The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu/the Letters of Madame De Sévigné to Her Daughter and Friends

Edited by MRS. HALE. Revised Edition. Boston : Roberts Brothers. Edited by MRS. HALE. Revised Edition. Boston : Roberts Brothers.

“THE last pleasure that fell in my way,” wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to her sister, “ was Madame Sévigné’s Letters; very pretty they are, but I assert, without the least vanity, that mine will be full as entertaining forty years hence. I advise you, therefore, to put none of them to the use of waste paper.” After more than a hundred years, we suppose most people find Lady Mary’s self-satisfaction a just, if not a modest one, and are glad that the Countess of Mar and her other friends kept her letters. They form her autobiography, and never was woman’s story as maiden, wife, and mother more charmingly written. Rarely, moreover, has any character been more worthy the portrayal of so brilliant an historian. Mrs. Hale, indeed, laments her want of religious feeling; but this is an indefinite regret which need not greatly trouble anybody till it is determined what religious feeling may be. She was not given, certainly, to devout expression, but she seems at least to have been a very stanch Protestant, and if the reader will turn to the letter to the Countess of Bute, written from Louvere, October 20, 1752, he will see enough to prove that Lady Mary had thought earnestly and clearly as well as read deeply upon the subject of her religious faith.

But if the editor is not very definite or perfectly fair in regard to Lady Mary, she makes up the deficiency to Madame de Sevigne, whom she praises for religious feeling, and who seems from her own testimony to have had chiefly a pretty piety, which led her to read books of devotion and moral discourses at the proper season, and left her free at other times to write scandal to her invalid daughter. We doubt if Mrs. Hale is quite a safe guide in commending the didactic qualities of a lady who in one breath could tell her daughter that M. de la Rouchefoucault said he would be in love with her if he were twenty years younger, and in the next cry with a sprightly air: “After all, we pity you in not having the word of God preached in a suitable manner..... How can one love God if one never hears him properly spoken of?” Madame de Sevigne was a tender and loving mother; but the way in which she speaks of her son’s relations with certain “little actresses,” is but a worldly way, and that of a Mother of the Period at the best; and her efforts to amuse him and win him away from low company by listening and laughing while he read Rabelais, were not such as to reinforce “ every good, just, and noble sentiment” with which she had endeavored to inspire him. She had very probably an “ exquisite tenderness of heart,” but it is not so much in the tone of a tender - hearted woman as of a sprightly chronicler, willing to turn any event to witty account, that she speaks of the execution of a famous poisoner : “ At length it is all over; La Brinvillier’s in the air; after her execution, her poor little body was thrown into a large fire and her ashes dispersed by the wind, so that whenever we breathe we shall inhale some small particles of her, and, by the communication of the minute spirits, we may all be infected with the desire of poisoning, to our no small surprise.” Madame de Sevigne’s “delicate refinement” is not to be found in the gossip of the dissolute court which she recounts, and it must be in the spirit of her time, and not from her own taste, that she repeats such coarse sayings as that of the prince, who “informed the ladies at Chantilly that their transparencies would be a thousand times more beautiful if they would wear them next their skin.” Though herself without reproach, she has scarcely a comment upon the profligacy of the society in which she lives, and only a formal sympathy for the truth of Mademoiselle d’Orleans, the king’s cousin, when Louis withdraws his permission for her marriage with the Duc de Lauzun. Madame de Sevigne speaks of this passage of guiltless and unhappy love, sole in the annals of that shameless reign, “as a fine dream, a glorious subject for a tragedy or romance, but especially talking or reasoning eternally.” The princess, she says in another place, with a neat self-possession which suggests how little comfort could have been got from her, “behaves to me as to a person that sympathizes with her in her distress ; in which she is not mistaken, for I really feel sentiments for her that are seldom felt for persons of such superior rank.”

“ How many readers and admirers has Madame de Sévigné,”says Lady Montagu, “ 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 that of a nurse, always tittletattle; yet so well gilt over with airy expressions and a flowing style.” This is a little unjust, but it is not so unjust and not so ill-advised as Mrs. Hale’s high-flown compliments, and prescription of Madame de Sevigne’s life and letters as models for the imitation of young ladies. Her letters are to be read for entertainment and instruction by persons of mature judgment. They are a delightful chronicle of the court gossip, when written from Paris, and a bit dull when written from the author’s retirement in Brittany; but they always afford a curious study of character and manners. For this reason, or as a kind of sub-history, they are greatly to be valued ; but there is so wide a gulf between the interests and conditions of Madame de Sevigne’s time and our own, that we think Mrs. Hale very extraordinary indeed, when she says a life like ours “ so vulgarizing alike to the mind and to the style, finds its best antidote in the letters of Madame de Sévigné"; and one might well doubt if she had made a faithful study of her author, when she adds that “the tumult of the outer world is faintly heard ” in those echoes of fashion and intrigue.

Madame de Sevigne was, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a brilliant and cultivated woman, better than the society in which she lived, but vividly reflecting its spirit in thought and expression ; but she had not so open or so liberal a mind as the Englishwoman ; she had not such wide and varied experience ; and her letters are infinitely less instructive and amusing. Neither is to be proposed as a model in everything, we think ; but of the two, by all means let Lady Mary form the younglady mind. In the mean time, those who are not young ladies, or whose minds are formed, will join us in gratitude to the publishers, who give us in this pleasing form selections from authors who can delight so much.