Hannah More Once More

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Title:     Hannah More Once More
Author: Augustine Birrell [More Titles by Birrell]

I have been told by more than one correspondent, and not always in words of urbanity, that I owe an apology to the manes of Miss Hannah More, whose works I once purchased in nineteen volumes for 8s. 6d., and about whom in consequence I wrote a page some ten years ago.[A]

[Footnote A: See Collected Essays, ii. 255.]

To be accused of rudeness to a lady who exchanged witticisms with Dr. Johnson, soothed the widowed heart of Mrs. Garrick, directed the early studies of Macaulay, and in the spring of 1815 presented a small copy of her Sacred Dramas to Mr. Gladstone, is no light matter. To libel the dead is, I know, not actionable--indeed, it is impossible; but evil-speaking, lying, and slandering are canonical offences from which the obligation to refrain knows no limits of time or place.

I have often felt uneasy on this score, and never had the courage, until this very evening, to read over again what in the irritation of the moment I had been tempted to say about Miss Hannah More, after the outlay upon her writings already mentioned. Eight shillings and sixpence is, indeed, no great sum, but nineteen octavo volumes are a good many books. Yet Richardson is in nineteen volumes in Mangin's edition, and Swift is in nineteen volumes in Scott's edition, and glorious John Dryden lacks but a volume to make a third example. True enough; yet it will, I think, be granted me that you must be very fond of an author, male or female, if nineteen octavo volumes, all his or hers, are not a little irritating and provocative of temper. Think of the room they take! As for selling them, it is not so easy to sell nineteen volumes of a stone-dead author, particularly if you live three miles from a railway-station and do not keep a trap. Elia, the gentle Elia, as it is the idiotic fashion to call a writer who could handle his 'maulies' in a fray as well as Hazlitt himself, has told us how he could never see well-bound books he did not care about, but he longed to strip them so that he might warm his ragged veterans in their spoils. My copy of Hannah More was in full calf, but never once did it occur to me--though I, too, have many a poor author with hardly a shirt to his back shivering in the dark corners of the library--to strip her of her warm clothing. And yet I had to do something, and quickly too, for sorely needed was Miss More's shelf. So I buried the nineteen volumes in the garden. 'Out of sight, out of mind,' said I cheerfully, stamping them down.

This has hardly proved to be the case, for though Hannah More is incapable of a literary resurrection, and no one of her nineteen volumes has ever haunted my pillow, exclaiming,

'Think how thou stab'dst me in my prime of youth,'

nevertheless, I have not been able to get quite rid of an uneasy feeling that I was rude to her ten years ago in print--not, indeed, so rude as was her revered friend Dr. Johnson 126 years ago to her face; but then, I have not the courage to creep under the gabardine of our great Moralist.

When, accordingly, I saw on the counters of the trade the daintiest of volumes, hailing, too, from the United States, entitled Hannah More,[A] and perceived that it was a short biography and appreciation of the lady on my mind, I recognised that my penitential hour had at last come. I took the little book home with me, and sat down to read, determined to do justice and more than justice to the once celebrated mistress of Cowslip Green and Barley Wood.

[Footnote A: Hannah More, by Marian Harland. New York and London: G.P. Putnam.]

Miss Harland's preface is most engaging. She reminds a married sister how in the far-off days of their childhood in a Southern State their Sunday reading, usually confined or sought to be confined, to 'bound sermons and semi-detached tracts,' was enlivened by the Works of Hannah More. She proceeds as follows:

'At my last visit to you I took from your bookshelves one of a set of volumes in uniform binding of full calf, coloured mellowly by the touch and the breath of fifty odd years. They belonged to the dear old home library.... The leaves of the book I held fell apart at The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain.'

I leave my readers to judge how uncomfortable these innocent words made me:

'The usher took six hasty strides
As smit with sudden pain.'

I knew that set of volumes, their distressing uniformity of binding, their full calf. Their very fellows lie mouldering in an East Anglian garden, mellow enough by this time and strangely coloured.

Circumstances alter cases. Miss Harland thinks that if the life of Charlotte Bronte's mother had been mercifully spared, the authoress of Jane Eyre and Villette might have grown up more like Hannah More than she actually did. Perhaps so. As I say, circumstances alter cases, and if the works of Hannah More had been in my old home library, I might have read The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain and The Search after Happiness of a Sunday, and found solace therein. But they were not there, and I had to get along as best I could with the Pilgrim's Progress, stories by A.L.O.E., the crime-stained page of Mrs. Sherwood's Tales from the Church Catechism, and, 'more curious sport than that,' the Bible in Spain of the never-sufficiently-bepraised George Borrow.

What, however, is a little odd about Miss Harland's enthusiasm for Hannah More's writings is that it expires with the preface. There, indeed, it glows with a beautiful light:

'And The Search after Happiness! You cannot have forgotten all of the many lines we learned by heart on Sunday afternoons in the joyful spring-time when we were obliged to clear the pages every few minutes of yellow jessamine bells and purple Wistaria petals flung down by the warm wind.'

This passage lets us into the secret. I suspect in sober truth both Miss Harland and her sister have long since forgotten all the lines in The Search after Happiness, but what they have never forgotten, what they never can forget, are the jessamine bells and the Wistaria petals, yellow and purple, blown about in the warm winds that visited their now desolate and forsaken Southern home. Less beautiful things than jessamine and Wistaria, if only they clustered round the house where you were born, are remembered when the lines of far better authors than Miss Hannah More have gone clean out of your head:

'As life wanes, all its cares and strife and toil
Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees
Which grew by our youth's home, the waving mass
Of climbing plants heavy with bloom and dew,
The morning swallows with their songs like words--
All these seem dear, and only worth our thoughts.'

Thus the youthful Browning in his marvellous Pauline. The same note is struck after a humbler and perhaps more moving fashion in the following simple strain of William Allingham:

'Four ducks on a pond,
A grass-bank beyond;
A blue sky of spring,
White clouds on the wing;
How little a thing
To remember for years--
To remember with tears!'

If this be so--and who, looking into his own heart, but must own that so it is?--it explains how it comes about that as soon as Miss Harland finished her preface, got away from her childhood and began her biography, she has so little to tell us about Miss More's books, and from that little the personal note of enjoyment is entirely wanting. Indeed, though a pious soul, she occasionally cannot restrain her surprise how such ponderous commonplaces ever found a publisher, to say nothing of a reader.

'Such books as Miss More's,' she says, 'would to-day in America fall from the press like a stone into the depths of the sea of oblivion, creating no more sensation upon the surface than the bursting of a bubble in mid-Atlantic.'

And again:

'That Hannah More was a power for righteousness in her long generation we must take upon the testimony of her best and wisest contemporaries.'

However good may be your intentions, it seems hard to avoid being rude to this excellent lady.

I confess I never liked her love story. Anything more cold-blooded I never read. I am not going to repeat it. Why should I? It is told at length in Miss More's authorized biography in four volumes by William Roberts, Esq. I saw a copy yesterday exposed for sale in New Oxford Street, price 1s. Miss Harland also tells the tale, not without chuckling. I refer the curious to her pages.

Then there are those who can never get rid of the impression that Hannah More 'fagged' her four sisters mercilessly; but who can tell? Some people like being fagged.

Precisely when Miss More bade farewell to what in later life she was fond of calling her gay days, when she wrote dull plays and went to stupid Sunday parties, one finds it hard to discover, but at no time did it ever come home to her that she needed repentance herself. She seems always thinking of the sins and shortcomings of her neighbours, rich and poor. Sometimes, indeed, when deluged with flattery, she would intimate that she was a miserable sinner, but that is not what I mean. She concerned herself greatly with the manners of the great, and deplored their cards and fashionable falsehoods. John Newton, captain as he had been of a slaver, saw the futility of such pin-pricks:

'The fashionable world,' so he wrote to Miss More, 'by their numbers form a phalanx not easily impressible, and their habits of life are as armour of proof which renders them not easily vulnerable. Neither the rude club of a boisterous Reformer nor the pointed, delicate weapons of the authoress before me can overthrow or rout them.'

But Miss More never forgot to lecture the rich or to patronize the poor.

Coelebs in Search of a Wife is an impossible book, and I do not believe Miss Harland has read it; but as for the famous Shepherd, we are never allowed to forget how Mr. Wilberforce declared a few years before his death, to the admiration of the religious world, that he would rather present himself in heaven with The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain in his hand than with--what think you?--Peveril of the Peak! The bare notion of such a proceeding on anybody's part is enough to strike one dumb with what would be horror, did not amazement swallow up every other feeling. What rank Arminianism! I am sure the last notion that ever would have entered the head of Sir Walter was to take Peveril to heaven.

But whatever may be thought of the respective merits of Miss More's nineteen volumes and Sir Walter's ninety-eight, there is no doubt that Barley Wood was as much infested with visitors as ever was Abbotsford. Eighty a week!

'From twelve o'clock until three each day a constant stream of carriages and pedestrians filled the evergreen bordered avenue leading from the Wrington village road.'

Among them came Lady Gladstone and W.E.G., aged six, the latter carrying away with him the Sacred Dramas, to be preserved during a long life.

Miss More was a vivacious and agreeable talker, who certainly failed to do herself justice with her pen. Her health was never good, yet, as she survived thirty-five of her prescribing physicians, her vitality must have been great. Her face in Opie's portrait is very pleasant. If I was rude to her ten years ago, I apologize and withdraw; but as for her books, I shall leave them where they are--buried in a cliff facing due north, with nothing between them and the Pole but leagues upon leagues of a wind-swept ocean.

[The end]
Augustine Birrell's essay: Hannah More Once More

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