Old Woman's Gossip

XII.

IT was years after these events that Lawrence, meeting my father accidentally in the street one day, stopped him and spoke with great feeling of his sympathy for us all in my approaching trial, and begged permission to come and see my mother and become acquainted with me, which he accordingly did; and from that time till his death, which occurred but a few months later, he was unwearied in acts of friendly and affectionate kindness to me. He came repeatedly to consult with my mother about the disputed point of my dress, and gave his sanction to her decision upon it. The first dress of Belvidera, I remember, was a point of nice discussion between them. Plain black velvet and a lugubrious long veil were considered my only admissible wear, after my husband’s ruin; but before the sale of our furniture, it was conceded that I might relieve the sombre Venetian patrician’s black dress with white satin puffs and crimson linings and rich embroidery of gold and pearl; moreover, before our bankruptcy, I was allowed (not, however, without serious demur on the part of Lawrence) to cover my head with a black hat and white feather, with which of course I was enamored, having never worn anything but my hair on my head before, and feeling an unspeakable accession of dignity in this piece of attire. I begged hard to be allowed to wear it through the tragedy, but this, with some laughter at my intense desire for it, was forbidden, and I was reduced after the first scene of the play to my own unadorned locks, which I think greatly strengthened my feeling of the abject misery into which I had fallen.

When in town, Lawrence never omitted one of my performances, always occupying the stage box, and invariably sending me the next morning a letter full of the most detailed and delicate criticism, showing a minute attention to every inflection of my voice, every gesture, every attitude, which, combined with expressions of enthusiastic admiration, with which this discriminating and careful review of my performance invariably terminated, was as strong a dose of the finest flattery as could well have been offered to a girl of my age, on the very first step of her artistic career. I used to read over the last of these remarkable criticisms, invariably, before going to the theatre, in order to profit by every suggestion of alteration or hint of improvement they contained; and I was in the act of reperusing the last I ever received from him, when my father came in and said, “ Lawrence is dead.”

I had been sitting to him for some time previously for a pencil sketch which he gave my mother; it was his last work, and certainly the most beautiful of his drawings. He had appointed a day for beginning a full-length, life-size portrait of me as Juliet, and we had seen him only a week before his death, and, in the interval, received a note from him merely saying he was rather indisposed. His death, which was quite unexpected, created a very great public sensation, and there was something sufficiently mysterious about its circumstances to give rise to a report that he had committed suicide.

The shock of this event was terrible to me, although I have sometimes since thought it was fortunate for me rather than otherwise. Sir Thomas Lawrence’s enthusiastically expressed admiration for me, his constant kindness, his sympathy in my success, and the warm interest he took in everything that concerned me, might only have inspired me with a grateful sense of his condescension and goodness. But I was a very romantic girl, with a most excitable imagination, and such was to me the melancholy charm of Lawrence’s countenance, the elegant distinction of his person, and exquisite, refined gentleness of his voice and manner, that a very dangerous fascination was added to my sense of gratitude for all his personal kindness to me, and my admiration for his genius; and I think it not at all unlikely that, had our intercourse continued, and had I sat to him for the projected portrait of Juliet, in spite of the forty years’ difference in our ages, and my knowledge of his disastrous relations with my cousins, I should have become in love with him myself, and been the fourth member of our family whose life he would have disturbed and embittered. His sentimentality was of a peculiarly mischievous order, as it not only induced women to fall in love with him, but enabled him to persuade himself that he was in love with them, and apparently with more than one at a time.

While I was sitting to him for the beautiful sketch he gave my mother, one or two little incidents occurred that illustrated curiously enough this superficial pseudo-sensibility of his. On one occasion, when he spent the evening with us, my mother had made me sing for him, and the next day, after my sitting, he said in a strange, hesitating, broken manner, as if struggling to control some strong emotion, “ I have a very great favor to beg of you; the next time I have the honor and pleasure of spending the evening with you, will you, if Mrs. Kemble does not disapprove of it, sing this song for me? ” He put a piece of music into my hand, and immediately left us without another word. On our way home in the carriage, I unrolled the song, the title of which was These few pale Autumn Flowers. “ Ha! ” said my mother, with, I thought, rather a peculiar expression, as I read the words; but she added no further comment. Both words and music were plaintive and pathetic, and had an original stamp in the melancholy they expressed.

The next time Lawrence spent the evening with us, I sang the song for him. While I did so, he stood by the piano in a state of profound abstraction, from which he recovered himself as if coming back from very far away, and with an expression of acute pain on his countenance, to thank me repeatedly for what he called the great favor I had done him.

At the end of my next sitting, when my mother and myself had risen to take leave of him, he said, “No, don’t go yet, — stay a moment, — I want to show you something — if I can; ” and he moved restlessly about, taking up and putting down his chalks and pencils, and standing, and sitting down again, as if unable to make up his mind to do what he wished. At length he went abruptly to an easel, and, removing from it a canvas with a few slight sketches on it, he discovered behind it the profile portrait of a lady in a white dress folded simply across her bosom, and showing her beautiful neck and shoulders. Her head was dressed with a sort of sibylline turban, and she supported it upon a most lovely hand and arm, her elbow resting on a large book, towards which she bent, and on the pages of which her eyes were fixed, the exquisite eyelid and lashes hiding the eyes. “ Oh, how beautiful! oh, who is it! ” exclaimed I. “A—: a lady,” stammered Lawrence, turning white and red, “ towards whom — for whom — I entertained the profoundest regard.” Thereupon he fled out of the room. “ It is the portrait of Mrs. W—,” said my mother; " she is now dead; she was an exceedingly beautiful and accomplished woman, the authoress of the words and music of the song Sir Thomas Lawrence asked you to learn for him.”

The great painter’s devotion to this lovely person had been matter of notoriety in the London world. Strangely enough, but a very short time ago I discovered that she was the kinswoman of my friend Miss Cobbe’s mother, of whom Miss Cobbe possessed a miniature in which the fashion of dress and style of head-dress were the same as those in the picture I saw, and in which T also traced some resemblance to the beautiful face which made so great an impression on me. Not long after this Mrs. Siddons, dining with us one day, asked my mother how the sketch Lawrence was making of me was getting on. After my mother’s reply, my aunt remained silent for some time, and then, laying her hand on my father’s arm, said, “ Charles, when I die, I wish to be carried to my grave by you and Lawrence.” Lawrence reached his grave while she was yet tottering on the brink of hers.

After my next sitting, my mother, thinking he might be gratified by my aunt’s feeling towards him, mentioned her having dined with us. He asked eagerly of her health, her looks, her words, and my mother telling him of her speech about him, he threw down his pencil, clasped his hands, and, with his eyes full of tears and his face convulsed, exclaimed, “Good God! did she say that? ”

When my likeness was finished, Lawrence showed it to my mother, who, though she had attended all my sittings, had never seen it till it was completed. As she stood silently looking at it, he said, “ What strikes you? what do you think? ” “ It is very like Maria,” said my mother, almost involuntarily, I am sure, for immediately this strange man fell into one of these paroxysms of emotion, and became again so agitated as scarcely to be able to speak; and at last, with a violent effort, said, “ Oh, she is very like her; she is very like them all! ”

In spite of these emotions, which I heard and saw Sir Thomas Lawrence express, I know positively that at his death a lady who had been an intimate acquaintance of our family for many years put on widow’s weeds for him, in the full persuasion that had he lived he would have married her, and that the mutual regard they entertained for each other warranted her assuming the deepest mourning for him. Not the least curious part of the emotional demonstrations I have described was the contrast which they formed to Sir Thomas Lawrence’s habitual demeanor, which was polished and refined, but reserved to a degree of coldness, and as indicative of reticent discretion and imperturbable self-control as became a man who lived in such high social places, and frequented the palaces of royalty and the boudoirs of the great rival beauties of the English aristocracy.

On my twentieth birthday, which occurred soon after my first appearance, Lawrence sent me a magnificent proofplate of Reynolds’s portrait of my aunt as the Tragic Muse, beautifully framed and with this inscription: “This portrait, by England’s greatest painter, of the noblest subject of his pencil, is presented to her niece and worthy successor, by her most faithful humble friend and servant, Lawrence.”When my mother saw this, she exclaimed at it, and said, “ I am surprised he ever brought himself to write those words — her ‘ worthy successor.’" A few days after, Lawrence begged me to let him have the print again, as he was not satisfied with the finishing of the frame. It was sent to him, and when it came back he had effaced the words in which he had admitted any worthy successor to his Tragic Muse; and Mr. H—, who was at that time his secretary, told me that Lawrence had the print lying with that inscription in his drawing - room for several days before sending it to me, and had said to him, “ Cover it up, I cannot bear to look at it.”

One day, at the end of my sitting, Lawrence showed me a lovely portrait of Mrs. Inchbald, of whom my mother, as we drove home, told me a number of amusing anecdotes. She was very beautiful, and gifted with original genius, as her plays and farces and novels (above all, the Simple Story) testify; she was not an actress of any special merit, but of respectable mediocrity. She stuttered habitually, but her delivery was never impeded by this defect on the stage; a curious circumstance, not uncommon to persons who have that infirmity, and who can read and recite without suffering from it, though quite unable to speak fluently. Mrs. Inchbald was a person of a very remarkable character, lovely, poor, with unusual mental powers and of irreproachable conduct. Her life was devoted to the care of some dependent relation, who from sickness was incapable of self - support. Mrs. Inchbald had a singular uprightness and unworldliness, and a childlike directness and simplicity of manner, which, combined with her personal loveliness and halting, broken utterance, gave to her conversation, which was both humorous and witty, a most peculiar and comical charm. Once after traveling all day in a pouring rain, on alighting at her inn, the coachman, dripping all over with wet, offered his arm to help her out of the coach, when she exclaimed, to the great amusement of her fellow-travelers, “ Oh, no, no! y-y-y-you will give me m-m-m-my death of c-c-c-cold; do bring me a-a-a-a dry man.” An aristocratic neighbor of hers, with whom she was slightly acquainted, driving with his daughter in the vicinity of her very humble suburban residence, overtook her walking along the road one very hot day, and, stopping his carriage, asked her to let him have the pleasure of taking her home; when she instantly declined, with the characteristic excuse that she had just come from the market-gardener’s: “ And, my lord, I-I-I have my pocket f-f-f-full of onions,” — an unsophisticated statement of facts which made them laugh extremely. At the first reading of one of her pieces, a certain young lady with rather a lean, lanky figure being proposed to her for the part of the heroine, she indignantly exclaimed, “ No, no, no; II-I-I won’t have that s-s-s-stick of a girl! D-d-d-do give me a-a-a girl with bumps ! ” Coming off the stage one evening, she was about to sit down by Mrs. Siddons in the green-room, when suddenly, looking at her magnificent neighbor, she said, “ No, I won’t s-s-s-sit by you; you’re t-t-t-too handsome!” — in which respect she certainly need have feared no competition, and less with my aunt than any one, their style of beauty being so absolutely dissimilar. Somebody speaking of having oysters for supper, much surprise was excited by Mrs. Inchbald’s saying that she had never eaten one. Questions and remonstrances, exclamations of astonishment and earnest advice to enlarge her experience in that respect assailed her from the whole greenroom, when she finally delivered herself thus: “ Oh, no indeed! I-I-I-I never, never could! What! e-e-e-eat the eyes and t-t-t-the nose, the teeth a-a-a-and the toes, the a-a-a-all of a creature!” She was an enthusiastic admirer of my uncle John, and the hero of her Simple Story, Doriforth, is supposed to have been intended by her as a portrait of him. On one occasion, when she was sitting by the fire-place in the green-room, waiting to be called upon the stage, she and Miss Mellon (afterwards Mrs. Coutts and Duchess of St. Albans) were laughingly discussing their male friends and acquaintances from the matrimonial point of view. My uncle John, who was standing near, excessively amused, at length jestingly said to Mrs. Inchbald, who had been comically energetic in her declarations of who she could or would, or never could or would, have married, “ Well, Mrs. Inchbald, would you have had me? ” “ Dear heart! ” said the stammering beauty, turning her sweet, sunny face up to him, “ I’d have j-j-j-jumped at you! ”

One day Lawrence took us, from the room where I generally sat to him, into a long gallery where were a number of his pictures, and, leading me by the hand, desired me not to raise my eyes till he told me. On the word of command I looked up, and found myself standing close to and immediately underneath, as it were, a colossal figure of Satan. The sudden shock of finding myself in such proximity to this terrible image made me burst into nervous tears. Lawrence was greatly distressed at the result of his experiment, which had been simply to obtain a verdict from my unprepared impression of the power of his picture. A conversation we had been having upon the subject of Milton and the character of Satan had made him think of showing this picture to me. I was too much agitated to form any judgment of it, but I thought I perceived through its fierce and tragical expression some trace of my uncle’s face and features, a sort of “more so” of the bitter pride and scornful melancholy of the banished Roman in the Volscian Hall. Lawrence’s imagination was so filled with the poetical and dramatic suggestions which he derived from the Kemble brother and sister, that I thought a likeness of them lurked in this portrait of the Prince of Darkness; and perhaps he could scarcely have found a better model for his arch-fiend than my uncle, to whom his mother occasionally addressed the characteristic reproof, “ Sir, you are as proud as Lucifer! ” (He and that remarkable mother of his must really have been a good deal like Coriolanus and Volumnia.) To console me for the fright he had given me, Lawrence took me into his drawing-room, — that beautiful apartment filled with beautiful things, including his magnificent collection of original drawings by the old masters, and precious gems of old and modern art, — the treasure-house of all the exquisite objects of beauty and curiosity that he had gathered together during his whole life, and that (with the exception of Raphael’s and Michael Angelo’s drawings, now in the museum at Oxford) were so soon, at his most unexpected death, to be scattered abroad and become, in separate, disjointed portions, the property of a hundred different purchasers. Here, he said, he hoped often to persuade my father and mother and myself to pass our unengaged evenings with him; here he should like to make, my brother John, of whom I had spoken enthusiastically to him, free of his art collections; and, adding that he would write to my mother to fix the day for my first sitting for Juliet, he put into my hands a copy of the first edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost. I never entered that room or his house, or saw him again; he died about ten days after that.

Lawrence did not talk much while he took his sketch of me, and I remember very little that passed between him and my mother but what was purely personal. I recollect he told me that I had a double row of eyelashes, which was an unusual peculiarity. He expressed the most decided preference for satin over every other material for painting, expatiating rapturously on the soft, rich folds and infinitely varied lights and shadows which that texture afforded above all others. He has dressed a great many of his female portraits in white satin. He also once said that he had been haunted at one time with the desire to paint a blush, that most enchanting “ incident ” in the expression of a woman’s face, but, after being driven nearly wild with the ineffectual endeavor, had had to renounce it, never, of course, he said, achieving anything but a red face. I remember the dreadful impression made upon me by a story he told my mother of Lady Jœ(George the Fourth’s Lady Jœ), who, standing before her drawing-room looking-glass, and unaware that he was in the room, apostrophized her own reflection with this reflection: “I swear, it would be better to go to hell at once, than live to grow old and ugly.”

Lawrence once said that we never dreamed of ourselves as younger than we were; that even if our dreams reproduced scenes and people and circumstances of our youth and childhood, we were always represented, by our sleeping imagination, at our present age. I presume he spoke of his own experience, and I cannot say that I recollect any instance in mine that contradicts his theory. It seems curious, if it is true, that in the manifold freaks of our sleeping fancy, self-consciousness should still exist to a sufficient degree to preserve unaltered one’s own conditions of age and physical appearance. I wonder whether this is really the common experience of people’s dreams? Frederick Maurice told me a circumstance in curious opposition to this theory of Lawrence’s. A young woman whom he knew, of more than usual mental and moral endowments, married a man very much her inferior in mind and character, and appeared to him to deteriorate gradually but very perceptibly under his influence. “ As the husband is, the wife is,” etc. Towards the middle of her life she told him that at one time she had carried on a double existence in her sleeping and waking hours, her dreams invariably taking her back to the home and period of her girlhood, and that she resumed this dream-life precisely where she left it off, night after night, for a considerable period of time, — poor thing! — perhaps as long as the roots of the young nobler self survived below the soil of a baser present existence. This story seemed to me always very pathetic. It must have been dismal to lose that dreamlife by degrees, as the real one ate more and more into her nature.

Of Lawrence’s merit as a painter an unduly favorable estimate was taken during his life, and since his death his reputation has suffered an undue depreciation. Much that he did partook of the false and bad style which, from the deeper source of degraded morality, spread a taint over all matters of art and taste, under the vicious influence of the “ first gentleman of Europe,” whose own artistic preferences bore witness, quite as much as the more serious events of his life, how little he deserved the name. Hideous Chinese pagoda pavilions, with grotesque and monstrous decorations, barbarous alike in form and in color; mean and ugly low-roomed royal palaces, without either magnificence or simplicity; military costumes in which gold and silver lace were plastered together on the same uniform, testified to the perverted perception of beauty and fitness which presided in the court of George the Fourth. Lawrence’s own portrait of him, with his corpulent body girthed in his stays and creasclcss coat, and his heavy falling cheeks supported by his stiff stock, with his dancing-master’s leg and his frizzled barber’s-block head, comes as near a caricature as a flattered likeness of the original (which was a caricature) dares to do. To have had to paint that was enough to have vulgarized any pencil. The defect of many of Lawrence’s female portraits was a sort of artificial sentimental elegantism. Pictures of the fine ladies of that day they undoubtedly were, pictures of great ladies, never; and, in looking at them, one sighed for the exquisite simple grace and unaffected dignity of Reynolds’s and Gainsborough’s noble and gentle women. The lovely head of Lady Nugent, the fine portrait I have mentioned of Mrs. W—, the splendid one of Lady Hatherton, and the noble picture of my grandmother, are among the best productions of Lawrence’s pencil; and several of his men’s portraits are in a robust and simple style of art worthy of the highest admiration. His likeness of Canning (which, by the bye, might have passed for his own, so great was his resemblance to the brilliant statesman) and the fine portrait be painted for Lord Aberdeen, of my uncle John, are excellent specimens of his best work. He had a remarkable gift of producing likenesses at once striking and favorable, and of always seizing the finest expression of which a face was capable; and none could ever complain that Lawrence had not done justice to the very best look they ever wore. Lawrence’s want of conscience with regard to the pictures which he undertook and never finished is difficult to account for by any plausible explanation. The fact is notorious that in various instances, after receiving the price of a portrait, and beginning it, he procrastinated and delayed and postponed the completion, until, in more than one case, the blooming beauty sketched upon his canvas had grown faded and wrinkled before the image of her youthful loveliness had been completed.

The renewal of intercourse between Lawrence and my parents, so soon to be terminated by his death, was the cause to me of a loss which I shall never cease to regret. My father had had in his library for years (indeed, as long as I remember) a large volume of fine engravings of the masterpieces of the great Italian painters, and this precious book of art we were occasionally allowed to look at for an hour of rare delight; but it belonged to Sir Thomas Lawrence, and had accidentally been kept for this long space of time in my father’s possession. One of my mother’s first acts, on again entering into friendly relations with Lawrence, was to restore the piece of property to him; a precipitate act of honesty which I could not help deploring, especially when, so soon after this deed of rash restitution, his death brought those beautiful engravings, with all the rest of his property, to the hammer.

There is no early impression stronger in my mind than that of some of those masterpieces, which, together with Winckelmann’s fine work on classical art (our familiarity with which I have elsewhere alluded to), were among the first influences of the sort which I experienced. Nor can I ever be too grateful that, restricted as were my parents’ means of developing in us the highest culture, they were still such as, combined with their own excellent taste and judgment, preserved us from that which is far worse than ignorance, a liking for anything vulgar or trivial. That which was merely pretty, in music, painting, or poetry, was never placed on the same level in our admiration with that which was fine; and though, from nature as well as training, we enjoyed with great zest everything that could in any sense be called good, our enthusiasm was always reserved for that which was best,, an incalculable advantage in the formation of a fine taste and critical judgment. A noble ideal beauty was what we were taught to consider the proper object and result of all art. In their especial vocation this tendency caused my family to be accused of formalism and artificial pedantry; and the so-called “classical” school of acting, to which they belonged, has frequently since their time been unfavorably compared with what, by way of contrast, has been termed the realistic or natural style of art. I do not care to discuss the question, but am thankful that my education preserved me from accepting mere imitation of nature as art, on the stage or in the picture gallery; and that, without destroying my delight in any kind of beauty, it taught me a decided preference for that which was highest and noblest.

All being in due preparation for my coming out, my rehearsals were the only interruption to my usual habits of occupation, which I pursued very steadily in spite of my impending trial. On the day of my first appearance I had no rehearsal, for fear of overfatigue, and spent my morning as usual, in practicing the piano, walking in the in closure of St. James’s Park opposite our house, and reading in Blunt’s Seripture Characters (a book in which I was then deeply interested) the chapters relating to St. Peter and Jacob. I do not know whether the nervous tension which I must have been enduring strengthened the impression made upon me by what I read, but I remember being quite absorbed by it, which I think was curious, because certainly such subjects of meditation were hardly allied to the painful undertaking so immediately pressing upon me. But I believe I felt imperatively the necessity of moderating my own strong nervous emotion and excitement by the fulfillment of my accustomed duties and pursuits, and above all by withdrawing my mind into higher and serener regions of thought as a respite and relief from the pressure of my alternate apprehensions of failure and hopes of success. I do not mean that it was at all a matter of deliberate calculation or reflection, but rather an instinct of self-preservation, which actuated me; a powerful instinct which has struggled and partially prevailed throughout my whole life against the irregular and passionate vehemence of my temperament, and which, in spite of a constant tendency to violent excitement of mind and feeling, has made me a person of unusually systematic pursuits and monotonous habits, and been a frequent subject of astonishment, not unmixed with ridicule, to my friends, who have not known as well as myself what wholesomeness there was in the method of my madness. And I am persuaded that religion and reason alike justify such a strong instinctive action in natures which derive a constant moral support, like that of the unobserved but all-sustaining pressure of the atmosphere, from the soothing and restraining influence of systematic habits of monotonous regularity. Amid infinite anguish and errors, existence may preserve a species of outward symmetry and harmony from this strong band of minute observance keeping down and assisting the mind to master elements of moral and mental discord and disorder, for the due control of which the daily and hourly subjection to recurring rules is an invaluable auxiliary to higher influences. The external practice does not supply, but powerfully supplements the internal principle of self-control.

My mother, who had left the stage for upwards of twenty years, determined to return to it on the night of my first appearance, that I might have the comfort and support of her being with me in my trial. We drove to the theatre very early, indeed while the late autumn sunlight yet lingered in the sky; it shone into the carriage upon me, and as I screened my eyes from it, my mother said, “ Heaven smiles on you, my child.” My poor mother went to her dressingroom to get herself ready, and did not return to me for fear of increasing my agitation by her own. My dear aunt Dall and my maid and the theatre dresser performed my toilet for me, and at length I was placed in a chair, with my satin train carefully laid over the back of it, and there I sat, ready for execution, with the palms of my hands pressed convulsively together, and the tears I in vain endeavored to repress welling up into my eyes and brimming slowly over, down my rouged cheeks, upon which my aunt, with a smile full of pity, renewed the color as often as these heavy drops made unsightly streaks in it. Once and again my father came to the door, and I heard his anxious “ How is she?” to which my aunt answered, sending him away with words of comforting cheer. At last, “Miss Kemble called for the stage, ma’am! ” accompanied with a brisk tap at the door, started me upright on my feet, and I was led round to the side scene opposite to the one from which I saw my mother advance on the stage; and while the uproar of her reception filled me with terror, dear old Mrs. Davenport, my nurse, and dear Mr. Keely, her Peter, and half the dramatis personœ of the play but not my father, who had retreated, quite unable to endure the scene) stood round me as I lay, all but insensible, in my aunt’s arms. “ Courage, courage, dear child! poor thing, poor thing!” reiterated Mrs. Davenport. “ Never mind ’em, Miss Kemble!” urged Keely, in that irresistibly comical, nervous, lachrymose voice of his, which I have never since heard without a thrill of anything but comical association; “never mind ’em! don’t think of ’em, any more than if they were so many rows of cabbages! ’ “ Nurse! ” called my mother, and on waddled Mrs. Davenport, and, turning back, called in her turn, “ Juliet! ” My aunt gave me an impulse forward, and I ran straight across the stage, stunned with the tremendous shout that greeted me, my eyes covered with mist, and the green baize flooring of the stage feeling as if it rose up against my feet; but I got hold of my mother, and stood like a terrified creature at bay, confronting the huge theatre full of gazing human beings. I do not think a word I uttered during this scene could have been audible; in the next, the ball-room, I began to forget myself; in the following one, the balcony scene, I had done so, and for aught I knew I was Juliet; the passion I was uttering sending hot waves of blushes all over my neck and shoulders, while the poetry sounded like music to me as I spoke it, with no consciousness of anything before me, utterly transported into the imaginary existence of the play. After this I did not return into myself till all was over, and amid tumultuous storm of applause, congratulation, tears, embraces, and a general joyous explosion of unutterable relief at the fortunate termination of my attempt, we went home. And so my life was determined, and I devoted myself to an avocation which I never liked or honored, and about the very nature of which I have never been able to come to any decided opinion. It is in vain that the undoubted specific gifts of great actors and actresses suggest that all gifts are given for rightful exercise, and not suppression; in vain that Shakespeare’s plays urge their imperative claim to the most perfect illustration they can receive from histrionic interpretation: a business which is incessant excitement and factitious emotion seems to me unworthy of a man; a business which is public exhibition, unworthy of a woman.

At four different periods of my life I have been constrained by circumstances to maintain myself by the exercise of my dramatic faculty; latterly, it is true, in a less painful and distasteful manner, by reading, instead of acting. But though I have never, I trust, been ungrateful for the power of thus helping myself and others, or forgetful of the obligation I was under to do my appointed work conscientiously in every respect, or unmindful of the precious good regard of so many kind hearts that it has won for me; though I have never lost one iota of my own intense delight in the act of rendering Shakespeare’s creations; yet neither have I ever presented myself before an audience without a shrinking feeling of reluctance, or withdrawn from their presence without thinking the excitement I had undergone unhealthy, and the personal exhibition odious.

Nevertheless I sat me down to supper that night with my poor, rejoicing parents well content, God knows! with the issue of my trial; and still better pleased with a lovely little Geneva watch, the first I had ever possessed, all encrusted with gold work and jewels, which my father laid by my plate and I immediately christened Romeo, and went, a blissful girl, to sleep with it under my pillow.

BUCKINGHAM GATE, JAMES STREET, December 14th. }

DEAREST H—: I received your letter this morning, before I was out of my room, and very glad I was to get it. You would have heard from me again ere this had it not been that, in your present anxious state of mind respecting your brother, I did not like to demand your attention for my proceedings. My trial is over, and, thank Heaven! most fortunately. Our most sanguine wishes could hardly have gone beyond the result, and at the same time that I hail my success as a source of great happiness to my dear father and mother, I almost venture to hope that the interest which has been excited in the public may tend to revive once more the decaying dramatic art. You say it is a very fascinating occupation; perhaps it is, though it does not appear to me so, and I think it carries with it drawbacks enough to operate as an antidote to the vanity and love of admiration which it can liardlv fail to foster. The mere embodying of the exquisite ideals of poetry is a great enjoyment, but after that, or rather for that, comes in ours, as in all arts, the mechanical process, the labor, the refining, the controlling the very feeling one has, in order to manifest it in the best way to the perception of others; and when all that intense feeling and careful work can accomplish is done, an actor must often see those points of his performance which are most worthy of approbation overlooked, and others, perhaps crude in taste or less true in feeling, commended; which must tend much, I think, to sober the mind as to the value of applause. Above all, the constant consciousness of the immeasurable distance between a fine conception and the best execution of it must in acting, as in all art, be a powerful cheek to vanity and self-satisfaction.

As to the mere excitement proceeding from the public applause of a theatre, I am sure you will believe me when I say I do not think I shall ever experience it. But should I reckon too much upon my own steadiness, I have the incessant care and watchfulness of my dear mother to rely on, and I do rely on it as an invaluable safeguard, both to the purity and good taste of all that I may do on the stage, and the quiet and soberness of my mind under all this new excitement. She has borne all her anxieties wonderfully well, and I now hope she will reap some repayment for them; my dear father is very happy; indeed, we have all cause for heartfelt thankfulness when we think what a light has dawned upon our prospects, lately so dismal and overcast. My own motto in all this must be, as far as possible, “ Beget a temperance in all things.” I trust I shall be enabled to rule myself by it, and in the firm hope that my endeavor to do what is right will be favored and assisted, I have committed myself, nothing doubting, to the stormy sea of life. Dearest H—, the papers will give you a detailed account of my début; I only wish to assure you that I have not embraced this course without due dread of its dangers, and a firm determination to watch, as far as in me lies, over its effect upon my mind. It is after all but lately, you know, that I have become convinced that fame and gratified ambition are not the worthiest aims for one’s exertions. With affectionate love, believe me ever your fondly attached, FANNY.

I most sincerely hope that your brother’s health is improving, and if we do not meet sooner, I shall now look forward to Dublin as our point de réunion; that will not be the least of the obligations I shall owe this happy turn of affairs.

I do not know whence I derived the deep impression I expressed in this letter of the moral dangers of the life upon which I was entering; certainly not from my parents, to whom, of course, the idea that actors and actresses could not be respectable people naturally did not occur, and who were not troubled, I am sure, as I then was, with a perception of the more subtle evils of their calling. I had never heard the nature of it discussed, and was absolutely without experience of it, but the vapid vacuity of the last years of my aunt Siddons’s life had made a profound impression upon me,— her apparent deadness and indifference to everything, which I attributed (unjustly, perhaps) less to her advanced age and impaired powers than to what I supposed the withering and drying influence of the overstimulating atmosphere of emotion, excitement, and admiration in which she had passed her life; certain it is that such was my dread of the effect of my profession upon me, that I added an earnest petition to my daily prayers that I might be defended from the evil influence I feared it might exercise upon me.

As for my success, there was, I believe, a genuine element in it, for puffing can send upwards only things that have a buoyant, rising quality in themselves; but there was also a great feeling of personal sympathy for my father and mother, of kindly indulgence for my youth, and of respectful recollection of my uncle and aunt; and a very general desire that the fine theatre where they had exercised their powers should be rescued, if possible, from its difficulties. All this went to make up a result of which I had the credit.

Among my experiences of that nauseous ingredient in theatrical life, puffery, some have been amusing enough. The last time that I gave public readings in America, the management of them was undertaken by a worthy, respectable person, who was not, I think, exceptionally addicted to the devices and charlatanism which appear almost inseparable from the business of public exhibition in all its branches. At the end of our first interview for the purpose of arranging my performances, as he was taking his leave he said, “Well, ma’am, I think everything is quite in a nice train. I should say things are in a most favorable state of preparation; we ’ve a delightful article coming out in the—.”Here he mentioned a popular periodical. “ Ah, indeed?” said I, not quite apprehending what my friend was aiming at. “ Yes, really, ma’am, I should say first-rate, and I thought perhaps we might induce you to be good enough to help us a little with it.” “Bless me! ” said I, more and more puzzled, “how can I help you? ” “ Well, ma’am, with a few personal anecdotes, perhaps, if you would be so kind.” “Anecdotes?” said I (with three points of interrogation). “ What do you mean? What about? ” “ Why, ma’am ” (with a low bow), “ about Mrs. Kemble, of course.” Now, my worthy agent’s remuneration was to consist of a certain proportion of the receipts of the readings, and, that being the case, I felt I had no right absolutely to forbid him all puffing advertisements and decently legitimate efforts to attract public attention and interest to performances by which he was to benefit. At the same time, I also felt it imperatively necessary that there should be some limit to these proceedings, if I was to be made a party to them. I therefore told him that, as his interest was involved in the success of the readings, I could not forbid his puffing them to some extent, as, if I did, he might consider himself injured. “ But,” said I, while refusing the contribution of any personal anecdotes to his forthcoming article, “ take care what you do in that line, for if you overdo it in the least, I will write an article, myself, on my readings, showing up all their faults and turning them into ridicule as I do not believe any one else either would or could. So puff just as quietly as you can.” I rather think my agent left me with the same opinion of my competency in business that Mr. Macready had expressed as to my proficiency in my profession, namely, that “I did not know the rudiments of it.”

Mr. Mitchell, who from the first took charge of all my readings in England, and was the very kindest, most considerate, and most courteous of all managers, on one occasion, complaining bitterly to my sister of the unreasonable objection I had to all laudatory advertisements of my readings, said to her, with a voice and countenance of the most rueful melancholy, and with the most appealing pathos, “ Why, you know, ma’am, it’s really dreadful; you know, Mrs. Kemble won’t even allow us to say in the bills, these celebrated readings ; and you know, ma’am, it ’s really impossible to do with less; indeed it is! Why, ma’am, you know even Morrison’s pills are always advertised as these celebrated pills.”' —an illustration of the hardships of his case which my sister repeated to me with infinite delight.

When I saw the shop-windows full of Lawrence’s sketch of me, and knew myself the subject of almost daily newspaper notices, when plates and saucers were brought to me with small figures of me as Juliet and Belvidera on them, and finally, when gentlemen showed me lovely buff-colored neck-handkerchiefs which they had bought, and which had, as I thought, pretty lilac-colored flowers all over them, which proved on nearer inspection to be minute copies of Lawrence’s head of me, I not unnaturally, in the fullness of my inexperience, believed in my own success.

I have since known more of the manufacture of public enthusiasm and public triumphs, and, remembering to how many people it was a matter of vital importance that the public interest should be kept alive in me, and Covent Garden filled every night I played, I have become more skeptical upon the subject.

Seeing lately a copy of my play of Francis the First, with (to my infinite astonishment) “ tenth edition ” upon it, I said to a friend, “ I suppose this was a bit of bookseller’s puffery; or did each edition consist of three copies? ” He replied, “ Oh, no, I think not; you have forgotten the furor there was about you when this came out.” At twenty I believed it all; at sixty-six I find it difficult to believe any of it.

It is certain, however, that I played Juliet upwards of a hundred and twenty times running, with all the irregularity and unevenness and immature inequality of which I have spoken as characteristics which were never corrected in my performances. My mother, who never missed one of them, would sometimes come down from her box and, folding me in her arms, say only the very satisfactory words, “ Beautiful, my dear!” Quite as often, if not oftener, the verdict was, “ My dear, your performance was not fit to be seen! I don t know how you ever contrived to do the part decently; it must have been by some knack or trick which you appear to have entirely lost the secret of; you had better give the whole thing up at once than go on doing it so disgracefully ill.”This was awful, and made my heart sink down into my shoes, whatever might have been the fervor of applause with which the audience had greeted my performance.

My life now became settled in its new shape. I acted regularly three times a week; I had no rehearsals, since Romeo and Juliet went on during the whole season, and so my mornings were still my own. I always dined in the middle of the day (and invariably on a muttonchop, so that I might have been a Harrow boy, for diet): I was taken by my aunt early to the theatre, and there in my dressing-room sat through the entire play, when I was not on the stage, with some piece of tapestry or needle-work, with which, daring the intervals of my tragic sorrows, I busied my fingers; my thoughts being occupied with the events of my next scene and the various effects it demanded. When I was called for the stage, my aunt came with me, carrying my train, that it might not sweep the dirty floor behind the scenes; and after spreading it out and adjusting its folds carefully, as I went on, she remained at the side scene till I came off again, then gathered it on her arm and, folding a shawl around me, escorted me back to my dressing-room and tapestry; and so my theatrical evenings were passed. My parents would not allow me to go into the green-room, where they thought my attention would be distracted from my business and where I might occasionally meet with undesirable associates. My salary was fixed at thirty guineas a week, and the Saturday after I came out, I presented myself for the first and last time at the treasury of the theatre to receive it, and carried it, clinking, with great triumph to my mother, the first money I ever earned.

It would be difficult to imagine anything more radical than the change which three weeks had made in the aspect of my whole life. From an insignificant school-girl, I had suddenly become an object of general public interest. I was a little lion in society, and the town talk of the day. Approbation, admiration, adulation, were showered upon me; every condition of my life had been altered, as by the wand of a fairy. Instead of the twenty pounds a year which my poor father squeezed out of his hardearned income for my allowance, out of which I bought (alas, with how much difficulty, seeing how many other things I would buy!) my gloves and shoes, I now had an assured income, as long as my health and faculties were unimpaired, of at least a thousand a year; and the thirty guineas a week at Covent Garden, and much larger remuneration during provincial tours, forever forbade the sense of destitution productive of the ecstasy with which, only a short time before I came out, I had found wedged into the bottom of my money drawer in my desk a sovereign that I had overlooked, and so had sorrowfully concluded myself penniless till next allowance day. Instead of trudging long distances afoot through the muddy London streets, when the hire of a hackney-coach was matter of serious consideration, I had a comfortable and elegant carriage; I was allowed, at my own earnest request, to take riding lessons, and before long had a charming horse of my own, and was able to afford the delight of giving my father one, the use of which I hoped would help to invigorate and refresh him. The faded, threadbare, turned, and dyed frocks which were my habitual wear were exchanged for fashionably - made dresses of fresh colors and fine texture, in which I appeared to myself transfigured. Our door was besieged with visitors, our evenings bespoken by innumerable invitations; social civilities and courtesies poured in upon us from every side in an incessant stream; I was sought and petted and caressed by persons of conventional and real distinction, and every night that I did not act, I might, if my parents had thought it prudent to let me do so, have passed in all the gayety of the fashionable world and the great London season. So much cordiality, sympathy, interest, and apparent genuine goodwill seemed to accompany all these flattering demonstrations, that it was impossible for me not to be touched and gratified, — perhaps, too, unduly elated. If I was spoiled and my head turned, I can only say I think it would have needed a strong head not to be so; but God knows how pitiful a preparation all this tinsel sudden success and popularity formed for the duties and trials of my after-life.

Frances Anne Kemble.