Two young men, officers of a militia regiment, became admirers of the
two young country actresses: how long an acquaintance existed before the
fact became evident that they were seriously paying their addresses to
the girls, I do not know; nor how long the struggle lasted between pride
and conventional respectability on the part of the young men's families
and the pertinacity of their attachment.
Fanny Kemble's suitor, Robert Arkwright, had certainly no pretensions to
dignity of descent, and the old Derbyshire barber, Sir Richard, or his
son could hardly have stood out long upon that ground, though the
immense wealth realized by their ingenuity and industry was abundant
worldly reason for objections to such a match, no doubt.
However that may be, the opposition was eventually overcome by the
determination of the lovers, and they were married; while to the others
a far different fate was allotted. The young man who addressed my aunt,
whose name I do not know, was sent for by his father, a wealthy
Yorkshire squire, who, upon his refusing to give up his mistress,
instantly assembled all the servants and tenants, and declared before
them all that the young gentleman, his son (and supposed heir), was
illegitimate, and thenceforth disinherited and disowned. He enlisted and
went to India, and never saw my aunt again. Mrs. Arkwright went home to
Stoke, to the lovely house and gardens in the Peak of Derbyshire, to
prosperity and wealth, to ease and luxury, and to the love of husband
and children. Later in life she enjoyed, in her fine mansion of Sutton,
the cordial intimacy of the two great county magnates, her neighbors,
the Dukes of Rutland and Devonshire, the latter of whom was her admiring
and devoted friend till her death. In the society of the high-born and
gay and gifted with whom she now mixed, and among whom her singular
gifts made her remarkable, the enthusiasm she excited never impaired the
transparent and childlike simplicity and sincerity of her nature. There
was something very peculiar about the single-minded, simple-hearted
genuineness of Mrs. Arkwright which gave an unusual charm of
unconventionality and fervid earnestness to her manner and conversation.
I remember her telling me, with the most absolute conviction, that she
thought wives were bound implicitly to obey their husbands, for she
believed that at the day of judgment husbands would be answerable for
their wives' souls.
It was in the midst of a life full of all the most coveted elements of
worldly enjoyment, and when she was still beautiful and charming, though
no longer young, that I first knew her. Her face and voice were heavenly
sweet, and very sad; I do not know why she made so profoundly melancholy
an impression upon me, but she was so unlike all that surrounded her,
that she constantly suggested to me the one live drop of water in the
middle of a globe of ice. The loss of her favorite son affected her with
irrecoverable sorrow, and she passed a great portion of the last years
of her life at a place called Cullercoats, a little fishing village on
the north coast, to which when a young girl she used to accompany her
father and mother for rest and refreshment, when the hard life from
which her marriage released her allowed them a few days' respite by the
rocks and sands and breakers of the Northumberland shore. The Duke of
Devonshire, whose infirmity of deafness did not interfere with his
enjoyment of music, was an enthusiastic admirer of Mrs. Arkwright, and
her constant and affectionate friend. Their proximity of residence in
Derbyshire made their opportunities of meeting very frequent, and when
the Arkwrights visited London, Devonshire House was, if they chose it,
their hotel. His attachment to her induced him, towards the end of his
life, to take a residence in the poor little village of Cullercoats,
whither she loved to resort, and where she died. I possess a copy of a
beautiful drawing of a head of Mrs. Arkwright, given to me by the duke,
for whom the original was executed. It is only a head, with the eyes
raised to heaven, and the lips parted, as in the act of singing; and the
angelic sweetness of the countenance may perhaps suggest, to those who
never heard her, the voice that seemed like that face turned to sound.
So Fanny Kemble married, and Adelaide Decamp came and lived with us, and
was the good angel of our home. All intercourse between the two (till
then inseparable companions) ceased for many years, and my aunt began
her new life with a bitter bankruptcy of love and friendship, happiness
and hope, that would have dried the sap of every sweet affection, and
made even goodness barren, in many a woman's heart for ever.
Without any home but my father's house, without means of subsistence but
the small pittance which he was able to give her, in most grateful
acknowledgment of her unremitting care of us, without any joys or hopes
but those of others, without pleasure in the present or expectation in
the future, apparently without memory of the past, she spent her whole
life in the service of my parents and their children, and lived and
moved and had her being in a serene, unclouded, unvarying atmosphere of
cheerful, self-forgetful content that was heroic in its absolute
unconsciousness. She is the only person I can think of who appeared to
me to have fulfilled Wordsworth's conception of
"Those blessed ones who do God's will and know it not."
I have never seen either man or woman like her, in her humble
excellence, and I am thankful that, knowing what the circumstances of
her whole life were, she yet seems to me the happiest human being I have
known. She died, as she had lived, in the service of others. When I went
with my father to America, my mother remained in England, and my aunt
came with us, to take care of me. She died in consequence of the
overturning of a carriage (in which we were travelling), from which she
received a concussion of the spine; and her last words to me, after a
night of angelic endurance of restless fever and suffering, were, "Open
the window; let in the blessed light"--almost the same as Goethe's, with
a characteristic difference. It was with the hope of giving her the
proceeds of its publication, as a token of my affectionate gratitude,
that I printed my American journal; that hope being defeated by her
death, I gave them, for her sake, to her younger sister, my aunt
Victoire Decamp. This sister of my mother's was, when we were living in
Covent Garden Chambers, a governess in a school at Lea, near Blackheath.
The school was kept by ladies of the name of Guinani, sisters to the
wife of Charles Young--the Julia so early lost, so long loved and
lamented by him. I was a frequent and much-petted visitor to their
house, which never fulfilled the austere purpose implied in its name to
me, for all my days there were holidays; and I remember hours of special
delight passed in a large drawing-room where two fine cedars of Lebanon
threw grateful gloom into the windows, and great tall china jars of
pot-pourri filled the air with a mixed fragrance of roses and (as it
seemed to me) plum-pudding, and where hung a picture, the contemplation
of which more than once moved me to tears, after I had been given to
understand that the princely personage and fair-headed baby in a boat in
the midst of a hideous black sea, overhung by a hideous black sky, were
Prospero, the good Duke of Milan, and his poor little princess daughter,
Miranda, cast forth by wicked relations to be drowned.
It was while we were still living in Covent Garden Chambers that Talma,
the great French actor, came to London. He knew both my uncle and my
father, and was highly esteemed and greatly admired by both of them. He
called one day upon my father, when nobody was at home, and the servant
who opened the door holding me by the hand, the famous French actor, who
spoke very good English, though not without the "pure Parisian accent,"
took some kind of notice of me, desiring me to be sure and remember his
name, and tell my father that Mr. Talma, the great French tragedian, had
called. I replied that I would do so, and then added, with noble
emulation, that my father was also a great tragedian, and my uncle was
also a great tragedian, and that we had a baby in the nursery who I
thought must be a great tragedian too, for she did nothing but cry, and
what was that if not tragedy?--which edifying discourse found its way
back to my mother, to whom Talma laughingly repeated it. I have heard my
father say that on the occasion of this visit of Talma's to London, he
consulted my uncle on the subject of acting in English. Hamlet was one
of his great parts, and he made as fine a thing of Ducis' cold, and
stiff, and formal adaptation of Shakespeare's noble work as his meagre
material allowed; but, as I have said before, he spoke English well, and
thought it not impossible to undertake the part in the original
language. My uncle, however, strongly dissuaded him from it, thinking
the decided French accent an insuperable obstacle to his success, and
being very unwilling that he should risk by a failure in the attempt his
deservedly high reputation. A friend of mine, at a dinner party, being
asked if she had seen Mr. Fechter in Hamlet, replied in the negative,
adding that she did not think she should relish Shakespeare declaimed
with a foreign accent. The gentleman who had questioned her said, "Ah,
very true indeed--perhaps not;" then, looking attentively at his plate,
from which I suppose he drew the inspiration of what followed, he added,
"And yet--after all, you know, Hamlet was a foreigner." This view of the
case had probably not suggested itself to John Kemble, and so he
dissuaded Talma from the experiment. While referring to Mr. Fechter's
personification of Hamlet, and the great success which it obtained in
the fashionable world, I wish to preserve a charming instance of naïve
ignorance in a young guardsman, seduced by the enthusiasm of the gay
society of London into going, for once, to see a play of Shakespeare's.
After sitting dutifully through some scenes in silence, he turned to a
fellow-guardsman, who was painfully looking and listening by his side,
with the grave remark, "I say, George, _dooced_ odd play this; its all
full of quotations." The young military gentleman had occasionally, it
seems, heard Shakespeare quoted, and remembered it.
To return to my story. About this time it was determined that I should
be sent to school in France. My father was extremely anxious to give me
every advantage that he could, and Boulogne, which was not then the
British Alsatia it afterwards became, and where there was a girl's
school of some reputation, was chosen as not too far from home to send a
mite seven years old, to acquire the French language and begin her
education. And so to Boulogne I went, to a school in the oddly named
"Rue tant perd tant paie," in the old town, kept by a rather sallow and
grim, but still vivacious old Madame Faudier, with the assistance of her
daughter, Mademoiselle Flore, a bouncing, blooming beauty of a discreet
age, whose florid complexion, prominent black eyes, plaited and
profusely pomatumed black hair, and full, commanding figure, attired for
fête days, in salmon-colored merino, have remained vividly impressed
upon my memory. What I learned here except French (which I could not
help learning), I know not. I was taught music, dancing, and Italian,
the latter by a Signor Mazzochetti, an object of special detestation to
me, whose union with Mademoiselle Flore caused a temporary fit of
rejoicing in the school. The small seven-year-old beginnings of such
particular humanities I mastered with tolerable success, but if I may
judge from the frequency of my _penitences_, humanity in general was not
instilled into me without considerable trouble. I was a sore torment, no
doubt, to poor Madame Faudier, who, on being once informed by some
alarmed passers in the street that one of her "demoiselles" was
perambulating the house roof, is reported to have exclaimed, in a
paroxysm of rage and terror, "Ah, ce ne peut etre que cette _diable_ de
Kemble!" and sure enough it was I. Having committed I know not what
crime, I had been thrust for chastisement into a lonely garret, where,
having nothing earthly to do but look about me, I discovered (like a
prince in the Arabian Nights) a ladder leading to a trap-door, and
presently was out on a sort of stone coping, which ran round the steep
roof of the high, old-fashioned house, surveying with serene
satisfaction the extensive prospect landward and seaward, unconscious
that I was at the same time an object of terror to the beholders in the
street below. Snatched from the perilous delight of this bad eminence, I
was (again, I think, rather like the Arabian prince) forthwith plunged
into the cellar; where I curled myself up on the upper step, close to
the heavy door that had been locked upon me, partly for the comfort of
the crack of light that squeezed itself through it, and partly, I
suppose, from some vague idea that there was no bottom to the steps,
derived from my own terror rather than from any precise historical
knowledge of oubliettes and donjons, with the execrable treachery of
stairs suddenly ending in mid-darkness over an abyss. I suppose I
suffered a martyrdom of fear, for I remember upwards of thirty years
afterwards having this very cellar, and my misery in it, brought before
my mind suddenly, with intense vividness, while reading, in Victor
Hugo's Notre Dame, poor Esmeralda's piteous entreaties for deliverance
from her underground prison: "Oh laissez moi sortir! j'ai froid! j'ai
peur! et des bêtes me montent le long du corps." The latter hideous
detail certainly completes the exquisite misery of the picture. Less
justifiable than banishment to lonely garrets, whence egress was to be
found only by the roof, or dark incarceration in cellars whence was no
egress at all, was another device, adopted to impress me with the evil
of my ways, and one which seems to me so foolish in its cruelty, that
the only amazement is, how anybody entrusted with the care of children
could dream of any good result from such a method of impressing a little
girl not eight years old. There was to be an execution in the town of
some wretched malefactor, who was condemned to be guillotined, and I was
told that I should be taken to see this supreme act of legal
retribution, in order that I might know to what end evil courses
conducted people. We all remember the impressive fable of "Don't Care,"
who came to be hanged, but I much doubt if any of the thousands of young
Britons whose bosoms have been made to thrill with salutary terror at
his untimely end were ever taken by their parents and guardians to see a
hanging, by way of enforcing the lesson. Whether it was ever intended
that I should witness the ghastly spectacle of this execution, or
whether it was expressly contrived that I should come too late, I know
not; it is to be hoped that my doing so was not accidental, but
mercifully intentional. Certain it is, that when I was taken to the
Grande Place the slaughter was over; but I saw the guillotine, and
certain gutters running red with what I was told (whether truly or not)
was blood, and a sad-looking man, busied about the terrible machine,
who, it was said, was the executioner's son; all which lugubrious
objects, no doubt, had their due effect upon my poor childish
imagination and nervous system, with a benefit to my moral nature which
I should think highly problematical.
The experiments tried upon the minds and souls of children by those who
undertake to train them, are certainly among the most mysterious of
Heaven-permitted evils. The coarse and cruel handling of these
wonderfully complex and delicate machines by ignorant servants, ignorant
teachers, and ignorant parents, fills one with pity and with amazement
that the results of such processes should not be even more disastrous
than they are.
In the nature of many children exists a capacity of terror equalled in
its intensity only by the reticence which conceals it. The fear of
ridicule is strong in these sensitive small souls, but even that is
inadequate to account for the silent agony with which they hug the
secret of their fear. Nursery and schoolroom authorities, fonder of
power than of principle, find their account in both these tendencies,
and it is marvellous to what a point tyranny may be exercised by means
of their double influence over children, the sufferers never having
recourse to the higher parental authority by which they would be
delivered from the nightmare of silent terror imposed upon them.
The objects that excite the fears of children are often as curious and
unaccountable as their secret intensity. A child four years of age, who
was accustomed to be put to bed in a dressing-room opening into her
mother's room, and near her nursery, and was left to go to sleep alone,
from a desire that she should not be watched and lighted to sleep (or in
fact kept awake, after a very common nursery practice), endured this
discipline without remonstrance, and only years afterwards informed her
mother that she never was so left in her little bed, alone in the
darkness, without a full conviction that a large black dog was lying
under it, which terrible imagination she never so much as hinted at, or
besought for light or companionship to dispel. Miss Martineau told me
once, that a special object of horror to her, when she was a child, were
the colors of the prism, a thing in itself so beautiful, that it is
difficult to conceive how any imagination could be painfully impressed
by it; but her terror of these magical colors was such, that she used to
rush past the room, even when the door was closed, where she had seen
them reflected from the chandelier, by the sunlight, on the wall.
The most singular instance I ever knew, however, of unaccountable terror
produced in a child's mind by the pure action of its imagination, was
that of a little boy who overheard a conversation between his mother and
a friend upon the subject of the purchase of some stuff, which she had
not bought, "because," said she, "it was ell wide." The words "ell
wide," perfectly incomprehensible to the child, seized upon his fancy,
and produced some image of terror by which for a long time his poor
little mind was haunted. Certainly this is a powerful instance, among
innumerable and striking ones, of the fact that the fears of children
are by no means the result of the objects of alarm suggested to them by
the ghost-stories, bogeys, etc., of foolish servants and companions;
they quite as often select or create their terrors for themselves, from
sources so inconceivably strange, that all precaution proves ineffectual
to protect them from this innate tendency of the imaginative faculty.
This "ell wide" horror is like something in a German story. The strange
aversion, coupled with a sort of mysterious terror, for beautiful and
agreeable or even quite commonplace objects, is one of the secrets of
the profound impression which the German writers of fiction produce. It
belongs peculiarly to their national genius, some of whose most striking
and thrilling conceptions are pervaded with this peculiar form of the
sentiment of fear. Hoffman and Tieck are especially powerful in their
use of it, and contrive to give a character of vague mystery to simple
details of prosaic events and objects, to be found in no other works of
fiction. The terrible conception of the _Doppelgänger_, which exists in
a modified form as the wraith of Scottish legendary superstition, is
rendered infinitely more appalling by being taken out of its misty
highland half-light of visionary indefiniteness, and produced in
frock-coat and trousers, in all the shocking distinctness of
commonplace, everyday, contemporary life. The Germans are the only
people whose imaginative faculty can cope with the homeliest forms of
reality, and infuse into them _vagueness_, that element of terror most
alien from familiar things. That they may be tragic enough we know, but
that they have in them a mysterious element of terror of quite
indefinite depth, German writers alone know how to make us feel.
I do not think that in my own instance the natural cowardice with which
I was femininely endowed was unusually or unduly cultivated in
childhood; but with a highly susceptible and excitable nervous
temperament and ill-regulated imagination, I have suffered from every
conceivable form of terror; and though, for some inexplicable reason, I
have always had the reputation of being fearless, have really, all my
life, been extremely deficient in courage.
Very impetuous, and liable to be carried away by any strong emotion, my
entire want of self-control and prudence, I suppose, conveyed the
impression that I was equally without fear; but the truth is that, as a
wise friend once said to me, I have always been "as rash and as cowardly
as a child;" and none of my sex ever had a better right to apply to
herself Shakespeare's line--
"A woman, naturally born to fears."
The only agreeable impression I retain of my school-days at Boulogne is
that of the long half-holiday walks we were allowed to indulge in. Not
the two-and-two, dull, dreary, daily procession round the ramparts, but
the disbanded freedom of the sunny afternoon, spent in gathering
wild-flowers along the pretty, secluded valley of the Liane, through
which no iron road then bore its thundering freight. Or, better still,
clambering, straying, playing hide-and-seek, or sitting telling and
hearing fairy tales among the great carved blocks of stone, which lay,
in ignominious purposelessness, around the site on the high, grassy
cliff where Napoleon the First--the Only--had decreed that his triumphal
pillar should point its finger of scorn at our conquered, "pale-faced
shores." Best of all, however, was the distant wandering, far out along
the sandy dunes, to what used to be called "La Gárenne;" I suppose
because of the wild rabbits that haunted it, who--hunted and rummaged
from their burrows in the hillocks of coarse grass by a pitiless pack of
school-girls--must surely have wondered after our departure, when they
came together stealthily, with twitching noses, ears, and tails, what
manner of fiendish visitation had suddenly come and gone, scaring their
peaceful settlement on the silent, solitary sea-shore.
Before I left Boulogne, the yearly solemnity of the distribution of
prizes took place. This was, at Madame Faudier's, as at all French
schools of that day, a most exciting event. Special examinations
preceded it, for which the pupils prepared themselves with diligent
emulation. The prefect, the sub-prefect, the mayor, the bishop, all the
principal civil and religious authorities of the place, were invited to
honor the ceremony with their presence. The courtyard of the house was
partly inclosed, and covered over with scaffoldings, awnings, and
draperies, under which a stage was erected, and this, together with the
steps that led to it, was carpeted with crimson, and adorned with a
profusion of flowers. One of the dignified personages, seated around a
table on which the books designed for prizes were exhibited, pronounced
a discourse commendatory of past efforts and hortatory to future ones,
and the pupils, all _en grande toilette_, and seated on benches facing
the stage, were summoned through the rows of admiring parents, friends,
acquaintances, and other invited guests, to receive the prizes awarded
for excellence in the various branches of our small curriculum. I was
the youngest girl in the school, but I was a quick, clever child, and a
lady, a friend of my family, who was present, told me many years after,
how well she remembered the frequent summons to the dais received by a
small, black-eyed damsel, the _cadette_ of the establishment. I have
considerable doubt that any good purpose could be answered by this
public appeal to the emulation of a parcel of school-girls; but I have
no doubt at all that abundant seeds of vanity, self-love, and love of
display, were sown by it, which bore their bad harvest many a long year
after.
I left Boulogne when I was almost nine years old, and returned home,
where I remained upwards of two years before being again sent to school.
During this time we lived chiefly at a place called Craven Hill,
Bayswater, where we occupied at different periods three different
houses.
My mother always had a detestation of London, which I have cordially
inherited. The dense, heavy atmosphere, compounded of smoke and fog,
painfully affected her breathing and oppressed her spirits; and the
deafening clangor of its ceaseless uproar irritated her nerves and
distressed her in a manner which I invariably experience whenever I am
compelled to pass any time in that huge Hubbub. She perpetually yearned
for the fresh air and the quiet of the country. Occupied as my father
was, however, this was an impossible luxury; and my poor mother escaped
as far as her circumstances would allow from London, and towards the
country, by fixing her home at the place I have mentioned. In those days
Tyburnia did not exist; nor all the vast region of Paddingtonian London.
Tyburn turnpike, of nefarious memory, still stood at the junction of
Oxford Road and the Edgeware Road, and between the latter and Bayswater
open fields traversed by the canal, with here and there an isolated
cottage dotted about them, stretched on one side of the high-road; and
on the other, the untidy, shaggy, ravelled-looking selvage of Hyde Park;
not trimmed with shady walks and flower borders and smooth grass and
bright iron railing as now, but as forbidding in its neglected aspect as
the desolate stretch of uninclosed waste on the opposite side.
About a mile from Tyburn Gate a lane turned off on the right, following
which one came to a meadow, with a path across its gentle rise which led
to the row of houses called Craven Hill. I do not think there were
twenty in all, and some of them, such as Lord Ferrar's and the Harley
House, were dwellings of some pretension. Even the most modest of them
had pretty gardens in front and behind, and verandas and balconies with
flowering creepers and shrubberies, and a general air of semi-rurality
that cheated my poor mother with a make-believe effect of being, if not
in the country, at any rate out of town. And infinite were the devices
of her love of elegance and comfort produced from the most unpromising
materials, but making these dwellings of ours pretty and pleasant beyond
what could have been thought possible. She had a peculiar taste and
talent for furnishing and fitting up; and her means being always very
limited, her zeal was great for frequenting sales, where she picked up
at reasonable prices quaint pieces of old furniture, which she brought
with great triumph to the assistance of the commonplace upholstery of
our ready-furnished dwellings. Nobody ever had such an eye for the
disposal of every article in a room, at once for greatest convenience
and best appearance; and I never yet saw the apartment into which by her
excellent arrangement she did not introduce an element of comfort and
elegance--a liveable look, which the rooms of people unendowed with that
special faculty never acquire, and never retain, however handsome or
finely fitted up they may be. I am sorry to be obliged to add, however,
that she had a rage for moving her furniture from one place to another,
which never allowed her to let well alone; and not unfrequently her mere
desire for change destroyed the very best results of her own good taste.
We never knew when we might find the rooms a perfect chaos of disorder,
with every chair, table, and sofa "dancing the hayes" in horrid
confusion; while my mother, crimson and dishevelled with pulling and
pushing them hither and thither, was breathlessly organizing new
combinations. Nor could anything be more ludicrous than my father's
piteous aspect, on arriving in the midst of this _remue-ménage_, or the
poor woman's profound mortification when, finding everything moved from
its last position (for the twentieth time), he would look around, and,
instead of all the commendation she expected, exclaim in dismay, "Why,
bless my soul! what has happened to the room, _again_!" Our furniture
played an everlasting game of puss in the corner; and I am thankful that
I have inherited some of my mother's faculty of arranging, without any
of her curious passion for changing the aspect of her rooms.
A pretty, clever, and rather silly and affected woman, Mrs. Charles
M----, who had a great passion for dress, was saying one day to my
mother, with a lackadaisical drawl she habitually made use of, "What do
you do when you have a headache, or are bilious, or cross, or nervous,
or out of spirits? I always change my dress; it does me so much good!"
"Oh," said my mother, briskly, "I change the furniture." I think she
must have regarded it as a panacea for all the ills of life. Mrs.
Charles M---- was the half-sister of that amiable woman and admirable
actress, Miss Kelly.
To return to Craven Hill. A row of very fine elm trees was separated
only by the carriage-road from the houses, whose front windows looked
through their branches upon a large, quiet, green meadow, and beyond
that to an extensive nursery garden of enchanting memory, where our
weekly allowances were expended in pots of violets and flower-seeds and
roots of future fragrance, for our small gardens: this pleasant
foreground divided us from the Bayswater Road and Kensington Gardens. At
the back of the houses and their grounds stretched a complete open of
meadow land, with hedgerows and elm trees, and hardly any building in
sight in any direction. Certainly this was better than the smoke and din
of London. To my father, however, the distance was a heavy increase of
his almost nightly labor at the theatre. Omnibuses were no part of
London existence then; a hackney coach (there were no cabs, either
four-wheelers or hansoms) was a luxury to be thought of only
occasionally, and for part of the way; and so he generally wound up his
hard evening's work with a five miles' walk from Covent Garden to Craven
Hill.
It was perhaps the inconvenience of this process that led to our taking,
in addition to our "rural" residence, a lodging in Gerard Street, Soho.
The house immediately fronts Anne Street, and is now a large
establishment for the sale of lamps. It was a handsome old house, and at
one time belonged to the "wicked" Lord Lyttleton. At the time I speak
of, we occupied only a part of it, the rest remaining in the possession
of the proprietor, who was a picture-dealer, and his collection of dusky
_chefs-d'oeuvre_ covered the walls of the passages and staircases with
dark canvas, over whose varnished surface ill-defined figures and
ill-discerned faces seemed to flit, as with some trepidation I ran past
them. The house must have been a curious as well as a very large one;
but I never saw more of it than our own apartments, which had some
peculiarities that I remember. Our dining-room was a very large, lofty,
ground-floor room, fitted up partially as a library with my father's
books, and having at the farther end, opposite the windows, two heavy,
fluted pillars, which gave it rather a dignified appearance. My mother's
drawing-room, which was on the first floor and at the back of the house,
was oval in shape and lighted only by a skylight; and one entrance to it
was through a small anteroom or boudoir, with looking-glass doors and
ceiling all incrusted with scrolls and foliage and _rococo_ Louis Quinze
style of ornamentation, either in plaster or carved in wood and painted
white. There were back staircases and back doors without number, leading
in all directions to unknown regions; and the whole house, with its
remains of magnificence and curious lumber of objects of art and
_vertu_, was a very appropriate frame for the traditional ill-repute of
its former noble owner.
A ludicrous circumstance enough, I remember, occurred, which produced no
little uproar and amusement in one of its dreariest chambers. My brother
John was at this time eagerly pursuing the study of chemistry for his
own amusement, and had had an out-of-the-way sort of spare bedroom
abandoned to him for his various ill savored materials and scientific
processes, from which my mother suffered a chronic terror of sudden
death by blowing up. There was a monkey in the house, belonging to our
landlord, and generally kept confined in his part of it, whence the
knowledge of his existence only reached us through anecdotes brought by
the servants. One day, however, an alarm was spread that the monkey had
escaped from his own legitimate quarters and was running wild over the
house. Chase was given, and every hole and corner searched in vain for
the mischievous ape, who was at length discovered in what my brother
dignified by the title of his laboratory, where, in a frenzy of gleeful
activity, he was examining first one bottle and then another; finally he
betook himself, with indescribably grotesque grinnings and chatterings,
to uncorking and sniffing at them, and then pouring their contents
deliberately out on the (luckily carpetless) floor,--a joke which might
have had serious results for himself, as well as the house, if he had
not in the midst of it suffered ignoble capture and been led away to his
own quarters; my mother that time, certainly, escaping imminent "blowing
up."
While we were living in Gerard Street, my uncle Kemble came for a short
time to London from Lausanne, where he had fixed his residence--compelled
to live abroad, under penalty of seeing the private fortune he had
realized by a long life of hard professional labor swept into the ruin
which had fallen upon Covent Garden Theatre, of which he was part
proprietor. And I always associate this my only recollection of his
venerable white hair and beautiful face, full of an expression of most
benign dignity, with the earliest mention I remember of that luckless
property, which weighed like an incubus upon my father all his life, and
the ruinous burden of which both I and my sister successively endeavored
in vain to prop.
My mother at this time gave lessons in acting to a few young women who
were preparing themselves for the stage; and I recollect very well the
admiration my uncle expressed for the beauty of one of them, an
extremely handsome Miss Dance, who, I think, came out successfully, but
soon married, and relinquished her profession.
This young lady was the daughter of a violinist and musical composer,
whose name has a place in my memory from seeing it on a pretty musical
setting for the voice of some remarkably beautiful verses, the author of
which I have never been able to discover. I heard they had been taken
out of that old-fashioned receptacle for stray poetical gems, the poet's
corner of a country newspaper. I write them here as accurately as I can
from memory; it is more than fifty years since I learnt them, and I have
never met with any copy of them but that contained in the old music
sheet of Mr. Dance's duet.
SONG OF THE SPIRIT OF MORN.
Now on their couch of rest
Mortals are sleeping,
While in dark, dewy vest,
Flowerets are weeping.
Ere the last star of night
Fades in the fountain,
My finger of rosy light
Touches the mountain.
Far on his filmy wing
Twilight is wending,
Shadows encompassing,
Terrors attending:
While my foot's fiery print,
Up my path showing,
Gleams with celestial tint.
Brilliantly glowing,
Now from my pinions fair
Freshness is streaming,
And from my yellow hair
Glories are gleaming.
Nature with pure delight
Hails my returning,
And Sol, from his chamber bright,
Crowns the young morning.
My uncle John returned to Switzerland, and I never saw him again; he had
made over his share of Covent Garden to my father, and went back to live
and die in peace at his Beau Site on the Lake of Geneva.
The first time that I visited Lausanne I went to his grave, and found it
in the old burial-ground above the town, where I wonder the dead have
patience to lie still, for the glorious beauty of the view their
resting-place commands. It was one among a row of graves with broad,
flat tombstones bearing English names, and surrounded with iron
railings, and flowers more or less running wild.
My father received the property my uncle transferred to him with
cheerful courage, and not without sanguine hopes of retrieving its
fortunes: instead of which, it destroyed his and those of his family;
who, had he and they been untrammelled by the fatal obligation of
working for a hopelessly ruined concern, might have turned their labors
to far better personal account. Of the eighty thousand pounds which my
uncle sank in building Covent Garden, and all the years of toil my
father and myself and my sister sank in endeavoring to sustain it,
nothing remained to us at my father's death; not even the ownership of
the only thing I ever valued the property for,--the private box which
belonged to us, the yearly rent of which was valued at three hundred
pounds, and the possession of which procured us for several years many
evenings of much enjoyment.
The only other recollection I have connected with Gerard Street is that
of certain passages from "Paradise Lost," read to me by my father, the
sonorous melody of which so enchanted me, that for many years of my life
Milton was to me incomparably the first of English poets; though at this
time of my earliest acquaintance with him, Walter Scott had precedence
over him, and was undoubtedly in my opinion greatest of mortal and
immortal bards. His "Marmion" and "Lay of the Last Minstrel" were
already familiar to me. Of Shakespeare at this time, and for many
subsequent years, I knew not a single line.
While our lodging in town was principally inhabited by my father and
resorted to by my mother as a convenience, my aunt Dall, and we
children, had our home at my mother's _rus in urbe_, Craven Hill, where
we remained until I went again to school in France.
Our next door neighbors were, on one side, a handsome, dashing Mrs.
Blackshaw, sister of George the Fourth's favorite, Beau Brummel, whose
daughters were good friends of ours; and on the other Belzoni, the
Egyptian traveller, and his wife, with whom we were well acquainted. The
wall that separated our gardens was upwards of six feet high,--it
reached above my father's head, who was full six feet tall,--but our
colossal friend, the Italian, looked down upon us over it quite easily,
his large handsome face showing well above it, down to his magnificent
auburn beard, which in those less hirsute days than these he seldom
exhibited, except in the privacy of his own back garden, where he used
occasionally to display it, to our immense delight and astonishment.
Great, too, was our satisfaction in visiting Madame Belzoni, who used to
receive us in rooms full of strange spoils, brought back by herself and
her husband from the East; she sometimes smoked a long Turkish pipe, and
generally wore a dark blue sort of caftan, with a white turban on her
head. Another of our neighbors here was Latour, the musical composer, to
whom, though he was personally good-natured and kind to me, I owe a
grudge, for the sake of his "Music for Young Persons," and only regret
that he was not our next-door neighbor, when he would have execrated his
own "O Dolce Concerto," and "Sul Margine d'un Rio," and all his
innumerable progeny of variations for two hands and four hands, as
heartily as I did. I do not know whether it was instigated by his advice
or not that my mother at this time made me take lessons of a certain Mr.
Laugier, who received pupils at his own house, near Russell Square, and
taught them thorough-bass and counterpoint, and the science of musical
composition. I attended his classes for some time, and still possess
books full of the grammar of music, as profound and difficult a study,
almost, as the grammar of language. But I think I was too young to
derive much benefit from so severe a science, and in spite of my books
full of musical "parsing," so to speak, declensions of chords, and
conjugations of scales, I do not think I learned much from Mr. Laugier,
and, never having followed up this beginning of the real study of music,
my knowledge of it has been only of that empirical and contemptible sort
which goes no further than the end of boarding-school young ladies'
fingers, and sometimes, at any rate, amounts to tolerably skilful and
accurate execution; a result I never attained, in spite of Mr. Laugier's
thorough-bass and a wicked invention called a chiroplast, for which, I
think, he took out a patent, and for which I suppose all luckless girls
compelled to practice with it thought he ought to have taken out a
halter. It was a brass rod made to screw across the keys, on which were
_strung_, like beads, two brass frames for the hands, with separate
little cells for the fingers, these being secured to the brass rod
precisely at the part of the instrument on which certain exercises were
to be executed. Another brass rod was made to pass under the wrist in
order to maintain it also in its proper position, and thus incarcerated,
the miserable little hands performed their daily, dreary monotony of
musical exercise, with, I imagine, really no benefit at all from the
irksome constraint of this horrid machine, that could not have been
imparted quite as well, if not better, by a careful teacher. I had,
however, no teacher at this time but my aunt Dall, and I suppose the
chiroplast may have saved her some trouble, by insuring that my
practising, which she could not always superintend, should not be merely
a process of acquiring innumerable bad habits for the exercise of the
patience of future teachers.
My aunt at this time directed all my lessons, as well as the small
beginnings of my sister's education. My brother John was at Clapham with
Mr. Richardson, who was then compiling his excellent dictionary, in
which labor he employed the assistance of such of his pupils as showed
themselves intelligent enough for the occupation; and I have no doubt
that to this beginning of philological study my brother owed his
subsequent predilection for and addiction to the science of language. My
youngest brother, Henry, went to a day-school in the neighborhood.
All children's amusements are more or less dramatic, and a theatre is a
favorite resource in most playrooms, and, naturally enough, held an
important place in ours. The printed sheets of small figures,
representing all the characters of certain popular pieces, which we
colored, and pasted on card-board and cut out, and then, by dint of long
slips of wood with a slit at one end, into which their feet were
inserted, moved on and off our small stage; the coloring of the scenery;
and all the arrangement and conduct of the pieces we represented, gave
us endless employment and amusement. My brother John was always manager
and spokesman in these performances, and when we had fitted up our
theatre with a _real_ blue silk curtain that would roll up, and a _real_
set of foot-lights that would burn, and when he contrived, with some
resin and brimstone and salt put in a cup and set on fire, to produce a
diabolical sputter and flare and bad smell, significant of the blowing
up of the mill in "The Miller and his Men," great was our exultation.
This piece and "Blue Beard" were our "battle horses," to which we
afterwards added a lugubrious melodrama called "The Gypsy's Curse" (it
had nothing whatever to do with "Guy Mannering"), of which I remember
nothing but some awful doggerel, beginning with--
"May thy path be still in sorrow,
May thy dark night know no morrow,"
which used to make my blood curdle with fright.
About this time I was taken for the first time to a real play, and it
was to that paradise of juvenile spectators, Astley's, where we saw a
Highland horror called "Meg Murdoch, or the Mountain Hag," and a
mythological after-piece called "Hyppolita, Queen of the Amazons," in
which young ladies in very short and shining tunics, with burnished
breastplates, helmets, spears, and shields, performed sundry warlike
evolutions round her Majesty Hyppolita, who was mounted on a snow-white
_live_ charger: in the heat of action some of these fair warriors went
so far as to die, which martial heroism left an impression on my
imagination so deep and delightful as to have proved hitherto indelible.
At length we determined ourselves to enact something worthy of notice
and approbation, and "Amoroso, King of Little Britain," was selected by
my brother John, our guide and leader in all matters of taste, for the
purpose. "Chrononhotonthologos" had been spoken of, but our youngest
performer, my sister, was barely seven years old, and I doubt if any of
us (but our manager) could have mastered the mere names of that famous
burlesque. Moreover, I think, in the piece we chose there were only four
principal characters, and we contrived to speak the words, and even sing
the songs, so much to our own satisfaction, that we thought we might
aspire to the honor of a hearing from our elders and betters. So we
produced our play before my father and mother and some of their friends,
who had good right (whatever their inclination might have been) to be
critical, for among them were Mr. and Mrs. Liston (the Amoroso and
Coquetinda of the real stage), Mr. and Mrs. Mathews, and Charles Young,
all intimate friends of my parents, whose children were our playmates,
and coadjutors in our performance.
For Charles Matthews I have always retained a kindly regard for auld
lang syne's sake, though I hardly ever met him after he went on the
stage. He was well educated, and extremely clever and accomplished, and
I could not help regretting that his various acquirements and many
advantages for the career of an architect, for which his father destined
him, should be thrown away; though it was quite evident that he followed
not only the strong bent of his inclination, but the instinct of the
dramatic genius which he inherited from his eccentric and most original
father, when he adopted the profession of the stage, where, in his own
day, he has been unrivaled in the sparkling vivacity of his performance
of a whole range of parts in which nobody has approached the finish,
refinement, and spirit of his acting. Moreover, his whole demeanor,
carriage, and manner were so essentially those of a gentleman, that the
broadest farce never betrayed him into either coarseness or vulgarity;
and the comedy he acted, though often the lightest of the light, was
never anything in its graceful propriety but high comedy. No member of
the French theatre was ever at once a more finished and a more
delightfully amusing and _natural_ actor.
Liston's son went into the army when he grew up, and I lost sight of
him.
With the Rev. Julian Young, son of my dear old friend Charles Young, I
always remained upon the most friendly terms, meeting him with cordial
pleasure whenever my repeated returns to England brought us together,
and allowed us to renew the amicable relations that always subsisted
between us.
I remember another family friend of ours at this time, a worthy old
merchant of the name of Mitchell, who was my brother John's godfather,
and to whose sombre, handsome city house I was taken once or twice to
dinner. He was at one time very rich, but lost all his fortune in some
untoward speculation, and he used to come and pay us long, sad, silent
visits, the friendly taciturnity of which I always compassionately
attributed to that circumstance, and wished that he had not lost the use
of his tongue as well as his money.
While we were living at Craven Hill, my father's sister, Mrs. Whitelock,
came to live with us for some time. She was a very worthy but
exceedingly ridiculous woman, in whom the strong peculiarities of her
family were so exaggerated, that she really seemed like a living parody
or caricature of all the Kembles.
She was a larger and taller woman than Mrs. Siddons, and had a fine,
commanding figure at the time I am speaking of, when she was quite an
elderly person. She was like her brother Stephen in face, with handsome
features, too large and strongly marked for a woman, light gray eyes,
and a light auburn wig, which, I presume, represented the color of her
previous hair, and which, together with the tall cap that surmounted it,
was always more or less on one side. She had the deep, sonorous voice
and extremely distinct utterance of her family, and an extraordinary
vehemence of gesture and expression quite unlike their quiet dignity and
reserve of manner, and which made her conversation like that of people
in old plays and novels; for she would slap her thigh in emphatic
enforcement of her statements (which were apt to be upon an incredibly
large scale), not unfrequently prefacing them with the exclamation, "I
declare to God!" or "I wish I may die!" all which seemed to us very
extraordinary, and combined with her large size and loud voice used
occasionally to cause us some dismay. My father used to call her Queen
Bess (her name was Elizabeth), declaring that her manners were like
those of that royal _un_-gentlewoman. But she was a simple-hearted,
sweet-tempered woman, whose harmless peculiarities did not prevent us
all being fond of her.
She had a great taste and some talent for drawing, which she cultivated
with a devotion and industry unusual in so old a person. I still possess
a miniature copy she made of Clarke's life-size picture of my father as
Cromwell, which is not without merit.
She was extremely fond of cards, and taught us to play the (even then)
old-fashioned game of quadrille, which my mother, who also liked cards,
and was a very good whist player, said had more variety in it than any
modern game.
Mrs. Whitelock had been for a number of years in the United States, of
which (then comparatively little known) part of the world she used to
tell us stories that, from her characteristic exaggeration, we always
received with extreme incredulity; but my own experience, subsequent by
many years to hers, has corroborated her marvelous histories of flights
of birds that almost darkened the sun (_i.e._ threw a passing shadow as
of a cloud upon the ground), and roads with ruts and mud-holes into
which one's carriage sank up to the axle-tree.
She used to tell us anecdotes of General Washington, to whom she had
been presented and had often seen (his favorite bespeak was always "The
School for Scandal"); and of Talleyrand, whom she also had often met,
and invariably called Prince _Tallierande_. She was once terrified by
being followed at evening, in the streets of Philadelphia, by a red
Indian savage, an adventure which has many times recurred to my mind
while traversing at all hours and in all directions the streets of that
most peaceful Quaker city, distant now by more than a thousand miles
from the nearest red Indian savage. Congress was sitting in Philadelphia
at that time; it was virtually the capital of the newly made United
States, and Mrs. Whitelock held an agreeable and respectable position
both in private and in public. I have been assured by persons as well
qualified to be critics as Judge Story, Chief-Justice Kent, and Judge
Hopkinson (Moore's friend), that she was an actress of considerable
ability. Perhaps she was; her Kemble name, face, figure, and voice no
doubt helped her to produce a certain effect on the stage; but she must
have been a very imperfectly educated woman. Nothing could be droller
than to see her with Mrs. Siddons, of whom she looked like a clumsy,
badly finished, fair imitation. Her vehement gestures and violent
objurgations contrasted comically with her sister's majestic stillness
of manner; and when occasionally Mrs. Siddons would interrupt her with,
"Elizabeth, your wig is on one side," and the other replied, "Oh, is
it?" and giving the offending head-gear a shove put it quite as crooked
in the other direction, and proceeded with her discourse, Melpomene
herself used to have recourse to her snuff-box to hide the dawning smile
on her face.
I imagine that my education must have been making but little progress
during the last year of my residence at Craven Hill. I had no masters,
and my aunt Dall could ill supply the want of other teachers; moreover,
I was extremely troublesome and unmanageable, and had become a
tragically desperate young person, as my determination to poison my
sister, in revenge for some punishment which I conceived had been
unjustly inflicted upon me, will sufficiently prove. I had been warned
not to eat privet berries, as they were poisonous, and under the above
provocation it occurred to me that if I strewed some on the ground my
sister might find and eat them, which would insure her going straight to
heaven, and no doubt seriously annoy my father and mother. How much of
all this was a lingering desire for the distinction of a public
execution of guillotine (the awful glory of which still survived in my
memory), how much dregs of "Gypsy Curses" and "Mountain Hags," and how
much the passionate love of exciting a sensation and producing an
effect, common to children, servants, and most uneducated people, I know
not. I never did poison my sister, and satisfied my desire of vengeance
by myself informing my aunt of my contemplated crime, the fulfillment of
which was not, I suppose, much apprehended by my family, as no measures
were taken to remove myself, my sister, or the privet bush from each
other's neighborhood.