MARIA to MRS. RUXTON.
EDGEWORTHSTOWN, Jan. 24, 1818.
My dearest aunt and friend—friend of my youth and age, and beloved sister of my father, how many titles you have to my affection and gratitude, and how delightful it is to me to feel them all! Since I have parted from you, I have felt still more than when I was with you the peculiar value to me of your sympathy and kindness. I find my spirits sink beyond my utmost effort to support them when I leave you, and they rise involuntarily when I am near you, and recall the dear trains of old associations, and the multitude of ideas I used to have with him who is gone for ever. Thank you, my dear aunt, for your most kind and touching letter. You have been for three months daily and hourly soothing, and indulging, and nursing me body and mind, and making me forget the sense of pain which I could not have felt suspended in any society but yours. My uncle's opinion and hints about the Life I have been working at this whole week. Nothing can be kinder than Lovell is to all of us.
I have read two-thirds of Bishop Watson's life. I think he bristles his independence too much upon every occasion, and praises himself too much for it, and above all complains too much of the want of preferment and neglect of him by the Court. I have Madame de Staël's Memoirs of her father's private life: I have only read fifty pages of it—too much of a French Éloge—too little of his private life. There is a Notice by Benjamin Constant of Madame de Staël's life prefixed to this work, which appears to me more interesting and pathetic than anything Madame de Staël has yet said of her father.
February 21.
I must and will write to my Aunt Ruxton to-day, if the whole College of Physicians, and the whole conclave of cardinal virtues, with Prudence primming up her mouth at the head of them, stood before me. I entirely agree with you, my dearest aunt, on one subject, as indeed I generally do on most subjects, but particularly about Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. The behaviour of the General in Northanger Abbey, packing off the young lady without a servant or the common civilities which any bear of a man, not to say gentleman, would have shown, is quite outrageously out of drawing and out of nature. Persuasion— excepting the tangled, useless histories of the family in the first fifty pages—appears to me, especially in all that relates to poor Anne and her lover, to be exceedingly interesting and natural. The love and the lover admirably well drawn: don't you see Captain Wentworth, or rather don't you in her place feel him taking the boisterous child off her back as she kneels by the sick boy on the sofa? And is not the first meeting after their long separation admirably well done? And the overheard conversation about the nut? But I must stop: we have got no farther than the disaster of Miss Musgrave's jumping off the steps.
I am going on, but very slowly, and not to my satisfaction with my work.
To MRS. SNEYD EDGEWORTH.
EDGEWORTHSTOWN, March 27.
I agree with you in thinking the MS. de Sainte-Helene a magnificent performance. My father was strongly of opinion that it was not written by Buonaparte himself, and he grounded this opinion chiefly upon the passages relative to the Duc d'Enghien: c'était plus qu'un crime, c'était une faute; no man, he thought, not even Nero, would, in writing for posterity say that he had committed a crime instead of a fault. But it may be observed that in the Buonaparte system of morality which runs through the book, nothing is considered what we call a crime, unless it be what he allows to be a fault. His proof that he did not murder Pichegru is, that it would have been useless. Le cachet de Buonaparte is as difficult to imitate as le cachet de Voltaire. I know of but three people in Europe who could have written it: Madame de Staël, Talleyrand, or M. Dumont. Madame de Staël, though she has the ability, could not have got so plainly and shortly through it. Talleyrand has l'esprit comme un démon, but he could not for the soul of him have refused himself a little more wit and wickedness. Dumont has not enough audacity of mind.