Clarissa Harlowe; or the history of a young lady Volume IX Part 32

But if her voice was melodious when she read, it was all harmony when she sung. And the delight she gave by that, and by her skill and great compa.s.s, was heightened by the ease and gracefulness of her air and manner, and by the alacrity with which she obliged.

Nevertheless she generally chose rather to hear others sing or play, than either to play or sing herself.

She delighted to give praise where deserved; yet she always bestowed it in such a manner as gave not the least suspicion that she laid out for a return of it to herself, though so universally allowed to be her due.

She had a talent of saying uncommon things in such an easy manner that every body thought they could have said the same; and which yet required both genius and observation to say them.

Even severe things appeared gentle, though they lost not their force, from the sweetness of her air and utterance, and the apparent benevolence of her purpose.

We form the truest judgment of persons by their behaviour on the most familiar occasions. I will give an instance or two of the correction she favoured me with on such a one.

When very young, I was guilty of the fault of those who want to be courted to sing. She cured me of it, at the first of our happy intimacy, by her own example; and by the following correctives, occasionally, yet privately enforced:

'Well, my dear, shall we take you at your word? Shall we suppose, that you sing but indifferently? Is not, however, the act of obliging, (the company so worthy!) preferable to the talent of singing? And shall not young ladies endeavour to make up for their defects in one part of education, by their excellence in another?'

Again, 'You must convince us, by attempting to sing, that you cannot sing; and then we will rid you, not only of present, but of future importunity.'--An indulgence, however, let me add, that but tolerable singers do not always wish to meet with.

Again, 'I know you will favour us by and by; and what do you by your excuses but raise our expectations, and enhance your own difficulties?'

At another time, 'Has not this accomplishment been a part of your education, my Nancy? How, then, for your own honour, can we allow of your excuses?'

And I once pleading a cold, the usual pretence of those who love to be entreated--'Sing, however, my dear, as well as you can. The greater the difficulty to you, the higher the compliment to the company. Do you think you are among those who know not how to make allowances? you should sing, my love, lest there should be any body present who may think your excuses owing to affectation.'

At another time, when I had truly observed that a young lady present sung better than I; and that, therefore, I chose not to sing before that lady --'Fie, said she, (drawing me on one side,) is not this pride, my Nancy?

Does it not look as if your princ.i.p.al motive to oblige was to obtain applause? A generous mind will not scruple to give advantage to a person of merit, though not always to her own advantage. And yet she will have a high merit in doing that. Supposing this excellent person absent, who, my dear, if your example spread, shall sing after you? You know every one else must be but as a foil to you. Indeed I must have you as much superior to other ladies in these smaller points, as you are in greater.'

So she was pleased to say to shame me. She was so much above reserve as disguise. So communicative that no young lady could be in her company half an hour, and not carry away instruction with her, whatever was the topic. Yet all sweetly insinuated; nothing given with the air of prescription; so that while she seemed to ask a question for information-sake, she dropt in the needful instruction, and left the instructed unable to decide whether the thought (which being started, she, the instructed, could improve) came primarily from herself, or from the sweet instructress.

She had a pretty hand at drawing, which she obtained with very little instruction. Her time was too much taken up to allow, though to so fine an art, the attention which was necessary to make her greatly excel in it: and she used to say, 'That she was afraid of aiming at too many things, for fear she should not be tolerable at any thing.'

For her years, and her opportunities, she was an extraordinary judge of painting. In this, as in every thing else, nature was her art, her art was nature. She even prettily performed in it. Her grandfather, for this reason, bequeathed to her all the family pictures. Charming was her fancy: alike sweet and easy was every touch of her pencil and her pen.

Yet her judgment exceeded her performance. She did not practise enough to excel in the executive part. She could not in every thing excel.

But, upon the whole, she knew what every subject required according to the nature of it; in other words, was an absolute mistress of the should-be.

To give a familiar instance for the sake of young ladies; she (untaught) observed when but a child, that the sun, moon, and stars, never appeared at once; and were therefore never to be in one piece; that bears, tigers, lions, were not natives of an English climate, and should not therefore have place in an English landscape; that these ravagers of the forest consorted not with lambs, kids, or fawns; nor kites, hawks, and vultures, with doves, partridges, or pheasants.

And, alas! she knew, before she was nineteen years of age, by fatal experience she knew! that all these beasts and birds of prey were outdone, in treacherous cruelty, by MAN! Vile, barbarous, plotting, destructive man! who, infinitely less excusable than those, destroys, through wantonness and sport, what those only destroy through hunger and necessity!

The mere pretenders to those branches of science which she aimed at acquiring she knew how to detect; and from all nature. Propriety, another word for nature, was (as I have hinted) her law, as it is the foundation of all true judgment. But, nevertheless, she was always uneasy, if what she said exposed those pretenders to knowledge, even in their absence, to the ridicule of lively spirits.

Let the modern ladies, who have not any one of her excellent qualities; whose whole time, in the short days they generally make, and in the inverted night and day, where they make them longer, is wholly spent in dress, visits, cards, plays, operas, and musical entertainments, wonder at what I have written, and shall further write; and let them look upon it as an incredible thing, that when, at a mature age, they cannot boast one of her perfections, there should have been a lady so young, who had so many.

These must be such as know not how she employed her time; and cannot form the least idea of what may be done in those hours in which they lie enveloped with the shades of death, as she used to call sleep.

But before I come to mention the distribution she usually made of her time, let me say a few words upon another subject, in which she excelled all the young ladies I ever knew.

This was her skill in almost all sorts of fine needleworks; of which, however, I shall say the less, since possibly you will find it mentioned in some of the letters.

That piece which she bequeaths to her cousin Morden is indeed a capital piece; a performance so admirable, that that gentleman's father, who resided chiefly abroad, (was, as is mentioned in her will,) very desirous to obtain it, in order to carry it to Italy with him, to show the curious of other countries, (as he used to say,) for the honour of his own, that the cloistered confinement was not necessary to make English women excel in any of those fine arts upon which nuns and recluses value themselves.

Her quickness at these sort of works was astonis.h.i.+ng; and a great encouragement to herself to prosecute them.

Mr. Morden's father would have been continually making her presents, would she have permitted him to do so; and he used to call them, and so did her grandfather, tributes due to a merit so sovereign, and not presents.

As to her diversions, the accomplishments and acquirements she was mistress of will show what they must have been. She was far from being fond of cards, the fas.h.i.+onable foible of modern ladies; nor, as will be easily perceived from what I have said, and more from what I shall further say, had she much time for play. She never therefore promoted their being called for; and often insensibly diverted the company from them, by starting some entertaining subject, when she could do it without incurring the imputation of particularity.

Indeed very few of her intimates would propose cards, if they could engage her to read, to talk, to touch the keys, or to sing, when any new book, or new piece of music, came down. But when company was so numerous, that conversation could not take that agreeable turn which it oftenest does among four or five friends of like years and inclinations, and it became in a manner necessary to detach off some of it, to make the rest better company, she would not refuse to play, if, upon casting in, it fell to her lot. And then she showed that her disrelish to cards was the effect of choice only; and that she was an easy mistress of every genteel game played with them. But then she always declared against playing high. 'Except for trifles,' she used to say, 'she would not submit to chance what she was already sure of.'

At other times, 'she should make her friends a very ill compliment,' she said, 'if she supposed they would wish to be possessed of what of right belonged to her; and she should be very unworthy, if she desired to make herself a t.i.tle to what was theirs.'

'High gaming, in short,' she used to say, 'was a sordid vice; an immorality; the child of avarice; and a direct breach of that commandment, which forbids us to covet what is our neighbour's.'

She was exceedingly charitable; the only one of her family that knew the meaning of the word; and this with regard both to the souls and the bodies of those who were the well-chosen objects of her benevolence. She kept a list of these, whom she used to call her Poor, entering one upon it as another was provided for, by death, or any other way; but always made a reserve, nevertheless, for unforeseen cases, and for accidental distresses. And it must be owned, that in the prudent distribution of them, she had neither example nor equal.

The aged, the blind, the lame, the widow, the orphan, the unsuccessful industrious, were particularly the objects of it; and the contributing to the schooling of some, to the putting out to trades and husbandry the children of others of the labouring or needy poor, and setting them forward at the expiration of their servitude, were her great delights; as was the giving good books to others; and, when she had opportunity, the instructing the poorer sort of her honest neighbours, and father's tenants, in the use of them. 'That charity,' she used to say, 'which provides for the morals, as well as for the bodily wants of the poor, gives a double benefit to the public, as it adds to the number of the hopeful what it takes from that of the profligate. And can there be, in the eyes of that G.o.d, she was wont to say, who requires nothing so much from us as acts of beneficence to one another, a charity more worthy?'

Her uncle Antony, when he came to settle in England with his vast fortune obtained in the Indies, used to say, 'This girl by her charities will bring down a blessing upon us all.' And it must be owned they trusted pretty much to this presumption.

But I need not say more on this head: nor perhaps was it necessary to say so much; since the charitable bequests in her will sufficiently set forth her excellence in this branch of duty.

She was extremely moderate in her diet. 'Quant.i.ty in food,' she used to say, 'was more to be regarded than quality; that a full meal was the great enemy both to study and industry: that a well-built house required but little repairs.'

But this moderation in her diet, she enjoyed, with a delicate frame of body, a fine state of health; was always serene, lively; cheerful, of course. And I never knew but of one illness she had; and that was by a violent cold caught in an open chaise, by a sudden storm of hail and rain, in a place where was no shelter; and which threw her into a fever, attended with dangerous symptoms, that no doubt were lightened by her temperance; but which gave her friends, who then knew her value, infinite apprehensions for her.*

* In her common-place book she has the following note upon the recollection of this illness in the time of her distress:

'In a dangerous illness, with which I was visited a few years before I had the unhappiness to know this ungrateful man! [would to Heaven I had died in it!] my bed was surrounded by my dear relations--father, mother, brother, sister, my two uncles, weeping, kneeling, round me, then put up their vows to Heaven for my recovery; and I, fearing that I should drag down with me to my grave one or other of my sorrowing friends, wished and prayed to recover for their sakes.--Alas! how shall parents in such cases know what to wish for! How happy for them, and for me, had I then been denied to their prayers! But now I am eased of that care. All those dear relations are living still--but not one of them (such as they think, has been the heinousness of my error!) but, far from being grieved, would rejoice to hear of my death.'

In all her readings, and her conversations upon them, she was fonder of finding beauties than blemishes, and chose to applaud but authors and books, where she could find the least room for it. Yet she used to lament that certain writers of the first cla.s.s, who were capable of exalting virtue, and of putting vice out of countenance, too generally employed themselves in works of imagination only, upon subjects merely speculative, disinteresting and unedifying, from which no useful moral or example could be drawn.

But she was a severe censurer of pieces of a light or indecent turn, which had a tendency to corrupt the morals of youth, to convey polluted images, or to wound religion, whether in itself, or through the sides of its professors, and this, whoever were the authors, and how admirable soever the execution. She often pitied the celebrated Dr. Swift for so employing his admirable pen, that a pure eye was afraid of looking into his works, and a pure ear of hearing any thing quoted from them. 'Such authors,' she used to say, 'were not honest to their own talents, nor grateful to the G.o.d who gave them.' Nor would she, on these occasions, admit their beauties as a palliation; on the contrary, she held it as an aggravation of their crime, that they who are so capable of mending the heart, should in any places show a corrupt one in themselves; which must weaken the influences of their good works; and pull down with one hand what they build up with the other.

All she said and all she did was accompanied with a natural ease and dignity, which set her above affectation, or the suspicion of it; insomuch that that degrading fault, so generally imputed to a learned woman, was never laid to her charge. For, with all her excellencies, she was forwarder to hear than speak; and hence, no doubt, derived no small part of her improvement.

Although she was well read in the English, French, and Italian poets, and had read the best translations of the Latin cla.s.sics; yet seldom did she quote or repeat from them, either in her letters or conversation, though exceedingly happy in a tenacious memory; princ.i.p.ally through modesty, and to avoid the imputation of that affectation which I have just mentioned.

Mr. Wyerley once said of her, she had such a fund of knowledge of her own, and made naturally such fine observations upon persons and things, being capable, by the EGG, [that was his familiar expression,] of judging of the bird, that she had seldom either room or necessity for foreign a.s.sistances.

But it was plain, from her whole conduct and behaviour, that she had not so good an opinion of herself, however deserved; since, whenever she was urged to give her sentiments on any subject, although all she thought fit to say was clear an intelligible, yet she seemed in haste to have done speaking. Her reason for it, I know, was twofold; that she might not lose the benefit of other people's sentiments, by engrossing the conversation; and lest, as were her words, she should be praised into loquaciousness, and so forfeit the good opinion which a person always maintains with her friends, who knows when she has said enough.--It was, finally, a rule with her, 'to leave her hearers wis.h.i.+ng her to say more, rather than to give them cause to show, by their inattention, an uneasiness that she had said so much.'--

You are curious to know the particular distribution of her time; which you suppose will help you to account for what you own yourself surprised at; to wit, how so young a lady could make herself mistress of so many accomplishments.

I will premise, that she was from infancy inured to rise early in a morning, by an excellent, and, as I may say, a learned woman, Mrs.

Norton, to whose care, wisdom, and example, she was beholden for the ground-work of her taste and acquirements, which meeting with such a.s.sistances from the divines I have named, and with such a genius, made it the less wonder that she surpa.s.sed most of her age and s.e.x.

Her s.e.x, did I say? What honour to the other does this imply! When one might challenge the proudest pedant of them all, to say he has been disciplined into greater improvement, than she had made from the mere force of genius and application. But it is demonstrable to all who know how to make observations on their acquaintance of both s.e.xes, arrogant as some are of their superficialities, that a lady at eighteen, take the world through, is more prudent and conversable than a man at twenty-five.

I can prove this by nineteen instances out of twenty in my own knowledge.