I am, I confess it, hard to please. If a round dozen of Bad Women, all
made in England too, does not satisfy me, what will? What ails the
fellow at them? Yet was I at first dissatisfied, and am, therefore,
glad to notice that whilst I was demurring and splitting hairs the
great, generous public was buying the _Lives of Twelve Bad Women_, by
Arthur Vincent, and putting it into a second edition. This is as it
should be. When the excellent Dean Burgon dubbed his dozen biographies
_Twelve Good Men_, it probably never occurred to him that the title
suggested three companion volumes; but so it did, and two of them,
_Twelve Bad Men_ and _Twelve Bad Women_, have made their appearance. I
still await, with great patience, _Twelve Good Women_. Twelve was the
number of the Apostles. Had it not been, one might be tempted to ask,
Why twelve? But as there must be some limit to bookmaking, there is no
need to quarrel with an arithmetical limit.
My criticism upon the Dean's dozen was that they were not by any
means, all of them, conspicuously good men; for, to name one only, who
would call old Dr. Routh, the President of Magdalen, a particularly
good man? In a sense, all Presidents, Provosts, Principals, and
Masters of Colleges are good men--in fact, they must be so by the
statutes--but to few of them are given the special notes of goodness.
Dr. Routh was a remarkable man, a learned man, perhaps a pious
man--undeniably, when he came to die, an old man--but he was no better
than his colleagues. This weakness of classification has run all
through the series, and it is my real quarrel with it. I do not
understand the principle of selection. I did not understand the Dean's
test of goodness, nor do I understand Mr. Seccombe's or Mr. Vincent's
test of badness. What do we mean by a good man or a bad one, a good
woman or a bad one? Most people, like the young man in the song, are
'not very good, nor yet very bad.' We move about the pastures of life
in huge herds, and all do the same things, at the same times, and for
the same reasons. 'Forty feeding like one.' Are we mean? Well, we have
done some mean things in our time. Are we generous? Occasionally we
are. Were we good sons or dutiful daughters? We have both honoured and
dishonoured our parents, who, in their turn, had done the same by
theirs. Do we melt at the sight of misery? Indeed we do. Do we forget
all about it when we have turned the corner? Frequently that is so. Do
we expect to be put to open shame at the Great Day of Judgment? We
should be terribly frightened of this did we not cling to the hope
that amidst the shocking revelations then for the first time made
public our little affairs may fail to attract much notice. Judged by
the standards of humanity, few people are either good or bad. 'I have
not been a great sinner,' said the dying Nelson; nor had he--he had
only been made a great fool of by a woman. Mankind is all tarred with
the same brush, though some who chance to be operated upon when the
brush is fresh from the barrel get more than their share of the tar.
The biography of a celebrated man usually reminds me of the outside of
a coastguardsman's cottage--all tar and whitewash. These are the two
condiments of human life--tar and whitewash--the faults and the
excuses for the faults, the passions and pettinesses that make us
occasionally drop on all fours, and the generous aspirations that at
times enable us, if not to stand upright, at least to adopt the
attitude of the kangaroo. It is rather tiresome, this perpetual game
of French and English going on inside one. True goodness and real
badness escape it altogether. A good man does not spend his life
wrestling with the Powers of Darkness. He is victor in the fray, and
the most he is called upon to do is every now and again to hit his
prostrate foe a blow over the costard just to keep him in his place.
Thus rid of a perpetual anxiety, the good man has time to grow in
goodness, to expand pleasantly, to take his ease on Zion. You can see
in his face that he is at peace with himself--that he is no longer at
war with his elements. His society, if you are fond of goodness, is
both agreeable and medicinal; but if you are a bad man it is hateful,
and you cry out with Mr. Love-lust in Bunyan's Vanity Fair: 'Away with
him. I cannot endure him; he is for ever condemning my way.'
Not many of Dean Burgon's biographies reached this standard. The
explanation, perhaps, is that the Dean chiefly moved in clerical
circles where excellence is more frequently to be met with than
goodness.
In the same way a really bad man is one who has frankly said, 'Evil,
be thou my good.' Like the good man, though for a very different
reason, the bad one has ceased to make war with the devil. Finding a
conspiracy against goodness going on, the bad man joins it, and thus,
like the good man, is at peace with himself. The bad man is bent upon
his own way, to get what he wants, no matter at what cost. Human
lives! What do they matter? A woman's honour! What does that matter?
Truth and fidelity! What are they? To know what you want, and not to
mind what you pay for it, is the straight path to fame, fortune, and
hell-fire. Careers, of course, vary; to dominate a continent or to
open a corner shop as a pork-butcher's, plenty of devilry may go to
either ambition. Also, genius is a rare gift. It by no means follows
that because you are a bad man you will become a great one; but to be
bad, and at the same time unsuccessful, is a hard fate. It casts a
little doubt upon a man's badness if he does not, at least, make a
little money. It is a poor business accompanying badness on to a
common scaffold, or to see it die in a wretched garret. That was one
of my complaints with Mr. Seccombe's Twelve Bad Men. Most of them came
to violent ends. They were all failures.
But I have kept these twelve ladies waiting a most unconscionable
time. Who are they? There are amongst them four courtesans: Alice
Perrers, one of King Edward III.'s misses; Barbara Villiers, one of
King Charles II.'s; Mrs. Mary Anne Clarke, who had to be content with
a royal Duke; and Mrs. Con Phillips. Six members of the criminal
class: Alice Arden, Moll Cutpurse, Jenny Diver, Elizabeth Brownrigg,
Elizabeth Canning, and Mary Bateman; and only two ladies of title,
Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset, and Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess
of Kingston. Of these twelve bad women one-third were executed, Alice
Arden being burnt at Canterbury, Jenny Diver and Elizabeth Brownrigg
being hung at Tyburn, and Mary Bateman suffering the same fate at
Leeds. Elizabeth Canning was sentenced to seven years' transportation,
and, indeed, if their biographers are to be believed, all the other
ladies made miserable ends. There is nothing triumphant about their
badness. Even from the point of view of this world they had better
have been good. In fact, squalor is the badge of the whole tribe. Some
of them, probably--Elizabeth Brownrigg, for example--were mad. This
last-named poor creature bore sixteen children to a house-painter and
plasterer, and then became a parish mid-wife, and only finally a
baby-farmer. Her cruelty to her apprentices had madness in every
detail. To include her in this volume was wholly unnecessary. She
lives but in George Canning's famous parody on Southey's sonnet to the
regicide Marten.
With those sentimentalists who maintain that all bad people are mad I
will have no dealings. It is sheer nonsense; lives of great men all
remind us it is sheer nonsense. Some of our greatest men have been
infernal scoundrels--pre-eminently bad men--with nothing mad about
them, unless it be mad to get on in the world and knock people about
in it.
_Twelve Bad Women_ contains much interesting matter, but, on the
whole, it is depressing. It seems very dull to be bad. Perhaps the
editor desired to create this impression; if so, he has succeeded.
Hannah More had fifty times more fun in her life than all these
courtesans and criminals put together. The note of jollity is
entirely absent. It was no primrose path these unhappy women
traversed, though that it led to the everlasting bonfire it were
unchristian to doubt. The dissatisfaction I confessed to at the
beginning returns upon me as a cloud at the end; but, for all that, I
rejoice the book is in a second edition, and I hope soon to hear it is
in a third, for it has a moral tendency.