Mary Russell Mitford

CHAPTER XIII

LITERARY FRIENDS AND LAST DAYS AT BERTRAM HOUSE

“What have you been doing, my dear friend, this beautiful autumn?” wrote Miss Mitford to Sir William Elford, towards the end of 1817. “Farming? Shooting? Painting? I have been hearing and seeing a good deal of pictures lately, for we have had down at Reading Mr. Hofland, an artist whom I admire very much (am I right?), and his wife, whom, as a woman and an authoress, I equally love and admire. It was that notable fool, His Grace of Marlborough, who imported these delightful people into our Bœotian town. He—the possessor of Blenheim—is employing Mr. Hofland to take views at Whiteknights—where there are no views; and Mrs. Hofland to write a description of Whiteknights—where there is nothing to describe.[18] I have been a great deal with them and have helped Mrs. Hofland to one page of her imperial quarto volume; and to make amends for flattering the scenery in verse, I comfort myself by abusing it in prose to whoever will listen.” The Hoflands were an interesting couple, and Mrs. Hofland, in particular, became one of Miss Mitford’s dearest friends and most regular correspondents. She was already an author of some repute and an extremely prolific writer. In the year 1812 she wrote and published some five works, including The Son of a Genius, which had a considerable vogue. Previous to her marriage with Hofland she had been married to a Mr. Hoole, a merchant of Sheffield, who died two years after their marriage, leaving her with an infant four months old and a goodly provision in funds invested. Owing to the failure of the firm which was handling her money, she was left on the verge of poverty and had a bitter struggle to secure enough to live upon. A volume of poems which she published in 1805 brought her a little capital, with which she was enabled to open a boarding-school at Harrogate; but in this venture she failed, and then took to writing for a living. In 1808 she married Mr. Hofland, an event which crowned her troubles for, although outwardly there was no sign of it, there is every certainty that the overbearing selfishness of Hofland and his lack of consideration for any but himself, made their home-life almost unendurable. It will, therefore, be understood why so much sympathy came to exist between Miss Mitford and her friend, seeing that they were both suffering from an almost similar trouble, although the matter was seldom mentioned between them.

Mrs. Hofland was an extremely pious woman, and she was also something of a busybody, though possibly one whose interest in the affairs of others was never unpleasant enough to cause trouble. Hearing of the Elford correspondence, she twitted Miss Mitford with having matrimonial designs in that quarter, which drew from the latter the clever retort: “The man is too wise; he has an outrageous fancy for my letters (no great proof of wisdom that, you’ll say), and marrying a favourite correspondent would be something like killing the goose with the golden eggs.”

Another of the notables who came prominently into Miss Mitford’s life at this period was young Thomas Noon Talfourd, the son of a Reading brewer. He had been educated at the Reading Grammar School under Dr. Valpy, and “began to display his genius by publishing a volume of most stupid poems before he was sixteen.” The description is, of course, Miss Mitford’s. Nevertheless, he who wrote such detestable poetry, “wrote and talked the most exquisite prose.” Upon leaving school he was sent “to Mr. Chitty a-special-pleading; and now he has left Mr. Chitty and is special pleading for himself—working under the Bar, as the lawyers call it, for a year or two, when he will be called; and I hope, for the credit of my judgment, shine forth like the sun from behind a cloud. You should know that he has the very great advantage of having nothing to depend on but his own talents and industry; and those talents are, I assure you, of the very highest order. I know nothing so eloquent as his conversation, so powerful, so full; passing with equal ease from the plainest detail to the loftiest and most sustained flights of imagination; heaping with unrivalled fluency of words and of ideas, image upon image and illustration upon illustration. Never was conversation so dazzling, so glittering. Listening to Mr. Talfourd is like looking at the sun; it makes one’s mind ache with excessive brilliancy.”

Miss Mitford’s prophecy as to Talfourd’s future was more than fulfilled, and he came, at length, not only to illumine the legal profession but to shed a considerable lustre on literature and the drama.

A year or two after the writing of the eulogy just quoted, Talfourd was in Reading in a professional capacity and caused a mild sensation by his masterly and eloquent pleading. Miss Mitford went, with her father, to hear him, and was so moved that she wrote the following sonnet:—

“On Hearing Mr. Talfourd Plead in the Assize-Hall at Reading, on his first Circuit,

March, 1821.

During the year 1817, Sir William Elford lost his wife. She was a most estimable woman, and although her husband had, occasionally, called on the Mitfords—turning aside, for that purpose, from the main road which ran through Reading—in his journeys from the west to London, she had never made their acquaintance and only knew of them by repute and what she gathered from the voluminous correspondence which passed between her husband and his literary friend. News of this lady’s death drew from Miss Mitford a charming letter of condolence which must have proved to Sir William how large a place he held in her thoughts: “Your very touching letter, my dear friend, brought me the first intelligence of the dreadful loss you have experienced. I had not even any idea of danger, or surely, most surely, I should never have intruded on you those letters whose apparently heartless levity I am now shocked to remember. I write now, partly in pursuance of your own excellent system, to avoid, as much as may be, prolonging and renewing your sorrow, and partly to assure you of our sincere and unaffected sympathy. We had not, indeed, the happiness of a personal acquaintance with Lady Elford, but the virtues of the departed are best known in the grief of the survivors. To be so lamented is to have been most excellent. And the recollected virtue, which is now agony, will soon be consolation. God bless and comfort you all!

“I hope soon to hear a better account both of yourself and your daughters; but do not think of writing out of form or etiquette. Write when you will, and what you will, certain that few, very few, can be more interested in your health or happiness than your poor little friend.”

From this date the correspondence between the two underwent a considerable change in tone and feeling. It became less stilted, suggesting to the unbiassed reader the idea that the existence of Lady Elford had, hitherto, forced the young person at Bertram House to mind her P’s and Q’s, “which I detest having to do.” She may, possibly, have adopted this freer style of writing in the hope of diverting Sir William from thinking of his bereavement. In any case the happier style of writing thus begun was never abandoned, and the consequence was that, thereafter, they contained more of that life and spirit which her friend Harness thought so characteristic of her writings when she let her words drop without any premeditation, at the prompting of her emotions.

“I have lately heard a curious anecdote of Mr. Coleridge,” she writes, “which, at the risk—at the certainty—of spoiling it in the telling, I cannot forbear sending you. He had for some time relinquished his English mode of intoxication by brandy and water for the Turkish fashion of intoxication by opium; but at length the earnest remonstrance of his friends, aided by his own sense of right, prevailed on him to attempt to conquer this destructive habit. He put himself under watch and ward; went to lodge at an apothecary’s at Highgate, whom he cautioned to lock up his opiates; gave his money to a friend to keep; and desired his druggist not to trust him. For some days all went on well. Our poet was ready to hang himself; could not write, could not eat, could not—incredible as it may seem—could not talk. The stimulus was wanting, and the apothecary contented. Suddenly, however, he began to mend; he wrote, he read, he talked, he harangued; Coleridge was himself again! And the apothecary began to watch within doors and without. The next day the culprit was detected; for the next day came a second supply of laudanum from Murray’s, well wrapped up in proof sheets of the Quarterly Review.”

As a foil to this she tells, in the next letter, a story of Haydon the painter—poor, embittered disappointed Haydon, who, later, killed himself—which she had just heard from Mrs. Hofland. “He was engaged to spend the day at Hampstead, one Sunday, with some of the cleverest unbelievers of the age ... and being reproached with coming so late, said with his usual simplicity, ‘I could not come sooner—I have been to church.’ You may imagine the torrent of ridicule that was raised upon him. When it had subsided, ‘I’ll tell ye what, gentlemen,’ said he, ‘I knew when I came amongst ye—and knowing this it is not, perhaps, much to my credit that I came—that I was the only Christian of the party; but I think you know that I will not bear insult, and I now tell you all that I shall look upon it as a personal affront if ever this subject be mentioned by you in my hearing; and now to literature, or what you will!’”

During 1818 Miss Mitford paid another short visit to the Perrys at Tavistock House in Tavistock Square, evidently arranged with the idea of keeping their young friend well before the public. “The party to-day consists of the Duke of Sussex, Lord Erskine, and some more. I don’t want to dine with them and most sincerely hope we shall not, for there is no one of literary note; but I am afraid we shall not be able to get off.” They did not get off, and Miss Mitford “had the honour of being handed into the dining-room by that royal porpoise, the Duke of Sussex, who complained much of want of appetite, but partook of nearly every dish on the table.” Concerning this lack of appetite, she subsequently wrote to Sir William Elford: “Never surely did man eat, drink, or swear so much, or talk such bad English. He is a fine exemplification of the difference between speaking and talking; for his speeches, except that they are mouthy and wordy and commonplace, and entirely without ideas, are really not much amiss.” While on this visit she must have heard from some candid friend of Mr. Perry’s the following story of Hazlitt’s revenge and, later, detailed it with great delight—for she dearly loved a joke, even at the expense of her friends.

Hazlitt had been contributing a series of articles, on the English Stage, to various newspapers, particularly to the Morning Chronicle, of which, it will be remembered, Perry was the Editor. Unfortunately Hazlitt’s “copy” came pouring in at the very height of the advertisement season, much to Perry’s disgust, who used “to execrate the d—d fellow’s d—d stuff.” But it was good “copy,” although the Editor had no idea that its writer was a man of genius, and having “hired him as you’d hire your footman, turned him off with as little or less ceremony than you would use in discharging the aforesaid worthy personage,” because he wrote a masterly but damaging critique on Sir Thomas Lawrence, one of Perry’s friends. “Last winter, when his Characters of Shakespeare and his lectures had brought him into fashion, Mr. Perry remembered him as an old acquaintance and asked him to dinner, and a large party to meet him, to hear him talk, and show him off as the lion of the day. The lion came—smiled and bowed—handed Miss Bentley to the dining-room—asked Miss Perry to take wine—said once ‘Yes’ and twice ‘No’—and never uttered another word the whole evening. The most provoking part of this scene was, that he was gracious and polite past all expression—a perfect pattern of mute elegance—a silent Lord Chesterfield; and his unlucky host had the misfortune to be very thoroughly enraged without anything to complain of.”

Reading was a place of great excitement during the year 1818, the resignation of the Member, Sir John Simeon, necessitating a general election. This brought Dr. Mitford back from Town post-haste, for he counted electioneering among his special delights, as we have previously noted. The occasion furnishes us with one of the few recorded instances of Mrs. Mitford shaking herself free from the cares of the household in order to be with and carefully watch her haphazard spouse. “Papa is going to stay in Reading the whole election, and mamma is going to take care of him. Very good in her, isn’t it? But papa does not seem to me at all grateful for this kind resolution, and mutters—when she is quite out of hearing—something about ‘petticoat government.’”

The candidate was Fyshe Palmer, who not only won the election but continued in the representation of Reading for eighteen years. “He is,” wrote Miss Mitford, “vastly like a mop-stick, or rather, a tall hop-pole, or an extremely long fishing-rod, or anything that is all length and no substance; three or four yards of brown thread would be as like him as anything, if one could contrive to make it stand upright. He and papa were riding through the town together, and one of the voters cried out, ‘Fish and Flesh for ever!’ Wit is privileged just now.”

Mr. Palmer’s wife was the Lady Madelina, a daughter of the Duke of Gordon, and she and Miss Mitford became very good friends. Miss Mitford’s anxiety for Palmer’s success was due not so much because of his politics as for the promise he had given her of following in the footsteps of his predecessor and keeping her well supplied with “franks,” if elected. His promise he, doubtless, intended to keep, but as Miss Mitford despairingly wrote: “he has the worst fault a franker can have: he is un-come-at-able. One never knows where to catch him. I don’t believe he is ever two days in a place—always jiggeting about from one great house to another. And such strides as he takes, too! Oh! for the good days of poor Sir John Simeon! He was the franker for me! Stationary as Southampton Buildings, solid as the doorpost, and legible as the letters on the brass-plate! I shall never see his fellow.”

Some time after the election, when, indeed, it was a thing forgotten, Dr. Valpy, the head-master of the Grammar School, decided to have a Greek play performed by the boys, and to this function the Mitfords were invited. The play was the Hercules Furens of Euripides and, of course, Miss Mitford made fun of the whole performance, especially of the last scene when, to slow music, the curtain dropped on “Theseus and Hercules in the midst of a hug which assuredly no Greek poet, painter or sculptor ever dreamt of. That hug was purely Readingtonian—conceived, born and bred in the Forbury.” However, the play was well received and became an annual fixture, with Miss Mitford as the official reporter or, as she put it, the “official puffer for the Reading paper.”

The year was also notable for the arrival in Reading of Henry Hart Milman as Vicar of St. Mary’s, and of the Duke of Wellington, who came in order to look over Strathfieldsaye, Lord Rivers’ estate, some distance beyond that of the Mitfords along the Basingstoke Road, which the Nation proposed he should accept as a tribute of its gratitude. “His Grace comes to look at it sometimes,” wrote Miss Mitford, “and whirls back the same day. He is a terrible horse-killer.”

Towards the close of the year 1819 the Chancery suit came to an end. Mr. Elliott—the Doctor’s opponent and a Bond Street upholsterer—visited Bertram House, saw Dr. Mitford, had a straight talk with him and, as Miss Mitford recorded, “this long affair of eight years was settled in eight minutes.”

With the settlement an accomplished fact, the Mitfords began to look about for an abode of humbler pretentions. London was suggested and promptly vetoed, as was also the idea of settling in Reading. Finally they selected a cottage at Three Mile Cross, situated by the side of the Basingstoke Road and distant about a mile from their old home. It was a wrench to the ladies to leave Bertram House, despite the fact that it had been the scene of so much distress and want. “I shall certainly break my heart when I leave these old walls and trees,” wrote Miss Mitford, but the blow was softened by the thought that she would still be able to wander about the fields and lanes which were so familiar and so dear to her, and, as was her wont on such occasions, gave vent to her feelings in a little sonnet:—

Bertram House is a thing of the past, for there is little left of the building which the Mitfords knew. Another mansion occupies the site, and only the trees and shrubberies remain as evidence of Dr. Mitford’s folly; while the name, which marked the Doctor’s proud descent, has been erased in favour of the older title, Grazeley Court.