V.

Besides the 'Life of Miss Mitford' by Messrs. Harness and Lestrange,

there is also a book of the 'Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford,'

consisting of the letters she received rather than of those which she

wrote. It certainly occurs to one, as one looks through the printed

correspondence of celebrated people, how different are written from

printed letters. Your friend's voice sounds, your friend's eyes look

out, of the written page, even its blots and erasures remind you of your

human being. But the magnetism is gone out of these printer's lines with

their even margins; in which everybody's handwriting is exactly alike;

in which everybody uses the same type, the same expressions; in which

the eye roams from page to page untouched, unconvinced. I can imagine

the pleasure each one of these letters may have given to Miss Mitford

to receive in turn. They come from well-known ladies, accustomed to be

considered. Mrs. Trollope, Mrs. Hofland, Mrs. Howitt, Mrs. S. C. Hall,

Miss Strickland, Mrs. Opie; there, too, are Miss Barrett and Mrs.

Jamieson and Miss Sedgwick who writes from America; they are all

interesting people, but it must be confessed that the correspondence is

not very enlivening. Miss Barrett's is an exception, that is almost as

good as handwriting to read. But there is no doubt that compliments

to OTHER authoresses are much less amusing, than those one writes or

receives oneself; apologies also for not writing sooner, CAN pall

upon one in print, however soothing they may be to the justly offended

recipient, or to the conscience-stricken correspondent.

'I must have seemed a thankless wretch, my dear Miss Mitford,' etc. etc.

'You, my dear friend, know too well what it is to have to finish a book,

to blame my not attempting,' etc. etc. 'This is the thirty-ninth letter

I have written since yesterday morning,' says Harriet Martineau. 'Oh,

I can scarcely hold the pen! I will not allow my shame for not having

written, to prevent me from writing now.' All these people seem to have

been just as busy as people are now, as amusing, as tiresome. They had

the additional difficulty of having to procure franks, and of having to

cover four pages instead of a post-card. OUR letters may be dull, but at

all events they are not nearly so long. We come sooner to the point and

avoid elegant circumlocutions. But one is struck, among other things,

by the keener literary zest of those days, and by the immense numbers

of MSS. and tragedies in circulation, all of which their authors

confidingly send from one to another. There are also whole flights of

travelling poems flapping their wings and uttering their cries as they

go.

An enthusiastic American critic who comes over to England emphasises the

situation. Mr. Willis's 'superlative admiration' seems to give point

to everything, and to all the enthusiasm. Miss Austen's Collins himself

could not have been more appreciative, not even if Miss de Burgh had

tried her hand at a MS.... Could he--Mr. Willis--choose, he would have

tragedy once a year from Miss Mitford's pen. 'WHAT an intoxicating life

it is,' he cries; 'I met Jane Porter and Miss Aikin and Tom Moore and a

troop more beaux esprits at dinner yesterday! I never shall be content

elsewhere.'

Miss Mitford's own letters speak in a much more natural voice.

'I never could understand what people could find to like in my letters,'

Miss Mitford writes, 'unless it be that they have a ROOT to them.' The

root was in her own kind heart. Miss Mitford may have been wanting a

little in discrimination, but she was never wanting in sympathy. She

seems to have loved people for kindness's sake indiscriminately as if

they were creations of her own brain: but to friendliness or to trouble

of any sort she responds with fullest measure. Who shall complain if

some rosy veil coloured the aspects of life for her?

'Among the many blessings I enjoy,--my dear father, my admirable mother,

my tried and excellent friends,--there is nothing for which I ought to

thank God so earnestly as for the constitutional buoyancy of spirits,

the aptness to hope, the will to be happy WHICH I INHERIT FROM MY

FATHER,' she writes. Was ever filial piety so irritating as hers? It is

difficult to bear, with any patience, her praises of Dr. Mitford. His

illusions were no less a part of his nature than his daughter's, the one

a self-centred absolutely selfish existence, the other generous, humble,

beautiful. She is hardly ever really angry except when some reports get

about concerning her marriage. There was an announcement that she was

engaged to one of her own clan, and the news spread among her friends.

The romantic Mrs. Hofland had conjured up the suggestion, to Miss

Mitford's extreme annoyance. It is said Mrs. Hofland also married off

Miss Edgeworth in the same manner.

Mary Mitford found her true romance in friendship, not in love. One day

Mr. Kenyon came to see her while she was staying in London, and offered

to show her the Zoological Gardens, and on the way he proposed calling

in Gloucester Place to take up a young lady, a connection of his own,

Miss Barrett by name. It was thus that Miss Mitford first made the

acquaintance of Mrs. Browning, whose friendship was one of the happiest

events of her whole life. A happy romance indeed, with that added

reality which must have given it endurance. And indeed to make a new

friend is like learning a new language. I myself have a friend who says

that we have each one of us a chosen audience of our own to whom we turn

instinctively, and before whom we rehearse that which is in our minds;

whose opinion influences us, whose approval is our secret aim. All this

Mrs. Browning seems to have been to Miss Mitford.

'I sit and think of you and of the poems that you will write, and of

that strange rainbow crown called fame, until the vision is before

me.... My pride and my hopes seem altogether merged in you. At my time

of life and with so few to love, and with a tendency to body forth

images of gladness, you cannot think what joy it is to anticipate....'

So wrote the elder woman to the younger with romantic devotion. What

Miss Mitford once said of herself was true, hers was the instinct of

the bee sucking honey from the hedge flower. Whatever sweetness and

happiness there was to find she turned to with unerring directness.

It is to Miss Barrett that she sometimes complains. 'It will help you to

understand how impossible it is for me to earn money as I ought to

do, when I tell you that this very day I received your dear letter and

sixteen others; then my father brought into my room the newspaper to

hear the ten or twelve columns of news from India; then I dined and

breakfasted in one; then I got up, and by that time there were three

parties of people in the garden; eight others arrived soon after.... I

was forced to leave, being engaged to call on Lady Madeline Palmer. She

took me some six miles on foot in Mr. Palmer's beautiful plantations, in

search of that exquisite wild-flower the bog-bean, do you know it? most

beautiful of flowers, either wild--or, as K. puts it,--"tame." After

long search we found the plant not yet in bloom.'

Dr. Mitford weeps over his daughters exhaustion, telling everybody that

she is killing herself by her walks and drives. He would like her

never to go beyond the garden and beyond reach of the columns of his

newspaper. She declares that it is only by getting out and afield that

she can bear the strain and the constant alternation of enforced

work and anxiety. Nature was, indeed, a second nature to her. Charles

Kingsley himself could scarcely write better of the East wind....

'We have had nine weeks of drought and east wind, scarcely a flower to

be seen, no verdure in the meadows, no leaves in the hedgerows; if a

poor violet or primrose did make its appearance it was scentless. I have

not once heard my aversion the cuckoo... and in this place, so evidently

the rendezvous of swallows, that it takes its name from them, not

a swallow has yet appeared. The only time that I have heard the

nightingale, I drove, the one mild day we have had, to a wood where I

used to find the woodsorrel in beds; only two blossoms of that could be

found, but a whole chorus of nightingales saluted me the moment I drove

into the wood.'

There is something of Madame de Sevigne in her vivid realisation of

natural things.

She nursed her father through a long and trying illness, and when he

died found herself alone in the world with impaired health and very

little besides her pension from the Civil List to live upon. Dr. Mitford

left 1000 pounds worth of debts, which this honourable woman then and

there set to work to try and pay. So much courage and devotion touched

the hearts of her many friends and readers, and this sum was actually

subscribed by them. Queens, archbishops, dukes, and marquises subscribe

to the testimonial, so do the literary ladies, Mesdames Bailey,

Edgeworth, Trollope; Mrs. Opie is determined to collect twenty pounds at

least, although she justly says she wishes it were for anything but to

pay the Doctor's debts.

In 1844 it is delightful to read of a little ease at last in this

harassed life; of a school-feast with buns and flags organised by the

kind lady, the children riding in waggons decked with laurel, Miss

Mitford leading the way, followed by eight or ten neighbouring

carriages, and the whole party waiting in Swallowfield Lane to see

the Queen and Prince Albert returning from their visit to the Duke of

Wellington. 'Our Duke went to no great expense,' says Miss Mitford. (Dr.

Mitford would have certainly disapproved had he been still alive.) One

strip of carpet the Duke did buy, the rest of the furniture he hired

in Reading for the week. The ringers, after being hard at work for four

hours, sent a can to the house to ask for some beer, and the can was

sent back empty.

It was towards the end of her life that Miss Mitford left Three Mile

Cross and came to Swallowfield to stay altogether. 'The poor cottage was

tumbling around us, and if we had stayed much longer we should have

been buried in the ruins,' she says; 'there I had toiled and striven and

tasted as bitterly of bitter anxiety, of fear and hope, as often falls

to the lot of women.' Then comes a charming description of the three

miles of straight and dusty road. 'I walked from one cottage to the

other on an autumn evening when the vagrant birds, whose habit of

assembling there for their annual departure, gives, I suppose, its

name of Swallowfield to the village, were circling over my head, and

I repeated to myself the pathetic lines of Hayley as he saw those same

birds gathering upon his roof during his last illness:--

'"Ye gentle birds, that perch aloof,

And smooth your pinions on my roof...

'"Prepare for your departure hence

Ere winter's angry threats commence;

Like you my soul would smooth her plume

For longer flights beyond the tomb.

'"May God by whom is seen and heard

Departing men and wandering bird,

In mercy mark us for His own

And guide us to the land unknown!"'

Thoughts soothing and tender came with those touching lines, and gayer

images followed....

It is from Swallowfield that she writes: 'I have fell this blessing of

being able to respond to new friendships very strongly lately, for I

have lost many old and valued connections during this trying spring. I

thank God far more earnestly for such blessings than for my daily bread,

for friendship is the bread of the heart.'

It was late in life to make such warm new ties as those which followed

her removal from Three Mile Cross; but some of the most cordial

friendships of her life date from this time. Mr. James Payn and Mr.

Fields she loved with some real motherly feeling, and Lady Russell who

lived at the Hall became her tender and devoted friend.