Part 1
By Gamaliel Bradford
PORTRAITS OF WOMEN. Illustrated. UNION PORTRAITS. Illustrated. CONFEDERATE PORTRAITS. Illustrated. LEE THE AMERICAN. Illustrated.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON AND NEW YORK
PORTRAITS OF WOMEN
PORTRAITS OF WOMEN
BY GAMALIEL BRADFORD
_With Illustrations_
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1916
COPYRIGHT, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1915, BY THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY THE SUWANEE REVIEW COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY THE SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY GAMALIEL BRADFORD
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published October 1916_
TO MY DAUGHTER
_Out, hyperbolical fiend! talkest thou nothing but of ladies?_
TWELFTH NIGHT.
PREFACE
The nine portraits contained in this volume are preliminary studies or sketches for the series of portraits of American women which will follow my Union portraits. Such a collection of portraits of women will certainly fill a most important section in the gallery of historical likenesses selected from the whole of American history, which it is my wish to complete, if possible.
There is always a certain impertinence about a man’s attempt to portray the characters of women. And this impertinence is not got rid of by the charming, but not wholly felicitous, epigraph of Sainte-Beuve’s _Portraits de Femmes_: _“Avez vous donc été femme, Monsieur, pour prétendre ainsi nous connâitre?”—“Non, Madame, je ne suis pas le devin Tirésias, je ne suis qu’un humble mortel qui vous a beaucoup aimées.”_ There is, however, an equal impertinence in trying to portray the characters of men, indeed of anybody but one’s self, and though this last undertaking is always delightful, it is apt to lead to even more astonishing results than accompany one’s attempts upon others. While endeavoring constantly to strengthen and deepen the accuracy of my portraits as regards mere fact, I yet become more and more convinced that their value must be more in suggestion and stimulation than in any reliable or final presentment of character. Such presentments do not exist.
The selection of portraits in this volume has grown in a rather haphazard way. Although the types depicted differ from one another, sometimes with marked contrast, still, if I had planned the series deliberately as a whole, I should have picked out figures more representative of entirely different lines of life. A disadvantage, much more marked in portraying women than in portraying men, is the necessity of dealing with exceptions rather than with average personages. The psychographer must have abundant material, and usually it is women who have lived exceptional lives that leave such material behind them. The psychography of queens and artists and authors and saints is little, if any, more interesting, than that of your mother or mine, or of the first shopgirl we meet. I would paint the shopgirl’s portrait with the greatest pleasure, but the material is lacking.
It will be noted, also, that none of these portraits presents the modern woman. Eugénie de Guérin is the latest in date and she is about as modern as Eve. The projection of woman into the very middle of the stage of active life, her participation on equal terms in almost all the lines of man’s achievement, are effecting the vastest social revolution since the appearance of Christianity. The outcome of this revolution is something no man—or woman—can foresee. But its most obvious and perhaps principal effect is in moulding the life, character, and habits of man. Woman already dominates our manners, our morals, our literature, our stage, our private finances. She proposes to dominate our politics. And it is by no means sure that she will not end by the subjugation of our intelligence. This feminine supremacy obtains, if I am correctly informed, in the kingdom of the spiders and also, according to some seers, in the most advanced development of the planetary worlds. While such a conquest must, of course, to some extent, react upon the conqueror, it seems probable that the fundamental instincts of the feminine temperament are what they were a thousand, or two thousand years ago, and that the new woman remains the same old woman in a little different garb, which propensity to a little different garb is the oldest thing about her.
As I have already explained in the preface to “Union Portraits,” the word “Portrait” is very unsatisfactory, in spite of the high authority of Sainte-Beuve. Analogies between different arts are always misleading and this particular analogy is particularly objectionable. Critics, otherwise kindly, have urged that a portrait takes a man only at one special moment of his life and may therefore be quite untrue to the larger lines of his character. This is perfectly just, and the word “psychographs” should be substituted for “portraits.” Psychography aims at precisely the opposite of photography. It seeks to extricate from the fleeting, shifting, many-colored tissue of a man’s long life those habits of action, usually known as qualities of character, which are the slow product of inheritance and training, and which, once formed at a comparatively early age, usually alter little and that only by imperceptible degrees. The art of psychography is to disentangle these habits from the immaterial, inessential matter of biography, to illustrate them by touches of speech and action that are significant and by those only, and thus to burn them into the attention of the reader, not by any means as a final or unchangeable verdict, but as something that cannot be changed without vigorous thinking on the part of the reader himself.
But “Psychographs of Women,” on the back of a book, is as yet rather startling for the publisher, for the purchaser, and even for me.
GAMALIEL BRADFORD
WELLESLEY HILLS, MASS. _May 26, 1916_
CONTENTS
I. LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU 1
II. LADY HOLLAND 23
III. MISS AUSTEN 45
IV. MADAME D’ARBLAY 67
V. MRS. PEPYS 89
VI. MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ 111
VII. MADAME DU DEFFAND 133
VIII. MADAME DE CHOISEUL 155
IX. EUGÉNIE DE GUÉRIN 177
ILLUSTRATIONS
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU _Frontispiece_ After the painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller
ELIZABETH, LADY HOLLAND 24 After the painting by Fagan
JANE AUSTEN 46 After the water-color drawing by her sister in the possession of W. Austen Leigh, Esq.
MADAME D’ARBLAY 68 After the painting by Edward Francis Burney in 1782.
MRS. PEPYS AS ST. KATHARINE 90 From an engraving by Hollyer after the painting by Hayls
MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ 112 After the original pastel by Nanteuil
MADAME DU DEFFAND 134 From an engraving after the painting by Carmontelle
MADAME DE CHOISEUL 156 From a photogravure in _Le Duc et la Duchesse de Choiseul_, by Gaston Maugras, after a portrait owned by the Comte de Ludre
PORTRAITS OF WOMEN
I
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU
CHRONOLOGY
Lady Mary Pierrepont. Born London, May 26, 1689. Married Edward Wortley Montagu, August 16, 1712. In Constantinople 1716-1718. In Italy 1739-1761. Husband died 1761. Died London, August 21, 1762.
[Illustration: _Lady Mary Wortley Montagu_]
I
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (born Pierrepont) wrote poems, essays, and translations of some note in her own day, of none in ours. She also wrote letters which can never die, letters less charming, indeed, than Madame de Sévigné’s because the writer was less charming, but full of light for the first half of the eighteenth century and also for Lady Mary herself. I do not refer so much to the celebrated letters from Constantinople, because those were probably arranged and edited for literary purposes, but to the general correspondence, which throbs and vibrates and sparkles like a live thing.
The writer knew quite well what she was doing. Speaking of Madame de Sévigné’s productions she says: “Mine will be full as entertaining forty years hence.” And, perhaps with a touch of jealousy not wholly uncharacteristic, she depreciates her French predecessor, “who only gives us, in a lively manner and fashionable phrases, mean sentiments, vulgar prejudices, and endless repetitions. Sometimes the tittle-tattle of a fine lady, sometimes the tittle-tattle of an old nurse, always tittle-tattle.” Those who find the divine tittle-tattle of “Notre Dame des Rochers” not only among the liveliest, but among the most human and even the wisest, things in literature, will not be the less ready to appreciate Lady Mary, who has her own tittle-tattle as well as her own wisdom and liveliness. How easy she is, how ready, and how graceful. Her letters, she says, are “written with rapidity and sent without reading over.” This may be true and may not. At any rate, they have, at their best, the freshness of first thoughts, the careless brilliancy of a high-bred, keen-witted woman, talking in her own parlor, indifferent to effect, yet naturally elegant, in her speech, as in her dress and motion.
With what vivacity she touches everything and everybody about her, “a certain sprightly folly that (I thank God) I was born with” she calls it, but it is only folly in the sense of making dull things gay and sad things tolerable. See how she finds laughter in the imminence of sea peril. An ancient English lady “had bought a fine point head, which she was contriving to conceal from the custom-house officers.... When the wind grew high, and our little vessel cracked, she fell heartily to her prayers, and thought wholly of her soul. When it seemed to abate, she returned to the worldly care of her head-dress, and addressed herself to me: ‘Dear madam, will you take care of this point? If it should be lost!—Ah, Lord, we shall all be lost!—Lord have mercy on my soul!—Pray, madam, take care of this head-dress.’ This easy transition from her soul to her head-dress, and the alternate agonies that both gave her, made it hard to determine which she thought of greatest value.”
In the constant imminence of life’s world perils Lady Mary had still by her this resource of merriment, which some call flippancy, but which, by any name, is not without its comforts.
True, such a glib tongue or pen is a dangerous play-thing and liable to abuse. Lady Mary’s own daughter said that her mother was too apt to set down people of a meek and gentle character for fools. People of any character, perhaps, whenever the wayward fancy struck her. She darted her shafts right and left. They stung and they clung, for they were barbed, if not poisoned. Sometimes they made near friends as cold as strangers. Too often they turned indifferent strangers into enemies. Enemies, too many, Lady Mary had all her life, and they seized on her weak points and amplified or invented ugly things about her till those who admire her most find defence somewhat difficult.
Yet she did not gloat over evil. “’Tis always a mortification to me to observe there is no perfection in humanity.” Her unkindness was far more on her tongue than in her heart. “This I know, that revenge has so few joys for me, I shall never lose so much time as to undertake it.” She had the keenest sense of human sorrow and suffering: “I think nothing so terrible as objects of misery, except one had the God-like attribute of being able to redress them.” What she could do to redress them she did. In her efforts to introduce inoculation for smallpox she surely proved herself one of the greatest benefactors of humanity. In many smaller things, also, she was kindly and sympathetic. And what pleases me most is that she makes little mention of such deeds herself. One is left to divine them from curt, half-sarcastic remarks in other connections. Thus, during her long residence in Italy, it appears that she ministered to her neighbors both in body and soul. “I do what good I am able in the village round me, which is a very large one; and have had so much success, that I am thought a great physician, and should be esteemed a saint if I went to mass.” Later she had much ado to keep the people from erecting a statue to her. But she shrank from love in Italy which was sure to breed laughter in England.
Also, even in her bursts of ill-nature, she had a certain reserve, a certain control, a certain sobriety. Indeed, she compliments herself, in old age, on her freedom from petulance. “To say truth, I think myself an uncommon kind of creature, being an old woman without superstition, peevishness, or censoriousness.” This is, perhaps, more than we could say for her. But in youth and age both she loved moderation and shunned excess. When she was twenty-three, she wrote, “I would throw off all partiality and passion, and be calm in my opinion.” She threw them off too much, she was too calm, she was cold. Walpole called her letters too womanish, but Lady Craven thought they must have been written by a man. Most readers will agree with Lady Craven. Even her vivacity lacks warmth. And it is here that she most falls short of the golden sunshine of Madame de Sévigné. Lady Mary is not quite the woman, even in her malice. Through her wit, through her thought, through her comment on life, even through her human relations runs a strain of something that was masculine.
Nowhere is this more curious and amusing than in her love and marriage. She was beautiful, and knew it, though the smallpox, by depriving her of eyelashes, had given a certain staring boldness to her eyes. When she was over thirty, she “led up a ball” and “believed in her conscience she made one of the best figures there.” When she was old, for all her philosophy, she did not look in a glass for eleven years. “The last reflexion I saw there was so disagreeable, I resolved to spare myself such mortifications for the future.”
She fed her youthful fancy with the vast fictions then in fashion and the result was a romantic head and a cool heart. These appear alternately in her strange correspondence with her lover and future husband, Edward Wortley Montagu. When they first met, the gentleman admired her learning—at fourteen! And Latinity seems to have drawn them together quite as much as love. There was a sister, Miss Anne Wortley, and sisters are of great use on such occasions. Lady Mary wrote to her in language of extravagant regard, and Miss Wortley wrote back—at her brother’s dictation. Then it became obviously simpler for the lovers to write direct.
Obstacles arose. Mr. Wortley Montagu would make no settlement on his wife. Lady Mary’s father would not hear of a marriage without one, and hunted up another suitor, rich—and unacceptable. There was doubt, debate, delay—and then an elopement. Lady Mary eloping! What elements of comedy! And her letters make it so.
That she loved her lover as much as she could love is evident. “My protestations of friendship are not like other people’s, I never speak but what I mean, and when I say I love, ’tis for ever.” “I am willing to abandon all conversation but yours. If you please I will never see another man. In short, I will part with anything for you, but you. I will not have you a month to lose you for the rest of my life.” “I would die to be secure of your heart, though but for a moment.”
Yet this apparent passion is tempered with doubt and reversal. She cannot make him happy, nor he her. “I can esteem, I can be a friend, but I don’t know whether I can love.” “You would be soon tired with seeing every day the same thing.” No, it is all folly. Cancel it, break it up, throw it over. Begin again, a new life, a new world. She will write to him no more. “I resolve against all correspondence of the kind; my resolutions are seldom made, and never broken.”
This one is broken in a few days. Again she loves, again she hopes. Everything shall be right, so far as it lies with her. “If my opinion could sway, nothing should displease you. Nobody ever was so disinterested as I am.” And yet once more cold analysis twitches her sleeve, murmurs in her ear. “You are the first I ever had a correspondence with, and I thank God I have done with it for all my life.” “When I have no more to say to you, you will like me no longer.”
Then she blows the doubts away, makes her stolen marriage, gives all to love, and in the very doing of it, lets fall one word that shows the doubter more than ever (italics mine): “I foresee all that will happen on this occasion. I shall incense my family in the highest degree. The generality of the world will blame my conduct ...; yet, _’tis possible_, you may recompence everything to me.” How two little words will show a heart!
And afterwards? She fared pretty much as she expected. Love hardened into marriage with some, not unusual, hours of agony. “I cannot forbear any longer telling you, I think you use me very unkindly.” When he fails to write to her, she cries for two hours. Then all becomes domestic, and decorous, and as it should be; and her matured opinion of marriage agrees very well with the previsions of her youth. “Where are people matched? I suppose we shall all come right in Heaven; as in a country dance, the hands are strangely given and taken, while they are in motion, at last all meet their partners when the jig is done.”
Perhaps because she showed no great conjugal affection, there was plenty of gossip about affection less legitimate. Pope lavished rhetorical devotion on her. She laughed at it and, I fear, at him. In consequence he lampooned her with the savage spite of an eighteenth-century poet. She said unkind things about Sir Robert Walpole and Sir Robert’s son said unkind things about her, mentioned some lovers by name, and implied many others. Lady Mary’s careful editors have dealt with these slanders most painstakingly; and though in one case, that of an Italian adventure, they have overlooked a passage in Sir Horace Mann’s letters oddly confirmatory of Walpole, I think they have cleared their heroine with entire success.
After all, Lady Mary’s best defense against scandal is her own temperament and her own words. It is true, those who have lived a wild life are often the first to exclaim against it. But in this case the language bears every mark of being prompted by observation rather than experience. She says of the notorious Lady Vane: “I think there is no rational creature that would not prefer the life of the strictest Carmelite to the round of hurry and misfortune she has gone through.”
Lady Mary’s long sojourn in Italy towards the close of her life did much to increase suspicion in regard to her relations with her husband. Her greatest admirers have not been able to explain clearly why she wished to exile herself in such a fashion. But the tone in which, during the whole period, she writes both to Mr. Wortley Montagu and of him, is absolutely incompatible with any serious coldness between them. “My most fervent wishes are for your health and happiness.” And again: “I have never heard from her since, nor from any other person in England, which gives me the greatest uneasiness; but the most sensible part of it is in regard of your health, which is truly and sincerely the dearest concern I have in this world.”
Lady Mary had two children, and as a mother she is very much what she is as a wife, reasonable, prudent, devoted, but neither clinging nor adoring. She had, indeed, a happy art of expressing maternal tenderness, as of expressing everything, by which I do not imply that her feelings were not sincere, but simply that they were not very vital or very overwhelming. When she sets out on her travels, she is heartbroken over the perils and exposures for her son: “I have long learnt to hold myself at nothing; but when I think of the fatigue my poor infant must suffer, I have all a mother’s fondness in my eyes, and all her tender passions in my heart.” But her language about this same son, when grown to manhood, is somewhat astounding. He was a most extraordinary black sheep, wasted money, contracted debts, gambled, liked evil occupations and worse company, varied a multiplicity of wives with a multiplicity of religions, was once in jail, and never respectable. All this Lady Mary deplores, but she is not driven to despair by it; on the contrary, she analyzes his character to his father with singular cold soberness. “It is very disagreeable to me to converse with one from whom I do not expect to hear a word of truth, and, who, I am very sure, will repeat many things that never passed in our conversation.” Or, more generally, “I suppose you are now convinced I have never been mistaken in his character; which remains unchanged, and what is yet worse, I think is unchangeable. I never saw such a complication of folly and falsity as in his letter to Mr. G.”
Her daughter, Lady Bute, she was fond of. “Your happiness,” she writes to her, “was my first wish, and the pursuit of all my actions, divested of all self-interest.” Nevertheless, she lived contentedly without seeing her for twenty years.
That Lady Mary was a good manager domestically hardly admits of doubt; but I find no evidence that she loved peculiarly feminine occupations, though she does somewhere remark that she considers certain types of learned ladies “much inferior to the plain sense of a cook maid, who can make a good pudding and keep the kitchen in good order.” Among her numerous benefactions in Italy was the teaching of her neighbors how to make bread and butter.
It is said that her servants loved her, not unnaturally, if she carried out her own maxim: “The small proportion of authority that has fallen to my share (only over a few children and servants) has always been a burden, ... and I believe every one finds it so who acts from a maxim ... that whoever is under my power is under my protection.” She was a natural aristocrat, however, both socially and politically, and any leveling tendencies that she may have cherished in the ardor of youth, vanished entirely with years and experience. “Was it possible for me to elevate anybody from the station in which they were born, I now would not do it: perhaps it is a rebellion against that Providence that has placed them; all we ought to do is to endeavour to make them easy in the rank assigned them.” And elsewhere, in a much more elaborate passage, she expresses herself with a deliberate haughtiness of rank and privilege which has rarely been surpassed. In her youth, she says, silly prejudice taught her that she was to treat no one as an inferior. But she has learned better and come to see that such a notion made her “admit many familiar acquaintances, of which I have heartily repented every one, and the greatest examples I have known of honor and integrity have been among those of the highest birth and fortunes.” The English tendency to mingle classes and level distinctions will, she believes, have some day fatal consequences. How curious, in so keen a wit, the failure to foresee that just this English social elasticity would avert the terrible disaster which was to befall the neat gradations of French order and system!