FROM MANSION TO COTTAGE
Miss Mitford owed to her friendship with Sir William Elford her first
acquaintance with the artist Haydon. Describing in later years to a
friend how this came about, she said: “An amateur painter himself,
painting interested Sir William particularly, and he often spoke much,
and warmly, of the young man from Plymouth, whose picture of the
‘Judgement of Solomon’ was then on exhibition in London. ‘You must see
it,’ said he, ‘even if you come to town on purpose.’
“It so happened,” continued Miss Mitford, “that I merely passed through
London that season ... and I arrived at the exhibition in company with
a still younger friend so near the period of closing that more punctual
visitors were moving out, and the doorkeeper actually turned us and our
money back. I persisted, however, assuring him that I only wanted to
look at one picture, and promising not to detain him long. Whether my
entreaties would have carried the point or not I cannot tell, but half
a crown did; so we stood admiringly before the ‘Judgement of Solomon.’
I am no great judge of painting; but that picture impressed me then,
as it does now, as excellent in composition, in colour, and in that
great quality of telling a story which appeals at once to every mind.
Our delight was sincerely felt, and most enthusiastically expressed, as
we kept gazing at the picture, and [it] seemed to give much pleasure
to the only gentleman who remained in the room—a young and very
distinguished-looking person, who had watched with evident amusement
our negotiation with the doorkeeper.... I soon surmised that we were
seeing the painter as well as his painting; and when two or three years
afterwards a friend took me ... to view the ‘Entry into Jerusalem,’
Haydon’s next great picture, then near its completion, I found I had
not been mistaken.
“Haydon was at that period a remarkable person to look at and listen
to.... His figure was short, slight, elastic and vigorous; his
complexion clear and healthful.... But how shall I attempt to tell
you,” she adds, “of his brilliant conversation, of his rapid energetic
manner, of his quick turns of thought as he flew from topic to topic,
dashing his brush here and there upon the canvas?... Among the studies
I remarked that day in his apartment was one of a mother who had just
lost her only child—a most masterly rendering of an unspeakable grief.
A sonnet which I could not help writing on the sketch gave rise to our
long correspondence, and to a friendship which never flagged.”
We have spoken in a recent chapter of the Mitfords’ great losses of
money from time to time. These were caused in part by the protracted
lawsuit carried on by Dr. Mitford against the Marquis de Chavannes.
But the main cause was the doctor’s unhappy habits of gambling and
of speculation. He was “ever seeking,” we are told, “to augment his
income by some doubtful investment for which he had the tip of some
unscrupulous schemer to whose class he fell an easy prey.” The only
remnant of the family property, once so large, which Dr. Mitford was
unable to touch was a sum of £3000 left by Dr. Russell to his daughter
and her offspring. This sum, placed in the funds, was happily held
in trust by the Mitfords’ fast friend, the Rev. William Harness, and
although he was applied to from time to time by Mrs. Mitford and
her daughter to hand it over to the doctor when he was pressed by
creditors, Mr. Harness steadily refused to do so. Writing to Miss
Mitford some years later after the death of her mother, he says: “That
£3000 I consider as the sheet-anchor of your independence ... and
_while your father lives_ it shall never stir from its present post
in the funds ... _from whatever quarter the proposition may come_ [to
hand it over to him]. I have but one black, blank unqualified _No_ for
my answer. I do not doubt Dr. Mitford’s integrity, but I have not the
slightest confidence in his prudence; and I am fully satisfied that
if these three thousand and odd hundreds of pounds were placed at his
disposal _to-day_ they would fly the way so many other thousands have
gone before them _to-morrow_.”[7]
[Footnote 7: See _Life and Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford_, by W.
J. Roberts.]
In the spring of 1820 the family were forced to quit Bertram House, at
which period we are told “the doctor must have been all but penniless,”
and there could have been “nothing between the father and mother and
hopeless destitution but the genius and industry of the daughter.”
Happily her courage and her affection never failed. But she could
not quit the house which had been her home for sixteen years without
sorrow. “It nearly broke my heart,” she writes. “What a tearing up of
the roots it was! The trees and fields and sunny hedgerows, however
little distinguished by picturesque beauty, were to me as old friends.
Women have more of this natural feeling than the stronger sex; they are
creatures of home and habit, and ill brook transplanting.”
[Illustration]