“We complain of this world,” she says, “and the variety of crosses and afflictions it abounds in, and for all this, who is weary on’t (more than in discourse), who thinks with pleasure of leaving it, or preparing for the next? We see old folks that have outlived all the comforts of life, desire to continue it, and nothing can wean us from the folly of preferring a mortal being, subject to great infirmity and unavoidable decays, before an immortal one, and all the glories that are promised with it.”
“Is not this very like preaching?” she asks. It is less like the preaching of the author of Holy Dying than that of six-and-twenty in love; but undoubtedly it proceeds from common experience. She was merciless to bad sermons, able to make such good ones of her own. “God forgive me, I was as near laughing yesterday where I should not. Would you believe that I had the grace to go hear a sermon upon a week-day?” Stephen Marshall was the preacher, a roaring divine of the prevailing type. “He is so famed that I expected rare things of him, and seriously I listened to him at first with as much reverence as if he had been St. Paul; and what do you think he told us? Why, that if there were no Kings, no Queens, no lords, no ladies, nor gentlemen, nor gentlewomen in the world, ’twould be no loss at all to God Almighty. This we had over some forty times, which made me remember it whether I would or not.... Yet, I’ll say for him, he stood stoutly for tithes, though, in my opinion, few deserved them less than he; and it may be he would be better without them.” Marshall should have known better than to try his levelling doctrine at Chicksands.
To the making of all good letter-writers, all those to whom it is a natural vent for the emotions, goes quality, that which we call style, an entire naturalness of expression turned in a manner of one’s own, an incommunicable something not to be mistaken. All the best have it; the second-best have something of it. Into literary quality goes, of course, moral quality, l’homme même. Now, Dorothy Osborne has quality: little as we have, there is enough to show that. She can be playful, but not sparkle, not ripple like the Marquise nor set a whole letter twinkling like the sea in a fresh wind; hers is a still wind. Nor has she such news to impart, to be “le dessus de touts ses panniers.” Chicksands was not Paris. She has spirit, but not gallantry. Madame de Sévigné’s chosen defence was always attack. Dorothy is as quick to see her advantage, but has a more staid manner of execution. She will be slower to believe herself menaced; and when she discovers it will reason plainly with the offender, as much for his good as for her justification. Take this for an example. Temple, who was a fussy man, a precisian, had been scolding her for fruit-eating. You could hardly expect a lady to approve lectures upon her digestion from her lover. She replied:
“In my opinion you do not understand the laws of friendship aright. ’Tis generally believed it owes its birth to an agreement and conformity of humours, and that it lives no longer than ’tis preserved by the mutual care of those that bred it.” Is there no style in that? “’Tis wholly governed by equality, and can there be such a thing in it as distinction of power? No, sure, if we are friends we must both command and both obey alike; indeed, a mistress and a servant sounds otherwise; but that is ceremony and this is truth. Yet what reason had I to furnish you with a stick to beat myself withal, or desire that you should command, that do it so severely?” Observe her conduct of the relative there! “I must eat fruit no longer than I could be content you should be in a fever; is not that an absolute forbidding of me? It has frighted me just now from a basket of the most tempting cherries that e’er I saw, though I know you did not mean that I should eat none. But if you had I think I should have obeyed you.”
Evidently she had tossed her head over his dictation; but how well in hand is her temper, how admirable her style! It is very much in the manner of Madame when her querulous daughter had hurt her feelings; and entirely in that manner Madame would throw up the sponge at the end of a successful attack—entirely as Dorothy does here, with her, “If you had I think I should have obeyed you.” Dorothy is not, however, so quick to veer from the stormy to the rainy quarter. She can be fierce, as I have shown, when her feelings are overstrained, but there is no hysterical passion. Modesty forbade. “Love is a terrible word,” she says, “and I should blush to death if anything but a letter accused me on’t.” She could be bold on such occasions; she could be as saucy as Rosalind, and as tender. When it is a case of his going to Ireland, on business of his father’s, which may advance their personal affair, she urges him to be off. But when the hour has come—“You must give Nan leave to cut off a lock of your hair for me.... Oh, my heart! What a sigh was there! I will not tell you how many this journey causes, nor the fears and apprehensions I have for you. No, I long to be rid of you—am afraid you will not go soon enough. Do not you believe this? No, my dearest, I know you do not, whate’er you say....” Any good girl in love would feel like that, but not everyone could let you hear the quickened breath in a letter three hundred years old.
Sévigné was wise, and so is Dorothy. She read and could criticise, she read and remembered. With less philosophy, and no fatalism, she looked her world in the face, and had no illusions about it. But she was in love, and it was a good world. Cheerfulness kept breaking in. “What an age we live in, where ’tis a miracle if in ten couples that are married, two of them live so as not to publish to the world that they cannot agree.” Yet she thinks that one should follow the Saviour’s precept, take up the cross and follow. She believes that the trouble is mostly of the woman’s making, for as for the husband, if he grumbles, and the wife says nothing, he will stop for lack of nutriment, and nobody be any the worse. A splenetic husband of her acquaintance had the trick, when harassed, of rising in the night and banging the table with a club. His wife provided a stout cushion for the table, and was not disturbed.
Sévigné is merry, and so is Dorothy, though much more demure. In her seventy letters you will find no tours de force—nothing like the “prairie” letter, the marriage-of-Mademoiselle, or the “incendie” letter. She can touch you off a situation in a phrase excellently well, as when after a quarrel comes a reconciliation between her and her brother Henry, and she says, “’Tis wonderful to see what curtseys and legs pass between us; and as before we were thought the kindest brother and sister, we are certainly now the most complimental couple in England”; or, asking “Is it true my Lord Whitelocke goes Ambassador?” she comments upon him, “He was never meant for a courtier at home, I believe. Yet ’tis a gracious Prince.” Another Commonwealth lord, whose title depended upon the standing of the Court of Chancery, has a flick in the same letter: “’Twill be sad news for my Lord Keble’s son. He will have nothing left to say when ‘my Lord, my father,’ is taken from him.” Those are both brisk and pleasant; more ambitious is her discussion of the “ingredients” of a husband, which opens with sketches of impossible husbands. He “must not be so much of a country gentleman as to understand nothing but horses and dogs, and be fonder of either than his wife”; nor one “whose aim reaches no further than to be Justice of the Peace, and once in his life High Sheriff”; nor “a thing that began the world in a free school ... and is at his furthest when he reaches the Inns of Court.” He must not be “a town gallant neither, that lives in a tavern and an ordinary,” who “makes court to all the women he sees, thinks they believe him, and laughs and is laughed at equally”; nor a “travelled Monsieur, whose head is all feather inside and outside, that can talk of nothing but dances and duels, and has courage enough to wear slashes when everybody else dies of cold to see him.” In fact, “he must love me, and I him, as much as we are capable of.” Those impersonations might have come as well from Belmont as from Chicksands.
I said just now that we have no “prairie” letter from Dorothy. We have something not far from it, though, and I will give as much of it as I dare. It is of her very best in the way of unforced, happy description; but after it I must give no more. The date of it is early May, 1653:
“You ask me how I pass my time here. I can give you a perfect account not only of what I do for the present, but of what I am likely to do this seven years if I stay here so long. I rise in the morning reasonably early, and before I am ready I go round the house till I am weary of that, and then into the garden till it grows too hot for me. About ten o’clock I think of making me ready, and when that’s done I go into my father’s chamber, and from thence to dinner, where my cousin Mollie and I sit in great state in a room and at a table that would hold a great many more. After dinner we sit and talk till Mr. B. (a suitor of Dorothy’s, a Mr. Levinus Bennet) comes in question, and then I am gone. The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and about six or seven o’clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit in the shade singing of ballads. I go to them and compare their voices and beauties to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of, and find a vast difference there; but, trust me, I think these are as innocent as those could be. I talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so.”