She was, however, at fault over Guy Mannering, being thrown clear off the scent by Scott’s cleverness in quoting a motto from his own Lay of the Last Minstrel, an act of which Miss Mitford evidently thought no author would be guilty: “he never could write Guy Mannering, I am sure—it is morally impossible!”
Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility she joined with others in ascribing to any but their real author, but when she learned that they were Miss Austen’s she let her pen go with a vengeance.
“A propos to novels, I have discovered that our great favourite, Miss Austen, is my countrywoman; that mamma knew all her family very intimately; and that she herself is an old maid (I beg her pardon—I mean a young lady) with whom mamma before her marriage was acquainted. Mamma says that she was then the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers; and a friend of mine, who visits her now, says that she has stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise, taciturn piece of ‘single blessedness’ that ever existed, and that, till Pride and Prejudice showed what a precious gem was hidden in that unbending case, she was no more regarded in society than a poker or a fire-screen, or any other thin or upright piece of wood or iron that fills its corner in peace and quietness. The case is very different now; she is still a poker—but a poker of whom every one is afraid.” Fortunately this description was qualified: “After all, I do not know that I can quite vouch for this account,” especially as the consensus of opinion regarding Miss Austen is entirely opposed to the above description.
Miss Edgeworth she found too cold and calculating as a writer: “I never can read Miss Edgeworth’s works without finding the wonderful predominance of the head over the heart; all her personages are men and women; ay, and many of them very charming men and women; but they are all of them men and women of the world. There is too much knowledge of life, too much hardness of character—too great a proneness to find bad motives for good actions, too great a contempt for that virtuous enthusiasm, which is the loveliest rose in the chaplet of youth; and, to say all in one word, I never take up her volumes myself without regretting that they were not written by a man; nor do I ever see a young girl reading them without lamenting that she will be let into the trick of life before her time.”
Early in the year 1813 a letter was received from Mr. and Mrs. Perry, inviting Miss Mitford to stay with them at their house in Tavistock Square. Mr. Perry was then Editor of the Morning Chronicle, and the invitation was gladly accepted, not only because Perry was a friend of her father’s, but because the latter had assured her that Tavistock House was the rendezvous for many of the leaders in the political and literary worlds. During this visit she met Mrs. Opie—“thinner, paler, and much older, but very kind and pleasant”—and Thomas Moore,—“that abridgement of all that is pleasant in man,”—with whom she had the “felicity” of dining frequently. “I am quite enchanted with him,” she wrote. “He has got a little wife (whom I did not see) and two little children, and they are just gone into Wales,[17] where he intends to finish a great poem [ Lalla Rookh] on which he is occupied. It is a Persian tale, and he says it will be his fault if it is not a fine work, for the images, the scenery, the subject, are poetry itself. How his imagination will revel among the roses, and the nightingales, and the light-footed Almé!” Mr. Moore did not forget his little friend and, a year later, gave her the added pleasure of reading over a part of his manuscript, “and I hope in a few days to see the whole in print. He has sold it for three thousand pounds. The little I have seen is beyond all praise and price,” she wrote enthusiastically. These visits to town were undoubtedly something more than mere pleasure jaunts, for it is quite apparent that they were undertaken with a view to keeping the name and person of Mary Russell Mitford well in the public mind and eye. Making her headquarters at 33, Hans Place, the residence of Fanny Rowden’s mother, she spent a whirling fortnight during the summer of 1814, meanwhile keeping Mrs. Mitford well-informed on all details, however slight. Under date, June 16, 1814, she writes: “Yesterday, my own dearest Granny, was, I think, the most fatiguing morning I ever underwent. Stuffed into a conspicuous place, stared at, talked to, or talked at, by everybody, dying with heat, worn out with flattery, I really should have wished myself in heaven or somewhere worse, if I had not been comforted by William Harness, who sat behind me, laughing at everybody, and more playful and agreeable than any one I ever remember.” The occasion was the Midsummer Breaking-up performance at her old school, during which an ode she had composed for another function was recited.
“We had no exercises,” she continued, “nothing but music and recitations, which lasted nearly four hours, and did them great credit. The March of Mind was well repeated, and received, of course, as verses commonly are in the presence of the authoress. I was to have presented the prizes; but to my great comfort Lady Caroline Lamb arrived, and I insisted on giving her my post.” Then follow particulars of a carefully-planned programme of sight-seeing, finishing with:—“How little people in the country know of fashions! I see nothing but cottage bonnets trimmed with a double plaiting, and sometimes two double plaitings, and broad satin ribbon round the edge. Gowns with half a dozen breadths in them, up to the knees before, and scarcely decent behind, with triple flounces, and sleeves like a carter’s frock, sometimes drawn, at about two inches distant, and sometimes not, which makes the arms look as big as Miss Taylor’s body. I like none of this but the flouncing, which is very pretty, and I shall bring three or four yards of striped muslin to flounce my gowns and yours. Tell Mrs. Haw, with my love, to prepare for plenty of hemming and whipping, and not to steal my needles.... I have been to see Haydon’s picture, and I am enchanted.... I saw, too, in a print-shop, the beautiful print of ‘Napoleon le Grand,’ of which you know there were but three in England, and those not to be sold. Oh, that any good Christian would give me that picture!”
Napoleon Bonaparte was one of her heroes, and she could never bring herself to adopt the general view of him held by the populace in this country. Her friend M. St. Quintin wanted her to translate some epigrams which he had composed against the late Emperor: “Let Mr. St. Quintin know that he has brought his pigs to the wrong market,” was her reply to her father, who had offered her the commission. “I am none of those who kick the dead lion. Let him take them to Lord Byron, or the editor of The Times, or the Poet Laureate, or the bellman, or any other official character.... I hate all these insults to a fallen foe.”
Later, when the Bellerophon with Napoleon on board—then on his way to exile—put into Plymouth, Miss Mitford wrote to Sir William Elford: “Goodness! if I were in your place, I would see him! I would storm the Bellerophon rather than not get a sight of him, ay, and a talk with him too. You and I have agreed to differ respecting the Emperor, and so we do now in our thoughts and our reasonings, though not, I believe, much in our feelings; for your relenting is pretty much the same as my—(what shall I venture to call it?)—my partiality.... But though I cannot tell you exactly what I would do with the great Napoleon, I can and will tell you what I would not do to him. I would not un-Emperor him—I would not separate him from his faithful followers—I would not ransack his baggage, as one would do by a thief suspected of carrying off stolen goods—I would not limit him to allowances of pocket-money to buy cakes and fruit like a great schoolboy—I would not send him to ‘a rock in the middle of the sea,’ like St. Helena.”
But this is a digression. We left Miss Mitford in London describing the Hans Place celebrations. The next morning she was taken to the Freemasons’ Tavern, in Great Queen Street, to attend the meeting of the Friends against the Slave Trade, where she heard such notables as Lords Grey and Holland, together with William Wilberforce and Lord Brougham.
“Lord Grey had all the Ogle hesitation, and my noble patron” [Holland, to whom her first book was dedicated] “has my habit of hackering so completely that he scarcely speaks three words without two stops; but when we can get at his meaning, it is better than any one’s. My expectations were most disappointed in Brougham, and most surpassed in Wilberforce. I no longer wonder at the influence he holds over so large a portion of the ‘religionists,’ as he calls them; he is a most interesting and persuasive speaker.”