CHAPTER XXVI

_RIENZI_

Miss Mitford’s capacity of throwing herself heart and soul into the widely varying subjects upon which she was engaged was truly remarkable. For whilst writing her playful or pathetic stories of village life, breathing as they do the calm and beauty of the surrounding country, she was composing one after another her stirring tragedies.

The finest of these is generally considered to be _Rienzi_ to which Miss Mitford had given much time and thought. She wrote in August, 1824, to a female friend who had enquired after her literary undertakings:—

“I write as usual for magazines, and (but this is quite between ourselves) I have a tragedy which will I may say certainly—as certainly as we can speak of anything connected with the theatre—be performed at Drury Lane next season. It is the story of ‘Rienzi,’ the friend of Petrarch; the man who restored for a short time the old republican government of Rome. If you do not remember the story you will find it very beautifully told in the last volume of Gibbon, and still more graphically related in L’Abbé de Sadi’s _Memoires pour la Vie de Pétrarque_.”

It was not, however, until four years later that the play actually appeared upon the stage. Its success was of vital importance to the little household at Three Mile Cross, and Mary was immersed in business of all sorts during the months preceding its début. Still she had a “heart at leisure” even then to sympathise with her friends in their joys and sorrows. On hearing that Haydon’s important picture of the year had just been purchased by the King, she writes:—

“A thousand and a thousand congratulations, my dear friend, to you and your loveliest and sweetest wife! I always liked the King, God bless him! He is a gentleman—and now my loyalty will be warmer than ever.... This is fortune—fame you did not want—but this fashion and fortune. Nothing in this world could please me more—not even the production of my own _Rienzi_. To see you in your place in Art and Talfourd in his in Parliament are the wishes next my heart, and I verily believe that I shall live to see both....

“God bless you, my dear friends! and God save the King!”

Miss Mitford writes on Sept. 23rd, 1828, to Sir William Elford:—

“My tragedy of _Rienzi_ is to be produced at Drury Lane Theatre on Saturday the 11th of October; that is to say, next Saturday fortnight.

“Mr. Young plays the hero, and has been studying the part during the whole vacation; and a new actress makes her first appearance in the part of the heroine. This is a very bold and hazardous experiment, no new actress having come out in a new play within the memory of man; but she is young, pretty, unaffected, pleasant-voiced, with great sensibility, and a singularly pure intonation—a qualification which no actress has possessed since Mrs. Siddons. Stanfield is painting the new scenes, one of which is an accurate representation of Rienzi’s house. This building still exists in Rome.... They have got a sketch which they sent for on purpose, and they are hunting up costumes with equal care; so that it will be very splendidly brought out, and I shall have little to fear, except from the emptiness of London so early in the season.”

[Illustration: IN GREAT QUEEN STREET]

Miss Mitford’s next letter to Sir William is written from London after the first performance of _Rienzi_. It is dated Oct. 5th, 1828, 5 Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn, and is as follows: “Our success last night was very splendid and we have every hope (in the theatrical world there is no such word as ‘certainty’) of making a great hit. As far as things have hitherto gone nothing can be better—nothing. Our new actress is charming.... Mr. Young is also admirable; and, in short, it is a magnificent performance throughout. God grant that its prosperity may continue! and these are not words, of course, but a prayer from my inmost soul, for on that hangs the comfort of those far dearer to me than myself.”

And a fortnight later she writes:—

“Hitherto the triumph has been most complete and decisive—the houses crowded—and the attention such as has not been known since Mrs. Siddons. You might hear a pin drop in the house. How long this run may continue I cannot say, for London is absolutely empty; but even if the play were to stop to-night I should be extremely thankful—more thankful than I have words to tell; the impression has been so deep and so general.”

Letters of congratulation from women of mark poured in from all sides, but Mary missed the sympathy of her intimate friend Lady Franklin (wife of the Arctic explorer) who had recently died. She remarks in the Introduction to her Dramatic Works:—

“When _Rienzi_, after a more than common portion of adventures and misadventures, did come out with a success rare in a woman’s life ... I missed the eager congratulations from her ... whose cheering prognostics had so often spurred me on....

“No part of my success,” she adds, “was more delightful than the pleasure which it excited amongst the most eminent of my female contemporaries. Maria Edgeworth, Joanna Baillie, Felicia Hemans (and to two of them I was at that time unknown) vied in the cordiality of their praises. Kindness met me on every hand.”

In a letter from Mrs. Trollope (a well-known authoress of the day), who was then staying in New York, she learns of _Rienzi_ being performed in that city. “It is here and here only,” writes Mrs. Trollope, “that I have had an opportunity of seeing _Rienzi_; it is a noble tragedy, and not even the bad acting of the Chatham Theatre could spoil it. I never witnessed such a triumph of powerful poetry over weak acting as in the magnificent scene where Rienzi refuses pardon to an Orsini.”

The play continued to draw large audiences at Drury Lane, and ran for a hundred days, a most unusual event in those times. Of the printed play Miss Mitford writes: “It is selling immensely, the first very large edition having gone in three days.”

We have read _Rienzi_ with deep interest. The tragic scenes are very powerful, tension being kept up throughout the whole action, while the love passages are beautiful, tender and truly pathetic. If we might venture upon a criticism it is that there is an absence in the play of all humour—a quality so conspicuous in Miss Mitford’s village stories. Perhaps it is only Shakespeare who possesses the consummate art of relieving the strain wrought upon the mind by deep tragedy with a touch of humour. It is certainly absent in some of the finest French and German tragedies.

Miss Mitford’s incessant work at this period, coupled with much domestic anxiety (for her mother’s health was then failing), made her possibly over anxious.

“I shall have hard work,” she observes in a letter to a friend, “to write up to my own reputation, for certainly I am at present greatly overrated.” And alluding to the triumph of _Rienzi_ she says:—

“Dramatic success, after all, is not so delicious, so glorious, so complete a gratification as in our secret longings we all expect to find. It is not satisfactory. It does not fill the heart.... It is an intoxication.... Within four-and-twenty hours [of the performance of _Rienzi_] I doubted if triumph there were, and more than doubted if it were deserved. It is ill-success that leads to self-assertion. Never in my life was I so conscious of my dramatic short-comings as on that day of imputed exaltation and vainglory.”

But Mary’s fame as a dramatic author was growing in spite of her own modest estimate of her powers, and in spite also of many a disappointment that she had to endure. Her play of Charles I, the subject of which was suggested to her by Macready, was condemned by the Licenser, “who saw a danger to the State in permitting the trial of an English monarch to be represented on the stage.” It was forbidden, therefore, at the two great houses although it afterwards appeared at a minor theatre.

The fate of another play, _Inez de Castro_, was still more unfortunate, for after having been rehearsed three times at the Lyceum Theatre, apparently with the approval of all concerned, it was suddenly withdrawn for some unknown reason. Fanny Kemble, whom Miss Mitford describes as “a girl of great ability,” was taking the part of the heroine.

“Great at the moment were these anxieties and tribulations,” writes Miss Mitford in after life, “but it is good to observe in one’s own mind and good to tell others how just as the keenest physical pain is known to be soon forgotten, so in mental vicissitudes time carries away the bitter and leaves the sweet. The vexations and the injuries fade into dim distance and the kindness and the benefits shine vividly out.”

An edition of her collected works was published in Philadelphia in the year 1841, which is prefaced by a short biography of the author written by James Crissy. It is pleasant therein to read his warm-hearted appreciation of her literary genius. He speaks of Miss Mitford as “a dramatist of no common power.” “In all her plays,” he says, “there is strong, vigorous writing—masculine in the free unhashed use of language, but wholly womanly in its purity from coarseness or licence and in its touches [of the] softest feeling and finest observation.”

He goes on, however, to say: “But the claims of Miss Mitford to swell the list of _inventors_ [of new styles in literature] rest upon yet firmer grounds. They rest upon those exquisite sketches by which she has created a school of writing, homely but not vulgar, familiar but not breeding contempt.... Wherein the small events and the simple characters of rural life are made interesting by the truth and sprightliness with which they are represented.”

In the Introduction to her “Dramatic Works,” Miss Mitford thus closes a detailed account of the composition and production of her plays:—

“So much for the Tragedies. There would have been many more such but that the pressing necessity of earning money, and the uncertainties and the delays of the drama, at moments when delay or disappointment weighed upon me like a sin, made it a duty to turn away from the lofty steep of Tragic Poetry to the everyday path of Village Stories.”

* * * * *

À propos of these words and knowing that Miss Mitford’s greatest power lay in the writing of those very Village Stories, we would quote the words of Tennyson:—

“Not once or twice in our fair island story The path of duty was the way to glory.”