CHAPTER XVIII

VERSATILITY AND PLAYFULNESS

In a letter to Sir William Elford dated January, 1812, Mary remarks: “I have lived so little with girls of my own age, and have been so much accustomed to think papa my pleasantest companion and mamma my best friend that ... I have escaped unscathed from all the charming folly and delectable romance of female intimacy and female confidence.” Then going on to speak of the usual school training of girls at that period she remarks: “I must observe that in this educating age everything is taught to women except that which is perhaps worth all the rest—the power and the habit of thinking. Do not misunderstand me.... I would only wish that while everything is invented and inculcated that can serve to amuse, to occupy, or adorn youth—youth which needs so little amusement or ornament!—something should be instilled that may add pleasure and respectability to age.”

About this time Sir William paid a visit to Bath. Mary writes: “What says Bath of _Rokeby_? But Bath, I suppose, is, as to literature, politics and fashion, the echo of London. Be that as it may, I am very happy that you have arrived there, both because it brings us a step nearer, and because it so comfortably rids you of the horrors of solitude. ‘_O, la Solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut avoir quelqu’une à qui l’on puisse dire, La Solitude est une belle chose!_’ ... I most sincerely hope that we shall meet this spring in London ... and that we shall have the pleasure of renewing (I might almost say commencing) our personal acquaintance. You will find just the same plain, awkward, blushing thing whom you profess to remember.... I talk to you with wonderful boldness upon paper, and while we are seventy miles distant; but I doubt whether I shall say three sentences to you when we meet, because the ghosts of all my impertinent letters will stare me in the face the moment I see you.”

A little later on Sir William paid a visit to the Mitfords at Bertram House, and Mary writes of him: “He is the kindest, cleverest, warmest-hearted man in the world.” Some of her friends fancied that, in spite of the great discrepancy in their ages, her partiality might possibly lead to a union between the friends. To their surmise Mary answers: “I shall not marry Sir William Elford, for which there is a remarkably good reason, the aforesaid Sir William having no sort of desire to marry me.... He has an outrageous fancy for my letters, and marrying a favourite correspondent would be something like killing the goose with the golden egg.”

In one of Sir William’s letters he had complained of Miss Mitford’s writing being somewhat illegible, to which she responds: “So, my dear friend, you cannot make out my writing! And my honoured father cannot help you! Really this is too affronting! The two persons in all the world who have had the most of my letters cannot read them! Well, there is the secret of your liking them so much. Obscurity is sometimes a great charm. You just make out my meaning and fill it up by the force of your own imagination. The outline is mine, the colouring your own. So much the better for me.”

Writing on a hot summer’s day, she says: “I have been solacing myself for this week past ‘taking mine ease’ in a hay-cock left solely for my accommodation, where Mossy and I repair every morning to perform between us the operation of reading a _good book_, I turning the leaves and _he_ going to sleep over it. It is ... the most delightful hay-cock in the world, in a snug little nook; nothing visible but lawn and plantation; whilst breathing the odours of the firs, whose fragrance this wet summer has been past anything I could have conceived.”

[Illustration: BERTRAM HOUSE]

Mossy was the name of her dog. Throughout her life Mary Mitford was much attached to dogs, and she was generally accompanied in her rambles by some special favourite. Sometimes it was a beautiful greyhound—one of her father’s coursers that had been given to her.

She concludes one of her letters by remarking: “I have nothing more to tell you, except that I have taken a new pet—the most sagacious donkey that ever lived. She lets nobody ride her—follows me everywhere, even indoors when she can—and is really a wonderful animal. Her favourite caress is to have her ears stroked. Shakespeare has noticed this in the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ when Titania tells Bottom that she will give him musk-roses and ‘stroke thy fair, large ears, my gentle joy.’”

In this same letter Mary speaks of some of the singers she had heard recently in London. “I hope you like Braham’s singing,” she says, “though I know among your scientific musicians it is a crime of _lèse majesté_ to say so; but he is the only singer I ever heard in my life who conveyed to my very unmusical ears any idea of the expression of which music is susceptible; no one else joins any sense to the sound. They may talk of music as ‘married to immortal verse’; but if it were not for Braham they would have been divorced long ago.... Moore’s singing has, indeed, great feeling; but then his singing is not much beyond a modulated sigh—though the most powerful sigh in the world.”

And speaking of the actors of the period, she says: “Of all that I have seen nothing has afforded me half so much delight as Miss O’Neil. She broke my heart, and charmed me beyond expression by showing me that I had a heart to break, a fact I always before rather doubted, having been till I saw her as impenetrable to tragedy as Punch and his wife or any other wooden-hearted biped. But she is irresistible.... The manner in which she identifies herself with the character exceeds all that I had before conceived possible of theatrical illusion. You never admire—you only weep.”

In another letter she complains of Kemble’s always declaiming and never speaking in a simple and natural manner. “It does appear to me,” she says, “that no man can be a perfect tragedian who is not likewise a good actor in the higher branch of comedy. A statesman not at the council board, and a hero when the battle is safely ended, would, as it seems to me, talk and walk much in the same way as other people. Even a tyrant does not always rave nor a lover always whine.... That Shakespeare and all the writers of Elizabeth’s days were of my opinion I am quite sure. Nothing is more remarkable in their delightful dramas ... than the sweet and natural tone of conversation which sometimes relieves the terrible intensity of their plots, like a flowery glade in a gloomy forest, or a sunbeam streaming [across] a winter sky.” She goes on to say: “I cannot take leave of the drama without adding my feeble tribute of regret for the secession of Mrs. Siddons. Yet it was better that she should quit the stage in undiminished splendour than have remained to show the feeble twilight of so glorious a day.”

In a letter written during a severe winter we find this description of a hoar-frost: “The scene has been lovely beyond any winter piece I ever beheld; a world formed of something much whiter than ivory—as white indeed as snow—but carved with a delicacy, a lightness, a precision to which the mossy, ungrateful, tottering snow could never pretend. Rime was the architect; every tree, every shrub, every blade of grass was clothed with its pure incrustations, but so thinly, so delicately clothed that every twig, every fibre, every ramification remained perfect, alike indeed in colour, but displaying in form to the fullest extent the endless, infinite variety of Nature. It is a scene that really defies description.”

Here is a playful letter to Sir William, written in August, 1816: “Pray, my dear friend, were you ever a bridesmaid? I rather expect you to say no, and I give you joy of your happy ignorance, for I am just now in the very agonies of the office, helping to buy and admire wedding clothes.... The bride is a fair neighbour of mine.... Her head is a perfect milliner’s shop, and she plans out her wardrobe much as Phidias might have planned the Parthenon.... She has had no sleep since the grand question of a lace bonnet with a plume, or a lace veil without one, for the grand occasion came into discussion.”

Two months later Mary writes: “I have at last safely disposed of my bride.... She had accumulated on her person so much finery that she looked as if by mistake she had put on two wedding dresses instead of one [and having wept copiously] was by many degrees the greatest fright I ever saw in my life. Indeed between crying and blushing brides, and bridesmaids too, do generally look strange figures. I am sure we did, though to confess the truth I really could not cry, much as I wished to keep all my neighbours in countenance, and was forced to hold my handkerchief to my eyes and sigh in vain for ‘_ce don de dames que Dieu ne m’a pas donné_.’”

Mary Mitford always enjoyed writing to Sir William upon literary matters, as the reader knows, and comparing their respective opinions.

“I am almost afraid to tell you,” she writes, “how much I dislike _Childe Harold_. Not but there are very many fine stanzas and powerful descriptions; but the sentiment is so strange, so gloomy, so heartless, that it is impossible not to feel a mixture of pity and disgust, which all our admiration of the author’s talents cannot overcome.... Are you not rather sick—now pray don’t betray me—are you not rather sick of being one of the hundred thousand confidants of his lordship’s mysterious and secret sorrows?... I would rather be the poorest Greek whose fate he commiserates than Lord Byron, if this poem be a true transcript of his feelings.”

In one of her letters she remarks: “I prefer the French pulpit oratory to any other part of their literature.... I mean, of course, their old preachers—Fénelon, Bourdaloue, Massillon and Bossuet—especially the last, who approaches as nearly to the unrivalled sublimity of the sacred writings as any writer I have ever met with. Oh! what a contrast between him and our dramatic sermonists Mesdames Hawkins and Brompton! I am convinced that people read them for the story, to enjoy the stimulus of a novel without the name.... Ah! they had better take South and Blair and Secker for guides, and go for amusement to Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen. By the way, how delightful is her _Emma_, the best, I think, of all her charming works.”

“Have you read _Pepys’ Memoirs_?” she asks on another occasion. “I am extremely diverted with them, and prefer them to Evelyn’s, all to nothing. He was too precise and too gentlemanly and too sensible by half; wrote in full dress, with an eye if not to the press, at least to posthumous reputation. Now this man sets down his thoughts in a most becoming _déshabille_—does not care twopence for posterity, and evidently thinks wisdom a very foolish thing. I don’t know when any book has amused me so much. It is the very perfection of gossiping—most relishing nonsense.”

Writing in 1819 she says: “Oh! but the oddest book I have met with is Madame de Genlis’s new novel _Les Parvenus_, an imitation of _Gil Blas_ ... while she sticks to that she is very good; her comic powers are really exceedingly respectable—but she flies off at a tangent to her old beaten path of sentimental vice and fanatical piety, and sends her heroine to the Holy Land as a Pilgrim in the nineteenth century and then fixes her in a Spanish convent!”

Now she writes with deep admiration of Burns—“Burns the sweetest, the sublimest, the most tricksy poet who has blest this nether world since the days of Shakespeare! I am just fresh from reading Dr. Currie’s four volumes and Cromak’s one, which comprise, I believe, all that he ever wrote.... Have you lately read Dr. Currie’s work? If you have not, pray do, and tell me if you do not admire him—not with the flimsy lackadaisical praise with which certain gentle damsels bedaub his _Mountain Daisy_ and his _Woodlark_ ... but with the strong and manly feeling which his fine and indignant letters, his exquisite and original humour, his inimitable pathos must awaken in such a mind as yours. Ah, what have they to answer for who let such a man perish? I think there is no poet whose works I have ever read who interests me so strongly by the display of personal character contained in almost everything he wrote (even in his songs) as Burns.” After speaking of “his versatility and his exhaustless imagination,” she says: “By the way, my dear Sir William, does it not appear to you that versatility is the true and rare characteristic of that rare thing called genius—versatility and playfulness?”

Writing to Sir William somewhat hurriedly in March, 1817, Mary remarks: “Rather than send the envelope blank I will fill it with the translation of a pretty allegory of M. Arnault’s, the author of ‘Germanicus.’ You must not read it if you have read the French, because it does not come near to its simplicity. If you have not read the French you may read the English. Be upon honour.”

Translation of M. Arnault’s lines on his own exile:—

“Torn rudely from thy parent bough, Poor withered leaf, where roamest thou? I know not where! A tempest broke My only prop, the stately oak; And ever since in wearying change With each capricious wind I range; From wood to plain, from hill to dale, Borne sweeping on as sweeps the gale, Without a struggle or a cry, I go where all must go as I; I go where goes the self-same hour A laurel leaf or rose’s flower!”