As for Baireuth itself, and its petty Court, the picture she gives of it is exceedingly curious. Her father-in-law, the reigning Margrave, was a narrow-minded mediocrity, whose conversation ‘resembled that of a sermon read aloud for the purpose of sending the listener to sleep,’ and he had only two topics, Telemachus, and Amelot de la Houssaye’s Roman History. The Ministers, from Baron von Stein, who always said ‘yes’ to everything, to Baron von Voit, who always said ‘no,’ were not by any means an intellectual set of men. ‘Their chief amusement,’ says the Margravine, ‘was drinking from morning till night,’ and horses and cattle were all they talked about. The palace itself was shabby, decayed and dirty. ‘I was like a lamb among wolves,’ cries the poor Margravine; ‘I was settled in a strange country, at a Court which more resembled a peasant’s farm, surrounded by coarse, bad, dangerous, and tiresome people.’
Yet her esprit never deserted her. She is always clever, witty, and entertaining. Her stories about the endless squabbles over precedence are extremely amusing. The society of her day cared very little for good manners, knew, indeed, very little about them, but all questions of etiquette were of vital importance, and the Margravine herself, though she saw the shallowness of the whole system, was far too proud not to assert her rights when circumstances demanded it, as the description she gives of her visit to the Empress of Germany shows very clearly. When this meeting was first proposed, the Margravine declined positively to entertain the idea. ‘There was no precedent,’ she writes, ‘of a King’s daughter and the Empress having met, and I did not know to what rights I ought to lay claim.’ Finally, however, she is induced to consent, but she lays down three conditions for her reception:
I desired first of all that the Empress’s Court should receive me at the foot of the stairs, secondly, that she should meet me at the door of her bedroom, and, thirdly, that she should offer me an armchair to sit on.
* * * * *
They disputed all day over the conditions I had made. The two first were granted me, but all that could be obtained with respect to the third was, that the Empress would use quite a small armchair, whilst she gave me a chair.
Next day I saw this Royal personage. I own that had I been in her place I would have made all the rules of etiquette and ceremony the excuse for not being obliged to appear. The Empress was small and stout, round as a ball, very ugly, and without dignity or manner. Her mind corresponded to her body. She was terribly bigoted, and spent her whole day praying. The old and ugly are generally the Almighty’s portion. She received me trembling all over, and was so upset that she could not say a word.
After some silence I began the conversation in French. She answered me in her Austrian dialect that she could not speak in that language, and begged I would speak in German. The conversation did not last long, for the Austrian and low Saxon tongues are so different from each other that to those acquainted with only one the other is unintelligible. This is what happened to us. A third person would have laughed at our misunderstandings, for we caught only a word here and there, and had to guess the rest. The poor Empress was such a slave to etiquette that she would have thought it high treason had she spoken to me in a foreign language, though she understood French quite well.
Many other extracts might be given from this delightful book, but from the few that have been selected some idea can be formed of the vivacity and picturesqueness of the Margravine’s style. As for her character, it is very well summed up by the Princess Christian, who, while admitting that she often appears almost heartless and inconsiderate, yet claims that, ‘taken as a whole, she stands out in marked prominence among the most gifted women of the eighteenth century, not only by her mental powers, but by her goodness of heart, her self-sacrificing devotion, and true friendship.’ An interesting sequel to her Memoirs would be her correspondence with Voltaire, and it is to be hoped that we may shortly see a translation of these letters from the same accomplished pen to which we owe the present volume. [{198}]
* * * * *
Women’s Voices is an anthology of the most characteristic poems by English, Scotch and Irish women, selected and arranged by Mrs. William Sharp. ‘The idea of making this anthology,’ says Mrs. Sharp, in her preface, ‘arose primarily from the conviction that our women-poets had never been collectively represented with anything like adequate justice; that the works of many are not so widely known as they deserve to be; and that at least some fine fugitive poetry could be thus rescued from oblivion’; and Mrs. Sharp proceeds to claim that the ‘selections will further emphasise the value of women’s work in poetry for those who are already well acquainted with English Literature, and that they will convince many it is as possible to form an anthology of “pure poetry” from the writings of women as from those of men.’ It is somewhat difficult to define what ‘pure poetry’ really is, but the collection is certainly extremely interesting, extending, as it does, over nearly three centuries of our literature. It opens with Revenge, a poem by the ‘learned, virtuous, and truly noble Ladie,’ Elizabeth Carew, who published a Tragedie of Marian, the faire Queene of Iewry, in 1613, from which Revenge is taken. Then come some very pretty verses by Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, who produced a volume of poems in 1653. They are supposed to be sung by a sea-goddess, and their fantastic charm and the graceful wilfulness of their fancy are well worthy of note, as these first stanzas show:
My cabinets are oyster-shells,
In which I keep my Orient pearls;
And modest coral I do wear,
Which blushes when it touches air.On silvery waves I sit and sing,
And then the fish lie listening:
Then resting on a rocky stone
I comb my hair with fishes’ bone;The whilst Apollo with his beams
Doth dry my hair from soaking streams,
His light doth glaze the water’s face,
And make the sea my looking-glass.
Then follow Friendship’s Mystery, by ‘The Matchless Orinda,’ Mrs. Katherine Philips; A Song, by Mrs. Aphra Behn, ‘the first English woman who adopted literature as a profession’; and the Countess of Winchelsea’s Nocturnal Reverie. Wordsworth once said that, with the exception of this poem and Pope’s Windsor Forest, ‘the poetry of the period intervening between Paradise Lost and The Seasons does not contain a single new image of external nature,’ and though the statement is hardly accurate, as it leaves Gay entirely out of account, it must be admitted that the simple naturalism of Lady Winchelsea’s description is extremely remarkable. Passing on through Mrs. Sharp’s collection, we come across poems by Lady Grisell Baillie; by Jean Adams, a poor ‘sewing-maid in a Scotch manse,’ who died in the Greenock Workhouse; by Isobel Pagan, ‘an Ayrshire lucky, who kept an alehouse, and sold whiskey without a license,’ ‘and sang her own songs as a means of subsistence’; by Mrs. Thrale, Dr. Johnson’s friend; by Mrs. Hunter, the wife of the great anatomist; by the worthy Mrs. Barbauld; and by the excellent Mrs. Hannah More. Here is Miss Anna Seward, ‘called by her admirers “the Swan of Lichfield,”’ who was so angry with Dr. Darwin for plagiarising some of her verses; Lady Anne Barnard, whose Auld Robin Gray was described by Sir Walter Scott as ‘worth all the dialogues Corydon and Phyllis have together spoken from the days of Theocritus downwards’; Jean Glover, a Scottish weaver’s daughter, who ‘married a strolling player and became the best singer and actor of his troop’; Joanna Baillie, whose tedious dramas thrilled our grandfathers; Mrs. Tighe, whose Psyche was very much admired by Keats in his youthful days; Frances Kemble, Mrs. Siddons’s niece; poor L. E. L., whom Disraeli described as ‘the personification of Brompton, pink satin dress, white satin shoes, red cheeks, snub nose, and her hair à la Sappho’; the two beautiful sisters, Lady Dufferin and Mrs. Norton; Emily Bronte, whose poems are instinct with tragic power and quite terrible in their bitter intensity of passion, the fierce fire of feeling seeming almost to consume the raiment of form; Eliza Cook, a kindly, vulgar writer; George Eliot, whose poetry is too abstract, and lacks all rhythmical life; Mrs. Carlyle, who wrote much better poetry than her husband, though this is hardly high praise; and Mrs. Browning, the first really great poetess in our literature. Nor are contemporary writers forgotten. Christina Rossetti, some of whose poems are quite priceless in their beauty; Mrs. Augusta Webster, Mrs. Hamilton King, Miss Mary Robinson, Mrs. Craik; Jean Ingelow, whose sonnet on An Ancient Chess King is like an exquisitely carved gem; Mrs. Pfeiffer; Miss May Probyn, a poetess with the true lyrical impulse of song, whose work is as delicate as it is delightful; Mrs. Nesbit, a very pure and perfect artist; Miss Rosa Mulholland, Miss Katharine Tynan, Lady Charlotte Elliot, and many other well-known writers, are duly and adequately represented. On the whole, Mrs. Sharp’s collection is very pleasant reading indeed, and the extracts given from the works of living poetesses are extremely remarkable, not merely for their absolute artistic excellence, but also for the light they throw upon the spirit of modern culture.
It is not, however, by any means a complete anthology. Dame Juliana Berners is possibly too antiquated in style to be suitable to a modern audience. But where is Anne Askew, who wrote a ballad in Newgate; and where is Queen Elizabeth, whose ‘most sweet and sententious ditty’ on Mary Stuart is so highly praised by Puttenham as an example of ‘Exargasia,’ or The Gorgeous in Literature? Why is the Countess of Pembroke excluded? Sidney’s sister should surely have a place in any anthology of English verse. Where is Sidney’s niece, Lady Mary Wroth, to whom Ben Jonson dedicated The Alchemist? Where is ‘the noble ladie Diana Primrose,’ who wrote A Chain of Pearl, or a memorial of the peerless graces and heroic virtues of Queen Elizabeth, of glorious memory? Where is Mary Morpeth, the friend and admirer of Drummond of Hawthornden? Where is the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I., and where is Anne Killigrew, maid of honour to the Duchess of York? The Marchioness of Wharton, whose poems were praised by Waller; Lady Chudleigh, whose lines beginning—
Wife and servant are the same,
But only differ in the name,