Book: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860




And so with her vigilant and appreciative eye she saw, and thus in her
own charming way she talked of the man, whose name, says Taylor, as a
popularizer of art, stands without a rival among his brethren.

* * * * *

Her passion for the Drama continued through life, and to see a friend's
play would take her up to London when nothing else would tempt her to
leave her cottage. It was delightful to hear her talk of the old actors,
many of whom she had known. She loved to describe John Kemble, Mrs.
Siddons, Miss O'Neill, and Edmund Kean, as they were wont to electrify
the town. Elliston was a great favorite, and she had as many good things
to tell of him as Elia ever had. One autumn afternoon she related all
the circumstances attending the "first play" she ever saw,--which, by
the way, was a tragedy enacted in a barn somewhere in the little town of
Alresford, where she was born. The winking candles dividing the stage
from the audience, she used to say, were winking now in her memory,
although fifty years had elapsed since her father took her, a child of
four years, to see "Othello." Her talent at mimicry made her always most
interesting, when she spoke of Munden and his pleasant absurdities on
the stage. For Bannister, Johnstone, Fawcett, and Emery she had a most
exquisite relish, and she said they had made comedy to her a living art
full of laughter and tears. Her passion for the stage, and overclouded
prospects for the future, led her in early youth to write a play. She
had already written a considerable number of verses which had been
printed, and were honored by being severely castigated by Gifford in the
"Quarterly."

"I didn't mind the great reviewer's blows at all," she used to say. "My
poems had been republished in America; and Coleridge had prophesied that
I should one day write a tragedy."

Talfourd was then, though a young man, a most excellent critic, and lent
a helping hand to the young authoress. Her anxieties attending the first
representation of her play at Covent Garden she was always fond of
relating, and in such a manner that we who listened fell into such
boisterous merriment with her, that I have known carriages stop in front
of her window, and their inmates put out anxiously inquiring heads, to
learn, if possible, what it all meant inside the cottage.

She never forgot "the warm grasp of Mrs. Charles Kemble's hand, when she
saw her, all life and heartiness, at her house in Soho Square,--or the
excellent acting of Young and Kemble and Macready, who did everything
actors could do to secure success for her."

"These are the things," she once wrote, "one thinks of, when sitting
calm and old by the light of a country fire."

The comic and the grotesque that were mingled up with her first
experiences of the stage as a dramatic author were inimitably rendered
by herself, whenever she sat down to relate the story of that visit to
London for the purpose of bringing out her tragedy. The rehearsals,
where "the only grave person present was Mr. Liston!--the tragic
heroines sauntering languidly through their parts in bonnets and thick
shawls,--the untidy ballet-girls" (there was a dance in "Foscari")
"walking through their quadrille to the sound of a solitary
fiddle,"--she was never weary of calling up for the amusement of her
listeners.

The old dramatists she had grown up to worship,--Shakspeare first, as in
all loyalty bound, and after him Fletcher. "Affluent, eloquent, royally
grand," she used to call both Beaumont and Fletcher; and whole scenes
from favorite plays she knew by heart. Dr. Valpy was her neighbor, he
being in the days of her youth headmaster of Reading School. A family
intimacy of long standing had existed between her father's household and
that of the learned and excellent scholar, so that his well-known taste
for the English dramatists had no small influence on Doctor Mitford's
studious daughter. "He helped me also," she said, "to enter into the
spirit of those mighty masters who dealt forth the stern Tragedies of
Destiny."

One of the dearest friends of her youth was Miss Porden, (afterwards
married, as his first wife, to Sir John Franklin,) and at her suggestion
Miss Mitford wrote "Rienzi." I have heard her say, that, going up
to London to bring out that play, she saw her old friend, then Mrs.
Franklin, working a flag for the captain's ship, then about to sail on
one of his early adventurous voyages. The agitation of parting with
her husband was too great for her delicate temperament, and before the
expedition was out of the Channel Mrs. Franklin was dead.

* * * * *

Often and often, when the English lanes were white with blossoms, I
have sat by her side while her faithful servant guided her low-wheeled
pony-chaise among the pleasant roads about Reading and Swallowfield.
Once we went to a cricket-ground together, and as we sat under the
trees, looking on as the game proceeded, she, who fell in love with
Nature when a child, and had studied the landscape till she knew
familiarly every flower and leaf that grows on English soil, assembled
all that was best in poesy from her memory to illustrate the beautiful
scene before us, and to prove how much better and more truly the great
end of existence is answered in a rural life than in the vexatious cares
of city occupation. As we sat looking at the vast lawn, magnificent in
its green apparel, she quoted Irving as one who had understood English
country-life perhaps more deeply and fully than any other foreign author
who had ever written.

Speaking, one day, of the slowness of poetical fame, she said,--

"It always takes ten years to make a poetical reputation in England; but
America is wiser and bolder, and dares say at once, '_This is fine!_'"

She rejoiced greatly in several of the American poets, and was never
weary of quoting certain ringing couplets which she has celebrated in
her "Notes of a Literary Life." "Is there anything under the sun," she
exclaims, "that Dr. Holmes cannot paint?"

During the last six years of her life she became a great invalid and
moved about only with severe pain. "It is not age," she said, "that has
thus prostrated me, but the hard work and increasing anxieties of thirty
years of authorship, during which my poor labors were all that my dear
father and mother had to look to; besides which, for the greater part of
that time I was constantly called upon to attend the sick bed, first of
one parent, and then of the other. I have only to be intensely thankful
that the power of exertion did not fail until the necessity for such
exertion was removed."

"I love poetry and people as well at sixty as I did at sixteen," she
said one day, when I gave her a new volume by an American friend, "and
can never be sufficiently grateful to God for having permitted me to
retain the two joy-giving faculties of admiration and sympathy." The
"Ballad of Cassandra Southwick" she esteemed as one of the finest things
of our time; and of "Astrea" she said,--"Nobody in England can write
the glorious resonant metre of Dryden like that strain, nowadays."

Pope was a great favorite with her, and she took me one morning to an
old house where he was a frequent guest, and where Arabella Fermor, the
heroine of the "Rape of the Lock," passed her married life. On the way
she often quoted the poet, whose works she seemed to know by heart.
Returning at sunset, she was very anxious that I should hear my first
nightingale among the woody lanes of her pretty country; but we were
both disappointed. We listened long, but, although the air was full of
birdsongs that evening, the sweet-voiced warbler was not of the choir.
She talked much, as we rode along, of Kingsley and Ruskin, both of whom
she loved as friends as well as authors. "John Ruskin," she said, "is
good and kind, and charming beyond the common lot of mortals, and there
are pages of his prose, to my thinking, more eloquent than any thing out
of Jeremy Taylor."

Speaking of Humor, she said,--"Between ourselves, I always have a little
doubt of genius, when there is none of that quality: certainly, in the
very highest poetry, the two go together."

She greatly admired Beranger, and often spoke of him as the beautiful
old man, the truest and best type of perfect independence. Hazlitt she
ranked highly as an essayist, and she mentioned that she had heard both
Charles Lamb and Talfourd praise him as not only the most brilliant, but
the soundest of critics.

Among modern romances, those by the author of "The Scarlet Letter"
seemed to impress her almost more than any others; and when "The House
of the Seven Gables" was translated into Russian, she was filled with
delight. Indeed, she was always among the first to cry, "Bravo!" over
any good words for American literature.

"Do coax Mr. Hawthorne and Dr. Holmes," she said one day, "into visiting
England. I want them to be welcomed as they deserve, and as they are
sure to be."

Her interest in the French Emperor's career amounted to enthusiasm, and
one day she told us a very pretty story about him which she knew to
be true. She said, when he was in England after Strasbourg and before
Boulogne, he spent a twelvemonth at Leamington, living in the quietest
manner. One of the principal persons in that town, Mr. H., a very
liberal and accomplished man, made a point of showing every attention in
his power to the Prince; and they very soon became intimate. There
was in the town an old officer of the Emperor's Polish Legion, who,
compelled to leave France after Waterloo, had taken refuge in England,
and, having a natural talent for languages, maintained himself by
teaching French, Italian, and German in different families. The old
exile and the young one found each other out, and the language-master
was soon an habitual guest at the Prince's table, where he was treated
with the most affectionate attention. At last Louis Napoleon was obliged
to repair to London, but before he went he called on his friend Mr. H.
to take leave. After warm thanks to him for all the pleasure he had
experienced in his society, the Prince said,--

"I am about to prove to you my entire reliance upon your unfailing
kindness by leaving you a legacy. I wish to ask that you would transfer
to my poor old friend the goodness you have lavished on me. His health
is failing,--his means are small; pray, call upon him sometimes, and see
that the lodging-house people do not neglect him. Draw upon me for what
may be wanting for his needs or for his comforts."

Mr. H. promised, and faithfully replaced the Prince in his kind
attentions to his old friend. The poor old man grew ill at last, and
died, Mr. H. defraying all the charges of his illness and of his
funeral. "I would willingly have paid them myself," said he, "but I knew
that would have offended and grieved the Prince. I found that provision
had been made at his banker's to answer my drafts to a much larger
amount than the actual debt."

Miss Mitford used to say that she kept this anecdote for non-admirers of
the Emperor.

One day she came limping into the room, with her dog Fanchon following
in the same lame plight,--she laughing heartily at their similarity of
gait, and holding up a letter just in from the post.

"Here," said she, "is an epistle from my dear old friend, Lady M.,"
(Gibbon's correspondent,) "who at the age of eighty-three is caught
by new books, and is as enthusiastic as a girl. She commissions me to
inquire of you all about your new authoress, the writer of 'Uncle Tom's
Cabin,' who she is, and all you know of her. So let me hear what you
have to say about the lady."

During a brief visit to her cottage not long before she died, the chase
was started one evening to find, if possible, the origin of the line
quoted by Byron,--

"A fellow-feeling makes one wondrous kind."

In vain we searched among the poets, and at last all the party gave up
in despair. I went up to London soon after, thinking no more of the lost
line. In a few days, however, came a brief note, as follows:--

"Hurrah, dear friend! I have found the line without any other person's
aid or suggestion! Last night it occurred to me that it was in some
prologue or epilogue; and my little book-room being very rich in the
drama, I have looked through many hundreds of those bits of rhyme, and
at last made a discovery, which, if it have no other good effect, will
at least have 'emptied my head of Corsica,' as Johnson said to Boswell;
for never was the great biographer more haunted by the thought of Paoli
than I by that line. It occurs in an epilogue by Garrick, on quitting
the stage, June, 1776, when the performance was for the benefit of sick
and aged actors.

"Not finding it quoted in Johnson convinced me that it would probably
have been written after the publication of the Dictionary, and
ultimately guided me to the right place. It is singular that epilogues
were just dismissed at the first representation of one of my plays,
'Foscari,' and prologues at another, 'Rienzi.'

"Ever most affectionately yours,

"M.R. MITFORD.

"P.S. I am still a close prisoner in my room. But when fine weather
comes, I will get down in some way or other, and trust myself to that
which never hurts anybody, the honest open air. Spring, and even the
approach of spring, sets me dreaming. I see leafy hedges in my sleep,
and flowery banks, and then I long to make the vision a reality.
I remember that my dog Flush, Fanchon's father, who was a famous
sporting-dog, used, at the approach of the covering season, to hunt in
his sleep, doubtless by the same instinct that works in me. So, as soon
as the sun tells the same story with the primroses, I shall make a
descent after some fashion, and, no doubt, aided by Sam's stalwart arm,
successfully."

* * * * *

After leaving Three-Mile Cross for Swallowfield, her health, never of
late years robust, seemed failing. In one of her letters to me she gives
this pleasant picture of her home:--

"Ill as I am, my spirits are as good as ever; and just at this moment I
am most comfortably seated under the acacia-tree at the corner of the
house,--the beautiful acacia literally loaded with its snowy chains. The
flowering-trees this summer, the lilacs, laburnums, and rhododendrons,
have been one mass of blossoms, but none are so graceful as this
waving acacia. On one side is a syringa, smelling and looking like an
orange-tree,--a jar of roses on the table before me,--fresh gathered
roses,--the pride of my gardener's heart. Little Fanchon is at my
feet, too idle to eat the biscuits with which I am trying to tempt
her,--biscuits from Boston, sent to me by kind Mrs. S., and which
Fanchon ought to like; but you know her laziness of old, and she
improves in it every day."

It was about this period that Walter Savage Landor sent to her these
exquisite lines:--

"The hay is carried; and the Hours
Snatch, as they pass, the linden-flowers;
And children leap to pluck a spray
Bent earthward, and then run away.
Park-keeper! catch me those grave thieves,
About whose frocks the fragrant leaves,
Sticking and fluttering here and there,
No false nor faltering witness bear.

"I never view such scenes as these
In grassy meadow girt with trees,
But comes a thought of her who now
Sits with serenely patient brow
Amid deep sufferings: none hath told
More pleasant tales to young and old.
Fondest was she of Father Thames,
But rambled to Hellenic streams;
Nor even there could any tell
The country's purer charms so well
As Mary Mitford.

"Verse! go forth
And breathe o'er gentle hearts her worth.
Needless the task: but should she see
One hearty wish from you and me,
A moment's pain it may assuage,--
A rose-leaf on the couch of Age."

In the early days of the year 1855 she sent, in her own handwriting,
kind greetings to her old friends only a few hours before she died.
Sweetness of temper and brightness of mind, her never-failing
characteristics, accompanied her to the last; and she passed on in her
usual cheerful and affectionate mood, her sympathies uncontracted by
age, narrow fortune, and pain.




THE PROFESSOR'S STORY.


CHAPTER XVII.

OLD SOPHY CALLS ON THE REVEREND DOCTOR.


The two meeting-houses which faced each other like a pair of
fighting-cocks had not flapped their wings or crowed at each other for a
considerable time. The Reverend Mr. Fairweather had been dyspeptic and
low-spirited of late, and was too languid for controversy. The Reverend
Doctor Honeywood had been very busy with his benevolent associations,
and had discoursed chiefly on practical matters, to the neglect of
special doctrinal subjects. His senior deacon ventured to say to him
that some of his people required to be reminded of the great fundamental
doctrine of the worthlessness of all human efforts and motives. Some of
them were altogether too much pleased with the success of the Temperance
Society and the Association for the Relief of the Poor. There was a
pestilent heresy about, concerning the satisfaction to be derived from
a good conscience,--as if anybody ever did anything which was not to be
hated, loathed, despised, and condemned.

The old minister listened gravely, with an inward smile, and told his
deacon that he would attend to his suggestion. After the deacon had
gone, he tumbled over his manuscripts, until at length he came upon his
first-rate old sermon on "Human Nature." He had read a great deal of
hard theology, and had at last reached that curious state which is so
common in good ministers,--that, namely, in which they contrive to
switch off their logical faculties on the narrow side-track of their
technical dogmas, while the great freight-train of their substantial
human qualities keeps in the main highway of common-sense, in which
kindly souls are always found by all who approach them by their human
side.

The Doctor read his sermon with a pleasant, paternal interest: it was
well argued from his premises. Here and there he dashed his pen through
a harsh expression. Now and then he added an explanation or qualified
a broad statement. But his mind was on the logical side-track, and he
followed the chain of reasoning without fairly perceiving where it would
lead him, if he carried it into real life.

He was just touching up the final proposition, when his granddaughter,
Letty, once before referred to, came into the room with her smiling face
and lively movement. Miss Letty or Letitia Forrester was a city-bred
girl of some fifteen or sixteen years old, who was passing the summer
with her grandfather for the sake of country air and quiet. It was a
sensible arrangement; for, having the promise of figuring as a belle
by-and-by, and being a little given to dancing, and having a voice which
drew a pretty dense circle around the piano when she sat down to play
and sing, it was hard to keep her from being carried into society before
her time, by the mere force of mutual attraction. Fortunately, she had
some quiet as well as some social tastes, and was willing enough to pass
two or three of the summer months in the country, where she was much
better bestowed than she would have been at one of those watering-places
where so many half-formed girls get prematurely hardened in the vice of
self-consciousness.

Miss Letty was altogether too wholesome, hearty, and high-strung a young
girl to be a model, according to the flat-chested and cachectic pattern
which is the classical type of certain excellent young females, often
the subjects of biographical memoirs. But the old minister was proud of
his granddaughter for all that. She was so full of life, so graceful, so
generous, so vivacious, so ready always to do all she could for him and
for everybody, so perfectly frank in her avowed delight in the pleasures
which this miserable world offered her in the shape of natural beauty,
of poetry, of music, of companionship, of books, of cheerful cooperation
in the tasks of those about her, that the Reverend Doctor could not
find it in his heart to condemn her because she was deficient in those
particular graces and that signal other-worldliness he had sometimes
noticed in feeble young persons suffering from various chronic diseases
which impaired their vivacity and removed them from the range of
temptation.

When Letty, therefore, came bounding into the old minister's study,
he glanced up from his manuscript, and, as his eye fell upon her,
it flashed across him that there was nothing so very monstrous and
unnatural about the specimen of congenital perversion he was looking at,
with his features opening into their pleasantest sunshine. Technically,
according to the fifth proposition of the sermon on Human Nature, very
bad, no doubt. Practically, according to the fact before him, a very
pretty piece of the Creator's handiwork, body and soul. Was it not a
conceivable thing that the divine grace might show itself in different
forms in a fresh young girl like Letitia, and in that poor thing he had
visited yesterday, half-grown, half-colored, in bed for the last year
with hip-disease? Was it to be supposed that this healthy young girl,
with life throbbing all over her, _could_, without a miracle, be good
according to the invalid pattern and formula?

And yet there were mysteries in human nature which pointed to some
tremendous perversion of its tendencies,--to some profound, radical vice
of moral constitution, native or transmitted, as you will have it, but
positive, at any rate, as the leprosy, breaking out in the blood of
races, guard them ever so carefully. Did he not know the case of a young
lady in Rockland, daughter of one of the first families in the place,
a very beautiful and noble creature to look at, for whose bringing-up
nothing had been spared,--a girl who had had governesses to teach her at
the house, who had been indulged almost too kindly,--a girl whose father
had given himself up to her, he being himself a pure and high-souled
man?--and yet this girl was accused in whispers of having been on the
very verge of committing a fatal crime; she was an object of fear to all
who knew the dark hints which had been let fall about her, and there
were some that believed--Why, what was this but an instance of the total
obliquity and degeneration of the moral principle? and to what could it
be owing, but to an innate organic tendency?

"Busy, grandpapa?" said Letty, and without waiting for an answer
kissed his cheek with a pair of lips made on purpose for that little
function,--fine, but richly turned out, the corners tucked in with a
finish of pretty dimples, the rosebud lips of girlhood's June.

The old gentleman looked at his granddaughter. Nature swelled up from
his heart in a wave that sent a glow to his cheek and a sparkle to his
eye. But it is very hard to be interrupted just as we are winding up a
string of propositions with the grand conclusion which is the statement
in brief of all that has gone before: our own starting-point, into which
we have been trying to back our reader or listener as one backs a horse
into the shafts.

"_Video meliora, proboque_,--I see the better, and approve it;
_deteriora sequor_,--I follow after the worse: 'tis that natural
dislike to what is good, pure, holy, and true, that inrooted
selfishness, totally insensible to the claims of"--

Here the worthy man was interrupted by Miss Letty.

"Do come, if you can, grandpapa," said the young girl; "here is a poor
old black woman wants to see you so much!"

The good minister was as kind-hearted as if he had never groped in the
dust and ashes of those cruel old abstractions which have killed out so
much of the world's life and happiness, "With the heart man believeth
unto righteousness"; a man's love is the measure of his fitness for good
or bad company here or elsewhere. Men are tattooed with their special
beliefs like so many South-Sea Islanders; but a real human heart, with
Divine love in it, beats with the same glow under all the patterns of
all earth's thousand tribes!

The Doctor sighed, and folded the sermon, and laid the Quarto Cruden on
it. He rose from his desk, and, looking once more at the young girl's
face, forgot his logical conclusions, and said to himself that she was
a little angel,--which was in violent contradiction to the leading
doctrine of his sermon on Human Nature. And so he followed her out of
the study into the wide entry of the old-fashioned country-house.

An old black woman sat on the plain oaken settle which humble visitors
waiting to see the minister were wont to occupy. She was old, but how
old it would be very hard to guess. She might be seventy. She might be
ninety. One could not swear she was not a hundred. Black women remain at
a stationary age (to the eyes of _white_ people, at least) for thirty
years. They do not appear to change during this period any more than
so many Trenton trilobites. Bent up, wrinkled, yellow-eyed, with long
upper-lip, projecting jaws, retreating chin, still meek features, long
arms, large flat hands with uncolored palms and slightly webbed fingers,
it was impossible not to see in this old creature a hint of the
gradations by which life climbs up through the lower natures to the
highest human developments. We cannot tell such old women's ages because
we do not understand the physiognomy of a race so unlike our own.
No doubt they see a great deal in each other's faces that we
cannot,--changes of color and expression as real as our own, blushes and
sudden betrayals of feeling,--just as these two canaries know what
their single notes and short sentences and full song with this or that
variation mean, though it is a mystery to us unplumed mortals.

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