A Letter Book Part 19

BA.

FOOTNOTES:

[123] Anna Jameson (1794-1860) was a woman of letters and an art-critic at one time of immense influence through her ill.u.s.trated books on "Sacred and Legendary" (as well as some other) "Art." But, as somehow or other happens not infrequently, the objects of her "affection and generosity" did not include her husband.

EDWARD FITZGERALD (1809-1883)

Not much need be added to what was said in the Introduction about this famous translator and almost equally, though less uniquely, remarkable letter-writer. His life was entirely uneventful and his friends.h.i.+ps have been already commemorated. The version of Omar Khayyam appeared in 1859; was an utter "drug"--remainder copies going at a few pence--for a time; but became one of the most admired books of the English nineteenth century before very long. Some of his _Letters_ were published at various times from 1889 to 1901 (those to f.a.n.n.y Kemble in 1895). It is not perhaps merely fanciful to suggest that the "uniqueness" above glanced at does supply a sort of connection between the _Letters_ and the _Works_. The faculty of at once retaining the matter of a subject and transforming it in treatment has perhaps never, as regards translation, been exhibited in such transcendence as in the English _Rubaiyat_. But something of this same faculty must belong to every good letter-writer--and a good deal of it certainly is shown by FitzGerald in _his_ letters. Indeed one of the processes of letter-and memoir-study (the memoir as has been said is practically an "open" letter) is that of comparing the treatments of the same subject by different persons--say of the Great Fire by Pepys and Evelyn, of the Riots of '80 by Walpole and Johnson. He himself, as will be seen, calls the letter given below "not very interesting." It seems to me very interesting indeed: and likely to be increasingly so as time goes on. Few things could be more characteristic of the writer than his way of "visiting his sister" by living alone in lodgings all _day_ for a month. The "_old_ age"--forty-five--is hardly less so. The allusions to "Alfred" (Tennyson); "old" Thackeray, for whom he constantly keeps the affectionate school and college use of the adjective; Landor[124] (who unluckily did _not_ die at Bath though he might have done so but for one of the last and least creditable of his eccentricities); Beckford ("Old Vathek"), and a fourth "old," Rogers (who was one of FitzGerald's aversions); Oxford (as yet almost unstained by any modernities spiritual or material); and Bath[125] (to remain still longer a "haunt of ancient peace")--are precious. The fifth "old," Spedding, who devoted chiefly to Bacon talents worthy of more varied exercise, was one of the innermost Tennyson set, as was "Harry" Lus.h.i.+ngton, who died very soon after this letter was written. "Your Book" is F.

Tennyson's _Days and Hours_, a volume of poetry while reading which probably many people have wondered in what respect it came short of really great poetry, though they felt it did so.

44. TO FREDERIC TENNYSON

BATH May 7/54.

My dear Frederic,

You see to what fas.h.i.+onable places I am reduced in my old Age. The truth is however I am come here by way of Visit to a sister I have scarce seen these six years; my visit consisting in this that I live alone in a lodging of my own by day, and spend two or three hours with her in the Evening. This has been my way of Life for three weeks, and will be so for some ten days more: after which I talk of flying back to more native counties. I was to have gone on to see Alfred in his "Island Home" from here: but it appears he goes to London about the same time I quit this place: so I must and shall defer my Visit to him. Perhaps I shall catch a sight of him in London; as also of old Thackeray who, Donne writes me word, came suddenly on him in Pall Mall the other day: while all the while people supposed _The Newcomes_ were being indited at Rome or Naples.

If ever you live in England you must live here at Bath. It really is a splendid City in a lovely, even a n.o.ble, Country. Did you ever see it?

One beautiful feature in the place is the quant.i.ty of Garden and Orchard it is all through embroidered with. Then the Streets, when you go into them, are as handsome and gay as London, gayer and handsomer because cleaner and in a clearer Atmosphere; and if you want the Country you get into it (and a very fine Country) on all sides and directly. Then there is such Choice of Houses, Cheap as well as Dear, of all sizes, with good Markets, Railways etc. I am not sure I shall not come here for part of the Winter. It is a place you would like, I am sure: though I do not say but you are better in Florence. Then on the top of the hill is old Vathek's Tower, which he used to sit and read in daily, and from which he could see his own Fonthill, while it stood. Old Landor quoted to me 'Nullus in orbe locus, etc.,' apropos of Bath: he, you may know, has lived here for years, and I should think would die here, though not yet.

He seems so strong that he may rival old Rogers; of whom indeed one Newspaper gave what is called an 'Alarming Report of Mr. Rogers' Health'

the other day, but another contradicted it directly and indignantly, and declared the Venerable Poet never was better. Landor has some hundred and fifty Pictures; each of which he thinks the finest specimen of the finest Master, and has a long story about, how he got it, when, etc. I dare say some are very good: but also some very bad. He appeared to me to judge of them as he does of Books and Men; with a most uncompromising perversity which the Phrenologists must explain to us after his Death.

By the bye, about your Book, which of course you wish me to say something about. Parker sent me down a copy 'from the Author' for which I hereby thank you. If you believe my word, you already know my Estimation of so much that is in it: you have already guessed that I should have made a different selection from the great Volume which is now in Tatters. As I differ in Taste from the world, however, quite as much as from you, I do not know but you have done very much better in choosing as you have; the few people I have seen are very much pleased with it, the Cowells at Oxford delighted. A Bookseller there sold all his Copies the first day they came down: and even in Bath a Bookseller (and not one of the Princ.i.p.al) told me a fortnight ago he had sold some twenty copies. I have not been in Town since it came out: and have now so little correspondence with literati I can't tell you about them.

There was a very unfair Review in the _Athenaeum_; which is the only Literary Paper I see: but I am told there are laudatory ones in _Examiner_ and _Spectator_.

I was five weeks at Oxford, visiting the Cowells in just the same way that I am visiting my Sister here. I also liked Oxford greatly: but not so well I think as Bath: which is so large and busy that one is drowned in it as much as in London. There are often concerts, etc., for those who like them; I only go to a s.h.i.+lling affair that comes off every Sat.u.r.day at what they call the Pump Room. On these occasions there is sometimes some Good Music if not excellently played. Last Sat.u.r.day I heard a fine Trio of Beethoven. Mendelssohn's things are mostly tiresome to me. I have brought my old Handel Book here and recreate myself now and then with pounding one of the old Giant's Overtures on my sister's Piano, as I used to do on that Spinnet at my Cottage. As to Operas, and Exeter Halls, I have almost done with them: they give me no pleasure, I scarce know why.

I suppose there is no chance of your being over in England this year, and perhaps as little Chance of my being in Italy. All I can say is, the latter is not impossible, which I suppose I may equally say of the former. But pray write me. You can always direct to me at Donne's, 12, St. James' Square, or at Rev. G. Crabbe's, Bredfield, Woodbridge. Either way the letter will soon reach me. Write soon, Frederic, and let me hear how you and yours are: and don't wait, as you usually do, for some inundation of the Arno to set your pen agoing. Write ever so shortly and whatever-about-ly. I have no news to tell you of Friends. I saw old Spedding in London; only doubly calm after the death of a Niece he dearly loved and whose deathbed at Hastings he had just been waiting upon. Harry Lus.h.i.+ngton wrote a martial Ode on seeing the Guards march over Waterloo Bridge towards the East: I did not see it, but it was much admired and handed about, I believe. And now my paper is out: and I am going through the rain (it is said to rain very much here) to my Sister's. So Goodbye, and write to me, as I beg you, in reply to this long if not very interesting letter.

FOOTNOTES:

[124] "Fitz's" remarks on Landor's judgment of "Pictures, Books and Men"

are very amusing; for they have been often repeated in regard to his own on all these subjects. In fact the two, though FitzGerald was not so childish as Landor, had much in common.

[125] The curious eulogy--preferring it to Oxford as being "large and busy" enough to "drown one as much" as London--is also very characteristic of FitzGerald. You can be alone in the country _and_ in a large town--hardly in a small one.

FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE (1809-1893)

To what has been said before of this remarkably gifted lady little need be added. The two letters which follow, derived from _Further Records_ (London, 1890), were written rather late in her life, but are characteristic, in ways partly coinciding, partly divergent, of her strong intellect[126]

and her powers of expression. The note to the ghost-story leaves open the question whether f.a.n.n.y did or did not know the accepted doctrine that the master and mistress of a haunted house are exempt from actual haunting. The "whiff of grape-shot" (as Carlyle might have called it) on the "Bakespearian" absurdity is one of the best things on the subject that the present writer, in a long and wide experience, has come across.

45. TO H---- [EXTRACT]

YORK FARM, BRANCHTOWN, PHILADELPHIA, Monday May 18th, 1874.

One evening that my maid was sitting in the room from which she could see the whole of the staircase and upper landing, she saw the door of my bedroom open, and an elderly woman in a flannel dressing-gown, with a bonnet on her head, and a candle in her hand come out, walk the whole length of the pa.s.sage, and return again into the bedroom, shutting the door after her. My maid knew that I was in the drawing-room below in my usual black velvet evening dress; moreover, the person she had seen bore no resemblance either in figure or face to me, or to any member of my household, which consisted of three young servant women besides herself, and a negro man-servant. My maid was a remarkably courageous and reasonable person, and, though very much startled (for she went directly upstairs and found no one in the rooms), she kept her counsel, and mentioned the circ.u.mstance to n.o.body, though, as she told me afterwards, she was so afraid lest I should have a similar visitation, that she was strongly tempted to ask Dr. W----'s advice as to the propriety of mentioning her experience to me. She refrained from doing so, however, and some time later, as she was sitting in the dusk in the same room, the man-servant came in to light the gas and made her start, observing which, he said, "Why, lors, Miss Ellen, you jump as if you had seen a ghost." In spite of her late experience, Ellen very gravely replied, "Nonsense, William, how can you talk such stuff! You don't believe in such things as ghosts, do you?" "Well," he said, "I don't know just so sure what to say to that, seeing it's very well known there was a ghost in this house." "Pshaw!" said Ellen. "Whose ghost?" "Well, poor Mrs.

R----'s ghost, it's very well known, walks about this house, and no great wonder either, seeing how miserably she lived and died here." To Ellen's persistent expressions of contemptuous incredulity, he went on, "Well, Miss Ellen, all I can say is, several girls" (_i.e._ maid-servants) "have left this house on account of it"; and there the conversation ended. Some days after this, Ellen coming into the drawing-room to speak to me, stopped abruptly at the door, and stood there, having suddenly recognized in a portrait immediately opposite to it, and which was that of the dead mistress of the house, the face of the person she had seen come out of my bedroom. I think this a very tidy ghost story; and I am bound to add, as a proper commentary on it, that I have never inhabited a house which affected me with a sense of such intolerable melancholy gloominess as this; without any a.s.signable reason whatever, either in its situation or any of its conditions. My maid, to the present day, persists in every detail (and without the slightest variation) of this experience of hers, absolutely rejecting my explanation of it; that she had heard, without paying any particular attention to it, some talk among the other servants about the ghost in the house, which had remained unconsciously to her in her memory, and reproduced itself in this morbid nervous effect of her imagination.

46. To H---- [EXTRACT]

YORK FARM, Sunday, December 6th, 1874.

My dearest H----,

It is not possible for me to feel the slightest interest in the sort of literary feat which I consider writing upon "who wrote Shakespeare?" to be. I was very intimate with Harness, Milman, Dyce, Collier--all Shakespearian editors, commentators, and scholars--and this absurd theory about Bacon, which was first broached a good many years ago, never obtained credit for a moment with them; nor did they ever entertain for an instant a doubt that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon were really written by him. Now I am intimately acquainted and in frequent communication with William Donne, Edward FitzGerald, and James Spedding, all thorough Shakespeare scholars, and the latter a man who has just published a work upon Bacon, which has been really the labour of his life; none of these men, competent judges of the matter, ever mentions the question of "Who wrote Shakespeare?" except as a ludicrous thing to be laughed at, and I think they may be trusted to decide whether it is or is not so.

I have a slight feeling of disgust at the attack made thus on the personality of my greatest mental benefactor; and consider the whole thing a misapplication, not to say waste, of time and ingenuity that might be better employed. As I regard the memory of Shakespeare with love, veneration, and grat.i.tude, and am proud and happy to be his countrywoman, considering it among the privileges of my English birth, I resent the endeavour to prove that he deserved none of these feelings, but was a mere literary impostor. I wonder the question had any interest for you, for I should not have supposed you imagined Shakespeare had not written his own plays, Irish though you be. Do you remember the servant's joke in the farce of "High Life Below Stairs" where the cook asks, "Who wrote Shakespeare?" and one of the others answers, with, at any rate, partial plausibility, "Oh! why, Colley Cibber, to be sure!"

FOOTNOTES:

[126] Sometimes one thinks her the wisest woman who ever lived. "Nothing seems stranger than the delusions of other people _when they have ceased to be our own_" suggests La Rochefoucauld and comes near to Solomon; but whosoever may have antic.i.p.ated or prompted her, he is not at the moment within my memory. But she is often not wise at all: and even her good wits are not always left unaffected by her bad temper. It is really amusing to read Mrs. Carlyle's rather mischievous account of Mrs. Butler (F. K.'s married name) calling and carrying a whip "to keep her hand in": and _then_ to come on F. K.'s waspish resentment at these words, when they were published.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-1863)

So much has been said of Thackeray's letter-writing powers in the Introduction that not much need be added here on the general side. But a few words may be allowed on what we may call the _conditioning_ circ.u.mstances which affected these powers, and made the result so peculiar. Except in Swift's case--a thing piquant in itself considering the injustice of the later writer to the earlier--hardly any body of letters exhibits these conditions so obviously and in so varied a fas.h.i.+on. In both there was the utmost intellectual satire combined with the utmost tenderness of feeling. Thackeray of course, partly from nature and partly from the influence of time, did not mask his tenderness and double-edge his severity with roughness and coa.r.s.eness. But the combination was intrinsically not very different. There has also to be taken into account in Thackeray's case domestic sorrow--coming quickly and life-long after it began; means long restricted (partly by his own folly but not so more tolerable); recognition of genius almost as long deferred; and yet other "maladies of the soul." The result was a constant ferment, of which the letters are in a way the relieving valve or tap. That they are often apparently light-hearted has nothing surprising in it: for when a man habitually "eats his heart" it naturally becomes lighter--till there is nothing of it left.

He is, however, not easy to "sample," there being, as has been said, no authorised collection to draw upon and other difficulties in the way. What follows may serve for fault of a better: and the _Spectator_ letter-pastiche referred to above under Walpole, will complete it perhaps more appropriately than may at first appear. For while the latter is quite Addisonian, not merely in dress but in body, its soul is blended of two natures--the model's and the artist's--in the rather uncanny fas.h.i.+on which makes _Esmond_ as a whole so marvellous, except to those stalwarts who hold that, as n.o.body before the twentieth century knew anything about anything, Thackeray could not know about the eighteenth.

47. TO MISS LUCY BAXTER

WAs.h.i.+NGTON, Sat.u.r.day Feb. 19. 1853.

My dear little kind Lucy:

I began to write you a letter in the railroad yesterday, but it b.u.mped with more than ordinary violence, and I was forced to give up the endeavour. I did not know how ill Lucy was at that time, only remembered that I owed her a letter for that pretty one you wrote me at Philadelphia, when Sarah was sick and you acted as her Secretary.

Is there going to be always Somebody sick at the brown house? If I were to come there now, I wonder should I be allowed to come and see you in your night-cap--I wonder even do you wear a night-cap? I should step up, take your little hand, which I daresay is lying outside the coverlet, give it a little shake; and then sit down and talk all sorts of stuff and nonsense to you for half an hour; but very kind and gentle, not so as to make you laugh too much or your little back ache any more. Did I not tell you to leave off that beecely jimnayshum? I am always giving fine advice to girls in brown houses, and they always keep on never minding. It is not difficult to write lying in bed--this is written not in bed, but on a sofa. If you write the upright hand it's quite easy; slanting-dicular is not so pleasant, though. I have just come back from Baltimore and find your mother's and sister's melancholy letters. I thought to myself, perhaps I might see them on this very sofa and pictured to myself their 2 kind faces.

Mr. Crampton was going to ask them to dinner, I had made arrangements to get Sarah nice partners at the ball--Why did dear little Lucy tumble down at the Gymnasium? Many a pretty plan in life tumbles down so, Miss Lucy, and falls on its back. But the good of being ill is to find how kind one's friends are; of being at a pinch (I do not know whether I may use the expression--whether "pinch" is an indelicate word in this country; it is used by our old writers to signify poverty, narrow circ.u.mstances, res angusta)--the good of being poor, I say, is to find friends to help you, I have been both ill and poor, and found, thank G.o.d, such consolation in those evils; and I daresay at this moment, now you are laid up, you are the person of the most importance in the whole house--Sarah is sliding about the room with cordials in her hands and eyes; Libby is sitting quite disconsolate by the bed (poor Libby! when one little bird fell off the perch, I wonder the other did not go up and fall off, too!) the expression of sympathy in Ben's eyes is perfectly heart-rending; even George is quiet; and your Father, Mother and Uncle (all 3 so notorious for their violence of temper and language) have actually forgotten to scold. "Ach, du lieber Himmel," says Herr Strumpf--isn't his name Herr Strumpf?--the German master, "die schone Fraulein ist krank!" and bursts into tears on the Pianofortyfier's shoulder when they hear the news (through his sobs) from black John. We have an Ebony femme de chambre here; when I came from Baltimore just now I found her in the following costume and att.i.tude standing for her picture to Mr. Crowe. She makes the beds with that pipe in her mouf and leaves it about in the rooms. Wouldn't she have been a nice lady's-maid for your mother and Miss Bally Saxter?

But even if Miss Lucy had not had her fall, I daresay there would have been no party. Here is a great snow-storm falling, though yesterday was as bland and bright as May (English May, I mean) and how could we have lionized Baltimore, and gone to Mount Vernon, and taken our diversion in the snow? There would have been nothing for it but to stay in this little closet of a room, where there is scarce room for 6 people, and where it is not near so comfortable as the brown house.

Dear old b.h., shall I see it again soon? I shall not go farther than Charleston, and Savannah probably, and then I hope I shall get another look at you all again before I commence farther wanderings--O, stop! I didn't tell you why I was going to write you--well, I went on Thursday to dine with Governor and Mrs. Fish, a dinner in honor of me--and before I went I arrayed myself in a certain white garment of which the collar-b.u.t.ton-holes had been altered, and I thought of the kind, friendly little hand that had done that deed for me; and when the Fisheses told me how they lived in the Second Avenue (I had forgotten all about 'em)--their house and the house opposite came back to my mind, and I liked them 50 times better for living near some friends of mine. She is a nice woman, Madam Fish, besides; and didn't I abuse you all to her? Good bye, dear little Lucy--I wish the paper wasn't full.

But I have been sitting half an hour by the poor young lady's sofa, and talking stuff and nonsense, haven't I? And now I get up, and shake your hand with a G.o.d bless you! and walk down stairs, and please to give everybody my kindest regards, and remember that I am truly your friend.