The Private Lives of Great Men

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THE PRIVATE LIVES OF GREAT MEN.

They are almost always unfortunate. It seems to be a part of the compensating provisions of nature that these men and women whose name are upon every lip, whose praises are upon every tongue, who bask in the sunlight of popular favor and who are envied, feted and courted, should be singularly unfortunate in their more private and intimate relations.

The recent exposures of the private life of Chas. Dickens,¹ whose name is of world-wide celebrity, and the offspring of whose imagination are household words throughout the intelligent portion of the community, present a case in point. The veil of sacred privacy that should have guarded the household affairs of the great novelist has been rudely swept away, and the “skeleton in the closet,” “the dweller on the threshold,” remorselessly exposed. These revelations must seem passing strange to Dickens’ readers and admirers—and he numbers them by tens of thousands—who doubtless imagined that their favorite author enjoyed some such domestic bliss as he has himself pictured in his “Copperfield.” It will strike many as strange that any man could have written such tender and pathetic lines as close that semi-autobiographical work, in which the writer alludes to his dream-wife in terms of the utmost affection, while, at the time, his own household was in reality made miserable by the incompatibility of temper existing between him and his real partner. But it is the case, nevertheless. Not always do the happy sentiment, the genial philosophy, the felicitous diction of the novelist spring from an inward perennial fountain of peace—not always are the tragedies of the fictionist drawn from the vivid imagination alone.

Look for a moment at the Domestic relations of England’s greatest novelists. Charles Dickens, after a wedded life of over twenty years, is separated from his wife on account of an unconquerable incompatibility of temper—Disraeli, the brilliant “Vivian Grey,” who in “Henrietta Temple,” has given us perhaps the most perfect love-story in existence was mated in the full flush of his success to a fat widow, old enough to be his mother—Thackeray, who, with all his cynicism, has rendered homage to the sex in his portraitures of Helen and Laura Pendennis, was forced to place his first wife in a lunatic Asylum—Bulwer, the prince of sentimentalists, has been separated from his wife for years, after a married life so turbulent that it is even said that his amiable partner used to chase the author of “Pelham” and “My Novel” around the house, broomstick in hand. A sad list, that might be extended much farther. Of all the calamities of authors—of all the infelicities of genius—it strikes us that their domestic difficulties are the worst. Take all else from a man and leave him a good and faithful wife and he can never be called unhappy, no matter what may be the fluctuations of fortune. But take that comfort, consolation and safeguard away and he becomes “poor indeed”—a vessel without a rudder, beaten here and there, at the mercy of the winds and waves.

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