Part 6 (2/2)

There was a basis for this eulogy; but it needs much qualification.

She and D'Alembert prized each other's society highly, and pa.s.sed much time together. But jealousy and exaction are tenacious occupants, easily recalled to the heart even of an aged and friendly woman. When D'Alembert formed a closer friends.h.i.+p with Mademoiselle Lespina.s.se, the young and charming companion of Madame du Deffand, the latter imperiously dictated the renunciation of the new friend as the condition of retaining the old. The superiority of temper, genius, and worth in Mademoiselle Lespina.s.se did not permit D'Alembert to hesitate; and she repaid him with memorable fidelity.

The affectionate and dependent girl was harshly driven out. In her anguish, she took laudanum, but not with a fatal result. D'Alembert then called Du Deffand an old viper; but his friend checked him, and would never allow any abuse of her former mistress, much less herself indulge in vituperation of her. When D'Alembert was attacked by a malignant fever, she went to his bedside, and nursed him day and night till he was convalescent. Marmontel says, ”Malice itself never a.s.sailed their pure and innocent intimacy.” She afterwards formed an attachment, of the most romantic character, to the young Spanish Marquis de Mora, who reciprocated her affection with impa.s.sioned ardor. He died while on the road to join her; and she was not long in following him into the grave, though, in the mean time, a still stronger pa.s.sion for Guibert had weaned her from D'Alembert. The fervent tenderness of the latter for her remained unaltered, and he was inconsolable at her departure. On hearing of her death, Madame du Deffand said, ”Had she only died fifteen years earlier, I should not have lost D'Alembert.” Her letters are famous in the literature of love. Sir James Mackintosh says, ”They are, in my opinion, the truest picture of deep pa.s.sion ever traced by a human being.” Margaret Fuller writes, ”I am swallowing by gasps that cauldrony beverage of selfish pa.s.sion and morbid taste, the letters of Lespina.s.se. It is good for me. The picture, so minute in its touches, is true as death.” Madame de Stael had many devoted friends.h.i.+ps, as would naturally be expected from the overwhelming wealth and ardor of her nature. Affinity of genius and a common love of liberty drew Benjamin Constant and her into intimate relations; and she maintained for years still closer relations with the all-knowing, all-cultured August Schlegel, whose devouring egotism and ever-sensitive vanity put all her patience and generosity to the proof.

The current opinion concerning Madame de Stael, that she was an exacting and disagreeable woman, is unjust. Schiller, who shrank from her impetuous eloquence, and Heine, whose reckless satire depicts her as going through Europe, a whirlwind in petticoats, both do her wrong. William von Humboldt, who knew her well, p.r.o.nounces a glowing eulogy on her exalted traits, and says that Goethe, from prejudice and ignorance, was very unjust to her. Madame Mole says, ”Women are not half grateful enough to Madame de Stael for the honor she conferred upon her s.e.x by taking up the n.o.ble side of every question, armed with her pen and her eloquence, and never once calculating what the consequences might be. As time goes on, and details sink into insignificance, she will rise as the grand figure who withstood Bonaparte at the head of six hundred thousand men, with Europe at his back. His vanity was such that he could not bear one woman should refuse to praise him; for that was her only guilt.” She was capable of the utmost magnanimity and disinterestedness. Every exalted sentiment struck a powerful chord in her heart. She lived in justice, freedom, beneficence, love, aspiration. The friends.h.i.+p of Matthieu de Montmorency, the most intimate and devoted of all her friends, is enough to prove her exalted worth, making every abatement for her acknowledged foibles. This chivalrous n.o.bleman came, in his youth, to America with Lafayette, and fought for the new Republic. Although one of the foremost members of the aristocracy, it was on his motion in the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly that the privileges of the n.o.bility were abolished. Sympathy in opinions and in the generous strain of their characters was the basis of a connection between him and Madame de Stael, that constantly grew in strength with the trials to which it was subjected, and was not severed even by death. When his brother, ardently loved, fell under the axe of the Revolution, it was her delicate sympathy, her ingenious and indefatigable goodness, that first soothed his anguish, a.s.suaged the horror that threatened his reason, and prepared the way for religion and peace. And in turn, when she was exiled by Napoleon, Montmorency journeyed to Switzerland to visit her, at the risk of being banished himself, as he immediately was. ”Matthieu, the friend of twenty years, is the most faultless being I have ever known.” ”How could he think I should tarry in Germany, when, by leaving it, I had a chance of seeing him?

All Germany could not pay me for the loss of two days of his society.” No unkindness, suspicion, or ign.o.bleness of any sort, ever interrupted or mixed in the affection of these high friends. When Montmorency died, suddenly, in church, years after the death of Madame de Stael, the daughter of the latter, the d.u.c.h.ess de Broglie, instinctively exclaimed, on hearing of the event, ”Ah, my G.o.d! I seem to see the grief of my poor mother.” The prejudice in England and America against friends.h.i.+ps between men and women has operated considerably to lessen their frequency, still more to keep them from public attention when they do exist. Undoubtedly, many a charming English woman, many a charming American woman, in her time the centre of the social circles of fas.h.i.+on, letters, and politics, has been surrounded by a company of friends as devoted at heart as those who have gathered with more public homage about the famous dames of France and Germany. Such groups will be called to mind by the English names of Mrs. Montagu, Lady Melbourne, Lady Holland; the American names of Mrs. Madison, Mrs. Hamilton, Mrs. Seaton, Mrs. Schuyler, and many others. But, since, with the most of these latter, the details have not been taken from the category of private property, by publications of memoirs and journals, it would be impertinent to single them out for personal mention, even where it is possible.

Magdalen Herbert, mother of George Herbert, befriended Dr. Donne in his distresses, ministering to the wants of his family with generous delicacy, and comforting him by her society. His discernment of her wit and piety, her gracious and n.o.ble disposition, combined with his grat.i.tude to make him her fast and fervent friend. His conversation, together with that of Bishop Andrews, whose renown Clarendon and Milton unite to swell, appears to have given Lady Herbert great delight. Lasting evidence of the impression her character and kindness made on him is found in his verses and letters addressed to her, and in the funeral sermon which, with many tears, he preached for her. He says in verse, in her advancing age,

No spring nor summer beauty has such grace As I have seen on an autumnal face.

And he gratefully writes to her in his quaint prose, ”Your favors to me are everywhere. I use them and have them. I enjoy them at London and leave them there, and yet find them at Mitcham. Such riddles as these become things inexpressible; and such is your goodness.” There was a choice, ever-comforting, and sacred friends.h.i.+p between the great John Locke and the excellent Lady Damaris Masham, the only daughter of that ornament of the English Church, the learned and benignant Cudworth.

She was one of the most gifted, cultivated, and elegant women of her time. The genius and moral worth of Locke are well known to all.

Domesticated in the family of Lady Masham for many years before his death, giving her all the advantage of his talents, acquirements, and sympathy, ”she returned the obligation with singular benevolence and grat.i.tude, always treating him with the utmost generosity and respect; for she had an inviolable friends.h.i.+p for him.” She watched by him in his last illness. He asked her to read a psalm to him. As death approached, he desired her to break off reading, and in a few minutes breathed his closing breath. She wrote the fine sketch of his character published in the ”Historical Dictionary.” She says his manners made him very agreeable to all sorts of people, and n.o.body was better received than he among those of the highest rank. ”His greatest amus.e.m.e.nt was to talk with sensible people, and he courted their conversation.” The amiable, unfortunate Cowper, the most shrinking and melancholy of men, too gentle and too unworldly for common companions.h.i.+p, was especially fitted for the soothing ministrations and the healing sympathy of women. He was dependent on these friends.h.i.+ps, and found his chief happiness in them. But for them, his career would have been as brief as it was wretched; and his name, now haloed with such sadly pleasing attractions, would have had no place in English literature, except in the dark list of madmen and suicides. Who that has read his matchless lines on his mother's picture will not bless the good women who shed so many rays of peace and bliss on his unhappy lot. His cousin, the angelic Lady Hesketh, whose disinterested tenderness lavished grateful attentions on him, with a sweet skill that failed neither in his youth nor in his age, was as a light from heaven on his path through the whole journey.

Some touching verses, and innumerable references in his letters, attest his appreciation of her. Mrs. Throckmorton and her husband, in whose grounds he loved to walk, and in whose kindly and refined society he spent so many delightful hours, furnished a healthy relief from the gloom of his austere religion, in the atmosphere of their genial catholicity; and were an invaluable comfort and benefit to him. Lady Austen also, a sprightly and accomplished woman, of intellectual tastes, quick sympathies, and charming manners, whose appearance at Olney ”added fresh plumes to the wings of time,” was at one period an inexpressible blessing to him. ”Lady Austen's conversation acted on Cowper's mind as the harp of David on the troubled spirit of Saul.” He christened her ”Sister Ann,” and wrote cordial verses to her. Constant communications with her withdrew his attention from depressing superst.i.tions, and enlivened his spirits.

At her suggestion it was, and under her sustaining encouragement, that he composed the immortal ballad of ”John Gilpin,” the ”Dirge for the Royal George,” and his greatest work, ”The Task.” Love being proscribed by his repeated subjection to insanity, friends.h.i.+p was the resource in which he was thrice fortunate.

Far above all others in the number of his female friends, in importance, must be ranked Mary Unwin, whose name is indissolubly joined with his in the memories of all who are familiar with his plaintive story. Mrs. Unwin, wife of a clergyman, religious after the most scrupulous evangelical type, was first drawn to Cowper by a sectarian interest. They were fated to be friends, as by the striking of a die. ”That woman,” he soon wrote to Lady Hesketh, ”is a blessing to me; and I never see her without being the better for her company.”

This is the secret of the charm of all true friends.h.i.+p--that it soothes the heart, clarifies the mind, heightens the soul. One feels so much the better for it. Almost penniless as he was, a s.h.i.+ftless manager, a.s.sailed by terrible depression and even madness, the Unwins took him under their roof, and gave him a home on the most generous terms. From this time until her death, the friends.h.i.+p of Mary was a necessity to Cowper, the greatest support and enjoyment the hapless poet knew, combining with his native humor and gentleness to combat his melancholy malady with frequent and long victories. In his fits of insanity, she watched and waited on him day and night, defying alike personal hards.h.i.+ps and the slanderous remarks of the vile. The only drawback on Cowper's indebtedness to Mrs. Unwin was her jealous wish to restrict him to the society of her own sect of religionists, that harrowing type of piety represented by John Newton. Otherwise, he might have enjoyed much more frequent and prolonged periods of what he cheerily characterized as ”absences of Mr. Blue-devil.” Lady Hesketh said of her, ”She seems in truth to have no will left on earth but for his good. How she has supported the constant attendance she has gone through with the last thirteen years is to me, I confess, wonderful.” Cowper himself said, ”It is to her, under Providence, I owe it that I am alive at all.” With a devotion in which self appeared to be lost, ”there she sat, on the hardest and smallest chair, leaving the best to him, knitting, with the finest possible needles, stockings of the nicest texture. He wore no others than of her knitting.” After nearly a generation of her fond and sedulous ministering, repeatedly stricken with paralysis, her mind decayed, mute, almost blind, as she sat by his side, a pathetic memento of what she had been, Cowper composed for her that unsurpa.s.sed tribute, his exquisite and imperishable lines, ”To Mary”:

The twentieth year has well-nigh past, Since first our sky was overcast: Ah! would that this might be our last, My Mary!

Thy spirits have a fainter flow: I see thee daily weaker grow; 'Tis my distress that brought thee low, My Mary!

Thy needles, once a s.h.i.+ning store, For my sake restless heretofore, Now rust, disused, and s.h.i.+ne no more, My Mary!

Thy indistinct expressions seem Like language uttered in a dream; Yet me they charm, whate'er the theme, My Mary!

Thy silver locks, once auburn bright, Are still more lovely in my sight Than golden beams of orient light, My Mary!

Partakers of my sad decline, Thy hands their little force resign; Yet, gently prest, press gently mine, My Mary!

Yet ah! by constant heed, I know How oft the sadness that I show Transforms thy smiles to looks of woe, My Mary!

And should my future lot be cast With much resemblance of the past, Thy worn-out heart will break at last, My Mary!

Lady Hesketh, ever a true angel, came and dwelt with the afflicted pair. And when Cowper, after four wretched years of separation, plunged, as he expressed it, in deeps unvisited by any human soul save his, followed his faithful sister-spirit to a better world, Lady Hesketh, that model of a third friend, built, in St. Edmund's Chapel, where he was buried, a monument displaying two tablets, both bearing poetical inscriptions; one dedicated to William Cowper, the other to Mary Unwin. The friends.h.i.+p of Garrick and Mrs. Clive is memorable for its sprightliness, sincerity, unbroken harmony-saving a few momentary quarrels for relish--long duration, and the large measure of happiness it yielded. Their correspondence is very entertaining, and reflects honor on them both. Their talents and virtues contributed in a high degree to adorn and elevate the profession to which they belonged. It is an interesting fact, equally creditable to all the parties, that ”Pivy,” as they affectionately called Kittie Clive, was as dear to the excellent Mrs. Garrick as to her brilliant husband. The friends.h.i.+p of David Garrick was also one of the most delightful features in the life of the admirable Hannah More. A letter written by Hannah on seeing him play Lear, greatly pleased him, and led to their acquaintance. Acquaintance soon ripened into a warm esteem, and produced a friends.h.i.+p of the most cordial--and intimate character, which lasted until death. He declared that the nine muses had taken up their residence in her mind; and both in his conversation and his letters he constantly called her ”Nine.” One day when she and Johnson, and a few others, were at table with the Garricks, David read to the company her Sir Eldred, with such inimitable feeling that the happy auth.o.r.ess burst into tears. Friends.h.i.+p filled a large s.p.a.ce in the life of Hannah More, administering incalculable strength in her labors, joy in her successes, comfort in her afflictions. It has left its memorials in the records of a host of visits, gifts, letters, poems, dedications. Her correspondence with Sir William Pepys shows what an invaluable resource a wise, pure, comprehensive friends.h.i.+p is in the life of a thoughtful woman. Bishop Porteus bequeathed her a legacy of a hundred pounds. She consecrated an urn to him near her house with an inscription in memory of his long and faithful friends.h.i.+p. Mr. Turner, of Belmont, to whom she was for six years betrothed, but broke off the engagement after he had three times postponed the appointed wedding-day, always retained the highest esteem for her, and left her a thousand pounds at his death.

She also maintained a most friendly relation, as long as his increasing habit of intemperance allowed it, with her early tutor, Langhorne, the translator of Plutarch. On occasion of an antic.i.p.ated visit from her, Langhorne wrote a very pretty poem, beginning,

Blow, blow, my sweetest rose!

For Hannah More will soon be here; And all that crowns the ripening year Should triumph where she goes.

Joanna Baillie and Sir Walter Scott were deeply attached friends.

United by a generous admiration for genius, by esteem for exalted worth and by community of tastes, they were drawn still more closely together by many mutual kindnesses, visits, and frequent correspondence. A copy of Scott's ”Marmion,” fresh from the press, was placed in Joanna's hands. She cut the leaves and began to read it aloud to a small circle of friends, when she suddenly came upon the following magnificent and electrifying tribute to herself:

Or, if to touch such chord be thine, Restore the ancient tragic line, And emulate the notes that rung From the wild harp that silent hung By silver Avon's holy sh.o.r.e Till twice an hundred years rolled o'er; When she, the bold enchantress, came With fearless hand and heart in flame, From the pale willow s.n.a.t.c.hed the treasure, And swept it with a kindred measure, Till Avon's swans, while rung the grove With Monfort's hate and Basil's love, Awakening at the inspired strain, Deemed their own Shakespeare lived again!

Joanna, though taken by surprise, read on in a firm voice, till she observed the uncontrollable emotion of a friend by her side. Then she too gave way. It is delightful to partake by sympathy in so generous a gift of joy. What a pity it is that such a loving magnanimity as that of glorious Sir Walter is not more frequent among authors! The chief advantage of Fox over Pitt consisted in the fascinating demonstrativeness of his heart and manners. This won him hosts of idolizing friends, foremost among whom were many of the choicest ladies of the kingdom.

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