Records of Later Life Part 52

I do not know who the amateurs are who are to act for the starving Irish with me in London. Forster, the editor of the _Examiner_, I hear, is one; Henry Greville, who, indeed, is the getter-up of the whole thing, another; but for the rest I do not know.

Your people are what are commonly called a generous people; and that, I suppose, is why they don't mind begging. I think it takes an immensity of generosity to beg.

Only think of Mr. Radley, here at the Adelphi, expressing his surprise, when he saw me, that you were not with me! Was not that really quite touching and nice of him?

My cousin, Charles Mason, is here.... His amiable temper and gentle manner made him a favorite with my poor mother, and I like to see him on that account....

How sorry I shall be for both you and Dorothy when your pleasant time at Torquay is over! especially for you, who will have to see misery and sometimes hear nonsense. I mean when you go back to Ireland; not, _of course_, while you are with me....

ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, Sunday, 7th.

I have minded what you said (as when didn't I?), and am swallowing ipecacuanha lozenges by the gross. It drives me almost crazy that you should be compelled to make your plans so dependent upon mine, which are so dependent upon the uncertain wills and arrangements of so many people.

The manager of the Princess's Theatre, where I am engaged to act in London, will not allow me to act for the proposed charity at the St.

James's Theatre. I offered to give up the engagement with him rather than break my promise to the amateurs and disappoint all their plans; but he will not let me off my engagement to him, and will not permit me to appear anywhere else before that takes place. I think he is injuring himself by balking a pet plan of amus.e.m.e.nt in which all manner of fine folks, lady patronesses, and the Queen herself, had been induced to interest themselves; and I think his preventing my acting for this charity will injure him much more than my appearance on this occasion, before my coming out at his theatre, could have done. But, of course, he must be the judge of his own interest; and, at any rate, having entered into an engagement with him, I cannot render myself liable to squabbles, and perhaps a lawsuit with him, about it. All these petty worries and annoyances torment and confuse me a good deal. I have a very poor brain for business, and there is something in the ign.o.ble vulgarity and coa.r.s.eness of manner that I occasionally encounter that increases my inapt.i.tude by the sort of dismay and disgust with which it fills me. If the person who has hired me does not relent about these charity representations, I shall be obliged to give them up, and then I shall act in Manchester at that time, instead of on the 25th and 27th of March, which had been before intended, but which I now think I should give to two representations in Chester on my way back from Dublin. All this, you see, is still in a state of most vexatious uncertainty, and I can give you no satisfaction about it, having been able to obtain none myself....

Perhaps, dearest Hal, I ought not to have asked you the precise meaning of what you wrote about dear little H----[her nephew, a charming child, who died in early boyhood], but, every now and then, those expressions which have become almost meaningless in the mouths of the great majority of those who use them strike me very much when used by thinking people.

Unless death produces in us an immediate accession of goodness (which, I think, in those who have labored faithfully to be good here, and are therefore prepared and ready for more goodness, it may), I cannot conceive that it should produce greater nearness to G.o.d.

Place, time, life, death, earth, heaven, are divisions and distinctions that we make, like the imaginary lines we trace upon the surface of the globe. But goodness, surely, is nearness to G.o.d, and _only_ goodness; and though I suppose those good servants of His who have striven to do His will while in this life are positively nearer to Him after death, I think it is because, in laying down the sins of infirmity that inevitably lodge in their mortal bodies, they really are thus much better after death.

I do not think this is the case with those who have not striven after excellence, which a young child can hardly be supposed to have done; because if there is one thing I believe in, it is that there is work to do for every soul called into conscious existence.... If Dorothy were to die, I should believe she had gone nearer to G.o.d. His care and love for us is, I verily believe, the nearest of all things to us; but I think our _conscious_ nearness to Him depends upon how we do His will--_i.e._ how we _strive_ to do it.

I do not speak of Christ in this discussion, because, you know, I think it was G.o.d's will, but man's nature, that He came to show us, and to teach; and this part of the subject would involve me in more than I have s.p.a.ce to write: but we will speak of this hereafter.

Is it not strange that Charles Greville and you should both be writing to me just now upon this same subject, of life after death?

I have been walking to-day and yesterday in the Botanical Garden here.... The place is full of the saddest and tenderest recollections to me; it is full, too, of innumerable witnesses of G.o.d's mercy and wisdom; plants and flowers from every climate, and the annual resurrection of the earth is already begun among them. I am very unwell to-day, but I was well yesterday, and this seems to be now the sort of life-tenure I may expect:--so be it.

G.o.d bless you, dear.

I am ever yours, f.a.n.n.y.

DEAR DOROTHY,

I send you a kiss, which Hal will give you for me.

MORRISON'S HOTEL, DUBLIN, March 14th, 1847.

MY DEAR HAL,

I think you must have begun to think that I never meant to write to you again; for it is seldom that three unanswered letters of yours are allowed to acc.u.mulate in my writing-book; but since I left Liverpool, I have really not had leisure to write....

The houses at Liverpool were crammed, but here last night there was a very indifferent one, partly, they say, owing to the fact that the Lord Lieutenant bespeaks the play for to-morrow night; but I should think it much more rational to account for it by the deplorable condition to which the famine has reduced the country, which ought to affect the minds of those whose bodies do not suffer with something like a sympathetic seriousness, inimical to public diversions....

I do not care to pursue the argument with you about the change produced by death in the existence of a child. That which you say about it appears to me to involve some absolute contradictions; but I would rather postpone the discussion till we meet.

Charles Greville began writing to me upon these subjects, with reference to the rapidly declining health and strength of his and my friend, Mary Berry; over whose approaching death he lamented greatly, although she is upwards of eighty years old, and, according to my notions, must be ready and willing to depart.

Charles Greville's ideas, as far as I can make them out, appear to me those of a materialist. His chief regret seems to be for the loss of a person he cared for, and the departure of a remarkable member of his society. Beyond these two views of the subject he does not appear to me to go.

He has sent me, in the last letter I received from him, an extract from one of Sir James Mackintosh's, on the death of his wife, which he calls a "touching expression of grief," but which strikes me as rather a deplorable expression of grief without other alleviation than the dim and doubtful surmise of a mind the philosophy of which had never accepted the consolations of revelation, and yet, under the pressure of sorrow, rejected the narrower and shallower ones of stoical materialism.

You wish to hear of my arrangement with my cousin, Charles Mason, and I will tell you when it is decided on....

I have had a note from your sister, asking me to dine with them any day after the 16th, when they expect to come to town; but I have declined the invitation, because I do not wish to give up dining with my brother Henry, who comes to me every day when I don't act....

It seems strange that you should ask me if uncertainty, torments me. It torments me SO that I never endure it, even when the only escape from it is by some conclusion that I know to be rash and ill-advised.

"The woman who deliberates," says the saying, "is lost." My loss has been, and ever will be, through precipitation, not deliberation. To choose anything, a gown even, is a martyrdom to me, and, unlike the generality of my s.e.x, I generally go into a shop, wis.h.i.+ng to look at nothing, and knowing only the precise color, material, and quant.i.ty of the stuff I mean to purchase; for if I were to leave myself the smallest discretion--option, we will say (I can hardly leave myself what I haven't got)--I should infallibly buy something revoltingly ugly, out of mere impatience of the investigation and deliberation necessary to get something that pleased me. It is to save myself from the trouble of choice that I have made so many arbitrary and, to your thinking, absurd rules about the details of my daily life; but they spare me indecision about trifles, and I find it, therefore, comfortable to follow them.

I am at Morrison's hotel; the rooms are clean, comfortable, and cheerful, but the fare is bad and far from abundant; but if the charges are meagre in proportion, I shall be satisfied, if not with food, at least with equity.

My friend Arthur Malkin is here, as secretary to one of the members of the committee sent out from England to organize relief for your wretched countrymen. He is good and clever, and it is a great pleasure to me to have him here. I am sorry Mr. Labouchere [afterwards Lord Taunton] is away in Parliament. I wished particularly to have met him.

Lord Bessborough was at the play last night, and sent, after it was over, to invite me to the St. Patrick's ball on Wednesday; but I have declined, as I do not feel at all well enough for dissipations that would bore as well as tire me. I am told he means to ask me to dine at the Castle, which I rather dread, as it is not, I believe, allowable to refuse a representative of majesty; but I dread the exertion and the tedium of the thing, and have a particular dislike to the notion of meeting ----....

Good-bye, my dear.

Ever yours, f.a.n.n.y.

[Our total ignorance of the laws of health and the accidents of sickness throws us necessarily for help upon the partial knowledge of physicians; but I am often reminded of what that admirable physician and charming man, Dr. Gueneau de Mussy, once said to me: "Madame, nous ne savons rien." "Ah mais!" remonstrated I, "cependant quelque chose?" "Absolument rien, madame," was the consolatory reply of one of the first medical men of Europe, under whose care both I and my sister then were, and to whose skilful and devoted care I attribute the preservation of my sister's life under circ.u.mstances of great peril.

The amateur performance given at the St. James's Theatre was Lord Ellesmere's translation of Victor Hugo's "Hernani," which had been acted sixteen years before under such very different circ.u.mstances, as far as I was concerned, at Bridgewater House. Mr. C---- was again the hero, as I the heroine, of the piece, but the part of Don Carlos was filled by Henry Greville, and that of the old Spanish n.o.ble by Mr. John Forster.

It was upon this performance that Mr. Macready pa.s.sed such annihilating condemnation, not even excepting from his d.a.m.natory sentence of total incapacity his friend and admirer, John Forster, whose mode of delivering the part of Don Ruez bore ludicrous witness to Macready's own influence and example, if not direct teaching.

Macready does not even mention poor Forster; the entry in his diary runs thus: "Went to the amateur play at the St. James's Theatre; the play "Hernani," translated by Lord Ellesmere, was in truth an _amateur_ performance. Greville and Craven were very good _amateurs_, but--tragedy by amateurs!"

The recital of a very graceful and touching poetical address, written by Lady Dufferin for the occasion, was part of the evening's work a.s.signed to me, and as I was so weak and suffering from my late severe illness as to be hardly able to stand, it was with a sense of having certainly done my share in the evening's charity that I brought my part of the performance to a close.

While standing at the side-scene before going on to speak this address, dear Lord Carlisle brought me a most exquisite bunch of flowers, saying, "I know I ought to throw this at your head from the front of the house, but I would rather lay it at your feet here."

He then, to my great amazement, proceeded to spread out my satin train for me with a dexterity so remarkable that I asked him where he had served his apprentices.h.i.+p. "Oh, at Court," said he, "at the drawing-rooms, where I have spread out and gathered up oceans of silk and satin, thousands of yards more than a counter-gentleman at Swan and Edgar's." He certainly had learned his business very well.

After leaving Dublin I entered into an arrangement with my cousin, Charles Mason, to become my agent, and make my engagements for me, undertaking the necessary correspondence with the managers who employed me, and looking after my money transactions with them for me. I stood greatly in need of some such a.s.sistance, being quite incompetent to the management of any business, and ignorant of all the usual modes of proceeding in theatrical affairs, to a degree that rendered it highly probable that my interests would suffer severely from my ignorance. My cousin, however, only rendered me this service for a very short time, as he left England for America soon after he undertook it; after which I reverted to my former condition of comparative helplessness, making my contracts with my employers as well as I could, and protecting myself from loss, and keeping out of troublesome complications and disputes, by the light of what natural reason and rect.i.tude I possessed; always making my engagements by the night, and thus limiting any possible loss I might sustain or inflict upon my employers, to my salary and their receipts, for one performance. I also reduced my written transactions to the very fewest and briefest communications possible, with my various theatrical correspondents, and have more than once had occasion to observe that precision, conciseness, and a rigid adherence to mere statements of terms, times, and purely indispensable details of business, were not the distinguis.h.i.+ng features of the letters of most of the men of business with whom I corresponded.]

QUEEN'S HOTEL, BIRMINGHAM, Sat.u.r.day, May 29th.

MY DEAR HAL,

How did you get through that dreary time after we parted? I did so repent not having left some of my "good angels," my flowers, with you; for though you do not care for them as I do, I love them so much that I think they would have seemed part of myself to you. What a vision remained to me of your lonely stay in that horrid room! But the day pa.s.sed, and its sorrow, as they all do; and when this reaches you, you will be comfortable and rested, and among your own people again.

From Liverpool to Crewe I had companions in the ladies' carriage in which I was; after that I had it to myself, and lay stretched on the ground for rest the whole of the rest of the way.

I finished Dr. Mays's memoir, and read through half Harriet Martineau's book, before I reached this place.

Women are always said to talk more than men, and yet I have generally observed that when Englishwomen who are strangers to each other travel together, not a single word is exchanged between them; while men almost invariably fall into discourse together. This, I suppose, is partly from the want of subjects of general interest among women, such as politics, agriculture, national questions of importance, etc., which form excellent common ground of conversation for chance companions; while the questions of human society and considerations which concern men and women alike may be too important or too futile, too general or too special, to admit of easy discussion with strangers. The fact is, that most women's subjects of interest are so purely personal and individual that they can only be talked over with intimates.

I like Harriet Martineau's book very much, though perhaps not quite so much as I expected. What pleases me best is its spirit, the Christian faith in good, which is really delightful; though I cannot help thinking she mistakes in supposing that one _must_ be very ill before one believes in G.o.d's sole law, _good_, more almost than in one's own existence.