Lord Byron befriended William
Harness at Harrow, a younger boy who was lame like himself; before departing on his
eastern tour Byron had Harness’s portrait taken and upon returning invited
him to Newstead and considered dedicating Childe Harold to him. Byron and
Harness travelled in the same circles and exchanged letters down to the time the
poet left for the Continent, after which they went separate ways.
If Byron was the quintessential
liberal, Harness was his conservative counterpart. As a clergyman he engaged in the
“Satanic Poetry” controversy, bewailing Byron’s bad example in
The Wrath of Cain (1822). There was no personal animosity; Harness was
simply orthodox. Like Fielding’s Thwackum he might conclude that
“honour is not therefore manifold, because there are many absurd opinions
about it; nor is religion manifold, because there are various sects and heresies in
the world. When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the
Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant
religion, but the Church of England.” Harness declares as much in his
sermons.
Yet Harness was not exactly a
bigot; like Fielding, or Byron for that matter, his opinions tended to be those of
an unreconstructed country Whig. He despised canting religion and championed
aristocratic virtue. Like Fielding and Byron he regarded the human condition as
fundamentally corrupt but capable of amelioration through private charity, equality
before the law, and the force of positive example. Harness the clergyman, like
Byron the satirist, seemed to contemporaries a throwback to the eighteenth century.
Though conservative, he had no use for Romanism or the Oxford Movement; when he
built All Saints in Knightsbridge the fashionable gothic was rejected.
A believer in social
subordination, Harness nonetheless valued personal liberty: “I never could be
at the trouble of keeping up noble friendships, unless the coronet did two-thirds
of the business” (p. 288) These words sound odd coming from the mouth of one
who spent much of his long life being entertained by fashionable hostesses at
dinner parties and country-house visits. But it does seem to have been the case:
Byron was his one titled friend, and when the letters stopped coming he was content
to let the relationship drop. Instead he cultivated literary relationships with his
childhood friend Mary Russell Mitford, his college friend Henry Hart Milman, with
the novelist and plutocrat Thomas Hope and later with Charles Dickens.
Harness’s paleolithic
political and theological views seem not at all to have impeded friendships with
writers across the political spectrum. One is struck by the friendly, confiding
tone of the letter from Harriet Martineau. He took a lively and personal interest
in people as such as one sees in the stories he relates to L’Estrange, who
relished anecdotes and who would compile a book on humor, in enduring friendships
with his curates, and in the tact with which he speaks of “old Mrs. Scott
Waring, who died last year at the age of 102”—a parishioner with a
questionable past (297). In person, Harness seems to have been less Reverend
Thawkum than Parson Adams. He differed from Fielding and Byron in his predilection
for bluestocking writers.
The life of Mary Russell Mitford
(1870) undertaken with L’Estrange was, after the edition of Shakespeare
(1825), the largest and most important literary project of his life. It was
intended to be in six volumes, on the scale of Lockhart’s life of Scott. This
was a labor of love, as was Memorials of Miss Catherine Maria Fanshawe
(1865) a collection of poems by a long-deceased friend. He admired these women
writers, as he did Jane Austen and George Eliot. He also undertook for John Murray
a four-volume “family” Massinger on the model of Bowdler’s
Shakespeare. Harness’s two dramatic poems were privately printed for
distribution among friends. Though a respectable man of letters his belletristic
pretensions were modest.
It was otherwise with professional
writings that include his Boyle lectures, The Connexion of Christianity with
Human Happiness (1823), Christian Education (1840) and The Image
of God in Man (1841). In his sermons Harness was very much the practical
Christian, which is perhaps what drew Dickens to him. Having spent almost his
entire career in London parishes Harness seems to have had, like Dickens and
Fielding, a clear-eyed view of the moral failings peculiar to the lower orders and
their social betters. His anonymous pamphlet on misbegotten charity, Visiting
Societies and Lay Readers (1844) was rejected by Lockhart at the
Quarterly Review as too hot to handle. Rather than competing for a
lucrative country rectory or a snug cathedral stall Harness raised funds to build a
new London parish.
The Literary Life of William Harness is not a common book, probably because
it is not a particularly good book. While all life and letters volumes are
cut-and-paste constructions, L’Estrange’s effort is an egregious olio
with awkward transitions like the one yoking Harness’s writings on
Shakespeare to the Kembles’ letters on America. Long quotations begin to look
like padding and selections can be perplexing. We are given the merest scraps of
the Byron correspondence but thirty letters to L’Estrange. There is little of
Mary Russell Mitford and nothing of Milman, Harness’s life-long friend and
confidant. There are no letters to or from Alexander Dyce. Instead of such
materials, surely available for the asking, we are given long pages reprinted from
already-published volumes.
Since Harness and L’Estrange
had just spent three years annotating Mitford’s correspondence one might
think that L’Estrange would take care to identify Miss This or Mr. That,
knowing that such names would soon become as obscure as those over which they had
been laboring. But this is not the case. We are not told which Harness “my
brother” refers to, or even how many brothers he had. Nor did
L’Estrange take the trouble to compile an index. As such things go, The
Literary Life of the Rev. William Harness is a shoddy piece of work. The
author-compiler seems to have outlined twelve chapters, arranged his documents into
twelve piles, and then lopped or padded merely to fit page requirements.
Nonetheless there are things of
value and the work as a whole is better than it first appears. The absence of Byron
correspondence is disappointing. But in the place it would have gone we have
instead something of great interest, Harness’s account of the Byron marriage.
This must of have been a late composition since it speaks of manners “forty
years ago.’ It might conceivably have been written in response to Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Lady Byron Vindicated which Harness read just a few
weeks before his death in 1869. Harness knew Lady Byron before her marriage and was
friends with her friends such as Sarah Siddons and Joanna Baillie. He does not
mince words: most of Miss Milbanke’s acquaintances “looked upon her as
a reserved and frigid sort of being whom one would rather cross the room to avoid
than be brought into conversation with unnecessarily” (24).
Harness was a privileged witness
not only to the marriage but to what was said about it by those who ostracized the
peccant poet: “The complaints, at first so trifling, gradually acquired a
more serious character. ‘Poor Lady Byron was afraid of her life.’
‘Her husband slept with loaded pistols by his bedside, and a dagger under his
pillow.’ Then there came rumours of cruelty—no one knew of what kind,
or how severe. Nothing was definitely stated. But it was on all hands allowed to be
‘very bad—very bad indeed.’ And as there was nothing to be known,
everybody imagined what they pleased” (26). Given his moral realism,
incipient feminism, and lack of empathy for Byron’s poetry and religious
views, such bias is not what one would necessarily expect. Harness can find little
positive to say about Lady Byron and little negative so say about his childhood
friend.
In addition to what Harness
relates about Byron, his well-filed anecdotes of other literary contemporaries lend
value and interest. One can only wish there were more, or that Harness had written
his own life. Yet L’Estrange’s book improves on acquaintance; reading
it from end to end one comes away with the sense of having spent time with an
interesting man. If much space is devoted to Harness’s sermons, the
distribution does reflect the shape of a life in which Byron was less significant
than Dean Milman. Even the two concluding chapters of desultory correspondence on
the Mitford biography are not without interest: one observes a life-and-letters in
the process of being made.
Of Harness’s collaborator
and biographer very little is recorded. Alfred Guy Kingan L’Estrange was born
in Ireland in 1832 and after taking his degrees from Exeter College, Oxford was
Harness’s curate at All Saints. At the time the biographer’s parents
were living as absentee landlords in Clifton near Bristol. One gathers that
L’Estrange was not poor but published his life of Harness out of a sense of
admiration for the man and a desire to preserve the stories he told.
L’Estrange’s later books, which include the History of English
Humor (1878), are all of a lighter character. He never married and seems to
have returned to Ireland where he restored the spectacular castle at Conna which
his father had purchased in 1851. Upon his death in 1915 he willed it to the
nation.
David Hill Radcliffe
