1774, Anne Letitia Aikin became the wife of the Rev. Rochemont Barbauld,
a descendant of a French Protestant family. Mr. Barbauld’s father had
been chaplain to the Electress of Hesse Cassel, a daughter of George II,
and the son had been intended for the Church of England. He had,
however, conscientious objections to taking orders in that Church, and
joined the Presbyterian body. Miss Aikin was warned before her marriage
that her future husband had suffered already from an attack of insanity,
but with Quixotic devotion this only seemed to her an additional reason
why she should unite her life with his. Her married life,
notwithstanding many good qualities on her husband’s part, was one of
exceptional trial and loneliness. Mr. Barbauld was liable throughout his
life to fits of insanity, which took the form of fierce and
uncontrollable fury as often as not directed against his wife. They
settled at Palgrave in Suffolk, and opened a boys’ school there. Mrs.
Barbauld was much urged by her friend Mrs. Montague to open a school for
girls, for the purpose of imparting to them, in a regular manner,
various branches of science, such as did not then form an ordinary part
of women’s education. Mrs. Barbauld declined the task, giving various
excuses, such as her own want of proficiency in music and dancing, and
other feminine accomplishments. It may, however, be not improbable that
her real reason was one that could not be avowed, and was to be found in
the mental condition of her husband. It must have been a sufficiently
severe trial to the strongest nerves to keep a boys’ school, and to know
that the head master and principal teacher was at any time liable to
fits of insane fury; but this would have been even worse, it would have
been a fatal objection, in a girls’ school. Poor Mrs. Barbauld set
herself with pathetic resolution to make the best of the partner and the
life she had chosen. She seems immediately to have assumed she would
never have any children of her own, for within a year of her marriage
she adopted from his birth her nephew Charles, her brother’s son. This
was the little Charles from whom _The Early Lessons_ and _Hymns in
Prose_ were written. Very few educational books for young children had
then been written, and Mrs. Barbauld set herself to supply the
deficiency. She discovered from practical experience the sort of books
children learn best from, and the kind of paper and type that suited
them best. Many of her friends in the literary world thought she was
wasting her talents in such employment. Dr. Johnson is recorded in
Boswell’s life to have spoken very scornfully of what she was doing, and
set it all down to her having married a “little Presbyterian parson.” It
appears, however, in the anecdotes of Johnson, collected by Mrs. Thrale,
that though he might have spoken in this way at times, his warm heart
did not fail to appreciate the devotion of Mrs. Barbauld’s talents to
the humble tasks which her marriage had rendered necessary. “Mrs.
Barbauld,” Mrs. Thrale wrote, “had his best praise, and deserved it; no
man was more struck than Mr. Johnson with the voluntary descent from
possible splendour to painful duty.” She wrote herself in her preface to
_The Early Lessons_: “The task is humble, but not mean, for to lay the
first stone of a noble building and to plant the first idea in a human
mind can be no dishonour to any hand.”
The school at Palgrave was successful mainly through Mrs. Barbauld’s
efforts; among the scholars were reckoned many men of future
distinction, such as the first Lord Denman and William Taylor of
Norwich. After eleven years of courageous and exhausting work, the
school was given up, and Mr. Barbauld undertook the charge of a
Presbyterian church at Hampstead. The husband and wife here enjoyed the
friendship of Joanna Baillie and her sister, and here some of Mrs.
Barbauld’s best literary work was done. But the terrible malady which
had pursued her husband throughout his life continued to darken their
existence. In order to be near her brother, and enjoy the protection and
solace of his society, Mrs. Barbauld left Hampstead in 1802, and removed
to Stoke Newington, where Dr. Aikin then lived. But Mr. Barbauld’s mania
continued to increase, and after a sudden attack which he made upon his
wife with a dinner knife, it became obvious that he must be put under
restraint. The unhappy man put an end to his own life in 1808. After an
interval, Mrs. Barbauld resumed her literary work, bringing out an
edition of English Novels in 1810. In the following year she brought out
a poem, which she called “1811,” very strongly tinged with the
despondency which she felt regarding public affairs. She had been bred
as a Whig, to hope for great things from the measures of emancipation
with which that party had always been identified. Her sympathies were
rather with the French Revolution than with the long-continued struggle
of England against Napoleon. The poem had a tone of gloom and deep
melancholy, which perhaps reflected more of the writer’s personal
despondency than the circumstances justified. It is not a little curious
that a passage in it is credited with having suggested Lord Macaulay’s
famous prophecy that in years to come a New Zealander “will from a
broken arch of Blackfriars Bridge contemplate the ruins of St. Paul’s.”
The poem provoked a coarse and insulting review in the _Quarterly_, with
which it is to be regretted that Southey’s name is now identified.
Murray, the proprietor of the _Review_, is said to have declared that he
was more ashamed of that article than of any that had ever appeared in
his magazine. Mrs. Barbauld’s friends, Miss Edgeworth foremost among
them, expressed their indignation and sympathy; a more ungentlemanlike,
unjust, and insolent review, Miss Edgeworth said she had never read; and
she wrote an inspiriting letter to her friend, concluding with the
words, “Write on, shine out, and defy them.” But at nearly seventy years
of age Mrs. Barbauld was to be excused if she felt that younger and
stronger hands must carry on the fight. The poem referred to was not her
last literary effort, but it was the last of her writings published
during her lifetime. Very little, perhaps, of her work has permanent
value; one poem, however, that beginning “Life! I know not what thou
art,” which was written in extreme old age, will probably live as long
as anything in the language. It indicates possibly what she might have
done, had it not been for the tragedy of her married life. Of two lines
in this poem—
Life, we’ve been long together,
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather—
Wordsworth declared that, though he was not in the habit of grudging
people their good things, he wished he had written those lines. Her
mental powers remained clear and vigorous to the end of her long life.
When she was past eighty, writing to Miss Edgeworth, she summed up, as
it were, the worth of what she knew and did not know. “I find that many
things I knew, I have forgotten; many things I _thought_ I knew, I find
I knew nothing about; some things I know, I have found not worth
knowing, and some things I would give—oh! what would one not give to
know, are beyond the reach of human ken.”
All her life through she laboured with her pen in defence of civil and
religious liberty, against the iniquities of the slave trade, and for
many other causes which have made life more worth living in England
to-day. She died, universally honoured and respected, in 1825, aged
eighty-two.
XXI
JOANNA BAILLIE
MRS. JOANNA BAILLIE, as she was usually called, because, though she was
never married, her age and literary reputation were held to entitle her
to brevet rank, was a remarkable instance of a writer rapidly rising to
the highest pinnacle of fame, and then as rapidly and surely descending
almost to the common level of ordinary mortals. But the Scotch woman,
with the blood of heroes in her veins, showed herself worthy of her
descent, both by the modesty and dignity with which she bore her fame,
and by the sweetness and unassuming simplicity with which she bore the
loss of it. She was descended from Sir William Wallace, and the fame of
this long-past ancestor is perhaps equalled by that of another and a
much nearer relative. John Hunter, the great anatomist and physiologist,
the founder of the College of Surgeons, was her mother’s brother. She
therefore might truly feel, not in a figurative sense, that in
everything she was “sprung of earth’s first blood”; and her double
connection with the best and greatest of the heroes of Scotland was
probably not without its influence on the development of her mind and
character.
She was born at Bothwell, near Glasgow, on the banks of the Clyde, in
1762. In a poem addressed, near the close of her life, to her sister
Agnes, she recalls how they had as children—
... paddled barefoot side by side,
Among the sunny shallows of the Clyde.
Her father was a minister of the Scotch Church, and afterwards a
Professor of Divinity in the University of Glasgow. His death in 1778,
and the establishment of his son Matthew in the medical profession in
London, caused Mrs. Baillie and her daughters, Joanna and Agnes, to
remove there in 1784; and in London practically the rest of the future
poetess’s long life was spent. Her first work was a volume of verse
published anonymously in 1790. The first of her series of dramas, called
_Plays on the Passions_, was published in 1798. These were also
published without the author’s name. They made an immediate and very
widespread impression; and their author was frequently, and by the very
best judges, lauded as being equal, if not superior, to Shakespeare. The
idea of these dramas, and of those in the successive volumes which
appeared in 1802 and 1812, was to delineate a single dominant passion,
such as hatred, envy, etc.; and each of the passions thus treated was
made the subject first of a tragedy, then of a comedy. The language
employed is easy, dignified, and simple: and it is probable that the
contrast Joanna Baillie’s dramas afforded in this respect to the dramas
of the generation closing with the death of Dr. Johnson, was the reason
of the great hold which they at once obtained upon the public mind. It
is not easy in any other way to account for their extraordinary
popularity. The time in which Joanna Baillie lived was one marked by a
literary revolution, in which the formal, stilted, and didactic manner
was overthrown, and poets and great writers sought to express their
thoughts in simple and natural language. The leaders of this literary
revolution were Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the great movement
identified with their names Joanna Baillie bore a humbler, but a useful
and effective part.
When Joanna Baillie’s first volume of plays appeared, there was much
speculation as to their possible authorship. Samuel Rogers, the banker,
poet, and critic, thought that they were written by a man. It seems to
have been difficult, at the end of the last century, for the great
judges in the literary world to conceive that a poem, worthy of praise,
could be of female authorship. Even so late as 1841, a writer in the
_Quarterly Review_, writing upon Joanna Baillie’s poetical works, puts
the coping-stone upon the praise which he bestows upon her style and
diction by saying that they are “masculine.” He says, “Let us again
express our admiration of the wonderful elasticity and _masculine_ force
of mind exhibited in this vast collection of dramas;” and in another
place the writer says, “The spirit breathing everywhere is a spirit of
_manly_ purity and moral uprightness.” We should say, at the present
day, that there is certainly force of mind in Joanna Baillie’s dramas,
but that it is feminine, not masculine in character, and that the spirit
of purity which breathes through them is essentially the womanly spirit.
She had particular power and skill in the delineation of female
characters, especially those of an unusual degree of elevation and
purity. This in itself would have sufficiently betrayed the sex of the
writer now when people have had far wider opportunities of judging of
the differences between men and women as authors. Thackeray could give
us an Ethel Newcome and a Becky Sharp, but women were needed to give us
a Dorothea, a Marion Erle, or a Shirley Keeldar. Mrs. Siddons, the great
actress, was charmed by the character of Jane de Montfort in Joanna
Baillie’s Tragedy on Hatred. The play called _De Montfort_ was put upon
the stage by John Kemble, the brother of Mrs. Siddons: they both
appeared in it. It ran for eleven nights, but it was not successful on
the stage. Joanna’s complete ignorance of what was requisite for the
success of a play upon the stage foredoomed her to failure; the audience
was, in the first act, let into the secret upon which the plot of the
whole play turned, consequently as the drama proceeded the interest in
it, instead of becoming more and more intense, gradually dwindled away,
until in the fifth act it had quite evaporated. Mrs. Siddons, whose
admiration for the character of Jane de Montfort has been already
mentioned, is said to have remarked to the poetess, “Make me some more
Jane de Montforts”—a request which does not appear to have been
gratified. In all, five of Joanna Baillie’s plays were put upon the
stage—two of them, called _Constantine and Valeria_ and _The Family
Legend_, had a considerable degree of success. _The Family Legend_ was
brought out in Edinburgh in 1809, under the special patronage of Sir
Walter Scott, who wrote the prologue of the play. At a later date it was
reproduced in London.
The authorship of Joanna Baillie’s first volume of plays did not long
remain a secret. Sir Walter Scott was the first to make a successful
guess as to the personality of the writer; and the discovery led to the
formation of a warm friendship between him and Joanna, which only
terminated with his life. Many of Scott’s most delightful and
characteristic letters were written to her. It was perhaps Scott’s too
generous appreciation of Joanna’s powers as a dramatist that led to her
plays being so much overrated, as they certainly were when they first
appeared. Scott compared her to Shakespeare. Miss Mitford followed suit,
saying of her sister-writer, “Her tragedies have a boldness and grasp of
mind, a firmness of hand, and resonance of cadence that scarcely seem
within the reach of a female writer.” Byron made her an exception to his
sweeping generalities concerning the female sex, saying, “Woman (save
Joanna Baillie) cannot write tragedy.”
In 1825 the golden mists which had surrounded the sunrise of her
literary life had melted away. Charles Lamb was too keen a critic
probably to have been carried away by the stream of fashion at any time;
but in the year mentioned, writing to his friend Bernard Barton, he
says: “I think you told me your acquaintance with the drama was confined
to Shakespeare and Miss Baillie: some read only Milton and Croly. The
gap is as from an ananas to a turnip.” Lamb’s contemptuous reference
measures the rapid fall from the heights of fame which Joanna Baillie
endured, and endured without any failure of sweetness and dignity of
character.
Joanna Baillie’s day as a poetess was of short duration: it is now
chiefly as a woman that she charms and helps us. Her house at Hampstead
was for many years a meeting-place for those who were most worth
meeting, either for talent or goodness; her kindly and gentle influence
brought out all that was best in her guests and companions. In Miss
Martineau’s autobiography she has something to say about nearly all the
lions and lionesses of the literary London of her day, and she singles
out our poetess for special commendation. “There was Joanna Baillie,”
she writes, “whose serene and gentle life was never troubled by the
pains and penalties of vanity; what a charming spectacle was she! Mrs.
Barbauld’s published correspondence tells of her in 1800, as a ‘young
lady of Hampstead whom I visited, and who came to Mr. Barbauld’s
meeting, all the while with as innocent a face as if she had never
written a line.’ That was two years before I was born. When I met her
about thirty years afterwards, there she was, still ‘with as innocent a
face as if she had never written a line!’ And this was after an
experience which would have been a bitter trial to an author with a
particle of vanity. She had enjoyed a fame almost without parallel, and
had outlived it. She had been told every day for years, through every
possible channel, that she was second only to Shakespeare, if second;
and then she had seen her works drop out of notice, so that, of the
generation who grew up before her eyes, not one in a thousand had read a
line of her plays; yet was her serenity never disturbed, nor her merry
humour in the least dimmed” (_Autobiography_, vol. i. p. 385).
This serene and happy temperament accompanied Joanna throughout her long
life. She went on writing till past eighty, and lived to the great age
of eighty-nine. Her sister Agnes, her inseparable friend and companion,
lived to be over a hundred, and preserved her faculties clearly to the
end. Joanna Baillie was never ill. The day before her death she
expressed a strong desire to die. She went to bed, apparently in her
usual health, but was found to be in a state of coma in the morning, and
she died on the afternoon of the same day, 23d February 1851.
XXII
HANNAH MORE
MISS CHARLOTTE M. YONGE’S charming little biography of Hannah More
brings strikingly before us the picture of the authoress of _Cœlebs in
Search of a Wife_, and also depicts in a way that will not easily be
forgotten, some of the more striking contrasts between the present day
and the England of eighty or ninety years ago. There are some who are
always inclined to say “the old is better”; but they must be very
curiously constituted who can look back on the social condition of our
country at the end of the last century and beginning of this, without
being filled with amazement and thankfulness at the improvement that has
taken place.
It is not so generally remembered as it ought to be, that the second
half of Hannah More’s life was devoted to the service of the poor,
especially to the spread of some measure of education and civilisation
in the then almost savage districts in the neighbourhood of Cheddar, and
of the Mendip Hills. Yet even so advanced an educationalist as Hannah
More thought that on no account should the poor be taught to write. In a
letter to Bishop Beadon, describing her system of instruction for the
poor children in the parishes immediately under her care, she says:
“They learn on week-days such coarse work as may fit them for servants.
_I allow of no writing for the poor._ My object is not to make fanatics,
but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.” We
cannot have a more apt illustration of the fact that the advanced
reformer of one generation may become, by the natural growth of society,
the type of what is most exaggeratedly retrograde in the next. It would
be very ungenerous and short-sighted on our part to condemn Hannah More
for her narrowness of view. She belonged to a day when the farmers in
the village, where she sought to establish a Sunday school, begged her
to desist because “religion would be the ruin of agriculture, and had
done nothing but mischief ever since it had been brought in by the monks
at Glastonbury.” At another place her educational schemes were so
stoutly opposed by all the leading inhabitants that it was impossible to
obtain for the school the shelter of any roof, and the children were
accordingly assembled to sing a few hymns under an apple-tree. They were
soon, however, driven from this shelter by the fears of the owner of the
tree, who said he was afraid the hymn singing was “methody,” and that
“methody” had blighted an apple-tree belonging to his mother!
Even these examples of ignorance and superstition might possibly,
however, be matched at the present day. More thoroughly significant of a
state of things that is past and gone for ever, is the following
incident. “On a Sunday,” about the year 1790, “in the midst of morning
service the congregations in the Bristol churches were startled by the
bell and voice of the crier, proclaiming the reward of a guinea for a
poor negro girl who had run away.” The idea of property in human beings
is one that is now universally abhorrent; but less than a hundred years
ago the loss of such property could be cried in the midst of
congregations assembled to acknowledge the Fatherhood of God and the
brotherhood of humanity, and it was only one here and there among the
worshippers who felt the blasphemy and the mockery of the proceeding.
As an illustration of the extreme hardships endured by the poor before
the era of steam manufactures had set in, we learn that the difficulty
in obtaining clothes was so great that at Brentford, close to London,
thrifty parents bought rags by the pound, and made clothing for their
children by patching the pieces together. Brushes and combs, it is
added, were entirely unknown. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to say
that the poorest beggar of the present day can, if he choose, be more
luxuriously clad and cared for than the children of the thrifty poor a
hundred years ago. The difference in morals is as great as the
difference in manners and education. Hannah More heard a charity sermon,
in which the preacher, a dignified ecclesiastic, propounded that “the
rich and great should be extremely liberal in their charities, because
they _were happily exempted from the severer virtues_.” This was the old
Papal practice of the sale of indulgences appearing again in a
Protestant dress. No wonder, if this was a type of the Gospel that was
preached to the rich, that Patty, Hannah’s sister, was accustomed to say
that she had good hope that the hearts of some of the “rich poor
wretches” might be touched by her sister’s eloquence.
The change of manners may be illustrated by the following anecdote.
Hannah More, in the height of her literary celebrity, was asked to sit
next the Bishop of Chester, Dr. Porteous, at dinner, and make him talk.
She pressed him to take a little wine. He replied, “I can’t drink a
_little_, child: therefore I never touch it. Abstinence is easy to me;
temperance would be difficult.”
These were days when Edmund Spenser was not considered a poet, and when
Dryden and Pope were preferred to Shakespeare. Hannah, however, defended
Milton’s _L’Allegro_, _Il Penseroso_, and _Lycidas_, against the
strictures of Dr. Johnson; though they found themselves in entire
agreement in depreciating Milton’s sonnets. Johnson’s simile for a
sonnet was “a bead carved out of a cherry stone.” The noble and solemn
music of Milton’s majestic sonnets certainly did not harmonise with
Johnson’s image, and, therefore, as Milton’s sonnets were not pretty
playthings, it was agreed that he could not write sonnets.
The bigotry and narrowness of religious criticism at that day may be
measured by the fact, which Hannah mentions in one of her letters, that
her book on _Practical Piety_ had been attacked by the Calvinists as
giving a sanction to idolatry, because she had spoken of the sun as
“he.” She did not altogether escape being tarred with the same brush, if
we may judge from the passage in _Cœlebs_, where she makes Mr. Stanley
complain of Day’s _Sandford and Merton_, and other books which had
lately been written for the young, that there was “no intimation in them
of the corruption of human nature, and thus that they contradict the
catechism when it speaks of being ‘born in sin, and the children of
wrath.’” She could not help, it appears, taking her religion sadly, as
English people are supposed to take their pleasures. There was, however,
a great fund of natural gaiety and light-heartedness in her, but whether
she considered this one of the results of being a child of wrath or not,
she did not seem to think gaiety, any more than writing, was a thing to
be encouraged in the poor. She describes a great meeting of the schools
founded by herself in the Mendip Hills. This annual “Mendip feast” took
the form of what we should now call a gigantic school treat. The schools
established were spread over an area of twenty-eight miles, and nearly
the whole population of the villages, to the number of seven or eight
thousand people, attended. The children were generously regaled on
substantial fare. But nothing in the form of a game or a festivity of
any kind was permitted. The singing of “God save the King” “is the only
pleasure in the form of a song we ever allow.... The meeting,” she says
again, “took its rise from religious institutions. The day passed in the
exercise of duties, and closed with joy. Nothing of a gay nature was
introduced....”
One cannot help thinking, on reading this, that she had only herself to
thank if, in spite of all her talents and goodness, her name became a
byword for severity and primness. Charles Lamb speaks in one of his
early letters of “out-Hannahing Hannah More”; and she herself tells what
she states is a true story, illustrating the way in which she was
regarded in circles where childish merriment was not discountenanced: “A
lady gave a very great children’s ball,” wrote Miss Hannah, somewhere
about 1792: “at the upper end of the room, in an elevated place, was
dressed out a figure to represent me, with a large rod in my hand,
prepared to punish such naughty doings.”