The poor Sylph seems to have had rather a hard time of it after the death of the Honourable Agmondesham, who relished his wife’s vagaries so little, or feared them so much, that he left the bulk of his estate to his nephew, a respectable young man with no unearthly qualities. The heir, however, behaved generously to his widowed aunt, giving her an income large enough to permit her to live with comfort, and to keep her coach. Miss Carter was decidedly of the opinion that Mr. Vesey made such a “detestable” will because he was lacking in sound religious principles, and she expressed in plain terms her displeasure with her friend for mourning persistently over the loss of one who “so little deserved her tears.” But the Sylph, lonely, middle-aged, and deaf, realized perhaps that her little day was over. Mrs. Montagu’s profuse hospitality had supplanted “the biscuit’s ample sacrifice.” People no longer cared to sit back to back, talking platitudes through long and hungry evenings. The “innocent irregularity” deepened into melancholy, into madness; and the Sylph, a piteous mockery of her old sweet foolish self, faded away, dissolving like Niobe in tears.
It may be noted that the mission of the literary lady throughout all these happy years was to elevate and refine. Her attitude towards matters of the intellect was one of obtrusive humility. It is recorded that “an accomplished and elegant female writer” (the name, alas! withheld) requested Sir William Pepys to mark all the passages in Madame de Staël’s works which he considered “above her comprehension.” Sir William “with ready wit” declined this invidious task; but agreed to mark all he deemed “worthy of her attention.” We hardly know what to admire the most in a story like this;—the lady’s modesty, Sir William’s tact, or the revelation it affords of infinite leisure. When we remember the relentless copiousness of Madame de Staël’s books, we wonder if the amiable annotator lived long enough to finish his task.
In matters of morality, however, the female pen was held to be a bulwark of Great Britain. The ambition to prove that—albeit a woman—one may be on terms of literary intimacy with the seven deadly sins (“Je ne suis qu’un pauvre diable de perruquier, mais je ne crois pas en Dieu plus que les autres”) had not yet dawned upon the feminine horizon. The literary lady accepted with enthusiasm the limitations of her sex, and turned them to practical account; she laid with them the foundations of her fame. Mrs. Montagu, an astute woman of the world, recognized in what we should now call an enfeebling propriety her most valuable asset. It sanctified her attack upon Voltaire, it enabled her to snub Dr. Johnson, and it made her, in the opinion of her friends, the natural and worthy opponent of Lord Chesterfield. She was entreated to come to the rescue of British morality by denouncing that nobleman’s “profligate” letters; and we find the Rev. Montagu Pennington lamenting years afterwards her refusal “to apply her wit and genius to counteract the mischief which Lord Chesterfield’s volumes had done.”
Miss Hannah More’s dazzling renown rested on the same solid support. She was so strong morally that to have cavilled at her intellectual feebleness would have been deemed profane. Her advice (she spent the best part of eighty-eight years in offering it) was so estimable that its general inadequacy was never ascertained. Rich people begged her to advise the poor. Great people begged her to advise the humble. Satisfied people begged her to advise the discontented. Sir William Pepys wrote to her in 1792, imploring her to avert from England the threatened dangers of radicalism and a division of land by writing a dialogue “between two persons of the lowest order,” in which should be set forth the discomforts of land ownership, and the advantages of labouring for small wages at trades. This simple and childlike scheme would, in Sir William’s opinion, go far towards making English workmen contented with their lot, and might eventually save the country from the terrible bloodshed of France. Was ever higher tribute paid to sustained and triumphant propriety? Look at Mary Wollstonecraft vindicating the rights of woman in sordid poverty, in tears and shame; and look at Hannah More, an object of pious pilgrimage at Cowslip Green. Her sisters were awestruck at finding themselves the guardians of such preëminence. Miss Seward eloquently addressed them as
sweet satellites that gently bear
Your lesser radiance round this beamy star;
and, being the humblest sisters ever known, they seemed to have liked the appellation. They guarded their luminary from common contact with mankind; they spoke of her as “she” (like Mr. Rider Haggard’s heroine), and they explained to visitors how good and great she was, and what a condescension it would be on her part to see them, when two peeresses and a bishop had been turned away the day before. “It is an exquisite pleasure,” wrote Miss Carter enthusiastically, “to find distinguished talents and sublime virtue placed in such an advantageous situation”; and the modern reader is reminded against his will of the lively old actress who sighed out to the painter Mulready her unavailing regrets over a misspent life. “Ah, Mulready, if I had only been virtuous, it would have been pounds and pounds in my pocket.”
“Harmonious virgins,” sneered Horace Walpole, “whose thoughts and phrases are like their gowns, old remnants cut and turned”; and it is painful to know that in these ribald words he is alluding to the Swan of Lichfield, and to the “glowing daughter of Apollo,” Miss Helen Maria Williams. The Swan probably never did have her gowns cut and turned, for she was a well-to-do lady with an income of four hundred pounds; and she lived very grandly in the bishop’s palace at Lichfield, where her father (“an angel, but an ass,” according to Coleridge) had been for many years a canon. But Apollo having, after the fashion of gods, bequeathed nothing to his glowing daughter but the gift of song, Miss Williams might occasionally have been glad of a gown to turn. Her juvenile poem “Edwin and Eltruda” enriched her in fame only; but “Peru,” being published by subscription (blessed days when friends could be turned into subscribers!), must have been fairly remunerative; and we hear of its author in London giving “literary breakfasts,” a popular but depressing form of entertainment. If ever literature be “alien to the natural man,” it is at the breakfast hour. Miss Williams subsequently went to Paris, and became an ardent revolutionist, greatly to the distress of poor Miss Seward, whose enthusiasm for the cause of freedom had suffered a decline, and who kept imploring her friend to come home. “Fly, my dear Helen, that land of carnage!” she wrote beseechingly. But Helen couldn’t fly, being then imprisoned by the ungrateful revolutionists, who seemed unable, or unwilling, to distinguish friends from foes. She had moreover by that time allied herself to Mr. John Hurford Stone, a gentleman of the strictest religious views, but without moral prejudices, who abandoned his lawful wife for Apollo’s offspring, and who, as a consequence, preferred living on the Continent. Therefore Miss Williams fell forever from the bright circle of literary stars; and Lady Morgan, who met her years afterwards in Paris, had nothing more interesting to record than that she had grown “immensely fat,”—an unpoetic and unworthy thing to do. “For when corpulence, which is a gift of evil, cometh upon age, then are vanished the days of romance and of stirring deeds.”
Yet sentiment, if not romance, clung illusively to the literary lady, even when she surrendered nothing to persuasion. Strange shadowy stories of courtship are told with pathetic simplicity. Miss Carter, “when she had nearly attained the mature age of thirty,” was wooed by a nameless gentleman of unexceptionable character, whom “she was induced eventually to refuse, in consequence of his having written some verses, of the nature of which she disapproved.” Whether these verses were improper (perish the thought!) or merely ill-advised, we shall never know; but as the rejected suitor “expressed ever after a strong sense of Miss Carter’s handsome behaviour to him,” there seems to have been on his part something perilously akin to acquiescence. “I wonder,” says the wise Elizabeth Bennet, “who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love.” It is a pleasure to turn from such uncertainties to the firm outlines and providential issues of Miss Hannah More’s early attachment. When the wealthy Mr. Turner, who had wooed and won the lady, manifested an unworthy reluctance to marry her, she consented to receive, in lieu of his heart and hand, an income of two hundred pounds a year, which enabled her to give up teaching, and commence author at the age of twenty-two. The wedding day had been fixed, the wedding dress was made, but the wedding bells were never rung, and the couple—like the lovers in the story-books—lived happily ever after. The only measure of retaliation which Miss More permitted herself was to send Mr. Turner a copy of every book and of every tract she wrote; while that gentleman was often heard to say, when the tracts came thick and fast, that Providence had overruled his desire to make so admirable a lady his wife, because she was destined for higher things.
It was reserved for the Lichfield Swan to work the miracle of miracles, and rob love of inconstancy. She was but eighteen when she inspired a passion “as fervent as it was lasting” in the breast of Colonel Taylor, mentioned by discreet biographers as Colonel T. The young man being without income, Mr. Seward, who was not altogether an ass, declined the alliance; and when, four years later, a timely inheritance permitted a renewal of the suit, Miss Seward had wearied of her lover. Colonel Taylor accordingly married another young woman; but the remembrance of the Swan, and an unfortunate habit he had acquired of openly bewailing her loss, “clouded with gloom the first years of their married life.” The patient Mrs. Taylor became in time so deeply interested in the object of her husband’s devotion that she opened a correspondence with Miss Seward,—who was the champion letter-writer of England,—repeatedly sought to make her acquaintance, and “with melancholy enthusiasm was induced to invest her with all the charms imagination could devise, or which had been lavished upon her by description.”