A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY
AND OTHER ESSAYS
A
HAPPY HALF-CENTURY
_AND OTHER ESSAYS_
BY
AGNES REPPLIER, LITT. D.
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1908
COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY AGNES REPPLIER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published September 1908_
TO
J. WILLIAM WHITE
PREFACE
The half-century, whose more familiar aspects this little book is
designed to illustrate, has spread its boundary lines. Nothing is so
hard to deal with as a period. Nothing is so unmanageable as a date.
People will be born a few years too early; they will live a few years
too long. Events will happen out of time. The closely linked decades
refuse to be separated, and my half-century, that I thought so compact,
widened imperceptibly while I wrote.
I have filled my canvas with trivial things, with intimate details,
with what now seem the insignificant aspects of life. But the
insignificant aspects of life concern us mightily while we live; and
it is by their help that we understand the insignificant people who
are sometimes reckoned of importance. A hundred years ago many men and
women were reckoned of importance, at whose claims their successors
to-day smile scornfully. Yet they and their work were woven into the
tissue of things, into the warp and woof of social conditions, into the
literary history of England. An hour is not too precious to waste upon
them, however feeble their pretensions. Perhaps some idle reader in the
future will do as much by us.
A. R.
CONTENTS
A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY 1
THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY 16
WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG 32
THE CORRESPONDENT 51
THE NOVELIST 73
ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS 94
THE LITERARY LADY 116
THE CHILD 138
THE EDUCATOR 155
THE PIETIST 177
THE ACCURSED ANNUAL 196
OUR ACCOMPLISHED GREAT-GRANDMOTHER 217
THE ALBUM AMICORUM 234
“A Happy Half-Century,” “The Perils of Immortality,” and “The
Correspondent” appeared first in _Harper’s Magazine_, “Our Accomplished
Great-Grandmother” in _Harper’s Bazar_, and “On the Slopes of
Parnassus” in the _Atlantic Monthly_; they are here reprinted by
permission of the publishers of those magazines.
A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY
This damn’d unmasculine canting age!
CHARLES LAMB.
There are few of us who do not occasionally wish we had been born in
other days, in days for which we have some secret affinity, and which
shine for us with a mellow light in the deceitful pages of history.
Mr. Austin Dobson, for example, must have sighed more than once to see
Queen Anne on Queen Victoria’s throne; and the Rt. Hon. Cecil Rhodes
must have realized that the reign of Elizabeth was the reign for him.
There is a great deal lost in being born out of date. What freak of
fortune thrust Galileo into the world three centuries too soon, and
held back Richard Burton’s restless soul until he was three centuries
too late?
For myself, I confess that the last twenty-five years of the eighteenth
century and the first twenty-five years of the nineteenth make up my
chosen period, and that my motive for so choosing is contemptible.
It was not a time distinguished--in England at least--for wit or
wisdom, for public virtues or for private charm; but it _was_ a time
when literary reputations were so cheaply gained that nobody needed
to despair of one. A taste for platitudes, a tinge of Pharisaism, an
appreciation of the commonplace,--and the thing was done. It was in
the latter half of this blissful period that we find that enthusiastic
chronicler, Mrs. Cowley, writing in “Public Characters” of “the proud
preëminence which, in all the varieties of excellence produced by the
pen, the pencil, or the lyre, the ladies of Great Britain have attained
over contemporaries in every other country in Europe.”
When we search for proofs of this proud preëminence, what do we find?
Roughly speaking, the period begins with Miss Burney, and closes
with Miss Terrier and Miss Jane Porter. It includes--besides Miss
Burney--one star of the first magnitude, Miss Austen (whose light never
dazzled Mrs. Cowley’s eyes), and one mild but steadfast planet, Miss
Edgeworth. The rest of Great Britain’s literary ladies were enjoying
a degree of fame and fortune so utterly disproportionate to their
merits that their toiling successors to-day may be pardoned for wishing
themselves part of that happy sisterhood. Think of being able to find a
market for an interminable essay entitled “Against Inconsistency in our
Expectations”! There lingers in all our hearts a desire to utter moral
platitudes, to dwell lingeringly and lovingly upon the obvious; but
alas! we are not Mrs. Barbaulds, and this is not the year 1780. Foolish
and inconsequent we are permitted to be, but tedious, never! And think
of hearing one’s own brother burst into song, that he might fondly
eulogize our
Sacred gifts whose meed is deathless praise,
Whose potent charm the enraptured soul can raise.
There are few things more difficult to conceive than an enthusiastic
brother tunefully entreating his sister to go on enrapturing the world
with her pen. Oh, thrice-favoured Anna Letitia Barbauld, who could warm
even the calm fraternal heart into a glow of sensibility.
The publication of “Evelina” was the first notable event in our happy
half-century. Its freshness and vivacity charmed all London; and Miss
Burney, like Sheridan, had her applause “dashed in her face, sounded
in her ears,” for the rest of a long and meritorious life. Her second
novel, “Cecilia,” was received with such universal transport, that in
a very moral epilogue of a rather immoral play we find it seriously
commended to the public as an antidote to vice:--
Let sweet Cecilia gain your just applause,
Whose every passion yields to nature’s laws.
Miss Burney, blushing in the royal box, had the satisfaction of hearing
this stately advertisement of her wares. Virtue was not left to be its
own reward in those fruitful and generous years.
Indeed, the most comfortable characteristic of the period, and the one
which incites our deepest envy, is the universal willingness to accept
a good purpose as a substitute for good work. Even Madame d’Arblay,
shrewd, caustic, and quick-witted, forbears from unkind criticism of
the well-intentioned. She has nothing but praise for Mrs. Barbauld’s
poems, because of “the piety and worth they exhibit”; and she rises to
absolute enthusiasm over the anti-slavery epistle, declaring that its
energy “springs from the real spirit of virtue.” Yet to us the picture
of the depraved and luxurious West Indian ladies--about whom it is
safe to say good Mrs. Barbauld knew very little--seems one of the most
unconsciously humorous things in English verse.
Lo! where reclined, pale Beauty courts the breeze,
Diffused on sofas of voluptuous ease.
* * * * *
With languid tones imperious mandates urge,
With arm recumbent wield the household scourge.
There are moments when Mrs. Barbauld soars to the inimitable, when
she reaches the highest and happiest effect that absurdity is able to
produce.
With arm recumbent wield the household scourge
is one of these inspirations; and another is this pregnant sentence,
which occurs in a chapter of advice to young girls: “An ass is much
better adapted than a horse to show off a lady.”
To point to Hannah More as a brilliant and bewildering example of
sustained success is to give the most convincing proof that it was a
good thing to be born in the year 1745. Miss More’s reputation was
already established at the dawning of my cherished half-century, and,
for the whole fifty years, her life was a series of social, literary,
and religious triumphs. In her youth, she was mistaken for a wit. In
her old age, she was revered as a saint. In her youth, Garrick called
her “Nine,”--gracefully intimating that she embodied the attributes of
all the Muses. In her old age, an acquaintance wrote to her: “You who
are secure of the approbation of angels may well hold human applause
to be of small consequence.” In her youth, she wrote a play that
everybody went to see. In her old age, she wrote tracts that everybody
bought and distributed. Prelates composed Latin verses in her honour;
and when her “Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World” was
published anonymously, the Bishop of London exclaimed in a kind of
pious transport, “Aut Morus, aut Angelus!” Her tragedy, “Percy,” melted
the heart of London. Men “shed tears in abundance,” and women were
“choked with emotion” over the “affecting circumstances of the Piece.”
Sir William Pepys confessed that “Percy” “broke his heart”; and that he
thought it “a kind of profanation” to wipe his eyes, and go from the
theatre to Lady Harcourt’s assembly. Four thousand copies of the play
were sold in a fortnight; and the Duke of Northumberland sent a special
messenger to Miss More to thank her for the honour she had done his
historic name.
As a novelist, Hannah was equally successful. Twenty thousand copies of
“Cœlebs in Search of a Wife” were sold in England, and thirty thousand
in America. “The Americans are a very approving people,” acknowledged
the gratified authoress. In Iceland “Cœlebs” was read--so Miss More
says--“with great apparent profit”; while certain very popular tracts,
like “Charles the Footman” and “The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain,”
made their edifying way to Moscow, and were found by the missionary
Gericke in the library of the Rajah of Tanjore. “All this and Heaven,
too!” as a reward for being born in 1745. The injustice of the thing
stings us to the soul. Yet it was the unhesitating assumption of
Heaven’s co-partnership which gave to Hannah More the best part of
her earthly prestige, and made her verdicts a little like Protestant
Bulls. When she objected to “Marmion” and “The Lady of the Lake” for
their lack of “practical precept,” these sinless poems were withdrawn
from Evangelical book-shelves. Her biographer, Mr. Thompson, thought
it necessary to apologize for her correspondence with that agreeable
worldling, Horace Walpole, and to assure us that “the fascinations of
Walpole’s false wit must have retired before the bright ascendant of
her pure and prevailing superiority.” As she waxed old, and affluent,
and disputatious, it was deemed well to encourage a timid public with
the reminder that her genius, though “great and commanding,” was
still “lovely and kind.” And when she died, it was recorded that “a
cultivated taste for moral scenery was one of her distinctions”;--as
though Nature herself attended a class of ethics before venturing to
allure too freely the mistress of Barley Wood.
It is in the contemplation of such sunlight mediocrity that the
hardship of being born too late is felt with crushing force. Why
cannot we write “Letters on the Improvement of the Mind,” and be held,
like Mrs. Chapone, to be an authority on education all the rest of
our lives; and have people entreating us, as they entreated her, to
undertake, at any cost, the intellectual guidance of their daughters?
When we consider all that a modern educator is expected to know--from
bird-calls to metric measures--we sigh over the days which demanded
nothing more difficult than the polite expression of truisms.
“Our feelings are not given us for our ornament, but to spur us on to
right action. Compassion, for instance, is not impressed upon the human
heart, only to adorn the fair face with tears, and to give an agreeable
languor to the eyes. It is designed to excite our utmost endeavour to
relieve the sufferer.”
Was it really worth while to say this even in 1775? Is it possible
that young ladies were then in danger of thinking that the office
of compassion was to “adorn a face with tears”? and did they try to
be sorry for the poor and sick, only that their bright eyes might
be softened into languor? Yet we know that Mrs. Chapone’s little
volume was held to have rendered signal service to society. It has
the honour to be one of the books which Miss Lydia Languish lays out
ostentatiously on her table--in company with Fordyce’s sermons--when
she anticipates a visit from Mrs. Malaprop and Sir Anthony. Some
halting verses of the period exalt it as the beacon light of youth;
and Mrs. Delany, writing to her six-year-old niece, counsels the
little girl to read the “Letters” once a year until she is grown up.
“They speak to the heart as well as to the head,” she assures the poor
infant; “and I know no book (next to the Bible) more entertaining and
edifying.”
Mrs. Montagu gave dinners. The real and very solid foundation of _her_
reputation was the admirable manner in which she fed her lions. A
mysterious halo of intellectuality surrounded this excellent hostess.
“The female Mæcenas of Hill Street,” Hannah More elegantly termed her,
adding,--to prove that she herself was not unduly influenced by gross
food and drink,--“But what are baubles, when speaking of a Montagu!”
Dr. Johnson praised her conversation,--especially when he wanted to
tease jealous Mrs. Thrale,--but sternly discountenanced her attempts
at authorship. When Sir Joshua Reynolds observed that the “Essay on
the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare” did its authoress honour, Dr.
Johnson retorted contemptuously: “It does _her_ honour, but it would do
honour to nobody else,”--which strikes me as a singularly unpleasant
thing to hear said about one’s literary masterpiece. Like the fabled
Caliph who stood by the Sultan’s throne, translating the flowers of
Persian speech into comprehensible and unflattering truths, so Dr.
Johnson stands undeceived in this pleasant half-century of pretence,
translating its ornate nonsense into language we can too readily
understand.
But how comfortable and how comforting the pretence must have been,
and how kindly tolerant all the pretenders were to one another! If,
in those happy days, you wrote an essay on “The Harmony of Numbers
and Versification,” you unhesitatingly asked your friends to come and
have it read aloud to them; and your friends--instead of leaving town
next day--came, and listened, and called it a “Miltonic evening.” If,
like Mrs. Montagu, you had a taste for letter-writing, you filled up
innumerable sheets with such breathless egotisms as this:--
“I come, a happy guest, to the general feast Nature spreads for all her
children, my spirits dance in the sunbeams, or take a sweet repose in
the shade. I rejoice in the grand chorus of the day, and feel content
in the silent serene of night, while I listen to the morning hymn of
the whole animal creation, I recollect how beautiful it is, sum’d up in
the works of our great poet, Milton, every rivulet murmurs in poetical
cadence, and to the melody of the nightingale I add the harmonious
verses she has inspired in many languages.”
So highly were these rhapsodies appreciated, and so far were
correspondents from demanding either coherence or punctuation, that
four volumes of Mrs. Montagu’s letters were published after her death;
and we find Miss More praising Mrs. Boscawen because she approached
this standard of excellence: “Mrs. Palk tells me her letters are
hardly inferior to Mrs. Montagu’s.”
Those were the days to live in, and sensible people made haste to be
born in time. The close of the eighteenth century saw quiet country
families tearing the freshly published “Mysteries of Udolpho” into
a dozen parts, because no one could wait his turn to read the book.
All England held its breath while Emily explored the haunted chambers
of her prison-house. The beginning of the nineteenth century found
Mrs. Opie enthroned as a peerless novel-writer, and the “Edinburgh
Review” praising “Adeline Mowbray, or Mother and Daughter,” as the most
pathetic story in the English language. Indeed, one sensitive gentleman
wrote to its authoress that he had lain awake all night, bathed in
tears, after reading it. About this time, too, we begin to hear “the
mellow tones of Felicia Hemans,” whom Christopher North reverently
admired; and who, we are assured, found her way to all hearts that
were open to “the holy sympathies of religion and virtue.” Murray’s
heart was so open that he paid two hundred guineas for the “Vespers of
Palermo”; and Miss Edgeworth considered that the “Siege of Valencia”
contained the most beautiful poetry she had read for years. Finally
Miss Jane Porter looms darkly on the horizon, with novels five volumes
long. All the Porters worked on a heroic scale. Anna Maria’s stories
were more interminable than Jane’s; and their brother Robert painted
on a single canvas, “The Storming of Seringapatam,” seven hundred
life-sized figures.
“Thaddeus of Warsaw” and “The Scottish Chiefs” were books familiar
to our infancy. They stretched vastly and vaguely over many tender
years,--stories after the order of Melchisedec, without beginning and
without end. But when our grandmothers were young, and my chosen period
had still years to run, they were read on two continents, and in many
tongues. The King of Würtemberg was so pleased with “Thaddeus” that
he made Miss Porter a “lady of the Chapter of St. Joachim,”--which
sounds both imposing and mysterious. The badge of the order was a gold
cross; and this unusual decoration, coupled with the lady’s habit
of draping herself in flowing veils like one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s
heroines, so confused an honest British public that it was deemed
necessary to explain to agitated Protestants that Miss Porter had no
Popish proclivities, and must not be mistaken for a nun. In our own
country her novels were exceedingly popular, and her American admirers
sent her a rose-wood armchair in token of appreciation and esteem.
It is possible she would have preferred a royalty on her books; but
the armchair was graciously accepted, and a pen-and-ink sketch in an
album of celebrities represents Miss Porter seated majestically on its
cushions, “in the quiet and ladylike occupation of taking a cup of
coffee.”
And so my happy half-century draws to its appointed end. A new era,
cold, critical, contentious, deprecated the old genial absurdities,
chilled the old sentimental outpourings, questioned the old profitable
pietism. Unfortunates, born a hundred years too late, look back with
wistful eyes upon the golden age which they feel themselves qualified
to adorn.
THE PERILS OF IMMORTALITY
Peu de génie, point de grâce.
There is no harder fate than to be immortalized as a fool; to have
one’s name--which merits nothing sterner than obliteration--handed
down to generations as an example of silliness, or stupidity, or
presumption; to be enshrined pitilessly in the amber of the “Dunciad”;
to be laughed at forever because of Charles Lamb’s impatient and
inextinguishable raillery. When an industrious young authoress named
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger--a model of painstaking insignificance--invited
Charles and Mary Lamb to drink tea with her one cold December night,
she little dreamed she was achieving a deathless and unenviable fame;
and that, when her half dozen books should have lapsed into comfortable
oblivion, she herself should never be fortunate enough to be forgotten.
It is a cruel chance which crystallizes the folly of an hour, and makes
it outlive our most serious endeavours. Perhaps we should do well to
consider this painful possibility before hazarding an acquaintance
with the Immortals.
Miss Benger did more than hazard. She pursued the Immortals with
insensate zeal. She bribed Mrs. Inchbald’s servant-maid into lending
her cap, and apron, and tea-tray; and, so equipped, penetrated into
the inmost sanctuary of that literary lady, who seems to have taken
the intrusion in good part. She was equally adroit in seducing Mary
Lamb--as the Serpent seduced Eve--when Charles Lamb was the ultimate
object of her designs. Coming home to dinner one day, “hungry as a
hunter,” he found to his dismay the two women closeted together, and
trusted he was in time to prevent their exchanging vows of eternal
friendship, though not--as he discovered later--in time to save himself
from an engagement to drink tea with the stranger (“I had never seen
her before, and could not tell who the devil it was that was so
familiar”), the following night.
What happened is told in a letter to Coleridge; one of the best-known
and one of the longest letters Lamb ever wrote,--he is so brimful of
his grievance. Miss Benger’s lodgings were up two flights of stairs in
East Street. She entertained her guests with tea, coffee, macaroons,
and “much love.” She talked to them, or rather _at_ them, upon purely
literary topics,--as, for example, Miss Hannah More’s “Strictures on
Female Education,” which they had never read. She addressed Mary Lamb
in French,--“possibly having heard that neither Mary nor I understood
French,”--and she favoured them with Miss Seward’s opinion of Pope. She
asked Lamb, who was growing more miserable every minute, if he agreed
with D’Israeli as to the influence of organism upon intellect; and
when he tried to parry the question with a pun upon organ--“which went
off very flat”--she despised him for his feeble flippancy. She advised
Mary to carry home two translations of “Pizarro,” so that she might
compare them _verbatim_ (an offer hastily declined), and she made them
both promise to return the following week--which they never did--to
meet Miss Jane Porter and her sister, “who, it seems, have heard much
of Mr. Coleridge, and wish to meet _us_ because we are _his_ friends.”
It is a _comédie larmoyante_. We sympathize hotly with Lamb when we
read his letter; but there is something piteous in the thought of the
poor little hostess going complacently to bed that night, and never
realizing that she had made her one unhappy flight to fame.
There were people, strange as it may seem, who liked Miss Benger’s
evenings. Miss Aikin assures us that “her circle of acquaintances
extended with her reputation, and with the knowledge of her excellent
qualities, and she was often enabled to assemble as guests at her
humble tea-table names whose celebrity would have insured attention
in the proudest salons of the metropolis.” Crabb Robinson, who was
a frequent visitor, used to encounter large parties of sentimental
ladies; among them, Miss Porter, Miss Landon, and the “eccentric but
amiable” Miss Wesley,--John Wesley’s niece,--who prided herself upon
being broad-minded enough to have friends of varying religions, and
who, having written two unread novels, remarked complacently to Miss
Edgeworth: “We sisters of the quill ought to know one another.”
The formidable Lady de Crespigny of Campion Lodge was also Miss
Benger’s condescending friend and patroness, and this august
matron--of insipid mind and imperious temper--was held to sanctify
in some mysterious manner all whom she honoured with her notice. The
praises lavished upon Lady de Crespigny by her contemporaries would
have made Hypatia blush, and Sappho hang her head. Like Mrs. Jarley,
she was the delight of the nobility and gentry. She corresponded, so we
are told, with the _literati_ of England; she published, like a British
Cornelia, her letters of counsel to her son; she was “courted by the
gay and admired by the clever”; and she mingled at Campion Lodge “the
festivity of fashionable parties with the pleasures of intellectual
society, and the comforts of domestic peace.”
To this array of feminine virtue and feminine authorship, Lamb was
singularly unresponsive. He was not one of the _literati_ honoured
by Lady de Crespigny’s correspondence. He eluded the society of Miss
Porter, though she was held to be handsome,--for a novelist. (“The only
literary lady I ever knew,” writes Miss Mitford, “who didn’t look like
a scarecrow to keep birds from cherries.”) He said unkindly of Miss
Landon that, if she belonged to him, he would lock her up and feed her
on bread and water until she left off writing poetry. And for Miss
Wesley he entertained a cordial animosity, only one degree less lively
than his sentiments towards Miss Benger. Miss Wesley had a lamentable
habit of sending her effusions to be read by reluctant men of letters.
She asked Lamb for Coleridge’s address, which he, to divert the evil
from his own head, cheerfully gave. Coleridge, very angry, reproached
his friend for this disloyal baseness; but Lamb, with the desperate
instinct of self-preservation, refused all promise of amendment. “You
encouraged that mopsey, Miss Wesley, to dance after you,” he wrote
tartly, “in the hope of having her nonsense put into a nonsensical
Anthology. We have pretty well shaken her off by that simple expedient
of referring her to you; but there are more burs in the wind.”... “Of
all God’s creatures,” he cries again, in an excess of ill-humour, “I
detest letters-affecting, authors-hunting ladies.” Alas for Miss Benger
when she hunted hard, and the quarry turned at bay!
An atmosphere of inexpressible dreariness hangs over the little coterie
of respectable, unilluminated writers, who, to use Lamb’s priceless
phrase, encouraged one another in mediocrity. A vapid propriety, a
mawkish sensibility were their substitutes for real distinction of
character or mind. They read Mary Wollstonecraft’s books, but would
not know the author; and when, years later, Mrs. Gaskell presented
the widowed Mrs. Shelley to Miss Lucy Aikin, that outraged spinster
turned her back upon the erring one, to the profound embarrassment
of her hostess. Of Mrs. Inchbald, we read in “Public Characters” for
1811: “Her moral qualities constitute her principal excellence; and
though useful talents and personal accomplishments, of themselves, form
materials for an agreeable picture, moral character gives the polish
which fascinates the heart.” The conception of goodness then in vogue
is pleasingly illustrated by a passage from one of Miss Elizabeth
Hamilton’s books, which Miss Benger in her biography of that lady (now
lost to fame) quotes appreciatively:--
“It was past twelve o’clock. Already had the active and judicious
Harriet performed every domestic task; and, having completely regulated
the family economy for the day, was quietly seated at work with her
aunt and sister, listening to Hume’s ‘History of England,’ as it was
read to her by some orphan girl whom she had herself instructed.”
So truly ladylike had the feminine mind grown by this time, that the
very language it used was refined to the point of ambiguity. Mrs.
Barbauld writes genteelly of the behaviour of young girls “to the
other half of their species,” as though she could not bear to say,
simply and coarsely, men. So full of content were the little circles
who listened to the “elegant lyric poetess,” Mrs. Hemans, or to “the
female Shakespeare of her age,” Miss Joanna Baillie (we owe both these
phrases to the poet Campbell), that when Crabb Robinson was asked by
Miss Wakefield whether he would like to know Mrs. Barbauld, he cried
enthusiastically: “You might as well ask me whether I should like to
know the Angel Gabriel!”
In the midst of these sentimentalities and raptures, we catch now
and then forlorn glimpses of the Immortals,--of Wordsworth at a
literary entertainment in the house of Mr. Hoare of Hampstead, sitting
mute and miserable all evening in a corner,--which, as Miss Aikin
truly remarked, was “disappointing and provoking;” of Lamb carried
by the indefatigable Crabb Robinson to call on Mrs. Barbauld. This
visit appears to have been a distinct failure. Lamb’s one recorded
observation was that Gilbert Wakefield had a peevish face,--an awkward
remark, as Wakefield’s daughter sat close at hand and listening.
“Lamb,” writes Mr. Robinson, “was vexed, but got out of the scrape
tolerably well,”--having had, indeed, plenty of former experiences to
help him on the way.
There is a delightful passage in Miss Jane Porter’s diary which
describes at length an evening spent at the house of Mrs. Fenwick, “the
amiable authoress of ‘Secrecy.’” (Everybody was the amiable authoress
of something. It was a day, like our own, given over to the worship of
ink.) The company consisted of Miss Porter and her sister Maria, Miss
Benger and her brother, the poet Campbell, and his nephew, a young
man barely twenty years of age. The lion of the little party was of
course the poet, who endeared himself to Mrs. Fenwick’s heart by his
attentions to her son, “a beautiful boy of six.”
“This child’s innocence and caresses,” writes Miss Porter gushingly,
“seemed to unbend the lovely feelings of Campbell’s heart. Every
restraint but those which the guardian angels of tender infancy
acknowledge was thrown aside. I never saw Man in a more interesting
point of view. I felt how much I esteemed the author of the ‘Pleasures
of Hope.’ When we returned home, we walked. It was a charming summer
night. The moon shone brightly. Maria leaned on Campbell’s arm. I did
the same by Benger’s. Campbell made some observations on _pedantic_
women. I did not like it, being anxious for the respect of this man.
I was jealous about how nearly he might think _we_ resembled that
character. When the Bengers parted from us, Campbell observed my
abstraction, and with sincerity I confessed the cause. I know not what
were his replies; but they were so gratifying, so endearing, so marked
with truth, that when we arrived at the door, and he shook us by the
hand, as a sign of adieu immediately prior to his next day’s journey to
Scotland, we parted with evident marks of being all in tears.”
It is rather disappointing, after this outburst of emotion, to find
Campbell, in a letter to his sister, describing Miss Porter in language
of chilling moderation: “Among the company was Miss Jane Porter, whose
talents my _nephew_ adores. She is a pleasing woman, and made quite a
conquest of him.”
Miss Benger was only one of the many aspirants to literary honours
whose futile endeavours vexed and affronted Charles Lamb. In reality
she burdened him far less than others who, like Miss Betham and Miss
Stoddart, succeeded in sending him their verses for criticism, or who
begged him to forward the effusions to Southey,--an office he gladly
fulfilled. Perhaps Miss Benger’s vivacity jarred upon his taste. He was
fastidious about the gayety of women. Madame de Staël considered her
one of the most interesting persons she had met in England; but the
approval of this “impudent clever” Frenchwoman would have been the
least possible recommendation to Lamb. If he had known how hard had
been Miss Benger’s struggles, and how scanty her rewards, he might have
forgiven her that sad perversity which kept her toiling in the field
of letters. She had had the misfortune to be a precocious child, and
had written at the age of thirteen a poem called “The Female Geniad,”
which was dedicated to Lady de Crespigny, and published under the
patronage of that honoured dame. Youthful prodigies were then much in
favour. Miss Mitford comments very sensibly upon them, being filled
with pity for one Mary Anne Browne, “a fine tall girl of fourteen, and
a full-fledged authoress,” who was extravagantly courted and caressed
one season, and cruelly ignored the next. The “Female Geniad” sealed
Miss Benger’s fate. When one has written a poem at thirteen, and that
poem has been printed and praised, there is nothing for it but to keep
on writing until Death mercifully removes the obligation.
It is needless to say that the drama--which then, as now, was the
goal of every author’s ambition--first fired Miss Benger’s zeal. When
we think of Miss Hannah More as a successful playwright, it is hard to
understand how any one could fail; yet fail Miss Benger did, although
we are assured by her biographer that “her genius appeared in many ways
well adapted to the stage.” She next wrote a mercilessly long poem upon
the abolition of the slave-trade (which was read only by anti-slavery
agitators), and two novels,--“Marian,” and “Valsinore: or, the Heart
and the Fancy.” Of these we are told that “their excellences were such
as genius only can reach”; and if they also missed their mark, it must
have been because--as Miss Aikin delicately insinuates--“no judicious
reader could fail to perceive that the artist was superior to the
work.” This is always unfortunate. It is the work, and not the artist,
which is offered for sale in the market-place. Miss Benger’s work is
not much worse than a great deal which did sell, and she possessed
at least the grace of an unflinching and courageous perseverance.
Deliberately, and without aptitude or training, she began to write
history, and in this most difficult of all fields won for herself a
hearing. Her “Life of Anne Boleyn,” and her “Memoirs of Mary, Queen
of Scots,” were read in many an English schoolroom; their propriety
and Protestantism making them acceptable to the anxious parental mind.
A single sentence from “Anne Boleyn” will suffice to show the ease
of Miss Benger’s mental attitude, and the comfortable nature of her
views:--
“It would be ungrateful to forget that the mother of Queen Elizabeth
was the early and zealous advocate of the Reformation, and that, by
her efforts to dispel the gloom of ignorance and superstition, she
conferred on the English people a benefit of which, in the present
advanced state of knowledge and civilization, it would be difficult to
conceive or to appreciate the real value and importance.”
The “active and judicious Harriet” would have listened to this with as
much complacence as to Hume.
In “La Belle Assemblée” for April, 1823, there is an engraving
of Miss Smirke’s portrait of Miss Benger. She is painted in an
imposing turban, with tight little curls, and an air of formidable
sprightliness. It was this sprightliness which was so much admired.
“Wound up by a cup of coffee,” she would talk for hours, and her
friends really seem to have liked it. “Her lively imagination,”
writes Miss Aikin, “and the flow of eloquence it inspired, aided by
one of the most melodious of voices, lent an inexpressible charm to
her conversation, which was heightened by an intuitive discernment of
character, rare in itself, and still more so in combination with such
fertility of fancy and ardency of feeling.”
This leaves little to be desired. It is not at all like the Miss
Benger of Lamb’s letter, with her vapid pretensions and her stupid
insolence. Unhappily, we see through Lamb’s eyes, and we cannot see
through Miss Aikin’s. Of one thing only I feel sure. Had Miss Benger,
instead of airing her trivial acquirements, told Lamb that when she was
a little girl, bookless and penniless, at Chatham, she used to read
the open volumes in the booksellers’ windows, and go back again and
again, hoping that the leaves might be turned, she would have touched
a responsive chord in his heart. Who does not remember his exquisite
sympathy for “street-readers,” and his unlikely story of Martin B----,
who “got through two volumes of ‘Clarissa,’” in this desultory fashion.
Had he but known of the shabby, eager child, staring wistfully at the
coveted books, he would never have written the most amusing of his
letters, and Miss Benger’s name would be to-day unknown.
WHEN LALLA ROOKH WAS YOUNG
And give you, mixed with western sentimentalism,
Some glimpses of the finest orientalism.
“Stick to the East,” wrote Byron to Moore, in 1813. “The oracle, Staël,
told me it was the only poetic policy. The North, South, and West have
all been exhausted; but from the East we have nothing but Southey’s
unsaleables, and these he has contrived to spoil by adopting only their
most outrageous fictions. His personages don’t interest us, and yours
will. You will have no competitors; and, if you had, you ought to be
glad of it. The little I have done in that way is merely a ‘voice in
the wilderness’ for you; and if it has had any success, that also will
prove that the public are orientalizing, and pave the way for you.”
There is something admirably business-like in this advice. Byron, who
four months before had sold the “Giaour” and the “Bride of Abydos” to
Murray for a thousand guineas, was beginning to realize the commercial
value of poetry; and, like a true man of affairs, knew what it meant
to corner a poetic market. He was generous enough to give Moore the
tip, and to hold out a helping hand as well; for he sent him six
volumes of Castellan’s “Mœurs des Ottomans,” and three volumes of
Toderini’s “De la Littérature des Turcs.” The orientalism afforded by
text-books was the kind that England loved.
From the publication of “Lalla Rookh” in 1817 to the publication of
Thackeray’s “Our Street” in 1847, Byron’s far-sighted policy continued
to bear golden fruit. For thirty years Caliphs and Deevs, Brahmins
and Circassians, rioted through English verse; mosques and seraglios
were the stage properties of English fiction; the bowers of Rochnabed,
the Lake of Cashmere, became as familiar as Richmond and the Thames
to English readers. Some feeble washings of this great tidal wave
crossed the estranging sea, to tint the pages of the New York “Mirror,”
and kindred journals in the United States. Harems and slave-markets,
with beautiful Georgians and sad, slender Arab girls, thrilled our
grandmothers’ kind hearts. Tales of Moorish Lochinvars, who snatch
away the fair daughters--or perhaps the fair wives--of powerful rajahs,
captivated their imaginations. Gazelles trot like poodles through these
stories, and lend colour to their robust Saxon atmosphere. In one, a
neglected “favourite” wins back her lord’s affection by the help of a
slave-girl’s amulet; and the inconstant Moslem, entering the harem,
exclaims, “Beshrew me that I ever thought another fair!”--which sounds
like a penitent Tudor.
A Persian’s Heaven is easily made,
’Tis but black eyes and lemonade;
and our oriental literature was compounded of the same simple
ingredients. When the New York “Mirror,” under the guidance of the
versatile Mr. Willis, tried to be impassioned and sensuous, it dropped
into such wanton lines as these to a “Sultana”:--
She came,--soft leaning on her favourite’s arm,
She came, warm panting from the sultry hours,
To rove mid fragrant shades of orange bowers,
A veil light shadowing each voluptuous charm.
And for this must Lord Byron stand responsible.
The happy experiment of grafting Turkish roses upon English boxwood
led up to some curious complications, not the least of which was the
necessity of stiffening the moral fibre of the Orient--which was
esteemed to be but lax--until it could bear itself in seemly fashion
before English eyes. The England of 1817 was not, like the England of
1908, prepared to give critical attention to the decadent. It presented
a solid front of denial to habits and ideas which had not received the
sanction of British custom; which had not, through national adoption,
become part of the established order of the universe. The line of
demarcation between Providence and the constitution was lightly drawn.
Jeffrey, a self-constituted arbiter of tastes and morals, assured
his nervous countrymen that, although Moore’s verse was glowing, his
principles were sound.
“The characters and sentiments of ‘Lalla Rookh’ belong to the poetry
of rational, honourable, considerate, and humane Europe; and not to
the childishness, cruelty, and profligacy of Asia. So far as we have
yet seen, there is no sound sense, firmness of purpose, or principled
goodness, except among the natives of Europe and their genuine
descendants.”
Starting with this magnificent assumption, it became a delicate and a
difficult task to unite the customs of the East with the “principled
goodness” of the West; the “sound sense” of the Briton with the fervour
and fanaticism of the Turk. Jeffrey held that Moore had effected this
alliance in the most tactful manner, and had thereby “redeemed the
character of oriental poetry”; just as Mr. Thomas Haynes Bayly, ten
years later, “reclaimed festive song from vulgarity.” More carping
critics, however, worried their readers a good deal on this point; and
the nonconformist conscience cherished uneasy doubts as to Hafed’s
irregular courtship and Nourmahal’s marriage lines. From across the sea
came the accusing voice of young Mr. Channing in the “North American,”
proclaiming that “harlotry has found in Moore a bard to smooth her
coarseness and veil her effrontery, to give her languor for modesty,
and affectation for virtue.” The English “Monthly Review,” less open
to alarm, confessed with a sigh “a depressing regret that, with the
exception of ‘Paradise and the Peri,’ no great moral effect is either
attained or attempted by ‘Lalla Rookh.’ To what purpose all this
sweetness and delicacy of thought and language, all this labour and
profusion of Oriental learning? What head is set right in one erroneous
notion, what heart is softened in one obdurate feeling, by this
luxurious quarto?”
It is a lamentable truth that Anacreon exhibits none of Dante’s
spiritual depth, and that la reine Margot fell short of Queen
Victoria’s fireside qualities. Nothing could make a moralist of Moore.
The light-hearted creature was a model of kindness, of courage, of
conjugal fidelity; but--reversing the common rule of life--he preached
none of the virtues that he practised. His pathetic attempts to adjust
his tales to the established conventions of society failed signally
of their purpose. Even Byron wrote him that little Allegra (as yet
unfamiliar with her alphabet) should not be permitted to read “Lalla
Rookh”; partly because it wasn’t proper, and partly--which was prettily
said--lest she should discover “that there was a better poet than
Papa.” It was reserved for Moore’s followers to present their verses
and stories in the chastened form acceptable to English drawing-rooms,
and permitted to English youth. “La Belle Assemblée” published in
1819 an Eastern tale called “Jahia and Meimoune,” in which the lovers
converse like the virtuous characters in “Camilla.” Jahia becomes the
guest of an infamous sheik, who intoxicates him with a sherbet composed
of “sugar, musk, and amber,” and presents him with five thousand
sequins and a beautiful Circassian slave. When he is left alone with
this damsel, she addresses him thus: “I feel interested in you, and
present circumstances will save me from the charge of immodesty, when
I say that I also love you. This love inspires me with fresh horror at
the crimes that are here committed.”
Jahia protests that he respectfully returns her passion, and that his
intentions are of an honourable character, whereupon the circumspect
maiden rejoins: “Since such are your sentiments, I will perish with you
if I fail in delivering you”; and conducts him, through a tangle of
adventures, to safety. Jahia then places Meimoune under the chaperonage
of his mother until their wedding day; after which we are happy to
know that “they passed their lives in the enjoyment of every comfort
attending on domestic felicity. If their lot was not splendid or
magnificent, they were rich in mutual affection; and they experienced
that fortunate medium which, far removed from indigence, aspires not to
the accumulation of immense wealth, and laughs at the unenvied load of
pomp and splendour, which it neither seeks, nor desires to obtain.”
It is to be hoped that many obdurate hearts were softened, and many
erroneous notions were set right by the influence of a story like
this. In the “Monthly Museum” an endless narrative poem, “Abdallah,”
stretched its slow length along from number to number, blooming with
fresh moral sentiments on every page; while from an arid wilderness of
Moorish love songs, and Persian love songs, and Circassian love songs,
and Hindu love songs, I quote this “Arabian” love song, peerless amid
its peers:--
Thy hair is black as the starless sky,
And clasps thy neck as it loved its home;
Yet it moves at the sound of thy faintest sigh,
Like the snake that lies on the white sea-foam.
I love thee, Ibla. Thou art bright
As the white snow on the hills afar;
Thy face is sweet as the moon by night,
And thine eye like the clear and rolling star.
But the snow is poor and withers soon,
While thou art firm and rich in hope;
And never (like thine) from the face of the moon
Flamed the dark eye of the antelope.
The truth and accuracy of this last observation should commend the poem
to all lovers of nature.
It is the custom in these days of morbid accuracy to laugh at the
second-hand knowledge which Moore so proudly and so innocently
displayed. Even Mr. Saintsbury says some unkind things about the notes
to “Lalla Rookh,”--scraps of twentieth-hand knowledge, _he_ calls
them,--while pleasantly recording his affection for the poem itself, an
affection based upon the reasonable ground of childish recollections.
In the well-ordered home of his infancy, none but “Sunday books” might
be read on Sundays in nursery or schoolroom. “But this severity
was tempered by one of those easements often occurring in a world,
which, if not the best, is certainly not the worst of all possible
worlds. For the convenience of servants, or for some other reason, the
children were much more in the drawing-room on Sundays than on any
other day; and it was an unwritten rule that any book that lived in
the drawing-room was fit Sunday reading. The consequence was that from
the time I could read until childish things were put away, I used to
spend a considerable part of the first day of the week in reading and
re-reading a collection of books, four of which were Scott’s poems,
‘Lalla Rookh,’ ‘The Essays of Elia,’ and Southey’s ‘Doctor.’ Therefore
it may be that I rank ‘Lalla Rookh’ too high.”
Blessed memories, and thrice blessed influences of childhood! But if
“Lalla Rookh,” like “Vathek,” was written to be the joy of imaginative
little boys and girls (alas for those who now replace it with “Allan
in Alaska,” and “Little Cora on the Continent”), the notes to “Lalla
Rookh” were, to my infant mind, even more enthralling than the poem.
There was a sketchiness about them, a detachment from time and
circumstance--I always hated being told the whole of everything--which
led me day after day into fresh fields of conjecture. The nymph who
was encircled by a rainbow, and bore a radiant son; the scimitars that
were so dazzling they made the warriors wink; the sacred well which
reflected the moon at midday; and the great embassy that was sent
“from some port of the Indies”--a welcome vagueness of geography--to
recover a monkey’s tooth, snatched away by some equally nameless
conqueror;--what child could fail to love such floating stars of
erudition?
Our great-grandfathers were profoundly impressed by Moore’s text-book
acquirements. The “Monthly Review” quoted a solid page of the notes
to dazzle British readers, who confessed themselves amazed to find a
fellow countryman so much “at home” in Persia and Arabia. Blackwood
authoritatively announced that Moore was familiar, not only “with the
grandest regions of the human soul,”--which is expected of a poet,--but
also with the remotest boundaries of the East; and that in every tone
and hue and form he was “purely and intensely Asiatic.” “The carping
criticism of paltry tastes and limited understandings faded before
that burst of admiration with which all enlightened spirits hailed the
beauty and magnificence of ‘Lalla Rookh.’”