Blackwood's Magazine/Volume 20/Issue 115/My Transmogrifications

by Mary Diana Dods

MY TRANSMOGRIFICATIONS.

Miss Mitford, in a very clever little sketch, published in Ackermann’s pretty “Forget-me-not,” has very amusingly detailed the continual transmigrations of the female part of humanity in its progress through childhood, girlhood, and womanhood, to marriage and old age. But to us of the more lordly sex she has denied a mutability which perhaps she has not so much observed—this is solely because she is not one of us, and could scarcely have opportunities of remarking our changes as closely as those of her own sex. She observes, “there is very little change in men from early boyhood, and that they keep the same faces, however ugly.” In some instances it may be so, but in general there are very few animals more unlike than the boy to the man; but perhaps Miss Mitford, in this sweeping indistinction, only alluded to the “wearers of smock frocks,”—in that case there is an end of the argument; but supposing the contrary, (which I do, otherwise an excellent article would be lost,) I will proceed to detail the history of my own “Transmogrifications.”

I cannot say I recollect myself, but I perfectly well remember a portrait that strongly resembled me, painted when I was two years old, for my dear and tender mother, and valued accordingly. It represents a fat, roguish, black-eyed, curly-headed urchin, sitting on a bank with a lap full of flowers, which showed out magnificently from the white frock beneath them. There was happiness, round, rich, luscious, rosy happiness, in every little feature; and altogether it was such a child as a mother might be proud of. Three years after, I can recollect myself—the fat was passing away—I was growing tall, slender, an impudent self-willed imp, the delight of my father, the torment of my sister, and the curse of servants. My god-father gave me a guinea, and I gave it to a groom, as a bribe to let me mount his horse and ride him a few yards to water. I had a new beaver hat—I had no objection to sunbeams, and thought I could turn it to better account—I cut it into the shape of a very tolerable boat, and sent it down the stream, that, innocent of mischief, flowed quietly through the grounds. Yet amid all this wildness, there might have been seen “sparkles of a better nature;” for I had much tenderness in my composition, glimpses of enthusiasm, and some queer undefined notions of the beautiful; for instance, a gang of gipsies sometimes favoured “our village” by pitching their tents in the outskirts; and many a time have I slipped away from the paternal care of “Old John” to listen to the voice of one dark-eyed girl among the troop, who had fascinated my young heart, or (I rather suppose) my ear, by her singing. How often have I wept over the melancholy fate of the lady, who, in the storm at sea, told her lover to

“Take a white napkin, and bind my head softly,
And then throw me overboard, me and my baby;”

and have frequently been elevated to heroism by the splendid portrait of that hero who was martyrised at Tyburn; his constancy at his trial won my fervent admiration.

“I stood as bold as John of Gaunt,
All in my natty attire;
I ne’er seem’d daunted in the least,
Which made the folks admire!

“That all the people they may say,
That I am no des-arter;
For the captain, he must lead the way,
And the men must follow a’-ter.”

My wild spirits were really taken captive by these vagabonds; the lawless independence of their children was my envy; they had no lessons to learn, no elder sisters to keep them in order, nor elder brother to thump them out of their pocket-money; their whole existence to me was paradisaical. I believe if they had attempted to steal me, they would have found the business half done to their hands.

At seven years old I was breeched—I had a cloth jacket and trowsers—I was told that I was a man; and I thought it incumbent on me to be “grave and gentlemanlike.” I paid more attention to my lessons and the young ladies, and thought it an imperative duty to discover they were more amiable and pretty than boys. Soon this affectation became sincere. My sister was better loved than all my kin; to her I flew to roar away my grief, when my father took out Henry, and left me at home, or when he threatened to sell my pony, or give him to my playfellow, Richard Howard, whom I hated ever after. In her I reposed all my confidence, and in her gentle bosom deposited my tutor’s severities, and my brother’s wrongs—I was, in truth, “a most pathetical nit.”

But at ten, “O what a change was there!” No Chrysalis’ metamorphosis was ever greater. I had grown accustomed to my breeches, and no longer held them in any consideration; I was impudent to my sister, contradicted my father, fought my own battles with my brother, and played truant with my tutor, till he made a solemn complaint of my manifold abominations. I scrambled all over the country, and came back with scarcely a rag on my back, and what were left me were so defaced by mud, or dust, as the weather would have it, that their quality could barely be discovered. My mother wept, my father swore, my tutor said the devil was in me. I was up to all sorts of villainy. I stuffed a goose with gunpowder in the absence of the cook, who was preparing to put it down to the spit, and I felt no sort of compunction for her intense fear and agony, when, on applying the lighted paper to singe it, it blew into ten thousand pieces, and nearly knocked her eyes out. I had threshed my brother into respect for me; and my playmates consoled themselves for not being able to master me, by bestowing upon me the very expressive cognomen of “Gallows!” At length I tired them out; my tutor gave in, and my mother acquiesced with my father in thinking school alone could preserve me. So to a public school I went, to learn decorum and obedience.

In four years more, there were no traces of Young Gallows, but I came home a monkey still, only melancholy, instead of mischievous. My early enthusiasm returned, and my intense love of the beautiful, undirected by reason, exhibited itself in the most ridiculous forms—I read novels, and the pathetic stories in the magazines.—I contemplated the setting sun—fell in love with the moon, and made verses to every little star that twinkled behind the clouds and before the clouds. I would not have read or written anything lively for the world; I should have thought fun an insult to my feelings; and understanding I was a slender boy, with long arms and legs, of an active light figure, but delicate constitution—everybody said I should be tall—I had looked in the glass, and observing a pale, dark face, inclining to sallow, masses of black curling hair, and a somewhat serious look, I concluded that I should be a tall, thin, pale, pensive-looking young man, and acted up to the character accordingly. I loved to be thought an invalid, and frightened my mother to death by the affectation of a hectic cough, which I pretended to consider as a warning that I should die early of a decline. I wrote a long string of verses, called the “Dying Boy,” in which I lamented my early doom, expressed my resignation, and took a tender and pathetic farewell of the trees, and the moon, and the flowers. It brought the tears into my own eyes to read it—(I have since learned it had the same effect upon others, but from a very opposite emotion)—I sent them to one of the most pitiful magazines, where they were (God knows why) inserted. Oh, how proud was I—I was a Scholar and a Poet! There was wanting but one thing to complete me—I should fall in love—and so I did; but the affair was more serious than I could have imagined—more of real feeling mingled with the thing than I expected—the passion of a boy of fourteen has something desperate in it always; and that mine had an uncommon portion of sincerity, was obvious from the character of the object of my choice. She was a beautiful, accomplished woman of twenty-two (the daughter of an intimate friend of my father). A girl of my own age would not have been endurable. I “never told my love” to this charming creature for many months that she was on a visit to my sister and resided in my neighbourhood; but I endeavoured to make it apparent by every possible pathetical mode—I looked at her till I could not see, and listened to her till I could not hear; I gathered flowers to twist into her bright hair, and when they were dead, wept over them for envy at their fate, and deposited them next my shirt—I read to her, in the most tender voice, all the amatory verses I could put my hands on, launched out on the happiness of domestic love, and affected to caress little children in her presence—I never ate any dinner when she was at table, but, with an air of desperation, gulped down as much wine as I possibly could, without incurring my father’s observation—now, I thought, I should like to be a king, and place her on a throne; then, a successful warrior, that her country might offer her homage—love and a cottage had its charms, and sometimes I thought how delicious it would be to suffer for her sake. These thoughts became feelings, and what was begun as a matter of course, terminated in real tenderness, no less ridiculous. I was a diffident lad, exceeding modest: judge then of my sincerity by its effect. Finding myself alone with her in a beautiful bower by moonlight, I fell upon my knees, seized her fair hand, and made a vehement declaration of my passion; I besought her to have compassion upon my youth, and not by coldness to destroy its hopes—I vowed eternal truth, and swore desperately I could not live without her—I drew a glowing picture of the delights of married life, and expatiated warmly on the tyranny of parents and friends—I promised to make the best of husbands, the tenderest of fathers, and shuddered at the prospect of separation, shed real tears at the bare imagination of her indifference; and finally, rising with my subject, assured her that I had ten pounds untouched, and besought her to commit herself to my protection, and elope with me that night. I was too much agitated in the first instance to observe the effect of my pleadings, but I was soon most fearfully enlightened. Imagine my boundless horror, my stupefaction of feeling at hearing her burst into a loud laugh, and seeing her spring from her seat, and dart rapidly out of the bower—I was agonized beyond all description; I rubbed my eyes and my nose, and tried to persuade myself that all that had passed was a dream. Presently my brother came into the arbour, he had an unspeakable grin upon his odious face, but he said nothing, affected to look for some unmissed article, and went out again; next, my father walked slowly past, whistling, as if perfectly indifferent to my movements, but I noticed a quick, queer, shrewd, merry-looking glance that was not to be misunderstood.—The story soon travelled; my acquaintance tried hard not to laugh in my face, and the more they stifled their mirth, the more frightful seemed its occasional ebullitions; and she, the cruel cause of all this misery to me, she married in about a week after this event, a man of thirty, who, as Blackwood says, “shaved twice a-day,” and no doubt entertained him mightily with the pathos of the smooth-chinned boy, who had the presumption to try to supplant him.

This adventure cured me completely of sentiment—I ceased, for a time, all attempts to captivate fair ladies, and turned an eye of admiration on myself. At seventeen, I was a puppy, a dandy; my dress and appearance the only subjects worthy my contemplation; I detested poetry, the moon, and little children, and generally gave these last a sly pinch or kick, when they had the presumption to expect I should play with them. This state continued a few years; and then, last stage of all, came whiskers, mustachios, love, real love, marriage, business, bustle, and twenty-nine—Here I pause—it would be egotism to say farther—my friends alone must decide whether the boy be like the man—I think not—so, with the burthen of nearly thirty years on my shoulders, all the usual cares of life, and some, perhaps, that are not usual, I take my leave, to fight out the remainder as I may.—Reader—Vale.

 

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