“Our feelings are not given us for our ornament, but to spur us on to right action. Compassion, for instance, is not impressed upon the human heart, only to adorn the fair face with tears, and to give an agreeable languor to the eyes. It is designed to excite our utmost endeavour to relieve the sufferer.”
Was it really worth while to say this even in 1775? Is it possible that young ladies were then in danger of thinking that the office of compassion was to “adorn a face with tears”? and did they try to be sorry for the poor and sick, only that their bright eyes might be softened into languor? Yet we know that Mrs. Chapone’s little volume was held to have rendered signal service to society. It has the honour to be one of the books which Miss Lydia Languish lays out ostentatiously on her table—in company with Fordyce’s sermons—when she anticipates a visit from Mrs. Malaprop and Sir Anthony. Some halting verses of the period exalt it as the beacon light of youth; and Mrs. Delany, writing to her six-year-old niece, counsels the little girl to read the “Letters” once a year until she is grown up. “They speak to the heart as well as to the head,” she assures the poor infant; “and I know no book (next to the Bible) more entertaining and edifying.”
Mrs. Montagu gave dinners. The real and very solid foundation of her reputation was the admirable manner in which she fed her lions. A mysterious halo of intellectuality surrounded this excellent hostess. “The female Mæcenas of Hill Street,” Hannah More elegantly termed her, adding,—to prove that she herself was not unduly influenced by gross food and drink,—“But what are baubles, when speaking of a Montagu!” Dr. Johnson praised her conversation,—especially when he wanted to tease jealous Mrs. Thrale,—but sternly discountenanced her attempts at authorship. When Sir Joshua Reynolds observed that the “Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare” did its authoress honour, Dr. Johnson retorted contemptuously: “It does her honour, but it would do honour to nobody else,”—which strikes me as a singularly unpleasant thing to hear said about one’s literary masterpiece. Like the fabled Caliph who stood by the Sultan’s throne, translating the flowers of Persian speech into comprehensible and unflattering truths, so Dr. Johnson stands undeceived in this pleasant half-century of pretence, translating its ornate nonsense into language we can too readily understand.
But how comfortable and how comforting the pretence must have been, and how kindly tolerant all the pretenders were to one another! If, in those happy days, you wrote an essay on “The Harmony of Numbers and Versification,” you unhesitatingly asked your friends to come and have it read aloud to them; and your friends—instead of leaving town next day—came, and listened, and called it a “Miltonic evening.” If, like Mrs. Montagu, you had a taste for letter-writing, you filled up innumerable sheets with such breathless egotisms as this:—
“I come, a happy guest, to the general feast Nature spreads for all her children, my spirits dance in the sunbeams, or take a sweet repose in the shade. I rejoice in the grand chorus of the day, and feel content in the silent serene of night, while I listen to the morning hymn of the whole animal creation, I recollect how beautiful it is, sum’d up in the works of our great poet, Milton, every rivulet murmurs in poetical cadence, and to the melody of the nightingale I add the harmonious verses she has inspired in many languages.”
So highly were these rhapsodies appreciated, and so far were correspondents from demanding either coherence or punctuation, that four volumes of Mrs. Montagu’s letters were published after her death; and we find Miss More praising Mrs. Boscawen because she approached this standard of excellence: “Mrs. Palk tells me her letters are hardly inferior to Mrs. Montagu’s.”
Those were the days to live in, and sensible people made haste to be born in time. The close of the eighteenth century saw quiet country families tearing the freshly published “Mysteries of Udolpho” into a dozen parts, because no one could wait his turn to read the book. All England held its breath while Emily explored the haunted chambers of her prison-house. The beginning of the nineteenth century found Mrs. Opie enthroned as a peerless novel-writer, and the “Edinburgh Review” praising “Adeline Mowbray, or Mother and Daughter,” as the most pathetic story in the English language. Indeed, one sensitive gentleman wrote to its authoress that he had lain awake all night, bathed in tears, after reading it. About this time, too, we begin to hear “the mellow tones of Felicia Hemans,” whom Christopher North reverently admired; and who, we are assured, found her way to all hearts that were open to “the holy sympathies of religion and virtue.” Murray’s heart was so open that he paid two hundred guineas for the “Vespers of Palermo”; and Miss Edgeworth considered that the “Siege of Valencia” contained the most beautiful poetry she had read for years. Finally Miss Jane Porter looms darkly on the horizon, with novels five volumes long. All the Porters worked on a heroic scale. Anna Maria’s stories were more interminable than Jane’s; and their brother Robert painted on a single canvas, “The Storming of Seringapatam,” seven hundred life-sized figures.
“Thaddeus of Warsaw” and “The Scottish Chiefs” were books familiar to our infancy. They stretched vastly and vaguely over many tender years,—stories after the order of Melchisedec, without beginning and without end. But when our grandmothers were young, and my chosen period had still years to run, they were read on two continents, and in many tongues. The King of Würtemberg was so pleased with “Thaddeus” that he made Miss Porter a “lady of the Chapter of St. Joachim,”—which sounds both imposing and mysterious. The badge of the order was a gold cross; and this unusual decoration, coupled with the lady’s habit of draping herself in flowing veils like one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines, so confused an honest British public that it was deemed necessary to explain to agitated Protestants that Miss Porter had no Popish proclivities, and must not be mistaken for a nun. In our own country her novels were exceedingly popular, and her American admirers sent her a rose-wood armchair in token of appreciation and esteem. It is possible she would have preferred a royalty on her books; but the armchair was graciously accepted, and a pen-and-ink sketch in an album of celebrities represents Miss Porter seated majestically on its cushions, “in the quiet and ladylike occupation of taking a cup of coffee.”
And so my happy half-century draws to its appointed end. A new era, cold, critical, contentious, deprecated the old genial absurdities, chilled the old sentimental outpourings, questioned the old profitable pietism. Unfortunates, born a hundred years too late, look back with wistful eyes upon the golden age which they feel themselves qualified to adorn.