Part 6

At this time William and Mary were both well out of the kindergarten. He was forty and she was thirty-seven. Several years before, William had issued a sort of proclamation to the public, and a warning to women of the quest that bachelordom was his by choice, and that he was wedded to philosophy. Very young people are given to this habit of declaration, "I intend never to wed," and it seems that older heads are just as absurd as young ones. It is well to refrain from mentioning what we intend to do, or intend not to do, since we are all sailing under sealed orders and nothing is so apt to occur as the unexpected.

Towards the last of the year Seventeen Hundred Ninety-six, William was introducing Mary as his wife, and congratulations were in order. To them, mutual love constituted marriage, and when love died, marriage was at an end.

A sharp rebuke was printed about this time by Mary, evidently prompted by that pestiferous class of law-breakers who do not recognize that the opposites of things are alike, and that there is a difference between those who rise above law and those who burst through it. Said Mary, "Freedom without a sense of responsibility, is license, and license is a ship at sea without rudder or sail." That the careless, mentally slipshod, restless, and morally unsound should look upon her as one of them caused Mary more pain than the criticisms of the unco guid. It was this persistent pointing out by the crowd, as well as regard for the unborn, that caused William and Mary to go quietly in the month of March, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-seven, to Saint Pancras Church and be married all according to the laws of England.

Godwin wrote of the mating thus: "The partiality we conceived for each other was in that mode which I have always considered as the purest and most refined quality of love. It grew with equal advances in the minds of each. It would have been impossible for the most minute observer to have said who was before and who was after. One sex did not take the priority which long-established custom had awarded it, nor the other overstep that delicacy which is so severely imposed. I am not conscious that either part can assume to have been the principal agent in the affair. When, in the course of things, the disclosure came, there was nothing, in a manner, for either party to disclose to the other. There was no period of throes and resolute explanation attendant on the tale. It was friendship melting into love."

Mary was now happier than she had ever been before in her life. She wrote to a friend: "My bark has at last glided out upon the smooth waters. Married to a man whom I respect, revere and love, who understands my highest flights of fancy, and with whom complete companionship exists, my literary success assured, and the bugaboo of poverty at last removed, you can imagine how serene is my happiness." But this time of joy was to be short.

She died three months later, September Tenth, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-seven, leaving behind her a baby girl eleven days old.

This girl, grown to womanhood, was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and without whom the name of Shelley would be to us unknown.

In writing of the mother who died in giving her birth, Mary Shelley says: "Mary Wollstonecraft was one of those rare beings who appear once, perhaps, in a generation, to gild humanity with a ray which no difference of opinion nor chance of circumstance can cloud. Her genius was undeniable. She had been bred in the hard school of adversity, and having experienced the sorrows entailed on the poor and oppressed, an earnest desire was kindled within her to diminish these sorrows.

"Her sound understanding, her intrepidity, her sensibility and eager sympathy, stamped all her writings with force and truth, and endowed them with a tender charm that enchants while it enlightens. Many years have passed since that beating heart has been laid in the cold, still grave, but no one who has ever seen her speaks of her without enthusiastic love and veneration. Was there discord among friends or relatives, she stood by the weaker party, and by her earnest appeals and kindliness awoke latent affection, and healed all wounds. Open as day to melting charity, with a heart brimming with generous affection, yearning for sympathy, helpful, hopeful and self-reliant, such was Mary Wollstonecraft." And here let us leave her.

DANTE AND BEATRICE

What should be said of him can not be said; By too great splendor is his name attended; To blame is easier those who him offended, Than reach the faintest glory round him shed. This man descended to the doomed and dead For our instruction; then to God ascended; Heaven opened wide to him its portals splendid, Who from his country's, closed against him, fled. Ungrateful land! To its own prejudice Nurse of his fortunes; and this showeth well, That the most perfect, most of grief shall see. Among a thousand proofs let one suffice, That as his exile hath no parallel, Ne'er walked the earth a greater man than he.

--_Longfellow_

[Illustration: DANTE]

It was George Bernard Shaw who placed in the pillory of letters what he was pleased to call "The Disagreeable Girl."

And he has done the deed by a dry-plate, quick-shutter process in a way that surely lays him liable for criminal libel in society's assize.

I say society's assize advisedly, because it is only in society that the Disagreeable Girl plays a prominent part, assuming the center of the stage. Society, in the society sense, is built on vacuity, its favors being for those who reveal a fine capacity to waste and consume. Those who would write their names high on society's honor-roll need not be either useful or intelligent--they need only seem.

And this gives the Disagreeable Girl her opportunity. In the paper-box factory she would have to make good; Cluett, Coon and Company ask for results; the stage demands a modicum at least of intellect, in addition to shape; but society asks for nothing but pretense, and the palm is awarded to palaver.

But do not, if you please, imagine that the Disagreeable Girl does not wield an influence.

That is the very point: her influence is so far-reaching that George Bernard Shaw, giving cross-sections of life, in the form of dramas, can not write a play and leave her out.

She is ubiquitous, omniscient and omnipresent--is the Disagreeable Girl. She is a disappointment to her father, a humiliation to her mother, a pest to brothers and sisters, and when she finally marries, she saps the inspiration of her husband and often converts a proud and ambitious man into a weak and cowardly cur.

Only in society does the Disagreeable Girl shine: everywhere else she is an abject failure. The much-vaunted Gibson Girl is a kind of deluxe edition of Shaw's Disagreeable Girl. The Gibson Girl lolls, loafs, pouts, weeps, talks back, lies in wait, dreams, eats, drinks, sleeps and yawns. She rides in a coach in a red jacket, plays golf in a secondary sexual sweater, dawdles on a hotel veranda, and tum-tums on a piano, but you never hear of her doing a useful thing or saying a wise one. She reveals a beautiful capacity for avoiding all useful effort.

Gibson gilds the Disagreeable Girl. Shaw paints her as she is. In the "Doll's House" Henrik Ibsen has given us Nora Hebler, a Disagreeable Girl of mature age, who beyond a doubt first set George Bernard Shaw a-thinking. Then looking about, Shaw saw her at every turn in every stage of her moth-and-butterfly existence.

And the Disagreeable Girl being everywhere, Shaw, dealer in human character, can not write a play and leave her out, any more than Turner could paint a picture and leave man out, or Paul Veronese produce a canvas and omit the dog.

The Disagreeable Girl is a female of the genus homo persuasion, built around a digestive apparatus with marked marshmallow proclivities.

She is, moreover, pretty, pug-nosed, poetical, pert and pink; and at first glance to the unwary, she shows signs of gentleness and intelligence. Her age is anywhere from eighteen to twenty-eight. At twenty-eight she begins to evolve into something else, and her capacity for harm is largely curtailed, because by this time spirit has written itself in her form and features, and the grossness and animality which before were veiled are now becoming apparent. Habit writes itself on the face, and the body is an automatic recording-machine.

To have a beautiful old age, you must live a beautiful youth, for we ourselves are posterity and every man is his own ancestor. I am today what I am because I was yesterday what I was.

The Disagreeable Girl is always pretty--at least she has been told she is pretty, and she fully accepts the dictum. She has also been told she is clever, and she thinks she is. The actual fact is she is only "sassy."

The fine flaring-up of youth has set sex rampant, but she is not "immoral," except in her mind. She has caution to the verge of cowardice, and so she is "sans reproche." In public she pretends to be dainty; but alone, or with those for whose good opinion she does not care, she is gross, coarse and sensual in every feature of her life. She eats too much, does not exercise enough, and considers it amusing to let others wait upon her, and do for her the things she should do for herself. Her room is a jumble of disorder, a fantasy of dirty clothes, a sequinarium of unmentionables--that is, if the care of it is left to herself. The one gleam of hope for her lies in the fact that out of shame she will allow no visitor to enter the apartment if she can help it. Concrete selfishness is her chief mark. She avoids responsibility; sidesteps every duty that calls for honest effort; is secretive, untruthful, indolent, evasive and dishonest.

"What are you eating?" asks Nora Hebler's husband as she enters the room, not expecting to see him.

"Nothing," is the answer, and she hides the box of bonbons behind her, and presently backs out of the room.

I think Mr. Hebler had no business to ask her what she was eating: no man should ask any woman such a question--and really it was no difference anyway. But Nora is always on the defensive, and fabricates when it is necessary--and when it isn't, just through habit. She will hide a letter written by her grandmother, as quickly and deftly as if it were a missive from a guilty lover. The habit of her life is one of suspicion; for, being inwardly guilty herself, she suspects everybody, although it is quite likely that crime with her has never broken through thought into deed. Nora rifles her husband's pockets, reads his notebook, examines his letters, and when he goes on a trip she spends the day checking up his desk, for her soul delights in duplicate keys.

At times she lets drop hints of knowledge concerning little nothings that are none of hers, just to mystify folks. She does strange, annoying things, simply to see what others will do.

In degree, Nora's husband fixed the vice of finesse in her nature, for even a "good" woman accused parries by the use of trickery and wins her point by the artistry of the bagnio. Women and men are never really far apart anyway, and women are what men have made them.

We are all just getting rid of our shackles: listen closely anywhere, even among honest and intellectual people, if such there be, and you can detect the rattle of chains.

The Disagreeable Girl's mind and soul have not kept pace with her body. Yesterday she was a slave, sold in Circassian mart, and freedom to her is so new and strange that she does not know what to do with it.

The tragedy she works, according to George Bernard Shaw, is through the fact that very often good men, blinded by the glamour of sex, imagine they love the Disagreeable Girl, when what they love is their own ideal.

Nature is both a trickster and a humorist and sets the will of the species beyond the discernment of the individual. The picador has to blindfold his horse in order to get him into the bull-ring, and likewise Dan Cupid exploits the myopic to a purpose.

For aught we know, the lovely Beatrice of Dante was only a Disagreeable Girl clothed in a poet's fancy. Fortunate, indeed, was Dante that he never knew her well enough to get undeceived, and so walked through life in love with love, sensitive, saintly, sweetly sad and divinely happy in his melancholy.

* * * * *

There be simple folks and many, who think that the tragedy of love lies in its being unrequited.

The fact is, the only genuinely unhappy love--the only tragedy--is when love wears itself out.

Thus tragedy consists in having your illusions shattered.

The love-story of Dante lies in the realm of illusion and represents an eternal type of affection. It is the love of a poet--a Pygmalion who loves his own creation. It is the love that is lost, but the things we lose or give away are the things we keep. That for which we clutch we lose.

Love like that of Dante still exists everywhere, and will until the end of time. One-sided loves are classic and know neither age nor place; and to a degree--let the fact be stated softly and never hereafter be so much as whispered--all good men and women have at some time loved one-sidedly, the beloved being as unaware of the love as a star is of the astronomer who discovers it.

This kind of love, carried on discreetly, is on every hand, warming into life the divine germs of art, poetry and philosophy. Of it the world seldom hears. It creates no scandal, never is mentioned in court proceedings, nor is it featured by the newspapers. Indeed, the love of Dante would have been written in water, were it not for the fact that the poet took the world into his confidence, as all poets do--for literature is only confession.

Many who have written of Dante, like Boccaccio and Rossetti, have shown as rare a creative ability as some claim Dante revealed in creating his Beatrice.

"Paint me with the moles on," said Lincoln to the portrait-man. I'll show Dante with moles, wrinkles and the downward curve of the corners of his mouth, duly recording the fact that the corners of his mouth did not turn down always.

I think, somewhere, I have encouraged the idea of women marrying the second time, and I have also given tangible reasons. Let me now say as much for men.

The father of Dante married and raised a family of seven. On the death of his wife he sought consolation for his sorrow in the love of a lass by the name of Bella--her family-name is to us unknown. They were married, and had one child, and this child was Dante.

Dante, at times, had a way of mourning over the fact that his father and mother ever met, but the world has never especially sympathized in this regret. Dante was born in the year Twelve Hundred Sixty-five, in the city of Florence, which was then the artistic and intellectual capital of the world.

Dante seemed to think that the best in his nature was derived from his mother, who was a most gentle, sensitive and refined spirit. Such a woman married to a man old enough to be her father is not likely to be absurdly happy. This has been said before, but it will bear repeating. Yet disappointment has its compensation, since it drives the mind on to the ideal, and thus is a powerful stimulant for the imagination. Deprive us of our heritage here, and we will conjure forth castles in Spain--you can not place an injunction on that!

Dante was not born in a castle, nor yet in a house with portcullis and battlements.

Time was when towers and battlements on buildings were something more than mere architectural appendenda. They had a positive use. Towers and courtyards were only for the nobility, and signified that the owner was beyond the reach of law; he could lock himself in and fight off the world, the flesh and the devil, if he wished.

Dante's father lived in a house that had neither tower nor court that closed with iron gate. He was a lawyer, a hard-headed man who looked after estates, collected rents and gave advice to aristocratic nobodies for a consideration. He did not take snuff, for obvious reasons, but he was becomingly stout, carried a gold-headed cane or staff with a tassel on it, and struck this cane on the ground, coughing slightly, when about to give advice, as most really great lawyers do.

When little Durante--or Dante, as we call him--was nine years old, his father took him to a lawn fete held at the suburban home of Folco de Portinari, one of the lawyer's rich clients.

Now Signor Portinari in social station was beyond Alighieri the lawyer, and of course nobody for a moment suspected that the dark-skinned, half-scared little boy, clutching his father's forefinger as they walked, was going to write "The Divine Comedy." No one paid any

## particular attention to the father and child, as they strolled beneath

the trees, rested on the benches, and were served chocolate and cheese-straws by the servants.

But on this occasion the boy caught a passing glimpse of Beatrice Portinari, the daughter of the host. The girl was just nine years old: the boy must have been told this by his father as he pointed out the fair one. The boy did not speak to her nor did she speak to him: this was quite out of the question, for they were on a totally different social plane.

Amid the dim lights of the flaming torches he saw her--just for an instant! The whole surroundings were strangely unreal, but well calculated to impress the youthful imagination, and out of it all the boy carried with him this vision of loveliness.

In his "New Life"--what an appropriate title for a love-story!--Dante tells of this first sight of the beloved somewhat thus: "Nine times already since my birth had the heaven of light returned to the selfsame point almost, as concerns its own revolution, when first the glorious lady of my mind was made manifest to my eyes, even she who was called Beatrice by many who knew not wherefore. She had already been in this life so long as that, within her time the starry heaven had moved toward the Eastern quarter one of the twelve parts of the degree; so that she appeared to me at the beginning of her ninth year, and I saw her almost at the end of my ninth year. Her dress on that day was of the most noble color, a subdued and goodly crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited her very tender age. At that moment, I say most truly that the spirit of life, which has its dwelling in the secretest chamber of my heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith; and in trembling it said these words: Here is a deity stronger than I who coming shall rule over me."

* * * * *

Nine was a sacred number with Dante. He was nine years old when he first saw his lady-love, and she too was nine, having not yet reached the age of indiscretion.

Nine years were to elapse before he was to speak to her. It is quite possible that he had caught glimpses of her in the interval, at church.

Churches have their uses as trysting-places for the unquenched spirit: vows are repeated there that have no witnesses and do not go into the register. There lovers meet in soul, and feed upon a glance, when heads are bowed in prayer. Love lends a deep religious air to the being, and when we are in love we love God. At other times we only fear Him.

I am told that there be young men and maidens fair who walk on air and live in paradise until Sunday comes again, all on account of a loving look into eyes that look love again, in the dim religious light while the music plays soft and low.

The lover watched his graceful maid As mid the virgin train she strayed, Nor knew her beauty's best attire Was woven still in the snow-white choir.

And where is the gray-bearded prophet who has yet been wise enough to tell us where love ends and religion begins! But in all these nine years Beatrice and Dante had never met. She had not heard his voice, nor he hers--only glances, or a hand lifted in a way that spoke tomes. He had developed into a dark, dashing youth, given to falconry, painting and music. He had worked with Cimabue, the father of Italian art, and had been chum of Giotto, to whom all cherubim and seraphim trace.

At that time people with money who wanted to educate their sons sent them out, at what seems to us a very tender age, to travel and tramp the earth alone. They were remittance-men who shifted from university to university, and took lessons in depravity, being educated by the boys.

Dean Pluntre says that there were universities in the Middle Ages at Padua, Bologna, Paris and Oxford carried on in a very desultory way by pious monks, where the boys were divided by nationalities, so as to afford a kind of police system--Italian, Spanish, French and English.

They caroused, occasionally fought, studied when they felt like it, and made love to married women--all girls being under lock and key for safe-keeping.

So there you get the evolution of the modern university: a mendicant monastery where boys were sent, in the hope that they might absorb a little of the religious spirit and a desire to know.

Finally, there were enough students so that they organized cliques, clubs and secret societies, and by a process of natural selection governed themselves, as well as visited punishment upon offenders.

Next, on account of a laxity of morals and an indifference to books, a military system of discipline was enforced: lights had to be out at ten o'clock, and a student caught off the grounds without leave was punished. The teacher was a vicarious soldier. At that time each school had a prison attached, of which the "carcer" at Heidelberg is the surviving type. Up to the Sixteenth Century, every university was a kind of castle or fort, and the students might at any time be compelled to do military duty. The college had its towers for fighting-men, its high walls, its fortressed fronts and iron gates. These gates and walls still survive in rudimentary form, and the sixteen-foot spiked steel fence at Harvard is the type of a condition that once was an actual necessity: the place was a law unto itself, paid no taxes, and at any time might be raided. Colleges yet pay no taxes and are also quasi-mendicant institutions.