Memoirs, Letters, and Diaries

THOSE of us who in the spacious leisure of youth read and reread certain many-volumed memoirs, letters, and diaries, finding them never a foot-note too long, are inclined to be a little scornful of books made up, for busy or perhaps mentally indolent readers, of more or less aptly selected and arranged extracts from these delectable works. It would seem that the superlatively well-edited Early Diary of Frances Burney is of sufficiently recent publication to be hardly yet regarded as uncurrent literature; but still the chronicles of the Burney family in St. Martin’s Street¹ — a period for which materials must be largely drawn from the Diary — is a book which can be heartily welcomed and enjoyed. If its pages sometimes repeat what should be a familiar tale, they also illustrate and supplement it. “Oh, how agréable they are,” exclaimed the great and gentle Pacchierotti. “I don’t know anybody so agréable as Mr. Dr. Burney’s family!” Father and children were alike clever, tactful, good-humored, kind-hearted, and affectionate; and, fortunately for us, the pen of a ready writer was a common family possession.

Miss Hill and her sister, with pen and pencil, give us glimpses of the house, built by Sir Isaac Newton, which was the Burneys’ latest London home. They take us into the hospitable dining-parlor, where guests whose names are known to all the reading world had a confirmed habit of dropping in casually as well as coming formally; the drawing-room so often crowded with distinction of every kind and of every clime; and the music-room with the two harpsichords, where Hetty and her husband played duets with such taste and skill, and “the singer of singers,” Signora Agujari, all of whose notes otherwhere were literally golden, sang divinely in twenty different styles for five hours at a stretch. There are well-selected portraits, some, like the charming miniature of Susan Burney, reproduced for the first time. The extracts from the diary of this loveliest of the sisters will be to many readers the most interesting new material in the book. She could write very nearly as vividly or as entertainingly as Fanny, whether in the brief notes during the anxious days and nights of the Gordon Riots, or of the wrestlings with the English language of l’Imperatore del Canto, who sadly fears he must become the object of his gentle teacher’s “peculiar despise.” We care more for these things than for the scene from The Witlings, though that can be read, even at this late day, with pleasure and a wish for more, yet with a tolerably assured conviction that its author’s “two Daddies” were right in doubting its theatric possibilities.

Not only in the Burney records, but in all the social history of the time, David Garrick is a conspicuous figure. And he left behind him letters without number. How was so actively busy a man able to write so many, in days when even a busy man usually wrote with his own hand ? But notwithstanding this wealth of material, the great actor has scarcely been happy in his biographers, and a book like that of Mrs. Parsons’,² drawn as it is from a good-sized library of works readable and unreadable, is a thing to be grateful for. Not only does she appear to have read — and to have mastered — everything the most exacting could require; but she has shown excellent judgment as to fact and fable, essentials and non-essentials. In a series of vignettes, beginning with the boyhood in Lichfield, and ending with the burial in Westminster Abbey, Garrick’s career and his associations, domestic, professional, and social, are vividly sketched. The writer has, so to speak, lived with Roscius and his friends, and portrays them with skill and insight. There have been other great players, but never one “who was so great a personality outside the theatre.” Witness his Parisian social triumphs, remembered so long as old France endured, though there the attractions of thecher et charmant M. Garrique were only those of the private gentleman. Mrs. Parsons’s agreeable book can be read and reread with so much pleasure that one regrets that her natural vivacity of style should now and then degenerate into a too persistent and colloquial liveliness. Dullness is not a danger she need dread. A word must be said for the well-selected and not too familiar illustrations—which really illustrate. In this connection mention assuredly should be made of the admirable sketch of Garrick which Sir Theodore Martin has included in his Monographs, now happily collected in a volume.³ In less than a hundred pages this accomplished man of letters and wise commentator on things dramatic has produced a model brief biography. The more tellingly, perhaps, because so tersely he shows the baselessness of the tales of the “meanness” of one of the most generous of men, fables usually originating in professional envy, wounded literary vanity, or resentful ingratitude for favors received ; and he touches with peculiar feeling the most fortunate event in the actor’s fortunate life, — his marriage.

For nearly three hundred years Stanhopes have been Earls of Chesterfield, yet the fourth holder of the title is the Lord Chesterfield of men’s knowledge and needs no further appellation. Unliterate persons will use “a perfect Chesterfield ” as a descriptive phrase, and many, somewhat better informed, regard him simply as a well-mannered fop, who vainly tried to turn a dull, awkward youth into a finished diplomat of the eighteenthcentury pattern, and who kept Dr. Johnson waiting in an ante-room, and was long afterward sharply and enduringly punished therefor. His latest biographer⁴ very justly urges that the lighter and least worthy aspects of his subject’s character have been dwelt upon more than enough, while his skill and eloquence as a debater, and the distinguished ability, energy, integrity, and political prescience which he brought to the public service have been well-nigh forgotten, — sufficient reasons for a new memoir illustrating these traits, if it be as intelligently written as Mr. Craig’s volume. The writer in no way endeavors to produce a portrait without shadows; even his commendation is sometimes, perhaps, too carefully guarded. Chesterfield was often witty to his own disadvantage, and his rare powers were generally devoted to the Opposition; but his independence of mind and absolute incorruptibility — a marvel in that age — can account for some ill-success as well as his tactical shortcomings. His views on many public questions are so exceedingly modern that we have to remember that a century was to pass before some of them would be generally adopted. His greatest moment was when, in 1745, — an ill-omened year, — he went as viceroy to Ireland. The political wisdom, justice, tolerance he there showed can hardly be over-praised. We should be grateful to him that in 1752 the troublesome double date dropped from English use, yet how many remember that it was mainly owing to his energy, persistence, and eloquence that the reformed calendar was accepted in face of the strenuous opposition of conservatism which loved not “ new fangled things,” and ignorance mourning its lost eleven days. It is one of the many ironies of his history, that a scholar and lover of books, who had the sincerest respect for literary distinction, should always be remembered in connection with Dr. Johnson’s “fancied grievance,” — in truth, if examined, it is only that. It is to be hoped that this biography may help its readers to take a reasonably comprehensive view of a by no means simple personality.

At last we have an authoritative, and, it would seem, a definitive life of that most interesting of the women of the eighteenth-century Parisian salons, Julie de Lespinasse.⁵ Unpublished letters and other papers, which the Marquis de Ségur, with his accustomed literary skill, has examined to such good purpose, may yet see the light, but they probably will only confirm the impression given by this admirable memoir. It is written not only with grace and charm, but with insight and sympathy. Some purveyors of biographic gossip have treated Mademoiselle de Lespinasse with that flippant depreciation which is such an easy denotement of worldly wisdom. But M. de Ségur, writing with both knowledge and understanding, shows us the real woman, so that in some sort we can comprehend the potent charm and very strong influence wielded by a hostess without beauty or wealth, or even a recognized social status. It was a complex nature, in its fine intuitions, its sensitiveness, its exquisite tact, its large generosity, its unfailing good sense,—for others, —its so long carefully maintained self-respect, and that intensely passionate temperament, which in the end — if it made her one of the world’s great lovers — brought remorse, suffering, death. The translation, only fair at the best, is occasionally more literal than makes for exactness or limpid English. We would suggest that the belle-mère of the boy Marquis de Mora was, as the context shows, his motherin-law, not his “stepmother,” a relation he did not possess; and why should Lord Shelburne be called a “Count” in his own language? “Has peopled Hell and small houses,” is an anti-climax which the writer in her most overwrought moment would not have perpetrated - in English.

To retell a tale, known in some sort to all those who read history, with such completeness and accuracy of knowledge, such vividness and picturesqueness of style, such keen as well as sympathetic insight, so that the narrator seems an actual actor in his story and makes his reader share his experience, is surely no small achievement. M. Lenotre’s history of the flight to Varennes and the woeful return therefrom fulfills⁶ all these conditions. Again we meet that noble, steadfast son of the North, Axel Fersen, who in his French environment could well be called “so different from other men,” with his life-long devotion to the Queen, a devotion as respectful as passionate. With the wisest foresight and “incredible energy” he arranges all the details of the flight, admirably carried out so long as he is in control. The first dangers past, the open country reached, the fugitives become almost cheerful as the terrible city is left farther and farther behind. The incidents of the long summer’s-day journey live again, till night falls, and that stretch of road between Clermont and Varennes, haunted with tragic memories, is reached, where these poor people, “tracked like wild beasts,” believing that safety is very near, fall asleep from sheer exhaustion. As graphic is the record of the dolorous journey to Paris, its miseries and brutalities winch turned the Queen’s hair white; while the after history of those concerned in the capture is followed to the end, an end usually calamitous. Even the obscure little town, made famous in one fateful night, had very good reason then and afterward to rue its sudden eminence. The illustrations always add to the value of the book, while Mrs. Stawell’s translation is in every way of so rare an excellence that never for a moment is the reader made conscious that it is a translation.

A clever writer has recently suggested that a detective story need not necessarily be devoted to criminal investigations. Why not tell a tale of biographic or historic research ? And certainly M. Pichot’s distinguished success in discovering the identity of the Count de Cartrie, and in tracing his family history, is a very pretty piece of highly skilled detective work. For more than a hundred years a manuscript English translation of M. de Cartrie’s memoirs⁷ has been in existence, in which the translator apparently wrote all proper names by ear, with most astonishing results. Fortunately this manuscript lately fell into the hands of an appreciative London publisher, who persuaded M. Pichot, to examine it and expound its mysteries. The Count de la Cartrie belonged to a famille de robe illustrious in their province, having for generations deserved well of their country. He lived on his paternal acres the life of a rural gentleman, devoted to the education of his children, and on the best of terms with the peasants around him. To this household as to thousands of others, victims equally blameless and equally forgotten, the Revolution brought utter ruin and misery beyond all telling. M. de Cartrie, like his neighbors, was practically compelled by the country-folk to join the revolt against the tyranny of the Convention, and his memoirs are another record of the hopeless heroism and the unspeakably cruel reprisals which make the story of the war in La Vendée. How the husband and father was separated from all his family save the youngest boy, how through a thousand perils he at length escaped, made his way to England, and there for some time worked as a gardener, is told with a simplicity as pathetic as unaffected. By painful economies he was able to return to France in 1800, but the story of him and his was to have no happy ending. The smallest restitution did not come to the old Vendean — he was given the Cross of St. Louis! After lives of military service his sons died in poverty. His tenderly reared young daughters, escaping the executioner, in their helpless desolation were married to men of such low degree that perhaps their fate forms the most tragic element in the long-drawn-out family tragedy.

An earlier and more fortunate émigré was the Marquis d’Osmond, a courtier wiser than most in that he had some comprehension of the mistakes and follies of those about him in Versailles or in exile. His only daughter’s upbringing was what then would have been thought, to use our speech, “advanced,” her infancy not being spent in a foster-mother’s cottage, nor her girlhood in a convent, while the father himself directed her quite genuine home education. From her ten years’ life in England she brought a belief in English constitutionalism and an ability to look at her native world with a certain detachment. Marrying at seventeen, for her impoverished family’s sake, a soldier of fortune of fifty, possessing (for that day) “vast wealth,” her future in one respect was assured, through as illassorted a union as might be. When in 1835 she began to write her reminiscences,⁸ her salon had been for thirty years open to all opinions and talent of every kind. Her story of the last years of old France has an individuality which gives new life to an oft-told tale. Noteworthy, if not edifying, are her sketches of some great prelates, especially of the — to speak mildly — very secular household of her kinsman, the Archbishop of Narbonne, though his guests, out of respect for his office, attended mass on Sundays, carrying not prayer-books, but volumes of light and even scandalous literature; the brilliant social career of this ecclesiastic, who spent a fortnight every two years in his diocesan duties, fittingly ending in bankruptcy.

Mme. de Boigne and her family held proudly aloof from the imperial court, but she frankly owns that had the empire lasted a few years longer all the old nobility would have been absorbed by it; still she had no illusions as to the Bourbon princes, daughter of the crusaders though she was. We know now from whom Sainte-Beuve heard of that five hours’ drive in an Alpine storm, when half-adozen personages, enthralled by Mme. de Staël’s eloquent discussion of the just published letters of Mlle, de Lespinasse, were absolutely unconscious of the lost road, the passage of time, and the fury of the tempest. With some delightfully graphic touches, Mme. de Boigne depicts life at Coppet, where talking well was everybody’s first duty. That the mistress’s conversation “was far more remarkable than her books ” can well be believed; she had made it an art, and was so great an artist that art seemed simply nature. Mme. de Boigne herself “ possessed in the highest degree this delicate and charming science of good society,”and this charm is to be found in her unstudied literary style; it is always a quick-witted, open-minded, and agreeable talker, who relates her experiences or gossips entertainingly. An honest narrator, we believe, of what came within her own cognizance, her hearsays are probably as heard. If, for instance, several earnest biographers have of late enabled us to deal more accurately with the early career of Emma Hart, we have entire confidence in the young Adèle d’Osmond’s actual impressions of Lady Hamilton. There is no doubt as to the welcome which the readers of the first volume of the Memoirs will give to the second.

It would not do to inquire too closely as to the extent of the acquaintance of English-reading folk with the personality and history of the woman who became, one may almost say, the patron-saint of Prussia. So Miss Moffat’s well-written, well-arranged, and always interesting memoir,⁹ which in every page shows the author’s clear comprehension of the historic as well as the biographic aspects of her subject, and her faithful use of the new material only of late years available, should reach a wide circle of readers, by just desert and to supply a need. Louisa of Mecklenburg inherited from her mother’s family the beauty so often before and since the dower of Hessian princesses; she was “beautiful as an angel,” declared the King of Prussia when he sought her hand for his heir. A loyal and loving wife, with the German woman’s belief in the divine right of kings and husbands, she seems from the first to have been sensible of the prince’s limitations, understanding that she must take thought for him, not he for her; opposing, when the evil days came, her clear intelligence and cheerful courage to his irresolution and despondency. She could quickly learn the lessons of adversity, and realize that institutions worn out and noxious must be swept away, and she was astonishingly shrewd in her judgment of men and measures. Constantly she was a mediator between her husband and his able ministers, striving against his tendency to trust the incompetent. When Stein was transforming a mediæval into a modern state, the harassed Queen writes, “If he were a little more careful of the way in which he addresses the King, if he could contrive not to appear so great a man as he is, all would go well,” At once Napoleon recognized her as a dangerous enemy, and used against her the weapon of widely published calumnies, in their insinuations as vile as contemptible. She plainly foresaw the appointed end of overweening ambition, but the day of reckoning was still in the future when her short life ended. “In death as in life she was the heroine of the struggle,” her memory a veritable inspiration in the conflict yet to be. Happily for our real knowledge of the woman, her letters to her father and brother show her very self. An unavoidable reflection, of course, in considering the heavy burdens and bitter sorrows and humiliations of Louisa’s last years, when she hoped little for herself but much for her children, is that in this case the revenges of time were of a singular and startling completeness.

It is a far cry from London, Paris, and Berlin to the inchoate town on the Potomac to which Margaret Bayard came as a bride in 1800, and which was to remain her home for the rest of her life. Indeed Washington, even in its small, unattractive beginnings, was her world, one with which she was well content. If cities and men elsewhere interested her at all, save as regarded her own kindred, no sign of it appears in her published correspondence,¹⁰ She writes easily and readably, though without special grace or charm; she has good feeling and good sense, and a lively interest in her friends, including of course certain public characters. Her concern with politics is in men rather than measures. Her father was a Federalist; her husband, the founder of the National Intelligencer, a Republican; and while she naturally accepted his views, she does not seem ever to have been violently partisan, though Jefferson was her idol, whom she places and keeps on so high a pedestal that we get no very vivid impression of him. She was an ardent admirer of Crawford, that unimportant and almost forgotten presidential candidate, — an admiration probably excited by his attractive personal qualities, — while Henry Clay was her long-time and greatly attached friend. After twenty years in the capital she could write, in a rare moment of depression, that she lived in a land of strangers, with no family connections about her, and her society constantly changing. There are graphic touches depicting the advent of Jackson, and the dismay and suffering caused by the baleful inauguration of the spoils system. Socially, aside from its political quality, Washington in those days was in most respects a Southern town. It had too often its epidemics, and one great “revival” is described, its most intimate features forming the principal topic of conversation to a degree of which Mrs. Smith by no means approved. There were for many years Sunday services in the Capitol, a curious mixture of a religious and social function. The letters appear to have been transcribed with unusual care; only in a very few instances is a word misread, as when we are told that Jefferson was “a notional man, full of odd fancies in little things” and he appears as “national.” The editor’s notes are always to the point, but we wish he could have given one or two to Mrs. Smith’s own family. Her daughters we have to find out for ourselves, and even the index mixes up a sister-in-law and child of not quite the same name. We are sometimes interested in the kindly writer’s domestic happenings fully as much as in her social life, as is usually the case with the letters of a housemother after a hundred years.