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{Transcriber's note:
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listed at the end of this e-text. Spellings and accents in foreign
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RECORDS OF LATER LIFE
BY
FRANCES ANN KEMBLE
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1882.
COPYRIGHT, 1882,
BY
HENRY HOLT & CO.
RECORDS OF LATER LIFE.
PHILADELPHIA, October 26th, 1834.
DEAREST MRS. JAMESON,
However stoutly your incredulity may have held out hitherto against the
various "authentic" reports of my marriage, I beg you will, upon receipt
of this, immediately believe that I was married on the 7th of June last,
and have now been a wife nearly five mortal months. You know that in
leaving the stage I left nothing that I regretted; but the utter
separation from my family consequent upon settling in this country, is a
serious source of pain to me....
With regard to what you say, about the first year of one's marriage not
being as happy as the second, I know not how that may be. I had pictured
to myself no fairyland of enchantments within the mysterious precincts
of matrimony; I expected from it rest, quiet, leisure to study, to
think, and to work, and legitimate channels for the affections of my
nature....
In the closest and dearest friendship, shades of character, and the
precise depth and power of the various qualities of mind and heart,
never approximate to such a degree, as to preclude all possibility of
occasional misunderstandings.
"Not e'en the nearest heart, and most our own,
Knows half the reasons why we smile or sigh."
It is impossible that it should be otherwise: for no two human beings
were ever fashioned absolutely alike, even in their gross outward bodily
form and lineaments, and how should the fine and infinite spirit admit
of such similarity with another? But the broad and firm principles upon
which all honorable and enduring sympathy is founded, the love of truth,
the reverence for right, the abhorrence of all that is base and
unworthy, admit of no difference or misunderstanding; and where these
exist in the relations of two people united for life, it seems to me
that love and happiness, as perfect as this imperfect existence affords,
may be realized....
Of course, kindred, if not absolutely similar, minds, do exist; but they
do not often meet, I think, and hardly ever unite. Indeed, though the
enjoyment of intercourse with those who resemble us may be very great, I
suppose the influence of those who differ from us is more wholesome; for
in mere _unison_ of thought and feeling there could be no exercise for
forbearance, toleration, self-examination by comparison with another
nature, or the sifting of one's own opinions and feelings, and testing
their accuracy and value, by contact and contrast with opposite feelings
and opinions. A fellowship of mere accord, approaching to identity in
the nature of its members, would lose much of the uses of human
intercourse and its worth in the discipline of life, and, moreover,
render the separation of death intolerable. But I am writing you a
disquisition, and no one needs it less....
I did read your praise of me, and thank you for it; it is such praise as
I wish I deserved, and the sense of the affection which dictated it, in
some measure, diminished my painful consciousness of demerit. But I
thank you for so pleasantly making me feel the excellence of moral
worth, and though the picture you held up to me as mine made me blush
for the poor original, yet I may strive to become more like your
likeness of me, and so turn your praise to profit. Those who love me
will read it perhaps with more satisfaction than my conscience allows me
to find in it, and for the pleasure which they must derive from such
commendation of me I thank you with all my heart.
What can I tell you of myself? My life, and all its occupations, are of
a sober neutral tint. I am busy preparing my Journal for the press. I
read but little, and that of old-fashioned kinds. I have never read
much, and am disgracefully ignorant: I am looking forward with delight
to hours of quiet study, and the mental hoards in store for me. I am
busy preparing to leave town; I am at present, and have been ever since
my marriage, staying in the house of my brother-in-law, and feel not a
little anxious to be in a home of my own. But painters, and carpenters,
and upholsterers are dirty divinities of a lower order, not to be moved,
or hastened, by human invocations (or even imprecations), and we must
e'en bide their time.
I please myself much in the fancying of furniture, and fitting up of the
house; and I look forward to a garden, green-house, and dairy, among my
future interests, to each of which I intend to addict myself zealously.
My pets are a horse, a bird, and a black squirrel, and I do not see
exactly what more a reasonable woman could desire. Human companionship,
indeed, at present, I have not much of; but as like will to like, I do
not despair of attracting towards me, by-and-by, some of my own kind,
with whom I may enjoy pleasant intercourse; but you can form no
idea--none--none--of the intellectual dearth and drought in which I am
existing at present.
I care nothing for politics here, ... though I wish this great Republic
well. But what are the rulers and guides of the people doing in England?
I see the abolition of the Peerage has been suggested, but, I presume,
as a bad joke.... If I were a man in England, I should like to devote my
life to the cause of national progress, carried on through party
politics and public legislation; and if I was not a Christian, I think,
every now and then, I should like to shoot Brougham.... You speak of
coming to this country: but I do not think you would like it; though you
are much respected, admired, and loved here.
I have not met Miss Martineau yet, but I am afraid she is not likely to
like me much. I admire her genius greatly, but have an inveterate
tendency to worship at all the crumbling shrines, which she and her
employers seem intent upon pulling down; and I think I should be an
object of much superior contempt to that enlightened and clever female
Radical and Utilitarian.
I was introduced to Mrs. Austin some years ago, and she impressed me
more, in many ways, than any of the remarkable women I have known. Her
husband's constant ill-health kept her in a state of comparative
seclusion, and deprived London society of a person of uncommon original
mental power and acquired knowledge; in most respects I thought her
superior to the most brilliant female members of the society of my day,
of which her daughter, Lucy Gordon, was a distinguished ornament.
Once too, years ago, I passed an evening with Lady Byron, and fell in
love with her for quoting the axiom which she does apply, though she did
not invent it--"To treat men as if they were better than they are, is
the surest way to _make_ them better than they are:"--and whenever I
think of her I remember that.
I congratulate you on your acquaintance with Madame von Goethe: to know
any one who had lived intimately with the greatest genius of this age,
and one of the greatest the world has produced, seems to me an immense
privilege.
Your letter is dated July--how many things are done that you then meant
to do?
I am just now seeing a great deal of Edward Trelawney; he traveled with
us last summer when we went to Niagara, and professing a great regard
for me, told me, upon reading your "notice" of me, that he felt much
inclined to write to you and solicit your acquaintance....
Good-bye, and God bless you; write to me when the spirit prompts you,
and believe me always
Yours very truly,
F. A. B.
[My long experience of life in America presents the ideas and
expectations with which I first entered upon it in an aspect at once
ludicrous and melancholy to me now. With all an Englishwoman's
notions of country interests, duties, and occupations; the village,
the school, the poor, one's relations with the people employed on
one's place, and one's own especial hobbies of garden, dairy, etc.,
had all been contemplated by me from a point of view which, taken
from rural life in my own country, had not the slightest resemblance
to anything in any American existence.
Butler Place--or as I then called it, "The Farm," preferring that
homely, and far more appropriate, though less distinctive
appellation, to the rather pretentious title, which neither the
extent of the property nor size and style of the house
warranted--was not then our own, and we inhabited it by the kind
allowance of an old relation to whom it belonged, in consequence of
my decided preference for a country to a town residence.
It was in no respect superior to a second-rate farm-house in
England, as Mr. Henry Berkeley told a Philadelphia friend of ours,
who considered it a model country mansion and rural residence and
asked him how it compared with the generality of "country places" in
England.
It was amply sufficient, however, for my desires: but not being
mine, all my busy visions of gardening and green-house improvement,
etc., had to be indefinitely postponed. Subsequently, I took great
interest and pleasure in endeavoring to improve and beautify the
ground round the house; I made flower-beds and laid out
gravel-walks, and left an abiding mark of my sojourn there in a
double row of two hundred trees, planted along the side of the
place, bordered by the high-road; many of which, from my and my
assistants' combined ignorance, died, or came to no good growth. But
those that survived our unskillful operations still form a screen of
shade to the grounds, and protect them in some measure from the dust
and glare of the highway.
Cultivating my garden was not possible. My first attempt at
cultivating my neighbors' good-will was a ludicrous and lamentable
failure. I offered to teach the little children of my gardener and
farmer, and as many of the village children as liked to join them,
to read and write; but found my benevolent proposal excited nothing
but a sort of contemptuous amazement. There was the village school,
where they received instruction for which they were obliged and
willing to pay, to which they were accustomed to go, which answered
all their purposes, fulfilled all their desires, and where the small
students made their exits and their entrances without bob or bow,
pulling of forelock, or any other superstitious observance of
civilized courtesy: my gratuitous education was sniffed at alike by
parents and progeny, and of course the whole idea upon which I had
proffered it was mistaken and misplaced, and may have appeared to
them to imply an impertinent undervaluing of a system with which
they were perfectly satisfied; of the conditions of which, however,
I was entirely ignorant then. These people and their children wanted
nothing that I could give them. The "ladies" liked the make of my
gowns, and would have borrowed them for patterns with pleasure, and
this was all they desired or required from me.
On the first 4th of July I spent there, being alone at the place, I
organized (British fashion) a feast and rejoicing, such as I thought
should mark the birthday of American Independence, and the expulsion
of the tyrannical English from the land. I had a table set under the
trees, and a dinner spread for thirty-two guests, to which number
the people on the two farms, with children and servants, amounted.
Beer and wine were liberally provided, and fireworks, for due
honoring of the evening; and though I did not take "the head of the
table" (which would have been a usurpation), or make speeches on the
"expulsion of the British," I did my best to give my visitors "a
good time"; but succeeded only in imposing upon them a dinner and
afternoon of uncomfortable constraint, from which the juniors of the
party alone seemed happily free. Neither the wine nor beer were
touched, and I found they were rather objects of moral reprobation
than of material comfort to my Quaker farmer and his family, who
were all absolute temperance people; he, indeed, was sorely
disinclined to join at all in the "festive occasion," objecting to
me repeatedly that it was a "shame and a pity to waste such a fine
day for work in doing nothing"; and so, with rather a doleful
conviction that my hospitality was as little acceptable to my
neighbors as my teaching, I bade my guests farewell, and never
repeated the experiment of a 4th of July Celebration dinner at
Butler Place.
Of all my blunders, however, that which I made with regard to the
dairy was the most ludicrous. Understanding nothing at all of the
entirely independent position of our "farmer"--to whom, in fact, the
dairy was rented, as well as the meadows that pastured the
cattle--and rather dissatisfied at not being able to obtain a daily
fresh supply of butter for our home consumption, I went down to the
farm-house, and had an interview with the dairymaid; to whom I
explained my desire for a small supply of fresh butter daily for our
breakfast table. But words are faint to express her amazement at the
proposition; the butter was churned regularly in large quantities
twice a week, and the necessary provision for our household being
set aside and charged to us, the remainder was sent off to market
with the rest of the farm produce, and there disposed of to the
public in general. Philadelphia butter had then a high reputation
through all the sea-board States, where it was held superior to that
of all other markets; it was sold in New York and Baltimore, and
sent as far as Boston as a welcome present, and undoubtedly not
churned oftener than twice a week. Fresh butter every morning! who
ever heard the like? Twice-a-week butter not good enough for
anybody! who ever dreamt of such vagaries? The young woman was quiet
and Quakerly sober, in spite of her unbounded astonishment at such a
demand; but when, having exhausted my prettiest vocabulary of
requests and persuasions, and, as I thought, not quite without
effect, I turned to leave her, she followed me to the door with this
parting address: "Well--anyhow--don't thee fill theeself up with the
notion that I'm going to churn butter for thee more than twice a
week." She probably thought me mad, and I was too ignorant to know
that to "bring" a small quantity of butter in the enormous churn she
used was a simple impossibility: nor, I imagine, was she aware that
any machine of lesser dimensions was ever used for the purpose. I
got myself a tiny table-churn, and for a little while made a small
quantity of fresh butter myself for our daily breakfast supply; but
soon weaned of it, and thought it not worth while--nobody cared for
it but myself, and I accepted my provision of market butter twice a
week, with no more ado about the matter, together with the
conclusion that the dairy at Butler Place would decidedly not be one
of its mistress's hobbies.
Of any charitable interest, or humane occupation, to be derived from
the poverty of my village neighbors, I very soon found my
expectation equally vain. Our village had no _poor_--none in the
deplorable English acceptation of that word; none in the too often
degraded and degrading conditions it implies. People poorer than
others, comparatively poor people, it undoubtedly had--hard workers,
toiling for their daily bread; but none who could not get well-paid
work or find sufficient bread; and the abject element of ignorant,
helpless, hopeless pauperism, looking for its existence to charity,
and substituting alms-taking for independent labor, was unknown
there. As for "visiting" among them, as technically understood and
practiced by Englishwomen among their poorer neighbors, such a
civility would have struck mine as simply incomprehensible; and
though their curiosity might perhaps have been gratified by making
acquaintance with my various (to them) strange peculiarities, I
doubt even the amusement they might have derived from them being
accepted as any equivalent for what would have seemed the strangest
of them all--my visit.
A similar blessed exemption from the curse of pauperism existed in
the New England village of Lenox, where I owned a small property,
and passed part of many years. Being asked by my friends there to
give a public reading, it became a question to what purpose the
proceeds of the entertainment could best be applied. I suggested
"the poor of the village," but, "We have no poor," was the reply,
and the sum produced by the reading was added to a fund which
established an excellent public library; for though Lenox had no
paupers, it had numerous intelligent readers among its population.
I have spoken of the semi-disapprobation with which my Quaker farmer
declined the wine and beer offered him at my 4th of July festival.
Some years after, when I found the men employed in mowing a meadow
of mine at Lenox with no refreshment but "water from the well," I
sent in much distress a considerable distance for a barrel of beer,
which seemed to me an indispensable adjunct to such labor under the
fervid heat of that summer sky; and was most seriously expostulated
with by my admirable friend, Mr. Charles Sedgwick, as introducing
among the laborers of Lenox a mischievous need and deleterious
habit, till then utterly unknown there, and setting a pernicious
example to both employers and employed throughout the whole
neighborhood. In short, my poor barrel of beer was an offense to the
manners and morals of the community I lived in, and my meadow was
mowed upon cold "water from the well"; of which indeed the water was
so delicious, that I often longed for it as King David did for that
which, after all, he would not drink, because his mighty men had
risked their lives in procuring it for him.[1]
[1] In writing thus, I do not mean to imply that the abuse of
intoxicating liquors, or the vice of drunkenness were then
unknown in America. The national habits of the present day would
suggest that such a change (albeit in the space of fifty years)
would surpass the rapidity of movement of even that most rapidly
changing nation. But the use of either beer or wine at the
tables of the Philadelphians, when I first lived among them, was
quite exceptional. There was a small knot of old-fashioned
gentlemen (very like old-fashioned Englishmen they were), by
whom good wine was known and appreciated; especially certain
exquisite Madeira, of the Bingham and Butler names, the like of
which it was believed the world could not produce; but this was
Olympian nectar, for the gods alone; and the usual custom of the
best society, at the early three-o'clock dinner, was
water-drinking. Nor had the immense increase of the German
population then flooded Philadelphia with perennial streams from
innumerable "lager beer" cellars and saloons: the universal
rule, at the time when these letters were written, was absolute
temperance; the exception to it, a rare occasional instance of
absolute intemperance.
Very many fewer than fifty years ago, a celebrated professional
English cricketer consulted, in deep dudgeon, a medical
gentleman upon certain internal symptoms, which he attributed
entirely to the "damned beastly cold water" which had been the
sole refreshment in the Philadelphia cricket-field, and which
had certainly heated his temper to a pitch of exasperation which
made it difficult for the medical authority appealed to, to keep
his countenance during the consultation.
I need not say that, under the above state of things, no
provision was made for what I should call domestic or household
drunkenness in American families. Beer, or beer money, was not
found necessary to sustain the strength of footmen driving about
town on a coach-box for an hour or two of an afternoon, or
valets laying out their masters' boots and cravats for dinner,
or ladies'-maids pinning caps on their mistresses' heads, or
even young housemaids condemned to the exhausting labor of
making beds and dusting furniture. The deplorable practice of
_swilling_ adulterated malt liquor two or three times a day,
begun in early boy and girlhood among English servants, had not
in America, as I am convinced it has with us, laid the
foundation for later habits of drinking in a whole class of the
community, among whom a pernicious inherited necessity for the
indulgence is one of its consequences; while another, and more
lamentable one, is the wide-spread immorality, to remedy (and if
possible prevent) which is the object of the institution of the
Girls' Friendly Society, and similar benevolent
associations--none of which I am persuaded will effectually
fulfill their object, until the vicious propensity to drink
ceases to be fostered in the kitchens and servants' halls of our
most respectable people.
To English people, the character and quality of my "mowers" would
seem astonishing enough; at the head of them was the son of a much
respected New England judge, himself the owner of a beautiful farm
adjoining my small estate, which he cultivated with his own hands--a
most amiable, intelligent, and refined man, a gentleman in the
deepest sense of the word, my very kind neighbor and friend, whose
handsome countenance certainly expressed unbounded astonishment at
my malt liquor theory applied to his labor and that of his
assistants.]
PHILADELPHIA, November 27th, 1837.
MY DEAR H----,
If in about a month's time you should grumble and fall out with me for
not writing, you will certainly be in some degree justified; for I think
it must be near upon three weeks since I wrote to you, which is a sin
and a shame. To say that I have not had time to write is nonsense, for
in three weeks there are too many days, hours, and minutes, for me to
fancy that I _really_ had not had sufficient leisure, yet it has almost
seemed as if I had not. I have been constantly driving out to the farm,
to watch the progress of the painting, whitewashing, etc., etc.: in town
I have been engaging servants, ordering china, glass, and furniture,
choosing carpets, curtains, and house linen, and devoutly studying all
the time Dr. Kitchener's "Housekeeper's Manual and Cook's Oracle." You
see, I have been careful and troubled about many things, and through
them all you have been several thorns in both my sides; for I thought of
you perpetually, and knew I ought to write to you, and wanted and wished
to do so--and didn't; for which pray forgive me.
I want to tell you two circumstances about servants, illustrative of the
mind and manners of that class of persons in this country. A young woman
engaged herself to me, as lady's-maid, immediately before my marriage;
she had been a seamstress, and her health had been much injured by
constantly stooping at her sedentary employment. I took her into my
service at a salary of L25 a year. She had little to do; I took care
that every day she should be out walking for at least an hour; she had
two holidays a week, all my discarded wardrobe, and every kindness and
attention of every sort that I could bestow upon her, for she was very
gentle and pleasant to me, and I liked her very much. A short time ago,
she gave me warning; the first reason she assigned for doing so was that
she didn't think she should like living in the country, but finally it
resolved itself into this--that she could not bear _being a servant_.
She told me that she had no intention of seeking any other situation,
for that she knew very well that after mine she could find none that she
would like, but she said the sense of entire independence was necessary
to her happiness, and she could not exist any longer in a state of
"_servitude_." She told me she was going to resume her former life, or
rather, as I should say, her former process of dying, for it was
literally that; she took her wages, and left me. She was very pretty and
refined, and rejoiced in the singular Christian name of Unity.[2]
[2] A lady's-maid was quite an unusual member of a household in
America, at this time; I remember no lady in Philadelphia who then
had such an attendant: it is not impossible that the singularity of
her service, and therefore apparently anomalous character of her
position, may have helped to disgust my maid Unity with her
situation. Probably the influence of Quaker modes of thought, and
feeling, and habits of life (even among such of the community as
were not "friends"--technically so called), had produced the
peculiarities which characterized the Philadelphian society of that
day, and made people among whom I lived strange to me--as I to them.
The other instance of domestic manners in these parts was furnished me
by a woman whom I engaged as cook; terms agreed upon, everything
settled: two days after, she sent me word that she had "_changed her
mind_,"--that's all--isn't it pleasant?...
My dear H----, you half fly into a rage with me all across the Atlantic,
because I tell you that I hope ere long to see you; really that was not
quite the return I expected for what I thought would be agreeable news
to you; however, hear further.... If I am alive next summer, I hope to
spend three months in England: one with my own family and Emily
Fitzhugh: one in Scotland; and one with you, if you and Mrs. Taylor
_please_.... I have been obliged to give up riding, for some time ago my
horse fell with me, and though I was not at all hurt, I was badly
frightened; so I trot about on my feet, and drive to and from town and
the farm in a little four-wheeled machine called here a wagon.
The other day, for the first time, I explored my small future domain,
which is bounded, on the right, by the high-road; on the left, by a not
unromantic little mill-stream, with bits of rock, and cedar-bushes, and
dams, and, I am sorry to say, a very picturesque, half-tumbled-down
factory; on the north, by fields and orchards of our neighbors, and
another road; and on the south, by a pretty, deep, shady lane, running
from the high-road to the above-mentioned factory.... I think the extent
of our _estate_ is about three hundred acres. A small portion of it,
perhaps some seventy acres, lies on the other side of the high-road.
Except a kitchen-garden, there is none that deserves the name: no
flower-beds, no shrubberies, no gravel-walks. A large field, now planted
with maize, or Indian corn, is on one side of an avenue of maple-trees
that leads to the house; on the other is an apple-orchard. There is
nothing that can call itself a lawn, though coarse grass grows all round
the house. There are four pretty pasture meadows, and a very pretty
piece of woodland, which, coasting the stream and mill-dam, will, I
foresee, become a favorite haunt of mine. There is a farm-yard, a
cider-press, a pond, a dairy, and out-houses, and adjuncts innumerable.
I have succeeded, after difficulties and disasters manifold, in engaging
an apparently tolerably decent staff of servants; the house is freshly
painted and clean, the furniture being finished with all expedition, the
carpets ready to lay down; next week I hope to send our household out,
and the week after I sincerely hope we shall transfer ourselves thither,
and I shall be in a home of my own.
Miss Martineau is just now in Philadelphia: I have seen and conversed
with her, and I think, were her stay long enough to admit of so
agreeable a conclusion, we might become good friends. It is not
presumptuous for me to say that, dear H----, because, you know, a very
close degree of friendship may exist where there is great disparity of
intellect. Her deafness is a serious bar to her enjoyment of society,
and some drawback to the pleasure of conversing with her, for, as a man
observed to me last night, "One feels so like a fool, saying, 'How do
you do?' through a speaking-trumpet in the middle of a drawing-room;"
and unshoutable commonplaces form the staple of all drawing-room
conversation. They are giving literary parties to her, and balls to one
of their own townswomen who has just returned from abroad, which makes
Philadelphia rather gayer than usual; and I have had so long a fast from
dissipation that I find myself quite excited at the idea of going to a
dance again.
I toil on, copying my Journal, and one volume of it is already printed;
but now that the object of its publication is gone, I feel rather
disgusted at the idea of publishing it at all. You know what my Journal
always was, and that no word of it was ever written with the fear of the
printer's devil before my eyes, and now that I have become careless as
to its money value, it seems to me a mere mass of trivial egotism....
When I sold it, it was an excellent, good book, for I thought it would
help to make a small independence for my dear Dall; now she is gone, and
it is mere trash, but I have sold it....
My country life will, I hope, be one of study, and I pray and believe,
of quiet happiness. I drove out to the farm yesterday, and walked nearly
four miles, through meadows and lanes and by-roads, and over plowed
fields, and found mill-streams and bits of picturesque rock, and pretty
paths to be explored at further length on horseback hereafter.... I have
one very great pleasure almost in contemplation; I think it probable
that my friend, Miss Sedgwick, will visit Philadelphia this winter. If
she does, I am sure she will remain a short time here, which will be a
great delight to me.... I wish to have no more _acquaintance_--that is a
pure waste of time: I do not wish to know any one whom, if opportunity
served, I should not desire to make my friend, as well as my visitor. I
have begun learning book-keeping by double entry, and find it
unspeakably tiresome; indeed, nothing in it engages my attention but
various hypothetical cases of Loss of Ships and Cargoes (as per invoice,
so and so, and so and so); Bankruptcies, with so much in the pound for
creditors; Dissolutions of partnership, with estimates of joint
property, or calculations of profit and loss; Insurances and
fire-catastrophes; Divisions of capital invested in failing securities,
or unlucky speculations; instead of attending to all which in their
purely business aspect, my imagination flies off to the dramatic,
passionate, human element involved in such accidents, and I think of all
manner of plays and novels, instead of "Cash Accounts," to be extracted
therefrom....
Good-bye, dearest H----.
Ever affectionately yours,
F. A. B.
BRANCHTOWN, May 1st, 1835.
DEAREST EMILY,
Reflecting upon the loss I have sustained in the death of my dear Dall,
you exclaim, "How difficult it is to realize that life has become
eternity, hope is become certainty! How strange, how impossible, it
seems to conceive a state of existence without expectation, and where
all is fulfillment!" I have marked under the word "_impossible_,"
because such a belief is literally impossible to my mind; the sense of
activity, of desire for, and aiming at, and striving after something
better than what I am, is so essential a portion of the idea of
happiness to me that I absolutely can conceive of no happiness but in
the attempt at, and consciousness of, progress. The state where that
hope did not exist, and where the spiritual energies were not presented
with deeper and higher objects of attainment, would be no state of
enjoyment to me. I cannot imagine heaven without inexhaustible means of
increasing knowledge and excellence.... Perhaps in that state, dear
Emily, we shall be able to find out how a mummy of the days of Memnon
should have preserved in its dead grasp a living germ for 3000 years....
[This last sentence referred to a striking fact, which Miss Fitz Hugh's
uncle, Mr. William Hamilton, told us, of a bulb found in the sarcophagus
of a mummy, which was planted, and actually began to germinate and
grow.]
BRANCHTOWN, May 27th, 1835.
MY DEAREST H----,
... It is curious that in a comparatively inactive state of life, the
sense of the infinite business _of living_ has become far more vivid to
me than it ever was before; existence seems so abounding in duties, in
objects of interest and energy, in means of excellence and
pleasure--happiness, I ought rather to say,--the immense and important
happiness of constant endeavor after improvement.... Dear H----, my
letter was interrupted here yesterday by a visitor. I will join my
thread, and go on with a few words which I have this moment read in
Hayward's Appendix to Goethe's "Faust." When Goethe had to bear the
death of his only son, he wrote to Zelter thus: "Here then can _the
mighty conception of duty_ alone hold us erect--I have no other care
than to keep myself in equipoise. The body _must_, the spirit _will_,
and he who sees a necessary path prescribed to his will has no need to
ponder much." The first part of this is noble; but I am not going to do
what I used to quarrel so much with you for doing--fill my letters with
quotations, or even make disquisitions of them; at any rate, till I have
answered your last.
I am extremely vexed at all the trouble you and Emily have taken about
my picture: for the artist himself (Mr. Sully, of Philadelphia) is not
satisfied with it, and I am sure would be rather sorry than glad that it
were exhibited. That artist is a charming person; and I must tell you
how he proceeded about that picture. When your letter came,
acknowledging the receipt of it, he asked how you were satisfied: I told
him the truth, and what you had written on the subject of the likeness.
He did not appear stupidly annoyed, but sorry for your disappointment,
and told me that he had been from the first dissatisfied with it as a
likeness, himself. He pressed upon my acceptance for you a little
melancholy head of me, an admirable and not too much flattered likeness;
but as he had given that to his wife, of whom I am very fond, of course
I would not deprive her of it; and there the matter rested. But when,
some time after, some pictures he had painted for us were paid for, he
steadfastly refused the price agreed upon for yours, because it had not
satisfied him _himself_. He said that had you been even less pleased
with it, he should not _therefore_ have refused the money; but his own
conscience, he added, bore witness to the truth of your objections, and
when that was the case, he invariably acted in the same way, and
declined to receive payment for what he didn't consider worth it. As he
is our friend, we could not press the money upon him; but we have got
him to undertake a portrait of Dr. Mease, and I have added sundry grains
more to my regard for him. As to the likeness, had you seen me about
three months after my marriage, you would have thought better of it.
[The portrait in question, painted for my friend, and now, I believe,
still at Ardgillan Castle, was one of six that my friend, Mr. Sully,
painted of me at various times, the best likeness of them all being one
that he took of me in the part of Beatrice, for which I did not sit.]
You talk of "nailing me down," to send me to the Academy, and the
expression brought a sudden shuddering recollection to my mind of the
dismal night I passed in Boston _packing up our stage clothes_ in dear
Dall's bedroom _while she was lying in her coffin_. I know not why your
words recalled that miserable circumstance to me, and all the mingled
feelings that accompanied such an occupation in such company....
You ask me if I do not love the country as I used to do. Indeed I do;
for, like all best good things, it seems the lovelier for near and
intimate acquaintance. Yet the country here, and this place in
particular, is not to me what it might be, and will be yet. This place
is not ours, and during the life of an old Miss B. will not belong to
us: this, of course, keeps my spirit of improvement in check, and
indeed, even if it were made over to us, with signing and sealing and
all due legal ceremonies, I should still feel some delicacy in making
wholesale alterations in a place which an elderly person, to whom it has
belonged, remembers such as it is for many years.
The absolute absence of all taste in matters of ornamental cultivation
is lamentably evident in the country dwellings of rich and poor alike,
as far as I have yet seen in this neighborhood. No natural beauty seems
to be perceived and taken advantage of, no defect hidden or adorned;
proximity to the road, for obvious purposes of mere convenience, seems
to have been the one idea in the selection of building sites; and
straight, ungraveled paths, straight rows of trees, straight strips of
coarse grass, straight box borders, dividing straight narrow
flower-beds, the prevailing idea of a garden; together with a deplorable
dearth of flowers, shrubberies, ornamental trees, and everything that
really deserves the name.
Good-bye, and God bless you.
Ever, as ever, yours,
F. A. B.
[The country between the Wissihiccon and Pennipack--two small
picturesque streams flowing, the one into the Schuylkill, the other
into the Delaware--is a prosperous farming region, with a pleasingly
varied, undulating surface, the arable land diversified with
stretches of pretty wild woodland, watered by numerous small
water-courses, and divided by the main highroad, once the chief
channel of communication between New York and Philadelphia.
Six miles from the latter city, at a village called Branchtown, and
only a few yards from the road, stood my home; and it would be
difficult for those who do not remember "the old York road," as it
was called, and the country between that and Germantown, in the days
when these letters were written, to imagine the change which nearly
fifty years have produced in the whole region.
No one who now sees the pretty populous villadom which has grown up
in every direction round the home of my early married years--the
neat cottages and cheerful country houses, the trim lawns and bright
flower-gardens, the whole well laid out, tastefully cultivated, and
carefully tended suburban district, with its attractive dwellings,
could easily conceive the sort of abomination of desolation which
its aspect formerly presented to eyes accustomed to the finish and
perfection of rural English landscape.
Between five and six miles of hideous and execrable turnpike road,
without shade, and aridly detestable in the glare, heat, and dust of
summer, and almost dangerously impassable in winter, made driving
into Philadelphia an undertaking that neither love, friendship, nor
pleasure--nothing but inexorable business or duty--reconciled one
to. The cross roads in every direction were a mere succession of
heavy, dusty, sandy pitfalls, or muddy quagmires, where, on foot or
on horseback, rapid progress was equally impossible. The whole
region, from the very outskirts of the city to the beautiful crest
of Chestnut Hill, overlooking its wide expanse of smiling foreground
and purple distant horizon, was then, with its mean-looking
scattered farm-houses and huge ungainly barns (whatever may have
been its agricultural merits), uninteresting and uninviting in all
the human elements of the landscape, dreary in summer and dismal in
winter, and absolutely void of the civilized cheerful charm that now
characterizes it.
_Per contra_, it then was _country_, and now is suburb: there were
woods and lanes where now there are stations and railroads, and the
solitude of rural walks and rides instead of the "continuation of
the city" which has now cut up and laid waste the old Stenton
estate, and threatens the fields of Butler Place and the lovely and
beloved woods of Champlost, and will presently convert that whole
neighborhood into a mere appendage of Philadelphia, wildly driven
over by city rowdies with fast-trotting teams or mad, gigantic
daddy-long-legs-looking sulkies, and perambulated by tramps
pretending poverty and practicing theft.]
BRANCHTOWN, 1835.
DEAR MRS. JAMESON,
I have not written to you since I received a most interesting and
delightful letter of yours from Saxe-Weimar, containing an account of
your stay in Goethe's house. My answering you at all is a movement of
gratitude for your kindness in remembering me in the midst of such
surroundings, and nothing but my faith in your desire to hear something
of me would induce me to send into the world of romantic and poetic
associations you are now inhabiting, any dispatch from this most prosaic
and commonplace world of my adoption.
I think, however, it will please you to hear that I am well and happy,
and that my whole state of life and being has assumed a placid,
tranquil, serene, and even course, which, after the violent excitements
of my last few years, is both agreeable and wholesome. I should think,
ever since my coming out on the stage, I must have lived pretty much at
the rate of three years in every one--I mean in point of physical
exertion and exhaustion. The season of my repose is, however, arrived,
and it seems almost difficult to imagine that, after beginning life in
such a tumult of action and excitement, the remainder of my years is
lying stretched before me, like a level, peaceful landscape, through
which I shall saunter leisurely towards my grave. This is the pleasant
probable future: God only knows what changes and chances may sweep
across the smiling prospect, but at present, according to the
calculations of mere human foresight, none are likely to arise. As I
write these words, I _do_ bethink me of one quarter from which our
present prosperous and peaceful existence might receive a shock--the
South. The family into which I have married are large slaveholders; our
present and future fortune depend greatly upon extensive plantations in
Georgia. But the experience of every day, besides our faith in the great
justice of God, forbids dependence on the duration of the mighty abuse
by which one race of men is held in abject physical and mental slavery
by another. As for me, though the toilsome earning of my daily bread
were to be my lot again to-morrow, I should rejoice with unspeakable
thankfulness that we had not to answer for what I consider so grievous a
sin against humanity.
I believe many years will not pass before this cry ceases to go up from
earth to heaven. The power of opinion is working silently and strongly
in the hearts of men; the majority of people in the North of this
country are opposed to the theory of slavery, though they tolerate its
practice in the South: and though the natural selfishness with which men
cling to their interests is only at present increasing the vigilance of
the planters in guarding their property and securing their prey, it is a
property which is crumbling under their feet, and a prey which is
escaping from their grasp; and perhaps, before many years are gone by,
the black population of the South will be free, and we comparatively
poor people--Amen! with all my heart....
I had hoped to revisit England before the winter, ... but this cannot
be, and I shall certainly not see England this year, if ever again.... I
think women in England are gradually being done justice to, and many
sources of goodness, usefulness, and happiness, that have hitherto been
sealed, are opened to them now, by a truer and more generous public
feeling, and more enlightened views of education.
I saw a good deal of Harriet Martineau, and liked her very much indeed,
in spite of her radicalism. She is gone to the South, where I think she
cannot fail to do some good, if only in giving another impulse to the
stone that already topples on the brink--I mean in that miserable matter
of slavery.
Yours very truly,
F. A. B.
[No more striking instance can be given of the rapidity of movement,
if not of progress, of American public opinion, than the so-called
"Woman's Rights" question. When these letters were written, scarcely
a whisper had made itself heard upon this and its relative subjects:
the "Female Suffrage" was neither demanded nor desired; Margaret
Fuller had not made public her views upon the condition of "Woman in
the Nineteenth Century"; the different legislatures of the different
States had not found it expedient to enact statutes securing to
married women the independent use of their own property, and women's
legal disabilities were, in every respect, much the same in the
United States as in the mother country. Now, however, so great and
rapid has been the change of public opinion in this direction in
America, that in some of the States married women may not only
possess and inherit property over which their husbands have no
control, but their personal earnings have been so secured to them
that neither their husbands nor their husbands' creditors can touch
them; while at the same time, strange to say, their husbands are
still liable for their support, and answerable for any debts they
may contract, and men must pay these independent ladies' milliners'
bills, if all these additional _rights_ have not brought with them
some additional sense of justice, honesty, and old-fashioned right
and wrong.
This amazing consideration for the property claims of women is not,
however, without its possible advantages for the magnanimous sex
bestowing it; and unprincipled speculators, gamblers, in pursuits
calling themselves business, but in reality mere games of chance,
may now secure themselves from the ruin they deserve, and have
incurred, by settling upon their wives large sums of money, or
estates, which, by virtue of the women's independent legal tenure of
property, effectually enable their husbands to baffle the claims of
their creditors. Every use has its abuse. The melancholy process of
divorce, by which an insupportable yoke may be dissolved with the
sanction of the law, is achieved in America with a facility and upon
grounds inadmissible for that purpose in England. Pennsylvania has
long followed the German practice in this particular, allowing
divorce, in cases of non-cohabitation for a space of two years, to
either party claiming it upon those grounds; in some of the Western
States the ease with which divorces are obtained is untrammeled by
any condition but that of a sufficient term of residence, often a
very brief one, within the State jurisdiction.
Women lecture upon all imaginable subjects, and are listened to,
whether treating of the right of their sex to the franchise, or the
more unapproachable theme of its degraded misery in the public
prostitution legally practiced in all the cities of this great New
World, or the frantic vagaries of their theory of so-called Free
Love. They are professors in colleges, practicing physicians; not
yet, I believe, ordained clergywomen (the Quakers admit the female
right to preach without the ceremony of laying on of hands), or
admitted members of the bar; but it is difficult to imagine society
existing at all under more absolute conditions of freedom for its
female members than the women of the United States now enjoy. It is
a pity that the use sometimes made of so many privileges forms a
powerful argument to reasonable people in other countries against
their possession.[3]]
[3] I have learned since writing the above that in some of the
Western States and cities--among others, I believe,
Chicago--women are now practicing lawyers. A "legal lady" made
at one time, I know not how successfully, an attempt to become a
received member of the profession in Washington. In this, as in
all other matters, the several States exercise uncontrolled
jurisdiction within their own borders, and the Western States
are naturally inclined to favor by legislation all attempts of
this description; they are essentially the "New World." In the
Eastern States European traditions still influence opinion, and
women are not yet admitted members of the New York bar.
BRANCHTOWN, 1835.
DEAR MRS. JAMESON,