Chapter II: Part 2

He derided the “breathing odours of Araby,” and the Eastern travellers who imported this exotic atmosphere into Grosvenor Square. Yonng Bedwin Sands, who has “lived under tents,” who has published a quarto, ornamented with his own portrait in various oriental costumes, and who goes about accompanied by a black servant of most unprepossessing appearance, “just like another Brian de Bois Guilbert,” is only a degree less ridiculous than Clarence Bulbul, who gives Miss Tokely a piece of the sack in which an indiscreet Zuleika was drowned, and whose servant says to callers: “Mon maître est au divan,” or “Monsieur trouvera Monsieur dans son sérail.... He has coffee and pipes for everybody. I should like you to have seen the face of old Bowly, his college tutor, called upon to sit cross-legged on a divan, a little cup of bitter black mocha put into his hand, and a large amber-muzzled pipe stuck into his mouth before he could say it was a fine day. Bowly almost thought he had compromised his principles by consenting so far to this Turkish manner.” Bulbul’s sure and simple method of commending himself to young ladies is by telling them they remind him of a girl he knew in Circassia,--Ameena, the sister of Schamyle Bey. “Do you know, Miss Pim,” he thoughtfully observes, “that you would fetch twenty thousand piastres in the market at Constantinople?” Whereupon Miss Pim is filled with embarrassed elation. An English girl, conscious of being in no great demand at home, was naturally flattered as well as fluttered by the thought of having market value elsewhere. And perhaps this feminine instinct was at the root of “Lalla Rookh’s” long popularity in England.

THE CORRESPONDENT

Correspondences are like small-clothes before the invention of
suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.--SYDNEY SMITH to MRS.
CROWE.

In this lamentable admission, in this blunt and revolutionary sentiment, we hear the first clear striking of a modern note, the first gasping protest against the limitless demands of letter-writing. When Sydney Smith was a little boy, it was not impossible to keep a correspondence up; it was impossible to let it go. He was ten years old when Sir William Pepys copied out long portions of Mrs. Montagu’s letters, and left them as a legacy to his heirs. He was twelve years old when Miss Anna Seward--the “Swan of Lichfield”--copied thirteen pages of description which the Rev. Thomas Sedgwick Whalley had written her from Switzerland, and sent them to her friend, Mr. William Hayley. She called this “snatching him to the Continent by Whalleyan magic.” What Mr. Hayley called it we do not know; but he had his revenge, for the impartial “Swan” copied eight verses of an “impromptu” which Mr. Hayley had written upon her, and sent them in turn to Mr. Whalley;--thus making each friend a scourge to the other, and widening the network of correspondence which had enmeshed the world.

It is impossible not to feel a trifle envious of Mr. Whalley, who looms before us as the most petted and accomplished of clerical bores, of “literary and chess-playing divines.” He was but twenty-six when the kind-hearted Bishop of Ely presented him with the living of Hagworthingham, stipulating that he should not take up his residence there,--the neighbourhood of the Lincolnshire fens being considered an unhealthy one. Mr. Whalley cheerfully complied with this condition; and for fifty years the duties were discharged by curates, who could not afford good health; while the rector spent his winters in Europe, and his summers at Mendip Lodge. He was of an amorous disposition,--“sentimentally pathetic,” Miss Burney calls him,--and married three times, two of his wives being women of fortune. He lived in good society, and beyond his means, like a gentleman; was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds (who has very delicately and maliciously accentuated his resemblance to the tiny spaniel he holds in his arms); and died of old age, in the comfortable assurance that he had lost nothing the world could give. A voluminous correspondence--afterwards published in two volumes--afforded scope for that clerical diffuseness which should have found its legitimate outlet in the Hagworthingham pulpit.

The Rev. Augustus Jessup has recorded a passionate admiration for Cicero’s letters, on the ground that they never describe scenery; but Mr. Whalley’s letters seldom do anything else. He wrote to Miss Sophia Weston a description of Vaucluse, which fills three closely printed pages. Miss Weston copied every word, and sent it to Miss Seward, who copied every word of her copy, and sent it to the long-suffering Mr. Hayley, with the remark that Mr. Whalley and Petrarch were “kindred spirits.” Later on this kinship was made pleasantly manifest by the publication of “Edwy and Edilda,” which is described as a “domestic epic,” and which Mr. Whalley’s friends considered to be a moral bulwark as well as an epoch-making poem. Indeed, we find Miss Seward imploring him to republish it, on the extraordinary ground that it will add to his happiness in heaven to know that the fruits of his industry “continue to inspire virtuous pleasure through passing generations.” It is animating to contemplate the celestial choirs congratulating the angel Whalley at intervals on the “virtuous pleasure” inspired by “Edwy and Edilda.” “This,” says Mr. Kenwigs, “is an ewent at which Evin itself looks down.”

There was no escape from the letter-writer who, a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five years ago, captured a coveted correspondent. It would have been as easy to shake off an octopus or a boa-constrictor. Miss Seward opened her attack upon Sir Walter Scott, whom she had never seen, with a long and passionate letter, lamenting the death of a friend whom Scott had never seen. She conjured him not to answer this letter, because she was “dead to the world.” Scott gladly obeyed, content that the lady should be at least dead to him, which was the last possibility she contemplated. Before twelve months were out they were in brisk correspondence, an acquaintance was established, and when she died in earnest, some years later, he found himself one of her literary executors, and twelve quarto manuscript volumes of her letters waiting to be published. These Scott wisely refused to touch; but he edited her poems,--a task he much disliked,--wrote the epitaph on her monument in Lichfield Cathedral, and kindly maintained that, although her sentimentality appalled him, and her enthusiasm chilled his soul, she was a talented and pleasing person.

The most formidable thing about the letters of this period--apart from their length--is their eloquence. It bubbles and seethes over every page. Miss Seward, writing to Mrs. Knowles in 1789 upon the dawning of the French Revolution, of which she understood no more than a canary, pipes an ecstatic trill. “So France has dipped her lilies in the living stream of American freedom, and bids her sons be slaves no longer. In such a contest the vital sluices must be wastefully opened; but few English hearts I hope there are that do not wish victory may sit upon the swords that freedom has unsheathed.” It sounds so exactly like the Americans in “Martin Chuzzlewit” that one doubts whether Mr. Jefferson Brick or the Honourable Elijah Pogram really uttered the sentiment; while surely to Mrs. Hominy, and not to the Lichfield Swan, must be credited this beautiful passage about a middle-aged but newly married couple: “The berries of holly, with which Hymen formed that garland, blush through the snows of time, and dispute the prize of happiness with the roses of youth;--and they are certainly less subject to the blights of expectation and palling fancy.”

It is hard to conceive of a time when letters like these were sacredly treasured by the recipients (our best friend, the waste-paper basket, seems to have been then unknown); when the writers thereof bequeathed them as a legacy to the world; and when the public--being under no compulsion--bought six volumes of them as a contribution to English literature. It is hard to think of a girl of twenty-one writing to an intimate friend as Elizabeth Robinson, afterwards the “great” Mrs. Montagu, wrote to the young Duchess of Portland, who appears to have ventured upon a hope that they were having a mild winter in Kent.

“I am obliged to your Grace for your good wishes of fair weather; sunshine gilds every object, but, alas! December is but cloudy weather, how few seasons boast many days of calm! April, which is the blooming youth of the year, is as famous for hasty showers as for gentle sunshine. May, June, and July have too much heat and violence, the Autumn withers the Summer’s gayety, and in the Winter the hopeful blossoms of Spring and fair fruits of Summer are decayed, and storms and clouds arise.”

After these obvious truths, for which the almanac stands responsible, Miss Robinson proceeds to compare human life to the changing year, winding up at the close of a dozen pages: “Happy and worthy are those few whose youth is not impetuous, nor their age sullen; they indeed should be esteemed, and their happy influence courted.”

Twenty-one, and ripe for moral platitudes! What wonder that we find the same lady, when crowned with years and honours, writing to the son of her friend, Lord Lyttelton, a remorselessly long letter of precept and good counsel, which that young gentleman (being afterwards known as the wicked Lord Lyttelton) seems never to have taken to heart.

“The morning of life, like the morning of the day, should be dedicated to business. Give it therefore, dear Mr. Lyttelton, to strenuous exertion and labour of mind, before the indolence of the meridian hour, or the unabated fervour of the exhausted day, renders you unfit for severe application.”

“Unabated fervour of the exhausted day” is a phrase to be commended. We remember with awe that Mrs. Montagu was the brightest star in the chaste firmament of female intellect;--“the first woman for literary knowledge in England,” wrote Mrs. Thrale; “and, if in England, I hope I may say in the world.” We hope so, indeed. None but a libertine would doubt it. And no one less contumelious than Dr. Johnson ever questioned Mrs. Montagu’s supremacy. She was, according to her great-grandniece, Miss Climenson, “adored by men,” while “purest of the pure”; which was equally pleasant for herself and for Mr. Montagu. She wrote more letters, with fewer punctuation marks, than any Englishwoman of her day; and her nephew, the fourth Baron Rokeby, nearly blinded himself in deciphering the two volumes of undated correspondence which were printed in 1810. Two more followed in 1813, after which the gallant Baron either died at his post or was smitten with despair; for sixty-eight cases of letters lay undisturbed for the best part of a century, when they passed into Miss Climenson’s hands. This intrepid lady received them--so she says--with “unbounded joy”; and has already published two fat volumes, with the promise of several others in the near future. “Les morts n’écrivent point,” said Madame de Maintenon hopefully; but of what benefit is this inactivity, when we still continue to receive their letters?

Miss Elizabeth Carter, called by courtesy Mrs. Carter, was the most vigorous of Mrs. Montagu’s correspondents. Although a lady of learning, who read Greek and had dipped into Hebrew, she was far too “humble and unambitious” to claim an acquaintance with the exalted mistress of Montagu House; but that patroness of literature treated her with such true condescension that they were soon on the happiest terms. When Mrs. Montagu writes to Miss Carter that she has seen the splendid coronation of George III, Miss Carter hastens to remind her that such splendour is for majesty alone.

“High rank and power require every external aid of pomp and éclat that may awe and astonish spectators by the ideas of the magnificent and sublime; while the ornaments of more equal conditions should be adapted to the quiet tenour of general life, and be content to charm and engage by the gentler graces of the beautiful and pleasing.”

Mrs. Montagu _was_ fond of display. All her friends admitted, and some deplored the fact. But surely there was no likelihood of her appropriating the coronation services as a feature for the entertainments at Portman Square.

Advice, however, was the order of the day. As the excellent Mrs. Chapone wrote to Sir William Pepys: “It is a dangerous commerce for friends to praise each other’s Virtues, instead of reminding each other of duties and of failings.” Yet a too robust candour carried perils of its own, for Miss Seward having written to her “beloved Sophia Weston” with “an ingenuousness which I thought necessary for her welfare, but which her high spirits would not brook,” Sophia was so unaffectedly angry that twelve years of soothing silence followed.

Another wonderful thing about the letter-writers, especially the female letter-writers, of this engaging period is the wealth of hyperbole in which they rioted. Nothing is told in plain terms. Tropes, metaphors, and similes adorn every page; and the supreme elegance of the language is rivalled only by the elusiveness of the idea, which is lost in an eddy of words. Marriage is always alluded to as the “hymeneal torch,” or the “hymeneal chain,” or “hymeneal emancipation from parental care.” Birds are “feathered muses,” and a heart is a “vital urn.” When Mrs. Montagu writes to Mr. Gilbert West, that “miracle of the Moral World,” to condole with him on his gout, she laments that his “writing hand, first dedicated to the Muses, then with maturer judgment consecrated to the Nymphs of Solyma, should be led captive by the cruel foe.” If Mr. West chanced not to know who or what the Nymphs of Solyma were, he had the intelligent pleasure of finding out. Miss Seward describes Mrs. Tighe’s sprightly charms as “Aonian inspiration added to the cestus of Venus”; and speaks of the elderly “ladies of Llangollen” as, “in all but the voluptuous sense, Armidas of its bowers.” Duelling is to her “the murderous punctilio of Luciferian honour.” A Scotch gentleman who writes verse is “a Cambrian Orpheus”; a Lichfield gentleman who sketches is “our Lichfield Claude”; and a budding clerical writer is “our young sacerdotal Marcellus.” When the “Swan” wished to apprise Scott of Dr. Darwin’s death, it never occurred to her to write, as we in this dull age should do: “Dr. Darwin died last night,” or, “Poor Dr. Darwin died last night.” She wrote: “A bright luminary in this neighbourhood recently shot from his sphere with awful and deplorable suddenness”;--thus pricking Sir Walter’s imagination to the wonder point before descending to facts. Even the rain and snow were never spoken of in the plain language of the Weather Bureau; and the elements had a set of allegories all their own. Miss Carter would have scorned to take a walk by the sea. She “chased the ebbing Neptune.” Mrs. Chapone was not blown by the wind. She was “buffeted by Eolus and his sons.” Miss Seward does not hope that Mr. Whalley’s rheumatism is better; but that he has overcome “the malinfluence of marine damps, and the monotonous murmuring of boundless waters.” Perhaps the most triumphant instance on record of sustained metaphor is Madame d’Arblay’s account of Mrs. Montagu’s yearly dinner to the London chimney-sweeps, in which the word sweep is never once used, so that the editor was actually compelled to add a footnote to explain what the lady meant. The boys are “jetty objects,” “degraded outcasts from society,” and “sooty little agents of our most blessed luxury.” They are “hapless artificers who perform the most abject offices of any authorized calling”; they are “active guardians of our blazing hearth”; but plain chimney-sweeps, never! Madame d’Arblay would have perished at the stake before using so vulgar and obvious a term.

How was this mass of correspondence preserved? How did it happen that the letters were never torn up, or made into spills,--the common fate of all such missives when I was a little girl. Granted that Miss Carter treasured Mrs. Montagu’s letters (she declared fervidly she could never be so barbarous as to destroy one), and that Mrs. Montagu treasured Miss Carter’s. Granted that Miss Weston treasured Mr. Whalley’s, and that Mr. Whalley treasured Miss Weston’s. Granted that Miss Seward provided against all contingencies by copying her own letters into fat blank books before they were mailed, elaborating her spineless sentences, and omitting everything she deemed too trivial or too domestic for the public ear. But is it likely that young Lyttelton at Oxford laid sacredly away Mrs. Montagu’s pages of good counsel, or that young Franks at Cambridge preserved the ponderous dissertations of Sir William Pepys? Sir William was a Baronet, a Master in Chancery, and--unlike his famous ancestor--a most respectable and exemplary gentleman. His innocent ambition was to be on terms of intimacy with the literary lights of his day. He knew and ardently admired Dr. Johnson, who in return detested him cordially. He knew and revered, “in unison with the rest of the world,” Miss Hannah More. He corresponded at great length with lesser lights,--with Mrs. Chapone, and Mrs. Hartley, and Sir Nathaniel Wraxall. He wrote endless commentaries on Homer and Virgil to young Franks, and reams of good advice to his little son at Eton. There is something pathetic in his regret that the limitations of life will not permit him to be as verbose as he would like. “I could write for an hour,” he assures poor Franks, “upon that most delightful of all passages, the Lion deprived of its Young; but the few minutes one can catch amidst the Noise, hurry and confusion of an Assize town will not admit of any Classical discussions. But was I in the calm retirement of your Study at Acton, I have much to say to you, to which I can only allude.”

The publication of scores and scores of such letters, all written to one unresponsive young man at Cambridge (who is repeatedly reproached for not answering them), makes us wonder afresh who kept the correspondence; and the problem is deepened by the appearance of Sir William’s letters to his son. This is the way the first one begins:--

“MY DEAR BOY,--I cannot let a Post escape me without giving you the
Pleasure of knowing how much you have gladdened the Hearts of two
as affectionate Parents as ever lived; when you tell us that the
Principles of Religion begin already to exert their efficacy in
making you look down with contempt on the wretched grovelling Vices
with which you are surrounded, you make the most delightful Return
you can ever make for our Parental Care and Affection; you make Us
at Peace with Ourselves; and enable us to hope that our dear Boy
will Persevere in that Path which will ensure the greatest Share of
Comfort here, and a certainty of everlasting Happiness hereafter.”

I am disposed to think that Sir William made a fair copy of this letter and of others like it, and laid them aside as models of parental exhortation. Whether young Pepys was a little prig, or a particularly accomplished little scamp (and both possibilities are open to consideration), it seems equally unlikely that an Eton boy’s desk would have proved a safe repository for such ample and admirable discourses.

The publication of Cowper’s letters in 1803 and 1804 struck a chill into the hearts of accomplished and erudite correspondents. Poor Miss Seward never rallied from the shock of their “commonness,” and of their popularity. Here was a man who wrote about beggars and postmen, about cats and kittens, about buttered toast and the kitchen table. Here was a man who actually looked at things before he described them (which was a startling innovation); who called the wind the wind, and buttercups buttercups, and a hedgehog a hedgehog. Miss Seward honestly despised Cowper’s letters. She said they were without “imagination or eloquence,” without “discriminative criticism,” without “characteristic investigation.” Investigating the relations between the family cat and an intrusive viper was, from her point of view, unworthy the dignity of an author. Cowper’s love of detail, his terrestrial turn of mind, his humour, and his veracity were disconcerting in an artificial age. When Miss Carter took a country walk, she did not stoop to observe the trivial things she saw. Apparently she never saw anything. What she described were the sentiments and emotions awakened in her by a featureless principle called Nature. Even the ocean--which is too big to be overlooked--started her on a train of moral reflections, in which she passed easily from the grandeur of the elements to the brevity of life, and the paltriness of earthly ambitions. “How vast are the capacities of the soul, and how little and contemptible its aims and pursuits.” With this original remark, the editor of the letters (a nephew and a clergyman) was so delighted that he added a pious comment of his own.

“If such be the case, how strong and conclusive is the argument deduced from it, that the soul must be destined to another state more suitable to its views and powers. It is much to be lamented that Mrs. Carter did not pursue this line of thought any further.”

People who bought nine volumes of a correspondence like this were expected, as the editor warns them, to derive from it “moral, literary, and religious improvement.” It was in every way worthy of a lady who had translated Epictetus, and who had the “great” Mrs. Montagu for a friend. But, as Miss Seward pathetically remarked, “any well-educated person, with talents not above the common level, produces every day letters as well worth attention as most of Cowper’s, especially as to diction.” The perverseness of the public in buying, in reading, in praising these letters, filled her with pained bewilderment. Not even the writer’s sincere and sad piety, his tendency to moralize, and the transparent innocence of his life could reconcile her to plain transcripts from nature, or to such an unaffecting incident as this:--

“A neighbour of mine in Silver End keeps an ass; the ass lives on the other side of the garden wall, and I am writing in the greenhouse. It happens that he is this morning most musically disposed; either cheered by the fine weather, or by some new tune which he has just acquired, or by finding his voice more harmonious than usual. It would be cruel to mortify so fine a singer, therefore I do not tell him that he interrupts and hinders me; but I venture to tell you so, and to plead his performance in excuse of my abrupt conclusion.”

Here is not only the “common” diction which Miss Seward condemned, but a very common casualty, which she would have naturally deemed beneath notice. Cowper wrote a great deal about animals, and always with fine and humorous appreciation. He sought relief from the hidden torment of his soul in the contemplation of creatures who fill their place in life without morals, and without misgivings. We know what safe companions they were for him when we read his account of his hares, of his kitten dancing on her hind legs,--“an exercise which she performs with all the grace imaginable,”--and of his goldfinches amorously kissing each other between the cage wires. When Miss Seward bent her mind to “the lower orders of creation,” she did not describe them at all; she gave them the benefit of that “discriminative criticism” which she felt that Cowper lacked. Here, for example, is her thoughtful analysis of man’s loyal servitor, the dog:--

“That a dog is a noble, grateful, faithful animal we must all be conscious, and deserves a portion of man’s tenderness and care;--yet, from its utter incapacity of more than glimpses of rationality, there is a degree of insanity, as well as of impoliteness to his acquaintance, and of unkindness to his friends, in lavishing so much more of his attention in the first instance, and of affection in the latter, upon it than upon them.”

It sounds like a parody on a great living master of complex prose. By its side, Cowper’s description of Beau is certainly open to the reproach of plainness.

“My dog is a spaniel. Till Miss Gunning begged him, he was the property of a farmer, and had been accustomed to lie in the chimney corner among the embers till the hair was singed from his back, and nothing was left of his tail but the gristle. Allowing for these disadvantages, he is really handsome; and when nature shall have furnished him with a new coat, a gift which, in consideration of the ragged condition of his old one, it is hoped she will not long delay, he will then be unrivalled in personal endowments by any dog in this country.”

No wonder the Lichfield Swan was daunted by the inconceivable popularity of such letters. No wonder Miss Hannah More preferred Akenside to Cowper. What had these eloquent ladies to do with quiet observation, with sober felicity of phrase, with “the style of honest men”!

THE NOVELIST

Soft Sensibility, sweet Beauty’s soul!
Keeps her coy state, and animates the whole.

HAYLEY.

Readers of Miss Burney’s Diary will remember her maidenly confusion when Colonel Fairly (the Honourable Stephen Digby) recommends to her a novel called “Original Love-Letters between a Lady of Quality and a Person of Inferior Station.” The authoress of “Evelina” and “Cecilia”--then thirty-six years of age--is embarrassed by the glaring impropriety of this title. In vain Colonel Fairly assures her that the book contains “nothing but good sense, moral reflections, and refined ideas, clothed in the most expressive and elegant language.” Fanny, though longing to read a work of such estimable character, cannot consent to borrow, or even discuss, anything so compromising as love-letters; and, with her customary coyness, murmurs a few words of denial. Colonel Fairly, however, is not easily daunted. Three days later he actually brings the volume to that virginal bower, and asks permission to read portions of it aloud, excusing his audacity with the solemn assurance that there was no person, not even his own daughter, in whose hands he would hesitate to place it. “It was now impossible to avoid saying that I should like to hear it,” confesses Miss Burney. “I should seem else to doubt either his taste or his delicacy, while I have the highest opinion of both.” So the book is produced, and the fair listener, bending over her needlework to hide her blushes, acknowledges it to be “moral, elegant, feeling, and rational,” while lamenting that the unhappy nature of its title makes its presence a source of embarrassment.

This edifying little anecdote sheds light upon a palmy period of propriety. Miss Burney’s self-consciousness, her superhuman diffidence, and the “delicious confusion” which overwhelmed her upon the most insignificant occasions, were beacon lights to her “sisters of Parnassus,” to the less distinguished women who followed her brilliant lead. The passion for novel-reading was asserting itself for the first time in the history of the world as a dominant note of femininity. The sentimentalities of fiction expanded to meet the woman’s standard, to satisfy her irrational demands. “If the story-teller had always had mere men for an audience,” says an acute English critic, “there would have been no romance; nothing but the improving fable, or the indecent anecdote.” It was the woman who, as Miss Seward sorrowfully observed, sucked the “sweet poison” which the novelist administered; it was the woman who stooped conspicuously to the “reigning folly” of the day.

The particular occasion of this outbreak on Miss Seward’s part was the extraordinary success of a novel, now long forgotten by the world, but which in its time rivalled in popularity “Evelina,” and the well-loved “Mysteries of Udolpho.” Its plaintive name is “Emmeline; or the Orphan of the Castle,” and its authoress, Charlotte Smith, was a woman of courage, character, and good ability; also of a cheerful temperament, which we should never have surmised from her works. It is said that her son owed his advancement in the East India Company solely to the admiration felt for “Emmeline,” which was being read as assiduously in Bengal as in London. Sir Walter Scott, always the gentlest of critics, held that it belonged to the “highest branch of fictitious narrative.” The Queen, who considered it a masterpiece, lent it to Miss Burney, who in turn gave it to Colonel Fairly, who ventured to observe that it was not “piquant,” and asked for a “Rambler” instead.

“Emmeline” is _not_ piquant. Its heroine has more tears than Niobe. “Formed of the softest elements, and with a mind calculated for select friendship and domestic happiness,” it is her misfortune to be loved by all the men she meets. The “interesting languor” of a countenance habitually “wet with tears” proves their undoing. Her “deep convulsive sobs” charm them more than the laughter of other maidens. When the orphan leaves the castle for the first time, she weeps bitterly for an hour; when she converses with her uncle, she can “no longer command her tears, sobs obliged her to cease speaking”; and when he urges upon her the advantages of a worldly marriage, she--as if that were possible--“wept more than before.” When Delamere, maddened by rejection, carries her off in a post-chaise (a delightful frontispiece illustrates this episode), “a shower of tears fell from her eyes”; and even a rescue fails to raise her spirits. Her response to Godolphin’s tenderest approaches is to “wipe away the involuntary betrayers of her emotion”; and when he exclaims in a transport: “Enchanting softness! Is then the safety of Godolphin so dear to that angelic bosom?” she answers him with “audible sobs.”

The other characters in the book are nearly as tearful. When Delamere is not striking his forehead with his clenched fist, he is weeping at Emmeline’s feet. The repentant Fitz-Edward lays his head on a chair, and weeps “like a woman.” Lady Adelina, who has stooped to folly, naturally sheds many tears, and writes an “Ode to Despair”; while Emmeline from time to time gives “vent to a full heart” by weeping over Lady Adelina’s infant. Godolphin sobs loudly when he sees his frail sister; and when he meets Lord Westhaven after an absence of four years, “the manly eyes of both brothers were filled with tears.” We wonder how Scott, whose heroines cry so little and whose heroes never cry at all, stood all this weeping; and, when we remember the perfunctory nature of Sir Walter’s love scenes,--wedged in any way among more important matters,--we wonder still more how he endured the ravings of Delamere, or the melancholy verses with which Godolphin from time to time soothes his despondent soul.

In deep depression sunk, the enfeebled mind
Will to the deaf cold elements complain;
And tell the embosomed grief, however vain,
To sullen surges and the viewless wind.

It was not, however, the mournfulness of “Emmeline” which displeased Miss Seward, but rather the occasional intrusion of “low characters”; of those underbred and unimpassioned persons who--as in Miss Burney’s and Miss Ferrier’s novels--are naturally and almost cheerfully vulgar. That Mr. William Hayley, author of “The Triumphs of Temper,” and her own most ardent admirer, should tune his inconstant lyre in praise of Mrs. Smith was more than Miss Seward could bear. “My very foes acquit me of harbouring one grain of envy in my bosom,” she writes him feelingly; “yet it is surely by no means inconsistent with that exemption to feel a little indignant, and to enter one’s protest, when compositions of mere mediocrity are extolled far above those of real genius.” She then proceeds to point out the “indelicacy” of Lady Adelina’s fall from grace, and the use of “kitchen phrases,” such as “she grew white at the intelligence.” “White instead of pale,” comments Miss Seward severely, “I have often heard servants say, but never a gentleman or a gentlewoman.” If Mr. Hayley desires to read novels, she urges upon him the charms of another popular heroine, Caroline de Lichtfield, in whom he will find “simplicity, wit, pathos, and the most exalted generosity”; and the history of whose adventures “makes curiosity gasp, admiration kindle, and pity dissolve.”

Caroline, “the gay child of Artless Nonchalance,” is at least a more cheerful young person than the Orphan. Her story, translated from the French of Madame de Montolieu, was widely read in England and on the Continent; and Miss Seward tells us that its author was indebted “to the merits and graces of these volumes for a transition from incompetence to the comforts of wealth; from the unprotected dependence of waning virginity to the social pleasures of wedded friendship.” In plain words, we are given to understand that a rich and elderly German widower read the book, sought an acquaintance with the writer, and married her. “Hymen,” exclaims Miss Seward, “passed by the fane of Cytherea and the shrine of Plutus, to light his torch at the altar of genius”;--which beautiful burst of eloquence makes it painful to add the chilling truth, and say that “Caroline de Lichtfield” was written six years after its author’s marriage with M. de Montolieu, who was a Swiss, and her second husband. She espoused her first, M. de Crousaz, when she was eighteen, and still comfortably remote from the terrors of waning virginity. Accurate information was not, however, a distinguishing characteristic of the day. Sir Walter Scott, writing some years later of Madame de Montolieu, ignores both marriages altogether, and calls her Mademoiselle.

No rich reward lay in wait for poor Charlotte Smith, whose husband was systematically impecunious, and whose large family of children were supported wholly by her pen. “Emmeline, or the Orphan of the Castle” was followed by “Ethelinda, or the Recluse of the Lake,” and that by “The Old Manor House,” which was esteemed her masterpiece. Its heroine bears the interesting name of Monimia; and when she marries her Orlando, “every subsequent hour of their lives was marked by some act of benevolence,”--a breathless and philanthropic career. By this time the false-hearted Hayley had so far transferred to Mrs. Smith the homage due to Miss Seward that he was rewarded with the painful privilege of reading “The Old Manor House” in manuscript,--a privilege reserved in those days for tried and patient friends. The poet had himself dallied a little with fiction, having written, “solely to promote the interests of religion,” a novel called “The Young Widow,” which no one appears to have read, except perhaps the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom its author sent a copy.

In purity of motive Mr. Hayley was rivalled only by Mrs. Brunton, whose two novels, “Self-Control” and “Discipline,” were designed “to procure admission for the religion of a sound mind and of the Bible where it cannot find access in any other form.” Mrs. Brunton was perhaps the most commended novelist of her time. The inexorable titles of her stories secured for them a place upon the guarded book-shelves of the young. Many a demure English girl must have blessed these deluding titles, just as, forty years later, many an English boy blessed the inspiration which had impelled George Borrow to misname his immortal book “The Bible in Spain.” When the wife of a clergyman undertook to write a novel in the interests of religion and the Scriptures; when she called it “Discipline,” and drew up a stately apology for employing fiction as a medium for the lessons she meant to convey, what parent could refuse to be beguiled? There is nothing trivial in Mrs. Brunton’s conception of a good novel, in the standard she proposes to the world.

“Let the admirable construction of fable in ‘Tom Jones’ be employed to unfold characters like Miss Edgeworth’s; let it lead to a moral like Richardson’s; let it be told with the elegance of Rousseau, and with the simplicity of Goldsmith; let it be all this, and Milton need not have been ashamed of the work.”

How far “Discipline” and “Self-Control” approach this composite standard of perfection it would be invidious to ask; but they accomplished a miracle of their own in being both popular and permitted, in pleasing the frivolous, and edifying the devout. Dedicated to Miss Joanna Baillie, sanctioned by Miss Hannah More, they stood above reproach, though not without a flavour of depravity. Mrs. Brunton’s outlook upon life was singularly uncomplicated. All her women of fashion are heartless and inane. All her men of fashion cherish dishonourable designs upon female youth and innocence. Indeed the strenuous efforts of Laura, in “Self-Control,” to preserve her virginity may be thought a trifle explicit for very youthful readers. We find her in the first chapter--she is seventeen--fainting at the feet of her lover, who has just revealed the unworthy nature of his intentions; and we follow her through a series of swoons to the last pages, where she “sinks senseless” into--of all vessels!--a canoe; and is carried many miles down a Canadian river in a state of nicely balanced unconsciousness. Her self-control (the crowning virtue which gives its title to the book) is so marked that when she dismisses Hargrave on probation, and then meets him accidentally in a London print-shop after a four months’ absence, she “neither screamed nor fainted”; only “trembled violently, and leant against the counter to recover strength and composure.” It is not until he turns, and, “regardless of the inquisitive looks of the spectators, clasped her to his breast,” that “her head sunk upon his shoulder, and she lost all consciousness.” As for her heroic behaviour when the same Hargrave (having lapsed from grace) shoots the virtuous De Courcy in Lady Pelham’s summer-house, it must be described in the author’s own words. No others could do it justice.

“To the plants which their beauty had recommended to Lady Pelham, Laura had added a few of which the usefulness was known to her. Agaric of the oak was of the number; and she had often applied it where many a hand less fair would have shrunk from the task. Nor did she hesitate now. The ball had entered near the neck; and the feminine, the delicate Laura herself disengaged the wound from its covering; the feeling, the tender Laura herself performed an office from which false sensibility would have recoiled in horror.”

Is it possible that anybody except Miss Burney could have shrunk modestly from the sight of a lover’s neck, especially when it had a bullet in it? Could a sense of decorum be more overwhelmingly expressed? Yet the same novel which held up to our youthful great-grandmothers this unapproachable standard of propriety presented to their consideration the most intimate details of libertinism. There was then, as now, no escape from the moralist’s devastating disclosures.

One characteristic is common to all these faded romances, which in their time were read with far more fervour and sympathy than are their successors to-day. This is the undying and undeviating nature of their heroes’ affections. Written by ladies who took no count of man’s proverbial inconstancy, they express a touching belief in the supremacy of feminine charms. A heroine of seventeen (she is seldom older), with ringlets, and a “faltering timidity,” inflames both the virtuous and the profligate with such imperishable passions, that when triumphant morality leads her to the altar, defeated vice cannot survive her loss. Her suitors, reversing the enviable experience of Ben Bolt,--

weep with delight when she gives them a smile,
And tremble with fear at her frown.

They grow faint with rapture when they enter her presence, and, when she repels their advances, they signify their disappointment by gnashing their teeth, and beating their heads against the wall. Rejection cannot alienate their faithful hearts; years and absence cannot chill their fervour. They belong to a race of men who, if they ever existed at all, are now as extinct as the mastodon.

It was Miss Jane Porter who successfully transferred to a conquering hero that exquisite sensibility of soul which had erstwhile belonged to the conquering heroine,--to the Emmelines and Adelinas of fiction. Dipping her pen “in the tears of Poland,” she conveyed the glittering drops to the eyes of “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” whence they gush in rills,--like those of the Prisoner of Chillon’s brother. Thaddeus is of such exalted virtue that strangers in London address him as “excellent young gentleman,” and his friends speak of him as “incomparable young man.” He rescues children from horses’ hoofs and from burning buildings. He nurses them through small-pox, and leaves their bedsides in the most casual manner, to mingle in crowds and go to the play. He saves women from insult on the streets. He is kind even to “that poor slandered and abused animal, the cat,”--which is certainly to his credit. Wrapped in a sable cloak, wearing “hearse-like plumes” on his hat, a star upon his breast, and a sabre by his side, he moves with Hamlet’s melancholy grace through the five hundred pages of the story. “His unrestrained and elegant conversation acquired new pathos from the anguish that was driven back to his heart: like the beds of rivers which infuse their own nature with the current, his hidden grief imparted an indescribable interest and charm to all his sentiments and actions.”

What wonder that such a youth is passionately loved by all the women who cross his path, but whom he regards for the most part with “that lofty tranquillity which is inseparable from high rank when it is accompanied by virtue.” In vain Miss Euphemia Dundas writes him amorous notes, and entraps him into embarrassing situations. In vain Lady Sara Roos--married, I regret to say--pursues him to his lodgings, and wrings “her snowy arms” while she confesses the hopeless nature of her infatuation. The irreproachable Thaddeus replaces her tenderly but firmly on a sofa, and as soon as possible sends her home in a cab. It is only when the “orphan heiress,” Miss Beaufort, makes her appearance on the scene, “a large Turkish shawl enveloping her fine form, a modest grace observable in every limb,” that the exile’s haughty soul succumbs to love. Miss Beaufort has been admirably brought up by her aunt, Lady Somerset, who is a person of great distinction, and who gives “conversaziones,” as famous in their way as Mrs. Proudie’s.--“There the young Mary Beaufort listened to pious divines of every Christian persuasion. There she gathered wisdom from real philosophers; and, in the society of our best living poets, cherished an enthusiasm for all that is great and good. On these evenings, Sir Robert Somerset’s house reminded the visitor of what he had read or imagined of the School of Athens.”

Never do hero and heroine approach each other with such spasms of modesty as Thaddeus and Miss Beaufort. Their hearts expand with emotion, but their mutual sense of propriety keeps them remote from all vulgar understandings. In vain “Mary’s rosy lips seemed to breathe balm while she spoke.” In vain “her beautiful eyes shone with benevolence.” The exile, standing proudly aloof, watches with bitter composure the attentions of more frivolous suitors. “His arms were folded, his hat pulled over his forehead; and his long dark eye-lashes shading his downcast eyes imparted a dejection to his whole air, which wrapped her weeping heart round and round with regretful pangs.” What with his lashes, and his hidden griefs, the majesty of his mournful moods, and the pleasing pensiveness of his lighter ones, Thaddeus so far eclipses his English rivals that they may be pardoned for wishing he had kept his charms in Poland. Who that has read the matchless paragraph which describes the first unveiling of the hero’s symmetrical leg can forget the sensation it produces?

“Owing to the warmth of the weather, Thaddeus came out this morning without boots; and it being the first time the exquisite proportion of his limb had been seen by any of the present company excepting Euphemia” (why had Euphemia been so favoured?), “Lascelles, bursting with an emotion which he would not call envy, measured the count’s fine leg with his scornful eye.”

When Thaddeus at last expresses his attachment for Miss Beaufort, he does so kneeling respectfully in her uncle’s presence, and in these well-chosen words: “Dearest Miss Beaufort, may I indulge myself in the idea that I am blessed with your esteem?” Whereupon Mary whispers to Sir Robert: “Pray, Sir, desire him to rise. I am already sufficiently overwhelmed!” and the solemn deed is done.

“Thaddeus of Warsaw” may be called the “Last of the Heroes,” and take rank with the “Last of the Mohicans,” the “Last of the Barons,” the “Last of the Cavaliers,” and all the finalities of fiction. With him died that noble race who expressed our great-grandmothers’ artless ideals of perfection. Seventy years later, D’Israeli made a desperate effort to revive a pale phantom of departed glory in “Lothair,” that nursling of the gods, who is emphatically a hero, and nothing more. “London,” we are gravely told, “was at Lothair’s feet.” He is at once the hope of United Italy, and the bulwark of the English Establishment. He is--at twenty-two--the pivot of fashionable, political, and clerical diplomacy. He is beloved by the female aristocracy of Great Britain; and mysterious ladies, whose lofty souls stoop to no conventionalities, die happy with his kisses on their lips. Five hundred mounted gentlemen compose his simple country escort, and the coat of his groom of the chambers is made in Saville Row. What more could a hero want? What more could be lavished upon him by the most indulgent of authors? Yet who shall compare Lothair to the noble Thaddeus nodding his hearse-like plumes,--Thaddeus dedicated to the “urbanity of the brave,” and embalmed in the tears of Poland? The inscrutable creator of Lothair presented his puppet to a mocking world; but all England and much of the Continent dilated with correct emotions when Thaddeus, “uniting to the courage of a man the sensibility of a woman, and the exalted goodness of an angel” (I quote from an appreciative critic), knelt at Miss Beaufort’s feet.

Ten years later “Pride and Prejudice” made its unobtrusive appearance, and was read by that “saving remnant” to whom is confided the intellectual welfare of their land. Mrs. Elwood, the biographer of England’s “Literary Ladies,” tells us, in the few careless pages which she deems sufficient for Miss Austen’s novels, that there _are_ people who think these stories “worthy of ranking with those of Madame d’Arblay and Miss Edgeworth”; but that in their author’s estimation (and, by inference, in her own), “they took up a much more humble station.” Yet, tolerant even of such inferiority, Mrs. Elwood bids us remember that although “the character of Emma is perhaps too manœuvring and too plotting to be perfectly amiable,” that of Catherine Morland “will not suffer greatly even from a comparison with Miss Burney’s interesting Evelina”; and that “although one is occasionally annoyed by the underbred personages of Miss Austen’s novels, the annoyance is only such as we should feel if we were actually in their company.”

It was thus that our genteel great-grandmothers, enamoured of lofty merit and of refined sensibility, regarded Elizabeth Bennet’s relations.

ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS

Perhaps no man ever thought a line superfluous when he wrote it. We
are seldom tiresome to ourselves.--DR. JOHNSON.

It is commonly believed that the extinction of verse--of verse in the bulk, which is the way in which our great-grandfathers consumed it--is due to the vitality of the novel. People, we are told, read rhyme and metre with docility, only because they wanted to hear a story, only because there was no other way in which they could get plenty of sentiment and romance. As soon as the novel supplied them with all the sentiment they wanted, as soon as it told them the story in plain prose, they turned their backs upon poetry forever.

There is a transparent inadequacy in this solution of a problem which still confronts the patient reader of buried masterpieces. Novels were plenty when Mr. William Hayley’s “Triumphs of Temper” went through twelve editions, and when Dr. Darwin’s “Botanic Garden” was received with deferential delight. But could any dearth of fiction persuade us now to read the “Botanic Garden”? Were we shipwrecked in company with the “Triumphs of Temper,” would we ever finish the first canto? Novels stood on every English book-shelf when Fox read “Madoc” aloud at night to his friends, and they stayed up, so he says, an hour after their bedtime to hear it. Could that miracle be worked to-day? Sir Walter Scott, with indestructible amiability, reread “Madoc” to please Miss Seward, who, having “steeped” her own eyes “in transports of tears and sympathy,” wrote to him that it carried “a master-key to every bosom which common good sense and anything resembling a human heart inhabit.” Scott, unwilling to resign all pretensions to a human heart, tried hard to share the Swan’s emotions, and failed. “I cannot feel quite the interest I would like to do,” he patiently confessed.

If Southey’s poems were not read as Scott’s and Moore’s and Byron’s were read (give us another Byron, and we will read him with forty thousand novels knocking at our doors!); if they were not paid for out of the miraculous depths of Murray’s Fortunatus’s purse, they nevertheless enjoyed a solid reputation of their own. They are mentioned in all the letters of the period (save and except Lord Byron’s ribald pages) with carefully measured praise, and they enabled their author to accept the laureateship on self-respecting terms. They are at least, as Sir Leslie Stephen reminds us, more readable than Glover’s “Leonidas,” or Wilkie’s “Epigoniad,” and they are shorter, too. Yet the “Leonidas,” an epic in nine books, went through four editions; whereupon its elate author expanded it into twelve books; and the public, undaunted, kept on buying it for years. The “Epigoniad” is also in nine books. It is on record that Hume, who seldom dallied with the poets, read all nine, and praised them warmly. Mr. Wilkie was christened the “Scottish Homer,” and he bore that modest title until his death. It was the golden age of epics. The ultimatum of the modern publisher, “No poet need apply!” had not yet blighted the hopes and dimmed the lustre of genius. “Everybody thinks he can write verse,” observed Sir Walter mournfully, when called upon for the hundredth time to help a budding aspirant to fame.

With so many competitors in the field, it was uncommonly astute in Mr. Hayley to address himself exclusively to that sex which poets and orators call “fair.” There is a formal playfulness, a ponderous vivacity about the “Triumphs of Temper,” which made it especially welcome to women. In the preface of the first edition the author gallantly laid his laurels at their feet, observing modestly that it was his desire, however “ineffectual,” “to unite the sportive wildness of Ariosto and the more serious sublime painting of Dante with some portion of the enchanting elegance, the refined imagination, and the moral graces of Pope; and to do this, if possible, without violating those rules of propriety which Mr. Cambridge has illustrated, by example as well as by precept, in the ‘Scribleriad,’ and in his sensible preface to that elegant and learned poem.”

Accustomed as we are to the confusions of literary perspective, this grouping of Dante, Ariosto, and Mr. Cambridge does seem a trifle foreshortened. But our ancestors had none of that sensitive shrinking from comparisons which is so characteristic of our timid and thin-skinned generation. They did not edge off from the immortals, afraid to breathe their names lest it be held lèse-majesté; they used them as the common currency of criticism. Why should not Mr. Hayley have challenged a contrast with Dante and Ariosto, when Miss Seward assured her little world--which was also Mr. Hayley’s world--that he had the “wit and ease” of Prior, a “more varied versification” than Pope, and “the fire and the invention of Dryden, without any of Dryden’s absurdity”? Why should he have questioned her judgment, when she wrote to him that Cowper’s “Task” would “please and instruct the race of common readers,” who could not rise to the beauties of Akenside, or Mason, or Milton, or of his (Mr. Hayley’s) “exquisite ‘Triumphs of Temper’”? There was a time, indeed, when she sorrowed lest his “inventive, classical, and elegant muse” should be “deplorably infected” by the growing influence of Wordsworth; but, that peril past, he rose again, the bright particular star of a wide feminine horizon.

Mr. Hayley’s didacticism is admirably adapted to his readers. The men of the eighteenth century were not expected to keep their tempers; it was the sweet prerogative of wives and daughters to smooth the roughened current of family life. Accordingly the heroine of the “Triumphs,” being bullied by her father, a fine old gentleman of the Squire Western type, maintains a superhuman cheerfulness, gives up the ball for which she is already dressed, wreathes her countenance in smiles, and

with sportive ease,
Prest her Piano-forte’s favourite keys.

The men of the eighteenth century were all hard drinkers. Therefore Mr. Hayley conjures the “gentle fair” to avoid even the mild debauchery of siruped fruits,--

For the sly fiend, of every art possest,
Steals on th’ affection of her female guest;
And, by her soft address, seducing each,
Eager she plies them with a brandy peach.
They with keen lip the luscious fruit devour,
But swiftly feel its peace-destroying power.
Quick through each vein new tides of frenzy roll,
All evil passions kindle in the soul;
Drive from each feature every cheerful grace,
And glare ferocious in the sallow face;
The wounded nerves in furious conflict tear,
Then sink in blank dejection and despair.