Eugénie De Guérin and Dorothy Wordsworth

I

A CERTAIN young woman wrote in her diary one March morning: —

He has a nice bright day. It was hard frost in the night. The Robins are singing sweetly. Now for my walk. I will be busy. I will look well and be well when he comes back to me. O the darling! Here is one of his bitten apples. I can hardly find it in my heart to throw it into the fire.

Another young woman, on a February day. in a different country, many years later, wrote in her diary: —

That you are no longer here seems to me impossible. I keep telling myself you will come back, and yet you are far-away, and your shoes, those two empty feet in your bedroom, stand perfectly still. I stare at them and love them.

One would suppose that the man who had left the bitten apple and the man who had worn the shoes were lovers or husbands of the writers; but, in fact, it was a sister in each case who penned these words about an absent brother. Between Dorothy Wordsworth, in the North of England, romancing about her poet brother William, who had gone away for three days to a neighboring village, and Eugénie de Guérin, in the South of France, pining for her poet brother Maurice, who had long been in Paris, there is at least a superficial resemblance. But they were most alike in the height and purity of their characters — a springing height and exquisite purity, which set them apart even from other most delicate and lofty spirits.

Sixty years ago, Matthew Arnold, who was always trying to interest his countrymen in the finer aspects of French life, and to that end kept his eye upon current French criticism, was attracted to the literary remains of Eugénie de Guérin by one of SainteBeuve’s Causeries du Lundi. Nothing could be slighter in bulk or, seemingly, in importance than the fragmentary poetry, the letters, and the journal which are all that we have of her writings; yet Sainte-Beuve, who might justly have professed to know the highest and tenderest things recorded by the pens of Frenchwomen, said that the little volume, Reliquiæ, was filled with sweet and lofty thought, and called its author a rare person.

Her life was brief and obscure. She was born in 1805, of a family rich in a noble name and the possession of an old château at Le Cayla, in Languedoc, but so impoverished that they hid there rather than flourished. She had a brother five years younger than herself, who, after a period of religious and scholastic retirement with Lamennais, in Brittany, had gone to Paris, seeking a channel there for his pure, yet by no means copious, stream of poetic genius. He was her pride and joy, though his prolonged absence from the shelter of home, his experience of unbelief, and the failure of his health caused her to live under the shadow of a hovering distress. From her dim retreat in the mountains of the Cévennes, his existence amid the glare of Paris seemed full of danger to body and soul. She tremblingly felt that his acquaintances there, scholars and literary people, belonged to the ‘world,’and that his ambitions were unhallowed. The contrast between her life, deepening at home and growing ever more quiet there, and his, who had ventured forth into change and temptation, is full of pathos.

Her writings have but two subjects — this brother Maurice, and the religious faith which tortured her with apprehension while he was alive, and supported her through the blankness left by his early death, in 1839. She survived him less than ten years, endeavoring in vain to bring out an edition of his fragments of prose and verse. They have since been published, and her judgment of their quality has been confirmed by the best French critics. I remember the delight with which, in my undergraduate days, I read what I still regard as Arnold’s most charming pages — his essays on Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin. With their copious quotations from the journals of brother and sister, they introduced me, as he desired to introduce his readers, to a peculiarly refined and elevated region of French life, — a nook perhaps rather than a region, — such as one could not discover in French fiction, though, as I did not then know, places like it may be found in French memoirs.

Mr. George Saintsbury, in his rough, hurried style, stupidly grumbles: ‘One may marvel, and almost grow angry at the whim which made Mr. Arnold waste two whole essays on an amiable and interesting person like Eugénie de Guérin and a mere nobody like her brother. They are very pretty essays in themselves. . . . Seventy-two mortal pages of Mr. Arnold’s, at his very best time, wasted on a brother and sister who happened to be taken up by Sainte-Beuve!’ Mr. Saintsbury continues: ‘Even in the Guérin pieces, annoyance at the waste of first-rate power on tenth-rate people need not wholly blind us to the grace of the exposition and to the charming eulogy of “distinction” at the end.’ —

‘The Guérin pieces’! What elegant rhetoric! ‘Tenth-rate people’! What discernment, and what amenity!

With no encouragement, then, from Mr. Saintsbury, but heartened by the company of two ‘strong siding champions,’ Sainte-Beuve and Arnold, I venture to say that her poor little fragments of writing show Eugénie de Guérin to have been a very distinguished woman, indeed.

Beauty, wisdom, power, distinction, — the rarest of these is distinction. It is a quality, not an attribute, and generally an inherent grace rather than a faculty acquired. It has a negative and a positive element. The negative element is entire freedom from vulgarity; and this freedom consists, to use part of St. James’s definition of true religion, in keeping one’s self unspotted from the world. One has but to reflect upon this phrase, to perceive that it means living true to one’s self or to standards recommended by something other than the world’s approval. If a man is either attracted or abashed by practices to which he cannot give genuine assent, he is vulgar. Thousands of persons, especially among the lowly, are free from vulgarity. They live boldly, not fearing the opinion of others. They do not seek to rise in any way by affecting to be different from what they are. But distinction is uncommon, because, upon this negative basis of freedom from vulgarity, it requires that an elevated character shall stand; and the elevation must be intellectual as well as moral. In a distinguished character there will be found, on the one hand, unusual knowledge, judgment, or taste, and, on the other, unusual energy, patience, kindness, courage, love of truth, or some other eminent virtue.

That Eugénie de Guérin was one of these rare persons, a few extracts from her journal will suffice to make evident. It will be observed, too, by anyone who is at all well acquainted with French life, that, notwithstanding the obscurity in which her short years were passed and the lonely heights on which her spirit dwelt, she represents much that is peculiar to the French race and much that is inherent in the Catholic ideal. The soul of France, with its possibilities and its limitations, is as roundly epitomized in this quiet young woman as in her celebrated admirer, Madame George Sand, for example, or Madame de Staël, or Madame Roland.

II

As one reads her journal, there rises, foot by foot, a picture of the dilapidated château, with its somewhat pinched and meagre housekeeping, its wild surroundings, the domestic servants and farm-hands, the dogs and cattle, the visiting priests, the rare passersby. The touches that compose it fall lightly from her pen and are so rubbed over with religious coloring that it is impossible to pick them out and show them here. She has a very direct and intimate approach to nature, and it is not impossible that she was cheery and helpful and went laughing through the wide, bare rooms, though the journal tells much of tears and yearning. She had few distractions. The monotony of her daily round gave time to note many little details, which would have been overlooked by a woman less simply occupied, and from them she drew lessons which she appropriated with gratitude. The poise of her mind was almost perfect because her faith was firm. The poise of her feelings was altogether perfect, because her love had one supreme object. Only when her love seemed to be in conflict with her faith was the balance disturbed.

Without being in the least discontented with her domestic duties, in a solitary country-house in which whole days were spent with no more lively incident than a call from some passing beggar, she kept her heart fixed upon the saints and upon God and upon her absent brother. Though keenly perceptive of natural beauty, she would not dwell upon it with frank delight unless in some way she might connect it with religion. Describing her conception of a Christian, she writes to Maurice: —

Through tears or festivals, he journeys onward toward Heaven; his goal is there, and what he encounters on the way cannot turn him aside. Do you suppose that, if I were running to you, a flower in my path or a thorn in my foot would stop me?

She shrinks from attempting to penetrate the secrets of nature, however much they solicit her imagination. On a moonlit night, when her sister and other girls are singing, laughing, playing beside the brook that flowed beneath her window, she sits alone, writing to her brother: —

I could spend the whole night here, describing what is to be seen and heard in my sweet little room — the things that come and visit me, little insects black as night, little moths spotted and slashed with color, fluttering about my lamp as if they were mad. There is one burning, one flying off, one coming, another returning, and my table is covered with a sort of moving dust. How many inhabitants in so small a space! A word with one of them, a look at one, a question about its family, its life, its country, would lead us off into infinity. I had better say my prayers here at my window, before the infinity of Heaven.

Similarly, she chooses books and avoids books with a view to the salvation of her soul rather than the gratification of curiosity or taste. After long hesitation, she decides to read Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, excusing herself for so bold a step by saying: ‘It is not to acquire knowledge, but to lift my soul that I read; everything is to me a ladder by which to climb to Heaven.’ She sets down the titles of the volumes in her little library, chiefly books of devotion, sermons, lives of saints, with a few of those poets, notably Racine and Lamartine, who were considered free from worldly taint. This deliberate narrowness in one so sweet and generally so wholesome affects the reader unpleasantly; yet she states but the truth when she laments the pride and vanity of authors.

Oh! if these illustrious writers had begun with a lesson in humility, they would not have made so many errors or so many books. Pride hatches such a number of books; and just see what fruit they produce, and into how many a maze these mazed men lead us!

Otherworldliness, or the fear of this world and the planting of one’s hopes in a world to come, is not a characteristic of Puritanism only; it is as truly a Catholic trait, not to mention the mystical religions of Asia. We see it in this young girl’s account of her feelings on receiving a letter from her brother’s intimate friend, the Breton poet La Morvonnais: —

My heart is moved, penetrated, filled, by theletter I received this morning from M. de la Morvonnais: he speaks to me of Marie [his dead wife], of another world, of his sorrows, of you, brother, of death, of all the things I love so much. That is why these letters give me a pleasure which I feared I should feel too keenly, because all pleasure is to be feared.

Not without a faint sense of shame at her own credulity, and yet stubbornly defending herself, she writes: —

I have just hung about my neck a medal of the Holy Virgin, which Louise sent me as a preventive of cholera. It is the medal that they say has performed so many miracles. It is not an article of faith to believe this, but does no harm.

Nothing, perhaps, could do more harm, in the long run, than the indifference to rational evidence of which this remark is an example; but in the presence of so gentle a creature, one shrinks from being censorious. She overflows with approval of the sacrament of confession, not perceiving, or not admitting to herself, that loneliness and a natural feminine instinct to seek the moral support of a masculine mind may have something to do with the confidence she reposes in her confessor. She goes on pilgrimage to ‘sacred places,’ though realizing apparently that such conduct is superstitious. She is distressed by the free-thinking which has penetrated even the mountain recesses of the Cévennes, and cries out against two gentlemen who find it absurd to fast, to believe in original sin, and to venerate images; and is particularly vexed that some of the illiterate country-folk have been discussing theology. She is opposed to schools, and thinks it enough that the poor should be taught ‘religion.’

It is hard to believe that such ideas were entertained by an educated Frenchwoman in 1837, by a woman, moreover, whose brother was a disciple of the liberal theologian Lamennais, and moved in the literary circles of Paris. Maurice had been one of the group of earnest seekers who followed the prophet of a new social order to his retreat at La Chênaie in Brittany. From Lamennais he learned that obedience to Jesus means to love our fellow men, and that this love leads to God and is the essence of religion, no matter how many entanglements the churches may have spun over the simple though difficult truth, so attractive in our best moments, and so repulsive to our selfish hearts.

How close to each other in spirit, yet how far apart in rational experience, Eugénie and Maurice were, can be gathered from one of her appeals to him on the subject of prayer: —

My dear, I wish I could see you pray like a good child of God. What would it cost you? You have naturally a loving soul; and what is prayer but love, a love that flows out from the soul like water from a fountain? You know that better than I do. M. de Lamennais has on this subject said divine things, which must have penetrated your heart if you heard them, but unfortunately he has said other things too, which I fear have hindered their good effect. What a calamity, once more, what a calamity, that you are under the influence of that erring genius! Poor Maurice, let us think no more about it all.

Apprehensive, reactionary, obscurantist, no doubt she was; yet it is precisely her quiet aloofness, the integrity and unity of her spirit, her detachment from current fashions of thought, that give her the tone of distinction which breathes through the pages of her journal. There is something which, if not admirable, at least strikes us dumb with a sort of amazed respect, in the firmness with which she narrows her mental outlook. She is willing to forgo experience for the sake of faith, to forgo modernness and the sense of solidarity with her own generation, for the sake of beliefs very old and in her opinion venerable — breadth for the sake of height. And that there was not always mere loss in the exchange is shown in many a fine and penetrating remark, such as that ‘prayer is too often an effort to impose our will upon the will of God,’ whereas prayer of the right kind is ’a submissive desire’; or her sensible statement: ‘When I feel or see affection growing faint, I hasten to revive it.’

No doubt there was a romantic element in her religion; to dwell upon the emotions associated with religious practices, to yield to them freely, to express them beautifully, gave her an æsthetic satisfaction. Perhaps there was moral unsoundness in this; intelligence was subordinated to feeling, and feeling was too often disconnected with action. But her love for her brother Maurice was both sound and romantic. In this love, both reason and will had their full scope; yet it was adorned with all the graces of imagination, hope, and memory. One entry in her journal reads: — ‘I have just spent the night writing to you. Day has supplanted candlelight, and it’s not worth while to go to bed. Oh! if father knew!’ And next day she adds:

How quickly, dear, last night flew by, when I was writing to you! Dawn appeared when I thought it was only midnight; yet it was three o’clock, and I had seen many stars cross the sky; for from my table I see the sky, and from time to time I look up and consult it, and it seems that an angel dictates to me.

The old-fashioned simplicity of her life, as well as her constant yearning for Maurice, appears in many a jotting like this: ‘I was milking a ewe just now. Oh! the good ewe’s milk of Le Cayla, and how I wished you could have some!’ Slight as are these traces of her character, they contain something unique, a rare fineness, a different tone from that which the world imposes upon its devotees. If they retain any value after the lapse of nearly ninety years, it is because of their distinction and for a reason also which Eugénie herself expressed in a luminous phrase: ‘Do you care, my dear, for this notebook, in which I wrote two years ago? It is all old now, but the things of the heart are eternal. '

III

A woman equally free from the vulgarity which is worldliness, of equally fine moral texture, and of higher intellect, was Dorothy Wordsworth. It is not without a clear purpose that I associate her with Eugénie de Guérin, though at first the connection may seem slight. There is an obvious parallel, and a less obvious but more instructive divergence between them.

Each was born and reared in a remote mountainous region, secluded and primitive. If Mademoiselle de Guérin’s family was of ancient nobility, Miss Wordsworth’s was what is called in the north country ‘gentle.’ Each remained unmarried and poured out upon a brother the love of her whole heart. In each case the brother was a poet, and went through a heart-shaking religious crisis in early manhood. Each of the sisters was endowed with keen powers of observation, which she delighted to exercise; each was aware of a life or soul in nature; each felt the possibility of harmony between humanity and nature, though, as we have seen, Eugénie stood on her guard against acknowledging anything in favor of nature which might appear prejudicial to a religion of otherworldliness. Each was unaffectedly interested in the details of human activity as displayed in simple country life, and by the conduct of poor and uneducated people. Each was sensible of the value of ‘minute particulars’ — a trait more common in women than in men. Both possessed, though not in equal measure, the rare literary gift of exact, concise, original, unpretentious, imaginative expression.

There were, to be sure, differences of degree and circumstances, especially in the way they were able to serve their brothers. Dorothy seems to have had complete confidence in her William, and a belief that he was almost perfect. After his twenty-fifth and her twenty-fourth year, they were able to live together in constant intimacy, having defied their uncle and guardian, who, for quite plausible reasons, had long refused to let him visit her; and down to the beginning of old age, she had the happiness of knowing that her care and labors were contributing to the immortal achievement of a great poet. There is, therefore, little or no painfulness in her mention of him, though there are traces of profound anxiety and even acute grief, which she suffered when he determined to marry Mary Hutchinson after, as it would appear, considering himself for ten years bound to Annette Vallon. Apart from this, the record of Dorothy Wordsworth’s relations with her beloved William is one of almost perfect happiness, and I am not aware that biography presents anything equal to it in this respect. It is a comfort to know that there was such a woman, that there was so full and happy a life; there seems to be some compensation here for humanity’s imperfections and sorrows. Of what use are they, if here and there a flower of joy and beauty does not bloom? The foundation of Dorothy Wordsworth’s happiness was her confidence in her brother’s goodness, grace, and power.

Eugénie, on the other hand, was haunted by the fear that Maurice might lose his soul. Reticence on his part, and perhaps too great importunity on hers, sundered them to some extent in spirit; and his ambition to make his way in a larger field than Languedoc kept him from her through many long months. The record contains more pain than joy. We must remember that to alarm about his spiritual state was added the knowledge that he was suffering from consumption. When Dorothy was only twentyone, in the terrible crisis when William told her about his entanglement with Annette Vallon, she followed her sympathies and flew to the lovers’ relief, took their part, treated Annette as a sister, and acted altogether in a most spontaneous and unconventional way. When Maurice offended against the principles of Le Cayla by turning his back on Catholicism, Eugénie could not stand at his side. Her arms received him when he stumbled home to die; but she could not look on him and say, ’I have seen of the travail of my soul and am satisfied.’

The divergences between the lives of these two women are very wide, and are significant of much — of racial difference, of the profound gulf between Protestantism and Catholicism, of the contrast between eighteenth-century rationalism and the reaction that weighed upon Europe between 1815 and 1848. Dorothy Wordsworth was a daughter of the dawn. The energy of England, the intellectual light of religious freedom, the hopefulness of the Revolution animate her letters and journals. She lived in the natural world of human affections, of reason, of fresh individual perceptions. Eugénie endeavored to establish contact at all points with the Catholic past and with a supernatural future, distrusting reason and her own senses, and standing upon tradition and external authority in cases of conflict. Dorothy represents English womanhood, or, for that matter, the womanhood of her generation of Americans, in its independence, its subordination of merely feminine instincts to those feelings which men and women have in common. What a man could read and think, she read and thought. Eugénie represents French womanhood in its full and constant consciousness of femininity. Dorothy Wordsworth is Protestant, in that she exercises her private judgment upon all questions of moral conduct. Indeed, her Protestantism is of a very extreme kind, for she seems almost unaware of any corporate religious forms and external religious authorities. She seldom mentions Bible, Church, or Priest. Impossible to think of her going to confession. Ridiculous to think of her wearing a medal to keep off the cholera.

Unlike the evangelical Englishwomen of her day, Dorothy seems little, or not at all, preoccupied with the idea of sin. It is to her and this freedom of hers, no doubt, that her brother refers in the second stanza of his ‘Ode to Duty’; she was, in his mind, one of those naturally beautiful and good souls who, he hesitatingly imagined, do right by instinct and without moral striving: —

As the manuscript was first sent to the printer, the last two lines showed no misgiving; they were: —

Dorothy, with her turn for realism and humor, must have disclaimed the perfection implied in the original stanza and have suggested changing the last two lines to the humble prayer they now are. A Christian she truly was, in humility, self-forgetfulness, and love of her fellow creatures; and all the more Christian, it seems to me, because she does not worry about the future of either her body or her soul.

Euéenie, on the other hand, is a Christian in the narrower sense, preoccupied with the ideas of temptation, sin, repentance, penance, forgiveness, divine retribution, and personal immortality. Though beautifully unselfish with respect to her brother, she is religiously self-conscious, not through selfishness, but for conscience’ sake; and when she catches herself taking an interest in active life or in nature, she is pathetically startled, as if it were a stolen pleasure.

Shy though she was, and spending her years in privacy, Dorothy Wordsworth sympathized with the Revolutionary movement, which was equalitarian and rationalistic. It is impossible for me to believe that she, with her high powers of intellect, could converse, day after day and through the long watches of many a night, with her brother and Coleridge, two scorned radicals, without consciously sharing, or else violently repudiating, their opinions. That she did not repudiate them is evident; and I can find nothing to indicate that she gave up the social and religious heresies of her youth when her companions sank back into apathy and conformity. She was thirty-four years old in 1805, when Eugénie de Guérin was born, and too settled in her mental habits and of too intrepid a temper to be much affected by the reaction which benumbed the younger generation.

To think of Dorothy Wordsworth as leading a life of seclusion would be to mistake quietness for inactivity; for in fact she was intellectually the least secluded woman in England. While well-bred and spiritually minded French girls were limited in their reading to a selection of the French classics and to books of piety, Dorothy ranged freely through literature, — English, Italian, French, and German, — making no distinction on grounds of mere refinement; devouring the best poetry and fiction her country had produced, from Chaucer to Scott, including the Elizabethan drama and the eighteenth-century novel. She was personally acquainted with a host of interesting persons, several of whom were among the leaders of the age — with her brothers William, Christopher, and John, with Coleridge, with Charles Lamb, with Wilberforce, who is said to have offered her his hand in marriage, with Hazlitt, with Thomas Clarkson, with John Wilson, with De Quincey, who worshiped her, with Southey, who was her neighbor, with Sir Walter Scott, with Charles Lloyd, with Sir Humphry Davy, Thomas Poole, John Thelwall, and Crabb Robinson; and among friends of her own sex she numbered the lively Jane Pollard, the publicspirited Mrs. Clarkson, Mary Lamb, and her own sister-in-law, Mary Hutchinson, William’s wife, and Sara Hutchinson, whom Coleridge esteemed above all other women.

I think it is quite likely that she was socially the most highly privileged and intellectually the best-educated woman who crossed the divide between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. That she was also the most permanently interesting woman writer of her generation in England, is also my opinion, and perhaps many readers would agree with me if her exquisite journals were more available. They were incorrectly edited by Professor Knight, who guessed wildly, or omitted deliberately, when he could not decipher words and phrases in her handwriting, which is by no means a difficult one; and, underestimating the value of her artless notes, he left out much that he considered trivial or unedifying. Even this imperfect edition of Dorothy’s Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals is out of print.

The world is thus deprived of a gentle power that it can ill afford to lose. We want our daughters to be more fully aware than they are of the life of nature around them; to have a more solid education; to possess their souls in quietness; to understand the poor and humble and be kindly disposed toward them; to be free from vulgarity which is worldliness; to read the best books and write with simplicity and charm; to realize that the highest personal distinction is compatible with the faithful and competent performance of household duties. It might help them to live thus, in the beautiful oldfashioned way, if they had Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals at hand, in which to learn how lively and happy and deep and serene a woman s life may be.

I have gone over in my mind all the diaries, autobiographies, and collections of letters I have ever read, without finding one of them more capable of moulding the character of a girl. The educated young women of our time are too well instructed in history and science to be much edified by the timid reflections of the Languedocian recluse; but they would find in the frank maid of rocky Cumberland a helpful sister. She shrank from no truth. She was modern in her outlook, facing the future hopefully. She made a mark for herself in her station where she stood, accepting her brother’s maxim, —

And though she could speculate with the philosophers and dream with the reformers, her soul