A Book of Sibyls Part 8

One of the prettiest and most sympathetic incidents in Maria Edgeworth's life was a subsequent expedition to Abbotsford and the pleasure she gave to its master. They first met in Edinburgh, and her short account conjures up the whole scene before us:--

Ten o'clock struck as I read this note. We were tired, we were not fit to be seen, but I thought it right to accept Walter Scott's cordial invitation, sent for a hackney coach, and just as we were, without dressing, we went. As the coach stopped we saw the hall lighted, and the moment the door opened heard the joyous sounds of loud singing. Three servants' 'The Miss Edgeworths!' sounded from hall to landing-place, and as I paused for a moment in the anteroom I heard the first sound of Walter Scott's voice--'The Miss Edgeworths _come_!' The room was lighted by only one globe lamp; a circle were singing loud and beating time: all stopped in an instant.

Is not this picture complete? Scott himself she describes as 'full of genius without the slightest effort at expression, delightfully natural, more lame but not so unwieldy as she expected.' Lady Scott she goes on to sketch in some half-dozen words--'French, large dark eyes, civil and good-natured.'

When we wakened the next morning the whole scene of the preceding night seemed like a dream [she continues]; however at twelve came the real Lady Scott, and we called for Scott at the Parliament House, who came out of the Courts with joyous face, as if he had nothing on earth to do or to think of but to show us Edinburgh.

In her quick, discriminating way she looks round and notes them all one by one.

Mr. Lockhart is reserved and silent, but he appears to have much sensibility under this reserve. Mrs. Lockhart is very pleasing--a slight, elegant figure and graceful simplicity of manner, perfectly natural. There is something most winning in her affectionate manner to her father. He dotes upon her.

A serious illness intervened for poor Maria before she and her devoted young nurses could reach Abbotsford itself. There she began to recover, and Lady Scott watched over her and prescribed for her with the most tender care and kindness. 'Lady Scott felt the attention and respect Maria showed to her, perceiving that she valued her and treated her as a friend,' says Mrs. Edgeworth; 'not, as too many of Sir Walter's guests did, with neglect.' This is Miss Edgeworth's description of the Abbotsford family life:--

It is quite delightful to see Scott and his family in the country; breakfast, dinner, supper, the same flow of kindness, fondness, and genius, far, far surpa.s.sing his works, his letters, and all my hopes and imagination. His Castle of Abbotsford is magnificent, but I forget it in thinking of him.

The return visit, when Scotland visited Ireland, was no less successful.

Mrs. Edgeworth writes:--

Maria and my daughter Harriet accompanied Sir Walter and Miss Scott, Mr.

Lockhart, and Captain and Mrs. Scott to Killarney. They travelled in an open caleche of Sir Walter's....

Sir Walter was, like Maria, never put out by discomforts on a journey, but always ready to make the best of everything and to find amus.e.m.e.nt in every incident. He was delighted with Maria's eagerness for everybody's comfort, and diverted himself with her admiration of a green baize-covered door at the inn at Killarney. 'Miss Edgeworth, you are so mightily pleased with that door, I think you will carry it away with you to Edgeworthtown.'

Miss Edgeworth's friends.h.i.+ps were certainly very remarkable, and comprise almost all the interesting people of her day in France as well as in England.[3] She was liked, trusted, surrounded, and she appears to have had the art of winning to her all the great men. We know the Duke of Wellington addressed verses to her; there are pleasant intimations of her acquaintance with Sir James Mackintosh, Romilly, Moore, and Rogers, and that most delightful of human beings, Sydney Smith, whom she thoroughly appreciated and admired. Describing her brother Frank, she says, somewhere, 'I am much inclined to think that he has a natural genius for happiness; in other words, as Sydney Smith would say, _great hereditary const.i.tutional joy_.' 'To attempt to Boswell Sydney Smith's conversation would be to outboswell Boswell,' she writes in another letter home; but in Lady Holland's memoir of her father there is a pleasant little account of Miss Edgeworth herself, 'delightful, clever, and sensible,' listening to Sydney Smith. She seems to have gone the round of his parish with him while he scolded, doctored, joked his poor people according to their needs.

Footnote 3: A touching ill.u.s.tration of her abiding influence is to be found cited in an article in the _Daily News_ of September 7, 1883, published as these proofs are going to press, by 'One Who Knew' Ivan Turgueneff, that great Russian whom we might almost claim if love and admiration gave one a right to count citizens.h.i.+p with the great men of our time. An elder brother of his knew Miss Edgeworth, perhaps at Abbotsford, for he visited Walter Scott there, or at Coppet with Madame de Stael. This man, wise and cultivated in all European literature, 'came to the conclusion that Maria Edgeworth had struck on a vein from which most of the great novelists of the future would exclusively work.

She took the world as she found it, and selected from it the materials that she thought would be interesting to write about, in a clear and natural style. It was Ivan Turgueneff himself who told me this, says the writer of the article, and he modestly said that he was an unconscious disciple of Miss Edgeworth in setting out on his literary career. He had not the advantage of knowing English; but as a youth he used to hear his brother translate to visitors at his country house in the Uralian Hills pa.s.sages from _Irish Tales and Sketches_, which he thought superior to her three-volume novels. Turgueneff also said to me, "It is possible, nay probable, that if Maria Edgeworth had not written about the poor Irish of the co. Longford and the squires and squirees, that it would not have occurred to me to give a literary form to my impressions about the cla.s.ses parallel to them in Russia. My brother used, in pointing out the beauties of her unambitious works, to call attention to their extreme simplicity and to the distinction with which she treated the simple ones of the earth."'

'During her visit she saw much of my father,' says Lady Holland; 'and her talents as well as her thorough knowledge and love of Ireland made her conversation peculiarly agreeable to him.' On her side Maria writes warmly desiring that some Irish bishopric might be forced upon Sydney Smith, which 'his own sense of natural charity and humanity would forbid him refuse.... In the twinkling of an eye--such an eye as his--he would see all our manifold grievances up and down the country. One word, one _bon mot_ of his, would do more for us, I guess, than ----'s four hundred pages and all the like with which we have been bored.'

The two knew how to make good company for one another; the quiet-Jeanie-Deans body could listen as well as give out. We are told that it was not so much that she said brilliant things, but that a general perfume of wit ran through her conversation, and she most certainly had the gift of appreciating the good things of others.

Whether in that 'scene of simplicity, truth, and nature' a London rout, or in some quiet Hampstead parlour talking to an old friend, or in her own home among books and relations and interests of every sort, Miss Edgeworth seems to have been constantly the same, with presence of mind and presence of heart too, ready to respond to everything. I think her warmth of heart s.h.i.+nes even brighter than her wit at times. 'I could not bear the idea that you suspected me of being so weak, so vain, so senseless,' she once wrote to Mrs. Barbauld, 'as to have my head turned by a little fas.h.i.+onable flattery.' If her head was not turned it must have been because her spirit was stout enough to withstand the world's almost irresistible influence.

Not only the great men but the women too are among her friends. She writes prettily of Mrs. Somerville, with her smiling eyes and pink colour, her soft voice, strong, well-bred Scotch accent, timid, not disqualifying timid, but naturally modest. 'While her head is among the stars her feet are firm upon the earth.' She is 'delighted' with a criticism of Madame de Stael's upon herself, in a letter to M. Dumont.

'Vraiment elle etait digne de l'enthousiasme, mais elle se perd dans votre triste utilite.' It is difficult to understand why this should have given Miss Edgeworth so much pleasure; and here finally is a little vision conjured up for us of her meeting with Mrs. Fry among her prisoners:--

Little doors, and thick doors, and doors of all sorts were unbolted and unlocked, and on we went through dreary but clean pa.s.sages till we came to a room where rows of empty benches fronted us, a table on which lay a large Bible. Several ladies and gentlemen entered, took their seats on benches at either side of the table in silence. Enter Mrs. Fry in a drab-coloured silk cloak and a plain, borderless Quaker cap, a most benevolent countenance, calm, benign. 'I must make an inquiry. Is Maria Edgeworth here?'

And when I went forward she bade me come and sit beside her. Her first smile as she looked upon me I can never forget. The prisoners came in in an orderly manner and ranged themselves upon the benches.

XV.

'In this my sixtieth year, to commence in a few days,' says Miss Edgeworth, writing to her cousin Margaret Ruxton, 'I am resolved to make great progress.' 'Rosamond at sixty,' says Miss Ruxton, touched and amused. Her resolutions were not idle.

'The universal difficulties of the money market in the year 1826 were felt by us,' says Mrs. Edgeworth in her memoir, 'and Maria, who since her father's death had given up rent-receiving, now resumed it; undertook the management of her brother Lovell's affairs, which she conducted with consummate skill and perseverance, and weathered the storm that swamped so many in this financial crisis.' We also hear of an opportune windfall in the shape of some valuable diamonds, which an old lady, a distant relation, left in her will to Miss Edgeworth, who sold them and built a market-house for Edgeworthtown with the proceeds.

_April_ 8, 1827.--I am quite well and in high good humour and good spirits, in consequence of having received the whole of Lovell's half-year's rents in full, with pleasure to the tenants and without the least fatigue or anxiety to myself.

It was about this time her novel of 'Helen' was written, the last of her books, the only one that her father had not revised. There is a vivid account given by one of her brothers of the family a.s.sembled in the library to hear the ma.n.u.script read out, of their anxiety and their pleasure as they realised how good it was, how spirited, how well equal to her standard. Tickner, in his account of Miss Edgeworth, says that the talk of Lady Davenant in 'Helen' is very like Miss Edgeworth's own manner. His visit to Edgeworthtown was not long after the publication of the book. His description, if only for her mention of her father, is worth quoting:--

As we drove to the door Miss Edgeworth came out to meet us, a small, short, spare body of about sixty-seven, with extremely frank and kind manners, but who always looks straight into your face with a pair of mild deep grey eyes whenever she speaks to you. With characteristic directness she did not take us into the library until she had told us that we should find there Mrs.

Alison, of Edinburgh, and her aunt, Miss Sneyd, a person very old and infirm, and that the only other persons const.i.tuting the family were Mrs. Edgeworth, Miss Honora Edgeworth, and Dr. Alison, a physician.... Miss Edgeworth's conversation was always ready, as full of vivacity and variety as I can imagine.... She was disposed to defend everybody, even Lady Morgan, as far as she could. And in her intercourse with her family she was quite delightful, referring constantly to Mrs. Edgeworth, who seems to be the authority in all matters of fact, and most kindly repeating jokes to her infirm aunt, Miss Sneyd, who cannot hear them, and who seems to have for her the most unbounded affection and admiration.... About herself as an author she seems to have no reserve or secrets. She spoke with great kindness and pleasure of a letter I brought to her from Mr. Peabody, explaining some pa.s.sage in his review of 'Helen' which had troubled her from its allusion to her father. 'But,' she added, 'no one can know what I owe to my father. He advised and directed me in everything. I never could have done anything without him. There are things I cannot be mistaken about, though other people can. I know them.'

As she said this the tears stood in her eyes, and her whole person was moved.... It was, therefore, something of a trial to talk so brilliantly and variously as she did from nine in the morning to past eleven at night.

She was unfeignedly glad to see good company. Here is her account of another visitor:--

_Sept_. 26.--The day before yesterday we were amusing ourselves by telling who among literary and scientific people we should wish to come here next. Francis said Coleridge; I said Hersch.e.l.l.

Yesterday morning, as I was returning from my morning walk at half-past eight, I saw a bonnetless maid in the walk, with a letter in her hand, in search of me. When I opened the letter I found it was from Mr. Hersch.e.l.l, and that he was waiting for an answer at Mr. Briggs's inn. I have seldom been so agreeably surprised, and now that he is gone and that he has spent twenty-four hours here, if the fairy were to ask me the question again I should still more eagerly say, 'Mr. Hersch.e.l.l, ma'am, if you please.'

She still came over to England from time to time, visiting at her sisters' houses. Honora was now Lady Beaufort; another sister, f.a.n.n.y, the object of her closest and most tender affection, was Mrs. Lestock Wilson. Age brought no change in her mode of life. Time pa.s.ses with tranquil steps, for her not hasting unduly. 'I am perfect,' she writes at the age of seventy-three to her stepmother of seventy-two, 'so no more about it, and thank you from my heart and every component part of my precious self for all the care, and successful care, you have taken of me, your old petted nurseling.'

Alas! it is sad to realise that quite late in life fresh sorrows fell upon this warm-hearted woman. Troubles gather; young sisters fade away in their beauty and happiness. But in sad times and good times the old home is still unchanged, and remains for those that are left to turn to for shelter, for help, and consolation. To the very last Miss Edgeworth kept up her reading, her correspondence, her energy. All along we have heard of her active habits--out in the early morning in her garden, coming in to the nine o'clock breakfast with her hands full of roses, sitting by and talking and reading her letters while the others ate. Her last letter to her old friend Sir Henry Holland was after reading the first volume of Lord Macaulay's History. Sir Henry took the letter to Lord Macaulay, who was so much struck by its discrimination that he asked leave to keep it.

She was now eighty-two years of age, and we find her laughing kindly at the anxiety of her sister and brother-in-law, who had heard of her climbing a ladder to wind up an old clock at Edgeworthtown. 'I am heartily obliged and delighted by your being such a goose and Richard such a gander,' she says 'as to be frightened out of your wits by my climbing a ladder to take off the top of the clock.' She had not felt that there was anything to fear as once again she set the time that was so nearly at an end for her. Her share of life's hours had been well spent and well enjoyed; with a peaceful and steady hand and tranquil heart she might mark the dial for others whose hours were still to come.

Mrs. Edgeworth's own words tell all that remains to be told.

It was on the morning of May 22, 1849, that she was taken suddenly ill with pain in the region of the heart, and after a few hours breathed her last in my arms. She had always wished to die quickly, at home, and that I should be with her. All her wishes were fulfilled. She was gone, and nothing like her again can we see in this world.

_MRS OPIE._

1769-1853.

'Your gentleness shall force more than your force move us to gentleness.'--_As You Like It_.

I.

It is not very long since some articles appeared in the 'Cornhill Magazine' which were begun under the influence of certain ancient bookshelves with so pleasant a flavour of the old world that it seemed at the time as if yesterday not to-day was the all-important hour, and one gladly submitted to the subtle charm of the past--its silent veils, its quiet incantations of dust and healing cobweb. The phase is but a pa.s.sing one with most of us, and we must soon feel that to dwell at length upon each one of the pretty old fancies and folios of the writers and explorers who were born towards the end of the last century would be an impossible affectation; and yet a postscript seems wanting to the sketches which have already appeared of Mrs. Barbauld and Miss Edgeworth, and the names of their contemporaries should not be quite pa.s.sed over.

In a hundred charming types and prints and portraits we recognise the well-known names as they used to appear in the garb of life. Grand ladies in broad loops and feathers, or graceful and charming as nymphs in muslin folds, with hanging clouds of hair; or again, in modest coiffes such as dear Jane Austen loved and wore even in her youth.

Hannah More only took to coiffes and wimples in later life; in early days she was fond of splendour, and, as we read, had herself painted in emerald earrings. How many others besides her are there to admire! Who does not know the prim, sweet, amply frilled portraits of Mrs. Trimmer and Joanna Baillie? Only yesterday a friend showed me a sprightly, dark-eyed miniature of Felicia Hemans. Perhaps most beautiful among all her sister muses smiles the lovely head of Amelia Opie, as she was represented by her husband with luxuriant chestnut hair piled up Romney fas.h.i.+on in careless loops, with the radiant yet dreaming eyes which are an inheritance for some members of her family.

The auth.o.r.esses of that day had the pre-eminence in looks, in gracious dress and bearing; but they were rather literary women than anything else, and had but little in common with the n.o.ble and brilliant writers who were to follow them in our own more natural and outspoken times; whose wise, sweet, pa.s.sionate voices are already pa.s.sing away into the distance; of whom so few remain to us.[4] The secret of being real is no very profound one, and yet how rare it is, how long it was before the readers and writers of this century found it out! It is like the secret of singing in perfect tune, or of playing the violin as Joachim can play upon it. In literature, as in music, there is at times a certain indescribable tone of absolute reality which carries the reader away and for the moment absorbs him into the mind of the writer. Some metempsychosis takes place. It is no longer a man or a woman turning the pages of a book, it is a human being suddenly absorbed by the book itself, living the very life which it records, breathing the spirit and soul of the writer. Such books are events, not books to us, new conditions of existence, new selves suddenly revealed through the experience of other more vivid personalities than our own. The actual experience of other lives is not for us, but this link of simple reality of feeling is one all independent of events; it is like the miracle of the loaves and fishes repeated and multiplied--one man comes with his fishes and lo! the mult.i.tude is filled.

Footnote 4: And yet as I write I remember one indeed who is among us, whose portrait a Reynolds or an Opie might have been glad to paint for the generations who will love her works.

But this simple discovery, that of reality, that of speaking from the heart, was one of the last to be made by women. In France Madame de Sevigne and Madame de La Fayette were not afraid to be themselves, but in England the majority of auth.o.r.esses kept their readers carefully at pen's length, and seemed for the most part to be so conscious of their surprising achievements in the way of literature as never to forget for a single instant that they were in print. With the exception of Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, the women writers of the early part of this century were, as I have just said, rather literary women than actual creators of literature. It is still a mystery how they attained to their great successes. Frances Burney charms great Burke and mighty Johnson and wise Macaulay in later times. Mrs. Opie draws compliments from Mackintosh, and compliments from the d.u.c.h.ess of Saxe-Coburg, and Sydney Smith, and above all tears from Walter Scott.

Perhaps many of the flattering things addressed to Mrs. Opie may have said not less for her own charm and sweetness of nature than for the merit of her una.s.suming productions; she must have been a bright, merry, and fascinating person, and compliments were certainly more in her line than the tributes of tears which she records.

The auth.o.r.esses of heroines are often more interesting than the heroines themselves, and Amelia Opie was certainly no exception to this somewhat general statement. A pleasant, sprightly auth.o.r.ess, beaming bright glances on her friends, confident, intelligent, full of interest in life, carried along in turn by one and by another influence, she comes before us a young and charming figure, with all the spires of Norwich for a background, and the sound of its bells, and the stir of its a.s.sizes, as she issues from her peaceful home in her father's tranquil old house, where the good physician lives widowed, tending his poor and his sick, and devotedly spoiling his only child.

II.