Part 4

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.