Chapter IV: Part 4

This was poor encouragement for Dick, who had already tasted the sweets of application. It was better worth while for Miss Sally Spellwell to reach the perfection which her name implies, for _she_ was adopted by a rich old lady with a marriageable son,--“a young Gentleman of such purity of Morals and good Understanding as is not everywhere to be found.” In the breast of this paragon “strange emotions arise” at sight of the well-informed orphan; his mother, who sets a proper value on orthography, gives her full consent to their union; and we are swept from the contemplation of samplers and hornbooks to the triumphant conclusion: “Miss Sally Spellwell now rides in her coach and six.” Then follows the unmistakable moral:--

If Virtue, Learning, Goodness are your Aim,
Each pretty Miss may hope to do the same;

an anticipation which must have spurred many a female child to diligence. There was no ill-advised questioning of values in our great-grandmothers’ day to disturb this point of view. As the excellent Mrs. West observed in her “Letters to a young Lady,” a book sanctioned by bishops, and dedicated to the Queen: “We unquestionably were created to be the wedded mates of man. Nature intended that man should sue, and woman coyly yield.”

The most appalling thing about the precocious young people of this period was the ease with which they slipped into print. Publishers were not then the adamantine race whose province it is now to blight the hopes of youth. They beamed with benevolence when the first fruits of genius were confided to their hands. Bishop Thirlwall’s first fruits, his “Primitiæ,” were published when he was eleven years old, with a preface telling the public what a wonderful boy little Connop was;--how he studied Latin at three, and read Greek with ease and fluency at four, and wrote with distinction at seven. It is true that the parent Thirlwall appears to have paid the costs, to have launched his son’s “slender bark” upon seas which proved to be stormless. It is true also that the bishop suffered acutely in later years from this youthful production, and destroyed every copy he could find. But there was no proud and wealthy father to back young Richard Polwhele, who managed, when he was a schoolboy in Cornwall, to get his first volume of verse published anonymously. It was called “The Fate of Llewellyn,” and was consistently bad, though no worse, on the whole, than his maturer efforts. The title-page stated modestly that the writer was “a young gentleman of Truro School”; whereupon an ill-disposed critic in the “Monthly Review” intimated that the master of Truro School would do well to keep his young gentlemen out of print. Dr. Cardew, the said master, retorted hotly that the book had been published without his knowledge, and evinced a lack of appreciation, which makes us fear that his talented pupil had a bad half-hour at his hands.

Miss Anna Maria Porter--she who delighted “critical audiences” by reciting Shakespeare at five--published her “Artless Tales” at fifteen; and Mrs. Hemans was younger still when her “Blossoms of Spring” bloomed sweetly upon English soil. Some of the “Blossoms” had been written before she was ten. The volume was a “fashionable quarto,” was dedicated to that hardy annual, the Prince Regent, and appears to have been read by adults. It is recorded that an unkind notice sent the little girl crying to bed; but as her “England and Spain; or Valour and Patriotism” was published nine months later, and as at eighteen she “beamed forth with a strength and brilliancy that must have shamed her reviewer,” we cannot feel that her poetic development was very seriously retarded.

And what of the marvellous children whose subsequent histories have been lost to the world? What of the two young prodigies of Lichfield, “Aonian flowers of early beauty and intelligence,” who startled Miss Seward and her friends by their “shining poetic talents,” and then lapsed into restful obscurity? What of the wonderful little girl (ten years old) whom Miss Burney saw at Tunbridge Wells; who sang “like an angel,” conversed like “an informed, cultivated, and sagacious woman,” played, danced, acted with all the grace of a comédienne, wept tears of emotion without disfiguring her pretty face, and, when asked if she read the novels of the day (what a question!), replied with a sigh: “But too often! I wish I did not.” Miss Burney and Mrs. Thrale were so impressed--as well they might be--by this little Selina Birch, that they speculated long and fondly upon the destiny reserved for one who so easily eclipsed the other miraculous children of this highly miraculous age.

“Doubtful as it is whether we shall ever see the sweet Syren again,” writes Miss Burney, “nothing, as Mrs. Thrale said to her” (this, too, was well advised), “can be more certain than that we shall hear of her again, let her go whither she will. Charmed as we all were, we agreed that to have the care of her would be distraction. ‘She seems the girl in the world,’ Mrs. Thrale wisely said, ‘to attain the highest reach of human perfection as a man’s mistress. As such she would be a second Cleopatra, and have the world at her command.’

“Poor thing! I hope to Heaven she will escape such sovereignty and such honours!”

She did escape scot-free. Whoever married--let us hope he married--Miss Birch, was no Mark Antony to draw fame to her feet. His very name is unknown to the world. Perhaps, as “Mrs.--Something--Rogers,” she illustrated in her respectable middle age that beneficent process by which Nature frustrates the educator, and converts the infant Cleopatra or the infant Hypatia into the rotund matron, of whom she stands permanently in need.

THE EDUCATOR

The Schoolmaster is abroad.--LORD BROUGHAM.

It is recorded that Boswell once said to Dr. Johnson, “If you had had children, would you have taught them anything?” and that Dr. Johnson, out of the fulness of his wisdom, made reply: “I hope that I should have willingly lived on bread and water to obtain instruction for them; but I would not have set their future friendship to hazard for the sake of thrusting into their heads knowledge of things for which they might have neither taste nor necessity. You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets, and wonder, when you have done it, that they do not delight in your company.”

It is the irony of circumstance that Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb should have been childless, for they were the two eminent Englishmen who, for the best part of a century, respected the independence of childhood. They were the two eminent Englishmen who could have been trusted to let their children alone. Lamb was nine years old when Dr. Johnson died. He was twenty-seven when he hurled his impotent anathemas at the heads of “the cursed Barbauld crew,” “blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child.” By that time the educator’s hand lay heavy on schoolroom and nursery. In France, Rousseau and Mme. de Genlis had succeeded in interesting parents so profoundly in their children that French babies led a _vie de parade_. Their toilets and their meals were as open to the public as were the toilets and the meals of royalty. Their bassinettes appeared in salons, and in private boxes at the playhouse; and it was an inspiring sight to behold a French mother fulfilling her sacred office while she enjoyed the spectacle on the stage. In England, the Edgeworths and Mr. Day had projected a system of education which isolated children from common currents of life, placed them at variance with the accepted usages of society, and denied them that wholesome neglect which is an important factor in self-development. The Edgeworthian child became the pivot of the household, which revolved warily around him, instructing him whenever it had the ghost of a chance, and guarding him from the four winds of heaven. He was not permitted to remain ignorant upon any subject, however remote from his requirements; but all information came filtered through the parental mind, so that the one thing he never knew was the world of childish beliefs and happenings. Intercourse with servants was prohibited; and it is pleasant to record that Miss Edgeworth found even Mrs. Barbauld a dangerous guide, because little Charles of the “Early Lessons” asks his nurse to dress him in the mornings. Such a personal appeal, showing that Charles was on speaking terms with the domestics, was something which, in Miss Edgeworth’s opinion, no child should ever read; and she praises the solicitude of a mother who blotted out this, and all similar passages, before confiding the book to her infant son. He might--who knows?--have been so far corrupted as to ask his own nurse to button him up the next day.

Another parent, still more highly commended, found something to erase in _all_ her children’s books; and Miss Edgeworth describes with grave complacency this pathetic little library, scored, blotted, and mutilated, before being placed on the nursery shelves. The volumes were, she admits, hopelessly disfigured; “but shall the education of a family be sacrificed to the beauty of a page? Few books can safely be given to children without the previous use of the pen, the pencil, and the scissors. These, in their corrected state, have sometimes a few words erased, sometimes half a page. Sometimes many pages are cut out.”

Even now one feels a pang of pity for the little children who, more than a hundred years ago, were stopped midway in a story by the absence of half a dozen pages. Even now one wonders how much furtive curiosity was awakened by this process of elimination. To hover perpetually on the brink of the concealed and the forbidden does not seem a wholesome situation; and a careful perusal of that condemned classic, “Bluebeard,” might have awakened this excellent mother to the risks she ran. There can be no heavier handicap to any child than a superhumanly wise and watchful custodian, whether the custody be parental, or relegated to some phœnix of a tutor like Mr. Barlow, or that cock-sure experimentalist who mounts guard over “Émile,” teaching him with elaborate artifice the simplest things of life. We know how Tommy Merton fell from grace when separated from Mr. Barlow; but what _would_ have become of Émile if “Jean Jacques” had providentially broken his neck? What would have become of little Caroline and Mary in Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Original Stories,” if Mrs. Mason--who is Mr. Barlow in petticoats--had ceased for a short time “regulating the affections and forming the minds” of her helpless charges? All these young people are so scrutinized, directed, and controlled, that their personal responsibility has been minimized to the danger point. In the name of nature, in the name of democracy, in the name of morality, they are pushed aside from the blessed fellowship of childhood, and from the beaten paths of life.

That Mary Wollstonecraft should have written the most priggish little book of her day is one of those pleasant ironies which relieves the tenseness of our pity for her fate. Its publication is the only incident of her life which permits the shadow of a smile; and even here our amusement is tempered by sympathy for the poor innocents who were compelled to read the “Original Stories,” and to whom even Blake’s charming illustrations must have brought scant relief. The plan of the work is one common to most juvenile fiction of the period. Caroline and Mary, being motherless, are placed under the care of Mrs. Mason, a lady of obtrusive wisdom and goodness, who shadows their infant lives, moralizes over every insignificant episode, and praises herself with honest assiduity. If Caroline is afraid of thunderstorms, Mrs. Mason explains that _she_ fears no tempest, because “a mind is never truly great until the love of virtue overcomes the fear of death.” If Mary behaves rudely to a visitor, Mrs. Mason contrasts her pupil’s conduct with her own. “I have accustomed myself to think of others, and what they will suffer on all occasions,” she observes; “and this loathness to offend, or even to hurt the feelings of another, is an instantaneous spring which actuates my conduct, and makes me kindly affected to everything that breathes.... Perhaps the greatest pleasure I have ever received has arisen from the habitual exercise of charity in its various branches.”

The stories with which this monitress illustrates her precepts are drawn from the edifying annals of the neighbourhood, which is rich in examples of vice and virtue. On the one hand we have the pious Mrs. Trueman, the curate’s wife, who lives in a rose-covered cottage, furnished with books and musical instruments; and on the other, we have “the profligate Lord Sly,” and Miss Jane Fretful, who begins by kicking the furniture when she is in a temper, and ends by alienating all her friends (including her doctor), and dying unloved and unlamented. How far her mother should be held responsible for this excess of peevishness, when she rashly married a gentleman named Fretful, is not made clear; but all the characters in the book live nobly, or ignobly, up to their patronymics. When Mary neglects to wash her face--apparently that was all she ever washed--or brush her teeth in the mornings, Mrs. Mason for some time only hints her displeasure, “not wishing to burden her with precepts”; and waits for a “glaring example” to show the little girl the unloveliness of permanent dirt. This example is soon afforded by Mrs. Dowdy, who comes opportunely to visit them, and whose reluctance to perform even the simple ablutions common to the period is as resolute as Slovenly Peter’s.

In the matter of tuition, Mrs. Mason is comparatively lenient. Caroline and Mary, though warned that “idleness must always be intolerable, because it is only an irksome consciousness of existence” (words which happily have no meaning for childhood), are, on the whole, less saturated with knowledge than Miss Edgeworth’s Harry and Lucy; and Harry and Lucy lead rollicking lives by contrast with “Edwin and Henry,” or “Anna and Louisa,” or any other little pair of heroes and heroines. Edwin and Henry are particularly ill used, for they are supposed to be enjoying a holiday with their father, “the worthy Mr. Friendly,” who makes “every domestic incident, the vegetable world, sickness and death, a real source of instruction to his beloved offspring.” How glad those boys must have been to get back to school! Yet they court disaster by asking so many questions. All the children in our great-grandmothers’ story-books ask questions. All lay themselves open to attack. If they drink a cup of chocolate, they want to know what it is made of, and where cocoanuts grow. If they have a pudding for dinner, they are far more eager to learn about sago and the East Indies than to eat it. They put intelligent queries concerning the slave-trade, and make remarks that might be quoted in Parliament; yet they are as ignorant of the common things of life as though new-born into the world. In a book called “Summer Rambles, or Conversations Instructive and Amusing, for the Use of Children,” published in 1801, a little girl says to her mother: “Vegetables? I do not know what they are. Will you tell me?” And the mother graciously responds: “Yes, with a great deal of pleasure. Peas, beans, potatoes, carrots, turnips, and cabbages are vegetables.”

At least the good lady’s information was correct as far as it went, which was not always the case. The talented governess in “Little Truths” warns her pupils not to swallow young frogs out of bravado, lest perchance they should mistake and swallow a toad, which would poison them; and in a “History of Birds and Beasts,” intended for very young children, we find, underneath a woodcut of a porcupine, this unwarranted and irrelevant assertion:--

This creature shoots his pointed quills,
And beasts destroys, and men;
But more the ravenous lawyer kills
With his half-quill, the pen.

It was thus that natural history was taught in the year 1767.

The publication in 1798 of Mr. Edgeworth’s “Practical Education” (Miss Edgeworth was responsible for some of the chapters) gave a profound impetus to child-study. Little boys and girls were dragged from the obscure haven of the nursery, from their hornbooks, and the casual slappings of nursery-maids, to be taught and tested in the light of day. The process appears to have been deeply engrossing. Irregular instruction, object lessons, and experimental play afforded scant respite to parent or to child. “Square and circular bits of wood, balls, cubes, and triangles” were Mr. Edgeworth’s first substitutes for toys; to be followed by “card, pasteboard, substantial but not sharp-pointed scissors, wire, gum, and wax.” It took an active mother to superintend this home kindergarten, to see that the baby did not poke the triangle into its eye, and to relieve Tommy at intervals from his coating of gum and wax. When we read further that “children are very fond of attempting experiments in dyeing, and are very curious about vegetable dyes,” we gain a fearful insight into parental pleasures and responsibilities a hundred years ago.

Text-book knowledge was frowned upon by the Edgeworths. We know how the “good French governess” laughs at her clever pupil who has studied the “Tablet of Memory,” and who can say when potatoes were first brought into England, and when hair powder was first used, and when the first white paper was made. The new theory of education banished the “Tablet of Memory,” and made it incumbent upon parent or teacher to impart in conversation such facts concerning potatoes, powder, and paper as she desired her pupils to know. If books were used, they were of the deceptive order, which purposed to be friendly and entertaining. A London bookseller actually proposed to Godwin “a delightful work for children,” which was to be called “A Tour through Papa’s House.” The object of this precious volume was to explain casually how and where Papa’s furniture was made, his carpets were woven, his curtains dyed, his kitchen pots and pans called into existence. Even Godwin, who was not a bubbling fountain of humour, saw the absurdity of such a book; and recommended in its place “Robinson Crusoe,” “if weeded of its Methodism” (alas! poor Robinson!), “The Seven Champions of Christendom,” and “The Arabian Nights.”

The one great obstacle in the educator’s path (it has not yet been wholly levelled) was the proper apportioning of knowledge between boys and girls. It was hard to speed the male child up the stony heights of erudition; but it was harder still to check the female child at the crucial point, and keep her tottering decorously behind her brother. In 1774 a few rash innovators conceived the project of an advanced school for girls; one that should approach from afar a college standard, and teach with thoroughness what it taught at all; one that might be trusted to broaden the intelligence of women, without lessening their much-prized femininity. It was even proposed that Mrs. Barbauld, who was esteemed a very learned lady, should take charge of such an establishment; but the plan met with no approbation at her hands. In the first place she held that fifteen was not an age for school-life and study, because then “the empire of the passions is coming on”; and in the second place there was nothing she so strongly discountenanced as thoroughness in a girl’s education. On this point she had no doubts, and no reserves. “Young ladies,” she wrote, “ought to have only such a general tincture of knowledge as to make them agreeable companions to a man of sense, and to enable them to find rational entertainment for a solitary hour. They should gain these accomplishments in a quiet and unobserved manner. The thefts of knowledge in our sex are connived at, only while carefully concealed; and, if displayed, are punished with disgrace. The best way for women to acquire knowledge is from conversation with a father, a brother, or a friend; and by such a course of reading as they may recommend.”

There was no danger that an education conducted on these lines would result in an undue development of intelligence, would lift the young lady above “her own mild and chastened sphere.” In justice to Mrs. Barbauld we must admit that she but echoed the sentiments of her day. “Girls,” said Miss Hannah More, “should be led to distrust their own judgments.” They should be taught to give up their opinions, and to avoid disputes, “even if they know they are right.” The one fact impressed upon the female child was her secondary place in the scheme of creation; the one virtue she was taught to affect was delicacy; the one vice permitted to her weakness was dissimulation. Even her play was not like her brother’s play,--a reckless abandonment to high spirits; it was play within the conscious limits of propriety. In one of Mrs. Trimmer’s books, a model mother hesitates to allow her eleven-year-old daughter to climb three rounds of a ladder, and look into a robin’s nest, four feet from the ground. It was not a genteel thing for a little girl to do. Even her schoolbooks were not like her brother’s schoolbooks. They were carefully adapted to her limitations. Mr. Thomas Gisborne, who wrote a much-admired work entitled “An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex,” was of the opinion that geography might be taught to girls without reserve; but that they should learn only “select parts” of natural history, and, in the way of science, only a few “popular and amusing facts.” A “Young Lady’s Guide to Astronomy” was something vastly different from the comprehensive system imparted to her brother.

In a very able and subtle little book called “A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters,” by Dr. John Gregory of Edinburgh,--

He whom each virtue fired, each grace refined,
Friend, teacher, pattern, darling of mankind![1]

--we find much earnest counsel on this subject. Dr. Gregory was an affectionate parent. He grudged his daughters no material and no intellectual advantage; but he was well aware that by too great liberality he imperilled their worldly prospects. Therefore, although he desired them to be well read and well informed, he bade them never to betray their knowledge to the world. Therefore, although he desired them to be strong and vigorous,--to walk, to ride, to live much in the open air,--he bade them never to make a boast of their endurance. Rude health, no less than scholarship, was the exclusive prerogative of men. His deliberate purpose was to make them rational creatures, taking clear and temperate views of life; but he warned them all the more earnestly against the dangerous indulgence of seeming wiser than their neighbours. “Be even cautious in displaying your good sense,” writes this astute and anxious father. “It will be thought you assume a superiority over the rest of your company. But if you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from men, who are apt to look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts and cultivated understanding.”

This is plain speaking. And it must be remembered that “learning” was not in 1774, nor for many years afterwards, the comprehensive word it is to-day. A young lady who could translate a page of Cicero was held to be learned to the point of pedantry. What reader of “Cœlebs”--if “Cœlebs” still boasts a reader--can forget that agitating moment when, through the inadvertence of a child, it is revealed to the breakfast table that Lucilla Stanley studies Latin every morning with her father. Overpowered by the intelligence, Cœlebs casts “a timid eye” upon his mistress, who is covered with confusion. She puts the sugar into the cream jug, and the tea into the sugar basin; and finally, unable to bear the mingled awe and admiration awakened by this disclosure of her scholarship, she slips out of the room, followed by her younger sister, and commiserated by her father, who knows what a shock her native delicacy has received. Had the fair Lucilla admitted herself to be an expert tight-rope dancer, she could hardly have created more consternation.

No wonder Dr. Gregory counselled his daughters to silence. Lovers less generous than Cœlebs might well have been alienated by such disqualifications. “Oh, how lovely is a maid’s ignorance!” sighs Rousseau, contemplating with rapture the many things that Sophie does not know. “Happy the man who is destined to teach her. She will never aspire to be the tutor of her husband, but will be content to remain his pupil. She will not endeavour to mould his tastes, but will relinquish her own. She will be more estimable to him than if she were learned. It will be his pleasure to enlighten her.”

This was a well-established point of view, and English Sophies were trained to meet it with becoming deference. They heard no idle prating about an equality which has never existed, and which never can exist. “Had a third order been necessary,” said an eighteenth-century schoolmistress to her pupils, “doubtless one would have been created, a midway kind of being.” In default of such a connecting link, any impious attempt to bridge the chasm between the sexes met with the failure it deserved. When Mrs. Knowles, a Quaker lady, not destitute of self-esteem, observed to Boswell that she hoped men and women would be equal in another world, that gentleman replied with spirit: “Madam, you are too ambitious. _We_ might as well desire to be equal with the angels.”

The dissimulation which Dr. Gregory urged upon his daughters, and which is the safeguard of all misplaced intelligence, extended to matters more vital than Latin and astronomy. He warned them, as they valued their earthly happiness, never to make a confidante of a married woman, “especially if she lives happily with her husband”; and never to reveal to their own husbands the excess of their wifely affection. “Do not discover to any man the full extent of your love, no, not although you marry him. _That_ sufficiently shows your preference, which is all he is entitled to know. If he has delicacy, he will ask for no stronger proof of your affection, for your sake; if he has sense, he will not ask it, for his own. Violent love cannot subsist, at least cannot be expressed, for any time together on both sides. Nature in this case has laid the reserve on you.” In the passivity of women, no less than in their refined duplicity, did this acute observer recognize the secret strength of sex.

A vastly different counsellor of youth was Mrs. West, who wrote a volume of “Letters to a Young Lady” (the young lady was Miss Maunsell, and she died after reading them), which were held to embody the soundest morality of the day. Mrs. West is as dull as Dr. Gregory is penetrating, as verbose as he is laconic, as obvious as he is individual. She devotes many agitated pages to theology, and many more to irrefutable, though one hopes unnecessary, arguments in behalf of female virtue. But she also advises a careful submission, a belittling insincerity, as woman’s best safeguards in life. It is not only a wife’s duty to tolerate her husband’s follies, but it is the part of wisdom to conceal from him any knowledge of his derelictions. Bad he may be; but it is necessary to his comfort to believe that his wife thinks him good. “The lordly nature of man so strongly revolts from the suspicion of inferiority,” explains this excellent monitress, “that a susceptible husband can never feel easy in the society of his wife when he knows that she is acquainted with his vices, though he is well assured that her prudence, generosity, and affection will prevent her from being a severe accuser.” One is reminded of the old French gentleman who said he was aware that he cheated at cards, but he disliked any allusion to the subject.

To be “easy” in a wife’s society, to relax spiritually as well as mentally, and to be immune from criticism;--these were the privileges which men demanded, and which well-trained women were ready to accord. In 1808 the “Belle Assemblée” printed a model letter, which purported to come from a young wife whose husband had deserted her and her child for the more lively society of his mistress. It expressed in pathetic language the sentiments then deemed correct,--sentiments which embodied the patience of Griselda, without her acquiescence in fate. The wife tells her husband that she has retired to the country for economy, and to avoid scandalous gossip; that by careful management she is able to live on the pittance he has given her; that “little Emily” is working a pair of ruffles for him; that his presence would make their poor cottage seem a palace. “Pardon my interrupting you,” she winds up with ostentatious meekness. “I mean to give you satisfaction. Though I am deeply wronged by your error, I am not resentful. I wish you all the happiness of which you are capable, and am your once loved and still affectionate, Emilia.”

That last sentence is not without dignity, and certainly not without its sting. One doubts whether Emilia’s husband, for all her promises and protestations, could ever again have felt perfectly “easy” in his wife’s society. He probably therefore stayed away, and soothed his soul elsewhere. “We can with tranquillity forgive in ourselves the sins of which no one accuses us.”

THE PIETIST

They go the fairest way to Heaven that would serve God without a
Hell.--_Religio Medici._

“How cutting it is to be the means of bringing children into the world to be the subjects of the Kingdom of Darkness, to dwell with Divils and Damned Spirits.”

In this temper of pardonable regret the mother of William Godwin wrote to her erring son; and while the maternal point of view deserves consideration (no parent could be expected to relish such a prospect), the letter is noteworthy as being one of the few written to Godwin, or about Godwin, which forces us to sympathize with the philosopher. The boy who was reproved for picking up the family cat on Sunday--“demeaning myself with such profaneness on the Lord’s day”--was little likely to find his religion “all pure profit.” His account of the books he read as a child, and of his precocious and unctuous piety, is probably over-emphasized for the sake of colour; but the Evangelical literature of his day, whether designed for young people or for adults, was of a melancholy and discouraging character. The “Pious Deaths of Many Godly Children” (sad monitor of the Godwin nursery) appears to have been read off the face of the earth; but there have descended to us sundry volumes of a like character, which even now stab us with pity for the little readers long since laid in their graves. The most frivolous occupation of the good boy in these old story-books is searching the Bible, “with mamma’s permission,” for texts in which David “praises God for the weather.” More serious-minded children weep floods of tears because they are “lost sinners.” In a book of “Sermons for the Very Young,” published by the Vicar of Walthamstow in the beginning of the last century, we find the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah selected as an appropriate theme for infancy, and its lessons driven home with all the force of a direct personal application. “Think, little child, of the fearful story. The wrath of God is upon them. Do they now repent of their sins? It is all too late. Do they cry for mercy? There is none to hear them.... Your heart, little child, is full of sin. You think of what is not right, and then you wish it, and that is sin.... Ah, what shall sinners do when the last day comes upon them? What will they think when God shall punish them forever?”

Children brought up on these lines passed swiftly from one form of hysteria to another, from self-exaltation and the assurance of grace to fears which had no easement. There is nothing more terrible in literature than Borrow’s account of the Welsh preacher who believed that when he was a child of seven he had committed the unpardonable sin, and whose whole life was shadowed by fear. At the same time that little William Godwin was composing beautiful death-bed speeches for the possible edification of his parents and neighbours, we find Miss Elizabeth Carter writing to Mrs. Montagu about her own nephew, who realized, at seven years of age, how much he and all creatures stood in need of pardon; and who, being ill, pitifully entreated his father to pray that his sins might be forgiven. Commenting upon which incident, the reverent Montagu Pennington, who edited Miss Carter’s letters, bids us remember that it reflects more credit on the parents who brought their child up with so just a sense of religion than it does on the poor infant himself. “Innocence,” says the inflexible Mr. Stanley, in “Cœlebs in Search of a Wife,” “can never be pleaded as a ground of acceptance, because the thing does not exist.”

With the dawning of the nineteenth century came the controversial novel; and to understand its popularity we have but to glance at the books which preceded it, and compared to which it presented an animated and contentious aspect. One must needs have read “Elements of Morality” at ten, and “Strictures on Female Education” at fifteen, to be able to relish “Father Clement” at twenty. Sedate young women, whose lightest available literature was “Cœlebs,” or “Hints towards forming the Character of a Princess,” and who had been presented on successive birthdays with Mrs. Chapone’s “Letters on the Improvement of the Mind,” and Mrs. West’s “Letters to a Young Lady,” and Miss Hamilton’s “Letters to the Daughter of a Nobleman,” found a natural relief in studying the dangers of dissent, or the secret machinations of the Jesuits. Many a dull hour was quickened into pleasurable apprehension of Jesuitical intrigues, from the days when Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, stoutly refused to take cinchona--a form of quinine--because it was then known as Jesuit’s bark, and might be trusted to poison a British constitution, to the days when Sir William Pepys wrote in all seriousness to Hannah More: “You surprise me by saying that your good Archbishop has been in danger from the Jesuits; but I believe they are concealed in places where they are less likely to be found than in Ireland.”

Just what they were going to do to the good Archbishop does not appear, for Sir William at this point abruptly abandons the prelate to tell the story of a Norwich butcher, who for some mysterious and unexplained reason was hiding from the inquisitors of Lisbon. No dignitary was too high, no orphan child too low to be the objects of a Popish plot. Miss Carter writes to Mrs. Montagu, in 1775, about a little foundling whom Mrs. Chapone had placed at service with some country neighbours.

“She behaves very prettily, and with great affection to the people with whom she is living,” says Miss Carter. “One of the reasons she assigns for her fondness is that they give her enough food, which she represents as a deficient article in the workhouse; and says that on Fridays particularly she never had any dinner. _Surely the parish officers have not made a Papist the mistress!_ If this is not the case, the loss of one dinner in a week is of no great consequence.”

To the poor hungry child it was probably of much greater consequence than the theological bias of the matron. Nor does a dinnerless Friday appear the surest way to win youthful converts to the fold. But devout ladies who had read Canon Seward’s celebrated tract on the “Comparison between Paganism and Popery” (in which he found little to choose between them) were well on their guard against the insidious advances of Rome. “When I had no religion at all,” confesses Cowper to Lady Hesketh, “I had yet a terrible dread of the Pope.” The worst to be apprehended from Methodists was their lamentable tendency to enthusiasm, and their ill-advised meddling with the poor. It is true that a farmer of Cheddar told Miss Patty More that a Methodist minister had once preached under his mother’s best apple tree, and that the sensitive tree had never borne another apple; but this was an extreme case. The Cheddar vestry resolved to protect their orchards from blight by stoning the next preacher who invaded the parish, and their example was followed with more or less fervour throughout England. In a quiet letter written from Margate (1768), by the Rev. John Lyon, we find this casual allusion to the process:--

“We had a Methodist preacher hold forth last night. I came home just as he had finished. I believe the poor man fared badly, for I saw, as I passed, eggs, stones, etc., fly pretty thick.”

It was all in the day’s work. The Rev. Lyon, who was a scholar and an antiquarian, and who wrote an exhaustive history of Dover, had no further interest in matters obviously aloof from his consideration.

This simple and robust treatment, so quieting to the nerves of the practitioners, was unserviceable for Papists, who did not preach in the open; and a great deal of suppressed irritation found no better outlet than print. It appears to have been a difficult matter in those days to write upon any subject without reverting sooner or later to the misdeeds of Rome. Miss Seward pauses in her praise of Blair’s sermons to lament the “boastful egotism” of St. Gregory of Nazianzus, who seems tolerably remote; and Mr. John Dyer, when wrapped in peaceful contemplation of the British wool-market, suddenly and fervently denounces the “black clouds” of bigotry, and the “fiery bolts of superstition,” which lay desolate “Papal realms.” In vain Mr. Edgeworth, stooping from his high estate, counselled serenity of mind, and that calm tolerance born of a godlike certitude; in vain he urged the benignant attitude of infallibility. “The absurdities of Popery are so manifest,” he wrote, “that to be hated they need but to be seen. But for the peace and prosperity of this country, the misguided Catholic should not be rendered odious; he should rather be pointed out as an object of compassion. His ignorance should not be imputed to him as a crime; nor should it be presupposed that his life cannot be right, whose tenets are erroneous. Thank God that I am a Protestant! should be a mental thanksgiving, not a public taunt.”

Mr. Edgeworth was nearly seventy when the famous “Protestant’s Manual; or, Papacy Unveiled” (endeared forever to our hearts by its association with Mrs. Varden and Miggs), bowled over these pleasant and peaceful arguments. There was no mawkish charity about the “Manual,” which made its way into every corner of England, stood for twenty years on thousands of British book-shelves, and was given as a reward to children so unfortunate as to be meritorious. It sold for a shilling (nine shillings a dozen when purchased for distribution), so Mrs. Varden’s two post-octavo volumes must have been a special edition. Reviewers recommended it earnestly to parents and teachers; and it was deemed indispensable to all who desired “to preserve the rising generation from the wiles of Papacy and the snares of priestcraft. They will be rendered sensible of the evils and probable consequences of Catholic emancipation; and be confirmed in those opinions, civil, political, and religious, which have hitherto constituted the happiness and formed the strength of their native country.”

This was a strong appeal. A universal uneasiness prevailed, manifesting itself in hostility to innovations, however innocent and orthodox. Miss Hannah More’s Sunday Schools were stoutly opposed, as savouring of Methodism (a religion she disliked), and of radicalism, for which she had all the natural horror of a well-to-do, middle-class Christian. Even Mrs. West, an oppressively pious writer, misdoubted the influence of Sunday Schools, for the simple reason that it was difficult to keep the lower orders from learning more than was good for them. “Hard toil and humble diligence are indispensably needful to the community,” said this excellent lady. “Writing and accounts appear superfluous instructions in the humblest walks of life; and, when imparted to servants, have the general effect of making them ambitious, and disgusted with the servile offices which they are required to perform.”

Humility was a virtue consecrated to the poor, to the rural poor especially; and what with Methodism on the one hand, and the jarring echoes of the French Revolution on the other, the British ploughman was obviously growing less humble every day. Crabbe, who cherished no illusions, painted him in colours grim enough to fill the reader with despair; but Miss More entertained a feminine conviction that Bibles and flannel waistcoats fulfilled his earthly needs. In all her stories and tracts the villagers are as artificial as the happy peasantry of an old-fashioned opera. They group themselves deferentially around the squire and the rector; they wear costumes of uncompromising rusticity; and they sing a chorus of praise to the kind young ladies who have brought them a bowl of soup. It is curious to turn from this atmosphere of abasement, from perpetual curtsies and the lowliest of lowly virtues, to the journal of the painter Haydon, who was a sincerely pious man, yet who cannot restrain his wonder and admiration at seeing the Duke of Wellington behave respectfully in church. That a person so august should stand when the congregation stood, and kneel when the congregation knelt, seemed to Haydon an immense condescension. “Here was the greatest hero in the world,” he writes ecstatically, “who had conquered the greatest genius, prostrating his heart and being before his God in his venerable age, and praying for His mercy.”

It is the most naïve impression on record. That the Duke and the Duke’s scullion might perchance stand equidistant from the Almighty was an idea which failed to present itself to Haydon’s ardent mind.

The pious fiction put forward in the interest of dissent was more impressive, more emotional, more belligerent, and, in some odd way, more human than “Cœlebs,” or “The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain.” Miss Grace Kennedy’s stories are as absurd as Miss More’s, and--though the thing may sound incredible--much duller; but they give one an impression of painful earnestness, and of that heavy atmosphere engendered by too close a contemplation of Hell. A pious Christian lady, with local standards, a narrow intelligence, and a comprehensive ignorance of life, is not by election a novelist. Neither do polemics lend themselves with elasticity to the varying demands of fiction. There are, in fact, few things less calculated to instruct the intellect or to enlarge the heart than the perusal of controversial novels.

But Miss Kennedy had at least the striking quality of temerity. She was not afraid of being ridiculous. She was undaunted in her ignorance. And she was on fire with all the bitter ardour of the separatist. Miss More, on the contrary, entertained a judicial mistrust for fervour, fanaticism, the rush of ardent hopes and fears and transports, for all those vehement emotions which are apt to be disconcerting to ladies of settled views and incomes. Her model Christian, Candidus, “avoids enthusiasm as naturally as a wise man avoids folly, or as a sober man shuns extravagance. He laments when he encounters a real enthusiast, because he knows that, even if honest, he is pernicious.” In the same guarded spirit, Mrs. Montagu praises the benevolence of Lady Bab Montagu and Mrs. Scott, who had the village girls taught plain sewing and the catechism. “These good works are often performed by the Methodist ladies in the heat of enthusiasm; but, thank God! my sister’s is a calm and rational piety.” “Surtout point de zèle,” was the dignified motto of the day.

There is none of this chill sobriety about Miss Kennedy’s Bible Christians, who, a hundred years ago, preached to a listening world. They are aflame with a zeal which knows no doubts and recognizes no forbearance. Their methods are akin to those of the irrepressible Miss J----, who undertook, Bible in hand, the conversion of that pious gentleman, the Duke of Wellington; or of Miss Lewis, who went to Constantinople to convert that equally pious gentleman, the Sultan. Miss Kennedy’s heroes and heroines stand ready to convert the world. They would delight in expounding the Scriptures to the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople. Controversy affords their only conversation. Dogma of the most unrelenting kind is their only food for thought. Piety provides their only avenue for emotions. Elderly bankers weep profusely over their beloved pastor’s eloquence, and fashionable ladies melt into tears at the inspiring sight of a village Sunday School. Young gentlemen, when off on a holiday, take with them “no companion but a Bible”; and the lowest reach of worldliness is laid bare when an unconverted mother asks her daughter if she can sing something more cheerful than a hymn. Conformity to the Church of England is denounced with unsparing warmth; and the Church of Rome is honoured by having a whole novel, the once famous “Father Clement,” devoted to its permanent downfall.

Dr. Greenhill, who has written a sympathetic notice of Miss Kennedy in the “Dictionary of National Biography,” considers that “Father Clement” was composed “with an evident wish to state fairly the doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, even while the authoress strongly disapproves of them”;--a point of view which compels us to believe that the biographer spared himself (and who shall blame him?) the reading of this melancholy tale. That George Eliot, who spared herself nothing, was well acquainted with its context, is evidenced by the conversation of the ladies who, in “Janet’s Repentance,” meet to cover and label the books of the Paddiford Lending Library. Miss Pratt, the autocrat of the circle, observes that the story of “Father Clement” is, in itself, a library on the errors of Romanism, whereupon old Mrs. Linnet very sensibly replies: “One ’ud think there didn’t want much to drive people away from a religion as makes ’em walk barefoot over stone floors, like that girl in ‘Father Clement,’ sending the blood up to the head frightful. Anybody might see that was an unnat’ral creed.”

So they might; and a more unnatural creed than Father Clement’s Catholicism was never devised for the extinction of man’s flickering reason. Only the mental debility of the Clarenham family can account for their holding such views long enough to admit of their being converted from them by the Montagus. Only the militant spirit of the Clarenham chaplain and the Montagu chaplain makes possible several hundred pages of polemics. Montagu Bibles run the blockade, are discovered in the hands of truth-seeking Clarenhams, and are hurled back upon the spiritual assailants. The determination of Father Dennis that the Scriptures shall be quoted in Latin only (a practice which is scholarly but inconvenient), and the determination of Edward Montagu “not to speak Latin in the presence of ladies,” embarrass social intercourse. Catherine Clarenham, the young person who walks barefooted over stone floors, has been so blighted by this pious exercise that she cannot, at twenty, translate the Pater Noster or Ave Maria into English, and remains a melancholy illustration of Latinity. When young Basil Clarenham shows symptoms of yielding to Montagu arguments, and begins to want a Bible of his own, he is spirited away to Rome, and confined in a monastery of the Inquisition, where he spends his time reading “books forbidden by the Inquisitors,” and especially “a New Testament with the prohibitory mark of the Holy Office upon it,” which the weak-minded monks have amiably placed at his disposal. Indeed, the monastery library, to which the captive is made kindly welcome, seems to have been well stocked with interdicted literature; and, after browsing in these pastures for several tranquil months, Basil tells his astonished hosts that their books have taught him that “the Romish Church is the most corrupt of all churches professing Christianity.” Having accomplished this unexpected but happy result, the Inquisition exacts from him a solemn vow that he will never reveal its secrets, and sends him back to England, where he loses no time in becoming an excellent Protestant. His sister Maria follows his example (her virtues have pointed steadfastly to this conclusion); but Catherine enters a convent, full of stone floors and idolatrous images, where she becomes a “tool” of the Jesuits, and says her prayers in Latin until she dies.

No wonder “Father Clement” went through twelve editions, and made its authoress as famous in her day as the authoress of “Elsie Dinsmore” is in ours. No wonder the Paddiford Lending Library revered its sterling worth. And no wonder it provoked from Catholics reprisals which Dr. Greenhill stigmatizes as “flippant.” To-day it lives by virtue of half a dozen mocking lines in George Eliot’s least-read story: but for a hundred years its progeny has infested the earth,--a crooked progeny, like Peer Gynt’s, which can never be straightened into sincerity, or softened into good-will. “For first the Church of Rome condemneth us, we likewise them,” observes Sir Thomas Browne with equanimity; “and thus we go to Heaven against each others’ wills, conceits, and opinions.”

THE ACCURSED ANNUAL

Why, by dabbling in those accursed Annuals, I have become a by-word
of infamy all over the kingdom.--CHARLES LAMB.

The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems. We can trace it, if we try, back to the first printing-presses, which catered indulgently to hungry scholars and to noble patrons; and we can see it in another generation separating “Waverley” and “The Corsair,” which everybody knew by heart, from the gorgeous “Annual” (bound in Lord Palmerston’s cast-off waistcoats, hinted Thackeray), which formed a decorative feature of well-appointed English drawing-rooms. The perfectly natural thing to do with an unreadable book is to give it away; and the publication, for more than a quarter of a century, of volumes which fulfilled this one purpose and no other is a pleasant proof, if proof were needed, of the business principles which underlay the enlightened activity of publishers.

The wave of sentimentality which submerged England when the clear-headed, hard-hearted eighteenth century had done its appointed work, and lay a-dying, the prodigious advance in gentility from the days of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to the days of the Countess of Blessington, found their natural expression in letters. It was a period of emotions which were not too deep for words, and of decorum which measured goodness by conventionalities. Turn where we will, we see a tear in every eye, or a simper of self-complacency on every lip. Moore wept when he beheld a balloon ascension at Tivoli, because he had not seen a balloon since he was a little boy. The excellent Mr. Hall explained in his “Memories of a Long Life” that, owing to Lady Blessington’s anomalous position with Count D’Orsay, “Mrs. Hall never accompanied me to her evenings, though she was a frequent day caller.” Criticism was controlled by politics, and sweetened by gallantry. The Whig and Tory reviewers supported their respective candidates to fame, and softened their masculine sternness to affability when Mrs. Hemans or Miss Landon, “the Sappho of the age,” contributed their glowing numbers to the world. Miss Landon having breathed a poetic sigh in the “Amulet” for 1832, a reviewer in “Fraser’s” magnanimously observed: “This gentle and fair young lady, so undeservedly neglected by critics, we mean to take under our special protection.” Could it ever have lain within the power of any woman, even a poetess, to merit such condescension as this?

Of a society so organized, the Christmas annual was an appropriate and ornamental feature. It was costly,--a guinea or a guinea and a half being the usual subscription. It was richly bound in crimson silk or pea-green levant; Solomon in all his glory was less magnificent. It was as free from stimulus as eau sucrée. It was always genteel, and not infrequently aristocratic,--having been known to rise in happy years to the schoolboy verses of a royal duke. It was made, like Peter Pindar’s razors, to sell, and it was bought to be given away; at which point its career of usefulness was closed. Its languishing steel engravings of Corfu, Ayesha, The Suliote Mother, and The Wounded Brigand, may have beguiled a few heavy moments after dinner; and perhaps little children in frilled pantalets and laced slippers peeped between the gorgeous covers, to marvel at the Sultana’s pearls, or ask in innocence who was the dying Haidee. Death, we may remark, was always a prominent feature of annuals. Their artists and poets vied with one another in the selection of mortuary subjects. Charles Lamb was first “hooked into the ‘Gem’” with some lines on the editor’s dead infant. From a partial list, extending over a dozen years, I cull this funeral wreath:--

The Dying Child. _Poem._

The Orphans. _Steel engraving._

The Orphan’s Tears. _Poem._

The Gypsy’s Grave. _Steel engraving._

The Lonely Grave. _Poem._

On a Child’s Grave. _Poem._

The Dying Mother to her Infant. _Poem._

Blithesome reading for the Christmas-tide!