Lady Morgan’s Memoirs
Sydney Owenson to Alicia Le Fanu?, 12 January 1803
January 12th, 1803.
“L’union de
l’esprit et du corps est en effet si forte qu’on a de
la peine a concevoir que l’on puisse agir sans que
l’autre se ressente plus aux mains de son
action” says Monsieur Tissot; and when you tell me you write under the
influence of five weeks’ disorder, and yet send me a letter full of wit,
sentiment, and imagination, I really know not whether to believe you or
Monsieur Tissot; he has proved the sympathy of the
soul and body in theory, but you practically prove there exists no inseparable
connexion between them, and that the debility of the frame has no influence
over the “strength of spirit.” The fact is, I am tempted to wonder
(like an old general on the eve of a great battle to a mili-![]()
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tary invalid), how you dare be sick? Had I your mind
and imagination I should set the whole College of Physicians at defiance. And,
as it is, though gifted with a very small portion of the vivida vis anima! (smile at my Latin), I
am pretty well enabled to keep the reins of health in my own hands. In the
first place I have got possession of the “citadel the
heart,” and command its pulsations,
fibres, nerves, &c., with the unlimited power of a field-marshal. Thus,
having subjugated my constitutional forces, I play them
off as I please. When my pulse grows languid, and the heaviness of approaching
sickness seizes on me, I immediately set fancy to work, seize the pen, and mock
the spirit of poetry; then the eye rolls, the pulses throb, the blood
circulates freely in every vein—my poem is finished—I am well. Or
should a fever seize my absorbing spirits—memory and hope thrill every
nerve—call up the forms of joys elapsed, or paint the welcome semblance
of joys anticipated; then the heart beats cheerily, and recruits every artery
with new tides of health. Well! Vive le
galimatias! for when it dies, my epistolary talent dies
with it, and common sense may sing a jubilate as a
requiem. Seriously though. Do you know I never was seriously ill. But the day I dined with you I was
struggling hard with a cold—an influenza—and you might have
perceived a fever burning in my cheek, that seized me beyond the power of fancy to dispel it on my return home. I must have
appeared, therefore, to you very different from the thing I
am,—“sober, demure, and steadfast.” I suppose I
looked the personification of ![]()
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authorship or jeune savante, when, had I been myself, I
should have romped with your boys, coquetted with your husband, and, probably,
procured my lettre de cachet from
yourself as a nuisance to all decorous society. Am I indeed of the age and mind
to admire the splendid rather than the awful virtues? I am, at all events, glad
to find you believe I do admire virtue of whatever
species or description, for I have been so long attempting to make the
“worse appear the better reason,” and pleading so
strenuously for the errors of superior talent, that I began to fear you put me
down as the decided apologist of the vices of genius;
but I know, had I taken up the right side of the question, there would have
been an end of the argument, and I should have lost some of the most delightful
passages in your delightful letters. However, the best reason I know of the great soul being more liable to err than the little one,
is that given by Mr. Addison.
“We may generally discover,” says he, “a pretty
nice proportion between the strength, and reason, and passion in the
greatest geniuses, they having the strongest affections; as on the other
hand, the weaker understandings have the weaker passions.” So
poor genius mounted on his high-mettled racer, with no
more power to check his pranks and curvettings, than is given to the
leaden-headed dulness to guide his sorry jade (who sets
off at a tangent), suffers thrice the concussion, if the zigzag caprices of his
courser do not even force him to lose his equilibrium.
I entirely agree with you that some
women, in attaining that intellectual acquisition which excite ad-![]()
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miration and even reverence, forfeit their (oh! how much
more valuable) claims on the affections of the heart,
the dearest, proudest immunity nature has endowed her
daughter with—the precious immunity which gives them empire over empire, and renders them sovereigns over the
world’s lords. I must tell you, my dear madam, I
am ambitious, far, far beyond the line of laudable emulations, perhaps beyond the power of being happy. Yet
the strongest point of my ambition is to be every inch a
woman. Delighted with the pages of La Voisine, I dropped the study of chemistry,
though urged to it by a favourite friend and preceptor, lest I should be less
the woman. Seduced by taste, and a thousand arguments,
to Greek and Latin, I resisted, lest I should not be a very
woman. And I have studied music rather as a sentiment than a science,
and drawing as an amusement rather than an art, lest I
should have become a musical pedant or a masculine artist. And let me assure you, that if I
admire you for any one thing more than another, it is that, with all your
talent and information you are “a woman still.” I have said thus
much to convince you that I agree, perfectly agree with
you, in all you have said on the subject, and that when Rousseau insists on le cosur aimant of Julie, he endows her with the best
and most endearing attribute woman can possess. Am I to thank you or your
Tom for the trouble he has had with
my commission? Castle Hyde I
am not a little anxious about, since I have taken the liberty of dedicating it
to you, as I dedicated Ned of the
Hills to Lady
Clonbrock—![]()
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the two friends whose tastes
I most admire and revere. It is but just Castle Hyde should be all your own, since your approbation
gave it a new value in my opinion, and tempted me to its publication. Have you,
indeed, read St.
Clair a third time? You have touched me where I am most
vulnerable. I cannot conceive how you can think my hero and heroine dangerous;
to have rendered them such I must have been myself not a little so; yet you
know long since I am the most harmless of all human beings. There is a young
man of some talent here, who has done a hundred profiles of me; one of them was
so strong a likeness, I am strongly tempted to enclose it you. L’amour propre aime les portraits. The vanity of
my intentions struck me so forcibly that I determined to expiate my crime by
confessing it to her against whom it was meditated, and
I sent the profile to a poor partial friend who will think more of it than the
original itself deserves; but friendship can be un
peu aveugle as well as love.
My sister begs leave to return her acknowledgements for
your polite inquiries, and the sympathy you expressed as to the nature of her
disorder. She is now perfectly recovered, and very busy tuning the pianoforte by my side.
My father is so proud of the recollections you sometimes
honour him with in your letters, that though they were not made, I should
invent them for the sake of affording him ideal satisfaction. If I had given
him leave, he would himself have assured you of his gratitude. S. O.
Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
English politician and man of letters, with his friend Richard Steele he edited
The Spectator (1711-12). He was the author of the tragedy
Cato (1713).
Thomas Philip Le Fanu (1784-1845)
The son of Joseph and Alicia Le Fanu; he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and was
Dean of Emly.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
Swiss-born man of letters; author of, among others,
Julie ou la
Nouvelle Heloïse (1761),
Émile (1762) and
Les Confessions (1782).
Pierre François Tissot (1768-1854)
French poet, man of letters, and liberal politician; he taught at the Collège de
France.
