Book 2 — A LITERARY GOSSIP WITH MISS MITFORD.[12]

A LITERARY GOSSIP WITH MISS MITFORD.^[12]

Draw the curtains, stir the fire, make a semicircle round the rug, and now for a causerie. Mary Russell Mitford shall talk to us out of the three volumes of reminiscences she has just given to the world; and whatever we have to say about the sundry things she discourseth upon therein shall be said in a cordial, and, at the same time, perfectly frank spirit, as becometh an honest fireside.

There she sits in the large chair, not quite so young as she was when she charmed all homesteads and hearth-stones with pictures of her own quiet Berkshire village, before railroads came to destroy the pretty wayside inns, where travelers used to be so snug and comfortable in tiny carpeted rooms with dimity curtains and glass cupboards full of antediluvian china: when little Red-riding-hoods were as plenty as blackberries, and the gipsies were never at a loss for secluded nooks and dells, where they could camp and cook, and tell stories under the hedge-rows, with a feeling of solitude and security they can never enjoy again in merry England. That was a long, long time ago; yet Mary Russell Mitford looks as ready as she was in her brightest days to enter with a relishing zest into the garden delights and book pleasures that have formed the occupation and happiness of her life, and made her name known and welcome wherever natural description and unaffected feeling are truly appreciated.

There she sits, with as homely and good-humored an air as if, instead of writing books and holding correspondence with half the celebrities of her time, she had no other vocation in this world than to attend to domestic affairs, prune shrubs on the lawn, dispense flannels at Christmas to the poor, and look after a neighboring school. Beside her chair stands her constant companion, a remarkable stick, with an odd sort of a head to it; and to make her actual presence the more palpable she should be surrounded by her inseparable friends—Fanchon, her little dog, that might be crouched at her feet, with its sensitive ears lifting and falling at every sound; her neat maid, Nancy, watching her on a low stool, and her boy, Henry—(we hope he is still a boy,) and that he will contrive, for her sake, to continue so—standing behind her chair.

That stick has a biography all to itself, and a very curious one it is. Sixty years ago it was a stick of quality, and belonged to some Dowager Duchess of Athol, who has no more reality for us than one of the embroidered ladies in an old piece of tapestry. So far as its original owner is concerned, the stick, for aught we know to the contrary, may be a phantom-stick, or a witch-stick; but, be that as it may, Miss Mitford’s father bought it at the sale of Berkshire House, where it was huddled by the auctioneer into a lot of old umbrellas, watering-pots, and flower-stands. It was then light, straight, and slender, nearly four feet high, polished, veined, and of a yellowish color, and of the order called a crook, such, says Miss Mitford, who is evidently very particular about it, as may be seen upon a chimney-piece figuring in the hand of some trim shepherdess of Dresden china. First, the housekeeper carried this stick—then, when the housekeeper died, Miss Mitford’s mother took possession of it; and from her it descended to Miss Mitford, herself, who, first out of whim, and afterward from habit and necessity, made it her trusty supporter on all occasions. The adventures of that stick are as full of perils and hair-breadth escapes as ever befell a South Sea whaler, or a Hudson’s bay trapper. Once it was lost in a fair, once forgotten in a marquee at a cricket match, and at another time stolen by a little boy, which cost its mistress a ten miles walk for its recovery. But the worst calamity that befell it was, when in the act of drawing down a rich branch of woodbine from the top of a hedge, its ivory crook came off, falling into a muddy ditch, and sinking so irretrievably that it was never recovered. The crook, it seems, was very handsome, and was bound with a silver rim, imparting a lady-like appearance to the stick, which at the first sight, gave you a hint of its aristocratic origin. In this extremity it was sent to a parasol shop to have a new crook put on, but the stupid people first docked many inches of its height, and then put on a bone umbrella-top, that fell off of its own accord in a few days. A good-natured friend remedied the second loss by fastening on an ebony top, which looks, after four or five years’ wear, a little graver, “and more fit for the poor old mistress, who having at first taken to a staff in sport, is now so lame as to be unable to walk without one.” The memoirs of a walking-stick may strike our readers as a mere waste of words and paper; but it is surprising what slight incidents rise into importance and interest in a country life, and how much the reality of its portraiture is indebted to trivial, but by no means unessential features. At all events, Miss Mitford’s stick is a stick of note, and should no more be passed over in silence than the ruff of Queen Elizabeth, or the flowing ringlets of Congreve.

Miss Mitford’s life seems to have opened upon her in that page of the old quarto edition of “Percy’s Reliques,” where the ballad of the “Children in the Wood” is to be found. It is the first book, almost the first event she remembers. They used to put her upon a table before she was three years old, when she was, as she says, only a sort of twin-sister to her own doll, to make her read leading articles out of the morning papers; and the reward for this terrible penance was to hear her mother recite the “Children in the Wood,” just as children are rewarded for taking nauseous things by a promise of a lump of sugar. At last, she got possession of the volumes themselves, and made acquaintance with the rest of the ballads, which possess as great a charm for her now as they did then; and she never looks upon the old books—the very same edition Dr. Johnson used to treat with a very learned and unwise superciliousness—that the days of her childhood, or doll-hood, do not come vividly back upon her.

She still keeps to the Percy collection. She does not seem to care about the lore that has been dug up since, or the antiquarian research that has come to the illustration of our old English poetry. Even the first edition contents her—she will have no other—she has an affection for it—it is enough for her purpose—it recalls the happy time when its pages disclosed a new world of enchantments to her—and she holds it in reverence amongst her literary penates. There is nothing in her reminiscences to show that she troubles herself about Percy societies, or Shakspeare societies, that she has ever dipped into Notes and Queries, or would think herself obliged to the officious critic who should detect a flaw in her two precious quarto volumes. The faith and the enthusiasm of childhood still cling to the well-known book, and would be very much put out by being disturbed at their devotions. And this is the character of Miss Mitford’s mind. She would rather believe in an old tradition than have it dispelled by the detective police that go about exploring chronicles and ferreting out damaging facts. She thinks a pleasant delusion better than a disagreeable truth; and it is to this fondness for old books, and old places, and the old stories that have grown up into a popular creed about them, that we may trace the paramount charm of simplicity and trustfulness, the cheerful spirit and the teeming good-nature which abound in her writings.

To us, we must acknowledge, this freshness of the heart and entire freedom of the imagination, is very delightful. Miss Mitford is not a critic; but she is something a great deal better and more agreeable. She is of too enjoyable a temperament for a critic; she has not a tinge of the malice or perversity of criticism in her genial nature. For this reason, her opinions are sometimes slightly heterodox, but it is always on the side of a good-will, and a hearty admiration of some gracious or gentle quality which she has been at the pains to discover, and which few people would take the trouble to look for. She speaks rapturously of Davis’ “Life of Curran;” has such innocent rural views of literature, that she thinks nobody reads Pope and Dryden now, and that George Darley is unknown as a poet to the English public; detects a close resemblance between the Irish novels of Banim and the romanticist creations of Victor Hugo, Sue, Dumas, and the rest of that school; thinks that few works are better worth reading than Moncton Milnes’ “Life of Keats,” not only for the sake of Keats, but of his “generous benefactors, Sir James Clarke and Mr. Severn;” regrets that certain works have fallen into oblivion, from which no effort of fashionable or literary patronage can redeem them; considers Willis, Lowell and Poe the great American poets; and hopes that Richardson’s novels and Walpole’s letters will never come to an end. Nobody’s judgment can suffer any damage from such amiable notions; and the world is always sure to derive benefit from the kindly spirit that overlooks a hundred defects and follies for the sake of a single virtue it finds hidden beneath them. We wish there were more Miss Mitfords, with her intellect, to set us so influential an example of toleration and a willingness to be pleased.

She confesses that she was a spoilt child, and that papa spoilt her. It is evident, from what we have just said, that sudden and high as was the growth of her reputation, the public have not spoilt her. What the applause of critics and the admiration of her readers failed to do, papa did. “Not content with spoiling me in-doors, he spoilt me out. How well I remember his carrying me round the orchard on his shoulder, holding fast my little three-year-old feet, whilst the little hands hung on to his pig-tail, which I called my bridle—those were days of pig-tails—hung so fast, and lugged so heartily, that sometimes the ribbon would come off between my fingers, and send his hair floating, and the powder flying down his back.” The papa who thus made her first acquainted with the orchard, occupies a still more prominent space in her subsequent reminiscences. From him to whom she was indebted for her early love of nature, and the happy hours of childhood, she also derived the heaviest sorrow of her life. The story is strange and melancholy.

A young physician, clever, handsome, gay, in a small town in Hampshire, Miss Mitford’s father won the hand of an heiress with a property of eight-and-twenty thousand pounds. With the exception of two hundred a year, settled on her as pin-money, the whole of this fortune was injudiciously placed at the free use of Dr. Mitford, who seems to have possessed every quality to make his wife happy—except prudence. Being an eager Whig, he plunged into election politics and made enemies; being very hospitable, he spent more money than he could afford; and, endeavoring to retrieve the waste by cards and speculation, he sank nearly the whole of his resources. In this extremity, he thought he would do better in a fresh place, and so the family removed to Lyme Regis, where they had a fine house, which twenty years before had been rented by the great Lord Chatham for the use of his sons. Here they led a very gay life for two or three seasons—balls, excursions, dinners; yet in the midst of it, Miss Mitford says, she felt a secret conviction that something was wrong—“such a foreshowing as makes the quicksilver in the barometer sink while the weather is still bright and clear.” Her father went ominously to London, and lost more money—she does not say how—all was now gone except the pin-money: friends departed one by one, and there was great hurry and confusion, and then everything was to be parted with, and everybody to be paid, and the family made a forced journey to London, part of which was performed in a tilted cart without springs, for lack of better conveyance.

Settled in a dingy, comfortless lodging in one of the suburbs beyond Westminster Bridge, Dr. Mitford’s constitutional vivacity returned. He used to take his little girl, then ten years old, in his hand about town to show her the sights; and one day they stopped at an Irish lottery-office, and showing her certain mysterious bits of paper with numbers on them, he desired her to choose one. She selected No. 2,224; but as this was only a quarter, and papa wanted to purchase a whole ticket, he desired her to choose again. But her heart was set on No. 2,224, because the numbers added together made up ten, and that day happened to be her tenth birth-day. Fortunately, the lottery-office man had the whole number in shares, and so the ticket was bought. She must relate the sequel in her own words.

“The whole affair was a secret between us, and my father, whenever he got me to himself, talked over our future twenty thousand pounds, just like Almaschar over his basket of eggs.

“Meanwhile time passed on, and one Sunday morning we were all preparing to go to church, when a face that I had forgotten, but my father had not, made its appearance. It was the clerk of the lottery-office. An express had just arrived from Dublin, announcing that No. 2,224 had drawn a prize of twenty thousand pounds, and he had hastened to communicate the good news.

“Ah, me! in less than twenty years what was left of the produce of the ticket so strangely chosen? What? except the Wedgwood dinner service that my father had had made to commemorate the event, with the Irish harp within the border on one side, and his family crest on the other. That fragile and perishable ware long outlasted the more perishable money!”

Miss Mitford relates these painful recollections with a serenity and patience that yield a lesson from which her readers may profit as largely as from the example of extravagance and recklessness which made so severe a demand on her feelings and her philosophy; and it is pleasant, after all her vicissitudes and jolting over the rough ways of the world, to find her in a tranquil cottage, in the midst of the scenery she loves, with her dog and her maid, her stick and her pony, enjoying as much felicity as can be reasonably looked for in the sunset of a chequered life.

Scattered over the volumes without much heed of chronology or sequence, are many little personal scraps that will hereafter enter into her biography, from the light which they throw upon the cast and color of her training. The papa, who was so indifferent to money, who was addicted to such ruinous habits, and who in his general relations with society, seems to have sacrificed the comfort and repose of his home, was, nevertheless, the most devoted of fathers. From her earliest childhood to the last hour of his life, he treated her with an affectionate and caressing tenderness that, in spite of his manifest errors, leaves an amiable impression of his character behind. One of the incidents on which she dwells with the greatest satisfaction was her first visit to London; and the mode of it is not only illustrative of the comparatively primitive habits of the time, but of the simplicity of the man in his domestic life. Having occasion to come to London in the middle of July, he suddenly announced his intention of taking her up with him in his gig; and at this open fashion they started, stopping to dine at Crauford Bridge in a little inn—then a very famous posting-house—whose pretty garden and Portugal laurels she still remembers; and then on to Hatchett’s Hotel in Piccadilly, where she stood looking out of the window and wondering when the crowd would go by; and in the evening she was so unconscious of fatigue from this exciting journey that papa took her to the Haymarket to see a comedy—one of the comedies, she says, that George III. used to enjoy so heartily, although what sort of comedy it was we know not, unless, which we shrewdly suspect, it was a specimen of Colman the Younger, or of the Morton and Reynolds school. She had seen plays before in a barn—but never such a play as this. The whole description of this trip to London is as good in its way as anything Fielding himself could have done.

“Dear papa,” in the pride of his heart, insisted upon making an accomplished musician of her, and would “stick her up” to the piano, although she had neither ear, taste, nor application. Her master was Hook, the father of the facetious Theodore, and she was taught in the schoolroom where Miss Landon passed the greater part of her life. Luckily they shut her up in a room to make her practise the harp, and as it was full of books she fell to reading, and under these auspicious circumstances made her first acquaintance with the plays of Voltaire and Molière. She was caught in the fact of laughing till the tears ran down her cheeks over that passage in the “Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” where the angry father apostrophises the galley, “Que diable alloit-il faire dans cette galère!” As her good stars had it, she was detected in her delinquency by the husband of the schoolmistress, who happened to be a Frenchman, an adorer of Molière, and a hater of music, and who, instead of chiding her for her neglect of the instrument, dismissed the harp-mistress, and made the young student a present of a cheap edition of Molière, for her own reading, which she has to this hour, in twelve unbound, foreign-looking, little volumes.

After these scenes, we find her in a cottage, at Taplow—at this time a grown-up lady—looking over a garden of honeysuckles, lilies, and roses, making excursions to Windsor, to Gray’s Lawn at Stoke Poges, to Burke’s at Beaconsfield, and to the College at Chalfont, where Milton found a refuge during the plague. We always associate Miss Mitford with cottages. We cannot imagine her living in a slated house, three stories high, with a carriage sweep, and steps up to the door—we cannot suffer her in our imagination to have any of the comforts and solidity of a well-built mansion about her; it must be a cottage, with its ivy creepers, its portico and latticed windows, and everything round it looking as green and rural as a wilderness of trees and shrubs, growing up luxuriantly in a warm, languid climate can make it. In short, we must smother her in flowers, or she is not the Miss Mitford that we know so well in the pastoral books she has written.

Turning from the autobiographical passages which form so interesting a part of these volumes, there are a variety of literary sketches of an equally attractive kind. Miss Mitford runs over a wide field of books and recollections; and from her extensive acquaintance with literary people, and the desultory character of her reading, she supplies an abundant store of anecdote and remark.

The following is new, and certainly very curious. The scene is an old, wooden, picturesque house, at Cambridge, in America, once the head quarters of Washington, but now the residence of Longfellow, the poet.

“One night the poet chanced to look out of his window, and saw by the vague starlight a figure riding slowly past the mansion. The face could not be distinguished; but the tall, erect person, the cocked hat, the traditional costume, the often-described white horse, all were present. Slowly he paced before the house, and then returned, and then again passed by, after which, neither horse nor rider were seen or heard of.”

Miss Mitford does not give us any authority for this anecdote; but the collectors of ghost stories are not very particular about authorities, and will be content to take it upon her own, as we do.

There is a sketch of Elizabeth Barrett, and a little biography attached to it, which will be read with interest. Miss Mitford’s acquaintance with her commenced fifteen years ago.

“Of a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on either side of a most expressive face large, tender eyes richly fringed by dark eye-lashes, a smile like a sunbeam, and such a look of youthfulness, that I had some difficulty in persuading a friend, in whose carriage we went together to Chiswick, that the translator of the ‘Prometheus of Æschylus,’ the authoress of the ‘Essay on Mind,’ was old enough to be introduced into company, or, in technical language, was out.”

It was in the following year that Miss Barrett broke a blood-vessel in the lungs, which consigned her to a long illness, during which she lost a favorite brother by one of those melancholy accidents which leave ineffaceable memories in the hearts of the survivors. He was drowned, with two companions, in sight of her windows at Torquay, whither she was ordered for change of air. This tragedy nearly killed her; and more than a year afterward, when she was removed to London by easy journeys, she told Miss Mitford that, “during that whole winter, the sound of the waves rang in her ears like the moans of one dying.”

William Cobbett was one of the notabilities to whom Miss Mitford was introduced by her father, whose intimacy with him was brought about through their mutual attachment to field sports. She describes him in his own house as a man of unfailing good humor and great heartiness; tall, stout and athletic, with a bright smile, and an air compounded of the soldier and the farmer, to which his habitual red waistcoat contributed not a little. His activity was something to be remembered, for he would begin the day by mowing his own lawn, a laborious pastime in which he beat his gardener, who was esteemed, except himself, the best mower in the parish.

Upon one occasion, Dr. Mitford and his daughter were invited to Cobbett’s to meet the wife and daughters of a certain Dr. Blamire; and as it appeared that Dr. Mitford had formerly flirted with Mrs. Blamire, some amusement was expected from seeing how they would meet after a lapse of twenty years, both of them having shaken off the old liaison, and married in the meanwhile.

“The most diverting part of this scene, very amusing to a bystander, was, that my father, the only real culprit, was the only person who throughout maintained the appearance and demeanor of the most unconscious innocence. He complimented Mrs. Blamire on her daughters—two very fine girls—inquired after his old friend, the doctor, and laughed and talked over by-gone stories with the one lady, just as if he had not jilted her, and played the kind and attentive husband to the other, just as if he had never in all his days made love to anybody except his own dear wife.”

Formerly, we frequently met with physicians who belonged to this class, and who were indebted for their professional success mainly to their social tactics and invincible pleasantry; but although you still occasionally fall in with a medical man who considers it as necessary to cultivate popularity amongst ladies as to attend to the practice of his art, the age of the flirt-physicians, we are happy to believe, has passed away.

Miss Mitford’s literary “recollections” bear rather more upon books than upon the authors of them. The book-gossip to which she invites us, traverses a considerable round of poets, novelists, and miscellaneous writers, and the specimens of their works over which she lingers with delight, make a body of extracts which enhance the value and variety of the publication. Her notes upon these selected passages discover a geniality and earnestness which will be grateful even to the reader who may sometimes have occasion to think that her praise is a little in excess, or who may doubt the judgment that has been shown in particular selections.

This tendency to a good-natured estimate of her favorite authors, shows itself most conspicuously in her admiration of certain poets, whose merits the world has not hitherto rated so highly. We are not sorry, nevertheless, to meet snatches of such people as Mr. Spencer and Miss Catharine Fanshawe—whose chief claim to notice is, that she was the author of the Enigma on the letter H, which used to be ascribed to Byron—for, except through the flattering medium of books like these, we are not very likely to see the vers de société that were in such request some fifty years ago, disinterred for our special delectation. They are abundantly curious, and discover a certain verbal facility and gayety of the thinnest and airiest kind, which will at least amuse, if not instruct the reader, by setting him thinking of the extinct modes and tastes to which they were addressed, and out of which they extracted their fugitive popularity. But poetasters of this order, however cheerfully and successfully they help to shed a grace on private life, and to give a sort of intellectual vivacity to social intercourse, can never be made to survive their hour in print. They must perish with the occasion that gave them birth; and you might as well hope to procure for the acted charade, if it were taken down in short-hand and published, the same success in the closet that it received on its impromptu delivery, as to procure for the graceful trifles thrown off for the amusement of a coterie, the honors of a permanent place in the library. They never aimed at such a destiny, and can never achieve it; and it may be doubted whether their fragile existence should be risked in print at all.

Of all the neglected, forgotten, or unknown books Miss Mitford has brought to life again, the Autobiography of Holcroft is the most deserving of resuscitation. We know no memoir of its kind—excepting the only one forbidden book in French literature—that possesses its charm of frankness, truthfulness of detail, and quiet development of character. Unfortunately it is nothing more than a fragment, consisting of seventeen chapters, dictated by Holcroft—a prolific author and translator—in his last illness; stopping short at an interesting point in his career, and furnishing such evidences of clear-sighted judgment, and happy skill in relation and portraiture, as to leave an indelible regret upon the mind of the reader at finding himself cast upon the grander diction of Hazlitt for the continuation of the narrative. The contrast is painful. The brilliancy and paradoxical genius of Hazlitt, rendered him of all men the most unfit to follow up the unpretending strength and simplicity of Holcroft; and the transition is something like being transported from the fresh air and pastoral beauty of a natural landscape into a severe Italian garden. There was but one point in common between them—and that was the most contracted and least characteristic of all—their agreement in politics. Holcroft was a man of larger powers, and a wider range of tastes than might be predicated from that party martyrdom which gave him so distressing a notoriety in the latter days of his life, to the partial eclipse of his literary reputation. But the subject is not likely to be revived now, nor would it repay the labors of a more competent editor. Miss Mitford, however, has done well in drawing attention to Holcroft’s book, and the extracts she has given from it will be read with interest; but it is only from the memoir itself, as a whole, tracing the course of the self-educated boy from his origin upward, that an adequate notion can be formed of the enthralling charm of that singular narrative.

We have exceeded our limits. A gossip, intended to occupy only five minutes or so, has already run over the brim of the measure which we proposed to fill up to the health of Miss Mitford. It is not the first time she has tempted us into an excess of this kind; but, if the reader will open her volumes over the fireside as we have done, we are mistaken if he do not find quite as much difficulty as we do now in shutting them up and putting them down again.