bribery and corruption. Nobody has ever denied it for the last fifty
years. It has been in the school text-books for generations. But the
point is, Did Mr. Knox know? If he did, it must seem to all who have
read his Remains--and it is worth while reading them only to enjoy the
sensation--a most marvellous thing. It would not be more marvellous had
we learnt from Canon Liddon’s long-looked-for volumes that Mr. Pusey
was Mr. Disraeli’s adviser in all matters relating to the disposition
of the secret service money and the Tory election funds. If Knox did
not know anything about it, how was he kept in ignorance, how was he
sheltered from the greedy Irish peers and borough-mongers and all the
other impecunious rascals who had the vending of a nation? And what are
we to think of the foresight of Castlereagh, who secured for himself
such a secretary in order that, after all was over, Mr. Knox might sit
down and in all innocence become the historian of proceedings of which
he had been allowed to know nothing, but which sorely needed the cloak
of a holy life and conversation to cover up their sores?
It is an odd problem. For my part, I believe in Knox’s innocence.
Trying very hard to be worthy of the second century was not good
training for seeing his way through the fag-end of the eighteenth.
Apart from this, it is amazing what some men will not see. I recall but
will not quote the brisk retort of Mrs. Saddletree at her husband’s
expense, which relates to the incapacity of that learned saddler to see
what was going on under his nose. The test was a severe one, but we
have no doubt whatever that Alexander Knox could have stood it as well
as Mr. Bartoline Saddletree.
Another strange incident connected with the same event is that the
final ratification of the Act of Union in Dublin was witnessed by,
and made, as it could not fail to do, a great impression upon, the
most accomplished rhetorical writer of our time. De Quincey, then a
precocious boy of fifteen, happened by a lucky chance to be in Ireland
at the time, and as the guest of Lord Altamount, an Irish peer, he had
every opportunity both of seeing the sight and acquainting himself
with the feelings of some of the leading actors in the play, call it
tragedy, comedy, or farce, as you please.
De Quincey’s account of the scene, and his two chapters on the Irish
Rebellion, are to be found in the first volume of his ‘Autobiographic
Sketches.’
De Quincey hints that both Lord Altamount and his son, ‘who had an
Irish heart,’ would have been glad if at the very last moment the
populace had stepped in between Mr. Pitt and the Irish peers and
commoners and compelled the two Houses to perpetuate themselves.
Internally, says De Quincey, they would have laughed. But it was
written otherwise in Heaven’s Chancery, and ‘the Bill received the
Royal assent without a muttering or a whispering or the protesting echo
of a sigh.... One person only I remarked whose features were suddenly
illuminated by a smile--a sarcastic smile, as I read it--which,
however, might be all fancy. It was Lord Castlereagh.’ Can it possibly
be that this was the very moment when it occurred to his lordship’s
mind that Mr. Knox was the man to be the historian of the event thus
concluded?
The new edition of De Quincey’s writings has naturally provoked many
critics to attempt to do for him what he was fond enough of doing for
others, often to their dismay--to give some account, that is, of the
author and the man. De Quincey does not lend himself to this familiar
treatment. He eludes analysis and baffles description. His great fault
as an author is best described, in the decayed language of the equity
draughtsman, as multifariousness. His style lacks the charm of economy,
and his workmanship the dignity of concentration.
A literary spendthrift is, however, a very endurable sinner in these
stingy days. Mr. Mill speaks somewhere (I think in his ‘Political
Economy’) almost sorrowfully of De Quincey’s strange habit of
scattering fine thoughts up and down his merely miscellaneous writings.
The habit has ceased to afflict the reader. The fine maxim ‘Waste
not, want not,’ is now inscribed over the desks of our miscellaneous
writers. Such extravagance as De Quincey’s, as it is not likely to be
repeated, need not be too severely reprobated.
De Quincey’s magnificence, the apparent boundlessness of his
information, the liberties he takes, relying upon his mastery of
language, his sportiveness and freakish fancies, make him the idol of
all hobbledehoys of a literary turn. By them his sixteen volumes are
greedily devoured. Happy the country, one is tempted to exclaim, that
has such reading to offer its young men and maidens!
The discovery that De Quincey wrote something else besides the ‘Opium
Eater’ marks a red-letter day in many a young life. The papers on
‘The Twelve Cæsars’; on the ‘Essenes and Secret Societies’; on ‘Judas
Iscariot,’ ‘Cicero,’ and ‘Richard Bentley’; ‘The Spanish Nun,’ the
‘Female Infidel,’ the ‘Tartars,’ seemed the very climax of literary
well-doing, and to unite the learning of the schools with all the fancy
of the poets and the wit of the world.
As one grows older, one grows sterner--with others.
‘Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control
That o’er thee swell and throng;
They will condense within thy soul,
And change to purpose strong.’
The lines have a literary as well as a moral value.
But though paradox may cease to charm, and a tutored intellect seem to
sober age a better guide than a lawless fancy, and a chastened style a
more comfortable thing than impassioned prose and pages of _bravura_,
still, after all, ‘the days of our youth are the days of our glory,’
and for a reader who is both young and eager the Selections Grave and
Gay of Thomas de Quincey will always be above criticism, and belong to
the realm of rapture.
HANNAH MORE.
An ingenious friend of mine, who has collected a library in which every
book is either a masterpiece of wit or a miracle of rarity, found great
fault with me the other day for adding to my motley heap the writings
of Mrs. Hannah More. In vain I pleaded I had given but eight shillings
and sixpence for the nineteen volumes, neatly bound and lettered on
the back. He was not thinking, so he protested, of my purse, but of my
taste, and he went away, spurning the gravel under his feet, irritated
that there should be such men as I.
I, however, am prepared to brazen it out. I freely admit that the
celebrated Mrs. Hannah More is one of the most detestable writers that
ever held a pen. She flounders like a huge conger-eel in an ocean of
dingy morality. She may have been a wit in her youth, though I am
not aware of any evidence of it--certainly her poem, ‘Bas Bleu,’ is
none--but for all the rest of her days, and they were many, she was
an encyclopædia of all literary vices. You may search her nineteen
volumes through without lighting upon one original thought, one happy
phrase. Her religion lacks reality. Not a single expression of genuine
piety, of heart-felt emotion, ever escapes her lips. She is never
pathetic, never terrible. Her creed is powerless either to attract the
well-disposed or make the guilty tremble. No naughty child ever read
‘The Fairchild Family’ or ‘Stories from the Church Catechism’ without
quaking and quivering like a short-haired puppy after a ducking; but,
then, Mrs. Sherwood was a woman of genius, whilst Mrs. Hannah More was
a pompous failure.
Still, she has a merit of her own, just enough to enable a middle-aged
man to chew the cud of reflection as he hastily turns her endless
pages. She is an explanatory author, helping you to understand how
sundry people who were old when you were young came to be the folk they
were, and to have the books upon their shelves they had.
Hannah More was the first, and I trust the worst, of a large
class--‘the ugliest of her daughters Hannah,’ if I may parody a poet
she affected to admire. This class may be imperfectly described as
‘the well-to-do Christian.’ It inhabited snug places in the country,
and kept an excellent, if not dainty, table. The money it saved in
a ball-room it spent upon a greenhouse. Its horses were fat, and
its coachman invariably present at family prayers. Its pet virtue
was Church twice on Sunday, and its peculiar horrors theatrical
entertainments, dancing, and threepenny points. Outside its garden
wall lived the poor who, if virtuous, were for ever curtsying to the
ground or wearing neat uniforms, except when expiring upon truckle-beds
beseeching God to bless the young ladies of The Grange or the Manor
House, as the case might be.
As a book ‘Cœlebs in Search of a Wife’ is as odious as it is
absurd--yet for the reason already assigned it may be read with a
certain curiosity--but as it would be cruelty to attempt to make good
my point by quotation, I must leave it as it is.
It is characteristic of the unreality of Hannah More that she prefers
Akenside to Cowper, despite the latter’s superior piety. Cowper’s
sincerity and pungent satire frightened her; the verbosity of Akenside
was much to her mind:
‘Sir John is a passionate lover of poetry, in which he has a
fine taste. He read it [a passage from Akenside’s “Pleasures of
Imagination”] with much spirit and feeling, especially these truly
classical lines:
‘“_Mind--mind_ alone; bear witness, earth and heaven,
The living fountains in itself contains
Of Beauteous and Sublime; here hand in hand
Sit paramount the graces; here enthroned
Celestial Venus, with divinest airs,
Invites the soul to never-fading joy.”
‘“The reputation of this exquisite passage,” said he, laying down the
book, “is established by the consenting suffrage of all men of taste,
though, by the critical countenance you are beginning to put on you
look as if you had a mind to attack it.”
‘“So far from it,” said I [Cœlebs], “_that I know nothing more splendid
in the whole mass of our poetry_.”’
Miss More had an odd life before she underwent what she calls a
‘revolution in her sentiments,’ a revolution, however, which I fear
left her heart of hearts unchanged. She consorted with wits, though
always, be it fairly admitted, on terms of decorum. She wrote three
tragedies, which were not rejected as they deserved to be, but duly
appeared on the boards of London and Bath with prologues and epilogues
by Garrick and by Sheridan. She dined and supped and made merry. She
had a prodigious flirtation with Dr. Johnson, who called her a saucy
girl, albeit she was thirty-seven; and once, for there was no end to
his waggery, lamented she had not married Chatterton, ‘that posterity
might have seen a propagation of poets.’ The good doctor, however,
sickened of her flattery, and one of the rudest speeches even he ever
made was addressed to her.
After Johnson’s death Hannah met Boswell, full of his intended book
which she did her best to spoil with her oily fatuity. Said she to
Boswell, ‘I beseech your tenderness for our virtuous and most revered
departed friend; I beg you will mitigate some of his asperities,’ to
which diabolical counsel the Inimitable replied roughly, ‘He would not
cut off his claws nor make a tiger a cat to please anybody.’
The most moving incident in Hannah More’s life occurred near its close,
and when she was a lone, lorn woman--her sisters Mary, Betty, Sally,
and Patty having all predeceased her. She and they had long lived in
a nice house or ‘place’ called Barley Wood, in the neighbourhood of
Bristol, and here her sisters one after another died, leaving poor
Hannah in solitary grandeur to the tender mercies of Mrs. Susan, the
housekeeper; Miss Teddy, the lady’s-maid; Mrs. Rebecca, the housemaid;
Mrs. Jane, the cook; Miss Sally, the scullion; Mr. Timothy, the
coachman; Mr. John, the gardener; and Mr. Tom, the gardener’s man.
Eight servants and one aged pilgrim--of such was the household of
Barley Wood!
Outwardly decorum reigned. Poor Miss More fondly imagined her domestics
doted on her, and that they joyfully obeyed her laws. It was the
practice at family prayer for each of the servants to repeat a text.
Visitors were much impressed, and went away delighted. But like so many
other things on this round world, it was all hollow. These menials were
not what they seemed.
After Miss More had heard them say their texts and had gone to bed,
their day began. They gave parties to the servants and tradespeople
of the vicinity (pleasing word), and at last, in mere superfluity of
naughtiness, hired a large room a mile off and issued invitations to
a great ball. This undid them. There happened to be at Barley Wood on
the very night of the dance a vigilant visitor who had her suspicions,
and who accordingly kept watch and ward. She heard the texts, but she
did not go to bed, and from her window she saw the whole household,
under cover of night, steal off to their promiscuous friskings, leaving
behind them poor Miss Sally only, whose sad duty it was to let them in
the next morning, which she duly performed.
Friends were called in, and grave consultations held, and in the end
Miss More was told how she had been wounded in her own household. It
was sore news; she bore it well, wisely determined to quit Barley Wood
once and for ever, and live, as a decent old lady should, in a terrace
in Clifton. The wicked servants were not told of this resolve until
the actual moment of departure had arrived, when they were summoned
into the drawing-room, where they found their mistress, and a company
of friends. In feeling tones Miss Hannah More upbraided them for their
unfaithfulness. ‘You have driven me,’ said she, ‘from my own home, and
forced me to seek a refuge among strangers.’ So saying, she stepped
into her carriage and was driven away. There is surely something
Miltonic about this scene, which is, at all events, better than
anything in Akenside’s ‘Pleasures of Imagination.’
The old lady was of course much happier at No. 4, Windsor Terrace,
Clifton, than she had been at Barley Wood. She was eighty-three years
of age when she took up house there, and eighty-nine when she died,
which she did on the 1st of September, 1833. I am indebted for these
melancholy--and, I believe, veracious--particulars to that amusing book
of Joseph Cottle’s called ‘Early Recollections, chiefly relating to the
late Samuel Taylor Coleridge during his long residence in Bristol.’
I still maintain that Hannah More’s works in nineteen volumes are worth
eight shillings and sixpence.
MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.
Miss Mathilde Blind, in the introduction to her animated and admirable
translation of the now notorious ‘Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff,’ asks
an exceedingly relevant question--namely, ‘Is it well or is it ill done
to make the world our father confessor?’ Miss Blind does not answer her
own question, but passes on her way content with the observation that,
be it well or ill done, it is supremely interesting. Translators have,
indeed, no occasion to worry about such inquiries. It is hard enough
for them to make their author speak another language than his own,
without stopping to ask whether he ought to have spoken at all. Their
business is to make their author known. As for the author himself, he,
of course, has a responsibility; but, as a rule, he is only thinking
of himself, and only anxious to excite interest in that subject. If he
succeeds in doing this, he is indifferent to everything else. And in
this he is encouraged by the world.
Burns, in his exuberant generosity, was sure that it could afford small
pleasure
‘Even to a deil
To skelp and scaud poor dogs like me,
And hear us squeal;’
but whatever may be the devil’s taste, there is nothing the reading
public like better than to hear the squeal of some self-torturing atom
of humanity. And, as the atoms have found this out, a good deal of
squealing may be confidently anticipated.
The eclipse of faith has not proved fatal by any means to the
instinct of confession. There is a noticeable desire to make humanity
or the reading public our residuary legatee, to endow it with our
experiences, to enrich it with our egotisms, to strip ourselves bare
in the market-place--if not for the edification, at all events for the
amusement, of man. All this is accomplished by autobiography. We then
become interesting, probably for the first time, as, to employ Mlle.
Bashkirtseff’s language, ‘documents of human nature.’
The metaphor carries us far. To falsify documents by addition,
or to garble them by omission, is an offence of grave character,
though of frequent occurrence. Is there, then, to be no reticence in
autobiography? Are the documents of human nature to be printed at
length?
These are questions which each autobiographer must settle for himself.
If what is published is interesting for any reason whatsoever, be it
the work of pious sincerity or diseased self-consciousness, the world
will read it, and either applaud the piety or ridicule the absurdity of
the author. If it is not interesting it will not be read.
Therefore, to consider the ethics of autobiography is to condemn
yourself to the academy. ‘Rousseau’s Confessions’ ought never to have
been written; but written they were, and read they will ever be. But
as a pastime moralizing has a rare charm. We cannot always be reading
immoral masterpieces. A time comes when inaction is pleasant, and when
it is soothing to hear mild accents murmuring ‘Thou shalt not.’ For a
moment, then, let the point remain under consideration.
The ethics of autobiography are, in my judgment, admirably summed up
by George Eliot, in a passage in ‘Theophrastus Such,’ a book which, we
were once assured, well-nigh destroyed the reputation of its author,
but which would certainly have established that of most living writers
upon a surer foundation than they at present occupy. George Eliot says:
‘In all autobiography there is, nay, ought to be, an incompleteness
which may have the effect of falsity. We are each of us bound to
reticence by the piety we owe to those who have been nearest to us,
and have had a mingled influence over our lives--by the fellow-feeling
which should restrain us from turning our volunteered and picked
confessions into an act of accusation against others who have no chance
of vindicating themselves, and, most of all, by that reverence for
the higher efforts of our common nature which commands us to bury
its lowest faculties, its invincible remnants of the brute, its most
agonizing struggle with temptation, in unbroken silence.’
All this is surely sound morality and good manners, but it is not the
morality or the manners of Mlle. Marie Bashkirtseff, who was always
ready to barter everything for something she called Fame.
‘If I don’t win fame,’ says she over and over again, ‘I will kill
myself.’
Miss Blind is, no doubt, correct in her assertion that, as a painter,
Mlle. Bashkirtseff’s strong point was expression. Certainly, she had a
great gift that way with her pen. Amidst a mass of greedy utterances,
esurient longings, commonplace ejaculations, and unlovely revelations,
passages occur in this journal which bid us hold. For all her
boastings, her sincerity is not always obvious, but it speaks plainly
through each one of the following words:
‘What is there in us, that, in spite of plausible arguments--in
spite of the consciousness that all leads to _nothing_--we should
still grumble? I know that, like everyone else, I am going on
towards death and nothingness. I weigh the circumstances of life,
and, whatever they may be, they appear to me miserably vain, and,
for all that, I cannot resign myself. Then, it must be a force; it
must be a _something_--not merely “a passage,” a certain period
of time, which matters little whether it is spent in a palace or
in a cellar; there is, then, something stronger, truer, than our
foolish phrases about it all. It is life, in short; not merely a
passage--an unprofitable misery--but life, all that we hold most
dear, all that we call ours, in short.
‘People say it is nothing, because we do not possess eternity.
Ah! the fools. Life is ourselves, it is ours, it is all that we
possess; how, then, is it possible to say that it is _nothing_? If
this is _nothing_, show me _something_.’
To deride life is indeed foolish. Prosperous people are apt to do so,
whether their prosperity be of this world or anticipated in the next.
The rich man bids the poor man lead an abstemious life in his youth,
and scorn delights, in order that he may have the wherewithal to spend
a dull old age; but the poor man replies:
‘Your arrangements have left me nothing but my youth. I will enjoy
that, and _you_ shall support me in a dull old age.’
To deride life, I repeat, is foolish; but to pity yourself for
having to die is to carry egotism rather too far. This is what Mlle.
Bashkirtseff does.
‘I am touched myself when I think of my end. No, it seems impossible!
Nice, fifteen years, the three Graces, Rome, the follies of Naples,
painting, ambition, unheard-of hopes--to end in a coffin, without
having had anything, not even love.’
Impossible, indeed! There is not much use for that word in the human
comedy.
Never, surely, before was there a lady so penetrated with her own
personality as the writer of these journals. Her arms and legs,
hips and shoulders, hopes and fears, pictures and future glory, are
all alike scanned, admired, stroked, and pondered over. She reduces
everything to one vast common denominator--herself. She gives two
francs to a starving family.
‘It was a sight to see the joy, the surprise of these poor creatures.
I hid myself behind the trees. Heaven has never treated me so well;
heaven has never had any of these beneficent fancies.’
Heaven had, at all events, never heard the like of this before. Here
is a human creature brought up in what is called the lap of luxury,
wearing purple and fine linen, and fur cloaks worth 2,000 francs,
eating and drinking to repletion, and indulging herself in every fancy;
she divides a handful of coppers amongst five starving persons, and
then retires behind a tree, and calls God to witness that no such
kindness had ever been extended to her.
When Mlle. Elsnitz, her long-suffering companion--‘young, only
nineteen, unfortunate, in a strange house without a friend’--at last,
after suffering many things, leaves the service, it is recorded:
‘I could not speak for fear of crying, and I affected a careless look,
but I hope she may have seen.’
Seen what? Why, that the carelessness was unreal. A quite sufficient
reparation for months of insolence, in the opinion of Miss Marie.
It is said that Mlle. Bashkirtseff had a great faculty of enjoyment.
If so, except in the case of books, she hardly makes it felt. Reading
evidently gave her great pleasure; but, though there is a good deal of
rapture about Nature in her journals, it is of an uneasy character.
‘The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is amongst the lonely hills,’
do not pass into the souls of those whose ambition it is to be greeted
with loud cheers by the whole wide world.
Whoever is deeply interested in himself always invents a God whom he
can apostrophize on suitable occasions. The existence of this deity
feeds his creator’s vanity. When the world turns a deaf ear to his
broken cries he besieges heaven. The Almighty, so he flatters himself,
cannot escape him. When there is no one else to have recourse to, when
all other means fail, there still remains--God. When your father, and
your mother, and your aunt, and your companion, and your maid, are all
wearied to death by your exhaustless vanity, you have still another
string to your bow. Sometimes, indeed, the strings may get entangled.
‘Just now, I spoke harshly to my aunt, but I could not help it. She
came in just when I was weeping with my hands over my face, and was
summoning God to attend to me a little.’
A book like this makes one wonder what power, human or divine, can
exorcise such a demon of vanity as that which possessed the soul of
this most unhappy girl. Carlyle strove with great energy in ‘Sartor
Resartus’ to compose a spell which should cleave this devil in three.
For a time it worked well and did some mischief, but now the magician’s
wand seems broken. Religion, indeed, can still show her conquests, and,
when we are considering a question like this, seems a fresher thing
than it does when we are reading ‘Lux Mundi.’