MRS OPIE. 1769-1853.
'Your gentleness shall force more than your force move us to gentleness.'--As You Like It.
I.
It is not very long since some articles appeared in the 'Cornhill Magazine' which were begun under the influence of certain ancient bookshelves with so pleasant a flavour of the old world that it seemed at the time as if yesterday not to-day was the all-important hour, and one gladly submitted to the subtle charm of the past--its silent veils, its quiet incantations of dust and healing cobweb. The phase is but a passing one with most of us, and we must soon feel that to dwell at length upon each one of the pretty old fancies and folios of the writers and explorers who were born towards the end of the last century would be an impossible affectation; and yet a postscript seems wanting to the sketches which have already appeared of Mrs. Barbauld and Miss Edgeworth, and the names of their contemporaries should not be quite passed over.
In a hundred charming types and prints and portraits we recognise the well-known names as they used to appear in the garb of life. Grand ladies in broad loops and feathers, or graceful and charming as nymphs in muslin folds, with hanging clouds of hair; or again, in modest coiffes such as dear Jane Austen loved and wore even in her youth. Hannah More only took to coiffes and wimples in later life; in early days she was fond of splendour, and, as we read, had herself painted in emerald earrings. How many others besides her are there to admire! Who does not know the prim, sweet, amply frilled portraits of Mrs. Trimmer and Joanna Baillie? Only yesterday a friend showed me a sprightly, dark-eyed miniature of Felicia Hemans. Perhaps most beautiful among all her sister muses smiles the lovely head of Amelia Opie, as she was represented by her husband with luxuriant chestnut hair piled up Romney fashion in careless loops, with the radiant yet dreaming eyes which are an inheritance for some members of her family.
The authoresses of that day had the pre-eminence in looks, in gracious dress and bearing; but they were rather literary women than anything else, and had but little in common with the noble and brilliant writers who were to follow them in our own more natural and outspoken times; whose wise, sweet, passionate voices are already passing away into the distance; of whom so few remain to us.[4] The secret of being real is no very profound one, and yet how rare it is, how long it was before the readers and writers of this century found it out! It is like the secret of singing in perfect tune, or of playing the violin as Joachim can play upon it. In literature, as in music, there is at times a certain indescribable tone of absolute reality which carries the reader away and for the moment absorbs him into the mind of the writer. Some metempsychosis takes place. It is no longer a man or a woman turning the pages of a book, it is a human being suddenly absorbed by the book itself, living the very life which it records, breathing the spirit and soul of the writer. Such books are events, not books to us, new conditions of existence, new selves suddenly revealed through the experience of other more vivid personalities than our own. The actual experience of other lives is not for us, but this link of simple reality of feeling is one all independent of events; it is like the miracle of the loaves and fishes repeated and multiplied--one man comes with his fishes and lo! the multitude is filled.
Footnote 4: And yet as I write I remember one indeed who is among us, whose portrait a Reynolds or an Opie might have been glad to paint for the generations who will love her works.
But this simple discovery, that of reality, that of speaking from the heart, was one of the last to be made by women. In France Madame de Sévigné and Madame de La Fayette were not afraid to be themselves, but in England the majority of authoresses kept their readers carefully at pen's length, and seemed for the most part to be so conscious of their surprising achievements in the way of literature as never to forget for a single instant that they were in print. With the exception of Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, the women writers of the early part of this century were, as I have just said, rather literary women than actual creators of literature. It is still a mystery how they attained to their great successes. Frances Burney charms great Burke and mighty Johnson and wise Macaulay in later times. Mrs. Opie draws compliments from Mackintosh, and compliments from the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg, and Sydney Smith, and above all tears from Walter Scott.
Perhaps many of the flattering things addressed to Mrs. Opie may have said not less for her own charm and sweetness of nature than for the merit of her unassuming productions; she must have been a bright, merry, and fascinating person, and compliments were certainly more in her line than the tributes of tears which she records.
The authoresses of heroines are often more interesting than the heroines themselves, and Amelia Opie was certainly no exception to this somewhat general statement. A pleasant, sprightly authoress, beaming bright glances on her friends, confident, intelligent, full of interest in life, carried along in turn by one and by another influence, she comes before us a young and charming figure, with all the spires of Norwich for a background, and the sound of its bells, and the stir of its assizes, as she issues from her peaceful home in her father's tranquil old house, where the good physician lives widowed, tending his poor and his sick, and devotedly spoiling his only child.
II.
Amelia Opie was born in 1769 in the old city of Norwich, within reach of the invigorating breezes of the great North Sea. Her youth must have been somewhat solitary; she was the only child of a kind and cultivated physician, Doctor James Alderson, whose younger brother, a barrister, also living in Norwich, became the father of Baron Alderson. Her mother died in her early youth. From her father, however, little Amelia seems to have had the love and indulgence of over half a century, a tender and admiring love which she returned with all her heart's devotion. She was the pride and darling of his home, and throughout her long life her father's approbation was the one chief motive of her existence. Spoiling is a vexed question, but as a rule people get so much stern justice from all the rest of the world that it seems well that their parents should love and comfort them in youth for the many disgraces and difficulties yet to come.
Her mother is described as a delicate, high-minded woman, 'somewhat of a disciplinarian,' says Mrs. Opie's excellent biographer, Miss Brightwell, but she died too soon to carry her theories into practice. Miss Brightwell suggests that 'Mrs. Opie might have been more demure and decorous had her mother lived, but perhaps less charming.' There are some verses addressed to her mother in Mrs. Opie's papers in which it must be confessed that the remembrance of her admonition plays a most important part--
Hark! clearer still thy voice I hear. Again reproof in accents mild, Seems whispering in my conscious ear, and so on.
Some of Mrs. Alderson's attempts at discipline seemed unusual and experimental; the little girl was timid, afraid of black people, of black beetles, and of human skeletons. She was given the skeleton to play with, and the beetles to hold in her hand. One feels more sympathy with the way in which she was gently reconciled to the poor negro with the frightening black face--by being told the story of his wrongs. But with the poor mother's untimely death all this maternal supervision came to an end. 'Amelia, your mother is gone; may you never have reason to blush when you remember her!' her father said as he clasped his little orphan to his heart; and all her life long Amelia remembered those words.
There is a pretty reminiscence of her childhood from a beginning of the memoir which was never written:--'One of my earliest recollections is of gazing on the bright blue sky as I lay in my little bed before my hour of rising came, listening with delighted attention to the ringing of a peal of bells. I had heard that heaven was beyond those blue skies, and I had been taught that there was the home of the good, and I fancied that those sweet bells were ringing in heaven.' The bells were ringing for the Norwich Assizes, which played an important part in our little heroine's life, and which must have been associated with many of her early memories.
The little girl seems to have been allowed more liberty than is usually given to children. 'As soon as I was old enough to enjoy a procession,' she says, 'I was taken to see the Judges come in. Youthful pages in pretty dresses ran by the side of the High Sheriff's carriage, in which the Judges sat, while the coaches drove slowly and with a solemnity becoming the high and awful office of those whom they contained.... With reverence ever did I behold the Judges' wigs, the scarlet robes they wore, and even the white wand of the Sheriff.'
There is a description which in after years might have made a pretty picture for her husband's pencil of the little maiden wandering into the court one day, and called by a kind old Judge to sit beside him upon the bench. She goes on to recount how next day she was there again; and when some attendant of the court wanted her to leave the place, saying not unnaturally, 'Go, Miss, this is no place for you; be advised,' the Judge again...
