I have been told by more than one correspondent, and not always in
words of urbanity, that I owe an apology to the manes of Miss Hannah
More, whose works I once purchased in nineteen volumes for 8s. 6d.,
and about whom in consequence I wrote a page some ten years ago.[A]
[Footnote A: See _Collected Essays_, ii. 255.]
To be accused of rudeness to a lady who exchanged witticisms with Dr.
Johnson, soothed the widowed heart of Mrs. Garrick, directed the early
studies of Macaulay, and in the spring of 1815 presented a small copy
of her _Sacred Dramas_ to Mr. Gladstone, is no light matter. To libel
the dead is, I know, not actionable--indeed, it is impossible; but
evil-speaking, lying, and slandering are canonical offences from which
the obligation to refrain knows no limits of time or place.
I have often felt uneasy on this score, and never had the courage,
until this very evening, to read over again what in the irritation of
the moment I had been tempted to say about Miss Hannah More, after the
outlay upon her writings already mentioned. Eight shillings and
sixpence is, indeed, no great sum, but nineteen octavo volumes are a
good many books. Yet Richardson is in nineteen volumes in Mangin's
edition, and Swift is in nineteen volumes in Scott's edition, and
glorious John Dryden lacks but a volume to make a third example. True
enough; yet it will, I think, be granted me that you must be very fond
of an author, male or female, if nineteen octavo volumes, all his or
hers, are not a little irritating and provocative of temper. Think of
the room they take! As for selling them, it is not so easy to sell
nineteen volumes of a stone-dead author, particularly if you live
three miles from a railway-station and do not keep a trap. Elia, the
gentle Elia, as it is the idiotic fashion to call a writer who could
handle his 'maulies' in a fray as well as Hazlitt himself, has told us
how he could never see well-bound books he did not care about, but he
longed to strip them so that he might warm his ragged veterans in
their spoils. My copy of _Hannah More_ was in full calf, but never
once did it occur to me--though I, too, have many a poor author with
hardly a shirt to his back shivering in the dark corners of the
library--to strip her of her warm clothing. And yet I had to do
something, and quickly too, for sorely needed was Miss More's shelf.
So I buried the nineteen volumes in the garden. 'Out of sight, out of
mind,' said I cheerfully, stamping them down.
This has hardly proved to be the case, for though Hannah More is
incapable of a literary resurrection, and no one of her nineteen
volumes has ever haunted my pillow, exclaiming,
'Think how thou stab'dst me in my prime of youth,'
nevertheless, I have not been able to get quite rid of an uneasy
feeling that I was rude to her ten years ago in print--not, indeed, so
rude as was her revered friend Dr. Johnson 126 years ago to her face;
but then, I have not the courage to creep under the gabardine of our
great Moralist.
When, accordingly, I saw on the counters of the trade the daintiest of
volumes, hailing, too, from the United States, entitled _Hannah
More_,[A] and perceived that it was a short biography and appreciation
of the lady on my mind, I recognised that my penitential hour had at
last come. I took the little book home with me, and sat down to read,
determined to do justice and more than justice to the once celebrated
mistress of Cowslip Green and Barley Wood.
[Footnote A: _Hannah More_, by Marian Harland. New York and London:
G.P. Putnam.]
Miss Harland's preface is most engaging. She reminds a married sister
how in the far-off days of their childhood in a Southern State their
Sunday reading, usually confined or sought to be confined, to 'bound
sermons and semi-detached tracts,' was enlivened by the _Works of
Hannah More_. She proceeds as follows:
'At my last visit to you I took from your bookshelves one of a set
of volumes in uniform binding of full calf, coloured mellowly by
the touch and the breath of fifty odd years. They belonged to the
dear old home library.... The leaves of the book I held fell apart
at _The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain_.'
I leave my readers to judge how uncomfortable these innocent words
made me:
'The usher took six hasty strides
As smit with sudden pain.'
I knew that set of volumes, their distressing uniformity of binding,
their full calf. Their very fellows lie mouldering in an East Anglian
garden, mellow enough by this time and strangely coloured.
Circumstances alter cases. Miss Harland thinks that if the life of
Charlotte Brontë's mother had been mercifully spared, the authoress of
_Jane Eyre_ and _Villette_ might have grown up more like Hannah More
than she actually did. Perhaps so. As I say, circumstances alter
cases, and if the works of Hannah More had been in my old home
library, I might have read _The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain_ and
_The Search after Happiness_ of a Sunday, and found solace therein.
But they were not there, and I had to get along as best I could with
the _Pilgrim's Progress_, stories by A.L.O.E., the crime-stained
page of Mrs. Sherwood's _Tales from the Church Catechism_, and,
'more curious sport than that,' the _Bible in Spain_ of the
never-sufficiently-bepraised George Borrow.
What, however, is a little odd about Miss Harland's enthusiasm for
Hannah More's writings is that it expires with the preface. _There_,
indeed, it glows with a beautiful light:
'And _The Search after Happiness!_ You cannot have forgotten all of
the many lines we learned by heart on Sunday afternoons in the
joyful spring-time when we were obliged to clear the pages every
few minutes of yellow jessamine bells and purple Wistaria petals
flung down by the warm wind.'
This passage lets us into the secret. I suspect in sober truth both
Miss Harland and her sister have long since forgotten all the lines in
_The Search after Happiness_, but what they have never forgotten, what
they never can forget, are the jessamine bells and the Wistaria
petals, yellow and purple, blown about in the warm winds that visited
their now desolate and forsaken Southern home. Less beautiful things
than jessamine and Wistaria, if only they clustered round the house
where you were born, are remembered when the lines of far better
authors than Miss Hannah More have gone clean out of your head:
'As life wanes, all its cares and strife and toil
Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees
Which grew by our youth's home, the waving mass
Of climbing plants heavy with bloom and dew,
The morning swallows with their songs like words--
All these seem dear, and only worth our thoughts.'
Thus the youthful Browning in his marvellous _Pauline_. The same note
is struck after a humbler and perhaps more moving fashion in the
following simple strain of William Allingham:
'Four ducks on a pond,
A grass-bank beyond;
A blue sky of spring,
White clouds on the wing;
How little a thing
To remember for years--
To remember with tears!'
If this be so--and who, looking into his own heart, but must own that
so it is?--it explains how it comes about that as soon as Miss Harland
finished her preface, got away from her childhood and began her
biography, she has so little to tell us about Miss More's books, and
from that little the personal note of enjoyment is entirely wanting.
Indeed, though a pious soul, she occasionally cannot restrain her
surprise how such ponderous commonplaces ever found a publisher, to
say nothing of a reader.
'Such books as Miss More's,' she says, 'would to-day in America fall
from the press like a stone into the depths of the sea of oblivion,
creating no more sensation upon the surface than the bursting of a
bubble in mid-Atlantic.'
And again:
'That Hannah More was a power for righteousness in her long
generation we must take upon the testimony of her best and wisest
contemporaries.'
However good may be your intentions, it seems hard to avoid being rude
to this excellent lady.
I confess I never liked her love story. Anything more cold-blooded I
never read. I am not going to repeat it. Why should I? It is told at
length in Miss More's authorized biography in four volumes by William
Roberts, Esq. I saw a copy yesterday exposed for sale in New Oxford
Street, price 1s. Miss Harland also tells the tale, not without
chuckling. I refer the curious to her pages.
Then there are those who can never get rid of the impression that
Hannah More 'fagged' her four sisters mercilessly; but who can tell?
Some people like being fagged.
Precisely _when_ Miss More bade farewell to what in later life she was
fond of calling her gay days, when she wrote dull plays and went to
stupid Sunday parties, one finds it hard to discover, but at no time
did it ever come home to her that she needed repentance herself. She
seems always thinking of the sins and shortcomings of her neighbours,
rich and poor. Sometimes, indeed, when deluged with flattery, she
would intimate that she was a miserable sinner, but that is not what I
mean. She concerned herself greatly with the manners of the great,
and deplored their cards and fashionable falsehoods. John Newton,
captain as he had been of a slaver, saw the futility of such
pin-pricks:
'The fashionable world,' so he wrote to Miss More, 'by their numbers
form a phalanx not easily impressible, and their habits of life are as
armour of proof which renders them not easily vulnerable. Neither the
rude club of a boisterous Reformer nor the pointed, delicate weapons
of the authoress before me can overthrow or rout them.'
But Miss More never forgot to lecture the rich or to patronize the
poor.
_Coelebs in Search of a Wife_ is an impossible book, and I do not
believe Miss Harland has read it; but as for the famous _Shepherd_, we
are never allowed to forget how Mr. Wilberforce declared a few years
before his death, to the admiration of the religious world, that he
would rather present himself in heaven with _The Shepherd of Salisbury
Plain_ in his hand than with--what think you?--_Peveril of the Peak_!
The bare notion of such a proceeding on anybody's part is enough to
strike one dumb with what would be horror, did not amazement swallow
up every other feeling. What rank Arminianism! I am sure the last
notion that ever would have entered the head of Sir Walter was to take
_Peveril_ to heaven.
But whatever may be thought of the respective merits of Miss More's
nineteen volumes and Sir Walter's ninety-eight, there is no doubt that
Barley Wood was as much infested with visitors as ever was Abbotsford.
Eighty a week!
'From twelve o'clock until three each day a constant stream of
carriages and pedestrians filled the evergreen bordered avenue
leading from the Wrington village road.'
Among them came Lady Gladstone and W.E.G., aged six, the latter
carrying away with him the _Sacred Dramas_, to be preserved during a
long life.
Miss More was a vivacious and agreeable talker, who certainly failed
to do herself justice with her pen. Her health was never good, yet, as
she survived thirty-five of her prescribing physicians, her vitality
must have been great. Her face in Opie's portrait is very pleasant. If
I was rude to her ten years ago, I apologize and withdraw; but as for
her books, I shall leave them where they are--buried in a cliff facing
due north, with nothing between them and the Pole but leagues upon
leagues of a wind-swept ocean.