Hannah More (British edition 1888)/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
LITERARY LIFE.
Mrs. Garrick clung so much to the friendship of Miss More, as to wish to keep her entirely as a resident in the country home at Hampton. Indeed, Hannah spent most of her time there during the two years from 1779 to 1781, writing letters and transacting business for the good lady, whose foreign education, no doubt, made this a difficulty to her. Boswell says that Mrs. Garrick was wont to call Miss More her domestic chaplain, probably because she watched over the religious welfare of the servants, as their mistress, being a Roman Catholic, could hardly do. The Roman Church was, at that period, in a very quiet, unaggressive state, and this may account for our never hearing of any of the controversies with, or attempts at influence from, Roman Catholic priests, that would certainly be met with by a person in her situation in the present day.
With Hampton as her head-quarters, she kept up intercourse with her London friends, and had sundry sparrings with Johnson. She says,—
"I never saw Johnson really angry with me but once; and his displeasure did him so much honour, that I loved him the better for it. I alluded, rather flippantly I fear, to some passage in Tom Jones. He replied, 'I am shocked to hear you quote from so vicious a book. I am sorry to hear you have read it—a confession which no modest lady should ever make. I scarcely know a more corrupt work.'
"I thanked him for his correction, assured him I thought full as ill of it now as he did, and had only read it at an age when I was more subject to be caught by the wit than able to discern the mischief. Of Joseph Andrews I declared my decided abhorrence. He went so far as to refuse to Fielding the great talents which are ascribed to him, and broke out into a noble panegyric on his competitor, Richardson, who, he said, was as superior to him in talents as in virtue, and whom he pronounced to be the greatest genius that had shed its lustre on this path of literature."
Johnson came to enliven Hannah while she was sitting for her portrait to Miss Reynolds, and was induced to promise his autograph for Patty's collection, which was, perhaps, the first on record. He certainly did not treat her as he did a lady whom Hannah mentions, who begged him to look over a tragedy she had composed. He told her she could discover the mistakes as well as he could.
"But, Sir," said she, "I have no time! I have so many irons in the fire."
"Then, Madam," growled the Doctor, "the best thing I can advise you to do is to put your tragedy in along with your irons."
The lady deserved a rebuff. Garrick, having some time before refused a drama of hers, she had revenged herself by inditing a novel full of spiteful personalities against him. Miss More was requested to meet this by a criticism in the Gentleman's Magazine. She did so effectively; but she found that the indulgence of sarcastic censure was so pleasant to her, that she resolved never to make use of a weapon so dangerous to the employer.
Johnson had just been with George III., who begged him to place Edmund Spenser among his Lives of the Poets, thereby showing more taste and knowledge than the booksellers, who had not accepted the author of The Faery Queen as a poet.
Hannah thus describes her life at Hampton in the early days of Mrs. Garrick's widowhood:—
"After breakfast I go to my own apartment for several hours, where I read, write, and work, very seldom letting anybody in, though I have a room for separate visitors; but I almost look on a morning visit as an immorality. At four we dine. We have the same elegant table as usual, but I generally confine myself to one single dish of meat. I have taken to drink half a glass of wine. At six we have coffee. At eight, tea, when we have sometimes a dowager or two of quality. At ten we have salad and fruits. Each has her book, which we read without any restraint, as if we were alone, without apologies or speech-making."
Of Mrs. Garrick she says a little later:—
"Her garden and her family amuse her; but the idea of company is death to her. We never see a human face but each other's. Though in such deep retirement I am never dull, because I am not reduced to the fatigue of entertaining dunces, nor of being obliged to listen to them. We dress like a couple of scaramouches; dispute like a couple of Jesuits; eat like a couple of aldermen; walk like a couple of porters; and read as much as any two doctors of either University. I wish the fatal 20th were well over, I dread the anniversary of that day. On her wedding-day she went to the Abbey, where she stayed a good while, and she said she had been to spend the morning on her husband's grave, where, for the future, she should pass all her wedding-days. Yet she seems cheerful, and never indulges the least melancholy in company."
Hannah went out occasionally to spend a few days with friends in London. She met Dr. Burney and his daughter, and was one of those who thought of Fanny as that curious person wished to be regarded: "This Evelina is an extraordinary girl; she is not more than twenty, and of a very retired disposition."
At the end of the year of widowhood, Mrs. Garrick moved to her house at the Adelphi, and Hannah was admitted to good old Mrs. Delany's little select parties, never exceeding eight in number, where she met among others the brilliant Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and that clever dilettante, able satirist, and admirable correspondent, Horace Walpole, who formed a warm friendship for "Saint Hannah," as he was wont to term her.
This visit of 1780 ended by a journey to Oxford, where Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott welcomed her affectionately, and where she formed a friendship with Dr. Horne, President of Magdalen, afterwards the admirable Bishop of Norwich, and author of the most beautiful of English Commentaries on the Psalms. To his little daughter, Sally, Miss More gave a copy of Mother Bunch's Fairy Tales, with a playful dedication in verse. Copies were much sought after, and so precious were they, that Mrs. Kennicott refused one to the Bishop of London—Lowth—whose comment on Isaiah is still a standard book. On his making a personal request for it, Hannah sent it, and was requited with an elegant compliment in Latin verse.
While at Oxford, Hannah mentioned as a favourite book, L'Histoire de Messieurs de Port Royal—the history of the Jansenist community—so familiar to everyone in these days. No one had ever heard of it except Dr. Horne, who admired it extremely. Two copies were sent for from Holland, where it was published, but it was out of print, and Miss More wrote to borrow, for the Kennicotts, Mrs. Boscawen's copy of what she calls "a book in which, it must be confessed, there is some Popish trumpery, and a little mystical rubbish."
She must have been carefully educated in a dread of mysticism, for the dislike of it in a person with so strong a feeling for poetry was remarkable. She had a veritable instinct for poetry, which made her stand up against Johnson himself when he contemned L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Lycidas. Neither of them, however, appreciated the sonnets, for it was to Hannah that Johnson made the well-known speech: "Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a colossus from a rock, but could not carve beads out of cherry-stones."
The quiet summer and autumn enabled Hannah to do a good deal of work, and when she rejoined Mrs. Garrick for the winter, she carried with her a set of Sacred Dramas—reminiscences, perhaps, of Metastasio, though they have far less action than have his Biblical plays. They were on the Finding of Moses, the Slaying of Goliath, Belshazzar's Feast, and a monologue of Hezekiah in his sickness.
Writers generally contrived to be at hand during the printing of their works, since the transmission of proofs by the post would have been too expensive, so she was in London at the critical moment. Bishop Porteus, then of Chester, called, and, she writes, "inquired very much when the book was to appear, to my no small confusion, for the reason I am going to give. The book lay on Mrs. Boscawen's table, and we had just discovered a most ridiculous blunder, for, by the misplacing of a single asterisk, the Bishop is made a painter and Sir Joshua Reynolds a Bishop. Neither Mrs. B——nor I had courage to mention this, so I very foolishly only said I could not tell when it would be published. I have sent the history of this blunder to Caddell, and with a dash of the pen it is tolerably rectified.
"After all, the kindest thing to my friends is not to send them a book, for a present from the author is very inconvenient, as I have often found to my cost, since it forces the person so distinguished to write against their conscience, and to praise what perhaps they secretly despise. Besides, as I have mentioned all my particular friends, it would be rather awkward, after offering the incense, to thrust the censer in their faces."
The book has gone through nineteen editions, though the author soon wrote: "The word sacred is a damper to the dramas. It is tying a millstone round the neck of sensibility, which will drown them both together.... Bishop Lowth has just finished the dramas, and sent me word that although I have paid him the most swinging compliment he ever received, he likes the book more than he can say. But the Bishop of Chester's compliment was the most solid; he said he thought that it would do a vast deal of good, and that is the praise best worth having. Well, I think I have said enough for myself now, as I could treat you with some more fine things from other quarters, and which I believe as little as those who utter them; so there is no harm done on my part at least, for I had neither the guilt of falsehood, nor the weakness of credulity."
No doubt these dramas did good. They were excellent Sunday reading when such literature was scarce; and thus the excellent Jonas Hanway (whose Book of Nature is really beautiful), after sitting down to it in fear and trembling lest undue liberties had been taken with Scripture, had no sooner finished than he carried three or four copies to a boarding school for young ladies, and told the governess it was her duty to see that all the girls studied it thoroughly.
It would be of little use now, for the lack of Biblical research into Eastern manners and customs almost necessarily brings the scenery into the general conventional world, such as is exemplified by an engraving of the period, which is still to be seen in some old country houses, representing the finding of Moses by Pharoah's daughter in the likeness of Queen Charlotte, with all her attendants arrayed fashionably in Court plumes, and little pyramids interspersed among the roofs of the city in the background. However, the dramas had the essential qualities of reverence and sound principles, and they added to the general esteem in which their author was held. Indeed, Mrs. Trimmer wrote that they excited in her much the same devotional sentiment as the Scriptures themselves.
With them appeared, in the form of a letter to Mrs. Boscawen, a poem on "Sensibility." At that period of reaction from coarseness, sensibility was held to be the greatest charm a human creature could possess. This meant not the feeling which acts, but the feeling that weeps and shrinks. Rousseau had made natural impulse and tenderness appear the great motives of human life, and Goethe had followed this up in the passionate tale of the Sorrows of Werther, which had appeared about eight years previously, and had been translated into every European language. The French, as we may see in the memoirs of the time, thought it needful to weep for a couple of days at every parting, and in England the fashion was to consider semistarvation, agitated nerves, fainting fits, tears, fright, and helplessness, the token of delicate refinement. While spiders, toads and earwigs sent ladies into hysterics, lap-dogs, birds, and the like were petted and lamented with exaggerated fervour. The Pilgrim Good Intent, a clever imitation of the Pilgrim's Progress, adapted to the days of false philosophy, shows in its travesty the Charity of the House Beautiful, personated by Sensibility weeping over a young ass, and in Hannah More's poem we find—
There are who for a dying fawn deplore,
As if friend, parent, country were no more.
And again—
He scorning life's low duties to attend,
Writes odes on friendship while he cheats his friend.
With great good sense, Hannah proceeds to preach an excellent prose sermon on what true Sensibility means, and how mere feeling—
Is not a gift peculiar to the good,
'Tis often but the virtue of the blood;
And what would seem compassion's moral flow,
Is but a circulation swift or slow.
But to divert it to its proper course,
There wisdom's power appears, there reason's force.
If ill-directed, it pursue the wrong,
It adds new strength to what before was strong;
But if religious bias rule the soul,
Then Sensibility exalts the whole.
This may not be exactly poetry, but it is very wholesome doctrine; and Bishop Lowth, among others, thought very highly of it.
Dr. Johnson was of the same mind. "He told me the other day," writes Hannah, "that he hated to hear people whine about metaphysical distresses when there was so much want and hunger in the world. I told him I supposed, then, he never wept at any tragedy but Jane Shore, who had died for want of a loaf. He called me a saucy girl, but did not deny the inference."
Meeting him a day or two later at the Bishop of Chester's (Porteus), she was asked to sit next him and make him talk; and she writes: "You would have enjoyed seeing him take me by the hand and repeat, with no small enthusiasm, many passages from The Fair Penitent, &c. I urged him to take a little wine; he replied: 'I can't drink a little, child, therefore I never touch it. Abstinence is easy to me; temperance would be difficult.' He was very good-humoured and gay. One of the company happened to say a word about poetry. 'Hush, hush!' said he; 'it is dangerous to say a word of poetry before her; it is talking of the art of war before Hannibal.'"
Then followed a breakfast where Hannah had a discussion with that strange person, the Scotch Lord Monboddo, who complained that everything was degenerating.
"Men are not so tall as they were; women not so handsome. Nobody can write a long period." (What would he have said in the present day?)
Miss More said that, though long periods were fine in oratory and declamation, such was not the language of passion, and she defended her opinion from the short outbursts of despair of Shakespeare's Constance: "Gone to be married!" "Gone to swear a truce!" "False blood with false blood joined!" Then they had an argument on the slave trade, which he admired "on principle." However, Hannah drove him to confess that his principle meant that Plutarch had justified the like proceeding, and she had her revenge in a story she had just heard from a Dutch Captain, a prisoner on parole, who had been taken by Commodore Johnson in that naval war against Holland which was an offshoot of the American War of Independence.
This Dutch captain had been dining on board another ship, when a storm came on which completely wrecked his own vessel, in which he had left his two little sons, four and five years old, under the care of a negro. There was one large boat, and all crowded into it. The black carefully placed the two children in a large bag, with a little pot of sweetmeats for them to eat, slung them across his shoulder, and put them into the boat. He was stepping into it himself when he was told there was no room, either the children or he must be left to their fate.
"Very well," he said; "give my duty to my master, and tell him I beg pardon for all my faults." With which he let himself sink.
Lord Monboddo fairly burst into tears at this noble story. Hannah was asked "by the greatest lady in this land" to make an elegy of it; but she wisely observed, "It is above poetry."
The same letter tells how, when George Selwyn was beset by chimney-sweepers, who insisted on forcing money from him, he exclaimed with a low bow, "Gentlemen, I have heard of the majesty of the people. I presume your highnesses are in Court mourning!"
The return from this sojourn in London was by way of Oxford, where, while staying at Christ Church with the Kennicott's, Hannah had the pleasure of being honoured by Dr. Johnson, who took her over his own college, Pembroke, with great enjoyment. "This was my room, this Shenstone's." Then, after pointing out all the rooms of the poets who had been at his college, "In short," said he, "we were a nest of singing birds. Here we walked, here we played at cricket." The letter continues: "When we came into the common room we espied a fine large print of Johnson, framed and hung up that morning, with this motto: 'And is not Johnson in himself a host?' Under which stared you in the face: From Miss More's Sensibility. This little incident amused us; but alas! Johnson looks very ill indeed, spiritless and wan. However, he made an effort to be cheerful, and I exerted myself much to make him so."
He had, indeed, as he had written to Boswell, been very unwell, and had come to Oxford for change of air, "struggling with so much infirmity of body, and such strong impressions of the fragility of life that death, whenever it appears, fills me with melancholy."
The Doctor must have looked as he does in the fine portrait of him by Reynolds, that hangs in Pembroke College, a most pathetic and noble production, in the wonderful combination of the clumsy, massive form with the tokens of mighty intellect, and the lines of constant suffering. The bright-eyed merry little woman, who talked to him fearlessly, and at thirty-seven seemed a mere girl to the man of seventy-three, must have been a great relief to his spirits.
Great mirth went on with the Kennicotts. Each of the party had a nickname. Dr. Kennicott was the Elephant, his wife the Dromedary, her sister the Antelope, and Miss More the Rhinoceros. Soon after leaving them she wrote, as a parody on the lengthy notes appended at that time to each single line of text:—
"Dear Dromy,
"Pray send word if Ante is come, and also how Ele does, to your very affectionate
"Notes on the above epistle by a commentator of the latter end of the nineteenth century.
"This epistle is all that is come down to us of this voluminous author, and is probably the only thing she ever wrote that was worth preserving, or which we might reasonably expect to reach posterity. Her name is only preserved to us in some beautiful hendecasyllables written by the best poet of his time."
Then follow, on each abbreviation, long and learned notes, full of references to learned authors, altogether very excellent fooling, showing what a clever and playful companion Hannah was. The hendecasyllables were Bishop Lowth's complimentary address.