go to Radley's Hotel, where I hope we shall find you on our
arrival. My father is pretty well, in spite of all the late
anxieties and annoyances he has had to wade through. In the course
of the day preceding our departure from London two arrests were
served upon him by creditors of the theater, who, I suppose, think
when he is gone the whole concern must collapse and fall to pieces,
and I began to think some means would be devised to prevent our
leaving England after all. Our parting on Wednesday morning was, as
I told you, most miserable.... My poor mother was braver than I had
expected; but her parting from us, poor thing, is yet to come.
I found a letter from Emily Fitzhugh here, inclosing one as an
introduction to a lady in New York, who had once been her
friend.... Edinburgh is lovely and dear, and peace and quiet and
repose are always found by me near my dear Mrs. Harry Siddons; but
my heart is, oh, so sad!... Pray answer this directly. The time is
at hand when the quickest "directly" in our correspondence will be
three months.
Ever your affectionate
F. A. K.
_Monday, 2d._--My father and I went to the theater to rehearse
"Romeo and Juliet." In the evening the house was very fair,
considering how much the hot weather is against us; but of all the
comfortless people to act to, commend me to an Edinburgh audience.
Their undemonstrativeness, too, is something more than mere
critical difficulty to be pleased; there is a want of kindliness in
the cold, discourteous way in which they allow a stranger to appear
before them without ever affording him the slightest token of their
readiness to accept the efforts made to please them. I felt quite
sorry this evening for poor Mr. Didear, to whom not the faintest
sign of encouragement was vouchsafed on his first coming on. This
is being cold to an unamiable degree, and seems to me both a want
of good feeling and good breeding. I acted as well as they would
let me. As for poor John Mason, concluding, I suppose, from their
frozen silence that he was flat and ineffective, he ranted and
roared, and pulled me about in the last scene, till I thought I
should have come to pieces in his hands, as the house-maids say of
what they break. I was dreadfully exhausted at the end of the play;
there is nothing so killing as an ineffectual appeal to sympathy,
and, as the Italians know, "ben servire e non gradire" is one of
the "tre cose da morire." ...
_Tuesday, 3d._--Went to the theater to rehearse.... In the evening
the house was good, and the play went off very well. I acted well,
in spite of my new dresses, which stuck out all round me
portentously, and almost filled the little stage. J---- L---- was
like a great pink bird, hopping about hither and thither, and
stopping to speak, as if it had been well tamed and taught. The
audience actually laughed and applauded, and I should think must
have gone home very much surprised and exhausted with the unwonted
exertion.
_Wednesday, 4th._--Went to the theater to rehearse "Francis I."
After I got home, my mother told me she had determined to leave us
on Saturday, and go back to London with Sally Siddons; and I am
most thankful for this resolution.... How sad it will be in that
strange land beyond the sea, among those strange people, to whom we
are nothing but strangers! But this is foolish weakness; it must
be; and what a world of strength lies in those two little words!...
At the theater the house was very good, and I played very well....
_Thursday, 5th._--After breakfast went to rehearse "The Gamester."
... In the evening the house was not good. My father acted
magnificently; I never played this part well, and am now gone off
in it, and play it worse than not well; besides, I cannot bully
that great, big man, Mr. Didear; it is manifestly absurd.
_Friday, 6th._--To the theater to rehearse "Francis I." On my
return found Mr. Liston and his little girl waiting to ride with
me.... [This was the beginning of my acquaintance with the
celebrated surgeon Liston, who afterward became an intimate friend
of ours, and to whose great professional skill my father was
repeatedly indebted for relief under a most painful malady. He was
a son of Sir Robert Liston, and cousin of the celebrated comedian,
between whom and himself, however, there certainly was no family
likeness, Liston, the surgeon, being one of the handsomest persons
I ever saw. The last time I saw him has left a melancholy
impression on my mind of his fine face and noble figure. He had
been attending me professionally, but I had ceased to require his
care, and had not seen him for some time, when one morning walking,
according to my custom in summer, before seven o'clock, as I came
to the bridge over the Serpentine in Kensington Gardens, a horseman
crossing the bridge stopped by the iron railing, and, jumping off
his horse, came toward me. It was Liston, who inquired kindly after
my health, and, upon my not answering quite satisfactorily, he
said, "Ah! well, you are better than I am." I laughed
incredulously, as I looked at a magnificent figure leaning against
the great black horse he rode, and looking like a model of manly
vigor and beauty. But in less than a week from that day Liston died
of aneurism; and I suppose that when I met him he was well aware of
the death which had got him literally by the throat.]
_Saturday, 7th._--Miserable day of parting! of tearing away and
wrenching asunder!... At eleven we were obliged to go to rehearsal,
and when we returned found my mother busy with her packing.... When
she was gone, I sat down beside my father with a book in my hand,
not reading, but listening to his stifled sobbing; and every now
and then, in spite of my determination not to do it, looking up to
see how far the ship had moved. (Our windows looked over the
Forth.) But the white column of steam was rising steadily from
close under Newhaven, and for upward of half an hour continued to
do so. I had resolved not to raise my eyes again from my book, when
a sudden exclamation from my father made me spring up, and I saw
the steamer had left the shore, and was moving fast toward
Inchkeith, the dark smoky wake that lingered behind it showing how
far it had already gone from us, and warning us how soon it would
be beyond the ken of our aching eyes.... The carriage was
announced, and with a heavy heart and aching head, I drove to the
theater.... The play was "Francis I.," for the first time. The
house was very fine; I acted abominably, but that was not much to
be wondered at. However, I always have acted this part of my own
vilely; the language is not natural--mere stilted declamation from
first to last, most fatiguing to the chest, and impossible for me
to do anything with, as it excites no emotion in me whatever....
EDINBURGH, July 8, 1832.
MY DEAREST H----,
I had just left my father at the window that overlooks the Forth,
watching my poor mother's ship sailing away to England, when I
received your letter; and it is impossible to imagine a sorer,
sadder heart than that with which I greeted it.... Thank you for
the pains you are taking about your picture for me; crammed with
occupation as my time is here, I would have done the same for you,
but that I think in Lawrence's print you have the best and likest
thing you can have of me.... I cannot tell you at what hour we
shall reach Liverpool, but it will be very early on Monday
morning.... I am glad you have not deferred sitting for your
picture till you came to Liverpool, for it would have encroached
much upon our time together. I remember when I returned from
abroad, a school-girl, I thought I had forgotten my mother's face.
This copy of yours will save me from that nonsensical morbid
feeling, and you will surely not forget mine.... You bid me, if
anything should go ill with me, summon you across the Atlantic.
Alas! dear H----, you forget that before a letter from that other
world can reach this, more than a month must have elapsed, and the
writer may no longer be in either. You say you hope I may return a
new being; and I have no doubt my health will be benefited, and my
spirits revived by change of external objects; but oh, how dreary
it all is now! You bid me cheer my father when my mother shall have
left us, without knowing that she is already gone. I make every
exertion that duty and affection can prompt; but, you know, it is
my nature rather to absorb the sorrow of others than to assist them
in throwing it off; and when one's own heart is all but frozen, one
knows not where to find warmth to impart to those who are shivering
with misery beside one.... I have left myself scarcely any room to
tell you of my present life. I work very hard, rehearsing every
morning and acting every night, and spending the intervening time
in long farewell rides round this most beautiful and beloved
Edinburgh. Mr. Combe says I am wearing myself out, body and mind;
but I am already looking better, and less thin, than when I left
London; and besides, I shall presently have a longer rest--holiday
I cannot call it--on board ship than I have had for the last three
years. We acted "Francis I." here last night, for the first time;
and I am sure that, mingled with the applause, I heard very
distinct hissing; whether addressed to the acting, which was some
of it execrable, or to the play itself, which I think quite
deserving of such a demonstration, I know not.... You know my
opinion of the piece; and as, with the exception of the two parts
of De Bourbon and the Friar, and not excepting my own, it really
was vilely acted, hissing did not appear to me an unnatural
proceeding, though perhaps, under the circumstances, not altogether
a courteous one on the part of the modern Athenians. I tell you
this, because what else have I to tell you, but that I am your ever
affectionate
F. A. K.
_Tuesday, 10th._--At half-past twelve rode out with Liston and his
daughter, Mr. Murray, and Allen (since Sir William, the celebrated
artist, friend, and painter, of Walter Scott and his family).... In
the evening, at the theater, the house was very full, and I acted
very well, though I was so tired that I could hardly stand, and
every bone in my body ached with my hard morning's ride. While I
was sitting in the greenroom, Mr. Wilson came in, and it warmed my
heart to see a Covent Garden face. He tells me Laporte is giving
concerts in the poor old playhouse: well, good luck attend him,
poor man (though I know it won't, for "there's nae luck about that
house, there's nae luck at a'"). Walter Scott has reached
Edinburgh, and starts for Abbotsford to-morrow: I am glad he has
come back to die in his own country, in his own home, surrounded by
the familiar objects his eyes have loved to look upon, and by the
hearts of his countrymen, and the prayers, the blessings, the
gratitude, and the love they owe him. All Europe will mourn his
death; and for years to come every man born on this soil will be
proud, for his sake, to call himself a Scotchman.
_Wednesday, 11th._-- ... At half-past twelve met Mr. Murray, Mr.
Allen, and Mr. Byrne.... As we started for our ride, and were
"cavalcading" leisurely along York Place, that most enchanting old
sweetheart of mine, Baron Hume, came out of a house. I rode toward
him, and he met me with his usual hearty, kind cordiality, and a
world of old-fashioned stately courtesy, ending our conference by
devoutly kissing the tip of my little finger, to the infinite
edification of my party, upon whose minds I duly impressed the vast
superiority of this respectful style of gallantry to the flippant,
easy familiarity of the present day. These old beaux beat the young
ones hollow in the theory of courtship, and it is only a pity that
their time for practice is over. Commend me to this bowing and
finger-kissing! it is at any rate more dignified than the nodding,
bobbing, and hand-shaking of the present fashion. The be-Madaming,
too, has in it something singularly pleasing to my taste; there's a
hoop and six yards of brocade in each of its two syllables.... At
the theater the play was "Francis I." I acted well, and the play
went off very well. Mr. Allen came and sat in the greenroom,
telling me all about Constantinople and the Crimea, and the
beautiful countries he has seen, and where his memory and his
wishes are forever wandering; a rather sad comment upon the perfect
vision of content his charming home at Laurieston had suggested to
me.
_Thursday, 12th._-- ... At the theater the play was "The
Hunchback." The house was very good, and I acted very well. Dear
Mr. Allen came into the greenroom, and had a long gossip with me.
_Friday, 13th._-- ... Went with Mr. Combe to the Phrenological
Museum, and spent two hours listening to some very interesting
details on the anatomy of the brain, which certainly tended to make
the science more credible to my ignorance, though the general
theory has never appeared to me as impossible and extravagant as
some people think it. The insuperable point where I stick fast is a
doubt of the practically beneficial result which its general
acceptance would produce. I think they overrate the reforming power
of their system, though Mr. Combe's account of the numbers who
attend his lectures, and of the improvement of their bodily and
mental conditions which he has himself witnessed, must, of course,
make me feel diffident of my own judgment in the matter. Their own
experience can alone test the utility of their system, and whether
it does or does not answer their expectations. I thought of Hamlet
as I sat on the ground, with my arms and lap full of skulls. It is
curious enough to grasp the empty, worthless, unsightly case in
which once dwelt the thinking faculty of a man. One of the best
specimens of the human skull, it seems, is Raphael's; a cast of
whose head I held lovingly in my hands, wishing it had been the
very house where once abode that spirit of immortal beauty. [The
phrenological authorities were mistaken, it seems, in attributing
this skull to Raphael. I believe that it has been ascertained to be
that of his friend, the engraver, Marc Antonio.] At the theater the
play was "The Hunchback;" the house very good, and I played very
well.
_Saturday, 14th._--My last day in Edinburgh for two years; and who
can tell for how many more? At eleven o'clock, Mr. Murray, Mr.
Allen, Mr. Byrne, and myself sallied forth on horseback toward the
Pentlands, having obtained half an hour's grace off dinner-time, in
order to get to Habbies How. We went out by the Links, and up steep
rises over a white and dusty road, with a flaring stone dyke on
each side, and neither tree nor bush to shelter us from the
scorching sunlight till we came to Woodhouseleigh, the haunted walk
of a white specter, who, it seems, was fond of the shade, for her
favorite promenade was an avenue overarched with the green arms of
noble old elm trees; and we blessed the welcome shelter of the
Ghost's Haunt.... A cloud fell over all our spirits as we rode away
from this enchanting spot, and Mr. Murray, pointing to the sprig of
heather I had put in my habit, said they would establish an Order
of Knighthood, of which the badge should be a heather spray, and
they three the members, and I the patroness; that they would meet
and drink my health on the 14th of July, and on my birthday, every
year till I returned; and a solemn agreement was made by all
parties that whenever I did return and summoned my worthies, we
should again adjourn together to the glen in the Pentlands. When we
reached home, Mr. Allen, who cannot endure a formal parting, shook
hands with me and bade me good-by as I dismounted, as if we were to
ride again to-morrow. [And I never saw him again. Peace be with
him! He was a most amiable and charming companion, and during these
days of friendly intimacy, his conversation interested and
instructed me, and his poetical feeling of Nature, and placid,
unruffled serenity, added much to the pleasure of those delightful
rides.] ... At the theater the play was "The Provoked Husband," for
my benefit; the house was very fine, and I played pretty well.
After it was over, the audience shouted and clamored for my father,
who came and said a few words of our sorrow to leave their
beautiful city.... Mrs. Harry, Lizzie, and I were in my
dressing-room, crying in sad silence, and vainly endeavoring to
control our emotion. Presently my father came hurriedly in, and
folding them both in his arms, just uttered in a broken voice,
"Good-by! God bless you!" and I, embracing my dear friends for the
last time, followed him out of the room. It is not the time only
that must elapse before I can see her again, it is the terrible
distance, the slowness and uncertainty of communication; it is that
dreadful America.
_Thursday, 19th, Liverpool._-- ... At eleven went to the theater
for rehearsal; it was very slovenly. I wonder what the performance
will be? In the evening to the theater; the play was "Francis I.,"
and the house was very good, which was almost to be wondered at in
this plague-stricken city. [The cholera was raging in Liverpool.] I
was frightened, as I always am at a new part, even in my own play,
though glad enough to resign that odious dignity, the queen-mother.
[The part of Louisa of Savoy had been given to me when first the
piece was brought out at Covent Garden; I was now playing the
younger heroine, Françoise de Foix.] I played pretty well, though
there is nothing to be done with the part. She is perfectly
uninteresting and ineffective; but it is better for the cast of the
play that I should act her instead of Louisa. And when one can have
such a specimen of a queen as we had to-night, it would be a
thousand pities the audience should be put off with my inferior
views of royalty. Such bouncing, frowning, growling, and snarling
might have challenged a whole zoological garden full of wild beasts
to surpass. It's a comfort to see that it is possible to play that
part worse than I did.
_Friday, 20th._--Went to rehearsal.... Received a letter from
Lizzie, giving me an account of my dear old Newhaven fish-wife,
poor body! to whom I had sent a farewell present by her. I received
also a long copy of anonymous verses, in which I was rather
pathetically remonstrated with for seeking fame and fortune out of
my own country. The author is slightly mistaken; neither the love
of money nor notoriety would carry me away from England, but the
love of my father constrains me.... The American Consul and Mr.
Arnold called. After dinner I read Combe's "Constitution of Man,"
which interested me very much, though it fails to convince me that
phrenology can alone bestow this insight into human nature. At the
theater "The School for Scandal;" I played pretty well, though the
actors were all dreadfully imperfect, and some of them so nervous
and quick, and some so nervous and slow, that it was hardly
possible to keep pace with them.
_Saturday, 21st._--From Liverpool to Manchester. After all, this
Liverpool, with all its important wealth and industry, is a
dismal-looking place, a swarming world of dingy red houses and
dirty streets.... How well I remember the opening of this
railway!... They have placed a marble tablet in the side of the
road to commemorate the spot where poor Huskisson fell; I
remembered it by the pools of dark-green water that, as we passed
them then, made a dismal impression on me; they looked like stony
basins of verdigris. How glad I was to see Chatmoss--that
villainous, treacherous, ugly, useless bog--trenched and ditched in
process of draining and reclaiming, with the fair, holy, healthy
grain waving in bright green patches over the brown peaty soil!
Next to moral conversion, and the reclaiming to their noble uses
the perverted powers of human nature, there is nothing does one's
heart so much good as the sight of waste and barren land reclaimed
to the uses and wants of man; to see vegetation clothe the idle
space, and the cursed and profitless soil teeming with the means of
life and bringing forth abundant produce to requite the toil that
fertilized it; to see the wilderness crowned with bounteous
increase, and the blessing of God rising from the earth to reward
the labor of His creatures. It forcibly reminds one of all that is
left undone, and might be done, with that far more precious waste
land, those multitudes of our ignorant poor, whose minds and
spirits are as dark, as profitless, as barren, as dreary, and as
dangerous, as this wild bog was formerly, and who were never
ordained to live and die like so many human morasses.... In the
evening to the theater, which was crammed from the floor to the
ceiling; they are a pleasant audience, too, and make a delightful
quantity of sympathetic noise. I did not play well, which was a
pity and a shame, because they really deserved that one should do
so; but my coadjutors were too much for me.
_Sunday, 22d, Liverpool._--I did not think there was such another
day in store for me as this. I thought all was past and over, and
had forgotten the last drop in the bitter cup.... The day was
bitter cold, and we were obliged to have a fire.
LIVERPOOL, July 22.
MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON,
I fear you are either anxious or vexed, or perhaps both, about the
arrival of your books, and my non-acknowledgment of them. They
reached me in all safety, and but for the many occupations which
swallow up my time would have been duly receipted ere this. Thank
you very much for them, for they are very elegant outside, and the
dedication page, with which I should have been most ungracious to
find any fault. The little sketch on that leaf differs from the
design you had described to me some time ago, and I felt the full
meaning of the difference. I read through your preface all in a
breath; there are many parts of it which have often been matters of
discussion between us, and I believe you know how cordially I
coincide with most of the views expressed in it. The only point in
your preliminary chapter on which I do not agree with you is the
passage in which you say that humor is, of necessity and in its
very essence, vulgar. I differ entirely with you here. I think
humor is very often closely allied to poetry; not only a large
element in highly poetic minds, which surely refutes your position,
but kindred to the highest and deepest order of imagination, and
frequently eminently fanciful and graceful in its peculiar
manifestations. However, I cannot now make leisure to write about
this, but while I read it I scored the passage as one from which I
dissented. That, however, of course does not establish its fallacy;
but I think, had I time, I could convince you of it. I acted Juliet
on Wednesday, and read your analysis of it before doing so. Oh,
could you but have seen and heard my Romeo!... I am sure it is just
as well that an actress on the English stage at the present day
should not have too distinct a vision of the beings Shakespeare
intended to realize, or she might be induced, like the unfortunate
heroine of the song, to "hang herself in her garters." To be sure
there is always my expedient to resort to, of acting to a wooden
vase; you know I had one put upon my balcony, in "Romeo and
Juliet," at Covent Garden, to assist Mr. Abbott in drawing forth
the expression of my sentiments. I have been reading over Portia
to-day; she is still my dream of ladies, my pearl of womanhood....
I must close this letter, for I have many more to write to-night,
and it is already late. Once more, thank you very much for your
book, and believe me,
Ever yours very truly,
F. A. K.
_August 1st._--Sailed for America.
The book referred to in this letter was Mrs. Jameson's "Analysis of
Shakespeare's Female Characters," which she very kindly dedicated to me.
The etching in the title-page was changed from the one she at first
intended to have put in it, and represented a female figure in an
attitude of despondency, sitting by the sea, and watching a ship sailing
toward the setting sun; a design which I know she meant to have
reference to my departure. I believe she subsequently changed it again
to the one she had first executed, and which was of a less personal
significance.... I exchanged no more letters with my friend Miss S----,
who joined me at Liverpool, and remained with me till I sailed for
America.... "A trip," as it is now called, to Europe or America, is one
of the commonest of experiences, involving, apparently, so little
danger, difficulty, or delay, that the feelings with which I made my
first voyage across the Atlantic must seem almost incomprehensible to
the pleasure-seeking or business-absorbed crowds who throng the great
watery highway between the two continents.
But when I first went to America, steam had not shortened the passage of
that formidable barrier between world and world. A month, and not a
week, was the shortest and most favorable voyage that could be looked
for. Few men, and hardly any women, undertook it as a mere matter of
pleasure or curiosity; and though affairs of importance, of course, drew
people from one shore to the other, and the stream of emigration had
already set steadily westward, American and European tourists had not
begun to cross each other by thousands on the high seas in search of
health or amusement.
I was leaving my mother, my brothers and sister, my friends and my
country, for two years, and could only hear from them at monthly
intervals. I was going to work very hard, in a distasteful vocation,
among strangers, from whom I had no right to expect the invariable
kindness and indulgence my own people had favored me with. My spirits
were depressed by my father's troubled fortunes, and I had just received
the first sharp, smarting strokes in the battle of life; those gashes
from which poor "unbruised youth," in its infinite self-compassion,
fancies its very life-blood must all pour away; little imagining under
what gangrened, festering wounds brave life will still hold on its way,
and urge to the hopeless end its warfare with unconquerable sorrow.
There is nothing more pathetic than the terrified impatience of youth
under its first experience of grief, and its vehement appeal of "Behold,
and see if any sorrow be like unto my sorrow!" to the patient adepts in
suffering such as it has not yet begun to conceive of. Orlando's
adjuration to the exiled duke in "As You Like It," and the wise Prince's
reply, seem to me one of the most exquisite illustrations of the
comparative griefs of youth and age.
OFF SANDY HOOK, Monday, September 5.
MY DEAREST H----,
We are within three hours' sail of New York, having greeted the
first corner of Long Island (the first land we saw) yesterday
morning; but we are becalmed, and the sun shines so bright, and the
air is so warm and breathless, that we seem to have every chance of
lying here for the next--Heaven knows how long! In point of time,
you see, our voyage has been very prosperous, and I am surprised
that we have made such good progress, for the weather has been
squally, with constant head-winds. I do not think we have had, in
all, six days of fair wind, so that we have no reason whatever to
complain of our advance, having come thus far in thirty-two days.
You bade me write to you by ships passing us, but though we have
encountered several bound eastward, we only hailed them without
lying to; notwithstanding which, about a fortnight ago, on hearing
that a vessel was about to pass us, I wrote you a scrawl, which
none but you could have made out (so the fishes won't profit much
by it), and a kind fellow-passenger undertook to throw it from our
ship to the other as it passed us. She came alongside very rapidly,
and though he flung with great force and good aim, the distance was
too great, and my poor little missive fell into the black sea
within twenty feet of its destination. I could not help crying to
think that those words from my heart, that would have gladdened
yours, should go down into that cold, inky water.... I pray to God
that we may return to England, but I am possessed with a dread that
I never shall....
I have been called away from this letter by one of those little
incidents which Heaven in its mercy sends to break the monotony of
a sea-voyage. Ever since daybreak this morning an English brig has
been standing at a considerable distance behind us. About an hour
ago we went on deck to watch the approach of a boat which they were
sending off in our direction. The distance was about five miles,
and the men had a hard pull in the broiling heat. When they came on
board, you should have seen how we all clustered about them. The
ship was a merchantman from Bristol, bound to New York; she had
been out eleven weeks, her provisions were beginning to run short,
and the crew was on allowance. Our captain, who is a gentleman,
furnished them with flour, tea, sugar, porter, cold tongue, ham,
eggs, etc., etc. The men remained about half an hour on board, and
as they were remanning their boat we saw a whole cargo of eatables
carried to it from our steerage passengers. You know that these are
always poor people, who are often barely supplied themselves with
necessaries for their voyage. The poor are almost invariably kind
and compassionate to one another, and Gaffer Gray is half right
when he says--
"The poor man alone,
When he hears the poor moan,
Of his morsel one morsel will give."
They (the men from the brig) gave us news from Halifax, where they
had put in. The cholera had been in Boston, Philadelphia,
Baltimore, and New York; the latter town was almost deserted, and
the people flying in numbers from the others. This was rather bad
news to us, who were going thither to find audiences (if possible
not few, whether fit or not), but it was awful to such as were
going back to their homes and families. I looked at the anxious
faces gathered round our informer, and thought how the poor hearts
were flying, in terrible anticipation of the worst, to the nests
where they had left their dear ones, and eagerly counting every
precious head in the homes over which so black a cloud of doom had
gathered in their absence.... My father, though a bad sailor, and
suffering occasionally a good deal, has, upon the whole, borne the
voyage well. Poor dear Dall has been the greatest wretch on board;
she has been perfectly miserable the whole time. It has made me
very unhappy, for she has come away from those she loves very
dearly on my account, and I cannot but feel sad to see that most
excellent creature now, in what should be the quiet time of her
life, leaving home and all its accustomed ways, habits, and
comforts, and dear A----, who is her darling, to come wandering to
the ends of the earth after me.... These distant and prolonged
separations seem like foretastes of death.... We have seen an
American sun, and an American moon, and American stars, and we
think they "get up these things better than we do." We have had
several fresh squalls, and one heavy gale; we have shipped sundry
seas; we have had rat-hunting and harpooning of porpoises; we have
caught several hake and dogfish.
NEW YORK, AMERICA, Wednesday, September 5, 1832.
Here we really are, and perhaps you, who are not here, will believe
it more readily than I who am, and to whom it seems an impossible
kind of dream from which I must surely presently wake. We made New
York harbor Monday night at sunset, and cast anchor at twelve
o'clock off Staten Island, where we lay till yesterday morning at
half-past nine, when a steamboat came alongside to take the
passengers to shore. A thick fog covered the shores, and the rain
poured in torrents; but had the weather been more favorable, I
should have seen nothing of our approach to the city, for I was
crying bitterly. The town, as we drove through it from the landing,
struck me as foreign in its appearance--continental, I mean; trees
are mixed very prettily with the houses, which are painted of
various colors, and have green blinds on the outside, giving an
idea of coolness and shade.
The sunshine is glorious, and the air soft and temperate; our hotel
is pleasantly situated, and our rooms are gay and large. The town,
as I see it from our windows, reminds me a little of Paris.
Yesterday evening the trees and lighted shop-windows and brilliant
moonlight were like a suggestion of the Boulevards; it is very gay,
and rather like a fair.
The cholera has been very bad, but it is subsiding, and the people
are returning to town. We shall begin our work in about ten days. I
have not told you half I could say, but foolscap will contain no
more. God bless you, dear!
Affectionately yours,
F. A. K.
The foreboding with which I left my own country was justified by the
event. My dear aunt died, and I married, in America; and neither of us
ever had a home again in England.
NEW YORK, September 16, 1832.
MY DEAREST H----,
What shall I say to you? First of all, pray don't forget me, don't
be altered when I see you again, don't die before I come back,
don't die if I never come back.... You cannot imagine how strange
the comparisons people here are perpetually making between this
wonderful sapling of theirs and our old oak seem to me.... My
father, thank God, is wonderfully improved in health, looks, and
spirits; the fine, clear, warm (hot it should be called) atmosphere
agrees with him, and the release from the cares and anxieties of
that troublesome estate of his in St. Giles' will, I am sure, be of
the greatest service to him. He begins his work to-morrow night
with Hamlet, and on Tuesday I act Bianca. It is thought expedient
that we should act singly the two first nights, and then make a
"constellation." Dall is in despair because I am to be discovered
instead of coming on (a thing actors deprecate, because they do not
receive their salvo of entrance applause), and also because I am
not seen at first in what she thinks a becoming dress. For my part,
I am rather glad of this decision, for besides Bianca's being one
of my best parts, the play, as the faculty have mangled it, is such
a complete monologue that I am less at the mercy of my coadjutors
than in any other piece I play in....
Dall is very well, very hot, and very mosquito-bitten. The heat
seems to me almost intolerable, though it is here considered mild
autumn weather: the mornings and evenings are, it is true,
generally freshened with a cool delicious air, which is at this
moment blowing all my pens and paper away, and compensating us for
our midday's broiling. I do nothing but drink iced lemonade, and
eat peaches and sliced melon, in spite of the cholera.
Baths are a much cheaper and commoner luxury (necessary) in the
hotels here than with us; a great satisfaction to me, who hope in
heaven, if I ever get there, to have plenty of water to wash in,
and, of course, it will all be soft rainwater there. What a
blessing! On board ship we were not stinted in that respect, but
had as much water as we desired for external as well as internal
purposes.
There are no water-pipes or cisterns in this city such as we have,
but men go about as they do in Paris, with huge water-butts,
supplying each house daily; for although a broad river (so called)
runs on each side of this water-walled city, the one--the East
River--is merely an arm of the sea; and the Hudson receives the
salt tide-water, and is rendered brackish and unfit for washing or
cooking purposes far beyond the city. There are fine springs, and a
full fresh-water stream, at a distance of some miles; but the
municipality is not very rich, and is economical and careful of the
public money, and many improvements which might have been expected
to have been effected here long ago are halting in their advance,
leaving New York ill paved, ill lighted, and indifferently supplied
with a good many necessaries and luxuries of modern civilization.
[This was fifty-six years ago. Times are altered since this letter was
written. New York is neither ill paved nor ill lighted; the municipality
is rich, but neither economical, careful, nor honest, in dealing with
the public moneys. The rapid spread of superficial civilization and
accumulation of easily-got wealth, together with incessant communication
with Europe, have made of the great cities of the New World, centres of
an imperfect but extreme luxury, vying with, and in some respects going
beyond, all that London or Paris presents for the indulgence of tastes
pampered by the oldest civilization of Europe.
One day, after the Croton water had been brought into New York, I was
sitting with the venerable Chancellor Kent at the window of his house in
Union Square, and, pointing to the fountain that sprang up in the midst
of the inclosure, he said, "When I was a boy, much more than half a
century ago, I used to go to the Croton water, and paddle, and fish, and
bathe, and swim, and loiter my time away in the summer days. I cannot go
out there any more for any of these pleasant purposes, but the Croton
water has come here to me." What a ballad Schiller or Goethe would have
made of that! That morning visit to Chancellor Kent has left that pretty
picture in my mind, and the recollection of his last words as he shook
hands with me: "Ay, madam, the secret of life is always to have
excitement enough, and never too much." But he did not give me the
secret of that secret.]
There are, on an average, half a dozen fires in various parts of
the town every night--I mean houses on fire. The sons of all the
gentlemen here are volunteer engineers and firemen, and great is
the delight they take in tearing up and down the streets,
accompanied by red lights, speaking trumpets, and a rushing,
roaring escort of running amateur extinguishers, who make night
hideous with their bawling and bellowing. This evening as I was
observing that we had had no fire to-day, Dall said the weather was
so hot, she thought they must have left off fires for the season.
Speaking of carriages and the devices on the panels of them here,
which appear to be rather fancy pieces than heraldic bearings, my
father said, "I wonder what they do for arms." "Use legs," said
Dall immediately, not at all bethinking herself how ancient a
device on the shield of the Island of Man the three legs were, or
knowing how much more ancient on the coins of Crotona, I think, or
some other of the Magna Grecian colonies.
The hours which prevail here are those of our shop-keeping
population; they rise and go to business very early, dine at three,
which indeed is considered late, take tea at five, and supper at
nine, which seems to us very primitive.... The women here are,
generally speaking, very pretty little creatures, with a great deal
of freshness and brilliancy; they dress in the extreme of the
French fashion, and, I suppose from some unfavorable influence of
the climate, they lose their beauty prematurely--they become
full-blown very early, and their bloom is extremely evanescent;
they fade almost suddenly.... There seems to be a great deal of
consumption here. The climate is as capricious as ours, with this
additional disadvantage, that the extremes of heat and cold are
much more intense, and the transitions much more violent, the
temperature varying occasionally as much as thirty degrees in the
twenty-four hours. I have just left off writing for five minutes to
watch the lightning, which is dancing in a fiery ring all round the
horizon--summer lightning, no thunder, although the flashes are
strong and vivid....
We have had such a tremendous storm--really gorgeous, grand, and
awful; lightning that stretched from side to side of the sky,
making a blaze like daylight for several seconds at a time. The
mere reflection of it on the ground was more than the eye could
endure; great forked ribbons of fire darting into the very bosom of
the city and its crowded dwellings, or zigzagging through the air
to an accompaniment of short, sharp, crackling thunder, succeeded
by endless, deep, full-toned rolls that made the whole air shake
and vibrate with the heavy concussion; pelting and pouring rain, a
perfect tornado of wind. Heaven and earth are all, while I write,
one livid, violet-colored flame, and the thunder resounds through
the wild frenzy of the elements like the voice of "the Ruler of the
spirits." My eyes ache with the incessant glare, and I must close
my letter, for it is past eleven o'clock, and I have to rehearse
to-morrow morning.... I have seen Mr. Wallack since our arrival,
whom I never saw in England, either on or off the stage. I went the
other night to see him in one of his favorite pieces, "The
Rent-Day," which made me cry dreadfully, but chiefly, I believe,
because, when they are ruined, he asks his wife if she will go with
him to America. You see I am taking to play-going in my old age.
The theater is very pretty, of the best possible dimensions for me,
and tolerably good for the voice. We leave this place for
Philadelphia on the 10th of October, and remain there a fortnight,
and then go on to Boston....
Last Thursday we crossed the Hudson in one of the steamers
constantly plying between the opposite shores and New York, and
took a delightful walk along the New Jersey shore to a place called
Hoboken, famous once as a dueling-ground, now the favorite resort
of a pacific society of _bon vivants_, who meet once a week to eat
turtle, or, as it is expressed on their cards of invitation, for
"spoon exercise." The distance from our landing-point to the place
where these meetings are held is about five miles, a charming walk
through a strip of forest-ground, which crowns the banks of the
river, gradually rising to a considerable height above it. We were
delighted with the vivid, various, and strange foliage of the
trees, the magnificent river, broad and blue as a lake, with its
high and richly wooded shore, and the sparkling, glittering town
opposite. We looked down to the Narrows, the defile through which
the waters of this noble estuary reach the Atlantic, and between
whose rocky walls two or three ships stood out against the
brilliant sky. The ebbing tide plashed on the rocks far below us,
and the warm grass through which we walked was alive with
grasshoppers, whose scarlet wings, suddenly unfolded when they
flew, made me take them for some strange species of butterfly. It
was all indescribably bright and joyous-looking, and the air of a
transparent clearness that was one of the most striking
characteristics of the whole scene, and one of the most
delightful.... [In discussing the relative merits of England and
America, Dr. Channing once said to me, "The earth is yours, but the
heavens are ours;" and I quite agree with him. I have never seen a
sky comparable, for splendor of color or translucent purity, to
that of the Northern States.]
I have been reading your favorite book, "Salmonia." ... I am rather
surprised at your liking it so very much, because, though the
descriptions are beautiful, and the natural history interesting,
and the philosophical and moral reflections scattered through it
delightful, yet there is so much that is purely technical about
fishing and its processes, and addressed only to the hook-and-line
fraternity, that I should not have thought it calculated to charm
you so greatly. However, you may have some associations connected
with it; liking is a very complex and many-motived thing....
We went through the fish and fruit markets the other day;
unfortunately it was rather late in the morning, and of course the
glory of the market was over, but yet there remained enough to
enchant us, with their abundant plenteousness of good things. The
fruit-market was beautiful; fruit-baskets half as high as I am,
placed in rows of a dozen, filled with peaches, and painted of a
bright vermilion color, which throws a ruddy becoming tint over the
downy fruit. It looked like something in the "Arabian Nights;"
heaps, literally heaps of melons, apples, pears, and wild grapes,
in the greatest profusion. I was enchanted with the beautiful
forms, bright colors, and fragrant smell, but I saw no flowers, and
I have seen hardly any since I have been here, which is rather a
grief to me....
Americans are the most extravagant people in the world, and flowers
are among them objects of the most lavish expenditure. The prices
paid for nosegays, wreaths, baskets, and devices of every sort of
hot-house plants, are incredible to any reasonable mind. At parties
and balls ladies are laden with costly nosegays which will not even
survive the evening's fatigue of carrying them. Dinner and luncheon
parties are adorned, not only with masses of exquisite bloom as
table ornaments, but by every lady's plate a magnificent nosegay of
hot-house flowers is placed; and I knew a lady who, wishing to
adorn her ballroom with rather more than usual floral magnificence,
had it hung round with garlands of white camellias and myosotis.
At the theater enormously expensive nosegays and huge baskets of
forced flowers are handed to the favorite performers from the front
of the house, till the ceremony becomes embarrassing, and almost
ridiculous for the object of the demonstration. The churches at
certain festivals are hung with draperies of costly hot-house
flowers; the communion-tables heaped with them. Weddings, of
course, are natural occasions for that species of ornament, but in
America funerals are as flowery as marriage-feasts; and I have seen
there in mid-winter, with the thermometer at fifteen degrees below
zero, large crosses, and hearts, and wreaths, made entirely of
rosebuds and lilies of the valley, as part of the solemnities of a
burial service; and a young girl who died in the flowerless season
was not only shrouded in blossoms, but as her coffin was carried to
the bosom of the wintry earth, a white pall of the finest material
was thrown over it, with a great cross of double forced violets,
almost the length of the coffin, laid on it. I have had as many as
a dozen huge baskets of camellias, violets, orange-flower, and
tuberose, at one time, in my room; perishable tokens of anonymous
public and private favor, the cost of which used to fill me with
dismay: and on one occasion a table of magnificent hot-house
flowers was sent to me, of such dimensions that both sides of the
street door had to be opened to admit it. When I have deplored the
inordinate amount of money lavished upon that which could only
impart pleasure for so brief a time, I have been answered, but not
converted from my feeling of disapprobation and regret, that the
gardeners profited by this wild extravagance. In New York I have
known a guinea paid for a gentleman's button-hole rosebud, and
three guineas for half a dozen sprays of lily of the valley.
Good-by, my dearest H----. I pray for you morning and night. Is not
that thinking of you, and loving you as best I can?
Your affectionate
F. A. K.
DEAREST H----,
... We are all pretty well, but all but devoured by multitudinous
and multivarious beasts of prey--birds, I suppose they are:
mosquitoes, ants, and flies, by day; and flies, fleas, and worse,
by night. The plagues of Egypt were a joke to it. We spend our
lives in murdering hecatombs of creeping and jumping things, and
vehemently slapping our own faces with intent to kill the flying
ones that incessantly buzz about one. It is rather a deplorable
existence, and reminds me of one of the most unpleasant circles in
Dante's "Hell," which I don't think could have been much worse. My
father began his work on Monday last with Hamlet. Dall and I went
into a private box to see him; he acted admirably, and looked
wonderfully young and handsome. The house was crammed, and the
audience, we were assured, was enthusiastic beyond all precedent.
On Tuesday I came out in Bianca; I was rather glad they had
appointed that part for my first, because it is one of my best; but
had not the genius of theatrical management made such a mere
monologue of the play as it has, I verily believe I should have
been "swamped" by my helpmate. My Fazio was an unhappy man who
played Romeo once with me in London, and failed utterly: moreover,
he had studied this part in a hurry, it seems, and did not know
three words of it, and was, besides, too frightened to profit by my
prompting. The only thing that seemed to occur to him was to go
down on his knees, which he did every five minutes. Once when I was
on mine, he dropped down suddenly exactly opposite to me, and there
we were, looking for all the world like one of those pious conjugal
_vis-à-vis_ that adorn antique tombs in our cathedrals. It really
was exceedingly absurd. But I looked and acted well, and the play
was very successful.... I was not nervous for my first night, till
my unhappy partner made me so. My dislike to the stage would really
render me indifferent to my own success, but that I am working for
my livelihood; my bread depends upon success, and that is a
realistic, if not an artistic, view of the case, of which I
acknowledge the importance....
Absolute and uncompromising vulgarity is really not very
objectionable; it is rather refreshing, indeed, for it is simple,
and, in that respect, rare. Vulgarity allied to pretension and the
affectation of fine manners is the only real vulgarity, and is an
intolerable thing. The plain rusticity, or even coarseness, of what
are called the lower classes, is infinitely preferable to the
assumption of _gentility_ of those a little above them in the
social scale. The artisan, or day-laborer, or common workman, is
apt to be a gentleman, compared with a certain well-to-do small
shopkeeper....
On Thursday, when I went to rehearse "Romeo and Juliet," I found
that the unfortunate Mr. Keppel was, by general desire, taken out
of Romeo, which my father was therefore called upon, for the first
time, to act with me. I was vexed at this every way. I was sorry
for the poor player, whose part, of course, was money to him; and
sorry for my father, who has the greatest objection to playing
Romeo, for which his age, of course, disqualifies him, however much
his excellent acting may tend to make one forget it; and I was
sorry for the public, who lost his admirable Mercutio, which I do
not think they were compensated for by his taking the other
part....
The steward of our ship, a black--a very intelligent, obliging,
respectable servant--came here the other morning to ask my father
for an order, at the same time adding that it must be for the
gallery, as people of color were not allowed to go into any other
part of the theater. Qu'en dis-tu? The prejudice against these
unfortunate people is, of course, incomprehensible to us. On board
ship, after giving that same man some trouble, Dall poured him out
a glass of wine, when we were having our dinner, whereupon the
captain looked at her with utter amazement, and I thought some
little contempt, and said, "Ah! one can tell by that that you are
not an American;" which sort of thing makes one feel rather glad
that one is not.
[This was in 1832, when slavery literally governed the United States. In
1874, when the Civil War had washed out slavery with the blood of free
men, the prejudice engendered by it governed them still to the following
degree. Going to the theater in Philadelphia one night, I desired my
servant, a perfectly respectable and decorous colored man, to go into
the house and see the performance. This, however, he did not succeed in
doing, being informed at all the entrance doors that persons of color
were not admitted to any part of the theater. At this same time, more
than half the State legislature of South Carolina were blacks. Moreover,
at this same time, colored children were not received into the public
schools of Philadelphia, though colored citizens were eligible, and in
some cases acted as members of the board of management of these very
schools. I talked of this outrageous inconsistent prejudice with some of
my friends; among others, the editor of a popular paper. They were all
loud in their condemnation of the state of things, but strongly of
opinion that to move at all in the matter would be highly inopportune
and injudicious. Time, they said, would settle all these questions; and,
without doubt, it will. Charles Sumner, who thought Time could afford to
have his elbow jogged about them, had just gone to his grave, leaving,
unfortunately, incomplete his bill of rights in behalf of the colored
citizens of the United States.
My servant was a citizen of the United States, having a vote, when he
was turned from the theater door as a person of color; and negroes had
been elected as Members of Congress at that very time. Strangely enough,
Philadelphia, once the seat of enthusiastic and self-devoted Quaker
abolitionism, the home of that noble and admirable woman, Lucretia Mott,
who stood heroically in its vanguard, is now one of the strongholds of
the most illiberal prejudice against the blacks.]
On Friday we acted "The School for Scandal." Our houses have been
very fine indeed, in spite of the intolerable heat of the
weather.... My ill-starred Fazio of Thursday night is making a
terrible stir in the papers, appealing to the public, and writing
long letters about his having merely studied the part to
accommodate me. "Hard case--unjust partiality--superior influence,"
etc., etc.--in short, an attempt at a little cabal, the effect of
which is that he has obtained leave to appear again to-morrow night
in Jaffier to my Belvidera. The poor man is under a strong mental
delusion, he cannot act in the least; however, we shall see what he
will do with "Venice Preserved." ...
Yesterday evening we dined with some English people who are staying
in this hotel, and met Dr. Wainwright, rector of the most
"fashionable" church in New York; a very agreeable, good, and
clever man, who expressed great delight at having an opportunity of
meeting us in private, as his congregation are so strait-laced that
he can neither call upon us nor invite us to his house, much less
set his foot in the theater. The probable consequence of any of
these enormities, it seems, would be deserted pews next Sunday, and
perhaps eventually the forced resignation of his cure of souls.
This is rather narrow minded, I think, for this free and
enlightened country. Think of my mother's dear old friend, Dr.
Hughes, and Milman, and Harness, and Dyce, and all our excellent
reverend friends and intimate acquaintance....
To-morrow we act "Venice Preserved," on Tuesday "Much Ado about
Nothing," Wednesday is a holiday, on Thursday, for my benefit, "The
Stranger," and on Friday "The Hunchback." On the 10th of next month
we act in Philadelphia, where we shall remain for a fortnight, and
then return here for a fortnight, after which we go on to Boston.
God bless you, dear! It is past twelve at night, and I have a
ten-o'clock rehearsal to-morrow morning.
Ever your affectionate
F. A. K.
PART OF LETTER TO MRS. JAMESON.
NEW YORK, September 30, 1832.
I am not sure that, upon the whole, our acting is not rather too
quiet--tame, I suppose they would call it--for our present public.
Ranting and raving in tragedy, and shrieks of unmeaning laughter in
comedy, are not, you know, precisely our style, and I am afraid our
audiences here may think us flat. I was informed by a friend of
mine who heard the remark, that one gentleman observed to another,
after seeing my father in "Venice Preserved," "Lord bless you! it's
nothing to Cooper's acting--nothing! Why, I've seen the
perspiration roll down his face like water when he played Pierre!
You didn't see Mr. Kemble put himself to half such pains!" Which
reminds me of the Frenchwoman's commendation to her neighbor of a
performance of Dupré, the great Paris tenor of his day: "Ah! ce
pauvre cher M. Dupré! ce brave homme! quel mal il se donne pour
chanter cela! Regardez donc, madame, il est tout en sueur!" But
this order of criticism, of course, may be met with anywhere; and
the stamp-and-stare-and-start-and-scream-school has had its
admirers all the world over since the days of Hamlet the Dane.
I have not seen much of either places or people yet.... This city
is picturesque and foreign-looking; trees are much intermixed with
the houses, among them a great many fine willows, and these,
together with the various colors of the houses, and the
irregularity of the streets and buildings, form constantly "little
bits" that would gladden the eye of a painter. The sky here is
beautiful; I find in it what you have seen in Italy, and I only in
Angerstein's Gallery, the orange sunsets of Claude Lorraine.
We leave New York for Philadelphia after next week, and shall
remain there three weeks.
I have read and noted much of your pretty book. There are one or
two points which shall "serve for sweet discourses" in our time to
come. I find great satisfaction in our discussions, for though I
may not often confess to being convinced by your arguments in our
differences (does any one ever do so?), I derive so much
information from them, that they are as profitable as pleasant to
me. Are you going to be busy with your pen soon again? Write me how
the world is going on yonder, and believe me ever truly yours,
F. A. K.
NEW YORK, September 30, 1832.
DEAREST H----,
... Perhaps, as you say, it is morbid to dwell as I do upon the
unreality of acting, because its tangible reality makes its
appearance duly every morning with the "returns" of the preceding
night; but I am not sure that it is morbid to consider wants
exaggerated and necessities unreal which render insufficient
earnings that would be ample for any one's real need. A livelihood,
of course, we could make in England.... You speak of all the
various strange things I am to see, and the amount of knowledge I
shall involuntarily acquire, by this residence in America; but you
know I am what Dr. Johnson would have considered disgracefully
"incurious," and the lazy intellectual indifference which induced
me to live in London by the very spring of the fountain of
knowledge without so much as stooping my lips to it, prevails with
me here.
[Our house in Great Russell Street, which was the last at the corner of
Montague Place, adjoined the British Museum, and has since been taken
into, or removed for (I don't know which), the new buildings of that
institution. Our friend Panizzi, the learned librarian, lived in the
house that stood where ours, formerly my uncle's, did. While we were
still living there, however, I was allowed a privileged entrance at all
times to the library, and am ashamed to think how seldom I availed
myself of so great a favor.]
Then, too, my profession occupies nearly the whole of my time; I
have rehearsals every day, and act four times a week; my
journalizing takes up a good deal of my leisure. Walking in the
heat we still have here fatigues me and hurts my feet very much,
especially when I have to stand at the theater all the evening.
Although I have been here a month, I have seen but little either of
places or people; the latter, you know, I nowhere affect, and my
distaste for the society of strangers must, of course, interfere
with my deriving information from them. Still, as you say, I must
inevitably see and learn much that is new to me, and I take
pleasure in the hope that when I return to you I shall be less
distressingly ignorant than you must often have found me....
I am very sorry my brother Henry and his men are going to be sent
upon so odious an errand as tithe-collecting must be in Ireland. I
trust in God he may meet with no mischief while fulfilling his
duty; I should be both to think of that comely-looking young thing
bruised or broken, maimed or murdered. I hardly think your savage
Irishers would have the heart to hurt him, he looks so like, what
indeed he is, a mere boy; but then, to be sure, his errand is not
one to recommend him to their mercy.
I have read Bryant's poetry, and like it very much. The general
spirit of it is admirable; it is all wholesome poetry, and some of
it is very beautiful.
I am going to get Graham's "History of the United States," and
Smith's "History of Virginia," to beguile my journey to
Philadelphia with. I can't fancy a savage woman marrying a
civilized man.... I suppose love might bring harmony out of the
discords of natures so dissimilar, but I think if I had been a wild
she-American, I should not have been tamed by one of the invading
race, my hunters. Pocahontas thought differently....
Are you acquainted with any of Daniel Webster's speeches? They are
very fine, eloquent, and powerful; and one that he delivered upon
the commemoration of the landing of the English exiles at Plymouth,
in many parts, magnificent. I was profoundly affected by it when my
father read it to us on board ship....
Bad as your mice, of which you complain so bitterly, may be, they
are civilized Christian creatures compared with the heathen swarms
with which we wage war incessantly here. Every evening, as soon as
the sun sets, clouds of mosquitoes begin their war-dance round us;
their sting is most venomous, and as my patience is not even
skin-deep, I tear myself like a maniac, and then, instead of oil,
pour aromatic vinegar into my wounds, and a very pretty species of
torture is produced by that means, I assure you. Besides these
winged devils, we have swarms of flies, which also bite and sting,
with a venomous rancor of which I should have thought their
frivolity incapable. Besides these, every cupboard and drawer in
our rooms is full of moths. Besides these, we have an army of
cantankerous fleas quartered upon us. Besides these, we have one
particular closet where we keep--our bugs, and where for the most
part, I am truly thankful to say, they keep themselves. Besides
these, we have two or three ants' nests in our bedroom, and
everything we look upon seems but a moving mass of these red,
long-legged, but always exemplary insects. These fellow-creatures
make one's life not worth much having, and I do nothing all day
long but sing the famous entomological chorus in "Faust;" and if
this goes on much longer, I feel as if I should take to buzzing. Do
you know that it is hard upon three o'clock in the morning? I must
leave off and go to bed, for I rehearse Constance to-morrow at
eleven, and act her to-morrow night. On Friday I act Bizarre in
"The Inconstant," and think I shall find it great fun.... God bless
you, dearest H----.
Ever your affectionate
F. A. K.
MANSION HOUSE, PHILADELPHIA, October 10, 1832.
DEAREST H----,
Do not let the date of this make any alteration in your way of
addressing your letters, which must still be "Park Theater, New
York;" for before this reaches you we shall probably have returned
thither; but I date particularly that you may follow us with your
mind's legs, and know where to find us. My dearest H----, in spite
of an often heavy heart, and my distaste for my present
surroundings, I have reason to be most grateful, and I trust I am
so, for the benefits which we have already derived from a visit to
this far world beyond the sea. The first and greatest of these is
the wonderful improvement in my dear father's health. He looks full
ten years younger than when last you saw him, and besides enjoying
better spirits from the absence of the many cares and anxieties and
vexations that weighed upon him daily in England, he says that he
is conscious since he came away of a great increase of absolute
muscular strength and vigor; and when he said this, I felt that my
share of the unpleasant duty of coming hither was already amply
repaid.... We have finished our first engagement at New York, which
was for twelve nights, and have every reason to be satisfied with
our financial, as well as professional, success. Living here is not
as cheap as we had been led to expect, but our earnings are very
considerable, and as we labor for these, it is matter of rejoicing
that we labor so satisfactorily.
Dall is very well, except the nuisance of a bad cold. I am very
well, without exception. The only unpleasant effect I feel from
this climate is a constant tendency to slight relaxation of the
throat, but this is nothing more than a trifling inconvenience,
very endurable, and which probably a little more seasoning will
remove.... I tell you of our health first, for at our distance from
each other that is the matter of greatest moment and anxiety....
I must tell you of our future arrangements; and, to begin like an
Irishwoman, we arrived here on Monday. My father acts to-night for
the first time, Hamlet; and I make my first appearance to-morrow in
"Fazio." We shall act here for three weeks, and then return to New
York for a month; after which we shall proceed to Boston, whence
look to receive volumes from me about Webster, and Channing, and
our friends and fellow-passengers, the H----s, who reside there.
I like this place better than New York; it has an air of greater
age. It has altogether a rather dull, sober, mellow hue, which is
more agreeable than the glaring newness of New York. There are one
or two fine public buildings, and the quantity of clean,
cool-looking white marble which they use both for their public
edifices and for the doorsteps of the private houses has a simple
and sumptuous appearance, which is pleasant. It is electioneering
time, and all last night the streets resounded with cheers and
shouts, and shone with bonfires. The present President, Jackson,
appears to be far from popular here, and though his own partisans
are determined, of course, to re-elect him if possible, a violent
struggle is likely to take place; and here already his opponent,
Henry Clay, who is the leader of the aristocratic party in the
United States, is said to have obtained the superiority over him.
I have got Graham's and Smith's "Histories," and though my time for
reading is anything but abundant, yet every night and morning I do
contrive, while brushing the outside of my head, to cram something
into the inside of it.
I cannot bear to give up any advantage which I once possessed, and
therefore struggle to keep up, in some degree, my music and
Italian. These, together with rehearsing every morning, and acting
four times a week, besides my journal, which I very seldom neglect,
make up a good deal of daily occupation. Then, one must sacrifice a
certain amount of time to the conventional waste of society,
receiving and returning visits, etc.... I like what I have read of
Graham very much; the matter is very interesting, and the spirit in
which it is treated; and I am deeply in love with Captain John
Smith, and wonder greatly at Pocahontas marrying anybody else. I
suppose, however, the savage was not without excuse; for Mary
Stuart, who knew something of these matters, says, with a rather
satirical glance at her cousin of England, "En ces sortes de
choses, la plus sage de nous toutes n'est qu'un peu moins sotte que
les autres."
I have been to my first rehearsal here to-day; the theater is
small, but pretty enough. The public has high pretensions to
considerable critical judgment and literary and dramatic taste, and
scouts the idea of being led by the opinion of New York.... It is
rather tiresome that fools are cut upon the same pattern all the
world over. What is the profit of traveling? Oh dear! I think my
Fazio has got St. Vitus's dance!...
Yesterday I tried some horses, which were rather terrible
quadrupeds. They were not ill-bred cattle to look at, and I should
think of a race that, with care and attention, might be brought to
considerable perfection; but they are never properly broken for the
saddle. The Americans who have spoken to me about riding say that
they do not like a horse to have what we consider proper paces, but
prefer a shambling sort of half-trot, half-canter, which they
judiciously call a rack, and which is the ugliest pace to behold,
and the most difficult to endure, possible. They never use a curb,
but ride their horses upon the snaffle entirely, dragging it as
tight as they can, and having the appearance of holding on for dear
life by it; so that the horse, in addition to the awkward gait I
have described, throws his head up, and pokes his nose out, and
with open jaws "devours the road" before him....
I acted here last night for the first time. Dall and my father say
that I received my reception very ungraciously. I am sure I am very
sorry, I did not mean to do so, but I really had not the heart or
the face to smile and look as pleased and pleasant as I can at a
parcel of strangers.... I was not well, or in spirits, and laboring
under a severe cold, which I acquired on board the steamboat that
brought down the Delaware.... Neither the Raritan nor the Delaware
struck me in any way except by their great width. These vast
streams naturally suggest the mighty resources which a country so
watered presents to the commercial enterprise of its inhabitants.
The breadth of these great rivers dwarfs their shores and makes
their banks appear flat and uninteresting, though the large
lake-like basins into which they occasionally expand are grand from
the mere extent and volume of the sweeping mass of waters.
The colors of the autumnal foliage are rich and beautiful beyond
imagination--crimson and gold, like a regal mantle, instead of the
sad russet cloak of our fading woods. I think, beautiful as this
is, that its gorgeousness takes away from the sweet solemnity that
makes the fall of the year pre-eminently the season of thoughtful
contemplation. Our autumn at home is mellow and harmonious, though
sometimes melancholy; but the brilliancy of this decay strikes one
sometimes with a sudden sadness, as if the whole world were dying
of consumption, with these glittering gleams and hectic flushes, a
mere deception of disease and death.... Good-by, my dearest H----
PHILADELPHIA, October 14, 1832.
DEAREST H----,
"Boston is a Yankee town, and so is Philadelphy;" considering
which, I assure you I find the latter quite a civilized place. The
above quotation is from "Yankee-doodle," the National Anthem of the
Americans, which I will sing to you some day when I am within
hearing.
We have just returned from church. Dall and I being too late this
morning for the service, which begins at half-past ten, sallied
forth in search of salvation this afternoon, and after wandering
about a little, entered a fine-looking church, which we found was a
Presbyterian place of worship.... The preaching to-day was
extemporaneous, and extremely feeble and commonplace, occasionally
reminding me of your eloquent friend at Skerries.... I shall try,
on my return to New York, to settle to some work in earnest, as I
hope there that we shall repeat the plays we have already acted,
and so need no rehearsals.... To-morrow I act Juliet to my father's
Romeo; he does it still most beautifully.... In spite of his acting
it with his own child (which puts a manifest absurdity on the very
face of it), the perfection of his art makes it more youthful,
graceful, ardent, and lover-like--a better Romeo, in short, than
the youngest pretender to it nowadays. It is certainly simple truth
when he says, "I am the youngest of that name, for lack of a
better," when the nurse asks for young Romeo.
Wednesday we act "The School for Scandal," and Friday "Venice
Preserved." So there's your play-bill....
At this moment a great political excitement pervades the country;
it is the time of the Presidential Election, and the most vehement
efforts are being made by the Democratic party to maintain the
present President, General Jackson, in his post. The majority, I
believe, is in his favor, though we are told that the "better
classes" (whatever that may mean where no distinctions of class
exist) embrace the cause of his opponent, Henry Clay.
It seems curious, if it is true, as we have been assured, that in
this one State of Pennsylvania, eight thousand persons out of fifty
who have the right of voting were all who in this last election
exercised it; so that the much-vaunted privilege of universal
suffrage does not seem to be highly prized where it is possessed.
From all the opinions that I hear expressed upon the subject, it
does not seem as though the system of election prevalent here works
much better, or is much freer from abuses, than the well-vilified
one which England has just been reforming. Bribery and corruption
are familiar here as elsewhere, to those who have, and those who
wish to have, power; and I have not yet heard a single American
speak of our Radical reformers without uplifted hands at what they
consider their folly in not "letting well alone," or, as they say,
in substituting one set of abuses for another, as they declare we
shall do if we adopt their vote by ballot system.
I have now written you a philosophical, moral, and political
letter, and beg you will score up my attempt to write rationally
against the loads of gibberish I have from time to time discoursed
to you. Good bless you, dearest H----! Three thousand miles away, I
am still
Always your affectionate
F. A. K.
PHILADELPHIA, October 22, 1832.
DEAR H----,
My first news is deplorable, and I beg you will lament over it
accordingly. I eat little, drink less, rehearse six mornings and
act five nights a week; in spite of all which, and riding a
heavy-going, jolting, shambling, hard-pulling horse, I have grown
so fat that I really cannot perceive that there is any shape in
particular about me. Grotesque things sometimes are melancholy too,
and it is so with me, for I am both....
My father and Dall are very well; at this moment he is busy saying,
and she hearing him say, the part of Fazio, which he is to act with
me to-morrow night. I dread it dreadfully; acting anything painful
with him always tries my nerves extremely.
Bianca is a part of terrible excitement in itself, without the
addition of having to act it to his Fazio. I cannot get rid of his
being he, and it agonizes me really to see his sham agony; however,
"'tis my vocation, Hal." It is very well that our audiences should
look at us as mere puppets, for could they sometimes see the real
feelings of those for whose false miseries their sympathies are
excited, I believe sufficiently in their humanity to think they
would kindly give us leave to leave off and go home. Ours is a very
strange trade, and I am sorry to say that every day increases my
distaste for it.... I do not think that during my father's life I
shall ever leave the stage; it is very selfish to feel regret at
this, I know, but it sometimes seems to me rather dreary to look
along my future years, and think that they will be devoted to labor
that I dislike and despise.... For many years--ever since I entered
upon my first girlhood, indeed--a quiet, lonely life upon a small
independence has been the aim of my desires and my notion of
happiness. Italy and the south of France formerly constantly
solicited my imagination, as offering pleasant places wherein to
build a solitary nest.... And now a cottage near Edinburgh, with an
income of two hundred a year, seems to me the most desirable of
earthly possessions; but, though this is certainly not a very wild
vision of wealth or magnificence, I fear it is quite as little
within my reach as southern palaces, or villas on the
Mediterranean.
My father has hitherto been able to lay by nothing, and my
assistance is absolutely necessary to him, ... and as long as I can
in any way serve my father's interests by remaining in my
profession I shall do so, and must naturally look forward to a
prolonged period of my present exertions. It is useless pondering
upon this, but I have been led to do so lately from a letter which
my father received from Mr. Bartley, the stage manager of Covent
Garden, the other day, which contained the plan of a new theatrical
speculation, in which he is most anxious to engage us. I know not
how my father feels upon this subject.... I, however, am well
determined that neither Mr. L----'s opinion, nor that of the whole
world besides, should induce me to own the value of a truss of
straw in any theater. My father's whole life has been given over to
trouble and anxiety in consequence of his proprietorship and
involvement in that ruinous concern, Covent Garden; and now, when
his remaining health and strength will no more than serve to lay up
the means of subsistence when health and strength are gone, the
idea of his loading himself with such a burden of bitterness as the
proprietorship of a new theater makes me perfectly miserable. For
my own part, I am determined to own neither part nor lot in any
such venture: I will lend or give anything that I may earn to it,
and I will act, at half the price I might get elsewhere, for it, if
my father wishes me to do so; but not a demonstrable cent per cent
profit should induce me to run such a risk of cursing the day that
I was born, as to become owner of a theater. I write you all this
(and I have written more than enough about it) because it has been
lately a subject of much anxious meditation to me. The matter is at
present without settled form or plan, but the proposal of such a
scheme has caused me deep regret and anxiety.... I am going to act
to-morrow in "The Hunchback;" Thursday, Mrs. Beverley; Friday, Lady
Townley; Saturday, Juliet; Monday, Julia again; and Tuesday,
Bizarre in "The Inconstant;" which ends our engagement here. This
is pretty hard work, is it not? besides always one, and sometimes
two rehearsals of a morning.
We begin our second engagement in New York on the 7th of November.
Don't forget that the 27th of that month is my birthday, and that
if you neglect to drink my health, I shall probably die, for want
of your good wishes to keep me alive.
We act in Boston on the 3d of December; "further than that the
deponent sayeth not."
I told you in my last letter that Philadelphia was the cleanest
place in the world. The country along the banks of the Schuylkill
(one of the rivers on which it stands; the other is the Delaware)
is wild and beautiful, and the glory of the autumn woods what an
eye that hath not seen can by no manner of means conceive. I have
for the last week had my room full of the most delicious flowers
that could only be seen with us at midsummer, and here, in these
last days of autumn, they are as abundant and fragrant, and the sun
is as intensely hot and brilliant, as it should be, but never is,
with us, in the month of July....
Dall went into a Quaker's shop here the other day, when, after
waiting upon her with the utmost attention and kindness, the master
of the shop said, "And how doth Fanny? I was in hopes she might
have wanted something; we should have great pleasure in attending
upon her." Was not that nice? So to-day I went thither, and bought
myself a lovely sober-colored gown. This place, as you know, is the
headquarters of Quakerdom, and all the enchanting nosegays come
from "a Philadelphia friend," the latter word dashed under, as if
to indicate a member of the religious fraternity always called by
that kindly title here....
I think my father has some idea of bringing out "The Star of
Seville" here, and if he does I shall break my heart that it was
not brought out first in England. Emily always reproaches me with
want of patriotism. I have more than helps to make me cheerful
here, and leaving England--not home, and not you, but England,
England--for two years, seems to me now ridiculous, and fabulous,
and preposterous, and disastrous.
I have finished my first volume of Graham, and I have finished this
letter. God bless you!
Ever your affectionate
F. A. K.
PHILADELPHIA, November 2, 1832.
DEAREST H----,
I received your fifth letter to-day, and one from Dorothy, and one
from Emily Fitzhugh.... My last letter to you was a sad one, and
sad in a fashion that does not often occur to me. I was troubled
and anxious about my professional labor and its results, and that
may be called a small sadness compared with some other with which I
have lately become familiar. Of course none of these anxieties have
been removed, for some time must elapse before I can know on what
plan my father determines with regard to Mr. Bartley's proposal
about this new theater. It does not affect me personally, because I
am thoroughly determined to take no part in any speculation of the
kind; but the possibility of my father entering into any such
scheme is care enough to "kill a cat," and make a kitten miserable
besides.... In all matters, but especially in matters of business,
I hold frankness, straightforwardness, and decision as conducive to
success, as consonant with right feeling; but I think men are much
more cowardly than women, and believe a great deal more in policy,
temporizing, and expediency than we do. "Managing" is supposed to
be a feminine tendency; it has no place in my composition; perhaps
I might be the better for a little of it--but only perhaps, and
only a little.... This letter, as you will perceive by its date,
was begun on the banks of the Delaware; here we are, however, once
more in New York. It is Monday evening, the 5th of November, and
you are firing squibs and burning manikins _en action de grâces_
that the Houses of Parliament were not blown up by the Roman
Catholics, instead of living to be reformed by the Whigs, and
(peradventure) blowing up the nation.
The Presidential Election is going on here, and creates immense
excitement. General Jackson, they say, will certainly be
re-elected.
Our last fortnight in Philadelphia has been one of incessant and
very hard work, rehearsing every morning and acting every night. I
rejoiced heartily when our engagement drew to a close, for I was
fairly worn out, and money bought with health is bought too dear, I
think.... I have taken some very pleasant rides during our stay in
Philadelphia; the horses are none of them properly broken for
riding, which makes it a pleasure of no small fatigue to ride them
for three or four hours. Luckily, I do not object to severe
exercise, and the weather and the country were both charming....
I am glad you have been re-reading the "Tempest." ... What
exquisite pleasure that fine creation has given me! I like it
better than any of the other plays; it is less "of the earth,
earthy" than any of the others; for though the "Midsummer Night's
Dream" is in some sort, as it were, its companion, the mortal
element in the latter poem is far less noble and lovely than in the
"Tempest." Prospero and Miranda, the dwellers on the enchanted
island, are statelier and fairer than any of the human wanderers in
the mazes of the Athenian wood. There is a deep and indescribable
melancholy to me in the "Tempest" that mingles throughout with its
beauty, and lends a special charm to it. I so often contemplate in
fancy that island, lost in the unknown seas, just in the hour of
its renewed solitude, after the departure of its "human mortal"
dwellers and visitors, when Prospero and his companions had bade
farewell to it, when Caliban was grunting and grubbing and
groveling in his favorite cave again, when Ariel was hovering like
a humming-bird over the flower draperies of the woods, where the
footprints of men were still stamped on the wet sand of the shining
shore, but their voices silent and their forms vanished, and utter
solitude, and a strange dream of the past, filling the haunts where
human life, its sin and sorrow, and joy and hope, and love and
hate, had breathed and palpitated, and were now forever gone. The
notion of that desert once, but now deserted, paradise, whose
flowers had looked up at Miranda, whose skies had shed wisdom on
Prospero, always seems to me full of melancholy. The girl's sweet
voice singing no more in the sunny, still noon, the grave, tender
converse of the father and child charming no more the solemn
eventide, the forsaken island dwells in my imagination as at once
desecrated and hallowed by its mortal sojourners; no longer savage
quite, and never to be civilized; the supernatural element
disturbed, the human element withdrawn; a sad, beautiful place,
stranger than any other in the world. Perhaps the sea went over it;
it has never been found since Shakespeare landed on it. I love that
poem beyond words....
I shall ruin you in postage; if there is any chance of that, keep
Mrs. Norton's five guineas to pay for my American epistles.
Ever your affectionate
F. A. K.
DEAREST H----,
I have received your letter, acknowledging my first to you.... As
for letters, they are like everything else we experience here,
sources of to the full as much suffering as satisfaction. Who has
not felt their whole blood run backward at sight of one of these
folded fate-bearers? I declare, breaking an envelope always has
something of the character of pulling a shower-bath string over
one's own head; I wonder anybody ever has the courage to do it....
Your dread of our finding New York quite a desert would have been
literally fulfilled had we reached it a fortnight sooner; but the
dreadful malady, the cholera, had taken its departure, and though
private bereavements and general stagnation of business rendered
the season a very unfavorable one for our experiment, yet, upon the
whole, we have every reason to be well satisfied with the result of
it, and think we did well not to postpone the beginning of our
campaign.... The first serious experiences of our youth seem to me
like the breaking asunder of some curious, beautiful, and mystical
pattern or device.... All our lives long we are more or less intent
on replacing the bright scattered fragments in their original
shape: most of us die with the bits still scattered round us--that
is to say, such of the bits as have not been ground into powder, or
soiled and defaced beyond recognition, in the life-process. The few
very wise find and place them in a coherent form at last, but it is
quite another curious, beautiful, and mystical device or pattern
from the original one.
The deaths of the young Napoleon, the Duke of Reichstadt, and
Walter Scott have excited universal interest here, naturally of a
very dissimilar kind. One's heart burns to think of that young
eagle falling like a weakly winter flower, or a faded, sickly girl,
into his untimely grave.... There was nothing for him but death. If
he had been anything, it could only have been a wild spark of the
mad meteor from which he sprang; and as Heaven in its wisdom
forbade that, I think it much of its mercy that it extinguished him
early and utterly, and did not leave him to flare and flicker and
burn himself out with foul gunpowder smoke, and smell of dead men
slain in battle, in the middle of the smoldering ashes of his
father's European empire.
My admiration and respect for Walter Scott are unbounded, and were
I the noblest, richest, and charmingest man in the world, I would
lay myself at Anne Scott's feet out of sheer love and veneration
for her father....
You ask me if I wrote anything on board ship? Nothing but odds and
ends of doggerel. Since I have been here I have written some verses
on the beautiful American autumn, which have been published with
commendation. I am thinking of writing a prose story, if ever again
I can get two minutes and a half of leisure.... Your entreaties for
minute details of our life make me sad, for how little of what we
do, be, or suffer can be conveyed to you in this miserable scrap of
paper!... Our dinner-hour is three when we are actors, five when we
are ladies and gentlemen. The food we get here in New York is very
indifferent. It was excellent in quality in Philadelphia, but
wherever we have been there is a want of niceness and refinement in
the cooking and serving everything that is very disagreeable....
Thursday, Nov. 27th. This is my birthday--in England always one of
the gloomiest days of this gloomy month; here my windows are all
open, and the warm sun streaming in as it might on the finest of
early September days with us. I am to-day three-and-twenty. Where
is my life gone to? As the child said, "Where does the light go
when the candle is out?" ... Since last I wrote to you I have been
forty miles up the Hudson, and seen such noble waters and beautiful
hills, such glory of color and magnificent breadth in the grand
river and its autumn woods, as I cannot describe.
This is our last night but one of acting here. We play "The
Hunchback" on Saturday, and on Monday go back to Philadelphia for
three weeks; thence to Baltimore and Washington, and then return
here. I must go now and rehearse Katharine and Petruchio.
I have just finished Graham's "History," and am beginning John
Smith. By the by, a gentleman here is writing a play, in which I am
to act Pocahontas and my father Captain Smith. Come out and see it,
won't you? Good-by, dear. Think always of your affectionate
F. A. K.
December 9, 1832.
MY DEAREST H----,
I received yours of October 16th yesterday.... You are not
healthily natured enough to be inconstant. Yours is one of those
morbid organizations for whom the present never does its wholesome,
proper office of superseding the past, and your thoughts and
feelings, your whole inner life, in short, is always out of
perspective, because your background is forever your foreground,
and with you, half the time, nothing is but what is not; not in
consequence of looking forward, like Macbeth, but the reverse.... I
am delighted that you are going to Scotland to know my dear Mrs.
Harry Siddons.
Before this letter reaches you, however, you will have returned to
your castle, and your visit to Edinburgh will be over.... Mercy on
me! what disputations you and Mr. Combe will have had--on matters
physiological, psychological, phrenological, and philosophical! My
brains ache to imagine them.... Spurzheim, you know, is dead lately
in Boston. It is a matter of regret to me not to have seen him, and
his death will be a grief to the Combes, who venerate him
highly.... Making trial of people is running a foolish risk, and
they who get disappointment by it reap the most probable result
from such experiments. I am quite willing to trust my friends; God
forbid I should ever try them!...
We have not yet been to Boston, and therefore I myself know nothing
of Channing, and cannot answer your questions about him. All that I
hear inclines me to like as well as respect him. His gentleness and
kindness, his weak health, brought on by over-study, his perfect
simplicity and unaffectedness--these are the usual details that
follow any mention of him, and accord with the impression his
writings produced upon me; but of his theological treatises I know
nothing.
I am glad anything so universal as the blessed sunshine reminds you
of me, because my remembrance must be present with you almost
daily. The lights of heaven shine more glowingly here than through
the misty veils that curtain our islands. The moon and stars are
wonderfully bright, and there is an intensity, an earnestness, and
a translucent purity in the sky here that delights me.... Four
months are already gone out of the two years we are to pass out of
England. Dear England! My heart dwells with affectionate pride upon
the beauty and greatness and goodness of my own country--that
wonderful little land, that mere morsel of earth as it seems on the
map--so full of power, of wealth, of intellectual vigor and moral
worth!...
I found Graham a little too much of a Republican for me, though his
"History" seemed to me upon the whole good and very impartial. I am
now half way through Smith's "Virginia," which pleases me by its
quaint old-world style. I am myself much inclined to be in love
with Captain Smith. A man who fights three Turks and carries their
heads on his shield is to me an admirable man....
I answer the propositions in your letters in regular rotation as
they come; and so, with regard to the peaches, those that I have
tasted on this side of the Atlantic I should say were not
comparable to fine hothouse peaches in England and fine French
espalier peaches; but then the peach trees here are standard trees,
and there are whole orchards of them. Their chief merit, therefore,
is their abundance, and some of that abundance is certainly fit for
nothing but to feed pigs withal. [It is by no means a luxury to be
despised, however, to have, in the American fashion, on a hot
summer's day, a deep plate presented to you full of peaches, cut up
like apples for a pie, that have been standing in ice, and are then
snowed over with sugar and frozen cream.]
We are now in Philadelphia, whence we go to Baltimore, Washington,
and Charleston. The Southern States are at this moment in a state
of violent excitement, which seems almost to threaten a dissolution
of the Union. The tariff question is the point of disagreement; and
as the interests of the North and South are in direct opposition on
this subject, there is no foretelling the end.
Our success is very great, and we have every reason to be satisfied
with and grateful for it. Our houses are full, and eke our pockets,
and we have hitherto managed to live in tolerable privacy and very
tolerable discomfort. But I believe the western part of the country
has yet to teach us the extent of inconvenience to which travelers
in America are sometimes liable. God bless you, dearest H----.
I am, ever yours affectionately,
F. A. K.
My father and I took a moonlight walk the other night, from ten
o'clock till half-past twelve, during which we neither of us
uttered six words.
BALTIMORE, January 2, 1833.
MY DEAREST H----,
You are the first to whom I date this new year.... I told you in
one of my letters to keep the five guineas Mrs. Norton has paid you
for my scribblements to pay the postage of my letters--do so....
We arrived in this place on Monday, at half-past four, having left
Philadelphia at six in the morning. We have just terminated a
second engagement there very successfully. If the roads and
carriages are bad, and the land-traveling altogether detestable,
the speed, facility, and convenience of the steamboats, by which
one may really be conveyed from one end to another of this world of
vast waters, are very admirable. Vast waters indeed they are! We
came down the Delaware on Monday, and (open your Irish eyes!)
sometimes it was six, sometimes thirteen miles wide, and never
narrower than three or four miles at any part of it that we saw. So
wide an expanse of fresh running water is in itself a fine object.
We crossed the narrow neck of land between the Delaware and the
Chesapeake on a railroad with one of Stephenson's engines....
The railroad was full of knots and dots, and jolting and jumping
and bumping and thumping places. The carriages we were in held
twelve people very uncomfortably. Baltimore itself, as far as I
have seen it, strikes me as a large, rambling, red-brick village on
the outskirts of one of our manufacturing towns, Birmingham or
Manchester. It covers an immense extent of ground, but there are
great gaps and vacancies in the middle of the streets, patches of
gravely ground, parcels of meadow land, and large vacant
spaces--which will all, no doubt, be covered with buildings in good
time, for it is growing daily and hourly--but which at present give
it an untidy, unfinished, straggling appearance.
While my father and I were exploring about together yesterday, we
came to a print-shop, whose window exhibited an engraving of
Reynolds's Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, and Lawrence's picture
of my uncle John in Hamlet. We stopped before them, and my father
looked with a good deal of emotion at these beautiful
representations of his beautiful kindred, and it was a sort of sad
surprise to meet them in this other world where we are wandering,
aliens and strangers.
This is the newest-looking place we have yet visited, the youngest
in appearance in this young world; and I have experienced to-day a
disagreeable instance of its immature civilization, or at any rate
its small proficiency in the elegancies of life. I wanted to ride,
but although a horse was to be found, no such thing as a
side-saddle could be procured at any livery-stable or saddler's in
the town, so I have been obliged to give up my projected exercise.
I have been to my first rehearsal here this morning, and wretched
enough all things were. I act for the first time to-morrow night
Bianca, which they have everywhere chosen for my opening part; and
it is a good one for that purpose, as I generally act and look well
in it, and it is the sort of play that all sorts of people can
comprehend. There is a foreign--I mean continental--custom here,
which is pleasant. They have a _table d'hôte_ dinner at two
o'clock, and while it is going on a very tolerable band plays all
manner of Italian airs and German waltzes, and as there is a fine
long corridor into which my room-door opens, with a window at each
end, I have a very agreeable promenade, and take my exercise to
this musical accompaniment....
I have at this moment on my table a lovely nosegay--roses,
geraniums, rare heaths, and perfect white camellias. Our windows
are all wide open; the heat is intense, and the air that comes in
at them like a sirocco. It is unusual weather for the season even
here, and very unwholesome.
In a week's time we are going on to Washington, where we shall find
dear Washington Irving, whom I think I shall embrace, for England's
sake as well as his own. We have letters to the President, to whom
we are to be presented, and to his rival, Henry Clay, and to Daniel
Webster, whom I care more to know than either of the others.
After a short stay in Washington we return here, and then back to
Philadelphia and New York, till the 20th of February, after which
we sail for Charleston. There has been, and still exists at
present, a very considerable degree of political alarm and
excitement in this country, owing to the threat of the South
Carolinians to secede from the Union if the tariff is not annulled,
and the country is in hourly expectation of being involved in a
civil war. However, the prevailing opinion among the wise seems to
be that the Northern States will be obliged to give up the tariff,
as the only means of preserving the Union; and if matters come to a
peaceable settlement, we shall proceed in February to Charleston;
if not, South Carolina will have other things to think of besides
plays and play-actors. The summer we shall probably spend in
Canada; the winter perhaps in Jamaica, to which place we have
received a most pressing invitation from Lord Mulgrave. The end of
the ensuing spring will, I trust in God, see us embarked once more
for England....
We are earning money very fast, and though I think we work too
incessantly and too hard, yet, as every night we do not act is a
certain loss of so much out of my father's pocket, I do not like to
make many objections to it, although I think it is really not
unlikely to be detrimental to his own health and strength....
I spent yesterday evening with some very pleasant people here, who
are like old-fashioned English folk, the Catons, Lady Wellesley's
father and mother. They are just now in deep mourning for Mrs.
Caton's father, the venerable Mr. Carroll, who was upward of
ninety-five years old when he died, and was the last surviving
signer of the Declaration of Independence. I saw a lovely picture
by Lawrence of the eldest of the three beautiful sisters, the
daughters of Mrs. Caton, who have all married Englishmen of rank.
[The Marchioness of Wellesley, the Duchess of Leeds, and Lady
Stafford. The fashion of marrying in England seems to be
traditional in this family. Miss McTavish, niece of these ladies,
married Mr. Charles Howard, son of the Earl of Carlisle.]
The Baltimore women are celebrated for their beauty, and I think
they are the prettiest creatures I have ever seen as far as their
faces go; but they are short and thin, and have no figures at all,
either in height or breadth, and pinch their waists and feet most
cruelly, which certainly, considering how small they are by nature,
is a work of supererogation, and does not tend to produce in them a
state of grace.... We act every night this week, and as we are
obliged to rehearse every morning, of course I have no time for any
occupations but my strictly professional ones. I do not approve of
this quantity of hard work for either my father or myself, but I do
not like to make any further protest upon the subject....
Good-by, dearest H----.
I am ever your affectionate
F. A. K.
TO MRS. JAMESON.
BALTIMORE, January 11, 1833.
Thank you across the sea, dear Mrs. Jameson, for your letter of the
1st of November. I had been wondering, but the day before it
reached me, whether you had ever received one I wrote to you on my
first arrival in New York, or whether you were accusing me of
neglect, ingratitude, forgetfulness, and all the turpitudes that
the delay of a letter sometimes causes folk to give other folk
credit for. My occupations are incessant, or rather, I should say,
my occupation, for to my sorrow I have but one. 'Tis not with me
now as in the fortunate days when, after six rehearsals, a piece
ran, as the saying is, twenty nights, leaving me all the mornings
and three evenings in the week at my own disposal. Here we rush
from place to place, at each place have to drill a new set of
actors, and every night to act a different play; so that my days
are passed in dawdling about cold, dark stages, with blundering
actors who have not even had the conscience to study the words of
their parts, all the morning. All the afternoon I pin up ribbons
and feathers and flowers, and sort out theatrical adornments, and
all the evening I enchant audiences, prompt my fellow-mimes, and
wish it had pleased Heaven to make me a cabbage in a corner of a
Christian kitchen-garden in--well, say Hertfordshire, or any other
county of England; I am not particular as to the precise spot....
Whenever I can I get on horseback; it is the only pleasure I have
in this world; for my dancing days are drawing to a close. But I
mean to ride as long as I have a hand to hold a rein, or a leg to
put over a pommel. By the by, I ought to beg your pardon for the
last sentence; I ought to have said a foot to put into a stirrup;
for if you are not ashamed of having legs you ought to be--at
least, we are in this country, and never mention, or give the
slightest token of having such things, except by wearing very short
petticoats, which we don't consider objectionable.... I am glad you
have furbished up and completed your little room, because it is a
sign you mean to stay where you are, and I like to know where to
find you in my imagination.... I have just seen dear Washington
Irving, and it required all my sense of decent decorum to prevent
my throwing my arms round his neck, he looked so like a bit of
home, England.
You will be glad to hear that we are thriving, in body and estate.
We are all well, and our work is very successful. The people flock
to see us, and nothing can exceed the kindness which we meet with
everywhere and from everybody.... I read nothing whatever since I
am in this blessed land. The only books I have accomplished getting
through have been Graham's "History of North America,"
Knickerbocker's "History of New York," which nearly killed me with
laughing; "Contarini Fleming," which is very affected and very
clever; sundry cantos of Dante, sundry plays of Shakespeare, sundry
American poems [which are very good], and old Captain John Smith's
quaint "History of Virginia." As fast as I gather my wits together
for any steady occupation, I am whisked off to some new place, and
do not recover from one journey before I have to take another. The
roads here shake one's body, soul, thoughts, opinions, and
principles all to pieces; I assure you they are wicked roads.
Our theater, Covent Garden, is, we understand, going to the dogs. I
cannot help it any more, that is certain, and feel about that as
about all things that have had their day--it must go. Taglioni is
like a dream, and you must not abuse Mademoiselle Mars to me. I
never saw her but twice--in "L'Ecole des Vieillards" and
"Valérie"--and I thought her perfection in both.... If I do not
leave off, you will be blind for the next fortnight with reading
this crossed letter. I wish you success most heartily in all you
undertake, and am truly and faithfully yours,
FANNY KEMBLE.
[Washington Irving was intimately acquainted with my father and mother,
and a most kind and condescending friend to me. He often told me that
when first he went to England, long before authorship or celebrity had
dawned upon him, he was a member of a New York commercial house, on
whose affairs he was sent to Europe. It was when he was a mere obscure
young man of business in London that he had been introduced to my
mother, whose cordial kindness to him in his foreign isolation seemed to
have made a profound impression on him; for when I knew him, in the days
of his great literary celebrity and social success, he often referred to
it with the warmest expressions of gratitude. I think, of all the
distinguished persons I have known, he was one of the least affected by
the adulation and admiration of society. He remained quite unchanged by
his extreme social popularity. Simple, unaffected, unconstrained,
genial, kindly, and good, he seemed so entirely to forget his own
celebrity, that one almost forgot it too in talking to him. I remember
his coming, the day after my first appearance at Covent Garden, to see
us, and congratulated my parents on the success of that terrible
experiment. I, who was always delighted to see him, ran to fetch the
pretty new watch I had received from my father the night before, and
displayed its beauties with an eager desire for his admiration of them.
He took it and slowly turned it about, commending its fine workmanship
and pretty enamel and jewelry; then putting it to his ear, with a most
mischievous look of affected surprise, he exclaimed, as one does to a
child's watch, "Why, it goes, I declare!"
To my great regret and loss, I saw Mademoiselle Mars only in two parts,
when, in the autumn of her beauty and powers, she played a short
engagement in London. The grace, the charm, the loveliness, which she
retained far into middle age, were, even in their decline, enough to
justify all that her admirers said of her early incomparable
fascination. Her figure had grown large and her face become round, and
lost their fine outline and proportion; but the exquisite taste of her
dress and graceful dignity of her deportment, and sweet radiance of her
expressive countenance, were still indescribably charming; and the
voice, unrivaled in its fresh melodious brilliancy, and the pure and
perfect enunciation, were unimpaired, and sounded like the clear liquid
utterance of a young girl of sixteen. Her Celimène and her Elmire I
never had the good fortune to see, but can imagine, from her performance
of the heroine in Casimir de la Vigne's capital play of "L'Ecole des
Vieillards," how well she must have deserved her unrivaled reputation in
those parts.
It is remarkable that one of the most striking points in Madame d'Orval
was suggested by herself to the author. De la Vigne, according to the
frequent usage of French authors, was reading his piece to the great
actress, upon whom its success was mainly to depend, and when he came to
the scene where the offended but unjustly suspicious husband recounts to
his wife the details of his duel with the young duke whose attentions to
her had excited his jealousy, and that when, full of the tenderest
anxiety for his safety, she flies to meet him, and is repulsed by the
bitter irony of his speech, beginning, "Rassurez-vous, madame, le duc
n'est point blessé," Mademoiselle Mars, having listened in silence till
the end of D'Orval's speech, exclaimed, "Mais, quoi! je ne dis rien,
elle ne dit rien!" De la Vigne, who had made the young woman listen in
speechless anguish to the bitter and unjust reproach conveyed by her
husband's first words and his subsequent account of the duel, said, in
some surprise at Mademoiselle Mars' suggestion, "Mais quoi encore--que
peut-elle dire? que voudriez-vous qu'elle dise?" "Ah, quelquechose!"
cried Mademoiselle Mars, clasping her hands in the imagined distress of
the situation; "rien--deuxmots seulement. 'Ah, monsieur!' quand il dit,
'Rassurez-vous, madame, le duc n'est point blessé.'" "Eh bien! dites,
dites comme cela," cried De la Vigne, amazed at all the expression the
exquisite voice and face had given to the two words. And so the scene
was altered, and the long recital of D'Orval was broken by the
reproachful "Ah, monsieur!" of his wife, and seldom has the utterance of
such an insignificant exclamation affected those who heard it so keenly.
For myself, I never can forget the sudden, burning blush that spread
tingling to my shoulders at all the shame and mortification and anguish
conveyed in the pathetic protest of that "Ah, monsieur!" of Mademoiselle
Mars.
Dr. Gueneau de Mussy, who knew her well, and used to see her very
frequently in her later years of retirement from the stage, told me that
he had often heard her read, among other things, the whole play of "Le
Tartuffe," and that the coarse flippancy of the honest-hearted Dorinne,
and the stupid stolidity of the dupe Orgon, and the vulgar, gross,
sensual hypocrisy of the Tartuffe, were all rendered by her with the
same incomparable truth and effect as her own famous part of the heroine
of the piece, Elmire. On one of the very last occasions of her appearing
before her own Parisian audience, when she had passed the limit at which
it was possible for a woman of her advanced age to assume the appearance
of youth, the part she was playing requiring that she should exclaim "Je
suis jeune! je suis jolie!" a loud, solitary hiss protested against the
assertion with bitter significance. After an instant's consternation,
which held both the actors and audience silent, she added, with the
exquisite grace and dignity which survived the youth and beauty to which
she could no longer even pretend, "Je suis Mademoiselle Mars!" and the
whole house broke out in acclamations, and rang with the applause due to
what the incomparable artiste still was and the memory of all that she
had been.]
NEW YORK, February 21, 1833.
It is a long time since I have written to you, my dearest H----....
My work is incessant, ... and there is no end to the breathless
hurry of occupation we pass our days in. Here is already a break
since I began this letter, for we are now in Philadelphia, on our
way to Washington, and it is Thursday, the 3d of March.... It has
been matter of serious regret to me that I have not, from the very
first day of my becoming a worker for wages, looked more into the
details of my earnings and spendings. I have felt this particularly
lately from circumstances relative to V----'s position, which is a
very sad one, from which I have been very anxious to relieve
her.... All I know at present is, that since we have been here in
America our earnings have already been sufficient to enable us to
live in tolerably decent comfort on the Continent.... Do you know,
dearest H----, that it is not impossible that I may never return to
England to reside there. See it again, I will, please God to grant
me life and eyes, but the state of my father's property in Covent
Garden is such that it seems more than likely that he may never be
able to return to England without risking the little which these
last toilsome years will have enabled him to earn for the support
of his own and my mother's old age. He will be compelled, in all
likelihood, to settle and die abroad, as my uncle John did, by the
liabilities of that ruinous possession of theirs, the first theater
of London. When first my father communicated this chance to me, and
expressed his determination, should the affairs of the theater
remain in their present situation, to buy a small farm in Normandy,
and go and live there, my heart sank terribly. This was very
different from my girlish dream of a life of lonely independence
among the Alps, or by the Mediterranean; and the idea of living
entirely out of England seems to me now very sad for all of us....
However, there are earth and skies out of England. What does Imogen
say?--
"I prithee think, there's livers out of Britain;"
and if God vouchsafe me my faculties, and I can bid farewell to
this life of distasteful toil, I have visions of studies and
pursuits which I think might make existence very happy in a farm in
Normandy, though such might not have been my own choice.... What
special inquiries did you wish me to make about General Washington?
I was, when at Washington, within fifteen miles of Mount Vernon,
his home and burying-place, but could not make time to go thither.
I have one of his autograph letters, and if there be any indication
of character in handwriting--which I hope to goodness there is
not--it certainly exists in his, for a firmer, clearer, and fairer
hand I never saw--an excellent, honest handwriting. His likeness
confronts one at every corner here; not only at every street
corner, where he lends his countenance to the frequenters of
drinking-houses, but over every chimney-piece in every
sitting-room. He is like the frogs of the old Egyptian plague,
except that they were in the king's chamber, where he was too good
a Republican ever to have been.
I am amused at your summing up your account of the restless and
perturbed state of poor Ireland by saying, "After all, I believe
America is the land of peace and quiet." It seems to me, who am
here, that everything at this moment threatens change and
disintegration in this country. It is impossible to imagine more
menacing elements of discord and disunion than those which exist in
the opposite and antagonistic interests of its southern and
northern provinces, and the anomalous mixture of aristocratic
feeling and democratic institutions.... God bless you, my dear
H----. I will write to you soon again; if possible, before the
breathing-time this snow-storm is giving us is over.
Ever affectionately yours,
F. A. K.
NEW YORK, April 3, 1833.
MY DEAREST H----,
... I am working very hard, what with rehearsing, acting, studying
new parts, devising new dresses, and attending--which, of course, I
am obliged also to do--to the claims of the society in which we are
living, and my time is so full that I barely contrive to fulfill
all my duties and answer all the claims made upon me.... The spring
is in the sky, and in the air her soft smile and sweet breath are
gladdening the world; but the process of vegetation is much later
in beginning, and much more rapid in its operations when they do
begin here, than with us. Though the last three days have been as
hot as our midsummer weather, the trees are yet leafless and
budless--as dry and unpromising-looking as they were in mid-winter;
and, indeed, the transition from winter to summer is almost
instantaneous here. The spring does not stand coaxing and beckoning
the shy summer to the woods and fields as in our country, but while
winter yet seems lord of the ascendant, and his white robes are
still covering land and water, suddenly the summer looks down upon
the earth from the cloudless sky, and, as by magic, the ice melts,
the snow evaporates, the trees are clothed with green, the woods
are full of flowers, and the whole world breaks out into a
hallelujah of warmth, beauty, and blossoming like mid-July in our
deliberate climate. This again lasts, as it were, but a day; the
sun presently becomes so powerful that the world withers away under
the intense heat, the flowers and shrubs fade, and instead of
screening and refreshing the earth, are themselves scorched and
parched with the glaring fierceness of the sky; the ground cracks,
the watercourses dry up, the rivers shrink in their beds, and every
human creature that can flies from the lowlands and the cities to
go up into the north or to the mountains to find breath, shelter,
and refreshment from the sultry curse. Then comes the autumn, and
that is most glorious; not soft and sad as ours, but to the very
threshold of winter bright, warm, lovely, and gorgeous. Two seasons
remain to our earthly year, remembrances, I think, of Paradise; the
spring in Italy, and autumn in America....
You ask me how I "fit in" to my American audiences? Why, very
kindly indeed. At first they seemed to me rather cold, and I felt
this more with regard to my father than myself, but I think they
have grown to like us; I certainly have grown to like them, and
their applause satisfies me amply.... I heard yesterday of one of
Sir Thomas Lawrence's prints of me which was carried by a peddler
beyond the Alleghany Mountains [the Alleghany Mountains then were
further than the Rocky Mountains are now from the Atlantic
seaboard], and bought at an egregious price by a young engineer,
who with fifteen others went out there upon some railroad
construction business, were bidding for it at auction in that
wilderness, where they themselves were gazed at, as prodigies of
strange civilization, by the half-savage inhabitants of the region.
That touched and pleased me very much.... We are going to act here
till the 12th of this month, when we go to Boston, where we shall
remain for a month; after which we return here for a week, and then
proceed to Philadelphia by the 1st of June, where we intend closing
our professional labors for the summer. Thence we shall probably go
to Niagara and the Canadas. My father has talked of spending a
little quiet time in Rhode Island, where the weather is cool and we
might recruit a little; but there does not seem much certainty
about our plans at present. In the autumn we shall begin our
progress toward New Orleans, where we shall probably winter, and
act our way back here by the spring, when I hope and trust we shall
return to England.... The book of Harriet Martineau's which you
bade me read is delightful. I have not quite finished it yet, for I
have scarcely any time at all for reading; for want of the habit of
thinking and reading on such subjects I find the political economy
a little stiff now and then, though the clearness and simplicity
with which it is treated in this story are admirable. I did not
know that I was supposed to be the original of Letitia.... God
bless you, my dearest H----.
I am ever your most affectionate,
F. A. K.
"For Each and for All" was, I think, the name of the volume taken from
Miss Martineau's admirable series of political economy tales, which my
friend, Miss S----, sent me. The heroine of the story is a young
actress, and Miss Martineau once told me that she had derived some
slight suggestion of the character from me.
NEW YORK, Friday, April 10, 1833.
MY DEAREST H----,