to one unresponsive young man at Cambridge (who is repeatedly
reproached for not answering them), makes us wonder afresh who kept the
correspondence; and the problem is deepened by the appearance of Sir
William’s letters to his son. This is the way the first one begins:--
“MY DEAR BOY,--I cannot let a Post escape me without giving you the
Pleasure of knowing how much you have gladdened the Hearts of two
as affectionate Parents as ever lived; when you tell us that the
Principles of Religion begin already to exert their efficacy in
making you look down with contempt on the wretched grovelling Vices
with which you are surrounded, you make the most delightful Return
you can ever make for our Parental Care and Affection; you make Us
at Peace with Ourselves; and enable us to hope that our dear Boy
will Persevere in that Path which will ensure the greatest Share of
Comfort here, and a certainty of everlasting Happiness hereafter.”
I am disposed to think that Sir William made a fair copy of this letter
and of others like it, and laid them aside as models of parental
exhortation. Whether young Pepys was a little prig, or a particularly
accomplished little scamp (and both possibilities are open to
consideration), it seems equally unlikely that an Eton boy’s desk would
have proved a safe repository for such ample and admirable discourses.
The publication of Cowper’s letters in 1803 and 1804 struck a chill
into the hearts of accomplished and erudite correspondents. Poor Miss
Seward never rallied from the shock of their “commonness,” and of
their popularity. Here was a man who wrote about beggars and postmen,
about cats and kittens, about buttered toast and the kitchen table.
Here was a man who actually looked at things before he described them
(which was a startling innovation); who called the wind the wind, and
buttercups buttercups, and a hedgehog a hedgehog. Miss Seward honestly
despised Cowper’s letters. She said they were without “imagination or
eloquence,” without “discriminative criticism,” without “characteristic
investigation.” Investigating the relations between the family cat and
an intrusive viper was, from her point of view, unworthy the dignity
of an author. Cowper’s love of detail, his terrestrial turn of mind,
his humour, and his veracity were disconcerting in an artificial age.
When Miss Carter took a country walk, she did not stoop to observe
the trivial things she saw. Apparently she never saw anything. What
she described were the sentiments and emotions awakened in her by a
featureless principle called Nature. Even the ocean--which is too big
to be overlooked--started her on a train of moral reflections, in which
she passed easily from the grandeur of the elements to the brevity
of life, and the paltriness of earthly ambitions. “How vast are the
capacities of the soul, and how little and contemptible its aims and
pursuits.” With this original remark, the editor of the letters (a
nephew and a clergyman) was so delighted that he added a pious comment
of his own.
“If such be the case, how strong and conclusive is the argument deduced
from it, that the soul must be destined to another state more suitable
to its views and powers. It is much to be lamented that Mrs. Carter did
not pursue this line of thought any further.”
People who bought nine volumes of a correspondence like this were
expected, as the editor warns them, to derive from it “moral, literary,
and religious improvement.” It was in every way worthy of a lady who
had translated Epictetus, and who had the “great” Mrs. Montagu for a
friend. But, as Miss Seward pathetically remarked, “any well-educated
person, with talents not above the common level, produces every day
letters as well worth attention as most of Cowper’s, especially as
to diction.” The perverseness of the public in buying, in reading,
in praising these letters, filled her with pained bewilderment. Not
even the writer’s sincere and sad piety, his tendency to moralize, and
the transparent innocence of his life could reconcile her to plain
transcripts from nature, or to such an unaffecting incident as this:--
“A neighbour of mine in Silver End keeps an ass; the ass lives on the
other side of the garden wall, and I am writing in the greenhouse. It
happens that he is this morning most musically disposed; either cheered
by the fine weather, or by some new tune which he has just acquired,
or by finding his voice more harmonious than usual. It would be cruel
to mortify so fine a singer, therefore I do not tell him that he
interrupts and hinders me; but I venture to tell you so, and to plead
his performance in excuse of my abrupt conclusion.”
Here is not only the “common” diction which Miss Seward condemned, but
a very common casualty, which she would have naturally deemed beneath
notice. Cowper wrote a great deal about animals, and always with fine
and humorous appreciation. He sought relief from the hidden torment of
his soul in the contemplation of creatures who fill their place in life
without morals, and without misgivings. We know what safe companions
they were for him when we read his account of his hares, of his kitten
dancing on her hind legs,--“an exercise which she performs with all
the grace imaginable,”--and of his goldfinches amorously kissing each
other between the cage wires. When Miss Seward bent her mind to “the
lower orders of creation,” she did not describe them at all; she gave
them the benefit of that “discriminative criticism” which she felt that
Cowper lacked. Here, for example, is her thoughtful analysis of man’s
loyal servitor, the dog:--
“That a dog is a noble, grateful, faithful animal we must all be
conscious, and deserves a portion of man’s tenderness and care;--yet,
from its utter incapacity of more than glimpses of rationality,
there is a degree of insanity, as well as of impoliteness to his
acquaintance, and of unkindness to his friends, in lavishing so much
more of his attention in the first instance, and of affection in the
latter, upon it than upon them.”
It sounds like a parody on a great living master of complex prose.
By its side, Cowper’s description of Beau is certainly open to the
reproach of plainness.
“My dog is a spaniel. Till Miss Gunning begged him, he was the property
of a farmer, and had been accustomed to lie in the chimney corner among
the embers till the hair was singed from his back, and nothing was
left of his tail but the gristle. Allowing for these disadvantages,
he is really handsome; and when nature shall have furnished him with
a new coat, a gift which, in consideration of the ragged condition
of his old one, it is hoped she will not long delay, he will then be
unrivalled in personal endowments by any dog in this country.”
No wonder the Lichfield Swan was daunted by the inconceivable
popularity of such letters. No wonder Miss Hannah More preferred
Akenside to Cowper. What had these eloquent ladies to do with quiet
observation, with sober felicity of phrase, with “the style of honest
men”!
THE NOVELIST
Soft Sensibility, sweet Beauty’s soul!
Keeps her coy state, and animates the whole.
HAYLEY.
Readers of Miss Burney’s Diary will remember her maidenly confusion
when Colonel Fairly (the Honourable Stephen Digby) recommends to
her a novel called “Original Love-Letters between a Lady of Quality
and a Person of Inferior Station.” The authoress of “Evelina” and
“Cecilia”--then thirty-six years of age--is embarrassed by the glaring
impropriety of this title. In vain Colonel Fairly assures her that
the book contains “nothing but good sense, moral reflections, and
refined ideas, clothed in the most expressive and elegant language.”
Fanny, though longing to read a work of such estimable character,
cannot consent to borrow, or even discuss, anything so compromising
as love-letters; and, with her customary coyness, murmurs a few words
of denial. Colonel Fairly, however, is not easily daunted. Three days
later he actually brings the volume to that virginal bower, and asks
permission to read portions of it aloud, excusing his audacity with the
solemn assurance that there was no person, not even his own daughter,
in whose hands he would hesitate to place it. “It was now impossible
to avoid saying that I should like to hear it,” confesses Miss Burney.
“I should seem else to doubt either his taste or his delicacy, while
I have the highest opinion of both.” So the book is produced, and
the fair listener, bending over her needlework to hide her blushes,
acknowledges it to be “moral, elegant, feeling, and rational,” while
lamenting that the unhappy nature of its title makes its presence a
source of embarrassment.
This edifying little anecdote sheds light upon a palmy period of
propriety. Miss Burney’s self-consciousness, her superhuman diffidence,
and the “delicious confusion” which overwhelmed her upon the most
insignificant occasions, were beacon lights to her “sisters of
Parnassus,” to the less distinguished women who followed her brilliant
lead. The passion for novel-reading was asserting itself for the first
time in the history of the world as a dominant note of femininity. The
sentimentalities of fiction expanded to meet the woman’s standard, to
satisfy her irrational demands. “If the story-teller had always had
mere men for an audience,” says an acute English critic, “there would
have been no romance; nothing but the improving fable, or the indecent
anecdote.” It was the woman who, as Miss Seward sorrowfully observed,
sucked the “sweet poison” which the novelist administered; it was the
woman who stooped conspicuously to the “reigning folly” of the day.
The particular occasion of this outbreak on Miss Seward’s part was the
extraordinary success of a novel, now long forgotten by the world, but
which in its time rivalled in popularity “Evelina,” and the well-loved
“Mysteries of Udolpho.” Its plaintive name is “Emmeline; or the Orphan
of the Castle,” and its authoress, Charlotte Smith, was a woman of
courage, character, and good ability; also of a cheerful temperament,
which we should never have surmised from her works. It is said that
her son owed his advancement in the East India Company solely to the
admiration felt for “Emmeline,” which was being read as assiduously in
Bengal as in London. Sir Walter Scott, always the gentlest of critics,
held that it belonged to the “highest branch of fictitious narrative.”
The Queen, who considered it a masterpiece, lent it to Miss Burney, who
in turn gave it to Colonel Fairly, who ventured to observe that it was
not “piquant,” and asked for a “Rambler” instead.
“Emmeline” is _not_ piquant. Its heroine has more tears than Niobe.
“Formed of the softest elements, and with a mind calculated for select
friendship and domestic happiness,” it is her misfortune to be loved
by all the men she meets. The “interesting languor” of a countenance
habitually “wet with tears” proves their undoing. Her “deep convulsive
sobs” charm them more than the laughter of other maidens. When the
orphan leaves the castle for the first time, she weeps bitterly
for an hour; when she converses with her uncle, she can “no longer
command her tears, sobs obliged her to cease speaking”; and when he
urges upon her the advantages of a worldly marriage, she--as if that
were possible--“wept more than before.” When Delamere, maddened by
rejection, carries her off in a post-chaise (a delightful frontispiece
illustrates this episode), “a shower of tears fell from her eyes”; and
even a rescue fails to raise her spirits. Her response to Godolphin’s
tenderest approaches is to “wipe away the involuntary betrayers of her
emotion”; and when he exclaims in a transport: “Enchanting softness!
Is then the safety of Godolphin so dear to that angelic bosom?” she
answers him with “audible sobs.”
The other characters in the book are nearly as tearful. When Delamere
is not striking his forehead with his clenched fist, he is weeping at
Emmeline’s feet. The repentant Fitz-Edward lays his head on a chair,
and weeps “like a woman.” Lady Adelina, who has stooped to folly,
naturally sheds many tears, and writes an “Ode to Despair”; while
Emmeline from time to time gives “vent to a full heart” by weeping
over Lady Adelina’s infant. Godolphin sobs loudly when he sees his
frail sister; and when he meets Lord Westhaven after an absence of
four years, “the manly eyes of both brothers were filled with tears.”
We wonder how Scott, whose heroines cry so little and whose heroes
never cry at all, stood all this weeping; and, when we remember the
perfunctory nature of Sir Walter’s love scenes,--wedged in any way
among more important matters,--we wonder still more how he endured the
ravings of Delamere, or the melancholy verses with which Godolphin from
time to time soothes his despondent soul.
In deep depression sunk, the enfeebled mind
Will to the deaf cold elements complain;
And tell the embosomed grief, however vain,
To sullen surges and the viewless wind.
It was not, however, the mournfulness of “Emmeline” which displeased
Miss Seward, but rather the occasional intrusion of “low characters”;
of those underbred and unimpassioned persons who--as in Miss Burney’s
and Miss Ferrier’s novels--are naturally and almost cheerfully vulgar.
That Mr. William Hayley, author of “The Triumphs of Temper,” and her
own most ardent admirer, should tune his inconstant lyre in praise
of Mrs. Smith was more than Miss Seward could bear. “My very foes
acquit me of harbouring one grain of envy in my bosom,” she writes
him feelingly; “yet it is surely by no means inconsistent with that
exemption to feel a little indignant, and to enter one’s protest,
when compositions of mere mediocrity are extolled far above those of
real genius.” She then proceeds to point out the “indelicacy” of Lady
Adelina’s fall from grace, and the use of “kitchen phrases,” such as
“she grew white at the intelligence.” “White instead of pale,” comments
Miss Seward severely, “I have often heard servants say, but never a
gentleman or a gentlewoman.” If Mr. Hayley desires to read novels,
she urges upon him the charms of another popular heroine, Caroline de
Lichtfield, in whom he will find “simplicity, wit, pathos, and the
most exalted generosity”; and the history of whose adventures “makes
curiosity gasp, admiration kindle, and pity dissolve.”
Caroline, “the gay child of Artless Nonchalance,” is at least a more
cheerful young person than the Orphan. Her story, translated from
the French of Madame de Montolieu, was widely read in England and on
the Continent; and Miss Seward tells us that its author was indebted
“to the merits and graces of these volumes for a transition from
incompetence to the comforts of wealth; from the unprotected dependence
of waning virginity to the social pleasures of wedded friendship.”
In plain words, we are given to understand that a rich and elderly
German widower read the book, sought an acquaintance with the writer,
and married her. “Hymen,” exclaims Miss Seward, “passed by the fane
of Cytherea and the shrine of Plutus, to light his torch at the altar
of genius”;--which beautiful burst of eloquence makes it painful to
add the chilling truth, and say that “Caroline de Lichtfield” was
written six years after its author’s marriage with M. de Montolieu,
who was a Swiss, and her second husband. She espoused her first, M. de
Crousaz, when she was eighteen, and still comfortably remote from the
terrors of waning virginity. Accurate information was not, however, a
distinguishing characteristic of the day. Sir Walter Scott, writing
some years later of Madame de Montolieu, ignores both marriages
altogether, and calls her Mademoiselle.
No rich reward lay in wait for poor Charlotte Smith, whose husband
was systematically impecunious, and whose large family of children
were supported wholly by her pen. “Emmeline, or the Orphan of the
Castle” was followed by “Ethelinda, or the Recluse of the Lake,” and
that by “The Old Manor House,” which was esteemed her masterpiece. Its
heroine bears the interesting name of Monimia; and when she marries
her Orlando, “every subsequent hour of their lives was marked by some
act of benevolence,”--a breathless and philanthropic career. By this
time the false-hearted Hayley had so far transferred to Mrs. Smith
the homage due to Miss Seward that he was rewarded with the painful
privilege of reading “The Old Manor House” in manuscript,--a privilege
reserved in those days for tried and patient friends. The poet had
himself dallied a little with fiction, having written, “solely to
promote the interests of religion,” a novel called “The Young Widow,”
which no one appears to have read, except perhaps the Archbishop of
Canterbury, to whom its author sent a copy.
In purity of motive Mr. Hayley was rivalled only by Mrs. Brunton,
whose two novels, “Self-Control” and “Discipline,” were designed “to
procure admission for the religion of a sound mind and of the Bible
where it cannot find access in any other form.” Mrs. Brunton was
perhaps the most commended novelist of her time. The inexorable titles
of her stories secured for them a place upon the guarded book-shelves
of the young. Many a demure English girl must have blessed these
deluding titles, just as, forty years later, many an English boy
blessed the inspiration which had impelled George Borrow to misname
his immortal book “The Bible in Spain.” When the wife of a clergyman
undertook to write a novel in the interests of religion and the
Scriptures; when she called it “Discipline,” and drew up a stately
apology for employing fiction as a medium for the lessons she meant
to convey, what parent could refuse to be beguiled? There is nothing
trivial in Mrs. Brunton’s conception of a good novel, in the standard
she proposes to the world.
“Let the admirable construction of fable in ‘Tom Jones’ be employed to
unfold characters like Miss Edgeworth’s; let it lead to a moral like
Richardson’s; let it be told with the elegance of Rousseau, and with
the simplicity of Goldsmith; let it be all this, and Milton need not
have been ashamed of the work.”
How far “Discipline” and “Self-Control” approach this composite
standard of perfection it would be invidious to ask; but they
accomplished a miracle of their own in being both popular and
permitted, in pleasing the frivolous, and edifying the devout.
Dedicated to Miss Joanna Baillie, sanctioned by Miss Hannah More,
they stood above reproach, though not without a flavour of depravity.
Mrs. Brunton’s outlook upon life was singularly uncomplicated. All
her women of fashion are heartless and inane. All her men of fashion
cherish dishonourable designs upon female youth and innocence. Indeed
the strenuous efforts of Laura, in “Self-Control,” to preserve her
virginity may be thought a trifle explicit for very youthful readers.
We find her in the first chapter--she is seventeen--fainting at the
feet of her lover, who has just revealed the unworthy nature of his
intentions; and we follow her through a series of swoons to the last
pages, where she “sinks senseless” into--of all vessels!--a canoe;
and is carried many miles down a Canadian river in a state of nicely
balanced unconsciousness. Her self-control (the crowning virtue which
gives its title to the book) is so marked that when she dismisses
Hargrave on probation, and then meets him accidentally in a London
print-shop after a four months’ absence, she “neither screamed nor
fainted”; only “trembled violently, and leant against the counter
to recover strength and composure.” It is not until he turns, and,
“regardless of the inquisitive looks of the spectators, clasped her
to his breast,” that “her head sunk upon his shoulder, and she lost
all consciousness.” As for her heroic behaviour when the same Hargrave
(having lapsed from grace) shoots the virtuous De Courcy in Lady
Pelham’s summer-house, it must be described in the author’s own words.
No others could do it justice.
“To the plants which their beauty had recommended to Lady Pelham, Laura
had added a few of which the usefulness was known to her. Agaric of
the oak was of the number; and she had often applied it where many a
hand less fair would have shrunk from the task. Nor did she hesitate
now. The ball had entered near the neck; and the feminine, the delicate
Laura herself disengaged the wound from its covering; the feeling, the
tender Laura herself performed an office from which false sensibility
would have recoiled in horror.”
Is it possible that anybody except Miss Burney could have shrunk
modestly from the sight of a lover’s neck, especially when it had
a bullet in it? Could a sense of decorum be more overwhelmingly
expressed? Yet the same novel which held up to our youthful
great-grandmothers this unapproachable standard of propriety presented
to their consideration the most intimate details of libertinism. There
was then, as now, no escape from the moralist’s devastating disclosures.
One characteristic is common to all these faded romances, which in
their time were read with far more fervour and sympathy than are
their successors to-day. This is the undying and undeviating nature
of their heroes’ affections. Written by ladies who took no count of
man’s proverbial inconstancy, they express a touching belief in the
supremacy of feminine charms. A heroine of seventeen (she is seldom
older), with ringlets, and a “faltering timidity,” inflames both the
virtuous and the profligate with such imperishable passions, that
when triumphant morality leads her to the altar, defeated vice cannot
survive her loss. Her suitors, reversing the enviable experience of Ben
Bolt,--
weep with delight when she gives them a smile,
And tremble with fear at her frown.
They grow faint with rapture when they enter her presence, and,
when she repels their advances, they signify their disappointment
by gnashing their teeth, and beating their heads against the wall.
Rejection cannot alienate their faithful hearts; years and absence
cannot chill their fervour. They belong to a race of men who, if they
ever existed at all, are now as extinct as the mastodon.
It was Miss Jane Porter who successfully transferred to a conquering
hero that exquisite sensibility of soul which had erstwhile belonged
to the conquering heroine,--to the Emmelines and Adelinas of fiction.
Dipping her pen “in the tears of Poland,” she conveyed the glittering
drops to the eyes of “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” whence they gush in
rills,--like those of the Prisoner of Chillon’s brother. Thaddeus is of
such exalted virtue that strangers in London address him as “excellent
young gentleman,” and his friends speak of him as “incomparable
young man.” He rescues children from horses’ hoofs and from burning
buildings. He nurses them through small-pox, and leaves their bedsides
in the most casual manner, to mingle in crowds and go to the play.
He saves women from insult on the streets. He is kind even to “that
poor slandered and abused animal, the cat,”--which is certainly to
his credit. Wrapped in a sable cloak, wearing “hearse-like plumes” on
his hat, a star upon his breast, and a sabre by his side, he moves
with Hamlet’s melancholy grace through the five hundred pages of the
story. “His unrestrained and elegant conversation acquired new pathos
from the anguish that was driven back to his heart: like the beds of
rivers which infuse their own nature with the current, his hidden grief
imparted an indescribable interest and charm to all his sentiments and
actions.”