No sketch of Maria Edgeworth's life, however slight, would be complete
without a few words about certain persons coming a generation before her
(and belonging still to the age of periwigs), who were her father's
associates and her own earliest friends. Notwithstanding all that has
been said of Mr. Edgeworth's bewildering versatility of nature, he seems
to have been singularly faithful in his friendships. He might take up
new ties, but he clung pertinaciously to those which had once existed.
His daughter inherited that same steadiness of affection. In his life of
Erasmus Darwin, his grandfather, Mr. Charles Darwin, writing of these
very people, has said, 'There is, perhaps, no safer test of a man's real
character than that of his long-continued friendship with good and
able men.' He then goes on to quote an instance of a long-continued
affection and intimacy only broken by death between a certain set of
distinguished friends, giving the names of Keir, Day, Small, Boulton,
Watt, Wedgwood, and Darwin, and adding to them the names of Edgeworth
himself and of the Galtons.
Mr. Edgeworth first came to Lichfield to make Dr. Darwin's acquaintance.
His second visit was to his friend Mr. Day, the author of 'Sandford and
Merton,' who had taken a house in the valley of Stow, and who invited
him one Christmas on a visit. 'About the year 1765,' says Miss Seward,
'came to Lichfield, from the neighbourhood of Reading, the young and gay
philosopher, Mr. Edgeworth; a man of fortune, and recently married to a
Miss Elers, of Oxfordshire. The fame of Dr. Darwin's various talents
allured Mr. E. to the city they graced.' And the lady goes on to describe
Mr. Edgeworth himself:--'Scarcely two-and-twenty, with an exterior yet
more juvenile, having mathematic science, mechanic ingenuity, and a
competent portion of classical learning, with the possession of the
modern languages.... He danced, he fenced, he winged his arrows with
more than philosophic skill,' continues the lady, herself a person of no
little celebrity in her time and place. Mr. Edgeworth, in his Memoirs,
pays a respectful tribute to Miss Seward's charms, to her agreeable
conversation, her beauty, her flowing tresses, her sprightliness and
address. Such moderate expressions fail, however, to do justice to this
lady's powers, to her enthusiasm, her poetry, her partisanship. The
portrait prefixed to her letters is that of a dignified person with an
oval face and dark eyes, the thick brown tresses are twined with pearls,
her graceful figure is robed in the softest furs and draperies of the
period. In her very first letter she thus poetically describes her
surroundings:--'The autumnal glory of this day puts to shame the summer's
sullenness. I sit writing upon this dear green terrace, feeding at
intervals my little golden-breasted songsters. The embosomed vale of
Stow glows sunny through the Claude-Lorraine tint which is spread over
the scene like the blue mist over a plum.'
In this Claude-Lorraine-plum-tinted valley stood the house which Mr. Day
had taken, and where Mr. Edgeworth had come on an eventful visit. Miss
Seward herself lived with her parents in the Bishop's palace at Lichfield.
There was also a younger sister, 'Miss Sally,' who died as a girl, and
another very beautiful young lady their friend, by name Honora Sneyd,
placed under Mrs. Seward's care. She was the heroine of Major André's
unhappy romance. He too lived at Lichfield with his mother, and his
hopeless love gives a tragic reality to this by-gone holiday of youth
and merry-making. As one reads the old letters and memoirs the echoes
of laughter reach us. One can almost see the young folks all coming
together out of the Cathedral Close, where so much of their time was
passed; the beautiful Honora, surrounded by friends and adorers,
chaperoned by the graceful Muse her senior, also much admired, and much
made of. Thomas Day is perhaps striding after them in silence with keen
critical glances; his long black locks flow unpowdered down his back. In
contrast to him comes his brilliant and dressy companion, Mr. Edgeworth,
who talks so agreeably. I can imagine little Sabrina, Day's adopted
foundling, of whom so many stories have been told, following shyly at
her guardian's side in her simple dress and childish beauty, and André's
young handsome face turned towards Miss Sneyd. So they pass on happy and
contented in each other's company, Honora in the midst, beautiful,
stately, reserved: she too was one of those not destined to be old.
Miss Seward seems to have loved this friend with a very sincere and
admiring affection, and to have bitterly mourned her early death. Her
letters abound in apostrophes to the lost Honora. But perhaps the poor
Muse expected almost too much from friendship, too much from life.
She expected, as we all do at times, that her friends should be not
themselves but her, that they should lead not their lives but her own.
So much at least one may gather from the various phases of her style
and correspondence, and her complaints of Honora's estrangement and
subsequent coldness. Perhaps, also, Miss Seward's many vagaries and
sentiments may have frozen Honora's sympathies. Miss Seward was all
asterisks and notes of exclamation. Honora seems to have forced feeling
down to its most scrupulous expression. She never lived to be softened
by experience, to suit herself to others by degrees: with great love she
also inspired awe and a sort of surprise. One can imagine her pointing
the moral of the purple jar, as it was told long afterwards by her
stepdaughter, then a little girl playing at her own mother's knee in her
nursery by the river.
People in the days of shilling postage were better correspondents than
they are now when we have to be content with pennyworths of news and of
affectionate intercourse. Their descriptions and many details bring all
the chief characters vividly before us, and carry us into the hearts and
the pocket-books of the little society at Lichfield as it then was. The
town must have been an agreeable sojourn in those days for people of
some pretension and small performance. The inhabitants of Lichfield seem
actually to have read each other's verses, and having done so to have
taken the trouble to sit down and write out their raptures. They were a
pleasant lively company living round about the old cathedral towers,
meeting in the Close or the adjacent gardens or the hospitable Palace
itself. Here the company would sip tea, talk mild literature of their
own and good criticism at second hand, quoting Dr. Johnson to one
another with the familiarity of townsfolk. From Erasmus Darwin, too,
they must have gained something of vigour and originality.
With all her absurdities Miss Seward had some real critical power and
appreciation; and some of her lines are very pretty.[1] An 'Ode to the
Sun' is only what might have been expected from this Lichfield Corinne.
Her best known productions are an 'Elegy on Captain Cook,' a 'Monody on
Major André,' whom she had known from her early youth; and there is a
poem, 'Louisa,' of which she herself speaks very highly. But even more
than her poetry did she pique herself upon her epistolary correspondence.
It must have been well worth while writing letters when they were not
only prized by the writer and the recipients, but commented on by their
friends in after years. 'Court Dewes, Esq.,' writes, after five years,
for copies of Miss Seward's epistles to Miss Rogers and Miss Weston, of
which the latter begins:--'Soothing and welcome to me, dear Sophia, is
the regret you express for our separation! Pleasant were the weeks we
have recently passed together in this ancient and embowered mansion! I
had strongly felt the silence and vacancy of the depriving day on which
you vanished. How prone are our hearts perversely to quarrel with the
friendly coercion of employment at the very instant in which it is
clearing the torpid and injurious mists of unavailing melancholy!' Then
follows a sprightly attack before which Johnson may have quailed indeed.
'Is the Fe-fa-fum of literature that snuffs afar the fame of his brother
authors, and thirsts for its destruction, to be allowed to gallop
unmolested over the fields of criticism? A few pebbles from the
well-springs of truth and eloquence are all that is wanted to bring the
might of his envy low.' This celebrated letter, which may stand as
a specimen of the whole six volumes, concludes with the following
apostrophe:--'Virtuous friendship, how pure, how sacred are thy
delights! Sophia, thy mind is capable of tasting them in all their
poignance: against how many of life's incidents may that capacity be
considered as a counterpoise!'
Footnote 1: In a notice of Miss Seward in the _Annual Register_, just
after her death in 1809, the writer, who seems to have known her,
says:--'Conscious of ability, she freely displayed herself in a manner
equally remote from annoyance and affectation.... Her errors arose from
a glowing imagination joined to an excessive sensibility, cherished
instead of repressed by early habits. It is understood that she has left
the whole of her works to Mr. Scott, the northern poet, with a view to
their publication with her life and posthumous pieces.'
There were constant rubs, which are not to be wondered at, between Miss
Seward and Dr. Darwin, who, though a poet, was also a singularly witty,
downright man, outspoken and humorous. The lady admires his genius,
bitterly resents his sarcasms; of his celebrated work, the 'Botanic
Garden,' she says, 'It is a string of poetic brilliants, and they are of
the first water, but the eye will be apt to want the intersticial black
velvet to give effect to their lustre.' In later days, notwithstanding
her 'elegant language,' as Mr. Charles Darwin calls it, she said several
spiteful things of her old friend, but they seem more prompted by
private pique than malice.
If Miss Seward was the Minerva and Dr. Darwin the Jupiter of the
Lichfield society, its philosopher was Thomas Day, of whom Miss Seward's
description is so good that I cannot help one more quotation:--
'Powder and fine clothes were at that time the appendages of gentlemen;
Mr. Day wore not either. He was tall and stooped in the shoulders, full
made but not corpulent, and in his meditative and melancholy air a
degree of awkwardness and dignity were blended.' She then compares
him with his guest, Mr. Edgeworth. 'Less graceful, less amusing, less
brilliant than Mr. E., but more highly imaginative, more classical, and
a deeper reasoner; strict integrity, energetic friendship, open-handed
generosity, and diffusive charity, greatly overbalanced on the side of
virtue, the tincture of misanthropic gloom and proud contempt of common
life society.' Wright, of Derby, painted a full-length picture of Mr.
Day in 1770. 'Mr. Day looks upward enthusiastically, meditating on
the contents of a book held in his dropped right hand ... a flash of
lightning plays in his hair and illuminates the contents of the volume.'
'Dr. Darwin,' adds Miss Seward, 'sat to Mr. Wright about the same
period--_that_ was a simply contemplative portrait of the most perfect
resemblance.'