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Title: Portraits of women
Author: Gamaliel Bradford
Release date: November 3, 2024 [eBook #74674]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company
Credits: Jamie Brydone-Jack and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PORTRAITS OF WOMEN ***
By Gamaliel Bradford
PORTRAITS OF WOMEN. Illustrated.
UNION PORTRAITS. Illustrated.
CONFEDERATE PORTRAITS. Illustrated.
LEE THE AMERICAN. Illustrated.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
PORTRAITS OF WOMEN
PORTRAITS OF WOMEN
BY
GAMALIEL BRADFORD
_With Illustrations_
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1916
COPYRIGHT, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1915, BY THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY THE SUWANEE REVIEW
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY THE SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY GAMALIEL BRADFORD
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published October 1916_
TO MY DAUGHTER
_Out, hyperbolical fiend! talkest thou nothing but of ladies?_
TWELFTH NIGHT.
PREFACE
The nine portraits contained in this volume are preliminary studies
or sketches for the series of portraits of American women which will
follow my Union portraits. Such a collection of portraits of women will
certainly fill a most important section in the gallery of historical
likenesses selected from the whole of American history, which it is my
wish to complete, if possible.
There is always a certain impertinence about a man’s attempt to portray
the characters of women. And this impertinence is not got rid of by
the charming, but not wholly felicitous, epigraph of Sainte-Beuve’s
_Portraits de Femmes_: _“Avez vous donc été femme, Monsieur, pour
prétendre ainsi nous connâitre?”—“Non, Madame, je ne suis pas le devin
Tirésias, je ne suis qu’un humble mortel qui vous a beaucoup aimées.”_
There is, however, an equal impertinence in trying to portray the
characters of men, indeed of anybody but one’s self, and though this
last undertaking is always delightful, it is apt to lead to even more
astonishing results than accompany one’s attempts upon others. While
endeavoring constantly to strengthen and deepen the accuracy of my
portraits as regards mere fact, I yet become more and more convinced
that their value must be more in suggestion and stimulation than in any
reliable or final presentment of character. Such presentments do not
exist.
The selection of portraits in this volume has grown in a rather haphazard
way. Although the types depicted differ from one another, sometimes with
marked contrast, still, if I had planned the series deliberately as a
whole, I should have picked out figures more representative of entirely
different lines of life. A disadvantage, much more marked in portraying
women than in portraying men, is the necessity of dealing with exceptions
rather than with average personages. The psychographer must have abundant
material, and usually it is women who have lived exceptional lives that
leave such material behind them. The psychography of queens and artists
and authors and saints is little, if any, more interesting, than that
of your mother or mine, or of the first shopgirl we meet. I would paint
the shopgirl’s portrait with the greatest pleasure, but the material is
lacking.
It will be noted, also, that none of these portraits presents the modern
woman. Eugénie de Guérin is the latest in date and she is about as modern
as Eve. The projection of woman into the very middle of the stage of
active life, her participation on equal terms in almost all the lines of
man’s achievement, are effecting the vastest social revolution since the
appearance of Christianity. The outcome of this revolution is something
no man—or woman—can foresee. But its most obvious and perhaps principal
effect is in moulding the life, character, and habits of man. Woman
already dominates our manners, our morals, our literature, our stage, our
private finances. She proposes to dominate our politics. And it is by no
means sure that she will not end by the subjugation of our intelligence.
This feminine supremacy obtains, if I am correctly informed, in the
kingdom of the spiders and also, according to some seers, in the most
advanced development of the planetary worlds. While such a conquest must,
of course, to some extent, react upon the conqueror, it seems probable
that the fundamental instincts of the feminine temperament are what
they were a thousand, or two thousand years ago, and that the new woman
remains the same old woman in a little different garb, which propensity
to a little different garb is the oldest thing about her.
As I have already explained in the preface to “Union Portraits,” the word
“Portrait” is very unsatisfactory, in spite of the high authority of
Sainte-Beuve. Analogies between different arts are always misleading and
this particular analogy is particularly objectionable. Critics, otherwise
kindly, have urged that a portrait takes a man only at one special moment
of his life and may therefore be quite untrue to the larger lines of his
character. This is perfectly just, and the word “psychographs” should be
substituted for “portraits.” Psychography aims at precisely the opposite
of photography. It seeks to extricate from the fleeting, shifting,
many-colored tissue of a man’s long life those habits of action,
usually known as qualities of character, which are the slow product of
inheritance and training, and which, once formed at a comparatively early
age, usually alter little and that only by imperceptible degrees. The
art of psychography is to disentangle these habits from the immaterial,
inessential matter of biography, to illustrate them by touches of speech
and action that are significant and by those only, and thus to burn
them into the attention of the reader, not by any means as a final or
unchangeable verdict, but as something that cannot be changed without
vigorous thinking on the part of the reader himself.
But “Psychographs of Women,” on the back of a book, is as yet rather
startling for the publisher, for the purchaser, and even for me.
GAMALIEL BRADFORD
WELLESLEY HILLS, MASS. _May 26, 1916_
CONTENTS
I. LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU 1
II. LADY HOLLAND 23
III. MISS AUSTEN 45
IV. MADAME D’ARBLAY 67
V. MRS. PEPYS 89
VI. MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ 111
VII. MADAME DU DEFFAND 133
VIII. MADAME DE CHOISEUL 155
IX. EUGÉNIE DE GUÉRIN 177
ILLUSTRATIONS
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU _Frontispiece_
After the painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller
ELIZABETH, LADY HOLLAND 24
After the painting by Fagan
JANE AUSTEN 46
After the water-color drawing by her sister in the possession
of W. Austen Leigh, Esq.
MADAME D’ARBLAY 68
After the painting by Edward Francis Burney in 1782.
MRS. PEPYS AS ST. KATHARINE 90
From an engraving by Hollyer after the painting by Hayls
MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ 112
After the original pastel by Nanteuil
MADAME DU DEFFAND 134
From an engraving after the painting by Carmontelle
MADAME DE CHOISEUL 156
From a photogravure in _Le Duc et la Duchesse de Choiseul_,
by Gaston Maugras, after a portrait owned by the Comte de
Ludre
PORTRAITS OF WOMEN
I
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU
CHRONOLOGY
Lady Mary Pierrepont.
Born London, May 26, 1689.
Married Edward Wortley Montagu, August 16, 1712.
In Constantinople 1716-1718.
In Italy 1739-1761.
Husband died 1761.
Died London, August 21, 1762.
[Illustration: _Lady Mary Wortley Montagu_]
I
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (born Pierrepont) wrote poems, essays, and
translations of some note in her own day, of none in ours. She also wrote
letters which can never die, letters less charming, indeed, than Madame
de Sévigné’s because the writer was less charming, but full of light for
the first half of the eighteenth century and also for Lady Mary herself.
I do not refer so much to the celebrated letters from Constantinople,
because those were probably arranged and edited for literary purposes,
but to the general correspondence, which throbs and vibrates and sparkles
like a live thing.
The writer knew quite well what she was doing. Speaking of Madame de
Sévigné’s productions she says: “Mine will be full as entertaining
forty years hence.” And, perhaps with a touch of jealousy not wholly
uncharacteristic, she depreciates her French predecessor, “who only
gives us, in a lively manner and fashionable phrases, mean sentiments,
vulgar prejudices, and endless repetitions. Sometimes the tittle-tattle
of a fine lady, sometimes the tittle-tattle of an old nurse, always
tittle-tattle.” Those who find the divine tittle-tattle of “Notre Dame
des Rochers” not only among the liveliest, but among the most human and
even the wisest, things in literature, will not be the less ready to
appreciate Lady Mary, who has her own tittle-tattle as well as her own
wisdom and liveliness. How easy she is, how ready, and how graceful. Her
letters, she says, are “written with rapidity and sent without reading
over.” This may be true and may not. At any rate, they have, at their
best, the freshness of first thoughts, the careless brilliancy of a
high-bred, keen-witted woman, talking in her own parlor, indifferent to
effect, yet naturally elegant, in her speech, as in her dress and motion.
With what vivacity she touches everything and everybody about her, “a
certain sprightly folly that (I thank God) I was born with” she calls
it, but it is only folly in the sense of making dull things gay and sad
things tolerable. See how she finds laughter in the imminence of sea
peril. An ancient English lady “had bought a fine point head, which she
was contriving to conceal from the custom-house officers.... When the
wind grew high, and our little vessel cracked, she fell heartily to her
prayers, and thought wholly of her soul. When it seemed to abate, she
returned to the worldly care of her head-dress, and addressed herself
to me: ‘Dear madam, will you take care of this point? If it should be
lost!—Ah, Lord, we shall all be lost!—Lord have mercy on my soul!—Pray,
madam, take care of this head-dress.’ This easy transition from her soul
to her head-dress, and the alternate agonies that both gave her, made it
hard to determine which she thought of greatest value.”
In the constant imminence of life’s world perils Lady Mary had still by
her this resource of merriment, which some call flippancy, but which, by
any name, is not without its comforts.
True, such a glib tongue or pen is a dangerous play-thing and liable
to abuse. Lady Mary’s own daughter said that her mother was too apt to
set down people of a meek and gentle character for fools. People of any
character, perhaps, whenever the wayward fancy struck her. She darted her
shafts right and left. They stung and they clung, for they were barbed,
if not poisoned. Sometimes they made near friends as cold as strangers.
Too often they turned indifferent strangers into enemies. Enemies, too
many, Lady Mary had all her life, and they seized on her weak points and
amplified or invented ugly things about her till those who admire her
most find defence somewhat difficult.
Yet she did not gloat over evil. “’Tis always a mortification to me to
observe there is no perfection in humanity.” Her unkindness was far more
on her tongue than in her heart. “This I know, that revenge has so few
joys for me, I shall never lose so much time as to undertake it.” She
had the keenest sense of human sorrow and suffering: “I think nothing so
terrible as objects of misery, except one had the God-like attribute of
being able to redress them.” What she could do to redress them she did.
In her efforts to introduce inoculation for smallpox she surely proved
herself one of the greatest benefactors of humanity. In many smaller
things, also, she was kindly and sympathetic. And what pleases me most
is that she makes little mention of such deeds herself. One is left to
divine them from curt, half-sarcastic remarks in other connections.
Thus, during her long residence in Italy, it appears that she ministered
to her neighbors both in body and soul. “I do what good I am able in
the village round me, which is a very large one; and have had so much
success, that I am thought a great physician, and should be esteemed a
saint if I went to mass.” Later she had much ado to keep the people from
erecting a statue to her. But she shrank from love in Italy which was
sure to breed laughter in England.
Also, even in her bursts of ill-nature, she had a certain reserve, a
certain control, a certain sobriety. Indeed, she compliments herself, in
old age, on her freedom from petulance. “To say truth, I think myself
an uncommon kind of creature, being an old woman without superstition,
peevishness, or censoriousness.” This is, perhaps, more than we could
say for her. But in youth and age both she loved moderation and shunned
excess. When she was twenty-three, she wrote, “I would throw off all
partiality and passion, and be calm in my opinion.” She threw them off
too much, she was too calm, she was cold. Walpole called her letters too
womanish, but Lady Craven thought they must have been written by a man.
Most readers will agree with Lady Craven. Even her vivacity lacks warmth.
And it is here that she most falls short of the golden sunshine of Madame
de Sévigné. Lady Mary is not quite the woman, even in her malice. Through
her wit, through her thought, through her comment on life, even through
her human relations runs a strain of something that was masculine.
Nowhere is this more curious and amusing than in her love and marriage.
She was beautiful, and knew it, though the smallpox, by depriving her of
eyelashes, had given a certain staring boldness to her eyes. When she was
over thirty, she “led up a ball” and “believed in her conscience she made
one of the best figures there.” When she was old, for all her philosophy,
she did not look in a glass for eleven years. “The last reflexion I saw
there was so disagreeable, I resolved to spare myself such mortifications
for the future.”
She fed her youthful fancy with the vast fictions then in fashion and the
result was a romantic head and a cool heart. These appear alternately
in her strange correspondence with her lover and future husband,
Edward Wortley Montagu. When they first met, the gentleman admired her
learning—at fourteen! And Latinity seems to have drawn them together
quite as much as love. There was a sister, Miss Anne Wortley, and sisters
are of great use on such occasions. Lady Mary wrote to her in language
of extravagant regard, and Miss Wortley wrote back—at her brother’s
dictation. Then it became obviously simpler for the lovers to write
direct.
Obstacles arose. Mr. Wortley Montagu would make no settlement on his
wife. Lady Mary’s father would not hear of a marriage without one, and
hunted up another suitor, rich—and unacceptable. There was doubt, debate,
delay—and then an elopement. Lady Mary eloping! What elements of comedy!
And her letters make it so.
That she loved her lover as much as she could love is evident. “My
protestations of friendship are not like other people’s, I never speak
but what I mean, and when I say I love, ’tis for ever.” “I am willing
to abandon all conversation but yours. If you please I will never see
another man. In short, I will part with anything for you, but you. I will
not have you a month to lose you for the rest of my life.” “I would die
to be secure of your heart, though but for a moment.”
Yet this apparent passion is tempered with doubt and reversal. She cannot
make him happy, nor he her. “I can esteem, I can be a friend, but I don’t
know whether I can love.” “You would be soon tired with seeing every
day the same thing.” No, it is all folly. Cancel it, break it up, throw
it over. Begin again, a new life, a new world. She will write to him no
more. “I resolve against all correspondence of the kind; my resolutions
are seldom made, and never broken.”
This one is broken in a few days. Again she loves, again she hopes.
Everything shall be right, so far as it lies with her. “If my
opinion could sway, nothing should displease you. Nobody ever was
so disinterested as I am.” And yet once more cold analysis twitches
her sleeve, murmurs in her ear. “You are the first I ever had a
correspondence with, and I thank God I have done with it for all my
life.” “When I have no more to say to you, you will like me no longer.”
Then she blows the doubts away, makes her stolen marriage, gives all to
love, and in the very doing of it, lets fall one word that shows the
doubter more than ever (italics mine): “I foresee all that will happen
on this occasion. I shall incense my family in the highest degree. The
generality of the world will blame my conduct ...; yet, _’tis possible_,
you may recompence everything to me.” How two little words will show a
heart!
And afterwards? She fared pretty much as she expected. Love hardened into
marriage with some, not unusual, hours of agony. “I cannot forbear any
longer telling you, I think you use me very unkindly.” When he fails to
write to her, she cries for two hours. Then all becomes domestic, and
decorous, and as it should be; and her matured opinion of marriage agrees
very well with the previsions of her youth. “Where are people matched?
I suppose we shall all come right in Heaven; as in a country dance, the
hands are strangely given and taken, while they are in motion, at last
all meet their partners when the jig is done.”
Perhaps because she showed no great conjugal affection, there was plenty
of gossip about affection less legitimate. Pope lavished rhetorical
devotion on her. She laughed at it and, I fear, at him. In consequence he
lampooned her with the savage spite of an eighteenth-century poet. She
said unkind things about Sir Robert Walpole and Sir Robert’s son said
unkind things about her, mentioned some lovers by name, and implied many
others. Lady Mary’s careful editors have dealt with these slanders most
painstakingly; and though in one case, that of an Italian adventure, they
have overlooked a passage in Sir Horace Mann’s letters oddly confirmatory
of Walpole, I think they have cleared their heroine with entire success.
After all, Lady Mary’s best defense against scandal is her own
temperament and her own words. It is true, those who have lived a wild
life are often the first to exclaim against it. But in this case the
language bears every mark of being prompted by observation rather than
experience. She says of the notorious Lady Vane: “I think there is
no rational creature that would not prefer the life of the strictest
Carmelite to the round of hurry and misfortune she has gone through.”
Lady Mary’s long sojourn in Italy towards the close of her life did much
to increase suspicion in regard to her relations with her husband. Her
greatest admirers have not been able to explain clearly why she wished to
exile herself in such a fashion. But the tone in which, during the whole
period, she writes both to Mr. Wortley Montagu and of him, is absolutely
incompatible with any serious coldness between them. “My most fervent
wishes are for your health and happiness.” And again: “I have never heard
from her since, nor from any other person in England, which gives me the
greatest uneasiness; but the most sensible part of it is in regard of
your health, which is truly and sincerely the dearest concern I have in
this world.”
Lady Mary had two children, and as a mother she is very much what she
is as a wife, reasonable, prudent, devoted, but neither clinging nor
adoring. She had, indeed, a happy art of expressing maternal tenderness,
as of expressing everything, by which I do not imply that her feelings
were not sincere, but simply that they were not very vital or very
overwhelming. When she sets out on her travels, she is heartbroken over
the perils and exposures for her son: “I have long learnt to hold myself
at nothing; but when I think of the fatigue my poor infant must suffer, I
have all a mother’s fondness in my eyes, and all her tender passions in
my heart.” But her language about this same son, when grown to manhood,
is somewhat astounding. He was a most extraordinary black sheep, wasted
money, contracted debts, gambled, liked evil occupations and worse
company, varied a multiplicity of wives with a multiplicity of religions,
was once in jail, and never respectable. All this Lady Mary deplores,
but she is not driven to despair by it; on the contrary, she analyzes
his character to his father with singular cold soberness. “It is very
disagreeable to me to converse with one from whom I do not expect to hear
a word of truth, and, who, I am very sure, will repeat many things that
never passed in our conversation.” Or, more generally, “I suppose you are
now convinced I have never been mistaken in his character; which remains
unchanged, and what is yet worse, I think is unchangeable. I never saw
such a complication of folly and falsity as in his letter to Mr. G.”
Her daughter, Lady Bute, she was fond of. “Your happiness,” she writes to
her, “was my first wish, and the pursuit of all my actions, divested of
all self-interest.” Nevertheless, she lived contentedly without seeing
her for twenty years.
That Lady Mary was a good manager domestically hardly admits of doubt;
but I find no evidence that she loved peculiarly feminine occupations,
though she does somewhere remark that she considers certain types of
learned ladies “much inferior to the plain sense of a cook maid, who
can make a good pudding and keep the kitchen in good order.” Among her
numerous benefactions in Italy was the teaching of her neighbors how to
make bread and butter.
It is said that her servants loved her, not unnaturally, if she carried
out her own maxim: “The small proportion of authority that has fallen
to my share (only over a few children and servants) has always been a
burden, ... and I believe every one finds it so who acts from a maxim ...
that whoever is under my power is under my protection.” She was a natural
aristocrat, however, both socially and politically, and any leveling
tendencies that she may have cherished in the ardor of youth, vanished
entirely with years and experience. “Was it possible for me to elevate
anybody from the station in which they were born, I now would not do it:
perhaps it is a rebellion against that Providence that has placed them;
all we ought to do is to endeavour to make them easy in the rank assigned
them.” And elsewhere, in a much more elaborate passage, she expresses
herself with a deliberate haughtiness of rank and privilege which has
rarely been surpassed. In her youth, she says, silly prejudice taught
her that she was to treat no one as an inferior. But she has learned
better and come to see that such a notion made her “admit many familiar
acquaintances, of which I have heartily repented every one, and the
greatest examples I have known of honor and integrity have been among
those of the highest birth and fortunes.” The English tendency to mingle
classes and level distinctions will, she believes, have some day fatal
consequences. How curious, in so keen a wit, the failure to foresee that
just this English social elasticity would avert the terrible disaster
which was to befall the neat gradations of French order and system!
Lady Mary was not only practical in her household, but in all the other
common concerns of life. Few women have pushed their husbands on in the
world with more vigorous energy than is shown in the letters she writes
to Mr. Wortley Montagu, urging him to drop his diffidence and claim what
he deserves. “No modest man ever did, or ever will, make his fortune.”
As regards money, also, she was eminently a woman of business—too
eminently, say her enemies. One reason alleged for her quarrel with Pope
is his well-meant advice which brought her large losses in South Sea
speculation. However much one may like and admire her, it is impossible
wholly to explain away Walpole’s picture of her sordid avarice, which
cannot be omitted, though hideous. “Lady Mary Wortley is arrived; I
have seen her; I think her avarice, her dirt, and her vivacity are all
increased. Her dress, like her languages, is a _galimatias_ of several
countries, the groundwork, rags; and the embroidery nastiness. She
wears no cap, no handkerchief, no gown, no petticoat, no shoes. An old
black-laced hood represents the first; the fur of a horseman’s coat,
which replaces the third, serves for the second; a dimity petticoat is
deputy, and officiates for the fourth; and slippers act the part of the
last.”
It is easy to see here the brush of hatred deepening the colors; but
hatred can hardly have invented the whole. Yet all the references to
money matters in Lady Mary’s letters are sane and commendable. She
hates poverty, and she hates extravagance as the road to poverty, and
she cherishes thrift as the assurance of independence and comfort. That
sort of lavish living which is certain to end in suffering for self and
others she condemns bitterly. Will any one say she can condemn it too
bitterly? “He lives upon rapine—I mean running in debt to poor people,
who perhaps he will never be able to pay.” But I do not find that she
cherishes money for itself. We should seek riches, she says, but why?
“As the world is, and will be, ’tis a sort of duty to be rich, that it
may be in one’s power to do good, riches being another word for power.”
With which compare the remark of Gray, a man surely not liable to the
charge of avarice: “It is a striking thing that one can’t only not live
as one pleases, but where and with whom one pleases, without money. Swift
somewhere says, that money is liberty; and I fear money is friendship,
too, and society, and almost every external blessing. It is a great,
though ill-natured, comfort, to see most of those who have it in plenty,
without pleasure, without liberty, and without friends.”
Nevertheless, it must be admitted that in these questions of conduct
Lady Mary does not err on the side of enthusiasm. In a long and curious
passage she enlarges on the virtues of her favorite model—Atticus, the
typical trimmer and opportunist, who lived in one of the greatest crises
of the world, and weathered it safe and rich, who had many friends and
served many and betrayed none, but did not think any cause good enough
to die for.
As regards social life and general human relations, it is very much
the same. Lady Mary had vast acquaintance. I do not find that she had
many friends, either dear or intimate. Of Lady Oxford she does, indeed,
always speak with deep affection. And she says of herself, no doubt
truly: “I have a constancy in my nature that makes me always remember
my old friends.” Also her love of a snapping exchange of wit made her
appreciate conversation. “You know I have ever been of opinion that a
chosen conversation composed of a few that one esteems is the greatest
happiness of life.” Yet she was too full of resources to need people, too
critical to love people, too little sympathetic to pity people. And in
one of the lightning sentences of self-revelation she shows a temperament
not perfectly endowed by heaven for friendship: “I manage my friends with
such a strong yet with a gentle hand, that they are both willing to do
whatever I have a mind to.”
But, if she did not love mankind, she found them endlessly amusing, a
perpetual food for observation and curiosity. And the wandering life
she led nourished this taste to the fullest degree. “It was a violent
transition from your palace and company to be locked up all day with my
chambermaid, and sleep at night in a hovel; but my whole life has been in
the Pindaric style.” It is this love of diversity, this keen sense of the
human in all its phases, which give zest to her Turkish letters and the
record of wanderings and hardships which might not now be encountered
in a journey to the Pole. But long wanderings and strange faces are not
necessary for the naturalist of souls who can find the ugliest weeds
and tenderest flowers at his own front door. Lady Mary was never tired
of studying souls and thought highly of her own discernment in them. “I
have seldom been mistaken in my first judgment of those I thought it
worth while to consider.” This confidence I am sorry to find in her; for
I have always believed it a good rule that those who asserted their sure
judgment of men knew little about them. True insight is more modest. At
any rate, mistaken or not, she found the varied spectacle of human action
endlessly diverting and again and again recurs to the charm of it: “I
endeavour upon this occasion to do as I have hitherto done in all the odd
turns of my life; turn them, if I can, to my diversion.” “I own I enjoy
vast delight in the folly of mankind; and, God be praised, that is an
inexhaustible source of entertainment.”
Thus she could always amuse herself with men and women. At the same time,
she could amuse herself without them and needed neither courtship nor
cards nor gossip to keep her heart at ease. It is true that in youth
she knew youth’s restlessness, and that haunting dread, chronic to some
souls, which fills one day with anxiety as to what may fill the next. To
Mrs. Hewet she writes: “Be so good as never to read a letter of mine but
in one of those minutes when you are entirely alone, weary of everything,
and _inquiète_ to think of what you shall do next. All people who live
in the country must have some of those minutes.” But time soothes this
and makes the present seem so insufficient that the poor shreds of life
remaining can never quite eke it out. “I have now lived almost seven
years in a stricter retirement than yours in the Isle of Bute, and can
assure you, I have never had half an hour heavy on my hands, for want of
something to do.”
Her country life did not, indeed, include much ecstasy over the natural
world. She was born too early for Rousseau and it is doubtful whether
high romance could ever have seriously appealed to her. She finds Venice
a gay social centre. Of its poetry, its mystery, its moonlight, never a
word. Perhaps these did not exist before Byron. On the Alps and their
sublimity she has as delightful a phrase as the whole eighteenth century
can furnish (italics mine): “The prodigious prospect of mountains covered
with eternal snow, clouds hanging far below our feet, and the vast
cascades tumbling down the rocks with a confused roaring, would have been
_solemnly entertaining_ to me, if I had suffered less from the extreme
cold that reigns here.” If that is not Salvator Rosa in little, what is?
I know few things better, unless it be Ovid’s _Nile jocose_, gamesome
Nile.
No. Lady Mary’s nature, like that of most of her contemporaries, was an
artful invention of trim lawns, boxed walks, shady alleys with a statue
at the end or a ruined temple on a turfy hill. Such gardens she liked
well enough to stroll in; but the garden that charmed her most was the
garden of her soul. “Whoever will cultivate their own mind, will find
full employment. Every virtue does not only require great care in the
planting, but as much daily solicitude in cherishing, as exotic fruits
and flowers.... Add to this the search after knowledge (every branch of
which is entertaining), and the longest life is too short for the pursuit
of it.”
In that pursuit she never tired, from her early youth to her latest
years. Indeed, among her contemporaries she had the reputation of a
learning as masculine as some of her other tastes and habits. Here
rumor probably exaggerated, as usual. She herself, in her many curious
and interesting references to her education, disclaims anything of the
sort. She was a bright, quick child, left to herself, with a passion
for reading and many books accessible. She learned Latin, French, and
Italian, and used them, but rather as a reader than as a scholar.
Systematic intellectual training she could hardly have had or desired,
merely that passionate delight in the things of the mind which is one of
the greatest blessings that can be bestowed upon a human being. “If,”
she says of her granddaughter, “she has the same inclination (I should
say passion) for learning that I was born with, history, geography, and
philosophy will furnish her materials to pass away cheerfully a longer
life than is allotted to mortals.”
She had, however, little disposition to brag of her acquirements. On
the contrary, it is singular with what insistence, bitterness almost,
she urges that a woman should never, never allow herself to be thought
wiser or more studious than her kind. Read, if you please; think, if you
please; but keep it to yourself. Otherwise women will laugh at you and
men avoid you. “I never studied anything in my life, and have always (at
least from fifteen) thought the reputation of learning a misfortune to a
woman.” And again, of her granddaughter, with a sharp tang that hints at
many sad experiences, “The second caution to be given her is to conceal
whatever learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide
crookedness or lameness; the parade of it can only serve to draw on her
the envy, and consequently the most inveterate hatred, of all he and she
fools, which will certainly be at least three parts in four of all her
acquaintance.”
It is in this spirit that Lady Mary speaks very slightingly of her own
poems and other writings; and indeed, they do not deserve much better.
For us they are chiefly significant as emphasizing, in their coarseness
and in some other peculiarities, that masculine strain which has been so
apparent in many sides of her interesting personality.
As a critic she is more fruitful than as an author, and her remarks on
contemporary writers have a singular vigor and independence. Johnson
she recommends for the idle and ignorant. “Such gentle readers may be
improved by a moral hint, which, though repeated over and over from
generation to generation, they never heard in their lives.” Fielding and
Smollett she adores—again the man’s taste, you see. On Clarissa she is
charming. The man in her disapproves, derides. The woman weeps, “like any
milkmaid of sixteen over the ballad of the Lady’s Fall.” But weeping, or
laughing, or yawning, she reads, reads, reads. For she is a true lover
of books. And she thus delightfully amplifies Montesquieu’s delightful
eulogy, “_Je n’ai jamais eu de chagrin qu’une demi-heure de lecture ne
pouvait dissiper_.” “I wish your daughters to resemble me in nothing but
the love of reading, knowing, by experience, how far it is capable of
softening the cruellest accidents of life; even the happiest cannot be
passed over without many uneasy hours; and there is no remedy so easy as
books, which, if they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to
the most troubled mind. Those that fly to cards or company for relief,
generally find they only exchange one misfortune for another.”
It must be by this time manifest that in the things of the spirit Lady
Mary was as masculine and as stoical as in things of the flesh. In very
early youth she translated Epictetus and he stood by her to the grave.
Life has its vexations and many of them. People fret and torment, till
even her equanimity sometimes gives way. “I am sick with vexation.”
But, in general, she surmounts or forgets, now with an unpleasant,
haughty fling of cynical scorn, “For my part, as it is my established
opinion that this globe of ours is no better than a Holland cheese, and
the walkers about in it mites, I possess my mind in patience, let what
will happen; and should feel tolerably easy, though a great rat came
and ate half of it up;” now, as in her very last years, with a gentler
reminiscence of her heroic teacher: “In this world much must be suffered,
and we ought all to follow the rule of Epictetus, ‘Bear and forbear.’”
As for nerves, vapors, melancholy, she has little experience of such
feminine weakness, and no patience with it. “Mutability of sublunary
things is the only melancholy reflection I have to make on my own
account.” She seldom makes any other. “Strictly speaking, there is but
one real evil—I mean acute pain; all other complaints are so considerably
diminished by time, that it is plain the grief of it is owing to our
passion, since the sensation of it vanishes when that is over.” If by
chance any little wrinkle shows itself, sigh from some unknown despair,
winter shadow of old age and failing strength and falling friends, let
us smother it, strangle it, obliterate it, by a book, or a flower, or a
smile. In these matters habit is everything.
And what was God in Lady Mary’s life? Apparently, little or nothing. As
strangely little as in so many eighteenth century lives. There is no
rebellion, no passionate debate of hope or doubt; simply, as it seems,
very little thought given to the subject. Religion is a useful thing—for
the million, oh, an excellent thing, under any garb, in Turkey, in Italy,
in England. Respect it? Yes. Cherish it? Yes. Believe it? The question
is—well, an impertinent one. And if it be said that there may have been a
feeling that some things were too sacred to be spoken about, let anyone
who can read Lady Mary’s letters through and retain that idea, cling to
it for his comfort.
No, she lived like a gentlewoman, I had almost said like a gentleman,
with a decent regard for the proprieties, a fundamental instinct of
duty, a fair share of human charity, and an inexhaustible delight in
the fleeting shows of time. And she died as she had lived. “Lady Mary
Wortley, too, is departing,” says Horace Walpole. “She brought over a
cancer in her breast, which she concealed till about six weeks ago. It
burst and there are no hopes of her. She behaves with great fortitude,
and says she has lived long enough.”
Altogether, not a winning figure, but a solid one, who, with many
oddities, treads earth firmly, and makes life seem respectable, if not
bewitching.
II
LADY HOLLAND
CHRONOLOGY
Elizabeth Vassall
Born March 25, 1771.
Married Sir Godfrey Webster 1786.
Traveled abroad 1791-1796.
Divorced July 4, 1797.
Married Lord Holland July 6, 1797.
Lord Holland died 1840.
Died 1845.
[Illustration: _Elizabeth, Lady Holland_]
II
LADY HOLLAND
The brilliant salons which have made so conspicuous a figure in French
social life have had few counterparts in England. English women have
perhaps influenced politics and thought quite as powerfully as have their
French sisters. But in England the work has been done through husbands or
fathers or brothers, domestically, not in an open social circle where wit
glitters and ideas clash.
One of the most notable exceptions to this rule was the Holland House
society during the first half of the nineteenth century. Politically
Holland House was a Whig centre; but its hospitable doors were open to
all who talked or thought. Fox, Canning, Brougham, Grey, Melbourne, John
Russell, unbent there and discussed great themes and little. Rogers
mocked, Sydney Smith laughed, Moore sang, Macaulay unwound his memory,
and Greville listened and recorded. Wordsworth dropped a thought there,
Talleyrand a witticism. Irving brought over the America of the eighteenth
century, Ticknor of the nineteenth.
“It is the house of all Europe,” says Greville. “All like it more or
less; and whenever ... it shall come to an end, a vacuum will be made in
society which nothing can supply. The world will suffer by the loss; and
it may be said with truth that it will ‘eclipse the gaiety of nations.’”
Macaulay adorned the theme with his ample rhetoric: “Former guests will
recollect how many men who have guided the politics of Europe, who have
moved great assemblies by reason and eloquence, who have put life into
bronze or canvas, or who have left to posterity things so written that
it shall not willingly let them die, were there mixed with all that was
loveliest and gayest in the society of the most splendid of capitals.
They will remember the peculiar character which belonged to that circle,
in which every talent and accomplishment, every art and science, had its
place.... They will remember, above all, the grace, and the kindness,
far more admirable than grace, with which the princely hospitality of
that ancient mansion was dispensed. They will remember the venerable
and benignant countenance and the cordial voice of him who bade them
welcome.... They will remember, too, that he whose name they hold in
reverence was not less distinguished by the inflexible uprightness of
his political conduct than by his loving disposition and his winning
manners. They will remember that, in the last lines which he traced, he
expressed his joy that he had done nothing unworthy of the friend of Fox
and Grey; and they will have reason to feel similar joy, if, in looking
back on many troubled years, they cannot accuse themselves of having done
anything unworthy of men who were distinguished by the friendship of Lord
Holland.”
You will observe that little is said here of the mistress of the house.
As regards Lord Holland, it is instructive to turn from Macaulay’s
swelling periods to the cool comment of Greville, who was neither a
rhetorician nor a cynic: “I doubt, from all I see, whether anybody
(except his own family, including Allen) had really a very warm affection
for Lord Holland, and the reason probably is that he had none for
anybody.”
There was a mistress of the house and Macaulay elsewhere has enough
to say about her. It is quite astonishing, the unanimity with which
her guests combine to slight her character and emphasize her defects.
Macaulay asserts, in the passage quoted above, that “all that was
loveliest and gayest” met at Holland House. This is quite false; for few
women went there. Those who did had little good to say of their hostess.
In the early years before she married Lord Holland, Miss Holroyd wrote of
her: “If anybody ever offends you so grievously that you do not recollect
any punishment bad enough for them, only wish them on a party of pleasure
with Lady Webster!... Everything that was proposed she decidedly
determined on a contrary scheme, and as regularly altered her mind in a
few hours.” Long after, Fanny Kemble expresses herself quite as bitterly:
“The impression she made upon me was so disagreeable that for a time it
involved every member of that dinner party in a halo of undistinguishable
dislike in my mind.”
When the women condemn, one expects the men to praise. In this case they
do not. All alike, in milder or harsher terms, record her acts that
crushed, her speeches that stung. The gentle Moore takes Irving to visit
her. “Lady H. said, ‘What an uncouth hour to come at,’ which alarmed me
a little, but she was very civil to him.” Rogers told Dyce that “when she
wanted to get rid of a fop, she would beg his pardon and ask him to sit
little further off, adding ‘there is something on your handkerchief I do
not quite like.’” She observed to Rogers himself: “Your poetry is bad
enough, so pray be sparing of your prose.” And to Lord Porchester: “I am
sorry to hear you are going to publish a poem. Can’t you suppress it?”
Also they paid her back in kind, with a vim which, in gentlemen, as they
all were, seems to imply immense provocation. “My lady ... asked me how I
could write those vulgar verses the other day about Hunt,” writes Moore.
“Asked her in turn, why she should take it for granted, if they were so
vulgar, that it was I who wrote them.” Croker records: “Lady Holland was
saying yesterday to her assembled coterie, ‘Why should not Lord Holland
be Secretary for Foreign Affairs—why not as well as Lord Landsdowne for
the Home Department?’ Little Lord John Russell is said to have replied,
in his quiet way, ‘Why, they say, Ma’am, that you open all Lord Holland’s
letters, and the Foreign Ministers might not like _that_.’” Rogers was
talking of beautiful hair. “Why, Rogers, only a few years ago I had
such a head of hair that I could hide myself in it, and I’ve lost it
all.” Rogers merely answered, “What a pity!” “But with such a look and
tone,” says Fanny Kemble, “that an exultant giggle ran round the table
at her expense.” And the table was her own! To Ticknor she said “That
she believed New England was originally colonized by convicts sent over
from the mother country. Mr. Ticknor replied that he was not aware of
it, but said he knew that some of the Vassall family—ancestors of Lady
Holland—had settled early in Massachusetts.” Finally, there is the almost
incredible incident so vividly narrated by Macaulay. “Lady Holland is in
a most extraordinary state. She came to Rogers’s, with Allen, in so bad
a humour that we were all forced to rally and make common cause against
her. There was not a person at table to whom she was not rude; and none
of us were inclined to submit. Rogers sneered; Sydney made merciless
sport of her; Tom Moore looked excessively impertinent; Bobus put her
down with simple, straightforward rudeness; and I treated her with what
I meant to be the coldest civility. Allen flew into a rage with us all,
and especially with Sydney, whose guffaws, as the Scotch say, were indeed
tremendous.”
One and all, they felt that the lady wished to domineer, to rule over
everything and everybody, and they did not like it. “Now, Macaulay,” she
would say, “we have had enough of this. Give us something else.” At a
crowded table, when a late guest came: “Luttrell, make room.” “It must
be made,” murmured Luttrell; “for it does not exist.” “The centurion did
not keep his soldiers in better order than she kept her guests,” Macaulay
writes. “It is to one, ‘Go,’ and he goeth; and to another, ‘Do this,’
and it is done.” Some one asked Lord Dudley why he did not go to Holland
House. He said that he did not choose to be tyrannized over while he was
eating his dinner.
Her friends thought she wished to regulate their lives, especially to
regulate them in the way that suited her comfort and convenience. What
could be more remarkable than the scene Macaulay describes, when she
implored, ordered him to refuse his high appointment in India? “I had
a most extraordinary scene with Lady Holland. If she had been as young
and as handsome as she was thirty years ago, she would have turned my
head. She was quite hysterical about my going; paid me such compliments
as I cannot repeat; cried; raved; called me dear dear Macaulay. ‘You are
sacrificed to your family. I see it all. You are too good to them. They
are always making a tool of you; last session about the slaves; and now
sending you to India.’ I always do my best to keep my temper with Lady
Holland for three reasons: because she is a woman; because she is very
unhappy in her health, and in the circumstances of her position; and
because she has a real kindness for me. But at last she said something
about you. This was too much, and I was beginning to answer her in a
voice trembling with anger, when she broke out again: ‘I beg your pardon.
Pray forgive me, dear Macaulay. I was very impertinent. I know you will
forgive me. Nobody has such a temper as you. I said so to Allen only this
morning. I am sure you will bear with my weakness. I shall never see
you again’; and she cried, and I cooled; for it would have been to very
little purpose to be angry with her. I hear that it is not to me alone
that she runs on in this way. She storms at the ministry for letting me
go.”
And she was supposed to tyrannize over her household as well as over her
guests. The Allen referred to above is a curious figure. Originally
recommended to Lord Holland as a traveling physician, he entered the
family and remained in it. He was an immense reader, a careful student,
and supplied many a Holland House politician with the stuff of oratory.
He had opinions of his own, was a violent enemy of all religion, and
was gibingly known as “Lady Holland’s atheist.” He did not hesitate to
contradict his patroness and some even assert that she was a little
afraid of him. At any rate, he was deeply attached to her, remained with
her after Lord Holland’s death, and suffered himself in practical matters
to be ordered about like a domestic poodle. Moore records an interesting
bit of mutual self-confession, when Allen, after years of intimate
contact with the deepest thought and brightest wit in Europe, admitted
that to keep up conversation during these evenings was “frequently a most
heavy task and that if he had followed his own taste and wishes he would
long since have given up that mode of life.” And Moore himself adds that
the “Holland House sort of existence, though by far the best specimen
of its kind going, would appear to me, for any continuance, the most
wearisome of all forms of slavery.”
Even Lord Holland himself appeared to his observant visitors to be
subject to a domination at times somewhat irksome. “A little after twelve
my lady retired and intimated that he ought to do so too,” writes Moore;
“but he begged hard for ten minutes more.” Greville says that when
some revivalists called on Lord Holland, Lady Holland was with great
difficulty persuaded to allow him to go and receive them. “At last she
let him be wheeled in, but ordered Edgar and Harold, the two pages, to
post themselves outside the door and rush in if they heard Lord Holland
scream.” On the great occasion of Macaulay’s going to India, it is
recorded that the good-natured husband was goaded into a disciplinary
outburst: “Don’t talk such nonsense, my lady! What the devil! Can we tell
a gentleman who has a claim upon us that he must lose his only chance for
getting an independence in order that he may come and talk to you in an
evening?”
I repeat, it is a most curious thing to observe this mob of illustrious
and kindly gentlemen handing down to posterity such unanimous abuse of a
lady, who, whatever her defects, had done them infinite courtesies. And
she is dead and cannot defend herself.
She left a journal, however, which Lord Ilchester has lately edited.
And few studies can be more delightful than to turn from the picture
painted of her by her friends(?) to her intimate and faithful likeness of
herself. The tart, even the boisterous, tongue is indeed not concealed,
as when she told a political friend that “I regretted he had not lived
in the Middle Ages and given his faith to orthodox points, as he would
have made one of the firmest pillars of the church, instead of being a
milk and water politician now.” But there are many other things besides
tartness and boisterousness.
Unfortunately the Journal stops before the great days of Holland
House began. What would we not give for the lady’s account of those
conversations with Moore and Ticknor and Macaulay? What for portraits of
them and of others such as she well knew how to draw? For her pen was
no mean one. It could bite and sting, could emphasize lights and shadows
quite as strongly as some of those that etched the figures at her table
and the scenes in her drawing-room. You may meet such a type as the
following any day in Italy; but only an artist could so render it. “The
old Marchesa was also delightful, not to the eye, for she was hideous,
nor to the ear, for she squalled, nor to the nose, for she was an
Italian; yet, from her unbounded desire of pleasing, the _tout ensemble_
created more agreeable sensations than many more accomplished could have
inspired.” Or match this with an English married couple: “The first thing
she did was to live apart from him, and keep up a love correspondence
with him; hence to the world they appeared enamoured of one another. She
is a little mad, and parsimony is her chief turn. She is good-natured
and a little clever. Trevor has no judgment and slender talents. His
foibles are very harmless and his whole life has been insipidly good. His
_ridicules_ are a love of dress coats, _volantes_, and always speaking
French. _Au reste_, he is very like other people, only better.” And, as
will appear from these two, her portraits, though satirical, are not all
unkindly, or at least she sweetens the bitterest of them with a touch of
human charity.
Just a few sketches she has of the great men who afterwards became so
widely identified with her, enough to increase our ardent desire for
more. Thus the following of Wordsworth, interesting in every word for
both painter and painted, if somewhat astounding: “Sent an invitation
to Wordsworth, one of the Lake poets, to come and dine, or visit us
in the evening. He came. He is much superior to his writings, and his
conversation is even beyond his abilities. I should almost fear he is
disposed to apply his talents more towards making himself a _vigorous
conversationist_ in the style of our friend Sharp, than to improve his
style of composition.... He holds some opinions on picturesque subjects
with which I completely differ, especially as to the effects produced
by white houses on the sides of the hills; to my taste they produce a
cheerful effect. He, on the contrary, would brown, or even black-work
them; he maintained his opinion with a considerable degree of ingenuity.”
With which compare the snub administered by Henry Taylor, when she
sneered at Wordsworth’s poetry: “Let me beg you to believe, Lady Holland,
that this has not been the sort of thing to say about Wordsworth’s poetry
for the last ten years.”
But the Journal is far less interesting for its portraits of others than
for that of the lady herself, who is seen there complete, and human, and
not unlovely.
When she was young, she was beautiful. “I observed a portrait of Lady
Holland, painted some thirty years ago,” says Macaulay. “I could have
cried to see the change. She must have been a most beautiful woman.”
A mere child, she was married to a man she detested, who perhaps deserved
it. “At fifteen, through caprice and folly, I was thrown into the
power of one who was a pompous coxcomb, with youth, beauty, and a good
disposition, all to be so squandered!” I imagine that Sir Godfrey Webster
was a rough English squire of the Western type, fond of beef, beer,
hunting, and rural politics, fond also of his wife, after his fashion,
but believing that wives should bake, brew, and breed, and utterly
intolerant of my lady’s freaks and fancies, of her social ambitions and
her sentimental whims. To her he appeared a simple brute. When he “in a
paroxysm threw the book I was reading at my head, after having first torn
it out of my hands,” I can divine something of how he felt. So perhaps
could she; but the incident gave her all the gratification of martyrdom.
“Ah, me!” she writes, “what can please or cheer one who has no hope of
happiness in life? Solitude and amusement from external objects is all
I hope for; home is the abyss of misery!” Condemned to the exile of a
country house, I am sorry to say that she revenged herself by devising
cruel tricks against her husband’s aunt, who, however, was most apt at
paying back. Later her despair drove her nearly to suicide. “Oftentimes
in the gloom of midnight I feel a desire to curtail my grief, and but
for an unaccountable shudder that creeps over me, ere this the deed of
rashness would be executed. I shall leave nothing behind that I can
regret. My children are yet too young to attach me to existence, and
Heaven knows I have no close, no tender ties besides. Oh, pardon the
audacity of the thought.”
Then Lord Holland appeared and her whole life was altered. With such
an early career and with a temper so erratic one would hardly expect
that an irregular connection, even though legalized as soon as possible
by divorce and marriage, would turn out well. It did. When she first
meets her lover, he is “quite delightful.” A number of years later she
recognizes that life with him has transformed her character. Every hour
she continues “to wonder [sic] and admire the most wonderful union of
benevolence, sense, and integrity in the character of the excellent being
whose faith is pledged with mine. Either he has imparted some of his
goodness to me, or the example of his excellence has drawn out the latent
good I had—as certainly I am a better person and a more useful member of
society than I was in my years of misery.”
Although she was still young and very beautiful, the ardent suit of other
lovers makes no impression on her. She gets rid of them as best she can
and consults her husband as to the most effective manner of doing so.
Formerly life was hateful and she longed to be rid of it. “In the
bitterness of sorrow I prayed for death. Now I am a coward indeed; a
spasm terrifies me, and every memento of the fragile tenure of my bliss
strikes a panic through my frame. Oh! my beloved friend, how hast thou
by becoming mine endeared the every day occurrences of life! I shrink
from nothing but the dread of leaving or of losing thee.” In the lot of
an acquaintance who has lost her husband she bewails the most terrible
of future possibilities for herself. “How fortunate for her should she
never awaken to her wretchedness, but die in the agonies of delirium. Oh!
in mercy let such be my close if I am doomed to the—oh! I cannot with
calmness suppose the case.”
It is in no cynical spirit, nor with any question of the genuineness of
these feelings, but simply as a comment on the ways of this world, that I
turn to a passage of Greville, written three months after Lord Holland’s
death: “I dined with Lady Holland yesterday. Everything there is exactly
the same as it used to be, excepting only the person of Lord Holland, who
seems to be pretty well forgotten. The same talk went merrily round, the
laugh rang loudly and frequently, and, but for the black and the mob-cap
of the lady, one might have fancied he had never lived or had died half a
century ago.”
There has been some question as to whether Lady Holland cared very much
for her children by either marriage. Certainly at her death she left
her son only two thousand pounds and a large income to a comparative
stranger. Yet at the time of her separation from her first husband she
sought passionately to retain her daughter, even resorting to the strange
and characteristic device of pretending that the child was dead and
burying a kid in a coffin in her place.
The Journal, too, is full of passages that come straight from the heart
and absolutely prove a sincere, if somewhat erratic maternal affection.
I hardly know a stranger mixture of passionate grief and curious
self-analysis than the following passage, written on occasion of a
child’s death. “There is a sensation in a mother’s breast at the loss
of an infant that partakes of the feeling of instinct. It is a species
of savage despair. Alas! to lose my pretty infant, just beginning to
prattle his little innocent wishes, and imagination so busily aids my
grief by tracing what he might have been. In those dreary nights whilst
I sat watching his disturbed sleep, I knelt down and poured out to God
a fervent prayer for his recovery, and swore that if he were spared me
the remainder of my life should be devoted to the exercise of religious
duties; that I would believe in the mercy of a God who could listen to
and alleviate my woe. Had he lived I should have been a pious enthusiast.
I have no superstition in my nature, but from what I then felt it is
obvious how the mind may be worked upon when weakened and perplexed by
contending passions of fear, hope, and terror.”
It is admitted that Lady Holland was an able housekeeper, and Mr. Ellis
Roberts even thinks that the success of her salon was largely owing to
the excellence of her table. “It is true the parties were overcrowded,
but ... men do not much care how they eat, if what they eat is to their
liking.” It is admitted, also, that she was most generous, kind, and
thoughtful for her servants. Yet the inveterate prejudice against her
manifests itself even here. “In this,” says Greville, “probably selfish
considerations principally moved her; it was essential to her comfort to
be diligently and zealously served, and she secured by her conduct to
them their devoted attachment. It used often to be said in joke that they
were very much better off than her guests.” Nevertheless, perhaps there
are worse tests of character than the devoted attachment of servants.
On Lady Holland’s intellectual and spiritual life much curious light
is thrown by her Journal, when taken in connection with the comments
of her friends. Her wayward childhood, her early marriage, her utter
lack of systematic education must not be forgotten. “I should be _bien
autre chose_ if I had been regularly taught. I never had any method
in my pursuits, and I was always too greedy to follow a thing with any
_suite_. Till lately [age 26] I did not know the common principles of
grammar, and still a boy of ten years old would outdo me.” Yet she was a
wide, curious, and intelligent reader, and remembered what she read, as
when she located one of Moore’s innumerable stories in an old volume of
Fabliaux.
She had her strong opinion on most general subjects. In art she was
distinctly of the eighteenth century, as in her view of Wordsworth’s
poetry, and her admiration for Guido and the Bolognese painters. “‘St.
Peter weeping,’ by _Guido_, reckoned the first of his works and the most
faultless picture in Italy.” Nature sometimes moved her deeply, however,
as became a contemporary of Byron and Chateaubriand: “The weather was
delicious, truly Italian, the night serene, with just enough air to waft
the fragrance of the orange-flower, then in blossom. Through the leaves
of the trees we caught glimpses of the trembling moonbeams on the glassy
surface of the bay; all objects conspired to soothe my mind and the
sensations I felt were those of ecstatic rapture. I was so happy that
when I reached my bedroom, I dismissed my maid, and sat up the whole
night looking from my window upon the sea.”
In religion she was more than liberal, in fact, had no positive beliefs.
“Oh, God! chance, nature, or whatever thou art,” is the best she can do
in the way of a prayer, though she never encouraged sceptical talk at her
table and sometimes snubbed Allen sharply for it. With irreligion went a
strong touch of superstition, as so often. “She would not set out on a
journey of a Friday for any consideration; dreadfully afraid of thunder,
etc.,” “was frightened out of her wits by hearing a dog howl. She was
sure that this portended her death, or my lord’s.”
According to her critical guests she was pitifully afraid of death
always. “She was in a terrible taking about the cholera,” writes
Macaulay; “talked of nothing else; refused to eat any ice, because
somebody said that ice was bad for the cholera.” And again, in regard to
the same disease: “Lady Holland apparently considers the case so serious
that she has taken her conscience out of Allen’s keeping and put it
into the hands of Charles Grant.” At any rate, she was morbidly, almost
ludicrously anxious about her health; and she herself records that in
Spain she selfishly refused to let Allen leave her when she was very ill
to attend another invalid friend who greatly needed him. Yet in view of
many other passages in her Journal, I cannot think that she really lacked
courage in the face of death or of anything else. With her it is never
possible to tell what is serious and what is whim. Certain it is that
her parting scene was dignified, if not even noble: “She evinced during
her illness a very philosophical calmness and resolution, and perfect
good-humor, aware that she was dying, and not afraid of death.”
In her main interest, she was preëminently a social being. Greville says
that she dreaded solitude above everything, that she “could not live
alone for a single minute; she never was alone, and even in her moments
of greatest grief it was not in solitude but in society that she sought
her consolation.” Her Journal is, I think, sufficient to prove that this
is exaggerated. She read and loved to read, and no true lover of books
hates solitude. Still she was social, loved men and women and their talk
and laughter, loved the sparkle of wit, the snap of repartee, the long
interchange of solid argument. Nor was she too particular in the choice
of her associates. “There was no person of any position in the world, no
matter how frivolous and foolish, whose acquaintance she was not eager to
cultivate,” says Greville again. Here, too, her Journal supplies a needed
correction, or at least sets things in a fairer and more agreeable light:
“A long acquaintance is with me a passport to affection. This does not
operate to exclusion of new acquaintances, as I seek them with avidity.”
The “passport to affection” is generally recognized. She was loyal in her
affections and in her admirations, though sometimes carrying them, like
everything else, to the point of oddity, as in her strange worship of
Napoleon.
That a person so fond of society should have shown so little tact in it
is one of the curious features of her case. But some things throw an
interesting light on her brusqueness, her downright rudeness. Here is one
brief passage about a woman she met and liked. “If I were to see much of
her she might perhaps be benefited, for as nobody can do more mischief
to a woman than a woman, so perhaps might one reverse the maxim and say
nobody can do more good. A little mild reproof and disapprobation of
some of her doctrines might possibly rescue her from the gulf.” Does not
that explain a host of oddities, and pleasantly? Who of us likes to be
rescued from the gulf by a little mild reproof?
And the woman was nervous, sensitive, imaginative. Society irritates
such people even when it fascinates them. Of one guest she writes: “His
loud voice and disgusting vanity displeased me so much that I fled
for refuge speedily into my own room.” Another bit of most delicate
analysis shows how easily the social disillusionment of a sensitive
organization might manifest itself in tactless ill-humor. “There is some
perverse quality in the mind that seems to take an active pleasure in
destroying the amusement it promises to itself. It never fails to baffle
my expectations; so sure as I propose to my imagination an agreeable
conversation with a person where past experience warrants the hope, so
sure am I disappointed. I feel it perpetually, for example, with Dumont;
with him I have passed very many cheerful hours. This knowledge tempts
me to renew our walks, the consequence is we both yawn.” So clear, so
sure is it, that in all human relations the true road to happiness and
enjoyment is not to seek them directly for one’s self.
The sense of power, of guiding and controlling others, was doubtless a
large element of Lady Holland’s social instinct. “Her love and habit
of domination were both unbounded,” writes Greville. To achieve this,
to govern the sort of men that gathered about her, she knew that she
must study their pursuits. Hence she devoted herself to the details of
politics almost as sedulously as did Greville himself. The minuteness of
her Spanish Journals, personally of little importance, in this respect,
is remarkable. Yet I know of few things more delightfully feminine than
her brief comment on ministerial changes. Her friends go out of power,
and she observes, “The loss of all interest in public affairs was the
natural effect of the change of Administration to me.”
It is, I hope, by this time evident, that, whatever her virtues or her
defects, Lady Holland was an extraordinarily interesting character. I
have quoted from her guests and friends much that was bitter. But a
careful search brings out also testimony all the more favorable when
we consider the extent of the abuse. Thus Greville admits that “though
often capricious and impertinent, she was never out of temper, and bore
with good-humor and calmness the indignant and resentful outbreaks
which she sometimes provoked in others.” And while asserting that “She
was always intensely selfish,” he adds in the next sentence that “To
those who were ill and suffering, to whom she could show any personal
kindness and attention, among her intimate friends, she never failed
to do so.” Sydney Smith writes to her with a tenderness, an obviously
genuine affection, which would prove fine qualities in any woman: “I am
not always confident of your friendship for me at particular times; but
I have great confidence in it from one end of the year to the other:
above all, I am confident that I have a great affection for you.” “I
have heard five hundred people assert that there is no such agreeable
house in Europe as Holland House: why should you be the last person
to be convinced of this and the first to make it true?” “I love the
Hollands so much that I would go to them in any spot, however innocent,
sequestered and rural.” Finally, the most sympathetic, as well as one of
the shrewdest judgments, comes from Sir Henry Holland, the physician, who
had studied Lady Holland in all her aspects perhaps as carefully as any
one. “In my long and intimate knowledge of Lady Holland, I never knew her
to desert an old friend, whatever his condition might be. Many things
seemingly wilful and incongruous in her might be explained through this
happier quality of mind blended with that love of power, which, fostered
by various circumstances, pervaded every part of her life.... Her manner
of conversation at the dinner-table—sometimes arbitrary and in rude
arrest of others, sometimes courteously inviting the subject—furnished
a study in itself. Every guest felt her presence, and generally more or
less succumbed to it. She was acute in distinguishing between real and
false merit, and merciless in her treatment of the latter. Not a woman of
wit in words, she had what might well be called consummate wit in all her
relations to society. Once only, and that very late in life, she spoke to
me of the labor she underwent in maintaining the position thus acquired.”
May we not accept Greville’s dictum that she was a very strange woman,
adding that, after all, she played her rôle of a great lady in not
unseemly fashion? And perhaps it was with some justice that on her
deathbed she spoke—most characteristically—of her life “with considerable
satisfaction, asserting that she had done as much good and as little harm
as she could during her existence.”
III
MISS AUSTEN
CHRONOLOGY
Jane Austen.
Born December 16, 1775.
Wrote “Pride and Prejudice,” 1796-1797.
“Sense and Sensibility,” published 1811.
“Pride and Prejudice,” published 1813.
“Mansfield Park,” published 1814.
“Emma,” published 1816.
Died July 18, 1817.
“Northanger Abbey” and “Persuasion,” published 1818.
[Illustration: _Jane Austen_]
III
MISS AUSTEN
Jane Austen lived her brief life in two or three quiet English towns.
She had no adventures, no experiences, no great fortunes or misfortunes.
She began to do her best writing when she was little more than a girl.
She left a few immortal works, surpassed by no others in the painting of
the human heart. What sort of woman was she herself? Not very remarkable
to look at, it appears. Round, full cheeks—“for the most part, they are
foolish that are so,” Cleopatra tells us—bright, hazel eyes, brown curls
about her face. No doubt, in every point a lady. But her soul?
At first sight, it seems that she laughed, mocked, at all things, very
gently and decorously, but still mocked. “I dearly love a laugh,” says
the heroine who surely most resembles her creatress. And again it is said
of this same Elizabeth Bennett: “She had a lively, playful disposition
which delighted in anything ridiculous.”
Those who love Miss Austen best will recognize, far beyond any testimony
of quoted instances, this incessant, pervading spirit of gentle mockery
which appears in all her books, courteous, infinitely well-bred, but
sometimes very far from amiable.
That she should mock at woman’s education was, perhaps, at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, natural enough. But it would be hard to
find any one in any century who has mocked at it more cruelly. “Where
people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a
well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the
vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A
woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should
conceal it as well as she can.” Which was also the opinion of Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, considered one of the most learned women of her time.
Now we have changed all that.
But if you suppose that Miss Austen wishes to contrast with learning
the sweets of domesticity, you are far astray indeed. I do not know
whether she read La Rochefoucauld. She hardly needed to. In any case,
she well supports his dictum that there are comfortable marriages, but
no delicious ones. The motive of most she lashes with her whip of silken
scorn. “His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like
many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favor
of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman.” Though she had a
sister whom she loved better than anything on earth, the kindest thing
she could find to say of two most affectionate sisters was: “Among the
merits and the happiness of Elinor and Marianne, let it not be ranked
as the least considerable, that, though sisters, and living almost
within sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between
themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands.”
Nor is she much more enthusiastic about the charms of society. Her
heroines do, indeed, love an outing or a ball; but much more stress is
laid on untoward accidents that blight enjoyment than on its rapturous
completeness. And this is life, as we all know. Only—As for the little
distresses of social converse, who has ever depicted them more subtly?
“To Elizabeth it appeared, that had her family made an agreement to
expose themselves as much as they could during the evening, it would have
been impossible for them to play their parts with more spirit, or finer
success.”
No one probably will maintain that Miss Austen treats love very
seriously. Its common youthful ardors, “what is so often described as
arising on a first interview with its object, and even before two words
have been exchanged,” she makes matter for derision or dismisses with
indifference. Isabella utters a platitude on the subject. “This charming
sentiment, recommended as much by sense as novelty, gave Catherine a
most pleasing remembrance of all the heroines of her acquaintance.” With
the author’s own serious heroines love is an emotion of such reverend
profundity that the ladies themselves require years to discover it, and
even then it has to be forced upon their notice.
Religion and the deeper concerns of life generally, where they are
mentioned at all, fare no better. They are touched with an irony of
somewhat dubious effect on the profane, as at the end of Northanger
Abbey, where those it may concern are left to wonder “Whether the
tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or
reward filial disobedience.” There is no doubt, however, that Miss
Austen sincerely honored sacred things. She would have said with her
own Elizabeth, “I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good.” She
appeared to think she would attain this end by keeping matters of the
soul mainly out of her work. But she miscalculated a little. I do not
know how one could more discredit religion than by exhibiting it in such
representatives as Dr. Grant, Mr. Elton, and Mr. Collins: a glutton, a
ninny, and an imbecile. If any reader holds that the prosy sermonizing of
Edward Bertram helps the divine end of the matter, I disagree totally.
And as she mocked all things in human life, so she had a peculiar fancy
for mocking the departure out of it. We know much mockable is there;
but it seems odd matter for a young girl to deal with. “It was felt as
such things must be felt. Everybody had a degree of gravity and sorrow;
tenderness toward the departed, solicitude for the surviving friends;
and, in a reasonable time, curiosity to know where she would be buried.
Goldsmith tells us that when lovely woman stoops to folly, she has
nothing to do but to die; and when she stoops to be disagreeable, it is
equally to be recommended as a clearer of ill-fame.”
Obviously Miss Austen’s mocking was not all sweet, sunny, natural gaiety.
It had too much ill-nature in it. This shows, I think, in her fundamental
conception of character. Read over her list of _dramatis personæ_ and see
how many are attractive or agreeable. It is not that she presents set
types of evil or folly. Far from it. Her people are all human, vividly
human, walking figures of flesh and blood humanity. But like all true
human beings, they have good and evil both, and her vision usually turns
towards the evil, the mildly evil, the foolish and ridiculous. This
perversion is slight, but constant, and its very slightness makes it more
true—and more depressing. What doubles the hideousness of the hideous
scene between Mr. and Mrs. Dashwood (“Sense and Sensibility,” chapter II)
is its perfect humanity and the possibility that it might have been you
and I.
She will brand a whole company with a touch: they “almost all labored
under one or other of these disqualifications for being agreeable—want
of sense, either natural or improved—want of elegance—want of spirits—or
want of temper.” As any company might, to be sure—if you took it so. She
will brand a whole sex. Mr. Palmer had “no traits at all unusual in his
sex and time of life. He was nice in his eating, uncertain in his hours;
fond of his child, though affecting to slight it; and idled away the
morning at billiards, which ought to have been devoted to business.”
Above all, she is severe upon women past middle life. Few indeed has she
drawn that are even tolerable. Yet I have known some who were charming.
With what infinite, subtle, loving art are Mrs. Jennings and Mrs.
Norris made odious! And the best illustration of all for Miss Austen’s
methods is Miss Bates. Her creatress starts with a heroic determination
to be amiable for once. God has given this poor old specimen excellent
qualities. For heaven’s sake, let us dwell upon them and leave the
defects in shadow. “She was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named
without good will. It was her own universal good will and contented
temper which worked such wonders. She loved everybody, was interested
in everybody’s happiness, quick-sighted to everybody’s merits.” Yet the
turning of a page makes Miss Bates ridiculous, and the turning of more
makes her almost as tedious to us as the author evidently found her. In
the end she drives even Emma to open insult, which Emma speedily regrets,
and would probably as speedily renew.
But, it will be urged, I am making the old mistake of interpreting an
author from her writings, of transferring to her the sentiments of her
characters, or, at any rate, her merely formal literary expression.
Very well, let us turn to Miss Austen’s letters, and see what we
find there. To begin with, they are charming letters, full of life,
spirit, and vivacity, quite as charming as her novels. Her editors and
biographers seem to feel it necessary to apologize for them. Why? It is
true, they contain no reference to topics of the day. She might never
have heard of Napoleon, or known that America was discovered. But, as
letters, they are none the worse for that. Also, they are not formally
literary, have no set pieces, or elaborate disquisitions. There is hardly
a general thought in the whole of them. Who cares? They are literary
as being the work of one of the most exquisite masters of expression.
Indeed, an occasional odd glimpse of her constant literary preoccupation
slips out. “Benjamin Portal is here. How charming that is! I do not know
exactly why, but the phrase followed so naturally that I could not help
putting it down.” And again: “Your letter is come. It came, indeed,
twelve lines ago, but I could not stop to acknowledge it before, and I am
glad it did not arrive till I had completed my first sentence, because
the sentence had been made ever since yesterday, and I think forms a
very good beginning.” But, in general, they are merely the swiftest,
lightest chronicle of little daily happenings, made eternal by a sense
of fun as keen as Lamb’s. Is there in Lamb any bit of happier nonsense
than the sketch of Mr. Haden? “You seem to be under a mistake as to Mr.
H. You call him an apothecary. He is no apothecary; he has never been an
apothecary; there is not an apothecary in this neighbourhood.... He is
a Haden, nothing but a Haden, a sort of wonderful nondescript creature
on two legs, something between a man and an angel, but without the
least spice of an apothecary. He is, perhaps, the only person _not_ an
apothecary hereabouts. He has never sung to us. He will not sing without
a pianoforte accompaniment.”
Yet, minute as they are, and natural as they are, Miss Austen’s letters
tell us little about herself, that is, the inmost self that we wish to
get at. Those we have were almost all written to her nearest and dearest
sister, Cassandra. To Cassandra, if to any one, she must have opened her
soul. But, if so, she did it by lip and not by letter. It is rare indeed
that she goes so far as to say, “I am sick of myself and my bad pens.”
To be sure, such concealment of personal feeling and emotion is a most
significant trait of character. The gleam and glitter of those sparkling
pages with all their implication and suggestion recalls the charming
speech of Birnheim to Fanny Lear, “_Ce qui fait le charme de votre
conversation, ce n’est pas seulement ce que vous dites; c’est encore et
surtout ce que vous ne dites pas._” But when we try to get any definite
picture of the writer, she eludes us like a kind of elfin spirit, in
perpetual glimmering, mazy dance, refusing to stand still.
At any rate, mockery is the prominent feature in the letters, as in the
novels; and in letters as in novels, the mockery, though sometimes sunny
and sweet, is too often unkindly and leaves a sting. Miss Austen herself
once at least recognizes this. She describes a certain person as “the
sort of woman who gives me the idea of being determined never to be well
and who likes her spasms and nervousness, and the consequence they give
her, better than anything else. This is an ill-natured statement to send
all over the Baltic.” Doubtless, her modesty prevented her from thinking
of the ill-natured statements she was to send for ages all over the world.
But let us see, again, with more minuteness how completely she spins this
gauze web of satire over every phase of life. Is learning in question?
“I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most
unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.” Or
is she discussing family relations? “The possessor of one of the finest
estates in England and of more worthless nephews and nieces than any
other private man in the United Kingdom.” A prospective marriage is
summarily disposed of. Mr. Blackall is “a piece of perfection—noisy
perfection.... I could wish Miss Lewis to be of a silent turn and
rather ignorant, but naturally intelligent and wishing to learn, fond of
cold veal pies, green tea in the afternoon, and a green window-blind at
night.” Mrs. Austen is disturbed by receiving an unamiable letter from
a relative. Miss Austen is not. “The discontentedness of it shocked and
surprised her—but _I_ see nothing in it out of nature.”
As to society she resembles her heroines in liking balls, and, like her
heroines, she finds many drawbacks in them. “Our ball was chiefly made up
of Jervoises and Terrys, the former of whom were apt to be vulgar, the
latter to be noisy.... I had a very pleasant evening, however, though
you will probably find out that there was no particular reason for it;
but I do not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until there is
some real opportunity for it.” On beauty she comments freely. “There
were very few beauties, and such as there were were not very handsome.
Miss Iremonger did not look well, and Mrs. Blount was the only one much
admired. She appeared exactly as she did in September, with the same
broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband, and fat neck.”
As in this passage, she often refers to dress and too often unkindly.
“Mrs. Powlett was at once expensively and nakedly dressed; we have had
the satisfaction of estimating her lace and her muslins; and she said
too little to afford us much other amusement.” In regard to one special
company she seems to express naïvely her general attitude. “I cannot
anyhow continue to find people agreeable.”
More intimate social relations and the sacred name of friendship are
treated at least as lightly. “The neighborhood have quite recovered the
death of Mrs. Rider; so much so, that I think they are rather rejoiced at
it now; her things were so very dear! And Mrs. Rogers is to be all that
is desirable. Not even death itself can fix the friendships of the world.”
And love? Persons who mock at nothing else mock at that. What should we
expect, then, from the genius of mockery? Whether she rallied her young
men to their faces, I do not know. Assuredly she rallied them behind
their backs. One evening she expects an offer, but is determined to
refuse, unless he promises to give away his white coat. The next she
makes over to a friend all her love interest, even “the kiss which C.
Powlett wanted to give me,” everything except Tom Lefroy, “for whom I
don’t care sixpence.” And when, writing to her niece in later years,
she sketches the man she might have loved, she ends by turning all
into laughter. “There are such beings in the world, perhaps one in a
thousand, as the creature you and I should think perfection, where grace
and spirit are united to worth, where the manners are equal to the heart
and understanding, but such a person may not come in your way, or, if he
does, he may not be the eldest son of a man of fortune, the near relation
of your particular friend and belonging to your own county.”
Also, as in the novels, she is perpetually laughing at religion and
virtue, that is, of course, at those elements in religion and virtue
which are undeniably laughable. Morals and immorals she can treat lightly
in individual cases. “The little flaw of having a mistress now living
with him at Ashdown Park seems to be the only unpleasing circumstance
about him.” In their general phases she can jumble them happily with
physical disorders. “What is become of all the shyness in the world?
Moral as well as natural diseases disappear in the progress of time,
and new ones take their place. Shyness and the sweating sickness have
given way to confidence and paralytic complaints.” On death she is
inexhaustible. One would think she found it the most humorous thing
in life—as perhaps it is. With what amiable, kid-gloved atrocity does
she bury Mrs. Holder. “Only think of Mrs. Holder’s being dead! Poor
woman, she has done the only thing in the world she could possibly do to
make one cease to abuse her.” Apparently, even this supreme effort of
Mrs. Holder’s was not successful, in fact embalmed her in spiced abuse
forever. Other interments are quite as sympathetic as hers.
Most curious of all is Miss Austen on the death of a near relative, the
trim decorum, the correct restraint, the evident fear of being either
over-conventional or under-feeling. So in the first letter; but two days
later she rebounds and trifles with her mourning. “_One_ Miss Baker makes
my gown and the other my bonnet, which is to be silk covered with crape.”
Well could she say of herself, “I can lament in one sentence and laugh in
the next.” Only she immensely mistook the proportion.
One bare strong phrase takes us right to the root of all the mocking
and perversity. “Pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and
wicked.”
It is in this spirit that she makes fun even of her own art, novel
writing, will not take it seriously, “the art of keeping lovers apart
in five volumes,” will not take its professors seriously. She mocks at
their machinery, their heroines, their landscape, their morals, and their
language, “novel slang,” she calls it, “thorough novel slang, and so old
that I daresay Adam met with it in the first novel he opened.” Whatever
pains she may have taken with her own work, she does not mention them,
unless ironically, when some one praises her. “I am looking about for a
sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room.”
If money and profit are suggested as possible objects, she laughs at
them. Fame is all she is thinking of. “I write only for fame and without
any view to pecuniary emolument.” But when it is a question of glory,
she laughs at that, and toils instead for pounds and shillings. “Though
I like praise as well as anybody, I like what Edward calls _Pewter_,
too.” Yet at the getting of money, and at the keeping of it, and at the
spending of it, and at the lack of it, still she laughs: “They will not
come often, I dare say. They live in a handsome style and are rich, and
she seemed to like to be rich, and we gave her to understand that we were
far from being so; she will soon feel, therefore, that we are not worth
her acquaintance.”
One subject only is too sacred for mocking—the British navy. And even
that seems sacred chiefly in connection with the Austens; for Sir
Walter Elliot is allowed to say that all officers should be killed off
after forty because of their weatherbeaten complexion. Miss Austen
herself, however, appears to have been possessed, like Louisa Musgrove,
with “a fine naval fervour,” which blossoms in Captain Wentworth’s
rapturous praise of his calling and fruits in the charming conclusion of
“Persuasion”: “She gloried in being a sailor’s wife, but she must pay
the tax of quick alarm for belonging to that profession which is, if
possible, more distinguished in the domestic virtues than in its national
importance.” A sentiment which would have delighted Sir Joseph Porter,
K.C.B., though it would have obliged Nelson to turn away his face.
So, are we to set down this demure, round-faced chit of a parson’s
daughter as one of the universal mockers, _der Geist der verneint_ in
petticoats, a sister of Aristophanes and Heine? It sounds ridiculous? How
she would have shrunk from _Das Buch Le Grand_ and shuddered with horror
at _Schnabelwopski_! Yet would she?
But her cynicism is more nearly related to Fielding and Smollett and
to the eighteenth century, that is, it does not flow from Heine’s
universal dissolution of all things, but is founded on a secure basis
of conventional belief. Minds of that eighteenth-century type were
so confident of God that they felt entirely at liberty to abuse man;
“whatever is is right” said the “one infallible Pope,” as Miss Austen
styles him, therefore there could be no harm in calling it wrong.
On the other hand, what separates Miss Austen from Fielding, what brings
her close to Heine, and what almost, if not quite, makes up for all her
mocking, is that you feel underneath the mocking an infinite fund of
tenderness, a warm, loving, hoping, earnest heart. Rarely has a woman
been more misjudged by another woman than Miss Austen by Miss Brontë
when she wrote,“Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a
very incomplete and insensible woman.” Oh, no, under that demure demeanor
was hidden the germ of every emotion known to woman or to man. She knew
them all, she felt them all, and she restrained them all, which means
quite as much character—if perhaps not quite so much “temperament”—as the
volcanic flare of Charlotte Brontë. The very difficulty of tracing these
things under Miss Austen’s vigilant reserve adds to their significance
when found and to the convincing force of their reality.
First, as to emotion in general. The testimony of the novels is often
disputed. It is disputable when it refers to particular experiences
and must be used with care. But many little touches would have been
absolutely impossible, if the writer had not first felt them herself.
Thus, she says: “It is the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely
enjoyed by those who enjoy it completely, and the strong feelings which
alone can estimate it truly are the very feelings which ought to taste it
but sparingly.” Or again, with brief and rapid analysis, “She read with
an eagerness which hardly left her the power of comprehension; and from
impatience of knowing what the next sentence might bring, was incapable
of attending to the sense of the one before her eyes.” Do you suppose
the writer of that had never torn the heart out of a letter as madly as
Jane Eyre? And was there not plenty of emotion in the woman who described
the moment of release from a disagreeable partner as “ecstasy,” and who
fainted dead away when told suddenly that she was to leave her old home
and seek a new one?
Or in another line, how all the mockery of her own writing withers before
one short sentence which shows the real author, like all other authors:
“I _should_ like to know what her estimate is, but am always half afraid
of finding a clever novel _too clever_, and of finding my own story and
my own people all forestalled.”
Then as to love. Here the problem is more obscure. Some critics have
endeavored to deduce Miss Austen’s feelings from that of her heroines.
Others have entirely denied the legitimacy of such deduction. No doubt,
observation and divination may do much, but it seems to me that the
subtle details introduced in many a critical moment must be based on
experiences closely akin to those described. No man can ever understand
Miss Austen’s taste in heroes, and her creations in this line are the
worst of her mockeries, all the more so because unintentional. But if
she was blind to the faults of the type, she may have been equally blind
to them in some real Edward or Knightley. We all are. I should even like
to believe, with her adoring relative, that that shadowy lover who died
unnamed to posterity blighted her literary effort and accounted for the
singular gap between her earlier and later work. “That her grief should
have silenced her is, I think, quite consistent with the reserve of her
character,” writes the said relative. I agree as to the possibility, but
somewhat question the fact.
With the more common domestic and social feelings we are on surer ground.
There is a universal concordance of testimony as to Miss Austen’s
sweetness in such relations, her tenderness, her charm. Guarded as
her letters are, these qualities appear, in all the laughter, in all
the mockery. She watches over her mother, she longs for every detail
about her brothers, she cries for joy at their promotion, she exchanges
with her sister a thousand little intimacies, all the more sincere for
their daily triviality. It is said that the family were always amiable
in their daily intercourse, never argued or spoke harshly, and I can
believe it. It is said that Cassandra always controlled her temper,
but that Jane had no temper to control, and the latter statement I do
not believe, but do believe that appearances justified it. It is said
that she loved children, and many passages in her letters prove this.
See in the following the deep and evident tenderness turning into her
eternal mockery. “My dear itty Dordy’s remembrance of me is very pleasing
to me—foolishly pleasing, because I know it will be over so soon. My
attachment to him will be more durable. I shall think with tenderness and
delight on his beautiful and smiling countenance and interesting manner
until a few years have turned him into an ungovernable ungracious fellow.”
That she enjoyed playing the rôle of maiden aunt I see no reason to
imagine. But she accepted it with sweet kindliness, and as years went
on, she seems to have grown even more self-forgetful and thoughtful of
those about her. I have spoken of Heine. What could be lovelier than
his efforts to spare his old mother every detail of his last torturing
illness, writing her the gayest of letters from his pillow of agony?
Everything with Miss Austen is on a slighter scale; but how sweet is
the story of the sofa. Sofas were scarce in those days. The Austen rooms
contained but one, and Jane, dying, propped herself on two chairs, and
left the sofa to her invalid mother, declaring that the chairs were
preferable.
And if she loved others, they loved her. Her brother makes the truly
astonishing statement that in regard to her neighbors “even on their
vices did she never trust herself to comment with unkindness.... She
always sought in the faults of others something to excuse, to forgive
or forget.” And he adds, “No one could be often in her company without
feeling a strong desire of obtaining her friendship and cherishing a hope
of having obtained it.” The profound affection of her sister Cassandra
needs no further evidence than the pathetic letters written by her after
Jane’s death, and the feeling of the other members of the family seems
to have been hardly less deep. Especially was her society cherished
by children and young people. “Her first charm to children was great
sweetness of manner,” writes her niece, “she seemed to love you, and you
loved her in return.” Again, “Soon came the delight of her playful talk.
She could make everything amusing to a child.” And later, when years had
somewhat diminished the difference of age, “It had become a habit with me
to put by things in my mind with reference to her, and to say to myself,
I shall keep that for aunt Jane.”
Altogether, whatever may have been her instincts of intellectual
cynicism, she was past question a woman exquisitely lovable and one who
craved and appreciated love, even when she made least show of doing
so. How pathetic is the tenderness of her last letter! “As to what I
owe her, and the anxious affection of all my beloved family on this
occasion, I can only cry over it, and pray God to bless them more and
more.” And again: “If ever you are ill, may you be as tenderly nursed
as I have been. May the same blessed alleviations of anxious friends be
yours; and may you possess, as I dare say you will, the greatest blessing
of all, in the consciousness of not being unworthy of their love. _I_
could not feel this.” Surely those with such a longing and with such a
sense of unworthiness are not the least worthy of love in this harsh,
self-absorbed, and loveless world.
Nevertheless, what remains most characteristic of Miss Austen is her
singular and inexhaustible delight in the observation of humanity. No
one illustrates better than she the odd paradox that it is possible to
love mankind as a whole, or, at any rate, to take the greatest interest
in them, while finding most individual specimens unattractive and even
contemptible. I think she would have understood perfectly that wonderful
passage in a letter of another novelist not unlike her, Mrs. Craigie:
“I live in a world and among beings of my own creation, and when I hear
of tangible mortals, what they do, what they say, and what they think,
I feel a stranger and a pilgrim; life frightens me; humanity terrifies
me; perhaps that is why it is real suffering for me to be in a room with
more than one other. I believe I am a lover of souls, but people scare
me out of my wits: it is not that I am nervous. I have only a sensation
of being, as it were, in ‘the wrong Paradise.’ I am not at home: I talk
about things I do not believe in to people who do not believe me: I
become constrained, artificial.”
“I am a great wonderer,” says one of Miss Austen’s characters. I think
she was a great wonderer herself.
How fertile this interest in human nature was, what endless and richly
varied entertainment it afforded, is made manifest in many passages
throughout both novels and letters. “I did not know before,” says
Bingley to Elizabeth, “that you were a studier of character. It must be
an amusing study.” Elizabeth’s creatress found it so. When she visits
picture galleries, she confesses that she cannot look at the pictures
for the men and women. In trying social situations the watchful critical
instinct remains imperturbable and revels in the unguarded display of
emotions commonly concealed. “Anything like a breach of punctuality was
a great offense, and Mr. Moore was very angry, which I was rather glad
of. I wanted to see him angry.” Even in the most solemn crises the habit
of curious observation cannot be wholly extinguished. Writing to her
sister, with deep and genuine sympathy, on occasion of a sister-in-law’s
death, she interjects this query, which strikes you like a flat slap on
an unexpectant cheek. “I suppose you see the corpse? How does it appear?”
Finally, like all profound, minute observers of character, she realizes
how far from perfect her knowledge is, that she cannot predict, cannot
foresee. “Nobody ever feels or acts, suffers or enjoys, as one expects.”
Miss Austen alone would be sufficient to disprove the contention that
age and wide knowledge of the world are necessary for the understanding
of the human heart. She had neither of these qualifications. Yet, though
she may have missed many superficial varieties of experience, who knew
better the essential motives that animate us all? She lived in a quiet
neighborhood and saw comparatively few specimens; but those were enough.
As she says, through Elizabeth, “people alter so much, that there is
something new to be observed in them forever.”
Thus she herself enjoyed and pointed out to others the simplest, the most
available, the most inexhaustible of all earthly distractions. Only, I
could wish she might have seen mankind a little more constantly by the
amiable side. As Lamb well observed, the great majority of Shakespeare’s
characters are lovable. How few of Miss Austen’s are! Yet it may be that
at twenty-one she knew better than Shakespeare.
IV
MADAME D’ARBLAY
CHRONOLOGY
Frances Burney.
Born June 13, 1752.
“Evelina,” published January, 1778.
“Cecilia,” published July, 1782.
At Court 1786-1791.
Married General D’Arblay July 31, 1793.
“Camilla,” published 1796.
“The Wanderer,” published 1814.
Died January 6, 1840.
[Illustration: _Madame D’Arblay_]
IV
MADAME D’ARBLAY
Frances Burney (Madame D’Arblay) wrote a diary or diary-like letters
almost from the cradle to the grave. For reasons which will appear later
we do not know so much about her intimate self as might be expected from
such minuteness of record; but her external life, the places she dwelt
in, the people she saw, the things she did, are brought before us with a
full detail which is rare in the biography of women and even of men.
She was by no means a Bohemian in soul. Yet her career has something of
the nomadic, kaleidoscopic character which we are apt to call Bohemian.
She met all sorts of people and portrayed all sorts, from the top of
society to the bottom. And through this infinite diversity of spiritual
contact she carried an eager eye, an untiring pen, and a singularly
amiable heart.
Her father, Dr. Charles Burney, the musician and historian of music, had
an excellent stock of what is nowadays called temperament. He was witty,
gay, and charming. Everybody went to his house and he to everybody’s.
Thus Fanny in her youth (she was born in 1752) had the opportunity of
seeing many of the distinguished men and women of eighteenth-century
London: Johnson and Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Händel, Garrick and
Sheridan, Bruce the traveler, actors, singers, beaux, divines, ladies
with blue stockings, and with stockings of other colors. It was a gay and
variegated world for a quick-eyed girl to make merry in. She made merry
in it, she studied it, and as a certain literary gift was born in her,
she profited.
Then, when she was twenty-five, she wrote and published anonymously an
epistolary novel called “Evelina.” Even to-day, though its charm is of
a peculiarly perishable order, the book may be read with pleasure and
some laughter. But its freshness, its ease, and its rollicking spirits
must have commended it highly to an age whose own speech and manners were
reflected in it. Fanny had first the delicious satisfaction of hearing
genuine praise from those who had no idea of her authorship. And when
the authorship was confessed—as who, under such circumstances would have
concealed it?—the praise became universal, more high-pitched still,
and perhaps no less delicious. The book was read everywhere, commended
everywhere. Fanny’s father, whom she adored, was bewitched with it. No
less so was that odd personage Samuel Crisp, almost equally adored, who,
like some others, having made a notable failure in literature himself,
felt especially qualified to advise those who had succeeded.
In the houses where Fanny had before been a minor personage, a petted
child, watching great doings and bewigged celebrities with wide-eyed
curiosity from quiet corners, she now appeared as a celebrity herself,
not bewigged, but with the wigs bowing down to her. Titles of honor
begged for an introduction and titles of learning. She was pointed out
in the streets and in the theatres. Her characters were cited, her wit
quoted, her sentiments applied by daily personages to daily life. London
was all the English world then and a book read by ten thousand people in
London had a sort of personal success which no book could have anywhere
to-day.
Best of all, Fanny was praised to her face by those whose praise she knew
to be really worth having. Sir Joshua said he would give fifty pounds to
know the author of “Evelina.” Burke sat up all night to finish it. Murphy
and Sheridan entreated her to write a comedy and Sheridan agreed to take
it before a word was put on paper. To a girl of twenty-five, up to that
day merely one of the babes and sucklings, all this must have seemed like
a golden dream.
But the best was Johnson. Fanny was brought into intimate contact with
him in Mrs. Thrale’s hospitable house at Streatham. Something of the
Doctor’s enthusiasm must doubtless be laid to the influence of grace,
beauty, and feminine charm on that ogrish and susceptible heart.
But, whatever the cause, he set no bounds to an outcry of admiration
sufficient to turn the head of an older and sedater woman. Nothing like
“Evelina,” he said, had appeared for years. And of its author “I know
none like her—nor do I believe there is, or ever was, a man who could
write such a book so young.” And the literary praise was mingled with
expressions of personal affection. “Afterwards, grasping my hand with the
most affectionate warmth, he said: ‘I wish you success! my dear little
Burney!’ When, at length, I told him I could stay no longer, and bid him
good night, he said, ‘There is none like you, my dear little Burney!
there is none like you!—good night, my darling!’”
In such a highly-flavored atmosphere did the girl live until the
publication of her second novel, “Cecilia,” in 1782. This, though more
elaborate, more Johnsonian, and less freshly entertaining than “Evelina,”
was equally well received, and Miss Burney continued to be idolized by
all the literary set of London.
Then there came an extraordinary change. Mrs. Thrale married the Italian
musician, Piozzi, and the Streatham circle was broken up. Miss Burney’s
greatest supporter, Johnson, died in 1784, and in the following year
Fanny was transplanted, elevated or degraded, as you please, from the
free, fascinating life of a popular author to be a personal attendant
on the queen. Dr. Burney thought his daughter’s future assured in the
most promising fashion. She herself entered upon her new career with
anxiety and regret and found nothing in it to contradict her unpleasant
expectations.
The queen and princesses were, indeed, kind to her; but their hangers-on
were not, or not all of them. She had been born free, had grown up
in freedom, had been accustomed to indulge her fancies, to have them
indulged by others, limiting them only by love and the affectionate wish
to comply with the fancies of those dear to her. Now she was cramped in
every movement, what was far worse, in every thought. To do servant’s
work for a servant’s stipend was hateful. To run at bell-call for an
idle bidding was more hateful. But these were nothing compared to having
no home, no time, no life, of one’s own. To move by the clock, some
one else’s clock, to be thrown into any quarters that could be spared
from the needs of those higher, to dress and undress at stated times in
stated fashions, to be never, never Dr. Burney’s daughter, but always
the handmaid of the queen—what a change from the caresses of Johnson
and the compliments of Burke! Even pastimes not unwelcome in themselves
become so in such surroundings. What a wail does she utter over the
daily infliction of piquet with the tyrannous Mrs. Schwellenberg: “And—O
picquet—life hardly hangs on earth during its compulsion, in these months
succeeding months, and years creeping, crawling after years.”
And then another change, quite as violent as the preceding. Miss Burney’s
health fails under the strain, she leaves the court, is thrown among
a group of French _émigrés_, meets General D’Arblay, marries him, and
settles down in a quiet country cottage, with a bit of an income and a
garden full of cabbages. No Burkes or Johnsons here, no kings or queens
or saucy gentlemen in waiting; just quiet. One would think she would
miss it all, even what was hateful. Charles Lamb sighed to be rid of
his India House slavery, and when he was rid of it, could not tell what
to do with his freedom. So it is apt to be with all of us. But Madame
D’Arblay apparently knew when she was well off. She adored her husband.
She was absorbed in her son. She wrote another novel, “Camilla,” less
readable than the others, but well paid for. She entertained with perfect
simplicity any friend who could come to her. She had but one dread—lest
some call of military or political duty in France might draw away her
husband and break up her Paradise. “Ah, if peace would come without, what
could equal my peace within!”
The call of duty did come. Her husband went and she followed him, into
other scenes, still totally different from what had gone before. She
saw the France of the first Napoleon and Napoleon himself. She saw the
restoration of the Bourbons. She was hurried along in the mad bustle of
the flight from Paris. She waited in Brussels through the suspense of
Waterloo. With husband and son, and alone, she had adventures and perils
by land and sea. Surely she had need of a good stock of peace within, for
peace without seemed very far away.
But the last act passed quietly at home in England. She was not fêted
or flattered any more, as she had been. Yet enough of old glory clung
about her to bring her a large price for one more very indifferent novel,
“The Wanderer.” Her husband died, her son died. Not much was left to
her but memories and these, when she was nearly eighty, she wove into a
life of her father, which Macaulay condemned, but which has at least the
merit of being sweet and sunshiny. To recall such a golden past, such a
tangled web of fortune, at eighty, without a word of bitterness for the
present, shows a heart worth loving, worth studying. Let us study Madame
D’Arblay’s.
She will not help us so much as we could wish. “Poor Fanny’s face tells
what she thinks, whether she will or no,” said Dr. Burney. Her face
might. Her Diary does not. To be sure, she herself asserts repeatedly
that she writes nothing but the truth. “How truly does this Journal
contain my real, undisguised thoughts ... its truth and simplicity are
its sole recommendation.” No doubt she believed so. No doubt she aimed
to be absolutely veracious. No doubt she avoids false statements and
perversion of fact. Her diary may be true, but it is not genuine. It is
literary, artificial, in every line of it. She sees herself exactly as a
man—or woman—sees himself in a mirror: the very nature of the observation
involves unconscious and instinctive posing.
Macaulay, in his rhetorical fashion, draws a violent contrast between
Madame D’Arblay’s Memoirs of her father and her Diary. The Diary, he
says, is fresh and natural, the Memoirs tricked up with all the artifice
of a perfumer’s shop. Neither is fresh and natural. The Memoirs are
overloaded with Johnsonian ornament; but the simpler style of the Diary
is not one bit more spontaneous or more genuine. It was impossible for
the woman to look at herself from any but a literary point of view.
Take, for instance, the address to “Nobody,” with which the Diary opens.
It sets the note at once. There is not the slightest suggestion of a
sincere, direct effort to record the experiences of a soul; merely an
airy, literary coquetting with somebody, everybody, under the Nobody mask.
A single breath of fresh air is enough to blast the artificiality of
the whole thing. Turn from a page of the Diary to any letter of Mrs.
Piozzi—some of them are given in the Diary itself. A coarse woman, a
passionate woman, a jealous woman—but, oh, so genuine in every word.
Her loud veracity sweeps through Fanny’s dainty nothings like a salt
sea breeze. And do not misunderstand the distinction. Fanny could not
have told a lie to save her life. Mrs. Piozzi probably tossed them
about like cherries or bonbons. But Mrs. Piozzi, laughing or lying,
was always herself, without thinking about herself. Fanny was always
thinking—unconsciously, if one may say so—of how she would appear to
somebody else.
Thus I cannot agree with Mr. Dobson that her Diary is to be classed
with the great diaries. A page of Pepys is enough to put her out of the
count. She may be more decorous, more varied, even more entertaining. As
a portrayer of her own soul or of the souls of others, between her and
Pepys there is no comparison.
Take the mere matter of conversations. In these Miss Burney is
inexhaustible. She gives an evening’s talk of half a dozen personages,
tricked out with the neatness of finished comic dialogue. She may keep
the general drift of what was said. But who supposes her record can be
exact? Exact enough, you say. In a sense, yes. Yet she turns humanity
into literature. When Pepys quotes a sentence, you know you have the
gross reality.
So, I repeat, our diarist helps us less than she ought. Yet even she
cannot write two thousand pages, nominally about herself, without telling
something. The very fact of such literary self-consciousness is of deep
human interest. It is to be noted, also, that she does not conceal
herself from any instinct of reserve. She is willing to drop pose and
tell all, if she could; but she cannot. Such thoughtless self-confession
as Pepys’s would have been impossible to her. I do not think that once,
in all her volumes, does she show herself in an unfavorable light.
But we can detect what she does not show. We can read much, much that she
did not mean us to read. And lights are thrown on her by others as well
as by herself.
To begin with, how did she bear glory? For a girl of twenty-five to be
thrown into such a blaze of it was something of an ordeal. She herself
disclaims any excessive ambition. She could almost wish the triumph might
“happen to some other person who had more ambition, whose hopes were more
sanguine, who could less have borne to be buried in the oblivion which I
even sought.” She records all the fine things that are said of her, the
surmises of eager curiosity, the ardent outbursts of family affection,
the really tumultuous enthusiasm of ripened critical judgment. But she is
rather awed than inflated by it, at least, so she says. “I believe half
the flattery I have had would have made me madly merry; but _all_ serves
only to depress me by the fulness of heart it occasions.” “Steeped as she
was in egotism,” is the phrase used of her by Hayward, the biographer
of Mrs. Piozzi. If she was so steeped, it certainly did not appear in
outward obtrusiveness, pretense, or self-assertion. She repeatedly
complains of her own shyness; and others, who knew her in very various
surroundings, bear witness to it as strongly. “She was silent, backward,
and timid, even to sheepishness,” writes her father. “Dr. Burney and
his daughter, the author of ‘Evelina’ and ‘Cecilia’ ... I always thought
rather avoided than solicited notice,” says Wraxall. And Walpole,
assuredly never inclined to minimize defects, speaks with an enthusiasm
which is absolutely conclusive. Miss Burney “is half-and-half sense and
modesty, which possess her so entirely, that not a cranny is left for
pretense or affectation.”
No. The author of “Evelina” may, must, have reveled in the praise which
was showered upon her in such intoxicating measure. But she kept her
head, and few men or women ever lived who were less spoiled by flattery
than she.
Indeed, her extreme shyness probably prevented her being brilliantly
successful in general society. She herself disposes summarily of her
qualifications in this regard. A hostess, she says, should provide
for the intellectual as well as the material wants of her guests. “To
take care of both, as every mistress of a table ought to do, requires
practice as well as spirits, and ease as well as exertion. Of these four
requisites I possess not one.”
This is the sort of thing one prefers saying one’s self to having others
say it. There can be no doubt that Miss Burney had tact, grace, charm,
and above all, that faculty of taking command of and saving a difficult
situation which is one of the most essential of social requisites. There
is character in the pretty little anecdote of her childhood. She and her
playmates had soaked and ruined a crusty neighbor’s wig. He scolded. For
a while Fanny—ten years old—listened with remorse and patience. Then she
walked up to him and said. “What signifies talking so much about an
accident? The wig is wet, to be sure; and the wig was a good wig, to be
sure; but ’tis of no use to speak of it any more, because what’s done
can’t be undone.”
Still, she was doubtless at her best in companies of three or four
friends, where she felt at her ease. She loved society and conversation,
but it was of the intimate, fireside order. How fine is her remark on
this point. “I determined, however, to avoid all tête-à-têtes with him
whatsoever, as much as was in my power. How very few people are fit for
them, nobody living in trios and quartettos can imagine!” She studied
her interlocutors and adapted herself to them. “As soon as I found by
the looks and expressions of this young lady, that she was of a peculiar
cast, I left all choice of subjects to herself, determined quietly to
follow as she led.” She had also that charming gift for intimate society,
the power—rather, the instinctive habit—of drawing confidences. Young
and old, men and women, told her their hopes, their sorrows, their
aspirations, and their difficulties. This, I think, does not commonly
happen to persons steeped in egotism.
As it is delightful to turn from one trait in a character to another that
seems quite incompatible with it, we must not assume that, because Miss
Burney was shy and retiring, therefore she wanted spirits and gayety. On
the contrary, she assures us, and the Diary and her other writings and
her friends confirm it, that in good company she could carry laughter
and hilarity to the pitch of riot. What a delicious picture does Crisp
paint of her in childhood, dancing “Nancy Dawson on the grass-plot, with
your cap on the ground, and your long hair streaming down your back, one
shoe off, and throwing about your head like a mad thing.” She was always
ready to dance Nancy Dawson, and eager in sympathy when others danced. In
the lively parts of “Evelina” there is a Bacchic boisterousness almost
Rabelaisian, and again and again throughout the Diary scenes of pure,
wild fun diversify the literary gravity of Streatham and the dull decorum
of the court of George the Third.
But if Miss Burney could mock her friends, she could also love them,
and to study her friendships is to study the woman herself. Mrs.
Thrale-Piozzi does, indeed, write of her young protégée in rather harsh
terms. Like all the rest of the Streatham world, Fanny was bitterly
opposed to the Piozzi marriage, and her attitude provoked her former
hostess to indignant criticism. Even in the earlier days of ardent
affection, Mrs. Thrale notes some flaws in the relationship. Fanny was
independent. Mrs. Thrale was patronizing. Fanny accepted favors a little
as her due. Mrs. Thrale showered them, but wished them recognized. “Fanny
Burney has kept her room here in my house seven days, with a fever or
something that she calls a fever; I gave her every medicine and every
slop with my own hand; took away her dirty cups, spoons, etc.; moved her
tables; in short, was doctor, nurse, and maid—for I did not like the
servants should have additional trouble, lest they should hate her for
it. And now, with the true gratitude of a wit, she tells me that the
world thinks the better of me for my civility to her. It does? does it?”
Can you not understand how Fanny felt? And how Mrs. Thrale felt? And that
they loved each other, nevertheless, as Mrs. Thrale indeed eagerly admits?
Then came the Piozzi trouble and the lady speaks harshly of “the
treacherous Burneys.” Yet I do not think Fanny deserved it. She loved Dr.
Johnson and she loved Mrs. Thrale. Between them her course was difficult.
Also, she was undeniably conventional by nature and Mrs. Thrale’s
irregularities shocked her. Yet she did the best she could.
“Treacherous,” said Mrs. Thrale. “True as gold,” said Queen Charlotte.
The latter is much nearer the facts. Affection, loyal, devoted affection
was the root of Miss Burney’s existence. She quotes Dr. Johnson’s saying
to her, “Cling to those who cling to you,” and I am sure she was ready to
carry it the one step further which real loyalty requires. Her friends
stick by her and she by them. She defends them when they need it, even
when they hardly deserve it. “All else but kindness and society has to me
always been nothing.”
Especially charming is her devotion to her family. The Memoirs of her
father are three volumes of long laudation. Almost equal is her affection
for that singular figure, her other father, Samuel Crisp. Her sisters,
Susan especially, are loved and praised with like ecstasy and when her
husband appears, her letters to him and about him are as rapturous as was
to be expected. One exception to these family ardors stands out by its
oddity. Madame D’Arblay’s only son is, in youth, not what she would wish
him to be—not dissipated, not vicious, but unsocial, unconventional—and
she analyzes him to his father with a critical coldness which, in her,
is startling. “When he is wholly at his ease, as he is at present, ...
he is uncouth, negligent, and absent.... He exults rather than blushes
in considering himself ignorant of everything that belongs to common
life, and of everything that is deemed useful.... Sometimes he wishes
for wealth, but it is only that he might be supine.... Yet, while thus
open to every dupery, and professedly without any sense of order, he
is so fearful of ridicule that a smile from his wife at any absurdity
would fill him with the most gloomy indignation. It does so now from his
mother.” And thus we get sudden glimpses into deep gulfs of human nature,
where it is hardly meant we should.
It seems almost an irony that a person of Miss Burney’s social and
conventional temper should have been forced into the excess of social
convention—a court. She knew what was before her and hated it; for we
like to indulge our failings in our own way. All the more, therefore, is
one struck with the admirable qualities which such a trying experience
calls out in her. To begin with, she maintains her dignity. Sensitive,
shy, and timid as she was, it might be supposed that all court creatures
would walk over her, from the king to the lowest lacquey, that in
the busy struggle to climb she would be made a ladder-rung for every
coarse or careless foot. No, it is clear she was not. She had no false
pretensions, no whimsical assertion of pride in the wrong place. But she
would not be imposed upon. How fine and straightforward is her statement
of principle in the matter: “To submit to ill-humour rather than argue
and dispute I think an exercise of patience, and I encourage myself all
I can to practise it: but to accept even a shadow of an obligation upon
such terms I should think mean and unworthy; and therefore I mean always,
in a Court as I would elsewhere, to be open and fearless in declining
such subjection.”
Even finer is the force of character with which she resists depression
and brooding over being torn from her friends and cut off from all her
favorite pursuits. “Now therefore I took shame to myself and _resolved to
be happy_.” Happy she could not be, but such a resolution alters life,
nevertheless, and shows an immense fund of character in the resolver.
Similar resources she had shown before, when literary failure came to her
as well as success. Accept the inevitable, resolutely control all thought
of what cannot be helped, say nothing about it, and try something else.
In short, she had a rich supply of that useful article, common sense. It
is to be noted, also, that the heroines of her novels have it, for all
their wild adventures.
With these various opportunities of human contact and with this natural
shrewdness, Madame D’Arblay’s Diary should have been a mine of varied
and powerful observation of life. It is not. She presents us with a vast
collection of figures, vividly contrasted and distinguished in external
details and little personal peculiarities; but rarely, if ever, does
she get down to essentials, to a real grip on the deeper springs and
motives of character. This is in large part due to the eternal literary
prepossession which I have already pointed out. You feel that the painter
is much more interested in making an effective picture than a genuine
likeness. But Miss Burney’s deficiencies as an analyst of hearts go
deeper than this technical artificiality and are bound up with one of the
greatest charms of her personal temperament. For an exact observer of
character she is altogether too amiable. I do not at all assert that a
good student of men must hate them. Far from it.
There is a soul of goodness in things evil,
Would we observingly distil it out,—
is an excellent warning for the psychologist. But Miss Burney is really
too full of the milk of human kindness. It oozes from every pore. She
“tempers her satire with meekness,” said Mrs. Thrale. She does indeed.
Occasionally, in a very elaborate portrait, like that of her fellow
courtier, Mr. Turbulent, she makes what the French call a _charge_;
but even these are the rallying of joyous good-nature, not the bitter
caricature of the born satirist. When, by rare chance, she does bring
herself to a bitter touch, she usually atones for it by the observing
distillation of a soul of goodness, which transfers the subject to the
sheep category at once.
It is thus that her really vast gallery of portraiture is cruelly
disappointing. Turn from her to Saint-Simon or Lord Hervey, turn even
to the milder Greville or Madame de Rémusat, and you will feel the
difference. George the Third was not Louis the Fourteenth, nor Queen
Charlotte Queen Caroline. But George and his wife were hardly the
beatific spirits that appear in this Diary. Miss Burney cannot say enough
about her dear queen, her good queen, her saintly queen. Mrs. Thrale
remarks: “The Queen’s approaching death gives no concern but to the
tradesmen, who want to sell their pinks and yellows, I suppose.” And this
is really refreshing after so much distillation of soul perfumery.
In short, though she was far from a fool, Miss Burney’s views of
humanity do more credit to her heart than to her head. If the paradox
is permissible, she was exceedingly intelligent, but not very richly
endowed with intelligence, that is, she was quick to perceive and reason
in detail, but she had no turn for abstract thinking. The “puppy-men”
at Bath complained to Mrs. Thrale that her young protégée had “such
a drooping air and such a timid intelligence.” This was greatly to
the credit of the puppy-mens’ discernment. Timid intellectually—not
morally—Miss Burney certainly was. Such learning as she had she
carefully disguised, and in this, no doubt, she had as fellows other
eighteenth-century women much bigger than she. But when she gets hold of
an attractive book, she waits to read it in company. “Anything highly
beautiful I have almost an aversion to reading alone.” Here I think we
have a mark of social instincts altogether outbalancing the intellectual.
As to religious opinions, we have no right to criticize Miss Burney’s
reserve, because she tells us that it is of set purpose. At the same time
it is noticeable how ready she is to look up to somebody else for her
thinking. Her father, Crisp, Dr. Johnson, Mr. Locke, her husband, each in
turn is an idol, a mainstay for the timid intelligence to cling to.
And as her intelligence was perhaps not Herculean, so I question whether
her emotional life, just and tender and true as it indisputably was,
had anything volcanic in it. She had certainly admirable control of her
feelings; but in these cases we are never quite sure whether the force
controlling is strong or the force controlled weak. Her love for her
husband was rapturous—in words. Words were her stock in trade. It was
also, no doubt, capable of supreme sacrifice; for her conscience was high
and pure. Still, that “drooping air and timid intelligence” haunt me.
She seems to approach all life, from God to her baby, with a delicious
spiritual awe; so different from Miss Austen, who walks right up and
lifts the veil of awe from everything. Miss Burney, indeed, stands as
much in awe of herself as of everything else; and hence it is that,
writing thousands of words about herself, she tells us comparatively
little.
One thing is certain, she was a writer from her childhood to her death.
Her own experiences and all others’ were “copy,” first and foremost. “I
thought the lines _worth preserving_; so flew out of the room to write
them.” She was always flying out of life to preserve it—in syrup. The
minute detail with which she writes out—or invents—all the conversations
of her first love affair is extraordinary enough. Still, as she had no
feeling in the matter herself, it was less wonderful that she could
describe—not analyze—the young man’s. But she did love her father. She
did love her husband. That she could go from their deathbeds and note
down last words and dying wishes, all the hopes and fears of those
supreme moments, with cool artistic finish and posterity in her eye, is a
fine instance of the scribbling mania.
It is, therefore, as an authoress that we must chiefly think of her. It
is as the fêted, flattered, worshiped creatress of “Evelina” that her
girlish figure gets its finest piquancy; and she herself, in old age,
must have gone back again and again, through all the varied agitations of
fifty years, to that glorious evening when Johnson and Burke vied with
each other in enthusiastic praise of her books, and as she left them,
intoxicated with glory, Burke quietly said to her, “Miss Burney, die
to-night.”
V
MRS. PEPYS
CHRONOLOGY
Elizabeth Saint-Michel.
Born 1640.
Married Samuel Pepys December 1, 1655.
Died November 10, 1669.
[Illustration: _Mrs. Pepys as St. Katharine_]
V
MRS. PEPYS
The psychographer is apt to be hampered in his study of women by lack of
material. Men of energy and vigor make themselves felt in the world at
large. Even if they write little, they have a vast acquaintance, come
into close contact with those who can write, and all their doings and
sayings of importance are narrowly watched and minutely chronicled. In
making their portraits one is more often embarrassed by the excess of
material than by the lack of it.
With women this is not the case. Those who have public careers,
historical figures, artists, writers especially, are approachable
enough. And there is a great temptation to portray such mainly, if not
exclusively. Yet so far from being all of the sex, they are not fairly
representative of it, perhaps one may even say they are not normally
representative. It is the quiet lives that count, the humble lives, the
simple lives, lives perhaps of great achievement and of great influence,
but of great influence through others, not direct. The richest and
fullest and most fruitful of these lives often pass without leaving any
written record, without a single trace that can be seized and followed to
good purpose by the curious student. No doubt such women would prefer to
be left in shadow, as they lived. But the loss to humanity in the study
of their nobility and usefulness is very great. Above all, in portraying
women of another type we should not forget these fugitive and silent
figures who ought to be occupying the very first place in the history of
their sex.
No one will maintain that Elizabeth, wife of Samuel Pepys, was an
especially noble or heroic personage, or that her influence in the
world, direct or indirect, was of a character to deserve any particular
celebration. She appears, however, to have been thoroughly feminine and
she is exceptional and interesting in this one point, at least, that she
has not left posterity a single written line, yet she is known to us,
from the Diary of her husband, with an intimacy and an accuracy of detail
which we can hope to acquire with few characters who lived so long ago.
George Sand remarked justly of Rousseau’s “Confessions,” that while he
was without doubt at liberty to expose his own frailty, he had no right,
in doing so, to expose the frailty of others. Right or wrong, Pepys
certainly exposed his wife, in all her humanity, to the curious gaze of
those who care to read. If we had a full volume of her letters, we could
probably add something to certain phases of her experience, and more
than anything else we should be glad to have her frank and daily comment
on her husband. But, as it is, we know her as we know few of our living
acquaintances and not all of our intimate friends.
When she first appears to us, she was twenty years old. Pepys married her
at the early age of fifteen. It was a pure love match. He was poor and
she was poor. Her father was a French Protestant. He was unsuccessful
and unthrifty and Pepys helped the whole family, so far as he could. Of
Elizabeth’s early life we know little, except that her Catholic friends
tried to convert her. Of her married life before the Diary begins, in
1660, we know nothing.
She was eminently beautiful. Pepys assures us of that, and he was a
connoisseur. Nor was this a lover’s illusion on his part. Years after his
marriage, when too much friction had set in between them, he reiterates
his opinion and notes with pride that she is not outdone by the greatest
beauties of the time: “My wife, by my troth, appeared as pretty as any
of them; I never thought so much before; and so did Talbot and W. Hewer,
as they said, I heard, to one another.” The admiring husband does not
attempt details, and perhaps it is as well. In the likenesses that have
come down to us we do not discern any singular charm: a forehead rather
full and prominent, eyebrows gracefully arched, a strongly marked nose,
the mouth somewhat heavy, with lips, especially the upper, protruding.
That dress occupied a large place in Mrs. Pepys’s thoughts, as well as
in her husband’s finances, goes without saying. He wishes her at all
times to look well, but is not always eager about paying the bills.
She follows the fashion, but not, it would seem, too curiously. Black
patches, pendant curls, enhance, or disfigure, her natural charm. She
cuts her dresses low in the neck, considerably to Pepys’s disgust,
“out of a belief, but without reason, that it is the fashion.” When
worldly prospects are favorable, she gets gifts,—for example, a new
silk petticoat, “a very fine rich one, the best I did see there, and
much better than she desires or expects.” On the other hand, if a
speculation—or a dinner—goes awry, her adornments are viewed less
amiably. The purchase of a costly pair of earrings “did vex me and
brought both me and her to very high and very foule words from her to me.”
As this shows, she was in many ways a child; and what else should she
have been? Married at fifteen, after a wandering and uncertain youth,
how could she have attained solid training or any staid capacity? When
she came to Pepys, she had apparently little education, but it is clear
that she had a quick mother wit, so that with the passage of years she
probably acquired as much as might decently justify the eulogy of her
delightful epitaph, “_forma, artibus, linguis cultissima_.” Her husband
was vexed by her false spelling, which must, therefore, have been indeed
atrocious. But in his leisure hours he taught her arithmetic, geography,
astronomy, and declares, in his patronizing way, that she made good
profit.
She was a considerable reader, perhaps not of very solid literature,
but at any rate of the poets and novelists. When obliged to remain at
home, with a new Easter bonnet, on account of Pepys’s indisposition, she
consoles him, if not herself, by reading Fuller’s “Worthies.” On other
similar occasions she reads Du Bartas or Ovid. Her erudition at times
even produces a great effect on her husband, as when she assures him that
the plot of a popular play is taken from a novel, goes home and puts the
passage before him, also when she laboriously copies out a letter on
jealousy from the “Arcadia” and submits it to him for his edification.
The romances that she loved she knew by heart, for her mentor finds
occasion to check her for “her long stories out of Grand Cyrus, which she
would tell, though nothing to the purpose, nor in any good manner.”
When she was married, she had not many accomplishments. But Pepys wanted
a wife who would do him credit and took pains to teach her. Also, it must
be added that music was one of the greatest pleasures of his life and he
tried hard to share it with her. Sometimes he is encouraged. She really
has quite a voice, if it were not that she has no ear. And even if she
has no voice, she is so deft with her fingers that he is sure she will
play the flageolet charmingly. Then it ends too often in the wail of the
musical temperament over the temperament that is not musical and never
can be. With drawing it is somewhat better. The lady makes progress;
she decidedly outdoes Peg Penn, which is gratifying, and in one case,
at least, her husband defers abjectly to her esthetic judgment. I “did
choose two pictures to hang up in my house, which my wife did not like
when I came home, and so I sent the picture of Paris back again.”
Mrs. Pepys’s enthusiasm for her artistic pursuits was so great as
occasionally to bring reproach upon her for neglect of her household
duties. But in general we may conclude that she was a faithful, a
devoted, and an interested housekeeper. In a girl of twenty some slips
were surely to be expected. “Finding my wife’s clothes lie carelessly
laid up, I was angry with her, which I was troubled for.” The record,
however, usually indicates both intelligence and energy. “My poor
wife, who works all day at home like a horse,” remarks the not always
appreciative husband. There are spurts of cleanliness, when the lady and
her maids rise early and labor late, with a grim determination to rid
their belongings of dirt, that monster of the world. Every woman will
sympathize and will resent the unkindly comment of the observing cynic:
“She now pretends to a resolution of being hereafter very clean. How long
it will hold I can guess.”
Washing seems to have been done with a thoroughness which makes up for
its rarity. Washing day upsets the whole household and with it Mr.
Pepys’s temper, because he had invited friends to dinner and did not see
how preparations could possibly be made to receive them. Nevertheless, I
imagine the guests were received, and had no suspicions. A good housewife
can work those miracles. At another time he goes to bed late and leaves
mistress and maids still washing, washing.
The lady was a cook, too, and no doubt a good one. Many a dinner of her
getting is minutely detailed and many more of her supervising. As has
happened to others, her new oven bakes too quickly and burns her tarts
and pies, but she “knows how to do better another time.” And this is a
little touch of character, is it not?
But the sweetest picture of Mrs. Pepys at work is drawn by her husband’s
memory, as he looks back from growing fortune on cottage days and simple
love. “Talking with pleasure with my poor wife, how she used to make coal
fires, and wash my foul clothes with her own hand for me, poor wretch!
in our little room at my Lord Sandwich’s; for which I ought for ever to
love and admire her, and do; and persuade myself she would do the same
thing again, if God should reduce us to it.”
Riches diminish some cares and swell others. In the little room at Lord
Sandwich’s the servant problem was not serious. Afterwards it became so.
A procession of sweet old English names, Nells and Janes and Nans and
Debs, gleams and dances through the Diary, sometimes in tears, sometimes
in laughter, sometimes trim, dainty, and coquettish, sometimes red-armed
and tousle-headed. Some please master and mistress both, some please only
the mistress, some, alas!—not the red arms and tousled heads—please only
the master and fill that quaint and ancient Pepysian domesticity with
tragedy and woe. Nothing, absolutely nothing, not even her children,
tests a woman’s character so much as do her servants. From all that
we read, it seems safe to assume that Mrs. Pepys showed judgment,
common sense, and balance in the treatment of hers. If she flew out
occasionally, we must remember that she was very young and that she lived
with servants in very close intimacy. I fancy that her voice had deserved
weight in the pretty little scene which took place in the garden and the
moonlight. “Then it being fine moonshine with my wife an houre in the
garden, talking of her clothes against Easter and about her mayds, Jane
being to be gone, and the great dispute whether Besse, whom we both love,
should be raised to be chamber-mayde or no. We have both a mind to it,
but know not whether we should venture the making her proud and so make
a bad chamber-mayde of a good-natured and sufficient cook-mayde.”
Probably the greatest wrecker of domestic peace is and always has
been money. Was Mrs. Pepys a good economist? She was woman enough,
human enough, to take delight in comfort and luxury. A new hanging,
a new picture, a new bit of furniture enchanted her, as did a frock
or a jewel. The purchase of the family coach was a matter of manifest
rejoicing. Also, she was not perfect in her accounts, and when called
to a stern audit by her source of supply, was forced to admit that she
sometimes juggled with the figures, a confession truly horrible to one
whose Philistine morality strained at a commercial gnat and swallowed
a sexual camel. It “madded me and do still trouble me, for I fear she
will forget by degrees the way of living cheap and under sense of want.”
Nevertheless, her management is usually approved. After all, she costs
less than other wives, a good many, and occasions of expense for her are
not so frequent, all things considered. Even, in one felicitous instance,
she receives praise, of that moderate sort which must often content the
starved susceptibilities of matrimony. “She continuing with the same care
and thrift and innocence, so long as I keep her from occasions of being
otherwise, as ever she was in her life.”
One question that occurs frequently in regard to Mrs. Pepys is, had
she friends? Apparently she had none. Perhaps her vague and troubled
youth had kept her from contracting any of the rapturous intimacies
of girlhood. If she had done so, they did not survive marriage. For
Pepys was not the man to let his wife’s close companions pass without
comment. He would have hated them—or loved them, and in either case made
his house not over-pleasant to them. Perhaps he had done so before the
Diary begins. At any rate, while Mrs. Pepys had many acquaintances, we
do not see that she had one real confidante to whom she entrusted the
many secrets that she obviously had to entrust. And in consequence she
was lonely. The Diary shows it in touching fashion. Pepys recognizes it,
but, with a certain cold-bloodedness, prefers having her lonely at home
to having her dissipated abroad. So she is left to gossip and bicker with
her maids, to pet her dogs and birds, and to quarrel with her husband.
Even of her own family she sees little. Pepys did not seek their company,
because they always wanted something. And they did not seek his, because
they did not always get what they wanted, though with them, as with
others, he was usually just and often generous.
It must not, however, be supposed that Mrs. Pepys was a Cinderella, or
that the maids in the kitchen were her sole society. Pepys was proud
of her, proud of his house, proud of his hospitality, which enlarged
as riches came. He took her about with him often to the houses of his
friends. Now and again they made a journey together with great peace of
mind and curious content. Also, few weeks passed that he did not bring
some one home with him, for dancing, or music, or general merriment,
and in all these doings Mrs. Pepys’s share was greater or less. I think
we can easily surmise her hand in that royal and triumphant festivity,
the mere narrative of which breeds joy as well as laughter in any
well-tempered disposition. “We fell to dancing, and continued, only
with intermission for a good supper, till two in the morning, the music
being Greeting, and another most excellent violin, and theorbo, the
best in town. And so with mighty mirth, and pleased with their dancing
of jigs afterwards several of them, and among others, Betty Turner,
who did it mighty prettily; and, lastly, W. Batelier’s ‘Blackmore and
Blackmore Mad’; and then to a country-dance again, and so broke up with
extraordinary pleasure, as being one of the days and nights of my life
spent with the greatest content; and that which I can but hope to repeat
again a few times in my whole life. This done, we parted, the strangers
home, and I did lodge my cozen Pepys and his wife in our blue chamber.
My cozen Turner, her sister, and The., in our best chamber; Bab., Betty,
and Betty Turner in our own chamber; and myself and my wife in the maid’s
bed, which is very good. Our maids in the coachman’s bed; the coachman
with the boy in his settle-bed, and Tom where he uses to lie. And so I
did, to my great content, lodge at once in my house, with the greatest
ease, fifteen, and eight of them strangers of quality.” And surely Mrs.
Pepys was the queen of the feast, even though her name is but once
mentioned.
Moreover, she had the social instinct, and gave her husband advice as to
his conduct in the world, which he himself recognizes as excellent, and
resolves to follow it. “I told all this day’s passages, and she to give
me very good and rational advice how to behave myself to my Lord and his
family, by slighting everybody but my Lord and Lady, and not to seem to
have the least society or fellowship with them, which I am resolved to
do, knowing that it is my high carriage that must do me good there, and
to appear in good clothes and garbe.”
In one of Pepys’s diversions, which meant more to him than any except,
perhaps, music, Mrs. Pepys was allowed to share to a considerable extent,
and that was theatre-going. It would seem that she entered into it almost
as heartily as did her husband and with quite as intelligent criticism.
In one of his delightful spells of conscience-ache, he reproaches himself
for going to a play alone, after swearing to his wife that he would go no
more without her. But he sometimes permits her to go alone and very often
enjoys her company and her enthusiasm. Occasionally she differs from him
without shaking his judgment. But they agree entirely in their delight
in Massinger’s “_Bondman_” and as entirely in their contempt for “_A
Midsummer Night’s Dream_.”
When one considers the frailties that resulted from Pepys’s social
relations, one is tempted to ask how Mrs. Pepys was affected in this
regard. So far as we can judge, it was not an age of very nice morality,
at any rate among the upper classes. Wives as fair and as respectable as
Pepys’s seem to have entertained the addresses of lovers more or less
numerous. But I think we may assume that the lady we are concerned with
was all that a wife should be. Pepys himself was undoubtedly of that
opinion and he was an acute and a by no means partial judge. He does,
indeed, have tempestuous bursts of jealousy. There was a certain dancing
master, Pembleton by name, who caused a great deal of uneasiness.
It is pretty evident that Mrs. Pepys coquetted with him, perhaps
intentionally, and drove her husband at times to the verge of frenzy,
perhaps intentionally. It “do so trouble me that I know not at this very
minute that I now write this almost what either I write or am doing.” But
it blows over with the clear admission that the parties had been nothing
more than indiscreet.
Also, I divine a little malice in that pleasant incident of later date,
when Mrs. Pepys appears with a couple of fine lace pinners, at first
causing infinite disquiet by the suspicion that they were a present and
then dispelling this disagreeable state of mind by another hardly less
disagreeable. “On the contrary, I find she hath bought them for me to pay
for them, without my knowledge.”
Under other aspects of morality, Mrs. Pepys perhaps impresses us less
favorably. She would seem to have had faults of temper, faults of tongue,
to be at times inclined to deception, at times to violence. Here again
her age must be remembered, her age and her training. I imagine that in
some moral points she was more practical than her husband, less inclined
to hair-splitting nicety. I would give a good deal to know what she
thought of his precious business of vows, his fine distinctions as to
indulgence and abstinence, his forfeits, his pretexts and subterfuges.
When he made up for a vow broken in an extra visit to the theatre by
getting her to substitute one of her visits which she could not use, I
can see her soothing agreement, “Oh, yes, Sam, of course, why not?” And I
can see also the fine smile twitching the corners of her pretty mouth as
she watched the departing Phariseeism of those sturdy English shoulders.
What religion she had back of her morals—or immorals—we do not know.
Although, in the enthusiasm of first love, she announced that she had
a husband who would help her out of popery, she doubtless soon found
that there was not much spiritual comfort to be had from one who in
good fortune boasted of sharing the utter irreligion of Lord Sandwich
and, when things went wrong, dreaded abjectly that the Lord God would
punish him for his sins. Curious depths of inward experience suggest
themselves from the fact that Mrs. Pepys became a Catholic and received
the sacrament, without a single suspicion on the part of her watchful
inquisitor. Yet, after all, there may have been little spiritual
experience, but merely a deft confessor and an unresponsive world.
So it is hard to find out whether Mrs. Pepys loved God and it is equally
hard to find out what we are even more eager to know, whether she loved
her husband. In considering the point, we must remember first that the
world saw him quite other than we see him in the Diary. We see the lining
of his soul, somewhat spotted and patched and threadbare. The world at
large saw the outer tissue which was really imposing and magnificent. Not
only was he a useful, prosperous, successful public servant and man of
business, but he had more than the respect, the esteem and admiration, of
the best men of his time, as a scholar and a gentleman. Here, therefore,
was a husband to be proud of.
Pride does not make love, however. And we know well that folly and even
vice often hold a woman’s heart closer and longer than well-laundered
respectability. It would appear that Mr. Pepys might have combined all
the desired qualifications with peculiar success. Yet as to the result,
I repeat, we do not know. And it is strange that we do not. Every shade
of the husband’s varying feelings is revealed to us, but what the wife
felt he does not record, because, alas, he does not greatly care. Or,
rather, may we say that he assumed that she worshiped him? And may we not
go further and conclude that he was right in so assuming and that for
one word of real affection she was ready to lay all her whims and errors
and vagaries at his feet? Is not this attitude quite compatible with
understanding him completely?
His family she did not love, nor they her. The case is not unprecedented.
Very likely she tried her best. Very likely they tried their best. But
she was young and fashionable and quick-witted. They were old, some of
them, and all of them antique. Then they adored Sam, who was making the
family. Well, so did she. But she knew Sam and did not care to have his
Sunday attitudes and platitudes thrust upon her perpetually.
If they had only had children, how different it might all have been!
Pepys as a father would have furnished one more delight to the civilized
world. Mrs. Pepys as a mother would have come in for some bad half hours,
but she would have been more cherished and even more interesting. There
is little evidence that Pepys regretted his childless state, or that his
wife did. But we can guess how it was with her.
I have said that Pepys’s feelings towards his wife can be seen in minute
detail all through the Diary. The study of them is profoundly curious.
That he was an ardent lover before marriage is manifest from many casual
observations, notably from one of the most high-wrought and passionate
entries in the entire record. “But that which did please me beyond
anything in the whole world was the wind-musique when the angel comes
down, which is so sweet that it ravished me, and indeed, in a word, did
wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly
been when in love with my wife.”
The calm daylight of matrimonial domesticity paled these raptures to a
very considerable extent. It has done so in other cases. The dull wear
of duns and debts, the friction of household management, an ill-cooked
dinner, an ill-dusted study—these things may not shatter the foundations
of love, but they do a little tarnish its fresh trim and new felicity.
Yet, though the husband is no longer made “almost sick” by the lover’s
rapturous longing, there are plenty of instances of a solid habit of
affection, growing firmer and more enduring with the passage of years.
When she is away on a visit, his heart is heavy for the absence of his
dear wife, all things seem melancholy without her, and he is filled with
satisfaction at her return. When she is ill, suddenly and violently ill,
his anxiety and distress prove to him his great love for her, though,
when the crisis is past, his incomparable candor adds, “God forgive me!
I did find that I was most desirous to take my rest than to ease her, but
there was nothing I could do to do her any good with.” When the world
goes wrong and life seems nothing but toil and trouble, he turns to her
and gets her to comfort him.
It is true that that relentless Diary has scenes as painful as they
are curious, scenes in which the estimable naval secretary and friend
of Newton and Evelyn comports himself after a fashion that would be
disgraceful in any station of life. There are outbursts of jealousy and
fits of temper, kickings of furniture and trinkets smashed in spite,
abuse, blows, and nose and ear pullings of intolerable indignity. The
fault is confessed and temporarily forgotten, “Last night I was very
angry, and do think I did give her as much cause to be angry with me.”
Then, some wretched trifle, an ill-timed visit, a shilling mis-spent, a
foolish fashion followed, sets all awry again. I do not know where in
literature to find a fiercer or more cutting scene of domestic infelicity
than that of the tearing of the old love letters. Mrs. Pepys had written
a remonstrance as to some phases of ill-treatment. “She now read it, and
it was so piquant, and wrote in English, and most of it true, of the
retiredness of her life, and how unpleasant it was; that being wrote in
English, and so in danger of being met with and read by others, I was
vexed at it, and desired her and then commanded her to tear it: when she
desired to be excused, I forced it from her, and tore it, and withal took
her other bundle of papers from her.... I pulled them out one by one
and tore them all before her face, though it went against my heart to
do it, she crying and desiring me not to do it, but such was my passion
and trouble to see the letters of my love to her ... to be joyned with
a paper of so much disgrace to me and dishonour, if it should have been
found by anybody.”
Things like this, one would say, could never be forgotten. Yet they are.
“After winter comes summer,” says the “Imitation,” “after the night the
day, and after a storm a great calm.” Great calms came in the Pepys
family also. “I home, and to writing, and heare my boy play on the lute,
and a turne with my wife pleasantly in the garden by moonshine, my heart
being in great peace, and so home to supper and to bed.” Truly, life is
made up of delightful—and pitiful—contrasts.
The worst domestic troubles of the Pepyses were caused by the husband’s
extreme susceptibility to feminine charm. “A strange slavery that I stand
in to beauty,” he remarks, with that pleased amazement at himself which
makes him so attractive.
The detail of these infatuations—how they were mildly resisted at first,
and how they grew and developed to an extent hardly possible for such a
man in a less scandalous age, how they were indulged, and then repented,
and again indulged, and again repented—belongs to the history of Mr.
Pepys—and of human nature. Mrs. Pepys knew little of them, though she
divined much.
What does concern her is the very instructive fashion in which she
gradually gained power over her husband by his infidelities themselves.
She knew well that he loved her at heart. At any rate, she knew that he
was tied to her by bonds of habit and circumstance which a man of his
temperament could never shake off. Therefore, by the aid of jealousy
and tears and scenes she learned that she could in time mould him to
almost anything she wished. This experience begins with outsiders, with
Mrs. Pierce and Mrs. Knipp. A little well-placed anger—certainly not
feigned—was found to accomplish wonders. “Which is pretty to see how my
wife is come to convention with me, that whatever I do give to anybody
else, I shall give her as much, which I am not much displeased with.”
By the time the crisis of the maid, Deb Willett, had arrived, Mrs.
Pepys had become past-mistress in the art of working on her husband’s
sensibilities. Note that I do not mean that this was a coldly deliberate
process; simply, that all the instinct of her outraged affection
concentrated itself on energetic means of overcoming this foolish and
recalcitrant male, and triumphed magnificently. Deb is wooed and forsaken
and wooed again and banished. The man’s will is bent, and bent, and bent,
till he comes right square down upon his knees: “Therefore I do, by the
grace of God, promise never to offend her more, and did this night begin
to pray to God upon my knees alone in my chamber, which God knows I
cannot yet do heartily; but I hope God will give me the grace more and
more every day to fear Him, and to be true to my poor wife.”
Even after this the symptoms recur, but milder, and in that pathetic
blank stop which ends the Diary because of failing sight, the phrase “my
amours to Deb are past,” seems to leave the wife victorious, we hope
permanently.
So, after we have known her for nine years in the closest intimacy, she
steps out from us into great night. A few months later, still a young
woman, she died; but she dies for us with the last line of her husband’s
imperishable record. In that record it may be said, in a certain sense,
that she is shown at the greatest possible disadvantage, as we may in
part realize, if we consider what a similar record would have been, kept
by herself. Yet even seen as her husband reports her, we feel that she
had, with much of a woman’s weakness, much also of a woman’s charm.
VI
MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ
CHRONOLOGY
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal.
Born 1626.
Married Marquis de Sévigné 1644.
Husband died 1651.
Died 1696.
[Illustration: _Madame de Sévigné_]
VI
MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ
Merely as a literary figure, as a writer, Madame de Sévigné amply
justifies her claim to celebrity in the greatest age of French letters.
As a mistress of style she is the worthy contemporary of Molière,
Corneille, Pascal, and La Fontaine.
Yet she wrote only letters and wrote those letters as naturally as she
talked. Just before her came Balzac and Voiture, who wrote epistles,
after the fashion of Pliny and James Howell. Now, Madame de Sévigné knows
that she writes well and takes pride in it, just as Cicero did; but like
him, she knows that letters, to be of any interest, must be sincere, must
be written for matter, not manner. Hers flow from her heart direct, as
she says; they pour forth all the passion, the curiosity, the laughter
of the moment. Often she does not even reread them before sending. The
far-fetched felicities of a laborious writer fill her with disgust. Of
the style of one such she writes, “It is insupportable to me. I had
rather be coarse than be like her. She drives me to forget delicacy,
refinement, and politeness, for fear of falling into her juggler’s
tricks. Now isn’t it sad to become just a mere peasant?”
Peasant or not, she makes the whole wide world of the French seventeenth
century live in her letters, as does Saint-Simon, in his Memoirs,
somewhat later; and in Madame de Sévigné it lives more vividly, if in
Saint-Simon more profoundly. The great affairs of princes and their
petty humanness, the splendor of war and its hideous cruelty, intrigues
of courtiers, intrigues of lovers, new books, new plays, new prayers,
fashion, folly, tears, and laughter, all mingle in her pages and help us
understand to-day and to-morrow by their deep and startling similitude
with yesterday. As “human documents” these letters have rarely been
surpassed.
But the most interesting thing in her letters is her soul, and she
lays bare every fold and fibre of it, without the slightest bravado of
self-revelation, but also without any attempt at reserve or concealment.
She defies our minutest curiosity, because she could.
Above all, she was a healthy, normal temperament, with all the elements
delightfully blended, a rich, human creature of balance and sanity. She
knew well that life is of a mingled yarn, at its best not free from
bitterness. She knew well what passion is, what grief is. This is just
what makes her so rounded and so human. But, in most things, she held a
sure rein and kept her heart in reasonable harmony with her intelligence.
As a practical manager she was admirable. Her husband, who fortunately
died early, was a spendthrift. So was her son, and her daughter not much
better. But the wife and mother knew the excellent utility of money,
watched carefully her great estate, scolded her agents, spent largely
when she could, and when she could not, went without. She accuses herself
of avarice, as the avaricious never do. But we know that she was prudent,
and forethoughtful, and discreet.
I am sure, also, that she was perfect mistress of her household. But it
is a strange thing that a woman, writing a thousand of the frankest long
letters, should say scarcely a word about her servants. Could you imitate
her, madam? And do you not agree with me that it is an indication of
strong sense and native tact?
Let us trace further the charming many-sidedness of this beautifully
rounded character. She was a Parisian, a child of brick and mortar, her
ears well tuned to the hubbub of city streets, yet she loved the country,
not for hasty week-ends of dress and gossip, but for its real quiet and
solitude. She felt its melancholy. “In these woods reveries sometimes
fall upon me so black that I come out of them as if I had had a touch of
fever.” And when she rambles under the shade of melancholy boughs, with
Madame de La Fayette and La Rochefoucauld, whose company one would not
have supposed exhilarating, their conversations are “so dismal that you
would think there was nothing else to do but bury us.” Yet the quick,
sweet reaction of her sunny temper shows in the very next sentence.
“Madame de La Fayette’s garden is the loveliest thing in the world. It is
all flowers, all sweetness.”
She herself assures her friends that they need not fear that country
solitude will bore her and make her morbid. “Except for pangs of
heart, against which I am too weak, there is nothing to pity me for.
I am naturally happy and get on with everything and am amused with
everything.” So, if the song of a nightingale could fill her eyes with
tears, in another instant, like the merry Phædria, she could “laugh at
shaking of the leaves light.” It is she who invented that exquisite
spring phrase, “the singing woods,” she who calls herself “lonely as a
violet, easy to be hid,” she who knows the love of mute insensate things,
“I understand better than any one in the world the sort of attachment one
has for inanimate objects.” How fresh and charming is the picture of her
wading in the morning dew up to her knees to take an eager survey of her
open-air possessions.
With that other joy of solitude, books, she is as engaging and as frank
as with the natural world. It would be absurd to think of her as a
pedant, or a blue-stocking. Any call of the normal feminine pursuits of
life found her quickly and readily responsive, her best books cast into a
corner, forgotten. Yet she did love them. “When I step into this library,
I cannot understand why I ever step out of it.” She can pass long hours
wholly absorbed in new authors, or old ones. Her comments on the great
French literature that was springing up about her are always fresh,
shrewd, and suggestive. Of Racine’s religious plays she says, “Racine has
outdone himself; he loves God as he loved his mistresses; he enters into
sacred things as he did into profane.” La Fontaine she prized as one born
under the same planet. He was gay like her, tender like her, loved the
birds and flowers like her, and like her, kept his tears in the closest
contact with his laughter. I feel a certain yearning in the words with
which she socially condemns the wayward poet. “You can only thank God for
such a man and pray to have nothing to do with him.”
But novels, novels! Assuredly no one ever loved them more than Madame
de Sévigné, those interminable ten-volume romances of chivalry and
sentiment which she pored over, as later generations pored over
Richardson, or Scott, or Dumas, or Victor Hugo. No one has ever expressed
more vivaciously than she the fascination we feel in these books, even
when our cooler judgment laughs at them: “The style of La Calprenède
is wretched in a thousand places: the swelling romantic phrases, the
ill-assorted words, I feel them all. I admit that such language is
detestable, and all the time the book holds me like glue. The beauty of
the sentiments, the violence of the passions, the great scale of the
incidents, and the miraculous success of the hero’s redoubtable sword—it
sweeps me away as if I were a girl again.”
Yet though she could make such rich and ample use of the resources of
nature and books in solitude, she was the last person in the world to
shrink from human society. As a friend she was exquisite. She practised
friendship widely, yet discreetly, as one of the most delicious arts of
life. “I am nice in my friendships and it is a business in which I am
sufficiently expert.” She recognized those whom she felt to be akin to
her, even when she knew them but by hearsay, and she mourns over the
death of a friend’s friend because she loved her, though, she says, “only
by reverberation.”
She had friends of both sexes and all kinds. She was devoted alike
to the magnificent Fouquet, the gay, volatile, and malicious Bussy,
the brilliant, ardent Retz, the cynical La Rochefoucauld, the wise
and quiet scholar, Corbinelli. It is difficult to say whether she
loved most the grave, thoughtful, sentimental Madame de La Fayette, or
Madame de Coulanges with whom she could play the lightest, daintiest
sort of epistolary battledore and shuttlecock. So souls were honest
and right-minded and of stuff to knit loyally with hers, they were all
acceptable to her.
For she was beautifully, nobly, femininely loyal in all these different
friendships. Perhaps the best known of her letters are those in which
she relates the trial of Fouquet on charges of maladministration in his
great financial office. With what passionate eagerness does she narrate
every detail from day to day, the judges’ malevolence (as she views it),
the varying testimony, the gradual approach of doom, and above all, the
lofty, admirable bearing of the accused! With what indignant grief does
she resent and resist—in spirit—the conviction and the punishment. And
in lesser troubles she has the same firm fidelity. Contagious illness,
what is that in a matter of friendship? “I feel about infections as you
do about precipices, there are people with whom I have no fear of them.”
Disagreements, controversies, quarrels?—
“To be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.”—
“In our family,” she says, of one such, “we do not lose affection. The
bonds may stretch, but they never break.” And again, when she is hurt
by coldness and indifference, she protests, “Ah, how easy it really is
to live with me! A little gentleness, a little social impulse, a little
confidence, even superficial, will lead me such a long way. I do believe
that no one is more responsive than I in the daily intercourse of life.”
Yet, though she had many friends and loved them, it must not be supposed
that she was love-blinded or without keen insight into folly and
weakness. She was a careful observer of the facts of human nature, and
could say with Pepys, whom she resembles in some points, not in others,
“I confess that I am in all things curious.” Indeed, she herself remarks
of one who had died in a rather unusual manner, “I perfectly understand
your desire to see her. I should like to have been there myself. I love
everything that is out of the common.” And a sympathetic acquaintance
writes, after Madame de Sévigné’s own death: “You appear to have the
taste of your late friend, who yearned for details and baptized them as
‘the style of friendship.’”
One who looked so closely into souls, and especially one who was a near
friend of La Rochefoucauld, could not escape some harsh conclusions,
could not avoid seeing that all is not love that speaks kindly, nor all
honor that pranks itself in stately phrase. Madame de Sévigné had her
moments when she lost faith in humanity, moments of despair, moments of
still more melancholy mocking. When she is most touched with the spirit
of her cynical associate, she writes, “We like so much to hear people
talk of us and of our motives, that we are charmed even when they abuse
us.” And again, “The desire to be singular and to astonish by ways out
of the common seems to me to be the source of many virtues.” One day,
when she was especially out of sorts, she let her quick wit amuse itself
imagining what it would be to take the roof off of too many households
that she knew and see inside the hate, the jealousy, the bickering, the
pettiness that are veiled so carefully under the decorous fashions of the
world.
Nevertheless, it would be wholly unjust to class her with La
Rochefoucauld or with any one who was a cynic by permanent habit of
thought. She observed men and women because she loved them. She knew
that their faults were her faults and that what was good in her was to
be found in them also. In no one is more obvious and unfailing the large
spirit of tolerance and charity so exquisitely expressed by old Fagon,
physician to King Louis the Fourteenth, “_Il faut beaucoup pardonner
à la nature_.” It is true that her native spirit of merriment cannot
resist a good joke, however it comes. “Friendship,” she says, “bids us
be indignant with those who speak against our friends; but it does not
forbid us to be amused when they speak wittily.” Yet she had always and
everywhere that deepest and most essential element of human kindness,
the faculty of putting herself in another’s place, and her sense of the
laughable in trivial misfortunes was not so keen as her ready and active
sympathy in great.
Therefore she was popular and widely beloved and largely sought after.
In her youth and even in her later maturity she was beautiful. Precisely
because her beauty was less of the features than of the expression, it
lasted longer than mere pink cheeks and delicate contours. Her soul
laughed in her eyes and her merry and fortunate thoughts spoke as much in
her gestures and the carriage of her body as in the quick grace of her
Parisian tongue. And though no human being was less vain, she no doubt
knew her charm, and prized it, and cultivated it in all due and proper
ways. “There is nothing so lovely as to be beautiful. Beauty is a gift of
God and we should cherish it as such.”
Delicious is the word her friends most often use of her. “Your letters
are delicious and so are you,” writes one of them. “She was delicious to
live with,” said another. And her son-in-law, with whom she had sharp
spats at times, yet declared that “delicious” was the true name for her
society.
The fact is, she loved to be with men and women, and therefore they
loved to be with her. Being flesh and blood, she sometimes tired of
the invitations and festivities that were thrust upon her. There were
receptions and entertainments without end, court functions and private
functions. “I wish with all my soul I were out of here where they
honor me too much. I am hungry for privation and silence.” And again,
when the courtesies rained as thickly as blossoms in May, and tired
nerves rebelled against late eating sauced with interminable chatter,
“When, when can I die of hunger and keep still?” Also, being a creature
of petulant wit, she could not fail occasionally to find average
humanity—that is, you and me—somewhat tedious.
Yet she makes the best, even of such tediousness, in her kindly, human
way, and turns it into gentle pleasantry. After all, she argues, it is
much better to mix with bad company than good. Why? Because when the
bad leaves you, you are not a bit sorry. But parting with those whose
society is delightful leaves you utterly at a loss how to resume the
common life of every day. Does not this last touch of hers recall many
a poignant minute of your own? This is what makes Madame de Sévigné
so charming, that in giving perfect expression to every shade of her
feeling she is finding immortal utterance for your feelings and for
mine. “Sometimes I am seized with the fancy to cry at a great ball, and
sometimes I give way to my fancy, without any one’s ever knowing it.”
Crying or laughing, she went to balls and banquets, and enjoyed them, and
described them with the golden glow of her decorative imagination. “I
went to the marriage of Mademoiselle de Louvois. What shall I say about
it? Magnificence, gorgeousness, all France, garments loaded and slashed
with gold, jewels, a blaze of fires and flowers, a jam of coaches,
cries in the street, torches flaring, poor folk thrust back and run
over; in short, the usual whirlwind of nothing, questions not answered,
compliments not meant, civilities addressed to no one in particular,
everybody’s feet tangled up in everybody’s train.” And she went home
weary and resolved not to go again. And she went again—like all of us.
It will naturally be asked whether, in an age of too courtly morals, when
exact virtue was not always insisted upon, perhaps not even expected,
this gay young widow lived within the limits of propriety. It can only
be said that the keenest scandal-mongers of the time—and none were ever
keener—find no fault with her in this respect. She had passionate lovers
of all sorts, princes, generals, statesmen, poets. She laughed with
them all, picked the fine flower of their adoration, and went on her way
untouched, so far as it appears. What the passions were she knew well, as
is shown clearly enough in the wonderful sentence in which she compares
them to vipers, which may be bruised and crushed and torn and trampled,
and still they move; you may tear their hearts out, and still they move.
But for her own, she flourished in spite of them, not perhaps with white
innocence, but with royal self-possession.
And this self-possession was not wholly the outcome of coldness, nor
even of balanced sanity. A large amount of spiritual elevation entered
into it, a religious fervor which, if not always haunting, is rarely far
away. Madame de Sévigné took nice and constant counsel for the welfare
of her soul. With all her ample sense of the charm and solace of this
world, she was very much alive to the awful immanence of another. Time
flies, she says, “and I see it fly with horror, bringing me hideous
old age, disease, and death.” Again, “I find death so terrible, that I
hate life more because it brings me to it than because of the thorns
that strew the path.” She assuages the horror with devout practice. On
suitable occasions she resolves to withdraw from the world, pray and
fast much, and “practice boredom for the love of God.” She is a faithful
and constant reader of the fathers and the moralists. She listens to the
great sermons of Bossuet and Bordaloue, and profits, though her shrewd
wit is sometimes critical. Above all, she strives for a humble, earnest
attitude of submission to the will of God everywhere and always. Without
this, she thinks, life would be unbearable. The sense of His presence and
of His guidance, the solution of sin and suffering by His all-controlling
and all-loving will are never far from her. At moments she even rises to
something of the mystic’s joy.
Yet she was no mystic, but in this aspect of life also a sane and normal
woman, and it is delicious, because so human, to see how the pressure of
this world returns upon her and crowds out even God. How charming is her
naïve report of the verdict of a suggested confessor. “I have seen the
Abbé de la Vergne; we talked about my soul; he says that unless he can
lock me up, not stir a step from me, take me to and from church himself,
and neither let me read, speak, nor hear a single thing, he will have
nothing to do with me whatever.” The saints, the saints! She envies them,
of course. But they are so dowdy. The sinners are so much more agreeable.
And the ways of this world are pleasant, pleasant. Dark thoughts, dark
hours will intrude, will overcome us like a summer cloud, and then we get
out Pascal or Nicole and hurry to the altar. But who can live on this
level long? Yes, she is mean and low and base, she says. When she sees
people too happy it fills her with despair, which is not the fashion of a
beautiful soul. She is not a beautiful soul, calls herself a soul of mud.
How can any prayer, or any religion, or any God save her?
She has her moments, also, not of defiance, but of question whether it
is worth while to make one’s self unhappy. “You must love my weaknesses,
my faults,” she says. “For my part I put up with them well enough.”
After all, if she is lukewarm, and easy-going, and forgetful, so are
others, millions of others. Why should she suffer for it more than they?
We practice salvation with the saints, she says, and damnation with the
children of this world. “We are not the devil’s,” she says, “because we
fear God and because at bottom we have a touch of religion. We are not
God’s, either, because His law is hard and we do not wish to do ourselves
a damage. This is the state of the lukewarm, and the great number of them
does not disturb me. I enter perfectly into their reasons. At the same
time God hates them and they ought to escape from their condition; but
this is precisely the difficulty.”
No one has portrayed more exquisitely than she the pitiful but human
lightness of common souls in face of these enormous questions. “My
saintly friend sometimes finds me as reasonable and serious as she would
have me. And then, a whiff of spring air, a ray of sunshine, sweeps away
all the reflections of the twilight gloom.” And it is she who framed the
advice, dangerous or precious according to the heart it falls on. “_Il
faut glisser sur les pensées et ne pas les approfondir._” It is sometimes
best to slip over thoughts and not go to the bottom of them.
So we have seen Madame de Sévigné to be in every respect a sweetly
rounded nature, one of the most so, one of the most sane, normal, human
women that have left the record of their souls for the careful study of
posterity. Well, in this pure and perfect crystal of balanced common
sense and judgment there was one most curious and interesting flaw, the
lady’s love for her daughter. Love for her daughter? you repeat. And is
not that the most sane and normal of all possible characteristics in a
woman?
It ought to be. But in Madame de Sévigné it certainly was not. She had
two children, a daughter and a son. The son much resembled her, with some
of her good qualities exaggerated into faults. He was gay and kindly;
but he was light-headed and careless. Such as he was, his mother loved
him with normal affection. She saw his weakness and tried to correct
it. But she enjoyed his society, retained his confidence, and could be
as merry with him as a summer’s day, witness her inimitable account of
his relating to her his comic parting from Ninon de l’Enclos. “He said
the maddest things in the world and so did I. It was a scene worthy of
Molière.” Then, when he keeps bad company, behaves indiscreetly, and is
generally reprehensible, she is aware of it at once and comments in no
uncertain terms. “I wish you could see how little merit or beauty it
takes to charm my son. His taste is beneath contempt.”
But the daughter, the daughter, Madame de Grignan, she is a paragon, a
miracle of nature, above admiration, and without defect. The bulk of
Madame de Sévigné’s correspondence is written to her, and what is much
worse, it is written about her, page after page of advice, of anxiety,
of adoration, until even dear lovers of the mother, like Fitzgerald,
feel that, in her own vivid phrase, they have had “an indigestion of
Grignans.”
But this feeling of boredom vanishes as soon as you see that you are
confronted with a psychological problem. For Madame de Sévigné’s
attitude, her language, are not that of a normal, not even of a
passionately affectionate, mother. Her feeling in this case is an
obsession, a real mania, like a girl’s or a grown woman’s genuine love
affair. She cannot be happy one moment away from the object of her
devotion. She thinks of her daily, nightly, dreams of her, in everything
is anxious to please her or sick to think she has not pleased her. She
seeks solitude because there she can dream more freely of this beloved
daughter of hers. And the chief charm of society is that some one may
inquire about Madame de Grignan’s health and venture a compliment which
the eager listener can set down and pass on. Like a lover of twenty, she
suggests that she and her beloved are looking at the moon at the same
time. “You alone,” she writes, in the ardor of her passion, “can make
the joy or the sorrow of my life. I know nothing but you, and beyond
you everything is nothing to me.” Over and over again she repeats that
she wishes she loved God as she loves this bit of herself, this thing
of mortal, but exquisite fragility. Now this is not quite the love of a
common sane and normal mother, is it?
And the daughter, did she deserve it? Some think not. She was beautiful.
And she was a scholar, a pupil of Descartes, a reader of philosophies and
critic of literature, who looked down a little on her mother’s naïve and
extremely personal judgments. She was a wit, also,—wrote what she thought
fine letters. They seem to us a little stilted, as the one she sent to
Moulceau after her mother’s death. And some say she was haughty, without
her mother’s broad sympathy, and even high-tempered and quarrelsome.
But all these flaws were nothing to the mother lover. It is, indeed,
pretty to observe how, being the keenest sighted of women, she
occasionally sees things that she will not see. Thus, she writes of
her daughter’s boasted style, “It is perfect. All you have to do is to
keep it as it is and not try to improve it.” Or of her attitude towards
herself. “Somebody said the other day that, with all the tender affection
you have for me, you don’t get as much out of my society as you might,
that you do not appreciate what I am worth, even as regards you.”
For the most part, however, it is a sweet, warm tempest of praise, an
indigestion of praise, touchingly at variance with the chilly judgment
of those who looked on. Madame de Grignan has not only the choicest of
intellects, but the tenderest of hearts. She has a stoical, old Roman
virtue which the vulgar may mistake for indifference; but underneath
she is so surprisingly sensitive that every precaution is necessary to
guard her too delicate nerves from intolerable shock. She thinks loftily,
she speaks wittily, and her letters are the quintessence of everything
finished and exquisite, so different from the hasty and careless scrawls
of this scribbling mother, though, to be sure, good judges have found
ours, also, not unworthy of commendation. And some, who do not believe
that a love that takes us out of ourselves is the best worth having
of all things in this loveless world, may think such a degree of
self-deception puerile. It is a little unusual, at any rate.
Such a love, in a universe of cross accidents and unforeseen
contingencies, is always shot through and through with misery. This
woman, so poised and tempered in all that concerned herself and the
common course of life, dwelt in a cloud of anxiety for what concerned the
welfare of her precious daughter. It was worry, worry from morning till
night. In far Provence, where the treasure and her husband and children
lived, what disasters might not occur, while the sun was shining and
wit sparkling in jovial Paris? With the lovely inconsistency of love,
the mother declares at one moment that her passion is all joy and the
delight of it far, far outweighs the care and trouble, at the next that
life is only wretchedness for those who have a great devotion. “The mind
should be at peace,” she says; “but the heart debauches it perpetually.
Mine is filled full with my daughter.” She frets over great things and
little, Madame de Grignan’s children, Madame de Grignan’s debts, Madame
de Grignan’s lawsuits, above all over Madame de Grignan’s health. The
daughter was, apparently, one of those persons who are never ill and
never well. And the doting mother, at five hundred miles distance, is
always suggesting drugs, draughts, plasters, poultices, doctors, doctor’s
devices, and devices of the devil.
Also, in the rare intervals when they were together, she suggested to the
same effect, and in consequence such sojourns were not happy. I know few
things more tragic than this vast affection, longing, longing to be with
its object, and when they did meet, thwarted, hampered, blighted by that
fatal inadequacy of human contact which makes love’s fine fruition a joy
not of this transitory world. We have, of course, little record of things
actually done or said while the lover and the beloved were together. But
we have the piteous cry of the bereaved one when they had felt themselves
compelled to part. “Was it a crime for me to be anxious about your
health? I saw you perishing before my eyes, and I was not permitted to
shed a tear. I was killing you, they said, I was murdering you. I must
keep still, if I suffocated. I never knew a more ingenious and cruel
torment.” Or again, “In God’s name, child, let us try another visit to
reëstablish our reputation. We must be more reasonable, at least you
must, and not give them occasion to say, ‘You simply kill one another.’”
With what a strangling clutch does she tear at her heart, in the effort
to make those adjustments of human passion which can never be perfectly
made by flesh and blood. “You speak like one who is even further from me
than I thought, who has wholly forgotten me, who no longer understands
the measure of my attachment, nor the tenderness of my heart, who knows
no longer the devotion I have for her, nor that natural weakness and
bent to tears which have been an object of mocking to your philosophic
firmness.”
But it makes no difference. In spite of presence, or absence, or
indifference, the old wound keeps still and always fresh and bleeding.
Still, still the longing heart cries out for what it needs, even if it
can never obtain it. “How is it that my whole life turns on one sole
thought and everything else appears to me to be nothing?” Only God can
comfort her. “Everything must be given up for God, and I will do it, and
will only wonder at His ways, who, when all things seem as if they should
be well with us, opens great gulfs which swallow the whole good of life,
a separation which wounds my heart every hour of the day and far more
hours of the night than sense or reason would.”
Thus, you see, this sweet and noble lady, whose robust strength it seems
as if we might all envy, also carried her burden of spiritual grief.
Assuredly she is the more charming for it. As she herself said: “In
the midst of all my moralizing, I keep a good share of the frailty of
humanity.” Thank God, she did!
VII
MADAME DU DEFFAND
CHRONOLOGY
Marie de Vichy-Chamrond.
Born 1697.
Married Marquis du Deffand August 2, 1718.
Friendship with Mademoiselle de L’Espinasse 1754-1764.
Met Horace Walpole 1765.
Died October 24, 1780.
[Illustration: _Madame du Deffand_]
VII
MADAME DU DEFFAND
We know her intimately through her multitude of letters, but we know her
only as a blind, infirm old woman, dependent on the kindness of others
for amusement, if not for support, and ready to depart at any time from
the well-worn and tedious spectacle of flavorless existence, if it had
not been for her utter uncertainty as to the world that lay beyond.
She had been very young, however, very young and very gay, as traditions
tell us. Born into the most dissipated period of French social life, the
regency of the first half of the eighteenth century, she was conspicuous
for her charm and wit as well as for the irregularity of her conduct. She
is said to have been loved by the regent himself. In any case, she was
most intimate with him and with his favorites, and turned that intimacy
to advantage by securing a pension which was of solid value to her in
later life. She fascinated others besides the wicked. The great preacher,
Massillon, was summoned by her friends to convert her in early youth.
He talked with her very freely, but would make no comment except that
she was charming, and when asked to prescribe for her case would suggest
nothing but a five-cent catechism.
She was married for convenience, but most inconveniently to her and her
husband both. Either he was too fast for her, or too slow, at any rate
he was too dull. She left him, and returned to him, and left him again,
and was adrift in the wide world.
It is important to note that with Madame du Deffand, as with some other
French women, extreme freedom of living is quite compatible not only with
great refinement of taste, but with a singular delicacy and sensitiveness
of moral perception. She has an occasional coarseness of speech belonging
to her age, but few people have been more alive to fine shades of
affection, of devotion, of spiritual tact.
Nevertheless, her early life must be remembered, if we would understand
her later. She herself says, “Oh, I should not want to be young again on
condition of being brought up as I was, living with the people I lived
with, and having the sort of mind and character I have.” Dissipation,
even less innocent than hers, disorders life, strips it of illusion,
takes away utterly and forever the charm of simple things.
With Madame du Deffand, at any rate, there was no illusion left, and in
her gray old age the charm of simple things was gone and of complex also.
If she could have detailed her chill philosophy to Rosalind, that child
of dawn would have cried out even more than to the curious Jacques, “I
had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.”
To this disillusioned lady the men and women of the age she lived in were
either cynics or pedants, they were bold without force and licentious
without merriment, they had little talent and a vast deal of presumption.
But as far as her thought and her reading and her knowledge went, the
men and women of other times were little better. Most were either fools
or knaves and the few who were not were so painfully conscious of it that
living with them was more of a burden than with the others. She has words
more bitterly acrid than even La Rochefoucauld’s to designate the folly
and emptiness and wickedness of life. “I do not know why Diogenes went
looking for a man: nothing could happen to him worse than finding one.”
And she sums it up in one terrible sentence. “For my part, I confess that
I have but one fixed thought, one feeling, one misfortune, one regret,
that ever I was born.”
As a general thing, however, her complaint is less violent than this
and what impresses her in life is not so much its actual evil and
misery as its intolerable ennui. I must ask the reader’s pardon for
using the French word, which is, perhaps, by this time almost English.
No equivalent exactly fits it. “Melancholy” suggests somewhat more of
abstract reflection and “boredom” more of irritation with external
circumstances. Both these are sometimes applicable, but one cannot get
along without “ennui” in discussing Madame du Deffand.
This, then, is the deadly burden that life inflicts upon her. The great
hours run by, immense, interminable, with nothing to fill them, nothing
that inspires her, nothing that amuses her, nothing that distracts her
even. The weary waste of time to come can be judged only by the barren
memory of time past and that holds out neither encouragement nor hope.
To be sure, she readily recognizes that the root of the trouble may
be within. A certain lady fails to please her, “but she shared this
misfortune with many others, for everything seems insupportable to me.
This may very well be because I am insupportable myself.” Whatever the
cause, the malady is always present and without cure. “I end because I am
sad with no reason for sadness except that I exist.”
It might be supposed that, drifting always in such a dead fog of ennui,
she might bore her correspondents, much more her readers among posterity.
She does often. She would very much oftener, if she were not after all a
Frenchwoman of the wittiest age of French social life, with the sparkle
of French vivacity at the end of her pen. Feeble as she was, world-weary
as she was, perhaps even in close connection with these conditions, she
had an indomitable nervous energy, which responded in the most surprising
way to social or spiritual stimulus. Horace Walpole speaks with admirable
justice of her “Herculean weakness.” She found life dull. Yet out of the
dulness she could weave the tissue of a correspondence with Voltaire
in which the balance of brilliancy is not always on one side. Could we
say more? She goes right to the fact in her letters, speaks vigorously,
without tautology, or circumlocution. “I care nothing for perfection
of style or even for finished politeness. I detest phrases and energy
delights me.” With what verve and petulance does she express the emotion
of the moment, grave or gay. “Quick, quick, quick, let me tell you about
the supper of yesterday which worried me so for fear I should be dull, or
crabbed, or embarrassed. Nothing of the sort. I never remember in all my
life being younger, or gayer, or merrier.”
She had the sheer salt of French wit, too, could tell a story inimitably,
or strike off a stinging epigram. It was she who created the well-known
phrase in regard to St. Denis’s long perambulation with his head off: “It
is the first step that costs”; she who said—untranslatably—of the verses
that showered on Voltaire’s grave, that the great author had become “_la
pâture des vers_”; she who remarked of one of her own friends that her
wit was like a fine instrument always a-tuning and never played on. Above
all, she could make inexhaustible mockery of her besetting evil. “Write
disagreeably, if you like,” she urges. “As the man said of the rack, it
will help me to pass an hour or two, at any rate.” And again, “I hear
nothings, I speak nothings, I take interest in nothing, and from nothing
to nothing I travel gently down the dull way which leads to becoming
nothing.”
Thus the roses strewn over the abyss make it only deeper and blacker and
more horrible. Others may take pleasure in her vivacity, may laugh at her
stories and applaud her wit. She takes no pleasure and finds the applause
and laughter utterly hollow. Man delights her not nor woman either. And
still those interminable hours drag along, unfilled and unfillable as the
sieves of the daughters of Danäus.
To be sure, when all these glittering analyses of nothing were written,
she was old, and blind, and sleepless, three things that are apt to dull
the quickest spirits. Before she was far past middle life her eyesight
failed her and she became the frail, exquisite, touching figure that
we see in her best-known portrait, sitting in a great straw-canopied
chair, her _tonneau_, she called it, with fine, earnest, sensitive
features, stretching out her hands in the groping gesture pathetically
characteristic of her affliction. And loss of sight to eyes so keen must
leave an appalling emptiness.
Also she was tormented by insomnia, to long, blind, empty days added
solitary nights, when the tossing of weary limbs doubles the tossing of
weary spirits. “One goes over and over in one’s mind everything that
worries and distresses one; I have a gnawing worm which sleeps no more
than I do; I reproach myself alone with all my troubles and it seems
clear that I have brought them all upon myself.” At two A.M. such things
do have a most intolerable clarity.
With afflictions like these, at seventy years old, it is perhaps not
wonderful that a lone woman should feel she had had enough of life.
Unfortunately Madame du Deffand’s weariness began when she was young
and could see—too well. According to Mademoiselle Aïssé, after she and
her husband had parted, she asked him to come back to her, desiring to
reëstablish her position in the world. For six weeks things hobbled
along. Then she became bored till she could endure it no further, and she
made her state of mind so evident, not by ill-temper, but by all signs of
depression, that the husband departed, this time for good and all. But
who can depict her experiences better than herself? “I remember thinking
in my youth that no one was happy but madmen, drunkards, and lovers.” And
elsewhere she flings the facts at us like a glass of cold water in the
face. “I was born melancholy. My gayety comes only by fits and they are
growing rare enough.”
Those things which distract and divert most men and women, those great
passions and little pleasures which to some of us seem to fill every
cranny of life with business and delight, to her meant simply nothing. If
we review them in their larger categories, we shall see her lay her cold,
light finger on them and shrivel them up. It is not deliberate on her
part. She would be glad to enjoy as others do. But she has not the power.
“It is not my purpose to refuse happiness from anything. I leave open
every door that seems to lead to pleasure; and if I could, I would bar
those that let in sorrow and regret. But destiny or fortune has bereft me
of the keys that open and close the mansion of my soul.”
Nature, the calmest, the most soothing of spiritual consolations? She
has no place for it. As a scientific, intellectual pursuit, she blasts
it with her savage, untranslatable epigram on Buffon: _“Il ne s’occupe
que des bêtes; il faut l’être un peu soi-même pour se dévouer à une
telle occupation._” As for the emotional, imaginative aspects of the
natural world, she grudgingly confesses that she might enjoy them, if
circumstances were favorable: “I am not insensible to natural and rural
beauties, but one’s soul must be in a very gentle and peaceful mood to
get much pleasure from them.” Her friend, Horace Walpole, can hardly be
regarded as an ardent nature lover, he who wrote of general birdsong,
“It is very disagreeable that the nightingales should sing but half a
dozen songs, and the other beasts squall for two months together.” Yet to
Madame du Deffand it seemed that even Walpole’s delight in country life
was quite incomprehensible. “I cannot form any idea of the pleasures you
taste in solitude and of the charm you find in inanimate objects.”
But the more human interests did not please her any better. Thought,
learning, the long effort to understand the secret of life and the
springs of human action? Will this dissipate ennui? Not hers. It only
deadens it.
Politics? The movement of the world, wars, battles and sieges, deaths of
illustrious princes and of unknown thousands? They move not her. High and
mighty potencies seem to her perfectly trivial. “Let me whisper in your
ear that I make precious little account of kings; their protestations,
their retractations, their recriminations, their contradictions, I find
them of no more moment than the mixing of a breakfast for my cat.” But
if you think that at the other extreme she had any more sympathy with
the people, just then at the point of striving so mightily, you are
altogether mistaken. “From the Agrarian Law down to your monument, your
lanterns, and your black flag, the people, with its joy, its anger, its
applause, and its curses, is thoroughly odious to me.”
Then there is art, beauty of human creation, to some a resource so great
that it overcomes not only tedium but even misery and acute suffering.
To this lady with the dead heart beauty makes no appeal whatever. Her
blindness of course cut her off from beauty of the eye to which she
seldom if ever refers. But the ears of the blind are supposed to be
doubly keen and indeed hers were so. Yet to the nerves behind the ears
music was mainly a vexation. In one instance she does, indeed, find the
harp delightful. This was her idea of delight: “The thought that one gets
hold of nothing, that everything slips away and fails us, that one is
alone in the universe and fears to go out of it: this is what occupied me
during the music.” Do you wonder that she elsewhere writes, “To me music
is a noise more importunate than agreeable.”
With literature the case is little better. Madame du Deffand knew well
most of the French writers of her day and had little esteem for them
or their works. Of earlier authors she thought more, but not much. La
Fontaine occasionally made her smile. Corneille’s heroics enraptured
her—for a moment. A minor comedy gives her extreme pleasure, in fact
she weeps during the whole third act, and “they were not tears of
bitter anguish, but tears of tender emotion.” Her usual state of mind
is, however, better expressed in another passage: “Everything I read
bores me; history, because I am totally incurious; essays, because they
are half platitude and half affected originality; novels, because the
love-making seems sentimental and the study of passion makes me unhappy.”
For a soul thus blasted by a dry wind from the barren places of this
world it would seem as if the thought of another might offer irresistible
attraction. It did, and Madame du Deffand is fascinating on the subject.
She would like, oh, she would like to practice religion with fervor. She
invites a confessor to dine, talks with him, and is quite encouraged. Why
should not grace work a miracle for her as well as for others? She reads
Saint François de Sales and finds a tender and winning spirit under his
“mystical nonsense.” She regrets that he is dead. “He would have bored
me considerably, but I should have loved him.” And in her long hours of
insomnia she reflects upon the delightful possibility of believing and
builds castles in Spain, or in heaven. “I should read sermons instead of
novels, the Bible instead of fables, the Lives of the Saints instead of
history, and I should be less bored, or no more, than with what I read
now ... at least I should have an object to which I could offer all my
sorrows and make the sacrifice of all my desires.”
But it is utterly futile, babble of children, dreams of white nuns bereft
of all converse with the heart of man. She was the pupil of Voltaire,
the mistress of the Regent, the friend of D’Alembert and Helvétius. To
be the friend of these celebrities and of God also would have been too
much. Therefore she believed in nothing whatever. Faith, she says, is a
devout belief in what one does not understand. We must leave it to those
who have it. I have it not. And what belief could overcome the colossal
wretchedness of having been born? “Everything that exists is wretched, an
angel, an oyster, perhaps even a grain of sand; nothingness, nothingness,
what better can we have to pray for?” She did not originate, but she
would gladly have accepted the bitter definition of life as “a nightmare
between two nothings.”
Thus, you see, she missed, as so many do, the one great privilege of
universal scepticism: universal hope. There are thousands who, like her,
proclaim that they have no belief in anything, yet, like her, appear to
have a most fervent belief in the devil and all his works.
It was natural that one isolated by blindness and unable to get pleasure
from the resources of her own soul should turn to society, should try
to draw life from constant contact with others who had more of it than
she. In none was this restless desire ever more intense than in Madame
du Deffand. She seeks people always, goes among them when she can, uses
every effort to make them come to her. Her chief dread of poverty is that
she may lose the means of attracting company. Even dull company seems to
her more tolerable than her own thoughts. And as I have already pointed
out, when she got among people, they enjoyed and admired her. She was
quick, vivacious, brilliant, gave no sign of being bored, if she was so.
Some of her words even make one suspect that she exaggerated her troubles
and found more in life to please her than she would willingly confess.
Hear what she says of a long projected and finally realized visit. “I
have been here five weeks and I can say, with entire truth, that I have
not been bored one single minute, have not had the smallest mishap or
annoyance.” Surely the most contented of us can seldom say as much.
But the general tone of her social experience is much better manifested
in one long passage, as remarkable for style as for self-revelation. “Men
and women alike seemed to me machines on springs, which went, came,
spoke, laughed, without thinking, without reflecting, without feeling.
Everybody played a part from habit merely. One woman shook with laughter,
another sneered at everything, another gabbled about everything. The
men’s performance was no better. And I myself was swallowed up in the
blackest of black thoughts. I reflected that I had passed my life in
illusions; that I had dug for myself all the pits I had fallen into;
that all my judgments had been false and rash, always too hasty; that I
had never known any one perfectly; that I had never been known by any
one either, and perhaps I did not know myself. One seeks everywhere for
something to lean on. One is charmed with the hope of having found it: it
turns out to be a dream which harsh facts scatter with a rude awakening.”
By this time it must be very clear that the lady’s worst tormentor was
herself. If she could have followed the wholesome advice of her exquisite
friend, Madame de Choiseul, she would have seen life differently. “Eat
little at night, open your windows, drive out often, and look for the
good in things and people.... You will no longer be sad, or bored, or
ill.” It was quite in vain. In such maladies the patient must minister
to himself, and this poor patient not only submitted to the black ennui
of to-day but doubled it, in fact gave it its chief significance, by
dreading the longer, blacker hours of many to-morrows.
So you set her down as a cold, barren, dead old woman, and think you have
heard enough of her. But there is more and of singular interest. She
had noble and beautiful and winning qualities. For one thing, she was
frank, straightforward, and sincere. Indeed, it was the excess of these
fine traits that caused her troubles. She would have no illusion, no
deception, no sham, nothing but the truth. It was the exaggerated fear of
accepting pleasant falsehoods which led her to believe that necessarily
everything pleasant must be a falsehood. But her honesty draws you to
her, even while her misery repels.
Then, curiously enough, though the case is not unprecedented, her very
pessimism and failure to find any good in the world resulted from
an inherent idealism, from too high expectations of men and things.
Her imagination was so keen that it discounted every pleasure before
it came, with resultant disappointment. Her natural instinct was to
trust, often unwisely. Then, when she was deceived, she mistrusted and
suspected—unwisely also. Primarily she was a dreamer, a hoper, as she
herself phrases it in her vivid language, “a listen-if-it rains, a
visionary, who watches the clouds and sees lovely things there that fade
even as one beholds them.” And vast dreams dispelled left a darker and a
sadder emptiness.
So with people. She demanded perfection, and would take nothing less.
Men and women thus tempered go starved and discontented in this far
from perfect world. “I pass in review everybody I know and everybody I
have known; I do not see one of them without a fault, and I find myself
worse than any of them.” But, good heavens, what son or daughter of
Adam can endure such a test as that? Yet some are extreme good company,
nevertheless.
In other words, her bitter judgments were founded on an over-exacting
standard and did not exclude pity or tenderness. Though too impatient to
be of great help to others and too critical to be tolerant towards them,
she was capable of keen and passionate sympathy, and she held kindness to
be a great and most estimable virtue. With the candor which is one of her
chief charms she confesses, “I renew every day the resolution to be kind
and loving myself. How much progress I make I do not know.”
And following this clue, if we probe still deeper, we come across a
curious fact in Madame du Deffand’s temperament, which seems to explain
many things. Under all her misery, all her discontent, all her boredom,
she was aching for love. Perhaps she was incapable of it. Perhaps her
keen vision, and her deep mistrust, and her lofty demands on human
nature made it impossible for her to give or to receive the passionate
affection which might have filled her life. But after careful study it is
impossible to resist the conclusion that she more than most women felt
the deep need of all women, that the right home, and the right husband,
and the right children might have given her the satisfaction she could
not get from books, or thought, or art, or nature.
She herself recognized this, with lucidity as well as pathos. She
repeats often that she loves nothing, less often that some inborn
flaw, some unconquerable twist or imperfection, makes her incapable of
loving anything. But far more often still does she cry out for love
and tenderness. “Friendship is almost a mania with me; I was born for
nothing else.” “I love nothing and that is the true cause of my ennui.”
When she was dying, she saw her secretary, Wiart, who had long served
her, in tears. “You love me, then?” she murmured, and so her last words
expressed at once the doubt and the longing of her life.
Of her earlier attempts to satisfy this natural instinct three, at least,
are well known to us and none was perfectly successful. For years she
lived in the most intimate relations with Hénault, a man of the highest
position and character; but he was not of a nature to feel ardor or
inspire it. Their mutual attitude was one of respectful esteem, largely
tempered with keen-sighted criticism. Again, Madame du Deffand took into
her protection a young orphan relative, Mademoiselle de L’Espinasse,
hoping to find a comfort for her age. But the older lady was exacting,
the younger restless, and they quarreled and parted by the fault of
both—or of neither. Finally, there was Madame de Choiseul, with whom
it was not easy to quarrel. Madame du Deffand adored her, called her
“grandmamma,” though she was many years the younger, declared over and
over again that her love was all she wanted, all her hope and comfort in
life. Yet in one of her moments of desperate petulance she could write
of even Madame de Choiseul: “She shows a good deal of friendship; and
as she has none for me and I have none for her, it is perfectly natural
that we should exchange the tenderest expressions in the world.” Truly, a
strange, subtle, and difficult temper, and one ill-fitted to separate the
evil from the good in the tangled yarn of human life.
Then, after all these attempts at love and failures, came a most singular
adventure. Madame du Deffand, at seventy, fell in love with a man of
fifty. This world-worn, life-wearied, pale, frail, dusty heart was
suddenly set beating by another as cold, as disillusioned, if not as
bored as hers, that of Horace Walpole, a bachelor, a dilettante, and an
Englishman. And this old woman’s love was no mere fancy, no indifferent
whim, lightly caught and blown off like a feather. It was a real,
intense, absorbing, overwhelming passion, like that of a girl of twenty
or a woman of forty. “Everybody loves after his own manner; I have only
one way of loving, infinitely, or not at all.” “The thought of you enters
into everything I think and everything I do.” This is the tone, not for
an hour, or a day, but over and over and over, for eleven years. Let us
note some of the special phases of such an unusual experience.
To begin with, how about Walpole himself? He was not infatuated. He never
could have been, and certainly not at fifty, for an aged Frenchwoman.
He kept a cool head and saw with perfect clearness the foibles of
his ardent correspondent. At the same time, his bearing in a rather
difficult situation is on the whole loyal and manly. He defended his
aged friend against criticism and mockery and it is from him that we get
the finest appreciation of her good qualities, her noble sincerity, her
unconquerable vivacity, her social charm.
But if he sees her as we see her, assuredly she does not see him as we
see him, or never, never admits that she does. Without accepting all of
Macaulay’s severe judgment, it is difficult to place Walpole on a very
heroic plane. He was kindly, he was gentle, he was generous where it
cost him little, he was mildly loyal to his friends. But he was vain,
superficial, snobbish while pretending to democracy, incapable of great
devotion and of self-forgetfulness. The Walpole that Madame du Deffand
loved was, however, far different from this. He had the virtues of French
and English combined and the vices of no race. As an author, he is in the
same class with Voltaire, his letters are like Voltaire’s for style, and
far above for matter. “For style they have had no model and cannot be
imitated. They are the sublime of abundance and of naturalness.” If you
know Walpole, what do you think of that? And his character is as sublime
as his letters. He is perhaps a little godlike for perfect friendship,
or is she wrong about this? But in the early stages of her passion she
proclaims the lover’s idea from which she never swerves. “If others saw
as clearly as I do, you would be placed first, not only in England, but
in the universe; this is not flattery; wit, talent, and the perfection of
kindness have never been united as they are in you.” What a marvellous
light is thrown on the woman’s character, as we have studied it, by such
a sentence as that!
So she plays, in letter after letter, on the whole compass of the
tenderest, most self-abandoning affection. With him in London and herself
in Paris, and several days of delaying post between them, she writes
incessantly, begging for good news, bad news, any news. His plans,
she must know every detail of his plans, what he does, where he goes,
whom he sees. His health. Let but the gout touch him and she is in
misery. She showers remedies, like a quack doctor, or an aged nurse. Her
distress is everywhere made plain to us by the vivid touches of her quick
imagination. “I am like a child hanging out of a window by a cord and
every instant on the brink of falling.”
The best remedy for the anxiety of absence would certainly be presence
and she seems to live only in the passionate hope of those rare and
hurried visits which brought her beloved to her. Yet even so, she is
most characteristically afraid that when he does come he will be bored.
He shall see only whom he wishes when he wishes, provided he gives long
hours to seeing her. He comes, she is in Paradise, sits talking with him
till two in the morning, and he gets a long letter from her before he
rises the next day.
Then he is gone again and she is in pain again. The memory of past
pleasure only makes the pang of separation keener. She is old, old,
hardly a particle of life left in her, and she cannot hope to live to see
him ever any more.
A passion like this, full as it is of tragedy and pathos, will at times
tempt sarcasm. The sincerity and fine intelligence of Madame du Deffand
make it impossible for a sympathetic reader even to smile at her. But
Walpole was by nature abnormally sensitive to ridicule, as he himself
confesses. To be praised as if he were a god and loved as if he were
an opera tenor by an old lady of seventy, whom he knew to be living in
closest intimacy with the most critical and mocking wits of the world,
placed a man of his temper in an exceedingly difficult position. Beware
of romance, he cautioned mildly. But she laughed at him. Romance! at her
age! She had never been romantic, had all her life stripped the veil
of sentimental illusion from the cold bones of reality. Romance! Her
feelings were nothing but common, daylight friendship. In which she was
quite wrong, for nothing about her was or could be common or of every day.
So felt Walpole. And he still shuddered at the thought of the vast guffaw
of future generations. Destroy my letters, he insisted, and do, do
moderate the tone of yours. And he cautioned, and he lectured, as a tutor
might lecture a moonstruck girl.
She did not like it, she resented it. The notes she writes so thickly are
of painful interest in their sore, hurt, pleading, protesting energy. “If
I were as unreasonable as you, you would never hear another word from me.
The letter I have just received is so offensive, so extravagant, that I
should throw it in the fire unanswered.” “Should throw,” you notice, not
“have thrown.” “It is impossible to judge more falsely than you judge
me.... You see yourself in everything I say about others and think I am
finding fault with you, when I find fault with any one.” “God is not more
incomprehensible than you; but if he is not more just, it is hardly worth
while believing in him.”
Yet she kissed the hand that chastened her, she turned like a child to
its tutor, for advice and comfort, with blind trust, blind confidence,
blind hope. He is a true physician for the soul, she says, and one who
needs no physician for his own. She only wishes that he might have had
control of her from childhood. How different she would have been! “You
would have formed my taste, my judgment, my discernment, you would have
taught me to know the world, to mistrust it, to despise it, to enjoy it;
you would not have bridled my imagination, or blighted my passions, or
chilled my soul; but you would have been like a skilful dancing-master,
who keeps the natural poise of health and vigor and adds to it finished
grace.”
So she loved for eleven years and died with this final illusion like the
cross in her hands and the sacred wafer at her lips. You think she was
pitiably infatuated. Perhaps she was. But it was an infatuation that not
only furnished the clue to her whole life, but in a manner sanctified it.
It is a curious thing that the two greatest women letter writers of
France, perhaps of the world, Madame de Sévigné and Madame du Deffand,
should each have built the main fabric of their correspondence on an
exaggerated, not to say abnormal, affection. It is far more curious
that this affection should be with Madame de Sévigné the one flaw in a
singularly well-balanced character and with Madame du Deffand the most
marked symptom of health in a character otherwise erratic, distorted, and
unsound.
VIII
MADAME DE CHOISEUL
CHRONOLOGY
Louise Honorine Crozat du Châtel.
Born 1734.
Married Duc de Choiseul 1750.
Choiseul’s ministry 1758-1770.
Husband died 1785.
Died December 3, 1801.
[Illustration: _Madame de Choiseul_]
VIII
MADAME DE CHOISEUL
A portrait of Madame de Choiseul seems the natural complement to the
portrait of Madame du Deffand. The two were intimate friends, in spite
of a considerable difference in age; their lives were intertwined in
the closest fashion. At the same time, they present a marked contrast
in temperament, character, and habits of thought. Madame du Deffand’s
estimate of her younger friend, whom she playfully called “grandmamma,”
will serve well to set the note for a portrayal of the latter: “If there
is a perfect being in the world, ’tis she. She has mastered all her
passions. No one is at once so sensitive and so completely mistress of
herself. Everything is genuine in her, nothing artificial, yet everything
is under control.”
Elsewhere Madame du Deffand points out that if Madame de Choiseul was
perfect, she had everything to make her so, family, fortune, friends,
and social position. “I know no one who has been so continuously and
so completely fortunate as you.” In a sense this was exact. Madame de
Choiseul from birth filled a high position in the social life of the
French mid-eighteenth century. She married early a man of the greatest
distinction and charm, who came to occupy the most important political
offices, and for a time she was perhaps the leading lady of France, next
the queen—and the king’s mistress. But her life was not all roses, by
any means. Her husband was charming to others as well as to her. She had
no children. Politics brought her misery as well as fortune, since the
duke lost his office and was sent in disgrace and banishment from court.
Later he died and she was left alone to face the Revolution, which she
did with the splendid patience and courage shown by so many women of her
class. But this was long after Madame du Deffand had exchanged the ennui
of earth for the felicity of heaven.
During the time she held a leading social position, Madame de Choiseul
proved to be in every way fitted for it. She herself declares she has
no preference for such a life, complains that her hours are filled not
occupied, longs for solitude and quiet, and when they come, as a result
of political failure, accepts them with a sigh of genuine relief.
But all agree that for the manifold uses of society she had a singular
aptness and charm. She was married when she was fifteen, and at eighteen
went as ambassadress to Rome, where she made herself beloved by every
one. She was not perhaps regularly beautiful, but her little figure had a
fairylike grace and lightness, and her simple, dainty speech and manners
doubled the attraction of her figure. “A Venus in little,” _Vénus en
abrégé_, Voltaire calls her. Horace Walpole, who to be sure loved all
the friends of Madame du Deffand, says of the duchess: “Oh, it is the
gentlest, amiable, civil, little creature that ever came out of a fairy
egg! So just in its phrases and thoughts, so attentive and good-natured!”
Elsewhere he is even more enthusiastic: “She has more sense and more
virtues than almost any human being,” and another brief touch gives a
climax quite unusual with the cynic of Strawberry Hill: “The most perfect
being I know of either sex.”
Nor was this grace and perfection of the tame order which effaces
itself and merely warms others till they sparkle and flame. The lady
had a fairy’s vivacity as well as a fairy’s daintiness. It is true,
social embarrassment sometimes overcame her—most winningly. She had,
says Walpole further, “a hesitation and modesty, the latter of which
the court has not cured, and the former of which is atoned for by the
most interesting sound of voice, and forgotten in the most elegant turn
and propriety of expression.” She herself gives a charming account of a
social crisis in which she was utterly at a loss what to do or say and
could only stammeringly repeat the words of others, “Yes, Madam, no,
Madam,—I think, that is, I believe—oh, yes, I am sure I agree with you
entirely.”
But she had wit of her own, spirit of her own, courage of her own, and
could find words in plenty when occasion really called for them. Madame
du Deffand has preserved many of her clever sayings, as the comment on
two gentlemen equally amiable, but different. “One is charming for the
manner that he has and the other for the manner that he has not.”
The lasting evidence for us, however, of Madame de Choiseul’s vivacity
is her letters. They exist in no such number as Madame du Deffand’s or
Madame de Sévigné’s, but they yield to neither in ease, in variety,
in grace and swiftness of expression. These qualities are equally
manifest in her long description of the busy day of a prime minister’s
wife,—the scores of petitioners, the hurry from one function to another,
the tedious necessity of being something to everybody while nobody is
anything to you,—and in little touches of the most pregnant and delicate
simplicity. “What is there to say in the country when you are alone
and it rains? We were alone and it was raining. This suggested talk of
ourselves and, after all, what is there that we know so much about?” or
again, “To love and to please is to be always young.” She could and did
write French as perfect as Voltaire’s. But she did not hesitate a moment
to twist grammar or syntax, when some unusual turn of thought required
it. “I propose to speak my own tongue before that of my nation,” she
says, “and it is often the irregularity of our thought that causes the
irregularity of our expressions.”
But it was neither her beauty nor her wit that made the duchess so much
admired and beloved. It was her sympathy and tenderness, her faculty of
entering into the joys and sorrows of others and her pleasure in doing
so, that drew all hearts to her. “She had the art of listening and of
making others shine,” says a memoir writer of her own day. This is a
social quality by no means contemptible. But the quality of sympathetic
comprehension served for much more than social purposes. “I cannot
bear the idea of suffering, even for persons indifferent to me,” she
writes. This did not mean, however, that she fled suffering, but that
she endeavored to alleviate it, by every means in her power. Where the
suffering was mental or imaginary, she soothed and diverted it by sound
counsel and gentle rallying, if necessary. Where it was physical, she
gave her time and thought and strength to substantial relief.
Her dependents, her servants, the poor in all the region round, adored
her. She gave them money, she gave them food, she gave them the sunshine
of her presence and her cheerfulness. A servant whose work had been
about the house was offered a better position outside. He refused it.
“But why,” urged the duchess, “why? Your pay will be better, your hours
shorter, your work lighter.” “Yes, madam, but I shall not be near you.”
After the Revolution, when she had lost everything and was living in a
garret, there came one day a knock at the door. She opened it to a rather
prosperous-looking mechanic, and inquired what he wanted. “Madam, when
I was a poor peasant, working on the roads, you asked me what I desired
most in the world. I said, a cart and an ass to draw it. You gave them to
me and I have made a comfortable fortune. Now it is all yours.”
If she was thus kind to those who were nothing to her personally, it may
well be supposed that she was devoted to her friends. She had many of
them and never felt that she had enough. Like all persons of such ample
affection, she had her disappointments, with resulting cynicism, and once
wrote: “It is well to love even a dog when you have the opportunity,
for fear you should find nothing else worth loving.” But in general,
though she was far from indiscriminate in her choice, she loved widely,
and she repeats again and again that love is the only thing that makes
life worth living, that love is life. When the bitter saying of Madame
de Staël is reported to her, that she was always glad to make new
acquaintances because she felt sure they could not be worse than those
she had already, Madame de Choiseul rebels with the utmost indignation,
declaring that she is not dissatisfied with any of her acquaintance
and that she is enchanted with her friends. It seems, also, that her
friendship was to a singular degree sympathetic and self-forgetful. So
many of us see our friends’ lives from the point of view of our own and
enter into their interests chiefly so far as they are identical with
ours. But this lady has one beautiful and perfect word on the subject: “I
have always had the vanity of those I love, that is my fashion of loving.”
One of her friendships we can study in minute detail and we find it to be
without fault or flaw, that for Madame du Deffand. One friend was young,
rich, beautiful, popular, driven in the rush and hurry of the great
world. The other was old, feeble, blind, forlorn. Yet the friendship was
as genuine and heartfelt on one side as on the other. Madame de Choiseul
had the discernment to see Madame du Deffand’s fine qualities, her clear
head, her tender heart, her magnificent sincerity; but she cherished
her, as love does cherish, not from a mathematical calculation of fine
qualities, but simply because it does and must. I love you, she repeats,
I love you. I think of you daily, hourly. Tell me everything, as I tell
you everything. Let there be no secrets and no shadows between us.
Nor was it by any means an untested friendship. Madame du Deffand had
nothing to do but think of trouble, she was critically sensitive, knew
her own weaknesses, and could not believe that anybody loved her.
Often she intimates her complaints, her dissatisfaction, her jealousy.
Madame de Choiseul is sometimes forced to treat her like the child she
calls her. There are moments when a frank, outspoken word is necessary.
But it is spoken with careful tenderness. “You think I love you from
complaisance and ask you to visit me from politeness. I don’t. I love
you because I love you. I will not say because you are lovable; for
your fears, your doubts, your absurd hesitations annoy me too much
for compliments. I don’t care about doing you justice. I want to do
justice to myself. I love you because you love me, because I have my
own interests at heart, and because I am absolutely sure of you.... I
want to see you, because I love you, right or wrong.” And she did love
her, in spite of all criticism and difficulty, with patient tenderness,
thoughtful devotion, and infinite solicitude, till the very end.
Another friendship, of a somewhat different character, but of almost
equal interest, is that for the Abbé Barthélemy, the clever, brilliant,
sensitive scholar who was dependent upon the duchess’s bounty during
a great part of his life. Here again, in the Abbé’s enthusiastic
descriptions and comments, we see the thoughtful kindness, the unselfish
devotion, the unobtrusive sympathy, which Madame de Choiseul lavished on
those whom she had taken into her heart.
Sometimes this tenderness got her into difficulties. She added a child,
apt and skilled in music, to her household, and made a pet of him. As
he grew older, the boy fell in love with her, and she did not know what
to do about it. Her pathetic account of her attempts to reason with
him should be read in the original to be appreciated: “He could eat
nothing, he could attend to nothing, and one day I found him seated at
the clavichord, his heart overflowing in pitiful sighs. I called him, ‘my
sweet child,’ to pet him and comfort him a little. Then his heart failed
him and his tears flowed abundantly. Through a thousand sobs I could
make out that he reproached me for calling him ‘my sweet child,’ when I
didn’t love him and wouldn’t let him love me.... My courage broke too, I
cried as much as he did, and to hide my tears I ran to find Monsieur de
Choiseul and told him the whole story.”
Some gossips attempted to see in this pretty incident a suggestion,
or at any rate a parallel, to the adventures of the page, Cherubino,
in Beaumarchais’s “Marriage of Figaro,” written at a later date.
Such slander was utterly unfounded. It is not the least of Madame de
Choiseul’s charms that in an age when to have only one lover at a time
was virtue and to have many was hardly vice, she is absolutely above the
suspicion of having had any lovers at all. No doubt she knew that she
was charming and liked to be admired. Madame du Deffand was perfectly
right in reproaching Walpole for the singular lack of tact implied in
his compliment to the duchess’s virtue. “Why did you tell her that a man
would never think of falling in love with her? No woman under forty
likes to be praised in that fashion.” But she herself declares that she
was something of a prude and the testimony of many besides Walpole proves
conclusively that she was not the opposite.
Moreover, she had the best of guarantees against waywardness of the
affections, a profound, enduring, and self-forgetful love for her
husband. Walpole cynically suggests that this love was too obtrusive
to be sincere. In Walpole’s world such obtrusiveness may not have been
fashionable. “My grandmamma has the ridiculous foible of being in love,”
says Madame du Deffand. Some may not find it so ridiculous. At any rate,
to the duchess her husband was the most important figure in the world and
the obvious delight with which she welcomes political banishment because
it means solitude and seclusion with him is as charming as it is pathetic.
Pathetic, because she did not get the same devotion in return. The duke
loved her, respected her, admired her. His serious words about her are
worthy of him and her both: “Her virtues, her attractions, her love for
me and mine for her, have brought to our union a happiness far beyond
the gifts of fortune.” But, though a prime minister, the duke was not
always serious, in fact too seldom. He was a brilliant, versatile, gay,
and amorous Frenchman, and while he loved his wife, which was a merit,
he loved many other ladies, which was less so. “He does not mean to go
without anything,” writes the duchess to Madame du Deffand, in a moment
of unusual frankness. “He lets no pleasure escape him. He is right
in thinking that pleasure is a legitimate end, but not every one is
satisfied with pleasures that come as easily as his. Some of us cannot
get them for merely stooping to pick them up.”
Yet, with all his weaknesses, it cannot be said that the passionate
lover had chosen a wholly unworthy object, and even if she had, the
breadth, the intensity, the nobility of her passion would have gone far
to justify it. How tactful she is, with all her longing for affection!
She does not intrude her feelings at the wrong place or time. She thinks
more of giving than of getting. How exquisitely tender are the gleams
we see, often through others, of the devotion which showed itself in a
hundred little forms of the desire to please. “Your grandmamma is at the
clavichord,” writes Barthélemy, with playful exaggeration, “and will
remain there till dinner time. She will go at it again at seven and
play till eleven. She has been doing this for two months, with infinite
pleasure. Her sole object is to get so she can play to the duke without
nervousness. To accomplish that result will take her about fourteen years
longer, and she will be perfectly satisfied if at fifty she can play two
or three pieces without a slip.”
Her own words are even more significant. “I want to grow young again, and
pretty, if I could. At any rate, I should like to make your grandpapa
think I am both one and the other, and as he has little here to compare
me with, I may be able to deceive him.” Again, in as charming a bit of
self-revelation as it would be easy to find, she writes to Madame du
Deffand, with a lover’s passionate urgency: “Tell me, dear grandchild,
did your grandpapa come back again Wednesday, after he had put me into
the carriage? Did he speak of me? What did he say and how did he say it?
I can’t help thinking that he grows a little less ashamed of me, and it
is a great point gained when we no longer mortify those whom we would
have love us.—You must admit that your grandpapa is the best of men;
but that is not all, I assure you he is the greatest man the age has
produced.”
If he was not, at least she did her best to make him so. While he was
minister, she pulled every wire a loving woman can pull honestly, even
stooping to court and caress Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of the
king. When he was disgraced, she cherished his friends and fought his
enemies, minimized his faults and blazoned his virtues, believed in him
so intensely that she made others believe who were much more ready to
doubt. After his death, she sold her possessions and lived in poverty to
pay his debts and clear his memory. When she was urged to flee during the
Revolution, she said she could not, or those debts would never be paid,
and when she was imprisoned and in danger of the guillotine, her plea for
release was still that she had a task to do on earth that was not done.
She was set free and continued her efforts till her death.
It will be asked if this charming personage had no faults. Of course she
had. She realized them herself, and so did others. It was even maintained
that her very faultlessness was an imperfection and that she overcame
nature so completely as to be not quite human enough. The Abbé Barthélemy
himself, loyal and devoted as he was, and protesting that he is a monster
of ingratitude, whispers gently to Madame du Deffand that his patroness
had serious defects, to be sure chiefly injurious to herself, which
resulted from her very excess of virtue, sympathy, and self-control.
Elsewhere he murmurs that she is so busy with everybody it is sometimes
hard to realize that she cares for anybody, and again that she thinks so
much of friends who are absent that those who are present get very little
attention.
Madame du Deffand, who was lonely, sensitive, and jealous, is much
more free in her criticism. Persons overflowing with sympathy and
kindness, like Madame de Choiseul, are always exposed to the charge of
insincerity and the older friend expresses this, in the early days of
their acquaintance, with the utmost bitterness. “She makes a great show
of friendship. And as she has none for me and I have none for her, it is
perfectly natural that we should say the tenderest things possible to one
another.”
The passage of years wholly corrected this misapprehension. The blind,
forlorn, love-thirsty dreamer came to know that there was no love in the
world more loyal, more tender, more self-forgetful than that of this
wonderful lady who might have had princes at her feet. Yet the solitary
heart is not contented, can never be contented. Soothing, petting,
rallying may calm it for the moment. It will never be still. “You cannot
let go in your letters. You always say just what you want to say.” She
writes grumblingly to Walpole of the duchess: “She wants to be perfect.
That is her defect.” And again, “It is vexatious that she is an angel. I
had rather she were a woman.” The sum total of the complaint recurs again
and again in a phrase which Madame de Choiseul had most unfortunately
invented herself. “You know you love me, but you do not feel it.”
Yet, after all, the lady was not so fatally angelic as to lose every
appeal to frail humanity. It stung her to be dependent. It stung her to
ask a favor of an enemy. It stung her to have any one ask a favor for
her. With what wholesome vigor does she lash Madame du Deffand, who had
innocently spoken a kind word for her friend to the wife of her friend’s
chief political antagonist. “This is something I will not allow. This
is something you absolutely must make right, and in the presence of the
very persons who were witnesses to a piece of cajolery so unfitting under
existing circumstances and so utterly foreign to my character.” And she
adds, “the Abbé, who is all for gentle methods, will try to smooth this
over. But, for my part, though I am sorry to hurt you, I don’t retract a
word, because I have said what I feel.”
Also, she was capable of good honest hatred, when she thought there was
occasion for it, and right in the family too. Her husband had a sister,
Madame de Grammont, a big haughty Juno, if the duchess was a little
Venus, and between the two there was no friendship. The duke hearkened
to the sister much more than the wife liked. In short, they were jealous
of each other and though they finally patched up an armed truce which
age developed into a reconciliation, they never regarded each other with
much cordiality. How vividly human is Madame de Choiseul’s account of her
conduct when the duke had an attack of illness. “Though I hate Madame de
Grammont, I sent her word, because I should wish her to do the same to
me. What happened? She never thanked me, she never even answered me, but
wrote to the duke to complain that he had not written and thus got me
into trouble.”
So, you see, she knew the bitter emotions of life as well as the sweet,
and was by no means exempt from any aspect of human frailty. Yet,
although her soul was wide-open to emotions of all sorts, and though
she herself passionately repeated that feeling was the only good of
existence, was the whole of existence, she had, beside her emotions,
an intellectual life singularly subtle, plastic, and varied, and full
of interest to the curious student. She was apt to condemn reason as
misleading, deceptive, and of little worth, but in demonstrating the
point she indulged herself in reasoning of a highly elaborate and
ingenious order. In fact, she was a child of the eighteenth century, and
could not wholly escape its abstract tendencies. Speaking of her own
letters, when a friend wanted to collect them for publication, she said,
“to me they seem to be the writing of a _raisonneuse_.”
She came naturally by this argumentative tendency, for it was said of
her father that he was too inclined to dissect his ideas and had a
leaning toward metaphysics which he communicated to his wife, so that
the daughter’s cradle may have been rocked by tempests of theoretical
discussion. She herself declares that she was not educated at all and
thanks heaven for it. For, she says, at least she was not taught the
errors of others. “If I have learned anything, I owe it neither to
precepts nor to books, but to a few opportune misfortunes. Perhaps the
school of misfortunes is the very best.” She had, however, picked up
a rather broad learning through keen attention and a love of books.
She speaks of Pliny, Horace, Cicero, and other Latin authors, as if
she knew them by heart. She reads the Memoirs of Sully with delight,
though chiefly why? Because Sully’s situation reminds her of Monsieur de
Choiseul’s. She deplores Madame du Deffand’s indifference to reading:
“Books help us to endure ignorance and life itself: Life, because the
knowledge of past wretchedness helps us to endure the present; ignorance,
because history tells us nothing but what we already know.” Here you
see the touch of the _raisonneuse_, to use her own phrase, the curious
analyst, the minute dissector of her own motives and those of others.
Madame du Deffand quotes a German admirer as saying of the duchess: “She
is reason masquerading as an angel and having the power to persuade with
charm.”
It is most fruitful to follow the gleaming thread of Madame de Choiseul’s
analysis through the different concerns and aspects of human life.
Of art she apparently knew nothing whatever. Though herself a figure just
stepped out of a canvas of Watteau, she never mentions him, nor any other
artist, greater or lesser. We do not see that plastic beauty existed for
her at all. Of her music we know only that she practised day and night to
please her husband. Nature she never mentions in any aspect. All that she
has to say of her long years in the country is that solitude is restful.
On the other hand, she shows much of herself and of her own mind in what
she says of literature. As we have seen, she was a good deal of a reader,
would have read much more, or fancied she would, if she had not had a
thousand other things to do. And her judgment of books and authors is as
keen and penetrating as it is independent. It shows further the strong,
sound, moral bent of her disposition. She pierces Rousseau’s extravagant
theorizing about nature with swift thrusts of practical sense, summing
up her verdict in a touch of common truth expressed inimitably: “Let us
beware of metaphysics applied to simple things.” And Rousseau himself
she defined with bitter accuracy: “He has always seemed to me to be a
charlatan of virtue.” Voltaire she judged with a singular breadth and
justice of perception, appreciating to the full his greatness and his
pettiness. “He tells us he is faithful to his enthusiasms; he should
have said, to his weaknesses. He has always been cowardly where there
was no danger, insolent where there was no motive, and mean where there
was no object in being so. All which does not prevent his being the most
brilliant mind of the century. We should admire his talent, study his
works, profit by his philosophy, and be broadened by his teaching. We
should adore him and despise him, as is indeed the case with a good many
objects of worship.”
This passage alone would show that we are dealing with a vigorous and
independent mind. The impression is by no means diminished when we
read the duchess’s other outpourings on abstract subjects. Some indeed
think that she overdoes the matter, that she has caught the pernicious
eighteenth-century habit of moral declamation, in short, that she
violated her own excellent precept about applying metaphysics to simple
things. But her sight was so clear, her sympathy so tender, and her heart
so sound that I do not think any one can seriously accuse her of being a
rhetorician.
It is, however, very curious to compare her in this respect with Madame
du Deffand, who takes no interest whatever in general questions, and
is disposed to leave politics to princes, religion to priests, and the
progress of mankind to those who can still believe in it. Not so Madame
de Choiseul. She thinks passionately on the great problems of life and
history and follows with keen interest the thinking of others. When
Voltaire sets himself up as the apologist of Catherine II of Russia, the
duchess’s sense of right is outraged and in a strange long letter to
Madame du Deffand she analyzes Catherine’s career and with it the whole
theory of political and social morals. When Rousseau is under discussion,
she analyzes carefully the tissue and fabric of organized community
life. When forms of government attract her pen, she analyzes monarchy
and democracy and expresses a sympathy with the latter surprisingly
significant for her age and class. When her analyzing appetite can find
no other bone to gnaw on, she analyzes her own happiness, with the
subtlety of La Bruyère. Perhaps the following is a little too much an
application of metaphysics to simple things: “Gayety, even when it is
habitual, seems to me only an accident. Happiness is the fruit of reason,
a tranquil condition, and an enduring one, which knows neither transport
nor ecstasy. Perhaps it is a slumber of the soul, death, nothingness.
As to that I cannot say, but by these words I mean nothing sad, though
people commonly think of them as lugubrious.”
In all these elaborate analyses it is noticeable that there is no trace
whatsoever of religion. Madame de Choiseul was as completely sceptical
as Madame du Deffand. In all their correspondence God is hardly
mentioned, even in the light, intimate way so common with the French.
Madame de Choiseul declares her uncertainty with perfect frankness.
“My scepticism has grown so great that it falls over backward and from
doubting everything I have become ready to believe everything. For
instance, I believe just as much in Blue Beard, the Thousand and One
Nights, genii, fairies, sorcerers, and will-o’-the-wisps, as in—what
shall I say?—anything you please.” Nor is her faith in human nature in
the abstract any more stable, as soon as she subjects it to the cold ray
of her analyzing intellect. “Let us say once for all that there are few
people whom one can count on, a melancholy truth that chills the heart
and withers the confidence of youth. We grow old as soon as we cease to
love and trust.” While her summing up of the acme of possible good wishes
is, to say the least, not of a very spiritual tenor. “Good-by, dear
child, I wish you good sleep and a good digestion. I don’t know anything
better to desire for those I love.”
What is deeply important and significant for the study of Madame de
Choiseul in this lack of positive belief is that on a substructure
apparently so frail there could be built up a character so rounded, so
pure, so delicate, so eminently self-forgetful and devoted. And it is
to be observed that her perfection was not all the result of a happy,
contented, optimistic temperament. She was not born entirely a saint, nor
quite ignorant of the perversities of frail humanity. She herself says:
“With a warm heart which longed for affection and a quick imagination
which must be ever at work, I was more disposed to unhappiness and ennui
than people usually are. Yet I am happy and ennui gets no hold on me.”
In many other passages she makes it evident that she had her troubles,
many of them. Physically, she was delicate and sensitive, always ailing,
and it is a charming bit of human nature that with all her splendid
self-control she could not refrain from eating things that disagreed with
her, so that Barthélemy complains that she had the courage of a lion in
great matters and was a coward in little. Also, the seeds of spiritual
complaints were manifestly latent in her and she had her dark hours when
sadness and anxiety and regret threatened to assert themselves with
irresistible vigor. She speaks somewhere, as the years roll on, of “the
terror which seizes me and the disgust which overpowers me when I see the
work of destruction advancing and that resistance is no longer equal to
attack.”
But to all these subtle dangers she opposed a superb strength of will,
a splendid courage, and above all the instinctive, unconquerable,
eternal energy of love. While she was doing something for others she
was happy and for others there was always something to be done. It is
a most satisfying and tranquilizing thing to see a creature so dainty,
so exquisite, so finely tempered with all the delicate responsiveness
we nowadays call nerves, at the same time steeled and toughened by
that substantial necessity, common sense. She knew all the good of
life and all the evil. Beauty, rank, wealth, love, honor, exile, ruin,
and disaster were all hers. And through them all she remained the same
simple, gentle, loyal, heroic figure, admirable if a woman ever was, and
memorable if the highest charm backed by the strongest character are
indeed worth remembering.
IX
EUGÉNIE DE GUÉRIN
CHRONOLOGY
Eugénie de Guérin.
Born in Languedoc, 1805.
Visited Paris 1838.
Brother died 1839.
Visited Paris 1841.
Died May, 1848.
IX
EUGÉNIE DE GUÉRIN
She lived a solitary, an almost eremitical life, utterly secluded from
the contact, and almost from the knowledge, of the great world. No
isolation in America to-day could be quite so complete as that of a lady
in a French provincial town a hundred years ago: the same quiet waysides,
the same faces at the same corners the same seasons in their eternal
change, the bell of centuries tolling a monotonous succession of births,
marriages, and deaths. All the varied doings of mankind in hasty cities,
kings crowned and uncrowned, new thoughts, new fashions, new vices, new
beauty, echoed in that tranquil dwelling like the far passage of some
martial pageant stirring a dream. “Two visits, two letters written, one
received, fill a day,” she says; “fill a day full for us.”
She did not complain of the solitude, she loved it. She was born in it,
grew up in it, and wished to die in it. Every tree, every flower was a
friend to her. Old sunlit walls caressed her with a touch like love’s. “I
could take a vow to remain here forever,” she says. “No place could be
to me so much my home.” The habit of loneliness grows on her, as all our
habits do, until one day, returning to a house quite empty, she exclaims,
“You cannot think how gaily I took possession of this abandoned dwelling.
Here I am alone, absolutely alone, in a place which of itself breeds
calm reflection. I hear the passers pass, and do not even turn my head.”
In a life so unbroken little movements made a great stir. Twice she
sojourned for a few weeks in Paris and she made a brief visit to a
watering place in the Pyrenees. On all these occasions she was quick and
wide-eyed to catch what went on about her. She responded to great scenes
and notable monuments and was not incurious as to the ways of men and
women. But she felt no eagerness to change her own habits and returned
with undisturbed delight to the places she had always loved. “Repose is
what delights me; not inaction, but the poised quiet of a heart that is
content.”
Do not imagine that her solitude meant always quiet, however. Such
outward peace perhaps fosters inward turbulence, at any rate leaves
room for it. Hearts unvexed by the world’s rash hurry have tempests and
revolutions and tumults all their own. How many strange soul-combats go
on in quiet tenements! How many fierce struggles pass unperceived and
unrecorded, perhaps not worth recording, yet of immense significance to
those who conquer or succumb! “All my days are alike, so far as the outer
world goes,” writes Mademoiselle de Guérin; “but with the soul’s life it
is different, nothing could be more varied, more flexible, more subject
to perpetual change.”
Two main, essential objects of all her inner life and thought kept her in
this unceasing agitation. One was her brother Maurice. She had another
brother and a sister whom she loved and cherished. To her father she
was a sympathetic companion and a faithful attendant. But Maurice was
confessedly more to her than any one else. He was younger than she. She
had supplied for him the place of the mother who died early. She tended
him, watched over him, guided him, and when he went out into the great
world thought of him and prayed for him perpetually.
He was one who well deserved such affection. Sensitive, delicate in
health and in feeling, imaginative, finely touched to all the fine issues
of genius, his brief life was torn and tortured by alternate aspiration
and doubt, by vast dreams of what he might achieve and miserable distrust
of his ability to achieve anything. He died young and left behind him a
journal recording these struggles with pathetic fidelity and one short
prose poem, which has wide harmonies of classic dignity and echoing
grandeur not surpassed by the “Hyperion” of Keats. Who that knows that
music can ever forget it? “_O Mélampe! les dieux errants ont posé leur
lyres sur les pierres; mais aucun—aucun ne l’y a oubliée._”
The sister also kept a journal. But while Maurice’s was addressed to
himself or to curious posterity, hers was addressed only to him; even
after death had snatched him from her, only to him. All her inmost
thoughts go there, all her hopes, all her sorrows, and to pour them out
to him is the great preoccupation of her life. She can say to him things
she cannot say to others. He will understand. He has always understood.
With great and with little events it is the same. A sunset walk in the
fields and the death of a dear friend—each alike must be discussed with
Maurice. All the emotion each brings with it must be confided to him.
Anxiety for his health, for his future, for his happiness, is constantly
blended with her own daily doings, the whole making a curious tissue of
love, as fine and delicate as it is tender and true.
To turn to the brother’s journal from the sister’s is a fruitful lesson
in human nature. In her life everything is related to him. In his she
is an element, an episode, beloved, delightful, nothing more. Her name
hardly occurs in his Journal, even casually. The letters he writes to her
are affectionate, and appeal for comfort when he needs it. He was the sun
of her life. In his, even before his marriage, she was only a tranquil
star, shining quietly, treasured, but not always remembered. She knew
this. Love always knows. Looking back, after he was gone, she wonders
if she did not sometimes bore him. While she had him with her, the
longed-for letters used to come, not always bringing what she demanded of
them. “How my fingers burned to open that letter in which at last I was
to see you. I have seen you, but I do not know you. You open only your
head to me. It was your heart, your soul, the very inmost of your being,
what makes your life, that I hoped to see.”
No lack of response made any difference in the sister’s ardent affection,
however, unless perhaps to increase the ardor, as sometimes happens
in this inconsequent world. Eugénie’s thought was ever on the beloved
object, on his reading, on his thinking, on his material condition, on
his varied failure and success in his efforts to overcome the maddening
poverty which hampered his progress. Yet how strange are the vagaries
of the human heart. With all her passionate thought and affection, I do
not find that she gave much heed to the one interest which was positive
in Maurice’s life, his desire to achieve enduring beauty for the delight
of men. When a life is devoured by this longing, it measures all things
and all people by their sympathy with it and contribution to it. It is
perhaps just here that Eugénie failed to evoke the entire response she
looked for from her brother’s heart. To be sure, when his writings were
gathered together after his death, she expressed great interest and some
enthusiasm. Yet even then her chief anxiety was that he should not be
misrepresented, misunderstood, mispraised as pagan rather than Christian,
and she did not hesitate to assert that he had no thought of fame and did
not desire it.
How even our most unselfish love is absorbed in its own point of view!
How hard it is to love others as they would be loved, not as we would be
loved. Eugénie worried perpetually about Maurice’s soul, but very little
about his reputation. She had not learned the profound truth and beauty
of Madame de Choiseul’s remark: “I have always had the vanity of those I
love: that is my fashion of loving.”
I wonder whether the young wife from the far Indies, whom Maurice married
when death was already beginning to lay its hand on him, had any more
sympathy with his aspirations for this world. There is no evidence that
she had, though she was tender and devoted in her care and ministrations
to the very last.
It is most curious to observe Eugénie’s relation to this new sister. Even
for a mother, who has her own distinct, assured claim, it is hard enough
to give up a son she loves. But a sister, with all a mother’s love, but
only a sister’s intimacy, cannot see the forming of a new and stronger
bond without some dread, some repugnance, some coldness at the heart.
Eugénie, like all persons who analyze their feelings, was naturally
inclined to doubt others’ affection because she doubted her own desert.
When her friends fail to write to her, she hints her grief about it.
When the tone of Maurice’s letters is indifferent, or she fancies that
it is, she frets and broods over it. “Do you remember that little short
letter that tormented me for a fortnight?” How, then, did she bear the
intrusion of a stranger heart, sure to see into all the hidden places
where even she had not been privileged to come? We can divine well enough
how hard it was. Her tone about her new sister might indeed seem to be
all praise. She is good, she is beautiful, she is devoted to Maurice, she
fulfils all her duties and is a sweet companion and friend. Nevertheless,
there is the faintest, perfectly unintentional patronage. Her family are
not, perhaps, quite all they should be. Her dress, charming, delightful,
appropriate, but is it a little startling for a country town, that black
velvet hat with an ostrich plume, fit to amaze earth and heaven, as a
neighbor puts it? But we do so want to be friendly, to do our part. “I
hope Maurice will be happy with her. She isn’t just the sort of woman I
am used to, for character, or heart, or face. She is a stranger. I am
studying her. I am trying to get her near to me, to enter into her life,
if she cannot enter into mine.”
When they both together were soothing the last hours of the beloved
one, Eugénie has nothing but praise and affection for her sister-in-law.
But who could miss the poignancy of the quiet remark that the sister
lies awake all night and hears the wife ministering to the husband as
she herself would like to minister? It is hard to tell which is more
significant, this comment or that of a few weeks earlier: “They are
happy. Maurice is a perfect husband. He is worth a hundred of what he
was a year ago. He told me so himself. He confides in me just as much as
ever. We often talk together intimately.”
On one point Maurice’s marriage seems to be as satisfactory as it could
be, that of religion. His wife does not appear to have distracted him in
any way from his salvation, which would have been hard for Eugénie; nor
yet does the wife promote it more than the sister did, which would have
been even harder. Maurice’s salvation! That was the object of Eugénie’s
daily thoughts and of her nightly prayers. Maurice’s salvation! While she
had him under her own motherly wing, all was well. He might perhaps have
been too easily distracted, not intensely serious, as she was; but at
least his faith was firmly grounded and she sent him out into the great
world, confident that he would be a white soldier of Christ always.
Alas, how often such hopes are disappointed! Not that Maurice really
sinned, or went astray. Most would have thought him virtuous enough,
Christian enough. But he took a certain interest in the heresies of his
adored teacher, Lamennais, and, to the half-cloistered sister at any
rate, he appeared much tainted with the follies and incredulities of an
unbelieving age. How she longed to have him back with her, at least in
spirit! How she prayed that he might pray! How she trembled and shrank at
the thought that after being separated on earth they might not be united
in heaven! “I am not holy enough to convert you, nor strong enough to
draw you with me. God alone can do that. Oh, how I ask it of him, for
all my happiness goes with it. Perhaps you cannot imagine, with your
philosophic eye you cannot see, the tears of a Christian eye, weeping for
a soul that may be lost, a soul so much beloved, a brother’s soul, the
sister of one’s own.”
At least she had the satisfaction of feeling that in the end her prayers
were answered and that the frail and wavering spirit returned to die
in the faith in which she had cradled it. Taking a view with which the
unregenerate will find it hard to sympathize, she declares that errors
of the intellect are much more serious, more dangerous than errors of
the heart. To her fond hope it seemed that on her brother’s deathbed
intellectual errors were all forgotten, and after he had left her
she resented bitterly the verdict of great writers, George Sand and
Sainte-Beuve, that he would live to posterity as a poet of nature whose
essential spirit was much less Christian than Greek.
I have said that Mademoiselle de Guérin’s secluded and in a sense
impersonal life was filled by two great preoccupations. One was her
brother. It will be evident by this time that the other was God. “There
is one thing needful, to possess God,” wrote Amiel at the beginning
of his Journal. Assuredly few human beings have possessed God, have
been more thoroughly possessed by the thought of God, than Eugénie de
Guérin. All thoughts, all passions, all hopes, all griefs are referred
constantly, in prayer and meditation, to that one source, to that
one end. It is indeed beautiful to see how completely the two great
interests of her life merge in each other. Madame de Sévigné adored her
daughter more than God, felt and admitted that the earthly idol usurped
God’s place in her eager, tender, frantic mother’s heart. Madame du
Deffand worshipped Horace Walpole instead of God, a frail and singular
substitute, it will certainly be admitted. With Mademoiselle de Guérin
there was never any question of conflict. Her two loves were absolutely
united, and one simply enhanced the other. To one object she addressed
herself almost as freely as to the other, and it was matter of regret to
her that she did not quite: “I speak as I please to this little book [her
Journal, addressed to Maurice]. I tell it everything, thoughts, griefs,
pleasures, feelings, everything but what can be told only to God, and
even then I am sorry to leave anything at the bottom of the box.”
After her brother’s death, she recognizes, in a passage of wonderful
self-analysis, the huge, the over-mastering power of earthly affection,
yet at once her permanent instinct blends God with it all in a complete,
supreme effort of submission to his will. “Shall we never be rid of our
affections? Neither grief, nor anguish, nor death has power to change us.
To love, always to love, to love right down into the grave, to love the
earthly remnants, to love the body that has borne the soul, even though
the soul has fled to heaven!... All happiness is dead for me on earth.
I have buried my heart’s life. I have lost the charm of my existence. I
cannot tell all that my brother was to me or how profoundly I had hidden
in him all my happiness. My future, my hopes, my old age, all were one
with his, and then he was a soul that understood me. He and I were two
eyes in one forehead. Now we are torn apart and God has come between us.
His will be done!”
In emphasizing this divine possession of Mademoiselle de Guérin, we must
not, however, imply that she was actually unbalanced, or not alive to
the common needs and duties of daily life. Her religion was active as
well as passive. Even in the more ecstatic rites of spiritual devotion
she recognizes a wholesome practical efficacy, as in her striking remark
about confession. “What ease, what light, what strength come to me every
time I say right out, ‘I was at fault.’” Such a normal attitude makes one
regret more than ever that, in our day, at any rate, those make most use
of confession who have very little to confess.
In the wide practice of charity it does not appear that Mademoiselle de
Guérin was especially active. Yet here too it is evident that she gave
not only money but the comfort and the sage, kindly counsel which are
worth much more than money, whenever occasion called for them.
So with domestic pursuits. Though her family were of old, high standing,
they were poor, lived simply, kept few attendants, and the daughters
of the house were wont to turn their prudent hands to every sort of
service. Eugénie had evidently been trained in the methods of careful
French housekeeping. She dusts, she mends, she lays the table, she cooks,
in emergency she takes the linen to the brook and washes it after the
picturesque, muscular European fashion. She often finds pleasure in all
these doings, also, has a true domestic sense of order and finish and
propriety. Nay, she does her washing with real lightness of heart, seeing
charms in it which perhaps escape the average laundress. “It is a real
joy to wash, to see the fish swim by, to watch the little wavelets, the
twigs, the leaves, the blossoms floating in the stream. The brook brings
so much that is pretty to the toiler who knows how to see.”
But even here we note that the toiler’s thoughts were not wholly on
her toil, however well she might perform it. She was not born to labor
with contented indifference. Her heart was too restless, too eager, too
bent on vast reveries beyond the limits of this world’s cleanliness.
Therefore she willingly lets her sister be housekeeper and only stands
ready to help when needed. If little tasks absorb too much of her time,
she complains, almost petulantly. “I have hardly opened a book to-day.
My time has been passed with things quite different from reading, things
nothing in themselves, not even worth mentioning, yet which fill up every
moment.” And always, through the humblest of such tasks, runs the glowing
current of those thoughts which to her were the only reality in a world
of tawdry, trivial, incoherent phantoms. Even when the phantoms burn her
fingers, she thinks only of Saint Catherine of Sienna, who had a taste
for cooking. “It gave her so many subjects for meditation. I can well
believe it, if for nothing but the sight of the fire and the little burns
one gets, which make one think of purgatory.”
For she was thinking of hell, and purgatory, and heaven all the time,
or as I said in beginning, more justly, she was thinking of God, which
included them all three, and far more. God entered into every step she
took, and every breath she breathed.
We may trace Him in all her earthly affections. They were deep and
strong. We have seen this in regard to Maurice. It was just as true
in regard to all others. Her father she cherished tenderly. She knew
that he depended on her for everything and she was ready to give him
everything at any moment. The deepest workings of her soul she kept from
him, because she knew that he would not wholly understand them, and
in covering them even with a certain duplicity she only practiced the
precept of one who had penetrated the spiritual life as deeply as she,
though from a different angle, “the law of love is higher than the law of
truth.” Her friendships for other women, also, were profoundly sincere
and lasting. She gives much and asks little, just tenderness shown in
a brief letter, or a fleeting word. Who has analyzed the passing of
friendship more delicately than she? “It is said that women never love
each other. I do not know. There may be deep affections that last only a
short time. But I have always mistrusted these, for myself and for those
I love. Nothing is sadder than a bit of death in the heart. Therefore,
when I see an affection dying, I set to work to rekindle it with all
my power.” Hers also is this perfect expression of a heart inclined to
tenderness: “Our affections are born one of another.”
Yet, as with Maurice, in all these relations God was first. The thought
of Him sanctified them. The sense of his presence enhanced and beautified
them. Except as they turned towards Him, they could not live and did not
deserve to live. “The tenderest affections of the heart, what are they,
if they are not bent towards heaven, if they are not offered up to God?
They are as mortal as ourselves. We should love not for this world, but
for another.”
As with human love, so is it for Eugénie with all other phases of the
inner life. By nature she had keen intellectual instincts, liked to
read, liked to think, would even have been inclined to think with broad
audacity. She had eminently the habit of reflection and analysis which
makes solitude fruitful and also makes it dangerous. What scholar could
express the charm of lonely hours with more depth and delicacy than this
slightly tutored girl? “I love to linger over my thoughts, to bend over
each one and breathe its fragrance, to enjoy them fully before they fade
away.” Books are a refuge, a resource, a consolation to her. She hates to
leave them, even for the brief journeys she is called upon to make.
Also, the very interesting catalogue of her limited bookshelf contains
some authors of distinctly profane persuasion, whom she does not always
shun. Victor Hugo fascinates her. Sometimes, indeed, the quality of the
text forces her to confine her attention to the pictures, but again she
is wrapt by the adventures of Jean Valjean and the flamboyant mediævalism
of “Notre Dame de Paris.” She tries to break a long day by an exciting
novel, picks “The Chamber of Poisons” for its title, but finds only
disappointments, pet toads, Jesuits turned into hobgoblins, big names
in petty places. She has no taste for poisons, she says. Or again, she
turns to Sainte-Beuve’s “Volupté,” having been assured by her confessor
that pure minds may pass untainted through strange regions. She likes the
book, not perhaps wholly fathoming its depths of morbid suggestiveness.
But the best is Molière. She tries him once, is delighted, and means to
read more. Now what could be further apart than the worlds of Molière and
Eugénie de Guérin?
But, in the main, she reads the writers of this life only to condemn
them. Bossuet, Pascal, the Fathers, the “Imitation,” are her daily and
nightly company. Such books are all that Christians should read or even
recognize. As for the general diffusion of book-learning and education,
she deplores it with the real obscurantism of mediæval superstition.
The peasants, she says, were once simple-minded, earnest, reverent,
devout. Now they go to school, they read the newspapers, they acquire
the superficial jargon of modern culture, and as a consequence they are
atheistic in their talk and immoral in their lives.
The same intense and constant preoccupation with the mystical point of
view that affected Mademoiselle de Guérin’s intellectual pursuits entered
into her æsthetic enjoyments. Art in its technical form was completely
out of her world. She probably saw pictures with the other curiosities of
Paris, but they made no appeal, and churches to her were churches, not in
any way creations of architectural art. Music alone she approaches with a
sort of groping sense of its vast emotional possibility. But as to this
she would undoubtedly have agreed with Cowper that all music not directly
intended and employed for the worship of God was corrupting, enervating,
debasing. “Oh, if I knew music!” she cries, in a moment of enthusiasm.
“They say it is so good for the disorders of the soul.” Yet it does not
touch her. “Nothing in the world has such power to move and stimulate the
soul. I know it, but I do not feel it.” And a similar experience calls
forth words profoundly characteristic for more than music. “I listened to
wonders, yet nothing astonished me. Is there then no astonishment save in
heaven?”
But there was one region of beauty in which Eugénie’s soul opened and
flowered with the most exquisite delicacy and sensibility of response and
that was the world of nature. The subtle, dreamy, suggestive landscape of
France, which has meant so much to poets and painters, has rarely been
felt or rendered with more perfection than by this simple girl who spent
her life with flowers and birds and clouds and stars. “I tried to begin a
letter to you yesterday,” she says, “but I could not write. All my soul
was at the window.” How often her soul was at the window, all ears, all
eyes, stirred to wild joy or grief by the breath of light winds, or the
dance of blossoms in sunshine, or the drift of autumn leaves. Now it is
fair spring weather that delights her, now it is the long and wind-swept
rains of autumn. The vast tranquillity of summer nights at times befits
her mood. And again she welcomes the tumult of great storms and cries
out for even thunder to jar the too monotonous quiet. Not the heart of
Keats or Shelley was more vividly, more blissfully or painfully, at one
with little sounds, or fleeting sights, or unknown odors that vanish as
quickly as they come.
She reads Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s description of the strawberry vine,
which, he says, would make matter for a volume, with all its relations
and experiences. “I,” she says, “am like the strawberry vine, bound up
with earth and air and sky, with the birds, with so many things, visible
and invisible, that I should never get through describing them, without
counting what lives hidden in the folds of my heart, like the insects
that dwell in the thickness of a leaf.” And again, “I wish my heart did
not feel the condition of the air and of the season so much that it opens
and closes like a flower with cold or sun. I don’t understand it, but so
it is, so long as the soul is encased in this frail habitation of the
body.”
But nature is never all to her, never enough for her. She must have God.
Either she sees Him as the whole life and beauty of it all, hears his
voice in the breeze and in the storm, feels his hand in the motion of
flowers and of stars, or she turns away from the beauty of earth as too
apt to distract from the beauty of heaven. “The sky to-day is pale and
languid like a fair face after a fever. This look of languor is full of
charm. The blending of greenness and decay, of flowers that open with
flowers that fall, of singing birds and creeping brooks, the breath of
storm and May sunshine mingled, give an effect of fine fabrics ruffled
and tossed together, of sad and sweet at once, which fills me with
delight. But this is Ascension day: let us leave earth and earth’s skies;
let us rise above our fragile dwelling place and follow where Christ has
gone before us.” In another mood the quiet, subtle sounds of night seem
to penetrate devotion with an overpowering tenderness, to waft thought
higher even than meditation undisturbed. “It is black night. But you
can still hear the crickets, the streamlet, and the nightingale, just
one, which sings, sings, sings, in the thick darkness. What a perfect
accompaniment to evening prayer!”
I said in beginning that Mademoiselle de Guérin had no active personal
life of her own. This is as true of her as perhaps of any of us. She
followed the thought of others and of God as the shadow follows the sun.
At the same time, she was human, she was a woman, she was made of earth,
as we all are. It is a study of exceeding interest to watch the stirrings
of humanity, even barely perceptible and quickly crushed, in this white,
pure vessel filled with the glow of an unearthly adoration.
Revolt she seems to have had none, doubt none, or only such momentary
dimming of the pure flame as serves to make it shine the brighter. It
does indeed trouble her a little to reflect that just those consolations
which the poor need are given only to the rich who need them not.
Life, she says, seems inside out and upside down, which was the view
of Prometheus and of Satan, but in Mademoiselle de Guérin it does not
strike us as Satanic. Also, her questioning of the divine order goes so
far as a regret that she cannot have her doves in heaven. But this pulls
her up with a shock, for in heaven we shall regret nothing—not even doves.
Some shreds of human frailty, some lingering hints of impatience and
irritability and nerves, we are pleased to find that even this saint
shares with us. How subtly and charmingly does she analyze them herself.
“I am not in the mood to write or to do anything amiable: quite the
contrary. There are days when the soul shuts itself up like a hedgehog.
If you were here, how I would prick you.” And again, in a little
different phase. “I am most unsuccessful in dealing with difficulties,
and am always in too great a hurry to get at what is to give me pleasure.”
Also, I wonder whether her friends really got near her and felt at ease
with her. Monsieur Anatole France speaks charmingly of _la douceur
impérieuse des saintes_. Had Mademoiselle de Guérin’s infinite gentleness
sometimes a touch of the imperious? I can hardly prove it. It is rare
and subtle and indefinable. But I divine it—a little. She remarks,
with beatific triumph, “I speak to everybody I love of the things of
eternity.” She did. She did. And it seems merely prophetic despair to
imply that the things of eternity might grow tiresome. But in this world
we are contented only with eternal change.
There are some special matters of absorbing interest to most women.
Eugénie de Guérin was a woman. Did she take no interest in these
matters? Beauty, for instance? It does not appear that she had any
special charm of feature or carriage. Was she aware of this? Did it
trouble her? If so, she seldom shows it. Yet there are words here and
there that set one thinking. When she was young, she says, she desired
passionately to be beautiful, because she was told that if she were so,
her mother would love her more. But as she grows older, she thinks only
of beauty of the soul. Nevertheless, coming age seems to affect her with
suggestions of ugliness, not of the soul only.
Dress again. Fair women employ it to enhance beauty, others to create
it. Did Eugénie give no thought to what she should put on? Not much,
I confess, beyond an exquisite sense of neatness and good order. Yet,
here, too, if you watch closely, you get a gleam of human vanity, like
the flash of a spangle on a sombre floor. She looks back and reviews the
preoccupations of her youth, long since laid aside and forgotten, she
says. “Dolls, toys, birds, butterflies I cherished, pretty and innocent
fancies of childhood. Then books, talk, jewels and ornaments a little,
dreams, fair dreams—but I am not writing a confession.”
If she had written one, would there have been men in it, fairy lovers
such as girls dream, an ideal blend of manly beauty and mad tenderness?
We do not know, but here again little things make us suspect. She tells
us she does not like novels, because the passions are let loose in
them—but she reads them. She pities the souls in purgatory because of the
terrible impatience with which they await release. What expectation on
earth can compare with it? she says. Not that of fortune, or of glory, or
of anything else that makes the human heart pant, unless perhaps it be
the longing of the beloved waiting for the lover. And elsewhere she draws
a domestic picture of quiet happiness, a little house in the fields, with
vines and poultry, and some one, whom? Not a peasant, she says, like ours
who beat their wives. “Do you remember—?” But she stops short and does
not give the name.
In such a picture the crowning object would be children and though she
does not mention them here, she does elsewhere, often, with all a born
mother’s tenderness. How charming is her dream of the way she would rear
them and teach them. “If I had a child to bring up, how gently I would do
it, how merrily, with all the care one gives a delicate flower. I would
speak to them of God with words of love. I would tell them that He loves
them even more than I do, that He gives them everything I give them, and
besides, the air, the sun, and the flowers, that He made the sky and the
beautiful stars.” When Maurice’s child is about to be born, after the
father’s death, she cries out in ecstasy. “How I long to have a baby in
the house, to play mother, and nurse it, and caress it.” Surely the real
woman is speaking to us here.
Other feminine affairs were of less interest to her, as we have seen with
things purely domestic. General society she shunned, and no doubt lost
by doing so. Occasionally she is tricked out and led to a party, where
she thinks every one remarks her ill, unaccustomed manner of dancing,
the truth probably being that no one noticed her at all. She might, no
doubt, have been successful in conversation, for she had wit, refinement,
distinction, and was capable of vivacity. But she avoided what she calls
the world, with a suggestion of inexpressible disdain, alleging to
herself that it was futile, frivolous, and unprofitable. Perhaps a good
part of the reason was that she herself was proud and shy and essentially
a spiritual aristocrat. “Books are my intellectual passion; but how few
there are that I like. It is just so with people. I rarely meet any one
that pleases me.” When you frequent the world in that spirit, it is
unprofitable indeed.
One phase of human weakness did take hold of this celestial wanderer and
even threaten to disturb her saintly peace, and that was the ambition of
literature. She restrains it, subdues it, disclaims it. But no one could
take such nice care of expression as she does, could turn sentences so
daintily, so vigorously, and not take pride in them. She is like Saint
François de Sales, who announces the loftiest contempt for poor words,
but uses the most cunning skill to get all he can out of them.
Writing is almost a necessity to her, she says. She turns to her pen as
an outlet for all the struggles and trials and passions of her inner
life. “Writing is the sign that I am alive, as that of a brook is
running.” She looks to publication, too, makes delicate verses and sends
them to a review, which she thinks will print them, if it prints women’s
verses at all. Not that she cares for the public, oh, no! She writes only
to please a friend or two who can appreciate her. And her name must not
be used in print, oh, never! Still, there is a subtle charm about this
newspaper notoriety, you can hardly call it glory, which does appeal,
even to the saints.
Then she thinks it appeals too much. All earthly glory is vanity, even
that of the poet’s corner of a magazine. Can it be right for her to spend
time and thought which should belong to God on the mere tinkle of human
rhyming? She consults her confessor, who assures her that no great harm
is done. She consults Maurice, who is very round with her, tells her
not to worry about her conscience in the matter, but to write, tells
her to think a little more about the subject of her verses and less
about herself, and above all suggests that she should omit devotion and
mysticism and be human, advice by which he lays himself open to gentle
admonition and reproof.
But she sticks to her pen just the same. Who ever failed to, that was
born for it? Why, I may do good by writing, she urges. No doubt her
confessor persuaded her she might, with perfect justice as regarded doing
good to one person, at any rate.
But we must not emphasize too much all these petty and indifferent
preoccupations. None of them really counted, none of them was more than
a trifle beside the paramount, absorbing interest of Mademoiselle de
Guérin’s life. Not a page, hardly a paragraph, of her Journal but has
some allusion to God, to her desire for God, her thirst for God, her
complete, entire reference of all things earthly to what was, for her, at
any rate, their origin, their purpose, and their end. She has words of
marvellous mystical subtlety and grace, though the constant impression
is more powerful than any single words. “When a brook runs, it starts
full of foam and turmoil and grows clearer as it travels. The road I
wander in is God, or a friend, but above all, God. In Him I run my course
and find repose.” “In this vast silence, when God only speaks to me,
my soul is ravished and dead to everything else, above, below, within,
without; but the rapture does not last.”
Alas, no, it does not last. These ecstasies never do, whether earthly or
heavenly, unless in heaven. And persons who spend their lives in waiting
for them are apt to view the common, petty joys of earth with discontent.
This was unquestionably the case with Mademoiselle de Guérin. A word less
frequent than God in her Journal is ennui, but it is frequent enough.
People bore her, society bores her, little daily duties bore her. She
endures them and keeps a brave face because God bids, but the ennui is
there just the same.
Nor is it only ennui. She sees a vast amount of positive evil in life.
“Pessimism is half of saintliness,” says an excellent authority. It
was at least half of Mademoiselle de Guérin’s. Besides general human
suffering and cruelty and neglect, she has a set of individual troubles
which seem avoidable, some doubt as to her own salvation and very
considerable doubt as to the salvation of others. These things keep dark
clouds over her until the sun has hard work to break through. She speaks
perpetually of graves and death, always, to be sure, to draw a moral
lesson from them; but cannot moral lessons be drawn from sweeter things?
Even the great Christian poet, Donne, while expressing a preference for
the grave, found other matters more attractive still.
“I hate extremes, yet I had rather stay
With graves than cradles to wear out a day.”
But Mademoiselle de Guérin is more than “half in love with easeful death”
and inclines to woo him with all the strange fancies of Constance in
“King John.” “Hippolyte talks to me of Marie, of another world, of his
grief, of you, of death, of all the things I love so much.”
One is inclined to break in on a strain so morbid and abnormal with
reminders of “earthlier happy is the rose distilled,” or with the
somewhat brutal Philistinism of Horace Greeley’s comment on his dear
friend, Margaret Fuller, “A good husband and two or three bouncing babies
would have emancipated her from a good deal of cant and nonsense.”
But, though Mademoiselle de Guérin might herself have been happier as a
normal wife and mother, she would not have left us the fine, elaborate
analysis of an exquisite soul.
THE END
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