“A father,” he said, “takes his son to the theatre: a great crowd, the door besieged. Buthe is a tall man and a stout. He breaks a way to the turnstile, and as he is on the point of passing in, puts the lad before him, who, without that foresight, would either have come in late or not come in at all.”
A pretty turn to give his gratitude! Apart from that he was unnecessarily provocative. He went out of his way to praise Racine at the expense of Corneille, which, seeing that Thomas Corneille was a brother, and Fontenelle a nephew of the great man, and that both were present was asking for trouble. Trouble there was—efforts to refuse him inscription in the archives, a foaming attack in theMercure Galant, a plot to print and publish separately the address of his co-nominee, and so on. But the Abbé Bignon stood by him; both addresses were published together, La Bruyère’s with a fighting preface, and inscription in the records followed.
In his preface he girds at his critics for not having seen what he was driving at inLes Caractères. They had taken it, he says, for a collection of aphorisms and sentences loosely assorted under headings, with portraits here and there of distinguished persons, scandalous or malicious as might be. They took it, in short, for a nosegay of flowers of speech, selected more for their pungency than their fragrance, relieved by foliage luxuriant enough, but beset with thorns. That was not at all his own idea of it.
“Have they not observed,” he asks, “that of the sixteen chapters comprised in it, there are fifteen which, applied to the discovery of what is false and absurd in the objects of the passions andattachments of mankind, aim only at breaking down the growths which first enfeeble and presently extinguish the knowledge of God in men—nothing therefore but preliminary to the sixteenth and last, in which atheism is attacked, and possibly routed.”
I confess that if the critics had not detected all that in the plan or content of Sections I-XV, there is much excuse for them. I am in the same condemnation. It is true that those sections may be said to attack false gods in general: folly, ostentation, vainglory, evil concupiscence and such like. It is true that La Bruyère is acensor morum, like many a man before him and since. But it is not at all obvious that he is clearing a way by his analytic philosophy for a synthetic which will seat the true God firmly on his throne in the heart. Nor is the effort to do that conspicuous. “I feel that there is a God,” he says in his sixteenth section, “and I do not feel that there is no God. That is enough for me; all the reasoning in the world is beyond the purpose: I conclude that God is.” Very good; but then, why all the reasoning in the book? Pascal said the same thing, rather better. “It is the heart that feels God, not the reason. That is faith: God sensible to the heart, not to the reason.” It is probably as near as one can go. But how does La Bruyère make it more pointed by what has gone before? If you prove to demonstration that the goods of this world are but vanity, does that of itself imply, first that there is another world, whose goods (secondly) are not vain? Not at all. My impression is that La Bruyère had nosuch large intention when he began, and that if he had had it, he would have declared it in his opening observations. He was moralist and satirist both; but as much of one as the other. Character rather than characteristics attracted him, as I think, and the sharp sentences he aimed at were more literary than ethical. As for maxim-drawing, although he drew plenty, he expressly disavowed it. “I ought to say that I have had no desire to write maxims. Maxims are the laws of morality, and I own that I have neither the authority nor the genius which would fit me to legislate.... Those, in a word, who make maxims desire to be believed. I, on the other hand, am willing that anyone should say of me that I have not always well observed, provided that he himself observe better.”
And the last sentence in the book is this: “If theseCaractèresof mine are not relished I shall be surprised; and if they are I shall be equally so.”
There is a pose in that; but it is a literary pose.
He did not live long to enjoy his academic dignity. He made but one appearance at the table, and then supported the candidature of somebody whose name was not before the assembly. His proposal was of Dacier the classic, but he owned that he should prefer to see Madame Dacier chosen. On the 10th of May 1696, just a month after Madame de Sévigné, he died of apoplexy at Versailles. He had rooms in the Chateau opening on to the leads—bedroom, book-closet, and dressing-room. The inventory of hiseffects shows him to have been possessed of some three hundred books. Very few of his letters exist: one to Ménage about Theophrastus, one to Bussy, thanking him for his vote and sending him the sixth edition ofLes Caractères, others to Condé, of earlier date, about the progress of his grandson. Two letters to him from Jérôme Phélypeaux, the son of Pontchartrain, survive, which hint at a happy relationship between the scholar and the young blade. Phélypeaux, who was just one-and-twenty, chaffs the philosopher; calls him a “fort joli garçon,” suspects him of being “un des plus rudes joueurs de lansquenet qui soit au monde.” La Bruyère’s solitary letter to his young friend is in a light-hearted vein too, chiefly about the weather.
It is so hot, he says, that yesterday he cooked a cake on his leads, and an excellent cake. To-day it has rained a little. Then he plays the fool very pleasantly. “Whether it will rain to-morrow, or whether it won’t, is a thing, sir, which I could not pronounce if the health of all Europe depended upon it. All the same, I believe, morally speaking, that there will be a little rain; that when that rain shall have ceased it will leave off raining, unless indeed it should begin to rain again.” It is evidence of a sound heart that a learned man can write so to a young friend; and as it is much better to love a man than not, I close upon that frivolous, but happy note. La Bruyère was to live a year more in his attic on the leads. Let us hope that he baked some more cakes and wrote many more letters to young M. Phélypeaux.
Sainte-Beuve, in one of his earlyLundis, tells a touching story of Madame de Pompadour, the frail and pretty lady who was forced by circumstances rather than native bent into becoming a Minister of State, and one, at that, who had to measure swords with the great Frederick of Prussia. At one stage of her career she had hopes of a match between a daughter of her married state and a natural son of Louis. There seemed to be the makings of a Duc du Maine in the lad, of a Duchess consequently for her family. And that was the simple objective of those of her faction who favoured the scheme. But her own was simpler still. She spoke her real mind about it to Madame de Hausset, her lady-in-waiting, from whose Mémoires Sainte-Beuve quotes it.
“Un brevet de duc pour mon fils,” she said, “c’est bien peu; et c’est à cause que c’est son fils que je le préfère, ma bonne, à tous les petits ducs de la Cour. Mes petits enfants participeraient en ressemblance du grand-père et de la grand’-mère, et ce mélange que j’ai l’espoir de voir ferait mon bonheur un jour.”
Interesting revelation. “Les larmes lui vinrent aux yeux,” says Madame de Hausset. She was bourgeoise, you see, this poor Pompadour, with the homely instincts, the longing for the snug interior, the home, the family life which characterise the plainly-born. She had been a Mademoiselle Poisson. Poisson indeed! What had aMademoiselle Poisson to do with a Fils de Saint-Louis, or in a Parc aux Cerfs? Nothing whatever in first intention, at least; rather she was all for love and the world well lost. She had had her dreams, wherein Louis was to be her “jo,” and they were to climb the hill together. The ideal remained with her, for ever unrealised, always, it seemed, just realisable; and her foreign and military adventures, the certain ruin of her country, were so many shifts to arrive—she and Louis together, hand in hand—at some Island of the Blest. No beautiful end will justify means so unbeautiful, but to some extent it excuses them.
Exactly on a level with that tale is one which I read somewhere lately: also a French tale. It was about the exorbitantly-loved mistress of some officer, who craved the rights of a wife, and worried him until she had them—with the result that she obtained also the wrongs. She in fact became what the man’s wife was at the moment: in her turn she wastrompée. And what were the rights for which she risked, and indeed lost, everything she had? To preside at his breakfast-table, to dinevis-à-visat home instead of at a restaurant, to sleep with her head on his shoulder. That was all. And when she had it, her pride and joy became his ineffable weariness. He carried his vice elsewhere. There is the whole difference between two classes there—between Louis le Désiré and his Poisson; between two instincts—Sentiment and Curiosity; between two ideals—Distraction and Fulfilment. There is very nearly all the essential difference that exists betweenmen and women, the active and the passive principle in human nature.
Behind the sentimental there is always a moral reality. It may not be all the sentimentalists believe it; they may mistake appearance of the thing for the thing itself; but there is a reality. To preside over a man’s tea-cups is symbolic; to be his wife is more than symbolic, for a symbol may be a sacrament—and that is a reality. The wedding-ring is a sacrament for those who seek fulfilment of their being. To those who seek distraction of it, it simply puts a point to their need. To the seekers of distraction there is neither end, nor symbol, nor sacrament. Mr. Hardy once wrote a parable upon the theme—the Pursuit of the Well-Beloved it was called; and after his manner he gave a mocking twist to it. In it a nympholept, a sort of Louis XV, pursued successively a woman, her daughter and her grand-daughter, and having caught them one after another, found that there was nothing in it. Last of all, the man died also, but not without feeling pretty sure that if he could have waited for the great-grand-daughter all would have been well with him. Such shadows we are, pursuing shadows. But women are realists. They can see detail and fulfil themselves with that, failing the great thing. That is a strength which is also a weakness, fatal to them in many cases. Only, even so, it is not always easy to decide which it is. Was it strength or weakness in Romney’s wife? She nursed him through a fever, herself then a young girl, and he married her for her pains. He lived with her for five years, gave her a family, and left her. Hehardly saw her again for forty years, when he returned, broken and old, to Kendal, where he had left her, to be nursed once more out of illness. So far as we know, she had no reproaches for him. He died in her arms. What reality she may have found to support her constancy one can hardly say; but at least she had more than the nympholept had ever found in his forty years in the wilderness. Enough indeed to give her fulfilment at the last.
I have touched a thing there, or I am the more deceived, which Mr. Lucas has entirely overlooked in a recent book of his. By so doing he has turned what might have been a touching piece of sentiment into something which, luckily for us, exists mainly in club arm-chairs. We have hadScience from an Easy-Chair, and none the worse for being so delivered. But arm-chair ethics is another matter. In Mr. Lucas’sRose and Rosea doctor, with a good cook (an important factor) and an Epicurean friend, who has the knack of making cynicisms sound true, by using a genial manner, becomes guardian of a child, who grows up into a nice girl, and in due course falls in love. She chooses a man whom the doctor dislikes, whom she, however, prefers to several other candidates, against whom there are really only nods and winks from the doctor and the Epicurean on the sofa. She marries, and isn’t happy. Her husband, without being a prig—he had not enough colour for that—was a precisian, careful of his money, who did his own housekeeping. He had not such a good cook as the doctor had, and may have felt that Rose’s education in housewifery had been neglected. Probably it had. A good cook will coddleher clients, but not impart her mystery. I daresay the husband was trying; but he seems to have been good-tempered and honourable; he paid his way, and he gave Rose I a Rose II. That at least should have been an asset on his side of the account. But not at all. After a time, not clearly illuminated, in which nothing particular seems to have happened—except one thing—Rose I ups and elopes with the one thing, leaving her husband and Rose II in the lurch. She had known her lover before marriage. He had very white teeth, and she had nursed him through an illness. Well, when she found him again, his teeth were still quite white, and he had another illness. So there you were. She went off with him, I think to Singapore, and did not reappear until the last chapter, by which time her ailing lover had cleaned his teeth for the last time. The doctor, who still had the good cook, and had adopted and brought up Rose II to the marriage-point, then received back with a beating heart his Rose I.
A doctor of seventy, with a good cook and digestion, an arm-chair and a rather good cellar of port, fortified also by the caustic wit of an epicurean patient, is capable of much. He might think (as Mr. Lucas’s did) that it was all right. He would be for the line of least resistance, and that would certainly be the baby. He happened to like them—which put him in a strong position. But his Rose I went much further than even Jean-Jacques had gone. He took his superfluous children to theEnfants Trouvés. Rose simply dropped hers. “De Charon pas un mot!” And so far as I can find out not a word afterwards, untilshe came home in the last chapter, as if nothing had happened. Then, if you please, Rose II takes the prodigal mother to her bosom, and they all lived happily ever after. Life is not so simple as all that. It could not be while women were women.
The poor “unfortunate females” with whom I began this article are against it. Mrs. Romney is against it. To the best of my belief the middle-class, to which the Roses belong, is still against it. Many marriages are unhappy, and many children left to shift; but not yet in the middle-class to any dangerous extent. A doctor in an easy-chair, with a good cook and cellar, does not count. His cook has unclassed him.
GEORGE SAND AND FLAUBERT
Flaubert is, or was, the fashion in high-art circles; George Sand was never that, and to-day is little more than a name in any circle. Yet in the familiar letters, lately published in translation, translated by Aimée McKenzie, between a pair so ill-assorted in temperament, so far apart in the pigeon-holes of memory, it is she who proves herself the better man.
Gustave Flaubert will live for times to come less by what he did than by his gesture in doing it. He was, before all, the explicit artist, the art-for-art’s-sake, neck-or-nothing artist; and as such he will stand in history when these strange creatures come up for review. He made the enormous assumption of an aristocracy of intelligence. As, once upon a time, Venice, and later on we British, claimed to hold the gorgeous East in fee, so Flaubert, and the handful of poets, novelists and playwrights whom he admitted as his equals, looked upon the world at large with its hordes of busy people as so much stuff for the workshop. Bourgeois all, Philistines all. They were the quarry; upon them as they went about their affairs he would peep and botanise. He would lay bare their hearts in action, their scheming brains, their secret longings, dreams, agonies of remorse, desire, fear. All this as a god might do it, a being apart, and for the diversion of a select Olympus. It was useless to write for the rest, for they could noteven begin to understand you. More, it was an unworthy condescension. It exposed you either to infamy, as when they prosecuted you for an outrage against morals, or to ridicule, as when they asked you what your novel “proved.” Write for ever, wear yourself to a thread, hunting word ornuance; but write for the Olympians, not for the many. Such was the doctrine of Flaubert, gigantic, bald, cavern-eyed, with the moustaches of a Viking, and the voice of a bull; and so Anatole France saw him in 1873:
“I had hardly been five minutes with him when the little parlour hung with Arab curtains swam in the blood of twenty thousand bourgeois with their throats cut. Striding to and fro, the honest giant ground under his heels the brains of the municipal councillors of Rouen.”
“I had hardly been five minutes with him when the little parlour hung with Arab curtains swam in the blood of twenty thousand bourgeois with their throats cut. Striding to and fro, the honest giant ground under his heels the brains of the municipal councillors of Rouen.”
That was the sort of man who, in 1863, struck up a friendship with George Sand.
And she, the overflowing, mannish, brown old woman, his antithesis; her vast heart still smouldering like a sleepy volcano; she who had kicked over all the traces, sown all the wild oats, made spillikins of the Ten Commandments, played leapfrog with the frying-pan and the fire; written a hundred novels, as many plays, a thousand reviews, ten thousand love-letters; grandmother now at Nohant, with a son whom she adored, a little Aurore whom she idolised; still enormously busy, writing a novel with each hand, a play with each foot, and reviews (perhaps) with her nose; she ofElle et Lui, ofConsueloandValentineandFrançois le Champi—how on earth came she to cope with the Berserk of Croisset, who hated every other person in the world, took four years to write a novel, and read through a whole library for the purpose? The answer is easy. She made herself his grandmother, took him to her capacious bosom, and handled him as he had never been handled before. Affectionately—to him she was “cher maitre,” to her he was her “pauvre enfant” or her “cher vieux”—but she could poke fun at him too. She used to send him letters from imaginary bourgeois, injured by his attacks, or stimulated by them, as might be. One was signed, “Victoire Potelet, called Marengo Lirondelle, Veuve Dodin”:
“I have read your distinguished works, notably Madame Bavarie, of which I think I am capable of being a model to you.... I am well preserved for my advanced age and if you have a repugnance for an artist in misfortune I should be content with your ideal sentiments. You can then count on my heart not being able to dispose of my person being married to a man of light character who squandered my wax cabinet wherein were all figures of celebrities, Kings, Emperors ancient and modern and celebrated crimes....”
“I have read your distinguished works, notably Madame Bavarie, of which I think I am capable of being a model to you.... I am well preserved for my advanced age and if you have a repugnance for an artist in misfortune I should be content with your ideal sentiments. You can then count on my heart not being able to dispose of my person being married to a man of light character who squandered my wax cabinet wherein were all figures of celebrities, Kings, Emperors ancient and modern and celebrated crimes....”
A delicious letter to write and to receive.
With all that, in spite of her impulse to love, to admire, to fall at his feet, she saw what was the matter with her “pauvre enfant.”Madame Bovaryhurt her because it was heartless. She understood the prosecution of that dreadful book;she saw that the passionless analysis of passion may be exceedingly indecent. She is guarded in her references to it, but she saw quite well that the book was condemned, not because it was indecent (though it was indecent), but because it was cruel. She thoughtL’Education Sentimentalea failure; ugly without being reasonable:
“All the characters in that book are feeble and come to nothing, except those with bad instincts; that is what you are reproached with ... when people do not understand us it is always our fault.... You say that it ought to be like that, and that M. Flaubert will violate the rules of good taste if he shows his thought and the aim of his literary enterprise. It is false in the highest degree. When M. Flaubert writes well and seriously, one attaches oneself to his personality. One wants to sink or swim with him. If he leaves you in doubt, you lose interest in his work, you neglect it, or you give it up.”
“All the characters in that book are feeble and come to nothing, except those with bad instincts; that is what you are reproached with ... when people do not understand us it is always our fault.... You say that it ought to be like that, and that M. Flaubert will violate the rules of good taste if he shows his thought and the aim of his literary enterprise. It is false in the highest degree. When M. Flaubert writes well and seriously, one attaches oneself to his personality. One wants to sink or swim with him. If he leaves you in doubt, you lose interest in his work, you neglect it, or you give it up.”
Not a doubt but she was right. You cannot with impunity leave your heart out of your affair. I will not say that a good book cannot be written with the intellect and the will; but I am convinced that a great book was never yet so written. The greatest books in the world’s history are those which the world at large knows to be good; and to the making of such books goes the heart of a man as well as his brain.
But eighteen-seventy was at hand. Isidore, as they called him, was diddled into war. Everything went badly. French armies blew away likesmoke, France was invaded, the Prussians were at Rouen, and there was no time to theorise about art. Sedan; the Prussians in Paris; then the senseless rage of the Commune. Flaubert took it allà sa manière:
“I shall not tell you all I have suffered since September. Why didn’t I die from it?... And I cannot get over it! I am not consoled! I have no hope!”
“I shall not tell you all I have suffered since September. Why didn’t I die from it?... And I cannot get over it! I am not consoled! I have no hope!”
And in another letter:
“Ah! dear and good master,if you could only hate!That is what you lack—hate.... Come now. Cry out! Thunder! Take your lyre and touch the brazen string; the monsters will flee.”
“Ah! dear and good master,if you could only hate!That is what you lack—hate.... Come now. Cry out! Thunder! Take your lyre and touch the brazen string; the monsters will flee.”
Poor wretch, with the only remedy of the arrogant! But the fine old priestess of another heaven and earth did as he bid her; cried out, thundered, in a noble letter, which should be engraved on gold plates and hung up on the Quai d’Orsay:
“What then, you want me to stop loving? You want me to say that I have been mistaken all my life, that humanity is contemptible, hateful, that it has always been and will always be so?... You assert that the people has always been ferocious, the priest always a hypocrite, the bourgeois a coward, the soldier a brigand, the peasant a beast?... The people, you say? The people is yourself and myself.... Whoever denies the people cheapens himself, and gives the world the shameful spectacle of apostasy....”
“What then, you want me to stop loving? You want me to say that I have been mistaken all my life, that humanity is contemptible, hateful, that it has always been and will always be so?... You assert that the people has always been ferocious, the priest always a hypocrite, the bourgeois a coward, the soldier a brigand, the peasant a beast?... The people, you say? The people is yourself and myself.... Whoever denies the people cheapens himself, and gives the world the shameful spectacle of apostasy....”
That is plain speaking; but she goes on to be prophetic. It would seem as if she had foreseen a war and its aftermath infinitely more terrible than that of 1870:
“We shall have to pity the German nation for its victories as much as ourselves for our defeats, because this is the first act of its moral dissolution. The drama of its degradation has begun.... It will move very quickly....Well, the moral abasement of Germany is not the future safety of France, and if we are called upon to return to her the evil that has been done us, her collapse will not give us back her life.”
“We shall have to pity the German nation for its victories as much as ourselves for our defeats, because this is the first act of its moral dissolution. The drama of its degradation has begun.... It will move very quickly....Well, the moral abasement of Germany is not the future safety of France, and if we are called upon to return to her the evil that has been done us, her collapse will not give us back her life.”
Is not that nobly said? And then her great cry:
“Frenchmen, let us love one another ... let us love one another or we are lost.”
“Frenchmen, let us love one another ... let us love one another or we are lost.”
She was but five years off her death-bed when she wrote that. In a sense it was her swan-song. Had she never loved so blindly, she might have been a better woman it may be. But she loved kindly, too, and will be forgiven no doubt because she loved much. Love at any rate inspired her to better purpose than Flaubert’s hate could have done. The world is not to be advantaged by intellectual arrogance; nor does it appear from these letters that poor Flaubert was at all advantaged either. It served him but ill in literature and not at all in the adventure of life. One must be a man before one can be an artist. Whether George Sand was an artist or not, she neither knew nor cared. There is no doubt at all, though, of her manliness.
LA PRINCESS DE CLÈVES
The first novelist in the world as we know it (I say nothing of the Greeks and Romans) was, I believe, a Pope—Pius II. It is not what we have come to expect from the Vatican; but his novel, I ought to add, was “only a little one.” The second, if I don’t mistake, was Mademoiselle de Scudéry, who did the thing on a large scale.Artamène, ou Le Grand Cyrusis in twenty volumes; and though men be so strong (some of them) as to have read it, it is not unkind to say that, for the general, it is as dead as King Pandion. “Works,” then, won’t secure more for an author than his name in a dictionary. You must have quality to do that. The littlePrincesse de Clèves, written by a contemporary of Mademoiselle’s, all compact in a small octavo of 170 pp., has quality. First published in 1678, at this hour, says Mr. Ashton, in his study of its author,[2]“there are preparing simultaneously an art edition, a critical edition, and an édition de luxe, to say nothing of the popular edition, which has just appeared.” Here is “that eternity of fame,” or something like it, hoped for by the poet. I suppose the nearest we can approach to that would beRobinson Crusoe.
The authoress of the little classic was Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, who was born in 1634. She was ofpetite noblesseon both sides,but her mother’s remarriage to the Chevalier Renaud de Sévigné lifted her into high society, and brought her acquainted with the incomparable Marquise. If it had done nothing else for her, in doing that it served two delightful women, and the world ever after. But it did more. It procured for Mlle. de La Vergne her entry to the Hôtel de Rambouillet; it gave her the wits for her masters; it gave her the companionship of La Rochefoucauld; and it gaveusthe Princesse de Clèves. She married, or was married to, a provincial seigneur of so little importance that everybody thought he was separated from his wife some twenty years before he was. When separation did come, it was only that insisted on by death; and through Mr. Ashton’s diligence we now know when he died. Nothing about him, however, seems to matter much, except the bare possibility that the relations between him, his wife, and La Rochefoucauld, which may have been difficult and must have been delicate, may also have given Madame de Lafayette the theme of her novels.
She wrote three novels altogether, and it is a curious thing about them that they all deal with the same subject—namely, jealousy. Love, of course, the everlasting French triangular love, is at the bottom of them: inclination and duty contend for the heroine. But the jealousy which consumes husband and lover alike is the real theme. Only in thePrincesse de Clèvesis the treatment fresh, the subject deeply plumbed, thedénoumentoriginal and unexpected. Those valuable considerations, and the eloquence with which they are brought to bear, may account for its instantpopularity. It has another quality which recommends it to readers of to-day—psychology. To a surprising extent, considering its epoch, it does consider of men and women from within outwards—not as clothes-props to be decked with rhetoric, but as reasonable souls in human bodies, and sometimes as unreasonable souls.
Here’s the story. Mademoiselle de Chartres, a high-born young beauty of the Court of Henri II—is there any other novel in the world the name of whose heroine is never revealed?—is married by her mother in the opening pages to the Prince de Clèves, without inclination of her own, or any marked distaste. The prince, we are told, is “parfaitement bien fait,” brave, splendid, “with a prudence which is not at all consistent with youth.” I do not learn that he was, in fact, a youth. All goes well, nevertheless, until the return to Court of a certain Duc de Nemours, a renowned breaker of hearts, more brave, more splendid, more “bien fait,” and much less prudent, certainly, than the Prince de Clèves. He arrives during a ball at the Louvre; Madame de Clèves nearly steps into his arms by accident; their eyes meet; his are dazzled, hers troubled, and the seed is sown. For a space of time she does not know that she loves, or guess thathedoes: the necessary discoveries are provided for by some very good inventions. An accident to Nemours in a tournament, in the trouble which it causes her, reveals him the truth; his stealing of her picture, which she happens to witness, reveals it to her.
Discovery of the state of affairs, naturally, spurs the young man; but it terrifies the lady. Greatlyagitated, she prevails upon her unsuspecting lord to take her into the country. Nemours follows them, as she presently learns. Then, when her husband insists on her return with him to Paris and the daily intercourse with the person she dreads, driven into a corner, she confesses that she dare not obey him, since her heart is not her own. Nothing will induce her to say more; and the prince, disturbed as he is, is greatly touched by the nobility and candour of her avowal. Unfortunately, he is not the only one to be touched; for Nemours, who had been on the point of paying a visit to his enchantress, stands in the ante-room and overhears the whole conversation. He knew it all before, no doubt—but wait a moment. He is so exalted by the sense of his mistress’s virtue that, on his way back to Paris, he casts the whole story into a tale of “a friend” of his, but with such a spirit of conviction thrilling in his tones, that it is quite easy for him who receives it to be certain that “the friend” was Nemours himself. That is really excellent invention, quite unforced, and as simple as kissing. Naturally the tale is repeated, and puts husband and wife at cross-purposes, since it makes either suspect the other of having betrayed the secret. More, it tells the husband the name of his wife’s lover. Further misunderstandings ensue, and last of all, the husband dies of it. I confess that that seems to me rather stiff. Men have died and worms have eaten them—but not the worms of jealousy.
The end of the book is perfectly original. When her grief and remorse have worn themselves out, what is to prevent the lovers coming together?A curious blend in her of piety and prudence, which again seems to me very reasonable. Madame de Clèves feels that, practically, Nemours was the death of her husband. He had not meant to be, did not suspect that he was: she knows that, and allows that time might work in his favour. “M. de Clèves,” she admits, “has only just expired, and the melancholy object is too close at hand to allow me to take a clear view of things.” Leave all that to time, then, by all means. But, says she, at this moment “I am happy in the certainty of your love; and though I know that my own will last for ever, can I be so sure of yours? Do men keep their passion alight in these lifelong unions? Have I the right to expect a miracle in my favour? Dare I put myself in the position of seeing the certain end of that passion which constitutes the whole of my happiness?” M. de Clèves, she goes on, was remarkable for constancy—a lover throughout his married life. Was it not probable that that was precisely because she did not at all respond? “You,” she tells the young man, “have had many affairs of the heart, and will no doubt have more. I shall not always be your happiness. I shall see you kneel to some other woman as now you kneel to me.” No—she prefers him to dangle, “always to be blest!” “I believe,” she owns, with remarkable frankness, “that as the memory of M. de Clèves would be weakened were it not kept awake by the interests of my peace of mind, so also those interests themselves have need to be kept alive in me by the remembrance of my duty.” This lady would rather be loved than love, it is clear; but how long M. de Nemours would continue tosigh, being given so unmistakably to understand that there would be nothing to sigh for, is not so well established.
He was very much distressed, but she would not budge. “The reasons that she had for not marrying again appeared to her strong on the score of duty, insurmountable on that of repose.” So she retired to a convent, “and her life, which was not a long one, left behind her an example of inimitable virtues.”
So far as we are concerned to-day, thePrincesse de Clèveslives upon its psychological insight. But for that I don’t see how it could possibly have survived. It is a recital, in solid blocks of narrative interspersed with harangues. It is extremely well-written in a terse, measured style of the best tradition; Love is its only affair; nobody under the rank of a Duke is referred to; as Horace Walpole said of Vauxhall in its glory, the floor seems to be of beaten princes. None of these excellencies are in its favour to-day. Why then does it exist? Because it exhibits mental process logically and amusingly; and because it offers a fresh and striking aspect of a situation as old as Abraham.
[2]Madame de Lafayette: La vie et ses Œuvres, par H. Ashton. Cambridge University Press.
Two Dorothys in our literature showed themselves worthy of a name declaratory of so much. Dorothy Osborne was one, Dorothy Wordsworth, much more famous, was another. If I were teacher of the Sixth Form in a girls’ school I should take my class methodically through the pair, satisfied that if I did my duty by them it would have as fair a view of the moral and mystical philosophy of its sex as needs could ask or require. The text-books exist; little but appreciation could be expected from the teacher. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Letters and Journals fill the better part of three small volumes. They need but little annotation, save cross-references to her brother’s poems, and to Coleridge’s. She was the muse of those two, and had perhaps more of the soul, or substance, of poetry in her than either. They informed what she taught them, and she taught them through the great years. Of the two Dorothean voices hers was of the heights. More beautiful interpretation of nature hardly exists in our tongue. “She tells us much, but implies more. We may see deeply into ourselves, but she sees deeply into a deeper self than most of us can discern. It is not only that, knowing her, we are grounded in the rudiments of honour and lovely living; it is to learn that human life can be so lived, and to conclude that of that at least is the Kingdom of Heaven.” If I quote from a paragraph of my own about her, it is only to save myselffrom saying the same thing in other words. It is the only thing to say of a woman long enskied and sainted by her lovers.
Dorothy Osborne, whose little budget of seventy-seven letters and a few scraps more has been exquisitely edited by the late Judge Parry, did not dwell apart: starry as she was, she was much before her world. She was daughter of a stout old cavalier, Sir Peter, and shared with him the troubles of Civil War and sequestration of goods under the Commonwealth. For six years, also, she was the lover and beloved of William Temple, whom, until the end of that term, she had little hope or prospect of marrying. Her father and his had other ideas of the marriage of their children, and means of carrying them out. Sir Peter Osborne had lost heavily by his defence of Guernsey for the King, and sought to re-establish himself in the settlement of Dorothy. Sir John Temple gave his son an allowance and was not disposed to increase it, except for a handsome equivalent from the other side. When Sir Peter died it was no better. Dorothy’s brothers brought up suitor after suitor, of whom Henry Cromwell, the Protector’s second son, was the most formidable, and Sir Justinian Isham, an elderly widower, with four daughters older than herself, the most persistent. She was fairly beset; and when she made her guardians understand that her heart was fixed, the truth came out that they disliked and distrusted William Temple. They doubted his principles, accused him of being sceptical in religion, and (not without cause) of lukewarmness in politics. Temple was a prudent youth, andwas already on the fence, which he rarely left all his life. During the Commonwealth he was a good deal abroad, but whether abroad or at home, neither for the King nor his enemies. He was moderately educated—Macaulay says that he had no Greek—but it may have been too much for the Osbornes. Possibly he gave himself airs, though Dorothy did not think so. However it was, the lovers could only meet by accident, and must correspond under cover. That correspondence, a year and a half of it, is all we have of her writing, and good as it is, the thing it does best of all is to measure the extent of our loss. Love-letters apart—and there must have been the worth of five years or more of them lost—she was writing, we hear, at one time weekly to her bosom-friend, Lady Diana Rich, a beauty of whose mind she had as high an opinion as of her person. All that has gone. Later, when she had been many years married, she made another close friend in Queen Mary II, but the letters which went to her address in what a relative of Dorothy’s describes as a “constant correspondence,” letters which were greatly admired for their “fine style, delicate turn of wit and good sense,” are supposed to have been burnt among her private papers just before the Queen died. So they have gone too, and with them what chance we may have had—as I think, a fair chance—of possessing ourselves of a native Madame de Sévigné. It does not do, and is foolish, to press might-have-beens too far, if only because you cannot press them home. How are you to set off seventy-odd letters, for one thing, against seventeen hundred? There are obvious parallels,however, with Madame de Sévigné which there is no harm in remarking. She and Dorothy were almost exactly coevals. Both were born in 1627; Madame died in 1696, Miladi Temple (as she became) in 1695. Each was well-born, each had one absorbing attachment, each was handsome. Dorothy, in the portrait prefixed to theWayfareredition, has a calm, grave face, remarkable for its broad brow, level-gazing, uncompromising eyes, and fine Greek nose, not at all a “petit nez carré.” She looks, as her letters prove her to have been, a young woman of character and breeding. She does not show the enchanting mobility of Madame de Sévigné, nor can she have had it. At any rate, she was a beautiful woman, whose conversation, as I judge, would have been distinguished by originality and a “delicate turn of wit,” as her letters certainly are. Further resemblances, if there are any, must be sought in the documents, to which I shall now turn.
We are to read a woman’s love-letters, always “kittle work,” however long ago the pen has fallen still, whether they are the letters of a fond mother to her child or of a girl to her sweetheart; yet there is no reason why we should shrink from the one intrusion and make light of the other. Indeed, of the two, it is Madame de Sévigné who displays the pageant of her bleeding heart, and is able more than once to make the judicious grieve, and even the injudicious uncomfortable. There was nothing of the “jolie païenne” in Dorothy Osborne. She served no dangerous idolatry. Thereis not a phrase in her touching and often beautiful letters, not even in those where her heart wails within her and the sound of it enfolds and enhances her words—not there, even, is there a word or a phrase which imperils her maiden dignity. She loved, in her own way of speaking, “passionately and nobly.” It is perfectly true. At all times, under all stresses, her nobility held her passion bitted and bridled. She rode it on the curb, not, as was Madame’s delightful weakness, “la bride sur le cou.” Her extreme tenderness for the man she loved is implicit in every line. Nobody could mistake; but when, man-like, he seemed to demand of her more and ever more testimony, she was not to be turned further from her taste in expression than from “dear” to “dearest.” Towards the end of the long probation—and in our seventy-seven letters we have, in fact, the last year and a half of it—a certain quickening of the pulse is discernible in her writing, a certain breathlessness in the phraseology. “Dear! Shall we ever be so happy, think you? Ah! I dare not hope it,” she writes to him in one of the later letters, and cutting short the formalities, ends very plainly, “Dear, I am yours.” Nothing more ardent escapes her throughout, yet in that very frugality of utterance, never was exalted and faithful love made more manifest. When—as did happen—misunderstandings were magnified by Temple’s jealousy, and aggravated by her honesty, she was hurt and showed it. Separation then seemed the only remedy; despair gave her eloquence, and we have for once a real cry of the heart:
“If you have ever loved me, do not refuse the last request I shall ever make you; ’tis to preserve yourself from the violence of your passion. Vent it all upon me; call me and think me what you please; make me, if it be possible, more wretched than I am. I’ll bear it without the least murmur. Nay, I deserve it all, for had you never seen me you had certainly been happy.... I am the most unfortunate woman breathing, but I was never false. No; I call Heaven to witness that if my life could satisfy for the least injury my fortune has done you ... I would lay it down with greater joy than any person ever received a crown; and if I ever forget what I owe you, or ever entertain a thought of kindness for any person in the world besides, may I live a long and miserable life. ’Tis the greatest curse I can invent: if there be a greater, may I feel it. This is all I can say. Tell me if it be possible I can do anything for you, and tell me how I can deserve your pardon for all the trouble I have given you. I would not die without it.”
Eloquent, fierce words, indignant, dry with offended honour, but certainly not lacking in nobility. It is the highest note struck in the series, and can hurt nobody’s delicacy to read now. Happily the storm passed over, the sky cleared, and the sun came out. From the sounding of that wounded note there is adiminuendoto be observed. The very next letter is lower in tone, though she has some sarcasms for him which probably did him good. In the next but one: “I will not reproach you how ill an interpretation you made (of the attentions of Henry Cromwell), becausewe’ll have no more quarrels.” Nor did they, though they were still a year off marriage. So much of the love affair which called the letters into being I must needs have given. I shall not refer to it again.
Her head went into her letters as well as her heart; and though love was naturally the fount of her inspiration, she wrote as much to entertain and enhearten her lover as to relieve herself. There is enough literary quality in what we have left to make it a valuable possession. It is by no means only to be learned from her with what courage a seven years of star-crossed love may be borne; how gently the fretting and chafing of a self-conscious man turned; how modesty can veil passion without hiding it. At her discretion raillery can be pungent without ceasing to be playful, and the rough and dirty currency of the world handled without soiling her fingers, with a freedom bred of innocence of thought. This still and well-bred Dorothy was a critic of her day, and though she was pious had no fugitive and cloistered virtue. All about her were living the survivors of a Court not quite so profligate, perhaps, as that of the first or the third Stuart king, but profligate enough. It was not the less so for being in hiding. She did not approve of much that her acquaintance did, but she accepted it and, as far as might be, excused it. “I am altogether of your mind,” she writes, “that my Lady Sunderland is not to be followed in her marrying fashion, and that Mr. Smith never appeared less her servant than in desiring it. To speak truth, ’twas convenient for neither of them, and in meaner people had beenplain undoing of one another, which I cannot understand to be kindness of either side. She had lost by it much of the repute she had gained by keeping herself a widow; it was then believed that wit and discretion were to be reconciled in her person that have so seldom been persuaded to meet in anybody else. But we are all mortal.” From that, which is temperate statement, go on to consider a passage of temperate argument which is surely notable in a girl of her age. She was twenty-six when she wrote:
“’Tis strange to see the folly that possesses the young people of this age, and the liberties they take to themselves. I have the charity to believe they appear very much worse than they are, and that the want of a Court to govern themselves by is in great part the cause of their ruin. Though that was no perfect school of virtue, yet vice there wore her mask, and appeared so unlike herself that she gave no scandal. Such as were really as discreet as they seemed to be gave good example, and the eminency of their condition made others strive to imitate them, or at least they durst not own a contrary course. All who had good principles and inclinations were encouraged in them, and such as had neither were forced to put on a handsome disguise that they might not be out of countenance at themselves.”
Is that not excellent discourse upon the subject of “young people” from a girl of six-and-twenty? Dorothy, it will be seen, writes the modern as opposed to the seventeenth-century English, but does it in mid-career of the century. Comparison with her contemporary, the Duchess ofNewcastle, is proof enough. “Madam,” writes that very “blue” lady, “here was the Lord W. N. to visit me, whose discourse, as you say, is like a pair of bellows to a spark of fire in a chimney, where are coals or wood, for as this spark would sooner go out than inkindle the fuel, if it were not blown, so his discourse doth set the hearer’s brain on a light flame, which heats the wit, and inlightens the understanding.” And so on—like a wounded snake. Dorothy, I think, was almost the first to do what Milton never did, and what Dryden was to make the standard of good prose. James Howell preceded her slightly in that use, but was not so sure a hand at it. In cogency and simplicity of expression hers is like good eighteenth-century letter-writing. She apologises to her lover for “disputing again.” He had been a churl to find fault with such sagacious reflections.
There is no sign that she was the least bit “blue,” though she read the books of thatcoterie, and esteemed them, with reservations. She had the Cléopâtre of Calprenède, theGrand Cyrusof la Scudéri, and passed them on, volume by volume, to Temple, remarking of “L’amant non aimé” in the latter that he was an ass. She had Lord Broghill’sParthenissahot from the press. “’Tis handsome language,” she says of it. “You would know it to be writ by a person of good quality, though you were not told it; but, on the whole, I am not much taken with it.” The stories were too much like all the others, she thought—and certainly they were: “the ladies are so kind they make no sport.” One thing inParthenissamade her angry. “I confess I have no patience for ourfaiseurs de Romancewhen they make women court. It will never enter into my head that ’tis possible any woman can love where she is not first loved; and much less that if they should do that, they could have the face to own it.” That is high doctrine, yet inquiry yields the best sort of support to it.
So far from being aprécieuse, Dorothy quarrelled withParthenissaon account of preciosity. “Another fault I find, too, in the style—’tis affected.Ambitionedis a great word with him, andignore;my concern, orof great concernis, it seems, properer thanconcernment?” She expects Temple, nevertheless, to fit her up with the newest town-phrases. “Pray what is meant bywellnessandunwellness; and why isto some extremebetter thanto some extremity?” She has her own ideas about style. “All letters, methinks, should be free and easy as one’s discourse; not studied as an oration, nor made up of hard words like a charm.” Then she pillories “a gentleman I knew, who would never say ‘the weather grew cold,’ but that ‘winter began to salute us.’” She had “no patience with such coxcombs.” A jolly word of her own is “pleasinger.” I have not met it anywhere else. “’Twill be pleasinger to you, I am sure, to tell you how fond I am of your lock.” His “lock” was a lock of hair which he had sent her on demand before he went to Ireland. For a moment it charmed her out of her reserve. “Cut no more on’t, I would not have it spoiled for the world. If you love me be careful on’t.” For once she lets herself go. “I would not have the rule absolutely true without exceptions that hard hairs are ill-natured, for then I should be so. But I can allowthat soft hairs are good, and so are you, or I am deceived as much as you are if you think I do not love you enough. Tell me, my dearest, am I? You will not be if you think I am yours.” That charming little outbreak, writtenà bride abattue, concludes a letter which begins, as all of them do, with the formal “Sir.” In its complete unaffectedness and spontaneity it is not far behindNotre Dame des Rochers.
To return to Dorothy’s reading, I do not know that, country for country, she was far behind her contemporary. Novel apart, she is reading the travels of Mendez Pinto, quotes the action, not the words, of Shakespeare’sRichard III, has Spanish proverbs at command, writes a note in French, takes a part inThe Lost Lady, knows Cowley’s poems, and was a “devote” of Dr. Jeremy Taylor. From that goodly divine she takes a long argument upon resignation of the will, nearly word for word, and holds it up for Temple’s admiration. She is more reticent about her religious opinions than Madame was, having to deal with a lover suspected of being something of a Gallic instead of a daughter adept in Descartes. If she was primed with Jeremy Taylor she was in a good way. Yet I don’t know what that doctor would have said to this:
“We complain of this world,” she says, “and the variety of crosses and afflictions it abounds in, and for all this, who is weary on’t (more than in discourse), who thinks with pleasure of leaving it, or preparing for the next? We see old folks that have outlived all the comforts of life, desire to continue it, and nothing can wean us from thefolly of preferring a mortal being, subject to great infirmity and unavoidable decays, before an immortal one, and all the glories that are promised with it.”
“Is not this very like preaching?” she asks. It is less like the preaching of the author ofHoly Dyingthan that of six-and-twenty in love; but undoubtedly it proceeds from common experience. She was merciless to bad sermons, able to make such good ones of her own. “God forgive me, I was as near laughing yesterday where I should not. Would you believe that I had the grace to go hear a sermon upon a week-day?” Stephen Marshall was the preacher, a roaring divine of the prevailing type. “He is so famed that I expected rare things of him, and seriously I listened to him at first with as much reverence as if he had been St. Paul; and what do you think he told us? Why, that if there were no Kings, no Queens, no lords, no ladies, nor gentlemen, nor gentlewomen in the world, ’twould be no loss at all to God Almighty. This we had over some forty times, which made me remember it whether I would or not.... Yet, I’ll say for him, he stood stoutly for tithes, though, in my opinion, few deserved them less than he; and it may be he would be better without them.” Marshall should have known better than to try his levelling doctrine at Chicksands.
To the making of all good letter-writers, all those to whom it is a natural vent for the emotions, goes quality, that which we call style, an entire naturalness of expression turned in a manner of one’s own, an incommunicable something notto be mistaken. All the best have it; the second-best have something of it. Into literary quality goes, of course, moral quality,l’homme même. Now, Dorothy Osborne has quality: little as we have, there is enough to show that. She can be playful, but not sparkle, not ripple like the Marquise nor set a whole letter twinkling like the sea in a fresh wind; hers is a still wind. Nor has she such news to impart, to be “le dessus de touts ses panniers.” Chicksands was not Paris. She has spirit, but not gallantry. Madame de Sévigné’s chosen defence was always attack. Dorothy is as quick to see her advantage, but has a more staid manner of execution. She will be slower to believe herself menaced; and when she discovers it will reason plainly with the offender, as much for his good as for her justification. Take this for an example. Temple, who was a fussy man, a precisian, had been scolding her for fruit-eating. You could hardly expect a lady to approve lectures upon her digestion from her lover. She replied:
“In my opinion you do not understand the laws of friendship aright. ’Tis generally believed it owes its birth to an agreement and conformity of humours, and that it lives no longer than ’tis preserved by the mutual care of those that bred it.” Is there no style in that? “’Tis wholly governed by equality, and can there be such a thing in it as distinction of power? No, sure, if we are friends we must both command and both obey alike; indeed, a mistress and a servant sounds otherwise; but that is ceremony and this is truth. Yet what reason had I to furnish you with a stick to beat myself withal, or desire thatyou should command, that do it so severely?” Observe her conduct of the relative there! “I must eat fruit no longer than I could be content you should be in a fever; is not that an absolute forbidding of me? It has frighted me just now from a basket of the most tempting cherries that e’er I saw, though I know you did not mean that I should eat none. But if you had I think I should have obeyed you.”
Evidently she had tossed her head over his dictation; but how well in hand is her temper, how admirable her style! It is very much in the manner of Madame when her querulous daughter had hurt her feelings; and entirely in that manner Madame would throw up the sponge at the end of a successful attack—entirely as Dorothy does here, with her, “If you had I think I should have obeyed you.” Dorothy is not, however, so quick to veer from the stormy to the rainy quarter. She can be fierce, as I have shown, when her feelings are overstrained, but there is no hysterical passion. Modesty forbade. “Love is a terrible word,” she says, “and I should blush to death if anything but a letter accused me on’t.” She could be bold on such occasions; she could be as saucy as Rosalind, and as tender. When it is a case of his going to Ireland, on business of his father’s, which may advance their personal affair, she urges him to be off. But when the hour has come—“You must give Nan leave to cut off a lock of your hair for me.... Oh, my heart! What a sigh was there! I will not tell you how many this journey causes, nor the fears and apprehensions I have for you. No, I long to be rid of you—am afraidyou will not go soon enough. Do not you believe this? No, my dearest, I know you do not, whate’er you say....” Any good girl in love would feel like that, but not everyone could let you hear the quickened breath in a letter three hundred years old.
Sévigné was wise, and so is Dorothy. She read and could criticise, she read and remembered. With less philosophy, and no fatalism, she looked her world in the face, and had no illusions about it. But she was in love, and it was a good world. Cheerfulness kept breaking in. “What an age we live in, where ’tis a miracle if in ten couples that are married, two of them live so as not to publish to the world that they cannot agree.” Yet she thinks that one should follow the Saviour’s precept, take up the cross and follow. She believes that the trouble is mostly of the woman’s making, for as for the husband, if he grumbles, and the wife says nothing, he will stop for lack of nutriment, and nobody be any the worse. A splenetic husband of her acquaintance had the trick, when harassed, of rising in the night and banging the table with a club. His wife provided a stout cushion for the table, and was not disturbed.
Sévigné is merry, and so is Dorothy, though much more demure. In her seventy letters you will find notours de force—nothing like the “prairie” letter, the marriage-of-Mademoiselle, or the “incendie” letter. She can touch you off a situation in a phrase excellently well, as when after a quarrel comes a reconciliation between her and her brother Henry, and she says, “’Tis wonderful to see what curtseys and legs pass between us; and as before we were thought thekindest brother and sister, we are certainly now the most complimental couple in England”; or, asking “Is it true my Lord Whitelocke goes Ambassador?” she comments upon him, “He was never meant for a courtier at home, I believe. Yet ’tis a gracious Prince.” Another Commonwealth lord, whose title depended upon the standing of the Court of Chancery, has a flick in the same letter: “’Twill be sad news for my Lord Keble’s son. He will have nothing left to say when ‘my Lord, my father,’ is taken from him.” Those are both brisk and pleasant; more ambitious is her discussion of the “ingredients” of a husband, which opens with sketches of impossible husbands. He “must not be so much of a country gentleman as to understand nothing but horses and dogs, and be fonder of either than his wife”; nor one “whose aim reaches no further than to be Justice of the Peace, and once in his life High Sheriff”; nor “a thing that began the world in a free school ... and is at his furthest when he reaches the Inns of Court.” He must not be “a town gallant neither, that lives in a tavern and an ordinary,” who “makes court to all the women he sees, thinks they believe him, and laughs and is laughed at equally”; nor a “travelled Monsieur, whose head is all feather inside and outside, that can talk of nothing but dances and duels, and has courage enough to wear slashes when everybody else dies of cold to see him.” In fact, “he must love me, and I him, as much as we are capable of.” Those impersonations might have come as well from Belmont as from Chicksands.
I said just now that we have no “prairie” letter from Dorothy. We have something not far from it, though, and I will give as much of it as I dare. It is of her very best in the way of unforced, happy description; but after it I must give no more. The date of it is early May, 1653:
“You ask me how I pass my time here. I can give you a perfect account not only of what I do for the present, but of what I am likely to do this seven years if I stay here so long. I rise in the morning reasonably early, and before I am ready I go round the house till I am weary of that, and then into the garden till it grows too hot for me. About ten o’clock I think of making me ready, and when that’s done I go into my father’s chamber, and from thence to dinner, where my cousin Mollie and I sit in great state in a room and at a table that would hold a great many more. After dinner we sit and talk till Mr. B. (a suitor of Dorothy’s, a Mr. Levinus Bennet) comes in question, and then I am gone. The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and about six or seven o’clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit in the shade singing of ballads. I go to them and compare their voices and beauties to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of, and find a vast difference there; but, trust me, I think these are as innocent as those could be. I talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so.”
I could go on to empty the whole paragraph on to the page, for it is all excellent; but willstop with that happily rounded period. Charm, or the deuce, is in it.
Beyond it I will not go. Too little straw has been allowed to the making of my brick. With twice as much more—with some of the letters to Lady Diana or Queen Mary, freed from the preoccupations of a love affair—who can say that we might not have had something to set off against the letters to Mesdames de Lafayette, de Coulanges, de Guitant? We have something very distinctive and charming, at any rate, enough to certify us that we have missed of a letter-writer of excellence who need not have feared comparison with our best. She had not the vivacity, or the opportunities of Lady Mary; but she had what that lively observer missed of, a heart wherewith to inform her writing. She had not the wit of Lady Harriet Granville, but she had more humanity. I would not put her up, in a Court of Claims, to “walk” before Mrs. Carlyle, or plead her sagacity and tenderness against that unhappy woman’s brilliancy. Yet who would hesitate in the choice of one of them for correspondent? Whose book would you sooner have at the bed’s head? Such questions, however, do not arise. You judge Literature like coins at the Mint. You are either good or bad. If you ring false—out you go.
Moll Flanders, which has now received the large octavo honours due to a classic, was written, Defoe tells us, in 1683. The statement is almost certainly part of the cheat, for it was published in 1722, two years afterRobinson Crusoe; and if it had been true he would have performed a feat which has never been equalled, that of writing his first novel with the accomplishment shown in that of his prime. Nothing in the technique ofCrusoeshows any advance uponMoll Flanders. Its greater popularity is, of course, due to its matter: it is moresimpatico, more moving, more endearing to youth. The adventures upon the island are more arbitrary and more surprising. They come from outside the hero, not from his inside. Anything shocking may happen upon a desert island, even the greatest shock of all, which is to find that it is not deserted.Suave mari magno... the tag holds good when you are thrilled by a tale in the first person. The flesh creeps; but it is like being tickled by a kindly hand. The pleasure to be had fromMoll Flanderscomes when we know enough of the world to have need of large allowances. Then it is that we are interested in the liabilities of character, and love to see the oracle worked out. InMoll Flanderswe do. With the single premise that Moll was the abandoned child of a thief and baggage, cast upon the parish by gypsies, everything that happens to her follows as inevitably as night the day. She engages thecompassion of a genteel family, and is taken in quasi-adoption. She grows up with the children of the house, petted by the daughters, and in due time, naturally, by the sons, one of whom “undoes” her. But by the time that happens we know something of Moll’s temperament, and nod sagaciously at what, we say, was bound to be. So it goes on from stave to stave to make out the promise of the title-page that, born in Newgate, she was “Twelve Year aWhore, five times aWife(whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year aThief, Eight Year a transportedFeloninVirginia, at last grewRich, liv’d Honest, and died aPenitent.” It sounds uncommonly like Boccaccio’s tale of the Princess of Babylon, not at all unlikeGil Blas; but the point is that it is most of all like Life, that the lurid programme is smoothly and punctually kept, and that we never withhold our assent for a moment—not even from the added statement that it was “Written from her own Memorandums.” It is no more necessary to believe that than that it was written in 1683; but there is no difficulty in believing either.
Defoe, if he began to write novels at fifty-eight, came by his method as Athené by her ægis; it sprang fully armed from his brain. He never varied it for a worse, and could not have for a better. It was to tell his story in plain English without emotion, and to get his facts right. That is his secret, which nobody since his time has ever worked so well. ThePolice Newsstyle has often been used, and many a writer has laboured after his facts. Some have succeeded—very few—in smothering their feelings, and some, of course,have had no feelings to smother. Defoe alone accomplishes his ends with consummate mastery. He is certainly our greatest realist, and there are few in France to beat him. Perhaps the nearest approach to him was made by the Abbé Prevost inManon Lescaut(1731)—but put Zola beside him if you would judge his method fairly. Zola, who went about his business with stuffed notebooks, succeeded in various aims of the novelist, but not in commanding assent. He could not control himself; the poor man had an itch. Artistically speaking, he did unpardonable things. Some of the bestiality ofLa Terremight have happened in a Norman village; a Norman villagemighthave been called Rognes. To conjoin the two in a realistic romance is paltry. It absolutely disenchants the reader, and gives away the writer and his malady with both hands. You may call a town Eatanswill in a satire; butLa Terreis not a satire. As forManon, astonishingly documented as it is, the conviction which it carries does not survive perusal, though it revives in every re-perusal. Its intention, which is rather to suggest than to narrate, to provoke than to satisfy, is apparent when the book is shut. No such aims are to be detected inMoll Flanders, concerned apparently with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
The triumph of the method, used as Defoe only can use it, remains to be told.Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.We can all see round Moll Flanders, behind her as well as before. The current of the tale, every coil and eddy and backwash of it, is not only exactly like life, it puts usin a position to appraise life. Conviction of such a matter, rare as it is, is not so difficult to secure as the understanding of it. There are, of course, extenuating circumstances in every guilty course. One finds them for oneself as a neighbour, in the jury box, on the bench. One finds them or invents them. InMoll Flandersthey steal upon us unawares until, quite suddenly, we find ourselves with her in a human relationship. Her close shaves, her near-run things in shop-lifting give us thrills; but when she is rash enough to steal a horse we are aghast. Mad-woman! how can she dispose of a horse in a common lodging-house? When she is finally lagged we agonise with her. Why? We know that she could not help herself. But there’s more than that. She is never put beyond our moral pale. She steals from children, but suffers both shame and sorrow. She robs a poor householder of her valuables in a fire, but cannot forget the treachery. She picks the pocket of a generous lover when he is drunk, but repents and confesses. He forgives her, and so do we. All her normal relations with her fellow-creatures are warm with the milk of human kindness. For instance, she puts herself, for business purposes, in the disposition of a “Governess,” that is, an old gentlewoman who is procuress, midwife, baby-farmer, and receiver of stolen goods. But the pair are on happy and natural terms. Moll calls her Mother; the old thing calls Moll Child; and when she is transported as a convicted thief she entrusts “Mother” with all her little fortune, and is faithfully served in that and other concerns. The pair of them, rascals together, are badlots, if you will—and good sorts too. That’s the virtue of the realistic method when you are not on the look out for bad smells.
In her dealings with my sex, certainly she was often and unguardedly a wife, as well as something else not so proper. Yet kindness was her only fault. Whatever else she may have been as a wife, she was a good one, faithful, affectionate, sympathetic, and most responsive. If the young man who undid her had kept his promises, I daresay she would have lived to be Mayoress of Colchester and mother to some sixteen children, without a stain upon her character. As it was, she must have had half that number. She is never a beast. She never revels, nor wallows, nor is besotted; she is no slave to appetite. She plays hazard one night and wins a matter of fifty guineas. She will not play again for fear of becoming a gamester. She continues a thief for many years, though often moved to break away. Why does she not break away?
“Though by this job I was become considerably richer than before, yet the resolution I had formerly taken of leaving off this horrid trade when I had gotten a little more, did not return, but I must still get farther, and more; and the avarice joined so with the success, that I had no more thoughts of coming to a timely alteration of life, though without it I could expect no safety, no tranquillity in the possession of what I had so wickedly gained; but a little more, and a little more, was the case still.”
“Though by this job I was become considerably richer than before, yet the resolution I had formerly taken of leaving off this horrid trade when I had gotten a little more, did not return, but I must still get farther, and more; and the avarice joined so with the success, that I had no more thoughts of coming to a timely alteration of life, though without it I could expect no safety, no tranquillity in the possession of what I had so wickedly gained; but a little more, and a little more, was the case still.”
What could be more human, and on our footingmore reasonable, than that? That, in fact, which savedThe Beggar’s Operafrom being an immoral, cynical, even a flagrant work, was precisely that which gives Moll Flanders our sympathy—its large humanity. There is heart in every average human being, as well as much vice and an amazing amount of indolence; but to see it there you must have it yourself, and to exhibit it there you must be a good deal of a genius. We feel for Moll without esteeming her: we say, “There but for the grace of God....” What saves us? Well, caution, timidity, the likes of those; but chiefly the grace of God.