The Common Reader
soul? Why this overmastering desire to communicate with others? Is the
beauty of this world enough, or is there, elsewhere, some explanation of
the mystery? To this what answer can there be? There is none. There is
only one more question: “Que scais-je?”
[Footnote 3: _Essays of Montaigne_, translated by Charles Cotton,
5 vols. The Navarre Society, £6: 6s. net]
_The Duchess of Newcastle_[4]
“. . . All I desire is fame”, wrote Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of
Newcastle. And while she lived her wish was granted. Garish in her
dress, eccentric in her habits, chaste in her conduct, coarse in her
speech, she succeeded during her lifetime in drawing upon herself the
ridicule of the great and the applause of the learned. But the last
echoes of that clamour have now all died away; she lives only in the few
splendid phrases that Lamb scattered upon her tomb; her poems, her
plays, her philosophies, her orations, her discourses—all those folios
and quartos in which, she protested, her real life was shrined—moulder
in the gloom of public libraries, or are decanted into tiny thimbles
which hold six drops of their profusion. Even the curious student,
inspired by the words of Lamb, quails before the mass of her mausoleum,
peers in, looks about him, and hurries out again, shutting the door.
But that hasty glance has shown him the outlines of a memorable figure.
Born (it is conjectured) in 1624, Margaret was the youngest child of a
Thomas Lucas, who died when she was an infant, and her upbringing was
due to her mother, a lady of remarkable character, of majestic grandeur
and beauty “beyond the ruin of time”. “She was very skilful in leases,
and setting of lands and court keeping, ordering of stewards, and the
like affairs.” The wealth which thus accrued she spent, not on marriage
portions, but on generous and delightful pleasures, “out of an opinion
that if she bred us with needy necessity it might chance to create in us
sharking qualities”. Her eight sons and daughters were never beaten, but
reasoned with, finely and gayly dressed, and allowed no conversation
with servants, not because they are servants but because servants “are
for the most part ill-bred as well as meanly born”. The daughters were
taught the usual accomplishments “rather for formality than for
benefit”, it being their mother’s opinion that character, happiness, and
honesty were of greater value to a woman than fiddling and singing, or
“the prating of several languages”.
Already Margaret was eager to take advantage of such indulgence to
gratify certain tastes. Already she liked reading better than
needlework, dressing and “inventing fashions” better than reading, and
writing best of all. Sixteen paper books of no title, written in
straggling letters, for the impetuosity of her thought always outdid the
pace of her fingers, testify to the use she made of her mother’s
liberality. The happiness of their home life had other results as well.
They were a devoted family. Long after they were married, Margaret
noted, these handsome brothers and sisters, with their well-proportioned
bodies, their clear complexions, brown hair, sound teeth, “tunable
voices”, and plain way of speaking, kept themselves “in a flock
together”. The presence of strangers silenced them. But when they were
alone, whether they walked in Spring Gardens or Hyde Park, or had music,
or supped in barges upon the water, their tongues were loosed and they
made “very merry amongst themselves, . . . judging, condemning,
approving, commending, as they thought good”.
The happy family life had its effect upon Margaret’s character. As a
child, she would walk for hours alone, musing and contemplating and
reasoning with herself of “everything her senses did present”. She took
no pleasure in activity of any kind. Toys did not amuse her, and she
could neither learn foreign languages nor dress as other people did. Her
great pleasure was to invent dresses for herself, which nobody else was
to copy, “for”, she remarks, “I always took delight in a singularity,
even in accoutrements of habits”.
Such a training, at once so cloistered and so free, should have bred a
lettered old maid, glad of her seclusion, and the writer perhaps of some
volume of letters or translations from the classics, which we should
still quote as proof of the cultivation of our ancestresses. But there
was a wild streak in Margaret, a love of finery and extravagance and
fame, which was for ever upsetting the orderly arrangements of nature.
When she heard that the Queen, since the outbreak of the Civil War, had
fewer maids-of-honour than usual, she had “a great desire” to become one
of them. Her mother let her go against the judgement of the rest of the
family, who, knowing that she had never left home and had scarcely been
beyond their sight, justly thought that she might behave at Court to her
disadvantage. “Which indeed I did,” Margaret confessed; “for I was so
bashful when I was out of my mother’s, brothers’, and sisters’ sight
that . . . I durst neither look up with my eyes, nor speak, nor be any
way sociable, insomuch as I was thought a natural fool.” The courtiers
laughed at her; and she retaliated in the obvious way. People were
censorious; men were jealous of brains in a woman; women suspected
intellect in their own sex; and what other lady, she might justly ask,
pondered as she walked on the nature of matter and whether snails have
teeth? But the laughter galled her, and she begged her mother to let her
come home. This being refused, wisely as the event turned out, she
stayed on for two years (1643–45), finally going with the Queen to
Paris, and there, among the exiles who came to pay their respects to the
Court, was the Marquis of Newcastle. To the general amazement, the
princely nobleman, who had led the King’s forces to disaster with
indomitable courage but little skill, fell in love with the shy, silent,
strangely dressed maid-of-honour. It was not “amorous love, but honest,
honourable love”, according to Margaret. She was no brilliant match; she
had gained a reputation for prudery and eccentricity. What, then, could
have made so great a nobleman fall at her feet? The onlookers were full
of derision, disparagement, and slander. “I fear”, Margaret wrote to the
Marquis, “others foresee we shall be unfortunate, though we see it not
ourselves, or else there would not be such pains to untie the knot of
our affections.” Again, “Saint Germains is a place of much slander, and
thinks I send too often to you”. “Pray consider”, she warned him, “that
I have enemies.” But the match was evidently perfect. The Duke, with his
love of poetry and music and play-writing, his interest in philosophy,
his belief “that nobody knew or could know the cause of anything”, his
romantic and generous temperament, was naturally drawn to a woman who
wrote poetry herself, was also a philosopher of the same way of
thinking, and lavished upon him not only the admiration of a
fellow-artist, but the gratitude of a sensitive creature who had been
shielded and succoured by his extraordinary magnanimity. “He did
approve”, she wrote, “of those bashful fears which many condemned, . . .
and though I did dread marriage and shunned men’s company as much as I
could, yet I . . . had not the power to refuse him.” She kept him
company during the long years of exile; she entered with sympathy, if
not with understanding, into the conduct and acquirements of those
horses which he trained to such perfection that the Spaniards crossed
themselves and cried “Miraculo!” as they witnessed their corvets,
voltoes, and pirouettes; she believed that the horses even made a
“trampling action” for joy when he came into the stables; she pleaded
his cause in England during the Protectorate; and, when the Restoration
made it possible for them to return to England, they lived together in
the depths of the country in the greatest seclusion and perfect
contentment, scribbling plays, poems, philosophies, greeting each
other’s works with raptures of delight, and confabulating doubtless upon
such marvels of the natural world as chance threw their way. They were
laughed at by their contemporaries; Horace Walpole sneered at them. But
there can be no doubt that they were perfectly happy.
For now Margaret could apply herself uninterruptedly to her writing. She
could devise fashions for herself and her servants. She could scribble
more and more furiously with fingers that became less and less able to
form legible letters. She could even achieve the miracle of getting her
plays acted in London and her philosophies humbly perused by men of
learning. There they stand, in the British Museum, volume after volume,
swarming with a diffused, uneasy, contorted vitality. Order, continuity,
the logical development of her argument are all unknown to her. No fears
impede her. She has the irresponsibility of a child and the arrogance of
a Duchess. The wildest fancies come to her, and she canters away on
their backs. We seem to hear her, as the thoughts boil and bubble,
calling to John, who sat with a pen in his hand next door, to come
quick, “John, John, I conceive!” And down it goes—whatever it may be;
sense or nonsense; some thought on women’s education—“Women live like
Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts, and die like Worms, . . . the best
bred women are those whose minds are civilest”; some speculation that
had struck her perhaps walking that afternoon alone—why “hogs have the
measles”, why “dogs that rejoice swing their tails”, or what the stars
are made of, or what this chrysalis is that her maid has brought her,
and she keeps warm in a corner of her room. On and on, from subject to
subject she flies, never stopping to correct, “for there is more
pleasure in making than in mending”, talking aloud to herself of all
those matters that filled her brain to her perpetual diversion—of wars,
and boarding-schools, and cutting down trees, of grammar and morals, of
monsters and the British, whether opium in small quantities is good for
lunatics, why it is that musicians are mad. Looking upwards, she
speculates still more ambitiously upon the nature of the moon, and if
the stars are blazing jellies; looking downwards she wonders if the
fishes know that the sea is salt; opines that our heads are full of
fairies, “dear to God as we are”; muses whether there are not other
worlds than ours, and reflects that the next ship may bring us word of a
new one. In short, “we are in utter darkness”. Meanwhile, what a rapture
is thought!
As the vast books appeared from the stately retreat at Welbeck the usual
censors made the usual objections, and had to be answered, despised, or
argued with, as her mood varied, in the preface to every work. They
said, among other things, that her books were not her own, because she
used learned terms, and “wrote of many matters outside her ken”. She
flew to her husband for help, and he answered, characteristically, that
the Duchess “had never conversed with any professed scholar in learning
except her brother and myself”. The Duke’s scholarship, moreover, was of
a peculiar nature. “I have lived in the great world a great while, and
have thought of what has been brought to me by the senses, more than was
put into me by learned discourse; for I do not love to be led by the
nose, by authority, and old authors; _ipse dixit_ will not serve my
turn.” And then she takes up the pen and proceeds, with the importunity
and indiscretion of a child, to assure the world that her ignorance is
of the finest quality imaginable. She has only seen Des Cartes and
Hobbes, not questioned them; she did indeed ask Mr. Hobbes to dinner,
but he could not come; she often does not listen to a word that is said
to her; she does not know any French, though she lived abroad for five