Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi Part 22

Madame D'Arblay gives two accounts of the last interview she ever had with Johnson,--on the 25th November, 1784. In the "Diary" she sets down:

"I had seen Miss T. the day before."

"'So,' said he, 'did I.'

"I then said, 'Do you ever, Sir, hear, from her mother?'

"'No,' cried he, 'nor write to her. I drive her quite from my mind.

If I meet with one of her letters, I burn it instantly.[1] I have burnt all I can find. I never speak of her, and I desire never to hear of her name. I drive her, as I said, wholly from my mind.'"

[Footnote 1: If this was true, it is strange that he did not destroy the letter (No. 4) which gave him so sudden and mortifying a check.

Miss Hawkins says in her Memoirs: "It was I who discovered the letter. I carried it to my father; he enclosed and sent it to her, _there never having been any intercourse between them_." Anything from Hawkins about Streatham and its inmates must therefore have been invention or hearsay.]

In the "Memoirs," describing the same interview, she says:--"We talked then of poor Mrs. Thrale, but only for a moment, for I saw him greatly incensed, and with such severity of displeasure, that I hastened to start another subject, and he solemnly enjoined me to mention that no more."

This was only eighteen days before he died, and he might be excused for being angry at the introduction of any agitating topic. It would stain his memory, not hers, to prove that, belying his recent professions of tenderness and grat.i.tude, he directly or indirectly encouraged her a.s.sailants.

"I was tempted to observe," says the author of "Piozziana," "that I thought, as I still do, that Johnson's anger on the event of her second marriage was excited by some feeling of disappointment; and that I suspected he had formed some hope of attaching her to himself.

It would be disingenuous on my part to attempt to repeat her answer.

I forget it; but the impression on my mind is that she did not contradict me." Sir James Fellowes' marginal note on this pa.s.sage is: "This was an absurd notion, and I can undertake to say it was the last idea that ever entered her head; for when I once alluded to the subject, she ridiculed the idea: she told me she always felt for Johnson the same respect and veneration as for a Pascal."[1]

[Footnote 1: When Sheridan was accused of making love to Mrs.

Siddons, he said he should as soon think of making love to the Archbishop of Canterbury.]

On the margin of the pa.s.sage in which Boswell says, "Johnson wis.h.i.+ng to unite himself with this rich widow was much talked of, but I believe without foundation,"--she has written, "I believe so too!!"

The report sufficed to bring into play the light artillery of the wits, one of whose best hits was an "Ode to Mrs. Thrale, by Samuel Johnson, LL.D., on their approaching Nuptials," beginning:

"If e'er my fingers touched the lyre, In satire fierce, in pleasure gay, Shall not my Thralia's smiles inspire, Shall Sam refuse the sportive lay?

"My dearest lady, view your slave, Rehold him as your very _Scrub_: Ready to write as author grave, Or govern well the brewing tub.

"To rich felicity thus raised, My bosom glows with amorous fire; Porter no longer shall be praised, 'Tis I Myself am _Thrale's Entire_."

She has written opposite these lines, "Whose fun was this? It is better than the other." The other was:

"Cervisial coctor's viduate dame, Opinst thou this gigantick frame, Proc.u.mbing at thy shrine, Shall catinated by thy charms, A captive in thy ambient arms Perennially be thine."

She writes opposite: "Whose silly fun was this? Soame Jenyn's?"

The following paragraph is copied from the note-book of the late Miss Williams Wynn[1], who had recently been reading a large collection of Mrs. Piozzi's letters addressed to a Welsh neighbour:

[Footnote 1: Daughter of Sir Watkyn Wynn (the fourth baronet) and granddaughter of George Grenville, the Minister. She was distinguished by her literary taste and acquirements, as well as highly esteemed for the uprightness of her character, the excellence of her understanding, and the kindness of her heart. Her journals and note-books, carefully kept during a long life pa.s.sed in the best society, are full of interesting anecdotes and curious extracts from rare books and ma.n.u.scripts. They are now in the possession of her niece, the Honourable Mrs. Rowley.]

"_London, March_, 1825.--I have had an opportunity of talking to old Sir William Pepys on the subject of his old friend, Mrs. Piozzi, and from his conversation am more than ever impressed with the idea that she was one of the most inconsistent characters that ever existed.

Sir William says he never met with any human being who possessed the talent of conversation in such a degree. I naturally felt anxious to know whether Piozzi could in any degree add to this pleasure, and found, as I expected, that he could not even understand her.

"Her infatuation for him seems perfectly unaccountable. Johnson in his rough (I may here call it brutal) manner said to her, 'Why Ma'am, he is not only a stupid, ugly dog, but he is an old dog too.' Sir William says he really believes that she combated her inclination for him as long as possible; so long, that her senses would have failed her if she had attempted to resist any longer. She was perfectly aware of her degradation. One day, speaking to Sir William of some persons whom he had been in the habit of meeting continually at Streatham during the lifetime of Mr. Thrale, she said, not one of them has taken the smallest notice of me ever since: they dropped me before I had done anything wrong. Piozzi was literally at her elbow when she said this."

The reviewer quotes the remark, "She was perfectly aware of her degradation," as resting on the personal responsibility of Miss Wynn, "who knew her in later life in Wales." The context shews that Miss Wynn (who did not know her) was simply repeating the impressions of Sir William Pepys, one of the bitterest opponents of the marriage, to whom she certainly never said anything derogatory to her second husband. The uniform tenor of her letters and her conduct shew that she never regarded her second marriage as discreditable, and always took a high and independent, instead of a subdued or deprecating, tone with her alienated friends. A bare statement of the treatment she received from them is surely no proof of conscious degradation.

In a letter to a Welsh neighbour, near the end of her life, some time in 1818, she says:

"Mrs. Mostyn (her youngest daughter) has written again on the road back to Italy, where she likes the Piozzis above all people, she says, _if they were not so proud of their family_. Would not that make one laugh two hours before one's own death? But I remember when Lady Egremont raised the whole nation's ill will here, while the Saxons were wondering how Count Bruhle could think of marrying a lady born Miss Carpenter. The Lombards doubted in the meantime of my being a gentlewoman by birth, because my first husband was a brewer. A pretty world, is it not? A s.h.i.+p of Fooles, according to the old poem; and they will upset the vessel by and by."

This is not the language of one who wished to apologise for a misalliance.

As to Piozzi's a.s.sumed want of youth and good looks, Johnson's knowledge of womankind, to say nothing of his self-love, should have prevented him from urging this as an insuperable objection. He might have recollected the Roman matron in Juvenal, who considers the world well lost for an old and disfigured prize-fighter; or he might have quoted Spenser's description of one--

"Who rough and rude and filthy did appear, Unseemly man to please fair lady's eye, Yet he of ladies oft was loved dear, When fairer faces were bid standen by: Oh! who can tell the bent of woman's phantasy?"

Madame Campan, speaking of Caroline of Naples, the sister of Marie Antoinette, says, she had great reason to complain of the insolence of a Spaniard named Las Casas, whom the king, her father-in-law, had sent to persuade her to remove M. Acton[1] from the conduct of affairs and from about her person. She had told him, to convince him of the nature of her sentiments, that she would have Acton painted and sculptured by the most celebrated artists of Italy, and send his bust and his portrait to the King of Spain, to prove to him that the desire of fixing a man of superior capacity could alone have induced her to confer the favour he enjoyed. Las Casas had dared to reply, that she would be taking useless trouble; that a man's ugliness did not always prevent him from pleasing, and that the King of Spain had too much experience to be ignorant that the caprices of a woman were inexplicable. Johnson may surely be allowed credit for as much knowledge of the s.e.x as the King of Spain.

[Footnote 1: M. Acton, as Madame Campan calls him, was a member of the ancient English family of that name. He succeeded to the baronetcy in 1791, and was the grandfather of Sir John E.E. Dalberg Acton, Bart., M.P., &c.]

Others were simultaneously accusing her of marrying a young man to indulge a sensual inclination. The truth is, Piozzi was a few months older than herself, and was neither ugly nor disagreeable. Madame D'Arblay has been already quoted as to his personal appearance, and Miss Seward (October, 1787) writes:

"I am become acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Piozzi. Her conversation is that bright wine of the intellects which has no lees. Dr. Johnson told me truth when he said she had more colloquial wit than most of our literary women; it is indeed a fountain of perpetual flow. But he did not tell me truth when he a.s.serted that Piozzi was an ugly dog, without particular skill in his profession. Mr. Piozzi is a handsome man, in middle life, with gentle, pleasing, unaffected manners, and with very eminent skill in his profession. Though he has not a powerful or fine-toned voice, he sings with transcending grace and expression. I am charmed with his perfect expression on his instrument. Surely the finest sensibilities must vibrate through his frame, since they breathe so sweetly through his song."

The concluding sentence contains what Partridge would call a _non sequitur_, for the finest musical sensibility may coexist with the most commonplace qualities. But the lady's evidence is clear on the essential point; and another pa.s.sage from her letters may a.s.sist us in determining the precise nature of Johnson's feelings towards Mrs.

Piozzi, and the extent to which his later language and conduct regarding her were influenced by pique:

"Love is the great softener of savage dispositions. Johnson had always a metaphysic pa.s.sion for one princess or another: first, the rustic Lucy Porter, before he married her nauseous mother; next the handsome, but haughty, Molly Aston; next the sublimated, methodistic Hill Boothby, who read her bible in Hebrew; and lastly, the more charming Mrs. Thrale, with the beauty of the first, the learning of the second, and with more worth than a bushel of such sinners and such saints. It is ridiculously diverting to see the old elephant forsaking his nature before these princesses:

"'To make them mirth, use all his might, and writhe, His mighty form disporting.'

"_This last and long-enduring pa.s.sion for Mrs. Thrale was, however, composed perhaps of cupboard love, Platonic love, and vanity tickled and gratified, from morn to night, by incessant homage_. The two first ingredients are certainly oddly heterogeneous; but Johnson, in religion and politics, in love and in hatred, was composed of such opposite and contradictory materials, as never before met in the human mind. This is the reason why folk are never weary of talking, reading, and writing about a man--

"'So various that he seem'd to be, Not one, but all mankind's epitome.'"

After quoting the sentence printed in italics, the reviewer says: "On this hint Mr. Hayward enlarges, nothing loth." I quoted the entire letter without a word of comment, and what is given as my "enlarging"

is an _olla podrida_ of sentences torn from the context in three different and unconnected pa.s.sages of this Introduction. The only one of them which has any bearing on the point shews, though garbled, that, in attributing motives, I distinguished between Johnson and his set.

Having thus laid the ground for fixing on me opinions I had nowhere professed, the reviewer asks, "Had Mr. Hayward, when he pa.s.sed such slighting judgment on the motives of the venerable sage who awes us still, no fear before his eyes of the anathema aimed by Carlyle at Croker for similar disparagement? 'As neediness, and greediness, and vain glory are the chief qualities of most men, so no man, not even a Johnson, acts, or can think of acting, on any other principle.

Whatever, therefore, cannot be referred to the two former categories, Need and Greed, is without scruple ranged under the latter.'"[1]

[Footnote 1: Edinb, Review, No. 230, p. 511.]

This style of criticism is as loose as it is unjust; for one main ingredient in Miss Seward's mixture is Platonic love, which cannot be referred to either of the three categories. Her error lay in not adding a fourth ingredient,--the admiration which Johnson undoubtedly felt for the admitted good qualities of Mrs. Thrale. But the lady was nearer the truth than the reviewer, when he proceeds in this strain:

"We take an entirely different view at once of the character and the feelings of Johnson. Rude, uncouth, arrogant as he was--spoilt as he was, which is far worse, by flattery and toadying and the silly homage of inferior wors.h.i.+ppers--selfish as he was in his eagerness for small enjoyments and disregard of small attentions--that which lay at the very bottom of his character, that which const.i.tutes the great source of his power in life, and connects him after death with the hearts of all of us, is his spirit of imaginative romance. He was romantic in almost all things--in politics, in religion, in his musings on the supernatural world, in friends.h.i.+p for men, and in love for women."

"Such was his fancied 'padrona,' his 'mistress,' his 'Thralia dulcis,' a compound of the bright lady of fas.h.i.+on and the ideal Urania who rapt his soul into spheres of perfection."

Imaginative romance in politics, in religion, and in musings on the supernatural world, is here only another term for prejudice, intolerance, bigotry, and credulity--for rabid Toryism, High Church doctrines verging on Romanism, and a confirmed belief in ghosts.

Imaginative romance in love and friends.h.i.+p is an elevating, softening, and refining influence, which, especially when it forms the basis of character, cannot co-exist with habitual rudeness, uncouthness, arrogance, love of toadying, selfishness, and disregard of what Johnson himself called the minor morals. Equally heterogeneous is the "compound of the bright lady of fas.h.i.+on and the ideal Urania." A G.o.ddess in crinoline would be a semi-mundane creature at best; and the image unluckily suggests that Johnson was unphilosophically, not to say vulgarly, fond of rank, fas.h.i.+on, and their appendages.

His imagination, far from being of the richest or highest kind, was insufficient for the attainment of dramatic excellence, was insufficient even for the n.o.bler parts of criticism. Nor had he much to boast of in the way of delicacy of perception or sensibility. His strength lay in his understanding; his most powerful weapon was argument: his grandest quality was his good sense.