Chapter II (4)

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:

“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 that you 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 afraid you 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 no _tours 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 the kindest 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 will stop 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.

REALISM WITH A DIFFERENCE

_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 after _Robinson 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 of _Crusoe_ shows any advance upon _Moll Flanders_. Its greater popularity is, of course, due to its matter: it is more _simpatico_, 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 from _Moll Flanders_ comes 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. In _Moll Flanders_ we 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 the compassion 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 a _Whore_, five times a _Wife_ (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a _Thief_, Eight Year a transported _Felon_ in _Virginia_, at last grew _Rich_, liv’d Honest, and died a _Penitent_.” It sounds uncommonly like Boccaccio’s tale of the Princess of Babylon, not at all unlike _Gil 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. The _Police News_ style 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 in _Manon 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 of _La Terre_ might have happened in a Norman village; a Norman village _might_ have 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; but _La Terre_ is not a satire. As for _Manon_, 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 in _Moll 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 us in 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. In _Moll Flanders_ they 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 bad lots, 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.”

What could be more human, and on our footing more reasonable, than that? That, in fact, which saved _The Beggar’s Opera_ from 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.

MR. PEPYS HIS APPLE-CART

It is hard to deal fairly by Samuel Pepys, and that because he has dealt so fairly by himself. You cannot even put that amazing candour of his down to his credit, for reasons which grow upon you as you read. If he was candid it was to please himself, and, as one must suppose, nobody else in the world. Whatever his motive was, it certainly was not to read a moral lesson to mankind. But that he is all in his Diary, the whole of him, inside and out, is evident upon any prolonged perusal of it. He has neither been blind to himself, nor kind; he never excuses himself, and rarely accuses. He pities himself, when he has been found out, and hugs himself when he has made a good deal, or played the fortunate gallant; but he rarely indeed pities anybody else, and if he hugs other persons, always mentions it. Though we cannot impute his honesty to righteousness, nevertheless it seems rather hard that he should have to suffer for it.

Anyhow, his merits would have transpired without a diary. State papers exist to testify to them; his mounting credit is its own record. Evelyn liked him, so did the King and his brother, so did Sir William Coventry. Undoubtedly he was an able Clerk of the Acts, and by the standard of any times but some which are still modern history, an honest public servant. Had he lived in the golden age of the Civil Service, an age which only ended a few years ago, he would not have taken any commissions at all. As things are now, he took very few; as they were in his day, what he took was negligible. I feel sure that the Crown did uncommonly well by him. Then, socially, he was a brisk, companionable creature, with an infectious laugh, a taste for languages, the drama, parlour-science and chamber-music. He had curiosity, which always makes a man good company; he was both dilettante and connoisseur; he was affable with all sorts and conditions, gave himself no airs, had vanity, but little conceit. Women liked him; he had a way with him. And then he liked them. I cannot imagine Pepys for five minutes in a woman’s company without her knowing all that she need about him, and about it. Morally, he was a beast, without pity or scruple, or personal shame, or courage, or honour. He was depraved, and knew it, and didn’t care so long as no one else knew it. He was the slave of public opinion, and in moments of apprehension what that might be, sacrificed his companion in his dealing without a thought. And yet women liked him, and suffered him. Psychologically, he is, so far, an unsolved problem. Nobody has found out why on earth he wrote himself down what he did write down; I have seen no account which satisfies. To that I should add that no attempt to explain him seems to have been made since we received all that we ever can receive of his Diary.

R. L. Stevenson’s exegesis was based upon Minors Bright, who is now superseded by Wheatley. It is elaborate, and I think fanciful. I doubt if it could have been accepted upon the then available evidence: it is clean out of date now. Shortly, it was that Pepys, taking (as he did) infinite pleasure in the minutiæ of memory, was careful to make a hoard of such things for his after-needs. But even when that theory was propounded we knew that Pepys recorded his shames and humiliations, and it is difficult to allow that he might have looked forward to recalling those towards his latter end. Now, however, we know the worst that Pepys could say of himself, and lack nothing but the literal details of his acts. We know how he glorifies and how he humiliates himself--for he writes down all his failures along with his triumphs; we can see him splash in the bagnio, and afterwards get rolled in the gutter. It can be no question of remembrance. What is it, then? Any man may conceive, and many will do the things which Pepys did: but not record them, complacently, with the grin of relish. Why on earth did he do that? I have a suggestion to make, though I am not certain that it meets the whole case. My first opinion was that he derived that cerebral excitation out of his details which it is to be supposed the lad may who defaces walls with a stump of pencil, or the lover who, writing about kisses, or craving them as he writes, ends up his letter with a pullulation of little crosses--paraphrases of his passion. Reading him again, I see that that is not all. It is part of the truth; it is true of the middle of the Diary. But it is not the whole truth--not true of the beginning, not true of the end. I now believe that he originally intended his entries of delinquency as an act of penance or humiliation--and that is supported by the accounts he gives of all his shifts and turns under the screw of jealousy--but that out of that act he found himself obtaining a perverse pleasure, which overlaid his first intention and supplanted it. In the earlier diary you will find him expressing his relief over lapses avoided or temptations withstood; from 1663 onwards that is exceedingly rare; then, at the very end, when he has been found out and has lost conceit in his delight, his reflections are as contrite as you please. For the moment that explanation satisfies me.

Pepys’s Diary covers ten years of his life, his twenty-seventh to his thirty-eighth. They would be critical years in the life of any married man, particularly when, as was the case, they coincided with the Restoration and the sudden unlocking of all doors. When he began to record he had been married five years, to a woman seven years younger than himself, a diligent, handsome, thrifty, responsive little French girl, whom he ruled, evidently, upon a theory; for he says more than once that he found it desirable to give way when she showed a knowledge of what her rights were. Being, as she was, exceedingly alive to them in one essential matter, so long as those were observed she was easy about others. Therefore, for the first two recorded years, Pepys had very much of his own way. He kept her short of money, stinted her in clothes and fal-lals[3]; and left her much alone while he pursued business and pleasure abroad. All that she took in good part, until her eyes were opened to what was going on. She did not, for instance, mind his going to the theatre three or four times a week, until she found out what he did when he was there. But when she became aware of Mrs. Knipp and Mrs. Pierce and Mrs. Gwynne, and of relations which were not scenic, there was great trouble at home. After it she insisted on going with him, and he hardly dared show his nose in a playhouse without her. But that was later on: for for the first three years of the diary, beyond a little kissing, or staying up “playing the fool with the lass of the house” when he was on a jaunt, there was little for Mrs. Pepys to worry over. Kissing, indeed, of the ceremonial kind, she did not mind in the least. It was the English habit, as it still is in one class of life at least. Pepys himself was advised to put up with it when his wife was so distinguished. “So to Mrs. Hunt, where I found a Frenchman, a lodger of hers, at dinner, and just as I came in was kissing my wife, which I did not like, though there could not be any hurt in it.” Surely not.

But Pepys himself was not content with kisses of ceremony, nor did he select proper objects of ceremony for his attentions of the sort--that is, when once he was fairly on the primrose path. At first it was, “God forgive me! what a mind I had to her, but did not meddle with her.” That did not last. In September of that very year--it was 1662--he both had the mind and the opportunity; he followed his inclination; and though he recorded his first total lapse with great contrition, he was past praying for, and with increasing frequency past writing about. Vivacious man of pleasure as he was, and as his portrait shows him, he discovers himself to us as voracious too. He cast a wide net, and took all fish that came, gentle and simple, mistress and maid, mother and daughter. Not a shop that had a handsome woman in it, not a tavern with a pretty maid, between Fish Street Hill and Westminster Hall, but he drew it regularly, like a covert. I am sure he was no worse than his superiors; I think he may have been a good deal better than most of them; he was never a corsair, like Rochester, Sedley, Jermyn; he was in too small a way for that. But we can only guess at the whole of their malpractice by adding two to two, and we know all about his; therefore our gorges rise. Even his peculiar depravity was probably not peculiar at all.

“Yet to our buzzards overfed
Virtue was Pandarus to Vice;
A maiden was a maidenhead,
A maidenhead a matter of price....”

That was the foible of a hateful age, and it was Pepys’s. He preyed upon modesty. He must overcome virtue. He could not tire of that, and wrought in his way incurable mischief. In short, he was a middle-class Minotaur, a devourer of virgins.