CHAPTER XXXVI

A BRAVE HEART

Two new works by Mary Russell Mitford had been recently published—_Belford Regis_ and _Country Stories_. Belford Regis, as the reader may remember, was her pseudonym for the good town of Reading.

She writes in June, 1835, to Sir William Elford: “I thank you very much, my ever dear and kind friend, for your kind letter, and I rejoice that you like my book. It has been most favourably received and is, I find, reckoned my best; although when one considers that _Our Village_ has passed through fourteen large editions in England and nearly as many in America, one can hardly expect an increase of popularity and has only to hope for an equal success for any future production.”

There was a still further proof of the popularity of _Our Village_ at this time, as Miss Mitford learnt from a friend travelling in Spain that he had come across a copy of the work translated into Spanish.

_Country Stories_ appeared two years later. She dedicated the work to her valued friend, the Rev. William Harness, “whose old hereditary friendship,” she writes, “has been the pride and pleasure of her happiest hours, her consolation in the sorrows and her support in the difficulties of life.”

It was to him that she opened her heart on religious matters more than to anyone else, and it is interesting to learn from their correspondence her opinions upon such matters as the question of Church Reform, then beginning to be discussed.

After receiving a volume of Sermons by the Rev. William Harness, she writes:—

“It is a very able and conciliatory plea for the Church. My opinion (if an insignificant woman may presume to give one) is that certain reforms ought to be; that very gross cases of pluralities should be abolished ... that some few of the clergy are too rich, and that a great many are too poor. But although not holding all her doctrines, I heartily agree with you that, as an establishment, the Church ought to remain; for to say nothing of the frightful precedent of sweeping away property, which would not stop there, the country would be overrun with fanatics.... But the Church must be (as many of her members are) wisely tolerant. Bishops must not wage war with theatres, nor rectors with a Sunday evening game of cricket.”

Happily reforms in such matters were soon to be brought forward by Charles Kingsley and many others. Charles Kingsley, when he was made Rector of Eversley, was a neighbour of Miss Mitford’s and became in time her fast friend.

During the year 1842 Dr. Mitford’s health rapidly declined and his devoted daughter was nearly worn out by her constant attendance upon him. He had a strange notion which he held pertinaciously that all outdoor exercise was bad for her, while, in fact, her short strolls in her garden or in the neighbouring fields was the only change that could keep her from breaking down. When after some hours spent in weary watching she had seen her father fall asleep, she would steal out of the house with Dash for a companion for a scamper round the meadows. “How grateful I am,” she writes at this time, “to that great gracious Providence who makes the most intense enjoyment the cheapest and the commonest.”

Dr. Mitford died on the 11th day of December. He was buried by his wife in Shinfield Church, being followed by an imposing procession of neighbours and friends. We cannot help thinking that this was more to show sympathy and respect for Miss Mitford than from special respect to him.

That she loved her father dearly in spite of all his faults is very certain, and that she was not blind to these faults is also certain. But she looked upon them at all times very much in the same way as she did when a young girl on hearing of his money losses. “Poor Papa!” she would exclaim, “I am so sorry for him, I wish he would deal with honest people.”

A beautiful expression of a dying mother to her children has been handed down in our family, “Cover each other’s faults,” she said, “with a mantle of love.” Miss Mitford did this and perhaps sometimes unwisely, but her life was the happier for it. She never knew the misery of condemning the conduct of her father.

“But her father was not the only person whom Miss Mitford egregiously overestimated, and unconsciously flattered,” writes Mrs. Tindal. “She looked upon her friends through rose-coloured spectacles, she exaggerated their good gifts and multiplied their graces; she hoped and believed great things of them.”

Dr. Mitford had continued to squander the small means of the household to the last, and so powerless was his daughter to prevent this (without giving him great pain) that she remarks in a letter to one with whom she was intimate: “I have to provide for expenses over which I have no more control than my own dog Dash.”

When the true state of affairs became known Miss Mitford was faced with a list of liabilities amounting to nearly £1000, but her determination was at once taken that all the creditors should have complete satisfaction. “Everybody shall be paid,” she exclaimed, “if I have to sell the gown off my back, or pledge my little pension.”

But this could never be allowed. Her friends and admirers were eager to show their desire to help one who, by her beautiful writings and unselfish life, had done so much for the good of humanity. Miss Mitford was astonished and touched by the letters she received. “I only pray God,” she writes, “that I may deserve half that has been said of me.”

Money was subscribed on all sides, and by the month of March following nearly the whole thousand pounds had already been handed over to her, whilst in addition to this some hundreds of pounds were promised. Many, too, were the acts of kind and unostentatious attention that were showered upon her and which went straight to her heart. Conspicuous among these was the welcome act of her friend Mr. George Lovejoy, the well-known bookseller of Reading, in supplying her with books. He was a man of considerable learning, and his library was noted from its earliest days for its fine collection of foreign works, which made it especially valuable to Miss Mitford, whose love of French literature was so marked.

Writing to a friend who had offered to lend her some books she explains that she has already seen them. “I have at this moment,” she writes, “eight sets of books belonging to Mr. Lovejoy. I have every periodical within a week, often getting them literally the day before publication.”

About this time a source of happiness came into Mary Mitford’s life in the shape of a little child of two years old, the son of her attached servant K——, whom she soon looked upon as a son of the household, and who as time went on became her constant little companion in her strolls about the country.

A few years later Mary was suffering from an attack of lameness and she had recourse for help to that same “historic staff” whose loss had caused so much bustle and excitement in the village of Three Mile Cross.

[Illustration: Verses written by M. R. Mitford,

July 12th 1847]

“Long before little Henry could open the outer door, there he would stand,” she writes, “the stick in one hand, and, if it were summer, a flower in the other, waiting for my going out, the pretty Saxon boy with his upright figure, his golden hair, his eyes like two stars, and his bright intelligent smile.”

Woodcock lane was a chosen resort where Mary, her servant “the hemmer of flowers,” little Henry and the dogs would proceed to a certain green hillock “redolent of wild thyme and a thousand fairy flowers, delicious in its coolness, its fragrance and its repose.” Here whilst Mary sat on the turf with pen in hand and paper on knee jotting down her thoughts, she would still keep an eye on the child who was gathering flowers hard by. “Do not gather them all, Henry,” she would say, “because some one who has not so many pretty flowers at home as we have may come this way and would like to gather some.”

Miss Mitford’s many visitors from far and near had all a kindly word for the little lad—Mr. Fields especially was much interested in him.

In the month of January, 1847, when the first volume of _Modern Painters_ was just published, Mary Mitford wrote to a friend: “Have you read an English Graduate’s _Letters on Art_? The author, Mr. Ruskin, was here last week and is certainly the most charming person I have ever known.” In her _Recollections of a Literary Life_ Miss Mitford speaks with admiration of his “boldness” in demolishing old idols and setting up new! “Often,” she remarks, “he was right, though sometimes wrong, but always striking, always eloquent, always true to his own convictions.... Many passages of _Modern Painters_ are really poems in their tenderness, their sentiment and their grandeur.

“But the greatest triumph of Mr. Ruskin,” she remarks, “is that long series of cloud pictures, unparalleled, I suppose, in any language, whether painted or written.” Here follows a long quotation of which we would give two passages.

“It is a strange thing,” writes the author, “how little, in general, people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which Nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him, and teaching him than in any other of his works; and it is just the part in which we least attend to her.... The noblest scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by few; it is not intended that man should live always in the midst of them; he injures them by his presence, he ceases to feel them if he be always with them; but the sky is for all; bright as it is, it is not ‘too bright nor good for human nature’s daily food.’ It is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort, and exalting of the heart, for the soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust.”

The acquaintance with Mr. Ruskin soon ripened into a warm friendship, which was the cause of much happiness to Miss Mitford during the last years of her life. His attentions to her when she was unwell were unremitting either in the way of interesting books to entertain her or of delicacies of the table to tempt her appetite. On one occasion when she was confined to her bed from the effects of a fall, he writes to her: “I do indeed sympathize most deeply in the sorrow (it may without exaggeration be so called) which your present privation must cause you, especially coming in the time of spring—your favourite season.... After all though your feet are in the stocks, you have the Silas spirit, and the doors will open in the mid-darkness.”

After an important event in his life had occurred in 1848, he writes: “Two months ago I was each day on the point of writing to you to ask for your sympathy—the kindest and keenest sympathy that, I think, ever filled the breadth and depth of an unselfish heart.” And then alluding to the Revolution of 1848 he says: “I should be very happy just now but for these wild storm clouds bursting on my dear Italy and my fair France. My occupation gone and all my earthly treasures ... perished amidst ‘the tumult of the people and the imagining of vain things.’ ... I begin to feel that ... these are not times for watching clouds or dreaming over quiet waters, that some serious work is to be done, and that the time for endurance has come rather than for meditation, and for hope rather than for happiness. Happy those whose hope, without this severe and tearful rending away of all the props and stability of earthly enjoyments, has been fixed ‘where the wicked cease from troubling.’ Mine has not; it was based on ‘those pillars of the earth’ which are astonished at His reproof.”[20]

[Footnote 20: See Cook’s _Life of Ruskin_.]

Mary Mitford continued her intimate correspondence with Miss Barrett after the latter’s marriage with Robert Browning—which was a source of much happiness to both. She warmly admired Mrs. Barrett Browning’s poems, as we have already seen, but Browning’s poems were not equally intelligible or attractive to her, and in a letter to a friend she thus quaintly criticizes his style and writing: “I am just reading Robert Browning’s Poems,” she says, “there is much more in them than I thought to find.... He ought to be forced to write journey-work for his daily bread (say for the _Times_) which would make him write clearly.”

In the summer of 1847 Hans Andersen was in England. “He is the lion of London this year,” writes Miss Mitford. “Dukes, princes, and ministers are all disputing for an hour of his company, and Mr. Boner (his best translator) says that he is quite unspoilt, as simple as a child and with as much poetry in his everyday doings as in his prose.... Mr. Boner sent me the other day for dear Patty Lovejoy’s album (she is a sweet little girl of eleven years old) an autograph of Spohr’s and one of Andersen’s. The latter is so pretty that I must transcribe it for you.

“‘How blue are the mountains! How blue the sea and the sky! It is the expression of love in three different languages.

H. C. Andersen.’

London, July 16th, 1847.”

The Mr. Boner alluded to was a valued friend of Miss Mitford’s with whom she corresponded much during the later years of her life.