LA MARQUISE DU DEFFAND.t To Mrs. Paget Toynbee lovers and
students of the eighteenth .century are indebted for her majestic edition of Horace Walpole's Letters in sixteen volumes, minutely annotated, with an exhaustive index, a revised text, surpassing Cunningham's 'collection by four hundred and seven letters, and containing -one hundred and eleven letters which had never been printed before. Her work has been done so thoroughly that no English classic has been edited better, and hardly any one so well. We hope that some day or other Walpole's seven volumes of Memoirs and his three volumes of Journals may be re-edited with equal competence and care ; so that our best witness for the society and politics of England in the -eighteenth century may become even more valuable, and be interpreted more sympathetically than be is at present.
Mrs. Toynbee has now doubled our obligations to herself by this monumental edition of Madame du Deffand's Letters to Horace Walpole. Alas! that it should be monumental in _another sense ; for the indefatigable editor who initiated the work, and had accomplished the greater part of it, has not lived to pat the final touches or to see it published. Its com- pletion is due to the pious care of her husband, to whom every _student of Dante must be grateful, and whose own editorial work is a guarantee that nothing is likely to be wanting in this edition which can be secured by labour, thoroughness, and skill. With a courage that was prompted by fine taste, and is justified by success, Mr. Toynbee has provided his long and valuable Introduction as well as all the notes in a French that is not unworthy of the classical text which they elucidate.
The story of the Deffand letters is like one of those romances of scholarship which were more common at the revival of learning than in our prosaic time. It shows that the age of discovery and surprises is not gone, and that even now we may -hope to recover lost classics. Madame du Deffand's letters to Walpole were preserved carefully by him, and were entrusted to Miss Berry. She published an edition in 1810, purporting to contain three hundred and forty-eight letters; but of these, as Mrs. Toynbee has demonstrated, only fifty-two were given
• Ann. iv. 13.
t "Aires de la Marquise du Deffand d Horace Walpole. Par Mrs. Paget 'Toynbee. vols. Londres : Methuen et Cie. [63s. net.] complete. Sainte-Beuve, in his Causerie of March 11th, 1850, begins by saying that latterly many French classics, and many writers not classical, have been reprinted; but not Madame du Deffand. The only editions of her then existing were two volumes of Correspondance, published in 1809, and repro- ductions from Miss Berry, published in 1811, 1812, and 1824, with some corrections, and, as he adds ominously, some suppressions. He laments the want of a fuller edition: " Car elle est an de nos classiques par in langue et par la pensee, et l'un des plus excellents." The omission was repaired in 1859 by the Marquis de Sainte-Aulaire, who published then two large volumes of the Deffand correspondence ; and he reprinted them, with some additions, in 1866 and 1877. The first of his editions contained five letters to Walpole, communicated to him by Miss Berry, and not included in her collection. The number of letters was thus brought up to three hundred and fifty-three. In his edition of 1866 the Marquis said he possessed the manuscripts of these five lettere, but that no more letters to Walpole could be expected. "Nous les tenons de Miss Berry elle-meme, l'editeur anglais de 1810, de qui nous aeons alors recu l'assurance que tout le reste avait ete detruit apres cette publication de 1810." This statement was fortunately untrue, but it was made undeniably in good faith. It was due apparently to some confusion between Walpole's letters to Madame du Deffand, which certainly were destroyed, and her letters to him, which were not, as Miss Berry testifies herself in her Journal. Writing on August 14th, 1810, the year of her publication, she says, " Received the two notes for a hundred pounds each for my book, from Longman." On the 16th she adds, "I worked bard at restoring all the Du Deffand papers into their original box, which is to be left here " (Strawberry Hill). There the Deffand manuscripts remained until the sale in 1842. The sale catalogue then carries their history a stage further. As this interesting Walpolean docu- ment is not commonly accessible, we think it is a pity that Mr. Toynbee did not favour his readers with more details from it. The catalogue tells us that the Deffand papers were among the contents of " the glass closet in the library," and they formed Lot 107 of the sixth day's sale; " They will be offered in one or thirteen lots, as may be determined upon at the time of sale." The " collection" contains " upwards of eight hundred letters by hereto Horace Walpole, of the greatest interest," "clothed in beautiful language," presenting a "true history of the time," " invaluable as a literary treasure." " The whole have been carefully preserved in the same state as they were left by Lord Orford, and are contained in a large cedarwood chest." Besides the letters, which were the eleventh item in the lot, there were many other interesting items, especially the fifth, "a small quarto volume bound in red morocco, with a silver lock." It contained Madame du Deffand's " beautiful portraits of the nobility and gentry of the Courts of France," and " in the fly-leaf will be found an account of her life, and a beautiful eulogium on her by her old and tried friend, Horace Walpole." Unfortunately, again, Mr. Toynbee does not tell us clearly about the fate of all these treasures other than the letters to Walpole. They were bought for £157 by Dye,e-Sombre. At his death, in 1851, they passed to his widow, by whom they were left to her nephew, Mr. Parker-Jervis. At his house in Staffordshire they were discovered accidentally by Mrs. Toynbee when she was preparing her great edition of Walpole's Letters. We are glad that her zeal and affection for Horace Walpole were rewarded by this magnificent discovery, but in the face of Miss Berry's Journal and of the Strawberry Hill sale catalogue it is almost inexplicable that Sainte- Aulaire's blunder about the destruction of these letters should have been left unchallenged for so many years. Between Sainte-Aulaire's editions of 1859 and 1866 there came in 1865 another collection in two large volumes edited by M. de Lescure. This professed to be the "correspondance complete" of Madame du Deffand with Henault, Montesquieu, d'Alembert, Voltaire, and Horace Walpole. As regards the latter, it was miserably incomplete, for the reasons we have explained; and it contains only seven hundred and two letters to all the correspondents, one hundred less than Mrs. Toynbee has now given us to Walpole alone. It is, however, a meritorious collection, and the preliminary account of Walpole and Madame du Deffand, extending to two hundred and forty pages, is remarkably sane, full, and animated. Mr. Toynbee has not spoken warmly enough of this most
interesting and valuable edition. There can be no doubt, un- fortunately, that Walpole's letters to Madame du Deffand were destroyed by his own peremptory order. They were, of course, written in French ; and he was nervous about their publication. Writing to Conway in 1774, he deprecates
their "very bad French," and his frank speaking about many English and Parisian celebrities. As to his French style, his fears were probably excessive ; for Madame do Deffand wrote to him, " J'aime aussi votre mauvais Francais qua le style de Voltaire." In another place she compares his letters to Madame de Sevigne's and Voltaire's; and again, "Il n'y que vows et lui [Voltaire] qui ne disent ni ecrivent rien d'inutile." She was no biassed or partial critic; and Sainte- Beuve says of her, truly, that she judged literature severely, and quite apart from any personal considerations. "Le trait distinctif de son esprit etait de saisir is verite, la realite des choses et des personnes sans illusion d'ancun genre." During fifteen years Walpole wrote at least one letter a week to Madame du Deffand, except when he was in Paris. His share of the correspondence would have amounted to about eight hundred letters, the number we have from her to Walpole ; and equal, we may remark, to the number written by him to Mann during a correspondence of more than forty years. Assuredly Walpole's share in this correspondence would not have been inferior in amusement and charm either to Madame do Deffand's or to his own English letters. This valuable commentary on English politics, literature, and society, made for a correspondent who was at the centre of Parisian life, and most of whose friends were known intimately to Walpole, would have been a priceless gift to posterity. However, it has perished. We can only deplore Walpole's too severe and timid judgment of himself. His instructions were an error of judgment. The nearest approach we have to Walpole's lost correspondence is a translation into French of his letters written during his journeys and visits abroad between 1739 and 1775, made by the Comte de Baillon, and published in 1871, with a very pleasing and sympathetic introduction. Of Walpole's part in the Deffand correspondence only a few scattered fragments have been rescued, and Mrs. Toynbee was able to secure one or two which had not been published before. Some of Walpole's letters in French, and especially his famous letter to Rousseau, are quite equal to his happiest English style, and are worthy of Madame du Deffand's high praise; but, ou the other hand, we must confess that some of his letters to French correspondents in Mrs. Toynbee's edition are very much below those standards.
It has seemed to us that the mystery of a lost classic, the romance of its discovery, and some account of the magnificent edition in which it is now enshrined, were deserving of all the space we have given to them ; and so we can say very little about Madame du Deffand herself, but little or nothing should be required in the case of so universal and established a reputation.
Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise du Deffand, was a woman of aristocratic family, of distinguished and fascinating manners, and of remarkable beauty. Few people of either sex have been endowed with a keener intellect or with clearer powers of reasoning. She has been described with sober truth as a female Voltaire and as another Madame de Sevigne, both of whom, we think, she surpassed in some of her qualities. A comparison with the former would be happier if she were defined as a more masculine Voltaire, or a Talleyrand incapable of pettiness ; and her differentiation from Madame de Sevigno might be explained best by saying it resembles the difference in tone and style between Loisy and Henan. In Madame du Deffand the dry light of reason prevailed over all other qualities, and no human brain was ever clearer and more penetrating. To all these gifts were added a brilliant and ironic wit with a genius for conversation and letter-writing which has not been excelled even by any of her compatriots. Her long life, from 1697 to 1780, practically covers the eighteenth century, and she is the very embodiment of it at its best ; in its wit and gaiety, its high breeding, its fine and sturdy rationalism, and its sovereign common sense. She detested the acrimonious conceit of the Philosophes as much as she despised the silli- ness of clerical bigots. Her sympathies were entirely with the methods and thought of Voltaire ; she abominated Rousseau and all his ways. For his maudlin and dangerous sentimentality, which was responsible for so many of the revolutionary horrors, and still is for innumerable modern follies, she had no patience. Never was she deceived by any sort of cant, nor deluded by any mysticism. Therefore she may be recommended to the present age as a corrective to many of its fallacious and sentimental theories, and as one of the most admirable guides in literary and intellectual concerns.
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