THE GAY REALITIES OF MOLIÈRE
Dr. Mitford had set his heart upon his daughter’s becoming an
“accomplished musician,” in spite of her having, as she tells us,
“neither ear, nor taste, nor application.” Her first music master in
Hans Place failing to bring about any improvement in her playing upon
the piano, she was removed from his tuition and placed under that of
a German professor, “an impatient, irritable man of genius,” who, in
his turn, soon summarily dismissed his pupil! “Things being in this
unpromising state,” she writes, “I began to entertain some hope that my
musical education would be given up altogether. This time [however] my
father threw the blame upon the instrument, and he now resolved that I
should become a great performer upon the harp.
“It happened that our school-house ... was so built that the principal
reception-room was connected with the entrance-hall by a long passage
and two double doors. This room, fitted up with nicely bound books,
contained, amongst other musical instruments, the harp upon which I
was sent to practise every morning. I was sent alone, [and was] most
comfortably out of sight and hearing of every individual in the house,
the only means of approach being through the two resounding green baize
doors, swinging to with a heavy bang the moment they were let go. As
the change from piano to harp ... had by no means worked a miracle, I
very shortly betook myself to the book-shelves, and seeing a row of
octavo volumes lettered _Théâtre de Voltaire_, I selected one of them
and had deposited it in front of the music-stand and perched myself
upon the stool to read it in less time than an ordinary pupil would
have consumed in getting through the first three bars of _Ar Hyd y Nos_.
“The play upon which I opened was _Zaïre_. There was a certain
romance in the situation, an interest in the story.... So I got
through _Zaïre_, and when I had finished _Zaïre_ I proceeded to other
plays—_Ædipe_, _Mérope_, _Algire_, _Mahomet_, plays well worth reading,
but not so absorbing as to prevent my giving due attention to the
warning doors, and putting the book in its place, and striking the
chords of _Ar Hyd y Nos_ as often as I heard a step approaching.
“But when the dramas of Voltaire were exhausted and I had recourse to
some neighbouring volumes the state of matters changed at once. The new
volumes contained the comedies of Molière, and once plunged into the
gay realities of this delightful world, all the miseries of this globe
of ours—harp, music-books, practisings, and lessons—were forgotten....
I never remembered that there was such a thing as time; I never heard
the warning doors; the only tribulations that troubled me were the
tribulations of _Sganarelle_, the only lessons I thought about—the
lessons of the ‘Bourgeois Gentilhomme.’ So I was caught; caught in
the very act of laughing till I cried over the apostrophes of the
angry father to the galley, in which he is told his son has been taken
captive, ‘Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère!’
“Luckily, however, the person who discovered my delinquency was one of
my chief spoilers—the husband of our good school mistress. Accordingly
when he could speak for laughing, what he said sounded far more like a
compliment upon my relish for the comic drama than a rebuke. I suppose
that he spoke to the same effect to my father. At all events the issue
of the affair was the dismissal of the poor little harp mistress and a
present of a cheap edition of Molière for my own reading.” And writing
in after years Miss Mitford says: “I have got the set still—twelve
little foreign-looking books, unbound, and covered with a gay-looking
pink paper, mottled with red, like certain carnations.”
Miss Mitford tells us in the Introduction to one of her works that her
father had engaged the English teacher Miss Rowden, of whom we have
already spoken, to act as a sort of private tutor—a governess out of
school hours to his young daughter.
“At the time I was placed under her care,” writes Mary, “her whole
heart was in the drama, especially as personified by John Kemble; and I
am persuaded that she thought she could in no way so well perform her
duty as in taking me to Drury Lane whenever his name was in the bills.
“It was a time of great actors—Jack Bannister and Jack Johnstone,
Fawcett and Emery, Lewis and Munden, Mrs. Davenport, Miss Pope and Mrs.
Jordan (most exquisite of all) made comedy a bright and living art, an
art as full as life itself of laughter and tears.
“My enthusiasm for the drama soon equalled that of Miss Rowden....
There was of course a great difference in kind between her pleasure and
mine; hers was a critical, mine a childish enjoyment; she loved fine
acting, I loved the play.”
Writing in later years of her pleasure, however imperfect then, in
the acting of “the glorious family of Kemble,” she says: “The fame
of John Kemble ... has suffered not a little by the contact with his
great sister. Besides her uncontested and incontestable power Mrs.
Siddons had one advantage not always allowed for—she was a woman. The
actress must always be dearer than the actor, goes closer to the heart,
draws tenderer tears.... Add that the tragedy in which they were best
remembered was one in which the heroine must always predominate, for
Lady Macbeth is the moving spirit of the play. But the characters of
more equality—Katherine and Wolsey, Hermione and Leontes, Coriolanus
and Volumnia, Hamlet and the Queen—and surely John Kemble may hold his
own. How often have I seen them in those plays! What would I give to
see again those plays so acted!”
In the year 1802, when Mary was fourteen years of age, her thirst for
knowledge was growing rapidly. Miss Rowden happened to be reading
Virgil, and Mary longed to be able to read it also. “I have just
taken a lesson in Latin,” she writes to her mother, “but I shall in
consequence omit some of my other business. It is so extremely like
Italian that I think I shall find it much easier than I expected.”
“I told you,” she says in a letter to her father, “that I had finished
the _Iliad_, which I admire beyond anything I ever read. I have begun
the _Æneid_, which I cannot say I admire so much. Dryden is so fond of
triplets and Alexandrines that it is much heavier reading; ... when I
have finished it I shall read the _Odyssey_.... I am now reading that
beautiful opera of Metastasio, _Themistocles_, and when I have finished
that I shall read Tasso’s _Jerusalem Delivered_. His poetry is really
heavenly.”
Again she writes, “I went to the library the other day with Miss Rowden
and brought back the first volume of Goldsmith’s _Animated Nature_.
It is quite a lady’s natural history, and extremely entertaining....
The only fault is its length. There are eight volumes. But as I read
it to myself, and read pretty quick, I shall soon get through it. I am
likewise reading the _Odyssey_, which I even prefer to the _Iliad_. I
think it beautiful beyond comparison.”
Mrs. Mitford was staying in town in the summer of 1802, and she writes
to her husband: “You would have laughed yesterday when M. St. Quintin
was reading Mary’s English composition, of which the subject was, ‘The
advantage of a well-cultivated mind’; a word struck him as needless to
be inserted, and which after objecting to it he was going to expunge.
Mam Bonette (a pet name), in her pretty meek way, urged the necessity
of the word used. Miss Rowden was then applied to. She and I both
asserted that the sentence would be incomplete without it. St. Quintin,
on a more deliberate view of the subject, with all the liberality which
is so amiable a point in his character, begged our daughter’s pardon,
and the passage remained as it originally stood.”
A young French girl, Mlle. Rose, had recently become an inmate of the
schoolroom. She was an orphan, and her venerable grand-parents, who
belonged to a noble Bretonne family, were now dependent upon her for
support. The three were to be seen occasionally at M. St. Quintin’s
hospitable supper-parties, and on such occasions Rose “always brought
with her some ingenious straw-plaiting to make into fancy bonnets,
which were then in vogue.... She was a pallid, drooping creature,
whose dark eyes looked too large for her face.” She now brought her
straw-plaiting into the schoolroom and also assisted in teaching French
to the pupils.
“About this time a little girl named Betsy, of a short, squat figure,
plain in face and ill-dressed and overdressed, appeared at the school,
brought by her father. They happened to arrive at the same time with
the French dancing master, a marquis of the _ancien régime_. I never
saw such a contrast between two men. The Frenchman was slim, long
and pale, and allowing always for the dancing-master air, he might
be called elegant. The Englishman was the beau-ideal of a John Bull,
portentous in size, broad and red of visage, and loud of tongue. He did
not stay five minutes, but that was time enough to strike monsieur with
horror ... especially when his first words conveyed an injunction to
the lady of the house ‘to take care that no grinning Frenchman had the
ordering of his Betsy’s feet. If she must learn to dance, let her be
taught by an honest Englishman.’
“Poor Betsy! there she sat, the tears trickling down her cheeks, little
comforted by the kind notice of the governess and the English teacher.
I made some girlish advances towards acquaintanceship which she was too
shy or too miserable to return....
“For the present she seemed to have attached herself to Mademoiselle
Rose. She had crept to the side of the young French woman and watched
her as she wove her straw plaits. She had also attempted the simple art
with some discarded straws, and when mademoiselle had so far roused
herself as to show her the proper way, she soon became an efficient
assistant.
“No intercourse took place between them. Indeed none was possible
since neither knew a word of the other’s language. Betsy was silence
personified, and poor Mlle. Rose was now more than ever dejected.
An opportunity of returning to France had opened to her and to her
grand-parents, and was passing away. The expenses of the journey were
beyond her means. So she sighed over her straw-plaiting and submitted.
“In the meantime the second Saturday after the new pupil’s coming to
school arrived, and with it a summons home to Betsy, who, for the
first time gathering courage to address our good governess, asked ‘if
she might be trusted with the bonnet Mlle. Rose had just finished,
to show her aunt—she knew she would like to buy that bonnet because
mademoiselle had been so good as to let her assist in plaiting it.’ Our
good governess ordered the bonnet to be put into the carriage, told her
the price, called her a good child, and took leave of her till Monday.
“Two hours after, Betsy and her father reappeared in the schoolroom.
‘Ma’amselle,’ said he, bawling as loud as he could with the view
evidently of making her understand him, ‘Ma’amselle, I’ve no great love
for the French, whom I take to be our natural enemies. But you’re a
good young woman; you’ve been kind to my Betsy, and have taught her to
make your fal-lals. She says that she thinks you’re fretting because
you can’t manage to take your grandfather and grandmother back to
France again; so as you let her help you in that other handiwork, why
you must let her help you in this.’ Then throwing a heavy purse into
her lap and catching his little daughter up in his arms he departed,
leaving poor Mlle. Rose too much bewildered to speak or to comprehend
the happiness that had fallen upon her.”
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