churches to women exhorters; Garrison denounced the attack on the Grimké sisters and Whittier ridiculed it in his poem “The Pastoral Letter.” Angelina pointedly answered Miss Beecher on the Slave Question (1837) in letters in the Liberator. Sarah, who had never forgotten that her studies had been curtailed because she was a girl, contributed to the Boston Spectator papers on “The Province of Woman” and published Letters on the Condition of Women and the Equality of the Sexes (1838)—the real beginning of the “woman’s rights” movement in America, and at the time a cause of anxiety to Whittier and others, who urged upon the sisters the prior importance of the anti-slavery cause. In 1838 Angelina married Theodore Dwight Weld (1803–1895), a reformer and abolition orator and pamphleteer, who had taken part in the famous Lane Seminary debates in 1834, had left the Seminary for the lecture platform when the anti-slavery society was broken up by the Lane trustees, but had lost his voice in 1836 and had become editor of the publications of the American Anti-Slavery Society.[1] They lived, with Sarah, at Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1838–1840, then on a farm at Belleville, New Jersey, and then conducted a school for black and white alike at Eagleswood, near Perth Amboy, New Jersey, from 1854 to 1864. Removing to Hyde Park, Massachusetts, the three were employed in Dr Lewis’s school. There Sarah died on the 23rd of December 1873, and Angelina on the 26th of October 1879. Both sisters indulged in various “fads”—Graham’s diet, bloomer-wearing, absolute non-resistance. Angelina did no public speaking after her marriage, save at Pennsylvania Hall (Philadelphia), destroyed by a mob immediately after her address there; but besides her domestic and school duties she was full of tender charity. Sarah at the age of 62 was still eager to study law or medicine, or to do something to aid her sex; at 75 she translated and abridged Lamartine’s life of Joan of Arc.
See Catherine H. Birney, The Grimké Sisters (Boston, 1885).
GRIMM, FRIEDRICH MELCHIOR, Baron von (1723–1807),
French author, the son of a German pastor, was born at Ratisbon
on the 26th of December 1723. He studied at the University
of Leipzig, where he came under the influence of Gottsched and
of J. A. Ernesti, to whom he was largely indebted for his critical
appreciation of classical literature. When nineteen he produced
a tragedy, Banise, which met with some success. After two years
of study he returned to Ratisbon, where he was attached to the
household of Count Schönberg. In 1748 he accompanied August
Heinrich, Count Friesen, to Paris as secretary, and he is said
by Rousseau to have acted for some time as reader to Frederick,
the young hereditary prince of Saxe-Gotha. His acquaintance
with Rousseau, through a mutual sympathy in regard to musical
matters, soon ripened into intimate friendship, and led to a close
association with the encyclopaedists. He rapidly obtained a
thorough knowledge of the French language, and acquired so
perfectly the tone and sentiments of the society in which he
moved that all marks of his foreign origin and training seemed
effaced. A witty pamphlet entitled Le Petit Prophète de Boehmischbroda
(1753), written by him in defence of Italian as against
French opera, established his literary reputation. It is possible
that the origin of the pamphlet is partly to be accounted for by
his vehement passion[2] for Mlle Fel, the prima donna of the
Italian company. In 1753 Grimm, following the example of the
abbé Raynal, began a literary correspondence with various
German sovereigns. Raynal’s letters, Nouvelles littéraires, ceased
early in 1755. With the aid of friends, especially of Diderot
and Mme d’Épinay, during his temporary absences from France,
Grimm himself carried on the correspondence, which consisted
of two letters a month, until 1773, and eventually counted among
his subscribers Catherine II. of Russia, Stanislas Poniatowski,
king of Poland, and many princes of the smaller German States.
It was probably in 1754 that Grimm was introduced by Rousseau
to Madame d’Épinay, with whom he soon formed a liaison
which led to an irreconcilable rupture between him and Rousseau.
Rousseau was induced by his resentment to give in his Confessions
a wholly mendacious portrait of Grimm’s character. In 1755,
after the death of Count Friesen, who was a nephew of Marshal
Saxe and an officer in the French army, Grimm became secrétaire
des commandements to the duke of Orleans, and in this capacity
he accompanied Marshal d’Estrées on the campaign of Westphalia
in 1756–57. He was named envoy of the town of Frankfort
at the court of France in 1759, but was deprived of his office for
criticizing the comte de Broglie in a despatch intercepted by
Louis XV. He was made a baron of the Holy Roman Empire
in 1775. His introduction to Catherine II. of Russia took place
at St Petersburg in 1773, when he was in the suite of Wilhelmine
of Hesse-Darmstadt on the occasion of her marriage to the
czarevitch Paul. He became minister of Saxe-Gotha at the
court of France in 1776, but in 1777 he again left Paris on a visit
to St Petersburg, where he remained for nearly a year in daily
intercourse with Catherine. He acted as Paris agent for the
empress in the purchase of works of art, and executed many
confidential commissions for her. In 1783 and the following
years he lost his two most intimate friends, Mme d’Épinay and
Diderot. In 1792 he emigrated, and in the next year settled
in Gotha, where his poverty was relieved by Catherine, who in
1796 appointed him minister of Russia at Hamburg. On the
death of the empress Catherine he took refuge with Mme
d’Épinay’s granddaughter, Émilie de Belsunce, comtesse de
Bueil. Grimm had always interested himself in her, and had
procured her dowry from the empress Catherine. She now
received him with the utmost kindness. He died at Gotha on
the 19th of December 1807.
The correspondence of Grimm was strictly confidential, and was not divulged during his lifetime. It embraces nearly the whole period from 1750 to 1790, but the later volumes, 1773 to 1790, were chiefly the work of his secretary, Jakob Heinrich Meister. At first he contented himself with enumerating the chief current views in literature and art and indicating very slightly the contents of the principal new books, but gradually his criticisms became more extended and trenchant, and he touched on nearly every subject—political, literary, artistic, social and religious—which interested the Parisian society of the time. His notices of contemporaries are somewhat severe, and he exhibits the foibles and selfishness of the society in which he moved; but he was unbiassed in his literary judgments, and time has only served to confirm his criticisms. In style and manner of expression he is thoroughly French. He is generally somewhat cold in his appreciation, but his literary taste is delicate and subtle; and it was the opinion of Sainte-Beuve that the quality of his thought in his best moments will compare not unfavourably even with that of Voltaire. His religious and philosophical opinions were entirely negative.
Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique . . ., depuis 1753 jusqu’en 1769, was edited, with many excisions, by J. B. A. Suard and published at Paris in 1812, in 6 vols. 8vo; deuxième partie, de 1771 à 1782, in 1812 in 5 vols. 8vo; and troisième partie, pendant une partie des années 1775 et 1776, et pendant les années 1782 à 1790 inclusivement, in 1813 in 5 vols. 8vo. A supplementary volume appeared in 1814; the whole correspondence was collected and published by M. Jules Taschereau, with the assistance of A. Chaudé, in a Nouvelle Edition, revue et mise dans un meilleur ordre, avec des notes et des éclaircissements, et où se trouvent rétablies pour la première fois les phrases supprimées par la censure impériale (Paris, 1829, 15 vols. 8vo); and the Correspondance inédite, et recueil de lettres, poésies, morceaux, et fragments retranchés par la censure impériale en 1812 et 1813 was published in 1829. The standard edition is that of M. Tourneux (16 vols., 1877–1882). Grimm’s Mémoire historique sur l’origine et les suites de mon attachement pour l’impératrice Catherine II jusqu’au décès de sa majesté impériale, and Catherine’s correspondence with Grimm (1774–1796) were published by J. Grot in 1880, in the Collection of the Russian Imperial Historical Society. She treats him very familiarly, and calls him Héraclite, Georges Dandin, &c. At the time of the Revolution she begged him to destroy her letters, but he refused, and after his death they were returned to St Petersburg. Grimm’s side of the correspondence, however, is only partially preserved. He signs himself
- ↑ Weld was the author of several anti-slavery books which had considerable influence at the time. Among them are The Bible against Slavery (1837), American Slavery as It Is (1839), a collection of extracts from Southern papers, and Slavery and the Internal Slave Trade in the U.S. (1841).
- ↑ Rousseau’s account of this affair (Confessions, 2nd part, 8th book) must be received with caution.
