_RIENZI_
Miss Mitford’s capacity of throwing herself heart and soul into
the widely varying subjects upon which she was engaged was truly
remarkable. For whilst writing her playful or pathetic stories
of village life, breathing as they do the calm and beauty of the
surrounding country, she was composing one after another her stirring
tragedies.
The finest of these is generally considered to be _Rienzi_ to
which Miss Mitford had given much time and thought. She wrote in
August, 1824, to a female friend who had enquired after her literary
undertakings:—
“I write as usual for magazines, and (but this is quite between
ourselves) I have a tragedy which will I may say certainly—as certainly
as we can speak of anything connected with the theatre—be performed
at Drury Lane next season. It is the story of ‘Rienzi,’ the friend of
Petrarch; the man who restored for a short time the old republican
government of Rome. If you do not remember the story you will find
it very beautifully told in the last volume of Gibbon, and still more
graphically related in L’Abbé de Sadi’s _Memoires pour la Vie de
Pétrarque_.”
It was not, however, until four years later that the play actually
appeared upon the stage. Its success was of vital importance to the
little household at Three Mile Cross, and Mary was immersed in business
of all sorts during the months preceding its début. Still she had a
“heart at leisure” even then to sympathise with her friends in their
joys and sorrows. On hearing that Haydon’s important picture of the
year had just been purchased by the King, she writes:—
“A thousand and a thousand congratulations, my dear friend, to you and
your loveliest and sweetest wife! I always liked the King, God bless
him! He is a gentleman—and now my loyalty will be warmer than ever....
This is fortune—fame you did not want—but this fashion and fortune.
Nothing in this world could please me more—not even the production of
my own _Rienzi_. To see you in your place in Art and Talfourd in his in
Parliament are the wishes next my heart, and I verily believe that I
shall live to see both....
“God bless you, my dear friends! and God save the King!”
Miss Mitford writes on Sept. 23rd, 1828, to Sir William Elford:—
“My tragedy of _Rienzi_ is to be produced at Drury Lane Theatre on
Saturday the 11th of October; that is to say, next Saturday fortnight.
“Mr. Young plays the hero, and has been studying the part during the
whole vacation; and a new actress makes her first appearance in the
part of the heroine. This is a very bold and hazardous experiment, no
new actress having come out in a new play within the memory of man;
but she is young, pretty, unaffected, pleasant-voiced, with great
sensibility, and a singularly pure intonation—a qualification which no
actress has possessed since Mrs. Siddons. Stanfield is painting the new
scenes, one of which is an accurate representation of Rienzi’s house.
This building still exists in Rome.... They have got a sketch which
they sent for on purpose, and they are hunting up costumes with equal
care; so that it will be very splendidly brought out, and I shall have
little to fear, except from the emptiness of London so early in the
season.”
[Illustration: IN GREAT QUEEN STREET]
Miss Mitford’s next letter to Sir William is written from London after
the first performance of _Rienzi_. It is dated Oct. 5th, 1828, 5 Great
Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn, and is as follows: “Our success last
night was very splendid and we have every hope (in the theatrical world
there is no such word as ‘certainty’) of making a great hit. As far
as things have hitherto gone nothing can be better—nothing. Our new
actress is charming.... Mr. Young is also admirable; and, in short, it
is a magnificent performance throughout. God grant that its prosperity
may continue! and these are not words, of course, but a prayer from my
inmost soul, for on that hangs the comfort of those far dearer to me
than myself.”
And a fortnight later she writes:—
“Hitherto the triumph has been most complete and decisive—the houses
crowded—and the attention such as has not been known since Mrs.
Siddons. You might hear a pin drop in the house. How long this run may
continue I cannot say, for London is absolutely empty; but even if the
play were to stop to-night I should be extremely thankful—more thankful
than I have words to tell; the impression has been so deep and so
general.”
Letters of congratulation from women of mark poured in from all sides,
but Mary missed the sympathy of her intimate friend Lady Franklin (wife
of the Arctic explorer) who had recently died. She remarks in the
Introduction to her Dramatic Works:—
“When _Rienzi_, after a more than common portion of adventures and
misadventures, did come out with a success rare in a woman’s life
... I missed the eager congratulations from her ... whose cheering
prognostics had so often spurred me on....
“No part of my success,” she adds, “was more delightful than the
pleasure which it excited amongst the most eminent of my female
contemporaries. Maria Edgeworth, Joanna Baillie, Felicia Hemans (and to
two of them I was at that time unknown) vied in the cordiality of their
praises. Kindness met me on every hand.”
In a letter from Mrs. Trollope (a well-known authoress of the day), who
was then staying in New York, she learns of _Rienzi_ being performed in
that city. “It is here and here only,” writes Mrs. Trollope, “that I
have had an opportunity of seeing _Rienzi_; it is a noble tragedy, and
not even the bad acting of the Chatham Theatre could spoil it. I never
witnessed such a triumph of powerful poetry over weak acting as in the
magnificent scene where Rienzi refuses pardon to an Orsini.”
The play continued to draw large audiences at Drury Lane, and ran for a
hundred days, a most unusual event in those times. Of the printed play
Miss Mitford writes: “It is selling immensely, the first very large
edition having gone in three days.”
We have read _Rienzi_ with deep interest. The tragic scenes are very
powerful, tension being kept up throughout the whole action, while the
love passages are beautiful, tender and truly pathetic. If we might
venture upon a criticism it is that there is an absence in the play of
all humour—a quality so conspicuous in Miss Mitford’s village stories.
Perhaps it is only Shakespeare who possesses the consummate art of
relieving the strain wrought upon the mind by deep tragedy with a touch
of humour. It is certainly absent in some of the finest French and
German tragedies.
Miss Mitford’s incessant work at this period, coupled with much
domestic anxiety (for her mother’s health was then failing), made her
possibly over anxious.
“I shall have hard work,” she observes in a letter to a friend, “to
write up to my own reputation, for certainly I am at present greatly
overrated.” And alluding to the triumph of _Rienzi_ she says:—
“Dramatic success, after all, is not so delicious, so glorious, so
complete a gratification as in our secret longings we all expect to
find. It is not satisfactory. It does not fill the heart.... It is an
intoxication.... Within four-and-twenty hours [of the performance of
_Rienzi_] I doubted if triumph there were, and more than doubted if it
were deserved. It is ill-success that leads to self-assertion. Never in
my life was I so conscious of my dramatic short-comings as on that day
of imputed exaltation and vainglory.”
But Mary’s fame as a dramatic author was growing in spite of her
own modest estimate of her powers, and in spite also of many a
disappointment that she had to endure. Her play of Charles I, the
subject of which was suggested to her by Macready, was condemned by the
Licenser, “who saw a danger to the State in permitting the trial of
an English monarch to be represented on the stage.” It was forbidden,
therefore, at the two great houses although it afterwards appeared at a
minor theatre.
The fate of another play, _Inez de Castro_, was still more unfortunate,
for after having been rehearsed three times at the Lyceum Theatre,
apparently with the approval of all concerned, it was suddenly
withdrawn for some unknown reason. Fanny Kemble, whom Miss Mitford
describes as “a girl of great ability,” was taking the part of the
heroine.
“Great at the moment were these anxieties and tribulations,” writes
Miss Mitford in after life, “but it is good to observe in one’s own
mind and good to tell others how just as the keenest physical pain is
known to be soon forgotten, so in mental vicissitudes time carries away
the bitter and leaves the sweet. The vexations and the injuries fade
into dim distance and the kindness and the benefits shine vividly out.”
An edition of her collected works was published in Philadelphia in the
year 1841, which is prefaced by a short biography of the author written
by James Crissy. It is pleasant therein to read his warm-hearted
appreciation of her literary genius. He speaks of Miss Mitford as “a
dramatist of no common power.” “In all her plays,” he says, “there
is strong, vigorous writing—masculine in the free unhashed use of
language, but wholly womanly in its purity from coarseness or licence
and in its touches [of the] softest feeling and finest observation.”
He goes on, however, to say: “But the claims of Miss Mitford to swell
the list of _inventors_ [of new styles in literature] rest upon yet
firmer grounds. They rest upon those exquisite sketches by which she
has created a school of writing, homely but not vulgar, familiar but
not breeding contempt.... Wherein the small events and the simple
characters of rural life are made interesting by the truth and
sprightliness with which they are represented.”
In the Introduction to her “Dramatic Works,” Miss Mitford thus closes a
detailed account of the composition and production of her plays:—
“So much for the Tragedies. There would have been many more such but
that the pressing necessity of earning money, and the uncertainties
and the delays of the drama, at moments when delay or disappointment
weighed upon me like a sin, made it a duty to turn away from the lofty
steep of Tragic Poetry to the everyday path of Village Stories.”
* * * * *
À propos of these words and knowing that Miss Mitford’s greatest power
lay in the writing of those very Village Stories, we would quote the
words of Tennyson:—
“Not once or twice in our fair island story The path of duty was the
way to glory.”