The Dial/Volume 15/Number 171/More "Recollections of a Happy Life"
The New Books.
More "Recollections of a Happy Life."[1]
Those who have read Marianne North's "Recollections of a Happy Life" will approve the publishing by the editor, Mrs. J. A. Symonds, of a supplementary volume of "Further Recollections" containing certain earlier chapters of Miss North's journals omitted from the original work. We may say at once that while the new volume lacks the scientific interest of its predecessor, it easily surpasses it in wit and vivacity. The chapters now given were originally omitted, chiefly, as the editor tells us, because the journeys described were over what is nowadays comparatively well-trodden ground—an objection, however, which loses force in the case of narrators whose "travel-pictures," like Miss North's, are largely a reflection of temperament. Miss North had, in a special sense, her own way of seeing things. What she describes comes to us tinged and refracted, as it were, through a quite peculiar medium; so that it really matters little in point of novelty whether her observations are made from the deck of a Nile dahabieh or from the top of a Brompton omnibus, the results being in either case largely out of the average ken.
The most objective and guide-lookish of Miss North's descriptions have, however, a certain value of their own, in that they enable us to contrast the travel of thirty years ago with the more convenient, if less picturesque, methods of our own day. Railways and Cook's steamers had not then, in Spain and on the Nile, quite supplanted the leisurely arrangements of more primitive travel. The jogging, jingling caravan of mules is now, almost everywhere, a thing of the past; so is the old Spanish diligence—a delightful vehicle in which Miss North was whirled "at a furious pace over zig-zag passes and round shoulders of the Pyrenees, racing with a rival diligence in a most breakneck manner, too shaken and exhausted even to notice the wondrous change of vegetation." There is a big hotel now at Luxor! fitted with the "modern improvements," and affected by squads of Cook-forwarded pilgrims; and, in short, the ubiquitous railway, wafting abroad the winged seeds of the "Anglo-Saxon contagion," will in a few more years have made travel, as the editor laments, "everywhere exactly alike."
"Further Recollections" is essentially a transcript of the journals kept by the author from 1859 to 1870, while travelling with her father in Spain, Switzerland, Egypt, and the Levant. The thread of continuity supplied in the opening volume by the scientific purpose of the writer's later journeyings, is here lacking. It is distinctly the work of a younger woman—of a fresh young girl with a fair stock of reading and a vast stock of animal spirits, whose keen enjoyment of the novelties of foreign travel is bracingly manifest in every page of her diary. Miss North was a specially stout-hearted and independent traveller, one of the sort whose elasticity of spirits is more than proof against the annoyances and discomforts that form the melancholy refrain of the narratives of less resolute pilgrims. The direst mishap serves, with her, to point a jest. At the very start, for instance, a precious portmanteau (one portmanteau, containing everything that this admirable woman thought necessary for a journey of several months) fell overboard in the harbor at St. Heliers:
"Everything was thoroughly soaked, and had to be spread out separately to dry; all my paints, paper, and dress (only one); for we took the least possible luggage, and yet had everything we really needed, even luxuries(?) including a bonnet, whose crown I used to stuff with a compact roll of stockings and cram into a hole left for it amongst my underclothing, just big enough to contain it: when taken out it would be damped and set in the sun, with the stockings still in the crown, and it stretched itself into proper shape again, and was the admiration of all beholders."
Very different, we may note in passing, from Miss North's slender effects must have been the baggage train of the American ladies (the "Skinners of Boston") whom she saw later at Philæ tripping about among the relics of the Pharaohs, appropriately dressed "in Worth's very latest fashions," and convoyed by a male apparition clad "in a complete suit of cineraria color, from stockings to cap." Sarcastic Miss North! She even goes to say that, owning to this "Yankee incursion" (that is her disrespectful expression) from the Back Bay, "the place lost half its charm," etc.
A pleasanter American experience was her meeting with Miss Hosmer in Rome 1860.
Once Miss Raincock took me to see Gibson's young American pupil, Miss Hosmer, in a large unfurnished studio she had just taken, where she was preparing to make a portrait statue of some famous countryman, it was to be nine feet high, she said (looking herself like a small child); she had only one chair, which she gave me, as the stranger; seating our old friend on the table, she mounted to the top of a high ladder herself, from whence she chattered and laughed with the happy air of one who is sure to please. Miss Raincock had once received a note from Gibson,—'That poor American girl has fever, come and nurse her,' so she had packed up her old carpet-bag and gone at once to obey the order, thus forming a friendship for life."
But Miss North's turn for satirical portraiture was by no means reserved for Americans. Among the most amusing of her "Innocents Abroad" was a Frenchman, a fellow-passenger on the Nile boat, who was, she rather naïvely complains, "absurdly national and unlike us in everything." Curiously enough, Monsieur, on his side, seems to have been observing his English companions, and making, mutatis mutandis, the same conclusions about them. Says Miss North:
"He got up late in the morning, and came into the saloon in demi-toilette as we were finishing our breakfast, having been 'strangled' and frozen entirely by the cold, and, mon Dieu! he had no appetite! he would take a glass of lemonade and his narghile, and lecture us in the most polite and unreasonable way about the bêtise and English barbarism of fatiguing the stomach so early in the morning by eating; after a little while he would get faint with hunger, and declare the cold would kill him, and, mon Dieu! he would die if he got nothing to eat till so late, and Achmet ya Achmet! and then he began gorging like a boa-constrictor, stopping every now and then to explain how much better the food would have been if, etc., after which he began smoking again, and tried to draw, but, mon Dieu! he had no time; if he only had time he could do something of true merit. . . . Mr. S. confided to me that the Frenchman went to bed clothes and all, and that his toilette in the morning consisted of a thorough brushing downwards with the same brush, beginning with his hair, then his green velvet coat, and lastly his dear shining boots, c'est tout, voilà! He also complained that he could not get filtered water to wash in; if he could not get it filtered he would not wash his 'figure' at all. He was told Madame only used that of the Nile for hers. 'Madame was too good to complain, and besides she was an Englishwoman, bah'!"
Miss North visited Egypt in 1865, and she gives a lively account of the country and people and of her own experiences. The route from Alexandria ("a nasty, mongrel, mosquito-ish place") to Cairo reminded her of the fens of Ely; but the country was richly cropped with cotton and Indian corn, with scarcely a tree to break the monotony of the view, and but few villages. The cottages were merely square blocks of hardened mud, windowless and with the flat roofs covered with pigeons, chickens, and cats; primitive ploughs, like the ancient models in old Egyptian carvings, were scratching the rich soil.
"The natives had that calm, soft type of countenance that marks the old statuary of their country, large eyes and gentle expression, but no strength of character, and one could easily see that the old sculptors had before their eyes the ancestors of the present race, and that, though the ruling classes might be changed in Egypt, the fellahs or original population of the land are of the same blood as their forefathers."
Books might be filled, says Miss North, with the architectural wonders of Cairo, its elaborate arabesques, and lacelike patterns in stone-work, plaster, and wood-carving. The tombs outside the city were the greatest gems of all, though they were only visited by flights of falcons or stray Arab wanderers. Europeans seemed popular with the people, who were fond of showing off any words they knew. Miss North's donkeyman, like most of his tribe, was a special linguist. He knew "a few words of many languages, and made the most of them by transposing and reversing their order in a sentence; for instance, 'gentleman like donkey,' 'no gentleman like donkey,' 'donkey no like gentleman.' He told his beast where to go, and the clever creature trotted off right or left accordingly. 'Donkey speak English,' then the donkey always put its ears back and kicked out behind,"—a proceeding reminding one of the intelligent animal that carried Silas Wegg to "Boffinses Bower" on a memorable occasion.
The author confesses to having regarded things Egyptian "from a purely picturesque point," and was scolded for this by the Cairo clergyman's wife:
"'Dear, dear, like all travellers, you wander hither and thither and see nothing with a proper object, everything from a false point of view. I suppose you never considered that on the precise spot where those Mameluke tombs stand the Israelites made their bricks without straw!' And her husband took us to the top of a hill and showed us the very stone on which Moses stood to count the Israelites as they passed out of Egypt."
The start from Cairo was made the day after Christmas, and the author's record of the ensuing Nile voyage is studded with characteristic bits of vivid, semi-humourous description. At Luxor, Miss North visited the eccentric Lady Duff Gordon, whom she had seen twenty-five years before. Lady Lucie was picturesquely installed in some rooms raised up amongst the pillars of an old temple, "like a second story":
"She herself was old and gray, but had still the handsome face which had captivated me then, in spite of having burst two blood-vessels that year, and she said the air at Luxor did wonders for her. The natives all worshipped her, and she doctored them, amused them, and even smoked with them. They looked on her as something mysterious, and even rather uncanny, and respected her accordingly."
Later, at Karnak, Miss North was rather startlingly reminded of one of Lady Gordon's early eccentricities:
"Once while painting, and quite absorbed in my work at Karnak, a man sat down close to me, and I said 'Good morning,' without looking up, till Hassan pulled my dress, and, oh horror! the man was holding a huge golden snake by the tail, a yard of shining, polished, slippery snake, quite straight and looking at me! I shouted and sprang away, and Hassan drove off the two wretched brutes. They take out the fangs of these tame snakes, but I hate even the sight of them now, though I used to like poor Lucie's pet when I was a child."
The justness of the following description of our heroine's first crocodiles will be recognized by those familiar with both terms of her comparison:
"One day we saw seven crocodiles, looking like rocks or shadows on the sand; we were disputing if they were really crocodiles, when the huge creatures curved their backs with a violent effort, raised themselves on what our Frenchman called their 'pattes,' and slid slowly into the water, as a fat lady descends from her carriage, with a certain waddle and air of importance."
Everything in Thebes appeared to Miss North "too stupendous," seeming, as she says,—
"To blunt my poor wits and pencil too, no cutting could get the wretched thing to draw straight; and then the flocks of Americans and 'backsheesh' people drove all peace away. The little women of eleven or twelve years old, who carried water jars on their heads, only supported by the palm of one hand, keeping up with our fast donkeys at a run, were very bewitching, with their bright eyes and easy graceful movements. They said they were all ladies, not girls, meaning they were married. 'You got wife?' they asked me. 'Oh yes, you have in house in England!'—as if I locked up my husband at home as they do their wives here."
Near the caves of Beni Hassan the writer encountered her first Egyptian "saint," who seems to have been, in some points, very like his historic prototypes:
"One morning we were surprised to see Achmet and the Reis go on shore amicably together, after incessant squabbling, for a walk, but a few minutes later a wild head with a mop of hair came suddenly out of the water and up the boat's side, and its owner seated himself on the edge and tied himself into a petticoat which he had brought on the top of the mop, and then proceeded to kiss all the sailors, who did not enjoy it, while we shrank closer into our cabin shell. The poor fellows all gave him some coppers, and after he had administered another hugging all round, he took off and folded up his petticoat, put it on his head, and dived and swam off to a boat full of corn near us, to levy the same tax. They said he was mad, and consequently a saint, and thus gained his own livelihood."
We shall close our extracts from Miss North's journals with the following description of the journalist herself, given by the Egyptian pilot who took the Norths up the river:
"This Bint was unlike most other English Bints, being, firstly, white and lively; secondly, she was gracious in her manner, and of kind disposition; thirdly, she attended continually to her father, whose days went in rejoicing that he had such a Bint; fourthly, she represented all things on paper, she drew all the temples of Nubia, all the Sakkiahs, and all the men and women and nearly all the palm trees; she was a valuable and remarkable Bint."
The portrait is certainly more complimentary to its subject than to English "Bints" (we confess to some uncertainty as to the meaning of this term) in general.
There are three illustrations, including portraits of the author and her father, and a pensketch, by a fellow-traveler, which is so absurdly bad that it is difficult to account for its inclusion.
- ↑ Some Further Recollections of a Happy Life. Selected from the Journals of Marianne North, chiefly between the years 1859-69. Edited by her sister, Mrs. John A. Symonds. With portraits. New York: Macmillan & Co.