The Wit of Women Read online

  CHAPTER II.

  HUMOR OF LITERARY ENGLISHWOMEN.

  In reviewing the bon-mots of Stella, whom Swift pronounced the most witty woman he had ever known, it seems that we are improving. I will give but two of her sayings, which were so carefully preserved by her friend.

  When she was extremely ill her physician said, “Madam, you are near the bottom of the hill, but we will endeavor to get you up again;” she answered: “Doctor, I fear I shall be out of breath before I get up to the top.”

  After she had been eating some sweet thing a little of it happened to stick on her lips. A gentleman told her of it, and offered to lick it off. She said: “No, sir, I thank you; I have a tongue of my own.”

  Compare these with the wit of George Eliot or the irony of Miss Phelps.

  Some of Jane Taylor’s stories and poems were formerly regarded as humorous; for instance, the “Discontented Pendulum” and the “Philosopher’s Scales.” They do not now raise the faintest smile.

  Fanny Burney’s novels were considered immensely humorous and diverting in their day. Burke complimented her on “her natural vein of humor,” and another eminent critic speaks of “her sarcasm, drollery, and humor;” but it would be almost impossible to find a passage for quotation that would now satisfy on these points. Even Jane Austen’s novels, which strangely retain their hold on the public taste, are tedious to those who dare to think for themselves and forget Macaulay’s verdict.

  Mrs. Barbauld, in her poem on “Washing Day,” shows a capacity seldom exercised for seeing the humorous side of every-day miseries.

  “Woe to the friend

  Whose evil stars have urged him forth to claim

  On such a day the hospitable rites!

  Looks, blank at best, and stinted courtesy

  Shall he receive. Vainly he feeds his hopes

  With dinner of roast chicken, savory pie,

  Or tart, or pudding; pudding he nor tart

  That day shall eat; nor, though the husband try

  Mending what can’t be helped to kindle mirth

  From cheer deficient, shall his consort’s brow

  Cheer up propitious; the unlucky guest

  In silence dines, and early slinks away.”

  But her style is too stiff and stately for every day.

  There were many literary Englishwomen who had undoubted humor. Hannah More did get unendurably poky, narrow, and solemn in her last days, and not a little sanctimonious; and we naturally think of her as an aged spinster with black mitts, corkscrew curls, and a mob cap, always writing or presenting a tedious tract, forgetting her brilliant youth, when she was quite good enough, and lively, too. She was a perennial favorite in London, meeting all the notables; the special pet of Dr. Johnson, Davy Garrick, and Horace Walpole, who called her his “holy Hannah,” but admired and honored her, corresponding with her through a long life. She was then full of spirit and humor and versatile talent. An extract from her sister’s lively letter shows that Hannah could hold her own with the Ursa Major of literature:

  “Tuesday evening we drank tea at Sir Joshua’s with Dr. Johnson. Hannah is certainly a great favorite. She was placed next him, and they had the entire conversation to themselves. They were both in remarkably high spirits. It was certainly her lucky night. I never heard her say so many good things. The old genius was extremely jocular, and the young one very pleasant. You would have imagined we had been at some comedy had you heard our peals of laughter. They, indeed, tried which could pepper the highest, and it is not clear to me that the lexicographer was really the highest seasoner.”

  And how deliciously does she set out the absurdity then prevailing, and seen now in editions of Shakespeare and Chaucer, of writing books, the bulk of which consists of notes, with only a line or two at the top of each page of the original text.

  It seems that a merry party at Dr. Kennicott’s had each adopted the name of some animal. Dr. K. was the elephant; Mrs. K., dromedary; Miss Adams, antelope; and H. More, rhinoceros.

  “HAMPTON, December 24, 1728.

  “DEAR DROMY (a): Pray, send word if Ante

  (b) is come, and also how Ele (c) does, to your

  very affectionate RHYNEY” (d).

  The following notes on the above epistle are by a commentator of the latter end of the nineteenth century. This epistle is all that is come down to us of this voluminous author, and is probably the only thing she ever wrote that was worth preserving, or which might reasonably expect to reach posterity. Her name is only presented to us in some beautiful hendecasyllables written by the best Latin poet of his time (Bishop Lowth):

  Note (_a_).

  “Dromy.—From the termination of this address it

  seems to have been written to a woman, though there is

  no internal evidence to support this hypothesis. The

  best critics are much puzzled about the orthography of

  this abbreviation. Wartonius and other skilful

  etymologists contend that it ought to be spelled

  drummy, being addressed to a lady who was probably

  fond of warlike instruments, and who had a singular

  predilection for a canon. Drummy, say they, was a

  tender diminutive of drum, as the best authors in their

  more familiar writings now begin to use gunny for gun.

  But Hardius, a contemporary critic, contends, with

  more probability, that it ought to be written Drome,

  from hippodrome; a learned leech and elegant bard of

  Bath having left it on record that this lady spent much

  of her time at the riding-school, being a very

  exquisite judge of horsemanship. Colmanus and

  Horatius Strawberryensis insist that it ought to be

  written Dromo, in reference to the Dromo Sorasius of

  the Latin dramatist.”

  Note (_b_).

  “Ante.—Scaliger 2d says this name simply signifies

  the appellation of uncle’s wife, and ought to be

  written Aunty. But here, again, are various readings.

  Philologists of yet greater name affirm that it was

  meant to designate pre-eminence, and therefore ought

  to be written ante, before, from the Latin, a

  language now pretty well forgotten, though the authors

  who wrote in it are still preserved in French

  translations. The younger Madame Dacier insists that

  this lady was against all men, and that it ought to be

  spelled anti; but this Kennicotus, a rabbi of the

  most recondite learning, with much critical wrath,

  vehemently contradicts, affirming it to have been

  impossible she could have been against mankind whom all

  mankind admired. He adds that ante is for antelope,

  and is emblematically used to express an elegant and

  slender animal, or that it is an elongation of ant,

  the emblem of virtuous citizenship.”

  And so she continues her comments to close of notes.

  Mrs. Gaskell’s “Cranford” is full of the most delicate but veritable humor, as her allusion to the genteel and cheerful poverty of the lady who, in giving a tea-party, “now sat in state, pretending not to know what cakes were sent up, though she knew, and we knew, and she knew that we knew; and we knew that she knew that we knew she had been busy all the morning making tea-bread and sponge-cakes.”

  The humor of Mary Russell Mitford, quiet and delectable, must not be forgotten. We will sympathize with her woes as she describes a visitation from

  THE TALKING LADY.

  “Ben Jonson has a play called The Silent Woman, who turns out, as might be expected, to be no woman at all—nothing, as Master Slender said, but ‘a great lubberly boy,’ thereby, as I apprehend, discourteously presuming that a silent woman is a nonentity. If the learned dramatist, thus happily prepared and predisposed, had happened to fall in with such a specimen of
female loquacity as I have just parted with, he might, perhaps, have given us a pendant to his picture in the talking lady. Pity but he had! He would have done her justice, which I could not at any time, least of all now; I am too much stunned, too much like one escaped from a belfry on a coronation day. I am just resting from the fatigue of four days’ hard listening—four snowy, sleety, rainy days; days of every variety of falling weather, all of them too bad to admit the possibility that any petticoated thing, were she as hardy as a Scotch fir, should stir out; four days chained by ‘sad civility’ to that fireside, once so quiet, and again—cheering thought!—again I trust to be so when the echo of that visitor’s incessant tongue shall have died away….

  “She took us in her way from London to the west of England, and being, as she wrote, ‘not quite well, not equal to much company, prayed that no other guest might be admitted, so that she might have the pleasure of our conversation all to herself (_ours!_ as if it were possible for any of us to slide in a word edgewise!), and especially enjoy the gratification of talking over old times with the master of the house, her countryman.’

  “Such was the promise of her letter, and to the letter it has been kept. All the news and scandal of a large county forty years ago, and a hundred years before, and ever since; all the marriages, deaths, births, elopements, law-suits, and casualties of her own times, her father’s, grandfather’s, great-grandfather’s, nephews’, and grandnephews’, has she detailed with a minuteness, an accuracy, a prodigality of learning, a profuseness of proper names, a pedantry of locality, which would excite the envy of a county historian, a king-at-arms, or even a Scotch novelist.

  “Her knowledge is most astonishing; but the most astonishing part of all is how she came by that knowledge. It should seem, to listen to her, as if at some time of her life she must have listened herself; and yet her countryman declares that in the forty years he has known her, no such event has occurred; and she knows new news, too! It must be intuition!…

  “The very weather is not a safe subject. Her memory is a perpetual register of hard frosts and long droughts, and high winds and terrible storms, with all the evils that followed in their train, and all the personal events connected with them; so that, if you happen to remark that clouds are come up and you fear it may rain, she replies: ‘Ay, it is just such a morning as three-and-thirty years ago, when my poor cousin was married—you remember my cousin Barbara; she married so-and-so, the son of so-and-so;’ and then comes the whole pedigree of the bridegroom, the amount of the settlements, and the reading and signing them overnight; a description of the wedding-dresses in the style of Sir Charles Grandison, and how much the bride’s gown cost per yard; the names, residences, and a short subsequent history of the bridesmaids and men, the gentleman who gave the bride away, and the clergyman who performed the ceremony, with a learned antiquarian digression relative to the church; then the setting out in procession; the marriage, the kissing, the crying, the breakfasting, the drawing the cake through the ring, and, finally, the bridal excursion, which brings us back again, at an hour’s end, to the starting-post, the weather, and the whole story of the sopping, the drying, the clothes-spoiling, the cold-catching, and all the small evils of a summer shower. By this time it rains, and she sits down to a pathetic see-saw of conjectures on the chance of Mrs. Smith’s having set out for her daily walk, or the possibility that Dr. Brown may have ventured to visit his patients in his gig, and the certainty that Lady Green’s new housemaid would come from London on the outside of the coach….

  “I wonder, if she had happened to be married, how many husbands she would have talked to death. It is certain that none of her relatives are long-lived, after she comes to reside with them. Father, mother, uncle, sister, brother, two nephews, and one niece, all these have successively passed away, though a healthy race, and with no visible disorder—except—But we must not be uncharitable.”

  Mary Ferrier, the Scotch novelist, was gifted with genial wit and a quick sense of the ludicrous. Walter Scott admired her greatly, and as a lively guest at Abbotsford she did much to relieve the sadness of his last days. He said of her:

  “She is a gifted personage, having, besides her great talents,

  conversation the least exigeante of any author, female at

  least, whom I have ever seen, among the long list I have

  encountered. Simple and full of humor, and exceedingly ready at

  repartee; and all this without the least affectation of the

  blue-stocking. The general strain of her writing relates to the

  foibles and oddities of mankind, and no one has drawn them with

  greater breadth of comic humor or effect. Her scenes often

  resemble the style of our best old comedies, and she may boast,

  like Foote, of adding many new and original characters to the

  stock of our comic literature.”

  Here is one of her admirably-drawn portraits:

  THE SENSIBLE WOMAN.

  “Miss Jacky, the senior of the trio, was what is reckoned a very sensible woman—which generally means a very disagreeable, obstinate, illiberal director of all men, women, and children—a sort of superintendent of all actions, time, and place, with unquestioned authority to arraign, judge, and condemn upon the statutes of her own supposed sense. Most country parishes have their sensible woman, who lays down the law on all affairs, spiritual and temporal. Miss Jacky stood unrivalled as the sensible woman of Glenfern. She had attained this eminence partly from having a little more understanding than her sisters, but principally from her dictatorial manner, and the pompous, decisive tone in which she delivered the most commonplace truths. At home her supremacy in all matters of sense was perfectly established; and thence the infection, like other superstitions, had spread over the whole neighborhood. As a sensible woman she regulated the family, which she took care to let everybody hear; she was a sort of postmistress-general, a detector of all abuses and impositions, and deemed it her prerogative to be consulted about all the useful and useless things which everybody else could have done as well. She was liberal of her advice to the poor, always enforcing upon them the iniquity of idleness, but doing nothing for them in the way of employment, strict economy being one of the many points in which she was particularly sensible. The consequence was that, while she was lecturing half the poor women in the parish for their idleness, the bread was kept out of their mouths by the incessant carding of wool, and knitting of stockings, and spinning, and reeling, and winding, and pirning, that went on among the ladies themselves. And, by the by, Miss Jacky is not the only sensible woman who thinks she is acting a meritorious part when she converts what ought to be the portion of the poor into the employment of the affluent.

  “In short, Min Jacky was all over sense. A skilful physiognomist would at a single glance have detected the sensible woman in the erect head, the compressed lips, square elbows, and firm, judicious step. Even her very garments seemed to partake of the prevailing character of their mistress. Her ruff always looked more sensible than any other body’s; her shawl sat most sensibly on her shoulders; her walking-shoes were acknowledged to be very sensible, and she drew on her gloves with an air of sense, as if the one arm had been Seneca, the other Socrates. From what has been said it may easily be inferred that Miss Jacky was, in fact, anything but a sensible woman, as, indeed, no woman can be who bears such visible outward marks of what is in reality the most quiet and unostentatious of all good qualities.”

  Frederika Bremer, the Swedish novelist, whose novels have been translated into English, German, French, and Dutch, had a style peculiarly her own. Her humor reminds me of a bed of mignonette, with its delicate yet permeating fragrance. One paragraph, like one spray of that shy flower, scarcely reveals the dainty flavor.

  From the “Neighbors,” her best story, and one that still has a moderate sale, I take her description of Franziska’s first little lover-like quarrel with her adoring husband, the “Bear.” (Let us remember Miss Bremer wit
h appreciation and gratitude, as one of the very few visitors we have entertained who have written kindly of our country and our “Homes.”)

  THE FIRST QUARREL.

  “Here I am again sitting with a pen in my hand, impelled by a desire for writing, yet with nothing particular to write about. Everything in the house and in the whole household arrangement is in order. Little patties are baking in the kitchen, the weather is oppressively hot, and every leaf and bird seem as if deprived of motion. The hens lie outside in the sand before the window, the cock stands solitarily on one leg, and looks upon his harem with the countenance of a sleepy sultan. Bear sits in his room writing letters. I hear him yawn; that infects me. Oh! oh! I must go and have a little quarrel with him on purpose to awaken us both.

  “I want at this moment a quire of writing-paper on which to drop sugar-cakes. He is terribly miserly of his writing-paper, and on that very account I must have some now.

  “Later.—All is done! A complete quarrel, and how completely lively we are after it! You, Maria, must hear all, that you may thus see how it goes on among married people.

  “I went to my husband and said quite meekly, ‘My Angel Bear, you must be so very good as to give me a quire of your writing-paper to drop sugar-cakes upon.’

  “He (_in consternation_). ‘A quire of writing-paper?’

  “She. ‘Yes, my dear friend, of your very best writing-paper.’

  “He. ‘Finest writing-paper? Are you mad?’

  “She. ‘Certainly not; but I believe you are a little out of your senses.’

  “He. ‘You covetous sea-cat, leave off raging among my papers! You shall not have my paper!’

  “She. ‘Miserly beast! I shall and will have the paper.’

  “He. ‘“I shall”! Listen a moment. Let’s see, now, how you will accomplish your will.’ And the rough Bear held both my small hands fast in his great paws.