“MY OLDEST AND KINDEST FRIEND.”
“Nature has given us two ears, but only one mouth—why do not we take
the hint?” was a sentence which Macready wrote in his Diary when
suffering the consequences of some ill-advised, hasty utterance. If
only Miss Mitford, with her impulsiveness, had seen this sentence
and could have realized how wise was the advice contained in it,
she would have been a happier woman in many respects. Too often her
eagerness to champion the cause of one of her friends led her to
embitter and estrange another. Among her neighbours was a family
of the name of Merry, and one day, while Talfourd was on a visit
to the Mitford Cottage, Mr. Merry called and in some way affronted
the other. This vexed the hostess considerably at the time, and
was referred to later, when she and the Merrys met at an afternoon
function at Bearwood, the residence of Mr. Walter, of the _Times_.
There was a heated argument, and Miss Mitford took up a resentful
attitude, “certainly with too much violence,” as she afterwards
explained. The occasion was ill-chosen for such an altercation, and
Mr. Merry was deeply offended. Repenting at leisure, Miss Mitford
wrote him an apology, which he would not accept. For six weeks he
nursed his grievance, spreading the tale of Miss Mitford’s offence
among mutual friends. Realizing at last how deeply she had offended,
Miss Mitford sent her old friend the following letter, which we quote
as an instance of her wholehearted contrition.
“I cannot suffer you to leave our neighbourhood for weeks, perhaps
for months, without making one more effort to soften a displeasure
too justly excited—without once more acknowledging my fault, and
entreating your forgiveness. Do not again repulse me—pray do
not! Life is too short, too full of calamity, for an alienation
indefinitely prolonged—a pardon so long suspended. I know you
better, perhaps, than you know yourself, and am sure that, were I
at this moment suffering under any great affliction, you would be
the first—ay, the very first—to soothe and to succour me. If my
father (which may God in his mercy avert!) were dead; if I myself
were on a sick bed, or in prison, or in a workhouse (and you well
know that this is the destiny to which I always look forward),
then you would come to me—I am sure of it. You would be as ready
to fly to my assistance then as the angel of peace and mercy at
your side”—[a tender allusion to Mrs. Merry, who was deeply
grieved at the estrangement].—“But do not wait for that moment; do
not, for an error which has been sincerely and severely repented,
deprive a melancholy and a most anxious existence of one of its few
consolations. Lonely and desolate as I am—with no one belonging to
me in the world but my dear father—poor in every sense, earning
with pain and difficulty a livelihood which every day makes more
precarious, I cannot afford the loss of your sympathy. I say this
without fear of misconstruction. You will understand that what I
regret is the friendship, and intimacy, the everyday intercourse of
mind and of heart, on which even you yourself—so much more happily
placed—did yet set some value. You did like me once; try me again.
You will find me—at least I hope so—all the better for the rigorous
discipline which my mind has lately undergone, the salutary and
unwonted course of self-examination and self-abasement.
“At all events, do not go without a few words of peace and of
kindness. I send you the last flowers of my garden. Your flower seems
to have continued in blossom on purpose to assist in the work of
reconciliation. Do not scorn its sweet breath, or resist its mute
pleadings, but give me in exchange one bunch of the laurustinus for
which I used to ask you last winter, and let it be a token of the
full and perfect reconciliation for which I am a suppliant; and then
I shall cherish it—oh, I cannot tell you how much! Once again,
forgive me—and farewell.”
It is pleasant to record that this touching appeal had, as of course
it would, the desired effect, and the old happy relationship was
renewed.
The year was 1833 and, like many a previous one, it was full of
pecuniary worries and embarrassments. Dr. Mitford was again giving
trouble, seeking to augment his income by some doubtful investment
for which he had, as usual, the tip of some unscrupulous schemer,
to whose class he fell an easy prey. The matter fortunately came to
Miss Mitford’s knowledge, and she wrote off in great haste to William
Harness “to caution you in case you should receive any authority,
from any quarter, to sell out our money in the Funds, not to do
so without communicating with me. I have no doubt of my father’s
integrity, but I think him likely to be imposed on.”
This was a more serious matter than it at first appears. The money in
the Funds was left by Dr. Russell for his daughter and her offspring
and could not therefore be touched without authority from Miss
Mitford, who was her mother’s sole heir. How then did Dr. Mitford
propose to obtain its use? There is only one answer and it is one
which involves the integrity which Miss Mitford did not question.
Harness’s reply was plain and to the point. “Depend upon it the
money shall never be touched with _my_ consent. It was consideration
for your future welfare which prevented my father’s consenting to
its being sold out some years ago, when you had been persuaded,
and wished to persuade him, to your own utter ruin.” [This was
during the stressful time at Bertram House when, with the consent
of her mother, Miss Mitford wrote to Dr. Harness imploring him to
sell out and give her father the use of the money.] “That £3,000 I
consider as the sheet-anchor of your independence, if age should ever
render literature irksome to you, or infirmity incapacitate you for
exertion; and, _while your father lives_, it shall never stir from
its present post in the Funds. After he has ceased (as all fathers
must cease) to live, my first object will be to consult with you
and my most intelligent money-managing friends, and discover the
mode of making the stock most profitable to your comfort, either by
annuity or any other mode that may be thought most advisable. Till
then—_from whatever quarter the proposition may come_—I have but
one black, blank, unqualified _No_ for my answer. I do not doubt Dr.
Mitford’s integrity, but I have not the slightest confidence in his
prudence; and I am fully satisfied that if these three thousand and
odd hundreds of pounds were placed at his disposal _to-day_, they
would fly the way so many other thousands have gone before them,
_to-morrow_. Excuse me saying this; but I cannot help it.”
This letter stands to the lasting credit of its writer and affords
ample proof of his steadfast and unflinching devotion to his trust,
failing which the tragedy of Miss Mitford’s life would have been
deeper than it was. He alone had the power of drawing out the best
that was in Miss Mitford, in getting her to express the moral and
spiritual side of her nature. Art, literature, the Drama she could
talk and write upon to other people, but it was to William Harness
that she would pour out her convictions on the deeper things of life.
He sent her a book of his sermons, and although it reached her at
midnight (having been conveyed from her friend by Dr. Milman to her
father, whom he met at a dinner-party), she sat far into the night,
reading and studying it, and inditing a reply at three o’clock in the
morning while the mood was hot upon her.
“I have read it through—the second part twice through. That second
sermon would have done honour to Shakespeare, and I half expected
to find you quoting him. There would be a tacit hypocrisy, a moral
cowardice, if I were to stop here, and not to confess, what I think
you must suspect, although by no chance do I ever talk about it—that
I do not, or rather cannot, believe all that the Church requires.
I humbly hope that it is not necessary to do so, and that a devout
sense of the mercy of God, and an endeavour, however imperfectly and
feebly, to obey the great precepts of justice and kindness, may be
accepted in lieu of that entire faith which, in me, _will not_ be
commanded. You will not suspect me of thoughtlessness in this matter;
neither, I trust, does it spring from intellectual pride. Few persons
have a deeper sense of their own weakness; few, indeed, can have so
much weakness of character to deplore and to strive against. Do not
answer this part of my letter. It has cost me a strong effort to say
this to you; but it would have been a concealment amounting to a
falsity if I had not, and falsehood must be wrong. Do not notice it;
a correspondence of controversy could only end in alienation, and
I could not afford to lose my oldest and kindest friend—to break
up the close intimacy in which I am so happy and of which I am so
proud.” This was in 1829. In the Spring of 1834 her old friend sent
another of his printed sermons, which again she read and studied
and which drew from her some pronouncements on Disestablishment and
Disendowment of the Church and on questions of Social Reform which
cannot but be read with interest to-day.
“It is a very able and conciliatory plea for the Church. My opinion
(if an insignificant woman may presume to give one) is, that certain
reforms ought to be; that very gross cases of pluralities should be
abolished (it is too sweeping, I think, to say _all_ pluralities);
that some few of the clergy are too rich, and that a great many
are too poor; but (although not holding all her doctrines) I
heartily agree with you that, as an establishment, the Church
ought to remain; for, to say nothing of the frightful precedent of
sweeping away property, a precedent which would not stop there,
the country would be over-run with fanatics, and, in the rural
districts especially, a clergyman (provided he be not a magistrate)
is generally, in _worldly_, as well as spiritual matters, a great
comfort to the poor. But our wise legislators never think of the
rural districts—_never_. They legislate against gin-shops, which are
the evil of great towns, and encourage beer-shops, which are the pest
of the country, the cause of half the poverty and three-fourths of
the demoralization. But the Church must be (as many of her members
_are_) wisely tolerant; bishops must not wage war with theatres, nor
rectors with a Sunday evening game of cricket. If they take up the
arms of the Puritans, the Puritans will beat them.”
The reference in this letter to rectors and Sunday cricket is most
interesting in view of the fact that only a few miles away, in the
village of Eversley, there had just arrived a new curate who, as time
went on, became the rector; and who, among other things, shocked
some of his clerical brethren by actually encouraging manly sports,
such as cricket and quoits, on the village green in the intervals
between the Sunday services. His name was Charles Kingsley and he was
destined to be numbered among the very dear friends of Miss Mitford
in her declining days.
The refusal—the just refusal—of William Harness to entertain
Dr. Mitford’s idea regarding money matters, somewhat upset the
latter’s calculations, besides causing him to be more importunate
in his demands on his daughter. There were, of course, certain sums
coming in regularly from the various magazines, but these were not
sufficient, and so both father and daughter decided to take a bold
risk and endeavour to produce the prohibited play of _Charles the
First_ at some theatre where the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain
did not operate.
Dr. Mitford took the manuscript with him to London in the May of
1834, where, by the kindness of Mr. T. J. Serle—a noted playwright
and actor—he was introduced to Mr. Abbott, who, having left Covent
Garden Theatre and become Manager of the Victoria Theatre in the
Waterloo Road, was a likely person to take up the project. Mr.
Abbott immediately accepted the play and was extremely liberal in
his terms—£200 to be paid down and a fourth share of the profits if
the play ran for a certain number of nights. The negotiations were
somewhat prolonged, but by the end of June the whole matter had been
arranged and Miss Mitford went to town to superintend the rehearsals.
The play was produced in July, with Mr. Cathcart in the cast and
with the prologue both written and spoken by Mr. Serle. It was a
great success, despite the drawbacks attendant on its production
in a minor theatre on the Surrey side of the Thames. Writing to
her friend Miss Jephson, the delighted author said:—“The papers
will of course have told you that both I and my actor have been
successful ... the thing is admirably got up, the theatre beautiful,
and Cathcart’s acting refined, intellectual, powerful and commanding
beyond anything I ever witnessed.... They make a real queen of me,
and would certainly demolish my humility, if I were happy enough to
be humble, though I feel that over-praise, over-estimation, is a far
more humbling thing—a thing that sends you back on your own mind to
ask, ‘Have I deserved this?’ than anything else that can be. For the
first ten days I spent on an average from four to six hours every
morning in the Victoria Theatre, at hard scolding, for the play has
been entirely got up by me; then I dined out amongst twenty or thirty
eminent strangers every evening. Since that I have been to operas and
to pictures, and held a sort of drawing-room every morning; so that
I am so worn out, as to have, for three days out of the last four,
fainted dead away between four and five o’clock, a fine-lady trick
which I never played before, and which teaches me I must return, as
soon as I can, into the country, to write another play and run again
the same round of fatigue, excitement and pleasure. After all, my
primary object is, and has been, to establish Mr. Cathcart.”
[Illustration: Mary Russell Mitford.
(From a drawing by F. R. Say, 1837.)]
Although the Duke of Devonshire could not agree to licence the
play, he was not averse to accepting its Dedication to himself,
acknowledging it in a very gracious note to the author. Thus, set on
their feet once more, the little household pursued a normal course
of existence. The Doctor went to London and his daughter plodded,
exhausted and overdone, at her new book, which was to be called
_Belford Regis_ and be descriptive of life and character in a country
town—Belford Regis being, of course, none other than the adjacent
town of Reading.
It was a project originally undertaken by its author for no other
purpose than to try her hand at delineating the scenery and
characteristics of a town in the same way that she had treated the
country in _Our Village_. The original scheme was for one volume, but
the thing grew and the characters afforded such scope to the writer
that, by the time it was published, it had extended to three volumes.
While Dr. Mitford was in town—he went up in the early part of
1835—he opened up negotiations on the subject with Richard Bentley,
the publisher, and secured very good terms, with the result that
Bentley published _Belford Regis: or Sketches of a Country Town_,
late in the same year. Charming and valuable as the book may be for
its picture of life in the Reading of that day, it cannot compare in
the slightest degree with the similar work which preceded it. It
is slipshod as to style and is full of repetitions, bearing all too
plainly the marks of hurried compilation and the harassed, overworked
mind of its author. Miss Mitford, recognized these faults, but
attributed them to another cause, viz., “its having been sent up at
different times; having been first intended to appear in one volume,
then in two, and now in three volumes.”
It had a certain success; that was inevitable with a book from Miss
Mitford’s pen now that her reputation had been established; but the
success was not maintained, and now _Belford Regis_ is looked upon
as a literary curiosity by students and with affection by all who
claim a more than passing interest in the town which it describes.
The critics of the day were divided in their opinions; some preferred
it to _Our Village_, but most found fault with it in that it pictured
life as too bright and sunny. The author’s own estimate was conveyed
in a letter to Miss Jephson.
“In my opinion it is overloaded with civil notes, and too full of
carelessnesses and trifling repetitions.... Nevertheless, I myself
prefer it to my other prose works, both as bolder and more various
and deeper in sentiment, and as containing one character (a sort of
embodiment of the strong sense and right feeling which I believe to
be common in the middling classes, emphatically _the people_) which
appears and reappears in several of the stories, giving comfortable
proof of the power to carry on a strongly distinguished character
through three volumes which, if I do not comply (as I suppose I must)
with Mr. Bentley’s desire for a novel, will be very valuable.”
This project of a novel was one which Miss Mitford thought upon as a
sort of nightmare. Longmans had proposed it years before but had been
met with a refusal, and now Bentley was renewing the attack, though
he did not succeed.
Altogether the year was one which should have been regarded as
prosperous. It saw the issue of the fourteenth edition of the first
volume of _Our Village_ and the issue of a two-volume edition (five
vols. in two), illustrated with woodcuts by George Baxter, who
visited Three Mile Cross early in the year to take sketches under the
author’s supervision. It also saw the production of the opera _Sadak
and Kalasrade_ at the Lyceum, but this can hardly be accounted a
success as its performance was restricted to one night.
The publication of _Belford Regis_ naturally inspired the writing
of many congratulatory letters to its author and brought shoals of
visitors to the little cottage to see the author and her flowers—the
latter she had described in great detail in the work. Among the
visitors were William and Mary Howitt, both of whom went away charmed
with all they had seen. Mary Howitt told Miss Mitford that her study
of the development of intellect in the heroine of “The Dissenting
Minister,” might pass for the history of her own mind, and that the
author must have lived much amongst rigid Dissenters to give so
exact a picture of the goings-on in the interior of their families.
William Howitt paid his tribute in a delightful account of his visit
which appeared in the _Athenæum_ of August of that same year. It
was entitled, _A Visit to our Village_, and, although Miss Mitford
thought the praise was overdone, she yet hoped her old friend, Sir
William Elford, would read it:—“It is at once so pretty and so kind;
the praise does not describe me as I am, because I fall far short of
the picture; but it is just how I should wish to be—and how very
seldom does that happen!”
And, in addition to all this, the September brought a commission from
the editors of _Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal_. “It is one of the signs
of the times, that a periodical selling for three-halfpence should
engage so high-priced a writer as myself; but they have a circulation
of 200,000 or 300,000.” This was Miss Mitford’s passing comment on
the transaction, but it was to be of far more lasting importance
than she anticipated, resulting as it did in a close friendship with
William Chambers and in a scheme of collaboration in which she took a
prominent part.