wrote to her erring son; and while the maternal point of view
deserves consideration (no parent could be expected to relish such a
prospect), the letter is noteworthy as being one of the few written
to Godwin, or about Godwin, which forces us to sympathize with the
philosopher. The boy who was reproved for picking up the family cat on
Sunday--“demeaning myself with such profaneness on the Lord’s day”--was
little likely to find his religion “all pure profit.” His account
of the books he read as a child, and of his precocious and unctuous
piety, is probably over-emphasized for the sake of colour; but the
Evangelical literature of his day, whether designed for young people or
for adults, was of a melancholy and discouraging character. The “Pious
Deaths of Many Godly Children” (sad monitor of the Godwin nursery)
appears to have been read off the face of the earth; but there have
descended to us sundry volumes of a like character, which even now stab
us with pity for the little readers long since laid in their graves.
The most frivolous occupation of the good boy in these old story-books
is searching the Bible, “with mamma’s permission,” for texts in which
David “praises God for the weather.” More serious-minded children weep
floods of tears because they are “lost sinners.” In a book of “Sermons
for the Very Young,” published by the Vicar of Walthamstow in the
beginning of the last century, we find the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah
selected as an appropriate theme for infancy, and its lessons driven
home with all the force of a direct personal application. “Think,
little child, of the fearful story. The wrath of God is upon them. Do
they now repent of their sins? It is all too late. Do they cry for
mercy? There is none to hear them.... Your heart, little child, is
full of sin. You think of what is not right, and then you wish it, and
that is sin.... Ah, what shall sinners do when the last day comes upon
them? What will they think when God shall punish them forever?”
Children brought up on these lines passed swiftly from one form of
hysteria to another, from self-exaltation and the assurance of grace
to fears which had no easement. There is nothing more terrible in
literature than Borrow’s account of the Welsh preacher who believed
that when he was a child of seven he had committed the unpardonable
sin, and whose whole life was shadowed by fear. At the same time that
little William Godwin was composing beautiful death-bed speeches for
the possible edification of his parents and neighbours, we find Miss
Elizabeth Carter writing to Mrs. Montagu about her own nephew, who
realized, at seven years of age, how much he and all creatures stood in
need of pardon; and who, being ill, pitifully entreated his father to
pray that his sins might be forgiven. Commenting upon which incident,
the reverent Montagu Pennington, who edited Miss Carter’s letters,
bids us remember that it reflects more credit on the parents who
brought their child up with so just a sense of religion than it does on
the poor infant himself. “Innocence,” says the inflexible Mr. Stanley,
in “Cœlebs in Search of a Wife,” “can never be pleaded as a ground of
acceptance, because the thing does not exist.”
With the dawning of the nineteenth century came the controversial
novel; and to understand its popularity we have but to glance at
the books which preceded it, and compared to which it presented an
animated and contentious aspect. One must needs have read “Elements of
Morality” at ten, and “Strictures on Female Education” at fifteen, to
be able to relish “Father Clement” at twenty. Sedate young women, whose
lightest available literature was “Cœlebs,” or “Hints towards forming
the Character of a Princess,” and who had been presented on successive
birthdays with Mrs. Chapone’s “Letters on the Improvement of the Mind,”
and Mrs. West’s “Letters to a Young Lady,” and Miss Hamilton’s “Letters
to the Daughter of a Nobleman,” found a natural relief in studying
the dangers of dissent, or the secret machinations of the Jesuits.
Many a dull hour was quickened into pleasurable apprehension of
Jesuitical intrigues, from the days when Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough,
stoutly refused to take cinchona--a form of quinine--because it
was then known as Jesuit’s bark, and might be trusted to poison a
British constitution, to the days when Sir William Pepys wrote in all
seriousness to Hannah More: “You surprise me by saying that your good
Archbishop has been in danger from the Jesuits; but I believe they are
concealed in places where they are less likely to be found than in
Ireland.”
Just what they were going to do to the good Archbishop does not appear,
for Sir William at this point abruptly abandons the prelate to tell the
story of a Norwich butcher, who for some mysterious and unexplained
reason was hiding from the inquisitors of Lisbon. No dignitary was too
high, no orphan child too low to be the objects of a Popish plot. Miss
Carter writes to Mrs. Montagu, in 1775, about a little foundling whom
Mrs. Chapone had placed at service with some country neighbours.
“She behaves very prettily, and with great affection to the people
with whom she is living,” says Miss Carter. “One of the reasons she
assigns for her fondness is that they give her enough food, which she
represents as a deficient article in the workhouse; and says that on
Fridays particularly she never had any dinner. _Surely the parish
officers have not made a Papist the mistress!_ If this is not the case,
the loss of one dinner in a week is of no great consequence.”
To the poor hungry child it was probably of much greater consequence
than the theological bias of the matron. Nor does a dinnerless Friday
appear the surest way to win youthful converts to the fold. But
devout ladies who had read Canon Seward’s celebrated tract on the
“Comparison between Paganism and Popery” (in which he found little to
choose between them) were well on their guard against the insidious
advances of Rome. “When I had no religion at all,” confesses Cowper
to Lady Hesketh, “I had yet a terrible dread of the Pope.” The worst
to be apprehended from Methodists was their lamentable tendency to
enthusiasm, and their ill-advised meddling with the poor. It is true
that a farmer of Cheddar told Miss Patty More that a Methodist minister
had once preached under his mother’s best apple tree, and that the
sensitive tree had never borne another apple; but this was an extreme
case. The Cheddar vestry resolved to protect their orchards from blight
by stoning the next preacher who invaded the parish, and their example
was followed with more or less fervour throughout England. In a quiet
letter written from Margate (1768), by the Rev. John Lyon, we find this
casual allusion to the process:--
“We had a Methodist preacher hold forth last night. I came home just as
he had finished. I believe the poor man fared badly, for I saw, as I
passed, eggs, stones, etc., fly pretty thick.”
It was all in the day’s work. The Rev. Lyon, who was a scholar and
an antiquarian, and who wrote an exhaustive history of Dover, had no
further interest in matters obviously aloof from his consideration.
This simple and robust treatment, so quieting to the nerves of the
practitioners, was unserviceable for Papists, who did not preach in
the open; and a great deal of suppressed irritation found no better
outlet than print. It appears to have been a difficult matter in
those days to write upon any subject without reverting sooner or
later to the misdeeds of Rome. Miss Seward pauses in her praise of
Blair’s sermons to lament the “boastful egotism” of St. Gregory of
Nazianzus, who seems tolerably remote; and Mr. John Dyer, when wrapped
in peaceful contemplation of the British wool-market, suddenly and
fervently denounces the “black clouds” of bigotry, and the “fiery
bolts of superstition,” which lay desolate “Papal realms.” In vain Mr.
Edgeworth, stooping from his high estate, counselled serenity of mind,
and that calm tolerance born of a godlike certitude; in vain he urged
the benignant attitude of infallibility. “The absurdities of Popery are
so manifest,” he wrote, “that to be hated they need but to be seen. But
for the peace and prosperity of this country, the misguided Catholic
should not be rendered odious; he should rather be pointed out as an
object of compassion. His ignorance should not be imputed to him as a
crime; nor should it be presupposed that his life cannot be right,
whose tenets are erroneous. Thank God that I am a Protestant! should be
a mental thanksgiving, not a public taunt.”
Mr. Edgeworth was nearly seventy when the famous “Protestant’s Manual;
or, Papacy Unveiled” (endeared forever to our hearts by its association
with Mrs. Varden and Miggs), bowled over these pleasant and peaceful
arguments. There was no mawkish charity about the “Manual,” which
made its way into every corner of England, stood for twenty years
on thousands of British book-shelves, and was given as a reward to
children so unfortunate as to be meritorious. It sold for a shilling
(nine shillings a dozen when purchased for distribution), so Mrs.
Varden’s two post-octavo volumes must have been a special edition.
Reviewers recommended it earnestly to parents and teachers; and it
was deemed indispensable to all who desired “to preserve the rising
generation from the wiles of Papacy and the snares of priestcraft.
They will be rendered sensible of the evils and probable consequences
of Catholic emancipation; and be confirmed in those opinions, civil,
political, and religious, which have hitherto constituted the happiness
and formed the strength of their native country.”
This was a strong appeal. A universal uneasiness prevailed, manifesting
itself in hostility to innovations, however innocent and orthodox.
Miss Hannah More’s Sunday Schools were stoutly opposed, as savouring
of Methodism (a religion she disliked), and of radicalism, for which
she had all the natural horror of a well-to-do, middle-class Christian.
Even Mrs. West, an oppressively pious writer, misdoubted the influence
of Sunday Schools, for the simple reason that it was difficult to keep
the lower orders from learning more than was good for them. “Hard toil
and humble diligence are indispensably needful to the community,”
said this excellent lady. “Writing and accounts appear superfluous
instructions in the humblest walks of life; and, when imparted to
servants, have the general effect of making them ambitious, and
disgusted with the servile offices which they are required to perform.”
Humility was a virtue consecrated to the poor, to the rural poor
especially; and what with Methodism on the one hand, and the jarring
echoes of the French Revolution on the other, the British ploughman
was obviously growing less humble every day. Crabbe, who cherished no
illusions, painted him in colours grim enough to fill the reader with
despair; but Miss More entertained a feminine conviction that Bibles
and flannel waistcoats fulfilled his earthly needs. In all her stories
and tracts the villagers are as artificial as the happy peasantry of
an old-fashioned opera. They group themselves deferentially around the
squire and the rector; they wear costumes of uncompromising rusticity;
and they sing a chorus of praise to the kind young ladies who have
brought them a bowl of soup. It is curious to turn from this atmosphere
of abasement, from perpetual curtsies and the lowliest of lowly
virtues, to the journal of the painter Haydon, who was a sincerely
pious man, yet who cannot restrain his wonder and admiration at seeing
the Duke of Wellington behave respectfully in church. That a person so
august should stand when the congregation stood, and kneel when the
congregation knelt, seemed to Haydon an immense condescension. “Here
was the greatest hero in the world,” he writes ecstatically, “who had
conquered the greatest genius, prostrating his heart and being before
his God in his venerable age, and praying for His mercy.”
It is the most naïve impression on record. That the Duke and the Duke’s
scullion might perchance stand equidistant from the Almighty was an
idea which failed to present itself to Haydon’s ardent mind.
The pious fiction put forward in the interest of dissent was more
impressive, more emotional, more belligerent, and, in some odd way,
more human than “Cœlebs,” or “The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain.” Miss
Grace Kennedy’s stories are as absurd as Miss More’s, and--though
the thing may sound incredible--much duller; but they give one an
impression of painful earnestness, and of that heavy atmosphere
engendered by too close a contemplation of Hell. A pious Christian
lady, with local standards, a narrow intelligence, and a comprehensive
ignorance of life, is not by election a novelist. Neither do polemics
lend themselves with elasticity to the varying demands of fiction.
There are, in fact, few things less calculated to instruct the
intellect or to enlarge the heart than the perusal of controversial
novels.
But Miss Kennedy had at least the striking quality of temerity. She was
not afraid of being ridiculous. She was undaunted in her ignorance.
And she was on fire with all the bitter ardour of the separatist. Miss
More, on the contrary, entertained a judicial mistrust for fervour,
fanaticism, the rush of ardent hopes and fears and transports, for all
those vehement emotions which are apt to be disconcerting to ladies
of settled views and incomes. Her model Christian, Candidus, “avoids
enthusiasm as naturally as a wise man avoids folly, or as a sober man
shuns extravagance. He laments when he encounters a real enthusiast,
because he knows that, even if honest, he is pernicious.” In the
same guarded spirit, Mrs. Montagu praises the benevolence of Lady
Bab Montagu and Mrs. Scott, who had the village girls taught plain
sewing and the catechism. “These good works are often performed by
the Methodist ladies in the heat of enthusiasm; but, thank God! my
sister’s is a calm and rational piety.” “Surtout point de zèle,” was
the dignified motto of the day.
There is none of this chill sobriety about Miss Kennedy’s Bible
Christians, who, a hundred years ago, preached to a listening world.
They are aflame with a zeal which knows no doubts and recognizes no
forbearance. Their methods are akin to those of the irrepressible
Miss J----, who undertook, Bible in hand, the conversion of that
pious gentleman, the Duke of Wellington; or of Miss Lewis, who went
to Constantinople to convert that equally pious gentleman, the
Sultan. Miss Kennedy’s heroes and heroines stand ready to convert the
world. They would delight in expounding the Scriptures to the Pope
and the Patriarch of Constantinople. Controversy affords their only
conversation. Dogma of the most unrelenting kind is their only food
for thought. Piety provides their only avenue for emotions. Elderly
bankers weep profusely over their beloved pastor’s eloquence, and
fashionable ladies melt into tears at the inspiring sight of a village
Sunday School. Young gentlemen, when off on a holiday, take with
them “no companion but a Bible”; and the lowest reach of worldliness
is laid bare when an unconverted mother asks her daughter if she can
sing something more cheerful than a hymn. Conformity to the Church of
England is denounced with unsparing warmth; and the Church of Rome is
honoured by having a whole novel, the once famous “Father Clement,”
devoted to its permanent downfall.
Dr. Greenhill, who has written a sympathetic notice of Miss Kennedy in
the “Dictionary of National Biography,” considers that “Father Clement”
was composed “with an evident wish to state fairly the doctrines and
practices of the Roman Catholic Church, even while the authoress
strongly disapproves of them”;--a point of view which compels us to
believe that the biographer spared himself (and who shall blame him?)
the reading of this melancholy tale. That George Eliot, who spared
herself nothing, was well acquainted with its context, is evidenced
by the conversation of the ladies who, in “Janet’s Repentance,” meet
to cover and label the books of the Paddiford Lending Library. Miss
Pratt, the autocrat of the circle, observes that the story of “Father
Clement” is, in itself, a library on the errors of Romanism, whereupon
old Mrs. Linnet very sensibly replies: “One ’ud think there didn’t want
much to drive people away from a religion as makes ’em walk barefoot
over stone floors, like that girl in ‘Father Clement,’ sending the
blood up to the head frightful. Anybody might see that was an unnat’ral
creed.”
So they might; and a more unnatural creed than Father Clement’s
Catholicism was never devised for the extinction of man’s flickering
reason. Only the mental debility of the Clarenham family can account
for their holding such views long enough to admit of their being
converted from them by the Montagus. Only the militant spirit of the
Clarenham chaplain and the Montagu chaplain makes possible several
hundred pages of polemics. Montagu Bibles run the blockade, are
discovered in the hands of truth-seeking Clarenhams, and are hurled
back upon the spiritual assailants. The determination of Father Dennis
that the Scriptures shall be quoted in Latin only (a practice which is
scholarly but inconvenient), and the determination of Edward Montagu
“not to speak Latin in the presence of ladies,” embarrass social
intercourse. Catherine Clarenham, the young person who walks barefooted
over stone floors, has been so blighted by this pious exercise that
she cannot, at twenty, translate the Pater Noster or Ave Maria into
English, and remains a melancholy illustration of Latinity. When young
Basil Clarenham shows symptoms of yielding to Montagu arguments, and
begins to want a Bible of his own, he is spirited away to Rome, and
confined in a monastery of the Inquisition, where he spends his time
reading “books forbidden by the Inquisitors,” and especially “a New
Testament with the prohibitory mark of the Holy Office upon it,” which
the weak-minded monks have amiably placed at his disposal. Indeed, the
monastery library, to which the captive is made kindly welcome, seems
to have been well stocked with interdicted literature; and, after
browsing in these pastures for several tranquil months, Basil tells
his astonished hosts that their books have taught him that “the Romish
Church is the most corrupt of all churches professing Christianity.”
Having accomplished this unexpected but happy result, the Inquisition
exacts from him a solemn vow that he will never reveal its secrets,
and sends him back to England, where he loses no time in becoming an
excellent Protestant. His sister Maria follows his example (her virtues
have pointed steadfastly to this conclusion); but Catherine enters a
convent, full of stone floors and idolatrous images, where she becomes
a “tool” of the Jesuits, and says her prayers in Latin until she dies.
No wonder “Father Clement” went through twelve editions, and made its
authoress as famous in her day as the authoress of “Elsie Dinsmore” is
in ours. No wonder the Paddiford Lending Library revered its sterling
worth. And no wonder it provoked from Catholics reprisals which Dr.
Greenhill stigmatizes as “flippant.” To-day it lives by virtue of half
a dozen mocking lines in George Eliot’s least-read story: but for a
hundred years its progeny has infested the earth,--a crooked progeny,
like Peer Gynt’s, which can never be straightened into sincerity, or
softened into good-will. “For first the Church of Rome condemneth
us, we likewise them,” observes Sir Thomas Browne with equanimity;
“and thus we go to Heaven against each others’ wills, conceits, and
opinions.”
THE ACCURSED ANNUAL
Why, by dabbling in those accursed Annuals, I have become a by-word
of infamy all over the kingdom.--CHARLES LAMB.
The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and
books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it
seems. We can trace it, if we try, back to the first printing-presses,
which catered indulgently to hungry scholars and to noble patrons;
and we can see it in another generation separating “Waverley” and
“The Corsair,” which everybody knew by heart, from the gorgeous
“Annual” (bound in Lord Palmerston’s cast-off waistcoats, hinted
Thackeray), which formed a decorative feature of well-appointed English
drawing-rooms. The perfectly natural thing to do with an unreadable
book is to give it away; and the publication, for more than a quarter
of a century, of volumes which fulfilled this one purpose and no other
is a pleasant proof, if proof were needed, of the business principles
which underlay the enlightened activity of publishers.
The wave of sentimentality which submerged England when the
clear-headed, hard-hearted eighteenth century had done its appointed
work, and lay a-dying, the prodigious advance in gentility from the
days of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to the days of the Countess of
Blessington, found their natural expression in letters. It was a period
of emotions which were not too deep for words, and of decorum which
measured goodness by conventionalities. Turn where we will, we see
a tear in every eye, or a simper of self-complacency on every lip.
Moore wept when he beheld a balloon ascension at Tivoli, because he
had not seen a balloon since he was a little boy. The excellent Mr.
Hall explained in his “Memories of a Long Life” that, owing to Lady
Blessington’s anomalous position with Count D’Orsay, “Mrs. Hall never
accompanied me to her evenings, though she was a frequent day caller.”
Criticism was controlled by politics, and sweetened by gallantry. The
Whig and Tory reviewers supported their respective candidates to fame,
and softened their masculine sternness to affability when Mrs. Hemans
or Miss Landon, “the Sappho of the age,” contributed their glowing
numbers to the world. Miss Landon having breathed a poetic sigh in the
“Amulet” for 1832, a reviewer in “Fraser’s” magnanimously observed:
“This gentle and fair young lady, so undeservedly neglected by critics,
we mean to take under our special protection.” Could it ever have
lain within the power of any woman, even a poetess, to merit such
condescension as this?
Of a society so organized, the Christmas annual was an appropriate and
ornamental feature. It was costly,--a guinea or a guinea and a half
being the usual subscription. It was richly bound in crimson silk or
pea-green levant; Solomon in all his glory was less magnificent. It was
as free from stimulus as eau sucrée. It was always genteel, and not
infrequently aristocratic,--having been known to rise in happy years to
the schoolboy verses of a royal duke. It was made, like Peter Pindar’s
razors, to sell, and it was bought to be given away; at which point
its career of usefulness was closed. Its languishing steel engravings
of Corfu, Ayesha, The Suliote Mother, and The Wounded Brigand, may
have beguiled a few heavy moments after dinner; and perhaps little
children in frilled pantalets and laced slippers peeped between the
gorgeous covers, to marvel at the Sultana’s pearls, or ask in innocence
who was the dying Haidee. Death, we may remark, was always a prominent
feature of annuals. Their artists and poets vied with one another in
the selection of mortuary subjects. Charles Lamb was first “hooked into
the ‘Gem’” with some lines on the editor’s dead infant. From a partial
list, extending over a dozen years, I cull this funeral wreath:--
The Dying Child. _Poem._
The Orphans. _Steel engraving._
The Orphan’s Tears. _Poem._
The Gypsy’s Grave. _Steel engraving._
The Lonely Grave. _Poem._
On a Child’s Grave. _Poem._
The Dying Mother to her Infant. _Poem._
Blithesome reading for the Christmas-tide!
The annual was as orthodox as it was aristocratic. “The Shepherd of
Salisbury Plain” was not more edifying. “The Washerwoman of Finchley
Common” was less conspicuously virtuous. Here in “The Winter’s Wreath”
is a long poem in blank verse, by a nameless clergyman, on “The
Efficacy of Religion.” Here in the “Amulet,” Mrs. Hemans, “leading
the way as she deserves to do” (I quote from the “Monthly Review”),
“clothes in her own pure and fascinating language the invitations which
angels whisper into mortal ears.” And here in the “Forget-Me-Not,”
Leontine hurls mild defiance at the spirit of doubt:--
Thou sceptic of the hardened brow,
Attend to Nature’s cry!
Her sacred essence breathes the glow
O’er that thou wouldst deny;