Chapter 2

In 1787, Anna Seward tells us, she became acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Piozzi (formerly Mrs. Thrale), and on the latter’s publication of Johnson’s letters, she writes:—“Greatly as I admired Johnson’s talents and revered his knowledge, and formidable as I felt the powers to be of his witty sophistry, yet did a certain quickness of spirit, and zeal for the reputation of my favourite authors, irresistibly urge me to defend them against his spleenful injustice—a temerity, which I was well aware made him dislike me, notwithstanding the coaxing regard he always expressed for me on his first salutations on returning to Lichfield.” Again, in other letters, she says:—. . . “I have had frequent opportunities of conversing with that wonderful man (Dr. Johnson). Seldom did I listen to him without admiring the great powers of his mind, and feeling concern and pain at the malignance of his disposition. He would sometimes be just to the virtues and literary fame of others, if they had not been praised in the conversation before his opinion was asked—if they had been previously praised, never.” . . .

“What right had a man who wrote a play for the stage, to avow contempt for the theatric profession”? she wrote, when referring to Johnson’s envy of David Garrick. Boswell admitted, when he visited Anna Seward, in 1785, at Lichfield, that Johnson was “galled by Garrick’s prosperity.” . . . “Who can think Johnson’s heart a good one? In the course of many years’ personal acquaintance with him, I never knew a single instance in which the praise (from another’s lip) of any human being, excepting that of Mrs. Thrale, was not a caustic on his spirit; and this, whether their virtues or abilities were the subject of encomium.” His opinions of poetry were, she thought, “so absurd and inconsistent with each other, that, though almost any of his dogmas may be clearly and easily confronted, yet the attempt is but combating an hydra-headed monster . . . Johnson’s ‘Lives of the Poets,’ and all the records of his own life and conversation, prove that envy did deeply stain his spirit. To your question, ‘Whom could Johnson envy’? I answer, all his superiors in genius, all his equals; in short, at times, every celebrated author, living or dead . . . I cannot help feeling that he has superiors, and that in a very large degree, though they will not be found amongst our essayists, where I acknowledge his pre-eminence. Johnson was a very bright star, yet to Shakespeare and Milton, he was but as a star to the sun . . . Gray was indolent, and wrote but little; yet that little proves him the first genius of the period in which he lived. I have been assured that he had more learning than Johnson, and he certainly was a very superior poet. Johnson felt the superiority, and for that he hated him. . . . Johnson’s first ambition was to be distinguished as a poet, and as a poet he was first celebrated. His fine satire, ‘London,’ had considerable reputation; yet it neither eclipsed, nor had power to eclipse, the satires of Pope.”

The account she has given of Johnson’s last days and hours differs very widely from Macaulay’s version, who states that, “when at length the moment, dreaded through so many years, came close, the dark cloud passed away from Johnson’s mind. His temper became unusually patient and gentle; he ceased to think with terror of death, and that which lies beyond death; he spake much of the mercy of God and of the propitiation of Christ.” In a letter written by Anna Seward to T. S. Whalley, dated November 7th, 1784, she said, “The extinction, in our sphere, of that mighty spirit, approaches fast. A confirmed dropsy deluges the vital source. It is melancholy to observe with what terror he contemplates his approaching fate.” In a letter to Mrs. Knowles (the wife of Dr. Knowles, an eminent physician in London, and in her younger days a well-known Staffordshire beauty), dated March 27th, 1785, Anna Seward says, “O, yes, as you observe, dreadful were the horrors which attended poor Johnson’s dying state. His religion was certainly not of that nature which sheds comfort on a death-bed pillow. I believe his faith was sincere, and therefore could not fail to reproach his heart, which had swelled with pride, envy, and hatred, through the whole course of his existence. But religious feeling, on which you lay so great stress, was not the desideratum in Johnson’s virtue.” The reader must decide for himself which of these two contradictory accounts he will believe. It may be remarked that she was in “the almost daily habit of contemplating his dying,” which she describes as “a very melancholy spectacle.” She informs us that it was at Johnson’s repeatedly expressed desire that she often visited him.

* * * * *

In a letter written in 1785, to James Boswell, Anna Seward said that she regretted it was not in her power to collect more anecdotes of Dr. Johnson’s infancy. “My mother passed her days of girlhood with an uncle at Warwick, consequently, was absent from home in the school-boy days of the great man; neither did I ever hear her mention any of the promissory sparkles which, doubtless, burst forth, though no records of them are within my knowledge. I cannot meet with any contemporary of those, his _very_ youthful days. . . . Adieu, sir, go on and prosper in your arduous task of presenting to the world the portrait of Johnson’s mind and manners. If faithful, brilliant will be its lights, but deep its shades.”

Anna Seward seems to have known everybody worth knowing, and she met many celebrities of her day,—not only at Lichfield, but when she visited Buxton and Harrogate, as she sometimes did, for the Baths. Writing from Buxton in 1796 to Mr. Saville, she said, “my acquaintance here seem to set a far higher value on my talents and conversation, such as they are, than the Lichfieldiens; but it is more than probable that novelty is the cause of this so much more appreciating attention”; and, further on, she adds that she had conversed with William Wilberforce, the philanthropist, “who disappoints no expectation his imputed eloquence has excited”; and also with the luminous and resistless Lord Chancellor, Thomas Erskine, “whose every sentence is oratory, whose form is graceful, whose voice is music, and whose eye lightens as he speaks.” She corresponded with Dr. William Lort Mansel, when he was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1798, who was well known as a wit, and writer of epigrams, and to whom she was introduced by her cousin, H. White, at Lichfield. In a letter written in 1806, she said that “the animated attention with which he honoured me, the praise he lavished on my poems, and the passages he quoted from them, constituted one of the most poignant literary gratifications I ever received. The hope that they may live, is attached to the demonstrated impression they had made on a mind of such distinguished classical endowment.” Further on, she said that he often exclaimed, “Lichfield is, indeed, classic ground of peculiar distinction.”

In a letter dated March 5th, 1789, written from Lichfield by Anna Seward, she said, “I was honoured and blest by a two hours personal conversation with the most distinguished excellence that ever walked the earth, since saints and angels left off paying us morning visits. To say that his name is Howard would be superfluous. This is the third time he has favoured me with his conversation on his way through this town. I am truly glad of our King’s recovery, but yet I should not walk half so tall upon a visit from him. Mr. Howard presented me with his new publication, and had previously given me the former.”

The Poet Laureate in 1785 was Thomas Warton, and she corresponded with him, “our great Laureate,” as she called him.

Miss Mitford has described Anna Seward as “all tinkling and tinsel—a sort of Dr. Darwin in petticoats.” Edgeworth described her as “a handsome woman of agreeable manners, she was generous, possessed of good sense, and capable of strong affection”; and Sir Walter Scott thought that she must have been, “when young, exquisitely beautiful; for, in advanced age, the regularity of her features, the fire and expression of her countenance, gave her the appearance of beauty, and almost of youth. Her eyes were auburn, of the precise shade and hue of her hair, and possessed great expression. In reciting, or in speaking with animation, they appeared to become darker, and, as it were, to flash fire. . . . Her voice was melodious, guided by excellent taste, and well suited to reading and recitation, in which she willingly exercised it.”

An accident to her knee in her youth prevented her from riding, which, had she been able to do, she thought she would have enjoyed.

She did not care for “eternal card-parties,” and considered the card-table “an annihilator of ideas.” She had a passionate love for scenery, especially for mountain scenery, and in general for the pleasures of landscape.

Her estimates of many of the poets born in her lifetime appear in her letters, but most of their poetry was only read during their respective lives, and for a few years after, and theirs, like her own productions, are little known to readers of this age, though it appears that she hoped her works would be read for a long time after her death. She wrote, “If my poems are of that common order which have, as Falstaff says, a natural alacrity in sinking, the praise of hireling and nameless critics would not keep them above the gulf of oblivion. If, on the contrary, they possess the buoyant property of true poetry, their fame will be established in after years, when no one will ask, ‘What said the reviewers?’” Her remarks as to plagiarism—petty pilferings—and borrowing from others, to be found in her letters, are most interesting. She thought that “imitative traces, of one kind or other, may be found in all works of imagination, up to Homer; and that he is not detected in the same practice, is certainly owing to the little that remains of the writings of his predecessors.”

Her religious views were broad. She felt “no great reverence for Kings.” In politics she was a Whig. “I was born and bred in Whiggism,” which word, she tells us, was synonymous to “fool and rascal,” from Johnson’s lips. It may be added that Johnson also said, “the Devil was the first Whig.” She confessed she had no great appetite for politics, though she expressed her views pretty freely on the subject. In 1790 the titles of nobility were suppressed in France, and Anna Seward disapproved of Burke’s vindication of hereditary honours. She thought that “they are more likely to make a man repose, with slumbering virtue upon them, for the distinction he is to receive in society, than to inspire the effort of rendering himself worthy of them. They are to men what beauty is to women, a dangerous gift, which has a natural tendency to make them indolent, silly, and worthless. Let property be hereditary, but let titular honours be the reward of noble or useful exertions. France, in her folly, has destroyed them totally, instead of making them conditional.” Howbeit, titled people appear to have been highly honoured by her, notwithstanding these observations. By 1797 she had lost her long-existing confidence in Pitt’s wisdom and integrity, and in 1798 she thought he was “disqualified for retaining the reasonable confidence of the people of England.” In 1801 she wrote of “Pitt’s low and perfidious manœuvres,” and she never changed her opinion of him. She seemed unable to write what is called plain English. Archdeacon Vyse is described by her as “a man of prioric talents in a metrical impromptu.” Another person “evinced an elevated mind,” while a third exhibited an “attic spirit” in her writings. An evening is described as being “attic”; but even Pope, we may remark, calls a nightingale an “attic warbler.” It is true, however, he was writing poetry, not prose. Though a Bluestocking, her praise was usually generously bestowed; she knew well how to flatter. She, though unacquainted with Latin, paraphrased Horace; and she admitted her ignorance of French. She loved all animals, notably cats and dogs, and, believing in a future existence for the dumb creation, wrote a poem, entitled “On the Future Existence of Brutes.”

The following are three of more beautiful stanzas:—

“Has GOD decreed this helpless, suffering train Shall, groaning yield the vital breath he gave, Unrecompens’d for years of want, and pain, And close on them the portals of the grave?

Ah, no! the great Retributory Mind Will recompense, and may, perhaps, ordain Some future mode of being, more refin’d Than ours, less sullied with inherent stain;

Less torn by passion, and less prone to sin, Their duty easier, trial less severe, Till their firm faith, and virtue prov’d, may win The wreaths of life in yon Eternal Sphere.

She appears to have liked all things bright and beautiful. “It is too seldom,” she wrote, “that people express a conscious enjoyment of the present. While regret is busy with the past, and expectation with the future, _ennui_ usurps the place of cheerful feelings, and thinks coldly of the social, and yawns through the studious hour.” But as to Balls, she tells us, “I am one of the creatures that love not Balls in general.”

Had she lived now, she probably would have approved of women having votes, for, concerning a book published in her life-time, entitled, “Rights of Woman,” she wrote:—“It has, by turns, pleased and displeased, startled, and half-convinced me that its author is oftener right than wrong. Though the ideas of absolute equality in the sexes are carried too far, and though they certainly militate against St. Paul’s maxims concerning that important compact, yet they do expose a train of mischievous mistakes in the education of females.” We may note that Tom Paine, “the greatest of pamphleteers,” died in 1809, whose pamphlets, “The Rights of Man,” and “The Age of Reason,” achieved great success. Anna Seward sympathised with the views expressed in his books on the French Revolution, though she considered many of his views on politics far too fanciful to be put into practice; moreover, she thought they would, if adopted, “ruin the earth.”

Her affection for a Mr. Saville (“a man of sense, and a scholar”) who was for 48 years Vicar-choral of Lichfield Cathedral, appears to have been merely platonic, though deep and sincere. In a letter dated August 31st, 1803, she tells us that, “the dearest friend I had on earth, passed in one quarter of an hour, from apparent health and even gay vivacity, to the silence and ghastliness of death.” He died August 2nd, 1803, aged 67 years. She erected a monument to his memory in the Cathedral, and composed the verses inscribed on it. His vault is on the south side of the green surrounding the Cathedral.

In a letter to Sir Walter Scott, written in 1807, the poetess remarks that her “astonishment and disgust” rose to their utmost height while she read Wordsworth’s poem, “The Daffodils”—“dancing daffodils, ten thousand, as he says, in high dance in the breeze beside the river, whose waves dance with them, and the poet’s heart, we are told, danced too.” She deemed this unnatural writing, and mentions some of his verses she liked, notably the “Leech-Gatherer.” If he had written nothing else, that composition might stamp him, she thought, a poet of no common powers. Lovers of poetry generally, however, think “The Daffodils” one of the most beautiful poems ever written.

Mr. Alfred Austin, the Laureate of our own day, has recently written in an article, entitled, “The Essentials of Great Poetry,” that the English masters of song are, Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron, and he tells us that only the merest fraction of Wordsworth’s work is real poetry. Anna Seward would seem to have agreed with the selection of these names, if we substitute Pope for Byron. However, the latter was, we must recollect, only born in 1788. She would surely have welcomed Mr. Austin’s estimate of Wordsworth! Anna Seward considered Southey’s genius, beyond comparison, superior to that of Wordsworth. She wrote in 1796, “This is the age of wonders. A great one has lately arisen in the poetical world—the most extraordinary that ever appeared, as to juvenile powers, except that of the ill-starred Chatterton—Southey’s Joan of Arc, an epic poem of strength and beauty, by a youth of twenty.” Cowper was, to her mind, a vapourish egotist and a fanatic. She hated his Calvinism, and thought that the spirit of scornful denunciation everywhere prevails when Cowper reprehends the errors of mankind. Still, in answer to a request for her opinion of Cowper, she wrote, “He appears to me at once a fascinating, and a great poet; as a descriptive one, hardly excelled;” but she would not allow that his constitutional melancholy was any excuse for his misantrophy. She writes, “Dante is the only poetic author of high reputation, whom I cannot understand. Were you not struck with the inherent cruelty of that mind which could delight in suggesting pains and penalties at once so odious and so horrid?” We may remember that Dante has stated that “I found the original of my hell in the world which we inhabit.”

She did not like “gloomy religionists,” as she called the Calvinists. One acquaintance she evidently did not care for, because he talked “methodistically.” Hannah More, she lamented, “exposed herself to the reproach of that absurd and intolerant Methodism with which I have long believed her tainted.” She wrote to the Rev. R. Fellowes; “the eminent champion in our day of true and perfect Christianity,”—“How happily have you removed that dire impediment to rational faith, the doctrine of original sin, which the revived Calvinistic school, of which Mr. Wilberforce is the head, so injudiciously presses upon the attention of the public. . . . The licentious, or giddy votaries of fashion, wish to have an excuse for persisting in their career, and think they have found it in the dark and cruel difficulties in which resumed Calvinism involves Christianity.”

Anna Seward did not sing, but enjoyed music. She learnt, late in life, to handle the harpsichord sufficiently well to play it in little private concerts. Musical festivals she frequented, and admired Elizabeth Billington’s singing.

This vocalist is remembered in our day as one of England’s greatest singers, especially at Handel commemorations. “Handel,” Anna Seward said, “is as absolute a monarch of the human passions as Shakespeare.” . . . “Were Handel living, I should approach and address him with much more awe than any merely good sort of body upon the throne of England.” . . .

“Poetry itself, though so much the elder science, for music has been a science only since the harmonic combinations were discovered, possesses not a more inherent empire over the passions than music, of which Handel is the mighty master; than whom

‘Nothing went before so great, And nothing greater can succeed.’” . . .

“Milton knew music scientifically, and felt all its powers. To Samuel Johnson, the sweetest airs and most superb harmonies were but unmeaning noises. {39} I often regret that Milton and Handel were not contemporaries; that the former knew not the delight of hearing his own poetry heightened as Handel has heightened it.”

The poetess thought that “The contemptible rage for novel-reading is a pernicious and deplorably prevalent taste, which vitiates and palls the appetite for literary food of a more nutritive and wholesome kind. . . . I am well assured, that novels and political tracts are the only things generally read.” . . . Though disavowing a propensity to read and to love novels, yet she always considered the “Clarissa” and “Grandison” of Richardson—“glorious Richardson” she calls him—as the highest efforts of genius in our language, next to Shakespeare’s plays. She abjured the coarse, unfeeling taste of those who preferred Fielding’s romances to the glories of the Richardsonian pen. In 1792 she wrote that “the London papers had no authority for saying that I was writing a novel. The design of framing such a composition never occurred to me; though I am well aware that novels and political tracts are the only things generally read. If I could write like Richardson, I would turn novelist; but then my work would be too good to be popular;—for how is Richardson neglected!”

Mr. Andrew Lang, at the festival this year of the Royal Literary Fund, stated that the only literary people who prospered were “the novelist and the gentleman who remembered many people in his reminiscences. The essayist was no longer in favour. He had been killed by fiction and photographs. It was the purpose of the Royal Literary Fund to aid authors who needed assistance, and all who were not novelists did need it.” It seems that the public, a hundred years ago, had the same taste as the public of to-day! It is novels, novels, novels, which alone satisfy their appetites, when they feed on books!

“Wit was never my talent,” Anna Seward says, but she has recorded that when the “rulers of our Cathedral” decreed a four years’ silence for “the pealing organ and the full-voic’d choir,” because of alterations to be made there, she considered them “a little bedemoned, or much be-deaned—which is nearly the same thing.”

Anna Seward was a faithful and generous friend; her fault would appear to have been her conceit. As Mr. Lucas finely remarks, everything conspired to increase her self-esteem and importance, for the three things that might have corrected it were all lacking: poverty, London life, and marriage.

The poetess had several lovers, and was jilted by one, who was a native of Lichfield, and who afterwards became a General. “But overtures, not preceded by assiduous tenderness and, which expected to reap the harvest of love without having nursed its germs, suited not my native enthusiasm, nor were calculated to inspire it.” She wrote in 1767, from Gotham Rectory, “to a female mind, that that can employ itself ingeniously, that is capable of friendship, that is blessed with affluence, where are the evils of celibacy? For my part, I could never imagine that there were any, at least, compared to the _ennui_, the chagrin, the preclusion, which hearts, cast in the warm mould of passion, must feel in a marriage of mere esteem.”

As to sermons, she considered, “immoderate length in a sermon is a fault which excellence itself cannot expiate.” . . . “The present mode of dress in our young women of fashion, and _their_ imitators, is, for its gross immodesty, a proper subject of grave rebuke for the preacher.” . . . “Nothing is more disgusting to me, and, indeed, to the generality of people, than dictatorial egotism from the pulpit. Even in the learned and aged clergyman it is priestly arrogance. When we see that man in the pulpit whom we are in the habit of meeting at the festal board, at the card-table, perhaps seen join in the dance, and over whose frailties, in common with our own, no holy curtain has been drawn, we expect modest exhortation, sober reasoning, chastened denunciation.” . . .