The Press. — London, England, 1855-03-17 00:00:00

Yittratart. The Literary Life and Correspondence of the Countess of Blessington. By R. R. Madden, M.R.I.A. London : Newby. MR. MADDEN should have selected as the motto of this work the significant adage, " Save me from my friends!" He would thus have fitly expressed the moral of the publica tion, so far as it involves the unhappy lady who is the principal object of his labo rs. But this is a matter beyond our province. It is no part of our duty to sit in censorship upon the errors of friendship. That which concerns us, and our readers, is the moral of the book as it relates to literature and society. Nothing can be more satisfactory than the principles Mr. Madden lays down at the outset for the government of biography : The great aim (he observes) is to make the truthful portraiture of the person we describe, and present to the public, stand out in a distinct shape and form, distinguish able from all surrounding objects, an instructive, directive, suggestive, encouraging, or admonitory representation of a character and career, as the case may be. Again : If he [the biographer] has to deal with the career of one who has played an important part in public life, or in fashionable circles, and would attain the object I have re ferred to, he will have to speak freely and fearlessly of the miseries and vexations of a false position, however splendid that position may be ; miseries which may not be escaped from by any efforts to keep them out of sight or hearing, either in the turmoil of a fashionable life, in the tumult of its pleasures, or in the solitude of the dressing-room, the stillness of which is often more intolerable than the desert gloom, the desolation of Mar Saba, or the silence of La Trappe. This is excellent, and full of promise. The biographer's duty is to give a truth ful portraiture of the person he describes ; and if that person occupied a false position, he is to speak freely and fearlessly of its miseries and vexations. Nothing can be more satisfactory. Let us see how Mr. Madden has discharged this duty. Whoever has been acquainted with the notorieties of London life during the last eighteen or twenty years, must be familiar with a large house standing within gates in Kensington Gore, where a once beautiful woman, who enjoyed what may be called, without offence to the living or the dead, a special reputation, resided in the latter part of her career. Out of those gates might be seen emerging on opera nights the sumptuous carriage which conveyed the lady to the well known box, from which she was rarely absent on those occasions ; and in the descending crush, when the entertainment was over, her liveries might be distinguished from a thou sand in the hall below by their brilliant singu larity. Out of the same gates might also be seen issuing daily a cabriolet of rare perfection in form and colour, picked out with exquisite delicacy, carrying behind a tiger so tiny that he might have served for the chariot of Titania, and looking in his miniature cords, top-boots, and looped hat, exactly as if he had just been freshly pranked out by the fairies to wait upon their queen. Within, sat the model of a fashionable athlete, combining something of the beauty of Adonis, a little materialised by voluptuous living, and the indolent strength of Hercules ; luxurious to effeminacy in his air ; original and distinctive in his style and ap pointments, from the liberal display of chest, the careful tie, and fancy-coloured gloves, to the snowy reins, which he handled with admirable grace and mastery.. Over that mansion and its inmates hung a cloud of mystery. But as the darkest cloud is said to have a silver lining, so the interior of Gore house was understood to be resplendent with a secret glory of its own. There were, of course, many strange stories current touching the antecedents that had led up to this esoteric magnificence, and many speculations con cerning the means by which so much splendour was sustained. Year after year the mystery grew d e eper and deeper ; Penis, of a class who might be supposed to hav e no legitimate busi ness in such quarters, watched in vain at the gates for an opportunity of penetrating the paradise within ; the cabriolet no longer appeared—except occasionally on a Sunday; and ominous rumours portended a coming catastrophe. At last it cam e. The i nmates THE PRESS. of Gore house suddenly left the country ; and the gorgeous contents of their palatial salons were surrendered to the inspection of the vulgar public, and the hammer of the auo• tioneer. There is not much that can be considered very novel or surprising in these incidents. The celebrity of the persons mixed up in them alone gave them a sort of temporary fascination. Had they been permitted to take the usual course of such episodes in our social annals, they would have furnished a topic of gossip for a season, and been for gotten. The Loudon world, with all its love of scandal, is not so uncharitable as to linger long over vices or follies expiated by ruin and expatriation ; and its peccant curiosity, pam pered with variety, is very easily appeased. But there are some people who will not let well alone. There are others who will not let ill alone. Mr. Madden belongs to the latter description. He will not suffer Lady Bless ington's career to drop quietly into oblivion : he will not allow the public to exercise its charity in silence. The consequences are precisely such as invariably result from indis cretions of this nature. The subject of the biography answers accu• rately to the conditions laid down in the open ing. Mr. Madden could not have found a more complete example of the character he proposed to illustrate. Lady Blessington notoriously occupied what he calls a " false position." It was not merely that she lived extravagantly; that there was a. perpetual wear and tear of brain and spirits in the struggle to keep up appearances; and that the external life of splendour and excitement was a mask that concealed daily increasing pecuniary embarrassments, recklessly and wantonly incurred. It was not merely, as Mr. Madden tells us, that for two years before the "break up" at Gore-house, Lady Blessington lived in " constant apprehension of execu " tions," and adopted " unceasing precautions " in the admission of persons " at the outer " gate and hall door ;" or that for a consider able period Count D'Orsay was in " continual " danger of arrest," and obliged to " confine " himself to the house and grounds, except on " Sundays, and in the dusk of the evening on " other days," till a sheriff's officer at length effected an entrance in disguise ; or that, when the " break up" took place, " numerous " creditors pressed their claims, bill-die " counters, money-lenders, jewellers, lace " venders, tax-collectors, gas-company agents," &c., laying bare the whole machinery by which what Mr. Madden designates the "false appear anees " had been maintained ; or that an execu tion for 4,000/. was finally put in by a house " largely engaged in the silk, lace, India " shawls, and fancy jewellery business," clearly indicating the character of the expendi ture which in the long run brought down its inevitable punishment.* If this were all, it would be no great matter. Cases of this kind are common enough, where vanity and want of principle predominate over the obligations of good sense and honesty. But there were other vultures that fed upon Lady Blessing ton's peace of mind, and delivered her up in solitude to remorse and " splendid " misery." And it is herein we must look for the circumstances that rendered her case ex ceptional. Mr. Madden frequently hints at these secret tortures. In one place he says, in italics, to impress the dark allusion more strongly, " the present enjoyments were never un " accompanied with reminiscences of the past that " were painful." Similar mysterious little frag merits of sentences of a like tendency are scattered up and down his pages, casting their heavy shadows into every nook and cranny of the story. Lady Blessington herself supplies a clue to the suspicions awakened by her biographer Her " detached thoughts. found in various papers, or noted down amongst certain " records of reflection," to which she gave the name of " Night Thought " Books." intimate with a terrible clearness the nature of her lonely meditations on the past. They all run much upon the same class • The exit of Count D'Orsay, as described by Mr. Madden, is striking. A " confidential servant" having communicated the alarming fact of the execution, the necessity for his immediate departure became apparent. " The following morning, with a single portmanteau, attended by his valet, he set out f. Paris, and thus ended the London life of Count D'Orsay!" SATURDAY, of experiences, and the inferences she ex tracted from them. Here is an instance, con• taining a complaint against the rigorous ver dicts of society in certain cases : England is the only country in Europe where the loss of one's virtue superinduces the loss of all. I refer to chastity. A woman known to have violated this virtue, though she possess all the other virtues, is driven with ignominy from society into a solitude rendered insupportable by a sense of the injustice by which she is made a victim to solitude, which often becomes the grave of the virtues she brought to it. This is immediately succeeded by the fol lowing appropriate reflection : Passion! possession ! indifference ! What a history is comprised in these three words ! What hopes and fears, succeeded by a felicity as brief as intoxicating, followed in its turn by the old consequence of possession, indifference 1 What burning tears, what bitter pangs, rending the very heartstrings—what sleepless nights and watchful days form part of this every-day story of life, whose termination leaves the actors to search again for new illusions to finish like the last! --- - Now follows the effort to reconcile these things, not to the conscience, whose functions may be presumed to have been suspended in the process, but to the doctrine of appear ances, the last refuge of the victim of the in justice of society : In some women modesty has been known to survive chastity, and in others chastity to survive modesty. The last example is the most injurious to the interests of so ciety, because they who believe while they preserve chastity inviolate they may throw aside the feminine reserve and delicacy which ought to be its outward sign and token, give cause for suspicions, and offend the purity of others of • their sex with whom they are brought in contact much more than those who, failing in chastity, preserve its de cency and decorum. We will make no commentary on this wretched sophistry, which even the most vicious French novelist would consider it derogatory to the credit of his vocation to employ. We only touch upon these passages to exhibit the tenor of Lady Blessington's " Night Thoughts," leaving the reader to form his own opinions, and. draw his own conclusions. We might accu mulate a heap of such moralities ; but these are sufficient for the purpose. Here then are the evidences of that " false " position " Mr. Madden had to deal with. We see it in both its aspects—external and inter nal : the silks and laces, tapestries, or mole and marqueterie of the drawing-room, and the hideous skeleton of the midnight chamber. Mr. Madden tells us, on the threshold of his book, that it will be his duty to speak freely and fearlessly of this " false position ;" and we, accordingly, look into his voluminous compilation for the narrative that is to instruct and admonish the fashionable world by the force of a conspicuous example. But what do we find there? That he has altogether evaded the responsibility he had thus voluntarily un dertaken ; endeavoured to excite sympathy where he should have pronounced condemna tion; and embalmed in spices, and crowned with laurels, the dead actors in this most moral drama to whose memory he dedicates his inky tears. As it would be obviously impossible, how ever, in putting together the materials of this biography, to affect ignorance of circumstances notorious to all persons who have moved in the circles of London any time these five and twenty years—indeed, Lady Blessington's celebrity dates much farther back—Mr. Mad den tries to elude the difficulty by leaving a long interval in Lady Blessington's life wholly unaccounted for, and by substituting dim allu sions and deprecatory comments for the facts he is either unwilling to disclose, or desirous of exhibiting in tinted side-lights. This mode of treatment is unfortunate in two points of view. It wrongs at once the public and the heroine of the book. Mr. Madden is not con tent to leave out Hamlet ; he suppresses the Ghost also. Of this the public have a right to complain. On the other hand, his way of hinting at sundry unrevealed incidents is so suggestive, that it makes the case press much harder upon the lady than if he had told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Of this, we think, the friends of Lady Blessington have a still more manifest right to complain. It will be said, no doubt, that the sup pressions and omissions are justified by cer tain considerations which all readers will easily understand, and that the publication of the particulars we desiderate would have been I