A STORY OF "THE BATH."*
THE most worthless, vicious, and frivolous periods in the social life of any country are the most difficult to reproduce in fiction ; the laughter of fools, likened by King Solomon to the crackling of thorns under a pot, has dreary echoes, and the corpse of a hooped and patched, a clouded-cane-carrying, and Beau-Nash- controlled era is ghastly when galvanised. The serious epochs serve the purposes of the novelist better ; the hours of a nation's glory, or of its agony, the great transition periods, the days of heroes, or tyrants, or of the sovereign people, our Cavalier and Roundhead stories, and also the feebler fictions of the diluted tragedy-days of the Jacobite troubles, were full of interest for the readers of a generation ago ; and even now, any writer who takes the great French Revolution for his theme will be read even by those who avow a dislike to historical novels. The reigns of the Georges, apart from the Jacobite element in the time of the two first of those least picturesque and imposing of Sovereigns, lend themselves with
peculiar difficulty to the construction of readable fiction ; they are singularly devoid of romance, and their combination of
coarseness with finery is distasteful to the general sense, though " society " is said to be swinging back again to it. The kind and degree of difference between the aptitude for the pur- poses of fiction of the two eras may be accurately traced in Mr. Thackeray's Esmond and 7'he Virginians respectively. The first of these two novels is almost unanimously conceded to be his most perfect work of art—by which we do not mean his most popular novel— Vanity Fair is indisputably that—the second is the least read and the most rarely quoted of his works. Nevertheless, it is as true a picture of the time in which Henry Esmond's grandsons lived, as Esmond is of the time of Marl- borough and Mrs. Masham ; the epoch is to blame.
The epoch which she has selected for revival is to blame for the failure of Miss Deane's story to interest the reader as deeply as it might otherwise interest him, considering its motive, and its clever and delicate working-out. She judges the epoch justly, she describes it well, as "not a true nor a noble age, but one of tinsel and false affectation ; men of the upper classes were, for the greater part, brutal, or effeminate, or wise with a poor imitation of the wisdom of heathen philosophers ; religion was lying in a deadly lethargy, neither upon the buildings, the poetry, the pic- tures, nor the lives of the time was to be found the stamp of truth, purity, or nobility." There was no place at which the spirit of the time was more dominant than at "The Bath," as King Bladud's city was called, one hundred and fifty years ago, and down to a much later period ; indeed, it began to be called " Bath " only a little before the date at which it becomes classic ground to all persons of taste and humour, as the scene of Miss Austen's Northanger Abbey, of Catherine Morland's debut under the auspices of Mrs. Allen and her India muslin gown, of her persecution by John Thorpe, and her romantic friendship with the faithless Isabella.
Miss Deane commences her story with the following vivid sketch :—
• seen in an old Mirror: a Norei. By Mary Deane. London : Charing Cross Publishing Company. "This particular autumn was supposed to be a good season ; the weather was remarkably fine, so was the company; the much-used furniture got rubbed-up; the doctors were in bland expectation of many fees; the assembly-houses began to prepare their lists of enter- tainments. If faithfully followed out, the programme for the day left little to be desired, among those who came tired of their own company, for every hour was provided for. At one time, the nobility had kept themselves apart from the ordinary throng of country gentlemen and military and naval officers ; but times had changed, and now they frequented the same room, drank from the same pump, and strolled upon the same terraces. The Princess Amelia was honouring the city with her presence; she had been met at the north gate by a hundred armed young men and a hundred amazons, and escorted in high pomp, and amid the clangour of abbey bells and the cheers of the populace, who were always liable to a craze at the sight of Royalty, to her house in Westgate Street. Nash, great monarch of Bath, received her royally ; his dashing chariot and brilliant outriders wore in attend- ance wherever she went. Poor Bean Nash ! he served the world faith- fully, and it rewarded him with poverty and neglect ; but if he has left the reputation of a king of folly, there stands a hospital as a memorial of his beneficence, and his little nook of society had to thank him for such decency and order as reigned among those who owned no sway but his. Wisdom came down from Westminster, wit from tho coffee-houses, fashion from St. James's, and Nash, from his house in St. John's Court, ruled them all."
To this scene, on which are crowded groups of " good " com- pany of the time, noisy women, and dissipated, worthless men, all well drawn from the types preserved for us by books, pictures, and satires, come Lady Chesney, and her fair daughter, Dolly, from Spincourt, in Hampshire. The elder lady is an ambitious widow, who "had kept up a correspondence with all her old friends who had eligible sons, with a view to Dolly's future estab- lishment," and on learning that two of whom she was disposed to think most favourably were at the Bath at the same time, has had a timely touch of rheumatism, which needs curing there. The author sketches Lady Chesney's character well, but afterwards handles her inconsistently, making her shut herself up with her
peevish brother, because he is ill, and send her daughter, when she ought to be looking closely after her, and to be bent on the accomplishment of her own plans, on a visit to Lady Di Buckler, the loudest, most reckless, most extravagant and vulgar of the great ladies whose conversation and manners were a disgrace to civilisation, and an outrage upon decency, at the time. Dolly is
taken to the bath, "in which, amid a cloud of warm steam, floated a motley collection of the rank and fashion of Bath, in all the glory of wigs and powder. By each lady floated a little dish containing her nosegay, snuff-box, and handkerchief ; and many of company were further provided with cups of chocolate, which added their fragrant cloudlet to the general mist. Some faces were pale and sickly-looking, in spite of rouge ; and others seemed to gain freshness and colour from this boiling process, which was the preliminary to the day's amusements. Chat and gossip were in full swing, and friends were making their appointments and arrangements for the next twelve hours." Certain of these arrangements involve poor little Dolly Chesney's fate, which might have been the same in any age or state of society, for it is that of a girl whose heart is caught by glitter that is not gold, and who is fooled by a vain and heartless knave. There is not much in the author's villain, Sir Piers Ludlow, beyond his fine clothes, and from such snares as are constructed of satin, velvet, and embroidery displayed on male persons, the silly girls of our time at least are safe, as they are from the seductions of "posies," and the barbarous flattery of duels fought on account of their bright eyes or their foolish talk. Otherwise, Dolly Chesneys are of all times and fashions. The women into whose set the girl ' is drawn, the vulgar, brazen fine ladies, the scheming widows, the foppish fortune-hunters, the brawling gamesters, the " junkettings," the jaunts, the sales, the conjurors' booths, the promenades on the rampiers,' the whims and humours of a brainless and reckless mob of ignorant, rich, and well-born people are cleverly presented to the reader, and Dolly is always interesting. Miss Deane very ingeniously introduces the attempted destruction of the canal that put an end to the carriage by road of the coal from the Mendip mines,—an important incident of the industrial history of the time—and she also makes clever use of the infamous institu- tion of Fleet marriages. The Zinzen family, good people who counterbalance the vicious and vulgar fools of the story, are made as agreeable as they are good. We think Miss Biddy Trulow, a de- testable young person of twelve, who goes to the balls and repeats all the scandals, must be an exaggeration of even that portentous period, and she is not in the least amusing. The close of the story is very good indeed. Dolly is saved from the penalty of her in- fatuation, but not by any access of wisdom on her own part, and her after-life is peaceful and content ; but the old delusion lingers in her fancy still, and we learn that "she told her grandchildren in after-days, that there were no such handsome, courtly men then as she remembered in her youth." The story is commendable in all senses, and it indicates the author's ability in no uncertain manner, but we do not think the reproduction of such scenes as it summons up from the past social life of England is worth so much study and labour as it has cost.
Previous page
