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[Illustration: Fanny Kemble]
RECORDS OF A GIRLHOOD
BY
FRANCES ANN KEMBLE
_SECOND EDITION._
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1880.
COPYRIGHT, 1879,
BY
HENRY HOLT & CO.
JOHN A. GRAY, Agent,
TYPE-SETTING MACHINERY,
16 & 18 JACOB STREET,
NEW YORK.
PREFATORY NOTE.
Considerable portions of this work originally appeared in the _Atlantic
Monthly_, but there is added to these a large amount of new matter not
hitherto published, and the whole work has been thoroughly revised.
RECORDS OF A GIRLHOOD.
CHAPTER I.
A few years ago I received from a friend to whom they had been addressed
a collection of my own letters, written during a period of forty years,
and amounting to thousands--a history of my life.
The passion for universal history (_i.e._ any and every body's story)
nowadays seems to render any thing in the shape of personal
recollections good enough to be printed and read; and as the public
appetite for gossip appears to be insatiable, and is not unlikely some
time or other to be gratified at my expense, I have thought that my own
gossip about myself may be as acceptable to it as gossip about me
written by another.
I have come to the garrulous time of life--to the remembering days,
which only by a little precede the forgetting ones. I have much leisure,
and feel sure that it will amuse me to write my own reminiscences;
perhaps reading them may amuse others who have no more to do than I
have. To the idle, then, I offer these lightest of leaves gathered in
the idle end of autumn days, which have succeeded years of labor often
severe and sad enough, though its ostensible purpose was only that of
affording recreation to the public.
* * * * *
There are two lives of my aunt Siddons: one by Boaden, and one by the
poet Campbell. In these biographies due mention is made of my paternal
grandfather and grandmother. To the latter, Mrs. Roger Kemble, I am
proud to see, by Lawrence's portrait of her, I bear a personal
resemblance; and I please myself with imagining that the likeness is
more than "skin deep." She was an energetic, brave woman, who, in the
humblest sphere of life and most difficult circumstances, together with
her husband fought manfully a hard battle with poverty, in maintaining
and, as well as they could, training a family of twelve children, of
whom four died in childhood. But I am persuaded that whatever qualities
of mind or character I inherit from my father's family, I am more
strongly stamped with those which I derive from my mother, a woman who,
possessing no specific gift in such perfection as the dramatic talent of
the Kembles, had in a higher degree than any of them the peculiar
organization of genius. To the fine senses of a savage rather than a
civilized nature, she joined an acute instinct of correct criticism in
all matters of art, and a general quickness and accuracy of perception,
and brilliant vividness of expression, that made her conversation
delightful. Had she possessed half the advantages of education which she
and my father labored to bestow upon us, she would, I think, have been
one of the most remarkable persons of her time.
My mother was the daughter of Captain Decamp, an officer in one of the
armies that revolutionary France sent to invade republican Switzerland.
He married the daughter of a farmer from the neighborhood of Berne. From
my grandmother's home you could see the great Jungfrau range of the
Alps, and I sometimes wonder whether it is her blood in my veins that so
loves and longs for those supremely beautiful mountains.
Not long after his marriage my grandfather went to Vienna, where, on the
anniversary of the birth of the great Empress-King, my mother was born,
and named, after her, Maria Theresa. In Vienna, Captain Decamp made the
acquaintance of a young English nobleman, Lord Monson (afterwards the
Earl of Essex), who, with an enthusiasm more friendly than wise, eagerly
urged the accomplished Frenchman to come and settle in London, where his
talents as a draughtsman and musician, which were much above those of a
mere amateur, combined with the protection of such friends as he could
not fail to find, would easily enable him to maintain himself and his
young wife and child.
In an evil hour my grandfather adopted this advice, and came to England.
It was the time when the emigration of the French nobility had filled
London with objects of sympathy, and society with sympathizers with
their misfortunes. Among the means resorted to for assisting the many
interesting victims of the Revolution, were representations, given under
the direction of Le Texier, of Berquin's and Madame de Genlis's juvenile
dramas, by young French children. These performances, combined with his
own extraordinary readings, became one of the fashionable frenzies of
the day. I quote from Walter Scott's review of Boaden's life of my uncle
the following notice of Le Texier: "On one of these incidental topics we
must pause for a moment, with delighted recollection. We mean the
readings of the celebrated Le Texier, who, seated at a desk, and dressed
in plain clothes, read French plays with such modulation of voice, and
such exquisite point of dialogue, as to form a pleasure different from
that of the theatre, but almost as great as we experience in listening
to a first-rate actor. We have only to add to a very good account given
by Mr. Boaden of this extraordinary entertainment, that when it
commenced Mr. Le Texier read over the _dramatis personæ_, with the
little analysis of character usually attached to each name, using the
voice and manner with which he afterward read the part; and so accurate
was the key-note given that he had no need to name afterward the person
who spoke; the stupidest of the audience could not fail to recognize
them."
Among the little actors of Le Texier's troupe, my mother attracted the
greatest share of public attention by her beauty and grace, and the
truth and spirit of her performances.
The little French fairy was eagerly seized upon by admiring fine ladies
and gentlemen, and snatched up into their society, where she was fondled
and petted and played with; passing whole days in Mrs. Fitzherbert's
drawing-room, and many a half hour on the knees of her royal and
disloyal husband, the Prince Regent, one of whose favorite jokes was to
place my mother under a huge glass bell, made to cover some large group
of precious Dresden china, where her tiny figure and flashing face
produced even a more beautiful effect than the costly work of art whose
crystal covering was made her momentary cage. I have often heard my
mother refer to this season of her childhood's favoritism with the fine
folk of that day, one of her most vivid impressions of which was the
extraordinary beauty of person and royal charm of manner and deportment
of the Prince of Wales, and his enormous appetite: enormous perhaps,
after all, only by comparison with her own, which he compassionately
used to pity, saying frequently, when she declined the delicacies that
he pressed upon her, "Why, you poor child! Heaven has not blessed you
with an appetite." Of the precocious feeling and imagination of the poor
little girl, thus taken out of her own sphere of life into one so
different and so dangerous, I remember a very curious instance, told me
by herself. One of the houses where she was a most frequent visitor, and
treated almost like a child of the family, was that of Lady Rivers,
whose brother, Mr. Rigby, while in the ministry, fought a duel with some
political opponent. Mr. Rigby had taken great notice of the little
French child treated with such affectionate familiarity by his sister,
and she had attached herself so strongly to him that, on hearing the
circumstance of his duel suddenly mentioned for the first time, she
fainted away: a story that always reminded me of the little Spanish girl
Florian mentions in his "Mémoires d'un jeune Espagnol," who, at six
years of age, having asked a young man of upward of five and twenty if
he loved her, so resented his repeating her question to her elder sister
that she never could be induced to speak to him again.
Meantime, while the homes of the great and gay were her constant resort,
the child's home was becoming sadder, and her existence and that of her
parents more precarious and penurious day by day. From my grandfather's
first arrival in London, his chest had suffered from the climate; the
instrument he taught was the flute, and it was not long before decided
disease of the lungs rendered that industry impossible. He endeavored to
supply its place by giving French and drawing lessons (I have several
small sketches of his, taken in the Netherlands, the firm, free delicacy
of which attest a good artist's handling); and so struggled on, under
the dark London sky, and in the damp, foggy, smoky atmosphere, while the
poor foreign wife bore and nursed four children.
It is impossible to imagine any thing sadder than the condition of such
a family, with its dark fortune closing round and over it, and its one
little human jewel, sent forth from its dingy case to sparkle and
glitter, and become of hard necessity the single source of light in the
growing gloom of its daily existence. And the contrast must have been
cruel enough between the scenes into which the child's genius
spasmodically lifted her, both in the assumed parts she performed and in
the great London world where her success in their performance carried
her, and the poor home, where sickness and sorrow were becoming abiding
inmates, and poverty and privation the customary conditions of
life--poverty and privation doubtless often increased by the very outlay
necessary to fit her for her public appearances, and not seldom by the
fear of offending, or the hope of conciliating, the fastidious taste of
the wealthy and refined patrons whose favor toward the poor little
child-actress might prove infinitely helpful to her and to those who
owned her.
The lives of artists of every description in England are not unapt to
have such opening chapters as this; but the calling of a player alone
has the grotesque element of fiction, with all the fantastic
accompaniments of sham splendor thrust into close companionship with the
sordid details of poverty; for the actor alone the livery of labor is a
harlequin's jerkin lined with tatters, and the jester's cap and bells
tied to the beggar's wallet. I have said artist life in England is apt
to have such chapters; artist life everywhere, probably. But it is only
in England, I think, that the full bitterness of such experience is
felt; for what knows the foreign artist of the inexorable element of
Respectability? In England alone is the pervading atmosphere of
respectability that which artists breathe in common with all other
men--respectability, that English moral climate, with its neutral tint
and temperate tone, so often sneered at in these days by its new German
title of Philistinism, so often deserving of the bitterest scorn in some
of its inexpressibly mean manifestations--respectability, the
pre-eminently unattractive characteristic of British existence, but
which, all deductions made for its vulgar alloys, is, in truth, only the
general result of the individual self-respect of individual Englishmen;
a wholesome, purifying, and preserving element in the homes and lives of
many, where, without it, the recklessness bred of insecure means and
obscure position would run miserable riot; a tremendous power of
omnipotent compression, repression, and oppression, no doubt, quite
consistent with the stern liberty whose severe beauty the people of
these islands love, but absolutely incompatible with license, or even
lightness of life, controlling a thousand disorders rampant in societies
where it does not exist; a power which, tyrannical as it is, and
ludicrously tragical as are the sacrifices sometimes exacted by it,
saves especially the artist class of England from those worst forms of
irregularity which characterize the Bohemianism of foreign literary,
artistic, and dramatic life.
Of course the pleasure-and-beauty-loving, artistic temperament, which is
the one most likely to be exposed to such an ordeal as that of my
mother's childhood, is also the one liable to be most injured by it, and
to communicate through its influence peculiar mischief to the moral
nature. It is the price of peril, paid for all that brilliant order of
gifts that have for their scope the exercise of the imagination through
the senses, no less than for that crown of gifts, the poet's passionate
inspiration, speaking to the senses through the imagination.
How far my mother was hurt by the combination of circumstances that
influenced her childhood I know not. As I remember her, she was a frank,
fearless, generous, and unworldly woman, and had probably found in the
subsequent independent exercise of her abilities the shield for these
virtues. How much the passionate, vehement, susceptible, and most
suffering nature was banefully fostered at the same time, I can better
judge from the sad vantage-ground of my own experience.
After six years spent in a bitter struggle with disease and difficulties
of every kind, my grandfather, still a young man, died of consumption,
leaving a widow and five little children, of whom the eldest, my mother,
not yet in her teens, became from that time the bread-winner and sole
support.
Nor was it many years before she established her claim to the
approbation of the general public, fulfilling the promise of her
childhood by performances of such singular originality as to deserve the
name of genuine artistic creations, and which have hardly ever been
successfully attempted since her time: such as "The Blind Boy" and "Deaf
and Dumb;" the latter, particularly, in its speechless power and pathos
of expression, resembling the celebrated exhibitions of Parisot and
Bigottini, in the great tragic ballets in which dancing was a
subordinate element to the highest dramatic effects of passion and
emotion expressed by pantomime. After her marriage, my mother remained
but a few years on the stage, to which she bequeathed, as specimens of
her ability as a dramatic writer, the charming English version of "La
jeune Femme colère," called "The Day after the Wedding;" the little
burlesque of "Personation," of which her own exquisitely humorous
performance, aided by her admirably pure French accent, has never been
equaled; and a play in five acts called "Smiles and Tears," taken from
Mrs. Opie's tale of "Father and Daughter."
She had a fine and powerful voice and a rarely accurate musical ear; she
moved so gracefully that I have known persons who went to certain
provincial promenades frequented by her, only to see her walk; she was a
capital horsewoman; her figure was beautiful, and her face very handsome
and strikingly expressive; and she talked better, with more originality
and vivacity, than any English woman I have ever known: to all which
good gifts she added that of being a first-rate _cook_. And oh, how
often and how bitterly, in my transatlantic household tribulations, have
I deplored that her apron had not fallen on my shoulders or round my
waist! Whether she derived this taste and talent from her French blood,
I know not, but it amounted to genius, and might have made her a
pre-eminent _cordon bleu_, if she had not been the wife, and _cheffe_,
of a poor professional gentleman, whose moderate means were so
skillfully turned to account, in her provision for his modest table,
that he was accused by ill-natured people of indulging in the expensive
luxury of a French cook. Well do I remember the endless supplies of
potted gravies, sauces, meat jellies, game jellies, fish jellies, the
white ranges of which filled the shelves of her store-room--which she
laughingly called her boudoir--almost to the exclusion of the usual
currant jellies and raspberry jams of such receptacles: for she had the
real _bon vivant's_ preference of the savory to the sweet, and left all
the latter branch of the art to her subordinates, confining the exercise
of her own talents, or immediate superintendence, to the production of
the above-named "elegant extracts." She never, I am sorry to say,
encouraged either my sister or myself in the same useful occupation,
alleging that we had what she called better ones; but I would joyfully,
many a time in America, have exchanged all my boarding-school
smatterings for her knowledge how to produce a wholesome and palatable
dinner. As it was, all I learned of her, to my sorrow, was a detestation
of bad cookery, and a firm conviction that that which was exquisite was
both wholesomer and more economical than any other. Dr. Kitchener, the
clever and amiable author of that amusing book, "The Cook's Oracle" (his
name was a _bonâ fide_ appellation, and not a drolly devised appropriate
_nom de plume_, and he was a doctor of physic), was a great friend and
admirer of hers; and she is the "accomplished lady" by whom several
pages of that entertaining kitchen companion were furnished to him.
The mode of opening one of her chapters, "I always bone my meat" (_bone_
being the slang word of the day for steal), occasioned much merriment
among her friends, and such a look of ludicrous surprise and reprobation
from Liston, when he read it, as I still remember.
My mother, moreover, devised a most admirable kind of _jujube_, made of
clarified gum-arabic, honey, and lemon, with which she kept my father
supplied during all the time of his remaining on the stage; he never
acted without having recourse to it, and found it more efficacious in
sustaining the voice and relieving the throat under constant exertion
than any other preparation that he ever tried; this she always made for
him herself.
The great actors of my family have received their due of recorded
admiration; my mother has always seemed to me to have been overshadowed
by their celebrity; my sister and myself, whose fate it has been to bear
in public the name they have made distinguished, owe in great measure to
her, I think, whatever ability has enabled us to do so not unworthily.
I was born on the 27th of November, 1809, in Newman Street, Oxford Road,
the third child of my parents, whose eldest, Philip, named after my
uncle, died in infancy. The second, John Mitchell, lived to distinguish
himself as a scholar, devoting his life to the study of his own language
and the history of his country in their earliest period, and to the
kindred subject of Northern Archæology.
Of Newman Street I have nothing to say, but regret to have heard that
before we left our residence there my father was convicted, during an
absence of my mother's from town, of having planted in my baby bosom the
seeds of personal vanity, while indulging his own, by having an
especially pretty and becoming lace cap at hand in the drawing-room, to
be immediately substituted for some more homely daily adornment, when I
was exhibited to his visitors. In consequence, perhaps, of which, I am a
disgracefully dress-loving old woman of near seventy, one of whose minor
miseries is that she can no longer find _any_ lace cap whatever that is
either pretty or becoming to her gray head. If my father had not been so
foolish then, I should not be so foolish now--perhaps.
The famous French actress, Mlle. Clairon, recalled, for the pleasure of
some foreign royal personage passing through Paris, for one night to the
stage, which she had left many years before, was extremely anxious to
recover the pattern of a certain cap which she had worn in her young
days in "La Coquette corrigée," the part she was about to repeat. The
cap, as she wore it, had been a Parisian rage; she declared that half
her success in the part had been the cap. The milliner who had made it,
and whose fortune it had made, had retired from business, grown old;
luckily, however, she was not dead: she was hunted up and adjured to
reproduce, if possible, this marvel of her art, and came to her former
patroness, bringing with her the identical head-gear. Clairon seized
upon it: "Ah oui, c'est bien cela! c'est bien là le bonnet!" It was on
her head in an instant, and she before the glass, in vain trying to
reproduce with it the well-remembered effect. She pished and pshawed,
frowned and shrugged, pulled the pretty _chiffon_ this way and that on
her forehead; and while so doing, coming nearer and nearer to the
terrible looking-glass, suddenly stopped, looked at herself for a moment
in silence, and then, covering her aged and faded face with her hands,
exclaimed, "Ah, c'est bien le bonnet! mais ce n'est plus la figure!"
Our next home, after Newman Street, was at a place called Westbourne
Green, now absorbed into endless avenues of "palatial" residences, which
scoff with regular-featured, lofty scorn at the rural simplicity implied
by such a name. The site of our dwelling was not far from the Paddington
Canal, and was then so far out of town that our nearest neighbors,
people of the name of Cockrell, were the owners of a charming residence,
in the middle of park-like grounds, of which I still have a faint,
pleasurable remembrance. The young ladies, daughters of Mr. Cockrell,
really made the first distinct mark I can detect on the _tabula rasa_ of
my memory, by giving me a charming pasteboard figure of a little girl,
to whose serene and sweetly smiling countenance, and pretty person, a
whole bookful of painted pasteboard petticoats, cloaks, and bonnets
could be adapted; it was a lovely being, and stood artlessly by a stile,
an image of rustic beauty and simplicity. I still bless the Miss
Cockrells, if they are alive, but if not, their memory for it!
Of the curious effect of dressing in producing the _sentiment_ of a
countenance, no better illustration can be had than a series of caps,
curls, wreaths, ribbons, etc., painted so as to be adaptable to one
face; the totally different _character_ imparted by a helmet, or a
garland of roses, to the same set of features, is a "caution" to
irregular beauties who console themselves with the fascinating variety
of their _expression_.
At this period of my life, I have been informed, I began, after the
manner of most clever children, to be exceedingly troublesome and
unmanageable, my principal crime being a general audacious contempt for
all authority, which, coupled with a sweet-tempered, cheerful
indifference to all punishment, made it extremely difficult to know how
to obtain of me the minimum quantity of obedience indispensable in the
relations of a tailless monkey of four years and its elders. I never
cried, I never sulked, I never resented, lamented, or repented either my
ill-doings or their consequences, but accepted them alike with a
philosophical buoyancy of spirit which was the despair of my poor
bewildered trainers.
Being hideously decorated once with a fool's cap of vast dimensions, and
advised to hide, not my "diminished head," but my horrible disgrace,
from all beholders, I took the earliest opportunity of dancing down the
carriage-drive to meet the postman, a great friend of mine, and attract
his observation and admiration to my "helmet," which I called aloud upon
all wayfarers also to contemplate, until removed from an elevated bank I
had selected for this public exhibition of myself and my penal costume,
which was beginning to attract a small group of passers-by.
My next malefactions were met with an infliction of bread and water,
which I joyfully accepted, observing, "Now I am like those poor dear
French prisoners that everybody pities so." Mrs. Siddons at that time
lived next door to us; she came in one day when I had committed some of
my daily offenses against manners or morals, and I was led, nothing
daunted, into her awful presence, to be admonished by her.
Melpomene took me upon her lap, and, bending upon me her "controlling
frown," discoursed to me of my evil ways in those accents which curdled
the blood of the poor shopman, of whom she demanded if the printed
calico she purchased of him "would wash." The tragic tones pausing, in
the midst of the impressed and impressive silence of the assembled
family, I tinkled forth, "What beautiful eyes you have!" all my small
faculties having been absorbed in the steadfast upward gaze I fixed upon
those magnificent orbs. Mrs. Siddons set me down with a smothered laugh,
and I trotted off, apparently uninjured by my great-aunt's solemn moral
suasion.
A dangerous appeal, of a higher order, being made to me by my aunt's
most intimate friend, Mrs. F----, a not very judicious person, to the
effect, "Fanny, why don't you pray to God to make you better?"
immediately received the conclusive reply, "So I do, and he makes me
worse and worse." Parents and guardians should be chary of handling the
deep chords upon whose truth and strength the highest harmonies of the
fully developed soul are to depend.
In short, I was as hopelessly philosophical a subject as Madame Roland,
when, at six years old, receiving her penal bread and water with the
comment, "Bon pour la digestion!" and the retributive stripes which this
drew upon her, with the further observation, "Bon pour la circulation!"
In spite of my "wickedness," as Topsy would say, I appear to have been
not a little spoiled by my parents, and an especial pet and favorite of
all their friends, among whom, though I do not remember him at this
early period of our acquaintance, I know was Charles Young, that most
kindly good man and pleasant gentleman, one of whose many amiable
qualities was a genuine love for little children. He was an intimate
friend of Mrs. Siddons and her brothers, and came frequently to our
house; if the elders were not at home, he invariably made his way to the
nursery, where, according to the amusing description he has often since
given me of our early intercourse, one of his great diversions was to
make me fold my little fat arms--not an easy performance for small
muscles--and with a portentous frown, which puckered up my mouth even
more than my eyebrows, receive from him certain awfully unintelligible
passages from "Macbeth;" replying to them, with a lisp that must have
greatly heightened the tragic effect of this terrible dialogue, "_My
handth are of oo tolor_" (My hands are of your color). Years--how
many!--after this first lesson in declamation, dear Charles Young was
acting Macbeth for the last time in London, and I was his "wicked wife;"
and while I stood at the side scenes, painting my hands and arms with
the vile red stuff that confirmed the bloody-minded woman's words, he
said to me with a smile, "Ah ha! _My handth are of oo tolor._"
Mr. Young's own theatrical career was a sort of curious contradiction
between his physical and mental endowments. His very handsome and
regular features of the Roman cast, and deep, melodious voice, were
undoubtedly fine natural requisites for a tragic actor, and he succeeded
my uncle in all his principal parts, if not with any thing like equal
genius, with a dignity and decorum that were always highly acceptable.
He had, however, no tragic mental element whatever with these very
decided external qualifications for tragedy; but a perception of and
passion for humor, which he indulged in private constantly, in the most
entertaining and surprising manner. Ludicrous stories; personal mimicry;
the most admirable imitation of national accent--Scotch, Irish, and
French (he spoke the latter language to perfection, and Italian very
well); a power of grimace that equaled Grimaldi, and the most
irresistibly comical way of resuming, in the midst of the broadest
buffoonery, the stately dignity of his own natural countenance, voice,
and manner.
He was a cultivated musician, and sang French and Italian with taste and
expression, and English ballads with a pathos and feeling only inferior
to that of Moore and Mrs. Arkwright, with both which great masters of
musical declamation he was on terms of friendly intimacy. Mr. Young was
a universal favorite in the best London society, and an eagerly sought
guest in pleasant country-houses, where his zeal for country sports, his
knowledge of and fondness for horses, his capital equestrianism, and
inexhaustible fund of humor, made him as popular with the men as his
sweet, genial temper, good breeding, musical accomplishments, and
infinite drollery did with the women.
Mr. Young once told Lord Dacre that he made about four thousand pounds
sterling per annum by his profession; and as he was prudent and moderate
in his mode of life, and, though elegant, not extravagant in his tastes,
he had realized a handsome fortune when he left the stage.
Mr. Young passed the last years of his life at Brighton, and I never
visited that place without going to see him, confined as he latterly was
to his sofa with a complication of painful diseases and the weight of
more than seventy years. The last time I saw him in his drawing-room he
made me sit on a little stool by his sofa--it was not long after my
father, his life-long friend and contemporary's death--and he kept
stroking my hair, and saying to me, "You look so like a child--a good
child." I saw him but once more after this; he was then confined to his
bed. It was on Sunday; he lay propped with pillows in an ample flannel
dressing-gown, with a dark-blue velvet skull-cap on his head, and I
thought I had never seen his face look more strikingly noble and
handsome; he was reading the church service and his Bible, and kept me
by him for some time. I never saw him again.
As a proof of the little poetical imagination which Mr. Young brought to
some of his tragic performances, I remember his saying of his dress in
Cardinal Wolsey, "Well, I never could associate any ideas of grandeur
with this old woman's red petticoat." It would be difficult to say what
his best performances were, for he had never either fire, passion, or
tenderness; but never wanted propriety, dignity, and a certain stately
grace. Sir Pertinax McSycophant and Iago were the best things I ever saw
him act, probably because the sardonic element in both of them gave
partial scope to his humorous vein.
Not long after this we moved to another residence, still in the same
neighborhood, but near the churchyard of Paddington church, which was a
thoroughfare of gravel walks, cutting in various directions the green
turf, where the flat tombstones formed frequent "play-tables" for us;
upon these our nursery-maid, apparently not given to melancholy
meditations among the tombs, used to allow us to manufacture whole
delightful dinner sets of clay plates and dishes (I think I could make
such now), out of which we used to have feasts, as we called them, of
morsels of cake and fruit.
At this time I was about five years old, and it was determined that I
should be sent to the care of my father's sister, Mrs. Twiss, who kept a
school at Bath, and who was my godmother. On the occasion of my setting
forth on my travels, my brother John presented me with a whole
collection of children's books, which he had read and carefully
preserved, and now commended to my use. There were at least a round
dozen, and, having finished reading them, it occurred to me that to make
a bonfire of them would be an additional pleasure to be derived from
them; and so I added to the intellectual recreation they afforded me the
more _sensational_ excitement of what I called "a blaze;" a proceeding
of which the dangerous sinfulness was severely demonstrated to me by my
new care-takers.
Camden Place, Bath, was one of the lofty terraces built on the charming
slopes that surround the site of the Aquæ Solis of the Romans, and here
my aunt Twiss kept a girls' school, which participated in the favor
which every thing belonging to, or even remotely associated with, Mrs.
Siddons received from the public. It was a decidedly "fashionable
establishment for the education of young ladies," managed by my aunt,
her husband, and her three daughters. Mrs. Twiss was, like every member
of my father's family, at one time on the stage, but left it very soon,
to marry the grim-visaged, gaunt-figured, kind-hearted gentleman and
profound scholar whose name she at this time bore, and who, I have heard
it said, once nourished a hopeless passion for Mrs. Siddons. Mrs. Twiss
bore a soft and mitigated likeness to her celebrated sister; she had
great sweetness of voice and countenance, and a graceful, refined,
feminine manner, that gave her great advantages in her intercourse with
and influence over the young women whose training she undertook. Mr.
Twiss was a very learned man, whose literary labors were, I believe,
various, but whose "Concordance of Shakespeare" is the only one with
which I am acquainted. He devoted himself, with extreme assiduity, to
the education of his daughters, giving them the unusual advantage of a
thorough classic training, and making of two of them learned women in
the more restricted, as well as the more general, sense of the term.
These ladies were what so few of their sex ever are, _really well
informed_; they knew much, and they knew it all thoroughly; they were
excellent Latin scholars and mathematicians, had read immensely and at
the same time systematically, had prodigious memories stored with
various and well-classed knowledge, and, above all, were mistresses of
the English language, and spoke and wrote it with perfect purity--an
accomplishment out of fashion now, it appears to me, but of the
advantage of which I retain a delightful impression in my memory of
subsequent intercourse with those excellent and capitally educated
women. My relations with them, all but totally interrupted for upward of
thirty years, were renewed late in the middle of my life and toward the
end of theirs, when I visited them repeatedly at their pretty rural
dwelling near Hereford, where they enjoyed in tranquil repose the easy
independence they had earned by honorable toil. There, the lovely
garden, every flower of which looked fit to take the first prize at a
horticultural show, the incomparable white strawberries, famous
throughout the neighborhood, and a magnificent Angola cat, were the
delights of my out-of-door life; and perfect kindness and various
conversation, fed by an inexhaustible fund of anecdote, an immense
knowledge of books, and a long and interesting acquaintance with
society, made the indoor hours passed with these quiet old lady
governesses some of the most delightful I have ever known. The two
younger sisters died first; the eldest, surviving them, felt the sad
solitude of their once pleasant home at "The Laurels" intolerable, and
removed her residence to Brighton, where, till the period of her death,
I used to go and stay with her, and found her to the last one of the
most agreeable companions I have ever known.
At the time of my first acquaintance with my cousins, however, neither
their own studies nor those of their pupils so far engrossed them as to
seclude them from society. Bath was then, at certain seasons, the gayest
place of fashionable resort in England; and, little consonant as such a
thing would appear at the present day with the prevailing ideas of the
life of a teacher, balls, routs, plays, assemblies, the Pump Room, and
all the fashionable dissipations of the place, were habitually resorted
to by these very "stylish" school-mistresses, whose position at one
time, oddly enough, was that of leaders of "the ton" in the pretty
provincial capital of Somersetshire. It was, moreover, understood, as
part of the system of the establishment, that such of the pupils as were
of an age to be introduced into society could enjoy the advantage of the
chaperonage of these ladies, and several did avail themselves of it.
What profit I made under these kind and affectionate kinsfolk I know
not; little, I rather think, ostensibly; perhaps some beneath the
surface, not very manifest either to them or myself at the time; but
painstaking love sows more harvests than it wots of, wherever or
whenever (or if never) it reaps them.
I did not become versed in any of my cousins' learned lore, or
accomplished in the lighter labors of their leisure hours--to wit, the
shoemaking, bread-seal manufacturing, and black and white Japan, table
and screen painting, which produced such an indescribable medley of
materials in their rooms, and were fashionable female idle industries of
that day.
Remote from the theatre, and all details of theatrical life, as my
existence in my aunt's school was, there still were occasional
infiltrations of that element which found their way into my small
sphere. My cousin John Twiss, who died not very long ago, an elderly
general in her Majesty's service, was at this time a young giant,
studying to become an engineer officer, whose visits to his home were
seasons of great delight to the family in general, not unmixed on my
part with dread; for a favorite diversion of his was enacting my uncle
John's famous rescue of Cora's child, in "Pizarro," with me clutched in
one hand, and exalted to perilous proximity with the chandelier, while
he rushed across the drawing-rooms, to my exquisite terror and triumph.
I remember, too, his sisters, all three remarkably tall women (the
eldest nearly six feet high, a portentous petticoat stature), amusing
themselves with putting on, and sweeping about the rooms in, certain
regal mantles and Grecian draperies of my aunt Mrs. Whitelock's, an
actress, like the rest of the Kembles, who sought and found across the
Atlantic a fortune and celebrity which it would have been difficult for
her to have achieved under the disadvantage of proximity to, and
comparison with, her sister, Mrs. Siddons. But I suppose the dramatic
impression which then affected me with the greatest and most vivid
pleasure was an experience which I have often remembered, when reading
Goethe's "Dichtung und Wahrheit," and the opening chapters of "Wilhelm
Meister." Within a pleasant summer afternoon's walk from Bath, through
green meadows and by the river's side, lay a place called Claverton
Park, the residence of a family of the name of A----. I remember nothing
of the house but the stately and spacious hall, in the middle of which
stood a portable theatre, or puppet-show, such as Punch inhabits, where
the small figures, animated with voice and movement by George A----, the
eldest son of the family, were tragic instead of grotesque, and where,
instead of the squeaking "Don Giovanni" of the London pavement,
"Macbeth" and similar solemnities appeared before my enchanted eyes. The
troupe might have been the very identical puppet performers of Harry
Rowe, the famous Yorkshire trumpeter. These, I suppose, were the first
plays I ever saw. Those were pleasant walks to Claverton, and pleasant
days at Claverton Hall! I wish Hans Breitmann and his "Avay in die
Ewigkeit" did not come in, like a ludicrous, lugubrious burden, to all
one's reminiscences of places and people one knew upward of fifty years
ago.
I have been accused of having acquired a bad habit of _punning from
Shakespeare!_--a delightful idea, that made me laugh till I cried the
first time it was suggested to me. If so, I certainly began early to
exhibit a result, of which the cause was, in some mysterious way, long
subsequent to the effect; unless the Puppet Plays of Claverton inspired
my wit. However that may be, I developed at this period a decided
faculty for punning, and that is an unusual thing at that age. Children
have considerable enjoyment of humor, as many of their favorite fairy
and other stories attest; they are often themselves extremely droll and
humorous in their assumed play characters and the stories they invent to
divert their companions; but punning is a not very noble species of wit;
it partakes of mental dexterity, requires neither fancy, humor, nor
imagination, and deals in words with double meanings, a subtlety very
little congenial to the simple and earnest intelligence of childhood.
_Les enfans terribles_ say such things daily, and make their
grandmothers' caps stand on end with their precocious astuteness; but
the clever sayings of most clever children, repeated and reported by
admiring friends and relations, are, for the most part, simply the
result of unused faculties, exercising themselves in, to them, an unused
world; only therefore surprising to worn-out faculties, which have
almost ceased to exercise themselves in, to them, an almost worn-out
world.
To Miss B---- I was indebted for the first doll I remember possessing--a
gorgeous wax personage, in white muslin and cherry-colored ribbons, who,
by desire of the donor, was to be called Philippa, in honor of my uncle.
I never loved or liked dolls, though I remember taking some pride in the
splendor of this, my first-born. They always affected me with a grim
sense of being a mockery of the humanity they were supposed to
represent; there was something uncanny, not to say ghastly, in the doll
existence and its mimicry of babyhood to me, and I had a nervous
dislike, not unmixed with fear, of the smiling simulacra that girls are
all supposed to love with a species of prophetic maternal instinct.
The only member of my aunt Twiss's family of whom I remember at this
time little or nothing was the eldest son, Horace, who in subsequent
years was one of the most intimate and familiar friends of my father and
mother, and who became well known as a clever and successful public man,
and a brilliant and agreeable member of the London society of his day.
My stay of a little more than a year at Bath had but one memorable
event, in its course, to me. I was looking one evening, at bedtime, over
the banisters, from the upper story into the hall below, with tiptoe
eagerness that caused me to overbalance myself and turn over the rail,
to which I clung on the wrong side, suspended, like Victor Hugo's
miserable priest to the gutter of Notre Dame, and then fell four stories
down on the stone pavement of the hall. I was not killed, or apparently
injured, but whether I was not really irreparably damaged no human being
can possibly tell.
My next memories refer to a residence which my parents were occupying
when I returned to London, called Covent Garden Chambers, now, I
believe, celebrated as "Evans's," and where, I am told, it is
confidently affirmed that I was born, which I was not; and where, I am
told, a picture is shown that is confidently affirmed to be mine, which
it is not. My sister Adelaide was born in Covent Garden Chambers, and
the picture in question is an oil sketch, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, of my
cousin Maria Siddons; quite near the truth enough for history, private
or public. It was while we were living here that Mrs. Siddons returned
to the stage for one night, and acted Lady Randolph for my father's
benefit. Of course I heard much discourse about this, to us, important
and exciting event, and used all my small powers of persuasion to be
taken to see her.
My father, who loved me very much, and spoiled me not a little, carried
me early in the afternoon into the market-place, and showed me the dense
mass of people which filled the whole Piazza, in patient expectation of
admission to the still unopened doors. This was by way of proving to me
how impossible it was to grant my request. However that might then
appear, it was granted, for I was in the theatre at the beginning of the
performance; but I can now remember nothing of it but the appearance of
a solemn female figure in black, and the tremendous _roar_ of public
greeting which welcomed her, and must, I suppose, have terrified my
childish senses, by the impression I still retain of it; and this is the
only occasion on which I saw my aunt in public.
Another circumstance, connected in my mind with Covent Garden Chambers,
was a terrible anguish about my youngest brother, Henry, who was for
some hours lost. He was a most beautiful child, of little more than
three years old, and had been allowed to go out on the door-steps, by an
exceedingly foolish little nursery-maid, to look at the traffic of the
great market-place. Returning without him, she declared that he had
refused to come in with her, and had run to the corner of Henrietta
Street, as she averred, where she had left him, to come and fetch
authoritative assistance.
The child did not come home, and all search for him proved vain
throughout the crowded market and the adjoining thoroughfares, thronged
with people and choked with carts and wagons, and swarming with the
blocked-up traffic, which had to make its way to and from the great mart
through avenues far narrower and more difficult of access than they are
now. There were not then, either, those invaluable beings, policemen,
standing at every corner to enforce order and assist the helpless. These
then were not; and no inquiry brought back any tidings of the poor
little lost boy. My mother was ill, and I do not think she was told of
the child's disappearance, but my father went to and fro with the face
and voice of a distracted man; and I well remember the look with which
he climbed a narrow outside stair leading only to a rain-water cistern,
with the miserable apprehension that his child might have clambered up
and fallen into it. The neighborhood was stirred with sympathy for the
agony of the poor father, and pitying gossip spreading the news through
the thronged market-place, where my father's name and appearance were
familiar enough to give a strong personal feeling to the compassion
expressed. A baker's boy, lounging about, caught up the story of the
lost child, and described having seen a "pretty little chap with curly
hair, in a brown holland pinafore," in St. James's Square. Thither the
searchers flew, and the child was found, tired out with his
self-directed wandering, but apparently quite contented, fast asleep on
the door-step of one of the lordly houses of that aristocratic square.
He was so remarkably beautiful that he must have attracted attention
before long, and _might_ perhaps have been restored to his home; but God
knows what an age of horror and anguish was lived through by my father
and my poor aunt Dall in that short, miserable space of time till he was
found.
My aunt Dall, of whom I now speak for the first time, was my mother's
sister, and had lived with us, I believe, ever since I was born. Her
name was Adelaide, but the little fellow whose adventure I have just
related, stumbling over this fine Norman appellation, turned it into
Idallidy, and then conveniently shortened it of its two extremities and
made it Dall, by which title she was called by us, and known to all our
friends, and beloved by all who ever spoke or heard it. Her story was as
sad a one as could well be; yet to my thinking she was one of the
happiest persons I have ever known, as well as one of the best. She was
my mother's second sister, and as her picture, taken when she was
twenty, shows (and it was corroborated by her appearance till upward of
fifty), she was extremely pretty. Obliged, as all the rest of her family
were, to earn her own bread, and naturally adopting the means of doing
so that they did, she went upon the stage; but I can not conceive that
her nature can ever have had any affinity with her occupation. She had a
robust and rather prosaic common-sense, opposed to any thing exaggerated
or sentimental, which gave her an excellent judgment of character and
conduct, a strong genial vein of humor which very often made her
repartees witty as well as wise, and a sunny sweetness of temper and
soundness of moral nature that made her as good as she was easy and
delightful to live with. Whenever any thing went wrong, and she was
"vexed past her patience," she used to sing; it was the only indication
by which we ever knew that she was what is termed "out of sorts." She
had found employment in her profession under the kindly protection of
Mr. Stephen Kemble, my father's brother, who lived for many years at
Durham, and was the manager of the theatre there, and, according to the
fashion of that time, traveled with his company, at stated seasons, to
Newcastle, Sunderland, and other places, which formed a sort of
theatrical circuit in the northern counties, throughout which he was
well known and generally respected.
In his company my aunt Dall found employment, and in his daughter, Fanny
Kemble, since well known as Mrs. Robert Arkwright, an inseparable friend
and companion. My aunt lived with Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Kemble, who were
excellent, worthy people. They took good care of the two young girls
under their charge, this linsey-woolsey Rosalind and Celia--their own
beautiful and most rarely endowed daughter, and her light-hearted,
lively companion; and I suppose that a merrier life than that of these
lasses, in the midst of their quaint theatrical tasks and homely
household duties, was seldom led by two girls in any sphere of life.
They learned and acted their parts, devised and executed, with small
means and great industry, their dresses; made pies and puddings, and
patched and darned, in the morning, and by dint of paste and rouge
became heroines in the evening; and withal were well-conducted, good
young things, full of the irrepressible spirits of their age, and
turning alike their hard home work and light stage labor into fun. Fanny
had inherited the beauty of her father's family, which in her most
lovely countenance had a character of childlike simplicity and serene
sweetness that made it almost angelic.
Far on in middle age she retained this singularly tender beauty, which
added immensely to the exquisite effect of her pathetic voice in her
incomparable rendering of the ballads she composed (the poetry as well
as the music being often her own), and to which her singing of them gave
so great a fashion at one time in the great London world. It was in vain
that far better musicians, with far finer voices, attempted to copy her
inimitable musical recitation; nobody ever sang like her, and still less
did anybody ever look like her while she sang. Practical jokes of very
doubtful taste were the fashion of that day, and remembering what
wonderfully coarse and silly proceedings were then thought highly
diverting by "vastly genteel" people, it is not, perhaps, much to be
wondered at that so poor a piece of wit as this should have furnished
diversion to a couple of light-hearted girls, with no special
pretensions to elegance or education. Once they were driving together in
a post-chaise on the road to Newcastle, and my aunt, having at hand in a
box part of a military equipment intended for some farce, accoutred her
upper woman in a soldier's cap, stock, and jacket, and, with heavily
corked mustaches, persisted in embracing her companion, whose frantic
resistance, screams of laughter, and besmirched cheeks, elicited
comments of boundless amazement, in broad north-country dialect, from
the market folk they passed on the road, to whom they must have appeared
the most violent runaway couple that ever traveled.
Liston, the famous comedian, was at this time a member of the Durham
company, and though he began his career there by reciting Collins's "Ode
to the Passions," attired in a pea-green coat, buckskins, top-boots, and
powder, with a scroll in his hand, and followed up this essay of his
powers with the tragic actor's battle-horse, the part of Hamlet, he soon
found his peculiar gift to lie in the diametrically opposite direction
of broad farce. Of this he was perpetually interpolating original
specimens in the gravest performances of his fellow-actors; on one
occasion suddenly presenting to Mrs. Stephen Kemble, as she stood
disheveled at the side scene, ready to go on the stage as Ophelia in her
madness, a basket with carrots, turnips, onions, leeks, and pot-herbs,
instead of the conventional flowers and straws of the stage maniac,
which sent the representative of the fair Ophelia on in a broad grin,
with ill-suppressed fury and laughter, which must have given quite an
original character of verisimilitude to the insanity she counterfeited.
On another occasion he sent all the little chorister boys on, in the
lugubrious funeral procession in "Romeo and Juliet," with pieces of
brown paper in their hands to wipe their tears with.
The suppression of that very dreadful piece of stage pageantry has at
last, I believe, been conceded to the better taste of modern audiences;
but even in my time it was still performed, and an exact representation
of a funeral procession, such as one meets every day in Rome, with
torch-bearing priests, and bier covered with its black-velvet pall,
embroidered with skull and cross-bones, with a corpse-like figure
stretched upon it, marched round the stage, chanting some portion of the
fine Roman Catholic requiem music. I have twice been in the theatre when
persons have been seized with epilepsy during that ghastly exhibition,
and think the good judgment that has discarded such a mimicry of a
solemn religious ceremony highly commendable.
Another evening, Liston, having painted Fanny Kemble's face like a
clown's, posted her at one of the stage side doors to confront her
mother, poor Mrs. Stephen Kemble, entering at the opposite one to
perform some dismally serious scene of dramatic pathos, who, on suddenly
beholding this grotesque apparition of her daughter, fell into
convulsions of laughter and coughing, and half audible exclamations of
"Go away, Fanny! I'll tell your father, miss!" which must have had the
effect of a sudden seizure of madness to the audience, accustomed to the
rigid decorum of the worthy woman in the discharge of her theatrical
duties.
Long after these provincial exploits, and when he had become the
comedian _par excellence_ of the English stage, for which eminence
nature and art had alike qualified him by the imperturbable gravity of
his extraordinarily ugly face, which was such an irresistibly comical
element in his broadest and most grotesque performances, Mr. Liston used
to exert his ludicrous powers of tormenting his fellow-actors in the
most cruel manner upon that sweet singer, Miss Stephens (afterward
Countess of Essex). She had a curious nervous trick of twitching her
dress before she began to sing; this peculiarity was well known to all
her friends, and Liston, who certainly was one of them, used to agonize
the poor woman by standing at the side scene, while the symphony of her
pathetic ballads was being played, and indicating by his eyes and
gestures that something was amiss with the trimming or bottom of her
dress; when, as invariably as he chose to play the trick, poor Miss
Stephens used to begin to twitch and catch at her petticoat, and half
hysterical, between laughing and crying, would enchant and entrance her
listeners with her exquisite voice and pathetic rendering of "Savourneen
Deelish" or "The Banks of Allan Water."