A SIMPLE STORY
BY
MRS. INCHBALD
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
G. L. STRACHEY
LONDON
HENRY FROWDE
1908
OXFORD: HORACE HART
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
Transcriber’s Note: Table of Contents Added.
Left Archaic spellings, but made minor changes to punctuation.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PREFACE.
Volume I
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
Volume II
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
Volume III
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
Volume IV
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
Plays written by Mrs. Inchbald
INTRODUCTION
_A Simple Story_ is one of those books which, for some reason or other,
have failed to come down to us, as they deserved, along the current of
time, but have drifted into a literary backwater where only the
professional critic or the curious discoverer can find them out. “The
iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy;” and nowhere more
blindly than in the republic of letters. If we were to inquire how it
has happened that the true value of Mrs. Inchbald’s achievement has
passed out of general recognition, perhaps the answer to our question
would be found to lie in the extreme difficulty with which the mass of
readers detect and appreciate mere quality in literature. Their
judgment is swayed by a hundred side-considerations which have nothing
to do with art, but happen easily to impress the imagination, or to fit
in with the fashion of the hour. The reputation of Mrs. Inchbald’s
contemporary, Fanny Burney, is a case in point. Every one has heard of
Fanny Burney’s novels, and _Evelina_ is still widely read. Yet it is
impossible to doubt that, so far as quality alone is concerned,
_Evelina_ deserves to be ranked considerably below _A Simple Story_.
But its writer was the familiar friend of the greatest spirits of her
age; she was the author of one of the best of diaries; and her work was
immediately and immensely popular. Thus it has happened that the name
of Fanny Burney has maintained its place upon the roll of English
novelists, while that of Mrs. Inchbald is forgotten.
But the obscurity of Mrs. Inchbald’s career has not, of course, been
the only reason for the neglect of her work. The merits of _A Simple
Story_ are of a kind peculiarly calculated to escape the notice of a
generation of readers brought up on the fiction of the nineteenth
century. That fiction, infinitely various as it is, possesses at least
one characteristic common to the whole of it—a breadth of outlook upon
life, which can be paralleled by no other body of literature in the
world save that of the Elizabethans. But the comprehensiveness of view
shared by Dickens and Tolstoy, by Balzac and George Eliot, finds no
place in Mrs. Inchbald’s work. Compared with _A Simple Story_ even the
narrow canvases of Jane Austen seem spacious pictures of diversified
life. Mrs. Inchbald’s novel is not concerned with the world at large,
or with any section of society, hardly even with the family; its
subject is a group of two or three individuals whose interaction forms
the whole business of the book. There is no local colour in it, no
complexity of detail nor violence of contrast; the atmosphere is vague
and neutral, the action passes among ill-defined sitting-rooms, and the
most poignant scene in the story takes place upon a staircase which has
never been described. Thus the reader of modern novels is inevitably
struck, in _A Simple Story_, by a sense of emptiness and thinness,
which may well blind him to high intrinsic merits. The spirit of the
eighteenth century is certainly present in the book, but it is the
eighteenth century of France rather than of England. Mrs. Inchbald no
doubt owed much to Richardson; her view of life is the indoor
sentimental view of the great author of _Clarissa_; but her treatment
of it has very little in common with his method of microscopic analysis
and vast accumulation. If she belongs to any school, it is among the
followers of the French classical tradition that she must be placed. _A
Simple Story_ is, in its small way, a descendant of the Tragedies of
Racine; and Miss Milner may claim relationship with Madame de Clèves.
Besides her narrowness of vision, Mrs. Inchbald possesses another
quality, no less characteristic of her French predecessors, and no less
rare among the novelists of England. She is essentially a stylist—a
writer whose whole conception of her art is dominated by stylistic
intention. Her style, it is true, is on the whole poor; it is often
heavy and pompous, sometimes clumsy and indistinct; compared with the
style of such a master as Thackeray it sinks at once into
insignificance. But the interest of her style does not lie in its
intrinsic merit so much as in the use to which she puts it. Thackeray’s
style is mere ornament, existing independently of what he has to say;
Mrs. Inchbald’s is part and parcel of her matter. The result is that
when, in moments of inspiration, she rises to the height of her
opportunity, when, mastering her material, she invests her expression
with the whole intensity of her feeling and her thought, then she
achieves effects of the rarest beauty—effects of a kind for which one
may search through Thackeray in vain. The most triumphant of these
passages is the scene on the staircase of Elmwood House—a passage which
would be spoilt by quotation and which no one who has ever read it
could forget. But the same quality is to be found throughout her work.
“Oh, Miss Woodley!” exclaims Miss Milner, forced at last to confess to
her friend what she feels towards Dorriforth, “I love him with all the
passion of a mistress, and with all the tenderness of a wife.” No young
lady, even in the eighteenth century, ever gave utterance to such a
sentence as that. It is the sentence, not of a speaker, but of a
writer; and yet, for that very reason, it is delightful, and comes to
us charged with a curious sense of emotion, which is none the less real
for its elaboration. In _Nature and Art_, Mrs. Inchbald’s second novel,
the climax of the story is told in a series of short paragraphs, which,
for bitterness and concentration of style, are almost reminiscent of
Stendhal:
The jury consulted for a few minutes. The verdict was “Guilty”.
She heard it with composure.
But when William placed the fatal velvet on his head and rose to
pronounce sentence, she started with a kind of convulsive motion,
retreated a step or two back, and, lifting up her hands with a scream,
exclaimed—
“Oh, not from _you_!”
The piercing shriek which accompanied these words prevented their being
heard by part of the audience; and those who heard them thought little
of their meaning, more than that they expressed her fear of dying.
Serene and dignified, as if no such exclamation had been uttered,
William delivered the fatal speech, ending with “Dead, dead, dead”.
She fainted as he closed the period, and was carried back to prison in
a swoon; while he adjourned the court to go to dinner.
Here, no doubt, there is a touch of melodrama; but it is the melodrama
of a rhetorician, and, in that fine “She heard it with composure”,
genius has brushed aside the forced and the obvious, to express, with
supreme directness, the anguish of a soul.
For, in spite of Mrs. Inchbald’s artificialities, in spite of her lack
of that kind of realistic description which seems to modern readers the
very blood and breath of a good story, she has the power of doing what,
after all, only a very few indeed of her fellow craftsmen have ever
been able to do—she can bring into her pages the living pressure of a
human passion, she can invest, if not with realism, with something
greater than realism—with the sense of reality itself—the pains, the
triumphs, and the agitations of the human heart. “The heart,” to use
the old-fashioned phrase—there is Mrs. Inchbald’s empire, there is the
sphere of her glory and her command. Outside of it, her powers are weak
and fluctuating. She has no firm grasp of the masculine elements in
character: she wishes to draw a rough man, Sandford, and she draws a
rude one; she tries her hand at a hero, Rushbrook, and she turns out a
prig. Her humour is not faulty, but it is exceedingly slight. What an
immortal figure the dim Mrs. Horton would have become in the hands of
Jane Austen! In _Nature and Art_, her attempts at social satire are
superficial and overstrained. But weaknesses of this kind—and it would
be easy to prolong the list—are what every reader of the following
pages will notice without difficulty, and what no wise one will regard.
“Il ne faut point juger des hommes par ce qu’ils ignorent, mais par ce
qu’ils savent;” and Mrs. Inchbald’s knowledge was as profound as it was
limited. Her Miss Milner is an original and brilliant creation, compact
of charm and life. She is a flirt, and a flirt not only adorable, but
worthy of adoration. Did Mrs. Inchbald take the suggestion of a heroine
with imperfections from the little masterpiece which, on more sides
than one, closely touches her’s—Manon Lescaut? Perhaps; and yet, if
this was so, the borrowing was of the slightest, for it is only in the
fact that she _is_ imperfect that Miss Milner bears to Manon any
resemblance at all. In every other respect, the English heroine is the
precise contrary of the French one: she is a creature of fiery will, of
high bearing, of noble disposition; and her shortcomings are born, not
of weakness, but of excess of strength. Mrs. Inchbald has taken this
character, she has thrown it under the influence of a violent and
absorbing passion, and, upon that theme, she has written her delicate,
sympathetic, and artificial book.
As one reads it, one cannot but feel that it is, if not directly and
circumstantially, at least in essence, autobiographical. One finds
oneself speculating over the author, wondering what was her history,
and how much of it was Miss Milner’s. Unfortunately the greater part of
what we should most like to know of Mrs. Inchbald’s life has vanished
beyond recovery. She wrote her Memoirs, and she burnt them; and who can
tell whether even there we should have found a self-revelation?
Confessions are sometimes curiously discreet, and, in the case of Mrs.
Inchbald, we may be sure that it is only what was indiscreet that would
really be worth the hearing. Yet her life is not devoid of interest. A
brief sketch of it may be welcome to her readers.
Elizabeth Inchbald was born on the 15th of October, 1753, at
Standingfield, near Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk;[1] one of the numerous
offspring of John and Mary Simpson. The Simpsons, who were Roman
Catholics, held a moderate farm in Standingfield, and ranked among the
gentry of the neighbourhood. In Elizabeth’s eighth year, her father
died; but the family continued at the farm, the elder daughters
marrying and settling in London, while Elizabeth grew up into a
beautiful and charming girl. One misfortune, however, interfered with
her happiness—a defect of utterance which during her early years
rendered her speech so indistinct as to be unintelligible to strangers.
She devoted herself to reading and to dreams of the great world. At
thirteen, she declared she would rather die than live longer without
seeing the world; she longed to go to London; she longed to go upon the
stage. When, in 1770, one of her brothers became an actor at Norwich,
she wrote secretly to his manager, Mr. Griffith, begging for an
engagement. Mr. Griffith was encouraging, and, though no definite steps
were taken, she was sufficiently charmed with him to write out his name
at length in her diary, with the inscription “Each dear letter of thy
name is harmony.” Was Mr. Griffith the hero of the company as well as
its manager? That, at any rate, was clearly Miss Simpson’s opinion; but
she soon had other distractions. In the following year she paid a visit
to her married sisters in London, where she met another actor, Mr.
Inchbald, who seems immediately to have fallen in love with her, and to
have proposed. She remained cool. “In spite of your eloquent pen,” she
wrote to him, with a touch of that sharp and almost bitter sense that
was always hers, “matrimony still appears to me with less charms than
terrors: the bliss arising from it, I doubt not, is superior to any
other—but best not to be ventured for (in my opinion), till some little
time have proved the emptiness of all other; which it seldom fails to
do.” Nevertheless, the correspondence continued, and, early in 1772,
some entries in her diary give a glimpse of her state of mind:—
_Jan. 22_. Saw Mr. Griffith’s picture.
_Jan. 28_. Stole it.
_Jan. 29_. Rather disappointed at not receiving a letter from Mr.
Inchbald.
A few months later she did the great deed of her life: she stepped
secretly into the Norwich coach, and went to London. The days that
followed were full of hazard and adventure, but the details of them are
uncertain. She was a girl of eighteen, absolutely alone, and
astonishingly attractive—“tall,” we are told, “slender, straight, of
the purest complexion, and most beautiful features; her hair of a
golden auburn, her eyes full at once of spirit and sweetness;” and it
was only to be expected that, in such circumstances, romance and daring
would soon give place to discomfort and alarm. She attempted in vain to
obtain a theatrical engagement; she found herself, more than once,
obliged to shift her lodging; and at last, after ten days of
trepidation, she was reduced to apply for help to her married sisters.
This put an end to her difficulties, but, in spite of her efforts to
avoid notice, her beauty had already attracted attention, and she had
received a letter from a stranger, with whom she immediately entered
into correspondence. She had all the boldness of innocence, and, in
addition, a force of character which brought her safely through the
risks she ran. While she was still in her solitary lodging, a
theatrical manager, named Dodd, attempted to use his position as a
cover for seduction. She had several interviews with him alone, and the
story goes that, in the last, she snatched up a basin of hot water and
dashed it in his face. But she was not to go unprotected for long; for
within two months of her arrival in London she had married Mr.
Inchbald.
The next twelve years of Mrs. Inchbald’s life were passed amid the
rough and tumble of the eighteenth-century stage. Her husband was
thirty-seven when she married him, a Roman Catholic like herself, and
an actor who depended for his living upon ill-paid and uncertain
provincial engagements. Mrs. Inchbald conquered her infirmity of speech
and threw herself into her husband’s profession. She accompanied him to
Bristol, to Scotland, to Liverpool, to Birmingham, appearing in a great
variety of rôles, but never with any very conspicuous success. The
record of these journeys throws an interesting light upon the
conditions of the provincial companies of those days. Mrs. Inchbald and
her companions would set out to walk from one Scotch town to another;
they would think themselves lucky if they could climb on to a passing
cart, to arrive at last, drenched with rain perhaps, at some wretched
hostelry. But this kind of barbarism did not stand in the way of an
almost childish gaiety. In Yorkshire, we find the Inchbalds, the
Siddonses, and Kemble retiring to the moors, in the intervals of
business, to play blindman’s buff or puss in the corner. Such were the
pastimes of Mrs. Siddons before the days of her fame. No doubt this
kind of lightheartedness was the best antidote to the experience of
being “saluted with volleys of potatoes and broken bottles”, as the
Siddonses were by the citizens of Liverpool, for having ventured to
appear on their stage without having ever played before the King. On
this occasion, the audience, according to a letter from Kemble to Mrs.
Inchbald, “extinguished all the lights round the house; then jumped
upon the stage; brushed every lamp out with their hats; took back their
money; left the theatre, and determined themselves to repeat this till
they have another company.” These adventures were diversified by a
journey to Paris, undertaken in the hope that Mr. Inchbald, who found
himself without engagements, might pick up a livelihood as a painter of
miniatures. The scheme came to nothing, and the Inchbalds eventually
went to Hull, where they returned to their old profession. Here, in
1779, suddenly and somewhat mysteriously, Mr. Inchbald died. To his
widow the week that followed was one of “grief, horror, and almost
despair”; but soon, with her old pertinacity, she was back at her work,
settling at last in London, and becoming a member of the Covent Garden
company. Here, for the next five years, she earned for herself a meagre
living, until, quite unexpectedly, deliverance came. In her moments of
leisure she had been trying her hand upon dramatic composition; she had
written some farces, and, in 1784, one of them, _A Mogul Tale_, was
accepted, acted, and obtained a great success. This was the
turning-point of her career. She followed up her farce with a series of
plays, either original or adapted, which, almost without exception,
were well received, so that she was soon able to retire from the stage
with a comfortable competence. She had succeeded in life; she was
happy, respected, free.
Mrs. Inchbald’s plays are so bad that it is difficult to believe that
they brought her a fortune. But no doubt it was their faults that made
them popular—their sentimentalities, their melodramatic absurdities,
their strangely false and high-pitched moral tone. They are written in
a jargon which resembles, if it resembles anything, an execrable prose
translation from very flat French verse. “Ah, Manuel!” exclaims one of
her heroines, “I am now amply punished by the Marquis for all my
cruelty to Duke Cordunna—he to whom my father in my infancy betrothed
me, and to whom I willingly pledged my faith, hoping to wed; till
Romono, the Marquis of Romono, came from the field of glory, and with
superior claims of person as of fame, seized on my heart by force, and
perforce made me feel I had never loved till then.” Which is the more
surprising—that actors could be found to utter such speeches, or that
audiences could be collected to applaud them? Perhaps, for us, the most
memorable fact about Mrs. Inchbald’s dramatic work is that one of her
adaptations (from the German of Kotzebue) was no other than that
_Lovers’ Vows_ which, as every one knows, was rehearsed so brilliantly
at Ecclesford, the seat of the Right Hon. Lord Ravenshaw, in Cornwall,
and which, after all, was _not_ performed at Sir Thomas Bertram’s. But
that is an interest _sub specie aeternitatis_; and, from the temporal
point of view, Mrs. Inchbald’s plays must be regarded merely as
means—means towards her own enfranchisement, and that condition of
things which made possible _A Simple Story_. That novel had been
sketched as early as 1777; but it was not completely written until
1790, and not published until the following year. A second edition was
printed immediately, and several more followed; the present reprint is
taken from the fourth, published in 1799—but with the addition of the
characteristic preface, which, after the second edition, was dropped.
The four small volumes of these early editions, with their large type,
their ample spacing, their charming flavour of antiquity, delicacy, and
rest—may be met with often enough in secluded corners of secondhand
bookshops, or on some neglected shelf in the library of a country
house. For their own generation, they represented a distinguished title
to fame. Mrs. Inchbald—to use the expression of her biographer—“was
ascertained to be one of the greatest ornaments of her sex.” She was
painted by Lawrence, she was eulogized by Miss Edgeworth, she was
complimented by Madame de Stael herself. She had, indeed, won for
herself a position which can hardly be paralleled among the women of
the eighteenth century—a position of independence and honour, based
upon talent, and upon talent alone. In 1796 she published _Nature and
Art_, and ten years later appeared her last work—a series of
biographical and critical notices prefixed to a large collection of
acting plays. During the greater part of the intervening period she
lived in lodgings in Leicester Square—or “Leicester Fields” as the
place was still often called—in a house opposite that of Sir Joshua
Reynolds. The œconomy which she had learnt in her early days she
continued to practise; dressing with extraordinary plainness, and often
going without a fire in winter; so that she was able, through her
self-sacrifice, to keep from want a large band of poor relatives and
friends. The society she mixed with was various, but, for the most
part, obscure. There were occasional visits from the now triumphant
Mrs. Siddons; there were incessant propositions—but alas! they were
equivocal—from Sir Charles Bunbury; for the rest, she passed her life
among actor-managers and humble playwrights and unremembered medical
men. One of her friends was William Godwin, who described her to Mrs.
Shelley as a “piquante mixture between a lady and a milkmaid”, and who,
it is said, suggested part of the plot of _A Simple Story_. But she
quarreled with him when he married Mary Wollstonecraft, after whose
death she wrote to him thus—“With the most sincere sympathy in all you
have suffered—with the most perfect forgiveness of all you have said to
me, there must nevertheless be an end to our acquaintance _for ever_. I
respect your prejudices, but I also respect my own.” Far more intimate
were her relations with Dr. Gisborne—a mysterious figure, with whom, in
some tragic manner that we can only just discern, was enacted her final
romance. His name—often in company with that of another physician, Dr.
Warren, for whom, too, she had a passionate affection—occurs frequently
among her papers; and her diary for December 17, 1794, has this
entry:—“Dr. Gisborne drank tea here, and staid very late: he talked
seriously of marrying—but not _me_.” Many years later, one September,
she amused herself by making out a list of all the Septembers since her
marriage, with brief notes as to her state of mind during each. The
list has fortunately survived, and some of the later entries are as
follows:—
1791. London; after my novel, Simple Story ... very happy.
1792. London; in Leicester Square ... cheerful, content, and sometimes
rather happy....
1794. Extremely happy, but for poor Debby’s death.
1795. My brother George’s death, and an intimate acquaintance with Dr.
Gisborne—not happy....
1797. After an alteration in my teeth, and the death of Dr. Warren—yet
far from unhappy.
1798. Happy, but for suspicion amounting almost to certainty of a rapid
appearance of age in my face....
1802. After feeling wholly indifferent about Dr. Gisborne—very happy
but for ill health, ill looks, &c.
1803. After quitting Leicester Square probably for ever—after caring
scarce at all or thinking of Dr. Gisborne ... very happy....
1806.... After the death of Dr. Gisborne, too, often very unhappy, yet
mostly cheerful, and on my return to London nearly happy.
The record, with all its quaintness, produces a curious impression of
stoicism—of a certain grim acceptance of the facts of life. It would
have been a pleasure, certainly, but an alarming pleasure, to have
known Mrs. Inchbald.
In the early years of the century, she gradually withdrew from London,
establishing herself in suburban boarding-houses, often among sisters
of charity, and devoting her days to the practice of her religion. In
her early and middle life she had been an indifferent Catholic:
“Sunday. Rose late, dressed, and read in the Bible about David,
&c.”—this is one of the very few references in her diary to anything
approaching a religious observance during many years. But, in her old
age, her views changed; her devotions increased with her retirement;
and her retirement was at last complete. She died, in an obscure
Kensington boarding-house, on August 1, 1821. She was buried in
Kensington churchyard. But, if her ghost lingers anywhere, it is not in
Kensington: it is in the heart of the London that she had always loved.
Yet, even there, how much now would she find to recognize? Mrs.
Inchbald’s world has passed away from us for ever; and, as we walk
there to-day amid the press of the living, it is hard to believe that
she too was familiar with Leicester Square.
G. L. STRACHEY.
[1] The following account is based upon the _Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald,
including her familiar correspondence with the most distinguished
persons of her time_, edited by James Boaden, Esq.—a discursive, vague,
and not unamusing book.
A
SIMPLE STORY,
IN FOUR VOLUMES,
BY
MRS. INCHBALD.
VOL. I.
_THE FOURTH EDITION._
LONDON:
Printed for G. G. and J. ROBINSON,
Paternoster Row.
1799.
PREFACE.
It is said, _a book should be read with the same spirit with which it
has been written_. In that case, fatal must be the reception of
this—for the writer frankly avows, that during the time she has been
writing it, she has suffered every quality and degree of weariness and
lassitude, into which no other employment could have betrayed her.
It has been the destiny of the writer of this Story to be occupied
throughout her life, in what has the least suited either her
inclination or capacity—with an invincible impediment in her speech, it
was her lot for thirteen years to gain a subsistence by public
speaking—and, with the utmost detestation to the fatigue of inventing,
a constitution suffering under a sedentary life, and an education
confined to the narrow boundaries prescribed her sex, it has been her
fate to devote a tedious seven years to the unremitting labour of
literary productions—whilst a taste for authors of the first rank has
been an additional punishment, forbidding her one moment of those
self-approving reflections, which are assuredly due to the industrious.
But, alas! in the exercise of the arts, industry scarce bears the name
of merit. What then is to be substituted in the place of genius? GOOD
FORTUNE. And if these volumes should be attended by the good fortune
that has accompanied her other writings, to that divinity, and that
alone, she shall attribute their success.
Yet, there is a _first cause_ still, to whom I cannot here forbear to
mention my obligations.
The Muses, I trust, will pardon me, that to them I do not feel myself
obliged—for, in justice to their heavenly inspirations, I believe they
have never yet favoured me with one visitation; but sent in their
disguise NECESSITY, who, being the mother of Invention, gave me all
mine—while FORTUNE kindly smiled, and was accessory to the cheat.
But this important secret I long wished, and endeavoured to conceal;
yet one unlucky moment candidly, though unwittingly, divulged it—I
frankly owned, “That Fortune having chased away Necessity, there
remained no other incitement to stimulate me to a labour I abhorred.”
It happened to be in the power of the person to whom I confided this
secret, to send NECESSITY once more. Once more, then, bowing to its
empire, I submit to the task it enjoins.
This case has something similar to a theatrical anecdote told (I think)
by Colly Cibber:
“A performer of a very mean salary, played the Apothecary in Romeo and
Juliet so exactly to the satisfaction of the audience, that this little
part, independent of the other characters, drew immense houses whenever
the play was performed. The manager in consequence, thought it but
justice to advance the actor’s salary; on which the poor man (who, like
the character he represented, had been half starved before) began to
live so comfortably, he became too plump for the part; and being of no
importance in any thing else, the manager of course now wholly
discharged him—and thus, actually reducing him to the want of a piece
of bread, in a short time he became a proper figure for the part
again.”
Welcome, then, thou all-powerful principle, NECESSITY! THOU, who art
the instigator of so many bad authors and actors—THOU, who from my
infancy seldom hast forsaken me, still abide with me. I will not
complain of any hardship thy commands require, so thou dost not urge my
pen to prostitution. In all thy rigour, oh! do not force my toil to
libels—or what is equally pernicious—panegyric on the unworthy!
A SIMPLE STORY.
CHAPTER I.
Dorriforth, bred at St. Omer’s in all the scholastic rigour of that
college, was, by education, and the solemn vows of his order, a Roman
Catholic priest—but nicely discriminating between the philosophical and
the superstitious part of that character, and adopting the former only,
he possessed qualities not unworthy the first professors of
Christianity. Every virtue which it was his vocation to preach, it was
his care to practise; nor was he in the class of those of the
religious, who, by secluding themselves from the world, fly the merit
they might have in reforming mankind. He refused to shelter himself
from the temptations of the layman by the walls of a cloister, but
sought for, and found that shelter in the centre of London, where he
dwelt, in his own prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.
He was about thirty, and had lived in the metropolis near five years,
when a gentleman above his own age, but with whom he had from his youth
contracted a most sincere friendship, died, and left him the sole
guardian of his daughter, who was then eighteen.
The deceased Mr. Milner, on his approaching dissolution, perfectly
sensible of his state, thus reasoned with himself before he made the
nomination:—“I have formed no intimate friendship during my whole life,
except one—I can be said to know the heart of no man, except the heart
of Dorriforth. After knowing his, I never sought acquaintance with
another—I did not wish to lessen the exalted estimation of human nature
which he had inspired. In this moment of trembling apprehension for
every thought which darts across my mind, and more for every action
which I must soon be called to answer for; all worldly views here
thrown aside, I act as if that tribunal, before which I every moment
expect to appear, were now sitting in judgment upon my purpose. The
care of an only child is the great charge that in this tremendous
crisis I have to execute. These earthly affections that bind me to her
by custom, sympathy, or what I fondly call parental love, would direct
me to study her present happiness, and leave her to the care of those
whom she thinks her dearest friends; but they are friends only in the
sunshine of fortune; in the cold nipping frost of disappointment,
sickness, or connubial strife, they will forsake the house of care,
although the very house which they may have themselves built.”
Here the excruciating anguish of the father, overcame that of the dying
man.
“In the moment of desertion,” continued he, “which I now picture to
myself, where will my child find comfort? That heavenly aid which
religion gives, and which now, amidst these agonizing tortures, cheers
with humbler hope my afflicted soul; that, she will be denied.”
It is in this place proper to remark, that Mr. Milner was a member of
the church of Rome, but on his marriage with a lady of Protestant
tenets, they mutually agreed their sons should be educated in the
religious opinion of their father, and their daughters in that of their
mother. One child only was the result of their union, the child whose
future welfare now occupied the anxious thoughts of her expiring
father. From him the care of her education had been with-held, as he
kept inviolate his promise to her departed mother on the article of
religion, and therefore consigned his daughter to a boarding-school for
Protestants, whence she returned with merely such ideas of religion as
ladies of fashion at her age mostly imbibe. Her little heart employed
in all the endless pursuits of personal accomplishments, had left her
mind without one ornament, except such as nature gave; and even they
were not wholly preserved from the ravages made by its rival, _Art_.
While her father was in health he beheld, with extreme delight, his
accomplished daughter, without one fault which taste or elegance could
have imputed to her; nor ever enquired what might be her other
failings. But, cast on a bed of sickness, and upon the point of leaving
her to her fate, those failings at once rushed on his thought—and all
the pride, the fond enjoyment he had taken in beholding her open the
ball, or delight her hearers with her wit, escaped his remembrance; or,
not escaping it, were lamented with a sigh of compassion, or a
contemptuous frown, at such frivolous qualifications.
“Something essential,” said he to himself, “must be
considered—something to prepare her for an hour like this. Can I then
leave her to the charge of those who themselves never remember such an
hour will come? Dorriforth is the only person I know, who, uniting the
moral virtues to those of religion, and pious faith to native honour,
will protect, without controlling, instruct, without tyrannizing,
comfort, without flattering; and, perhaps in time, make good by choice,
rather than by constraint, the dear object of his dying friend’s sole
care.”
Dorriforth, who came post from London to visit Mr. Milner in his
illness, received a few moments before his death all his injunctions,
and promised to fulfil them. But, in this last token of his friend’s
esteem, he still was restrained from all authority to direct his ward
in one religious opinion, contrary to those her mother had professed,
and in which she herself had been educated.
“Never perplex her mind with an idea that may disturb, but cannot
reform”—were his latest words; and Dorriforth’s reply gave him entire
satisfaction.
Miss Milner was not with her father at this affecting period—some
delicately nervous friend, with whom she was on a visit at Bath,
thought proper to conceal from her not only the danger of his death,
but even his indisposition, lest it might alarm a mind she thought too
susceptible. This refined tenderness gave poor Miss Milner the almost
insupportable agony of hearing that her father was no more, even before
she was told he was not in health. In the bitterest anguish she flew to
pay her last duty to his remains, and performed it with the truest
filial love, while Dorriforth, upon important business, was obliged to
return to town.