Women of History Part 17

ANNE RADCLIFFE.

[BORN 1764. DIED 1823.]

EDINBURGH REVIEW.

Born in 1764, died in 1823, this lady was as truly an inventor, a great and original writer in the department she had struck out for herself--whether that department was of the highest kind or not--as the Richardsons, Fieldings, or Smolletts whom she succeeded, and for a time threw into the shade; or the Ariosto of the North, before whom her own star has paled its ineffectual fires. The pa.s.sion of fear, "the latent sense of supernatural awe and curiosity concerning whatever is hidden and mysterious"--these were themes and sources of interest which, prior to the appearance of her tales, could scarcely be said to have been touched upon. The "Castle of Otranto" was too obviously a mere caprice of imagination; its gigantic helmets, its pictures descending from their frames, its spectral figures dilating themselves in the moonlight to the height of the castle battlements,--if they did not border on the ludicrous, no more impressed the mind with any feeling of awe than the enchantments and talismans, the genii and peris, of the "Arabian Nights."

A nearer approach to the proper tone of feeling was made in the "Old English Baron;" but while it must be admitted that Mrs Radcliffe's principle of composition was to a certain degree antic.i.p.ated in that clever production, nothing can ill.u.s.trate more strongly the superiority of her powers, the more poetical character of her mind, than a comparison of the way in which in her different works the principle is wrought out; the comparative boldness and rudeness of Clara Reeves' mode of exciting superst.i.tious emotions as contrasted with the profound art, the multiplied resources, the dexterous display and concealment, the careful study of that cla.s.s of emotions on which she was to operate, which Mrs Radcliffe displays in her supernatural machinery. Certainly never before or since did any one more accurately perceive the point to which imagination might be wrought up by a series of hints, glimpses, or half-heard sounds, consistently at the same time with pleasurable emotion, and with the continuance of that very state of curiosity and awe which had been thus excited. The clang of a distant door, a footfall on the stair, a half-effaced stain of blood, a stream of music floating over a wood or round some decaying chateau--nay, a very "rat behind the arras,"--become, in her hands, invested with a mysterious dignity; so finely has the mind been attuned to sympathise with the terrors of the sufferer by a train of minute details and artful contrasts, in which all sights and sounds combine to awaken and render the feeling more intense.

Yet her art is more visible in what she conceals than in what she displays. "One shade the more, one ray the less," would have left the picture in darkness; but to have let in any farther the garish light of day upon her mysteries, would have shown at once the hollowness and meanness of the puppet which alarmed us, and have broken the spell beyond the power of reclasping it. Hence, up to the moment when she chooses to do so herself by those fatal explanations, for which no reader will ever forgive her, she never loses her hold on the mind. The very economy with which she avails herself of the talisman of terror preserves its power to the last undiminished, if not increased. She merely hints at some fearful thought, and leaves the excited fancy surrounded by night and silence to give it colour and form.

Of all the pa.s.sions, that of fear is the only one which Mrs Radcliffe can be properly said to have painted. More wearisome beings than her heroines, and anything "more tolerable and not to be endured" than her love tales, Calprenede or Scuderi never invented. As little have the sterner pa.s.sions of jealousy or hatred, or the dark shades of envious and malignant feeling, formed the subjects of her a.n.a.lysis. Within the circle of these pa.s.sions, indeed, she did not feel that she could walk with security; but her quick perception showed where there was still an opening in a region of obscurity and twilight as yet all but untrodden.

To that, as to the sphere pointed out to her by nature, she at once addressed herself; from that, as from a central point, she surveyed the provinces of pa.s.sion and imagination, and was content if, without venturing into their labyrinths, she could render their leading and more palpable features available to set off and to brighten, by their variety, the solemnity and gloom of the department which she had chosen.

MISS EDGEWORTH.

[BORN 1767. DIED 1849.]

JEFFREY.

Miss Edgeworth is the great modern mistress in the useful school of true philosophy, and has eclipsed, we think, the fame of all her predecessors. By her many excellent tracts on education, she has conferred a benefit on the whole ma.s.s of the population, and discharged, with exemplary patience as well as extraordinary judgment, a task which superficial spirits may perhaps mistake for an humble and easy one. By her popular tales, she has rendered an invaluable service to the middling and lower cla.s.ses of the people; and, by her novels, has made a great and meritorious effort to promote the happiness and respectability of the higher cla.s.ses.

There are two great sources of unhappiness to those whom fortune and nature seem to have placed above the reach of ordinary miseries. The one is _ennui_, that stagnation of life and feeling which results from the absence of all motives to exertion, and by which the justice of Providence has so fully compensated the partiality of fortune, that it may be fairly doubted whether upon the whole the race of beggars is not happier than the race of lords, and whether those vulgar wants that are sometimes so importunate are not in this world the chief ministers of enjoyment. This is a plague that infects all indolent persons that can live on in the rank in which they were born, without the necessity of working; but in a free country it rarely occurs in any great degree of virulence, except among those who are already at the summit of human felicity. Below this there is room for ambition, and envy, and emulation, and all the feverish movements of aspiring vanity and unresisting selfishness, which act as prophylactics against this more dark and deadly distemper. It is the canker which corrodes the full-blown flower of human felicity--the pestilence which smites at the bright hour of noon.

The other curse of the happy has a range more wide and indiscriminate.

It, too, tortures only the comparatively rich and fortunate, but is most active among the least distinguished, and abates in malignity as we ascend to the lofty regions of pure _ennui_. This is the desire of being fashionable, the restless and insatiable pa.s.sion to pa.s.s for creatures a little more distinguished than we really are, with the mortification of frequent failure, and the humiliating consciousness of being perpetually exposed to it. Among those who are secure of "meat, clothes, and fire,"

and are thus above the chief evils of existence, we do believe that this is a more prolific source of unhappiness than guilt, disease, or wounded affection; and that more positive misery is created, and more true enjoyment excluded, by the eternal fretting and straining of this pitiful ambition, than by all the ravages of pa.s.sion, the desolations of war, or the accidents of mortality. This may appear a strong statement, but we make it deliberately, and are deeply convinced of its truth. The wretchedness which it produces may not be so intense, but it is of much longer duration, and spreads over a far wider circle. It is quite dreadful indeed to think what a sweep this pest has taken among the comforts of our prosperous population. To be thought fashionable--that is, to be thought more opulent and tasteful, and on a footing of intimacy with a greater number of distinguished persons than they really are,--is the great and laborious pursuit of four families out of five, the members of which are exempted from the necessity of daily industry.

These are the giant curses of fashionable life; and Miss Edgeworth has accordingly dedicated her two best tales to the delineation of their symptoms. The history of Lord Glenthorn is a fine picture of _ennui_; that of Almeria, an instructive representation of the miseries of aspirations after fashion. The moral use of these narratives, therefore, must consist in warning us against the first approaches of evils which can never afterwards be resisted. To some readers her tales may seem to want the fairy colouring of high fancy and romantic tenderness; and it is very true that they are not poetical love tales, any more than they are anecdotes of scandal. We have great respect for the admirers of Rousseau and Petrarca, and we have no doubt that Miss Edgeworth has great respect for them; but _the world_, both high and low, which she is labouring to mend, have no sympathy with this respect. They laugh at these things, and do not understand them; and, therefore, the solid sense which she possesses presses perhaps rather too closely upon them, and, though it permits of relief from wit and direct pathos, really could not be combined with the more luxuriant ornaments of an ardent and tender imagination.

CHARLOTTE CORDAY.

[BORN 1768. DIED 1793.]

CARLYLE.

Amid which dim ferment of Caen and the world, history specially notices one thing. In the lobby of the Mansion de l'Intendance, where busy deputies are coming and going, a young lady, with an aged valet, taking grave, graceful leave of Deputy Barbaroux. She is of stately Norman figure, in her twenty-fifth year, of beautiful still countenance; her name is Charlotte Corday, heretofore styled D'Armans, while n.o.bility still was. Barbaroux has given her a note to Deputy Duperret, him who once drew his sword in the effervescence. Apparently, she will to Paris on some errand. "She was a republican before the Revolution, and never wanted energy." A completeness, a decision is in this fair figure: "by energy she means the spirit that will prompt one to sacrifice himself for his country." What if she, this fair young Charlotte, had emerged from her secluded stillness suddenly like a star; to gleam for a moment, and in a moment to be extinguished; to be held in memory, so bright complete was she, through long centuries! Quitting Cimmerian coalitions without, and the dim-simmering twenty-five millions within, history will look fixedly at this one fair apparition of a Charlotte Corday; will note whither Charlotte moves, how the little life burns forth so radiant, then vanishes, swallowed of the night.

With Barbaroux's note of introduction, and slight stock of luggage, we see Charlotte on Tuesday, the 9th of July, seated in the Caen diligence, with a place for Paris. None takes farewell of her, wishes her good journey; her father will find a line left, signifying that she is gone to England, that he must pardon her and forget her. The drowsy diligence lumbers along, amid drowsy talk of politics and praise of the Mountain, in which she mingles not; all night, all day, and again all night. On Thursday, not long before noon, we are at the bridge of Neuilly. Here is Paris, with her thousand black domes--the goal and purpose of thy journey! Arrived at the Inn de la Providence, in the Rue des Vieux Augustins, Charlotte demands a room, hastens to bed, sleeps all afternoon and night, till the morrow morning.

On the morrow morning she delivers her note to Duperret. It relates to certain family papers which are in the Minister of the Interior's hands, which a nun at Caen, an old convent-friend of Charlotte's, has need of, which Duperret shall a.s.sist her in getting: this, then, was Charlotte's errand to Paris? She has finished this in the course of Friday, yet says nothing of returning. She has seen and silently investigated several things. The Convention, in bodily reality, she has seen; what the Mountain is like. The living physiognomy of Marat she could not see; he is sick at present, and confined to home.

About eight o'clock on the Sat.u.r.day morning she purchases a large sheath-knife in the Palais-Royal; then straightway, in the Place de Victoires, takes a hackney-coach. "To the Rue de l'Ecole de Medicine, No. 44." It is the residence of the Citoyen Marat! The Citoyen Marat is ill, and cannot be seen, which seems to disappoint her much. Her business is with Marat, then? Hapless, beautiful Charlotte--hapless, squalid Marat! From Caen in the utmost west, from Neuchatel in the utmost east, they two are drawing nigh each other; they two have, very strangely, business together. Charlotte returning to her inn, despatches a short note to Marat, signifying that she is from Caen; that she desires earnestly to see him, and "will put it in his power to do France a great service." No answer. Charlotte writes another note, still more pressing; sets out with it by coach, about seven in the evening, herself.

It is yellow July evening, we say, the 13th of the month. Marat sits, about half-past seven of the clock, stewing in slipper-bath, sore, afflicted, ill of Revolution fever--of what other malady this history had rather not name. Excessively sick and worn, poor man; with precisely elevenpence-half-penny in paper; with slipper-bath, strong three-footed stool for writing on the while, and a squalid--washerwoman, one may call her; that is his civic establishment in Medical-School Street; thither and not elsewhither has his road led him. Not to the reign of brotherhood and perfect felicity; yet surely on the way towards that.

Hark! a rap again! A musical woman's voice, refusing to be rejected: it is the citoyenne who would do France a service. Marat, recognising from within, cries--Admit her. Charlotte Corday is admitted.

"Citoyen Marat, I am from Caen, the seat of rebellion, and wished to speak with you." "Be seated, _mon enfant_. Now what are the traitors doing at Caen--what deputies are at Caen?" Charlotte names some deputies. "Their heads shall fall within a fortnight," croaks the eager people's friend, clutching his tablets to write: _Barbaroux, Petion_, writes he, with bare, shrunk arm, turning aside in the bath; _Petion_ and _Louvet_, and--Charlotte has drawn her knife from the sheath; plunges it, with one sure stroke, into the writer's heart. "_A moi, chere amie_--Help, dear!" no more could the death-choked say or shriek.

The helpful washerwoman running in--there is no friend of the people or friend of the washerwoman left; but his life with a groan gushes out, indignant, to the shades below.

On Wednesday evening, about half-past seven o'clock, from the gate of the Conciergerie, to a city all on tiptoe, the fatal cart issues; seated on it a fair young creature, sheeted in red smock of murderess; so beautiful, serene, so full of life; journeying towards death--alone amid the world. The executioners proceed to bind her feet; she resists, thinking it meant as an insult; on a word of explanation, she submits with cheerful apology. As the last act, all being now ready, they take the neckerchief from her neck; a blush of maidenly shame overspreads that fair face and neck; the cheeks were still tinged with it when the executioner lifted the severed head, to show it to the people. "It is most true," says Forster, "that he struck the cheek insultingly, for I saw it with my eyes."

MADAME DE STAEL.

[BORN 1766. DIED 1817.]

JEFFREY.

The most powerful writer that her country has produced since the time of Voltaire and Rousseau, and the greatest writer, of a woman, that any time or any country has produced. Her taste perhaps is not quite pure, and her style is too irregular and ambitious. These faults may even go deeper. Her pa.s.sion for effect, and the tone of exaggeration which it naturally produces, have probably interfered occasionally with the soundness of her judgment, and given a suspicious colouring to some of her representations of fact. At all events, they have rendered her impatient of the humbler task of completing her explanatory details, or stating in their order all the premises of her reasonings. She gives her history in abstracts, and her theories in aphorisms; and the greater part of her works, in place of presenting that systematic unity, from which the highest degrees of strength and beauty and clearness must ever be derived, may be fairly described as a collection of striking fragments, in which a great deal of repet.i.tion does by no means diminish the effect of a good deal of inconsistency. In those same works, however, whether we consider them as fragments or as systems, we do not hesitate to say that there are more of original and profound observations, more new images, greater sagacity, combined with higher imagination, and more of the true philosophy of the pa.s.sions, the politics, and the literature of her contemporaries, than in any other author we can now remember.

She has great eloquence on all subjects, and a singular pathos in representing those bitterest agonies of the spirit in which wretchedness is aggravated by remorse, or by regrets that partake of its character.

Though it is difficult to resist her when she is in earnest, we cannot say that we agree in all her opinions, or approve of all her sentiments.

She overrates the importance of literature, either in determining the character, or affecting the happiness of mankind; and she theorises too confidently on its past and its future history. On subjects like this, we have not yet facts enough for so much philosophy, and must be contented, we fear for a long time to come, to call many things accidental which it would be more satisfactory to refer to determinate causes. In her estimate of the happiness and her notions of the wisdom of private life, we think her both unfortunate and erroneous. She makes pa.s.sions and high sensibilities a great deal too indispensable, and varnishes over all pictures too uniformly with the glue of an extravagant or affected enthusiasm. She represents men, in short, as a great deal more unhappy, more depraved, and more energetic than they are, and seems to respect them the more for it. In her politics, she is far more unexceptionable. She is everywhere the warm friend and animated advocate of liberty, and of liberal, practical, and philanthropic principles. On these subjects we cannot blame her enthusiasm, which has nothing in it vindictive or provoking, and are far more inclined to envy than to reprove that sanguine and buoyant temper of mind which, after all she has seen and suffered, still leads her to overrate, in our apprehension, both the merits of past attempts at political amelioration, and the chances of their success hereafter. It is in that futurity, we fear, and in the hopes that make it present, that the lovers of mankind must yet for a while console themselves for the disappointments which still seem to beset them. If Madame de Stael, however, predicts with too much confidence, it must be admitted that her labours have a powerful tendency to realise her predictions. Her writings are all full of the most animating views of the improvement of our social condition and the means by which it may be effected, the most striking refutations of prevailing errors on these great subjects, and the most persuasive expostulations with those who may think their interest or their honour concerned in maintaining them. Even they who are the least inclined to agree with her must admit that there is much to be learned from her writings; and we can give them no higher praise than to say that their tendency is not only to promote the interests of philanthropy and independence, but to soften rather than exasperate the prejudices to which they are opposed.

With our manners in society she is not quite well pleased, though she is kind enough to ascribe our deficiencies to the most honourable causes.

In commiserating the comparative dulness of our social talk, however, has not this philosophic observer a little overlooked the effects of national tastes and habits? and is it not conceivable at least that we who are used to it may really have as much satisfaction in our own hum-drum way of seeing each other, as our more sprightly neighbours in their exquisite a.s.semblies?

MADAME DE LA ROCHEJAQUELEIN.

[BORN 1772. DIED 1857.]

JEFFREY.

This hard-fated woman was very young and newly married when she was thrown, by the adverse circ.u.mstances of the time, into the very heart of those deplorable contests [the war in La Vendee, during the first and maddest years of the French Republic]; and without pretending to any other information than she could draw from her own experience, and scarcely presuming to pa.s.s any judgment upon the merits or demerits of the cause, she has made up her memoirs of a clear and dramatic description of acts in which she was a sharer, or scenes of which she was an eye-witness, and of the characters and histories of the many distinguished individuals who partook with her of their glories and sufferings. The irregular and undisciplined wars which it was her business to describe were naturally far more prolific of extraordinary incidents, unexpected turns of fortune, and striking displays of individual talent, and vice and virtue, than the more solemn movements of national hostility, where everything is in a great measure provided and foreseen, and where the inflexible subordination of rank, and the severe exactions of a limited duty, not only take away the inducement, but the opportunity, for those exaltations of personal feeling and adventure which produce the most lively interest, and lead to the most animating results.

This lady had some right, in truth, to be delicate and royalist beyond the ordinary standard. Her father, the Marquis de Donnison, had an employment about the person of the king, in virtue of which he had apartments in the Palace of Versailles, in which splendid abode Madame de la Rochejaquelein was born, and continued constantly to reside in the very focus of royal influence and glory till the whole of its unfortunate inhabitants were compelled to leave it by the fury of that mob which escorted them to Paris in 1789. She had, like most French ladies of distinction, been destined from her infancy to be the wife of M. de Lescure, a near relation of her mother, and the representative of the ancient and n.o.ble family of Salgues in Poitou.

The picture of the war [in which Madame de la Rochejaquelein figured so prominently, and in which she lost her young husband] is shaded with deep horrors. The convention issued the barbarous decree that the country [La Vendee], which still continued its resistance, should be desolated, that the whole inhabitants should be exterminated without distinction of age or s.e.x, the habitations consumed with fire, and the trees cut down by the axe. A mult.i.tude of sanguinary conflicts ensued, and the insurgents succeeded in resisting this desolating invasion.

Among the slain in one of those engagements the republicans found the body of a young woman, which, Madame de la Rochejaquelein informs us, gave occasion to a number of idle reports, many giving it out that it was she herself, or a sister of M. de la Rochejaquelein, who had no sister, or a new Joan of Arc, who had kept up the spirit of the peasantry by her enthusiastic predictions. The truth was, that it was the body of an innocent peasant who had always lived a remarkably quiet and pious life till recently before this action, when she had been seized with an irresistible desire to take a part in the conflict. [She deserved to be "a woman of history," but her name has not been preserved.] She had discovered herself some time before to Madame de la Rochejaquelein, and begged of her a shift of a peculiar fabric. The night before the battle, she also revealed herself to M. de la Rochejaquelein, asking him to give her a pair of shoes, and promising to behave in such a manner in the morrow's fight that he would never think of parting with her. Accordingly, she kept near his person through the whole of the battle, and conducted herself with the most heroic bravery.

Two or three times, in the very heat of the fight, she said to him: "No, mon general, you shall not get before me; I shall always be closer up to the enemy even than you." Early in the day she was hurt pretty severely in the hand, but held it up, laughing, to her general, and said, "It is nothing at all." In the end of the battle, she was surrounded in a charge, and fell fighting like a desperado. There were about ten other women who took up arms, Madame de la Rochejaquelein says, in this cause: two sisters under fifteen, and a tall beauty who wore the dress of an officer.

At the end, after the loss of her husband, Madame de la Rochejaquelein was told that it was impossible to resist the attack that was to be made next day, and was advised to seek her safety in flight and disguise, without the loss of an instant. She set out accordingly with her mother, on a gloomy day in December, under the conduct of a drunken peasant; and, after being out most of the night, at length obtained shelter in a dirty farm-house, from which, in the course of the day, she had the misery of seeing her unfortunate countrymen scattered over the whole open country, chased and butchered without mercy by the republicans, who now took a final vengeance for all the losses they had sustained. She had long been clothed in shreds and patches, and needed no disguise to conceal her quality. She was sometimes hidden in the mill when the troopers came to search for fugitives in her lonely retreat, and often sent in the midst of winter to herd the sheep or cattle of her faithful and compa.s.sionate host, along with his raw-boned daughter.