understandings.” They would rather join in any general acclamation.
“Browning’s poetry obscure!” I once heard a lecturer say with scorn.
“Let us ask ourselves, ‘Obscure to whom?’ No doubt a great many things
are obscure to long-tailed Brazilian apes.” After which his audience,
with one accord, admitted that it understood “Sordello.” So when
Jeffrey--great umpire of games whose rules he never knew--informed
the British public that there was not in “Lalla Rookh” “a simile,
a description, a name, a trait of history, or allusion of romance
that does not indicate entire familiarity with the life, nature, and
learning of the East,” the public contentedly took his word for it.
When he remarked that “the dazzling splendours, the breathing odours”
of Araby were without doubt Moore’s “native element,” the public,
whose native element was neither splendid nor sweet-smelling, envied
the Irishman his softer joys. “Lalla Rookh” might be “voluptuous” (a
word we find in every review of the period), but its orientalism was
beyond dispute. Did not Mrs. Skinner tell Moore that she had, when in
India, translated the prose interludes into Bengali, for the benefit
of her moonshee, and that the man was amazed at the accuracy of the
costumes? Did not the nephew of the Persian ambassador in Paris tell
Mr. Stretch, who told Moore, that “Lalla Rookh” had been translated
into Persian; that the songs--particularly “Bendemeer’s Stream”--were
sung “everywhere”; and that the happy natives could hardly believe the
whole work had not been taken originally from a Persian manuscript?
I’m told, dear Moore, your lays are sung
(Can it be true, you lucky man?)
By moonlight, in the Persian tongue,
Along the streets of Ispahan.
And not of Ispahan only; for in the winter of 1821 the Berlin court
presented “Lalla Rookh” with such splendour, such wealth of detail,
and such titled actors, that Moore’s heart was melted and his head
was turned (as any other heart would have been melted, and any other
head would have been turned) by the reports thereof. A Grand Duchess
of Russia took the part of Lalla Rookh; the Duke of Cumberland was
Aurungzebe; and a beautiful young sister of Prince Radzivil enchanted
all beholders as the Peri. “Nothing else was talked about in Berlin”
(it must have been a limited conversation); the King of Prussia had
a set of engravings made of the noble actors in their costumes; and
the Crown Prince sent word to Moore that he slept always with a copy
of “Lalla Rookh” under his pillow, which was foolish, but flattering.
Hardly had the echoes of this royal fête died away, when Spontini
brought out in Berlin his opera “The Feast of Roses,” and Moore’s
triumph in Prussia was complete. Byron, infinitely amused at the
success of his own good advice, wrote to the happy poet: “Your Berlin
drama is an honour unknown since the days of Elkanah Settle, whose
‘Empress of Morocco’ was presented by the court ladies, which was, as
Johnson remarks, ‘the last blast of inflammation to poor Dryden.’”
Who shall say that this comparison is without its dash of malice? There
is a natural limit to the success we wish our friends, even when we
have spurred them on their way.
If the English court did not lend itself with much gayety or grace
to dramatic entertainments, English society was quick to respond
to the delights of a modified orientalism. That is to say, it sang
melting songs about bulbuls and Shiraz wine; wore ravishing Turkish
costumes whenever it had a chance (like the beautiful Mrs. Winkworth
in the charades at Gaunt House); and covered its locks--if they were
feminine locks--with turbans of portentous size and splendour. When
Mrs. Fitzherbert, aged seventy-three, gave a fancy dress ball, so many
of her guests appeared as Turks, and Georgians, and sultanas, that it
was hard to believe that Brighton, and not Stamboul, was the scene of
the festivity. At an earlier entertainment, “a rural breakfast and
promenade,” given by Mrs. Hobart at her villa near Fulham, and “graced
by the presence of royalty,” the leading attraction was Mrs. Bristow,
who represented Queen Nourjahad in the “Garden of Roses.” “Draped in
all the magnificence of Eastern grandeur, Mrs. Bristow was seated in
the larger drawing-room (which was very beautifully fitted up with
cushions in the Indian style), smoking her hookah amidst all sorts
of the choicest perfumes. Mrs. Bristow was very profuse with otto of
roses, drops of which were thrown about the ladies’ dresses. The whole
house was scented with the delicious fragrance.”
The “European Magazine,” the “Monthly Museum,” all the dim old
periodicals published in the early part of the last century for
feminine readers, teem with such “society notes.” From them, too, we
learn that by 1823 turbans of “rainbow striped gauze frosted with gold”
were in universal demand; while “black velvet turbans, enormously
large, and worn very much on one side,” must have given a rakish
appearance to stout British matrons. “La Belle Assemblée” describes for
us with tender enthusiasm a ravishing turban, “in the Turkish style,”
worn in the winter of 1823 at the theatre and at evening parties. This
masterpiece was of “pink oriental crêpe, beautifully folded in front,
and richly ornamented with pearls. The folds are fastened on the left
side, just above the ear, with a Turkish scimitar of pearls; and on the
right side are tassels of pearls, surmounted by a crescent and a star.”
Here we have Lady Jane or Lady Amelia transformed at once into young
Nourmahal; and, to aid the illusion, a “Circassian corset” was devised,
free from encroaching steel or whalebone, and warranted to give its
English wearers the “flowing and luxurious lines” admired in the
overfed inmates of the harem. When the passion for orientalism began
to subside in London, remote rural districts caught and prolonged the
infection. I have sympathized all my life with the innocent ambition
of Miss Matty Jenkyns to possess a sea-green turban, like the one worn
by Queen Adelaide; and have never been able to forgive that ruthlessly
sensible Mary Smith--the chronicler of Cranford--for taking her a
“neat middle-aged cap” instead. “I was most particularly anxious to
prevent her from disfiguring her small gentle mousy face with a great
Saracen’s head turban,” says the judicious Miss Smith with a smirk of
self-commendation; and poor Miss Matty--the cap being bought--has to
bow to this arbiter of fate. How much we all suffer in life from the
discretion of our families and friends!
Thackeray laughed the dim ghost of “Lalla Rookh” out of England. He
mocked at the turbans, and at the old ladies who wore them; at the
vapid love songs, and at the young ladies who sang them.
I am a little brown bulbul. Come and listen in the moonlight. Praise
be to Allah! I am a merry bard.
He derided the “breathing odours of Araby,” and the Eastern travellers
who imported this exotic atmosphere into Grosvenor Square. Yonng
Bedwin Sands, who has “lived under tents,” who has published a quarto,
ornamented with his own portrait in various oriental costumes, and
who goes about accompanied by a black servant of most unprepossessing
appearance, “just like another Brian de Bois Guilbert,” is only a
degree less ridiculous than Clarence Bulbul, who gives Miss Tokely a
piece of the sack in which an indiscreet Zuleika was drowned, and
whose servant says to callers: “Mon maître est au divan,” or “Monsieur
trouvera Monsieur dans son sérail.... He has coffee and pipes for
everybody. I should like you to have seen the face of old Bowly, his
college tutor, called upon to sit cross-legged on a divan, a little
cup of bitter black mocha put into his hand, and a large amber-muzzled
pipe stuck into his mouth before he could say it was a fine day. Bowly
almost thought he had compromised his principles by consenting so far
to this Turkish manner.” Bulbul’s sure and simple method of commending
himself to young ladies is by telling them they remind him of a girl
he knew in Circassia,--Ameena, the sister of Schamyle Bey. “Do you
know, Miss Pim,” he thoughtfully observes, “that you would fetch twenty
thousand piastres in the market at Constantinople?” Whereupon Miss
Pim is filled with embarrassed elation. An English girl, conscious
of being in no great demand at home, was naturally flattered as well
as fluttered by the thought of having market value elsewhere. And
perhaps this feminine instinct was at the root of “Lalla Rookh’s” long
popularity in England.
THE CORRESPONDENT
Correspondences are like small-clothes before the invention of
suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.--SYDNEY SMITH to MRS.
CROWE.
In this lamentable admission, in this blunt and revolutionary
sentiment, we hear the first clear striking of a modern note, the
first gasping protest against the limitless demands of letter-writing.
When Sydney Smith was a little boy, it was not impossible to keep a
correspondence up; it was impossible to let it go. He was ten years
old when Sir William Pepys copied out long portions of Mrs. Montagu’s
letters, and left them as a legacy to his heirs. He was twelve years
old when Miss Anna Seward--the “Swan of Lichfield”--copied thirteen
pages of description which the Rev. Thomas Sedgwick Whalley had
written her from Switzerland, and sent them to her friend, Mr. William
Hayley. She called this “snatching him to the Continent by Whalleyan
magic.” What Mr. Hayley called it we do not know; but he had his
revenge, for the impartial “Swan” copied eight verses of an “impromptu”
which Mr. Hayley had written upon her, and sent them in turn to Mr.
Whalley;--thus making each friend a scourge to the other, and widening
the network of correspondence which had enmeshed the world.
It is impossible not to feel a trifle envious of Mr. Whalley, who
looms before us as the most petted and accomplished of clerical
bores, of “literary and chess-playing divines.” He was but twenty-six
when the kind-hearted Bishop of Ely presented him with the living of
Hagworthingham, stipulating that he should not take up his residence
there,--the neighbourhood of the Lincolnshire fens being considered an
unhealthy one. Mr. Whalley cheerfully complied with this condition;
and for fifty years the duties were discharged by curates, who
could not afford good health; while the rector spent his winters
in Europe, and his summers at Mendip Lodge. He was of an amorous
disposition,--“sentimentally pathetic,” Miss Burney calls him,--and
married three times, two of his wives being women of fortune. He
lived in good society, and beyond his means, like a gentleman; was
painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds (who has very delicately and maliciously
accentuated his resemblance to the tiny spaniel he holds in his arms);
and died of old age, in the comfortable assurance that he had lost
nothing the world could give. A voluminous correspondence--afterwards
published in two volumes--afforded scope for that clerical diffuseness
which should have found its legitimate outlet in the Hagworthingham
pulpit.
The Rev. Augustus Jessup has recorded a passionate admiration for
Cicero’s letters, on the ground that they never describe scenery; but
Mr. Whalley’s letters seldom do anything else. He wrote to Miss Sophia
Weston a description of Vaucluse, which fills three closely printed
pages. Miss Weston copied every word, and sent it to Miss Seward, who
copied every word of her copy, and sent it to the long-suffering Mr.
Hayley, with the remark that Mr. Whalley and Petrarch were “kindred
spirits.” Later on this kinship was made pleasantly manifest by the
publication of “Edwy and Edilda,” which is described as a “domestic
epic,” and which Mr. Whalley’s friends considered to be a moral
bulwark as well as an epoch-making poem. Indeed, we find Miss Seward
imploring him to republish it, on the extraordinary ground that it will
add to his happiness in heaven to know that the fruits of his industry
“continue to inspire virtuous pleasure through passing generations.”
It is animating to contemplate the celestial choirs congratulating
the angel Whalley at intervals on the “virtuous pleasure” inspired by
“Edwy and Edilda.” “This,” says Mr. Kenwigs, “is an ewent at which Evin
itself looks down.”
There was no escape from the letter-writer who, a hundred or a hundred
and twenty-five years ago, captured a coveted correspondent. It would
have been as easy to shake off an octopus or a boa-constrictor. Miss
Seward opened her attack upon Sir Walter Scott, whom she had never
seen, with a long and passionate letter, lamenting the death of a
friend whom Scott had never seen. She conjured him not to answer this
letter, because she was “dead to the world.” Scott gladly obeyed,
content that the lady should be at least dead to him, which was the
last possibility she contemplated. Before twelve months were out they
were in brisk correspondence, an acquaintance was established, and when
she died in earnest, some years later, he found himself one of her
literary executors, and twelve quarto manuscript volumes of her letters
waiting to be published. These Scott wisely refused to touch; but he
edited her poems,--a task he much disliked,--wrote the epitaph on her
monument in Lichfield Cathedral, and kindly maintained that, although
her sentimentality appalled him, and her enthusiasm chilled his soul,
she was a talented and pleasing person.
The most formidable thing about the letters of this period--apart from
their length--is their eloquence. It bubbles and seethes over every
page. Miss Seward, writing to Mrs. Knowles in 1789 upon the dawning of
the French Revolution, of which she understood no more than a canary,
pipes an ecstatic trill. “So France has dipped her lilies in the living
stream of American freedom, and bids her sons be slaves no longer. In
such a contest the vital sluices must be wastefully opened; but few
English hearts I hope there are that do not wish victory may sit upon
the swords that freedom has unsheathed.” It sounds so exactly like the
Americans in “Martin Chuzzlewit” that one doubts whether Mr. Jefferson
Brick or the Honourable Elijah Pogram really uttered the sentiment;
while surely to Mrs. Hominy, and not to the Lichfield Swan, must be
credited this beautiful passage about a middle-aged but newly married
couple: “The berries of holly, with which Hymen formed that garland,
blush through the snows of time, and dispute the prize of happiness
with the roses of youth;--and they are certainly less subject to the
blights of expectation and palling fancy.”
It is hard to conceive of a time when letters like these were sacredly
treasured by the recipients (our best friend, the waste-paper basket,
seems to have been then unknown); when the writers thereof bequeathed
them as a legacy to the world; and when the public--being under no
compulsion--bought six volumes of them as a contribution to English
literature. It is hard to think of a girl of twenty-one writing to an
intimate friend as Elizabeth Robinson, afterwards the “great” Mrs.
Montagu, wrote to the young Duchess of Portland, who appears to have
ventured upon a hope that they were having a mild winter in Kent.
“I am obliged to your Grace for your good wishes of fair weather;
sunshine gilds every object, but, alas! December is but cloudy weather,
how few seasons boast many days of calm! April, which is the blooming
youth of the year, is as famous for hasty showers as for gentle
sunshine. May, June, and July have too much heat and violence, the
Autumn withers the Summer’s gayety, and in the Winter the hopeful
blossoms of Spring and fair fruits of Summer are decayed, and storms
and clouds arise.”
After these obvious truths, for which the almanac stands responsible,
Miss Robinson proceeds to compare human life to the changing year,
winding up at the close of a dozen pages: “Happy and worthy are those
few whose youth is not impetuous, nor their age sullen; they indeed
should be esteemed, and their happy influence courted.”
Twenty-one, and ripe for moral platitudes! What wonder that we find the
same lady, when crowned with years and honours, writing to the son of
her friend, Lord Lyttelton, a remorselessly long letter of precept and
good counsel, which that young gentleman (being afterwards known as the
wicked Lord Lyttelton) seems never to have taken to heart.
“The morning of life, like the morning of the day, should be dedicated
to business. Give it therefore, dear Mr. Lyttelton, to strenuous
exertion and labour of mind, before the indolence of the meridian hour,
or the unabated fervour of the exhausted day, renders you unfit for
severe application.”
“Unabated fervour of the exhausted day” is a phrase to be commended.
We remember with awe that Mrs. Montagu was the brightest star in the
chaste firmament of female intellect;--“the first woman for literary
knowledge in England,” wrote Mrs. Thrale; “and, if in England, I hope I
may say in the world.” We hope so, indeed. None but a libertine would
doubt it. And no one less contumelious than Dr. Johnson ever questioned
Mrs. Montagu’s supremacy. She was, according to her great-grandniece,
Miss Climenson, “adored by men,” while “purest of the pure”; which
was equally pleasant for herself and for Mr. Montagu. She wrote more
letters, with fewer punctuation marks, than any Englishwoman of her
day; and her nephew, the fourth Baron Rokeby, nearly blinded himself
in deciphering the two volumes of undated correspondence which were
printed in 1810. Two more followed in 1813, after which the gallant
Baron either died at his post or was smitten with despair; for
sixty-eight cases of letters lay undisturbed for the best part of a
century, when they passed into Miss Climenson’s hands. This intrepid
lady received them--so she says--with “unbounded joy”; and has already
published two fat volumes, with the promise of several others in the
near future. “Les morts n’écrivent point,” said Madame de Maintenon
hopefully; but of what benefit is this inactivity, when we still
continue to receive their letters?
Miss Elizabeth Carter, called by courtesy Mrs. Carter, was the most
vigorous of Mrs. Montagu’s correspondents. Although a lady of learning,
who read Greek and had dipped into Hebrew, she was far too “humble and
unambitious” to claim an acquaintance with the exalted mistress of
Montagu House; but that patroness of literature treated her with such
true condescension that they were soon on the happiest terms. When Mrs.
Montagu writes to Miss Carter that she has seen the splendid coronation
of George III, Miss Carter hastens to remind her that such splendour is
for majesty alone.
“High rank and power require every external aid of pomp and éclat that
may awe and astonish spectators by the ideas of the magnificent and
sublime; while the ornaments of more equal conditions should be adapted
to the quiet tenour of general life, and be content to charm and engage
by the gentler graces of the beautiful and pleasing.”
Mrs. Montagu _was_ fond of display. All her friends admitted, and
some deplored the fact. But surely there was no likelihood of
her appropriating the coronation services as a feature for the
entertainments at Portman Square.
Advice, however, was the order of the day. As the excellent Mrs.
Chapone wrote to Sir William Pepys: “It is a dangerous commerce for
friends to praise each other’s Virtues, instead of reminding each other
of duties and of failings.” Yet a too robust candour carried perils of
its own, for Miss Seward having written to her “beloved Sophia Weston”
with “an ingenuousness which I thought necessary for her welfare, but
which her high spirits would not brook,” Sophia was so unaffectedly
angry that twelve years of soothing silence followed.
Another wonderful thing about the letter-writers, especially the female
letter-writers, of this engaging period is the wealth of hyperbole in
which they rioted. Nothing is told in plain terms. Tropes, metaphors,
and similes adorn every page; and the supreme elegance of the language
is rivalled only by the elusiveness of the idea, which is lost in an
eddy of words. Marriage is always alluded to as the “hymeneal torch,”
or the “hymeneal chain,” or “hymeneal emancipation from parental care.”
Birds are “feathered muses,” and a heart is a “vital urn.” When Mrs.
Montagu writes to Mr. Gilbert West, that “miracle of the Moral World,”
to condole with him on his gout, she laments that his “writing hand,
first dedicated to the Muses, then with maturer judgment consecrated
to the Nymphs of Solyma, should be led captive by the cruel foe.” If
Mr. West chanced not to know who or what the Nymphs of Solyma were, he
had the intelligent pleasure of finding out. Miss Seward describes Mrs.
Tighe’s sprightly charms as “Aonian inspiration added to the cestus
of Venus”; and speaks of the elderly “ladies of Llangollen” as, “in
all but the voluptuous sense, Armidas of its bowers.” Duelling is to
her “the murderous punctilio of Luciferian honour.” A Scotch gentleman
who writes verse is “a Cambrian Orpheus”; a Lichfield gentleman who
sketches is “our Lichfield Claude”; and a budding clerical writer is
“our young sacerdotal Marcellus.” When the “Swan” wished to apprise
Scott of Dr. Darwin’s death, it never occurred to her to write, as
we in this dull age should do: “Dr. Darwin died last night,” or,
“Poor Dr. Darwin died last night.” She wrote: “A bright luminary
in this neighbourhood recently shot from his sphere with awful and
deplorable suddenness”;--thus pricking Sir Walter’s imagination to
the wonder point before descending to facts. Even the rain and snow
were never spoken of in the plain language of the Weather Bureau;
and the elements had a set of allegories all their own. Miss Carter
would have scorned to take a walk by the sea. She “chased the ebbing
Neptune.” Mrs. Chapone was not blown by the wind. She was “buffeted
by Eolus and his sons.” Miss Seward does not hope that Mr. Whalley’s
rheumatism is better; but that he has overcome “the malinfluence of
marine damps, and the monotonous murmuring of boundless waters.”
Perhaps the most triumphant instance on record of sustained metaphor
is Madame d’Arblay’s account of Mrs. Montagu’s yearly dinner to the
London chimney-sweeps, in which the word sweep is never once used, so
that the editor was actually compelled to add a footnote to explain
what the lady meant. The boys are “jetty objects,” “degraded outcasts
from society,” and “sooty little agents of our most blessed luxury.”
They are “hapless artificers who perform the most abject offices of
any authorized calling”; they are “active guardians of our blazing
hearth”; but plain chimney-sweeps, never! Madame d’Arblay would have
perished at the stake before using so vulgar and obvious a term.
How was this mass of correspondence preserved? How did it happen that
the letters were never torn up, or made into spills,--the common fate
of all such missives when I was a little girl. Granted that Miss Carter
treasured Mrs. Montagu’s letters (she declared fervidly she could never
be so barbarous as to destroy one), and that Mrs. Montagu treasured
Miss Carter’s. Granted that Miss Weston treasured Mr. Whalley’s, and
that Mr. Whalley treasured Miss Weston’s. Granted that Miss Seward
provided against all contingencies by copying her own letters into
fat blank books before they were mailed, elaborating her spineless
sentences, and omitting everything she deemed too trivial or too
domestic for the public ear. But is it likely that young Lyttelton at
Oxford laid sacredly away Mrs. Montagu’s pages of good counsel, or
that young Franks at Cambridge preserved the ponderous dissertations
of Sir William Pepys? Sir William was a Baronet, a Master in Chancery,
and--unlike his famous ancestor--a most respectable and exemplary
gentleman. His innocent ambition was to be on terms of intimacy with
the literary lights of his day. He knew and ardently admired Dr.
Johnson, who in return detested him cordially. He knew and revered, “in
unison with the rest of the world,” Miss Hannah More. He corresponded
at great length with lesser lights,--with Mrs. Chapone, and Mrs.
Hartley, and Sir Nathaniel Wraxall. He wrote endless commentaries on
Homer and Virgil to young Franks, and reams of good advice to his
little son at Eton. There is something pathetic in his regret that the
limitations of life will not permit him to be as verbose as he would
like. “I could write for an hour,” he assures poor Franks, “upon that
most delightful of all passages, the Lion deprived of its Young; but
the few minutes one can catch amidst the Noise, hurry and confusion of
an Assize town will not admit of any Classical discussions. But was I
in the calm retirement of your Study at Acton, I have much to say to
you, to which I can only allude.”