“I was scarcely less happy,” she wrote in the after years, “in the great London school than at home; to tell the truth, I was well nigh as much spoilt in one place as in the other; but as I was a quiet and orderly little girl, and fell easily into the rules of the house, there was no great harm done, either to me or to the school discipline.”
Nevertheless, there is a lonely touch in one of her early letters home from Hans Place. It is dated September 15, 1799, and after thanking the dear papa for certain parcels just received, goes on to state: “My uncle called on me twice while he stayed in London, but he went away in five minutes both times. He said that he only went to fetch my aunt, and would certainly take me out when he returned. I hope that I may be wrong in my opinion of my aunt; but I again repeat, I think she has the most hypocritical drawl I have ever heard. Pray, my dearest papa, come soon to see me. I am quite miserable without you, and have a thousand things to say to you.”
A year later—November 30, 1800—she wrote exuberantly in her pocket book: “Where shall I be this day month? At home! How happy I shall be, and shall be ready to jump out of my skin for joy.”
Of her inability to master music, due to her absolute lack of taste for it, we have already spoken. Her first attempts were made on the piano at the age of five, and so determined was her father in the matter that, waiving all objections, he insisted on her continuing to practise right up to the date of her removal to the school in Hans Place and for some years after.
The music-master at Hans Place was Mr. Hook, the father of Theodore Hook, and a composer of songs for the Vauxhall Gardens. He was, so we learn, an instructor of average ability, smooth-faced, good-natured and kindly, but although these commended him to Miss Mitford they aroused no enthusiasm in her for his art. So he, like many others who had preceded him in the thankless task of trying to teach little Mary her notes, was promptly told by the hasty father—who, unlike his daughter, was not struck by Mr. Hook’s appearance or manner—that he was no good and must be replaced by some one more competent. This some one promptly appeared in the person of Herr Schuberl, at that time engaged in the special tuition of two of Mary’s schoolfellows. He was an impatient, irritable, but undoubtedly able man, and before long amply avenged Mr. Hook, by refusing to have anything more to do with the impossible pupil.
This dismissal was, of course, hailed by the child with great glee, for she began to entertain the hope that the incident would put a stop for ever to the attempts being made in regard to her musical education. But her joy was short-lived; her father was too pertinacious to be so easily turned from his purpose, and believing that the failure of his child was due to incompetent teachers and to his own choice of instrument, he decreed that she must learn the harp.
Apart from any other consideration, this decision had an advantage in that it was supposed to afford the child an opportunity of learning what was then designated as an “elegant accomplishment.” So, a harp was installed at the school, being placed for the convenience of the tutor and pupil in the principal reception-room, an apartment connected with the entrance-hall by a long passage and two double doors, the outer pair of which were covered in green-baize and swung to with a resounding bang when let go by the person who had opened them.
Being a reception-room, it was handsomely fitted up with shelves upon which reposed a number of nicely-bound books, chiefly of French plays and classics. To this room was the unwilling pupil sent each morning to practise alone the exercises previously set her by the “demure little Miss Essex,” the new music mistress; “sent alone, most comfortably out of sight and hearing of every individual in the house.”
But there was little of harp-practice, for before long “I betook myself to the book-shelves, and seeing a row of octavo volumes lettered Théâtre de Voltaire, I selected one of them and had deposited it in front of the music-stand, and perched myself upon the stool to read it in less time than an ordinary pupil would have consumed in getting through the first three bars of ‘Ar Hyd y Nos.’ The play upon which I opened was ‘Zaïre.’ ‘Zaïre’ is not ‘Richard the Third,’ any more than M. de Voltaire is Shakespeare: nevertheless, the play has its merits. I proceeded to other plays—‘Œdipe,’ ‘Mérope,’ ‘Alzire,’ ‘Mahomet,’ plays well worth reading, but not so absorbing as to prevent my giving due attention to the warning doors, and putting the book in its place, and striking the chords of ‘Ar Hyd y Nos’ as often as I heard a step approaching; or gathering up myself and my music, and walking quietly back to the school-room as soon as the hour for practice had expired.”
All of which was, of course, very naughty, and scarcely what the dear papa, blissfully ignorant away in Reading, would have desired! But worse was to follow. In time Voltaire was exhausted, and, hunting along the shelves, the omnivorous Miss came upon the comedies of Molière, which plunged her at once into the gaieties of his delightful world, blotting out all thought of present things—harp, music-books, and lessons—and even demure little Miss Essex vanished into thin air along with “Ar Hyd y Nos.” Fascinated by the tribulations of “Sganarelle” or the lessons of the “Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” she was at length caught by none other than M. St. Quintin, who found her laughing till she cried over the apostrophes of the angry father to the galley in which he is told his son has been taken captive. “Que diable alloit-il faire dans cette galère!” an apostrophe which, as she quaintly wrote, “comes true with regard to somebody in a scrape during every moment of every day, and was never more applicable than to myself at that instant.”