she published (Cadell and Strahan) "Observations and Reflections made
in the course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany," in
two volumes octavo of about 400 pages each. As happened to almost
everything she did or wrote, this book, which she calls the
"Travel-book," was by turns assailed with inveterate hostility and
praised with animated zeal. It would seem that sustained calumny had
seasoned her against the malevolence of criticism. On the passage in
Johnson's letter to T. Warton, "I am little afraid for myself," her
comment is: "That is just what I feel when insulted, not about
literary though, but social quarrels. The others are not worth a
thought." In "Thraliana," Dec. 30th, 1789, she writes: "I think my
Observations and Reflexions in Italy, &c., have been, upon the whole,
exceedingly well liked, and much read."
Walpole writes to Mrs. Carter, June 13th, 1789:
"I do not mean to misemploy much of your time, which I know is always
passed in good works, and usefully. You have, therefore, probably not
looked into Piozzi's Travels. I, who have been almost six weeks lying
on a couch, have gone through them. It was said that Addison might
have written his without going out of England. By the excessive
vulgarisms so plentiful in these volumes, one might suppose the
writer had never stirred out of the parish of St. Giles. Her Latin,
French, and Italian, too, are so miserably spelt, that she had better
have studied her own language before she floundered into other
tongues. Her friends plead that she piques herself on writing as she
talks: methinks, then, she should talk as she would write. There are
many indiscretions too in her work of which she will perhaps be told
though Baretti is dead."
Miss Seward, much to her credit, repeated to Mrs. Piozzi both the
praise and the blame she had expressed to others. On December 21st,
1789, she writes:
"Suffer me now to speak to you of your highly ingenious, instructive,
and entertaining publication; yet shall it be with the sincerity of
friendship, rather than with the flourish of compliment. No work of
the sort I ever read possesses, in an equal degree, the power of
placing the reader in the scenes and amongst the people it describes.
Wit, knowledge, and imagination illuminate its pages--but the
infinite inequality of the style!--Permit me to acknowledge to you
what I have acknowledged to others, that it excites my exhaustless
wonder, that Mrs. Piozzi, the child of genius, the pupil of Johnson,
should pollute, with the vulgarisms of unpolished conversation, her
animated pages!--that, while she frequently displays her power of
commanding the most chaste and beautiful style imaginable, she should
generally use those inelegant, those strange _dids_, and _does_, and
_thoughs_, and _toos_, which produce jerking angles, and stop-short
abruptness, fatal at once to the grace and ease of the
sentence;--which are, in language, what the rusty black silk
handkerchief and the brass ring are upon the beautiful form of the
Italian countess she mentions, arrayed in embroidery, and blazing in
jewels."
Mrs. Piozzi's theory was that books should he written in the same
colloquial and idiomatic language which is employed by cultivated
persons in conversation, "Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;"
and vulgar she certainly was not, although she sometimes indulged her
fondness for familiarity too far. The period was unluckily chosen for
carrying such a theory into practice; for Johnson's authority had
discountenanced idiomatic writing, whilst many phrases and forms of
speech, which would not be endured now, were tolerated in polite
society.
The laws of spelling, too, were unfixed or vague, and those of
pronunciation, which more or less affect spelling, still more so.
"When," said Johnson, "I published the plan of my dictionary, Lord
Chesterfield told me that the word _great_ should be pronounced so as
to rhyme to _state_; and Sir William Yonge sent me word that it
should be pronounced so as to rhyme to _seat_, and that none but an
Irishman would pronounce it _grait_. Now here were two men of the
highest rank, one the best speaker in the House of Lords, the other
the best speaker in the House of Commons, differing entirely." Mrs.
Piozzi has written on the margin:--"Sir William was in the right."
Two well-known couplets of Pope imply similar changes:--
"Dreading e'en fools, by flatterers besieged,
And so obliging that he ne'er obliged."
* * * * *
"Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea."
Within living memory, elderly people of quality, both in writing and
conversation, stuck to Lunnun, Brummagem, and Cheyny (China). Charles
Fox would not give up "Bour_dux_." Johnson pronounced "heard"
_heerd_. In 1800 "flirtation" was deemed a vulgar word.[1] Lord Byron
wrote _redde_ (for _read_, in the past tense), and Lord Dudley
declined being helped to apple _tart_. When, therefore, we find Mrs.
Piozzi using words or idioms rejected by modern taste or
fastidiousness, we must not be too ready to accuse her of ignorance
or vulgarity. I have commonly retained her original syntax, and her
spelling, which frequently varies within a page.
[Footnote 1: "Those abstractions of different pairs from the rest of
the society, which I must call 'flirtation,' spite of the vulgarity
of the term."--_Journal kept during a Visit to Germany_ in 1799 and
1800. Edited by the Dean of Westminster (not published), p. 38.]
Two days afterwards, Walpole returns to the charge in a letter to
Miss Berry, which is alone sufficient to prove the worthlessness of
his literary judgments:--
"Read 'Sindbad the Sailor's Voyages,' and you will be sick of
Æneas's. What woful invention were the nasty poultry that dunged on
his dinner, and ships on fire turned into Nereids! A barn
metamorphosed into a cascade in a pantomime is full as sublime an
effort of genius.... I do not think the Sultaness's narratives very
natural or very probable, but there is a wildness in them that
captivates. However, if you could wade through two octavos of Dame
Piozzi's _though's_ and _so's_ and _I trows_, and cannot listen to
seven volumes of Scheherezade's narratives, I will sue for a divorce
in foro Parnassi, and Boccalini shall be my proctor."
A single couplet of Gifford's was more damaging than all Walpole's
petulance:
"See Thrale's grey widow with a satchel roam,
And bring in pomp laborious nothings home."[1]
[Footnote 1: "She, one evening, asked me abruptly if I did not
remember the scurrilous lines in which she had been depicted by
Gifford in his 'Baviad and Moeviad.' And, not waiting for my answer,
for I was indeed too much embarrassed to give one quickly, she
recited the verses in question, and added, 'how do you think
"Thrale's grey widow" revenged herself? I contrived to get myself
invited to meet him at supper at a friend's house, (I think she said
in Pall Mall), soon after the publication of his poem, sate opposite
to him, saw that he was "perplexed in the extreme;" and smiling,
proposed a glass of wine as a libation to our future good fellowship.
Gifford was sufficiently a man of the world to understand me, and
nothing could be more courteous and entertaining than he was while we
remained together.'"--_Piozziana_.]
This condemnatory verse is every way unjust. The nothings, or
somethings, which form the staple of the book, are not laboured; and
they are presented without the semblance of pomp or pretension. The
Preface commences thus:
"I was made to observe at Rome some vestiges of an ancient custom
very proper in those days. It was the parading of the street by a set
of people called Preciæ, who went some minutes before the Flamen
Dialis, to bid the inhabitants leave work or play, and attend wholly
to the procession; but if ill-omens prevented the pageants from
passing, or if the occasion of the show was scarce deemed worthy its
celebration, these Precise stood a chance of being ill-treated by the
spectators. A prefatory introduction to a work like this can hope
little better usage from the public than they had. It proclaims the
approach of what has often passed by before; adorned most certainly
with greater splendour, perhaps conducted with greater regularity and
skill. Yet will I not despair of giving at least a momentary
amusement to my countrymen in general; while their entertainment
shall serve as a vehicle for conveying expressions of particular
kindness to those foreign individuals, whose tenderness softened the
sorrows of absence, and who eagerly endeavoured by unmerited
attentions to supply the loss of their company, on whom nature and
habit had given me stronger claims."
The Preface concludes with the happy remark that--"the labours of the
press resemble those of the toilette: both should be attended to and
finished with care; but once completed, should take up no more of our
attention, unless we are disposed at evening to destroy all effect of
our morning's study."
It would be difficult to name a book of travels in which anecdotes,
observations, and reflections are more agreeably mingled, or one from
which a clearer bird's-eye view of the external state of countries
visited in rapid succession may be caught. I can only spare room for
a few short extracts:
"The contradictions one meets with every moment at Paris likewise
strike even a cursory observer,--a countess in a morning, her hair
dressed, with diamonds too perhaps, a dirty black handkerchief about
her neck, and a flat silver ring on her finger, like our ale-wives; a
_femme publique_, dressed avowedly for the purposes of alluring the
men, with a not very small crucifix hanging at her bosom;--and the
Virgin Mary's sign at an ale-house door, with these words,
"'Je suis la mère de mon Dieu,
Et la gardienne de ce lieu.'"
"I have stolen a day to visit my old acquaintance the English Austin
Nuns at the Foffèe, and found the whole community alive and cheerful;
they are many of them agreeable women, and having seen Dr. Johnson
with me when I was last abroad, inquired much for him: Mrs, Fermor,
the Prioress, niece to Belinda in the Rape of the Lock, taking
occasion to tell me, comically enough, 'that she believed there was
but little comfort to be found in a house that harboured _poets_; for
that she remembered Mr. Pope's praise made her aunt very troublesome
and conceited, while his numberless caprices would have employed ten
servants to wait on him; and he gave one,' (said she) 'no amends by
his talk neither, for he only sate dozing all day, when the sweet
wine was out, and made his verses chiefly in the night; during which
season he kept himself awake by drinking coffee, which it was one of
the maids' business to make for him, and they took it by turns.'"
At Milan she institutes a delicate inquiry: "The women are not
behind-hand in openness of confidence and comical sincerity. We have
all heard much of Italian cicisbeism; I had a mind to know how
matters really stood; and took the nearest way to information by
asking a mighty beautiful and apparently artless young creature, _not
noble_, how that affair was managed, for there is no harm done _I am
sure_, said I: 'Why no,' replied she, 'no great _harm_ to be sure:
except wearisome attentions from a man one cares little about; for my
own part,' continued she, 'I detest the custom, as I happen to love
my husband excessively, and desire nobody's company in the world but
his. We are not _people of fashion_ though you know, nor at all rich;
so how should we set fashions for our betters? They would only say,
see how jealous he is! if _Mr. Such-a-one_ sat much with me at home,
or went with me to the Corso; and I _must_ go with some gentleman you
know: and the men are such ungenerous creatures, and have such ways
with them: I want money often, and this _cavaliere servente_ pays the
bills, and so the connection draws closer--_that's all_.' And your
husband! said I--'Oh, why he likes to see me well dressed; he is very
good-natured, and very charming; I love him to my heart.' And your
confessor! cried I.--'Oh! why he is _used to it_'--in the Milanese
dialect--_è assuefaà."_
"An English lady asked of an Italian
What were the actual and official duties
Of the strange thing, some women set a value on,
Which hovers oft about some married beauties,
Called 'cavalier servente,' a Pygmalion
Whose statues warm, I fear! too true 't is
Beneath his art. The dame, press'd to disclose them,
Said, Lady, I beseech you to _suppose them_."[1]
[Footnote 1: "Don Juan," Canto ix. See also "Beppo," verses 36, 37:
"But Heaven preserve Old England from such courses!
Or what becomes of damage and divorces?"]
At Venice, the tone was somewhat different from what would be
employed now by the finest lady on the Grand Canal:
"This firmly-fixed idea of subordination (which I once heard a
Venetian say, he believed must exist in heaven from one angel to
another), accounts immediately for a little conversation which I am
now going to relate.
"Here were two men taken up last week, one for murdering his
fellow-servant in cold blood, while the undefended creature had the
lemonade tray in his hand going in to serve company; the other for
breaking the new lamps lately set up with intention to light this
town in the manner of the streets at Paris. 'I hope,' said I, 'that
they will hang the murderer.' 'I rather hope,' replied a very
sensible lady who sate near me, 'that they will hang the person who
broke the lamps: for,' added she, 'the first committed his crime only
out of revenge, poor fellow!! because the other had got his mistress
from him by treachery; but this creature has had the impudence to
break our fine new lamps, all for the sake of spiting _the
Arch-duke!!_' The Arch-duke meantime hangs nobody at all; but sets
his prisoners to work upon the roads, public buildings, &c., where
they labour in their chains; and where, strange to tell! they often
insult passengers who refuse them alms when asked as they go by; and,
stranger still, they are not punished for it when they do." ...
The lover sacrificing his reputation, his liberty, or his life, to
save the fair fame of his mistress, is not an unusual event in
fiction, whatever it may be in real life. Balzac, Charles de Bernard,
and M. de Jarnac have each made a self-sacrifice of this kind the
basis of a romance. But neither of them has hit upon a better plot
than might be formed out of the following Venetian story:
"Some years ago then, perhaps a hundred, one of the many spies who
ply this town by night, ran to the state inquisitor, with information
that such a nobleman (naming him) had connections with the French
ambassador, and went privately to his house every night at a certain
hour. The _messergrando_, as they call him, could not believe, nor
would proceed, without better and stronger proof, against a man for
whom he had an intimate personal friendship, and on whose virtue he
counted with very particular reliance. Another spy was therefore set,
and brought back the same intelligence, adding the description of his
disguise: on which the worthy magistrate put on his mask and bauta,
and went out himself; when his eyes confirming the report of his
informants, and the reflection on his duty stifling all remorse, he
sent publicly for _Foscarini_ in the morning, whom the populace
attended all weeping to his door.
"Nothing but resolute denial of the crime alleged could however be
forced from the firm-minded citizen, who, sensible of the discovery,
prepared for that punishment he knew to be inevitable, and submitted
to the fate his friend was obliged to inflict: no less than a dungeon
for life, that dungeon so horrible that I have heard Mr. Howard was
not permitted to see it.
"The people lamented, but their lamentations were vain. The
magistrate who condemned him never recovered the shock: but Foscarini
was heard of no more, till an old lady died forty years after in
Paris, whose last confession declared she was visited with amorous
intentions by a nobleman of Venice whose name she never knew, while
she resided there as companion to the ambassadress. So was Foscarini
lost! so died he a martyr to love, and tenderness for female
reputation!"
The Mendicanti was a Venetian institution which deserves to be
commemorated for its singularity:
"Apropos to singing;--we were this evening carried to a well-known
conservatory called the Mendicanti, who performed an oratorio in the
church with great, and I dare say deserved applause. It was difficult
for me to persuade myself that all the performers were women, till,
watching carefully, our eyes convinced us, as they were but slightly
grated. The sight of girls, however, handling the double bass, and
blowing into the bassoon, did not much please _me_; and the
deep-toned voice of her who sung the part of Saul seemed an odd
unnatural thing enough.
"Well! these pretty sirens were delighted to seize upon us, and
pressed our visit to their parlour with a sweetness that I know not
who would have resisted. We had no such intent; and amply did their
performance repay my curiosity for visiting Venetian beauties, so
justly celebrated for their seducing manners and soft address. They
accompanied their voices with the forte-piano, and sung a thousand
buffo songs, with all that gay voluptuousness for which their country
is renowned.
"The school, however, is running to ruin apace; and perhaps the
conduct of the married women here may contribute to make such
_conservatorios_ useless and neglected. When the Duchess of Montespan
asked the famous Louison D'Arquien, by way of insult, as she pressed
too near her, '_Comment alloit le metier_?' '_Depuis que les dames
s'en mèlent_,' (replied the courtesan with no improper spirit,) '_il
ne vaut plus rien_.'"
Describing Florence, she says:--
"Sir Horace Mann is sick and old; but there are conversations at his
house of a Saturday evening, and sometimes a dinner, to which we have
been almost always asked."
So much for Walpole's assertion that "she had broken with his Horace,
because he could not invite her husband with the Italian nobility."
She held her own, if she did not take the lead, in whatever society
she happened to be thrown, and no one could have objected to Piozzi
without breaking with her. In point of fact, no one did object to
him.
One of her notes on Naples is:
"Well, well! if the Neapolitans do bury Christians like dogs, they
make some singular compensations we will confess, by nursing dogs
like Christians. A very veracious man informed me yester morning,
that his poor wife was half broken-hearted at hearing such a
Countess's dog was run over; 'for,' said he, 'having suckled the
pretty creature herself, she loved it like one of her children.' I
bid him repeat the circumstance, that no mistake might be made: he
did so; but seeing me look shocked, or ashamed, or something he did
not like,--'Why, Madam,' said the fellow, 'it is a common thing
enough for ordinary men's wives to suckle the lap-dogs of ladies of
quality:' adding, that they were paid for their milk, and he saw no
harm in gratifying one's _superiors_. As I was disposed to see
nothing _but_ harm in disputing with such a competitor, our
conference finished soon; but the fact is certain."
On the margin she has written:
"Mrs. Greathead could scarcely be made to credit so hideous a fact,
till I showed her the portrait (at a broker's shop) of a woman
_suckling a cat_."
Cornelia Knight says: "Mr. and Mrs. Piozzi passed the winter at
Naples and gave little concerts. He played with great taste on the
pianoforte, and used to carry about a miniature one in his carriage."
Whilst discussing the propriety of complying with the customs of the
country, she relates:
"Poor Dr. Goldsmith said once--'I would advise every young fellow
setting out in life _to love gravy_:'--and added, that he had
formerly seen a glutton's eldest nephew disinherited, because his
uncle never could persuade him to say he liked gravy."
Mr. Forster thinks that the concluding anecdote conveys a false
impression of one
"Who wrote like an angel, but talked like poor Poll."
"Mrs. Piozzi, in her travels, quite solemnly sets forth that poor Dr.
Goldsmith said once, 'I would advise every young fellow setting forth
in life to love gravy,' alleging for it the serious reason that 'he
had formerly seen a glutton's eldest nephew disinherited because his
uncle never could persuade him to say he liked gravy.' Imagine the
dullness that would convert a jocose saying of this kind into an
unconscious utterance of grave absurdity."[1] In his index may be
read: "Mrs. Piozzi's absurd instance of Goldsmith's absurdity." Mrs.
Piozzi does not quote the saying as an instance of absurdity; nor set
it forth solemnly. She repeats it, as an illustration of her
argument, in the same semi-serious spirit in which it was originally
hazarded. Sydney Smith took a different view of this grave gravy
question. On a young lady's declining gravy, he exclaimed: "I have
been looking all my life for a person who, on principle, rejected
gravy: let us vow eternal friendship."
[Footnote 1: Life of Goldsmith, vol. ii. p. 205. Mr. Forster allows
her the credit of discovering the lurking irony in Goldsmith's verses
on Cumberland, vol. ii. p. 203.]
The "British Synonymy" appeared in 1794. It was thus assailed by
Gifford:
"Though 'no one better knows his own house' than I the vanity of this
woman; yet the idea of her undertaking such a work had never entered
my head; and I was thunderstruck when I first saw it announced. To
execute it with any tolerable degree of success, required a rare
combination of talents, among the least of which may be numbered
neatness of style, acuteness of perception, and a more than common
accuracy of discrimination; and Mrs. Piozzi brought to the task, a
jargon long since become proverbial for its vulgarity, an utter
incapability of defining a single term in the language, and just as
much Latin from a child's Syntax, as sufficed to expose the ignorance
she so anxiously labours to conceal. 'If such a one be fit to write
on Synonimes, speak.' Pignotti himself laughs in his sleeve; and his
countrymen, long since undeceived, prize the lady's talents at their
true worth,
"Et centum Tales[1] curto centusse licentur."
[Footnote 1: Quere Thrales?--_Printer's Devil_."]
Other critics have been more lenient or more just. Enough
philosophical knowledge and acuteness were discovered in the work to
originate a rumour that she had retained some of the great
lexicographer's manuscripts, or derived a posthumous advantage, in
some shape, from her former intimacy with him. In "Thraliana,"
Denbigh, 2nd January, 1795, she writes:
"My 'Synonimes' have been reviewed at last. The critics are all civil
for aught I see, and nearly just, except when they say that Johnson
left some fragments of a work upon Synonymy: of which God knows I
never heard till now one syllable; never had he and I, in all the
time we lived together, any conversation upon the subject."
Even Walpole admits that it has some marked and peculiar merits,
although its value consists rather in the illustrative matter, than
in the definitions and etymologies. Thus, in distinguishing between
_lavish_, _profuse_ and _prodigal_, she relates: