Chapter C: KEGAN PAUL: ‘William Godwin, His Friends and Contemporaries.’ (6)

The cottage where I found her was situated on the high road between Basingstoke and Reading; and the village street on which she was then living contained the public-house and several small shops near by. There was also close at hand the village pond full of ducks and geese, and I noticed several young rogues on their way to school were occupied in worrying their feathered friends. The windows of the cottage were filled with flowers, and cowslips and violets were plentifully scattered about the little garden. Miss Mitford liked to have one dog, at least, at her heels, and this day her pet seemed to be constantly under foot. I remember the room into which I was shown was sanded, and a quaint old clock behind the door was marking off the hour in small but very loud pieces. The cheerful old lady called to me from the head of the stairs to come up into her sitting-room. I sat down by the open window to converse with her, and it was pleasant to see how the village children, as they went by, stopped to bow and courtesy. One curly-headed urchin made bold to take off his well-worn cap, and wait to be recognized as “little Johnny.” “No great scholar,” said the kind-hearted old lady to me, “but a sad rogue among our flock of geese. Only yesterday the young marauder was detected by my maid with a plump gosling stuffed half-way into his pocket!” While she was thus discoursing of Johnny’s peccadilloes, the little fellow looked up with a knowing expression, and very soon caught in his cap a ginger-bread dog, which the old lady threw to him from the window. “I wish he loved his book as well as he relishes sweetcake,” sighed she, as the boy kicked up his heels and disappeared down the lane.

JAMES T. FIELDS: ‘Yesterdays with Authors.’

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[Sidenote: Leaves Three Mile Cross for Swallowfield.]

The poor cottage was crumbling around us, and if we had stayed much longer we should have been buried in the ruins. And yet it was great grief to go. Besides my general aversion to new habitations, I had associations with those old walls which endeared them to me more than I can tell. There I had toiled and striven, and tasted of bitter anxiety.... There in the fulness of age, I had lost those whose love had made my home sweet and precious.... Other recollections, less dear and less sad, added their interest to the place. Friends many and kind; strangers, whose names were an honor, had come to that bright garden, and that garden room.... It was a heart-tug to leave that garden.

I walked from the one cottage to the other on an autumn evening, when the vagrant birds, whose habit of assembling here for their annual departure, gives, I suppose, the name of Swallowfield to the village, were circling and twittering over my head.... Here I am in the prettiest village, in the snuggest and cosiest of all snug cabins; a trim cottage garden, divided by a hawthorn hedge from a little field guarded by grand old trees; a cheerful glimpse of the high-road in front, just to hint that there is such a thing as a peopled world; and on either side the deep silent lanes that form the distinctive character of English scenery.

MARY RUSSELL MITFORD: ‘Recollections of a Literary Life.’

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[Sidenote: Miss Martineau did not like her.]

I must say that personally I did not like her so well as I liked her works. The charming _bonhomie_ of her writings appeared at first in her conversation and manners; but there were other things which presently sadly impaired its charm. It is no part of my business to pass judgment on her views and modes of life. What concerned me was her habit of flattery, and the twin habit of disparagement of others. I never knew her respond to any act or course of conduct which was morally lofty. She could not believe in it, nor, of course, enjoy it; and she seldom failed to “see through” it, and to delight in her superiority to admiration. She was a devoted daughter, where the duty was none of the easiest; and servants and neighbors were sincerely attached to her. The little intercourse I had with her was spoiled by her habit of flattery; but I always fell back on my old admiration of her as soon as she was out of sight, and her ‘Village’ rose up in my memory.

HARRIET MARTINEAU: ‘Autobiography.’ Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1877.

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[Sidenote: “Not flattery prepense.”]

I never say one word more than appears to me to be true. To be sure, there is an atmosphere of love--a sunshine of fancy--in which objects appear clearer and brighter; and from such I may sometimes paint; but that is not flattery prepense, is it, my dear friend? I never mean to flatter--no, never! But it is a great pleasure to me to love and admire, and it is a faculty which has survived many frosts and storms.

MARY RUSSELL MITFORD: _Letter to Sir William Elford_ in the former’s ‘Life,’ by L’Estrange.

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[Sidenote: Visited by Americans.]

I suppose she was one of the earliest English authors who was “interviewed” by the Americans. She was far from democratic, but always spoke of that nation with great respect. What impressed me much more was her admiration for Louis Napoleon; upon which point, as on many others, we soon agreed to differ. She even approved of the _coup d’état_, concerning which she writes to me, a little apologetically, “My enthusiasm is always ready laid, you know, like a housemaid’s fire”; which was very true.

JAMES PAYN: ‘Some Literary Recollections.’

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[Sidenote: Enthusiasm.]

Carlyle tells us, “Nothing so lifts a man from all his men imprisonments, were it but for moments, as true admiration”; and Miss Mitford admired to such an extent that she must have been lifted in this way nearly all her lifetime. Indeed she erred, if she erred at all, on this side, and over-praised and over-admired everything and everybody whom she regarded. When she spoke of Beranger, or Dumas, or Hazlitt, or Holmes, she exhausted every term of worship and panegyric. Louis Napoleon was one of her most potent crazes.... Although she had been prostrated by the hard work and increasing anxieties of forty years of authorship, when I saw her she was as fresh and independent as a skylark. She was a good hater as well as a good praiser, and she left nothing worth saving in an obnoxious reputation.... I have heard her go on in her fine way, giving preference to certain modern poems far above the works of the great masters of song. Pascal says that “the heart has reasons that reason does not know”; and Miss Mitford was a charming exemplification of this wise saying.

JAMES T. FIELDS: ‘Yesterdays with Authors.’

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[Sidenote: Devotion to her father.]

Nothing ever destroyed her faith in those she loved. If I had not known all about him (from my own folks of another generation who had known him well), I should have thought her father had been a patriot and a martyr. She spoke of him as if there had never been such a father--which in a sense was true. He had spent his wife’s fortune, and then another, and then the £10,000 [sic] which “little Mary” herself had got for him by hitting on the lucky number in a lottery, and was rapidly getting through her own modest earnings in the same free-handed manner, when good fortune removed him; but she always deemed it an irreparable loss. “I used to contrive to keep our house in order,” she would say, speaking of her literary gains, “and a little pony-carriage, and my dear, dear father.” To my mind he seemed like a Mr. Turveydrop, but he had really been a most accomplished and agreeable person, though with nothing sublime about him except his selfishness.

[Sidenote: Prejudices.]

She had the same exaggerated notions of the virtues and talents of her friends (including myself); nay, her sympathies even extended to _their_ friends, whom she did not know. Of course she had her prejudices by way of complement; and when she spoke of those who did not please her, her tongue played about their reputations like sheet-lightning--for there was much more flash than fork in it.

JAMES PAYN: ‘Some Literary Recollections.’

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[Sidenote: A country lady.]

She was a “country lady,” and if she caught any author growing a snowdrop and crocus at the wrong time of the year, he never recovered a place in her memory. On a certain occasion she had been speaking of the rabbit-shooting at Bear Wood; and afterwards happening to propose a visit there, I inadvertently remarked that I should be very happy to accompany her, but that of late years I had taken to gymnastic exercises, and quite given up all field-sports--besides, “I didn’t care for rabbit-shooting.” It was the wrong season!--and the look and exclamation that followed showed me that I had lost something of my position in her mind forever.

RICHARD HENGIST HORNE: ‘Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to R. H. Horne.’

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[Sidenote: Tranquil old age.]

I think I should have recognized her anywhere. The short, plump body, the round, cheerful old face, with cheeks still as rosy as a girl’s, the kindly blue eyes, the broad, placid brow, and bands of silver hair peeping from beneath the quaint frilled cap, seemed to be all features of the picture which I had previously drawn in my mind. But for a gay touch in the ribbons, and the absence of the book-muslin handkerchief over the bosom, she might have been taken for one of those dear old Quaker ladies, whose presence, in its cheerful serenity, is an atmosphere of contentment and peace. Her voice was sweet, round, and racy, with a delicious archness at times. Sitting in deep arm-chairs, on opposite sides of the warm grate, while the rain lashed the panes and the autumn leaves drifted outside, we passed the afternoon in genial talk.

BAYARD TAYLOR: ‘At Home and Abroad.’ New York: G. P. Putnam, 1862.

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[Sidenote: Conversation and voice.]

She was always cheerful, and her talk is delightful to remember. From girlhood she had known and had been intimate with most of the prominent writers of her time, and her observations and reminiscences were so shrewd and pertinent that I have scarcely known her equal. Her voice had a peculiar ringing sweetness in it, rippling out sometimes like a beautiful chime of silver bells; and when she told a comic story, hitting off some one of her acquaintances, she joined in with the laugh at the end with great heartiness and _naïveté_. When listening to anything that interested her, she had a way of coming into the narrative with “Dear me, dear me, dear me,” three times repeated, which it was very pleasant to hear.

JAMES T. FIELDS: ‘Yesterdays with Authors.’

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[Sidenote: Voice and laugh.]

I seem to see the dear little old lady now, looking like a venerable fairy, with bright sparkling eyes, a clear, incisive voice, and a laugh that carried you away with it. I never saw a woman with such an enjoyment of--I was about to say a joke, but the word is too coarse for her--of a pleasantry.

JAMES PAYN: ‘Some Literary Recollections.’

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[Sidenote: “Heart-whole.”]

The remark has often been made that we meet with no romance in Miss Mitford’s history--no trace of even a passing predilection or an unfortunate attachment. In her earlier years she was sometimes twitted about partialities for her cousin, Bertram Mitford, and others, but no impression seems to have been made. That she was heart-whole was evident, for she could be jocose on the subject.

REV. A. G. L’ESTRANGE: ‘Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford.’

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[Sidenote: A helping hand.]

She was constantly saying good words for unfledged authors who were struggling forward to gain recognition. No one ever lent such a helping hand as she did to the young writers of her country.

JAMES T. FIELDS: ‘Yesterdays with Authors.’

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[Sidenote: In old age.]

I can never forget the little figure rolled up in two chairs in the little Swallowfield room, packed round with books up to the ceiling, on to the floor--the little figure with clothes on, of course, but of no recognized or recognizable pattern; and somewhere out of the upper end of the heap, gleaming under a great, deep, globular brow, two such eyes as I never, perhaps, saw in any other Englishwoman--though I believe she must have had French blood in her veins to breed such eyes, and such a tongue; for the beautiful speech which came out of that ugly (it was that) face, and the glitter and depth too of the eyes, like live coals--perfectly honest the while, both lips and eyes--these seemed to me to be attributes of the highest French, or rather Gallic, not of the highest Englishwoman. In any case, she was a triumph of mind over matter, of spirit over flesh.

CHARLES KINGSLEY: _Letter to James Payn_, quoted in ‘Some Literary Recollections.’

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[Sidenote: Pride in her plays.]

She was much more proud of her plays (which had even then been well-nigh forgotten) than of the works by which she was so well known, and which at that time brought people from the ends of the earth to see her.

JAMES PAYN: ‘Some Literary Recollections.’

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[Sidenote: Greater values of her tales.]

I was early fond of her tales and descriptions, and have always regarded her as the originator of that new style of “graphic description” to which literature owes a great deal, however weary we may sometimes have felt of the excess in to which the practice of detail has run. Miss Austen has claims to other and greater honors; but she and Miss Mitford deserve no small gratitude for rescuing us from the folly and bad taste of slovenly indefiniteness in delineation. Miss Mitford’s tales appealed to a new sense, as it were, in a multitude of minds--greatly to the amazement of the whole circle of publishers who had rejected, in her works, as good a bargain as is often offered to publishers. Miss Mitford showed me at once that she undervalued her tales, and rested her claims on her plays. I suppose everybody who writes a successful tragedy must inevitably do this. Miss Mitford must have possessed some dramatic requisites, or her success could not have been so decided as it was; but my own opinion always was that her mind wanted the breadth, and her character the depth, necessary for genuine achievement in the highest enterprise of literature.

HARRIET MARTINEAU: ‘Autobiography.’

* * * * *

Her ‘Belford Regis’ should probably take rank as her best work; it has most power and most character; and is somewhat less uniformly soft and green than ‘Our Village’ is. The ‘Village,’ however, is, by association, my favorite. If read by snatches, it comes on the mind as the summer air and the sweet hum of rural sounds would float upon the senses through an open window in the country, and leaves with you for the whole day a tradition of fragrance and dew. She is in fact a sort of prose Crabbe in the sun, but with more grace and less strength; and also with a more steadfast look upon scenic nature--never going higher than the earth to look for the beautiful, but always finding it as surely as if she went higher. She is “matter-of-fact,” she says, which may be so, but then she idealizes matter of fact before she touches it, and thus her matter of fact is as beautiful as the matter of fantasy of other people.

[Sidenote: Mrs. Browning’s estimate.]

In my own mind--and Mr. Kenyon agrees with me--she herself is better and stronger than any of her books; and her letters and conversation show more grasp of intellect and general power than would be inferable from her finished compositions. In her works, however, through all the beauty there is a clear vein of sense, and a quickness of observation which takes the character of a refined shrewdness. Do you not think so? And is she not besides most intensely a woman, and an Englishwoman?

ELIZABETH BARRETT: ‘Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to R. H. Horne.’ New York: James Miller, 1877.

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[Sidenote: ‘Our Village.’]

I think you will like ‘Our Village.’... Charles Lamb (the matchless ‘Elia’ of the _London Magazine_) says that nothing so fresh and characteristic has appeared for a long while. It is not over-modest to say this; but who would not be proud of the praise of such a _proser_?

MARY RUSSELL MITFORD: _Letter to Sir Wm. Elford_, in the former’s ‘Life,’ by L’Estrange.

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[Sidenote: Fear of unconscious plagiarism.]

I am very indulgent towards such borrowings in general, knowing how extraordinary is the manner in which memory and invention are sometimes mixed up, especially where the first faculty is weak. With me it is singularly so, and for years I was tormented by constant fear that every line of tragedy less bad than the next was stolen from my letters. It was a miserable feeling.

M. R. MITFORD: _Letter to Mr. D. Starkey_, in ‘Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford.’

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[Sidenote: View of the moral purpose of fiction.]

All that vile design of doing good, or making out this to be wrong and that to be right, ... I hold ... to be the most fatal fault of all fiction nowadays.... It was the one fault of Miss Edgeworth that she wrote to a text. How much better she wrote without one she showed in ‘Belinda.’ All the greatest writers of fiction are pure of that sin--Chaucer, Shakespeare, Scott, Jane Austen; and are not these precisely the writers who do most good as well as give most pleasure?

M. R. MITFORD: _Letter to Mr. D. Starkey_, in ‘Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford.’

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[Sidenote: Religious belief.]

There would be a tacit hypocrisy, a moral cowardice, if I were to stop here, and not to confess, what I think you must suspect, although by no chance do I ever talk about it--that I do not, or rather cannot, believe all that the Church requires. I humbly hope that it is not necessary to do so, and that a devout sense of the mercy of God, and an endeavor, however imperfectly and feebly, to obey the great precepts of justice and kindness, may be accepted in lieu of that entire faith which, in me, _will not_ be commanded. You will not suspect me of thoughtlessness in this matter; neither, I trust, does it spring from intellectual pride. Few persons have a deeper sense of their own weakness; few, indeed, can have so much weakness of character to deplore and strive against.