(No date, 1849.)
Dear Mr. Fields: I cannot tell you how vexed I am at this mistake
about letters, which must have made you think me careless of your
correspondence and ungrateful for your kindness. The same thing has
happened to me before, I may say often, with American letters,--with
Professor Norton, Mrs. Sigourney, the Sedgwicks,--in short I always
feel an insecurity in writing to America which I never experience in
corresponding with friends on the Continent; France, Germany,
Italy, even Poland and Russia, are comparatively certain. Whether it
be the agents in London who lose letters, or some fault in the
post-office, I cannot tell, but I have twenty times experienced the
vexation, and it casts a certain discouragement over one's
communications. However, I hope that this letter will reach you, and
that you will be assured that the fault does not lie at my door.
During the last year or two my health has been declining much, and I
am just now thinking of taking a journey to Paris. My friend, Henry
Chorley of the Athenaeum, the first musical critic of Europe, is
going thither next month to assist at the production of Meyerbeer's
Prophète at the French Opera, and another friend will accompany me
and my little maid to take care of us; so that I have just hopes
that the excursion, erenow much facilitated by railways, may do me
good. I have always been a great admirer of the great Emperor, and
to see the heir of Napoleon at the Elysée seems to me a real piece
of poetical justice. I know many of his friends in England, who all
speak of him most highly; one of them says, "He is the very
impersonation of calm and simple honesty." I hope the nation will be
true to him, but, as Mirabeau says, "there are no such words as
'jamais' or 'toujours' with the French public."
10th of June, 1849.
I have been waiting to answer your most kind and interesting letter,
dear Mr. Fields, until I could announce to you a publication that
Mr. Colburn has been meditating and pressing me for, but which,
chiefly I believe from my own fault in not going to town, and not
liking to give him or Mr. Shoberl the trouble of coming here, is now
probably adjourned to the autumn. The fact is that I have been and
still am very poorly. We are stricken in our vanities, and the only
things that I recollect having ever been immoderately proud of--my
garden and my personal activity--have both now turned into causes of
shame and pity; the garden, declining from one bad gardener to
worse, has become a ploughed field,--and I myself, from a severe
attack of rheumatism, and since then a terrible fright in a
pony-chaise, am now little better than a cripple. However, if there
be punishment here below, there are likewise
consolations,--everybody is kind to me; I retain the vivid love of
reading, which is one of the highest pleasures of life; and very
interesting persons come to see me sometimes, from both sides of the
water,--witness, dear Mr. Fields, our present correspondence. One
such person arrived yesterday in the shape of Doctor ----, who has
been working musical miracles in Scotland, (think of making singing
teachers of children of four or five years of age!) and is now on
his way to Paris, where, having been during seven years one of the
editors of the National, he will find most of his colleagues of the
newspaper filling the highest posts in the government. What is the
American opinion of that great experiment; or, rather, what is
yours? I wish it success from the bottom of my heart, but I am a,
little afraid, from their total want of political economy (we have
not a school-girl so ignorant of the commonest principles of demand
and supply as the whole of the countrymen of Turgot from the
executive government downwards), and from a certain warlike tendency
which seems to me to pierce through all their declarations of peace.
We hear the flourish of trumpets through all the fine phrases of the
orators, and indeed it is difficult to imagine what they will do
with their _soi-disant ouvriers_,--workmen who have lost the habit
of labor,--unless they make soldiers of them. In the mean time some
friends of mine are about to accompany your countryman Mr. Elihu
Burritt as a deputation, and doubtless M. de Lamartine will give
them as eloquent an answer as heart can desire,--no doubt he will
keep peace if he can,--but the government have certainly not
hitherto shown firmness or vigor enough to make one rely upon them,
if the question becomes pressing and personal. In Italy matters seem
to be very promising. We have here one of the Silvio Pellico
exiles,--Count Carpinetta,--whose story is quite a romance. He is
just returned from Turin, where he was received with enthusiasm,
might have been returned as Deputy for two places, and did recover
some of his property, confiscated years ago by the Austrians. It
does one's heart good to see a piece of poetical justice transferred
to real life. _Apropos_ of public events, all London is talking of
the prediction of an old theological writer of the name of Fleming,
who in or about the year 1700 prophesied a revolution in France in
1794 (only one year wrong), and the fall of papacy in 1848 at all
events.
Ever yours, M.R.M.
(No date, 1849)
DEAR MR. FIELDS: I must have seemed very ungrateful in being so long
silent. But your magnificent present of books, beautiful in every
sense of the word, has come dropping in volume by volume, and only
arrived complete (Mr. Longfellow's striking book being the last)
about a fortnight ago, and then it found me keeping my room, as I am
still doing, with a tremendous attack of neuralgia on the left side
of the face. I am getting better now by dint of blisters and tonic
medicine; but I can answer for that disease well deserving its bad
eminence of "painful." It is however, blessed be God! more
manageable than it used to be; and my medical friend, a man of
singular skill, promises me a cure.
I have seen things of Longfellow's as fine as anything in Campbell
or Coleridge or Tennyson or Hood. After all, our great lyrical poets
are great only for half a volume. Look at Gray and Collins, at your
own edition of the man whom one song immortalized, at Gerald
Griffin, whom you perhaps do not know, and at Wordsworth, who,
greatest of the great for about a hundred pages, is drowned in the
flood of his own wordiness in his longer works. To be sure, there
are giants who are rich to overflowing through a whole shelf of
books,--Shakespeare, the mutual ancestor of Englishmen and
Americans, above all,--and I think the much that they did, and did
well, will be the great hold on posterity of Scott and of Byron.
Have you happened to see Bulwer's King Arthur? It astonished me very
much. I had a full persuasion that, with great merit in a certain
way, he would never be a poet. Indeed, he is beginning poetry just
at the age when Scott, Southey, and a host of others, left it off.
But he is a strange person, full of the powerful quality called
_will_, and has produced a work which, although it is not at all in
the fashionable vein and has made little noise, has yet
extraordinary merit. When I say that it is more like Ariosto than
any other English poem that I know, I certainly give it no mean
praise.
Everybody is impatient for Mr. George Ticknor's work. The subject
seems to me full of interest. Lord Holland made a charming book of
Lope de Vega years ago, and Mr. Ticknor, with equal qualifications
and a much wider field, will hardly fail of delighting England and
America. Will you remember me to him most gratefully and
respectfully? He is a man whom no one can forget. As to Mr.
Prescott, I know no author now, except perhaps Mr. Macaulay, whose
works command so much attention and give so much delight. I am
ashamed to send you so little news, but I live in the country and
see few people. The day I caught my terrible Tic I spent with the
great capitalist, Mr. Goldsmidt, and Mr. Cobden and his pretty wife.
He is a very different person from what one expects,--graceful,
tasteful, playful, simple, and refined, and looking absolutely
young. I suspect that much of his power springs from his genial
character. I heard last week from Mrs. Browning; she and her husband
are at the Baths of Lucca. Mr. Kenyon's graceful book is out, and I
must not forget to tell you that "Our Village" has been printed by
Mr. Bohn in two volumes, which include the whole five. It is
beautifully got up and very cheap, that is to say, for 3 _s._ 6 _d._
a volume. Did Mr. Whittier send his works, or do I owe them wholly
to your kindness? If he sent them, I will write by the first
opportunity. Say everything for me to your young friend, and believe
me ever, dear Mr. F---- most faithfully and gratefully yours, M.R.M.
1850.
(No date.)
I have to thank you very earnestly, dear Mr. Fields, for two very
interesting books. The "Leaves from Margaret Smith's Journal" are, I
suppose, a sort of Lady Willoughby's Diary, so well executed that
they read like one of the imitations of Defoe,--his "Memoirs of a
Cavalier," for instance, which always seemed to me quite as true as
if they had been actually written seventy years before. Thank you
over and over again for these admirable books and for your great
kindness and attention. What a perfectly American name Peabody is!
And how strange it is that there should be in the United States so
many persons of English descent whose names have entirely
disappeared from the land of their fathers. Did you get my last
unworthy letter? I hope you did. It would at all events show that
there was on my part no intentional neglect, that I certainly had
written in reply to the last letter that I received, although
doubtless a letter had been lost on one side or the other. I live so
entirely in the quiet country that I have little to tell you that
can be interesting. Two things indeed, not generally known, I may
mention: that Stanfield Hall, the scene of the horrible murder of
which you have doubtless read, was the actual birthplace of Amy
Robsart,--of whose tragic end, by the way, there is at last an
authentic account, both in the new edition of Pepys and the first
volume of the "Romance of the Peerage"; and that a friend of mine
saw the other day in the window of a London bookseller a copy of
Hume, ticketed "An Excellent Introduction to Macaulay." The great
man was much amused at this practical compliment, as well he might
be. I have been reading the autobiographies of Lamartine and
Chateaubriand, as well as Raphael, which, although not avowed, is of
course and most certainly a continuation of "Les Confiances." What
strange beings these Frenchmen are! Here is M. de Lamartine at
sixty, poet, orator, historian, and statesman, writing the stories
of two ladies--one of them married--who died for love of him! Think
if Mr. Macaulay should announce himself as a lady-killer, and put
the details not merely into a book, but into a feuilleton!
The Brownings are living quite quietly at Florence, seeing, I
suspect, more Americans than English. Mrs. Trollope has lost her
only remaining daughter; arrived in England only time enough to see
her die.
Adieu, dear Mr. Fields; say everything for me to Mr. and Mrs.
Ticknor, and Mr. and Mrs. Norton. How much I should like to see you!
Ever faithfully yours, M.R.M.
(February, 1850.)
You will have thought me either dead or dying, my dear Mr. Fields,
for ungrateful I hope you could not think me to such a friend as
yourself, but in truth I have been in too much trouble and anxiety
to write. This is the story: I live alone, and my servants become,
as they are in France, and ought, I think, always to be, really and
truly part of my family. A most sensible young woman, my own maid,
who waits upon me and walks out with me, (we have another to do the
drudgery of our cottage,) has a little fatherless boy who is the pet
of the house. I wonder whether you saw him during the glimpse we had
of you! He is a fair-haired child of six years old, singularly quick
in intellect, and as bright in mind and heart and temper as a
fountain in the sun. He is at school in Reading, and, the small-pox
raging there like a pestilence, they sent him home to us to be out
of the way. The very next week my man-servant was seized with it,
after vaccination of course. Our medical friend advised me to send
him away, but that was, in my view of things, out of the question;
so we did the best we could,--my own maid, who is a perfect Sister
of Charity in all cases of illness, sitting up with him for seven
nights following, for one or two were requisite during the delirium,
and we could not get a nurse for love or money, and when he became
better, then, as we had dreaded, our poor little boy was struck
down. However, it has pleased God to spare him, and, after a long
struggle, he is safe from the disorder and almost restored to his
former health. But we are still under a sort of quarantine, for,
although people pretend to believe in vaccination, they avoid the
house as if the plague were in it, and stop their carriages at the
end of the village and send inquiries and cards, and in my mind they
are right. To say nothing of Reading, there have been above thirty
severe cases, after vaccination, in our immediate neighborhood, five
of them fatal. I had been inoculated after the old style, my maid
had had the small-pox the natural way and the only one who escaped
was a young girl who had been vaccinated three times, the last two
years ago. Forgive this long story; it was necessary to excuse my
most unthankful silence, and may serve as an illustration of the way
a disease, supposed to be all but exterminated, is making head again
in England.
Thank you a thousand and a thousand times for your most delightful
books. Mr. Whipple's Lectures are magnificent, and your own Boston
Book could not, I think, be beaten by a London Book, certainly not
approached by the collected works of any other British
city,--Edinburgh, for example.
Mr. Bennett is most grateful for your kindness, and Mrs. Browning
will be no less enchanted at the honor done her husband. It is most
creditable to America that they think more of our thoughtful poets
than the English do themselves.
Two female friends of mine--Mrs. Acton Tindal, a young beauty as
well as a woman of genius, and a Miss Julia Day, whom I have never
seen, but whose verses show extraordinary purity of thought,
feeling, and expression--have been putting forth books. Julia Day's
second series she has done me the honor to inscribe to me,
notwithstanding which I venture to say how very much I admire it,
and so I think would you. Henry Chorley is going to be a happy man.
All his life long he has been dying to have a play acted, and now he
has one coming out at the Surrey Theatre, over Blackfriars Bridge.
He lives much among fine people, and likes the notion of a Faubourg
audience. Perhaps he is right. I am not at all afraid of the play,
which is very beautiful,--a blank-verse comedy full of truth and
feeling. I don't know if you know Henry Chorley. He is the friend of
Robert Browning, and the especial favorite of John Kenyon, and has
always been a sort of adopted nephew of mine. Poor Mrs. Hemans loved
him well; so did a very different person, Lady Blessington,--so that
altogether you may fancy him a very likeable person; but he is much
more,--generous, unselfish, loyal, and as true as steel, worth all
his writings a thousand times over. If my house be in such condition
as to allow of my getting to London to see "Old Love and New
Fortune," I shall consult with Mr. Lucas about the time of sitting
to him for a portrait, as I have promised to do; for, although there
be several extant, not one is passably like. John Lucas is a man of
so much taste that he will make a real old woman's picture of it,
just with my every-day look and dress.
Will you make my most grateful thanks to Mr. Whipple, and also to
the author of "Greenwood Leaves," which I read with great pleasure,
and say all that is kindest and most respectful for me to Mr. and
Mrs. George Ticknor. I shall indeed expect great delight from his
book.
Ever, dear Mr. Fields, most gratefully yours,