Gamaliel Bradford

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ With the more common domestic and social feelings we are on surer ground. There is a universal concordance [62] 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. ”

“ 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 [41] 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. ”

“ It is most curious to observe Eugénie’s relation to this new sister. Even for a mother, who has her own distinct, [184] 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 [60] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 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 [149] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”