There is a pleasant notice in one of Mrs. Barbauld’s letters from Hampstead of two shy, Nature-loving girls, whom she was constantly encountering in her walks, and who were never so happy as when gathering wild-flowers in the woods and hedgerows, or in seeing the ‘gold-thorn’ blazing on the Heath, or in roaming about the old gravel-pits and water-courses. They were the daughters of her near neighbour, Mrs. Dorothea Baillie, widow of the Rev. James Baillie, D.D., Professor of Divinity at Glasgow, and sisters of the distinguished Dr. Matthew Baillie. But the youngest of these girls was then twenty-two years of age.
Later on (in 1800) Mrs. Barbauld writes to a friend: ‘I have received great pleasure lately from the representation of “De Montfort,” a tragedy, which you probably read a year and a half ago in a volume entitled “A Series of Plays on the Passions.” I admired it then, but little dreamed I was indebted for my entertainment to a young lady whom I visited, and who came to Mr. Barbauld’s meetings all the while with as innocent a face as if she had never written a line.’ The play, she adds, is admirably played by Mrs. Siddons and Kemble, and is finely written, with great purity of sentiment and beauty of diction, strength, and originality of character, but it is open to criticism.[155]
Six years later the young poetess (the prologue to whose tragedy had been written by the Hon. Francis North, and the epilogue by the Duchess of Devonshire) had become famous, and her home on Windmill Hill an object of pilgrimage to men of the highest intellectual reputation. Hither came Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, Rogers, and, as time moved on, succeeding representative men and women, to pay their tribute of respect and admiration to the successful poetess.
No longer shy, but simple and unaffected, and full of genuine kindness, she appears to have had the faculty of attaching those whom she attracted—notably Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott, whose appreciation of her as a poetess led to life-long personal friendship.
It is noteworthy that on the first occasion of the great novelist, whom a clever critical correspondent of mine calls the ‘greatest second-rate man the world ever saw,’ coming to London in the summer of 1806, the year in which Miss Baillie’s mother died, one of his earliest visits was to his gifted fellow-countrywoman—for the little manse, near Bothwell Brig, in the valley of the Clyde, where her father was minister, was Joanna Baillie’s birthplace—a visit that led to many others on both sides, and a friendship, as I have said, that lasted through life. She tells us that at her first meeting with him she was disappointed, so different was he in appearance from the ideal bard of the ‘Lay,’ which her own poetical mind had imagined. She had pictured an ‘ideal elegance and refinement of feature in the poet,’ ‘but found comfort in looking at the benevolence and shrewdness in the rough-hewn, homely face of her great compatriot; and in the thought that were she in a crowd, and at a loss what to do, she should have fixed upon that face among a thousand, as the sure index of a brave kind nature that would, and could, help her in her strait.’ Yet before they had talked long, she saw in the expressive play of his countenance far more, even of elegance and refinement, than she had missed in its mere lines. Henceforth she and her brother, Dr. Matthew Baillie, were amongst the most honoured friends of Sir Walter. The acquaintance on both sides ripened into the most affectionate regard.
Amongst Joanna Baillie’s correspondence, Sir Walter’s letters are about the most interesting. One of them has for the purposes of these pages a twofold interest, not only as showing his admiration of the poetess, but as illustrating the evil reputation of the neighbourhood of Hampstead, and the dangers to which foot-passengers were liable, even at that time. The letter is dated 1811, and was written on the appearance of a new volume of Joanna Baillie’s ‘Plays on the Passions,’ one of them being the passion of Fear, in which appear the lines set to music by Bishop, with which we are all familiar, ‘The Chough and Crow.’
‘Fear, the most dramatic passion you have hitherto touched, because capable of being drawn to the most extreme paroxysm on the stage. In Ozra you have all the gradations from timidity excited by strong and irritable imagination to the extremity which altogether unhinges the understanding. The most dreadful fright I ever had in my life (being neither constitutionally timid nor in the way of being exposed to real danger) was in returning from Hampstead the day which I spent so pleasantly with you. Although the evening was nearly closed, I foolishly chose to take the short-cut through the fields, and in the enclosure where the path leads by a thick and high hedge with several gaps. In it, however, did I meet with one of your thoroughpaced London ruffians—at least, judging from the squalid and jail-bird appearance and blackguard expression of countenance. Like the man who met the Devil, I had nothing to say to him, if he had nothing to say to me; but I could not help looking back to watch the movements of such a suspicious figure, and, to my great uneasiness, saw him creep through the hedge on my left hand. I instantly went to the first gap to watch his motions, and saw him stooping, as I thought, either to pick up a bundle or to speak to someone lying in the ditch. Immediately after he came cowering back, up the opposite side of the hedge, as returning to me under cover of it. I saw no weapon he had except a stick, but, as I moved on to gain the stile which was to let me into the free field, with the idea of a wretch springing upon me from the cover at every step I took, I assure you I would not wish the worst enemy I ever had to undergo such a feeling as I had for about five minutes. My fancy made him of that description which usually combines murder with plunder; and though I was armed with a stout stick, and a very formidable knife, which when open becomes a sort of shene-dhu, or dagger, I confess my sensations, though those of a man resolved not to die like a sheep, were vilely short of heroism. So much so that, when I jumped over the stile, a sliver of the wood ran a third of an inch between my nail and the flesh without my feeling the pain, or being sensible that such a thing had occurred. However, I saw my man no more, and it is astonishing how my spirits rose when I got into the open field; and when I reached the top of the little mount, and all the bells of London’ (it was probably on a Sunday evening) ‘began to jingle at once, I thought I had never heard anything so delightful in my life, so rapid are the alternations of our feelings.’[156]
Writing twelve months later, Crabb Robinson relates how, on a morning of May, 1812, meeting Wordsworth in the Oxford Road (now Oxford Street), and getting into the fields, he walked thence with him to Hampstead, where they met Joanna Baillie, whom he thus describes:
‘She is small in figure, and her gait is mean and shuffling, but her manners are those of a well-bred woman. She has none of the unpleasant airs too common to literary ladies. Her conversation is sensible. She possesses apparently considerable information, is prompt without being forward, and has a fixed judgment of her own, without any disposition to force it upon others. Wordsworth said of her, with warmth: “If I had to present anyone to a foreigner as a model English gentlewoman, it would be Joanna Baillie.”’