No one can have glanced at Our Village, or any of the charming sketches of Miss Mitford, without having been struck by the peculiar elegance, the raciness, the simplicity of her style. It is as free in all its movements as that pet of hers, the Italian greyhound she has made so familiar to us all—as free and as graceful. A beautiful style is no singularity in our days, and there are many orders of such beauty; nevertheless, Miss Mitford has a dialect of her own. It is a style gathered from familiarity with the classic, and especially the dramatic poets, and with whatever is most terse and elegant amongst our prose writers, and yet applied with perfect ease to the simplest details of life, to the real transaction and the daily scene before her. You would think every one was talking in the same manner; it is only Miss Mitford who speaks this dialect. It is as if any one should learn Italian from the works of Petrarch or Tasso, or any other of their classics, and be able to apply the language he had thus acquired without the least restraint to the common purposes of life; every Italian would understand him, and seem to speak like him, and yet he would remain in exclusive possession of his own Tuscan speech.
Miss Mitford is one of those who have made the discovery that there is always a "California" under our feet, if we look for it. She detected, by her own independent sagacity, and before the truth was so generally known and so generally acted upon as it is at present, that what most interests in books is precisely that which is nearest to us in real life. She did not find it necessary to go to the Alps or the Pyrenees for her landscape, nor to Spain or Constantinople for her men and women; she looked down the lane that led from her own cottage-door; she saw the children in it, and the loaded hay-cart; she saw Arabia with all her tents in that gipsy encampment where the same kettle seems to swing for ever between the same three poles—nomadic race, eternally wandering and never progressing. She looked out of her own window, and within it her own home—always cheerful, or always deserving to be such, from the cheerful spirit of its owner; and she found in all these things, near and dear to her, sufficient subjects for her pencil. And very faithfully she paints the village scene—with, at least, as much fidelity to truth as a graceful womanly spirit could summon up resolution enough to practise. A light something too golden falls uniformly over the picture.
A work professing to be the Recollections of a Literary Life, and that literary life Miss Mitford's, could not fail to attract us. The subject is one of the most interesting an author could select; for, in addition to whatever charm it may acquire from personal narrative, the recollections in which it deals are in themselves thoughts, in themselves literature. They must always have this twofold interest—whatever they gain from the reminiscent, and whatever they possess themselves of sterling value. The subject is excellent, and we are persuaded that Miss Mitford is capable of doing ample justice to it; all we have to regret here is that she has not thrown herself completely and unreservedly into her subject; she never seems, indeed, quite to have determined what should be the distinct scope and purpose of her work. This apparent indecision or hesitation on her part is, we suspect, the sole cause of any disappointment which some of its readers may possibly feel.
Our authoress has been unwilling to launch herself on the full stream or current of her own personal reminiscences and feelings, to write what would be, in fact, little else than an autobiography; she has shrunk back, afraid of the charge of being too personal, too egotistical. A delicacy and sensitiveness very natural; and yet the very nature of her subject required that she should brave this charge. It was not a mere selection of extracts and quotations, accompanied by a few critical remarks, which she intended to give us. If this had been her sole, original, and specific purpose, we venture to say that it would have been, in many respects, a very different series of extracts she would have brought together. Now, if Miss Mitford had boldly recalled her own intellectual history—giving us the favourite passages of her favourite authors, as they were still living in her memory and affections, (for of that which has ceased to be admired the faintest glance is sufficient)—she would have produced a far superior work to that which lies before us. Or if, discarding altogether her own personal history, she had merely gone into her library, and, pulling down from the shelves a certain number of favourite authors, had selected from each what she most approved, accompanying her quotations with some critical and biographical notices, and arranging them in something like harmonious order, so that we should not be tossed too abruptly from one author to another of quite different age and character, she could not have failed, here also, of producing a work complete of its kind. In the first case, we should have had the unity and the interest of a continuous and personal narrative; in the second case, we should have had a higher order of selections and criticisms; the beauty of the quotation would have been the sole motive for inserting it; and her clear critical faculty would have been unbiassed by the amiable partialities of friendship.
As we cannot tell, however, with what anticipations the reader may open a book of this description, (which, in its premises, must be always more or less vague,) we are perhaps altogether wrong in supposing that he is likely to feel any disappointment whatever. There is much in it which cannot fall to interest him. But if he does experience to any degree this feeling of disappointment, it will be traceable to the simple fact we have been pointing out—the want of a settled plan or purpose in the work itself. No one knows better than Miss Mitford that, if a writer is not quite determined in the scope and object of his own book, he is pretty sure to leave a certain indistinct and unsatisfactory impression on his reader.
Having said thus much in the absence of a definite purpose, we ought to permit the authoress to explain herself upon this head. "The title of this book," she says in the preface, "gives a very imperfect idea of the contents. Perhaps it would be difficult to find a short phrase that would accurately describe a work so miscellaneous and so wayward; a work where there is far too much of personal gossip and of local scene-painting for the grave pretension of critical essays, and far too much of criticism and extract for anything approaching in the slightest degree to autobiography. The courteous reader must take it for what it is."
We hope to rank amongst "courteous readers," and will "take it for what it is." Recollections of a Literary Life was a title which promised too much; but there was no help for it: a title the book must have, and we can easily understand that, under certain circumstances, the choice of a name may be a very difficult matter. Whatever name may best become it, the book is, without doubt, full of pleasant and agreeable reading. A better companion for the summer's afternoon we could not recommend. That "personal gossip" of which the preface speaks, is written in the most charming manner imaginable; and it will be impossible, we think, for any one, however familiar with our literature, not to meet, amongst the quotations, with some which he will sincerely thank the authoress for having brought before him.
Having thus discharged our critical conscience by insisting, perhaps with a more severe impartiality than the case demanded, on the one apparent defect in the very structure and design of this book, we have now only to retrace our steps through it, pausing where the matter prompts an observation, or where it affords an apt example of the kind of interest which pervades it. And first we must revert to that "personal gossip," to which we have a decided predilection, and in which Miss Mitford pre-eminently excels: in her hands it becomes an art. Here is something about "Woodcock Lane." She is about to introduce her old favourites, Beaumont and Fletcher, and carries us first to a certain pleasant retreat where she was accustomed to read these dramatists. "I pore over them," she says, "in the silence and solitude of a certain green lane, about half a mile from home; sometimes seated on the roots of an old fantastic beech, sometimes on the trunk of a felled oak, or sometimes on the ground itself, with my back propped lazily against a rugged elm."