And here I will put into Mrs. Johnson’s mouth, that mouth to which no one else has ever attributed any beautiful sayings, the words of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore to the young husband she loved: “Older than thou! Let me never see thou knowest it. Forget it! I will remember it, to die before thy death.”
Macaulay, in his unerring effectiveness, uses Johnson’s short sight for an added affront to Mrs. Johnson. The bridegroom was too weak of eyesight “to distinguish ceruse from natural bloom.” Nevertheless, he saw well enough, when he was old, to distinguish Mrs. Thrale’s dresses. He reproved her for wearing a dark dress; it was unsuitable, he said, for her size; a little creature should show gay colours “like an insect.” We are not called upon to admire his wife; why, then, our taste being thus uncompromised, do we not suffer him to admire her? It is the most gratuitous kind of intrusion. Moreover, the biographers are eager to permit that touch of romance and grace in his relations to Mrs. Thrale, which they officially deny in the case of Mrs. Johnson. But the difference is all on the other side. He would not have bidden his wife dress like an insect. Mrs. Thrale was to him “the first of womankind” only because his wife was dead.
Beauclerc, we learn, was wont to cap Garrick’s mimicry of Johnson’s love-making by repeating the words of Johnson himself in after-years—“It was a love-match on both sides.” And obviously he was as strange a lover as they said. Who doubted it? Was there any other woman in England to give such a suitor the opportunity of an eternal love? “A life radically wretched,” was the life of this master of Letters; but she, who has received nothing in return except ignominy from these unthankful Letters, had been alone to make it otherwise. Well for him that he married so young as to earn the ridicule of all the biographers in England; for by doing so he, most happily, possessed his wife for nearly twenty years. I have called her his only friend. So indeed she was, though he had followers, disciples, rivals, competitors, and companions, many degrees of admirers, a biographer, a patron, and a public. He had also the houseful of sad old women who quarrelled under his beneficent protection. But what friend had he? He was “solitary” from the day she died.
Let us consider under what solemn conditions and in what immortal phrase the word “solitary” stands. He wrote it, all Englishmen know where. He wrote it in the hour of that melancholy triumph when he had been at last set free from the dependence upon hope. He hoped no more, and he needed not to hope. The “notice” of Lord Chesterfield had been too long deferred; it was granted at last, when it was a flattery which Johnson’s court of friends would applaud. But not for their sake was it welcome. To no living ear would he bring it and report it with delight.
He was indifferent, he was known. The sensitiveness to pleasure was gone, and the sensitiveness to pain, slights, and neglect would thenceforth be suffered to rest; no man in England would put that to proof again. No man in England, did I say? But, indeed, that is not so. No slight to him, to his person, or to his fame could have had power to cause him pain more sensibly than the customary, habitual, ready-made ridicule that has been cast by posterity upon her whom he loved for twenty years, prayed for during thirty-two years more, who satisfied one of the saddest human hearts, but to whom the world, assiduous to admire him, hardly accords human dignity. He wrote praises of her manners and of her person for her tomb. But her epitaph, that does not name her, is in the greatest of English prose. What was favour to him? “I am indifferent . . . I am known . . . I am solitary, and cannot impart it.”
MADAME ROLAND
The articulate heroine has her reward of appreciation and her dues of praise; it is her appropriate fortune to have it definitely measured, and generally on equal terms. She takes pains to explain herself, and is understood, and pitied, when need is, on the right occasions. For instance, Madame Roland, a woman of merit, who knew her “merit’s name and place,” addressed her memoirs, her studies in contemporary history, her autobiography, her many speeches, and her last phrase at the foot of the undaunting scaffold, to a great audience of her equals (more or less) then living and to live in the ages then to come—her equals and those she raises to her own level, as the heroic example has authority to do.
Another woman—the Queen—suffered at that time, and suffered without the command of language, the exactitude of phrase, the precision of judgement, the proffer of prophecy, the explicit sense of Innocence and Moderation oppressed in her person. These were Madame Roland’s; but the other woman, without eloquence, without literature, and without any judicial sense of history, addresses no mere congregation of readers. Marie Antoinette’s unrecorded pangs pass into the treasuries of the experience of the whole human family. All that are human have some part there; genius itself may lean in contemplation over that abyss of woe; the great poets themselves may look into its distances and solitudes. Compassion here has no measure and no language. Madame Roland speaks neither to genius nor to complete simplicity; Marie Antoinette holds her peace in the presence of each, dumb in her presence.
Madame Roland had no dumbness of the spirit, as history, prompted by her own musical voice, presents her to a world well prepared to do her justice. Of that justice she had full expectation; justice here, justice in the world—the world that even when universal philosophy should reign would be inevitably the world of mediocrity; justice that would come of enlightened views; justice that would be the lesson learnt by the nations widely educated up to some point generally accessible; justice well within earthly sight and competence. This confidence was also her reward. For what justice did the Queen look? Here it is the “abyss that appeals to the abyss.”
Twice only in the life of Madame Roland is there a lapse into silence, and for the record of these two poor failures of that long, indomitable, reasonable, temperate, explicit utterance which expressed her life and mind we are debtors to her friends. She herself has not confessed them. Nowhere else, whether in her candid history of herself, or in her wise history of her country, or in her judicial history of her contemporaries, whose spirit she discerned, whose powers she appraised, whose errors she foresaw; hardly in her thought, and never in her word, is a break to be perceived; she is not silent and she hardly stammers; and when she tells us of her tears—the tears of youth only—her record is voluble and all complete. For the dignity of her style, of her force, and of her balanced character, Madame Roland would doubtless have effaced the two imperfections which, to us who would be glad to admire in silence her heroic figure, if that heroic figure would but cease to talk, are finer and more noble than her well-placed language and the high successes of her decision and her endurance. More than this, the two failures of this unfailing woman are two little doors opened suddenly into those wider spaces and into that dominion of solitude which, after all, do doubtless exist even in the most garrulous soul. By these two outlets Manon Roland also reaches the region of Marie Antoinette. But they befell her at the close of her life, and they shall be named at the end of this brief study.