MRS. AUGUSTUS CRAVEN.
IT is impossible to estimate how far the benign influence of a beautiful life may extend, and one of the chief claims to our respect for the Christian Church is its emphatic recognition of this human response to its dogmas. A noble life is a reflection of their light on the eddying streams of existence, and a visible embodiment of the ideals to which we cling, sometimes in spite of a superficial unbelief that they exist. Pauline Marie Armande de la Ferronnays performed a twofold work during her eighty-three years of life, which ended on Tuesday last at her apartment in Paris. She gave Western Europe the most finished picture it possesses of refined family and social manners. No doubt the " BAR d'une Scour" gains brilliancy and charm through the social position, the cultivation, and the polished amenity of those whose correspondence she. linked together with rare art. But the book is pre-eminently a story of the inner life, of joys and sorrows and faithful trust that are possible to us all, and lie too deep to be affected by superficial circumstances. Love in its higher aspects, human and divine, is the theme of the book. Fatherly and filial, betrothed and married love,—the love which "rose to the stars," as Dante's did when death had shown the way, the love of family and friends, those golden threads in the texture of human life which sign in it the name of God as in some Eastern embroidery,—distinguishes all Mrs. Craven's work, whether it be narrative or fiction. The story of her own family, built up on their journals and letters, will remain Mrs. Craven's best achievement, and no writer of this, perhaps of any century, has produced a fairer monument of such ex- quisite proportions, harmonious and tending to the furthest aims of art, than is the " Recit." Mrs. Craven was a great artist, and to those who knew her personally, it is a constant subject of regret that she too modestly concealed the large part she had in the presentation of those lives to whom she has given the immortality of literary beauty. English taste is slow to admire French ideals ; but the great nation on whose mantle shine such stars as Pascal and Fenelon, and innumerable lights less visible but as pure, is yet strong in piety and orderly Christian life. Mrs. Craven's per- sonality may well outweigh a dozen scandals of modern French literature, and the friends and comrades of her life held the standard of French manners well above that gutter of coarseness and irreligion about which we are too curious. The La Ferronnays family were but one of a group ; they certainly did not think themselves unusually good, and, in fact, did not encourage the publication of the " Welt." It was to obey the last wish of her Swedish sister-in-law, Alexandrine Alopeus, that Mrs. Craven printed, at first for private circulation, the story of her brother Albert's life and Alexandrine's con-
version. Like the Journal of Eugenie de Guerin, it was an unconscious revelation, a revelation that in its turn revealed how large was the number of those who could appreciate such books. On its publication in 1867, it was crowned by the Academy, and greeted by critics of every shade as a work of excellent beauty. It has passed its fortieth edition, and. the letters must be counted by hundreds which the author has received from grateful readers who have been helped by it to know that sorrow and death may be but other names for joy and triumph.
From her own pen we know little of Pauline de la Ferron- nays. Yet her life contained materials for romance that would make her memoirs as pathetic as any she has given us of others. Her father and mother, both of the best noblesse
- de l'epee, were never rich, and they suffered real poverty during the emigration. They were married at Klagenfurth in 1802, while with the army of the Prince de Conde. Of their ten children, four died in infancy. Pauline was born in 1808 at 36 Manchester Street, London, and her childish recol- lections were of privation, and the brave courage engendered in noble souls by misfortune. The Comte de la Ferronnays, as- the intimate friend of the Due de Berry, counted for much at the Tuileries after the Restoration. His wife was lady-in- waiting to the Duchess° de Berry, and her mother, the Marquise de Montsoreau, niece of that Duchesse de Tourzel who had shared the imprisonment of the Temple with Louis XVI. and his family, was in her turn named to be gonvernante of the Enfants de France. M. de la Ferronnays, too able to remain only a courtier, was appointed Ambassador to Russia in 1818. Violently phil-Hellene, he was the friend of Alexander and of Capo d'Istria, and in sympathy with the Due de Richelieu and Hyde de Neuville. He was, at the Con- gresses of Laibach and Verona, anti-Austrian and anti-English, but distinguished in all transactions by that fine sense of honour which refused the patronage of the power behind the throne, as represented by Madame du Cayla. Foreseeing the dangers of the Polignac ordonnances, and other follies of Charles X's rS' gime, he resigned his portfolio as Foreign Minister in 1829, and was appointed Ambassador at Rome, where the news. of the fall of his master in 1830 reached him, and made an end of his official career and its emoluments. Meantime, his daughter Pauline had gained much of that charming reasonableness which is, perhaps, best acquired in diplomatic life. During this period many of those friendships were formed which she never gave up. To have danced, as a child, with the late Lord Sydney at Moscow in 1817, and to have been among the visitors at Frognal not long before his death in 1890, gives some gauge of her experience of English society. Carlyle was able to tell her that there was "something in her very pleasing to" him; and Sir Walter Scott's mention of her in his Diary shows that he had been struck by her in her brilliant youth. With the Bourbon dynasty ended the worldly prosperity of her family ; but other distinctions besides wealth and position belonged to them.. Their history, from their political fall in 1830 to 1848, is given in. the " Welt " ; and we infer from it, notwithstanding her per- sonal reticence, how much valued both Pauline and her husband, were in the circle in which they moved. She married Mr. Augustus Craven in September, 1834. He had left the Army to. become a diplomatist and to indulge his tastes as a student. Ex- tremely good-looking, and fitted hardly less than his wife for- social success, he was said by Fanny Kemble to be the best amateur actor she had known. Son of Mr. Keppel Craven, who so long shielded George IV.'s unhappy wife from even worse, disaster than befell her, Augustus was the grandson of the- Margravine of Anspach, and in his childhood a pet at Branden- burg House. During the first thirty-six years of their married life, Mr. and Mrs. Craven were on a level of fortune with most of their acquaintances. They had the genius of hospitality, and wherever his diplomatic career led him— Lisbon, Carlsruhe, Brussels, or Naples—they formed a brilliant centre. Music, and the gift of voice to express it, were hereditary in the La Ferronays family, and Mrs. Craven loved and interpreted Shakespeare well, as did her husband, in their little theatre at Naples. In politics and religion, they were of that noble if over-sanguine party which counted Montalembert, Ozanam, Lacordaire, and Falloux among its leaders. They hoped that the "principles of '89 might be remodelled and sanctioned by the Church, and who shall say how much those sincere and brilliant men have done towards "baptising democracy " ? Mrs. Craven's conception
of the dignity of human personality, on the ground of its relation with God, was a high one. She ardently desired that liberty of the interior man" which defies all jailers of human souls, and she gave her enthusiasm to all noble assertions of freedom as she understood it,—even perhaps to Garibaldi for the moment when he offered hie conquest to Victor Emmanuel, but only for the moment. In England she had many friends. For some time Mr. Craven was on Lord Palmerston's personal staff, and he and his wife lived in Berkeley Square, a position he resigned to stand unsuccessfully for Dublin in 1852. Mrs. Craven's Reminiscences," published many years afterwards, reveal something of her social standing in London. But no one truly estimated her genius until the " Welt " was given to the public. One of her dearest English friends was Lady Georgiana Fullerton, whose Life is Mrs. Craven's latest publication, written with a sympathy and literary power extraordinary in an octogenarian. Mrs. Craven's first attempt at literature was her story, "Anne Severin," not published, however, until after the " Reeit." She underrated at all times her literary power, and we doubt if the series of volumes which in the past twenty years have amounted to a considerable literary equipment, would have seen the light had not the complete loss of their
.fortune befallen Mr. Craven and his wife in 1870. It was after this date, and when she was past sixty, that the true courage -of the woman shone with a light more brilliant than any in the " Welt." Noble by every title of refinement, endurance, and labour, as of birth, she faced her new circumstances boldly, and by her pen enabled her husband and herself to struggle through years when their only resource was the sale -of some personal treasures saved from the wreck of their fortune. Happily, they had never incurred debt, and what they had was their own. An annuity of some hundreds was -obtained from the Bavarian Exchequer, after two years of abso- lute uncertainty, by way of compromise for a dormant claim -a the Margravine of Anspaoh ; but self-denying prudence and hard work were the outlook of the Cravens for the rest of their lives. Mr. Craven's translation and excellent abridgment of the Prince Consort's Life was written under this pressure, and he was doubly helped by his wife, alike in the work itself and by her cheerfulness and courage at times when he suffered extreme depression. Few of her friends knew that her charm of manner, her dignity, her interest in literature and politics, concealed an aching heart and a sick ,sense of discouragement during that struggling old age. It was at the close of a specially brilliant season at Rome, when her . salon had been crowded with all the illustrious visitors of 1870, that a telegram suddenly announced their ruin. They went to La Cava, their beautiful villa on the Tyrrhene Sea, to break the last links with their past. " Fleurange," Mrs. Craven's most popular novel, was written within six months, while her heart was torn by the disasters of her country, as well as by what seemed to her her personal shipwreck. Those who knew this read " Fleurange" with a fresh sense of its true realism in the sphere of love and duty. They admired anew the sweet rendering of human life, the practical good sense which under- lies all its idealism and proves the harmony of beauty and good, when they entered into the writer's troubles. She knew, in her large experience, of many a thrilling episode that might have been used for sensational purposes ; but when the drift of her world was most adverse, she persevered in writing according to the highest standard of a refined and religious judgment.
It is always a question whether it is desirable to lay bare in :fiction the springs of devout life, the life with which, for all her social qualities, Mrs. Craven was most conversant. For the Christian hero as such, there can be no Nemesis. Fates and Furies have no more power over him than over Dante at the gates of Die. Nor was it in Mrs. Craven's nature or religious tendency to lead her readers to those gates. Neither could a talent which draws sections of human misery as an engineer might draw the section of a sewer where it is at its fullest, commend itself to the large optimism of Mrs. Craven, which could not exclude the Creator from his creation, She attempted, particularly in what we think her best novel, "Le Mot de ltnigme," as she wrote to a friend, to redeem the word 'Love' from the profanation which has made it almost unpronounceable in French, and to revive some sentiment of poetry in my dear but most prosaic Faubourg St. Germain, where next to Love," Piety is the most forbidden of all words, and is looked on as a dangerous ingredient in life, whereas it seems to me obvious that the present danger of even the beet French society lies in the opposite direction."
During the years of anxiety and hard work that followed the Franco-German War, Mrs. Craven frequently indulged what she called her malheureuse passion for England, which her husband fully shared. She knew, indeed, England at its best. Holland House was but one of the historical homes always open to her. Her description of Broadlands in her " Reminiscences " is one of her best sketches. In 1884, Mr. Craven was attacked by paralysis, and nothing in the "Reck " is more touching than his wife's report of his piety and resignation during his illness. He died at the house of Princess Wittgenstein, near Lausanne, who was one of their most faithful friends ; and afterwards Mrs. Craven returned to her life of loneliness in Paris. Death was in her thoughts, but a passage to fuller life through grief can never crush a character such as hers. She arranged her expenses so as to free her mind altogether from money anxieties, which bad a special horror for her; but writing had become a habit. To obey a wish of Mr. Craven's, she published her last novel, "Le Valbriant," which they had planned together, in 1885. Her last visit to England, in 1886, was to collect materials for her Life of Lady G. Fullerton. In that visit she was as delightful as ever to her many friends, freshening our memory of great men gone and of events during the last sixty years, in some of which she had played her part. Nor did her personality dwindle, up to the fatal illness which in June, 1890, paralysed her busy right hand and silenced her fine faculty of speech. Her sine% erect figure, her hair white of recent years, her large, pathetic eyes, the smile of good sense when new-fangled fantasies were broached, were in harmonious relief to her drawing-room and library in Paris, the windows of which looked on the spacious garden of a convent, beyond which the dome of the Invalides in the mist of setting sun- light almost reminded her of her beloved Rome. When she was eighty, she was still the life of a dinner-party of old friends given to celebrate her birthday. She still felt an enthusiasm which obliged her to write of Gordon and Damien, at the expense, alas ! of a work that would have been the com- plement of the " Weft," a memoir of her own life, to be entitled " Chemin Parcouru." Will some part of it at least be given to the world P Would that her Life could be written by hands as reverent and skilful as her own, and inspired as hers were by the genius of that spiritual portraiture which is the highest art !
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