What I Remember Part 21

"M.E. LEWES."

The "words of Dr. Haller," to which the above letter refers, were to the effect that one of Lewes's great advantages in scientific and philosophical research was his familiar acquaintance with the works of German and French writers, which enabled him to follow the contemporaneous movement of science throughout Europe, whereas many writers of learning and ability wasted their own and their readers'

time in investigating questions already fully investigated elsewhere, and advancing theories which had been previously proved or disproved without their knowledge. Dr. Ludwig Haller, of Berlin, in writing to me about G.H. Lewes, then recently deceased, had said, if I remember rightly, that he had some intention of publis.h.i.+ng a sketch of Lewes in some German periodical. I am not aware whether this intention was ever carried into effect.

The attack to which the above letter alludes was a very bad one of sciatica. At length the baths of Baden in Switzerland cured me permanently, but after their--it is said ordinary and normal, but very perverse--fas.h.i.+on, having first made me incomparably worse. I suffered excruciatingly, consolingly (!) a.s.sured by the doctor that sciatica never kills--only makes you wish that it would! While I was at the worst my brother came to Baden to see me, and on leaving me after a couple of days, wrote to my wife the following letter, which I confiscated and keep as a memorial.

After expressing his commiseration for me, he continues:--

"For you, I cannot tell you the admiration I have for you. Your affection and care and a.s.siduity were to be expected. I knew you well enough to take them as a matter of course from you to him. But your mental and physical capacity, your power of sustaining him by your own cheerfulness, and supporting him by your own attention, are marvellous. When I consider all the circ.u.mstances I hardly know how to reconcile so much love with so much self-control."

Every word true! And what he saw for a few hours in each of a couple of days, I saw every hour of the day and night for four terrible months!

But all this is a parenthesis into which I have been led, I hope excusably, by Mrs. Lewes's mention of my illness.

N.B.--I said at an early page of these recollections that I had never been confined to my bed by illness for a single day during more than sixty years. The above-mentioned illness leaves the statement still true. The sciatica was bad, but never kept me in bed. Indeed I was perhaps in less torment out of it.

Here is the last letter of George Eliot's which reached us. It is written by Mrs. Lewes to my wife, from "The Priory, 30 December, 1879":--

"DEAR MRS. TROLLOPE,--I inclose the best photograph within my reach.

To me all portraits of him are objectionable, because I see him more vividly and truly without them. But I think this is the most like what he was as you knew him. I have sent your anecdote about the boy to Mr.

Du Maurier, whom it will suit exactly. I asked Charles Lewes to copy it from your letter with your own pretty words of introduction.

"Yours affectionately,

"M.E. LEWES."

It is pretty well too late in the day for me to lament the loss of old friends. They have been well-nigh some time past all gone. I have been exceptionally fortunate in an aftermath belonging to a younger generation. But they too are dropping around me! And few losses from this second crop have left a more regretted void than George Henry Lewes and his wife.

CHAPTER XVII.

I have thought that it might be more convenient to the reader to have the letters contained in the foregoing chapter all together, and have not interrupted them therefore to speak of any of the events which were meantime happening in my own life.

But during the period which the letters cover the two greatest sorrows of my life had fallen upon me--I had lost first my mother, then my wife.

The bereavement, however, was very different in the two cases. If my mother had died a dozen years earlier I should have felt the loss as the end of all things to me--as leaving me desolate and causing a void which nothing could ever fill. But when she died at eighty-three she had lived her life, upon the whole a very happy one, to the happiness of which I had (and have) the satisfaction of believing I largely contributed.

It is very common for a mother and daughter to live during many years of life together in as close companions.h.i.+p as I lived with my mother, but it is not common for a son to do so. During many years, and many, many journeyings, and more _tete-a-tete_ walks, and yet more of _tete-a-tete_ home hours, we were inseparable companions and friends.

I can truly say that, from the time when we put our horses together on my return from Birmingham to the time of my marriage, she was all in all to me! During some four or five days in the early time of our residence at Florence I thought I was going to lose her, and I can never forget the blank wretchedness of the prospect that seemed to be before me.

She had a very serious illness, and was, as I had subsequently reason to believe, very mistakenly treated. She was attended by a pract.i.tioner of the old school, who had at that time the leading practice in Florence. He was a very good fellow, and an admirable whist player; and I do not think the members of our little colony drew a sufficiently sharp line of division between his social and his professional qualifications. He was, as I have said, essentially a man of the (even then) old school, and retained the old-fas.h.i.+oned general pract.i.tioners phraseology. I remember his once mortally disgusting an unhappy dyspeptic old lady by asking her, "Do we go to our dinner with glee?" As if the poor soul had ever done anything with glee!

This gentleman had bled my mother, and had appointed another bleeding for the evening. I believe she would a.s.suredly have died if that had been done, and I attribute to Lord Holland the saving of her. Her doctor had very wrongly resisted the calling in of other English advice, professional jealousy, and indeed enmity, running high just then among us. Lord Holland came to the house just in the nick of time; and over-ruling authoritatively all the difficulties raised by the Esculapius in possession of the field, insisted on at once sending his own medical attendant. The result was the immediate administration of port wine instead of phlebotomy, and the patient's rapid recovery.

My mother was at the time far past taking any part in the discussion of the medical measures to be adopted in her case. But I am not without a suspicion that she too, if she could have been consulted, would have sided with phlebotomy and whist, as against modern practice unrelieved by any such alleviation. For the phlebotomist had been a constant attendant at her Friday night whist-table; and as it was she lost him, for he naturally was offended at her recovery under rival hands.

What my mother _was_ I have already said enough to show, as far as my imperfect words can show it, in divers pa.s.sages of these reminiscences. She was the happiest natured person I ever knew--happy in the intense power of enjoyment, happier still in the conscious exercise of the power of making others happy; and this continued to be the case till nearly the end. During the last few years the bright lamp began to grow dim and gradually sink into the socket. She suffered but little physically, but she lost her memory, and then gradually more and more the powers of her mind generally. I have often thought that this peris.h.i.+ng of the mind before the exceptionally healthy and well-const.i.tuted physical frame, in which it was housed, may have been due to the tremendous strain to which she was subjected during those terrible months at Bruges, when she was watching the dying bed of a much-loved son during the day, and, dieted on green tea and laudanum, was writing fiction most part of the night. The cause, if such were the case, would have preceded the effect by some forty years; but whether it is on the cards to suppose that such an effect may have been produced after such a length of time, I have not physiological knowledge enough to tell.

She was, I think, to an exceptional degree surrounded by very many friends, mostly women, but including many men, at every period of her life. But the circ.u.mstances of it caused the world of her intimates during her youth, her middle life, and her old age, to be to a great degree peopled by different figures.

She was during all her life full of, and fond of, fun; had an exquisite sense of humour; and at all times valued her friends and acquaintances more exclusively, I think, than most people do, for their intrinsic qualities, mainly those of heart, and, not so much perhaps intellect, accurately speaking, as brightness. There is a pa.s.sage in my brother's _Autobiography_ which grates upon my mind, and, I think, very signally fails to hit the mark.

He writes (vol. i. p. 28):--"She loved society, affecting a somewhat Liberal _role_, and professing an emotional dislike to tyrants, which sprung from the wrongs of would-be regicides and the poverty of patriot exiles. An Italian marquis who had escaped with only a second s.h.i.+rt from the clutches of some archduke whom he had wished to exterminate, or a French _proletaire_ with distant ideas of sacrificing himself to the cause of liberty, were always welcome to the modest hospitality of her house. In after years, when marquises of another caste had been gracious to her, she became a strong Tory, and thought that archd.u.c.h.esses were sweet. But with her, politics were always an affair of the heart, as indeed were all her convictions. Of reasoning from causes I think that she knew nothing."

Now there is hardly a word of this in which Anthony is not more or less mistaken; and that simply because he had not adequate opportunities for close observation. The affection which subsisted between my mother and my brother Anthony was from the beginning to the end of their lives as tender and as warm as ever existed between a mother and son. Indeed I remember that in the old days of our youth we used to consider Anthony the Benjamin. But from the time that he became a clerk in the Post Office to her death, he and my mother were never together but as visitors during the limited period of a visit.

From the time that I resigned my position at Birmingham to the time of her death, I was uninterruptedly an inmate of her house, or she of mine. And I think that I knew her, as few sons know their mothers.

No regicide, would-be or other, ever darkened her doors. No French _proletaire_, or other French political refugee was ever among her guests. She never was acquainted with any Italian marquis who had escaped in any degree of distress from poverty. With General Pepe she was intimate for years. But of him the world knows enough to perceive that my brother cannot have alluded to him. And I recollect no other marquis. It is very true that in the old Keppel Street and Harrow days several Italian exiles, and I think some Spaniards, used to be her occasional guests. This had come to pa.s.s by means of her intimacy with Lady Dyer, the wife and subsequently widow of Sir Thomas Dyer, whose years of foreign service had interested him and her in many such persons. The friends of her friend were her friends. They were not such by virtue of their political position and ideas. Though it is no doubt true, that caring little about politics, and in a jesting way (how jesting many a memorial of fun between her and Lady Dyer, and Miss Gabell, the daughter of Dr. Gabell of Winchester, is still extant in my hands to prove;) the general tone of the house was "Liberal."

But nothing can be farther from the truth than the idea that my mother was led to become a Tory by the "graciousness" of any "marquises" or great folks of any kind. I am inclined to think that there was _one_ great personage, whose (not graciousness, but) intellectual influence _did_ impel her mind in a Conservative direction. And this was Metternich. She had more talk with him than her book on Vienna would lead a reader to suppose; and very far more of his mind and influence reached her through the medium of the Princess.

To how great a degree this is likely to have been the case may be in some measure perceived from a letter which the Princess addressed to my mother shortly after she had left Vienna. She preserved it among a few others, which she specially valued, and I transcribe it from the original now before me.

"Vous ne pourriez croire, chere Madame Trollope, combien le portrait que vous avez charge le Baron Hugel de me remettre m'a fait de plaisir!

"Il y a longtemps que je cachais au fonds de mon coeur le desir de posseder votre portrait, qui, interressant pour le monde, est devenu precieux pour moi, puisque j'ai le plaisir de vous connaitre telle que vous etes, bonne, simple, bienveillante, et loin de tout ce qui effroie et eloigne des reputations literaires. Je remercie M. Hervieu de Tavoir fait aussi ressemblant. Et je vous a.s.sure, chere Madame Trollope, que rien ne pouvait me toucher aussi vivement et me faire autant de plaisir que ce souvenir venant de vous, qui me rappelera sans cesse les bons moments que j'ai eu la satisfaction de pa.s.ser avec vous et qui resteront a jamais cheres a ma memoire.

"MELANIE, PRINCESSE DE METTERNICH."

I think that the hours pa.s.sed by the Princess and my mother _tete-a-tete_, save for the presence of the artist occupied by his work during the painting of the Princess Melanie's portrait for my mother, were mainly the cause of the real intimacy of mind and affection which grew up between them--though, of course, the painting of the portrait shows that a considerable intimacy had previously arisen. And it had been arranged that the portrait of my mother, which was the occasion of the above letter, should be exchanged for that of the Princess. But there had been no time amid the whirl of the Vienna gaieties to get it executed. It was, therefore, sent from England by Baron Hugel when he called on my mother, on visiting this country shortly after her return from Austria.

It occurs to me here to mention a circ.u.mstance which was, I think, the first thing to begin--not the acquaintance but--the intimacy in question; and which may be related as possessing an interest not confined to either of the ladies in question.

The Archd.u.c.h.ess Sophie had graciously intimated her desire that my mother should be presented to her, and an evening had been named for the purpose. But a few days before--just three, if I remember rightly--my mother caught a cold, which resulted in erysipelas, causing her head to become swollen to nearly double its usual size!

Great was the dismay of the ladies who had arranged the meeting with the Archd.u.c.h.ess, chief among whom had been the Princess Melanie.

She came to my mother, and insisted upon sending to her an old h.o.m.oeopathic physician, who was her own medical attendant, and had been Hahnemann's favourite pupil. He came, saw his patient, and was told that what he had to do was to make her presentable by the following Friday! He shook his head, said the time was too short--but he would do his best. And the desired object was _fully_ attained.

I have no doubt that my mother returned from her Vienna visit a more strongly convinced Conservative in politics than she had hitherto been. And it does not seem to me that the modification of her opinions in that direction, which was doubtless largely operated by conversation with the great Conservative statesman and his _alter ego_, the Princess, needs to be in any degree attributed to the "graciousness" of people in high position either male or female. Is it not very intelligible and very likely that such opinions, so set forth, as she from day to day heard them, should have honestly and legitimately influenced her own?

But I think that I should be speaking, if perhaps presumptuously, yet truly, if I were to add that there was also one very far from great personage, whose influence in the same direction was greater than even that of Prince Metternich or of any other great folks whatever; and that was the son in daily and almost hourly communion and conversation with whom she lived. I also had begun life as a "Liberal," and was such in the days when Mr. Gladstone was a high Tory. But my mind had long been travelling in an inverse direction to his. And far too large a number of my contemporaries distinguished and undistinguished have been moving in the same direction for it to be at all necessary to say that most a.s.suredly my slowly maturing convictions were neither generated nor fostered by any "graciousness" or other influence of dukes or d.u.c.h.esses or great people of any sort.

That my mother's political ideas were in no degree "an affair of the heart," I will not say, and by no means regret not being able to say.

But I cannot but a.s.sert that it is a great mistake to say that they were uninfluenced by "reasoning from causes," or that the movement of her mind in this respect was in any degree whatever due to the caresses which my brother imagines to have caused it.

She was not a great or careful preserver of papers and letters, or I might have been able to print here very many communications from persons in whom the world feels an interest. Among her early and very dear friends was Mary Mitford.