VERSATILITY AND PLAYFULNESS
In a letter to Sir William Elford dated January, 1812, Mary remarks: “I
have lived so little with girls of my own age, and have been so much
accustomed to think papa my pleasantest companion and mamma my best
friend that ... I have escaped unscathed from all the charming folly
and delectable romance of female intimacy and female confidence.” Then
going on to speak of the usual school training of girls at that period
she remarks: “I must observe that in this educating age everything is
taught to women except that which is perhaps worth all the rest—the
power and the habit of thinking. Do not misunderstand me.... I would
only wish that while everything is invented and inculcated that can
serve to amuse, to occupy, or adorn youth—youth which needs so little
amusement or ornament!—something should be instilled that may add
pleasure and respectability to age.”
About this time Sir William paid a visit to Bath. Mary writes: “What
says Bath of _Rokeby_? But Bath, I suppose, is, as to literature,
politics and fashion, the echo of London. Be that as it may, I am
very happy that you have arrived there, both because it brings us a
step nearer, and because it so comfortably rids you of the horrors of
solitude. ‘_O, la Solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut avoir
quelqu’une à qui l’on puisse dire, La Solitude est une belle chose!_’
... I most sincerely hope that we shall meet this spring in London ...
and that we shall have the pleasure of renewing (I might almost say
commencing) our personal acquaintance. You will find just the same
plain, awkward, blushing thing whom you profess to remember.... I talk
to you with wonderful boldness upon paper, and while we are seventy
miles distant; but I doubt whether I shall say three sentences to you
when we meet, because the ghosts of all my impertinent letters will
stare me in the face the moment I see you.”
A little later on Sir William paid a visit to the Mitfords at Bertram
House, and Mary writes of him: “He is the kindest, cleverest,
warmest-hearted man in the world.” Some of her friends fancied that,
in spite of the great discrepancy in their ages, her partiality might
possibly lead to a union between the friends. To their surmise Mary
answers: “I shall not marry Sir William Elford, for which there is a
remarkably good reason, the aforesaid Sir William having no sort of
desire to marry me.... He has an outrageous fancy for my letters, and
marrying a favourite correspondent would be something like killing the
goose with the golden egg.”
In one of Sir William’s letters he had complained of Miss Mitford’s
writing being somewhat illegible, to which she responds: “So, my dear
friend, you cannot make out my writing! And my honoured father cannot
help you! Really this is too affronting! The two persons in all the
world who have had the most of my letters cannot read them! Well, there
is the secret of your liking them so much. Obscurity is sometimes a
great charm. You just make out my meaning and fill it up by the force
of your own imagination. The outline is mine, the colouring your own.
So much the better for me.”
Writing on a hot summer’s day, she says: “I have been solacing myself
for this week past ‘taking mine ease’ in a hay-cock left solely for
my accommodation, where Mossy and I repair every morning to perform
between us the operation of reading a _good book_, I turning the leaves
and _he_ going to sleep over it. It is ... the most delightful hay-cock
in the world, in a snug little nook; nothing visible but lawn and
plantation; whilst breathing the odours of the firs, whose fragrance
this wet summer has been past anything I could have conceived.”
[Illustration: BERTRAM HOUSE]
Mossy was the name of her dog. Throughout her life Mary Mitford was
much attached to dogs, and she was generally accompanied in her
rambles by some special favourite. Sometimes it was a beautiful
greyhound—one of her father’s coursers that had been given to her.
She concludes one of her letters by remarking: “I have nothing more to
tell you, except that I have taken a new pet—the most sagacious donkey
that ever lived. She lets nobody ride her—follows me everywhere, even
indoors when she can—and is really a wonderful animal. Her favourite
caress is to have her ears stroked. Shakespeare has noticed this in the
_Midsummer Night’s Dream_ when Titania tells Bottom that she will give
him musk-roses and ‘stroke thy fair, large ears, my gentle joy.’”
In this same letter Mary speaks of some of the singers she had heard
recently in London. “I hope you like Braham’s singing,” she says,
“though I know among your scientific musicians it is a crime of _lèse
majesté_ to say so; but he is the only singer I ever heard in my life
who conveyed to my very unmusical ears any idea of the expression of
which music is susceptible; no one else joins any sense to the sound.
They may talk of music as ‘married to immortal verse’; but if it were
not for Braham they would have been divorced long ago.... Moore’s
singing has, indeed, great feeling; but then his singing is not much
beyond a modulated sigh—though the most powerful sigh in the world.”
And speaking of the actors of the period, she says: “Of all that I have
seen nothing has afforded me half so much delight as Miss O’Neil. She
broke my heart, and charmed me beyond expression by showing me that I
had a heart to break, a fact I always before rather doubted, having
been till I saw her as impenetrable to tragedy as Punch and his wife
or any other wooden-hearted biped. But she is irresistible.... The
manner in which she identifies herself with the character exceeds all
that I had before conceived possible of theatrical illusion. You never
admire—you only weep.”
In another letter she complains of Kemble’s always declaiming and
never speaking in a simple and natural manner. “It does appear to me,”
she says, “that no man can be a perfect tragedian who is not likewise
a good actor in the higher branch of comedy. A statesman not at the
council board, and a hero when the battle is safely ended, would, as
it seems to me, talk and walk much in the same way as other people.
Even a tyrant does not always rave nor a lover always whine.... That
Shakespeare and all the writers of Elizabeth’s days were of my opinion
I am quite sure. Nothing is more remarkable in their delightful dramas
... than the sweet and natural tone of conversation which sometimes
relieves the terrible intensity of their plots, like a flowery glade
in a gloomy forest, or a sunbeam streaming [across] a winter sky.” She
goes on to say: “I cannot take leave of the drama without adding my
feeble tribute of regret for the secession of Mrs. Siddons. Yet it was
better that she should quit the stage in undiminished splendour than
have remained to show the feeble twilight of so glorious a day.”
In a letter written during a severe winter we find this description of
a hoar-frost: “The scene has been lovely beyond any winter piece I ever
beheld; a world formed of something much whiter than ivory—as white
indeed as snow—but carved with a delicacy, a lightness, a precision
to which the mossy, ungrateful, tottering snow could never pretend.
Rime was the architect; every tree, every shrub, every blade of grass
was clothed with its pure incrustations, but so thinly, so delicately
clothed that every twig, every fibre, every ramification remained
perfect, alike indeed in colour, but displaying in form to the fullest
extent the endless, infinite variety of Nature. It is a scene that
really defies description.”
Here is a playful letter to Sir William, written in August, 1816:
“Pray, my dear friend, were you ever a bridesmaid? I rather expect
you to say no, and I give you joy of your happy ignorance, for I am
just now in the very agonies of the office, helping to buy and admire
wedding clothes.... The bride is a fair neighbour of mine.... Her head
is a perfect milliner’s shop, and she plans out her wardrobe much as
Phidias might have planned the Parthenon.... She has had no sleep
since the grand question of a lace bonnet with a plume, or a lace veil
without one, for the grand occasion came into discussion.”
Two months later Mary writes: “I have at last safely disposed of my
bride.... She had accumulated on her person so much finery that she
looked as if by mistake she had put on two wedding dresses instead of
one [and having wept copiously] was by many degrees the greatest fright
I ever saw in my life. Indeed between crying and blushing brides, and
bridesmaids too, do generally look strange figures. I am sure we did,
though to confess the truth I really could not cry, much as I wished
to keep all my neighbours in countenance, and was forced to hold my
handkerchief to my eyes and sigh in vain for ‘_ce don de dames que Dieu
ne m’a pas donné_.’”
Mary Mitford always enjoyed writing to Sir William upon literary
matters, as the reader knows, and comparing their respective opinions.
“I am almost afraid to tell you,” she writes, “how much I dislike
_Childe Harold_. Not but there are very many fine stanzas and powerful
descriptions; but the sentiment is so strange, so gloomy, so heartless,
that it is impossible not to feel a mixture of pity and disgust, which
all our admiration of the author’s talents cannot overcome.... Are
you not rather sick—now pray don’t betray me—are you not rather sick
of being one of the hundred thousand confidants of his lordship’s
mysterious and secret sorrows?... I would rather be the poorest Greek
whose fate he commiserates than Lord Byron, if this poem be a true
transcript of his feelings.”
In one of her letters she remarks: “I prefer the French pulpit oratory
to any other part of their literature.... I mean, of course, their
old preachers—Fénelon, Bourdaloue, Massillon and Bossuet—especially
the last, who approaches as nearly to the unrivalled sublimity of
the sacred writings as any writer I have ever met with. Oh! what a
contrast between him and our dramatic sermonists Mesdames Hawkins and
Brompton! I am convinced that people read them for the story, to enjoy
the stimulus of a novel without the name.... Ah! they had better take
South and Blair and Secker for guides, and go for amusement to Miss
Edgeworth and Miss Austen. By the way, how delightful is her _Emma_,
the best, I think, of all her charming works.”
“Have you read _Pepys’ Memoirs_?” she asks on another occasion. “I
am extremely diverted with them, and prefer them to Evelyn’s, all to
nothing. He was too precise and too gentlemanly and too sensible by
half; wrote in full dress, with an eye if not to the press, at least
to posthumous reputation. Now this man sets down his thoughts in a
most becoming _déshabille_—does not care twopence for posterity, and
evidently thinks wisdom a very foolish thing. I don’t know when any
book has amused me so much. It is the very perfection of gossiping—most
relishing nonsense.”
Writing in 1819 she says: “Oh! but the oddest book I have met with is
Madame de Genlis’s new novel _Les Parvenus_, an imitation of _Gil Blas_
... while she sticks to that she is very good; her comic powers are
really exceedingly respectable—but she flies off at a tangent to her
old beaten path of sentimental vice and fanatical piety, and sends her
heroine to the Holy Land as a Pilgrim in the nineteenth century and
then fixes her in a Spanish convent!”
Now she writes with deep admiration of Burns—“Burns the sweetest, the
sublimest, the most tricksy poet who has blest this nether world since
the days of Shakespeare! I am just fresh from reading Dr. Currie’s
four volumes and Cromak’s one, which comprise, I believe, all that
he ever wrote.... Have you lately read Dr. Currie’s work? If you
have not, pray do, and tell me if you do not admire him—not with the
flimsy lackadaisical praise with which certain gentle damsels bedaub
his _Mountain Daisy_ and his _Woodlark_ ... but with the strong and
manly feeling which his fine and indignant letters, his exquisite and
original humour, his inimitable pathos must awaken in such a mind as
yours. Ah, what have they to answer for who let such a man perish? I
think there is no poet whose works I have ever read who interests me
so strongly by the display of personal character contained in almost
everything he wrote (even in his songs) as Burns.” After speaking of
“his versatility and his exhaustless imagination,” she says: “By the
way, my dear Sir William, does it not appear to you that versatility
is the true and rare characteristic of that rare thing called
genius—versatility and playfulness?”
Writing to Sir William somewhat hurriedly in March, 1817, Mary
remarks: “Rather than send the envelope blank I will fill it with
the translation of a pretty allegory of M. Arnault’s, the author of
‘Germanicus.’ You must not read it if you have read the French,
because it does not come near to its simplicity. If you have not read
the French you may read the English. Be upon honour.”
Translation of M. Arnault’s lines on his own exile:—
“Torn rudely from thy parent bough, Poor withered leaf, where roamest
thou? I know not where! A tempest broke My only prop, the stately oak;
And ever since in wearying change With each capricious wind I range;
From wood to plain, from hill to dale, Borne sweeping on as sweeps the
gale, Without a struggle or a cry, I go where all must go as I; I go
where goes the self-same hour A laurel leaf or rose’s flower!”