Havergal College - Magazine Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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Havergal College Magazine style was formed by Johnson, her theology by the excellent Bishop Porteous, her outlook by the circumscribed and serious life of an important concern ' a seminary for young ladies, in which she was assisted by four sisters, persistently unmarried, like herself. We think instinctively of another school-room authoress, of equal fortitude amidst the dull routine and long hours of governessing duty, whose spirit laughed at the subjection of body and mind to narrowing formality, and followed Romance to the supreme liter- ary summit. But therein lies the difference of genius from talent, and Hannah More would,. in any case, have disclaimed with horror the title of novelist. Coelebs is entrenched deep behind a subsidi- ary title, Observations on Domestic Habits and Manners, Religion and Morals, and to a sermon-reading and select circle of readers it proved a sugar-coated pill, x o pill is ever delicious, but Coelebs is far from unpleasant, and to two generations to whom Mrs. Bar- bauld and Mrs. Trimmer were a long-drawn-out dessert on sleepy Sunday afternoons it may even have been an appetiser. Even by the young ladies of St. John ' s College School, its pages were cut to the four hundred and thirtieth, and the reader of 1913 will find much that is pleasantly suggestive of English life and thought in country homes and vicarages of Evangelical ten- dencies in 1808. True, it is always the school mistress who speaks, thinly disguised beneath the topcoat of the mild Coelebs, but to one not greedy of romance the excellent common-sense and real Christian sentiment have their value. Much is unconsciously hu- morous, from the opening paragraph, in which the hero confesses that the ideal of his youthful dreams has been Mil ton ' s Eve, but, he adds hastily, in her state of innocence. His pious mother seems to have dreaded too rapid disillusionment for her Charles, for in sending him forth, at the age of twenty-four, on his adven- turous quest, she entreats him to bear in mind that the fairest creature is also a fallen creature. Long exhortations follow from both parents, for his father, knowing and approving what he styles Charles ' domestic propensities, adds much counsel and advice. An unimproved and inelegant mind is his chief dread in his prospective daughter-in-law, but the foundation must be solid. You will want a companion; an artist you can hire. It says much for the domestic propensities as well as the courage of Charles, that they survived the opening chapters, which also narrate the death of both parents. Thoroughly depressed and chastened, he is yet determined, and we plunge with him into ten chapters of what may he called domestic survey in the houses of acquaintances and friends. Hut the story thenceforward, as in other lovers ' lives, divides into the days before, and after, he met Lucilla. From the moment the careful Coelebs ascertained that this paragon of 25

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Havergal College Magazine which has owned the dignified dozen, and at least half of their number were uncut, alas, when the writer took them down two years ago. Either the title, The Works of Hannah More, or the extreme respectability of the author, has proved alarming to those whom that lady would have called the young females of the Red River Settlement. Some adventurous spirits have, it is true, explored the gentle hills and vales of Hannah ' s verse, and the tragedies The Inflexible Captive, Percy, and The Fatal Falsehood, show foot-prints, or, rather, finger-prints, of early travellers. The stern warning, however, of Vol. V., page 33, Let not the vulgar read this pensive strain ' has had due ef- fect, and it seems to have crushed any youthful Manitoban desires to study the still more pensive pages of the prose essays. An unslaked thirst for romance, however diluted, has not spared the Stories for Persons in the Mid die Ranks, and the once famous Coelebs in Search of a Wife; but it fell to my lot to thrust the paper-knife for the first time into the dense paragraphs of the author ' s life, with her Strictures an the Modem System of Female Education and several succeeding volumes. For every true book lover there is a hallowed joy in cutting one ' s own pages ' ' — one of the familiarities that may lead to lifer long intimacy, and, in any case, a definite sense of proprietorship. Real friendship of course goes further, in the company of pencil and marginal appreciations and reflections. It is with mingled feelings that one cuts pages that should have seen daylight sixty years ago. Then the Strictures still awoke an echo; Coelebs was yet a classic on the family shelf, and the Sacred Dramas stood in the front rank of books that might be safely presented to a young lady on the more important occasions of her life, sow, the Time machine seems to have whirled us on far more than a century since those weighty sentences were penned and those correct sentiments endorsed by readers who, in an age of limited reading, might be counted by thousands. Coelebs, hard though it is to believe it, ran into six editions in the year the book appeared, and the large fortune enjoyed by Mrs. More in her declining years is yet another testimony to the popular admiration of her works. It is difficult to remind ourselves, in turning over the leaves, that the language and the thoughts are those of one who long survived Jane Austen. The shadow of Dr. Johnson lies heavv on every page. Of the wit of Garrick, the splendour of Burke, the urbane gentleness of Reynolds — all among her friends and cor- respondents — no trace is to be found. Few women enjoyed in their early years more varied and delightful social opportunities; few writers have left twelve volumes more uniform and sedate. Her 24

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Havergal ' College Magazine daughters was not an artist, his doom was sealed. Perfectly ele- gant, rather than perfectly beautiful, were her face and form; while her conversation was, according to her admirer, com- pounded of liveliness, sensibility, and delicacy. The liveliness is less apparent to those of us who are not enamoured, and one wishes that Elizabeth Bennet could, for his soul ' s good, have taken Charles in hand in the intervals of shaping Darcy. Lucilla would, later on in life, have risen up and called her blessed. Truth to tell, with the entrance of the heroine, the foregone conclusion becomes extraordinarily slow. The linked sweetness is so long- drawn-out, and not so very sweet, after all. As the little girl re- marked at nursery dinner, when her baby brother deposited some fragments of gristle on a neighbouring plate, Jimmy is putting all his tit-bits on nurse ' s plate ; and they ' re not so very tit, either. Only some strongly-drawn minor characters or incidents could have saved from tedium the last twenty-nine chapters, and these are devoted to the religious experiences of Miss Stanley ' s neighbours and friends, guided for the most part by the Rector, the excel- lent Dr. Barlow, much admired by the Stanley family, not only for his positive virtues, but on the curious ground that he is zealous without enthusiasm. This dread of enthusiasm, recurrent throughout our author ' s pages, is evidently a feature of her tem- perament and her circle, and explains, possibly, why Coelebs at his most lover-like fails to convince us that he is anything more than the mouthpiece of a learned spinster expounding her views on young ladies ' education. Yet, let us remember the six editions of the first year, the thirty thousand copies bought in America alone, the French and German translations. Even in . Iceland, says the gratified author, Coelebs a was read with great apparent profit, and from Geneva came a picture of Lucilla kneeling by the bedside of a poor pensioner. Tempora Mutantur; we are at once more exacting and less patient than the reading public which hailed Hannah More as a prophetess. Her books, we fear, will remain high and dry on the top shelf, and as a literary memory she has almost ceased to be. But her genuine benevolence and warm support of humane and Christianising efforts that claimed her help and money almost amount to that enthusiasm which she dreaded. The anti-slavery movement, orphanages, hospitals, Sunday schools, the Bible Society, and foreign mission outposts as far apart as South Africa, Ceylon, and Newfoundland, all rejoiced in her liberality, both in her life and at her death, and it is as a philanthropist that she still deserves recognition. 26