Letters from Egypt

Letters from Egypt, by Lucie
Duff Gordon,

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Gordon, Edited by Janet Ross
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Title: Letters from Egypt
Author: Lucie Duff Gordon
Editor: Janet Ross
Release Date: February 21, 2006 [eBook #17816]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTERS
FROM EGYPT***

Transcribed from the 1902 R. Brimley Johnson edition by David Price,
email [email protected]

Lady Duff Gordon's Letters from Egypt
Revised Edition with Memoir by Her Daughter Janet Ross
New Introduction by George Meredith
SECOND IMPRESSION
LONDON: R. BRIMLEY JOHNSON 1902
[Photograph of Lady Duff Gordon from sketch by G. F. Watts, R.A.,
about 1848: ill1.jpg]

INTRODUCTION
The letters of Lady Duff Gordon are an introduction to her in person.
She wrote as she talked, and that is not always the note of private
correspondence, the pen being such an official instrument. Readers
growing familiar with her voice will soon have assurance that,
addressing the public, she would not have blotted a passage or affected
a tone for the applause of all Europe. Yet she could own to a liking for
flattery, and say of the consequent vanity, that an insensibility to it is
inhuman. Her humour was a mouthpiece of nature. She inherited from
her father the judicial mind, and her fine conscience brought it to bear
on herself as well as on the world, so that she would ask, 'Are we so
much better?' when someone supremely erratic was dangled before the
popular eye. She had not studied her Goethe to no purpose. Nor did the
very ridiculous creature who is commonly the outcast of all compassion
miss having the tolerant word from her, however much she might be of
necessity in the laugh, for Moliere also was of her repertory. Hers was
the charity which is perceptive and embracing: we may feel certain that
she was never a dupe of the poor souls, Christian and Muslim, whose
tales of simple misery or injustice moved her to friendly service.
Egyptians, consule Junio, would have met the human interpreter in her,
for a picture to set beside that of the vexed Satirist. She saw clearly into

the later Nile products, though her view of them was affectionate; but
had they been exponents of original sin, her charitableness would have
found the philosophical word on their behalf, for the reason that they
were not in the place of vantage. The service she did to them was a
greater service done to her country, by giving these quivering creatures
of the baked land proof that a Christian Englishwoman could be
companionable, tender, beneficently motherly with them, despite the
reputed insurmountable barriers of alien race and religion. Sympathy
was quick in her breast for all the diverse victims of mischance; a shade
of it, that was not indulgence, but knowledge of the roots of evil, for
malefactors and for the fool. Against the cruelty of despotic rulers and
the harshness of society she was openly at war, at a time when
championship of the lowly or the fallen was not common. Still, in this,
as in everything controversial, it was the [Greek text] with her. That
singular union of the balanced intellect with the lively heart arrested
even in advocacy the floods pressing for pathos. Her aim was at
practical measures of help; she doubted the uses of sentimentality in
moving tyrants or multitudes to do the thing needed. Moreover, she
distrusted eloquence, Parliamentary, forensic, literary; thinking that the
plain facts are the persuasive speakers in a good cause, and that rhetoric
is to be suspected as the flourish over a weak one. Does it soften the
obdurate, kindle the tardily inflammable? Only for a day, and only in
cases of extreme urgency, is an appeal to emotion of value for the gain
of a day. Thus it was that she never forced her voice, though her
feelings might be at heat and she possessed the literary art.
She writes from her home on the Upper Nile: 'In this country one gets
to see how much more beautiful a perfectly natural expression is than
any degree of the mystical expression of the best painters.' It is by her
banishing of literary colouring matter that she brings the Arab and Copt
home to us as none other has done, by her unlaboured pleading that she
touches to the heart. She was not one to 'spread gold-leaf over her
acquaintances and make them shine,' as Horace Walpole says of
Madame de Sevigne; they