Two Types of Piety

THE Autobiography of Mary Smith, “ Schoolmistress and Nonconformist,”¹ is one of the most curious and interesting pieces of self - portraiture that has appeared for many a day. The narrative is very modest and measured, perfectly ingenuous, and also perfectly serious. Indeed, if the author had but had a touch of humor along with her other fine mental qualities, she might almost have given us an immortal book, so unwillingly does the world let die an autobiography, no matter whose, which is at once candid and lively.

Mary Smith was born in 1822, in Cropredy, an agricultural village of Oxfordshire ; and surely no one who has never idled through long English midsummer days, from one to another of those green, low-lying hamlets, knows how profoundly sleepy and archaic an Oxfordshire village can be. There was, apparently, no hall or manor house very near, but the vicarage was large and stately, with extensive shrubberies and highwalled gardens ; for the vicar was “ a rich pluralist who had married a duke’s daughter.” The houses of the village tradesmen stood humbly about the gates of this mansion ; the thatched dwellings of the very poor were extremely miserable.

Mary’s father was the village shoemaker. Making all due allowance for his daughter’s loyal partiality, we must admit William Smith to have been a fine specimen of his class. A man of blameless life, who had read a little and thought for himself over his lapstone. he displayed not much of what Matthew Arnold taught us to call the “ dissidence of dissent.,’’ and took very quietly the petty persecutions which nonconformity must needs entail in so minute a world. Even the “ little wench,” who had inherited both his love of books and his independent, spirit, had to suffer in the dame school, of which otherwise she was the pride, from the pointed neglect of the vicarage ladies. We may smile at the conventional epithet “ haughty,” which is regularly applied to the vicar of Cropredy ; but he would indeed seem to have been a bit of a despot, to judge by the tale of his walking in on the Smiths’ family dinner, and peremptorily demanding, against the forthcoming visitation of the bishop, “ such children as might be of an age for confirmation.” William Smith rose respectfully, and submitted that his children must be left to decide for themselves when their minds should be mature. Whereupon “ his reverence slammed tiro door, and went away without a word of courtesy.”

After all, it appears to have been the stamping and the slamming which especially shocked the prim little maiden who was brought up upon stone floors, with a horror of bad manners which was almost morbid. “ Things of this kind,” she adds very quaintly, “ helped to make me a sturdy nonconformist all my days, as my father had been.”

Mary was happy for a time in being removed from the dame school and its grand visitors to one of a better grade, kept by two Methodist ladies of the best type,” where she and the neighboring farmers’ daughters were instructed (“’tis sixty years since,” be it remembered) both in all manner of fine needlework and in the meekest and most minute decorums of speech and behavior. But all formal schooling was soon at an end for her, and in her early teens Mary and a brother a little older than herself were set up in a tiny shop on the Oxfordshire Canal, whose accounts were kept by the girl with agonizing exactitude, and every penny of its profits, of course, turned in to the common stock of the struggling and hard-pressed home. She even half reproaches herself with the odd moments which were still found for study ; for Mary had an intelligence which could not sleep even by the sedgy streams and under the heavy elms of Oxfordshire ; no petty ambitions of any kind, — hardly enough of the simple desire to please and be praised which is so natural a grace of youth, and yet withal a boundless aspiration. It was a terrible moment to her — one seems to see the village vestal blushing as she records the outrage — when a gay young Honorable, who was canvassing Cropredy in the Tory interest, kissed her across the counter of the shop by the canal. With the same adorable naïveté, she tells us how it was that, about this time, she came first to think of making verses. All her mother’s sisters in Gloucestershire had married farmers. One of these, “ Uncle Newth,” had a rhyming spirit; and having also, as a convinced Baptist, much sympathy with Mary’s father, he wrote to him often, and usually in metre. We give a specimen of his style : —

We cannot discover that this sort of thing appeared either blasphemous or funny to Mary; it simply excited emulation, and, as she says, set them all rhyming. There was really no fatal objection to Uncle Newth’s poetry on the score of metrical form, and happily the shrinking girl had deeper sources of inspiration than the fat, complacent elder. In her hunger for books, she had already exhausted the literary stores of Cropredy ; borrowing Kirke White’s Remains from one house, the Vicar of Wakefield and the Castle of Otranto from another, and even at a third, from a woman whose parents had been Roman Catholics, “ though she herself went to chapel,” certain lives of the saints, and memorials of “ monks, nuns, and abbots.” Of the existence of these unnatural beings she now heard for the first time, and seems never to have suspected, up to her dying day, how intimately she was herself allied to the best of them, both by her strong proclivity to mysticism, and by her unappeasable craving for the most radical, not to say fantastic forms of self-sacrifice.

Her own great spiritual awakening occurred at about this time, and the words she finds in which to describe this crisis in her story are so rapt, so solemn, so eloquent, and yet so fit that we deeply regret the lack of space for quotation. There were months of spiritual darkness and agony, endured in heroic silence, followed by a brief interval of heavenly sunshine. “ I gave up all,” she says ; and one asks, with a certain impatience, what the poor child had to give up, while she goes on gravely to tell us : “ The ear-rings were taken out of my ears, the coral necklace from my neck, the flowers and bows from my bonnet. It was a joy to me to give them up. ... I had in fact learned the great lesson to lie low in the Lord’s hands, and feel that every step downward is a step upward. Till then I had never known how sweet life was.”

But the hour of rapture was pathetically brief. The mystic faith professed had to be proved ; the “ tasks in hours of insight willed ” had now to be done. We must at least let her tell in her own candid words how the first shadow fell upon her fervid spirit: “ As a young religious enthusiast, I expected I know not what manifestations of the Spirit in fulfilling the ordinances. I fear I had a sense that, in making so great a sacrifice, I should also have some return of special blessing, but I was disappointed. I felt nothing, and I was certainly determined not to pretend that I felt anything.” The “ haughty ” vicar would have told her curtly, the ideal director — from whom she was debarred, and whom, for the rest, she could do without as well as any living soul — would have told her soothingly, that hers was the need of authentic sacraments. But she managed to grow in grace, even so deprived, for, in her own strong words, she “ never relented.” “ And writing this today,” she adds, “ after forty years have passed, I now regard ordinances no more than a Quaker does.”

But about this time are introduced, rather abruptly, the names of the canny pair who were destined to be for so many years the ruthless taskmasters of this enthusiastic soul. Having seen so fine a dissenting type in the person of Mary’s father, it is but fair that we should be told what she had to learn concerning the more sordid aspects of nonconformity. Mr. Osborne — his Christian or “ given ” name is, I think, never mentioned — was a clever and showy Baptist preacher, whose ministrations the family at Cropredy had lately been attending. Now he had received a call to Brough, in Westmoreland, and Mary got a letter intimating that if pious work was what she wanted, it might he found, plus Christian society and example, in the family of the minister. Her family, even the mild and humble - minded father, rather disliked the plan ; but Mary saw in it a divine summons, and obeyed without hesitation, though not without misgiving.

She went into Westmoreland with the Osbornes in the depth of a severe winter, much too thinly clad for the great change of climate, of which none of them seem to have had any adequate conception; and she went to a life of such domestic drudgery and physical hardship as had never been imagined in the easy-going south. Ostensibly, she was not a mere servant, and the ridiculous term “ lady help ” had not then been invented; but it would have been far better if her position had been defined and her remuneration fixed, for then she might at least have sued at law for wages which were earned ten times over, but never paid at all. Her father had tried to stipulate, before she left home, that the arrangement with the Osbornes should be for three months only ; but the sin by which the angels fell was certainly not quite rooted out of Mary Smith’s heart, for she would not write to him after the little money which she had taken with her from home was gone ; and ten toilsome years were to pass away, and Mary would be nearly thirty, before she was to see kind Oxfordshire again.

Yet for all the straits to which she was reduced, and the sordid tyranny which she felt to the uttermost, though scorning to complain of it even in retrospect, that first sharp winter among the fells was a time both of spiritual and mental exaltation. The brusque manners and rough speech of the north struck her painfully at first, sensitive as she was by nature, and always remained, to anything like personal rudeness ; but her growing sense of the rare goodness of many of these hill folk is recorded in touching language:—

“ No people I had then or have since met with have impressed me with having a religion so true and pure and lofty as theirs. . . . Coming as I did from the south of England, ... I never could like Brough, or reconcile myself to that long, dreary prospect of snow-covered fells which for more than half of the year encompassed it all around. Its inhospitable, ungenerous skies, as I still thought them, never won me over to delight, or kept my heart from sighing for a kinder and brighter home. It was not a place to love nor to add to one’s happiness. We all felt it was only probationary, and held our peace. A morrow would come, and for that morrow we lived. That was a recognized fact on all hands.”

After a while the Osbornes graciously permitted her to open a little day school for girls, while still keeping her place as “ assistant ” in their household. Somehow or other, books of a sort were found at lonely Brough, and even amid her multiplied activities the time to read them. Whately’s Logic and the Scotch metaphysicians do not sound very enlivening, but by and by a milder light arose upon her chilly way. Mary was one morning dusting the room which Mr. Osborne used as a study, when her eye fell upon a pamphlet on his writing-table. It was Emerson’s Essay on Nature, “ lying open at the Christian teacher.” The girl read, with her dusting - cloth suspended in her hand, and life was transfigured, labor idealized and consecrated anew. Mary never came to the point of positively liking either a “ church ” or a “ cowl,” but she knew a “ prophet of the soul ” at the first glance, and her silent, progressive emancipation from the more cramping bonds of the creed she had embraced dated from that wintry hour. “ I read the paragraph on the snowstorm,” she says. “ It was all I dare read. It woke a thousand new and wonderful thoughts. I was so ravished with the genial freshness and fertility of the argument that I read it over and over again, whenever I could get a chance, until I knew it by heart, as I knew the Psalms of David and my favorite hymns.”

After some three years in Brough, Mr. Osborne moved to Carlisle, and Mary yielded to the persuasions of her “ friends ” and accompanied them. She even placed in Mr. Osborne’s hands the five pounds which represented the entire profits of her little school. Her bondage seems almost craven, as we read of it, even though she pleads in extenuation that she always loved the Osbornes, and found something agreeably stimulating in the contact with her taskmaster’s mind. Sheer necessity, however, compelled her to leave them again, and frankly to take service in a rich Quaker family living at Scotsby, a few miles from Carlisle. It was a pleasant episode in Mary Smith’s life which followed, a blessed breathingspace which lasted for several years; and the story is so charmingly told of her experiences as nursery governess in that exquisite country home of “ peace, order, and good manners ” that one regrets the lack of space for free quotation. The chapters concerning Scotsby are, however, earnestly recommended to the latter-day inventors of social Utopias, as showing how unostentatiously some of their theoretical difficulties were actually solved in a dissenting British household of the lower middle class almost fifty years ago. Mary Smith was now able to possess herself of Emerson and Carlyle, who gave her her second great mental awakening, as well as of the works of Shakespeare and others of the elder immortals, and her own power of expression grew day by day. She had become the “ M. S.” of the Poets’ Corner in the local newspaper, and the verses which appeared above that signature were not vulgar. Sometimes they reflected with a fidelity and beauty quite astonishing the aspects of the changeful year; as in the stirring lines entitled February : —

There is a distant echo of Emerson here, and there are many reminiscences of the German lyric poets, with whom, under the stimulus of Carlyle’s essays, she presently made herself acquainted ; as here ; —

In the midst of this time of peaceful expansion the Osbornes again claimed Mary for their own; and, true to her instinct of self-immolation, she took her strong inward shrinking from the change as an indubitable sign that she ought to return to them. Mr. Osborne’s activity of mind and hospitality to new opinions had gotten him into trouble with the leaders of his sect. He was more than suspected of heresy, and, having decided to quit preaching and open a school, he saw plainly that the new enterprise would never succeed without Miss Smith’s cooperation. That coöperation meant, as usual, entire responsibility, exhausting labor, and no manner of outward recognition, whether moral or material, of her services. But the Osbornes were Mary’s “ weird,” and she toiled for them as though bound in sacred honor to the extinction of some spiritual, albeit to the reader of her confessions quite imaginary debt. The time came, though not for several years yet, when the burden fell from her, the imperious conscience was satisfied, and she felt that she had at last completely discharged her mystic obligation. After this tragic time the Osbornes left the place, and, somehow or other, Mary found her own worth recognized, and her solid prosperity as a singularly successful teacher of youth began.

We have followed her story rather minutely up to this point. The rest is equally fresh and striking, but if we have managed to inspire any reader with a tithe of the interest it has excited in ourselves, he will seek the book out, and read the close of the humble, honorable story in its heroine’s own apt words. He will linger over the affecting account of her last visit to the good old father in Oxfordshire, and mark how perfectly the pensive poems written at that time embody the charm, so long unfelt, of the tranquil midland scenery. He will read the indirectly (never, of course, intentionally) amusing tale of how Mary went from Cropredy, with some of her bucolic cousins, to London, to see the first great exhibition of 1851, and how she admired, as in duty bound, the triumphs of human industry, but shrank deep into her essentially fastidious self from the noise and sordid bustle of the crowded town, and the unavoidable incidents of thirdclass travel by an excursion train.

A great pleasure was in store for the succeeding years in the personal friendship of the Carlyles, who both appear at their best and brightest in their relations with her. About the year 1854 Mary conceived the bold idea of writing to Jane Welsh Carlyle, telling her story, hinting at her depressed position (for she was then still with the Osbornes), and confessing her literary aspirations, and her longing for something like what she conceived to be the stimulating and improving conditions of life at Cheyne Row. Mrs. Carlyle’s answer is delightful. She takes time to write at length ; she puts on no airs ; she abounds in playful sympathy, and sound, sweet common sense. The beginning is characteristic: “ Your faith in things unseen, myself among them, is very beautiful and affecting to me ; ” and so she goes on, leading easily up to the sentence in which she tenderly pricks the bubble of Mary Smith’s reverent illusions concerning one phase of London society : “ Believe a woman older than yourself, who has seen and seen through all you are now longing after. There is as little nourishing for an aspiring soul in ‘ literary society ‘ as in any civilized society one could name.” All Mrs. Carlyle’s letters to Mary are given in an appendix, and, needless to say, they are the best of reading. Last of all there is a noble, fatherly one from the sad old man at Chelsea, dated December 8,1873, seven years after his wife’s death. “ I well enough remember,” he begins, “ the transient shadow of a fine relation which you once had in this household, and, in a mournful, changed condition, must always have,” etc.

The child of Mrs. Carlyle’s hearty adoption was now herself past fifty, and had long been a personage in the city of Carlisle. Her excellent school had become an honor and attraction to the town ; her modestly growing means (she lost some hundreds of pounds, of course, by the failure of the Glasgow Bank) had been given lavishly to its charities. She had written for its newspapers, and inaugurated Penny Readings for its poor. Through it all she was most discreetly feminine, using the word quite in its limited, old-fashioned sense. When she had written a strong anonymous “ leader,” denouncing in unsparing terms some local abuse, she would cower and tremble in her daily walks for a long time, lest she should be detected and insulted for her temerity. She was a capital reporter for the press, and as such often employed ; but she did all through attention and memory merely, for she could not endure the thought of being affichée by pencil and notebook. She admits that one who saw her first in these clear latter days of her life describes her appearance as “ stately ; ” and we gather from the number of the suitors for her hand, who are conscientiously and dryly catalogued, as well as from her naïve regret over the temporary loss of her complexion through seasickness, that she must always have possessed a certain demure personal comeliness. She lived to be nearly seventy. It is one of the advantages, not to say decencies, of an autobiography that it cannot end with a death-bed scene. We know of Mary Smith that, in her last years, she suffered much in body, but was sustained by the steadfast hope of an unearthly future ; always a nonconformist, though adhering to no recognized sect.

If one were to seek the world over for a woman’s lot as unlike as possible to Mary Smith’s, one might well select that of a French lady of high social distinction, whose sorrowing friends have lately embalmed her literary remains in the most luxurious of privately printed volumes.² The Comtesse Jeanne de Chambrun, née Godard-Demorest, who died in Paris in July, 1891, was born in 1827, not indeed to a great French name, but to an immense French fortune, amassed by her father and grandfather in the glass works of Baccarat. Her mother’s family was Béarnaise, and highly respectable, and the equally religious and romantic girl, while she “ venerated ” the memory of Louis IX., “loved” that of Henri IV., prizing his autograph more than aught else which she inherited, although the famous signature was merely appended to an acknowledgment by the roi vaillant of a debt to one of Jeanne’s maternal ancestors, which, naturally, never was paid.

Jeanne was brought up at great expense in that most choice, ideal, and flowery form of Roman Catholicism which one is not too much inclined to respect, until the unlooked-for discovery is one day made of the rare strength which occasionally comes out of its excessive sweetness. She was taught all that a girl might learn under that oldfashioned régime, for which we think — or at least hope — that we have substituted something so much better. In music, of which she was passionately fond, she was thoroughly trained by the first masters of the day, so that she became not merely an amateur performer of unusual merit, but a respectable composer as well.

Her spiritual director, the Abbé Sénac, appears to have been both a good and an astute man ; able to fortify a languishing soul by stringent and bracing counsels, but fully alive, on behalf of his penitents, to the advantages of both worlds. In the mellifluous words of a friend of Jeanne, “ she asked of the priest the word of eternal life only; he gave her beside terrestrial happiness.” That is to say, in 1853, when the heiress was twenty-six, a mature, not to say an advanced age for a French bride of her attractions, the abbé arranged a marriage for her with another of his spiritual children, the Vicomte Adalbert de Chambrun, a brave and hard-working young aristocrat, grandson of one of Louis XVI.’s marshals, but already holding high office under the nascent Second Empire. A sentimental man of his caste might not so soon have rallied to the support of Louis Napoleon ; the Vicomte (afterwards the Comte) de Chambrun seems to have acted on the principle that it is better to serve than to sulk, and, as a matter of fact, he served his country well. He was a deeply religious man, with a faith in the unseen and a consciousness of God so simple, so vivid, so unwavering, that it appears sometimes to have awed and abashed even his enthusiastic wife, with all her own innate and cultivated capacity for pious ecstasy. On the darkest of New Year’s Days to a true-hearted Frenchwoman, January 1, 1871, the countess wrote thus to an intimate friend concerning the man who had then been her husband for almost eighteen years : —

“ Quis mihi det ut moriar ? . . . This aspiration for deliverance is M. de Chambrun’s to such a degree that even during our honeymoon it was his habitual refrain. Quis mihi det ut moriar ? Sublime, oh yes ! One is only too sure that this prayer will be heard. But for a young wife it was not gay. The truth is that always he has been one of those believers of whom you spoke to me the other day, half lightly, half enviously, all admiringly, to whom the light of God and of eternity is as plainly visible as that of the sun at noon. ... If only all the heroes who are so generously giving their lives in this hour, for their duty and their country, could have the same vision, their valor would be no less deserving, but it would be so much easier and more consolatory! And it is not so very difficult as one thinks, — at least Adalbert often tells me so when he is trying to reassure me, in lesser as well as greater things ; and sometimes, lately, when I have had these poor martyrs under my very hands, I have felt convinced of it. They give up their souls to God in such heart-rending extremity, amid such cruel sufferings, and yet with simplicity and resignation. . . . Forgive my lugubrious New Year’s letter; it is only too appropriate to the times.”

The Comte Adalbert de Chambrun had been sous-préfet of Toulon in 1850. A year later, at the age of thirty, he was promoted to the prefecture of the Jura, and found something very like an insurrection on his hands at the moment of assuming office. Peace and order were soon restored by the wisdom of his administration ; and when, in August, 1853, he brought his bride into the mountains, the prestige of her wealth and the winning sweetness of her manners assisted his popularity, and the prospect before the newly married pair appeared as bright as possible. But after six happy months the bridegroom got a terrible fall from his horse, and lay for a while in great danger. From this he was barely convalescent when there came an outbreak of cholera in the department, through which husband and wife fought bravely, side by side, till at last the count himself was seized by the disease. The dread tidings swiftly made their way to Jeanne’s mother.

“ Try, dear child,” wrote Madame Godard-Demorest in response, “ to summon a little courage. . . . God will uphold you, and keep count of every pang. Take just as much as you can upon yourself of his [Adalbert’s] burden beside your own. Do not let him see the extent of your anxiety, and the very effort at self-control will be healthful for you. But do not leave him unless he positively commands if. You may imagine that it is anguish to me to give you this advice, but your place is beside him. One must not lay up regrets for one’s self, whatever happens. Say simply that you are too wretched away from him. Take care and forethought for your husband without crossing him. Make an effort even to be gay ; it will distract him, and it will force you to distract yourself.”

There was at least nothing debilitating or depressing in the conception of wifely duty thus presented to the petted but, as it appeared, unspoiled child of fortune. The daughter proved worthy of her mother’s high-hearted advice, staying stanchly at her husband’s side until the epidemic was quite stamped out: after which, it will be agreed, they had both earned the relaxation, and to faithful souls like theirs the supreme spiritual refreshment, of a winter in Rome.

The portrait of which an engraving stands as frontispiece to the sumptuous volume of Madame de Chambrun’s remains was painted that winter in Rome by Hébert, of the French Academy, “ under the laurels,” as the biographer poetically observes, “ of the Villa Médicis.” It represents a being so dainty, so elegant, so fragile, with so wistful and appealing a look in the large and very beautiful eyes, that it seems to lend something like positive meaning to the otherwise vaporous remark of one of the lady’s most elaborate eulogists, one who constantly frequented the salon which she held in Paris in her declining years, the late M. Émile Ollivier: “ .She had early established herself on the extreme limit of the world of reality, whence it needed but a lift of the wing to launch her into the infinite spheres.”

When Madame de Chambrun’s noble mother died suddenly, in January, 1857, the daughter was greatly prostrated by her grief, and it seemed for a time as though she would never recover her health of body and mind. The phases and stages of the sharp spiritual conflict through which she passed stand recorded in a painful journal, from which Madame de Chambrun’s biographer quotes copiously, but from which we shall not quote at all. It may be a solace to keep such a record ; it always seems to us an outrage to make it public. After three years of almost complete seclusion, she addressed herself once more to the active duties of life. Her husband now held the prefecture of La Lozère, the dreariest, most inclement, most poverty-stricken tract of country in France. Here there was plenty of the sort of work to be done which is the best remedy ever yet invented for imaginative woe. She became the Providence of the country,” says her biographer; and the conventional remark is, for once, only a simple statement of fact.

To such exceedingly orthodox Catholics as the Chambruns, the Italian war of 1859 was of course a sacrilegious one. and the count felt that he could no longer serve the third Napoleon. But for many years he represented the chers Lozhèriens in the Assembly, and he remained faithfully at his post, even during those six dark weeks of the Commune. How the heart and hands of Madame de Chambrun were occupied during the dire twelvemonth which followed the surrender at Sedan we have already intimated. When the war was over, and liberty, equality, and fraternity everywhere proclaimed, the count and countess naturally ranged themselves among the Legitimists, and the party had no pleasanter place of meeting than Madame de Chambrun’s salon, where the visitors were always sure of one bit of unalloyed pleasure in hearing the best music of the world interpreted by the first artists. It was certainly a very flowery and sheltered path by which the Chambruns stepped down the decline of life. They were rich, but their thought and care for the poor were incessant; they were childless, but they had wards and godchildren by the score, and they were inexhaustible in their devices for the pleasure and profit of the young.

Almost all the poems collected in the volume before us belong to the tranquil and sunny afternoon of the writer’s life. They are all curiously simple both in thought and expression ; the verse frequently irregular, but also delicately musical. She could always make verses that, would sing, and the foremost composers of the day did not disdain to write melodies for her words. There is one little lyric, entitled The Passion Flower (it seems to us her best), which was set to music both by Gounod and Ambroise Thomas ; but though Dom Pedro rendered it into Portuguese, it seems to us, like all the others, untranslatable. The texture of the silken verse is so very fine and thin that it breaks away hopelessly under the attempt to transfer it to an alien tongue. And after all, the most remarkable, perhaps the only really remarkable thing about Madame de Chambrun’s verses is the intense aspiration which breathes through them all after something more stable and satisfying than this, to her, so flattering life ; an unflagging endeavor (in the noble words of one of our own old divines) to “ turn the eyes away from those things of time and sense which perish with the using.” The best gift which one human being can possibly receive from another, in these days, is that of a veritable glimpse of the unseen. One such, though never so fleeting, and obtained through eyes not our own, does yet afford a blessed relief to that sickening ache of the spirit which comes from our sharpened sense of the inequality of earthly conditions, and which, for the rest, it would be a shame never to feel. The “ disinherited ” in this life, as it is now the custom to call them, so terribly outnumber the others, their needs are so much more pressing, that it is well to give them our chief attention and honest sympathy; but he who would “ see life steadily and see it whole ” may also remember with profit that to be rich in this world’s goods is not necessarily to be disinherited in a larger and more permanent order of things.