The Semi-attached Couple/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
The world, created and peopled by Jane Austen, is imperfect only in being too small. We pass through the magic door into fairyland, and hardly have we shed the muddy vesture of our vulgar, strident conflict beyond, than we find ourselves once more faced with the necessity of resuming it. What would not those of us who love Pride and Prejudice give for the discovery of another half-dozen novels by the same hand, comparable with it?
A year or two back, with a presumption which it now unnerves me to recall, I endeavoured in the columns of the London Mercury to spring upon the literary fancy a forgotten rival to Jane Austen. I argued with Mr. Birrell that "to admire by tradition is a poor thing. Far better really to admire Miss Gabblegoose's novels than pretend to admire Miss Austen's," and I undertook to produce a lost novel by another hand which would recreate the enchanted atmosphere of Pride and Prejudice in some measure and might even justify, in the hearts of those who appreciate Mr. Birrell's courage, the bold verdict, "Better than Sense and Sensibility."
And now the bread so light-heartedly thrown on the waters has returned to me after many days and I am called on to make good my boast to a wider and necessarily more critical public.
Emily Eden, the author of The Semi-attached Couple, was one of fourteen children of the first Lord Auckland. The seventh daughter, she was born at Westminster on March 3rd, 1797.
Her father's diplomatic career entailed constant wanderings abroad, and wherever the multiplying family bestowed itself, it received unstinted praise and admiration as a model of domestic harmony, enlightenment and ideals.
The children owed everything to their mother, a sister of the first Lord Minto, who supervised their early education with all the energy and determination with which she guarded their health and morals. She confessed that "out of fourteen, I suckled thirteen. Eleven of the children had small-pox during their wanderings, also cow-pox, whooping-cough, measles and scarlet fever."
We know from Emily that before she was eleven, she had read Boswell's Johnson, the Memoirs of Cardinal Retz, and Shakespeare; and had committed to memory a great part of the Bible.
Small wonder that when Lady Auckland died in 1818, she had married off six of her daughters in a manner eminently satisfactory to a proud Whig lady, and from among them had provided William Pitt with the only love of his life in the person of Eleanor, Lady Buckinghamshire. At their mother's death, Emily and Fanny set up house with their eldest brother George and, on his appointment as Governor-General in 1835, accompanied him to India, where they remained until 1842.
George, Lord Auckland, died in 1849 and Fanny in the same year. For the remaining twenty years of her life, Emily Eden lived at Eden Lodge, Kensington Gore, passing her days in seeing her many friends, corresponding with them, writing her books and providing for her Whig circle a centre of political and literary interests which, despite her ill health, held together while she lived. She died at Richmond on August 5th, 1869, and is buried at Beckenham.
All her life Emily Eden moved in the select and exclusive Whig circle which had its headquarters at the beginning of the nineteenth century at Holland House, Bowood and a dozen other great country houses, and passed the Reform Bill from Brooks' Club, transferring with wonderful illogicality a share of their exclusive privileges to the middle classes, which above all others it was their habit and recreation to ridicule and despise.
She possessed all the prejudices of her class, the convinced belief that the few great families to whom she was drawn or related were a race apart, and that every other family and class in the State belonged to a lower order of the animal creation. She accompanied her brother to India because she possessed a fine sense of duty and because she loved him, but she regarded the task imposed on her precisely as a banishment for a period of years to a colony of gibbering apes, and at first she rarely left the grounds of the Viceregal residences, or showed even the most genteel curiosity about the wonders around her and the lives of those who administered that portion of the Empire. Her heart remained in the West End of London, and in the drawing-rooms at Bowood—a cosmos quite large enough for a Whig lady of fashion of that day.
Subsequently the glamour of the East conquered her, and her two books on India, Portraits of the People (1844) and Up the Country (1866) were widely read.
Miss Eden was no Miss Gabblegoose. She was a keen politician, clever, witty, shrewd, critical, well-informed, the friend of the great men of the day, such as Melbourne, and Monkton Milnes who greatly admired her novels. Her letters[1] have been published, and reveal those qualities of shrewd observation and wit which are especially brought out in correspondence with her friend, Lady Campbell, daughter of Lord Edward Fitzgerald.
As a novelist. Miss Eden set little store by her work, and must have suffered from the fact that, at the time she began to write, professionalism in a woman of fashion was not good form. The distant memory of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and the more recent memory of Lady Caroline Lamb, had brought about a fierce reaction towards reticence and retirement among ladies in society. In the autumn of 1834, Miss Eden was living with her brother at Ham Cottage, very anxious for a little money to spare to the furnishing of a country cottage of her own.
"I wish," she wrote to Mrs. Lister, "I could write like Mrs. Hannah More, and have money enough to build myself a Barley Wood." She was, moreover, stimulated to emulation by the publication of Ann Grey, which at the time she believed was the anonymous work of her friend. The Semi-attached Couple resulted, but remained for near thirty years in a drawer before her friends persuaded her to revise and give it to the world.
Miss Eden's first novel. The Semi-detached House, was published in 1859, under the editorship of Lady Theresa Lewis (the Mrs. Lister above mentioned who inspired and encouraged the composition of the Semi-attached Couple). Bentley, the publisher, offered her £250 for the book, but she successfully stood out for £300. It was well reviewed in the Globe, but not noticed in The Times, which did not then "stoop to single-volume novels." Her friends, of course, were delighted with it; Lord Lansdowne and Locock wrote enthusiastically, and Sidney Herbert called in person to report the appreciation of Pall Mall. Its success surprised and pleased her, and doubtless encouraged her to revise and complete the long-neglected Semi-attached, which duly appeared in the following year. It was received with equal warmth, and is on the whole the more attractive of the two novels. In the last of Miss Eden's published letters she refers to the quantity of appreciations which she possessed, notably "a grand one from Lord Houghton in praise of my pure and facile English." In plot and characterization The Semi-attached Couple is a curious parallel to Pride and Prejudice and there can be no doubt that Miss Austen's masterpiece—which had appeared in 1813 and was at length beginning, like its lamented author, to secure the highest recognition—was not absent from Miss Eden's consciousness when she wrote, and that the Douglas family had their origin in the Bennets. This view is supported by the text, where reference is made to the current novels of the day, and Pride and Prejudice is singled out for special mention. If it be argued that Miss Austen depicted the social life of a generation preceding Miss Eden's, it must be remembered that Miss Eden's novel was actually written only twenty years after the publication of Pride and Prejudice, and that however violent the changes during that period in the social life and thought of London Society, these convulsions reacted very little on the dull and ordered existence of the lesser country house. The movements to break down social barriers and conventions, to secure freedom for thought and action, and emancipation for women, progressed very much more slowly than is commonly believed. It was in the interval between the writing and the publication of The Semi-attached Couple that the revolution in social life began universally to be seen and its direct expression to be observable in literature, and in her preface Miss Eden admits that she is aware of the change.
The story deals with the family life of the proud and aristocratic Eskdale family, and of their humbler neighbours, the Douglas family. The plot, which is admirably simple, turns on the marital misunderstandings that arise in the first few months of the married life of Helen Beaufort, the youngest of the three lovely daughters of Lord and Lady Eskdale. Helen, the most adored of an adoring and self-sufficient family, marries "out of the schoolroom," and entirely as a matter of pre-ordained destiny, "Lord Teviot, the great parti of the year, with five country houses—being four more than he could live in, with £120,000 a year—being £30,000 less than he could spend, with diamonds that had been collected by the last ten generations of Teviots, and a yacht that had been built by himself, with the rank of a marquess, and the good looks of the poorest of younger brothers."
Spoilt from the cradle, having every craving instantly satisfied, Teviot is violently and passionately in love. The very strength of his passion frightens and puzzles the child wife, whose only experience of love hitherto has been the devotion of an adoring family, and her continued interest in the home from which her early marriage has torn her is more than sufficient to send him into paroxysms of jealousy and to build up a barrier of misunderstandings.
There is in the character of Teviot, which is drawn with less than Miss Eden's usual sureness, more than a touch of Darcy; that selfishness "in practice but not in theory" is common to both the young men, and though Teviot had not, like Darcy, fallen in love "beneath him," a pride, bred of spoiling and flattery from childhood, led him remorselessly to learn the bitter lesson from a young and inexperienced girl.
The estrangement, which is widened on one side by the malice of an egotistical woman of fashion. Lady Portmore, and on the other by the machinations of a roue, is finally ended by a severe illness and worldly misfortunes which threaten Teviot. He recovers his health and property, and with them the love of his young and lovely wife. Minor plots are interwoven with the love affairs of Helen's brother, Lord Beaufort, and her friend Mary, and of Helen's cousin, Ernest Beaufort, and Eliza Douglas.
The Semi-attached Couple is a gold mine to the social historian. It gives an unrivalled picture of the family life of a great Whig family in the early part of the nineteenth century, and few who take it up will deny its charm and humour, or manage to resist the peculiar "atmosphere" with which Miss Eden has invested her story.
Miss Austen laid her characters, for the most part, a degree lower in the social scale, and seldom turned her attention to the aristocracy, whom she usually portrayed in caricature. Miss Eden, on the other hand, frankly despised the middle classes and the landed gentry, and depicted intimately the life of her own exclusive world, and could yet draw, a thing which, curiously, Miss Austen never once attempted, the characters of servants with brilliance of touch and a knowledge of flunkeiana which Thackeray might have envied.
It has been said of Miss Austen that if, by her upbringing, she was shielded from the truth, very little of the truth was shielded from her. And it has been said that genius means nothing more than the power of guessing right. Miss Austen is acknowledged as a genius, and genius is not claimed for Miss Eden. The latter knew her world, and knew, from experience at any rate, considerably more about life, men and women, than did Miss Austen.
The genius of Miss Austen made up for her inexperience by accurate guessing. It is claimed for Miss Eden that by a power of selecting judiciously from her own wide experience, she was sometimes able to accomplish what the genius of Miss Austen accomplished. It is best to be a good guesser—a genius. It is better to be a judicious and clever photographer than an indifferent guesser. Miss Eden's description of Teviot's feelings in the height of his passion reveals the fact that she knew a good deal about men, and, like Miss Austen, little of the truth was shielded from her.
Her style is easy, and falls into a graceful and natural antithesis, and everywhere abounds in humour. It is not my intention to quote at any length from the pages that follow, but one short example of Miss Eden's methods will best illustrate my point. The whole neighbourhood is on tip-toe of expectation to see Lord Teviot, who is rumoured to be at the castle.
"It was obvious to the whole neighbourhood that the Eskdales wished to avoid observation by coming early to church, for they arrived before the end of the first lesson—a most unusual degree of punctuality; but this sign of timidity did not prevent the whole congregation from fixing their eyes intently on the tall young man who followed Lord Eskdale into church, and took a seat opposite to Lady Helen in the pew. Moreover, Lady Helen dropped her prayer-book, and the tall young man picked it up for her. Such an incident! Mrs. Thompson, as usual, missed it, because she was, unluckily, tying her little girl's bonnet-strings. When Lady Helen came out, leaning on her father's arm, and Lady Eskdale followed, attended by the tall young man, and when they had all bowed and curtsied, and got into the open carriage . . . nothing could exceed the gratification of the assembly.
"Lord Teviot was exactly what they expected, so very distinguished and so good-looking. Some thought him too attentive to his prayers for a man in love, and some thought him too attentive to Lady Helen for a man in church, but eventually the two factions joined, and thought him simply very attentive."
And then it turned out that Lord Teviot had gone up to London on Saturday, and that the "observed of all observers" was an architect come down to complete the statue gallery.
"The reaction was frightful, and, as usual in all cases of reaction, the odium fell on the wrong man. The architect, who was, in fact, an awkward, ungainly concern, remained in possession of distinguished looks . . . and it was generally asserted that Lord Teviot kept out of the way—as he was quite aware of being ill-looking; that he was not attached in the smallest degree to Lady Helen, or he would not have gone to London; and that he was very unprincipled, not to say an atheist, or he would have gone to church."
So much for Miss Eden's style. Her abounding humour is delicate but by no means bloodless, and the reader will probably agree with me that the passage of arms between Lady Portmore and Mrs. Douglas shows it mixed as richly and robustly as could be desired.
With servants she could accomplish what Miss Austen never attempted, dared not even guess; and the letter from Lady Teviot's maid to Lady Eskdale's maid, written from St. Mary's, where the Teviots were honeymooning, should find a place in any collection of gems of the gentle art, and will stand for all time among the masterpieces of below-stairs humour.
It is with the Douglas family that Miss Eden brings back most nearly the atmosphere of Pride and Prejudice. Indeed, in the general setting of the home life of Mr. and Mrs. Douglas, a curious literary parallel is produced.
The spite and vulgarity of Mrs. Douglas irresistibly brings to mind Mrs. Bennet, and the husbands, small squires, interested in their turnips, less vulgar than their wives, lazy-minded, tolerant, disliking spiteful criticism of their richer neighbours who gave such good dinners, fond of their daughters, bored with their wives, are parallels so close as to leave a doubt in the mind of anyone intimately familiar with both novels, as to which gentleman was squire of Longbourn and which of Thornbank.
It is thus that Miss Eden sketches with three sure strokes of her pencil the character of Mrs. Douglas:
"Now, my dear Mr. Douglas, don't go off on those tiresome foreign affairs. . . . You need not pretend to understand national feuds, if you have not found out what is passing under your eyes; but I cannot believe it, you must see what an unhappy couple these poor Teviots are."
". . . I cannot think all this can be so, Anne, it is too bad to be true."
"Nothing is too bad to be true, Mr. Douglas, and nothing is true that is not bad. . . ."
The book indeed teems with neat little thumb-nails. All the minor characters are clever miniatures, with the exception only of Lady Portmore, where Miss Eden departed from the admirable standard she set herself and laid on the colours with a trowel.
Lady Eskdale is triumphantly convincing as she moves through life, sheltered from all but the mildest winds. Fondly addressed as "dear" by her nephews, she inspired terror in the breasts of unfortunates not in the charmed circle. Eliza Douglas, resembling rather Catherine Morland than any other of Miss Austen's girls, has none of the wit of Elizabeth Bennet. She owes her settlement in life to a facility for hero-worship and a gentle willingness to please, when, in a fit of loneliness, the prematurely bored Colonel Beaufort (Ernest, aged twenty-six!) surrenders to her promise to fetch and carry for him through life, and attend to his farm accounts, as she does for papa, in the gloomy barrack of an estate which the Colonel has seldom visited. Lord Beaufort, Mary Forrester, Fisherwick, the unkempt secretary, with his blind devotion to his political chief, the foreigner more British than the Briton, all these characters walked in real life across the saloons of Bowood, Chatsworth, Panshanger, Brocket, Lansdowne and Devonshire Houses.
Miss Eden, proud, diffident, dreading publicity, hiding her talent, brings this extinct race before us with a sureness of touch which has not received, hitherto, the approbation which it is entitled to expect from posterity.
I boldly guarantee that the social historian who spends a couple of hours in Miss Eden's company will not waste his time. Every chapter will reward him with relics of another race and age, extinct as the Dodo. There is a glorious and detailed account of the slow progress of an election before the Reform Bill began to cut the rottenness from the heart of the Parliamentary borough; when polling extended beyond one day, and alternate applications of threats and spirits brought the free and independent electors one by one to the presence of the polling clerk, when the ladies openly assisted their candidates with polite bribery and the scene closed in universal intoxication. There is a glimpse of the life of young gentlemen of good family who earned a hundred a year as clerks in the Treasury, and must needs spend it and their private allowances besides on the maintenance of a cab and diminutive groom, owing to the vast size of London. The reader is wafted back to the days when a "week-end" party lasted for a full month, and albums and "a little harmony"—Views of Venice and Tom Moore's ballads—more than sufficed for the evening's hilarity. And lastly, the severe etiquette of the day is sharply illustrated. Instance the occasion when the house party at St. Mary's comes out on the Terrace. Lord Beaufort offers to walk with Eliza Douglas down a garden path, one hundred yards in broad daylight, to join his sister who is visible at the far end. Eliza is anxious to comply with so agreeable a proposal, but an obvious difficulty occurs to them both. The plan must fall through unless a chaperon is forthcoming!
The social life which Miss Eden portrays in the Semi-attached Couple does indeed belong to a civilization far more strange to us to-day than that of the Pharaohs. It is for this reason, I believe, she will particularly appeal to a generation that ever pines for something fresh, something different, and is not averse from finding it in the atmosphere of the early nineteenth century, now emerging more brilliant than ever from its Victorian eclipse.
If I am right, then at this late hour Miss Eden on her merits will obtain from posterity her fitting place in the Outer Hall of Honour. She herself would have deprecated any such distinction—a further proof of the remoteness of her generation—and her warmest admirers seek no niche for her in the inner shrine where the Immortals are.
- ↑ Edited by her great-niece, Miss Violet Dickinson.