I said at the beginning of the last chapter, that during the period,
some of the recollections of which I had been chronicling, the two
greatest sorrows I had ever known had befallen me. A third came
subsequently. But that belonged to a period of my life which does not
fall within the limits I have assigned to these reminiscences. Of the
first, the death of my mother, I have spoken. The other, the death of
my wife, followed it at no great distance, and was of course a far
more terrible one. She had been ailing--so long indeed that I had
become habituated to it, and thought that she would continue to live
as she had been living. We had been travelling in Switzerland, in the
autumn of 1864; and I remember very vividly her saying on board the
steamer, by which we were leaving Colico at the head of the Lake of
Como, on our return to Italy, as she turned on the deck to take a last
look at the mountains, "Good-bye, you big beauties!" I little thought
it was her last adieu to them; but I thought afterwards that she
probably may have had some misgiving that it was so.
But it was not till the following spring that I began to realise that
I must lose her. She died on the 13th of April, 1865.
I have spoken of her as she was when she became my wife, but without
much hope of representing her to those who never had the happiness
of knowing her, as she really was, not only in person, which matters
little, but in mind and intellectual powers. And to tell what she was
in heart, in disposition--in a word, in soul--would be a far more
difficult task.
In her the aesthetic faculties were probably the most markedly
exceptional portion of her intellectual constitution. The often cited
dictum, _les races se feminisent_ was not exemplified in her case.
From her mother, an accomplished musician, she inherited her very
pronounced musical[1] faculty and tendencies, and, I think, little
else. From her father, a man of very varied capacities and culture,
she drew much more. How far, if in any degree, this fact may be
supposed to have been connected in the relation of cause and effect,
with the other fact that her mother was more than fifty years of age
at the time of her birth, I leave to the speculations of physiological
inquirers. In bodily constitution her inheritance from her father's
mother was most marked. To that source must be traced, I conceive, the
delicacy of constitution, speaking medically, which deprived me of
her at a comparatively early age; for both father and mother were
of thoroughly healthy and strong constitutions. But if it may be
suspected that the Brahmin Sultana, her grandmother, bequeathed her
her frail diathesis, there was no doubt or difficulty in tracing to
that source the exterior delicacy of formation which characterised
her. I remember her telling me that the last words a dying sister of
her mother's ever spoke, when Theodosia standing by the bedside placed
her hand on the dying woman's forehead were, "Ah, that is Theo's
little Indian hand," And truly the slender delicacy of hand and foot,
which characterised her, were unmistakably due to her Indian descent.
In person she in nowise resembled either father or mother, unless it
were possibly her father in the conformation and shape of the teeth.
[Footnote 1: But this she might also have got from her father, who was
passionately fond of music, and was a very respectable performer on
the violin.]
I have already in a previous chapter of these reminiscences given
a letter from Mrs. Browning in which she speaks of Theodosia's
"multiform faculty." And the phrase, which so occurring, might in
the case of almost any other writer be taken as a mere epistolary
civility, is in the case of one whose absolute accuracy of veracity
never swerved a hair's-breadth, equivalent to a formal certificate of
the fact to the best of her knowledge. And she knew my wife well both
before and after the marriage of either of them. Her faculty was truly
_multiform_.
She was not a great musician; but her singing had for great musicians
a charm which the performances of many of their equals in the art
failed to afford them. She had never much voice, but I have rarely
seen the hearer to whose eyes she could not bring the tears. She had
a spell for awakening emotional sympathy which I have never seen
surpassed, rarely indeed equalled.
For language she had an especial talent, was dainty in the use of
her own, and astonishingly apt in acquiring--not merely the use for
speaking as well as reading purposes, but--the delicacies of other
tongues. Of Italian, with which she was naturally _most_ conversant,
she was recognised by acknowledged experts to be a thoroughly
competent critic.
She published, now many years ago, in the _Athenaeum_, some
translations from the satirist Giusti, which any intelligent reader
would, I think, recognise to be cleverly done. But none save the very
few in this country, who know and can understand the Tuscan poet's
works in the original, can at all conceive the difficulty of
translating him into tolerable English verse. And I have no hesitation
in asserting, that any competent judge, who is such by virtue of
understanding the original, would pronounce her translations of Giusti
to be a masterpiece, which very few indeed of contemporary men or
women could have produced. I have more than once surprised her in
tears occasioned by her obstinate struggles with some passage of
the intensely idiomatic satirist, which she found it almost--but
eventually not quite--impossible to render to her satisfaction.
She published a translation of Niccolini's _Arnaldo da Brescia_, which
won the cordial admiration and friendship of that great poet. And
neither Niccolini's admiration nor his friendship were easily won. He
was, when we knew him at Florence in his old age, a somewhat crabbed
old man, not at all disposed to make new acquaintances, and, I think,
somewhat soured and disappointed, not certainly with the meed of
admiration he had won from his countrymen as a poet, but with the
amount of effect which his writings had availed to produce in the
political sentiments and then apparent destinies of the Italians.
But he was conquered by the young Englishwoman's translation of
his favourite, and, I think, his finest work. It is a thoroughly
trustworthy and excellent translation; but the execution of it was
child's play in comparison with the translations from Giusti.
She translated a number of the curiously characteristic _stornelli_ of
Tuscany, and especially of the Pistoja mountains. And here again it
is impossible to make any one, who has never been familiar with these
_stornelli_ understand the especial difficulty of translating them. Of
course the task was a slighter and less significant one than that of
translating Giusti, nor was the same degree of critical accuracy and
nicety in rendering shades of meaning called for. But there were
not--are not--many persons who could cope with the especial
difficulties of the attempt as successfully as she did. She produced
also a number of pen-and-ink drawings illustrating these _stornelli_,
which I still possess, and in which the spirited, graphic, and
accurately truthful characterisation of the figures could only have
been achieved by an artist very intimately acquainted _intus et in
cute_ with the subjects of her pencil.
She published a volume on the Tuscan revolution, which was very
favourably received. The _Examiner_, among other critics--all of them,
to the best of my remembrance, more or less favourable--said of these
_Letters_ (for that was the form in which the work was published, all
of them, I think, having been previously printed in the _Athenaeum_),
"Better political information than this book gives may be had in
plenty; but it has a special value which we might almost represent by
comparing it to the report of a very watchful nurse, who, without the
physician's scientific knowledge, uses her own womanly instinct in
observing every change of countenance and every movement indicating
the return of health and strength to the patient ... She has written a
very vivid and truthful account." The critic has very accurately, and,
it may be said, graphically, assigned its true value and character to
the book.
I have found it necessary in a former chapter, where I have given a
number of interesting and characteristic letters from Landor to my
wife's father, to insert a deprecatory _caveat_ against the exuberant
enthusiasm of admiration which led him to talk of the probability of
her eclipsing the names and fame of other poets, including in this
estimate Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The preposterousness of this
no human being would have felt more strongly than Theodosia Garrow,
except Theodosia Trollope, when such an estimate had become yet
more preposterous. But Landor, whose unstinted admiration of Mrs.
Browning's poetry is vigorously enough expressed in his own strong
language, as may be seen in Mr. Forster's pages, would not have
dreamed of instituting any such comparison at a later day. But that
his critical acumen and judgment were not altogether destroyed by the
enthusiasm of his friendship, is, I think, shown by the following
little poem by Theodosia Trollope, written a few years after the birth
of her child. I don't think I need apologise for printing it.
The original MS. of it before me gives no title; nor do I remember
that the authoress ever assigned one to the verses.
I.
"In the noon-day's golden pleasance,
Little Bice, baby fair,
With a fresh and flowery presence,
Dances round her nurse's chair,
In the old grey loggia dances, haloed by her shining hair.
II.
"Pretty pearl in sober setting,
Where the arches garner shade!
Cones of maize like golden netting,
Fringe the sturdy colonnade,
And the lizards pertly pausing glance across the balustrade.
III.
"Brown cicala drily proses,
Creaking the hot air to sleep,
Bounteous orange flowers and roses,
Yield the wealth of love they keep,
To the sun's imperious ardour in a dream of fragrance deep.
IV.
"And a cypress, mystic hearted,
Cleaves the quiet dome of light
With its black green masses parted
But by gaps of blacker night,
Which the giddy moth and beetle circle round in dubious flight.
V.
"Here the well chain's pleasant clanging,
Sings of coolness deep below;
There the vine leaves breathless hanging,
Shine transfigured in the glow,
And the pillars stare in silence at the shadows which they throw.
VI.
"Portly nurse, black-browed, red-vested,
Knits and dozes, drowsed with heat;
Bice, like a wren gold-crested,
Chirps and teases round her seat,
Hides the needles, plucks the stocking, rolls the cotton o'er her feet.
VII.
"Nurse must fetch a draught of water,
In the glass with painted wings,[1]
Nurse must show her little daughter
All her tale of silver rings,
Dear sweet nurse must sing a couplet--solemn nurse, who _never_
sings!
VIII.
"Blest Madonna! what a clamour!
Now the little torment tries,
Perched on tiptoe, all the glamour
Of her coaxing hands and eyes!
May she hold the glass she drinks from--just one moment, Bice cries.
IX.
"Nurse lifts high the Venice beaker,
Bossed with masks, and flecked with gold,
Scarce in time to 'scape the quicker
Little fingers over-bold,
Craving tendril-like to grasp it, with the will of four years old.
X.
"Pretty wood bird, pecking, flitting,
Round the cherries on the tree.
Ware the scarecrow, grimly sitting,
Crouched for silly things, like thee!
Nurse hath plenty such in ambush. 'Touch not, for it burns,'[2] quoth
she.
XI.
"And thine eyes' blue mirror widens
With an awestroke of belief;
Meekly following that blind guidance,
On thy finger's rosy sheaf,
Blow'st thou softly, fancy wounded, soothing down a painless grief.
XII.
"Nurse and nursling, learner, teacher,
Thus foreshadow things to come,
When the girl shall grow the creature
Of false terrors vain and dumb,
And entrust their baleful fetish with her being's scope and sum.
XIII.
"Then her heart shall shrink and wither,
Custom-straitened like her waist,
All her thought to cower together,
Huddling sheep-like with the rest,
With the flock of soulless bodies on a pattern schooled and laced.
XIV.
"Till the stream of years encrust her
With a numbing mail of stone,
Till her laugh lose half its lustre,
And her truth forswear its tone,
And she see God's might and mercy darkly through a glass alone!
XV.
"While our childhood fair and sacred.
Sapless doctrines doth rehearse,
And the milk of falsehoods acrid,
Burns our babe-lips like a curse,
Cling we must to godless prophets, as the suckling to the nurse.
XVI.
"As the seed time, so the reaping,
Shame on us who overreach,
While our eyes yet smart with weeping,
Hearts so all our own to teach,
Better they and we lay sleeping where the darkness hath no speech!"
[Footnote 1: Those unacquainted with the forms of the old decorated
Venetian glass will hardly understand the phrase in the text. Those
who know them will feel the accuracy of the picture.]
[Footnote 2: "_Non toccare che brucia_," Tuscan proverb.]
It is impossible for any but those who know--not Florence, but--rural
Tuscany well, to appreciate the really wonderful accuracy and
picturesque perfection of the above scene from a Tuscan afternoon. But
I think many others will feel the lines to be good. In the concluding
stanzas, in which the writer draws her moral, there are weak lines.
But in the first eleven, which paint her picture, there is not one.
Every touch tells, and tells with admirable truth and vividness of
presentation. In one copy of the lines which I have, the name is
changed from Bice to "Flavia," and this, I take it, because of the
entire non-applicability of the latter stanzas to the child, whose
rearing was in her own hands. But the picture of child and nurse--how
life-like none can tell, but I--was the picture of her "baby
Beatrice," and the description simply the reproduction of things seen.
I think I may venture to print also the following lines. They are, in
my opinion, far from being equal in merit to the little poem printed
above, but they are pretty, and I think sufficiently good to do no
discredit to her memory. Like the preceding, they have no title.
I.
"I built me a temple, and said it should be
A shrine, and a home where the past meets me,
And the most evanescent and fleeting of things,
Should be lured to my temple, and shorn of their wings,
To adorn my palace of memories.
II.
"The pearl of the morning, the glow of the noon,
The play of the clouds as they float past the moon,
The most magical tint on the snowiest peak,
They are gone while I gaze, fade before you can speak,
Yet they stay in my palace of memories.
III.
"I stood in the midst of the forest trees,
And heard the sweet sigh of the wandering breeze,
And this with the tinkle of heifer bells,
As they trill on the ear from the dewy dells,
Are the sounds in my palace of memories.
IV.
"I looked in the face of a little child,
With its fugitive dimples and eyes so wild,
It springs off with a bound like a wild gazelle,
It is off and away, but I've caught my[1]
And here's mirth for my palace of memories.
V.
"In the morning we meet on a mountain height,
And we walk and converse till the fall of night,
We hold hands for a moment, then pass on our way,
But that which I've got from the friend of a day,
I'll keep in my palace of memories."
[Footnote 1: Word here illegible.]
The verses which Landor praised with enthusiasm so excessive were
most, or I think all of them, published in the annual edited by his
friend Lady Blessington, and were all written before our marriage. I
have many long letters addressed to her by that lady, and several by
her niece Miss Power, respecting them. They always in every instance
ask for "more."
Many of her verses she set to music, especially one little poemlet,
which I remember to this day the tune of, which she called the _Song
of the Blackbird_, and which was, if I remember rightly, made to
consist wholly of the notes uttered by the bird.
Another instance of her "multiform faculty" was her learning landscape
sketching. I have spoken of her figure drawing. And this, I take it,
was the real bent of her talent in that line. But unable to compass
the likeness of a haystack myself, I was desirous of possessing some
record of the many journeys which I designed to take, and eventually
did take with her. And wholly to please me she forthwith made the
attempt, and though her landscape was never equal to her figure
drawing, I possess some couple of hundred of water-colour sketches
done by her from nature on the spot.
I used to say that if I wanted a Sanscrit dictionary, I had only to
put her head straight at it, and let her feel the spur, and it would
have been done!
We lived together seventeen happy years. During the five first, I
think I may say that she lived wholly and solely in, by, and for me.
That she should live for somebody other than herself was an absolute
indefeasible necessity of her nature. During the last twelve years I
shared her heart with her daughter. Her intense worship for her "Baby
Beatrice" was equalled only by--that of all the silliest and all the
wisest women, who have true womanly hearts in their bosoms, for their
children. The worship was, of course, all the more absorbing that the
object of it was unique. I take it that, after the birth of her child,
I came second in her heart. But I was not jealous of little Bice.
I do not think that she would have quite subscribed to the opinion of
Garibaldi on the subject of the priesthood, which I mentioned in a
former chapter--that they ought all to be forthwith put to death. But
all her feelings and opinions were bitterly antagonistic to them. She
was so deeply convinced of the magnitude of the evil inflicted by them
and their Church on the character of the Italians, for whom she ever
felt a great affection, that she was bitter on the subject. And it
is the only subject on which I ever knew her to feel in any degree
bitterly. Many of her verses written during her latter years are
fiercely denunciatory or humorously satirical of the Italian
priesthood, and especially of the Pontifical Government. I wish that
my space permitted me to give further specimens of them here. But I
must content myself with giving one line, which haunts my memory, and
appears to me excessively happy In the accurate truthfulness of its
simile. She is writing of the journey which Pius the Ninth made, and
describing his equipment, says that he started "with strings of cheap
blessings, like glass beads for savages."
With the exception of this strong sentiment my wife was one of the
most tolerant people I ever knew. What she most avoided in those with
whom she associated was, not so much ignorance, or even vulgarity of
manner, as pure native stupidity. But even of that, when the need
arose, she was tolerant. I never knew her in the selection of an
acquaintance, or even of a friend, to be influenced to the extent
of even a hair's-breadth, by station, rank, wealth, fashion, or any
consideration whatever, save personal liking and sympathy, which was,
in her case, perfectly compatible with the widest divergence of views
and opinions on nearly any of the great subjects which most divide
mankind, and even with divergence of rules of conduct. Her own
opinions were the honest results of original thinking, and her conduct
the outcome of the dictates of her own heart--of her heart rather than
of her reasoning powers, or of any code of law--a condition of mind
which might be dangerous to individuals with less native purity of
heart than hers.
As a wife, as a daughter, as a daughter-in-law, as a mother, she was
absolutely irreproachable. In the first relationship she was all in
all to me for seventeen years. She brought sweetness and light into
my life and into my dwelling. She was the angel in the house, if ever
human being was.
Her father became an inmate of our house after the death of his wife
at a great age at Torquay, whither they had returned after the
death of my wife's half-sister, Harriet Fisher. He was a jealously
affectionate, but very exacting father; and few daughters, I think,
could have been more admirable in her affection for him, her attention
to him, her care of him. And I may very safely say that very few
mothers of sons have the fortune of finding such a daughter-in-law.
My mother had been very fond of her before our marriage, and became
afterwards as devotedly attached to her as she was to me, of whom she
knew her to be an indivisible part, while she was to my mother simply
perfect. Her own mother she had always been in the habit of calling by
that name. She always spoke to and of my mother as "mammy." What she
was to her own daughter I have already said. There was somewhat of
the tendency towards "spoiling," which is mostly inseparable from
the adoration which a young mother, of the right sort, feels for her
firstborn child, but she never made any attempt to avert or counteract
my endeavours to prevent such spoiling. When little Bice had to be
punished by solitary confinement for half an hour, she only watched
anxiously for the expiration of the sentence.[1]
[Footnote 1: I do not remember that little Bice ever consoled herself
under the disgrace of such captivity as my present wife has confessed
to me that she did when suffering under the same condemnation. _Her_
method of combining the maintenance of personal dignity with revenge
on the oppressor, was to say to the first person who came to take her
out of prison: "No! you can't come into _my_ parlour!"]
But that her worth, her talent, her social qualities, were recognised
by a wider world than that of her own family, or her own circle of
friends, is testified by the recording stone, which the Municipality
placed on my house at the corner of the Piazza dell' Independenza,
where it may still be seen. Indeed the honour was not undeserved. For
during the whole of her residence in Italy, which nearly synchronised
with the struggle of Italy for her independence and unity, she had
adopted the Italian cause heart and soul, and done what was in her to
do, for its advancement. The honour was rendered the more signal, and
the more acceptable, from the fact that the same had recently been
rendered by the same body to Elizabeth Barrett Browning.