rest, for enfranchisement from the thraldom of some of our passions and
affections, the goods and bonds that spur us through this life and
fasten us to it. We--perhaps I ought to say I--involuntarily connect the
idea of death with that of peace and repose; delivery, at any rate, from
some subjugation to sin, and from some subjection to "the ills we know"
(though it may be none of this), so that my first feeling about it is
generally that it is a happy rather than a deplorable event for the
principals concerned; but then comes the loss of the living, and I
perceive very well how my heart would bleed if those I love were taken
from me. I see my own desolation and agony in that case, but still feel
as if I could rejoice for them; for, after all, life is a heavy burden
on a weary way, and I never saw the human being whose existence was what
I should call happy. I have seen some whose lives were so _good_ that
they justified their own existence, and one could conceive both why
they lived and that they found it good to live.
Of course, this is instinctive feeling; reflection compels one to
acknowledge the infinite value of existence, for the purposes of
spiritual progress and improvement; the education of the soul; but my
nature, impatient of restraint and pain and trial (and therefore most in
need of the discipline of life), always rejoices at the first aspect of
death, as at that of the Deliverer. Sudden death I certainly pray _for_,
rather than _against_, and I think my father and sister were horrified
and indignant at my saying that I could not conceive a better way of
dying than being smashed, as we were all together, on that railway,
dashed to pieces in a moment, like those eight men who perished there
the other day.... This drew forth a suggestion that, if such were my
sentiments, we had better hire a carriage on the Brighton railroad, and
keep incessantly running up and down the line, by which means there
would be every probability of my dying in the way I thought most
desirable.
I wish you would just step over from Ireland and spend the evening with
me; Adelaide and my father will be at the theatre....
God bless you, dearest Harriet.
Ever yours,
FANNY.
[Some years after writing this letter, having returned to the stage,
I was fulfilling an engagement at the Hull theatre, and as I stood
at the side scene, waiting to go on, two poor young girls were
standing near me, of that miserable class from which the temporarily
employed supernumeraries of country theatres are recruited. One of
them, who looked as if she was dying of consumption, and coughed
incessantly, said to her companion, who remarked upon it, "Yes, I go
on so pretty much all the time, and I have a mind sometimes to kill
myself." "That's running away from school, my child," said I. "Don't
do it, for you can't tell whether you mayn't be put to just as hard
or even a harder life to finish your lesson in another world." "O
Lord, ma'am!" said the girl, "I never thought of that." "But I have
very often," said I to her, as I went on the stage to finish my
mumming.
The strange ignorance of all the conditions of life (except their
own most wretched ones), even those but a few degrees removed from
their own, of these poor creatures, betrayed itself in their
awestruck admiration of my stage ornaments, which they took for real
jewels. "Oh, but," said I, as they gazed at them with wonder, "if
they were real jewels, you know, I should sell them to live, and not
come to the theatre to act for my bread every night." "Oh, wouldn't
you, ma'am?" exclaimed they, amazed that so blissful an occupation
as that of a stage star, radiant with "such diamonds," should not be
all that heart of woman could desire. Poor things--all of us!]
HARLEY STREET, January 1st, 1842.
It is New Year's Day, my dearest Harriet. May God bless you. You will, I
hope, receive to-day my account of my journey home from Bowood. Any
anxiety you might have felt about us was certain to be dispelled by the
note I despatched to you after our arrival, and as to the accident which
took place on the railroad, I have nothing to tell you about it more
than you would see in the newspapers, and it did not occur to me to
mention it.
I read with attention the newspaper article you sent me about the corn
laws and the currency, and, though I did not quite understand all the
details given on the latter subject, yet the main question is one that I
have been so familiar with lately as to have comprehended, I believe,
the general sense of it. But I read it at Bowood, and though, as I
assure you, with the greatest attention, I do not remember a single word
of it now (the invariable practice of my memory with any subject that is
entirely uncongenial to me).
The mischievous influence of the undue extension of the credit system is
matter of daily discussion and daily illustration, I am sorry to say, in
the United States, where, in spite of their easy institutions, boundless
space, and inexhaustible real sources of credit (the wealth of the soil
and its agricultural and universal products), and all the commercial
advantages which their comparatively untrammelled conditions afford
them, they are all but bankrupt now; distressed at home and disgraced
abroad by the excess to which this pernicious system of trading upon
fictitious capital has been carried by eager, grasping,
hastening-to-be-rich people. Of course, the same causes must tend to
produce the same effects everywhere, though different circumstances may
partially modify the results; and in proportion as this vicious system
has prevailed with us in England, its consequences must, at some time or
other, culminate in sudden severe pressure upon the trading and
manufacturing interests, and I suppose, of course, upon all classes of
the industrial population of the country. The difficult details of
finance, and their practical application to the currency question, have
not often been understood, and therefore not often relished by me
whenever I have attempted to master them; but I have heard them
frequently and vehemently discussed by the advocates of both paper money
and coin currency; I have read all the manifestoes upon the subject put
forth by Mr. Nicholas Biddle, late President of the United States Bank,
who is supposed to have understood finance well, though the unfortunate
funds committed to his charge do not appear to have been the safer for
that circumstance.... The failure of the United States Bank has been
sometimes considered as a political catastrophe, the result of party
animosity and personal enmity towards Mr. Biddle on the part of General
Jackson, who, being then President of the United States, gave a fatal
blow to the credit of the bank (which, though calling itself the United
States Bank, was not a Government institution) by removing from its
custody the Government deposits. My impression upon the subject (simple,
as I have no doubt you would expect to find the result of any mental
process of mine) is that paper money is a financial expedient, the
substitution of an appearance or makeshift for a real thing, and likely,
like all other such substitutes of whatever kind, to become a source of
shame, trouble, and ruin whenever, after the appointed time of
circulation, which every expedient has, there should be a demand for the
real article; more especially if the shadow has imposed upon the world
by being twice as big as the substance.
The papers and pamphlets you have sent me, dear Harriet, seem to me only
to prove that excessive and unjust taxation, partial and unjust corn
laws, and unwise financial ones (together with other causes, which seem
to me ominous of evil results), have produced the distress,
embarrassment, and discontent existing in this, the richest and most
enlightened country in the world....
I have been interrupted half a dozen times while writing this letter,
once by a long visit from Mrs. Jameson.... Lady M---- called too, with
a pretty little widow, a Mrs. M----, a great friend of Adelaide's.
Dearest Harriet, here my letter was broken off yesterday morning,
Friday; it is now Saturday evening, and this morning arrived two long
ones from America. Now, if I should get one to-morrow or the next day,
from you, will it be very unjust to put yours under these, and answer
them before I write any more to you? I think not, but I must make an end
of this....
Good-bye, and God bless you.
I am ever yours,
FANNY.
HARLEY STREET, Tuesday, January 4th, 1842.
DEAREST HARRIET,
... You say you wonder that those who love and worship Christ should be
wanting in patience and the spirit of endurance. Do you not wonder, too,
that they should fail in self-denial, charity, mercy, all the virtues of
their Divine Model? But this is a terrible chapter, and sad subject of
speculation for all of us, and I can't bear to speak upon it.
In talking once with my sister of self-condemnation, and our
condemnation of others, I used an expression which she took up as
eminently ridiculous; but I think she did not quite understand me. I
said that there was a feeling of _modesty_ which prevented one's
uttering the extent of one's own self-accusations, at which she laughed
very much, and said she thought that modesty ought to interfere in
behalf of others as well as one's self; but there are some reasons why
it does not. Severely as one may judge and blame others, it is always,
of course, with the perception that one cannot know the _whole_ of the
case for or against them; nevertheless, even with this conviction, there
are certain words and deeds of others which one condemns unhesitatingly.
Such sentences as these I pronounce often and without scruple (harshly,
perhaps, and therein committing most mischievous, foul sin in chiding
sin), but one does not utter that which one feels more rarely (however
strongly, in particular instances), one's impression of the evil
tendency of a whole character, the weakness or wickedness, the disease
which pervades the whole moral constitution, and which seems to denote
certain inevitable results; on these one hesitates to pronounce
opinion, not so much, I think, because of the uncertainty one feels, as
in the case of a special motive, or temptation to any special act, and
the liability to mistake, both in the quality of motive and quality of
temptation; as because so much deeper a condemnation is involved in such
judgments. It is the difference between a physician's opinion on an
acute attack of illness or a radical and fatal constitutional tendency.
This sort of condemnation requires such intimate knowledge that one can
hardly pass it upon any but one's self. One cannot tear off all
coverings from the hearts and minds of others, whereas one could strip
one's own moral deformities naked, and that species of self-accusation
does seem to me a kind of immodesty. One naturally shrinks, too, from
speaking of deep and awful things, and then there is the all but
insuperable difficulty of putting one's most intimate convictions, _the
realities of one's soul_, into words at all....
Oh, my dear Harriet, I have told you nothing of John and Natalia's
mesmeric practices [my brother and his German wife]. If you could have
seen them, you would have split your lean sides more than you did at my
aspect and demeanor while listening to A---- reading her favorite French
novels to me.
By-the-by, do you know that that very book, "Mathilde," which I could
not listen to for a quarter of an hour with common patience, is cried up
everywhere and by everybody as a most extraordinary production? At
Bowood everybody was raving about it; Mrs. Jameson tells me that Carlyle
excepted it from a general anathema on French novels. Sometimes I think
I will try again to get through it, and then I think, as little F----
says when she is requested to do something that she ought, "_Eelly_,
now, me _tan not_."
I am finishing George Sand's "Lettres d'un Voyageur," because in an evil
hour I began them. Her style is really admirable, and in this book one
escapes the moral (or immoral) complications of her stories.
God bless you, dear Harriet. Good-bye. Time and opportunity serving, you
surely see that I am not only faithful, but prompt, in the discharge of
my debts.
Ever yours,
FANNY.
I forgot to tell you that my poor Margery [my children's former nurse]
has at length applied to the tribunals of Pennsylvania for a separation
from her cruel and worthless husband. Poor thing! I hope she will obtain
it.
[The tribunals of Pennsylvania followed, in the law of divorce, the
German and not the English precedent and process. Divorce was
granted by them, as well as mere separation, on plea of
incompatibility of temper, and also for cause of non-cohabitation
during a space of two years. In regard to the laws of marriage and
divorce, as well as most other matters, each state in the Union had
its own peculiar code, agreeing or differing from the rest. The
Massachusetts laws of marriage and divorce were, I believe, the same
as the English. In Pennsylvania a much greater facility for
obtaining divorce--adopted, I suppose, from German modes of thought
and feeling, and perhaps German legislature--prevailed, while in
some of the western states, more exclusively occupied by a German
population, the facility with which the bond of marriage was
dissolved was greater than in any civilized Christian community in
the world, I think.]
HARLEY STREET, January 16th, 1842.
At the end of a long, kind letter I received from you this morning,
dearest Harriet, there is a most sudden and incomprehensible sentence,
an incoherent, combined malediction upon yourself and your dog Bevis,
which I found it difficult to connect in any way with the matter which
preceded it, which was very good advice to me, abruptly terminating in a
declaration that you were a fool and your dog Bevis a brute, and leaving
me to conclude either that he had overturned your inkstand or that you
had gone mad, though indeed your two propositions are sane enough: for
the first I would contradict if I could; the second I could not if I
would; and so, as the Italians say, "Sono rimasta." ...
With regard to the likeness between my sister and myself, it is as great
as our unlikeness.... Our mode of perceiving and being affected by
things and people is often identical, and our impressions frequently so
similar and so simultaneous that we both often utter precisely the same
words upon a subject, so that it might seem as if one of us might save
the other the trouble of speaking.... She is a thousand times quicker,
keener, finer, shrewder, and sweeter than I am, and all my mental
processes, compared with hers, are slow, coarse, and clumsy.
Here my letter broke off yesterday morning, and yesterday evening I went
to see the new opera, so that I shall have realities instead of
speculations to treat you to. [The opera was an English version of the
"Elena da Feltre," by Mercadante, whose dramatic compositions, "La
Vestale," "Le Due Illustre Rivale," the "Elena da Feltre," and others,
obtained a very considerable temporary popularity in Italy, but were, I
think, little known elsewhere. They were not first-rate musical
productions, but had a good deal of agreeable, though not very original,
melody, and were favorable to a declamatory, passionate style of
singing, having a great deal of dramatic power and pathos. My sister was
fond of them, and gave them with great effect, and the celebrated _prima
donna_, Madame Ungher, achieved great popularity and excited immense
enthusiasm in some of them.]
The opera was entirely successful, owing certainly to Adelaide, for the
music is not agreeable, or of an order to become popular; the story is
rather involved, which, however, as people have books to help them to
it, does not so much matter. She was beautifully and becomingly dressed
in mediaeval Italian costume, and looked very handsome. Her voice was, as
usual, very much affected by her nervousness, and comparatively feeble;
this, however, signifies little, as it is only on the first night that
it occurs, and every succeeding representation, her anxiety being less,
she recovers more power of voice.
She acted extremely well, so as again to excite in me the strongest
desire to see her in an _acting_ part; a desire which is only qualified
by the consideration that she makes more money at present as a singer
than she probably could as an actress. At the end of the piece she
_died_, with one of those expressions of feeling the effect of which
may, without exaggeration, be called electrifying: it made me spring on
my seat, and the whole audience responded with that voice of human
sympathy that any true representation of feeling elicits
instantaneously. Having renounced her lover, and married a man she
hated, to save her father's life, after seeing her lover go to church
and be married to another woman, her father being nevertheless executed
(an old story, no doubt, but that's no matter), she loses her senses
and stabs herself, and as she falls into the arms of her husband (the
man she hated) she sees her lover, who just arrives at this moment, and
the dying spring which she made, with her arms stretched towards him,
falling, before she reached him, dead on the ground, was one of those
terrible and touching things which the stage only can reproduce from
nature--I mean, out of reality itself--a thing that of course neither
painting nor sculpture could attempt, and that would have been
comparatively cold and ineffective even in poetry, but which "in action"
was indescribably pathetic. It had been, like many happy dramatic
effects, a sudden thought with her, for it had only occurred to her
yesterday morning; but the grace of the action, its beauty, truth, and
expressiveness, are not to be conveyed by words. You will see it; not
that, indeed, it may ever again be so very happy a thing in its
effect....
God bless you, dear Harriet. Good-bye.
Ever yours,
FANNY.
HARLEY STREET, January 31st, 1842.
MY DEAREST HARRIET,
Why do you ask me if I would not write to you unless you wrote to me? Do
you not know perfectly well that I _would not_--unless, indeed, I
thought you were ill or something was the matter with you; and then I
would write just enough to find out if such was the case. Why should I
write to you, when I hate writing, and yet nevertheless _always_ answer
letters? Surely the spontaneous, or promiscuous (which did you call it,
you Irishwoman?) epistle should come from the person who does not
profess to labor under an _inkophobia_. And what can you righteously
complain of, when I not only never fail scrupulously to answer your
letters, but, be they long or short, invariably answer them
_abundantly_, having as great an objection to writing a short letter
almost as I have to writing any? Basta! never doubt any more about the
matter, my dear Harriet. I never (I think) shall write to you, but I
also (I think) shall never fail to answer you. If you are not satisfied
with that, I can't help it.... We have a lull in our engagements just
now--comparative quiet. We gave a family dinner on Friday.... My father,
I am sorry to say, gets no rent from the theatre. The nights on which
my sister does not sing the house is literally empty. Alas! it is the
old story over again: that whole ruinous concern is propped only by her.
That property is like some fate to which our whole family are subject,
by which we are every one of us destined to be borne down by turn, after
vainly dedicating ourselves to its rescue.
On Saturday I spent the evening at Lady Charlotte Lindsay's, who has a
very kind regard for you, and spoke of your brother Barry with great
affection. To-morrow, after going to the opera, I shall go to Miss
Berry's. My sister and father go to Apsley House, where the Duke of
Wellington gives a grand entertainment to the King of Prussia. We were
asked too, but, though rather tempted by the fine show, it was finally
concluded that we should not go, so we shall only have it at second
hand. This is all my news for the present, dear Harriet. God bless you.
Good-bye. If you ever wish to hear from me, drop me a line to that
effect.
Ever yours (and the same),
FANNY.
[Circumstances occurred which induced us to change our plans, and I
did go to the _fete_ at Apsley House, which was very beautiful and
magnificent. A pleasant incident of the evening was a special
introduction to and a few minutes' conversation with our illustrious
host; and the pleasantest of all, I am almost ashamed to say, was
the memorable appearance of Lady Douro and Mademoiselle d'Este, who,
coming into the room together, produced a most striking effect by
their great beauty and their exquisite dress. They both wore
magnificent dresses of white lace over white satin, ornamented with
large cactus flowers, those of the blonde marchioness being of the
sea-shell rose color, and the dark Mademoiselle d'Este's of the deep
scarlet; and in the bottom of each of these large, vivid blossoms
lay, like a great drop of dew, a single splendid diamond. The women
were noble samples of fair and dark beauty, and their whole
appearance, coming in together, attired with such elegant and
becoming magnificent simplicity, produced an effect of surprise and
admiration on the whole brilliant assembly.]
HARLEY STREET, February 4th, 1842.
MY DEAREST HARRIET,
At twelve o'clock to-day I rang for candles, in order that the fog might
not prevent my answering your letter. I was obliged to go out, however,
and the skies in the interim have cleared; and where do you think I have
been? Why, like a fool as I am, to _see a sight_, and I am well paid by
feeling so tired, and having such a headache, and having had such a
fright, that--it serves me right.
Our dear friend Harness has, as perhaps you know, an office which Lord
Lansdowne gave him, by virtue of which he occupies a very pleasant
apartment in the Council Office Building, the windows of which look out
on Whitehall. Here he begged me to come and bring the children, that we
might see the Queen, and the King of Prussia, and all the great folks,
go to the opening of Parliament, and in an evil hour I consented,
Harness informing me at what hour to come, and what way to take to avoid
the crowd. But the carriage was ordered half an hour later than we ought
to have started, and the coachman was ordered to take us down Whitehall
(though Harness had warned me that we could not come that way, and that
we must leave our carriage at the Carlton Terrace steps, and walk across
the park to the little passage which leads straight into Downing
Street). Down Whitehall, however, we attempted to go, and were of course
turned back by the police. We then retraced our route to the Carlton
steps, and here, with the two children, Anne, and the footman, I made my
way through the crowd; but oh, what a way! and what a crowd! When we got
down into the park, the only clear space was the narrow line left open
for the carriages, and some of them were passing at a rapid trot, just
as we found our way into their road, and the dense wall of human beings
we had squeezed through closed behind us. I assure you, Harriet, the
children were not half a foot from one of those huge carriage-horses,
nor was there any means of retreat; the living mass behind us was as
compact as brick and mortar. We took a favorable moment, and, rushing
across the road into the protecting arms of some blessed, benevolent
policemen, who were keeping the line, were seized, and dragged, and
pushed, and pulled, and finally made way for, through the crowd on the
other side, and then ran, without stopping, till we reached our
destination; but the peril of the children, and the exertion of
extricating them and ourselves from such a situation, had been such
that, on reaching Harness's rooms, I shook so that I could hardly stand,
and the imperturbable Anne actually burst into tears. So much for the
delights of sight-seeing.
As for me, you know I would not go to the end of the street to see the
finest thing in the universe; but, in the first place, I had promised,
and in the next, I was so miserably out of spirits that, though I could
not bear to go out, I could not bear to stay at home; but certainly, my
detestation of running after a sight was never more heartily confirmed.