Strange is the fate of some books and of some bookmen and bookwomen Slowly, through long laborious hours of daylight, when the bees are humming, or in the silent spaces of the night, Genius translates its hidden energy into form and matter. The fires burn in the furnace of the soul, and with painful hand the master craftsman smites and shapes the glowing bar upon the anvil. In the fulness of time the work is done and given to the world, that the world may store it in its treasure-houses, to be drawn forth continually after the years-perhaps after the centuries-fresh, shining, incorruptible: a delight to the eye, a refreshment to the spirit. So happily it is with the greatest things of all. The cycles drift by, the peoples come and go, but still Achilles girds on his armor, aflame for the death of Patroclus, and Penelope spins sadly amid the clamorous suitors, while an old man, with cheeks furrowed by the sea-wind, waits hungry for revenge at the outer porch. And happily too in these supreme cases the workman has been forgotten in the work. Of Homer no one knows anything at all, no more than we know of the author of the Book of Job: of Virgil, Shakespeare, Dante, the most of us are scarcely less ignorant. do not complicate our delight in these mightier manifestations of the Power we call Art by dwelling on that mere instrument the Artist, a man with like passions unto ourselves, save that through his brain and hand the mystery of creation has found such expression as can reach our consciousness.

We

But those are the few, the chosen, the demigods. How many there are whose fate has been quite otherwise! The Book is forgotten; but over the Man we babble volubly, prying with

unceasing inquisitiveness into those weaknesses and personal adventures which make him one with us, instead of concerning ourselves with that which sets him like a star apart. And in this our hurrying age, impatient of abstraction and generalization, fastening feverishly on the concrete, the "actual," which means the transient, it seems as if all history is interesting only so far as it can be turned into gossip. We are vague about some of Napoleon's battles, but we know all about his dealings with the Fair Sex; why exactly the victory of the Nile was won, or what it effected, the intelligent student cannot say; but he has the details of Nelson's relationship with Lady Hamilton at his fingers' ends. Publishers say that "serious" history is a drug in the market, though there is always a demand for piquant accounts of Royal Mistresses and Splendid Sinners and suitably written chroniques d'amour. Can one be surprised or even censorious? The gossip touches a permanent element of human nature, while the Great Event may be local and transitory. What is it to Jones in Brixton-to Mrs. Jones more particularly-if some thousands of human beings did hack and hew one another to pieces somewhere amid the swamps and mountains some hundreds of years ago because a forgotten king had quarrelled with another over a vanished city? Don John of Austria, on his high-prowed argosy, thundering among the Turkish galleys at Lepanto is a sufficiently heroical figure; but all this business of Cross and Crescent, of the most Christian King and the Commander of the Faithful, is very dead and shadowy in Brixton, where yet men and women live and love and suffer, and husbands are not always kind, and wives are sometimes unhappy, sighing for the

unattainable-even in Brixton. You cannot wonder if the story of Swift and Stella does take our Mrs. Jones more than A Tale of a Tub or The Conduct of the Allies; or that for her the white plume of Navarre waves against a background of romantic love-affairs rather than one of wars and treaties.

So it comes about that we ignore the writings and read of the writers. How grimly ironic is the fate of some of them! Carlyle, for instance, he who toiled remorselessly for the better part of half a century to deliver his message to the world, has fallen upon a generation which cares nothing for his message and is interested only in himself. You hardly ever meet any person who seems to have a working knowledge of the writings of Thomas of Chelsea. The Frederick, the Cromwell, the French Revolution-I think even Past and Present and Sartor Resartus, lie unopened upon the topmost shelves; the gorgeous rhetoric, the grand and solemn cadences, the satire, the wit, the prose-poetry, have never touched the thousands who know and care for Carlyle only as the husband of Jane Welsh. There is no commentary scarcely an intelligent criticism on his works; but a library of essays, monographs, stout volumes, has piled itself round his private affairs. Not a detail, not a triviality in the commonplace domesticity of this childless couple has escaped publication. The petty quarrels of husband and wife, their tiffs, and squabbles, and reconciliations, Mr. Carlyle's struggles with dyspepsia and Mrs. Carlyle's wrestlings with the housemaids, all these and many other minute events in two singularly eventless lives, are pursued with avidity, by those who would yawn over the throbbing periods of the great prophetic books. It is, I suspect, even so with Browning; you might find many who "cannot read" the poems, but can and do enjoy the

effusive frankness of Mrs. Browning's love-letters.

His

It is all very undignified; yet in a sense inevitable. And this at least must be said, that in the case of the man of letters a curiosity about merely personal matters is more justifiable than it is with other artists. One cannot separate the literary creator from his work as one can separate the painter, the sculptor, the architect, the engineer, even the musician. For all these deal with a material that is outside themselves; the man's personality need not greatly affect our appreciation of the results of his labor. There the miracle is achieved in color or sound, in stone or marble; and as the eye travels up those climbing spires or rests on faultless line and curve, or drinks in the ecstasy of light and shade and motion, it matters little what hand it was that held the brush and chisel. But with the writer, the poet, the artist-philosopher, it is otherwise. material is largely himself, his own soul, his own nature, his individuality; with all at least but the very greatest who rise to the large impersonality of creative nature herself. For some of the others the biographical factor is a necessary element of understanding. This is especially the case with the prophets, the evangelists, the missionaries, the preachers of new gospels. If a man comes to my house to paint a picture or mend a bell-wire he may be an atheist or a bigamist for all I care; but if I employ him to teach my boys, or to prepare my daughters for confirmation, I really do want to know something about his character and conduct. It is even so with the great teachers of men. When I am invited to read Nietzsche it is not mere impertinence to remind me that this fierce apologist for Force, Egoism, ruthless Adventure, was himself a fidgety invalid struggling with landladies and patent medicines. Shall I

study him with due insight if I do not know that he died insane at fifty-six? That is surely no irrelevant detail which I should thrust from my thoughts when I ponder the obscure texts of Zarathustra. Or when I listen to Nietzsche and to Schopenhauer on women, am I to forget that both were hypochondriac celibates, both, perhaps, sexually abnormal? Can I read Rousseau aright if I put out of my mind those passages of unspeakable illumination in the Confessions?

So perhaps, instead of treating the gossip of literature as mere triviality, and leaving it to be dealt with by trivial persons, anxious only to hatch out a piquant story, we ought to have it handled seriously as a branch of psychological inquiry. The personal history of men of genius might be investigated in a scientific fashion, and the results tabulated with as much precision as the available knowledge admits. Then we should know more than we do of the conditions under which Genius develops, and of its physical and psychical environment. At present we are content to treat it as something abnormal, or something accidental. We say the poet took too much wine or too many mistresses because he was a genius; or we say he would have been a greater genius if he had been more moderate. Either proposition may be true, or both may be false. But it is desirable that we should know what element of truth and falsity there is, and deduce that knowledge from a tabulation and analysis of the facts. One would like to see the gossip of literature withdrawn from the hands of the sedulous bookmaker and the lively feminine compiler, and dealt with by those who would make it more scientific if less entertaining.

Take that subject of genius in its connubial aspect. It is a commonplace that the marriages and love af

fairs of the great literary artists are often unfortunate. The proposition is accepted without much consideration of its significance; for significant it surely must be in some way that the writer of genius is most often an individual who has missed happiness and success in the most vital relation of all. Perhaps the statement will be traversed; you generalize, it will be said, from a few conspicuous examples. But that does not appear to be the case.. Cast an eye down the literary record of almost any nation, and you will find the same tale of futility, suffering, failure in this particular. It would seem that the famous author who attains marital and parental content is the exception; the majority were celibate and childless, if they were not unsatisfied or unsatisfying husbands. We find examples enough in our own literature, the literature of a nation which puts a high estimate on its morals and its domesticity. Here is a list which I suppose can be regarded as fairly representative of the British literary genius during nearly three centuries, excluding living writers and those recently deceased. I append to each famous name a brief note as to its owner's "condition in regard to marriage":

Shakespeare-Married at eighteen, with hasty irregularity, a woman of humble origin, eight years older than himself. The union seems to have been unsympathetic, and the terms of the poet's will point to an estrangement between husband and

wife.

Milton-Married three times. The poet's first wife left him after a few weeks. He wrote tracts on divorce, and paid his addresses "to a very handsome and witty gentlewoman" until the wife returned. Dryden-Married-unhappily.

Bunyan-Married twice-satisfactorily. Hobbes-Unmarried.

Pepys Married.

Unfaithful to his

wife, and frequently quarrelled with her.

Samuel Butler-Married late in life.

Newton-Unmarried.
Locke-Unmarried.

Swift-Secretly married to a woman
with whom he never lived, and
whom he hardly ever saw except in
presence of a third person.
Defoe Married; had several children.
Little known of the circumstances
of his domestic life.
Addison-Married three years before
his death. The marriage "is gener-
ally said to have been uncomfort-
able." (Dict. of Nat. Biog.)
Steele Twice married: happily, in
spite of irregularities of conduct.
Congreve A bachelor and professional
"man of pleasure."

Otway-Unmarried. Life wrecked by an unhappy passion. Pope-Unmarried.

Prior-Unmarried.

Fielding-Married twice. Devotedly attached to his first wife; after her death married her maid. Richardson-Unmarried. Smollett-Married: satisfactorily. Samuel Johnson-Married a vulgar and affected widow twenty years his senior. The marriage considered a grotesque affair by Johnson's friends and contemporaries. Childless. James Thomson-Unmarried.

Gray-Unmarried. Hume-Unmarried.

Sterne-Married. Got on badly with his wife, and had various love affairs and sentimental philanderings. Adam Smith-Unmarried.

Boswell-Married; frequently unfaithful to his wife. Goldsmith-Unmarried.

Gibbon-Unmarried.

Sheridan-Married; not unhappily.
Cowper-Unmarried.

Burns-Married to a woman who had been his mistress. Occasionally unfaithful to her afterwards.

Crabbe-Married: satisfactorily.

Bentham-Unmarried.

Wordsworth-Married; satisfactorily. Scott-Married: not quite sympathetically. Southey-Married twice. First wife became insane. Married his second wife at age of 66, just before complete failure of his own mental faculties.

Coleridge-Married: unsatisfactorily. Husband and wife became almost completely alienated, and lived apart.

Shelley-Made an imprudent marriage early in life. Separated from his wife, who committed suicide. Keats-Unmarried. Tormented by au unhappy love affair.

Byron-Separated from his wife after a great scandal, and entered into various irregular unions. Charles Lamb-Unmarried. Hazlitt-Married twice. First wife divorced him; second refused to live with him.

Leigh Hunt-Married: not quite happily.

Thomas Moore-Married: satisfactorily. De Quincey-Married: happily, so far as the husband's habits permitted. Wife died anno ætat. 39. "One can suppose that hers had not been the easiest or happiest of lives."-Prof. Mason.

Macaulay-Unmarried.

Edward Bulwer Lytton-Separated from his wife. Newman-Unmarried.

Carlyle-Married: bickered a good deal with his wife.

John Stuart Mill-Unmarried.
Herbert Spencer-Unmarried.

Darwin-Married: satisfactorily.
Ruskin-Marriage annulled.

Landor-Quarrelled with his wife, and
lived many years apart from her.
Dickens Separated from his wife.
Thackeray-Wife became insane.

Charles Reade-Unmarried.

Froude-Married: satisfactorily.

Matthew Arnold-Married: satisfactorily.

Kingsley-Married: satisfactorily. Tennyson-Married: satisfactorily. Browning-Married: satisfactorily. Rossetti Unsatisfactory married life, ended by wife, two years after wedding, dying of overdose of laudanum. Edward FitzGerald-Separated from his wife.

James Thomson (“B. V.")-Unmarried. William Morris-Married: satisfactorily.

Walter Pater-Unmarried.

Taking this list of sixty-eight names, all those of men of high, in some cases of the highest, literary talent, we find that there are only twenty marriages which can be called satisfactory, even if we include some, like those of Fielding and Southey, which can hardly be so described, and others like that of Defoe, of which next to nothing is known. Twenty-three of the marriages were unfortunate, and several disastrous; and twenty-five of the persons mentioned were unmarried. Thus among these sixty-eight gifted writers less than a third were married and lived in ordinary content and comfort with their wives.

The result would be similar if we included women in our list. We might mention the cases of Aphra Behn, Maria Edgeworth, Hannah More, Fanny Burney, the Brontë sisters, Mrs. Hemans, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, to indicate that the woman-writer rather

frequently avoids matrimony or is unfortunate in her experience of it. And if we turned our survey to France, Germany, America, the names of Goethe, Balzac, Dumas, Heine, Kleist, De Musset, George Sand, Walt Whitman, Poe, and many others leap to the mind, and suggest the same reflection. It would seem that a wellregulated family life does not in the majority of cases go with literary pro

duction of the higher kind either for men or women. In two cases out of three the great author is either unmarried or married badly. It is notable that only three or four of the more splendid names are found in our catalogue of successful marriages. It includes Moore, Crabbe, Smollett, Kingsley; but not Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats, Byron or Burns. Wordsworth and Browning are among the exceptions-great poets who achieved at least average felicity as husbands and fathers. But more commonly, the great writer does not marry, or if he marries the union turns out badly.

It may be said, of course, that in this respect the great writer shares the common lot of humanity. Engineers, architects, painters, stockbrokers, cheesemongers, are often unmarried, and if married they do not always "get on" with their wives. But one would like to know whether in these avocations the matrimonial failures are as numerous as among the men of letters. That is where the Professor of Psychological Gossip might do useful work. He might ascertain whether the proportion of the celibates and the ill-married is really as high among cheesemongers and stockbrokers as it has been among the poets and playwrights. He might conduct an historical survey through other professional biographies and let us know the result. If we took the seventy most famous soldiers, statesmen, or artists between the age of Elizabeth and the middle of Queen Victoria's reign, should we find that only about a third were married and lived happily with their wives. Is failure in matrimony the penalty of eminence generally, or merely of literary eminence?

If the common opinion that the author is exceptionally unlucky in this respect proves to be well-founded, our scientific gossip-expert may be able to give us the reason. A friend of mine