London what it has been hereabout. Scarce a tinge of Green on the
hedgerows; scarce a Bird singing (only once the Nightingale, with broken
Voice), and no flowers in the Garden but the brave old Daffydowndilly,
and Hyacinth--which I scarce knew was so hardy. I am quite pleased to
find how comfortably they do in my Garden, and look so Chinese gay. Two
of my dear Blackbirds have I found dead--of Cold and Hunger, I suppose;
but one is even now singing--across that Funeral Bell. This is so, as I
write, and tell you--Well: we have Sunshine at last--for a day--'thankful
for small Blessings,' etc.
I think I have felt a little sadder since March 31 that shut my
seventieth Year behind me, while my Brother was--in some such way as I
shall be if I live two or three years longer--'Parlons d'autres'--that I
am still able to be sincerely yours
E. F.G.
LVI.
WOODBRIDGE: _May_ 18, [1879.]
MY DEAR MRS. KEMBLE,
By this Post you ought to receive my Crabbe Book, about which I want your
Opinion--not as to your own liking, which I doubt not will be more than
it deserves: but about whether it is best confined to Friends, who will
like it, as you do, more or less out of private prejudice--Two points in
particular I want you to tell me;
(1) Whether the Stories generally seem to you to be curtailed so much
that they do not leave any such impression as in the Original. That is
too long and tiresome; but (as in Richardson) its very length serves to
impress it on the mind:--My Abstract is, I doubt not, more readable: but,
on that account partly, leaving but a wrack behind. What I have done
indeed is little else than one of the old Review Articles, which gave a
sketch of the work, and let the author fill in with his better work.
Well then I want to know--(2) if you find the present tense of my Prose
Narrative discordant with the past tense of the text. I adopted it
partly by way of further discriminating the two: but I may have
misjudged: Tell me: as well as any other points that strike you. You can
tell me if you will--and I wish you would--whether I had better keep the
little _Opus_ to ourselves or let it take its chance of getting a few
readers in public. You may tell me this very plainly, I am sure; and I
shall be quite as well pleased to keep it unpublished. It is only a
very, very, little Job, you see: requiring only a little Taste, and Tact:
and if they have failed me--_Voila_! I had some pleasure in doing my
little work very dexterously, I thought; and I did wish to draw a few
readers to one of my favourite Books which nobody reads. And, now that I
look over it, I fancy that I may have missed my aim--only that my Friends
will like, etc. Then, I should have to put some Preface to the Public:
and explain how many omissions, and some transpositions, have occasioned
the change here and there of some initial particle where two originally
separated paragraphs are united; some use made of Crabbe's original MS.
(quoted in the Son's Edition;) and all such confession to no good, either
for my Author or me. I wish you could have just picked up the Book at a
Railway Stall, knowing nothing of your old Friend's hand in it. But that
cannot be; tell me then, divesting yourself of all personal Regard: and
you may depend upon it you will--save me some further bother, if you bid
me let publishing alone. I don't even know of a Publisher: and won't
have a favour done me by 'ere a one of them,' as Paddies say. This is a
terrible Much Ado about next to Nothing. 'Parlons,' etc.
Blanche Donne wrote me you had been calling in Weymouth Street: that you
had been into Hampshire, and found Mrs. Sartoris better--Dear Donne seems
to have been pleased and mended by his Children coming about him. I say
but little of my Brother's Death. {149} We were very good friends, of
very different ways of thinking; I had not been within side his lawn
gates (three miles off) these dozen years (no fault of his), and I did
not enter them at his Funeral--which you will very likely--and
properly--think wrong. He had suffered considerably for some weeks: but,
as he became weaker, and (I suppose) some narcotic Medicine--O blessed
Narcotic!--soothed his pains, he became dozily happy. The Day before he
died, he opened his Bed-Clothes, as if it might be his Carriage Door, and
said to his Servant 'Come--Come inside--I am going to meet them.'
Voila une petite Histoire. Et voila bien assez de mes Egoismes. Adieu,
Madame; dites-moi tout franchement votre opinion sur ce petit Livre; ah!
vous n'en pouvez parler autrement qu'avec toute franchise--et croyez moi,
tout aussi franchement aussi,
Votre ami devoue
E. F.G.
LVII.
WOODBRIDGE: _May_ 22, [1879.]
MY DEAR MRS. KEMBLE,
I must thank you for your letter; I was, beforehand, much of your
Opinion; and, unless I hear very different advice from the two others
whom I have consulted--Spedding, the All-wise--(I mean that), and Aldis
Wright, experienced in the Booksellers' world, I shall very gladly abide
by your counsel--and my own. You (I do believe) and a few friends who
already know Crabbe, will not be the worse for this 'Handybook' of one of
his most diffuse, but (to me) most agreeable, Books. That name
(Handybook), indeed, I had rather thought of calling the Book, rather
than 'Readings'--which suggests readings aloud, whether private or
public--neither of which I intended--simply, Readings to oneself. I, who
am a poor reader in any way, have found it all but impossible to read
Crabbe to anybody. So much for that--except that, the Portrait I had
prepared by way of frontispiece turns out to be an utter failure, and
that is another satisfactory reason for not publishing. For I
particularly wanted this Portrait, copied from a Picture by Pickersgill
which was painted in 1817, when these Tales were a-writing, to correct
the Phillips Portrait done in the same year, and showing Crabbe with his
company Look--not insincere at all--but not at all representing the
_writer_. When Tennyson saw Laurence's Copy of this Pickersgill--here,
at my house here--he said--'There I recognise the Man.'
If you were not the truly sincere woman you are, I should have thought
that you threw in those good words about my other little Works by way of
salve for your _dictum_ on this Crabbe. But I know it is not so. I
cannot think what 'rebuke' I gave you to 'smart under' as you say. {151a}
If you have never read Charles Tennyson (Turner's) Sonnets, I should like
to send them to you to read. They are not to be got now: and I have
entreated Spedding to republish them with Macmillan, with such a preface
of his own--congenial Critic and Poet--as would discover these Violets
now modestly hidden under the rank Vegetation of Browning, Swinburne, and
Co. Some of these Sonnets have a Shakespeare fancy in them:--some rather
puerile--but the greater part of them, pure, delicate, beautiful, and
quite original. {151b} I told Mr. Norton (America) to get them published
over the water if no one will do so here.
Little did I think that I should ever come to relish--old Sam Rogers! But
on taking him up the other day (with Stothard's Designs, to be sure!) I
found a sort of Repose from the hatchet-work School, of which I read in
the Athenaeum.
I like, you know, a good Murder; but in its place--
'The charge is prepared; the Lawyers are met--
The Judges all ranged, a terrible Show' {152}--
only the other night I could not help reverting to that sublime--yes!--of
Thurtell, sending for his accomplice Hunt, who had saved himself by
denouncing Thurtell--sending for him to pass the night before Execution
with perfect Forgiveness--Handshaking--and 'God bless you--God bless
you--you couldn't help it--I hope you'll live to be a good man.'
You accept--and answer--my Letters very kindly: but this--pray do
think--is an answer--verily by return of Post--to yours.
Here is Summer! The leaves suddenly shaken out like flags. I am
preparing for Nieces, and perhaps for my Sister Andalusia--who used to
visit my Brother yearly.
Your sincere Ancient
E. F.G.
LVIII.
WOODBRIDGE: _August_ 4, [1879].
MY DEAR MRS. KEMBLE:
Two or three days, I think, after receiving your last letter, I posted an
answer addrest to the Poste Restante of--Lucerne, was it?--anyhow, the
town whose name you gave me, and no more. Now, I will venture through
Coutts, unwilling as I am to trouble their Highnesses--with whom my
Family have banked for three--if not four--Generations. Otherwise, I do
not think they would be troubled with my Accounts, which they attend to
as punctually as if I were 'my Lord;' and I am now their last Customer of
my family, I believe, though I doubt not they have several Dozens of my
Name in their Books--for Better or Worse.
What now spurs me to write is--an Article {153} I have seen in a Number
of Macmillan for February, with very honourable mention of your Brother
John in an Introductory Lecture on Anglo Saxon, by Professor Skeat. If
you have not seen this 'Hurticle' (as Thackeray used to say) I should
like to send it to you; and will so do, if you will but let me know where
it may find you.
I have not been away from this place save for a Day or two since last you
heard from me. In a fortnight I may be going to Lowestoft along with my
friends the Cowells.
I take great Pleasure in Hawthorne's Journals--English, French, and
Italian--though I cannot read his Novels. They are too thickly detailed
for me: and of unpleasant matter too. We of the Old World beat the New,
I think, in a more easy manner; though Browning & Co. do not bear me out
there. And I am sincerely yours
E. F.G.
LIX.
LOWESTOFT, _Septr._ l8, [1879.]
MY DEAR MRS. KEMBLE,
Your last letter told me that you were to be back in England by the
middle of this month. So I write some lines to ask if you _are_ back,
and where to be found. To be sure, I can learn that much from some
Donne: to the Father of whom I must commit this letter for any further
Direction. But I will also say a little--very little having to
say--beyond asking you how you are, and in what Spirits after the great
Loss you have endured. {154}
Of that Loss I heard from Blanche Donne--some while, it appears, before
you heard of it yourself. I cannot say that it was surprising, however
sad, considering the terrible Illness she had some fifteen years ago. I
will say no more of it, nor of her, of whom I could say so much; but
nothing that would not be more than superfluous to you.
It did so happen, that, the day before I heard of her Death, I had
thought to myself that I would send her my Crabbe, as to my other
friends, and wondered that I had not done so before. I should have sent
off the Volume for Donne to transmit when--Blanche's Note came.
After writing of this, I do not think I should add much more, had I much
else to write about. I will just say that I came to this place five
weeks ago to keep company with my friend Edward Cowell, the Professor; we
read Don Quixote together in a morning and chatted for two or three hours
of an evening; and now he is gone away to Cambridge and [has] left me to
my Nephews and Nieces here. By the month's end I shall be home at
Woodbridge, whither any Letter you may please to write me may be
addressed.
I try what I am told are the best Novels of some years back, but find I
cannot read any but Trollope's. So now have recourse to Forster's Life
of Dickens--a very good Book, I still think. Also, Eckermann's
Goethe--almost as repeatedly to be read as Boswell's Johnson--a German
Johnson--and (as with Boswell) more interesting to me in Eckermann's
Diary than in all his own famous works.
Adieu: Ever yours sincerely
E. F.G.
I am daily--hourly--expecting to hear of the Death of another Friend
{155}--not so old a Friend, but yet a great loss to me.
LX.
11 MARINE TERRACE, LOWESTOFT,
_Septr._ 24, [1879 ]
MY DEAR MRS. KEMBLE,
I was to have been at Woodbridge before this: and your Letter only
reached me here yesterday. I have thought upon your desire to see me as
an old Friend of yourself and yours; and you shall not have the trouble
of saying so in vain. I should indeed be perplext at the idea of your
coming all this way for such a purpose, to be shut up at an Hotel with no
one to look in on you but myself (for you would not care for my Kindred
here)--and my own Woodbridge House would require a little time to set in
order, as I have for the present lost the services of one of my 'helps'
there. What do you say to my going to London to see you instead of your
coming down to see me? I should anyhow have to go to London soon; and I
could make my going sooner, or as soon as you please. Not but, if you
want to get out of London, as well as to see me, I can surely get my
house right in a little time, and will gladly do so, should you prefer
it. I hope, indeed, that you will not stay in London at this time of
year, when so many friends are out of it; and it has been my thought--and
hope, I may say--that you have already betaken yourself to some pleasant
place, with a pleasant Friend or two, which now keeps me from going at
once to look for you in London, after a few Adieus here. Pray let me
know your wishes by return of Post: and I will do my best to meet them
immediately: being
Ever sincerely yours
E. F.G.
LXI.
WOODBRIDGE: _Sept._ 28, [1879.]
DEAR MRS. KEMBLE:--
I cannot be sure of your Address: but I venture a note--to say that--If
you return to London on Wednesday, I shall certainly run up (the same
day, if I can) to see you before you again depart on Saturday, as your
letter proposes. {157}
But I also write to beg you not to leave your Daughter for ever so short
a while, simply because you had so arranged, and told me of your
Arrangement.
If this Note of mine reach you somehow to morrow, there will be plenty of
time for you to let me know whether you go or not: and, even if there be
not time before Wednesday, why, I shall take no harm in so far as I
really have a very little to do, and moreover shall see a poor Lady who
has just lost her husband, after nearly three years anxious and uncertain
watching, and now finds herself (brave and strong little Woman) somewhat
floored now the long conflict is over. These are the people I may have
told you of whom I have for some years met here and there in
Suffolk--chiefly by the Sea; and we somehow suited one another. {158} He
was a brave, generous, Boy (of sixty) with a fine Understanding, and
great Knowledge and Relish of Books: but he had applied too late in Life
to Painting which he could not master, though he made it his Profession.
A remarkable mistake, I always thought, in so sensible a man.
Whether I find you next week, or afterward (for I promise to find you any
time you appoint) I hope to find you alone--for twenty years' Solitude
make me very shy: but always your sincere
E. F.G.
LXII.
LITTLE GRANGE: WOODBRIDGE. _October_ 7, [1879]
DEAR MRS. KEMBLE,
When I got home yesterday, and emptied my Pockets, I found the precious
Enclosure which I had meant to show, and (if you pleased) to give you. A
wretched Sketch (whether by me or another, I know not) of your Brother
John in some Cambridge Room, about the year 1832-3, when he and I were
staying there, long after Degree time--he, studying Anglo-Saxon, I
suppose--reading something, you see, with a glass of Ale on the table--or
old Piano-forte was it?--to which he would sing very well his German
Songs. Among them,
{Music Score: p159.jpg}
Do you remember? I afterwards associated it with some stray verses
applicable to one I loved.
'Heav'n would answer all your wishes,
Were it much as Earth is here;
Flowing Rivers full of Fishes,
And good Hunting half the Year.'
Well:--here is the cause of this Letter, so soon after our conversing
together, face to face, in Queen Anne's Mansions. A strange little After-
piece to twenty years' Separation.
And now, here are the Sweet Peas, and Marigolds, sown in the Spring,
still in a faded Blossom, and the Spirit that Tennyson told us of fifty
years ago haunting the Flower-beds, {160} and a Robin singing--nobody
else.
And I am to lose my capital Reader, he tells me, in a Fortnight, no Book-
binding surviving under the pressure of Bad Times in little Woodbridge.
'My dear Fitz, there is no Future for little Country towns,' said Pollock
to me when he came here some years ago.
But my Banker here found the Bond which he had considered unnecessary,
safe in his Strong Box:--and I am your sincere Ancient
E. F.G.
Burn the poor Caricature if offensive to you. The 'Alexander' profile
was become somewhat tarnished then.
LXIII.
WOODBRIDGE: _Oct._ 27, [1879.]
MY DEAR MRS. KEMBLE,
I am glad to think that my Regard for you and yours, which I know to be
sincere, is of some pleasure to you. Till I met you last in London, I
thought you had troops of Friends at call; I had not reflected that by
far the greater number of them could not be Old Friends; and those you
cling to, I feel, with constancy.
I and my company (viz. Crabbe, etc.) could divert you but little until
your mind is at rest about Mrs. Leigh. I shall not even now write more
than to say that a Letter from Mowbray, which tells of the kind way you
received him and his Brother, says also that his Father is well, and
expects Valentia and Spouse in November.
This is all I will write. You will let me know by a line, I think, when
that which you wait for has come to pass. A Post Card with a few words
on it will suffice.
You cross over your Address (as usual) but I do my best to find you.
Ever yours
E. F.G.
LXIV.
WOODBRIDGE: _Octr._ [? _Nov._] 4/79.
MY DEAR LADY:--
I need not tell you that I am very glad of the news your note of Sunday
tells me: and I take it as a pledge of old Regard that you told it me so
soon: even but an hour after that other Kemble was born. {161}
I know not if the short letter which I addressed to 4 Everton Place,
Leamington (as I read it in your former Letter), reached you. Whatever
the place be called, I expect you are still there; and there will be for
some time longer. As there may be some anxiety for some little time, I
shall not enlarge as usual on other matters; if I do not hear from you, I
shall conclude that all is going on well, and shall write again.
Meanwhile, I address this Letter to London, you see, to make sure of you
this time: and am ever yours sincerely
E. F.G.
By the by, I think the time is come when, if you like me well enough, you
may drop my long Surname, except for the external Address of your letter.
It may seem, but is not, affectation to say that it is a name I dislike;
{162} for one reason, it has really caused me some confusion and trouble
with other more or less Irish bodies, being as common in Ireland as
'Smith,' etc., here--and particularly with 'Edward'--I suppose because of
the patriot Lord who bore [it]. I should not, even if I made bold to
wish so to do, propose to treat you in the same fashion; inasmuch as I
like your Kemble name, which has become as it were classical in England.
LXV.
WOODBRIDGE: _Nov._ 13/79.
MY DEAR LADY,
Now that your anxieties are, as I hope, over, and that you are returned,
as I suppose, to London, I send you a budget. First: the famous
_Belvidere Hat_; which I think you ought to stick into your Records.
{163a} Were I a dozen years younger, I should illustrate all the Book in
such a way; but, as my French song says, 'Le Temps est trop court pour de
si longs projets.'
Next, you behold a Photo of Carlyle's Niece, which he bid her send me two
or three years ago in one of her half-yearly replies to my Enquiries.
What a shrewd, tidy, little Scotch Body! Then you have her last letter,
telling of her Uncle, and her married Self, and thanking me for a little
Wedding gift which I told her was bought from an Ipswich Pawnbroker
{163b}--a very good, clever fellow, who reads Carlyle, and comes over
here now and then for a talk with me. Mind, when you return me the
Photo, that you secure it around with your Letter paper, that the Postman
may not stamp into it. Perhaps this trouble is scarce worth giving you.
'Clerke Sanders' has been familiar to me these fifty years almost; since
Tennyson used to repeat it, and 'Helen of Kirkconnel,' at some Cambridge
gathering. At that time he looked something like the Hyperion shorn of
his Beams in Keats' Poem: with a Pipe in his mouth. Afterwards he got a
touch, I used to say, of Haydon's Lazarus. Talking of Keats, do not
forget to read Lord Houghton's Life and Letters of him: in which you will
find what you may not have guessed from his Poetry (though almost
unfathomably deep in that also) the strong, masculine, Sense and Humour,
etc., of the man more akin to Shakespeare, I am tempted to think, in a
perfect circle of Poetic Faculties, than any Poet since.
Well: the Leaves which hung on more bravely than ever I remember are at
last whirling away in a Cromwell Hurricane--(not quite that, neither)--and
my old Man says he thinks Winter has set in at last. We cannot complain
hitherto. Many summer flowers held out in my Garden till a week ago,
when we dug up the Beds in order for next year. So now little but the
orange Marigold, which I love for its colour (Irish and Spanish) and
Courage, in living all Winter through. Within doors, I am again at my
everlasting Crabbe! doctoring his Posthumous Tales _a la mode_ of those
of 'The Hall,' to finish a Volume of simple 'Selections' from his other
works: all which I will leave to be used, or not, whenever old Crabbe
rises up again: which will not be in the Lifetime of yours ever
E. F.G.
I dared not decypher all that Mrs. Wister wrote in my behalf--because I
knew it must be sincere! Would she care for my Eternal Crabbe?
LXVI.
[_Nov._ 1879.]
MY DEAR LADY,
I must say a word upon a word in your last which really pains me--about
yours and Mrs. Wister's sincerity, etc. Why, I do most thoroughly
believe in both; all I meant was that, partly from your own old personal
regard for me, and hers, perhaps inherited from you, you may both very
sincerely over-rate my little dealings with other great men's thoughts.
For you know full well that the best Head may be warped by as good a
Heart beating under it; and one loves the Head and Heart all the more for
it. Now all this is all so known to you that I am vexed you will not at
once apply it to what I may have said. I do think that I have had to say
something of the same sort before now; and I do declare I will not say it
again, for it is simply odious, all this talking of oneself.
Yet one thing more. I did go to London on this last occasion purposely
to see you at that particular time: for I had not expected Mrs. Edwards
to be in London till a Fortnight afterward, until two or three days after
I had arranged to go and meet you the very day you arrived, inasmuch as
you had told me you were to be but a few days in Town.
There--there! Only believe me; my sincerity, Madam; and--_Voila ce qui
est fait_. _Parlons_, etc.
Well: Mrs. Edwards has opened an Exhibition of her husband's works in
Bond Street--contrary to my advice--and, it appears, rightly contrary:
for over 300 pounds of them were sold on the first private View day,
{166} and Tom Taylor, the great Art Critic (who neither by Nature nor
Education can be such, 'cleverest man in London,' as Tennyson once said
he was), has promised a laudatory notice in the omnipotent Times, and
then People will flock in like Sheep. And I am very glad to be proved a
Fool in the matter, though I hold my own opinion still of the merit of
the Picture part of the Show. Enough! as we Tragic Writers say: it is
such a morning as I would not have sacrificed indoors or in
letter-writing to any one but yourself, and on the subject named.
BELIEVE ME YOURS SINCERELY.
LXVII.
WOODBRIDGE: _Decr._ 10, [1879.]
MY DEAR LADY,