Moralists and misanthropists, maidens with starched morals and matrons with starched frills, ancient adorers of Bohea and scandal, venerable votaries of whispering and of whist, learned professors of the compassionate sneer and the innocent innuendo, eternal pillars of gravity and good order, of stupidity and decorum—come not near me with your spare and spectacled features, your candid and considerate criticism. In you I have no hope, in me you have no interest. I am to speak of stories you will not believe, of beings you cannot love; of foibles for which you have no compassion, of feelings in which you have no share.
Fortunate and unfortunate couples, belles in silks and beaux in sentimentals, ye who have wept and sighed, ye who have been wept for and sighed for, victims of vapours and coiners of vows, makers and marrers of intrigue, readers and writers of songs—come to me with your attention and your salts, your sympathy and your cambric; your griefs, your raptures, your anxieties, all have been mine; I know your blushing and your paleness, your self-deceiving and your self-tormenting.[Pg 232]
so com’è inconstanta e vaga
Timida, ardita vita degli amanti,
Ch’un poco dolce molto amaro appoggia;
Ε so i costumi, e i lor sospiri, e i canti
E’l parlar rotto, e’l subito silenzio,
E’l brevissimo riso, e i lunghi pianti;
E qual è ’l mel temprato con l’assenzio.
All these things are so beautiful in Italian! But I need not have borrowed a syllable from Petrarch, for shapes of shadowy beauty, smiles of cherished loveliness, glances of reviving lustre, are coming in the mist of memory around me! I am writing “an ower true tale!”
I never fell seriously in love till I was seventeen. Long before that period I had learned to talk nonsense and tell lies, and had established the important points that a delicate figure is equivalent to a thousand pounds, a pretty mouth better than the Bank of England, and a pair of bright eyes worth all Mexico. But at seventeen a more intricate branch of study awaited me.
I was lounging away my June at a pretty village in Kent, with little occupation beyond my own meditations, and no company but my horse and dogs. My sisters were both in the South of France; and my uncle, at whose seat I had pitched my camp, was attending to the interests of his constituents and the wishes of his patron in Parliament. I began after the lapse of a week to be immensely bored; I felt a considerable dislike of an agricultural life, and an incipient inclination for laudanum. I took to playing backgammon with the rector. He was more than a match for me, and used to grow most unclerically hot when the dice, as was their duty, befriended the weaker side. At last, at the conclusion of a very long hit, which had kept Mrs. Penn’s tea waiting full an hour, my worthy and wigged friend flung deuce-ace three times in succession, put the board in the fire, overturned Mrs. Penn’s best china, and hurried to his study to compose a sermon on patience.
Then I took up reading. My uncle had a delightful library, where a reasonable man might have lived and died. But I confess I never could endure a long hour of lonely reading. It is a very pretty thing to take down a volume of Tasso or Racine, and study accent and cadence for the[Pg 233] benefit of half a dozen listening belles, all dividing their attention between the work and the work-basket, their feelings and their flounces, their tears and their trimmings, with becoming and laudable perseverance. It is a far prettier thing to read Petrarch or Rousseau with a single companion, in some sheltered spot so full of passion and of beauty that you may sit whole days in its fragrance and dream of Laura and Julie. If these are out of the way, it is endurable to be tied down to the moth-eaten marvels of antiquity, poring to-day that you may pore again to-morrow, and labouring for the nine days’ wonder of some temporary distinction, with an ambition which is almost frenzy, and an emulation which speaks the language of animosity. But to sit down to a novel or a philosopher, with no companion to participate in the enjoyment and no object to reward the toil, this indeed—oh! I never could endure a long hour of lonely reading; and so I deserted Sir Roger’s library, and left his Marmontel and his Aristotle to the slumbers from which I had unthinkingly awakened them.
At last I was roused from a state of most Persian torpor by a note from an old lady, whose hall, for so an indifferent country-house was by courtesy denominated, stood at the distance of a few miles. She was about to give a ball. Such a thing had not been seen for ten years within ten miles of us. From the sensation produced by the intimation you might have deemed the world at an end. Prayers and entreaties were offered up to all the guardians and all the milliners; and the old gentlemen rose in a passion, and the old lace rose in price. Everything was everywhere in a flurry; kitchen, and parlour, and boudoir and garret—Babel all! Ackermann’s Fashionable Repository, the Ladies’ Magazine, the New Pocket-book—all these, and all other publications whose frontispieces presented the “fashions for 1817,” personified in a thin lady with kid gloves and a formidable obliquity of vision, were in earnest and immediate requisition. Needles and pins were flying right and left; dinner was ill-dressed that dancers might be well-dressed; mutton was marred that misses might be married. There was not a schoolboy who did not cut Homer and capers; nor a boarding-school beauty who did[Pg 234] not try on a score of dancing shoes, and talk for a fortnight of Angiolini. Every occupation was laid down, every carpet was taken up; every combination of hands-across and down the middle was committed most laudably to memory; and nothing was talked, nothing was meditated, nothing was dreamed, but love and romance, fiddles and flirtation, warm negus and handsome partners, dyed feathers and chalked floors.
In all the pride and condescension of an inmate of Grosvenor Square, I looked upon Lady Motley’s “At Home.” “Yes,” I said, flinging away the card with a tragedy twist of the fingers, “yes: I will be there. For one evening I will encounter the tedium and the taste of a village ball. For one evening I will doom myself to figures that are out of date, and fiddles that are out of tune; dowagers who make embroidery by wholesale, and demoiselles who make conquests by profession: for one evening I will endure the inquiries about Almack’s and St. Paul’s, the tales of the weddings that have been and the weddings that are to be, the round of courtesies in the ball-room and the round of beef at the supper-table: for one evening I will not complain of the everlasting hostess and the everlasting Boulanger, of the double duty and the double bass, of the great heiress and the great plum-pudding:
Come one, come all,
Come dance in Sir Roger’s great hall.”