Hannah More (British edition 1888)/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII.
BARLEY WOOD.
Early in 1802 the More sisterhood made another migration. The cottage at Cowslip Green was too slightly built for the winter residence of ladies in delicate health and advancing in years; and Bath had become distasteful to them. They therefore purchased a piece of land named Barley Wood, about a mile distant from Cowslip Green, and in the same parish of Wrington, and there built a comfortable roomy house, which became their home for many years.
The laying out of the grounds, planting, and gardening, gave them great delight, and, in the fashion of the time, they placed little shrines and tablets with inscriptions to their friends, living and departed, in favourite spots.
A family party of five old maids in those days might have been derided, but, on the contrary, their house was a centre of intellectual as well as religious society, and they received and entertained many of the most distinguished people of the time, as well as former pupils who were like daughters to them, while the house was also the resort of half the population of the Mendip parishes, who were always coming over to consult or ask assistance from the two diligent workers known as Mrs. Hannah and Mrs. Martha, for just at this time the sisterhood had assumed the good old title of mistress before the Christian name, as was then thought becoming in spinsters of elder years.
The first trouble was the death of Mr. Drewitt, the good curate of Cheddar, who had worked with the sisters, and been persecuted together with them. After returning from the funeral, Hannah writes in her journal: "If I am not the better for her (the widow's) example on this occasion, it will be among the number of my sins."
A fresh task was imposed on the authoress by one especial request of Queen Charlotte, namely that she would write a book of advice on the education of the little Princess Charlotte of Wales, then about six years old, and looked upon as the future Queen Regnant. Perhaps the idea was suggested by the letters in Adèle et Théodore from the Chevalier de Roseville, in which Madame de Genlis actually described what she was doing for Louis Philippe; but though the request was a command, it was a curious thing to publish for everyone's reading the line of study and training recommended for the royal child.
The book was finished and published anonymously in 1805, dedicated to Bishop Fisher of Exeter, who had just been appointed tutor to the Princess. It was written with great care and consideration, and is full of excellent practical good sense applicable to women in every station, especially in the chapters on the study of history and the choice of books.
Among "books of amusement," the foremost of her selections is Don Quixote. "Wit," she quotes, "is gay, but humour is grave. It is a striking illustration of this opinion that the most serious and solemn nation in the world has produced the work of the most genuine humour." After this, she recommends the tales most removed from resemblance to ordinary life, such as the Arabian Nights and Pope's Odyssey, and she has a separate section on Shakespeare, together with Potter's translations of the Greek tragedians. Her chapters on the "Arts of Popularity," and on "Zeal for Religious Opinions no Proof of Religion," are excellent; and though we cannot read the summary of English history without being amused at the different light since cast on characters and events, we feel that it comes from a high-minded and sensible woman, well read in the best literature accessible. She has a good chapter on the Church of England, according to her lights, and dwells especially on the Via Media. "Though her worship be wisely popular, it is also deeply spiritual; though simple, it is sublime." She did not, however, presume to enter upon advice as to the personal management of the young Princess, going rather into intellectual matters, excepting in one chapter on the perils of flattery to sovereigns.
On the whole it may be feared that these hints proved about as useful to poor Princess Charlotte as Bossuet's works, "In usum Delphini," to the Grand Dauphin; but the loyal Hannah remained in happy ignorance of how father, mother, and grandmother contended over the high-spirited girl, who meanwhile, under Lady Albemarle's easy rule, laughed at Bishop Fisher, and ran wild with George Keppel.
Hannah and Patty were together at Fulham Palace when the book appeared. It was presented by Bishop Fisher to the royal parents and grandparents, when the Queen certainly read it through and was much delighted with it; and altogether it attracted much attention and approval. The Anti-Jacobin even praised it highly, and this perhaps incited the Edinburgh Review, then in its mordant eager youth, to cut it up, objecting to female learning, and to the preference for Rollin's history to Gibbon's, which after all does not occupy the same field. Those two remarkable men, Jebb and Knox, wrote the species of criticism which is really precious, and which was accepted in a grateful spirit, leading to some correspondence with Mr. Knox.
The next two years of Hannah's life were spent in a sick-room. A chill caught in the autumn of 1806, on one of her Sunday rounds, led to a pleuritic affection, accompanied with fever, which was doubly serious to a person always delicate, and now in her sixty-first year. For a whole year her pulse could not be materially reduced, and for another she was debarred both from writing and from visiting her schools. In the time of danger, the strongest possible demonstrations of affection were made by her friends, and the poor were in the deepest grief, though Patty did her best for them.
Meanwhile, as an after-clap of the Blagdon persecution, a pamphlet came out accusing Mrs. Hannah More of hiring two men to assassinate a clergyman; of being engaged in Hadfield's attempt to assassinate George III., and of being art and part with Charlotte Corday in the murder of Marat, all as a hireling of Pitt. This was actually the work of a couple of infidel and Jacobinian curates, who appear to have escaped scot free.
However, in the summer of 1808, after two years' confinement to the house, Hannah was able to go to church, and was, after change of air at Weymouth, able to be among her scholars again, preparing for the twentieth anniversary of the schools at Cheddar. There had been time for the effects of the work to show themselves in the characters of the people who had been brought up under the care of the ladies.
Dearer to her than all her fame must have been what she records in a letter to Wilberforce:—"Do you remember John Hill, our first scholar, whose piety and good manners you used to notice? He afterwards became a teacher, but war tore him from us. Judge of our pleasure to see him at Weymouth, in full regimentals, acting as paymaster and sergeant-major! There was a sort of review. Everybody praised the training of eight hundred men so well disciplined; the officers said they were fit for any service. One of them said to me: 'All this is owing to the great abilities and industry of Sergeant Hill. He is the greatest master of military tactics we have. At first he was so religious that we thought him a Methodist, but we find him so fine a soldier and so correct in his morals that we do not trouble ourselves about his religion. He will probably be adjutant at the next vacancy.' By the way, we never had so good a meeting as this year at Shipham. I did not dare venture. Poor Patty, though ill able, entertained near a hundred gentry at dinner, among whom were about twenty clergy. It is a fatiguing and expensive day, but I trust it has had its uses. Many similar institutions have sprung up in consequence."
Hannah was returning to literary enjoyments, and welcomed with delight Walter Scott's earlier poems. Her judgment given at the same time on Corinne, in a letter to Sir W. W. Pepys, is worth having: "There never was such a book; such a compound of genius and bad taste, such a fermentation of sense and nonsense. The descriptions of Italy are the best, and the descriptions of love the worst, I ever met with. There is no shading. As there is little nature it excites little interest, and the virtuous hero is to me a gloomy specimen of frigid sentimentality. Corinne herself gave me too much the idea of Dr. Graham's Goddess of Health, or the French Goddess of Reason, for me to take a very lively interest in her. Yet let me acknowledge that though, like Pistol, I swallowed and execrated, yet I went on swallowing, and I must own it is a book which requires great knowledge and very considerable powers of mind to produce."
The autumn brought a visit from the Bishop of London, one of the most valued of her still surviving friends. He was so feeble and broken in health that she had little hope of seeing him again, and he continued in a weak state all the winter. On the 2nd May he wrote a note, entreating her prayers, saying that he was in much difficulty and distress, but not explaining why. Three days later came the following:—
My Dear Mrs. More,
Prayer has had its usual effect, and all is now perfectly right.
It was the last note she was ever to have from him. On the 24th Mrs. Kennicott wrote from Fulham to announce his death, and she then explained what had troubled him, namely the report of the institution of a club, under the patronage of the Prince of Wales, which was to meet on a Sunday. Feeble as he was, he requested an audience of the Prince. He was supported by two servants and hardly able to move with their assistance; but he reached the presence of the Prince, and with agitated earnestness implored him to change the day. The Prince was touched, and this great effort gained the victory. The old man went home to die content.
He had bequeathed one hundred pounds to Hannah More, and, after the fashion of the time, she dedicated to his memory a plantation at Barley Wood, putting up an inscription, as she had done in the case of other much-loved friends. She must have missed the approval of one who had so warmly appreciated her works, one after the other, when, in the winter, she made a new venture, a religious tale or novel for the upper classes, entitled Cœlebs in Search of a Wife. Cœlebs is a young gentleman of four-and-twenty, very carefully brought up by an excellent mother, and serving as a peg upon which to hang numerous sketches of society and character. Cœlebs goes forth, instructed by his mother, and enamoured of the character of Milton's Eve, to seek for as near a likeness of the latter as may exist, but, in accordance with the dying wishes of his parents, intends to come to no decision till he has consulted his father's old friend, Mr. Stanley.
He visits London, as it were, to reconnoitre. He goes to so ill-dressed and badly managed a dinner that he concludes that the daughters must be learned ladies, and therefore begins by asking one if she did not think Virgil the finest poet in the world: "She started and said she had never heard of the person I mentioned, but that she had read Tears of Sensibility, and Rosa Matilda, and Sympathy of Souls, and Two Civil by Half, and the Sorrows of Werter, and the Stranger, and the Orphans of Snowdon."
"Yes, Sir," chimed in the younger sister, who did not rise to so high a pitch of literature, "and we have read Perfidy Punished, and Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, and the Fortunate Footman, and the Illustrious Chambermaid."
He rose from the table convinced "that it is very possible for a woman to be totally ignorant of the ordinary but indispensable duties of common life without knowing one word of Latin."
Next he goes to dine with his father's friend, Sir John Belfield, in Cavendish Square. All is delightful here, conversation and everything else, till dessert, when in rush all the children, to be petted and flattered and fed, little to their own benefit, and greatly to the discomfiture of the guest, who finds rational talk impossible.
Then follows a visit to one of those ladies whose form of piety has somewhat gone out of fashion, who avows that, since grace alone is efficacious, it was not worth while to attend to the religious training of her daughters, but to leave them to be converted. Another family disgusts Cœlebs by their more than toleration of a man of fashion of bad character, and so do a pair of young ladies by their heartless coquetries.
With the Belfields he is happier, but they are too easy-going, and think "things may be carried too far" when the standard of the Gospel is suggested. Their house becomes a sort of home to him, and he gets the opportunity of seeing the lady who is a slave to fashion, and the lady whom we should now term a frisky matron, but who was then "a modish dowager." Certainly types repeat themselves: Lady Bab affected no delicacy, she laughed at restraint, she had shaken hands with decorum,—
She held the noisy tenour of her way
With no assumed refinement.
Next he meets a Mrs. Fentham, a religious lady, who sits in Passiontide with A Week's Preparation open before her, but talking to all the comers and goers; and while refusing a guinea to help an old servant after a fire, gives ten to Signor Squallini's benefit. Then there is a charming warm-hearted, rattle-pated Lady Melbury—a too flattering likeness, as Sir William W. Pepys declared, of the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire. She utterly ruins her poor tradesfolk by running in debt, weeps, borrows, and begins her course again.
And after all these experiences, Cœlebs betakes himself to Stanley Grove, where, of course, all is perfect, especially the eldest daughter, Lucilia, who is altogether the model woman. She is neither a beauty nor a genius, and neither plays, sings, nor draws, though she is cultivated up to the point of having a perfect taste and appreciation of music and art. As to study, when one morning the hero asks Mr. Stanley his views on the propriety of young ladies learning the dead languages, "Mrs. Stanley smiled, Phœbe laughed outright, Lucilia, who had nearly finished making tea, blushed excessively. Little Celia, who was sitting on my knee while I was teaching her to draw a bird, put an end to the difficulty, by looking up in my face and crying out, 'Why, Sir, Lucilla reads Latin with papa every morning.' I cast a timid eye on Miss Stanley, who, after putting the sugar into the cream-pot, and the tea into the sugar-basin, slid out of the room, beckoning Phœbe to follow her."
So dreadful was it to learn Latin in those days! Yet Phœbe, because she had a superabundance of vivacity and a tincture of romance, was thoroughly taught arithmetic and some amount of mathematics.
On the eighth birthday of one of the younger little girls, which is very prettily celebrated by a tea-drinking in a bower, she gives up all her "little story-books," as the year before she had given up all her gilt books with pictures, "and I am now," she says, "going to read such books as men and women read."
Mr. Stanley allows that a slower child might be kept on these stories a year longer, but he says, "These books are novels in miniature and will lead to the want of novels at full length. The too great profusion of them (what would he say now?) protracts the imbecility of childhood. They arrest the understanding instead of advancing it. They give forwardness without strength."
In all this he was perfectly right, though perhaps too rigid in excluding all youthful literature, but he was much in the habit of reading aloud to his children the best parts of amusing authors whom he did not put into their hands. Day's Sandford and Merton, Berquin's Ami des Enfans, the English selection called The Looking-glass for the Mind, and the German tale translated by Mary Wollstonecraft under the title of Elements of Morality, and most powerfully illustrated by Blake, were probably in Mr. Stanley's mind when he complained that there was no intimation in them of the corruption of human nature, and thus that they contradict the Catechism when it speaks of being "born in sin and the children of wrath."
In fact, before Mr. and Mrs. Stanley have reformed many of their friends, and Cœlebs has fulfilled his destiny and resigned his title; there is a good deal of theological discussion, such as could not fail to bring the authoress into hot water; and first with the Pope's Vicar-General in England, Dr. Berrington, who took serious exception at her having said in the comment on Mrs. Fentham's formal observances, "Why, this is retaining all the worst part of Popery." One would think he might have been used to hearing harder things said of his Church! However, very courteous letters passed between them; Hannah professed her warm admiration for St. Francois de Sales, Bossuet, Massillon and Bourdaloue, and moreover for Pascal and Messieurs de Port Royal, and added, "I am too zealous in my own faith not to admire zeal in the opposite party." On the other hand, Dr. Berrington replied by picking her sentence to pieces, and showing her its logical incorrectness, advising her to expunge it altogether, which she seems to have done, for it does not occur in the edition of her collected works. It is curious that he makes no protest against her Jansenist tastes. Did he share them, or was he too wise to betray to an outsider that there were differences of opinion; "as if," he writes, "our tenets, scattered through a thousand brains, were as varying and unstable as your own?"
Very different was the handling poor Cœlebs received at the hands of Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh Review. Of course, when descending into the arena of secular literature, it was only reasonable to expect to be judged critically on the literary merits of the work, and not to view its religious object as serving for a shield against censure. There were persons who were far from any profanity, and only desired truth and piety to prevail, who convulsed a private circle with laughter by turning into ridicule the priggishness unavoidable in imaginary models of male excellence, especially when drawn by female hands, and those, so utterly unable to construct an interesting story as Hannah More had always been. Distrust of what is known as Evangelicalism, partly of its doctrines, and chiefly of the narrowness and what in Germany is called "pietism," caused the darts to be directed against the book, and they were barbed with the irony of which the Canon of St. Paul's was a master.
To those more seriously disposed persons who barely tolerated fiction of any sort, Cœlebs, with its really able sketches of character, and epigrammatic turns, was genuinely entertaining and delightful. Mrs. More was continually receiving letters recommending it to her perusal, and those friends to whom she sent it, concealing the secret of its authorship, were greatly excited. Dr. Randolph writes: "Junius's letters nor Chatterton's poems hardly occasioned more anxious research or eager controversy in public than Cœlebs did, at least in a certain circle." He himself had come to the conclusion that the writer was a lady, and a spinster, because of a certain Mrs. Carlton, a model victim to an ill-starred marriage. He says: "This inimitable wife, who sets us all a-crying, does not scruple to converse with her religious female friends on the faults of her husband, and she fears having a female confidant in the house with her, lest she should talk of them always."
The first edition was sold out in a day or two, the second in a fortnight, eleven had appeared in nine months, and thirty before the close of the author's life, twenty-four years later.
As her earlier friends passed away, a younger generation took their places, chiefly belonging to those good and excellent allies of Wilberforce, who were known as the Clapham party. Zachary Macaulay had been brought to Barley Wood by Mr. Wilberforce, in 1796, and had there fallen in love with Selina Mills, a former pupil of the elder sisters, who was like one of themselves. Their marriage had taken place after Mr. Macaulay's expedition to Sierra Leone, and visits to their house at Clapham were among Hannah's London pleasures. On calling there one day in one of the last of her thirty-five winters in London, she was met at the door by a fair pretty boy, about four years old, who politely informed her that his parents were out, but if she would be so good as to come in he would give her a glass of old spirits. This was "Master Tommy," known in after life as Lord Macaulay. On being asked what prompted his extraordinary offer, he could only say that Robinson Crusoe always had some!
Hannah took the greatest delight in the quaint little boy, and his sister, her godchild and namesake. The description of the young Stanleys being able to dispense with childish books at seven and eight years old was probably taken from these children, for little Tom was given to sitting up in his nankeen frock expounding from a volume as big as himself, and talking in "quite printed words," and his sister was his close companion. They were often visitors at Barley Wood, where the old ladies knew how to make real companions of children. "Mrs. Hannah 'would keep the boy' with her for weeks, listening to him as he read prose by the ell, declaimed poetry by the hour, and discussed and compared his favourite heroes, ancient, modern, and fictitious under all points of view and every possible condition, coaxing him into the garden under pretence of a lesson on botany, sending him from his books to run round the grounds, or play at cooking in the kitchen, giving him Bible lessons which invariably ended in a theological argument, and following him with her advice and sympathy through his multifarious literary enterprises."
Childish squibs and parodies were produced under her encouragement, one called Childe Hugh and the Labourer, a pathetic ballad, seems to have been suggested by the battle of Blagdon, Childe Hugh alluding to Sir Abraham Elton's knightly defence of her cause against "the Abbot." It was meant as an imitation of Percy's Reliques, but, we are told, strongly suggests John Gilpin. The enjoyment with which the Stanleys are represented as listening to that poem as a birthday treat may well have been copied from that of this most amusing little guest. Hannah constantly corresponded with him, and, as his nephew and biographer says, to her "was due the commencement of what eventually became the most readable of libraries." When he was only six years old, she wrote, "Though you are a little boy now, you will one day, if it please God, be a man; but long before you are a man I hope you will be a scholar. I therefore wish you to purchase such books as will be useful and agreeable to you then, and that you employ this little sum in laying a little tiny corner-stone for your future library."
A year or two after, she thanks him for his "two letters so neat and free from blots. By this obvious improvement you have entitled yourself to another book. You must go to Hatchard's and choose. I think we have nearly exhausted the Epics. What say you to a little good prose, Johnson's Hebrides, or Walton's Lives, unless you would like a neat edition of Cowper's poems, or Paradise Lost for your own eating? In any case choose something you do not possess. I want you to become a complete Frenchman that I may give you the works of Racine, the only dramatic poet I know, in any modern language, that is perfectly pure and good."
It is somewhat amusing that, whereas Louis Philippe was Madame de Genlis's favourite pupil, and Dean Stanley the representative of Dr. Arnold, Lord Macaulay should have been so much under Hannah More's influence! The aptest scholars do not always run in the groove that their teachers have left them.