Records of Later Life Part 53

The descriptions of natural objects are admirable, and the human loving-kindness excellent; but I think she pushes her propositions sometimes to the verge of paradox.... I am delighted to have it, and think it better reading than the _Dublin Magazine_.

I got here at a little after three. The house is upside down with cleansing processes, by reason of which I am put (till a smaller one can be got ready for me) into an amazingly lofty large room, with some good prints hung on the walls, and a pianoforte; seeing which privileges, I have declined transferring myself to any other apartment, and shall be made to pay accordingly.

Tell me of your errand to the theatre at Liverpool, and how you spent the day, and how the sea treated you, and everything about everything.

G.o.d bless you, my dear.

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

BRISTOL, Sunday, May 30th, 1847.

A thousand thanks, dear friend, for Liebig's book. You are right, I want something more to read. I finished Harriet Martineau (Oh, what ink! wait till I get some better) yesterday evening before tea, and the pamphlet on bread after I got into bed, and the "Liverpool Tragedy" (such a thing!) this morning in the railroad; so that your present of Liebig's book came to my wish and to my need, just as a gift from you should do; and I shall spend this Sunday afternoon in learning those wonderful things, and praising G.o.d for them.

I regret very much that I cannot recollect anything distinctly that I read, because the consequence is that books of an order calculated to be of the greatest use to me, books of fact and positive scientific knowledge, are really of less advantage to me than any others, because of their making no appeal to what I should call my emotional memory, and so they only profit me for the moment in which I read them. Works of imagination, of criticism, of history, and biography (even of metaphysical speculation), leave more with me than treatises of positive knowledge or scientific facts. From the others, a spirit, an animus, a general impression, a mental, moral, or intellectual accretion, remains with me; indeed, that is pretty much the whole result I obtain from anything I read. But books of _knowledge_, of scientific or natural facts, though they sometimes affect me beyond the finest poetry with an awe and delight that brings tears to my eyes, have but one invariable result with me, to add to my love and wonder of G.o.d. Their other uses depend, of course, upon the memory which retains and applies them subsequently, either in action or observation; and this I fail to do, by reason of forgetting: and it is a sorrow and a loss to me, because the whole world is in some sort transfigured, and life endowed with double significance, to those who are familiar with the details of the wonderful laws that govern them, and their self-communion must be as full of variety and interest as their conversation is to others.

I have infinite respect for knowledge; it is only second in value to wisdom, and to unite both is to be very _fortunate_--which word I use advisedly, for, though the n.o.bler of the two, wisdom is allowed to all, knowledge is not.

I agree with you in what you say of Harriet Martineau's book: the good in it is _her_ peculiar good (very good good it is, too), but it must be taken with the shadow of her bad upon it. It seems to me occasionally a little hard and dogmatical, and I have not liked it, upon the whole, as much as I expected, for it is rather less Christian than I expected; yet it is a very valuable book, and I was very thankful for it.

I shall send the recipe for making effervescing bread forthwith to Lenox, to Catherine Sedgwick, who is a martyr to dyspepsia and bad baking, and who, being herself an expert cook, will know how to have the staff of life prepared from these directions, so as to support instead of piercing her, as it mostly does, up among those country operators.

They never have good bread there, and are all miserable in consequence, especially herself and her brother Charles, who have delicate stomachs and cannot endure the heavy sour concoction which they are nevertheless obliged to swallow by way of daily bread. (I almost wonder how they manage to say the Lord's Prayer pet.i.tion for it.)

The note you forwarded me from Liverpool was another scream from that mad manageress about Macbeth. I wonder if her whole life is pa.s.sed in such agonies; I think it must be worse than the greatest bodily pain.

Only think, my dear, on arriving here, and inquiring for Hayes, I recollected that I had sent her to Bath and not to Bristol! "Consekens is," as Mr. Sam Weller says (but alas for you! you don't know Pickwick), that I have had to send off a porter from this house to Bath, per railway, to reclaim my erring maid, and fetch her hither; and, being Sunday, fewer trains go between the two places than usual, and she cannot get here till near four o'clock this afternoon, until which time I dare not trust myself to think of the state of mind of the abandoned (in the perfectly honest sense of the word) Bridget or Biddy Hayes; indeed, I shall not get her here till six this evening, and I only hope that I may then.

What a moon there was last night! and how it made me think of you, as it shone into the dark lofty room at Birmingham, where I sat playing and singing very sadly all by myself! The sea must have been as smooth as gla.s.s, and you cannot have been sick, even with your best endeavor.

The road from Birmingham here is quite pretty; the country in a most exquisite state of leaf and blossom; the crops look extremely well along this route; and the little cottage gardens, which delight my heart with their tidy cheerfulness, are so many nosegays of laburnum, honeysuckle, and lilac.

The stokers on all the engines that I saw or met this morning had adorned their huge iron dragons with great bunches of hawthorn and laburnum, which hung their poor blossoms close to the hissing hot breath of the boilers, and looked wretched enough. But this dressing up the engines, as formerly the stage-coach horses used to be decked with bunches of flowers at their ears on Mayday, was touching.

I suppose the railroad men get fond of their particular engine, though they can't pat and stroke it, as sailors do of their s.h.i.+p. Speculate upon that form of human love. I take it there is nothing which, being the object of a man's occupation, may not be made also that of his affection, pride, and solicitude, too. Were we--people in general, I mean--_Christians_, forms of government would be matters of quite secondary importance; in fact, of mere expediency. A republic, such as the American, being the slightest possible form of government, seems to me the best adapted to an enlightened, civilized _Christian_ community, a community who deserve that name; and, you know, the theory of making people what they should be is to treat them better than they deserve--an axiom that holds good in all moral questions, of which political government should be one.

This hotel is charming, clean, comfortable, cheerful, very nice.

Farewell. Give my kind regards to your people, and believe me

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

MY DEAR HAL,

_Go to Atkinson's and Co., 31, College Green, Dublin, and Pay 8 13s.

for my sister, and get a receipt for it, and send it to me, and do this just as fast as ever you love me--that is, this very minute._ I will repay you when we meet, or as much sooner as you may wish.

I have this morning received a note of eleven lines from Rome from Adelaide, without one single word of anything in it but a desire that I will immediately pay this debt for her; not a syllable about her husband, her children, herself, or any created thing, but Messrs.

Atkinson and Co., and 8 13s. Therefore do what she bids me, and I ask you "right away," as the Americans say, that I may send this afflicted soul her receipt, and bid her be at rest.

That they are still in Rome I know only by the address, which she does put, though not the date; as a compensation for which, however, she heads her letter with the sum she wishes me to pay, thus--

_Rome, Trinita dei Monti._ 8 13_s._

--a new way of dating a letter, it strikes me. She must have had poplin on the brain.

I wrote to you yesterday, my dear, and therefore have little to say to you. After all, _I_ had directed my poor maid perfectly _write_! (look how I've spelt this, in the tumult of my feelings and confusion of my thoughts!), and she arrived, but not till three o'clock in the afternoon, paper in hand, with the direction I had myself written as large as life--"The Great Western Hotel, Bristol." The fact is that I had made so sure that she would be here before I was, that, not finding her on my arrival, I made equally sure that I had misdirected her to Bath, and despatched one of the hotel porters thither to hunt for her, which he did, sans intermission, for two hours, and on his return had the pleasure of finding her here. What a capital thing a clear head is, to be sure! At least, I imagine so....

I have just come back from rehearsal at the theatre, where I found a letter from Emily, containing a bad account of her mother, and a most affectionate, cordial, illegible scrawl from poor dear old Mrs. Fitzhugh herself.

I also received a letter from Henry Greville, full of strictures upon my carriage and deportment on the stage, and earnestly entreating me to suffer his _coiffeur_ ("a clean, tidy foreigner") to whitewash me after the approved French method, _i.e._, to anoint my skin with cold cream, and then cover it with pearl powder; and this, not only my face, but my arms, neck, and shoulders. Don't you see me undergoing such a process, and submitting to such "manipulation"?

I have read more than half through Liebig, and am always tempted to glance at the paragraphs _ahead_ to see what wonders they contain. I have not yet consulted the last chapter for the "winding-up of the story." The marvels in the midst of which we exist are a "story without an end."

I find some of his details of "quant.i.ty" a little puzzling sometimes, but nothing else, and the book is delightful.

Charles Mason drank tea with me last night, and talked well, and with a good deal of information, about chemistry. He has read somewhat, and has some superficial knowledge of various subjects; moreover, is a judge of physiognomy, for he said he never saw a countenance with a more beautiful expression of goodness than yours. Evidently, like Beatrice, he can "see a church by daylight." Isn't it a pity that he can no longer be my agent? Were you not struck with his great resemblance to your idol, John Kemble? My mother used to say he was more like his son than his nephew; and never having seen his uncle even, the curious collateral likeness showed itself in all sorts of queer tricks in his delivery and deportment on the stage, where, in spite of his resemblance to his celebrated kinsman, he is a most lamentable actor. Of course, being an educated man, he speaks with "good discretion;" of the "emphasis" the less said the better.

I go to Bath to-morrow morning, and remain there until Thursday, when I return here to act Lady Macbeth and then go back again to represent that same lady at Bath either Friday or Sat.u.r.day.

Farewell, my dear. G.o.d bless you.

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

BATH, Wednesday, June 2d.

I have just had a long visit from Mr. C----, who is here, and who came to see me this morning with a young niece of his--a fair, sweet-looking girl of about eighteen, who, strangely enough, asked me a good many questions about my affairs.... At the end of their visit, I found that the young lady, while talking and listening to me, had torn up a visiting-card and, with the fragments of it, put together on the table the outline of a tiny Calvary, the cross upon a heap of rocks. I suppose she is a Catholic, like her uncle, and I wonder why so many religious people of all sorts and denominations take it for granted that others stand in need of "Hints to Religion." ...

I was reminded (unnecessarily) of you at the theatre yesterday evening when, immediately after the hateful stage-warning at my dressing-room door of "Overture on, ma'am!" (the summons to the actors who are to begin a piece), I heard the orchestra break forth into your favorite strain of "Sad and fearful was the story." ...

The instinctive horror of suffering of our poor human bodies is pitiful.

What a sorry martyr I should have made! though I think I should not so much object to others inflicting pain upon me as to inflicting it upon myself,--that seems to me such an absurd and disagreeable work of supererogation, I should never have been a self-body-torturer for the salvation of my soul....

You would have been amused yesterday evening if you had been at the theatre with me. The weather was so beautifully bright that I could not bear to shut the shutters and light the gas, so I dressed by the blessed light of heaven, and was sitting all rouged and arrayed for my part, working, with my back to the window, when a small mob of poor little ragged urchins, who had climbed over a railing that separated the theatre from a mean-looking street behind it, collected round it, and, clambering on each other's shoulders, cl.u.s.tered and hung like a swarm of begrimed bees at the window, which was near the ground, to enjoy the sight of me and my finery. Bridget, who is kind-hearted and fond of children, turned the dresses that were hanging up right side out for the edification of the poor little ragam.u.f.fins, and their comments were exceedingly funny and touching. We could hear all that they said through the window--how they wondered if I put _them_ beautiful dresses on one by one, or over each other; the rose in my hair, which you gave me, and the roses in my shoes, made them scream with delight; and if you could have heard the pathetic earnestness with which one of them exclaimed, "Oh my! don't you wish _them ere windies was cleaner_!" for the dirt-dimmed gla.s.s obstructed the full glory of the vision not a little.

Poor little creatures! my heart ached with compa.s.sion for them and their hard conditions, while they hung and clung in ecstatic amazement at my frippery.

The house at Bristol the first night was wretched, my share of it only 14; here last night it was much better, but I do not yet know the proceeds of it. Charles Mason has latterly dropped a hint or two about intending shortly to go to America, so that I dare say he will be quite prepared to terminate his present arrangement with me.

In the railroad, coming from Bristol to Bath, I met Edward Romilly, a kind and pleasant acquaintance of mine. I had Liebig's book in my hand, which he said was rather severe railroad reading, and proceeded to enlighten me as to the unsoundness of some of the author's positions and deductions. Now, you know, Edward Romilly married Mrs. Marcet's daughter, and, I take it for granted, in virtue of such a mother-in-law, is wise upon natural philosophy; but still, when one's ignorance is as huge and one's faith as implicit as mine,--when one's one endless, supreme question about everything is Pilate's bewildered, "What is Truth?"--when from history, science, literature, art, nature, one receives every impression with the child's yearning query, "But is it true?" it makes one feel desperate and deplorable thus to have one teacher contradict and discredit another. After all, all knowledge by degrees turns to ignorance, as it were, by dint of more knowledge; and human progress, pa.s.sing from stage to stage in its incessant onward flight, leaves deserted, from day to day and hour to hour, its temporary abiding-places. There is no rest for those who learn, and ignorance is a great deal more complete and perfect a thing, _here_, at any rate, than knowledge; with which paradox let me hug my ignorance, only regretting that I ever spoiled it by learning even so much as my alphabet.

In spite of Mrs. Marcet's son-in-law, I have finished Liebig, and now have only "Wilhelm Meister" to read, which is one of the most wonderful books that ever was written. I have read it often, and each time I do so I think it more wonderful than before. Do you remember poor Mignon's last song?--"Sorrow hath made me early old, make me again for ever young!" No wonder you love youth, my dear; in heaven there are no old people.

The gardens in which this house stands are exquisite, and full of lovely children, who are a perpetual delight to me.

Good-bye, my dear.

BATH, Friday, June 4th.

DEAR HAL,

... I have just spent a delightful hour with three charming little creatures, children of the master of this hotel, for whom I have been buying toys, and who have been amusing themselves with them and allowing me a time of enchanting partic.i.p.ation.