MR. T. P. O'CONNOR'S LOVE-STORIES.*
WHATETBR may be our opinions about Mr. T. P. O'Connor's position and aims as a politician, or of his especial uses of journalism, there can be no doubt of his capacity for writing very attractive English when it pleases him. We do not know of any exact principle which guided him in his selection and treatment of subjects for his present book, which he has • Some Old Loos Stories. By T. P. O'Connor. London: Chapman and Ball. dubbed by the name of love-stories, out of some spirit of con- tradiction. They are in truth, notably in the two best instances, the histories of Lincoln and Carlyle and their courtship and marriage, rather the chronicles of ill-assorted unions than of anything else ; while the sad romance of Marie Antoinette, the poor little queen-child of fourteen years old, who would gamble and would not clean her teeth, and Fersen, the Swede, who was to her so true and devoted a servant, to die in the end in his own country a death even more terrible than hers, hardly comes under the common but characteristic heading of a love- story. The same test may be applied to the relations of Mirabean and Sophie Monier, though there was something of the heroic in their straggles in Belgium, while the sordid and inglorious episode of Hazlitt and Sarah Walker must surely have strayed into such company through some extra- ordinary error. We do not understand why Mr. Le Gallienne disinterred it, or why Mr. O'Connor disinterred Mr. Le Gallienne. On behalf of such heroes as Lincoln and Mirabean and Carlyle, and such a Queen of the world as Marie Antoinette, we resent the intrusion. With all respect for Mr. O'Connor's republican tendencies, from Marie Antoinette to Sarah Walker is too far a cry. It should be added that the essayist seems to us to make more than history warrants of the friendship of Fersen and the French Queen. Lamartine and others have done no more than sug- gest the personal devotion of a faithful servant to both the Sovereigns, and Marie Antoinette's proud self-sacrifice to the name and fortunes of the kindly and unequal husband who was forced by the hardest of fates into the popition for which he was so eminently unfitted, form one of the most redeeming of the features of that terrible story. For it grows and does not lose in terror as the time goes on. The philosophical origin of the Revolution, with the tenets and teachings of Rousseau and Voltaire, its far-reaching consequences, and its uprooting of the landmarks, seem less and less significant by the side of the infinite horror and ruin which attended it. We may try to attach what import we will to the views and characters of a Danton, a Marat, or a Robespierre ; but what remains with us as we read their story, whether through Carlyle or Lamartine or Mr. O'Connor, is a wild nightmare of bloodthirst and murder-madness, which seems neither to have had nor to have desired any object but blood, or anything but itself to feed upon. And, after all, we are beginning to doubt if the political influence of the Revolution has extended very far beyond France. It is certain that there the very founda- tions of Monarchy and Empire were unloosed, and that to the quiet observer she seems at last to have found the form of government that suits her best in the very opposite of all with which the world has credited the French,—in a placid, commercial Republic where nobody is at all above his fellows, which welcomes a British Lord Mayor as a sort of accredited envoy. But the contagion has not spread. Haps- burgs and Hohenzollerns and Romanoffs abide as firmly as ever ; our own country holds fast to its Royal shows and pageantries. Italy has developed a Royal family and a strong throne for herself, in the face of the great Papal power; and the inclination of mankind to Cmars seems but little changed. The terrible story of the French Revolution reads already like a local story. Mr. O'Connor's preference for the period springs both of knowledge and sympathy, for his strong Republicanism shows in every line, though in his interesting delineation of Marie Antoinette he both affects and attains impartiality. Captivating and vivid, too, is the portrait which in no uncertain colours he paints for us of Mirabean, as devoted as Fersen to the cause of the Crown, though in a very different way. The strong Conservative element in his nature was, like Gladstone's in another degree and kind, a cause alike of his weakness and his strength. And the story of the ugly, irregular mauvais sujet of the Riquetti race, which got a footing in Marseilles in the sixteenth century, with his impossible relations to his father, the terrible old Marquis, comes to us as always with a fresh interest, though we care less about the part of the article which relates to Sophie Monnier than we do for the rest of it. Indeed, it is an episode even in the article, Mr. O'Connor having throughout his book used his heroines rather as a means to the study of his heroes than for any purpose of their own, except in the case of Marie Antoinette. Both Mrs. Carlyle and Mrs. Lincoln are made to interest us, more as a key to the story of their famous husbands, than they do on their own account; though in the
instance of Janie Welsh this may hardly have been the writer's intention. We presume that it is to the latter romance which most readers will turn, in preference to the other love-stories.
It is ineffably sad, that almost impossible example of the incompleteness of human things, from the first meeting between the two unattached lovers to the sudden end which came to the poor overtaxed wife, at the very moment of her husband's triumph. Mr. O'Connor boldly vindicates Mr. Fronde from the charges so freely ,brought against him in reference to his disclosures of Carlyle's married life :--
In the picture of all that was gloomy, selfish, and awful in his own life, the materials for which Carlyle deliberately bequeathed to his nearest friend, I find Carlyle's logical and honest fulfil- ment of his own lifelong gospel,—that the world should know life in its truth, naked, bleak, and chill ; and a deliberate per- petuation of the self-abasement by which, in all the recoil of remorse, he sought to atone for his cruelty and selfishness to his wife If ever there was a man who preached the moral that a life truly told was a need, an enlightenment, and a duty to humanity, it was Carlyle ; and assuredly nobody had a better right. To the science of the world he has contributed nothing, or worse than nothing; to the history of the world his contribu- tions are of very doubtful value ; but on that great subject, the study of the human heart and human soul, he has told more almost than any man of his time or any other time. Where out- side Shakespeare is there a portrait-gallery so rich, so picturesque, so faithful, so full of photographic truth, lurid insight, morals and lessons finely preached, as that which is to be found in his splendid pages ? "
Mr. O'Connor has said in other words what the present writer has often felt disposed to hold, that the doubt attaching to Carlyle's exact purport and position in literature rises from the fact that he was really and by nature what he affected most to despise, a great poetical dramatist. The painful story of Jane Carlyle's marriage, with her own wasted and unappre- ciated powers, is told for us again with a very picturesque touch, though we may not go so far as to agree with those who
would place her mental strength and attainments on a level with those of her husband.
There is a community of interest between Carlyle's story and Lincoln's, widely different as were the lives and natures of those two famous men, in the fact that their marriages
may both be said to have been not only mistaken, but made by mistake. There is a greater element of novelty to English readers about the romance of the American President than about the companion picture of the self-made Scotchman. Mr. O'Connor's authority on Lincoln was a friend of the President's, whom he met at Carlsbad, a typical American,
by name Ward Lamon. " There is something trying to the nerves in Americanese," writes our essayist, "to those who have not learned the language ; but when you have acquired it, there is a singular attraction in its slow drawl, its curious serenity, and what I may call passionate composure."
Few Englishmen, as Mr. O'Connor says, knew anything of Lincoln's inner life, or that he had a love-story at all. Born in the South of the outcast race of "poor whites," he never lost an abiding sense of pain and humiliation about his origin.
His father was idle and nomadic, and his mother, Nancy Hanks, belonged to the "primitive period of religion, in which bodily contortion and hysterical excitement are assumed to be manifestations of the godly spirit." A wonderful de- scription by Mr. Herndon, whose book is Mr. O'Connor's text, of a camp meeting at Elizabeth's Town in Kentucky, where Mrs. Lincoln figured, gives us the strangest idea of the bringing up the great President, for whom Nature threw aside her old- world moulds, as Lowell wrote, and, " taking fresh clay from the breast of the unexhausted West," fashioned a new and steadfast hero for the new crisis and the new times. But his life was intensely sad from start to finish. He loved nothing but reading, rail-splitter and athlete as he was by vocation and build. "He read on Sundays and wrote on Sundays, and usually he brought his books with him to the woods. It was no uncommon thing for him to drop the axe, and retiring to the shade of some tree, bury himself in the dreamland of the Bible or _ZEsop's Fables." The love of books and the love of story-telling were his characteristics to the last. For years he described himself as "floating driftwood," walking miles to his work, making " 3,000 rails for Major Warwick," and witnessing at New Orleans a slave-auction, which so revolted him that he " moved away from the scene in a deep feeling of incomparable hate." Bidding his companions follow him, he said, "By God, boys, let's get away from this if ever I get a chance to hit that thing "—meaning slavery-
" I'll hit it hard." His first love was a beautiful Miss Rontledge, and it was only on her death that he paid his addresses to the Mary Owen, "tall and portly, jovial and social," who in a bad hour for him became his wife after a second engagement. The first had ended in his running away on the appointed wedding-day, for which Miss Owen never forgave him. Himself a " lonely, gloomy, smileless man," with a half-frantic wife subject to cerebral disease, as a doctor summed-up her fantasies, he was " throughout his married life steadily, persistently, and profoundly miserable." She used occasionally to receive his visitors with such violence and emphasis that they often complained to Lincoln, who, after listening to one of them, said : " Let me ask you in all candour, cannot you endure for a few moments what I have had as my portion for the last fifteen years ?" The man was so disarmed and moved that he became one of Lincoln's warmest friends. The whole story will well repay perusal. Mr. O'Connor has, with the one exception of Hazlitt's vagary, chosen his subjects well. They form a little collection of the hidden tragedies of life, which cannot fail thoroughly to interest those who read them.
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