BOOKS.
MISS MITFORD'S LIFE.* THE interest of these volumes is twofold,—personal and literary. Miss Mitford's life, as mournful as it was beautiful, is more deserving of remembrance than any of her writings. It exhibits a spirit of self-sacrifice, of filial devotion—and, shall we add, of filial delusion ?—which is to most of. us almost past understanding. Dr. Mitford, her father, a man " utterly selfish at heart, and incapable of sacrificing the slightest inclina- tion of his own for the welfare of his wife, or even of his daughter," —having, as a young man, wasted his own patrimony,—married a rich heiress, squandered all her property in play within eight or nine years of their marriage,—gained a lottery prize of £20,000 (which, by the way, belonged not to himself, but to his only child), dissipated this fortune as he had dissipated the former, and was finally contented to live a life of entire dependence upon the literary earnings of his daughter. Strange to say, this wretched father, whose sole virtues seem to have been a handsome face and agreeable manners, possessed the unfailing love both of bis daughter and his wife, neither of whom ever complained of the man who had destroyed the prospects of one and the happiness of both. To administer to his comforts, to find money for his follies, to prevent his feeling any of the annoyance of straitened circum- stances, this seems to have been the sole aim of Miss Mitford's life.
• The Life of Nary Russell Jlitprd, related in a Selection from her Letters to her Friends. Edited by the Bev. A. U. L'Estrange. 3 vols. London: Bentley. 1869.
It is a strange story. From a school-girl the child lived ou terms of curious familiarity with her parents, to whom she uses the cosseting terms of endearment a father might bestow upon a child or a young husband on his wife. It reminds us of the " little language" which Swift used to Stella. She calls Dr. Mitford her " dear old Tod," her " ittey boy," her " best beloved darling," her "dear Dodo," and so ou ; and at the very time when she learnt that the family was entirely ruined by his folly, she tells him "the world does not contain so proud, so happy, or so fond a daughter." Aud this, severe as was her struggle for existence, seems to have been the feeling to the last. Once indeed she remarks, in later life, when worn out by pecuniary anxiety, that she cannot describe her father's absolute inertness, "obstinacy of going on in the same way ;'' and at another time she hopes " there is no want of duty in my wishing him to contribute his efforts with mine to our support" (which efforts, we may observe, in parenthesis, were never made). But these were but transient feelings, past apparently as soon as uttered, while her prevailing feeling was one of unquestioning faith in his "thousand virtues." It was well for her own comfort that she was thus blinded, for no one could have felt more keenly the hardships of a literary life.
"I consider the being forced to this drudgery," she writes, "as the greatest misery that life can afford. But it is my wretched fate, and must be undergone, so long, at least, as my father is spared to me. If I should have the misfortune to lose him, I shall go quietly to the workhouse, and never write another line, a far preferable destiny." Again, she writes, under the pressure of physical pain, " Women were not meant to earn the bread of a family. I am sure of that,—there is a want of strength ;" and again, with a pathos that is very touching, " If you knew all that I have gone through this winter alone, day after day, week after week, you would wonder that I am still left to cumber the earth. Nothing could bear up under it but the love that is mercifully given to the object of anxiety,—such love as the mother bears to her sickly babe." The story of Charles Lamb amusing his childish father at the card-table immediately after the dreadful tragedy which darkened his life, is scarcely more affecting than Miss Mitford's tale of how her father, who liked no one to read to him but herself, occupied those hours which on his account ought to have been devoted to work, and how, when debts accumulate in consequence, she attributes all the blame to her own " want of energy." Nothing seemed more melancholy to her than the lives of authors, but she was too loving a daughter to confess even to herself that all the melancholy of her own lot as a woman of letters was due to the sins of a spendthrift and a gambler. In the preface to Belford Regis the author disclaims, honestly enough no doubt, all individual portrait- painting. Yet we can scarcely doubt that some thoughts of her father must have passed through her mind in drawing the character of Nat Kinlay. Whether she knew it or not, and it is just possible she was not aware of the likeness, the verisimilitude is striking.
Miss Mitford's literary career was neither obscure nor unprofit- able. Her popularity was great, her friends included some of the best and noblest in the land, her books and dramas were extra- ordinarily successful. Some of her early poems were revised by Coleridge, and proved " very popular," her plays drew full houses, and both Charles Kemble and Macready were eager to retain her services. She was tossed about between them, she writes, like a
cricket-ball ; in 1835, Our Village had passed through fourteen large editions in England, and nearly as many in America ; and
through her writings, in a degree that rarely happens, she not only won reputation, but the esteem and love of many to whom otherwise she would have remained unknown. Assuredly, if the literary profession has its drawbacks, it has its compensations also. Fame is dear even to women, and Miss Mitford possessed too healthy a nature to be indifferent to its delights.
The best kind of biography, says Miss Mitford, is that of letters connected by a slight narrative, and in this manner she is made to tell her life-story in these volumes. The correspondence, which commences with the beginning of the century and terminates in 1855, abounds with delightful literary gossip and personal remin- iscences. The style, we need scarcely say, is admirable—simple,
unaffected, and idiomatic ; the bits of rural description remind us of Our Village, and the remarks on books and men are, for the
most part, generous and discriminating. Such a book allures us on from page to page with a curious fascination. Every moment the eye is attracted by a familiar name, or by a criticism that compels attention, by some pleasant thought or amusing anecdote, and it may he safely said that there is not one tedious chapter in the three volumes.
Miss Mitford accumulated a large library, and we suspect that among her six thousand books might have been found a vast num- ber of presentation copies, for she alludes in one letter to receiving books daily by the post. She had the habit of running over almost every work of note that was published, and the passion for reading. like that for flowers, was in full strength all her life through. When she was nineteen she is said to have read fifty-five volumes in thirty-one days, and when she was past sixty her talk was still of books in every letter, and in one of the latest we find her reading and enjoying the old novels loved in her youth. " I remembered a library in Bristol rich in such rarities, and got a friend to ask for some and hire them for me. The bookseller, finding who wanted them, wrote me a charming letter, putting his whole stock at my disposal ; I never read so graceful a note. Since then I have been revelling in old associations and good English." Her warm admiration of old English poets and dramatists tem- pered her enthusiasm for the works of modern writers, indeed, it is doubtful whether she ever fully appreciated the literature of her contemporaries. To their faults she was sensitively alive, and with all her good-nature she is sometimes a little sarcastic in her comments about books and people. "Jacqueline," she writes, "is like everything belonging to Mr. Rogers (except himself), exceedingly pretty." Of 1Vaverley she considered the style abominable, and as- serted that there was not in the whole book one single page of pure and vernacular English. Lady Byron received too much sympathy, she said. The man's vices were public, and why therefore (lid she marry him but to partake his celebrity ? "She has now the comfort of being interesting' in the eyes of all men, and exem- plary' in the mouths of all women ; she has, moreover—and even I, spinster as I am, can feel that this must be solid consola- tion—she has, moreover, the delight of hating her husband, to the admiration and edification of the whole world." Again, she writes, "The Wordsworths never dine, you know, they hats such doings ; when they are hungry, they go to the cupboard and eat." Uncle Tones Cabin she could not read, but stopped short at a hundred pages : it was "so painful, so exaggerated." Dickens, who " cannot write good English," is meretricious in sentiment; and she did not like Miss Martineau's political-economy tales, having "an aversion to do-me-good books in general and to politi- cal economy in particular." She had a foolish dislike of science, of which she speaks with feminine ignorance and contempt. " Don't, dear, write to me about science ; I never can understand what scientific people mean ; and I used to pose poor dear Captain Kater and to shock scientific ladies by asking what good it did ; for really I never could make out." Very feminine, too, but as grace- ful as it is womanly, is Miss Mitford's ardent passion for flowers. Literature was her business, the cultivation of flowers her recrea- tion, and no one ever pursued it with a keener sense of enjoy- ment. She had her reward, and in the soothing, quiet pleasures of the garden forgot for a time the perplexities of her life. " I place flowers," she writes, " in the very first rank of simple pleasures, and I have no very good opinion of the hard, worldly people who take no delight in them." She relates with evident gusto how gardeners are constantly calling plants after her ; how a dahlia under her name is selling at ten guineas a root, how she herself obtained twenty guineas for a seedling ; that she has three hundred different sorts of geraniums, and " shall be magnificent in dahlias, having one hundred and eight of the very finest known." Here is a pretty picture of her garden :— "I should not omit, when reckoning up my felicities just now, to tell you that my little garden is a perfect rosary,—the greenest and most blossomy nook that ever the sun shone upon. It is almost shut in by buildings; one a long open shed, very pretty, a sort of rural arcade, where we sit. On the other side is an old granary, to which we mount by outside wooden steps, also very pretty. Then there is an opening to a little court, also backed by buildings, but with room enough to let in the sunshine, the north-west sunshine, that comes aslant in summer evenings through and under a large elder tree. One end is closed by eur pretty irregular cottage, which, as well as the granary, is covered by cherry trees, vines, roses, jessamine, honeysuckle, and grand spires of hollyhocks. The other is comparatively open, showing over high pales the blue sky, and a range of woody hills. All and every part is un- trimmed, antique, weather-stained, and homely as can be imagined,— gratifying the eye by its exceeding picturesqueness, and the mind by the certainty that no pictorical effect was intended, that it owes all its charms to ' rare accident.' "
Take another sunny garden picture, as seen from the top of a hay-rick :-
" Ben having said that half the parish had mounted on a hayriok close by to look at the garden, which lies beneath it (an acre of dowers rich in colour as a painter's palette), I could not resist the sight of the ladder, and one evening, when all the men wore away, climbed up to take myself a view of my flowery domain. I wish you could see it ! Masses of the Siberian larkspur, and sweet williams, mostly double, the still brighter new larkspur (Delphinium Chinensis), rich as an Oriental but- terfly—such a size, and such a blue !—amongst roses in millions, with the blue and white Canterbury bells (also double), and the white fox- glove, and the variegated monkshood, the carmine pea, in its stalwart beauty, the nemophila, like the sky above its head, the new erysimum, with its gay orange tuft, hundreds of lesser annuals, and fuchsias, zinnias, salvias, geraniums, past compt; so bright are the flowers, that the green really does not predominate amongst them !"
On the whole, this autobiographical memoir will afford delightful entertainment to most readers. The staple commodity is gossip such as only a clever, lively, sensitive woman could write. Miss Mitford's tastes and knowledge were confined within a compara- tively narrow range. She had never travelled, she was almost wholly self-educated, she was not a strong thinker or a powerful writer, yet there are few women of our day whose memory will be more affectionately cherished, and few writers of fiction who have earned a reputation so honourable and consistent. It would be absurd to call Miss Mitford a great novelist, as absurd as to call her a great tragedian ; but in her own simple line, as a teller of village tales and a prose describer of rural scenery, she has rarely, we think, been equalled. Novel-readers require stronger food nowadays than she can provide for them, and tales that may be read with the most absolute placidity are liable to be voted tame ; yet there is a literary grace, a breezy freshness, a delightful woman- liness in Belford Regis and in Our Village which will always attract readers whose taste has not been spoilt by sensational fiction. The latter work especially is one which would have delighted Cowper, and as a picture of English rural life it will, we think, retain its place when many more pretentious works are forgotten. It is not a book to borrow, but to possess, not a book to read straight through, but to enjoy daintily at leisure moments. One word as to the manner in which the Life has been edited. The task was no light one, for, as Miss Mitford jocosely observes, no one but an unraveller of State cyphers can possibly transcribe her letters.; and Mr. Harness, one of her executors, whose recent loss at a ripe old age breaks off another of the links which unite the literary workmen of to-day with the famous men who flourished at the beginning of the century, relates that not only was the writing illegible, but many of the most interesting letters were written on unfolded envelopes, fly-leaves of books, or any odd scraps of paper that came readiest to hand.
Moreover, there was hardly a letter in which some circumstance, or anecdote, or opinion, that occurred in it, was not repeated in a second or a third. So it was not only necessary to decipher, but to select, and the labour appears to have been performed with judgment. One or two faults strike us. Sometimes the narra- tive which connects the correspondence is too slight, sometimes the want of explanatory notes forces us to guess when we should like to know, and sometimes we are a little surprised at the publication of remarks upon living men and women, justifiable enough in pri- vate correspondence, but scarcely justifiable in print. We imagine that Mr. Tennyson, Mr. Kingsley, and other well-known persons, will be scarcely pleased with the familiar manner, friendly though it be, in which they are spoken of in these pages.
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