is no indication of it in any of the numerous letters addressed to her. Neither has it ever been pretended that he strove in the direction of that resignation which love and duty made possible to David Copperfield, or even that he remained in every way master of himself, as many men have known how to remain, the story of whose wedded life and its disappointments has never been written in history or figured in fiction."

And this troublous condition of things was very much intensified by d.i.c.kens having fallen violently in love with Mary Hogarth, Mrs.

d.i.c.kens's youngest sister. This beautiful girl died at their house at the early age of seventeen. No sorrow seems ever to have touched the heart and possessed the imagination of Charles d.i.c.kens like that for the loss of this dearly loved girl. "I can solemnly say," he wrote to her mother a few months after her death, "that waking or sleeping I have never lost the recollection of our hard sorrow, and I never shall."

"If," he writes in his diary at the beginning of a new year, "she was with me now,--the same winning, happy, amiable companion, sympathizing with all my thoughts and feelings more than any one I ever knew did or will,--I think I should have nothing to wish but a continuance of such happiness." Throughout life her memory haunted him with great vividness.

After her death he wrote: "I dreamed of her every night for many weeks, and always with a kind of quiet happiness, which became so pleasant to me that I never lay down without a hope of the vision returning." The year before he died he wrote to a friend: "She is so much in my thoughts at all times, especially when I am successful, that the recollection of her is an essential part of my being, and is as inseparable from my existence as the beating of my heart is." In a word, she was the one great imaginative pa.s.sion of his life. He is said to have pictured her in Little Nell, and he writes after finis.h.i.+ng that book, "Dear Mary died yesterday when I think of it."

Have we not in this the key to all the sorrows of his domestic life?

Could he have married the woman he loved in this manner, he would doubtless have been one of the tenderest and most devoted of husbands, and a family life as beautiful as any of the ideal ones he has depicted would have resulted. It is probable that he did not know Mary Hogarth until after his marriage, when she came to live in his house, and when his youthful fancy for his wife had begun to decline. Miss Hogarth died instantly of heart-disease, without even a premonitory warning.

All accounts agree in calling Mrs. d.i.c.kens a very pretty, amiable, and well-bred woman; and even if she was as infinitely incapable as represented, that alone would seem to be insufficient cause for so serious a trouble. Miss Georgina Hogarth, whom all describe as a very lovely and superior person, possessed the executive ability Mrs. d.i.c.kens lacked, it would seem; for all visitors both to Tavistock House and Gad's Hill describe with enthusiasm the perfect order which prevailed in the large establishments, attributing this in part at least to d.i.c.kens's own intense love of method and pa.s.sion for neatness. But no man without the aid of feminine head and hands would have succeeded in attaining to this perfect housekeeping, especially where the family consisted of nine children, as in this case.

Hans Christian Andersen thus describes a visit to Gad's Hill:--

"It was a fine new house, with red walls and four bow-windows, and a jutting entrance supported by pillars; in the gable a large window. A dense hedge of cherry-laurel surrounded the house, in front of which extended a neat lawn, and on the opposite side rose two mighty cedars of Lebanon, whose crooked branches spread their green far over another large lawn surrounded by ivy and wild vines, the hedge being so dense and dark that no sunbeam could penetrate it.

"As soon as I stepped into the house, d.i.c.kens came to meet me kindly and cordially. He was now in the prime of life, still so youthful, so active, so eloquent, so rich in the most pleasant humor, through which his sterling kind-heartedness always beamed forth. As he stood before me in the first hour, so he was and remained during all the weeks I pa.s.sed in his company,--merry, good-natured, and full of charming sympathy. d.i.c.kens at home seems to be perpetually jolly, and enters into the interests of games with all the ardor of a boy. My bedroom was the perfection of a sleeping-apartment; the view across the Kentish hills, with a distant peep of the Thames, charming. In every room I found a table covered with writing-materials, headed notepaper, envelopes, cut quill-pens, wax, matches, sealing-wax, and all scrupulously neat and orderly. There are magnificent specimens of Newfoundland dogs on the grounds, such animals as Landseer would love to paint. One of these, named b.u.mble, seems to be a favorite with d.i.c.kens."

Mr. Mackenzie writes:--

"Eminently social and domestic, he exercised a liberal hospitality, and though he lived well as his means allowed, avoided excesses. It is said of him that he never lost a friend, never made an enemy."

From all sources comes the same report of his geniality, of his devotion to his children and their devotion to him, of his constant generosity and good-humor. Byron's old servant said that Lady Byron was the only woman he ever saw who could not manage his master. Was this also true of Mrs. d.i.c.kens? Was she the only one who found him "ill to live with"? It may be; and yet one can easily imagine him to have been a man of moods, and that in some of these moods it would be best to give him a wide berth. The very excess of his animal spirits may have been wearying to one who could not share them; and that he was egotistical to a degree, and vain, and fond of flattery, goes without saying. A lady in the "English-woman's Magazine" tells this story of his wild and reckless fun, and it is matched by many others. They were down on the seash.o.r.e in the moonlight, and had been dancing there.

"We then strolled farther down to watch the fading light. The tide came rippling in. The night grew darker,--starless, moonless.

d.i.c.kens seemed suddenly to be possessed with the spirit of mischief; he threw his arm around me, and ran me down the inclined plane to the end of the jetty till we reached the toll-post. He put his other arm around this, and exclaimed in theatrical tones that he intended to hold me there till the sad sea waves should submerge us. 'Think of the sensation we shall create.' Here I implored him to let me go, and struggled hard to release myself. 'Let your mind dwell upon the column in the "Times" wherein will be vividly described the pathetic fate of the lovely E. P., drowned by d.i.c.kens in a fit of dementia. Don't struggle, poor little bird; you are helpless.' By this time the last gleam of light had faded out, and the water close to us looked uncomfortably black. The tide was coming up rapidly, and surged over my feet. I gave a loud shriek, and tried to bring him back to common-sense by reminding him that my dress--my best dress, my only silk dress--would be ruined. Even this climax did not soften him; he still went on with his serio-comic nonsense, shaking with laughter all the time, and panting with his struggles to hold me. 'Mrs. d.i.c.kens,' I shrieked, 'help me! Make Mr. d.i.c.kens let me go--the waves are up to my knees.' 'Charles,' cried Mrs. d.i.c.kens, 'how can you be so silly?

You will both be carried off by the tide!' And it was not until my dress had been completely ruined that I succeeded in wresting myself from him. Upon two other occasions he seized me and ran with me under the cataract, and held me there until I was thoroughly baptized and my bonnets a wreck of lace and feathers."

The same writer says,--and she is one who writes from familiar personal acquaintance,--"To describe d.i.c.kens as always amiable, always just, and always in the right, would be simply false and untrue to Nature;" and she relates several anecdotes going to prove that he was sometimes capricious, not always responsive to appeals for help, and other things of that sort; all of which may be true and not be very damaging. This writer tells still another story of his reckless fun-making, as follows:--

"We were about to make an excursion to Pegwell Bay, and lunch there. Presently d.i.c.kens came in in high glee, flouris.h.i.+ng about a yard of ballads, which he had bought from a beggar in the street.

'Look here,' he cried exultingly, 'all for a penny. One song alone is worth a Jew's eye,--quite new and original, the subject being the interesting announcement by our gracious Queen.' He commenced to give us a specimen, but after hearing one verse there arose a cry of universal execration. He pretended to be vexed at our 'shutting him up.' said there was nothing wrong in it, he had written a great deal worse himself; and when we were going to enter the carriages he said: 'Now, look here! I give due notice to all and sundry, that I mean to sing that song, and a good many others, during the ride; so those ladies who think them vulgar can go in the other carriages. I am not going to invest my hard-earned penny for nothing.' I was quite certain that Charles d.i.c.kens was the last man in the world to shock the modesty of any female, and too much of a gentleman to do anything that was annoying to us, but I thought it as well to go in the other carriage; and so he had no ladies with him but his wife and Mrs. S----. I was not sorry, however, to be where I was, as I heard for the next half-hour portions of those songs wafted on the breeze; and the bursts of laughter from ladies and gentlemen and the mischievous twinkle in d.i.c.kens's eye proved that he was in such a madcap mood that it was as well there were none but married people with him,--the subject being of a 'Gampish' nature. But he was not always full of spirits or even-tempered,--indeed, I was sometimes puzzled by the variability of his moods."

Anecdotes like the following, told by Blanchard Jerrold, abound in all writers who wrote of d.i.c.kens from personal knowledge:--

"A very dear friend of mine, and of many others to whom literature is a staff, had died. To say that his family had claims upon d.i.c.kens is to say that they were promptly acknowledged and satisfied, with the grace and heartiness which double the gift, sweeten the bread, and warm the wine. I asked a connection of our dead friend whether he had seen the poor wife and children. 'Seen them?' he answered. 'I was there to-day. They are removed into a charming cottage. They have everything about them; and just think of this: when I burst into the room, in my eager survey of the new home, I saw a man in his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves up some steps, hammering away l.u.s.tily. He turned. It was Charles d.i.c.kens, and he was hanging the pictures for the widow. . . . d.i.c.kens was the soul of truth and manliness as well as kindness, so that such a service as this came as naturally to him as help from his purse.'"

Jerrold continues:--

"There was that boy-element in him which has been so often remarked of men of genius. 'Why, we played a game of knock 'em down only a week ago,' a friend remarked to me last June, with beaming eyes, 'and he showed all the old astonis.h.i.+ng energy and delight in taking aim at Aunt Sally.' My own earliest recollections of d.i.c.kens are of his gayest moods, when the boy in him was exuberant, and leap-frog and rounders were not sports too young for the player who had written 'Pickwick' twenty years before. The sweet and holy lessons which he presented to humanity out of the humble places in the world could not have been evolved out of a nature less true and sympathetic than his. It wanted such a man as d.i.c.kens was in his life to be such a writer as he was for the world."

One more anecdote. J. C. Young tells us that one day Mrs. Henry Siddons, a neighbor and intimate of Lord Jeffrey, who often entered his library unannounced, opened the door very gently to see if he were there, and saw enough at a glance to convince her that the visit was ill-timed. The hard critic of the "Edinburgh Review" was sitting in his chair with his head on the table in deep grief. As Mrs. Siddons was retiring, in the hope that her entrance had been unnoticed, Jeffrey raised his head and kindly beckoned her back. Perceiving that his cheek was flushed and his eyes suffused with tears, she begged permission to withdraw. When he found that she was intending to leave him, he rose from his chair, took her by both hands, and led her to a seat.

"Don't go, my dear friend; I shall be right again in another minute."

"I had no idea you had had any bad news, or cause for grief, or I would not have come. Is any one dead?"

"Yes, indeed. I'm a great goose to have given way so; but I could not help it. You'll be sorry to hear that little Nelly, Boz's little Nelly, is dead."

Dear, sweet, loving little Nell! We doubt if any other creation of poet or novelist in any language has received the tribute of as many tears as thou. From high, from low, on land, on sea, wherever thy story has been read, there has been paid the spontaneous tribute of tears. Whether or not many of the fantastic creations of the great master's hand will live in the far future we cannot tell, but of thy immortality there is no more question than there is of that of Hamlet or of Lear. Bret Harte tells us of a camp among the stern Sierras, where a group of wanderers gathered about the fire, and one of them arose, and "from his pack's scant treasure" drew forth the magic book; and soon all their own wants and labors were forgotten, and

"The whole camp with Nell on English meadows Wandered and lost their way."

And from many different sources come stories of her influence upon the hearts and minds of all cla.s.ses and conditions of men.

Of d.i.c.kens's personal appearance and of the leading traits of his character much has been written, and by some of the keenest observers of his time. He is said to have been a very small and sickly boy, subject to attacks of violent spasm. Although so fond of games and sports when a man, as a boy he evinced little interest in them, probably on account of his ill health. We should naturally think of him as the autocrat of the playground, and the champion in all games of strength and skill; but such was not the fact. He was extremely fond of reading, at a very early age, and of acting little plays, and showing pictures in a magic lantern; he even sang at this time, and was as fond of fun as in later life. When quite young he and his companions mounted a small theatre, and got together scenery to ill.u.s.trate "The Miller and his Men," and one or two other plays.