GREAT RUSSELL STREET, February 7, 1831.
MY DEAR H----,
I found your lecture waiting for me on my return from Brighton; I
call it thus because if your two last were less than letters your
yesterday's one is more; but I shall not attempt at present to
follow you to the misty heights whither our nature tends, or dive
with you into the muddy depths whence it springs. I have heard from
my brother John, and now expect almost hourly to see him. The
Spanish revolution, as he now sees and as many foresaw, is a mere
vision. The people are unready, unripe, unfit, and therefore
unwilling; had it not been so they would have done their work
themselves; it is as impossible to urge on the completion of such a
change before the time as to oppose it when the time is come. John
now writes that, all hope of rousing the Spaniards being over, and
their party consequently dispersing, he is thinking of bending his
steps homeward, and talks of once more turning his attention to the
study of the law. I know not what to say or think. My cousin,
Horace Twiss, was put into Parliament by Lord Clarendon, but the
days of such parliamentary patronage are numbered, and I do not
much deplore it, though I sometimes fancy that the House of
Commons, could it by any means have been opened to him, might
perhaps have been the best sphere for John. His natural abilities
are brilliant, and his eloquence, energy, and activity of mind
might perhaps have been made more and more quickly available for
good purposes in that than in any other career.
I am not familiar with all that Burns has written; I have read his
letters, and know most of his songs by heart. His passions were so
violent that he seems to me in that respect to have been rather a
subject for poetry than a poet; for though a poet should perhaps
have a strongly passionate nature, he should also have power enough
over it to be able to observe, describe, and, if I may so say,
experimentalize with it, as he would with the passions of others. I
think it would better qualify a man to be a poet to be able to
perceive rather than liable to feel violent passion or emotion. May
not such things be known of without absolute experience? What is
the use of the poetical imagination, that lower inspiration, which,
like the higher one of faith, is the "evidence of things not seen"?
Troubled and billowy waters reflect nothing distinctly on their
surface; it is the still, deep, placid element that gives back the
images by which it is surrounded or that pass over its surface. I
do not of course believe that a good man is necessarily a poet, but
I think a devout man is almost always a man with a poetical
imagination; he is familiar with ideas which are essentially
sublime, and in the act of adoration he springs to the source of
all beauty through the channel by which our spirits escape most
effectually from their chain, the flesh, and their prison-house,
the world, and rise into communion with that supreme excellence
from which they originally emanated and into whose bosom they will
return. I cannot now go into all I think about this, for I have so
many other things to talk about. Since I began this letter I have
heard a report that John is a prisoner, that he has been arrested
and sent to Madrid. Luckily I do not believe a word of this; if he
has rendered himself obnoxious to the British authorities in
Gibraltar they may have locked him up for a week or two there, and
I see no great harm in that; but that he should have been delivered
to the Spaniards and sent to Madrid I do not believe, because I
know that the whole revolutionary party is going to pieces, and
that they have neither the power nor the means to render themselves
liable to such a disagreeable distinction. We expect him home every
day. Only conceive, dear H----, the ill-fortune that attends us: my
father, or rather the theater, is involved in six lawsuits I He and
my mother are neither of them quite well; anxiety naturally has
much share in their indisposition.
I learned Beatrice this morning and the whole of it, in an hour,
which I tell you because I consider it a feat. I am delighted at
the thoughts of acting it; it will be the second part which I shall
have acted with real pleasure; Portia is the other, but Beatrice is
not nearly so nice. I am to act it next Thursday, when pray think
of me.
I do not know whether you have seen anything in the papers about a
third theater; we have had much anxiety, vexation, and expense
about it, but I have no doubt that Mr. Arnold will carry the
question. The great people want a plaything for this season, and
have set their hearts upon that. I acted Belvidera to my father's
Jaffier at Brighton; you cannot imagine how great a difference it
produced in my acting. Mrs. Siddons and Miss O'Neill had a great
advantage over me in their tragic partners. Have you heard that Mr.
Hope, the author of "Anastasius," is just dead? That was a
wonderfully clever book, of rather questionable moral effects, I
think; the same sort of cynical gloom and discontent which pervade
Byron's writings prevail in that; and I thought it a pity, because
in other respects it seems a genuine book, true to life and human
nature. A few days before I heard of his death, Mr. Harness was
discussing with me a theory of Hope's respecting the destiny of the
human soul hereafter. His notion is that all spirit is after death
to form but one whole spiritual existence, a sort of _lumping_
which I object to. I should like always to be able to know myself
from somebody else.
I _do_ read the papers sometimes, dear H----, and, whenever I do, I
wonder at you and all sensible people who make a daily practice of
it; the proceedings of Parliament would make one angry if they did
not make one so sad, and some of the debates would seem to me
laughable but that I know they are lamentable.
I have just finished Channing's essay on Milton, which is
admirable.
My cousin Harry sails for India on Thursday; his mother is making a
brave fight of it, poor soul! I met them all at my aunt Siddons's
last night; she was remarkably well, and "charming," as she styles
herself when that is the case. Good-by. Always affectionately
yours,
FANNY.
I suppose it is one of the peculiarities of the real poetical
temperament to receive, as it were, a double impression of its own
phenomena--one through the senses, affections, and passions, and one
through the imagination--and to have a perpetual tendency to make
intellectual capital of the experiences of its own sensuous,
sentimental, and passionate nature. In the above letter, written so many
years ago, I have used the term _experimentalizing_ with his own nature
as the process of a poet's mind; but though self-consciousness and
self-observation are almost inseparable from the poetical organization,
Goethe is the only instance I know of what could, with any propriety, be
termed self-experimentalizing--he who wrung the heart and turned the
head of the whole reading Europe of his day by his own love passages
with Madame Kestner transcribed into "The Sorrows of Werther."
Self-illustration is perhaps a better term for the result of that
passionate egotism which is so strong an element in the nature of most
poets, and the secret of so much of their power. _Ils s'intéressent
tellement à ce qui les regarde_, that they interest us profoundly in it
too, and by the law of our common nature, and the sympathy that pervades
it, their great difference from their kind serves but to enforce their
greater likeness to it.
Goethe's nature, however, was not at all a predominantly passionate one;
so much the contrary, indeed, that one hardly escapes the impression all
through his own record of his life that he _felt_ through his
overmastering intellect rather than his heart; and that he analyzed too
well the processes of his own feelings ever to have been carried by them
beyond the permission of his will, or out of sight of that æsthetic
self-culture, that development, which really seems to have been his
prevailing passion. A strong histrionic vein mixes, too, with his more
imaginative mental qualities, and perpetually reveals itself in his
assumption of fictitious characters, in his desire for producing
"situations" in his daily life, and in his conscious "effects" upon
those whom he sought to impress.
His genius sometimes reminds me of Ariel--the subtle spirit who,
observing from aloof, as it were (that is, from the infinite distance of
his own _unmoral_, demoniacal nature), the follies and sins and sorrows
of humanity, understands them all and sympathizes with none of them; and
describes, with equal indifference, the drunken, brutish delight in his
music expressed by the coarse Neapolitan buffoons and the savage
gorilla, Caliban, and the abject self-reproach and bitter, poignant
remorse exhibited by Antonio and his fellow conspirators; telling
Prospero that if _he_ saw them he would pity them, and adding, in his
passionless perception of their anguish, "I should, sir, _were I
human_."
There is a species of remote partiality in Goethe's mode of delineating
the sins and sorrows of his fellows, that seems hardly human and still
less divine; "_Das ist dämonisch_," to use his own expression about
Shakespeare, who, however, had nothing whatever in common with that
quality of moral _neutrality_ of the great German genius.
Perhaps nothing indicates what I should call Goethe's intellectual
_unhumanity_ so much as his absolute want of sympathy with the progress
of the race. He was but mortal man, however, though he had the head of
Jove, and Pallas Athena might have sprung all armed from it. Once, and
once only, if I remember rightly, in his conversations with Eckermann,
the cause of mankind elicits an expression of faith and hope from him,
in some reference to the future of America. I recollect, on reading the
second part of "Faust" with my friend Abeken (assuredly the most
competent of all expounders of that extraordinary composition), when I
asked him what was the signification of that final cultivation of the
barren sea sand, in Faust's blind old age, and cried, "Is it possible
that he wishes to indicate the hopelessness of all attempt at progress?"
his replying, "I am afraid he was no believer in it." And so it comes
that his letters to Madame von Stein leave one only amazed with the more
sorrowful admiration that the unrivaled genius of the civilized world in
its most civilized age found perfect satisfaction in the inane routine
of the life of a court dignitary in a petty German principality.
It is worthy of note how, in the two instances of his great
masterpieces, "Faust" and "Wilhelm Meister," Goethe has worked up in a
sequel all the superabundant material he had gathered for his subject;
and in each case how the life-blood of the poet pulses through the first
part, while the second is, as it were, a mere storehouse of splendid
intellectual supply which he has wrought into elaborate phantasmagoria,
dazzling in their brilliancy and wonderful in their variety, but all
alike difficult to comprehend and sympathize with--the rare mental
fragments, precious like diamond dust, left after the cutting of those
two perfect gems.
Free-trade had hardly uttered a whisper yet upon any subject of national
importance when the monopoly of theatrical property was attacked by Mr.
Arnold, of the English Opera House, who assailed the patents of the two
great theaters, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, and demanded that the
right to act the legitimate drama (till then their especial privilege)
should be extended to all British subjects desirous to open play-houses
and perform plays. A lawsuit ensued, and the proprietors of the great
houses--"his Majesty's servants," by his Majesty's royal patent since
the days of the merry monarch--defended their monopoly to the best of
their ability. My father, questioned before a committee of the House of
Commons upon the subject, showed forth the evils likely, in his opinion,
to result to the dramatic art and the public taste by throwing open to
unlimited speculation the right to establish theaters and give
theatrical representations. The great companies of good sterling actors
would be broken up and dispersed, and there would no longer exist
establishments sufficiently important to maintain any large body of
them; the best plays would no longer find adequate representatives in
any but a few of the principal parts, the characters of theatrical
pieces produced would be lowered, the school of fine and careful acting
would be lost, no play of Shakespeare's could be decorously put on the
stage, and the profession and the public would alike fare the worse for
the change. But he was one of the patented proprietors, one of the
monopolists, a party most deeply interested in the issue, and therefore,
perhaps, an incompetent judge in the matter. The cause went against us,
and every item of his prophecy concerning the stage has undoubtedly come
to pass. The fine companies of the great theaters were dissolved, and
each member of the body that together formed so bright a constellation
went off to be the solitary star or planet of some minor sphere. The
best plays no longer found decent representatives for any but one or two
of their first parts; the pieces of more serious character and higher
pretension as dramatic works were supplanted by burlesques and parodies
of themselves; the school of acting of the Kembles, Young, the Keans,
Macready, and their contemporaries, gave place to no school at all of
very clever ladies and gentlemen, who certainly had no pretension to act
tragedy or declaim blank verse, but who played low comedy better than
high, and lowest farce best of all, and who for the most part wore the
clothes of the sex to which they did not belong. Shakespeare's plays
_all_ became historical, and the profession was decidedly the worse for
the change; I am not aware, however, that the public has suffered much
by it.
GREAT RUSSELL STREET, March 5, 1831.
MY DEAREST H----,
I am extremely obliged to you for your long account of Mrs. John
Kemble, and all the details respecting her with which, as you knew
how intensely interesting they were likely to be to me, you have so
kindly filled your letter. Another time, if you can afford to give
a page or two to her interesting dog, Pincher, I shall be still
more grateful; you know it is but omitting the superfluous word or
two you squeeze in about yourself.
As for the journal I keep, it is--as what is not?--a matter of
mingled good and bad influences and results. I am so much alone
that I find this pouring out of my thoughts and feelings a certain
satisfaction; but unfortunately one's book is only a recipient, and
not a commentary, and I miss the sifting, examining, scrutinizing,
discussing intercourse that compels one to the analysis of one's
own ideas and sentiments, and makes the society of any one with
whom one communicates unreservedly so much more profitable, as well
as pleasurable, than this everlasting self-communion. I miss my
wholesome bitters, my daily dose of contradiction; and you need not
be jealous of my book, for it is a miserable _pis aller_ for our
interminable talks.
I had a visit from J---- F---- the other day, and she stayed an
hour, talking very pleasantly, and a little after your fashion; for
she propounded the influence of matter over mind and the
impossibility of preserving a sound and vigorous spirit in a weak
and suffering body. I am blessed with such robust health that my
moral shortcomings, however anxious I may be to refer them to
side-ache, toothache, or any other ache, I am afraid deserve small
mercy on the score of physical infirmity; but she, poor thing, I am
sorry to say, suffers much and often from ill health, and
complained, with evident experience, of the difficulty of
preserving a cheerful spirit and an even temper in the dreary
atmosphere of a sick-room.
When she was gone I set to work with "Francis I.," and corrected
all the errors in the meter which Mr. Milman had had the kindness
to point out to me. I then went over Beatrice with my mother, who
takes infinite pains with me and seems to think I profit. She went
to the play with Mrs. Fitzgerald and Mrs. Edward Romilly, who is a
daughter of Mrs. Marcet, and, owing to A----'s detestation of that
learned lady's elementary book on natural philosophy, I was very
desirous they should not meet one another, though certainly, if any
of Mrs. Marcet's works are dry and dull, it is not this charming
daughter of hers.
But A---- was rabid against "Nat. Phil.," as she ignominiously
nick-named Mrs. Marcet's work on natural philosophy, and so I
brought her to the theater with me; and she stayed in my
dressing-room when I was there, and in my aunt Siddons's little box
when I was acting, as you used to do; but she sang all the while
she was with me, and though I made no sign, it gave me the nervous
fidgets to such a degree that I almost forgot my part. In spite of
which I acted better, for my mother said so; and there is some hope
that by the time the play is withdrawn I shall not play Beatrice
"like the chief mourner at a funeral," which is what she benignly
compares my performance of the part to.
The alteration in my gowns met with her entire approbation--I mean
the taking away of the plaits from round the waist--and my aunt
Dall pronounced it an immense improvement and wished you could see
it.
Lady Dacre and her daughter, Mrs. Sullivan, and Mr. James Wortley
were in the orchestra, and came after the play to supper with us,
as did Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald, Mrs. Edward Romilly, and Mr.
Harness: a very pleasant party, for the ladies are all clever and
charming, and got on admirably together.
It is right, as you are a shareholder in that valuable property of
ours, Covent Garden, you should know that there was a very fine
house, though I cannot exactly tell you the amount of the receipts.
I miss you dreadfully, my dear H----, and I do wish you could come
back to us when Dorothy has left you; but I know that cannot be,
and so I look forward to the summer time, the sunny time, the rosy
time, when I shall be with you again at Ardgillan.
Yesterday, I read for the first time Joanna Baillie's "Count
Basil." I am not sure that the love she describes does not affect
me more even than Shakespeare's delineation of the passion in
"Romeo and Juliet." There is a nerveless despondency about it that
seems to me more intolerable than all the vivid palpitating anguish
of the tragedy of Verona; it is like dying of slow poison, or
malarial fever, compared with being shot or stabbed or even
bleeding to death, which is life pouring out from one, instead of
drying up in one's brains. I think the lines beginning--
"I have seen the last look of her heavenly eyes,"
some of the most poignantly pathetic I know. I afterward read over
again Mr. Procter's play; it is extremely well written, but I am
afraid it would not act as well as it reads. I believe I told you
that "Iñez de Castro" was finally given up.
Sally and Lizzy Siddons came and sat with me for some time; they
seem well and cheerful. Their mother, they said, was not very well;
how should she be! though, indeed, regret would be selfish. Her son
is gone to fulfill his own wishes in pursuing the career for which
he was most fit; he will find in his uncle George Siddons's house
in Calcutta almost a second home. Sally, whom you know I respect
almost as much as love, said it was surprising how soon they had
learned to accept and become reconciled to their brother's
departure. Besides all our self-invoked aids of reason and
religion, nature's own provision for the need of our sorrows is
more bountiful and beneficent than we always perceive or
acknowledge. No one can go on living upon agony; we cannot grieve
for ever if we would, and our most strenuous efforts of
self-control derive help from the inevitable law of change, against
which we sometimes murmur and struggle as if it wronged our
consistency in sorrow and constancy in love. The tendency to _heal_
is as universal as the liability to _smart_. You always speak of
change with a sort of vague horror that surprises me. Though all
things round us are for ever shifting and altering, and though we
ourselves vary and change, there is a supreme spirit of
steadfastness in the midst of this huge unrest, and an abiding,
unshaken, immovable principle of good guiding this vanishing world
of fluctuating atoms, in whose eternal permanence of nature we
largely participate, and our tendency toward and aspiration for
whose perfect stability is one of the very causes of the progress,
and therefore mutability, of our existence. Perhaps the most
painful of all the forms in which change confronts us is in the
increased infirmities and diminished graces which after long
absence we observe in those we love; the failure of power and
vitality in the outward frame, the lessened vividness of the
intellect we have admired, strike us with a sharp surprise of
distress, and it is startling to have revealed suddenly to us, in
the condition of others, how rapidly, powerfully, and unobservedly
time has been dealing with ourselves. But those who believe in
eternity should be able to accept time, and the ruin of the altar
from which the flame leaps up to heaven signifies little.
My father and I went to visit Macdonald's collection of sculpture
to-day. I was very much pleased with some of the things; there are
some good colossal figures, and an exquisite statue of a kneeling
girl, that charmed me greatly; there are some excellent busts, too.
How wonderfully that irrevocable substance assumes the soft, round
forms of life! The color in its passionless purity (absence of
color, I suppose I should say) is really harder than the substance
itself of marble. I could not fall in love with a statue, as the
poor girl in Procter's poem did with the Apollo Belvidere, though I
think I could with a fine portrait: how could one fall in love with
what had no eyes! Was it not Thorwaldsen who said that the three
materials in which sculptors worked--clay, plaster, and
marble--were like life, death, and immortality? I thought my own
bust (the one Macdonald executed in Edinburgh, you know) very good;
the marble is beautiful, and I really think my friend did wonders
with his impracticable subject; the shape of the head and shoulders
is very pretty. I wonder what Sappho was like! An ugly woman, it is
said; I do not know upon what authority, unless her own; but I
wonder what kind of ugliness she enjoyed! Among other heads, we saw
one of Brougham's mother, a venerable and striking countenance,
very becoming the mother of the Chancellor of England. There was a
bust, too, of poor Mr. Huskisson, taken after death. I heard a
curious thing of him to-day: it seems that on the night before the
opening of the railroad, as he was sitting with some friends, he
said, "I cannot tell what ails me; I have a strange weight on my
spirits; I am sure something dreadful will happen to-morrow; I wish
it were over;" and that, when they recapitulated all the
precautions, and all the means that had been taken for security,
comfort, and pleasure, all he replied was, "I wish to God it were
over!" There is something awful in these stories of presentiments
that always impresses me deeply--this warning shadow, projected by
no perceptible object, falling darkly and chilly over one; this
indistinct whisper of destiny, of which one hears the sound,
without distinguishing the sense; this muffled tread of Fate
approaching us!
Did you read Horace Twiss's speech on the Reform Bill? Every one
seems to think it was excellent, whether they agree with his
opinions and sentiments or not. I saw by the paper, to-day, that an
earthquake had been felt along the coast near Dover. A---- says the
world is coming to an end. We certainly live in strange times, but
for that matter so has everybody that ever lived.
[In the admirable letter of Lord Macaulay to Mr. Ellis, describing the
division of the house on the second reading of the Reform Bill, given in
Mr. Trevelyan's life of his uncle, the great historian says Horace
Twiss's countenance at the liberal victory looked like that of a "damned
soul." If, instead of a lost soul, he had said poor Horace looked like a
_lost seat_, he would have been more accurate, if not as picturesque.
Mr. Twiss sat for one of Lord Clarendon's boroughs, and the passage of
the Reform Bill was sure to dismiss him from Parliament; a serious thing
in his future career, fortunes, and position.]
I must now tell you what I do next week, that you may know where to
find me. Monday, the king goes to hear "Cinderella," and I have a
holiday and go with my mother to a party at Dr. Granville's.
Tuesday, I act Belvidera, and _afterward_ go to Lady Dacre's; I do
this because, as I fixed the day myself for her party, not
expecting to act that night, I cannot decently get off. Lady
Macdonald's dinner party is put off; so until Saturday, when I play
Beatrice, I shall spend my time in practicing, reading, writing
(_not_ arithmetic), walking, working cross-stitch, and similar
young-ladyisms.
Good-by, my dear H----. Give my love to Dorothy, if she will take
it; if not, put it to your own share. I think this letter deserves
a long answer. Mrs. Norton, Chantrey, and Barry Cornwall have come
in while I have been finishing this letter; does not that sound
pretty and pleasant? and don't you envy us some of our
_privileges?_ My mother has been seeing P----'s picture of my
father in Macbeth this morning, and you never heard anything
funnier than her rage at it: "A fat, red, round, staring, _pudsy_
thing! the eyes no more like his than mine are!" (certainly, no
human eyes could be more dissimilar); "and then, his jaw!--bless my
soul, how could he miss it! the Kemble jawbone! Why, it was as
notorious as Samson's!" Good-by. Your affectionate
FANNY.
Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Ponsonby, the famous friends of Llangollen,
kept during the whole life they spent together under such peculiar
circumstances a daily diary, so minute as to include the mention not
only of every one they saw (and it must be remembered that their
hermitage was a place of fashionable pilgrimage, as well as a hospitable
refuge), but also _what they had for dinner every day_--so I have been
told.
The little box on the stage I have alluded to in this letter as Mrs.
Siddons's was a small recess opposite the prompter's box, and of much
the same proportions, that my father had fitted up for the especial
convenience of my aunt Siddons whenever she chose to honor my
performances with her presence. She came to it several times, but the
draughts in crossing the stage were bad, and the exertion and excitement
too much for her, and her life was not prolonged much after my coming
upon the stage.
Lord and Lady Dacre were among my kindest friends. With Lady Dacre I
corresponded from the beginning of our acquaintance until her death,
which took place at a very advanced age. She was strikingly handsome,
with a magnificent figure and great vivacity and charm of manner and
conversation. Her accomplishments were various, and all of so masterly
an excellence that her performances would have borne comparison with the
best works of professional artists. She drew admirably, especially
animals, of which she was extremely fond. I have seen drawings of groups
of cattle by her that, without the advantage of color, recall the life
and spirit of Rosa Bonheur's pictures. She was a perfect Italian
scholar, having studied enthusiastically that divine tongue with the
enthusiast Ugo Foscolo, whose patriotic exile and misfortunes were
cheered and soothed by the admiring friendship and cordial kindness of
Lord and Lady Dacre. Among all the specimens of translation with which I
am acquainted, her English version of Petrarch's sonnets is one of the
most remarkable for fidelity, beauty, and the grace and sweetness with
which she has achieved the difficult feat of following in English the
precise form of the complicated and peculiar Italian prosody. These
translations seem to me as nearly perfect as that species of literature
can be. But the most striking demonstrations of her genius were the
groups of horses which Lady Dacre modeled from nature, and which, copied
and multiplied in plaster casts, have been long familiar to the public,
without many of those who know and admire them being aware who was their
author. It is hardly possible to see anything more graceful and
spirited, truer at once to nature and the finest art, than these
compositions, faithful in the minutest details of execution, and highly
poetical in their entire conception. Lady Dacre was the finest female
rider and driver in England; that is saying, in the world. Had she lived
in Italy in the sixteenth century her name would be among the noted
names of that great artistic era; but as she was an Englishwoman of the
nineteenth, in spite of her intellectual culture and accomplishments she
was _only_ an exceedingly clever, amiable, kind lady of fashionable
London society.
Of Lord Dacre it is not easy to speak with all the praise which he
deserved. He inherited his title from his mother, who had married Mr.
Brand of the Hoo, Hertfordshire, and at the moment of his becoming heir
to that estate was on the point of leaving England with Colonel Talbot,
son of Lord Talbot de Malahide, to found with him a colony in British
Canada, where Arcadia was to revive again, at a distance from all the
depraved and degraded social systems of Europe, under the auspices of
these two enthusiastic young reformers. Mr. Brand had completed his
studies in Germany, and acquired, by assiduous reading and intimate
personal acquaintance with the most enlightened and profound thinkers of
the philosophical school of which Kant was the apostle, a mental
cultivation very unlike, in its depth and direction, the usual
intellectual culture of young Englishmen of his class.
He was an enthusiast of the most generous description, in love with
liberty and ardent for progress; the political as well as the social and
intellectual systems of Europe appeared to him, in his youthful zeal for
the improvement of his fellow-beings, belated if not benighted on the
road to it, and he had embraced with the most ardent hopes and purposes
the scheme of emigration of Colonel Talbot, for forming in the New World
a colony where all the errors of the Old were to be avoided. But his
mother died, and the young emigrant withdrew his foot from the deck of
the Canadian ship to take his place in the British peerage, to bear an
ancient English title and become master of an old English estate, to
marry a brilliant woman of English fashionable society, and be
thenceforth the ideal of an English country gentleman, that most
enviable of mortals, as far as outward circumstance and position can
make a man so.
His serious early German studies had elevated and enlarged his mind far
beyond the usual level and scope of the English country gentleman's
brain, and freed him from the peculiarly narrow class prejudices which
it harbors. He was an enlightened liberal, not only in politics but in
every domain of human thought; he was a great reader, with a wide range
of foreign as well as English literary knowledge. He had exquisite
taste, was a fine connoisseur and critic in matters of art, and was the
kindliest natured and mannered man alive.
At his house in Hertfordshire, the Hoo, I used to meet Earl Grey; his
son, the present earl (then Lord Howick); Lord Melbourne; the Duke of
Bedford; Earl Russell (then Lord John), and Sidney and Bobus Smith--all
of them distinguished men, but few of them, I think, Lord Dacre's
superiors in mental power. Altogether the society that he and Lady Dacre
gathered round them was as delightful as it was intellectually
remarkable; it was composed of persons eminent for ability, and
influential members of a great world in which extraordinary capacity was
never an excuse for want of urbanity or the absence of the desire to
please; their intercourse was charming as well as profoundly interesting
to me.
During a conversation I once had with Lady Dacre about her husband, she
gave me the following extract from the writings of Madame Huber, the
celebrated Therëse Heyne, whose first husband, Johann Georg Forster, was
one of the delegates which sympathizing Mentz sent to Paris in 1793, to
solicit from the revolutionary government the favor of annexation to the
French republic.
"In the year 1790 Forster had attached to himself and introduced in his
establishment a young Englishman, who came to Germany with the view of
studying the German philosophy [Kant's system] in its original language.
He was nearly connected with some of the leaders of the then opposition.
He was so noble, so simple, that each virtue seemed in him an instinct,
and so stoical in his views that he considered every noble action as the
victory of self-control, and never felt himself good enough. The friends
[Huber and Forster] who loved him with parental tenderness sometimes
repeated with reference to him the words of Shakespeare--
'So wise, so young, they say, do ne'er live long.'
But, thanks to fate, he has falsified that prophecy; the youth is grown
into manhood; he lives, unclaimed by any mere political party, with the
more valuable portion of his people, and satisfies himself with being a
good man so long as circumstances prevent him from acting in his sense
as a good citizen. Our daily intercourse with this youth enabled us to
combine a knowledge of English events with our participation in the
proceedings on the Continent. His patriotism moderated many of our
extreme views with regard to his country; his estimate of many
individuals, of whom from his position he possessed accurate knowledge,
decided many a disputed point amongst us; and the tenderness which we
all felt for this beloved and valued friend tended to produce justice
and moderation in all our conflicts of opinion."[A]
[A] Sketch of Lord Dacre's character by Madame Huber.
Lady Dacre had had by her first marriage, to Mr. Wilmot, an only child,
the Mrs. Sullivan I have mentioned in this letter, wife of the Reverend
Frederick Sullivan, Vicar of Kimpton. She was an excellent and most
agreeable person, who inherited her mother's literary and artistic
genius in a remarkable degree, though her different position and less
leisurely circumstances as wife of a country clergyman and mother of a
large family, devoted to the important duties of both callings, probably
prevented the full development and manifestation of her fine
intellectual gifts. She was a singularly modest and diffident person,
and this as well as her more serious avocations may have stood in the
way of her doing justice to her uncommon abilities, of which, however,
there is abundant evidence in her drawings and groups of modeled
figures, and in the five volumes of charming stories called "Tales of a
Chaperon," and "Tales of the Peerage and the Peasantry," which were not
published with her name but simply as edited by Lady Dacre, to whom
their authorship was, I think, generally attributed. The mental gifts of
Lady Dacre appear to be heirlooms, for they have been inherited for
three generations, and in each case by her female descendants.
The gentleman who accompanied her to her house, on the evening I
referred to in my letter, was the Honorable James Stuart Wortley,
youngest son of the Earl of Wharncliffe, who was prevented by failure of
health alone from reaching the very highest honors of the legal
profession, in which he had already attained the rank of
solicitor-general, when his career was prematurely closed by disastrous
illness. At the time of my first acquaintance with him he was a very
clever and attractive young man, and though intended for a future Lord
Chancellor he condescended to sing sentimental songs very charmingly.
Of my excellent and amiable friend, the Reverend William Harness, a
biography has been published which tells all there is to be told of his
uneventful life and career. Endowed with a handsome face and sweet
countenance and very fine voice, he was at one time a fashionable London
preacher, a vocation not incompatible, when he exercised it, with a
great admiration for the drama. He was an enthusiastic frequenter of the
theater, published a valuable edition of Shakespeare, and wrote two
plays in blank verse which had considerable merit; but his pre-eminent
gift was goodness, in which I have known few people who surpassed him.
Objecting from conscientious motives to hold more than one living, he
received from his friend, Lord Lansdowne, an appointment in the Home
Office, the duties of which did not interfere with those of his clerical
profession. He was of a delightfully sunny, cheerful temper, and very
fond of society, mixing in the best that London afforded, and frequently
receiving with cordial hospitality some of its most distinguished
members in his small, modest residence. He was a devoted friend of my
family, had an ardent admiration for my aunt Siddons, and honored me
with a kind and constant regard.
Miss Joanna Baillie was a great friend of Mrs. Siddons's, and wrote
expressly for her the part of Jane de Montfort, in her play of "De
Montfort." My father and mother had the honor of her acquaintance, and I
went more than once to pay my respects to her at the cottage in
Hampstead where she passed the last years of her life.
The peculiar plan upon which she wrote her fine plays, making each of
them illustrate a single passion, was in great measure the cause of
their unfitness for the stage. "De Montfort," which has always been
considered the most dramatic of them, had only a very partial success,
in spite of its very great poetical merit and considerable power of
passion, and the favorable circumstance that the two principal
characters in it were represented by the eminent actors for whom the
authoress originally designed them. In fact, though Joanna Baillie
selected and preferred the dramatic form for her poetical compositions,
they are wanting in the real dramatic element, resemblance to life and
human nature, and are infinitely finer as poems than plays.
But the desire and ambition of her life had been to write for the stage,
and the reputation she achieved as a poet did not reconcile her to her
failure as a dramatist. I remember old Mr. Sotheby, the poet (I add this
title to his name, though his title to it was by some esteemed but
slender), telling me of a visit he had once paid her, when, calling him
into her little kitchen (she was not rich, kept few servants, and did
not disdain sometimes to make her own pies and puddings), she bade him,
as she was up to the elbows in flour and paste, draw from her pocket a
paper; it was a play-bill, sent to her by some friend in the country,
setting forth that some obscure provincial company was about to perform
Miss Joanna Baillie's celebrated tragedy of "De Montfort." "There,"
exclaimed the culinary Melpomene, "there, Sotheby, I am so happy! You
see my plays can be acted somewhere!" Well, too, do I remember the tone
of half-regretful congratulation in which she said to me, "Oh, you lucky
girl--you lucky girl; you are going to have your play acted!" This was
"Francis I.," the production of which on the stage was a bitter
annoyance to me, to prevent which I would have given anything I
possessed, but which made me (vexed and unhappy though I was at the
circumstance on which I was being congratulated) an object of positive
envy to the distinguished authoress and kind old lady.
In order to steer clear of the passion of revenge, which is in fact
hatred proceeding from a sense of injury, Miss Joanna Baillie in her
fine tragedy of "De Montfort" has inevitably made the subject of it an
_antipathy_--that is, an instinctive, unreasoning, partly physical
antagonism, producing abhorrence and detestation the most intense,
without any adequate motive; and the secret of the failure of her noble
play on the stage is precisely that this is not (fortunately) a natural
passion common to the majority of human beings (which hatred that _has_
a motive undoubtedly is, in a greater or less degree), but an abnormal
element in exceptionally morbid natures, and therefore a sentiment (or
sensation) with which no great number of people or large proportion of a
public audience can sympathize or even understand. Intense and causeless
hatred is one of the commonest indications of insanity, and, alas! one
that too often exhibits itself toward those who have been objects of the
tenderest love; but De Montfort is not insane, and his loathing is
unaccountable to healthy minds upon any other plea, and can find no
comprehension in audiences quite prepared to understand, if not to
sympathize with, the vindictive malignity of Shylock and the savage
ferocity of Zanga. Goethe, in his grand play of "Tasso," gives the poet
this morbid detestation of the accomplished courtier and man of the
world, Antonio; but then, Tasso is represented as on the very verge of
that madness into the dark abyss of which he subsequently sinks.
Shakespeare's treatment of the passion of hatred, in "The Merchant of
Venice," is worthy of all admiration for the profound insight with which
he has discriminated between that form of it which all men comprehend,
and can sympathize with, and that which, being really nothing but
diseased idiosyncrasy, appears to the majority of healthy minds a mere
form of madness.
In his first introduction to us the Jew accounts for his detestation of
Antonio upon three very comprehensible grounds: national race hatred, in
feeling and exciting which the Jews have been quite a "peculiar people"
from the earliest records of history; personal injury in the defeat of
his usurious prospects of gain; and personal insult in the unmanly
treatment to which Antonio had subjected him. However excessive in
degree, his hatred is undoubtedly shown to have a perfectly
comprehensible, if not adequate cause and nature, and is a _reasonable_
hatred, except from such a moral point of view as allows of none.
An audience can therefore tolerate him with mitigated disgust through
the opening portions of the play. When, however, in the grand climax of
the trial scene Shakespeare intends that he shall be no longer tolerated
or tolerable, but condemned alike by his Venetian judges and his English
audience, he carefully avoids putting into his mouth any one of the
reasons with which in the opening of the play he explains and justifies
his hatred. He does not make him quote the centuries-old Hebrew scorn of
and aversion to the Gentiles, nor the merchant's interference with his
commercial speculations, nor the man's unprovoked spitting at, spurning,
and abuse of him; but he will and _can_ give _no_ reason for his
abhorrence of Antonio, whom he says he _loathes_ with the inexplicable
revulsion of nature that certain men feel toward certain animals; and
the mastery of the poet shows itself in thus making Shylock's cruelty
monstrous, and accounting for it as an abnormal monstrosity.
Hatred that has a reasonable cause may cease with its removal. Supposing
Antonio to have become a converted Jew, or to have withdrawn all
opposition to Shylock's usury and compensated him largely for the losses
he had caused him by it, and to have expressed publicly, with the utmost
humility, contrition for his former insults and sincere promises of
future honor, respect, and reverence, it is possible to imagine Shylock
relenting in a hatred of which the reasons he assigned for it no longer
existed. But from the moment he says he has _no_ reason for his hatred
other than the insuperable disgust and innate enmity of an antagonistic
nature--the deadly, sickening, physical loathing that in rare instances
affects certain human beings toward others of their species, and toward
certain animals--then there are no calculable bounds to the ferocity of
such a blind instinct, no possibility of mitigating, by considerations
of reflection or feeling, an inherent, integral element of a morbid
organization. And Shakespeare, in giving this aspect to the last
exhibition of Shylock's vindictiveness, cancels the original appeal to
possible sympathy for his previous wrongs, and presents him as a
dangerous maniac or wild beast, from whose fury no one is safe, and whom
it is every one's interest to strike down; so that at the miserable
Jew's final defeat the whole audience gasps with a sense of unspeakable
relief. Perhaps, too, the master meant to show--at any rate he has
shown--that the deadly sin of hatred, indulged even with a cause, ends
in the dire disease of causeless hate and the rabid frenzy of a maniac.
It has sometimes been objected to this wonderful scene that Portia's
reticence and delay in relieving Antonio and her husband from their
suspense is unnatural. But Portia is a very _superior woman_, able to
control not only her own palpitating sympathy with their anguish, but
her impatient yearning to put an end to it, till she has made ever
effort to redeem the wretch whose hardness of heart fills her with
incredulous amazement--a heavenly instinct akin to the divine love that
desires not that a sinner should perish, which enables her to postpone
her own relief and that of those precious to her till she has exhausted
endeavor to soften Shylock; and Shakespeare thus not only justifies the
stern severity of her ultimate sentence on him, but shows her endowed
with the highest powers of self-command, and patient, long-suffering
with evil; her teasing her husband half to death afterward restores the
balance of her humanity, which was sinking heavily toward perfection.
Bryan Waller Procter, dear Barry Cornwall--beloved by all who knew him,
even his fellow-poets, for his sweet, gentle disposition--had married
(as I have said elsewhere) Anne Skepper, the daughter of our friend,
Mrs. Basil Montague. They were among our most intimate and friendly
acquaintance. Their house was the resort of all the choice spirits of
the London society of their day, her pungent epigrams and brilliant
sallies making the most delightful contrast imaginable to the cordial
kindness of his conversation and the affectionate tenderness of his
manner; she was like a fresh lemon--golden, fragrant, firm, and
wholesome--and he was like the honey of Hymettus; they were an
incomparable compound.
The play which I spoke of as his, in my last letter, was Ford's "White
Devil," of which the notorious Vittoria Corrombona, Duchess of
Bracciano, is the heroine. The powerful but coarse treatment of the
Italian story by the Elizabethan playwright has been chastened into
something more adapted to modern taste by Barry Cornwall; but, even with
his kindred power and skillful handling, the work of the early master
retained too rough a flavor for the public palate of our day, and very
reluctantly the project of bringing it out was abandoned.
The tragical story of Vittoria Corrombona, eminently tragical in that
age of dramatic lives and deaths, has furnished not only the subject of
this fine play of Ford's, but that of a magnificent historical novel, by
the great German writer, Tieck, in which it is difficult to say which
predominates, the intense interest of the heroine's individual career,
or that created by the splendid delineation of the whole state of Italy
at that period--the days of the grand old Sixtus the Fifth in Rome, and
of the contemporary Medici in Florence; it is altogether a masterpiece
by a great master. Superior in tragic horror, because unrelieved by the
general picture of contemporaneous events, but quite inferior as a work
of imagination, is the comparatively short sketch of Vittoria
Corrombona's life and death contained in a collection of Italian stories
called "Crimes Célèbres," by Stendal, where it keeps company with other
tragedies of private life, which during the same century occupied with
their atrocious details the tribunals of justice in Rome. Among the
collection is the story from which Mr. Fechter's melodrama of "Bel
Demonio" was taken, the story of the Cenci, and the story of a certain
Duchess of Pagliano, all of them inconceivably horrible and revolting.
About the same time that this play of Barry Cornwall's was given up, a
long negotiation between Miss Mitford and the management of Covent
Garden came to a conclusion by her withdrawal of her play of "Iñez de
Castro," a tragedy founded upon one of the most romantic and picturesque
incidents in the Spanish chronicle. After much uncertainty and many
difficulties, the project of bringing it out was abandoned. I remember
thinking I could do nothing with the part of the heroine, whose corpse
is produced in the last act, seated on the throne and receiving the
homage of the subjects of her husband, Pedro the Cruel--a very ghastly
incident in the story, which I think would in itself have endangered the
success of the play. My despondency about the part of Inez had nothing
to do with the possible effect of this situation, however, but was my
invariable impression with regard to every new part that was assigned to
me on first reading it. But I am sure Miss Mitford had no cause to
regret that I had not undertaken this; the success of her play in my
hands ran a risk such as her fine play of "Rienzi," in those of Mr.
Young or Mr. Macready, could never have incurred; and it was well for
her that to their delineation of her Roman tribune, and not mine of her
Aragonese lady, her reputation with the public as a dramatic writer was
confided.
I have mentioned in this last letter a morning visit from Chantrey, the
eminent sculptor, who was among our frequenter. His appearance and
manners were simple and almost rustic, and he was shy and silent in
society, all which may have been results of his obscure birth and early
want of education. It was to Sir Francis Chantrey that my father's
friends applied for the design of the beautiful silver vase which they
presented to him at the end of his professional career. The sculptor's
idea seemed to me a very happy and appropriate one, and the design was
admirably executed; it consisted of a simple and elegant figure of
Hamlet on the cover of the vase, and round it, in fine relief, the
"Seven Ages of Man," from Jacques's speech in "As You Like It;" the
whole work was very beautiful, and has a double interest for me, as that
not only of an eminent artist, but a kind friend of my father's.
GREAT RUSSELL STREET, March 7, 1831.
MY DEAREST H----,
With regard to change as we contemplate it when parting from those
we love, I confess I should shrink from the idea of years
intervening before you and I met again; not that I apprehend any
diminution of our affection, but it would be painful to be no
longer young, or to have grown _suddenly_ old to each other. But I
hope this will not be so; I hope we may go on meeting often enough
for that change which is inevitable to be long imperceptible; I
hope we may be allowed to go on _wondering_ together, till we meet
where you will certainly be happy, if wonder is for once joined to
_knowledge_. I remember my aunt Whitelock saying that when she went
to America she left my father a toddling thing that she used to
dandle and carry about; and the first time she saw him after her
return, he had a baby of his own in his arms. That sort of thing
makes one's heart jump into one's mouth with dismay; it seems as if
all the time one had been _living away_, unconsciously, was thrown
in a lump at one's head.
J---- F---- told me on Thursday that her sister, whose wedding-day
seemed to be about yesterday, was the mother of four children; she
has lost no time, it is true, but my "yesterday" must be five years
old. After dinner, yesterday, I wrote a new last scene to "Francis
I." I mean to send it to Murray.
A---- says you seem younger to her than I do; which, considering
your fourteen years' seniority over me, is curious; but the truth
is, though she does not know it, I am still _too young_; I have not
lived, experienced, and suffered enough to have acquired the
self-forgetfulness and gentle forbearance that make us good and
pleasant companions to our _youngers_.
Henry and I are going together to the Zoological Gardens one of
these days; that lovely tigress hangs about my heart, and I must go
and see her again. Ever your affectionate
F.A. KEMBLE.
GREAT RUSSELL STREET, March 9, 1831.
MY DEAR H----,
Why are you not here to kiss and congratulate me? I am so proud and
happy! Mr. Murray has given me four hundred and fifty pounds for my
play alone! the other things he does not wish to publish with it.
Only think of it--was there ever such publishing munificence! My
father has the face to say _it is not enough!_ but looks so proud
and pleased that his face alone shows it is _too much_ by a great
deal; my mother is enchanted, and I am so happy, so thankful for
this prosperous result of my work, so delighted at earning so much,
so surprised and charmed to think that what gave me nothing but
pleasure in the doing has brought me such an after-harvest of
profit; it is too good almost to be true, and yet it is true.
But I am happy and have been much excited from another reason
to-day. Richard Trench, John's dear friend and companion, is just
returned from Spain, and came here this morning to see us. I sat
with him a long while. John is well and in good spirits. Mr. Trench
before leaving Gibraltar had used every persuasion to induce my
brother to return with him, and had even got him on board the
vessel in which they were to sail, but John's heart failed him at
the thought of forsaking Torrijos, and he went back. The account
Mr. Trench gives of their proceedings is much as I imagined them to
have been. They hired a house which they denominated Constitution
Hall, where they passed their time smoking and drinking ale, John
holding forth upon German metaphysics, which grew dense in
proportion as the tobacco fumes grew thick and his glass grew
empty. You know we had an alarm about their being taken prisoners,
which story originated thus: they had agreed with the
constitutionalists in Algeciras that on a certain day the latter
were to _get rid_ of their officers (murder them civilly, I
suppose), and then light beacons on the heights, at which signal
Torrijos and his companions, among them our party who were lying
armed on board a schooner in the bay, were to make good their
landing. The English authorities at Gibraltar, however, had note of
this, and while they lay watching for the signal they were boarded
by one of the Government ships and taken prisoners. The number of
English soldiers in whose custody they found themselves being,
however, inferior to their own, they agreed that if the beacons
made their appearance they would turn upon their guards and either
imprison or kill them. But the beacons were never lighted; their
Spanish fellow-revolutionists broke faith with them, and they
remained ingloriously on board until next day, when they were
ignominiously suffered to go quietly on shore again.