“Nature has given us two ears, but only one mouth—why do not we take the hint?” was a sentence which Macready wrote in his Diary when suffering the consequences of some ill-advised, hasty utterance. If only Miss Mitford, with her impulsiveness, had seen this sentence and could have realized how wise was the advice contained in it, she would have been a happier woman in many respects. Too often her eagerness to champion the cause of one of her friends led her to embitter and estrange another. Among her neighbours was a family of the name of Merry, and one day, while Talfourd was on a visit to the Mitford Cottage, Mr. Merry called and in some way affronted the other. This vexed the hostess considerably at the time, and was referred to later, when she and the Merrys met at an afternoon function at Bearwood, the residence of Mr. Walter, of the Times. There was a heated argument, and Miss Mitford took up a resentful attitude, “certainly with too much violence,” as she afterwards explained. The occasion was ill-chosen for such an altercation, and Mr. Merry was deeply offended. Repenting at leisure, Miss Mitford wrote him an apology, which he would not accept. For six weeks he nursed his grievance, spreading the tale of Miss Mitford’s offence among mutual friends. Realizing at last how deeply she had offended, Miss Mitford sent her old friend the following letter, which we quote as an instance of her wholehearted contrition.
“I cannot suffer you to leave our neighbourhood for weeks, perhaps for months, without making one more effort to soften a displeasure too justly excited—without once more acknowledging my fault, and entreating your forgiveness. Do not again repulse me—pray do not! Life is too short, too full of calamity, for an alienation indefinitely prolonged—a pardon so long suspended. I know you better, perhaps, than you know yourself, and am sure that, were I at this moment suffering under any great affliction, you would be the first—ay, the very first—to soothe and to succour me. If my father (which may God in his mercy avert!) were dead; if I myself were on a sick bed, or in prison, or in a workhouse (and you well know that this is the destiny to which I always look forward), then you would come to me—I am sure of it. You would be as ready to fly to my assistance then as the angel of peace and mercy at your side”—[a tender allusion to Mrs. Merry, who was deeply grieved at the estrangement].—“But do not wait for that moment; do not, for an error which has been sincerely and severely repented, deprive a melancholy and a most anxious existence of one of its few consolations. Lonely and desolate as I am—with no one belonging to me in the world but my dear father—poor in every sense, earning with pain and difficulty a livelihood which every day makes more precarious, I cannot afford the loss of your sympathy. I say this without fear of misconstruction. You will understand that what I regret is the friendship, and intimacy, the everyday intercourse of mind and of heart, on which even you yourself—so much more happily placed—did yet set some value. You did like me once; try me again. You will find me—at least I hope so—all the better for the rigorous discipline which my mind has lately undergone, the salutary and unwonted course of self-examination and self-abasement.
“At all events, do not go without a few words of peace and of kindness. I send you the last flowers of my garden. Your flower seems to have continued in blossom on purpose to assist in the work of reconciliation. Do not scorn its sweet breath, or resist its mute pleadings, but give me in exchange one bunch of the laurustinus for which I used to ask you last winter, and let it be a token of the full and perfect reconciliation for which I am a suppliant; and then I shall cherish it—oh, I cannot tell you how much! Once again, forgive me—and farewell.”
It is pleasant to record that this touching appeal had, as of course it would, the desired effect, and the old happy relationship was renewed.
The year was 1833 and, like many a previous one, it was full of pecuniary worries and embarrassments. Dr. Mitford was again giving trouble, seeking to augment his income by some doubtful investment for which he had, as usual, the tip of some unscrupulous schemer, to whose class he fell an easy prey. The matter fortunately came to Miss Mitford’s knowledge, and she wrote off in great haste to William Harness “to caution you in case you should receive any authority, from any quarter, to sell out our money in the Funds, not to do so without communicating with me. I have no doubt of my father’s integrity, but I think him likely to be imposed on.”
This was a more serious matter than it at first appears. The money in the Funds was left by Dr. Russell for his daughter and her offspring and could not therefore be touched without authority from Miss Mitford, who was her mother’s sole heir. How then did Dr. Mitford propose to obtain its use? There is only one answer and it is one which involves the integrity which Miss Mitford did not question. Harness’s reply was plain and to the point. “Depend upon it the money shall never be touched with my consent. It was consideration for your future welfare which prevented my father’s consenting to its being sold out some years ago, when you had been persuaded, and wished to persuade him, to your own utter ruin.” [This was during the stressful time at Bertram House when, with the consent of her mother, Miss Mitford wrote to Dr. Harness imploring him to sell out and give her father the use of the money.] “That £3,000 I consider as the sheet-anchor of your independence, if age should ever render literature irksome to you, or infirmity incapacitate you for exertion; and, while your father lives, it shall never stir from its present post in the Funds. After he has ceased (as all fathers must cease) to live, my first object will be to consult with you and my most intelligent money-managing friends, and discover the mode of making the stock most profitable to your comfort, either by annuity or any other mode that may be thought most advisable. Till then—from whatever quarter the proposition may come—I have but one black, blank, unqualified No for my answer. I do not doubt Dr. Mitford’s integrity, but I have not the slightest confidence in his prudence; and I am fully satisfied that if these three thousand and odd hundreds of pounds were placed at his disposal to-day, they would fly the way so many other thousands have gone before them, to-morrow. Excuse me saying this; but I cannot help it.”
This letter stands to the lasting credit of its writer and affords ample proof of his steadfast and unflinching devotion to his trust, failing which the tragedy of Miss Mitford’s life would have been deeper than it was. He alone had the power of drawing out the best that was in Miss Mitford, in getting her to express the moral and spiritual side of her nature. Art, literature, the Drama she could talk and write upon to other people, but it was to William Harness that she would pour out her convictions on the deeper things of life. He sent her a book of his sermons, and although it reached her at midnight (having been conveyed from her friend by Dr. Milman to her father, whom he met at a dinner-party), she sat far into the night, reading and studying it, and inditing a reply at three o’clock in the morning while the mood was hot upon her.
“I have read it through—the second part twice through. That second sermon would have done honour to Shakespeare, and I half expected to find you quoting him. There would be a tacit hypocrisy, a moral cowardice, if I were to stop here, and not to confess, what I think you must suspect, although by no chance do I ever talk about it—that I do not, or rather cannot, believe all that the Church requires. I humbly hope that it is not necessary to do so, and that a devout sense of the mercy of God, and an endeavour, however imperfectly and feebly, to obey the great precepts of justice and kindness, may be accepted in lieu of that entire faith which, in me, will not be commanded. You will not suspect me of thoughtlessness in this matter; neither, I trust, does it spring from intellectual pride. Few persons have a deeper sense of their own weakness; few, indeed, can have so much weakness of character to deplore and to strive against. Do not answer this part of my letter. It has cost me a strong effort to say this to you; but it would have been a concealment amounting to a falsity if I had not, and falsehood must be wrong. Do not notice it; a correspondence of controversy could only end in alienation, and I could not afford to lose my oldest and kindest friend—to break up the close intimacy in which I am so happy and of which I am so proud.” This was in 1829. In the Spring of 1834 her old friend sent another of his printed sermons, which again she read and studied and which drew from her some pronouncements on Disestablishment and Disendowment of the Church and on questions of Social Reform which cannot but be read with interest to-day.
“It is a very able and conciliatory plea for the Church. My opinion (if an insignificant woman may presume to give one) is, that certain reforms ought to be; that very gross cases of pluralities should be abolished (it is too sweeping, I think, to say all pluralities); that some few of the clergy are too rich, and that a great many are too poor; but (although not holding all her doctrines) I heartily agree with you that, as an establishment, the Church ought to remain; for, to say nothing of the frightful precedent of sweeping away property, a precedent which would not stop there, the country would be over-run with fanatics, and, in the rural districts especially, a clergyman (provided he be not a magistrate) is generally, in worldly, as well as spiritual matters, a great comfort to the poor. But our wise legislators never think of the rural districts—never. They legislate against gin-shops, which are the evil of great towns, and encourage beer-shops, which are the pest of the country, the cause of half the poverty and three-fourths of the demoralization. But the Church must be (as many of her members are) wisely tolerant; bishops must not wage war with theatres, nor rectors with a Sunday evening game of cricket. If they take up the arms of the Puritans, the Puritans will beat them.”
The reference in this letter to rectors and Sunday cricket is most interesting in view of the fact that only a few miles away, in the village of Eversley, there had just arrived a new curate who, as time went on, became the rector; and who, among other things, shocked some of his clerical brethren by actually encouraging manly sports, such as cricket and quoits, on the village green in the intervals between the Sunday services. His name was Charles Kingsley and he was destined to be numbered among the very dear friends of Miss Mitford in her declining days.
The refusal—the just refusal—of William Harness to entertain Dr. Mitford’s idea regarding money matters, somewhat upset the latter’s calculations, besides causing him to be more importunate in his demands on his daughter. There were, of course, certain sums coming in regularly from the various magazines, but these were not sufficient, and so both father and daughter decided to take a bold risk and endeavour to produce the prohibited play of Charles the First at some theatre where the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain did not operate.
Dr. Mitford took the manuscript with him to London in the May of 1834, where, by the kindness of Mr. T. J. Serle—a noted playwright and actor—he was introduced to Mr. Abbott, who, having left Covent Garden Theatre and become Manager of the Victoria Theatre in the Waterloo Road, was a likely person to take up the project. Mr. Abbott immediately accepted the play and was extremely liberal in his terms—£200 to be paid down and a fourth share of the profits if the play ran for a certain number of nights. The negotiations were somewhat prolonged, but by the end of June the whole matter had been arranged and Miss Mitford went to town to superintend the rehearsals. The play was produced in July, with Mr. Cathcart in the cast and with the prologue both written and spoken by Mr. Serle. It was a great success, despite the drawbacks attendant on its production in a minor theatre on the Surrey side of the Thames. Writing to her friend Miss Jephson, the delighted author said:—“The papers will of course have told you that both I and my actor have been successful ... the thing is admirably got up, the theatre beautiful, and Cathcart’s acting refined, intellectual, powerful and commanding beyond anything I ever witnessed.... They make a real queen of me, and would certainly demolish my humility, if I were happy enough to be humble, though I feel that over-praise, over-estimation, is a far more humbling thing—a thing that sends you back on your own mind to ask, ‘Have I deserved this?’ than anything else that can be. For the first ten days I spent on an average from four to six hours every morning in the Victoria Theatre, at hard scolding, for the play has been entirely got up by me; then I dined out amongst twenty or thirty eminent strangers every evening. Since that I have been to operas and to pictures, and held a sort of drawing-room every morning; so that I am so worn out, as to have, for three days out of the last four, fainted dead away between four and five o’clock, a fine-lady trick which I never played before, and which teaches me I must return, as soon as I can, into the country, to write another play and run again the same round of fatigue, excitement and pleasure. After all, my primary object is, and has been, to establish Mr. Cathcart.”
Although the Duke of Devonshire could not agree to licence the play, he was not averse to accepting its Dedication to himself, acknowledging it in a very gracious note to the author. Thus, set on their feet once more, the little household pursued a normal course of existence. The Doctor went to London and his daughter plodded, exhausted and overdone, at her new book, which was to be called Belford Regis and be descriptive of life and character in a country town—Belford Regis being, of course, none other than the adjacent town of Reading.
It was a project originally undertaken by its author for no other purpose than to try her hand at delineating the scenery and characteristics of a town in the same way that she had treated the country in Our Village. The original scheme was for one volume, but the thing grew and the characters afforded such scope to the writer that, by the time it was published, it had extended to three volumes.
While Dr. Mitford was in town—he went up in the early part of 1835—he opened up negotiations on the subject with Richard Bentley, the publisher, and secured very good terms, with the result that Bentley published Belford Regis: or Sketches of a Country Town, late in the same year. Charming and valuable as the book may be for its picture of life in the Reading of that day, it cannot compare in the slightest degree with the similar work which preceded it. It is slipshod as to style and is full of repetitions, bearing all too plainly the marks of hurried compilation and the harassed, overworked mind of its author. Miss Mitford, recognized these faults, but attributed them to another cause, viz., “its having been sent up at different times; having been first intended to appear in one volume, then in two, and now in three volumes.”
It had a certain success; that was inevitable with a book from Miss Mitford’s pen now that her reputation had been established; but the success was not maintained, and now Belford Regis is looked upon as a literary curiosity by students and with affection by all who claim a more than passing interest in the town which it describes. The critics of the day were divided in their opinions; some preferred it to Our Village, but most found fault with it in that it pictured life as too bright and sunny. The author’s own estimate was conveyed in a letter to Miss Jephson.
“In my opinion it is overloaded with civil notes, and too full of carelessnesses and trifling repetitions.... Nevertheless, I myself prefer it to my other prose works, both as bolder and more various and deeper in sentiment, and as containing one character (a sort of embodiment of the strong sense and right feeling which I believe to be common in the middling classes, emphatically the people) which appears and reappears in several of the stories, giving comfortable proof of the power to carry on a strongly distinguished character through three volumes which, if I do not comply (as I suppose I must) with Mr. Bentley’s desire for a novel, will be very valuable.”
This project of a novel was one which Miss Mitford thought upon as a sort of nightmare. Longmans had proposed it years before but had been met with a refusal, and now Bentley was renewing the attack, though he did not succeed.
Altogether the year was one which should have been regarded as prosperous. It saw the issue of the fourteenth edition of the first volume of Our Village and the issue of a two-volume edition (five vols. in two), illustrated with woodcuts by George Baxter, who visited Three Mile Cross early in the year to take sketches under the author’s supervision. It also saw the production of the opera Sadak and Kalasrade at the Lyceum, but this can hardly be accounted a success as its performance was restricted to one night.
The publication of Belford Regis naturally inspired the writing of many congratulatory letters to its author and brought shoals of visitors to the little cottage to see the author and her flowers—the latter she had described in great detail in the work. Among the visitors were William and Mary Howitt, both of whom went away charmed with all they had seen. Mary Howitt told Miss Mitford that her study of the development of intellect in the heroine of “The Dissenting Minister,” might pass for the history of her own mind, and that the author must have lived much amongst rigid Dissenters to give so exact a picture of the goings-on in the interior of their families.
William Howitt paid his tribute in a delightful account of his visit which appeared in the Athenæum of August of that same year. It was entitled, A Visit to our Village, and, although Miss Mitford thought the praise was overdone, she yet hoped her old friend, Sir William Elford, would read it:—“It is at once so pretty and so kind; the praise does not describe me as I am, because I fall far short of the picture; but it is just how I should wish to be—and how very seldom does that happen!”
And, in addition to all this, the September brought a commission from the editors of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal. “It is one of the signs of the times, that a periodical selling for three-halfpence should engage so high-priced a writer as myself; but they have a circulation of 200,000 or 300,000.” This was Miss Mitford’s passing comment on the transaction, but it was to be of far more lasting importance than she anticipated, resulting as it did in a close friendship with William Chambers and in a scheme of collaboration in which she took a prominent part.