A quite unpremeditated inspiration which occurred to me upon being again
offended--to run away--probably alarmed my parents more than my
sororicidal projects, and I think determined them upon carrying out a
plan which had been talked of for some time, of my being sent again to
school; which plan ran a narrow risk of being defeated by my own
attempted escape from home. One day, when my father and mother were both
in London, I had started for a walk with my aunt and sister; when only a
few yards from home, I made an impertinent reply to some reproof I
received, and my aunt bade me turn back and go home, declining my
company for the rest of the walk. She proceeded at a brisk pace on her
way with my sister, nothing doubting that, when left alone, I would
retrace my steps to our house; but I stood still and watched her out of
sight, and then revolved in my own mind the proper course to pursue.
At first it appeared to me that it would be judicious, under such
smarting injuries as mine, to throw myself into a certain pond which was
in the meadow where I stood (my remedies had always rather an extreme
tendency); but it was thickly coated with green slime studded with
frogs' heads, and looked uninviting. After contemplating it for a
moment, I changed my opinion as to the expediency of getting under that
surface, and walked resolutely off towards London; not with any idea of
seeking my father and mother, but simply with that goal in view, as the
end of my walk.
Half-way thither, however, I became tired, and hot, and hungry, and
perhaps a little daunted by my own undertaking. I have said that between
Craven Hill and Tyburn turnpike there then was only a stretch of open
fields, with a few cottages scattered over them. In one of these lived a
poor woman who was sometimes employed to do needlework for us, and who,
I was sure, would give me a bit of bread and butter, and let me rest; so
I applied to her for this assistance. Great was the worthy woman's
amazement when I told her that I was alone, on my way to London; greater
still, probably, when I informed her that my intention was to apply for
an engagement at one of the theatres, assuring her that nobody with
talent need ever want for bread. She very wisely refrained from
discussing my projects, but, seeing that I was tired, persuaded me to
lie down in her little bedroom and rest before pursuing my way to town.
The weather was oppressively hot, and having lain down on her bed, I
fell fast asleep. I know not for how long, but I was awakened by the
sudden raising of the latch of the house door, and the voice of my aunt
Dall inquiring of my friendly hostess if she had seen or heard anything
of me.
I sat up breathless on the bed, listening, and looking round the room
perceived another door than the one by which I had entered it, which
would probably have given me egress to the open fields again, and
secured my escape; but before I could slip down from the bed and resume
my shoes, and take advantage of this exit, my aunt and poor Mrs. Taylor
entered the room, and I was ignominiously captured and taken home; I
expiated my offence by a week of bread and water, and daily solitary
confinement in a sort of tool-house in the garden, where my only
occupation was meditation, the "clear-obscure" that reigned in my prison
admitting of no other.
This was not cheerful, but I endeavored to make it appear as little the
reverse as possible, by invariably singing at the top of my voice
whenever I heard footsteps on the gravel walk near my place of
confinement.
Finally I was released, and was guilty of no further outrage before my
departure for Paris, whither I went with my mother and Mrs. Charles
Matthews at the end of the summer.
We travelled in the _malle poste_, and I remember but one incident
connected with our journey. Some great nobleman in Paris was about to
give a grand banquet, and the _conducteur_ of our vehicle had been
prevailed upon to bring up the fish for the occasion in large hampers on
our carriage, which was then the most rapid public conveyance on the
road between the coast and the capital. The heat was intense, and the
smell of our "luggage" intolerable. My mother complained and
remonstrated in vain; the name of the important personage who was to
entertain his guests with this delectable fish was considered an
all-sufficient reply. At length the contents of the baskets began
literally to ooze out of them and stream down the sides of the carriage;
my mother threatening an appeal to the authorities at the _bureau de
poste_, and finally we got rid of our pestiferous load.
I was now placed in a school in the Rue d'Angoulême, Champs Élysées; a
handsome house, formerly somebody's private hotel, with _porte cochère_,
_cour d'honneur_, a small garden beyond, and large, lofty ground-floor
apartments opening with glass doors upon them. The name of the lady at
the head of this establishment was Rowden; she had kept a school for
several years in Hans Place, London, and among her former pupils had had
the charge of Miss Mary Russell Mitford, and that clever but most
eccentric personage, Lady Caroline Lamb. The former I knew slightly,
years after, when she came to London and was often in friendly
communication with my father, then manager of Covent Garden, upon the
subject of the introduction on the stage of her tragedy of the
"Foscari."
The play of "Rienzi," in which Miss Mitford achieved the manly triumph
of a really successful historical tragedy, is, of course, her principal
and most important claim to fame, though the pretty collection of rural
sketches, redolent of country freshness and fragrance, called "Our
Village," precursor, in some sort, of Mrs. Gaskell's incomparable
"Cranford," is, I think, the most popular of Miss Mitford's works.
She herself has always a peculiar honor in my mind, from the exemplary
devotion of her whole life to her father, for whom her dutiful and
tender affection always seemed to me to fulfil the almost religious idea
conveyed by the old-fashioned, half-heathen phrase of "filial piety."
Lady Caroline Lamb I never saw, but from friends of mine who were well
acquainted with her I have heard manifold instances of her extraordinary
character and conduct. I remember my friend Mr. Harness telling me that,
dancing with him one night at a great ball, she had suddenly amazed him
by the challenge: "Gueth how many pairth of thtockingth I have on." (Her
ladyship lisped, and her particular graciousness to Mr. Harness was the
result of Lord Byron's school intimacy with and regard for him.) Finding
her partner quite unequal to the piece of divination proposed to him,
she put forth a very pretty little foot, from which she lifted the
petticoat ankle high, lisping out, "Thixth."
I remember my mother telling me of my father and herself meeting Mr. and
Lady Caroline Lamb at a dinner at Lord Holland's, in Paris, when
accidentally the expected arrival of Lord Byron was mentioned. Mr. Lamb
had just named the next day as the one fixed for their departure; but
Lady Caroline immediately announced her intention of prolonging her
stay, which created what would be called in the French chambers
"sensation."
When the party broke up, my father and mother, who occupied apartments
in the same hotel as the Lambs,--Meurice's,--were driven into the
court-yard just as Lady Caroline's carriage had drawn up before the
staircase leading to her rooms, which were immediately opposite those of
my father and mother. A _ruisseau_ or gutter ran round the court-yard,
and intervened between the carriage step and the door of the vestibule,
and Mr. Lamb, taking Lady Caroline, as she alighted, in his arms (she
had a very pretty, slight, graceful figure), gallantly lifted her over
the wet stones; which act of conjugal courtesy elicited admiring
approval from my mother, and from my father a growl to the effect, "If
you were _my_ wife I'd put your ladyship _in_ the gutter," justified
perhaps by their observation of what followed. My mother's sitting-room
faced that of Lady Caroline, and before lights were brought into it she
and my father had the full benefit of a curious scene in the room of
their opposite neighbors, who seemed quite unmindful that their
apartment being lighted and the curtains not drawn, they were, as
regarded the opposite wing of the building, a spectacle for gods and
men.
Mr. Lamb on entering the room sat down on the sofa, and his wife perched
herself on the elbow of it with her arm round his neck, which engaging
attitude she presently exchanged for a still more persuasive one, by
kneeling at his feet; but upon his getting up, the lively lady did so
also, and in a moment began flying round the room, seizing and flinging
on the floor cups, saucers, plates,--the whole _cabaret_,--vases,
candlesticks, her poor husband pursuing and attempting to restrain his
mad moiety, in the midst of which extraordinary scene the curtains were
abruptly closed, and the domestic drama finished behind them, leaving no
doubt, however, in my father's and mother's minds that the question of
Lady Caroline's prolonged stay till Lord Byron's arrival in Paris had
caused the disturbance they had witnessed.
I never read "Glenarvon," in which, I believe, Lady Caroline is supposed
to have intended to represent her idol, Lord Byron, and the only
composition of hers with which I am acquainted is the pretty song of
"Waters of Elle," of which I think she also wrote the air. She was
undoubtedly very clever, in spite of her silliness, and possessed that
sort of attraction, often as powerful as unaccountable, which belongs
sometimes to women so little distinguished by great personal beauty,
that they have suggested the French observation that "ce sont les femmes
laides qui font les grandes passions." The European women fascinating
_par excellence_ are the Poles; and a celebrated enchantress of that
charming and fantastic race of sirens, the Countess Delphine Potocka,
always reminded me of Lady Caroline Lamb, in the descriptions given of
her by her adorers.
With Mr. Lamb I never was acquainted till long after Lady Caroline's
death--after I came out on the stage, when he was Lord Melbourne, and
Prime Minister of England. I was a very young person, and though I often
met him in society, and he took amiable and kindly notice of me, our
intercourse was, of course, a mere occasional condescension on his part.
He was exceedingly handsome, with a fine person, verging towards the
portly, and a sweet countenance, more expressive of refined, easy,
careless good-humor, than almost any face I ever saw. His beauty was of
too well born and well bred a type to be unpleasantly sensual; but his
whole face, person, expression, and manner conveyed the idea of a
pleasure-loving nature, habitually self-indulgent, and indulgent to
others. He was my _beau ideal_ of an Epicurean philosopher (supposing it
possible that an Epicurean philosopher could have consented to be Prime
Minister of England), and I confess to having read with unbounded
astonishment the statement in the "Greville Memoirs," that this apparent
prince of _poco curanti_ had taken the pains to make himself a profound
Hebrew scholar.
I retain one very vivid impression of that most charming of debonair
noblemen, Lord Melbourne. I had the honor of dining at his house once,
with the beautiful, highly gifted, and unfortunate woman with whom his
relations afterwards became subject of such cruel public scandal; and
after dinner I sat for some time opposite a large, crimson-covered
ottoman, on which Lord Melbourne reclined, surrounded by those three
enchanting Sheridan sisters, Mrs. Norton, Mrs. Blackwood (afterwards
Lady Dufferin), and Lady St. Maur (afterwards Duchess of Somerset, and
always Queen of Beauty). A more remarkable collection of comely
creatures, I think, could hardly be seen, and taking into consideration
the high rank, eminent position, and intellectual distinction of the
four persons who formed that beautiful group, it certainly was a picture
to remain impressed upon one's memory.
To return to my school-mistress, Mrs. Rowden; she was herself an
authoress, and had published a poem dedicated to Lady Bessborough (Lady
Caroline Lamb's mother), the title of which was "The pleasures of
friendship" (hope, memory, and imagination were all bespoken), of which
I remember only the two opening lines--
"Visions of early youth, ere yet ye fade,
Let my light pen arrest your fleeting shade."
Mrs. Rowden, during the period of her school-keeping in London, was an
ardent admirer of the stage in general and of my uncle John in
particular, of whom the mezzotint engraving as Coriolanus, from
Lawrence's picture, adorned her drawing-room in the Rue d'Angoulême,
where, however, the nature and objects of her enthusiasm had undergone a
considerable change: for when I was placed under her charge, theatres
and things theatrical had given place in her esteem to churches and
things clerical; her excitements and entertainments were Bible-meetings,
prayer-meetings, and private preachings and teachings of religion. She
was what was then termed Methodistical, what would now be designated as
very Low Church. We were taken every Sunday either to the chapel of the
embassy or to the Église de l'Oratoire (French Protestant worship), to
two and sometimes to three services; and certainly Sunday was no day of
rest to us, as we were required to write down from memory the sermons we
had heard in the course of the day, and read them aloud at our evening
devotional gathering. Some of us had a robust power of attention and
retention, and managed these reproductions with tolerable fidelity.
Others contrived to bring forth such a version of what they had heard as
closely resembled the last edition of the subject-matter of a prolonged
game of Russian scandal. Sometimes, upon an appeal to mercy and a solemn
protest that we had paid the utmost attention and _couldn't_ remember a
single sentence of the Christian exhortation we had heard, we were
allowed to choose a text and compose an original sermon of our own; and
I think a good-sized volume might have been made of homilies of my
composition, indited under these circumstances for myself and my
companions. I have always had rather an inclination for preaching, of
which these exercises were perhaps the origin, and it is but a few years
ago that I received at Saint Leonard's a visit from a tottering, feeble
old lady of near seventy, whose name, unheard since, carried me back to
my Paris school-days, and who, among other memories evoked to recall
herself to my recollection, said, "Oh, don't you remember how
good-natured you were in writing such nice sermons for me when I never
could write down what I had heard at church?" Her particular share in
these intellectual benefits conferred by me I did not remember, but I
remembered well and gratefully the sweet, silver-toned voice of her
sister, refreshing the arid atmosphere of our dreary Sunday evenings
with Handel's holy music. "I know that my Redeemer liveth," and "He
shall feed his Flock," which I heard for the first time from that gentle
schoolmate of mine, recall her meek, tranquil face and, liquid thread of
delicate soprano voice, even through the glorious associations of Jenny
Lind's inspired utterance of those divine songs. These ladies were
daughters of a high dignitary of the English Church, which made my
sermon-writing for their succor rather comical. Besides these Sunday
exercises, we were frequently taken to week-day services at the Oratoire
to hear some special preacher of celebrity, on which occasions of devout
dissipation Mrs. Rowden always appeared in the highest state of elation,
and generally received distinguished notice from the clerical hero of
the evening.
I remember accompanying her to hear Mr. Lewis Wade, a celebrated
missionary preacher, who had been to Syria and the Holy Land, and
brought thence observations on subjects sacred and profane that made his
discourses peculiarly interesting and edifying.
I was also taken to hear a much more impressive preacher, Mr. César
Malan, of Geneva, who addressed a small and select audience of very
distinguished persons, in a magnificent _salon_ in some great private
house, where every body sat on satin and gilded _fauteuils_ to receive
his admonitions, all which produced a great effect on my mind--not,
however, I think, altogether religious; but the sermon I heard, and the
striking aspect of the eloquent person who delivered it, left a strong
and long impression on my memory. It was the first fine preaching I ever
heard, and though I was undoubtedly too young to appreciate it duly, I
was, nevertheless, deeply affected by it, and it gave me my earliest
experience of that dangerous thing, emotional religion, or, to speak
more properly, religious excitement.
The Unitarians of the United States have in my time possessed a number
of preachers of most remarkable excellence; Dr. Channing, Dr. Dewey, Dr.
Bellows, my own venerable and dear pastor, Dr. Furness, Dr. Follen,
William and Henry Ware, being all men of extraordinary powers of
eloquence. At home I have heard Frederick Maurice and Dean Stanley, but
the most impressive preaching I ever heard in England was still from a
Unitarian pulpit; James Martineau, I think, surpassed all the very
remarkable men I have named in the wonderful beauty and power,
spirituality and solemnity, of his sacred teaching. Frederick Robertson,
to my infinite loss and sorrow, I never heard, having been deterred from
going to hear him by his reputation of a "fashionable preacher;" he,
better than any one, would have understood my repugnance to that species
of religious instructor.
Better, in my judgment, than these occasional appeals to our feelings
and imaginations under Mrs. Rowden's influence, was the constant _use_
of the Bible among us. I cannot call the reading and committing to
memory of the Scriptures, as we performed those duties, by the serious
name of study. But the Bible was learnt by heart in certain portions and
recited before breakfast every morning, and read aloud before bedtime
every evening by us; and though the practice may be open to some
objections, I think they hardly outweigh the benefit bestowed upon young
minds by early familiar acquaintance with the highest themes, the
holiest thoughts, and the noblest words the world possesses or ever will
possess. To me my intimate knowledge of the Bible has always seemed the
greatest benefit I derived from my school training.
Of the secular portion of the education we received, the French lady who
was Mrs. Rowden's partner directed the principal part. Our lessons of
geography, grammar, history, arithmetic, and mythology (of which latter
subject I suspect we had a much more thorough knowledge than is at all
usual with young English girls) were conducted by her.
These studies were all pursued in French, already familiar to me as the
vehicle of my elementary acquirements at Boulogne; and this soon became
the language in which I habitually wrote, spoke, and thought, to the
almost entire neglect of my native tongue, of which I never thoroughly
studied the grammar till I was between fifteen and sixteen, when, on my
presenting, in a glow of vanity, some verses of mine to my father, he
said, with his blandest smile, after reading them, "Very well, very
pretty indeed! My dear, don't you think, before you write poetry, you
had better learn grammar?" a suggestion which sent me crestfallen to a
diligent study of Lindley Murray. But grammar is perfectly uncongenial
matter to me, which my mind absolutely refuses to assimilate. I have
learned Latin, English, French, Italian, and German grammar, and do not
know a single rule of the construction of any language whatever. More
over, to the present day, my early familiar use of French produces
uncertainty in my mind as to the spelling of all words that take a
double consonant in French and only one in English, as apartment, enemy,
etc.
The men of my family--that is, my uncle John, my father, and my eldest
brother--were all philologists, and extremely fond of the study of
language. Grammar was favorite light reading, and the philosophy which
lies at the root of human speech a frequent subject of discussion and
research with them; but they none of them spoke foreign languages with
ease or fluency. My uncle was a good Latin scholar, and read French,
Italian, and Spanish, but spoke none of them; not even the first, in
spite of his long residence in French Switzerland. The same was the case
with my father, whose delight in the dry bones of language was such that
at near seventy he took the greatest pleasure in assiduously studying
the Greek grammar. My brother John, who was a learned linguist, and
familiar with the modern European languages, spoke none of them well,
not even German, though he resided for many years at Hanover, where he
was curator of the royal museum and had married a German wife, and had
among his most intimate friends and correspondents both the Grimms,
Gervinus, and many of the principal literary men of Germany. My sister
and myself, on the contrary, had remarkable facility in speaking foreign
languages with the accent and tune (if I may use the expression)
peculiar to each; a faculty which seems to me less the result of early
training and habit, than of some particular construction of ear and
throat favorable for receiving and repeating mere sounds; a musical
organization and mimetic faculty; a sort of mocking-bird specialty,
which I have known possessed in great perfection by persons with whom it
was in no way connected with the study, but only with the use of the
languages they spoke with such idiomatic ease and grace. Moreover, in my
own case, both in Italian and German, though I understand for the most
part what I read and what is said in these languages, I have had but
little exercise in speaking them, and have been amused to find myself,
while travelling, taken for an Italian as well as for a German, simply
by dint of the facility with which I imitated the accent of the people I
was among, while intrepidly confounding my moods, tenses, genders, and
cases in the determination to speak and make myself understood in the
language of whatever country I was passing through.
Mademoiselle Descuillès, Mrs. Rowden's partner, was a handsome woman of
about thirty, with a full, graceful figure, a pleasant countenance, a
great deal of playful vivacity of manner, and very determined and strict
notions of discipline. Active, energetic, intelligent, and
good-tempered, she was of a capital composition for a governess, the
sort of person to manage successfully all her pupils, and become an
object of enthusiastic devotion to the elder ones whom she admitted to
her companionship.
She almost always accompanied us when we walked, invariably presided in
the schoolroom, and very generally her eager figure and pleasant, bright
eyes were to be discovered in some corner of the playground, where, from
a semi-retirement, seated in her fauteuil with book or needlework in
hand, she exercised a quiet but effectual surveillance over her young
subjects.
She was the active and efficient partner in the concern, Mrs. Rowden the
dignified and representative one. The whole of our course of study and
mode of life, with the exception of our religious training, of which I
have spoken before, was followed under her direction, and according to
the routine of most French schools.
The monastic rule of loud-reading during meals was observed, and l'Abbé
Millot's "Universal History," of blessed boring memory, was the dry
daily sauce to our diet. On Saturday we always had a half-holiday in the
afternoon, and the morning occupations were feminine rather than
academic.
Every girl brought into the schoolroom whatever useful needlework,
mending or making, her clothes required; and while one read aloud, the
others repaired or replenished their wardrobes.
Great was our satisfaction if we could prevail upon Mademoiselle
Descuillès herself to take the book in hand and become the "lectrice" of
the morning; greater still when we could persuade her, while intent upon
her own stitching, to sing to us, which she sometimes did, old-fashioned
French songs and ballads, of which I learnt from her and still remember
some that I have never since heard, that must have long ago died out of
the musical world and left no echo but in my memory. Of two of these I
think the words pretty enough to be worth preserving, the one for its
naïve simplicity, and the other for the covert irony of its reflection
upon female constancy, to which Mademoiselle Descuillès' delivery, with
her final melancholy shrug of the shoulders, gave great effect.
LE TROUBADOUR
Un gentil Troubadour
Qui chante et fait la guerre,
Revenait chez son père,
Rêvant à son amour.
Gages de sa valeur,
Suspendus à son écharpe,
Son épée, et sa harpe,
Se croisaient sur son coeur.
Il rencontre en chemin
Pelerine jolie,
Qui voyage, et qui prie,
Un rosaire à la main.
Colerette, à long plis,
Cachait sa fine taille,
Un grand chapeau de paille,
Ombrait son teint de lys.
"O gentil Troubadour,
Si tu reviens fidèle,
Chante un couplet pour celle
Qui bénit ton retour."
"Pardonne à mon refus
Pelerine jolie!
Sans avoir vu ma mie,
Je ne chanterai plus."
"Et ne la vois-tu pas?
O Troubadour fidèle!
Regarde moi--c'est elle!
Ouvre lui donc tes bras!
"Craignant pour notre amour,
J'allais en pelerine,
A la Vierge divine
Prier pour ton retour!"
Près des tendres amans
S'élève une chapelle,
L'Ermite qu'on appelle,
Bénit leurs doux sermens
Venez en ce saint lieu,
Amans du voisinage,
Faire un pelerinage
A la Mère de Dieu!
The other ballad, though equally an illustration of the days of
chivalry, was written in a spirit of caustic contempt for the fair sex,
which suggests the bitterness of the bard's personal experience:--
LE CHEVALIER ERRANT.
Dans un vieux château de l'Andalousie,
Au temps où l'amour se montrait constant,
Où Beauté, Valeur, et Galanterie
Guidait aux combats un fidèle amant,
Un beau chevalier un soir se présente,
Visière baissée, et la lance en main;
Il vient demander si sa douce amante
N'est pas (par hasard) chez le châtelain.
"Noble chevalier! quelle est votre amie?"
Demande à son tour le vieux châtelain.
"Ah! de fleurs d'amour c'est la plus jolie
Elle a teint de rose, et peau de satin,
Elle a de beaux yeux, dont le doux langage
Porte en votre coeur vif enchantment,
Elle a tout enfin--elle est belle,--et sage!"
"Pauvre chevalier! chercherez longtemps!
"Guidez de mes pas l'ardeur incertain,
Où dois-je chercher ce que j'ai perdu?"
"Mon fils, votre soit, hélas! s'en fait peine,
Ce que vous cherchez ne se trouve plus."
"Poursuivez, pourtant, votre long voyage,
Et si vouz trouvez un pareil trésor--
Ne le perdez plus! Adieu, bon voyage!"
L'amant repartit--mais, il cherche encore.
The air of the first of these songs was a very simple and charming
little melody, which my sister, having learnt it from me, adapted to
some English words. The other was an extremely favorite _vaudeville_
air, repeated constantly in the half-singing dialogue of some of those
popular pieces.
Our Saturday sewing class was a capital institution, which made most of
us expert needle-women, developed in some the peculiarly lady-like
accomplishment of working exquisitely, and gave to all the useful
knowledge of how to make and mend our own clothes. When I left school I
could make my own dresses, and was a proficient in marking and darning.
My school-fellows were almost all English, and, I suppose, with one
exception, were young girls of average character and capacity. Elizabeth
P----, a young person from the west of England, was the only remarkable
one among them. She was strikingly handsome, both in face and figure,
and endowed with very uncommon abilities. She was several years older
than myself, and an object of my unbounded school-girl heroine worship.
A daughter of Kiallmark, the musical composer, was also eminent among us
for her great beauty, and always seemed to my girlish fancy what Mary
Queen of Scots must have looked like in her youth.
Besides pupils, Mrs. Rowden received a small number of parlor boarders,
who joined only in some of the lessons; indeed, some of them appeared to
fulfil no purpose of education whatever by their residence with her.
There were a Madame and Mademoiselle de ----, the latter of whom was
supposed, I believe, to imbibe English in our atmosphere. She bore a
well-known noble French name, and was once visited, to the immense
excitement of all "ces demoiselles," by a brother, in the uniform of the
Royal Gardes du Corps, whose looks were reported (I think rather
mythologically) to be as superb as his attire. In which case he must
have been strikingly unlike his sister, who was one of the ugliest women
I ever saw; with a disproportionately large and ill-shaped nose and
mouth, and a terrible eruption all over her face. She had, however, an
extremely beautiful figure, exquisite hands and feet, skin as white as
snow, and magnificent hair and eyes; in spite of which numerous
advantages, she was almost repulsively plain: it really seemed as if she
had been the victim of a spell, to have so beautiful a body, and so all
but hideous a face. Besides these French ladies, there was a Miss
McC----, a very delicate, elegant-looking Irishwoman, and a Miss ----,
who, in spite of her noble name, was a coarse and inelegant, but very
handsome Englishwoman. In general, these ladies had nothing to do with
us; they had privileged places at table, formed Mrs. Rowden's evening
circle in the drawing-room, and led (except at meals) a life of
dignified separation from the scholars.
I remember but two French girls in our whole company: the one was a
Mademoiselle Adèle de ----, whose father, a fanatical Anglomane, wrote a
ridiculous book about England.
The other French pupil I ought not to have called a companion, or said
that I remembered, for in truth I remember nothing but her funeral. She
died soon after I joined the school, and was buried in the cemetery of
Père la Chaise, near the tomb of Abelard and Eloïse, with rather a
theatrical sort of ceremony. She was followed to her grave by the whole
school, dressed in white, and wearing long white veils fastened round
our heads with white fillets. On each side of the bier walked three
young girls, pall-bearers, in the same maiden mourning, holding in one
hand long streamers of broad white ribbon attached to the bier, and in
the other several white narcissus blossoms.
The ghostly train and the picturesque mediæval monument, close to which
we paused and clustered to deposit the dead girl in her early
resting-place, formed a striking picture that haunted me for a long
time, and which the smell and sight of the chalk-white narcissus blossom
invariably recalls to me.
Meantime, the poetical studies, or rather indulgencies of home, had
ceased. No sonorous sounds of Milton's mighty music ever delighted my
ears, and for my almost daily bread of Scott's romantic epics I hungered
and thirsted in vain, with such intense desire, that I at length
undertook to write out "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" and "Marmion" from
memory, so as not absolutely to lose my possession of them. This task I
achieved to a very considerable extent, and found the stirring,
chivalrous stories, and spirited, picturesque verse, a treasure of
refreshment, when all my poetical diet consisted of "L'Anthologie
française à l'Usage des Demoiselles," and Voltaire's "Henriade," which I
was compelled to learn by heart, and with the opening lines of which I
more than once startled the whole dormitory at midnight, sitting
suddenly up in my bed, and from the midst of perpetual slumbers loudly
proclaiming--
"Je chante ce héros qui regna sur la France,
Et par droit de conquête, et par droit de naissance."
More exciting reading was Madame Cottin's "Mathilde," of which I now got
hold for the first time, and devoured with delight, finishing it one
evening just before we were called to prayers, so that I wept bitterly
during my devotions, partly for the Norman princess and her Saracen
lover, and partly from remorse at my own sinfulness in not being able to
banish them from my thoughts while on my knees and saying my prayers.
But, to be sure, that baptism in the desert, with the only drop of water
they had to drink, seemed to me the very acme of religious fervor and
sacred self-sacrifice. I wonder what I should think of the book were I
to read it now, which Heaven forefend! The really powerful impression
made upon my imagination and feelings at this period, however, was by my
first reading of Lord Byron's poetry. The day on which I received that
revelation of the power of thought and language remained memorable to me
for many a day after.
I had occasionally received invitations from Mrs. Rowden to take tea in
the drawing-room with the lady parlor boarders, when my week's report
for "bonne conduite" had been tolerably satisfactory. One evening when I
had received this honorable distinction, and was sitting in sleepy
solemnity on the sofa, opposite my uncle John's black figure in
"Coriolanus," which seemed to grow alternately smaller and larger as my
eyelids slowly drew themselves together and suddenly opened wide, with a
startled consciousness of unworthy drowsiness, Miss H----, who was
sitting beside me, reading, leaned back and put her book before my face,
pointing with her finger to the lines--
"It is the hour when from the boughs
The nightingale's high note is heard."
It would be impossible to describe the emotion I experienced. I was
instantly wide awake, and, quivering with excitement, fastened a grip
like steel upon the book, imploring to be allowed to read on. The fear,
probably, of some altercation loud enough to excite attention to the
subject of her studies (which I rather think would not have been
approved of, even for a "parlor boarder") prevented Miss H---- from
making the resistance she should have made to my entreaties, and I was
allowed to leave the room, carrying with me the dangerous prize, which,
however, I did not profit by.
It was bedtime, and the dormitory light burned but while we performed
our night toilet, under supervision. The under teacher and the lamp
departed together, and I confided to the companion whose bed was next to
mine that I had a volume of Lord Byron under my pillow. The emphatic
whispered warnings of terror and dismay with which she received this
information, her horror at the wickedness of the book (of which of
course she knew nothing), her dread of the result of detection for me,
and her entreaties, enforced with tears, that I would not keep the
terrible volume where it was, at length, combined with my own nervous
excitement about it, affected me with such a sympathy of fear that I
jumped out of bed and thrust the fatal poems into the bowels of a straw
_paillasse_ on an empty bed, and returned to my own to remain awake
nearly all night. My study of Byron went no further then: the next
morning I found it impossible to rescue the book unobserved from its
hiding-place, and Miss H----, to whom I confided the secret of it, I
suppose took her own time for withdrawing it, and so I then read no more
of that wonderful poetry, which, in my after days of familiar
acquaintance with it, always affected me like an evil potion taken into
my blood. The small, sweet draught which I sipped in that sleepy
school-salon atmosphere remained indelibly impressed upon my memory,
insomuch that when, during the last year of my stay in Paris, the news
of my uncle John's death at Lausanne, and that of Lord Byron at
Missolonghi, was communicated to me, my passionate regret was for the
great poet, of whose writings I knew but twenty lines, and not for my
own celebrated relation, of whom, indeed, I knew but little.
It was undoubtedly well that this dangerous source of excitement should
be sealed to me as long as possible; but I do not think that the works
of imagination to which I was allowed free access were of a specially
wholesome or even harmless tendency. The false morality and
attitudinizing sentiment of such books as "Les Contes à ma Fille," and
Madame de Genlis' "Veillées du Château," and "Adèle et Théodore," were
rubbish, if not poison. The novels of Florian were genuine and simple
romances, less mischievous, I incline to think, upon the whole, than the
educational Countess's mock moral sentimentality; but Chateaubriand's
"Atala et Chactas," with its picturesque pathos, and his powerful
classical novel of "Les Martyrs," were certainly unfit reading for young
girls of excitable feelings and wild imaginations, in spite of the
religious element which I supposed was considered their recommendation.
One great intellectual good fortune befell me at this time, and that was
reading "Guy Mannering;" the first of Walter Scott's novels that I ever
read--the _dearest_, therefore. I use the word advisedly, for I know no
other than one of affection to apply to those enchanting and admirable
works, that deserve nothing less than love in return for the healthful
delight they have bestowed. To all who ever read them, the first must
surely be the best; the beginning of what a series of pure enjoyments,
what a prolonged, various, exquisite succession of intellectual
surprises and pleasures, amounting for the time almost to happiness.
Scott, like Shakespeare, has given us, for intimate acquaintance,
companions, and friends, men and women of such peculiar individual
nobleness, grace, wit, wisdom, and humor, that they people our minds and
recur to our thoughts with a vividness which makes them seem rather to
belong to the past realities of the memory, than to the shadowy visions
of the imagination.
It was not long before all this imaginative stimulus bore its legitimate
fruit in a premature harvest of crude compositions which I dignified
with the name of poetry. Rhymes I wrote without stint or stopping--a
perfect deluge of doggerel; what became of it all I know not, but I have
an idea that a manuscript volume was sent to my poor parents, as a
sample of the poetical promise supposed to be contained in these unripe
productions.
Besides the studies pursued by the whole school under the tuition of
Mademoiselle Descuillès, we had special masters from whom we took
lessons in special branches of knowledge. Of these, by far the most
interesting to me, both in himself and in the subject of his teachings,
was my Italian master, Biagioli.
He was a political exile, of about the same date as his remarkable
contemporary, Ugo Foscolo; his high forehead, from which his hair fell
back in a long grizzled curtain, his wild, melancholy eyes, and the
severe and sad expression of his face, impressed me with some awe and
much pity. He was at that time one of the latest of the long tribe of
commentators on Dante's "Divina Commedia." I do not believe his
commentary ranks high among the innumerable similar works on the great
Italian poem; but in violence of abuse, and scornful contempt of all but
his own glosses, he yields to none of his fellow-laborers in that vast
and tangled poetical, historical, biographical, philosophical,
theological, and metaphysical jungle.
Dante was his spiritual consolation, his intellectual delight, and
indeed his daily bread; for out of that tremendous horn-book he taught
me to stammer the divine Italian language, and illustrated every lesson,
from the simplest rule of its syntax to its exceedingly complex and
artificially constructed prosody, out of the pages of that sublime,
grotesque, and altogether wonderful poem. My mother has told me that she
attributed her incapacity for relishing Milton to the fact of "Paradise
Lost" having been used as a lesson-book out of which she was made to
learn English--a circumstance which had made it for ever "Paradise
_Lost_" to her. I do not know why or how I escaped a similar misfortune
in my school-girl study of Dante, but luckily I did so, probably being
carried over the steep and stony way with comparative ease by the help
of my teacher's vivid enthusiasm. I have forgotten my Italian grammar,
rules of syntax and rules of prosody alike, but I read and re-read the
"Divina Commedia" with ever-increasing amazement and admiration. Setting
aside all its weightier claims to the high place it holds among the
finest achievements of human genius, I know of no poem in any language
in which so many single lines and detached passages can be found of
equally descriptive force, picturesque beauty, and delightful melody of
sound; the latter virtue may lie, perhaps, as much in the instrument
itself as in the master hand that touched it--the Italian tongue, the
resonance and vibrating power of which is quite as peculiar as its
liquid softness.
While the stern face and forlorn figure of poor Biagioli seemed an
appropriate accompaniment to my Dantesque studies, nothing could exceed
the contrast he presented to another Italian who visited us on alternate
days and gave us singing lessons. Blangini, whose extreme popularity as
a composer and teacher led him to the dignity of _maestro di capella_ to
some royal personage, survives only in the recollection of certain
elderly drawing-room nightingales who warbled fifty summers ago, and who
will still hum bits of his pretty Canzoni and Notturni, "Care pupille,"
"Per valli per boschi," etc.
Blangini was a _petit maître_ as well as a singing master; always
attired in the height of the fashion, and in manner and appearance much
more of a Frenchman than an Italian. He was mercilessly satirical on the
failures of his pupils, to whom (having reduced them, by the most
ridiculous imitation of their unfortunate vocal attempts, to an almost
inaudible utterance of _pianissimo_ pipings) he would exclaim, "Ma per
carità! aprite la bocca! che cantate come uccelli che dormano!"
My music master, as distinguished from my singing master, was a worthy
old Englishman of the name of Shaw, who played on the violin, and had
been at one time leader of the orchestra at Covent Garden Theatre.
Indeed, it was to him that John Kemble addressed the joke (famous,
because in his mouth unique) upon the subject of a song in the piece of
"Richard Coeur de Lion"--I presume an English version of Gietry's
popular romance, "O Richard, O mon Roi!" This Mr. Shaw was painfully
endeavoring to teach my uncle, who was entirely without musical ear, and
whose all but insuperable difficulty consisted in repeating a few bars
of the melody supposed to be sung under his prison window by his
faithful minstrel, Blondel. "Mr. Kemble, Mr. Kemble, you are murdering
the time, sir!" cried the exasperated musician; to which my uncle
replied, "Very well, sir, and you are forever beating it!" I do not know
whether Mrs. Rowden knew this anecdote, and engaged Mr. Shaw because he
had elicited this solitary sally from her quondam idol, John Kemble. The
choice, whatever its motive, was not a happy one. The old leader of the
theatrical orchestra was himself no piano-forte player, could no longer
see very well nor hear very well, and his principal attention was
directed to his own share of the double performance, which he led much
after the careless, slap-bang style in which overtures that nobody
listened to were performed in his day. It is a very great mistake to let
learners play with violin accompaniment until they have thoroughly
mastered the piano-forte without it. Fingering, the first of fundamental
acquirements, is almost sure to be overlooked by the master, whose
attention is not on the hands of his pupil but on his own bow; and the
pupil, anxious to keep up with the violin, slurs over rapid passages,
scrambles through difficult ones, and acquires a general habit of merely
following the violin in time and tune, to the utter disregard of steady,
accurate execution. As for me, I derived but one benefit from my old
violin accompanier, that of becoming a good timist; in every other
respect I received nothing but injury from our joint performances,
getting into incorrigible habits of bad fingering, and of making up my
bass with unscrupulous simplifications of the harmony, quite content if
I came in with my final chords well thumped in time and tune with the
emphatic scrape of the violin that ended our lesson. The music my master
gave me, too, was more in accordance with his previous practice as
leader of a theatrical orchestra, than calculated to make me a steady
and scrupulous executant.
We had another master for French and Latin--a clever, ugly, impudent,
snuffy, dirty little man, who wrote vaudevilles for the minor theaters,
and made love to his pupils. Both these gentlemen were superseded in
their offices by other professors before I left school: poor old Pshaw
Pshaw, as we used to call him, by the French composer, Adam, unluckily
too near the time of my departure for me to profit by his strict and
excellent method of instruction; and our vaudevillist was replaced by a
gentleman of irreproachable manners, and I should think morals, who
always came to our lessons _en toilette_--black frock-coat and
immaculate white waistcoat, unexceptionable boots and gloves--by dint of
all which he ended by marrying our dear Mademoiselle Descuillès (who,
poor thing, was but a woman after all, liable to charming by such
methods), and turning her into Madame Champy, under which name she
continued to preside over the school after I left it; and Mrs. Rowden
relinquished her share in the concern--herself marrying, and becoming
Mrs. St. Quintin.
I have spoken of my learning Latin: Elizabeth P----, the object in all
things of my emulous admiration, studied it, and I forthwith begged
permission to do so likewise; and while this dead-language ambition
possessed me, I went so far as to acquire the Greek alphabet; which,
however, I used only as a cipher for "my secrets," and abandoned my
Latin lore, just as I had exchanged my Phædrus for Cornelius Nepos, not
even attaining to the "Arma virumque cano."
Nobody but Miss P---- and myself dabbled in these classical depths, but
nearly the whole school took dancing lessons, which were given us by two
masters, an old and young Mr. Guillet, father and son: the former, a
little dapper, dried-up, wizen-faced, beak-nosed old man, with a brown
wig that fitted his head and face like a Welsh night-cap; who played the
violin and stamped in time, and scolded and made faces at us when we
were clumsy and awkward; the latter, a highly colored, beak-nosed young
gentleman who squinted fearfully with magnificent black eyes, and had
one shining, oily wave of blue-black hair, which, departing from above
one ear, traversed his forehead in a smooth sweep, and ended in a
frizzly breaker above the other. This gentleman showed us our steps, and
gave us the examples of graceful ability of which his father was no
longer capable. I remember a very comical scene at one of our dancing
lessons, occasioned by the first appearance of a certain Miss ----, who
entered the room, to the general amazement, in full evening costume--a
practice common, I believe, in some English schools where "dressing for
dancing" prevails. We only put on light prunella slippers instead of our
heavier morning shoes or boots, and a pair of gloves, as adequate
preparation. Moreover, the French fashion for full dress, of that day,
did not sanction the uncovering of the person usual in English evening
attire.