All quotation marks, hyphens, dashes,
apostrophes and colons have been transcribed as entity references.
All apostrophes and single right quotation marks are encoded as
’.
Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed; all hyphens are
encoded as ‐ and em dashes as —.
(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 little girl was named Georgiana. She had
an elder sister, Susan, and the two were carefully and even severely
educated by a good governess, against whose influence Georgiana at one time
rebelled, but who became, when she grew up, her dear and
intimate friend. They lived in the splendid house allotted to the British Embassy in Paris, entered by a vast court from the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, and sheltered at the back by a large shady garden. Most tourists know the great gates in the high wall surmounted by the arms of England--the Lion and the Unicorn, no longer "fighting for the crown," and speaking of home to all British residents in the capital of France. Two little girls and three little boys then formed the English family at the Embassy.
When the Ladies Susan and Georgiana Leveson Gower grew up, they were
taken by their mother, Lady Granville, into the great world of fashion
which then surrounded the French court, and to the famous Almack's,
in London, and they both married early. Lady Susan became the wife of Earl
Rivers, and Lady Georgiana, after some little opposition, was allowed to
marry the man she preferred, an untitled gentleman, Captain Fullerton. Her
father was afraid that there was not enough money to enable his daughter to
live as she had been brought up, and, on the other hand, the parents of the
bridegroom were alarmed at his
marrying a young lady whose father, mother, uncles, aunts and cousins, all belonged to the greatest nobility of England. The obstacles, were, however, smoothed away by the active kindness of the Duke of Devonshire, who was tenderly attached to his niece. Very pretty and charming are her letters to him; she was, indeed, an "old-fashioned girl," and sent quaint, modest messages through him to the man of her heart. Finally, Captain Fullerton left the army on half pay, a post was found for him at the Embassy in Paris, and the young couple after their marriage lived with Lord and Lady Granville in the great old house where Lady Georgiana had passed her childhood and youth. She was one-and-twenty when her son was born--her only son, her only child.
The next ten years of Lady Georgiana's life passed in the usual
employment of her rank and state in life. She notices, in her letters to
her old governess and to her sister Susan, all the little growths and
changes in her boy's childhood; how he learnt to read, and how she
has dressed him up for a child's costume-ball at the French
court. She writes at great length about
his religious education and his Sunday toys; and then there came a sad time when the little man was very ill, his brain too excitable, said the doctors, and a threat was made of stopping his education. But he recovered, and the grievous alarms of the parents were laid to rest.
The letters presently reach the beginning of Lady Georgiana's
career as an authoress, but she has left no record in her correspondence of
the mental travail she must have undergone before writing "Ellen
Middleton," a book in which she tried to grapple with the deepest
questions of conscience. She sent the manuscript to Mr. Henry Greville and
to Lord Brougham, the latter being then at the zenith of his fame; and we
have their letters and comments. Lord Brougham greatly admires the novel,
but objects to its High Church tendencies, for Lady Georgiana had become a
strong High Churchwoman. Henry Greville praises and criticizes, and both
men give it a singularly respectful attention. It was published, and
straightway greeted with a burst of applause, and "Grantley
Manor," her second book, very soon revived the same chorus of
delighted admiration. The most unlikely people
--Harriet Martineau and the aged Maria Edgeworth--wrote of them as if they were ardent young novel readers. Miss Martineau says she made her eyes red with crying! Mr. Gladstone, then the youthful hope of the High Church and Tory Party, wrote an elaborate review; the best minds in England on all sides agreed in reading and delighting in these two books, full of theology and ardent old-fashioned romance.
But ere the echoes had died away, Lady Georgiana Fullerton had followed
her husband and her revered friend, John Henry Newman, into the Roman
Catholic Church. It is pleasant to learn that this momentous step in no way
broke up her tender filial ties, nor her relations with her beloved sister
and her nieces. Lady Georgiana remained the bright, charming wife and
mother; and young Granville Fullerton went creditably through the years of
education, and finally entered the army. His health had occasionally
aroused anxiety, but had not debarred his preparation for the military
career.
When the first alarm of the Crimean War was sounded, it became necessary
for the parents to face the dangers of active service for their son.
Not since Waterloo had there been a real shock of arms in Europe, and now the best blood of England, in all ranks, was summoned to that awful contest so disastrous in its earlier stages to the British troops, and the Fullertons had to resign themselves to part with their son. Strange, pathetic anxiety, not destined to be borne with lingering pain--fear unrealized, anguish of waiting strangely changed into quite another doom. His mother was prepared to send him forth to his professional duty, in what she recognized as England's cause. She would have watched for bulletins in alternate agonies of fear and hope; had her boy been wounded, she would have hurried off to Scutari; had he even been shot down in the trenches, he would have shared, with ah! so many others, the honours of soldier's grave; and she would have been one of the many, many mothers who rued the name Sebastopol. But none of these things were to be. At the last moment medical advice forbade the young fellow to join the active army. Bitterly disappointed, he resigned himself to remain at home, and going to visit his uncle, Lord Rivers, at Rushmore, in Hampshire--met
there his death! Met it by a most sudden, sad accident, which, as it is not detailed in the book from which we have been quoting, so neither will we detail it here. He was alone when the summons came.
We have been told by a private friend that when Mr. Fullerton received
the letter containing this terrible news, he did not at first know how to
tell such a thing to the wife of his youth, the beloved companion of his
middle age, and that he tenderly lured her into the open church where she
was wont to pray, and there, as she knelt peacefully before the altar, he
found words in which to make her understand that her one child was
dead.
Of this time of anguish Lady Georgiana Fullerton in after years never
spoke or wrote. Only in one note to a favourite niece, who had been as a
sister to the lost son, is there any mention of him; a note written just a
year after his death. With all the force of a powerful nature she
submitted; and to us, who knew her in later years, there seemed no darkness
in her kindly smile, no moment of flagging in her tireless charity.
But shortly after her child's death she took a vow which may seem
singular to many of my readers--a vow of poverty, which, though she
survived for thirty years and mixed freely with friends and relatives, and
was, as was seen by all, a most beloved mistress of a household, she never
broke. She engaged never to buy or possess anything which was not
absolutely necessary in the way of her ordinary duties. Gloves went first;
"the half crown for the poor" meant, by the end of the year,
the annual payment needed for some orphan child. How often were seen the
kind, useful hands laid for the moment on that comfortable black shawl,
when she stood amidst a group of other ladies at some meeting for the poor.
In her younger days she must inevitably have been accustomed to the finest
dresses ever made or worn, living, as she did, in the house of an
ambassador of the first rank. She now never wore any costume but the black
dress and shawl and plain cap, which might have suggested austerity but for
the bright, merry eyes, which were also penetrating and spiritual, full of
mingled expressions. Who that has read the "Récit d'une
Soeur" but remembers the sen-
tence of final resignation, "Je pleure mon Albert gaiement"? There was this touch of gaiety in Lady Georgiana's eyes, infinitely touching to those who knew the agony she had passed through.
She did not lay down her pen, though she seems to have hesitated as to
whether it was right to give hours a day to the writing of romances. She
drew up a curious written argument in two columns, in which she says that
she could earn so much more money for the poor in this way than in any
other, that she thought she ought to continue; and most lovely were some of
the stories she produced. "Constance Sherwood," an historical
romance of the time of Elizabeth, is perhaps the best. "Too Strange
not to be True" is a striking story, based on the legend of the
survival of the Czarowitch, son of Peter the Great. Another is "A
Will and a Way," the subtle story of a young woman constrained in the
French Revolution to marry a rough suitor who saves her father's
life. She redeems the situation, changing her husband's half savage
nature and moulding him afresh. Lady Georgiana continued to
the last just as capable of writing an interesting love story as when she made Miss Martineau cry.
Of her manifold charities one knows not how to speak. She was the
kindest and the most industrious of women. The charge of orphans, sick
people, and schools was a daily matter of course to her, as to many
another; but in touching ever so slightly upon her sphere of activity, one
became aware of the odds and ends which were, so to speak, stuffed into the
crevices from year's end to year's end. The village library, of
which, when she was called away to another part of England, the covers were
dropping off (happy books we loved so much, for ever finding new
treasures); the old servants pensioned; the five shillings slipped into a
little friend's hand to buy a fan at a bazaar; the given book; the
old priest's sister still living on the remains of her bounty; the
bringing of the Grey Sisters over from France (this last a serious heavy
responsibility), and establishing them in Westminster;--such are a few
of the things which might be multiplied indefinitely by the memories of
others.
And so, year by year, Lady Georgiana Fullerton's life went on,
until the time came when she was attacked by a painful disease, and the
black gown hung in long thin folds on a wasted figure, which recalled some
early Italian picture in the severe grace of old age. On her deathbed she
asked that the curtain covering her son's portrait should be
withdrawn, saying that she had the courage to look at it now. Another time,
when Father Gallwey was reading the Scriptures to her, he saw her eyes fill
at an allusion to the death of a child; an involuntary revelation of the
pain silently endured for thirty years. Please God they are now together,
the mother and the son; and of her it may most emphatically be said:
"Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord!"
Until two years ago the writer had never heard of him, and feels
tolerably sure that to the reader of this page Charles Felix is equally
unknown.
A more completely obliterated life it were hard to imagine, for he died childless in 1831, was succeeded by his far-away cousin, Carlo Alberto de Carignan, and all the principles, aims, and efforts of his own strenuous life were swept away as if they had never been. The cradle of his race, and the very core of his ancient dukedom, the town of Chambèry, is a French préfêture. Hautecombe, though technically Italian, is only so by an amiable legal fiction, and his distant relatives, the King and Queen of Italy, now share Rome with the Vatican. And yet somewhere lives Charles Felix; and wherever dwells that blessed soul, it is impossible to conceive of it as having ceased to pray and labour for Savoy.
I will try to convey the impression of his life, as recounted in a
volume written and sold at Hautecombe, in the hope that someone will send
for the book, which only costs three francs, and is a very precious record
of a fair and unusual type of human character.
The House of Savoy dates from Humbert Whitehands, a contemporary of
Edward the Confessor; and for centuries its members made treaties and
intermarried with the House of
France. Not merely were they known as pious people, but as remarkably holy people--five of them were in one age or another canonized by Rome; and on one occasion Pope Gregory the Sixteenth is reported to have exclaimed, "What! another beatification in the House of Savoy!" So that in judging the character of Charles Felix, this hereditary strain of devotion has to be taken into account. It limited his point of view, and was partly the secret of his great personal sanctity. It bound every part of his nature like a fine iron wire, and caused him to absolutely ignore all those wide-spreading and inevitable changes which were rooted in theories he neither shared nor understood. Stupid, Charles Felix was not: he possessed a quick insight and a most tender heart. One feels a vain regret in realizing the apparently useless struggle against an advancing tide, which he carried on from youth to age. Living, he stood like a half-submerged rock; dead, the waters swept over his tomb. He was but the eleventh child of a family of twelve; a mere little princeling, with no apparent chance of ever coming to any special honour, though his father was Victor
Amedeo, King of Savoy, and his mother a Spanish princess of the Bourbon line. She lost a favourite brother by small-pox just before the birth of Charles Felix, and devoted herself with special tenderness to this little boy. After his birth came one more infant brother, so that by the time that Louis the Sixteenth had succeeded his grandfather on the throne of France, Savoy had already three little princes getting their education in Turin, and a much older Crown Prince of twenty. One baby boy had died and also two small princesses, but there still remained nine children who were mostly destined as usual to marry to France. Strange to say, one sister, wedded to the Comte de Provence, died at Gosfield Hall, in Essex, where her husband, who had become King Louis the Eighteenth, was then living in exile; this elder princess was married when Charles Felix was only six years old; and he remembered that in the midst of the wedding festivities he was taken to the theatre for the first time.
At the age of ten he saw his eldest brother, the Crown Prince, depart
for Versailles, to marry Madame Clotilde de France. When the
Prince of Piedmont returned with his bride, the people of Chambèry very impolitely called out, "Oh! how fat she is! How fat she is!" and her good mother-in-law, sitting by her side in the royal carriage, said consolingly, "When I came here in similar circumstances the people cried out, 'Oh! how ugly she is! How ugly she is!'" But Clotilde was good and sweet like her sister, Madame Elizabeth, and spoke tenderly to the little brothers, as Charles Felix recalls in a fragment of his lively autobiography. After the wedding, the royal children went back to Montcalieri, a country palace, and there for more than ten years they received a solid and serious education. Charles Felix is reported to have done only one naughty thing in his childhood: having had a taste of the stage at his sister's wedding, he wanted to see it again. A theatre was attached to the palace, and on the occasion of a new piece being performed, he persuaded a page to leave open a private door, that he might peep in. He found it duly open, but alas! on the other side was a man! Charles Felix tumbled into the arms of his father!
When he was sixtieth years of age, his
young-
est sister, two years his senior, was married to a Prince of Saxony, but in the very next year, that terrible scourge of princes, the inexorable small-pox of the eighteenth century, carried off the poor young bride. At the age of twenty Charles Felix also lost his mother, and his nature had taken the impress which it ever afterwards retained--an impress of gentle severity and holy peace. It was well for him that he was thus annealed, for days were coming when storms were to break over little Piedmont, storms which in all ranks within that kingdom were hard to bear.
The first rumble of the coming thunder came from the rolling
carriage-wheels which brought back the married children of Savoy.
First to appear was the Comtesse d'Artois, bringing with her two
French sons, Angoulème, sixteen years old, and Charles Ferdinand,
Duc de Berry, somewhat younger. After them followed troops of
emigrés, among them the Dukes of
Condé and Bourbon, and the little Duc d'Enghien--three
generations of a great race. They all seem to have kept Christmas together,
and on Twelfth Day the
children had a cake, young Prince Maurrienne of Savoy was King, and Angoulème, oddly enough, was Queen. In March, 1791, came two very unhappy women, Mesdames Adelaide and Victoire of France, elderly and bewildered, pausing to visit their niece Clotilde on their way to Rome. Carlyle has given us in his "French Revolution" a grotesque, and, to my thinking, irreverent picture of these old daughters of Louis the Fifteenth. They were close upon sixty, just a year between them; Madame Victoire was tall and ugly, Madame Adelaide was tall and stout, but had a very kind face; both poor ladies were clad in brown stuff gowns and black fichus, and were so utterly scared by the recent scenes at Versailles, that they could hardly abide the sight of strangers, even though these strangers were royal cousins of their own. On crossing the bridge over the river which then divided the territories of France and Piedmont, they had been pursued with jeers and maledictions, while on the Italian side they were received by a guard of honour and drums and trumpets. When the carriage stopped at the gate of the palace of Chambèry,
the King of Savoy handed out Madame Adelaide, who very naturally did not know him, and in her trouble and confusion did not so much as notice the gentleman on whose arm she leant. Great was her distress when she was told he was her royal host, and that she had been wanting in due etiquette. Charles Felix kept a sort of diary, written with quaint, mild vivacity and flashes of humour. It would help us to understand those times much better than we do, if other people had done the same. His point of view was naturally quite different from that of the usual historian. He was the equal of all those of whom he spoke, naming them by their territorial titles--"D'Aosta, Maurrienne, Piedmont, Angoulème," the latter as the "eldest of the petits d'Artois." Poor D'Enghien (the youngest of the three Condés) cried when he went away from Chambèry. And in this old court of Sardinia all the elaborate ceremonies and frequent religious functions were kept up with the utmost care; and they are noted down, intermixed with the quaintest revelations of personal character.
In the midst of that family gathering, Charles Felix's sister, the
Comtesse D'Artois, shut herself
up in a darkened room, declaring with tears that under no circumstances would she ever return to France, but desired to go straightway into a convent. To which "the Cardinal" replied that as she had a husband and two sons she must do no such thing, and she was obliged to come out and give it up. During all this time M. de Provence and his wife, that other sister of Charles Felix, were shut up in Paris, and on the twelfth of July, 1791, Mme. d'Artois received a letter from them, which her brother abridged in his diary, describing how the Princess Josephine (Madame de Provence) stole away on a dark night, apparently from the Tuilleries, and felt her way along the garden wall until she reached a small door where waited Madame de G--. By the help of a man-servant and that servant's wife, the two ladies got off out of Paris, and reached Lille, picking up M. de Provence at Mons. This was coincident with the fatal flight of the royal family to Varennes. At Brussels Monsieur and Madame found their younger brother the Comte d'Artois, and the three Condés; but Madame declined to remain, and said she wished to return to her father, the King of Sardinia.
This tender but precise parent said she might come if she came by herself, and he would provide her with a court: "what was certain," said her brother in his diary, with a faint touch of irony, "was that she had not a halfpenny, and was dying of hunger" at Brussels. She survived, however, many years, and so finally died in England.
Meantime the threatening storm drew nearer, and the poor little court of
Sardinia stood like a sand castle on the shore, in face of the advancing
tide. We are accustomed to read of the splendid victories of the armies of
France, of the enthusiasm of the Republican troops, of the great race of
soldiers bred up in their ranks, generals and marshals of
France--their deeds are a poem, an undying legend of glory; their
portraits are at Versailles, their names are engraven on the Arc de
Triomphe. In the palace of the Tuilleries, the great central hall opening
on the balcony under the clock (the familiar clock that is no more!), was
known as the Salles des Marechaux. They have had
their poets and their painters, and their memory will never die. But in the
life of Charles Felix we
read a pathetic page of the other side of the story; how the Republic sent a revolutionary ambassador, M. de Semonville, to Turin; how quarrels were skilfully fostered; how in the winter of 1792 the King of Sardinia sent him back to France; how Paris roared, got her troops together, and finally, in September, invaded helpless little Savoy, while Austria shilly-shallied, not sorry to see a lamb thrown to the wolf. France pounced on Savoy and Nice, and a weary struggle began which lasted on and off for four years; till Buonaparte, carrying everything before him, halted at a few days' march from Turin, and the old monarch, Victor Amedeo, the father of so many sons, was summoned to abandon his capital. He ended by giving up Savoy, Nice, Tende, and Beuil, and not unnaturally died in a fit of apoplexy before worse came about. His eldest son, Charles Emmanuel, husband of Clotilde de France, was finally driven off the mainland to the island of Sardinia, and was escorted thither by the English fleet. Before this came to pass, and during the time of bewildering trouble, Charles Felix went on with his private diary, even so late
as 1798; but there came a day, it was the sixth o{ December, in that year, when he notes that the royal family all sat up in conclave until two o'clock in the morning. On the seventh he writes, "Vendredi. Vivalde, Ch. Bernes"--these three words and nothing more; the rest of the book is blank white paper, and he seems never to have written again. On the tenth, a Monday morning, the royal family of Sardinia set out very early by torchlight. In the darkness those who first got out of Turin waited anxiously for those who were belated. At last all the young men were got together, and the carriages started for the place of rendezvous by different roads. They intended to meet at Leghorn, but the old king, who had gone round by Florence, fell ill in that city, and there they all waited for two months; not till the twenty-fourth of February did the English fleet take them in charge and land them in Cagliari, where the people received them with joy and greeting, and where Charles Felix was destined to dwell for sixteen years without ever revisiting his native Piedmont. He went there a young prince, he left it a man of forty, soon to be a king. How they all got on in
the interval can be shortly told, for one sorrow after another fell on the House of Savoy. The old king died on the mainland and was taken to be buried at Montcalieri. When his sons went into exile on the island, Charles Emmanuel took with him a troop of Piedmontese retainers, and settled into an old building near the cathedral of Cagliari, and made of it his palace, while the Archbishop made room for Charles Felix, who chose for his household only native Sardinians. Hardly were they all established when a little boy, son of the Duke d'Aosta, and sole male heir of all the brothers, died at the age of five. Next came the death of Maurice, Duke de Montférat, who caught a violent cold and fever on a night voyage, and perished at the age of thirty-four. During these events the mainland of Italy was overrun by Austrians, Russians, and French. The misfortunes of Piedmont culminated in Napoleon's famous victory at Marengo, on the 14th of June, 1800, after which Charles Felix gave his native country up for lost. The new king "Piedmont" had bad health, his dearly loved wife, Clotilde de France, had died, and he said he could no longer "bear his Crown of Thorns;" he
abdicated and went away to Rome to live, and his next brother, Victor Emmanuel, then became king. A ray of relief in the gloomy tragedy of these years is given by the passage across the scene of the well-known Frenchman, Count Joseph de Maistre, who came and lived for a time with Charles Felix at Cagliari. The sight of his name in the sad pathetic pages is like a breath of air from the outer world.
Finally the youngest of all the brothers, the "dear, dear
child" of the wise Charles Felix (but one year older) died quite
suddenly, apparently of the usual fever, and this last blow quite upset the
nerve of the Viceroy of Sardinia. Affection for Mauria (the Comte de
Maurrienne) is the dominant note of the first half of the book; the two had
been educated together, in the strict monastic manner of that old court;
they had suffered insult, and what they felt to be very bitter exile in
common. "Dear, dear child, I love you more than myself and more than
anything else on earth," says one letter; and in another, "They
tell me to preach to you because you work too much; take care of yourself,
for the whole world is not worth your little finger; you are
all that is good, and I am la cattivaria"--which seems to be patois for general worthlessness.
And so, when Mauria died, Charles Felix for the first and last time
quailed before the storm. He fell into black melancholy and was got off to
Rome, where he besought the Pope to favour his entering a monastery, an old
and ardent desire of his youth. But the Holy Father expressed a strong
desire that the Prince should remain in the world, for the House of Savoy
was dwindling away visibly. He then tried to get out of being any longer
Viceroy; but to this his brother the King was equally opposed; and worse
befell, for he was implored to enter the marriage state! There were now but
three of his brothers living; the original Prince of Piedmont, who had
abdicated; Victor Emmanuel (Aosta), who had lost his only boy; and Charles
Felix himself, who was by this time seven and thirty. They sent him back to
Sardinia to consider the matter; and there, as ever, and more than ever, he
lived the life of a saint, giving up his revenue for the poor, rounding a
dispensary with a doctor and a surgeon attached, which has survived all
dangers, and is still to be found at
Cagliari, and devoting time, thought, and money to education of a high order, especially medical.
Numberless little traits recounted of him, give the impression of a man
of absolute rectitude and ardent piety; not clever in the ordinary sense of
the word, and limited by education to one set of thoughts; but lifted above
his fellows by that higher wisdom which always ends by impressing its mark
upon a reluctant world.
Two years he gave to thinking and praying, and then he gave way, and
wrote to his royal brother that he had made up his mind to marry, and
thought he could choose no more suitable wife than the Princesse Marie
Christine of Naples, the niece of Marie Antoinette, and great aunt of the
Comte de Paris. But here again there was a difficulty, for the Princess,
who was six-and-twenty, said that she on her side did not
wish to marry; she had already refused several suitable alliances, and the
most the ambassador could obtain from her was that she must take some time
to consider; and it was six weeks before she would ratify the consent given
secretly by her parents. But she did so,
and she had certainly never any cause to repent. Charles Felix wrote her a very pretty letter, in which he tells her that he will always try to make her happy, and says further that he hopes she will be pleased to accept the "seules expressions" which he is as yet allowed to make use of, when he signs himself her very affectionate cousin, Charles Felix. The short letter is perfumed with the bloom of good wishes and sincere resolves. The Pope blessed him, and prayed that he might give a numerous offspring to the House of Savoy. But, alas! Heaven denied the prayer, and a painful omen befell in the loss by shipwreck of four thousand pounds worth of diamonds, which he ordered from England for his bride. They are at the bottom of the sea! He told a friend that she had "enough of her own," and so went off to Palermo to be married to her whom he afterwards called his "Dear Wife," and who showed in subsequent years the firmness and real goodness of her sister Marie Amélie, the Queen of the French, and seems to have become much loved by Charles Felix.
For some years the married pair lived tranquilly in their island; lived
in fact the lives
of saints, keeping a modest court and doing good with the right and the left hand. The chief incident was the stamping out of a violent epidemic fever, during which Charles Felix worked incessantly with the medical men, and when his relatives sent an English ship to fetch him away, he refused to leave, or to let her touch at the port of Cagliari and so incur quarantine. During these years poor little Piedmont floated about, a derelict on the stormy waters of European politics. Sometimes the King saw a chance of getting back to Turin, and then his hopes would be rudely upset. Austria, having married Marie Therèse to Napoleon, was no longer to be counted as a friend; the King of Naples lived in Sicily, and every change in French affairs had a contrecoup in the Italian Peninsula. During the Hundred Days, when the French Royal Family left Paris, Charles Felix did his best to keep his wife's mind easy about her relatives, and curious paragraphs indicate their distance from the centre of affairs; Christine counting the days to prove that the bad news could not possibly, if true, have become known. But it was true nevertheless.
At last, however, Waterloo put an end to Napoleon, and under the treaties of the Allied Sovereigns the Royal Family of Piedmont all went back to Turin, after years of exile.
Now began a new state of matters, which it is extremely interesting to
see from the inside. The King had no male heir, and Charles Felix, alas!
had no child; and the next in succession to the throne of Savoy and
Piedmont was a very far away cousin, the Prince de Carignan. We knew him
many years later as Charles Albert, an heroic fighter against the
Austrians, but in 1815 he was a very young man, whose father had died when
he was only two years old, and he had consequently received his education
from a mother who shared none of the opinions and prejudices of the old
House of Savoy; she lived firstly at Dresden and afterwards at Geneva, and
at the age of fifteen her son received from Bonaparte a lieutenancy in a
regiment of dragoons. When the fall of the Emperor cast this youth into the
bosom of the Royal Family at Turin, it may be imagined that the excellent
old cousins did not know what to do with him. And yet he was the heir!
Charles Felix, in spite of his profound personal
piety, had a wider outlook on life than the rest of his House; and he was more hopeful for and indulgent to the Prince de Carignan than was the King. But for the disparity between their ages, he might probably have won him, and saved him from those associations with the Carbonari which were matters of danger in Charles Albert's later life, when it used to be said that he was in constant fear of assassination from the companions of his youth.
The brothers married him in 1817 to a princess of Tuscany, and they
tried very sincerely to hold friendly relations with the young couple;
Charles Felix, in particular, did his best to soften the severer and
narrower judgment of the King. Meanwhile political intrigues and popular
demands were threatening to overwhelm the ancient Monarchical Constitution,
and in 1821 the King felt he could bear the situation no longer, and
suddenly abdicated, as had done the original Prince of Piedmont. Charles
Felix, who did not lack firmness, accepted the heavy task; and for ten
years he literally set his back against the wall, and fought for the old
ideas and the ancient laws of Savoy. A weaker
man or a more foolish man would have succumbed from the mere worry. The hero prince "held the fort" for Jesus, King of men.
Charles Albert's singularly unlucky career began at Novara, and
ended in 1848; but during the ten years of the reign of Charles Felix he
seems to have dwelt in peace with his old cousin.
There is to me something indescribably touching in the story of those
ten years. The modest dignity of the royal Court, the expenses perpetually
cut down in the cause of charity, the minute pains with which the people
were cared for, the encouragement given to learning, the restoration of
Hautecombe (though it cannot be said that the architecture rivals that of
the Middle Ages), and, above all, the personal holiness of the man at the
helm of the Ship of State, make a beautiful picture, however opposed to the
popular English sympathy of to-day. There is nothing in the coarse
common-sense of Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy, nothing in the
verbose eloquence and shady private life of Garibaldi, to compare for a
moment with the character or the language of the last King of Savoy. One of
the most extraordinary political
enthusiasms of modern times has resulted in our English toleration of men who, if they had been Londoners, we should not have tolerated for a year. Victor Emmanuel weeping metaphorically at the knees of the Pope, and consenting to marry his mistress lest he should die without the sacraments, and Garibaldi getting into troubles which were an open secret, and pouring forth torrents of inflated prose, seem to me very poor men indeed compared to noble, chaste, firm Charles Felix.
When he died, in 1832, they bore his coffin regally across Lake Bourget.
The chants of the Water Funeral were echoed back from the mountains, and
the people he had governed were stirred as when a saint is gone. And so
little could the Princes of Carignan keep up the old glories of their place
and state, that Savoy is now a French province, Royal Chambèry the
head of a Prefecture, Nice a possession of France, and the King of Italy
leads an uneasy life in his capital, overwhelmed with debt, submissive to
Germany, building ironclad on ironclad to keep invaders from his shores,
ruining the sublime beauty of Rome by the huge barracks which lack
inhabitants, cutting up the splendid gardens, turning out the religious orders, and indirectly fostering a mongrel society which must be seen and heard to be believed in.
Charles Felix lies at Hautecombe, on the side of the Savoyard lake, and
though his laws and the principles in which they were rooted are swept away
from the mountains and valleys where his ancestors had ruled for a thousand
years, the life of such a man is never lived in vain.
Meredith placed the London home of Diana of the Cross-ways.
Basil Montagu was the son of the historic Lord Sandwich, the patron of
Captain Cook and name-father of the Sandwich Islands. His birth was
irregular, and his life from beginning to end a strange romance. He was one
of the three finally surviving children of Miss Ray, who was barbarously
murdered as she was leaving Convent Garden Theatre by a young clergyman of
the name of Hackman. It was a most piteous and dreadful crime, for there is
no authentic record¹ of any worse
flaw in the poor woman's character than that involved in her
relations to Lord Sandwich, and her murderer was actuated by a mad jealousy
which, according to reasonable testimony, she had done nothing to provoke.
The event is reported in the serious-minded Gentleman's
Magazine, under date of April 7th, 1779. Here are the exact words in
their quaint sobriety:--
"Wednesday. A most unprecedented murder was committed on the
person of Miss Ray by the
___________________¹ The spurious nature of the
letters lately republished is surely demonstrated by Lord Sandwich's
public recognition of his children.
Page 137
Rev. W. Hackman, who, being desperately in love with her, watched her from the play, and as she was stepping into her coach amidst a crowd of people, clapped a pistol to her ear and shot her through the head. She dropped and expired without a groan. His intent was instantly to destroy himself, but in that he failed, and endeavouring to make his escape, he was secured and committed to prison. He appeared to be perfectly in his senses, and endeavoured to justify the act by a sudden impulse that for a moment convulsed his mind. The deceased for more than sixteen years had been connected with Lord Sandwich, and had been the mother of nine children, five of whom are now alive. At the time when Lord Sandwich was attracted by her person she was in her sixteenth year, and an apprentice to a mantua-maker in Clerkenwell. This murder affords a melancholy proof that there is no act contrary to reason that reasonable men will not commit when under the dominion of their passions. It is impossible to convey an idea of the impression made on all ranks of people when it was first reported; the manner of it struck every feeling heart with horror."
Such was the very human utterance of Sylvanus Urban, avoiding all reproach
of the unfortunate mother of so many young children, who expiated her fault
by so dreadful a fate. The street ballad, of the epoch which then usually
commemorated events striking to the popular imagination, touches the same
key, and Grub Street furnished a long poem on the death of Miss Ray; one
verse of it, quoted by Thackeray, ends with a rough but touching
piety:--
"A clergyman, O wicked one!
In Convent
Garden shot her,
No time to cry upon her
God,
It's hoped He's not forgot
her."
It must be added that it would be unfair for the cloth to suffer in
reputation for Hackman's atrocious deed. He had held His
Majesty's Commission, and it was as a soldier that he first met Miss
Ray, at Hinchinbrooke, and he sold out in pursuance of the object of his
admiration. Why he took orders, how he obtained ordination, and why he
should have imagined that by such extraordinary and disreputable plotting
he could succeed in winning Miss Ray away from her children and their
father, is one of those mysteries which surround the sphere of madness. At
the
inquest, which was very fully reported on the next page of the magazine, Hackman seems to have made no effort at self-defence, simply saying that jealousy had driven him mad. A Mr. Macnamara appeared as principal witness, and described how he had taken Miss Ray upon his arm in order to lead her to the carriage sent by Lord Sandwich, how he had suddenly felt the shock and the noise of the explosion, and the movement of the lady dropping on the pavement, dead! The pistol had been fired close to the back of her head.
Hackman was of course condemned, and suffered at Tyburn Tree on the 19th
of April, whither he was taken in a mourning coach accompanied by the
chaplain of Newgate, a sheriff's officer, and James Boswell of
Auchinlick. Lord Carlisle also attended the execution, and gave an account
of it to George Selwyn which is to be found in Selwyn's
correspondence. Hackman stated that he had taken the pistol with the intent
of committing suicide, but had been maddened by jealousy at the sight of
Mr. Macnamara. Such was the poor crazy criminal whose deed filled all
London with horror, and
orphaned a house full of children, causing the people of that day to overlook the irregularities of Miss Ray's life in their pity for her tragical fate.
It is wonderful and instructive to note that in the official life of
Lord Sandwich, written by his domestic chaplain, the great minister is
lauded as a model of all the virtues, in language which only the pompous
diction of the last century could supply. He was sixty when this awful
tragedy befell him, and survived to the age of seventy-three, dying
younger than did his son Basil. He was succeeded by his only legitimate
son, born to him by his third wife, Dorothy Fane, which son became a man of
no particular importance; but Basil rose to great eminence, and
Basil's brother became Admiral Montagu, while the only surviving
sister married the Sardinian Ambassador, Comte de Viry.
It was probably one result of the mother's melancholy death that
Lord Sandwich thenceforth brought up the children of his dead mistress as
kings have brought up their offspring, giving them his name, and, so far as
he could, the advantages of his own rank. Basil's name is deeply writ
on the Statute Book of England,
while from the Sardinian marriage sprang a train of curious circumstances, of which "The Lost Chord" survives as an echo of the Catholic marriage of Madame de Viry.
It should be also recorded by the truthful historian that pious proper
George the Third was much attached to Lord Sandwich, and twice visited the
fleet while that nobleman was at the head of the Admiralty. In this
connection an anecdote is told (but not by the chaplain) of the inquisitive
monarch. He asked to taste the pork and pease soup on which the equipage of
a certain man-of-war was about to dine. Lord Sandwich sent a
message to the purser, who sent word back that he could not "victual
any man in a King's ship without a warrant from the captain."
This was obtained in due form, and accompanied with the request that a nice
piece of pork should be selected for his Majesty. The crusty purser
declared that this was against all rule. Either the King or the First Lord
of the Admiralty must "prick in the tub and take pot luck."
Returning to Basil Montagu (still a familiar figure when our Queen was
young), he was in
due time sent by his father to Oxford, and thence to the Bar. While at college and under twenty-one, he made a runaway marriage with a baronet's daughter. I forget her name, but he used to talk about her to me with much frankness. The young wife died in child-birth, leaving a son, also named Basil, who grew up to manhood. The boyish father was heartbroken at her loss, and told, in his old age, how he spent the days thinking about her, and the nights in lying upon her grave. "But," said he, with old-fashioned precision, "I reflected, my dear, that such indulgence in grief would never do; so I made a resolution to think of my wife for a quarter of an hour less every day, and I did so (impressively); and so at last I was cured of my sorrow." It is half a century since this narrative of a grief-cure was given, but the quotation of the strange recipe is exact.
At the Bar Mr. Montagu built up a great reputation. He was intimately
associated with Sir Samuel Romilly in successful efforts to abolish the
punishment of death for those numerous offences, far short of murder, for
which it was then pitilessly exacted. Together
they waged a long and successful crusade. Of the state of the law and the astounding callousness of the British judge at the beginning of this century, the following letter bears evidence, and is worth many statistics. In 1810 Sir Samuel received a letter signed Stephen R. Amwell, informing him that in passing through Maidstone, the writer had learned that three men, all convicted for slight offences, had been left for execution by the judge. One of them, Lawes by name, who had stolen property worth forty shillings, might be thought to have some claim to mercy because a bill to repeal in such cases the punishment of death was actually pending in Parliament. The man was to be hanged on the day following the receipt of the letter. Sir Samuel hastened to the Secretary of State, and he without delay sent on Amwell's letter to Judge Heath. Here is the judge's answer:--
"Sir,--I have received and read the letter with the signature
of Amwell, and by some passages I am confident that he wrote me a letter,
signed Amicus Curiæ, respecting Lawes. As for Lawes, he was guilty of
house-breaking, and
most probably burglary, in the dwelling house of Mary Wilkins, a widow woman, who carries on the business of baker at Minster, and stole plate to the value of £20 and upwards, to the best of my recollection. As housebreaking has been frequent in Kent and no person appeared to give him a character, I left him for execution. Stephen Nichols was convicted of stealing two heifers, which the prisoner and his brother, who has absconded, pretended to have bought for £34. They were driven from the close of a poor widow woman whose property they were, and slaughtered by the prisoner.
"The third is Peter Presnel, who was convicted for breaking into
the cottage of John Orpin, no persons being therein, and stealing therein
property to the value of five shillings; in fact, the things were of the
value of forty shillings. It was found that the cottage was broken into
while the prosecutor was absent at his labour, and all the valuable things
were stolen by the prisoner. I consider this offence the worst of all,
because, if not checked, it would destroy all parsimony and frugality among
cottagers. In truth, I tried ninety-nine prisoners at
Maidstone; and excepting one executed for murder, I only left the above three for execution, and not one of those could adduce a single witness to his character.
"I have the honour to be, etc.,
"D. HEATH.
"Bedford Square,
"April 8th, 1810."
No respite was sent, and consequently the three men were hanged. Nichols
was reported in the newspapers to be a boy of nineteen.
The abolition of these ghastly laws and practices was the main triumph
of Basil Montagu's middle age; but his house was for years the centre
of bright, refined activity; 25, Bedford Square, was blessed by all the
younger spirits of literature and the law.
In his old age, when all his sons and daughters were married or
otherwise scattered (for of the boys I have no accurate count), he was a
devotee of Lord Bacon, whose works he edited, and of whom he ever spoke
with fanatic admiration.
In 1845 my parents lived in his near
neigh-
bourhood, and I thought it an immense honour to help him prepare gigantic rolls of paper, which were pasted together till they were of the size of a small sheet. On these Mr. Montagu would print in huge capitals the names of the Cardinal Virtues. I understood at the time that these had some connection with Lord Bacon! It is not my impression that Mr. Montagu was particularly gifted with devotion to the Counsels of Perfection, but to this day I cannot see Truth and Temperance printed on a handbill in Roman letters without thinking of my dear old friend. I do not know what purpose he had in view, but I can hardly think that so important a personage intended to deliver a lecture to any audience lower in status than the assembled Bar!
Quite towards his closing years Mr. Montagu suffered some reverse of
fortune which must have been caused by younger members of his family. The
little establishment at Storey's Gate was broken up, and he and his
wife retired to France. I last saw him waving a good-bye to my
parents on the pier of Boulogne, He was buried in the cemetery on the St.
Omer
Road, with one short line of noble epitaph, well deserved, for he had certainly used his life of labour for the cause of Justice and Liberty and the happiness of Mankind.
Storey's Gate, where I once spent long hours, listening with enthusiasm to her wise and kindly wisdom, I feel amazement after a lapse of a long half-century that the image of such a wife and mother should remain associated with the unredressed insults of Carlyle's ungrateful pen. But to this subject I must needs return when I come to speak of her daughter, Mrs. Procter.
Mrs. Montagu's maiden name was Benson, and she came from the same
family stock as the present Archbishop of Canterbury. She was born in York.
I do not know what was the occupation of her father, but I have reason to
believe that her uncle was incumbent of the living of Bolton on the Wharfe,
and that by him, and in his parish church, she was early married to a young
lawyer named Skepper, a lineal descendant of the second partner of the
famous firm of Fust and Scheffer, the earliest printers. This marriage must
have occurred shortly before the year 1800. Mr. Skepper died early, and
when Basil Montagu met the young widow, which I have always supposed to
have happened while he was on the Northern Circuit,
her little Anne was a very young child. I have no record of the place or date of Mrs. Skepper's marriage to Mr. Montagu. My father's first memory of her referred to her as installed in the large house, No. 25, Bedford Square, where the children of his two previous marriages were gathered, nor do I know anything about Mr. Montagu's second wife, who died prematurely, leaving, I think, two sons. Little Anne Skepper was thus brought up in the house of her stepfather, and could recall no other parent; she ever regarded him with profound respect and warm affection, and was a true sister in all her dealings with the other children of that complicated family. Mrs. Montagu was at all ages a most beautiful person; the only figure which in any way recalls her to me is the well-known portrait of Mrs. Siddons as Queen Catherine. Speaking of Anne Skepper's marriage to the poet Mr. Procter, then better known as Barry Cornwall, Mr. Coventry Patmore, who knew them all, says, "That a poet could hardly have aspired to a greater temporal reward than the friendship of the Basil Montagus and the hand of their daughter will not be questioned by any of the
many living persons who have had the happiness of knowing the family. No young man who understood what honour meant, and none understood it better than the high-minded and sensitive young poet, could think that fame had in store for him any favour which could surpass or equal those which she was now conferring on him. Hence, perhaps, the sudden and final extinction of his literary ambition, which seemed to occur about this time, notwithstanding an amount of popular encouragement that, under ordinary circumstances, was calculated to fire him to redoubled exertions. The manners, at once stately and genial, of Mr. Basil Montagu and his wife have few or no counterpart in modern society. The stateliness was not that of reserve but of truth in action, and the geniality arose, not from easy good-humour, but from earnest goodwill. Of Mrs. Basil Montagu it may indeed be said that for a young man to know her was an education. Even at a time when her great personal beauty was slightly (it was never more than slightly) obscured by age, there was that about her that no well-disposed and imaginative young man could long behold without feeling
that he was committed thereby to leading a worthy life. If the reader is inclined to smile at this praise as somewhat obsolete in its mode, let him be assured by one who knew Mrs. Montagu that it seems so only because that style of woman is obsolete."
I have quoted at length this page from Mr. Coventry Patmore's
biography of Mr. Procter because there are now left so few people who can
recall the Montagu household. It was in the little drawing-room at
Storey's Gate that I first met Mr. Patmore. He had just published his
first book.
Mrs. Montagu's great personal beauty and distinction were
heightened by the pains which she took with her peculiar dress; it was
almost that of a "Plain Friend," and recalled the aspect of
Elizabeth Fry. She never indulged in more than three dresses, and the
material was black satin, which in the years when I first remember her (in
the Forties) was very much in vogue. I imagine that she must have allowed
herself one new dress every year, and she wore the three in strict and
careful rotation. The costume was cut low and square in front, as in so
many of the
portraits of Reynolds and Gainsborough; ample folds of white muslin met the dress, and, mounting to the chin, encircled her fine old face and head in beautiful pleats; the effect was that of a cap, but I do not know how it was managed, and it was a standing jest among her intimate friends that no one could ever divine the modus operandi of Mrs. Montagu's toilet. I believe that the robe was cunningly fastened upon the shoulder, and the point of junction concealed under a fold of black satin. I have often seen her clear starching and ironing out the voluminous folds of white muslin with her own stately hands. The effect of the whole costume was charming to behold.
She wrote a remarkably beautiful Italian hand, or rather what we now
know as the Elizabethan writing, the stems of the letters serried together,
and the letters themselves wide apart. Every word was plainly separate. In
her old age she was fond of teaching writing to her young friends. She
would not tolerate a blot upon the page, and she abhorred a word of slang
in conversation. It was just the time when Boz and Pickwick had started
fresh forms of speech
among the new generation of young men and maidens, and I regret to say that they occasionally fell with her into deep disgrace! No one ever gave me so much the impression of a moral soldier under arms as Mrs. Basil Montagu. About a month before her death her son-in-law went upstairs to pay her a visit in her private sitting-room. He came down and said to Mrs. Procter "My dear Anne, your mother must be ill; she has allowed herself to cough in my presence." During that last thirty days, Mrs. Montagu sat up quietly reading as usual; she was a religious woman, and when she could no longer go out to church, she read her books of devotion steadily at home, but her daughter one day, standing softly behind her, saw that the book was upside down in her mother's hand. When at length one Friday morning the brave old lady could no longer rise and sit in her accustomed arm-chair, it was the first time that her granddaughter, Adelaide Procter, had ever seen her head recumbent upon its pillow. In three days she had quietly passed away, and for all those, now few in number, who can still familiarly remember her, the name of Anne Benson Montagu recalls
an image of majestic beauty and dauntless moral courage of which Englishwomen may well be proud.
A few words must be added about the only daughter of the famous
advocate. Carlyle refers to her as having made "a considerable
foreign marriage;" about which he evidently knew nothing, for it was
not in any way a legitimate subject for his covert sneer.
Emily Montagu was born in Bedford Square, and was, I think, about
fifteen years younger than her half-sister Anne, who felt for her an
affection which was one of the softest points in Mrs. Procter's
character. I only saw her at one epoch, when, in middle age and a second
time widowed, she came back to England to see her mother, then living in
Mr. Procter's household. This was her story.
It will be remembered that the daughter of Lord Sandwich, educated and
dowered by him, eventually married the Sardinian Ambassador, Comte de Viry.
She disappeared from England, and over Sardinia and Savoy swept the great
storm of the French Revolution, during which the House of Savoy took refuge
in the island, conveyed thither under the escort of the British Fleet. Forty years passed; the last king of the old line of Savoy, Charles Felix, was restored to his kingdom after Waterloo; and after a ten years' reign, he died a holy death, and his coffin was conveyed in a "Water Funeral" across the Lake of Bourget (close to Aix-les-Bains) and laid in the abbey church of Hautecombe, where his forefathers had also been buried. Hautecombe is still considered an isolated point of Italian soil. To Charles Felix succeeded his distant cousin, the Prince de Carignan, whom we know as Carlo Alberto, and it was during the reign of that liberal king that two young Sardinian gentlemen came over to the Embassy in London, whose names were Comte William de Viry and Comte Adrien de Revel. The first-named was, of course, nephew to Basil Montagu, and both of them were attracted to the refined, gentle daughter of the household. Emily Montagu preferred her cousin, but there were difficulties, probably arising from unwillingness on the part of the parents to part with their only girl. Comte de Revel at this juncture conquered his own feelings, and did
his best to promote his friend's happiness. Presently the family opposition was surmounted, and Miss Montagu became Comtesse William de Viry, and went away with her husband to Turin. This was about the year 1840. But the marriage was of short duration; Comte William died early, leaving two very young children, a boy and a girl. The boy was the king's godson, and destined to be a royal page; he was named Alberto, and was his mother's darling. Then began a long renewed courtship on the part of Comte Adrien de Revel, a courtship of romantic tenderness and very little hope, for de Revel was sent on foreign missions, St. Petersburg always looming in the distance, and Alberto could not legally leave Italy, and Comtesse William de Viry refused to listen to her faithful lover until both were middle-aged. At last, when Alberto was fifteen, and some change was made in the boy's position and education, his mother gave way. Adrien de Revel obtained his lifelong desire, and they were married at Turin, where the Court to which they were attached habitually resided. After the ceremony they went to Genoa for their honeymoon, intending to return
shortly to the capital and their usual duties, for both of them were of an ideal strain, and fidelity to all their engagements was with both the habit of their lives. The long-deferred wedding had taken place on a Wednesday, and on the next Monday morning Comte de Revel awoke at early dawn in the grip of the Cholera Fiend, then hovering over Europe. Nothing availed to save him. There were only twenty lives lost in Genoa, but his, alas! was one.
There is no need to say more. They are all gone now: the faithful
lover, the faithful mother, and also the two children whom they had reared
from their early orphanhood. Alberto became a soldier, and his sister
eventually entered a convent. Madame de Revel did not survive many years,
but I have only a vague memory of the news of her death coming to London,
and of the grief caused by it to the English relatives who had always loved
her well.
known to so many surviving friends, that it is only fitting their names should precede her own, although she achieved a greater fame; yet there were years when "Barry Cornwall" was known to all, and when his songs were sung all over England. Two of them, "The sea, the sea, the open sea," and the "Return of the Admiral," have their permanent place, though many of his charming and poetic pages have sunk into comparative oblivion. In his own person he was a refined and somewhat silent man, with a head said to resemble Sir Walter Scott's in miniature, and he was extremely beloved by the literary world. But he lived an interior life, into which, I think, none but his wife ever penetrated. He was profoundly attached to her, and she was for ever shielding him from the wind that blew too roughly. He had many sorrows, and death twice visited his household under most pathetic circumstances. To ward off blows from "Brian" and to sustain him with her own abundant strength, was Mrs. Procter's constant care, and in this she showed a side of her character wholly unsuspected by the outer world.
Mr. Procter was born so long ago as 1787, and was not far from forty
when he married the lovely girl, Anne Skepper, who had been brought up in
the home of her stepfather, Basil Montagu. Bryan Walter Procter came from
the North of England. He was educated at Harrow, and spent his holidays at
the house of a great-uncle who lived about a dozen miles from
London; and his first real instructress in literature was a female servant,
born in a better station of life, who had read Richardson and Fielding and
worshipped Shakespeare. She used to recite whole scenes to the boy, and
encouraged him to buy a Shakespeare of his own. "But," says he,
"I had not leisure to study and worship my Shakespeare long, for at
the end of a month or six weeks my destiny drove me back to school."
There he had two schoolfellows, boys named Robert Peel and George Gordon
Byron. Of Byron, Mr. Procter says that he then showed no signs of poetic
grace. "He was loud, even coarse, and very capable of a boy's
vulgar enjoyments. He played at hockey and racquets, and was occasionally
engaged in pugilistic encounters." Of himself he says he was neither
very short nor very tall, neither handsome nor hideous. He survived Byron for fifty years, seeing the dawn, the zenith, and the partial oblivion of his fame.
Among Mr. Procter's poems should be especially noticed the fine
ring of Belshazzar, and some of deep and tender domestic interest. The
lovely lines to his wife, beginning--
"How many years, my Dove,
Hast thou been
mine!
How many years, my Love,
Have I been
thine!"
and the exquisite tribute to his dead boy, called "The Little
Voice," are among the most poignant utterances of the human heart.
But nothing in his gentle, reserved face betrayed in later life the
interior fire.
He led a hard-working life in London as a barrister, and later in
a Government office.
In looking through the memoir published in his widow's lifetime, I
was chiefly struck by a letter in which he describes his study, and says,
regretfully, that he has never been abroad, never seen Italy or France, he,
the poet and the lover of Italian art; and by another letter about the
Indian Mutiny, in which "Our son (the only son I have, indeed) escaped from Delhi." He tells how this young man, left to him after the death of his eldest boy Edward, had been in Delhi, and how he and four or five other officers, four women, and a child, escaped. The men were "obliged to drop the women a fearful height from the walls of the fort amidst showers of bullets. They were seven days and seven nights in the jungle without money or meat, scarcely any clothes, no shoes. They forded rivers, lay on the wet ground at night, lapped water from the puddles, and finally reached Meerut."
Montagu Procter married some years later the youngest of the ladies here
spoken of. At the time of the Mutiny she was a girl of fifteen. He became
eventually a general, and, returning to England, survived his father, but
predeceased his mother, who, indeed, lost successively all her children
save two.
Of Mrs. Procter much will inevitably be written in future years. She was
a very remarkable person, and lived in possession of almost unbroken health
and faculties until nearly ninety. As a girl ("my dearest
girl," writes the
poet during his betrothal) she had been extremely pretty. She was an early playmate of my mother's, but my memory of her dates from her middle age, and extends over nearly fifty years. She was the daughter by a first marriage of Mrs. Basil Montagu, and always spoke of her mother with the greatest reverence. But of the race of poets to which she was inextricably bound, she spoke with a half-laughing satire. One was evidently her life-long lover, and one was her child, and several others clustered about her like bees. She did not exactly hold a salon; there was no great fortune in the household, nor any sort of pretension whatever, and Mrs. Procter gave one the impression of having her hands very full; but everybody of any literary pretension whatever seemed to flow in and out of the house. The Kembles, the Macreadys, the Rossettis, the Dickens, the Thackerays, never seemed to be exactly visitors, but to belong to the place. Three of the daughters became Catholic, and Mrs. Procter, who, I imagine, did not dwell much on the next world, stood between them and the sensitive father, to whom the loss of close union was a great misery. I used to think it infinitely
touching to see Mrs. Procter trying to harmonize the household. If "Brian" could be kept cheerful and if nobody was ill (and, alas! somebody was very often ill), then the quick vivid mother of the family seemed content. She had a habit of going into the world, a habit of dressing fashionably, a habit of writing the nearest and most concise notes possible; but her consistent, steady kindness had assuredly some deep spiritual root, of which she never spoke. Like her mother, she never abdicated for a moment her great tenue, never kept her room, never lowered the scale of her dress, never lost her composure; I should doubt if in sixty years a meal had ever been placed upon the table which she had not herself ordered. It was my fate to be very closely associated with her under circumstances in which ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have broken down, and yet when she lost her daughters, it was their friend whom she tried to spare. I particularly remember her taking me with her to the Catholic cemetery in Kensal Green to plant a quantity of ivy on Adelaide's grave. I can see her kneeling at the headstone, twisting the sprays, with a face of anxious,
steady determination. That grave is now a place of pilgrimage to American and Colonial travellers. It is thickly overgrown with ivy, but nobody guesses that the mother planted it herself.
Many years afterwards, Edythe Procter died very suddenly--indeed,
in a manner truly tragical--failure of the heart's action. Mrs.
Procter was then more than eighty; and before the announcement could
traverse the Continent in the newspapers, came a careful letter, addressed
to a delicate friend at Mentone, and on the corner of the envelope two
tiny, neatly-written words, "Bad News."
Such were the environments of Adelaide Procter's life--a
short life, for she died at the age of thirty-eight. Of outward
incidents, apart from the sudden blossoming of her literary fame, there
were scarcely any. The year spent in Italy, where her aunt, Madame de Viry,
was attached to the Court circle at Turin, was certainly a determining
influence on her life. Emily de Viry had become a devout Catholic, and at
that time the saintly wife of Victor Emmanuel was living. The example
impressed
Adelaide's mind, and doubtless contributed to her religious change. At Aix-les-Bains is a large portrait en pied of the young Queen of Sardinia in her bridal dress. It looks, at first sight, to be a purely conventional picture, but the eyes are of a haunting depth. They recall a word-picture of the Queen returning from Holy Communion, which Adelaide Procter gave. The wife of Victor Emmanuel was passing along one of the galleries of the Palace, her face "shining as with an interior lamp," when she was met by the young English girl, who never forgot the sight. Of this association Adelaide Procter always bore the trace. In her religious attitude she resembled a foreign rather than an English Catholic. She looked like a Frenchwoman mounting the steps of the Madeleine, or a veiled Italian in St. Peter's. The one thing she never mentioned was her own conversion.
One of Miss Procter's sisters, named Agnes, joined the order of
the Irish Sisters of Mercy; and in looking back to our childhood I best
remember her, as the nearer to my own age.
In 1840 the Procters lived in St. John's Wood,
and used to visit their grandparents in Storey's Gate; and in this house it must have been that two children were sitting by the fireside one evening. There was no other light in the room, and Agnes Procter (Sister Mary Francis) suddenly made a confidence; saying, in a tone of intense childish conviction, "I do love mama." These words made an ineffaceable impression on the hearer, for the little speaker was never supposed to be at all imaginative, and certainly Mrs. Procter did not pose before the world as a tender woman--rather the reverse--though her intimates knew her for a very good and kind one. And the last time that I saw Sister Mary Francis she was kneeling by that mother's open grave at Kensal Green, her sincere, gentle face, under its veil, looking but little changed since the day of her profession some thirty years before. It may not be irrelevant to add that shortly after her somewhat unexpected death after a few days' illness, the Reverend Mother spoke of Sister Mary Francis' great and unusual affection for her mother as of a profound sentiment rarely noticed either in or out of the religious life. It was the sweet soul's one
earthly romance. I do not know in what light Mrs. Procter's memory will go down to posterity when the letters and memoirs of the generation in which she played so large a social part come to be written and published; but this image of her as enshrined in her daughter's heart should be recorded, for it is true.
Of the gifted eldest daughter the mother was intensely proud, and well
may she have been, for a more vital spirit never inhabited a
finely-wrought frame. Adelaide Anne Procter was so curiously unlike
her poems, and yet so distinct in individuality, that it is a pity she was
not painted by any artist capable of rendering her singular and interesting
face. There was something of Dante in the contour of its thin lines, and
the colouring was a pale, delicate brown, which harmonized with the darker
hair, while the eyes were blue, less intense in hue than those of Shelley;
and like his also was the exquisitely fine, fluffy hair, which when ruffled
stood out in a halo round the brow. A large oil painting of her exists,
done, I believe, by Emma Galiotti, and it is like her as she appeared in a
conventional dress and a most lugubrious mood, but the real
woman was quite different. She had a forecast of the angel in her face and figure, but it was of the Archangel Michael that she made one think. There was something spirited and almost militant in her aspect, if such a word can be applied to one so exquisitely delicate and frail. She was somewhat older than myself, and therefore, while I remember Agnes as a little girl, my first distinct memory of Adelaide dates from a period when she was already grown up, and had returned from Turin.
In her manner and dress she bore all the marks of a very exquisite
breeding. She was conversant with foreign languages, knew French and
Italian well, and wrote a peculiarly clear and delicate hand. One of her
minor accomplishments was that of illumination. Monsignor Gilbert possessed
two excellent examples of her skill in this unusual art. In her youth she
danced lightly and well. All these little details go to make up the
portrait of a very charming personality.
She was already thirty before her name had been heard, except as that of
Barry Cornwall's "sweet, beloved First Born." Her poems
circu-
lated among friends, just as Rossetti's used to do, being copied from hand to hand. Then one was sent by her anonymously to Charles Dickens, and inserted by him in a Christmas number of Household Words. Dickens thus tells the story:--"Happening one day to dine with an old and dear friend, distinguished in literature as 'Barry Cornwall,' I took with me an early proof of the Christmas number of Household Words, entitled 'The Seven Poor Travellers,' and remarked, as I laid it on the drawing-room table, that it contained a very pretty poem, written by a certain Miss Berwick. Next day brought me a disclosure that I had so spoken of the poem to the mother of the writer in the writer's presence; that I had no such correspondent in existence as Miss Berwick, and that the name had been assumed by Barry Cornwall's daughter, Miss Adelaide Anne Procter."
From this time forward, I forget the year, she continued to write in
Household Words, and the poems attracted so much attention
that people used to pretend they had written them. When they were at length
collected into volume, with the writer's name attached, they
rushed into fame, and circulated all over the kingdom; and Miss Procter received a pathetic appeal from a young lady, who asked her could it be true that these lovely verses were all hers, for her lover had been in the habit of assuring her, as each poem successively appeared, that it was his own! Twelve editions followed one another, and five years after, the demand for her poems was still "far in excess of that for the writings of any living poet except Mr. Tennyson." I think it caused her a feeling of shyness amounting to pain to have so far outstripped her poet-father in popular estimation. "Papa is a poet. I only write verses."
A very few years after this wide recognition of her genius the end came.
Her health began to fail in 1862, and by the end of that year she was
confined to her bed. So great was the fragility of her frame, that when
once the lungs were attacked there seemed to be no chance of saving her.
Then began a battle which the two or three surviving people who witnessed
it can assuredly never forget--a battle royal with the power of Death.
I do not mean that she consciously tried to live a longer life, but that
she did
not give way an inch to the Destroyer. The only time I ever saw her quail was one day when I got a little pencil note, "They say the second lung is attacked." I hurried off to the house, and found her sitting up in bed, her pretty fair hair standing out in a halo, her blue eyes fastening on mine with an anxious, wistful look. But the momentary panic passed away, and she recovered her cheerfulness, repeated her prayers, talked of Jean Ingelow's poems (and particularly of the "High Tide in Lincolnshire"), made her gentle jests--she was naturally extremely witty--and faced the Destroyer with the most pathetic mixture of resignation and pluck imaginable.
At last, one day--it was the 1st of February, 1864 (Thackeray had
died on Christmas Eve)--I went to her in the evening, and found her
greatly oppressed. But she was very eager about a poem of mine,
"Avignon," and would sit up in bed holding it in her slender,
trembling hands, and trying to correct the proof. The last line ran--
"Ora pro nobis, Sainte Marie."
The evening wore on--nine--ten--eleven
o'clock. It was not possible for me to remain later without greatly alarming my parents, and I had to leave. After an anxious consultation with Edythe, I returned to the sick-room and kissed her forehead, saying, "Good-night, dear." She looked up at me quickly and gravely, and said, "Good-night." After I had left, they sat beside her--the mother, the sister, and the maid who had been with them very many years. About two in the morning of the Feast of the Purification her breathing became oppressed. She looked up in her mother's face, and said, "Mamma, has it come?" And Mrs. Procter said, "Yes, my dear," and took her in her arms. And so, while Edythe knelt by her side, reciting the prayers for the dying, my dear Adelaide passed away in peace.
It remains to say a few words about her poems. Since for years they had
a larger sale than those of any other poet save Tennyson, they must have
penetrated into every reading household in Great Britain. Of late, however,
their popular fame seems chiefly to repose on the "Lost Chord,"
nobly set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan. It is wonderful to see the
enthusiasm infused by this
song. The vast audience of St. James's Hall thrills as one man when it is given. But in the beauty of the narrative poems, and in the profound depth of feeling of those which have an autobiographical source, the student of Victorian literature will, I am convinced, find permanent delight; and that many verses and many lines will survive may be inferred from that perfection of form which is essential to lasting fame. Miss Procter always used the plainest words to convey her thought, the simplest, choicest words to express her feeling. Some of those which deal with the human heart are wonderfully sweet and subtle.
One of the most striking of the personal poems is "A Woman's
Question," beginning--
"Before I trust my fate to thee."
And another, named "Beyond," of which the two last stanzas
run thus:--
"If in my heart I now could fear that, risen again, we should
not know
What was our Life of Life when here--the hearts we
loved so much below;
I would arise this very day, and cast so poor a
thing away.
But love is no such soulless clod;
living, perfected it shall rise
Transfigured in the light of God, and
giving glory to the skies.
And that which makes this life so sweet
shall render Heaven's joy complete."
Another delicately subtle poem is entitled
"Returned--Missing," and how strong and noble is "A
Parting." And lastly, the charming "Comforter."
"If you break your plaything yourself,
dear,
Don't you cry for it all the
same?
I don't think it is such a
comfort,
One has only oneself to
blame.
"People say things cannot be
helped, dear,
But then that is the reason
why;
For if things could be helped or
altered,
One would never sit down to
cry."
The more specially religious poems are to be found in a small volume
entitled "A Chaplet of Verses," published for the benefit of
the Night Refuge originally established close to the church in Moorfields.
It opens with the trumpet call of the "Army of the Lord," a
splendid piece of verse. But "Give me thy heart" is to be found
in the first volume of "Legends and Lyrics." Both of them are
surely equal to any of Father Faber's. What nobler prayer, more
perfectly
expressed, than that contained in the eight lines:--
"Send down, O Lord, Thy sacred
fire!
Consume and cleanse the sin
That lingers
still within its depths;
Let heavenly love
begin.
That sacred flame Thy Saints have
known.
Kindle, O Lord, in me!
Thou above all
the rest for ever,
And all the rest in
Thee."
The "Chaplet" has been stereotyped, and has had a wide
circulation. One poem, entitled
"Homeless,"¹ was
written at Monsignor Gilbert's special request, and was for years
inserted in the annual report and appeal for funds. Of the seven stanzas, I
quote two. The concluding lines of each exemplify the rigour with which
Miss Procter rounded a thought where weaker poets fail:--
"Why, our criminals all are
sheltered,
They are pitied, and taught, and
fed;
That is only a sister--woman,
Who
has got neither food nor bed--
And the Night cries, 'Sin
to be living,'
And the River cries, 'Sin
to be dead.'"
___________________¹ Now that Monsignor Gilbert has
been withdrawn from our midst, there is no reason for refraining to say
that he, who was her confessor, and whom she certainly trusted above all,
read through this paper and ratified it with his approval.
Page 176
"Nay; goods in our thrifty
England
Are not left to lie and grow
rotten;
For each man knows the market value
Of
silk, or woollen, or cotton...
But in counting the riches of
England,
I think our Poor are
forgotten!"
The profits of this little book, of which the sale still continues, were so
considerable that Monsignor Gilbert founded a bed in the Refuge called the
"Adelaide Procter Bed," a permanent memento and reminder of
prayer for her soul.
And lastly, I have been told upon the highest authority that her
personal habits of piety were of the most fervent and consistent kind. The
intensity of her susceptible nature found expression and support in her
faith. She was strengthened in much suffering, and consoled in much grief,
by ardent love of God. She never failed in courage when to publicly confess
obedience to the Catholic Church demanded strength of no usual sort, for
her lot was cast among those who did not acknowledge the claim; and she,
who was eminently delicate in fibre and subject to many fears, went down by
slow degrees into the
"valley of the shadow of Death," with a cheerful heroism rarely seen.
It was on the 2nd of February, 1864, that Adelaide Procter's
wasted frame was laid within the coffin. The snow lay on the ground in
patches outside the old church in Spanish Place, full of the lighted
candles held by a dense congregation.
"And we know when the Purification,
Her
first feast, comes round,
The early spring flowers to greet
it
Just opening are found;
And pure, white,
and spotless, the snowdrop
Will pierce the dark
ground."
So we laid masses of snowdrops all about her, and for years the
recurring sight of them brought back the vision of that calm spiritual face
amidst the flowers. But of her, more than of others, it truly appeared that
only the frail worn envelope lay there. While on earth she had habitually
dwelt in the spiritual world; and into its inner depths, behind the veil,
the Lord, whom she so well loved, had led her, by a long and painful path,
so that it seemed to those who knew her as if by an almost imperceptible
vanishing she had been withdrawn from their eyes.
Edythe now lies in the same grave in the Catholic Cemetery at Kensal Green, and the names of the two sisters are folded in the ivy which their mother planted there.
over this cluster of dwellings, this house, these steep green banks and groves of secular chestnuts, rolled the full tide of war five-and-twenty years ago.
Looking back to the early months of 1870, I can recall no portent, no
slightest cloud upon the horizon. Invasion seemed as far from us in France
as it seems from us in England now; and France was very prosperous.
Commerce made no complaint; the corn and the wine and the oil of that land
of many climates were poured forth into the markets as from an abundant
cornucopia. Literature was still sending out fresh shoots, and Victor Hugo
survived as a magnificent oak-tree of the past. There were scarcely
any beggars to be seen, and the innumerable works of charity were unvexed
by opposition. Near our village the Empress had specially favoured the
great convalescent hospital at Le Vesinet, and omnibuses rolled constantly
to and fro between its gates and those of the Paris hospitals. So far as I
could see the huge machines of the State worked smoothly: we had
great doctors in the wards and great lawyers at the Bar. Not only was there
an Imperial follow-
ing of unquestioned zeal, but the Opposition numbered in its ranks men such as a Thiers and a Gambetta, and a great following of respectable and thoughtful men of the professional classes. Parties, however much opposed, were of a firm consistence, and political aspirations were reasonably expressed and definite in shape. The household whose experiences I am about to describe had then been settled in the village for forty years. They had bought houses and a little land, and children had grown to maturity and settled in life. The surviving elders, who had been very young under the First Empire, were not Imperialist, but were personally attached to the House of Orleans; and the men of the next succeeding generation had interests connected with the Second Empire, and one of them, who ten years later occupied a public office of eminence, was a consistent Republican of a moderate type. The growing lads had of course taken their baccalauréat at Paris Lycées, and one of them had just won the Premier Prix of the year 1867, and was therefore exempt from all military service. So that this family might fairly be considered to
be in touch with the varied elements of French life.
But there were two things which they did not know. They had no social
link with the Tuilleries or Compiègne, and the low thunder of the
democratic growl was unheard by one and all. Once, two years before the
war, the English member of this family had dined in Paris at the house of
an Inspector of Schools who had risen from the ranks, and at this table
there arose a whisper of a likely rising among the workmen of Lyons, a
whisper nervously hushed, and which was until later forgotten by the
hearer. Who remembers the sheet lightning of the previous evening in the
broad light of a stormy day?
In the spring of 1870 the sense of security was exceptionally strong,
for the Emperor, vexed by parliamentary opposition, and aware of
smouldering embers in the great towns of which the outer world knew
nothing, called a Plébiscite in the
month of May. The result was an overwhelming vote of confidence. We
happened to be at La Rochelle on the day of the vote, and spent the evening
at a villa on the shore belong-
ing to the mayor of the town. One of the official tellers hurried out with the yet unpublished result. He whispered in the ear of our hostess the one word "Splendide!" in a tone of the deepest exultation. And from every quarter of France during that week came up similar returns from all the Mairies. I have never doubted the essential veracity of that popular vote, which counted by millions, and which no tampering could have caused to swerve in an appreciable degree.
It is not true that provincial France distrusted the Empire. Whatever
may have been the state of feeling among the workmen of the great towns, no
one who really knows the departments of that immense country can imagine
that the great wine-growers in the south, or the farmers of La
Beauce, or the fishers of Brittany desired a change of government. France
is so very much larger than England, and its farming peasants have so great
a stake in the soil, that they form a huge, steady, horizontal mass of
workers, up at four in the morning and in bed by nine in the evening,
devoted to their children and to the accumulation of five-franc
pieces or coupons de
rente, which are four-pound divisions of the National Debt, and constitute an immense savings bank, reposing on the stability of public institutions. These French millions have less to complain of than any other labouring millions in Europe, and in spite of difficulties in manufacturing centres, and in the Parliament sitting in Paris, it is difficult to believe that the shock would in our generation have come from within if it had not previously come from without. Never for twenty years did Napoleon the Third appear to sit more firmly on his throne than in May, 1870.
The month of June was very hot; the temperature of the north of France,
unsoftened by the Gulf Stream, is more acute in heat and cold than that of
our island. The shutters on the south side of the house were all closed, we
literally barricaded out the sun, and sat in a small strip of garden to the
north, the maids and the ladies sewing and reading in the profound
stillness. The white fruit blossoms had fallen from the apple and pear
trees, the Spanish chestnuts were filling out their crop, and nothing more
wildly improbable could have been sug-
gested than that the one or the other should be plucked and eaten by armed warriors of another nation, with spiked helmets and the accents of a tongue absolutely unknown to our people. Then came the Hohenzollern incident, which did not seem much to concern us; and then the half-ironical quarrel of the ambassadors, which as told in the newspapers read like the dramatic insult:--
"I, sir?"
"Yes, you, sir!"
And then all in a moment the unlikely thing happened, and war was
declared. But though the telegrams were read with eager interest, they did
not seem to immediately concern the village. The coffee was roasted as
usual out of doors, perfuming the air with an odour which is one of the
most characteristic of rural France. French nursery rhymes were sung in the
shrill accents of Tarbes, and the village crier delivered his usual warning
about mad dogs. We knew that the French troops had shot across the frontier
on their way to Berlin, and one of the newspapers published a map of the
seat of war, which we pinned up, and on which the advance was daily marked
in
blue paint. Then came anxious letters from London--"You do not know what is happening. Come back, come back, and bring your belongings." But it seemed useless to dislodge a very complicated household of old people and young children, and servants who were practically Basques; and so the days passed on, and July was out, and Saturday the 7th of August dawned upon us--the last peaceful day we were to know for many a month.
This Saturday evening stands out in my memory because of a visit from
Paris. A very young man, not yet twenty-one, the "Premier
Prix," who, as I have said, was thereby exempt from conscription,
came out to dinner; and an hour later the heavy shutters were unbarred, and
the windows of the drawing-room thrown open on the balcony. The
fading sunset filled the room in the cool of the evening, and a little
child lay asleep in a cot while the servants were dining. It was a time of
special stillness; but that sun had set on the battle-field of
Woerth, the first great defeat of the war. MacMahon was wounded, and
the sons of many mothers lay dead before their time.
This news did not reach us till 8 o'clock the next morning, and
then it came thirty miles across country
viâ Versailles, although we were much
nearer to Paris. It had been brought by the late train overnight to a still
lonelier village near Mont l'hèry, by a wealthy gentleman
connected with the Paris Bourse, and travelled in an omnibus starting at
six o'clock in the morning from Mont l'hèry to our
neighbourhood. I doubt if the dread reality appeared in the morning
newspapers until twenty-four hours later.
We knew, then, on the Sunday morning that the tide had turned, and that
the Germans were chasing the French. Still, not a soul believed that they
would get to Paris, or that the zone of country in which we lay could be in
the smallest danger; and for three weeks we remained quietly, trusting
absolutely to the great battle which was to be fought between Paris and the
frontier. Meanwhile, the young child was baptized in the village church,
and the youthful cousin and godfather came in the new uniform of a Garde
Mobile. All the men under forty were being enrolled in some volunteer
corps.
All through August the Germans seemed to
us to be not so much advancing as concentrating in huge masses between us and the frontier. They were still a hundred miles away, and I cannot now remember what gave the first bad alarm; but one day an order was given to make ready for the blowing up of all the bridges on the Seine outside Paris. This was afterwards said to have been absolutely useless. The Germans were coming from the east, the Seine running from Paris to the sea turns north and west, doubling like a riband, and is so comparatively narrow that it could oppose small hindrance to the passage of troops. But the order was given, and our old stone bridge at Bougival was to be prepared by excavating a huge hole in the central buttress and the filling of the same with powder. This sight for the first time struck terror into the country people; and as we went on the following day down the steep hill, a mile in length, between our house and the river, we found literally every woman in Bougival sitting on her doorstep crying, with her children round her--not only the poorer inhabitants, but the most respectable shop-keepers and bourgeois were in the street, filled with a prevision of what
was really coming, for three weeks later every soul was turned out of house and home and Bougival evacuated in four hours. Meantime we watched the men working at the hole in the bridge, the first symbol of the coming ruin.
We now began to feel it unwise for a family containing very old and very
young members to remain in an isolated house on the outskirts of a village
absolutely without defence, and, strange to say, we made up our minds to
move into Paris, and all our neighbours who had apartments in the city did
the same; but this was not easily accomplished. Some fresh panic struck the
general courage on the 27th of August, and on the 28th, St.
Augustine's Day, and a Sunday, high mass was said as usual at ten
o'clock, and in the afternoon everybody who could procure a vehicle
got to the railway station of St. Cloud, a distance of five miles, at four
o'clock. There the scene was most extraordinary. No luggage could be
taken, and the terrified crowd was dressed with the usual precision of the
French on Sunday. Nobody showed any panic in their outward attire. Streams
of well-dressed people came to the
station from all sides, the train was hopelessly late, the service disorganized with the strain. The tired children cried, and when at last the train came up, the people were packed in as best could be done, and we steamed away to Paris; our boxes with personal luggage were brought in next day. Everything else had to be left to its fate; that is to say, the house was put into complete order, securely barred and locked, and the keys deposited with the village schoolmaster. We were by this time aware that the dozen dwellings of the gentry would be occupied, if ever the German army approached Paris, but nobody knew anything about the customs of war, or had any notion of havoc being wrought by regular troops. It is amazing now to reflect upon that extreme ignorance. In any case, however, it would have been hopeless to attempt any sort of guard, for every valid man was enrolled in some corps, and the farmers and gardeners and tradespeople of the locality were all too fearful for their own property to pay any attention to ours.
So we went into Paris, to a small apartment near the Luxembourg, where,
with a sigh of
relief, we felt ourselves perfectly safe! And an English lady, who was in very weak health, told me that she sat under the trees in the Luxembourg with a Tauchnitz volume of Miss Yonge's "Daisy Chain"; she felt it soothing to her nerves!
But this delusion did not last many days. A regiment of young mobiles
who had been stationed somewhere in the Eastern Departments, were returned
upon Paris. They marched through the streets looking thoroughly tired and
depressed, and made more impression on their fellow-citizens than a
hundred telegrams from the seat of war. Urgent letters from England
implored us to come over without delay, and the French newspapers told us
of the victualling of Paris and the closing of the railways. As I look back
on that five days, the last we were to see of Imperial Paris, I wish that
we had taken one more glance at the Tuilleries--had walked once again
round the Hotel de Ville! But every hour was taken up with inexorable
family duties, and we had to get away by a line we had never travelled
before; for the Northern Railway was no longer available. It was late on
the Friday evening when our party of three elders and two
young children got off from the station of St. Lazare, and as we passed the line of the fortifications, bands of navvies were piling earth upon the road, leaving only the one line of rails on which our train rolled. Their bent heads in the fading sunset was the last we saw of Paris and its people for many a long month. We embarked at Havre for Southampton, and as we passed through a wicket, which must have been put up to check the stream of passengers passing on to the steamer, one of our party vexatiously gave in the dark a ten-franc piece instead of half a franc to the toll-man. By this time it was past midnight, and Saturday the 3rd of September. At Southampton we found the German vessels in the harbour dressed out with flags in honour of Sedan!
I will now return to the village and to the silent, dark house where we
had left so many treasures. It may perhaps be said, with astonishment, why
were they left there, since we had had so long a warning of the Prussian
advance? It seems as if we might have filled up the Paris apartments with
our household goods. Assuredly, if we had had any conception
of what war means, we should have done our utmost to get a van, and to place at least the pictures in safety. But while we did not dream of spoliations, and believed that the worst which could happen would be the billeting of German officers in the house, it would, unless we had taken the alarm in the very beginning of August, have been extremely difficult to get the larger pictures conveyed twelve miles into Paris. I was not the actual mistress of the house, and the real and most dear mistress was in acute anxiety for her grandsons, exposed to constant danger; and for the younger children, who might have been caught in some place where they would not be able to get proper food, and, above all, milk. So many children were thus sacrificed in the siege of Paris. Their number will never be known. But what might have been undoubtedly saved were the miniatures and bronzes; and in particular two of the former, which had been given over into my care. Their date was about 1750, and their subjects in full costume. I had pinned them by their faded loops of ribbon to the velvet border of a mirror in the drawing-room on the day they came from
an old house in the provinces. It is a sore vexation to me to think that I packed up the silver spoons and forgot these treasured great-great-grandparents. Nay, still more astounding was it that during the week we spent in Paris, one of the servants (they were sisters, and extremely intelligent women from the south) went out to the village, walking for many miles; and after assuring herself that all was right and safe within the house, she filled a large clothes basket with our apples and pears, which it vexed her frugal soul (she was the cook) to leave wasting on the trees. She then cast about how to get them into Paris, and thought herself very fortunate to find a washerwoman with a cart. The two women hoisted up the basket, and then jogged back to Paris in a leisurely way!
Of the other houses in the village summary mention can be made. The
Chateau, a noble old pile of Louis the 14th's date, was left with
servants, and ultimately used to lodge an Etât Majeur. It was not
ill-treated. A large handsome villa on the summit of the hill was
quite spoilt internally. A small house belonging to a relative was
occupied, knocked about, but not
destroyed; but the house next to this, where I remember an old lady with a white cat and much handsome Indian china, was entirely gutted. From the floor of the salon, where the great tall Aladdin jars had proudly stood, the visitor looked up to the roof, with a view of the three fireplaces left in the wall one above the other.
I do not know by which route the Germans came into the village, whether
by the lower road from Bougival, or by the upper road from Versailles; but
the date was the 19th of September, when the gardens are in gorgeous array,
and the woods are untouched. I only know that they must have fetched the
keys of our house from the schoolmaster, and that they started with good
intentions, for the commanding officer caused an inventory to be taken of
everything in the house. Sixty soldiers were lodged in it, who must have
indeed been in tight quarters. The officer settled into one of the two
largest bedrooms; he had the drawing-room curtains brought upstairs
to drape his broad window; he also transferred the drawing-room
clock to his mantelshelf, and to this we owe its preservation. Even the
large bell glass
which protected it was unbroken, when a smaller clock of white marble and ormolu was broken to pieces with a hammer, and the works taken away. To this unknown officer I feel that we owe gratitude for his good intentions, though he was in the sequel quite unable to carry them out, for it seems that the troops were constantly shifted.
When the German army had been in occupation on our hills for about a
month, the sortie of the 13th of October took place. So far as we are able
to understand what happened, the French poured out of Paris by way of Rueil
and Mont Valerien, and met the Prussians somewhere near Bougival, from
which all the inhabitants had been summarily sent away in the course of an
afternoon. They were given four hours in which to pack and go. The French
seem to have surged up through the steep little town, and to have fought
desperately on the broad road below our house. The four nuns who keep our
village school stuck gallantly to their dwelling, which they turned into a
hospital. They were respectfully treated by the German soldiers, and the
good women took in the wounded of both sides. Soeur Marie told me
afterwards that fifteen legs
were amputated in one night. In our cemetery is a lonely grave, marked only with the initials and the regimental number of three German soldiers, and with the fatal date, the 13th of October. I believe this was the one occasion on which there was actual desperate fighting in our immediate neighbourhood, though bombs came flying over the village, and one shot by Mont Valerien whizzed over miles of tree-tops and fell on a small room on the ground floor of the Chateau. The staff officer who sat writing at a bureau threw himself flat upon the floor, and while the window, the mantelshelf, and yards of the wall flew into splinters, he was unhurt.
Week after week went by, the scarlet geraniums died in the garden, the
vine leaves became scanty on the wall, the frost of late autumn deepened in
intensity, and the troops packed into our house began to suffer from cold.
They cut away for firewood the upper part of an outside staircase which was
sheltered under the deep eaves of a chalet standing on part of our ground;
and then, when they wanted three little attic rooms under the roof, they
set up a tree against the wall and climbed up like bears
at the Zoo. They wrenched an arm off several chairs, as handy to light up the fires, and they piled up such a quantity of wood in the fireplace of the drawing-room that the parquet was literally charred in a great semicircle, and it was a miracle that on the day this happened the whole house was not burnt down. Another day they wrenched off a dressing-room door, and a great piece of the wall came down with it. The village doctor, who remained through the whole time, told us afterwards that jorums of brandy were served out to the men in the worst of the weather. This filled his French medical mind with astonishment, and perhaps accounts for the strange things which occurred. For instance, they tore away one marble jamb of the dining-room mantel, and with it they appeared to have pounded something on the tiled floor. They burnt the cupboard doors, and they carefully extracted every map of France wherever they found one, particularly from Murray's Handbook in which were several! But I think that the strangest record of their presence was the condition of a small chandelier brought from Vienna by my dear friend the author of "Gossip
of the Century." It was of Bohemian glass, a bowl with pendants, and very prettily coloured. Being of small size, it hung high on a hook in the centre of the ceiling. I found the pendants broken and the bowl intact! What sort of strange popgun had been employed by the idle troops, and what wonderful marksmen they must have been!
That our house was substantially preserved, was owing, I believe, to the
presence of Dr. Russell, the correspondent of the Times at the
headquarters at Versailles, to whom I wrote begging for his intercession.
In spite of the strange ruin which fell upon our interior, not a single
mirror was broken, nor were the pictures stolen with one exception. But a
magnificent portrait en pied now in the
French Gallery of the Louvre was stabbed five times on the black velvet
robe, and another smaller portrait of a venerable ancestress was badly
scratched by being wedged against a broken window to keep out the draught.
Our fruit trees were not cut down, and a general intention had obtained of
not gutting us for firewood! The mischief was of a smaller
kind, and infinite in detail. For
instance, a polished bed of walnut wood was scarred with innumerable fine cuts, and on our return we wondered who had ornamented it, till we learned that the officers invariably lay down "booted and spurred." More intentional, on the part of some idle trooper, was the running of a sharp knife up the kind face of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, on an engraving given by herself. It took the exact middle of the nose in perfect accuracy. As to the books, they were torn in an extraordinary manner. A large volume of biographies of literary ladies of all countries, executed in America and sent over to France by enthusiastic friends, was torn, defaced, and here and there adorned with flourishing moustaches! A similar volume of American "Queens of Society," of which the frontispiece had been a beautiful engraving of Mrs. Martha Washington, was entirely despoiled. Presentation copies of works by Victor Hugo and Thiers, and a set of Byron given by Mr. Murray, were torn and injured. One precious object, a brown paper first edition of "Hernani," with Victor Hugo's autograph respects, did escape. It was found tossing in a cupboard in an attic, saved by its
shabby look and ancient date. But piles of autograph letters from nearly every writer of eminence in France, and from very many in England, carefully sorted, laid in a secretaire, and put aside by the mistress of the house for a literary grandson, were hopelessly sacrificed. They were found lying about in fragments in the garden, dirtied, torn, and charred. It was decided by those who first returned to the home that none of them could be picked up. They were shovelled aside and burnt.
Of the people who remained valiantly in the village a few strange and
painful incidents may be recorded. I have already said that the nuns were
well and respectfully treated. One of them having to go to Versailles for
food and medicine, told me she had been carefully and politely driven over
by a soldier. But when the beloved old curé was turned out of his
presbytery and sent off to Versailles by night, some wretched wag tied two
of his hens round the old man's neck! The village doctor remained in
his solitary house, and two officers were billeted upon him.
The first of his military inmates cleared off all his cups and saucers,
and he laid in a fresh stock;
two more officers succeeded, and they also packed up and went off with his crockery, which seemed to be an article in much request; the third time he received new inmates he said he had no money, and they had to buy their dishes. When we came back the following June we found that Dr. Lemaire, who had always been a particularly trim, clean-shaven elderly gentleman, had grown a long white beard. We looked with wonder at this unprofessional adjunct, and he told us that "his officers" had a trick (which sounded like a queer joke) of insisting on his procuring legs of mutton, not only for their own consumption, but for other favoured friends. When he assured them that he could get neither sheep nor special joints, they frowned ferociously, and said, "Take him out and shoot him." Six times he was taken out, and respited! "After which," said he, "I grew my white beard, thinking that it might soften their hearts." Finally, when peace was made, the two last officers quartered upon him wished him good-bye with effusion, hoped to see him if he ever travelled so far as Berlin, and solemnly presented their cards "for the ladies of the family" (who were safe at St.
Valery). The old doctor replied, wrathfully, "Oh! Ç'a non." Which said in a certain manner is very like an expletive!
During the later weeks of the siege a very malignant form of
small-pox became epidemic at St. Germains, three miles off. A
village woman caught it, and the Prussians nailed her up in a cottage, and
vowed instant vengeance on anybody who should dare to break in. Our good
Soeur Marie crept out at night and got soup and medicine through the
crevices. The patient recovered; and it is fair to say that the officers
had probably a shrewd notion that the nuns would manage the matter somehow
in spite of their prohibition. Not so fortunate was the village innkeeper,
a man of substance, whose chief customers had been wealthy Parisians coming
out to dine on Sundays under the spreading limes in a picturesque
courtyard. This well-known inn was called the
Tourne-Bride. On the first appearance of the Prussians,
an officer requisitioned the whole of the cellar. The wine was worth 10,000
francs, £400 of English money. Its loss and the stoppage of the
business meant ruin to the unfortunate man. He moved with
his good wife into a small tavern two miles away, but it broke his heart, and he died at the end of a year.
Endless were the stories told us by our humbler friends. One woman who
took her daughters off to her own family in Normandy, buried all her linen,
which she had no means of carrying away, in a great tub. Of course it was
discovered and dug up, and the linen was nowhere on her return. But the
worst trouble of all happened at Bougival when François Duberg was
taken for cutting the telegraph wires, tried by a court-martial at
Beauregard (a Chateau once in royal occupation, and a nursery for the
children of France), and shot on a field above our house. He was a gardener
by trade, carried no arms, but said, "he would do it again." At
the obelisk raised to his memory on the road, a discourse is every year
pronounced in the early days of November. His wife, poor soul, went
mad.
I have now set down after the lapse of five and twenty years the things
which I saw and the things which were told me by my neighbours, and they
are mostly such as do not pertain to
the great tragedies of war. Of these there were no lack, but I mostly heard of them by letter or read of them in print, and I have as yet strictly confined myself to my immediate oral knowledge. But one young friend of mine, a Breton of a noble family which sent five members to the field, contracted fever in the retreat from Orleans, and got back to his wife and to his old mother, just to die. He left two orphan children. Of our family, a cousin was dragged out dead from a heap at Sedan; both our own young mobiles suffered severely in health, and our "Premier Prix" felt the effect for years. Typhoid fever and lingering ill-health are apt to strike lads suddenly deprived of proper food and exposed to days and nights of inclement weather. Another friend, a middle-aged man, sent his young family away, but remained in Paris with an elder daughter who was dying of consumption and could not be moved. He nursed her to the end, and buried her, and sickened himself of small-pox, of which he died. His wife and younger children at St. Valery knew nothing of what had happened for three weeks, and were in an agony of suspense, receiving no more balloon letters from Paris. At last a
cautious word reached them in a circuitous way from Belgium, and the wife nearly lost her reason. This unfortunate man was son-in-law to our excellent doctor, who, being himself outside Paris in our village, could only write to his daughter and his own old wife that he had "no news."
Finally, of the very worst side of war a much younger medical man who
afterwards succeeded Dr. Lemaire spoke to me with shuddering horror. He had
been employed in an ambulance corps on the frontier, and at forty was an
ageing grey-haired man. He published a volume of reminiscences which
for ghastliness is unsurpassed, for he possessed literary talent, in
addition to medical skill. He said to me,
apropos of his book, "Of course I would
go through it again if necessary; but I look back on those weeks not only
with unimaginable horror, but with unutterable disgust."
And this I believe was the real impression left by the
Franco-German war. France certainly did not want it;
and though Prince Bismark did want if, and planned how best to prick on an
excitable people, it is impossible to
believe that the Germans wanted it. There were practically no wrongs to revenge; or whatever wrongs had formerly been done could be laid on the shoulders of that great Captain who cost us all so much blood and treasure that even the son of Queen Louise of Prussia was not justified in avenging them on peasants and shopkeepers sixty years after. War between two highly-civilized nations is not only cruel, but profoundly shocking, and yet ever since the world's literature began, there has existed a conspiracy of silence in favour of recording only the heroic aspects of war; but the reports of the English newspaper correspondents and the publication of even one book such as Doctor Pierre Boyer's, have brought the truth nearer to the apprehension of general readers. A well-dressed, intelligent woman whom I met in a railway carriage, and who seemed to be engaged in some successful commerce, said to me, with an expression of extreme disgust, apropos of the war, "Ce n'est plus dans nos moeurs"; and this feeling obtained far and wide. The French people did fight to the bitter end, and would do it again, but it would be with a reluctant anger difficult to describe. It would be unnatural
to expect that the Services, whose advancement and reputation depend on getting some one to fight with them, should share this feeling; but it is true of the vast masses of provincial French people, busy on their own concerns, prosperous in affairs, doting on their children, scrupulously particular in their dress, in their cooking, and in the conduct of all their ceremonies, marriages, baptisms, and funerals--people who are extremely civilized, from Boulogne in the north to Nice in the south, and who have no love either for the anarchist or the long-haired Bohemian--these comfortable millions, though they will fight like lions when their blood is up, certainly feel that the bloodshed, the dirt and destruction, and the many abominable incidents of war ne sont plus dans leur moeurs.
was perfectly polite, but I thought that he disliked speaking to a woman who had taken an active part in a public movement. This may have been a morbid impression on my part, but it caused me to be frightened. I was not long in the room, but though he spoke with the most measured chilly calmness, the few things he said made a deep and lasting effect on me. He told me that "by the mercy of God" he had never doubted of His Personality. He spoke as if perfectly conscious of the Comtist influence then taking possession of English society. It was just at the time when George Henry Lewes and George Eliot were beginning to reign supreme. If one so peculiarly impersonal as Dr. Manning could stoop to a personal revelation, the words and the accent he used may be held to have conveyed this meaning: "Though I am well aware of the length to which the controversy has been carried, still I have never had to concern myself with it. Doubt never touched me in that direction. I have always had an entire faith in a Personal God."
He then spoke, with a curious divining sympathy, yet not in any way
sympathetically, of
the manner of torments to which sensitive converts were exposed by the change.
He said that the wearing of the round Roman collar in the street had
been a misery to him; and he told me of having said to Hope Scott as they
walked away from the church where I think they had both been received
simultaneously, "Now my career is ended." And he
added, looking at me impressively, "But where I once worked on an
acre I now work on a square mile."
He knew that I had worked hard, and he had some secret wish to console
and encourage in a possible loss of influence, though his manner was that
of a man of marble.
He then advised me to read up the history of the Reformation on all
sides, for he put down several books on a sheet of paper, and among them
D'Aubigné, remarking, calmly, "But it is full of
lies." In this interview Dr. Manning gave me no spiritual advice,
made no appeal to me. His look seemed to say, "You are an unpleasant
young woman, one of the stiff old Presbyterian stock; but I will tell you
faithfully what I think, and let it take its chance." I do not think
he
had any suspicion that I was so impressed and overpowered by his intellect, that when I left the room and the house I ran nearly all the way home, with the sense that I was fleeing from an overmastering brain, and that I dreaded it.
I did not see him again till he was Archbishop of Westminster and I a
married woman with a young child, whom I took to him for his blessing one
day when I had to call upon him about the subscriptions got up for poorer
French exiles in 1870-71. How good and kind he was about it, writing
a letter which I took to Lady Lothian. Since then I have always loved him
with a full comprehension of the absolute fitness of the choice of Rome; a
fitness which everyone was finally compelled to acknowledge before he died.
Other priests and bishops have been good, holy, of old English birth, and
assimilated to the type of the Vatican, but it was Henry Edward, Cardinal
Archbishop, who was then wanted for England, and he seemed by his whole
experience and training to be the appointed man.
Sunday, June 8th, 1890, was his silver Jubilee. He preached in the
little Catholic church of St. Edward, Palace Street, Westminster, standing
for three-quarters of an hour by the altar rail; his text: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." After a very few doctrinal words, he fell back on the personal example of Jesus Christ our Lord, talking very simply and plainly to his congregation, saying he had no doubt they were "good," but were they good? A word not to be forgotten. To his Jubilee he made no allusion whatever; but he did say that he had remembered on the previous day that in this church he had said his first mass, or rather in the poor room which then did duty for a church in that parish. And his first pastoral work had also been in that most poor parish, now totally changed by the building of Victoria Street. He said he had worked with the good Sisters of St. Vincent, some of whom he noticed among the audience this day.
In his scarlet robes, and with his fine worn face, he was much less
terrible than "Dr. Manning of Bayswater" in the black dress of
the oblates. I do not think anybody ran away from him in his closing
years.
In the afternoon a goodly gathering took place at Archbishop's
House, and nearly four thousand pounds was given to him for church
purposes.
As he passed through the crowd, in which every layer of the English world was represented, he bore himself with upright dignity, but his tall figure seemed so frail, and its movement so noiseless, that he might have been taken for a visitant from another world than ours. He took his place on the red daïs, and in thanking the subscribers for their gift, and making a special allusion to those who were absent in Ireland, he spoke of his own great age, and as being conscious that he would soon be called away; and instantly from every corner of the vast room rose an interrupting murmur of men's and women's voices, of which the sense was an entreating "No, no!" It was a spontaneous and unconventional cry, which no hearer could forget, and for nineteen months longer it prevailed. On the 14th of January, 1892, the old man who had nobly done his work, and the young man on whom so many hopes were set, passed away almost in the same hour.
Seldom has any man more completely conquered prejudice than did Cardinal
Manning, and in the slight speech to which allusion has been made, he spoke
of times when he had felt
it his duty to withstand some current of thought popular among his own people, adding, in a tone of intense feeling, "And I bore the reproach." These words would make a wonderful epitaph for his tomb, for they were like all his utterances, emphatically true. Probably none of the English converts to Roman Catholicism had suffered from interior causes more deeply than he. It used to be said of him that he was an ambitious man, and in the sense in which Pitt and Fox, Gladstone and Beaconsfield, have been ambitious, it was no doubt true. He had taken a great place at Oxford, and was of that stuff of which statesmen are made. How should he not have been ambitious, when he might have been the Becket or the Wolsey of the Church of England? Our country offers great prizes to her worthy sons, and Henry Edward Manning might have been anything he chose. But in 1851 he obeyed the call of conscience, resigned his place and his work, and for fourteen years lived literally in obscurity, like any other ordinary ecclesiastic. As a childless widower, his life had for many years been a lonely one. When he took Catholic orders I believe that a female relative
of an older generation kept his house in South Audley Street; and when he went to be head of the Oblates in Bayswater, his position, though important and dignified, was not more so than that of a hundred others. In the ten years during which England passed through the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny, and when the French Alliance was a prominent political factor, Dr. Manning's name was literally unheard in the outer world. He had lost himself, and his place knew him no more, so far as his Protestant fellow-countrymen were concerned; and when, in 1865, he was made Archbishop of Westminster, a post in which Dr. Wiseman's genial kindness and literary gifts had greatly succeeded in disarming prejudice, the appointment was greeted with a deep murmur of dissatisfaction, of which perhaps the most reasonable element was the feeling that the honour was due to one of those old English families who had held to their faith through centuries of difficulty. And the new Archbishop was known to be far from conciliating. He had the severity of a Wesley; he turned the ladies out of the choirs; he put down florid church music; he detested
theatres, round dances, and the drinking of wine; and, above all, he never tried to soften dogma. A Frenchman might have said of him, "Qu'il etait plus Royaliste que le Roi." When a young lady had the audacity to tell him, "But, your Eminence, I like going to balls," his characteristic answer was, "Better not, my child." His whole leaning was towards counsels of perfection, and he died when he did because he absolutely refused to take stimulants lest his tempted children should thereby feel themselves ever so slightly loosened from their pledge; and for these and other most unpopular causes he "bore the reproach" with a certain pathetic severity. And little by little, year by year, the ascetic old man, who went about on ordinary occasions like "a shabby curate," won upon his own recalcitrant people, and upon the outer English world. They came to understand his point of view, which was that if a man saw a good thing he was to strive after it utterly regardless of human respect; and if he saw a bad thing he was to fling himself against it; and if it was clear about a text of Scripture it was to be obeyed in all its length and breadth. His
natural fastidiousness never stopped him for an instant. To the repentant woman he simply said, "Go and sin no more"; the drunken man he took literally into Archbishop's House, and set him on his feet again.
Also, in the later years of his life, when all opposition had faded away
in the respect and affection gained by his great qualities, the Cardinal
himself softened. In nothing was this more evident than in his widened
sympathy with other men and their partial conceptions of Christian faith;
but it was a sympathy born of perfect security that none could
misunderstand him. When it was a question of the submerged millions, he
went down into the arena, and the delicate, fastidious Dr. Manning of
former times seemed infused with white light and heat of Christian
love.
I will conclude by a few extracts from a letter written by a witness of
the funeral service at the Oratory, who was stationed in the organ loft of
the immense church. It begins by an allusion to the lying in state, when
the people stood waiting in the streets in a
queue half a mile in length.
"Ah! how I wish you had seen the Cardinal
lying in death. There was no pomp of any sort, though the size of the great square rooms draped with black cloth gave a certain external majesty to the scene. He lay on a sloping bier clothed in dark purple, and surrounded by tall green palms and wax lights, severe in beauty, and suggesting one of the older monuments in our Abbey, and his delicate, worn face and calm repose majestic as the bronze image of Margaret of Richmond.
"And at the Oratory on Thursday the only pomp was the great array
of white-robed priests of his diocese, each with a lighted taper.
Every man represented a world of work. And there also were gathered
representatives of every rank, of every profession, of all the services.
But what most moved me were the long minutes when I stood by the temporary
porch on the pavement and saw the coffin carried out, and the pall slipped
from the polished mahogany as it was placed in the small, low hearse, while
the bishops and the clergy stood in a circle with bowed heads. There ensued
a long halt in the street, amidst the silent crowd; and it seemed an
especially fitting farewell to one who had peculiarly been
the people's priest. It was the last of Henry Edward, one of our four greatest, Gladstone, Tennyson, and the Queen the other corners of the great English Square; but the Cardinal and the Queen are morally first. He stood out as a landmark or a lighthouse in the troubled sea of public life, and on the day of his burial, all over the world, wherever live the English-speaking peoples, from Melbourne to San Francisco, from New York to India, went up the prayers of his fellow-Catholics following the course of the sun. And all the way to the cemetery the three miles of road was lined by the English working-men; they came by the hundred thousand to see that little low hearse pass by, just as by the hundred thousand they had come to see him lying dead. I have been tempted to destroy this letter lest you should think it of intemperate warmth, not thinking as he thought. But impressions of the hour are worth preserving, and what I have sought to convey is this: The man who so died and so was buried was no emissary of an alien power, no head of an 'Italian Mission.' He was peculiarly English--nay, even insular--in the severity of his piety, and every man within or
without the Oratory Church was almost without exception English. Into the very marrow of the social politics of his time had the English Cardinal penetrated, striving to bring into them the will and words of that only Saviour in whom he believed. And not until Queen Victoria is gathered to her fathers shall we see such an emotion of the popular heart again."
I remember the sincere, measured paper read by Miss Maude Stanley, and
the declamation of an officer from Portsmouth, and a horrible
recital of Russian atrocities given by Lord Radstock. I cannot now remember in what way they were connected in his mind with the condition of the London poor, but all the more ardent Christians approached the question from the standpoint of conversion.
Then from a seat lying a little way back to the left, and facing a
formidable array of countesses, of whom there were said to be six sitting
near the one to the other, rose a small, pale, quietly-dressed
woman--Mrs. Booth, the wife of a dissenting minister, and
comparatively unknown. In later years she made quite another impression
upon me, but she was then about five and forty, dressed, so far as I
remember, in no particular costume, and she was so closely surrounded by
tall, handsomely-dressed women that her physical being seemed to
sink into insignificance, only her face shining out with a sort of luminous
pallor. Nor was her speech outwardly more impressive than her appearance.
She had no graces of acting, no remarkable choice of words; the
high-bred faces of the portraits on the walls seemed to ask,
"Who is this daughter of the people, whose face is square and simple,
whose
dress is that of the most modest middle class, who has evidently never even in the most refined way sought for the applause of man?"
But Mrs. Booth spoke, and with her first few words all
possibility of comparison fled from my mind. The poor of London rose up, a
piteous, accusing crowd, in those charming rooms; their unutterable
sufferings quivered in her voice, and the ardent love with which she
regarded the human creatures for whom Christ died shone in her eyes. She
told story after story of the back courts and the gutters, of the drunkard
snatched from the feet of the kicking horses, of the widow, the orphan
child, the convict, the lost women in the street. At this distance of time
I can remember very little detail, but when the meeting broke up I made my
way through the benches and sat down by her side, and she talked to me of
her own children, who as they grew up turned one by one definitely to the
Lord and His work.
I suppose I must have told her that I had young children of my own, for
our conversation was wholly on these lines. I remember the
lovely expression of face with which she spoke of her two eldest born.
Years passed before I again saw Mrs. Booth. The Salvation Army had
become organized, active, and famous, and I felt a curiosity to see one of
the meetings advertised at the door of the hall close to Regent Circus. It
was full noon as we went in, and the light shone down on Mrs. Booth
standing in the centre of the gallery or estrade from which she spoke. Two
or three of her young daughters were with her, and a knot of other workers
in the costume since become so familiar in the streets of London. The
meeting must have been nearly. over, for I do not remember any word of Mrs.
Booth's, and one of the sweet-faced children led off a hymn.
At the conclusion I walked up to the estrade, and said, "Do you
remember us? I am so glad to see you again. We are Catholics." It was
an older and, as it seemed to me, a much more assured and vigorous face
which smiled down a welcome on mother and child. "Ah!" she
said," that makes no difference," and I felt a
sort of enveloping kindness and sympathy shining in her eyes. And that was
the open secret of the woman who
was borne to the grave a few years later amid such an outburst of universal sympathy as has perhaps never been paid to one of her sex before. She had a good and broad intelligence, judging complicated questions with common sense, and was a mental power in the great organization which has struck so deep a root among the working classes. But that which gave her predominant influence was a higher thing, a spiritual quality which inspired her judgment and drew hearts by the hundred and the thousand. It survived on that painful death-bed of more than thirty months' duration, and thrilled in the messages she sent to her husband's people. It can only be defined as the power of the saint.
On two other occasions I witnessed Mrs. Booth's extraordinary
influence. The first was that of the funeral service at Olympia. She had
died, of long wasting malady heroically borne, at
Clacton-on-Sea, and on Monday, the 13th of October, 1890, at
eight o'clock in the evening, the coffin was borne from one end to
the other of the immense building, into which 36,000 people had crowded,
after which it was necessary to
close the gates and shut out thousands more. After his wife's coffin,
the General walked alone, followed by his children. It was placed on a
raised platform in the gallery, behind which a friend and I were seated, so
that the vast audience lay far below us, and the mourning group a little to
the right. No single voice could have penetrated the great space of
Olympia, and to meet this difficulty a special litany had been prepared,
printed, and distributed among the congregation, and large lettered signals
were hoisted at intervals on the platform, instructing the audience to rise
and sing or to pray. The service began with the old Wesleyan hymn,--
"When I survey the wondrous cross
On
which the Prince of Glory died,
All earthly gain I count but
loss,
And pour contempt on all
beside."
Such a volume of sound can seldom have been heard by human ears. But most
touching was the moment when the children of Mrs. Booth, rising above the
coffin, sang the hymn which had comforted her when dying. One voice rang
sweet and even triumphant above the rest. I was told it was that of the
beloved eldest
daughter, Catherine Booth, who, after many journeys to her mother's bedside, was not with her at the last. The scene was indeed indescribably affecting.
And on the following day the traffic of central London was stopped for
two hours in the busiest part of the twenty-four, while "the
Army Mother" was carried past the Bank and the Royal Exchange. I can
only speak for the subdued reverence of the crowd in that great triangle
opposite the Mansion House, but the incident which impressed me most
concerned the omnibuses. Long after the cabs and carriages had disappeared
from the streets, the Bayswater omnibuses made their way slowly across to
one of the railways. But there came a moment when they also were stopped.
For that last hour every one of these vehicles carried a black flag, rising
above the head of the driver.
In turning over the two volumes of Mrs. Booth's life, the
reader's eye is arrested by the mute witness of the photographs. The
first, of "Catherine Mumford" at the age of
twenty-three, was taken shortly before her marriage. It shows us a
thoughtful and intelligent girl, with
curls smoothed away from a very broad forehead; the eyes are steady and lambent, and the dress is not only careful but in the fashion of the time. She wears a brooch, a buckle, and a little lace. The costume is simple and modest, but by no means that of a young lady indifferent to her appearance. I compare this portrait with the face of the living woman whom I met about twenty-five years later, and the change was very great. She was then the anxious, devoted mother of many children, and the Salvation Army was already being organized; moreover, she had been sorely tried by illness in her family, and other anxieties, spoken of freely in the Life, had pressed upon her. I remember how frail she looked in 1878, and how everything in the least mundane had dropped away from her dress and manner; how entirely she looked the minister's wife. But in the early eighties the tide had again turned, and the sweet, matronly countenance of "the Army Mother" under the Salvation Army bonnet, was as reposeful but far more animated than that of the young Catherine Mumford with the curls. Her smile dwelt like sunshine on those whom she addressed. One felt that
she must be a lovely mother at home. And there is one more faithful photographic record of that wonderful face, "Mrs. Booth in her last illness." Once more the softly curling hair is brushed back from the broad forehead, over which sixty years have passed, and a full half century of thought and prayer; and strange to say, though the expression is deeply marked by suffering, it has regained something of youth. The beautiful large eyes are undimmed, and in the intentness of their gaze and the patient stillness of the attitude can be read a touch of final obedience, which goes to the depths of the beholder's heart. She who did all things well had gathered up her feeble strength to leave a peaceful, comforting last impression on her children near and far.
It was on a Saturday, the last day of Self-Denial Week, and
"the sun was sinking in an almost cloudless sky," when death
released Mrs. Booth from the sick bed on which she had lain for more than
two years. But as her death was the very text on which her life was
written, the Army Mother survives in a very full and peculiar sense.
Whatever may be the future of the Salvation Army, on whatever lines it may
develop when
the General and his children are called away, and the infinite modifications of time act and react on their special conceptions of faith and duty, the great figure of Catherine Booth must remain as permanent in the history of our race.
Zola and Ibsen use other measuring rods, but
of the two, Zola adheres in substance much the more closely to the old canons of right and wrong. In the powerful story of "Thérèse Raquin" the connection between adultery and murder is wrought out with awful precision; and in his other books this great author is driven to paint the truth of things, not merely, as is often said, by coarse epithets describing coarse subjects, but by some intellectual necessity of hunting an evil thing to the bitter end. Once started on the track of a sin or a sinner, Zola seems compelled by the law of his own genius to finally kill them out of the way. Whether the process be intentional or no (a difficult question to decide), Zola and his characters get hopelessly entangled in the laws Of the universe, and thus it is that his novels so closely reflect human life on its seamy side, and are a mine of interest to the mature intellect.
But the subject is rapidly being sifted upon the plane of the larger
literature. It is radically impossible to write a long complex description
of human lives without knocking up against the granite walls and the
inexorable laws which environ mankind; all novels and plays which attempt
to disregard them end by pro-
ducing an impression of lunacy on the reader's mind, for even the phantoms of creative imagination are forced to obey the laws of human life. There is a famous parody in which the ghost of an uncle indignantly claims possession of his own corridor, laying down a law of mine and thine which, in spite of its absurdity, holds good in other matters than a ghost's own right of patrol.
The major question will soon settle itself. But while books are long to
write and long to read, a guerilla warfare is found easier to handle than
an attack by troops of the line--and small darts begin to thicken the
air. One well-known gentleman writes to say that it is a sad pity
our climate is not that of Fiji, so that we might adopt the charming and
poetical costume of the floral wreath only. One can but lament that
since--
He might have been a Roosian,
He
might have been a Proosian,
He was (alas!
for him) an Englishman.
And another gentleman (a very young one) exhausts the powers of outline to
suggest divers aspects of the person who is said in Scripture to sit by the
wayside. Originally this fearsome
image was sparingly used in pictorial art by Albert Dürer, by Michael Angelo, or by Hogarth; but she now takes the middle of the road. She possesses our walls, our playbills, our chance illustrations; she renders successive articles of costume abominable and ridiculous; of late she has taken to the harmless boa of fifty years ago, and instantly the harmless boa becomes endued with unholy wriggling life. Even more objectionable are her boots.
And the poems, the neat little poems in four stanzas, stuffed with
suggestive metaphors as a bun is stuffed with currants. Evening after
evening they appear with inexhaustible fertility, seeming to be evolved
from some faint hysterical guitar, so thin and unreal are they. Once on a
while a school of poetic gush was squelched by a great author asking at
some length--
"Oh! Firmilian, where is Lilian?"
Can nobody put an end to the maiden who is eternally being apostrophized by
a weeping gentleman, whose tears would fill a bucket; while as for his
choice epithets, they remind one of that missing letter which was once said
"to lie about the floor."
One really eloquent poem, published a year ago, portrays the hero as breaking his mother's stiff yet fragile heart, and quickly putting his too conscientious father out of pain. His poetical education is finished by teachers whom we are forced to refrain from describing. And yet the reader cannot afford to laugh, for when the glaring poster is painted and pasted, and the neat little stanzas are winged away on the evening breeze, down comes the ghastly midnight murderer brandishing his cruel knife, and the poem is silenced, and the fantastic, unreal eyes are closed for ever, and the boa is drabbled with the life-blood of the girl who wore it.
Is it, then, quite in vain to attempt to reach ground-rock on so
vital a subject, and to ask ourselves how the historic morality of
Christendom, so inseparable from our conception of the older European
world, could have been accepted if it be not true? If anyone say it was
enforced by the preached doctrine of judgment, we are driven to ask how
that doctrine of unerring retribution came to be accepted. We must regard
it as appealing to the inner sense of the human heart, and fall back upon
the saying of Prospero in
"The Tempest," that there may be "one whose race had that in't which a good nature cannot abide to be with."
Consider how many things fall under this instinctive condemnation. For
instance, man "cannot abide" the snake and the alligator, nor
the roar of the hungry lions, even when caged. All kinds of decomposition
are abhorrent, witness the old expression to "scent danger."
Consider the inner meaning of the word "intolerable," and the
old notion of hair standing on end with horror, and the wide-world
superstition of the evil eye. Consider what we mean by nerves, and how,
although we know some of their functions, we know nothing of their hourly
influence in hatred or in love. As we suffer a deadly fear of that which
has not yet come to pass, so have we never reached to the root of that
which we cannot abide.
Volumes might be written upon the value of the discord in music and the
grotesque in art. The "devils" of Notre Dame, of which we have
been lately hearing, are not devils in the ordinary sense, but subtle
emanations from the under world, clinging to the
archi-
tecture of the great cathedral whose beauty they enhance.
They are creatures not yet brought into order, and they have been
gradually driven up to the highest gallery of the towers, retreating from
the Presence enshrined below; and there they sit, strange and wistful,
looking out over the vast city like relics of the pagan world. Of them
Victor Hugo has written the most wonderful description in his romance of
"Notre Dame de Paris."
If it be true that mathematics finally repose upon primary statements
which cannot be proved by wit of mortal men--no, not though they be
taken in flank, and so worked out in detail that we can build our towers
and bridges in full confidence of their innate veracity, it is equally true
that morals, and all those questions which lie on the outskirts of
morality, also repose on reasoning which in the last resort eludes the
intellect of man. St. Paul certainly treats them as axiomatic, and from the
loftiest poetry down to the humblest nursery rhyme, bards of all ages have
sung in the same sense. The little child who revolts at his bath is asked
by mother and nurse, in the words of an ancient poem,--
"What, wish to go dirty?"
"Not wish to be clean!"
"No !" says the Teutonic Greek; "no!" says the
obstinate child; "I wish to go dirty, and you are a narrow Philistine
when you preach up soap!"
It is difficult for a Christian speaking to Christians to avoid alluding
to the positive injunctions of Scripture as regards public and private
morals. These injunctions lie at the base of our public law, they have been
hitherto on the whole unquestioned, even by the transgressor, but now that
a systematic and perfectly conscious effort is being made to deny their
inherent truth and validity, we must if possible seek another base of
argument. One thing is certain, amongst us the new theorists can only be
imitative; by no faintest possibility could the modern artist or poet, made
up of Keltic, Latin, and Teuton stuff, resemble
the Apollo Belvedere or the Antinous. There is no vitality in an imitation,
no propagating possibility in a fraud. The woman who sits by the wayside
will never be the nursing mother of children; the man who looks through
yellow spectacles does not see human
life as it really is. Sane human perception is finally sure of its own vindication. The railway signalman who does not know red from green ends by smashing the train.
We have, most of us, whatever our philosophy, come to agree at least
upon this, that the Power which made the human race also makes for
righteousness. We don't know why, but on the whole we do know how.
Though the Catechism, except by authoritative assertion, does not help us
on this particular point, and the Creed implies a foregone conclusion, the
fact is witnessed by the almost consentaneous agreement of thinkers, and by
the familiar proverbs of every nation, as one of the deep, undeniable
things of God. To say the Contrary is to say an insane thing, and the man
or woman who persists on saying insane things will finally do insane
deeds: and their last end is nought. If we seek health we are forced
to fall back in the last resort upon the morals of the Gospel, not only
because they fit the complicated wards of the human lock, but because after
a violent recrudescence of low art and low literature, we touch the brink
of that sphere which Shakespeare's Prospero declares "A good
nature cannot abide to be with." The human torch turns blue deprived of vital moral air. In the presence of the power of darkness the human creature surely dies.
Written in December,
1894.
far, however, was this from being the case, that five-and-twenty years later we find him fascinating two quite young girls, by whom, as they lived into extreme old age, his memory was kept green, and prolonged deep into the reign of Queen Victoria. I once had a book, in two volumes, which I gave to a learned and much gifted friend--it was entitled "Walpoliana," and came from the private library of Mary Berry.
Such are some of the benefits of living in a garden.
But it may be said that Horace Walpole lived, after all, in a suburban
garden. True. But every ten miles of that far-gone time was as a
hundred now. It took him longer to get to Arlington Street than it would
now to travel from Brighton; and the astonishing liveliness of his
intellect was really preserved under difficulties which were little less
than what one encounters here, fifty miles away, for he had no newspapers
to speak of, and was so crippled with his gout or his rheumatism, that he
doubts whether he dare sit in the damp by the River Thames, close to which
he had made this "nest for his old age." He doesn't know
whether it
is gout or rheumatism, and "hates haggling about obscurities," a sentiment which makes the modern sufferer smile lugubriously. A rose by any other name will smell as sweet. Do not therefore trouble whether your bones are stiffened by gout or rheumatism, but sit in your garden in as sunny a spot as you can find, and endeavour to keep well to the front.
And the very words draw my eyes across the old ivy-covered wall
to the great trees within whose screen once lived a noble old lady. Her
years numbered nearly a century: she had been painted by Opie; she
had lost her husband in the year previous to the battle of Waterloo, and he
and she had been intimate friends of Louis Philippe while yet he was Duc
d'Orleans. When she grew so old that she could no longer drive out to
see her neighbours, it is recorded in the village that while she was on the
one hand the most pious, the most charitable of women, she yet did not like
to fall behind the times; and ordering from London the newest and most
fashionable bonnets suited to an aged lady, wore them seated in her
splendid drawing-room, where she received her guests.
Perhaps the person who in our modern world lived most to the front
through a long life and up to its very end was the lady who was so aptly
described by Lord Houghton as a "Poet's Wife, a Poet's
Mother, herself of many poets the counsellor and friend." Mrs.
Procter's inexhaustible vitality was a wonder to behold. To a certain
extent this was true of her mother, Mrs. Basil Montagu, Carlyle's
"Beautiful Lady." But the latter was dressed like a picture of
splendid stately old age, and recalled a generation alive in 1800; while it
seemed as if Mrs. Procter could not grow old. There came a time at last
when many of the old habitués were
dead or invalided, and then her drawing-room was bright with eager,
fashionable Americans. If another decade had brought Chinese society to our
very doors, the most travelled mandarins would have found their way to that
charming room in the Albert Mansions. She would have found appropriate
words wherewith to condole with the New Zealander upon the ruins of London
Bridge. She was mentally quite devoid of prejudice, nothing in her ever
fossilized. The broad principles upon which
her life was based are such as resist the impact of years. Her religion, very silent, never seemed to take on any fashion; and her heart retained its few passions uneffaced by time, or loss, or death. When Carlyle's posthumous words attacked disrespectfully the household of her stepfather, Basil Montagu, in which she had been brought up, Mrs. Procter sprang to her filial revenge with the alertness of a young Sioux. She said to me with angry scorn, "It is dangerous to war with a dead hand." And the London world, which had read the attack with silent pain, found itself confronted with Carlyle's own letters of sixty years ago.
Of singular vitality was also the intellect of the younger of our two
great Cardinals, though more than eighty years had passed over his head. If
anyone in the world could be reasonably expected to entrench himself in the
ascertained doctrines and secular custom of the Church, it would be a man
of strictly clerical training, once a high dignitary of the Church of
England, and then for five-and-twenty years a still greater
dignitary of the Church of Rome. Added to which, a man of proverbial
moderation and
reserve, to whom the word enthusiasm would ever have seemed inapplicable. Yet he it was who caught every breath of social change, whether it were for evil or for good. He was awake to every fever of the popular pulse. I once heard him in the Pro-Cathedral give a sermon about the reading of bad books, which was enough to make the readers and hearers shake in their shoes. Be sure that he knew every current of the modern book trade. And so of the sufferings of humanity. Few there are who really understand the sting of poverty, the anguish of the downward plunge, the misery which causes suicide in Paris and in London. But Cardinal Manning did understand these things, and looked at the state of our working classes as Ruskin also looked, though with a far deeper sense of the spiritual loss.
Yet the son of a rich London merchant, college bred, and surrounded from
infancy with all the luxuries and refinements of his father's rank in
life, was the last person to have ever realized by experience what it is to
want a meal or, as happened lately to a poor woman in Paris, to
borrow the charcoal with which to put an
end to mortal existence. Cardinal Manning's heart and imagination penetrated across the gulf.
To a similar power of keeping abreast of the times the royal family of
England owe their solid place in the affections of the nation, when so many
other royal houses have gone down. And the popular sympathy has not been
won by concession. No one of the Queen's children has tucked under
his arm the umbrella of the Citizen King. No princess has been sent to
Girton, nor any prince to a school equivalent in social degree to a French
Lycée. The all-aliveness is
deeper than that, and they owe it not merely to the keen, refined intellect
of their father, but much more to the essential sympathy of their
mother's heart; which whoever reads intelligently will find rippling
through her letters, her journals, and even through the quaint telegrams
which she sends flying through her private wire. When a certain popular
sold-by-the-million-for-a-penny
periodical calls her Majesty "our own Good Gracious One," the
extreme vulgarity of the expression may be pardoned for its wonderful
aptness. The slight
damage done to "trade" in the first years of the Queen's sombre widowhood may well be pardoned for the sake of her perpetual expression, couched in vigorous and extremely individual language, of that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin. There are passages in the "Highland Journals," and notes to the "Life of the Prince Consort," which will remain firmly embedded in the rich literature of the Victorian Era, and which, if picked up in a bottle on the sea shore in any part of the dominion, would cause a finder of critical faculty to exclaim "Bless me! This must have been written by the Queen!" I remember, in particular, the account of the telegram telling of the death of the Prince Imperial; and the picture of the carriage accident in Scotland; and sundry notes in which her Majesty explains that in her very early girlhood she had preferred to keep her young lover dangling. Elizabeth "swore roundly": her dear and honourable successor does not swear, but her voice hits straight out and says exactly what she means to say. More than ever in the modern world if you speak at all you must speak plainly, and to
a certain extent it must be what people are willing to hear. When Macaulay obtained a Peerage and a fantastic sum for his "History of England," it was because for one hundred and seventy years the English nation had been educated to Whiggery. Even the Toryism of the day had turned Whig in the persons of Sir Robert Peel and Gladstone.
But with Beaconsfield the tide turned to Tory Democracy, or rather it
should be said that he himself caught the turn of the tide--caught it
instinctively, not because he was a courtier, but because he was a poet.
Can anyone doubt that the man who wrote "Lothair" would have
now been for Federation, and have so written and spoken as to make it a
self-evident return to the enchanting and revered Heptarchy? He
never would have fossilized had he lived to be a hundred years old.
It does not suffice that persons should be intellectual, popular,
entertaining, to ensure their being to the front. Browning, for instance,
was less in touch with his time than Mrs. Procter, and probably less than
Lord Tennyson, who seemed to catch instinctively the echo of popular
feelings and reflect them in his song. George Eliot certainly lived an intellectually present life; and had she not unfortunately been alienated from the religious thought of her day, she would probably have reflected more than any other writer the collective thought of England. But she had persuaded herself that the problem of historic Christianity was practically extinct. I think that her mind altered slowly on this point, and that had her life been prolonged she would have come to endorse at least the remarkable summing up of John Stuart Mill.
In France a singular change is taking place, rising up in the very last
quarter whence it could be expected, in the ranks of the novelists, who are
entering into a passionate controversy for and against the place of Christ
in history, nor can any man be said to live to the front in modern England
who ignores as "ancien Testament"
the eternal question asked at every street corner, "Who will show us
any good thing?"
He begins by painting the misery of the poor in Moscow--and more
penetrating pages have never been written. Unfortunately, the very poor are
perforce dumb creatures. Not the cotter's son, who becomes a
missionary; nor the lad who runs away to become Captain Cook; nor yet the
traditional boy with half-a-crown, who comes to London, and
sells his cat to the King of Morocco. But the real poor of the slums; or
the lowest women, or the convicts at
Portland. They are dumb; more dumb than the dog that runs after you, or the cat that rubs itself against your knee. How on earth should they speak! and if they did speak, who on earth could bear to listen? Their language is a very veil. They hide themselves in slang. Fifty years ago Harrison Ainsworth wrote a book called "Jack Sheppard." And a certain little schoolboy caught up a song from its comparatively harmless pages--for, after all, it was the fancy portrait of a criminal by a man of letters. I can see the nursery fire and the tea table, and the bread and butter spread with fine brown sugar, and hear the little impish voice singing gaily, "In the box of a 'stone-jug' I was born." The little gentleman had not the remotest conception of the reality of which he was singing, any more than his great-nephew, fifty years later, can have of the choice expression, "blooming blazes." Have we ever really taken it into our minds that the lowest class of all our fellow-creatures have a language of their own--a detritus, not a new growth? It needs a genius to divine and translate it. Count Leo Tolstoi has managed to do it. Whatever be the real
state of things in Moscow, he has so described it as to make his readers shudder at the picture, and wonder why in primitive Russia the same things should be reproduced to which we are supposed to be accustomed in Bethnal Green. Siberia and slavery, the convict prison and the knout, the gorgeous court and the communal village--all these are the properties of the Russian mise en scène. But a slum one does not expect.
And Tolstoi describes, with his accustomed power, many attempts on his
part to mend the slums. Being a noble, and a man of great worth and
reputation, he persuaded the authorities to help him. And for his pains he
got cheated and worried, and the gigantic mass of human misery loomed up
before him as big as ever. The pages read like extracts from the diary of
Lord Shaftesbury or Mr. Frederick Charrington, with a literary sprinkling
of Sir Walter Besant. The more he plunged up against the seething people,
the oftener he recoiled worsted. Something could have undoubtedly been done
by building a People's Palace in a bad part of the Russian city. But,
after all, only the decent poor would frequent its learned halls, and the
poor
who have fallen from all sense of decency go on multiplying in its immediate neighbourhood. So the Palace does real good to ten thousand people out of a rough total of three millions, who are either deplorably poor or on the immediate verge of becoming so.
Tolstoi also confesses that he was inwardly conscious of his own
benevolent kindness, and regarded himself with modest approval as a
benefactor of the poor. Till, one day, seeing that he made no real way, he
suffered a spiritual revolution. It was borne in upon him that it was
useless to try and help others, because he was himself a thief! Well, yes,
a thief, who had spent his life in thieving. His coat and his
cloak--to take the biblical expressions--and his silver
cigar-case, and the nicely bound books in his library, and the horse
he rode, to say nothing of the lands his father had left him, had all been
made by the labour of other people, and, however complicated had been the
process of stealing, stolen they were.
At the first presentation this idea is almost unthinkable. It is so
alien to all one's notions of the relation between capital and
labour, so destructive of the sacred principle of saving, of
thrift, so absolutely condemned by the first quarter of an hour's walk in Oxford Street, that the mind refuses to grasp it. After sleeping upon it for a fortnight certain considerations emerge as follows as intended by Tolstoi.
A man can scarcely make to grow by the actual work of his hands more
than he requires for his own sustenance and that of his family. And a woman
can scarcely do more in a day than the necessary cooking, washing, and
sewing required for the family. If either of them can save a surplus with
which to buy somebody else's labour, it must at first be a tiny
surplus; but if by superior cleverness this surplus is made to roll up, it
becomes little by little an engine of dire oppression, and ought to be put
down by law. It is already forbidden to use your mechanical knowledge in
certain directions. You may not race steam carriages through the Strand.
You may certainly not invent a machine with claws capable of carrying off
all the cats in the country. If, unhappily, you are a giant, even though
you were Gog and Magog, it is doubtful whether you would be allowed to
contract for the exclusive sweeping of the City streets. Neither, says
Tolstoi, ought you to construct that monster, a baby capital--the Frankenstein creation of modern days. When it is in swaddling clothes it will be only equal to opening a small shop, but as it fattens and fattens it will grow big enough to start a store, and presently, when it is quite a grown-up young capital, it will build a mill, and will buy up an army of workers, whom it will enslave almost as if they were blacks, and make them work for it, and at last, like the starling, they "can't get out." But mind well, its endings are but the natural growth of its beginnings. You must not save your first shilling with any view to personal aggrandisement. Saved capital is like the imp in the "Lay of the Last Minstrel"--as soon as it can get a voice it will be heard by the attentive ear to be shrieking "Lost, lost, lost!" It is not the offspring of honest labour--it is a devil which has taken its place.
I have tried to disentangle from Count Tolstoi's wonderfully
eloquent pages the thoughts which logically underlie them. St. Paul will
help you to make your own boots, and St. Matthew will forbid you to keep
your own coat if anybody wants it. Holy poverty, or, at least,
the holding of riches as though you had them not, has been a counsel of Christianity from the very first. But the extremely intricate mechanism of modern industrial life, and the problem of the middlemen and the sweater, require definite thought, if they are touched at all. And the fundamental idea of Tolstoi is that the very first accumulations of capital are wrong.
We are in the midst of immense forces which it would require a far more powerful brain than mine, or than, I think, Count Tolstoi's to define. But the thinkers have begun to analyze them, and the artists in merely following Ruskin have begun to paint their doings, and the thoughtful working man is crying out that they are devouring him and his brothers, and that their misdeeds must no longer be.
Of practical politics in this matter there seem to me to be but two.
Some would throw the responsibility of the use of capital upon the State,
and some have had faith in a sporadic movement, born of the popular
conscience, and directed by a more educated popular thought. It is very
difficult to see how the State could become an immense bureau, without
frightful dangers occurring from any blow to the central power. In spite of
the endless speculations of the Socialists of the type of Louis Blanc, it
is plainly Fourier who will win the day. I cannot conceive the method by
which all the complicated processes of victualling and clothing London
could be organized by a central committee, and London is only one of many
cities.
Let anyone ascend the dome of St. Paul's, or stand upon the Shropshire Wrekin, or count for one twelve hours the people passing the sculptured "Griffin" at Temple Bar, or take any other method by which the imagination may be assisted to grasp the vastness of a million units, and I think that State Socialism will be felt to be an intellectual dream. In the army and navy results are obtained by strict coercion--the welfare of the individual is quite a secondary matter. In the French navy two deserters were, not long ago, chained down in the hold; a punishment from which men never recover. A serious State Socialism would require its police and its prisons to control its deserters, and its successes would demand a co-ordination of parts in which no joint or screw or rivet could go wrong.
But the same objection does not apply to the gradual growth of a
Socialistic conscience; and this it is which is really growing, springing
up every day in the most unlikely places. The "all things in
common" of the early Christians is a doctrine regaining its place in
England after centuries of disuse. In the religious Orders
private property is deliberately laid aside; the dower of the nun is absorbed in the common fund. In the Salvation Army everything is given up--of the 9000 officers, many of whom are married couples with children, not one has retained any portion of their private property; they are sustained by a common fund, which often runs low and causes privations of a severe kind.
The old theory of nobility controlled by the mediæval Church,
provided for the redistribution of the funds accumulated by the big baron.
He had to keep the baroness and the little barons suitably, and in all
honour; he had to feed and clothe his men-at-arms. He dined
with his servants who sat below the salt; he had his chaplain and his
leech; and up to past middle life he was generally bullied by his nurse. In
all the old romances and plays a decent baron behaved as such, or otherwise
a neighbouring baron came and put an end to him.
It is only the modern capitalist who is really irresponsible. He may
plan and plot and undersell, and if he has only the shrewd wit to maintain
strict personal respectability, no one
has any claim upon him. He may be a miser in the household; he may live in a flat and marry his cook, or build a suburban palace outside the town where he has heaped up his gold, and support all the local charities. He may keep twenty servants, or hire them in relays like post-horses. He may live entirely on his yacht, like one millionaire who has made the solid earth of the civilized world too hot to hold him; or like another enormously wealthy gentleman who for some years dwelt on the high seas with his neighbour's wife, being unable by reason of his nationality to pass any divorce court.
In England, it is true, the possession of immense wealth opens the way
to nobler ambitions, but this is only because we have preserved the
tattered fragments of the old flag, and they are still worth fighting for.
The day may come when the capitalist can sit upon his pile, owning, even in
England, no social master, and when his sole object will be to keep his
equilibrium on an unstable heap of gold.
But though this picture be economically conceivable, there are other
forces at work which threaten to abolish the cormorant, even as the
mediæval baron has been practically abolished; and more rapidly, for the modern sinner is much the worst, and his redeeming points are few. Power of brain and industry he must possess, and tenacious grip; but he appeals to none of the softer feelings or nobler emotions, and if he were got rid of, history would only remember him as a curious phenomenon of trade. Nobody will write romantic memoirs of him--the ruins of his dwelling will appeal to no tourist of the future--nor will the last capitalist be borne to his grave with any tribute of human tears.
nobleman in the reign of Elizabeth, where is it now? Who sprinkles precious stones among the crowd, or wears a rapier with a jewelled hilt? The aristocrat is still made to pay for the handle to his name, but his habits are not really more luxurious than those of the rich middle class. The heaping up of wealth on to the person of man is a thing of the past; and if an example of female dress is required, look at the effigy of Queen Elizabeth in the armoury of the Tower--the long robe in which she sits her horse is literally embroidered with pearls, while our present Queen wears no jewels, save such as are affairs of State, and would no more powder her petticoats with jewels than any other lady of her dominions. Neither does the greatest gourmand in Christendom now spend upon meat and drink as did the pagan emperors of Rome.
But, on the other hand, what an immense accession of average comfort
from the effects of combination, and all secured within the last century.
What more wonderful than the post, when one can rescue the idea from
columns of statistics. I don't want to know what it brings in to
Government, or how far it helps the free
breakfast table; but I do think it extraordinary that when I walk up to a slit in an old grey wall just where four roads meet--a lonely country road where the phantoms of fourteen mail coaches drive by in the light of the moon, but where swift bicycles and wandering pedlars now constitute the principal traffic--and when I have dropped into that slit a folded paper with one, or three, or perchance five small pennies mystically attached thereto, the paper flies to Teheran or Yokohama, to the limits of Southern Tasmania, or to Vancouver, the furthest northern boundary attained by Captain Cook. It is an astounding thing, to which we have become only used by daily repetition, and within the memory of living man. The feat has been so changed in conditions that for ease and rapidity it partakes of legerdemain.
From the somewhat trite example of the penny post, let us look at a much
less familiar one--of the victualling of Paris. Such a combination as
that of the Bouillons Duval has never been seen since the world began.
Duval was the largest butcher in Paris; probably one of the largest
butchers in the world. And in 1867,
at the time of the Great Exhibition, which was the last occasion on which France shone forth in all the glory of the Second Empire, Duval imagined and carried out the giving of dinners to the hungry public, not, indeed, for a penny, but for about a shilling of English money; a dinner of several courses, with some of the delicacies of each season. A little plate of meat, a little plate of vegetables, carefully cooked, a tiny bottle of wine, a custard, or cream, and fruit. All this can be got out of the shilling. If you are fiercely hungry you might make away with two shillings at the Bouillon Duval, The waitresses are neat, respectable women, and these restaurants are in all parts of Paris. Whole vineyards are employed for the supply of their wine. In the matter of little cream cheeses alone, wagon-loads must be brought up by rail. I once went into a fisherman's cottage at St. Valery-sur-Somme, and saw a room where the fresh shrimps of the morning's catch lay two feet thick all over the floor. Such a reservoir would be needed for shrimp day at the Bouillon Duval. And it goes without saying that the habit of these dinners has so completely taken
possession of the busy business world of Paris that it is very difficult to get a seat at certain hours, and that imitation establishments are starting up all over the city.
And what is to hinder other men from doing what was done by Duval? He
was undoubtedly a genius in his way. The simplicity of his conception has
only been equalled by its success. The food has always been in the meadow,
the garden, and the sea; the hungry mouths have always been there to eat
it. Duval contrived to bring the two together in delicately balanced, ever
varying proportions, and there can be no reason why, in the near future,
every town in Europe, nay, every village in Europe, should not possess
adaptations of the Bouillon which bears his name.
Then will come a day when young children will no longer be fed on Dutch
cheeses, and when cow's milk will no longer be a luxury difficult of
attainment by the infants of the poor.
The Comte de Circourt belonged to a noble family of Lorraine; his
ancestors were not
wealthy, they possessed neither chateau nor fortified manor, but their lineage went back to the Crusades. His parents were betrothed so long ago as 1792, but the marriage project was broken by the Revolution; the bride's father and mother were imprisoned, and the bridegroom was engaged in the Royalist army, serving under his relative, General de Viomesnil. The young people did not even meet for many years, but in quieter times the engagement was renewed, and their marriage took place somewhere about 1800. Adolphe de Circourt, their eldest child, was born on the 22nd of September, 1801. The married pair were both literary in their tastes, the father read with delight Bernardin de Saint Pierre and Jean Jacques Rousseau; his wife belonged to one of the old patrician families of Besançon, and was allied to parliamentary circles and the noblesse de la robe. Her education was both serious and learned, she had artistic faculty and painted well. Thus Adolphe de Circourt and his younger brothers received their earliest education from their own father and mother, who had been left by the Revolution poorer in worldly goods than if they had been
small shop-keepers. The garden of their little cottage was laid out in fruits, vegetables, and a few flowers; it also contained a small chapel where mass was privately said before the family and certain select neighbours. Adolphe was baptized in this chapel by a proscribed priest, for the parish churches closed by the Revolution were not yet reopened, and there were penalties for celebrating the rites of religion. Their nearest neighbour was an Irish gentleman, a Chevalier de Saint-Louis, and the son of an officer who had fought at Culloden. The first work of art beheld by the little de Circourts was an excellent pastel of Charles Edward, whose pale face appeared to their infant eyes to be that of a hero and a saint! Adolphe de Circourt was a very precocious child. He read with avidity before he was four years old. A priest was called in to teach him Latin, but the child soon knew as much as the priest, and he went on devouring books, and translated a German grammar into Latin at eight years old. As all the little brothers would necessarily have to provide for themselves in the future, the family moved into Besançon in search of
education. Their maternal grandmother, Madame de Sauvagney, lived in that town, but they had not for long the comfort of her society; she died within three years, shortly after the death of her son-in-law, and her daughter soon followed her to the grave, leaving the five little boys doubly orphaned. Adolphe was then only eleven years old. They had however an uncle, M. Mareschal de Sauvagney, a former parliamentary councillor, and he proved a good guardian to his sister's sons.
Two of the orphans died in childhood; of the remaining three, Arthur was
sent to Saint Cyr, Albert went into the navy, and Adolphe was destined to a
legal and administrative career in Paris. He was warmly received by his
relative, become Marshal de Viomesnil. The Royalist party were in the
ascendant, and young de Circourt, a brilliant scholar and the most correct
of men, managed to live on an annual income of fifty pounds, until his
appointment in 1822 to a post in the Ministry of the Interior, where his
salary was £60 a year. In five years he had risen to be
sous-chef de bureau, at £180
salary, and two years later he was Chef du Cabinet
of the Ministère. But the Revolution of 1830 fell heavily on the brothers, who belonged by every association to the service of the older Bourbon. Poor as they were, Adolphe and Albert resigned their posts; Arthur remained in his regiment. Thus, scanty as are the salaries allotted to the civil servants of France, Comte Adolphe de Circourt found himself in 1830 obliged by his political conscience to renounce his own; and it must have seemed for the moment as if there were no future open for the gifted young man. But in that very same year a great good came to him.
In the winter of 1827, he had become acquainted in Paris with two
interesting Russian ladies, Madame de Klustine
(née Comtesse Tolstoi) and her
daughter. The mother was a distinguished woman of the world, but the
daughter was unusually cultured, and had already written a remarkable paper
upon Russian literature and literary men. This had appeared in the
Bibliothèque Universelle without the
author's name, and had been reproduced in several French
publications. At the time of their first acquaintance these ladies had been
painfully occupied
with the disappearance of the eldest son and brother at the Siege of Varna. His body could not be found among the dead, and the mother and sister entertained vague hopes that he might have been taken prisoner. Adolphe de Circourt used his influence in the French Foreign Office to obtain some certain news, and his brother Albert, who was then afloat on the Mediterranean, tried to discover the missing man on the Turkish littoral. At last a letter from the surviving brother came to assure them that the young man was really dead; but the vain search had naturally endeared Adolphe de Circourt to Madame de Klustine, and in 1830 she made no objection to her daughter giving herself and her modest fortune to the almost penniless young Frenchman. In the following year the mother was recalled to Russia by important affairs, and M. de Circourt took his wife to Besançon to make the acquaintance of his relations, where she got on excellently with the guardian uncle and the two aunts. For some years the wedded pair travelled in Italy, Switzerland, and France--they did not fix definitely in Paris till 1837. Then began for them a most interesting life. Madame de Circourt
opened her salon to distinguished people of all nationalities; though her husband at first would hardly believe that people would mount to an apartment on a third story, to visit people who were not particularly rich, and were attached to no public office; but he had soon to own that he was mistaken.
Under the reign of Louis Philippe the court circle was not socially
influential. The rigid piety of Queen Amélie, the strict domestic
life led at the Tuileries and at St. Cloud, the death of the Duke of
Orleans, and the anxiety felt by the King for his other sons on dangerous
service in Africa, and also the recurrent political difficulties of the
reign, left a freer field for private social ambition than might otherwise
have been possible. The de Circourts lived in the Rue do Saussayes, and the
Comtesse appears to have received her friends every day from four to six,
and also on Tuesday evenings. She was a most brilliant mistress of a
salon; she was great in little notes of
special invitation. She was always kind and helpful to distinguished
foreigners in Paris, and she took much trouble to help young and unknown
talent. For many years after her death, these
cosmo-
politan reunions continued to be remembered and talked of.
In the "Life of M. de Circourt," a series of interesting
letters from the historian Sismondi to the Comtesse are given at length.
They show Sismondi in a very human light; and of special interest is the
one dated 30th September, 1838, in which he laments the death of Madame de
Broglie, the daughter of Madame de Staël. He says that during her
lifetime he had been chilled by the intense pietistic atmosphere in which
she dwelt, and into which he could not follow her; but no sooner was she
dead than he felt how much he loved her, how deep was his respect for her
virtues, and how great his appreciation of her talents. In politics
Sismondi had been a most hopeful philosopher up to the year 1832. It is
melancholy to note in his latter letters how keenly he felt, as years went
on, the small result of the liberal principles, from which he had hoped so
much.
Sismondi, who had married an English wife (the sister of Lady Mackintosh
and Mrs. Wedgewood), was a moderate Liberal of the most thoughtful type. It
was well for him that he
did not live to see 1848 and the reaction. He died, in 1842, of a lingering illness of which the chief suffering consisted in a growing inability to take nourishment. He compared himself to Count Ugolino, repeating a verse from Dante's "Inferno," "Galandi con Sismondi et con Lanfranchi,"' and adding, "Am I then condemned to die by the same torture as Ugolino, in expiation, after the lapse of five centuries, of the crime of an ancestor?" But these pathetic words, wrung from him by suffering, are in no way the reflection of his honourable, useful, and far from unhappy life.
In 1848, Adolphe de Circourt was sent by Lamartine as ambassador to
Berlin, and the chapter of his experiences is of much political interest.
He became a personal friend of Frederick William the Fourth of Prussia, who
took delight in his society. In leaving Berlin, he refused every diplomatic
distinction, but three years later the king sent de Circourt his own
portrait painted on porcelain, executed at the famous royal manufactory,
and wrote an autograph letter assuring his friend that he need not scruple
to accept the gift, as it had cost him (the king) nothing but the
frame.
More interesting, however, to the student of history, is the chapter
relating to the Comte de Chambord, of whom de Circourt saw much at
Frohsdorf. The Parisian's wide reading and philosophic habit of mind
caused him to have no faith in revolutions, or in unproved political
theories of any kind. Not merely because he had inherited Legitimist
principles, but because France had been created, moulded, and made great by
the secular influences of the old monarchy, did Adolphe de Circourt hold to
his king. His point of view was very peculiar and very interesting. As in
religion he had always remained a sincere Catholic, of a thoughtful and
liberal type, so in politics he was a convinced Royalist in theory, but
perfectly capable of analyzing the character of a monarch. One is tempted
to say, in reading his reports of conversations with Henri Cinq, that both
the men were too reasonable to be able to descend efficiently into the
sphere of modern politics. De Circourt gives the impression that Henri held
to the White Flag not from romantic obstinacy, but from a reasoned
conviction that any attempt to reinstate him on the throne of his ancestors
would fail, unless the main principles
of historic right were genuinely conceded by France. He did not wish to be a second "Citizen King," and saw no practical good in the renewing of an experiment which had already signally failed; yet it cannot be denied that by reason of his secluded position at Frohsdorf, he was less aware than was the Comte de Circourt of the immense changes which modern science and industrial development had brought to pass among the nations of Europe. For good or for evil the old habits of mind had passed away, and were replaced by new conceptions of human life. None knew this better than the guest who came from Paris to offer his homage to an exiled king. Of the two high-minded women whose lives were so closely associated with that of the Comte de Chambord, his Italian wife and his aunt, Madame d'Angoulême, Dauphine of France, and daughter of Marie Antoinette, a life-like description is given, and they undoubtedly exercised a permanent influence on the situation.
During the first twelve years of the Second Empire, Madame de Circourt
continued to receive her friends as usual. In 1856, the year of the
Congress of Paris, her rooms were filled
with foreign diplomats, although a sad accident had already rendered her an invalid. On a summer evening she had sent her servants away to enjoy themselves at one of the fairs so popular in France, and in sealing a letter the lace strings of her cap caught fire; she was severely burnt on the left side of her neck and shoulders, and the result was a state of suffering which lasted for some eight years, and finally caused her death in 1863; but although chiefly recumbent, she never ceased to entertain her friends. She was only fifty-three when the end came, and her loss made a sad difference to her husband; he gave up his apartment in Paris, and his only home remained the charming house in its large garden called "Les Bruyères" at La Celle Saint Cloud. It was there that for many years I had the honour of well knowing the Comte Adolphe de Circourt, and of listening to that astonishing conversation which no words of mine can adequately describe.
It is my conviction that he knew more on various subjects than any man
alive. It was a jest in our family to try and find out some unlikely
subject on which to question M. de Cir-
court, in the faint hope that we might catch him tripping. Once we tried the history, lineage, morals, and manners of Prester John. Another time we expressed ignorance of some of the most intimate details of the Reformation in England; on both questions our remark was like the turning on of a golden tap. Some allusion being one day made to Marie Antoinette, M. de Circourt suddenly said, "Do you know why the royal carriage was late in starting for Varennes?" Needless to say that no one present knew why that fatal hour had been lost. He then explained, with the utmost detail, that while the carriage was being packed in the courtyard of the Tuileries, the governess of the royal children, Madame de Toursel, descending the stairs with her young charges, found Louis the Sixteenth painfully exercised in mind as to where she should sit in the great roomy carriage. It was impossible to provide for the usual etiquette, which was so completely a law in the French court that the delay of nearly an hour took place before the matter could be settled. To hear M. de Circourt's description of the scene, one would have thought he had been on duty
that night in the Palace ten years before he was born.
The universality of his knowledge was only to be matched by that of his
worldly relations. He was as intimate at the Deanery of Westminster as in
Legitimist chateaux. He knew the best people
in every capital in Europe, and was as familiar with Protestants as with
Catholics in Germany, England, Austria, and Italy. His little
drawing-room at Les Bruyères was always completely dressed in
white, and in summer the fireplace and mantel-shelf were masses of
green-growing ivy trained in pots and rising to the ceiling, while
on the walls were a few very choice portraits and mementoes of the most
remarkable people in Europe, among them several exquisite bronze medallions
by David d'Angers. It was the prettiest room imaginable, and marked
in every detail by an exquisite refinement of taste. The Comte de Circourt
possessed a very delicate and charming face, of which age had not injured
the outline. At church he had as an old man the habit of standing during
the most solemn parts of the mass, shielding his eyes with his hand, and
his
attitude was one of profound reverence. It is so that I like best to remember him. He was stricken for death while walking upon the road which crests the hill of La Celle Saint Cloud, and in sight of one of the most beautiful views in the world, looking across the valley of the Seine towards the hills of Normandy. He was found lying alone and unconscious, his hat and stick fallen by his side: whatever were his last thoughts, they were assuredly good and peaceful, as had been his whole life. He was buried in the little cemetery of La Celle Saint Cloud, by the side of his wife; and Madame de Klustine, who had attained a very great age, was within a few days laid within a neighbouring grave, having been spared all knowledge that he who had been to her as a dutiful son for fifty years, had passed away before herself. There are few men of this century of whom it can more truly be said, that in all which he renounced, and in all which he fulfilled, he thoroughly exemplified the meaning of the old proverb "Noblesse oblige."
The Montgolfiers were very wealthy, important people, who were known to
protect the clergy, and their various houses were the scene of frequent
domiciliary visits from the revolutionary authorities.
Nearly two hundred years ago President Montgolfier was a large
paper-maker in Annonay. He received that title as being at the head
of some great commercial corporation having its chief centre at Lyons. He
had nine children, and lived in patriarchal fashion among his workpeople,
and surrounded by relatives. They were all important members of that Tiers
Étât of which so little is known in England, and which on its
upper level was allied to the noblesse de la
robe. Two of President Montgolfier's sons became famous as
joint inventors of the balloon. Their names were Joseph and Etienne, and
the latter was the father of Adelaide de Montgolfier. Joseph was the eldest
of the two, and must from the first have had a lively mind, for at the age
of thirteen he ran away from the College de Tournon, setting out gallantly
for the shores of the Mediterranean, intending to live upon
shell-fish. Hunger compelled him
to stop on the way at a farm in Bas Languedoc, where he was employed to pick mulberry-leaves for the rearing of silk-worms. There his distracted parents found him and sent him back to school.
Joseph's intellectual passion was for calculation and the higher
mathematics, and a strong thread of eccentricity ran through his nature.
Arrived at manhood he went off to a sort of hermitage, where he lived by
fishing, and devoted himself to chemistry.
He made with his own hands Prussian blue and many salts needed in
manufactures, and peddled them in the Vivarais. At length his wealthy
father got him back, and set him to his natural work in the paper
fabrique; but he never ceased making
experiments and getting into divers schemes and much hot water. Meanwhile
his brother Etienne, five years younger, was trained as an architect, and,
according to the family tradition, fell upon a translation of one of Dr.
Priestley's works on air; on which he rushed to his wife, saying,
"If what this Englishman says is true respecting the relative density
and weight of warm and of cold air, we can raise a light machine
above the earth." The two brothers then laid their scientific heads together, probably much troubling the respectable President, and made the splendid invention of which the last word is as yet far from being said.
After a first successful trial at Annonay, Etienne, though so much the
youngest, was sent on a mission to Paris, where the idea was eagerly caught
up by the scientific world, then in full activity previous to the
Revolution, and he was invited to send off a balloon from the gardens of
Versailles in the presence of the king and queen, and "all the court
beside." The experiment proved a splendid success, and the brothers
were offered a patent of nobility, which they refused, unless it were first
conferred upon the old President, their father. In 1832, Mademoiselle de
Montgolfier and Madame Swanton-Belloc spent a first summer at La
Celle St. Cloud, and saw an old woman living in the village who well
remembered the fall of that balloon in a neighbouring wood. Some of these
particulars are to be found in an article written by Mademoiselle de
Montgolfier for the Biographie Universelle in 1821,
others she told to me herself.
Etienne de Montgolfier did not live to be old. He married a Mademoiselle
Brun, who in her early youth had been by some family intrigue made to take
the veil. At the age of eighteen she appealed to Rome, and Rome set her
free. She became the Madame de Montgolfier who survived her husband so many
years that she became legendary in Paris. In the forties a quite fantastic
story was set about of a workman finding a very old lady in the street, who
said she had forgotten her own name, on which the workman said politely,
"Ah, then you must be Madame de
Montgolfier," and straightway took her to her home! She was
popularly said to have died at the age of one hundred and twelve, but she
really was in all probability a century old, and there is no genuine record
of her having failed in mind. She died in 1845, and is buried in our family
grave at La Celle. Her husband predeceased her nearly half a century. He
was deeply and fatally affected by the tragic events of the French
Revolution. He only himself escaped death by the devotion of his
workpeople, who hid him in a moment of extreme danger. But his daughter
told me that what really shook
his health was the death of his dear friend Malesherbes, the defender of Louis the Sixteenth, which took place under peculiarly horrible circumstances. The son-in-law of Malesherbes, the President de Rosambo, imprisoned with him, had been taken away from his side for execution a few days before, and Malesherbes himself on the 22nd of April, 1794, was placed in the same cart as his daughter, Madame de Rosambo, and his granddaughter, Madame de Chateaubriand, and her husband. These had entreated to be allowed to share the same prison as the old man, and their wish had been granted. The young people were first guillotined, then Mme. de Rosambo, and lastly Malesherbes himself. The horror of that day, falling on the vivid, sensitive nature of Etienne de Montgolfier, was never recovered, though he survived for five years. His heart became affected, and he went in 1799 to Lyons with his family in search of medical advice. Feeling the approach of death, and "wishing to save his wife and children the sight of his death-bed," he started to return alone to Annonay, but did not reach his home alive. He died upon the way, at Serrières,
on the 2nd of August, 1799, when his little daughter was only ten years old. She survived him for eighty-one years. No stronger proof of hereditary faculty can be cited than the case of Mlle. de Montgolfier. She was so good an artist, so good a writer, and so intelligent an organizer of daily life, that she might have excelled in any special department of activity to which she had devoted herself. At eighty years of age she was still at her easel, still wielding a lively pen, and still practically keeping a very complicated household. She was tiny in person, with a face full of expression, and her most marked characteristic was an extraordinary sensibility, using the word in its highest and best sense. She seemed a human harp on which every influence of nature, and every joy and grief of others played in turn. Her musical faculty had been keen, she wrote poems and set them to music. Her "Melodies du Printemps" were well known in France, and are delicate flowers of fancy. When nearly ninety she was fond of playing one particular air upon the piano; it was a Belgian Carillon, and the touch of her frail fingers seemed to the hearers to produce a wonderful
effect of melodies in the upper air, shaken down from high towers upon the children of men.
Mlle. de Montgolfier was liberal in politics. She reminded one of the
pre-revolutionary thinkers who finally sealed with their blood their
devotion to the rights of man; and she scorned to allow the crimes of the
ultra party to make her unjust.
She preserved a profound silence about religion, but went to Mass every
Sunday. If the Gallican element had remained as an influence in French
thought, creating a party, it is my impression that she would have been
very Gallican, or perhaps a liberal Jansenist.
As it was, she said nothing, but accepted the ministrations of an old
priest who knew her well and understood her points of view, and she passed
away munie des sacraments de l'Eglise.
Ten years before her death occurred the Siege of Paris, when she absolutely
refused to leave the city, or even the house not far from the Luxembourg
where she had lived for forty years; although it was on the south side of
Paris and exposed to Prussian bombs sent from
the hills in possession of the enemy. It was not far from that orphanage in which eight children were killed in their beds. Every other family in the large dwelling-house shut their apartments and departed, but Mlle. de Montgolfier resolutely stayed on in her flat, with her maid and a young lad for the outdoor service, doubly necessary during the siege, when every pound of food had to be obtained by standing in the queue, and she merely filled a huge bath with water and put it on the landing outside her door "to quench the bombs." This old Frenchwoman of eighty spent her days for four months of that bitter winter attending an ambulance ever full of wounded soldiers brought in from the sorties, and when the siege was over it was found that Mademoiselle had torn up all her sheets and table-cloths for dressings, and had then taken her own delicate stock of body-linen, so that her maid said tearfully, "Elle ne s'est pas même gardée une seule chemise." And this extraordinary bravoure which responded to a call of duty like that of some old knight taking down his arms from the wall, was adorned in daily intercourse with a most elaborate courtesy, a perfect politeness, of
which the modern world shows no example. If it were at first artificial in the original conception of the Versailles of the seventeenth century, it had become entirely natural to French people of social rank after its adoption by three or four succeeding generations. Educated by a mother who had been young under Louis the Fifteenth, and who had occupied in the Ardêche a great provincial position--brought to Paris when still a child, and accustomed to the conversation and the manners of the choicest cosmopolitan world as the inheritrix of a scientific name--Mlle. de Montgolfier blended in her own person all the best elements of French breeding. The Fairy Godmother had allotted her every gift except that of beauty, and she seems to have early made up her mind not to marry, though suitors were not wanting. The chief interest of a most affectionate heart was her enduring friendship of sixty years with Mme. Swanton-Belloc, whose noble portrait in the Louvre enables this generation to understand the devotion she inspired. To this lady's children, and particularly to the only son, Mlle. de Montgolfier was a second mother. To the
youngest generation she became in her old age the dear "Maman Aide" they will never forget; a gracious figure of the France which has passed away.
and slippers and wooden shoes; and right in the midst of the thoroughfare, where it spreads out into a wide circle, is a monument; it is large and imposing, and on the top stands a female figure; her head is ornamented with a diadem of battlements, and her right hand rests upon a spinning-wheel; she symbolizes the good town of St. Quintin, the town of spinners; but on either side of her are bas-reliefs of a battlefield commanded by an elderly general in spectacles, and at her back, facing the upper street, is sculptured the haughty inspired head of the "Fou Furieux" Leon Gambetta.
And this was the short story told by the shoemaker.
It was the very fag-end of the siege of Paris, and the great city
could hold out no longer, and a general effort was ordered to be made of
troops fighting all round about, so that the sortie which we now call the
Battle of Buzenval, the last sortie from Paris, which took place on the
21st of January, might have a chance of success. And it nearly did have it,
for the French were uppermost on that dark winter afternoon, when they were
forced to desist by the waning day-
light from pushing on to the Prussian headquarters at Versailles. That was the sortie in which Regnier the artist was killed in his glorious youth. He was a "Prix de Rome," and all his early works announced a future of unsurpassed success. In that same famous fatal sortie marched a more elderly professor. He was then past forty, the father of many boys, and the very last human being with whom could be associated ideas of bloodshed; from him, as he sits in his velvet cap, may be heard the story of what happened at Buzenval.
But Buzenval, whenever planned, did not come off till the 21st of
January, and by some dismal mistake, or the want of some necessary
communication such as was for ever happening in that saddest war, General
Faidherbe and his Army of the North turned up at St. Quintin and met the
Germans on the 19th, two days too soon. The shoemaker said one could read
all about it in any history of the war; so one could, but not so
graphically as he told it to me in his shop in the midst of the town.
Thus:--
"The man with the spectacles managed his troops so well, that
after fighting all through
one day and part of the next, they beat; and this also perpetually happened in the side issues of the war. But then--along that northern railway connecting St. Quintin with Paris, and having started from the occupied zone encircling the besieged city, came up train after train filled with fresh, well-fed Germans. Shriek went the whistles as the men with spiked helmets got out of the carriages and formed. It seemed to the St. Quintin people as if the trains would never have done coming, and by dusk General Faidherbe was beaten back, and the town of St. Quintin was given over to pillage for over two hours."
"Pillage! It was said the Germans never pillaged!"
"Ah, well, this was an open town, and our gendarmes had fought
with the regular French troops, which, being an irregular proceeding, was
punished by pillage."
"And what did the Germans really do?" said the hearer,
looking with troubled eyes up the broad, busy street.
Said the shoemaker, "Luckily for us it was just dark, or matters
would have gone much
worse. What they did was to run into the cafés and drink the wine, and if they wanted anything, boots for instance, they carried off five or six pairs to be sure of a fit, and so on with clothes--shirts, drawers, and stockings; but it was certainly a great mercy that they rushed round for two hours in the dark, or we should have been much worse off."
"And was there a great slaughter on the battle-field
outside the town?"
"Yes, the worst was by the windmill which you can see sculptured
on the monument. Altogether I suppose there were from fifteen to twenty
thousand killed or wounded."
"Alas! mothers' sons! and all for nothing, absolutely
nothing!"
"And what became of the man in spectacles?"
"Ah! General Faidherbe is now Commander-in-chief of
the Legion of Honour, and lives at the Chancellerie in Paris; but he was so
crippled by the rheumatism he caught in all his campings out, that he goes
about in a little chair on wheels in which he pushes himself along, you
know. You can see him any day."
Perhaps this was legendary; perhaps Faidherbe did not propel himself
along the quays like the crippled artists upon the pavement, but the
shoemaker fully believes that he did. What is certain is that he lived for
nineteen years longer, bearing, as did so many thousand others, the penalty
of broken health as the result of the campaigns of 1870-71.
that men are capable of inflicting such unwarrantable pain, for what man has done man may do.
French biographical history supplies us with a companion picture to that
of Lady Rachel, and accident placed in my hands the story and the letters,
which latter are absolutely unknown in England. The
Maréchale-Duchesse de Montmorency, whose real character can
with patience be unearthed from the solemn diction of her biographer, and
the strange old French of her own letters (a French anterior to that of
Corneille and Racine, and not much later than that of the essays of
Montaigne), is a figure well worth preserving. The original biography
appears to have been published in 1684, sixteen years after her death, and
was reprinted in Belgium at the beginning of this century, in 1824. It is
probably impossible to find except on some old bookstall, and the antiquity
of the story it relates may be imaginatively gauged by the fact that its
heroine was a devoted friend of Madame de Sevigné's
grandmother. She is wrapt round in the printed pages by what may be
figuratively termed the folds of a Veil of Devotion, under which it becomes
a little difficult to realize the figure
of the adoring wife of Henri de Montmorency. Nevertheless we will try and discover what the poor young woman was really like, before age and bitter suffering had changed and chastened her almost beyond recognition.
Maria Felicia des Ursins was an Italian Princess, and the niece of Pope
Sixtus the Fifth; she was born in Rome in the year 1600, when Elizabeth was
ruling England in her old age, and the prosperous Shakespeare was adored by
the play-going people of London. Marie de Medicis had lately left
Florence for Paris, to be the second wife of Henri the Fourth; the series
of huge pictures constituting Rubens' historic rhapsody, and now on
the walls of the Louvre, show us the veritable form and face of one at
least of the principal personages in the following story; the Royal
Godmother; the Duchesse de Bracciano, mother of Felicia, was the cousin and
intimate friend of Marie de Medicis, and would have accompanied the bride
to Paris but for the expected birth of this youngest child. When the little
girl was born, the Queen was godmother by proxy, the baptism took place at
St. Peter's, and the baby was, alas! destined to the grandeur
which beseemed the cousin of royalty. When she was four years of age she was given up to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, to be brought up under that lady's care; her own mother, the Duchess of Bracciano, died three years later. Of her childhood we have a few scanty details--how she once told a lie about some apricots, and was greatly repentant, and how she nearly lost her life from an attack of small-pox; the remedies inflicted by the Florentine doctors were truly horrible, nevertheless Felicia survived them, and at thirteen a marriage was arranged for her by the Queen of France, who betrothed her to Henri, Duc de Montmorency; he was five years older than herself, and the most accomplished of all the young French nobles. He was son and grandson to the two famous Constables de Montmorency, and had indeed been destined by his father for another bride, but the Queen had her own way; she sent the Marquis de Traynel to Florence with his wife to fetch Felicia, and the young Princess was married by proxy.
As soon as the ceremony was over, her father, the Duc de Bracciano, left
secretly for Rome,
without bidding the poor little soul good-bye. He wished to spare her the pangs of a farewell of which he knew the probable duration. Of all his many children, Felicia most resembled himself. But her brothers and her eldest married sister remained with her, and also the Princess Orsina, who seems to have been a trifle older than herself.
With the festivities mingled doubtless many tears, but they were cut
short by the arrival of the French ships at Leghorn; and the young Duchess
left her native Italy for ever, and, with a suitable train of attendants,
set sail for Marseilles, where we learn that she visited several famous
churches, and in particular the neighbouring grotto in which Mary Magdalene
is said to have dwelt for many years in penitence. At Avignon she was met
by her father-in-law, the old Constable de Montmorency, who
received her most tenderly, but regretted to find her such a child. He left
her on the borders of Dauphiné, to prepare the proper cortège
for his son, and Felicia journeyed north, along the roads we know so well,
though we now rush past them with lightning speed; and she finally reached
Paris some days
before the young Duke. Marie de Medicis received her at the New Louvre, in that Pavilion du Roi which had been completed under Henri the Fourth. These noble rooms, long closed, are now shown to the public. The rest of the New Louvre is due to successive reigns. On the day when the young Duke was expected, Felicia took her station at one of the windows (doubtless the great window with the balcony upon the quay which looks across the Seine to Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle), and by her side was the Boy-King Louis the Thirteenth, just a year younger than herself. Felicia this day was full of "extraordinary gaiety." It is the only time we catch the glimpse of a smile enlivening her serious and passionate nature. Presently appeared the procession from Languedoc; a hundred of the best gentlemen of the province riding in splendid coaches, accompanying the extremely handsome young bridegroom, who was not quite twenty years of age; the bride being now in her fifteenth year. She was presented to him by the King, who said, "Here is my cousin. Behold the illustrious Italian. Is she not worthy of you? Are you not satisfied with her?" The
Queen-mother also made a pretty speech, and the Duc de Montmorency, godson to the late King (the Grand Henri), replied suitably, as did the old Constable, his father. The young couple were solemnly and suitably married at the Louvre, and the King paid all the expenses of the splendid fête, Felicia being so nearly related to his mother.
And now began the singular romance which the old-fashioned writer
of this biography, evidently a priest of the seventeenth century, finds it
difficult to tell in suitably, edifying words, although it is also
whimsically evident that his human heart profoundly sympathized with the
story he had to tell. Felicia, an exile from her family and her native
land, and possessed of a soul naturally yearning towards unusual heights of
religious devotion, received Henri de Montmorency as a special gift from
heaven, and concentrated upon him all the passionate fervour of her nature.
The Bishop of St. Pons, who had known her well at the Court, said of her
many years after, that anyone, considering her character as it appeared to
those among whom she lived, would never have supposed it possible that she
could give her love to any man, had not
the evident object of her affection been actually visible in the person of her husband, She seemed to him, and to others, predestined to a life of prayer and good works, had not Henri de Montmorency intervened. It is a little difficult to translate the good bishop's thought fully into common English, but it probably contained more than a kernel of truth. No children blessed the union, and she prayed incessantly for the heir that did not come, her husband consoling her by saying that if he had had a boy, he must have taken much more pains to save his money. Montmorency from the first regarded her with the highest esteem and admiration, but for some years he did not give her unmixed satisfaction. Her biographer treats this delicate subject with great reserve, saying that "he always loved her, but did not always love her only," and that nevertheless his distractions were only "reprehensible amusements." Felicia, under these troubled circumstances, showed unusual sense and courage for so young a wife. However much she was tormented by a natural jealousy, she exercised complete exterior self-control, and at last literally conquered by prayer "this dear
husband (époux), whom alone she loved, and whose entire affection she herself desired." And when at last Montmorency finally repented of his evil doings, he seasoned his repentance with a mild jest, saying, "My heart! if you cannot forget the past, think when you remember it, that if I had been better you would have shown less piety, for how many of your prayers would have then been left unsaid!" But he told everybody, especially the Court, that he owed his conversion to his wife, and that then, and in the future, she was the only woman for him.
It is impossible to understand the old French biographies without
recognizing the double current of human passion and intense spiritual
devotion. It meets the reader at every turn--sin and conviction of
sin; failure and redress; the woman who leads "a youth of
pleasure" not ending by "an old age of cards," but on her
knees in some convent; the man turning right round, and changing his ways
in obedience to a call. French history is full of it. In Felicia's
young days we are told that she managed to lead a quiet life in Paris, even
in the midst of "tumult and agitations." Henri was
there--"she saw him,
she possessed him, she was happy." When he was obliged to go to Languedoc to his government, she returned to Chantilly, "that she might think more freely about him and pray for his preservation." When he was seized with a contagious fever, she rushed down to Languedoc to nurse him, and here she had what she considered a distinct answer to prayer. One night, when he seemed to be sinking from hour to hour, the Duchess went into a cabinet adjacent to his room, and falling on her knees, cried, "My God! my God! wilt thou take him from me?" and hardly had the words left her lips, than an unknown voice replied very distinctly, "No, not now" (non pas pour cette fois).
The Marquis de Portés, a friend who had braved the contagious
fever, tried to prevent her re-entering the room. He believed the
Duke to be at the very moment of death, and he held out the will, probably
as a sign that all was over. She brushed past the Marquis, saying that her
husband would not die. She hushed the prayers for the dying which were
being recited round his bed, and in an hour the Duke awoke as if from a
profound sleep.
And now how shall the rest of the story be told? I pass over the many
details of the way in which Felicia dealt with the immense complicated
household of the great Seigneur. How she kept the gentlemen in check and
ruled the gentlewomen, and did constant acts of charity; and how from the
age of nineteen her health became very delicate, and how she never allowed
scandal to be talked in her presence, and how the young King said he wished
all the young Court ladies were as modest as Mme. de Montmorency. The
portrait is stippled in with many words.
And as this is a short story of the wife and not of the husband, I will
not enter into the politics of the troubled time further than to explain
their effect on the Duke's career. He continued to be Governor of
Languedoc, and she to do the social honours of that great position for some
years longer.
In 1629 she was obliged to leave him and take the long, fatiguing
journey to Paris, that she might hold her nephew, the young Prince de
Conti, at the baptismal font. The godfather was Cardinal Richelieu. After
the ceremony a great fête was held at the Hôtel de
Mont-
morency, attended by the King and all the great nobility. It was still a youthful Court; the Duchess, whose age marched with the century, was just nine-and-twenty, the King was eight-and-twenty, and her husband thirty-four.
A small war was now got up by the French king against Piedmont and
Savoy, in which Montmorency is said to have covered himself with glory by
his feats in the field; and Louis, who had accompanied his army, wrote to
the Queen-mother that Montmorency had not only won a battle, but had
wounded the Italian Prince Doria, making him prisoner, and had also taken
nineteen flags. All this so terrified Felicia, that she persuaded the King
to recall her husband from the war, and the latter promised her that he
would so organize the government of Languedoc as to live more in Paris, and
also at Chantilly, where he now began to spend great sums of money over
that splendid château which was eventually destroyed at the French
Revolution, and which in our own days was rebuilt by the Duc
d'Aumale. But vain were all these projects, evil days were coming on
the Montmorencys, concerning which I find in the old
book a most extraordinary prophecy, which at the time was kept carefully from the Duchess by all concerned.
The Duke, passing through Avignon with Marshal de Schomberg, was told of
a holy monk who when at his prayers was seen to be elevated above the
ground. There is a well-known picture in the Louvre of a similar
occurrence, in which the monk is represented as peeling carrots in the
convent kitchen while engaged meanwhile in interior prayer. The two nobles
went to the convent at Avignon, saw the monk hovering in the air, and tried
to kiss his feet. Marshal de Schomberg was allowed to perform the act of
homage, but when Montmorency approached, the feet were withdrawn from his
lips, at which he was greatly alarmed, supposing that the hindrance could
only be accounted for by some forgotten sin on his own part. But on being
interrogated by the superior of the convent, the monk replied that he could
not allow his feet to be kissed by "a man predestined so soon to
enter into the glory of the saints." The reply was carefully kept
secret from the subject of the prophecy, and remained untold until after
his death.
This journey to the South of France was the last undertaken by the
hapless man; his wife had insisted on accompanying him, but when she
reached Beziers, a town not far from Montpellier, she fell violently ill
with acute rheumatism, which was attributed to her having, when lately in
Lyons, spent her nights at her window, watching for the couriers, during
the anxieties of the Italian War. And what was worse and more alarming was
the intelligence that Gaston of Orleans, the King's rebellious
brother, had returned to France from the Spanish Netherlands. The quarrel
was a complicated one; Marie de Medicis sided with her younger son, and
Richelieu with the King; Richelieu's chief object being to lower the
influence of the great feudal nobles; and, as is well known, he succeeded
in giving to the monarchy that fatal supremacy which long afterwards was
one great source of the Revolution. It was sorely against his wife's
wish that Montmorency took the side of Gaston, and it is difficult to
understand how he can have so utterly miscalculated. Ill as she was, she
put forth her whole strength to induce him to change his mind, but in vain.
One night he pacified
her by going to bed in an adjoining room, after wishing her a tender good-night, but he presently got up softly and secretly, and went off to meet the conspirators. On another occasion after he had so deceived her, she insisted on leaving her sick-bed three times, and had herself carried into his room. to see if he were safe, and each time she found him there; his hour had not yet come; and the third time she besought him in the tenderest way to give up his designs, which she assured him "he could not carry out without causing her death of grief." He wept and caressed and cajoled her, but she saw through him only too well. No other human being was now anything to him but his wife Felicia, yet not even for her would he renounce his ambition. On the 24th of August, 1632, he came for the last time and sat by her bedside; he told her he hoped finally to reconcile Gaston with the King, talked of things he meant to do on his return, and told her that he felt sure of success. The poor woman could do nothing and could say no more; she could only weep upon her pillow, and when Henri had at last got out of the room he was so agonized that
he fainted away. He was afterwards heard praying amidst his sobs--praying for his wife's temporal welfare and for the safety of his own soul, "que mon salut eternel ne perisse point avec ma vie." And he was gone.
The end came very quickly. In one of the first engagements with the
troops of the King, Montmorency received eighteen wounds and was taken
prisoner. It may be thought it would have been happier for him if he had
died on the field of battle, and assuredly to Felicia it would have been a
far lesser shock; but the intervening weeks gave him the opportunity of
making a singularly pious and resigned end. When the
écuyer sent by his unhappy wife came
to his bedside, the surgeons were dressing his wounds, and Montmorency
said, "Tell your mistress how numerous and how severe are the wounds
you have beheld, and assure her that which I have caused to her heart is
the cruellest of all to me." And he wrote this letter with his own
hands:--
"MY HEART,--I have been singularly consoled by the sight of
Maurins. I had already written what the surgeons thought of my wounds. I
assure you that they are exactly as he will de-
scribe them to you, and the sharpest pain I feel in my unhappy condition is the thought of your grief. Arise above it for the love of me, I beseech you, since I was not killed, and God does all for the best. Adieu. Je suis tout votre.
"MONTMORENCY."
The next page contains a curious and pathetic record of how the poor
Duchess was tossed backwards and forwards in the throes of a heart and
conscience almost too delicate for this world's work. She refused to
attempt to corrupt the guards, and she gives a strange hint of wishing to
fly into Italy and let it be thought she was dead; she seems to have
imagined that if Montmorency was supposed to be a widower his life might be
saved by a royal alliance, but she knew that this would be a sinful thing
to do. Somebody suggested recourse to witchcraft, and the possible help of
the devil, but to this also Felicia turned a deaf ear; she would not risk
her husband's soul for his temporal safety. At last his friends
determined to try and save him without letting the Duchess know their ways
and means; they were foiled, because he was so weakened by the loss of
blood as to be constantly fainting away, and it was impossible
to make any plans involving personal exertion on the part of the prisoner. All this is very obscurely told, for when the biography was originally put together only fifty-two years had elapsed since the catastrophe, and it is probable that some of the people concerned were still alive. In the meantime the different members of the royal family, and many of the great nobility, tried hard to save Montmorency, and the wretched Gaston, who had been the tempter and caused all the misery, implored the clemency of the King, but in vain. Louis the Thirteenth, inspired by Richelieu, left the Duke to be tried by the parliament of Languedoc, "according to the laws of the State," which meant death. The prisoner pleaded guilty, was at once condemned, and turned every thought of his heart to the ordinances of his religion. He died with perfect courage and resignation, at the age of thirty-seven; supremely dear to one poor woman's heart, dear to his sister the Princess de Condé, dear to France, which regarded him as a national hero, and regretted by the whole of Europe in an age when Europe was more vitally united than she is now. This is his last letter to his wife:--
"MY DEAR HEART,--I bid you a last farewell with an affection
as deep as that which has always been between us. I conjure you by the
repose of my soul, which I trust will soon be in heaven, to accept this
affliction from the gentle hand of our Saviour. I have received such graces
from His goodness that you can feel that you have every subject of
consolation. Adieu once again, my dear heart. MONTMORENCY."
The intelligence that the execution had taken place was brought to
Felicia by two Capuchin fathers, who were reluctantly persuaded to precede
the government commissioners. They entered her room in profound silence and
found her sitting in a passion of tears; but no sooner did she see them
than she suddenly became quiet, saying afterwards that she felt as if
Almighty God had seized her in a firm grasp, "and as one whom another
was tightly holding to avoid any possibility of motion," and she then
and there made three resolutions, firstly to embrace the religious life as
soon as she was free to do so, secondly to follow strictly step by step
whatever appeared to be the will of God,
thirdly to make a sacrifice of every feeling of resentment; and when, as she interiorly uttered this last promise, the remembrance of a gesture of her fatal enemy Cardinal Richelieu rushed into her mind, she heard a voice saying imperiously, "Je veux que cela meure aujourd'hui."
Madame de Montmorency survived her husband for thirty-four years,
but though she was nearly sixty before she was able to carry out her desire
of taking the veil, her life was so associated with the order of the
Visitation that it is difficult to describe it in a manner interesting to
the general reader. She was for some time kept in a kind of royal
imprisonment in the Château of Moulins, where her brother the
Père des Ursins, a bare-footed Carmelite, came to visit her,
and when at last she was set free by the King's decree, she made up
her mind not to leave that town. Her brother stayed with her for two
months, and was to her an immense consolation; with his approval she
acquired a large house next door to the Convent of Saint Marie de Moulins
and obtained permission to open a door of communication. Here she kept up a
large household of retainers suitable to her rank, and
though she lived personally according to a strict religious rule, she was obliged to keep up much intercourse with the outer world. Anne of Austria wrote her a very affectionate letter, and Gaston wrote her another which cost her many bitter tears. He told her he was coming to see her, and she consented to receive him. In this she strictly obeyed her husband's dying injunctions to pardon the direct and indirect authors of his condemnation.
Ten years after her husband's death, Louis the Thirteenth passed
through Moulins, and Madame de Montmorency, who was in church with the
nuns, heard the drums and trumpets which announced the arrival of the King,
and wept at the sound, but had the self-command to continue quietly
saying her prayers. Both the King and Richelieu sent a messenger to the
woman whose earthly happiness they had ruined. She spoke to both of these,
saying to the first, "Sir, I beg of you to tell the King that I have
been much surprised that his Majesty yet remembers such an unhappy
creature, and one so unworthy of the honour." And to the second
messenger she said, "Sir, you will say if you please to your master
that my tears speak for me, and that I
am his very humble servant," but neither the King nor Richelieu dared to present themselves before her. And when on the 4th of the December of that same year she received the news of the death of Richelieu, she opened the letter and read it in perfect silence. She then folded up the letter, telling none but the Superior of the news which it contained, and as soon as the hour of recreation was ended and she had returned to her own rooms, she made up several rolls of money, which she sent round to the different churches of the town and ordered Masses to be said for the repose of her enemy's soul.
Madame de Montmorency caused a wonderfully beautiful tomb to be erected
over her husband many years after his death; and she obtained permission to
have his coffin brought from the South of France to Moulins. It was opened
in the presence of officers sent by her, who found his body embalmed and in
the same state as when first he was laid in the grave. It was borne through
France in a chariot covered with a great pall of black velvet, and drawn by
eight horses in funeral trappings. The Queen had written to the Duchess to
beg her that this should
be done very quietly, and the cortège avoided passing through any of the great towns of Languedoc; but in Limousin, one of his old friends, M. Soudheilles, seeing it approach near to one of his estates, called together the nobility of the neighbouring country, who went out in a procession to meet it. It was brought into Moulins at night and the coffin laid where the splendid monument can be seen to this day.¹
Madame de Montmorency was a seer of visions, and quite convinced that
her Henri appeared to her three separate times, to her immense consolation.
At one moment she made the sacrifice of all the letters he had ever written
to her except those dated from prison. She wished to forget the too
poignant sense of loss. She was an old woman of sixty-six when she
was called to rejoin him in perfect faith. I trust that the story of her
life-long grief, and the way in which she bore it, may not be
without some interest to the modern world.