Speaking truthfully, _Mary Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings_ is not
a good book. It neither enlarges the mind nor purifies the heart. There
is nothing in it about Prime Ministers and not very much about Miss
Mitford. Yet, as one is setting out to speak the truth, one must own
that there are certain books which can be read without the mind and
without the heart, but still with considerable enjoyment. To come to the
point, the great merit of these scrapbooks, for they can scarcely be
called biographies, is that they license mendacity. One cannot believe
what Miss Hill says about Miss Mitford, and thus one is free to invent
Miss Mitford for oneself. Not for a second do we accuse Miss Hill of
telling lies. That infirmity is entirely ours. For example: “Alresford
was the birthplace of one who loved nature as few have loved her, and
whose writings ‘breathe the air of the hayfields and the scent of the
hawthorn boughs’, and seem to waft to us ‘the sweet breezes that blow
over ripened cornfields and daisied meadows’.” It is perfectly true that
Miss Mitford was born at Alresford, and yet, when it is put like that,
we doubt whether she was ever born at all. Indeed she was, says Miss
Hill; she was born “on the 16th December, 1787. ‘A pleasant house in
truth it was,’ Miss Mitford writes. ‘The breakfast-room . . . was a
lofty and spacious apartment.’” So Miss Mitford was born in the
breakfast-room about eight-thirty on a snowy morning between the
Doctor’s second and third cups of tea. “Pardon me,” said Mrs. Mitford,
turning a little pale, but not omitting to add the right quantity of
cream to her husband’s tea, “I feel . . .” That is the way in which
Mendacity begins. There is something plausible and even ingenious in her
approaches. The touch about the cream, for instance, might be called
historical, for it is well known that when Mary won £20,000 in the
Irish lottery, the Doctor spent it all upon Wedgwood china, the winning
number being stamped upon the soup plates in the middle of an Irish
harp, the whole being surmounted by the Mitford arms, and encircled by
the motto of Sir John Bertram, one of William the Conqueror’s knights,
from whom the Mitfords claimed descent. “Observe,” says Mendacity, “with
what an air the Doctor drinks his tea, and how she, poor lady, contrives
to curtsey as she leaves the room.” Tea? I inquire, for the Doctor,
though a fine figure of a man, is already purple and profuse, and foams
like a crimson cock over the frill of his fine laced shirt. “Since the
ladies have left the room,” Mendacity begins, and goes on to make up a
pack of lies with the sole object of proving that Dr. Mitford kept a
mistress in the purlieus of Reading and paid her money on the pretence
that he was investing it in a new method of lighting and heating houses
invented by the Marquis de Chavannes. It came to the same thing in the
end—to the King’s Bench Prison, that is to say; but instead of allowing
us to recall the literary and historical associations of the place,
Mendacity wanders off to the window and distracts us again by the
platitudinous remark that it is still snowing. There is something very
charming in an ancient snowstorm. The weather has varied almost as much
in the course of generations as mankind. The snow of those days was more
formally shaped and a good deal softer than the snow of ours, just as an
eighteenth-century cow was no more like our cows than she was like the
florid and fiery cows of Elizabethan pastures. Sufficient attention has
scarcely been paid to this aspect of literature, which, it cannot be
denied, has its importance.
Our brilliant young men might do worse, when in search of a subject,
than devote a year or two to cows in literature, snow in literature, the
daisy in Chaucer and in Coventry Patmore. At any rate, the snow falls
heavily. The Portsmouth mail-coach has already lost its way; several
ships have foundered, and Margate pier has been totally destroyed. At
Hatfield Peveral twenty sheep have been buried, and though one supports
itself by gnawing wurzels which it has found near it, there is grave
reason to fear that the French king’s coach has been blocked on the road
to Colchester. It is now the 16th of February, 1808.
Poor Mrs. Mitford! Twenty-one years ago she left the breakfast-room, and
no news has yet been received of her child. Even Mendacity is a little
ashamed of itself, and, picking up _Mary Russell Mitford and Her
Surroundings_, assures us that everything will come right if we possess
ourselves in patience. The French king’s coach was on its way to
Bocking; at Bocking lived Lord and Lady Charles Murray-Aynsley; and Lord
Charles was shy. Lord Charles had always been shy. Once when Mary
Mitford was five years old—sixteen years, that is, before the sheep
were lost and the French king went to Bocking—Mary “threw him into an
agony of blushing by running up to his chair in mistake for that of my
papa”. He had indeed to leave the room. Miss Hill, who, somewhat
strangely, finds the society of Lord and Lady Charles pleasant, does not
wish to quit it without “introducing an incident in connection with them
which took place in the month of February, 1808”. But is Miss Mitford
concerned in it? we ask, for there must be an end of trifling. To some
extent, that is to say, Lady Charles was a cousin of the Mitfords, and
Lord Charles was shy. Mendacity is quite ready to deal with “the
incident” even on these terms; but, we repeat, we have had enough of
trifling. Miss Mitford may not be a great woman; for all we know she was
not even a good one; but we have certain responsibilities as a reviewer
which we are not going to evade.
There is, to begin with, English literature. A sense of the beauty of
nature has never been altogether absent, however much the cow may change
from age to age, from English poetry. Nevertheless, the difference
between Pope and Wordsworth in this respect is very considerable.
_Lyrical Ballads_ was published in 1798; _Our Village_ in 1824. One
being in verse and the other in prose, it is not necessary to labour a
comparison which contains, however, not only the elements of justice,
but the seeds of many volumes. Like her great predecessor, Miss Mitford
much preferred the country to the town; and thus, perhaps, it may not be
inopportune to dwell for a moment upon the King of Saxony, Mary Anning,
and the ichthyosaurus. Let alone the fact that Mary Anning and Mary
Mitford had a Christian name in common, they are further connected by
what can scarcely be called a fact, but may, without hazard, be called a
probability. Miss Mitford was looking for fossils at Lyme Regis only
fifteen years before Mary Anning found one. The King of Saxony visited
Lyme in 1844, and seeing the head of an ichthyosaurus in Mary Anning’s
window, asked her to drive to Pinny and explore the rocks. While they
were looking for fossils, an old woman seated herself in the King’s
coach—was she Mary Mitford? Truth compels us to say that she was not;
but there is no doubt, and we are not trifling when we say it, that Mary
Mitford often expressed a wish that she had known Mary Anning, and it is
singularly unfortunate to have to state that she never did. For we have
reached the year 1844; Mary Mitford is fifty-seven years of age, and so
far, thanks to Mendacity and its trifling ways, all we know of her is
that she did not know Mary Anning, had not found an ichthyosaurus, had
not been out in a snowstorm, and had not seen the King of France.
It is time to wring the creature’s neck, and begin again at the very
beginning.
What considerations, then, had weight with Miss Hill when she decided to
write _Mary Russell Mitford and Her Surroundings_? Three emerge from the
rest, and may be held of paramount importance. In the first place. Miss
Mitford was a lady; in the second, she was born in the year 1787; and in
the third, the stock of female characters who lend themselves to
biographic treatment by their own sex is, for one reason or another,
running short. For instance, little is known of Sappho, and that little
is not wholly to her credit. Lady Jane Grey has merit, but is undeniably
obscure. Of George Sand, the more we know the less we approve. George
Eliot was led into evil ways which not all her philosophy can excuse.
The Brontës, however highly we rate their genius, lacked that
indefinable something which marks the lady; Harriet Martineau was an
atheist; Mrs. Browning was a married woman; Jane Austen, Fanny Burney,
and Maria Edgeworth have been done already; so that, what with one thing
and another, Mary Russell Mitford is the only woman left.
There is no need to labour the extreme importance of the date when we
see the word “surroundings” on the back, of a book. Surroundings, as
they are called, are invariably eighteenth-century surroundings. When we
come, as of course we do, to that phrase which relates how “as we looked
upon the steps leading down from the upper room, we fancied we saw the
tiny figure jumping from step to step”, it would be the grossest outrage
upon our sensibilities to be told that those steps were Athenian,
Elizabethan, or Parisian. They were, of course, eighteenth-century
steps, leading down from the old panelled room into the shady garden,
where, tradition has it, William Pitt played marbles, or, if we like to
be bold, where on still summer days we can almost fancy that we hear the
drums of Bonaparte on the coast of France. Bonaparte is the limit of the
imagination on one side, as Monmouth is on the other; it would be fatal
if the imagination took to toying with Prince Albert or sporting with
King John. But fancy knows her place, and there is no need to labour the
point that her place is the eighteenth-century. The other point is more
obscure. One must be a lady. Yet what that means, and whether we like
what it means, may both be doubtful. If we say that Jane Austen was a
lady and that Charlotte Brontë was not one, we do as much as need be
done in the way of definition, and commit ourselves to neither side.
It is undoubtedly because of their reticence that Miss Hill is on the
side of the ladies. They sigh things off and they smile things off, but
they never seize the silver table by the legs or dash the teacups on the
floor. It is in many ways a great convenience to have a subject who can
be trusted to live a long life without once raising her voice. Sixteen
years is a considerable stretch of time, but of a lady it is enough to
say, “Here Mary Mitford passed sixteen years of her life and here she
got to know and love not only their own beautiful grounds but also every
turn of the surrounding shady lanes.” Her loves were vegetable, and her
lanes were shady. Then, of course, she was educated at the school where
Jane Austen and Mrs. Sherwood had been educated. She visited Lyme Regis,
and there is mention of the Cobb. She saw London from the top of St.
Paul’s, and London was much smaller then than it is now. She changed
from one charming house to another, and several distinguished literary
gentlemen paid her compliments and came to tea. When the dining-room
ceiling fell down it did not fall on her head, and when she took a
ticket in a lottery she did win the prize. If in the foregoing sentences
there are any words of more than two syllables, it is our fault and not
Miss Hill’s; and to do that writer justice, there are not many whole
sentences in the book which are neither quoted from Miss Mitford nor
supported by the authority of Mr. Crissy.
But how dangerous a thing is life! Can one be sure that anything not
wholly made of mahogany will to the very end stand empty in the sun?
Even cupboards have their secret springs, and when, inadvertently we are
sure, Miss Hill touches this one, out, terrible to relate, topples a
stout old gentleman. In plain English, Miss Mitford had a father. There
is nothing actually improper in that. Many women have had fathers. But
Miss Mitford’s father was kept in a cupboard; that is to say, he was not
a nice father. Miss Hill even goes so far as to conjecture that when “an
imposing procession of neighbours and friends” followed him to the
grave, “we cannot help thinking that this was more to show sympathy and
respect for Miss Mitford than from special respect for him”. Severe as
the judgement is, the gluttonous, bibulous, amorous old man did
something to deserve it. The less said about him the better. Only, if
from your earliest childhood your father has gambled and speculated,
first with your mother’s fortune, then with your own, spent your
earnings, driven you to earn more, and spent that too; if in old age he
has lain upon a sofa and insisted that fresh air is bad for daughters,
if, dying at length, he has left debts that can only be paid by selling
everything you have or sponging upon the charity of friends—then even a
lady sometimes raises her voice. Miss Mitford herself spoke out once.
“It was grief to go; there I had toiled and striven and tasted as deeply
of bitter anxiety, of fear, and of hope as often falls to the lot of
woman.” What language for a lady to use! for a lady, too, who owns a
teapot. There is a drawing of the teapot at the bottom of the page. But
it is now of no avail; Miss Mitford has smashed it to smithereens. That
is the worst of writing about ladies; they have fathers as well as
teapots. On the other hand, some pieces of Dr. Mitford’s Wedgwood dinner
service are still in existence, and a copy of Adam’s Geography, which
Mary won as a prize at school, is “in our temporary possession”. If
there is nothing improper in the suggestion, might not the next book be
devoted entirely to them?