A BRAVE HEART
Two new works by Mary Russell Mitford had been recently
published—_Belford Regis_ and _Country Stories_. Belford Regis, as the
reader may remember, was her pseudonym for the good town of Reading.
She writes in June, 1835, to Sir William Elford: “I thank you very
much, my ever dear and kind friend, for your kind letter, and I rejoice
that you like my book. It has been most favourably received and is, I
find, reckoned my best; although when one considers that _Our Village_
has passed through fourteen large editions in England and nearly as
many in America, one can hardly expect an increase of popularity and
has only to hope for an equal success for any future production.”
There was a still further proof of the popularity of _Our Village_ at
this time, as Miss Mitford learnt from a friend travelling in Spain
that he had come across a copy of the work translated into Spanish.
_Country Stories_ appeared two years later. She dedicated the work to
her valued friend, the Rev. William Harness, “whose old hereditary
friendship,” she writes, “has been the pride and pleasure of her
happiest hours, her consolation in the sorrows and her support in the
difficulties of life.”
It was to him that she opened her heart on religious matters more
than to anyone else, and it is interesting to learn from their
correspondence her opinions upon such matters as the question of Church
Reform, then beginning to be discussed.
After receiving a volume of Sermons by the Rev. William Harness, she
writes:—
“It is a very able and conciliatory plea for the Church. My opinion (if
an insignificant woman may presume to give one) is that certain reforms
ought to be; that very gross cases of pluralities should be abolished
... that some few of the clergy are too rich, and that a great many are
too poor. But although not holding all her doctrines, I heartily agree
with you that, as an establishment, the Church ought to remain; for to
say nothing of the frightful precedent of sweeping away property, which
would not stop there, the country would be overrun with fanatics....
But the Church must be (as many of her members are) wisely tolerant.
Bishops must not wage war with theatres, nor rectors with a Sunday
evening game of cricket.”
Happily reforms in such matters were soon to be brought forward by
Charles Kingsley and many others. Charles Kingsley, when he was made
Rector of Eversley, was a neighbour of Miss Mitford’s and became in
time her fast friend.
During the year 1842 Dr. Mitford’s health rapidly declined and his
devoted daughter was nearly worn out by her constant attendance upon
him. He had a strange notion which he held pertinaciously that all
outdoor exercise was bad for her, while, in fact, her short strolls
in her garden or in the neighbouring fields was the only change that
could keep her from breaking down. When after some hours spent in weary
watching she had seen her father fall asleep, she would steal out of
the house with Dash for a companion for a scamper round the meadows.
“How grateful I am,” she writes at this time, “to that great gracious
Providence who makes the most intense enjoyment the cheapest and the
commonest.”
Dr. Mitford died on the 11th day of December. He was buried by his
wife in Shinfield Church, being followed by an imposing procession of
neighbours and friends. We cannot help thinking that this was more to
show sympathy and respect for Miss Mitford than from special respect
to him.
That she loved her father dearly in spite of all his faults is very
certain, and that she was not blind to these faults is also certain.
But she looked upon them at all times very much in the same way as she
did when a young girl on hearing of his money losses. “Poor Papa!” she
would exclaim, “I am so sorry for him, I wish he would deal with honest
people.”
A beautiful expression of a dying mother to her children has been
handed down in our family, “Cover each other’s faults,” she said,
“with a mantle of love.” Miss Mitford did this and perhaps sometimes
unwisely, but her life was the happier for it. She never knew the
misery of condemning the conduct of her father.
“But her father was not the only person whom Miss Mitford egregiously
overestimated, and unconsciously flattered,” writes Mrs. Tindal.
“She looked upon her friends through rose-coloured spectacles, she
exaggerated their good gifts and multiplied their graces; she hoped and
believed great things of them.”
Dr. Mitford had continued to squander the small means of the household
to the last, and so powerless was his daughter to prevent this (without
giving him great pain) that she remarks in a letter to one with whom
she was intimate: “I have to provide for expenses over which I have no
more control than my own dog Dash.”
When the true state of affairs became known Miss Mitford was faced with
a list of liabilities amounting to nearly £1000, but her determination
was at once taken that all the creditors should have complete
satisfaction. “Everybody shall be paid,” she exclaimed, “if I have to
sell the gown off my back, or pledge my little pension.”
But this could never be allowed. Her friends and admirers were eager
to show their desire to help one who, by her beautiful writings and
unselfish life, had done so much for the good of humanity. Miss Mitford
was astonished and touched by the letters she received. “I only pray
God,” she writes, “that I may deserve half that has been said of me.”
Money was subscribed on all sides, and by the month of March following
nearly the whole thousand pounds had already been handed over to her,
whilst in addition to this some hundreds of pounds were promised. Many,
too, were the acts of kind and unostentatious attention that were
showered upon her and which went straight to her heart. Conspicuous
among these was the welcome act of her friend Mr. George Lovejoy, the
well-known bookseller of Reading, in supplying her with books. He was
a man of considerable learning, and his library was noted from its
earliest days for its fine collection of foreign works, which made it
especially valuable to Miss Mitford, whose love of French literature
was so marked.
Writing to a friend who had offered to lend her some books she explains
that she has already seen them. “I have at this moment,” she writes,
“eight sets of books belonging to Mr. Lovejoy. I have every periodical
within a week, often getting them literally the day before publication.”
About this time a source of happiness came into Mary Mitford’s life in
the shape of a little child of two years old, the son of her attached
servant K——, whom she soon looked upon as a son of the household, and
who as time went on became her constant little companion in her strolls
about the country.
A few years later Mary was suffering from an attack of lameness and
she had recourse for help to that same “historic staff” whose loss had
caused so much bustle and excitement in the village of Three Mile Cross.
[Illustration: Verses written by M. R. Mitford,
July 12th 1847]
“Long before little Henry could open the outer door, there he would
stand,” she writes, “the stick in one hand, and, if it were summer,
a flower in the other, waiting for my going out, the pretty Saxon
boy with his upright figure, his golden hair, his eyes like two stars,
and his bright intelligent smile.”
Woodcock lane was a chosen resort where Mary, her servant “the hemmer
of flowers,” little Henry and the dogs would proceed to a certain green
hillock “redolent of wild thyme and a thousand fairy flowers, delicious
in its coolness, its fragrance and its repose.” Here whilst Mary sat on
the turf with pen in hand and paper on knee jotting down her thoughts,
she would still keep an eye on the child who was gathering flowers hard
by. “Do not gather them all, Henry,” she would say, “because some one
who has not so many pretty flowers at home as we have may come this way
and would like to gather some.”
Miss Mitford’s many visitors from far and near had all a kindly word
for the little lad—Mr. Fields especially was much interested in him.
In the month of January, 1847, when the first volume of _Modern
Painters_ was just published, Mary Mitford wrote to a friend: “Have you
read an English Graduate’s _Letters on Art_? The author, Mr. Ruskin,
was here last week and is certainly the most charming person I have
ever known.” In her _Recollections of a Literary Life_ Miss Mitford
speaks with admiration of his “boldness” in demolishing old idols and
setting up new! “Often,” she remarks, “he was right, though sometimes
wrong, but always striking, always eloquent, always true to his own
convictions.... Many passages of _Modern Painters_ are really poems in
their tenderness, their sentiment and their grandeur.
“But the greatest triumph of Mr. Ruskin,” she remarks, “is that long
series of cloud pictures, unparalleled, I suppose, in any language,
whether painted or written.” Here follows a long quotation of which we
would give two passages.
“It is a strange thing,” writes the author, “how little, in general,
people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which Nature
has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and
evident purpose of talking to him, and teaching him than in any other
of his works; and it is just the part in which we least attend to
her.... The noblest scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by
few; it is not intended that man should live always in the midst of
them; he injures them by his presence, he ceases to feel them if he
be always with them; but the sky is for all; bright as it is, it is
not ‘too bright nor good for human nature’s daily food.’ It is fitted
in all its functions for the perpetual comfort, and exalting of the
heart, for the soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust.”
The acquaintance with Mr. Ruskin soon ripened into a warm friendship,
which was the cause of much happiness to Miss Mitford during the last
years of her life. His attentions to her when she was unwell were
unremitting either in the way of interesting books to entertain her or
of delicacies of the table to tempt her appetite. On one occasion when
she was confined to her bed from the effects of a fall, he writes to
her: “I do indeed sympathize most deeply in the sorrow (it may without
exaggeration be so called) which your present privation must cause you,
especially coming in the time of spring—your favourite season.... After
all though your feet are in the stocks, you have the Silas spirit, and
the doors will open in the mid-darkness.”
After an important event in his life had occurred in 1848, he writes:
“Two months ago I was each day on the point of writing to you to ask
for your sympathy—the kindest and keenest sympathy that, I think, ever
filled the breadth and depth of an unselfish heart.” And then alluding
to the Revolution of 1848 he says: “I should be very happy just now
but for these wild storm clouds bursting on my dear Italy and my fair
France. My occupation gone and all my earthly treasures ... perished
amidst ‘the tumult of the people and the imagining of vain things.’
... I begin to feel that ... these are not times for watching clouds
or dreaming over quiet waters, that some serious work is to be done,
and that the time for endurance has come rather than for meditation,
and for hope rather than for happiness. Happy those whose hope, without
this severe and tearful rending away of all the props and stability
of earthly enjoyments, has been fixed ‘where the wicked cease from
troubling.’ Mine has not; it was based on ‘those pillars of the earth’
which are astonished at His reproof.”[20]
[Footnote 20: See Cook’s _Life of Ruskin_.]
Mary Mitford continued her intimate correspondence with Miss Barrett
after the latter’s marriage with Robert Browning—which was a source
of much happiness to both. She warmly admired Mrs. Barrett Browning’s
poems, as we have already seen, but Browning’s poems were not equally
intelligible or attractive to her, and in a letter to a friend she thus
quaintly criticizes his style and writing: “I am just reading Robert
Browning’s Poems,” she says, “there is much more in them than I thought
to find.... He ought to be forced to write journey-work for his daily
bread (say for the _Times_) which would make him write clearly.”
In the summer of 1847 Hans Andersen was in England. “He is the lion of
London this year,” writes Miss Mitford. “Dukes, princes, and ministers
are all disputing for an hour of his company, and Mr. Boner (his best
translator) says that he is quite unspoilt, as simple as a child and
with as much poetry in his everyday doings as in his prose.... Mr.
Boner sent me the other day for dear Patty Lovejoy’s album (she is a
sweet little girl of eleven years old) an autograph of Spohr’s and one
of Andersen’s. The latter is so pretty that I must transcribe it for
you.
“‘How blue are the mountains! How blue the sea and the sky! It is the
expression of love in three different languages.
H. C. Andersen.’
London, July 16th, 1847.”
The Mr. Boner alluded to was a valued friend of Miss Mitford’s with
whom she corresponded much during the later years of her life.