Part 15

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 to sigh, 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, the _Princesse de Clèves_ lives 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.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] _Madame de Lafayette: La vie et ses Œuvres_, par H. Ashton. Cambridge University Press.

THE OTHER DOROTHY

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 myself from 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, and was 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 the _Wayfarer_ edition, 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. There is 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 a _diminuendo_ to 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), because we’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 been plain 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 of Newcastle, 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 that _coterie_, and esteemed them, with reservations. She had the Cléopâtre of Calprenède, the _Grand Cyrus_ of 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’s _Parthenissa_ hot 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 in _Parthenissa_ made her angry. “I confess I have no patience for our _faiseurs de Romance_ when 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 a _précieuse_, Dorothy quarrelled with _Parthenissa_ on account of preciosity. “Another fault I find, too, in the style--’tis affected. _Ambitioned_ is a great word with him, and _ignore_; _my concern_, or _of great concern_ is, it seems, properer than _concernment_?” She expects Temple, nevertheless, to fit her up with the newest town-phrases. “Pray what is meant by _wellness_ and _unwellness_; and why is _to some extreme_ better than _to 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 allow that 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, written _à 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 behind _Notre 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’s _Richard III_, has Spanish proverbs at command, writes a note in French, takes a part in _The 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 the folly 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 of _Holy Dying_ than 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 not to 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: