Madame Roland may seem the more heroic to those whose suffrages she seeks in all times and nations because of the fact that she manifestly suppresses in her self-descriptions any signs of a natural gaiety. Her memoirs give evidence of no such thing; it is only in her letters, not intended for the world, that we are aware of the inadvertence of moments. We may overhear a laugh at times, but not in those consciously sprightly hours that she spent with her convent-school friend gathering fruit and counting eggs at the farm. She pursued these country tasks not without offering herself the cultivated congratulation of one whom cities had failed to allure, and who bore in mind the examples of Antiquity. She did not forget the death of Socrates. Or, rather, she finds an occasion to reproach herself with having once forgotten it, and with having omitted what another might have considered the tedious recollection of the condemnation of Phocion. She never wearied of these examples. But it is her inexhaustible freshness in these things that has helped other writers of her time to weary us.
In her manner of telling her story there is an absence of all exaggeration, which gives the reader a constant sense of security. That virtue of style and thought was one she proposed to herself and attained with exact consciousness of success. It would be almost enough (in the perfection of her practice) to make a great writer; even a measure of it goes far to make a fair one. Her moderation of statement is never shaken; and if she now and then glances aside from her direct narrative road to hazard a conjecture, the error she may make is on the generous side of hope and faith. For instance, she is too sure that her Friends (so she always calls the Girondins, using no nicknames) are safe, whereas they were then all doomed; a young man who had carried a harmless message for her—a mere notification to her family of her arrest—receives her cheerful commendation for his good feeling; from a note we learn that for this action he suffered on the scaffold and that his father soon thereafter died of grief. But Madame Roland never matched such a delirious event as this by any delirium of her own imagination. The delirium was in things and in the acts of men; her mind was never hurried from its sane self-possession, when the facts raved.
It was only when she used the rhetoric ready to her hand that she stooped to verbal violence; et encore! References to the banishment of Aristides and the hemlock of Socrates had become toy daggers and bending swords in the hands of her compatriots, and she is hardly to be accused of violence in brandishing those weapons. Sometimes, refuse rhetoric being all too ready, she takes it on her pen, in honest haste, as though it were honest speech, and stands committed to such a phrase as this: “The dregs of the nation placed such a one at the helm of affairs.”
But her manner was not generally to write anything but a clear and efficient French language. She never wrote for the love of art, but without some measure of art she did not write; and her simplicity is somewhat altered by that importunate love of the Antique. In “Bleak House” there is an old lady who insisted that the name “Mr. Turveydrop,” as it appeared polished on the door-plate of the dancing master, was the name of the pretentious father and not of the industrious son—albeit, needless to say, one name was common to them. With equal severity I aver that when Madame Roland wrote to her husband in the second person singular she was using the tu of Rome and not the tu of Paris. French was indeed the language; but had it been French in spirit she would (in spite of the growing Republican fashion) have said vous to this “homme éclairé, de moeurs pures, à qui l’on ne peut reprocher que sa grande admiration pour les anciens aux dépens des modernes qu’il méprise, et le faible de trop aimer à parler de lui.” There was no French tu in her relations with this husband, gravely esteemed and appraised, discreetly rebuked, the best passages of whose Ministerial reports she wrote, and whom she observed as he slowly began to think he himself had composed them. She loved him with a loyal, obedient, and discriminating affection, and when she had been put to death, he, still at liberty, fell upon his sword.
This last letter was written at a moment when, in order to prevent the exposure of a public death, Madame Roland had intended to take opium in the end of her cruel imprisonment. A little later she chose that those who oppressed her country should have their way with her to the last. But, while still intending self-destruction, she had written to her husband: “Forgive me, respectable man, for disposing of a life that I had consecrated to thee.” In quoting this I mean to make no too-easy effect with the word “respectable,” grown grotesque by the tedious gibe of our own present fashion of speech.
Madame Roland, I have said, was twice inarticulate; she had two spaces of silence, one when she, pure and selfless patriot, had heard her condemnation to death. Passing out of the court she beckoned to her friends, and signified to them her sentence “by a gesture.” And again there was a pause, in the course of her last days, during which her speeches had not been few, and had been spoken with her beautiful voice unmarred; “she leant,” says Riouffe, “alone against her window, and wept there three hours.”
FELLOW TRAVELLERS WITH A BIRD
To attend to a living child is to be baffled in your humour, disappointed of your pathos, and set freshly free from all the preoccupations. You cannot anticipate him. Blackbirds, overheard year by year, do not compose the same phrases; never two leitmotifs alike. Not the tone, but the note alters. So with the uncovenanted ways of a child you keep no tryst. They meet you at another place, after failing you where you tarried; your former experiences, your documents are at fault. You are the fellow traveller of a bird. The bird alights and escapes out of time to your footing.
No man’s fancy could be beforehand, for instance, with a girl of four years old who dictated a letter to a distant cousin, with the sweet and unimaginable message: “I hope you enjoy yourself with your loving dolls.” A boy, still younger, persuading his mother to come down from the heights and play with him on the floor, but sensible, perhaps, that there was a dignity to be observed none the less, entreated her, “Mother, do be a lady frog.” None ever said their good things before these indeliberate authors. Even their own kind—children—have not preceded them. No child in the past ever found the same replies as the girl of five whose father made that appeal to feeling which is doomed to a different, perverse, and unforeseen success. He was rather tired with writing, and had a mind to snare some of the yet uncaptured flock of her sympathies. “Do you know, I have been working hard, darling? I work to buy things for you.” “Do you work,” she asked, “to buy the lovely puddin’s?” Yes, even for these. The subject must have seemed to her to be worth pursuing. “And do you work to buy the fat? I don’t like fat.”
The sympathies, nevertheless, are there. The same child was to be soothed at night after a weeping dream that a skater had been drowned in the Kensington Round Pond. It was suggested to her that she should forget it by thinking about the one unfailing and gay subject—her wishes. “Do you know,” she said, without loss of time, “what I should like best in all the world? A thundred dolls and a whistle!” Her mother was so overcome by this tremendous numeral, that she could make no offer as to the dolls. But the whistle seemed practicable. “It is for me to whistle for cabs,” said the child, with a sudden moderation, “when I go to parties.” Another morning she came down radiant. “Did you hear a great noise in the miggle of the night? That was me crying. I cried because I dreamt that Cuckoo