[BORN 1766. DIED 1817.]
JEFFREY.
The most powerful writer that her country has produced since the time of
Voltaire and Rousseau, and the greatest writer, of a woman, that any
time or any country has produced. Her taste perhaps is not quite pure,
and her style is too irregular and ambitious. These faults may even go
deeper. Her passion for effect, and the tone of exaggeration which it
naturally produces, have probably interfered occasionally with the
soundness of her judgment, and given a suspicious colouring to some of
her representations of fact. At all events, they have rendered her
impatient of the humbler task of completing her explanatory details, or
stating in their order all the premises of her reasonings. She gives her
history in abstracts, and her theories in aphorisms; and the greater
part of her works, in place of presenting that systematic unity, from
which the highest degrees of strength and beauty and clearness must ever
be derived, may be fairly described as a collection of striking
fragments, in which a great deal of repetition does by no means diminish
the effect of a good deal of inconsistency. In those same works,
however, whether we consider them as fragments or as systems, we do not
hesitate to say that there are more of original and profound
observations, more new images, greater sagacity, combined with higher
imagination, and more of the true philosophy of the passions, the
politics, and the literature of her contemporaries, than in any other
author we can now remember.
She has great eloquence on all subjects, and a singular pathos in
representing those bitterest agonies of the spirit in which wretchedness
is aggravated by remorse, or by regrets that partake of its character.
Though it is difficult to resist her when she is in earnest, we cannot
say that we agree in all her opinions, or approve of all her sentiments.
She overrates the importance of literature, either in determining the
character, or affecting the happiness of mankind; and she theorises too
confidently on its past and its future history. On subjects like this,
we have not yet facts enough for so much philosophy, and must be
contented, we fear for a long time to come, to call many things
accidental which it would be more satisfactory to refer to determinate
causes. In her estimate of the happiness and her notions of the wisdom
of private life, we think her both unfortunate and erroneous. She makes
passions and high sensibilities a great deal too indispensable, and
varnishes over all pictures too uniformly with the glue of an
extravagant or affected enthusiasm. She represents men, in short, as a
great deal more unhappy, more depraved, and more energetic than they
are, and seems to respect them the more for it. In her politics, she is
far more unexceptionable. She is everywhere the warm friend and animated
advocate of liberty, and of liberal, practical, and philanthropic
principles. On these subjects we cannot blame her enthusiasm, which has
nothing in it vindictive or provoking, and are far more inclined to envy
than to reprove that sanguine and buoyant temper of mind which, after
all she has seen and suffered, still leads her to overrate, in our
apprehension, both the merits of past attempts at political
amelioration, and the chances of their success hereafter. It is in that
futurity, we fear, and in the hopes that make it present, that the
lovers of mankind must yet for a while console themselves for the
disappointments which still seem to beset them. If Madame de Stael,
however, predicts with too much confidence, it must be admitted that her
labours have a powerful tendency to realise her predictions. Her
writings are all full of the most animating views of the improvement of
our social condition and the means by which it may be effected, the most
striking refutations of prevailing errors on these great subjects, and
the most persuasive expostulations with those who may think their
interest or their honour concerned in maintaining them. Even they who
are the least inclined to agree with her must admit that there is much
to be learned from her writings; and we can give them no higher praise
than to say that their tendency is not only to promote the interests of
philanthropy and independence, but to soften rather than exasperate the
prejudices to which they are opposed.
With our manners in society she is not quite well pleased, though she is
kind enough to ascribe our deficiencies to the most honourable causes.
In commiserating the comparative dulness of our social talk, however,
has not this philosophic observer a little overlooked the effects of
national tastes and habits? and is it not conceivable at least that we
who are used to it may really have as much satisfaction in our own
hum-drum way of seeing each other, as our more sprightly neighbours in
their exquisite assemblies?
MADAME DE LA ROCHEJAQUELEIN.
[BORN 1772. DIED 1857.]
JEFFREY.
This hard-fated woman was very young and newly married when she was
thrown, by the adverse circumstances of the time, into the very heart of
those deplorable contests [the war in La Vendee, during the first and
maddest years of the French Republic]; and without pretending to any
other information than she could draw from her own experience, and
scarcely presuming to pass any judgment upon the merits or demerits of
the cause, she has made up her memoirs of a clear and dramatic
description of acts in which she was a sharer, or scenes of which she
was an eye-witness, and of the characters and histories of the many
distinguished individuals who partook with her of their glories and
sufferings. The irregular and undisciplined wars which it was her
business to describe were naturally far more prolific of extraordinary
incidents, unexpected turns of fortune, and striking displays of
individual talent, and vice and virtue, than the more solemn movements
of national hostility, where everything is in a great measure provided
and foreseen, and where the inflexible subordination of rank, and the
severe exactions of a limited duty, not only take away the inducement,
but the opportunity, for those exaltations of personal feeling and
adventure which produce the most lively interest, and lead to the most
animating results.
This lady had some right, in truth, to be delicate and royalist beyond
the ordinary standard. Her father, the Marquis de Donnison, had an
employment about the person of the king, in virtue of which he had
apartments in the Palace of Versailles, in which splendid abode Madame
de la Rochejaquelein was born, and continued constantly to reside in the
very focus of royal influence and glory till the whole of its
unfortunate inhabitants were compelled to leave it by the fury of that
mob which escorted them to Paris in 1789. She had, like most French
ladies of distinction, been destined from her infancy to be the wife of
M. de Lescure, a near relation of her mother, and the representative of
the ancient and noble family of Salgues in Poitou.
The picture of the war [in which Madame de la Rochejaquelein figured so
prominently, and in which she lost her young husband] is shaded with
deep horrors. The convention issued the barbarous decree that the
country [La Vendee], which still continued its resistance, should be
desolated, that the whole inhabitants should be exterminated without
distinction of age or sex, the habitations consumed with fire, and the
trees cut down by the axe. A multitude of sanguinary conflicts ensued,
and the insurgents succeeded in resisting this desolating invasion.
Among the slain in one of those engagements the republicans found the
body of a young woman, which, Madame de la Rochejaquelein informs us,
gave occasion to a number of idle reports, many giving it out that it
was she herself, or a sister of M. de la Rochejaquelein, who had no
sister, or a new Joan of Arc, who had kept up the spirit of the
peasantry by her enthusiastic predictions. The truth was, that it was
the body of an innocent peasant who had always lived a remarkably quiet
and pious life till recently before this action, when she had been
seized with an irresistible desire to take a part in the conflict. [She
deserved to be "a woman of history," but her name has not been
preserved.] She had discovered herself some time before to Madame de la
Rochejaquelein, and begged of her a shift of a peculiar fabric. The
night before the battle, she also revealed herself to M. de la
Rochejaquelein, asking him to give her a pair of shoes, and promising to
behave in such a manner in the morrow's fight that he would never think
of parting with her. Accordingly, she kept near his person through the
whole of the battle, and conducted herself with the most heroic bravery.
Two or three times, in the very heat of the fight, she said to him: "No,
mon general, you shall not get before me; I shall always be closer up to
the enemy even than you." Early in the day she was hurt pretty severely
in the hand, but held it up, laughing, to her general, and said, "It is
nothing at all." In the end of the battle, she was surrounded in a
charge, and fell fighting like a desperado. There were about ten other
women who took up arms, Madame de la Rochejaquelein says, in this cause:
two sisters under fifteen, and a tall beauty who wore the dress of an
officer.
At the end, after the loss of her husband, Madame de la Rochejaquelein
was told that it was impossible to resist the attack that was to be made
next day, and was advised to seek her safety in flight and disguise,
without the loss of an instant. She set out accordingly with her mother,
on a gloomy day in December, under the conduct of a drunken peasant;
and, after being out most of the night, at length obtained shelter in a
dirty farm-house, from which, in the course of the day, she had the
misery of seeing her unfortunate countrymen scattered over the whole
open country, chased and butchered without mercy by the republicans, who
now took a final vengeance for all the losses they had sustained. She
had long been clothed in shreds and patches, and needed no disguise to
conceal her quality. She was sometimes hidden in the mill when the
troopers came to search for fugitives in her lonely retreat, and often
sent in the midst of winter to herd the sheep or cattle of her faithful
and compassionate host, along with his raw-boned daughter.
While skulking about in this state of peril and desolation, they had
glimpses and occasional rencounters with some of their former
companions, whom similar misfortunes had driven upon similar schemes of
concealment. In this wretched condition, the time of Madame de la
Rochejaquelein's confinement drew on; and after a thousand frights and
disasters, she was delivered of two daughters, one of whom died within a
fortnight. The result at length was, that Madame de la Rochejaquelein,
after several struggles with pride and principle, was prevailed to
repair to Nantes, to avail herself of an amnesty.
MADAME RECAMIER.
[BORN 1777. DIED 1849.]
DAVENPORT ADAMS.
The daughter of Monsieur Bernard, a notary of Lyons, born in 1777, and
married at fifteen to Monsieur Recamier, a wealthy banker of
forty-three. She was a beauty, and she knew it; the idol of that gay,
irresistible French society which knows so well how to repay the
devotion of its votaries; the theme of song, the goddess of _la beau
monde_; very capable of love, but denied its natural exercise as wife
and mother. If her path then ran among the flowers, not the less did she
skirt the brink of the precipice; and her friends' advice and counsel
were often needed and always welcome. She did not disdain the flatteries
of her admirers; often she encouraged them to an extent that in England
would have been considered criminal; but from the testimony of impartial
witnesses, it seems clear that she never overstepped the bounds of
virtue. She was the only woman, said Charles James Fox, "who united the
attractions of pleasure to those of modesty;" but a woman who is always
travelling on the verge of danger needs such a friend as Matthieu de
Montmorency to counsel her in time.
Fox was in Paris in 1802 when Madame Recamier was at the zenith of her
reputation. He almost divided with her the allegiance of the gay world.
The Parisian beaux imitated his costume, and the Parisian shop-windows
were crowded with his portraits. Between the statesman and the beauty so
close an intimacy was established that scandal made busy with it. She
called upon him one day to accompany her in a drive along the
Boulevards. "Before you came," said she, "I was the fashion; it is a
point of honour, therefore, that I should not seem jealous of you." When
sitting with her in her box at the opera, a copy of an ode was placed in
the hands of each, in which Fox was panegyrised as Jupiter, and Madame
Recamier as Venus.
The failure of Monsieur Recamier in 1806 affected her health, and she
went to spend the summer months of 1807 with Madame de Stael at Coppet.
Among the illustrious residents at Geneva at the time was Prince
Augustus of Prussia, a nephew of Frederick the Great, and a handsome
young man of twenty-four. He fell violently in love with the Parisian
beauty, who was by no means indifferent to the passion he openly
displayed. He offered her his hand if she could obtain a divorce from
her husband, whom half Paris [according to an old scandal] declared to
be her father. Madame was not unwilling to be a princess, and she wrote
to her husband proposing a divorce. Monsieur Recamier, in reply,
expressed his willingness, but at the same time appealed to her better
feelings. Years afterwards the love-suit dropped, and the prince,
instead of a wife, received her portrait. Other lovers followed, and her
career came near its close. In 1849 the cholera broke out in Paris.
Madame Recamier was not afraid of dying, but she shrunk from death in so
terrible a form. To avoid its ravages she removed to the Bibliotheque
Nationale, but she could not escape from fate. On the 10th of May she
was seized with the premonitory symptoms; on the 11th she was a corpse.
She had completed nearly two-and-seventy years when she was removed from
life by a death which of all others she most dreaded.
In her time she played a conspicuous part; was constantly upon the gay
and glittering stage; the audience applauded her loudly, and illustrious
hands flung at her garlands and bouquets. Now that the applause has died
out, now that the lamps burn dimly, now that the silent stage is given
up to shadows, we wonder what there was in her acting to secure her so
wide a fame. We look in vain for a flash of genius, for a burst of noble
emotion. Vain, greedy of admiration, an errant coquette, a somewhat
frivolous intruder on the threshold of criminal passion,--what was she
more? A beauty? Yes, but could beauty alone have secured her so wide a
repute among her contemporaries? She did not even converse brilliantly,
like a Du Deffand or a De Stael. She did not write charming epistles,
like a De Sevigne, and yet she was assiduously courted by famous wits
and accomplished men of letters. Partly we may suppose her celebrity to
have arisen from her profession of liberal principles under the stern
_regime_ of a Bonaparte; partly it was owing to the tact with which she
drew out the best qualities, and flattered the _amour propre_ of her
visitors.
MARY BRUNTON.
[BORN 1778. DIED 1818.]
DR BRUNTON.
Mary Brunton, [authoress of the novels "Self-Control" and "Discipline,"
was the only daughter of Colonel Thomas Balfour of Elwick, and of
Frances Ligonier, only daughter of Colonel Francis Ligonier, the brother
of Field-Marshal the Earl of Ligonier. From her sixteenth year (although
her mother is spoken of as still alive at a much later date), it is
stated that the entire charge of her father's household devolved upon
her, and left her very little time for anything else. Thus matters
continued till she was nearly twenty. Meanwhile her future husband, Dr
Brunton, and she had met, when or where we are not informed.] Dr Brunton
merely says: "About this time, Viscountess Wentworth, who had formerly
been the wife of Mrs Balfour's brother, the second Earl Ligonier,
proposed that Mary, her god-daughter, should reside with her in London.
What influence this alteration might have had on her after-life is left
to be matter of conjecture. She preferred the quiet and privacy of a
Scotch parsonage. We were married in her twentieth year, and went to
reside at Bolton, near Haddington."
[A love of reading had been an early passion with her, but in her
childhood it had spent itself mostly in poetry and fiction; and her
want of leisure afterwards had withdrawn her to a great extent even from
literature of that description.] "Her time," Dr Brunton continues, "was
now much more at her own command. Her taste for reading returned in all
its strength, and received rather a more methodical direction. Some
hours of every forenoon were devoted by her to this employment; and in
the evenings I was in the habit of reading aloud to her books chiefly of
criticism and _belles lettres_. Among other subjects of her attention,
the philosophy of the human mind became a favourite study with her, and
she read Dr Reid's works with uncommon pleasure." After their removal to
Edinburgh, their circle increased. "She mingled more with those whose
talents and acquirements she had respected at a distance.... She had
often urged me to undertake some literary work, and once she appealed to
an intimate friend who was present whether he would not be my publisher.
He consented readily, but added that he would at least as willingly
publish a book of her own writing. This seemed at the time to strike her
as something the possibility of which had never occurred to her before,
and she asked more than once whether he was in earnest. A considerable
part of the first volume of 'Self Control' was written before I knew
anything of its existence. When she brought it to me, my pleasure was
mingled with surprise. The beauty and correctness of the style, the
acuteness of observation, and the loftiness of sentiment, were, each of
them in its way, beyond what even I was prepared to expect from her."
[The work was published in two large volumes, which were afterwards
distributed into three post octavos in January or early in February 1811
anonymously, and after considerable precautions had been taken to
preserve the secret of the authorship, which actually was, we are told,
for a little time so well kept that she had frequent opportunities of
hearing her work commented on.
Mrs Brunton commenced a new novel, "Discipline;" but before it was
completed "Waverley" appeared. It came into her hands, her husband says,
while she was in the country, and when she had heard nothing of its
reputation; but she at once discerned its high merit, and was so
fascinated by it, that she could not go to bed till she had read it
through. It happened that a scene of a part of her own work too was laid
in the Highlands, about which a universal interest had been for some
years before this awakened by Scott's "Lady of the Lake," and other
poems; and her first impulse was to cancel the Highland portion of her
story altogether; but to this sacrifice her husband strongly objected.
Writing to one of her female friends in December, a few days before her
new work was to appear, she says: "It is very unfortunate in coming
after 'Waverley,' by far the most splendid exhibition of talent in
novel-writing which has appeared since the days of Fielding and
Smollett. There seems little doubt that it comes from the pen of Scott.
What a competitor for poor little me!" When "Discipline" at length came
out, however, its success was far greater than she anticipated. "But she
was by no means gratified by it," we are told, "to the same extent she
had been by the reception of 'Self-Control.' She was now well known to
be the author, and therefore she was not so sure that the applause which
reached her was all sincere." The silence of the _Edinburgh_ and
_Quarterly Reviews_, too, annoyed and discouraged her.
All this indisposed her to attempt a third novel. Yet she commenced some
other works, in which she proceeded slowly. But the end of all was at
hand. After being married for twenty years, she had at last the
prospect of becoming a mother. Her husband's interesting narrative
proceeds:] "She was strongly impressed, indeed, with the belief that her
confinement was to prove fatal, not in vague presentiment, but on
grounds of which I could not entirely remove the force, though I
obstinately refused to join in the inference which she drew from them.
Under this belief, she completed every, the most minute, preparation for
her great change, with the same tranquillity as if she had been making
arrangements for one of those short absences which only endeared her
home the more to her. The clothes with which she was laid in her grave
had been selected by herself; she herself had chosen and labelled some
tokens of remembrance for her more intimate friends; and the intimations
of her death were sent round from a list in her own handwriting. But
these anticipations, though so deeply fixed, neither shook her fortitude
nor diminished her cheerfulness. They neither altered her wish to live,
nor the ardour with which she prepared to meet the duties of returning
health, if returning health were to be her portion. After giving birth
to a still-born son on the 7th December, and recovering for a few days
with a rapidity beyond the hopes of her medical friends, she was
attacked with fever. It advanced with fatal violence, till it closed her
earthly life on the morning of Saturday, December 19, 1818."
FELICIA HEMANS.
[BORN 1794. DIED 1835.]
JEFFREY.
The business of women being with actual or social life, and the colours
it receives from the conduct and dispositions of individuals, they
unconsciously acquire, at a very early age, the finest perception of
characters and manners, and are almost as soon instinctively schooled in
the deep and dangerous learning of feeling and emotion; while the very
minuteness with which they make and meditate on these interesting
observations, and the finer shades and variations of sentiment which are
thus treasured and recorded, trains their whole faculties to a nicety
and precision of operation which often discloses itself to advantage in
their application to studies of a different character. When women
accordingly have turned their minds, as they have done but too seldom,
to the exposition or arrangement of any branch of knowledge, they have
commonly exhibited, we think, a more beautiful accuracy, and a more
uniform and complete justness of thinking, than their less
discriminating brethren. There is a finish and completeness, in short,
about everything they put out of their hands, which indicates not only
an inherent taste for elegance and neatness, but a habit of nice
observation, and singular exactness of judgment.