Records of Later Life Part 5

I heard of you from my friend, Miss Sedgwick, whose sympathies were as much excited by your personal acquaintance as her admiration had been by your books. I heard of you, too, from Theodore Fay, whom I saw a short time since, and who gave me a letter of yours to read, which you wrote him from New York. [Mr. Theodore Fay was a graceful writer of prose and poetry, and achieved some literary reputation in his own country; he was for some time United States Minister at Berlin.]

Lady Hatherton, whom I met the other evening at old Lady Cork's, was speaking of you with much affection; and all your friends regret your absence from England; and none more sincerely than I, who shall, I fear, have the ill fortune to miss you on both sides of the Atlantic.

I find London more beautiful, more rich and royal, than ever; the latter epithet, by-the-bye, applies to external things alone, for I do not think the spirit of the people as royal, _i.e._, loyal, as I used to fancy it was.

Liberalism appears to me to have gained a much stronger and wider influence than it had before I went away; liberal opinions have certainly spread, and I suppose will spread indefinitely. Toryism, on the other hand, seems as steadfast in its old strongholds as ever; the Tories, I see, are quite as wedded as formerly to their political faith, but at the same time more afraid of all that is not themselves, more on the defensive, more socially exclusive; I think they mix less with "the other side" than formerly, and are less tolerant of difference of opinion.

I find a whole race of _prima donnas_ swept away; Pasta gone and Malibran dead, and their successor, Grisi, does not charm and enchant me as they did, especially when I hear her compared to the former n.o.ble singer and actress. When I look at her, beautiful as she is, and think of Pasta, and hear her extolled far above that great queen of song, by the public who cannot yet have forgotten the latter, I am more than ever impressed with the worthlessness of popularity and public applause, and the mistake of those who would so much as stretch out their little finger to obtain it. I came to England just in time to see my father leave the stage, and close his laborious professional career. After a long life of public exhibition, and the glare of excitement which inevitably attends upon it, to withdraw into the sober twilight of private life is a great trial, and I fear he finds it so. His health is not as good as it was while he still exercised his profession, and I think he misses the stimulus of the daily occupation and nightly applause.

What a dangerous pursuit that is which weans one from all other resources and interests, and leaves one dependent upon public exhibition for the necessary stimulus of one's existence! This aspect of it alone would make me deprecate that profession for any one I loved; it interferes with every other study, and breaks the thread of every other occupation, and produces mental habits which, even if distasteful at first, gradually become paramount to all others, and, in due time, inveterate; and besides perpetually stimulating one's personal vanity and desire for admiration and applause, directs whatever ambition one has to the least exalted of aims, the production of evanescent effects and transitory emotions.

I am thankful that I was removed from the stage before its excitement became necessary to me. That reminds me that, within the last two days, Pasta has returned to England: they say she is to sing at Drury Lane, Grisi having possession of the Opera House. Now, will it not be a pity that she should come in the decline of her fine powers, and subject herself to comparisons with this young woman, whose voice and beauty and popularity are all in their full flower? If I knew Pasta, I think I would go on my knees to beg her not to do it.

I find my sister's voice and singing very much improved, and exceedingly charming. She speaks always with warm regard of you, and remembers gratefully your kindness to her.

My dear Mrs. Jameson, it is a great disappointment to me that I cannot welcome you to my American home, and be to you that pleasant thing, an old friend in a foreign land. It appears to me that we shall have the singular ill-luck of pa.s.sing each other on the sea; at least, if it is true that you return in the autumn.

Much as I had desired to see my own country again, my visit to it has had one effect which I certainly had not antic.i.p.ated, and for which I am grateful: it has tended to reconcile me to my present situation in life, comparatively remote as it is from the best refinements of civilization and all the enjoyments of society.... The turmoil and dissipation of a London life, amusing as they are for a time, soon pall upon one, and I already feel, in my diminished relish for them, that I am growing old.

To live in the country in England!--that indeed would be happiness and pleasure; but we shall never desert America and the duties that belong to us there, and I should be the last person to desire that we should do so; and so I think henceforth England and I are "Paradises Lost" to each other,--and this is a very strange life; with which "wise saw," but not "modern instance," I will conclude, begging you to believe me,

Ever yours most truly, F. A. B.

[Madame Pasta did return then to the stage, and her brilliant young rival, Grisi, was to her what the Giessbach would be to a great wave of the Atlantic. But, alas! she returned once more after that to the scene of her former triumphs in London; the power, majesty, and grace of her face, figure, and deportment all gone, her voice painfully impaired and untrue, her great art unable to remedy, in any degree, the failure of her natural powers.

She came as an agent and emissary of the political party of Italian liberty, to help the cause of their _Italia Unita_, and our people received her with affectionate respect, for the sake of what she had been; but she accepted their applause with melancholy gestures of disclaimer, and sorrowful head-shaking over her own decline. Those who had never heard or seen her before were inclined to laugh; those who had, _did_ cry.

The latent expression of a face is a curious study for the physiognomist, and is sometimes strikingly at variance with that which is habitual, as well as with the general character of the features. That fine and accurate observer of the symptoms of humanity, George Eliot, gives her silly, commonplace, little second-heroine in "Adam Bede," Hester, a pathetic and sentimental expression, to which nothing in her mind or character corresponds, and which must have been an inheritance from some ancestress in whom such an expression had originated with a meaning.

Madame Pasta was not handsome, people of uneducated and unrefined taste might have called her plain; but she had that indescribable quality which painters value almost above all others--style, and a power and sweetness of expression, and a grandeur and grace of demeanor, that I have never seen surpa.s.sed. She was not handsome, certainly; but she was _beautiful_, and never, by any chance, looked common or vulgar.

Madame Grisi was almost perfectly handsome; the symmetry of her head and bust, and the outline of her features resembled the ideal models of cla.s.sical art--it was the form and face of a Grecian G.o.ddess; and her rare natural gifts of musical utterance and personal loveliness won for her, very justly, the great admiration she excited, and the popularity she so long enjoyed. In a woman of far other and higher endowments, that wonderful actress, Rachel, whose face and figure, under the transforming influence of her consummate dramatic art, were the perfect interpreters of her perfect tragic conceptions, an ign.o.ble, low-lived expression occasionally startled and dismayed one, on a countenance as much more n.o.ble and intellectual, as it was less beautiful than Grisi's,--the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual disgrace, which made it possible for one of her literary countrymen and warmest admirers to say that she was adorable, because she was so "_deliceus.e.m.e.nt canaille_." Emilie, Camille, Esther, Pauline, such a "delightful blackguard"!

Grazia, the Juno of the Roman sculptors of her day, their model of severe cla.s.sical beauty, had a perfectly stolid absence of all expression; she was like one of the oxen of her own Campagna, a splendid, serious-looking animal. No animal is ever vulgar, except some dogs, who live too much with men for the interest of their dignity, and catch the infection of _the_ human vice.

With us coa.r.s.e-featured English, and our heavy-faced Teutonic kinsfolk, a thick outline and snub features are generally supposed to be the vulgar attributes of our lower cla.s.ses; but the predominance of spirit over matter vindicates itself strikingly across the Atlantic, where, in the lowest strata of society, the native American rowdy, with a face as pure in outline as an ancient Greek coin, and hands and feet as fine as those of a Norman n.o.ble, strikes one dumb with the aspect of a countenance whose vile, ign.o.ble hardness can triumph over such refinement of line and delicacy of proportion. A human soul has a wonderful supremacy over the matter which it _informs_. The American is a whole nation with well-made, regular noses; from which circ.u.mstance (and a few others), I believe in their future superiority over all other nations. But the _lowness_ their faces are capable of "flogs Europe."]

BANNISTERS, August 1st, 1837.

MY DEAR MRS. JAMESON,

After a riotous London season, my family has broken itself into small pieces and dispersed. My mother is at her cottage in Surrey, where she intends pa.s.sing the rest of the summer; my father and sister are gone to Carlsbad--is not that spirited?--though indeed they journey in search of health, rather than pleasure. My father has been far from well for some time past, and has at length been literally packed off by Dr. Granville, to try the Bohemian waters.

I am at present staying with my friends, the Fitz Hughs, at Bannisters.

I leave this place on Friday for Liverpool, where I shall await the arrival of the American packet; after that, we have several visits to pay, and I hope, when we have achieved them, to join my father and Adelaide at Carlsbad. I am pretty sure that we shall winter in America; for, indeed, I was to have written to you, to beg you to spend that season with us in Philadelphia, but as I had already received your intimation of your intended return to England in the autumn, I knew that such an offer would not suit your plans.

How glad you will be to see England again! and how glad your friends will be to see you again! Miss Martineau, who was speaking of you with great kindness the other day, added that your publishers would rejoice to see you too.

I do not know whether her book on America has yet reached you. It has been universally read, and though by no means agreeable to the opinions of the majority, I think its whole tone has impressed everybody with respect for her moral character, her integrity, her benevolence, and her courage.

She tells me she is going to publish another work upon America, containing more of personal narrative and local description; after which, I believe, she thinks of writing a novel. I shall be quite curious to see how she succeeds in the latter undertaking. The stories and descriptions of her political tales were charming; but whether she can carry herself through a work of imagination of any length with the same success, I do not feel sure.

I saw the Montagues, and Procters, and Chorley (who is, I believe, a friend of yours), pretty often while I was in London, and they were my chief informers as to your state of being, doing, and suffering. I am sorry that the latter has formed so large a portion of your experience in that strange and desolate land of your present sojourn. You do not say in your last letter whether you intend visiting the United States before your return, or shall merely pa.s.s through so much of them as will bring you to the port from which you sail. As I am not there to see you, I should hardly regret your not traveling through them; for, in spite of your popularity, which is very great in all parts of the country that I have visited, I do not think American tastes, manners, and modes of being would be, upon the whole, congenial to you.

I believe I told you how I had met your friend, Lady Hatherton, at a party at old Lady Cork's, and how kindly she inquired after you....

We are here in the midst of the elections, with which the whole country is in an uproar just now. My friends are immovable Tories, and I had the satisfaction of being personally hissed (which I never was before), in honor of their principles, as I drove through the town of Southampton to-day in their carriage.

The death of poor old King William, and the accession of the little lady, his niece, must be stale news, even with you, now. She was the last excitement of the public before the "dissolution of London," and her position is certainly a most interesting one. Poor young creature!

at eighteen to bear such a burden of responsibility! I should think the mere state and grandeur, and slow-paced solemnity of her degree, enough to strike a girl of that age into a melancholy, without all the other graver considerations and causes for care and anxiety which belong to it. I dare say, whatever she may think now, before many years are over she would be heartily glad to have a small pension of 30,000 a year, and leave to "go and play," like common folk of fortune. But, to be sure, if "_n.o.blesse oblige_," royalty must do so still more, or, at any rate, on a wider scale; and so I take up my burden again--poor young Queen of England!...

Emily sends you her best remembrances.... We shall certainly remain in England till October, so that I feel sure that I shall have the pleasure of seeing you here before I return to my _other_ country--for I reckon that I have two; though, as the old woman said, and you know, "between two stools," etc.

I should have thought you and Sir Francis Head would have become infinite cronies. I hear he is so very clever; and as you tell me he says so many fine things of me, I believe it.

Ever yours most truly, F. A. B.

[The admirable novel of "Deerbrook" sufficiently answered all who had ever doubted Miss Martineau's capacity for that order of composition; in spite of Sydney Smith's determination that no village "poticary," as he called it, might, could, would, or ever should, be a hero of romance, and the incessant ridicule with which he a.s.sailed the choice of such a one. If, he contended, he takes his mistress's hand with the utmost fervor of a lover, he will, by the mere force of habit, end by feeling her pulse; if, under strong emotion, she faints away, he will have no salts but Epsom about him, wherewith to restore her suspended vitality; he will put cream of tartar in her tea, and (a) flower of brimstone in her bosom. There was no end to the fun he made of "the medicinal lover," as he called him. Nevertheless, the public accepted the Deerbrook M. D., and all the paraphernalia of gallipots, pill-boxes, vials, salves, ointments, with which the facetious divine always represented him as surrounded; and vindicated, by its approval, the auth.o.r.ess's choice of a hero.

I do not know whether Mr. Gibson is not, to me, decidedly the hero of Mrs. Gaskell's "Wives and Daughters." I like him infinitely better than all the younger men of the story; and I think the preponderating interest with which one closes George Eliot's wonderful "Middlemarch" is decidedly in behalf of Lydgate, the country surgeon and hospital doctor. To be sure, we have come a long way since the Liberalism of Sydney Smith and 1837.

I was indebted to my kind friend, Lord Lansdowne, for the memorable pleasure of being present at the first meeting between Queen Victoria and her Houses of Parliament. The occasion, which is always one of interest when a new sovereign performs the solemnity, was rendered peculiarly so by the age and s.e.x of the sovereign. Every person who, by right or favor, could be present, was there; and no one of that great a.s.sembly will ever forget the impression made upon them. Lady Lansdowne, who was Mistress of the Robes, was herself an important member of the group round the throne, and I went with her niece, Lady Valletort, under Lord Lansdowne's escort, to places most admirably situated for hearing and seeing the whole ceremony. The queen was not handsome, but very pretty, and the singularity of her great position lent a sentimental and poetical charm to her youthful face and figure.

The serene, serious sweetness of her candid brow and clear soft eyes gave dignity to the girlish countenance, while the want of height only added to the effect of extreme youth of the round but slender person, and gracefully moulded hands and arms. The queen's voice was exquisite; nor have I ever heard any spoken words more musical in their gentle distinctness, than the "My Lords and Gentlemen" which broke the breathless silence of the ill.u.s.trious a.s.sembly, whose gaze was riveted upon that fair flower of royalty. The enunciation was as perfect as the intonation was melodious, and I think it is impossible to hear a more excellent utterance than that of the queen's English, by the English queen.]

WEDNESDAY, July 26th, 1837.

_Bannisters!_ (Think of that, Master Brook!!)

DEAREST H----,

These overflowing spirits of mine all come of a gallop of fifteen miles I have been taking with dear Emily, over breezy commons and through ferny pine-woods, and then coming home and devouring luncheon as fast as it could be swallowed; and so you get the result of all this physical excitement in these very animal spirits; and if my letter is "all sound and fury, signifying nothing," under the circ.u.mstances how can I help it?

That rather ill-conducted person, Ninon de l'Enclos, I believe, said her soup got into her head; and though "comparisons are odious,"

and I should be loth to suggest any between that wonderful no-better-than-she-should-be and myself, beyond all doubt my luncheon has got into my head, though I drank nothing but water with it; but I rather think violent exercise in the cold air, followed immediately by eating, will produce a certain amount of intoxication, just as easily as stimulating drink would. I suppose it is only a question of accelerated circulation, with a slight tendency of blood to the head.

However that may be, I wish you would speak to Emily (you needn't bawl, though you are in Ireland), and tell her to hold her tongue and not disturb me. She is profanely laughing at a sermon of Dr. South's, and interrupting me in this serious letter to you with absurd questions about such nonsense as Life, Death, and Immortality. I can't get on for her a bit, so add her to the cold ride and the hot lunch in the list of causes of this crazy epistle--I mean, the causes of its craziness.

Do you know old South? I don't believe you do even this much of him:--

"Old South, a witty Churchman reckoned, Was preaching once to Charles the Second: When lo! the King began to nod, Deaf to the zealous man of G.o.d; Who, leaning o'er his pulpit, cried To Lauderdale by Charles's side:-- 'My Lord, why, 'tis a shameful thing!

You snore so loud, you'll wake the King!'"

I quote by memory, through my luncheon, and I dare say all wrong; but it doesn't matter, for I don't believe you know it a bit better than I remember it. I and my baby came here on Monday, and shall stay until to-morrow week; after that I go to Liverpool, to meet and be met; and after that I know nothing, of course.... If, however, by that time you are likely to be near London, we will come up thither forthwith, and you must come and stay in Park Place with us. We shall be alone keeping house there; for my mother is in the country, and my father and Adelaide are going to Carlsbad, where we think to join them by-and-by; in the mean time, we hope to enjoy ourselves much sight-seeing all over London, which we shall then have entirely to ourselves; and you had better come and help us.

Good-bye, dearest H----.

Yours ever, F. A. B.

[This letter was written from Bannisters, the charming country home of my dear friend, Miss Fitz Hugh. For years it had been a resort of rest for Mrs. Siddons, who was always made welcome as one of her own sisters, by Mrs. Fitz Hugh; and for years it was a resort of rest for me, to whom my friend was as devoted as her mother had been to my aunt.]