A Happy Half-century and Other Essays

There are few of us who do not occasionally wish we had been born in other days, in days for which we have some secret affinity, and which shine for us with a mellow light in the deceitful pages of history. Mr. Austin Dobson, for example, must have sighed more than once to see Queen Anne on Queen Victoria’s throne; and the Rt. Hon. Cecil Rhodes must have realized that the reign of Elizabeth was the reign for him. There is a great deal lost in being born out of date. What freak of fortune thrust Galileo into the world three centuries too soon, and held back Richard Burton’s restless soul until he was three centuries too late?

For myself, I confess that the last twenty-five years of the eighteenth century and the first twenty-five years of the nineteenth make up my chosen period, and that my motive for so choosing is contemptible. It was not a time distinguished—in England at least—for wit or wisdom, for public virtues or for private charm; but it was a time when literary reputations were so cheaply gained that nobody needed to despair of one. A taste for platitudes, a tinge of Pharisaism, an appreciation of the commonplace,—and the thing was done. It was in the latter half of this blissful period that we find that enthusiastic chronicler, Mrs. Cowley, writing in “Public Characters” of “the proud preëminence which, in all the varieties of excellence produced by the pen, the pencil, or the lyre, the ladies of Great Britain have attained over contemporaries in every other country in Europe.”

When we search for proofs of this proud preëminence, what do we find? Roughly speaking, the period begins with Miss Burney, and closes with Miss Terrier and Miss Jane Porter. It includes—besides Miss Burney—one star of the first magnitude, Miss Austen (whose light never dazzled Mrs. Cowley’s eyes), and one mild but steadfast planet, Miss Edgeworth. The rest of Great Britain’s literary ladies were enjoying a degree of fame and fortune so utterly disproportionate to their merits that their toiling successors to-day may be pardoned for wishing themselves part of that happy sisterhood. Think of being able to find a market for an interminable essay entitled “Against Inconsistency in our Expectations”! There lingers in all our hearts a desire to utter moral platitudes, to dwell lingeringly and lovingly upon the obvious; but alas! we are not Mrs. Barbaulds, and this is not the year 1780. Foolish and inconsequent we are permitted to be, but tedious, never!