The ten years that remain — one knows, of course, that it must come to an end. Already the Custances have gone to Bath; the Parson has had a touch of gout; far away, with a sound like distant thunder, we hear the guns of the French Revolution. But it is comforting to observe that the imprisonment of the French king and queen, and the anarchy and confusion in Paris, are only mentioned after it has been recorded that Thomas Ram has lost his cow and that Parson Woodforde has “brewed another Barrell of Table Beer to-day”. We have a notion, indeed — and here it must be confessed that we have given up reading Parson Woodforde altogether, and merely tell over the story on a stroll through fields where the hares are scampering and the rooks rising above the elm trees — we have a notion that Parson Woodforde does not die. Parson Woodforde goes on. It is we who change and perish. It is the kings and queens who lie in prison. It is the great towns that are ravaged with anarchy and confusion. But the river Wensum still flows; Mrs. Custance is brought to bed of yet another baby; there is the first swallow of the year. The spring comes, and summer with its hay and its strawberries; then autumn, when the walnuts are exceptionally fine, though the pears are poor; so we lapse into winter, which is indeed boisterous, but the house, thank God, withstands the storm; and then again there is the first swallow, and Parson Woodforde takes his greyhounds out a-coursing.
Crabbe
NOTHING is more remarkable in reading the life of Crabbe than his passion for weeds. After his wife’s death — she was mad for the last years of her life, alternately melancholic and exalted — he gave up weed collecting and took to fossils. But he always went fossilizing alone; though if children insisted upon coming he suffered them. “Playing with fossils,” he called it. When he went to stay with his son George he went off, always alone, to grout for fossils in the blue lias quarries; “stopping to cut up any herb not quite common that grew in his path”; and he would return loaded with them. “The dirty fossils were placed in our best bedroom, to the great diversion of the female part of my family, the herbs stuck in the borders, among my choice flowers, that he might see them when he came again. I never displaced one of them.” This gnarled and sea-salted man was no smug clergyman underneath. He had a passion for the rejected and injured, the stunted, the hardy, the wild self-grown, self-supported unsightly weed. He was himself a weed. His birth and breeding had been the weeds — at Aldeburgh, where he was born on Christmas Eve, 1754. His father was a warehouse keeper, and rose to be collector of Salt Duties, or Salt Master, in that miserable dull sea village, the sound of whose waves never went out of George’s ears, even at Belvoir or Troubridge. His mother had kept a public house, and his father, a short powerful man, who used sometimes to read poetry — Milton or Young — to his children but was fondest of mathematics, became, owing to the death of his only daughter, violent sometimes; her “untimely death drew from him those gloomy and savage tokens of misery, which haunted, fifty years after, the memory of his gentler son”. His mother was pious, resigned, and dropsical.
Such, then, was his original weedlike life, on the quays rolling casks, waiting for a signal from the offing. And nothing is more remarkable than that this pale boy should have raised himself once and for all, by the force of one letter to Burke, into a luxurious, educated, cushioned career for life. Nothing of the kind would now be possible. Burke has been supplanted by the elementary school and scholarships.
Then there were his amorous propensities. This has to be referred to by the most respectful of sons — did he not let his father’s weeds grow among his own choice flowers? — because “These things were so well-known among the circle of which at this period he formed the delight and ornament that I have thought it absurd not to dwell on them.” He suffered at the age of sixty-four more acutely from love and jealousy than most young men of twenty. Crabbe’s nature, indeed, included more than one full-grown human being. He could shine — witness his diary, brief, pointed — in the very highest society. He had admirable manners, but, though he always gave way, yet always expected to be given way to. Moreover he was untidy in the extreme. His study table was notorious. And he was genial; called his sons “old fellows” and liked to offer his friends good claret. He tipped servants, gave presents, was loved and plundered by the poor, who pestered him for shillings so that his birthday was a kind of levée for the whole neighbourhood. As a preacher too he was unconventional, and would stand in a seat near the window to finish reading his sermon in the dark. And he took opium, with very good results, in a constant and slightly increasing dose. He would wander with his children in the fields at Glemham till the moon rose, reading aloud from some novel as he walked, while the boys chased moths, filled their caps with glow worms, and the nightingales sang. He wrote innumerable books which he afterwards burnt in his garden, the children stirring up the fire and flinging on it fresh manuscripts. Thus was burnt his Essay on Botany because it was in English and his friend, Mr. Davies of Trinity College, Cambridge, “could not stomach the notion of degrading such a science by treating of it in a modern language”. For this reason he missed the honour of being known as the discoverer of the humble trefoil now known as Trofolium Suffocatum. And in 1787 he was seized one fine summer’s day with so intense a longing for the sea that he mounted his horse, rode alone to the coast of Lincolnshire sixty miles from his home, dipped in the waves that washed the beach of Aldeburgh, and returned home to sit in his untidy study, arranging minerals, shells, and insects.
Selina Trimmer
THE gardens at Chatsworth which contained so many strange exotic plants brought by the great gardener Paxton from foreign lands, could boast, too, of one modest daisy whose surname was Trimmer and whose Christian name was Selina. She was a governess of course, and when we think what it meant to Charlotte Brontë and to Miss Weeton to be a governess in a middle-class family, the life of Selina Trimmer redounds more to the credit of the Cavendishes than all the splendours of Chatsworth, Devonshire House and Hardwick Hall. She was a governess; yet her pupil Lady Harriet wrote to her when she became engaged, “I send you the enclosed bracelet.... I often think of all your past conduct to me with affection and gratitude not to be expressed. God bless you, my dearest friend.”
Selina sheds light upon the Cavendishes, but outside that radiance little is known of her. Her life must begin with a negative — she was not her sister-in-law, the famous Mrs. Trimmer of the Tales. She had a brother who lived at Brentford. From Brentford then, about 1790, came Selina, up the great marble stairs, following a footman, to be governess to the little Cavendishes in the nursery at Devonshire House. But were they all Cavendishes — the six romping, high-spirited children she found there? Three it appeared had no right to any surname at all. And who was the Lady Elizabeth Foster who lived on such intimate terms with the disagreeable Duke, and on such friendly terms with the lovely Duchess? Soon it must have dawned upon Trimmer as she sat over her Quaker discourse when her pupils were in bed that she had taken up her lodging in the abode of vice. Downstairs there was drinking and gambling; upstairs there were bastards and mistresses. According to Brentford standards she should have drawn her skirts about her and flounced out of the polluted place at once. Yet she stayed on. Far from being vicious, the Devonshire House family was healthy and in its own way virtuous. No more devoted family existed. The children adored their mother. They were on the best of terms with one another. If the Duke was an indifferent father, his daughters were as dutiful as the daughters of any country parson. One person, it is true, all the children hated, and that was Lady Liz. But they hated her not because she was their father’s mistress, but because she was corrupt; whining and cooing, false and spiteful. Could it be possible, then, that an absence of conventional morality brings into being a real morality? Were not the little girls, Georgiana and Hary-o, who knew from childhood all the facts that are concealed from female Trimmers till they were married women, far less sentimental, less prudish and silly, infinitely more honest, sensible and downright than the middle-class girls whose virtue w
as so carefully shielded at Brentford?
These were questions that Trimmer must have pondered as she walked with her dubious brood in Hyde Park or escorted them to parties. They were asked everywhere. The courtyard at Devonshire House was full of coaches by day and by night. Nobody looked askance at them. So, while she taught the little Cavendishes their sums and their pothooks, they taught her; they enlarged her mind. They laughed at her and teased her and vowed that she was carrying on a love affair with Bob Adair. But for all that they treated her as if she were a woman of flesh and blood. There was only one class for the Cavendish children, and that was their own. Whatever their faults, and Hary-o always overslept, and could never read only one book at a time, the Cavendishes were the least snobbish of people. They treated her as an equal; they accepted her as part of their pagan and classless society. When the girls began to go out into the world they wrote as frankly and freely to their “dearest Selina” about their parties and their partners as they wrote to each other.
By the time they were going out into the great world, Trimmer was well aware of its dangers. She could take comfort in the fact that Georgiana and Hary-o were spared at least one temptation — they had not their mother’s beauty. “I am delighted to be reckoned like mama,” Hary-o wrote. “ ‘A very bad edition though,’ as an honest man said of me at Mrs. Somebody’s party.” They were short, fat, and rather heavy featured. But by way of compensation they had excellent brains. Their little eyes were extremely shrewd; in mind they were precocious and caustic. Hary-o could dash off a description of her fox-hunting cousin Althorp with a vivacity that any novelist might have envied, and with a worldly wisdom that would have done credit to a dowager.
Althorp as he might have been, no reasonable woman could refuse or help loving and respecting. Althorp as he is, no reasonable woman can for a moment think of but as an eager huntsman. He has no more importance in society now (as he is, remember) than the chairs and tables.... Evenings and Sundays are to him a visible penance.... But when he appears at breakfast in his red jacket and jockey cap, it is a sort of intoxicating delight that must be seen to seem credible, and one feels the same sort of good-natured pleasure as at seeing a Newfoundland dog splash into the water, a goldfinch out of his cage, or a mouse run out of his trap. This is the man that I cannot wish to marry....
Shocked, puzzled yet charmed, Selina stayed on. But she preserved her own standards. In that intimate society where every lord and lady had a nickname, Trimmer had hers. She was called Raison Sévère, Triste Raison, Vent de Bise. Lady Bessborough lamented “... rigidly right, she forgets that one may do right without making oneself disagreeable to everyone around”. And Bess, Lady Elizabeth Foster, shivered in her presence. “Bess... says she always affects her like a North-East wind.” Trimmer was no sycophant. By degrees she assumed the part that is so often played by the humble retainer; from governess she became confidante. In that wild whirling life of incessant love-making and intrigue she represented reason, morality — something that Hary-o as she grew up missed in her mother and needed. Mama, she owned to her sister when Duncannon pestered her, was “not prudent”; mama did not mind putting her daughter into a “most awkward situation”. But Selina, on the other hand, “gave me a most furious lecture that my coquetry was dreadful, and that, without caring for my cousin, I had made him fall in love with me.” It was “merely to enjoy the triumph of supplanting Lady E.”, Trimmer said. Lady Harriet was angry at Trimmer’s plain speaking, but she respected her for it nevertheless.
More and more, as Hary-o grew older, the extraordinary complications of Devonshire House morality involved her in tortures of doubt — what was her duty to her father, what, after her mother’s death, to his mistress, and what did she owe to society? Ought she to allow Lady Liz to drag her into the company of the abandoned Mrs. Fitzherbert? “And yet I have no right to be nice about the company I go into; or rather no power, for I think no blame can be attached to me for that I so reluctantly live in.” Strangely, it was not to the Bessboroughs or to the Melbournes that Hary-o turned in her dilemma; it was to Trimmer. Though companion now to old Lady Spencer, Trimmer came back to bear Harriet company at Devonshire House when Lady Liz was queening it there, saying “we” and “us” all the time, and fondling the Duke’s spotted and speckled puppies in her shawl. Trimmer alone had the courage to show that the dogs bored her. Trimmer compelled the Duke and George Lamb to talk about “the Quaker persuasion and Mr. Boreham’s scruples about giving the oath”. In those tortured days Trimmer, “arch advocate of reason”, was the greatest blessing to her distracted pupil. And it was finally to Trimmer that Harriet turned when the crucial question of her life had to be decided. Was she to marry her aunt’s lover, Lord Granville? He had two children by Lady Bessborough. They had always been in league against her. She had hated him; yet there had come over her the spell of his wonderful almond-shaped eyes, and it would mean escape — from Lady Liz, from the ignominies and insults that her father’s mistress put upon her. What was she to do? What she did was to marry Granville— “Adored Granville, who would make a barren desert smile.” And it proved, on the face of it, an ideal union. Lord Granville became a model of the domestic virtues. Harriet developed into the most respectable of Victorian matrons, wearing a large black bonnet, setting up old orange women with baskets of trifles, illuminating book markers with texts, and attending church assiduously. She survived till 1862. But did Trimmer suffer a Victorian change? Or did Trimmer remain immutably herself? There was something hardy and perennial about Trimmer. One can Imagine her grown very old and very gaunt, dwindling out her declining years in discreet obscurity. But what tales she could have told had she liked — about the lovely Duchess and the foolish Caro Ponsonby, and the Melbournes and the Bessboroughs — all vanished, all changed. The only relic of that wild world that remained was the bracelet on her wrist. It recalled much that had better be forgotten, and yet, as Trimmer looked at it, how happy she had been in Devonshire House with Hary-o, her dearest friend.
The Captain’s Death Bed
THE Captain lay dying on a mattress stretched on the floor of the boudoir room; a room whose ceiling had been painted to imitate the sky, and whose walls were painted with trellis work covered with roses upon which birds were perching. Mirrors had been let into the doors, so that the village people called the room the “Room of a Thousand Pillars” because of its reflections. It was an August morning as he lay dying; his daughter had brought him a bunch of his favourite flowers — clove pinks and moss roses; and he asked her to take down some words at his dictation: —
’Tis a lovely day [he dictated] and Augusta has just brought me three pinks and three roses, and the bouquet is charming. I have opened the windows and the air is delightful. It is now exactly nine o’clock in the morning, and I am lying on a bed in a place called Langham, two miles from the sea, on the coast of Norfolk.... To use the common sense of the word [he went on] I am happy. I have no sense of hunger whatever, or of thirst; my taste is not impaired.... After years of casual, and, latterly, months of intense thought, I feel convinced that Christianity is true... and that God is love.... It is now half-past nine o’clock. World, adieu.
Early in the morning of August 9th, 1848, just about dawn he died.
But who was the dying man whose thoughts turned to love and roses as he lay among his looking-glasses and his painted birds? Singularly enough, it was a sea captain; and still more singularly it was a sea captain who had been through the multitudinous engagements of the Napoleonic wars, who had lived a crowded life on shore, and who had written a long shelf of books of adventure, full of battle and murder and conquest. His name was Frederick Marryat. Who then was Augusta, the daughter who brought him the flowers? She was one of his eleven children; but of her the only fact that is now known to the public is that once she went ratting with her father and seized an enormous rat— “You must know that our Norfolk rats are quite as large as well-grown guinea pigs” — and held on to him with her bare hands mu
ch to the amazement of the onlookers and, we may guess, to the admiration of her father, who remarked that his daughters were “true game”. Then, again, what was Langham? Langham was an estate in Norfolk for which Captain Marryat had exchanged Sussex House over a glass of champagne. And Sussex House was a house at Hammersmith in which he lived while he was equerry to the Duke of Sussex. But here certainty begins to falter. Why he quarrelled with the Duke of Sussex and ceased to be his equerry; why, after an apparently pacific interview with Lord Auckland at the Admiralty he was in such a rage that he broke a blood vessel; why, after having eleven children by his wife, he left her; why, being possessed of a house in the country, he lived in London; why, being the centre of a gay and brilliant society he suddenly shut himself up in the country and refused to budge; why Mrs.
B refused his love and what were his relations with Mrs. S —— ; these are questions that we may ask, but that we must ask in vain. For the two little volumes with very large print and very small pages in which his daughter Florence wrote his life refuse to tell us. One of the most active, odd and adventurous lives that any English novelist has ever lived is also one of the most obscure.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 453