not), seek you a lodging near me, I do not think that you understand
that we live six miles from town, and see as little of Philadelphia as
if that six were sixty. This circumstance, too, made me hesitate as to
whether I ought to remove you from seeing what there is to be seen
there--which is little enough, to be sure,--and withdraw you beyond the
reach of those civilities which you would receive on all hands in the
city. All this, though, is for yourself to determine on; bed, board, and
welcome, we tender you freely; your room, and the inkstand you desire in
it, shall be ready on the day you name; and we will joyfully meet you
when and where you please to be met, and convey you to our abode, where
I can positively promise you absolute quiet, which perhaps in itself may
not be unacceptable, after all your mind and body have gone through
during your stay in this country.
The Reform Convention is now sitting in Philadelphia, and is no mean
curiosity of its kind, I assure you; I should like you to see and hear
it.
Ever yours truly,
F. A. B.
[Mrs. Jameson paid us a short, sad visit, and returned to Europe
with the bitter disappointment of her early life confirmed, to
resume her honorable and laborious career of literary industry. Her
private loss was the public gain. When next we met, it was in
England.]
BRANCHTOWN, Friday, December 29th, 1837.
MY DEAR LADY DACRE,
Doubtless you have long ago accounted your kind letter lost, for I am
sure you would not imagine that I could have received, and yet so long
delayed to answer it: yet so it is; and I hardly know how to account for
it, for the receipt of your letter gratified and touched me very much;
the more so, probably, that my father and mother hardly ever write to
any of us, and so a letter from any one much my senior always seems to
me a condescension; and though I may have appeared so, believe me, I am
not ungrateful for your kindness in making the effort of writing to
me....
I wish it were in my power to give you a decent excuse for not having
written sooner, but the more I reflect, the less I can think what I have
been doing; yet I have been, and am, busy incessantly from morning to
night, about nothing. My whole life passes in trifling activities, and
small recurring avocations, which do not each seem to occupy an hour,
and yet at last weigh down the balance of the twenty-four. I cannot name
the thing I do, and but that our thoughts are to be revealed at the Day
of Judgment, I should on that occasion be in the knife-grinder's case:
"Story! Lord bless you! I have none to tell, sir!" for except ordering
my dinner (and eating it), and riding on horseback every day, I have no
distinct idea of any one thing I accomplish. Mine is not a life of much
excitement, yet the time goes, and all the more rapidly, perhaps, that
it flows with uninterrupted monotony. I neither read, write, nor cast up
accounts; and shall soon have to begin again with the first elements. Do
you not think that an ignorance, unbroken even by the slightest tincture
of these, would be rather a fine thing for one's original powers? If one
did nothing but a "deal of thinking," perhaps one's thinking might be
something worth. Is it not Goethe who says: "Thought expands and weakens
the mind; action contracts and strengthens it"? If this be true, mine
should be an intellect of vast extent, and too shallow to drown a
fly....
Do you know that I consider pain and disease as inventions of our own;
and every death _unnatural_, but that gradual decay of all the
faculties, and cessation of all the functions, which is, as we manage
matters now, the rarest termination of human existence? Therefore,
besides pitying people when they are ill, I blame them too, unless their
suffering be an inheritance, the visitation of God, even unto the third
and fourth generation, for disobedience to His wise and beneficent laws.
One would think, if this belief in hereditary retribution was _real_,
instead of a mere profession, people would be thoughtful, if not for
themselves, at least for those to whom they are to transmit a healthy or
diseased nature; one sees so much sin and so much suffering, the
manifest causes of which lie at our own doors....
Thank you for your account of Lady Beecher; she always made a most
pleasing impression upon me. I think, however you must be mistaken in
saying that she and I excited our audiences _alike_: I should think that
impossible in such very dissimilar actresses as we must have been. The
quantity of effect produced, of course I cannot judge of; but it seems
to me, from what I have seen and known of her off the stage, that the
quality must have been essentially different. This theme, however,
should not be begun in the corner of a letter already too long.
Your letter was brought to me into the Harrisburg Convention, whose
sessions I once or twice attended. That Convention was very funny, and
very strange, and very interesting too; I've a great mind to write Lord
Dacre an account of it, because, you know, you disclaim being a
"political lady," though I presume you admit that he is a "political
lord." And that reminds me that no democrat would accept your
three-legged stool and its inferences [Lady Dacre had compared the
stability of our Government, by the Sovereign, the Lords, and the
Commons, to a solid, three-legged stool, contrasting it
disadvantageously with that of the United States], for nature scorns
plurality of means where one suffices; and the broadest shadowing tree
needs but one stem, if the root be deep and widespread enough. This is
merely by the way, for I am as little "political" as you are.
Give my love to Lord Dacre, if that is respectful enough; and also to
Mrs. Sullivan, whose intercourse, briefly as I was able to enjoy it, was
very delightful to me.
Affectionately yours,
F. A. B.
PHILADELPHIA, Tuesday, January 8th, 1838.
MY DEAREST HARRIET,
I am not prone to that hungry longing for letters which you have so
often expressed to me, yet I was getting heart-sick for some
intelligence from some of my dear ones beyond the seas. My own people
have not written to me since I left England, and it seemed to me an age
since I had heard from you. The day before yesterday, however, brought
me letters from you and Emily, and they were dearly welcome.
A poor woman, who of course had more children than she could well feed
or honestly provide for, said to me the other day, alluding to my
solitary blessing in that kind, that "Providence had spared me
wonderfully." ... How fatal this notion, so prevalent among the poor and
ignorant, and even the less ignorant and better-to-do classes, is!--this
fathering of our progeny upon Providence, which produces so much misery,
and so much crime to boot, in our swarming pauper populations. I have
had it in my mind lately once or twice, to write an "Apology for," or
"Defense of" Providence. I am sick of hearing so much misery, so much
suffering, so much premature death, and so much unnecessary disease,
laid to the charge of our best Friend, our Father who is in heaven.
Moreover, it is the _good_ (not the reasonable, though) who bring these
railing accusations against Providence. Let what calamity soever visit
them, they never bethink themselves of their own instrumentality in the
business; but with a resignation quite more provoking than praiseworthy,
turn up their eyes, and fold their hands, and miscall it a dispensation
of Providence. The only application of that "technical" term that I ever
heard with pleasure, was that of the delightfully _devout_ old Scotch
lady, who said, "Hech, sirs, I'm never weary of reflecting on the
gracious dispensations of Providence towards myself, and its righteous
judgments on my neighbors!" Doubtless, God has ordained that sin and
folly shall produce suffering, that the consequences may warn us from
the causes. Madame de Stael, whose brilliancy, I think, has rather
thrown into the shade her very considerable common sense, has well said,
"Le secret de l'existence, c'est le rapport de nos peines avec nos
fautes." And to acknowledge the just and inevitable results of our own
actions only as the inscrutable caprices of an inscrutable Will, is to
forego one of the most impressive aspects of the great goodness and
wisdom of the Providence by which we are governed. Death, and the decay
which should be its only legitimate preparation, are not contrary to a
right conception of either. But instead of sitting down meekly under
what godly folks call "mysterious dispensations" of the Divinity, I
think, if I took their view of such unaccountable inflictions, I should
call them devilish rather than Divine, and certainly go mad, or _very
bad_. Bearing the righteous result of our own actions, while we suffer,
we can adore the mercy that warns us from evil by its unavoidable
penalties, at the same time remembering that even our sins, duly
acknowledged, and rightly used, may be our gain, through God's merciful
provision, that our bitterest experience may become to us a source of
virtue and a means of progress. The profound sense of the justice of our
Maker renders all things endurable; but the idea of the arbitrary
infliction of misery puts one's whole soul in revolt. Wretchedness
poured upon us, we cannot conceive why or whence, may well be
intolerable; suffering resulting from our own faults may be borne
courageously, and with a certain _comfort_,--forgive the apparent
paradox--the comfort is general, the discomfort individual; and if one
is not too selfish, one may rejoice in a righteous law, even though one
suffers by it. Moreover, if evil have its inevitable results, has not
good its inseparable consequences? If the bad deeds of one involve many
in their retribution, the well-doing of one spreads incalculable good in
all directions. It is because we are by no means wholly selfish, that
the consequences of our actions affect others as well as ourselves; so
that we are warned a thousand ways to avoid evil and seek good, for the
whole world's sake, as well as our own.
What a sermon I have written you! But it was my thought, and therefore,
I take it, as good to you as anything else I could have said.
Of course, children cannot love their parents _understandingly_ until
they become parents themselves; then one thinks back upon all the pain,
care, and anxiety which for the first time one becomes aware has been
expended on one, when one begins in turn to experience them for others.
But the debt is never paid _back_. Our children get what was given to
us, and give to theirs what they got from us. Love descends, and does
not ascend; the self-sacrifice of parents is its own reward; children
can know nothing of it. In the relations of the old with the young,
however, the tenderness and sympathy may well be on the elder side; for
age has known youth, but youth has not known age.
You say you are surprised I did not express more admiration of Harriet
Martineau's book about America. But I _do_ admire it--the spirit of
it--extremely. I admire her extremely; but I think the moral, even more
than the intellectual, woman. I do not mean that she may not be quite as
wise as she is good; but she has devoted her mind to subjects which I
have not, and probably could not, have given mine to, and writes upon
matters of which I am too ignorant to estimate her merit in treating of
them. Some of her political theories appear to me open to objection; for
instance, female suffrage and community of property; but I have never
thought enough upon these questions to judge her mode of advocating
them. The details of her book are sometimes mistaken; but that was to be
expected, especially as she was often subjected to the abominable
impositions of persons who deceived her purposely in the information
which she received from them with the perfect trust of a guileless
nature. I do entire justice to her truth, her benevolence, and her
fearlessness; and these are to me the chief merits of her book....
When Sully, the artist who painted the picture of me now in your
possession, found that it did not give entire satisfaction, he refused
to receive any payment for it, saying that he wished to have it back,
because, as a work of art, it was valuable to him, and that he would
execute another likeness (what a good word _execute_ is, so applied!)
_upon_ me, instead of that you have. We have never been able to alter
this determination of his, and therefore, as he will not take his money,
he should have his picture back. So, Harriet, dear, pack me up, and send
me to Messrs. Harrison and Latham, Liverpool; and as soon as Sully
returns from England, where he now is, you shall have another and, if
possible, a better likeness of me; though I do not feel very sanguine
about it, for Sully's characteristic is delicacy rather than power, and
mine may not be power, but certainly is not delicacy....
Alas! my dear Harriet, the little stone-pine [a seedling planted by my
friend from a pine-cone she brought from Italy], in one of our stormy
nights at sea, was dislodged from its place of security and thrown out
of the pot with all the mould. I watched its decay with extreme regret,
and even fell into some morbid and superstitious fancies about it; but I
could still cry to think that what would have been such a source of
pleasure to dear Emily, and might have prospered so well with her, was
thus unavailingly bestowed upon me. It made quite a sore place in my
heart....
God bless you, dear.
I am ever affectionately yours,
F. A. B.
PHILADELPHIA, February 6th, 1838.
MY DEAREST HARRIET,
The box and two letters arrived safely about a week ago. I read over my
old journal: this returning again into the midst of old events and
feelings, affected my spirits at first a good deal.... Of course this
passed off, and it afforded me much amusement to look over these
archives, ancient as they now almost appear to me.... It surely is
wisdom most difficult of attainment, to form a correct estimate of
things or people while we are under their immediate influence: the just
value of character, the precise importance of events, or the true
estimate of joy and sorrow, while one is subject to their action and
pressure. I suppose, with my quick and excitable feelings, I shall never
attain even so much of this moral power of comparison and just
appreciation as others may; but it cannot be easy to anybody....
Habitual accuracy of thought and moderation of feeling, of course, will
help one to conjecture how our present will look when it has become
past; but the mind that is able to do this must be naturally just, and
habitually trained to justice. With the majority of people, their
present must always preponderate in interest; and it is right that it
should, since our work is in the present, though our hopes may be in the
future, as our memories and examples must be in the past. There must be
some of this intense, vivid feeling about what is immediate, to enable
us to do the work of _now_--to bear the burden, surmount the impediment,
and appreciate the blessing of _now_. St. Paul very wisely bade us
"beget a temperance in all things" (I wish he had told us how to do it).
He also said, "Behold, _now_ is the accepted time, _now_ is the day of
salvation." ...
The medical mode of treatment in this country appears to me frightfully
severe, and I should think, with subjects as delicate as average
American men and women, it might occasionally be fatal. I have a violent
prejudice against bleeding, and would rather take ten doses of physic,
and fast ten days, than lose two ounces of my blood. Of course, in
extreme cases, extreme remedies must be resorted to; but this seems to
be the usual system of treatment here, and I distrust medical systems,
and cannot but think that it might be safer to reduce the quality rather
than the quantity of the vital fluid. Abstinence, and vegetable and
mineral matters of divers kinds, seem to me natural remedies enough; but
the merciless effusion of blood, because it is inflamed, rather reminds
me of my school-day cutting and gashing of my chilblains, in order to
obtain immediate relief from their irritation....
S----'s scarlet fever has been followed by the enlargement of one of the
tonsils, which grew to such a size as to threaten suffocation, and the
physician decided that it must be removed. This was done by means of a
small double-barreled silver tube, through the two pipes of which a wire
is passed, coming out in a loop at the other end of the instrument. This
wire being passed round the tonsil, is tightened, so as to destroy its
vitality in the course of four and twenty hours, during which the tube
remains projecting from the patient's mouth, causing some pain and
extreme inconvenience. The mode usually resorted to with adults (for
this, it seems, is a frequent operation here), is cutting the tonsil off
at once; but as hemorrhage sometimes results from this, which can only
be stopped by cauterizing the throat, that was not to be thought of with
so young a patient.... At the end of the twenty-four hours, the
instrument is removed, the diseased part being effectually killed by the
previous tightening of the wire. It is then left to rot off in the
mouth, which it does in the course of a few days, infecting the breath
most horribly, and, I should think, injuring the health by that
means.... At the same time, I was attacked with a violent sore throat,
perhaps a small beginning of scarlet fever of my own, and which seized,
one after another, upon all our household, and for which I had a hundred
leeches at once applied to my throat, which, without reducing me very
much, enraged me beyond expression. No less than seven of us were ill in
the house. We are now, however, thank God, all well.... I cannot obtain
from our physician any explanation whatever of the cause of this
swelling of the tonsils, so common here; and when, demurring about the
removal of my child's, I inquired into their functions, I received just
as little satisfaction. He told me that they were not ascertained, and
that all that was known was, that removing them did not affect the
breathing, speaking, or swallowing--with which I had to be satisfied.
This uncertainty seems to me a reason against the operation; cutting
away a part of the body whose functions are not ascertained, seems to me
rather venturesome; but of course the baby couldn't be allowed to choke,
and so we submitted to the inevitable. The disease and the remedy are
common here, and may be in England, though I never heard of them before.
Pray, if you know anything about either, write me what, as I cannot rest
satisfied without more information....
God bless you, dear.
Always affectionately yours,
F. A. B.
PHILADELPHIA, Wednesday, February 21st, 1838.
MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON,
Although it was a considerable disappointment to me not to see you
again, after the various rumors and last most authentic announcement of
your coming to Philadelphia, yet, upon the whole, I think it is as well
that we did not meet again, simply to renew that dismalest of
ceremonies, leave-taking. I had not the hope which you expressed, that a
second edition of our parting would have been less painful than the
first.... I think I should have felt less gloomily on that occasion, if
I had not had to leave you in such a dismal den of discomfort. External
things always, even in moments of strong emotion, affect me powerfully;
and that dreariest room, the door of which closed between us, left a
most forlorn impression upon my memory.
I have been of late myself living in an atmosphere darkened by
distress.... Typhus fever has carried off our most intimate friend, Mr.
B----, after but a fortnight's illness; and closed, almost at its
opening, a career which, under all worldly aspects, was one of fair and
goodly promise. He has left a young widow, to whom he had been married
scarcely more than two years, and a boy-baby who loses in him such a
preceptor as few sons in this country are trained under. I have lost in
him one of the few persons who cheer and make endurable my residence
here. Doubtless our loss is reckoned by Him who decrees it, and I pray
that none of us, by impatience of suffering, may forfeit the precious
uses of sorrow. Our friend and neighbor, W----, has just endured a most
dreadful affliction in the death of his youngest child, his only
daughter, one girl among six sons, the very darling of his heart, loved
above all the others, who, while she was still a baby, not a year old,
drew from him that ludicrously pathetic exclamation, "Oh, the man that
marries one's daughter must be hateful!" She died of scarlet fever,
which, after passing so lightly by our doorposts, has entered, like the
destroying angel, our poor friend's dwelling. His brother has been at
the point of death with it too, and I cannot but rejoice in trembling
when I think how happily we escaped from this terrible plague. As you
may suppose, my spirits have been a good deal affected by all the sorrow
around me.
_Mirabile dictu!_ I _have_ read the volume of Scott's Life which you
left here, also the volume of Miss Edgeworth, with which I was
disappointed; also the volume of Milton: not the Treatise on Divorce,
and the Areopagitica, alone; but Letters, Apologies for Smectymnuus, and
Denunciations against Episcopacy, and all. Did you do as much? Moreover,
I am just finishing Carlyle's "French Revolution"; so that you see, as
my friend Mr. F---- says, I am improving; and if I should ever happen to
read another book, I will be sure to mention the circumstance in my
letters.
Very truly yours,
F. A. B.
March 9th, 1838.
DEAREST EMILY,
I am almost ashamed to say I forgot the anniversary your letter recalls
to me; but the artificial or conventional epochs which used to divide my
time, and the particular days against which affection set its special
marks, are, by degrees, losing their peculiar associations for me. Even
the great division of all, death, which makes us miscall a portion of
eternity Time (as if it were different from, or other than, it), seems
less of an interruption to me than it did formerly. Is it not all one,
let us parcel it out as we will into hours, days, months, years, or
lifetimes? The boundary line exists in our narrow calculation alone. The
greatest change of all the changes we know, to mortal senses implying
almost cessation of being, to the believer in the immortality of spirit
suggests not even the idea of change, in what relates to the soul, so
much as uninterrupted progress, and the gradual lengthening of the chain
of moral consequence, inseparable from one's conception of a
responsible, rational agent, whose existence is to be eternal.
No doubt there are properties of our minds which find delight in order,
symmetry, recurring arrangement, and regular division; and the
harmonious course of the material world, alternately visited by the
sweet succession of day and night, the seasons, and all their lovely
variety of gradation, naturally creates the idea of definite periods, to
which we give definite names; but with God and with our souls there is
no time, and this material world in which our material bodies are
existing is but a shadow or reflection cast upon the surface of that
uninterrupted stream on which our true and _very selves_ are borne
onward; the real, the existing is within us.
I think it probable that the general disregard of times and seasons
formerly observed by me, in the community where I now live, may have
tended to lessen my regard for them; but, besides this, in thinking of
anniversaries connected with those I love--periods which used to appeal
to my affectionate remembrance,--I have come in a measure to feel that
to the very young alone, these marks we draw upon our life can appear
other than as the fictitious lines with which science has divided the
spheres of heaven and earth.
PHILADELPHIA, Saturday, March 18th, 1838.
Touching my picture, my dearest Harriet, I am desired to say that your
spirited defense of your right to it (whether you like it or not) is
admirable; that it certainly shall not be taken from you by force, and
that there was no intention whatever of infuriating you by the civil
proposal that was made to relieve you of it by sending you a more
satisfactory one, under the impression that you are not satisfied with
what you have.