Mrs. Opie went back, soon after her husband's death, to Norwich, to her
early home, her father's house; nor was she a widow indeed while she
still had this tender love and protection.
That which strikes one most as one reads the accounts of Mrs. Opie
is the artlessness and perfect simplicity of her nature. The deepest
feeling of her life was her tender love for her father, and if she
remained younger than most women do, it may have been partly from the
great blessing which was hers so long, that of a father's home. Time
passed, and by degrees she resumed her old life, and came out and about
among her friends. Sorrow does not change a nature, it expresses certain
qualities which have been there all along.
So Mrs. Opie came up to London once more, and welcomed and was made
welcome by many interesting people. Lord Erskine is her friend always;
she visits Madame de Staël; she is constantly in company with Sydney
Smith, the ever-welcome as she calls him. Lord Byron, Sheridan, Lord
Dudley, all appear upon her scene. There is a pretty story of her
singing her best to Lady Sarah Napier, old, blind, and saddened, but
still happy in that she had her sons to guide and to protect her steps.
Among her many entertainments, Mrs. Opie amusingly describes a dinner at
Sir James Mackintosh's, to which most of the guests had been asked at
different hours, varying from six to half-past seven, when Baron
William von Humboldt arrives. He writes to her next day, calling her
Mademoiselle Opie, 'no doubt from my juvenile appearance,' she adds,
writing to her father. It is indeed remarkable to read of her spirits
long after middle life, her interest and capacity for amusement. She
pays 4_l._ for a ticket to a ball given to the Duke of Wellington; she
describes this and many other masquerades and gaieties, and the blue
ball, and the pink ball, and the twenty-seven carriages at her door, and
her sight of the Emperor of Russia in her hotel. When the rest of the
ladies crowd round, eager to touch his clothes, Mrs. Opie, carried away
by the general craze, encircles his wrist with her finger and thumb.
Apart from these passing fancies, she is in delightful society.
Baron Alderson, her cousin and friend, was always kind and affectionate
to her. The pretty little story is well known of his taking her home in
her Quaker dress in the Judges' state-coach at Norwich, saying, 'Come,
Brother Opie,' as he offered her his arm to lead her to the carriage.
She used to stay at his house in London, and almost the last visit she
ever paid was to him.
One of the most interesting of her descriptions is that of her meeting
with Sir Walter Scott and with Wordsworth at a breakfast in Mount
Street, and of Sir Walter's delightful talk and animated stories. One
can imagine him laughing and describing a Cockney's terrors in the
Highlands, when the whole hunt goes galloping down the crags, as is
their North-country fashion. 'The gifted man,' says Mrs. Opie, with her
old-fashioned adjectives, 'condescended to speak to me of my "Father and
Daughter." He then went on faithfully to praise his old friend Joanna
Baillie and her tragedies, and to describe a tragedy he once thought of
writing himself. He should have had no love in it. His hero should have
been the uncle of his heroine, a sort of misanthrope, with only one
affection in his heart, love for his niece, like a solitary gleam of
sunshine lighting the dark tower of some ruined and lonely dwelling.'
'It might perhaps be a weakness,' says the Friend, long after recalling
this event, 'but I must confess how greatly I was pleased at the time.'
No wonder she was pleased that the great wizard should have liked her
novel.
It would be impossible to attempt a serious critique of Mrs. Opie's
stories. They are artless, graceful, written with an innocent good faith
which disarms criticism. That Southey, Sydney Smith, and Mackintosh
should also have read them and praised them may, as I have said, prove
as much for the personal charm of the writer, and her warm sunshine of
pleasant companionship, as for the books themselves. They seem to have
run through many editions, and to have received no little encouragement.
Morality and sensation alternate in her pages. Monsters abound there.
They hire young men to act base parts, to hold villainous conversations
which the husbands are intended to overhear. They plot and scheme to
ruin the fair fame and domestic happiness of the charming heroines, but
they are justly punished, and their plots are defeated. One villain, on
his way to an appointment with a married woman, receives so severe a
blow upon the head from her brother, that he dies in agonies of fruitless
remorse. Another, who incautiously boasts aloud his deep-laid scheme
against Constantia's reputation in the dark recesses of a stage-coach,
is unexpectedly seized by the arm. A stranger in the corner, whom he had
not noticed, was no other than the baronet whom Constantia has loved all
along. The dawn breaks in brightly, shining on the stranger's face:
baffled, disgraced, the wicked schemer leaves the coach at the very next
stage, and Constantia's happiness is ensured by a brilliant marriage
with the man she loves. 'Lucy is the dark sky,' cries another lovely
heroine, 'but you, my lord, and my smiling children, these are the
rainbow that illumines it; and who would look at the gloom that see the
many tinted Iris? not I, indeed.' 'Valentine's Eve,' from which this is
quoted, was published after John Opie's death. So was a novel called
'Temper,' and the 'Tales of Real Life.' Mrs. Opie, however, gave up
writing novels when she joined the Society of Friends.
For some years past, Mrs. Opie had been thrown more and more in the
company of a very noble and remarkable race of men and women living
quietly in their beautiful homes in the neighbourhood of Norwich, but
of an influence daily growing--handsome people, prosperous, generous,
with a sort of natural Priesthood belonging to them. Scorning to live
for themselves alone, the Gurneys were the dispensers and originators of
a hundred useful and benevolent enterprises in Norwich and elsewhere.
They were Quakers, and merchants, and bankers. How much of their strength
lay in their wealth and prosperity, how much in their enthusiasm, their
high spirits, voluntarily curbed, their natural instinct both to lead
and to protect, it would be idle to discuss. It is always difficult for
people who believe in the all-importance of the present to judge of
others, whose firm creed is that the present is nothing as compared to
the future. Chief among this remarkable family was Elizabeth Gurney,
the wife of Josiah Fry, the mother of many children, and the good angel,
indeed, of the unhappy captives of those barbarous days, prisoners, to
whose utter gloom and misery she brought some rays of hope. There are
few figures more striking than that of the noble Quaker lady starting on
her generous mission, comforting the children, easing the chains of the
captives. No domineering Jellyby, but a motherly, deep-hearted woman;
shy, and yet from her very timidity gaining an influence, which less
sensitive natures often fail to win. One likes to imagine the dignified
sweet face coming in--the comforting Friend in the quiet garb of the
Quaker woman standing at the gates of those terrible places, bidding the
despairing prisoners be of good hope.
Elizabeth Fry's whole life was a mission of love and help to others; her
brothers and her many relations heartily joined and assisted her in many
plans and efforts.
For Joseph John Gurney, the head of the Norwich family, Mrs. Opie is
said to have had a feeling amounting to more than friendship. Be this as
it may, it is no wonder that so warm-hearted and impressionable a woman
should have been influenced by the calm goodness of the friends with
whom she was now thrown. It is evident enough, nor does she attempt to
conceal the fact, that the admiration and interest she feels for John
Joseph Gurney are very deep motive powers. There comes a time in most
lives, especially in the lives of women, when all the habits and
certainties of youth have passed away, when life has to be built up
again upon the foundations indeed of the past, the friendships, the
memories, the habits of early life, but with new places and things to
absorb and to interest, new hearts to love. And one day people wake up
to find that the friends of their choice have become their home. People
are stranded perhaps seeking their share in life's allowance, and
suddenly they come upon something, with all the charm which belongs to
deliberate choice, as well as that of natural affinity. How well one
can realise the extraordinary comfort that Amelia Opie must have found
in the kind friends and neighbours with whom she was now thrown! Her
father was a very old man, dying slowly by inches. Her own life of
struggle, animation, intelligence, was over, as she imagined, for ever.
No wonder if for a time she was carried away, if she forgot her own
nature, her own imperative necessities, in sympathy with this new
revelation. Here was a new existence, here was a Living Church ready to
draw her within its saving walls. John Joseph Gurney must have been a
man of extraordinary personal influence. For a long time past he had
been writing to her seriously. At last, to the surprise of the world,
though not without long deliberation and her father's full approval, she
joined the Society of Friends, put on their dress, and adopted their
peculiar phraseology. People were surprised at the time, but I think it
would have been still more surprising if she had not joined them. J. J.
Gurney, in one of his letters, somewhat magnificently describes Mrs.
Opie as offering up her many talents and accomplishments a brilliant
sacrifice to her new-found persuasions. 'Illustrations of Lying,'
moral anecdotes on the borderland of imagination, are all that she is
henceforth allowed. 'I am bound in a degree not to invent a story,
because when I became a Friend it was required of me not to do so,' she
writes to Miss Mitford, who had asked her to contribute to an annual.
Miss Mitford's description of Mrs. Opie, 'Quakerised all over, and
calling Mr. Haydon 'Friend Benjamin,' is amusing enough; and so also
is the account of the visiting card she had printed after she became
a Quaker, with 'Amelia Opie,' without any prefix, as is the Quaker
way; also, as is not their way, with a wreath of embossed pink roses
surrounding the name. There is an account of Mrs. Opie published in the
'Edinburgh Review,' in a delightful article entitled the 'Worthies of
Norwich,' which brings one almost into her very presence.
Amelia Opie at the end of the last century and Amelia Opie in the
garb and with the speech of a member of the Society of Friends
sounds like two separate personages, but no one who recollects the
gay little songs which at seventy she used to sing with lively
gesture, the fragments of drama to which, with the zest of an
innate actress, she occasionally treated her young friends, or the
elaborate faultlessness of her appearance--the shining folds and
long train of her pale satin draperies, the high, transparent cap,
the crisp fichu crossed over the breast, which set off to
advantage the charming little plump figure with its rounded
lines--could fail to recognise the same characteristics which
sparkled about the wearer of the pink calico domino in which she
frolicked incognito 'till she was tired' at a ball given by the
Duke of Wellington in 1814, or of the eight blue feathers which
crowned the waving tresses of her flaxen hair as a bride.
Doctor Alderson died in October 1825, and Mrs. Opie was left alone. She
was very forlorn when her father died. She had no close ties to carry
her on peacefully from middle age to the end of life. The great break
had come; she was miserable, and, as mourners do, she falls upon herself
and beats her breast. All through these sad years her friends at Northrepps
and at Earlham were her chief help and consolation. As time passed her
deep sorrow was calmed, when peaceful memories had succeeded to the keen
anguish of her good old father's loss. She must have suffered deeply;
she tried hard to be brave, but her courage failed her at times: she
tried hard to do her duty; and her kindness and charity were unfailing,
for she was herself still, although so unhappy. Her journals are
pathetic in their humility and self-reproaches for imaginary omissions.
She is lonely; out of heart, out of hope. 'I am so dissatisfied with
myself that I hardly dare ask or expect a blessing upon my labours,' she
says; and long lists of kind and fatiguing offices, of visits to sick
people and poor people, to workhouses and prisons, are interspersed with
expressions of self-blame.
* * * * *
The writer can remember as a child speculating as she watched the
straight-cut figure of a Quaker lady standing in the deep window of an
old mansion that overlooked the Luxembourg Gardens at Paris, with all
their perfume and blooming scent of lilac and sweet echoes of children,
while the quiet figure stood looking down upon it all from--to a
child--such an immeasurable distance. As one grows older one becomes
more used to garbs of different fashions and cut, and one can believe in
present sunlight and the scent of flowering trees and the happy sound of
children's voices going straight to living hearts beneath their several
disguises, and Mrs. Opie, notwithstanding her Quaker dress, loved bright
colours and gay sunlight. She was one of those who gladly made life
happy for others, who naturally turned to bright and happy things
herself. When at last she began to recover from the blow which had
fallen so heavily upon her she went from Norwich to the Lakes and Fells
for refreshment, and then to Cornwall, and among its green seas and
softly clothed cliffs she found good friends (as most people do who go
to that kind and hospitable county), and her husband's relations, who
welcomed her kindly. As she recovered by degrees she began to see
something of her old companions. She went to London to attend the May
meetings of the Society, and I heard an anecdote not long ago which must
have occurred on some one of these later visits there.
One day when some people were sitting at breakfast at Samuel Rogers's,
and talking as people do who belong to the agreeable classes, the
conversation happened to turn upon the affection of a father for his
only child, when an elderly lady who had been sitting at the table, and
who was remarkable for her Quaker dress, her frills and spotless folds,
her calm and striking appearance, started up suddenly, burst into a
passion of tears, and had to be led sobbing out of the room. She did not
return, and the lady who remembers the incident, herself a young bride
at the time, told me it made all the more impression upon her at the
time because she was told that the Quaker lady was Mrs. Opie. My friend
was just beginning her life. Mrs. Opie must have been ending hers.
It is not often that women, when youth is long past, shed sudden and
passionate tears of mere emotion, nor perhaps would a Quaker, trained
from early childhood to calm moods and calm expressions, have been so
suddenly overpoweringly affected; but Mrs. Opie was no born daughter of
the community, she was excitable and impulsive to the last. I have heard
a lady who knew her well describe her, late in life, laughing heartily
and impetuously thrusting a somewhat starched-up Friend into a deep
arm-chair exclaiming, 'I will hurl thee into the bottomless pit.'