Read Ebook: The Sin and Danger of Self-Love Described by a Sermon Preached At Plymouth in New-England 1621 by Cushman Robert

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INTRODUCTION BY C.-A. SAINTE-BEUVE 1

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE 35

INDEX 323

From a photograph by Neurdin, Paris.

The Duc de Bourgogne carries a lance; the Duc d'Anjou holds a dog; the Duc de Berry is on his mother's lap; by Mignard ; in the Louvre.

Painter's name not obtained; probably Santerre; in the Royal palace at Turin; photographed by permission from the original for this edition.

Head of the portrait painted for Saint-Cyr by Mignard; now in the Louvre.

CORRESPONDENCE OF MADAME,

?LISABETH-CHARLOTTE, PRINCESS PALATINE, MOTHER OF THE REGENT.

INTRODUCTION BY C.-A. SAINTE-BEUVE.

"I am very frank and very natural, and I say all that I have in my heart." That is the motto that ought to be placed upon the correspondence of Madame, which was chiefly written in German and published from time to time in voluminous extracts at Strasburg and beyond the Rhine. This correspondence, translated by fragments, was made into a volume and called, very improperly, the "Memoirs of Madame." Coming after other memoirs of the celebrated women of the great century, it ran singularly counter to them in tone, and caused great surprise. Now that the Memoirs of Saint-Simon have been published in full, I will not say that the pages of the chronicle we owe to Madame have paled, but they have ceased to astonish. They are now recognized as good, na?ve pictures, somewhat forced in colour, rather coarse in feature, exaggerated and grimacing at times, but on the whole good likenesses. The right method for judging of Madame's correspondence, and thus of gaining insight to the history of that period, is to see how Madame wrote, and in what spirit; also what she herself was by nature and by education. For this purpose the letters published by M. Menzel in German, and translated by M. Brunet, are of great assistance to a knowledge of this singular and original personage; to understand her properly it is not too much to say that Germany and France must be combined.

In Germany, on the banks of the Neckar and the Rhine, ?lisabeth-Charlotte enjoyed the picturesque sites, her rambles through the forests, Nature left to herself, and also the spots of bourgeois plenty amid the wilder environment. "I love trees and fields more than the finest palaces; I like a kitchen garden better than a garden with statues and fountains; a brook pleases me a great deal more than sumptuous cascades; in a word, all that is natural is infinitely more to my taste than works of art or magnificence; the latter only please at first sight; as soon as one is accustomed to them they fatigue, and we care no more about them." In France she was particularly fond of residing at Saint-Cloud, where she enjoyed Nature with greater liberty. At Fontainebleau she often walked out on foot and went a league through the forest. On her arrival in France and first appearance at Court, she told her physician when presented to her that "she did not need him; she had never been bled or purged, and when she did not feel well she always walked six miles on foot, which cured her." Mme. de S?vign? who relates this, seems to conclude, with the majority of the Court, that the new Madame was overcome with her grandeur and spoke like a person who is not accustomed to such surroundings. Mme. de S?vign? is mistaken; Madame was in no degree overcome by her greatness. She felt herself born for the high rank of Monsieur's wife, and would have felt in her right place if higher still. But Mme. de S?vign? though she herself walked with pleasure in her woods at Livry and her park des Rochers, did not divine the proud young girl, so brusque and wild, who ate with delight her bit of bread and cherries plucked from the trees at five in the morning on the hills of Heidelberg.

Madame was, in truth, perfectly sincere in her conversion; nevertheless, she carried into it something of her freedom of mind and her independence of temper. "On my arrival in France," she says, "they made me hold conferences about religion with three bishops. All three differed in their beliefs; I took the quintessence of their opinions and formed my own." In this catholic religion, thus defined in the rough, which she believed and practised in perfect good faith, there remained traces and several of the habits of her early faith. She continued to read the Bible in German. She mentions that at that period in France scarcely any one, even among the devout, read Holy Scripture. The translations recently made of it had led to such discussions and bitter quarrels that the ecclesiastical authority intervened and forbade the reading of them; which has ever since remained a rarity in our country. Madame was therefore a notable exception when, in her plan of life, she gave a great and regular place to meditation on the Holy Book. She selected three days in the week for that salutary practice. "After my son's visit," she writes , "I sat down to table, and after dinner I took my Bible and read four chapters of the book of Job, four Psalms, and two chapters of Saint John, leaving the other two till this morning." And she might have written the same thing on each of her appointed days. On one occasion she was singing unconsciously the Calvinist psalms, or the Lutheran canticles , while walking alone in the Orangery at Versailles, when a painter who was at work on a scaffolding came down hurriedly and threw himself at her feet, saying with gratitude: "Is it possible, Madame, that you still remember our Psalms?" The painter was a reformer and afterwards a refugee; she relates the little story very touchingly.

"Madame," says Saint-Simon, "was a princess of the olden time; attached to honour, virtue, rank, grandeur, and inexorable as to their observances. She was not without intellect; and what she saw she saw very well. A good and faithful friend, trusty, true, and upright; easy to prejudice and shock; very difficult to bring back from prejudice; coarse, and dangerous in her public outbursts; very German in her habits; frank, indifferent to all propriety and all delicacy for herself and for others; sober, solitary, and full of notions. She loved dogs and horses, hunting and theatres passionately, and was never seen except in full dress or in a man's wig and riding-habit."

He concludes his portrait admirably in these words: "The figure and rusticity of a Swiss, but capable withal of a tender and inviolable friendship."

Introduced at Court by her aunt, the illustrious Princess Palatine, Anne of Gonzaga, in nothing was she in keeping with it,--neither in spirit, nor in the gifts of insinuation and conciliatory conduct, nor in caution. Succeeding the first Madame, she seemed even farther aloof from it, more completely a contrast in manners, in the quality and turn of her thoughts, in delicacy, in short, in everything. Madame, throughout her life, was, and must necessarily have been, the contrary of many things and many persons about her; she was original, at any rate, and in all ways Herself.

It seems an irony of fate that gave as second wife to Monsieur, that prince so weak and so effeminate, a woman who in tastes was far more like a man, and who always regretted she was not born a boy. Madame gayly relates how, in her youth, feeling her vocation as a cavalier very strongly, she was always expecting some miracle of Nature in her favour. With this idea she devoted herself as much as she could to all manly exercises and perilous leaping. She cared much more for swords and guns than for dolls. But above all she proves how little of a woman's nature was in her by the want of delicacy, or, to speak plainly, the lack of modesty in what she says. She is honesty itself, virtue, fidelity, honour; but also, at times, indecency and coarseness personified. She speaks of everything indiscriminately, like a man, is never disgusted by any language, and never goes by four roads when she has to express something which would be difficult and embarrassing to any one but herself. Contrary to the nature of women, she has no desire to please, and no coquetry. Being asked one day why she never glanced into a mirror in passing it, "Because," she replied, "I have too much self-love to like to see how ugly I am." The fine portrait by Rigaud gives us a perfect likeness of her in her old age, portly, fat, a double chin and red cheeks, with dignity of carriage nevertheless, and a proud bearing, but an expression of kindness in the eyes and smile. She herself was pleased at times to record her ugliness; one might even suppose that she valued it.

"It is no matter whether one is handsome or not; a fine face changes soon, but a good conscience is always good. You must remember very little of me if you do not rank me among the ugly ones; I have always been so, and I am more so now because of the small-pox. My waist is monstrous in size; I am as square as a cube; my skin is red, mottled with yellow; my hair is getting gray; my nose is honeycombed with the small-pox, and so are my cheeks; I have a large mouth and bad teeth; and there's the portrait of my pretty face."

And the difference between a temperate good man, and a belly-god is this: A good man will not eat his morsels alone, especially, if he have better than others, but if by God's providence, he have gotten some meat which is better than ordinary, and better than his other brethren, he can have no rest in himself, except he make others partake with him. But a belly-god will slop all in his own throat, yea, though his neighbor come in and behold him eat, yet his griple-gut shameth not to swallow all. And this may be done sometimes, as well in mean fare as in greater dainties, for all countries afford not alike.

And surely that which a man valueth much, he giveth much respect to, and so it is a sure sign that a man loves himself most when he giveth most to himself; and some intolerable proud persons even think all the world is for them, and all their purposes and endeavors shew what a large conceit they have of themselves.

But it is time to come to apply these things more particularly to ourselves, and see what Use is to be made of them:

Now, how much more ought we to bestir ourselves, for this matter of self love, since God himself hath cast all our waters, and felt all our pulses, and pronounceth us all dangerously sick of this disease? Believe it, God cannot lie, nor be deceived; He that made the heart, doth not he know it? Let every man's heart smite him, and let him fall to the examination of himself and see first, whether he love not riches and worldly wealth too much, whether his heart be not too jocund at the coming of it in, and too heavy at the going of it out, for if you find it so there is great danger, if thou canst not buy as if thou possessed not, and use this world as though thou used it not, thou art sick, and had need to look to it. So, if thou lovest thine ease and pleasure, see whether thou can be content to receive at God's hands evil as well as good, whether thou have learned as well to abound as to want, as well to endure hard labor, as to live at ease; and art as willing to go to the house of mourning as to the house of mirth, for, else, out of doubt, thou lovest thy carnal pleasure and ease too much.

Again, see whether thy heart cannot be as merry, and thy mind as joyful, and thy countenance as cheerful, with coarse fare, with pulse, with bread and water as if thou had the greatest dainties: So also whether thou can be content as well with scorns of men, when thou hast done well, as with their praises, so if thou can with comfort and good conscience say, I pass little for man's judgment; whether thou can do thy duty that God requireth, and despise the shame, referring thyself unto God, for if thou be disheartened, discouraged, and weakened in any duty because of men's dispraises, its a sign thou lovest thyself too much.

So for the will, if thou can be content to give way even from that which thou hast said shall be, yea, vowed shall be, when better reason cometh, and hast that reverence of other men, as that when it standeth but upon a matter of will, thou art as willing their wills should stand as thine, and art not sad, churlish, or discontented, but cheerful in thine heart, though thy will be crossed, it is a good sign, but if not, thou art sick of a self-will, and must purge it out. I the rather press these things, because I see many men both wise and religious, which yet are so tainted with this pestilent self-love, as that it is in them even as a dead fly to the apothecaries' ointment, spoiling the efficacy of all their graces, making their lives uncomfortable to themselves, and unprofitable to others, being neither fit for church nor commonwealth, but have even their very souls in hazard thereby, and therefore who can say too much against it.

But I have dwelt too long upon this first part; I come now to the second, which concerns an Exhortation, as I shewed you, in the Division.

The point of instruction is taken from the very letter and phrase, viz.

But besides these motives, there are other reasons to provoke us not only to do good one to another; but even to seek and search how to do it.

And let this be the first rule, which I will with two others conclude for this time.

First, this, indeed, is the common plea of such as will endure no inconveniences, and so for the hardness of men's hearts, God and man doth often give way to that which is not best, nor perpetual, but indeed if we take this course to change ordinances and practices because of inconveniences, we shall have every day new laws.

Secondly, if others be idle and thou diligent, thy fellowship, provocation, and example, may well help to cure that malady in them, being together, but being asunder, shall they not be more idle, and shall not gentry and beggary be quickly the glorious ensigns of your commonwealth?

Thirdly, construe things in the best part, be not too hasty to say, men are idle and slothful, all men have not strength, skill, faculty, spirit, and courage to work alike; it is thy glory and credit, that thou canst do so well, and his shame and reproach, that can do no better; and are not these sufficient rewards to you both.

And as you are a body together, so hang not together by skins and gymocks, but labor to be jointed together and knit by flesh and sinews; away with envy at the good of others, and rejoice in his good, and sorrow for his evil. Let his joy be thy joy, and his sorrow thy sorrow: Let his sickness be thy sickness: his hunger thy hunger: his poverty thy poverty; and if you profess friendship, be friends in adversity; for then a friend is known and tried, and not before.

AMEN.

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