It was a sonnet, and indeed one of her own writing, that brought about her acquaintance with Mr. Hutchinson. The sonnet was read to him, and discussed amongst his friends, with guesses at the authorship; for a young woman did not, in that world, write a sonnet without a feint of hiding its origin. One gentleman believed a woman had made it. Another said, if so, there were but two women capable of making it; but he owned, later, that he said “two” out of civility (very good civility of a kind that is not now practised) to a lady who chanced to be present; but that he knew well there was but one; and he named her. From her future husband Lucy Apsley received that praise of exceptions wherewith women are now, and always will be, praised: “Mr. Hutchinson,” she says, “fancying something of rationality in the sonnet beyond the customary reach of a she-wit, could scarcely believe it was a woman’s.”
He sought her acquaintance, and they were married. Her treasured conscience did not prevent her from noting the jealousy of her young friends. A generous mind, perhaps, would rather itself suffer jealousy than be quick in suspecting, or complacent in causing, or precise in setting it down. But Mrs. Hutchinson doubtless offered up the envy of her companions in homage to her Puritan lover’s splendour. His austerity did not hinder him from wearing his “fine, thick-set head of hair” in long locks that were an offence to many of his own sect, but, she says, “a great ornament to him.” But for herself she has some dissimulated vanities. She was negligent of dress, and when, after much waiting and many devices, her suitor first saw her, she was “not ugly in a careless riding-habit.” As for him, “in spite of all her indifference, she was surprised (she writes) with some unusual liking in her soul when she saw this gentleman, who had hair, eyes, shape, and countenance enough to beget love in any one.” He married her as soon as she could leave her chamber, when she was so deformed by small-pox that “the priest and all that saw her were affrighted to look at her; but God recompensed his justice and constancy by restoring her.”
The following are some of the admirable sentences that prove Lucy Hutchinson a woman of letters in a far more serious sense than our own time uses. One phrase has a Stevenson-like character, a kind of gesture of language; this is where she praises her husband’s “handsome management of love.” [{1}] She thus prefaces her description of her honoured lord: “If my treacherous memory have not lost the dearest treasure that ever I committed to its trust—.” She boasts of her country in lofty phrase: “God hath, as it were, enclosed a people here, out of the waste common of the world.” And again of her husband: “It will be as hard to say which was the predominant virtue in him as which is so in its own nature.” “He had made up his accounts with life and death, and fixed his purpose to entertain both honourably.” “The heat of his youth a little inclined him to the passion of anger, and the goodness of his nature to those of love and grief; but reason was never dethroned by them, but continued governor and moderator of his soul.”
She describes sweetly certain three damsels who had “conceived a kindness” for her lord, their susceptibility, their willingness, their “admirable tempting beauty,” and “such excellent good-nature as would have thawed a rock of ice”; but she adds no less beautifully, “It was not his time to love.” In her widowhood she remembered that she had been commanded “not to grieve at the common rate of women”; and this is the lovely phrase of her grief: “As his shadow, she waited on him everywhere, till he was taken to that region of light which admits of none, and then she vanished into nothing.”
She has an invincible anger against the enemies of her husband and of the cause. The fevers, “little less than plagues,” that were common in that age carry them off exemplarily by families at a time. An adversary is “the devil’s exquisite solicitor.” All Royalists are of “the wicked faction.” She suspected his warders of poisoning Colonel Hutchinson in the prison wherein he died. The keeper had given him, under pretence of kindness, a bottle of excellent wine, and the two gentlemen who drank of it died within four months. A poison of strange operation! “We must leave it to the great day, when all crimes, how secret soever, will be made manifest, whether they added poison to all their other iniquity, whereby they certainly murdered this guiltless servant of God.” When he was near death, she adds, “a gentlewoman of the Castle came up and asked him how he did. He told her, Incomparably well, and full of faith.”
On the subject of politics, Mrs. Hutchinson writes, it must be owned, platitudes; but all are simple, and some are stated with dignity. Her power, her integrity, her tenderness, her pomp, the liberal and public interests of her life, her good breeding, her education, her exquisite diction, are such as may well make a reader ask how and why the literature of England declined upon the vulgarity, ignorance, cowardice, foolishness, that became “feminine” in the estimation of a later age; that is, in the character of women succeeding her, and in the estimation of men succeeding her lord. The noble graces of Lucy Hutchinson, I say, may well make us marvel at the downfall following—at Goldsmith’s invention of the women of “The Vicar or Wakefield” in one age, and at Thackeray’s invention of the women of “Esmond” in another.
Mrs. Hutchinson has little leisure for much praise of the natural beauty of sky and landscape, but now and then in her work there appears an abiding sense of the pleasantness of the rural world—in her day an implicit feeling rather than an explicit. “The happiness of the soil and air contribute all things that are necessary to the use or delight of man’s life.” “He had an opportunity of conversing with her in those pleasant walks which, at the sweet season of the spring, invited all the neighbouring inhabitants to seek their joys.” And she describes a dream whereof the scene was in the green fields of Southwark. What an England was hers! And what an English! A memorable vintage of our literature and speech was granted in her day; we owe much to those who—as she did—gathered it in.
MRS. DINGLEY
We cannot do her honour by her Christian name. [{2}] All we have to call her by more tenderly is the mere D, the D that ties her to Stella, with whom she made the two-in-one whom Swift loved “better a thousand times than life, as hope saved.” MD, without full stops, Swift writes it eight times in a line for the pleasure of writing it. “MD sometimes means Stella alone,” says one of many editors. “The letters were written nominally to Stella and Mrs. Dingley,” says another, “but it does not require to be said that it was really for Stella’s sake alone that they were penned.” Not so. “MD” never stands for Stella alone. And the editor does not yet live who shall persuade one honest reader, against the word of Swift, that Swift loved Stella only, with an ordinary love, and not, by a most delicate exception, Stella and Dingley, so joined that they make the “she” and “her” of every letter. And this shall be a paper of reparation to Mrs. Dingley.
No one else in literary history has been so defrauded of her honours. In love “to divide is not to take away,” as Shelley says; and Dingley’s half of the tender things said to MD is equal to any whole, and takes nothing from the whole of Stella’s half. But the sentimentalist has fought against Mrs. Dingley from the outset. He has disliked her, shirked her, misconceived her, and effaced her. Sly sentimentalist—he finds her irksome. Through one of his most modern representatives he has but lately called her a “chaperon.” A chaperon!