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(titlepage)
BY
(contents)
The twilight falls, the stars come out, the "Great Bear"
begins its slow movement upon the darkening sky, and I hear the steps of
bygone generations passing up the village street. They come in the costume
which Chaucer wore when that old church was new. They come in brown
straight gowns and light-coloured tunics; they come in armour, in peaked hats and in peaked shoes, in gold chains and plentiful embroidery. Some of them are horsemen, and others monks, and there is a fair proportion of hooded goodwives and young maidens. We know that they thus came up the street to hear the news of Agincourt, and again on the day of Bosworth Field, and when Flodden was being fought to the bitter end. Do you hear the echo of the bugle thrown back from the neighbouring down? It means a royal progress--a Henry or an Edward comes to lodge in the monastery hard by. For at the head of the street, in its noble park, was a great monastery, one directly attached to the See of Canterbury. Such ecclesiastical strongholds existed at intervals of twenty miles all the way to the Land's End. Centuries older than London without the Walls, they were once centres of vivid local life, though now the place thereof may be silent and far from a high road. Such another, and indeed far more obliterated by the dust of time, is Robertsbridge, whose Abbot was sent to find and rescue Coeur de Lion. In this autumn season a garden full of crimson hollyhocks abuts
upon the great grey gable of a farm, which can only be reached by a narrow winding lane, and is itself the only remnant of that once famous Abbey of the Rother.
But here, where a stately house has incorporated the monastery, and
where village life has never ceased to murmur, all the ground is haunted.
It has happened to me to be aware of the faint whispers
of old conversations in this garden; the talk of the masons who built
successive portions of the dwelling--from those who hoisted up the
beam in the dairy when Shakespeare was alive, to those who put in the
parlour panels while Marlborough was fighting in Flanders--and the
gossip of the women who cooked their dinners in the neighbouring cottages,
by fires practically unextinguished from then till now, for as each hearth
crumbled by time another was built upon the same place. The contour of the
village makes it certain that the ancient cottages stood where the modern
ones do now, inheriting the traditions of twenty generations.
And I hear yet one other ghostly voice. It is that of a young girl who
grew up in the great house 150 years ago; her name was Barbara,
and so far as I know, there exists of her no portrait. In the year 1749 she made a very great marriage. She wedded the son of a famous man who had been executed on Tower Hill three years before, and whose estates had been confiscated to the Crown. Barbara, who survived what brothers and sisters she may have had, remade her husband's fortunes. The people who lived in this old house were not her tenants; they were farming squires of mild pretension. They had dwelt in Sussex from generation to generation, and when those ghastly executions took place in London the news must have travelled very rapidly down to a house like this. It must have thrilled with horror the family at the great house, who were Catholics, and every detail must have circulated through the village. Sitting in the garden, I have seen the girl come in with her lover, James Bartholomew, a young man of five-and-twenty. She wears a sacque; she is dressed like Clarissa Harlowe. He has a coat of coloured silk and a three-cornered hat. When they are married, the bells of the parish church will ring; and so also for the birth of their one boy, Antony James. Antony
James and his august widow carried on the history of this village for 110 years. Is it wonderful that Barbara and her descendants should yet inhabit for me the scenes where they were born and died?
ordinary wealth of illustration with which she wrought out her meaning should have hindered women from discussing the utterances of one who was in her own person essentially womanly, and who bore down upon the younger members of her own sex with what seemed for a time to be an almost irresistible impact.
There are reasons which make "Middlemarch" especially
interesting to me; for it was there that I first saw the writer! It is a
much truer book than "Adam Bede"--truer, I mean, to the
real conviction of the creating mind. "Adam Bede" is a
wonderful tour de force--a painting from
knowledge and observation of a group of people known, for the most part, to
George Eliot in her youth, and the finest of whom were profoundly moved by
convictions on which had ceased to have the slightest hold. During the
years when I saw her most intimately, I had with her private conversations,
and heard her speak with others in a weighty, thoughtful manner which left
not the slightest loophole for the idea that at this period of her life,
from 1850 onwards, she retained any faith in Christianity. I think that her
unbelief was historical, I had almost said
mechanical, but it was of the most sincere and absolute kind.
Yet these intellectual conclusions were in singular opposition to the
general cast of her character. Born myself in the very bosom of Puritan
England, and fed daily upon the strict letter of the Scripture from aged
lips which I regarded with profound reverence, I am in a position to
declare that, from first to last, George Eliot was the living incarnation
of English Dissent. She had "Chapel" written in every line of
the thoughtful, somewhat severe, face; not the flourishing Dissent of
Spurgeon or Parker, or the florid kindliness of Ward Beecher, or the
culture of Stopford Brooke, but the Dissent of Jonathan Edwards, of Philip
Henry, of John Wesley as he was ultimately forced to be. Her horror of a
lie, her unflinching industry, and sedulous use of all her talents, her
extraordinary courage--even her dress, which, spend as she might and
ultimately did, could never be lifted into fashion and retained a certain
quaint solemnity of cut and gesture like an eighteenth-century
diction applied to clothes--everything about her, to me, suggested
Bunyan in his Bedford prison, or Mary Bosanquet watched by Fletcher of Madeley as she bore the pelting of the stones in the streets of Northampton. No one has ever before said this, so far as I know; no one has ever attempted to describe her as I saw her in her younger years, but I think I saw the truth. She has been compared personally to Dante and Savonarola. I think that her real affinity may be traced nearer home; that there was in her nothing Italian, nothing in any sense foreign; in the Wars of the Roses her ancestors would have adhered to any leader who promised best for the people; in those of the Commonwealth the brewer of Huntingdon would have commanded them to a man. And precisely in such an atmosphere, except for certain differences of speculative opinion, did I first see George Eliot. Driving from Warwick through the arching elms of that embowered nook of the Shires, with a very dear and gifted companion (a descendant of Oliver Cromwell), we reached Coventry, and Rose Bank, the house of Mr. Charles Bray. It lay on the outskirts of that provincial town which has been rendered doubly famous by George
Eliot's life and letters, and is at least the suggestion of the Middlemarch of her dream. There, being at the time myself just one and twenty, I was taken to make the acquaintance of the very learned scholar, Miss Evans. Not Abelard in all his glory, not the veritable Isaac Casaubon of French Huguenot fame, not Spinosa in Holland or Porson in England, seemed to my young imagination more astonishing than this woman, herself not far removed from youth, who knew a bewildering number of learned and modern languages, and wrote articles in a first-class quarterly.
I remember the scene vividly, though, unfortunately, after so long an
interval of time, I can remember none of the conversation. George Eliot had
a bad headache, and received us kindly and politely, but with an air of
resigned fatigue, Mr. Bray himself was a great talker; always full of
ideas, somewhat vigorously expressed. I do not remember that Miss Evans
said any noteworthy thing, but I looked at her reverently, and noticed her
extraordinary quantity of beautiful brown hair (always to the last a great
charm), and that we all went out and stood on a
sort of little terrace at the end of the garden, to see the sunset, and that the light fell full on her head and was reflected from her kind blue eyes. And as night fell, my companion and I were driven back to Warwick, and I did not see the learned scholar again till the next year in London, the year 1851.
And so it came to pass that when "Middlemarch" was
published, many years after, the place seemed familiar to me, and Dorothea
stood beneath elms with the sunset falling upon her hair, and that she has
always been to me most real, though I cannot but think most unreasonable in
her misuse of life. The girl is real enough; it is her chances
which she and her biographer seem to me to have singularly missed, probably
because the very weight and worth of English Dissenters forty to fifty
years ago secluded them from all society but their own. From the
aristocracy and from the wealthy landed gentry they were absolutely cut
off. They never rode steeplechases by moonlight with their
nightshirts buttoned over their uniforms; they did not
frequent a doubtful salon at Holland House, or a much more doubtful one at
Kensington
Gore; to them a woman of indifferent reputation was only that and nothing more, whatever her abilities or her place in the world. The old scandals of the pre-Victorian Court, the occasional trials before the Lords, the wine and the whisky of the political dinner, the hunting pastor who strolled into his wife's bedroom in pink, cracking his whip as he bent to kiss his new-born child--all these things were as far from the horizon of the Dissenters then as they are from ours now, and farther. But it was not wholly gain; some things were missed which might well be totted up on the other side. The wide political skyline, the knowledge of foreign countries, of the embassies and the diplomatic services, the unbroken links with the older Roman Catholic families--Howards, Talbots, Petres, Arundels, Welds--and the stirrings of the new life among the Catholic converts; add to these the traditions of the stage, the Kembles and the Keans, Garrick's widow only lately dead (she survived her husband for nearly fifty years); add to these whatever life remained in the English Church, a life soon to re-blossom like the rose; and it must, I think, be acknow-
ledged that the noble, pure-hearted English Dissenters saw but one side of the national truth. As between them and the rest of the nation a gulf was fixed which can only be measured from where we now stand, when the lines of parties are so much effaced, when the Catholic Church is daily rising in power, when the press and the railroad and the post are more and more welding our peoples into one.
George Eliot, I think, places her story just before the passing of the
Reform Bill, a period which in Warwickshire brought out the sharpest
contrasts between the classes. Radical Birmingham was with difficulty kept
from rising, and when the one vote carried the Bill, a gentleman--my
father--drove at a gallop through the night in one of Lord
Grey's carriages and brought the first news to the "Metropolis
of the Midlands." Ah! those were days when the telegraph and the
railroad were alike unknown. Great affairs of State were swung off by
signal from the huge arms of the great machine on the roof of the
Admiralty, and were repeated from the Telegraph Hill at Hampstead to
Harrow, and far across to the north or south, as the case
might be. But for any other sort of news we galloped through the night. The landed gentry were ensconced in their parks, and the one family with which George Eliot's father was locally connected paid ninepence, as did all the rest of the world, for their letters--unless they obtained franks, as was probable. Strange antique world, that I, though not yet very old, can faintly remember. The coaches with four horses and a horn which stopped at the Mitre Inn in Oxford; the post-chaises and their relays which, perchance, as happened to one of ours, were wrecked against carts at two o'clock in the morning, to the great danger of life and limb; and for foreign parts the travelling carriage shipped at Dover, and thence rumbling all over the Continent, exactly as if the inmates were Horace Walpole or Lord Chesterfield doing the grand tour; such were our conveyances. Moi qui vous parle, I have spent eight days posting between Paris and Geneva, and three days from Boulogne to the capital, halting at Montreux, at Abbeville, and at Amiens.
Such being the outer world into which Dorothea Casaubon was born, George
Eliot formed the opinion that her moral chances were
very poor indeed. And yet, strange to say, at that very time, and in that very circle wherein is laid the beautiful drama of Mr. Gilfil's love-story, a girl was actually born who has proved to be one of the principal, and certainly one of the most really efficient, workers of modern times. It has always seemed to me a curious irony of literary fate which made her create a Dorothea in Warwickshire, in Coventry, in the very class, almost in the very family, in which Mr. Newdigate's energetic cousin was born!
Dorothea, then, starts with more than average intelligence; thirty years
later than Jane Austen's heroine, delightful Elizabeth Bennet; and so
far touched with the modern spirit that she burns with desire to do good,
which, oddly enough, is inspired by the example of St. Theresa. Now, St.
Theresa was a cloistered nun (George Eliot, be it noted, had an early
attraction to Spain), and her work was not outwardly practical, but
spiritual. Its efficacy entirely depended upon the validity of certain
alleged facts in regard to prayer and a personal relation to an unseen
Christ. The undeniable continuity of St. Theresa's work, which
subsists
to this day in full swing and efficacy, is one of the proofs, patent to all, of the deep root of this kind of faith in human nature; but as it was a faith which George Eliot wholly denied, and of which there is no sign of her heroine having in any way partaken, it is singular that so powerful and well-cultivated an intellect should have chosen the Spanish nun, dead three hundred years ago, as a constraining example. I have never been able to understand in what way St. Theresa impressed Dorothea Casaubon, nor why she wanted to resemble the saint. The foundress of some active order would have seemed more to the purpose.
Also, in regard to Dorothea's marriage, her point of view is, to
me, inexplicable. To marry for money or position may be wrong, to marry for
pity, or for usefulness, or religion, may be foolish and dangerous; but to
marry that you may help a man to finish a big book, even were it the
all-embracing Code Napoléon, seems to me to be an
inconceivable reason. So far had I written, when, on reading the last
sentence to a young friend, she answered, quick as lightning:
"Ah, well, then, I understand it." I
bow submissive; I feel bound to give the emendation--only remarking that it does not seem to me to partake of that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin.
In truth, "Middlemarch" is to me as a landscape seen in the
twilight; au teint grisâtre. It is from
first to last the plaint of a lost ideal. I do not think it even a true
rendering of life as it was lived in England sixty years ago. It would be
easy to account for this by saying that the writer had lost "the
wider hope." I prefer not to do it. Such an explanation is, indeed,
so far obviously true as that in a country town the most strenuous belief,
the most unflagging work, is religious. But the scepticism of
"Middlemarch" also extends to things social and human; although
at the very time there were forces stirring in England which were about to
transform the era of the first gentleman in Europe into that of the Queen
and Prince Albert. Surely a notable change.
I understand the opening of the story to be about the year 1828, and
Dorothea to be about ten years older than George Eliot herself. I have
touched on the outward aspect of the
England of my own birth; let us see wherein lay the hopeful germs of the future. In 1828 Miss Nightingale was a little student, and Mrs. Fry was a mature woman. Mrs. Fanny Kemble was a bright girl of twenty; two years later she was acting in Birmingham, and impressing her vivid personality on my father's household--sitting on the hearth, and playing with the youngest child. In the upper sphere of all, the Duchess of Kent was doing her utmost to bring up fitly that young daughter of nine years old, on whose character hung much of the future of England and her colonies. In politics, Grey and Brougham were fighting hard battles with the Tories, and the elder Mill and the young D'Israeli, and another youth, named William Gladstone, were alive in the world of letters, or preparing for the fray. Mr. Newman and Mr. Manning were preparing as hard-working young clergymen. A friend of mine remembers to this day how great a pleasure it was when young Mr. Manning came over to Midhurst, carrying a black bag with his sermon. In Birmingham, two eminent doctors--De Lys, the Frenchman, and Joseph Hodgson, Sir Robert Peel's friend--
were the local Lydgates. The air was trembling with scientific discovery; the railroad and the steamboat were invented, though the former was not yet in use; the photographic plates of the Lunar Society lay hidden in a cupboard, and there had lain for thirty years; but the Penny Magazine, parent of the modern press, with its extraordinary wood-cuts, which cost such a mint of money, was just about to start (its first cut was, I believe, the Dresden Madonna). Harriet Martineau had begun to write, and Mrs. Barbauld had left off. Mrs. Siddons was lately dead, her statue was not yet in Westminster Abbey. Princess Lieven was writing to Earl Grey; and Lady Morgan, in white satin, was stirring up any metropolis wherein she might happen to be with Sir Charles. Surely a bright, eager England of blue and green coats with gilt buttons; of white muslin frocks and hair twisted over high combs; an England full of the last speech and the last sermon; not so very long before "Tract 90." And all the innumerable ladies of the landed classes whom we, with our own eyes, have during the last forty years seen travelling,
painting, writing, and serving on committees, were little girls at their mothers' knees, like that little Princess who was dutifully to grow up and do heavy work as private secretary to England for fifty-eight years! And into this England was Dorothea Brooke born, with no sort of need, it seems to me, to wish to imitate St. Theresa. We have one or two saints of the world who would have suited her better as a model! Surely, surely, no young woman born in the Shires, however "unked" she might feel at times, had any cause to marry Mr. Casaubon's big book or Will Ladislaw's unworthy personality. No, no, Dorothea! I am obliged to admit and believe that you were a real person, but you will never persuade me that you might not have done better in every sense of the word!
more to say of the most remarkable woman of my generation. And indeed it requires touch upon touch to render such a personality living to those who never saw her, for her power was in some sense a veiled one. In the first place, none of her portraits appear to me to be like her. The one in a hooded bonnet, said to have been sketched in St. James's Hall, is a monstrous caricature and accidental impression of her face, which was neither harsh nor masculine. The one which prefaces her life is too sentimental. The early photograph, on sale at Spooner's in the Strand, is very like, but not favourable, and absolutely without any art in the arrangement. It is, however, the only real indication left to us of the true shape of the head, and of George Eliot's smile and general bearing. In daily life the brow, the blue eyes, and the upper part of the face had a great charm. The lower half was disproportionately long. Abundant brown hair framed a countenance which was certainly not in any sense unpleasing, noble in its general outline, and very sweet and kind in expression. Her height was good, her figure remarkably supple; at moments it had an almost serpentine
grace. Her characteristic bearing suggested fatigue; perhaps, even as a girl, she would hardly have been animated; but when she was amused her eyes filled with laughter. She did not look young when I first saw her, and I have no recollection of her ever looking much older.
The effect of her presence--it was peculiarly impressive. Her great
weight of intellect told in all circles. My father was much attached to
her, and whenever any special celebrity was invited to dinner, such as
Thackeray, Grote the historian, or old Mr. Warburton (one of the principal
founders of the London University), he was never content unless he had also
secured his young countrywoman, Marian Evans, for he himself was a
Warwickshire man. On these occasions, from 1851 to 1855, she used to wear
black velvet, then seldom adopted by unmarried ladies. I can see her
descending the great staircase of our house in Savile Row (afterwards the
Stafford Club), on my father's arm, the only lady, except my mother,
among the group of remarkable men, politicians, and authors of the first
literary rank. She would talk and laugh softly, and look up into my
father's face respect-
fully, while the light of the bright hall-lamp shone on the waving masses of her hair, and the black velvet fell in folds about her feet. But for the deliberate casting away of her social chances when she left for Germany with Mr. Lewes, she would undoubtedly have achieved a very great position in the London world quite independently of her novels. In those years not a soul suspected her of a tinge of imaginative power. A real, deep thought and quiet wit were the characteristics of her talk. Most interesting as it was, I should hesitate to call it charming. There was always a want of brightness in her conversation. Her nature smouldered deeply, and occasionally glowed with interior fire; to the outward eye it never burst into a quick flame.
The story of George Eliot's life having been fully told in her own
letters, the chief question which I can be supposed in any way to answer
is: "Why did she act as she did in the principal relation of
her life?" I do not know that any sufficient explanation can be given
of the reason of human inconsistency. She was the very last woman in
England of whom such a step could
have been prophesied. She certainly was in all her bearing grave, sincere, and of a sort of provincial reticence. In principle she was a strict monogamist, witness the testimony of all her books; and in every relation of life she placed an immense value upon the virtue of faithfulness. You could not be with her and not recognize that her Yea was yea and that her Nay was nay. But she probably believed, though she would hardly have allowed it in words, written or spoken, in a sliding scale of action; by which I mean that she considered a man or a woman justified, on rare occasions, in taking circumstances into account. Mr. Lewes's home having been broken up by causes of which I conclude that she held him innocent, George Eliot must have thought that he was justified in forming another tie. I do not think that she would have accepted a light excuse, but it is quite evident that her moral judgment accepted what she herself regarded as a grave one; and I can only say, as a Catholic, that I do not expect people who are not Catholics to think and act as if they were such. It is a distinguishing mark of the Roman Church that she speaks with
authority on this matter, independent of what may be called local arguments. She does not leave the conduct of life in the grave matter of marriage dependent upon the judgment of interested parties, but it is surely unreasonable to expect that a woman whose intellect had totally rejected Christianity in any form should have held Mr. Lewes unable to contract what she undoubtedly regarded as a second marriage. He was at the time very ill, threatened with softening of the brain from overwork and worry, and she went with him to Germany and nursed him into convalescence; being herself independent in means and of a worldly position hitherto high and secure. Surely only those who hold the sacramental view of marriage would have had a right to condemn her, and their condemnation would fall nearer the source of the error--on the fatal facility with which, years earlier, she had suffered her spiritual nature to be swept bare. But it behoves us to speak with pain and hesitation of so deep a problem as the responsibility of an individual soul before God. The example was very unfortunate, and was one of many causes which have
deeply shaken the old respect for the marriage law in England; and she herself, strangely, lost no opportunity of saying, by pen and speech: "Do not follow my path in life." At the time of her very sudden and untimely death, her mind was, I think, slowly reverting to some measure of faith--at least, if we may judge by the indications of "Daniel Deronda." Happier and more normal circumstances, into which she had entered, might have helped that great mind to have regained its freedom of poise, her sense of loyalty being no longer engaged upon the side of wrong.
And this brings me to the one mystery which I have ever felt quite
unable to solve. That George Eliot should have chosen her own path and
created in her own mind a moral code which covered her action--that I
can understand. It would be unjust to judge her by a Christian law which
she repudiated. But why, in the exercise of this amount of moral liberty,
she should have idealized and finally almost worshipped Mr. Lewes, is one
of those problems before which those who know the inner wheels of London
life in the Fifties may well stand confounded. On
the manuscripts now deposited in the British Museum she has left an imperishable testimony to her conception of his worth. The dedications "to my dear and ever dearer husband" rise in a pathetic crescendo of affection and esteem. I had myself at any time but an external acquaintance with Mr. Lewes, never having seen him until the return of George Eliot from Germany. I had been aware of her intention for some weeks before she went away. She told me of it during a long walk round Hyde Park. Needless to say, that I heard her with a sinking heart, and that remonstrance was practically impossible. That conversation seems to me, after a lapse of nearly forty years, to be printed on the very stones of Park Lane. When, after many months, she returned to London, I sought her out with anxious affection. I then saw Mr. Lewes for the first time. And during the long years of their union I saw him occasionally in the drawing-rooms of their various homes. My domestic circumstances withdrew me from George Eliot's sphere, but the inward tie was never broken. I was, I believe, almost the last person to whom she wrote before her sudden death, after four days'
illness; and I was, perhaps, the first to whom the most unexpected event was communicated by letter, with a request that I would break the intelligence to Madame Bodichon, our close friend.
Since, then, my personal knowledge of Mr. Lewes was comparatively
slight, I refrain from any observations on him. The impression he made on
his contemporaries has been recorded by several among them. There is no
real difference in the portraits drawn by Mr. L'Espinasse and Mrs.
Lynn Linton, by Carlyle himself and by Mrs. Carlyle in her letters. The
acute and brilliant side of his mind is shown in his books, biographical
and philosophical. They are delightful reading if not very profound. His
moral ideas he has told in "Rose, Blanche, and Violet." I would
add that I believe him to have been very kind and helpful in domestic life.
But there will come a time when no care for the living and no respectful
reticence with regard to the dead, will check the publication of
contemporary diaries and private letters. It is because I see plain signs
of that time approaching, that I wish to place on record the exact truth of
my
conception of George Eliot's character. It must be borne in mind that to her Mr. Lewes seemed true and reverent. She must have evolved some better self than that perceived by the outer world.
I will say in conclusion that I know she loved much, not only the one to
whom she gave faithful years of devoted care, but his children, whom she
educated and made her own, the friends of her youth, the poor, the sick,
and the suffering. She apparently regarded the Christian controversy as
relegated to the region of dead intellectual lumber; yet it is true of her,
as of all of us, that to our own Master we must stand or fall. To Him I
leave my dead friend.
a statue to him in 1874, the centenary of the discovery of oxygen.
When this statue was inaugurated, my mother, who was born in
Pennsylvania, was probably the only person living in England who could
personally recall Joseph Priestley. She was seven years old when he died.
He had taught her to read, and her memory of him remained perfectly clear
and vivid. The delicate features of the old man, framed in thin locks of
silvery hair, are recorded in the portrait by Artaud before me as I write.
This presentment, rather than any of those by Flaxman, is what my mother
affirmed to be the real grandfather she remembered. It may not be without
interest to try and recover some traits of the man as he was, according to
the last echo of oral tradition. Also to this end indirect help is given by
a record which he left of his private life, an old-fashioned
reticent autobiography, which, though several times reprinted, is hardly
known in general literature, because it is filled from cover to cover, not
with records of the scientific discoveries which were making him famous
from one end of Europe to the other, but with thoughts and
interpreta-
tions pertaining to the Scriptures and life eternal. It is impossible to look upon the faded manuscript, in its century-old binding of white skin, without a feeling of deep, pathetic reverence. Matthew, Paul, John--with them he wrestled single-handed, if by any means he might wring out the truth of things divine. He scarcely takes the trouble to note those experiments on electricity, gas, and water which earned for him, even in his own lifetime, the recognition of the civilized world. To this autobiography his eldest son appended a supplementary chapter recording the last years and peaceful death-bed, at which even the little grandchildren were present.
Modern readers will perhaps regret the destruction by Dr. Priestley
himself of the great bulk of his correspondence; and in the first edition
of the 'Life' Mr. Priestley expresses a sentiment which falls
on the ear like a tone from some old-fashioned musical instrument
forgotten of men:--
"The work," says he, "might have been made more
interesting, as well as entertaining, had I deemed myself at liberty to
have published
letters addressed to my father by persons of eminence in this country (America) as well as in Europe. But those communications, which were intended to be private, shall remain so, as I do not think I have a right to amuse the public either against or without the inclinations of those who confided their correspondence to his care."
Many letters have, however, been preserved from oblivion; some have been
privately printed in New York, others are in my possession, and now that
full ninety years have passed since the last letter was written and
received, and that few can even remember in his old age the reverent and
scrupulous son, no such obligation need restrain the pen, though the
written personal record is at best but meagre.
It can, however, be supplemented from other sources. Priestley made a
great impression upon his contemporaries, as is witnessed by the
extraordinary number of portraits and medallions executed in his lifetime;
nor did the political caricaturists spare him. Moreover, the dignified
household, marked by plain living and high thinking, and at all times poor
in worldly goods, became the centre of a very whirlpool. The
Birmingham riots raged round Priestley and his friends, and were full of ferocious passion, full also of incident, and of that strange blending of the sublime and the commonplace in which lies the deepest pathos. We have many letters recounting how people lost their property, their loose coin, their keys, and their clothes, as well as precious papers. We are told how the young people of Priestley's congregation, Mary R. and Sarah S. and their brothers, were hurried away along the country roads by their frightened parents, the mob roaring and racing a mile or two behind; and one of the girls afterwards wrote the best account we have of those four days. In the midst of the turmoil stood Priestley, calm and patient, forbidding the young men of his congregation to strike a blow. In the letters of his contemporaries, rather than in any documents furnished by himself, we must seek for the man.
He was born in Yorkshire, of an old Presbyterian stock; one branch of
the family acquired wealth and lived at Whiteways, but his own immediate
ancestors were farmers and clothiers, people of substance in the yeoman
class. We
can trace them accurately as far back as the middle of the seventeenth century, when one Phoebe Priestley, after wrestling with fever in her household, was herself stricken and "lay like a lamb before the Lord" on her death-bed. Her husband wrote a long and touching account of all she said and did, that her children might know what manner of mother they had lost. These people were presumably of the same stock as the Priestleys of Soylands, who run back into the Middle Ages.
The children of the Priestley families were all named after Scriptural
characters. They were Josephs, Timothys, and Sarahs from one generation to
another. The Bible was stamped into them, and from it they drew all the
inspiration of their lives. That gifted Joseph, who was to make so singular
an impression on his time, and to be associated with Shelburne and
Sandwich, with Captain Cook, D'Alembert, and Diderot, and to receive
honours from the Empress Catherine of Russia, was born on March 13th (old
style) in the year 1733, at Fieldhead, a small stone house about six miles
south-west of Leeds. It is now taken down, but I visited it
in my youth, and made a rough sketch, which shows that it was rather smaller than the house of Shakespeare's birth at Stratford-on-Avon, but of much the same type, and probably very ancient. The front door led into the house-place; a division had been made to accommodate two families, but originally, one hundred and sixty years ago, it would have been a solid and respectable homestead, and fifty years later we find Priestley writing to his sister, Mrs. Crouch, at the address of Fieldhead.
He was the eldest of six, and when quite a little fellow was sent to his
maternal grandfather, a farmer at Shapton, near Wakefield, and remained
there till his mother's death in 1740.
"It is but little," he says, "that I can recollect of
my mother. I remember, however, that she was careful to teach me the
Assembly's Catechism, and to give me the best instruction the little
time that I was at home. Once in particular, when I was playing with a pin,
she asked me where I got it; and on my telling her that I found it at my
uncle's, who lived very near to my father's, and where I had
been playing with my cousins, she made me carry it
back again; no doubt to impress my mind, as it could not fail to do, with the clear idea of the distinction of property, and of the importance of attending to it. She died in the hard winter of 1739, not long after being delivered of my youngest brother, and is said to have dreamed a little before her death that she was in a delightful place which she particularly described, and imagined to be heaven. The last words which she spoke, as my aunt informed me, were: 'Let me go to that fine place.'"
Quaint little picture of the Puritan woman whose lesson to her son was
to remain indelible, and to be recalled by the old man after a long career
of labour and honourable success!
The boy's life now underwent a radical change. On his
mother's death he was taken home, the next brother replacing him in
the farmer's household, and before long a sister of his
father's, married to a wealthy man of the name of Keighley, offered
to adopt and consider him as her own child. This was when Priestley was
nine years old, and for twenty years Mrs. Keighley survived and kept her
promise. Her husband, "remarkable for piety and for public
spirit," died soon after the adoption of the child, leaving the greater part of his fortune to the widow, and much of it at her disposal after her death. From this time forward the boy had every advantage of education so far as it could be obtained at a time when the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge were strictly closed to Dissenters. He was well instructed in the learned languages, of which he says he had acquired a pretty good knowledge at the age of sixteen.
His aunt naturally wished her adopted son to become a minister, and he
entered into her views; but becoming, as it was thought, consumptive, he
took another great intellectual start. The dead languages were laid aside,
and with a view to a mercantile situation the youth learned three modern
languages--French, Italian, and High Dutch, all without a
master--and in the first and last, says he, "I translated and
wrote letters for an uncle of mine who was a merchant, and who intended to
put me into a counting-house at Lisbon. A house was actually engaged
to receive me there, and everything was nearly ready for my undertaking the
voyage."
But the patient's health improved, and the foreign project was laid aside.
Priestley, therefore, resumed his theological studies, and in due time
was ordained minister; and being a man of great though unconscious ability,
wholly free from exaggeration of language, he has drawn a picture of the
life led in Yorkshire by Presbyterian divines which must impress the modern
reader with astonishment, and perhaps with admiration. No hermits of the
desert, no monks of La Trappe, dwelt more serenely in an atmosphere apart.
It was the time of Louis the Fifteenth in France and of George the Second
in England, and the nephews and nieces of Charlotte Princess Palatine were
still living, and her letters, whose name is legion, yet lay stored in the
cabinets of her correspondents, full of inexpressible details discussed in
most expressive language. It was the time when Jeanie Deans walked from
Scotland to beg her sister's life of Queen Caroline, and met Madge
Wildfire in the way. It was the time when the polite world was composed of
"men, women, and Herveys"; when Squire Pendarves was found dead
in his bed in
Greek Street, Soho, leaving his young widow to be courted by John Wesley and wedded by Dr. Delany; when statesmen bribed, and young blades drank, and Sir Harbottle carried off Harriet Byron, whose shrieks brought Sir Charles Grandison to the rescue, sword in hand. It was the period when the Jacobite Rebellion flamed up and expired, when the Young Pretender marched to Derby, and the heads of the decapitated lords were exposed on Temple Bar; tragedies, agonies, highway robberies,--Dick Turpin, Jack Sheppard, smugglers, the press gang;--Frederick Prince of Wales quarrelling in Leicester Square, Queen Caroline on her death-bed telling her weeping little George "que l'un n'empêche pas l'autre," Horace Walpole making the grand tour, Dean Swift dying in agonized misery. Merciful heavens! what an England, of which we possess the daily diary! We can see Hogarth at his easel, and Sir Joshua taking his first stiff portraits, and Garrick going on pilgrimage to Stratford, and the young king courting Hannah Lightfoot and marrying his little bride from Mecklenburg. Without too much verifying of dates, it is
certain that all this was happening before Dr. Priestley was thirty years of age, and that of none of it is there the faintest mention in the account he has drawn up of his own childhood, youth, and young manhood, though he was himself destined to be one of the principal illustrations of the Georgian era. For anything which appears to the contrary, he and his friends might have dwelt in some far serene planet, whose inhabitants were wholly given up to study and to prayer. The tutors and students of Warrington Academy bestowed their whole minds (and very good minds) on the classics, the mathematics and metaphysics, and most of all on the theological discussions upon freewill and necessity, on the exact attributes of the Logos, and the exact results of the Atonement. Keenly alive to the immortal interests of man, the actual world touched them not. Much must be allowed to the absence of newspapers, to the want of easy communication. The men of the North who did not live with their bottle lived with their book; but it does seem strange that forty years later, when writing or revising his own story, Priestley, become in a sense a man of the world,
should not recall of those exciting times a single letter; a single speech.
Still stranger perhaps is it to note that though during his last years
Europe still lay bleeding, he added no word on the great convulsion, nor
upon the rise of Buonaparte; except in occasional notices in his private
letters, he scarcely makes reference to the French
Revolution.¹ It is impossible to
doubt that all its details became gradually known to him, but it is the
literal truth that his interests lay "otherwhere." People now
talk of true inwardness--such inwardness as Priestley's was
really a "recollectedness" of the most singular kind, and it
largely accounts for the extraordinary personal influence he possessed. He
impressed those about him as a being from another sphere; of this there are
many traces. Yet his own life was really one of the first to be swept into
the vortex. When Harry Priestley rushed into the great drawing-room
at Barr to tell the Galtons that the Bastille was down, it meant for the
boy and his family flaming destruction and exile, and in his own case an
early
___________________¹ He received an invitation to
stand as deputé for the Departement de l'Orne, which he
refused.
Page 38
death. It is Marianne Galton, Mrs. Schimmelpennick, who tells the anecdote.
Returning to the thread of Priestley's life story, it was in 1752
that he went as a pupil to the Academy at Daventry, where he remained for
three years under a successor of Dr. Doddridge. The new student felt
"that peculiar satisfaction with which young persons of generous
minds usually go through a course of liberal study in the society of others
engaged in the same pursuits, and free from the cares and anxieties which
seldom fail to lay hold on them when they come out into the
world."
The endless discussions of these young persons need not be here
analyzed, though they are most curious and interesting. They are accessible
in print. In three years Priestley obtained a small appointment as minister
at Needham Market, in Suffolk, and seems to have been pleased to get it.
His congregation numbered about one hundred, and the salary did not even
amount to the now classical forty pounds a year. The young man lived very
meagrely. His rich aunt, Mrs. Keighley, had been displeased at his
theological opinions, and she had taken a
deformed niece into her charge, who ultimately inherited all she had to bequeath. His aunt had always assured him that she would leave him independent of his profession, but he was "satisfied that she was no longer able to perform her promise," and freely consented to the money being left to his deformed cousin. His aunt finally bequeathed him a silver tankard, and he remarks, "She has spared no expense in my education, and that was doing more for me than giving me an estate."
In 1758 he left Needham, going to London by sea to save expense, and
from thence to Nantwich, in Cheshire, where he had an offer from a
congregation, and where he opened a school for about thirty boys, with a
separate room for half a dozen young ladies. Priestley at all times gave
his best mind to the teaching of girls, and shows by many incidental words
that he held women in as high mental and moral estimation as men; and he
does this quite simply, and with no idea of propounding a theory or
combating a prejudice. The profits of the school now enabled him to buy a
few books, and also some philosophical instruments, which he used
merely to instruct and amuse his boys. He tells us that he had no leisure to make any experiments till many years later. A portrait of him at this period of his life shows a slender, intelligent young minister in wig, gown, and bands. At Nantwich he learned to play the flute, and makes the odd observation that he would "recommend the knowledge and practice of music to all studious persons, and it will be better for them if, like myself, they should have no very fine ear or exquisite taste, as by this means they will be more easily pleased and be less apt to be offended when the performances they hear are but indifferent."
In 1761 he moved to Warrington, where he succeeded the famous Dr. Aikin
as "tutor in the learned languages" at the Academy. "But
as I told the persons who brought me the invitation, I should have
preferred the office of teaching the mathematics and natural philosophy,
for which I had at that time a great predilection." Here he remained
six years, and in the second year became a married man, his wife being
sister to one of his pupils, William Wilkinson, and daughter of a wealthy
Welsh ironmaster.
This is how he writes about her many years later; there is no want of feeling in the simplicity of the style: our great-grandparents did not wear their hearts upon their sleeves:--
"This proved a very suitable and happy connection, my wife being a
woman of an excellent understanding much improved by reading, of great
fortitude and strength of mind, and of a temper in the highest degree
affectionate and generous, feeling strongly for others and little for
herself. Also excelling in everything relating to household affairs, she
entirely relieved me of all concern of that kind, which allowed me to give
all my time to the prosecution of my studies."
It is a tradition in the family that Mrs. Priestley once sent her famous
husband to market with a large basket, and that he so acquitted himself
that she never sent him again! She was extremely intelligent and original,
and her letters are much brighter than the Doctor's. Lord Shelburne
found her one morning sitting on the top of a pair of steps, clad in a
great apron, and vigorously pasting on a new well-paper. She
received him with calm composure! There
is a good portrait of her as an elderly lady in a cap, curving her hand round her ear to assist her hearing. She must have herself insisted upon being painted in this unusual attitude. She certainly looks like a person of excellent understanding whose mind had been much improved by reading.
In 1767 Priestley received an invitation to take charge of the
congregation of Mill Hill Chapel at Leeds, and in September he moved
thither, and remained six years. In 1772 he made his first publication on
the subject of air. It was a small pamphlet on the method of impregnating
water with fixed air. It was immediately translated into French, and
excited a great degree of attention to the subject, and in the following
year he published his first paper of experiments "in a large article
of the Philosophical Transactions," and was awarded the gold medal of
the Royal Society. By the kindness of Mr. Charles Aikin, I am enabled to
give a letter written by Priestley to Miss Aikin (afterwards Mrs.
Barbauld), which refers to similar experiments. The letter has no postmark,
and is undated, but the reference to a second publication by Miss Aikin,
and the
allusion to Calne, fixes the date as the latter end of 1773.
"DEAR MISS AIKIN,--You have made me perfectly easy and happy
by your answer to my letter, the occasion of which I shall no more think
of. Your name was not to the paper.
"Though I have published so much, I really am not able to give you
any advice about your bargain with Mr. Johnson; and can only recommend my
own practice, which is to leave it to himself, and to wait the sale of the
work, which I hope will be such as to enable him to make you a handsome
recompense.
"I am sorry for Mr. Walker and the Academy, but, after the
complaints he has so very publickly made, it is much the most advisable for
him to leave you; and though it may not be an easy matter to supply his
place so well with respect to his ability, I hope you may be more happy
upon the whole with another. I wish you may get some person of reputation,
because the Academy will otherwise dwindle into a common school, and of
that kind it will never be a first rate or a good one.
"You say your brother is over heads and ears
in chymistry; so am I. Tell him I have just hit upon a process by which I convert pure water into an Alkaline liquor, the smell of which is beyond comparison stronger than anything that has yet been made of the kind. I can also give him a bit of spunge at which he could not bear to smell. I also make spirit of salt much stronger than any that he has seen of pure water. I first produce the Alkaline and acid airs or vapours, and with them impregnate the water to saturation. The former I get immediately from Sal Ammoniac, and the latter from common salt. At present I do little besides attending to my experiments, in which I have been of late peculiarly successful; yesterday I made some remarkable experiments on the mixture of ether with different kinds of air.
"Tell your father, however, that at intervals I (or rather Mrs.
Priestley) am transcribing the third volume of the Institutes, in order to
be printed the next winter, and that I hope he will soon see an essay of
mine on the subject of giving the Eucharist to children. Mr. Walker makes
himself very merry with my conceit, as he
calls it, but I am as little moved by the jokes of my friends as the malice of my enemies.
"I expect much pleasure from your new publication, and Mr. Johnson
informs me that it is upon the road to Calne.
"With my most respectful compliments, I need not say to whom I
am
"Dear Miss Aikin,
"Yours sincerely,
"J. PRIESTLEY."
In that year Miss Aikin published two volumes, one of verse and one of
prose (the first of which went immediately through four editions); and in
that year Priestley went to Calne, in, Wiltshire, near Lord
Shelburne's seat of Bowood. He seems to have taken a house in the
village for Mrs. Priestley and the children, but to have been constantly
occupied in the great House, where he says that his office was
"nominally that of librarian," but that he had "little
employment as such." In the second year he made with Lord Shelburne a
considerable tour, visiting Flanders, Holland, and Germany, as far as
Strasburg, returning by Paris, where
a most interesting month was spent in the brilliant, intellectual society of the Encyclopedists. With characteristic attention to the one thing he thought important, Priestley makes the only observation recorded upon the state of France; remarking, "'As I was sufficiently apprised of the fact, I did not wonder, as I otherwise should have done, to find all the philosophical persons to whom I was introduced in Paris unbelievers in Christianity, and even professed Atheists. As I chose on all occasions to appear as a Christian, I was told by some of them that I was the only person they had ever met with, of whose understanding they had any opinion, who professed to believe Christianity. This was also the case with a great part of the company I saw at Lord Shelburne's."
It is said that a manuscript exists in the Town Library of Aix, in
Provence, giving some particulars of Priestley in Paris, but I made a
fruitless search for it on the only occasion of remaining a day in that
town.
For some years, while at Leeds, he had managed to spend a month every
year in London, and his winters were now passed in the
metropolis at Lansdowne House. His noteworthy experiments in the beer vats of a brewery at Leeds had made him known to the members of the Royal Society, he had become intimately acquainted with Benjamin Franklin, and a proposition had even been made that he should accompany Captain Cook in the voyage undertaken in 1772. He spent several years in Lord Shelburne's house, and appears to have moved from thence to Birmingham. But when he had been some years settled in that town, Lord Shelburne "sent an especial messenger and common friend to engage me again in his service," but Dr. Priestley declined the offer.
Into the experimental details of that fruitful period of five and twenty
years after his departure from Warrington it is needless to enter. It is
open to all who care to read about it. His letters and those of his
scientific friends are touched by an imaginative light of intellectual
dawn. Franklin and Wedgwood, James Watt and the elder Darwin, felt a breeze
as from a mountain-top. Not for them was Nature pessimistic in her
conclusions. They did not
anticipate that a perfected telescope would only serve to bring us within range of the ravening tyrants of the Star! They were haunted by no visions of a dying sun and a cooling earth. Most of them saw God in clouds and heard Him in the wind; and even those who were touched by intellectual atheism conceived of Nature as a boundless realm of progressive wealth, conducive to the use and happiness of man.
Priestley was made Doctor of Laws by the University of Edinburgh, and a
member of the Royal Society by the agency of Franklin. He tells us this in
four lines, and goes on to write six close pages on Scriptural matters as
discussed by his colleagues, the tutors and ministers of Warrington. During
several years he and his wife had to practise the most laborious economy in
order to feed and educate their four children. It would be curious to learn
what were the necessaries and what the luxuries of life in Yorkshire a
hundred and twenty-five years ago. What did meat cost, and was it
eaten every day? What was the price of textile fabrics, and what was paid
in wages? All who know the details of a minister's house even in
the first half of this century can keenly realize how very hard it was to have everything sacked, torn, and burnt in the Birmingham Riots.
When these occurred Priestley had been settled eleven years in the town
as minister, and very happy years they had proved. His house, Fair Hill,
was really in the country, but was then within an easy walk of the central
streets. Dotted about were the wealthy abodes of prosperous merchants and
manufacturers, and here he found "good workmen" to make his
instruments, and "the society of persons eminent for their knowledge
of chemistry." Here he met the Lunar Society, which dined together
every month at the full of the moon, and numbered James Watt, Matthew
Boulton, Erasmus Darwin, and Mr. Galton among its members. All this happy
activity, this peaceful and refined centre of human life, was swept away in
four cruel days, and never reconstituted.
In the first fortnight of July, 1791, a number of Birmingham gentlemen
had planned to dine together at an hotel, to commemorate the destruction of
the Bastille two years previously. At that time the coming horrors of the
Revolution
were undreamt of. The French royal family were at the Tuileries, and not a single head had as yet fallen beneath the guillotine. The mild men who wished to dine together in the full light of a blazing afternoon in July had no wish for anything but the highest good of their kind, and Dr. Priestley, meeting Mr. Berrington, the well-known Catholic priest, at tea on Wednesday the 6th, asked him and their host, Mr. William Hutton, to join the banquet. But Mr. Berrington was more acute than the Doctor, and replied, "No; we Catholics stand better with Government than you Dissenters, and we will not make common cause with you." On Monday the 11th the dinner was advertised in a local newspaper, and--sinister portent--immediately under that advertisement was "another, informing the public that the names of the gentlemen who should dine at the hotel on Thursday would be published, price one halfpenny. This seemed a signal for mischief, but mischief was unknown in Birmingham, and no one regarded it." So wrote Miss Catherine Hutton in a letter dated the following week. She adds that her brother Thomas told her on Tuesday the 12th
that "a riot was expected on Thursday, but so little was I interested by the intelligence that it left no impression on my mind. The word 'riot,' since so dreadful, contained no other idea than that of verbal abuse."
The dinner took place. A mob assembled and broke the windows, hissing
and groaning, but the Liberal gentlemen did not apparently think much of
this, and several of them went and took tea at a friend's house in
town. This was literally noted as occurring at five o'clock, and it
happens that their conversation has been recorded in a private letter,
since privately printed. Dr. Priestley, however, was not with them at
dinner or at tea. He had been persuaded by a wary friend to stay away. The
lively, bright girl, Miss Mary R., who wrote the most vivid of all the
accounts which have come down to us, went that afternoon to Fair Hill, and
found Mrs. Priestley preparing to walk into Birmingham. To the rumours of
window-breaking, told her by her young friend, she replied with
characteristic decision, "Nonsense, my dear," or words to that
effect. The two set out together and walked back into the town, the
distance of a mile, where
they found the gentlemen still at tea. They were all friends, and mostly relatives by blood or marriage--the older Birmingham families forming a sort of local mercantile aristocracy, full of culture and public spirit. After the ladies had returned each to their homes, Miss Mary R. went to look at a new conservatory which her father had just built for his daughters. It was quite empty, but the gardener had prepared the mould, and had purchased a number of plants which the young people meant to set early the next morning.
The flowers were never planted. The conservatory remains as "the
baseless fabric of a vision." When the twilight darkened, the young
ladies stood upon their father's lawn watching the double glow where
the Old and New Meeting Houses were in flames. Then Mr. Samuel Ryland,
whose daughter was engaged to marry Joseph Priestley the younger, got
"a chaise" and hurried off to Fair Hill. He had been warned by
"a very Liberal Churchman, Mr. Vale," who had heard mischief
intended, and begged him to "take Dr. Priestley away, as he was
fearful his life was in danger." Mr. Ryland
found the Doctor, who had not been into Birmingham at all, "playing at backgammon with his wife, and when informed his meeting house was on fire could scarcely believe it, and refused to leave home." Probably Mrs. Priestley also said she would not go, abandoning her pleasant, orderly rooms, her hundred and one simple treasures, her china, her linen, her books, the house where her children had grown up. However, "he and Mrs. Priestley were persuaded to get into the carriage" and leave the house to his servants and a few young men who had arrived meanwhile with the intelligence of the riot. These young men, members of the congregation, had begged hard to be allowed to defend Fair Hill. But Dr. Priestley absolutely forbade them to strike a blow. He told them that a minister of the gospel must not risk bloodshed even in lawful defence of his worldly goods, and he passed out of the house, leaving behind him his library, his costly and beautiful philosophical instruments, his treasured manuscripts, the notes of five and twenty years of scientific labour.
When the chaise with Dr. and Mrs. Priestley had relied away, the
servants extinguished every
fire, the blinds were drawn down, and in the darkened rooms began that vigil by Mr. Hill which his one surviving son, Mr. Frederick Hill, has lately recounted in such moving terms. For half an hour the young man watched and waited; then came the tramp of the mob. The rest is matter of oft-repeated history. The ringleaders procured a light from the nearest public-house and set fire to the laboratory and the library. Of all the property in that dwelling an official inventory was afterwards compiled, a copy of which was made for Mr. Timmins, the well-known local historian and antiquary, a hundred years later. The original document is a folio book of sixty-five pages, in which the most minute details are given, and the value of each entry given by sworn valuers, surveyors for the building, auctioneers for the furniture, and booksellers for the books. All these are very curious and interesting as records of the interior of a substantial house one hundred years ago, and valuable as a register of the prices of household furniture. It has been partially reproduced in Dr. Carrington Bolton's interesting volume of Priestley's scientific correspondence,
privately printed in New York. In addition to the splendid apparatus given to the Doctor partly by Lord Shelburne, partly by Wedgwood and other friends, are noted a large silver medallion of Sir Isaac Newton, and another in Wedgwood ware, two "five-guinea notes" in pocket books, a Magellan timepiece, three black Wedgwood inkstands, a large mahogany lathe, sixty pounds' worth of lenses, and other optical instruments, including a large camera obscura. Of "chemical substances" there were six or seven hundred, liquid and solid, of which no account can be given, many of them the results of expensive processes.
About three years later a similar inventory was taken of the apparatus
of the French chemist, Lavoisier, guillotined in May, 1794.
Fair Hill remained a mere shell, of which small pictures were made and
published. Of the actual burning a strange record exists. An artist of the
name of Exted, a "pupil of Hogarth," made an elaborate painting
in oils, sketched upon the spot. "This picture represents the mob,
with the banner inscribed 'Church and King,' in the very act of
destroy-
ing Dr. Priestley's house; chairs, globes, bottles, apparatus, a wig, slippers, window-frames, books and pamphlets, a telescope, a bed-post, lying on the ground or falling from a window. The more sober part of the rioters, both in the house and in the garden, in the most various attitudes, the drunken one stretched out at length. Several of the faces are portraits; among them the town-crier with his public bell, a demon who attended on the occasion to incite the mob." This description is from a private letter. It is my impression that the secret history of the Birmingham Riots has never been unearthed, and now never will be known. Political passion has subsided; Churchmen and Dissenters have changed their lines of thought; the New Meeting House has become a Roman Catholic chapel, and Dr. Priestley's congregation meets in a fine building called the Church of the Messiah, and a son of Sarah S. became the much-respected Mayor and most prominent citizen of the metropolis of the Midlands.
Of the destruction of many other houses, far wealthier than that of
Priestley's, sad stories remain, notably the ruin of William
Hutton's
two dwellings; while Dr. Priestley's journey to London, his sojourn at Hackney, and final emigration to America are matters of history. But, on examining the documents, some unpublished, others printed in old-fashioned magazines, from whence they have never emerged, I am deeply impressed with the struggle it cost him to cross the Atlantic, and the changed life to which he submitted. The younger men of the congregation, including his own sons, believed in the possibility of a successful settlement across the ocean. But, as happened in the case of Winthrop, a hundred and sixty years earlier, the hand of death lay heavy on the exiles. The first to go was Henry Priestley, a delicate young man brought up for a learned profession. He flung himself into a farmer's life, caught ague, then fever, from exposure in the unwonted climate, and died in 1795. His valiant mother survived him just nine months. The New House, now known as the Priestley House, and kept up by Government, was partly planned by her, the notable housewife who for thirty-four years had spared her husband every practical care. She did not
live to inhabit it. Priestley's habitual submission carried him over a time of deep depression, which he pathetically tries in his letters to conceal. Over them, though some of them have been printed from a collection at Warrington, I draw a veil. Under the deep self-control and reserve of his Presbyterian nurture was hidden a soul sensitively alive to affection, and an intellect instinct with genius. Among men he had one dear friend, with whom he continued to correspond. The following letter, hitherto unpublished, ends with sad, suppressed yearning. It reached its destination, travelling from the backwoods of Pennsylvania to the Strand, and lies before me now:--
"Northumberland, April 2, 1802.
"To the Rev. W. Lindsey,
"Essex Street, London.
"DEAR FRIEND,--I have at length, with great satisfaction,
received a box of books from Mr. Johnson, though by no means all that I
wrote for long ago. In it I was disappointed not to find either Mr.
Belsham's 'Lectures,' or his (brother's) fifth and
sixth volumes. But my
son, being at Philadelphia when the box arrived, purchased those books for me. The history, being more immediately interesting, I read first, and also the 'Answer to Mr. Marsh,' and I admire them as much as, from your account of them, I expected to do. I am, however, astonished at the freedom with which he writes. Nothing of the kind would have passed unnoticed here during Mr. Adams' administration. I long to see another volume, which I imagine will bring the history down to the general peace. I see references to his history in quarto. Is this materially different from that in octavo?
"I have made some progress in reading Mr. Belsham's
'Lectures,' and admire their clearness and comprehensiveness.
That any work of this kind should be inviting to the generality of readers
cannot be expected, especially as there is nothing of controversy to
stimulate. It will, however, I doubt not, be long a standard work on the
subject.
"Please to call on Mr. Philips, and thank him in my name for the
many curious and Valuable articles which he has sent me in this parcel.
"I sent Mr. Nicholson two articles for his Journal,
with a P.S. to one of them in a letter to you. Has he received them? I hope
Mr. Morgan has received the letter I wrote him. Dr. Woodhouse, Professor of
Chemistry here, is going to make a tour of part of Europe. I gave him a
letter of introduction to you, and sent after him, directed to you, one to
Sir Joseph Banks, who, I hope, will receive him with civility.
"Warned by the impaired state of my health (though I am not
without hopes of a restoration) that what I do I must. do quickly, I have
begun to print the 'Continuation of my Church History.' We have
printed two sheets, and I am promised three in a week. Four volumes will
complete the whole. As I have hardly any other source of expense, I hope
that, if Mr. Wilkinson continues his allowance, I shall be able to finish
this with little or no assistance, but if I receive any it will be welcome.
No person has been more liberal in his promises to aid me in works of this
kind than Mr. Russell, but his affairs have been in such a state that he
has not been able. I think to write to him on
the subject. He shall have copies for all that he may advance.
"I have just received a very interesting letter from Mr. J. Stone,
giving me an account of the state of religion in France and Germany, where
Unitarianism has already gained great ground, and has been the means of
putting a stop to the spread of infidelity. He was intimate with Mr. de la
Harpe, the tutor of the Emperor Alexander of Russia, and from his letters I
have formed great expectations from him. He is the friend of liberty, and
in this promises to be a truly patriot prince. Mr. Stone urges me much to
go to Paris. But any removal is now out of the question. I must be thinking
of my last, and I am thankful that I see no great cause to be anxious about
it. I have lived in good health to the usual term of human life, and hope I
have done some good in it, though I am sensible I might have done more. I
am particularly thankful that you have been so long preserved to me and to
the world. What could I have done without you? and this in many respects. I
can only wish that we may derive the same advantage from our intercourse in
another state, and the nearer I approach to it the more I think of it. How dark and gloomy must be the prospects of unbelievers in the same circumstances!
"We have had an uncommonly mild winter, such as no person here
remembers, and the papers say that you have had a severe one, and that the
clearness of provision continues. On the whole, I think a situation in this
country more truly eligible than in any other country in the world. We have
peace and plenty, and everything in a state of unexampled improvement. I
may add that this very place appears to me to be on the whole more eligible
than any other that I have seen or heard of.
"Yours and Mrs. Lindsey's most affectionately,
"J. PRIESTLEY."
Priestley survived his wife's death eight years, and found a
measure of restored happiness in the children of his eldest son. No murmur
ever crossed his lips. He worked on to the very last, correcting proofs of
his "Notes on Isaiah" two days before he died, "and,
having examined the Greek and Hebrew quotations, and finding them
right, he said he was satisfied we should finish the work very well." On the morning of his death, February 6, 1804, he dictated an alteration in a pamphlet; his son read it over to him, and he said, "That is right, and I have now done." He had previously offered grateful thanks to the Almighty for giving him a painless death among his children; and putting his hand before his face, so that those watching him could not tell the exact moment, he passed away in deep and conscious communion with his God.
must dwell in his old impressions if he hopes to revive the past.
In the spring of 1857 no railway came within many hours of the Eternal
City. She sat in isolated majesty upon the wild Campagna, and the traveller
entered her gates as Cæsar and Cicero, Leo and Pius, and kings and
pilgrims from time immemorial have approached, by travelling along the
Aurelian Way. In 1818 six English youths sent to colonize the desolate and
half ruined English College, similarly crossed the Campagna, and one of
them, a famous man in later years, tells us of the "great cupola,
cutting like a huge peak into the clear winter sky, increasing in size with
every mile." For indeed the rolling Campagna is like the sea, across
which you may see the snowy sails of a ship, herself invisible. And that
period of forty years had in 1857 made but little change. To us also the
dome appeared faintly upon the horizon; beautiful was the wealth of flowers
in the southern spring, the wayside bright and delicate with asphodel, and
spaced with the mile-stones of the famed Aurelian Way. The far
mountains were filmy in the distance, the
classic mountains which are the best guardians of ancient traditions, for man cannot change their outline; and in Rome itself Mrs. Anna Jameson was waiting to receive one young traveller, and she was perhaps the most wonderful cicerone in the world, dearest, wittiest, most cultured of women, and though sixty years old, retaining all the fire and enthusiasm of her youth. It is impossible to give to another generation any adequate idea of many men and women whose personality was greater than their achievement, or whose achievements were practically those of the improvisatore.
Mrs. Jameson was born in the year 1794 in Dublin. Her father, Brownell
Murphy, married an English wife; he was a well-known miniature
painter, who came over to England and became eventually Painter in Enamel
to the young Princess Charlotte of Wales in the year 1810. It is told of
Mr. Murphy that he once took the liberty of asking Her Majesty Queen
Charlotte whether she recollected a famous picture of Nell Gwynne, known to
have once existed in the Windsor Gallery. The Queen replied at once, that
most assuredly since she had resided at
Windsor there had been no Nell Gwynne there! At the sad death of Princess Charlotte, the hopes, fortunes, and happiness of many to whom she had shown kindness failed, and the Murphys suffered with the rest, but Anna Murphy was tenderly devoted to her parents, and both before and after her own marriage she never ceased to be the most devoted of daughters. Her life, with all its varying fortunes, has been well told by her favourite niece, Gerardine, the wife of Robert Macpherson of Rome. It was published by Longmans, and to it we must refer those who would fain know more of one of the best and brightest women of the earlier years of the Victorian era.
Mrs. Jameson's writing was like eloquent speech; she was an
interpreter of art and nature, she was a human Irish harp; to see her
kindle into enthusiasm amidst the gorgeous natural beauty and the antique
memorials and the sacred Christian relics of Italy was an experience not to
be forgotten. There is not a cyprus upon the Roman hills, or a sunny vine
overhanging the southern gardens, or a picture in those vast sombre
galleries of foreign palaces, or a
catacomb spread out dark under the martyr churches of the City of the Seven Hills, which is not associated with some vivid flash of her intellect and imagination, and with a dearer recollection of personal kindness from the old to the young.
Of the actual entrance into Rome it is strange that I can remember
nothing. It must have been after dark on a moonless night, and the voyage
from Genoa and the long hours in the open air behind the postillion of
other days must have made me fall unromantically asleep. But in the gray
dawn of the next morning I awoke, and woke to Rome. It was but little after
six when I found some servant afoot to let me out of the front door into
the shadowed black and white street, the Via Condotti. I was determined not
to ask my way; to speak to a fellow-creature would have destroyed
the spell. I had been, for a girl educated in the Forties,
well-grounded in the classics, and I was back with Romulus and Remus
in a fantastic dream. I knew that what I wanted lay to the west, and I
threaded my way swiftly along the Corse. With a greater traveller I could
have
said, "From this point"--the Column of
Antoninus--"all reckoning was lost; a long, narrow street and a
labyrinth of tortuous ways, through which a glimpse of a church or palace
front might be caught, occasionally askew; the Farnese Palace, as
completely Michelangelesque in brick as the Moses is in marble," and
so on to his goal. But I was not an English youth running for the English
College; pagan was then my heart, and pagan all my historic desire. Rain
began to fall; if the skies had fallen it would have been unheeded. I
reached the foot of a flight of immense steps, knew them at a glance by old
engravings, and also the great buildings atop--swerved to the right
and round the corner of the gigantic edifice, and there--below
me--there they were--the three great pillars with the broken
cornice, rising out of rough, unkempt, hillocky ground, a waste of stone
and grass, for the most part unexcavated, untortured; the unswept Forum
where Cicero had spoken, where Paul had passed, where Goethe had stood
amazed; and rising sharp from the soil that slender shaft, by Byron named
"The nameless pillar with the buried base."
Silently I had come, silently I retraced my steps, but the lapse of thirty-seven years has left that one unparalleled moment a landmark in my life.
And now began a period of such vivid intellectual happiness as can fall
to the lot of few; in Rome with Mrs. Jameson. She was visiting her niece
Gerardine, whose house was a centre for the English in Rome, and a room had
been arranged for me in the dwelling of a friend; so that I came into the
midst of all that was going on. The Macphersons then lived in a villa just
on the outskirts of the city, with a heavenly view towards the mountains.
My first visit was to St. Peter's, whither I was taken with a sort of
solemnity, Mrs. Jameson herself raising the great leathern screen and
watching me as the vast nave met my view. So that of the Catholic and
mediæval world my first vision was through the eyes of Michel Angelo.
She then took me to see Gibson. The famous sculptor was a little, gentle
old man with whom it seemed to me that the Greek gods had literally come
down to live in the Via della Fontanella. In 1821 Mrs. Jameson had seen him
at work on a beautiful group of Psyche borne by the Zephyrs;
in 1847 she had found him in the self-same studio, modelling the bas-relief of the Hours leading forth the Horses of the Sun, and had felt that "there was something inexpressibly touching, and elevating too, in the sense of progress without change; all appeared the same in that modest, quiet little room, but round it extended lofty and ample ateliers, crowded with models of works, already executed or in progress, and with workmen, assistants, students, visitors." And here, after the lapse of another ten years, she brought her young English friend. Gibson told Mrs. Jameson that his first commission in Rome was from "a tall young man" who said he had been "sent by Canova." It was the Duke of Devonshire who made a happy man that day! "Mars and Cupid" are now at Chatsworth.
In 1844, when Gibson visited England, the Queen sent for him and
commanded a statue of herself, intimating at the same time a desire that
the "statue should be a faithful portrait such as her children should
recognize, and calculated for a room in the palace, not for any public
institution." The young Queen of five and twenty sat every day for
ten days. Gibson was wont to say
that he owed his start in life more to the praises bestowed on his work by Mrs. Jameson in the pages of her "Diary of an Ennuyée" than to the fact of the group of Psyche borne aloft by the Zephyrs having been purchased by Sir George Beaumont. The Diary, her first work, was published after her marriage in 1825, and her only remuneration was a guitar!
From Gibson's studio the entranced visitor naturally turned to
that of his favourite pupil, Miss Hosmer, who had come from Boston five
years previously. Of all her admirable work, "Puck" was,
perhaps, the most appreciated by her public and by me. The Little Man
struck a Shakespearian note amidst the endless classic beauties of Rome.
Gibson had evidently in some previous existence been intimate with Phidias,
but Miss Hosmer was of a newer time, and at that youthful period she
herself resembled a charming boy with a curly crop, except that few boys
ever show such dogged determination to succeed. She went on from strength
to strength, and was then working at a reclining figure of the Cenci. Many
happy hours I spent in Miss Hosmer's studio, and for the first time
understood the sculptor's art and how the human image gradually formed itself in the wet clay and died in plaster, to resuscitate in marble.
To a dark, endless catacomb, I think it was Santa Agnese, Mrs. Jameson
took me in the company of Sir David Brewster; and his keen intellect played
vividly on the most diverse associations. He was quite an old man, but had
lately entered into his second marriage with extraordinary freshness of
feeling. He had a private hobby, a fine collection of engraved gems, and
brought them out one evening for inspection. In that cosmopolitan Rome the
strangest side-lights fell upon well-known figures.
Another image which rises to memory is that of Dr. Auguste Braun, the
most learned of German archæologists. He lived in a house on the top
of the Tarpeian Rock, from the windows of which was seen a splendid view
over the Forum, and there he carried on a great controversy about the site
of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, a question upon which Germans and
Italians were bitterly opposed. One party
said the foundations existed under the church of Ara Coeli, the other party assigned them to the opposite hill; but as the two hills were extremely near together and densely covered with buildings of all ages, it was indeed a very pretty quarrel, and one in which I took at the time a youthful and quite fantastic interest. Little did the disputants foresee that within thirteen years a new Italy would arise, and Rome be given up to a generation of railway-makers and building speculators. Who now cares for that poor old vanished temple? It is as extinct as the dispossessed Lion on the roof of Northumberland House, whose tail pointed to so many quarters of the compass that nobody could ever say which was which. Dr. Braun the archæologist died in 1860, and one is inclined to say that it was fortunate for him.
The excavations of the soil of Rome at that epoch had been very partial,
and a sense of the mystery of the haunted ground enhanced its charm. They
have since been "Systematized," and suggest an Examination in
Ancient History. For instance, in the Fifties the Coliseum was decorated
with a rich flora.
Delicate ferns and mosses and creeping greenery flourished among the huge steps and corridors, and were said to be unique, springing from the blood of the martyrs. Total ignorance of botany prevents my putting forth this as other than a legendary statement; but nature had wonderfully softened the horrors of the pagan amphitheatre; the floor was a soft mat of grass, and in the centre stood a black mission cross, where some monk had preached of grace and redemption. The cross is gone, and half of the vast area is deeply dug, and reveals the subterranean passages which ministered to the cruel show. He who now walks in the Coliseum by moonlight would do well to walk warily, lest in some dark corner he slip through the rails and plunge downwards into the dens of the wild beasts. If, on the other hand, the traveller approaches the Coliseum at noon, his eyes will be fatally attracted to the left of the great building, and to that hill-road, once so picturesque, but now blocked by a huge depôt for the sale of olive-oil, the Pears' soap of Italy.
That old Rome wherein Shelley was portrayed by Joseph Severn, where
Wiseman came to study
and remain as Rector, where Wilkie renewed his youth after long sickness, where Hawthorne imagined Donatello, has for ever faded away.
Of the overpowering ugliness of the great new buildings erected in the
meadow below the Castle of St. Angelo, and on that high site beyond the
Baths of Diocletian, once covered by lovely vineyards and gardens, what
adequate description can be given! Peabody's Lodgings and Queen
Anne's Mansions, half-finished and already old, dirty, and
dilapidated--such is the vision that meets the eye inside and outside
the San Lorenzo gate. The financial troubles of Italy have stopped the
works, and it is a moot question whether what they meant to do or what they
half achieved is the more deplorable. One complete handsome result has,
however, been effected, the Via Nationale cuts through Rome like a Parisian
boulevard, it recalls the architecture of Florence, and should fairly be
praised as a beautiful street, but in the very nature of things Rome cannot
be effectually Haussmannized. The mementoes of the pagan past are too
numerous and too important to be disregarded, and the great churches and
colleges belonging to every nation
in the civilized world cannot be erased for the formation of new structures, though here and there they stand out as huge blocks in the midst of clearings, and puzzle the old tourist as to their identity. In Rome we all have a vested interest; to the English College, the Scotch College, and the Irish College is now added a beautiful new Canadian College with the Imperial right of sanctuary. The French have St. Louis des Français, and French Sisters of more than one Order have standing room in Rome. That far-famed English College, "where many a pilgrim, gentle or simple, has knelt leaning on his trusty staff, cut in Needwood or the New Forest," and where among many other memorials of our dear land are the tombs of Sir Thomes Dereham, of a Prior of Worcester and an Archbishop of York, is standing evidence that the city of Rome guards other associations than those of her own citizens. And putting aside those ecclesiastical treasures about which men so widely differ, but of which it may be fairly said that all men of the slightest culture regard them with interest, none can deny that the art treasures of the Eternal City are the heritage of the world.
far from the heart of Shelley (Cor Cordium), and from where reposes one who bears the sole epitaph of "Filius Goethe." Although she had lived during her last years as a devout Catholic, and passed as we believe "in Paradiso," her tender love clung faithfully to the husband of her youth, and special permission was given that she should be reunited to him in death. On the white marble of the beautiful tomb the English stranger in Rome reads the familiar words "William and Mary Howitt."
When I first saw the home of the Howitts they had left that old house at
Clapton to which such tender reference is made in the autobiography. Claude
Howitt had been dead about four years, and the pathetic page of Mary
Howitt's writing, in which she tells her sister of the death of her
boy, lay buried in a private letter. It can be illustrated by a reference
to her daily habit of unflagging work. For many years the Howitts had so
arranged their life as to be wholly dependent on their own literary labour.
The opportunities of modern authorship were then undeveloped, but William
Howitt's talent and steady industry, and his wife's genius and
equally steadfast labour, met every claim. It was at all times beautiful to see the delicate method, the perfection with which Mrs. Howitt managed her household, her dress, her persistent work with the pen. It was the result of the old Quaker training, though she no longer wore the costume of a "Woman Friend," and expressed a rare high quality of character.
I once had a youthful discussion with her as to how much writing could
be done in a day. She smiled, and fixed the limit, saying, "My dear,
it is--such a number of--pages of manuscript; it is practically
impossible to overpass my average." And this explains the letter
written after Claude's death, which occurred in March, 1844, and was
the result of a sad accident at school caused by the practical joke of a
foolish boy. A month elapsed before his mother wrote to her sister the
letter which will be found on page fifteen of the second volume of the
memoirs. She begins, "Thy letter, my dearest sister (they always used
together the Quaker phraseology), was indeed like the voice of the truest
and sweetest affection. I have turned to it again and again, and I feel
that,
among the many blessings which I enjoy--and I enjoy a great many--is that of having a sister like thee." She then speaks at great length and with a wonderful chastened peace about Claude, a letter full of resigned prayer; and ends thus:--
"To-morrow I intend again to commence my regular avocation.
Poor dear Claude! At this very moment I see the unfinished translation
lying before me which was broken off by his death. Alas! I could have shed
burning tears over this. How often did he beg and pray of me to put aside
my translation just for that one day, that I might sit by him and talk or
read to him? I, never thinking how near his end was--(the boy had been
a tenderly nursed invalid for a year, and while, on the one hand, the
numerous doctors seemed to have hoped against hope, the mother's
labour could not stop)--said, 'Oh, no! I must go on
yet a page or two.' How little did I think that in a short time I
should have leisure enough and to spare! Oh, Anna! of all the agonizing
feelings which I know, none is so bitter as that longing for the dead. Just
one day, one hour of their lives, that one might pour out the whole
soul of one's inextinguishable love before them, and let them feel how dear, inexpressibly dear, they are. My very heart at times dies within me from this deep, agonizing longing. But, dearest, when we have angels in heaven, does not death seem robbed of its terrors?
"I wonder how it is with families in heaven? for there must be
different degrees of worthiness in the different members. Some must have
lower places than others. I would be content to sit on the lowest footstool
might I only be permitted to behold the glory and the bliss of my beloved
ones, and to make compensation to them in some way for my shortcomings on
earth."
It is well worth while to extract this wonderfully touching and humble
letter from the mass of printed matter in which it lies embedded. It is a
revelation of the writer's spiritual life.
In the next year, 1845, the Howitts went to Hastings, and formed a close
intimacy with a family with which my parents and I were also shortly to be
tenderly and gratefully associated: that of Mr. Benjamin Smith, the
member for Norwich. A great domestic affliction caused
us to take up our residence in Hastings--where, indeed, we were Mr. Smith's tenants--and until July, 1850, we were almost as one family, sheltered under the magnificent rock of the Castle Hill. Hastings was not then what it is now; the old town was widely separated from St. Leonards, and the lanes leading up to Ore Church were lanes of deep country seclusion. It was here, in 1846-7, that I first heard of the Howitts as a family. Mrs. Howitt's tales and poems had, of course, been familiar to me from early childhood, more especially the exquisite "Sketches from Natural History," containing that ballad beginning "Will you walk into my parlour, said the Spider to the Fly," which has become so much a classic phrase that I have seen it quoted in prose in a political leader, without any reference to the authoress, or to the fact that the quotation formed part of a verse.
If on the one hand we were all full of the distinguished authoress, and
her charming eldest daughter Anna Mary, on the other hand here is Mrs.
Howitt's allusion to the Leigh Smiths, which will explain a reference
in one of
her future letters to me. She describes the group of five, of whom the eldest was then eighteen, and the youngest twelve; speaks of their carriages and horses, and outdoor life, and of how "Every year their father takes them a journey. He has a large carriage built like an omnibus, in which they and their servants can travel and in it, with four horses, they make long journeys. This year they were in Ireland,¹ and next year I expect they will go into Italy. Their father dotes on them. They take with them books and sketching materials; and they have every advantage which can be obtained them, whether at home or abroad. Such were and are our friends the Leigh Smiths, and thou canst imagine how much pleasure we were likely to derive from such a family."
The Howitts presently left Clapton, and settled near the Regent's
Park, and here it was that I first saw them, being taken to the house by
Miss Leigh Smith--the Barbara of the letters. A vivid memory remains
to me of an
___________________¹ In Connemara, where from a
mountain-top it was jestingly said that they surveyed their
father's Irish land through a telescope; the country being impassable
and impossible.
Page 85
evening party, a sort of eminent gathering of art and literature, and of Mary Howitt seated in a corner of the room, her two younger children at her knee. She was then about fifty, and in the very zenith of her life and literary fame. Tennyson and Mrs. Gaskell, Talfourd and Joanna Baillie, Hans Christian Andersen and the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren, such are the first half-dozen names which suggest themselves to me in connection with the circle of the Howitts' lives in that early time.
In May, 1851, came a never-to-be-forgotten day at
Cambridge, when "Mr. Smith, of Jesus" (Leigh Smith, the Arctic
Explorer), welcomed his father, his sisters, and their friends, including
the two Pulskys, Professor Kinkel, and a good number of bearded and
moustachioed Hungarian exiles to the old University. Beards and moustaches
were quite uncommon in 1851. We all started at seven in the morning from
the Shoreditch station, and got back at eight in the evening, after a
splendid banquet offered by the father of Mr. Smith, of Jesus; and after
forty years that brilliant day is fresh in the memory of one grateful
survivor. Mrs. Howitt tells the
story at length in her bright language, where he who runs may read.
The next home of the Howitt family was at the Hermitage, on the West
Hill at Highgate; the premises consisted of a small three-storeyed
house and a lesser tenement--the Hermitage proper. In this
extraordinary appendage, with an upper chamber reached by an outside
staircase, the whole thatched and buried in an exuberant growth of ancient
ivy, poets and painters had their natural home. I find in an old book some
verses which describe the strange room wherein once Dante Gabriel Rossetti
had painted, and where Anna Mary Howitt now covered her canvas with some of
the most delicate, beautiful drawings ever done by a woman's
hand.
She became a pupil of Kaulbach, and recorded her experiences in a book
which was warmly welcomed and has been lately reprinted. It was entitled
"The Art Student in Munich." Her companion during that student
year was Jane Benham Hay, whose pictures were admitted to the line on the
wall of the Royal Academy. The career of this admirable artist suffered
eclipse, or she would now be recognized as a
worthy predecessor of Lady Butler. She had a devoted and honourable friend in the late Mr. Edward Pigott. Her life passed in Italy, and I do not know if she be yet living to read this short record of her early triumphs.
In the second volume of the autobiography, at page 108, will be found an
engraving of the Hermitage, with William and Mary Howitt in the foreground.
I think, however, that it is of the house and not of the appendage, though
the one is apparently as heavy with ivy as the other.
The hand of the spoiler was soon to be laid on the delightful Hermitage.
The American traveller who may care to travel up Highgate Hill in search of
poets and painters will find it no more, and the Howitts moved up to a
house with a large garden just opposite to Holly Lodge, with whose kind
mistress they enjoyed a long intimacy.
In 1855 "Anna Mary and Barbara" go off to Hastings, and get
lodged in Clive Vale Farm, the place where Holman Hunt had painted his
famous picture of the sheep upon the downs. He had made a great mess with
his oils upon a
certain table, which gave pleasure to the artists who were following in his footsteps!
The first letter which I find I have preserved of Mary Howitt's is
dated from this residence, on the West Hill, where they remained many
years. It is of December, 1858, and is addressed to my mother, at a moment
when I was lying in imminent danger of death. It is too personal for
quotation, and I pass on to Good Friday of the year 1865, when Mrs. Howitt
writes from West Hill Lodge about a Sussex Guide of mine which she had in
her possession. She is about to go to Switzerland, but "that is
only perhaps." The note ends
thus:--"How the budding leaves and all the amenity of this
lovely springtime recall Scalands and those pleasant woods to my
mind." She refers to a time which really gave me my last living
memory of dear Mary Howitt, though our intimacy may truly be said to have
lasted unbroken to the weeks immediately preceding her death, five and
twenty years afterwards. I shall ever remain grateful for those spring
weeks of 1864, when William and Mary Howitt were living at Scalands
Cottage, the English home of
Miss Leigh Smith, who had become Madame Bodichon. It was in the April of that year, and very shortly after the death in New Zealand of poor Charlton Howitt, whom I had known so well as a young boy, and of my own familiar friend Adelaide Procter, who had died on Candlemas Day, that I met Mrs. Howitt on the platform of the Robertsbridge station. I was going to a kind friend at an old farmhouse known as Brown's, and the Howitts were at Scalands, of which she writes:--"Barbara has built her cottage upon the plan of the old Sussex houses, in a style which must have prevailed at the time of the Conquest. It is very quaint, and very comfortable at the same time." And she gives lovely pictures in her letters of those "purple woods of Sussex," then blue with the wild hyacinth, in all the inexpressible tender beauty of the spring. It was there that I was privileged to enjoy my last conversations with Mary Howitt. I was on the very eve of submitting to the Catholic Church, though I feel sure that I said nothing of it to her; and she at that time was deeply impressed with Spiritualism, and her whole nature quiver-
ing with grief at Charlton's death. The young man of twenty-five had been drowned in a New Zealand lake. His knotted blanket, with its home letters and the scant baggage of a young surveying engineer, had been washed ashore; but of the manner and moment of his perishing there was no earthly record, nor was his body ever washed ashore. I well remember Mrs. Howitt's unwonted pallor as she spoke of him to me, and that for the first and only time I felt her strong nature to be shaken from its perfect equilibrium. She believed she had communications from Charlton, and said so to me with the utmost plainness, and many were the conversations we had together.
It was in the spring of 1856 that, as she herself tells, she and her
husband first paid attention to the phenomena of spiritualism. At a
séance at Professor de Morgan's
she "was much astonished and affected by communications purporting to
come from my dear son Claude." Just as at the later epoch she
asserted that she had been told of the manner in which Charlton went down,
unwitnessed, in the waters of the New Zealand lake. For certainly more
than ten years the mind of both the husband and the wife were extraordinarily impressed by the extraordinary meetings which took place in every part of London. Those were days when Mr. Hume was credibly asserted (I believe, by the Master of Lindsay) to have floated out of one window and through another of a flat in Victoria Street upon the sixth floor; when, as Mrs. S.C. Hall described to me, a band of musical instruments flew madly about her room, to the imminent danger of her mirrors; and Mr. Hall told me that he had seen Hume stretched to the abnormal length of seven feet upon the floor, and afterwards contract to his natural size. It was impossible then, it is equally impossible now, to decide what part in these things was played by imposture and what by occult agencies, with which Catholics are forbidden to tamper, but do not deny. In her later years Mrs. Howitt shrank from the subject, and her daughter has touched upon it lightly. She herself, however, alludes to it in the first of the two letters which I shall now give. The first sentence I believe to refer to the granting of a pension on the Civil List to William Howitt. After
his death, in 1879, Lord Beaconsfield granted a similar pension to Mary Howitt.
"Egerton House, Beckenham,
"July 13th ('65).
"DEAREST BESSIE,--Thank you for your loving little note of
congratulation and sympathy. Everybody seems pleased with what has been
done; though it is but small, still it is a recognition, and
in itself a benefit.
"I am here only for a few days on our way to join Maggie in
France, where she has been since April, whilst we have been ruralizing
among the pleasant Cotswolds.
"I am afraid I shall not be able to see you whilst in town, as I
have now only to-morrow remaining; still, I shall try to call on
dear Barbara, as I must be in her neighbourhood, and by some good chance
you may be there. If I should not see her, will you take charge of my dear
love to her? I hear that she is bright and beautiful as usual. Can she be
otherwise? Dear Barbara! she is one of my grand and lovely women.
"Annie and I have been reading the Lamp and other
Catholic books in Gloucestershire, as
we were located with Catholics. We found much mental and spiritual food, which was very accordant with our tastes and feelings. It was a pleasure also to find your name amongst the writers. We are half Catholics, our spiritualism makes us so, though you perhaps will not admit it.
"Give my kind regards to your mother, and with much love to
yourself,
"I remain, dearest Bessie,
"Your true old friend,
"MARY HOWITT."
This was her last English letter, and indeed, it is very sad to me now
to remember that I never saw her again. My marriage caused me to live much
in France, and on their side the Howitts left England, and went to live in
Italy and in Tyrol. Letters must have passed, and messages through our many
mutual friends. I never assuredly forgot the happy intercourse of former
years, nor they a kindly interest in the vicissitudes of my lot. But the
war of 1870 swept away all my correspondence of the immediately preceding
years, and I was
shortly absorbed in responsibilities which left me scant leisure for anything beyond the duties of every hour. At last when many days, and many deaths, and the slow blossoming of time had entirely changed my life, I received the following letter from Mary Howitt, then eighty years of age. It is dated from Tyrol, and from her own house of Mariensruhe ("Mary's Rest"):--
"Mariensruhe, Obernais,
"Meran, March 17, 1884.
"MY DEAR BESSIE,--I write to you, as I used to address you,
passing over but not forgetting all that has happened since we knew each
other personally, because I am willing to believe that you, as I know to be
the case with myself, are very much the same as regards an old friend as in
the old days; therefore I address you familiarly as I did then.
"From time to time tidings of you have reached us, and the impulse
has been, both with Margaret and myself, that a salutation of love should
pass from us to you, and that we should seek for tidings about you and your
children; in short, that the friendship which was alive
formerly should not be allowed to die. Therefore, I now write, and I feel sure that you will give us in return what we ask from you in love, news of yourself and your children. Tell us all about them like a fond mother--what are their ages, what are their names, and what is the direction of their minds--which is the poet and which is the philosopher, for I believe there are two of them--and what are their tastes and especial talents. In short, let it be a loving mother's letter to an aunt and grandmother, to whom they are strangers, but who loved their mother of old. Nor is that the only subject on which you would find us sympathetic. You are a Catholic, one of the great flock of Christ, and your heart and your intellect have found nourishment and life in the loving and in the sublime teaching of the Church--all that you aspired after and hungered and thirsted for in the most exalted dreams of your young poetical imagination has been given to you there. I do not think it was any surprise to us to learn that you had joined that great fellowship of saints and martyrs, for you and Adelaide Procter were kindred in so many ways.
"Perhaps you know that Margaret, the little girl to whom your
mother was so kind, and who was, from her childhood upwards, a seeker of
true discipleship, found from deep thought and constant, earnest prayer
during our life in Rome, that nowhere was it to be found except in the
Church of St. Peter. But it was not in Rome that she entered the Church,
but in Meran, the second year after our leaving Rome; and then truly did
she understand what all the long, long years of study had led her
to--for in spirit she had been a Catholic almost from her youth.
"Nor was the blessing alone confined to her, for the dear Lord in
His mercy opened my mind also to the same grand imperishable truth, and I
too was received into the Catholic Church, and that by baptism; I, having
been born a Friend. And after all my later seeking for the Truth and for
peace with God, which I did not find with any of the sects, I was, two
years ago this coming Whitsuntide, baptized, as I have said, into the
Church. I thank the blessed Lord for so great a mercy. But it is not
generally known in England, and as my dear husband
was known to be adverse to the Church of Rome--though, during the latter years of his life his best and most valued friends were of the Faith, still his outward profession was Protestant--I am not desirous of making my own faith more public than needful.
"I have spoken, dear Bessie, of our best and dearest Roman friends
being Catholic. They lived at that time (and still own) in the beautiful
villa of Alimontana, just by those remarkable historical churches of St.
Gregory and St. John and Paul, with the Fountain of Egeria and the walks in
which St. Philip Neri discoursed with his disciples on the things of God,
in their grounds. Of course you know the place. But I mention it
particularly, because they were so proud of and so pleased with your
beautiful poems on that locality and others, that they bought the whole set
of Longfellow's volumes on the 'Poetry of Places' that
they might possess yours, and there it was that we saw them first.
"Now this is a long letter, dear Bessie, but I hope it will not be
uninteresting to you; and,
with the kindest and best wishes for you and yours, and love from us both,
"I remain,
"Your faithful and affectionate old friend,
"MARY HOWITT."
Such was the long and lovely letter in which she told me of her
reception into the Fold. I trust I may be forgiven for having given it in
its entirety, in spite of its references to myself and my forgotten verses.
One other long letter I received from the same dear and venerated hand; it
was written about three months before her death, and being dated from
Meran, spoke of her approaching journey to Rome for the Jubilee, where she
greatly wished me to join her. I was unable to go at Christmas, but fully
purposed to do so at Easter, and thus see her once more; for nothing in the
letter indicated feebleness, or warned me of an approaching end,
But it was not to be. On January the 10th, 1888, Mary Howitt, the first
of the English pilgrims, was led up to Leo the Thirteenth on the occasion
of his Jubilee. Mr. Clifford presented her, and the Duke of Norfolk brought
her away.
The Pope laid his right hand upon her aged head, and blessed her, telling her he would meet her again "in Paradiso." On the 30th of January she passed away in her sleep. When I came to Rome in October, 1889, that Holy City of the most sacred memories of my life contained also the grave of Mary Howitt.
Lady Georgiana died ten years ago, and in the wide circle which she
frequented, a society chiefly knit together by incessant charitable work,
the loss of her familiar figure caused a great blank. She was tall and
largely built, her face was plain, but full of bright intelligence and
gentle humour, naturally a merry face; she always dressed in black, wearing
a shawl across her shoulders, and no gloves. She said that gloves cost too
much money, and that she had much
rather give the half-crown to the poor. Having had many occasions of speaking with her, I would describe the impression she made on her contemporaries as so marked that in entering even a crowded room Lady Georgiana would have been one of the first people to be noticed, from her majestic figure and the plain severity of her dress.
She was very nobly born. Her father, Lord Granville, served his country
for a long series of years as Ambassador to France. Her mother, an
excellent, conscientious woman, was daughter to that beautiful Duchess of
Devonshire, of whom so many anecdotes survive, and whose life-size
portrait by Gainsborough disappeared so mysteriously some years ago. Sir
Joshua Reynolds also repeatedly painted the Duchess, the best known
portrait being the one wherein she is playing with her child. It was after
this lovely grandmother that the l