Nowhere in England, nor even in Ireland or Scotland, could the life pictured in this book be paralleled. Feudalism has lingered, but not in delicate or decorative ways: in the Brittany of which Miss Sedgwick tells us, the beauty, the generous abundance, and the sincere brotherliness of life almost overcome one's distaste for the feudal system which formed its basis. The lady whose childhood is shown us was of a noble Breton family; her father seems to have been the only Republican she knew among the company of Royalists; life was still so ordered that the country people, coming to Mass, would bow to the lord and lady of the manor, after paying their respects to the altar. Yet one is left with a sense of fraternity as genuine as that one feels in reading Chaucer, as the story witnesses:
One peasant, I remember, Paul Simur by name, of whom my father was specially fond, was so dirty and unwashed that a sort of mark of dirt had formed upon his features. One day, at a hunting-party, papa called to Paul to come and sit beside him, and the other huntsmen, with singular bad taste, began to make fun of Paul, who sat much abashed, with hanging head. Papa affectionately laid an arm about his neck and defended him, until his friends finally cried out that they wagered he would not kiss him. At this, although he confessed afterwards to the most intense repugnance, he at once kissed Paul heartily. Poor Paul was quite overcome. He came to my father afterwards with tears in his eyes and said, standing before him and gazing at him: "Oh, mon maître, que je t'aime!"
Although the accounts of old Breton customs—the glimpse at the Folgoat pardon, the gently critical analysis of the lives of the gentry, the sidelights on the peasants, their cooking and their cottages—are all full of interest, the book is chiefly to be valued for preserving the fragrance of an order of living which too many of us are apt to think of as one of harsh tyranny alleviated by wanton luxury.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
THE LIFE OF THOMAS COUTTS, BANKER. By Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 2 Vols. Lane. 42s. net.
Thomas Coutts, virtual founder of the Bank of his name as it now is, was born in 1735, and, according to the standards of Scotland, well born, having, that is, wise, reputable forbears, relatives with place-names of their own—Stuarts of Allanbank and the like—and a coat-of-arms. "Instead of which," as the old story has it, at the age of twenty-eight he married his mother's nursemaid, and loved and served her faithfully until, after some fifty years' partnership, she wandered out of her mind and then out of his world. By that time his three daughters by her had married, one an Earl of Guilford, one a Marquis of Bute, and one Sir Francis Burdett. By that time also Coutts was one of the most considerable bankers in London, and one of the richest men in England. It might now be thought that his adventures in life were over—but not at all. At seventy years of age he stepped once more into the Pays du Tendre, and took into his protection—which in his case, it really appears, had no secondary meaning—Miss Harriot Mellon, a low comedy actress of abundant charm, humble birth, little education, and excellent disposition. She was then twenty-eight. He fell headlong in love with her and head over heels. He endowed her with stock and other movables to the amount of £500 a year, and when, at the age of eighty, he made her his second wife he settled the whole of that endowment upon herself. At his death, Mr. Coleridge tells us, her private fortune could not have been less than £200,000. Notwithstanding the estrangement and unconcealed disgust of "the ladies," as he always called his daughters, she made him perfectly happy for nine years; and when, at eighty-nine, he died, very reasonably, he left her practically everything he possessed.
That in outline is the life-history of Thomas Coutts as Mr. Ernest Coleridge pleasantly and ably narrates it in two portly volumes. The book offers a view of eighteenth-century manners which is not often, and seldom so well, illustrated. Coutts must have been, and he was, a notable man of affairs; but he was a good deal better than that. He knew, of course, everybody who was anybody. He was the friend and correspondent of Lord Bute, the favourite of Lord Chatham, of William Pitt. He lent, mero motu ejus, £10,000 to Charles Fox without security of any kind. He lent large sums to the Duchess of Devonshire, and forwent the interest until such time as her son was pleased to pay it; for her husband never would. He lectured that great and gay lady upon her follies with perfect freedom and no result. All the royal rips, sons of George III., banked with him, or, in other words, borrowed from him; and they dined with him too. Edward Duke of Kent, the only one of them who was not a rip, made a friend of him as well as a convenience. It is interesting to remark how Coutts deals with these disreputable magnates. He is respectful of their degree in so far as he is shopkeeper and they customers; but outside the bank-parlour he stands on level terms. His children are to commence with their children; his wife's table is as good as their tables. Servant-girl or not, his wife, Mrs. Coutts, is the equal of their wives. There is nothing of Sir Pertinax MacSycophant in his letters, although, as a trader, he continually has his eye upon business, and is never above doing himself a good turn. Mr. Coleridge is to be congratulated upon having presented so engaging a picture of the sound, cautious, and upright Scots merchant, who kept his head and his balance through the convulsions of the American and French wars, and cultivated the domestic virtues in the same social set as Old Q. and the Duchess of Gordon.
But, except for that sappy core of romance which twice betrayed itself in act and once in word, Tom Coutts was a dry stick. While his views of political affairs were sound and uncommonly independent, his expression of them was not interesting. He was by inheritance a Tory, yet he was staunch upon the American war. "The idea," he wrote in 1775 to Lord Stair, "of reducing such a continent to obedience (especially after letting them have so much time to unite) appears to me, so far as I am capable of judging, to be absolutely impossible." So, too, he opposed the war with revolutionary France. "The war made against their growth seems to me to be exactly the way to encourage instead of destroying them. There is no instance of opposition by force of arms subduing opinions! which by such manners have always grown stronger and more inveterate." One might be reading the present Dean of St. Paul's. The same faculty of seeing things as they really were allowed him to have no good opinion of Pitt's Reform proposals of 1784, and gave him as early as 1785 a plan of dealing with Irish disaffection which was in fact adopted in 1800, to our cost. "As to Ireland, I apprehend it is an aristocracy of about thirty nobles, etc., who command two hundred votes in the Lower House, and that these thirty may be bought and a union accomplished more easily than that heap of nonsense called the Irish propositions." They were bought.
Mr. Coleridge prints a recently discovered bundle of his love-letters to Harriot Mellon, from which, if one could feel love-letters to be fair game, it would be tempting, and easy, to make extracts. They are striking by their extraordinary difference from his other familiar correspondence. Coutts becomes emotional, profuse, sentimental, and occasionally ridiculous. Few love-letters, however, will stand the test of examination in cold blood. It can be said of his at least that there is nothing in them which is not intended to honour the recipient. To Coutts his Harriot was a pattern of womanly virtue. It is Mr. Coleridge's opinion, as it is our own, that she deserved it. That she made him happy is obvious; that she returned him a grateful love let this, which was written by herself five years after her wedding-day, bear witness:
"I never lose my spirits." My blessed Tom said these words to me in a dream. After he had kissed me and laid his dear head on my bosom, I felt his tears on my cheek—I was so happy, but so melancholy happy. He looked so well, tranquil and divine.... I see him at this moment, upright, beautiful and composed, as in his long and immaculate life. He looks just as I first saw his dear, blessed face upwards of twenty years ago.