CHAPTER XIX

FROM MANSION TO COTTAGE

Miss Mitford owed to her friendship with Sir William Elford her first acquaintance with the artist Haydon. Describing in later years to a friend how this came about, she said: “An amateur painter himself, painting interested Sir William particularly, and he often spoke much, and warmly, of the young man from Plymouth, whose picture of the ‘Judgement of Solomon’ was then on exhibition in London. ‘You must see it,’ said he, ‘even if you come to town on purpose.’

“It so happened,” continued Miss Mitford, “that I merely passed through London that season ... and I arrived at the exhibition in company with a still younger friend so near the period of closing that more punctual visitors were moving out, and the doorkeeper actually turned us and our money back. I persisted, however, assuring him that I only wanted to look at one picture, and promising not to detain him long. Whether my entreaties would have carried the point or not I cannot tell, but half a crown did; so we stood admiringly before the ‘Judgement of Solomon.’ I am no great judge of painting; but that picture impressed me then, as it does now, as excellent in composition, in colour, and in that great quality of telling a story which appeals at once to every mind. Our delight was sincerely felt, and most enthusiastically expressed, as we kept gazing at the picture, and [it] seemed to give much pleasure to the only gentleman who remained in the room—a young and very distinguished-looking person, who had watched with evident amusement our negotiation with the doorkeeper.... I soon surmised that we were seeing the painter as well as his painting; and when two or three years afterwards a friend took me ... to view the ‘Entry into Jerusalem,’ Haydon’s next great picture, then near its completion, I found I had not been mistaken.

“Haydon was at that period a remarkable person to look at and listen to.... His figure was short, slight, elastic and vigorous; his complexion clear and healthful.... But how shall I attempt to tell you,” she adds, “of his brilliant conversation, of his rapid energetic manner, of his quick turns of thought as he flew from topic to topic, dashing his brush here and there upon the canvas?... Among the studies I remarked that day in his apartment was one of a mother who had just lost her only child—a most masterly rendering of an unspeakable grief. A sonnet which I could not help writing on the sketch gave rise to our long correspondence, and to a friendship which never flagged.”

We have spoken in a recent chapter of the Mitfords’ great losses of money from time to time. These were caused in part by the protracted lawsuit carried on by Dr. Mitford against the Marquis de Chavannes. But the main cause was the doctor’s unhappy habits of gambling and of speculation. He was “ever seeking,” we are told, “to augment his income by some doubtful investment for which he had the tip of some unscrupulous schemer to whose class he fell an easy prey.” The only remnant of the family property, once so large, which Dr. Mitford was unable to touch was a sum of £3000 left by Dr. Russell to his daughter and her offspring. This sum, placed in the funds, was happily held in trust by the Mitfords’ fast friend, the Rev. William Harness, and although he was applied to from time to time by Mrs. Mitford and her daughter to hand it over to the doctor when he was pressed by creditors, Mr. Harness steadily refused to do so. Writing to Miss Mitford some years later after the death of her mother, he says: “That £3000 I consider as the sheet-anchor of your independence ... and _while your father lives_ it shall never stir from its present post in the funds ... _from whatever quarter the proposition may come_ [to hand it over to him]. 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_.”[7]

[Footnote 7: See _Life and Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford_, by W. J. Roberts.]

In the spring of 1820 the family were forced to quit Bertram House, at which period we are told “the doctor must have been all but penniless,” and there could have been “nothing between the father and mother and hopeless destitution but the genius and industry of the daughter.” Happily her courage and her affection never failed. But she could not quit the house which had been her home for sixteen years without sorrow. “It nearly broke my heart,” she writes. “What a tearing up of the roots it was! The trees and fields and sunny hedgerows, however little distinguished by picturesque beauty, were to me as old friends. Women have more of this natural feeling than the stronger sex; they are creatures of home and habit, and ill brook transplanting.”

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