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Other documents randomly have
different content
who appears to have ventured upon a hope that they were having a
mild winter in Kent.
“I am obliged to your Grace for your good wishes of fair weather;
sunshine gilds every object, but, alas! December is but cloudy
weather, how few seasons boast many days of calm! April, which is
the blooming youth of the year, is as famous for hasty showers as for
gentle sunshine. May, June, and July have too much heat and
violence, the Autumn withers the Summer’s gayety, and in the Winter
the hopeful blossoms of Spring and fair fruits of Summer are
decayed, and storms and clouds arise.”
After these obvious truths, for which the almanac stands responsible,
Miss Robinson proceeds to compare human life to the changing
year, winding up at the close of a dozen pages: “Happy and worthy
are those few whose youth is not impetuous, nor their age sullen;
they indeed should be esteemed, and their happy influence courted.”
Twenty-one, and ripe for moral platitudes! What wonder that we find
the same lady, when crowned with years and honours, writing to the
son of her friend, Lord Lyttelton, a remorselessly long letter of
precept and good counsel, which that young gentleman (being
afterwards known as the wicked Lord Lyttelton) seems never to have
taken to heart.
“The morning of life, like the morning of the day, should be dedicated
to business. Give it therefore, dear Mr. Lyttelton, to strenuous
exertion and labour of mind, before the indolence of the meridian
hour, or the unabated fervour of the exhausted day, renders you unfit
for severe application.”
“Unabated fervour of the exhausted day” is a phrase to be
commended. We remember with awe that Mrs. Montagu was the
brightest star in the chaste firmament of female intellect;—“the first
woman for literary knowledge in England,” wrote Mrs. Thrale; “and, if
in England, I hope I may say in the world.” We hope so, indeed.
None but a libertine would doubt it. And no one less contumelious
than Dr. Johnson ever questioned Mrs. Montagu’s supremacy. She
was, according to her great-grandniece, Miss Climenson, “adored by
men,” while “purest of the pure”; which was equally pleasant for
herself and for Mr. Montagu. She wrote more letters, with fewer
punctuation marks, than any Englishwoman of her day; and her
nephew, the fourth Baron Rokeby, nearly blinded himself in
deciphering the two volumes of undated correspondence which were
printed in 1810. Two more followed in 1813, after which the gallant
Baron either died at his post or was smitten with despair; for sixty-
eight cases of letters lay undisturbed for the best part of a century,
when they passed into Miss Climenson’s hands. This intrepid lady
received them—so she says—with “unbounded joy”; and has already
published two fat volumes, with the promise of several others in the
near future. “Les morts n’écrivent point,” said Madame de Maintenon
hopefully; but of what benefit is this inactivity, when we still continue
to receive their letters?
Miss Elizabeth Carter, called by courtesy Mrs. Carter, was the most
vigorous of Mrs. Montagu’s correspondents. Although a lady of
learning, who read Greek and had dipped into Hebrew, she was far
too “humble and unambitious” to claim an acquaintance with the
exalted mistress of Montagu House; but that patroness of literature
treated her with such true condescension that they were soon on the
happiest terms. When Mrs. Montagu writes to Miss Carter that she
has seen the splendid coronation of George III, Miss Carter hastens
to remind her that such splendour is for majesty alone.
“High rank and power require every external aid of pomp and éclat
that may awe and astonish spectators by the ideas of the
magnificent and sublime; while the ornaments of more equal
conditions should be adapted to the quiet tenour of general life, and
be content to charm and engage by the gentler graces of the
beautiful and pleasing.”
Mrs. Montagu was fond of display. All her friends admitted, and
some deplored the fact. But surely there was no likelihood of her
appropriating the coronation services as a feature for the
entertainments at Portman Square.
Advice, however, was the order of the day. As the excellent Mrs.
Chapone wrote to Sir William Pepys: “It is a dangerous commerce
for friends to praise each other’s Virtues, instead of reminding each
other of duties and of failings.” Yet a too robust candour carried
perils of its own, for Miss Seward having written to her “beloved
Sophia Weston” with “an ingenuousness which I thought necessary
for her welfare, but which her high spirits would not brook,” Sophia
was so unaffectedly angry that twelve years of soothing silence
followed.
Another wonderful thing about the letter-writers, especially the
female letter-writers, of this engaging period is the wealth of
hyperbole in which they rioted. Nothing is told in plain terms. Tropes,
metaphors, and similes adorn every page; and the supreme
elegance of the language is rivalled only by the elusiveness of the
idea, which is lost in an eddy of words. Marriage is always alluded to
as the “hymeneal torch,” or the “hymeneal chain,” or “hymeneal
emancipation from parental care.” Birds are “feathered muses,” and
a heart is a “vital urn.” When Mrs. Montagu writes to Mr. Gilbert
West, that “miracle of the Moral World,” to condole with him on his
gout, she laments that his “writing hand, first dedicated to the Muses,
then with maturer judgment consecrated to the Nymphs of Solyma,
should be led captive by the cruel foe.” If Mr. West chanced not to
know who or what the Nymphs of Solyma were, he had the
intelligent pleasure of finding out. Miss Seward describes Mrs.
Tighe’s sprightly charms as “Aonian inspiration added to the cestus
of Venus”; and speaks of the elderly “ladies of Llangollen” as, “in all
but the voluptuous sense, Armidas of its bowers.” Duelling is to her
“the murderous punctilio of Luciferian honour.” A Scotch gentleman
who writes verse is “a Cambrian Orpheus”; a Lichfield gentleman
who sketches is “our Lichfield Claude”; and a budding clerical writer
is “our young sacerdotal Marcellus.” When the “Swan” wished to
apprise Scott of Dr. Darwin’s death, it never occurred to her to write,
as we in this dull age should do: “Dr. Darwin died last night,” or,
“Poor Dr. Darwin died last night.” She wrote: “A bright luminary in this
neighbourhood recently shot from his sphere with awful and
deplorable suddenness”;—thus pricking Sir Walter’s imagination to
the wonder point before descending to facts. Even the rain and snow
were never spoken of in the plain language of the Weather Bureau;
and the elements had a set of allegories all their own. Miss Carter
would have scorned to take a walk by the sea. She “chased the
ebbing Neptune.” Mrs. Chapone was not blown by the wind. She
was “buffeted by Eolus and his sons.” Miss Seward does not hope
that Mr. Whalley’s rheumatism is better; but that he has overcome
“the malinfluence of marine damps, and the monotonous murmuring
of boundless waters.” Perhaps the most triumphant instance on
record of sustained metaphor is Madame d’Arblay’s account of Mrs.
Montagu’s yearly dinner to the London chimney-sweeps, in which
the word sweep is never once used, so that the editor was actually
compelled to add a footnote to explain what the lady meant. The
boys are “jetty objects,” “degraded outcasts from society,” and “sooty
little agents of our most blessed luxury.” They are “hapless artificers
who perform the most abject offices of any authorized calling”; they
are “active guardians of our blazing hearth”; but plain chimney-
sweeps, never! Madame d’Arblay would have perished at the stake
before using so vulgar and obvious a term.
How was this mass of correspondence preserved? How did it
happen that the letters were never torn up, or made into spills,—the
common fate of all such missives when I was a little girl. Granted
that Miss Carter treasured Mrs. Montagu’s letters (she declared
fervidly she could never be so barbarous as to destroy one), and that
Mrs. Montagu treasured Miss Carter’s. Granted that Miss Weston
treasured Mr. Whalley’s, and that Mr. Whalley treasured Miss
Weston’s. Granted that Miss Seward provided against all
contingencies by copying her own letters into fat blank books before
they were mailed, elaborating her spineless sentences, and omitting
everything she deemed too trivial or too domestic for the public ear.
But is it likely that young Lyttelton at Oxford laid sacredly away Mrs.
Montagu’s pages of good counsel, or that young Franks at
Cambridge preserved the ponderous dissertations of Sir William
Pepys? Sir William was a Baronet, a Master in Chancery, and—
unlike his famous ancestor—a most respectable and exemplary
gentleman. His innocent ambition was to be on terms of intimacy
with the literary lights of his day. He knew and ardently admired Dr.
Johnson, who in return detested him cordially. He knew and revered,
“in unison with the rest of the world,” Miss Hannah More. He
corresponded at great length with lesser lights,—with Mrs. Chapone,
and Mrs. Hartley, and Sir Nathaniel Wraxall. He wrote endless
commentaries on Homer and Virgil to young Franks, and reams of
good advice to his little son at Eton. There is something pathetic in
his regret that the limitations of life will not permit him to be as
verbose as he would like. “I could write for an hour,” he assures poor
Franks, “upon that most delightful of all passages, the Lion deprived
of its Young; but the few minutes one can catch amidst the Noise,
hurry and confusion of an Assize town will not admit of any Classical
discussions. But was I in the calm retirement of your Study at Acton,
I have much to say to you, to which I can only allude.”
The publication of scores and scores of such letters, all written to
one unresponsive young man at Cambridge (who is repeatedly
reproached for not answering them), makes us wonder afresh who
kept the correspondence; and the problem is deepened by the
appearance of Sir William’s letters to his son. This is the way the first
one begins:—
“My dear Boy,—I cannot let a Post escape me without
giving you the Pleasure of knowing how much you have
gladdened the Hearts of two as affectionate Parents as
ever lived; when you tell us that the Principles of Religion
begin already to exert their efficacy in making you look
down with contempt on the wretched grovelling Vices with
which you are surrounded, you make the most delightful
Return you can ever make for our Parental Care and
Affection; you make Us at Peace with Ourselves; and
enable us to hope that our dear Boy will Persevere in that
Path which will ensure the greatest Share of Comfort here,
and a certainty of everlasting Happiness hereafter.”
I am disposed to think that Sir William made a fair copy of this letter
and of others like it, and laid them aside as models of parental
exhortation. Whether young Pepys was a little prig, or a particularly
accomplished little scamp (and both possibilities are open to
consideration), it seems equally unlikely that an Eton boy’s desk
would have proved a safe repository for such ample and admirable
discourses.
The publication of Cowper’s letters in 1803 and 1804 struck a chill
into the hearts of accomplished and erudite correspondents. Poor
Miss Seward never rallied from the shock of their “commonness,”
and of their popularity. Here was a man who wrote about beggars
and postmen, about cats and kittens, about buttered toast and the
kitchen table. Here was a man who actually looked at things before
he described them (which was a startling innovation); who called the
wind the wind, and buttercups buttercups, and a hedgehog a
hedgehog. Miss Seward honestly despised Cowper’s letters. She
said they were without “imagination or eloquence,” without
“discriminative criticism,” without “characteristic investigation.”
Investigating the relations between the family cat and an intrusive
viper was, from her point of view, unworthy the dignity of an author.
Cowper’s love of detail, his terrestrial turn of mind, his humour, and
his veracity were disconcerting in an artificial age. When Miss Carter
took a country walk, she did not stoop to observe the trivial things
she saw. Apparently she never saw anything. What she described
were the sentiments and emotions awakened in her by a featureless
principle called Nature. Even the ocean—which is too big to be
overlooked—started her on a train of moral reflections, in which she
passed easily from the grandeur of the elements to the brevity of life,
and the paltriness of earthly ambitions. “How vast are the capacities
of the soul, and how little and contemptible its aims and pursuits.”
With this original remark, the editor of the letters (a nephew and a
clergyman) was so delighted that he added a pious comment of his
own.
“If such be the case, how strong and conclusive is the argument
deduced from it, that the soul must be destined to another state
more suitable to its views and powers. It is much to be lamented that
Mrs. Carter did not pursue this line of thought any further.”
People who bought nine volumes of a correspondence like this were
expected, as the editor warns them, to derive from it “moral, literary,
and religious improvement.” It was in every way worthy of a lady who
had translated Epictetus, and who had the “great” Mrs. Montagu for
a friend. But, as Miss Seward pathetically remarked, “any well-
educated person, with talents not above the common level, produces
every day letters as well worth attention as most of Cowper’s,
especially as to diction.” The perverseness of the public in buying, in
reading, in praising these letters, filled her with pained bewilderment.
Not even the writer’s sincere and sad piety, his tendency to moralize,
and the transparent innocence of his life could reconcile her to plain
transcripts from nature, or to such an unaffecting incident as this:—
“A neighbour of mine in Silver End keeps an ass; the ass lives on the
other side of the garden wall, and I am writing in the greenhouse. It
happens that he is this morning most musically disposed; either
cheered by the fine weather, or by some new tune which he has just
acquired, or by finding his voice more harmonious than usual. It
would be cruel to mortify so fine a singer, therefore I do not tell him
that he interrupts and hinders me; but I venture to tell you so, and to
plead his performance in excuse of my abrupt conclusion.”
Here is not only the “common” diction which Miss Seward
condemned, but a very common casualty, which she would have
naturally deemed beneath notice. Cowper wrote a great deal about
animals, and always with fine and humorous appreciation. He sought
relief from the hidden torment of his soul in the contemplation of
creatures who fill their place in life without morals, and without
misgivings. We know what safe companions they were for him when
we read his account of his hares, of his kitten dancing on her hind
legs,—“an exercise which she performs with all the grace
imaginable,”—and of his goldfinches amorously kissing each other
between the cage wires. When Miss Seward bent her mind to “the
lower orders of creation,” she did not describe them at all; she gave
them the benefit of that “discriminative criticism” which she felt that
Cowper lacked. Here, for example, is her thoughtful analysis of
man’s loyal servitor, the dog:—
“That a dog is a noble, grateful, faithful animal we must all be
conscious, and deserves a portion of man’s tenderness and care;—
yet, from its utter incapacity of more than glimpses of rationality,
there is a degree of insanity, as well as of impoliteness to his
acquaintance, and of unkindness to his friends, in lavishing so much
more of his attention in the first instance, and of affection in the latter,
upon it than upon them.”
It sounds like a parody on a great living master of complex prose. By
its side, Cowper’s description of Beau is certainly open to the
reproach of plainness.
“My dog is a spaniel. Till Miss Gunning begged him, he was the
property of a farmer, and had been accustomed to lie in the chimney
corner among the embers till the hair was singed from his back, and
nothing was left of his tail but the gristle. Allowing for these
disadvantages, he is really handsome; and when nature shall have
furnished him with a new coat, a gift which, in consideration of the
ragged condition of his old one, it is hoped she will not long delay, he
will then be unrivalled in personal endowments by any dog in this
country.”
No wonder the Lichfield Swan was daunted by the inconceivable
popularity of such letters. No wonder Miss Hannah More preferred
Akenside to Cowper. What had these eloquent ladies to do with quiet
observation, with sober felicity of phrase, with “the style of honest
men”!
 THE NOVELIST
Soft Sensibility, sweet Beauty’s soul!
Keeps her coy state, and animates the whole.

Hayley.

Readers of Miss Burney’s Diary will remember her maidenly

confusion when Colonel Fairly (the Honourable Stephen Digby)
recommends to her a novel called “Original Love-Letters between a
Lady of Quality and a Person of Inferior Station.” The authoress of
“Evelina” and “Cecilia”—then thirty-six years of age—is embarrassed
by the glaring impropriety of this title. In vain Colonel Fairly assures
her that the book contains “nothing but good sense, moral
reflections, and refined ideas, clothed in the most expressive and
elegant language.” Fanny, though longing to read a work of such
estimable character, cannot consent to borrow, or even discuss,
anything so compromising as love-letters; and, with her customary
coyness, murmurs a few words of denial. Colonel Fairly, however, is
not easily daunted. Three days later he actually brings the volume to
that virginal bower, and asks permission to read portions of it aloud,
excusing his audacity with the solemn assurance that there was no
person, not even his own daughter, in whose hands he would
hesitate to place it. “It was now impossible to avoid saying that I
should like to hear it,” confesses Miss Burney. “I should seem else to
doubt either his taste or his delicacy, while I have the highest opinion
of both.” So the book is produced, and the fair listener, bending over
her needlework to hide her blushes, acknowledges it to be “moral,
elegant, feeling, and rational,” while lamenting that the unhappy
nature of its title makes its presence a source of embarrassment.
This edifying little anecdote sheds light upon a palmy period of
propriety. Miss Burney’s self-consciousness, her superhuman
diffidence, and the “delicious confusion” which overwhelmed her
upon the most insignificant occasions, were beacon lights to her
“sisters of Parnassus,” to the less distinguished women who followed
her brilliant lead. The passion for novel-reading was asserting itself
for the first time in the history of the world as a dominant note of
femininity. The sentimentalities of fiction expanded to meet the
woman’s standard, to satisfy her irrational demands. “If the story-
teller had always had mere men for an audience,” says an acute
English critic, “there would have been no romance; nothing but the
improving fable, or the indecent anecdote.” It was the woman who,
as Miss Seward sorrowfully observed, sucked the “sweet poison”
which the novelist administered; it was the woman who stooped
conspicuously to the “reigning folly” of the day.
The particular occasion of this outbreak on Miss Seward’s part was
the extraordinary success of a novel, now long forgotten by the
world, but which in its time rivalled in popularity “Evelina,” and the
well-loved “Mysteries of Udolpho.” Its plaintive name is “Emmeline;
or the Orphan of the Castle,” and its authoress, Charlotte Smith, was
a woman of courage, character, and good ability; also of a cheerful
temperament, which we should never have surmised from her works.
It is said that her son owed his advancement in the East India
Company solely to the admiration felt for “Emmeline,” which was
being read as assiduously in Bengal as in London. Sir Walter Scott,
always the gentlest of critics, held that it belonged to the “highest
branch of fictitious narrative.” The Queen, who considered it a
masterpiece, lent it to Miss Burney, who in turn gave it to Colonel
Fairly, who ventured to observe that it was not “piquant,” and asked
for a “Rambler” instead.
“Emmeline” is not piquant. Its heroine has more tears than Niobe.
“Formed of the softest elements, and with a mind calculated for
select friendship and domestic happiness,” it is her misfortune to be
loved by all the men she meets. The “interesting languor” of a
countenance habitually “wet with tears” proves their undoing. Her
“deep convulsive sobs” charm them more than the laughter of other
maidens. When the orphan leaves the castle for the first time, she
weeps bitterly for an hour; when she converses with her uncle, she
can “no longer command her tears, sobs obliged her to cease
speaking”; and when he urges upon her the advantages of a worldly
marriage, she—as if that were possible—“wept more than before.”
When Delamere, maddened by rejection, carries her off in a post-
chaise (a delightful frontispiece illustrates this episode), “a shower of
tears fell from her eyes”; and even a rescue fails to raise her spirits.
Her response to Godolphin’s tenderest approaches is to “wipe away
the involuntary betrayers of her emotion”; and when he exclaims in a
transport: “Enchanting softness! Is then the safety of Godolphin so
dear to that angelic bosom?” she answers him with “audible sobs.”
The other characters in the book are nearly as tearful. When
Delamere is not striking his forehead with his clenched fist, he is
weeping at Emmeline’s feet. The repentant Fitz-Edward lays his
head on a chair, and weeps “like a woman.” Lady Adelina, who has
stooped to folly, naturally sheds many tears, and writes an “Ode to
Despair”; while Emmeline from time to time gives “vent to a full
heart” by weeping over Lady Adelina’s infant. Godolphin sobs loudly
when he sees his frail sister; and when he meets Lord Westhaven
after an absence of four years, “the manly eyes of both brothers
were filled with tears.” We wonder how Scott, whose heroines cry so
little and whose heroes never cry at all, stood all this weeping; and,
when we remember the perfunctory nature of Sir Walter’s love
scenes,—wedged in any way among more important matters,—we
wonder still more how he endured the ravings of Delamere, or the
melancholy verses with which Godolphin from time to time soothes
his despondent soul.
In deep depression sunk, the enfeebled mind
Will to the deaf cold elements complain;
And tell the embosomed grief, however vain,
To sullen surges and the viewless wind.
It was not, however, the mournfulness of “Emmeline” which
displeased Miss Seward, but rather the occasional intrusion of “low
characters”; of those underbred and unimpassioned persons who—
as in Miss Burney’s and Miss Ferrier’s novels—are naturally and
almost cheerfully vulgar. That Mr. William Hayley, author of “The
Triumphs of Temper,” and her own most ardent admirer, should tune
his inconstant lyre in praise of Mrs. Smith was more than Miss
Seward could bear. “My very foes acquit me of harbouring one grain
of envy in my bosom,” she writes him feelingly; “yet it is surely by no
means inconsistent with that exemption to feel a little indignant, and
to enter one’s protest, when compositions of mere mediocrity are
extolled far above those of real genius.” She then proceeds to point
out the “indelicacy” of Lady Adelina’s fall from grace, and the use of
“kitchen phrases,” such as “she grew white at the intelligence.”
“White instead of pale,” comments Miss Seward severely, “I have
often heard servants say, but never a gentleman or a gentlewoman.”
If Mr. Hayley desires to read novels, she urges upon him the charms
of another popular heroine, Caroline de Lichtfield, in whom he will
find “simplicity, wit, pathos, and the most exalted generosity”; and the
history of whose adventures “makes curiosity gasp, admiration
kindle, and pity dissolve.”
Caroline, “the gay child of Artless Nonchalance,” is at least a more
cheerful young person than the Orphan. Her story, translated from
the French of Madame de Montolieu, was widely read in England
and on the Continent; and Miss Seward tells us that its author was
indebted “to the merits and graces of these volumes for a transition
from incompetence to the comforts of wealth; from the unprotected
dependence of waning virginity to the social pleasures of wedded
friendship.” In plain words, we are given to understand that a rich
and elderly German widower read the book, sought an acquaintance
with the writer, and married her. “Hymen,” exclaims Miss Seward,
“passed by the fane of Cytherea and the shrine of Plutus, to light his
torch at the altar of genius”;—which beautiful burst of eloquence
makes it painful to add the chilling truth, and say that “Caroline de
Lichtfield” was written six years after its author’s marriage with M. de
Montolieu, who was a Swiss, and her second husband. She
espoused her first, M. de Crousaz, when she was eighteen, and still
comfortably remote from the terrors of waning virginity. Accurate
information was not, however, a distinguishing characteristic of the
day. Sir Walter Scott, writing some years later of Madame de
Montolieu, ignores both marriages altogether, and calls her
Mademoiselle.
No rich reward lay in wait for poor Charlotte Smith, whose husband
was systematically impecunious, and whose large family of children
were supported wholly by her pen. “Emmeline, or the Orphan of the
Castle” was followed by “Ethelinda, or the Recluse of the Lake,” and
that by “The Old Manor House,” which was esteemed her
masterpiece. Its heroine bears the interesting name of Monimia; and
when she marries her Orlando, “every subsequent hour of their lives
was marked by some act of benevolence,”—a breathless and
philanthropic career. By this time the false-hearted Hayley had so far
transferred to Mrs. Smith the homage due to Miss Seward that he
was rewarded with the painful privilege of reading “The Old Manor
House” in manuscript,—a privilege reserved in those days for tried
and patient friends. The poet had himself dallied a little with fiction,
having written, “solely to promote the interests of religion,” a novel
called “The Young Widow,” which no one appears to have read,
except perhaps the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom its author
sent a copy.
In purity of motive Mr. Hayley was rivalled only by Mrs. Brunton,
whose two novels, “Self-Control” and “Discipline,” were designed “to
procure admission for the religion of a sound mind and of the Bible
where it cannot find access in any other form.” Mrs. Brunton was
perhaps the most commended novelist of her time. The inexorable
titles of her stories secured for them a place upon the guarded book-
shelves of the young. Many a demure English girl must have blessed
these deluding titles, just as, forty years later, many an English boy
blessed the inspiration which had impelled George Borrow to
misname his immortal book “The Bible in Spain.” When the wife of a
clergyman undertook to write a novel in the interests of religion and
the Scriptures; when she called it “Discipline,” and drew up a stately
apology for employing fiction as a medium for the lessons she meant
to convey, what parent could refuse to be beguiled? There is nothing
trivial in Mrs. Brunton’s conception of a good novel, in the standard
she proposes to the world.
“Let the admirable construction of fable in ‘Tom Jones’ be employed
to unfold characters like Miss Edgeworth’s; let it lead to a moral like
Richardson’s; let it be told with the elegance of Rousseau, and with
the simplicity of Goldsmith; let it be all this, and Milton need not have
been ashamed of the work.”
How far “Discipline” and “Self-Control” approach this composite
standard of perfection it would be invidious to ask; but they
accomplished a miracle of their own in being both popular and
permitted, in pleasing the frivolous, and edifying the devout.
Dedicated to Miss Joanna Baillie, sanctioned by Miss Hannah More,
they stood above reproach, though not without a flavour of depravity.
Mrs. Brunton’s outlook upon life was singularly uncomplicated. All
her women of fashion are heartless and inane. All her men of fashion
cherish dishonourable designs upon female youth and innocence.
Indeed the strenuous efforts of Laura, in “Self-Control,” to preserve
her virginity may be thought a trifle explicit for very youthful readers.
We find her in the first chapter—she is seventeen—fainting at the
feet of her lover, who has just revealed the unworthy nature of his
intentions; and we follow her through a series of swoons to the last
pages, where she “sinks senseless” into—of all vessels!—a canoe;
and is carried many miles down a Canadian river in a state of nicely
balanced unconsciousness. Her self-control (the crowning virtue
which gives its title to the book) is so marked that when she
dismisses Hargrave on probation, and then meets him accidentally in
a London print-shop after a four months’ absence, she “neither
screamed nor fainted”; only “trembled violently, and leant against the
counter to recover strength and composure.” It is not until he turns,
and, “regardless of the inquisitive looks of the spectators, clasped
her to his breast,” that “her head sunk upon his shoulder, and she
lost all consciousness.” As for her heroic behaviour when the same
Hargrave (having lapsed from grace) shoots the virtuous De Courcy
in Lady Pelham’s summer-house, it must be described in the
author’s own words. No others could do it justice.
“To the plants which their beauty had recommended to Lady Pelham,
Laura had added a few of which the usefulness was known to her.
Agaric of the oak was of the number; and she had often applied it
where many a hand less fair would have shrunk from the task. Nor
did she hesitate now. The ball had entered near the neck; and the
feminine, the delicate Laura herself disengaged the wound from its
covering; the feeling, the tender Laura herself performed an office
from which false sensibility would have recoiled in horror.”
Is it possible that anybody except Miss Burney could have shrunk
modestly from the sight of a lover’s neck, especially when it had a
bullet in it? Could a sense of decorum be more overwhelmingly
expressed? Yet the same novel which held up to our youthful great-
grandmothers this unapproachable standard of propriety presented
to their consideration the most intimate details of libertinism. There
was then, as now, no escape from the moralist’s devastating
disclosures.
One characteristic is common to all these faded romances, which in
their time were read with far more fervour and sympathy than are
their successors to-day. This is the undying and undeviating nature
of their heroes’ affections. Written by ladies who took no count of
man’s proverbial inconstancy, they express a touching belief in the
supremacy of feminine charms. A heroine of seventeen (she is
seldom older), with ringlets, and a “faltering timidity,” inflames both
the virtuous and the profligate with such imperishable passions, that
when triumphant morality leads her to the altar, defeated vice cannot
survive her loss. Her suitors, reversing the enviable experience of
Ben Bolt,—
weep with delight when she gives them a smile,
And tremble with fear at her frown.
They grow faint with rapture when they enter her presence, and,
when she repels their advances, they signify their disappointment by
gnashing their teeth, and beating their heads against the wall.
Rejection cannot alienate their faithful hearts; years and absence
cannot chill their fervour. They belong to a race of men who, if they
ever existed at all, are now as extinct as the mastodon.
It was Miss Jane Porter who successfully transferred to a conquering
hero that exquisite sensibility of soul which had erstwhile belonged to
the conquering heroine,—to the Emmelines and Adelinas of fiction.
Dipping her pen “in the tears of Poland,” she conveyed the glittering
drops to the eyes of “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” whence they gush in
rills,—like those of the Prisoner of Chillon’s brother. Thaddeus is of
such exalted virtue that strangers in London address him as
“excellent young gentleman,” and his friends speak of him as
“incomparable young man.” He rescues children from horses’ hoofs
and from burning buildings. He nurses them through small-pox, and
leaves their bedsides in the most casual manner, to mingle in crowds
and go to the play. He saves women from insult on the streets. He is
kind even to “that poor slandered and abused animal, the cat,”—
which is certainly to his credit. Wrapped in a sable cloak, wearing
“hearse-like plumes” on his hat, a star upon his breast, and a sabre
by his side, he moves with Hamlet’s melancholy grace through the
five hundred pages of the story. “His unrestrained and elegant
conversation acquired new pathos from the anguish that was driven
back to his heart: like the beds of rivers which infuse their own
nature with the current, his hidden grief imparted an indescribable
interest and charm to all his sentiments and actions.”
What wonder that such a youth is passionately loved by all the
women who cross his path, but whom he regards for the most part
with “that lofty tranquillity which is inseparable from high rank when it
is accompanied by virtue.” In vain Miss Euphemia Dundas writes him
amorous notes, and entraps him into embarrassing situations. In
vain Lady Sara Roos—married, I regret to say—pursues him to his
lodgings, and wrings “her snowy arms” while she confesses the
hopeless nature of her infatuation. The irreproachable Thaddeus
replaces her tenderly but firmly on a sofa, and as soon as possible
sends her home in a cab. It is only when the “orphan heiress,” Miss
Beaufort, makes her appearance on the scene, “a large Turkish
shawl enveloping her fine form, a modest grace observable in every
limb,” that the exile’s haughty soul succumbs to love. Miss Beaufort
has been admirably brought up by her aunt, Lady Somerset, who is
a person of great distinction, and who gives “conversaziones,” as
famous in their way as Mrs. Proudie’s.—“There the young Mary
Beaufort listened to pious divines of every Christian persuasion.
There she gathered wisdom from real philosophers; and, in the
society of our best living poets, cherished an enthusiasm for all that
is great and good. On these evenings, Sir Robert Somerset’s house
reminded the visitor of what he had read or imagined of the School
of Athens.”
Never do hero and heroine approach each other with such spasms
of modesty as Thaddeus and Miss Beaufort. Their hearts expand
with emotion, but their mutual sense of propriety keeps them remote
from all vulgar understandings. In vain “Mary’s rosy lips seemed to
breathe balm while she spoke.” In vain “her beautiful eyes shone
with benevolence.” The exile, standing proudly aloof, watches with
bitter composure the attentions of more frivolous suitors. “His arms
were folded, his hat pulled over his forehead; and his long dark eye-
lashes shading his downcast eyes imparted a dejection to his whole
air, which wrapped her weeping heart round and round with regretful
pangs.” What with his lashes, and his hidden griefs, the majesty of
his mournful moods, and the pleasing pensiveness of his lighter
ones, Thaddeus so far eclipses his English rivals that they may be
pardoned for wishing he had kept his charms in Poland. Who that
has read the matchless paragraph which describes the first unveiling
of the hero’s symmetrical leg can forget the sensation it produces?
“Owing to the warmth of the weather, Thaddeus came out this
morning without boots; and it being the first time the exquisite
proportion of his limb had been seen by any of the present company
excepting Euphemia” (why had Euphemia been so favoured?),
“Lascelles, bursting with an emotion which he would not call envy,
measured the count’s fine leg with his scornful eye.”
When Thaddeus at last expresses his attachment for Miss Beaufort,
he does so kneeling respectfully in her uncle’s presence, and in
these well-chosen words: “Dearest Miss Beaufort, may I indulge
myself in the idea that I am blessed with your esteem?” Whereupon
Mary whispers to Sir Robert: “Pray, Sir, desire him to rise. I am
already sufficiently overwhelmed!” and the solemn deed is done.
“Thaddeus of Warsaw” may be called the “Last of the Heroes,” and
take rank with the “Last of the Mohicans,” the “Last of the Barons,”
the “Last of the Cavaliers,” and all the finalities of fiction. With him
died that noble race who expressed our great-grandmothers’ artless
ideals of perfection. Seventy years later, D’Israeli made a desperate
effort to revive a pale phantom of departed glory in “Lothair,” that
nursling of the gods, who is emphatically a hero, and nothing more.
“London,” we are gravely told, “was at Lothair’s feet.” He is at once
the hope of United Italy, and the bulwark of the English
Establishment. He is—at twenty-two—the pivot of fashionable,
political, and clerical diplomacy. He is beloved by the female
aristocracy of Great Britain; and mysterious ladies, whose lofty souls
stoop to no conventionalities, die happy with his kisses on their lips.
Five hundred mounted gentlemen compose his simple country
escort, and the coat of his groom of the chambers is made in Saville
Row. What more could a hero want? What more could be lavished
upon him by the most indulgent of authors? Yet who shall compare
Lothair to the noble Thaddeus nodding his hearse-like plumes,—
Thaddeus dedicated to the “urbanity of the brave,” and embalmed in
the tears of Poland? The inscrutable creator of Lothair presented his
puppet to a mocking world; but all England and much of the
Continent dilated with correct emotions when Thaddeus, “uniting to
the courage of a man the sensibility of a woman, and the exalted
goodness of an angel” (I quote from an appreciative critic), knelt at
Miss Beaufort’s feet.
Ten years later “Pride and Prejudice” made its unobtrusive
appearance, and was read by that “saving remnant” to whom is
confided the intellectual welfare of their land. Mrs. Elwood, the
biographer of England’s “Literary Ladies,” tells us, in the few
careless pages which she deems sufficient for Miss Austen’s novels,
that there are people who think these stories “worthy of ranking with
those of Madame d’Arblay and Miss Edgeworth”; but that in their
author’s estimation (and, by inference, in her own), “they took up a
much more humble station.” Yet, tolerant even of such inferiority,
Mrs. Elwood bids us remember that although “the character of
Emma is perhaps too manœuvring and too plotting to be perfectly
amiable,” that of Catherine Morland “will not suffer greatly even from
a comparison with Miss Burney’s interesting Evelina”; and that
“although one is occasionally annoyed by the underbred personages
of Miss Austen’s novels, the annoyance is only such as we should
feel if we were actually in their company.”
It was thus that our genteel great-grandmothers, enamoured of lofty
merit and of refined sensibility, regarded Elizabeth Bennet’s
relations.
 ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS
Perhaps no man ever thought a line superfluous when he
wrote it. We are seldom tiresome to ourselves.—Dr.
Johnson.
It is commonly believed that the extinction of verse—of verse in the
bulk, which is the way in which our great-grandfathers consumed it—
is due to the vitality of the novel. People, we are told, read rhyme
and metre with docility, only because they wanted to hear a story,
only because there was no other way in which they could get plenty
of sentiment and romance. As soon as the novel supplied them with
all the sentiment they wanted, as soon as it told them the story in
plain prose, they turned their backs upon poetry forever.
There is a transparent inadequacy in this solution of a problem which
still confronts the patient reader of buried masterpieces. Novels were
plenty when Mr. William Hayley’s “Triumphs of Temper” went through
twelve editions, and when Dr. Darwin’s “Botanic Garden” was
received with deferential delight. But could any dearth of fiction
persuade us now to read the “Botanic Garden”? Were we
shipwrecked in company with the “Triumphs of Temper,” would we
ever finish the first canto? Novels stood on every English book-shelf
when Fox read “Madoc” aloud at night to his friends, and they stayed
up, so he says, an hour after their bedtime to hear it. Could that
miracle be worked to-day? Sir Walter Scott, with indestructible
amiability, reread “Madoc” to please Miss Seward, who, having
“steeped” her own eyes “in transports of tears and sympathy,” wrote
to him that it carried “a master-key to every bosom which common
good sense and anything resembling a human heart inhabit.” Scott,
unwilling to resign all pretensions to a human heart, tried hard to
share the Swan’s emotions, and failed. “I cannot feel quite the
interest I would like to do,” he patiently confessed.
If Southey’s poems were not read as Scott’s and Moore’s and
Byron’s were read (give us another Byron, and we will read him with
forty thousand novels knocking at our doors!); if they were not paid
for out of the miraculous depths of Murray’s Fortunatus’s purse, they
nevertheless enjoyed a solid reputation of their own. They are
mentioned in all the letters of the period (save and except Lord
Byron’s ribald pages) with carefully measured praise, and they
enabled their author to accept the laureateship on self-respecting
terms. They are at least, as Sir Leslie Stephen reminds us, more
readable than Glover’s “Leonidas,” or Wilkie’s “Epigoniad,” and they
are shorter, too. Yet the “Leonidas,” an epic in nine books, went
through four editions; whereupon its elate author expanded it into
twelve books; and the public, undaunted, kept on buying it for years.
The “Epigoniad” is also in nine books. It is on record that Hume, who
seldom dallied with the poets, read all nine, and praised them
warmly. Mr. Wilkie was christened the “Scottish Homer,” and he bore
that modest title until his death. It was the golden age of epics. The
ultimatum of the modern publisher, “No poet need apply!” had not yet
blighted the hopes and dimmed the lustre of genius. “Everybody
thinks he can write verse,” observed Sir Walter mournfully, when
called upon for the hundredth time to help a budding aspirant to
fame.
With so many competitors in the field, it was uncommonly astute in
Mr. Hayley to address himself exclusively to that sex which poets
and orators call “fair.” There is a formal playfulness, a ponderous
vivacity about the “Triumphs of Temper,” which made it especially
welcome to women. In the preface of the first edition the author
gallantly laid his laurels at their feet, observing modestly that it was
his desire, however “ineffectual,” “to unite the sportive wildness of
Ariosto and the more serious sublime painting of Dante with some
portion of the enchanting elegance, the refined imagination, and the
moral graces of Pope; and to do this, if possible, without violating
those rules of propriety which Mr. Cambridge has illustrated, by
example as well as by precept, in the ‘Scribleriad,’ and in his
sensible preface to that elegant and learned poem.”