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.