CHAPTER XI

THE GAY REALITIES OF MOLIÈRE

Dr. Mitford had set his heart upon his daughter’s becoming an “accomplished musician,” in spite of her having, as she tells us, “neither ear, nor taste, nor application.” Her first music master in Hans Place failing to bring about any improvement in her playing upon the piano, she was removed from his tuition and placed under that of a German professor, “an impatient, irritable man of genius,” who, in his turn, soon summarily dismissed his pupil! “Things being in this unpromising state,” she writes, “I began to entertain some hope that my musical education would be given up altogether. This time [however] my father threw the blame upon the instrument, and he now resolved that I should become a great performer upon the harp.

“It happened that our school-house ... was so built that the principal reception-room was connected with the entrance-hall by a long passage and two double doors. This room, fitted up with nicely bound books, contained, amongst other musical instruments, the harp upon which I was sent to practise every morning. I was sent alone, [and was] most comfortably out of sight and hearing of every individual in the house, the only means of approach being through the two resounding green baize doors, swinging to with a heavy bang the moment they were let go. As the change from piano to harp ... had by no means worked a miracle, I very shortly betook myself to the book-shelves, and seeing a row of octavo volumes lettered _Théâtre de Voltaire_, I selected one of them and had deposited it in front of the music-stand and perched myself upon the stool to read it in less time than an ordinary pupil would have consumed in getting through the first three bars of _Ar Hyd y Nos_.

“The play upon which I opened was _Zaïre_. There was a certain romance in the situation, an interest in the story.... So I got through _Zaïre_, and when I had finished _Zaïre_ I proceeded to other plays—_Ædipe_, _Mérope_, _Algire_, _Mahomet_, plays well worth reading, but not so absorbing as to prevent my giving due attention to the warning doors, and putting the book in its place, and striking the chords of _Ar Hyd y Nos_ as often as I heard a step approaching.

“But when the dramas of Voltaire were exhausted and I had recourse to some neighbouring volumes the state of matters changed at once. The new volumes contained the comedies of Molière, and once plunged into the gay realities of this delightful world, all the miseries of this globe of ours—harp, music-books, practisings, and lessons—were forgotten.... I never remembered that there was such a thing as time; I never heard the warning doors; the only tribulations that troubled me were the tribulations of _Sganarelle_, the only lessons I thought about—the lessons of the ‘Bourgeois Gentilhomme.’ So I was caught; caught in the very act of laughing till I cried over the apostrophes of the angry father to the galley, in which he is told his son has been taken captive, ‘Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère!’

“Luckily, however, the person who discovered my delinquency was one of my chief spoilers—the husband of our good school mistress. Accordingly when he could speak for laughing, what he said sounded far more like a compliment upon my relish for the comic drama than a rebuke. I suppose that he spoke to the same effect to my father. At all events the issue of the affair was the dismissal of the poor little harp mistress and a present of a cheap edition of Molière for my own reading.” And writing in after years Miss Mitford says: “I have got the set still—twelve little foreign-looking books, unbound, and covered with a gay-looking pink paper, mottled with red, like certain carnations.”

Miss Mitford tells us in the Introduction to one of her works that her father had engaged the English teacher Miss Rowden, of whom we have already spoken, to act as a sort of private tutor—a governess out of school hours to his young daughter.

“At the time I was placed under her care,” writes Mary, “her whole heart was in the drama, especially as personified by John Kemble; and I am persuaded that she thought she could in no way so well perform her duty as in taking me to Drury Lane whenever his name was in the bills.

“It was a time of great actors—Jack Bannister and Jack Johnstone, Fawcett and Emery, Lewis and Munden, Mrs. Davenport, Miss Pope and Mrs. Jordan (most exquisite of all) made comedy a bright and living art, an art as full as life itself of laughter and tears.

“My enthusiasm for the drama soon equalled that of Miss Rowden.... There was of course a great difference in kind between her pleasure and mine; hers was a critical, mine a childish enjoyment; she loved fine acting, I loved the play.”

Writing in later years of her pleasure, however imperfect then, in the acting of “the glorious family of Kemble,” she says: “The fame of John Kemble ... has suffered not a little by the contact with his great sister. Besides her uncontested and incontestable power Mrs. Siddons had one advantage not always allowed for—she was a woman. The actress must always be dearer than the actor, goes closer to the heart, draws tenderer tears.... Add that the tragedy in which they were best remembered was one in which the heroine must always predominate, for Lady Macbeth is the moving spirit of the play. But the characters of more equality—Katherine and Wolsey, Hermione and Leontes, Coriolanus and Volumnia, Hamlet and the Queen—and surely John Kemble may hold his own. How often have I seen them in those plays! What would I give to see again those plays so acted!”

In the year 1802, when Mary was fourteen years of age, her thirst for knowledge was growing rapidly. Miss Rowden happened to be reading Virgil, and Mary longed to be able to read it also. “I have just taken a lesson in Latin,” she writes to her mother, “but I shall in consequence omit some of my other business. It is so extremely like Italian that I think I shall find it much easier than I expected.”

“I told you,” she says in a letter to her father, “that I had finished the _Iliad_, which I admire beyond anything I ever read. I have begun the _Æneid_, which I cannot say I admire so much. Dryden is so fond of triplets and Alexandrines that it is much heavier reading; ... when I have finished it I shall read the _Odyssey_.... I am now reading that beautiful opera of Metastasio, _Themistocles_, and when I have finished that I shall read Tasso’s _Jerusalem Delivered_. His poetry is really heavenly.”

Again she writes, “I went to the library the other day with Miss Rowden and brought back the first volume of Goldsmith’s _Animated Nature_. It is quite a lady’s natural history, and extremely entertaining.... The only fault is its length. There are eight volumes. But as I read it to myself, and read pretty quick, I shall soon get through it. I am likewise reading the _Odyssey_, which I even prefer to the _Iliad_. I think it beautiful beyond comparison.”

Mrs. Mitford was staying in town in the summer of 1802, and she writes to her husband: “You would have laughed yesterday when M. St. Quintin was reading Mary’s English composition, of which the subject was, ‘The advantage of a well-cultivated mind’; a word struck him as needless to be inserted, and which after objecting to it he was going to expunge. Mam Bonette (a pet name), in her pretty meek way, urged the necessity of the word used. Miss Rowden was then applied to. She and I both asserted that the sentence would be incomplete without it. St. Quintin, on a more deliberate view of the subject, with all the liberality which is so amiable a point in his character, begged our daughter’s pardon, and the passage remained as it originally stood.”

A young French girl, Mlle. Rose, had recently become an inmate of the schoolroom. She was an orphan, and her venerable grand-parents, who belonged to a noble Bretonne family, were now dependent upon her for support. The three were to be seen occasionally at M. St. Quintin’s hospitable supper-parties, and on such occasions Rose “always brought with her some ingenious straw-plaiting to make into fancy bonnets, which were then in vogue.... She was a pallid, drooping creature, whose dark eyes looked too large for her face.” She now brought her straw-plaiting into the schoolroom and also assisted in teaching French to the pupils.

“About this time a little girl named Betsy, of a short, squat figure, plain in face and ill-dressed and overdressed, appeared at the school, brought by her father. They happened to arrive at the same time with the French dancing master, a marquis of the _ancien régime_. I never saw such a contrast between two men. The Frenchman was slim, long and pale, and allowing always for the dancing-master air, he might be called elegant. The Englishman was the beau-ideal of a John Bull, portentous in size, broad and red of visage, and loud of tongue. He did not stay five minutes, but that was time enough to strike monsieur with horror ... especially when his first words conveyed an injunction to the lady of the house ‘to take care that no grinning Frenchman had the ordering of his Betsy’s feet. If she must learn to dance, let her be taught by an honest Englishman.’

“Poor Betsy! there she sat, the tears trickling down her cheeks, little comforted by the kind notice of the governess and the English teacher. I made some girlish advances towards acquaintanceship which she was too shy or too miserable to return....

“For the present she seemed to have attached herself to Mademoiselle Rose. She had crept to the side of the young French woman and watched her as she wove her straw plaits. She had also attempted the simple art with some discarded straws, and when mademoiselle had so far roused herself as to show her the proper way, she soon became an efficient assistant.

“No intercourse took place between them. Indeed none was possible since neither knew a word of the other’s language. Betsy was silence personified, and poor Mlle. Rose was now more than ever dejected. An opportunity of returning to France had opened to her and to her grand-parents, and was passing away. The expenses of the journey were beyond her means. So she sighed over her straw-plaiting and submitted.

“In the meantime the second Saturday after the new pupil’s coming to school arrived, and with it a summons home to Betsy, who, for the first time gathering courage to address our good governess, asked ‘if she might be trusted with the bonnet Mlle. Rose had just finished, to show her aunt—she knew she would like to buy that bonnet because mademoiselle had been so good as to let her assist in plaiting it.’ Our good governess ordered the bonnet to be put into the carriage, told her the price, called her a good child, and took leave of her till Monday.

“Two hours after, Betsy and her father reappeared in the schoolroom. ‘Ma’amselle,’ said he, bawling as loud as he could with the view evidently of making her understand him, ‘Ma’amselle, I’ve no great love for the French, whom I take to be our natural enemies. But you’re a good young woman; you’ve been kind to my Betsy, and have taught her to make your fal-lals. She says that she thinks you’re fretting because you can’t manage to take your grandfather and grandmother back to France again; so as you let her help you in that other handiwork, why you must let her help you in this.’ Then throwing a heavy purse into her lap and catching his little daughter up in his arms he departed, leaving poor Mlle. Rose too much bewildered to speak or to comprehend the happiness that had fallen upon her.”

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