Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847

Within these few years, the English novels are rapidly falling into the imitation of the French. And we say it with no less regret than surprise, that the chief imitators are females. The novels written by men have generally some manliness, some recollection of the higher impulses which occasionally act on the minds of men; some reluctancy in revealing the more infirm movements of the mind; and some doubts as to the absorption of all human nature in one perpetual whirl of love-making.

But with the female pen in general, the whole affair is resolved into one impulse—all is "passion." The winds of heaven have nothing to do, but to "waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole." The art of printing is seriously presumed to have been invented only for "some banished lover, or some captive maid." Flirtation is the grand business of life. The maiden flirts from the nursery, the married woman flirts from the altar. The widow adds to the miscellaneous cares of her "bereaved" life, flirtation from the hearse which carries her husband to his final mansion. She flirts in her weeds more glowingly than ever. But she knows too well the "value of her liberty" to submit to be a slave once more; and so flirts on for life, in the most innocent manner imaginable, taking all risks, and throwing herself into situations of which the result would be obvious any where but in the pages of an English novel.

The French have no scruples on such subjects, and their candour leaves nothing to the imagination. Our female novelists have not yet arrived at that pitch of explicitness, and it is to be hoped will pause before they leap the gulf.

We attribute a good deal of this dangerous adoption to the prevalent habit of yearly running to the Continent. The English ear becomes familiarised to language on the other side of the Channel, which would have shocked it here. The chief topic of foreign life is intrigue, the chief employment of foreign life is that half idle, half infamous intercourse, which extinguishes all delicacy even in the spectators. The young English woman sees the foreign woman leading a life which, though in England it would stamp her with universal shame, in France or Germany, and above all, in Italy, never brings more than a sneer, and seldom even the sneer. She sees this wedded or widowed profligate received in the highest ranks; flourishing without a reproach, if she has the means of keeping an opera-box, or giving suppers; every soul round her acquainted with every point of her history, yet none shrinking from her association. If she has one Cicisbeo, or ten, the whole affair is selon les règles.

The young English woman who blushes at this scandalous career, or exhibits any reluctance on the subject of the companionship or the crime, is laughed at as a "novice," is charged with a want of the "savoir vivre," is quietly reproved for "the coldness of her English blood," and is recommended to abandon, as speedily as possible, ideas so unsuitable to "the glow of the warm South."

She soon finds a dangler, or a dozen danglers, who, having nothing on earth to do, and in their penury rejoiced to find any spot where they can kill an hour, and get a cup of coffee, are daily at her command. All those fellows, too, are counts; the title being about as common, and as cheap, as chimney-sweepers among us, though not belonging to so valuable fraternity.

After a month's training of this kind, the poor fool is fit for nothing else, to the last hour of her being. She is a flirt and a figurante, as long as she lives. Duty and decorum are things too icy for the "ardour of her soul." The life of England is utterly barbarian to the refinement of the land of macaroni.

And it is unquestionably much better that the whole tribe should remain where they are, and roam among the lazzaroni, than return to corrupt the decencies of English life. If this sentimentalist has money, she is sure to be picked up by some "superb chevalier," some rambling fortune-hunter, or known swindler, hunted from the gambling table; probably beginning his career as a frizeur or a footman, and making rapid progress towards the galleys. If she has none, she returns to England, to grumble, for the next fifty years, at the climate, the country, and the people; to drawl out her maudlin regrets for olive groves, and pout for the Bay of Naples; to talk of her loves; exhibit a cameo or a crucifix, (the parting pledge of some inamorato, probably since hanged), prate papistry, and profess liberalism; pronounce the Roman holidays "charming things," and long to see the carnival, and the worship of the Virgin together, imported to relieve the ennui of London.

The subject is startling: and we recommend any thing, and every thing, in the shape of employment, in preference to the vitiating follies of a life of Touring.

Another tribe of female authorship ought to be extinguished without a moment's delay. Those are the yearly travellers. A woman of this kind scampers over the Continent, like a queen's messenger, every season; she rushes along with the rapidity and the regularity of the "Royal Mail." The month of May no sooner appears in the calendar, than she packs up her trunk, and crosses to Boulogne, "to make a book." One year she takes the north, another the south; to her, all points of the compass are equal. But whether the roulage carries her to the Baltic or the Mediterranean, her affair is done, if she adds a page a day to her journal. She gossips along, and scribbles, with the indefatigable finger of a maker of bobbin lace, or a German knitter of stockings. The most slipshod descriptions of every thing that has been described before; sketches of peasant character taken from the beggars at the roadside; national traits taken from the commonplaces of the table-d'hôte, and court secrets copied from the newspapers—all are disgorged into the Journal. We have, unfailingly, whole pages of setting suns, moonlight nights, effulgent stars, and southern breezes. She gloats over pictures of enraptured monks, and sees heaven in the eyes of saints, copied from the painter's mistresses. If she goes to Italy, she tells us of the banditti, the gondola, and St Peter's; gazes with solemn speculation on the naked beauties of the Belvidere Apollo; and descants in an ultra-ecstasy on the proportions of sages and heroes destitute of drapery; winding up by an adventure, in which she falls by night into the hands of a marching regiment, or band of smugglers setting out on a robbery, and leaving the world to guess at the results of the adventure to herself.

In all this farrago, she never gives the reader an atom of information worth the paper which she blots. We have no additional lights on character, public life, national feeling, or national advancement. All is as vapid as the "Academy of Compliments," and as well known as "Lindley Murray's Grammar." But why object to all this? Why not let the scribbler take her way—and the world know that vineyards are green, and the sky blue, if it desires the knowledge? Our reason is this,—such practices actually destroy all taste for the legitimate narratives of travel. Those trading tourists talk nonsense, until intelligence itself becomes wearisome. They strip away the interest which novelty gives to new countries, and by running their silly speculation into scenes of beauty, sublimity, or high recollection, would make Tempe a counterpart to the Thames Tunnel; Mount Atlas a fellow to Primrose Hill; and Marathon a fac-simile of the Zoological Garden or Bartholomew Fair. The subject is pawed, and dandled, and fondled, until the very name excites nausea; and a writer of real ability would no more touch upon it, than a great artist would paint St George and the Dragon.

This has been the history of the decline of works of imagination in England. No sooner had Mrs Radcliffe touched the old monasteries with her glorious pencil, than a generation of monk-describers and ruined-castle-builders sprang up, until the very name of convent or castle became an abhorrence. Sir Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel," rich and romantic as it was, was nearly buried under an overflow of heavy imitations, which drove his genius to other pursuits, and which filled the public ear with such enormities of octo-syllabic ennui, that it hates poetry ever since. The Helicon of which he drank the gushing and pure stream, was stirred into mire by the slippers of school-girls, city-apprentices, and chambermaid-poetesses of every shade of character.

A new Malthus for the express purpose of extinguishing, by strangulation or otherwise, the whole race of Annual Travellers in Normandy, Picardy, up the Seine and down the Seine, up the Loire and down the Loire, on the shores of the Mediterranean, and in the Brenner Alps, would be a benefactor to society.

Whether England would be the wiser and the happier if, instead of being separated from the Continent by a channel, she were separated by an ocean, is a question which we leave to the philosopher; but there can be no doubt of the nature of its answer by the historian. It will be found, that the national character had degenerated in every period when that intercourse increased, and that it resumed its vigour only in the periods when that intercourse was restricted.

It would not be difficult to exemplify this principle, from the earliest times of English independence. But our glance shall be limited to the era of the Reformation, when England began first to assume an imperial character.

Elizabeth was always contemptuous of the foreigner, and boasted of the defiance; the national mind never rose to a higher rank than in her illustrious reign. James renewed the connexions of the throne with France, and Charles I. renewed the connexion of the royal line. It may have been for the purpose of checking the national contagion of the intercourse, that rebellion was suffered to grow up in his kingdom. But whatever might be the origin, the effect was, to break off the intercourse with France and her corruptions, and to exhibit a new energy and purity in the people. Cromwell raised a sudden barrier against France by his political system, and the nation recovered its daring and its character in its contempt for the foreigner.

In the reign of Charles II. the intercourse was resumed, and corruption rapidly spread from France to the court, and from the court to the people. England, proud and powerful under the Protectorate, became almost a rival to France in infidelity and profligacy in the course of the Reign. Again the war of William with France closed the Continent upon the national intercourse, and the manliness of the national character partially revived. But with the death of Anne the intercourse was renewed, and the result was a renewal of the corruption. The war of the French Revolution again and utterly broke off the intercourse for the time; and it is undeniable, that the national character suddenly exhibited a most singular and striking return to the original virtues of the country—to its fortitude, to its patriotism, and to the purity of its religious feelings.

The period from the Treaty of Utrecht to the war of the French Revolution, has always appeared to us a blot on the annals of England. It is true that it contained many names of distinction, that it exhibited a graceful and animated literature, that it was characterised by striking advances in national power, and that towards its close it gave the world a Chatham, as if to reconcile us to its existence and throw a brief splendour over its close.

But no period of British history developed more unhappily those vices which naturally ripen in the hot bed of political intrigue. The names of Harley, Bolingbroke, Walpole, and Newcastle, might head a general indictment against the manliness, the integrity, and the honour of England. The low faithlessness of Harley, who seems to have been carrying on a Jacobite correspondence at the foot of the throne—the infamous treachery of his brother-minister, St John—the undenied and undeniable corruption of Walpole, and the half-imbecility which made the chicane of Newcastle ridiculous, while his perpetual artifice alone saved his imbecility from overthrow,—altogether form a congeries, which, like the animal wrecks of the primitive world, almost give in their deformity a reason for its extinction.

There can be no question of the perpetual villany which then assumed the insulted name of politics; none, of the utter sacrifice of public interests to the office-hunting avarice of all the successive parties; none, of the atrocious corruptibility of them all; none, of that general decay of religion, morals, and national honour, which was the result of a time when principle was laughed at, and when the loudest laugher passed for the wisest man of his generation.

The cause was obvious. Charles II. had brought with him from France all the vices of a court, where the grossest licentiousness found its grossest example in the person of the sovereign. Profligate as private life naturally is in all the dominions of a religion where every crime is rated by a tariff, and where the confessional relieves every man of his conscience, the conduct of Louis XIV. had made profligacy the actual pride of the throne.

The feeble and frivolous Charles was more a Frenchman than an Englishman; more a courtier than a king; and fitter to be a page in the seraglio than either.

The royal robe on the shoulders of such a monarch, instead of concealing his vices, only made them glitter in the national eyes; and the morals of England might have been irretrievably stained, but for that salutary judgment which interposed between the people and the dynasty, and by driving James into an ignominious exile, placed a man of principle on the throne. Unfortunately, the reign of William was too busy and too brief to produce any striking change in the habits of the people. His whole policy was turned to the great terror of the time, the daring ambition of France. He fought on the outposts of Europe. All his ideas were Continental. The singular constitution of his nature gave him the spirit of a warrior, combined with the seclusion of a monk. Solitary even in camps, what must he be in the trivial bustle of a court?—and, engrossed with the largest interests of nations, what interest could he attach to the squabbles of rival professors of licentiousness, to giving force to a feeble drama, or regulating the decorum of factions equally corrupt and querulous, and long since equally despised and forgotten?

The reign of Anne made some progress in the national restoration. But it was less by the influence of the Queen than by the work of time. The "gallants" of the reign of Charles were now a past generation. Their frolics were a gossip's tale; their showy vices were now as tarnished as their wardrobe, and both were hung out of sight. The man who, in the days of Anne, would have ventured on the freaks of Rochester, would have finished his nights in the watch-house, and his years in the plantations. The wit of the past age was also rude, vulgar, and pointless to the polished sarcasm of Pope, or even to the reckless sting of Swift. Yet manners were still coarse, and the Queen complained of Harley's coming to her after dinner,—"troublesome, impudent, and drunk." Her court exhibited form without dignity, and her parliaments the most violent partisanship in politics and religion, without sincerity or substance in either. But the long peace threw open the floodgates of frivolity and fashion once more, and France again became the universal model.

On glancing over the history of public men through this diversified period, the astonishment of an honest mind is perpetually excited at the unblushing effrontery with which the most scandalous treacheries seem to have been all but acknowledged. France was still the great corrupter, and French money was lavished, not more in undermining the fidelity of public men, than in degrading the character of the nation. But when Charles was an actual pensioner of the French King, and James a palpable dependent on the French throne, the force of example may be easily conceived, among the spendthrift and needy officials, one half of whose life was spent at the gaming table.

On those vilenesses history looks back with an eye of disgust. But they were the natural results of an age when religion was at the lowest ebb in Europe; when our travelled gentry only brought back with them that disregard of Christianity which they had learned in Paris and Rome, and when Voltaire's works were found on the toilet of every woman in high life.

The accession of George III. was, in this view, of incalculable value to England. Contempt for the marriage tie is universally the source of all popular corruption. The king instantly discountenanced the fashionable levity of noble life. No man openly stigmatised for profligacy, dared to appear before him. No woman scandalised by her looseness of conduct was suffered to approach the drawing-room. The public feeling was suddenly righted. The shameless forehead was sent into deserved obscurity. The debased heart felt that there was a punishment, which no rank, wealth, or effrontery could resist. The decorum of public manners was effectively restored, and the nation had to thank the monarch for the example and for the restoration.

Lady Sundon was of an obscure family, of the name of Dyves. Her portrait represents her as handsome, and her history vouches for her cleverness. It was probably owing to both that she was married to Mr Clayton, then holding an appointment in the treasury, and also the agent for the great Duke of Marlborough's estate, both of them appointments which implied a certain degree of intelligence and character. He also at one period was deputy-auditor of the exchequer. Mrs Clayton soon obtained the confidence of that most impracticable of all personages, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough.

On the death of Queen Anne, the duke and duchess had returned to England, but, repulsed shortly after by the ungracious manner of the ungrateful George I., they soon abandoned public life. Still it was difficult for so stirring a personage as the duchess altogether to abandon court intrigue, and probably for the purpose of obtaining some shadow of that influence which she might afterwards turn into substance, she contrived to obtain for her correspondent and dependant, Mrs Clayton, the place of bedchamber-woman to Caroline, wife of the heir-apparent.

It is obvious that such a position might give all the advantages of the most confidential intercourse, to a clever woman, who had her own game to play. The Princess herself was in a position which required great dexterity. She was the wife of a brutish personage whom it was impossible to respect, and yet with whom it was hazardous to quarrel. She was the daughter-in-law of a Prince utterly incapable of popularity, yet singularly jealous of power. She was surrounded by a court, half Jacobite, and wholly unprincipled; and exposed to the constant observation of a people still dubious of the German title to the throne, contemptuous by nature of all foreign alliances, disgusted with the manners of the court, and still disturbed by the struggles of the fallen dynasty.

It was obviously of high importance to such a personage, to have in her employ so clear-headed, and at the same time so stirring an agent as Mrs Clayton. There seems even to have been a strong similitude in their characters—both keen, both intelligent, both fond of power, and both exhibiting no delicacy whatever with regard to the means for its possession. Mrs Clayton never shrank from intercourse with those profligate persons who then abounded at court, when she had a point to carry; and Caroline, as Queen, endured for thirty years the notorious irregularities of her lord and master, without a remonstrance. She even went farther. She pretended, in the midst of those gross offences, to be even tenderly attached to him, talked of "not valuing her children as a grain of sand in comparison with him," and not merely acquiesced in conduct which must have galled every feeling of virtue in a pure heart, but involved herself in the natural suspicion of playing a part for the sake of power, and forgetting the injuries of the wife in order to retain the influence of the Queen.

There can be no doubt that this policy had its reward. The King gave her power, or at least never attempted to disturb the power belonging to her rank, while it left him the full indulgence of his vices. She thus obtained two objects—to the world she appeared a suffering angel, to the King a submissive wife. In the mean time she managed both court and King, possessed vast patronage, perhaps more general court popularity than any Queen of the age; led a pleasant life, enjoying the sweets without the responsibilities of royalty; and by judicious liberality of purse, and equally dexterous flexibility of opinion, contrived to carry some degree of public respect with her, while she lived, and be followed by some degree of public regret to her grave.

But this example was productive of palpable evil. The example of the higher ranks always operates powerfully on the lower. The toleration exhibited by the highest female in the kingdom for the most notorious vices, gave additional effect to that fashion of flexibility, which is the besetting sin of polished times. If the Queen had firmly set her face against the offences of her husband, or if she had shown the delicacy of a woman of virtue in keeping aloof from all intercourse with women whom the public voice had long marked as criminal, she might have, partially at least, reformed the corruptions of her profligate period.

But this indifference to all the nobler feelings was the style of the day. Religion was scarcely more than a form: its preachers were partisans; its controversies were court feuds, its principles were politics, and its objects were stoles and mitres. In an age when Sacheverel, with his rampant nonsense, had been a popular apostle, and Swift, with his pungent abominations, had been a church adviser of the cabinet, and when Hoadley was regarded alternately as a pillar and as a subverter of the faith, we may easily conjecture the national estimate of Christianity.

Unfortunately, a considerable proportion of the correspondence in these volumes is from clerical candidates for personal services; and if singular eagerness in pursuit of preferment, and singular homage to the influence of the queen's bed-chamber-woman, could stamp them with shame, the brand would be at once broad and indelible. But it must be remembered, that there are contemptible minds in every profession, that these men acted in direct violation of the principles of their religion, and that the church is no more accountable for the delinquencies of its members, than the courts of law for the morals of the jail.

Another repulsive feature of the period was the conduct of conspicuous females. The habits of Germany in its higher ranks were offensive to all purity. The Brunswick Princes had brought those habits to St James's. Born and educated in Germany, they were regardless even of the feeble decorums of English life, and a king's mistress was an understood portion of the royal establishment. It is to the honour of later times, that such offences could not now be committed with impunity. But the example of Louis XIV. had sanctioned all royal excesses, and the conduct of his successor was an actual study of the most reckless profligacy. The constant intercourse of the English nobility with Paris, to which allusion has already been made, had accustomed them to such scenes, and persons of the highest condition, of the most important offices of the state, and even of the most respectable private character, such as respectability was in those days, associated with those mistresses, corresponded with them, and even submitted to be assisted by their influence with the king.

We shall give but one example; that of Henrietta Hobart, afterwards Lady Suffolk. A baronet's daughter, and poor, she had married in early life the son of the Earl of Suffolk, nearly as poor as herself. In their narrowness of means, their only resource was some court office, and to obtain this, and probably to live cheap, they went to Hanover, to lay the foundation of favour with the future monarch of England. To some extent they succeeded. For, on the accession of George the First, Mrs Howard was appointed bedchamber-woman to Caroline the Princess of Wales.

Courts, in all countries, seem to be dull places; ceremonial fails as a substitute for animation, and dinners of fifty covers become a mere tax on time, taste, and common-sense. Etiquette is only ennui under another name, and the eternal anticipation of enjoyment is the death of all pleasure. Miss Burney's narrative has let in light on the sullen mysteries of the Maid of Honour's life, and her pencil has evidently given us only the picture of what had been in the times of our forefathers, and what will be in the times of our posterity.

Mrs Howard was well-looking, without the invidious attribute of great beauty, and lively, without the not less invidious faculty of wit. All the court officials crowded her apartments in the palace. Chesterfield, young Churchill, Lord Hervey, Lord Scarborough, all hurried to the tea-table of the well-bred bedchamber-woman, to escape the dreary duties and monotonous moping of attendance on the throne. Lady Walpole, Mrs Selwyn, Mary Lepell, and Mary Bellenden, formed a part of this coterie—all women of presumed character, yet all associating familiarly with women of none. Of Mrs Howard, Swift observed in his acid style—"That her private virtues, for want of room to operate, might be folded and laid up clean, like clothes in a chest, never to be put on; till satiety, or some reverse of fortune should dispose her to retirement."

Then, probably in reference to the prudery with which she occasionally covered her conduct,—"In the meantime," said he, "it will be her prudence, to take care that they be not tarnished and moth-eaten, for want of opening and airing, and turning, at least once a-year."

Those matters seem to have sought no concealment whatever. "Es regolar," says the Spaniard, when his country is charged with some especial abomination. Howard, the husband, though a roué, at last went into the quadrangle at St James's and publicly demanded his wife. He then wrote to the Archbishop. His letter was given to the Queen, and by her to Mrs Howard. Yet all this scandal never interrupted the lady's intercourse with the highest personages of the court. Mrs Howard continued to be the Queen's bedchamber woman; the Queen suffered her personal attendance, her carriage was escorted by John Duke of Argyle; her husband obtained a pension to hold his tongue; and even when the King grew tired of the liaison, and wished to get rid of her, actually complaining to the Queen, "That he did not know why she would not let him part with a deaf old woman, of whom he was weary," the politic Caroline would not allow him to give her up, "lest a younger favourite should gain a greater ascendency over him." After this, we must hear no more of the delicacy of Queen Caroline. Virtue and religion scarcely belonged to her day.

In a court of this intolerable worldliness, the worldly must thrive; and Mrs Clayton advanced year by year in the imitation of her mistress, and in power. She, as well as Lady Suffolk, adopted Caroline's patronage of letters, and corresponded a good deal with the clever men of the time. We quote one of Lady Suffolk's letters addressed to Swift, apparently in answer to some of his perpetual complaints of a world, which used him only too well after all.

    "September, 1727.

"I write to you to please myself. I hear you are melancholy, because you have a bad head and deaf ears. These are two misfortunes I have laboured under these many years, and yet never was peevish with either myself or the world. Have I more philosophy and resolution than you? Or am I so stupid that I do not feel the evil?

"Answer those queries in writing, if poison or other methods do not enable you soon to appear in person. Though I make use of your own word, poison, yet let me tell you—it is nonsense, and I desire you will take more care for the time to come. Now, you endeavour to impose on my understanding by taking no care of your own."

The value of a keen and active confidante in a court of perpetual intrigue was obvious, and Mrs Clayton was the double of the Queen. But a deeper and more painful reason is assigned for her confidence. The Queen had a malady, which is not described in her Memoirs, but which we suppose to have been a cancer, which she was most anxious to hide from all the world. Walpole discovered it, and the discovery exhibits his skill in human nature.

On the death of Lady Walpole, the Queen, who was about the same age, asked Sir Robert in many questions as to her illness; but he remarked, that she frequently reverted to one particular malady, which had not been Lady Walpole's disease. "When he came home," (his son writes) "he said to me,—now, Horace, I know by the possession of what secret Lady Sundon has preserved such an ascendant over the Queen."

Mrs Clayton possessed at least one merit (if merit it be) in a remarkable degree, that of providing for her relatives. She was of a poor family, and she contrived to get something for them all. Her three nieces had court places, one of them that of a maid of honour; one brother obtained a cornetcy in the Horse Guards; another a chief clerkship in the annuity office; and her nephew was sent out with Lord Albemarle to Spain. A more remarkable relative was Clayton, Bishop of Clogher, who evidently knew the value of her patronage, for a more importunate suitor, and a more persevering sycophant, never kissed hands. Finally, she obtained a peerage for her husband, a distinction in which, of course, she herself shared, but which probably she desired merely to throw some eclat round a singularly submissive husband.

Yet there was no slight infusion of pleasantry in the minds of some of the royal household. When they got rid of the stately pedantry of Caroline, and the smooth hypocrisy of her confidante,—when the gross and formal monarch was shut out, and the younger portion of the court were left to their own inventions, they seem to have enjoyed themselves like children at play. There was a vast deal of flirtation, of course, for this folly was as much the fashion of the time as rouge. But there was also a great deal of verse writing, correspondence of all degrees of wit, and now and then caricature with pencil and pen. Mary Lepell, in one of those jeux d' esprit, described the "Six Maids of Honour" as six volumes bound in calf.—The first, Miss Meadows, as mingled satire, and reflection; the second as a plain treatise on morality; the third as a rhapsody; the fourth (supposed to be the future Lady Pembroke) as a volume, neatly bound, of "The Whole Art of Dressing;" the next a miscellaneous work, with essays on "Gallantry;" the sixth, a folio collection of all the "Court Ballads." But there were some women of a superior stamp in the court circle. One of those was Lady Sophia Fermor, the daughter of Lady Pomfret, who seems to have been followed by all the men of fashion, and loved by some of them. But, like other professed beauties, she remained unmarried, until at last she accepted Lord Carteret, a man twice her age. Yet the match was a brilliant one in all other points, for Carteret was Secretary of State, and perhaps the most accomplished public man of his time.

"Do but imagine," observes that prince of gossips, Horace Walpole, "how many passions will be gratified in that family; her own ambition, vanity, and resentment—love, she never had any; the politics, management, and pedantry of her mother, who will think to govern her son-in-law out of Froissart. Figure the instructions which she will give her daughter. Lincoln, (one of her admirers) is quite indifferent, and laughs."