Mrs. Kemble's Letters

IN spite of the great mass of private correspondence offered to the public within the last, quarter of a century, we can think of .but three women, Mrs. Carlyle, Madame Craven, and Madame Mold, whose letters in any respect offer a parallel to those of Mrs. Kemble. This resemblance lies not so much in the style, the keen observation, the bold diagnosis, and the pretty variegated arrows shot almost at random, which amuse the reader, but may somewhere leave a sting, in which these letters remind us of Mrs. Carlyle’s ; nor in the exquisite feeling for family life, for friendship, for all beauty of the intellectual and moral order, in which Mrs. Kemble is nearly akin to Madame Craven ; nor yet in the capacity which belongs to the woman of the salon for a wide diversity of intimate friendships, and for keen appreciation of the exotic refinements of the most highly civilized life which characterize alike the writer and Madame Mohl ; but rather in the fact that each one of these women possesses, like Mrs. Kemble, the art of embodying the facts of her environment, giving definite shape and color to her surroundings, and presenting the men and women encountered day by day as in a magic mirror, where few of the shifting lights which constitute personality and make up life are lost. There is a wide difference in the way these four women write, and in the effect their letters produce upon the reader; but in each of them we discern the artist behind the detailed and balanced impression produced, — an artist under the spur of an imperative necessity to find some clear medium of expression, that takes the form of confidential letters, which are half a self-confession and half a work of art, presenting as they do, although unconsciously, by a cunning arrangement of details and stroke upon stroke of line and color, what the artist has seen, heard, and felt, thus making up in the total more than a narrative, — an idyl or a drama.

Of course another factor in such correspondence, and a powerful one, is friendly feeling, and a desire to share all with one in complete sympathy with the writer; but, as we know, that may exist quite independently of any capacity for producing good letters. George Sand’s letters are, in general, simple, serious, and charming, showing a large and tranquil outlook upon life, but the real human element nowhere emerges into full relief. When she writes about particular people, she idealizes, or philosophizes, or psychologizes ; that is, she crosses the borderland of actuality, and enters her own realm of romance. A thoroughly enjoyable letter-writer must have absolute truth for a starting-point, if only in order to give charm to his divagations on the road. Variations on a familiar air played out of tune delight, nobody with a true ear. Besides this instinctive habit of seeing accurately and reporting fairly, a keen vision and keener feelings are required, a wide sympathy with the facts of life, and, above all, the requisite “ push ” which comes from an unjaded literary talent and a strong individuality. For, after all. no matter what letters describe, the actual interest centres in the writer herself, and it is the revelation of her own character that gives worth to details which, except as manifestations of herself, would have little force or meaning.

If these Further Records lack the charm of Mrs. Kemble’s wonderful Records of a Girlhood, which first found favor with the public in the pages of The Atlantic under the title of Old Woman’s Gossip, or if they fail to touch contemporary life and thought with the same breadth and vigor which characterized her Later Records, they possess their own unique advantages, and could not easily be excelled in their clear presentation of a striking individuality and its milieu, or in their shrewd and accurate criticism of life. The present book is made up, not like the others from a general correspondence, but of two independent series of letters, each printed continuously : the first, addressed to Miss Harriet St. Leger, beginning’ in January, 1874, and ending with Miss St. Leger’s death, in 1877, taking up more than three quarters of the whole space, and making indeed a journal intime ; and the second to Mr. Arthur Malkin, infrequent, desultory, but still complete enough to give a general sketch of the writer’s experience from 1848 to 1883. There is a deplorable lack of good editing in the whole work, which might have been considerably shortened had the endless repetition of the same matter been omitted. Undated letters have been introduced in a way to make, at times, a bewildering jumble. Then, too, the want of chronological arrangement in the two distinct series of letters shows a singular indifference to the artistic make-up of the book on the part of author and publishers. Why those addressed to Mr. Malkin, most of which so far antedate those to Miss St. Leger, should not have been presented at the start, and finally have been merged in the fuller correspondence, is nowhere explained. However, the sudden transition offers the charm of the unexpected. In the twinkling of an eye the writer casts off the trappings of age, and reappears as the traditional Fanny Kemble midway in her brilliant career; crossing the ocean twice a year, and delighting both England and America with her readings; climbing mountains in Switzerland ; wintering in Rome and summering in Lenox. In truth, the letters to “Arthur,” both in their tone ami scope, afford a piquant contrast to those addressed to " H., " whose views of life, always serious, had plainly not lightened with the advance of age and loss of sight. Mrs. Kemble is evidently at not a little pains to put herself into sympathy with the deprivations of her elderly friend by herself coquetting with old age, as sexagenarians are apt to do. She is now many years older than when she wrote the latest in date of these letters ; yet when, in 1889, she was spending the summer in her beloved Switzerland, the group who were wont to gather in her tiny salon day after day — one of whom was a distinguished American novelist, and another John Walter Cross (who walked daily four miles across the glacier to join the little coterie) — found her, conversationally, at her inimitable best; never clearer in intellect or more ready with sallies of wit.

Miss St. Leger’s friendship had counted for much in Mrs. Kemble’s experience, and she was generous in acknowledgments. “ I have lost,” remarked the younger Pliny, when Corellius Rufus died, — “ yes, I have lost a witness of my own life; ” and this all readers of Mrs. Kemble’s various memoirs and letters know her beloved " H.” to have been to her. And certainly letters like Mrs. Kemble’s must have counted for much in the life of a blind invalid, past eighty years of age, written as they were with a complete absence of reserve, with marvelous facility of expression and trenchant powers of description, and out of an intellect swept clear of cobwebs. To see clearly and describe fearlessly belonged to Mrs. Kemble’s temper and habit, and in this full correspondence minuteness of detail amply atones in the way of interest for possible lack of variety. It seems to have been printed almost as it was written, the occasional hiatuses suggesting no obscure and conjectural private history,but rather serving to point to the meaning between the lines, while the initials are the most transparent veil to the personalities alluded to on every page.

Naturally, Mrs. Kemble’s return to Philadelphia, in 1874, stirred memories and associations of an experience which, in a life like hers, actually formed but a single chapter, and which during the busy years of her full after career as an actress and a reader must have seemed unreal, but now was brought up at every turn. Her relationship with those closest had, however, little of the intimate habit which usually accompanies ties of blood ; thus her constant allusions to her family take a delicate and piquant turn, and her admiring appreciation is tinged with a hundred pretty changeable lights of sentiment and also of criticism. She arranges her life at York Farm as completely as an Englishwoman may who perpetually reminds herself of American limitations. We may follow every detail of the quiet routine at York Farm, and each member of the household, from the central figure down to the setter dog and the canary bird, becomes individualized to us. Many vivid touches set forth the region round about, — the hurst of spring, the intense heats of summer, the wonderful transfiguration of autumn, the white and glittering splendors of winter, which seems to have expended its worst rigors in the years Mrs. Kemble lived at York Farm. The sloping fields undulate to the woods of Champlost, where lives her friend “ M.,” who is described over and over again, with a touch made exquisite by tender and admiring affection. Even the by-path leading to Champlost soon gains charm for the reader, — along a lane, across a park where fine oaks grow, with a gush of violets at the foot of the great trees, while the meadows on either side are blue-white with the starry blossoms of the euphrasia. A quick sense for nature’s refreshment and renovation to heart and soul is shown in every allusion to out-of-door life.

To transfer to this country not only the habits of English life, but also of English thought and the prejudices of a lifetime, was of course to make Mrs. Kemble an inexorable critic of everything American. We are accustomed to judicious strictures upon our manners, habits, and tendencies, — in fact, we frequently court them by asking foreigners, and particularly English people, for their candid opinion of us ; yet we do not get over a certain expectation of being pronounced faultless, and our withers are wrung when exceptions are taken to our public institutions and our national idiosyncrasies. There is no display of rosepink optimism in Mrs. Kemble’s criticisms, but it should be remembered that when she sets out to interpret our domestic habits and our public politics, she is answering the questions of a correspondent curious to know the worst of a country she believes little good of; indeed, is surprised should be inhabited by well-to-do people able to denationalize themselves by living in Europe.

That Mrs. Kemble, in spite of her fault-finding with America in certain minor details, was in sympathy with us at the time of the crisis of our history may be seen by this extract from a letter to Mr. Malkin in September, 1861:

£i The state of the country is very sad, and I fear will long continue to grieve and mortify its well-wishers ; but of the ultimate success of the North I have not a shadow of a doubt. I hope to God that neither England nor any other power from the other side of the water will meddle in the matter, but above all not England ; and thus, after some bad and good fighting, and an unlimited amount of brag and bluster on both sides, the South, in spite of a much better state of preparation, of better soldiers, better officers, and above all a much more unanimous and venomous spirit of hostility, will be obliged to knock under to the infinitely greater resources, and less violent but much more enduring determination, of the North. With the clearing away of this storm slavery will be swept from among the acknowledged institutions of America.”

This same power of what might be called divinatory diagnosis of the facts before her may be seen in certain remarks concerning Louis Napoleon in 1859. “ He is.” she writes, “ I take it, much wiser in his generation than any child of light; and yet, after all, the light that is in him (very powerful gas although it seems) may turn out sheer darkness in a little while.”

To return, however, to the impressions of our own country. Although Mrs. Kemble piques herself on being English in contradistinction to being American, and will not even accept the convenience of our decimal system, but goes on reckoning by cumbrous pounds, shillings, and pence, when such currency must have been a matter of sheer reminiscence, and although we are obliged to give up the hope that she will like any American institutions, yet she likes individual Americans. Our women, it is true, she considers cold and undemonstrative, but she says of our men: ‘‘You ask me if American men are Tike English men. No ; American gentlemen are a cross between English and French men, and yet really altogether like neither. They are more refined and modest than Frenchmen, and less manly, shy, and rough than Englishmen. Their brains are finer and flimsier, their bodies less robust and vigorous, than ours. We are the finer animals, and they the subtler spirits. Their intellectual tendency is to excitement and insanity, and ours to stagnation and stupidity.”

Her allusions to friendly intercourse with the editor of the Variorum Shakespeare, to whom she presents the pair of Shakespeare’s gloves which had once been the property of Garrick, and had been given by him to Mrs. Siddons, are charming, as are those to her familiar intercourse with Longfellow and his family. In speaking of Boston as she first knew it, she observes, in one of the many bracketed notes inserted in the correspondence : “ The persons I knew best and saw most frequently there were Dr. Channing; Prescott, Motley, the historians ; Felton, the learned Greek professor; Agassiz, the great scientific naturalist ; Hillard, Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow. Such an extraordinary contemporaneous collection of eminent and remarkable men in a comparatively small city ought to have resulted in a society that might have been the admiration and envy of the greatest civilized capitals of Europe. . . . With such material for the most charming and brilliant society, it has often been a subject of curious surprise to me that Boston had nothing that could be called so, — nothing comparable to that finest product of mature civilization, the frequent, easy, and delightful intercourse of highly cultivated and intelligent men and women. ... I had the honor, pleasure, and privilege of the acquaintance and friendship of these distinguished men, and was received by them with the most courteous kindness in their homes and families ; but a general society of them, attractive and interesting, such as their combined intercourse ought to have produced, did not exist among them. Three reasons may have tended to this result : the men worked too hard in their business abroad ; the women were too hard worked in their duties at home ; and I think the New Englanders inherited from the Old ones the want of both taste and talent for society, and from their Puritan ancestors a decided disinclination and incapacity for amusement in general, for amusingothers and being amused themselves.”

Probably she would confirm Matthew Arnold’s opinion that there exists in America no great society. Certainly she shows little sympathy for Lord Houghton’s genial optimism, who, she remarks (writing while he is staying a few days with her at York Farm), “has praised everything in the country, from the debased currency to the degraded government.’ ’ He was one of her lifelong friends, and in a sketch inserted, giving-some incidents of their acquaintance, she alludes to the time she first met him, at the age “ when conceit is the proud privilege of youth, and Monckton Milnes had a justifiable share of that great gift of the imperturbable gods.” The last time she saw Lord Houghton was when they were staying together at Mrs. Greville’s, and paid Alfred Tennyson an afternoon visit. “ The room where he received us commanded a fine view of the downs and the distant shining of the sea ; while the situation of the house itself, halfway up a hillside covered with fine trees, gave a striking effect to a sudden storm that darkened the sky, and swept the downs, and lashed with violent rain the window panes, against which the oaks bent and bowed themselves, writhingand struggling with the wind, while Alfred Tennyson, to whom Mrs. Greville had made an urgent request that he should read something to us, declaimed in his sonorous monotone the imprecations of his British Boadicea on her Roman Enemies. When he had finished reading, he brought me a Shakespeare which was on his writing-table, and, putting it in my hands, desired me to read something. ‘ What was this for ? ’ said I, taking a pen from between the leaves. ‘ Oh, to write his criticisms on Shakespeare,’ said Lord Houghton. I took possession of it. . . . and then read where it had divided the leaves, those wonderful computations of the worthlessness of life and the terrors of death spoken in the prison scene of Measure for Measure by the Duke and Claudio.”

We quote one more suggestion of the associations and intimacies of Mrs. Kemble’s fuller life: “ During the winter when my sister and myself were in Rome at the same time, we had an excellent custom of going on alternate weeks to spend a morning on the Campagna, always accompanied by the same party of our intimate friends, and carrying with us a picnic luncheon. Browning, Ampère, Sir Frederick Leighton, Lord Lyons, the sculptress Harriet Hosmer and a friend of hers, both known to us from their English girlhood, and two English sisters, our dear friends, one like a rippling brook in sunshine, the other like a still lake in moonlight, — with these, our invariable companions, we drove to some exquisite place in the flowery solitude of the magnificent desert which stretches on every side of Rome. We used to leave our carriages, and wander, and sit on the turf, and take our luncheon in the midst of all that was lovely in nature and picturesque in the ruined remains of Roman power and the immortal memories of Roman story. They were hours in such fellowship never to be forgotten. Alas, few now remain to remember them.”

Interludes like these inspire the regret that Mrs. Kemble has permitted us chiefly to gather the facts of her biography from her letters, since her complete reminiscences might have been so valuable, besides being so delightful. Letters are apt to voice complaints. It is in general our disquietude, our disappointment, our ennui, which give the spur to self-confession ; and literary work undertaken at a time of life when what is original, vital, fruitful, has largely been expended might gracefully take the form of recollections. She records an ingenious and graceful compliment from Frederika Bremer, upon whom she called one day, and found indisposed. Mrs. Kemble expressed a fear lest the exertion of receiving a visitor should be too much for her. " Oh, no ! ” Miss Bremer exclaimed ; then added, laughing, “ And yet I do not know that I ought to see so many people at once.” This pretty speech may be taken with two meanings; for Mrs. Kemble, one of the most brilliant and versatile women of this century, has in her time played many parts, not only on the stage, but in real life. She has been an actress, a dramatic reader, a poet, a playwriter, a voluminous writer in other literary forms, and she has throughout her career enjoyed high social distinction. Strange to say, in all her revelations of herself we nowhere see the whole woman dominated by an all-pervading idea, nor her powers fused into a single ambition. We suspect her of being most a poet, and, like other poets, chercheur de l’infini, whose secret goal of life dips far below the horizon, and is caught sight of only from the mountain top.

In every art in which she has expended an effort she has been more or less successful, and may be called a wonderfully clever woman all round, and not merely in this or that direction or quality. She always proclaimed her dislike for the stage, in spite of the éclat attending her career as an actress; and although the aerial charm of certain of her personations has never been surpassed, and must forever remain a tradition, it is generally considered that it was as a dramatic reader that she rose to the very zenith of her capabilities, embodying as she did with her matchless voice and with a marvelous versatility of sympathetic comprehension the whole scale of characters in every play she attempted. Whether her dislike of the stage sprang from a fastidious repugnance to the associations connected with it, or from her exacting demands upon her own powers, never fully satisfied, is a question which might be answered in different ways ; but quite unnecessarily. She herself remarks, in a letter to Mr. Malkin, apropos of Samuel Laurence, the portrait painter : “ If people have to live by bread, they should have as few opinions as possible, even about their own business, because one’s neighbors always know it better than one ’s self, in matters of art quite as much as any other matter.”

Speaking of the Life of Macready, she says: " How curious it seems to me that he could care as he did for his profession, having none of the feeling of contempt and dislike for it itself that I had, and then dislike and despise it because he thought it placed him socially in an inferior position! ... I do not think any of my people ever looked at their calling in that fashion.”

Apparently, the modern stage was known to her only by hearsay and rumor ; and when she alludes in one of her letters to the accounts of Henry Irving’s performances, she adds: “I have not seen a play of Shakespeare’s acted I do not know when. I think I should find such an exhibition extremely curious as well as entertaining.”

One wishes that she might have attended some “ Shakespearean revival,” and given us her impressions of the elaborate spectacular modern stage, with its fine-spun prettinesses and double-distilled subtleties, — clever substitutions which talent and invention impose for the missing genius once a sine qua non in a first-class actor. For Mrs. Kemble’s long life is the bridge which connects us with the ideas and traditions of the old school, which still remains the great school.

Mrs. Kemble’s intimate friendship with Miss Cobbe deserves particular mention, for it is evident that she derived benefit and stimulus from this influence. But, although she sympathizes with modern ideas, she is never carried into the wide sweep of curve which makes the orbit of the zealous reformer. On one occasion she sends for Mrs. Garret - Anderson, the “lady doctor,” and alluding to this visit, she remarks : “ The lady physicians that I have known have appeared to me clever and intelligent persons, but. with something hard and dry in their manner which would have struck me disagreeably in a man, but makes me wonder whether something especially and essentially womanly, tenderness, softness, refinement, must either be non-existent, or sacrificed in the acquirement of a manly profession and the studies it demands. On the other hand, it occurred to me that this very peculiarity of these ladies might be a judicious assumption of the manly unsympathetic ‘ habit of business ‘ tone and deportment.”

The letters contain nothing so fresh and exhilarating as the descriptions of her Alpine journeys, which seem to have been varied each year, until she gained a most comprehensive knowledge of the ins and outs of Switzerland. Her passion for mountain scenery dominates lesser impressions, and she writes from Sorrento: “ That which is sublime, severe, stern, dark, solemn, wild, and even savage is more to my taste than this profusion of shining, glittering, smiling, sparkling, beaming prospects and aspects.”

The letters are interspersed with anecdotes of well-known people, often piquant and characteristic, and invariably interesting. But there is no running after brilliant effects, and no effort to say fine or witty things. Still, they abound in the book, and help to make up the admirably balanced impression left by the letters, in which feeling, humorous perception, accurate judgment, clearheaded observation, and sympathy with life all have free play. It may be said of Mrs. Kemble, “ She brought an eye for all she saw,” and brought besides the wit to understand and power to describe.