Radical party is evidently effete,’ she writes to M. Victor Cousin; the probable ‘leader of the Tory party’ is Mr. Gladstone. ‘The people must be instructed, must be guided, must be, in short, governed,’ she writes elsewhere; and in a letter to Dr. Whewell, she says that the state of things in France fills ‘me with the deepest anxiety on one point,—the point on which the permanency of our institutions and our salvation as a nation turn. Are our higher classes able to keep the lead of the rest? If they are, we are safe; if not, I agree with my poor dear Charles Buller—our turn must come. Now Cambridge and Oxford must really look to this.’ The belief in the power of the Universities to stem the current of democracy is charming. She grew to regard Carlyle as ‘one of the dissolvents of the age—as mischievous as his extravagances will let him be’; speaks of Kingsley and Maurice as ‘pernicious’; and talks of John Stuart Mill as a ‘demagogue.’ She was no doctrinaire. ‘One ounce of education demanded is worth a pound imposed. It is no use to give the meat before you give the hunger.’ She was delighted at a letter of St. Hilaire’s, in which he said, ‘We have a system and no results; you have results and no system.’ Yet she had a deep sympathy with the wants of the people. She was horrified at something Babbage told her of the population of some of the manufacturing towns who are worked out before they attain to thirty years of age. ‘But I am persuaded that the remedy will not, cannot come from the people,’ she adds. Many of her letters are concerned with the question of the higher education of women. She discusses Buckle’s lecture on ‘The Influence of Women upon the Progress of Knowledge,’ admits to M. Guizot that women’s intellectual life is largely coloured by the emotions, but adds:
‘One is not precisely a fool because one’s opinions are greatly influenced by one’s affections. The opinions of men are often influenced by worse things.’ Dr. Whewell consults her about lecturing women on Plato, being slightly afraid lest people should think it ridiculous; Comte writes her elaborate letters on the relation of women to progress; and Mr. Gladstone promises that Mrs. Gladstone will carry out at Hawarden the suggestions contained in one of her pamphlets. She was always very practical, and never lost her admiration for plain sewing.
All through the book we come across interesting and amusing things. She gets St. Hilaire to order a large, sensible bonnet for her in Paris, which was at once christened the ‘Aristotelian,’ and was supposed to be the only useful bonnet in England. Grote has to leave Paris after the coup d’état, he tells her, because he cannot bear to see the establishment of a Greek tyrant. Alfred de Vigny, Macaulay, John Stirling, Southey, Alexis de Tocqueville, Hallam, and Jean Jacques Ampère all contribute to these pleasant pages. She seems to have inspired the warmest feelings of friendship in those who knew her. Guizot writes to her: ‘Madame de Staël used to say that the best thing in the world was a serious Frenchman. I turn the compliment, and say that the best thing in the world is an affectionate Englishman. How much more an Englishwoman! Given equal qualities, a woman is always more charming than a man.’
Lucie Austin, afterwards Lady Duff Gordon, was born in 1821. Her chief playfellow was John Stuart Mill, and Jeremy Bentham’s garden was her playground. She was a lovely, romantic child, who was always wanting the flowers to talk to her,
and used to invent the most wonderful stories about animals, of whom she was passionately fond. In 1834 Mrs. Austin decided on leaving England, and Sydney Smith wrote his immortal letter to the little girl:
Lucie, Lucie, my dear child, don’t tear your frock: tearing frocks is not of itself a proof of genius. But write as your mother writes, act as your mother acts: be frank, loyal, affectionate, simple, honest, and then integrity or laceration of frock is of little import. And Lucie, dear child, mind your arithmetic. You know in the first sum of yours I ever saw there was a mistake. You had carried two (as a cab is licensed to do), and you ought, dear Lucie, to have carried but one. Is this a trifle? What would life be without arithmetic but a scene of horrors? You are going to Boulogne, the city of debts, peopled by men who have never understood arithmetic. By the time you return, I shall probably have received my first paralytic stroke, and shall have lost all recollection of you. Therefore I now give you my parting advice—don’t marry anybody who has not a tolerable understanding and a thousand a year. And God bless you, dear child.
At Boulogne she sat next Heine at table d’hôte. ‘He heard me speak German to my mother, and soon began to talk to me, and then said, “When you go back to England, you can tell your friends that you have seen Heinrich Heine.” I replied, “And who is Heinrich Heine?” He laughed heartily and took no offence at my ignorance; and we used to lounge on the end of the pier together, where he told me stories in which fish, mermaids, water-sprites and a very funny old French fiddler with a poodle were mixed up in the most fanciful manner, sometimes humorous, and very often pathetic, especially when the water-sprites brought him greetings from the “Nord See.” He was . . . so
kind to me and so sarcastic to every one else.’ Twenty years afterwards the little girl whose ‘braune Augen’ Heine had celebrated in his charming poem Wenn ick an deinem Hause, used to go and see the dying poet in Paris. ‘It does one good,’ he said to her, ‘to see a woman who does not carry about a broken heart, to be mended by all sorts of men, like the women here, who do not see that a total want of heart is their real failing.’ On another occasion he said to her: ‘I have now made peace with the whole world, and at last also with God, who sends thee to me as a beautiful angel of death: I shall certainly soon die.’ Lady Duff Gordon said to him: ‘Poor Poet, do you still retain such splendid illusions, that you transform a travelling Englishwoman into Azrael? That used not to be the case, for you always disliked us.’ He answered: ‘Yes, I do not know what possessed me to dislike the English, . . . it really was only petulance; I never hated them, indeed, I never knew them. I was only once in England, but knew no one, and found London very dreary, and the people and the streets odious. But England has revenged herself well; she has sent me most excellent friends—thyself and Milnes, that good Milnes.’
There are delightful letters from Dicky Doyle here, with the most amusing drawings, one of the present Sir Robert Peel as he made his maiden speech in the House being excellent; and the various descriptions of Hassan’s performances are extremely amusing. Hassan was a black boy, who had been turned away by his master because he was going blind, and was found by Lady Duff Gordon one night sitting on her doorstep. She took care of him, and had him cured, and he seems to have been a constant source of delight to every one. On
one occasion, ‘when Prince Louis Napoleon (the late Emperor of the French) came in unexpectedly, he gravely said: “Please, my lady, I ran out and bought twopennyworth of sprats for the Prince, and for the honour of the house.”’ Here is an amusing letter from Mrs. Norton: