“Still within this life,
Though lifted o’er its strife.”[467]
Sunday was always her great delight—a Sunday to be dealt with as John Knox would have used it, and a church service freed from anything of ritual, but with an extempore preacher if possible. She felt, “I always like my victuals hot when I can get them,” as an old woman said in reference to her preacher. Latterly, however, Charlotte Leycester was scarcely able to hear sermons, though, as she wrote to me during my last absence,—“I always enjoy the sermon, though I do not hear it; for, as our old friend George Herbert says, ‘God takes a text, and preaches patience,’ and I can generally catch all texts quoted, which helps me to follow the drift, like finding one stone after another in crossing a current.”
When turned to her reminiscences of the past, her conversation was often very interesting. I remember her telling me this summer of her visit to Paris in 1827, and going to the Royal Chapel, into which came the king, Louis XVIII., and the Duchess d’Angoulême with full evening dress in the morning and feathers on her head. When the king entered, a great picture of our Lord hung opposite where he was to sit, to which the master of the ceremonies seemed to introduce him—“Le roi.” “At Rosny, a beautiful old château with chestnut avenues, to which we drove out one October evening after dining at Mantes, we saw the Duchesse de Berri. Most amusing the travelling then was, with the postillions in blue and in great jack-boots, into which they had to be lifted, with the blowing of their horns at every village we passed through.”
A few days after I reached home, two more volumes of mine were published, “Paris” and “Days near Paris.” They had been the engrossing work of the last two years. My hourly thought had been for them, and I had taken all the pains I could with them. I knew their faults, and know them still; but all the same I am conscious, and I am sure it is not conceit, that no better general books on those subjects have ever been written,—certainly in French there is nothing of the kind. I suppose it is one of the penalties of a lonely life, of having no near belongings, that it seemed—perhaps a little bathos as regarded the subjects which had filled one’s life—that no one spoke of them; that day after day passed on, and no one ever mentioned their existence. And then came a Review—a leading article indeed—in the Athenæum, not of mere abuse of the books, though no words were strong enough for that, but of such bitter personal malignity against myself, as gave one the shuddering conviction that one must indeed have an enemy as virulent as he was unscrupulous. “Turn author,” says Gray, “and straightway you expose yourself to pit, boxes, and gallery: any coxcomb in the world may come in and hiss if he pleases; ay, and what is almost as bad, clap too, and you cannot hinder him.” Most of the Reviews of my books have been unfavourable, but the books have always contrived to outlive them; and generally, when they have been found fault with, I have felt almost grateful for such lessons of humility, and have longed to say with Goethe, “Pray continue to make me acquainted with my own work.” Even honest reviewers, however, seldom read beyond the first chapter of a book; that they usually read, and occasionally criticise; but even then the tendency to save themselves trouble generally causes a great deal of copying. I have always found that a first Review has influenced all the others except the very best. The excessive injustice and untruthfulness this time made me understand the pain which Chatterton felt, especially when it was said that the hundred and forty-seven quotations, which I had been at such pains to find for my “Versailles,” were “all taken second-hand from Dussieux’ History” of that palace, though I am assured that not one (!!) of them is to be found there, except the few taken from S. Simon, the especial historian of Versailles, to which any one writing about it would naturally apply.
“Every white will have its black,
And every sweet its sour,”
and though serious disappointments are always a most bitter medicine, life becomes much the same again after they are once swallowed and assimilated. I know they must be good for one, like all the other humiliations of—is it?—yes, I suppose in a right spirit it may be, le chemin de la croix. Still I often wonder whether the writer of such an article, when he knows it is false and unjust, as this writer must have done, does it with pleasure in taking away an author’s innocent enjoyment in the birth of his book-child. In most cases of personal injustice and injury, I am sure that it answers to take some secret opportunity of doing something very kind towards the aggressor—it “takes out the taste;” but when the intentional injury is anonymous, one is deprived of even this consolation. Yet, to a certain extent, an inner consciousness of high aims and disinterested intentions may raise a screen against the base scurrilousness with which every one is assailed at some time in their lives. Fortunately, also, I have never quite—though very nearly—had to put in practice the maxim that—
“Those who live to please must please to live.”