Mrs. Thrale herself has lived an ambiguous scattered life all these years in a mass of half published or unpublished documents sprinkled over England and America. And for years Mr. Clifford has been tracking her down and piecing her together with the most devoted care and the most triumphant results. If it were not that her diary and her commonplace book are still in the hands of an American editor, we should suppose that the whole woman is now before us. As it is we know her better perhaps than almost any living person. We can follow her, as we cannot follow our friends, at a foot’s pace for more than eighty years. Yet the effect of this minute illumination is baffling. The more we know of people the less we can sum them up. Just as we think to hold the bird in our hands, the bird flits off. Who can explain, for example, why the brilliant and precocious Hester consented to marry the man whom Mr. Clifford now reveals in his entirety — the odious Thrale? When her father discovered their clandestine correspondence he fell dead in a fit. And for once the incompetent, irascible, impecunious Welsh squire was in the right. No marriage could have been more incongruous. Hester was impressionable, generous, intellectual. Thrale was a cold, callous conventional man of business who aped the habits of the aristocracy but was without their distinction, who had the grossness of the middle class but lacked their geniality. If he had any affection besides his passion for meat and drink, it was not for Hester but for her mother. Yet Hester married him and was at once immured in the great house at Streatham, “like a kept mistress,” as Johnson said, “shut from the world.”
It was her marriage, however, that gave depth to her relationship with Johnson. Had she been happy, she would never have known him as she did. He gave her, of course, the obvious things — stimulus, society, an outlet for her irrepressible curiosity and ambition. But the friendship between the young wife and the old man was based on deeper things. Johnson was not merely a distinguished guest at dinner. He had the run of the house. He and his hostess went together behind the scenes. It was to Johnson that Mrs. Thrale turned when her eyes were red with crying — when Queeney snubbed her; when Mr. Thrale took another mistress; when ruin threatened them; when one after another the children were born, and the children fell ill and died. “What shall I do? What can I do? Has the flattery of my friends made me too proud of my Brains? and must these poor Children suffer for my crime?” she cried out to him in her anguish. He gave her counsel and confidence. In return she gave him a share in the family, a stake in the next generation, and domesticity. It was by “the pump-side in the kitchen garden” at Streatham that Johnson was caught “fusing metals” when Mr. Thrale came back from the city and put out the fire. One anecdote sums up their relationship. Johnson had been more than usually rude to her in company, and some one protested. But Mrs. Thrale passed it off with a smile. “Oh dear good man!” she said. And when the words were repeated to Johnson “he seemed much delighted... and repeated in a loud whisper, Oh dear good man!”
Why, then, when Mr. Thrale finally ate himself to death, did a friendship that had been daily rubbed and tried for sixteen years come to an end? Partly, as Mr. Clifford makes plain, because Mrs. Thrale had suppressed a great deal. She had certain individual tastes of her own. One was a romantic passion for the scenery of Wales; another was a genuine love for painting. But when the three of them travelled in Wales, neither Johnson nor Thrale had a word of praise for the landscape; and in Paris she was left to gaze for hours in the galleries alone. Again as a writer — she scribbled incessantly — she was by nature an innovator. “Why, she wondered, should there be one set of words for writing and another for speaking?” She saw no reason why one should not write as one speaks, familiarly, colloquially; and her pages, “crowded with familiar phrases and vulgar idioms,” roused the disgust of the conventional. Clearly there were a thousand curiosities and desires dormant in her that the old man could not gratify. So long as she was Thrale’s wife and the mistress of Streatham she must suppress them. But when her husband’s dead weight was lifted off her, up she sprang. She became again the precocious and impulsive Hester Salusbury. Perhaps marriage had kept her youth green in her — she was only just past forty when she became a widow. And one day before Thrale’s death Mrs. Byron had warned her, while Piozzi sang to the harpsichord: “You know, I suppose, that that man is in Love with you?”
“That man” is one of Mr. Clifford’s most remarkable reconstructions. To the Streatham circle he was merely “an Italian musick master.” When they had said that they had said enough. But in fact he was an Italian gentleman of great charm and cultivation; a composer and performer of merit; and a passionate lover of music. He travelled with a small harpsichord fitted under the seat so that he could play Mozart and Haydn on the roads. They floated on a barge down the Brenta to the strains of his music. Nor was he lacking in the sober virtues. He managed Mrs. Piozzi’s tangled money matters admirably, and he ended his days in Wales giving plum puddings to villagers and performing the duties of a country gentleman. Yet at the notion that such a man could marry a brewer’s widow, the whole company of distinguished people who had feasted at her table took flight in one flock. Johnson trumpeted his rage. “She has now become a subject for her enemies to exult over, and for her friends, if she has any left, to forget or pity.”
“Heaven be praised,” exclaimed the Queen of the Blues, “that I have no daughters.” It was only charity that led her to conclude that Mrs. Thrale was mad. For Johnson there is the excuse that he had lost at one blow Streatham and its peaches and its pork pies and the undivided attention of his lady. The old elephant was jealous, and his rage has at least the dignity of wounded passion. But how are we to explain the conduct of the others? Only perhaps by supposing that it is almost impossible even for genius and learning to swim against the conventions of their time. And while genius and learning come down the stream untouched, the conventions in which they exist soon become obsolete and ridiculous. An Italian music master in the eighteenth century was, we must suppose, equal to a Negro today. To explain the conduct of the Streatham set we must imagine the attitude of society today to a lady of rank who has contracted an alliance with a Negro and expects Mayfair to open its doors to her dusky and illegitimate brood.
But the more we excuse the Streatham set, the more we must admire Mrs. Piozzi. Her passion for Piozzi made her for once concentrated and direct. There is a fine ring in her letter to Johnson.
The birth of my second husband [she told him] is not meaner than that of my first; his sentiments are not meaner; his profession is not meaner... till you have changed your opinion of Mr. Piozzi let us converse no more.
With those words she should have vanished down the Brenta to the strains of Mozart. Unfortunately, Mr. Clifford has an inexhaustible supply of those little facts that reduce music to common speech. With Johnson it is plain that Mrs. Thrale had lost her centre. Now there was some screw loose. The whirligig spins faster and faster. She was for ever dipping and sampling, quarrelling and chattering. She was impulsive and impressionable, but she was also obtuse and tactless. Her children found her intolerable. Fanny Burney resented her patronage. She decked her little body in grebe skins and tiger shawls and flaxen wigs and many-coloured ribbons. She made a fool of herself with her adopted nephew, and let herself be cheated out of six thousand pounds to buy him a baronetcy. There was a coarseness in her fibre and a commonness in her vision that explain why, as an observer, she was so greatly inferior to Boswell.
Yet the spin of the whirligig has its fascination. Her appetite for life was prodigious. She must have some one to worship. Mrs. Siddons succeeded Dr. Johnson. Mr. Conway succeeded Mrs. Siddons. When there was no hero to entertain, she devoured books. And when the books were read, and the letters written, and the copy books filled, she had out her telescope and scoured the horizon. One day she counted forty-one sails out to sea. Then, turning her telescope to the earth, she discovered Sir John Williams five miles away searching for something in his garden. What could it be? She could not rest until she had sent a serv
ant to ascertain that Sir John was looking for his watch.
At last, at the age of eighty, she led the dance at her birthday party with her nephew; and danced indefatigably till dawn. That was in 1820. By that time one has almost forgotten Boswell’s sketch. It was a snapshot at one particular moment. But the moment has long been covered over. She has loved; she has travelled; she has known everybody; she has been in the depths of despair and on the crest of the wave times without counting. The portrait of the old lady in the huge bonnet shows a very modern face, with her great vivacious eyes, her loose lips, and the deep scar over the mouth which, by her own wish, the artist has faithfully depicted. For that was the scar she got when her horse threw her in 1774 at Streatham.
Sir Walter Scott
I. GAS AT ABBOTSFORD
EITHER Scott the novelist is swallowed whole and becomes part of the body and brain, or he is rejected entirely. There is no middle party in existence — no busybodies run from camp to camp with offers of mediation. For there is no war. The novels of Dickens, Trollope, Henry James, Tolstoy, the Brontës — they are discussed perpetually; the Waverley novels never. There they remain, completely accepted, entirely rejected — a queer stage in that ever-changing process which is called immortality. If anything is going to break the deadlock perhaps it is the first volume of Scott’s Journal, 1825-1826, which Mr. J. G. Tait has been at immense pains to edit and revise. As Scott’s Journals are the best life of Scott in existence, as they contain Scott in his glory and Scott in his gloom, and gossip about Byron, and the famous comment upon Jane Austen, as in a few passages Scott throws more light upon his genius and its limitations than all his critics in their innumerable volumes, this new version may one of these dark nights bring the two non-combatants to blows.
By way of inducing that desirable encounter, let us take the entry for November 21st, 1825: “Went to the Oil Gas Committee this morning, of which concern I am President or Chairman.” Scott, as Lockhart tells us and we can well believe, had a passion for gas. He loved a bright light, and he did not mind a slight smell. As for the expense of those innumerable pipes, in dining-room, drawing-room, corridors, and bedrooms, and the men’s wages — he swept all that aside in those glorious days when his imagination was at its height. “The state of an illumination was constantly kept up”; and the gas shone upon a brilliant company. Everyone was flocking to Abbotsford — dukes and duchesses, lion hunters and toadies, the famous and the obscure. “Oh dear,” Miss Scott exclaimed. “Will this never end, Papa?” And her father replied, “Let them come, the more the merrier.” And someone else walked in.
One night, a year or two before the diary begins, the stranger was a young artist. Artists were so common at Abbotsford that Scott’s dog, Maida, recognised them at sight and got up and left the room. This time it was William Bewick, obscure, penniless, in pursuit of sitters. Naturally he was a good deal dazzled both by the gas and the company. Kind Mrs. Hughes, therefore, the wife of the deaf Dean of St. Paul’s, tried to put him at his ease. She told him how she had often soothed her children’s quarrels by showing them Bewick’s woodcuts. But William Bewick was no relation of Thomas Bewick. One feels that he had heard the remark before and rather resented it, for was he not a painter himself?
He was a painter himself, and an extremely bad one. Did not Haydon say “Bewick, my pupil, has realised my hopes in his picture of Jacob and Rachel”? Did he not add, some years later, when they had quarrelled about money, “Daniel’s left foot and leg would have disgraced Bewick before he ran away from my tuition to the shelter of Academical wings”? But we know without Haydon’s testimony that Bewick’s portraits were intolerable. We know that from his writing. His friends are always painted in a state of violent physical agitation, but mentally they are stock still, stone dead. There is his picture of Hazlitt playing tennis. “He looked more like a savage animal than anything human....” He cast off his shirt; he leapt; he darted; when the game was over he rubbed himself against a post, dripping with sweat. But when he spoke, “His ejaculations were interlarded,” Bewick says, “with unintentional and unmeaning oaths.” They cannot be repeated; they must be imagined; in other words, Hazlitt was dumb. Or take Bewick’s account of an evening party in a small room when the Italian poet Foscolo met Wordsworth. They argued. Foscolo “deliberately doubled his fist and held it in Wordsworth’s face close to his nose.” Then, suddenly, he began whirling round the room, tossing his quizzing glass, rolling his R’s, bawling. The ladies “drew in their feet and costumes.” Wordsworth sat “opening his mouth and eyes, gasping for breath.” At last he spoke. For page after page he spoke; or rather dead phrases coagulated upon his lips, in frozen and lifeless entanglements. Listen for a moment. “Although I appreciate, and I hope, can admire sufficiently the beauties of Raphael’s transcendent genius... yet we must brace the sinews, so to speak, of our comprehension to grapple with the grandeur and sublimity... of Michael Angelo....” It is enough. We see Bewick’s pictures; we realise how intolerable it became to sit any longer under the portrait of Grandpapa flinging out a bare arm from the toga while the horse in the background champs his bit, paws the ground, and seems to neigh.
That night at Abbotsford the gas blazed from the three great chandeliers over the dinner-table; and the dinner, “as my friend, Thackeray, would have said, was recherché.” Then they went into the drawing-room — a vast apartment with its mirrors, its marble tables, Chantrey’s bust, the varnished woodwork and the crimson tasselled curtains pendant from handsome brass rods. They went in and Bewick was dazzled— “The brilliant gaslight, the elegance and taste displayed throughout this beautiful apartment, the costumes of the ladies, with the sparkle and glitter of the tea-table” — the scene, as Bewick describes it, brings back all the worst passages in the Waverley Novels. We can see the jewels sparkling, we can smell the gas escaping, we can hear the conversation. There is Lady Scott gossiping with kind Mrs. Hughes; there is Scott himself, prosing and pompous, grumbling about his son Charles and his passion for sport. “But I suppose it will have an end at a given time, like any other hobby of youth.” To complete the horror, the German Baron D’este strums on the guitar. He is showing “how in Germany they introduced into guitar performances of martial music the imitation of the beating of drums.” Miss Scott — or is she Miss Wardour or another of the vapid and vacant Waverley novel heroines? — hangs over him entranced. Then, suddenly, the whole scene changes. Scott began in a low mournful voice to recite the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens:
Oh lang lang may their ladies sit
With their fans in their hands
Or e’er they see Sir Patrick Spens
Come sailing to the land.
The guitar stopped; Sir Walter’s hps trembled as he came to an end. So it happens, too, in the novels — the lifeless English turns to living Scots.
Bewick came again. Again he joined that extraordinary company, all distinguished either for their genius or for their rank. Again the tiny red beads of light in the chandeliers blossomed at the turn of a screw into “a gush of splendour worthy of the palace of Aladdin.” And there they all were, those gas-lit celebrities, dashed in with the usual dabs of bright oily paint: Lord Minto in plain black, wearing a most primitive tie; Lord Minto’s chaplain, with his saturnine expression and his hair combed and cut as if by the edge of a barber’s basin; Lord Minto’s servant, so enthralled by Scott’s stories that he forgot to change the plates; Sir John Malcolm wearing his star and ribbon; and little Johnny Lockhart gazing at the star. “You must try and get hold of one,” said Sir Walter, upon which Lockhart smiled, “... the only time I have observed him to relieve his fixed features from that impenetrable reserve, etc., etc.” And again they went into that beautiful apartment, and Sir John announced that he was about to tell his famous Persian story. Everybody must be summoned. Summoned they were.
From all quarters of that teeming and hospitable house guests came flocking. “One young lady, I remember, was brought from her sick-bed wrapt in blankets
and laid on the sofa.” The story began; the story went on. So long was it that it had to be cut into “miles.” At the end of one Sir John stopped and asked “Shall I go on?”
“Do go on, do go on, Sir John,” Lady Scott entreated, and on he went, mile after mile, until — from where? — there appeared Monsieur Alexandre, the French ventriloquist, who at once began to imitate the planing of a French-polished dinner-table. “The attitude, the action, the noise, the screeches and hitches at knots, throwing off the shavings with his left hand, were all so perfect that Lady Scott, in alarm, screamed ‘Oh! my dining-room table, you are spoiling my dining-room table! It will never be got bright again!’”And Sir Walter had to reassure her. “It is only imitation, my dear... it is only make-believe... he will not hurt the table.” And the screeching began again, and Lady Scott screamed again, and on it went, the screeching and the screaming, until the sweat poured from the ventriloquist’s forehead, and it was time for bed.
Scott took Bewick to his room; on the way he stopped; he spoke. His words were simple — oddly simple, and yet after all that gas and glitter they seem to come from the living hps of an ordinary human being. The muscles are relaxed; the toga slips off him. “You, I suppose, would be of the stock of Sir Robert Bewick?” That was all, but it was enough — enough to make Bewick feel that the great man, for all his greatness, had noted his discomfiture when Mrs. Hughes was so tactful, and wished to give him his chance. He took it. “I,” he exclaimed, “am of a very ancient family, the Bewicks of Annan, who lost their estates...” Out it all came; on it all went. Then Scott opened the bedroom door, and showed him the gas — how you can turn it up, how you can turn it down. And, expressing the hope that his guest would be comfortable — if not, he was to ring the bell — Scott left him. But Bewick could not sleep. He tossed and tumbled. He thought, as the people in his pictures must have thought, about magicians’ cells, alchemists’ spells, Hons’ lairs, the pallet of poverty, and the downy couch of luxury. Then, remembering the great man and his goodness, he burst into tears, prayed, and fell asleep.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 403
