P.S. All this time I have not said a word of "The Wonder Book."
Thanks again and again. Who was the Mr. Blackstone mentioned in "The
Scarlet Letter" as riding like a myth in New England History, and
what his arms? A grandson of Judge Blackstone, a friend of mine,
wishes to know.
(March, 1852.)
I can never enough thank you, dearest Mr. Fields, for your kind
recollection of me in such a place as the Eternal City. But you
never forget any whom you make happy in your friendship, for that is
the word; and therefore here in Europe or across the Atlantic, you
will always remain.... Your anecdote of the ---- is most
characteristic. I am very much afraid that he is only a poet, and
although I fear the last person in the world to deny that that is
much, I think that to be a really great man needs something more. I
am sure that you would not have sympathized with Wordsworth. I do
hope that you will see Beranger when in Paris. He is the one man in
France (always excepting Louis Napoleon, to whom I confess the
interest that all women feel in strength and courage) whom I should
earnestly desire to know well. In the first place, I think him by
far the greatest of living poets, the one who unites most completely
those two rare things, impulse and finish. In the next, I admire
his admirable independence and consistency, and his generous feeling
for fallen greatness. Ah, what a truth he told, when he said that
Napoleon was the greatest poet of modern days! I should like to have
the description of Beranger from your lips. Mrs. Browning ... has
made acquaintance with Madame Sand, of whom her account is most
striking and interesting. But George Sand is George Sand, and
Beranger is Beranger.
Thank you, dear friend, for your kind interest in my book. It has
found far more favor than I expected, and I think, ever since the
week after its publication, I have received a dozen of letters daily
about it, from friends and strangers,--mostly strangers,--some of
very high accomplishments, who will certainly be friends. This is
encouragement to write again, and we will have a talk about it when
you come. I should like your advice. One thing is certain, that this
work has succeeded, and that the people who like it best are
precisely those whom one wishes to like it best, the lovers of
literature. Amongst other things, I have received countless volumes
of poetry and prose,--one little volume of poetry written under the
name of Mary Maynard, of the greatest beauty, with the vividness and
picturesqueness of the new school, combined with infinite
correctness and clearness, that rarest of all merits nowadays. Her
real name I don't know, she has only thought it right to tell me
that Mary Maynard was not the true appellation (this is between
ourselves). Her own family know nothing of the publication, which
seems to have been suggested by her and my friend, John Ruskin. Of
course, she must have her probation, but I know of no young writer
so likely to rival your new American school. I sent your gift-books
of Hawthorne, yesterday, to the Walters of Bearwood, who had never
heard of them! Tell him that I have had the honor of poking him into
the den of the Times, the only civilized place in England where they
were barbarous enough not to be acquainted with "The Scarlet
Letter." I wonder what they'll think of it. It will make them stare.
They come to see me, for it is full two months since I have been in
the pony-chaise. I was low, if you remember, when you were here, but
thought myself getting better, was getting better. About Christmas,
very damp weather came on, or rather very wet weather, and the damp
seized my knee and ankles and brought back such an attack of
rheumatism that I cannot stand upright, walk quite double, and am
often obliged to be lifted from step to step up stairs. My medical
adviser (a very clever man) says that I shall get much better when
warm weather comes, but for weeks and weeks we have had east-winds
and frost. No violets, no primroses, no token of spring. A little
flock of ewes and lambs, with a pretty boy commonly holding a lamb
in his arms, who drives his flock to water at the pond opposite my
window, is the only thing that gives token of the season. I am quite
mortified at this on your account, for April, in general a month of
great beauty here, will be as desolate as winter. Nevertheless you
must come and see me, you and Mr. and Mrs. Bennoch, and perhaps you
can continue to stay a day or two, or to come more than once. I want
to see as much of you as I can, and I must change much, if I be in
any condition to go to London, even upon the only condition on which
I ever do go, that is, into lodgings, for I never stay anywhere; and
if I were to go, even to one dear and warm-hearted friend, I should
affront the very many other friends whose invitations I have refused
for so many years. I hope to get at Mr. Kingsley; but I have seen
little of him this winter. We are five miles asunder; his wife has
been ill; and my fear of an open carriage, or rather the medical
injunction not to enter one, has been a most insuperable objection.
We are, as we both said, summer neighbors. However, I will try that
you should see him. He is well worth knowing. Thank you about Mr.
Blackstone. He is worth knowing too, in a different way, a very
learned and very clever man (you will find half Dr. Arnold's letters
addressed to him), as full of crotchets as an egg is full of meat,
fond of disputing and contradicting, a clergyman living in the house
where Mrs. Trollope _was raised_, and very kind after his own
fashion. One thing that I should especially like would be that you
should see your first nightingale amongst our woody lanes. To be
sure, these winds can never last till then. Mr. ---- is coming here
on Sunday. He always brings rain or snow, and that will change the
weather. You are a person who ought to bring sunshine, and I suppose
you do more than metaphorically; for I remember that both times I
have had the happiness to see you--a summer day and a winter
day--were glorious. Heaven bless you, dear friend! May all the
pleasure ... return upon your own head! Even my little world is
charmed at the prospect of seeing you again. If you come to Reading
by the Great Western you could return later and make a longer day,
and yet be no longer from home.
Ever faithfully yours, M.R.M.
Swallowfield, April 27, 1852.
How can I thank you half enough, dearest Mr. Fields, for all your
goodness! To write to me the very day after reaching Paris, to think
of me so kindly! It is what I never can repay. I write now not to
trouble you for another letter, but to remind you that, as soon as
possible after your return to England, I hope to see you and Mr. and
Mrs. Bennoch here. Heaven grant the spring may come to meet you! At
present I am writing in an east-wind, which has continued two months
and gives no sign of cessation. Professor Airy says it will continue
five weeks longer. Not a drop of rain has fallen in all that time.
We have frosts every night, the hedges are as bare as at Christmas,
flowers forget to blow, or if they put forth miserable, infrequent,
reluctant blossoms, have no heart, and I have only once heard the
nightingale in this place where they abound, and not yet seen a
swallow in the spot which takes name from their gatherings. It
follows, of course, that the rheumatism, covered by a glut of wet
weather, just upon the coming in of the new year, is fifty times
increased by the bitter season,--a season which has no parallel in
my recollection. I can hardly sit down when standing, or rise from
my chair without assistance, walk quite double, and am lifted up
stairs step by step by my man-servant. I thought, two years ago, I
could walk fifteen or sixteen miles a day! O, I was too proud of my
activity! I am sure we are smitten in our vanities. However, you
will bring the summer, which is, they say, to do me good; and even
if that should fail, it will do me some good to see you, that is
quite certain. Thank you for telling me about the Galignani, and
about the kind American reception of my book; some one sent me a New
York paper (the Tribune, I think), full of kindness, and I do assure
you that to be so heartily greeted by my kinsmen across the Atlantic
is very precious to me. From the first American has there come
nothing but good-will. However, the general kindness here has taken
me quite by surprise. The only fault found was with the title,
which, as you know, was no doing of mine; and the number of private
letters, books, verses, (commendatory verses, as the old poets have
it), and tributes of all sorts, and from all manner of persons, that
I receive every day is something quite astonishing.
Our great portrait-painter, John Lucas, certainly the first painter
of female portraits now alive, has been down here to take a portrait
for engraving. He has been most successful. It is looking better, I
suppose, than I ever do look; but not better than under certain
circumstances--listening to a favorite friend, for example--I
perhaps might look. The picture is to go to-morrow into the
engraver's hands, and I hope the print will be completed before your
departure; also they are engraving, or are about to engrave, a
miniature taken of me when I was a little girl between three and
four years old. They are to be placed side by side, the young child
and the old withered woman, ---- a skull and cross-bones could
hardly be a more significant _memento mori_! I have lost my near
neighbor and most accomplished friend, Sir Henry Russell, and many
other friends, for Death has been very busy this winter, and Mr.
Ware is gone! He had sent me his "Zenobia," "from the author," and
for that very reason, I suppose, some one had stolen it; but I had
replaced both that and the letters from Rome, and sent them to Mr.
Kingsley as models for his "Hypatia." He has them still. He had
never heard of them till I named them to him. They seem to me very
fine and classical, just like the best translations from some great
Latin writer. And I have been most struck with Edgar Poe, who has
been republished, prose and poetry, in a shilling volume called
"Readable Books." What a deplorable history it was!--I mean his
own,--the most unredeemed vice that I have met with in the annals of
genius. But he was a very remarkable writer, and must have a niche
if I write again; so must your two poets, Stoddard and Taylor. I am
very sorry you missed Mrs. Trollope; she is a most remarkable woman,
and you would have liked her, I am sure, for her warm heart and her
many accomplishments. I had a sure way to Beranger, one of my dear
friends being a dear friend of his; but on inquiring for him last
week, that friend also is gone to heaven. Do pick up for me all you
can about Louis Napoleon, my one real abiding enthusiasm,--the
enthusiasm of my whole life,--for it began with the Emperor and has
passed quite undiminished to the present great, bold, and able ruler
of France. Mrs. Browning shares it, I think; only she calls herself
cool, which I don't; and another still more remarkable
co-religionist in the L.N. faith is old Lady Shirley (of Alderley),
the writer of that most interesting letter to Gibbon, dated 1792,
published by her father, Lord Sheffield, in his edition of the great
historian's posthumous works. She is eighty-two now, and as active
and vigorous in body and mind, as sixty years ago.
Make my most affectionate love to my friend in the Avenue des Champs
Elysées, and believe me ever, my dear Mr. Fields, most gratefully
and affectionately yours,