I can not remember any event, or series of events, the influence of
which could, during my first stay in Edinburgh, have made a distinctly
serious or religious impression on my mind, or have directed my thoughts
especially toward the more solemn concerns and aspects of life. But from
some cause or other my mind became much affected at this time by
religious considerations, and a strong devotional element began to
predominate among my emotions and cogitations. In my childhood in my
father's house we had no special religious training; our habits were
those of average English Protestants of decent respectability. My mother
read the Bible to us in the morning before breakfast; Mrs. Trimmer's and
Mrs. Barbauld's Scripture histories and paraphrases were taught to us;
we learnt our catechism and collects, and went to church on Sunday, duly
and decorously, as a matter of course. Grace was always said before and
after meals by the youngest member of the family present; and I remember
a quaint, old-fashioned benediction which, when my father happened to be
at home at our bedtime, we used to kneel down by his chair to receive,
and with which he used to dismiss us for the night: "God bless you! make
you good, happy, healthy, and wise!" These, with our own daily morning
and evening prayers, were our devotional habits and pious practices. In
Mrs. Harry Siddons's house religion was never, I think, directly made a
subject of inculcation or discussion; the usual observances of Church of
England people were regularly fulfilled by all her family, the spirit of
true religion governed her life and all her home relations, but special,
direct reference to religious subjects was infrequent among us. God's
service in that house took the daily and hourly form of the
conscientious discharge of duty, unselfish, tender affection toward each
other, and kindly Christian charity toward all. At various times in my
life, when hearing discussions on the peculiar (technical, I should be
disposed to call it) profession and character supposed by some very good
people of a certain way of thinking to be the only indication of what
they considered real religion, I have remembered the serene, courageous
self-devotion of my dear friend, when, during a dangerous (as it was at
one time apprehended, fatal) illness of her youngest daughter, she would
leave her child's bedside to go to the theater, and discharge duties
never very attractive to her, and rendered distasteful then by cruel
anxiety, but her neglect of which would have injured the interests of
her brother, her fellow-actors, and all the poor people employed in the
theater, and been a direct infringement of her obligations to them. I
have wondered what amount of religion a certain class of "professing
Christians" would have allowed entered into that great effort.
We attended habitually a small chapel served by the Rev. William
Shannon, an excellent but not exciting preacher, who was a devoted
friend of Mrs. Harry Siddons; and occasionally we went to Dr. Allison's
church and heard him--then an old man--preach, and sometimes his young
assistant, Mr. Sinclair, whose eloquent and striking sermons, which
impressed me much, were the only powerful direct appeals made to my
religious sentiments at that time. I rather incline to think that I had,
what a most unclerical young clergyman of my acquaintance once assured
me I had, a natural turn for religion. I think it not unlikely that a
great deal of the direct religious teaching and influences of my Paris
school-days was, as it were, coming up again to the surface of my mind,
and occupying my thoughts with serious reflections upon the most
important subjects. The freedom I enjoyed gave scope and leisure to my
character to develop and strengthen itself; and to the combined
healthful repose and activity of all my faculties, the absence of all
excitement and irritation from external influences, the pure moral
atmosphere and kindly affection by which I lived surrounded during this
happy year, I attribute whatever perception of, desire for, or endeavor
after goodness I was first consciously actuated by. In the rest and
liberty of my life at this time, I think, whatever was best in me had
the most favorable chance of growth, and I have remained ever grateful
to the wise forbearance of the gentle authority under which I lived, for
the benefit as well as the enjoyment I derived from the time I passed in
Edinburgh.
I think that more harm is frequently done by over than by under culture
in the moral training of youth. Judicious _letting alone_ is a precious
element in real education, and there are certain chords which, often
touched and made to vibrate too early, are apt to lose instead of
gaining power; to grow first weakly and morbidly sensitive, and then
hard and dull; and finally, when the full harmony of the character
depends upon their truth and depth of tone, to have lost some measure of
both under repeated premature handling.
I sometimes think that instead of beginning, as we do, with a whole
heaven-and-earth-embracing theory of duty to God and man, it might be
better to adopt with our children the method of dealing only with each
particular instance of moral obligation empirically as it occurs; with
each particular incident of life, detached, as it were, from the notion
of a formal system, code, or theory of religious belief, until the
recurrence of the same rules of morality under the same governing
principle, invoked only in immediate application to some instance of
conduct or incident of personal experience, built up by degrees a body
of precedent which would have the force and efficacy of law before it
was theoretically inculcated as such. Whoever said that principles were
_moral habits_ spoke, it seems to me, a valuable truth, not generally
sufficiently recognized or acted upon in the task of education.
The only immediate result, that I can remember, of my graver turn of
thought at this time upon my conduct was a determination to give up
reading Byron's poetry. It was a great effort and a very great
sacrifice, for the delight I found in it was intense; but I was quite
convinced of its injurious effect upon me, and I came to the conclusion
that I would forego it.
"Cain" and "Manfred" were more especially the poems that stirred my
whole being with a tempest of excitement that left me in a state of
mental perturbation impossible to describe for a long time after reading
them. I suppose the great genius touched in me the spirit of our time,
which, chit as I was, was common to us both; and the mere fact of my
being _un enfant du siècle_ rendered me liable to the infection of the
potent, proud, desponding bitterness of his writing.
The spirit of an age creates the spirit that utters it, and though
Byron's genius stamped its impress powerfully upon the thought and
feeling of his contemporaries, he was himself, after all, but a sort of
quintessence of _them_, and gave them back only an intensified,
individual extract of themselves. The selfish vanity and profligate vice
which he combined with his extraordinary intellectual gifts were as
peculiar to himself as his great mental endowments; and though fools may
have followed the fashion of his follies, the heart of all Europe was
not stirred by a fashion of which he set the example, but by a passion
for which he found the voice, indeed, but of which the key-note lay in
the very temper of the time and the souls of the men of his day. Goethe,
Alfieri, Châteaubriand, each in his own language and with his peculiar
national and individual accent, uttered the same mind; they stamped
their own image and superscription upon the coin to which, by so doing,
they gave currency, but the mine from whence they drew their metal was
the civilized humanity of the nineteenth century. It is true that some
of Solomon's coining rings not unlike Goethe's and Byron's; but Solomon
forestalled his day by being _blasé_ before the nineteenth century.
Doubtless the recipe for that result has been the same for individuals
ever since the world rolled, but only here and there a great king, who
was also a great genius, possessed it in the earlier times; it took all
the ages that preceded it to make the _blasé_ age, and Byron,
pre-eminently, to speak its mind in English--which he had no sooner done
than every nineteenth-century shop-boy in England quoted Byron, wore his
shirt-collar open, and execrated his destiny. Doubtless by grace of his
free-will a man may wring every drop of sap out of his own soul and help
his fellows like-minded with himself to do the same; but the everlasting
spirit of truth renews the vitality of the world, and while Byron was
growling and howling, and Shelley was denying and defying, Scott was
telling and Wordsworth singing things beautiful and good, and new and
true.
Certain it is, however, that the noble poet's glorious chanting of much
inglorious matter did me no good, and so I resolved to read that grand
poetry no more. It was a severe struggle, but I persevered in it for
more than two years, and had my reward; I broke through the thraldom of
that powerful spell, and all the noble beauty of those poems remained to
me thenceforth divested of the power of wild excitement they had
exercised over me. A great many years after this girlish effort and
sacrifice, Lady Byron, who was a highly esteemed friend of mine, spoke
to me upon the subject of a new and cheap edition of her husband's works
about to be published, and likely to be widely disseminated among the
young clerk and shopkeeper class of readers, for whom she deprecated
extremely the pernicious influence it was calculated to produce. She
consulted me on the expediency of appending to it some notice of Lord
Byron written by herself, which she thought might modify or lessen the
injurious effect of his poetry upon young minds. "Nobody," she said,
"knew him as I did" (this certainly was not the general impression upon
the subject); "nobody knew as well as I the causes that had made him
what he was; nobody, I think, is so capable of doing justice to him, and
therefore of counteracting the injustice he does to himself, and the
injury he might do to others, in some of his writings." I was strongly
impressed by the earnestness of her expression, which seemed to me one
of affectionate compassion for Byron and profound solicitude lest, even
in his grave, he should incur the responsibility of yet further evil
influence, especially on the minds of the young. I could not help
wondering, also, whether she did not shrink from being again, to a new
generation and a wider class of readers, held up to cruel ridicule and
condemnation as the cold-hearted, hard, pedantic prude, without sympathy
for suffering or relenting toward repentance. I had always admired the
reticent dignity of her silence with reference to her short and
disastrous union with Lord Byron, and I felt sorry, therefore, that she
contemplated departing from the course she had thus far steadfastly
pursued, though I appreciated the motive by which she was actuated. I
could not but think, however, that she overestimated the mischief
Byron's poetry was likely to do the young men of 1850, highly
prejudicial as it undoubtedly was to those of his day, illustrated, so
to speak, by the bad notoriety of his own character and career. But the
generation of English youth who had grown up with Thackeray, Dickens,
and Tennyson as their intellectual nourishment, seemed to me little
likely to be infected with Byronism, and might read his poetry with a
degree of impunity which the young people of his own time did not enjoy.
I urged this my conviction upon her, as rendering less necessary than
she imagined the antidote she was anxious to append to the poison of the
new edition of her husband's works. But to this she replied that she had
derived her impression of the probable mischief to a class peculiarly
interesting to him, from Frederick Robertson, and of course his opinion
was more than an overweight for mine.
Lady Byron did not, however, fulfill her purpose of prefacing the
contemplated edition of Byron's poems with a notice of him by herself,
which I think very likely to have been a suggestion of Mr. Robertson's
to her.
My happy year in Edinburgh ended, I returned to London, to our house in
James Street, Buckingham Gate, where I found my parents much burdened
with care and anxiety about the affairs of the theater, which were
rapidly falling into irretrievable embarrassment. My father toiled
incessantly, but the tide of ill-success and losing fortune had set
steadily against him, and the attempt to stem it became daily harder and
more hopeless. I used sometimes to hear some of the sorrowful details of
this dreary struggle, and I well remember the indignation and terror I
experienced when one day my father said at dinner, "I have had a new
experience to-day: I have been arrested for the first time in my life."
I believe my father was never personally in debt during all his life; he
said he never had been up to that day, and I am very sure he never was
afterward. Through all the severe labor of his professional life, and
his strenuous exertions to maintain his family and educate my brothers
like gentlemen, and my sister and myself with every advantage, he never
incurred the misery of falling into debt, but paid his way as he went
along, with difficulty, no doubt, but still steadily and successfully,
"owing no man any thing." But the suit in question was brought against
him as one of the proprietors of the theater, for a debt which the
theater owed; and, moreover, was that of a person whom he had befriended
and helped forward, and who had always professed the most sincere
gratitude and attachment to him. The constantly darkening prospects of
that unlucky theater threw a gloom over us all; sometimes my father used
to speak of selling his share in it for any thing he could get for it
(and Heaven knows it was not likely to be much!), and going to live
abroad; or sending my mother, with us, to live cheaply in the south of
France, while he continued to work in London. Neither alternative was
cheerful for him or my poor mother, and I felt very sorrowful for them,
though I thought I should like living in the south of France better than
in London. I was working with a good deal of enthusiasm at a tragedy on
the subject of Fiesco, the Genoese noble's conspiracy against the
Dorias--a subject which had made a great impression upon me when I first
read Schiller's noble play upon it. My own former fancy about going on
the stage, and passionate desire for a lonely, independent life in which
it had originated, had died away with the sort of moral and mental
effervescence which had subsided during my year's residence in
Edinburgh. Although all my sympathy with the anxieties of my parents
tended to make the theater an object of painful interest to me, and
though my own attempts at poetical composition were constantly cast in a
dramatic form, in spite of my enthusiastic admiration of Goethe's and
Schiller's plays (which, however, I could only read in French or English
translations, for I then knew no German) and my earnest desire to write
a good play myself, the idea of making the stage my profession had
entirely passed from my mind, which was absorbed with the wish and
endeavor to produce a good dramatic composition. The turn I had
exhibited for acting at school appeared to have evaporated, and Covent
Garden itself never occurred to me as a great institution for purposes
of art or enlightened public recreation, but only as my father's
disastrous property, to which his life was being sacrificed; and every
thought connected with it gradually became more and more distasteful to
me. It appears to me curious, that up to this time, I literally knew
nothing of Shakespeare, beyond having seen one or two of his plays
acted; I had certainly never read one of them through, nor did I do so
until some time later, when I began to have to learn parts in them by
heart.
I think the rather serious bias which my mind had developed while I was
still in Scotland tended probably to my greater contentment in my home,
and to the total disinclination which I should certainly now have felt
for a life of public exhibition. My dramatic reading and writing was
curiously blended with a very considerable interest in literature of a
very different sort, and with the perusal of such works as Mason on
"Self-Knowledge," Newton's "Cardiphonia," and a great variety of sermons
and religious essays. My mother, observing my tendency to reading on
religious subjects, proposed to me to take my first communion. She was a
member of the Swiss Protestant Church, the excellent pastor of which,
the Rev. Mr. S----, was our near neighbor, and we were upon terms of the
friendliest intimacy with him and his family. In his church I received
the sacrament for the first time, but I do not think with the most
desirable effect. The only immediate result that I can remember of this
increase of my Christian profession and privileges was, I am sorry to
say, a rigid pharisaical formalism, which I carried so far as to decline
accompanying my father and mother to our worthy clergyman's house, one
Sunday, when we were invited to spend the evening with him and his
family. This sort of acrid fruit is no uncommon first harvest of
youthful religious zeal; and I suppose my parents and my worthy pastor
thought it a piece of unripe, childish, impertinent conscientiousness,
hardly deserving a serious rebuke.
Another of my recollections which belong to this time is seeing several
times at our house that exceedingly coarse, disagreeable, clever, and
witty man, Theodore Hook. I always had a dread of his loud voice, and
blazing red face, and staring black eyes; especially as on more than one
occasion his after-dinner wit seemed to me fitter for the table he had
left than the more refined atmosphere of the drawing-room. One day he
dined with us to meet my cousin Horace Twiss and his handsome new wife.
Horace had in a lesser degree some of Hook's wonderful sense of humor
and quickness of repartee, and the two men brought each other out with
great effect. Of course I had heard of Mr. Hook's famous reply when,
after having returned from the colonies, where he was in an official
position, under suspicion of peculation, a friend meeting him said,
"Why, hallo, Hook! I did not know you were in England! What has brought
you back again?" "Something wrong about the _chest_," replied the
imperturbable wit. He was at this time the editor of the John Bull, a
paper of considerable ability, and only less scurrility than the _Age_;
and in spite of his _chest difficulty_ he was much sought in society for
his extraordinary quickness and happiness in conversation. His
outrageous hoax of the poor London citizen, from whom he extorted an
agonized invitation to dinner by making him believe that he and Charles
Mathews were public surveyors, sent to make observations for a new road,
which was to go straight through the poor shopkeeper's lawn,
flower-garden, and bedroom, he has, I believe, introduced into his novel
of "Gilbert Gurney." But not, of course, with the audacious
extemporaneous song with which he wound up the joke, when, having eaten
and drank the poor citizen's dinner, prepared for a small party of
citizen friends (all the time assuring him that he and his friend would
use their very best endeavors to avert the threatened invasion of his
property by the new line of road), he proposed singing a song, to the
great delight of the unsophisticated society, the concluding verse of
which was--
"And now I am bound to declare
That your wine is as good as your cook,
And that this is Charles Mathews, the player,
And I, sir, am Theodore Hook."
He always demanded, when asked for a specimen of his extemporizing
power, that a subject should be given to him. I do not remember, on one
occasion, what was suggested in the first instance, but after some
discussion Horace Twiss cried out, "The Jews." It was the time of the
first mooting of the question of the Jews being admitted to stand for
Parliament and having seats in the House, and party spirit ran extremely
high upon the subject. Theodore Hook shrugged his shoulders and made a
discontented grimace, as if baffled by his theme, the Jews. However, he
went to the piano, threw back his head, and began strumming a galloping
country-dance tune, to which he presently poured forth the most
inconceivable string of witty, comical, humorous, absurd allusions to
everybody present as well as to the subject imposed upon him. Horace
Twiss was at that time under-secretary either for foreign affairs or the
colonies, and Hook took occasion to say, or rather sing, that the
foreign department could have little charms for a man who had so many
more in the home, with an indication to Annie Twiss; the final verse of
this real firework of wit was this--
"I dare say you think there's little wit
In this, but you've all forgot
That, instead of being a jeu d'esprit,
'Tis only a jeu de mot,"
pronouncing the French words as broadly as possible, "a _Jew d'esprit_,
and 'tis only a _Jew de motte_," for the sake of the rhyme, and his
subject, the Jews. It certainly was all through a capital specimen of
ready humor. I remember on another occasion hearing him exercise his
singular gift in a manner that seemed to me as unjustifiable as it was
disagreeable. I met him at dinner at Sir John McDonald's, then
adjutant-general, a very kind and excellent friend of mine. Mrs. Norton
and Lord C----, who were among the guests, both came late, and after we
had gone into the dining-room, where they were received with a discreet
quantity of mild chaff, Mrs. Norton being much too formidable an
adversary to be challenged lightly. After dinner, however, when the men
came up into the drawing-room, Theodore Hook was requested to
extemporize, and having sung one song, was about to leave the piano in
the midst of the general entreaty that he would not do so, when Mrs.
Norton, seating herself close to the instrument so that he could not
leave it, said, in her most peculiar, deep, soft, contralto voice, which
was like her beautiful dark face set to music, "I am going to sit down
here, and you shall not come away, for I will keep you in like an iron
crow." There was nothing about her manner or look that could suggest any
thing but a flattering desire to enjoy Hook's remarkable talent in some
further specimen of his power of extemporizing, and therefore I suppose
there must have been some previous ill-will or heart-burning on his part
toward her--she was reckless enough in her use of her wonderful wit and
power of saying the most intolerable stinging things, to have left a
smart on some occasion in Hook's memory, for which he certainly did his
best to pay her then. Every verse of the song he now sang ended with his
turning with a bow to her, and the words, "my charming iron crow;" but
it was from beginning to end a covert satire of her and her social
triumphs; even the late arrival at dinner and its supposed causes were
duly brought in, still with the same mock-respectful inclination to his
"charming iron crow." Everybody was glad when the song was over, and
applauded it quite as much from a sense of relief as from admiration of
its extraordinary cleverness; and Mrs. Norton smilingly thanked Hook,
and this time made way for him to leave the piano.
We lived near each other at this time, we in James Street, Buckingham
Gate, and the Nortons at Storey's Gate, at the opposite end of the
Birdcage Walk. We both of us frequented the same place of worship--a
tiny chapel wedged in among the buildings at the back of Downing Street,
the entrance to which was from the park; it has been improved away by
the new government offices. Our dinner at the McDonalds' was on a
Saturday, and the next day, as we were walking part of the way home
together from church, Mrs. Norton broke out about Theodore Hook and his
odious ill-nature and abominable coarseness, saying that it was a
disgrace and a shame that for the sake of his paper, the _John Bull_,
and its influence, the Tories should receive such a man in society. I,
who but for her outburst upon the subject should have carefully avoided
mentioning Hook's name, presuming that after his previous evening's
performance it could not be very agreeable to Mrs. Norton, now, not
knowing very well what to say, but thinking the Sheridan blood
(especially in her veins) might have some sympathy with and find some
excuse for him, suggested the temptation that the possession of such wit
must always be, more or less, to the abuse of it. "Witty!" exclaimed the
indignant beauty, with her lip and nostril quivering, "witty! One may
well be witty when one fears neither God nor devil!" I was heartily glad
Hook was not there; he was not particular about the truth, and would
infallibly, in some shape or other, have translated for her benefit, "Je
crains Dieu, cher Abner, et n'ai point d'autre crainte."
The Nortons' house was close to the issue from St. James's Park into
Great George Street. I remember passing an evening with them there, when
a host of distinguished public and literary men were crowded into their
small drawing-room, which was literally resplendent with the light of
Sheridan beauty, male and female: Mrs. Sheridan (Miss Callender, of
whom, when she published a novel, the hero of which commits forgery,
that wicked wit, Sidney Smith, said he knew she was a Callender, but did
not know till then that she was a Newgate calendar), the mother of the
Graces, more beautiful than anybody but her daughters; Lady Grahame,
their beautiful aunt; Mrs. Norton, Mrs. Blackwood (Lady Dufferin),
Georgiana Sheridan (Duchess of Somerset and queen of beauty by universal
consent), and Charles Sheridan, their younger brother, a sort of younger
brother of the Apollo Belvedere. Certainly I never saw such a bunch of
beautiful creatures all growing on one stem. I remarked it to Mrs.
Norton, who looked complacently round her tiny drawing-room and said,
"Yes, we are rather good-looking people." I remember this evening
because of the impression made on me by the sight of these wonderfully
"good-looking people" all together, and also because of my having had to
sing with Moore--an honor and glory hardly compensating the distress of
semi-strangulation, in order to avoid drowning his feeble thread of a
voice with the heavy, robust contralto which I found it very difficult
to swallow half of, while singing second to him, in his own melodies,
with the other half. My acquaintance with Mrs. Norton lasted through a
period of many years, and, though never very intimate, was renewed with
cordiality each time I returned to England. It began just after I came
out on the stage, when I was about twenty, and she a few years older. My
father and mother had known her parents and grandparents, Richard
Brinsley Sheridan and Miss Lindley, from whom their descendants derived
the remarkable beauty and brilliant wit which distinguished them.
My mother was at Drury Lane when Mr. Sheridan was at the head of its
administration, and has often described to me the extraordinary
proceedings of that famous first night of "Pizarro," when, at last
keeping the faith he had so often broken with the public, Mr. Sheridan
produced that most effective of melodramas, with my aunt and uncle's
parts still unfinished, and, depending upon their extraordinary rapidity
of study, kept them learning the last scenes of the last act, which he
was still writing, while the beginning of the piece was being performed.
By the by, I do not know what became of the theories about the dramatic
art, and the careful and elaborate study necessary for its perfection.
In this particular instance John Kemble's Rolla and Mrs. Siddons's
Elvira must have been what may be called extemporaneous acting. Not
impossibly, however, these performances may have gained in vivid power
and effect what they lost in smoothness and finish, from the very
nervous strain and excitement of such a mental effort as the actors were
thus called upon to make. My mother remembered well, too, the dismal
Saturdays when, after prolonged periods of non-payment of their
salaries, the poorer members of the company, and all the unfortunate
work-people, carpenters, painters, scene-shifters, understrappers of all
sorts, and plebs in general of the great dramatic concern, thronging the
passages and staircases, would assail Sheridan on his way to the
treasury with pitiful invocations: "For God's sake, Mr. Sheridan, pay us
our salaries!" "For Heaven's sake, Mr. Sheridan, let us have something
this week!" and his plausible reply of, "Certainly, certainly, my good
people, you shall be attended to directly." Then he would go into the
treasury, sweep it clean of the whole week's receipts (the salaries of
the principal actors, whom he dared not offend and could not dispense
with, being, if not wholly, partially paid), and, going out of the
building another way, leave the poor people who had cried to him for
their arrears of wages baffled and cheated of the price of their labor
for another week. The picture was not a pleasant one.
When I first knew Caroline Sheridan, she had not long been married to
the Hon. George Norton. She was splendidly handsome, of an un-English
character of beauty, her rather large and heavy head and features
recalling the grandest Grecian and Italian models, to the latter of whom
her rich coloring and blue-black braids of hair gave her an additional
resemblance. Though neither as perfectly lovely as the Duchess of
Somerset, nor as perfectly charming as Lady Dufferin, she produced a far
more striking impression than either of them, by the combination of the
poetical genius with which she alone, of the three, was gifted, with the
brilliant wit and power of repartee which they (especially Lady
Dufferin) possessed in common with her, united to the exceptional beauty
with which they were all three endowed. Mrs. Norton was extremely
epigrammatic in her talk, and comically dramatic in her manner of
narrating things. I do not know whether she had any theatrical talent,
though she sang pathetic and humorous songs admirably, and I remember
shaking in my shoes when, soon after I came out, she told me she envied
me, and would give anything to try the stage herself. I thought, as I
looked at her wonderful, beautiful face, "Oh, if you should, what would
become of me!" She was no musician, but had a deep, sweet contralto
voice, precisely the same in which she always spoke, and which, combined
with her always lowered eyelids ("downy eyelids" with sweeping silken
fringes), gave such incomparably comic effect to her sharp retorts and
ludicrous stories; and she sang with great effect her own and Lady
Dufferin's social satires, "Fanny Grey," and "Miss Myrtle," etc., and
sentimental songs like "Would I were with Thee," "I dreamt 'twas but a
Dream," etc., of which the words were her own, and the music, which only
amounted to a few chords with the simplest modulations, her own also. I
remember she used occasionally to convulse her friends _en petit comité_
with a certain absurd song called "The Widow," to all intents and
purposes a piece of broad comedy, the whole story of which (the wooing
of a disconsolate widow by a rich lover, whom she first rejects and then
accepts) was comprised in a few words, rather spoken than sung, eked out
by a ludicrous burden of "rum-ti-iddy-iddy-iddy-ido," which, by dint of
her countenance and voice, conveyed all the alternations of the widow's
first despair, her lover's fiery declaration, her virtuous indignation
and wrathful rejection of him, his cool acquiescence and intimation that
his full purse assured him an easy acceptance in various other quarters,
her rage and disappointment at his departure, and final relenting and
consent on his return; all of which with her "iddy-iddy-ido" she sang,
or rather acted, with incomparable humor and effect. I admired her
extremely.
In 1841 I began a visit of two years and a half in England. During this
time I constantly met Mrs. Norton in society. She was living with her
uncle, Charles Sheridan, and still maintained her glorious supremacy of
beauty and wit in the great London world. She came often to parties at
our house, and I remember her asking us to dine at her uncle's, when
among the people we met were Lord Lansdowne and Lord Normanby, both then
in the ministry, whose good-will and influence she was exerting herself
to _captivate_ in behalf of a certain shy, silent, rather rustic
gentleman from the far-away province of New Brunswick, Mr. Samuel Cunard,
afterwards Sir Samuel Cunard of the great mail-packet line of steamers
between England and America. He had come to London an obscure and humble
individual, endeavoring to procure from the government the sole privilege
of carrying the transatlantic mails for his line of steamers. Fortunately
for him he had some acquaintance with Mrs. Norton, and the powerful
beauty, who was kind-hearted and good-natured to all but her natural
enemies (i.e. the members of her own London society), exerted all her
interest with her admirers in high place in favor of Cunard, and had made
this very dinner for the express purpose of bringing her provincial
_protégé_ into pleasant personal relations with Lord Lansdowne and Lord
Normanby, who were likely to be of great service to him in the special
object which had brought him to England. The only other individual I
remember at the dinner was that most beautiful person, Lady Harriet
d'Orsay. Years after, when the Halifax projector had become Sir Samuel
Cunard, a man of fame in the worlds of commerce and business of New York
and London, a baronet of large fortune, and a sort of proprietor of the
Atlantic Ocean between England and the United States, he reminded me of
this charming dinner in which Mrs. Norton had so successfully found the
means of forwarding his interests, and spoke with enthusiasm of her
kind-heartedness as well as her beauty and talents; he, of course, passed
under the Caudine Forks, beneath which all men encountering her had to
bow and throw down their arms. She was very fond of inventing devices for
seals, and other such ingenious exercises of her brains, and she gave
---- a star with the motto, "Procul sed non extincta," which she civilly
said bore reference to me in my transatlantic home. She also told me,
when we were talking of mottoes for seals and rings, that she had had
engraved on a ring she always wore the name of that miserable bayou of
the Mississippi--Atchafalaya--where Gabriel passes near one side of an
island, while Evangeline, in her woe-begone search, is lying asleep on
the other; and that, to her surprise, she found that the King of the
Belgians wore a ring on which he had had the same word engraved, as an
expression of the bitterest and most hopeless disappointment.
In 1845 I passed through London, and spent a few days there with my
father, on my way to Italy. Mrs. Norton, hearing of my being in town,
came to see me, and urged me extremely to go and dine with her before I
left London, which I did. The event of the day in her society was the
death of Lady Holland, about which there were a good many lamentations,
of which Lady T---- gave the real significance, with considerable
_naïveté_: "Ah, poore deare Ladi Ollande! It is a grate pittie; it was
suche a _pleasant 'ouse!_" As I had always avoided Lady Holland's
acquaintance, I could merely say that the regrets I heard expressed
about her seemed to me only to prove a well-known fact--how soon the
dead were forgotten. The _real_ sorrow was indeed for the loss of her
house, that pleasantest of all London rendezvouses, and not for its
mistress, though those whom I then heard speak were probably among the
few who did regret her. Lady Holland had one good quality (perhaps more
than one, which I might have found out if I had known her): she was a
constant and exceedingly warm friend, and extended her regard and
remembrance to all whom Lord Holland or herself had ever received with
kindness or on a cordial footing. My brother John had always been
treated with great friendliness by Lord Holland, and in her will Lady
Holland, who had not seen him for years, left him as a memento a copy,
in thirty-two volumes, of the English essayists, which had belonged to
her husband.
Almost immediately after this transient renewal of my intercourse with
Mrs. Norton, I left England for Italy, and did not see her again for
several years. The next time I did so was at an evening party at my
sister's house, where her appearance struck me more than it had ever
done. Her dress had something to do with this effect, no doubt. She had
a rich gold-colored silk on, shaded and softened all over with black
lace draperies, and her splendid head, neck, and arms were adorned with
magnificently simple Etruscan gold ornaments, which she had brought from
Rome, whence she had just returned, and where the fashion of that famous
antique jewelry had lately been revived. She was still "une beauté
triomphante à faire voir aux ambassadeurs."
During one of my last sojourns in London I met Mrs. Norton at Lansdowne
House. There was a great assembly there, and she was wandering through
the rooms leaning on the arm of her youngest son, her glorious head
still crowned with its splendid braids of hair, and wreathed with grapes
and ivy leaves, and this was my last vision of her; but, in the autumn
of 1870, Lady C---- told me of meeting her in London society, now indeed
quite old, but indomitably handsome and witty.
I think it only humane to state, for the benefit of all mothers anxious
for their daughters', and all daughters anxious for their own, future
welfare in this world, that in the matter of what the lady's-maid in the
play calls "the first of earthly blessings--personal appearance,"
Caroline Sheridan as a girl was so little distinguished by the
exceptional beauty she subsequently developed, that her lovely mother,
who had a right to be exacting in the matter, entertained occasionally
desponding misgivings as to the future comeliness of one of the most
celebrated beauties of her day.
At the time of my earliest acquaintance with the Nortons, our friends
the Basil Montagus had left their house in Bedford Square, and were also
living at Storey's Gate. Among the remarkable people I met at their
house was the Indian rajah, Ramohun Roy, philosopher, scholar, reformer,
Quaker, theist, I know not what and what not, who was introduced to me,
and was kind enough to take some notice of me. He talked to me of the
literature of his own country, especially its drama, and, finding that I
was already acquainted with the Hindoo theatre through the medium of my
friend Mr. Horace Wilson's translations of its finest compositions, but
that I had never read "Sakuntalà," the most remarkable of them all,
which Mr. Wilson had not included in his collection (I suppose because
of its translation by Sir William Jones), Ramohun Roy sent me a copy of
it, which I value extremely as a memento of so remarkable a man, but in
which I confess I am utterly unable to find the extraordinary beauty and
sublimity which he attributed to it, and of which I remember Goethe also
speaks enthusiastically (if I am not mistaken, in his conversations with
Eckermann), calling it the most wonderful production of human genius.
Goethe had not, any more than myself, the advantage of reading
"Sakuntalà" in Sanskrit, and I am quite at a loss to account for the
extreme and almost exaggerated admiration he expresses for it.
JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, August 23, ----.
MY DEAREST H----,
I received your last on my return from the country, where I had
been staying a fortnight, and I assure you that after an
uncomfortable and rainy drive into town I found it of more service
in warming me than even the blazing fire with which we are obliged
to shame the month of August.
I have a great deal to tell you about our affairs, and the effect
that their unhappy posture seems likely to produce upon my future
plans and prospects. Do you remember a letter I wrote to you a long
time ago about going on the stage? and another, some time before
that, about my becoming a governess? The urgent necessity which I
think now exists for exertion, in all those who are capable of it
among us, has again turned my thoughts to these two considerations.
My father's property, and all that we might ever have hoped to
derive from it, being utterly destroyed in the unfortunate issue of
our affairs, his personal exertions are all that remain to him and
us to look to. There are circumstances in which reflections that
our minds would not admit at other times of necessity force
themselves upon our consideration. Those talents and
qualifications, both mental and physical, which have been so
mercifully preserved to my dear father hitherto, cannot, in the
natural course of things, all remain unimpaired for many more
years. It is right, then, that those of us who have the power to do
so should at once lighten his arms of all unnecessary burden, and
acquire the habit of independent exertion before the moment comes
when utter inexperience would add to the difficulty of adopting any
settled mode of proceeding; it is right and wise to prepare for the
evil day before it is upon us. These reflections have led me to the
resolution of entering upon some occupation or profession which may
enable me to turn the advantages my father has so liberally
bestowed upon me to some account, so as not to be a useless
incumbrance to him at present, or a helpless one in future time. My
brother John, you know, has now determined, to go into the Church.
Henry we have good although remote hopes of providing well for,
and, were I to make use of my own capabilities, dear little A----
would be the only one about whom there need be any anxiety. I
propose writing to my father before he returns home (he is at
present acting in the provinces) on this subject. Some step I am
determined to take; the nature of it will, of course, remain with
him and my mother. I trust that whatever course they resolve upon I
shall be enabled to pursue steadily, and I am sure that, be it what
it may, I shall find it comparatively easy, as the motive is
neither my own profit nor reputation, but the desire of bringing
into their right use whatever talents I may possess, which have not
been given for useless purposes. I hope and trust that I am better
fitted for either of the occupations I have mentioned than I was
when I before entertained an idea of them. You asked me what
inclined John's thoughts to the Church. It would be hard to say; or
rather, I ought to say, that Providence which in its own good time
makes choice of its instruments, and which I ever firmly trusted
would not suffer my brother's fine powers to be wasted on unworthy
aims. I am not able to say how the change which has taken place in
his opinions and sentiments was effected; but you know one has not
done _all_ one's thinking at two and twenty. I have been by
circumstances much separated from my brother, and when with him
have had but little communication upon such subjects. It was at a
time when, I think, his religious principles were somewhat
unsettled, that his mind was so passionately absorbed by politics.
The nobler instincts of his nature, diverted for a while from due
direct intercourse with their divine source, turned themselves with
enthusiastic, earnest hope to the desire of benefiting his
fellow-creatures; and to these aims--the reformation of abuses, the
establishment of a better system of government, the gradual
elevation and improvement of the people, and the general progress
of the country towards enlightened liberty and consequent
prosperity--he devoted all his thoughts. This was the period of his
fanatical admiration for Jeremy Bentham and Mill, who, you know,
are our near neighbors here, and whose houses we never pass without
John being inclined to salute them, I think, as the shrines of some
beneficent powers of renovation. And here comes the break in our
intercourse and in my knowledge of his mental and moral progress. I
went to Scotland, and was amazed, after I had been there some time,
to hear from my mother that John had not got his scholarship, and
had renounced his intention of going to the bar and determined to
study for the Church. I returned home, and found him much changed.
His high sense of the duties attending it makes me rejoice most
sincerely that he has chosen that career, which may not be the
surest path to worldly advancement, but if conscientiously followed
must lead, I should think, to the purest happiness this life can
offer. I think much of this change may be attributed to the example
and influence of some deservedly dear friends of his; probably
something to the sobering effect of the disappointment and
mortification of his failure at college, where such sanguine hopes
and expectations of his success had been entertained. Above all, I
refer his present purpose to that higher influence which has
followed him through all his mental wanderings, suggesting the
eager inquiries of his restless and dissatisfied spirit, and
finally leading it to this, its appointed goal. He writes to us in
high spirits from Germany, and his letters are very delightful.
Mrs. Siddons and Cecy are with Mrs. Kemble at Leamington. Mrs.
Harry Siddons is, I fear, but little better; she has had another
attack of erysipelas, and I am very anxious to get to her, but the
distance, and the dependence of all interesting young females in
London on the legs and leisure of chaperons, prevents me from
seeing her as often as I wish.
German is an arduous undertaking, and I have once more abandoned
it, not only on account of its difficulty, but because I do not at
present wish to enter upon the study of a foreign language, when I
am but just awakened to my radical ignorance of my own. God bless
you, dear H----.
Yours ever,
FANNY.
As long as I retained a home of my own, I resisted my friend's
half-expressed wish that I should destroy her letters; but when I ceased
to have any settled place of habitation, it became impossible to provide
for the safe-keeping of a mass of papers the accumulation of which
received additions every few days, and by degrees (for my courage failed
me very often in the task) my friend's letters were destroyed. Few
things that I have had to relinquish have cost me a greater pang or
sense of loss, and few of the conditions of my wandering life have
seemed to me more grievous than the necessity it imposed upon me of
destroying these letters. My friend did not act upon her own theory with
regard to my correspondence, and indeed it seems to me that no general
rule can be given with regard to the preservation or destruction of
correspondence. What revelations of misery and guilt may lie in the
forgotten folds of hoarded letters, that have been preserved only to
blast the memory of the dead! What precious words, again, have been
destroyed, that might have lightened for a whole heavy lifetime the
doubt and anguish of the living! In this, as in all we do, we grope
about in darkness, and the one and the other course must often enough
have been bitterly lamented by those who "did for the best" in keeping
or destroying these chronicles of human existence.
Madame Pasta's daughter once said to Charles Young, who enthusiastically
admired her great genius, "Vous trouvez qu'elle chante et joue bien,
n'est-ce pas?" "Je crois bien," replied he, puzzled to understand her
drift. "Well," replied the daughter of the great lyrical artist, "to us,
to whom she belongs, and who know and love her, her great talent is the
least admirable thing about her; but no one but us knows that."
Doubtless if letters of Shakespeare's could be found, letters developing
the mystery of those sorrowful sonnets, or even letters describing his
daily dealings with his children, and Mistress Anne Hathaway, his wife;
nay, even the fashion, color, and texture of the hangings of "the
second-best bed," her special inheritance, a frenzy of curiosity would
be aroused by them. All his glorious plays would not be worth
(bookseller's value) some scraps of thought and feeling, or mere
personal detail, or even commonplace (he must have been sovereignly
commonplace) impartment of theatrical business news and gossip to his
fellow-players, or Scotch Drummond, or my Lord Southampton, or the Dark
Woman of the sonnets. But we know little about him, thank Heaven! and I
am glad that little is not more.
I know he must have sinned and suffered, mortal man since he was, but I
do not wish to know how. From his plays, in spite of the necessarily
impersonal character of dramatic composition, we gather a vivid and
distinct impression of serene sweetness, wisdom, and power. In the
fragment of personal history which he gives us in his sonnets, the
reverse is the case; we have a painful impression of mournful struggling
with adverse circumstances and moral evil elements, and of the labor and
the love of his life alike bestowed on objects deemed by himself
unworthy; and in spite of his triumphant promise of immortality to the
false mistress or friend, or both, to whom (as far as he has revealed
them to us) he has kept his promise, we fall to pitying Shakespeare, the
bestower of immortality. In the great temple raised by his genius to his
own undying glory, one narrow door opens into a secret, silent crypt,
where his image, blurred and indistinct, is hardly discernible through
the gloomy atmosphere, heavy and dim as if with sighs and tears. Here is
no clew, no issue, and we return to the shrine filled with light and
life and warmth and melody; with knowledge and love of man, and worship
of God and nature. There is our benefactor and friend, simplest and most
lovable, though most wonderful of his kind; other image of him than that
bright one may the world never know!
The extraordinary development of the taste for petty details of personal
gossip which our present literature bears witness to makes it almost a
duty to destroy all letters not written for publication; and yet there
is no denying that life is essentially interesting--every life, any
life, all lives, if their detailed history could be given with truth and
simplicity. For my own part, I confess that the family correspondence,
even of people utterly unknown to me, always seems to me full of
interest. The vivid interest the writers took in themselves makes their
letters better worth reading than many books we read; they are life, as
compared with imitations of it--life, that mystery and beauty surpassing
every other; they are morsels of that profoundest of all secrets, which
baffles alike the man of science, the metaphysician, artist, and poet.
And yet it would be hard if A, B, and C's letters should therefore be
published, especially as, had they contemplated my reading them, they
would doubtless never have written them, or written them quite other
than they did.
To resume my chronicle. My brother John was at this time traveling in
Germany; the close of his career at Cambridge had proved a bitter
disappointment to my father, and had certainly not fulfilled the
expectations of any of his friends or the promise of his own very
considerable abilities. He left the university without taking his
degree, and went to Heidelberg, where he laid the foundation of his
subsequent thorough knowledge of German, and developed the taste for the
especial philological studies to which he eventually devoted himself,
but his eminence in which brought him little emolument and but tardy
fame, and never in the least consoled my father for the failure of all
the brilliant hopes he had formed of the future distinction and fortune
of his eldest son. When a man has made up his mind that his son is to be
Lord Chancellor of England, he finds it hardly an equivalent that he
should be one of the first Anglo-Saxon scholars in Europe.
In my last letter to Miss S---- I have referred to some of my brother's
friends and their possible influence in determining his choice of the
clerical profession in preference to that of the law, which my father
had wished him to adopt, and for which, indeed, he had so far shown his
own inclination as to have himself entered at the Inner Temple.
Among my brother's contemporaries, his school and college mates who
frequented my father's house at this time, were Arthur Hallam, Alfred
Tennyson and his brothers, Frederick Maurice, John Sterling, Richard
Trench, William Donne, the Romillys, the Malkins, Edward Fitzgerald,
James Spedding, William Thackeray, and Richard Monckton Milnes.
These names were those of "promising young men," our friends and
companions, whose various remarkable abilities we learned to estimate
through my brother's enthusiastic appreciation of them. How bright has
been, in many instances, the full performance of that early promise,
England has gratefully acknowledged; they have been among the jewels of
their time, and some of their names will be famous and blessed for
generations to come. It is not for me to praise those whom all
English-speaking folk delight to honor; but in thinking of that bright
band of very noble young spirits, of my brother's love and admiration
for them, of their affection for him, of our pleasant intercourse in
those far-off early days,--in spite of the faithful, life-long regard
which still subsists between myself and the few survivors of that goodly
company, my heart sinks with a heavy sense of loss, and the world from
which so much light has departed seems dark and dismal enough.