What I Remember Part 23

"T.C.G."

I beg to observe that the exhortation addressed to me had no moral significance, but was the writer's characteristic mode of exciting me to new scribblements.

The following, also written on the envelope enclosing a letter from Mrs. Grattan, is dated the 30th of July, 1840:--

"I cannot let the envelope go quite a blank, though I cannot quite make it a prize ... In literature I have done nothing but write a preface and notes for two new editions of the old _Highways and Byeways_, and a short sketchy article in this month's number of the _North American Review_ on the present state of Ireland. I am going to follow it up in the next number in reference to the state of the Irish in America, and I hope I shall thus do some good to a subject I have much at heart. I have had various applications to deliver lectures at Lyceums, &c, and to preside at public meetings for various objects.

All this I have declined. I have been very much before the public at dinners for various purposes, and have refused many invitations to several neighbouring cities. I must now draw back a little. I think I have hitherto done good to the cause of peace and friends.h.i.+p between the countries. But I know these continued public appearances will expose me to envy, hatred, and malice. I hope to do something historical by and by, and perhaps an occasional article in the _North American Review_. But anything like light writing I never can again turn to."

From a very long letter written on the 13th of May, 1841, I will give a, few extracts:--

"MY DEAR AND VALUED FRIEND,--Your letter from Penryth [_sic_] without date, but bearing the ominous post-mark, 'April 1st,' has completely made a fool of me, in that sense which implies that nothing else can excuse a grey head and a seared heart for thinking and feeling that there are such things in the world as affection and sincerity. Being fond of flying in the face of reason, and despising experience, whenever they lay down general rules, I am resolved to believe in exceptions, to delight in instances, and to be quite satisfied that I have 'troops of friends'--you being one of the troopers--no matter how few others there may be, or where they are to be found.

"You really must imagine how glad we were to see your handwriting again, and I may say also, how surprised; for it pa.s.seth our understanding to discover how you _make_ time for any correspondence at all. We have followed all your literary doings step by step since we left Europe, and we never cease wondering at your fertility and rejoicing at your success. But I am grieved to think that all this is at the cost of your comfort. Or is it that you wrote in a querulous mood, when you said those sharp things about your grey goose quill.

Surely composition must be pleasant to you. No one who writes so fast and so well can find it actually irksome. I am aware that people sometimes think they find it so. But we may deceive ourselves on the dark as well as on the bright side of our road, and more easily, because it _is_ the dark. That is to say, we may not only cheat ourselves with false hopes of good, but with false notions of evil, which proves, if it proves anything just now, that you are considerably mistaken when you fancy writing to be a bore, and that I know infinitely better than you do what you like or dislike."

It is rather singular to find a literary _workman_ talking in this style. Grattan was not a fertile writer, and, I must suppose, was never a very industrious one. But he surely must have known that talk about the pleasures of "composition" was wholly beside the mark.

_That_ may be, often is, pleasant enough, and if the thoughts could be telephoned from the brain to the types it would all be mighty agreeable; and the world would be very considerably more overwhelmed with authors.h.i.+p than it is. It is the "grey goose quill" work, the necessity for incarnating the creatures of the brain in black and white, that is the world's protection from this avalanche. And I for one do not understand how anybody who, eschewing the suns.h.i.+ne and the fields and the song of birds, or the enjoyment of other people's brain-work, has glued himself to his desk for long hours, can say or imagine that his task is, or has been, aught else than hard and distasteful work, demanding unrelaxing self-denial and industry. And however fine the frenzy in which the poet's eye may roll while he builds the lofty line, the work of putting some thousands of them on the paper when built must be as irksome to him as the penny-a-liner's task is to _him_--more so, in that the mind of the latter does not need to be forcibly and painfully restrained from rus.h.i.+ng on to the new pastures which invite it, and curbed to the pack-horse pace of the quill-driving process.

"You must not," he continues, "allow yourself to be, or even to fancy that you are tired or tormented, or worn out. Work the mine to the last. Pump up every drop out of the well. Put money i' thy purse; and add story after story to that structure of fame, which will enable you to do as much to that house by the lake side, where I _will_ hope to see you yet."

He then goes on to speak at considerable length of the society of Boston, praising it much, yet saying that it is made more charming to a visitor than to a permanent resident. "In this it differs," he says, "from almost all the countries I have lived in in Europe, except Holland."

Speaking of a visit to Was.h.i.+ngton during the inauguration of General Harrison, which seems to have delighted him much, he says he travelled back with a family, "at least with the master and mistress of it, of whom I must tell you something. Mr. Paige is a merchant, and brother-in-law of Mr. Webster; Mrs. Paige a niece of Judge Story. From this double connection with two of the first men in the country their family a.s.sociations are particularly agreeable. Mrs. Paige is one of three sisters, all very handsome, spirited, and full of talent. One is married to Mr. Webster's eldest son. Another, Mrs. Joy, has for her husband an idle gentleman, a rare thing in this place. Mrs. Paige was in Europe two years ago with Mr. and Mrs. Webster senior (the latter by the bye is a _most_ charming person) and had the advantage of seeing society in England and France in its best aspect, and is one who can compare as well as see ... Among the men [of the Boston society] are Dr. Chinning, a prophet in our country, a pamphleteer in his own; Bancroft, _the_ historian of America, a man of superior talents and great agreeability, but a black sheep in society, on account of his Van Buren politics, against whom the white sheep of the Whig party will not rub themselves; Prescott, the author of _Ferdinand and Isabella_, a handsome, half blind shunner of the vanities of the world, with some others, who read and write a good deal, and no one the wiser for it. Edward Everett is in Italy, where you will surely meet him [we saw a good deal of him]. He is rather formal than cold, if all I hear whispered of him be true; of elegant taste in literature, though not of easy manners, and altogether an admirable specimen of an American orator and scholar. At Cambridge, three miles off, we have Judge Story, of the Supreme Court, eloquent, deeply learned, garrulous, lively, amiable, excellent in all and every way that a mortal can be. He is decidedly the gem of this western world.

Mr. Webster is now settled at Was.h.i.+ngton, though here at this moment on a visit to Mrs. Paige. Among our neighbouring notabilities is John Quincy Adams, an ex-President of the United States, ex-Minister at half the courts in Europe, and now at seventy-five, a simple Member of Congress, hard as a piece of granite, and cold as a lump of ice."

Speaking of his having very frequently appeared at public meetings during the first year of his Consuls.h.i.+p, and of his having since that refrained from such appearances, he continues: "I was doubtful as to the way my being so much _en evidence_ might be relished _at home_. Of late public matters have been on so ticklish a footing, that all the less a British functionary was seen the better.

"In literature I have done nothing barring a couple of articles on Ireland and the Irish in America, a subject I have much at heart.

But much as I feel for them and with them, I refused dining with my countrymen on St. Patrick's Day because they had the _gaucherie_ (of which I had previous notice), to turn the festive meeting into a political one, by giving 'O'Connell and success to repeal' as one of their 'regular' toasts, and by leaving out the Queen's health, which they gave when I dined with them last year."

Then after detailed notices of the movements of his sons, he goes on:

"We have many plans in perspective, Niagara, Canada, Halifax, the mountains, the springs, the sea; the result of which you shall know as soon as we receive a true and faithful account of your adventures in just as many pages as you can afford; but Tom must in the meantime send me a long letter ... Tell Tom I have half resolved to give up punning and take to repartee. A young fellow said to me the other day, 'Ah! Mr. Consul (as I am always called), I wish I could discover a new pleasure.' 'Try virtue!' was my reply. A pompous ex-Governor said swaggeringly to me at the last dinner party at which I a.s.sisted, 'Well, Mr. Consul, I suppose you Europeans think us semi-civilised here in America?' 'Almost!' said I. Now ask Tom if that was not pretty considerable smart. But a.s.sure him at the same time, it is nothing at all to what I _could_ do in the way of impertinence! Need I say how truly and affectionately we all love you?

"T.C. GRATTAN."

I wrote back that I would enter the lists with him in the matter of impertinence; and as a sample told him that I thought he had better return to the punning.

I could, I doubt not, find among my mother's papers some further letters that might be worth printing or quoting. But my waning s.p.a.ce warns me that I must not indulge myself with doing so.

CHAPTER XVIII.

I said at the beginning of the last chapter, that during the period, some of the recollections of which I had been chronicling, the two greatest sorrows I had ever known had befallen me. A third came subsequently. But that belonged to a period of my life which does not fall within the limits I have a.s.signed to these reminiscences. Of the first, the death of my mother, I have spoken. The other, the death of my wife, followed it at no great distance, and was of course a far more terrible one. She had been ailing--so long indeed that I had become habituated to it, and thought that she would continue to live as she had been living. We had been travelling in Switzerland, in the autumn of 1864; and I remember very vividly her saying on board the steamer, by which we were leaving Colico at the head of the Lake of Como, on our return to Italy, as she turned on the deck to take a last look at the mountains, "Good-bye, you big beauties!" I little thought it was her last adieu to them; but I thought afterwards that she probably may have had some misgiving that it was so.

But it was not till the following spring that I began to realise that I must lose her. She died on the 13th of April, 1865.

I have spoken of her as she was when she became my wife, but without much hope of representing her to those who never had the happiness of knowing her, as she really was, not only in person, which matters little, but in mind and intellectual powers. And to tell what she was in heart, in disposition--in a word, in soul--would be a far more difficult task.

In her the aesthetic faculties were probably the most markedly exceptional portion of her intellectual const.i.tution. The often cited dictum, _les races se feminisent_ was not exemplified in her case.

From her mother, an accomplished musician, she inherited her very p.r.o.nounced musical[1] faculty and tendencies, and, I think, little else. From her father, a man of very varied capacities and culture, she drew much more. How far, if in any degree, this fact may be supposed to have been connected in the relation of cause and effect, with the other fact that her mother was more than fifty years of age at the time of her birth, I leave to the speculations of physiological inquirers. In bodily const.i.tution her inheritance from her father's mother was most marked. To that source must be traced, I conceive, the delicacy of const.i.tution, speaking medically, which deprived me of her at a comparatively early age; for both father and mother were of thoroughly healthy and strong const.i.tutions. But if it may be suspected that the Brahmin Sultana, her grandmother, bequeathed her her frail diathesis, there was no doubt or difficulty in tracing to that source the exterior delicacy of formation which characterised her. I remember her telling me that the last words a dying sister of her mother's ever spoke, when Theodosia standing by the bedside placed her hand on the dying woman's forehead were, "Ah, that is Theo's little Indian hand," And truly the slender delicacy of hand and foot, which characterised her, were unmistakably due to her Indian descent.

In person she in nowise resembled either father or mother, unless it were possibly her father in the conformation and shape of the teeth.

[Footnote 1: But this she might also have got from her father, who was pa.s.sionately fond of music, and was a very respectable performer on the violin.]

I have already in a previous chapter of these reminiscences given a letter from Mrs. Browning in which she speaks of Theodosia's "multiform faculty." And the phrase, which so occurring, might in the case of almost any other writer be taken as a mere epistolary civility, is in the case of one whose absolute accuracy of veracity never swerved a hair's-breadth, equivalent to a formal certificate of the fact to the best of her knowledge. And she knew my wife well both before and after the marriage of either of them. Her faculty was truly _multiform_.

She was not a great musician; but her singing had for great musicians a charm which the performances of many of their equals in the art failed to afford them. She had never much voice, but I have rarely seen the hearer to whose eyes she could not bring the tears. She had a spell for awakening emotional sympathy which I have never seen surpa.s.sed, rarely indeed equalled.

For language she had an especial talent, was dainty in the use of her own, and astonis.h.i.+ngly apt in acquiring--not merely the use for speaking as well as reading purposes, but--the delicacies of other tongues. Of Italian, with which she was naturally _most_ conversant, she was recognised by acknowledged experts to be a thoroughly competent critic.

She published, now many years ago, in the _Athenaeum_, some translations from the satirist Giusti, which any intelligent reader would, I think, recognise to be cleverly done. But none save the very few in this country, who know and can understand the Tuscan poet's works in the original, can at all conceive the difficulty of translating him into tolerable English verse. And I have no hesitation in a.s.serting, that any competent judge, who is such by virtue of understanding the original, would p.r.o.nounce her translations of Giusti to be a masterpiece, which very few indeed of contemporary men or women could have produced. I have more than once surprised her in tears occasioned by her obstinate struggles with some pa.s.sage of the intensely idiomatic satirist, which she found it almost--but eventually not quite--impossible to render to her satisfaction.

She published a translation of Niccolini's _Arnaldo da Brescia_, which won the cordial admiration and friends.h.i.+p of that great poet. And neither Niccolini's admiration nor his friends.h.i.+p were easily won. He was, when we knew him at Florence in his old age, a somewhat crabbed old man, not at all disposed to make new acquaintances, and, I think, somewhat soured and disappointed, not certainly with the meed of admiration he had won from his countrymen as a poet, but with the amount of effect which his writings had availed to produce in the political sentiments and then apparent destinies of the Italians.

But he was conquered by the young Englishwoman's translation of his favourite, and, I think, his finest work. It is a thoroughly trustworthy and excellent translation; but the execution of it was child's play in comparison with the translations from Giusti.

She translated a number of the curiously characteristic _stornelli_ of Tuscany, and especially of the Pistoja mountains. And here again it is impossible to make any one, who has never been familiar with these _stornelli_ understand the especial difficulty of translating them. Of course the task was a slighter and less significant one than that of translating Giusti, nor was the same degree of critical accuracy and nicety in rendering shades of meaning called for. But there were not--are not--many persons who could cope with the especial difficulties of the attempt as successfully as she did. She produced also a number of pen-and-ink drawings ill.u.s.trating these _stornelli_, which I still possess, and in which the spirited, graphic, and accurately truthful characterisation of the figures could only have been achieved by an artist very intimately acquainted _intus et in cute_ with the subjects of her pencil.

She published a volume on the Tuscan revolution, which was very favourably received. The _Examiner_, among other critics--all of them, to the best of my remembrance, more or less favourable--said of these _Letters_ (for that was the form in which the work was published, all of them, I think, having been previously printed in the _Athenaeum_), "Better political information than this book gives may be had in plenty; but it has a special value which we might almost represent by comparing it to the report of a very watchful nurse, who, without the physician's scientific knowledge, uses her own womanly instinct in observing every change of countenance and every movement indicating the return of health and strength to the patient ... She has written a very vivid and truthful account." The critic has very accurately, and, it may be said, graphically, a.s.signed its true value and character to the book.

I have found it necessary in a former chapter, where I have given a number of interesting and characteristic letters from Landor to my wife's father, to insert a deprecatory _caveat_ against the exuberant enthusiasm of admiration which led him to talk of the probability of her eclipsing the names and fame of other poets, including in this estimate Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The preposterousness of this no human being would have felt more strongly than Theodosia Garrow, except Theodosia Trollope, when such an estimate had become yet more preposterous. But Landor, whose unstinted admiration of Mrs.

Browning's poetry is vigorously enough expressed in his own strong language, as may be seen in Mr. Forster's pages, would not have dreamed of inst.i.tuting any such comparison at a later day. But that his critical ac.u.men and judgment were not altogether destroyed by the enthusiasm of his friends.h.i.+p, is, I think, shown by the following little poem by Theodosia Trollope, written a few years after the birth of her child. I don't think I need apologise for printing it.

The original MS. of it before me gives no t.i.tle; nor do I remember that the auth.o.r.ess ever a.s.signed one to the verses.

I.

"In the noon-day's golden pleasance, Little Bice, baby fair, With a fresh and flowery presence, Dances round her nurse's chair, In the old grey loggia dances, haloed by her s.h.i.+ning hair.

II.

"Pretty pearl in sober setting, Where the arches garner shade!