_For the Table Book._
Mrs. Aurelia Sparr is a maiden lady, rather past fifty, but fresh and
handsome for her age: she has a strong understanding, a retentive
memory, a vast deal of acquired knowledge, and with all she is the most
disagreeable woman breathing. At first she is amusing enough to spend an
evening with, for she will tell you anecdotes of all your acquaintance,
and season them with a degree of pleasantry, which is not wit, though
something like it. But as a jest-book is the most tiresome reading in
the world, so is a narrative companion the most wearisome society. What,
in short, is conversation worth, if it be not an emanation from the
heart as well as head; the result of sympathy and the aliment of esteem?
Mrs. Aurelia Sparr never sympathized with any body in her life:
inexorable to weaknesses of every kind, more especially to those of a
tender nature, she is for ever taxing enthusiasm with absurdity, and
resolving the ebullition of vivacity into vanity, and the desire to show
off. She is equally severe to timidity, which she for ever confounds
with imbecility. We are told, that “Gentle dulness ever loved a joke.”
Now Mrs. Aurelia Sparr is neither gentle nor dull; it would be a mercy
to her hearers if she were either, or both: nevertheless, she chuckles
with abundant glee over a good story, is by no means particular as to
the admission of unpleasant images and likes it none the worse for being
a little gross. But woe to the unlucky wight who ventures any glowing
allusion to love and passionate affection in her hearing! Down come the
fulminations of her wrath, and indecency--immorality--sensuality--&c.
&c. &c.--are among the mildest of the epithets, or, to keep up the
metaphor, (a metaphor, like an actor, should always come in more than
once,) the _bolts_ which the tempest of her displeasure hurls down upon
its victim. The story of Paul and Virginia she looks upon as very
improper, while the remembrance of some of the letters in Humphrey
Clinker dimples her broad face with retrospective enjoyment.
If pronouns had been tangible things, Mrs. Aurelia Sparr would long ago
have worn out the first person singular. Her sentences begin as
regularly with “I,” as the town-crier’s address does with “O yes,” or as
a French letter ends with “l’assurance des sentimens distingués.” While
living with another lady in daily and inevitable intercourse, never was
she known to say, “We shall see--we shall hear--we can go--we must
read.” It was always “I, I, I.” In the illusion of her egotism, she once
went so far as to make a verbal monopoly of the weather, and exclaimed,
on seeing the rosy streaks in the evening sky, “I think I shall have a
fine day to-morrow.” If you forget yourself so far, in the querulous
loquacity of sickness, as to tell her of any ailment, as “My sore-throat
is worse than ever to-night”--she does not rejoin, “What will you take?”
or “Colds are always worse of an evening, it may be better to-morrow;”
or propose flannel or gargle, or any other mode of alleviation, like an
ordinary person; no! she flies back from you to herself with the
velocity of a coiled-up spring suddenly let go; and says, “I had just
such another sore-throat at Leicester ten years ago, I remember it was
when I had taken down my chintz bed-curtains to have them washed and
glazed.” Then comes a mammoth of an episode, huge, shapeless, and bare
of all useful matter: telling all she said to the laundress, with the
responses of the latter. You are not spared an item of the complete
process: first, you are blinded with dust, then soaked in lye, then
comes the wringing of your imagination and the calico, then the
bitterness of the gall to refresh the colours; then you are extended on
the mangle, and may fancy yourself at the court of king Procrustes, or
in a rolling-press. All the while you are wondering how she means to get
round to the matter in question, your sore-throat.--Not she! _she cares_
no more for your sore-throat than the reviewers do for a book with the
title of which they head an article; your complaint was the peg, and her
discourse the voluminous mantle to be hung on it. Some people talk
_with_ others, and they are companions; others _at_ their company, and
they are declaimers or satirists; others _to_ their friends, and they
are conversationists or gossips, according as they talk of things or
persons. Mrs. Aurelia Sparr talks neither to you, nor with you, nor at
you. Listen attentively, or show your weariness by twenty devices of
fidgetiness and preoccupation, it is all the same to Mrs. Aurelia Sparr.
She talks spontaneously, from an abstract love of hearing her own voice;
she can no more help talking, than a ball can help rolling down an
inclined plane. She will quarrel with you at dinner, for she is
extremely peevish and addicted to growling over her meals; and by no
means so nice as to what comes out of her mouth as to what goes into it;
and then, before you can fold your napkin, push back your chair and try
to make good your escape, she begins to lay open the errors, failures,
and weaknesses of her oldest and best friends to your cold-blooded
inspection, with as little reserve as an old practitioner lecturing over
a “subject.” Things that no degree of intimacy could justify her in
imparting, she pours forth to a person whom she does not even treat as a
friend; but talk she must, and she had no other topic at hand. Thus, at
the end of a siege, guns are charged with all sorts of rubbish for lack
of ammunition.
Mrs. Aurelia Sparr not only knows all the modern languages, but enough
of the ancient to set up a parson, and every dialect of every county she
has ever been in. If you ask her the name of any thing, she will give
you a polyglot answer; you may have the satisfaction to know how the
citizens of every town and the peasants of every province express
themselves, on a matter you may never have occasion to name again. But I
earnestly recommend you never to ask anything; it is better to go
without hearing one thing you do want to hear, than to be constrained to
hear fifty things that are no more to you than I to Hecuba--not half so
much as Hecuba is to me. Mrs. Aurelia Sparr is not easy to deal with;
she looks upon all politeness as affectation, and all affectation as
perfidy: she palsies all the courtesies of life by a glum air of
disbelief and dissatisfaction. When one sees nobody else, one forgets
that such qualities as urbanity, grace, and benignity exist, and is
really obliged to say civil things to one’s self, to keep one’s hand in.
Mrs. Aurelia Sparr is more eminent as a chronicler than as a logician;
some of her conclusions and deductions are not self-evident. For
instance--she interprets a reasonable conformity to the dress and
manners of persons of other countries, while sojourning among them, into
“hating one’s own country.” Command of temper is “an odious, cold
disposition.” Address, and dexterity in female works, what good ladies
in England term notability, are deemed by her “frivolous vanity,” &c.
&c. &c. She has learnt chemistry, and she distils vexation and
bitterness from every person and every event--geometry, and she can
never measure her deportment to circumstances--algebra, merely to
multiply the crosses of all whose fate makes them parallel with
her--navigation, and she does but tack from one absurdity to another,
without making any way--mathematics, and she never calculates how much
more agreeable a little good-nature would make her than all her
learning--history, and that of her own heart is a blank--perspective,
without ever learning to place self at the “vanishing point”--and all
languages, without ever uttering in any one of them a single phrase that
could make the eyes of the hearer glisten, or call a glow on the cheek
of sympathy. Every body allows that Mrs. Aurelia Sparr is very
clever--poor, arid praise, what is it worth?