Part 12
She came naturally by this argumentative tendency, for it was said of her father that he was too inclined to dissect his ideas and had a leaning toward metaphysics which he communicated to his wife, so that the daughter’s cradle may have been rocked by tempests of theoretical discussion. She herself declares that she was not educated at all and thanks heaven for it. For, she says, at least she was not taught the errors of others. “If I have learned anything, I owe it neither to precepts nor to books, but to a few opportune misfortunes. Perhaps the school of misfortunes is the very best.” She had, however, picked up a rather broad learning through keen attention and a love of books. She speaks of Pliny, Horace, Cicero, and other Latin authors, as if she knew them by heart. She reads the Memoirs of Sully with delight, though chiefly why? Because Sully’s situation reminds her of Monsieur de Choiseul’s. She deplores Madame du Deffand’s indifference to reading: “Books help us to endure ignorance and life itself: Life, because the knowledge of past wretchedness helps us to endure the present; ignorance, because history tells us nothing but what we already know.” Here you see the touch of the _raisonneuse_, to use her own phrase, the curious analyst, the minute dissector of her own motives and those of others. Madame du Deffand quotes a German admirer as saying of the duchess: “She is reason masquerading as an angel and having the power to persuade with charm.”
It is most fruitful to follow the gleaming thread of Madame de Choiseul’s analysis through the different concerns and aspects of human life.
Of art she apparently knew nothing whatever. Though herself a figure just stepped out of a canvas of Watteau, she never mentions him, nor any other artist, greater or lesser. We do not see that plastic beauty existed for her at all. Of her music we know only that she practised day and night to please her husband. Nature she never mentions in any aspect. All that she has to say of her long years in the country is that solitude is restful.
On the other hand, she shows much of herself and of her own mind in what she says of literature. As we have seen, she was a good deal of a reader, would have read much more, or fancied she would, if she had not had a thousand other things to do. And her judgment of books and authors is as keen and penetrating as it is independent. It shows further the strong, sound, moral bent of her disposition. She pierces Rousseau’s extravagant theorizing about nature with swift thrusts of practical sense, summing up her verdict in a touch of common truth expressed inimitably: “Let us beware of metaphysics applied to simple things.” And Rousseau himself she defined with bitter accuracy: “He has always seemed to me to be a charlatan of virtue.” Voltaire she judged with a singular breadth and justice of perception, appreciating to the full his greatness and his pettiness. “He tells us he is faithful to his enthusiasms; he should have said, to his weaknesses. He has always been cowardly where there was no danger, insolent where there was no motive, and mean where there was no object in being so. All which does not prevent his being the most brilliant mind of the century. We should admire his talent, study his works, profit by his philosophy, and be broadened by his teaching. We should adore him and despise him, as is indeed the case with a good many objects of worship.”
This passage alone would show that we are dealing with a vigorous and independent mind. The impression is by no means diminished when we read the duchess’s other outpourings on abstract subjects. Some indeed think that she overdoes the matter, that she has caught the pernicious eighteenth-century habit of moral declamation, in short, that she violated her own excellent precept about applying metaphysics to simple things. But her sight was so clear, her sympathy so tender, and her heart so sound that I do not think any one can seriously accuse her of being a rhetorician.
It is, however, very curious to compare her in this respect with Madame du Deffand, who takes no interest whatever in general questions, and is disposed to leave politics to princes, religion to priests, and the progress of mankind to those who can still believe in it. Not so Madame de Choiseul. She thinks passionately on the great problems of life and history and follows with keen interest the thinking of others. When Voltaire sets himself up as the apologist of Catherine II of Russia, the duchess’s sense of right is outraged and in a strange long letter to Madame du Deffand she analyzes Catherine’s career and with it the whole theory of political and social morals. When Rousseau is under discussion, she analyzes carefully the tissue and fabric of organized community life. When forms of government attract her pen, she analyzes monarchy and democracy and expresses a sympathy with the latter surprisingly significant for her age and class. When her analyzing appetite can find no other bone to gnaw on, she analyzes her own happiness, with the subtlety of La Bruyère. Perhaps the following is a little too much an application of metaphysics to simple things: “Gayety, even when it is habitual, seems to me only an accident. Happiness is the fruit of reason, a tranquil condition, and an enduring one, which knows neither transport nor ecstasy. Perhaps it is a slumber of the soul, death, nothingness. As to that I cannot say, but by these words I mean nothing sad, though people commonly think of them as lugubrious.”
In all these elaborate analyses it is noticeable that there is no trace whatsoever of religion. Madame de Choiseul was as completely sceptical as Madame du Deffand. In all their correspondence God is hardly mentioned, even in the light, intimate way so common with the French. Madame de Choiseul declares her uncertainty with perfect frankness. “My scepticism has grown so great that it falls over backward and from doubting everything I have become ready to believe everything. For instance, I believe just as much in Blue Beard, the Thousand and One Nights, genii, fairies, sorcerers, and will-o’-the-wisps, as in—what shall I say?—anything you please.” Nor is her faith in human nature in the abstract any more stable, as soon as she subjects it to the cold ray of her analyzing intellect. “Let us say once for all that there are few people whom one can count on, a melancholy truth that chills the heart and withers the confidence of youth. We grow old as soon as we cease to love and trust.” While her summing up of the acme of possible good wishes is, to say the least, not of a very spiritual tenor. “Good-by, dear child, I wish you good sleep and a good digestion. I don’t know anything better to desire for those I love.”
What is deeply important and significant for the study of Madame de Choiseul in this lack of positive belief is that on a substructure apparently so frail there could be built up a character so rounded, so pure, so delicate, so eminently self-forgetful and devoted. And it is to be observed that her perfection was not all the result of a happy, contented, optimistic temperament. She was not born entirely a saint, nor quite ignorant of the perversities of frail humanity. She herself says: “With a warm heart which longed for affection and a quick imagination which must be ever at work, I was more disposed to unhappiness and ennui than people usually are. Yet I am happy and ennui gets no hold on me.” In many other passages she makes it evident that she had her troubles, many of them. Physically, she was delicate and sensitive, always ailing, and it is a charming bit of human nature that with all her splendid self-control she could not refrain from eating things that disagreed with her, so that Barthélemy complains that she had the courage of a lion in great matters and was a coward in little. Also, the seeds of spiritual complaints were manifestly latent in her and she had her dark hours when sadness and anxiety and regret threatened to assert themselves with irresistible vigor. She speaks somewhere, as the years roll on, of “the terror which seizes me and the disgust which overpowers me when I see the work of destruction advancing and that resistance is no longer equal to attack.”
But to all these subtle dangers she opposed a superb strength of will, a splendid courage, and above all the instinctive, unconquerable, eternal energy of love. While she was doing something for others she was happy and for others there was always something to be done. It is a most satisfying and tranquilizing thing to see a creature so dainty, so exquisite, so finely tempered with all the delicate responsiveness we nowadays call nerves, at the same time steeled and toughened by that substantial necessity, common sense. She knew all the good of life and all the evil. Beauty, rank, wealth, love, honor, exile, ruin, and disaster were all hers. And through them all she remained the same simple, gentle, loyal, heroic figure, admirable if a woman ever was, and memorable if the highest charm backed by the strongest character are indeed worth remembering.
IX
EUGÉNIE DE GUÉRIN
CHRONOLOGY
Eugénie de Guérin. Born in Languedoc, 1805. Visited Paris 1838. Brother died 1839. Visited Paris 1841. Died May, 1848.
IX
EUGÉNIE DE GUÉRIN
She lived a solitary, an almost eremitical life, utterly secluded from the contact, and almost from the knowledge, of the great world. No isolation in America to-day could be quite so complete as that of a lady in a French provincial town a hundred years ago: the same quiet waysides, the same faces at the same corners the same seasons in their eternal change, the bell of centuries tolling a monotonous succession of births, marriages, and deaths. All the varied doings of mankind in hasty cities, kings crowned and uncrowned, new thoughts, new fashions, new vices, new beauty, echoed in that tranquil dwelling like the far passage of some martial pageant stirring a dream. “Two visits, two letters written, one received, fill a day,” she says; “fill a day full for us.”
She did not complain of the solitude, she loved it. She was born in it, grew up in it, and wished to die in it. Every tree, every flower was a friend to her. Old sunlit walls caressed her with a touch like love’s. “I could take a vow to remain here forever,” she says. “No place could be to me so much my home.” The habit of loneliness grows on her, as all our habits do, until one day, returning to a house quite empty, she exclaims, “You cannot think how gaily I took possession of this abandoned dwelling. Here I am alone, absolutely alone, in a place which of itself breeds calm reflection. I hear the passers pass, and do not even turn my head.”
In a life so unbroken little movements made a great stir. Twice she sojourned for a few weeks in Paris and she made a brief visit to a watering place in the Pyrenees. On all these occasions she was quick and wide-eyed to catch what went on about her. She responded to great scenes and notable monuments and was not incurious as to the ways of men and women. But she felt no eagerness to change her own habits and returned with undisturbed delight to the places she had always loved. “Repose is what delights me; not inaction, but the poised quiet of a heart that is content.”
Do not imagine that her solitude meant always quiet, however. Such outward peace perhaps fosters inward turbulence, at any rate leaves room for it. Hearts unvexed by the world’s rash hurry have tempests and revolutions and tumults all their own. How many strange soul-combats go on in quiet tenements! How many fierce struggles pass unperceived and unrecorded, perhaps not worth recording, yet of immense significance to those who conquer or succumb! “All my days are alike, so far as the outer world goes,” writes Mademoiselle de Guérin; “but with the soul’s life it is different, nothing could be more varied, more flexible, more subject to perpetual change.”
Two main, essential objects of all her inner life and thought kept her in this unceasing agitation. One was her brother Maurice. She had another brother and a sister whom she loved and cherished. To her father she was a sympathetic companion and a faithful attendant. But Maurice was confessedly more to her than any one else. He was younger than she. She had supplied for him the place of the mother who died early. She tended him, watched over him, guided him, and when he went out into the great world thought of him and prayed for him perpetually.
He was one who well deserved such affection. Sensitive, delicate in health and in feeling, imaginative, finely touched to all the fine issues of genius, his brief life was torn and tortured by alternate aspiration and doubt, by vast dreams of what he might achieve and miserable distrust of his ability to achieve anything. He died young and left behind him a journal recording these struggles with pathetic fidelity and one short prose poem, which has wide harmonies of classic dignity and echoing grandeur not surpassed by the “Hyperion” of Keats. Who that knows that music can ever forget it? “_O Mélampe! les dieux errants ont posé leur lyres sur les pierres; mais aucun—aucun ne l’y a oubliée._”
The sister also kept a journal. But while Maurice’s was addressed to himself or to curious posterity, hers was addressed only to him; even after death had snatched him from her, only to him. All her inmost thoughts go there, all her hopes, all her sorrows, and to pour them out to him is the great preoccupation of her life. She can say to him things she cannot say to others. He will understand. He has always understood. With great and with little events it is the same. A sunset walk in the fields and the death of a dear friend—each alike must be discussed with Maurice. All the emotion each brings with it must be confided to him. Anxiety for his health, for his future, for his happiness, is constantly blended with her own daily doings, the whole making a curious tissue of love, as fine and delicate as it is tender and true.
To turn to the brother’s journal from the sister’s is a fruitful lesson in human nature. In her life everything is related to him. In his she is an element, an episode, beloved, delightful, nothing more. Her name hardly occurs in his Journal, even casually. The letters he writes to her are affectionate, and appeal for comfort when he needs it. He was the sun of her life. In his, even before his marriage, she was only a tranquil star, shining quietly, treasured, but not always remembered. She knew this. Love always knows. Looking back, after he was gone, she wonders if she did not sometimes bore him. While she had him with her, the longed-for letters used to come, not always bringing what she demanded of them. “How my fingers burned to open that letter in which at last I was to see you. I have seen you, but I do not know you. You open only your head to me. It was your heart, your soul, the very inmost of your being, what makes your life, that I hoped to see.”
No lack of response made any difference in the sister’s ardent affection, however, unless perhaps to increase the ardor, as sometimes happens in this inconsequent world. Eugénie’s thought was ever on the beloved object, on his reading, on his thinking, on his material condition, on his varied failure and success in his efforts to overcome the maddening poverty which hampered his progress. Yet how strange are the vagaries of the human heart. With all her passionate thought and affection, I do not find that she gave much heed to the one interest which was positive in Maurice’s life, his desire to achieve enduring beauty for the delight of men. When a life is devoured by this longing, it measures all things and all people by their sympathy with it and contribution to it. It is perhaps just here that Eugénie failed to evoke the entire response she looked for from her brother’s heart. To be sure, when his writings were gathered together after his death, she expressed great interest and some enthusiasm. Yet even then her chief anxiety was that he should not be misrepresented, misunderstood, mispraised as pagan rather than Christian, and she did not hesitate to assert that he had no thought of fame and did not desire it.
How even our most unselfish love is absorbed in its own point of view! How hard it is to love others as they would be loved, not as we would be loved. Eugénie worried perpetually about Maurice’s soul, but very little about his reputation. She had not learned the profound truth and beauty of Madame de Choiseul’s remark: “I have always had the vanity of those I love: that is my fashion of loving.”
I wonder whether the young wife from the far Indies, whom Maurice married when death was already beginning to lay its hand on him, had any more sympathy with his aspirations for this world. There is no evidence that she had, though she was tender and devoted in her care and ministrations to the very last.
It is most curious to observe Eugénie’s relation to this new sister. Even for a mother, who has her own distinct, assured claim, it is hard enough to give up a son she loves. But a sister, with all a mother’s love, but only a sister’s intimacy, cannot see the forming of a new and stronger bond without some dread, some repugnance, some coldness at the heart. Eugénie, like all persons who analyze their feelings, was naturally inclined to doubt others’ affection because she doubted her own desert. When her friends fail to write to her, she hints her grief about it. When the tone of Maurice’s letters is indifferent, or she fancies that it is, she frets and broods over it. “Do you remember that little short letter that tormented me for a fortnight?” How, then, did she bear the intrusion of a stranger heart, sure to see into all the hidden places where even she had not been privileged to come? We can divine well enough how hard it was. Her tone about her new sister might indeed seem to be all praise. She is good, she is beautiful, she is devoted to Maurice, she fulfils all her duties and is a sweet companion and friend. Nevertheless, there is the faintest, perfectly unintentional patronage. Her family are not, perhaps, quite all they should be. Her dress, charming, delightful, appropriate, but is it a little startling for a country town, that black velvet hat with an ostrich plume, fit to amaze earth and heaven, as a neighbor puts it? But we do so want to be friendly, to do our part. “I hope Maurice will be happy with her. She isn’t just the sort of woman I am used to, for character, or heart, or face. She is a stranger. I am studying her. I am trying to get her near to me, to enter into her life, if she cannot enter into mine.”
When they both together were soothing the last hours of the beloved one, Eugénie has nothing but praise and affection for her sister-in-law. But who could miss the poignancy of the quiet remark that the sister lies awake all night and hears the wife ministering to the husband as she herself would like to minister? It is hard to tell which is more significant, this comment or that of a few weeks earlier: “They are happy. Maurice is a perfect husband. He is worth a hundred of what he was a year ago. He told me so himself. He confides in me just as much as ever. We often talk together intimately.”
On one point Maurice’s marriage seems to be as satisfactory as it could be, that of religion. His wife does not appear to have distracted him in any way from his salvation, which would have been hard for Eugénie; nor yet does the wife promote it more than the sister did, which would have been even harder. Maurice’s salvation! That was the object of Eugénie’s daily thoughts and of her nightly prayers. Maurice’s salvation! While she had him under her own motherly wing, all was well. He might perhaps have been too easily distracted, not intensely serious, as she was; but at least his faith was firmly grounded and she sent him out into the great world, confident that he would be a white soldier of Christ always.
Alas, how often such hopes are disappointed! Not that Maurice really sinned, or went astray. Most would have thought him virtuous enough, Christian enough. But he took a certain interest in the heresies of his adored teacher, Lamennais, and, to the half-cloistered sister at any rate, he appeared much tainted with the follies and incredulities of an unbelieving age. How she longed to have him back with her, at least in spirit! How she prayed that he might pray! How she trembled and shrank at the thought that after being separated on earth they might not be united in heaven! “I am not holy enough to convert you, nor strong enough to draw you with me. God alone can do that. Oh, how I ask it of him, for all my happiness goes with it. Perhaps you cannot imagine, with your philosophic eye you cannot see, the tears of a Christian eye, weeping for a soul that may be lost, a soul so much beloved, a brother’s soul, the sister of one’s own.”
At least she had the satisfaction of feeling that in the end her prayers were answered and that the frail and wavering spirit returned to die in the faith in which she had cradled it. Taking a view with which the unregenerate will find it hard to sympathize, she declares that errors of the intellect are much more serious, more dangerous than errors of the heart. To her fond hope it seemed that on her brother’s deathbed intellectual errors were all forgotten, and after he had left her she resented bitterly the verdict of great writers, George Sand and Sainte-Beuve, that he would live to posterity as a poet of nature whose essential spirit was much less Christian than Greek.