For one likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer advancing with
lights across the waste of years to the rescue of some stranded ghost—a
Mrs. Pilkington, a Rev. Henry Elman, a Mrs. Ann Gilbert—waiting,
appealing, forgotten, in the growing gloom. Possibly they hear one
coming. They shuffle, they preen, they bridle. Old secrets well up to
their lips. The divine relief of communication will soon again be
theirs. The dust shifts and Mrs. Gilbert—but the contact with life is
instantly salutary. Whatever Mrs. Gilbert may be doing, she is not
thinking about us. Far from it. Colchester, about the year 1800, was for
the young Taylors, as Kensington had been for their mother, “a very
Elysium”. There were the Strutts, the Hills, the Stapletons; there was
poetry, philosophy, engraving. For the young Taylors were brought up to
work hard, and if, after a long day’s toil upon their father’s pictures,
they slipped round to dine with the Strutts they had a right to their
pleasure. Already they had won prizes in Darton and Harvey’s pocketbook.
One of the Strutts knew James Montgomery, and there was talk, at those
gay parties, with the Moorish decorations and all the cats—for old Ben
Strutt was a bit of a character: did not communicate; would not let his
daughters eat meat, so no wonder they died of consumption—there was
talk of printing a joint volume to be called _The Associate Minstrels_,
to which James, if not Robert himself, might contribute. The Stapletons
were poetical, too. Moira and Bithia would wander over the old town wall
at Balkerne Hill reading poetry by moonlight. Perhaps there was a little
too much poetry in Colchester in 1800. Looking back in the middle of a
prosperous and vigorous life, Ann had to lament many broken careers,
much unfulfilled promise. The Stapletons died young, perverted,
miserable; Jacob, with his “dark, scorn-speaking countenance”, who had
vowed that he would spend the night looking for Ann’s lost bracelet in
the street, disappeared, “and I last heard of him vegetating among the
ruins of Rome—himself too much a ruin”; as for the Hills, their fate
was worst of all. To submit to public baptism was flighty, but to marry
Captain M.! Anybody could have warned pretty Fanny Hill against Captain
M. Yet off she drove with him in his fine phaeton. For years nothing
more was heard of her. Then one night, when the Taylors had moved to
Ongar and old Mr. and Mrs. Taylor were sitting over the fire, thinking
how, as it was nine o’clock, and the moon was full, they ought,
according to their promise, to look at it and think of their absent
children, there came a knock at the door. Mrs. Taylor went down to open
it. But who was this sad, shabby-looking woman outside? “Oh, don’t you
remember the Strutts and the Stapletons, and how you warned me against
Captain M.?” cried Fanny Hill, for it was Fanny Hill—poor Fanny Hill,
all worn and sunk; poor Fanny Hill, that used to be so sprightly. She
was living in a lone house not far from the Taylors, forced to drudge
for her husband’s mistress, for Captain M. had wasted all her fortune,
ruined all her life.
Ann married Mr. G., of course—of course. The words toll persistently
through these obscure volumes. For in the vast world to which the memoir
writers admit us there is a solemn sense of something unescapable, of a
wave gathering beneath the frail flotilla and carrying it on. One thinks
of Colchester in 1800. Scribbling verses, reading Montgomery—so they
begin; the Hills, the Stapletons, the Strutts disperse and disappear as
one knew they would; but here, after long years, is Ann still
scribbling, and at last here is the poet Montgomery himself in her very
house, and she begging him to consecrate her child to poetry by just
holding him in his arms, and he refusing (for he is a bachelor), but
taking her for a walk, and they hear the thunder, and she thinks it the
artillery, and he says in a voice which she will never, never forget:
“Yes! The artillery of Heaven!” It is one of the attractions of the
unknown, their multitude, their vastness; for, instead of keeping their
identity separate, as remarkable people do, they seem to merge into one
another, their very boards and title-pages and frontispieces dissolving,
and their innumerable pages melting into continuous years so that we can
lie back and look up into the fine mist-like substance of countless
lives, and pass unhindered from century to century, from life to life.
Scenes detach themselves. We watch groups. Here is young Mr. Elman
talking to Miss Biffen at Brighton. She has neither arms nor legs; a
footman carries her in and out. She teaches miniature painting to his
sister. Then he is in the stage coach on the road to Oxford with Newman.
Newman says nothing. Elman nevertheless reflects that he has known all
the great men of his time. And so back and so forwards, he paces
eternally the fields of Sussex until, grown to an extreme old age, there
he sits in his Rectory thinking of Newman, thinking of Miss Biffen, and
making—it is his great consolation—string bags for missionaries. And
then? Go on looking. Nothing much happens. But the dim light is
exquisitely refreshing to the eyes. Let us watch little Miss Frend
trotting along the Strand with her father. They meet a man with very
bright eyes. “Mr. Blake,” says Mr. Frend. It is Mrs. Dyer who pours out
tea for them in Clifford’s Inn. Mr. Charles Lamb has just left the room.
Mrs. Dyer says she married George because his washerwoman cheated him
so. What do you think George paid for his shirts, she asks? Gently,
beautifully, like the clouds of a balmy evening, obscurity once more
traverses the sky, an obscurity which is not empty but thick with the
star dust of innumerable lives. And suddenly there is a rift in it, and
we see a wretched little packet-boat pitching off the Irish coast in the
middle of the nineteenth-century. There is an unmistakable air of 1840
about the tarpaulins and the hairy monsters in sou’westers lurching and
spitting over the sloping decks, yet treating the solitary young woman
who stands in shawl and poke bonnet gazing, gazing, not without
kindness. No, no, no! She will not leave the deck. She will stand there
till it is quite dark, thank you! “Her great love of the sea . . . drew
this exemplary wife and mother every now and then irresistibly away from
home. No one but her husband knew where she had gone, and her children
learnt only later in life that on these occasions, when suddenly she
disappeared for a few days, she was taking short sea voyages . . .” a
crime which she expiated by months of work among the Midland poor. Then
the craving would come upon her, would be confessed in private to her
husband, and off she stole again—the mother of Sir George Newnes.
One would conclude that human beings were happy, endowed with such
blindness to fate, so indefatigable an interest in their own activities,
were it not for those sudden and astonishing apparitions staring in at
us, all taut and pale in their determination never to be forgotten, men
who have just missed fame, men who have passionately desired
redress—men like Haydon, and Mark Pattison, and the Rev. Blanco White.
And in the whole world there is probably but one person who looks up for
a moment and tries to interpret the menacing face, the furious beckoning
fist, before, in the multitude of human affairs, fragments of faces,
echoes of voices, flying coat-tails, and bonnet strings disappearing
down the shrubbery walks, one’s attention is distracted for ever. What
is that enormous wheel, for example, careering downhill in Berkshire in
the eighteenth-century? It runs faster and faster; suddenly a youth
jumps out from within; next moment it leaps over the edge of a chalk pit
and is dashed to smithereens. This is Edgeworth’s doing—Richard Lovell
Edgeworth, we mean, the portentous bore.
For that is the way he has come down to us in his two volumes of
memoirs—Byron’s bore, Day’s friend, Maria’s father, the man who almost
invented the telegraph, and did, in fact, invent machines for cutting
turnips, climbing walls, contracting on narrow bridges and lifting their
wheels over obstacles—a man meritorious, industrious, advanced, but
still, as we investigate his memoirs, mainly a bore. Nature endowed him
with irrepressible energy. The blood coursed through his veins at least
twenty times faster than the normal rate. His face was red, round,
vivacious. His brain raced. His tongue never stopped talking. He had
married four wives and had nineteen children, including the novelist
Maria. Moreover, he had known every one and done everything. His energy
burst open the most secret doors and penetrated to the most private
apartments. His wife’s grandmother, for instance, disappeared
mysteriously every day. Edgeworth blundered in upon her and found her,
with her white locks flowing and her eyes streaming, in prayer before a
crucifix. She was a Roman Catholic then, but why a penitent? He found
out somehow that her husband had been killed in a duel, and she had
married the man who killed him. “The consolations of religion are fully
equal to its terrors,” Dick Edgeworth reflected as he stumbled out
again. Then there was the beautiful young woman in the castle among the
forests of Dauphiny. Half paralysed, unable to speak above a whisper,
there she lay when Edgeworth broke in and found her reading. Tapestries
flapped on the castle walls; fifty thousand bats—“odious animals whose
stench is uncommonly noisome”—hung in clusters in the caves beneath.
None of the inhabitants understood a word she said. But to the
Englishman she talked for hour after hour about books and politics and
religion. He listened; no doubt he talked. He sat dumbfounded. But what
could one do for her? Alas, one must leave her lying among the tusks,
and the old men, and the cross-bows, reading, reading, reading. For
Edgeworth was employed in turning the Rhone from its course. He must get
back to his job. One reflection he would make. “I determined on steadily
persevering in the cultivation of my understanding.”
He was impervious to the romance of the situations in which he found
himself. Every experience served only to fortify his character. He
reflected, he observed, he improved himself daily. You can improve, Mr.
Edgeworth used to tell his children, every day of your life. “He used to
say that with this power of improving they might in time be anything,
and without it in time they would be nothing.” Imperturbable,
indefatigable, daily increasing in sturdy self-assurance, he has the
gift of the egoist. He brings out, as he bustles and bangs on his way,
the diffident, shrinking figures who would otherwise be drowned in
darkness. The aged lady, whose private penance he disturbed, is only one
of a series of figures who start up on either side of his progress,
mute, astonished, showing us in a way that is even now unmistakable,
their amazement at this well-meaning man who bursts in upon them at
their studies and interrupts their prayers. We see him through their
eyes; we see him as he does not dream of being seen. What a tyrant he
was to his first wife! How intolerably she suffered! But she never
utters a word. It is Dick Edgeworth who tells her story in complete
ignorance that he is doing anything of the kind. “It was a singular
trait of character in my wife,” he observes, “who had never shown any
uneasiness at my intimacy with Sir Francis Delaval, that she should take
a strong dislike to Mr. Day. A more dangerous and seductive companion
than the one, or a more moral and improving companion than the other,
could not be found in England.” It was, indeed, very singular.
For the first Mrs. Edgeworth was a penniless girl, the daughter of a
ruined country gentleman, who sat over his fire picking cinders from the
hearth and throwing them into the grate, while from time to time he
ejaculated “Hein! Heing!” as yet another scheme for making his fortune
came into his head. She had had no education. An itinerant
writing-master had taught her to form a few words. When Dick Edgeworth
was an undergraduate and rode over from Oxford she fell in love with him
and married him in order to escape the poverty and the mystery and the
dirt, and to have a husband and children like other women. But with what
result? Gigantic wheels ran downhill with the bricklayer’s son inside
them. Sailing carriages took flight and almost wrecked four stage
coaches. Machines did cut turnips, but not very efficiently. Her little
boy was allowed to roam the country like a poor man’s son, bare-legged,
untaught. And Mr. Day, coming to breakfast and staying to dinner, argued
incessantly about scientific principles and the laws of nature.
But here we encounter one of the pitfalls of this nocturnal rambling
among forgotten worthies. It is so difficult to keep, as we must with
highly authenticated people, strictly to the facts. It is so difficult
to refrain from making scenes which, if the past could be recalled,
might perhaps be found lacking in accuracy. With a character like Thomas
Day, in particular, whose history surpasses the bounds of the credible,
we find ourselves oozing amazement, like a sponge which has absorbed so
much that it can retain no more but fairly drips. Certain scenes have
the fascination which belongs rather to the abundance of fiction than to
the sobriety of fact. For instance, we conjure up all the drama of poor
Mrs. Edgeworth’s daily life; her bewilderment, her loneliness, her
despair, how she must have wondered whether any one really wanted
machines to climb walls, and assured the gentlemen that turnips were
better cut simply with a knife, and so blundered and floundered and been
snubbed that she dreaded the almost daily arrival of the tall young man
with his pompous, melancholy face, marked by the smallpox, his profusion
of uncombed black hair, and his finical cleanliness of hands and person.
He talked fast, fluently, incessantly, for hours at a time about
philosophy and nature, and M. Rousseau. Yet it was her house; she had to
see to his meals, and, though he ate as though he were half asleep, his
appetite was enormous. But it was no use complaining to her husband.
Edgeworth said, “She lamented about trifles.” He went on to say: “The
lamenting of a female with whom we live does not render home
delightful.” And then, with his obtuse open-mindedness, he asked her
what she had to complain of? Did he ever leave her alone? In the five or
six years of their married life he had slept from home not more than
five or six times. Mr. Day could corroborate that. Mr. Day corroborated
everything that Mr. Edgeworth said. He egged him on with his
experiments. He told him to leave his son without education. He did not
care a rap what the people of Henley said. In short, he was at the
bottom of all the absurdities and extravagances which made Mrs.
Edgeworth’s life a burden to her.
Yet let us choose another scene—one of the last that poor Mrs.
Edgeworth was to behold. She was returning from Lyons, and Mr. Day was
her escort. A more singular figure, as he stood on the deck of the
packet which took them to Dover, very tall, very upright, one finger in
the breast of his coat, letting the wind blow his hair out, dressed
absurdly, though in the height of fashion, wild, romantic, yet at the
same time authoritative and pompous, could scarcely be imagined; and
this strange creature, who loathed women, was in charge of a lady who
was about to become a mother, had adopted two orphan girls, and had set
himself to win the hand of Miss Elizabeth Sneyd by standing between
boards for six hours daily in order to learn to dance. Now and again he
pointed his toe with rigid precision; then, waking from the congenial
dream into which the dark clouds, the flying waters, and the shadow of
England upon the horizon had thrown him, he rapped out an order in the
smart, affected tones of a man of the world. The sailors stared, but
they obeyed. There was something sincere about him, something proudly
indifferent to what you thought; yes, something comforting and humane,
too, so that Mrs. Edgeworth for her part was determined never to laugh
at him again. But men were strange; life was difficult, and with a sigh
of bewilderment, perhaps of relief, poor Mrs. Edgeworth landed at Dover,
was brought to bed of a daughter, and died.
Day meanwhile proceeded to Lichfield. Elizabeth Sneyd, of course,
refused him—gave a great cry, people said; exclaimed that she had loved
Day the blackguard, but hated Day the gentleman, and rushed from the
room. And then, they said, a terrible thing happened. Mr. Day, in his
rage, bethought him of the orphan, Sabrina Sydney, whom he had bred to
be his wife; visited her at Sutton Coldfield; flew into a passion at the
sight of her; fired a pistol at her skirts, poured melted sealing wax
over her arms, and boxed her ears. “No; I could never have done that,”
Mr. Edgeworth used to say, when people described the scene. And whenever
to the end of his life he thought of Thomas Day he fell silent. So
great, so passionate, so inconsistent—his life had been a tragedy, and
in thinking of his friend, the best friend he had ever had, Richard
Edgeworth fell silent.
It is almost the only occasion upon which silence is recorded of him. To
muse, to repent, to contemplate were foreign to his nature. His wife and
friends and children are silhouetted with extreme vividness upon a broad
disc of interminable chatter. Upon no other background could we realise
so clearly the sharp fragment of his first wife, or the shades and
depths which make up the character, at once humane and brutal, advanced
and hidebound of the inconsistent philosopher, Thomas Day. But his power
is not limited to people; landscapes, groups, societies seem, even as he
describes them, to split off from him, to be projected away, so that we
are able to run just ahead of him and anticipate his coming. They are
brought out all the more vividly by the extreme incongruity which so
often marks his comment and stamps his presence; they live with a
peculiar beauty, fantastic, solemn, mysterious, in contrast with
Edgeworth, who is none of these things. In particular, he brings before
us a garden in Cheshire, the garden of a parsonage, an ancient but
commodious parsonage.
One pushed through a white gate and found oneself in a grass court,
small but well kept, with roses growing in the hedges and grapes hanging
from the walls. But what, in the name of wonder, were those objects in
the middle of the grass plot? Through the dusk of an autumn evening
there shone out an enormous white globe. Round it at various distances
were others of different sizes—the planets and their satellites, it
seemed. But who could have placed them there, and why? The house was
silent; the windows shut; nobody was stirring. Then, furtively peeping
from behind a curtain, appeared for a second the face of an elderly man,
handsome, dishevelled, distraught. It vanished.
In some mysterious way, human beings inflict their own vagaries upon
nature. Moths and birds must have flitted more silently through the
little garden; over everything must have brooded the same fantastic
peace. Then, red-faced, garrulous, inquisitive, in burst Richard Lovell
Edgeworth. He looked at the globes; he satisfied himself that they were
of “accurate design and workmanlike construction”. He knocked at the
door. He knocked and knocked. No one came. At length, as his impatience
was overcoming him, slowly the latch was undone, gradually the door was
opened; a clergyman, neglected, unkempt, but still a gentleman, stood
before him. Edgeworth named himself, and they retired to a parlour
littered with books and papers and valuable furniture now fallen to
decay. At last, unable to control his curiosity any longer, Edgeworth
asked what were the globes in the garden? Instantly the clergyman
displayed extreme agitation. It was his son who had made them, he
exclaimed; a boy of genius, a boy of the greatest industry, and of
virtue and acquirements far beyond his age. But he had died. His wife
had died. Edgeworth tried to turn the conversation, but in vain. The
poor man rushed on passionately, incoherently about his son, his genius,
his death. “It struck me that his grief had injured his understanding,”
said Edgeworth, and he was becoming more and more uncomfortable when the
door opened and a girl of fourteen or fifteen, entering with a tea-tray
in her hand, suddenly changed the course of his host’s conversation.
Indeed, she was beautiful; dressed in white; her nose a shade too
prominent, perhaps—but no, her proportions were exquisitely right. “She
is a scholar and an artist!” the clergyman exclaimed as she left the
room. But why did she leave the room? If she was his daughter why did
she not preside at the tea-table? Was she his mistress? Who was she? And
why was the house in this state of litter and decay? Why was the front
door locked? Why was the clergyman apparently a prisoner, and what was
his secret story? Questions began to crowd into Edgeworth’s head as he
sat drinking his tea; but he could only shake his head and make one last
reflection, “I feared that something was not right,” as he shut the
white wicket gate behind him, and left alone for ever in the untidy
house among the planets and their satellites, the mad clergyman and the
lovely girl.