Chapter 2

Poor lady! The future held, indeed, many a sad and unsuspected hour for her, many a cruel pang, many a dark and heavy season, that must have seemed intolerably weary to one of her sprightly and yet somewhat indolent nature, more easily accepting evil than devising escape from it. But it also held many blessings of constancy, friendship, kindly deeds, and useful doings. She had not devotion to give such as that of the good Howard whom she revered, but the equable help and sympathy for others of an open-minded and kindly woman was hers. Her marriage would seem to have been brought about by a romantic fancy rather than by a tender affection. Mr. Barbauld's mind had been once unhinged; his protestations were passionate and somewhat dramatic. We are told that when she was warned by a friend, she only said, 'But surely, if I throw him over, he will become crazy again;' and from a high-minded sense of pity, she was faithful, and married him against the wish of her brother and parents, and not without some misgivings herself. He was a man perfectly sincere and honourable; but, from his nervous want of equilibrium, subject all his life to frantic outbursts of ill-temper. Nobody ever knew what his wife had to endure in secret; her calm and restrained manner must have effectually hidden the constant anxiety of her life; nor had she children to warm her heart, and brighten up her monotonous existence. Little Charles, of the Reading-book, who is bid to come hither, who counted so nicely, who stroked the pussy cat, and who deserved to listen to the delightful stories he was told, was not her own son but her brother's child. When he was born, she wrote to entreat that he might be given over to her for her own, imploring her brother to spare him to her, in a pretty and pathetic letter. This was a mother yearning for a child, not a schoolmistress asking for a pupil, though perhaps in after times the two were somewhat combined in her. There is a pretty little description of Charles making great progress in 'climbing trees and talking nonsense:' 'I have the honour to tell you that our Charles is the sweetest boy in the world. He is perfectly naturalised in his new situation; and if I should make any blunders in my letter, I must beg you to impute it to his standing by me and chattering all the time.' And how pleasant a record exists of Charles's chatter in that most charming little book written for him and for the babies of babies to come! There is a sweet instructive grace in it and appreciation of childhood which cannot fail to strike those who have to do with children and with Mrs. Barbauld's books for them: children themselves, those best critics of all, delight in it.

'Where's Charles?' says a little scholar every morning to the writer of these few notes.

IV.

Soon after the marriage, there had been some thought of a college for young ladies, of which Mrs. Barbauld was to be the principal; but she shrank from the idea, and in a letter to Mrs. Montagu she objects to the scheme of higher education for women away from their natural homes. 'I should have little hope of cultivating a love of knowledge in a young lady of fifteen who came to me ignorant and uncultivated. It is too late then to begin to learn. The empire of the passions is coming on. Those attachments begin to be formed which influence the happiness of future life. The care of a mother alone can give suitable attention to this important period.' It is true that the rigidness of her own home had not prevented her from making a hasty and unsuitable marriage. But it is not this which is weighing on her mind. 'Perhaps you may think,' she says, 'that having myself stepped out of the bounds of female reserve in becoming an author, it is with an ill grace that I offer these statements.'

Her arguments seem to have been thought conclusive in those days, and the young ladies' college was finally transmuted into a school for little boys at Palgrave, in Norfolk, and thither the worthy couple transported themselves.

One of the letters to Miss Belsham is thus dated:--'_The 14th of July, in the village of Palgrave (the pleasantest village in all England), at ten o'clock, all alone in my great parlour, Mr. Barbauld being studying a sermon, do I begin a letter to my dear Betsy._'

When she first married, and travelled into Norfolk to keep school at Palgrave, nothing could have seemed more tranquil, more contented, more matter-of-fact than her life as it appears from her letters. Dreams, and fancies, and gay illusions and excitements have made way for the somewhat disappointing realisation of Mr. Barbauld with his neatly turned and friendly postscripts--a husband, polite, devoted, it is true, but somewhat disappointing all the same. The next few years seem like years in a hive--storing honey for the future, and putting away--industrious, punctual, monotonous. There are children's lessons to be heard, and school-treats to be devised. She sets them to act plays and cuts out paper collars for Henry IV.; she always takes a class of babies entirely her own. (One of these babies, who always loved her, became Lord Chancellor Denman; most of the others took less brilliant, but equally respectable places, in after life.) She has also household matters and correspondence not to be neglected. In the holidays, they make excursions to Norwich, to London, and revisit their old haunts at Warrington. In one of her early letters, soon after her marriage, she describes her return to Warrington.

'Dr. Enfield's face,' she declares, 'is grown half a foot longer since I saw him, with studying mathematics, and for want of a game of romps; for there are positively none now at Warrington but grave matrons. I who have but half assumed the character, was ashamed of the levity of my behaviour.'

It says well indeed for the natural brightness of the lady's disposition that with sixteen boarders and a satisfactory usher to look after, she should be prepared for a game of romps with Dr. Enfield.

On another occasion, in 1777, she takes little Charles away with her. 'He has indeed been an excellent traveller,' she says; 'and though, like his great ancestor, some natural tears he shed, like him, too, he wiped them soon. He had a long sound sleep last night, and has been very busy to-day hunting the puss and the chickens. And now, my dear brother and sister, let me again thank you for this precious gift, the value of which we are both more and more sensible of as we become better acquainted with his sweet disposition and winning manners.'

She winds up this letter with a postscript:--

'Everybody here asks, "Pray, is Dr. Dodd really to be executed?" as if we knew the more for having been at Warrington.'

Dr. Aikin, Mrs. Barbauld's brother, the father of little Charles and of Lucy Aikin, whose name is well known in literature, was himself a man of great parts, industry, and ability, working hard to support his family. He alternated between medicine and literature all his life. When his health failed he gave up medicine, and settled at Stoke Newington, and busied himself with periodic literature; meanwhile, whatever his own pursuits may have been, he never ceased to take an interest in his sister's work and to encourage her in every way.

It is noteworthy that few of Mrs. Barbauld's earlier productions equalled what she wrote at the very end of her life. She seems to have been one of those who ripen with age, growing wider in spirit with increasing years. Perhaps, too, she may have been influenced by the change of manners, the reaction against formalism, which was growing up as her own days were ending. Prim she may have been in manner, but she was not a formalist by nature; and even at eighty was ready to learn to submit to accept the new gospel that Wordsworth and his disciples had given to the world, and to shake off the stiffness of early training.

It is idle to speculate on what might have been if things had happened otherwise; if the daily stress of anxiety and perplexity which haunted her home had been removed--difficulties and anxieties which may well have absorbed all the spare energy and interest that under happier circumstances might have added to the treasury of English literature. But if it were only for one ode written when the distracting cares of over seventy years were ending, when nothing remained to her but the essence of a long past, and the inspirations of a still glowing, still hopeful, and most tender spirit, if it were only for the ode called 'Life,' which has brought a sense of ease and comfort to so many, Mrs. Barbauld has indeed deserved well of her country-people and should be held in remembrance by them.

Her literary works are, after all, not very voluminous. She is best known by her hymns for children and her early lessons, than which nothing more childlike has ever been devised; and we can agree with her brother, Dr. Aikin, when he says that it requires true genius to enter so completely into a child's mind.

After their first volume of verse, the brother and sister had published a second in prose, called 'Miscellaneous Pieces,' about which there is an amusing little anecdote in Rogers's 'Memoirs.' Fox met Dr. Aikin at dinner.

'"I am greatly pleased with your 'Miscellaneous Pieces,'" said Fox. Aikin bowed. "I particularly admire," continued Fox, "your essay 'Against Inconsistency in our Expectations.'"

'"That," replied Aikin, "is my sister's."

'"I like much," returned Fox, "your essay 'On Monastic Institutions.'"

'"That," answered Aikin, "is also my sister's."

'Fox thought it best to say no more about the book.'

These essays were followed by various of the visions and Eastern pieces then so much in vogue; also by political verses and pamphlets, which seemed to have made a great sensation at the time. But Mrs. Barbauld's turn was on the whole more for domestic than for literary life, although literary people always seem to have had a great interest for her.

During one Christmas which they spent in London, the worthy couple go to see Mrs. Siddons; and Mrs. Chapone introduces Mrs. Barbauld to Miss Burney. 'A very unaffected, modest, sweet, and pleasing young lady,' says Mrs. Barbauld, who is always kind in her descriptions. Mrs. Barbauld's one complaint in London is of the fatigue from hairdressers, and the bewildering hurry of the great city, where she had, notwithstanding her quiet country life, many ties, and friendships, and acquaintances. Her poem on 'Corsica' had brought her into some relations with Boswell; she also knew Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson. Here is her description of the 'Great Bear:'--

'I do not mean that one which shines in the sky over your head; but the Bear that shines in London--a great rough, surly animal. His Christian name is Dr. Johnson. 'Tis a singular creature; but if you stroke him he will not bite, and though he growls sometimes he is not ill-humoured.'

Johnson describes Mrs. Barbauld as suckling fools and chronicling small beer. There was not much sympathy between the two. Characters such as Johnson's harmonise best with the enthusiastic and easily influenced. Mrs. Barbauld did not belong to this class; she trusted to her own judgment, rarely tried to influence others, and took a matter-of-fact rather than a passionate view of life. She is as severe to him in her criticism as he was in his judgment of her: they neither of them did the other justice. 'A Christian and a man-about-town, a philosopher, and a bigot acknowledging life to be miserable, and making it more miserable through fear of death.' So she writes of him, and all this was true; but how much more was also true of the great and hypochondriacal old man! Some years afterwards, when she had been reading Boswell's long-expected 'Life of Johnson,' she wrote of the book:--'It is like going to Ranelagh; you meet all your acquaintances; but it is a base and mean thing to bring thus every idle word into judgment.' In our own day we too have our Boswell and our Johnson to arouse discussion and indignation.

'Have you seen Boswell's "Life of Johnson?" He calls it a Flemish portrait, and so it is--two quartos of a man's conversation and petty habits. Then the treachery and meanness of watching a man for years in order to set down every unguarded and idle word he uttered, is inconceivable. Yet with all this one cannot help reading a good deal of it.' This is addressed to the faithful Betsy, who was also keeping school by that time, and assuming brevet rank in consequence.

Mrs. Barbauld might well complain of the fatigue from hairdressers in London. In one of her letters to her friend she thus describes a lady's dress of the period:--

'Do you know how to dress yourself in Dublin? If you do not, I will tell you. Your waist must be the circumference of two oranges, no more. You must erect a structure on your head gradually ascending to a foot high, exclusive of feathers, and stretching to a penthouse of most horrible projection behind, the breadth from wing to wing considerably broader than your shoulder, and as many different things in your cap as in Noah's ark. Verily, I never did see such monsters as the heads now in vogue. I am a monster, too, but a moderate one.'

She must have been glad to get back to her home, to her daily work, to Charles, climbing his trees and talking his nonsense.

In the winter of 1784 her mother died at Palgrave. It was Christmas week; the old lady had come travelling four days through the snow in a postchaise with her maid and her little grandchildren, while her son rode on horseback. But the cold and the fatigue of the journey, and the discomfort of the inns, proved too much for Mrs. Aikin, who reached her daughter's house only to die. Just that time three years before Mrs. Barbauld had lost her father, whom she dearly loved. There is a striking letter from the widowed mother to her daughter recording the event. It is almost Spartan in its calmness, but nevertheless deeply touching. Now she, too, was at rest, and after Mrs. Aikin's death a cloud of sadness and depression seems to have fallen upon the household. Mr. Barbauld was ailing; he was suffering from a nervous irritability which occasionally quite unfitted him for his work as a schoolmaster. Already his wife must have had many things to bear, and very much to try her courage and cheerfulness; and now her health was also failing. It was in 1775 that they gave up the academy, which, on the whole, had greatly flourished. It had been established eleven years; they were both of them in need of rest and change. Nevertheless, it was not without reluctance that they brought themselves to leave their home at Palgrave. A successor was found only too quickly for Mrs. Barbauld's wishes; they handed over their pupils to his care, and went abroad for a year's sunshine and distraction.

V.

What a contrast to prim, starched scholastic life at Palgrave must have been the smiling world, and the land flowing with oil and wine, in which they found themselves basking! The vintage was so abundant that year that the country people could not find vessels to contain it. 'The roads covered with teams of casks, empty or full according as they were going out or returning, and drawn by oxen whose strong necks seemed to be bowed unwillingly under the yoke. Men, women, and children were abroad; some cutting with a short sickle the bunches of grapes, some breaking them with a wooden instrument, some carrying them on their backs from the gatherers to those who pressed the juice; and, as in our harvest, the gleaners followed.'

From the vintage they travel to the Alps, 'a sight so majestic, so totally different from anything I had seen before, that I am ready to sing _nunc dimittis_,' she writes. They travel back by the south of France and reach Paris in June, where the case of the Diamond Necklace is being tried. Then they return to England, waiting a day at Boulogne for a vessel, but crossing from thence in less than four hours. How pretty is her description of England as it strikes them after their absence! 'And not without pleasing emotion did we view again the green swelling hills covered with large sheep, and the winding road bordered with the hawthorn hedge, and the English vine twirled round the tall poles, and the broad Medway covered with vessels, and at last the gentle yet majestic Thames.'

There were Dissenters at Hampstead in those days, as there are still, and it was a call from a little Unitarian congregation on the hillside who invited Mr. Barbauld to become their minister, which decided the worthy couple to retire to this pleasant suburb. The place seemed promising enough; they were within reach of Mrs. Barbauld's brother, Dr. Aikin, now settled in London, and to whom she was tenderly attached. There were congenial people settled all about. On the high hill-top were pleasant old houses to live in. There was occupation for him and literary interest for her.

They are a sociable and friendly pair, hospitable, glad to welcome their friends, and the acquaintance, and critics, and the former pupils who come toiling up the hill to visit them. Rogers comes to dinner 'at half after three.' They have another poet for a neighbour, Miss Joanna Baillie; they are made welcome by all, and in their turn make others welcome; they do acts of social charity and kindness wherever they see the occasion. They have a young Spanish gentleman to board who conceals a taste for 'seguars.' They also go up to town from time to time. On one occasion Mr. Barbauld repairs to London to choose a wedding present for Miss Belsham, who is about to be married to Mr. Kenrick, a widower with daughters. He chose two slim Wedgwood pots of some late classic model, which still stand, after many dangers, safely on either side of Mrs. Kenrick's portrait in Miss Reid's drawing-room at Hampstead. Wedgwood must have been a personal friend: he has modelled a lovely head of Mrs. Barbauld, simple and nymph-like.

Hampstead was no further from London in those days than it is now, and they seem to have kept up a constant communication with their friends and relations in the great city. They go to the play occasionally. 'I have not indeed seen Mrs. Siddons often, but I think I never saw her to more advantage,' she writes. 'It is not, however, seeing a play, it is only seeing one character, for they have nobody to act with her.'

Another expedition is to Westminster Hall, where Warren Hastings was then being tried for his life.

'The trial has attracted the notice of most people who are within reach of it. I have been, and was very much struck with all the apparatus and pomp of justice, with the splendour of the assembly which contained everything distinguished in the nation, with the grand idea that the equity of the English was to pursue crimes committed at the other side of the globe, and oppressions exercised towards the poor Indians who had come to plead their cause; but all these fine ideas vanish and fade away as one observes the progress of the cause, and sees it fall into the summer amusements, and take the place of a rehearsal of music or an evening at Vauxhall.'

Mrs. Barbauld was a Liberal in feeling and conviction; she was never afraid to speak her mind, and when the French Revolution first began, she, in common with many others, hoped that it was but the dawning of happier times. She was always keen about public events; she wrote an address on the opposition to the repeal of the Test Act in 1791, and she published her poem to Wilberforce on the rejection of his great bill for abolishing slavery:--

Friends of the friendless, hail, ye generous band!

she cries, in warm enthusiasm for the devoted cause.

Horace Walpole nicknamed her Deborah, called her the Virago Barbauld, and speaks of her with utter rudeness and intolerant spite. But whether or not Horace Walpole approved, it is certain that Mrs. Barbauld possessed to a full and generous degree a quality which is now less common than it was in her day.

Not very many years ago I was struck on one occasion when a noble old lady, now gone to her rest, exclaimed in my hearing that people of this generation had all sorts of merits and charitable intentions, but that there was one thing she missed which had certainly existed in her youth, and which no longer seemed to be of the same account: that public spirit which used to animate the young as well as the old.

It is possible that philanthropy, and the love of the beautiful, and the gratuitous diffusion of wall-papers may be the modern rendering of the good old-fashioned sentiment. Mrs. Barbauld lived in very stirring days, when private people shared in the excitements and catastrophes of public affairs. To her the fortunes of England, its loyalty, its success, were a part of her daily bread. By her early associations she belonged to a party representing opposition, and for that very reason she was the more keenly struck by the differences of the conduct of affairs and the opinions of those she trusted. Her friend Dr. Priestley had emigrated to America for his convictions' sake; Howard was giving his noble life for his work; Wakefield had gone to prison. Now the very questions are forgotten for which they struggled and suffered, or the answers have come while the questions are forgotten, in this their future which is our present, and to which some unborn historian may point back with a moral finger.

Dr. Aikin, whose estimate of his sister was very different from Horace Walpole's, occasionally reproached her for not writing more constantly. He wrote a copy of verses on this theme:--

Thus speaks the Muse, and bends her brows severe: Did I, Lætitia, lend my choicest lays, And crown thy youthful head with freshest bays, That all the expectance of thy full-grown year, Should lie inert and fruitless? O revere Those sacred gifts whose meed is deathless praise, Whose potent charm the enraptured soul can raise Far from the vapours of this earthly sphere, Seize, seize the lyre, resume the lofty strain.

She seems to have willingly left the lyre for Dr. Aikin's use. A few hymns, some graceful odes, and stanzas, and _jeux d'esprit_, a certain number of well-written and original essays, and several political pamphlets, represent the best of her work. Her more ambitious poems are those by which she is the least remembered. It was at Hampstead that Mrs. Barbauld wrote her contributions to her brother's volume of 'Evenings at Home,' among which the transmigrations of Indur may be quoted as a model of style and delightful matter. One of the best of her _jeux d'esprit_ is the 'Groans of the Tankard,' which was written in early days, with much spirit and real humour. It begins with a classic incantation, and then goes on:--

'Twas at the solemn silent noontide hour When hunger rages with despotic power, When the lean student quits his Hebrew roots For the gross nourishment of English fruits, And throws unfinished airy systems by For solid pudding and substantial pie.

The tankard now,

Replenished to the brink, With the cool beverage blue-eyed maidens drink,

but, accustomed to very different libations, is endowed with voice and utters its bitter reproaches:--

Unblest the day, and luckless was the hour Which doomed me to a Presbyterian's power, Fated to serve a Puritanic race, Whose slender meal is shorter than their grace.

VI.