'It might perhaps be a weakness,' says the Friend, long after recalling this event, 'but I must confess how greatly I was pleased at the time.' No wonder she was pleased that the great wizard should have liked her novel.
It would be impossible to attempt a serious critique of Mrs. Opie's stories. They are artless, graceful, written with an innocent good faith which disarms criticism. That Southey, Sydney Smith, and Mackintosh should also have read them and praised them may, as I have said, prove as much for the personal charm of the writer, and her warm sunshine of pleasant companionship, as for the books themselves. They seem to have run through many editions, and to have received no little encouragement. Morality and sensation alternate in her pages. Monsters abound there. They hire young men to act base parts, to hold villainous conversations which the husbands are intended to overhear. They plot and scheme to ruin the fair fame and domestic happiness of the charming heroines, but they are justly punished, and their plots are defeated. One villain, on his way to an appointment with a married woman, receives so severe a blow upon the head from her brother, that he dies in agonies of fruitless remorse. Another, who incautiously boasts aloud his deep-laid scheme against Constantia's reputation in the dark recesses of a stage-coach, is unexpectedly seized by the arm. A stranger in the corner, whom he had not noticed, was no other than the baronet whom Constantia has loved all along. The dawn breaks in brightly, shining on the stranger's face: baffled, disgraced, the wicked schemer leaves the coach at the very next stage, and Constantia's happiness is ensured by a brilliant marriage with the man she loves. 'Lucy is the dark sky,' cries another lovely heroine, 'but you, my lord, and my smiling children, these are the rainbow that illumines it; and who would look at the gloom that see the many tinted Iris? not I, indeed.' 'Valentine's Eve,' from which this is quoted, was published after John Opie's death. So was a novel called 'Temper,' and the 'Tales of Real Life.' Mrs. Opie, however, gave up writing novels when she joined the Society of Friends.
For some years past, Mrs. Opie had been thrown more and more in the company of a very noble and remarkable race of men and women living quietly in their beautiful homes in the neighbourhood of Norwich, but of an influence daily growing—handsome people, prosperous, generous, with a sort of natural Priesthood belonging to them. Scorning to live for themselves alone, the Gurneys were the dispensers and originators of a hundred useful and benevolent enterprises in Norwich and elsewhere. They were Quakers, and merchants, and bankers. How much of their strength lay in their wealth and prosperity, how much in their enthusiasm, their high spirits, voluntarily curbed, their natural instinct both to lead and to protect, it would be idle to discuss. It is always difficult for people who believe in the all-importance of the present to judge of others, whose firm creed is that the present is nothing as compared to the future. Chief among this remarkable family was Elizabeth Gurney, the wife of Josiah Fry, the mother of many children, and the good angel, indeed, of the unhappy captives of those barbarous days, prisoners, to whose utter gloom and misery she brought some rays of hope. There are few figures more striking than that of the noble Quaker lady starting on her generous mission, comforting the children, easing the chains of the captives. No domineering Jellyby, but a motherly, deep-hearted woman; shy, and yet from her very timidity gaining an influence, which less sensitive natures often fail to win. One likes to imagine the dignified sweet face coming in—the comforting Friend in the quiet garb of the Quaker woman standing at the gates of those terrible places, bidding the despairing prisoners be of good hope.
Elizabeth Fry's whole life was a mission of love and help to others; her brothers and her many relations heartily joined and assisted her in many plans and efforts.
For Joseph John Gurney, the head of the Norwich family, Mrs. Opie is said to have had a feeling amounting to more than friendship. Be this as it may, it is no wonder that so warm-hearted and impressionable a woman should have been influenced by the calm goodness of the friends with whom she was now thrown. It is evident enough, nor does she attempt to conceal the fact, that the admiration and interest she feels for John Joseph Gurney are very deep motive powers. There comes a time in most lives, especially in the lives of women, when all the habits and certainties of youth have passed away, when life has to be built up again upon the foundations indeed of the past, the friendships, the memories, the habits of early life, but with new places and things to absorb and to interest, new hearts to love. And one day people wake up to find that the friends of their choice have become their home. People are stranded perhaps seeking their share in life's allowance, and suddenly they come upon something, with all the charm which belongs to deliberate choice, as well as that of natural affinity. How well one can realise the extraordinary comfort that Amelia Opie must have found in the kind friends and neighbours with whom she was now thrown! Her father was a very old man, dying slowly by inches. Her own life of struggle, animation, intelligence, was over, as she imagined, for ever. No wonder if for a time she was carried away, if she forgot her own nature, her own imperative necessities, in sympathy with this new revelation. Here was a new existence, here was a Living Church ready to draw her within its saving walls. John Joseph Gurney must have been a man of extraordinary personal influence. For a long time past he had been writing to her seriously. At last, to the surprise of the world, though not without long deliberation and her father's full approval, she joined the Society of Friends, put on their dress, and adopted their peculiar phraseology. People were surprised at the time, but I think it would have been still more surprising if she had not joined them. J. J. Gurney, in one of his letters, somewhat magnificently describes Mrs. Opie as offering up her many talents and accomplishments a brilliant sacrifice to her new-found persuasions. 'Illustrations of Lying,' moral anecdotes on the borderland of imagination, are all that she is henceforth allowed. 'I am bound in a degree not to invent a story, because when I became a Friend it was required of me not to do so,' she writes to Miss Mitford, who had asked her to contribute to an annual. Miss Mitford's description of Mrs. Opie, 'Quakerised all over, and calling Mr. Haydon 'Friend Benjamin,' is amusing enough; and so also is the account of the visiting card she had printed after she became a Quaker, with 'Amelia Opie,' without any prefix, as is the Quaker way; also, as is not their way, with a wreath of embossed pink roses surrounding the name. There is an account of Mrs. Opie published in the 'Edinburgh Review,' in a delightful article entitled the 'Worthies of Norwich,' which brings one almost into her very presence.
Amelia Opie at the end of the last century and Amelia Opie in the garb and with the speech of a member of the Society of Friends sounds like two separate personages, but no one who recollects the gay little songs which at seventy she used to sing with lively gesture, the fragments of drama to which, with the zest of an innate actress, she occasionally treated her young friends, or the elaborate faultlessness of her appearance—the shining folds and long train of her pale satin draperies, the high, transparent cap, the crisp fichu crossed over the breast, which set off to advantage the charming little plump figure with its rounded lines—could fail to recognise the same characteristics which sparkled about the wearer of the pink calico domino in which she frolicked incognito 'till she was tired' at a ball given by the Duke of Wellington in 1814, or of the eight blue feathers which crowned the waving tresses of her flaxen hair as a bride.
Doctor Alderson died in October 1825, and Mrs. Opie was left alone. She was very forlorn when her father died. She had no close ties to carry her on peacefully from middle age to the end of life. The great break had come; she was miserable, and, as mourners do, she falls upon herself and beats her breast. All through these sad years her friends at Northrepps and at Earlham were her chief help and consolation. As time passed her deep sorrow was calmed, when peaceful memories had succeeded to the keen anguish of her good old father's loss. She must have suffered deeply; she tried hard to be brave, but her courage failed her at times: she tried hard to do her duty; and her kindness and charity were unfailing, for she was herself still, although so unhappy. Her journals are pathetic in their humility and self-reproaches for imaginary omissions. She is lonely; out of heart, out of hope. 'I am so dissatisfied with myself that I hardly dare ask or expect a blessing upon my labours,' she says; and long lists of kind and fatiguing offices, of visits to sick people and poor people, to workhouses and prisons, are interspersed with expressions of self-blame.
The writer can remember as a child speculating as she watched the straight-cut figure of a Quaker lady standing in the deep window of an old mansion that overlooked the Luxembourg Gardens at Paris, with all their perfume and blooming scent of lilac and sweet echoes of children, while the quiet figure stood looking down upon it all from—to a child—such an immeasurable distance. As one grows older one becomes more used to garbs of different fashions and cut, and one can believe in present sunlight and the scent of flowering trees and the happy sound of children's voices going straight to living hearts beneath their several disguises, and Mrs. Opie, notwithstanding her Quaker dress, loved bright colours and gay sunlight. She was one of those who gladly made life happy for others, who naturally turned to bright and happy things herself. When at last she began to recover from the blow which had fallen so heavily upon her she went from Norwich to the Lakes and Fells for refreshment, and then to Cornwall, and among its green seas and softly clothed cliffs she found good friends (as most people do who go to that kind and hospitable county), and her husband's relations, who welcomed her kindly. As she recovered by degrees she began to see something of her old companions. She went to London to attend the May meetings of the Society, and I heard an anecdote not long ago which must have occurred on some one of these later visits there.
One day when some people were sitting at breakfast at Samuel Rogers's, and talking as people do who belong to the agreeable classes, the conversation happened to turn upon the affection of a father for his only child, when an elderly lady who had been sitting at the table, and who was remarkable for her Quaker dress, her frills and spotless folds, her calm and striking appearance, started up suddenly, burst into a passion of tears, and had to be led sobbing out of the room. She did not return, and the lady who remembers the incident, herself a young bride at the time, told me it made all the more impression upon her at the time because she was told that the Quaker lady was Mrs. Opie. My friend was just beginning her life. Mrs. Opie must have been ending hers. It is not often that women, when youth is long past, shed sudden and passionate tears of mere emotion, nor perhaps would a Quaker, trained from early childhood to calm moods and calm expressions, have been so suddenly overpoweringly affected; but Mrs. Opie was no born daughter of the community, she was excitable and impulsive to the last. I have heard a lady who knew her well describe her, late in life, laughing heartily and impetuously thrusting a somewhat starched-up Friend into a deep arm-chair exclaiming, 'I will hurl thee into the bottomless pit.'
X.