I MISS MITFORD
Speaking truthfully, Mary Russell Mitford and her Surroundings is not a good book. It neither enlarges the mind nor purifies the heart. There is nothing in it about Prime Ministers and not very much about Miss Mitford. Yet, as one is setting out to speak the truth, one must own that there are certain books which can be read without the mind and without the heart, but still with considerable enjoyment. To come to the point, the great merit of these scrapbooks, for they can scarcely be called biographies, is that they license mendacity. One cannot believe what Miss Hill says about Miss Mitford, and thus one is free to invent Miss Mitford for oneself. Not for a second do we accuse Miss Hill of telling lies. That infirmity is entirely ours. For example: “Alresford was the birthplace of one who loved nature as few have loved her, and whose writings ‘breathe the air of the hayfields and the scent of the hawthorn boughs’, and seem to waft to us ‘the sweet breezes that blow over ripened cornfields and daisied meadows’.” It is perfectly true that Miss Mitford was born at Alresford, and yet, when it is put like that, we doubt whether she was ever born at all. Indeed she was, says Miss Hill; she was born “on the 16th December, 1787. ‘A pleasant house in truth it was,’ Miss Mitford writes. ‘The breakfast-room ... was a lofty and spacious apartment.’” So Miss Mitford was born in the breakfast-room about eight-thirty on a snowy morning between the Doctor’s second and third cups of tea. “Pardon me,” said Mrs. Mitford, turning a little pale, but not omitting to add the right quantity of cream to her husband’s tea, “I feel ...” That is the way in which Mendacity begins. There is something plausible and even ingenious in her approaches. The touch about the cream, for instance, might be called historical, for it is well known that when Mary won ￡20,000 in the Irish lottery, the Doctor spent it all upon Wedgwood china, the winning number being stamped upon the soup plates in the middle of an Irish harp, the whole being surmounted by the Mitford arms, and encircled by the motto of Sir John Bertram, one of William the Conqueror’s knights, from whom the Mitfords claimed descent. “Observe”, says Mendacity, “with what an air the Doctor drinks his tea, and how she, poor lady, contrives to curtsey as she leaves the room.” Tea? I inquire, for the Doctor, though a fine figure of a man, is already purple and profuse, and foams like a crimson cock over the frill of his fine laced shirt. “Since the ladies have left the room”, Mendacity begins, and goes on to make up a pack of lies with the sole object of proving that Dr. Mitford kept a mistress in the purlieus of Reading and paid her money on the pretence that he was investing it in a new method of lighting and heating houses invented by the Marquis de Chavannes. It came to the same thing in the end – to the King’s Bench Prison, that is to say; but instead of allowing us to recall the literary and historical associations of the place, Mendacity wanders off to the window and distracts us again by the platitudinous remark that it is still snowing. There is something very charming in an ancient snowstorm. The weather has varied almost as much in the course of generations as mankind. The snow of those days was more formally shaped and a good deal softer than the snow of ours, just as an eighteenth-century cow was no more like our cows than she was like the florid and fiery cows of Elizabethan pastures. Sufficient attention has scarcely been paid to this aspect of literature, which, it cannot be denied, has its importance.
Our brilliant young men might do worse, when in search of a subject, than devote a year or two to cows in literature, snow in literature, the daisy in Chaucer and in Coventry Patmore. At any rate, the snow falls heavily. The Portsmouth mail-coach has already lost its way; several ships have foundered, and Margate pier has been totally destroyed. At Hatfield Peverel twenty sheep have been buried, and though one supports itself by gnawing wurzels which it has found near it, there is grave reason to fear that the French king’s coach has been blocked on the road to Colchester. It is now the 16th of February 1808.
Poor Mrs. Mitford! Twenty-one years ago she left the breakfast-room, and no news has yet been received of her child. Even Mendacity is a little ashamed of itself, and, picking up Mary Russell Mitford and her Surroundings, assures us that everything will come right if we possess ourselves in patience. The French king’s coach was on its way to Bocking; at Bocking lived Lord and Lady Charles Murray-Aynsley; and Lord Charles was shy. Lord Charles had always been shy. Once when Mary Mitford was five years old – sixteen years, that is, before the sheep were lost and the French king went to Bocking – Mary “threw him into an agony of blushing by running up to his chair in mistake for that of my papa”. He had indeed to leave the room. Miss Hill, who, somewhat strangely, finds the society of Lord and Lady Charles pleasant, does not wish to quit it without “introducing an incident in connection with them which took place in the month of February, 1808”. But is Miss Mitford concerned in it? we ask, for there must be an end of trifling. To some extent, that is to say, Lady Charles was a cousin of the Mitfords, and Lord Charles was shy. Mendacity is quite ready to deal with “the incident” even on these terms; but, we repeat, we have had enough of trifling. Miss Mitford may not be a great woman; for all we know she was not even a good one; but we have certain responsibilities as a reviewer which we are not going to evade.