JOANNA BAILLIE. 1762-1851.

JOANNA BAILLIE.
1762-1851.

JOANNA BAILLIE.

Joanna Baillie, the daughter of a Scotch clergyman, was born at Bothwell, in Lanarkshire, in 1762. When she was about six years old, her father exchanged the Bothwell Kirk for that of Hamilton. At ten she was sent to boarding-school in Glasgow; and, her father having been appointed to a professorship in Glasgow University, when Joanna was fifteen the family removed to that city. Two years later her father died, and the Baillies left Glasgow for Long Calderwood, in the Middle Ward of Lanarkshire. In 1784, Joanna’s brother, Dr. Matthew Baillie, took his mother and sisters to live in London. In 1790, Joanna published anonymously a volume of miscellaneous poems; and in 1798, also anonymously, the first volume of Plays on the Passions. In 1802, a second, and in 1812, a third volume appeared. Meanwhile Miss Baillie had published, in 1804, a volume of Miscellaneous Dramas; and in 1810 a tragedy, The Family Legend, was brought out at the Edinburgh Theatre. It was played fourteen nights; and in 1814 was again acted in London. In 1826 appeared The Martyr, a tragedy, and in 1836 three more volumes of plays. In 1831 Miss Baillie published A View of the General Tenor of the New Testament regarding the Nature and Dignity of Jesus Christ. She was also the author of Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters.

In 1801, Joanna, her mother, and her sister, Agnes, had established themselves at Hampstead, where Mrs. Baillie had died in 1806. The sisters more than once revisited Scotland. Joanna “passed away without suffering” on the 23rd of February, 1851.

Her firm adherence to a mistaken theory of dramatic writing—the subordination of all else to the development of a master passion—has prevented her plays from holding the stage. Her finely humorous Scotch songs are perfection in their way. Many of them were suggested by earlier songs, and written to the old airs; and the manner in which she has dealt with this rude material is an indication of those characteristics which led Lucy Aikin to speak of the “innocent and maiden grace” which “still hovered over her to the end.” Every contemporary mentions Joanna Baillie with respect, and with affectionate admiration of her graceful old age.

Both father and mother were rarely high-principled; and, in spite of his warm affections and her latent faculties of humor and pathos, they were alike strongly tinged with the strict, somewhat stern, reserve of the old Scotch character. Agnes Baillie (Joanna’s sister) told Lucy Aikin that, though her father had sucked the poison from a bite which she had received from a dog believed to be mad, he had never kissed her in his life. Joanna herself spoke to the same friend of her unsatisfied yearning for caresses when a child, and of her mother’s simply chiding her when she ventured to clasp that mother’s knee; “but,” Joanna added, with perfect comprehension, “I know she liked it.”

The village of Bothwell, where Dr. James Baillie’s kirk and manse were situated, possessed many advantages. It was where “Clyde’s banks are bonnie,” in the fruit lands of the Middle Ward of Lanarkshire, and where there is a strath of waving verdure at all seasons. In May and June it is one great white and pink flush of orchard blossoms. In August and September boughs bend richly under purple plums, scarlet streaked apples, and mottled olive and russet pears. Close by are the fragments of the great castle-keep of the Douglasses, one of the most stately ruins of Scotland.... Other legends, besides those of well-authenticated history, lurked in each drearier spot of that country. Vague tales of the foul fiend himself started up in the desolation of a peat bog, or the horror of a gruesome cavern. There were legends of gray “bogles” and sheeted ghosts.... These were the common chronicles and fireside lore of the country people of the day. As a stirring, inquisitive child, Joanna Baillie had a good source from which she could derive such knowledge, and form a familiar acquaintance betimes with many-sided humanity. The kitchen of the country manse was then the free resort and resting-place of privileged beggars, old soldiers and sailors, and humble travellers of every description. The settle in the chimney, and the “bink” in the “hallan,” were rarely empty, as backwards and forwards trotted the little maid herself, making believe to dispense the doles of bannocks and cheese, and the cogs of brose and kale. All the while she was gathering scraps of racy conversation into wide-open little pitchers of ears, and photographing still more accurately with clear fresh mirrors of eyes the quaintly-expressive faces and figures.

She was not more than six years old when her father exchanged the kirk of Bothwell for that of Hamilton, likewise in the fruit lands. But Hamilton was a town of six thousand inhabitants, clustering round the ducal palace and park of the Hamiltons. Here Joanna found herself one of a community which numbered scores of young people of her own age and degree. So well did she like it, that she was the leader in every romping game and frolic—an adept at out-of-door sports, whether swinging, skipping or climbing. She was celebrated for the fearlessness with which she ran along the parapets of bridges and on the tops of walls, and scampered heedlessly on any pony she could find. She had the misfortune to cause the fracture of her brother’s arm by inducing him to ride double with her. The horse, not approving of a pair of riders, threw the one who had the worse seat. “Look at Miss Jack!” a farmer once commented, ... “she sits her horse as if it was a bit of herself.”

In advanced life she loved to dwell on her early unchecked rambles over heaths compared to which Hampstead was a common; on her endless “paidling” in innumerable burns, tributaries of the Clyde. She was wont to regret wistfully that she could no longer “pad” barefooted on the grass or “plowter” in the water. And she would eagerly recommend to dainty and horrified English matrons the entire wholesomeness and happiness of letting their petted children run bare-footed in summer.

Whatever more valuable acquisitions Joanna made in these young days she was singularly deficient in learning, as the term is generally understood. “At nine I could not read plainly,” Joanna Baillie told Lucy Aikin. “At nine, Joanna?” her sister Agnes called her back. “You could not read well at eleven.”... The worthy minister took the stout little ignoramus in hand along with his breakfast. She spoilt the flavor of his trout and cake and black pudding by crying throughout each lesson. It was thought that a change was called for in order to conquer Joanna’s repugnance to sedentary studies, and her passion for open-air pursuits and boyish pranks. At ten years of age she was accordingly sent, along with her elder sister, to Miss Macdonald’s boarding-school, in the heart of the city of Glasgow.... Joanna learned to read perfectly at the Glasgow boarding-school, as doubtless she also learned more or less serviceable writing and arithmetic, and correct or incorrect notions in geography and history. If she did not learn much else beyond singing a little to the guitar, and making a few promising attempts at drawing and dancing, still the school did its part. The study for which she showed a particular inclination was mathematics—a fact which is characteristic of the clear-headed girl. Of her own free will and entirely unassisted, she mastered a considerable portion of Euclid.

Pricked on by the demands of a large girl-audience at school, Joanna’s hereditary gift of story-telling, by which she could excite laughter or tears, grew and grew until at length she found herself the chief figure in something like private theatricals. In connection with these chamber-dramas, Joanna was play-writer, playwright, player, stage-dresser, and scene-shifter in one. In this foreshadowing of her future career, she is said to have strongly displayed an eye for effect, which failed her in her great efforts of later life.... Let us conjure up, if we can, the old Glasgow boarding-school, with its small rooms and dim tallow candles. There stand the host of eager girls in their short-waisted, short-sleeved gowns and mittens, absorbed in the common levy of buckles, brooches, necklaces, plaids, scarfs, breast-knots, and Highland bonnets. The acknowledged mistress of the ceremonies and games, and the “first lady” of the troop, is the undersized girl with marked features and gray eyes.... Down on the scene Miss Macdonald and her governess look for a moment, from the elevation of their huge toupees and barricades of ruffles. They dismiss authoritatively the excited rabble, and retire to their cosy supper where they admit in confidence to each other the mother-wit of Miss Jack Baillie, who has yet got a bad memory for facts of consequence outside of her “fule” stories, and her “droll swatches” of this man and that woman.

Joanna appeared to her companions a capable young woman with much decision of character, like her mother. She was shy amongst strangers, but sufficiently frank to her friends; and in the midst of her seriousness she was the merriest soul when the fit took her. She had quietly written some clever Scotch songs, most of them adaptations from old ditties. These were already sung with glee around many a rustic hearth and at many a homely supper table.... Joanna was not handsome. She was below the middle height, and had the large, statuesque features which suit better with a stately figure. Years lent these features dignity rather than robbed them of grace. There is no word of her youthful bloom. She wore her hair for many years simply divided and braided across her forehead; but the hair must have grown low on it from the first, and, whether in a crop, or in braids, must have nearly concealed the expansive brow, which thus lent no relief to the dark gauntness of the face. The brows were firmly arched. Her mouth was wide, and expressed benevolence. Her chin was clearly moulded, and slightly projecting. She was the most sensible of wilful geniuses; the most retiring of “wise” women; the most maidenly of experienced elderly ladies; the most tenderly attached of daughters and sisters; one of the meekest and most modest of Christians. Joanna Baillie’s was a noble soul. She had a great man’s grand guilelessness, rather than a woman’s minute and subtle powers of sympathy; a man’s shy but unstinted kindness and forbearance, rather than a woman’s eager but measured cordiality and softness; a man’s modesty in full combination with a woman’s delicacy; and, as if to prove her sex beyond mistake, she had after all more than the usual share of a woman’s pugnacity and headstrongness, when the fit was upon her.

Sarah Tytler and J. L. Watson: ‘Songstresses of Scotland.’ London: Strahan & Co., 1871.

Mrs. Barbauld mentions Miss Baillie in her letter to Mrs. Kenrick, and tells her how much amazed she was at finding the author [of ‘Plays on the Passions’] was not one of the already celebrated writers to whom it had been attributed, but “a young lady of Hampstead whom she visited, and who came to Mr. Barbauld’s meeting all the while with as innocent a face as if she had never written a line.”

Grace A. Ellis (Oliver): ‘Memoir of Mrs. Barbauld.’ Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1874.

I was taken by Dr. and Mrs. Baillie to Hampstead to see the gifted Joanna. I found her on a Sunday morning reading the Bible to her mother, a very aged lady, who was quite blind. Joanna’s manners and accent were very Scottish, very kind, simple, and unaffected, but less frank than those of her elder sister. She seemed almost studious to avoid literary conversation, but spoke with much interest of old Scotch friends, and of her early days in Scotland.

The first new play produced by Henry Siddons [at the Edinburgh Theatre] was the ‘Family Legend’ of Joanna Baillie. This was, I believe, the first of her dramas that ever underwent the test of representation in her native kingdom; and Scott appears to have exerted himself most indefatigably in its behalf. He was consulted about all the minutiæ of costume, attended every rehearsal, and supplied the prologue. The play was better received than any other which the gifted authoress has since subjected to the same experiment; and how ardently Scott enjoyed its success will appear from a few specimens of the many letters which he addressed to his friend on the occasion.

“On receiving your long kind letter yesterday, I sought out Siddons, who was equally surprised and delighted at your liberal arrangement about the ‘Lady of the Rock.’ I will put all the names to rights, and retain enough of locality and personality to please the antiquary, without the least risk of bringing the clan Gillian about our ears. I went through the theatre, which is the most complete little thing of the kind I ever saw, elegantly fitted up, and large enough for every purpose.... With regard to the equipment of the ‘Family Legend,’ I have been much diverted at a discovery which I have made. I had occasion to visit our Lord Provost (by profession a stocking-weaver), and was surprised to find the worthy magistrate filled with a new-born zeal for the drama. He spoke of Mr. Siddons’ merits with enthusiasm, and of Miss Baillie’s powers almost with tears of rapture. Being a curious investigator of cause and effect, I never rested until I found out that this theatric rage which had seized his lordship of a sudden, was owing to a large order for hose, pantaloons, and plaids for equipping the rival clans of Campbell and Maclean, and which Siddons was sensible enough to send to the warehouse of our excellent provost.”

“You have only to imagine all that you could wish to give success to a play, and your conceptions will still fall short of the complete and decided triumph of the ‘Family Legend.’ The house was crowded to a most extraordinary degree; many people had come from your native capital of the west; everything that pretended to distinction, whether from rank or literature, was in the boxes, and in the pit such an aggregate mass of humanity as I have seldom, if ever, witnessed in the same space.... I sat the whole time shaking for fear a scene-shifter, or a carpenter, or some of the subaltern actors, should make some blunder and interrupt the feeling of deep and general interest. The scene on the rock struck the utmost possible effect into the audience, and you heard nothing but sobs on all sides. The banquet-scene was equally impressive, and so was the combat. Of the greater scenes, that between Lorn and Helen in the castle of Maclean, that between Helen and her lover, and the examination of Maclean himself in Argyle’s castle, were applauded to the very echo. Siddons announced the play ‘for the rest of the week,’ which was received not only with a thunder of applause, but with cheering and throwing up of hats and handkerchiefs. Mrs. Siddons supported her part incomparably.... The scenery was very good, and the rock, without the appearance of pantomime, was so contrived as to place Mrs. Siddons in a very precarious situation to all appearance. The dresses were more tawdry than I should have judged proper, but expensive and showy. I got my brother John’s Highland recruiting party to reinforce the garrison of Inverary, and as they mustered beneath the porch of the castle, and seemed to fill the courtyard behind, the combat scene had really the appearance of reality.... My kind respects attend Miss Agnes Baillie, and believe me ever your obliged and faithful servant,

J. G. Lockhart: ‘The Life of Sir Walter Scott.’ Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1871.

It is too little to say that I am enchanted with the third volume [of ‘Plays on the Passions’], especially with the two first plays, which in every point not only sustain, but even exalt your reputation as a dramatist. [Miss Baillie had written him that this was to be her last publication, and that she was “getting her knitting-needles in order”——meaning to begin her new course of industry by making him a purse.] The whole character of ‘Orra’ is exquisitely supported as well as imagined, and the language distinguished by a rich variety of fancy, which I know no instance of excepting in Shakespeare. After I had read ‘Orra’ twice to myself, Terry [the comedian, Scott’s warm friend and admirer] read it over to us a third time, aloud, and I have seldom seen a little circle so much affected as during the whole fifth act. I think it would act charmingly.... Yet I have a great quarrel with this beautiful drama, for you must know that you have utterly destroyed a song of mine, precisely in the turn of your outlaw’s ditty, and sung by persons in somewhat the same situation.... I took out my unfortunate manuscript to look at it, but alas! it was the encounter of the iron and the earthen pitchers in the fable. I was clearly sunk, and the potsherds not worth gathering up. But only conceive that the chorus should have run thus verbatim——

[Note by Lockhart: These lines were accordingly struck out of the outlaw’s song in ‘Rokeby.’ The verses of ‘Orra,’ to which Scott alludes, are no doubt the following:

“The wild fire dances on the fen,
The red star sheds its ray,
Up rouse ye then, my merry men,
It is our opening day.”]

To return, I really think ‘Fear’ the most dramatic passion you have hitherto touched, because capable of being drawn to the most extreme paroxysm on the stage. In ‘Orra’ you have all gradations, from a timidity excited by a strong and irritable imagination, to the extremity which altogether unhinges the understanding.

Sir Walter Scott: Letter to Joanna Baillie, in the former’s ‘Life,’ by J. G. Lockhart.

She is small in figure, and her gait is mean and shuffling, but her manners are those of a well-bred woman. She has none of the unpleasant airs too common to literary ladies. Her conversation is sensible. She possesses apparently considerable information, is prompt without being forward, and has a fixed judgment of her own, without any disposition to force it on others. Wordsworth said of her with warmth: “If I had to present any one to a foreigner as a model of an English gentlewoman, it would be Joanna Baillie.”

Henry Crabb Robinson: Diary, 1812, in ‘Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence.’ Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1871.

I remember her as singularly impressive in look and manner, with the “queenly” air we associate with ideas of high birth and lofty rank. Her face was long, narrow, dark, and solemn, and her speech deliberate and considerate, the very antipodes of “chatter.” Tall in person,[9] and habited according to the mode of an olden time, her picture, as it is now present to me, is that of a very venerable dame, dressed in coif and kirtle, stepping out, as it were, from a frame in which she had been placed by the painter Vandyke.

S. C. Hall: ‘A Book of Memories of Great Men and Women of the Age.’ London: Virtue & Co., 1871.

She was past fifty when I first saw her, and appeared like an old lady to me, then in my teens. She dressed like an aged person, and with scrupulous neatness. She lived with a sister who looked older still, because she had not the vivacity of Joanna, and was only distinguished for the amiability with which she bore being outshone by her more gifted relative.

Miss Baillie, according to the English custom, took the title of Mrs. Joanna Baillie, on passing her fiftieth birthday. She gave the prettiest and the pleasantest dinners, and presided at them with peculiar grace and tact, always attentive to the wants of her guests, and yet keeping up a lively conversation the while. She took such pleasure in writing poetry, and especially in her ‘Plays on the Passions,’ that she said, “If no one ever read them, I should find my happiness in writing them.”

Though she was young when she left her native land, she never lost her Scotch accent. I thought it made her conversation only the more piquant. She was full of anecdotes and curious facts about remarkable people. I only recollect her telling one of Lord Byron being obliged, by politeness, to escort her and her sister to the opera, and her perceiving that he was provoked beyond measure at being there with them, and that he made faces as he sat behind them.

Eliza Farrar: ‘Recollections of Seventy Years.’ Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866.

Of Joanna Baillie I saw much both as a friend and patient. Her gentle simplicity, with a Scotch tinge coloring it to the end of life, won the admiration even of those who knew nothing of her power of dramatic poetry. It was pleasant to visit her in the quiet house at Hampstead, in which she lived with her sister Agnes. She reached, I think, her ninety-second year.[10] Agnes lived to a hundred.

Sir Henry Holland: ‘Recollections of Past Life.’ New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1872.

Our great poetess, or rather the sensible, amiable old lady that was a great poetess thirty years ago, is still in full preservation as to health. Never did the flame of genius more thoroughly expire than in her case.... She is, as Mr. Wordsworth observes, when quoting her non-feeling for Lycidas, “dry and Scotchy”; learning she never possessed, and some of her poetry, which I think was far above that of any other woman, is the worse for a few specks of bad English; then her criticisms are so surprisingly narrow and jejune, and show so slight an acquaintance with fine literature in general.

Yet if the authoress of ‘Plays on the Passions’ does not now write or talk like a poetess, she looks like one, and is a piece of poetry in herself. Never was old age more lovely and interesting; the face, the dress, the quiet, subdued motions, the silver hair, the calm in-looking eye, the pale, yet not unhealthy skin, all are in harmony; this is winter with its own peculiar loveliness of snows and paler sunshine.

Sara Coleridge: Letter to Miss E. Trevenen, 1833, in the former’s ‘Memoir and Letters,’ edited by her daughter. New York: Harper & Bros., 1874.

She had enjoyed a fame almost without parallel, and had outlived it. She had been told every day for years, through every possible channel, that she was second only to Shakespeare—if second; and then she had seen her works drop out of notice so that, of the generation who grew up before her eyes, not one in a thousand had read a line of her plays—yet was her serenity never disturbed, nor her merry humor in the least dimmed. I have never lost the impression of the trying circumstances of my first interview with her, nor of the grace, simplicity and sweetness with which she bore them. She was old; and she declined dinner-parties; but she wished to meet me, ... and therefore she came to Miss Berry’s to tea, one day when I was dining there. Miss Berry, her contemporary, put her feelings, it seemed to me, to a most unwarrantable trial, by describing to me, as we three sat together, the celebrity of the ‘Plays on the Passions’ in their day. She told me how she found on her table, on her return from a ball, a volume of plays; and how she kneeled on a chair to look at it, and how she read on till the servant opened the shutters, and let in the daylight of a winter morning. She told me how all the world raved about the plays; and she held on so long that I was in pain for the noble creature to whom it must have been irksome on the one hand to hear her own praises and fame so dwelt upon, and, on the other, to feel that we all knew how long that had been quite over. But, when I looked up at her sweet face, with its composed smile amidst the becoming mob-cap, I saw that she was above pain of either kind.

We drove out, by appointment, to Mrs. Joanna Baillie’s, at Hampstead, took our lunch with her, and passed the time at her house till four o’clock. We found her living in a small and most comfortable, nice, unpretending house, where she has dwelt for above thirty years. She is now above seventy, and, dressed with an exact and beautiful propriety, received us most gently and kindly. Her accent is still Scotch; her manner strongly marked with that peculiar modesty which you sometimes see united to the venerableness of age, and which is then so very winning; and her conversation, always quiet and never reminding you of her own claims as an author, is so full of good sense, with occasionally striking and decisive remarks, and occasionally a little touch of humor, that I do not know when I have been more pleased and gratified than I was by this visit.

She lives exactly as an English gentlewoman of her age and character should live, and everything about her was in good taste and appropriate to her position, even down to the delicious little table she had spread for us in her quiet parlor.

George Ticknor: Diary, 1835, in ‘Life, Letters, and Journals.’ Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1876.

A sweeter picture of old age was never seen. Her figure was small, light, and active; her countenance, in its expression of sincerity, harmonized wonderfully with her gay conversation and her cheerful voice. Her eyes were beautiful, dark, bright, and penetrating, with the full, innocent gaze of childhood. Her face was altogether comely, and her dress did justice to it. She wore her own silvery hair and a mob-cap, with its delicate lace border fitting close round her face. She was well-dressed in handsome dark silks, and her lace caps and collars looked always new. No Quaker ever was neater, while she kept up with the times in her dress as in her habit of mind, as far as became her years. In her whole appearance there was always something for even the passing stranger to admire, and never anything for the most familiar friend to wish otherwise.

She wore a delicate lavender satin bonnet; and Mrs. J—— says she is fond of dress, and knows what every one has on. Her taste is certainly exquisite in dress. I more than ever admired the harmony of expression and tint, the silver hair and silvery gray eye, the pale skin, and the look which speaks of a mind that has had much communing with high imagination, though such intercourse is only perceptible now by the absence of everything which that lofty spirit would not set his seal upon.... Age has slackened the active part of genius, and yet is in some sort a substitute for it. There is a declining of mental exercitation. She has had enough of that; and now for a calm decline, and thoughts of Heaven.

Sara Coleridge: Letter to her husband, 1834, in, ‘Memoir and Letters,’ edited by her daughter.

She talked of Scott with a tender enthusiasm that was contagious, and of Lockhart with a kindness that is uncommon when coupled with his name, and which seemed only characteristic of her benevolence. It is very rare that old age, or, indeed, any age, is found so winning and agreeable. I do not wonder that Scott in his letters treats her with more deference, and writes to her with more care and beauty, than to any other of his correspondents.

Unlike Zaccheus the publican in every other respect, she followed his rule with respect to the earnings of her pen—half of her goods she gave to feed the poor. This arrangement was made and adhered to, when the Baillies’ income, never a very large one, was at its minimum; and it was not departed from when increased funds brought in their train increased expenditures and a host of additional wants.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] Mr. Hall’s testimony on this point differs from that of all others who have described Miss Baillie.

[10] An error. Miss Baillie died at eighty-nine.