There is a sentence in one of Miss Mitford’s earliest and most charming papers, “The Cowslip Ball,” which has always delighted me by its quiet satire and admirable good-temper. She is describing her repeated efforts and her repeated failures to tie the fragrant clusters together.
“We went on very prosperously, _considering_, as people say of a young lady’s drawing, or a Frenchman’s English, or a woman’s tragedy, or of the poor little dwarf who works without fingers, or the ingenious sailor who writes with his toes, or generally of any performance which is accomplished by means seemingly inadequate to its production.”
Here is precisely the sentiment which Dr. Johnson embodied, more trenchantly, in his famous criticism of female preaching. “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.” It is a sentiment which, in one form or another, prevailed throughout the last century, and lapped over into the middle of our own. Miss Mitford is merely echoing, with cheerful humor, the opinions of the very clever and distinguished men whom it was her good fortune to know, and who were all the more generous to her and to her sister toilers, because it did not occur to them for a moment that women claimed, or were ever going to claim, a serious place by their sides. There is nothing clearer, in reading the courteous and often flattering estimate of woman’s work which the critics of fifty years ago delighted in giving to the world, than the under-current of amusement that such things should be going on. Christopher North, who has only censure and contempt for the really great poets of his day, is pleased to lavish kind words on Mrs. Hemans and Joanna Baillie, praising them as adults occasionally praise clever and good children. That, neither he nor his boon companions of the “Noctes” are disposed to take the matter seriously, is sufficiently proved by North’s gallant but controvertible statement that all female poets are handsome. “No truly ugly woman ever yet wrote a truly beautiful poem the length of her little finger.” The same satiric enjoyment of the situation is apparent in Thackeray’s description of Barnes Newcome’s lecture on “Mrs. Hemans, and the Poetry of the Affections,” as delivered before the appreciative audience of the Newcome Athenæum. The distinction which the lecturer draws between man’s poetry and woman’s poetry, the high-flown civility with which he treats the latter, the platitudes about the Christian singer appealing to the affections, and decorating the homely threshold, and wreathing flowers around the domestic hearth;--all these graceful and generous nothings are the tributes laid without stint at the feet of that fragile creature known to our great-grandfathers as the female muse.